Ok, yeah, it’s officially old news since it’s now 2010, but I’m wrapping up my promised (to myself, as much as you) wrapping up of 2009 (for those playing along at home, I have yet to post my favorite images and favorite blog posts, those will be up in the next two days).
I was pretty picky about engaging with the press in 2009, but as these things seem to happen, there were a few bursts of activity inspired by various controversies, plus my second major mention in the New York Times. Here are my favorite pieces of press from last year:
1. The Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys anthology got reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in late August. Kind of amazing, right? Even more amazing was the direct mention of my piece:
Audacia Ray, who now teaches human sexuality at Rutgers University, certainly earned her degree out in the field, having at one point paired up with a woman named Lily as a massage team offering happy endings. “Money got us hot and bothered,” she writes, and one evening, after Lily cashed a disability check from the federal government for $10,000 (she had no bank account, of course), she poured the money — “mostly $20 bills” — onto the bed. They shut off their phones, bathed together, got “very, very high” and then rolled around “naked in the cash. . . . Even now, when I think of the hottest sex we had, I think about currency stuck to her flesh.” Now there’s an image to promote the beneficence of Uncle Sam.
2. Last spring, the Speak Up media training coincided with some violence propagated against sex workers by the “Craigslist killer.” In the wake of the violence there was of course a flurry of media about sex work, and I took the opportunity to write a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald about their use of language referring to sex workers. Here’s a screenshot of the LTE and a related blog post I wrote about it called The Impact You Can Make.
3. In early May, a colleague pointed me at this story (link to my blog post): Escort Gets Robbed, Reports It, Gets Outed and I quickly followed up with a letter to the reporter and editor, and encouraged other folks to do the same. It created something of a bloggy shitstorm, but well worth it I think, because it got a lot of people thinking about talking about how the media can enable violence against sex workers.
4. My best bit of live media for the year was an appearance on the WNYC show The Takeaway in early July. I got up at 4:30 in the morning to load myself into the car the station sent for me and talk in studio about the ways that South Carolina “Governor Mark Sanford’s indiscretions have sparked a conversation about marriage and what constitutes infidelity in America”
5. When a college student tried to sell her virginity on the internet there was a big hullaballoo about it, and I commented on the story in two different places, a CNN.com article What is virginity worth today? and a piece that Susannah Breslin asked me to comment on at Slate, When Economies are Tight, Virgins Go to Auction
