In her new book The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, author Michelle Goldberg exposes the global battle over women’s reproductive rights that pit reformers against an international alliance of fundamentalists, with profound consequences for both individual lives and worldwide development.
Last night IWHC hosted an event with Michelle so our friends and staff could learn more about her approach to writing the book. We were especially interested to hear what she had to say because she chronicles the rise of the international women’s movement, including the key roles played by our founders Joan Dunlop and Adrienne Germain.
My coworkers Lori Adelman was able to get a few minutes with Michelle to talk about her work on video, which I then spent a day editing. Lori also wrote a post about her experience of meeting Michelle on the Feministing community blog.
Donna Hughes, a Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island and an outspoken opponent of the sex industry, wrote a piece for the Providence Journal called RI’s Carnival of Prostitution. In the piece, she describes a hearing in which sex workers speak out for themselves and give their perspectives on legislation to re-criminalize indoor prostitution in Rhode Island. Learn more about about what’s going on (well, sort of) from the archives of the Providence Journal. Filmmaker Tara Hurley responds on her blog (which, by the way, is the best chronicle of this saga I’ve seen).
The bulk of Hughes’ piece is criticism edging into mocking the sex workers who spoke up at the hearing. One of the women she picks on is Megan Andelloux (pictured above), who was a participant in the first Speak Up media training that Sex Work Awareness did in April.
Ms Hughes had this to say about Megan:
Then a tattooed woman, calling herself a “sexologist and sex educator,” spoke against the bill. She is also a reporter for a prostitutes’ magazine called $pread. (I couldn’t make this stuff up!)
And this is what Megan had to say in return:
Let me introduce myself: I’m the nationally certified sex-educator and derogatorily labeled “tattooed lady” mentioned by Ms. Donna Hughes in Wednesday’s paper. It seems that the would-be chairwoman of URI’s women’s studies program (she is not) was so put off by my appearance that she called into question my credentials. Putting quotation marks around my profession was insulting. And yes, it is not “made up” that I am a contributor to the sex-workers magazine $pread. Is it so shocking that sex-workers can read?
This “Opinion piece” was nothing more than an exercise in highbrow name calling. She attacked the opponents to her pet bill as “a sordid circus”, as “smelling of other odors”, and as projecting the atmosphere of “a carnival”. As an alum of URI (‘97), I would have expected faculty of our honored University to develop a reputation for science and truth. Instead, it seems that Ms. Hughes would rather resort to right-wing scare tactics. Perhaps if “the Professor” really cared about women, she wouldn’t attack us for the way that we look.
I’m not generally in the habit of reading biographies (exception: I’ve read all the biographies there are to read about Victoria Woodhull), because I don’t really subscribe to the “great men” approach to history (I’m somewhat more susceptible to “great women”). I’d rather read about social movements and popular culture. That said, William Masters and Virginia Johnson spawned a new age of sex in the United States, so: worth reading.
I really enjoyed this book - the prose was accessible and there was a lot of information without it getting too bogged down in details that the author was proud to have found but otherwise had no real reason to include. The characters were really vibrant - even though there were obvious gaps, like the degree to which both Masters and Johnson were just closed off, private people. Actually, that bit of mystery was an important and interesting element in the book.
The book’s arc was very “rise and fall” - which worked well, but I felt that some of the criticisms of the pair and their methods came too late in the book. The final chapters of the book are more investigative in a way, but I would’ve liked it if the author offered up some of these questions to chew on earlier in the book.
I know I’m overly history-nerdy and maybe this book wasn’t the right place for this (being a biography and not a history of the sexual revolution), but I wish the Masters and Johnson story was contexualized within the sexual revolution and American identity a bit more. Sure, M & J shaped American sexuality starting in the mid-twentieth century. But for and about whom? I’d love to see more analysis of representation, demographics, and sexual norms in their work. Fuck, did I just sign myself up for an essay about that?
I’ve got a guest post up at Feministing about the new HIV cases in porn valley, with some slightly harsh words about the ways that testing and prevention are thought of as the same thing, and a call to responsibility. Here are a few excerpts from the piece:
This past week it was revealed that there are some new cases of HIV within the adult industry in Los Angeles. The LA Times and LAist have both covered the story, as have adult industry media outlets AVN and Xbiz. A stunning majority of straight porn companies do not require condoms and actively discourage their use - in the business this is called “condom optional” which is euphemistic for “you either perform without a condom or you don’t perform for this company.” The gay porn industry has slightly different standards than the straight porn business. Gay porn companies do not require testing, with the idea that it is an invasion of privacy and HIV shouldn’t prevent people from working/having sex, but the more reputable companies require condom use. The Gay Video News Awards (GayVN) will not consider a film for an award if there is “barebacking” (sex without a condom) in it.
[snip]
The straight porn industry regards testing as prevention - and while testing and knowledge of your partners’ status is certainly part of a risk reduction strategy, testing is not prevention. Porn production companies argue that the appearance of condoms in porn reduces the fantasy for the viewer, and as a result condom mandatory videos sell fewer units. Yep: sales are more important than sexual health. Both male and female porn performers are disempowered to demand condom usage because most companies actively discourage condoms (even though the option to use condoms is often written into their model release or contract).
Directors who I’ve talked with about their reluctance to enforce a condom mandatory policy on their productions sometimes sheepishly say that the companies they work for won’t have it. Other times they tell me that the performers themselves feel safe enough with the testing policies and don’t want to use condoms for a variety of reasons. I believe that it is the producer and director’s responsibility to step up and advocate for their workers and protect their health. If this means enforcing a mandatory condom policy that the performers complain about - that’s part of being the boss. If a performer had become infected with a STI while on my set, I would have not forgiven myself for that kind of negligence. And that’s what the “condom optional” policy is - negligence, piled on top of blatant disregard for sexual health and a lack of respect for the performers as people.
Are directors and producers going to step up and make condoms mandatory? Probably not. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and herpes are all accepted as hazards of the trade, something that happens to everyone at some point. HIV is a big deal, but 22 performers infected over five years [EDIT: LA country health department has backtracked on the number of infections in the porn biz, and now says that possibly none of the positives were performers. she June 16 piece on LA Times blog here] is still a pretty small number - clearly not a big enough one for producers and directors to shift the way they run their productions. As a sexual health and rights advocate, I find this really appalling.
Click here to read (and comment on) the whole post.
This year continues to be something of a banner year for me gaining legitimacy in the world. Remember when I went from being a sex worker, blogger, and porn director to being a professor and non-profit full time job haver? Yeah, that was pretty awesome.
The latest development in the Year of Legitimacy (it deserves to be capitalized) is this:
Sex Work Awareness has been named the United States country research partner for the Exploratory Research on Internet & Sexuality (EROTICS) research project, funded by the Association for Progressive Communications’ Women’s Networking Support Program (APC WNSP). Other research teams are from Brazil, Lebanon-Egypt, South Africa and India. SWA will evaluate the effects of content restriction on women’s ability to access information about sexuality using the Internet. We will use an online survey to give women the opportunity to tell us about their experiences using the Internet to get sex-related information.
The research team is being led by Melissa Ditmore, who among many many things was lead researcher on several reports for the Sex Workers Project and was the producer of the short film Taking the Pledge. She’s also a Sex Work Awareness board member, very awesome researcher, and editor of the annual journal Research for Sex Work. Kevicha Echols is the other researcher on the team - she’s working on her doctorate of education in the Widener program in human sexuality. I’m an advisor to the project and something of a community liaison, since this stuff is near and dear to my heart and communities. We’re all very invested in producing research that serves communities of people who use the internet for gaining access to sexuality information. So if there’s stuff out there that you think is being restricted and needs some light shed on it, please speak up and help us create a project that can improve the flow of online information.
At the moment we’re in a preliminary stage of researching, called “mapping” (in lay person’s terms: big fucking list with some descriptive notes). We’re working to identify what issues regarding women’s access to online sexuality information are most pressing in the United States right now. This will result in a 5-10 page paper that we need to produce and present to the other working groups - from there we will build out the research study design and decide on what exactly we’ll be focusing on.
Here is some of the stuff we’re considering:
• Craigslist, Julissa Brissman’s death and policy responses - and the wider context of adult/cruising/looking for paid and unpaid partners online
• Sexting scandals including effects on youth (literature, not interviews) and the concept of “child porn” and youth arrested for sexual activity becoming sex offenders who need to register and the ways this ruins their lives
• Access to sites about sexuality information in on public computer terminals - in libraries, universities, and public wifi spaces - this is particularly relevant to people who do not have their own computers and therefore use library or cafe computers and people who do this outside home (e.g. students, youth)
• Access to accurate information about birth control and abortion, and the possibility that Google bombing is being used to sway results of online searches for this information
• Information about health for transgender and transsexual people that goes beyond transitioning. (which is to say, yes: the study is trans-inclusive)
• Terms of Service agreements on social networking sites and their ill-defined restrictions on “adult” content, especially with regards to images of breast-feeding
So, community, what would you like to know more about, specifically in the United States? Have you heard rumors about access to sexual health information being restricted in some way and wished that someone would look into it? Please let me know here in comments of by email dacia [at] wakingvixen.com. We’ll add your suggestions to our list for the initial mapping exercise, and of course I’ll keep everyone updated on our process.
The 2010 NYC Sex Blogger Calendar is unique in bringing together several of NYC’s writers, filmmakers and sex educators with twelve outstanding photographers and incorporating the participation of the larger sex-positive community to our efforts to support Sex Work Awareness. Last year’s calendar made the Speak Up! media training for sex workers possible and with our community’s continued support, who knows what we can accomplish this year!
In addition to sponsorship opportunities, which you can learn about by emailing nycsexbloggerscal [at] gmail.com, you can purchase a day on the calendar and put an 80 character message on it. Wish someone a happy birthday or blogoversary, or just advertise for your blog or other project. Each day is $10, or for $30 you can get a day and pre-order the calendar, which will be available in November 2009. Click on the graphics below to buy days, and be sure to tell us the date you want in the “special shipping instructions” box.
The BBC reports on Indian sex workers in Tamil Nadu learning karate for self defense. The 45 second video is a must-see, partly because they’ve got a great solution to the issue of sex workers having their identities revealed in the media: everyone is wearing a Spider-man mask.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recently released a report, Preventing HIV With Young People: The Key to Tackling the Epidemic, which you can download as a PDF by clicking here.
William Smith, Vice President for Public Policy at SIECUS reports on the unequivocal support for comprehensive sexuality education among governments in Latin America and the Caribbean in his RH Reality Check post Taking Sex Ed Seriously: Lessons From Southern Neighbors
And on Akimbo:
On Monday, we blogged about Igniting Change, an annual conference that the National Council for Research on Women organizes.
Mahmoud Fahmy Fathalla, a member of IWHC’s Board of Directors for 8 years and a major inspiration for many IWHC staff members, won a UN Population Award.
Our Brazilian colleague Kenarik Boujikian Felippe wrote about a new bill passed by the Brazilian House of Representatives that recognizes the right of incarcerated adolescents to conjugal visits and allows babies up to three years old to stay with their mothers in the prison facilities.
I feel like I’m getting the hang of this teaching thing. It’s pretty awesome. Since I’m pretty immersed in the teaching thing plus tons of other work, here’s a photo and some of my more favorite slides, instead of a grand ole post about how it has been going.
Out.com has a really interesting feature called No Man’s Land, about gay Iranian refugees.
In response to the murder of abortion provider Dr George Tiller last weekend, a few inspiring memorial websites have cropped up. Thank You Dr Tiller and I Am Dr Tiller are especially interesting. There is also a really lovely and sad collection of Kansas Stories, by women who traveled to Kansas to see Dr Tiller, on the website A Heartbreaking Choice.
After attending the vigil for Dr Tiller in New York, Kelly Castagnaro and Lori Adelman wrote In Solidarity with Domestic Abortion Providers, with an accompanying short video of pro-choice activist Sue Davis talking about the movement.
Our former communications assistant Whitney Welshimer resurfaced this week and sent us two posts about her experiences in India volunteering with the Positive Women Network of Rajasthan (PWNR+). Two posts: Part I and Part II. Whitney also took the above picture.
A post highlighting the newly released, colorful and fascinating Map of State Sponsored Homophobia from the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association.
And last but not least, a post about President Obama’s speech in Cairo
So, uh, I’ve been working on this piece of creative writing with the aims of making a one-woman show. You know, in my spare time.
It’s getting to the point in the draft where I need some hard nudges and it needs to start taking shape a bit more. Also, I need to take some risks with it. As much as I value transparency in my activist and collaborative projects, I am weirdly and intensely private about projects that I’m doing on my own. When I wrote Naked on the Internet, I just hunkered down and wrote. At one point my partner brought up the fact that even though I’d been writing a lot of it in his apartment, if someone asked him what I was writing about or even what chapter I was working on, he wouldn’t know the answer because I was so weird and secretive. I think that way of working has its place, and it has been functional for me - I mean, I wrote a fucking book that got consistently good reviews, so it obviously works.
But now I’m trying to shake up the creative process and do things a little different, do things in a way that actually makes me a little uncomfortable, but hopefully will make a better and more interesting end product.
That said: on this coming Monday I’ll be reading a section of the piece at Happy Ending. Carol Queen will be in town, and yesterday I got an email from her asking me to do a reading with her and some of my favorite NYC sex writers and activists. So: what the hell? Unless I totally chicken out, I’m planning on reading the rawest part of the piece, the part I’m not sure I can handle performing in public. I’ll be among friends, so I’m going to treat this as a workshop and just let it all hang out. It’ll be a little out of context of the bigger piece, but… we’ll see. If you’re curious about it and willing to offer some criticism… you should come on out. It’s free. And I haven’t done a reading in… possibly since the end of my book tour in summer 2007. Could that be right? Damn.
Here are the details!
Carol Queen visits from San Francisco, joined by Rachel Kramer Bussel, Elizabeth Wood, Audacia Ray, and Sinclair Sexsmith!
Monday, June 8, 6-9 pm (reading will start between 7:30-8, last about an hour).
Happy Ending, 302 Broome Street, New York, NY 10002 (B/D to Grand, J/M/Z to Bowery, F to Delancey or F/V to 2nd Avenue, between Forsyth & Eldridge. Look for the hot pink awning that says “XIE HE Health Club.” (212) 334-9676
Carol Queen’s coming through town and wants to collaborate with her friends Rachel and Elizabeth to make a space for connecting, schmoozing, touching base, and furthering plans for sex-positive world domination! Her SF nonprofit The Center for Sex & Culture has hosted Rachel and Audacia, worked with Elizabeth on her online community Sex in the Public Square, and has plans to expand its educational and cultural offerings online as soon as we can (if we can’t afford NY real estate, at least we can visit you via your computers). Come mingle with your fellow NY sex people and meet some new ones, then enjoy a reading that will surely be more salaciously smart/sexy brain candy than most people ever get on a Monday (and in some cases, sadly, EVER).
No charge, but we have a bar guarantee to meet, so have a drink, and donations will be gratefully accepted for the Center for Sex & Culture — no amount to big or too small, and tax-deductible!
Readers:
Carol Queen has authored or edited eleven books, including the Firecracker Alternative Book Award winner The Leather Daddy and the Femme. She’s staff sexologist at Good Vibrations, the founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture, and has just finished a rewrite of Exhibitionism for the Shy. Visit at http://www.carolqueen.com or come hang out at Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter.
Rachel Kramer Bussel is the editor of over 25 sex-related anthologies, including the Best Sex Writing series, Dirty Girls, Spanked, Do Not Disturb, The Mile High Club, He’s on Top, and She’s on Top. She hosts the monthly In The Flesh Reading Series at Happy Ending, is Senior Editor at Penthouse Variations, and writes frequently about sex, relationships, and pop culture.
Elizabeth Wood is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Nassau Community College, a unit of the State University of New York. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1999 for a study of gender, interaction and power in strip clubs. She writes about gender and sexuality, sex work, the use of online social networking technologies to create an Internet sex commons. She has published articles in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and Feminism & Psychology. In addition to her academic writing she runs a web site, Sex In The Public Square, for more general discussions of sex and society.
Audacia Ray wrote Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration, directed/produced the award-winning porn film The Bi Apple and the comedic short Dacia’s Love Machine; she’s the vice president of Sex Work Awareness, as well as a prolific writer, video blogger, and erotic art curator. Currently Dacia is the online strategist at the International Women’s Health Coalition as well as an adjunct professor of human sexuality at Rutgers University.
Sinclair Sexsmith writes Sugarbutch Chronicles, a personal writing exploration of sex, gender, and relationships, and attempts to celebrate queer theory, sexuality, gender, culture, and identity in ways that are expansive rather than restrictive, liberating rather than limiting.
The Center for Sex & Culture: Founded by cultural sexologist/writer Carol Queen and her partner Robert Morgan Lawrence, the Center for Sex & Culture provides judgment-free education, cultural events, a library/media archive, and other resources to audiences across the sexual and gender spectrum and researches and disseminate factual information, framing and informing issues of public policy and public health. To that end we utilize our space in San Francisco to grow community, inform and inspire. Visit us online or when you come to San Francisco: http://www.sexandculture.org (also on Facebook and MySpace).
Here’s what we’ve been checking out online this week:
