Contact

Recent Articles

• Policing sex trafficking in Rio, with farcical elements

  4 November 2009 in sex work, trafficking

  Sometimes the Rescue Industry reverts to farce. Take the recent history of Brazil with its efforts to appear ‘modern’ and world-powerful through militaristic social-control operations. Before I even got to the part of this article that mentions carnaval, I had thought ‘circus’ to describe what I was reading. These are excerpts from Operation Princess in Rio [...]

• Red lights, sexual warmth, paid sex

  2 November 2009 in sex work

  Red-light districts use red, pink and orange light for a reason: the warmth we feel at being bathed in them. These colours are found in all kinds of sex-industry businesses around the world, whether brothels in China or saunas in the West.

  The eyeball experiences pleasure on its own looking at these colours.

  It seems to be [...]

• The Other Swedish Model

  30 October 2009 in sex work

  After living in the south of Sweden for the past year, I’m opening up a new blog at The Local, Sweden’s English-language news website. I’ve called it The Other Swedish Model. Here I’m going to think about the current politics of gender, sex and culture in the context of Sweden, whose legal prostitution regime is [...]

• Trafficking as White Slavery, Chicago, 100 years ago

  26 October 2009 in sex work, trafficking

  Everleigh Club, Chicago

  When critics bring up the similarity of today’s trafficking brouhaha with white-slavery scares, they most often point to William Steads investigation for the Pall Mall Gazette in London in the late 19th century. In the April 2008 issue of Reason Magazine, Joanne McNeill reviews Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and [...]

• Hay que tener una visión de las cosas: Mujeres brasileiras en la industria del sexo en España

  21 October 2009 in migration, sex work

  Con todo el debate ideológico sobre la prostitución, salen poco simples testimonios de personas que han decidido viajar y trabajar en la industria del sexo. Cuando digo ‘decidido’ quiero decir que puede que tengan pocas opciones para salir adelante pero sí tienen algunas y pueden preferir unas a otras. Es un planteamiento básico, que no niega [...]