[The next Whore's Bath/Solace Spa Suite event will be held at the Desiree Alliance conference on Weds, July 17th, between 11 AM and 6:30 PM. At the time of posting, we believe you can still register for the Desiree Alliance conference, though you will no longer receive a room discount.—ed.] Whore’s Bath is a day [...]
Whore’s Bath—More Than Washing Your Pussy For The Next Client
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Activist Spotlight: Deon Haywood on Justice and the Movement in New Orleans
In May of this year, I talked to Deon Haywood, Executive Director of Women With A Vision in New Orleans about her approach to organizing. WWAV scored a significant grassroots legal and political victory in the last year with the NO Justice campaign, which removed hundreds of cis and trans women from Louisiana’s registered felony […]
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Activist Spotlight: Melissa Ditmore on Responsible Advocacy and No-BS Research
Dr. Melissa Ditmore is one of the sex workers’ rights movement’s most cherished academics. For twelve years, she has worked as a freelance research consultant, with an impressive list of clients that includes AIDS Fonds Netherland, UNAIDS, The Sex Workers’ Rights Project at the Urban Justice Center, and The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP). […]
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Activist Spotlight Interview: Sarah Patterson on Health, Access, and Risk
In January 2012, Sarah Elspeth Patterson and a group of other sex worker activists in NYC went to work offering health care and social services to sex workers. The much needed outcome, Persist Health Project, is the 2nd sex worker only health clinic in the United States, after Saint James Infirmary in San Francisco. While […]
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Who Gets Left Out: Respectability Politics Round Table, Part One
“Respectability politics” has been a recurring phrase coming up lately in conversations within the sex workers’ rights movement. In discussions on and off the site we’ve had about drug using sex workers, sex workers with disabilities, survival sex workers, etc., we’ve been bumping up against this idea constantly. The Tits and Sass editorial staff decided […]
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Who Gets Left Out: Respectability Politics Round Table, Part Two
You can read part one of this dialogue here. Emma Caterine: Red Umbrella Project has definitely encountered issues around pressure to conform to respectability politics from larger groups who fund or sponsor us in different ways. It is telling that I can’t mention many of the specifics for fear of re-opening old wounds. Particularly the […]
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For Their Own Good: SWOP-Phoenix’s Campaign Against Diversion Intiatives
SWOP-Phoenix, a new branch of national sex workers’ rights organization Sex Workers Outreach Project, mounted a campaign this year against the Project ROSE (Reaching Out To The Sexually Exploited) Prostitution Diversion Initiative, in which Phoenix police and students from the Arizona State University School of Social Work team up twice a year to arrest local sex […]
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Activist Spotlight: Anna Saini on Identity and Being An Unlikable Survivor
Anna Saini is a community organizer with Voices of Community Activists and Leaders – New York (VOCAL-NY), where she works towards ending the drug war, mass incarceration and racist policing. Her writing appears in Bitch magazine, make/shift magazine, the forthcoming Dear Sister Anthology, her self published anthology Colored Girls, as well as both Red Umbrella Project […]
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Equality Now, Or Else?
While Western-led feminist groups such as Equality Now continue to conflate consensual sex work with trafficking and violence, where do sex workers themselves fit into concepts of feminism and gender equality, especially if they live in countries like India? “When you are coming from a place like India, you have the whole caste system, stigma […]
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Xin’Ai: Chinese Sex Workers Helping Each Other
Willa Dong reached out to us as a translator/liason for Chinese sex worker activist Lanlan, who founded the Xin’Ai Home. We’re very happy to have Lanlan’s account of working to create and grow an NGO from the ground up. For more information on detainment of sex workers in China, as well as general background, read […]
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Trafficking Laws: Abetting Violence Against Sex Workers
Terra Burns runs the informative Sex Trafficking In Alaska site, which provides information on how Alaska’s sex trafficking laws harm the people they are supposed to protect and those who are in the sex industry by choice. This is a speech she will be giving today, December 17th, the International Day to End Violence Against […]
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“The Higher End of the Community”: John Scarpa and Solidarity
There are John Scarpas everywhere. There is a John Scarpa in every department of the federal government. There is a John Scarpa in every police department. Every four years, a John Scarpa is nominated to run for president. Our world is full of John Scarpas. The difference is that, unlike his doppelgangers, the actual John […]
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“Dragged Off By The Hair”: An Indian Sex Worker Recalls a Raid
Sitting in a warm room in Phnom Penh with several other women from the Asia Pacific region, Kamalabai Pani, a sex worker and a board member of Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP, Prostitutes’ Collective Against Injustice) in India, became visibly upset when discussion turned to the efforts of U.S.-led feminist groups to discredit several United […]
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A Sex Worker’s Open Letter to the Australian Media
After the Sydney Morning Herald published an editorial promoting the Swedish model of criminalizing sex workers’ clients, exploiting the murder of Australian street sex worker Tracy Connelly to further an anti-sex worker agenda, many sex workers responded to the piece by writing to the news outlets that printed or re-printed it. Jane Green wrote a […]
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Tune In Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. For Our Live Interview With Monica Jones
For Immediate Release; interview to take place Tuesday February 4th 2014 at 5:30 p.m. Tits and Sass to livestream interview with Phoenix sex work activist Monica Jones, currently facing charges of “manifesting prostitution” during protests of The Phoenix PD’s Project ROSE sweeps In May 2013, a sex workers’ rights activist and Arizona State University social […]
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Tits and Sass: Interview with Monica Jones
Tune in here on Tuesday, February 4th at 5:30 p.m. EST/2:30 p.m. PST for our interview with Monica Jones. Watch the archived interview below! The sound quality improves as it goes on, Bubbles had a learning curve in audio engineering. Beside Monica is Jaclyn Moskal-Dairman of SWOP-Phoenix, present at Monica’s request. You can read Caty’s […]
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Nude for the Needy: A Stripper’s Mission To Pay It Forward
Ziploc bags overflow with disposable handwarmers, hand sanitizer, crackers and nuts. Thick cotton socks and toothbrushes, tampons and lollipops are piled nearby. A few women and a couple of men stand or sit along a heavy wooden table, chatting lightheartedly and stuffing goodies and toiletries into bags. Two children toddle around, munching crackers and playing […]
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I Don’t Care About Clients
I got an anonymous message on my Tumblr after a recent post I made complaining about how fashionable it seems to be for the sex workers’ rights movement to focus on the voices of clients of sex workers. Like me, the anonymous poster felt that clients’ feelings and experiences were being prioritized over theirs. This […]
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Activist Spotlight: Melissa Gira Grant on Playing The Whore and Policing the Policers, Part One
In the early aughts when I was a novice escort and On Our Backs was still being published, I was wowed by Melissa Gira Grant, an internet porn-making, geeky, theory spouting phenom, even managing to be friends with her despite the fact that she was an Anais Nïn devotee. Over the years I’ve kept in […]
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Activist Spotlight Interview: Melissa Gira Grant on Playing The Whore and Policing The Policers, Part Two
Part one of this interview is here. You encapsulate the tired terms of the sex worker debate, in which the token sex worker is asked reductifying questions ad nauseaum: Is sex work exploitative or empowering? Is it violence against women? How can we help women (always women, and always cis women, never sex working men […]
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