Helpful, concise definition from SW2 at Yes, Roxanne, Put On The Red Light in response to a reader who asked "I was just wondering if you could explain what exactly a 'sex worker' is? (She ends by explaining why she and her fellow authors started their blog.)

Good question!!

A sex worker is paid to do sexy things, basically. If a person is paid to turn someone else on and/or get someone else off, they are a sex worker. This includes up-close and in-person sex workers like happy ending masseuses and masseurs, strippers, professional dominants, and prostitutes. It also includes sex workers who work at a bit of a remove or on the mental aspects of arousal such as peep show and web cam performers and phone sex operators. Because we all basically sell sex in one form or another, and we must all deal with our work being stigmatized and devalued, if not outright criminalized, we made this blog to share, commiserate, laugh, bitch, tell stories, and keep each other company.

Source: Yes, Roxanne, Put On The Red Light.

Their blog has an interesting format -- generally a series of red ("sex worker problems") or purple ("sex worker perks") decorated boxes with Twitter-length single words, phrases, or sentences. The authors are all current or former sex workers. According to their intro, one of them hates sex work, the other two love it. At least so far it's been quite active. They encourage contributions from other sex workers. I've added it to the blogroll.

Photo by Flickr user mamamusings. Used under a Creative Commons license.

First it was the CDC's "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocolypse," a tongue-in-cheek primer on general preparedness. Not to be outdone, just in time for Halloween, here's Planned Parenthood with advice about the hazards of unprotected sex with vampires:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 31, 2011 Contact: PPFA Media Office

Thinking About Having Sex with a Vampire This Halloween? Planned Parenthood Is Here to Help

Let's face it: vampires can rack up a lot of sexual partners over the years. Your vampire might be the same age as you, or she or he might be thousands of years old. But no matter how old you are, if you're going to jump into bed with a vampire, you're going to need more than a clove of garlic to protect your health.

Here are some things to think about before you enter into a sexual relationship with a vampire:

Vampires might be immortal, but you're not. It's important for both vampires and humans to get tested for STDs. Use this tool to find out if you should get tested for STDs.

Ladies, just because a vampire says he can't get you pregnant*, it doesn't mean he can't give you an STD. And guys, just because a vampire says she's on the pill, it doesn't mean that you can't get an STD. Use a condom correctly every time.

Don't wait until you're in the heat of the moment to bring up safer sex. Vampires have been known to "glamour" people to get their way, so play it safe and make it clear that you won't have sex without protection right from the start.

Remember, a vampire who doesn't care about protecting your health is not the kind of vampire that you want to get involved with. Not sure if you're dating the right vampire? We can help you figure it out.

* Let's not forget, Edward got Bella pregnant in the Twilight series, going against hundreds of years of vampire lore. So even if your vampire tells you he can't get you pregnant, why risk it? Condoms are not only a great way to prevent STDs, they're effective at preventing pregnancy. Even better, use a condom along with another birth control method.

Source: Planned Parenthood Media Office

Very cool when institutions like Planned Parenthood are able to hit the right note when attempting humor with a point.

Via Talking Points Memo

Let me take a moment away from my chronic writer's block* to say that the large group blog Gender Across Borders - a global feminist blog kind of rocks.

Just today there have been posts about

• Child Marriage: Ukuthwala in South Africa
• Female Circumcision: Comparing Muslim and Non-Muslim African Communities (Which helps explain some of the "blind persons and the elephant" nature of indifference to what you'd think should generate open-and-shut condemnation.)
• A Culture of Violence? (About the peculiar but extreme social pressure on women on the dole in Scotland to forgo perfectly legal and free contraceptive services.)

It's just all-round interesting perspectives plus clarification of issues I didn't know I don't know enough about.  Even when I thought I did.

* About this writer's block?   I dunno.  I still usually draft several posts a day, get them about 95% finished, and still can't get myself to write a closing sentence and post them.  Back. Log.  City.  Month after month.  I can comment just fine on other people's blogs.  Just not here.  Sigh.

There's another kerfuffle going around about why it is/isn't possible to be a "sex positive" feminist and/or whether "sex positive" is even a valid concept. An anonymous poster at 25 Things About My Sexuality inadvertently puts her finger on what I consider to be one of the acid tests of "sex positive" culture (emphasis mine.)

3. Over the past year I’ve realized that I am asexual, and I only feel comfortable with that label because I know that I’m not straight or gay.

4. Everyone thinks I’m a lesbian, especially my lesbian friends. A few have hinted that they’re waiting for me to come out. When I told one of them that I was asexual, hoping for solidarity, she paused and said, “Just stick with ‘queer.’”

Source: 25 Things About My Sexuality

People get this idea that "sex positive" means "anything goes." Or, even more off-by-a-mile, that it means "everything goes." Instead in a thoroughly sex-positive culture nobody needs to be warned "just stick with 'queer.'"

Incidentally  I'm not suggesting the friend herself was being ace-intolerant for giving that advice. Instead she was just acknowledging the reality that the unsexuality of asexuality alarms a lot of people and can sometimes provoke uncomprehending and suspicious "what's your damage, you have to have been damaged" interrogations.

People can, and seemingly do, argue all day month year century long about the perennial bugaboos of BDSM or sex work and where, how, or whether they fit in "sex positive" culture.  Contrary to partisans of those topics they're just not the best place to look for negative attitudes about people's sexuality.

According to the Kaiser Family Trust's State Health Facts site, New Hampshire has only ("only?") 19.8 pregnancies per 1000 teens per year. Mississippi, meanwhile, has 65.7 per 1000.

Raw numbers like these are often complicated. And sometimes fairly finger-pointingly biased against teenagers themselves. And yeah, the bluer states do tend to have not just more responsible, better socialized children and better comprehensive sex education but also more access to birth control and abortion services. And yeah, the redder states tend to have less of all the above with the result that "pregnant teenagers" isn't all that correlated with teenagers having sex." Let alone "teenagers successfully communicating, setting and honoring boundaries, waiting till they're ready.

But still. Teens in New Hampshire and pretty much all of New England are drastically less likely to become pregnant than teens in the nominally more "religious" and "traditional-family-values" deep South. And I'm... pretty sure a county-by-county map of nominally middle-of-the-road states like California, Virginia, North Carolina, and my home state of Washington would show similar differences between progressive and conservative areas.

(Via Amy Lang)

Feministing blogger Maya summarizes Terri Conley's debunking of six common gender-essentialist myths. Follow the links to read the rest. The last two myths really stood out for me.

5) Men like casual sex more than women do

This is one of the most persistent myths out there. But the researchers say that women’s reluctance to accept an offer of casual sex is mostly because they’re not convinced the guy will be good in bed (see #4) and are afraid of being slut-shamed. If you account for these two barriers, the gender difference disappears.

6) Women are pickier than men

Everyone tends to be choosier when they’re approached by a potential partner, and less choosy when they’re doing the approaching. So it’s our lingering expectation that men do the asking and women the accepting–not some evolutionary bullshit about spreading seeds–that keeps this myth alive.

Source: Feministing

The factors affecting #5 seem to be the crux of the matter for a lot of the other discrepancies. The higher the likelihood that sex will be personally disappointing (not just non-orgasmic but downright bad) the more “reasons” you’re probably going to need to do it anyway regardless of gender.

Meanwhile, to the extent “slut shaming” imposes external costs above and beyond personal enjoyment (or, conversely, to the extent that “stud-congratulating” imposes external benefits beyond actual enjoyment) you’d expect to see those being shamed limiting their activities.

If you include in “slut shaming” awkward little historical tendencies like “honor killings” and “stone her if she’s not a virgin on her wedding night,” plus psychiatric treatment for “nymphomania” if she wants sex more than her long-term partner, and approximately 0% interest from authorities if you’re sexually assaulted then we’re not just talking about a little name calling being an inhibiting factor. You don’t need special “genes” to explain that — just the plain old ordinary genes for self-preservation.

I'm perfectly comfortable with the notion of behavior-linked genes shaped by self-preservation in social situations. I just generally have a tough time with selected-for behavior that has to have evolved to handle a wide variety of fairly subtle and often ephemeral gendered situations.

Image via Tumblr

Hormonal contraception expert Ema of The Well-Timed Period says the whiny "the stores are out of Plan B so I can't have sex" piece by the so-called Humor "Health Editor" at XO Jane has to be satire because... well... she's more generous than I'd be.

The upshot being that there's an exceedingly good reason why nobody can get Plan B anymore, in New York City or pretty much anywhere else once current supplies are gone.

Plan B isn't pining for the fjords, it's no more

Pharmacies are out of Plan B because Plan B has been discontinued by its manufacturer quite some time ago. So forget about Plan B and familiarize yourselves with the available emergency contraceptive pill (ECP) brands.

Source: The Well-Timed Period

Go read Ema's post for a nice, reassuringly long list of new and improved Emergency Contraceptives.

While there's been considerable back and forth about the "morality," sensibility, responsibility, and cost of using a $50-per-use method of contraception, Ema avoids all that and points out exactly why "morning after" type pills aren't a good idea:

ECP postcoital birth control is only to be used in an emergency for the simple reason that it's not as effective as the other available methods when used on a regular basis.

And then there's her bottom line:

Forget Plan B, remember Plan B One-Step, Nextime, Next Choice, Postinor, Postinor 1/Postinor2 Unidosis, and ella. Don't substitute ECP for regular birth control. And, last but not least, even in emergencies avoid attempts at satirical articles on birth control.

I love me that Ema-style expertise.

I'm less sure why "grind" dancing is considered a bad thing. Sure, there's lots of sexual connotations. But...

Except for sweat there doesn't seem to be a lot of sharing of bodily fluids.

Also, this is going to sound old-fogie and out of touch maybe but...

Over time I've noticed that whereas there was a sort of mythology about men's "thrusting" behavior, as contrasted to women's passive receptivity, it's been seeming to me lately that women have their own version of "thrusting" that...

Pretty similar in both motivation and intent.

It's just that attitudes have changed since the 1970s that it's ok to, I dunno, thrust back.

Reading Emily Dugan's piece in The Independent about the practice of "bridenapping" around the world it seems kind of important to note that, over and over and around the world from Somalia to Sarajevo, the mechanism that seems to make bride kidnapping work is the notion that once a woman is presumed to have been "taken," even against her will, she's too tainted, damaged, or unclean either for her family to take her back or for anyone else to agree to marry her.

What on the Great Blue Marble is that all about anyway!?!?! And all for the hypothetical value of a sliver of vestigial tissue in whole human beings who are entirely competent, capable and often even ( in Dugan's case from Kyrgyzstan) college educated and working!

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Margo DeMello, reflecting on why a Nova Scotia NGO's initiative to humanize sex workers in the minds of the public is important.

Stepping Stone’s executive director, Rene Ross, points out that every time a prostitute is killed—sex workers have a mortality rate 40 times higher than the Canadian national average—media accounts emphasize that the victim was a prostitute, but not that she (or he) was also a mother, daughter, friend or, for example, animal lover. By thinking of sex workers only in terms of their stigmatized occupation, we don’t have to care about them as people.

In New Mexico, where I live, the remains of eleven women (and the unborn fetus of one) were found buried on a mesa outside of Albuquerque in 2009. The women had disappeared between 2003 and 2005, and most, according to police, were involved with drugs and/or prostitution. Why did it take the police so long to find the bodies of these women, and why do their murders still remain unsolved? Some observers have suggested that because the women were—or were alleged to be—prostitutes, there was less pressure to find them after they went missing, or to solve their murders once their bodies were found. As long as the victims were sex workers, then the non-sex worker public can feel safe in the knowledge that they are not at risk. We know that prostitution is dangerous, so it’s expected that some of them will die grisly deaths, and be buried like trash on a mesa outside of town.

Source: Sociological Images

Yeah, it's really important to portray sex workers as people. Not just because they're actually people but because enough people seem to think they're not people that a) some people think it's really ok to rob, rape, assault, or murder them, and b) waaaaay too many other people who don't actually commit those crimes seem to agree that, yeah, it's ok to do that stuff to them. Because, as Green River serial killer Gary Ridgway put it, "I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing, killing prostitutes ... Here you guys can't control them, but I can."

While researching this post I learned that Ridgway dumped the body of one of his victims near the parking lot of the hospital where my daughter was born -- just a nine minute drive from my neighborhood.

If that victim had been the only one, and if Ridgway was the only criminal who calculatedly chose sex workers, then maybe this wouldn't be a big deal. But as DeMello says in her article being a sex worker is 40 times more dangerous than the average job -- more dangerous than coal mining, more dangerous than crab fishing in the Bering Sea. They're people. They should be treated like people, not garbage.