sundaysex

All sex shops are alike. True? Most of these pictures show the licensed, legal kind, which means there are rules about what they can and cannot put in the windows as well as sell inside. Those who work in this segment of the sex industry occupy an ambiguous status: are they sex workers? Some say they are, some say they are not and some say if a sales assistant in a sex shop wants to think of himself as a sex worker than he is and if she doesn’t, she isn’t.

Taiwan

New York

Paris

Tampere

Amsterdam

Vancouver

Hong Kong

Dublin

When Augusta licensed its prostitutes

by Bill Kirby at The Augusta Chronicle

Augusta was booming in 1941. A military buildup had downtown streets swelling with soldiers from the nearby Army camp. . . ‘The soldiers want girls and are going to get them.’ Regulation, he concluded was the only practical solution. ‘The problem of prostitution in army camp towns cannot be solved by the moral indignation of good citizens. The traffic cannot be eradicated in a city of Augusta’s size even in normal times, let alone when 20,000 or more young men from all walks of life spend their leaves and money within her borders.’

Study suggests ‘hookups’ can turn into meaningful relationships

University of Iowa News Release

We didn’t see much evidence that relationships were lower quality because they started off as hookups. The study suggests that rewarding relationships are possible for those who delay sex. But it’s also possible for true love to emerge if things start off with a more ‘Sex and the City’ approach, when people spot each other across the room, become sexually involved and then build a relationship.

6 Reasons to Have Casual Sex

by Monica Shores

Casual sex and one-night stands are almost always framed as damaging to women, particularly young women. In recent years, writers like Laura Sessions Stepp and Wendy Shalit have issued dire warnings about the alleged dangers of sex outside of committed relationships. Let’s call this rhetoric what it is: a tired repeat of the sexist double standards that have haunted women for centuries.

Playing a woman like a cello

Bookplate by Michel Fingesten, from A Journey Round My Skull

Ladyboys of Phuket

Katoeys seem to be a widely accepted part of Thai society. This is probably partly to do with the Buddhist religion and its preaching of tolerance towards others. However, other countries with a strong Buddhist influence (Cambodia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Laos, Japan) are not known for their ladyboys. There must be something else at work. I think one strong factor is the Thai belief that life should be fun (sanook). When they see a katoey, they think it is fun. They will laugh and joke about it but not in a nasty way. They certainly will not hurl abuse or threats as might happen in western countries.

Will Dance for Food, by PhDork at The Pursuit of Harpyness

I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t find more work teaching or tutoring. To get through various lean times, I’ve taken just about every poorly-paid, disrespected job there is outside of the sex industry (although waitressing was close at times): fast food, retail (times a zillion), food service (restaurants and catering!), dishwasher, industrial painter, baby-sitter, office cleaner, adjunct professor…shall I go on? It’s been a fucking glamorous life.

My candle burns at both ends, by Raza Rumi at Himal Southasian

It is not a coincidence that the earliest novels of the Subcontinent dealt with the intense and memorable characters of ‘nautch girls’. Essentially a colonial construct, a nautch girl referred to the popular entertainer, a belle beau who would sing, dance and, when required, also provide the services of a sex worker.

My Illustrious Career in Times Square Peeps, Guy Gonzales, podcast by Audacia Ray

Legendary hardcore hustler Guy Gonzales was born in Manhattan of Asian-American ancestry. Despite the façade of a decent upbringing, he became enticed by the filthy streets. Flesh emporiums fueled his incentive; in 1982 Guy gravitated to Times Square, a reputed red-light district, and began as a cashier/mop-man in the adult peep shows.

Category: Images of strong women, women Doing Things, women who aren’t passive objects. Even if Patriarchy and Sexism were the name of the game.

Gold digger has been a highly negative label to call women who include financial questions when calculating sexual relationships. In this picture, however, gold diggers are superior to mere hookers.

Anyone who thought lap dance clubs were something new is in for a surprise.

Sexing it up in Pioneer Square by Leonard Garfield

Among the most successful of Seattle’s 19th century “sporting clubs” was the People’s Theater. Catering to the city’s swelling population of loggers, miners and sailors, the People’s Theater opened in 1890 in the wake of the Great Seattle Fire. . . Box theaters were a favorite venue among lascivious Seattleites, allowing patrons to enjoy performers onstage and purchase drinks from hostesses, who also offered to assuage their customers’ loneliness in curtained-off boxes. Box theaters were dependent on hostesses’ liquor sales to make a profit.

Let’s not arrest prostitutes, 1957

diagram by Peppermint

Border Wars: Swinging and Polyamory, by Peppermint

On the one hand, sexual identity is judged in our culture based on behavior. It is sleeping with the same sex that makes you gay, lesbian, or bisexual. It is enjoying BDSM play that makes you kinky. It is having or wanting multiple relationships that makes you poly, and so on. On the other hand, identity is supposed to represent an immutable truth about the person that comes from within, and has all sorts of implications for the person’s past, future, and personality. The result is that people in sexual minority identity categories are forced into a constant struggle to maintain that their behavior places them in their identity, or that their identity actually matches their behavior. And this is not some sort of abstract struggle, but a question that strikes to the core of their being.

Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century, by Sheila Rowbotham, discussed by Max Dunbar of3:AM

Towards the end of the nineteenth century working class feminists would sit in New York cafes debating politics into the night. To avoid the wrong kind of attention they wore plain and shapeless clothing. An acerbic bystander coined the stereotype that has haunted Western feminists to this day: ‘pallid, tired, thin-lipped, flat-chested and angular’ women, living in an ‘atmosphere of tea-steam and cigarette smoke’. . .

Warped Women: Strange Love Stripped Them of all Decency! Once over the line they could not stop!

Patient note: my surname is spelled Agustín, not Agustine, Augustine or Augustin

Word Games by Kat

So a stripper, an exotic dancer, an entertainer, a nude performance artist and an ecdysiast all walk into a bar… and the bartender only mixes one drink BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL THE SAME THING PEOPLE! Chart showing stripper thinking about not being sex workers

A café for the Paris sewing crowd, Global Post

It’s called Sweat Shop, but there are no poor children working on factory assembly lines in this Paris establishment. Instead, patrons of the “sewing bar” pay a fee to stitch and darn, and hone age-old skills like knitting and crocheting, for pure pleasure.

More deadly than the male by Kathy at The Edge of the American West

Our spy narratives have changed very little in sixty years, especially for women. There always has to be a dead drop, a furtive exchange of bags in a subway station, and a femme fatale, preferably with red hair and a Russian accent.

I wish I could show what’s inside Madams of the Old West but alas, we will just have to imagine it.

Remittance Girl Erotic Fiction

3 selected points from her Manifesto

1. I think there is a WORLD of difference between what people fantasize about and what they actually do.
2. If you have a difficult time understanding this difference, you should not be reading my work.
8. If you read something in my work that you find offensive, please be responsible enough to stop reading. The appeal of my work is not universal nor is it intended to be.

Rejecting the ‘not in my back yard’ approach to feminism by Elly at LiberalConspiracy

Rather than considering the complex issues surrounding lap-dancing and stripping as forms of employment, they focus on their own distaste at the sex industry, and their sense of threat from it.

The UK Sexual Underground 3 Minute Wonder video by James O’Flynn

The UK Sexual Underground is a pitch for a series of 25 minute documentaries which explore (not exploit) the UK adult industry.

Kuniyoshi Utagawa: A Street Prostitute

Outdoor “street” work question answered by compassionatetara at Bound Not Gagged

. . . People just assume the worst whenever I speak of outdoor work. First, while 3am walking the street in the worst neighborhoods does happen, it’s not as common in street or ‘outdoor’ work as one might think. It’s much more common in big cities, but in smaller cities and towns it’s much less common. (I’ve only worked in smaller towns and cities). So, in outdoor work, there is homeless work, where you are always working, and your clientele is of the lower income variety. (I’ve done this work). It’s mostly a lot of trade for sex work, and not a lot of actual cash. Another type of work is opportunity work, i.e. someone hits on you while you are out doing your normal routine. Most every woman has had the beginnings of this experience but few turn it into an opportunity to make money . . .

What to Do if You’re Charged with Prostitution by David Michael Cantor

One of the strongest defenses to Prostitution is Entrapment. Entrapment occurs when an undercover Officer gets a person to agree to something they would not ordinarily agree to by coercing them or overbearing their will. For example, if an undercover police officer utilizes the service of a “private dancer” or “escort”, and then begins offering extremely large amounts of money to induce the dancer or escort into a sex act, this can be argued as Entrapment.

A different view of cheating and corruption: All’s Fair in Love and Soccer by Henry Carey for Foreign Policy

Cheating and working the referees are part of what make the beautiful game fun to watch.

Africa: A Call for Sex Workers’ Rights in Continent by Chi Mgbako

Despite strong anti-prostitution sentiment on the continent, calls have begun to emerge for the realisation of sex workers’ rights in Africa. South African sex workers have advocated for the decriminalisation of prostitution in their country. There are examples of sex worker collectives forming in Cameroon, Zambia, Kenya and Senegal.

T*ts! What Can’t They Sell? from Animal New York

Breasts as advertising vehicles taken to a highly creative level in a video from Russia.

Against Equality says ‘It’s terrifying how earnest and righteous these folks have become with their vague rhetoric of equality and inclusivity, even when talking about historically oppressive institutions like marriage and military. As if somehow our inclusion in these institutions is going to magically transform them into a multicultural utopia where we can proudly kill muslim people for oil as part of a long term strategy for US imperialism and muse about our privileged tax status in a sinking economy where working class people are getting screwed out of just about everything. So how do we fight the rhetoric of equality and inclusion in favor of transformational justice?’

In Sweden, Men Can Have It All from The New York Times

Sofia Karlsson, a police officer and the wife of Mikael Karlsson, said she found her husband most attractive “when he is in the forest with his rifle over his shoulder and the baby on his back.”

While Sweden, with nine million people, made a strategic decision to get more women into the work force in the booming 1960s, other countries imported more immigrant men. As populations in Europe decline and new labor shortages loom, countries have studied the Swedish model, said Peter Moss an expert on leave policies at the University of London’s Institute of Education.