While I still say that Jasmine in Independence Day reigns supreme when it comes to a positive, realistic portrayal of a sex worker in a mainstream movie, I wanted to do some gender balancing and write about another favorite sex worker character.  I asked my Twitter followers if they could guess my favorite man ho, and no one could.  Like Jasmine in Independence Day, this character is from a family-friendly, big-budget movie, not a "kooky" comedy, a thriller/horror where a cliche killer targets sex workers, or a movie that's R-rated and centers on sex work as a titillating plot device to illustrate how fucked up a person is, like the depression porn that is Leaving Las Vegas.

My favorite "male" fictional sex worker character is the android prostitute Gigolo Joe from Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence, played by Jude Law.  (Law played a sex worker in another favorite entertainment, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  The saying on my blog, next to my photo, is a quote from that book/movie describing the bisexual hustler Danny: "A good time not yet had by all."  However, that's a true crime book/movie, not a favorite character of fiction.)

Artificial Intelligence is a retelling of Pinocchio set in the not-so-distant future where realistic androids, called "mecha," have become a normal part of the servant class relied upon by wealthier people.  A tech company decides to test a prototype mecha child, named David, which is the first of its kind programmed to feel genuine love and permanently imprint on a set of parents.  This scifi fairy tale follows David's quest to find "the blue fairy" from the children's book, whom he believes can turn him into a real boy as she did Pinocchio.  David does all sorts of charming and precocious things as he bonds with the family of one of the company's employees, but things go awry when the couple's biological son torments David until he repeatedly creates dangerous situations while trying to defend himself from the cruelty of humans.  Rather than having him destroyed as they're supposed to, David's human "mother" cares about him enough to set him free in the woods, where he has no idea what dangers await him.  After being discarded, David meets a "lover mecha" named Gigolo Joe as the two flee from both the police and a luddite band that captures and destroys mecha for amusement, all while searching for David's mythical blue fairy so he can "become real" in order to win his "mother's" affections.

What I like best about Artificial Intelligence is that it poses questions.  I don't really have a stance on ethics of artificial life, but I look forward to seeing such debates play out in the coming decades.  What rights or considerations, if any, would you want to extend to artificial life form?  Is "violence" against an android immoral?  These topics have been dealt with via Lt. Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the rapes of sexy "female" cylons in Battlestar Galactica, the uprising of machines in The Matrix, and other science fiction stories that ask questions about our moral obligations to technology that we create to be our slaves.  I like the addition of sex work to the topic, which seems like a natural progression, since we all know that as soon as we get new technologies, we rush to figure out how to have sex with it or use it to create or transmit porn.

But, what does the movie say about sex workers, especially this particular android sex worker?  I've edited some of Gigolo Joe's most relevant scenes into the 13-minute clip below.  Above all, I love that a family-friendly movie has a small "child's" only real friend be an fugitive hooker who never expresses a single desire to "escape" his occupation/programming.  (Unlike David, who desperately wants to be more than what he is.  Being an cute and loving mecha child is a terrible curse, but being a mecha prostitute is apparently pretty awesome.)  I also like the idea of stripping away the boring "...but why did you turn out this way?" sad-story-time character development normally seen in movies with sex workers.  Gigolo Joe wasn't the product of a broken home and molestation and forced sex trafficking, he is was created because human society needs prostitutes.  The fact that so many "lover mecha" seem to exist in this world speaks to the profession's permanence and the important role sex workers (be they android or human) fill in society.  Gigalo Joe isn't so much a character as an inextricable part of us.  Very bold stuff for a family-friendly movie to be insinuating.  It's an outsider story where the sex worker character is not an outsider because of his occupation, but because he is not flesh-and-blood, and that deep divide is the serious one, not sex worker versus civilian.

The only thing the movie is sorely lacking with this character is explaining how exactly Gigolo Joe's financial structure is set up.  Is he an independent sentient who keeps his fee, or does he have some kind of agency, renting him out like a DVD?  And what does a mecha prostitute spend his money on, anyway?  These are the answers we need!

Click the screenshot to watch the .mov file in your browser, or click here to download and watch in Quicktime (.mov) format, which is 22mb.  Spoilers about the movie contained within, obviously.

What this movie tells us about sex workers, Gigolo Joe, and the society that created him:

* Sex workers can be patient and compassionate lovers.
* Sex workers can be amateur therapists.
* Sex workers can encourage people to leave abusive partners and find something better.
* Sex workers appreciate tips from motel owners about how to avoid danger.
* Sex workers can tailor their appearance and demeanor to please different clients.
* Sex workers sometimes have to deal with vengeful, crazy spouses of their clients.
* Sex workers don't like licensing schemes, and will operate illegally if it keeps them safer.
* Sex workers aren't shy about listing their best qualities for you.
* Sex workers can participate in quests to help others realize their deepest desires.
* Sex workers can be very resourceful and know where to go in town to find anything.
* Sex workers can get a lot of business from conflicted religious people.
* Sex workers can get arrested.  (And if you're a good friend, you'll spring them from police custody.)
* Sex workers instinctively know how to operate futuristic helicopter submarines.
* Sex workers can be heroes who help people in times of need.
* Sex workers are safe to have around even the most adorable children.

"Browsing through the most gorgeous ties I'd ever seen I realized what was bothering me.  Growing up I was taught that the worst thing you could be if you were a man was a queer, and the worst thing you could be if you were a woman was a whore.  Then came my moment of epiphany: It was now my mission to have the time of my life being both.  No one but my closest friends would ever know I was doing this - it's not like I'd ever write a book about it.  And doing something so stigmatized, detested, and illegal, which already described my life as a gay man, also felt like a way to accord my country the same disregard it accorded me.  It wasn't as if being a monogamous gay man in love was seen as any better, so fuck it, I'll be a gigalo.  I took two ties to the cashier and handed the clerk a hundred-dollar bill.  Good riddance to the hungry years."

-- Richard Berkowitz, in his book, Stayin' Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex.

I'm not a hardcore nerd the way some of my wonderful friends are, so what I like with geek events are discussions of social implications of technologies, surveillance, privacy, anonymity, and fighting state power and censorship.  Most of these recommended videos are from the 28th Chaos Communication Congress, which concluded a couple of weeks ago.  These are my favorites, but you can find even more talks from the CCC by searching for "28c3" on YouTube.

How Governments have tried to block Tor by Jacob Appelbaum and Roger Dingledine [description].  Some amount of nerd jargon, a basic understanding of how the internet and censorship works is helpful.  Something to love here is both speaker's insistence that it's not about things like "Tor versus China," but the Chinese government versus their people.  There's good discussion of context and how things work differently under different regimes, and how ultimately, Tor developers want to help people decide their own fates in their own countries, and the life-or-death importance of truth in marketing when you offer a censorship circumvention tool.  It's valuable to look at how censorship is deployed in the world's most oppressive countries, and that those censorship tools are developed and sold by American companies like Cisco and Nokia, much like how IBM colluded with the Nazis during WWII.

Marriage from Hell: On the Secret Love Affair Between Dictators and Western Technology Companies by Evgeny Morozov [description].  Morozov is one of my favorite tweeters, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, and is fun to read for his snarky skepticism of the popular mentality that says that "the internet" magically makes activism and politics better.  (I'd call him a delightfully crabby old man, but he's a year younger than me.)  This talk has very little nerd jargon, and assumes you're already aware that US tech companies knowingly sell things to dictatorships to help them oppress people.

Macro dragnets: Why trawl the river when you can do the whole ocean by Redbeard [description].  Low amount of nerd jargon.  Redbeard is an awesome activist/hacker friend, and this talk takes a very quick jaunt though the basics of a wide array of data mining/collection/storage: US Customs and Immigration, DNA databases, voter records, facial/iris recognition, the data that Amazon stores on customer, IdentifyRioters.com, criminal/prison information collection, and more.  (If this topic interests you, Steve Rambam's multi-hour talks at HOPE are accessible and awesome.)

If you're into nerd-jargon-heavy stuff, Meredith Patterson's talk on The Science of Insecurity is a fun take on security from the perspective of someone who studies linguistics, math, and programming.  Another honorable mention goes to Your Disaster/Crisis/Revolution Just Got Pwned by Tomate and Willow.  Low amount of nerd jargon, this is aimed at hacktivists/coders on how humanitarian groups respond to disasters and crises.  I especially like that it emphasizes self-care, taking breaks, getting sleep, and keeping a sense of humor.  Stressed is the importance of knowing how secure your tools really are before suggesting people trust their lives to them, as well as taking an approach that focuses on the needs of people you're trying to help, rather then selling them on using something you created without their input.  "Don't make a solution for a problem that doesn't exist."  (Good advice for any activist.)

And, from back in October, I finally got around to watching Jacob Appelbaum speaking at an internet activism conference in Sweden on Internet surveillance, censorship, and avenues of resistance with anonymity.  Low amount of nerd jargon, scroll down to the fourth video on the linked page.  This talk includes the importance of privacy-by-design rather than privacy-by-policy, and how the specter of "child pornography" prevents people from questioning the "need" for internet filtering, and how the state functions as the real terrorists who most threaten our freedom.  I appreciate Jake's noting of the West's "othering" of censorship, assuming it's just an issue for foreigners and those in Arab dictatorships.  "Technological utopianism is really part of the problem."

And, finally, a bonus item, so long as I'm throwing out suggestions: PBS's Ascent of Money miniseries, available free online.  This four-hour documentary by Niall Ferguson is wonderful at making financial history of the world interesting, from the development of math and bookkeeping, how money has driven trade and colonization, determined the course of wars and revolutions, all the way up to hedge funds, derivatives, the current financial mess.  I've been looking to learn more about economics, and this is a highly recommended primer on everything from the history of stock, commerce, insurance, and how the real estate crash that's destroying America's poor and middle class was brought about by decades-earlier attempts to quash the appeal of communism.  Really, even if you're not curious about economics, this is a cool history of the not-so-well-known drunks, murderers, gamblers, entrepreneurs, and clergy who got us where we are today.

"...SCTNow, along with similar anti-trafficking concerns, uses a simplistic language of good and evil in its discussions of trafficking.  In this way, its selling of the anti-trafficking movement closely mirrors the selling of the 'War on Terror' in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.  Instead of untangling the resentment against American imperialism built up globally through centuries of exploitation, many Americans rushed to accept the nonsensical explanation, put forth by politicans and pundits, that terrorists 'hate us because they hate freedom.'  We wanted enemies that we could name and locate so that we might destroy them, not lessons in humility and self-reflection.  Likewise, today’s mainstream anti-trafficking movement appeals to middle-class Americans with the idea that trafficking happens because there are bad people out there just waiting to take your kids away from schools and malls.  Thus, its prevention efforts focus less on the systemic realities of poverty, racism, domestic abuse, and the dire circumstances surrounding runaway and thrownaway youth, and more on installing high-tech security cameras at schools and stationing more security guards at malls.  And it measures the success of its activities by the number of criminal convictions it achieves, rather than by the long-term health and well-being of the women and children who are most at risk."

-- Emi Koyama, in Trade Secrets on bitchmagazine.org

At some point last year, I sent off Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to a number of government agencies.  I'd actually pretty much forgotten about it after getting form letters back from a number of agencies saying they had nothing on me - or at least, nothing they felt like releasing.  Then, I got a padded mailer from the FBI yesterday.  My FBI file had arrived!  The contents were not what I was expecting.  I don't think I'm that terribly interesting to the government, but I have had the fortune/misfortune to have socialized with, dated, and befriended a number of wonderful people who definitely would be considered "interesting" to law enforcement.  I was expecting a few pages about my friends and lovers, but what I found was that I was physically followed by a group of FBI agents for five days of my life when I was 18 and involved in organizing a protest/campaign.

The FBI released 436 pages of intelligence related to or about me, none of which dates later than 2002.  436 pages!  Printed out, it would be almost a whole ream of paper.  And the most exciting things contained within are reports of us doing things like making photocopies, buying beer, riding the bus, and eating at a restaurant.  99% of it is mundane or mildly creepy, 1% of it is hilarious, and I hope there is something to be learned.  There are a ton of redactions.  It reads like this a lot of the time:

Here's the story: myself and 10 or 11 other people (judging based on line spacing in redacted lists) were being spied upon as we organized a campaign that culminated in a protest.  It ended up being a low-to-mid-level local protest event, got blurbs in the newspapers and TV that day, but will not be remembered by history books, which was about what we expected.  None of us got arrested, no one destroyed any property, and as far as I know, no one planned to, either.  (We were prepared for police aggression, and the group contained a number of street medics ready to deal with pepper spray.)  It was the sort of thing activists do every month all around the world.  There are repeated statements that basically say the FBI is not aware of anyone planning violent, destructive, or illegal acts, but since other protests have (notably the 1999 Seattle WTO), it's best to keep tabs on everyone just in case.  I'm not going to tell you exact details and name names of this one silly campaign, because that bit actually doesn't matter.  We were a small group of young poor activists living off cheap eats, lusty protester sex, and bitching about the system.  We could have been anyone or anywhere.  For the three days leading up to our protest, the day of, and the day after, we were being followed by a group of FBI agents who wrote down what we were doing and often took photos.

I'll spoil the ending for you: the only illegal act we committed in all 436 pages was dumpster diving at food distributor.  This was not actually picked up by the FBI's physical surveillance detail (that would come later), but a beat cop who happened to catch a few of us in the act on patrol.  Friends and I were issued misdemeanor trespassing citations on the spot, the fine for which was under $100.  (The FBI did note that a local police search of a compatriot netted the following suspicious materials: "three pieces of chalk in his pocket, green, red, and white in color," as well as a sticker for a campaign.)  After the citations by local police, the FBI "had the crime lab respond and photograph" the area.  Oh, how exciting!  What a crime scene!

After this dumpster diving citation, the clever FBI was excited to now know my address.  Except, I was hardly "in hiding" or anything.  For the first time since I was 15, I had an official address.  My name was on the lease and I had phone/DSL service at that address under my own name, as well as a mobile phone with a bill that went to that address.  Funny how my home address was still somehow a mystery to the federal government.  (Which calls to mind the first InterPol warrant out for Julian Assange, where they couldn't find one single photo of the man.)  FBI agents did a scouting of my apartment building, noting that there was a mailbox with my last name on it in the lobby.

I am repeatedly identified as a member of a different, more mainstream liberal activist group which I was not only not a part of, but actually fought with on countless occasions.  To somehow not know that I detested this group of people was a colossal failure of intelligence-gathering.  Hopefully the FBI has not gotten any better at figuring out who is a part of what, and that this has worked to the detriment of their surveillance of other activists.  I am also repeatedly identified as being a part of campaigns that I was never involved with, or didn't even know about, including protests in other cities.  Maybe the FBI assumes every protester-type attends all other activist meetings and protests, like we're just one big faceless monolith.  "Oh, hey, you're into this topic?  Well, then, you're probably into this topic, right?  You're all pinkos to us."

In taking a general survey of all area activists, the files keep trying to draw non-existant connections between the most mainstream groups/people and the most radical, as though one was a front for the other.  There are a few flyers from local events that have nothing to do with our campaign, including one posted to advertise a lefty discussion group at the university library.  The FBI mentions that activists may be planning "direct action" at their meetings, which the document's author clarifies means "illegal acts."  "Direct action" was then, and I'd say now, a term used to talk about civil disobedience and intentional arrests.  While such things are illegal actions, the tone and context in these FBI files makes it sound like protesters got together and planned how to fly airplanes into buildings or something.

There's a heavily-redacted page that talks about people networking with activists from other countries, and when a non-American has traveled for a protest to the area on other occasions.  This seems to be something of concern to them - if people would bother traveling for political causes.  One listed criteria for which people were profiled was if they have been previously arrested at other protests.  In trying to mentally piece together who might have been my fellow spied-upons, one of the people I think they were profiling had long since dropped out of activism by that point.

It's the surveillance detail where things get funny and weird.  Eleven or twelve of us were followed by a group of 3-6 FBI agents over the course of five days, and there was often a detail sitting outside of my apartment, totally unbeknownst to me.  (I feel like a total chump that I didn't notice that I was being followed and photographed during this time.)  I had never read law enforcement surveillance logs before, so it was interesting to comb through the pages.  Here is a typical page, which documents some hard-core anarcho-terrorist scheming, blue redactions were made by me:

Because if we let young people watch Lord of the Rings and drink beer, then the terrorists win!

Here are some other highlights about me, complete with snarky commentary:

Wow, serious Sherlock action there.  I entered a bakery, came out with a bag, and I am believed to be carrying bread or food.  (At least it doesn't say, "... believed to be carrying plastic explosives and hand grenades.")

This is cute to me because that hoodie was borrowed from my boyfriend at the time - perhaps the person I was seen walking with in this spy report.  I remember how it was amazingly soft, and I loved wearing it.  It smelled like him and made me horny.  Also: glasses are sexy.

This one documents the most serious activisting on my part - making copies at Kinkos.  The hidden humor here lies in the fact that it's entirely likely that I was making copies about stuff ranting against the police state and the explosion of domestic surveillance of protesters since 9/11.

My very favorite thing the FBI recorded about me:

As you can see, I pose a clear and present danger to society.  I pick up other people's trash and put it in the proper bins.

I'm bummed out that I didn't get to see good quality versions of my surveillance photos.  There are dozens included, but they are so screwed up from generation loss and copying and faxing, you can't even tell what's in them.  Most seem to be outdoors shots with some parked cars and trees.  The surveillance photos all have an otherworldly quality to them, like faded memories and half-remembered strolls after too many Cooks-based mimosas on the first warm day of spring.  Is this a photo of me?  Am I holding hands with someone I almost loved?  Or is this a photo of another person entirely, beamed from a parallel universe?  Such are the artistic mysteries of the FBI spying on Americans.

The day of the protest, I was followed along with others to a vegetarian cafe afterwards.  The FBI's surveillance notes report that we sat at a table.  You know, in stead of storming the place with guns drawn, demanding to be served in the bathroom, or on the ceiling.  The day after the protest, we still had our followers - I guess to make sure we hadn't planned an extra secret super-protest filled with violence and mayhem?  I was observed visiting hotbeds of political unrest like a dollar store, a used records shop, and a discount grocery place.  (Following us around, often on public transit, was basically a tour of "Places Poor People Go.")

At the end of it all, when the FBI decided to close the case file after the protest transpired and nothing interesting happened, it is concluded of me:

Well, there was that dumpster diving incident, but I guess they'll let it slide.

I wonder how much money this operation cost.

* * *

I don't have any particular tips or tricks to filing a FOIA on yourself.  I used this handy-dandy free service to generate the required form letters for me, which I then printed, signed, and mailed.  I didn't pay for anything, even though I indicated that I would pay for any amount of copying fees necessary.  I sent the letters to all the national agencies, and maybe a dozen FBI branch offices.  If I'm remembering correctly, I quickly got letters from all those local offices saying they'd sent my request to the national FBI office for processing.

What are you waiting for?  All it costs is some stamps and 10 minutes of your time.  Maybe a group of FBI agents once followed you around, too.  Filing for one's FBI file is one of those things I know a lot of us mean to do but never get around to doing.  I hope this blog post inspires more Americans to make today the day you ask your government if, how, and why you have been watched.

It's been a busy month, but I wanted to post a photo from last week's Google protest in Seattle.  The protest was just myself and @ishfery, a sex worker I'd previously only met on Twitter.  (And, ornery cunt that I am, I'd wondered if she was real, since "in a post-Alexa world," I've come to suspect all sex worker bloggers who don't post photos of themselves are possibly creepy dudes.)

If you haven't already, check out the Google campaign page on SWAAY.org.

The protest of two went well, and I was certainly happy to not be alone.  Being a lone protester makes you look like some kind of crazy trying to "educate" people about 9/11 being an inside job or something.  One protester is a nutjob, two protesters are lovable underdogs.  While I can make a banner I can hold by myself, it's hard to hold a banner straight and hand out fliers at the same time.  What this photo doesn't show is that I had another sign on my back, hastily tied onto my scarf, reading, "Google Don't Be Evil!"  The reason for the sign on my back was not just so Google employees in the building could see it, but because a little birdy alerted me to the fact that Google Seattle's web cam covered this portion of the bridge.

We probably handed out about 100 fliers, and had some really position conversations.  One woman introduced herself as a budding filmmaker in the early stages of putting together a documentary about the partners of sex workers, and the troubles she was having trying to find people willing to go on camera to talk about those dynamics.  A number of Google employees either emailed/tweeted, or said supportive things in person.  One took a stack of fliers to hand out in the building.  (At the end of the protest, I went to give the reception desk fliers to explain why we were there, and they already had them.)  Everyone was extremely nice and interested, and the only detractor was a homeless-looking older man who told us to get a "real job."  It sounds like the San Francisco and LA protests went well, too, and SWOP Bay Area has some photos online.

I'm now wondering what the next step should be.  It being the Christian holy month, the world is half shut down until early January, so trying to do anything this week would be pointless.  I'm curious if another round of protests is something people are interested in, and when to schedule that.  (Second week of January, I'm assuming, since many people go out of town for Christmas and New Years.)  I'm also wondering about effective ways to utilize internet-based activism as a part of this campaign.  I am steadfastly against pointless, masturbatory "activism" like e-petitions, and with Google being such a massive company that doesn't exactly engage in dialog with the public, it's hard to know where to focus energies.

What I do know is that I'm happy to be working on a campaign that engages in real solidarity with sex workers in the developing world.  Though Google's shitty NGOs do things that harm sex workers right here in America, the brunt of their harm us directed as the poorest and most marginalized people in the world.  Some of the current crop of sex worker "activists" engage in "activism" in the form of attacking people online about which words they're allowed to use and how awful they ought to feel about the erratically-defined issue of "privilege," but it's just bullshit posturing that accomplishes nothing other than making a few people feel self-righteous.  If you surveyed sex workers in the developing world and asked what American activists could do to help them, I'm pretty sure that not one respondent would beg us to spend more of our time bludgeoning each other with freshman-level identity politics and feminist dogma on Twitter.  I love having an issue around which we have discuss the tangible effects of neocolonialism and Western do-gooderism, and what it really means when these NGOs say they want to "rescue" sex workers.  I don't know where the campaign will lead, and if we'll be able to pressure Google into supporting non-missionary, harm-reduction and rights-based services for sex workers, but this is the general direction I'd like to see American sex worker activism go.

My friend Jacob Appelbaum made a comment during his talk about Tor at a nerd convention that stuck with me because it concisely and politely explains what white Western political folk like myself should be doing with our time: "You should consider using your privilege to help other people."

I've spent almost the entire last 5 days researching the groups that Google is now funding.  Please see the campaign page and read something I've put a lot of time info!

Why are sex workers' rights supporters upset with Google?

Google announced last week that they are making the largest-ever corporate donation to "ending modern day slavery": an impressive $11.5 million dollars. We applaud and support Google's desire to fight slavery, forced trafficking, and exploitative labor conditions, but Google's funding recipients include three NGOs that cause serious harm to sex workers in around the world: International Justice Mission, Polaris Project, and Not for Sale. As small sex worker support services struggle for funding to serve their communities, it is offensive to watch Google shower money upon a wealthy faith-based group like the International Justice Mission, which took in nearly $22 million dollars in 2009 alone. (In contrast, the St. James Infirmary, a San Francisco clinic that provides free healthcare to sex workers, operated on only $335k in 2010.)

Does Google know what their money is really supporting? Let's take a look at what you won't read about on the front pages these groups' glossy web sites.

Continue >>>

Also, I'll be protesting outside of Google's Seattle building on Wednesday from 2-4pm (on the bridge next to it, to be specific).  There are also protests in other locations, too, so check the campaign page.  Please join me so I don't have to feel like a lonely sad protester.

This morning, I saw a tweet from a nerd that I knew was going to mean bad news: Google is donating $11.5 million to "fight modern slavery".  And what have we learned that politically-loaded phrase usually means?  It means "fighting to imprison and further criminalize vulnerable sex workers in the developing world."

Looks like the next campaign idea I've been looking to find for SWAAY has just popped up.

In the next few days, I'll have a better idea for a response to Google getting into the anti-sex worker business under the banner of "stopping sex slave trafficking," but for now, I'd appreciate any more information on the groups I'm not familiar with.  For one, I'm not sure if I even have a full list of the organizations Google is funding, so if you know someone at Google, I'd appreciate having them check.  Google's own charity giving web site has the list below, but I'm not sure if it's a complete one.  It's not exclusively anti-sex worker groups, but IJM, the Polaris Project, and Not For Sale are known foes.

ActionAid India
Aide et Action
BBC World Service Trust
Slavery Footprint
International Justice Mission
La Strada International
Not for Sale
Polaris Project
GoodWeave

Please post information in my comments area, I want to flesh out this subject so we know who exactly Google is funding, and what those groups do to sex workers to "save" them.  If you're not already familiar with how Western NGOs hurt sex workers in the developing world, please browse the video collection at Sex Workers Present, which is mostly from South East Asia.

"On the subject of ethics in sex work research, we usually think of the insensitivity and careerism of researchers whose interest is in obtaining information they will take credit for.  I want to point to another problematic angle: the issue of whether those being researched are honest with researchers.  Why, after all, should people who are being treated as objects of curiosity tell the truth?

[...]

To put it another way, keeping secrets may help sex workers gain independence or control over projects to help them.  Talking about sexual risks with people who think it's wrong to ever take any risks may cause them to treat you as irresponsible.  Admitting the desire to stay in sex work after getting out of the clutches of abusers can render you ineligible for victim-protection programmes.  The best policy may be to omit certain information from responses or to put on the expected front.

-- Dr Laura Agustín, in Alternate Ethics, or: Telling Lies to Researchers on lauraagustin.com

If you don't already follow the funny/sad/personal Sex Worker Problems blog, I will agan remind you to do so.  There was a post with a question about how to explain gaps in your resume if you move out of sex work and apply for straight jobs, and I shared my two cents about one could tackle that problem.

I’m almost 28, and I’ve been a sex worker since I was 18.  I have no plans to leave sex work any time soon, but the “what would I tell potential employers” thing always seemed like a no-brainer to me, so long as one doesn’t mind lying.  Here are two completely plausible lies that a potential straight employer has no way of disproving...

Read the rest here.

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