I agree
with the first commenter in this post by Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars: can we please just get the fucking Rapture over with already, so that we can rid ourselves of these subliterate cretins who seem to want to Love the rest of us to death? Failing that, can we just buy all of them first-class tickets to one of the places in the Middle East that they hunger so badly to blow up?

This is a good-news/bad-news kind of story: it's good because it shows idiocy and homophobia given the trouncing that it so richly deserves, but it's bad the fact that it took place at all shows that this country persists in treating lunatics seriously when in a just world, they should be laughed at.

A twist on an old joke has cropped up around CineKink, surfacing more frequently around festival submission time:

"What's the difference between art and pornography?"

"Pornography arrives with its 2257 compliance properly identified."

Bah dump bump.

Anyway...an expansion on some of the topics we discussed during our recent SXSW panel, The Porn Police: Know the Rules, an article by attorney Alan Levy has just been published in The Yale Law Journal.

First tracing the history of federal 2257 record-keeping regulations and its recent judicial back-and-forths, the article then goes into the implications that they present to all filmmakers, including those working with actual and with simulated depictions of sexual conduct.

As is true of a lot of people in the sex-positive community, I've been thinking a lot about Deborah Jean Palfrey's death this past week. I didn't know her personally, and never met her in person, so I can't speak of her death in terms of personal tragedy or grief. But grief and anger are what I'm feeling, because Deborah Jeane Palfrey's fate could have been written onto the lives of so many women and men. And the anger comes from the fact that it has, and it will be.

The real tragedy of her death, from where I'm standing, is not anything extraordinary about her story, but how common and familiar it is, to the point of being cliché. If the story of Deborah Jean Palfrey had been laid out in a novel or play or screenplay, I would be angry at having my time wasted by a writer who was unable or unwilling to rise above cheap hackery that was old and worn out in the days of the Victorian penny dreadfuls. But Palfrey was a real person, and it makes me sick and angry to think how often the lives of people who should live peaceful, untroubled lives are forced into old patterns.

Yesterday I'd intended to write a Labor Day post. It was going to be about the importance of workers organizing across all types of work, recognizing that we are all workers, and it was going to be the beginning of a conversation I want to have about why established unions need to support the organizing efforts of sex workers.

And then I read about Deborah Jeane Palfrey's death and all that went out the window for a while.

This morning I went back and looked for last year's May 1 post. I couldn't remember what I'd written about. My breath caught in my throat when I found that I'd written this, also about Deborah Jeane and about my speculation that perhaps the exposing of high profile clients would help in the effort to reduce the stigma attached to sex work.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey is dead, apparently by her own hand. She had been convicted on April 20, after a years-long investigation, of counts including racketeering related to her D. C. area escort service.

I am stunned, and too saddened to say very much right now, but I echo Amanda Brooks when she asks whether the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers counts those who kill themselves after prolonged harassment and persecution.

• Radical Vixen's interview with Deborah Jeane Palfrey, conducted last August.
• Bound, Not Gagged's coverage of Deborah Jeane Palfrey's prosecution.
• Huffington Post's coverage of Palfrey's suicide.

In solidarity,
Elizabeth

Technorati Tags: Deborah Jeane Palfrey, prostitution, sex, sex work

Melissa Farley and her fringe research mill Prostitution Research and Education have teamed up with a Scottish anti-prostitution group to produce a new 'research' report with the problematic title "Challenging Men's Demand for Prostitution in Scotland: A research report based on interviews with 110 men who bought women in prostitution" (PDF here).

Readers of this site will understandably be rolling their eyes and groaning, "not again!" But it is important to remember, awful though it is, that other folks take Farley's research seriously and that it deserves serious attention to help mitigate the damage it can do to real efforts to advocate for women's safety and sex worker safety. Such 'studies' play to particular political positions, in this case pressure to export the Swedish 'solution' through Europe, but political expedience is not the same as sound policy. Check today's Daily Record (Scotland) for the most recent orchestrated flood of bad news coverage of a poor study to support wrongheaded policy.

It is important to stress, again and again, that Farley's research cannot be considered reliable and certainly doesn't approach even basic scientific standards. The problems with the current study are many but can be summed up in terms of ethical concerns, bias and inadequate attention to detail in the write up. The write up is problematic enough that it is hard to judge the quality of the research, but the very clear bias is enough to call the findings into question. The bias also leads to the making of recommendations that are not proportional to the findings. Below I address just a few of the major problems. (Watch this space for links to critiques by other feminist sex worker advocates and researchers.)

We have been following an interpersonal conflict at the University of New Mexico that centers on issues of due process, graduate student-faculty interaction, sexual freedom and the right of both students and faculty to private lives. (If you're new around here or you need to get caught up you can see all of our previous posts on the matter here.)

One of the things that made it difficult to appreciate all of the layers of the conflict was a lack of access to primary source documents. We have now received a copy of the March 10 letter from the Deputy Provost to those who had petitioned for a review, by the Faculty Senate Ethics and Advisory Committee, of the extramural activities of one of the professors. After carefully considering the content and implications of this we have determined that it is in the public interest to publish that letter here in its entirety. In doing so, we were aware that extracts had appeared in the media. (You can click here for a PDF of the scanned letter or click on the images below.)

When people have only partial information there is a tendency to fill in the blanks with rumor, speculation and misinformation. We are publishing this letter to ensure that people are aware of the facts relating to the two reviews undertaken by the university administration. We appreciate that a number of members of faculty remain deeply concerned about the acts they sought a review of, and we respect both their right to hold those views and to raise them under University policies on the reporting of suspected misconduct. Nevertheless this is the second review the University has conducted of this complaint, and absent new evidence, little can be gained and much lost by pursuing this line of action. As the letter states, the matter is now "concluded" from the Adminstration's point of view. The observations and conclusions reached by the Provost's Office are congruent with our own observations based on interviews of the people involved and the documents examined.

A lot's gone down in the last year with Sex in the Public Square; I think that Elizabeth and I have accomplished even more than we originally expected to here so far with projects like the sex work forum, and the networking that we've done with people in the real world and all the discussion of news items. Looking at the site as a whole, I'm not only proud of what we've done, but outright amazed.

And there's still so much more that we can do.  Recently, we came up with an idea to take us even further: a sex-positive wiki. 

One of the things that made this seem like such a good idea to me was the surge of media coverage in the wake of the Spitzer scandal, and especially the Diane Sawyer 20/20 special, which repeatedly seemed to make a deliberate effort to snatch bullshit from the maw of truth.

We continue to analyse and comment on the distressing conflict within the English Department at the University of New Mexico (UNM) because of two recent events. The first involves the resignation, effective April 15^th , of the Director of the Creative Writing Program, and the second the follow up to our decision not to publish an anonymous commentary on this matter.

Sex 2.0 was amazing.

What do you get when one exceptionally talented organizer and her team bring together 80 or so people to talk about sex, feminism and social media in a gorgeous and very well appointed dungeon? You get Sex 2.0, which took place this past Saturday, April 12, in Atlanta.

It was a really amazing event. (Note: this was a conference, not a party. Despite the number of desirable and skillful people, and the amazing equipment, we all kept focused on the important discussions taking place.)

It was amazing because it brought together people will a huge range of connections to sex and the 'net. There were sex workers, BDSM practitioners, bloggers, academics, sex educators, community organizers, outreach workers (please note that many people fit in more than one of those categories). It was amazing because of the range of topics covered.

I led a discussion about building and maintaining the sex commons, and you can read a brief outline of my remarks here.