If the Zurich sex boxes are too difficult to get to, sex workers will not come. A lot of people don’t realize that while creating a sex zone seems like a good idea, doing so often takes sex workers out of the city to remote areas where they may be even more vulnerable. And access isn’t simply a question of transportation. Things like medical insurance, a permit to use the premises, and a nightly “house” fee, all pose obstructions.
Many women are working to take their bodies back by bringing representations of the female body to the public. In Africa, an artist has turned a former jail into a walk-in vagina. In the United States, another artist is using the rodeo to educate the public about the clitoris. In Australia, a student newspaper put 18 vulvae on its cover. The only thing more interesting than the art are the reactions the pieces have inspired.
News outlets do a stand-up job of publicizing incidents of impropriety on the parts of teachers, whether it’s because they are sleeping with students or because they are hiding previous involvement in some facet of the sex industry, but we never hear about the harassment that teachers and other faculty face at the hands of their own students. It’s not that it doesn’t happen — a survey by the American Association of University Women found that 36 percent of high school students report instances of student-on-teacher harassment, with four percent of students polled self-disclosing their harassment of a teacher.
You know how awesome it is to go to bed with someone, cozy under the covers in a post-coital haze, the only sound in the room the hum of the air-conditioner turned full-blast… until your arm falls asleep? Well, no more. Mehdi Mojtabavi’s Cuddle Mattress, created of a series of modules, is built to give every body the nooks and crannies it needs to stash your wayward limbs.
Theresa May, home secretary in the United Kingdom, is disturbed that prosecution rates are low given estimates about the number of trafficked persons in the UK. May and supporters believe this is due in part to uncertainty among law enforcement agencies. To this end, there is now a bill on the table that will create the office of the modern slavery commissioner, as well as toughen existing anti-trafficking legislation.
The story here isn’t a cautionary tale about the dangers of sexual appetites. Nanula isn’t a bad guy because he likes sex or wants to sleep with a lot of women, some of whom are sex workers. Nanula is a bad guy because he knew that some of these women wouldn’t consent to a specific sort of act with him so he deceived them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think there is a difference between porn and prostitution. At least two of the women involved do see a difference. They ended up doing something they didn’t want to do. Richard Nanula lied to them. That’s why he’s a bad guy.
I’m hard-pressed to think of anything which works the same in movies as it does in real life. Movies are, first and foremost, narrative art: they’re trying to tell a story, which means that everything which isn’t part of the story will be stripped down, which means that meaning and structure will be imposed on the sequence of events that you’re watching. Yet there seems to be a particular perversion that porn sex needs to be “real.”
Jonathon Green, slang lexicographer and author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, has released two timelines revealing our changing attitudes toward our genitals. The VAGINA timeline focuses on terms historically associated to refer to the female reproductive organs and associated features and dates back to 1250. The PENIS timeline, on the other hand, goes back to the 1300s and focuses not only on male genitals but their various features.
“A person who gives themselves permission to enter this state of erotic rebellion is an anathema to the fabric of social order, since none of the rewards that society can offer them have any value in that moment,” writes erotica author Remittance Girl in her critical essay distinguishing between Erotica and Erotic Romance. “They are in a state of revolution against the stable, against categorization, against limitation, against even language itself. And this is what lies at the heart of all the best erotica. This essentially transgressive, anarchic, unconstrained state of being.”
High-schoolers do it. College students do it. Stars do it. Politicians do it. Martha Stewart does it, for God’s sake! No matter how many horror stories we see in the media about people whose partners decided to share their private text messages and images, we’re all pretty much still at it. Last year, a poll by Lookout, a security company, reported that one in every five smartphone users send sexually explicit messages. Why do we persist?
