Md. Faraz Ahmad studied law at Sikkim University, and is currently enrolled as an : advocate under Calcutta State Bar Council. Ahmad is also a debator, writer, singer and human rights activist in general (special areas of interest or concern relates to sex workers). One of the most marginalized and unaddressed sections of Indian society are prostitutes or sex workers. Prostitution is an ancient institution which has an interesting past but unfortunately became the biggest challenge for the modern civil society.
Sex workers are denied or forcefully deprived of their very basic rights which is required to live as a human being i.e. education, health, privacy and most importantly dignity or respect. The simple understanding of Universal definition of ‘human rights’ is that every human being irrespective of his/her caste, creed, religion or any form of identification has certain basic rights which is a priority (from the very beginning). But when it comes to the sex workers we simply ignore everything and declare it against our morality or civilization without even knowing it.
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Nevin Öztop is a young feminist activist from Turkey, currently based in Switzerland, and deeply interested and committed to queer rights, sex workers rights and mobilizing resources for marginalised communities. She works as a Senior Resource Mobilization Officer at FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund, the only youth-led feminist fund that supports young feminist organizing worldwide, including funding for groups working on advancing the human rights of sex work, among other issues and causes. To learn more about FRIDA, follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. To make a contribution to FRIDA, follow this link.
Miss Jenny is a lifestyle and (presently retired... but ya never know...) professional Domme who is a prolific writer, educator and performer with a pedigree that includes being featured as a Burlesque star, stand-up Dommedienne, nightclub hostess/emcee/promoter, pin-up and fetish model, tarot and rune reader, Ren Faire guild member, event and ritual coordinator, after-dinner speaker and radio show host/DJ. She’s also worked as a marketing consultant, licensed esthetician, and a clerk/advisor at multiple occult shops. And she is an online moderator for a handful of support groups; military/spouse support, health and wellness, financial matters, Pagan outreach and support for those disowned/estranged by vanilla family. She has done numerous TV and seminar appearances, demos, performances and lectures at DomCon LA (three times so far), the Rev Mel show on the TSR network as a repeat guest and birthday show roaster, the Talk of Heathens program, for LADs (Los Angeles Dommes and subs), for LICK (Ladies In Charge of Kink) and for dozens of dungeons, nightclubs, private parties, faires (Pagan Prides, LGBTQ Prides, Renaissance/Pirate, Rockabilly Kar-shows and Goth/Psychobilly/horror cons), munch groups, expos and Burlesque revues. Jo Weldon is the Headmistress of the New York School of Burlesque and the author of The Burlesque Handbook, which contains detailed and illustrated instructions for making pasties and twirling tassels in every direction. She is also the author of the upcoming fashion history book FIERCE: The History of Leopard Print, available for pre-order. For more on the history of pasties, see Rosey LaRouge’s The Pastie Project, You can follow Jo at @joweldon Tassel-twirling is a revolutionary performing art skill, rarely appreciated outside of burlesque striptease. It involves pasties, which are generally two circular and conical pieces of stiffened and spangled fabric, angled with a 20-45 degree forward from the edge to the tip, with a tassel attached to those tips, which are then glued or taped to the body, most commonly over the nipples. Once affixed, rhythmic movement causes the tassels to move in circular motions, most frequently vertically, through physics similar to those which cause hula hoops to twirl horizontally. Throughout history, tassels have been attached to pharaohs’ jewellery, kings’ robes, prayer garments, curtain swags, and graduation caps, signifying luxury and accomplishment. Their significance at the tips of women’s breasts seems to have taken them in a new direction: a sign both of compliance with and rebellion against modesty restrictions for stripteasers.
Professor Ilari Kaila is a Finnish-born composer and pianist. He has worked at Columbia University and Stony Brook University (State University of New York), teaching harmony, counterpoint, musicianship, and post-tonal music analysis, and as a teaching artist in composition with the New York Philharmonic. His works have been performed in Australia by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; in Japan by the Avanti Chamber Orchestra; in Finland by the Joensuu Symphony Orchestra and the Zagros Ensemble; at the Banff Centre Summer Arts Festival in Canada; and at the MATA Festival in New York City; among others. He was also one of six young Composer Fellows featured at HKUST’s Intimacy of Creativity programme in the spring of 2014. Every now and then, you come across words strung together with such writerly virtuosity that they stick with you for a decade, verbatim, like a catchy tune. Back in 2009, in one of his excellent and scathing blog posts about the new administration’s healthcare reform efforts, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone employed a characteristically hilarious description of President Obama’s “healthcare czar”: “In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.” It’s a particularly vivid variation on an established metaphor: whores are evoked to illustrate the depravity of someone in the business of “selling that which should not be sold,” someone so corrupt that they have lost any semblance of shame. In his famous essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell advises that, in order to use metaphors effectively, a writer must see the mental image they are conjuring. Clumsy and incompatible metaphors are “a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.” We’ve come close to using the epithet “whore” on this blog but decided against it. Here’s the thing: when I follow Orwell’s advice, when I picture someone reduced to performing oral sex on a stranger to get their next meal, I’m unable to see a multi-millionaire healthcare grifter. To call someone like Tom Daschle a whore is an insult to sex workers.
Hannah-Freya is a PhD student and teaches literature at Leeds Trinity University. Her research is in Gothic and sensation fiction of the nineteenth century. Hannah-Freya also writes creative pieces and aspires to be a novelist, with multiple cats. You can follow her at @freya_cw. Boob celebration. Position hands beneath breasts and look down upon said breasts in sheer wonder at their amazement. Look up to your audience, smile, and then vigorously shake. There you have it: boob celebration. It’s about the only pose I can do in the beginner’s burlesque class, probably because my boobs are my best asset. I’ve got the tits, my sister has the butt. Now I’ve been eating too much chocolate for too long, I’ve also got the thighs, the belly and the wings to take off with. Bit of a difference to the teenage me, a skinny goth girl with an eating disorder. Still, the boobs were present. C cup tits above a rack of ribs; if I’d shook them then, I probably would’ve rattled. Dr Kate Brown (University of York); trustee, Basis Sex Work Project, Leeds. Here, Kate discusses the success of the Leeds managed approach to sex work, the tragic murder of Daria Pionko, and the repeated media references to Daria within anti sex work rhetoric.
Ellie spends a great deal of her time ‘fighting corners’ for those she sees as discriminated against no matter their gender, sexuality, colour, creed, age, ability or disability. For her the term “equality” mean not treating everyone the same, but as individuals, all with the same rights. She does not consider herself an activist, preferring to take things on based on individual merits. She likes to try and stand in other’s shoes to get an idea of what is going on for them and is vested in educating herself about those situations she has no idea about. She enjoys learning about other people’s experiences, beliefs, lifestyles, jobs, etc., and says her great gift is in never having lost that childlike quality to ask “why?” You can follow her at @countrymuso
“Education is a major key to bringing about a more understanding society and communities. You will not educate a bigot but you will help those in genuine need of wanting to understand.” Emery Draven was born and raised in Iowa where she was the last of four children and only girl In her family. During her early, she suffered severe abuses resulting in mental disorders including Morbid Non-functional Depression, Chameleon disorder, and PTSD among others. She now lives in Colorado with her husband and three children. You can follow Emery at @EmeryDraven TW. Emery's article contains reference to childhood sexual abuse. I have long believed that the only way to protect the health and safety of sex workers is to decriminalise and regulate the industry. In this article I am not just discussing pornography, but prostitution as well. The idea that all sex workers are abused by virtue of their profession, is to say any act of sex is an act of abuse. If we were to regulate (as some other countries have) we could guarantee job related health care, and the confidence to report abuses without fear of repercussion. In addition, this is the only real way to prevent the type of abuse I suffered, from happening to other girls, boys, men, and women around our nation, if not our world.
Nora E. Derrington holds degrees from Boston University and the University of New Mexico. She currently teaches English, and does a lot of thinking and talking about popular culture, at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. Her stories and essays have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Future Fire, the anthology Poems for the Queer Revolution, and elsewhere, and she reviews fantasy, horror, romance, and science fiction titles for Publishers Weekly. “You don’t think of them as human”: Strippers in (Somewhat) Recent Film
As has been noted elsewhere on Whores of Yore (e.g. http://www.thewhoresofyore.com/history-of-burlesque.html), stripping—in various forms—has been around for centuries. Understandably, then, strippers and strip clubs have been featured in film in a variety of ways, from featured roles to bit parts, almost since the medium was formed. Unfortunately, while there are certainly exceptions, depictions of strippers and strip clubs in film often serve primarily negative purposes: they might establish the seediness of a town, perhaps, or the depths to which a character has sunk or from which they’ll need to rise. Strippers are treated as disposable in films like 1998’s Very Bad Things, in which a stripper is accidentally killed at a bachelor party, and—based on the film’s trailers—in the forthcoming Rough Night, in which a stripper is accidentally killed at a bachelorette party. Like all too many depictions of sex workers in popular culture, those depictions serve more often than not to reinforce the status quo that sex workers are pitiable at best, and often simply less than human. |
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