Audacia Ray's Blog, page 47

I have now been producing the Red Umbrella Diaries audio podcast...

I have now been producing the Red Umbrella Diaries audio podcast version of the live stories for a year - I posted episode 50 this past week. So I'm just taking a minute to appreciate that: 50 different stories of the sex industry. I'm so proud to be able to document the sex industry in this way, give sex workers the platform to share their experiences, and make these stories available to the public for free.

Episode 50 (!!) features three-time Red Umbrella Diaries performer Dominick's account of a New Jersey cop's willingness to cross state lines, a great river, and several other boundaries to be with him. He told this story at the Law and Order themed event on June 2, 2011.

Subscribe to the weekly podcast by RSS feed for a new episode every Sunday or on iTunes.

Sex in the park is allowed. But show some consideration. Many...

Sex in the park is allowed. But show some consideration. Many children institutions use the park. Therefore please avoid: sex in the playground and visible places between 9 am and 4 pm. Loud sex in hiding between 9 am and 4 pm. Remember to: remove semen from the benches after the act. Leave condoms and used napkins in the bin. The city hall of Copenhagen calls for safe sex. Enjoy!(Denmark)

Ach, Skandinavien!

As compared to NYC, where we have just increased prostitution penalties for transactional sex in a school zone. Enjoy!

This week, five weeks after I left my job at IWHC, I started...

This week, five weeks after I left my job at IWHC, I started back working part time for them. I'm reinvigorating the online communications program. If you're interested in cisgender women's health and rights in the context of the global south and international sexual and reproductive rights and health policy, you should check out the blog Akimbo for daily posts, @IntlWomen on Twitter for short bursts of info, and the International Women's Health Coalition Facebook page for less frequent dollops of info.

Over the next few weeks, I'm doing a blog series on Akimbo about youth health and rights - with a particular focus on the advocacy young people in the global south are doing to achieve health and rights.

Read more about what's on deck: A Look at Youth Health and Rights Advocacy.

My book & I are in the Observer this week

My book & I are in the Observer this week:

squeela:

"Okay, this is important," said Ms. McClear as we walked up Eighth Avenue. She pointed at the ribbed building to our right. "The New York Times building. One of the lots on that site was the Playground…so there's a peepshow somewhere under there."

Back then, The Times was at its old 43rd street location. "I would wonder how many, many fucking Times people came to see a show," Ms. McClear said. "They do seem pretty straight-laced. Except for David Carr, but I never saw him."

"The Port Authority's a fucking hellmouth," she announced as we passed under the construction awning there.  "There's actually a really good wig kiosk in there, though."

Can't wait to read this! Did I mention Sheila's reading at the Red Umbrella Diaries next Thursday?

Space and silence

I keep wanting to write apologies and explanations about my absence from the internet.

But I'm not really sorry.

I'm recalibrating. It has been a weird few months, with deaths near and far, moving, leaving my job, finding my sense of boundaries, dealing heavily with the questions now what? and so what?

The last few years of working within professional feminism have sent me reeling. But I think I'm figuring it out now and getting back some command over my life. I haven't had paid work for the past five weeks and it has been pretty great to have the space to remember who I am. I am ready to dig back in, now, with some part time work at IWHC (so the blog will be bouncing back) and some other projects as well.

I made a commitment to myself six weeks ago that this summer I would focus on writing, reading, running, and cooking - one or more everyday. Today I did all four, and it was amazing.

I still love the internet, but over the last while I've been realizing how much the staccato pulse of it fucks with my thinking and waves of productivity. It's been really lovely to write offline, write longer and deeper, explore more instead of wrapping things up into a tiny blog post. So even if it seems like I'm being silent here, I am being loud at my keyboard.

"An old-school radical anti-porn, anti-prostitution activist known for criminal antics is in the news..."

"An old-school radical anti-porn, anti-prostitution activist known for criminal antics is in the news again, portraying a heavily biased anti-sex-work survey as science, when in fact it's the same message Melissa Farley has been screaming her entire career. Sadly, press outlets like Newsweek, Reuters, Jezebel and the Sydney Morning Herald are taking the bait, ignoring the fact that their information comes from a dubious report by a biased organization putting out a press release on PR Newswire…which is a for-pay distribution service that features relatively little other than self-promoting garbage."

-

Men Who "Buy Sex" Commit More Crimes; Newsweek, Trafficking, and the Lie of Fabricated Sex Studies

Great critique/takedown of the Newsweek "The John Next Door" article on sex work.

(via harmreduction)

Baked chicken with tomatoes, garlic, and red pepper. Not...

Baked chicken with tomatoes, garlic, and red pepper. Not pictured: couscous and cucumber salad with basil.

On August 4, the Red Umbrella Diaries will celebrate the release...

On August 4, the Red Umbrella Diaries will celebrate the release of Sheila McClear's memoir The Last of the Live Nude Girls (Soft Skull Press, August 2011). McClear, along with four other performers who have worked in the sex industry, will tell stories at Happy Ending Lounge (302 Broome Street between Eldridge and Forsyth) about disasters that have befallen them during their time in the sex industry. In addition to McClear's reading about the end of a New York era, the audience will hear rent boy Josh Ryely's hilarious story of a trip he took with a client to Paris, which goes wrong when food poisoning strikes; and former dominatrix L.D. Sorrow will share her moments of sex worker zen. The free event, hosted by Audacia Ray, is from 8 to 10 pm.

The Red Umbrella Diaries is a monthly storytelling series, hosted by former sex worker Audacia Ray, where people who've tangled with the sex industry tell personal stories about the complications that arise in the mix of sex and money. In addition to the live events in New York, the Red Umbrella Project includes a weekly podcast featuring stories from the live events, and offers media and storytelling training to sex workers.

See the full line-up and learn more: August 4 – Recipe For Disaster

godless embroidery: "Sex work" a Colonial Term says Indigenous Women Against Prostitution, Too much white privilege to see perhaps?

godless embroidery: "Sex work" a Colonial Term says Indigenous Women Against Prostitution, Too much white privilege to see perhaps?:

cumbersomecummerbund:

Is it so hard to understand that your *individual* white experience in or in opinion of prostitution or pornography isn't reflective of the other thousands of women's experiences in prostitution? Why not attempt to listen to women who are NOT white on this issue for a change? Why not click on the links to the indigenous women's groups that want to challenge the normalization of prostitution as well as the notion that prostitution is "sex work" - Aboriginal Women's Action Network asserts that "sex work" is a colonial term in and of itself, which it is…

Is it difficult to understand the systematic racism that sustains much of the sex industry? Is it difficult to understand how prostitution is a direct reflection of capitalism and white male supremacy?

An anti-prostitution perspective worth listening to.

melissa:laphamsquarterly:The July issue of Newsweek, 2011...

melissa:

laphamsquarterly:

The July issue of Newsweek, 2011 and the July issue of Cosmopolitan, 1955. 

"Why Men Buy Sex" (2011) / "Why Men Pay For Love" (1955)

Never change, magazine headlines. Never change. 

(I'm trying to get into what I have to say about the Newsweek story but I'm a little exhausted. Seriously, I get secondary trauma waves from reading Melissa Farley, not from having fucked for money.)

I second MGG's feelings of trauma around reading the Newsweek piece. I made it through the first two pages, will have to come back later. In the meantime, you should read Emi Koyana's analysis. Here's a choice snippet:

8a) The article cites the 2004 study inAmerican Journal of Epidemiologyby Potterat et al. to indicate that "Prostitution has laways been risky for women; the average age of death is 34." But this is misleading, because it does not mean that the average life expectancy for prostitutes is 34 or that the average prostitute dies at age 34. Potterat et al. are simply reporting that among the active prostitutes who died in the studied period, the average age at which they died was 34. If that is not clear, consider this analogy: average age at death for those who die while enrolling in college is probably somewhere near 20, but nobody would claim that the average college student dies at 20.