My, that was a long silence!

Your SweetVIP blog mistress now lives many, many countries away in a land that's always warm, and the plan was for the blog to be taken over in my absence by someone else. But it looks like that hasn't happened, and I hate to see a good blog go to waste! Too bad about the three-month silence, but let's see if we can't find something interesting out there in the world for an update. 

Ah, here's something intriguing, especially now that I'm in a global state of mind. Check out the Wikipedia country-by-country summary of sex work around the world. But as always, don't believe everything you read, seeing as the research stuff always seems to strip out all the fun and just go for the grim tales of exploitation, HIV and suffering. As we know, there's more to the story than that.

Siri likes sex workers!

Well, not sure what sex workers and abortion have in common, but for the purposes of this news story they must have summed up the yin and yang of Siri, that sultry-voiced high-tech vixen who voices commands on the latest versions of iPhones. Apparently the controversy is over Siri being helpful when it comes to finding sex workers nearby, but not for getting an abortion.
Hmmm. Slow news day, guys?

Make some noise!

Merry Christmas, everyone! OK, maybe a protest by survival sex workers isn't everybody's idea of cheery Christmas news, but it's great to see this news of some push-back developing among sex workers in the Downtown Eastside.
If anyone's still waiting for our government to address the problems of survival sex workers, best to just let that go. What lingers from the Pickton trial and inquiry is that we'll be waiting a long, long time if we leave it up to the mainstream and our governments to do right by sex workers. It's going to take protest - more than the 75 people who turned up for the DTES protest, it's true. But hey, it's a start.
The fifth annual Red Umbrella Day march last Saturday in Victoria brought out more people than ever for the walk to the legislature, including sex workers. Great to see some of the indoor workers out in support of stopping violence against sex workers.
Kudos to Tracie Fawkes and her crew from PEERS Victoria for organizing the walk, which also was a chance for new PEERS executive director Marion Little to introduce herself to the community and some of the local sex workers.
Sex workers need mainstream people to walk alongside them if they're ever going to get out from under the stigma and stay safe from the dangerous or exploitive aspects of their line of work. But it's great to see them out there on the front lines themselves, rejecting the stigma that keeps them sidelined and invisible all too often. Here's to many more protests in 2012!

The tide is turning....maybe?

Oh, isn't it heartening to see stories like this one starting to crop up in "respectable" papers like the Montreal Gazette? There was a time when this kind of coverage would have started with the police version of things and then maybe - maybe - allowed the sex worker a paragraph or two at the very bottom to protest that in fact, she was perfectly happy in her work.
Can we call this progress? Perhaps, but so slow! 

Two out of three agencies helping B.C. sex workers are closing

These are dire times for survival sex workers. Two out of the three agencies in B.C. that specifically work with sex workers have announced they'll be closing their doors - PEERS Vancouver in the spring, PACE Vancouver almost immediately, as that organization runs out of money to pay their staff in just three weeks.
And how deeply, tragically ironic that it's all happening even as a multimillion-dollar inquiry unfolds in our province looking into why so many sex workers went missing or turned up dead in the Pickton years even while police and the public watched with studied indifference.
The stigma around sex work has got to go. It kills people. It lets government safely withdraw funding from marginalized groups, because governments know that the public won't much be troubled by that.
If you've got any influence anywhere on this issue, please use it. Hundreds of people - mostly impoverished, traumatized women - work the outdoor strolls in our province. Regardless of how people feel about sex work - and we'd hope that those reading a blog linked to an escort agency would at least be a little more kindly disposed to these misunderstood workers - the situation for outdoor workers in particular simply must change. And part of that change is supporting the community groups that help them. 

Telling it like it is

Nothing like a gay porn star who's not afraid to talk about it to liven up the scene at Oxford. Here's coverage of what must have been an interesting presentation from the man who started the French sex workers' rights group Les Putes in 2006. 

Industry pays more, gets less

Another great health and safety night at Sweet VIPs this month - a big thanks to the Cool Aid street nurses for being there for STI tests and for some frank conversations on how to keep sex safer for everybody. These events are regular happenings at Sweet VIP, and are excellent opportunities for bringing staff together to get to know each other better.
One of the topics that came up a few times that afternoon had nothing to do with STIs, though. Talk turned to why it is that escort agencies pay a business licence that's 15 times higher than almost any other kind of business licence in the City of Victoria, and also requires individual SWs to pay an additional $250 apiece for their own licences.
It's not just the money that rubs agency owners and SWs the wrong way. What irritates them much more is that even though people working in the sex industry have to pay far higher fees for everything from business licences to Yellow Page ads just because it's sex that they're selling, they still get the chilly treatment from the municipal staff and publishing/advertising staff  at the places where they do business.
"If I'm going to be charged at the gold level, then at least I should get gold-level treatment," notes Sweet VIP's Ms. Harvi.
So true. Come on, business community - either quit your gouging of the industry or give them way, way better service for all that money they're having to spend.