The Honest Courtesan

That kind of sophistry may impress sheltered, middle-class white girls in “Womyn’s Studies” programs, but in the real world it’s about as appropriate as a cow pie on the dining room table and three times as rude.
–  “A Load of Farley”

This month marked my first year in blogging, and a look back at my first anniversary column shows how little I understood where things were going; compare the figures quoted therein with the ones from this year’s anniversary column (exactly three weeks ago) and have a good snicker at my naïveté.  But while some of the early regular features were fading away (this month’s interview with my husband was the last biographical sketch of someone I know personally, and the update and miscellanea columns were mere months away from replacement), other features such as Q & A, fictional interlude (“Concubine”) and harlotography (“Aspasia”) were still going strong.  The arrival of the second year was also accompanied by a new feature, “one year ago today”,  which I implemented as a way of introducing my ever-growing readership to my back catalog; sometimes it was just a postscript at the end of a column, but in many cases the entire essay was a sequel to that of the year before: examples of the latter are “Bone of Contention” (sequel to “Streetwalkers”)  and “Harlots of the Bible” (sequel to “Mary Magdalene”).  The feature lasted only a year before turning into a part of “That Was the Week That Was” for six months, then growing into “From the Archives”, the bottom half of my weekly “Links” feature; this very “Back Issue” feature is also another form of it.

The blog was growing in other ways as well; I was being asked to do a great deal of outside work, and hadn’t yet learned how to say no; furthermore, I was beginning to write more on civil liberties topics not directly connected to sex work (as in “Independence Day” and “Imaginary Lines”).  Most of these, however, were at least still connected to sexual rights or women’s rights if not sex worker rights; “Sisters in Arms” (criminalization of miscarriage), “Social Construction of Eunuchs” (the damage caused by “social construction of gender” dogma), “Imaginary Crises” (the invention of the “campus rape epidemic”), “Peeping Toms” (on Lawrence vs Texas and polygamy law) and “Presumption of Guilt” (laws assuming everyone is a criminal) all fall into this category.  The month’s big stories were the very public meltdown of prohibitionist parrot  Ashton Kutcher after the Village Voice debunked his absurd “sex trafficking” claims, and French poobah Dominque Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a hotel maid; however, the quieter stories covered in “Bootlickers” (Washington state cops’ ludicrous and puritanical war on coffee stands) and “Against Their Will” (sex workers escaping from their supposed “rescuers”) have had a lot more staying power as recurring topics.  Another topic you’ve seen often and will continue to see for as long as this blog exists:  comparison of sound and ethical (“The Proper Study”) with bogus and unethical (“A Load of Farley”) sex work research.

Rounding out the month were “Honolulu Harlots” (how Hawaii tolerated brothels until the end of World War II); “Housewife Harlotry” (transactional sex in marriage); “Head Games” (haggling and other power games clients play); “A Working System” (how sex work problems are handled when the job isn’t considered criminal); and “Profanation” (in which neofeminist academics deny evidence to pretend that sacred prostitution never existed).