In an incisive piece on Salon, adult performer Lorelei Lee writes about her concerns with the condom ordinance that the city of Los Angeles recently passed. Like many in the adult industry, Lee questions the motivation of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which set into motion the events that would culminate in this ordinance.

Lee writes:

The ordinance comes in response to a campaign spearheaded by Michael Weinstein, head of the San Francisco-based nonprofit AIDS Healthcare Foundation. In the last few years, Weinstein, alongside similarly agenda-driven Shelley Lubben of the Pink Cross Foundation, has aggressively campaigned to mandate the use of condoms in heterosexual adult films, enlisting half a dozen adult performers, boycotting the Marriott Hotel chain for carrying condom-less porn, suing the L.A. Department of Public Health, and staging protests throughout Los Angeles at industry events and at AIM headquarters. Weinstein called AIM a “fig leaf” over the adult industry and backed the lawsuit that led to the organization’s financial insolvency and shutdown last year, which left a vacuum in health and safety protections in the industry. Weinstein seemed to hope that leaving performers without any kind of health protection would force legislators to mandate condom use. If the city of Los Angeles had not passed the ordinance this week Weinstein had a backup plan: Using AHF funds, he had collected 70,889 signatures to put the condom-mandate question to Los Angeles voters in June, a move that would have cost L.A. $4.4 million.

We’ve written about Shelley Lubben before. She was part of the opposition at the Cambridge debate discussing whether pornography provides a good public service (for those curious, porn won that debate by 44 votes). Other sex bloggers have had occasion to mention Lubben, most notably because of her affiliation with Gail Dines, another tireless sex-negative, anti-porn crusader:

Gail Dines and her colleagues insist that when men view porn, it leads them to child molestation, and when women view porn, it gets them gang-raped. However, the actual data tells a different story. So insidiously effective is this tactic of fomenting moral panic [...] that Gail Dines even headlines in left-wing women’s media.

Look under the hood and you can see Gail Dines’ campaign is promulgated by Christian groups and companies with explicit anti-gay histories, that her most visible sidekick is faith-based Pink Cross “charity” founder Shelley Lubben, or that among her most vocal supporters is former Bush-era Obscenity Task Force Prosecutor Patrick Trueman (whose own “Porn Harms” group crows with obvious delight at censorship of sex-positive discussions). Here too, the fear-inducing messages—and the thinly-veiled threat—is the same: “good girls don’t; men are predators.”

Lubben is no stranger to anyone writing about the issues facing freedom and sexual expression in a sex-negative culture. Her agenda is not limited to pornography, either. Lubben doesn’t see a difference between the abusers who create porn, the monsters who watch it, and homosexuals. The following is a clip from a site created by the adult industry and dedicated to questioning Shelley Lubben’s motives:

In her critique of the condom ordinance, Lee continues:

Among performers I know, there is a mix of opinions as to whether they mind actually using condoms on set themselves — a different question than the one of a legislated condom mandate. Some, like Nina Hartley, who is also a sex educator and has training as a nurse, are strongly opposed to using condoms at work, believing that they may actually increase likelihood of STI transmission. Personally, I’m not opposed to using condoms during my shoots — in fact, I already do. I became a condom-only performer in 2010, after eight years of working non-condom. But during my time as a non-condom performer, I never once contracted an STI on set that condoms would have prevented, and truthfully, I’m not sure that condoms actually keep me safer than testing alone. Further, I would never want to work on a set that required condoms in lieu of STI testing.

[ ... ] What performers like Hartley and I are equally opposed to is being condescended to by hypocritical zealots like Weinstein and Lubben who are obviously motivated by a concern for something other than our health and safety. Who have, in fact, shown a “blatant disregard” for the health and safety of industry workers by making it more difficult for us to use the protections we already have in place when their actions led to the closure of AIM. We’re also opposed to the squandering of AHF resources – resources that could be effectively used to help prevent and treat HIV and AIDS – on a political campaign against an industry whose health and safety regulations are already working. In the decade since AIM began the program of mandatory testing, six performers have tested positive for HIV, and only three of those have shown to be from on-set transmissions. That’s three transmissions during the course of filming tens (or perhaps hundreds) of thousands of scenes. There are no real statistics as to how this compares to transmission rates in the general population. Rather than concrete evidence, Weinstein has used references to AIDS as a scare tactic, leading those who have been affected by the disease, like City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, to believe that a condom mandate would actually have some effect on HIV transmission rates. Condoms, even when used “consistently and correctly,” do not have a 100 percent success rate. Although numbers vary, one study showed condoms to be only 80 percent effective against HIV transmission in couples of different sero-statuses (in which one partner is HIV positive and the other negative). I have a hard time believing that condom mandate, if it is even possible to enforce, is likely to have a higher success rate than testing.

We covered the some of the various attempts the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) launched against the porn industry’s Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation (AIM), which eventually succeeded in May of last year, leaving performers exposed, as Lee writes.

The most unfortunate part of this conversation is that porn carries with it a lot of baggage. Even this, a conversation about workplace safety and employees, is easily derailed by questions about what porn does to men, whether porn exploits women, and what porn teaches children (children? Yes, children! We’re not kidding, this is a question that’s been raised time and time again in the context of this discussion). As a result of these emotionally-charged tangents, the discussion about what would really benefit performers never happens.

Lee writes:

Weinstein has remarked that the L.A. attorney’s office is trying to “thwart” voters’ will, but what stake do Los Angeles voters have in this matter? I’ve heard too many times the claim that the adult industry is acting irresponsibly by portraying barrier-free sex when – as the argument goes – people of all ages are getting their information about sex from pornography. But the overwhelming majority of porn is fiction, and the world it portrays is one of fantasy. I have to believe that most people who encounter porn know this. We don’t generally expect other forms of entertainment to be responsible for disseminating health and safety information. If pornography is in some capacity replacing sex education for people in this country, then mandating condom use is a ludicrously indirect way of addressing that problem.

Image of Lorelei Lee via Twitter.

We just got a curious e-mail from Tod Hunter, an adult industry reporter and blogger, saying there have been “reports of Legionnaires’ Disease” at the Luxor in Las Vegas and that people attending AVN’s Adult Entertainment Expo may have been exposed. Hunter warns:

The incubation period for the disease is between 10 days and two weeks, so anyone exposed during AVN Adult Entertainment Expo would be feeling the effects now. And maybe thinking they’re getting the traditional post-show January cold.

According to the Mayo Clinic, Legionnaires’ symptoms include headache, muscle pain, chills, and fevers that run 104F or higher. By the second or third day, symptoms include coughing, shortness of breath, chest pain, fatigue, loss of appetite, confusion or spaciness, and gastrointestinal issues such as nausea, vomiting and/or diarrhea.

A milder form of this disease is Pontiac fever, which usually doesn’t develop beyond primary symptoms and which clears within two to five days. Most healthy people can recover from the disease with antibiotic treatment, but death can occur in five to 30 percent of cases, if symptoms progress and the disease is left untreated, warns the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There has already been one death associated with this recent outbreak at the Luxor. The Las Vegas Review-Journal writes:

Bacteria that cause Legionnaires’ disease were found in water samples taken earlier this month at the Luxor after a former guest died of the form of pneumonia, officials with the Southern Nevada Health District said Monday.

[ ... ] Testing of the water done after the CDC reported the death to the health district on Jan. 6 found conclusively that the Legionella bacteria were present in the water system, a preliminary investigative report issued by the health district revealed. The incubation period for the disease is between 10 days and two weeks, [senior epidemiologist with the health district, Brian] Labus said.

Early last year, there was a Legionnaires’ outbreak among guests who had attended an event at the Playboy Mansion to benefit Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vax Generation Rescue Autism Foundation. According to the Los Angeles Times, at least 170 fell ill after being exposed to a whirlpool spa on the Holmby Hills mansion grounds.

Photo from AVNs used in the header collage by Michael Dorausch.

Umar Kahn is a 34-year-old computer technician who likes to drive around late at night. Nothing new there — late at night is the only time Los Angeles is not gridlocked in traffic. It’s probably the least annoying time to be on the road in this town. Unless you run a stop sign, that is.

So you get pulled over. Running a stop sign is not that big a deal when there’s no one else on the road. Maybe the cop will understand, you think as the Glendale officer makes his way up to your car. He knocks on the window. License and registration. You know the drill. The cop shines a light in your face. No biggie. You start explaining. Then the light shifts down to your lap.

You’re not wearing any pants.

This should be someone’s nightmare — you know, the L.A. version of showing up naked at a board meeting or to defend your dissertation. Except it’s not. This actually happened last week to the above-mentioned man.

According to CBS2, when the police asked the man to explain why he’d removed his pants and underwear, Kahn explained that he was sexually frustrated. He hadn’t had sex in a month, he told them.

Didn’t Glendale’s Police Department get it? Stripping in his car gave Kahn a sense of freedom. “My thing is the freedom,” the butt-ass naked man elaborated.

And it doesn’t stop there. LAist writes that the drives are only part of the kink. The plan, it seems, is to get high, drive around and find a cul-de-sac where Kahn can park and help himself relieve his sexual frustration.

“Los Angeles County Superior Court records indicate Kahn was convicted for indecent exposure in 1998,” writes LAist’s Lindsay Ross-Williams. He’s being investigated for a situation similar to this more recent incident, which unfolded a year ago — in Pomona! That’s 43 minutes away for those of you who are not from these parts. There is “getting around” and then there’s getting around!

We seriously can’t imagine any kink that’s more L.A., driving around desperately seeking parking, before one can actually get off. Come to think of, it sounds a lot like our sex lives. Except, you know, we wait until we get there to take off our pants.

Photo by Daniel Echeverri.

The International AIDS Conference — a gathering of all those involved in working for the eradication and treatment of HIV, as well as policymakers and activists — is returning to the United States after 22 years this July to assess the scientific progress that has been made and lobby for improvements in policy regarding the populations most affected by HIV and AIDS.

According to their site:

The AIDS 2012 programme will present new scientific knowledge and offer many opportunities for structured dialogue on the major issues facing the global response to HIV. A variety of session types — from abstract-driven presentations to symposia, bridging and plenary sessions — will meet the needs of various participants. Other related activities, including the Global Village, satellite meetings, exhibitions and affiliated independent events, will contribute to an exceptional opportunity for professional development and networking.

Audacia Ray, founder of the Red Umbrella Project, has issued a call to sex worker activists to join forces, noting among various pressing issues that “the U.S. exports terrible policies and strings-attached funding that harms sex workers. For example the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which funds international organizations, include an anti-prostitution clause in contracts with grantees. American sex workers must stand up to our government and denounce PEPFAR and similar policies that harm our brothers and sisters around the world. The IAC is an important forum for us to make our voices heard.”

From PEPFAR Watch:

Current law requires all organizations that receive PEPFAR funding to have a policy that explicitly opposes prostitution and sex trafficking. This policy, known as the anti-prostitution pledge, or the Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath (APLO), has been shown to have a negative impact on prevention efforts because it undermines the most effective approaches to working with sex workers.

Sex workers are among the most marginalized people in any society and often lack access to social and health support systems — while being at increased risk of HIV infection. Their rights to access health care and to be free from violence are frequently violated, making it essential that organizations work with them non-judgmentally. Organizations that build trust with and peer relationships among sex workers have yielded dramatic reductions in HIV infections among these populations. But CHANGE [Editor's note: The Center for Health and Gender Equity] has found that these organizations are unlikely to sign the pledge, making them ineligible for funding. Other groups have been cut off from funds because of over-interpretation of the policy by U.S. officials in the field, made possible because the government has not clearly defined what constitutes a violation of the policy. Moreover, the pledge has led organizations to eliminate, scale back, or censor their prevention efforts with sex workers, undermining best practices in public health.

As a result, the pledge has led to further alienation of already-stigmatized groups, given free rein to police who abuse or extort money from sex workers, and has resulted in further violence, discrimination and human rights violations against women, men and transgender people in prostitution. The policy is driving sex workers underground and away from the non-governmental organizations and health workers best poised to provide them with HIV prevention, health and alternate-livelihood services.

If you can’t join the Red Umbrella Project but feel strongly about these issues, you can still take action by writing a message to the Committee on Foreign Affairs urging for comprehensive, evidence-based HIV prevention in foreign assistance reform efforts that doesn’t marginalize at-risk populations such as sex workers.

Image of Red Umbrella activists by ReikHavoc, via TitsandSass.

Here at Sex and the 405, we have heard many rumors about the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) since we started reporting on their war on pornography, chief among them that they opposed research into an AIDS/HIV vaccine. Not content to become part of the gossip mill, we decided to dive into the allegations.

When our editrix asked Lori Yeghiayan, associate director of communications at AHF, whether its president Michael Weinstein does not support further development of an HIV vaccine, she responded: “no, that’s not accurate. There was a time — this was probably about five years ago that we had put out an argument about not spending exorbitant amounts of money on clinical trials for a vaccine when it was not really producing results. Not really basic research but actually clinical trials in several countries with thousands of people and that there had been several failures with the vaccine search in that way so we had made an argument about putting money into proven efforts, which is treatment. We are for basic research into HIV and HIV vaccines and new drugs and all that. It’s not accurate to say we’re against it.”

Okay. That makes perfect sense. But just to be sure we had all the information we hit up Google. What we found, from AHF itself, was disheartening.

On May 5, 2008, the 11th Annual Conference on Vaccine Research was scheduled to convene in Baltimore, Maryland. A little over a month before the conference, an editorial (which has since been yanked) appeared on Baltimore Sun in which AHF President Michael Weinstein and AHF Chief of Medicine Dr. Homayoon Khanlou wrote about the futility of continuing to fund vaccine research. The editorial, which remains on RedOrbit.com reads:

To control AIDS, funding must be invested in strategies that work: effective prevention efforts, routine testing and universal access to treatment — and not spent on expensive vaccine research that over 20 years has yielded little of promise other than discovering how not to make an AIDS vaccine.

The latest round of vaccine trial failures (including a large-scale Merck trial halted when the vaccine turned out to have possibly increased subjects’ risk of acquiring HIV) has added to a growing consensus in the scientific community that an AIDS vaccine is a decade or more away, if one can be developed at all.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), recently stated: “We have to leave open the possibility … that we might never get a vaccine for HIV.” That view was shared by leading AIDS expert David Baltimore, who conceded last month that the scientific community is no closer now to discovering an HIV vaccine than it was 20 years ago.

Twenty years of research and the fact remains: a vaccine against a retrovirus, the family of viruses HIV belongs to, has never been successfully developed. It is highly unlikely that there will be an AIDS vaccine — certainly not by any current standard definition of the word.

Having met the public’s criticism of his position, Weinstein elaborated on his position in an editorial for the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks later:

There are not just two or three AIDS vaccine candidates that have failed. Every AIDS vaccine candidate to date has failed. Leading scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Dr. David Baltimore, have even gone so far as noting that we are no closer to the discovery of an AIDS vaccine today than we were 20 years ago.

In fact, not only have all the AIDS vaccine candidates failed, the latest was hurriedly pulled from clinical trial after the vaccine was found to actually put people at a significantly increased risk of contracting HIV. Twenty-seven years into the AIDS pandemic, countless billions in taxpayer (and private) vaccine funding later, and our leading researchers can’t even meet the most fundamental tenet to “do no harm.”

[...] Currently, the AIDS vaccine establishment continues its taxpayer-funded, repeatedly unsuccessful search for a preventive AIDS vaccine while an alternative many have seen work on multiple levels — successful antiretroviral treatment as both treatment and prevention — goes unchampioned.

This is why the AIDS Healthcare Foundation believes that it is time to pull the plug on U.S. taxpayer financing of the search for a vaccine, and leave it to private donors to back what has been and continues to appear to be a fruitless goal. To continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a government-funded search for an AIDS vaccine in the vain hope of success someday while millions worldwide suffer and die is simply unacceptable when other currently available strategies offer practical — and effective — alternatives.

Dr. David Baltimore, incensed by the name-dropping that linked him to Weinstein’s indictment of the “vaccine establishment” responded in an editorial co-written with Dr. Seth Berkley, a medical epidemiologist and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI):

This very pessimistic view of the possibility of success in the vaccine quest is a misreading of the situation.

Yes, the Merck trial of an experimental vaccine failed to show efficacy. But it was not a failure as a trial. It had a hugely important outcome: We now know one preparation that will not work as a vaccine. Before this trial we knew only one other direction that had failed, so our knowledge has doubled.

Knowing what not to do is useful because it informs further research. Of course, we would rather have successful trials that tell us we are going in the right direction, but AIDS vaccine development is hard, and negative trials are not a surprise. Because the trial was so professionally accomplished, we can trust its results.

Now what we need are more such trials of materials different enough from the Merck materials that we can learn something from them. The job of the research community is to make the judgment of what materials fit this criterion. But to give up at this point would be criminal. Luckily, the cool heads in the AIDS research community are not giving up — they are searching for new directions. There is a healthy debate about what those directions should be. But to our minds, we need more human clinical research, not less, if we are to find the magic formula that will protect people against AIDS.

Not to be outdone by the Nobel Prize winner, Weinstein returned to the Los Angeles Times opinion page condemning efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine as “self-serving.” He writes:

The search for an AIDS vaccine has lost its scientific purpose and turned into a self-serving quest.

How else to explain the remarks found in David Baltimore and Seth Berkley’s “Keep funding the AIDS vaccine”? Saying simply that “AIDS vaccine development is hard” is not a credible response to recent criticism leveled at the ballooning U.S. budget for AIDS vaccine research and the meager results it has produced. The argument is particularly weak when you consider that nearly $1 billion in public funding is poured annually into this fruitless quest, while millions globally lack access to the revolutionary, life-saving AIDS treatment that was developed more than 12 years ago: antiretroviral medication.

We understand the desire to make treatment available to those affected by HIV and AIDS worldwide, but to actively campaign to kill all public funding for an HIV vaccine is unconscionable. And speaking of self-serving, here’s a question we leave with you: does AHF provide the above-mentioned unchampioned treatments for HIV and AIDS?

The answer, from the AHF website: “Our healthcare centers offer thousands of clients — many of them uninsured — the finest HIV-centered primary care, and our pharmacies specialize in HIV medications. Our researchers conduct trials of the newest drugs and treatment protocols to improve patient quality of life. Through Positive Healthcare, our managed care program in California and Florida, we provide HIV positive Medicaid recipients extra tools to manage their disease.”

Image of test tubes by Horia Varlan.

Los Angeles is now the first city in the nation that requires performers to use condoms while shooting porn in areas that require permits. The Mayor signed the ordinance pushed by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation on Monday. The law will go into effect 41 days after the City Clerk posts the ordinance publicly.

You can read the complete coverage about this on the LA Weekly. But for those of you who prefer the simple version, here’s a summary:

– The ordinance claims the adult industry is responsible for the ongoing epidemic of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and the HIV/AIDS crisis in Los Angeles.

- This measure is tied to the acquisition of permits, so only performers who are shooting outside a certified sound stage are required to use condoms in scenes with vaginal or anal penetration.

- The ordinance makes no mention of protection during oral.

- The ordinance makes no mention of testing.

- Enforcement costs will be covered using the money filmmakers pay for permits. There is no mention of what entity will be enforcing condom use at shoots. The office of City Attorney Carmen Trutanich has doubts about the ability of the strapped Los Angeles Police Department to take this role and county health officials have raised concerns about regulating the industry through the Department of Public Health.

- The AHF plans to take condom enforcement to the county as a work-place license so that no matter where the shooting is happening or whether it requires a permit, all performers will have to use protection. In the meantime, they are talking with the mayor of Simi Valley, hoping they will adopt the L.A. ordinance. Other plans include taking the measure to San Francisco. AHF has vowed to follow the industry wherever it goes.

Read the ordinance yourself here.

Image of condoms by Robert Elyov, image of Jessica Janson from her collection.

By all indications, the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards were a train wreck this year, so thank God you weren’t there. We’d say we braved the madness for you, but that would be a blatant lie. We had an epic weekend and picked up the press release when we got home. Lazy blogging — it’s an art.

In any event, here’s a run down of the award-winning accouterments, because if you’re anything like us, you’re always on the market to take things up a notch.

Best Lingerie or Apparel Company

Baci Lingerie is quickly becoming the hottest seduction item on the market with its brand of glam underthings. Paying as much attention to its photo shoots as it does its products, their collection catalog leaves every other brand in the dust. Forget Victoria’s Secret angels, with their slow but certain volte face into demure respectability: you deserve a heavenly upgrade.

Best Overall Sex Toy Line

Look closer — this is not your average lipstick and compact. OhMiBod’s Bedroom Kandi line has everything you need for discreet pleasure on the go. Don’t be deceived by the size — these vibes pack serious power and are whisper-quiet to boot. And forget fumbling for batteries — these babies are USB rechargeable for the technophile on the go.

Best Party, Game or Gag Product

Adult Trading Cards by Adult Trading Card Company bring a little fun to the memories of trading cards of our youth. As recovering Magic addicts (go ahead, judge us), we’d love to see their Fantasy Series developed into an actual game. Then again, we’d probably never post again if they did.

Best Sex Toy for Couples

The We-Vibe II is the only vibe that can be worn during sex. Shaped like a horseshoe, you insert one end into you and let the other hover over your clitoris. The part of the vibe that slides inside you is shaped to allow normal penetration (unless you’re our editrix and are sleeping with a man with a monster cock, anyway), allow both of you to enjoy the vibrations while going at it.

Best Sex Toy for Men

For the same reason that we lol at vibrators and dildos that are pink and cute and obviously created to appeal to us pink-and-cute loving females, we lol at Fleshlight’s Blade, which goes out of its way to ensure that buyers don’t dwell too much on the fact that they’re fucking their hands. It’s not just a sex toy, you see, it’s the hilt of a samurai sword! YOU MAY BE JACKING OFF, BUT YOU ARE A POWERFUL WARRIOR! To its benefit, how can Fleshlight — a company that revolutionized men’s solo pleasure — actually improve such a perfect offering? This is their first new product in a decade, and it’s come a long way, both in terms of internal texturing for maximum pleasure, and a squeezable exterior to provide more control of the experience than ever before.

Best Sex Toy for Women

The story goes that a group of researchers were working to create a product that strengthened the pelvic floor and that during trials, nearly everyone who tried the prototype had insane, explosive orgasms. Astonished — because apparently no researcher working with women’s nether bits would ever imagine that sustained stimulation there would EVER result in an orgasm — they took their contraption to Jopen, whose all-women development team added a G-spot stimulator on the shaft and vibe for the clit and turned it into the sex toy to end all sex toys. We can’t vouch for the veracity of the story or say Intensity will strengthen your pelvic floor, but we can say you’ll orgasm. Hard.

Best Fetish Product

Here’s one that will get anyone fighting for conservation to agree with the crazies at PETA: a butt plug with a tail attached made of real fur. The Crystal Minx Plug With Tail by Crystal Delights, and other plugs in its collection are made of Pyrex glass and are 3.3 inches in length and 1.4 inches in width. No word on whether the fur actually comes from foxes, minxes, and lynxes.

Curious about who else won? Check out the full list.

What the tech blog doesn’t tell you is that this is the most-watched video from their coverage of the expo.

As someone who has been researching and writing about slavery and trafficking since 2005, I worry that the overall desire to help on the part of Google has overridden a lot of details that must be understood if we are going to find a way to rid the world of trafficking and slavery. The most harmful and least understood of these details is the importance of supporting organizations that distinguish between consensual sex work and sexual slavery (something the State Department finally does and something NGOs must do to really help combat this blight). Several of the organizations that Google is funding do not make this necessary distinction.

International Justice Mission is a Christian group whose abolitionist practices are founded in morality, which casts anyone involved in sex work — coerced or not — into the role of victim in need of salvation. Their crackdowns on the sex industry is driving prostitution further underground, making it difficult for law enforcement to find real victims, and impossible for sex workers who have information about crimes to step forward.

The Polaris Project is little different. One look over their materials exposes their position on consensual sex work: they see no difference between a sex slave and a topless dancer. It’s also worth noting that they were one of the organizations on the forefront of the attack on Craigslist that resulted in the removal of the erotic services section. The problem with efforts like these is that people involved in sex trafficking will not cease their activities because a single avenue is closed off. Almost immediately after the section was closed, listings for adult services began to appear in other sections of Craigslist — in sections that do not require payment for postings, meaning there is no paper trail for law enforcement to follow.

While opponents of Craigslist may shake fists screaming about how Craigslist “profited” from sex trafficking, it is important to remember that the system of payment for adult services was instituted to create a record. That’s how Boston authorities managed to apprehend the Craigslist Killer, Philip Markoff. Censoring Craigslist has moved these activities to locations within the site where there is no paper trail, making it hard for law enforcement to locate and crack down on perpetrators.

Campaigns to remove sites similar to Craigslist altogether — such as that leveled against the Village Voice’s classified ads site Backpage, at the hands of Ashton Kutcher and the organizations with which his own DNA Foundation is aligned (among them the aforementioned Polaris; Shared Hope International, an organization that fights child sex trafficking by educating men about “the dangers of engaging in commercial sex markets, especially pornography”; and Citizens Against Trafficking, which continuously launches smear campaigns against sex educators, whom they believe are the cause of all these problems) — will only result in moving these activities underground where law enforcement will have an even more difficult time helping victims.

Censoring a site, it must be noted, is an easy victory. It gets organizations more money and it gets politicians elected. Never mind that doing so doesn’t really do anything to help real victims. And that’s not where it ends, unfortunately. The inability of these organizations to see a difference between sex work and trafficking means that efforts to censor will continue beyond sites like Craigslist: pornography is frequently a target and we’re not just talking about nude magazines and independent sites (where do you draw the line? Remember when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was considered obscene?). Sex educators are also consistently attacked, as are any groups whose desires don’t fall into the cookie-cutter moral ideal of what sex should be.

Ignorance on the topic, willful and not, and the eagerness of people to exploit this lack of information in pursuit of a moral agenda or political gain results in inaction and very dangerous legislation that affect all victims of slavery.

E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous — an expose about modern day slavery in various forms — has been a vocal advocate of the necessity of not only differentiating between the sex industry and sex trafficking, but also giving the same amount of attention to other forms of slavery, often overshadowed by sensationalism surrounding accounts of sex trafficking:

“The West’s efforts have been, from the outset, hamstrung by a warped understanding of slavery,” he says in A World Enslaved. “Though eradicating prostitution may be a just cause, Western policies based on the idea that all prostitutes are slaves and all slaves are prostitutes belittles the suffering of all victims.”

The inability to see the differences between sex work and slavery thwarts efforts and taxes resources set aside for identifying, freeing and protecting actual victims of slavery, because those working to help victims become diverted with matters of consensual prostitution, which should be handled by local law enforcement as necessary, and which, though a crime in most U.S. cities, is nowhere as severe as slavery of any kind.

Not for Sale also conflates consensual adult sex work and forced sexual slavery and rape. Their stance against the partial decriminalization of sex work among consenting adults in a 2008 San Francisco ballot initiative more than illustrates their position. Allowing this initiative, known as Proposition K, to pass would have brought the underground to the surface, making it easier for sex workers to work with law enforcement to nab abusers and rapists, and to find real victims of sexual slavery. The moralizing, driven in part by Not for Sale, led to the failure of Proposition K.

So, no. I am not glad that Google is supporting these organizations.

Last month, Apple took to the courts to begin enforcing its trademark on the name “app store” in hopes of keeping it out of competitors’ hands. They slapped a suit on Amazon’s app store as soon as it opened and are still tangled in a suit with Microsoft that resembles a circus more than a serious intellectual property case, what with all the linguists running about and the endless quibbling about font sizes.

Feeling impotent, no doubt, Apple has since gone after MiKandi, the first-ever adult app store for Android devices. In an effort to avoid costly, interminable lawsuits, the small Seattle-based operation has changed its tagline from “the world’s first adult app store” to “the world’s first adult app market.” We like boutique better, but market does the trick, since Apple’s trademark only applies to this exact combination of otherwise completely generic words.

MiKandi co-founders Jesse Adams and Jen McEwen are on the sidelines watching the Apple vs. Microsoft fight, but there is something to be said for their collected attitude about the whole thing. Unlike Apple, MiKandi knows that a store is more than its name. It’s what it offers. Their philosophy colored a recent interview with GeekWire, providing a breath of fresh air in an otherwise restrictive and oppressive marketplace.

“Companies need to learn to treat customers as adults, and not restrict them out of fear of upsetting another group,” McEwen told GeekWire. “That’s the approach we like to take with customers. We want to treat you as adults.”

Invariably, this lead to the discussion of an open operating system versus a closed one.

“The great thing about Android is that even if Amazon doesn’t want to sell adult content, the Android Marketplace doesn’t want to sell it, at least the platform allows third-party stores to sell more adult experiences,” Adams added. “That’s the big difference. Your phone is very personal. It’s going to be the way most adults connect to the world, over any other device very soon. Even if the other app stores start to offer it, developers really choose app stores as partners, not just as an app store operator. There’s other things they’re looking for more than just being able to sell adult content — partners that will promote and market the apps, and not just treat it as a back alleyway store like adult novelty shops were for a very long time.”

It’s MiKandi’s philosophy and commitment to users and developers that make it worth supporting, even if you don’t have an Android or desire adult apps.

Via Gizmodo.