Knee-jerk reactions to campaigns like these lead to the criminalization of prostitution, creating environments where exploitation, abuse, coercion and trafficking are made easier, not harder.

Politicians pat themselves on the back for taking down Craigslist, which does what? Trafficking doesn’t stop because a site is gone. This only serves to push the activity underground where it leaves no paper trail and where it becomes harder for law enforcement to identify and help victims.

The inability to tell the difference between a slave and a sex worker is how you end up with things like the Anti-Prostitution Pledge which denies funds to governments and non-governmental organizations who “support prostitution” (i.e., work with sex workers, even if that means only providing them with condoms and other health services). This is what happens when we throw the best intentions behind sensationalism: we end up with policy that helps no one and hurts everyone involved.

Trafficking won’t stop until we learn to tell the difference between those who are coerced into prostitution and those who aren’t. Painting the entire red light district in Amsterdam — one of the few places where sex work is legal and sex workers have rights — as a trafficking zone will only result in criminalizing prostitution, putting all sex workers at risk of exploitation.

How is this a better option that working with sex workers there to find trafficking victims? The sex workers who work there by choice know their rights and are much better able to educate those who come in about these rights and to sniff out those who are victims than any foreigner across an ocean who is up in arms over a sensationalist video about all the hopeful dancers who are turned into hookers.

By Mike Jacobsen, via SeeMikeDraw.com.au

This week, the sportswear brand Stüssy launched a Facebook campaign to get an extra bit of edge. The campaign, centered on Facebook, enables users to strip the model by liking the Stüssy page. “The more likes, the more clothes come off!” Stüssy promises fans.

Clicking the Like button enabled us to watch the model — who is apparently decked out in their entire Spring/Summer 2012 collection — do a little dance, removing a piece of clothing in each frame until she was down to her skivvies. And giving us the middle finger. Because nothing says sex appeal like “fuck you, lol.”

“[It's] a fun and engaging way to showcase Stussy’s new collection by having a cute model taking off layers of clothing according to the number of likes she gets,” Lauren Ince, the European client managing director at Arnold Worldwide — the firm handling the ad campaign — told Mashable.

When they ran the story two days ago, the campaign had 1,000 likes. Today, it has over 11,000. For those who see Likes as a measure of success, this is nothing to scoff at. For those who prefer engaging an audience in a meaningful way to numbers and gimmicks, Stüssy may be doing its image more harm than good.

There is nothing particularly revolutionary in the selling of stuff with skin. Sex sells, as the tired advertising mantra goes, and nothing says sex quite like a perky young woman ready to take it all off for you at the click of a button. But this type of campaign is not really new, either. Last month, Ellipse, a Columbia-based lingerie retailer, did the exact same thing with Twitter.

To get their model to strip down to one of the latest sets in their collection, Ellipse set the bar at 10,000 public tweets using the hashtag #striptweet. For every thousand tweets tagged thus, an item was discarded by their model. The model was down to her bra and panties in less than ten days.

Are these types of campaign going to lead to more brand awareness, or are people selling out a part of their consumer base to get some easy media attention? We suppose sales will speak for themselves next quarter. All we know is that we pity the fool who walks into a strip club and tries to get a lapdance for likes or retweets. Instant TKO.

Hey, wanna see an app to set your skin crawling?

So begins the much linked article at Cult of Mac that set off a mini-firestorm about the disgustingly creepy app “Girls Around Me,” a handy iPhone app built by the Russian developer iFree that utilized the publicly available APIs of Facebook, foursquare, and Google maps to provide a radar screen that informs the user of the location, photo, and profile of every girl who’s used a location-based service to check in nearby.

Perfectly designed to aid any wannabee pickup artist in finding an attractive woman in the vicinity and figuring out what band to say you like when hitting on a stranger, the app immediately raised hackles across the tech world. Foursquare swiftly revoked the app’s access to its API once word of it hit the tech sphere, and with good reason — it’s creepy enough to scare anyone away from social networking.

The response to “Girls Around Me” is nearly as creepy as the actual app, however, albeit far more subtly so.

Cult of Mac writer John Brownlee waxes eloquently about the app, exhorting it as something everyone should “download to teach the people you care about that privacy issues are real, that social networks like Facebook and Foursquare expose you and the ones you love, and that if you do not know exactly how much you are sharing, you are as easily preyed upon as if you were naked.”

That’s right ladies, going out with your Facebook settings not fully locked down is a lot like wandering outside with too short a skirt. You’re practically begging for all of that delicious data to be harvested and abused. Statements like these clearly suggest that the fault lies with the girls who childishly don’t realize what they’re getting into by using a social network like — gasp — Facebook. It certainly doesn’t lie with the folks over at iFree who made the app. They are, according to Brownlee, “nice guys.”

Never mind that the menfolk are allowed to use Facebook with wild abandon or post pictures of their face on reddit without being immediately sexualized. No, the ladies need educating. Just like we need to be educated to wear our skirts below the knee, never leave our drinks unattended, and always use the buddy system when we go to a party. Apparently, educating boys to not be creepy rapists is just too hard.

TechCrunch neatly rips apart this disgusting, but thoroughly unsurprising, attitude. The ones at blame for this abuse are the men that download the app, iFree, Foursquare, and Facebook, not the girls that agreed to Facebook’s terms and conditions. Excerpt below:

There is a discussion to be had about the default privacy settings of Facebook. But when I hear people proclaim the importance of educating these presumably ignorant young women about the dangers of Facebook, it is just a little too close to comfort to those seeking to educate women about the dangers of hemlines that end above the knee.

[...] Why is it reasonable to not blame gun manufacturers, or cigarette companies, or McDonald’s, but Girls Around Me? Because these developers are treating others as objects they have the right to use and manipulate without their permission or their knowledge. I’m sure it’s all very legal according to the terms of service we accepted when we created accounts on Facebook or Twitter or Foursquare. That does not excuse the clear moral failing that the makers of Girls Around Me demonstrated.

But, you may argue, the women signed up to be a part of this when they signed up to be on Facebook. No. What they signed up for was to be on Facebook.

How much blame do the creators of Girls Around Me deserve?

Header image via Cult of Mac.

Meet Sarah Tressler. By day, she writes about Houston society for the Houston Chronicle. It’s not the most fascinating job, but a great place to start for a journalist trying to make her way through the decaying body of an industry that still hasn’t managed to come up with a model that supports their costs in this time of the open web.

Once deadlines are met, assuming she’s not teaching writing as an adjunct professor at University of Houston, Tressler packs it up and heads to her other gig — at any of a handful strip clubs in Houston. Unsurprisingly, this job is the one that inspires the bulk of her writing. Over the years she’s been active on the web, Tressler has created an engaging community of both civilians and other strippers across various social media platforms, all of whom devour her blog, which is filled with stories of her experiences.

Having more than one job is not an easy act to manage, but Tressler managed fine — until the Chronicle‘s competitor, the Houston Press decided to assassinate her in a post on their Hairballs blog.

Houston Press writer Richard Connelly unceremoniously outs Tressler as a writer, adjunct professor and stripper, suggesting that she’s only doing what she’s doing because she wants a book deal and a movie made about her life. “It’s all pretty much what you’d expect,” he says. “Writing in the style that really, really wants to be described as ‘fearless’ and ‘intelligent’ and ‘funny’ and ‘sexy.’”

He goes on to quote an unnamed source at the Chronicle who says people at the paper are furious because Tressler never tried hard enough to hide the fact she’s a dancer, coming around the office wearing designer garb no journalist could ever hope to afford on such meager salaries, and because they know — they just know — she’s going to use them for fodder for a book.

Buried deep into the story is a quote from an actual named source who says Tressler is a highly competent freelancer — but the props she gets for her work are summarily dismissed in favor of an excerpt from one of her blog posts, where Tressler describes how uncomfortable it is when men at the club want her to play with their nipples.

In response to comments calling out the Houston Press for slut-shaming, Connelly tries to wash his hands of responsibility, assuring everyone he’s just trying to give a feelow journo some professional advice. He writes:

I don’t get the”slut shaming” charge. If you want to be a stripper, fine. If you want to write for a very conservative, uptight paper — covering the very powerful, very conservative and straitlaced people the paper so desperately works to keep happy and unruffled — fine. If you want to combine the two, it’s interesting, to say the least.

The implication here is that if you want to be a stripper, you can only be a stripper. Strippers are not allowed to be anything else — now or ever given how many people lose their jobs when adult history pasts come back to haunt them. But there is more here: the suggestion that sharing one’s personal narrative is a call for attention is something leveled against women all the time — especially those who write about anything relating to sex or the sex industry. It’s a silencing tactic to prevent sex workers — and, quite often, women in general — from sharing their realities. In the guise of offering “advice” Connelly is actually telling Tressler to shut up.

He seems to think it’s hypocritical for a woman who is in the sex industry to report on a conservative community, but the real hypocrisy is his. He’s accusing a woman who has found a way to make her career choices work for her of being an attention whore who only wants a book deal and a movie and doesn’t care who she uses for fodder, when he’s the one who has turned her into fodder.

And now, according to Gawker, Tressler has been fired from her job at the Chronicle. Way to go, Connelly. We hope the page views were worth it.

It wasn’t long before advertising firms around the nation learned a thing or two from the internet. Posting “controversial” things can mean incredible pageviews, so why shouldn’t they get into it? We really thought we’d seen it all — until last Friday, when Belvedere Vodka released a new ad on its social streams. The ad featured a laughing man with his arms around a woman who was clearly trying to elude him, her brows knitted in a frown and her mouth open into a plea for help as she tried to pull away. The text on the ad read, “Unlike some people, Belvedere always goes down smoothly.”

In a world where a lot of sexually coercive situations involve alcohol, it’s unconscionable to run an ad like this one. In fact, horrible economy or not, we hope the people responsible were not only fired immediately, but tattooed on the forehead with the words “utterly unhirable.”

A furor ensued and Belvedere quickly yanked the ads from their Facebook and Twitter profiles. They released an apology and assured the public that they are advocates of responsible drinking. The next day, the president of Belvedere called the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) to apologize. Per RAINN:

We got a call from Belvedere Vodka’s president, who was profusely apologetic about an offensive Facebook post yesterday. He stressed how much it was contrary to his values and what Belvedere stands for, and that he feels awful about it. He offered to make a generous donation to RAINN to support our work to help victims of sexual violence and educate the public. Nice to see a company that not only undoes its mistake but looks for a way to do good afterwards.

Despite their swift corrective action and efforts to make good, some don’t think they’ve done enough, saying that until Belvedere creates form of internal regulation to avoid mistakes like these in the future, the donation to RAINN will continue to feel like hush money.

And the worst is not over for Belvedere. According to LAist, the woman used in the advert is a voice actress named Alicyn Packard who was not aware her image was being used in connection with this campaign. Packard has filed a suit against the company seeking damages for misappropriation of her likeness and emotional distress. It seems the image was taken from a video she put together with the smiling man in the photo, her business partner Chris Strickland. Wow, really?

The e-commerce startup Sqoot could not believe the shitstorm. All they had done was advertised their Boston hack-a-thon by listing some of the perks they were offering at the event, you know, things like DJs, massages, food trucks, top-notch booze, energy drinks, snacks…

And women. Not women hackers, mind you. Clearly Sqoot doesn’t think women are capable of any technology-related task (except maybe using their phone cameras to snap n00dz to send them), because when they mentioned women as one of the perks along with all the other things they had available, they added: “Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) event staff get that for you.”

The internet rightfully exploded, causing Sqoot event sponsors to drop left and right. Eventually, the startup released a statement, saying: “While we thought this was a fun, harmless comment poking fun at the fact that hack-a-thons are typically male-dominated, others were offended. That was not our intention and thus we changed it.” This isn’t an apology. Apologies say something along the lines of “we screwed up. We’re sorry.” This says, “we thought it was funny. Some don’t. Fine. It’s gone. Party poopers.”

So they issued another apology, which said: “When we put together the original event page, we used language that we now realize was reckless and hurt efforts to diversify gender in tech. We immediately and deservedly received an enormous backlash. While we aimed to call attention to the male-dominated tech world through humor and intended to be inclusive, the gravity of our wording was just the opposite. Our words completely undermined our intentions and went further to harm the world we’re trying to have a positive impact on.”

They tried to call attention to the male-dominated tech world through humor and be inclusive? You don’t “call attention” to a male-dominated industry and foster inclusion by enforcing sexism. It’s only slightly better than the initial apology, but we are heartened by the swift and brutalizing reaction to the ad.

Get with the program, people! Technology isn’t just for guys.

Header image features a screengrab from an episode of the The X-Files called “Kill Switch” (season 5, episode 11), featuring Kristin Lehman as computer whiz kid Esther Nairn.

CumOnLive has come ahead of free tube sites by offering their users the ability to cam with their favorite adult stars, but it wasn’t until they took a page from the web space and began developing meatworld events that they started to pull ahead of other cam sites. Their monthly “Party With An Adult Star” events offer all members a chance to get away to Las Vegas for some heavy partying — flight, hotel, limo and entertainment included at no cost to the fans.

Most recently, CumOnLive contracted Bree Olson (of Goddess fame) to be their spokes model and purveyor of wild times in Sin City. “No one knows how to party like I do in Las Vegas!” Olson said in a statement. Given that she lived with Charlie Sheen for a while, we’re betting no one knows how to party anywhere like she does — except, perhaps, old Tigerblood himself.

But we’re not interested in the sort of partying that involves ranting drunkenly, so we’ll take Olson any day.

Header image of Bree Olson via Brian Gross, Vegas shot by AV Flox.

Topsy is an indexing platform primarily developed to enable businesses to understand social trends. As such, their dealings are of primary interest to people in the social marketing space, so when Topsy released their Google+ comment searching tool in October of last year, the reception was limited to people in that niche.

In the past could of days, however, the function has been spreading among regular users of the network, creating something of a frenzy. Usage is simple: all you need is a Google+ user number, which appears in their profile URL. You take that and input it at the end of the Topsy Google+ search URL (http://plus.topsy.com/googleplus/), hit enter and voila! All public comments made across the social network appear before you awaiting your perusal.

Many have hailed this tool as revolutionary for finding older comments they have made that they can no longer find using Google+’s limited search function. But as someone who posts content that largely deals with issues relating to sex and sexuality, this concerns me. I do not think it is dishonest as some have suggested to want to be able to comment on certain issues without making everything you say accessible to your boss, your family, your congregation, the people in your building, the people who live in the town where you summer, your children’s school administrators, your insurance company, your ex-spouses attorneys, etc.

Most of us lead compartmentalized lives. We go to work, we have great parties, we give our time to causes in the community, we have our sexual proclivities, we attend church (maybe only during holidays), we support certain political causes — and so on. The first rule of courtesy is to understand the place and time. You shouldn’t speak about your delight with new anal beads at work. You shouldn’t regale your family at brunch with endless details about a merger. You shouldn’t speak about your wild parties at church. And you would do well not to divide the room by mentioning religion or politics at a cocktail party. Real life allows us to keep the various facets that make us who we are separate so they do not cause discomfort to ourselves or others. This is for a variety of reasons, some dishonest, many not. It doesn’t make us dishonest to encompass our share of contradictions. It makes us human.

The problem with the web is that it largely began as a world separate from meatspace. Today, most people use their real names, but this wasn’t always the case. When I started going online in the mid-90s, no one even knew my gender. I preferred that, not because I was hiding, but because I feel very strongly that I should be judged by my thoughts, not who people assume I am by seeing I am a woman, by attaching a handful of preconceived notions to what I am saying because they see my photo and think I’m too young or too old or attractive or unattractive.

Being an intangible essence allowed me to be more myself than I’d ever been before. Posting on different niche boards enabled the level of frankness that we experience when we’re in a group of like-minded people with whom we can openly debate or discuss topics. But this is no longer how the web operates and the transition hasn’t been an easy one. In a world where employers can easily find out everything about you, where insurance companies can decide to give or deny coverage because they see some status update as representing a liability, where a judge at family court can take away your children because — God forbid — you had a photo taken at Playboy West some Halloween… It’s not a matter of the web exposing you. It’s a matter of no longer having the ability to segregate different aspects of your life as we were once easily able to do and the concern is entirely valid.

This is why, for example, the page I manage on Google+ for this blog doesn’t list the people who follow it. It is no one else’s business that you care enough about sex to follow a blog about it. I have spent a lot of time debating whether the page should be private to enable people to comment openly and if Google+ allowed pages to circle more people, I wouldn’t hesitate. But closing the doors means I might eventually reach the cap and then I would have to consider opening it to enable more people to join — and having to retrain everyone who is used to the privacy to understand that they can no longer enjoy the conversation they once did. It doesn’t seem right.

I dealt with this adding a Like box for Facebook as well. There is no way on that network to shield who has Liked a page. I wish there was. It’s not surprising that a lot of people follow the blog by subscribing to my personal feed on Facebook instead of Liking the Sex and the 405 page itself.

And I faced the same question when I implemented Disqus as the primary comment system on the blog as a means of dealing with a growing spam problem. Disqus enables people to look at comments users have made all over the web, simply by accessing their profiles. I didn’t like it then and I don’t now, and it doesn’t surprise me that comments disappeared almost entirely when I finally chose to implement it. Most often, people prefer to e-mail me when they have something to say. I understand why this is, but it saddens me because of how completely it limits the exchange of ideas.

To pretend that we can have a complete life by posting only what our mothers and bosses will read, as someone suggested in a conversation about the Topsy tool, is to rob ourselves of experience and to rob the community of valuable engagement. Comments don’t simply break down into valuable and inappropriate. There are many topics that are valuable but not something you’d want on the first page of Google when someone searches for your name. There is nothing wrong with wishing that it were possible to compartmentalize your digital conversations in the same way you do your meatspace exchanges.

Unfortunately for us, this is not the direction the web is going, which is why pseudonymous accounts and the networks who accept them are so very, very important. Those who accuse pseudonymous users of hiding and being dishonest are, in my opinion, the ones who are the most dishonest. People using pseudonyms do so mostly to protect themselves in a world they know has no walls and retains everything they’ve ever said. Are they less honest, really, than people who continuously self-censor and refuse to weigh in on important issues because they’re afraid of the repercussions?

At her bail hearing a week ago in New York, Anna Gristina had a resolute look about her. She’d spent the past couple of weeks at Rikers Island weighing her options. She’s facing charges of promoting prostitution after a five-year investigation uncovered the high class escort business she was running out of a Manhattan Upper East Side apartment.

Allegations that the 44-year-old suburban mother of four had bragged that she had contacts in law enforcement who tipped her about raids has resulted in pressure from the Manhattan district attorney’s office to leverage every method possible to further the investigation into police corruption, but the Millionaire Madam is proving difficult to work with.

At her arraignment on February 23, Gristina pleaded not guilty. Now, it seems she may be considering changing her tune and pleading guilty to avoid having to give specifics about the $15 million pleasure empire she built to investigators — including naming those who used her services.

But that seems to have been of no help to former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who has nevertheless been incriminated in the investigation. According to Manhattan’s DNAInfo, during the drawn-out investigation, one of the Madam’s girls disclosed that Edwards had had a one-nighter with her while he was in the Big Apple in 2007 raising money for his presidential campaign. She provided a very detailed account of the tryst and investigators found her claim credible, especially after substantiating that Edwards was in New York at the time the woman claimed to have indulged him.

The Edwards camp was quick to issue a statement in response, saying: “Mr. Edwards categorically denies that he was involved with any prostitute or service.” His attorney called the allegations defamatory and demanded a retraction. DNAInfo, however, is not budging.

Edwards’ credibility is not hard to question, considering the way his affair with Rielle Hunter played out. He denied the allegations of that affair and the resulting child, constructing an elaborate house of cards that eventually fell apart around him. In the case of the allegations relating to the Millionaire Madam scandal, however, charges are unlikely because it is so difficult to prove that money was exchanged for the purpose of sex.

Header image by Jessica Janson.