Criminalising the purchasing of sex, and the owning of brothels, would directly harm many of the sex workers living in my city (WGTN, NZ) - myself included. We’ve had full decrim, including buying of sex and running of brothels, agencies or parlours, since 2003. This allows consensual workers AND the people we work…

There’s a huge difference between ‘pimping’ (which I would define as exploitative) and legally running a brothel, agency, parlour or other establishment.

Fellow sex workers by choice! Yay :)

Unfortunately, not surprised in the slightest. That’s an extremely familiar story to me (and to a lot of the women I work with) and it’s pretty hurtful, to be honest.

And of course, a huge proportion of people taking sides in the inevitable debate this article caused, are not fucking sex workers. Thanks, everyone.

PETA.

Nowhere did the article denounce veganism, animal rights or PETA's actions other than their use of women's bodies as scapegoats for their misleading and chronically misinformed campaigns.

PETA does not need us to make them look bad. They do that quite well by themselves; promoting fat shaming, body shaming, domestic and sexual violence and blatant hypocrisy is their typical MO.

Going by the BMI standards is a bit silly really, seeing as the BMI scale was originally intended as a method to chart trends in a general population and not to determine individual weight categories. Using BMI to determine if someone is 'overweight' is complete bullshit whether our current medical culture has decided…

You know what's empowering? Deciding for yourself what you find empowering, and letting other people do the goddamn same.

That does explain a lot, from what I've heard (never been that far south myself) your description is depressingly apt :/

Have to say this has definitely not been my experience of where I've lived in New Zealand at all...and I've covered a lot of the country. Maybe it's worse in some parts than others?

As someone who lives here, New Zealand has an unfortunately vocal minority to like to make their bigoted views heard on everything and anything. I don't think their views represent the majority of our population at all - however I will say we have an awful problem with sexism/objectification in our media which leaks…

I have to say I'm surprised at the number of trolls who've crawled onto this post to vomit their "IT WORKED FOR A DACHSUND THEREFORE FAT PEOPLE ARE LAZY" rhetoric. Do they not realise that dogs are just slightly different to humans, or does their shortsighted self-absorption prevent that?

Er, not quite. Contract girls get paid an average of $60k a year, and non-contract girls have to rely on getting regular scenes. Depending on what's in the scene they're generally paid anywhere between $200 and $1500. Fetishes and extremes (like double anal) can earn them more. And that's when they can get the work;…

Lube does not solve the problem at all, these actors are shooting for literally hours at a time and condoms introduce a whole new layer for extra friction-y goodness. And realistically, if a director has only latex condoms on hand they will choose the performer without a latex allergy over the performer with an…

Doesn't matter how much lube you use, if you're on an 8-hour (or longer!) shoot a condom is going to dramatically increase friction and pain, for the receiving partner especially; also it leads to vaginal lesions and all kinds of nastiness. Seriously, speaking from experience lube can only do so much.