“At 23, she was clean. She followed the rules society had for her; she said, ‘I’m going to change my life,’” said Deon Haywood, the executive director of Women With a Vision, a grass-roots community nonprofit in New Orleans.

But being branded as a sex offender, the legacy of an archaic law that branded the sale of oral or anal sex as a “crime against nature,” was only going to stand in her way. Thanks to a groundbreaking legal settlement this week, spearheaded by Haywood’s organization and a team of civil rights attorneys, that’s about to change, with 700 people convicted under the law about to be removed from the registry.

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And now, with eight states handing down felony charges for prostitution -- where nonviolent, mostly female prostitution offenders are serving in state prison – a battle to lessen criminal penalties has been joined by an unlikely ally. Conservative lawmakers, looking at price tags, are also receptive to changing the way we see – and treat -- people working in prostitution.

The latest example of this shift to view people in prostitution as victims rather than criminals is last week’s passage of a bill removing the felony penalty in Illinois -- which has some of the harshest prostitution laws in the country. The legislation sailed through the Illinois Legislature, after a decade of work by End Demand Illinois, a coalition that wants to see prostitution eliminated. The highest penalty for selling sex in the state will now be a Class A misdemeanor.

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The health impact is clear: As Human Rights Watch reported,"Police use of condoms as evidence of prostitution has the same effect everywhere: despite millions of dollars spent on promoting and distributing condoms as an effective method of HIV prevention, groups most at risk of infection ... are afraid to carry them and therefore engage in sex without protection as a result of police harassment." What's more, "Outreach workers and businesses are unable to distribute condoms freely and without fear of harassment as well."

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The Washington Post reports:

Vitter is teaming up with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the chamber’s leading environmental advocate, to shore up levees and beach fronts from flood risk. He is working with one of the financial industry’s biggest thorns, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), on the latest bill targeting mega-banks and their “too big to fail” status. When he’s not working across party lines, Vitter is throwing his increased seniority around in stronger ways: Last week he vowed to block President Obama’s nominee for Labor secretary until the administration releases documents about voting rights issues in Louisiana.

Now Vitter’s name is atop most lists of possible GOP gubernatorial nominees for Louisiana in 2015 when Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) reaches his term limit.

Vitter won reelection in 2010, just a few years after revelations that hired a New Orleans prostitute in 1999, and after he was listed in the records of the "D.C. Madam" in 2007.

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From the Post:

The local lawyer told Dominican investigators that a foreign man, who identified himself as “Carlos,” had offered him $5,000 to find and pay women in the Caribbean nation willing to make the claims about Menendez, according to Jose Antonio Polanco, district attorney for the La Romana region, where the investigation is being conducted.

The details are sketchy and the lawyer, Melanio Figueroa, is unreliable, himself accused of paying the prostitutes to lie about Menendez. He also recently accused four news outlets, including the Caller, CNN, Telemundo and Univision, of pushing him to make up the allegations.

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But there was a time in American history when it wasn't quite so. Laws against selling sex are fairly new – just about 100 years old – and came onto the books long after the sex trade took root in American cities. Does that mean there was a time when selling sex was more tolerated? Or did the law simply take some time to catch up to the new American people's prejudices?

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Without much prodding she admitted to me that she had retuned to prostitution: “I am putting myself at risk for HIV to get my kids a f---ing happy meal.”

Despite looking high and low for a job, Carla explained, she was still unemployed. Most entry-level jobs felt out of reach with her drug record, but what’s worse, even the state wasn’t willing to throw her a temporary life preserver.

You see, Carla is from one of the 32 states in the country that ban anyone convicted of a drug felony from collecting food stamps. With the release of the Global Burden of Disease Study last week, it bears looking at how we are perpetuating burdens among the most vulnerable Americans with our outdated laws.

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As far as neighbors went, the sex workers were fine — quiet, courteous, not prone to cooking stinky tofu. The few times my clothes fell from the bamboo poles used to dry laundry in China, they saved the garments for me until I could make the trek downstairs to retrieve them. We didn’t share an entrance, though a window in the back of the parlor opened onto my stairwell, and on my way home on hot nights I would see the women brushing their teeth. (Even the room that doubled as a kitchen and bathroom glowed fuchsia.) As the years passed I rarely had reason to think about the brothel. But it remained a difficult thing to explain to overseas guests, invariably evoking one of those questions about China that evade any quick, pat answer.

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Some dedicated buyers-of-sex, or "hobbyists," as they call themselves, regularly take to specialized message boards for everything from reviewing escorts' various talents to debating presidential politics. As the names of 21 alleged clients of Alexis Wright, the accused instructor, are circulated, the Zumba case has become a hot topic.

Unsurprisingly, hobbyists seem chiefly concerned with the issue of law enforcement naming and shaming johns, an increasingly popular approach. "I think the world needs to evolve a little," says "flyboyfromca" on the Erotic Review, the so-called Yelp for prostitution. "As a member of the community, I support our right to spend time with the people we choose, and I support a woman's choice to do what she wants with her time."

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Reached by email, the newly formed Voice Media Group, which now owns the constellation of papers, offered the following explanation, “There will be no online adult classifieds in any market. Our print products will continue to operate with their current offerings -- these are separate from Backpage.” In other words, weeklies that contain escort and massage parlor ads will continue to contain escort and massage parlor ads.

With the proliferation of sex ads on Backpage.com, the alt weeklies’ physical back pages have largely been forgotten. Not so long ago, though, adult print ads were also being targeted -- on the grounds that they promoted illegal activity, including trafficking. Just a few years ago, activists managed to convince publications like New York magazine and the Washington Post to cut out massage parlor ads -- but not the Village Voice.

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Mike Risner, an Orange County man, was charged with running a brothel out of his house, and Horner's name turned up on a list of alleged clients. Bernie Presha, a spokesman for the Orange County state attorney’s office, told the Miami Herald that Horner is not being investigated, nor is anyone else on the list. “We arrested a guy for prostitution,” Presha said. “In some of his documentation – a ‘Mike Horner’ comes up."

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That’s according to a new survey of men who look for sex online, rather than on the storied street corner, and trade reviews on a website called the Erotic Review (as a Gawker headline once put it, “It’s like Yelp, but for hookers"). These men are connoisseurs of the sex trade, although they refer to themselves as "hobbyists." The nearly 600 men surveyed were mostly white, middle-aged, highly educated and pulling in six figures. They aren’t necessarily representative of users of the Erotic Review, let alone the much broader sex-buying community.

But the findings, even given these limitations, are fascinating -- take that most of these “hobbyists” are primarily concerned that a provider has “a happy and cheerful personality.” That’s why I decided to talk to Christine Milrod, a psychotherapist and one of the lead authors on the study, about the so-called Girlfriend Experience, in which sex workers provide the illusion of a more romantic, cash-free transaction -- and why these "hobbyists" are drawn to it.

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Lippman's latest is "And When She Was Good," a title that saucily suggests the novel will be racier than it is. "And When She Was Good" is in essence a character study, though the basic thread of its plot does generate a good amount of suspense. The character is Heloise Lewis, the proprietor of an escort service and, in her late 30s, a working prostitute.

Heloise is also a single mom, ensconced in a landscaped home in suburban Maryland, where she raises her son, Scott, with the implacable determination to give him everything -- an education, physical safety, respect -- that she was denied. Scott's father, Val, Heloise's scary former pimp, is serving a life sentence for murder. Though she still visits him regularly, Val has no idea that Scott exists, or that Heloise was the informant who put him away. The thrum of menace running through "And When She Was Good" begins when she learns that another "suburban madam" has died under suspicious circumstances and that part of the evidence convicting Val may be overturned, freeing the man she fears most.

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The landmark decision taken Monday, decided that the dangerous work of prostitution could be made more safe if it occurred under one roof with security staff, reported the Globe and Mail.

The Appeals Court of Ontario said that some of the country's anti-prostitution laws were unconstitutional as they restricted the prostitute's ability to protect themselves -- a ruling already made by a lower court in 2010 but appealed by the provincial and federal governments.

The court also said that it would re-model the law against pimps, which prohibits living off the work of others by adding "in circumstances of exploitation," reported PostMedia News.

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For many progressives, there is a dramatic tension here: Horror at the existence of child trafficking, and a desire to see it disappear, and yet a belief that consenting adults should be able to do what they want sexually -- maybe even if it involves the exchange of money. It’s not even a question of one concern trumping the other, because, while theories abound, it’s unclear what impact the shuttering of Backpage’s adult section would have on trafficking as a whole, let alone whether similar ads wouldn't just pop up in the personals section; nor is it clear what impact the site’s screening measures have had on reducing trafficking ads.

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My parents are a pretty conservative middle-class Jewish family. I was always open-minded about sex, but that's not where my decision to work in the sex industry came from. I think that had more to do with a lack of boundaries, and from having inappropriate relationships. (I had a relationship with a much older man when I was 12 years old -- the kind of thing that imprints young women who often wind up being strippers.)

When I was 16, I went to college a year early in New York and promptly dropped out. My friend said to me, "Why don't you come and work at the club where I work? They won't care that you're a terrible waitress." So I started off as a stripper, and then I moved into doing escort work, and it was through a friend that I knew from doing the latter that I got the job working supposedly to entertain rich businessmen in Singapore. Then I wound up being a guest of the Prince of Brunei and essentially becoming a member of his harem. This was about 18 years ago. (I haven't done sex work for the past 15 years.) I was in Brunei for about a year and a half on and off. We parted ways amicably and I went home and never went back.

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“I've pretty much read every book, saw every movie and heard every song relating to the subject matter," he told a Brooklyn judge, according to the New York Daily News. (Efforts on Tuesday afternoon to ascertain just which cultural products are definitive in this regard were unsuccessful.) Answering the standard questions about his qualifications as an expert witness, McCord also said he had attended two national conferences on pimping -- perhaps one of these -- and was “a member of a quiet society of pimps.”

Quiet? For decades, feminists and advocates for sex trafficking victims have been trying to stem the tide of pimp glorification in pop culture. And for decades, almost no one has given a shit. McCord may be an innovator in his particular audacity, but he's by no means alone.

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"There are not 100,000 to 300,000 children in America turning to prostitution every year. The statistic was hatched without regard to science. It is a bogeyman," said the Voice article, written by Martin Cizmar and Ellis Conklin and Kristen Hinman. Apparently, this unverified fact has been circulating widely across the media, including Salon. Doing some research of their own, the Voice concluded that there have been only 8,263 arrests for child prostitution in the last decade here in America, a much smaller number than the one Ashton (and other outlets) quoted.

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