If upon hearing the words ‘sex tourism’, you conjure up images of white, privileged, Western men embarking on journeys to developing countries with the pursuit of engaging in paid sexual activity, you would not be mistaken. Yes, sex tourism is actually a thing happening all around the globe. And in most cases, this conception…
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While researching for my earlier piece on rape during wartime, I kept coming across the Japanese military use of “comfort women” during the mid-20th century through World War II. I had never heard about this before, which prompted me to read further. Comfort women, or “ianfu,” a euphemism for “shofu,” meaning prostitute, were women and…
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Prostitutes, drunkards and erotic dancers. These were amongst the favourite subjects of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), whose art is the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris and the Moulin Rouge is composed of more than 100 works spanning his brief yet celebrated career. This includes…
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Back in November 2011, Kaylia Payne wrote about commodification of human bodies and where society draws the line in regard to human trafficking and the trade of women’s bodies for money. Rightly outraged, she wrote about the Sydney escort agency selling off the virginity of a 19 year old and how this seemed to be…
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While I began writing this simply as a response to this article, after doing some research about sex work in general I have decided to write about it as a whole in the second half. Firstly I want to say that this article outraged me in a way that I haven’t felt in a long…
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