We are living fantastic times. The Sunday Express revealed that a £67 expense claim made by UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for a Virgin Media bill included two 18-rated features viewed last April at her constituency house. Though she did not view the porn movies, let’s call a cat a cat, it is amazing that this is happening in the house of the woman who wants to control other’s, and in particular men, sexuality. I refer here to her “proposal for a new legislation aimed at bringing the sex industry …

Bangkok World AIDS Day 2006 © peripheries

According to the Bangkok Post, Thailand Deputy Public Health Minister Manit Nopamornbode said that “about 11,700 people were expected to become new [HIV/AIDS] sufferers”.
Amongst these new sufferers, Manit identified “women who will get HIV from their lovers [...] gay men who have unprotected sex [..] men who get HIV from sex workers [and] will infect their wives, intravenous drug users, those having casual sex and prostitutes”
Children excluded, that is pretty much everybody.
Depending on the sources, there are between 516,000 t0 610,000 people living with …

Note: Rather unusually, this post has a political content that I usually keep for myself or for friends and close relatives. Politics is too serious to be discussed on the Internet and a 600-word post can only gloss over events, beliefs and concepts that would need books on their own.
The last few days have been rather hectic between work and the preparation of my journey to Thailand. I had to cancel and book again my flight due to the closure of the 4th largest airport in South East Asia because …

This is a cross posting from Laura Agustín’s blog, Border Thinking on Migration and Trafficking: Culture, Economy and Sex. It is worth circulating broadly in an age where everything is conflated and reduced to a black and white understdanting.
Briefly, sex workers at the Barn Funn Brothel have been forcibly “rescued and liberated” by NGOs, charity workers or the Police (if the latter can be considered as a rescue).
In this poster designed by EMPOWER in Chiang Mai Thailand, the workers list the reasons why they do not wish to be rescued …

Bar Street, Siem Reap, Cambodia
© peripheries

IRIN reports how recent legislation against human trafficking introduced by the Cambodian government early this year, is shifting sex work from brothels to bars and karaokes leading to the development of new sexual behaviours increasing the spread of the HIV infection.
Like Thailand, Cambodia’s fight against HIV became another success story when back in 2001 Prime Minister Hun Sen endorsed a 100% condom policy for sex workers. Prevalence amongst sex workers plummeted from 45.8% in 1998 to 12.7% in 2006.
But earlier this year, under US pressure, …