The original “Happy Hooker,” Xaviera Hollander, looking happy as ever
 
From the dominatrix to the stripper, from the escort to the women who perform services I’ve probably never even heard of, sex workers are often the recipients of pity, disdain, and sometimes outright animosity—not even to mention the criminalization of their profession. On the one hand, you have the camp that can’t wrap their brains around the idea that many woman choose to enter the industry. On the other hand, you have lovely characters like self-described “militant feminist” Julie Burchill, who once said, “When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.”

Well, that sounds pretty pro-women, doesn’t it?

And if that kind of abuse isn’t bad enough, these ladies have to contend with being the subjects of some truly awful poetry. Luckily for us, the brilliant Lori Adorable has taken on the arduous task of curating the genre on the Tumblr, “Bad Poems About Sad Sex Workers.” Let’s take a sampling, shall we?

Lick your lips
Flutter those eyes
Shake them hips
Please all the guys

Work it harder you stupid whore
Pay these bills or you’re out the door
Don’t complain you have it easy
If you don’t mind a job that’s sleazy

Shake your ass
Make it wobble
Please these men
Make them oggle[sic]

 
I admire the stringent commitment to the rhyme scheme, but I simply cannot abide a spelling error in literary misogyny. Let’s try another.
 

conceal
hide
what you feel
inside

with eyes shut
lips closed
a pretty slut
a wicked rose

the goddess of love
she was
yet she lived not above
but deep below the dust

conceal
hide
what you feel
inside

her mother would
always tell her
to live a life without a man
is always better

— to the only whore i loved

 
Overwrought use of repetition, for when you can’t think of any more words. But let’s try one more.
 

Put those fairytales on the shelf,
No one can save you but yourself,
There’s no golden brick road,
Or somewhere over the rainbow,
Instead of ruby slippers,
She wears cheap stilettos,
Works the streets, she’s a keeper,
Of all the secrets we’re not suppose to know,
About the senators in their office,
About the representatives in the bathroom stalls,

 
I had to stop reading early because I was too annoyed by the third line to complete it. It’s “yellow brick road, you wistful idiot! Familiarize yourself with an American movie classic and the musical canon of Sir Elton John at once! Regardless, you went political (sort of), and that’s a risk I want to encourage.

Congratulations! You won the award I just made up for “Most Entertaining Terrible Poem About a Sad Sex Worker!”

 
Prostitution is legal in Argentina, but only for what one might call “free agents.” Organized brothels and other attempts to regulate the industry and protect workers haven’t made their way into the law books so the Association of Women Sex Workers in Argentina in Action for Our Rights (AMMAR) has hired an ad company to change hearts and minds. -

The campaign is a simple wheat-paste job. On one side of the corner is the life-size image of a sex worker. On the other side of the corner are her children, with the words, “86% of sex workers are mothers. We need a law to regulate our work.”

The one-two punch effect serves to both startle the viewer with something memorable, and show the personal side of a public profession to which so many would just as soon turn a blind eye.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Phone Sex Grandma is a short film by Jack Truman about an older female telephone sex worker that follows her routine for a day as she goes about her business. While it could be argued that this film has a lot to say about the socio-economic place of gender and the role of the elderly in declining late-capitalist society, you should probably just forget all that and admit that it’s really funny.

Old people having sex (or in this case talking sexy) is one of the oldest tropes in the comedy handbook - but you’ve gotta hand it to this woman, when it comes to sexy talk she is a pro. And I mean a professional. Check out 3:10 where she is taking a piss AND talking sexy AND pretending to be East Asian! Or 5:20 when she is taking a bath, reading Darwin, talking sexy AND pretending to be black! That is some epic multitasking right there. Phone Sex Grandma is my new (NSFW) hero:

EDIT: from the Phone Sex Grandma IMDB page (which states that the film is a “mockumentary”):

Director Jack Truman and star Opal Dockery are a real-life Mother/Son filmmaking team

WTF?!?

 
Thanks to Tickle for the link.