Sorry I haven’t been updating you on Rhode Island prostitution stuff; once the law passed things got quiet for a while, but now they’re picking up again. Two weeks ago the first spas got raided; women were arrested and translators weren’t provided. Tara has the story about that.

Two days before that, though, Citizens Against Trafficking sent out a newsletter wondering why spas–or, actually, just one spa–hadn’t been shut down. They’re ready to start the public shaming stage of their moral witch hunt, in other words!

CAT founder Donna Hughes and sidekick Melanie Shapiro try hard to mislead readers into falling for their crazy talk, starting with the probably untrue headline “Federal Hill Resident & Restaurateur Forced to Move Because of Spa-Brothel.” According to the duo, the “illegal operation” of the Fuji Spa on Atwells Avenue “has forced a resident and restaurateur to move” because of, among other things, “the unsanitary residue of sex acts” (left on doorknobs) that “have neighboring residents and businesses fed up.”

Steven O’Brien lived in the building for eight years, seven of which were before the spa was in business. Described in the article as “a former friend” of the building’s landlord, O’Brien told CAT he believed that the spa was “likely a front for prostitution and possibly human trafficking.” (There is no evidence of trafficking whatsoever at this spa, and one gets the feeling that Citizens Against Trafficking only threw that part in to rouse readers who actually do care about trafficking and who may have accidentally stumbled upon the CAT website mistakenly thinking that trafficking was an issue CAT cared about.)

CAT’s Melanie Shapiro visited the spa with a Boston Globe reporter last summer and says she came across “a young disoriented Asian woman who told them in broken English that this was her first day and she did not know what she was supposed to be doing.” [Emphasis mine.] Shapiro did not indicate in what way the woman was disoriented, or seem to acknowledge that most people are disoriented on their first day at any job. (Also, the Globe article cited doesn’t actually mention this.) Sadly, as is the case with far too many articles about alleged prostitutes, the CAT article doesn’t acknowledge that a person may not tell you the whole truth if you barge in to her workplace with a reporter asking a million questions about possibly illegal activities.

Using O’Brien’s testimony (and not Shapiro’s or the Globe reporter’s) we learn that the women are all “Asian, ranging in age from their mid-20s to mid-30s.” We learn about an “Asian madam” and “an Asian man who comes in a different car.” (Thankfully, Citizens Against Trafficking seem to have bought themselves a style manual, because the only word they only use ironic quotation marks once, for the word “girls,” because the spa employees are all older. This is an interesting shift in their rhetoric, since six months ago they wanted everyone to believe that all spa employees were trafficked minors.)

O’Brien also tosses out some other doozies which CAT chooses not to question. By his testimony–he’s the only person besides Shapiro quoted in the article–”many men” have gone into the salon next door asking for sex, apparently taking no notice of the salon chairs or female customers. He says the spa workers “never go out,” except for when they go out for breaks. He also says that he once arrived home to find “a white substance that appeared to be semen on the front door handle” of the house. (Imagine, reader, that you are a man at a spa and that you are getting a handjob or whatever. Now ask yourself how your semen might possibly end up on the outside doorknob of the building. If you come up with an answer feel free to leave it in the comments.)

Oh, and the whole restaurateur thing? O’Brien apparently opened a seasonal restaurant on the building’s back patio last summer, which I find interesting because I walked by that building nearly every day last summer and had no idea there was a restaurant there. Also, if it opened last summer the spa was already established there, so it can hardly be said that it drove him out of business.

But that’s not all!

“Men often go to the local pub near the brothel for a drink while they wait their turn,” the article says, not saying which of the four or five bars within a two-block radius they might be referring to. O’Brien says “there were always strange men hanging around the front of the house,” as though men going to an Asian spa are likely to spend time beforehand loitering on the busy street in front of the building. (If you’re not from Providence, you may not be aware that Atwells Avenue is our touristy street; it’s the one where people go out for fancy Italian dinners, where suburban kids go clubbing seven nights a week, and where the local mafia was headquartered for the greater part of the last century. According to CAT, there are six spas in the neighborhood.)

Though O’Brien says activity at the spa “has definitely quieted down” since the law changed in November, he still feels that “they have defiled the neighborhood and the legacy of the house.”

“I made the decision to move from this disgusting environment,” O’Brien says, “as I did not want my fiancé subjected to that kind of place.”

The building is currently for sale, anyway.

[image: The Federal Hill pine cone/pineapple thing, via Wikimedia]

I just today got my copy of the latest issue of $pread Magazine, which features an article written by someone mysterious (ahem) about being a legal male prostitute/rentbear in Rhode Island, well before any Rosa Parks enthusiasts came along to claim that they were America’s first legal male prostitute.  There’s also an article by Megan Andelloux about the prostitution situation as it stood a couple of months ago.  The magazine’s super cheap and full of neat stuff, like an interview with Nina Hartley.

Some of the things I would have brought up lately, except that my Firefox seems anxious to crash every ten minutes or so:

The Sexies, awards for mainstream writing about sex, were announced yesterday.  First prize awards went to Time’s piece about vaginal rejuvenation (which, ick) and Boston magazine’s look at all those pregnant girls at Gloucester High School.  They also declined to give any awards to sex-themed publications, feeling the quality was weak overall in 2009. (via Sex In The Public Square)

And, oh, hey, Audacia’s looking for people to read at upcoming Sex Worker Literati events.  If you’re a sex worker (past or present) and in the New York area and want to read I’m sure she would love to hear from you.

The deadline for written submissions for the awesome-sounding Holiday In Cambodia fundraiser passed the other day.  Which is too bad!  But there’s still time to read the interview about it with Anne Elizabeth Moore, who’s in Phnom Penh (or thereabouts) right now making zines with teenaged girls there.

I’ve never read Joan Didion’s The White Album, or Joan Didion’s anything else for that matter, but this essay about the book’s thirtieth anniversary made me add it to my Goodreads list.

The lineup for Coachella was just announced and it’s kind of the world’s biggest Pride Festival this year.  Grace Jones, The Gossip, La Roux, Gary Numan, David Guetta and Florence and the Machine?  Was Erasure busy that weekend?  (Except for David Guetta, who is very annoying, it all sounds pretty cool, though.)

Speaking of gay, AfterElton readers just voted in the Gay People’s Choice Awards, and their results are as predictable as predictable can be.  The three music awards went to Adam Lambert (Best Male), Lady GaGa (Best Female) and the Cast Of Glee (Best Group).  Which I would like to say something about, if I didn’t suddenly feel the urge to start barfing.  Other awards went to Tina Fey (yay) and Chelsea Handler (boo) and Kathy Griffin (mega-boo).

In other awards news, Swedish radio announced theirs last night.  On the upside, Fever Ray, Kent and Mando Diao all walked away with trophies.  On the flipside, so did stupid Erik Hassle, and Best Pop Act went to the whiny Deportees.  Lars Winnerbäck wasn’t a bad Artist Of The Year choice, though.

OK Go’s letter about why EMI won’t let people embed their videos–when the band only got really big because of the viral popularity of their videos–is interesting, more for what it doesn’t say than what it actually does say.  But they’re very diplomatic, at least.

“The emotional-social world she describes is familiar to me only in as much as I’ve seen it on television, and heard it from other people, and recognise it instantly and intimately as a series of conventional images.” –Cecily Nowell-Smith on Taylor Swift, over at The Singles Jukebox.

I went on Providence radio station 92 PRO-FM’s website the other day to find out why the hell they don’t have American Top 40 on Sunday mornings anymore and proceeded to get distracted looking at their Top 92 songs of the year list.  Mainly because I just had to Google their #1 song because I didn’t recognize the artist or the title.  (Although once it was on I was like “Oh yeah, that damn stupid Hailey’s Comet song.”)  I also thought it was odd that Poker Face was only #31.  That doesn’t seem right, does it?  (Oh, I didn’t know what the #1 song on local “alternative” station WBRU’s year-end list was, either.  Am I that out of touch?)

Rufus Wainwright’s note about his mother Kate McGarrigle’s death seems kind of odd, and not just because he acknowledges first hearing about it in the newspaper.  But then I don’t know much about their family relations.  Still, Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s 1996 album Matapedia is really wonderful; Going Back To Harlan and Jacques et Gilles and Bike Song are all super.  I got the CD about a decade ago, though honestly I never actually looked much deeper into their catalog.

Finally, Do Hairy Men Have More Sex Appeal? Can one of you nice ladies go and leave a comment to set this crazy woman straight; OF COURSE we do.

Tonight the Providence blogosphere will be turning into the Providence blogosnowglobe as the Daily Dose and four other blogs celebrate the holidays.  I’ll be guest DJ-ing along with Eric and Kevin and between the three of us we’ll have something for everyone.  Including the early-to-bed types, since this shindig commences at 8.

The holiday magic happens at the 201, located on festive Westminster Street in merry downtown Providence, in the vicinity of the jolly Dress Barn and the cockle-warming Design Within Reach.  Like I said it starts at 8 and runs until 1.  Pizza will also probably be involved, because nothing says Yuletide cheer like a pizza.

Also, rumor has it that some folks will be there celebrating the fact that a local boy made it onto the next season of Project Runway.

Sheena Beaston just posted her top 10 albums of the year.  Dizzee Rascal, Fever Ray and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs might all be on my list as well if I ever got around to making one, but how have I never heard of this Aceyalone person before?

Someone my age in my hometown was profiled in The Atlantic for being homeless.  Also, hookers!  (Don’t read the comments on that second one unless you want to start hating people.)

If you’ve ever wanted to see watermelon-themed twink porn–and shut up, of course you have–now’s your chance.  My favorite part might be the scrubs or whatever that the guy’s wearing at the beginning.  Unless my favorite part is the subtitles.  It’s hard to say.

I guess maybe I should start watching Gossip Girl.  I didn’t even know Serena’s brother Eric was a major character on the show.  (He’s not in the books.  Or at least in the books I’ve read.)  But hey, he likes Sondre Lerche!

McSweeney’s imagines what an Anne Geddes baby might be like as an adult.  Anne Geddes jokes never get tiresome.

New York Times film critics Manohla Dargis likes to swear a lot.  I still don’t know if I want to see The Hurt Locker.  I’m still reeling all these years later by how stupid Strange Days was; I also don’t know how I feel about everybody being like “this movie is awesome, a woman directed it!” when Kathryn Bigelow’s been making very well-known (if not exactly well-respected) movies for twenty years now.

And, oh yeah, Publishers Weekly made a pun this week.

Gray hair is a trend?  I wouldn’t mind that, actually, especially if it distracted people from the emergent Navajo sweater craze.

I wish more news stories used the word statuette.

Jesse Corcoran’s Olympic frowny faces, located on the side of a Vancouver gallery, were censored after someone allegedly complained about it being graffiti.

And here’s three stories I covered for Carnal Nation:

Reality TV creeps me out in all kinds of different ways, but the most extreme example of why can be found in this story about a gay porn star choking to death while police shot him with a taser and a TV crew filmed the whole thing.

I meant to post about this last week, but the prostitutes of Copenhagen are offering free services to anyone with a pass from the global climate summit; prostitution is legal in Denmark, but the mayor sent postcards to hotels asking employees not to hook up climate summit attendees with escorts.  The postcard actually said “Be Sustainable: Don’t Buy Sex!“  In English, too, that’s not just a weird translation from the Danish or anything.

Finally, Time thinks that Advocate readers are all porn-crazy sluts that want nothing more than to stick their dicks into the nearest inflatable person.

[image via Men and Machines]

Education can not, and will not, happen in downtown Pawtucket, Rhode Island.  The zoning board ruled on Tuesday night that the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health can’t open.  And just to prove their point, the city’s probably going to shut down the weaving studio and chess club that are already located in the same building.

Providence was the home of HP Lovecraft for much of his life, and it’s generally accepted even by people uninterested in unspeakable horrors that ol’ Howard was a racist even by early twentieth-century standards.  But try telling that to a blog commenter named Fluffy Panda.

Scott Woods’s roundup of the decade’s best music writing can go nowhere but down after this, a 2001 look at “an insuperably strong record that in time may well reveal itself to be a classic.”

Frank Gehry designed a hat for Lady GaGa. (via Design Observer)

100 films that are “beyond the canon.”  Some of my favorites are on there:  Magnolia, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, A Hard Day’s’ Night, Written On The Wind, The Player…  I still really hate Groundhog Day and think Laura is the most overrated thing ever, though.  (Well, besides Blade Runner.  But it’s up there.)

[image:  Exergian makes really minimal posters for TV shows, from Kojak to Home Improvement.  Plus a bunch I've never heard of before, because my knowledge of TV died some time around 1997.]

ObamaWeather hates me.

The anti-prostitution bill passed the Senate tonight.  Here’s the Providence Journal story, and my (admittedly highly opinionated and angry) take.  The governor will, I think, sign the bill tomorrow, and then it goes into effect immediately.  That means no time for the women in the spas to find other jobs, or even look for them, mainly in a county pushing 14% unemployment and a real unemployment rate of over 21%.  It also, of course, means a lot more rape and violence and women going to jail for non-violent crimes; the first offense is punishable by up to six months in prison.  During the House committee meeting the other night, one Representative asked how much implementation would cost; nobody had checked.  Later, that same Rep suggested job training, counseling and HIV risk education in lieu of jail time; he was told by the committee chairman that the state probably couldn’t afford that.  But hey, they’re sure fixing that Asian spa problem!  Right?

I testified at the State House last night against the proposed amendment to change the prostitution bill here in Rhode Island.  I hadn’t been inside the building since a fifth-grade field trip, and it showed.  I was overwhelmed.  Clearly, visibly overwhelmed.  As soon as I got up to speak my mouth dried up, I lost my voice, and all of a sudden I couldn’t read any of my own notes.  I don’t know how I made it through, or if what I said made any sense.  Either way, it didn’t make a difference.  The bill passed the Judiciary Committee the way it is, and will be voted on by the full House tonight.

About twenty other people also testified.  Signups to speak are first-come, first-served, but the first bunch were all people who supported it.  The rep who introduced the bill, the governor’s office, the attorney general’s office, Citizens Against Trafficking (who are apparently up to three members now), and two people from the state police.  The people who opposed the bill–at least the part of it that involves jail time for first offenders–included angry citizens (ie. me), the ACLU, a couple of lefty social organizations, a lawyer who defends spa workers,  the Coalition Against Human Trafficking, and the local rape crisis center.

An amendment was offered by one rep to get rid of the jail time and replace it with counseling and HIV education and job training, but that got shot down by the others.  The speaker said the state probably didn’t have enough money to offer job training (although it apparently does have enough money to pay for six months in prison for a first offense.)  I don’t disagree with most of what you’re saying, one of them said. [I'm paraphrasing.]  But we’ve all worked so hard on this compromise that it’s too late in the game to be changing anything.  Why don’t we just pass this and maybe we can look at it again next year?

That kind of logic makes me sad.  Very, very sad.

The Providence Journal article is here.

[UPDATE: RI Rep David Segal--who voted against the bill yesterday--has an article about everything up until two days ago on the Huffington Post now.]

If you’re following the prostitution situation in Rhode Island at all–and, I admit, I haven’t done a very good job of keeping you updated lately–you’ll want to read this.  It’s about the alleged anti-trafficking organization pushing the bill, and the fact they clearly have no interest in things like facts or truth or human trafficking.  Since the state’s real anti-trafficking coalition, the state chapter of the National Organization for Women, and the Students Against Human Trafficking groups aren’t supporting the bills, it ought to make legislators stop and wonder.  (Probably it won’t.  But it should.)

Anyway, the anti-prostitution bill comes before the state legislature late next week.  There’s public hearings in the House on Tuesday and the Senate on Wednesday.  I haven’t actually been inside the State House since a field trip when I was ten, so I’m not sure what happens, or how, or where, but Tara at the Happy Endings? blog probably does.