The Wisdom of Whores

Anyone convicted in South Dakota of intentionally exposing a sex partner to HIV will have to sign up as a sex offender, according to a bill signed into law today.
The AP reports this as though a person has to infect their partner before they become a sex offender, but the law appears to cast [...]

When I was working on the manuscript of The Wisdom of Whores, I got my knickers in a twist about what to call a girl’s nether regions. In Britain, “fanny” is a nice, friendly word, but in the States fanny means arse. So I asked a couple of American friends what friendly word they used [...]

Help me out here. George Bush says abstinence is the only reliable way of avoiding HIV. So you’d think do-it-yourself orgasms would be the order of the day. It took Bush’s home state of Texas a while to get with the programme, but they finally made it okay to masturbate, legalising dildos just in time [...]

Ok, we’re all Spitzered out. I had many reactions to a piece I wrote about the affair(s). Some were baffling — apparently I am anti-Semitic for implying that a man who breaks the very laws he makes might be one sandwich short of a picnic, for instance. Which at least alerted me to the fact [...]

Another window of hope for HIV prevention slammed shut this week, with publication of a study showing that treating herpes doesn’t prevent HIV.
There’s a very strong association between HIV infection and herpes simplex type 2 (HSV-2), especially in sub-Saharan Africa. People with HIV are more likely to get herpes, and vice versa. But because herpes [...]

There’s more smack than dope in British jails, according to newly-published data (pdf) from the Ministry of Justice. In random testing, 4.2% of prisoners tested positive for opiates, 4% for cannabis. In a couple of jails, heroin use was up at 16%. Some people say that prisoners are switching to heroin because it doesn’t hang [...]

This morning The Guardian published an opinion piece (Sptizer’s True Folly), in which I argued that we should promote laws which differentiate between the exchange of sex for money between consenting adults and the exploitation of children and unwilling workers. Here was one of the responses, from kathyw:
Oh, please. These women (and the transgendered men [...]

South Park is at it again, being funny about a deadly subject. Tut tut.