While she’s not exactly been fired yet, Bronx elementary school teacher Melissa Petro has been reassigned after admitting in the Huffington Post that she used to be a sex worker.
In the article published earlier this month, Petro’s comments about her past included a criticism of Craigslist shutting down its erotic services ads. She said Craigslist gave her “a simple, familiar forum through which I could do my business with complete anonymity, from the safety and convenience of my own home.” But she said she gave up sex work after a few months.
Petro also was encouraged by officials to make her public admissions under a pen name, but she refused. Petro wrote in the online magazine The Rumpus: “In an off-the-record conversation, a sympathetic administrator kindly asked if I couldn't publish under a pseudonym. I wish, for her sake, I could.” As we’ve seen before, honesty may not be the best policy for sex writers—if they want to keep their mainstream day jobs—but it certainly is the most honest policy.
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Rachida Dati, France's ex-justice minister, made a verbal slip during a TV interview that some might call Freudian. She said “fellatio” instead of “inflation.” Apparently, in French, that mistake is easier to make. The two words depicting the act of oral pleasuring and rising prices are very similar in Dati’s native language.
Dati apologized for the faux pas, saying on her Facebook site that, “This kind of thing happens if you speak too quickly on this kind of program.” She also added, “It is unfortunate that this is the only political message that has been received on such a serious subject.” Maybe it’s the media that has the Freudian fixation?
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Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell can’t seem to keep her witchy past from rising up to haunt her. New reports have surfaced of the anti-masturbation advocate as suggesting that the whole country should just stop having sex.
O’Donnell’s abstinence views—as applied to the entire U.S., which happens to be full of consenting adults—were made apparent on a 2003 taping of the MSNBC show Scarborough Country, where the now-candidate’s answer to HIV was to just make everyone put the condoms down and put their pants back on. When Eric Nies of the Moment of Hope Foundation asked her, “You're going to stop the whole country from having sex?” O’Donnell replied emphatically, “Yeah, yeah!”
Recently, O’Donnell has said her views have softened since her old appearances, and we can only hope so. Nationally distributed chastity belts would be a tough public health policy to enforce.
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Nudists at a 40-year-old vacation village are banding together in protest of their overly sexualized image, trying to keep the French resort Cap d'Agde from becoming the “European capital of debauchery.”
It’s not about the naked, it's about the nature for these residents. As one 34-year veteran of the conclave said, “When we bought [an apartment] here, it was to live naked, live with the sun, we wanted a natural life. Nowadays new wildlife is appearing.” While the mayor of the village has said he will ban minors from certain establishments, he will refrain from “making value judgments on the sexual practices of people.” A cool insight coming from people who show there’s more than one way to love our bodies.