If I recall correctly Carol Leigh was the woman who along with me was the first to coin the phrase "GFE" girlfriend experience" which had nothing to do with sex acts. It was about a real human interaction with another person like a girlfriend, even if only for an hour with an escort. This was on the alt.sex.prostitution newsgroups before there were web sites using 300 baud dial-up modems.
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Carol Leigh, who sought to change the image and treatment of sex workers — a term she is generally credited with coining — through both mainstream advocacy work and her colorful performances and writings under the name Scarlot Harlot, died on Wednesday at her home in San Francisco of cancer. She was 71.
Ms. Leigh began working as a prostitute after moving to San Francisco from the East Coast in 1978. In a 1996 interview with The San Francisco Examiner, she said she was galvanized into activism in 1979 after two men raped her at the sex studio where she worked and she realized that if she reported the crime, the establishment would be shut down, leaving her and other women there unemployed.
She argued that some people engaged in prostitution by choice, and that many sex-for-money transactions — the escort business, for instance — were not the street-corner deals the general public pictured.Her point, sometimes expressed humorously, was to encourage a rethinking of the possible relationships between sex and commerce.
“Carol Leigh was — and will always remain — a staple in the movement for sex workers’ rights,” Jenny Heineman, who teaches sociology and anthropology at the University of Nebraska Omaha and has written about sex work and feminism, said by email. “Never shying away from hard conversations, she coined the term ‘sex work’ to encapsulate the intersecting challenges that stigmatized and criminalized laborers across the globe face.”
In the early 1980s Ms. Leigh developed a one-woman show, “The Adventures of Scarlot Harlot,” which she performed in San Francisco and elsewhere. In it she told stories from her working life, argued for a place at the feminist table and suggested that sex for money was perhaps not that different from whatever the audience did for money.
In the mid-1990s she served on a commission on prostitution created by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and in 2008 she was among the more vocal advocates of Proposition K in San Francisco, a ballot measure that would have had the effect of decriminalizing prostitution in the city. It failed. Its opponents included the city’s district attorney at the time, Kamala Harris.
Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/us/carol-leigh-dead.html
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Carol Leigh, who sought to change the image and treatment of sex workers — a term she is generally credited with coining — through both mainstream advocacy work and her colorful performances and writings under the name Scarlot Harlot, died on Wednesday at her home in San Francisco of cancer. She was 71.
Ms. Leigh began working as a prostitute after moving to San Francisco from the East Coast in 1978. In a 1996 interview with The San Francisco Examiner, she said she was galvanized into activism in 1979 after two men raped her at the sex studio where she worked and she realized that if she reported the crime, the establishment would be shut down, leaving her and other women there unemployed.
She argued that some people engaged in prostitution by choice, and that many sex-for-money transactions — the escort business, for instance — were not the street-corner deals the general public pictured.Her point, sometimes expressed humorously, was to encourage a rethinking of the possible relationships between sex and commerce.
“Carol Leigh was — and will always remain — a staple in the movement for sex workers’ rights,” Jenny Heineman, who teaches sociology and anthropology at the University of Nebraska Omaha and has written about sex work and feminism, said by email. “Never shying away from hard conversations, she coined the term ‘sex work’ to encapsulate the intersecting challenges that stigmatized and criminalized laborers across the globe face.”
In the early 1980s Ms. Leigh developed a one-woman show, “The Adventures of Scarlot Harlot,” which she performed in San Francisco and elsewhere. In it she told stories from her working life, argued for a place at the feminist table and suggested that sex for money was perhaps not that different from whatever the audience did for money.
In the mid-1990s she served on a commission on prostitution created by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and in 2008 she was among the more vocal advocates of Proposition K in San Francisco, a ballot measure that would have had the effect of decriminalizing prostitution in the city. It failed. Its opponents included the city’s district attorney at the time, Kamala Harris.
Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/us/carol-leigh-dead.html
