Melissa Petro

Sometimes the fights I pick with my fiancé are really fights with myself.

It's time to talk substantively and honestly about how sex work isn't any one thing.

The other day on Facebook, one of my friends remarked that I was a “later-in-life” bride.

Sure, "friends forever" sounds nice. In theory. But sometimes it's better that two people just not be friends.

You may have heard the old joke that 98% of people masturbate, and the other two percent are lying.

No exaggeration, when I close my eyes— even for a second— I see white dresses.

For someone like me — someone with difficulty forming and maintaining relationships, who has struggled with commitment, and who’s got intimacy issues galore — surely, you can see the appeal. You don’t need to be Freud to figure out why, at a disturbingly young age, I looked forward to the day a man would commit.

“If someone’s crying at work, it’s because it’s their only outlet to release tension,” says Greg, age 30, a public school teacher. When people cry at work, Greg says, it’s because they’ve became “overwhelmed” or perhaps feel as if “they’re not meeting their goals.”

“If you believe in the decriminalisation of sex work,” Ian Dunt rightfully points out, “you will instantly come under a sustained and highly emotive attack on your morality and your identity.” In this vein, when a man comes out in favor of sex worker’s rights, he becomes “a betrayer of women, a gender Judas encouraging violence against them.”

Would Sheryl Sandberg be able to get away with leaning in while donning Zuckerberg's signature v-neck T-shirt and jeans? History says no.