Melissa Petro

The other day my friend on Facebook had made a remark about how there are people who have multiple income streams and travel abroad constantly and drive cars and eat at restaurants every week and then talk about class privilege like they don't have it and in my mind I was like, Oh. Yeah. She’s right. In the past six months or so, my life has dramatically changed.

So, I got an email from my brother yesterday telling me that he’s not coming to the wedding. “I want to be there,” he writes, “I really do, but the idea of being consigned to [our mother and her boyfriend’s] care for the duration of the trip is driving me mad. You know, the whole lack of autonomy and being on someone else's time and all that.”

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

Especially if you’re a woman, people assume you’re hungry for a man.

When I first got sober, I started to accept that the “happy” occasions in life — holidays, birthdays and other special events — might not only feel happy. When I’m “supposed” to feel good, I feel nervous, anxious, and embarrassed. The center of attention, I feel vulnerable and on display.

A lot has been written about what not to say to a pregnant person. Being on the opposite side of that, I’ve learned pregnant people make mistakes, too.

We’ve all been in a situation where we've thought NO ONE CAN EVER KNOW THAT THIS HAPPENED TO ME.

How do you break up with a best friend?

After gaining as much as forty pounds and pushing a cantaloupe out my vagina, I wondered: will my body ever be the same?

“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.”