Hypersexualisation and racialised erotic capital in sex work.

Eight people, including six women of East Asian descent, at three massage spas were killed on 16 March 2021 in Atlanta, USA by a 21-year-old White man who sought to eliminate 'temptation' for a sex addiction he claimed to experience. This mass killing compelled public discussion about the hypersexualisation of Asian women in White, Western contexts and the risks faced by Asian women in 'intimate labour'. This occurred alongside a dialogical shift towards sex worker rights in public and media discourses, yet these public dialogues appeared to occur alongside each other, rather than in interaction with each other. In between these dialogues remained questions about the legacies of hypersexualisation and what this means for Asian women in sex work, an industry that resists convenient understandings of desire and power and where hypersexuality may be simultaneously contested and deployed. This article bridges these dialogues to explore how a sex worker rights framework can engage with questions of race, hypersexualisation and erotic capital for Asian women in sex work. This is followed by an analysis of responses to hypersexualisation within Asian diasporic communities, and the implications for a more inclusive sex worker rights movement.

Scripting pragmatic intimacies in sex work, migration and intimate-material exchanges.

This paper examines women's movement between sex work and intimate economies, with a specific focus on how non-Chinese women in Hong Kong leverage intimacy as a means of managing legal and socio-economic precarity within various institutional and individual constraints. To capture the diversity of women's experiences, we use the term 'intimate-material exchanges' to broadly refer to compensation or material support provided in exchange for sexually intimate relations. We ground our analysis of the interactional processes involved in intimate-material exchanges in 39 interviews with ethnically non-Chinese women and men in Hong Kong. For the women in this study, intimate-material exchanges were shaped by migration and distinguished by pragmatism, strategy and intentionality that involved adapting, improvising and experimenting with sexual scripts in an ambiguous legal space in order to derive maximum material benefit. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of migration and intimate-material exchanges for sex worker rights.

Effects of an electrolyte additive on hydration and drinking behavior during wildfire suppression.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of a water + electrolyte solution versus plain water on changes in drinking behaviors, hydration status, and body temperatures during wildfire suppression. METHODS: Eight participants consumed plain water, and eight participants consumed water plus an electrolyte additive during 15 hours of wildfire suppression. Participants wore a specially outfitted backpack hydration system equipped with a digital flow meter system affixed inline to measure drinking characteristics (drinking frequency and volume). Body weight and urine-specific gravity were collected pre- and postshift. Ambient, core, and skin temperatures were measured continuously using a wireless system. Work output was monitored using accelerometry. RESULTS: There were no differences between groups for body weight, drinking frequency, temperature data, activity, or urine-specific gravity (1.019 +/- 0.007 to 1.023 +/- 0.010 vs. 1.019 +/- 0.005 to 1.024 +/- 0.009 for water and water + electrolyte groups pre- and postshift, respectively; P < .05). There was a main effect for time for body weight, demonstrating an overall decrease (78.1 +/- 13.3 and 77.3 +/- 13.3 kg pre- and postshift, respectively; P < .05) across the work shift. The water group consumed more total fluid (main effect for treatment) than the water + electrolyte group (504 +/- 472 vs. 285 +/- 279 mL.h(-1) for the water and water + electrolyte groups, respectively; P < .05). CONCLUSION: The addition of an electrolyte mixture to plain water decreased the overall fluid consumption of the water + electrolyte group by 220 mL.h(-1) (3.3 L.d(-1)). Supplementing water with electrolytes can reduce the amount of fluid necessary to consume and transport during extended activity. This can minimize carrying excessive weight, possibly reducing fatigue during extended exercise.