'Hooker Teacher' Forced To Resign, Now Can't Find Work

AOL ^ | 02/15/2012 | By Claire Gordon

[Responsibility2nd]

Melissa Petro has spent much of her young life writing about the plight of sex workers: The stigma and shame, their treatment as victims or villains. Now Petro has been trampled by the forces she was trying to fight. After writing about her own experience as a sex worker, Petro was forced to resign from her teaching post. With two master's degrees, five years' experience in nonprofit work and three years as a teacher, as well as a litany of published writings, Petro is skipping meals. No one will give her a job.

~SNIP~

Petro began stripping when she was 19, on her semester abroad in Mexico. From a working class home, and the first of her family to attend college, Petro had a string of grueling low-wage jobs. She entered the sex industry for the same reason as hundreds of thousands of American women: the money.

~SNIP~

Petro wishes her story could have raised issues like the legality of prostitution and the constitutionality of her speech. Instead, she describes herself as being treated as a monster, vanquished, now left to hand out resumes, and scrounge desperately for cash -- the same bleak circumstances that lead so many women to sex work in the first place.

"I was being idealistic," she writes about that HuffPost op-ed. "I was being provocative. I was naive. I picked a fight that I thought I could win -- and I was wrong."

[Hegewisch Dupa]

Totally not guilty

[newfreep]

[Clock King]

"Why must a person suffer their future because of a lifestyle they once had. Sometimes ya just gotta do what ya gotta do to survive."

Unacceptable. Women who prostitute themselves have NEVER been respected in human history, and women should recognize that. She's surviving NOW without prostitution, so why couldn't she have done that before?

[Chewbacca]

Why bother being a hooker when she could just become a webcam model and work from home?