NA Confidential: Spa's gone, and Kevin Zurschmiede's tiresome white male smirks proliferate as Amanda Beam returns to the topic of the sex trade.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Spa's gone, and Kevin Zurschmiede's tiresome white male smirks proliferate as Amanda Beam returns to the topic of the sex trade.

In Amanda Beam's News and Tribune column on Tuesday, she picked up right where she left off last week -- and where she left off last week was very instructive, indeed.

Meanwhile, KZ apparently thinks the crisis has passed. This belief is mistaken. I recommend that he issue a statement taking ownership of SpaGate, apologize for his insensitivity, vow to be more vigilant in the future, and move on. He stands to lose nothing by masquerading as a human.

Otherwise, I'll be compelled to spend the weeks from now through November 3 reminding him of it. I might just do that anyway.

Beam: Bless the broken road.

When you are a writer, certain stories affect you in unforeseen ways. First and foremost, the goal of a columnist is to change readers’ minds, or at the very least educate the public about certain issues.

Once in a while, though, research into a subject transforms the opinion of the journalist instead. Learning about the realities of human trafficking has caused this kind of change in me.

If you had asked before I embarked down this journey what my views were on prostitution in America, I would have answered that as long as the sex workers weren’t being coerced or trafficked, then I had no interest in what women do in their own lives. That’s the libertarian in me.

Boy, was I wrong. Prostitution makes victims of its workers, many of who had been traumatized to begin with.