sex work | Platypus

Unfinished Bodies: Cosmetic Surgeries Among Aging Sex Workers in Singapore

 Rong Mu  October 26, 2026

When I met Mia in her massage parlour, she had recently undergone cosmetic surgery. She openly showed me the sutures, dense and deep, tracing almost her entire hairline. Two weeks earlier, she had travelled to Shanghai for a major facelift involving the lifting and tightening of the skin. She even showed me videos of the operation: the surgeon peels back the skin of her face, pulls it taut, and sutures it into its new position. It reminded me of The Painted Skin in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi), where the demon peels off a face like a mask and replaces it with another. However, what gave Mia her new face was not a supernatural spell but modern surgery: a painful, costly, and carefully planned intervention made possible by highly sophisticated surgical techniques. More important, it carries Mia’s hope for work. Originally from China and now a permanent resident in Singapore, Mia has been working in the sex industry for more than ten years. “I’m fifty now,” she told me. “Just look at all the young, beautiful girls in the building. If I don’t undergo cosmetic surgery, what choice do I have? How could I ever compete with them? I need to survive. I still have to work and make money.” For Mia, cosmetic surgery was crucial to both her work and her future. If her appearance determined her competitiveness in the market, then surgery was an investment in her livelihood. (read more...)

PrEP in Thailand in the time of COVID-19

 Tim Quinn  June 29, 2020

In 2012, the first PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) drugs came onto the market, poised to revolutionize the field of HIV prevention. ‘The Pill’ promised to usher in a kind of sexual revolution, particularly for gay men and trans women. Sexual rights activists and health workers around the world analogized PrEP to birth control, suggesting that PrEP would allow particular sexual minority populations to secure bodily autonomy and serve as a tool for the self-management and mitigation of risk. (read more...)

A Feeling for Robotic Skin

 Mitali Thakor  November 1, 2018

“I hate it when her eyes flick open. This one, her eyeballs sometimes go in different directions and it looks creepy.” Catherine reached over, gently pulling the doll’s eyelids down with one extended finger. The doll, Nova, was petite, shorter than Catherine and I, and had jet black hair and brown skin. She had been clothed in a white unitard suit. Nova was flanked by other dolls of various heights and skin tones, to her right a white-skinned brunette, also a “petite” model, and across from her, a life-size replica of the porn actor Asa Akira. Henry, a newer model, stood beside Nova. He had been dressed in what might be described as office-kink-lite, a white button-down shirt and black slacks, along with black fingernail paint and a leather wrist cuff. His skull was cracked open to reveal the circuitry inside. Henry, Nova, Asa’s doll, and the others were standing propped in the display lobby of a sex doll manufacturer’s headquarters in southern California. I visited the headquarters in the spring of 2018 to meet the dolls and their makers. Catherine, the company’s media liaison, generously offered me a tour of the display showroom and production site. (read more...)

Animal Sex Work

 Jeannette Vaught  June 15, 2016

Crouched beneath a stallion’s hot undercarriage, bearing the weight of a two-foot long sterile tube on my shoulder as the horse thrusts into it, I vocally encouraged him to ejaculate along with a team of human handlers dedicated to the business of equine sperm. “Come on, boy,” we all chirp, “don’t stop now!” This particular kind of human-assisted animal sex is repeated all spring and summer long at equine breeding facilities across the globe. The proliferation of Artificial Insemination (AI) techniques and technologies over the past two decades has revolutionized the equine breeding shed, making it possible to produce offspring from two horses with no physical, or even geographical, proximity. As recently as fifteen years ago, performance horse breeders imported actual horses from Europe, Russia, or South America to improve the American strains of particular breeds. Now it is possible to breed American mares to international stallions without either party leaving home. New industries and technologies have been created to collect, package, freeze, and transport equine semen; state, federal, and international laws govern the movement of semen across political borders; and a whole branch of equine veterinary medicine concerned with reproduction—theriogenology—has swelled to accommodate the growing need for professionals to supervise encounters like the one I described above. (read more...)