TRAWLING through the classified section of a Johannesburg newspaper back in 2001 I came across a notice from Christina, a young Thai who, in a bid to draw attention to her services, boasted that she could suck a mouse through a garden hose.
For some reason this so intrigued me that I carefully cut it out and taped it to the cover of an anthology of Allan Boesak's love poems, some of which were written while he was in prison for fraud.
Of course, as the Mahogany Ridge regulars so often tell me, I was much more naive and thoughtless back then. These days, rather than muck about with attempts at postmodernism and the ironic gesture, a classified notice like that would have me on the phone most pronto to the animal welfare people, if not the Advertising Standards Authority.
I mention this only because there has been some stirrings in the trousers of the popular press following the Commission for Gender Equality's call to decriminalise what it calls "sex work".
According to the CGE commissioner Janine Hicks, this is the preferred term, in terms of trade description for this type of labour, chosen by the scrubbers themselves, rather than "prostitution" which, because of its unfortunate pejorative associations, didn't come to the party with much in the way of boosting self-esteem.
The commission believes the rights and dignity of sex workers should be protected, and the repeal of laws that prohibit their activities was the only way to achieve this; criminalisation, it argued, violated those sections of the Constitution regarding the right to human dignity, the right to security of the person, and the right of trade, occupation and profession.