The past several decades have welcomed a new voice in the controversial topic of sex work — sex-positive sex workers. They claim their experiences are consensual, positive and pleasurable. They enjoy getting paid for sex and are tired of getting negative attention.

New Year’s Eve? Meh. National Finals Rodeo? Pffft. The Consumer Electronics Show? Whatever.

Getting the most bang for your buck just doesn’t cut it in today’s world of harlotry. Now, customers want to buy affection, too.

The dorm room I’m standing in is tastefully decorated, with vibrant canvasses adorning the cinderblock walls and a plush green couch across from a flat-screen TV. There’s no felt, glow-in-the-dark Bob Marley poster under a black light. No lava lamp. Because this isn’t your typical college student’s digs. It’s UNLV sociology professor Georgiann Davis’ suite inside the school’s Tonopah Complex residence hall. Davis is the first participant in UNLV’s professor-in-residence program, which launched last fall and embeds a faculty member in a student dormitory with the aim of boosting student engagement. We chatted with Davis about her unique experience

Chelsea Lane was a freshman at Reed, the esteemed liberal-arts college in Portland, Oregon, when she first became ­interested in sex work. Someone in her humanities class had a Tumblr about being a prostitute, prompting a lively debate among fellow students over whether they could ever sell their bodies. “I started reading sex workers’ blogs,” Lane explains. The women behind the blogs sounded confident, financially secure. “And within Reed, it was like, ‘That’s cool. That’s edgy.’ ”

The 2012 film Eden distills all of our culture’s fears about underage sex trafficking into a single nightmare narrative. It shows dozens of young girls kidnapped from high school, forced into prostitution, and then murdered when they get too old for their dissipated clientele. Immoral, heartless criminals preying on innocent, attractive cissexual girls: This is a trafficking story that resonates.

Larimer County residents who died by suicide in 2015 largely reinforce national data that pinpoint a few key groups as more vulnerable than others.

For all that investigators have learned about the San Bernardino terrorist attack, a mystery persists: How did Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik—a couple with an infant, an American family, and, in the father’s case, a reputation as an easygoing colleague—maintain a hidden life as terrorists-to-be? Who did they deceive and how?

In the area of 1 in 2,000 people are born intersex. These individuals may have mixed genitalia, meaning some combination of ovaries and testes. This comes about either because ovarian and testicular tissue grow together in the same organ or because a "male side" and a "female side" develop in the body.

When news broke that former Los Angeles Lakers forward Lamar Odom was found unconscious at the Love Ranch brothel, it raised a lot of questions about prostitution in Nevada.

Nevada’s licensed brothels, many of which have struggled financially since the recession, face a more uncertain future after former NBA and reality TV star Lamar Odom was found unconscious in one on Tuesday.

Sex workers do business in every state, but only in Nevada is prostitution legalized, specifically in brothels.