helby Aesthetic, a landscaper and writer in Huntsville, Ala., said she worked as a prostitute throughout her teenage years but never knew of a “sex workers movement” until last year, when she caught a performance of a touring art show where prostitutes performed and read short stories and poetry.

“I had done sex work for years and I had never talked to anyone about it,” Ms. Aesthetic, 25, said. “I didn’t know there was anything out there.”

As often happens, a cultural interest opened doors to a social movement, this one involving “sex workers” and their supporters. In a new wave of activism, many prostitutes are organizing, staging public events and coming out publicly to demand greater acceptance and protection, giving a louder voice to a business that has thrived in silence.

In Huntsville, Ms. Aesthetic – who says that is her real name – recently formed a chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project, a California group that itself was created from an organization in Australia last year, and is collecting statistics on prostitution arrests.

At the Center for Sex and Culture in the hip South of Market area in San Francisco, prostitutes meet in support groups, hold fund-raisers and plot their next political move after having lost a ballot initiative in November that would have eased police enforcement of prostitution laws in Berkeley, Calif.

In New York, they are readying the first issue of a magazine for people in the sex industry for spring publication. And on the Internet, prostitutes have found a way not only to find customers but to find one another. They have formed online communities and have connected with groups in other countries.

Despite the country’s conservative climate, the ultimate goal for some in the movement is decriminalization, a move opposed by other former prostitutes who see the business as inherently exploitive and degrading.

For now, though, the activists see ways to push ahead on goals shy of decriminalization, like stopping violence, improving working conditions, learning from foreign efforts to legitimize their work and taking some of the stigma off their trade.

“We call ourselves the rebirth,” said Robyn Few, a former prostitute who heads the Sex Workers Outreach Project USA (SWOP) and led the ballot effort in Berkeley, said of the current incarnation of the prostitutes’ rights movement.

Such a movement has long existed in liberal urban centers like New York and San Francisco, where there is an infirmary for prostitutes named for Margo St. James, the founder in the 1970′s of one of the best-known prostitute groups, Coyote (for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). But the Internet, coupled with a younger generation of women willing to speak out as current or former prostitutes and tougher federal law enforcement are giving momentum to a more broadly based movement, some of the women said.

Ms. Aesthetic was among organizers of the second national Day of Remembrance yesterday to honor murdered prostitutes. In New York, former and current prostitutes gathered outside Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park to read the names of the dead. After each speaker read her segment, the crowd of about 20 people, some holding candles, said “whores’ lives are human lives.”

Prostitutes and their advocates say the illegal nature of their business makes them a target of violence because a majority of them do not report crimes for fear of being arrested or because they are ignored.

“There are safe ways to work,” says Carol Leigh, a longtime advocate for prostitutes’ rights. “It’s only a risk when it’s illegal.”

Those who study prostitution say there is a wide range in types, from streetwalkers to high-priced call girls, and in the working conditions they face.

“Some people are doing very well,” said Juhu Thukral, a lawyer and director of the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project in New York City, which offers legal representation to the women and researches the field. “Others are really doing it out of desperation.”

Advocates of prostitute rights contend that it is a viable source of income for many women and that sexual activity between adults for money should be treated as any other form of legal labor. Ms. Few, 46, who is on probation for conspiring to promote prostitution, and others say their ultimate goal is to remove prostitution altogether from criminal codes, rather than confining it to legal brothels, as in Nevada.

But opposition to that agenda is just as strong among many other prostitutes. Norma Hotaling, a former prostitute and founder of one of the best known groups working to help prostitutes leave sex work, the SAGE Project in San Francisco, said that while giving prostitutes legal rights might help some women “build a business and make money,” it would also feed into the worse consequences of commercial sex.

Ms. Hotaling said that there was a connection between those who hired prostitutes and those who sexually exploited children and that there was damage to the spirit of women who had no other options for a livelihood.

“It’s not just women’s rights,” she said. “We really haven’t talked about what it means to increase the demand and legitimize the buying and selling of human beings.”

But some of those working to help prostitutes leave their business see allies in those speaking out for sex workers. Celia Williamson, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Toledo in Ohio, said common ground could be found on calling public attention to the violence and lack of social services faced by streetwalkers, the most vulnerable of prostitutes.

Ms. Williamson says her research shows that most of these women are victims of “sadistic and predatory” violence by customers, and scores suffer from drug addiction and mental illness. Last September, Ms. Williamson organized a conference to help spur a national strategy to deal with the problems.

“Mostly we’re sick and tired,” said the social worker, who is chairwoman of the advisory board to an outreach program for prostitutes in Toledo. “Prostitution is like domestic violence 20 years ago. Nobody wants to talk about it. Police officers have a lot of discretion. There’s no institutional support.”

Few people predict that prostitutes are anywhere near obtaining legal rights, but some experts note that there are gains to be had if the movement perseveres.

Ronald Weitzer, a professor of sociology at George Washington University and the author of “Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry,” said realistic goals included training police officers to respond properly to prostitutes’ complaints. The police could also steer resources from revolving-door arrests to referrals to social service programs, he said.

“There’s some discretion,” Mr. Weitzer said.

In the meantime, some of the women continue their political work.

At the St. James Infirmary in San Francisco, Alexandra Lutnick, 26, a research coordinator for the program, said the infirmary not only offered health services but also collected data “to inform policy.”

“We can be discounted and ignored as sex workers,” said Ms. Lutnick, who has worked in the trade, “but if you go into it as an organization that’s seen 500 participants in the last year and 70 percent of them are saying they’re being harassed by police, then it’s harder to dismiss.”

Ms. Few said her ballot measure was just the beginning. “We’re not quiet,” she said. “We’re moving forward. We’re not just prostitutes around here.”

Janon Fisher contributed reporting from New York for this article.

hiladelphia

EARLIER this month, the high school football season ended around the country. There were the state championships and before that, the annual Thanksgiving Day games. There were the rose-colored images of innocence and valor and healthy competition, attributes that we continue to insist upon from sports in America even though such attributes have become extinct.

We are clinging to the supposed virtues of high school athletics with particular zeal. Everybody knows that pro sports is too far gone (take your pick of recent scandals). Everybody knows that college sports is too far gone (take your pick of recent scandals). But still there’s high school sports, still the classic battle of one rival against the other in shaggy glory, what James Jones described in “From Here to Eternity” as “the magnificent foolishness of youth as if the whole of life depended on this game.” A half-century later, the depiction of noble sacrifice at the high school level still forms our baseline, gives us hope that something in sports is still unsullied, restores our faith in the family values fad that has overtaken the low-carb diet.

Except that high school sports in America has become an epidemic of win-at-all-costs in too many places, just as corroded as college and the pros; actually more so because none of the ends can possibly justify the means when many of those involved are still too young to vote. No Super Bowl with television ratings through the roof. No Bowl Championship Series games with millions watching. Just millions of dollars spent by certain school districts that cannot possibly begin to explain the millions they are spending. Just booster clubs, like little Mafia families, filling in the gap between what the board of education is willing to cough up and what the athletic department claims that it needs to keep churning out those precious state championships. Just coaches in some places making close to $90,000 a year without teaching a class. Just further social stratification between the athlete and the non-athlete, those who are in and those who are out and feel humiliated and ridiculed with repercussions that can become deadly. Just steroid abuse, including a 17-year-old baseball player in a Dallas suburb who committed suicide because what of his parents believe was depression caused by stopping anabolic steroids.

Maybe I’m overselling the problem. But my point of reference is the late 1980′s, when I moved to Odessa, Tex., to do research for my book. When it was published in 1990, Permian High School in Odessa became a national symbol of everything that was wrong in high school sports – spending close to $70,000 on chartered jet trips to several away games, building a high school football stadium that seated nearly 20,000 and cost $5.6 million.

Over the past 14 years, I have had hundreds of conversations with parents about high school sports careening out of control. In virtually all of them, the reaction has been the same – approving nods of solidarity, followed by my own queasy sense that they weren’t really listening to a word I said, their own private SportsCenter moment reeling in their heads for their sons and daughters. Over those 14 years, the excesses have only gotten worse.

As USA Today reported in October, millions upon millions of dollars are being spent on high school football stadiums and related buildings across the country. Texas, of course, leads the arms race with new or pending high school football stadium projects in the Dallas area alone costing close to $180 million. But in Jefferson, Ind., as part of a privately financed $8 million building project, there’s a new 6,000-seat high school football stadium with an expensive video scoreboard. In Valdosta, Ga., $7.5 million was spent to renovate its football stadium, including building a museum to the glory of the Valdosta Wildcats. North Hills High, in the Pittsburgh region, spent $10 million to renovate the stadium and build a 13,000-square-foot field house.

The arguments for these sports centers are as familiar as they are wearying as they are transparent: the football programs not only are self-sustaining but also support other sports; these are stadiums the community wants so there’s no harm, particularly when they are privately financed.

But no community, at least no community I would want my children to live in, can justify any of these monoliths. In an age where educational resources are dwindling, how can the building of a lavish new stadium or a field house possibly be justified, much less needed? What does it say to the rest of the student body, the giant-sized majority who do not play football, except that they are inferior, a sloppy second to the football stars who shine on Friday night. How can a community brag about its ability to get financing for a multimillion-dollar football stadium when it can’t conjure up the money to hire more teachers that would lead to the nirvana of smaller class sizes? If it’s the desire of boosters to pour money into sports, and it usually is, then why not use these private funds for a physical education program to reduce obesity among teenagers?

IT isn’t simply money that has contributed to the professionalism of high school sports. As a reporter for The Chicago Tribune, I spent a year uncovering abuses in Illinois as disturbing as anything in Texas – high school coaches recruiting eighth-grade players with glossy pitches and come-ons straight out of the major-college mold, parents getting so many calls from high school recruiters that they simply had their phones turned off, high school basketball coaches siphoning off Chicago’s best players just so they wouldn’t compete against them. Jump a level down into that emotional hell known as travel team – there isn’t a parent of a travel team player who can’t recite at least one horror story of another parent going berserk or a coach flipping out in the name of providing 10- and 11- and 12-year-olds with a little extra competition.

In October, the National Association of State Boards of Education issued a report calling for greater oversight of high school athletics because of the alarming trickle-down of virtually every bad college practice. The list of concerns included steroid use, shady shoe agents, mercenary coaches, dubious recruiting tactics and extravagant gifts. Steroid abuse does exist in high schools. As many as 11 percent of the nation’s youth have used them, according to a study by the Mayo Clinic. Based on other research, some of the most disturbing users are freshman high school girls, with a rate of abuse at a minimum of 7 percent. “We have a moral obligation to prevent the exploitation of high school students,” the national association said.

Those are important words, but I’m afraid they are going to fall on deaf ears.

Sports as an institution is every bit as powerful in this country as corporate America or the Catholic Church. Yet sports are still considered a sidelight, ancillary to our daily experience. It’s still too easy to put on those rose-colored glasses, indulge in Grantland Rice images of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame and Knute Rockne speeches of winning one for the Gipper. It’s too easy to get wrapped up in the supposed character-building elements of it, the false narratives of heroes and come-from-behind glory fed us by newspapers and television networks and cable networks in their ceaseless search for easy emotional aphrodisiacs.

Which means that high school sports will continue to fester into shameful overemphasis in too many places, will continue to emulate the college sports model that is America’s educational shame. Which means that by the time we completely ruin the institution of sports for our teenagers, it will be too late to do anything except appoint a national commission to try to figure out how we could have missed so many warning signs.

Buzz Bissinger is the author of “Friday Night Lights.”

ORE than 40 years and 40 books ago, Louis Auchincloss depicted his maternal grandmother’s family, the Dixons, in a novel called ”Portrait in Brownstone.” Now, in the writer’s 88th year, it’s come time for his father’s people. We are told that the Carnochans of ”East Side Story,” Auchincloss’s latest novel, were brought to New York from Scotland by David, ”the emigrant,” a bluff Presbyterian thread merchant, in 1829. But the eulogy delivered at the patriarch’s funeral, excerpted on the book’s first page, is closely adapted from the one actually given for Auchincloss’s great-grandfather Hugh, which the novelist quoted in his autobiography, ”A Writer’s Capital,” published in 1974.

This new book, a mere 227 pages, is a considerable, if selective, saga. Near its opening, one character pays $300 for a stranger to take his place in the Union Army; near its close, another suffers estrangement from his children over Vietnam. And yet, ”East Side Story” is really no more a novel than earlier Auchincloss offerings like ”The Book Class” or ”Fellow Passengers,” each a necklace of character cameos given unity by a shared narrator or milieu.

In this case, the chain of the necklace is the Carnochan bloodline. Depending from the center is another David, not the emigrant but his great-grandson, ”a politician to the core of his being,” a familial manipulator who in the mid-20th century rises high in his professional world (president of the New York State Bar Association), but not quite high enough: ”He had never been summoned to take any part in the administration of his great nation, either as an attorney, a diplomat or a cabinet officer.” This relative failure is less important than its contribution to David’s self-awareness, which comes to include the understanding that ”to face defeat with assumed equanimity was the nearest thing to a victory that such a man as himself could expect.”

In Auchincloss’s world, the victories are often Pyrrhic or partial. The best and most lasting ones require cunning, patience and an acceptance of limits. Here people engage in a continuing, almost commercial, transaction with life; they cut themselves the best deal they can get. Eliza, the emigrant’s turn-of-the-last-century daughter-in-law, marries the son who proposes, not the one she’s in love with: ”She knew, in short, the cost of discipline and could sympathize with the pains of those who had subjected themselves to it — or who had tried to and failed.” Eliza’s own son will also make a marriage more sensible than romantic, ending up with ”a life and not a bad one.” The reader doesn’t pity him and isn’t meant to.

Those who in adversity make a sudden embrace of religion are like panic sellers during a market downturn. Their failure of nerve does no one any good. If some people are luckier than they should be, others are better than we know or expect: Pierre, a nephew of the younger David’s, makes a strategic, social-climbing marriage that renders his wife alcoholic and miserable — until he rises, or lowers himself, to the occasion and lovingly sees her through.

And when character won’t adapt this well to circumstance, circumstance may give character a break. Another of David’s nephews, Jaime, a libertine from the time he wrote his Yale senior thesis on Restoration comedy, shocks New York in the 1930′s by his rumored request of an open marriage with his wife. Thirty years later, New York has caught up to him, accepting his excesses and making him a successful party planner for the members of a liberalized social elite who must now ”identify their quest for festivity with the alleviation of human misery or the fostering of the arts. They danced for hospitals and medical research; they wined and dined for museums and schools. Charity excused their show of diamonds; humanity justified their mirth.”

Auchincloss has always given us not only the textures of this world (who else would remember the novels of Francis Marion Crawford?) but also its elemental and evolving truths. As a chronicler of the upper class, he could hardly be indifferent to wealth, but money interests him more as a kind of enzyme — sometimes inherited, sometimes injected — than as an object of worship. The Carnochans are, in fact, suited to an almost naturalistic explanation, which Auchincloss provides us through the viewpoint of David’s cousin Loulou: the family’s ”contribution to the arts, to politics, to teaching, to any occupation that involved giving out rather than taking in, was minimal. If there were no criminals, neither were there any saints. The Carnochans seemed dedicated to their own permanence.”

IF everyone in Auchincloss seems a type, that is less a sign of this writer’s limitations than his fidelity to real life. Each of us, like it or not, is born to embody at least one iron law of demographics, and Auchincloss’s gift has been the ability to typify with more specificity than most novelists can individualize. He is especially good at having one character explain another to his face: ”Isn’t the son-in-law the natural heir of the American tycoon? The son too often goes to the dogs.”

Auchincloss has been known to complain when ”told that I have confined my fiction to too small a world.” He has a point. The objection slights not only the depths of his exploration but also his consistent consideration of at least five generations. He has traveled far, if not wide, and still he perseveres. ”East Side Story” is his 60th book. The list of his other titles now takes up a full two pages in the front of each new volume, but the prose of this prolific writer remains decidedly economical, its firm, stately syntax inviting the kind of admiration produced by an old man’s ramrod posture or still-serviceable 50-year-old briefcase.

In chronicling a precinct of life in which the bon mot is unusually prized, Auchincloss still mints or overhears some awfully good ones: ”It couldn’t have been suicide, for he’d dined the night before with the Stoddards, and why, to anyone who had that behind him, wouldn’t the future have seemed bright?” If one or two slips of usage seem to occur — ”hang-ups” and ”recycling” coming out of characters’ mouths a decade or so prematurely — I’m still not sure I’d bet my ear, or even my dictionary, against this particular master.

Thomas Mallon’s most recent novels are ”Two Moons” and ”Bandbox.”

UBAI, United Arab Emirates

For years now it’s been clear that the Middle East peace process has left the realm of diplomacy and started to become an industry, with its own G.N.P. of conferences and seminars. But there is a new industry rapidly overtaking it in the Middle East, and that is the “reform industry.” Every month there seems to be a new conference on reform in the Arab world. Indeed, I have been attending one here in Dubai, an amazing city-state on the Persian Gulf that is becoming the Singapore of the Arab East.

What the reform process and the peace process have in common is that neither advances when we Americans tell the parties in English that they have to change. Progress happens only when the people here tell themselves in Arabic that they must change. So I took heart from the blunt manner in which Dubai’s crown prince, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, opened his conference by saying, in a speech broadcast by Arab satellite TV, “I say to my fellow Arabs [in power]: If you do not change, you will be changed.”

I didn’t hear talk like that five years ago. Nor did I hear an Egyptian friend remarking to me that she had absolutely no problem with Hosni Mubarak’s son, Gamal, one day succeeding his father. Gamal is a good man. She just had one condition, that Gamal Mubarak succeed his father the same way George W. Bush succeeded his father: in a free election.

Meanwhile, last Sunday, about 1,000 Egyptians gathered in downtown Cairo, many wearing over their mouths yellow stickers with the Arabic word for “enough” written on them, to protest plans by President Mubarak to run for a fifth term.

Yes, there is definitely something stirring out here, but it has miles to go before meaningful changes occur. It is something America should be quietly encouraging, so it is inexplicable to me that the Bush administration is holding up publication of the next U.N. Arab Human Development Report. Let me fill you in:

In 2002, the U.N. Development Program sponsored a group of courageous Arab economists, social scientists and other scholars to do four reports on human development in the Arab world. The first one, in 2002, caused a real stir in this region – showing, among other things, that the Arabs were falling so far behind that Spain’s G.D.P. was greater than that of the entire Arab League combined.

That first report, published in Arabic and English, was downloaded off the Internet one million times. It was a truly incisive diagnosis of the deficits of freedom, education and women’s empowerment retarding the Arab world.

In 2003, the same group produced a second Arab Human Development Report, about the Arab knowledge deficit – even tackling the supersensitive issue of how Islam and its current spiritual leaders may be holding back modern education. This was stuff no U.S. diplomat could ever raise, but the Arab authors of these reports could and did.

So I eagerly awaited the third Arab Human Development Report, due in October. It was going to be pure TNT, because it was going to tackle the issue of governance and misgovernance in the Arab world, and the legal, institutional and religious impediments to political reform. These are the guts of the issue out here. I waited. And I waited. But nothing.

Then I started to hear disturbing things – that the Bush team saw a draft of the Arab governance report and objected to the prologue, because it was brutally critical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation. This prologue constitutes some 10 percent of the report. While heartfelt, it’s there to give political cover to the Arab authors for their clear-eyed critique of Arab governance, which is the other 90 percent of the report.

But the Bush team is apparently insisting that language critical of America and Israel be changed – as if language 10 times worse can’t be heard on Arab satellite TV every day. And until it’s changed, the Bush folks are apparently ready to see the report delayed or killed altogether. And they have an ally. The government of Egypt, which is criticized in the report, also doesn’t want it out – along with some other Arab regimes.

So there you have it: a group of serious Arab intellectuals – who are neither sellouts nor bomb throwers – has produced a powerful analysis, in Arabic, of the lagging state of governance in the Arab world. It is just the sort of independent report that could fuel the emerging debate on Arab reform. But Bush officials, along with Arab autocrats, are holding it up until it is modified to their liking – even if that means it won’t appear at all.

It makes you weep.