Patterns of Schwartz

Take something you love, tell people about it, bring together people who share your love, and help make it better.  Ultimately, you’ll have more of whatever you love for yourself and the world.  -  Julius Schwartz

A few days before writing this I had a dream in which I was Hawkgirl, probably because we’ve been rewatching the Justice League animated series.  And though she’s a bit different in the show than in Silver Age comics (in the show she’s single, more belligerent and naturally winged) the dream still made me think of my column of one year ago today, in which I discussed my love for her and two other comic-book heroines, Wonder Woman and Alanna of Ranagar.  As I stated in that column, all three ladies…

…shared something…in common; they…appeared in titles edited by the late, great Julius Schwartz, father of the Silver Age of comics…Schwartz loved strong women and was a supporter of women’s rights at least since the 1940s, and most of the ladies (whether heroine, love-interest or villainess) who appeared in the titles he helmed were interesting, well-developed characters who stood out in sharp relief against the flat, stereotyped females who appeared in most other comics of the time (such as the rightfully-mocked Silver Age depiction of Superman’s girl friend Lois Lane, whose life was entirely dominated by schemes to trick the Man of Steel into proposing to her).

The job of a comic book editor is to coordinate the efforts of artist and writer, to set standards for his titles and to reject work which falls beneath that standard; he has to set a tone and ensure that it is maintained, and to help plan the “big picture”, the framework into which stories in that comic are expected to fit.  So even though the typical editor neither writes nor draws comics (though there are notable exceptions), no other single person is more to thank if a title is good and to blame if it’s bad.  Schwartz produced the best comics of the 1950s and early 1960s, bar none; he was a wizard at inspiring his people to superior work, and could steer a course through stormy waters where lesser men foundered.  In 1964 two of DC’s most important titles, Detective Comics (for which the company was named) and Batman, were failing due to years of mismanagement by veteran editor Jack Schiff; the company did not want to fire him but the Caped Crusader had to be saved.  So Schwartz was offered the helm of the two Batman titles…on condition that he give Schiff his two best-selling science fantasy comics, Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space (the title featuring Adam Strange, whom I discussed last time).  Schwartz accepted the deal, and Batman and Detective soon soared in quality and popularity; Mystery in Space was cancelled two years later, and Strange Adventures limped on until it was rescued by another editor in 1967.  Schwartz then went on to revive the various Superman titles in 1971 and Wonder Woman in 1974.

One of the most important elements of Schwartz’ managerial style was concentration on characterization.  Though the restrictive “Comics Code” foisted on the industry after the Kefauver Hearings in 1954 tied creators’ hands in many ways, nobody was to blame for flat, static characterizations but the creators themselves, and Schwartz insisted on a higher standard.  You can see an example of it in the story “Earth Victory – By a Hair!” which I introduced in “My Favorite Authors”; though the characters are necessarily simple (it’s only an eight-page comic story, which doesn’t leave much room), they are comparatively round and “The Wrecker” grows beyond his initially sexist attitude toward the strong female lead.  Such competent, interesting female characters are quite common in Schwartz’s titles, and today I’d like to tell you about two others, one created by Gardner Fox and the other by John Broome, the two writers most closely associated with Schwartz.

The first, Zatanna the Magician, was the dedicated and courageous daughter of the crime-fighting Golden Age magician Zatara, who had mysteriously vanished.  She was working to find him, and her quest intersected the paths of virtually every hero whose adventures were edited by Schwartz, starting with Hawkman and Hawkgirl and ending with the entire Justice League.  This clever stratagem allowed Schwartz to tie his various titles together (an unusual idea at that time), and to present a new character without a magazine of her own in a multi-part story which made her popular enough to eventually gain her own strip (a back-feature in Supergirl’s title during the early ‘70s).  I first encountered her in mid-‘70s reprints, and like many other readers I was enchanted by the sweet, vulnerable but plucky young sorceress, who later grew into one of the most powerful characters in the DC universe.

The other, Katma Tui, was originally intended as a one-shot character in Green Lantern.  For those unfamiliar with the mythos, I’ll explain that Earth’s Green Lantern is only the local representative of the Green Lantern Corps, a sort of cosmic order of knighthood dedicated to justice and presided over by the mysterious Guardians.  From time to time our hero encounters other alien Green Lanterns, and in issue #30 he was sent to dissuade a promising young Lantern who had decided to resign.  But the Guardians, who are obviously less sexist than Terrans of the 1960s, neglected to tell him that this other Green Lantern was female…because they simply didn’t consider it an important detail.  Our GL succeeded in his mission, Katma stayed in the Corps, and the readers demanded to see more of her; she eventually became the most popular guest star in the series.

Both of these ladies, like those I discussed last year, showed my young and impressionable self that a woman could be tough, resourceful, intelligent and powerful, yet still be beautiful, graceful and wholly feminine.  And since all of them were to a large degree shaped by Julius Schwartz, one might say that, ironically, one of the first people who taught me about female power and self-esteem was a man.  Of course, as a child I didn’t really think about that; young girls see female characters as women rather than as the fictional constructions of men.  I don’t know what sort of negative garbage most neofeminists read that convinces them that most men prefer weak, stupid, useless sex dolls; Julius Schwartz and his crew taught me that men of quality like strong, resourceful women with minds of their own.  And you know what?  They were right.

The Naked Emperor

So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy.  Everyone in the streets and the windows said, “Oh, how fine are the Emperor’s new clothes!  Don’t they fit him to perfection?  And see his long train!”  Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool.  No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.  -  Hans Christian Andersen

In Andersen’s tale the Emperor, his court and his subjects are all taken in by con artists who claim to have made him a suit of magical cloth which is invisible to fools and those unfit for their positions; of course nobody wants to admit that he can’t see the clothes, and so everyone pretends to admire them despite the evidence of his own eyes.  The scammers who weave the insubstantial “sex trafficking” fantasy are something like that, except that in this case they claim that those who can’t see their tissue of nothing are “evil” or “sick” or “don’t care about children”.  So everyone follows along with the procession, proclaiming how terrible this epidemic is, and how we have to “do something” about it no matter what the cost, despite the fact that they themselves can’t see a scrap of evidence for the existence of this horrible garment.  Like the people in the story they all take each other’s word that the thing exists, but unlike those people they ignore the voices shouting “but he has nothing on!” instead of recognizing the truth of the statement.

I’ve run into several examples of the syndrome recently; as you will see, these writers are clearly not entirely devoid of skepticism, yet still refuse to call “sex trafficking” hysteria what it is.  The first example appeared two months ago in Gawker; it’s entitled “A Timeline of Moral Panics in the Last Decade”, and though author Max Read clearly understands both the concept of a “moral panic” and the necessity of extraordinary claims being supported by, you know, like evidence and stuff, “sex trafficking” hysteria is conspicuous by its absence.  It’s not just that he avoids politically popular scares; he’s perfectly willing to call “cyberbullying” on the carpet.  But “trafficking”?  Not a whisper.

More recently, Gawker subsidiary Jezebel published “A Complete Guide to Hipster Racism”, whose author lists what she obviously considers ALL the ways (“complete guide”) in which young, middle-class white people display racism while pretending that they’re not racists.  Since I don’t have television, don’t read pop-culture magazines like People, don’t live in a city, and don’t go to “hip” places when I visit cities, I honestly have no idea what most of author Lindy West’s examples are even about.  But I do know that caring oh-so-much about brown people and following celebrities who “tweet” about “rescuing girls from sex slavery” and shutting down Backpage is practically the definition of “hip”…and it’s entirely based on the incredibly racist premise that brown people are so simple and childlike that if they leave their quaint, picturesque villages to work in nasty, rich white people’s countries or seedy, unwholesome brothels in their own or nearby countries, it must be because their simple, childlike minds were deceived by evil men and they were “trafficked” to those places. The idea that maybe they chose the best available option (just like white people do) and relocated for more lucrative work (just like white people do) never occurs to these “hipster racists”, nor does the realization that maybe they neither want nor need white saviors to “rescue” them from their own decisions, and that perhaps they might resent their meddling and condescension.  But apparently, Lindy feels that pop covers of hip-hop songs are much more racist than infantilization of millions based on the work they choose to do.

But lest you think this refusal to acknowledge reality for fear of what others might think is limited to Gawker bloggers, consider Sex Panic and the Punitive State by Roger Lancaster, a recent work about moral panics that wholly ignores sex trafficking hysteria.  Here’s an April 28^th review by Dr. Laura Agustín:

…For all Lancaster’s broad inclusivity in his thesis and in his construction of a narrative of sexual crime, he fails to account for the single most widespread sexual-crime issue in the United States:  the persecution of prostitutes/sex workers, treated as anti-social offenders, in virulently punitive, long-infamous legal policy.  Where are the figures on arrests of prostitutes in the panoply of ills Lancaster reveals?  Is this egregious injustice deemed somehow different, and if so, why?…In the current anti-trafficking hysteria in the United States, lawmakers and activists alike conflate trafficking with prostitution as a tactic to promote abolitionism.  Women who sell sex are divested of will and figured as helpless children in a deliberate attempt to provoke further panic.  Does this scenario not fit into Lancaster’s narrative, or how does it fit?

…Leaving aside adults, child sex trafficking surely constitutes the most vibrant panic of the last few years, despite a lack of evidence that it actually exists (what does exist are teens who leave home)…Law enforcement chiefs from numerous states have joined the targeting of online classified advertising services like Craigslist and Backpage, with the justification that minors are being sold there by traffickers.  Simultaneously, everyone ignores the palpable harm for adult female sex workers caused by these campaigns; apparently no one is bothered.  The absence in Lancaster’s account of the adult woman who sells sex reproduces the social death society inflicts continually on this group, as though prostitution were obviously different, separate, real, or intransigent–having nothing to do with the history of panic at hand…

I suspect Lancaster is silent on the issue for the same reason the others listed here and so many journalists are:  though they may perceive the Imperial nudity, they are afraid of admitting it for fear of moral censure.  And until the mainstream media are willing to join us in announcing the truth, the ridiculous procession will continue on just as if the garments existed.

One Year Ago Today

“Harm Magnification” explains how laws against consensual behaviors invariably inflict harm both on those they restrict and on society in general.

Greeks Bearing Gifts

Trust not the horse, O Trojans.  Be it what it may, I fear the Greeks even when they offer gifts.  -  Virgil, Aeneid (II, 48-9)

In general, people are not stupid; they are, however, extremely gullible.  Given the information that there is a problem to be solved and the information with which to solve it, the average person can generally come up with a workable solution.  But when that person does not realize that there is a problem, he won’t even attempt to find a solution even if all the necessary information is readily available.  In other words, the average person is insufficiently skeptical; unless he is warned that someone may be trying to deceive him, he will not expect deceit and in fact may even deny the possibility if the deceiver is someone he has been taught to trust, such as a leader.

This childlike trust is why propaganda works, and why names have such a powerful effect; if a group calls itself “The Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine” the natural tendency is to assume it’s a group of physicians fighting malpractice or the like, and if politicians call a law the “Violence Against Women Act” most people will presume that it is intended to combat violence against women.  Unfortunately, those natural assumptions would be incorrect.  As I explained in “The Anti-Life Equation”, the PCRM is actually a fanatical vegan group which uses lies and exaggerations to scare people out of eating meat.  And though the original VAWA of 1994 was bad enough, every successive reauthorization has loaded the horse with ever-increasing numbers of hoplites, which credulous women then browbeat men into taking inside the walls built to protect the citizenry from our own predatory government.

Let’s start by getting one thing out of the way right now:  VAWA does not protect women.  When it was enacted there were already laws against domestic violence in every state, and most states had already tightened and strengthened those laws due to increased awareness of the problem.  The law was therefore totally unnecessary from a practical or criminological point of view, and instead of reducing violence against women there is evidence that the law has actually increased it; a Department of Justice study associated the overly-aggressive policies spawned by VAWA with a increase in homicides of women, a National Institute of Justice study warned that “No-Drop” prosecution laws (see next paragraph) may place women “in greater jeopardy”, and mandatory arrest or prosecution laws make normal women far less likely to call police.  Other reasons the law is bad for women specifically (aside from the ways it’s bad for free people of either sex) include encouragement of aggressive arrest and prosecution (the number of women arrested in California increased 446% after VAWA); flooding the legal system with trivial and false abuse allegations which hide the real ones; denial of women’s agency; and promoting destruction of relationships instead of reconciliation.

Neofeminists wanted VAWA so women would have a gigantic government club to use against men, to promote criminalization of men, to encourage breakup of heterosexual relationships and to provide a precedent for infantilization of women who make sexual choices (such as sex work or BDSM) with which neofeminists disapprove, and it has been very successful in achieving those goals.  But as I’ve explained before, neofeminists are useful idiots to whom lawmakers cater because their rhetoric provides a Trojan horse for anti-civil rights measures, like a gigantic My Little Pony with which silly, brainwashed women are too enchanted to notice its dangerous payload.  Take “No-Drop” policies; these are programs authorized and funded by VAWA which render women powerless to stop the machinery of injustice once an accusation of domestic violence is made.  As soon as the woman (or in some states, anyone at all) calls the police to report an incident, the husband is arrested (no matter what the wife says, in many cases even if she is the aggressor) and prosecuted.  Because many wives rightly refuse to cooperate with such proceedings, the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW, the DoJ office which enforces and funds VAWA) authorized so-called “evidence-based” prosecutions, kangaroo courts in which any evidence (including hearsay) is allowed and the accused man is denied the constitutional rights of confrontation and cross-examination.  Is it any wonder domestic violence convictions have doubled under this regime?

The implications of this policy are twofold:  first, women are established as moral imbeciles, with the state acting in loco parentis to make legal decisions on our “behalf”; second, once civil rights are abrogated for men the precedent of “equal treatment under the law” allows them to be abrogated for women as well, and indeed they are with increasing frequency.  Other VAWA-enabled abuses include subjugation of women in shelters to a neofeminist political agenda and prosecutorial power to abduct the children of women who refuse to participate in the demolition of their husbands.  And that’s just the beginning; subsequent VAWA reauthorizations have loosened the definition of “domestic violence” so much that a psychotic New Mexico woman was able to get a restraining order against David Letterman for supposedly “tormenting” her with “facial gestures” and “code words” on his TV show, and empowered the police to collect and indefinitely retain DNA from anybody they care to point a finger at.  The most recent lowered the burden of proof for male university students accused of sexual misconduct to “a preponderance of the evidence” and gave the accuser (who need not even be the supposed victim) the right to appeal an acquittal.  The version currently under consideration will allow a man to be jailed for ten months if a woman says he was “disrespectful” to her but did not physically harm her.

I’m sure y’all can connect the dots.  If dirty looks can be crimes and feelings constitute evidence, any woman can have any man arrested on a whim…even if that woman is, say, a politician, and that man is, say, a vociferous detractor; all she has to say is that she “felt threatened”.  And under policies of “equality”, male politicians will soon be able to do the same.  To anyone, male or female.  Under the newest iteration of VAWA, cops, bureaucrats and politicians will be able to have anyone arrested, and even if he can’t be convicted under a preponderance of the hearsay, he can be bankrupted by repeated prosecutions or framed for something else via his DNA sample.  The proponents of VAWA include cops, prosecutors, career politicians, neofeminists and the brainwashed followers of any of the above who can’t be bothered to read something before giving it their support; they are personified by a comic actor-turned-legislator weeping crocodile tears and Republicans targeting throwaway additions about homosexuals and immigrants in order to call attention away from the flagrant civil rights violations they so desperately want to pass.  They want you to believe that to be against VAWA is to be anti-woman, but take a look at the bylines on the articles I linked above, and on all these articles as well. And no, they aren’t all Republicans or “conservatives” either; as I stated above, the Republicans want VAWA just as much as the Democrats do.  The only people who are against it are those who care about concepts like liberty, fairness, civil rights and the recognition of women’s capacity for adult decision…and unfortunately, there aren’t enough of us to stop the fools from breaking down the wall to drag this artfully-disguised menace inside.

One Year Ago Today

“Where are the Victims?” examines the absurdity and injustice of the federal prosecution of a man whose business helped make escorts’ work safer.

Mother’s Day

Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts and his higher nature – and another woman to help him forget them.  -  Helen Rowland

In the United States and many other countries around the world, today is the day on which mothers and the concept of motherhood are honored; even most nations which don’t celebrate it on this particular day do so on some other date, usually at some point in the spring.  Celebrations of motherhood aren’t anything new; many ancient cultures had them, often in conjunction with festivals of the Mother Goddess (such as the Roman Hilaria).  The modern observances are not directly descended from these ancient ones, though of course the principle is the same.  In any case, I thought that on this occasion a few observations about the connection between harlotry and motherhood might be in order.

Yes, I said connection; though the fallacy that whores and mothers are as different as chalk and cheese is still a popular one, both prostitution and motherhood are natural results of the sexual impulse, and many (probably most) whores are also mothers.  In fact, as I pointed out in “Whore Madonnas”, “Mecca”, “Feminine Pragmatism” and “Collaboration Horizontale”, many women become hookers specifically because they are mothers.  The Madonna-Whore duality is an outgrowth of every young man’s need to separate women about whom he is forbidden to have sexual feelings (such as close female relatives) from all others, and as long as it is recognized as such it’s harmless.  Alas, such reasonable men are in the minority; most project their own defense mechanism upon the entire human race, and imagine that sex somehow defiles a woman.  Even worse, women (being the accommodating creatures we are) often internalize this product of purely masculine psychology, and condemn other women (or worse, themselves) for the “sin” of being sexual.  And though second-wave feminists succeeded in attacking the idea that sex makes women dirty, they were not interested in dispelling it entirely, but rather merely carving out an exception for entirely selfish sexual behaviors.  In other words, women who are sexual for their own pleasure are now Madonnas; those who are sexual for any other reason, including monetary gain, are still whores (though the whore is now cast as a “victim” rather than a succubus).

The tenacity of this poisonous dogma is evident not only in the way that neofeminists divide all women into “good” and “bad” on the grounds of sexual actions, but also in the fallacy at the core of “sex trafficking” hysteria:  the irrational and absurd belief that women cannot choose to have sex for any but “pure” motives, so all prostitutes must have been forced into it.  The ease with which trafficking mythology and its bastard twin, the Swedish Model, have infiltrated cultures which seem on the surface relatively sex-positive is further proof that the Madonna-whore duality has not gone away, but is in fact lying just beneath the surface of human consciousness in all but a very few places.

Lately, I’ve even noticed the increased popularity of one of the classic logical fallacies by which prohibitionists attack decriminalization:  “Would you want your daughter to do it?”  People who use this old saw aren’t concerned with the danger of prostitution, because if they were we’d hear it used as an argument against women joining the military, doing police work or participating in dangerous sports like boxing.  No, it’s all about the stigma.  Let’s set aside for a moment the obvious point that there are lots of things people wouldn’t want their daughters doing (smoking, excessive drinking, getting pregnant out of wedlock, working at Wal-Mart, going into politics) which aren’t illegal, and the equally obvious fact that we don’t get to choose our offspring’s occupations (though some certainly try).  Let’s consider only that people do lots of things their parents wouldn’t like, and that most prostitutes have parents who would be upset and appalled at the choice.  It’s not your decision whether your daughter becomes a hooker; it’s hers.  And if she does make that choice (which 1% of all Western daughters do for some portion of their lives), do you really want her hounded by cops, forced into dangerous situations, unable to seek legal recourse if she’s robbed or raped, and branded as a pariah for life because of it?  Or would you rather she have the ability to repent what you see as her mistake and leave the job later if she chose?  Finally, is it worth rejecting your own flesh and blood for making a decision with which you disagree, and which hurt nobody except (in your opinion) her?  My mother thought so, which is why she doesn’t speak to me any more, and therefore doesn’t know about all the people I’ve helped and the respect I’ve earned in my field.

Women’s sexual choices don’t make us “bad” or “polluted” or “criminal” except in the minds of sick, twisted people.  Every whore is some mother’s daughter, and most are mothers themselves.  The Madonna and whore are not exclusive, and those who insist otherwise put themselves in a position to be hurt as badly as their warped belief hurts women…including, in many cases, members of their own families.

One Year Ago Today

“Another Friday the Thirteenth” was my second essay on the subject.

That Was the Week That Was (#19)

What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore.  -  Edward Dahlberg

Nine updates and a metaupdate.

Backward, Turn Backward (March 15^th, 2011)

Apparently, Zimbabwe is a colony of the Bizarro World, where whores force men to have sex with them for free:

Three sex workers accused of raping 17 men in Zimbabwe have been freed…[they] were arrested last year after…a police…search of their vehicle revealed more than 30 used condoms…men…said the women forced them to have sex while brandishing weapons.  However, DNA evidence…disproved any link between the women and [their accusers]…[there was] widespread speculation that the sex workers were collecting semen for witchcraft.

You’ve gotta love the use of the modern term “sex worker” in that last line.

The First Time (March 20^th, 2011)

Victorian men used to pay big money for whores who could credibly be passed as virgins, and apparently that kink is still around:

…Sweet Girls Premium Escort…is offering a Chinese-born Melbourne high school student [for $12,000]…”She is a virgin, you can tell,” [said] a spokeswoman…”She goes to your place or hotel and you can spend two days together.  She does not have a boyfriend and she wants to do it for the money,” she said.  The escort agency recruits mostly Asian women aged 18 to 25…The website written in English and Chinese suggests working for the agency “to solve your financial problem within short time”…

The rest of the article is a chorus of “feminists” clucking a lot of nonsense about “financial desperation” (as if anyone ever worked for any other reason), “no woman should have to sell her body” (because a woman is nothing but sex so selling it is equal to selling her entire self) and “double standards” (like the one they’re upholding by suggesting a girl’s virginity is too precious to sell and should instead be pointlessly given away).  I wish I had had the sense to sell my virginity; the experience probably would’ve been a lot more interesting than being clumsily mounted by some inexperienced boy in a dark room, and I would’ve had a lot fewer money worries the first few years of university.

The Scarlet Letter (March 29^th, 2011)

Greece has joined the parade of countries using extrajudicial punishment against hookers, and Cheryl Overs explains why this is a bad idea:

Greece has been in the news for prosecuting HIV positive sex workers and posting the women’s photographs on the Internet…public health prosecutions and “naming and shaming” of [HIV+] sex workers occurs…across the world, including in the UK and US.  We are also observing a general increase in mandatory HIV testing…Successful HIV prevention is known to depend on a large portion of sex workers and clients using condoms and accessing…treatment …there is sufficient research and experience to compare the results of “rights based” approaches with heavy handed tactics like those used in Greece that have been shown to drive sex industries underground…repeatedly testing a few “legal” sex workers while  alienating “illegal” sex workers from services and testing them  forcibly in the wake of sporadic raids is not good public health…

Simply put, if hookers know they’ll be shamed and prosecuted for turning up positive, they simply won’t get tested.  And if legal workers are forcibly tested, they’ll simply work illegally instead.  This isn’t rocket science, but “authorities” seem completely unable to comprehend it.

Because We Say So (June 8^th, 2011)

The crusade to impose Western cultural norms on Nepal has turned low-caste people into persecuted criminals:

…[Members of] the Badi, a Hindu caste that has for centuries been associated with entertainment and prostitution…live in the western districts of Nepal but…work in…cities…including Kathmandu, Mumbai and New Delhi.  Four years ago the Nepal government banned the Badis from pursuing their traditional occupation…[and] local communities…[have] used violent methods to compel the Badis to give up their sole means of livelihood…”We didn’t want to continue with prostitution but the government has failed to fulfill its promises of rehabilitation,” says Bishal Nepali, husband of a Badi sex worker.  The government did announce a package that included housing, income generation activities and scholarships…but these were never implemented…Nepali society gives little encouragement to Badi girls to pursue other professions and those among them who enter public schools are “often severely harassed by high caste students”…Badis are not allowed to run legitimate businesses.  ”People fear to buy anything from my shop because they fear the villagers,” says Dinesh Nepali, a Badi male who runs a small shop selling cigarettes, vegetables and soft drinks.  ”How can we survive like this?”…In 2007, Badi activists threatened to march naked through Kathmandu to embarrass the government into implementing the court-ordered rehabilitation, but that brought nothing except more promises…

September Q & A (September 30^th, 2011)

In response to a questioner who defined using every minute of a call in penetration as “getting what he paid for”, I replied:  “…the price doesn’t assume that; it’s like going into a restaurant and complaining because every square centimeter of the plate isn’t covered in food.  Though I usually gave a price break for multiple hours, I didn’t do so if I knew the client was doing cocaine because the work of attending to him was much more difficult; the same thing could be said of a client who wants 60 full minutes of pumping.  Most girls even give a price break for dinner-date type calls because they’re much easier per hour than calls spent entirely in bed.”  Well, here’s a man who apparently had the same attitude as the questioner, but was far less civilized about it:

A 58-year-old Elgin [Illinois] man…tried to strangle a prostitute in a motel room after the woman refused additional sex after more than 30 encounters over a four-day period.  Kim P. Brandmire was charged with aggravated battery…[the] woman said the two had rented a room at the motel Thursday and…when she refused to have sex Sunday…Brandmire…choked her…The woman was charged with prostitution…

The realization that it’s sick and sadistic to charge a crime victim with a crime herself never dawns in the lawhead mind.

The Immunity Syndrome (March 5^th, 2012)

Back in March I mentioned in passing that gonorrhea was rapidly becoming immune to all antibiotics; here’s an article from Scientific American which goes into more detail:

…Last summer…the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…demonstrated that up to 1.4 percent of 5,900 gonorrhea bacterial samples from around the U.S. had diminished susceptibility to cephalosporins…gonorrhea…is the second-most reported infectious disease in the U.S., with more than 600,000 new cases a year…if untreated, it can cause widespread organ damage…and infertility…Gonorrhea…[can borrow] DNA from other bacteria to construct new…defenses.  It steadily gained resistance…first the penicillins in the 1960s, then the tetracyclines in the 1980s, and…fluoroquinolones…in the 1990s.  By 2000 the only class of drugs that could provide [the inexpensive, effective, single-dose cure that] public health strategies rely on…was the cephalosporins.  [But] cephalosporin resistance has been emerging in Japan, and moving east and west from there, for at least a decade…Efforts to control STDs may have inadvertently accelerated the spread of resistance.  For years standard practice has been to quickly identify an infection, dole out the appropriate treatment and then move on to the next patient.  If symptoms return, the assumption has been that the patient was reinfected.  Experts now say that such patients may in fact have harbored resistant bacteria that were never killed in the first place—bacteria that the patients possibly spread to others…so far attempts to create a vaccine against gonorrhea have failed…

Even if a vaccine is eventually developed it won’t help the US, where adolescents – the carriers of 35% of all STIs – will certainly be blocked from receiving it by the same parental insanity which already prevents their vaccination against HPV.

Much Ado About Nothing (April 18^th, 2012)

Dania Suarez, the escort Agent Arthur Huntington cheated, was interviewed on the Today show in Madrid:

…the alleged escort at the center of the Secret Service scandal…  [described] the…agents…as ”stupid,” “idiots”…Dania Londono Suarez told NBC that the Secret Service agents seemed accustomed to soliciting women, saying the three men who approached her were not shy, drinking vodka “like it was water”…U.S. investigators have yet to talk with the single mother after she says she fled Colombia fearing for her life.

Note the dysphemism “alleged”, as though prostitution were criminal (which it isn’t in Colombia); if you don’t understand what Suarez was afraid of, you might want to read my column on Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

Meanwhile, “Army Gen. Charles H. Jacoby…stated in a May 6 memo that troops in Chicago during the [NATO] summit that begins May 20 will not ‘solicit prostitutes or engage in conduct which is unprofessional or unbecoming of a member of the armed forces.’  One military officer called the restrictions ‘an overreaction to recent Secret Service misconduct in Colombia’.”

Hiring whores is “unbecoming” to a soldier?  Pardon me while I die laughing.

Little Boxes (April 29^th, 2012)

Dr. Marty Klein published a superb essay entitled “Why Janet Jackson’s Nipple Won’t Go Away”:

You may recall that way back in 2004, Janet Jackson’s right nipple was unexpectedly exposed for exactly one-half second during the Super Bowl halftime show.  Grown men cried.  Women fainted.  Children were driven mad by the brown protuberance.  Not surprisingly, the stock market crashed only four years later, soon followed by the meltdown of Japan’s nuclear reactors.  To punish the TV network on which the travesty occurred, the…FCC levied enormous fines…Since then, the FCC and our federal courts have been going back and forth in an attempt to design a TV censorship policy that doesn’t involve, um, censorship…So why are two successive presidencies…obsessed with a half-second of nipple?  Why are millions more of your tax dollars about to be spent attempting to punish CBS for what they failed to prevent over 8 years ago?…It’s a special kind of politics:  coding certain phenomena as sexual…makes them…subject to public control.  There is virtually no private sexual behavior in America…the “public-izing” of sex is a key weapon in the War On Sex…

One has to wonder:  Do American politicians want to make the US the laughingstock of the entire world, or do they really not comprehend that’s what they’re doing?

Whorearchy (May 10^th, 2012)

In a perfect example of how “authorities” draw lines to divide whores from one another, Spain continues to turn the screws on streetwalkers so as to make it increasingly harder for them to make a living, while brothels are doing fine:

Indignant prostitutes take to the streets in Barcelona, angry at the city’s plans to ban street prostitution.  Unemployment in [Spain] has reached 23 percent, and sex workers say this is the only way they can earn a living…the police make their lives difficult as it is and…tightening the law will make it even harder to feed a family.  But…[brothels have] been making bigger profits every year since the crisis hit…

Metaupdates

The Camel’s Nose in TW3 (#16) (April 21^st, 2012)

Even if Obama really does keep his promise to veto CISPA, there’s already a contingency plan in the works:

The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms…to build in backdoors for government surveillance…FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans…The FBI [wants to force] social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and…e-mail [to] alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly…The FBI’s proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers…there are [also] indications that the [FCC] is considering reinterpreting CALEA to demand that products that allow video or voice chat over the Internet — from Skype to Google Hangouts to Xbox Live — include surveillance backdoors to help the FBI…

One Year Ago Today

“A War for Peace” turns a critical eye on the antics of Femen, the Ukranian feminist group known for topless protests.

Fictional Interlude: Vocation

Badness you can get easily, in quantity; the road is smooth, and it lies close by.  But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it.  -  Hesiod

Maru had been done with her packing for hours.  Not that there was all that much to do; the few meager belongings she could call hers had been tied up in a cloak, and she had donned her ornaments and her good gown.  Soon she would leave for the assembly, and when it was over she would bid her friends and family goodbye and accompany the priestess back to the temple.

The narrow dirt  streets of the village were thronged with girls and women eager to hear the priestess speak.  Once per month (on the sixth day after the full moon), a priest or priestess would arrive to address the people; everyone would gather in the square to hear the latest news from other parts of the kingdom, to ask questions and present grievances to be taken to the Priest-King, and to listen to the sermon.  An acolyte also accepted letters to be delivered to other parts of the realm, and handed out any letters which had come from elsewhere.  After dinner would come a talk about vocations, and those youths or maids who wished to return to the capital to be trained for one of the available positions would come forward to give their names, and early next morning would join the priestly entourage on its journey to the next village.

The first and second months of spring were slightly different, though.  Last month the priest of the war-god had come, resplendent in his magnificent armor, to speak only to the men and boys; as usual, several of the youths who had reached manhood in the past year had departed with him to be trained as priests, warriors or (in cases of unusual ability) both.  And this month it was the priestess of the love-goddess, whose meeting was open only to women and girls; Maru had decided several years ago that once she became a woman, she would follow the call to become a temple harlot.  She was widely recognized as the most beautiful maid in the village, and her natural grace and clever mind had long been remarked upon.  More than anything else she wanted an education and a chance to serve her people by caring for the needs of the great men in the service of the Priest-King, and the old women of the village were all certain she would be accepted.

But as she listened to the priestess, Maru began to doubt.  The holy woman was the epitome of poise and grace; her clothes were magnificent and her hair beautifully arranged, and if she had ever spoken in some provincial dialect there was no trace of it now in her perfect elocution.  She was everything Maru could ever wish to be, but she feared it was hopeless; still, she had come this far, and had to try.  All through the long afternoon she worked to reassure herself, but had no appetite at dinner and began to worry that her voice would fail when it came time to speak.

At last, the moment arrived; the call for vocations had been given.  Maru felt herself stand and heard her own voice speak her name, but it was almost as if someone else had accomplished it for her.  She felt every eye upon her, but the tension was broken in an instant when the priestess smiled and said, “I’m so glad you’re joining us, Maru; I’ve had my eye on you for two years now, and I’m sure the goddess is as pleased as I am.”  A great shout broke out among her friends and kin, and she felt she would be suffocated by hugs and kisses.

When she met the priestess in the square at dawn she was given a novice’s gown of plain white linen, and on the journey to the next village some seven hours away the great lady braided her hair and spoke to her as if they were peers, answering every question Maru could think of and listening while the girl told her more about the village and its people than she could possibly want to know.  The acolyte, Zuza, was only about two years older than Maru; she was as friendly as her mistress, and by the time they arrived at their destination Maru felt as though they had been friends for a long time.  Her heart swelled with pride as she saw the way the village girls looked at her, but she followed Zuza’s example and carried herself humbly, as a servant of the priestess.

They travelled thus from town to town for three weeks, and were joined on the way by three more girls; one aspired to the priestesshood, another wished to learn the healing arts and the third was an orphan whom the priestess had accepted as a servant of the temple; had even one more joined their number someone would have had to ride up front with the driver.  At last the tour was over, and on the day of the next full moon they arrived at the city which served as the capital of this province; from here they would depart for the City of the Gods, where the Priest-King ruled and all the great temples stood.  Maru’s father had been to the provincial capital once, years before she was born; but none of her family had ever been to the Royal Seat, which lay so far to the east it would take months to get there even on a fast horse.

But there were no longer any roads upon which to make such a journey; the great thoroughfares crossing the wastelands had fallen into ruin since the end of the Golden Age, and the only practical means of travel across the wilderness was the one they would board in the morning.  Though Maru had heard them described and even seen pictures, nothing could prepare her for the awesome sight of the airship, longer than the main street of her village, gleaming like burnished brass in the last rays of the setting sun.

One Year Ago Today

“The Eye of the Beholder” explains my philosophy of tolerance:  we all have the right to our own preferences, but nobody has the right to impose his own preferences on others.

Whorearchy

I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.  -  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

Among the few facts about sex work that everyone agrees upon is that there is a “whorearchy”, a sort of class system among sex workers.  Now, nobody agrees on anything about that system, only that it exists.  Many strippers, dominatrices, porn actresses, etc insist not only that they aren’t whores, but that they’re better than we are; those whose professions have separated enough from ours that they aren’t even considered sex workers any more (such as actresses and especially masseuses) can be very pompous about it.  Prostitutes, on the other hand, sometimes see themselves as better, smarter, more discreet, etc than strippers or porn starlets; sugar babies and other halfway whores deny that they’re sex workers at all; and some unusually self-deluded escorts will even try to draw imaginary lines separating themselves from other hookers.  “Authorities” in criminalization and legalization regimes devote great effort to erecting arbitrary barriers between “tolerable” and “intolerable” varieties of harlotry, and sometimes to cementing the strata in place; cops and prosecutors delight in tricking “legal” sex workers into breaking their ridiculous rules (or falsely claiming that they did) in order to have an excuse for victimizing them; and sex worker advocates expend considerable efforts in hand-wringing and lamentation over “classism”.

To a degree, these activists are right; a whore is a whore is a whore, and legal, moral or procedural lines serve only to break people into smaller groups which are more easily dominated by the power-hungry.  If you accept money from someone that he gives due to sexual interest in you, then you are a whore and everything else is just semantics.  When politicians, pundits or rulers use some arbitrary determinant like penetration, duration, location or motivation to bless some harlots while damning others, what they’re actually doing is reducing the size of the group who might oppose them and winning supporters from among those granted legitimacy.  This is why I’m harshly unsympathetic to those who vehemently maintain that their species of sex work or sensual therapy is absolutely not prostitution:  all they’re doing is throwing other women under the bus, and if we had all stuck together from the beginning of second-wave feminism half a century ago, prostitution would’ve been decriminalized long ago and many women who are now dead or damaged might still be alive and healthy.

At the same time, it’s madness to pretend that at the present level of human evolution there can ever be such a thing as a classless society.  Human beings, like other social animals, naturally form cliques, packs and tribes, and such groups inevitably develop hierarchies.  Some people are natural leaders and others natural followers, even outside of a formal structure; the Founding Fathers intended the US to be classless, but look what’s happened to it.  Nor are Marxists and Occupiers correct in their insistence that it’s always the rich who control everything; at our present stage of history money is indeed the single most powerful force, but it hasn’t always been that way and won’t always be in the future.  And those who rail about “the 1%” forget that there are lots of ways to get into that fraction:  birth, popularity, talent, intelligence, ambition, luck, sex appeal, and even plain animal cunning are all paths to riches and power, so pretending that there is still some elite caste inevitably born to the purple is disingenuous in the extreme.  Even those who are uninterested in influence over others sometimes find themselves in a position of leadership or control; some people have superior organizational skills, determination or intelligence which allows them to build infrastructures in which others freely choose to participate in exchange for money or whatever other return the organizer needs.  Such a person suddenly finds himself a manager or director of a company, co-op or club whom others turn to for guidance, even though his only motivation at the start was to make things easier, better or more comfortable for himself and his immediate dependents.

This is why I tend to tune out when sex worker activists start blathering about “privilege” as though it were some specific quality like height, skin color, IQ or income.  There is no single quality in the modern world which confers “privilege” as birth once could, not even money or education.  I’m not denying that some people are underprivileged and others start out with greater advantages, but this is inevitable in a world where everyone is different; even in a hypothetical post-scarcity economy of the future where teaching machines gave everyone a university degree at the age of five, there would still be a plethora of areas in which some had advantages over others.  Furthermore, early advantages no more ensure success than early disadvantages guarantee failure, and in fact a growing number of psychologists point out that too much privilege often makes a child (and the adult he becomes) fragile, maladjusted and less likely to succeed than one who has to struggle to achieve his goals.  It is as pointless to feel guilty about one’s natural advantages as it is to resent those with other advantages one lacks.

What it all boils down to is this:  people are drawn to different kinds of work and have different aptitudes and comfort levels.  Some women like one kind of sex work, some another; some prefer doing lots of low-dollar calls and others a few high-dollar ones.  Some fall into management roles without trying, while others avoid such roles at all costs.  Many if not most sex workers drift or migrate from one kind of work to another, in and out of sex work or from one kind of sex work to another, as their circumstances and needs change; a woman who was safely “legal” yesterday may be “illegal” tomorrow.  This is why it is absolutely imperative that we not allow outsiders to divide us by drawing lines in the sand and turning those on one side of the line against those on the other.  We need to stop obsessing about the whorearchy and pretending it can or should be eradicated, but we also need to oppose those who wish to calcify it in order to employ it as a tool of control.

One Year Ago Today

“Clueless Wonders” introduces my readers to the vice cops of Syracuse, New York, who are so aggressively ignorant and unselfconsciously stupid that they actually boast about it.