Olympe de Gouges

Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights.  The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies.  The flame of truth has dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation.  Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains.  Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion.  Oh, women, women!  When will you cease to be blind?  What advantage have you received from the Revolution?  -  Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen

When one reads the histories of famous women who started out as whores, one cannot fail to be struck by the way their harlotry is frequently downplayed, couched in euphemisms or completely ignored.  Theodora and Nell Gwyn are described as “actresses”, Lola Montez as a “dancer” and Édith Piaf as a “street singer”.  And Wikipedia diffidently describes Olympe de Gouges’ means of support with the evasive, “She chose to cohabit with several men who supported her financially.”  One can almost excuse this Victorian stuffiness in 19^th-century biographies or those written for children, but in a modern account written for adult readers it constitutes an unforgiveable distortion of the truth designed to render the lives of “feminist” heroines palatable to prudish modern sensibilities and to disguise their refutation of the neofeminist dogma that prostitution is degrading.  This would no doubt have infuriated de Gouges, who rejected traditional norms of female propriety, specifically listed women’s beauty as one of the qualities we “bring to the table”, and argued that the sexual freedom of women is an intrinsic part of our political and social freedom.

She was born Marie Gouze in the south of France sometime in 1748 (her birthday is variously reported, but was probably either on May 7^th or December 31^st) to the beautiful Anne Olympe Moisset, wife of a butcher named Pierre Gouze.  The marriage was not a happy one, and Anne was rumored to have had an affair with Jean-Jacques Lefranc, the Marquis de Pompignan; this rumor, together with the facts that Gouze died when Marie was two and that his name does not appear on her birth certificate or baptismal records, convinced her that the Marquis was her biological father and contributed to her passionate support of the rights of illegitimate children.  Historians now generally agree that Gouze probably was her real father, and that Marie preferred to believe otherwise for the same reasons many exceptional or unhappy children like to believe that they are “really” the child of someone other than their common or disliked parents.  She also felt a burning desire to climb the social ladder, and a noble pedigree (even an illegitimate one) supported this drive in her mind.

Marie was not formally educated, and in 1765 her mother married her to Louis Aubrey, a minor government official from Paris.  He died in 1768, a year after the birth of their son, Pierre; Marie was actually quite relieved because she despised him.  She refused to conduct herself as a widow was supposed to, instead moving to Paris in 1770 (sources disagree as to whether she left Pierre with her mother or took him along) and changing her name to Olympe de Gouges.  She supported herself as a courtesan, relying on her exceptional beauty and the carefully-encouraged rumor of her noble paternity to gain entry to higher social circles and a wealthier clientele.  In 1773 she established a long-lived association with the wealthy and educated Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, who introduced her into the salons where she made a number of influential friends and professional contacts.  Around this time she learned to read and write, and decided to become an author; accordingly, she embarked on a campaign to educate herself by reading everything recommended to her by her intellectual friends and clients.  By 1784 she began to publish essays and plays, always on social and political topics; Zamore et Mirza, for example, had an anti-slavery theme.  Unfortunately, her plays were terrible; the dialogue was awkward and wordy, and her grammar was very poor.  But her essays made up in energy what they lacked in style; she was extremely passionate about human rights, and therefore supported equal rights for men and women and the abolition of slavery.  She did not believe that men and women were the same, but rather argued that our different strengths and weaknesses combined to form a better and more balanced society.

Maximilien Robespierre

As political tensions increased in the 1780s, de Gouges advocated reforms which she believed would head off revolution, accomplishing change without violence.  She urged the King to grant reforms, and when he failed to do so she suggested he abdicate in favor of a regent government which could bring the growing revolution under control.  Her writings criticized and lampooned extremists on both sides, and she continued to preach moderation as conditions degenerated into chaos.  Though she supported the Revolution, she abhorred its violence and the fact that women had been denied equal rights; she considered this a betrayal of one of its core principles, égalité.  In October of 1789 she spoke before the Assembly and proposed a feminist agenda which included legal equality, marriage and divorce reform and better education for girls, but her concerns were dismissed and she grew increasingly disenchanted with the new government.  In 1791 she organized a feminist association called the Society of the Friends of Truth and published Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne, a response to Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (the primary declaration of Revolutionary principles).

The situation continued to spin out of control, and de Gouges became increasingly vociferous; she believed in a constitutional monarchy, and after Louis XVI was arrested and tried in the latter half of 1792 she spoke out against his execution.  But the Jacobin party (led by Maximilien Robespierre) was in the ascendancy; Louis was executed in January of 1793, and on June 2^nd the moderate Girondists, de Gouge’s allies, were arrested.  Her own arrest came in July, following her publication of a poster which demanded the people be given a choice between a republic, a federal government and a constitutional monarchy.  Her house was searched and unpublished writings used against her at her trial three months later; she was found guilty of sedition and executed by guillotine at 4 PM on November 3^rd, just 18 days after Marie Antionette.  Though she attempted to delay her fate by falsely claiming to be pregnant (a doctor examined her and pronounced otherwise), she mounted the scaffold without tears and said to the crowd, “Children of the Fatherland, you will avenge my death.”

Though her last words are not known to have come true in any direct fashion, I gave them a fictional consummation in my story of one year ago today, “Carnival”, which takes place almost four months later.  Even in real life, though, history has a far higher opinion of Olympe de Gouges – courtesan, writer, philosopher and feminist in the truest and noblest sense of the word – than it has of her enemies, whose names have become synonymous with bloodthirsty tyranny.

That Was the Week That Was (#7)

Why?  It paid the rent.  -  Marilyn Monroe (on posing nude)

Ten updates from the seventh week of 2012.

Whore Madonnas (August 29^th, 2010)

“The classic Madonna/whore fallacy teaches that women can be one or the other, but as I’ve said many, many times before this is complete and utter hogwash.  Any normal woman is capable of playing either role as required or even both simultaneously, and about half of the girls who worked for me had children.  In fact, I think it’s safe to say that many women enter prostitution because of their children…”  Case in point, from Offbeat Mama:

…I have the perfect suburban mommy resume [but] I keep a huge secret from my family, neighbors, and friends…I’m an escort…Scoop those jaws up off of the floor, moms and dads, because…it could happen to you.  I don’t mean you’ll be trafficked into sex work by some skeevy creeper on the internet — I mean that you may some day be in a position you never dreamed you’d be in doing things you never saw yourself doing in order to make ends meet…And you know what?  It’s not horrible.  I don’t hate my life.  In fact, sometimes I think I have it better than most American moms.  I work on the evenings and weekends the kids are at their father’s place…They never even know I’m gone.  Then when they are with me, I get to be a devoted single stay-at-home mom…

The piece is well worth reading in its entirety, and even the comments are overwhelmingly positive!

BDSM (Part One) (September 15^th, 2010)

OK, I like abduction fantasies as much as the next healthy woman, but most of us have the sense not to act them out in public:

…Nikolas Harbar, 31, [of Portland, Oregon] was only “role-playing” when he…tied up his naked girlfriend, 26-year-old Stephanie Pelzner and threw her in the back of his Subaru [on Valentine’s Day]…but…a concerned witness [called the cops and when they arrived]… Pelzner confirmed that “she was voluntarily bound and nude”…[the couple was] arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, but released later that day.

Real People (February 6^th, 2011)

Bethany St. James is a brothel prostitute who advocates extending the Nevada model to the whole United States.  And while I disagree with her belief that women can’t be trusted to manage our own sex lives, her recent essay in Huffington Post is excellent:

…when I recently appeared on a daytime talk show to discuss an article…I wrote…I was shocked to find that it was nearly impossible for the…audience to…fathom that a woman who works in the sex industry could be educated, happy and goal driven.  The stereotype that all prostitutes are drug addicted women with sad childhoods who’ve been reeled into a life of shame and disease…remains…prevalent.  No matter how I attempted to explain that just as in all professions, there are a multitude of factors and variables, my words seemed to have fallen on deaf ears…Not all sex workers and adult entertainers are the same, just as not all people within the same ethnic background are the same.  Although many women in the adult industry have problems, couldn’t the same be true of every profession?…there are college educated professionals with problems far worse that any prostitute I’ve known.  Job description alone should not be the sole factor when forming an opinion of a person…

Interview:  Jill Brenneman (Part Four) (February 24^th, 2011)

One year ago today I published the final installment of my interview with activist and sex trafficking survivor Jill Brenneman; coincidentally, a Dutch website named Nederlandse Debatbond recently reposted her July 2010 article “Prohibitionists’ Comparing Sex Work and Straight Work:  They are Dead Wrong”, which originally appeared in Bound, Not Gagged.  If you’ve never read it, now’s your chance.

It’s Different Because It Involves Sex, Part Umpteen (June 16^th, 2011)

Last year, judges in New York ruled that dancing isn’t dancing if it’s sexy.  That bizarre belief appears to be shared by a California woman who claims porn can’t be copyrighted:

…Hard Drive Productions…demanded $3,400 to make their threatened lawsuit go away but [Liuxia Wong] not only says she’s innocent and harassed, but also that porn cannot be copyrighted…In a lawsuit filed at the end of January, Wong says that she did not download the work in question and goes on to attack Hard Drive on a number of fronts…the alleged infringement [took] place [on] March 28^th, 2011, but…the movie…wasn’t officially registered until April 22^nd…[and though]…Hard Drive insist[ed] that [she] would be liable…even if her router was unsecured and someone else [used it] without her knowledge…Wong’s suit dismisses that…as “erroneous”.  But perhaps most interestingly, Wong is challenging the notion that Hard Drive can own the copyright to its own work – indeed, that porn can be copyrighted at all.

“…the Copyright Clause [of the US Constitution] empowers…Congress: ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” the lawsuit details, adding:  “Early Circuit law in California held that obscene works did not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and thus cannot be protected by copyright”…Wong is asking the court to…[declare] that not only is she not liable…for infringement, but that the company’s movie is not copyrightable and is illegal due to Hard Drive engaging in “solicitation, conspiracy to commit prostitution, pimping and/or pandering,” during its production…

While I’m sympathetic to Wong’s right to defend herself against those who misuse the law, that defense doesn’t require actions which are just as immoral as Hard Drive’s and could potentially cause a great deal of trouble and expense for others who aren’t even involved in the dispute.

Déjà Vu (June 25^th, 2011)

This column examined the strong resemblance between the Victorian and modern incarnations of anti-whore rhetoric, and its epigram was from a letter sent to The Times by an anonymous prostitute in 1858.  Well, on February 11^th Dr. Laura Agustín discussed the “fallen woman” metaphor and the persistent idea that whores need to be “rescued” from our “plight”; she also wrote of Charles Dickens’ involvement with a “rescue home” and mentioned that he once tried to “save” a woman who didn’t want “saving”…the very lady who wrote the letter from which my epigram came.  If you’d like to read that letter in its entirety, take a look at Dr. Agustín’s February 14^th column.

An Ounce of Prevention (October 15^th, 2011)

More news about potential HIV vaccines:

The discovery of HIV-resistant sex workers in Africa could pave the way for a more effective AIDS vaccine, according to a new study by University of Montreal researchers.  “Studying women who are naturally resistant…[may enable] researchers to…[develop] vaccinations or . . . gels that could prevent transmission of HIV,” said lead researcher, Dr. Michel Roger…”Our research shows that…we should turn to the entry points…to find a means for blocking the virus.”  The year-and-a-half-long study involved 52 commercial sex workers who were uninfected with HIV, 44 sex workers who were HIV-positive and 71 uninfected [non-prostitutes]…in Benin…researchers found that the…uninfected sex workers had fewer inflammatory molecules in the vagina than [HIV-positive] women…working under similar conditions.  “We have identified prostitutes, who of course, are highly exposed to the virus and some of them, they don’t get infected even though they practise in the same way as others, in the same building, with the same clients.  They don’t get infected after four, five, seven years of prostitution,” Roger [said]…this group of HIV-resistant women [even] had fewer inflammatory molecules than [non-prostitutes]…”we need to understand better the mucosal response against HIV in order to design an efficient vaccine,” he said.  This new kind of vaccine could be administered through the nose and would immunize all mucus membranes in the body…

Bad Fantasy, Good Reality (October 27^th, 2011)

Another Western female academic studied Asian hostess bars and discovered that the women there are neither “degraded” nor “victimized”, but rather following a deliberate strategy:

…seven years of in-depth research into the hostess bar scene in Phnom Penh has revealed…that…aspirations and obligations drive the girls from the countryside to the cities in search of opportunity.  For many…it was…a personal desire to earn money, after seeing friends…return to the provinces bedecked in gold, make-up and new clothes…Upon arrival in the capital, the easiest and most fruitful job for a newcomer is work in a hostess bar, where the monthly salaries range from $60-$100.  On top of that, tips and ‘ladies drinks’ (a $1 surcharge added to drinks bought for them by customers, which is then given back in their wages) can increase their earnings to as much as $300 per month.  In a country where the average monthly salary for a teacher or police officer is approximately $60-$80…bar work is incredibly lucrative…and is considered by many to be more ‘fun’ than other unskilled employment options, such as garment factory work or street trading…Most women arrive unable to speak English, but learn within months…they enjoyed the friends they made and the financial power it gave them.  All people…need money to survive; they work because of economic…motivations.  These young women are no different.  This is not to glamorise the bars – there are plenty of downsides, such as structural inequalities, exploitative bosses, large fines and gropey customers who are sometimes racist and rude.  However, [they] can also be viewed as places of opportunity, which the women exploit in order to empower themselves and improve their lives…

…these women are highly stigmatised by wider Cambodian society.  And those who…supplement their incomes by trading in sex…are considered srey kouch or ‘broken whores’…traditionally strict moral and social rules…require ‘good women’ to stay at home and take care of their families, be indoors before dark, and remain virgins until marriage…[but] within their families, the ability to speak English, learn about life outside of Cambodia, socialise with foreigners, and use the internet to communicate are also all markers of prestige and status…On the one hand, they completely defy all the social rules of respectability, such as being submissive and ‘virtuous’.  Yet the high status their families receive as a result of material goods provided by the women sometimes helps [them] improve their reputations.  In the end, they are virtuous for the help they give to their families…bar workers and professional girlfriends…don’t want to be viewed as bad women or helpless victims of exploitation that are in need of rescuing…

The author, Dr Heidi Hoefinger of the University of London, is the author of the upcoming book Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia.

Legal Is As Legal Does (December 14^th, 2011)

US law allows politicians and cops to tyrannize whores as they like, but in New Zealand even prohibiting streetwalkers from working in certain areas requires a new law:

…A bill that will allow Auckland Council to ban street prostitution in specific places is to be considered by the local government select committee.  Other city councils including Christchurch are expected to show interest and may seek to have the same powers applied generally…Chairwoman Nicky Wagner, who is MP for Christchurch Central, said…street prostitution in the inner city had moved out to the residential areas…[Manurewa MP George] Hawkins said he would have preferred to have had a bill amending the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 to outlaw street prostitution nationally…[but] the committee believed [that] would negate the intentions of the…Act…

The story also illustrates that freedom can never be taken for granted, because there will always be those who want to criminalize anything that isn’t currently criminal.

Moloch (January 29^th, 2012)

Here’s another story of American “authorities” sacrificing kids to their filthy devil-god; the February 10^th episode of the public radio show This American Life tells of attractive young police women posing as students in Florida high schools in order to ruin the lives of teenage boys by using their sex appeal to trick the boys into getting marijuana for them.  Once again, the sickness of American culture is revealed for the world to see:  Independent whoring to support one’s kids = degraded criminality, but whoring for the State Pimp to destroy innocent teenagers = heroic and laudable.

FarmVille

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.  -  George Bernard Shaw

Most of my readers are probably familiar with FarmVille, a computer game available through Facebook in which one creates and tends a virtual farm.  He raises virtual crops, which can be harvested for virtual money which is then used to buy more land, seed, tools, animals, etc.  The farm is completely dependent on its owner; if crops are not harvested when ripe they wither and if animals are not fed they fail to grow.  I say “animals” because they are shaped like animals, but of course they aren’t animals even in a virtual sense because they don’t do anything which characterizes animals.  They don’t have individual differences, move on their own, escape from pens, get sick, fight with one another or anything else.  In other words, they’re really just another type of virtual plant, passively remaining exactly where they’re placed by the game player, and they don’t need space or a particular type of habitat or even shelter from the elements because there aren’t any.

Of course, this doesn’t really matter because they’re just collections of data, electronic patterns which form the “pieces” of an electronic game, and can therefore be manipulated without moral consequences.  And since it’s unlikely that many FarmVille players will ever own farms of their own, there’s very little chance of the sort of disappointment a naïve teenage mother may experience when it sinks in that her baby is not a doll and cannot simply be laid aside when she doesn’t feel like playing house any more.  Real babies and real animals are often unpredictable, and unlike the cute little cartoon critters of FarmVille cannot merely be stacked up in neat little rows without any concern for what they might want…not without consequences, anyway.

Apparently, Nicholas Kristof doesn’t understand this; he imagines women and girls as passive, vegetable entities to be locked into compounds and “protected” like the electronic “animals” in FarmVille.  Think I’m exaggerating?  Here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth; the following is from an interview with Kristof  published on January 10^th in Fast Company and called to my attention two weeks later by a “tweet” from Melissa Gira Grant:

I think gaming might be the next big platform for news organizations and causes…there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time playing games online, so we in the news business would do well to think about how we can use games to attract eyeballs.  My wife and I are…creating a Facebook game…It will be vaguely analogous to FarmVille.  You’ll have a village, and in order to nurture this village, you’ll have to look after the women and girls in the village.  Actions in the game will also have real-world effects.  In other words, there will be schools and refugee camps that will benefit if you do well in the game…

What fun!  No doubt you’ll be able to arrange your little brown women and girls any way you like, and they’ll obediently and passively stay put until the bad old “traffickers” come to take them away.  Then you can “rescue” them from little cartoon brothels, and put them right back in their little village where they belong.  And your actions in the game will have real-world effects, because as godlike Western white people you should have the power of life and death over doll-like women and girls in third-world villages who will perish without your deific benevolence.

If Kristof had ever demonstrated some actual regard for the complex and often contradictory desires, needs and behaviors of real women I might not read this subtext into his silly game, but he hasn’t; females of every age are simply props to him, little game-pieces whose function is the aggrandizement of Nicholas Kristof.  He treats the real lives of sex workers as FarmVille players treat the existence of their virtual creatures:  as things to be manipulated for profit and “points”.  He uses the stories of girls to build up his own reputation, exaggerating their lurid details and reworking them into enslavement porn from which he reaps the profit while condemning others as “pimps” (talk about pot calling kettle black…)  He participates in Hollywood cowboy “brothel raids”, then never stops to wonder what happened to the women he “rescued” afterward.  And he no more bothers to consider what the girls he “rescues” and writes about might want than a FarmVille player considers the desires of his digital farm animals.  To Kristof, individual women are as interchangeable and passive as endlessly-duplicated digital beasts, and our function is to stay wherever he puts us and earn him money and status.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who recognizes Kristof for what he is; there are actually quite a few (including some at his own paper), but most don’t dare to speak out because it isn’t politically correct to blaspheme Saint Nicholas right now.  One who both sees and dares is Laura Agustín, who has written a number of columns against him; the most recent (and one of her best yet) appeared on January 25^th in Counterpunch.  It’s called “The Soft Side of Imperialism”, and I urge you to read it in its entirety; she, too, was struck by the paternalistic attitude inherent in “KristofVille”, but places it and its creator in a much larger (and even more disturbing) perspective.

One Year Ago Today

The third part of my interview with sex worker rights advocate and real sex trafficking survivor Jill Brenneman.

Profit from Panic

A fool and his money are soon parted.  -  John Bridges

Day before yesterday, I used the story of Chicken Licken as a metaphor for those who wildly overreact to regular events or even non-events, inflating the fall of a nut into Armageddon.  But while the identity of the various barnyard fowl (Henny Penny, Goosey Loosey et al) was obvious, you may have wondered who played the role of Foxy Loxy.  In most moral panics that would be government, fattening itself on the stupidity of the masses by granting itself ever-increasing powers to “fight” drugs, crime, terrorism, poverty, “trafficking” or whatever other bogeyman it can take advantage of.  But as I said on Monday, real moral panics are much more complicated than children’s stories, and there is plenty of room for more than one Foxy Loxy to feed on the fat geese who run around looking up at the sky for imaginary debris rather than paying attention to their surroundings and considering just who it is they’re trusting to “help” them.

The rescue industry is full of such scavengers, amoral profiteers who take advantage of a moral panic to rake in the dough.  They feed on government grants and private donations alike, and though jackals like Somaly Mam  entertain their donors with theatrics and may actually believe in their warped minds that they’re doing good, others simply weave fanciful tales of dangerous rescues that never happened.  Now, from the victims’ point of view the latter is infinitely preferable to the former, who destroy real businesses and abduct real women, stealing their children and abandoning them to beatings, gang rape and starvation in squalid, overcrowded third-world jails.  But from the donors’ point of view it would probably be the opposite; after all, the crowd craves real blood on the sand of the arena floor.

The problem, of course, is that there are only so many whores to brutalize and only a very small fraction are young enough to be cast as “trafficked children”.  So though competing rescue industry groups can repeat the same stories over and over, present pictures of Asian schoolchildren as “rescued trafficking victims”, and develop clever schemes to divert public funds from real issues, sooner or later they have to run out of tricks.  The next generation of “trafficking” scams therefore have to be more subtle, and to get money from new sources; that generation has already arrived.

As I pointed out in “One Born Every Minute”, con artists are always willing to take advantage of people’s unrealistic fantasies or their desire to get something for nothing, so it was only a matter of time before they used “trafficking”.  The “fake conference” scam has been making the rounds since about 2004; marks receive an email advertising an imaginary conference for a nonexistent NGO, and since many academics and professionals are always looking for a paid vacation they don’t really care that they’ve never heard of this organization before.  So they send money for registration, accommodations, etc…and of course that’s the last they hear of it.  Most of these supposed conferences are for environmental and social welfare causes; child abuse, racism and HIV are among the most popular topics, as you can see on this lengthy list.  Here’s one a correspondent of mine received on January 25^th:

Dear Colleague,

It is a great pleasure to invite you to the World Congress on human trafficking and forced labour 2012.  The theme of this conference is:  Combating Human And Sex Trafficking Worldwide.  This topic not only invites us to reflect upon the basic and classical criminological ideas from a contemporary perspective, but also proposes to discuss their current transformation, modification, and new developments.

The world congress on human trafficking and forced labour is scheduled to take place from Monday 27 February to Thursday 1st march 2012 at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City and 5th to 8th march 2012 at Firenze Conference Center Vicenza Italy.  The congress is hosted by the Campaign against Sex Trafficking and sponsored by other benevolent donors worldwide

Objectives of the world congress on human trafficking and forced labour objectives are:

1. To Increase awareness about the many types and ramifications of Human Trafficking
2. To serve as a resource to the public and advocates by providing valuable information about other initiatives working to address human Trafficking sex trafficking
3. To provide rehabilitation services to current and potential victims.
4. To encourage policy at local and national levels that will contribute to reducing human trafficking and abuse.
5. To provide insight in the activities in the field of science and policy interface;
6. To build a platform of knowledge at an international level;

For more information please contact the conference organizing committee via E-mail:  htafl2012secretariat@mynet.com

Sincerely,
Ms. Michael Judith
Youth organizing World Congress (Y.O.W.C)
E-mail:  congress.invitation@gmail.com

The clumsy grammar, poor punctuation and intermittent adherence to rules of capitalization would reveal this as a fake even if the scammers had bothered to create a website for the “event”, which they didn’t.  But a careless academic who really believed in the “trafficking” mythology might not be too scrupulous about checking out somebody who promised him a university-sponsored week in Italy.  And this is a good thing; the more good money is poured down the “trafficking” toilet, the more “Grey Man” and fake conference scams we see and the more ridiculous the bogus statistics get, the closer we come to the day when this whole house of cards collapses under its own weight.

One Year Ago Today

The second part of my interview with sex worker rights advocate and real sex trafficking survivor Jill Brenneman.

Fat Tuesday

While you stroll in New Orleans
You ought to go see the Mardi Gras
If you go to New Orleans
You ought to go see the Mardi Gras
When you see the Mardi Gras
Somebody’ll tell you what’s Carnival for.  -  R. Byrd, T. Terry, “Go To the Mardi Gras”

Today is Mardi Gras, which I referred to in last year’s column on the subject as “one of the last large-scale pagan festivals left in the increasingly sanitized and homogenized United States”; those of you who didn’t read that essay may wish to do so today.  You’ll notice that it is dated March 8^th, because Mardi Gras moves with Easter, which is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox and can therefore fall anywhere from March 22^nd to April 25^th.  Likewise, Fat Tuesday (since it’s always 47 days before Easter) can fall anywhere from February 3^rd to March 9^th; last year it was about as late as it could be, and this year it’s pretty typical.

As I wrote in the aforementioned column, one of the weirdest things about moving away from New Orleans is seeing everyone go about his business normally today as if it were any other day, when I know that back in the Crescent City there’s a huge party going on!  When we were in town two weeks ago, the signs were everywhere:  many places were decorated in purple, green and gold, the stores were full of king cakes, and viewing stands had been erected on the major parade routes in both New Orleans and Jefferson Parish.  Unfortunately there weren’t any parades any of the nights we were there, but that doesn’t mean we had nothing to do; we visited friends on three nights of the five, and on Wednesday went out walking on Bourbon Street with an out-of-town friend who had arrived that day.  While we were there, we went into a little courtyard called “Musical Legends Park”, where a jazzman named Steamboat Willie was playing.  My husband always buys a CD from any live performer we enjoy, and while he was doing so in this case he also requested that Willie perform “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” for me.  Well, when he heard my name he insisted on performing two songs for me, the first being his original composition “Maggie” from his album Move ‘N On (you can listen to a sample or download the song or album on Amazon).

Anyhow, even though today isn’t a holiday for most of you, it will always be one for me:  You can take the girl out of New Orleans, but you can’t take New Orleans out of the girl.  So I’m taking the day off, and I wish all of you a Happy Mardi Gras!

One Year Ago Today

The first installment of my four-part interview of sex worker rights activist Jill Brenneman, who was the victim of real sex trafficking and realizes that “only rights can stop the wrongs”.  The first two parts of the interview are both graphic and disturbing, and I caution sensitive readers to consider carefully before reading them.

The Sky is Falling!

“Oh, Foxy Loxy, the sky is falling!” said Turkey Lurkey.  “How do you know?” said Foxy Loxy.  “Goosey Loosey told me,” he replied.  “And Goosey Loosey, how do you know?” “Ducky Lucky told me”.  “Ducky Lucky, how do you know?”  “Henny Penny told me.”  “Henny Penny, how do you know?”  “Chicken Licken told me.”  “And Chicken Licken, how do you know?” “Part of it fell on my head!”  “Make haste, then,” said Foxy Loxy, “and all come into my den!”  -  English folktale

I’m sure everyone remembers the story of Chicken Licken (or Chicken Little, as she is called in America); some natural object (usually an acorn) falls on her head and she runs about shouting, “The sky is falling!” The other barnyard fowl then join the panic until a clever fox offers them shelter in his den, where he quickly devours the foolish birds.  The tale appears in many forms from all over the globe, including a 2500-year-old Tibetan version in which the animal who starts the panic is a hare, the frightening event a ripe fruit falling with a loud “plop” into a pond, and the predator a tiger.  Weaker modern versions in which the silly animals escape disaster subvert the moral of the tale, which could be stated as “Those who panic due to perfectly natural events or hearsay will be taken advantage of by the clever but unscrupulous.”  The “trafficking hysteria” is obviously an example of this, with ridiculous geese running about squawking “The sky is falling!” merely because someone else told them it was.

In real life, panics are usually a little more complicated; they are set off by a combination of events rather than one, and unfortunately do not generally end with the rapid devouring of the idiots who started the hysteria.  But the phenomena which trigger them are still nearly always perfectly natural ones; in the case of “trafficking” hysteria, for example, the triggers are women trading sex for money, people ignoring arbitrary laws which wrongfully restrain them from what they need to do, people crossing borders to work, and xenophobia.  The first two also combine with another natural event, young people doing things of which their elders disapprove, to produce a different but related moral panic we’ve discussed several times recently:  university students having compensated sex to pay their bills.  As Dominique Jackson pointed out, this isn’t remotely new; older men have always sought younger women since time immemorial (even when, as in my column of one year ago today, they get in trouble for it), and young women have always been willing to capitalize on it (as well they should).

But the fact that these things are as natural as the fall of a nut doesn’t stop media Chicken Lickens and Turkey Lurkeys from getting into a panic over them, as demonstrated by these two recent items which appeared on EconJeff’s blog.  The first one appeared in Click On Detroit January 17^th and Jeff commented on it the following day; since I have nothing to add to his insightful comments I’ll just embed an excerpt from the news story in boldface before quoting him:

A pornographic website features college co-eds having sex in dorms, and recent videos…feature students from the University of Michigan.  The DareDorm.com producers have posted advertisements on websites to recruit new students for new movies.  Anthony Kalil, a student at U of M, has heard about the campus porn invasion.  He knows students are being offered up to $10,000 to do the videos.  But he also knows the ramifications of shooting an X-rated movie.  “For somebody to let a crew in to film something like that, you’re ruining yourself and you’re ruining your friends.  It’s just not a good idea,” Kalil said.  ”It’s definitely a decision that you are going to have to deal with for the rest of your life.  Twenty years down the road and you have kids, they go on the Internet, they are going to see mommy and daddy when they were drunk in college”…

Can you imagine?  Students having sex in the dorms?  Video cameras?  The internet?  Money?  What is the world coming to?  Surely the end times are near! …Note the use of students (presumably carefully selected for their negative views) to provide the illusion that Channel 4 is engaged in reporting rather than running an anti-sex editorial.  Could they really not find a single student with something positive to say about getting lots of money for doing very little work? …Suppose that you can get $10K for a video.  At typical local wages for undergrads, that means putting in, say, two or three hours of time rather than 1000.  Those 1000 hours could be spent, say, studying.  They might allow an aspiring student to take harder classes or complete a harder major than he or she otherwise would.  Is that necessarily a bad tradeoff? …In the age of Facebook and surveillance cameras does anyone really think that one video on Dare Dorm is going to ruin someone’s life, as suggested by the undergraduates interviewed for the story?  How exactly will someone’s children find their parents’ Dare Dorm video from among the zillions of porn videos on the internet? …Note to Channel 4:  there are lots of important things to report on in the Detroit metro area.  This is not one of them.

I must point out that Jeff is a professor of economics, not a sex worker rights advocate, yet I couldn’t say this any better.  The very next day, he posted a commentary on a local news item about “the medium-term paid relationship services market, informally known as the sugar babies market…[which] lies somewhere between paid escorts who charge by the hour or day and particularly mercenary marriages…[note] the obligatory scary remarks from local law enforcement (playing double duty here as moral scolds)…”  The story appeared on January 18^th in MLive:

Students at Jackson-area colleges and universities are among the “College Sugar Babies” signed up on a worldwide dating-for-dollars website.  SeekingArrangement.com, which touts itself as the country’s leading…[compensated] dating website…recently released its top 20 list of colleges and universities with the largest number of sugar baby signups in 2011.  [Local institutions]…did not make that list, but they did have…[a total of 33] students…who registered as “sugar babies” last year…SeekingArrangement.com advertises “mutually beneficial relationships” and has garnered national [media] attention…One in every two “sugar babies” who join the website today are college students, and college “sugar babies” now make up 40 percent of the site’s population, [a recent press] release said.  The numbers and universities are identified by students who register on the site using their “.edu” email address.  They automatically receive a free premium membership upgrade and are classified as “College Sugar Babies,” which receive three times more inquires from potential “Sugar Daddies”…

The website does not promote a direct exchange for sex, so using it does not directly violate the law, said Jackson County Sheriff Steve Rand.  However, he said the website is potentially dangerous.  “The Internet is the wild, wild west and there ain’t no sheriff,” Rand said.  “It’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt on a site like this.  It’s a recipe for disaster”…

Legal adults using their time and assets sensibly without busybody interference from self-appointed “sheriffs”?  The horror!  Sheriff Rand says it’s only “a matter of time” before “disaster” strikes; considering that this sort of thing has been going on for at least 12,000 years, I presume he imagines we’re overdue for “somebody to get hurt” and that the sky will be falling any minute now.

That Was the Week That Was (#6)

Goodsex is any form of sex considered acceptable by the Party…all other forms…are considered sexcrime.  -  George Orwell, 1984

Eight updates from the sixth week of 2012:

Just Drawn That Way (July 21^st, 2010)

This is another of those “dog bites man” things which are only news because neofeminists have worked so hard to convince everyone that they’re not true:

New research is demonstrating what many people already knew from experience:  Women lose interest in sex over time, while men don’t…researchers Sarah Murray and Robin Milhausen…of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, asked 170 undergraduate women and men who had been in heterosexual relationships for anywhere from one month to nine years to report on their levels of relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction and sexual desire…The participants reported being generally satisfied with their relationships and sex lives, but women reported lower levels of desire depending on the length of their relationship…In fact, relationship duration was a better predictor of sexual desire in women than both relationship and sexual satisfaction.  While the…decrease in female desire was small, it contrasts with male desire, which held steady over time…evolutionary theorists predict that male desire should remain perpetually high in order for them to produce many offspring, while female desire should decrease as their attention turns, historically, toward child-rearing…

…Hormonal changes that occur as couples move from the passionate early stage to the compassionate later stage…sometime between six and 30 months may also mediate changes in desire over time.  Pharmaceutical companies are currently researching the impact of testosterone on women’s desire, but so far, the results have been inconclusive…In an earlier study, Murray found that women who reported more realistic expectations about what sex would be like in a long-term relationship also had higher levels of desire than those with less realistic expectations.  ”I think that individuals who expect to maintain the high level of excitement and passion that often exists in the first few months of a new relationship are setting up unrealistic expectations about what is to come and will be more disappointed when the desire and passion take on different forms,” she said…

I’ve frequently pointed out that both sexes need to view the others’ differing desires realistically: women need to either provide enough sex or expect that their men will get it elsewhere, and men who feel so driven need to hire professionals rather than entering into dangerous dalliances with amateurs.

Don’t Buy It (February 1^st, 2011)

In this column I provided links to a number of studies demonstrating that mega sporting events don’t attract increased numbers of prostitutes, but it never hurts to have a couple more.  Here’s a new one from the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW):

A widespread belief that major sporting events fuel sex trafficking is unsubstantiated and has a negative impact on groups that campaigners purport to protect, undermining anti-trafficking objectives…Activists opposed to sex work say large groups of men attending the Olympics, FIFA World Cup and U.S. Super Bowl competitions create a high demand for sex work causing large numbers of women to be trafficked…[but] there is no correlation between those beliefs and the actual number of trafficking cases found, the report titled “What’s the Cost of a Rumour?” said…“Despite increased scrutiny by the media, political figures and law enforcement, there is no evidence that large sporting events cause an increase in trafficking for prostitution,” Julie Ham, the author of the study, said…GAATW reviewed literature from United Nations (U.N.) agencies, government offices, academic researchers, anti-trafficking organisations, sex-workers rights organisations, non-governmental organisations and the media.

The claim sex work will increase is perpetuated in part because it is useful as a fundraising strategy, as a way to grab attention and be seen to “do something” about trafficking, and as a more socially acceptable guise for prostitution abolitionist agendas and anti-immigration agendas, the report said…[but] anti-trafficking campaigns that are based on unproven claims can…result…in increased criminal penalties and human rights violations against sex workers…[and] controls on women’s movements, intended to stop trafficking, can actually lead to increased trafficking…

Even better, the mythbusting website Snopes has now officially listed the rumor as false, which will greatly accelerate its demise among the internet-savvy portion of the population.

Not an Addiction (February 11^th, 2011)

Why must every strong urge now be described as an “addiction”?

…A new study shows…the urge for a Facebook fix is at least as strong as the lure of tobacco and alcohol.  The survey of 250 people was published…in the journal Psychological Studies, and revealed that sex and sleep were the two things most longed for during the day, yet the need to check Facebook was too hard for most to overcome…alcohol and cigarettes generated lower levels of desire than the urge to check social networks…

The fallacy here, of course, is the pretense that Facebook is a “substance” to which one can become addicted.  It isn’t; it’s simply a process by which many people communicate with their social groups.  The urge to check Facebook is nothing more or less than the desire for social interaction, which is extremely strong.  If checking Facebook can be an “addiction”, then all human interaction is an “addiction” and the word loses all meaning.

Backwards Into the Future (March 30^th, 2011)

South Africa, once the human rights pariah of the Western world, is now advancing in its treatment of sex workers while the United States moves backward into the sort of human rights model one associates with third-world dictatorships.  And now Kenya and Namibia are joining the list of African countries with a more civilized attitude toward sex work than that of the US:

…Nairobi is considering [decriminalization]…Mayor George Aladwa said…the council was working to harmonise by-laws with provisions of the new Constitution before allowing commercial sex workers to operate without restraint…“We will certainly find places to have them operate freely without any harassment.  These are people who have dedicated themselves to do their work, there is no need to continue harassing them”…

And though Namibia isn’t that far along, it’s still way ahead of the US:

The Director of Namibia’s largest sex-workers’ organization, Rights not Rescue, has called upon the government to decriminalize prostitution as an important step in the fight against HIV and AIDS.  Nicodemus Aochumub, better known as ‘Mama Africa’, [said]…“Government should decriminalize sex-work to [allow sex workers]…access to universal health care and to enable them to lay charges with the police without the fear of being arrested.  Discriminating against prostitutes will inevitably increase the HIV rate because they are helplessly exposed to abuse, even by police…How can we fight this deadly disease when law-enforcement officers take away condoms from the girls…They throw them away and tell us we don’t deserve to use condoms.  Some police officers force us into sex, otherwise we will end up in jail…We…are not free even 21 years after independence.  Prostitution is work and feeds many families,” emphasized Mama Africa…HIV infection among sex-workers has declined significantly in countries where prostitution is legalised.  Prostitutes in Germany, for instance, are registered with the legal and health authorities, are required to undergo regular medical checks and pay tax.

What Would Orrin Hatch Do? (April 17^th, 2011)

Is it so damned hard to just orient the computers so nobody can accidentally see what someone else is viewing?

…Libraries around the country are frequently troubled by the conflict of your First Amendment right to view “protected speech” and others who just have to watch pornography in a public library setting.  The most recent publicly exposed incident in Seattle occurred at the Lake City branch of the Seattle library system. Julie Howe said in a public email that her 10-year-old daughter was disturbed after looking over the shoulder of a man last month as he watched pornography at the branch…Andra Addison, spokeswoman for the Seattle Public Library, told the Seattlepi.com:  ”…We don’t tell people what they can view and check out…Filters compromise freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.  We’re not in the business of censoring information.”  However, in 2010 the State Supreme Court ruled in favor of a library that had taken a much less permissive attitude toward porn on its computers.  The court ruled that public libraries in Washington can filter Internet content to block things like pornography…Howe says she understands the predicament the library is in, but wants there to at least be signs warning patrons to watch out where they look…New Yorkers can [also] watch internet porn at the city’s public libraries thanks to a policy of free speech protected by the First Amendment, the New York Post reported in April…

Apparently, the Jefferson Parish Library is less averse to censorship; when I logged on there with my husband’s laptop on February 6^th, the first thing that popped up on my screen was a warning that I better not look at “adult” materials, or else.  So I made sure I viewed my red umbrella picture, just on principle.

A War for Peace
(May 12^th, 2011)

I have no real comment to make about this, but I figured my male readers might enjoy these pictures of Femen’s latest protest.

Girls, Girls, Girls!
(December 15^th, 2011)

There’s more than one way to skin a lawhead:

At least one Kansas City adult business is taking a creative approach to increasing attendance while attempting to follow tough new regulations limiting what its dancers can wear onstage.  Bazooka’s…now [features]…large, flat-screen televisions adjacent to the stage.  While a dancer performs live with her intimate areas covered, as the law requires, a video of the same dancer — with those areas exposed — appears on the screens…The latest strategy may help the business sidestep a new state law requiring “sexually oriented businesses” to close at midnight…Had the dancers exposed those areas in the flesh they would have broken the law, or at least forced the club to close at midnight.  But because they appeared on screen, [owner Dick] Snow said, they’re as legal as a general-interest movie.  “There is some full frontal nudity in these videos, but there’s full frontal nudity in every theater in the city,” he said.  Dick Bryant, an attorney who represents adult businesses, said, “The projection of the images of the nude dancers fully complies with the statutes and the U.S. Constitution”…A spokesman for the Kansas City Police Department said the department had received no complaints about Bazooka’s videos and said it did not appear that the establishment was violating any local or state laws…

Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark (January 11^th, 2012)

Everyone whose mind isn’t hopelessly mired in neofeminist dogma knows that hormones cause most differences in gendered behavior, but a new study shows which genes are affected:

…a team of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has uncovered many genes influenced by…testosterone and estrogen that…govern several specific types of male and female behaviors in mice.  The UCSF team selectively turned many of these genes off one by one and found they could manipulate individual behaviors in the mice, like their sex drive, desire to pick fights, or willingness to spend extra time caring for their young.  “It’s as if you can deconstruct a social behavior into genetic components,” said Nirao Shah, MD…”Each gene regulates a few components of a behavior without affecting [others]”…Identifying how genetic differences in our brains account for the differences in our behavior may also be a starting point for understanding how to better address human mental illness and neurodegenerative conditions in which such gender differences exist.  For example, autism is four times more common in males than in females…

Of course, this won’t convince “true believers”, but every such discovery makes it harder for them to peddle their lies to others.

One Year Ago Today

“John Law” presents four short articles about cops and hookers.

That Was the Week That Was (#5)

The good news is that Jesus is coming back.  The bad news is that he’s really pissed off.  – Bob Hope

Three new stories and six updates from the fifth week of 2012.

Good News, Bad News

Sometimes, reading stories about prostitution law is like the classic joke format.  GOOD NEWS:  77% of Canadians support decriminalization of prostitution and UNAIDS has condemned criminalization of sex work (including the “Swedish Model”, “end demand” schemes and the rescue industry) as a danger both to sex workers and to public health:

…Forced rescue and rehabilitation practices lower sex workers’ control over where and under what conditions they sell sexual services and to whom, exposing them to greater violence and exploitation…this leads to social disintegration and a loss of solidarity and cohesion (social capital) among sex workers, including reducing their ability to access health care, legal and social services.  Low social capital is known to increase vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections among sex workers and therefore has a detrimental impact on HIV prevention efforts…undermining sex worker organisations is one of the most important negative effects of law enforcement practices…anti-trafficking efforts typically ignore the possibility of engaging sex workers as partners…[even though they] are often best placed to know who is being trafficked into commercial sex and by whom, and are particularly motivated to work to stop such odious practices…Organised groups of sex workers are also best placed to establish safe working norms within the sex industry, and influence other[s]…to ensure that trafficked adults and children are not retained in sex work…

BAD  NEWS:  Western Australia is starting to buy into the “trafficking” narrative:

Federal police have launched an operation to rescue people trafficked into WA for forced labour, prostitution and servile marriages.  There are fears that an increasing number of women are being brought to Perth and forced into the city’s sex industry.  Supt Glyn Lewis…said human trafficking was insidious and abhorrent and many victims were never found…There have been only 14 convictions for human trafficking since legislation came into force in 2003.  People working in the area in Perth fear trafficking is a real and emerging issue “under the radar” of authorities and the public.  Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans said the problem had to be addressed…

None of these people stop to consider that maybe the reason that there are so few convictions and “many victims were never found” is that there was no crime in the first place.  But hey, we can’t let facts get in the way of hysteria and fear-mongering by cops and religious groups.

Scientific Detachment

The ability to look at sensitive subjects dispassionately and to present evidence without emotion is an admirable one, but as Professor G.S. Brindley (the doctor who developed the first medical treatment for erectile dysfunction) discovered in 1983, it’s probably best not to assume that the majority of one’s audience possesses that capacity to any great degree.  This January 27^th article on the Discover magazine blog explains, and since synopsizing it in any way would do it a disservice, I’ll just leave you with the link.

Fundraiser for St. James Infirmary

I’ve been asked to publicize an online fundraiser for St. James Infirmary, which provides compassionate healthcare and social services for sex workers in San Francisco.  It will be held tomorrow (February 19^th, 2012) at 3 PM EST on BlogTV; even if you can’t attend please spread the word!

Week 5 of 2012 Updates

Nothing in the Dark (August 8^th, 2010)

This story demonstrates not only the reason for considering condoms a “safety net” against disease rather than a first line of defense, but also the reason I’m hesitant to entrust my health to a government bureaucracy:

…South Africa’s leading anti-AIDS group said…that…faulty condoms are among more than 1.35 million handed out at the African National Congress’ 100^th birthday party…[they were] recalled but the Treatment Action Campaign said no warning has been issued to people that they may have carried away defective condoms…The third recall in less than five years raises questions about the quality of some of the 425 million-plus condoms that the government gives away each year, and the competence of the South African Bureau of Standards [SABS] that is supposed to ensure their quality…In 2007, the government recalled more than 20 million defective condoms…but recovered only 12 million…a [previous] recall…[resulted after] a testing manager at [SABS took] a bribe to certify the faulty contraceptives…

[AIDS activist Sello Mokhalipi] said people started coming with complaints about the condoms…three days after the celebrations ended…”We poured water into the condoms and they were leaking, not just in one place, they were leaking like a sieve,” he said.  Looking at them, “you can see there are small pores” like pinpricks…the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce, said many of the 10,000 to 15,000 prostitutes they work with often complain about the free government condoms…[so] they instead use a brand provided by an international charity…South Africa’s government sources its condoms from several companies and rebrands them with its colorful CHOICE packaging, in bright blue, red, yellow and green…

Any time there’s a lucrative government contract, there’s going to be graft.  And anything sourced out to the lowest bidder…

Who Did Your Tits? (October 1^st, 2010)

Most women who have boob jobs feel they confer psychological and/or financial benefits, but I never considered this possibility:

A 41-year-old Florida woman says the breast augmentation surgery she had three months ago saved her life…her ex-fiancé’s new girlfriend…attacked her…stabbing her repeatedly in the left side of her chest…the knife had punctured the implant and she was soaked with saline.  Doctors say the salt water and walls of the implant prevented a deadly blow.

The Camel’s Nose (October 2^nd, 2010)

Yet another spooge sneaker; this one is so reprehensible he constitutes a one-man argument in favor of sex offender registries:

…Mark Berndt, a third-grade teacher [at Miramonte Elementary School in California]…is charged with committing lewd acts on 23 boys and girls, ages 6 to 10, between 2005 and 2010…[he] was removed from classwork in January 2011 and fired within the month, but only parents of children identified as victims were told…some angry parents…complained that they only learned of the investigation through the media after Berndt’s arrest this week.  School officials and investigators said proper procedures were followed…but…two former students…said school officials were informed about [Berndt’s] odd behavior two decades ago…

…Berndt is suspected of snapping nearly 400 photographs of…students, some with a giant Madagascar cockroach from a classroom terrarium on their faces.  Others were blindfolded or had clear tape over their mouths, and some were shown with a spoonful of milky liquid placed near their lips…The photo sessions were treated as a game and some children were given sperm-laced cookies to eat as treats…The investigation began in the fall of 2010 when a film processor became suspicious about the photographs and turned them over to…police…an investigator…found a blue spoon…in a trash can [in Berndt’s classroom] that appeared to be the one seen in the photographs, but it took months before analysis determined there was semen on the spoon and more time before DNA testing matched it to Berndt…Meanwhile, investigators kept trying to identify children in the photographs…

I would hope that prosecutors build their cases on photographic and DNA evidence, and that they, cops and parents have the sense not to question the children or (even worse) subject them to the ordeal of trial participation; adult eyewitness testimony is unreliable at best, and that of children is often worse than useless.  Alas, I fear that’s a vain hope; adults just can’t resist traumatizing young children by subjecting them to frightening and confusing interrogations and filling their heads full of horrible images, thus exploiting them just as monstrously as the criminal did.

Welcome To Our World (January 20^th, 2011)

I think my readers can answer David Reber’s questions, which he seems to consider rhetorical:

…What could a teacher possibly know about education?  Countless arguments used to denigrate public school teachers begin with the phrase “in what other profession…” and conclude with practically anything the anti-teacher pundits find offensive about public education…In what other profession, indeed.  In what other profession are the licensed professionals considered the LEAST knowledgeable about the job?  You seldom if ever hear “that guy couldn’t possibly know a thing about law enforcement – he’s a police officer”, or “she can’t be trusted talking about fire safety – she’s a firefighter.”  In what other profession is experience viewed as a liability rather than an asset?  You won’t find a contractor advertising “choose me – I’ve never done this before”, and your doctor won’t recommend a surgeon on the basis of her “having very little experience with the procedure”.  In what other profession is the desire for competitive salary viewed as proof of callous indifference towards the job?  You won’t hear many say “that lawyer charges a lot of money, she obviously doesn’t care about her clients”, or “that coach earns millions – clearly he doesn’t care about the team”…For no other profession do so many outsiders refuse to accept the realities of an imperfect world.  Crime happens.  Fire happens.  Illness happens…People accept all these realities, until they apply to public education…

Well, Mr. Reber, there is at least one other…

The Enlightenment Police (October 1^st, 2011)

One would think the usually-sensible Dutch would have waited to see what the European High Court will do with the French version of this first:

The Dutch…government plans to ban Muslim face veils…”People should be able to look at each other’s faces and recognize each other when they meet,” the interior affairs ministry said…The ban will also apply to balaclavas and motorcycle helmets when worn in inappropriate places, such as inside a store, Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Verhagen told reporters, denying that this was a ban on religious clothing…The face-veil law, which still needs to win approval in both houses of parliament, excludes clothing worn for security reasons such as that worn by firemen and hockey players, as well as party clothing such as Santa Claus or Halloween costumes.  The ban does not apply to religious places, such as churches and mosques, nor to passengers on airplanes or en route via a Dutch airport…

Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark (January 11^th, 2012)

Since neofeminists insist that all gendered behavior is “socially constructed”, I’m sure they’ll deny these findings just as creationists deny fossils and carbon dating:

Testosterone makes us overvalue our own opinions at the expense of cooperation, research from…University College London has found…Problem solving in groups can provide benefits over individual decisions as we are able to share our information and expertise.  However…collaborating too closely can lead to an uncritical groupthink, ending in decisions that are bad for all…research has shown that people given a boost of the hormone oxytocin tend to be cooperative.  Now…researchers have shown that…testosterone has the opposite effect — it makes people act less cooperatively and more egocentrically.

Dr Nick Wright and colleagues…[tested] 17 pairs of female volunteers who had previously never met…On one…day…[they] were given a testosterone supplement; on the other day, they were given a placebo.  [Men were not used because supplements can trigger a drop in their own testosterone production, invalidating the results]…as expected, cooperation [in a task] enabled the group to perform much better than the individuals alone…but, when given a testosterone supplement, the benefit of cooperation was markedly reduced.  In fact, higher levels of testosterone were associated with individuals behaving egocentrically…”Most of the time, this allows us to seek the best solution to a problem, but sometimes, too much testosterone can help blind us to other people’s views,” [said Dr. Wright.]  “This can be very significant when we are talking about a dominant individual trying to assert his or her opinion in, say, a jury”…

One Year Ago Today

“Not the Same Tree” showcases a Detroit reporter’s excellent and very perceptive article about the federal persecution of an escort service.

The Anti-Life Equation

Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work.  Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can’t tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.  -  Noam Chomsky

When I was writing That Was the Week That Was (#3) I started thinking about the name of “The Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine”, and how it cleverly forces its opponents to give it a compliment and essentially promote its own propaganda just by saying its name.  As I explained in that column, the PCRM is “a fanatical animal-rights group with ties to PETA which relies primarily on scare tactics and gross-out ads in its continuing attempt to impose veganism on everyone, and less than 5% of its members are physicians.”  But because its name contains these positive, respectable words, one can’t speak of opposing them without sounding to the uninitiated as though one opposes physicians or responsible medicine.

This is of course the same tactic employed by the prohibitionists; they call themselves “abolitionists” or “anti-trafficking activists” or the like, to imply that anyone who is against them is in favor of slavery.  It’s a cheap trick, but it does put one’s opponents at a subtle disadvantage; that’s why I refuse to use such terms.  When it’s an actual name I use initials wherever possible, and when it’s a common descriptor I substitute my own; thus I call them “prohibitionists” rather than “abolitionists” (because they do in fact work for prohibition of something), and anti-prostitute or anti-sex worker activists rather than “anti-trafficking” or “anti-prostitution” activists.  As Furry Girl rightly points out, anti-sex worker activists try to pretend they’re not against people but rather practices and concepts, but in reality the laws and policies they advocate result in the persecution, marginalization, imprisonment, rape and death of actual human beings.  They claim to be against ideas, but are really against people, and should be so labeled.

The day after I wrote that column, another good example of it turned up; an Anne Summers essay entitled “There is No Such Thing as a Pro-Life Feminist”  appeared in The Age, and as I saw that title “tweeted” over a dozen times it began to sound ever more bizarre to me.  Yes, I understand that Anne Summers was using the anti-abortion people’s own preferred term, and that by “pro-life” she really meant “anti-abortion”, so why didn’t she just say “anti-abortion”?  Why give them what they want?  People who want something banned or outlawed (whether it be meat, prostitution or abortion) need to be described as “anti” whatever it is, not “pro” some vague positive concept like “responsibility”, “equality” or “life”.  Summers’ title makes it sound as though she’s actually calling her fellow feminists mass murderers or something.  If feminists aren’t pro-life, what does that make them?  Anti-life?

The late, great Jack Kirby was a prolific comic book writer and artist from the 1930s to the 1980s who created many well-known characters including Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man and the Fantastic Four.  But one of his most intriguing creations was the godlike supervillain Darkseid, ruler of an evil planet named Apokolips.  All of Darkseid’s complex machinations were aimed toward one end:  the discovery of a mysterious formula called the “Anti-Life Equation”, which he believed was somehow hidden in the minds of humans.  Despite what you might think, this equation was not a death ray or anything like that (Darkseid already had one of those, the “Omega Force”), but rather a means of destroying all free will and controlling every sentient being.  Kirby understood (as “pro-life” fanatics, opponents of assisted suicide and others of their ilk do not) that for a sentient being, “life” is not mere biochemical function but rather the capacity to make one’s own decisions.  To “live” in the biological sense while being denied volition, agency and the control of one’s own body and mind is not to be a man or woman; it is to be the equivalent of a cabbage or a sponge, a thing without freedom, dignity or humanity.  It is not life at all, and anyone who opposes the right of human beings to make their own choices, no matter what lying excuse he gives, is therefore anti-life.

Kirby is said to have intended Darkseid to be the apotheosis of every power-mad tyrant there ever was, so one might say there is a little bit of him in every petty dictator on Earth.  Every prohibitionist, moralist, crypto-moralist, lawhead, control freak, cop and politician; every censor who wants to prohibit certain substances, sex acts, ideas, tools, words, images or types of clothing; every busybody who wants to deny others the right to privacy, self-defense, profit, free movement or free association; every official or “concerned citizen” who thinks it’s his job to tell others what to eat, watch, read, think, say and do; and every costumed ape who thinks he has the right to brutalize the bodies, steal the property and control the movements of those without a costume, has in his mind a minute fragment of the anti-life equation.  It doesn’t matter whether they claim to be “pro-life”, “pro-woman”, “pro-law”, “pro-safety”, “pro-family”, “pro-health”, “pro-morality”, “pro-equality”, “pro-Homeland”, “pro-nature”, “pro-God”  or pro-anything else, because in reality they’re all anti-choice and anti-freedom, and therefore anti-life.

One Year Ago Today

“An Educated Idiot” presents a study of street prostitution in New York City by a sociologist who, while he seems to sincerely want to get at the truth, has to be among the most credulous people on Earth.

The Course of a Disease

This sickness doth infect the very life-blood of our enterprise.  -  William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One (IV,i)

If you pay any attention at all to the “debates” amateurs indulge themselves in over how prostitution should be “handled” or “regulated” (discussions that rarely, if ever, involve actual prostitutes), you’ve encountered the term “Swedish Model” (AKA “Nordic Model”).  My column of one year ago today  contained a simple explanation of this “model”, its shockingly sexist basis and a short synopsis of its progress at that time:

The Swedish Model…is based on the premise that women are moral imbeciles who are psychologically incompetent to determine the conditions under which we will consent to sex, and the state therefore assumes the right to set those conditions for us.  Like girls under the age of consent in most countries, women in Swedish Model countries are neither allowed to consent to certain sex partners, nor can they be held liable for their actions if they violate the law; since only men are considered fully competent to make sexual decisions, Swedish Model law only punishes men for violating that law.  Up until now only three Scandinavian countries (Norway,  Sweden and Iceland) had such a low opinion of women’s competency, but despite the total lack of demonstrable positive results the Swedish disease appears to be spreading; several jurisdictions in the United States appear to be flirting with it, a neofeminist group presumed to “demand” that Canada adopt it last year, Labour MSP Trish Goodman has repeatedly tried to force it through the Scottish parliament, and England only narrowly averted it by replacing its last Labour government.  The latest country to jump on the repressive, misogynistic bandwagon is Ireland…

Though I have nothing to add about the model itself, I thought a report on how the various patients exposed to this political disease were faring might prove instructive.

Sweden:  “Patient Zero” is like a psychotic HIV-positive man who makes an effort to give it to as many others as possible.  The Swedish government is actually proud of its deeply-twisted view of male-female relations and works hard to export it, even to the point of producing pamphlets and sending representatives to lie to other governments about its “success”.  But despite its grandiose claims about overwhelming public support for the “model”, its attempts to brainwash toddlers so as to ensure future support for it and its harsh suppression of women who dare to challenge its “philosophical” basis, the truth is that 81% of Swedes say they are “angry” about the law and 10% of Swedish girls report having taken money for sex at least once.  A few brave Swedish politicians keep opposing the law while others use their positions to run clandestine brothels,  and there is no evidence sex work has decreased even one iota, just as it never decreases under any criminalization regime.

Australia:  The Aussies appear highly resistant to this particular malady, and have even attempted to help others overcome it by releasing a report which “dismiss[es] it as a load of politically-motivated codswallop unsubstantiated by facts.”

Canada:  The efforts of neofeminists to infect this portion of the Commonwealth have failed dramatically, and despite government efforts to dehumanize prostitutes and deny them rights, the opinions of the public, the media and the courts are all moving toward decriminalization.  At the time of this writing a constitutional challenge against the anti-whore laws is in progress, and the Himel Decision striking down the laws in Ontario is still being discussed by an appeals court.

Denmark:  Though sex worker advocates are fighting it and few politicians support it, “sex trafficking” fetishists have even succeeded in exposing this usually-sensible country to the Swedish disease.  Though the fetishists would like to believe they have a chance of full infection, Laura Agustín tells me advocates there are reasonably confident that it hasn’t a chance.

Europe:  Despite the fact that individual European countries have their own prostitution policies and most are quite happy with their own versions of legalization, the soi-disant “European Women’s Lobby” managed to scam public funds to produce a ridiculous “end demand” commercial; some highly-placed officials were not at all pleased by the fact that the Swedish-born (and openly anti-whore) “Commissioner for Home Affairs” gave public funds to a fringe group to advance a personal agenda.

France:  The French have long had a love-hate affair with filles de joie which rivals that of the United States in its depth and intensity; after the Second World War whores became the scapegoats for Gallic self-loathing and the country has been officially “abolitionist” since 1960 (except in the military, which provided its troops with whores until about 15 years ago).  France is now “considering” the Swedish Model, but those who support it are in conflict with those pushing total criminalization.  And since France doesn’t shy away from criminalizing clothes and opinions, why not motivations for sex as well?

Iceland:  The Swedish infection is so acute in this westernmost outpost of Scandinavia that it might well prove terminal.  In addition to prostitution, Iceland has also criminalized stripping and is working on banning porn; this climate has bred a large group of misandrist vigilantes who use the laws to stalk and attack men and who demand censorship powers over all print, electronic and internet communication in the country.

Ireland:  Irish sex worker advocates have fought the massed forces of prohibitionists for a year now, despite interference from anti-whore behemoth Google and media-supported “sex trafficking” hysteria very similar to that in the American media; as in the US, the chief struggle for Irish prostitutes is simply to be heard (much less considered) above the Puritanical din raised by neofeminists, fanatical Christians and control-freak politicians.  I’ll be keeping an eye on Turn Off the Blue Light and Feminist Ire for further developments; the matter seems poised to come to a head in the spring.

Israel:  The Knesset (Israeli parliament) “Ministerial Committee on Legislation” unanimously approved a client criminalization bill on February 12^th; it now passes to the full legislature for consideration.  And if this recent editorial from the Jerusalem Post (which portrays all women as helpless moral imbeciles at the mercy of caricatured mustache-twirling male villains) is any indication, Israeli plague carriers are just as willing to use outrageous claims and blatant lies to promote their agenda as those in the US and Scandinavia.

Norway:  The second country infected by this vile illness hasn’t completely succumbed yet; as I reported on February 5^th the country’s official report to UNAIDS listed significant public health and human rights problems which it directly blamed on the ban.  Of course, the opinion of one government department won’t change anything, but since Norway isn’t as politically invested in the “model” as Sweden is, it could be some small sign of hope.

United Kingdom:  This patient offers the most hopeful prognosis after Canada; despite a close brush with an especially virulent case in 2010, Britain now seems to be moving in the direction of decriminalization.  The Association of Chief Police officers supports it, as does the new assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, and in December several politicians met with Tim Barnett, the British-born New Zealand MP who sponsored decriminalization there.  Recent developments in Scotland could lead to problems, but it’s too soon yet to tell.

United States:  The US State Department continues to pour money into “anti-trafficking” campaigns which encourage persecution and abuse of prostitutes in countries which depend on American charity (especially in the Far East), and while these campaigns aren’t directly tied to the “Swedish Model” they often feature “end demand” rhetoric which directly meshes with it.  In addition, wealthy American individuals with personal agendas and corporations eager to capitalize on popular hype continue to bankroll “rescue” operations which victimize women and children and “end demand” efforts which result in the arrest and officially-sanctioned robbery of hundreds of men.

All in all, then, I think we can be guardedly optimistic about the danger of this epidemic continuing to spread.  Though some countries (Ireland and the US) seem to be sinking into the disease, others (such as Canada and the UK) appear not only to have avoided the sickness, but to be headed in the healthy direction of family members like Australia and New Zealand.  In most countries (such as France and Denmark) it looks like business as usual, and though two of the three full-blown cases appear to be worsening, the third has shown a few faint signs of improvement.  I’ll continue to keep all the patients’ charts up to date, and let y’all know as the prognosis changes for each one.