A Little Help From Our Friends

The gods help them who help themselves. -  Aesop

There’s something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while now, but have avoided because I know it will provoke controversy.  However, two things I recently read on AlterNet brought it to the front of my mind so I won’t stay quiet about it any longer.  The first was Renegade Evolution’s essay about the total lack of attention to International Sex Worker Rights Day from those who call themselves our allies whenever it’s convenient for them:

Nary you mind that the way things are currently, however many sex workers could get robbed and raped tonight and have it laughed off by the law, nary you mind that sex workers pulled over by the law will be blackmailed into favors, nary you mind that sex workers of all races, genders, classes, political bent, religion, will still be seen by the majority of humanity as less than human themselves, nary you mind possession of condoms in the highly vaunted Swedish State is cause for arrest and possible immediate deportation.  Nary you mind.  It doesn’t rate…Hell, I thought it was a feminist issue.  Apparently not…If you don’t really intend to be an ally and speak up and out, don’t call yourself one.  Don’t use us when it’s convenient and forget us when it’s important.  Easier for all of us in the long run.

The next was a link sent to me last Friday by regular reader Shelley to this February 24^th post whose author felt the need to resurrect this ten-year-old news article in order to attack Pope Benedict’s recent statement that he believes atheism was a contributing factor in the Holocaust:

The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday [March 20, 2001] that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns.  Most of the abuse has occurred in Africa, where priests vowed to celibacy, who previously sought out prostitutes, have preyed on nuns to avoid contracting the AIDS virus.  Confidential Vatican reports obtained by the National Catholic Reporter…have revealed that members of the Catholic clergy have been exploiting their financial and spiritual authority to gain sexual favours from nuns, particularly those from the Third World who are more likely to be culturally conditioned to be subservient to men.  The reports, some of which are recent and some of which have been in circulation for at least seven years, said that such priests had demanded sex in exchange for favours, such as certification to work in a given diocese.  In extreme instances, the priests had made nuns pregnant and then encouraged them to have abortions…

Any moral person should be disgusted by this, and indeed AlterNet’s readers appear to have been.  But not one of over 100 comments on the AlterNet piece seems to have bothered to read the second line of the linked article.  Take a look down the comment thread; you’ll see plenty of anti-Catholic, radical atheist, neomarxist, neofeminist and knee-jerk “liberal” statements, and at least one repetition of the moronic “rape is not sexual” mantra, but not one single poster as much as mentioned the fact that these rapes were largely caused by the perceived lack of safe prostitutes (itself a problem largely caused by religious and/or masculine objections to condoms).  AlterNet’s stated mission is to “inspire citizen action and advocacy on the environment, human rights and civil liberties, social justice, media, and health care issues.”  But apparently, its readers don’t think the rights of prostitutes count; I guess raped nuns just make better poster children.  What makes this even more disgusting is that the pope many of the replies seek to demonize appears to have a more sensible view of the situation than his AlterNet critics do.  Remember our old friend harm reduction?  Even the freaking POPE recognizes that tolerating prostitution is preferable to allowing nuns to be raped, but do AlterNet’s “progressive”, “liberal” readers?  Of course not; they’d rather make stupid, ignorant, inflammatory statements than actually embrace tolerance of women’s employment choices.

Am I sounding angry yet?  If not, it’s because I’m too ladylike to really express the full extent of my anger at soi-disant “liberals” and “feminists” who are too busy checking off little boxes on their lists of approved beliefs to actually speak out for the single most systematically oppressed group in the entire world, namely whores.  A large portion of the fault for this lies with the neofeminists; their vulgar, foaming-at-the-mouth rants against us and dogmatic condemnation of our work as “paid rape” inspired the politically correct “progressive” position, and the basic human rights of real, flesh-and-blood women must be ignored in order to enforce our betters’ view of what’s good for us. But it’s not just them; one would think that of all people homosexuals would recognize our demand to be allowed to have sex on our own terms as intrinsically similar to their demand to be allowed to have sex on their own terms.  But do they?  Hell, no.  Sex worker activists and even organizations like SWOP are always marching in “gay pride parades” and spending their energy, rhetoric and very limited funds on speaking out for so-called “LGBT” issues, but how often do “LGBT” activists return the favor unless male or transsexual prostitutes are involved?  Almost never; they’re too damned busy pushing for the minutiae of their own agenda to fit a word in edgewise for even the largest concerns of ours.  And how many of the prominent women parroting drivel about “choice” ever own up to the fact that a woman’s right to choose the REASON she has sex with a man is at least as important as birth control or abortion?  Not one damned hypocritical bitch among them.  A “What Is Choice?” page on the NARAL Pro-Choice America website lists abortion, birth control, sex education and “healthy pregnancies” as the only choice issues, completely ignoring a woman’s right to choose whom she wants to have sex with in the first fucking place!

Well, it has to stop.  Now.  Sex worker advocates need to concentrate on OUR rights and stop wasting our time, money and energy on “LGBT” and general feminist causes like abortion rights.  Am I saying those causes are unimportant?  Don’t you dare even imply I said such a thing or I swear to Aphrodite I’ll slap your silly face into next week.  OF COURSE they’re important, but they’ve also got millions of dollars, scores of celebrity advocates, hundreds of legislators and many thousands of low-level activists behind them; they don’t need us.  We, on the other hand, have only ourselves.  The day that mainstream “gay rights” and feminist groups start consistently speaking out for prostitutes’ rights is the day I start giving a damn about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the concerns of white middle-class women in corporate jobs.  Until then, I have my own sisters to worry about.

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Check Your Premises

Contradictions do not exist.  Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. -  Ayn Rand

One of the absurdities which inevitably arise from the concept of a “consensual crime” is that a person can simultaneously be a “criminal” and a “victim” in the eyes of the law, which is rather like someone playing tennis with himself.  In the real world this sort of situation would be rightly viewed as impossible, but legislators and prosecutors delight in forcing people to pretend that dry water, cold fire and gaseous solids can exist in reality.  The most common example of this nonsense is the insistence that a teenage girl can be tried as an adult (because she is old enough to know better) for “child pornography” because she took pictures of herself, and the law says she is incompetent to consent to such; she is thus simultaneously an evil, perverted “sex offender” and an innocent, helpless child.  What makes this even more bizarre is that a 17-year-old girl can legally consent to actual intercourse (and thus risk creating a human life) in most states, yet cannot give her lover a photograph of herself as a keepsake.  For the purposes of sex and criminal liability she is an “adult”, but for the purpose of consenting to being photographed she is a “child”.  It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sick.

But the example I want to discuss today is this one from WRIC television in Richmond, Virginia, which was posted on February 22^nd and called to my attention by regular reader Joyce:

A 28-year-old was arraigned by video in Henrico County [Virginia] Tuesday [February 22^nd] for 14 charges stemming from the alleged forced prostitution of a young woman.  Damien MacIntosh, from Florida, was ordered held without bond by a Henrico judge Tuesday morning.  According to police, MacIntosh drove up from Florida and rented two rooms at a Brook Road hotel.  He then contacted an 18-year-old girl on a social networking website, making a deal to give her cash for sex.  Investigators said he picked her up in Woodbridge, then drove back to the hotel in Henrico.  There, police said the two had sex before MacIntosh held a gun to her head and told her “you belong to me now.”

From there, authorities said MacIntosh posted the victim’s picture online and forced her into prostitution.  Police do not know how many men the victim was forced to sleep with, but said the money from those transactions went to MacIntosh.  In court via video Tuesday, MacIntosh argued with the judge, saying “I don’t know why the police were so upset with me, but they charged me with everything.  I just rented a room for someone to sleep there.”  The victim, who is also facing a prostitution charge in connection to the sex she had with the suspect, was in the courtroom with her mother.  She declined comment.

This version from the Richmond Times-Dispatch of two days later reveals the “gun to the head” as a police exaggeration, names the unknown number of clients as five and adds the interesting detail that Latonya Belle, another woman MacIntosh pimped, is being prosecuted for prostitution despite the fact that she was also apparently under MacIntosh’s domination.

The mind boggles.  MacIntosh could not have “forced [the 18-year-old] into prostitution” because she was already a prostitute, and indeed is being prosecuted for arranging the date with MacIntosh in the first place.  Now, if the allegations are true (and I’m sure they are) the girl was certainly a victim of robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment and possibly rape; all of that is totally straightforward and comprehensible.  The contradiction starts when the cops allege that his stealing her money absolves her of blame for being a whore, yet doesn’t absolve the other woman, Latonya Belle (whose money was presumably also stolen).  Either prostitution is a crime or it isn’t; you can’t have it both ways.  If a thief robs a convenience store and then another thief steals the money from him, is the victimized thief instantly absolved of responsibility for the theft?  Of course not, and I daresay if a prosecutor suggested that charges against a thief should be dropped because someone else planned the robbery and stole his loot immediately afterward, he’d probably be fired on the spot.

Clearly, what’s going on here is a conflict of premises.  The traditional American police and prosecutorial view of prostitution is that it’s a crime and the prostitute a criminal who is responsible for her own acts.  But the new, politically correct view of prostitution is that it’s a form of “slavery” and that all prostitutes are acting under coercion from “pimps” (or, in the case of Swedish Model cultists, the male population in general).  Cops and prosecutors are thus under tremendous political pressure to come up with “pimps” or “traffickers” to arrest, and “anti-trafficking” laws like the new one in Georgia make it much easier (not to mention more lucrative) for the state to accuse any male (including her husband) who has anything to do with a prostitute of being a “trafficker” so he can be made the scapegoat for her “offense”.  But in the absence of such laws or any visible male target, cops and prosecutors automatically revert to the traditional premise and persecute the woman instead.  Thus, in many American jurisdictions whores are now filthy criminal miscreants unless they have male associates, employees or companions of any kind, at which point they morph into pure and innocent victims, their red dresses magically turning white with the wave of a prosecutorial wand.

I think it’s safe to say that MacIntosh was a disgusting criminal who deserves to be locked up, but let’s prosecute him for what he did rather than for some imaginary violation of the sanctity of womanhood.  He should be arraigned on exactly the same charges as would be filed against him had his victim been a cook, secretary or cab driver, and people need to wake up to the fact that what really allowed him to keep the girl prisoner for as long as he did was the fact that because of criminalization she was more afraid of the police than she was of him, else she could’ve called 911 as easily as she called her father.

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March Updates

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves. -  Eric Hoffer

Another round of short articles which examine topics we’ve raised before; this time, purely by coincidence, they’re all about propaganda (the first good and the rest bad).

Election Day (November 2^nd)

In November I told you about a proposed law in the state of New York which would prohibit police and prosecutors from using condoms as “evidence of prostitution”.  Well, apparently the vote on it must be getting close because the Sex Workers Project recently released this public service announcement encouraging people to contact their representatives to urge their support for the measure.  As I wrote in the previous column, this is important even to those of us who don’t live in New York because if it passes there, “health advocacy groups will no doubt try it in other civil-rights-friendly legislatures and even cops in other states may abandon the procedure for fear that prostitutes’ defense attorneys may use the proven legal arguments which established those laws in challenges elsewhere.”

Welcome To Our World (January 20^th)

Here’s another example of others (in this case, porn again) having to deal with the same kind of ridiculous attacks, bogus statistics and character assassination as we whores have to; it was published in Huffington Post on February 18^th:

No conclusive data exists on the harm pornography does directly to the men (or women) who view it, or to the partners of men (or women) who view it.  It seems unlikely that such data ever will come to be.  It’s been four decades since the…[President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography] found no connection between violent behavior and consumption of pornography, but then-president Richard Nixon — much like today’s radical feminists — summarily rejected that conclusion because it didn’t fit his personal ideology.  After 40 years promoting a movement devoid of scientific evidence, anti-porn activists are becoming increasingly desperate for ways to persuade the unconvinced public that sex on film is our greatest cultural threat.  Consequently, their arguments are increasingly ludicrous.  The most recent example is courtesy of Gail Dines and her horror over young ladies’ pubic grooming habits.

In a piece for The Guardian…Dines…claim[s] that (presumably straight) young women who don’t want to have sex simply don’t shave…know[ing] their porn-accustomed male dates will be so horrified by pubic hair that consenting to get naked…is…out of the question…such a convoluted tale renders college-attending young women into pitiful, self-hating shells unable to defend themselves from the second-hand tyranny of the dominant porn aesthetic…

This is Gail Dines. Any guesses why she hates porn?

…Is this what feminism looks like, the sober assertion that when women old enough to legally marry, drive and vote decide that “saying no is too difficult,” our best response is to outlaw sex on film?…Anti-porn activists do not want a more inclusive, egalitarian, respectful sex industry.  They want no sex industry at all, and they’ll say whatever they think will bring about such an outcome.  To claim that eliminating sexually explicit material makes young women more comfortable with their bodies and more empowered to make decisions about their sexual lives is insultingly facile.  But as sex educators have pointed out, Dines’s goal is…to create moral panic…but in an age when female adult performers have their own Twitter feeds, blogs and memoirs to affirm their lucidity and free will, it’s much harder to press the old “all women in porn are abused victims!” lie that dominated discourse in the 1980s…

…In [Gail Dines’] world, women are not human beings capable of asserting their own preferences or declining to conform to the preferences of others.  They are completely cowed by men and they only derive confidence from conforming to the most stringent of male requirements.  I have a hard time believing many porn films are more misogynistic than that grotesque disavowal of female intelligence, capability and self-respect.  And I have a hard time trusting someone who thinks so little of women with making decisions about what policies are best for furthering women’s development.

Change a few words and names, and it’s about anti-prostitution fanatics; the last paragraph barely needs to be changed at all.

A Manufactured War (January 23^rd)

It looks as though CNN is still channeling the spirit of William Randolph Hearst; the only way I can see for them to sink any lower would be to pay for their own Schapiro Group “study” or hire actresses to portray “rescued sex slaves” for the cameras.

Maggie in the Media (February 3^rd)

Most of you probably read Pete Kotz’s article about the Super Bowl hooker invasion myth for which Yours Truly was interviewed (and if you haven’t, why not?)  Well, his follow-up appeared Monday night and though I’m not mentioned in it, it’s every bit as entertaining as the first and well worth your time and commentary!

Life Imitates Artifice (February 15^th)

In the referenced column I pointed out that, while trafficking hysterics don’t do a damned thing for real sex slaves, their propaganda inspires creeps and criminals.  And as I recently discovered on this Russian news website, it also makes us look pretty bad internationally (especially in countries whose journalists were conditioned for decades not to question their sources).  Good going, trafficking fanatics!  Let’s see how much more damage you can do before you’re swept into the dustbin of history along with all the previous witch hunts.

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Mardi Gras

The celebration of Mardi Gras is an episode that never becomes stale to the people of the city, however monotonous the description or even the enumeration of its entertainments appears to strangers. -  Grace King

Today is Mardi Gras, French for “Fat Tuesday”; in other parts of Christendom it is referred to as Shrove Tuesday.  Its name is derived from the fact that it is the last day before the solemn fasting season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, and was thus celebrated in Catholic countries with the feasting, drinking and general tomfoolery which eventually grew into Carnival (itself derived from the Old Italian carne levare, “taking meat away”).  As we discussed before, the Carnival season begins on January 6th and ends on Fat Tuesday, and though there were parties, feasts and celebrations all through that time they were especially frequent in the last few days, culminating in the grand party on Mardi Gras.

In New Orleans, Carnival is the season of balls and parades, with the largest number in the preceding week (during which there is a parade nearly every night and even in the daytime on Saturday and Sunday).  But on Mardi Gras, all normal activities cease and the city is thronged with crowds of merrymakers and parade-goers; some major streets are given over to parades and many smaller ones nearby are impassable due to crowds, so anyone wishing to drive in needs to plan his route through areas unaffected by parades, then park his car and walk the rest of the way.  Now that I live in a part of the country where the holiday is unknown except as “something they have in New Orleans”, it always feels strange to me to go into town on Fat Tuesday and see businesses open as usual.

Those unfamiliar with New Orleans often fail to realize that there are really two separate and distinct ways to celebrate the day.  The first is of course attending parades; these run through the wide boulevards of Uptown, Mid-City and the suburbs and the attendees are mostly families, groups of teenagers, organizations from out of town, etc.  The attendees are largely dressed normally and most of them tend to remain in one spot all day while the parades pass by.  They usually bring food and ice chests and enjoy watching the floats, listening to the school marching bands and catching trinkets hurled by float riders.  An attractive woman watching a parade always gets the best stuff, including special keepsakes otherwise reserved for the riders’ friends;  a rider who wishes to bestow such a gift will generally catch the eye of the lady, beckon her near the float while it is momentarily stopped, then gently drop the prize into her open hands.  Otherwise, the baubles are hurled hither and yon to anyone who can catch them.

But the other celebration is a different thing entirely; it is confined to the French Quarter (especially Bourbon Street) and is strictly an adult event.  The majority of attendees wear costumes ranging from the elaborate to the makeshift and from the innocent to the vulgar, and it’s rare to see anyone not drinking.  The crowds are so tight that most women either travel in groups or with male escorts because otherwise one can literally be trapped by the press of bodies and unable to extricate oneself easily.  It’s not dangerous really, but an attractive woman needs to resign herself to the occasional grope if she ventures into such crowds alone.  Here as at the parades a woman easily attracts gifts from strange men, usually the nicer “long beads” caught at parades attended earlier in the day but sometimes even stuffed animals or the like.

The quickest way to attract such largesse is, as I have said before, to display one’s mammae; shy ladies are often egged on with cries of “show your tits!” and I’ve often been amazed at the buttoned-up types who will sometimes acquiesce to the repeated urging, caught up in the wild joy of the day.  But what amazes me even more are the hopeless prudes who moan, “how can women expose themselves for plastic beads?”  These lost souls cannot comprehend that one shows one’s tits for the pure enjoyment of it, and the beads are just the spectators’ way of saying “thank you!” Many girls (myself among them) don’t even bother with much of what’s offered, and some go about all day exposed but covered with body paint.  Unfortunately, the pagan debauchery of the holiday also tends to attract egotistical Christian fanatics who can’t resist using the opportunity to call attention to themselves with signs and bullhorns condemning the “sinners”.  C’est la vie.

Carnival season is the busiest one for the whores of New Orleans; not only are there more visitors at this time than any other, but even the locals tend to be in a festive mood and therefore more willing to treat themselves to filles de joie.  But Fat Tuesday itself presents quite the challenge for escorts; it can take a long time to get from place to place and many of the would-be clients are so inebriated by the time they call that they pass out before the girl can arrive.  During the day I eschewed my usual dresses and pumps for jeans and sneakers, and enjoyed running around the Quarter taking in the sights and displaying my charms.  I don’t recall ever getting a good call during the day, but the night was different for a reason which requires a few words of explanation.

Remember, the Catholic Church was always very powerful in New Orleans, and though it was willing to allow the excesses of Carnival for reasons we’ve discussed before, it would not tolerate the sin of such celebration on Ash Wednesday.  So from the very beginning, the city has cleared the Vieux Carré at the stroke of midnight on Fat Tuesday; in modern times, this takes the form of a literal wall of cops moving at walking speed down Bourbon Street, asking people to go home and taking immobile drunks to jail.  Directly behind them comes a massive street-cleaning machine which performs the miraculous feat of clearing literally tons of garbage from the street, leaving scrubbed, wet pavement in its wake; once the cops reach the end of Bourbon they spread out in groups to clear the less-densely-thronged other parts of the Quarter.  And once the revelers reach their homes and hotels, the phones of escort services start to ring and never let up until morning.

Alas, Carnival is not what it once was; Hurricane Katrina accelerated a cultural degeneration which was already underway for years.  Some Krewes (Carnival clubs) now sell seats on their floats to wealthy Yankee tourists, and most of the balcony-equipped buildings on Bourbon Street are owned or leased by big corporations so their guests can look down on the revelers; these package deals usually even include throws so this carpetbagger Carnival nobility doesn’t need to bother with it.  But the die-hard Carnival enthusiast never lets interlopers, whether equipped with bullhorns and placards or with beads and balconies, interfere with his enjoyment of one of the last large-scale pagan festivals left in the increasingly sanitized and homogenized United States.

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Actual Working Knowledge

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. -  Henry Brooks Adams

Don’t they teach the concept of “research” in journalism schools anymore?  Or has it been replaced by “cut-and-paste 101” and “basic fabrication”?  I have to wonder, because it seems that for every Pete Kotz or Darrell Dawsey who takes the time to investigate and question, there are dozens of Torsten Oves and Amber Lyon whose definition of “fact” appears to be “whatever a self-proclaimed authority tells me.”  And when that “authority” is woefully ignorant on the subject one gets a ludicrous article full of mistakes which are blatantly obvious to anyone who knows anything about the subject.  For example, here’s an article about the porn condom scam from the New York Times of February 10^th; even with my cursory knowledge of the porn industry and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s antics I caught a couple of errors, but Mark Kernes of Adult Video News (AVN) found a dozen, as detailed in this letter to the editor of the Times.  Here are a few edited highlights:

I normally respect The New York Times‘ coverage of events, but there was so much incorrect in Ian Lovett’s article “Condom Requirement Sought for Sex-Film Sets” that I have to question whether he did any research at all?

The errors begin with the first paragraph, where he claims that the AIM Healthcare Foundation…”abruptly shut its doors in December.”  Mr. Lovett makes it sound as if this shutdown was voluntary, where in fact the clinic was served with an illegal “cease and desist” order from the Los Angeles Department of Public Health…

…Los Angeles has NOT moved to fill AIM’s role in performer testing, though it has been clear for at least two years that they desperately WANT to do so, thinking that it will bring a large influx in income to the city—which it won’t.  But the city has no current plans to open any performer testing facilities, and in fact has not done so.

Paragraph 3 implies that AIM’s closing was somehow connected to the performer who tested HIV positive in October…The exact reason that performer became HIV positive is still under investigation, and the possibility that he contracted the disease through personal contact in his private life—he posted ads on the internet as a “male escort”—is considered likely.

… there is not currently any legislation being considered…which would “impose safety standards specifically on the pornographic film industry.”

…there has not been a “string of actresses” who “contracted HIV and filed lawsuits against production companies.”  Just one actress (stage name Brooke Ashley) filed suit, and it was with the California Employment Development Department…NO other suits have been filed against production companies due to HIV infection.

…adult producers have NOT “agreed not to hire performers who had not been tested in the last 30 days,” much as many members of the adult industry wish they would…Moreover, AIM doesn’t “hound” performers who had possibly been exposed to HIV to get them tested; it simply informs them that they should come in for such testing, and keeps a record (accessible only to movie producers) of whether they have done so, and when.

… there have NOT been “just five cases of HIV infection among its performers … since a 2004 outbreak shut down the industry for a month”; there have been just five cases INCLUDING the 2004 outbreak…

Contrary to the implications of the article’s 14^th paragraph, AIM continued to arrange for performers’ HIV and STD tests during the period when the clinic itself was not open; it simply arranged for the performers’ blood and urine samples to be drawn by outside physicians and clinics, but the results of those tests were disclosed only to AIM and to the performers themselves, and became part of AIM’s producer database as well…

The adult industry continues to question the STD infection statistics promulgated by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health…the County has wildly inflated performers’ infection rates, which are at most 2.4 percent of the performer population during a “bad month,” and 1.8 percent during a “good month.”  The idea that “a quarter of all performers each year” are diagnosed with a sexually-transmitted disease is ludicrous.  The reason for the discrepancy is that not only does the County count original infections in its statistics, but also each time a performer returns to the clinic to be retested before the disease has fully cleared his/her body—which performers frequently do since they are generally anxious to get back to work.  Hence, the County statistics improperly record an original report of infection as well as perhaps four or five retests within the following two weeks as if there were five or six original infections.

… if Mr. Lovett had done even a bit of investigation, he would have discovered that AHF is funded in part by the condom industry, and that AHF’s own HIV testing program, which uses one of the “10 minute” antibody tests for HIV, is itself seriously flawed, and can produce negative results in HIV-positive test subjects for as long as six months after infection…It has also been rumored that AHF itself would like a piece of what it sees as the “lucrative” field of performer STD testing.

In Mr. Lovett’s 22^nd paragraph, he refers to “Previous efforts to pass legislation that would specifically require condom use.”  There have been no such legislative attempts, although a reading of the California Health Code, in a section that was originally enacted to protect hospital workers, implies that not only condoms but also dental dams, rubber gloves, goggles and face shields may be required for on-camera sex scenes.  This portion of the Health Code has been the subject of five public hearings so far between Cal/OSHA and the adult industry, and is far from being resolved.

Perhaps the next time Mr. Lovett decides to write about the adult movie industry, he might want to speak to some people who have actual working knowledge of the medical and legal issues involved.

That sentiment in the last line could certainly be applied to literally every mainstream article about prostitution.  Reporters interview cops, prohibitionist groups and government agencies who are highly motivated to lie in order to protect their jobs and promote their own anti-prostitution agenda instead of simply speaking to some people who have actual working knowledge of prostitution…namely, whore bloggers like myself or any of the ladies whose links appear to the right of this column.

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A Moral Cancer

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. -  H.L. Mencken

Moralists are never afraid to pronounce that all manner of social ills and personal problems derive from sex (though many of them are magically rendered harmless through a spell cast by a priest after purchasing a sacred scroll from the Holy State).  But there is another, much larger group we might call crypto-moralists; they avoid words like “sin” and eschew religious rhetoric, and may not recognize their own moralism even if confronted with it.  Such people are always (perhaps unconsciously) looking for ways to prove that vices really are objectively “bad”; they delight in cirrhosis and emphysema, secretly love syphilis and AIDS and pore over each new “discovery” about the deleterious health effects of good-tasting foods with the same rapt attention as a normal person might read a letter from his accountant informing him that his taxes had decreased.  And when they encounter some connection between an illness and a sexual activity they can’t resist slanting the story to blame the activity rather than the lack of prophylactic measures, which is rather like blaming a person’s choking on the type of food consumed rather than on his eating it too quickly.

These are the sorts of thoughts which passed unbidden through my mind when I recently read this article from USA Today which essentially claims that blow jobs cause cancer:

There’s a worrisome uptick in the incidence of certain head and neck cancers among middle-aged and even younger Americans, and some experts link the trend to a rise in the popularity of oral sex over the past few decades.  That’s because the human papillomavirus (HPV) is a major trigger for these cancers, and HPV can be transmitted through this type of sexual activity.  “It seems like a pretty good link that more sexual activity, particularly oral sex, is associated with increased HPV infection,” said Dr. Greg Hartig…[of] the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine…

According to Dr. William Lydiatt…of…the University of Nebraska Medical Center…the overall incidence of head and neck cancers is going down, largely because fewer people are smoking…but the incidence of cancers of the tonsil and base of the tongue have been going up over the past decades…and those are the ones that are more likely to test positive for HPV.  “It’s gotten to the point now where 60 to 70% of all tonsil cancers in the U.S. are HPV-related,” Lydiatt said.

Although the link between HPV and these types of cancers is indisputable, the association with oral sex is strong but a little more speculative…A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that younger people with head and neck cancers who tested positive for oral HPV infection were more likely to have had multiple vaginal and oral sex partners in their lifetime.  In the study, having six or more oral sex partners over a lifetime was associated with a 3.4 times higher risk for [these]…cancers…having 26 or more vaginal-sex partners tripled the risk…cancers of the tonsil and base of the tongue have been increasing every year since 1973, and…”widespread oral sex practices among adolescents may be a contributing factor in this increase.”

Because, you know, it couldn’t have anything at all to do with “virginity pledges” which increase the chance teens will engage in oral sex without looking for signs of STDs or using condoms because those topics aren’t covered in their “abstinence-only sex education”.  And it certainly couldn’t be blamed on the fact that a vaccine for HPV has been out for years, but parents aren’t letting their daughters receive it because only “bad girls” need to prevent venereal diseases (which is also why the STD rate is five times as high among university students as among streetwalkers).

…So does the increase in incidence mean that recent generations are having more sex than their grandparents?  “The general consensus on the street is that because people’s (sexual) practices have changed over time, we’re seeing an increase in these cancers,” said Hartig.  ”I don’t know why they’re having more oral sex (but) the concept of having oral sex is something that seems less obscure to you than it did to your parents or grandparents.”

“The thought would be that the baby boomers — the ’60s and early ’70s generation — probably had more freedom in sexual relationships in general, including oral sex,” added Dr. Bert W. O’Malley Jr….[of] the University of Pennsylvania.  And at least in terms of oral sex, that appears true for those younger than boomers.  The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that, in 2002, some 90% of males and 88% of females aged 25 to 44 reported ever having oral sex…comparable figures from 1992 showed that about three-quarters of men aged 20 to 39 and closer to 70% of women aged 18 to 59 having ever given or received oral sex.

Why does every generation want to believe it invented sex?  Anybody who thinks that oral sex was “obscure” to his parents and grandparents is living in a fantasy world.  If your grandmother was upper-class and educated at a private all-girl school it was almost certainly obscure to her, but you can bet your grandfather knew about it.  And if your grandmother was working class or middle class and/or attended public school, especially a coed public school, so did she.  Suffering Sappho, some of my generation’s grandparents were in high school or university during the “Roaring Twenties”; if you believe they were less aware of oral sex than you are, you need to read more about that era.

But if the rate at which teenagers engage in it has really increased since 1992, doesn’t that mean something?  Sure it does; good ol’ “abstinence only sex education” started in 1992 and really took off in 1996.  But obviously preaching abstinence and denying information on birth control can’t possibly be the cause, so let’s blame…the internet!  Yeah, that must be it!  The internet causes oral sex, which causes cancer, therefore the internet causes cancer.  Q.E.D.

The silver lining is that the HPV-related head and neck cancers are eminently more treatable than those attributable to smoking or drinking, even though they tend to be diagnosed at a later stage…about 85% of non-smoking people with HPV-positive tumors survive…and tongue and tonsil cancers remain relatively rare in the United States.  The other good news — at least for the younger set — is that there is a relatively new vaccine to prevent against HPV infection.  It’s not going to help those who are already infected, but it…could help those who aren’t yet infected with the ubiquitous virus.

Of course, the part about how even with the “uptick” this type of cancer is both rare and highly treatable, and especially the part about it being preventable, has to wait for the very end of the article.  After all, we wouldn’t want to do anything that might interfere with our attempt to blame teen sex for a cancer epidemic that doesn’t actually exist.

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Godwin’s Law

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. -  Mike Godwin

Most well-informed internet users are familiar with Godwin’s Law, a humorous observation which acknowledges the fact that since the Nazi regime in general and Hitler in particular are widely viewed as the very worst recent examples of human behavior imaginable, they are often invoked when a critic or debater wishes to vilify his opponent in the most extreme manner possible.  Mike Godwin has written (both in articles and in his book Cyber Rights) that it is precisely because such comparisons are sometimes appropriate (as in discussions about propaganda, eugenics or oppressive regimes) that he formulated the “law” or observation, so as to call attention to the fact that frivolous use of such analogies tends to “rob the valid comparisons of their impact.”

He is particularly critical of Holocaust comparisons; “Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical:  I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the The Holocaust.”  A perfect example of this is in the recent tendency of trafficking fanatics to brand those who question their wild exaggerations as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers:  To compare the ancient evil of slavery with the modern one of genocide is merely asinine, but to compare those who demand basic proof for extraordinary claims with fanatics who deny overwhelming physical and documentary evidence and thousands of eyewitness accounts is both highly hypocritical and astonishingly irrational.

But Godwin’s clear statements about the intended application of his “law” don’t prevent some people from attempting to censor others’ arguments by invoking it even when the comparisons it is leveled against are in fact valid.  What makes such misuse more worthy of note than other sleazy argumentation tactics is what it says about people’s perception of the Nazi phenomenon:  By pretending the Nazis were so evil that NO comparison to them, however apt, is reasonable, we essentially say that Nazism was some sort of fluke that could never happen again…and that, sadly, is completely untrue.  People tend to overlook the fact that the Nazis were a legitimate political party duly elected to leadership of an advanced, modern country by the exact same democratic process as leaders are elected in every Western nation today.  Hitler was not a military dictator who seized power in some bloody coup d’état but a politician elected as chief executive by popular vote, and all of his actions as chief executive were 100% legal under the laws enacted by the German legislature.  The Nazis came to power by the same means as politicians always come to power everywhere (namely by telling the people what they wanted to hear), and the German people accepted the militaristic oppression of the Nazis for the exact reason that the British and American people have accepted the abridgement of their civil rights and ever-expanding police powers:  they valued the illusion of “safety” over the reality of liberty.

What this means is that whatever we may think of the Nazi’s morality, it’s impossible to fault their legality.  Morals are principles which transcend human behavior, while laws are merely arbitrary rules invented by eminently-fallible humans in order to control others and/or impose their own personal views of right action.  Some laws are moral and many immoral, but the majority are simply amoral; however, even moral or amoral laws can be (and often are) used for the highly immoral purpose of exerting external control over inoffensive individuals who neither desire nor require that control.  And because this is so, the act of agreeing to serve as a policeman in any regime is at best an amoral one, because in doing so the individual agrees to enforce (by violence if necessary) all of the laws passed by his government, whether he agrees with them or not; he abdicates his personal morality to those in authority and allows his actions to be dictated by others, even if he knows those actions to be wrong.

At Nuremberg, Western society established the legal precedent that “I was only following orders” is not a valid defense against wrongdoing even if the offender was only a low-level functionary in an authoritarian system, yet how often do we hear police abuses (especially against prostitutes) defended with phrases like “they’re just doing their job” or “cops don’t make the laws, they just enforce them”?  If a cop is tasked with enforcing a law he knows to be immoral, it is his duty as a moral man to refuse that order even if it means his job.  If he agrees with an immoral law then he is also immoral, and if he enforces a law he knows to be wrong even more so.  The law of the land in Nazi-era Germany was for Jews and other “undesirables” to be sent to concentration camps, and the maltreatment of the prisoners was encouraged and even ordered by those in charge; any German soldier or policeman enforcing those laws was the exact moral equivalent of any soldier or policeman under any other democratically-elected government enforcing the laws enacted by that regime.  Either “I was only following orders” is a valid defense, or it isn’t; either we agree that hired enforcers are absolved from responsibility because “they’re just doing their jobs”, or we don’t.  You can’t have it both ways, and sometimes Nazi analogies are entirely appropriate.

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He Said, She Said

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality. -  Max Beerbohm

As I’ve discussed before, BDSM is an exercise in trust, and not merely of the submissive for the dominant; in noncommercial male-dominant situations he must also trust her not to turn on him and misrepresent the situation to disapproving and ignorant “authorities” who will then accuse him of rape, torture and worse.  I examined one such case on October 27^th, and in recent weeks another appeared; here’s how it was reported on February 15^th in the Huffington Post:

A Wisconsin woman looking for New York City housing on Craigslist made an agreement with a 45-year-old man living in Brooklyn:  She’d cook and clean in exchange for free rent. But when she arrived this month, she told police, she was handcuffed to a radiator and made to be the man’s sex slave for eight days, acknowledging she left the apartment at least once and returned.

The man, John Hopkins, has been charged with rape, assault and unlawful imprisonment and was being held on $350,000 bail…Officers found the 27-year-old woman Saturday in the studio apartment in the fetal position, shaking, on the bed.  A rope was bolted near the bed where he tied her to rape her, she said.  Handcuffs she said were used to shackle her to the radiator were found nearby.  By the bed, officers found a bag with a ball-gag, whip and a rope.  The woman was taken to a hospital with rectal hemorrhaging and bruising.  Authorities withheld her name because of the nature of her complaint.

Authorities were called to the apartment Saturday after the woman’s mother contacted authorities in Wisconsin.  The woman apparently had broken free that day and contacted her mother, saying she was going to kill herself because she couldn’t bear to be locked up anymore, police said.  It’s not clear why she didn’t call 911 herself.  Police arrived and found both the man and woman in the apartment.

The woman told police she met Hopkins online, and he bought her a one-way ticket to New York City on February 4^th.  He met her at the airport, and the two took a taxi to his apartment…Once inside…he told her she was going to be his slave.  Hopkins forced her to call him “master” and let her leave only to go to work, the documents said.  She had a job as a chef at a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and she left at least once but for some reason returned, authorities said, though it’s not clear why.  When she did, she was handcuffed again.  During the eight days, she was blindfolded, gagged and repeatedly raped and forced to perform oral sex, according to court documents.

It’s clear there is an awful lot of information missing from the story as presented; the most obvious problem is the seemingly contradictory statements about her comings and goings.  At one point it says she “left at least once and returned”, but it also says Hopkins “only let her leave to go to work”…did she call her mother on the first day of work, or had she been in and out before?  She clearly couldn’t keep a job just reporting to work once in eight days.  And if she wanted to escape badly enough to call her mother for help, why on Earth did she go back to the apartment instead of simply waiting at the restaurant?  I immediately suspected that Hopkins and the woman had an online BDSM relationship and he eventually talked her into coming to New York to live it for real, but when she got there she discovered it was a case of “good fantasy, bad reality”.

Hopkins’ version appeared in the New York Daily News five days later:

John Hopkins said he has one question for the…woman who has accused him of rape:  ”Why did you do this to me?”… Hopkins…recalled responding to the ad his accuser posted on Craigslist two years ago looking for sex…[and] said they started to meet up for role-play sex sessions that involved him tying her up as the “slave” while he acted as “master.”  “I didn’t rape her,” insisted Hopkins, who works as an audio engineer.  ”Everything we did was role-playing.  In the game of role-play, the ‘slave’ actually has the power.”

Hopkins…faces a first-degree rape charge and a litany of other charges…Hopkins said that [the woman’s] account is a lie.  “Everything they’re saying I did was consensual,” Hopkins said.  ”She could have left if she wanted to, but she didn’t.”  Hopkins said his kinky sex games with the 27-year-old Midwest woman continued until a few weeks ago when she started drinking heavily.  She left his home, was then kicked out of her friend’s apartment on the upper West Side and claimed she crashed in Central Park one night, where she was attacked…”I’m convinced those are where the scratches came from,” he said.  ”I didn’t do any of that.”

Hopkins said the woman returned to his place Friday where she downed half a bottle of vodka.  He said he phoned her mother to tell her the situation and she spoke to her daughter, a sushi chef, for half an hour.  When they hung up, her mother then called the cops and Hopkins was swiftly arrested, Hopkins said.  “I got railroaded,” he said.  ”A woman says anything happened to them in New York State, and they believe her and not the man.  It’s not fair.”

Note the scare quotes around the word “consensual” in the headline, indicating the authors’ total ignorance of BDSM (they obviously don’t believe a woman could ever consent to it despite the fact that a great many do); also note that though the first story was plastered all over the media the follow-up got almost no press at all.  IMHO Hopkins’ story, though it has a few iffy elements, holds more water; except for the duration it’s pretty much what I had already guessed.  But it should be relatively easy to determine which story is true; if the woman only arrived in the city eight days ago on a one-way airline ticket as she claims, there will be a record of it.  Also, though Craigslist deletes old ads someone may be able to dig up a cached copy of the index showing the apartment ad the woman claims to have answered (like Gawker did for Chris Lee’s ad, as reported in Wednesday’s column).  Was she drunk when the police arrived as Hopkins claims, and what about the friend she supposedly stayed with one night?  And then, as reported in The Gothamist, there are the emails:

Hopkins’ attorney Andrew Stoll said the pair did not meet on Craiglist and, “All of the acts in question were consensual acts between two adults who freely agreed to every aspect of their relationship.”  He showed emails the woman allegedly sent to Hopkins, including one from during the alleged imprisonment, “i yearn to serve my Master better.  can i cook for you tomarrow?  i love you so much.”  Stoll said, “These accusations only arose when my client called the complainant’s mother, to tell her that her daughter needed some emotional help, and should probably go back home.”

What a sad, sorry mess.  One of the two is lying and the one telling the truth is a fool.  If the woman isn’t lying she was a damned fool to fly across the country to move in with a complete stranger in New York, and if Hopkins isn’t lying he was a damned fool to continue a BDSM relationship with a woman he knew was emotionally unstable (though the cops didn’t find her restrained there was evidence of rough anal sex).  Due to the current semi-legal status of BDSM it’s possible for a monster like the one who captured Jill Brenneman to pass a nonconsensual relationship off as consensual, and in other cases for disturbed women to represent consensual relationships as nonconsensual (as Hopkins alleges happened in his case).  Until the right of consenting adults to do as they please in private is recognized, confusion and hysteria take the place of rational analysis and situations are more likely to be interpreted as the observers want to see them rather than as they actually happened.

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International Sex Workers’ Rights Day

Why, since man and woman were created for each other, had He made their desires so dissimilar?  Why should one class of women be able to dwell in luxurious seclusion from the trials of life, while another class performed their loathsome tasks?  Surely His wisdom had not decreed that one set of women should live in degradation and in the end should perish that others might live in security, preserve their frappeed chastity, and in the end be saved. -  Madeleine Blair

In contrast with the much better-known International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers on December 17^th, International Sex Worker Rights Day usually comes and goes with very little fanfare.  SWOP only posted about it Tuesday, and few of the sex worker blogs mention it at all.  Renegade Evolution wrote about this on Alternet three years ago:

Apparently, while I don’t expect Sex Workers Rights to rank real high at all on everyone’s radars, it doesn’t seem to rank much at all on anyone’s.  Even on the feminist blogs.  The Big Feminist Blogs?  One, Feministe, mentioned today at all.  That’s it, one.  Elsewhere out and about?  Other than a few places like Amber’s, SITPS, and Sex Workers blogs, and a few shout outs, I see nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  Zero.  And I’ve looked. I’ve looked on big blogs and small, radical and sex positive, PoC and white, labor rights concerned and sexual freedom concerned. I’ve searched high and low.

She’s right, and it hasn’t changed much since then; most of the sites which mention it at all just republish the same 2009 press release (which I believe originated from the St. James Infirmary).  I hadn’t heard of it (except maybe in quickly-forgotten passing) before yesterday, when regular reader Shelley called it to my attention.  Now, I’ve said before that prior to last year I wasn’t much of an internet person; starting in the late ‘90s I occasionally visited websites, used Amazon and such, but I never even contributed to message boards before the autumn of 2004 and blogs were totally off my radar until about a year ago (I knew they existed but never read them).  So, that’s my excuse; however, I’ve known about December 17^th for years, so why not March 3^rd?

Well, maybe it’s precisely because December 17^th steals its thunder, at least in the United States where the former originated.  March 3^rd, however, originated in India in 2001 as a festival organized by the sex worker rights organization Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, and attended by 25,000 sex workers despite efforts from prohibitionist groups who tried to prevent it by pressuring the government to revoke their permit.  In celebration of their victory over those who wish to criminalize and marginalize sex workers, DMSC proposed it as an annual, international event the following year:

We felt strongly that that we should have a day what need to be observed by the sex workers community globally.  Keeping in view the large mobilization of all types of global sexworkers (Female, Male, Transgender), we proposed to observe 3^rd March as THE SEX WORKERS RIGHTS DAY.  Knowing the usual response of international bodies and views of academicians and intellectuals of the 1^st world (many of them consider that sex workers of third world are different from 1^st world and can’t take their decision) a call coming from a third world country would be more appropriate at this juncture, we believe.  It will be a great pleasure to us if all of you observe the day in your own countries too…We need your inspiration and support to turn our dreams into reality.

Perhaps its Asian origin has slowed the day’s “catching on” in Europe and the Americas, but in the light of the current trafficking hysteria and the growing problem of American “rescue” organizations in Asia, I think it’s time to remedy that.  Whores and regular readers of this column are acutely aware of the paternalistic attitude taken toward prostitutes by governments, soi-disant feminists and many others, and it’s no secret that many Westerners still have very colonial, “white man’s burden” ideas about Asia; imagine then the incredible paternalism to which Asian sex workers are subjected by American busybodies!  I therefore think it’s a FANTASTIC idea to popularize a sex worker rights day which began in India; its very existence is a repudiation of much of the propaganda which trafficking fetishists foist upon the ignorant public.  I ask all of my regular readers who have blogs yourselves to write about this observance, and I ask those who don’t have blogs to please mention it in appropriate venues online (you can link to this column or to the SWOP article I linked above if you like). Talk to people about sex worker rights, donate money to your favorite sex worker organization (or your favorite sex worker for that matter), or just carry a red umbrella to silently demonstrate your support.  And if you’re a sympathetic amateur and encounter anyone who tries the “anyone who would defend a witch must be a witch herself” attack on you, you might respond with something like this statement from an IWW press release for a Richmond, Virginia solidarity event:

While it may be a controversial topic, the morality of sex work is irrelevant when it comes to egregious violations of human rights.  From police brutality, to sexual violence in sky-high numbers, to the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of their work, these flagrant violations should be no more tolerable than any other violations of simple human rights.  The Sex Workers’ Rights movement operates from the perspective that sex work is an occupation, and is thusly deserving of the same rights as any other workers, including the right to legal protection from crimes such as sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and rape.  The movement also strives to give sex work legitimacy, and to show that sex workers are, in fact, humans as opposed to objects.

It’s good to see that some non-sex-workers understand this, even if feminists refuse to.

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Thinking with the Wrong Head

A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past. -  Queen Elizabeth I

It seems that politicians just can’t help making asses of themselves; yesterday I discussed three such cases who probably still don’t realize how stupid they look to rational people, but today we’ll look at one who destroyed his reputation and his political career through actions which appear to display a complete inability to foresee the totally foreseeable.  Of course, that would presume than Congressman Chris Lee was thinking with the big head rather than the little one, which he obviously wasn’t.  Here’s the story, condensed and paraphrased from one which appeared on Gawker last Friday (February 25^th):

Three hours after Gawker’s February 9^th publication of a photo of Chris Lee standing in the mirror shirtless, along with the story of the married Republican congressman from New York’s attempt to pick up a woman via the Craigslist personals, he had resigned.  His sudden exit took many people by surprise, but apparently Lee’s rapid retreat may have been intended to cover up something more scandalous:  two D.C.-area transgender women contacted Gawker, each with a separate story about exchanging emails with Lee.  One produced an ad that Lee allegedly posted on Craigslist in search of trans women; the other sent us a never-before-seen photo that she says Lee sent her after they started chatting by email.

The first report came from a pre-op transgender woman from Arlington, Virginia whom Gawker called “Fiona”; she said she had replied to a “casual encounters” ad on Craigslist in mid-January and used the “e-mail this posting to a friend” function to send a copy to herself:

Sexy Classy guy for passable TS/CD – m4t – 39 (Cap Hill)
Date: 2011-01-14, 8:55PM EST

New to area. Very fit classy, successful guy. 39, 6ft 190lbs, blond/blue. smooth hard body. Looking for a sexy ts/cd that i can spoil. I promise not to disappoint.

Craigslist personals are removed within seven days of posting, but since Google caches Craigslist index pages Gawker was able to confirm that an ad with precisely the same headline was posted on the evening of January 14.  The headline and ad itself are similar to the previously-revealed flirtation, such as the words “fit” and “classy”, and dates to the same evening; it also featured the same shirtless Blackberry picture, though cropped to hide Lee’s face.  Yes, that’s right:  a member of Congress posted a personal ad seeking transsexuals and crossdressers and even included a picture of himself, all without thinking twice, apparently.  Like the woman in the first incident Fiona is 34 and black, and she discovered his identity in the same way the first woman did:  ”I copied and pasted his email into Facebook, and that’s when his picture of him and his wife and his little boy showed up.  Then I clicked on the link and realized he was a politician from New York, and I was like OMG.”  She emailed him a few more times before telling him in an email on January 21 that she knew who he really was, and he never replied.  But that same day, Lee sent an email to his staff saying that his Gmail account may have been hacked.

The second report came from a transvestite prostitute Gawker called “Holly”, whose Craigslist ad Lee allegedly answered.  “Holly” demanded money from the site for email transcripts, but did provide a new picture before backing out of the deal.  This photo clearly resembles Lee; the man in the photo has the same physique, is standing in the same pose and is holding the same red Blackberry, although the photo was clearly taken in a different setting and he’s wearing different pants.

Lee has not yet spoken publicly about the incident, except to say in his letter of resignation that he made “profound mistakes” and “regret[s] the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents.”  But if Lee was using the Internet to meet up with transsexuals and cross-dressers his rapid resignation makes sense; he may have thought if he quit immediately he could avoid having his kink exposed.

Lots of politicians hire prostitutes, and lots of them have a queer streak, but most of them have the sense to hire professionals from a discreet, upscale agency rather than trolling Craigslist or, even worse, placing their own ads to attract liaisons!  But Lee didn’t stop there; no, he used his regular email address instead of setting up another one for his “hobby”, and then he sent real pictures showing his face not merely to one person but to at least three!  It’s impossible to pass this off as a momentary lapse of reason; his actions delineate a clear pattern which every experienced whore should recognize.  As I’ve discussed before, men tend to get very weird when they’re sexually frustrated; their fantasies get steadily kinkier and they are wont to take bigger and bigger risks to fulfill them as control over their actions shifts from the top of the torso to the bottom.  Most public figures have the sense to hire discreet professionals long before reaching the point of total loss of judgment, but obviously Lee did not and the results aren’t pretty.  I don’t feel sorry for any politician’s self-made messes, but I do pity his wife and the people of his congressional district whom he hurt with his spectacularly poor judgment.  Perhaps if our society were to grow up enough to stop persecuting harlots, men like Chris Lee would find it easier to deal with sexual tension before it causes a very messy public scandal.

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