Physician, Heal Thyself

There is no doubt in my mind that the game Dungeons and Dragons is causing young men to kill themselves and others.  -  Thomas Radecki

Every so often I run into an item in which prostitution somehow intersects with some other subject in which I’m interested, and because this one brings together several such topics – censorship, moral panics, infantilization of adolescents, prohibitionist lies, social constructionism, the drug war and Dungeons & Dragons – I just had to do an article on it despite the fact that it’s several months old.

Thomas Radecki has made a lifelong career out of minding other people’s business.  As a young man, he felt the best path by which he could accomplish this was psychiatry:  he graduated from Ohio State in 1973 and pursued his specialization in psychiatry, receiving his license to practice in 1977.  In 1980 he founded the National Coalition on Television Violence, one of the earliest of the “watchdog” groups which became so popular with puritans in that decade; its rationale was that people (especially teenagers) are infinitely-malleable putty whose minds are warped by portrayals of violence (and sex, though that doesn’t appear in the group’s name) on television and other media.  The way he claims to have come to this conclusion is quite interesting:

…his concern stemmed from his days in medical school, when he went to the movie A Clockwork Orange then saw a nurse and ”had this fantasy of me kicking and beating” her.  He became convinced that violent entertainment could trigger real violence and warp attitudes to the point that ”we are taking a serious chance of causing the end of the world”…

His proposed solution? “…mandatory announcements on television saying violent entertainment is harmful.”  Even among prudes, however, he was viewed as an extremist; Sam Simon of the Telecommunications Research and Action Center said Radecki’s “tendency to overstate things and exaggerate damages his credibility,” and Peggy Charren of Action for Children’s Television described his strategy as “the Chicken Little approach.”  Perhaps she had the wrong barnyard fowl in mind; in a review of the Disney Channel Radecki said, “I was particularly disturbed by the Donald Duck and his nephews cartoons …”

But it was a different cartoon which eventually brought him to my attention.  In 1983 the Dungeons and Dragons show premiered; like most ‘80s cartoons it was basically a commercial intended to get kids interested in a line of toys (or in this case, the popular role-playing game I had already been enjoying for three years).  The (laughably bad) show seems to have done its job with Radecki, but in the wrong way; his interest took the form of an obsessive hatred for the game manifesting in a campaign to get it banned by convincing everyone that it caused murder and suicide.  Radecki claimed to have personally investigated “8 or 9 cases of death due to role-playing games, and…[to have] familiarity with over 130 more”.  He demanded that a warning be broadcast during each episode of the cartoon “stating that Dungeons & Dragons had been linked to real life violent deaths”, and testified to that effect as an “expert” witness in at least 12 criminal trials (all unsuccessful).  His “evidence” largely consisted of incredibly tenuous connections (such as D&D books being present in the room of a teen who committed suicide), except when it was entirely fictional (such as a fictitious letter from the scare-novel Mazes and Monsters).

Fortunately for gamers, Radecki was by then widely recognized as a liar and a fraud; researchers whose studies he had misrepresented made public statements denouncing his interpretation of their work, and the University of Illinois School of Medicine debunked his claim to be a member of its faculty (he was not a teacher but rather a temporary, unpaid, volunteer advisor for a short time in 1983).  He quickly fell out of favor after 1985, and in December of 1992 his license to practice psychiatry was revoked by the state of Illinois due to ”allegations of inappropriate sexual activity…with one of his female patients”; at that time he also he resigned leadership of  NCTV.

But really compulsive busybodies just can’t let it go; deprived of his license to interfere in people’s lives via psychiatry, he decided to pursue another effective route of control by getting a law degree in 1998.  He was also on the boards of various anti-drug and pro-censorship organizations throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s (including Tipper Gore’s infamous PMRC) and owned a fertility clinic called the Surrogate Parenting Institute.  As a lawyer Radecki fought to have his medical license reinstated, finally succeeding in 2002; he then moved to Pennsylvania to specialize in addiction therapy.  His probation ended in 2008, but his neuroses got him in trouble again last year:

…Thomas E. Radecki has agreed to the permanent voluntary surrender of his medical license…[for] over-prescribing patient medications and trading prescription drugs for sex…Authorities executed search warrants at Radecki’s offices in…late June.  Evidence was also seized from [his] home…Radecki specialized in treating patients who are addicted to heroin and highly addictive pain pills through the use of a controversial prescription medication called Suboxone…The case remains under investigation by the Attorney General’s Office…

In the final analysis, I think it’s safe to say that the demons Radecki imagined he saw in cartoons, games and television shows were nothing more than the ones which have driven him to anti-social behavior for over 30 years.

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Due Consideration

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity.  It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.  -  H.L. Mencken

Despite my steady progress toward cronehood, I find that I still do change my mind on some things from time to time.  Really, this isn’t surprising; while most people become steadily more conservative as they age, I have become steadily more radical.  The reason should be obvious: as many of you have observed, I am unusually pragmatic and unafraid to follow ideas and observations to their logical conclusions.  When I was younger and far less battle-scarred I allowed far more sentiment to contaminate my moral views, and was much less likely to recognize the extent to which people will abuse even the slightest power over others.  But as I’ve lived in the real world, paid attention to its mechanisms and watched even the best-laid plans of mice and men gang agley, I’ve come to understand that the more control anyone (individually or collectively) is given over the lives of anyone else, the more often things go horribly wrong.  And while it’s true that some small amount of authoritarian violence is, unfortunately, a necessary evil, the optimum amount is vastly lower than that which exists anywhere in the world today.

I’ve expressed many ethical opinions over the past three years, and many of you have disagreed with me; I’ve also read the words of many other writers expressing different, tangential or totally contradictory opinions.  And while most of the time my own positions, developed as they have been over three decades of careful observation and consideration, remain unmoved, once in a while little things add up enough so that I recognize that my previous opinion on a subject was unformed, naïve, incomplete, erroneous or even dead wrong.  Sometimes it’s just because I never really thought deeply enough about the issue; for example, because I don’t drink I never thought enough about the way “drunk driving” laws are written to recognize them as fallacious and enabling of tyranny, but then I read an essay which asked why it’s legally considered worse to drive well with a blood-alcohol level above an arbitrary limit than it is to drive poorly (or even cause an accident) cold sober.  Had the authoritarians not taken these laws to their logical conclusion with police-state checkpoints (now with blood extraction and forced catheterization), I might never have been forced to consider the subject enough to recognize their wrongness.  Similarly, I never devoted any serious thought to the laws governing gender-reassignment surgery until a commenter on my column “He or She” very politely pointed out that my supporting the psychiatric community’s “gatekeeping” over the process violated the principle of self-ownership:

…governments and moralists who presume to know more about our minds and ourselves than we do?  Telling us what we are and are not allowed to do with our bodies, “for our own good”?  People who have no experience (or even understanding) of transsexuality unilaterally deciding that the desire to be the opposite sex HAS to be the byproduct of disturbed thinking, simply because it’s not something they can conceive of wanting to do?  I’m not equating transsexuality with prostitution…but I hope the rhetoric sounds familiar…Those safeguards…are not, and never have been, for the benefit of transsexuals.  They’re a buffer for medical professionals against malpractice suits, and the next best thing for the moralistic assholes in power if they can’t criminalize transsexuality outright…it does much more harm than good to set up an endless row of hurdles that transsexuals must clear, usually with a hostile or uncomprehending system, before we’re “allowed” to be what the rest of the population takes for granted.  Prohibitively difficult “safeguards” don’t make the process any safer, they just make it longer, more humiliating, and far more expensive…

In other cases, however, my thinking was clouded by my own emotions.  As I’ve mentioned before, I have fairly pronounced maternal instincts and suffered a very late-term miscarriage (22 weeks gestation) which still tends to upset me emotionally if I dwell on it.  Rationally, I understand that it’s probably best I did not have children, and that my own feelings on the matter no more constitute an argument against the legality of abortion than my aversion to depictions of male homosexual behavior constitutes one against its legality.  And yet, up until last year it always seemed to me that 12 weeks was enough of a window for legal abortion; despite compelling arguments that the limit of viability (roughly 24 weeks) is a far more logical dividing line, I simply did not want to think about ending pregnancies more advanced than my own was at the time of its spontaneous abortion.

But 18 years is a long time on a human scale, and I’m nothing if not reasonable; though dogmatic “feminist” arguments which ignore or even deny the fact that Roe vs. Wade also invalidates prostitution laws are even less convincing to me than Christian superstition about ensouled zygotes, arguments based in the philosophies of liberty and harm reduction are another matter entirely.  An email I received last July from Joyce Arthur of FIRST (the Canadian pro-sex worker feminist group) contained the following passage:

Delays in seeking abortion…are often the direct result of legal restrictions…making gestational limits even more unjust.  Canada has no laws against abortion whatsoever, not even gestational limits, yet only about 0.4% of abortions happen after 20 weeks, and over 90% are before 12 weeks.  This is what happens when you treat abortion like any other medical procedure, it does not turn into an irresponsible free-for-all when it’s not criminalized.  In fact, our abortion rates are much lower than the U.S. and have been in decline since 1997.  Abortion can be…handled the same way as any other medical procedure – through medical policies, codes of ethics, doctor discretion, etc.  The problem with imposing legal limitations…is that women will find a way – if you make it too difficult or too expensive, many will just try to do it themselves or have an illegal unsafe abortion…

Nor are unsafe abortions the only problem; government powers inevitably expand until they are forcibly stopped, and laws defining fetuses as citizens to be protected by law inevitably result in prosecution of women whose actions inadvertently result in miscarriage or stillbirth.  And it gets worse:

…Our study identified 413 criminal and civil cases involving the arrests, detentions, and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women’s physical liberty…between 1973…and 2005…[and] 250…since 2005…A [Utah] woman…was…charged with…homicide based on the claim that her decision to delay cesarean surgery was the cause of the stillbirth…a [Washington D.C.] court…[forced] a critically-ill pregnant woman…to undergo cesarean surgery over her objections.  Neither she nor her baby survived.  A judge in Ohio kept a woman imprisoned to prevent her from having an abortion.  A woman in Oregon…was subjected to involuntary civil commitment [for disobeying a doctor’s orders]…A Louisiana woman was charged with murder and spent…a year in jail…[for] miscarriage that resulted from [prescription] medication…In Texas, a pregnant woman who sometimes smoked marijuana…was arrested for delivery of a controlled substance to a minor.  A…Wisconsin…court…[arrested a] woman…and [subjected] her to involuntary…medical treatment [because she planned to use a midwife instead of an obstetrician]…if passed, so called “personhood” measures would: 1) provide the basis for arresting pregnant women who have abortions; and 2) provide state actors with the authority to subject all pregnant women to surveillance, arrest, incarceration, and other deprivations of liberty whether women seek to end a pregnancy or not…

For those still stuck in fantasyland about the innate trustworthiness of government, consider that Brazil has already tried to force all pregnant women to submit to compulsory registration and monitoring.  Even people who believe abortion should be illegal don’t generally think women should be arrested for it, but that is exactly what would happen because authoritarian governments totally lack both self-control and the ability to differentiate between an illegal act and a criminal one.  Having given the matter all the consideration it is due, I have come to the conclusion that I can no longer back any legal limits on abortion whatsoever; though I still feel it is unethical for a doctor to abort a viable and healthy fetus without some compelling reason, I also believe it is no concern of the state or any other uninvolved party, and that laws governing pregnancy inevitably lead to far greater evils than the rare ones they prevent.

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Volumnia Cytheris

The tribune of the people was being conveyed in an essedum, lictors with laurel preceded him; among whom, on an open litter, a mime actress was being carried; whom honorable men, citizens of the municipalities, coming out from their towns under compulsion to meet her, saluted not by the name by which she was notorious on the stage, but by that of Volumnia. A raeda followed full of pimps, thoroughly despicable companions; then his neglected mother was following the girlfriend of her filthy son as though she were a bride.  -  Cicero, Second Philippic

Cytheris was born a slave in the latter days of the Roman Republic, about 70 BCE.  Her parents were probably Greek, and her name (deriving from Cytherea, one of Aphrodite’s bynames) may not be the one she was originally assigned at birth, but rather one she adopted (or was given) later when it became clear what her profession would be.  She was the property of the wealthy and ambitious Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus, an enthusiastic patron of the theater, who had her trained as a mime and introduced her to the theater in her early teens.  Roman mime was not the silent niche-art it is today, but rather a blend of singing, dancing and acting, much of it improvised; it is therefore more closely akin to vaudeville than to Mummenschanz or Marceau. As I mentioned in “Meretrices and Prostibulae”, most mimes – like most actresses for centuries before and millennia after – were also prostitutes, and Cytheris was probably in the group of mimes who in 55 BCE began the tradition of ending the Floralia with a striptease (the public sex was not added until imperial times).

Cytheris so excelled at both the public and private aspects of her art that her master freed her sometime in the late 50s, but his action was not motivated by altruism; though she was legally free she was still an actress and whore and thus could not hope to rise very high in stratified Roman society.  Furthermore, she was bound to her patron by a restrictive contract which kept her from choosing her employment freely, and she was obligated to give him free performances (of both kinds) when asked.  In other words he was no longer her master, but he was still her pimp; this is exactly why he freed her.  No man of knightly or senatorial rank could associate with a slave-whore unless she belonged to him, but as an ostensibly free delicata she could be hired by the noble Romans Eutrapelus hoped to influence.  Cytheris was no exploited victim, however; she remained extremely loyal to her patron for the rest of her life, and he treated her more like a modern businessman would treat an extremely valued assistant than like something out of a prohibitionist fantasy.

About 49 BCE Cytheris became involved with Mark Antony, who openly made her his mistress after Caesar appointed him Master of the Horse (second in command) in the summer of 48.  Their relationship did not last much longer; he was forced to give her up by the end of 47 BCE, but the reason it ended is worthy of note because it reveals Antony’s two main personality flaws (politically speaking) and foreshadows his eventual downfall.  Though his family connections predestined him to high office, his heart was never really in it; as a youth he was well-known for drinking, gambling and general partying, and even as a man he was well-known for being fond of the company of theater people, especially mimes.  But the second flaw was the tragic one:  Antony had the unfortunate tendency to fall in love with his mistresses, which of course led to his doom once he took up with Cleopatra only six years later.

Nobody in Rome cared if prominent citizens had affairs with courtesans or other women of lower social class, no matter how many patricians knew about it; what was important was that it be kept out of sight of the plebeians, and given no official recognition.  But Antony seemed unable to maintain this necessary discretion, either with Cytheris or later with Cleopatra. Rather than treating his mistresses as a Roman statesman should, he acted like a young man in love who wants the world to know about his wonderful lady.  While Caesar was off in Africa wiping out the last army loyal to Pompey, Antony made administrative rounds in Italy with the great procession the conservative Cicero (who knew Cytheris personally and disliked her intensely) describes in the epigram: he essentially treated a courtesan like a wife, even to the point of having her addressed by her nomen (inherited from her former master) as though she were a matron, rather than by the cognomen under which she was famous.  When Caesar came back to Rome, he was extremely unhappy about this and insisted that Antony break off relations with her (Cicero mocks Antony by using the word “divorce”) and cultivate a more respectable image.

For the next four years Cytheris worked as a courtesan, being occasionally called upon to seduce one politician or another as her patron required; though he supported Antony until the end, he knew how to play politics and courted the favor of both Caesar’s party and the opposition.  Only one of Cytheris’ regular clients from this period has a famous name: Marcus Junius Brutus, who later became one of Caesar’s assassins.  Her next major conquest came around 43 or 42, when she took up with the soldier-politician Cornelius Gallus, who was also an accomplished poet; Gallus was so smitten with her that he eventually composed four books of poetry in her honor.  It was the tradition in Roman love poetry for the poet to use a pseudonym for his lover; the name so chosen had to have the same number and stress pattern of syllables as the real woman’s name, and so Cytheris became “Lycoris”.  The last of these books was written in 40 BCE, after she had left him; when Antony and Octavian began the first of several major quarrels Gallus supported the latter, so Eutrapelus reassigned her to Quintus Fufius Calenus, one of Antony’s generals.

The flower “lycoris” was named after her.

By the time Octavian became Augustus and the Republic became an Empire, Cytheris (now in her early 40s) had largely vanished from history.  Gallus’ poetry about her was both popular and highly regarded, thanks in part to Virgil’s tenth Eclogue (published about 38 BCE), which was on the subject of Gallus’ pining away for her.  Though Virgil also called her “Lycoris” as Gallus had, her identity was an open secret and she was held in great honor among the mimae; both “Cytheris” and “Lycoris” were popular stage names for the next 300 years.  Though we do not know how she spent her later years, we can hazard a guess:  the new Imperator loved mime, so as one might expect it grew even more popular during his reign; once she grew too old to work as a delicata any longer, the former consort to a ruler probably returned to the stage, ending her days performing as an archimima (lead comedienne) to thunderous applause.

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That Was the Week That Was (#50)

Rhoda Grant…believes sex workers are imbeciles who should be denied the right to earn a living and subjected to state-sanctioned sexual assault to ensure that they comply with the dictates imposed upon their profession.  -  Kate Gould

New Book Reviews

An interview with Xaviera Hollander, now a 69-year-old hotelier in Amsterdam.  Here’s my favorite bit:

It’s not as if she became a prostitute through lack of options. She speaks five languages. She was once voted Holland’s best secretary. She reads Philip Roth and Dostoyevsky. She…calls herself “a theatrical entrepreneur.” Yet she has never regretted her main career choice. “To get paid for what you enjoy? Is good, no?”

Think of the Children!

[Carol Ann Eastman,] an English teacher…in North Canton, Ohio…[published] a raunchy erotic novel [entitled Schooled] under the pseudonym Deena Bright…According to The Repository…Eastman’s students are responsible for outing [her]… the novel follows a teacher who has steamy sexual encounters with fellow teachers…[and] former students…to get revenge on her two-timing husband…many local parents feel Eastman shouldn’t teach high school…if she also publishes bawdy fiction…[she] agreed to a five-day suspension without pay for violating the…computer use policy…

License To Rape

It’s a sad statement about our society that this was necessary:

…jurors…won’t hear about [the] prostitution conviction…[of a woman who] says [Denver cop Hector] Paez arrested her…in May 2010, drove her to a secluded spot and coerced her into performing oral sex by threatening to take her to jail.  Paez’s defense…asked to question the woman about…a prostitution charge…[but] Judge John Madden said…”The information is highly unfairly prejudicial and (runs) a significant risk of confusing the issue”…The woman…has told jurors about her history of theft and heroin addiction.  Prosecutor Doug Jackson said it is precisely that troubled past that…made her an appealing target…

Meanwhile, in Ireland: “A [policeman was]…arrested…after a woman alleged he had raped her…he…was among a number of gardaí working on a…brothel…raid…[he later] went to one of the properties…and committed the alleged rape…”

Shifting the Blame

Lucius Crawford, 60, was arrested for stabbing a woman and has now “confessed to three murders, including the slaying of a Bronx prostitute…Long Island authorities are investigating if he is connected to the mass murder of sex workers in Suffolk County…”

Not an Addiction

In a word:  No.

Confessed serial killer Israel Keyes was a murder addict…”Israel Keyes didn’t kidnap and kill people because he was crazy…[or] because his deity told him to or because he had a bad childhood.  Israel Keyes did this because he got an immense amount of enjoyment out of it, much like an addict gets…out of drugs,” said Anchorage, Alaska, police Detective Monique Doll…

Against Their Will

Careful reading finds the most interesting details tucked away in news stories: “Senators [in the Philippines support]…strengthening the law against human trafficking… the bill…[would] ensure added protection for…law enforcers, who have been recipients of harassment suits for ‘lawful acts done in good faith during authorized rescue operations’…“  In other words, it makes cops and bureaucrats immune to lawsuits filed by sex workers who were “rescued” against their will.

My Readers Write

Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon just can’t understand why some women prefer not to identify as feminist, so Aspasia brilliantly explains it to her.  Of course Williams won’t read it and wouldn’t understand if she did, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.

Somehow, I Doubt He Thought This Through

…[Scott Pipher was] charged with hiring a prostitute…[after] he called police to complain that the woman “shorted him 10 minutes”…[the] investigation…[also] led to the arrests of two alleged prostitutes…Pipher is named on the Web sites National Blacklist and Bad Boy Client List as…being “notorious for booking out-calls and then not answering his door or phone”…

Though the author uses phrases like “so-called escort”, it’s interesting that she thought to consult those sites and didn’t bother to define “out-call” [sic].

Guest Columnist:  Norma Jean Almodovar

On an information page prepared by Norma Jean for the students of Dr. Rhacel Parrenas, I encountered the following chart: examine it and consider the amount of money, manpower and press devoted to “human trafficking” in comparison with the vastly more common (and real) violent crimes.

Follow Your Bliss

Moon Tae-Hwa stares at his computer, dizzy and nauseous from the hours of porn he’s viewed…He feels no shame — only a righteous sense of mission…Moon is among the most successful members of the “Nuri Cops”…a squad of nearly 800 volunteers who help…censors by patrolling the Internet for pornography in their spare time…pornography is illegal in South Korea, though…easy…to find…”It’s like shoveling snow in a blizzard,” Moon conceded…

The Nuri Cops:  selflessly devoting their lives to watching porn so others can’t.

Presents, Presents, Presents!

This week Korhomme sent me a copy of Sex and Punishment, a history of attempts to regulate sexual activity (see picture below).  Thank you very much!

The Immunity Syndrome

Compare and contrast with similar kerfuffles in the US:

…Ganz schön intim (“Really Quite Intimate”) is a 152-page…[sex education] publication…[which] includes detailed…information on masturbation, homosexuality and intersexuality…[conservative and religious groups]…called it “disturbing” and “a discredit to the so-called core family”…[and] called for [it] to be withdrawn…the government in Vienna and the pamphlet’s producers…[are] largely unmoved by the brouhaha…

Above the Law

How police privilege and anti-prostitution laws endanger all women:

…Forest Park [Georgia] police arrested Omar Shannondoah Chester…[after he] forced [a woman] into his apartment…beat her…[and] stated, “I am an FBI agent and you are under arrest for prostitution”…When she said she was not a prostitute, and her children were outside, he…[let her] go…[she] then ran out…and called police…

Small Choice

If this article had been published in the US, you can bet it would be warped to fit the “trafficking” paradigm.  But since it’s from Al Jazeera, the problems are discussed without denying the women’s agency or the advantages of their arrangement:

…commercial brokers fly Korean men into Vietnam to meet women, and many tie the knot within a week.  The South Korean government is concerned these marriages could breed greater social problems. So it is investing to increase these couples’ success rates [via] “orientation” classes [for Vietnamese women]…some marriages crumble [if] Vietnamese women [marry] for money only.  Another factor is the…average 17 years’ difference [between spouses], according to researchers Daniele Belanger and Tran Giang Linh…there have been reports of South Korean men beating and killing their foreign wives…[and] migrant wives committing suicide…International marriages, however, have worked out for many couples in South Korea.  Belanger and Linh have written that “marriage migration” has empowered Vietnamese women.  Girls who once served their families have now become decision-makers thanks to the [economic] leverage granted to them…

Uncharted Seas

Gay activist Alex Andreou on “Why I’m Conflicted About Marriage Equality”:

I…fear that it will create an added pressure to conform.  I recall fighting…in…the late eighties…hand-in-hand with transsexual prostitutes and militant dykes…being chased by police and beaten with clubs.  What we were fighting for was an acceptance of all different ways of expressing love and sexuality; it was a desire for more, not less, sexual liberation…What we have instead is an attempt to absorb that sexual freedom into conformism.  Instead of dragging the world into liberation, we have somehow managed to drag the LGBT community into neo-Puritanism…

Longtime readers will remember I made the same point in “Divided We Fall”.

Metaupdates

Creeping Rot (July Updates, Part Two)

The European Women’s Lobby (a group so detached from reality that it believes a video of a dude performing cunnilingus on a bunch of women will somehow turn men off to paying for sex), claiming to represent over 200 (unnamed) women’s groups, last week “demanded” the European Union impose the Swedish model on member states despite the fact that it does not actually have that power.  The English Collective of Prostitutes responded with a well-linked nine-point refutation of the EWL’s absurd, unsupported claims; guess which one got worldwide media coverage?

Toys for Tots (First Updates of the Year, Part Two)

The Platinum Cabaret…in Fayetteville, Ark…is…offering free lap dances in exchange for donations to Toys for Tots…“As long as it’s done in a legal manner, as long as people are bringing us new, unwrapped toys, we don’t get into how they were gathered and what the process was,” [said] John Staples, coordinator for Toys for Tots…But another Toys for Tots chapter wasn’t quite as forgiving when…Pleasures — an adult toy store in Huntsville [Alabama] –- [offered] any customer who brings in a gift for Toys for Tots their choice of a complimentary sex toy…”Toys for Tots should not be advertised at an adult store,” [said] Ret. Major Brian A. Murray…

Considering how much money US Marines collectively spend on sex workers every year, it’s absurd for some Marines to make nonsensical anti-sex work statements just to please prudes.

Crime Against Society (TW3 #14)

As I reported, people who were on Louisiana’s “sex offender” registry due to the overturned “crime against nature by solicitation” law can petition to be removed.  According to Deon Haywood of WWAV, “around 75 people have already had themselves removed from the registry, and around 100 people are waiting for a judge to hear their motions…We haven’t had one person that’s been rejected…“

What a Week! (TW3 #22)

I’m sure this had absolutely nothing to do with the owner’s winning a judgment against the city a few months ago:  “State and federal police have raided inner-city Sydney brothel Stiletto, owned by gambling identity Eddie Hayson…A spokeswoman for NSW police said the search warrant was attached to a joint operation codenamed Polaris making investigations ‘into a drug and money laundering syndicate’…”  Unsurprisingly, they found absolutely nothing.

Wise Investment (TW3 #31)

Officials admit that they knew their law to hold websites criminally liable for third-party content was unconstitutional:

The state of Washington has abandoned its defense of legislation…that could have exposed website operators to legal liability…The Internet Archive, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation…worried that [the law] could effectively make its archives of the Web illegal…so it joined a lawsuit by Backpage.com…now Washington state officials have…[agreed] to permanently block the law…[and] will pay $200,000 to defray the plaintiffs’ legal expenses, and Washington state attorney general Rob McKenna will “work with the…legislature to repeal the current unconstitutional version” of the law.

A Tale That Grew in the Telling (TW3 #35)

You’d think that in the age of ultra-realistic digital effects, people would recognize that just because someone made a movie doesn’t mean the subject is real:  ”[Sunitha Krishnan] has rescued thousands of women from prostitution and [has taken]…her advocacy to films, through [Ente,] a depiction of a real life sex-trafficking story…The activist…says she has received death threats and been targeted by acid attacks and even beaten up over a dozen times…”  All the beatings have succeeded, yet not one of the acid attacks or death threats have?  How convenient!

The Course of a Disease (TW3 #49)

Kate Gould is not a sex worker, but she’s done her homework and clearly “gets it”.  Her attack on Rhoda Grant’s Swedish model campaign, “Why I’m Opposed to Criminalising the Purchase of Sex”, is excellent, but the comment thread is suffering from the usual influx of lie-vomiting trafficking fanatics and deserves input from rational sex worker supporters (hint, hint).  Meanwhile, here’s Dr. Brooke Magnanti on how the proposed law as written will actually (like California’s Proposition 35) criminalize many human interactions virtually nobody would call “prostitution”.

This Week in 2010 and 2011

This week I exploded lots of lies, including ones about adolescents, the Super Bowl, decriminalization, STIs in porn, the purpose of a law, prostitution terminology and “sex trafficking”, and Julian Assange.  We also looked at bad jobs and the meaning of “legalization”, and saw a sleighful of short articles on HIV, halfway whores, maid cafes, sex rays, spiders, Rachel Wotton, Jill Brenneman, an important “trafficking” study, pompous masseuses, politician sex crimes, France, a pervert prosecutor, lethal butt injections, “sex school”, schadenfreude, Pedobear and strippers.

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Calamity Jane

I lifted him onto my horse in front of me and succeeded in getting him safely to the Fort.  Capt. Egan on recovering, laughingly said:  “I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains.”  I have borne that name up to the present time.  -  “Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane”

The legend of the American “Wild West” era is such a powerful and enduring one that it’s sometimes difficult to remember that it lasted only one generation, from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the 20^th century; many of those who either played important roles in the story of westward expansion, or who were notable for other reasons, found themselves literally legends in their own time by the early ‘90s.  One of these was Martha Jane Canary, a woman who would probably have lived and died in obscurity had she been born in a different place and time; like so many other women she made the best choices she could among the opportunities available to her, and found to her considerable surprise that they had resulted in fame (but not, alas, fortune).  She was born on May 1, 1852 to Robert and Charlotte Canary of Princeton, Missouri, the eldest of six children (two boys and four girls).  In 1865 the family headed west to Virginia City, Montana, but after Charlotte died of pneumonia en route Canary decided to push on to Salt Lake City.  They arrived in 1866 but he died only a year later, so 15-year-old Martha Jane became head of the family; she packed up the wagon and moved them to Piedmont, Wyoming, where she took whatever jobs she could find.  She is known to have worked as a dishwasher, a cook, a nurse, a driver, a dancer and a whore.

Jane does not seem to have cared that much for sex work; though it would have been the most lucrative of her jobs, her heart belonged to the Great Outdoors.  She had been an avid rider since childhood, and as related in her 1896 autobiography,  “Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane”:  “While on the way the greater portion of my time was spent in hunting along with the men and hunters of the party, in fact I was at all times with the men when there was excitement and adventures to be had.  By the time we reached Virginia City I was considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age.”  Since she is believed to have been functionally illiterate this short document was almost certainly ghostwritten, and many of the claims it makes are at odds with known facts.  For example, it states she worked as a scout under several generals (including the infamous Custer) from 1871-1873 and took part in the Indian wars; in truth, she did not secure her first scouting job until 1874.  It also attributes her nickname to an incident which supposedly occurred in 1873; my own theory is that it was actually her stage name, perhaps derived from a drunken attempt by either a client or Jane herself to say her last name.

The pamphlet did not lie about her skills, however, which were sufficient to win her a man’s job; some historians believe that she actually disguised herself as a man, and was dismissed after the truth was discovered in 1875.  In the spring of that year she accompanied General Crook to the Big Horn River, and was sent to Fort Fetterman with important dispatches; after fording the ice-cold Platte River she rode 145 km straight, and as might be expected she became seriously ill and was hospitalized for two weeks (during which time her sex was naturally discovered).  However, it is also possible that her superiors knew full well that she was a woman (see picture at right) and that she was fired for the same reason she lost so many jobs in later years:  she had a tendency to get rip-roaring drunk and start shooting at people (though she is not known to have ever hit one).  In any case, she soon ended up in Fort Laramie, Wyoming, where she met Wild Bill Hickok; she became good friends with him and accompanied him to Deadwood, South Dakota, and it is clear that she already had a reputation by this time because their arrival was announced in the July 15, 1876 Black Hills Pioneer with the headline, “Calamity Jane has arrived!”  Though Jane only knew Hickok for a few months, she fell deeply in love with him and was therefore understandably upset when he was shot in the back by Jack McCall during a poker game on August 2, 1876, even if she didn’t really go after McCall with a meat cleaver as she later recounted.  After Hickok’s death she began to claim that they had been married several years before and that she had borne him a daughter named Jean on September 25, 1873, but gave the child up for adoption when they separated.  Though this is not generally considered a credible claim, a woman named Jean Hickok (who claimed to be that very child and had an impromptu birth certificate written by a minister in a Bible) was entered into the Social Security rolls on September 6, 1941.

Jane stayed in Deadwood after Hickok’s death, supporting herself by prospecting and occasionally working for Dora DuFran, owner of Deadwood’s largest brothel.  It was during this period that she won her reputation for courage and golden-heartedness, thanks especially to two incidents in particular:  in the spring of 1877 she rescued the passengers of a stagecoach by catching up to it and taking over the reins after the driver was shot by hostile Indians, and in the autumn of 1878 she spent weeks nursing the victims of a smallpox epidemic; three men died, but the rest all survived thanks to her faithful ministrations.  She left Deadwood sometime in 1879, apparently working as an ox-team driver to earn enough to buy a ranch and inn near Miles City, Montana in 1881.  The settled life of an innkeeper did not long appeal to Jane; she sold the place only two years later and wandered across the West for a while, eventually ending up in El Paso, Texas, where she supposedly married one Clinton Burke and bore him a daughter, Jessie, on October 28^th, 1887.  As usual, other records conflict with her autobiography, including court records from November 1888 stating that she did “unlawfully bed, cohabit and live together” with a man named Charles Townley; she has also been linked with a Robert Dorsett and a William Steers, all during the time she was supposedly married to Burke and running another hotel in Boulder, Colorado.  The only detail we can be sure about is that her daughter did indeed exist, because the girl accompanied her when she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1893; Jane gave her up for adoption in October of 1895 by placing her with St. Mary’s Convent in Sturgis, South Dakota.

Calamity Jane had always been a heavy drinker, and by the time she turned 40 it was out of control; though all she had to do for Buffalo Bill was sit on a stage and tell tall tales about her supposed adventures, her drinking eventually led to his firing her for undependability and excessive use of profanity in her shows.  He had a soft spot for her, though, and always rehired her whenever she came looking for a job again.  In 1896 she worked for a circus named the Kohl & Middleton Dime Museum, which produced “Life and Adventures” as a 7-page souvenir booklet; even after she was fired by the circus for the usual reasons, she had the booklet reprinted and supported herself between gigs by selling autographed copies of it.  This went on until 1901, when she was fired from the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York after being arrested for public drunkenness.  Buffalo Bill gave her the money to go home to South Dakota, where she returned to Dora DuFran’s brothel and was given a job as cook and housekeeper.  While on a visit to Terry, South Dakota, she died of “inflammation of the bowels” on August 1, 1903, and was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery next to Wild Bill Hickok.

As we’ve seen, the lives of whores are often full of conflicting details, and this is more true of Jane than of most.  Even other people’s perceptions of her varied wildly; one citizen of Deadwood later described her as “nothing more than a common prostitute, drunken, disorderly and wholly devoid of any conception of morality,” while another said she was “generous, forgiving, kind-hearted [and] sociable,” and one of her biographers stated that “her story is mostly an account of uneventful daily life interrupted by drinking binges.”  But whatever the objective truth might be, the legend of Calamity Jane – adventurer, wanderer, entertainer and golden-hearted whore – will be told and retold for as long as people write stories against the mythic backdrop of the Wild West.

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My Favorite Things You May Never Have Heard Of

As a result of a general defect of nature, we are either more confident or more fearful of unusual and unknown things.  -  Julius Caesar

Some of you may have noticed that my tastes often run to the unusual and obscure; as you’ve read my previous “favorites” columns I’m sure I’ve mentioned a few things you’ve never even heard of before.  So today I thought it would be fun to do a column sharing some of those obscure things, and perhaps introducing you to some stuff you might not otherwise have ever discovered.  It’s a big internet, so I expect each of these things will be known to some of you, and each of you will probably be familiar with some of them; if, however, any of you are familiar with all of these, please speak up because I’d like to recognize a fellow explorer of the roads less travelled.  I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of these things are much better known in some areas than others, so if you know of such a situation please speak up.

My Favorite Movies You May Never Have Heard Of

This list has to start with Witch’s Sister (1979), which some of you may remember from the list of my favorite movies (but probably nowhere else); however, it’s obvious that somebody besides me remembers it because I discovered it’s available on YouTube, though broken into 8 parts:

I doubt very many of you were familiar with The Night Walker (1964) before I mentioned it as one of my favorite horror movies, despite the number of big names involved with it; likewise, a mention of the darkly satirical Lord Love a Duck (1966) rarely elicits any recognition even though it starred Roddy McDowell, Tuesday Weld and Ruth Gordon.  And how many of you had heard of The Monolith Monsters (1957) before I mentioned it last month?

My Favorite Actor You May Never Have Heard Of

I’m willing to bet you don’t recognize this face, and you probably don’t know his name, either.  But you certainly know Paul Frees’ voice, or more accurately voices; he was probably the second most talented voice actor in history after the demigod Mel Blanc, yet his name is much less well-known to the general public than that of the far less talented Daws Butler.  He was the narrator for many 1950s science fiction movies (including the aforementioned Night Walker and Monolith Monsters), played a radio announcer in countless other movies and TV shows, and was the never-seen John Beresford Tipton in the long-running TV show The Millionaire, but you probably know him best as the voice of Boris Badenov, Captain Peter Peachfuzz, Inspector Fenwick, Wally Walrus, Professor Ludwig von Drake,  Frosty the Snowman, the Burgermeister Meisterburger, innumerable extras and villains for Hanna-Barbera, and the original Pillsbury Dough Boy.

My Favorite TV Shows You May Never Have Heard Of

My American readers are probably less familiar with the oeuvre of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson than my British readers, so a quick introduction is in order:  the Andersons produced a number of adventure shows in the 1960s whose actors were all marionettes, the most famous being Thunderbirds.  With each successive show, their technology improved; the puppets became more lifelike and the directorial techniques increasingly better at hiding their deficiencies (most notably their inability to walk in a realistic manner).  Their very last puppet show before moving on to the live-action UFO was the little-remembered The Secret Service from 1969, in which comedian Stanley Unwin not only provides the voice of a character named after him, but doubles for the puppet in long shots!  The show only ran for 13 episodes, which is a pity because it achieved the same mixture of science fiction, spy action and whimsical humor as the Mrs. Peel episodes of The Avengers.

Another favorite with which you’re probably unfamiliar is Thriller, an anthology series hosted by Boris Karloff which started out with stories of crime and mystery but eventually moved wholly into gothic horror.  Though not as good as The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents, it still deserves to be better-known than it is.

My Favorite Musicians You May Never Have Heard Of

In last month’s Halloween favorites column I mentioned a song by a band named Renaissance; though my British readers may well remember them, most of my American readers were probably wondering who the hell they were.  Renaissance was a progressive rock band of the late 1970s which, despite its popularity in Britain, never had a single hit on this side of the pond (probably because Americans were too busy rotting their brains with disco at the time).  The song I mentioned last month, “Jekyll and Hyde”, is fairly typical for them in its length, complexity and willingness to tackle subject matter more interesting and challenging than love, sex, drugs, partying or teen angst; my very favorite song of theirs, “Mother Russia”, is a tribute to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with lyrics based on his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

My Favorite Candy You May Never Have Heard Of

Though I discussed my favorite Halloween candy last month, those were obviously the conventional sorts of things with which any child would be familiar.  But there is one sort of candy I like very much, yet don’t see very often; they’re called Violets and most people who know them at all tend to fall into two camps:  they either love them or hate them.  Obviously I’m in the former group, but my old friend Charlie declares that they “taste like soap”; I presume that’s because he thinks of flowers as something to smell rather than eat, but he’s not alone in the opinion.  I was very glad to discover they’re available online, because that means I’ll always be able to get them without having to find one of the rare stores that still carries them.

My Favorite Food You May Never Have Heard Of

Obviously, this is a much larger category than candy, and it’s likely that I cook a number of things with which many of you might be unfamiliar.  But there’s one dish I make often, yet have never heard anyone outside my family mention nor seen it on a restaurant menu; it’s the Hungarian version of a broad class of dishes in which chicken is cooked in some liquid in a skillet, and is thus related to coq au vin and chicken cacciatore.  This one is called chicken paprikash, and it’s very easy but delicious:

1)  Cook about 1 kilogram (2 to 2.5#) of chicken parts (leg quarters work best) in about 3 tablespoons (45 ml) of oil in a large skillet for 15 minutes, turning pieces to brown evenly.  Sprinkle pieces with salt and pepper, then remove them from the skillet and set them aside.

2)  Add 1 large onion, chopped up to the hot oil along with 1 heaping tablespoon (about 20 ml) paprika, and cook until the onion is tender.  Return the chicken to the skillet, turn the pieces to coat them with the paprika mixture, then add ¾ cup (180 ml) of chicken broth and ¼ cup (60 ml) of dry white wine (or just 240 ml of broth) and bring to boiling.  Reduce heat, cover and simmer for about 40 minutes, turning the pieces over every 15 minutes, until the chicken is done.  Remove it from the skillet again and keep it warm.

3)  Stir together 1 cup (240 ml) sour cream and 2 tablespoons (30 ml) flour, and add the mixture to the skillet; cook over medium heat until thickened and bubbly, then 1 minute more.  Serve sauce and chicken over hot cooked noodles, Hungarian dumplings or even rice.

Hungarian paprika is much hotter than the typical Spanish variety, so if you like your food spicy you may want to go out of your way to get some (though it’s still a treat either way).  Obviously, the best time to cook the noodles is while the chicken is simmering.

My Favorite Game You May Never Have Heard Of

I love board games, and have since I was old enough to play them; one of these days I’m going to do a column on my favorite games in general, and Switchboard  is one of them.  I’ll be very surprised if any of you who isn’t a die-hard game geek has ever played or even seen it, but it’s been one of my favorites ever since I bought it at a TG&Y store with birthday money when I was about 10.  Like all the best board games it is simple to learn, yet allows for strategic thinking; it starts out as a straightforward two-dice race game, but because the board is composed of moveable tiles the players can work to shorten their own paths to the finish while also trying to cut one another off.

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Thaïs

Thaïs the courtesan [conducted] the ceremony.  She was the first after the king to throw her blazing torch into the palace…What was most remarkable was that the sacrilege committed by Xerxes…against the Acropolis of Athens was avenged by a single woman, a fellow-citizen of the victims, who many years later, and in sport, inflicted the same treatment on the Persians.  -  Diodorus of Sicily

In order to give the broadest and most interesting picture of the lives of harlots, I try to choose the subjects of my harlotographies from as wide a range of time periods as possible.  I have decided that I won’t write on anyone who is still alive, but that still means I can cover contemporary figures such as Deborah Jeane Palfrey or Robyn Few, who have passed on very recently.  But on the other end, the boundary isn’t nearly as clear; I would be willing to write about a whore of Uruk or Mohenjo-Daro could I find a biography of one to draw from, but it seems as though Rhodopis of the 6^th century BCE may be about as early as I’m able to go; her life story is a mixture of fact, surmise and legend, and though we know the names of earlier whores (such as Shamhat and Rahab), they are largely inhabitants of the sphere of legend.  This is really not so surprising when one considers that we know little more than the names and dates of most kings from earlier times, and virtually nothing about anyone else unless they had some impact on the affairs of kings.

Thaïs was an Athenian hetaera who, unlike most of her profession, enjoyed travel.  Nothing is known of her life prior to 334 BCE, but she must have already achieved quite a reputation as a courtesan because sometime around that date she attracted the attention of Alexander the Great (either directly or through a relationship with his general and close friend Ptolemy) and afterward accompanied him on all of his Persian campaigns.  Her exact relationship with Alexander is unclear; obviously the fact that she was often seen with him demonstrates that he was extremely fond of her, but it is unknown whether she was his lover or Ptolemy’s at this time.  It may be that he merely enjoyed her company; she was said to have been very wise, an accomplished orator and a ready wit with a large repertoire of dirty jokes.

Her most famous (or infamous) contribution to history came soon after Alexander took Persopolis, capital of the Persian Empire.  After allowing his troops to loot the city for several days, Alexander decided to rest here for a few months and set up his headquarters in the Palace of Xerxes.  Historians have varying views about what exactly happened next, but let’s look at some facts and see if we can’t connect the dots:  Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 BCE and, after defeating the Spartans at Thermopylae, occupied Athens.  Immediately after he took possession of the city it (including the Temple of Athena on the Acropolis) was largely destroyed by fire; though this may have been an accident caused by Athenians fleeing Xerxes’ approach, naturally the leaders preferred to claim that the conqueror had done it on purpose, and by the time Thaïs was educated almost 150 years later this was taught as historical fact.

Now, Alexander was a heavy drinker, and after one of his legendary wild parties had been underway for long enough for his judgment to be well and truly numbed, Thaïs stood up and made a speech which convinced him that Xerxes’ act of sacrilege against Athena should be avenged by burning down his palace.  A great procession was arranged in which all the participants either played music or carried torches, and Thaïs ordered the building evacuated; when everyone was safely clear she egged Alexander into hurling his torch into the building, and hers immediately followed.  Everyone else then did the same, and the blaze was so great that it soon spread out of control and consumed the entire palace district, though apparently the neighbors fled quickly because there were no recorded fatalities.

If she ever was Alexander’s lover, she had ceased to be by 327 BCE; in the spring of that year he was smitten by the strikingly beautiful Roxana, Princess of Bactria, who married him and accompanied him until his death four years later.  Whether Thaïs had started with Ptolemy or not, it is certain she ended up with him and bore him three children named Lagus, Leontiscus and Eirene.  After Alexander’s death Ptolemy became the King of Egypt, but though he married Thaïs around this time she did not become his queen because he opted for a political marriage instead.  Her daughter Eirene, however, did become a queen as the wife of Soli, King of Cyprus.

Though history records a few minor references to her children, Thaïs herself lapses into obscurity after their births; we do not even know the year of her death.  Like so many people of pre-modern times we see her only in proximity to great events in which she was involved:  she emerges from shadow into the great circle of light cast by that burning palace, is visible while she crosses the area, and then vanishes again into the darkness on the other side.

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Robyn Few

Until prostitutes have equal protection under the law and equal rights as human beings, there is no justice.  -  Robyn Few

Last Thursday, sex workers all over the world were saddened to hear of the death (after a long battle with cancer) of the charismatic and tireless Robyn Few, founder of the Sex Workers Outreach Project USA.  When the day finally arrives on which sex work is recognized in the majority of the world as work like any other, hers will be one of the names remembered as instrumental in achieving it.

Robyn L. Spears was born in Paducah, Kentucky, on October 7^th, 1958, to Virginia Owen Spears; she had an older brother and a younger sister and lived in the small community of Lone Oak, Kentucky.  She attended Lone Oak Elementary and Lone Oak Middle School, but dropped out and ran away from home either during or after her 8^th grade year, when she was 13 years old.  The causes of her leaving are not clear, but whatever they were she later reconciled with her mother and in fact died while visiting at her home.  Like so many runaways she soon turned to survival sex work, and though she later received vocational training to be a materials tester for concrete and tried a few “straight” jobs such as drafting, she was never satisfied with these and became a stripper soon after turning 18.  As she says in the video below (recorded in Chicago in July of 2008), “I loved it so much; it was so empowering to be able to get up on the stage…I came alive, and for me being paid to dance and to show my body [that] I was so proud of anyway…it was just an amazing experience.”

After stripping for a while she started working in a massage parlor, then later escort services and a clandestine brothel; in her late 20s she married one of her clients and had a daughter, but after her divorce in 1993 (after which she retained her married name, Few) she moved to California and began to take college classes with the intent of earning a degree in theater.  She became interested in marijuana and AIDS activism, but the bills had to be paid so she returned to escorting in 1996 and soon became a madam.  Like so many of us, she never told anybody about her sex work; her activism was directed toward other causes until fate decreed otherwise.

The events of September 11^th, 2001 engendered a heightened climate of paranoia, and the enactment of the PATRIOT Act soon made an unprecedented level of funding available to any government agency which could make even a remote claim to “fighting terrorism”.  And though then-Attorney General Ashcroft had been strongly rebuked by Congress for devoting more FBI agents to the “Canal Street Brothel” case in New Orleans than to counterterrorist operations, he had learned his lesson and justified later whore persecutions with flimsy “anti-terrorism” excuses.  Robyn’s agency was accused of having “terrorist suspects” as clients and she was arrested in June of 2002,  then convicted of “conspiracy to promote prostitution” and sentenced to six months house arrest (during which the trial judge allowed her to continue her activism).  After her arrest, she was angry to discover that both neighbors and supposedly “enlightened” activists treated her differently once they knew she had been a prostitute; she threw herself even harder into medical marijuana activism, but began to think about how people’s ignorant attitudes and the oppressive anti-sex work laws could be changed.

Her inspiration came a year after her arrest, in the form of the US Supreme Court decision Lawrence vs. Texas:  Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in his dissenting opinion that “state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult  incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery,  fornication, bestiality, and obscenity  are likewise sustainable only in light of [the overturned Bowers vs. Hardwick decision’s] validation of laws based on moral choices,” and though the other justices tried to pretend otherwise Robyn knew that Scalia was correct, and that the court had opened a door for sex workers’ rights.  So after a Berkeley, California high-school teacher named Shannon Williams was arrested for prostitution in August, Robyn gathered a group of sex workers to protest outside the courthouse at Williams’ arraignment in September.  Unfortunately (but understandably), Williams wanted the whole mess to go away as soon as possible and so had no desire to become the “poster child” for prostitutes’ rights.  Robyn of course backed down, but the fire had been lit; with the help of her partner Michael Foley and sex worker Stacy Swimme (whom she had met earlier that year at a medical marijuana protest), she founded SWOP-USA the following month.

The organization was modeled on SWOP Australia, and Rachel Wotton (who now specializes in sex work with the disabled) was instrumental in securing permission for the American group to use the name and helping to set things up.  Within a few weeks the new organization was contacted by Dr. Annie Sprinkle for assistance in arranging the very first Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers, and for the next year Robyn worked furiously to contact politicians and get the attention of the media so as to let them know that sex workers were not going to quietly accept persecution any more, and were mobilizing like those in many other parts of the world to demand our rights.  But after the failure of “Proposition Q”, a ballot measure she wrote which would have established de facto decriminalization in Berkeley, Robyn and SWOP settled in for the long haul and committed themselves to the slow, arduous task of reversing centuries of stigma and decades of oppressive legislation.

Shortly after the two shorter videos were recorded at the International Conference on the Reduction of Drug Related Harms in Warsaw, Poland (May of 2007), Robyn was diagnosed with cancer; she continued to work tirelessly for the cause all through her chemotherapy, and though the disease appeared to have gone into remission in January of 2010 it returned by July of 2011, and this time proved terminal.  She died on September 13^th, 2012 while visiting her mother, and there will be a memorial service on what would have been her 54^th birthday (October 7^th, 2012) at the Milner and Orr Funeral Home in Lone Oak .  I never had the pleasure of meeting Robyn, but as you can see from the personal accounts on her website and the many expressions of grief all over the internet, those who did speak without exception of her warmth, her strength, her good humor, her courage and her plain human decency.  And though it’s an oft-used phrase, there is no other which sums up the way everyone in the sex worker rights community feels about her passing:  she will be sorely missed.

(I am indebted to the Sin City Alternative Professionals’ Association (formerly SWOP-LV) for information and links, and also to a group of Robyn’s school friends from Lone Oak, who contacted me Sunday morning and filled in a number of vital details I could not find anywhere else.  If anyone reading this can correct an error or omission, please email me with the info.)

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My Favorite Columns

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.  -  Benjamin Disraeli

Just over a year ago in “Top Ten” I listed the most popular posts at that time by number of visits and number of comments, and also shared those I thought deserved more attention.  I’ll do an update on the top columns in my annual summary in January, but today I’d like to discuss the ten columns with which I’m most pleased.  As is my custom with these lists, I’m going to restrict it to only one representative per column type; I’m also going to exclude all miscellanea-type columns, list columns and those built around large extracts from others’ writings (such as news stories).  With those rules in place, it was a little easier to whittle 779 posts down to this list, arranged in chronological order.

1)  Painted Devil  (August 23^rd, 2010)

It was really difficult to choose a favorite “fictional interlude”, and the two runners-up are mentioned as honorable mentions below.  But this one, the second I wrote, was very special to me because of the way it came into being.  The idea first occurred to me in the late ‘80s, but I was very dissatisfied with the resulting story and it rattled around in my brain for over two decades; though I tried many times to put it together it just never quite jelled.  But once I realized the missing ingredient was that the heroine had to be a courtesan, it came together in just a few hours; the result made me realize that I really could write a story every month, as long as I continued to employ that common factor.

Honorable mentions:  “Concubine” (July 19^th, 2011) and “Pearls Before Swine” (October 13^th, 2011)

2)  Amazingly Stupid Statements (October 10^th, 2010)

What makes this one a favorite is very simple:  it contains the most concise responses I have ever written to a number of common prohibitionist arguments, all of which have been addressed at greater length in other columns.  But for simplicity and convenience, I think this column deserves greater exposure.

3)  Plaçage (November 22^nd, 2010)

I’m very happy with most of my historical columns, but since I can only choose one it would have to be this treatment of the system of concubinage which was so prevalent in early New Orleans that it actually gave rise to an entire culture which survived until very recently.  Several of my historical columns cast light on obscure aspects of history, but this one seems to have become an important internet reference on the subject.

Honorable mentions: “Honolulu Harlots” (July 5^th, 2011) and “The Ouled Nail” (September 11^th, 2011)

4)  Harm Reduction (January 13^th, 2011)

Though the topic of harm reduction often arises with respect to the way society treats prostitution, few of those who talk about it acknowledge that the trade is itself a harm reduction mechanism.  This essay explains what is meant by “harm reduction”, gives a brief history of the concept and explains how whores practice it.

5)  Numerology (January 24^th, 2011

This column’s place on this list was a given because it was the one which first “put me on the map” by capturing the attention of many people outside the sex worker rights ghetto.  But even if that had not been the case, it deserves the position as the most important exercise in applied math I’ve done here to date.

6)  Godwin’s Law (March 5^th, 2011)

I’ve written a number of essays on why police states are a moral abomination, but I’m so proud of this one I even reposted it on The Agitator during my guest blogging there last month.  In it, I discuss the titular internet principle, point out the danger of the pretense that nothing like Nazi Germany could ever happen again and argue that “sometimes Nazi analogies are entirely appropriate.”

Honorable mentions:  “Creating Criminals” (January 15^th, 2011) and its sequel “Universal Criminality” (January 15^th, 2012), and the Star Trek-themed “The Fourth of July” (July 4^th, 2012)

7)  A False Dichotomy (June 22^nd, 2011)

Prohibitionists and sex worker rights advocates alike often subscribe to the fallacious belief that all whores are either free-willed “happy hookers” or “trafficked slaves”; this essay explains why that idea is incorrect and how belief in it is harmful to the cause of human rights and dismissive of the experiences of most of the world’s prostitutes.

Honorable mention:  “Thought Experiment” (December 16^th, 2011)

8)  Frightful Films (October 28^th, 2011)

At the time it was published this was the farthest off-topic I had ever wandered; it also had more pictures than any other, and some of them are the largest ones I ever uploaded to the blog.  It also took longer to post than any other column before or since (due to formatting issues), but it was worth it as a labor of love on a topic near and dear to my heart.

9)  Objectification Overruled (January 31^st, 2012)

Of all the numerous criticisms of feminist theory I’ve written, this is my favorite.  That’s partly because I find “objectification” the most absurd, indefensible, offensive and pie-in-the-sky of all feminist notions, yet it’s achieved widespread acceptance in popular discourse and is almost never questioned despite the fact that its asininity should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.  So as you might imagine, I took particular pleasure in demolishing it with the help of Rene Magritte and Captain Kirk.

Honorable mention:  “My Body, My Choice” (November 19^th, 2010)

10)  Imagination Pinned Down (June 12^th, 2012)

It’s bad enough that the Great Unwashed accept lurid and unproven anecdotes as valid arguments against demonstrable facts, well-supported statistics and a very large number of anecdotes which contradict the lurid ones.  But when those stories strongly resemble other outrageous “survivor” tales, and violate both common sense and physical laws, somebody needs to stand up and call a trafficking victim a UFO abductee; this essay does exactly that.

New readers will probably find these an excellent introduction to my back-catalog, and even regular readers may find some titles they don’t recognize.  But I hope even those of you who remember all of these appreciated this month’s look into my own aesthetic sensibilities.

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Mary Anne Clarke

The smile…was what they remembered in after years. The rest was forgotten. Forgotten the lies, the deceit, the sudden bursts of temper. Forgotten the wild extravagance, the absurd generosity, the vitriolic tongue. Only the warmth remained, and the love of living.  -  Daphne Du Maurier

For a courtesan, attracting a royal patron can be a mixed blessing; on the one hand, such an man can confer privileges far in excess of those available from even the wealthiest clients outside of the ruling class.  But on the other hand, there are unique difficulties inherent in such an arrangement, particularly if the lady in question is either indiscreet or abusive of her position; Mary Anne Clarke was both.

Mary Anne Thompson was born in a working-class section of London on April 3^rd, 1776, the daughter of a tradesman who died when she was young; her mother soon remarried a man named Farquhar who worked as a proofreader at a printing shop in Fleet Street.  Beauty, charm and wit were hers by nature, but it would appear that her stepfather was the one who taught her to read and write; both contributed to winning her a position correcting copy for the shop by her early teens.  An 1809 biography (which she may have written herself) claims that the manager, Mr. Day, paid for her education with an eye toward marrying her in the future; apparently, that didn’t work out and young Mary Anne took up with a pawnbroker who is said to have ruined his business in the process of feeding her already-expensive tastes.  In 1794 she married Joseph Clarke, the son of a wealthy stonemason, but he was as profligate a spender as his bride and declared bankruptcy only a few years later.  The marriage produced two children, George and Ellen; the latter eventually married Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier and was the mother of the cartoonist and novelist George du Maurier, from whom Daphne du Maurier  was descended (in 1954 the latter published Mary Anne, a fictionalized account of her ancestress’ life.)

After leaving Clarke, Mary Anne decided to support her children by a more professional and consistent style of harlotry and so became a courtesan, advertising herself as so many did at that time:  on the stage.  Though it is likely that her only interest in acting was as a means to an end, she is said to have been a natural talent (as are so many whores) and was often described as an “actress” for many years afterward.  In any case, she developed quite a reputation in the late ‘90s and had achieved such a lavish lifestyle that no one man could reasonably support her…which is why it was inevitable that her attempt at such an arrangement eventually led to disaster.  In 1803 Mary Anne became the kept mistress of Prince Frederick, Duke of York, the second son of King George III and Commander-in-Chief of the British Army.  He set her up in a mansion with numerous servants and an allowance of £100 a month (about $5600/month today), but the total cost of the household was roughly five times that.  It wasn’t nearly enough for her extravagant tastes, and she soon figured out a means of supplementing it:  for a fee (£2600 for promotion to major, other ranks in proportion), she would add the name of an officer who felt he wasn’t being promoted quickly enough to the list sent to the Duke for approval.

The scheme might’ve gone on indefinitely had she been more discreet, but her greed made her careless and she allowed the word about her promotion service to spread a little too widely.  In January of 1809 Colonel Gwyllym Lloyd Wardle, a veteran turned Welsh MP, discovered the whole business and decided to make his whistle-blowing even more scandalous by alleging that the Duke not only knew about his mistress’ actions, but was actually in on the deal.

I’m sure you can imagine the stink; the Duke resigned his post on March 25^th, but was reinstated after the ensuing trial proved he knew nothing about Mary Anne’s side business.  She managed like the professional she was and avoided prison, though at the cost of her reputation and connections.  It is very likely that her escape was at least partly due to her foresight in turning over the Duke’s letters – in which he had been far too critical of relatives and other government officials – to her solicitors for safekeeping.  After the trial, they negotiated a very sweet deal for her:  she received a settlement of £7000 and a large annuity which would pass to her daughter after her death, plus the costs of her son’s education and military commission, in return for the letters and her promise never to criticize or reveal anything she knew about the royal family.

The story might’ve ended there had Mary Anne been able to keep her mouth shut; she never broke her agreement to remain mum about the Hanovers, but kept publishing pamphlets in which she said things other powerful people didn’t like, and was sued for libel several times.  None of these charges stuck until 1813, when she was convicted and sentenced to nine months in prison.  Upon her release she travelled in Europe for some time before settling in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, and lived the rest of her long life in comfort before dying on June 21^st, 1852, over a decade into the reign of her former patron’s niece, Queen Victoria.  Though some whores ensure income for their declining years by careful investment, Mary Anne Clarke managed by a little shrewdness and a lot of dumb luck.

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