The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
- Saul Alinsky
As most of you probably realize, in order to keep this blog going I need to do an awful lot of reading on the internet every day. Readers send me many links, I discover some myself, and I get loads of them from Twitter; for every item which I eventually share as a link, a TW3 item or a full column there’s another I simply “retweet” and still another I pass over completely. Most of this latter category are simply things in which I’m not interested, or things in which I don’t think my readers would be interested, or things I’ve already shared, or new items that nonetheless cover ground I’ve already covered. And sometimes I disagree with the author’s spin, yet don’t find it so wrong that I feel the need to shoot it down. But there are others (and I’m sorry to say far too many others) which I can’t even finish reading because of their declamation of absurdities, their overuse of meaningless shibboleths, or their adherence to wholly obnoxious fads; my eyes glaze over, I close the window by feel (because my eyes are glazed over, of course), and I move on and try not to accidentally open any of the numerous repeats of the link in other tweets declaring it brilliant or profound or whatever.
A large fraction of these oh-so-annoying words, phrases and ideas derive ultimately from Marx, generally (though not always) by way of feminism. Even if I didn’t regard Marxism as an abomination against the individual, and even if it were not a failed social experiment, I would still find it bizarre that so many people who identify primarily as sex worker activists (though not many who identify first as sex workers) espouse it. First of all, despite the modern re-interpretations to which some Neo-Marxists subscribe, it is very clear that Marx considered prostitution to be a “disease” of capitalist society which would no longer be permitted in the communist paradise (presumably because the commune would magically make the sex drives and relative attractiveness of men and women equal). Every communist state has criminalized sex work and punished it harshly, even brutally; under Mao women caught whoring were sent for “re-education”, and though the regime declared in 1958 that prostitution has been “eradicated”, the “re-education centers” remained full and top party officials had access to that which was officially declared not to exist. Furthermore, neofeminism is really nothing but a form of Neo-Marxism with a few parameters redefined, and as we all know the neofeminists are no friends of whores. Yet all too many posts by sex worker activists go on and on about “Patriarchy” (the neofeminist version of “bourgeoisie”) and “capitalism” and blah blah blah blah until whatever they were trying to say is drowned out by nonsense.
Now, it is true that some people use the word “capitalism” to mean plutocracy or fascism (the marriage of government and big business). But that’s not the way those about whom I’m complaining use it; it’s clear from context they resent having to work for a living, and imagine some pie-in-the-sky Utopia in which people only work as much as they want to at whatever job they like, and yet somehow things still get made and the toilets still get cleaned. This is a fantasy for children, not a serious topic of discussion for sane adults; yet there they are bleating away with rubbish like “surviving under capitalism”, as though they imagine it was any easier under feudalism, barter systems, tribal communism or other economic systems. The very concept of a Utopia is impossible; it’s certainly not a topic on which an activist for the most pragmatic of trades should be wasting her time. And to do so with paradigms borrowed from people who would like nothing more than to see that trade abolished is as counterproductive as anything I can think of.
But the most appalling of these sins of content is one which seems to have become a new fad in the past few months; some sex worker activists now also declare themselves misandrists. To them I say, “please go home and find something else to do.” The campaign for sex worker rights must be grounded in the right of all people to be free to do as they like with their own bodies; it is incompatible with centrally-planned economies, incompatible with dogmatic systems of thought which demand orthodoxy, and certainly incompatible with the idea that it’s laudable to hate some people for an accident of biology. And how in Aphrodite’s name is someone supposed to provide a proper sexual service to a person she professes to hate? The very idea is asinine. I can understand burnout; I can accept that a hooker might so tire of sex with men, and with the offensive behavior of bad clients, that she decides to swear off of socializing with them after retirement. But that’s not the same thing as hating men, and the latter has no place in a movement which will absolutely never in a million years succeed without the cooperation of the men these ridiculous women profess to “hate”; that sort of attitude belongs in the prohibitionist movement, not ours. I’m not sure why the people I speak of can’t see the self-defeating nature of these negative beliefs and dogmas; those who embrace them are, figuratively or literally, sleeping with the enemy.
A Zumba fitness instructor at the center of a prostitution scandal…told a judge who sentenced her…to 10 months in jail that she’s happy to have escaped her former life…Alexis Wright said she felt relief when police raided her business on Feb. 12, 2012, because she wanted out. “In my eyes I’m free. I’m free from this,” she told the judge. “I have an incredible amount of strength that I knew was in me somewhere. Now that I have the strength I want to encourage others to come forward”…The former single mother was accused of conspiring with insurance business owner Mark Strong to run a prostitution business in which she videotaped clients without their knowledge…the defense said…that Wright became part of Strong’s private investigation firm and was manipulated into believing she was an “operative” working for the state with the task of investigating “all manner of sexual deviants.” Her attorney, Sarah Churchill, said…said self-deception is a coping mechanism for women involved in prostitution…
Fuck you, Alexis. Fuck you for that bullshit story about how you were manipulated, for that bootlicking garbage about how you were “relieved” at being arrested, for calling your clients “deviants”, and for letting your lawyer mouth bogus prohibitionist “false consciousness” filth. It was obvious from the start that you were extremely unprofessional and had no clue about the ethics of our trade, but hundreds of thousands of your fellow-whores around the world felt sorry for you anyway, spoke harsh words about your persecutors, hoped and prayed that you would get a lenient sentence and be able to put your life back together after this public pillorying.
And how do you repay us? By throwing us all under the bus. By standing up there and embracing every fucking myth the prohibitionists have used to attack us for the past decade. By confirming all the stupid stereotypes of how all sex workers were sexually abused, that we never do it voluntarily, that there’s always a big, bad pimp “exploiting” us, that we’re “relieved” when the cops smash down our doors to “rescue” us by caging us, stealing all of our profits and subjecting us to public ridicule. And worst of all, by letting your fucking shyster stand up there and vomit out Farleyisms about how we “survive” the horrible assault on our sexual purity (which is a woman’s only important characteristic) by convincing ourselves we like our work when deep down we just want out. The message being, of course, “Don’t listen to all those whores demanding their rights; what they really want is to be ‘saved’ by the police.”
Some of my readers may think I’m being unnecessarily harsh, that maybe you really were abused as a child (after all, some people are), that maybe you are as dumb as the proverbial box of rocks and got yourself into a situation you couldn’t handle. Maybe you have such a supple spine that your lawyer bullied you into reciting that script as the best way to appeal to the judge’s and prosecutors’ pathologically-swollen egos. Maybe. But even if that’s all true, it matters not one whit in my opinion of you, because the difference between my level of contempt for evil and my level of contempt for moral cowardice is so minuscule I probably couldn’t shove your scruples between them. Even if you had made all the same revolting claims but left out the bit about being happy to be arrested, I might have found room in my heart to give you the benefit of the doubt. But to sanctify the actions of tyrants, to provide the enemies of all our kind (and that means your kind, sister, no matter how much you deny it now) with another excuse to justify their barbaric tactics to the Great Unwashed, is utterly beyond the pale. You disgust me. The judge said to you, “I know that you will succeed when you’re released,” and she’s probably right because, unfortunately, amoral quislings willing to collaborate with the oppressor to save their own skins usually do.
The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind small. - Sextus Empiricus
Some years ago, after I retired but before I started writing this blog, I found that my perspective on human affairs had undergone a dramatic shift toward the cosmic. I don’t mean that my opinions changed at that time (though some of them undoubtedly did, at least subtly); what I mean is that my viewpoint suddenly receded, as though I had stepped away from a magnifying lens through which I had always viewed the world. I believe it was triggered by a period of very intensive study of biological history; since then I have been unable to view the timescale of any human life as “long”, and in fact often catch myself talking about stretches of many decades as “brief periods in history”. Most of you have probably noticed it when I discuss moral panics and make statements like “they never last longer than about 20 years,” in the same tone most people might say “I’ve only been waiting for 20 minutes.” I think the shift was necessary to prepare me for rights activism; an advocate who expects major change to occur within a relatively brief span of years is almost certainly doomed to disappointment, while one who understands that she is working not for herself but for generations yet unborn is much more likely to go to her grave with a sense of accomplishment as long as there has been some noticeable progress during her tenure. This isn’t to say that change never happens within a human life, because it certainly does; the surviving veterans of Selma and Stonewall can attest to that. But it is equally true that many generations stretching back to the Gracchi and beyond have worked to secure the rights of the individual against the state, and that without the efforts of those legions of fighters now gone to dust, the efforts of their modern descendants would have certainly come to naught.
So though the pace of change is usually glacial, it is inexorable. As generation follows generation and the knowledge and thoughts of each who troubles himself to think is made available to those who follow him, more and more people come to realize that society must respect the rights of individuals who themselves respect the rights of others, and that the use of state-sponsored violence to suppress individual rights is therefore indefensible. We live in a time where information can be shared more quickly and widely than it ever has been before, and though that means disinformation can also be shared more quickly, history demonstrates that, as fictional detectives are wont to say, “the truth will out.” Good ideas eventually win out over bad ones, though it may take centuries and there will inevitably be periods of retrogression.
We seem to be slowly moving toward the end of such a retrograde period. For the past two centuries, Western civilization has experimented with the bizarre and evil notion that it is both possible and desirable to force non-violent people to conform to the rulers’ definition of “moral behavior” by violently suppressing consensual behaviors of which the state officially disapproves. And while those whose power and wealth depend upon prohibition have convinced a large fraction of the populace that evil is kindness, ignorance is wisdom and slavery is freedom, the self-evident absurdity of the belief becomes apparent to a larger number every year, and must eventually result in the consignment of the entire prohibitionist dogma to the ash-heap of history. The week does not pass now in which we don’t see more and more people turning away from belief in the beneficence of bans, even while governments and their sycophantic worshipers push for ever-more prohibitions on consensual behavior. These people are never swayed by moral arguments, and only rarely by practical ones; however, they do respond to political pressure, and many of those situated to apply that pressure do respond to solid practical and ethical argumentation.
So it’s very heartening to me to find a book like Prohibitionsfrom the Institute of Economic Affairs. Though it was published in 2008, it seems not to have attracted the attention it deserves; I only discovered it via an article in Thinking About Freedom, the German-language blog of The Liberal Institute. But it is evidence of a seismic shift in society to see such a large number of scholars from such a diverse group of fields – philosophy, political science, economics, ethics, history, sociology, and law – come together to argue against the prohibition of drugs, boxing, guns, types of advertising, porn, prostitution, gambling and organ transplantation. Editor John Meadowcroft wrote the chapter on prostitution, in which he absolutely demolishes most of the typical anti-whore arguments and concludes thus:
An optimal legal regime…must legalise prostitution and all the activities that facilitate it, including the actions of third parties who manage sex workers or provide services to them for financial gain. Such a legal framework will ensure that prostitutes may employ agencies to screen clients or work together in brothels that employ appropriate security and provide other services, such as healthcare. The complete legalisation of prostitution would bring the industry within the tax system and facilitate the detection of criminal behaviour. Where there is criminal exploitation of people who do not enter prostitution through choice, such crimes can and should be dealt with via existing legislation dealing with kidnapping, sexual offences and employment practices. Moving prostitution from the black and grey economies into the white economy would greatly facilitate this…The prohibition of prostitution is an example of bad public policy founded upon a series of fallacious arguments that have gained wide currency, in part because relatively few people are willing to challenge them in public. This chapter has shown that prostitution is a mutually advantageous exchange voluntarily entered into by adult women and men. Many of the harms associated with prostitution are in fact the result of its quasi-legal or illegal status…Prostitution should fall within the private sphere of personal morality rather than the public sphere of government legislation; it is morally wrong for government to dictate the sex lives of consenting adults.
I’ve uploaded the book in PDF form so you can read the chapter in its entirety (or better yet, the whole book). I think we’ll be seeing a lot more books and essays of this type in the near future; ever-increasing numbers of educated, articulate people are refusing to be cowed into silence by the spurious arguments and public shaming of moralists, and within the next few years we may begin to see a real debate unmarred by the mealy-mouthed disclaimers some of our spineless “allies” feel compelled to utter. And once that happens, there will be no way for the prohibitionists to turn back the clock; though our quest to be treated as free people should be has been a long and arduous one, the wheel of time must eventually grind the false arguments of our enemies to powder.
There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want. - Calvin & Hobbes
Altogether, rather a busy week for links! I’m still working on catching up from all the various delays I’ve had since February (including the recent hard drive crash), so it was nice not to have to work too hard on this column. The race this week was very close; Jesse Walker was in the lead at first, then Grace overtook him, only to be passed on Friday by perennial champ Radley Balko. Everything down to the first video is his; the first three after the video are Graces’s, and the next three Jesse’s. The video itself is a parody of this rather unsettling Beyonce song which went so well with yesterday’s “Oscillation” I used it today. The second video is a mock newsreel referring to the events in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and the links between the two were provided by Mistress Matisse (“Calvin and Hobbes”), Feminist Whore (“fallacies”), Aspasia (“Call of Cthulhu”), Walter Olson (“litigious”), Nine (“El Salvador”), Jemima (“negative impact”), and Krulac (“cronyism”).
This essay first appeared on Cliterati on April 21st; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.
Most people yearn for a simple world where the goodies wear white hats and the baddies black, where people and behaviors can be easily sorted into neat little boxes, where good intentions lead to good outcomes and bad intentions lead to harm, and where everyone agrees on hierarchies of morality and the relative importance of different principles such as profit, honesty, self-respect, adherence to external mores, etc. But the real world isn’t like that at all: morality and motivations are often ambiguous, different individuals assign different weights to various principles, noble intentions can lead to disaster and base to commonweal, and the few people who wear “hats” at all favor a multiplicity of shades.
An article by Hsiao-Hung Pai in the Guardian illustrates this complicated reality in several different ways, the first being the venue itself; though the Guardian is happy to provide a platform for prudes and prohibitionists, it is equally amenable to publishing pro-sex worker articles and carried one of the earliest debunkings of “sex trafficking” hysteria three and a half years ago. This has nothing to do with any lofty journalistic ethos; the primary motivation of a newspaper is to make a profit, and from the perspective of the editorial board any good or ill to sex workers which occurs as a by-product of that process is purely incidental. The motive of the reporter herself (to write and sell a book) was similar to that of the paper, but her behavior went beyond the merely amoral to the reprehensible; in furtherance of her goal she lied, misrepresented herself, spied on sex workers, recorded their conversations without their consent and used their stories to generate profit for herself, and it is entirely possible that her actions may result in brothel raids and other dire consequences for her unwilling sources.
Though the book was researched unethically, if this excerpt is a fair indication it depicts migrant women as free agents motivated by the desire to provide for their families:
Ah Fen…had been in Britain for four years. During the first two years, like many newly arrived Chinese, she worked in catering. In the third year she was laid off amid increasing raids on Chinese restaurants by the immigration authorities. A friend introduced her to the sex trade. With no skills to find other work, she accepted immediately. She told me it was the best decision she had made during her time in Britain: her income had gone through the roof and the money she had been able to send home was making a real difference to her family. ”In a good week, I can earn £1,500 to £2,000,” she told me…Another [named]…Ah Ling…[said] “I wasted my first three years in England working in restaurants and takeaways doing tough work with little reward…A year ago, a friend of mine in the sex trade suggested I try doing this. She said: ‘Try it once and see if you are OK with it.’ Frankly, I had no real alternatives…Now I regret not having started it as soon as I got here.” Sex work had transformed Ah Ling’s life. She had paid off all her debts within a year and was earning £600 a week. Her current aim was to pay for a new house back home for her family, and return after two more years of sex work…
On the other hand, those heavily invested in “trafficking” myth see this through a distorted filter; one reviewer on Amazon called her reckless disregard for the welfare of migrant sex workers “compassionate” and claimed, “Hsiao-Hung Pai…videotaped the underworld of pimps and madams who make their living off slaving women in need…[and] deflates the myth of sex work as a free choice for migrant women.” This “true believer” denies the testimony of the workers, refers to a £2,000/week job as “slavery” and otherwise warps the narrative to her own ends; similarly, some of the post-article commenters insist on imposing Christian concepts of female sexual purity onto Asian women who do not share it, derailing nuanced discussions of pragmatism with lurid appeals to emotion. Yet at the same time, anyone who reads the text without the filter of “trafficking” dogma can see that it actually demonstrates the falsity of that paradigm, and adds more evidence to the growing heap which will eventually demolish it; many examples of such readers also appear in the comments. In the end, will the net effect of Hsiao-Hung’s self-serving, callous “investigation” be positive or negative? Will it ever be possible to tell?
For the final layer of complexity, we must look to the text itself. The brothel madam described therein (“Grace”) is a thoroughly nasty person, as self-centered, mercenary and unconcerned with others’ welfare as the newspaper and the journalist. But compare her actions with Hsiao-Hung’s; though the latter’s profession is “respectable” and the prohibitionists laud her work as “good” while painting the former’s as despicable, their own actions demonstrate otherwise. Though Grace was rude and abusive, her coercion was strictly verbal and situational; women were free to walk away and find other work (even sex work with a different madam) if they chose. The journalist, however, denied her subjects the information they needed to “opt out” of participating in her commercial enterprise; they were recorded without their knowledge or consent. Furthermore, the sex workers profited handsomely from putting up with Grace’s abuse, whereas their only reward from being “pimped” by Hsiao-Hung is having their lives offered up for scrutiny by judgmental prudes and their persons potentially targeted for harassment, detention and deportation. Who is the true “exploiter” here? Who are the “goodies” and who the “baddies”? In a world without scripts, stereotypes and endings neatly resolved just in time for the closing credits, these questions are a lot more complicated than in the two-dimensional, black-and-white world imagined by naïve moralists.
Feminism still feels like someone rescuing me from the patriarchy so that I may be told what to do by “sisters” who need to get their opinions out of my knickers. - Sarah Woolley
Justice minister Francisco Dominguez’s warning…that…men…who seek [paid] sex…will be…[prosecuted] has roiled [Dominican] workers… “There are customers who’ve called us to tell us that they won’t come”…said Carla Matos…who…said she had to become a prostitute…to raise her children…”What we’ll have to do in a couple of days will be to go out and rob and kill people, because imagine, we can’t do nothing else. I will not let my children starve,” [Jennifer] Paniagua said.
Not only is “prostitution” a tagged skill you can select on LinkedIn, there are actually escorts who advertise their services [there]…[but] LinkedIn…now explicitly bans escorts from using the site…The new user agreement states that you must not: ”Create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution” even if [they are] legal where you live…Not only can you list “prostitution” as a skill, you can list a whole lot of other unsavory skills like “rape,” “shoplifting,” “gangs,” “manslaughter,” and “drug trafficking”…
…Shona Langley, a street sex worker support officer, and Charlotte Crossland, a harm reduction nurse…[work for] the Harm Reduction project…[in] Lancashire…twice a week…they load their van with…condoms, panic alarms, needles and bank note checker pens, while Charlotte offers Hepatitis B and other vaccinations…[and] treatment for minor health issues…Shona said: “We don’t judge. We are not here to criticise or bully them into stopping what they do”…
Feminists at Cambridge University lead such privileged, unchallenging lives that they imagine jelly wrestling (girls grappling in gelatin in front of male spectators) has “a significant role to play in the degradation and abuse of women,” and imagine they’ve won a great victory for womankind via a petition which caused the event to be cancelled. Sarah Woolley explains why this is pure bollocks:
…”objectification” is a herd word used by women who can rarely recall the name of their last waitress…If a person sees a woman arse-deep in jelly and regards her as subhuman because of it, then that shit is on them…it takes more than nudity to cancel out a man’s regard for a woman as a human being. There will be misogynists in any crowd but –newsflash- a true woman hater will dehumanise you no matter how you behave or what you wear…Cambridge feminists …[are affiliated] with Object…a group known for lobbying against sex worker rights and for spreading irresponsible misinformation -particularly the fantasy that the Olympics would usher in an “explosion of prostitution.” Also on the list is “Smash Miss Contest” who “set off stink bombs”…at beauty pageants…
…mayoral candidates…argued for tougher penalties. Joseph J. Lhota…[called] for “a john list every day in the newspaper”…Adolfo Carrión Jr…went further, saying he would publish their license plate numbers…the moderator…took note of Edward I. Koch’s controversial directive…to read the names of convicted male customers on air…Christine C. Quinn…said she disagreed with publicizing the names…[but] favored an “incredibly effective” program in Brooklyn…that forces “johns” to sit through a program intended to deter bad behavior…
Translation: ”There’s no evidence whatsoever and the real experts say otherwise, but this makes a perfect excuse to ask for more power to stick our noses into people’s private business.”
Prostitutes helped clean up the streets of Murcia, Spain, in an effort to draw attention to…[a] proposed bylaw…aimed at curbing prostitution and sexual exploitation [which] would damage [their] livelihood…”We’ve spoken with neighbors and local business owners and…they’ve told us that there’s no problem as long as we follow some of the requests that they’ve made, such as sticking to a timetable and keeping the streets clean…That’s why we decided to hold a clean-up day. We wanted to show that we…want to get on well with everyone”…
As I predicted, the cancer of incredibly-broad “sex trafficking” laws based on the CASE Act is spreading, now to Pennsylvania:
…House Bill 663, which was unanimously passed 195-0…expands what the state considers “commercial sex acts” and raises the crime of buying or selling people for sex work from a third-degree to a…first-degree felony. Under the new bill, the definition of commercial sex includes being forced to perform “any sexual activity…in which anything of value is given…or received”…
The bill’s sponsor complains that the “current law is vague”, but what he actually means is that it isn’t vague enough.
Another would-be ally misses the bus by not bothering to check with sex workers first; though she makes several very good arguments against criminalization and recognizes from the title on that sex work is work, she also overestimates the role of pimps and the prevalence of street work, accepts the false “sex trafficking” dichotomy, supports regulation and licensing and ends by undermining her own argument with the typical mealy-mouthed disclaimer, “I am not endorsing the act of selling sex.”
Cecilia Flores-Oebanda has…become the face of the Philippines anti-trafficking movement…but now she is fighting a battle that could truly ruin her. Fraud allegations made by Philippine investigators threaten to destroy her reputation and the anti-trafficking organization she’s run for more than two decades…
Nonetheless, the credulous CNN reporters spends about 95% of the story lauding her and repeating her bullshit stories, apparently forgetting about that word “fraud”.
The owners of an over-21s nightclub in Inverness have been issued a licence to introduce lap dancing…Rhoda Grant…said…“The commodification of woman in society is damaging and I would have hoped the objections raised by the Highland Violence Against Women Strategy Group would have been listened to”…
…Osaka Mayor…Toru Hashimoto…told reporters…that Japan’s wartime sex slave system… “were necessary in order to provide relaxation for those brave soldiers who had been in the line of fire”…Hours later [he said]…he’d…told [U.S. military brass] that…there were legal facilities for releasing sexual energy, and that unless soldiers in Okinawa made more use of similar facilities, it would be difficult to control the sexual energy of the marines…
The media have conflated two totally different statements. What Hashimoto said about military personnel needing whores is true and every experienced commander knows it, no matter what political crap the Pentagon may emit. But that isn’t the same as his disgusting rationalization of the enslavement of the comfort women, who were neither professional sex workers nor volunteers.
“anti-trafficking”…essentialises gender and childhood, it confuses and obfuscates, and…it…acts against the interests of many that it purports to serve…the state is directly and inescapably the source of vulnerability…those formally excluded are given…the right NOT to enter, to be protected from movement. The [victim of "trafficking"]…is supposed to return home. Indeed the narrative is that she wants to return home, and part of her innocence and victimhood is that she never wanted to move in the first place…immigration controls are claimed to be a mechanism of protection for migrants, rather than a mechanism of oppression…
…data is often taken from methodologies that are not…estimates…media…have often reported that 79% of trafficking is for sexual exploitation, based on the “Global Report on Trafficking in Persons” by UNODC…[but] the data is of victims identified by state authorities and of convicted traffickers…The internationally recognized definition of human trafficking states the purpose of human trafficking is for exploitation…yet [it] is…equated with sex work or irregular…migration…as a result…data on trafficked persons almost exclusively focused on women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation…
The feminist antiporn group Stop Porn Culture has sponsored a petition…to change the editorial board and title of Routledge’s forthcoming…publication, Porn Studies…Constance Penley…co-editor of The Feminist Porn Book…[said] “[The petition] reveals a total lack of understanding about academic freedom, academic integrity and the nature of scholarship…and…how desperate the antiporn people are to prevent any research being done that might not support their ideological position”…
St. John’s, Newfoundland has just over 200,000 people, which means fewer than 100,000 males. The escort interviewed for this article (“Iris”) says there are about 30 escorts working there full-time, and doing such good business travelling girls are stopping in as well. Now, ask yourself: is it credible that only about 14,000 of those men have ever paid, that the majority of those who did are now regulars and that those working girls are doing well on an average of 1 client per day? Or is it more likely that the claim few men ever pay for sex is completely absurd? As Iris said, “We wouldn’t be doing this well if your husbands and boyfriends and friends weren’t coming to see us. It’s that simple.”
This essay first appeared in Cliterati on April 14th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
Intellectual laziness can manifest itself in many ways, of which one of the most common (and irrational) is black and white thinking. Humans are highly variable creatures whose characteristics, behaviors, beliefs, preferences, tastes, etc are often very different from one another; between the two most extreme points on any scale there are an incalculable number of different positions, and in any population one is likely to find as many different opinions on any given subject as there are people. But one would never know this from talking to the dualist; he insists on pretending that everyone is clustered near the endpoints, and willfully ignores every shade of grey in between. But this view of human reality is not only limited, it’s wrong; on most subjects, only a small minority of individuals can be found in those extreme endpoints, and the great majority fall somewhere in the middle.
What makes this fallacious dichotomization even worse is that people who might not be inclined to think that way often fall into it as a response to someone else’s extreme viewpoint. For example, when faced with the bogus claim that some drug (cannabis, for instance) is universally horrible, destructive and addictive, some supporters of drug decriminalization respond with equally-spurious claims that the drug is a physical or spiritual panacea. The truth is not only in between those two points, but also varies with individuals; any given drug has both beneficial effects and harmful effects, and the proportion of one to the other can vary considerably between individuals. Each individual must decide whether the drug is right for him, and in a free society he is allowed to make that decision for himself without fear of authoritarian violence. And though there are ample moral reasons to support the principle of self-determination, there are practical reasons as well: criminalizing consensual behavior adds artificial harmful effects to those inherent in it, and makes it much more difficult for anyone to make an informed choice because data about criminalized activities is often hidden or distorted.
Sex work provides good examples of this syndrome on both sides of the transaction, worker and client. Under criminalization and even quasi-criminalization (i.e. legalization schemes which criminalize some actions such as solicitation, kerb crawling, brothel-keeping, etc) prostitution is pushed into the shadows due to fear of arrest or other police harassment, thus creating dangers not inherent in the work itself. It also becomes impossible to collect comprehensive and reliable data on the subject, and as a result prohibitionists are free to make the sort of outlandish claims with which everyone is familiar (all sex workers have pimps, we were all abused as children and/or suffer from PTSD, the average age at debut is 13, most of us are coerced, etc, etc, ad nauseam). Unfortunately, in reacting to these lies many sex workers espouse a false dichotomy; as I explained in my column of that name,
…they believe there are two and only two kinds of prostitutes, free-willed high-dollar independent escorts and pimped, coerced slaves. This, of course, is pure poppycock…The only people who…have…absolutely free choice to do any kind of work are the Paris Hiltons of the world, those who have a guaranteed inheritance, income and secured future no matter what they choose to do with the present. Every other person has no choice but to work in some fashion; the choice not to work at all simply doesn’t exist unless one considers starvation an option. At that point, then, the choice boils down to what kind of work one is able and willing to do.
Some harlots absolutely adore their work; others like it but don’t love it; others tolerate it for the high income and flexibility; still others dislike it but prefer it to their other options; and some dislike or hate it but have no other options (due sometimes to literal coercion, but more often to conditions such as drug addiction or a criminal record). The distribution may be fairly even along the spectrum, or it may be a classic bell curve; it’s difficult to be sure because of the issues discussed above. But one thing is certain; the majority lie not on the ends, but somewhere in the middle.
Clients are, if anything, even harder to get data on than sex workers; after all, even in countries where prostitution is decriminalized most men have good reasons to be discreet (including wives and social stigma). In the 19th century nearly every man paid for sex from time to time, but as sexual mores progressively relaxed decade by decade in the 20th, that fraction undoubtedly dropped because at least some men could obtain casual sex without direct payment. In the 1940s Kinsey found that 69% of men had paid for sex at least once in their lives, and though it’s probably lower now (due, again, to the increased availability of “free” sex), it still gives us a reasonable baseline to work from. But when we look at modern claims about this percentage, we find them all over the map. A few studies still produce reasonable figures, but most go wildly in one direction or another due mostly to questions and categorization criteria specifically designed to give the “researcher” exactly what she’s looking for. On the one extreme, early in 2011 the well-known prohibitionist Melissa Farley defined “paying for sex” so broadly she literally couldn’t find any men who hadn’t (and therefore had to redesign the parameters to produce a less-obviously-bogus result). On the other, the General Social Survey claims only 14% have ever paid, a figure so ludicrously low the industry would collapse; reader Kevin Wilson (a research consultant) showed that when taken with other claims from the survey, this would mean the average American sex worker only has about 10 clients per year (a number I exceeded every week of my career).
Obviously, neither of these extreme claims can be true; logic dictates that the fraction of men paying for sex now could neither be higher than it was before the sexual revolution made casual sex socially acceptable, nor too low to support the observable economic reality. The most credible studies I’ve seen indicate that though a slight majority of men have directly paid for sex at least once, most don’t repeat the experience; about 20% of all men do it occasionally and 6% regularly. So once again, we see the same pattern; sex-worker-hiring is neither ubiquitous nor rare but, like most other human behaviors, somewhere in the middle.
An inability to tell fantasy from reality would normally be considered evidence of psychosis, but in law enforcement it’s a job requirement. - Maggie McNeill
Since at least the time of Plato, the natural world was generally viewed in Western thought as corrupt, foul and bad; this idea entered Christianity via Gnosticism and dominated philosophy until the advent of the Romantic Era in the late 18th century. Anything of the natural world (including, of course, sex) was to be looked down upon and avoided wherever possible; the things of the mind and spirit were what was important, and those who wished to appear superior to others removed themselves from the natural world and eschewed the “pleasures of the flesh” (at least in public). The Romantics, however, rejected all that; they taught that the natural world was innately good, that childhood “innocence” (i.e. closeness to the natural state) was a thing to be cherished, that primitive people were “noble savages” and that “natural” living was purer and better than “artificial”. This was decidedly a minority viewpoint; the growing middle class of 19th-century Europe and America still saw untamed Nature as rather nasty, and those who lived closer to it than they (in other words, the working class) as inferiors to be “improved” by curing them of their dedication to physical pleasures such as sex and liquor.
But humans are not known for logical consistency, and the bourgeois less so than most; as the Victorian Era wore on, some elements of Romantic philosophy were absorbed into the common weltanschauung, even when they contradicted other aspects of it. For example, the “innocence” of children became the center of a veritable cult despite the fact that adults were expected to behave in an incredibly artificial manner, and “natural” foods and medicines were all the rage in the “social purity” crowd because they were believed to excite the (natural) physical passions less than highly processed ones! But if the Victorians’ beliefs were incongruous, those of the neo-Victorians are even worse: while they reject the belief that sex is innately bad, they also believe against all reason and evidence that it’s something like a radioactive material which must be handled with special and elaborate precautions or else it becomes the single most destructive force on Earth. They imagine that engaging in sex for the “wrong” reasons, or without the benediction of elaborate rituals of consent, or with people separated from one another by more than a very few years of age, is terribly harmful. They believe that merely taking pictures of the taboo act creates a kind of Gorgonic icon which drives its viewers mad, and that the mere existence of such images harms women and children who are not even in close proximity to it. And they fervently assert that it is so incredibly dangerous to the sacred “innocence” of “children” (a term which refers not to true children, but to a ritual category which actually includes some adults), for strangers to even imagine sexual contact with them causes such tremendous harm that those who indulge in these Forbidden Thoughts deserve penalties greater than those for violent assault, followed by lifelong social ostracism.
Needless to say, most of this has only the most tenuous basis in reality, and some of it none at all. But the desire to describe Nature (especially sex) as “good” or “bad” is a very strong one, and for the neo-Victorian mind to accept sex into the “good” category it must be ritually purified by amputating all of its darker aspects, branding even the discussion of them as “violence”, and even pretending that they aren’t even sex at all. This belief flies in the face of reality; sex, fear, dominance and violence are inextricably bound together, and only by living in a state of complete denial can someone pretend that the only valid, “healthy” and legal sex is that which is so sanitized and neutered that it resembles the real thing about as closely as a hamburger does a heifer. Even many unadventurous people have a few rather dark fantasies or repressed turn-ons, and a few have fantasies that if acted upon would be evil indeed (as my friend Philippa used to say, “good fantasy, bad reality”). But the mere existence of violent, dark fantasies does not indicate a corresponding plan to carry them out; probably 99% of all sexual fantasies are never acted upon, and when it comes to those involving unquestionably evil acts I’m sure the percentage is higher still. Furthermore, the mere discussion of such fantasies with others does not constitute a conspiracy to turn them into reality. But in a world where prosecution for thoughtcrime has become a grim reality, it might be wise to restrict such discussions to fully-anonymized online accounts and to encrypt any files referring to the fantasy; otherwise you could end up like Gilberto Valle:
…agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation took Officer Valle into custody…after they uncovered several plots to kidnap, rape, cook and eat women…the officer’s estranged wife recently contacted the F.B.I. to report that…[he] viewed and kept disturbing items on his computer…[though he] never followed through on any of the acts he is accused of discussing. His lawyer…said the officer committed no crime. “At worst, this is someone who has sexual fantasies…There is no actual crossing the line from fantasy to reality,” she added…
At first I leaned toward believing the allegations, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that these were almost certainly no more than extreme fantasies used by a vindictive ex to put him away; the only reason I had given the story as much credence as I did was that it’s very easy to believe a cop capable of acts of extreme, non-consensual sadism. Then just a few weeks ago, I went from “almost certain” to “dead certain”:
A high-ranking police official…and a former high-school librarian were charged…in a plot to kidnap, torture and kill women and children, federal prosecutors said. Richard Meltz…and Robert Christopher Asch…were held without bail…Peter Brill, an attorney for Mr. Meltz, said his client “had no interest or intention of hurting anybody…it was never anything other than a fantasy”…An official said the case against the men grew out of an investigation in which a former New York Police Department officer was charged and convicted in a plot to kidnap, rape, cook and eat women. The former officer, Gilberto Valle, was convicted in March and is awaiting sentencing.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of an organized interstate gang of serial killers who plot capers for months on the internet without ever carrying a single one out. I think it’s pretty obvious that what the defense attorneys in both cases said is true: these are men with a very extreme BDSM fantasy who are being sacrificed to further the dominant cultural myth that sex can be purified, sanctified and tamed.
If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one – if he had the power – would be justified in silencing mankind. - John Stuart Mill
After thinking seriously about morality and ethics since my early teens, I eventually arrived about 15 years ago at a simple working definition of evil: “The attempt to inflict control upon others that they neither desire nor require.” If an individual wants to be controlled, giving it to him is not evil; if he needs to be controlled to stop him from harming others (or, if a child, himself), giving it to him is a necessity (though depending on how it’s handled, possibly a necessary evil or distortion of a necessity into evil). The right of the individual to be individual is otherwise inarguable; every individual has the right to survive, to follow his own path of growth and happiness, and to defend himself, so long as he affords others the same rights. Furthermore, these rights are indivisible and non-commutative; they cannot be subdivided, added to those of another or re-assigned to someone else. Each individual entity, no matter how large or small, has the same rights, and large groups do not gain more rights by adding those of their members together. The rights of each individual, no matter how small his minority group, are inalienable; even if he is the only representative of a wholly unique species, he would still have the same rights as everyone else, no matter how many “felt” or “thought” or “voted” that his rights should be abrogated (not even for “the public good”), unless (and only if) he abrogates the rights of another individual first (such as by violent attack). Violence is not the only form of evil, but it is the most severe, and even most of the non-violent forms are enabled by the threat of violence. Use of violence or threat of violence against an individual who has not himself violated or attempted to violate anyone else’s rights is always wrong and always evil, no matter how offensive, unpleasant, unpopular, weak, strong, poor, wealthy, stupid, intelligent or whatever he may be, and no matter which mores, rules, ordinances or laws he has broken.
There are those, possibly among those reading this, who would argue with some or all of this definition, who would like to pretend that there are certain “mitigating circumstances” or conditions under which some group has the right to inflict unprovoked violence upon another; they pretend that it’s moral to physically restrain him, violate his privacy, interfere with his interpersonal relations and private arrangements, steal his property or impede his free movement simply because he has done something or belongs to some group they don’t like. But that is a slippery slope indeed, because once we allow this the number of excuses for violence inevitably increases, and the size of the consensus needed to trigger the violence inevitably decreases, until we reach the nadir of America in 2013: a single individual can now inflict horrific violence upon anyone he chooses, so long as the aggressor has the right credentials and accuses his victim of the right “offense”. Nor are state actors the only ones who can get away with this; the right accusation by virtually anyone sets the machinery of the state in motion to crush the hapless individual hurled into it, and even many innocent bystanders who just happen to get in the way.
That last is the main reason that extremely large entities of any kind are dangerous, and need to be dismantled or at least heavily defended against. We all know what happens when a mob, an army, a large corporation, a government or other large, powerful entity actually intends to harm individuals or smaller collectives, but some of these are so large and ungainly that they cannot avoid harming others even when it isn’t intended. A bull in a china shop probably has no desire to break anything, but it’s exceedingly likely that he will; his size, strength, robustness and lack of agility combine to doom any of the comparatively small, fragile objects into which he cannot help blundering while attempting to operate in an environment to which he is unsuited. The same can be said of elephants stampeding toward a native village in a jungle movie; the panicked pachyderms merely want to save themselves from whatever has frightened them, and any destruction of breakable property and tiny humans who happen to get in their way is incidental. A government so large that it consumes most of its host-country’s gross domestic product in return for very little, and which limits individual freedom by its very existence, is much too large. A financial institution so huge that governments cannot prosecute it for flagrantly criminal behavior (due to fear of the economic repercussions) is dangerously huge. The fact that these institutions have millions of supporters is irrelevant; those numbers do not add up to greater rights than those of even the smallest, poorest, weakest individual they have harmed. It is long past time to either cut these leviathans down to size, or else to restrain them in such a way that their careless movements cannot crush us by the thousands without their even noticing.
RT @windypundit: Love my demographics: My last blog post was just retweeted by (1) a criminal defense lawyer and (2) a professional escort. 7 hours ago
All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say "pretty please with sugar on top" first, and then wait for me to say "okey-dokey".
A large fraction of these oh-so-annoying words, phrases and ideas derive ultimately from Marx, generally (though not always) by way of feminism. Even if I didn’t regard Marxism as an abomination against the individual, and even if it were not a failed social experiment, I would still find it bizarre that so many people who identify primarily as sex worker activists (though not many who identify first as sex workers) espouse it. First of all, despite the modern re-interpretations to which some Neo-Marxists subscribe, it is very clear that Marx considered prostitution to be a “disease” of capitalist society which would no longer be permitted in the communist paradise (presumably because the commune would magically make the sex drives and relative attractiveness of men and women equal). Every communist state has criminalized sex work and punished it harshly, even brutally; under Mao women caught whoring were sent for “re-education”, and though the regime declared in 1958 that prostitution has been “eradicated”, the “re-education centers” remained full and top party officials had access to that which was officially declared not to exist. Furthermore, neofeminism is really nothing but a form of Neo-Marxism with a few parameters redefined, and as we all know the neofeminists are no friends of whores. Yet all too many posts by sex worker activists go on and on about “Patriarchy” (the neofeminist version of “bourgeoisie”) and “capitalism” and blah blah blah blah until whatever they were trying to say is drowned out by nonsense.
But the most appalling of these sins of content is one which seems to have become a new fad in the past few months; some sex worker activists now also declare themselves misandrists. To them I say, “please go home and find something else to do.” The campaign for sex worker rights must be grounded in the right of all people to be free to do as they like with their own bodies; it is incompatible with centrally-planned economies, incompatible with dogmatic systems of thought which demand orthodoxy, and certainly incompatible with the idea that it’s laudable to hate some people for an accident of biology. And how in Aphrodite’s name is someone supposed to provide a proper sexual service to a person she professes to hate? The very idea is asinine. I can understand burnout; I can accept that a hooker might so tire of sex with men, and with the offensive behavior of bad clients, that she decides to swear off of socializing with them after retirement. But that’s not the same thing as hating men, and the latter has no place in a movement which will absolutely never in a million years succeed without the cooperation of the men these ridiculous women profess to “hate”; that sort of attitude belongs in the prohibitionist movement, not ours. I’m not sure why the people I speak of can’t see the self-defeating nature of these negative beliefs and dogmas; those who embrace them are, figuratively or literally, sleeping with the enemy.
