Lower Education

Just when you thought things could not get worse, the government…instructs universities to criminalize bad jokes, clumsy flirtation, and unpopular social science.  -  An anonymous Harvard professor

I often reflect that I got my undergraduate degree just in time, because soon after I graduated in 1987 American universities began a sharp decline in academic freedom and personal rights (all in the name of “feminism”) which continues to this day and shows no signs of stopping.  To be sure, there were loudmouthed neofeminists at UNO while I was there, but they were A) a small minority, and B) had no political power.  They were no more able to impose their bizarre beliefs on the university than the Marxists, the religious fundamentalists or any other pro-oppression fringe group, and faculty and students alike were free to express any opinion, however “offensive” to the dewicate widdle feewings of some sheltered nitwit, without fear of censure or worse.  Nobody thought it was weird if an undergrad dated a grad student, or had a sudden attack of the vapors if an English professor talked about Lady Macbeth’s tits, or reported a rather opinionated young lady to the Thought Police for expressing (in no uncertain terms) her highly unorthodox views on Kate Chopin’s writing ability.  And though there was an awful lot of sex going on, I can’t recall ever hearing in my four years there of a single student being raped by another student.

Unfortunately, the neofeminists were already hard at work to change all this in order to promote the politically-useful myth of “rape culture”.  A bogus study by Mary Koss of Kent State (which declared many women “rape victims” even when they reported otherwise) was published in Ms. magazine in 1985, and politicians were quick to jump on the bandwagon to divert millions in funds for “rape prevention” to campuses whose average sexual assault rate was 1/30 the rate in poor urban neighborhoods.  By the early ‘90s repressive speech and “sexual harassment” codes were being imposed on every American university, and by the turn of the century a stifling blanket of political correctness, woven from fear of lawsuits and increasingly-expansive interpretations of “Title IX”, had descended upon American academia.  But that still wasn’t enough for the neofeminists; despite a generation of brainwashing, most young women were still unwilling to make the number of rape accusations they needed to satisfy their bloodlust.  So in 2007 the Department of Justice conducted a new survey, and like Koss multiplied the results by four via the simple expedient of ignoring what the supposed “victims” thought about their experiences.  Using this as “evidence” of “a terrible, alarming trend of campus sexual violence”, in 2011 the Department of Education imposed a terrible, alarming new policy:

…even [if a man has] no way of telling…[how much a woman has been drinking it is] his responsibility to determine if she [is] “incapacitated” [because]…if she [is], any fondling they [do], no matter how great her zeal, [is] sexual assault.  She doesn’t even have to lodge a complaint; the college has to investigate if…[a witness] sees her…and suspects she’s drunk…and then there’s the new…requirement that has raised the most alarm among civil libertarians:  the lowering of the evidentiary standard to that used in civil-rights litigation…a “preponderance of the evidence” is now all that’s required…not the more familiar “beyond a reasonable doubt” of criminal cases or the intermediary “clear and convincing evidence” standard many schools used to employ…

In other words legal adults are defined as incompetent children if they happen to be female, and guilty until proven innocent if they’re male.  The result of this has been, as any fool could have predicted, a witch-hunt against heterosexual male students.  Of course, they could avoid that danger by simply refusing to date anyone at the same university, so obviously the list of potential “crimes” had to be expanded:

…both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have mandated the effective abolition of free speech on college campuses, as well as the almost certain conviction of large numbers of students…The ED/DOJ’s disturbing and unconstitutional May 9^th letter, mandating changes in sexual assault and harassment procedures and standards, arose out of a joint…investigation…at the University of Montana, Missoula…but…described [the letter] as “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country to protect students from sexual harassment and assault.”  In other words, any college or university receiving federal funding (which includes nearly all of them) risks losing that funding, if it does not comply…Henceforth, “sexual harassment,” for which a student must be investigated according to federal regulations, will be defined on campuses throughout the nation as engaging in “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”…including “verbal conduct” (more commonly known as “speech”), from the vantage point of the “victim.”  It doesn’t matter if the victim happens to be exceptionally brittle, or subjectively feels “sexually harassed” in situations that other students would deem nothing more than the normal interactions of daily life in a college community.

The inevitable result…is that all students would arguably be guilty of harassment several times a day…playing uncensored rap music…posting something controversial on Facebook, or defending former U.S. Representative Todd Akin in class could now constitute “harassment”…in a hypothetical 500-person lecture…the one person who takes offense to slide five has the power to silence the professor, and to keep the 499 other students from hearing the speech in question.  The Supreme Court some time ago referred to this tactic as “burning the house to roast the pig,” and has consistently ruled it unconstitutional…But by the time a challenge makes its way up to the Supreme Court…the bureaucrats will have already succeeded in establishing a permanent cultural change such that students won’t even be tempted to say something of a sexual or even, very likely, a gender-related nature, nor engage in dating activity, that might possibly disturb an overly sensitive fellow student…

Technically, a male student could just as easily use this awful policy against a female one as vice-versa, but I think we all recognize that this is both relatively unlikely and liable to face a much higher – perhaps even normal – burden of proof.  Unless something is done to overturn this (and I have little faith that it will be), the neofeminists now have a tool with which they can drive out as many of the remaining minority of male university students as they wish, and dumb down what passes for discourse until it challenges, stimulates and educates exactly nobody.

Well, that whole “higher education” thing was nice while it lasted.

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Guest Columnist: Kelly Michaels

In observance of Mother’s Day, I wanted to address one of the viler applications of the Madonna/whore fallacy, namely the practice of officially abducting the children of sex workers by branding them “unfit parents” on the strength of nothing but the fact that they are sex workers.  But I knew that nothing I could write would have the impact of my friend Kelly’s telling of her own story, to which the rest of today’s column is dedicated.

I became involved in the Sex Industry at the age of fifteen, living alone on Fort Lauderdale beach; it’s a haven of teenage prostitution and provided the means for me to take care of myself.  I was too young to have a job in Florida without my parents signing, and having no parents meant having no job.  For me it was an easy transition from men that fed me and gave me a place to sleep in exchange for sex, to men directly paying me for sex.  Even at that early age sex was a commodity that I controlled, and I viewed it as both an industry and a science.  But an arrest prompted me to leave that life to marry my husband.  I became a mother in 1993 and again in 1996 and 2001; I stayed home and raised those children for thirteen years.

Then in 2007 the housing market crashed; my husband lost his job and could not find another.  Christmas was approaching and we were about to lose our home, when after another fruitless day of job-hunting he asked me through tearful eyes to put in ads as an escort again.  I wasn’t alone; as the economy continued to decline, more and more women were turning to sex work to make ends meet, and not as reluctantly as you may think.  For me, sex work improved my self-esteem and financial position enough that divorce seemed possible for the first time; I had already tried to escape that marriage twice through domestic violence shelters, but they could never help me become economically sound.  And now I was thinking of divorce even more: my husband’s jealousy of my growing independence had incited his rage, and he was arrested twice for domestic violence.

The first time his parents quickly bailed him out, but by the second time they were angry at his lack of self control.  He thought quickly and told them that his rage had been incited by the “discovery” that I was working as a prostitute; this shocked them into sympathy.  No longer was he the villainous wife-beater; suddenly he was viewed only as a whore-beater, and that wasn’t nearly as bad.  He didn’t mention that it was his idea, or that he had answered client emails pretending to be me while I visited other clients.  His parents told him that the only way that they would bond him out this time was if he took our children and placed them on a plane to his brother (whom the children had never met) in another state.  He agreed, and on July 8, 2008 he and his family began a campaign to keep the dirty whore from being anywhere near the children.  And it worked:  at first the state took custody from both of us, he for domestic violence and me for prostitution, but he quickly signed a case plan and “cooperated”, while I plead not guilty and chose to go to trial; this made me the “hostile” parent.

For five long years I held faith in the justice system…Five years with no school pictures, teacher conferences or chaperoned field trips.  Five years of Mother’s Days with no breakfast in bed.  I really believed that when the case came to court and a Judge heard about the way that my husband had continued his abusive behavior, the ordeal would be over.  Surely the judge would look badly on my husband’s completely withholding visitation from me for six months despite a court order.  Surely when the court heard that in his two years of custody he had never taken them to a doctor or dentist, or provided them with the glasses the two younger ones needed, they would be returned to me.  Surely when they heard the sad stories that the children recount of living in their father’s home, they would be removed from there.  But it didn’t work out that way, because I was a sex worker.

I did not realize at first that the court officials were totally on his side; they expedited his case and delayed mine to ensure that his was finished first, thus earning him reunification with the children.  He also left the filing of the divorce papers to me, which delayed matters still further because I knew by that point I would need a good lawyer.  I stopped working as an escort and began working as a tantric instructor, but my lawyer told me I had zero chance of reunification doing any kind of sex work; I therefore opened a catering company which moved into a restaurant over the next year and a half.  The court had investigators crawling in and out of my restaurant and interviewing my employees, but never bothered to verify that my husband really had a job nor to ask why he hadn’t filed tax returns for over ten years.  When it came to trial, the head investigator reported that my restaurant was “questionable” because I subleased the kitchen of an existing pub; she also told the judge that if my work as a tantric instructor wasn’t prostitution, “It is something similar to prostitution.”  It didn’t matter that it had been more than a year since I had been involved in that, or that I admitted being previously involved; once a dirty whore, always a dirty whore.  Needless to say, the court awarded him full custody.  I haven’t finished fighting, though, and as he continues to neglect the children, I will continue to drag this case back to court to ask why I was never considered a “real option” in spite of the details of emotional abuse and neglect that continues in their father’s home.

Maggie was there all along, listening with a sympathetic ear and helping me to understand that the details of the case were not what mattered; she helped me understand that the stated purpose of family court (which of course is to “protect the children”) is not at all what they are truly interested in.  When it comes to sex workers, keeping the status quo and punishing the dirty whore was the objective, not only in my case but in many others.  The more I saw this theory proven, the more I wondered why more attention is not paid to the issue of families and custody within the sex worker rights movement; I personally found no organizations offering support for custody issues and vowed to change that.  I began to notice the reinforcement of the negative stereotype of sex workers on television, and began to contemplate the way that this programming influences decision makers like guardians ad litem, who have little to no education or experience with sex workers.  With that I began a Kickstarter project to produce a documentary film in which I will share my experience as a sex worker dealing with family court, and to dispel myths about sex work by looking at my life as I embark upon a typical tour.

This Mother’s Day, I propose that we take a closer look into sex work and the family court; let’s think not only about the rights of sex workers, but of the children that love them and are needlessly removed from their parents.  Porn Stars have the right to custody.  Strippers have the right to custody.  Why should escorts be treated any differently?  Sex work should not be considered in custody decisions when it does not affect the children directly, and we as a group need to stand up to demand unbiased treatment in custody decisions.  Please visit “Whoremom” at Kickstarter.com to support my effort to educate the public on the reality of being a whore-mom in the state of prohibition.

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May Day 2013

What potent blood hath modest May,
What fiery force the earth renews,
The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;
What joy in rosy waves outpoured
Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord.  – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “May-Day”

It’s Beltane again, and the world is warming; though here in North America the winter held on right into April and another chill is expected across much of the continent tonight, that seems to have daunted humans far more than the plants and animals, which (around here, at least) have been behaving just as one expects them to in April.  The grass turned green again, flowers are everywhere, birds are singing and insects are buzzing.  Mind you, I’m not terribly happy about that last; May and June are the two worst months for flies, ticks and chiggers where I live, so from now until the end of August I don’t dare set foot outside without rubbing insect repellant on my shins and feet.  And though I prefer skirts to jeans, that simply won’t work in the summer unless I’m going straight from house to car; the nasty little parasites will climb up the inside of a skirt, then right onto my repellant-free pelvis.  Ugh!

May is also the time when we shear our long-haired animals so they’ll be comfortable for the summer; I won’t do it until I’m sure the cold is gone, but it will have to be fairly soon.  If it’s done too late they won’t have time to re-grow their coats by winter, but if it’s done too early their hair will be long again by the Dog Days, always the hottest and most miserable time of year.  But May is usually lovely; as I’ve said before, spring is my second-favorite time of year after autumn, not only for the gorgeous colors but also because I love warm (not hot) days and cool (not cold) nights, and that’s the typical pattern around here from April to June and September to October.

May Day is largely a forgotten holiday; thought it was once rich in tradition, it was stolen from the old pagan gods and goddesses by the followers of one of the modern secular religions (though that one, too, has died in its turn).  But these are autumnal thoughts, and not suitable for lusty May; go forth, enjoy the day in whatever way suits you best, and remember that in less constipated times, this was a day to celebrate Nature’s gift of sex.

Blessed Be!

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May Eve

Bobby didn’t want to come back, Mommy.  -  Dead of Night

Tomorrow is May Day, halfway around the year from Samhain; today is therefore May Eve, a springtime counterpart of Halloween.  As I explained in last year’s column for the occasion, “the night was…believed to be one on which spirits walked abroad, and…bonfires were [used] to keep them at bay…though it’s become less common in the past few decades, 19^th and early 20^th century horror stories often depicted dark doings taking place on April 30^th.”  Last year I shared my picks for the ten scariest short stories of all time, and back in October of 2011 I shared my list of scariest horror movies; today I’m going to sort of combine the two and give you a list of video equivalents of short stories, in other words my picks for some of the scariest TV episodes I’ve ever seen.

Notice I didn’t say “of all time”; when I decided to do the list, I immediately realized that any list I could create would be like an antimatter version of the ridiculous lists created by twenty-something-year-old entertainment journalists, in which “of all time” actually means “since 1984”.  Since I stopped watching commercial television in 1980, broadcast television in the mid-‘90s and virtually all new television in 2003, my experience is as skewed as that of those young critics for whom the word “cheesy” usually means “anything in black and white or without digital effects.”  But just as I was about to give up on the idea, I realized it didn’t matter; many of my younger readers may not know of most of these selections, and I suspect even my older readers may be unfamiliar with some of them.  So without further ado, I present my top nine (and a few honorable mentions), listed in chronological order by original air date.

1)  One Step Beyond, “Vanishing Point” (February 23^rd, 1960)

Unlike its contemporary The Twilight Zone, this show featured dramatizations of reports of psychic phenomena and other weird happenings; sometimes the real people who claimed to have experienced them actually appeared on camera in an epilogue.  Regardless of one’s opinion of the veracity of these accounts, they made captivating television and, thanks in large part to the directorial talents of John Newland and haunting music by Harry Lubin, many are as creepy as anything ever to appear on the small screen.  In this one, a man is tried for the murder of his wife after she vanishes without a trace…and after he is acquitted for lack of evidence, his research discovers that she wasn’t the first mysterious disappearance in the house’s history.  HM:  “The Forests of the Night”

2)  Thriller, “The Grim Reaper” (June 13^th, 1961)

This effective tale of a haunted painting stars William Shatner; those who only know him as an action star or an elderly self-parodist may not realize that before Star Trek, he often played psychologically-disturbed young men tormented by internal (or external) demons.  His most famous role of this type was of course in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, but other examples include “Nick of Time” (The Twilight Zone), “Cold Hands, Warm Heart” (The Outer Limits) and “The Hungry Glass” (earlier in this season of Thriller).  Considering that the latter two stories are honorable mentions in this list and the Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold” (like “The Grim Reaper”, written by Robert Bloch) has a few horrific moments as well, that actually makes Shatner – an actor not generally associated with horror – the name appearing most often in this column.

3)  The Twilight Zone, “It’s a Good Life” (November 3^rd, 1961)

Though this series scored a very high number of brain-searing episodes, this tale of an amoral six-year-old with godlike powers edges out all the others in my estimation.  Its power to haunt is attested by the fact that there have been at least two attempts at sequels or remakes designed to paste a happy ending onto the horror, as if to exorcise it from the re-makers’ minds.  Honorable mention:  “And When the Sky Was Opened”, based on a Richard Matheson story of the wholly inexplicable and utterly horrifying fate of three astronauts.

4)  The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, “Final Escape” (February 21^st, 1964)

This series was known more for suspense than horror, but sometimes it’s a hard line to draw; the very first episode, “Revenge”, is so shocking it still had impact when remade for the revival series thirty years later.  In my opinion the later, hour-long episodes are not generally as good as the earlier half-hour ones, but this episode about a convict’s attempt to escape from prison is as harrowing as anything which has ever aired.

5)  The Outer Limits, “Wolf 359” (November 7^th, 1964)

This series is remembered especially for its monsters, all of which were created with the minimal special effects available on a television budget of the time.  The creature in this one is literally a hand puppet, but in the context of the story (about a tiny artificial planet haunted by a malevolent spirit-like entity), framed with skillful directing and a creepy Harry Lubin score, you probably won’t care unless you’ve sacrificed your capacity for imagination on the altar of CGI.

6)  Night Gallery, “The Cemetery” (November 8^th, 1969)

Rod Serling did not produce this series (he was only its host and an occasional writer), and it showed; its quality was far below that of The Twilight Zone, and a few episodes are almost unbelievably bad.  This one, however (from the original pilot movie) is not one of them; it stars Roddy McDowell as a young ne’er-do-well who murders his uncle in order to inherit his fortune…only to find that the old man has no intention of staying put in the grave.

7)  Space: 1999, “Dragon’s Domain” (December 5^th, 1975)

As I have explained before, this British series is usually mistaken for science fiction because of its conventional sci-fi trappings such as spaceships and laser guns.  But nearly all of its threats are thinly-disguised supernatural ones; they include a ghost, a vampire, an immortal serial killer, possessing spirits, a cannibal race and even an immense entity clearly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s Azathoth.  But it’s the tentacled Lovecraftian horror in this episode that gave a generation of young fans nightmares, and the creature itself is only the most obvious scare in a show that gives frissons from start to finish.

8)  Dead of Night, “Bobby” (March 29^th, 1977)

After Dark Shadows, Dan Curtis went on to produce a number of made-for-TV horror movies (including the pilot for The Night Stalker).  Many people remember Trilogy of Terror, and though the first two stories making up Dead of Night are nothing to write home about, the third part – “Bobby” –  is something else entirely.  Richard Matheson penned this utterly terrifying story of a woman so obsessed with her dead son that she resorts to black magic to get him back, and soon discovers what a truly bad idea that was.

9)  Tales from the Darkside, “The Geezenstacks” (October 26^th, 1986)

Though this series was often creepy or spooky (though many episodes were funny, confusing or just irritating), very few episodes were actually scary; this is one of those few, and in my opinion the scariest one (though it’s one of those that gets scarier the more you think about it and talk about it to friends at 2 AM).  The script was adapted from a story by Fredric Brown (notice how some of these names keep popping up in different columns?) about a family who discovers that the daughter’s dolls seem to be predicting everything that happens to them.  HM: “Inside the Closet”

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Monsters

This essay first appeared on Cliterati on March 31^st; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.

One of the best things about country life is being able to have as many animals as one likes, and for me that includes chickens because I absolutely love having a steady supply of fresh eggs.  I most emphatically do not love chickens, however, and if I had to do much more than give them food and water, collect the eggs and clean out the henhouse every once in a while, I probably wouldn’t bother.  Those who have never kept chickens generally think of them as comical (if they think of them at all), but in reality they are stupid, filthy, cruel beasts.  The expression “pecking order” is a reference to that cruelty; they establish their dominance hierarchy by pecking one another, and if they collectively decide for some unaccountable reason that there is something wrong with one of their number, that pecking is both merciless and, often, terminal.

Late last month I lost one of my white leghorns to this horrid behavior; she had always been a nervous, timid bird even by the low standards of poultry, and though I knew she was at the bottom of the pecking order I had no inkling that I would go out to close the henhouse that evening and find that she had been killed by the others sometime earlier in the day.  She wasn’t pecked to death exactly; her physical injuries were not fatal in and of themselves, but hens are extremely susceptible to stress and she had essentially died of ill-treatment.  My friend Grace (a great lover of animals) was very angry at the others, but as I pointed out they were only acting according to instinct, rejecting a member of the flock whom they had decided did not belong.  Chickens have extremely tiny brains and can’t exceed their programming, but humans have no such excuse; that makes this story (which broke earlier that week) all the more disgusting:

A transgender teacher…is believed to have committed suicide after her case appeared in the national media…in an email…sent to a supporter before her death, Lucy Meadows describes how she had to dodge waiting reporters and photographers as she went to work…Her decision to undergo gender reassignment in December was reported in a number of national newspapers and was the subject of a controversial comment piece by…Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn, who accused the popular teacher of “putting his (sic) own selfish needs ahead of the wellbeing of the children”…

Those who persecute sexual minorities just love to pretend that they’re acting “for the children”; I reckon they can’t admit that their behavior is actually on the same moral level as that of barnyard fowl.  Even worse, they imagine that encouraging those same “children” to participate in this kind of barbarism is totally acceptable:

…Destin Holmes, a 16-year-old lesbian, said that…students and teachers…[at Magnolia Junior High School in Mississippi referred to her] as an “it,” “queer,” “freak,” “alien,” “dyke,” and “he-she.”  Holmes was also denied access to the girls’ bathroom.  In one of the most shocking incidents, Holmes’ teacher degraded her in front of the entire class when she divided it up into boys vs. girls for a trivia game, but left Holmes in the middle.  “She told me since she didn’t know what I was, I should be on a team of my own,” Holmes said…when she went to the principal to complain about the harassment, the principal allegedly replied, “I don’t want a dyke in this school.”  Ultimately, Holmes left the junior high after one semester last year and is now being home-schooled…

Though it is now socially unacceptable to openly express hatred for others because of race, religion, disability and a number of other factors, it’s still “open season” on a few sexual minorities, including sex workers and transgender people.  But while it’s become fashionable to cloak anti-whore rhetoric in the pretense of wanting to “save” women, anti-trans sentiments are right out in the open.  Legislators and judges openly persecute them; one Tennessee representative defended his bigotry with, “Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk.”  Reporters make up for their lack of legal weaponry by humiliating them in the media instead, and the vitriol hurled at them by radical feminists is little short of nauseating.  Hateful people think of their targets as monsters, subhuman beings to be hated and ostracized, and want the rest of us to feel the same way.  But the true monsters in these situations aren’t the targets but rather the perpetrators, people who are no better than chickens mindlessly attempting to peck others to death for the offense of being different.

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Vice Versa

A reader asks:

I read your post and answer to the question: “How does one find a male prostitute for a straight female?“  Is there really a market for females that want male prostitutes?  Could you recommend a male prostitute that a man could fashion himself after (both physically and mentally)?  And could you recommend any books, websites or articles on the topic?

I’m afraid there just isn’t much of a market for heterosexual male prostitutes, which is why that reader had so much trouble finding one.  While every town in the world has female hookers and most make much more than they could at other jobs for which they’re qualified, men who want to do sex work usually deal mostly with men.  This isn’t to say that no woman ever pays a man for sex, but those who do so are statistical outliers and therefore not a dependable source of income.  The English sex worker Sensuous Amanda expressed it quite well:

Whilst I won’t say there is no market for straight male escorts, I will tell you that it is a teeny tiny market and it is awash with bright eyed hopefuls.  As far as I know, even the successful guys do it part time and have another job to pay the rent…Boys, go for it if you want, but don’t rely on it for income.  For instance, my ex – a tall strapping chap, pretty good looking, in his early 30s at the time – advertised his services.  He’d seen what I was earning and decided that he wanted in on the action.  He never made a sodding penny.  Nothing.  Not so much as an email or a call.  Not even a timewaster.

That article also suggests a helpful model:  Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.  No, he wasn’t a sex worker, but that’s exactly the point; as Amanda writes, “in general, women don’t want [it]…to be a charade.  We want a man to be all of those things to us because he wants to be.  Not because we’ve just handed him a wad of twenties…”  Or as I expressed it in “Just Drawn That Way”, “it is a rare woman indeed who will pay for sex with a man [because] it is an undeniable statement that he is not attracted to her, and that invalidates the primary reason for which [most women] might seek unprofitable, non-relationship sex.”  People try to refute that by pointing to female sex tourists, but the exception proves the rule because what these women are looking for is adventure and romance rather than sex per se,  which is why they seek this in exotic places rather than at home.  Furthermore, you must remember that dollars, pounds and euros go a long way in such locales; what constitutes a generous fee there might be only a small sum in the Global North.  That matters because women tend to be cheap tippers, especially where sex is concerned; as I explained once before, “A friend of mine who owned a male stripper service in addition to his escort service eventually had to stop offering so-called ‘bachelorette parties’ because none of his boys would do them anymore.  The reason they gave?  ‘Women are lousy tippers and they’re more interested in the buffet than the dancers.’”  The good, dependable income in sex work is from male clients, whether the sex worker is male or female; as Amanda put it, “You wanna be a male escort?  Fine, you go for it sweetie.  You wanna make real money as a male escort?  Lube up, bend over and take one for the team.”

I don’t know of any other resources for heterosexual male escorts, but by serendipity one of them (who says he has 15 years of experience) posted a reply just a few weeks ago on the very same Sensuous Amanda post I quoted above.  He confirmed that he couldn’t make enough to live on, points out the difficulties of trying to see more than two to three clients a week, and explained that his sessions have to be open-ended on time rather than by the hour as with female escorts.  He has a lot to say that I think you’ll find enlightening, including the fact that 75% of his clients were couples; this of course reinforces what I said above, because if it weren’t for the man’s interest in the fantasy you can be sure his wife wouldn’t be there.

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Awakening

This essay first appeared on Cliterati on March 10^th; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.

In the early days of second-wave feminism, sex workers were widely recognized as having fought for women’s rights for centuries; 1970s whores marched and protested right alongside of housewives and lesbians, and for a while it looked like the cause of sex worker rights would become a mainstream one.  But just as it had happened in first-wave feminism, a cabal of white, middle-class, sexually-repressed women commandeered the movement for themselves and elbowed sex workers out; once the AIDS scare began in the early 1980s their victory was complete, and sex worker rights languished as a marginal cause for a generation while gay rights advocates managed to build a powerful coalition which has not only won legal protections for gay people, but dramatically reduced bigotry toward them (especially among the young).

Finally, the sex worker rights movement began to pick up again around the turn of the 21^st century; prostitution was decriminalized in some places and liberalized in others, and sex worker unions and other alliances have gained rapidly in power and prominence.  Unfortunately, the prohibitionists are not stupid; they noticed that there had been a sea change in public opinion against interfering in private sexual arrangements between consenting adults, and so created the “sex trafficking” hysteria as a means of rallying the public behind criminalization again.  As the “Nation Strategy” of Swanee Hunt’s Demand Abolition organization states, “Framing the Campaign’s key target as sexual slavery might garner more support and less resistance, while framing the Campaign as combating prostitution may be less likely to mobilize similar levels of support and to stimulate stronger opposition.”  In other words, “since people now recognize it’s wrong for the government to stick its nose into private bedrooms, we have to pretend this is really about something else.”

But nobody stays asleep forever, and over the past couple of years I’ve begun to see strong signs of a public awakening on this issue despite the lullabies and sleeping-draughts assiduously administered by prohibitionists both inside and outside of government.  Canadian public support for criminalization has rapidly eroded in the wake of the Himel decision, and several UN agencies have come out in favor of decriminalization for both health and human rights reasons  (specifically repudiating restrictive forms of “legalization” such as those in Sweden, Nevada and the Netherlands).  After last summer’s “Sex Worker Freedom Festival” in Kolkata (an answer to the exclusion of sex workers from the International AIDS Conference in Washington), an article in the Guardian called Indian sex workers “a shining example of women’s empowerment”, The Lancet published a pro-decriminalization statement, and several British politicians have strongly criticized the incredible waste of money which resulted from the “trafficking” hysteria around the London Olympics.

Then in just the past few months, the stirrings have become extremely pronounced.  Melissa Gira Grant’s “The War on Sex Workers” in February’s Reason magazine touched off angry denunciations from radical feminists but soul-searching and even changes of heart from moderates.  On February 28^th, I spoke at a symposium at Albany Law School and was not only enthusiastically received, but found several academics and a UN official whose views were not far from mine.  Then on International Sex Worker Rights Day, a group of activists (including Dr. Brooke Magnanti and myself) took to Twitter to reveal some of the abuse we’ve received from prohibitionists under the hashtag #whenantisattack, opening the eyes of many to the brutality of those who wish to suppress our profession:

…Magnanti is forced to live in secrecy, her number taken to the top of any 999 summons list because of the innumerable threats she has received…Her family’s privacy has been invaded to find the “causes” of her choice and her personal appearance derided, not least within what might otherwise be called the sisterhood…[this abuse] would seem crazed were it not for MSP Rhoda Grant, who is sponsoring an “end demand for sex trafficking” bill in the Scottish parliament, declaring violence against sex workers a price worth paying to secure her proposals.  As Magnanti tweeted:  ”Let that sink in.  Politician thinks it’s OK if people die b/c of her bill.  No one bats an eyelid.”

Is it not time we came to terms with prostitution?  Instead, the prostitute herself…becomes the target for culture’s anxieties about sex…whore-bashing…is somehow deemed acceptable…said bashing includes a cohort of feminist critics who…[argue that]…sex workers cannot know their own minds, or be in control of their bodies, and thus consent…Hatred of prostitutes has implications for all women who desire to determine their sexual existences.  These obviously stigmatised targets allow a kind of thin-end-of-the-wedge, sanctioned misogyny…

Meanwhile, across the pond, Molly Crabapple wrote about the indefensible behavior of New York police:

…The NYPD will arrest you for carrying condoms, but that depends entirely on who you are.  If you’re a middle-class white girl like me, you’re probably safe.  But say you’re a sex worker or a queer kid kicked out of your home.  Say you’re a trans woman out for dinner with your boyfriend…Maybe some quota-filling cop thinks you look like a whore.  Then you’re not safe at all.  Like most laughably cruel tricks of the justice system, you probably wouldn’t know that you could be arrested for carrying condoms until it happened to you…the polite middle classes trivialize arrest…They don’t realize that the constant threat of arrest is traumatic, unless it happens to them or their kids.

…How does something so egregious keep happening?  Because sex workers don’t matter…to power…Horrors are acceptable when they’re not happening to the dominant class…LGBT civil rights and sex worker advocacy groups are fighting against the use of condoms as evidence.  Mainstream feminism is not.  A movement that rightly and vociferously fought pharmacists who refused to fill birth control prescriptions has remained largely silent about women being jailed for carrying another contraceptive.  Mainstream feminism might remember that the war on women always starts with the war on whores…Until 1996, Ireland locked up unmarried moms and rape victims in Magdalene Laundries, where nuns worked them to death to cleanse their imaginary sins.  The nuns built those Magdalene Laundries to imprison sex workers.  Tens of thousands of women died within their walls, of every walk of life except the very wealthiest…

Sex worker advocates have been talking and writing about this (not only in New York but in many places all over the world) for years, but Molly’s article is being widely linked and “tweeted” as though it were saying something new.  Please don’t take that as a complaint, because it most certainly isn’t; in fact, it’s the exact opposite.  I’m extremely grateful to those outside the sex worker rights movement who are beginning to call attention to our situation and to repeat and amplify our arguments to a much wider audience; with their help, I’m hopeful that sex worker rights will once again become a mainstream feminist, health, human rights and civil liberties issue as it was starting to become in my childhood, and that the majority of the next generation of young people will view persecution of sex workers with the same distaste as most of the current one sees persecution of gay people, and most of my own generation sees race prejudice.

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The Story Behind the Story

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.  -  Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

I’m sure most of you recognized yesterday’s column as a tribute to Dr. Seuss’ first published work, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street; you may even have recognized that it’s a line-by-line parody, and that I retained the good Doctor’s own words wherever I could.  But it just wouldn’t have been half as good without the Seussian illustrations; they were kindly provided by Ricardo Cortés, illustrator of the bestselling Go the Fuck to Sleep (and now that y’all know he’s a fellow reader, I’m sure some of y’all may be even more interested in some of the other books he’s illustrated).  Anyhow, Ricardo had a few questions about my parody and since I’m sure some of you have similar ones, I figured I’d share my answer.

…I’m curious about the context of the piece, and why April Fools?  It’s clearly a response to the all-sex-workers-are-slaves narrative.  Is it directed to a particular event or charge?  Obviously any Save-Them-All campaign is limited and patronizing. On the other hand, there certainly are prostitutes who are exploited and trafficked, etc., no?…perhaps you can direct me to some writing you’ve already made about this question…I’m curious as to how you address the other side of the equation (when sex workers are actually exploited by organized crime, etc.)

I wanted to do it on April Fool’s Day just because it’s kind of silly; I’ve never done a full-blown parody before so that seemed like a good day for it.  Though it is in part a response to the “enslaved whore” narrative, it’s even more a sharp criticism of the neofeminist practice of “re-framing experiences”.  Unhappy ex-hookers who are recruited by anti-whore organizations are encouraged to “re-frame their experiences”, which means make up things that didn’t happen so as to “sell” the public, media and politicians more strongly on the “evils of prostitution”.  Women who resist lying in this way are chastised, browbeaten and (if they persist) kicked out of the “movement”, while those who play along are praised and rewarded with money and attention.  An example of a reject is Jill Brenneman (who discussed the matter in her interview on this blog two years ago); an example of a perfect shill is Stella Marr, about whom I’ve written on several occasions.  The most striking example of “reframing” I’ve written about so far is the story of Long Pros, whom celebrity prohibitionist Somaly Mam used to advance her crusade:  Pros was a Cambodian girl from a poor family who never did any sex work in her life, but lost an eye to a tumor; under Mam’s coaching she invented the lurid story that she was a “sex trafficking” victim who had been enslaved in a brothel and had her eye gouged out by a brutal pimp.

The really creepy part of the whole thing is that the longer the “survivor” stays in the movement, the more her stories start to converge with those of others; she internalizes the preferred narratives, and they form a pattern in much the same way that any mythology begins to form a whole.  In the early ‘80s, the preferred feminist “survivor” narrative was that the “victim” had been abused by her father, uncle or other male relative; in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s it was that her abusers were part of a Satanic cult, and by the late ‘90s they had morphed into “sex traffickers” driven by profit.  By the early ‘20s it will change again, but of course we have no way to predict what that change will involve.  It’s fascinating from a psycho-sociological perspective, but extremely dangerous because the courts have abandoned the necessity for proper evidence and the presumption of innocence, so that even the most outlandish “eyewitness” testimony is taken seriously.

As for “organized crime”, that doesn’t really mean what the tale-spinners want you to believe; in criminology, “organized crime” just means any group (which could be as few as 3 or 4 people) who plan to carry out illegal activity together.  My escort service would be classified as “organized crime” because we “conspired” to “commit prostitution”.  The same goes for so-called “human traffickers”; two guys in Nigeria with a friend in Denmark and a border guard who is paid to ignore them sneaking willing immigrants into the country, make up an “international human trafficking ring” if the women work as maids, and an “international sex slavery ring” if one or more of them works as a hooker.  It’s not about enormous criminal cartels smuggling thousands of crying women in cages as the propaganda wants you to believe.  The best book for putting this all in perspective is Laura Agustín’s Sex at the Margins; Agustín has been studying migration and sex work for twenty years and will open your eyes to the truth of all this.  But for the most part, so-called “sex trafficking victims” are really just women going from a relatively poor country to a relatively wealthy one to do sex work, sometimes breaking the rules of the destination country in the process; anyone who helps her is therefore a “criminal” and a “trafficker”, even if the “victim” entered into the arrangement willingly and is as satisfied as any conventional worker with the terms of her employment.

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My Favorite Short Stories

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…  -  Fredric Brown

As I’ve said many times, I prefer short stories to novels; even when I shared my list of favorite books a year ago, six of thirteen were short story collections.  As I said then, “This is because for me, a large part of the pleasure of a book is the mood it sets, and if that mood is disturbed I can’t enjoy it nearly as much.  Short stories are quickly consumed, and even novellas or short novels can be read in one extended sitting…When I started whoring the long-established preference for short fiction grew even stronger, because I knew that at any moment I might be interrupted by a phone call from a client and have to run off.”  But despite this preference (or perhaps because of it), choosing a list of favorite short stories was even more difficult than choosing my favorite books.  Last May Eve I provided my list of the ten scariest short stories, and I’ve excluded those from this list along with all stories which are included in any of my favorite books (which means everything by Doyle, Lovecraft and Poe).  I also excluded fairy tales because, though I love them dearly, they’re really a different genre (and one I will visit in a future column).

Because most of these are quite well-known and highly regarded, and none of them were published after I was born, I was able to secure PDFs of all but two.  There was a PDF of #7 as well, but it was so poorly formatted that the ends of most lines were cut off on the right side; I therefore decided not to provide it, but if someone can locate a proper copy I will.  You will note the majority of these are quite short; three of them qualify as short-shorts, and only two are novelettes.  But since y’all know my own fiction is primarily in the short-short format, that shouldn’t surprise you.  All of these are either fantasy, science fiction, horror or suspense except for #3, which is essentially psychological horror (as is #5).  They all have something else in common: all are unique and highly memorable.  They are listed here in chronological order.

1)  “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844)

This gothic tale is often listed as one of the earliest works of science fiction, because its premise relies on human experimentation by a mad scientist.  Hawthorne was far more interested in the dark portions of the human soul than in speculation about the nature of the physical universe, but his short stories often explore this by means of some fantastic situation.  Those who recognized this month’s fictional interlude as a tribute to this story are probably unsurprised to see it here.

2)  “How Much Land Does A Man Need?” by Leo Tolstoy (1886)

Though he is best known in the English-speaking world for his lengthy novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy also wrote many fine short stories including this fine example of the subgenre the French refer to as contes cruels, stories which are not necessarily supernatural but demonstrate the cruelty of fate and usually conclude with a shocking or horrifying twist.  John Collier and Roald Dahl (see below) also produced many tales of this type.

3)  “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad (1899)

A steamboat captain travels up a river in Africa to investigate his company’s trade agent at an outpost in the interior, and discovers that the “Dark Continent” is not nearly as dark as the recesses of the human heart.  Many of you may have studied the story in literature class, and though it has been adapted several times the most famous was Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which transposed the events to Vietnam War-era Cambodia.

4)  “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki (1914)

Saki was the pen name of H.H. Munro, a brilliant British author whose career was cut short by a German sniper at the Battle of the Ancre in 1916.  His best work is equal parts horror and humor, and this one – the story of a sickly orphan who creates his own secret pagan cult in his guardian’s shed – is its perfect exemplar.

5)  “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken (1934)

This chilling (no pun intended) tale of a young boy’s descent into madness manages to create a horrifying atmosphere without any of the conventional elements of horror.  In addition to the PDF, I thought y’all might enjoy this short film made for TV in 1966; the same director later remade it as an episode of Night Gallery, narrated by Orson Welles.

6)  “Thus I Refute Beelzy” by John Collier (1940)

Many of John Collier’s stories are strange and haunting, but this one more than most.  It’s the tale of a boy whose father, one of those annoying people who makes a fetish of rationalism (think Maureen O’Hara in Miracle on 34^th Street), becomes jealous of his new imaginary friend and decides to disprove that friend’s existence once and for all.

7)  “With Folded Hands” by Jack Williamson (1947)

Some of you may recall that I have referred to this science-fiction warning of the perils of the nanny state once before, in a column which shares its name.

8)  “Man from the South” by Roald Dahl (1948)

Many people who know Dahl from his children’s works such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches may not have realized he also had a talent for marvelously wicked adult stories; he even had his own syndicated TV series, Tales of the Unexpected.  Even before that a number of his stories were adapted for television, most notably on Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Hitch’s production of this one starred Peter Lorre as the title character who bets Steve McQueen a new car that he can’t light his cigarette lighter ten times in a row without fail.

9)  “The Man Who Traveled In Elephants” by Robert Heinlein (1948)

This was Heinlein’s favorite of all his short stories, and mine as well; I can never read it without tearing up.  Some critics have dismissed it as a “mistake”, an overly-sentimental fantasy in sharp contrast to his usual hard science fiction.  But this is not Heinlein’s only fantasy, nor his only whimsical story, nor his only sentimental one; furthermore, its themes connect it to many of his longer works such as The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, I Will Fear No Evil and The Number of the Beast.

10) “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

Clarke is not among my favorite writers; IMHO he’s usually too dry, too self-limited and too obsessed with enormous timescales, and he created his female characters in much the same way Michelangelo did (i.e., by sticking tits onto male figures).  But there are a few times he really surpassed himself, and in my estimation this is the best of them.

11) “Space-Time for Springers” by Fritz Leiber (1958)

Don’t make the mistake of dismissing this as the science fiction equivalent of a LOLcat, though at first glance it may appear to be.  Yes, it’s cute; yes, the hero is a kitten behaving in a terribly precious way.  But stick with it, and you’ll find there’s actually a tale of courage, love, duty and sacrifice under that cuddly and apparently superficial veneer.

12) “Earthmen Bearing Gifts” by Fredric Brown (1960)

As I mentioned in “My Favorite Authors”, Brown was the absolute master of the short-short story, and though he wrote many excellent longer tales (including the one that was adapted into the Star Trek episode “Arena”) he is today best remembered for his little gems like this terribly sad conte cruel.

13) “Sagittarius” by Ray Russell (1962)

Ray Russell was the greatest 20^th-century writer in the Gothic style; when I first read his most famous story, “Sardonicus”, I had to check the copyright page to convince myself that it was not first published over a century earlier.  “Sagittarius” is the second part of a loose trilogy with the aforementioned story (the third part is “Sanguinarius”).  But I’ve always liked “Sagittarius” best for its clever interweaving of the stories of Jack the Ripper, Gilles de Rais, Mr. Hyde and the Grand Guignol Theater; unfortunately I can’t supply a PDF copy, but I own it in Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown, which is well worth the pittance you’ll pay for it.

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Book Review: SuperFreakonomics

Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free.  So what inevitably emerges is a supply of women who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand.
-  Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

I first heard of Freakonomics and its sequel several years ago, but because my stack of reading material is always much too high I never took the time to pick up a copy of either.  My interest began to ramp up two years ago when Satoshi Kanazawa mentioned SuperFreakonomics in the column which served to introduce us when I replied to it; his follow-up column which discussed our correspondence  sent an absolutely tremendous amount of traffic my way (I still get hits from it every week), so I became much more interested in the books and would probably have eventually bought them myself had Ted not sent them to me the following November.  Being a stickler for doing things the right way, I read Freakonomics first and reviewed it one year ago today; the fact that it has taken me this long to get around to reviewing the sequel is due in part to my reading many other books in the interim, in part to not having nearly as much time to read as I might like, and in part to my just finally catching up from the holiday backlog.

The books were written by economist Steven D. Levitt (of the University of Chicago) and journalist Stephen J. Dubner (formerly of The New York Times); Levitt is interested in economics in its larger sense, the study of how human beings react to incentives, and Dubner makes Levitt’s investigations interesting to read.  As in the first book, they covered a number of subjects: the chapters are entitled, “How is a Street Prostitute Like a Department-Store Santa?”, “Why Should Suicide Bombers Buy Life Insurance?”, “Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism”, “The Fix is In – and It’s Cheap and Simple”, and “What Do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo Have in Common?”  There is also an epilogue named “Monkeys are People Too”, which I’ve already discussed in a previous column.  And though chapters two through five are fascinating, enlightening and well worth the time of anyone who’s interested in psychology, sociology, criminology and/or global warming, the first chapter provides so much material that I’m going to dedicate the rest of this column to it.

For some reason I’ve never been able to adequately fathom, economists tend to be remarkably stupid about prostitution, often abandoning skepticism and proper data-gathering to embrace ludicrous claims they would never accept about any other economic activity.  Furthermore, virtually all books written about prostitution by sympathetic outsiders have a mixture of correct and incorrect information, and this one is no exception; however, I’m pleased to say that they got more right than they did wrong, and that none of the errors are due to buying into moronic prohibitionist myths.  In fact, the chapter serves as a thorough refutation of the most damaging and pervasive sex work myth of our times:  the notion that most whores are (or ever have been) coerced.  Though the book was published in 2009 the words “sex trafficking” do not appear anywhere in it, and prohibitionist laws are correctly framed as a product of the social purity era:  “The white slavery problem turned out to be a wild exaggeration.  The reality was perhaps scarier:  rather than being forced into prostitution, women were choosing it for themselves.”  They demonstrate that about 2% of American women in the 1910s were prostitutes (already considerably lower than the 19^th century average of 5.5%) and that the average Chicago whore of the period made almost twelve times as much as a factory worker.  Furthermore, they clearly understand a principle I’ve pointed out before:  the reason there are far fewer whores now, and the reason we make relatively less than we used to, is that so many women are giving it away now that the market simply won’t bear the prices and volume it used to a century ago.

Unlike his more credulous colleagues, Levitt recognizes harlotry as an economic activity like any other, governed by the same laws and responding to the same pressures.  In order to demonstrate this, he and Dubner look at two types of sex worker: opportunistic (and sometimes seasonal) street workers on Chicago’s south side, and a high-end escort named Allie in a different part of the same city.  But while the information on escorting is sound because it was provided by Allie herself (who contacted Levitt upon hearing he was interested in writing about the subject), the information about streetwalkers was collected by a man I’ve written about before: Sudhir Venkatesh, the Columbia sociologist known for his incredible credulity, his sloppy scholarship and his ethics violations.  Some of the conclusions the authors draw from Venkatesh’s data seem reasonable, such as the claim that many streetwalkers prefer to work with pimps because they bring in better clients (resulting in higher income even after the pimp’s 25% cut).  Others seem highly doubtful, such as the declaration that going without a condom only costs $2 more on average; in New York, he claimed it was typically 25% more (and as I pointed out then it’s difficult to fix a “usual” price on desperation).  But since there’s absolutely no way to tell the good data from the bad, nor to determine whether Venkatesh’s numbers are merely distorted or outright lies on his part (or that of the women he surveyed), this section of the chapter is absolutely worthless, and that includes the credible and highly-publicized “finding” that 3% of all tricks were freebies given to cops to avoid arrest.

The Venkatesh streetwalker study is definitely the weakest part of the book, though as I stated above it’s impossible to tell how wrong his numbers are.  My only other quibble is a minor but important one; it represents a flaw in Dubner’s thinking which is common even among sex workers, but which must be dispelled if there’s ever to be any progress.  Though Allie recognizes that she is no less a whore than any streetwalker, Dubner writes “she has less in common with that kind of woman than she does with a trophy wife…she isn’t really selling sex, or at least not sex alone…”  The error, of course, is that sex is purely a physical activity; Allie is very much selling sex, she’s just selling a richer sexual and sensual experience than the streetwalker is.  We wouldn’t claim that a dinner theater was fundamentally different from a hot-dog stand merely because the food is better and it comes with a lot of extras; the trophy wife is a whore as well, and though it’s true that a high-end escort is closer to her than to the streetwalker, it doesn’t change the fact that all of them are whores, and that no bright, clear line can be drawn at any point on that spectrum.

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