Tales from the Dark Side

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 18^th 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 19^th-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.

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The Devil’s Toys

Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.  -  R. Buckminster Fuller

Though the concept of the “slippery slope” can (and often is) used in a fallacious manner, it is wrong to insist (as government apologists often do) that it is always so.  In the common law tradition, laws are defended from those who would challenge them by arguing precedent: demonstrating that a new law or practice strongly resembles others already in existence which have never been challenged (or better yet, withstood such challenges) constitutes evidence that the new act is also permissible.  But there’s another factor, a psychological and moral one: once people get used to an idea, they’re much more likely to support laws that reflect that attitude.  Sometimes this is a good thing; for example, now that the majority of Americans have either smoked marijuana themselves or know someone who does, support for its criminalization is waning.  But it can also be a very bad thing: someone with a very negative opinion of a particular social group (such as homosexuals or sex workers) is unlikely to object very strenuously to laws criminalizing that group.

Yesterday, I discussed the way the state establishes precedents with demonized groups, then extends those precedents to everyone.  Today we’ll look at the other side of the coin: the way people become comfortable with doing nasty things themselves, so that when the state simply turns custom into law and replaces social penalties with criminal ones, most people don’t even flinch.  My first example is the public reaction to Julie Burchill’s awful hate-screed of a few weeks ago; for those who missed it, the neofeminist writer who said “prostitutes should be shot…for their terrible betrayal of all women”  published an ugly, hateful rant against transgender people in the Observer, and the resulting firestorm was so intense the newspaper “unpublished” it the next day.  Obviously, I have no love for Burchill and I was quite happy to see her reaping the whirlwind, but I found the deletion of her article very troubling, and people’s evident satisfaction over that deletion even more so.  As I wrote in my Cliterati article “Speech and More Speech”,

…nearly everyone is closed-minded about something, and that’s why it is so vital that we not allow anyone’s speech to be censored: nobody is (individually or collectively) qualified to judge what ideas “deserve”  to be heard.  The test of our commitment to the free exchange of ideas, and therefore to social progress, lies not in our support for free speech for those who say things we like, or even for those who politely say things we don’t like; rather, it lies in our dedication to defending the right of people we don’t like to say horrible, offensive things with which we vehemently disagree…

Those who rejoice when a private corporation deletes a writer’s article, and would gloat if she were fired, are already receptive to the idea of censorship; enacting the practice into law and establishing censors to act “on behalf of the public” is only one step further.

Then there was the case of the priest who called 911 for help getting out of a bondage situation in which he had accidentally trapped himself; tabloid websites had a field day with it, as you can imagine.  But Greta Christina explains the huge problem with this that nobody seems to have noticed:

…People in sexual situations that are both dangerous and potentially embarrassing need to be able to call for help, without fearing that they’re going to be publicly humiliated and that their call for help is going to be spread all over the Internet.  How many kinky people…are going to read this story and be reluctant to call 911 when they’re stuck in handcuffs, when they have something stuck in their ass, when they can’t get a cock ring off, when they stumble in their bondage boots and break their nose?  I don’t know anything about this priest, other than the fact that he got stuck in bondage gear and made a 911 call to help get him out…I don’t know if he preached sexual shame to his followers while secretly doing kinky stuff, or if he openly opposed the Church’s teachings on sexuality, or if in his public life he just stayed away from the whole topic…But I don’t think it matters…when he was stuck in handcuffs, he should have been able to call 911 without fearing that it would result in his massive public humiliation.  His public shaming sends a really crappy message to anyone involved in unconventional sex:  “If you’re responsible and take care of your safety by asking for help when you need it, from the people whose job it is to help you, you could easily wind up with your sexual practices becoming the laughing stock of the Internet”…

The “public records” excuse is increasingly used by the media to publicize things that aren’t anyone else’s business; it was bad enough when people who were accused of violent crimes were convicted in the media without benefit of a trial, then it spread to humiliating those accused of victimless crimes, and now it’s been extended to violating the privacy of those who, like the priest or the New York gun owners, aren’t accused of any kind of crime at all.  People have grown so used to this that nobody thought much about it when cities started erecting billboards with the names and pictures of men accused of soliciting prostitutes, and the majority quietly accepts the most egregious violations of privacy; how much longer will it be before government agencies just save a step and start making all the information gleaned from their omnipresent surveillance available for anyone to see?  Do you really want to live in a world where a complete police dossier on every friend, every neighbor, every co-worker, is only a few mouse-clicks away…and yours is equally accessible to everyone else?

Violating the rights of others is only acceptable in self-defense; it is not a toy for amusement or self-gratification.  As such toys are successively adopted by groups, then formal associations and finally governments, they change from mere playthings into dangerous weapons; unfortunately, the transformation is so gradual that most never even notice until it’s far too late to return them to the box from which they should never have been taken in the first place.

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That Was the Week That Was (#134)

If we are going to call attacks on reproductive and sexual rights a “war on women,” then let’s talk about a war on women that has actual prisoners and a body count.  -  Melissa Gira Grant

The Biggest Whores

Res ipsa loquitur:

Minnesota’s Supreme Court last week barred attorney Thomas P. Lowe from practicing law for at least the next 15 months after it was revealed that he was billing a client for sex.  Lowe…was approached in August 2011 by an acquaintance who asked him to represent her in a divorce.  Their…relationship soon evolved into a sexual one, but…Lowe…[billed] the woman for [all] the time they spent [together, including] having sex…[after] Lowe…[dumped her] the woman… attempted to commit suicide and was hospitalized…Lowe was previously on probation for purchasing cocaine from a client…

The second lawyer isn’t nearly as bad, though still terribly unprofessional:

A public defender…is facing charges after allegedly exchanging texts with an undercover cop who he thought was a prostitute, and then trying to exchange sex for legal representation.  Christopher Hollander…allegedly sent a text message to a phone formerly used by a prostitute [but now in possession of a cop who] Hollander met…in a hotel room…The two discussed the phony prostitute’s alleged legal trouble.  When the officer asked “How much is it going to cost me” for the legal services, Hollander started to caress her hand…then allegedly began trying to kiss and hug the officer, and told her he had two condoms…

Lawyers, if you want to propose exchange of services just say so; real hookers appreciate honesty, not some clumsy attempt at seduction.

Good Fantasy, Bad Reality

Ed Bagley has accepted a bargain in which he pleaded guilty to having sex with his supposed “victim” while she was underage, in return for prosecutors dropping all other charges (despite their insistence that he “swear” that the other accusations are true).  The one is bad enough; it can carry a 20-year sentence, and several of the other “conspirators” (as the state labels them) will also get very hefty sentences.

Something Rotten in Sweden (December Updates)

Remember, prostitution has never been illegal in Canada; these men were arrested for the “crime” of talking about it in public, which demonstrates the importance of taking this kind of power totally out of cops’ hands:  “Ottawa police swept the city’s downtown core…in an effort to find, charge and re-educate men looking for prostitutes…They arrested 15 men, 13 of whom escaped charges and will attend ‘john school’…a partnership with the Salvation Army…”  Please note the Orwellian term “re-educate”.

The Cold, Grey Light of Dawn

Looks like the Philippines is moving toward British-type legalization (erroneously called “decriminalization”):  “The Department of Social Welfare and Development…has endorsed a bill…which would decriminalize prostitution but punish those who control and profit from…[it, repealing] clauses…which punish ‘women who, for money, engage in sexual intercourse, or lascivious conduct’…”

It Looks Good On Paper

Another bit of feel-good legislation which capitalizes on hype but will actually help virtually nobody, due to its basis in fantasy:  “A bill filed in the Oklahoma Legislature…would erase the prostitution records of human trafficking victims…[who] average…12 to 14 years old…”

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic

This article has so much to recommend it:  Dr. Brooke Magnanti debunks “porn addiction”, describing the “studies” which claim to support it as “poorly conducted surveys on a level of market research, not science.”  In the process, she also quotes Dr. Marty Klein and lampoons both Cosmopolitan and Naomi “Stopped Clock” Wolf, all in less than a thousand well-chosen words.

Girls, Girls, Girls!

Of all the media one would expect to be least likely to side with puritans against a business persecuted for supposedly “corrupting public morals”, a rock music radio station has got to be pretty high on the list.  Though the article itself is dry enough, the wording and scare quotes in the headline and lede amply demonstrate the editor’s attitude:  “Lawsuit Claims Dancing in a Topless Bar ‘Improves the Self Esteem’ of the Stripper – seeks to have San Antonio’s strict new strip club law thrown out, also claims stripping is a ‘socially fulfilling experience’.”  It gets much worse; the station appears to have some close association with Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue…author of the titular song celebrating strippers.

A Whore in Church

The most interesting part of this article about sex workers in Malawi wearing hijab to attract Muslim customers is not the mere fact of it (which would simply be an example of the clipboard effect), but rather the fallacious notion (expressed both in text and comments) that a whore cannot be Muslim (or “truly” Christian either).  Also worthy of note is the author’s reversal of the usual feminist complaint that not covering up leads to “objectification”; this only goes to show that the real issue such women have is not some imaginary harm to women, but rather heterosexuality itself.

Above the Law

[Las Vegas] police officer John Norman is going to prison for two years…after pleading guilty to…coercing women to expose their breasts after stopping them on the road…Once Norman is released from prison, he will have to register as a sex offender…

The Crumbling Dam (TW3 #13)

Once again, Canadian government prohibitionists are trying to convince the courts that dangerous, repressive laws which deny sex workers’ agency are actually intended to “protect” them:

Hundreds of shadowy body rub parlours operated by exploitative pimps…are operating on the outskirts of Toronto, the Ontario Crown warns in a court document…[urging] the Supreme Court of Canada to let police keep the powers they have to protect female sex workers, who are often cowed into submissive silence…However, a group of prostitutes who have successfully challenged the ban through two levels of court accuse…Crown lawyers of scaremongering.  In the decision under appeal, the Ontario Court of Appeal invalidated the…prohibition on keeping a brothel…[and] granted prostitutes the right to…hire staff to protect them…the…court is scheduled to hear the…challenge in June…

Naked Truth

Melissa Gira Grant’s “The War on Sex Workers” appears in this month’s print edition of Reason; though regular readers will already be familiar with much of the ground she covers, it never hurts to revisit it.  More importantly, for an unrepentant sex worker to have the opportunity to discuss the neofeminist war on whores in a national magazine (albeit a libertarian one) is a sign that this issue is beginning to move into the mainstream.

Imagination Pinned Down

This article entitled “Sex, Lies and Audiotapes” is 12 years old, but is an excellent look at how “fantastic tales of sexual abuse” are instilled into the minds of the vulnerable, and why radical feminists were largely to blame for “sex abuse” hysteria and the Satanic Panic; it is thus still topical as background for the new guise of those moral panics, “sex trafficking”.

Shift in the Wind

Though it may be difficult to recognize for sex workers in the US, British Isles and any place else strongly affected by “trafficking” hysteria, 2012 actually saw net gains for sex workers; Cheryl Overs reviews the high points (without neglecting to mention the low ones) in “A Good Year for Red Umbrellas”.

Texas Tall Tales

Texans aren’t the only ones who can tell tall tales about new technology being used by “human traffickers” to “entrap innocent girls”:

…Mobile phone recharge shops have been reportedly taking advantage of innocent girls who approach them for recharge coupons and give their numbers.  The employees/owners of the shop or their friends call the girls…develop friendships and later misuse them…ruining the girls’ lives…human [traffickers in]…Kundapur…are said to be running a mobile recharge outlet…the accused lure the girls with jobs and then use them for their own ends.  Later, the girls are allegedly blackmailed and trapped, and their escape route is closed…apart from flesh trade, a drugs network is also interwoven in the racket…

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

As expected, a UK judge has ruled that the case of Mark Kennedy, the cop who was allowed to trick women into sex in order to spy on them, will be heard in a Star Chamber proceeding.  What was unexpected was that he would say what Kennedy did was OK because James Bond does it:

James Bond is the most famous fictional example of a member of the intelligence services who used relationships with women to obtain information…[such] fictional accounts…lend credence to the view that the intelligence and police services have for many years deployed both men and women officers to form personal relationships of an intimate sexual nature…in order to obtain information or access.

As Heresy Corner points out, “James Bond isn’t just ‘fiction’, it’s escapist fantasy…[which] doesn’t ‘lend credence’ to anything…and Mark Kennedy’s ‘targets’ weren’t exotic Russian agents with a handbag full of nuclear secrets and the sexual etiquette of a praying mantis…nor were they dangerous international terrorists intent on blowing up airports or shopping malls.  They were…largely peaceful activists engaged primarily in democratic dissent, however misguided or naive…”

Buried Truth

Remember Lisa Biron, the anti-gay lawyer who “transported a teen girl…to Ontario …and coerced her into engaging in sexual acts with another person”?  It turns out the girl was 14, there were two men, and Biron also had sex with her.  Oh, and one more thing:  the girl was her own daughter.  She was convicted of child porn charges on the 11^th.

South of the Border (TW3 #49)

The creation of “sex trafficking rings” from people who used to be called “illegal aliens” continues, complete with childish “code names”, bombastic rhetoric, exaggerated numbers and infantilization of sex workers:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced the results of a lengthy investigation called Operation Dark Night.  It looked into a sex trafficking ring stretching from Florida to Georgia to North and South Carolina…women…were forced into prostitution and traded like slaves in various cities for about a week at a time…11 victims were rescued and 40 customers called Johns were also taken into custody.  Investigators say the women were forced to perform up to 30 sex acts per day…

Like most “trafficking” articles, this one contains the Profession of Faith:  “…‘its a bigger issue than many people thought,’ said Joan Garcia-Melendez…‘Human trafficking is a very hidden crime’…Authorities say this is a wakeup call as to how widespread sex trafficking has become…”  But what will happen to those poor “victims” who were “rescued”?  The BBC says what the American story won’t: “Those who were illegal in the country would be deported.”

Q & A (January 2013)

I mentioned that “the only time [verification services] fail is…when some idiot fails to stick to the plan, gets caught in a sting and then ransoms his worthless hide by giving the busybodies his login info so they can pop several girls before the service gets wise.”  One of my readers supplied more details:  there were several instances, all in the Appleton/Oshkosh area of Wisconsin, and P411 removed those entire cities from the site as a precaution and directly warned all the ladies who might be targeted.  Apparently cops in Little Rock, Arkansas have also attempted the same thing, though less successfully.

Perverse Incentives

Susie Bright on how perverse prosecutorial incentives spawn abominations:

Twice in my career I’ve been asked to serve as an expert witness on the defense team of an obscenity trial…the defendants were low-hanging fruit…targeted because of their…vulnerability…The Justice Department [bags] obscenity law trophies by going after the poor, the suicidal, the insane, the cognitively impaired— because that’s the way they rack up numbers and status.  That’s the way they fuel their careers…not by taking on constitutional issues, or injustice, or fat cats who believe they’re above the law…They find someone who’s drooling, or depressed, or friendless— and then throw the book at them.  It doesn’t take long because the “defendant-target” is overmatched…

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Still More Mentoring

There are some questions that shouldn’t be asked until a person is mature enough to appreciate the answers.  -  Anne Bishop

I generally answer questions via email, then edit the question to make it more concise (and to remove identifying details), correct any clumsy phrasing in my answer, and transplant the whole into a column.  In this case the inquirer responded to my answer with a second, more general question that I think might prove useful to inexperienced hookers and enlightening to clients.  If you have a question of your own, please email me at maggiemcneill@earthlink.net.

I was wondering if you could give some advice to women working as dommes or doing fetish work.  I am new to this and don’t know exactly what it “illegal”.  I don’t have sex with clients, but I think the cops have other ways of busting you.  Do you have any advice/tips?  I do not want a prostitution record to haunt me for the rest of my life.

Unfortunately, both the laws and police practices vary from state to state, so even in states where paid BDSM or fetish work is legal one cannot always count on the police to honor that.  Many people are arrested every year and charged with things which are not crimes (for example, taking pictures of cops), and even if the charges are later dismissed it’s still traumatic, potentially expensive and (if your local police enjoy shaming people and the local media panders to their sick urges) reputation-destroying once the news is released.  You can’t unring a bell, so even if charges are dropped and your record is expunged the story is already out.  I’m not telling you all this to frighten you off, but rather to convince you of the necessity of proper precautions.  First, consult a lawyer about the legality in your state and the police practices; though you or I could easily look up the law itself that will not tell you if the police in your state have a habit of making spurious charges against dominatrices or fetish workers.  Next, screen your clients as thoroughly as if you were a vanilla escort; even if the police are unlikely to come after you, this is still important for the protection of your person and reputation.  The fact that your type of work does not involve intercourse matters to nobody but lawyers; it is still surrounded by stigma and an unstable man who is sexually aroused can still be dangerous, so you’ll want to be sure potential clients don’t have a history of violent or stalking behavior (asking for and checking references is the easiest way for a beginner to do this).  Finally, don’t cut yourself off from other sex workers; join your local escort board even though you are not a full-service escort, because it will keep you in touch with the latest talk on bad clients, stings and the like.  It may even get you some crossover clients; just make it very clear in your ads that you only do fetish and domination work.

I have heard about “screening clients” but it wasn’t really clear. Any advice on how to do that?

The best and simplest means of screening is by referrals; what this means is that you ask the client for the names of two established escorts he’s seen before.  It’s best if they provide the same type of service as you do, but even if that’s not possible just the fact that you know he’s the real McCoy, shows up on time and has no history of creepiness can be a great comfort.  When you get their contact information, make sure they’re really established girls (not just “Jade at the Bangkok Spa”) and then contact them, telling them Mr. So-and-so used them as references, and ask if they remember him.  The more information a girl gives you, and the more honest and friendly she sounds, the better; if she just shoots back a two-word text saying “he’s ok” from her smartphone, consider that just the same as if she failed to respond at all because she may just be blowing you off and doesn’t actually remember him.

You can also join a “whitelisting” service such as P411; “hobbyists” pay the company to verify them, and then give their P411 ID to escorts they wish to visit.  It doesn’t cost anything for providers to join, and you can see not only a self-generated profile of the client, but how many “OKs” he has received from other girls.  Provider Buzz is the opposite, a blacklist; an escort who has had a bad experiences with a client can enter his identifying information, and others will be able to see whatever she writes in the report (ranging from “no show” to serious violence).  Honeysuckle has a nice little escort screening tool which allows you to enter a potential client’s name, phone number and email address, and searches him via Google, phone listings, Amazon wishlists and Linkedin, all on one convenient screen (you may also be interested in her escorting tips and starter kit).  Pipl allows you to search names and even accesses some public records, and even just Googling a person’s name can turn up interesting stuff (especially if he owns his own company).

Last but definitely not least, trust your gut.  Even if everything checks out, if your intuition says he’s not right, he probably isn’t; at least half the girls I know who were arrested told me later that they felt something was wrong, but dismissed it and went anyway.  Vice cops practice deceit as a way of life and a few of them are very good at it, so if alarm bells go off you need to listen.

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Eros and Phobos

You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex.  -  Camille Paglia

As Paglia pointed out, second-wave feminists were fighting a losing battle in trying to paint sex as a wholly good, positive, non-scary, sunshine-and-rainbows thing in order to make it palatable to the naïve young coeds and sheltered housewives they hoped to liberate from the rigid traditional roles of Madonna and whore.  Though their motives were commendable, no good can come from hiding the truth and infantilizing those one hopes to help; the dark, chthonian power of sex is so important to its function and appeal that the only way to disguise it was to indulge in an ever-escalating (and ultimately futile) series of myths and denials which paved the way for the anti-sexual, anti-humanistic tyrannies of neofeminism.  Rape had to be absurdly presented as an asexual power exercise, which of course meant that BDSM had to be rejected  because its very nature refuted the claim that power could be cleanly divorced from sex; the second-wavers also didn’t want women thinking too hard about how much of a turn-on being overpowered or restrained (by the right man under the right conditions) can be.  Similarly, porn had to be demonized by creating arbitrary and fanciful distinctions between it and erotica, and because scary situations can arise in sex work it also had to be amputated from the mutilated, sanitized body of “good” sex.  At first this was a tough sell to women who had enjoyed the taste of sexual freedom in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but once the feminist establishment succeeded in stoking the fires of rape paranoia, all that had to be done was to define all “unacceptable” sex as rape, and AIDS hysteria drove the last nails into the coffin.

If sex were that easily buried, however, the human race would have died off long ago.  The efforts of the neofeminists and crypto-moralists to enforce a rigid sexual orthodoxy were as doomed to failure as those of Christianity (even when allied with the State since the late 19^th century) had been.  As the “light side” of sex was locked into ever-tighter bondage by the forces of law and middle-class mores, the “dark side” grew correspondingly stronger.  The more sexless marriage became, the more popular whores grew; the more chaste the popular media, the more explicit the pornography. Beneath the orderly facade of Victorian Europe and America the buried majority of sexuality grew in the darkness, erupting forth in fusions of lust and horror ranging from the literary (Bram Stoker’s wildly-popular Dracula and its many imitators) to the grotesque (the lurid spectacles of Paris’ Grand Guignol theater) to the terrifyingly real (the sex-driven crimes of Jack the Ripper).  It is no accident that erotic horror waned in popularity as sexual mores loosened in the 1920s, and vanished almost entirely by the end of the 1930s; contrast the tame sexuality of The Wolf Man (1941) with that of Dracula (1931) and other pre-code horror movies and you’ll see what I mean.

As the mass media grew in the 1960s and 1970s, they became harder to censor; the internet has made it nearly impossible.  Because of this, the character of horror fiction has become less reliable as a means of examining the relationship between sex and fear; though a great deal of horror literature and art is still highly erotic, most 21^st-century horror is now comparatively asexual and most erotica lacks any element of fright or violence (despite the claims of neofeminists).  But at the same time, the deep relationship between fear and sex is still clearly visible if one only cares to look:  the trappings of BDSM would be equally at home in a gothic horror setting, the rape fantasy is as popular as ever and the lurid fantasies of “sex trafficking” fetishists can be found in mainstream news outlets every day, forced up from the collective unconscious by the pressure of the return to Victorian levels of prudery.  Nor does one always have to look outward to find the connection; I’m sure many of my readers have realized that the things that sexually excite them most are often related to things that frighten them.  For example, some of you may recall my mentioning that I have a phobia of being trapped (including in traffic jams), and I think even the veriest psychological amateur could recognize that I have a tremendous aversion to authority.  Yet at the same time, I’m turned on by bondage and themes of dominance and submission.

Why should this be?  Is there some evolutionary reason that the emotions of fear and arousal should be so closely related that they’re often intermingled?  Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa suggested that fear of death might stimulate a male to want to mate in order to pass on his genetic material one last time, but obviously that wouldn’t apply to females; yet the sex-fear link is at least as strong in us as in men (as evidenced by the enduring fascination of sexualized monsters such as vampires).  My personal theory is that in women it’s a defense mechanism evolved to prevent trauma in forced-mating situations  where a woman might very well be terrified, but needs to relax and go with the flow so as to minimize injury and maximize the possibility of conception; this idea is supported by the fact that when a woman has sex, the area of the brain stem which controls “fight or flight” response is activated, and activity in the amygdala and hippocampus (which regulate fear and anxiety) is suppressed.  This is, of course, exactly the opposite of Todd Akin’s astonishingly ignorant “theory” that biological mechanisms evolved for the convenience and peace of mind of individuals rather than for the continuation of the species.

There’s one final possibility, either an alternate explanation or another, additional factor.  Human beings evolved to be risk-takers and novelty seekers; it is the driving force behind our curiosity, the exploratory urge which caused us to spread over the entire globe and our tendency to become bored and dissatisfied with unchanging routines.  Most humans are always in search of new experiences, and many seek adventures and thrills even when those thrills are frightening.  Horror movies, thrill rides and mind-altering substances give a controlled thrill, the exhilaration of an adrenaline rush without the danger of a real life-or-death situation.  And since sex is another “safe” thrill, another stimulus which produces feelings of excitement without the need for “fight or flight”, it may be that the feelings are easily confused by the brain’s limbic system in much the same way as pain and pleasure are in some people.  In other words, the intermixture of fear and sexual arousal, like that of pain and pleasure, may simply be an accident of our neurological wiring rather than something which had a specific survival function.  But whichever explanation is correct, there is no denying that sex and fear are deeply intertwined, and that attempting to separate them by shame, social engineering or government edict will be just as spectacularly ineffectual as attempting to suppress other human drives, urges and behaviors by those same means.

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Red in Tooth and Claw

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law?
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed?  -  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. (LVI)

One of the reasons the “rape is not sexual” myth has such staying power despite its clear absurdity is that it appeals to both men and women; as I said in “The Rape Question”,

… the truth – that rape is a natural, though unfortunate, outgrowth of our sexual programming – is scary to men because it reduces them to the level of animals, and to women because it means there is always the risk of rape in heterosexual relations.  By ignoring the 73% of all unwanted sex which isn’t forcible, people of both sexes could pretend there was no elephant in the parlor…

Very often, humans prefer to believe a comfortable lie than to accept the uncomfortable truth that Nature is a bitch goddess who doesn’t give a damn what any of us might want, and if She had Her way human life would be, as Hobbes put it, “nasty, brutish and short.”  From Her point of view, we exist for one reason and one reason only:  to be fruitful and multiply.  And both male sexual aggression and female sexual response evolved to fulfill that one goal, individual health and happiness be damned.  This is not to say that natural impulses are “corrupt” or “evil” as the Platonists (and their modern philosophical descendants) would have it, nor that they are “pure” and “good” as the idealists believe; they are amoral, and it is for the human mind, guided by the individual moral compass, to determine when to follow them, when to sublimate them and when to control them.  In order to make these determinations the individual needs understanding, and in order to understand he needs knowledge; the reason belief systems and mass movements want sexual knowledge suppressed is so that the faculties of rational decision-making are starved, and many therefore turn to the leaders of those movements for guidance.  If people understand the underlying reasons for rape, they can learn how to control it themselves rather than being forced to rely upon the morally bankrupt dogmas and paternalistic, authoritarian non-solutions pushed by governments, feminists, religions and others with a vested interest in controlling the interaction between men and women.

The most important thing to recognize is that, contrary to dogma, rape is neither an asexual act nor a result of “patriarchal culture”:  it is a type of reproductive behavior, and occurs in many species that have neither cultures nor hierarchical social interactions.  As I explained in “Ice Cream in the Hand”,  reproductive success for males depends upon spreading their sperm as widely as possible so as to inseminate as many females as possible; rape can therefore be an effective strategy for a low-status male who might not otherwise be able to pass on his genes in any other way.  Remember that concepts like law, fairness and individual autonomy are very recent arrivals on the landscape, and our sexual behaviors evolved in their absence.  The fact that we now recognize unwanted sexual contact as a violation of personal rights is no more germane to a discussion of how the behavior evolved than moral stipulations against murder are in considering the feeding habits of carnivora.

When one contemplates the big picture, human females are fortunate:  rape did not evolve as a primary mating strategy among the primates, and though it occurs in chimpanzees and some other apes and monkeys it is not the norm in any primate species.  That’s not so among ducks and geese, where sex is always violent and apparently coercive, and among a number of species of large herbivores, where it’s usually so; I can even tell you from personal observation that billy goats don’t wait for consent, and if they’re big and strong enough can sometimes force sex even with a nanny who doesn’t seem very happy with the proceedings.  Bottlenose dolphin sex is extremely aggressive, and what seem to be gang rape situations are not uncommon (we can’t be sure if they all take turns or if she’s forced to choose one, because dolphins are very averse to copulating within view of humans).  But in some species, there is absolutely no courtship at all; instead evolution has produced a sort of “arms race” between their sexes, with males evolving mechanisms to facilitate rape and females evolving mechanisms to make it more difficult.  Here’s an example from a recent news article:

A male fish from Mexico has…genitalia…equipped with four hooks…[to] allow him to grab onto a resistant female during mating…Brian Langerhans of North Carolina State University…explained that the male’s hooked genitals may be a counter-response to the female’s own defenses against undesirable mates.  “Typically, reproduction is more costly in females, so females favor ways of reducing mating with ‘lower quality’ males, but reproduction is cheap in males and so selection favors ways of mating with as many females as possible”…Females of this species have evolved to have a big ball of tissue that blocks most of the genital pore.  This means the female would have to deliberately allow the male to mate with her unless the male evolved a counter-response, Langerhans explained.  The four-hooked genitalia could help the males overcome resistance and latch onto a female’s genital pore and deposit sperm inside her…Another…species…recently discovered in Vietnam sports sex parts that jut out of its head and are equipped with a rod and a jagged hook to clasp the female during mating…

One can only imagine the thorny issues of consent and coercion which might arise if a species like this were to evolve high-order intelligence; the “War of the Sexes” would be more than just a metaphor among such creatures.  In humans, as in all other animals, conflict arises whenever the reproductive aims of an individual male and an individual female fail to coincide; the key to reducing the number of such incidents, and to mitigating the damage they cause to both parties (and to society as a whole) when they occur despite precautions, is knowledge.  Understanding why an organism behaves in the way it does may allow one to halt or divert that behavior, but the lack of understanding which inevitably results from an incorrect theoretical framework empowers nobody but those who want the conflict to continue in order to further their own self-serving agendas.

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More Hooker Humor

Congress is furious at the Secret Service for consorting with hookers, which has traditionally been Congress’s role.  –  Andy Borowitz

Two years ago today I published “Hooker Humor”, in which I shared a few jokes about my profession.  It was only a few for one simple reason: though there are hundreds of hooker jokes, the majority of them are tasteless, juvenile, vulgar and rely on offensive stereotypes about our being dirty, diseased, desperate and subhuman.  There are, however, some funny, clever and even cute ones out there if one has the patience to look.

The Value of Sex

In the mid-1960s, two young people got married soon after university, where he earned a degree in business administration and she graduated magna cum laude in economics.  On their wedding night, she asked him for $20 before they made love; he laughed about it, remembering their discussions about the economic value of women’s labor and the like, and handed her the money with a smile.  The same thing happened the next time they had sex, and the next; though he was a bit surprised that she was carrying what he perceived as a kind of joke this far, he was a good sport about it and so made sure he always had a bit put aside in case he got horny.

This went on for 40 years, and even though they had sex less often as time went on she was always enthusiastically available for him (though she did raise her rate to $50 in the early ‘90s).  Even before they married they had agreed it made more economic sense for her to stay at home and raise their children, of whom they eventually had four; she was an excellent manager of money, and he was always amazed at how far she could make his salary go even though they sent their kids to the best schools and never wanted for anything.

In later years they experienced a series of financial setbacks which cut into their savings, and as the economy worsened over the past few years the husband started to worry that there was just no way he would be able to retire at 65 as they had planned.  Eventually he put aside his ego, sat his wife down at the table and asked her advice about their financial situation.  She went to her filing cabinet, brought out a thick envelope and showed him a series of financial statements, stock certificates and the like, explaining that she had invested her earnings from sex in the stock market, and that her good judgment and keen economic instincts had eventually parlayed that long series of small fees into literally millions of dollars.  Her husband was overjoyed, and everything was going beautifully until he blurted out, “If I had realized what you were doing, I would have given you all my business!”

Analogy

Joe and Harry were chatting at a bar, and Joe said, “I wish my wife would get off of my back about my watching porn; she claims if I really loved her I wouldn’t need that.”

Harry replied, “Oh, my wife used to say the same thing until I pointed out to her that I love my car, but I still like watching Nascar racing.”

“And that satisfied her?” asked Joe.

“Yep,” said Harry, “but it’s a good thing she didn’t think about the fact that I rent cars when I’m away on business trips.”

Venery

Four Oxford dons were engaged one evening in casual but learned conversation, and the topic turned to collective nouns such as “a pride of lions” or “a gaggle of geese”; since these are also called “venereal nouns”, one of the professors asked what a collection of prostitutes might be called.  The four fell into silence for a moment, as they pondered the possibilities.

At last, one spoke: “How about ‘a jam of tarts’?”  The others nodded in acknowledgement as they continued to consider the problem.

A second suggested “an essay of trollops.” Again, the others nodded, and soon a third proposed “a flourish of strumpets.”  They all then looked to the fourth professor, who was the most senior and learned of them all, and one asked if he had any thoughts on the matter.

He paused for a few moments more and then replied, “An anthology of pros.”

Cheapskate

One evening a man who had worked late was walking toward the train station when he spotted a very attractive streetwalker; since his wife didn’t expect him home for some time he went up to her and asked her price.  When she told him it was $100 he exclaimed, “A hundred?  Don’t be ridiculous; I’ll give you forty!”  She laughed at him and told him where he could put his forty, and he stalked off in a snit.

That weekend, he took his wife out to dinner at a restaurant not all that far from his workplace, and as they were walking back to the car whom should he see but the same streetwalker.  He just looked straight ahead, hoping she wouldn’t recognize him, but when they passed she called out, “See what you get for forty bucks?”

The Old Man and the Prostitute

In the Days Before Cell Phones…

A man staying at a hotel in London picked up a tart card from a nearby phone box.  Back in his hotel room he rang the number and a woman with a very sexy voice asked if she could be of assistance.  “Yes” he said.  ”I’d like to know if you do bondage and discipline; I’m especially interested in getting a really hard spanking.  Would that be something you could provide?”

The woman replied, “I’d really like to oblige you, sir, but if you press 9 first you’ll get an outside line.”

Memory Lapse

A extremely old man decided he wanted sex, so he went to the local stroll and when he saw one woman he really liked, he started flirting with her as if he were making a pass, ignoring her questions about what he wanted.  When it became clear that he was just wasting her time, she told him to get lost but he continued bothering her, saying “I sure would like to get some action tonight.”

Exasperated, she cried “You’ve got to be kidding!  You’re too old!  You’re all finished.”

“What did you say?” asked the old man.

“You heard me – you’re all finished.”

“Oh,” he replied, “how much do I owe you?”

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That Was the Week That Was (#40)

[A] silly uberfeminist crusader…once called me a sex addict in a national newspaper…To some…[that] would be the gravest insult; to me it was the intellectual equivalent of claiming I am Father Christmas.  –  Brooke Magnanti

King of the Hill

The latest entry in the contest to claim bragging rights for “biggest sex trafficking hub in the United States”:  “Reports from cities with federal Innocence Lost Task Forces lists Toledo [Ohio] as the third largest city for human trafficking and sex slavery…”  Previous claimants include New York, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Portland, Oregon and Sacramento, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Phoenix, Arizona; and the entire state of Tennessee.

Updates

Good Fantasy, Bad Reality

A southwest Missouri woman who says she shared her bed for years with her husband and his sex slave has decided she needs help defending herself against five federal charges.  Marilyn Bagley… is charged with conspiracy, sex trafficking, forced labor trafficking, document servitude and use of an interstate facility to facilitate unlawful activity.  She and her husband, Edward, are scheduled for trial in February.

My Body, My Choice

Note that prohibitionist “feminists” had no comment on this:  “Former U.S. Congresswoman Linda Smith…[who] founded Shared Hope International…said that efforts to stop the sell [sic] and trade of minors in the sex industry should be an extension of the ‘pro-life’ cause.”

Acting and Activism

“President Obama is not alone in the fight to end sex trafficking.  Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino…[is] starring in a new Hollywood film, Trade of Innocents, following a sex trafficking ring in Cambodia.”  Thanks, CNN; had you not told me that Obama wasn’t alone in pandering to hysteria, I would never have known.

Backwards into the Future

Even some politicians in Zimbabwe have more respect for human rights than their American counterparts:

Zimbabwe Parliamentarians against HIV and AIDS…wants government to decriminalise commercial sex work…The Director of the Public Personalities against AIDS Trust, Tendai Westerhof, [also] condemned criminalisation of sex workers…“It is disappointing that the country still criminalises sex work…these people suffer a lot as a result of the discriminatory laws…They are raped and cannot report such abuses.  As a result, they cannot access health services”…

Meanwhile, in South Africa, sex worker rights group SWEAT recently made a presentation in their parliament.

Down Under

Though the Australian cops in this story subscribe to fashionable “end demand” malarkey, some of them also admit that client persecution harms streetwalkers:

As a crackdown on kerb crawlers in St Kilda intensifies, street sex workers could be moving…to…Dandenong or Footscray, or [using smartphone] apps to meet clients in unsafe areas.  Police tried unsuccessfully for decades to curb the trade by targeting workers…But halfway through the new two-year strategy, they noticed that the switch to targeting clients was having unwanted consequences.  ”If we do push them out of the area, they won’t necessarily all leave the industry – and they’ll either adopt online or they’ll go and work in another location”…said [Senior Sergeant Brad Daly].  ”We might be creating things that we haven’t thought of yet”…lawyer Vanda Hamilton works with more than 50 legal and illegal sex workers and said…she feared many were being forced into troubling scenarios.  She said the only way to ensure safety was to follow New South Wales’ example by legalising street-sex work…”You’re never going to stop sex work, you’re just going to push it so far underground that you can’t help people”…

Guess what, Brad?  Virtually none of them are leaving the industry; they’re just going where you can’t see them.

Counterfeit Comfort

More of this, please (but where’s the ACLU?)

Less than a month after approving restrictions on Halloween activities by registered sex offenders, the city of Simi Valley has been sued…the…law bans Halloween displays and outside lighting every Oct. 31…[and] requires a sign on the front door in letters at least an inch tall:  ”No candy or treats at this residence.”  Both the prohibition on decorations and the mandatory sign violate free speech rights, according to the lawsuit.  A total of 119 registered sex offenders live in Simi Valley…None has been involved in crimes involving children on Halloween, according to police, who say they have no records of any such crime occurring in Simi Valley during Halloween trick-or-treating…

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic

Dr. Brooke Magnanti on the newest, even stupider adjunct to “sex addiction”:

…The Daily Mail…claims [that young men] are addicted…[to] Viagra…[which unlike sex] is a pharmaceutical drug…[which] could [conceivably produce] physical dependency…[their “proof” consists of an]…interview [with] exactly one guy who uses Viagra a lot during sex…and…one…“psychosexual counselor”…who says this is “just a small sample of the problem”…Any studies…Any scientific research in any labs anywhere?  Because I…don’t see any.  At.  All.  Reading further down the article I see their real target:  porn “addiction”…[and] sexually empowered women…How dare the ladies express interest and enjoyment in sex!  Why won’t we just lie back and think of England like we’re supposed to!?…

Presents, Presents, Presents!

Mere days after I added it to my Amazon wishlist, a reader who prefers to remain anonymous sent me a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, which I somehow never got around to reading before.  Thank you so very much!

Profit from Panic

Hey, kids! Fight “human trafficking” for fun and profit! Implicate your neighbors! Persecute sex workers! Win big prizes!  “To raise awareness of human trafficking…the Department of Justice and Equality in Dublin and the Department of Justice in Belfast will launch a photography and video competition for Third Level students…Research human trafficking and present your understanding of the issue through a photograph or short video…Winners of each category will receive…1^st prize €1,000…2^nd prize €500…3^rd prize €250.”

Prudish Pedants

Here’s an interesting article debunking the fallacious notion that some kinds of porn are more “positive” than others, that “erotica” is intrinsically different from porn and that men can be “taught” to reject the kind of porn they prefer in favor of the kind women prefer…argued from a marketing perspective rather than a traditionally psychological one.  One important point:  “Human minds are not passive and infinitely malleable receptacles prone to any form of socialization and learning.  Successful marketers are well aware of this reality.  Ideologues, including some academics in the ivory tower, have much to learn!”

Misdirection

Remember when controversy over contraception was only something we read about in history books or in reference to unusually conservative Catholics?  I sure do.  But over the last two decades that equine carcass has been dragged out of the glue factory and is once again being set upon by sex-hating control freaks trying to call attention away from the uncontrolled tumescence of government, national debt and the police state.  The fact that the public obediently paid attention to this distraction has enabled lots of crazy people, including a group of nuns who produced an anti-contraception video chock full of propaganda because they obviously forgot that lying make Baby Jesus cry:

Feet of Clay

Anne Elizabeth Moore and Melissa Gira Grant write:

This week Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half The Sky premieres on PBS as a two-part miniseries, providing an opportunity for his audience to step into his well-worn white savior shoes…viewers will survey the lives of young women whom Kristof and WuDunn have chosen as the best ciphers for their agenda…to…“turn oppression into opportunity”…[by] proposing dubious schemes for advancing women’s rights—like arresting sex workers in order to “rescue” them from prostitution, or enthusiastically supporting the creation of “sweatshops” to accommodate sex workers and other women in the global south…

In response, Moore & Grant presented a “collective evaluation” of Nicholas Kristof, in other words excerpts from essays by Laura Agustín, Teju Cole and many others (including yours truly).  The article is also mentioned in this Buzzfeed article, which shows the outcry is getting big enough for even the usually-oblivious media to notice.

Little Boxes

Catarina Migliorini says that cooking, driving, reading and every other human activity magically become different things if one only does them once:

…A 20-year-old Brazilian woman is auctioning off her virginity for a one-time tryst on an airplane…Catarina Migliorini says she’ll donate some of the money to provide housing for poor families in her native Santa Catarina…the Internet bidding [has already] reached  $160,000…[and] ends Oct. 15…Migliorini insisted in a statement to the Sao Paulo daily Folha that…”For me, it’s not prostitution…when someone does something once in his or her life, this is not considered a profession.  If you take a picture and it comes out good, you are not a photographer because of it”…The Daily Mail reported that Migliorini is [also]…part of an Australian film project called Virgins Wanted.  She’s getting $20,000 and a 90-percent cut of the auction price…

The HuffPo comments are, of course, predictably disgusting.  Meanwhile, Slate presents this series of portraits of female Iranian singers, who are legally barred from singing on stage for a general audiences because it is “immodest”.  This is not a hypothetical reductio ad absurdum; it is the natural result of busybodies having control over women’s interactions with men and attempting to draw imaginary lines between “good” and “immoral” behavior.

The Public Eye

Rachel Aimee, one of the founders of the late $pread magazine, covers one specific aspect of the “sex workers as mothers” topic:  deciding if, when and how to tell one’s children that one is a sex worker.  She interviews an escort, a stripper, a dominatrix, a nude model and a sex educator, and though as you might expect she doesn’t reach a definitive conclusion, she presents a lot of worthwhile food for thought.

Metaupdates

Think of the Children! in TW3 (#11)

Another good, clean organization refuses charity from nasty, dirty whores:

A pornographic website has launched a fundraising effort for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, but the nonprofit says it wants nothing to do with the campaign…the…website said it would donate 1 cent for every 30 views of certain videos featuring breasts during October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month…[but the Komen organization said] “We are not a partner, not accepting donations, and have asked them to stop using our name”…

Obviously, the Komen Foundation has not yet learned that they are supposed to care more about women’s health than about prudishness.

I Really Shouldn’t Even LOOK at an Issue of Cosmopolitan in TW3 (#25)

Priya-Alika Elias imagines what it would be like if Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Tolkien and others wrote Cosmo sex tips.  Alas, she didn’t do Lovecraft, but it’s still pretty damned funny.

Follow Your Bliss in TW3 (#37)

The…TSA…didn’t bother to do a background check on a priest who had been defrocked for molesting girls before they gave him a job, which included doing pat downs on children at Philadelphia International Airport.  The Philadelphia Inquirer…reported that…65-year-old Thomas Harkins…has since been promoted from the…job that required him to pat down children and now oversees screening operations for checked baggage.

This Week in 2011

I answered questions on NBA policies, Wikipedia, gravatars and epigrams, discussed busybody control freaks who use women’s dignity as an excuse for oppression, introduced you to a young courtesan named Su Xiaoxiao, reported on a complaint to the APA about Melissa Farley’s numerous ethical violations, and shared short items on marital sex issues, Gardasil, a Sydney mega-brothel, a pervert cop, BDSM persecution, Edmonton’s attempt to create a bottleneck, a claim that the average hooker is 13, cops’ armed robbery of a strip club, AHF and an essay by Catherine Hakim.

This Week in 2010

I introduced the concept of “sex rays”, talked about my boob job, explained how criminalization exposes whores to danger from real criminals, discussed the families of sex workers, presented brief biographies of the five victims of Jack the Ripper, looked at the archetypal “hooker with a heart of gold”, and shared short items about Congress’ first attempt to control the internet and two creepy men’s attempts to sexually violate women unnoticed.

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Links #113

The essence of government is power, and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.  –  James Madison

Every week has a large number of police brutality stories, but this week had an unusually large number of offenses which are especially odious both for their incredible savagery and the triviality of the excuses under which they were inflicted.  For example, two Los Angeles cops handcuffed a 5’4″ (163 cm) nurse and slammed her head into the pavement for the heinous crime of talking on her cell phone, and five others in the same city left a morbidly obese woman to suffocate to death in the back seat of a police car after hobbling her and literally cramming her into the car with a kick to the genitals.  In Alabama, another brave hero assaulted a 90# (41 kg) brain-damaged woman who walks with a cane for the monstrous offense of taking pictures at a high-school football game.  And then there were the wanton murders of three dogs:  a South Carolina cop trespassed in a yard he had no business in and shot a tethered dog who could not even reach him; Buffalo, New York thugs broke into a woman’s house with a false warrant and murdered her dog while she was away, leaving her to discover the carnage when she returned; and a Denver-area sadist just shot his victim at random while harassing a “drug suspect” in the street.

All three examples of what Radley Balko calls “puppycide” are from his Twitter feed; a depressingly-large number of similarly-nauseating cases can be found on his blog, The Agitator.  He also provided the first two links after the first video, and the next two after that (plus the second video) are courtesy of Jesse Walker.  But first:  if you’re a “moon landing hoax” crackpot, it probably isn’t a good idea to trick Buzz Aldrin into an interview and then insult him.

• 11-year-old arrested, charged with “child pornography” for sexting.
• Man playing part of Bigfoot gets new role as roadkill.
• Missing woman searches for herself.
• “Many scientists don’t like to talk about shark sex.”
• A common skin condition is caused by microscopic, poop-filled, exploding spiders who like to have sex on your face.  You’re welcome.
• Florida deputy uses Spidey-sense to establish probable cause.
• Glenn Greenwald on blind obedience to authority.
• Violet Blue on why you should worry about face-recognition technology.
• Heroic cops protect the public decency from bachelor-party style performance nobody complained about.
• I agree that this is horrible.  But it’s not life-in-prison, $250,000 fine, harsher-sentence-than-most-murders horrible.
• This excellent William Anderson article explains how the “progressive” philosophy led inevitably to horrible prosecutorial abuses in the United States, such as federal prosecutors using an 88-year-old communist law from Mongolia as an excuse to steal a man’s property.

Speaking of relics from the 1920s, here’s a Dutch ethnographic film from that time, in Pathécolor.

• FBI gives free face-recognition software to all police departments while insisting it will only ever be used to search mugshots.
• Judge calls $675,000 fine for downloading 30 songs “fair”.
• So, is this “human trafficking” too?
• Well, you know, “family values” and “best interests of the child” and all.
• Inspector Javert would be proud:  Government forces bank to fire man for trying to steal 10¢ in 1963.
• Ignoramuses describe reproductions of paintings by Magritte, Munch  and Goya as ”bizarre…sexual…violent [and] very disturbing“, and declare they “may not be suitable for all ages.”

(Thanks to Grace for the first two links after the video, Cthulhuchick for the third, Wendy Lyon for the fourth, Mike Siegel for the fifth and reader MTflyboy for the last.)

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That Was the Week That Was (#30)

The truth is that it does not suit our social narrative to recognize that a woman can be raped and get on with her life.  -  Charlotte Shane

BDSM

As soon as anyone who has some unusual interest commits a crime, you can be sure the loudmouthed bigots will blame the interest rather than the criminal:

Three roommates involved with a “sex dungeon” at their home may have murdered a…California [woman] as they tried to satisfy their fetishes…Detectives found “bondage type sex apparatuses, toys and tools” at the home of the two women and man who have been charged with murder in the death of 22-year-old Brittany Killgore…[who] was last seen April 13…Jessica Lopez…said she strangled the victim, fearing the victim would upend a kinky sex ring by seducing her “Master,” according to…a seven-page letter that [Lopez wrote]…The documents give no indication that Killgore knew about the sex ring, and prosecutors call her an innocent victim…

Ignoring the dyphemisms like “ring” and “kinky”, what do we have here?  A woman murders another woman out of jealousy.  Period.  If the house had been full of workout equipment or sports memorabilia, you can be sure the cops wouldn’t be calling it an “athletics-related murder”, but let there be anything sexual in the house, and suddenly it’s a “factor”.

Think of the Children!

Things have grown far worse in the 21 years since Paul Reubens’ career was destroyed by vice cops who accused him of masturbating in an adult theater; back then, he might’ve survived the bad publicity had his audience not included children.  Fred Willard’s audience is all adult, yet he’s being crucified anyway:

…His career is now abruptly over because he was arrested by L.A. vice cops at an adult movie theater.  Not convicted, not sentenced.  Arrested.  For “lewd behavior” in a porn theater…In the past 35 weeks, L.A. police have apparently “inspected” the adult theater 40 times, arresting 23 people.  One can speculate how many of those “inspections” involved cops getting blow jobs.  One can wonder how much tax money was spent on these “inspections.”  And one can wonder, in a city where 300 people are murdered and several thousand are raped every year, how the city can possibly justify spending millions on “inspecting” porn theaters…If convicted, the State could require Fred Willard to register as a sex offender.  Depending on where he lives, he might have to move.  No producer or casting director would ever look at his photo ever again…

John Law

Though cops are well-known for being both astonishingly ignorant and disgustingly barbaric on the subject of whores, this moronic op-ed on the “hookernomics” of Chattanooga, Tennessee’s “fugly” streetwalkers represents a new low for puerile police vulgarity in print; it’s also a fine example of how when a cop is allowed to run his filthy mouth he’ll usually reveal more about himself than he realizes.

The Clueless Leading the Hysterical

Nestle Corporation proves it’s almost as clueless as cops are:  “Nestle…[removed] an image from its Kit Kat Facebook…page, after [discovering] it was similar to…‘Pedobear’ – considered visual shorthand on the internet for sites posting material with inappropriate overtones towards minors…”

Objectification Overruled

“Objectification”, blah blah blah.  ”Sending messages”, simper simper.

…Melinda Liszewski is part of a campaign against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls…”We’ve got an expanding sex industry in Queensland, we’ve got billboards advertising that kind of thing and we’ve got…children being exposed to the…message that women exist to be bought and sold,” she said.  But speak to 21-year-old Portia…and it’s all about money [and] flexible hours…[she's] been accepted to study Post Graduate Development Psychology…Indy…is 31 and said she was angered by the backlash.  ”I’ve been in this industry for 13 years and I have a child,” she said…  ”I’ve studied vet science and nursing and now I have my own business…”

The Course of a Disease

“Justice Minister Anna-Maja Henriksson is planning to push for a bill that would completely prohibit the purchase of sexual services..[which] would bring Finland’s legislation in line with the Swedish and Norwegian model…”  I have a suggestion for the minister:  talk to Norway’s social affairs chief before you make a complete ass of yourself.

The Rape Question

In The New Inquiry, Charlotte Shane published an excellent essay on how the feminist myth that all rape is equally traumatic and always life-destroying  harms women and shuts down discourse:

…Though some feminists regard “rape equals devastation” as sacred fact, the notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available.  Common sense instructs us that it is far more “dangerous” to insist to young women that they will be broken by an unwanted sex act than it is to propose they might have a happy, healthy, and sexually pleasant future ahead of them in spite of a sexual assault…When we refuse to acknowledge the possibility that a rape could be anything less than a tsunami of emotional and mental destruction for a woman, we establish a fantasy of absolute male sexual power and absolute female vulnerability.  We are, in essence, honoring the timeless belief that a woman’s worth, self-respect, and ability to function within society are dictated exclusively by the sexual use of her body…

Little Boxes

One can’t blame Anna Gristina’s partner for employing the “arbitrary line” defense, but it does demonstrate the inanity of prostitution laws:

…”Paying two individuals to watch them engage in sexual activity…is simply not prostitution,” veteran defense lawyer Robert Gottlieb argues…on behalf of…Jaynie Mae Baker…[who is] fighting a single count of promoting prostitution, for allegedly sitting at a restaurant with a prospective john last July and booking him…with a pair of escorts…not once do the parties specifically mention sex for money…[and] the recordings capture “the undercover officer meeting two other women at an apartment who eventually appear to engage in sexual contact with each other, but not with the undercover officer”…the fake john never even took his clothing off…prior judges have defined prostitution as specifically “A paying B for sexual activity to be performed on A,” and not as charging a fee merely to provide a building space for sexual activity or to let someone watch a sex performance…

Here’s a look at the British version of these idiotic technicalities from New Statesman, in which an accountant who represented a number of prostitutes points out the absurdity of taxing them as businesses while simultaneously denying that they are covered by business law:

…although prostitution is lawful…a prostitute cannot do things such as advertise, go into partnership, form a limited company, employ people, rent premises or sue for debts…the big problem lies with the legislation on brothel keeping.  This – unlike prostitution, is considered a crime.  Common sense dictates two fairly simple things:  one, prostitution won’t go away any time soon (something about that whole “oldest profession” thing), and two; the women doing it are safer working indoors with a maid, rather than working on the street.  There’s neither rhyme nor reason to this law, besides the rule that for every outraged Daily Mail headline there’s an equally cowardly political reaction…

The article goes onto say that the old brothel laws are now being justified with “sex trafficking” hysteria, and includes a 2009 video of a politician being forced to admit on television that the government’s source for “trafficking” figures was an article in the Daily Mirror.

The Pygmalion Fallacy

…Singapore-based Lovotics…unveiled…Kissenger…an egg-like orb outfitted with two soft plastic lips packed with sensors and actuators.  When a human…plants a kiss on the robot lips, the sensors record the shape changes the kisser creates on the lips and translates those pressure patterns into a mirror image that can be beamed over the Web to another Kissenger…[which] reproduces the sender’s unique kiss for a human on the other end.  It’s supposed to be a means of maintaining a sense of intimacy when two people are separated by distance, translating a person’s signature kissing style into something that can be transported and delivered to a recipient…

First They Came for the Hookers…

Of course we already knew this, but it’s nice to see them admit it for a change:  “Police have admitted that they do not have any evidence to support a claim that lap dancing clubs may contribute to sex offences…”  Meanwhile, teacher Stacie Halas (who was fired for having acted in porn) in now suing the school district with the help of feminist attack dog Gloria Allred, who as you may remember also took the case of the reporter fired for her past work as a stripper.

The Widening Gyre

Some readers seemed skeptical of my position that peaceful protest alone has done nothing for the sex worker rights movement, and that it’s time for us to be disruptive so we can no longer be ignored.  This made the national news, which is extremely unusual for any US sex worker protest:

Here’s another one from Wednesday.

I Swear To God

It’s really heartening to see a story like this from a major news outlet:

… while the United States lifted a travel ban on people infected with HIV in 2009, it has clung to a prohibition on the entry of foreign sex workers established more than two centuries ago.  Activists, and some [International AIDS] Conference officials, say that runs counter to a goal of achieving an end to the epidemic…”I don’t know how we’re going to ever see an end to AIDS in our lifetime…without including all of those populations who must be involved as part of this solution,” said U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee of California…Michel Sidibe, executive director of the United Nations AIDS program, said it was “outrageous” that in 2012 “when we have everything to beat this epidemic, we still have to fight prejudice, stigma, discrimination, exclusion, criminalization”…

The article then goes on to discuss the public health menace presented by allowing cops and prosecutors to seize condoms as “evidence”.  Incidentally, I’m not sure where this reporter got the idea that the whore immigration ban is “more than two centuries” old; it was part of the Page Law of 1875, a racist ploy to reduce the number of Chinese immigrants.

Metaupdates

The Crumbling Dam in Further Developments

Los Angeles billboard companies refused Furry Girl’s sex worker rights billboard, but were happy to display this:

The Pro-Rape Coalition in We’re Not Done Yet

Just in case you may have forgotten about Mitt Romney’s campaign promise to work hard to increase the rape rate:

Former Justice Department official Patrick Trueman, who proudly participated in federal pornography prosecutions during their “heyday” in the late 1980s and early 1990s…[said] that Mitt Romney’s campaign assured him that Romney would “vigorously” prosecute pornographers if elected president.  Trueman, the president of Morality in Media, contacted the Romney campaign earlier this year about the “untreated pandemic” of Internet pornography…

Good News, Bad News in TW3 (#14)

A brief respite:  “Western Australia’s new Attorney-General…has conceded the Government’s proposed prostitution laws are unlikely to be passed before the next election…”

This Week in 2011

Several “Harlots of the Bible” were positively portrayed, and many sex workers are abducted and caged “Against Their Will” in the name of “rescuing” them.  “A Load of Farley” vivisects the most recent bogus “study” from the most active font of such filth, and “Imaginary Crises” does the same for claims of a “rape epidemic”.  “A Working System” demonstrates how problems can be handled under decriminalization, “Peeping Toms” looks at the legacy of Lawrence vs. Texas, and “Profanation” discusses the neofeminist campaign to rewrite the history of harlotry.

This Week in 2010

An essay on the legends about “Mary Magdalene” was followed by one on why women lie about our weight and age, how escorts go about “Playing the Part”, a two-part column on rape in calls, and a debunking of the myth of “Pimps”.

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