That Was the Week That Was (#320)

Feminism still feels like someone rescuing me from the patriarchy so that I may be told what to do by “sisters” who need to get their opinions out of my knickers.  -  Sarah Woolley

Lack of Evidence

The Fourth District Court of Appeal…deemed West Palm Beach’s “loitering with intent to commit prostitution” ordinance unconstitutional…[because it was] “overbroad and vague”   It… cited a 1993 Florida Supreme Court ruling [striking down]…a similar law [in Tampa for discriminating]…against previously convicted prostitutes.  [The earlier decision stated that]…“All Florida citizens enjoy the inherent right to window shop, saunter down a sidewalk, and wave to friends and passerby with no fear of arrest”…

Meanwhile, in California, “Two women suspected of loitering with the intent to commit prostitution were arrested at a Burbank hotel…after officers reportedly discovered incriminating text messages, condoms and oils in their possession…“

Check Your Premises

“…Baltimore City police officer [Lamin Manneh]…and his…wife [Marissa Braun were]…charged with human trafficking…19-year-old [Braun was caught in a sting]…and…investigators charged the pair with human trafficking because Braun looked so young…”  You read that correctly; she’s been charged with “trafficking” herself.

Feminine Pragmatism

Justice minister Francisco Dominguez’s warning…that…men…who seek [paid] sex…will be…[prosecuted] has roiled [Dominican] workers… “There are customers who’ve called us to tell us that they won’t come”…said Carla Matos…who…said she had to become a prostitute…to raise her children…”What we’ll have to do in a couple of days will be to go out and rob and kill people, because imagine, we can’t do nothing else.  I will not let my children starve,” [Jennifer] Paniagua said.

The Prudish Giant

From the “progressive” Huffington Post:

Not only is “prostitution” a tagged skill you can select on LinkedIn, there are actually escorts who advertise their services [there]…[but] LinkedIn…now explicitly bans escorts from using the site…The new user agreement states that you must not:  ”Create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution” even if [they are] legal where you live…Not only can you list “prostitution” as a skill, you can list a whole lot of other unsavory skills like “rape,” “shoplifting,” “gangs,” “manslaughter,” and “drug trafficking”…

Yes, the writer did seriously equate consensual sex with rape and murder.  Dr. Brooke Magnanti comments on the absurdity and futility of the whole thing.

An Angel of Mercy

…Shona Langley, a street sex worker support officer, and Charlotte Crossland, a harm reduction nurse…[work for] the Harm Reduction project…[in] Lancashire…twice a week…they load their van with…condoms, panic alarms, needles and bank note checker pens, while Charlotte offers Hepatitis B and other vaccinations…[and] treatment for minor health issues…Shona said:  “We don’t judge.  We are not here to criticise or bully them into stopping what they do”…

Scapegoats

[David Beckman of Illinois]…faces a charge of misdemeanor animal cruelty after police said he sexually abused his pet peacock…police learned the bird died while they were investigating Beckman about an alleged case of indecent solicitation of a child…

Objectification Overruled

Feminists at Cambridge University lead such privileged, unchallenging lives that they imagine jelly wrestling (girls grappling in gelatin in front of male spectators) has “a significant role to play in the degradation and abuse of women,” and imagine they’ve won a great victory for womankind via a petition which caused the event to be cancelled.  Sarah Woolley explains why  this is pure bollocks:

…”objectification” is a herd word used by women who can rarely recall the name of their last waitress…If a person sees a woman arse-deep in jelly and regards her as subhuman because of it, then that shit is on them…it takes more than nudity to cancel out a man’s regard for a woman as a human being.  There will be misogynists in any crowd but –newsflash- a true woman hater will dehumanise you no matter how you behave or what you wear…Cambridge feminists …[are affiliated] with Object…a group known for lobbying against sex worker rights and for spreading irresponsible misinformation -particularly the fantasy that the Olympics would usher in an “explosion of prostitution.”  Also on the list is “Smash Miss Contest”  who “set off stink bombs”…at beauty pageants…

Worms in the Apple

New York City’s wallowing in the “end demand” sewer produced this grotesque display of political pandering:

…mayoral candidates…argued for tougher penalties.  Joseph J. Lhota…[called] for “a john list every day in the newspaper”…Adolfo Carrión Jr…went further, saying he would publish their license plate numbers…the moderator…took note of Edward I. Koch’s controversial directive…to read the names of convicted male customers on air…Christine C. Quinn…said she disagreed with publicizing the names…[but] favored an “incredibly effective” program in Brooklyn…that forces “johns” to sit through a program intended to deter bad behavior…

And no, “john schools” are not “incredibly effective”.

Finding What Isn’t There

…police admit they do not know the scale of trafficking in Victoria’s illegal brothels and cannot say how many…there are.  The cloak of anonymity and secrecy surrounding the industry makes it hard for police to investigate, Senior Sergeant Marilynn Ross told [a parliamentary] inquiry…”we suspect that in a small number of…licensed brothels human trafficking is occurring…on a…larger scale”…

Translation:  ”There’s no evidence whatsoever and the real experts say otherwise, but this makes a perfect excuse to ask for more power to stick our noses into people’s private business.”

Whorearchy (TW3 #19)

Prostitutes helped clean up the streets of Murcia, Spain, in an effort to draw attention to…[a] proposed bylaw…aimed at curbing prostitution and sexual exploitation [which] would damage [their] livelihood…”We’ve spoken with neighbors and local business owners and…they’ve told us that there’s no problem as long as we follow some of the requests that they’ve made, such as sticking to a timetable and keeping the streets clean…That’s why we decided to hold a clean-up day.  We wanted to show that we…want to get on well with everyone”…

Worse Than I Thought

As I predicted, the cancer of incredibly-broad “sex trafficking” laws based on the CASE Act is spreading, now to Pennsylvania:

…House Bill 663, which was unanimously passed 195-0…expands what the state considers “commercial sex acts” and raises the crime of buying or selling people for sex work from a third-degree to a…first-degree felony.  Under the new bill, the definition of commercial sex includes being forced to perform “any sexual activity…in which anything of value is given…or received”…

The bill’s sponsor complains that the “current law is vague”, but what he actually means is that it isn’t vague enough.

So Close and Yet So Far

Another would-be ally misses the bus by not bothering to check with sex workers first; though she makes several very good arguments against criminalization and recognizes from the title on that sex work is work, she also overestimates the role of pimps and the prevalence of street work, accepts the false “sex trafficking” dichotomy, supports regulation and licensing and ends by undermining her own argument with the typical mealy-mouthed disclaimer, “I am not endorsing the act of selling sex.”

Schadenfreude (TW3 #43)

Another rescue industry icon is exposed as a con artist:

Cecilia Flores-Oebanda has…become the face of the Philippines anti-trafficking movement…but now she is fighting a battle that could truly ruin her.  Fraud allegations made by Philippine investigators threaten to destroy her reputation and the anti-trafficking organization she’s run for more than two decades…

Nonetheless, the credulous CNN reporters spends about 95% of the story lauding her and repeating her bullshit stories, apparently forgetting about that word “fraud”.

Across the Pond (TW3 #45)

Scottish local governments seem unusually resistant to anti-sex business hype:

The owners of an over-21s nightclub in Inverness have been issued a licence to introduce lap dancing…Rhoda Grant…said…“The commodification of woman in society is damaging and I would have hoped the objections raised by the Highland Violence Against Women Strategy Group would have been listened to”…

Japanese Prostitution (TW3 #131)

A perfect demonstration of how the “sex trafficking” paradigm confuses those whose minds it pollutes:

…Osaka Mayor…Toru Hashimoto…told reporters…that Japan’s wartime sex slave system… “were necessary in order to provide relaxation for those brave soldiers who had been in the line of fire”…Hours later [he said]…he’d…told [U.S. military brass] that…there were legal facilities for releasing sexual energy, and that unless soldiers in Okinawa made more use of similar facilities, it would be difficult to control the sexual energy of the marines…

The media have conflated two totally different statements.  What Hashimoto said about military personnel needing whores is true and every experienced commander knows it, no matter what political crap the Pentagon may emit.  But that isn’t the same as his disgusting rationalization of the enslavement of the comfort women, who were neither professional sex workers nor volunteers.

Skin To Skin

A centre in Nuremberg is offering a course to sex industry professionals on how to cater to the sexual needs of disabled clients.  Those who complete training successfully attain a certificate in “sexual accompaniment and assistance”…

Comfort Zone

It’s great to see ever-larger numbers of academics openly declaring that the “trafficking” narrative is largely an excuse for restricting migration:

“anti-trafficking”…essentialises gender and childhood, it confuses and obfuscates, and…it…acts against the interests of many that it purports to serve…the state is directly and inescapably the source of vulnerability…those formally excluded are given…the right NOT to enter, to be protected from movement.  The [victim of "trafficking"]…is supposed to return home.  Indeed the narrative is that she wants to return home, and part of her innocence and victimhood is that she never wanted to move in the first place…immigration controls are claimed to be a mechanism of protection for migrants, rather than a mechanism of oppression…

And here’s a UN official on bogus data and bad definitions:

…data is often taken from methodologies that are not…estimates…media…have often reported that 79% of trafficking is for sexual exploitation, based on the “Global Report on Trafficking in Persons” by UNODC…[but] the data is of victims identified by state authorities and of convicted traffickers…The internationally recognized definition of human trafficking states the purpose of human trafficking is for exploitation…yet [it] is…equated with sex work or irregular…migration…as a result…data on trafficked persons almost exclusively focused on women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation…

Cops and Condoms (TW3 #313)

…If we’re honest, many of us do see condoms as robbing us of pleasure, stealing some excitement and spontaneity…and dulling the intensity of sexuality…These factors are the primary reasons that still only 60 percent of teenagers claim to use condoms…[and] usage declines as people grow older.  The number one reason…is the reduction of pleasure…[but] criticism of the condom opens one to…demonization…Bill Gates’…plans to make a condom that “is felt to enhance pleasure”…came under ideological fire.  Gawker called the argument that condoms reduce sensitivity one for “creeps” and “pervs,” while Popular Science reacted by concluding “men are idiots.”  Salon likened any criticism of the condom’s detrimental effect on sexuality to “whining“…

The Naked Anthropologist (TW3 #314)

The Proper Study (TW3 #319)

The feminist antiporn group Stop Porn Culture has sponsored a petition…to change the editorial board and title of Routledge’s forthcoming…publication, Porn Studies…Constance Penley…co-editor of The Feminist Porn Book…[said] “[The petition] reveals a total lack of understanding about academic freedom, academic integrity and the nature of scholarship…and…how desperate the antiporn people are to prevent any research being done that might not support their ideological position”…

Somewhere in the Middle

St. John’s, Newfoundland has just over 200,000 people, which means fewer than 100,000 males.  The escort interviewed for this article (“Iris”) says there are about 30 escorts working there full-time, and doing such good business travelling girls are stopping in as well.  Now, ask yourself:  is it credible that only about 14,000 of those men have ever paid, that the majority of those who did are now regulars and that those working girls are doing well on an average of 1 client per day?  Or is it more likely that the claim few men ever pay for sex is completely absurd?  As Iris said, “We wouldn’t be doing this well if your husbands and boyfriends and friends weren’t coming to see us.  It’s that simple.”

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Coyote Beauty

To make a great distinction between being paid for an hour’s sexual services, or an hour’s typing, or an hour’s acting on a stage is to make a distinction that is not there.  -  Margo St. James

Forty years ago today (on Mother’s Day of that year), Margo St. James founded COYOTE, the very first sex worker rights organization.  Ironically, she was set on that path in 1962 by a cop who decided she looked like a streetwalker and a judge who convicted her of prostitution without any real evidence:  “I said in court, ‘Your honor, I never turned a trick in my life!’ he responded, ‘Anyone who knows the language is obviously a professional.’ My crime was I knew too much to be nice girl.”  Once she had a criminal record, she found that she could not get any other work, and so decided she might as well do what she had been accused of.  And though she only worked for four years, she continued to identify with the hookers and eventually founded an organization called WHO:

…Whores, Housewives and Others.  Others meant lesbian, but it wasn’t being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles.  The first meeting of WHO was held on Alan Watt’s houseboat.  The name COYOTE came from novelist Tom Robbins who dubbed me the COYOTE Trickster…Richard Hongisto, a liberal sheriff elected in San Francisco about that time attended my parties.  He had been a cop, and had a sociology degree.  I…asked him what it would take to get NOW, and Gay rights groups to support prostitutes’ rights…He said that we needed someone from the victim class to speak out…I decided to be that someone…and I hoped the hookers would join me.  The PR people responsible for getting the sheriff elected volunteered to help me with COYOTE…I started organizing internationally with…Jennifer James, an anthropology professor…[who] coined the word decriminalization and was responsible for getting NOW to make it a plank in their 1973 convention.  COYOTE published a newsletter from 1974-79 and the Hooker’s Ball became popular, attracting 20,000 people in 1978…

Let that sink in:  the largest mainstream feminist organization actually supported sex worker rights for a short time, though the neofeminists destroyed that within just a few years.  Still, it looked for a while as though there was nowhere to go but up.  COYOTE chapters sprang up in Sacramento and Florida, and similar organizations were formed elsewhere; there was PONY in New York, PUMA in Massachusetts, CUPIDS and PEP in Michigan, KITTY in Kansas City, PASSION in New Orleans, OCELOT in San Diego, KAT in Los Angeles, ASP in Seattle and DOLPHIN in Hawaii.  On June 2^nd, 1975 French whores in Lyon held the protest which led to the formation of the French Collective of Prostitutes, and a sister organization soon formed in England; they and several others joined with COYOTE “to form the International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights (ICPR), the organization whose work and example helped to win prostitution law reform in a number of European countries and provided an example which inspired similar campaigns in many other parts of the world.”  In 1976, COYOTE filed the lawsuit which led to decriminalization in Rhode Island, and by 1977 even well-known journalists and politicians were listening.

Had HIV not arrived on the scene a few years later, criminalization might have been merely a black period of history by now.  But arrive it did, swinging the balance of power to the neofeminists and their fundamentalist Christian allies.  Margo moved to Europe to help sex worker rights efforts there, and COYOTE was directed by Samantha Miller and Gloria Lockett, who worked to make the organization more responsive to the concerns of minority sex workers and those who weren’t escorts (including strippers, phone sex operators, etc).  During the AIDS panic of the ‘80s and the neofeminist ascendance of the ‘90s, COYOTE was too busy fighting disinformation and stigma to make any actual progress, and by the time new organizations like SWOP started to appear around the turn of the century it had run out of steam.  Margo (who had returned to the US in 1993) decided to concentrate on sex worker health, and in 1999 COYOTE became the St. James Infirmary, which provides free medical care and social services for sex workers.  The only other remaining chapter is the Los Angeles one, which has been inactive since about the same time.  But though the mother of all sex worker organizations has ceased to exist in its original form, every current activist group owes it – and Margo – a debt of gratitude for showing that it could be done.

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Links #149

I hurt people . . . and then I make their cocaine fucking appear.  -  Constable James Ebdon

This was not a good week for me; on Tuesday night my slave hard drive (the one where all my data is saved) crashed, which meant I had to recreate yesterday’s and today’s columns (which were already mostly done) from memory.  And though Outlook was supposed to be saving my mail and backup file on two separate drives, it seems it wasn’t.  So now a data retrieval expert has my drive and will be letting me know sometime today if he can get my stuff back, so I don’t lose all my mail and a lot of other good stuff.  No one person really dominated the links this week; our top contributor, Mike Siegel, only edged out two others by providing the first video (a simple but extremely effective horror short).  The second video is a Taiwanese parody of the New York “stop and frisk” training video, and the links between the two were supplied by Grace, Gideon, Jesse Walker, Radley Balko (two links), Michael Whiteacre (two links), and Jillian Keenan (in that order); plus Mistress Matisse (“sex kittens”) and Emil Kirkegaard (“because he can”).

• Wine tasting is bullshit.
• The key to longevity: more bacon.

• Cop claims that a cell phone can be turned into a gun and that “officer safety” trumps the Constitution.
• Linguists trace modern Eurasian languages back to the late Pleistocene.
• High school class president suspended for criticizing a Twitter hastag.
• Chronic pain sufferers are “collateral damage” in the War on Drugs.
• Cops beat man to death, then steal all the witnesses’ cell phones.
• Woman “sends a message” by falsely claiming she was attacked.
• 40% of chronic lower-back pain may be curable by antibiotics.
• More than half of the human race lives within this circle.
• That’ll teach him to neglect safety precautions!
• Woman calls 911 to report kittens having sex.
• Because he can.

From the Archives

• Cops in Zimbabwe believe whores force men to have sex with them for free, those in South Africa think we form syndicates and poison clients, and those in Pennsylvania imagine we have our own SWAT teams.
• The vice cops of Syracuse, New York are so aggressively ignorant and unselfconsciously stupid that they actually boast about it.
• Crusade to impose Western norms on Nepal  turns low-caste people into persecuted criminals.
• Reminiscing about my wild youth, my favorite grandmother and my dear, departed friend Terry.
• The US government conjures thousands of “pimps” and “trafficking victims” out of thin air.
• We all have the right to our preferences, but nobody has the right to impose his on others.
• How infantilization of teenagers and adults has the opposite of its intended effect.
• Why extrajudicial punishment of whores is a spectacularly bad idea.
• The tale of a young woman who wins a chance at her dream job.
• The FBI wants private companies to enable its spying on people.
• In which I demolish a load of total nonsense about “sex robots”.
• Lawheads delight in charging a crime victim with another crime.
• A bizarre neofeminist manifesto in the Wall Street Journal.
• Gonorrhea is rapidly becoming immune to all antibiotics.
• How the whorearchy is used as a tool of social control.
• Spain continues to turn the screws on streetwalkers.
• Dania Suarez is interviewed on the Today show.
• The first of several virginity auctions last year.
• Why Janet Jackson’s nipple won’t go away.
• The incoherent absurdity known as Femen.
• The ignominious demise of Escorts.com.
• Deep Geek on sex worker rights.

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That Was the Week That Was (#318)

Moralists…always ignore the unpalatable truth that sex work is not oppression…but…opportunity.  -  Douglas Fox

Science!

If drought turns women into whores, what disaster turns them into politicians?

Several [congresscritters claim]…that climate change…could…drive poor women to “transactional sex”…The resolution, from Rep. Barbara Lee…and a dozen other Democrats, says…”[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health”…

“Vulnerable to sex work” may be an even more agency-annihilating phrase than “prostituted woman”.

Amazingly Stupid Statements

In another fine example of a pro-sex worker article by a non-sex worker, Clementine Ford debunks five amazingly stupid anti-whore arguments:

…a number of [recent] conversations around sex work, autonomy and feminism…trotted out the tired idea that sex work degrades and harms all women…I have a number of [sex worker] friends and acquaintances…and I’m tired of seeing their lives denigrated because of how they choose to make money…Demonising sex workers under the guise of “helping” them is simply a way of expressing puritanical snobbery…[and] relies more on myths and prejudices than any real knowledge…

This one by Jane Gilmore didn’t get nearly as much press, but it’s also very good.

Social Autoimmune Disorder

Western Australia’s war on whores continues:  ”The City of Vincent is considering a high-tech surveillance system that captures…licence plate information to help track kerb crawlers…mayor Alannah MacTiernan said…statistics proved more needed to be done to stamp out street prostitution and protect residents…she…also wants to name and shame people convicted of soliciting…”  Obviously, there is no actual crime in Vincent.

A False Dichotomy

Douglas Fox of Harlot’s Parlour, on the flexibility of sex work:

…Sex work…is one of the few areas…that allows the worker a wide variety of choices in how…where…and when they work.  It…provides a relatively good [cash]…return…for those…with few choices or…who need to make money quickly and anonymously…This…is…why sex work survives and flourishes no matter how [persecuted it is]…

Law of the Instrument

This article starts by claiming that “Police have a growing fear about the spread of human trafficking” due to “the growth of gambling in Maryland”.  But the text (which reads more like a Salvation Army screed than a news item) is about the cops “rescuing” a hooker by deceiving her, arresting her and abducting her children so she can be “saved from selling her body.”  After reading that, I feel I need to wash my eyeballs.

Moloch

Harsh public registration laws often punish youth sex offenders for life and do little to protect public safety, Human Rights Watch said in…Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the US…the laws…[make] them targets for harassment, humiliation, and even violence…[and] severely restrict where, and with whom [they] may live, work, attend school, or even spend time…Human Rights Watch interviewed 281 youth sex offenders, whose median age at offense was 15, across 20 states, as well as hundreds of offenders’ family members, defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, law enforcement officials, experts on the topic, and victims of child-on-child sexual assault…Numerous studies estimate the recidivism rate among children who commit sexual offenses to be between 4 and 10 percent, compared with a 13 percent rate for adult sex offenders and a national rate of 45 percent for all crimes…

Above the Law

“Monica Contreras went to family court with her 2-year-old daughter in August 2011….on a routine divorce case”, but as she was leaving the Las Vegas courtroom Ron Fox, a bailiff-like cop called a “marshal”, ordered her into an anteroom (supposedly for a “drug search”) and groped her.  She went back into the courtroom and complained to the presiding official, Patricia Donninger, who literally ignored her; Fox then had her arrested for “false allegations made against a police officer.”  Nothing was done until the video below was discovered and publicized by KLAS-TV; Fox was fired but is suing to get his job back, and Donninger is being investigated.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, a cop named Aravanh Lakmany was sentenced to only two years in jail after pleading guilty to “extortion by threat and three counts of solicitation of prostitutes,” thus escaping a much longer sentence and sex offender registration for raping three whores.

Traffic Jam

Another fourth-rate playwright capitalizes on human trafficking; this one apparently thinks it’s “edgy” or profound to refer to sex workers as “roadkill”:

Chicago Shakespeare Theater presents Roadkill, an immersive, theatrical event spotlighting the global issue of sex trafficking. Based on real-life experiences, the American premiere of Cora Bissett’s chilling production…[allows] audience members…to witness firsthand the brutal realities behind the newspaper headlines…

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (TW3 #25)

I’m shocked, SHOCKED I say, to discover that the “Trafficking in Persons Report” is nothing but a political tool:

…the United States may have been giving special treatment to major powers China, Russia, and India…[and] let even Uzbekistan off the hook…because of the repressive nation’s cooperation in getting supplies to American troops in Afghanistan…Iraq and Thailand too have seen their potential ranking downgrades delayed while Vietnam has won a premature ranking boost…due to strategic considerations…legislators and ex-state officials charged at a U.S. congressional hearing…

Broken Record

This story is noteworthy in that the quoted cop, while still buying the “gypsy whores” myth, only exaggerates the coercion rate by a factor of about 5 instead of the typical 45 or 50:

…beneath the pageantry, sport and spectacle, Kentucky Derby time is also the darkest hour for victims of human trafficking.  “We have high rates,” said Gretchen Hunt…[of] the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs…the phenomenon…accompanies other major sporting events in the United States, an influx of men willing to pay for sex.  Sgt. Andre Bottoms, of the Louisville…Police…estimates about ten percent of hundreds of prostitutes in Louisville this week are being forced or coerced…

The Public Eye

Caty Simon of Tits and Sass continues a string of good interviews, this time with veteran activist Carol Leigh (AKA Scarlot Harlot), originator of the term “sex worker”.  Carol speaks about the growth of activism, trafficking hysteria, neofeminism and whore art.

The Birth of a Movement (TW3 #39)

Remember, prostitution is supposedly legal in France:

For the past five years, Lyon has enforced bylaws prohibiting the parking of prostitutes’ trucks in much of the city, forcing them into the Gerland industrial district.  The city has now issued orders to prohibit this as well, but the girls stayed…Karen, their spokeswoman, reaffirmed that they would not leave despite “unprecedented” police operations:  “We are forced to stay.  There was nowhere to go.  When you try to move to other parts of Greater Lyon…you are immediately driven out by the police.”  Since March 19, the…police have patrolled the area three to four times a week…to enforce the bylaw…and…discourage the clients…the mayor says she is not seeking “the eradication of prostitution” in Gerland…[but claims she has had] a “flood” of complaint letters from local businesses…the police are also continuing to use the offense of passive soliciting to “identify trafficking networks and pimps”…[despite the fact that] the Senate repealed the offense on March 29…

Across the Pond (TW3 #45)

This article on Edinburgh’s saunas (tolerated brothels) is fairly respectful; the only people quoted are sex workers (including advocate Laura Lee) and a punter, the dysphemisms are kept to a bare minimum, sex work is recognized as work and the threat posed by Rhoda Grant’s attempt to impose the Swedish model is mentioned.

An Example to the West (TW3 #49)

Sex workers…demanded representation in all policy making bodies…dealing with them.  “People who make laws don’t know anything about our issues, concerns and why we do this work.  So, policy making bodies must have our representatives,” said a participant from Ajmer…[they] also…rooted for self regulatory boards like Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) in Kolkata and Ashodhaya in Mysore to check violence in sex work and trafficking…

Also in India, a government official stated that “There should be no pre-condition that sex workers must give up their profession to get social benefits…“

The Immunity Syndrome (TW3 #50)

…a sex-education book…in Berlin elementary schools has some parents up in arms…Wo kommst du her? ["Where Do You Come From?"]…is recommended for ages 5 and up [and] shows a couple…in various stages of arousal.  In one illustration, Lisa puts a condom on Lars’ erect penis…The text also veers toward the explicit.  “When it’s so good that it can’t get any better, Lisa and Lars have an orgasm,” it reads. And…”The vagina and penis feel nice and tingly and warm”…Parents began to complain…but the school did nothing…until it was reported in the local press…

Something Rotten in Sweden (TW3 #135)

Local news station “discovers” a practice which has existed for over 15 years; pearl-clutching, dysphemisms and political opportunism ensue:

People like to read reviews online before buying a car or reserving a hotel room.  But one website, http://www.eccie.net…allows users to review the services of local prostitutes…the idea that you can review prostitutes has a lot of people concerned…Jenny Ford…[of] ACH Child and Family Services…says people posting on sites like this often use kinky sex and prostitution as a cover up for sex trafficking…State Senator Leticia Van De Putte…[has] filed…a bill that go [sic] after the people using them…

Awakening

Those of you who followed the #whenantisattack hashtag on Twitter back on March 3^rd know the sort of abuse sex workers have to put up with; because of her prominence Dr. Brooke Magnanti gets more (and more severe) than most of us, and after a particularly nasty barrage last Saturday she wrote this essay on why it’s so very important that even angry perverts not be censored by “hate speech” laws.

The Widening Gyre (TW3 #314)

I wonder how many other cases of “sex trafficking” are exactly the same:

A missing 18-year-old Aurora [Colorado] woman [named Raven Cassidy Furlong]…was found…[after] police received a tip that she was sighted in Venice Beach…at tryouts for American Ninja Warrior…Furlong was taken to the police station [but released] once they ascertained she was in California of her own free will…Her family believes she was coerced into saying she’s OK.  “We know what Raven gave was a canned speech…They’ve been coerced to believe their families are bad, this is common in human trafficking,” [said] Shelley Shaffer, Director of the National Women’s Coalition Against Violence & Exploitation…

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t need to be “coerced” into wanting to escape from parents who infantilized me and were willing to use armed thugs to force me to live with them.

Monsters

Three “gay and effeminate” teens have died after being starved, tortured and killed at a camp that promised to turn them into “men”…Raymond Buys, 15 [died]…in April 2011…just 10 weeks [after he entered] the Echo Wild Game Rangers training course in South Africa in perfect health…Buys was severely malnourished, dehydrated, his arm was broken in two places and there were burns and wounds all over his body…Alex De Koker, 49, and employee Michael Erasmus, 20, are on trial for charges of murder, child abuse and neglect…[tentmate] Gerhard Oostuizen, 19, claims Buys was chained to his bed every night…refused permission to visit the toilet…forced to eat his own faeces…beaten with planks, hosepipes and sticks…[and tased while] tied…to a chair naked with his head covered in a pillowcase…Eric Calitz, 18, and Nicolaas Van Der Walt, 19, had both died after being enrolled at the…camp four years earlier…Calitz…died of…seizure, dehydration and [cerebral hemorrhage, and] Van Der Walt…appeared to have been choked with a seatbelt.  In 2009, De Koker was handed a suspended sentence over Calitz but escaped charges for…Van Der Walt, and the camp was allowed to continue…

The Widening Gyre (TW3 #317)

You know a moral panic is nearing collapse when it becomes a default bogeyman:  “The state representative behind Tennessee’s “ag-gag” bill compared Humane Society…investigations to human trafficking of 17-year-old women…”

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Challenge

To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor.
-  Martin Luther King, Jr.

As I have stated many times in this blog, in interviews, and in public speech, I am firmly convinced that criminalization of sex work in the United States will only end by judicial fiat.  Some people have (either sincerely or willfully) misinterpreted this position to mean that I prefer it that way, but that is not the case; it’s simply that it is the only realistic strategy open to us.  History has demonstrated over and over again that the vast majority of politicians are self-centered, morally retarded pigs whose actions are never determined by what is right, but only by what will get them re-elected; they can be counted on never to defend the rights of the weak against the powerful until it becomes politically popular for them to do so.  Democrats pretended to oppose George Bush’s various police-state actions on principle, but once their man was in the White House doing exactly the same things they suddenly stopped speaking up.  And the recent reversals on same-sex marriage are a striking example; hundreds of politicians who had vowed to fight it forever had a sudden change of heart as soon as it became politically expedient for them to do so.  Even then, the issue had to be reframed as being about wholesome “love” rather than dirty, nasty sex; had that not been done the puritans would still be fighting it just as viciously as they attack all sexual expression.

The rights to birth control, to abortion, to non-vaginal sex, to view sexual materials, etc have all been won by court decisions; had these things been left to politicians they would all still be illegal (as we have seen repeatedly demonstrated in the cases of abortion and “obscenity”).  Furthermore, it would be absolutely impossible to stop every little tin god with a title in every state, county and city in the US from working to enact laws favored by loudmouthed busybodies and designed to abrogate the rights of oppressed minorities and docile, silent majorities alike.  The only way to stop politicians from gaining power and money at the expense of those they criminalize is for a more powerful entity to prevent them from doing so, and that generally requires the decision of a higher-level court.  State supreme courts can put a halt to the oppressive schemes of all politicians in their state; federal district courts can do so over several states at once; and the US Supreme Court can quash the power-madness of any politician, even the President and Congress.

For years, I’ve been hoping for the sex work version of Eisenstadt v. Baird, Roe v. Wade or Lawrence v. Texas, and perhaps it is now on the horizon.  Last week Maxine Doogan of the Erotic Service Providers Legal, Education and Research Project contacted me to help publicize the group’s direct legal challenge to prostitution law in California.  She provided this background summary:

As soon as we lost Proposition K I called Margo St. James.  She pointed us to Coyote vs Roberts, the case which decriminalized indoor prostitution in Rhode Island; we won’t be settling out of court as they did, because we want the highest court’s ruling we can get so as to help as many people as possible.  Also, a court ruling would have enduring effects, while a settlement would put us at the mercy of legislators (as in Rhode Island, which recriminalized in 2009).  Our next step was to file for non-profit status (which took 3 years); Larry Cohen and I become founding members of ESPLERP, and now donations are anonymous and tax deductible.

Our case is about having our commercial sexual privacy legally noticed and protected by the courts.  Our plaintiffs’ privacy will be protected during the proceedings; we have a customer plaintiff, prospective worker plaintiffs and a union plaintiff (to cover our right to associate without being prosecuted for conspiracy).  Louis Sirkin will be representing us; he came highly recommended by the Free Speech Coalition due to his victory in Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition.  It is both his belief and ours that asking the highest court to strike down anti-prostitution laws is vital to ending the American war on sex and the expansion of ridiculous anti-trafficking laws such as Proposition 35.  What we would really like to get is a summary judgement based on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because a long trial would be much harder in the US than in Canada; though our case is similar to Bedford vs Canada, the two countries’ respective constitutions and the way anti-prostitution laws are written (state by state as opposed to nationally) and enforced (local district attorneys rather than provincial) are different.  Getting that judgment would be the beginning of the end of all the discriminatory laws against our class.  It won’t be overnight magic; it will probably take much more litigation to force police and prosecutors to stop arresting and charging us.

This will of course require a large war chest; it’s always been about the money and always will be.  We’ve asked certain groups like OSI for support and I’ve not received any response from them, so though we’ve launched our own GoFundMe page I’d welcome any suggestions about how to secure additional funding.  Even though groups like the ACLU and Open Society Foundation regularly throw us under the bus, I don’t mind asking; the worst they can do is to refuse.  I’m not going to waste any more time reaching out to non-funding groups, though; getting them to return my phone calls, emails or FaceBook messages on any issue over the past several years has never been fruitful (if I wrote a book about the subject, it would be called Nobody Home).

We at the Erotic Service Providers organize like our lives depend on it because they do.  Many of us have suffered greatly under criminalization – we’ve been arrested, jailed, and lost our ability to pay our rent and provide for ourselves and our children.  Our lives have been shattered when we’re held hostage for years in court proceedings where we are publically humiliated by officials and the press, and we don’t want one more person to suffer that fate.

Readers often ask how they can help, and to whom they can donate; I don’t think I need to tell you how important this is.  Maxine believes that once the case is filed, there are several organizations which will support it with amicus curiae briefs; they’re just waiting for us to make the first move.  The goal for the funding drive is $60,000, and I plan to do my part next week; I’d like you all to please consider making a donation as well.  As Maxine says, this isn’t going to be a magical solution, but it’s a necessary first step; civil rights are not won at a single stroke, but by a long series of judgments which clear out successively-larger areas of breathing room.  Sex workers in other countries have led the way, and now it’s our turn to claim the rights to privacy, sexual agency and productive labor which are violated by prohibitionist laws.

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That Was the Week That Was (#316)

The truth doesn’t have a sound bite.  -  Hadil Habiba

A Whore in the Bedroom

While working as a high-class escort for nine years, Rebecca Dakin saw hundreds of married men turn to her to fulfill sexual needs not being met by their wives.  In 2009, she…became an infidelity counselor, using her experience…to teach women about how to satisfy their husbands…Dakin says that the number one reason men look outside of their relationships for sex is because they’re not getting enough of it at home…other reasons…include…feeling bored by the sex they receive…or feeling hesitant to share their intimate desires and fantasies with their spouse…

November Book Reviews

Thaddeus Russell lectures on A Renegade History of the United States at the recent New Hampshire Liberty Forum:

Barbie

The pathetic losers who believe young girls can perform complex calculations in their heads are at it again, informing us that if Barbie were both alive and life-sized she wouldn’t have room for intestines.  That’s ironic, because it’s obvious that doofuses who obsess about plastic dolls have no room in their heads for comprehending that the smaller any animal is, the more slender its proportions tend to be, and that kids don’t actually notice this kind of stuff in any case.

Real People

It’s surprising that this article on Bay Area sex workers (including Kitty Stryker and Siouxsie Q) who cater to the tech sector appeared on CNN, of all places; the phrase “human trafficking” occurs only once, in a very short passage about a vice cop.  Maybe a few people over there are starting to wake up (or just seeing the writing on the wall).  The same holds true in the next item:

Feminine Pragmatism

The anti-whore rhetoric in this New York Times piece about Afghan sex workers is minimal, and the word “trafficking” entirely absent:

…Mazar…is…Afghanistan’s unofficial capital of prostitution…[this is] partly [due]…to the city’s culture, which is considerably more forgiving of vice than is the rest of the country.  Alcohol, though still illegal, can be found without too much trouble.  Women…can be seen socializing with men in…public parks, a rare sight even in Kabul…In recent years, the city’s economy has flourished as its proximity to Central Asia and its relative peace and stability have transformed it into a trading hub…The sex trade has [always] existed in one form or another…even under the ultraconservative rule of the Taliban.  But officials here say the rapid spread of mobile technology has made the business easier to manage and harder to detect…Women…host clients in a series of apartments…The point of contact is typically a man who orchestrates the meet-ups by cellphone.  This has made the business tough to infiltrate for those police officials eager to crack down…[sex workers] are almost always impoverished and typically divorced or widowed, struggling to support a family…they risk death if they are discovered…

The Pro-Rape Coalition

“The Supreme Court [of India] sought response from the government on a plea to block and ban porn sites on the internet, particularly those showing child pornography…The petition filed by Indore-based advocate Kamlesh Vaswani said watching obscene videos is not an offence but it is one of the major causes for crime against women…”  As we know, this is the exact opposite of the truth.

Where Are the Victims?

Even the police state seems unable to explain what legitimate public interest is served by jailing a 69-year-old quadriplegic polio victim who breathes through a ventilator for the “crime” of having sexual feelings.  In 2011 he was “convicted” of helping sex workers find safe clients by running a screening service, and apparently the terms of his probation demand he not be sexual in any way; unsurprisingly, he has been caught violating that condition twice so far.

We Told You So

…As part of a legal settlement, Tennessee-based Stop Child Trafficking Now…will agree to follow a list of requirements if it returns to Missouri…some of the stipulations include [detailing] how donated funds will be spent in the Kansas City area…[and] an accurate depiction of the organization’s accomplishments.  A 41 Action News investigation…followed the money trail and fact-checked some of SCTNow’s bold claims made on its website…hundreds of thousands of dollars [went] to fund private “special operatives” teams to gather undercover intelligence about child sex trafficking…[but] when pressed for more details, SCTNow could not point to a single case in the country where information lead to an arrest or prosecution…

Divided We Fall

The Gambia introduced…new laws…criminalising male prostitution [and] cross-dressing…Any man or boy who solicits, is “attired in the fashion of a woman” in a public place or who “practises sodomy as a means of livelihood or as a profession” now faces a hefty fine and jail term of up to five years…

Where’s the outcry from picket-fence gay activists? {sound of crickets}  I reckon they don’t want to be soil their newfound respectability by speaking up for drag hookers any more.

Change a Few Words

Dr. Laura Agustín on how all prohibitionism is the same:

…outlawing activities accomplishes only one thing…It tells citizens that government has decided something is Wrong…Sending A Message is the principle …behind the Swedish state’s…law against buying sex, and…behind all the [others]…who want the law for their countries.  Everyone wants to be seen to be Taking a Stand against immoral behaviour.  Try bringing evidence into the conversation and you will quickly learn how irrelevant it is; you can find Swedish promoters themselves saying things like We know it doesn’t work but we want to be in the forefront of Gender Justice…Any other claim about what prohibitionist laws achieve when they outlaw social activities like sex, drinking and drugs is not supported by evidence.  That’s because, after the law is passed and the message is sent, individuals deal with prohibition deviously…So buyers and sellers of drugs, alcohol and sex become creative, some of them maintaining a disapproving stance in public at the same time…

This is, of course, why self-reporting about paying for sex has become so absurdly inaccurate.

The Immunity Syndrome

A new Ohio law bans teachers from discussing “any gateway sexual activity or health message that encourages students to experiment with sexual activity” and allows parents to sue for “damages” if they claim a teacher has done so.  What exactly are “gateway sexual activities”, you ask?  The law doesn’t say, but we know that in Tennessee they include hand-holding.

An Example to the West

Add Latin America to the list of regions that do sex work activism more effectively than the US:

A new study, designed and carried out by the network of female sex workers in Latin America and Caribbean (REDTRASEX), has documented legislation that affects sex work – as well as detailing what this means in practice…independent sex work is not prohibited in any of the countries studied.  What is criminalized…is proxenetism (or ‘pimping’) and…“immoral” behaviours or disturbances to the peace or public order are applied in relation to sex work.  Furthermore…confusing sex workers…with trafficked persons…silences the legitimate voices of sex workers and actually blocks discussions on how to end human trafficking.  This creates a framework of legitimacy for police repression and state violence…[and] results in a culture of secrecy around sex work, increasing stigma and the vulnerability of sex workers…

The study is available in Spanish, and I’ll provide the English translation as soon as it’s available.

The Leading Players in the Field, Not (TW3 #14)

Gloria Steinem is at it again, now in collusion with rescue industry NGO Apne Aap:  “On April 18, human rights activists Gloria Steinem and Ruchira Gupta will kick off a two-day symposium at Smith College, ‘Trafficking Sex: Politics, Policy, Personhood’…”  Note the unintentional irony of prohibitionists borrowing the term “personhood” from their anti-abortion rights soulmates.

Held Together With Lies (TW3 #28)

Despite a total lack of evidence (“[trafficking] convictions [declined] 13 percent”), Chicken Licken and other overly-excitable barnyard fowl ordered EU member states “to get a move on with adopting tough new rules against human trafficking or face sanctions as a first report on the problem showed ‘modern-day slavery’ worsening”.  Obviously math isn’t the typical politician’s strong suit, but one would think even they could comprehend that the larger estimates might have something to do with the fact that they “[broadened] the definition of the crime” two years ago; now they’re claiming “the trafficking business is second-only in illegal activity to the weapons trade”, up from the equally-bogus assertion that it was third.  Anyone want to take bets on whether it will rise to first before the hysteria collapses?

Wise Investment (TW3 #31)

“Texas lawmakers…[want to criminalize] advertisements soliciting prostitution…‘the Backpage Bill’…would make it a felony to buy such advertising and might press Backpage.com to get out of the business.”  It will do nothing of the kind and these politicians know it.  But because they don’t pay the cost of defending tyrannical and patently-unconstitutional laws, they’re perfectly happy to buy votes from control freaks at taxpayer expense.

Lack of Evidence (TW3 #41)

The news that “San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón has agreed to make a ban on using condoms as evidence of prostitution permanent” is good (though as a policy rather than a law it could be revoked at a moment’s notice), but dig Gascón’s bizarre and Orwellian claim around mid-article that criminalization and police harassment of women are for our “protection”.

Uncharted Seas

…we’ve been hearing it for years.  Gay marriage is a slippery slope!  A gateway drug!  If we legalize it, then what’s next?  Legalized polygamy?  We can only hope…let’s not forget that the fight doesn’t end with same-sex marriage…Legalized polygamy in the United States is…constitutional, feminist, and sex-positive…we really can make our own choices.  We just might choose things people don’t like…Arguments about whether a woman’s consensual sexual and romantic choices are “healthy” should have no bearing on the legal process…It’s condescending, not supportive, to minimize them as mere “victims” without considering the possibility that some of them have simply made a different choice…

A Working System (TW3 #136)

A Sydney madam has been found guilty of keeping young Malaysian students in sexual servitude…Chee Mei Wong, 39, forced the six young women to work up to 20 hours a day in the Diamonds brothel…and ordered them to perform unusual sex acts against their will so they could pay ”debts”…

Something Rotten in Sweden (TW3 #138)

More on the ugly campaign of disinformation currently being waged by “End Demand Illinois”:

…Who are the organizers of this campaign trying to communicate with?  My suspicion is…people who already have a soft analysis of prostitution gleaned from watching 20/20…or true crime TV shows about sex trafficking busts…who is going to step up and be “in favor” of “modern day slavery” or “sex trafficking?” …I really want to know what it’s going to take for people to actually think about how complicated the sex trade is, and that it’s not all the same, and that ads that make us all the victims of overwhelming violence don’t do anything to actually improve our circumstances…

For Those Who Think Legalization is a Good Idea (TW3 #313)

Remember, prostitution was recently re-confirmed as legal in India, but brothels are still illegal; it’s therefore a simple matter for cops to redefine a business as a “ring”, label women of 20 to 25 as “girls”, call their arrest a “rescue” and describe imprisonment under psychological torture as “rehabilitation”.  That way the money from the US and NGOs keeps rolling in.

The Story Behind the Story

…Fox 2000…[is] adapting Go the Fuck to Sleep for the big screen…the bedtime-story parody, written by Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Ricardo Cortés, has become something of a viral hit…It is unclear how the filmmakers plan to turn what is essentially a nursery rhyme with one punchline…into an entire feature- length film…

I hope this proves lucrative for Ricardo and also opens more doors for him.

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Links #145

Every officer that signed off on this ”no evidence” conclusion should be guarding the entrance to a petting zoo for the remainder of their careers.  -  Anonymous

The big news this week was the death of Margaret Thatcher, and I seem to be one of the few people on the internet who does not have some strong opinion about her one way or the other (she was a politician; ’nuff said).  But whether you loved her or hated her, you will probably enjoy the sight of a prime minister quoting Monty Python in today’s first video from Mike Siegel  (who also provided “nukes” and “cosplay”).  The second video is my all-time favorite comic strip imagined as a “dark, gritty” movie as per current fashion; it and all the links down to the first video were supplied by Radley Balko.  Other links between the videos were contributed by Jesse Walker (“new sun”), Luscious Lani (“girl and cat”), Mistress Matisse (“Anonymous”), and Kevin Wilson (“honest fat”).

• Man criminally charged for not allowing himself to be mauled by bear.
• Politician arrested for masturbating out car window while speeding.
• Maryland plans to tax the rain.
• Another advantage of big tits.

• The zombie defense.
• Headline of the week.
• When the sun was new.
• What a humiliating way to die.
• Politician wants to ban cosplay.
• Beautiful, enchanting photo set of a little girl and her cat.
• An argument for restoration of proper evidentiary standards.
• Researchers estimate nuclear power has saved 1.8 million lives.
• Cops fail to solve crime in a year; Anonymous succeeds in two hours.
• Southerners aren’t really fatter than other Americans, just more honest.

From the Archives

• Sex worker rights are human rights, and there can never be too many voices speaking up for them, nor too many occasions on which to speak.
• It’s time to stop the ruinous Gender War which has been foisted on the human race by fanatics with lunatic agendas.
• Secret to success at heterosexual male prostitution:  don’t charge anything or expect much business.
• American states with “abstinence-only” sex education have the highest teen pregnancy rates.
• Those who define sex work as criminality just don’t get it, and never will.
• Both halves of the U.S. Big Government Party are against sexual rights.
• The incredible hypocrisy and yellow journalism of the New York Times.
• Naomi Wolf’s analysis of the TSA’s true motivation is much like mine.
• Why those who call themselves “anti-porn” are in reality pro-rape.
• More on Michael Weinstein’s campaign against an anti-HIV drug.
• Too bad Jezebel doesn’t stand up for sex workers more often.
• Neofeminist propaganda used to undermine abortion rights.
• A look at actresses who have played sex workers in movies.
• Reminiscing about lost friends and my favorite cousin.
• Who gets to define what the “collective good” is?
• Jennifer Love Hewitt on her show The Client List.
• Prohibitionists are the biggest pimps.
• Young woman jailed for being raped.
• Dr. Laura Agustín on Gloria Steinem.
• An orangutan hooker?

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Theatrics

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.  -  William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (III,iv)

The moral panic over human trafficking has grown more aggressively than most; in its earlier form, the Satanic Panic, it only barely got out of the United States.  But once the cultists metamorphosed into “criminal gangs”, two powerful and wealthy types of organizations recognized that the hysteria provided the perfect plot for media theatrics designed to disguise sleazy agendas which might have mobilized considerable resistance had they been openly revealed.  The anti-sex cabal of neofeminists and evangelical Christians use “trafficking” as camouflage for an anti-whore crusade, while governments use it as an excuse for tighter controls on immigration; the net result is an awful lot of money being invested into dramatic displays, and an awful lot of disinformation being spread through official channels, while real victims of exploitation are ignored.

In the US, “human trafficking” is practically synonymous with “sex trafficking”; though lip-service is paid to the existence of other forms of exploitation, virtually all of the money, manpower and press coverage is devoted to “sex trafficking”, which bogus statistics declare to be the most common form (with claims ranging from 60% to “almost all”, despite the insistence of other reports that it’s more like 10%).  This is due partly to the fact that most of the money either comes from or flows through prohibitionist organizations, and partly because sex sells in the media.  But there’s another, more sinister and far dirtier reason why so much attention is paid to whores who are not “enslaved” in any reasonable sense of the word, and so little to people who are clearly coerced and exploited:  modern Western economies depend upon dirt-cheap labor, so by harassing harlots they can make a great and entertaining show of “doing something” about exploitation while yet ensuring that the vegetables get picked and the garments get made.  Americans in particular leer over lurid accounts of “child sex trafficking” which is so rare as to be almost nonexistent, while ignoring widespread and pervasive sexual abuse among women who, if they were sex workers, would be called “trafficking victims”:

The majority of women farmworkers interviewed…by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Human Rights Watch had experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault, which ranged from verbal abuse to rape.  One…study…estimated that as many as 80 percent…have been sexually harassed or assaulted on the job…Women make up slightly more than 20 percent of U.S. farmworkers, and of these, the majority are immigrants from Mexico.  Women become migratory workers for the same reasons men do—in many cases, to escape rural poverty…“Generally, [the perpetrator] will have some kind of legal immigration status,” says Liz Maria Chacko, a supervising attorney at Friends of Farmworkers in Philadelphia.  “This gives them power over their victims”…lack of fluency in English makes the women even more vulnerable.  Their immediate supervisors, who tend to be their harassers, also tend to be bilingual.  If a woman complains, the perpetrator can directly present his case to the farm owner in English.  The woman who’s been victimized cannot…Chacko says owners often react defensively to accusations of harassment.  “The response we get is usually denial”…Women who are the victims of serious crimes, including rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment, are eligible to apply for a U-Visa.  But in order to qualify, they must cooperate with law enforcement—and thus risk deportation…

And when the US government itself is the “trafficker”, it’s even worse:

Alleging unpaid wages and repeated retaliation, McDonald’s workers in central Pennsylvania launched a surprise strike [on March 6^th]…The strikers are student guest workers from Latin America and Asia, brought to the United States under the controversial J-1 cultural exchange visa program…[which] is officially intended to promote educational and cultural exchange.  But advocates allege that J-1, like the other guest worker programs that collectively bring hundreds of thousands of workers in and out of the United States each year, is rife with abuse…According to [National Guestworker Alliance (NGA)] the visiting students each paid $3,000 or more for the chance to come and work, and were promised full-time employment; most received only a handful of hours a week, while others worked shifts as long as twenty-five hours straight, without being paid overtime.  “Their employer is also their landlord,” said [NGA Director Saket] Soni.  “They’re earning sub-minimum wages, and then paying it back in rent” to share a room with up to seven co-workers.  “Their weekly net pay is actually sometimes…as low as zero”…management required [them] to be on call twenty-four hours a day, ready to show up for work at thirty minutes’ notice, and…workers have been subject to threats and retaliation for speaking up or turning down work.  [Striker Jorge] Rios said that…“they actually threatened one of our roommates by saying that they’re just a call away from sending him back to his home country”…

Let’s see now; we’ve got people being misled about the conditions under which they’ll work, then paid starvation wages that are docked for “fees” so they can never get clear, and threatened with deportation if they complain…sound familiar?  Yet Nicholas Kristof, Polaris Project and the other “rescuers” who purport to care so much about victims are mysteriously silent on the issue, probably because they’re too busy trying to get sex workers and our clients arrested and our faces splashed across TV screens from coast to coast.  This is hypocrisy on an epic scale; either governments need to start paying attention to real labor exploitation (most of which doesn’t involve sex work) and cease harassing those who neither want nor need their “help”, or else drop the whole pretense and admit their real and ugly motives for funding “anti-trafficking” theater instead of simply ensuring the rights of all people, whether native or migrant.

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Links #144

Informally known as “mooning,” exposing one’s buttocks is a practice often intended as a sign of defiance or disrespect.  -  Will Greenlee

Another quiet week, and I’m disappointed there weren’t even any memorable April Fool pranks except for this one from REI discovered by my husband.  That is, of course, unless you count has-been comedian Jim Carrey making an April Fool of himself over gun control a few days early; today’s first video mocks the fact that opposing vaccination (as Carrey does) probably kills far more people than guns do.  The second video continues our Star Trek theme of the past few weeks, and was provided by Grace; everything above the first video was contributed by Radley Balko, and those between the two by Jolene Parton,  Popehat, Lenore Skenazy (two items), Jesse Walker, Amy Alkon and Aspasia (in that order).

• Man moons bus driver, then removes dentures and steals basketball.
• “This is not a photo of the actual papayas…thrown in the incident“.
• Judge rules that careful driving is not a crime in New York.
• So, a goat walks into a bar…
• They never learn.

• A rhyme for “orange”?
• Universal criminality in action.
• 14 words that are their own opposites.
• 7-year-old charged with felony for shooting BB gun.
• This is quite possibly the longest book title of all time.
• Man sentenced to decades in prison for custom car modifications.
• Next time someone tells you to go to Hell, you’ll know how to get there.

From the Archives

• My Easter columns for the last two years, and a creepy story I wrote on Easter Sunday, 1997.
• Stupidly endangering oneself is not a political statement; it’s just stupid.
• Women do not always have the luxury of obeying stupid, arbitrary laws.
• Vaginal injuries are just as likely to result from consensual sex as rape.
• Imaginative sex law ideas proposed by politicians in Alaska and Texas.
• Heroic cops save town from menace of a desperately-hungry woman.
• A one-woman prohibition campaign enabled by a sleazy political deal.
• Fanatics multiply a credible estimate of “trafficking” victims by 1000x.
• Sex workers in Asia and Africa are an example to those in the West.
• The Swedish Model is “a failed experiment in social engineering”.
• Why the “Occupy” movement should support sex worker rights.
• The real origin of that claim about “300,000 trafficked children”.
• A petition to press criminal charges against prohibitionist liars.
• Is New Orleans serious about giving up on harassing whores?
• Judge releases 400 sex workers from “sex offender” tyranny.
• An extreme example of how anti-whore laws hurt all women.
• Are the negative effects of underage sex as bad as claimed?
• How the entire trafficking myth is held together with lies.
• The New York Times takes aim at its own collective foot.
• The crumbling of Nicholas Kristof, idol with feet of clay.
• An ancient Roman festival and pictures of my pussy.
• How prohibitionists take statistics out of context.
• Witch-hunting is still a popular pastime in Salem.
• The how and why of the politicization of rape.
• An influx of web traffic and my first milestone.
• More on the upholding of the Himel decision.
• Jezebel’s weird ambivalence about sex work.
• Several links for sex worker rights in Korea.
• Gloria Steinem, “sex trafficking” fetishist.

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Under Every Bed

Like an ideal deity, the ideal devil is omnipotent and omnipresent.-Eric Hoffer

Though moral panics may differ in their particulars, they all share two important characteristics: the menace is claimed to be both enormous and all-pervasive, and to represent an existential threat to Our Treasured Way of Life.  During the “Red Scare” of the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that communists had so infiltrated the United States that there was practically “a red under every bed”; he stated that 20% of all government employees were communists, that they presented a clear and present danger to American liberty, and that it was therefore permissible to abrogate that liberty in a crusade to ferret out communists and neutralize the threat they presented.  And today, we are repeatedly told that “traffickers” are everywhere, that they are lying in wait on the internet to abduct “innocent children” into “sex slavery”, and that widespread human rights violations and the expenditure of millions are necessary to stop them.  Every small town and rural state in America scrambles for its place on the “trafficking” gravy train by insisting that “trafficking happens here, too!” and eagerly labeling every streetwalker a “victim” and every hapless client or driver a “trafficker” in order to create statistics where there were none.  Larger towns join the “king of the hill” competition, each proudly claiming to be a leading source, destination or “hub” for the imaginary slave caravans (usually on the bizarre basis that interstate highways pass through the area).  And even poor countries within the American sphere of influence get into the act, accepting whatever arbitrary “grade” is assigned them by the US State Department in its methodology-free “TIP Report”, then persecuting whores and clients in a twisted game of “fetch” to please their prudish masters.

Stories spouting these myths are so common now, I could literally reprint one every day and not ever run out of them; to demonstrate, here are six examples from a six-day period early last month.  The first appeared on March 6^th and comes to us from the big booming metropolis of Rapid City, South Dakota:

Human trafficking for sex is not a crime that only occurs in other countries or in large cities.  It also happens in South Dakota, according to U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson…trafficking is more prevalent in the Sioux Falls area, but it will happen eventually in Rapid City, Johnson said.  Sex traffickers target…vulnerable girls that they ultimately end up selling for sex…Once they’re inside, women feel they can’t ever leave the commercial sex-trafficking ring…

Then 87 minutes later and roughly 600 kilometers south, we got this one:

Human trafficking is occurring all over the state, according to Nebraska Family Council Executive Director Al Riskowski, and current laws do little to prevent or punish offenses…Riskowski said that Interstate 80 is part of the main route that victims, most often female minors, are shuffled along as they are forced from city to city by their captors…[a proposed law] would make it nearly impossible for an escort service to operate within the state because it would require these businesses to register for a permit…Riskowski said he was compelled to take up the issue of human trafficking after finding escort services in the Lincoln phonebook. He went to the chief of police, who said he knew very well that the escort services were prostitution rings.  “My only thought was, ‘How could they be advertising prostitution in the phonebook?’” Riskowski said.  “The ad even said that a minor would be sent out on request”…

He was shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, to discover escort services in the phone book!  That last whopper is incredible even by prohibitionist standards; “Minors available upon request?”  Really?  Does Riskowski assume his audience can’t look the ads up for themselves, or just that they won’t?  The hilarious lawhead delusion that passing a permit law will somehow stop harlotry isn’t limited to the hinterlands, though:

This week the Huntington Beach City Council voted in support of…[a] proposed ordinance [which] would require establishments to obtain certification from the city and would prohibit massage therapists from performing services in their own homes…Police Chief Kenneth Small…urged council members to pass the ordinance…and…expressed significant concern for the sex workers themselves.  “Overwhelmingly based on our investigations in Huntington Beach and throughout Orange County and Southern California, the women involved in most of these massage parlors are trafficked in,” said the Chief, who explained that many were forced to work six days a week at the coercion of pimps and panderers…In 2011 the [Orange County] Weekly reported on the issue of human trafficking, child sexual slavery and the difficulty in accurately reporting its numbers.  While crusaders such as Ashton Kutcher were pegging the figure between 100,000 and 300,000 sex slaves in America, most researchers offered significantly smaller numbers…

The Orange County Weekly is a Village Voice property, hence the skeptical tone which is wholly absent from this lugubrious idiocy published three days later in Denver (despite the fact that it does quote sex workers rights advocates down near the end):

Describe the tragedy of a 12-year-old being controlled by someone…who takes payment from scumbags for acts that shatter the child’s innocence, and repeatedly damage her body and soul…”We are definitely seeing an increase in the number of cases involving the commercial sexual exploitation of children, forced and coerced prostitution and organized prostitution,” according to Sgt. Dan Steele of the Denver Police Department…It’s called sex trafficking when a vulnerable person (of any age) is forced, coerced or lured…into providing sex acts for cash…the prostitute is a victim who may not even recognize that fact…Nina Martinez, executive director for Street’s Hope…[says] “We are unique in that we are faith-based, and right now a lot of our funding comes from churches”…Billie McIntire…[of the] Sex Workers Alliance Network…says the issue of sex trafficking has been seized by…”abolitionist feminists” and members of ultra-conservative Christian groups, as a way to help push their desire to eradicate the sex industry entirely…

Yes, you read that correctly; a prohibitionist group claims that being religious makes it “unique”.  But while FBI collaborations with local cops in Colorado are liable to involve “sting” operations and psychological abuse of sex workers, those conducted in small countries to satisfy State Department demands involve far less refined tactics:

…immigration officials, along with San Fernando CID officers, swooped down on the popular Classic Seamen Hotel…[in] Marabella, where they found 76 scantily dressed women, allegedly soliciting clients…the women ran at the sight of officers but were easily captured as the premises is surrounded by high walls topped by barbed wire…In 2012, the US Department of State’s Human Trafficking Report said that [Trinidad and Tobago] was “a destination, source and transit country for adults and children subjected to sex trafficking”…

And the next day on the mainland, lawyers demonstrate the unbelievable credulity that allows cops to get away with the most outrageous lies in court:

…members of The Jacksonville Bar Association…[were told that] Florida ranks third in the U.S. in human trafficking cases behind California and New York…2.5 million people are in forced labor at any given time as a result of trafficking, 1.2 million children are annually trafficked, a majority of victims are 18-24 years of age and 95 percent of victims experience physical or sexual violence during trafficking…”Human trafficking rivals Microsoft in what it makes annually in sheer profits.  It’s one of the greatest growth industries that we currently have in the world, which is a sobering statistic for all of us,” said [Terry] Coonan [of the Florida State University Center for the Advancement of Human Rights]…the…trafficking symposium…included Telisia Espinosa telling her story of being a victim of human trafficking…Members of the law enforcement panel agreed that one of the problems in human trafficking is that some people don’t think that they are victims…

Just a few days after Albany Law School had the sense to feature an actual sex worker on the panel of its “trafficking” symposium, the Florida Bar Association instead featured an attention-seeking religious fanatic whose unverifiable horror tales contradict both the experiences of thousands of sex workers and plain common sense.  But that’s the way it is with moral panics; the numbers grow ever higher, and the stories ever more ridiculous, until even the lowest common denominator can no longer believe in them and the whole hysteria collapses like a punctured balloon.

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