Image Enhancement

Images are the brood of desire.  -  George Eliot

What seems like a straightforward news article can often reveal hidden depths when examined critically by an informed mind; the biases, knowledge gaps and outright lies of both the author and the interviewees then stand out in sharp relief, like a computer-enhanced photo of the Earth taken from a satellite.  Many of you probably saw this item about the decline of Nevada brothels, but let’s apply some image enhancement to the picture:

…As state legislators ponder levying an 8% sales tax on brothels and other live entertainment, the director of the Nevada Brothel Association says that a bad economy and an abundance of illegal prostitutes is already killing off the business.  “When I started as the lobbyist for the industry in 1985, we had 37 brothels in the state,” [said] George Flint…“Now we have just 18, and 12 to 14 of them are not doing very well”…Since the recession…many women [have gone] into business for themselves so as to avoid handing over 50 percent of their fee to brothel owners.

There’s so much more to see in this short paragraph than meets the uninformed and uncritical eye; let’s take it in order of appearance.  First, it’s interesting that brothel owners are complaining about plans to tax them when they themselves agitated in favor of it for years, because they recognize that once a government becomes used to income from an industry it will generally work to build up that industry in order to increase revenues.  So I suspect Flint’s complaint is just poor-mouthing intended to set up some request for concessions to the brothel industry or a crackdown on independent operators; despite his claim that it’s the economy which has hurt the brothels, the fact of the matter is that it’s a combination of the internet and women’s social progress.  Since 1985, the average American woman’s opportunity cost has risen due to increased education and removal of impediments to employment, and it has been demonstrated that women of higher opportunity cost prefer to work illegally rather than submitting to the relatively exploitative conditions in Nevada brothels.  The internet then made it much easier for women to make that choice, and so they have; only a hopeless lawhead could fail to understand that arbitrary “legality” is very far down the list of factors used by the typical woman when considering her means of survival.

As a result…prices for sex have fallen.  “Instead of paying $400…these guys can now go out and get the same service for a third of the money,” Flint said.

This is an outright lie, as any man who has ever hired an escort in Vegas will tell you.  I don’t know if even the streetwalkers there can be hired for $130, much less an escort, and to pretend that’s the “same service” one receives from a brothel is more like something one might expect to hear from a prohibitionist (in close proximity to phrases like “selling her body” and “prostituted woman”).

State officials estimate that there are some 30,000 sex workers just in Las Vegas…“Look in the phone book, there are what, 100 pages for nude dancers who’ll come to your hotel room?” Flint said.  “The big hotels have their own girls.  The strip clubs have upstairs rooms.  You have a variety of different levels of prostitution in Vegas.”  With those many layers, the city has no shortage of problems, from violent pimps to the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV.  “Since 1987, we’ve never had a single woman test positive for HIV who worked in a brothel,” Flint said.

I probably don’t need to remind you that whores are not a significant vector for any STI anywhere in the developed world, but you may not realize that the invasive, degrading weekly disease checks required by Nevada law are one of the reasons so many women prefer to work independently or for escort service owners who treat them like adults capable of taking care of their own health.  I’ve also previously addressed the “violent pimp” propaganda and explained how politicians and brothel owners spread it in order to maintain public support for the status quo, but of course that’s not how they spin it:

A PPP poll conducted in 2012 found that 66% of Nevada residents believed that brothels should be legal across the state.  Few politicians, however, have shown the political will to take on the issue.  “My constituents are not ready for it,” former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman…[said] in 2011.  ”They are always ready to have a good discussion because they are smart people, but they are not ready to legalize prostitution because they have moral objections.”

We’ll pause for a few moments here so everyone can finish laughing at the idea that the majority of Las Vegas residents have “moral objections” to vice businesses, and to give y’all time to clean the coffee off of your monitor screens.

Barring a sudden economic turnaround or what he sees as an unlikely political awakening, Flint sees continued trouble for the brothel industry.  “I’m an optimistic guy, but I’m not optimistic that this business will bounce back very quickly,” Flint said.

This is the only wholly truthful statement Flint made in the whole article.  As an officially-sanctioned but ersatz replacement for escorts, the brothel industry is doomed; its only hope is gentrification, the transformation of brothels into attractive resorts to which men can take their friends, clients or open-minded wives, places which can offer an experience not available in a hotel room or even a typical incall.  When in the 1970s and ‘80s strip clubs went from being seedy dives to upscale gentlemen’s clubs, everyone benefitted except the prohibitionists (who had to invent the myth of “negative secondary effects” to shore up their “sin and degradation” catechism); the same thing will happen as Americans lose their ignorance-spawned fear of bordellos.  Here’s some free advice, Nevada brothel owners:  stop getting in bed with the prohibitionists and instead work toward decriminalization and eradicating stigma.  Then you can invest in turning your businesses into showplaces and possibly even franchise operations, and you’ll make more money than you ever did catering to guys who were just too scared to call “illegal” hookers to come to them.

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Somewhere in the Middle

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on April 14^th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

Intellectual laziness can manifest itself in many ways, of which one of the most common (and irrational) is black and white thinking.  Humans are highly variable creatures whose characteristics, behaviors, beliefs, preferences, tastes, etc are often very different from one another; between the two most extreme points on any scale there are an incalculable number of different positions, and in any population one is likely to find as many different opinions on any given subject as there are people.  But one would never know this from talking to the dualist; he insists on pretending that everyone is clustered near the endpoints, and willfully ignores every shade of grey in between.  But this view of human reality is not only limited, it’s wrong; on most subjects, only a small minority of individuals can be found in those extreme endpoints, and the great majority fall somewhere in the middle.

What makes this fallacious dichotomization even worse is that people who might not be inclined to think that way often fall into it as a response to someone else’s extreme viewpoint.  For example, when faced with the bogus claim that some drug (cannabis, for instance) is universally horrible, destructive and addictive, some supporters of drug decriminalization respond with equally-spurious claims that the drug is a physical or spiritual panacea.  The truth is not only in between those two points, but also varies with individuals; any given drug has both beneficial effects and harmful effects, and the proportion of one to the other can vary considerably between individuals.  Each individual must decide whether the drug is right for him, and in a free society he is allowed to make that decision for himself without fear of authoritarian violence.  And though there are ample moral reasons to support the principle of self-determination, there are practical reasons as well:  criminalizing consensual behavior adds artificial harmful effects to those inherent in it, and makes it much more difficult for anyone to make an informed choice because data about criminalized activities is often hidden or distorted.

Sex work provides good examples of this syndrome on both sides of the transaction, worker and client.  Under criminalization and even quasi-criminalization (i.e. legalization schemes which criminalize some actions such as solicitation, kerb crawling, brothel-keeping, etc) prostitution is pushed into the shadows due to fear of arrest or other police harassment, thus creating dangers not inherent in the work itself.  It also becomes impossible to collect comprehensive and reliable data on the subject, and as a result prohibitionists are free to make the sort of outlandish claims with which everyone is familiar (all sex workers have pimps, we were all abused as children and/or suffer from PTSD, the average age at debut is 13, most of us are coerced, etc, etc, ad nauseam).  Unfortunately, in reacting to these lies many sex workers espouse a false dichotomy; as I explained in my column of that name,

…they believe there are two and only two kinds of prostitutes, free-willed high-dollar independent escorts and pimped, coerced slaves.  This, of course, is pure poppycock…The only people who…have…absolutely free choice to do any kind of work are the Paris Hiltons of the world, those who have a guaranteed inheritance, income and secured future no matter what they choose to do with the present.  Every other person has no choice but to work in some fashion; the choice not to work at all simply doesn’t exist unless one considers starvation an option.  At that point, then, the choice boils down to what kind of work one is able and willing to do.

Some harlots absolutely adore their work; others like it but don’t love it; others tolerate it for the high income and flexibility; still others dislike it but prefer it to their other options; and some dislike or hate it but have no other options (due sometimes to literal coercion, but more often to conditions such as drug addiction or a criminal record).  The distribution may be fairly even along the spectrum, or it may be a classic bell curve; it’s difficult to be sure because of the issues discussed above.  But one thing is certain; the majority lie not on the ends, but somewhere in the middle.

Clients are, if anything, even harder to get data on than sex workers; after all, even in countries where prostitution is decriminalized most men have good reasons to be discreet (including wives and social stigma).  In the 19^th century nearly every man paid for sex from time to time, but as sexual mores progressively relaxed decade by decade in the 20^th, that fraction undoubtedly dropped because at least some men could obtain casual sex without direct payment.  In the 1940s Kinsey found that 69% of men had paid for sex at least once in their lives, and though it’s probably lower now (due, again, to the increased availability of “free” sex), it still gives us a reasonable baseline to work from.  But when we look at modern claims about this percentage, we find them all over the map.  A few studies still produce reasonable figures, but most go wildly in one direction or another due mostly to questions and categorization criteria specifically designed to give the “researcher” exactly what she’s looking for.  On the one extreme, early in 2011 the well-known prohibitionist Melissa Farley defined “paying for sex” so broadly she literally couldn’t find any men who hadn’t (and therefore had to redesign the parameters to produce a less-obviously-bogus result).  On the other, the General Social Survey claims only 14% have ever paid, a figure so ludicrously low the industry would collapse; reader Kevin Wilson (a research consultant) showed that when taken with other claims from the survey, this would mean the average American sex worker only has about 10 clients per year (a number I exceeded every week of my career).

Obviously, neither of these extreme claims can be true; logic dictates that the fraction of men paying for sex now could neither be higher than it was before the sexual revolution made casual sex socially acceptable, nor too low to support the observable economic reality.  The most credible studies I’ve seen indicate that though a slight majority of men have directly paid for sex at least once, most don’t repeat the experience; about 20% of all men do it occasionally and 6% regularly.  So once again, we see the same pattern; sex-worker-hiring is neither ubiquitous nor rare but, like most other human behaviors, somewhere in the middle.

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Unintentional Hilarity

Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little.  -  Mason Cooley

Psychologists still aren’t entirely sure what makes a given thing funny.  Oh, there’s been considerable thought about it in the past few decades, but no general consensus on some important details such as why one person finds something funny while another may not.  Part of this undoubtedly comes down to taste; for example, while I find absurd situations intrinsically amusing, others may only find them irritating.  And while many people find exaggerated depictions of misfortune hilarious, they only make me uncomfortable.  This accounts for my mixed reaction to the Three Stooges; though I find ridiculous scenes like Curly fighting a living clam in a bowl of chowder to be extremely funny, the physical slapstick leaves me absolutely cold.  Of course, some humor depends on knowledge; those in the know will get the joke, while those who aren’t, won’t.  Sometimes the latter may even take a situation very seriously, while the former recognize the irony and so perceive it as ludicrous.

That was the case when I read this recent story about a “sex trafficking” propaganda session held by Shared Hope International at a Washington State high school.  What first attracted my attention to it was the fact that though the speaker admits to having been naïve and ignorant at the beginning of her supposed “ordeal”, she is still just as clueless as ever, but doesn’t realize how her words betray that fact to anyone who’s ever done any kind of sex work (or even set foot in a modern strip club).  I planned to use the story in TW3 #318, but the more I looked at it the funnier it got, and I realized it needed the full-column treatment.  I hope I’m able to help most of you see what I saw, and if not…well, I guess you had to be there.

…Brianna…sketched a scene of lost innocence.  She was in Seattle on a whim to party with two older guys she barely knew.  She’d lied to her parents, telling them she was at a girlfriend’s house for the weekend.  The guys seemed nice enough, attractive, possibly wealthy.  But she soon discovered their motives weren’t merely impure, they were also likely criminal.  They told Brianna, who’d just turned 18, she could make a lot more money stripping than she could working her other job, waiting tables…

In other words, Brianna is a spoiled, sheltered moron who thinks it’s perfectly safe to spend the weekend with complete strangers 200 km from home without anyone knowing she’s there.  That’s not “innocence”; it’s exceptional stupidity.  Even so, these guys (if they existed at all) don’t appear to be “criminals” to me, unless telling the truth has been criminalized in Washington; a good-looking 18-year-old girl CAN make a lot more money stripping than waiting tables.  Surely Shared Hope and reporter Tyler Graf aren’t denying this?

“The strip club was really loud and really dark — it smelled,” Brianna said…”Everything there was really sticky.  It had germs on it.”

My guess is that Brianna has never actually been in a strip club; her description appears to be a combination of something she saw on a TV cop show and what somebody told her about seedy porn theaters, embellished on suggestion of her handlers.  Germs!

The guys told her she could make a lot of money with her young looks.  So why not get out of La Center?  Why not head down to Phoenix, Ariz., and catch some sun?  Why not empty her bank account and hand it over?  They’d take care of her.  In only a few days, the requests became increasingly unreasonable, and she realized something was wrong.  What she didn’t know until later was that she was on the brink of entering the sex trade world.

“Increasingly unreasonable”?  Really?  You mean, more unreasonable than “Hey, why not travel halfway across the country with two dudes you don’t know after turning over your bank account to them?”  Because I’m honestly having difficulty thinking of something that could be more unreasonable than that to anyone who was reared outside of a Skinner box and has a greater cerebral capacity than the average stray dog.  Though we aren’t told how Brianna “escaped” from these guys, it’s pretty obvious they did not actually intend to harm or (criminally) exploit her; she clearly lacks the intellectual agility to outwit a goldfish, much less a pair of gangsters (even assuming they were relatively obtuse).  I’m also very amused by the phrase “sex trade world”, which was clearly shat out by the same Yellow Journalism Phrase Generator^TM that produced “sex trafficking world” and “sex trafficking trade”.

Brianna’s brush with sex trafficking two years ago is documented in…”Chosen,” which made its premiere…in front of more than 100 La Center High School students.  The 20-minute video, produced by…Shared Hope International, is meant to be an educational tool warning teens and others about the dangers of the sex trade.

Shouldn’t that be “sex trafficking trade”?  Or is it “sex trade world”?  One needs to be precise about these things.

In the video, another young woman details how a pimp groomed her as a young teenager.  He bought her expensive gifts before eventually setting her loose at strip clubs in Portland.

I just can’t help picturing her running around the club going “woop woop woop” and “nyah nyah nyah”, then falling on her side on the floor and spinning around in a circle.

Law enforcement officials consider…Interstate 5…to be a major arterial for sex-trafficking operations, especially of underage girls…

Evidence!

“You might think pimps are cool — like, they have lots of money and cars,” senior Olivia Loreth, 19, said.  ”They get a lot of women because they’re just that cool.”

You might, if you were a complete imbecile.

…Former U.S. Rep. Linda Smith, the founder of Shared Hope International, says she wants the video to be another tool in fighting the rise of human trafficking…

…which is “an extension of the ‘pro-life’ cause.”  Finish your sentences, Linda.

…Smith said more awareness of the realities of sex trafficking needs to be coupled with stronger state laws that punish Johns and pimps but protect victims.

I’m starting to get the giggles every time I see some po-faced twit use the word “john” to mean a client.  Even more so when he capitalizes it.  And the irony of one of the chief disseminators of “sex trafficking” myths and lies using the phrase “realities of sex trafficking” is just icing on the cake.

Washington has been a leader in this.  It’s one of a handful of states that has what’s known as a “Safe Harbor” law, which redefines prostituted minors as victims…

What does it mean?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!?

Here’s an example of Washington’s “leadership”, and the truth about “safe harbor laws”.  I know this bit isn’t funny, but it does demonstrate Smith’s duplicity and Graf’s credulity.

[A new Washington law] will toughen the definition of sex trafficking, making every minor who participates in a sex-for-money scheme the victim of trafficking…

That’s right, the law has the power to rewrite reality like the Lathe of Heaven and make them victims even if they weren’t.  Justice!

In the two years since her ordeal, Brianna has rebounded.  She often joins Smith to spread the word about the realities of sex trafficking, and she’s enrolled in a nursing program at Clark College.

If I might offer a bit of unsolicited advice, Brianna, I don’t think you’re cut out for nursing; perhaps fantasy-writing or acting would be a closer fit.  Or better yet, stand-up comedy.

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Guest Columnist: Kelly Michaels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That Was the Week That Was (#319)

Who needs misogynists when you describe women engaged in sex work as “objects” whose humanity “can be forgotten”?  -  Maddie Collier

R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen

The greatest special-effects artist of all time has passed away at the age of 92.  His movies are among my all-time favorites, and no digital creature has ever entertained me as much as Ray’s masterful puppetry still does.  And even though he’s been retired for 32 years, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that the world will be just a little less magical without him.

Bad Girls

…[An] unnamed 14-year-old used his iPad to find…Dareka R. Brooks through a website used for sexual hookups…believing [her] to be a sex worker, [he] invited her to his…home, [where she]…pepper-sprayed the boy and made off with his piggy bank and the…iPad…Brooks was tracked down a short time later…and arrested after she used the iPad…Brooks was charged with armed robbery…[but] the…boy will not face charges for solicitation.

I suspect the cops’ “kindness” means the boy’s family is well-connected.

Halfway Whores

Dr. Laura Agustín on “Good-time girls and other non-professionals taking money for sex“:

Formalised money-sex exchanges get the attention and conflict…lots of other exchanges are ignored, a line is drawn between commercial and non-commercial sex.  But that line is imaginary.  Many people who expect to be compensated for their company will never call themselves sex workers or escorts…

Lack of Evidence

A Colorado woman was convicted of prostitution for answering a personal ad; after trying to talk her into having sex in a parking lot, a disguised cop “shoved a fistful of cash in front of her face and issued a command: ‘TAKE IT!’…Moments later, the car was surrounded [by] ‘Guns and guys in black with masks on’…the prosecution focused on the word ‘roses’ in the Craigslist ad…”  Maybe if this sort of thing starts to happen more often, amateurs will start to wake up to the fact that anti-whore laws harm everyone.

My Body, My Choice (Holiday Leftovers)

[For] five years…[William Coleman has been] force-fed…Starving himself…is the only way he has to…protest his conviction.  Not eating is his only available free speech act…He and his lawyer have gone to court to stop the force-feedings, but a judge ruled against him in March…Coleman is…[not at] Guantánamo…where a mass hunger strike of 100 prisoners has brought…force-feeding to American newspapers, if not American consciences…but…in Connecticut…Guantánamo is not an anomaly.  Prisoners…are routinely and systematically force-fed every day…force-feedings…are considered torture by most of the world’s medical and governing bodies…yet most media outlets continue to portray feeding tube use as a “complex ethical debate.”  It’s not.  Competent prisoners go on hunger strike because they have something to say and no other way to say it.  Prison officials choose not to hear — and silence them with tubes…

Check Your Premises

A Hialeah [Florida] police sergeant…Tomas Muñoz…has been suspended with pay after being…charged with cocaine possession and carrying drug paraphernalia…he told reporters…“I met a girl — she happens to have a pimp, and we fell in love…And he doesn’t let her be free.  This came about because he set the whole thing up.”

He “doesn’t let her be free”, except to fuck cops.  For free.

A Tale That Grew in the Telling

American’s mathematical illiteracy goes clear up to the White House, whose spokesman recently claimed that almost 4% of school-age American girls have become “child sex slaves” since the beginning of the panic a decade ago.  Also of note:  since the government was unable to shut down Backpage via unconstitutional censorship demands, it is now claiming that it intentionally gave up trying.

The Proper Study

Another step in the right direction:

Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) have announced…a new journal devoted to the study of pornography.  Porn Studies, to be edited by Professor Feona Attwood of Middlesex University and Dr Clarissa Smith of the University of Sunderland, will be the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts…

One Born Every Minute

…Thousands of sex workers in Sonagachi have lost their lifelong savings…in Ponzi schemes…”about [30 million rupees] has been lost”…[said] Bharati [of Durbar Mahila Samanaya Committee]…Till 2004-05…sex workers [only] deposited their earnings and took loans…[at] Usha Bank…but…7-8 agents [who] were sacked by [the] Bank…continued to operate in the red light area.  ”Sex workers were easily trapped because the agents were well known to them or were their relatives…” [said a bank officer]…Bharati says, “We…repeatedly issued warnings…But you can’t stop anyone…hell bent to invest her hard earned money in schemes promising much higher returns.”  The Durbar has recently launched a massive awareness programme…

Workers’ Paradise vs. Gold Diggers

 …Dongguan…has a population of about 7 million and a reputation as the Chinese capital of sex…Between 500,000 and 800,000 people – some 10 per cent of Dongguan’s migrant population – are in some way employed in the world’s oldest profession…[including] 300,000 sex workers…[but] authorities are now…trying to push prostitution off Dongguan’s streets with a crackdown…

Where Are the Protests?

Note that the word “trafficking” is entirely absent:

A company within Sweden’s home care services…mistreated migrant workers by making false promises about work conditions…Hassan…said that his official job offer stated that he would be employed full-time by…TPS Vårdteam…with a monthly wage of 26,500 kronor ($4,000)…”In the beginning I didn’t get any work at all…Then I had to work seven days a week….[for] only…8,000 kronor per month”…the company had not paid in any taxes at all for Hassan…

End demand for home health care!

Obfuscation via Dysphemisms

Tulsa, Oklahoma’s sleazy war on whores reaches a new level of evil:

Tulsa police have…charged 23 individuals under a state law that permits a felony to be filed when a person suspected of prostitution is arrested within 1,000 feet of a church or school.  ”It’s just a nightmare,” said defense attorney, Charles Kania…a “scarlet letter on their foreheads that follows them forever”…The felony charges are part of a stepped-up effort by police to get tough on prostitution…Sgt. Todd Evans said…”Most of Tulsa is within a thousand feet of a church or school”…[and] police have sometimes opted to book individuals under another statute that makes it a felony to utilize a computer to violate any state law…

All the Difference

…Active Blessing Uganda…[promised that children] would get an education and live a better life…instead [they were] denied basic rights and exploited…76 children, aged between four and 16 years, have been rescued from the alleged human traffickers…the children are malnourished…do domestic work…in return for food and when they fall sick…are not cared for…the parents [were]…always prevented…from visiting…

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic (TW3 #49)

On May 22, the American Psychiatric Association will release the…DSM-5…[practicing psychotherapist] Gary Greenberg, one of the book’s biggest critics, claims these disorders aren’t real — they’re invented…The Book of Woe: The Making of the DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry is his exposé of the business behind the creation of the new manual…

The Cold, Grey Light of Dawn (TW3 #137)

A powerful statement from Filipino sex workers:

…Being poor in the Philippines…means…no matter how much you believe things to be wrong you must believe it to be right when the rich, your master (amo)…[says] so…That…[is] why it was not difficult for the feminist (abolitionists) to appropriate our voices and to start…speaking for themselves in our name…For years, we could only stand , mouths gagged, as we watched our new “amos” build their careers speaking for other underprivileged and “mindless” women in their list who they claim do not have the ability to speak for themselves…We…do not understand the arrogance by which they have anointed themselves our saviors…what we want is save ourselves from them instead…we really do not care about  “patriarchy”, “commodification” and other words they spew.  Those matters don’t bring food on our table nor pay for our rent.  All we are interested in is work undisturbed…It is time to tell the world that only sex workers [can] speak for sex workers…

Held Together With Lies (TW3 #316)

Wendy Lyon does her usual thorough job ripping apart a bogus study:

Last month saw the publication of the EU’s first Trafficking in Human Beings report, which…is (properly) littered with disclaimers…Unfortunately…the press release…[went] for the handy soundbite…so we’ve been deluged with headlines like “Human trafficking increased by 18%“ when…the report doesn’t show it did any such thing…if all the statistics were accepted as readily as the “18% increase” has been, it would be a little bit inconvenient for some…Contrary to what we’re constantly told by the anti-trafficking movement, the most recent figures make it hard to discern any link between trafficking and the legal status of sex work.  The Dutch rate is very high, but the Cyprus rate is higher – and Cyprus has much stricter laws than the Netherlands…Romania, where sex work itself is illegal, is nearly as high.  Hungary (legal), Portugal (legal) and Lithuania (illegal) are tied for last.  Austria and Germany are also relatively low – in fact, Germany and Sweden are tied, at 0.8 per 100,000.  And the German rate has remained more or less constant over the three years surveyed, while Sweden’s has quadrupled…But sex workers’ rights advocates shouldn’t leap on those figures, either, because truthfully the whole report is pretty hopelessly undermined by its methodological weaknesses…

Monsters

Sometime…[in] April, an Ohio transgender woman was…stabbed repeatedly and then tied to a concrete block and cast into a pond.  She was left with no clothes below the waist, perhaps to shame her…But…insensitive stories by the local press…[wrote] about [her] as if she were a bizarre spectacle, not a victimized human being…the Cleveland Plain Dealer…used a mugshot of [Cemia] Acoff instead of the other readily available photos…the [headline which now reads]…“Oddly dressed body found in Olmsted Township identified,” originally said “oddly dressed man,” (you can see it in the url; it was changed after readers and activists protested)…the story [also] refers to her as Carl Acoff (her birth name) and uses a male pronoun...[a follow-up] story…details what she was wearing…lists old petty “crimes”…[and refers to the] hormones [she was carrying as] “dangerous drugs”…

The Widening Gyre (TW3 #317)

Maddie Collier’s response to Rakhi “pop stars cause sex trafficking” Kumar is well worth reading in its entirety, but here’s a sample:

…The anti-sex trafficking cause is already thick with moral panic, misinformation, and ill-informed, PR-boosting celebrity activists, and you’re cluttering the already-diminished discourse with further nonsense….[which spawns] attitudes and policies that actively harm sex workers.  You are ignoring the freely-available  perspectives and requests of real-life sex workers because they interfere with your romantic notion of the Prostituted Woman as a forlorn, passive victim who needs to be saved.  If you engage with sex workers before you form a view on what’s oppressing them, you might find that criminalisation and stigma are higher-priority concerns than mythical drug-dealing pimps wielding persuasive charm and Beyoncé’s hotpants…

Anatomy of a Boondoggle (TW3 #317)

The newest excuse for police rape of sex workers is that Asian massage parlors are “sophisticated”:

…an undercover police officer…[repeatedly paid for sex] over five months…in a fight against prostitution and human trafficking.  Officers say such methods led to…[their raiding] two businesses [and] arresting…four alleged prostitutes and two alleged pimps.  But the methods…were criticized…by legal…experts and women’s advocates as excessive, unnecessary and misapplied…prostitutes can be arrested and charged in Indiana as soon as an agreement to pay for a sex act is made…Plus…if the women indeed had been…working…against their will, the sex acts they performed on the officer only contributed to their humiliation, exploitation and degradation…Aaron Dietz, head of the…Task Force…which conducted the nine-month sting, said…the sophisticated nature of the prostitution ring required officers to take more extreme measures…Dietz and others wanted to emphasize that it was not a pleasurable experience for the officer, but entirely necessary.  “No one…really wants to go into these…It’s something that’s ethically and morally very trying, so I’d do anything to keep guys out of there.”

You’d do anything?  Then how about advocating for decriminalization, you fucking filthy liar?

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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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Preventative Measures

Ian Ironwood of The Red Pill Room writes:

I lurk at your site frequently, and love the way you write.  My own blog deals with…marriage topics, and one of my most popular subjects is “girl game”.  In these posts I try to explain to my female readers some of the psychology behind why and how men like to have sex, and what they can do to cater to it.  Most of the time I’m actually explaining the usual “why men go see whores” meme in different ways, and I have had some good response to it.  I’ve covered the GFE, the Happy Ending, and a couple of other professional go-to moves, but I was wondering if you had any further ideas in that direction.  What were the common reasons men saw you when you practiced, and how could their wives have countered their decision to go to a pro by giving them what they wanted at home?

The three most common reasons married men see whores could be abbreviated as “She doesn’t”, “She won’t” and “She isn’t”.  The first is wholly in the woman’s court, the last wholly in the man’s, and the second somewhere in between.  “She doesn’t” means the wife just doesn’t provide enough sex, or that the sex she provides is so lackluster it isn’t satisfying to the husband.  “She won’t” means the wife won’t do something the husband really yearns for, whether that be a particular activity (such as oral sex) or a mode of behavior (such as role-play or just being enthusiastic).  “She isn’t” means the wife is simply no longer sufficient for the husband’s desire no matter what she does; either age or weight has made her unattractive to him, or he can’t see her as sexual after having kids due to a bad case of the Madonna/whore duality, or he has a strong need for variety.  ”She doesn’t” and most “She won’t” are completely under the wife’s control; giving one’s husband the kind of good, enthusiastic sex he craves will go a long way toward sapping his desire to see whores.  If the man’s desire is for something the woman actually can’t provide (such as an energetic PSE when she’s over 50 and no longer athletic), a frank discussion of alternatives which might do the trick is in order; if it’s something for which she has a visceral repulsion (such as cross-dressing), he may not even dare to mention it to her and then, obviously, it moves into “She isn’t”.

By definition, there is less a woman can do to circumvent “She isn’t” issues, unless they’re purely dependent on something like her weight.  That’s quite rare despite what you might think; I can’t recall very many cases of a man telling me that his wife was still very interested in sex, but that she was so fat or old or whatever that he couldn’t get interested.  Though some feminists like to rant about male shallowness in this regard, the truth is that in the overwhelming majority of cases it’s a wife’s attitude and behavior which turn her husband off rather than her physical appearance (though obviously, if she pointedly insists that she doesn’t care about her appearance it says a lot about her attitude, no?)  The need for variety is a tough one, but not insurmountable; if a wife comes up with ways to spice things up (or even just responds favorably to her husband’s ideas) his hindbrain can often be tricked into perceiving her as different, and therefore satisfying to his need for variety.  If that’s not enough, there are couple calls and wife swapping, which allow the husband to satisfy his craving for “strange” under controlled conditions rather than acting behind the wife’s back.  Of course, if it’s the illicit nature of trysts with hookers which turns him on, that’s going to present a problem; if he craves sneaking around behind his wife’s back, he’s not likely to be satisfied with activities she attends, arranges or even simply condones.  The same could be said of the Madonna/whore issue, which might require some kind of counseling to help him get over it.  Still, those represent a very small minority of cases; most of the time, an attentive and caring wife can keep her husband from straying by simply taking her own responsibilities seriously, and by helping him to do the same for his.

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May Eve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Links #147

There is no evidence she condoned being called a horse.  -  Jeffrey Merlino

This was a weird week for links; up until Wednesday evening all I had was the first video (via Mike Siegel, who also provided “flu tax”), and I was trying to figure out what I would do if I didn’t get anything else!  But then the internet came through, and as you can see I have a full slate of interesting stuff.  This week’s top contributor was Franklin Harris, who supplied everything down to the first video; the second video was provided by Radley Balko (who also gave us “Idaho”), and the links between the videos were suggested by Mistress Matisse (“Elvis”), Walter Olson (“cigars”), Violet Blue (“CISPA”), Wil Wheaton’s Cat (“sci-fi”), and Kevin Wilson (“bingo”).

• Chick-Fil-A is opposed to gay marriage, but encourages medieval incest.
• Calling a classmate a “fat ass” is now a criminal matter in New Jersey.
• Somebody wants to make a movie out of an anti-D & D Chick comic.
• 4^th grade “science” quiz from a creationist school.

• In 1995, a New Mexico legislator introduced a bill that would’ve required psychologists to dress like wizards while on the witness stand.
• Elvis impersonator cleared of poison charges, looks for Moo Cow and promises foot massages for ladies.
• Cops are trying to steal a yacht because there were cigars on board.
• Idaho government agents abduct children of marijuana activists.
• US Congress votes on taxing the flu.
• CISPA is dead again, for now.
• Sci-fi children’s books.
• Statist bingo.
• Zardoz?

From the Archives

• My take on the Secret Service scandal attracted quite a bit of media attention, but US personnel running over whores did not.
• Jezebel blogger saves unwitting women from accidentally prostituting themselves “in fucking Thailand or some shit”.
• Real men support sex worker rights, and here’s a list of a few examples.
• Valeria Messalina, the Roman empress who enjoyed playing the whore.
• In honor of Vinalia Urbana, a catalog of aspects of the goddess Venus.
• The New York Daily News strongly criticizes Anna Gristina’s treatment.
• Last year’s attempt at banning “condoms as evidence” in New York.
• Tennessee joins the list of states defining miscarriage as murder.
• Northern Ireland has railroaded convicted its first “sex trafficker”.
• Either my strangest column ever, or not. Or both simultaneously.
• Government is practically the definition of “necessary evil”.
• The methodological deficiencies of prohibitionist “studies”.
• Cops try to blame the Long Island murders on hobbyists.
• In Asia, sex workers are welcome at feminist events.
• Helpful dating advice from government. Yes, really.
• Greta Christina invited whores to tell our stories.
• My favorite books and my favorite authors.
• The self-destruction of Somaly Mam.
• A selection of poems about harlots.
• The Thing and No, They Can’t.
• Early CISPA shenanigans.
• A hooker coffee klatsch.

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That Was the Week That Was (#317)

The laws just don’t make sense.  They don’t help sex workers.  They don’t protect sex workers.  They increase their risks and they make it harder for them to do their jobs.  –  Chris Bruckert

Cops and Condoms

Ugandan men are even worse about condoms than American and European ones; the sex workers interviewed for this article say that only about 20% of clients will agree to use one,  even when the worker tells them she is HIV+.  The problem is that many workers there will provide bareback (“live” in Ugandan slang) on demand, so a woman who insists on condoms is at a competitive disadvantage.

See No Evil

A New Zealand court has sentenced a man to three months in prison for downloading cartoon porn.  Ronald Clark has previous convictions for sexually abusing a minor, but the Japanese hentai he watched…[involved only] drawings…[and these were not even of humans, but rather] “elves and pixies, which led to concerns the images were linked to child sexual abuse…“

The More the Better (TW3 #4)

Heidi Fleiss…is…helping to renovate Dennis Hof’s Love Ranch…in Crystal, Nevada… “this…was very similar to a women’s penitentiary…You had to go through all these weird bars and buzzers, and someone’s peering out the little peephole, scoping you up and down… It was really a creepy feeling.”  [Fleiss says she wants the brothel to be] ”…not the dirty little secret where people drive up and sneak in…and then afterwards they’re full of shame…It’s something where people are so proud to be here, not only do they come back, but bring their friends back.”

The Notorious Badge (TW3 #15)

In The Client List…Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a struggling housewife who takes a rub-down side job in order to support her kids after her husband disappears.  The show…has always struck us as more campy nonsense than an accurate portrayal of the erotic massage business.  But how could we tell?  We asked an escort to watch the show and help us tell fact from fiction…

Little Boxes

Young people being pragmatic and sensible about sex?  We can’t have that!

…around 85 per cent of sexually active teens in the Bahamas are engaging in some kind of transactional sex…the majority of middle and high schoolers…are not sexually active.  But of those who are, the majority are involved in risky behaviour…Transactional sex…differs from prostitution in the sense that only a portion of the needs of the person providing the sex are met through the practice…“Many young people put themselves through high school and college in this way…They feel that if a man wants to deal with them he has to pay in some way and they are not prostituting themselves by doing this,” [NGO official Prodesta] Moore said…

Somehow I doubt an American court would accept “this isn’t prostitution because I have another source of income” as a defense.

First They Came for the Hookers…

What selfless devotion to duty!  Several different Oklahoma “law enforcement” agencies partied for four months at a strip club in order to “keep the citizens safe” from the scourge of private, consensual sex!

A Coweta strip club was busted on prostitution charges…Cherokee County deputies [investigated] the Secret Cavern strip club [for] a total of four months…[Alcohol Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission] agent [Pedro] Zardeneta…[said] “different agencies from different parts of the state worked well together to keep the citizens safe”…

The Widening Gyre

Dear “Sex Trafficking” Fetishists, please keep up the good work; we couldn’t possibly make y’all look as ridiculous as y’all make yourselves look:

Dear Michelle Obama…you were recently quoted as saying that Beyonce is a great “role model” to your two daughters…I think it’s time to stop suggesting to very young girls that ultimate feminine success…comes with the…expectation for them to undress…Variations of Beyonce’s body suit can be found in brothels, strip clubs and red light districts across the world – where sex is for sale…Remember that in the USA, the average age of a girl when she is trafficked for sex for the first time is 13…by drug dealers who promise her a celebrity lifestyle, clothes like the ones Beyonce wears…we are feeding a demonic myth that women must make themselves sexually available to enjoy ultimate success…It can take years of a young girl’s life away from her when she tries to escape a life of abuse at home…only to be sold for sex, beaten, and made addicted to drugs…

Bogeymen

A study conducted by a University of Ottawa criminology professor has confirmed what sex workers and those in the industry have said and known for years — the laws meant to protect sex workers from exploitation by targeting people who work in the industry but don’t actually do sex work end up putting those who do at much greater risk…These could include drivers…security personnel…website designers or photographers…receptionists…or the more traditional pimps or madams…Under current Canadian laws, all of those people, even the ones doing jobs that have mainstream counterparts, could be criminally charged…[despite the fact that] anything a third party could do to exploit a sex worker is already illegal if it were done to someone else…

Too Young To Know

Another sign of the decay of “sex trafficking” hysteria: even the most ignorant, dysphemism-riddled “sex trafficking” scare story chock-full of bogus statistics (“About one-third [of runaways] will be approached by a sex trafficker within 48 hours…the average life span for victims is seven years“) may admit to some real truth these days; this one, for example, recognizes that “pimps” don’t abduct screaming girls from their middle-class homes.  It will be interesting to watch as they start contradicting each other.

Bottleneck

…Jules Kim – migration project manager at Scarlet Alliance…told the [federal] inquiry into slavery and human trafficking…[that] the  current “scatter-gun” approach in which police look for trafficking victims by raiding Asian brothels was an “enormous waste of time, resources and misdirected energy…that has resulted in a gap between law enforcement bodies and…sex industry workers…People change the nature of their work to avoid that harassment…because constant raids on your business have an implication…None of the cases involved deception or trickery of the fact the person would be doing sex work.  Instead of an evidence-based approach addressing real vulnerabilities, Australia’s approach continues to try to detect the mythical trafficking victim and trafficker that is a media-driven stereotype”…

Poe Folks

According to a report released in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, watching porn only affects [young adult] sexual behavior in a negligible way.  Other influences such as personality type, educational and family background and poverty hold more girth than viewing sexually explicit material.  The study…surveyed 4,600…people between the ages of 15 and 25 living in the Netherlands during 2008-2009…

Another Small Victory (TW3 #133)

The fight in the SCOTUS over the “anti-prostitution pledge” began Monday.  On the side of Good:  The Open Society Foundation, the ACLU, the Cato Institute, the Gates Foundation and even such unlikely supporters as Fox News, the New York Times and MSNBC.  On the side of Evil:  The usual suspects, including the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.  Here’s Melissa Gira Grant’s look at the battle-lines as they were set up on Monday; note the important point that the whole thing has been framed as a question of free speech (hence the support of otherwise-hostile media outlets) rather than a referendum on the rectitude of the War on Whores.  No matter which way this goes, the persecution will go on until our “allies” stop vomiting out moronic filth like “Sex work is everywhere.  It is a brutal system.  It is an exploitative system.  Nobody thinks it’s OK.”

Big Sister (TW3 #138)

An excellent article, though I must point out that only someone hopelessly mired in the “left-right” myth could seriously consider Iceland “ultra-liberal”:

Ultra-liberal Iceland wants to ban online pornography…[as] the latest step in its attempts to eliminate the sex industry entirely.  In 2009 it introduced fines and jail terms for those who patronise prostitutes (whom it treats as victims).  In 2010 it outlawed strip clubs…No country has yet wholly succeeded in controlling commercial sex, either through legalisation or criminalisation…Iceland’s proposal is in its early stages and may lose momentum after an election on April 27^th, which the government is expected to lose.  But its plan puts it in some odd company.  Saudi Arabia similarly bans strip clubs, prostitution and pornography…Prostitution has proved hard…to police and stamp out…[but] regulating pornography is hardest of all.  Distributing and selling it has been illegal in Iceland since 1869…[but] a ban would be legally dubious, technically unfeasible and ineffective, argues Smari McCarthy…of the International Modern Media Institute…In an open letter to Ogmundur Jonasson, the interior minister, he and other opponents compared banning online pornography to repression in China, Iran and North Korea.  Iceland’s constitution forbids censorship…and…Studies in America, Denmark, Germany…Sweden…China, Finland and Japan…show that as pornography became increasingly available, the number of rapes in those countries remained stable or even decreased…

Anatomy of a Boondoggle (TW3 #314)

Florida rapists are cleverer, excusing themselves via the moral panic du jour:

…Police in Florida [went nude] during an undercover prostitution investigation at a Hallandale Beach massage parlor…and…arrested three women…attorney…Howard Finkelstein…said. “It is seedy, back-alley, icky, and we don’t want our cops doing that, especially so when it’s meaningless.”  But Florida ranks third in the nation in the number of reported cases of human trafficking…”This is not just an act of solicitation, but an organized crime effort,” [said] Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy…”It is not just a street-walker. It is a more sophisticated operation…”

The More the Better (TW3 #314)

She hated it so very much that she married a client and went on to own a brothel.  That’s deep hatred, y’all!

Linda Fondren, a mayoral candidate in Vicksburg, Miss., not only admits to a past life in prostitution, she says her husband was one of her Johns.  ”I was a working girl in a legal brothel over 30 years ago.  It’s true, my husband was my client…[we've] been married for 28 years”…Fondren tried to hold off making that admission for weeks…she…[says] she only did it to support herself after she got pregnant at age 14 and…her mom died of cancer…“I hated it.  I hated it.”  She also said that she would not support legal prostitution if elected…

That last bus-throwing line earns her a nomination for my Hall of Shame, though she’ll have to be still more disgusting to actually be inducted.

Held Together With Lies (TW3 #316)

Step 1:  Define some normal behavior as a problem.  Step 2:  Redefine it so you can claim it’s “growing”.  Step 3:  Increase “regulation” so as to narrow the bottleneck for “legal” behavior:

After years of dispute, Germany’s center-right governing coalition has agreed to enact tougher penalties for human trafficking and forced prostitution…and [to] more strictly regulate the commercial activities of brothels…brothel operators will need special authorization…authorities will be required to enforce hygienic standards and operators will be screened for prior criminal offences…recently, a report by the European Union…showed that human trafficking in Europe has risen sharply.

Step 4 (early next year):  Complain that “criminality” has increased, and repeat step 3.  Proceed until full criminalization is achieved.

The End of the Beginning

Down near the end of this article about another idiotic and dangerous “sex trafficking” law is a reason for hope:  “A bill focused on tightening punishments for pimps…[which] would require some to register as sex offenders, is progressing in [Texas]…Opponents believe the…requirement for sex offender registration may overwhelm an ‘overly broad database that includes too many offenders who are not threats to the community’…”  In other words, these opponents recognize the “pimp menace” as hype and the “sex offender registry” as far too large.  The same could be said for the reporter covering this story in which a Florida police department is claiming that the law says it “has to” humiliate so-called “sex predators” with huge red warning signs in their yards; she seems extremely skeptical of these theatrics, and asks a number of very sensible questions which the police chief of course answers dishonestly and smugly.

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