Diary #279

Slowly but surely, I’m getting back into the swing of things in Seattle.  Last week I attended a lovely party at which I got to meet quite a few inhabitants and habitués of the Seattle demimonde, and to catch up with some friends and fans I hadn’t seen in a while.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for my birthday; in a few days I’m going to be marking the occasion by getting together with a small group of friends, but I still wanted to do something on Halloween and Jae goes to sleep quite early these days.  She doesn’t like horror movies anyway, and since that’s my usual Halloween entertainment I was at a bit of a loss.  But Abby May came through for me by taking me out to Guillermo del Toro’s new release, Crimson Peak; it was a treat to see a Gothic on the big screen again, and since it’s been years since I’ve been to a theater at all that was already a treat in itself.  Late in the (rainy, spooky) afternoon I got a lovely flower arrangement from Grace, along with a card that had me crying like a baby.  And Jae displayed her knack for clever gifts by presenting me with the lady in the picture, who now occupies a place of honor atop my desk; if you don’t understand why this gift is appropriate, I call your attention to my book cover and several stories I published almost a year ago.  And if you know me in person, you might want to pay attention to a certain recurring theme in my wardrobe.

In the News (#585)

I support sex workers because I was one…it’s a job that’s needlessly shunned by society when frankly we should be worshiped.  –  Margaret Cho

Where Are the Protests? 

Note that absolutely none of the “human trafficking” cases mentioned in this story involve prostitution:

…the West Midlands branch of Hope for Justice has rescued 82 people so far this year.  Many of those were unknown to police…few cases of modern slavery have gone through the criminal justice system.  Only 130 cases that involved human trafficking were successfully prosecuted in 2014-15, representing just one prosecution for every 100…victims [claimed by fetishists]…

That last statement is roughly equivalent to my claiming to be a millionaire, but the bank will only let me have 1% of my money.

Higher Education

A website which purported to connect students with internships in every industry functioned in that manner for five years, from June of 2010.  But at some point after August 1^st of this year, the site was taken over by some sort of scammer who planned to use it to exploit wannabe sex workers by offering to “teach them the trade” via an “internship program”.  In other words, a crooked escort service or group of services was trying to trick newbie whores into working for them for free.  Once the sex worker community got ahold of the link and started tweeting it around, the site vanished at some point in the last few days.

The More the Better 

She’s been all over Twitter since, interacting with and following outspoken sex workers:

Margaret Cho…opened up about her former life as a sex worker to her thousands of Twitter followers Thursday, saying of herself and her fellow sex workers: “we were tough and proud…Sex work is simply work.  For me it was honest work.  I was a sex worker when I was young.  It was hard but well paid.  There’s no shame in it”…

Scapegoats

[Connecticut] resident Timothy T. Cutcher denies having sex with dogs or any of his relatives.  However, the 23-year-old man told the Reflector it’s true he’s addicted to sex…Cutcher said he’s “borderline mentally disabled”…

No, it isn’t true, because there is no such thing as “sex addiction”.

Above the Law 

A few hundred down, tens of thousands to go:

…In a yearlong investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.  The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action.  California and New York — with several of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies — offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct.  And even among states that provided records, some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records…

Yellow Fever

Alison Bass on the yellow journalism which permeates coverage of sex work:

When it comes to the coverage of sex work or trafficking, the mainstream media seems to forget a basic journalistic principle — the need to get their facts straight…anti-trafficking groups have spread grossly inaccurate and inflated statistics about the number of women and children being trafficked for paid sex in the United States…[Gloria] Steinem…points to the Nordic Model “as being the only system that seems to work for women in the trade.”  In fact, the opposite is true…sex workers themselves say that the…decriminalized model that New Zealand adopted in 2003 is a much more successful approach…why [do] otherwise respectable media drop their journalistic standards when reporting on the sex trade…Is it because they’re so desperate to be politically correct…or is it because the mere mention of women’s sexuality sends normally methodical journalists into a tizzy of sensationalistic misinformation?…

The Lion and the Ox

As I predicted almost 4 year ago, we’ve now reached the point where a mainstream publication can feature an article like this:

…”Trafficking”…is less a clear-cut crime than a call to moral panic.  The vagueness of the definition allows or even encourages governments, organizations, and researchers to claim that there are tens of millions of trafficking victims worldwide on the basis of little more than hyperbolic guesses…the term “sex trafficking”…seems to have been developed by anti-prostitution feminists in the 1990s…to describe the migration of women from the collapsing Soviet Union to the United States…Obama also uses the term to refer to children pressed into military service and agricultural laborers forced to work under poor conditions or without pay…the term…often is used to refer to cases in which there is no migration at all…in practice, trafficking does not mean “modern-day slavery.”  Nor does it mean being transported across borders for purposes of sexual exploitation.  Instead, it usually refers to one or more of the following:  being underage and selling sex; illegally immigrating; being subjected to any kind of forced labor or abusive labor practices; engaging in consensual sex work…

Capricious Lusts

The author of this piece fails to link the relevant statistics, so even though what he’s saying is generally true in essence, there’s no way to know if the correlation is as close and unmistakable as is claimed here:

…In October of 2014 the Seattle police department implemented the “Buyer Beware” program…he rate of rape shot up 150% compared to October 2013.  November 2014 the rate of rape shot up 225% compared to November 2013.  December 2014 the rate of rape shot up 80% compared to December 2013.  Statistics for 2015 are not yet available…The rape rate from January 2013 to September 2013 compared to the rape rate from January 2014 to September 2014 were nearly identical with the rate in 2014 being up a slight 4% for the nine month period.  Once the “Buyer Beware” program was implemented in October and the correlating jump in rape for the final three months of 2014, the final three months of 2014 compared to the final three months of 2013, the rape rate was up 151%.   That brought the year over year rate up 28%…

Coming and Going (#335)

Here’s a long, thorough look at Kathryn Griffin and her “prostitution diversion” scam in Houston:

…Griffin is currently under fire from sex worker and human rights advocates who say her tough-love, one-size-fits-all approach is flawed and fails to respect basic human dignity.  People who are arrested for prostitution are not necessarily poor and dependent on drugs, and so-called “rescue-and-recovery” operations that lump sex workers in with victims of sex trafficking have lead to human rights abuses across the globe.  Many activists say Griffin’s habit of thrusting her clients into the limelight…isn’t just manipulative, it’s dangerous…Kamylla claims she never offered [an undercover cop] sexual intercourse, but she could not afford a lawyer.  She called [the 8 Minutes] team…and…asked if they could help her with legal representation.  Instead of connecting Kamylla with an attorney, they connected her with…Griffin…At the time, Adrian Garcia was the sheriff of Houston, and in April he resigned to run for mayor of Houston.  Sex worker activists began connecting the dots on social media.  It turned out that Griffin has Garcia to thank for her program in the Houston jail, along with its $40,000 annual budget.  The activists dug up photos of Griffin and Garcia appearing in public together and were outraged to discover via social media that Griffin’s We’ve Been There Done That participants, many of whom were once held in Garcia’s jail, were asked to volunteer for Garcia’s campaign, and posed with him for photos wearing their organization’s T-shirt.  “Adrian Garcia is basically arresting himself this little army of free labor,” [said] one activist…Sex worker activists obtained audio recordings from some of the meetings that Kamylla attended, and the content made them furious.  In one recording, which is posted on YouTube, Griffin insists that a criminal is a criminal, and criminals hurt people, so even anyone who has “prostituted” even “one time” must admit that they share common ground with rapists and even Charles Manson…

Business As Usual (#442)

“She declined the officer’s request“.  Badge-lickers are nauseatingly obsequious, even when they’re talking about a savage would-be rapist:

A shocking video…captures the moment a [cop] brutally beats a mother on the street after “she refused to perform a sex act on him”.  In the clip, Weerasinghe Arachchilage Kanthilatha, a sex worker from Ratnapuara, Sri Lanka, is seen being struck repeatedly…She can be heard screaming out in pain as she lies on the ground…[P.P. Thissera] threatened to “teach her a lesson” before returning a few days later and attacking her with [his] baton.  The incident occurred in September 2014 and caused a public outcry…Kanthilatha and her lawyer have filed a Fundamental Rights petition in the Supreme Court, citing violation of her rights…

Guinea Pigs 

Yet another software package designed to sell whores out to the cops:

A San Diego State University professor and graduate student have developed [software]…that they believe could help law enforcement identify human trafficking victims…[it] can browse though thousands of Internet ads for “escorts” and finding potential victims through certain key words, phrases or other indicators….Murray Jennex…said the knowledge management system he and graduate student Marisa Hultgren developed could be a potential tool for [targeting sex workers for arrest]…“We’re looking for things that indicate young people,” Jennex said. “Things like, ‘Barely legal, fresh, college freshman”…The system they developed also searches for indicators that a person is being confined, such as ads that stipulate in-calls only, meaning a client must come to a specific place.  The system also searches for signs that a victim is being moved from town to town…Posts that suggest an escort is “open minded” and “willing to try anything” also could indicate somebody is being coerced by a trafficker…

So basically sex workers in their early twenties, or who don’t have cars, or who tour, or who do fetish work, are all “trafficking victims”.  The ignorance involved here is truly staggering.

The Face of Trafficking (#567)

Another case of what really happens when a wannabe “pimp” abducts a girl:

An East Bay rapper has been charged with human trafficking and sexually abusing a minor over a period of several weeks, and could spend the next 20 years in prison if convicted.  Joshua Richard Durham…goes by the stage name “Five Hunnet”…Police started investigating the case after the alleged victim — a female runaway who is [16] years old — told her family that Durham had been soliciting her…from Aug. 1 through Aug. 11…[and again] from Aug. 31 to Sept. 3 Durham continued to traffic the girl…and also forced her to perform oral sex on him during that time…

As usual: no cartel, no interstate travel, and victim got away in a very short time. This is absolutely nothing like the myths.  The story has one horrifying element, though: “Some of his lyrics contain references to pimping, and members of the District Attorney’s Office reportedly instructed…police to listen to Durham’s lyrics for potential evidence…”  Can you imagine what crimes the pigs could discover “evidence” for in my fiction?

Here’s what Tara Burns had to say about another highly-publicized recent case:

The public hears about trafficking most frequently in made-up, sensational movies and fundraising tall tales…Did you think sex trafficking was people being forced into prostitution?  That hardly ever happens — if for no other reason than that the customers would freak out…in #TheStory, which Zola has clarified is “based on a true story“, sex trafficking happened when Jessica lied and told her they were just going to dance and the guy was just her roommate (fraud in recruitment).  Women like Zola have been charged with conspiracy to traffick just for posting ads on the Internet…Sex trafficking in real life and the courtroom is so different from sex trafficking on TV that no one even recognizes it…

Links #278

What caused this…is still a mystery.  –  Chuanmin Hu

It always seems that the best Halloween videos appear after it’s too late to feature them before Halloween!  This one’s from Claudia Cristophe and the links above it are from Clarkhat (the first two), Elizabeth N. Brown, Nun Ya, and Radley Balko (in that order).

• Radio ghosts.
• Soylent green is people!
• Attack of the seaweed monster.
• Peoria has a low threshold of terror.
• Gang of thugs shoots woman while trying to abduct her grandchild.

From the Archives

• Devils, monsters, Ouija, cops, words, bullying, Gollum, “Annabel Lee”, censorship, government, horror films and two horror shorts.
• You might be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later you dance with the Reaper.
• It’s not only cops who think that believing a woman is a whore is grounds for assaulting her.
• Woman says it’s “inappropriate” for a Halloween party to be held Halloween weekend.
• Naturally, they don’t speak up for whores or donate any money to decrim.
• These types of procedures are very common in Swedish-flavored regimes.
• Cops, puritanism, clowns, investors, Halloween & real-life horror stories.
• When will amateurs learn that the War on Whores affects them as well?
• That “1 in 5” claim rests on defining “attempted forced kissing” as rape.
• Belle Knox’s story used as basis for an episode of Law and Order: SVU.
• LA Times reporters are forbidden to call the acts of rapist cops “rape”.
• Indian whores protest another attempt to impose the Swedish model.
• This academic’s blind spot about “sex trafficking” hysteria is massive.
• Another example of the state punishing citizens for following its lead.
• More pearl-clutching about young pop-stars from old, dried-up ones.
• US military bans personnel in Korea from buying drinks for women.
• Any advice for a married man who has fallen in love with a lesbian?
• Seven Edinburgh sauna licences renewed despite police objections.
• Interviews with activists about the rescue industry and its myths.
• It was a “cleansing initiative”.  You know, like “ethnic cleansing”.
• Irish politicians can always agree on control of women’s bodies.
• Media pretend bureaucrat hiring whores is somehow shocking.
• European anti-migration policies grow steadily more horrible.
• “Right. And the Invisible Fence collar…lets my dog be a dog.“
• “He had merely wanted to ‘pray for those dancers by name’.”
• Teen boys from Norway set up a fake escort service scam.
• The zombie legislation called CISPA just won’t stay dead.
• How should I act for my boyfriend who’s into cuckolding?
• Nigeria threatens to make paying for sex a capital crime.
• Zürich’s tippelzones have too much surveillance to work.
• A short biography of Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine.
• A collection of things to read and watch for Halloween.
• US Marine tried for murder of a sex worker in Hawaii.
• How cops and the media collaborate to destroy lives.
• Radio host tries to pass off sexual assault as BDSM.
• Church employee loses job for attempted bestiality.
• Please, Roman Kalinowski, become a prohibitionist.
• A powerful argument against draconian sentences.
• Theresa May moans about “modern day slavery”.
• “Trafficking” as an excuse for surveillance again.
• On the relationship between harlotry and death.
• Cops refer to teens as a criminal “sexting ring”.
• October 2010 and October 2011 in retrospect.
• His motive is obvious, but this is still freakish.
• Another excellent essay from Wendy Lyon.
• Cops plunge down a “sexting” rabbit hole.
• My two previous columns for Halloween.
• The vile mistreatment of Alicia Beltran.
• I love it when they feed on their own.
• An online “human trafficking” course.
• My most recent trip to New Orleans.
• Business as usual in a police state.
• The infamous “tiger porn” case.
• Sara Kruzan is finally paroled.
• 25,000 “victims” in Chicago?
• Rapist cops of the week.
• End demand squared.
• Messiah of Evil.
• Titcoin.

A Necessary End

It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.  –  William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (II, ii)

Just recently, we were once again subjected to the silly spectacle of grown men sonorously pronouncing that yet another of life’s simple pleasures leads to an “increased risk” of cancer…the implication being that one ought to avoid the stuff as though it were poison.  Dr. Brooke Magnanti (whose  judgment I trust much more than I would that of the WHO) assures me that the risk is small indeed:

A far smaller percentage of people who eat processed meat regularly will get cancer from it compared to the percentage who get cancer that smoke regularly…If it had been better reported, the news should not have alarmed people any more than knowing that sun exposure, hormone therapy of any kind including the Pill, wild garlic, alcohol, and salted fish also definitely cause cancer, in sufficient doses…

Since I’ve been on oral estrogen for over 20 years and don’t actually eat that much bacon or sausage, I have absolutely no plans to make any changes in my diet whatsoever, any more than I would due to any other nutritional proclamation by “experts” (which is to say somewhere between zero and not at all).  While I can think of many good reasons to alter one’s behavior, a slightly elevated risk of dying from one cause rather than another is not among them.  Colorectal cancer is probably not a particularly pleasant way to go, but guess what?  Most of the other possible routes aren’t any better, and some are much worse.  As I wrote in “The Day of the Dead“,

…death is the one inescapable experience of material existence.  You will die, and so will I, and there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it…yet vast numbers are so obsessed with this simple and indisputable fact that they waste much of their time on Earth in a struggle they absolutely cannot win.  In a pathetic attempt to stretch their allotted quantity of days just a little further, many are willing to dramatically reduce the quality of the whole…

If you really believe that it’s worth turning every meal into an ordeal (or at least a math problem) for the rest of your life in order to buy a ticket for a raffle whose prize is an extra year or two of senility and decrepitude at the end, be my guest; it’s your life and you are free to waste it as you like.  But please don’t expect me to join you; I’ve got better things to do with my time here on this plane than to spend it fleeing death.  Once a year on this day, I drink a toast to the Reaper and remind him that I’m not afraid of him; when he at last come to collect me it will be a rendezvous rather than a capture, a meeting (whether anticipated or unexpected) of old friends rather than the cornering of a terrified animal by a hunter who has never in the history of the world ever failed to run down his prey.

Halloween 2015

Happy Halloween, Dear Readers, and Blessed Be!

In the News (#584)

A prison might be defined as any place you’ve been put into against your will and can’t get out of, and where you are entirely at the mercy of the authorities, whoever they may be.  –  Margaret Atwood

Bad Jobs

You’ll notice that sex workers are immune to most of these factors:

People often like to groan about how their job is “killing” them.  Tragically, for some groups of people in the U.S., that statement appears to be true.  A new study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford has quantified just how much a stressful workplace may be shaving off of Americans’ life spans.  It suggests that the amount of life lost to stress varies significantly for people of different races, educational levels and genders, and ranges up to nearly three years of life lost for some groups…

A Tale That Grew in the Telling

There are about 40,000 girls aged 13-17 in San Diego; this “study” claims that 30% of them become “victims of sex trafficking” every year:

A new study released by the University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University revealed that the dark and secret world of sex trafficking in San Diego is the second largest underground economy locally after drugs…sex trafficking is an estimated $810 million-a-year industry and it is run mostly by gangs.  The study revealed that as many as 11,773 become victims to human trafficking in San Diego alone on a yearly basis…Victims are primarily underage…The study was funded by the Department of Justice, and found that more than 100 gangs are involved in the local sex trafficking operations…next to schools, other recruitment hot spots include:  trolley and bus stops, house parties, social media, tattoo parlors, churches, malls…about 1,776 victims/survivors come in contact with law enforcement…

That last is larger than the total number of “sex trafficking victims” that have ever been identified as such in the entire US.

With Folded Hands

Margaret Atwood on the asininity of giving away freedom for “security”:

…Governments know our desire for safety all too well, and like to play on our fears.  How often have we been told that this or that new rule or law or snooping activity on the part of officialdom is to keep us “safe”?  We aren’t safe, anyway:  many of us die in weather events – tornados, floods, blizzards – but governments, in those cases, limit their roles to finger-pointing, blame-dodging, expressions of sympathy or a dribble of emergency aid.  Many more of us die in car accidents or from slipping in the bathtub than are likely to be done in by enemy agents, but those kinds of deaths are not easy to leverage into panic…

Above the Law 

Sometimes sexually-exploitative cops stop short of rape:

In August Patrick Quinn, a 27-year-old…Texas [cop]…pulled over a driver and [claimed he] spotted marijuana paraphernalia in her car.  He told her he would not arrest her if she would let him lick her feet or give him her underwear.  He…was [fired and] sentenced to a year in jail…

Parting of the Ways

Peter Barbey is wasting no time as the new owner of the Village Voice.  Per an interview with [the] Wall Street Journal…he’s nixed the thought of changing the print edition size, pitched to staff the concept of special themed inserts and decided it’s time for a major ad dollar shift:  “Barbey plans to get rid of escort ads, a racy fixture of many an alt-weekly.  ‘Adult women can be escorts, that’s fine with me’, Mr. Barbey said, ‘but it’s not the kind of advertising that fits where we want go’.”

Monsters 

…Beyoncé Karungi, a 35-year-old campaigner…is in hospital following [a] horrific attack.  The activist had recently penned an article on surviving in Uganda as a trans sex worker, an occupation that can be dangerous and occasionally deadly.  After recieving several hate threats, she went into hiding.  When she emerged, she was attacked by a group of five unknown men.  She sustained several serious facial and bodily injuries…This is not the first time Beyoncé has been attacked…one time police undressed her, took her bag, money and phone and then cut her hair to make her “masculine”…

Frequently Told Lies

The title is “Feminism’s Sex Work Problem“, but this thorough article contains a large section debunking the usual lies prohibitionists employ:

I’m not going to make the pro-decriminalization case here.  Others have made it far more eloquently than I could…However, there are some elephants in the room that simply have to be addressed before a real conversation can occur.  These are mistruths that seem to have become cemented as fact through sheer force of mindless repetition, and unfortunately they severely derail any objective discussion of sex work…

Wise Investment (#440)

Much more of this, please:

Las Vegas police will pay more than $80,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a woman who said officers detained her for two hours in The Cosmopolitan after falsely accusing her of being a prostitute.  A federal judge wrote that the case showed…prostitution sweeps in casinos were overly broad and threatened people’s constitutional rights.  Chentile Goodman was released without charge after the 2011 incident and filed a lawsuit later that year…

The Camel’s Nose (#504)

Meet CISA, formerly known as CISPA, AKA SOPA, alias PIPA, née COICA:

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) passed the Senate today by a vote of 74 to 21.  A different version passed the House earlier in the year, so they’re going to have to conference to hammer out differences.  Retail business interests supported the legislation.  Major Internet and tech firms like Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Twitter…opposed it…”CISA…allows companies to monitor users and share their information with the government without a warrant, while offering a backdoor that circumvents any laws that might protect users’ privacy“…Attempts to add amendments to narrow the bill’s focus all failed…The Sunlight Foundation…notes that CISA creates a new exemption from the Freedom of Information Act…”That means if they overstep and share the wrong information — as this bill seems to intend — the public won’t know, and even if it did, it would have no legal recourse…CISA guarantees the public will have no ability to see what information is going from companies to the government“…

What Were You All Waiting For? 

I’m glad Richard Branson is speaking out against criminalization, but I wish he’d talk to sex workers so as to avoid gaffes like this:

…There are good Catholic countries like Chile that have legalised prostitution.  And I know its very controversial.  Most people would put their arms up in horror.  But by legalising it, they got rid of the pimps.  The girls are monitored properly to make sure that they are healthy, to make sure they can come forward if they’ve got a problem.  And they believe a lot of the illegal trafficking of young girls has gone away…

Now They Notice

One of the more loathsome uses of asset seizure:  stealing all of the victim’s bank accounts so he can’t pay for a legal defense.

Things aren’t looking good for rentboy.com…The company’s bank accounts containing millions of dollars were frozen and its website was seized by Homeland Security…Now, the company is selling its office supplies and furniture on Craigslist in an effort to raise money to pay for its mounting legal fees…Some of these “goodies” include glass desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and video monitors.  Other items for sale include cables, software, books, magazines, artwork, lamps, a copy machine, and “a lot of special, one of a kind rentboy.com ephemera”…

Seizing Power (#574)

The Cato institute supports sex workers’ right to advertise:

Prior restraints—legal prohibitions on disseminating information before publication—are an odious burden on the freedom of expression and come with a “heavy presumption” against their constitutionality.  Indeed, they are so disfavored in the law as to be virtually impossible to obtain outside of wartime.  Informal prior restraints—government pressure without formal sanction—are even more unconstitutional than formal ones, as the Supreme Court noted in Bantam Books v. Sullivan(1963)…But that strong precedent didn’t stop…Thomas Dart and his crusade against Backpage…As Cato, Reason Foundation, and DKT Liberty Project point out in our amicus brief before that court, Dart’s claimed “epidemic” of sex trafficking has evaded any sort of empirical verification for over two decades.  Indeed, State Department data indicate that the opposite may be true.  Nevertheless, Sheriff Dart, along with a new-age Baptist-and-bootleggers coalition matching the religious right and radical feminists, have raised the human-trafficking bugaboo to rally against prostitution—mimicking the drug war and all of its worst legal mechanisms…

Welcome To Our World (#578)

Here’s the first part of an in-depth look at how the New York Times callously maligned an entire industry – one that, like sex work, provides income for undocumented migrants with little money to squander on bureaucratically-imposed startup costs:

Sarah Maslin…Nir’s coverage broadly [mischaracterized] the nail salon industry, [and] several of the men and women she spoke with say she misquoted or misrepresented them.  In some cases, she interviewed sources without translators despite their poor English skills.  When her sources’ testimonies ran counter to her narrative, she omitted them altogether.  The second article lent the Times’ imprimatur to unproven theories, while committing science journalism’s cardinal sin of highlighting alarmist anecdotes that aren’t representative of systematic research.  If it hadn’t had real-world consequences, the series—and subsequent attempt by Nir and her editors to parry criticism—wouldn’t be worth such intense scrutiny.  But the day after the first article appeared in the print edition of the Times, Gov. Andrew Cuomo…announced a new multi-agency task force to inspect nail salons…The rush to legislate based solely on the Times’ shoddy reporting has hurt the industry.  New nail salons, “which used to open every week in New York,” have stopped appearing…Salons once provided a steady source of jobs for undocumented immigrants; now many owners say they’ll hire only legal workers who’ve completed an occupational licensing program because they’re afraid of getting in trouble…

Out of Bounds

For the past couple of years I’ve seen an amazing escort about once a month, and early this year she let me start contacting her via text.  This past summer, I developed deep feelings for her and began to text her frequently just to see how she was doing; I also expressed my affection via emails, cards and gifts.  Two weeks ago she cancelled a session for a reason which sounded good at the time, but I couldn’t get in touch with her for the next four days; we rescheduled, then she cancelled again five minutes before our appointment time.  We rescheduled again, and again she cancelled and has been impossible to reach since then.  I have a feeling she doesn’t want to see me anymore, but why not just tell me?  I’m hurt and angry, and I realize now that I can never have anything serious with her, but is there anything I can do to regain her trust?

It’s not at all unusual for a client to fall in love with a whore; sometimes, as in my case, that can actually go somewhere.  But there were a lot of men who fell in love with me before Matt, and every one of my sex-working friends has had clients fall for her; it’s a natural outgrowth of a situation in which a lonely man spends a lot of time in the company of a beautiful, alluring woman who only shows him her best side.  Sometimes she’s able to manage the situation so he can continue enjoying her company and she can continue enjoying the income, but at other times the situation spins out of control; he may become obsessive and begin to stalk or harass her, and might even become violently jealous.  On rare occasions, an unstable client’s infatuation with a professional can even lead to murder.  Now, I’m sure you’re protesting that you would never hurt a woman, and maybe that’s true; however, it’s equally true that most of the whores who wind up dead didn’t think their murderers would go that far, else they wouldn’t have been caught alone with them in the first place.  The fact of the matter is, all any woman has to go on when deciding whether to be alone with a man is her gut.  And though the instincts of most sex workers eventually become far more finely-tuned than those of our less-experienced amateur sisters, there is no such thing as an infallible cognitive process.  When you started straying out of bounds, wasting the lady’s time with non-appointment-related texting and violating her professional boundaries with excessive courtship displays, her alarm bells started to go off; it’s even possible that the first couple of cancellations were tests to see how you’d react.  And how did you react?  By repeatedly calling her and trying to reschedule multiple times in a very short period of time (your email to me was dated only 16 days after the date of your first cancelled appointment).  And given that you openly admit to being “hurt and angry”, I can imagine what some of your (probably dozens of) texts or voicemails to her during that 16 days sounded like.

You ask if there’s anything you can do to regain her trust, but there’s no way I can answer that because I’m not in her confidence and I don’t know how badly you’ve broken it.  It may be that if you let her alone for a few months before sincerely apologizing and asking for an appointment, she’ll give you another chance; most of the whores I know have “fired” clients before, and sometimes they’ve taken them back later.  Before you could violate her trust she had to grant it, and she let you overrun her boundaries for months before doing anything about it; that tells me she was reluctant to end your arrangement, and perhaps that will play in your favor.  But I’ve lived in the demimonde far too long to believe that your repeated attempts to reschedule were anything other than highly alarming, or that you’re as contrite as you represent yourself to be; it’s possible that she will never even speak to you again (much less agree to be alone with you).  Your only chance is to back off and thereby show her that you’re not a deranged stalker; that may not return you to her good graces, but it may at least keep her from adding your name to a blacklist.

(Have a question of your own?  Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)