Apparently learning when to use a turn signal is twice as complicated as conducting an undercover operation that jeopardizes women’s lives. – Samantha Allen
I’ll just point out that sex work is an “amusement and recreation service”. So much for “PTSD” and “90% would quit if they could”:
A study published last month…suggests that some jobs have much higher rates of depression than others…the…authors calculated the incidence of depression across 55 industries. The highest rate of depression (16.2 percent) was found among bus drivers. The lowest (6.9 percent) was…among those in “amusement and recreation services,” a broadly defined group that includes the sports, fitness, and performing-arts industries…
Part-time casual prostitution to supplement meager earnings has been a fact of female existence since at least Roman times, so this is not anything remotely like “news”:
…salaries for Japan’s flight attendants have slumped significantly over the past decade…This has lead to some stewardesses engaging in [casual prostitution]…“Girls willing to do it with a pilot passed their number to a person who was effectively a female pimp,” says [one] stewardess….other stewardesses may take up part-time work as party companions or bar hostesses in Tokyo’s ritzy Ginza district…
Have I told you lately how much I love Elizabeth Nolan Brown?
So I was going to ignore this silly study about how pornography is serving as a widespread “marriage substitute” for young American men. But it just keeps popping up on my radar…the study actually found [that]…the more hours of pornography a young man watched, the less likely he was to have a spouse…bachelorhood makes watching a lot of porn…more possible…than it is for people living with a wife and family…and…married individuals are less likely to self-report ample pornography consumption…Correlation does not imply causation. And “low-cost sexual gratification” probably isn’t the end of civilization as we know it.
Meanwhile, over at Slate, Jordan Weissmann goes into even more detail about why the study is, in his words, “deeply silly”. You will not be surprised to know that the “researchers” used data from the General Social Survey, whose unsuitability for questions of this nature I have noted before.
They just can’t call it rape when the rapist is a cop, can they? Especially if his victims are whores: “A Dallas police officer has been arrested for…using his position…to force prostitutes to perform sexual acts…David Kattner…will be [given paid vacation]…pending the results of the…investigation…”
What is it with actors presuming to judge sexual minorities they make big bucks playing on screen?
Jamie Dornan went to a sex dungeon for work. He was preparing to play Fifty Shades of Grey’s…Christian Grey, and…found it underwhelming. “I went there, they offered me a beer, and they did…whatever they were into…Then going back to my wife and newborn baby afterwards… I had a long shower before touching either of them”…
Jamie, I’m sorry to hear that your prudish sex life is so boring. I’ll leave you with a message from my friend, Mistress Matisse:
…Guess what? There were happily married people at that party doing BDSM. Some of them have children, too, just like you. How dare you take a role as someone who does BDSM and then blatantly insult the very people who allowed you into their party and let you observe them in their intimate moments?…I think it’s a shame the makers of 50SOG didn’t cast someone more emotionally mature and more secure in his own sexuality than this. Perhaps Mr. Dornan is more like the character of Christian Gray than he’d like to think…
The continuing crusade to treat “sex offenders” as subhuman:
…A registrant in Florida won a three million dollar scratch-off lottery…Timothy Poole…[is the subject of a] hue and cry…that he should, by any means possible, be denied his winnings…because he is a SEX OFFENDER. Florida has no prohibition against any convicted felon profiting from lottery winnings, not even SEX OFFENDERS. I am currently making book that Florida’s next legislative session will see a bill introduced that will do just that…Mr. Poole, since his release from prison in 2006, has maintained a record as spotless as the proverbial driven snow…None of that quashed the flood of outrage or deterred the cesspool of nasty headlines, articles, and commentary as to why he should not receive the money and how inherently wrong it is for him to have won it to begin with…
…Dublin road engineer [Thomas Lyons] rented an apartment for use as a brothel…[he] has been given a suspended jail sentence and ordered to pay over €10,000 to…Ruhama, an organisation which [profits from the harassment of sex workers]…
The Course of a Disease (TW3 #341)
A rare example of criminalization blowing up in the faces of “authorities”:
A prostitute won a landmark victory against police [when] an Oslo court…ruled that police were wrong to claim taxes for the money she had made selling sex…the court queried whether the state should tax income from prostitution, given that related activity such as pimping and human trafficking are crimes…
A new proposed bill in the Missouri state legislature would require women…seeking an abortion to get consent from the man who is the father of the child. Exceptions are allowed in cases of rape or incest, but [not]…if the woman is in an abusive relationship…
Or, presumably, if she just doesn’t know who the father is.
Next Generation Nepal (NGN) has launched its…report showing that…orphanages in Nepal contain over 15,000 children, yet at least two out of three…are not orphans…many…are being used as poverty commodities to raise money from well-intentioned but naïve fee-paying foreign volunteers and donors…almost 90 percent of “orphanages” in Nepal are located in the top five tourist districts for this reason…the growing global phenomenon of voluntourism…has the potential to…cause considerable harm…
The Mote and the Beam (TW3 #428)
Remember, consensual sex work is usually defined as “trafficking” in the US; this law would felonize the posting of an ordinary escort ad:
A state representative wants to make it a crime to post an ad on the internet if the person posting it knows it could result in human trafficking. It could be an ad anywhere – on websites such as Craigslist or Backpage, or even on a gas station bathroom wall…House Bill 152 would make that person guilty of sexual trafficking of a child; a felony that carries a penalty of up to life in prison…[sponsor] Elijah Haahr…says the idea is based on the SAVE Act…
…the relationship between law enforcement and sex workers in Alaska has supposedly altered in recent years…[due to dogma pretending that] sex workers[are] victims who need to be rescued…[but] a new report by Tara Burns titled People in Alaska’s Sex Trade: Their Lived Experience and Policy Recommendations…found…that…the role of the police has not changed that much…the law has been used against people selling sex (who are said to be trafficking themselves)…”In none of the documents I’ve examined since the law’s inception,” Burns says in the report, “has it been used to benefit a victim”…women Burns surveyed and interviewed see the police as a threat…More than a quarter of the women surveyed said they had been sexually assaulted by police; 9 percent said they had been robbed or beaten…
On December 19…[a spam] text message [landed] on mobile phones of [about 300,000] users [in Kathmandu, Nepal]. The…message…read “young boys and girls are available for commercial sex inside the Kathmandu Valley” and asked the recipients to call certain numbers for further details…the message was being delivered by Terre des Hommes…whose website says “it works against child exploitation”…[the NGO] defended the message…[as] “part of its campaign to aware [sic] the general public about child exploitation and end commercial sexual exploitation of children”…
Marching Up Their Own Arses (TW3 #450)
For a change, many outside the demimonde recognize anti-whore douchebaggery for what it is:
The retired cop used to interfere in sex worker’s lives by arresting them, now he just ambushes them with cameras…sex workers…rightly call [reality show 8 Minutes] “vile,” “gross,” “terrifying,” and “exploitative”…[Kevin] Brown was profiled in the LA Times…as founder…of Safe Passage OC, a group with a website that looks like it was made in 1998 and a moral worldview from at least a hundred years earlier than that…Volunteers only need to “attend a 16-hour course”…about half as long as it takes to get a learner’s permit in the state of California…
Umm, yeah Maggie, but finding that an entire category of industry has a particular attribute is not the same as saying every facet of that category does.
The people thrown to the lions in the Colosseum were also in the ‘amusement and recreation’ business. But I guess they didn’t suffer from PTSD at least.
Yo’re absolutely right, but if the prohibitionists can claim that their surveys of jailed streetwalkers represent all sex workers, my reasoning from a group to a subgroup is at least as valid.
If the study was done professionally (and it looks like it was, but I am not going to spend the $40 a copy costs to really find out), a large deviation for the case of sex-workers would have resulted in them being given their on category.
Lets see: They had 214,413 depressed people and a population average of 10.45 % people being depressed. That means an overall (virtual) sample of about 2.05 million people. I found no good estimates for the number of sex workers in the US, only approximations in the 1…2 Million range. That would be 0.5…1% and hence they should have had about 10.000 … 20.000 sex workers in the overall virtual sample and roughly 500 … 3000 depressed ones (5….15% of 10k…20k). That is far larger than needed to make a good determination of whether they deviate strongly from other entertainers.
Hence my guess would be they do not.
re: Property of the State
And presumably, for the sake of consistency, women who decide not to abort will also need the consent of the father?
>“90% would quit if they could”:
Yes, let’s apply this to every other job out there. Let’s ask all the factory workers, bus drivers, bank tellers, nurses- If money were no object, if you were guaranteed at least the salary you currently have for life, would you quit your job?
Everyone except scientists and artists would. Or at least vast majorities.
This is meaningless codswallop.
In my opinion, the other occupations with the same stresses as sex work is modeling, acting, music, sports, psychotherapy, and nursing. All occupations where one’s income depends on physical appearance and performance, and upon working closely and intimately with clients.
It is a bit broader than scientists and artists. From my observation, it depends on how much choice you have of how to do your job. Still being a scientist (if inly as a minor part of what I do), I might be biased though.
You’re right there Celos.
Several studies have shown lack of freedom in the work environment to be strongly correlated with depression. Even more so than poverty, social isolation, illness or physical disability.
I suspect that’s one reason prohibitionists keep overplaying the ‘violent pimp’ card.
Jamie Dornan huh? jamie “doorknob” the guy is as exciting as a wet noodle, his acting “skills” prove that point. and as for his research, really? And a long hot shower before touching his wife and kid? Probably because he had to rub one out while in the shower, cause fetishists like myself are such drrty drrty people that we literally rub off on a person! LMAO!!
Yes, brilliant new prostitution law, isn’t it? The Supreme Court is already questioning its constitutionality.
i wish that was true, but best case scenario is about 5 years before it gets before the SCC. MIght be a bit quicker if Wynne plays ball. Everybody already knows it isn’t charter compliant and the Cons are just hoping they’re out of power before the SCC just says what everybody already knows and they once again get to campaign via the moral high ground
Too right.