Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear. – Alan Coren
Today is Election Day in the United States, which means that business has been slow for most American prostitutes for several weeks now. It happens every year, but is more pronounced in even-numbered years (because of Congressional elections) and most pronounced in elections where some major party-balance shift is possible, a major issue is to be decided or an incumbent feels endangered by a challenger; this year it’s all of the above, so I’ll bet most American whores have had a lot of free time lately. Don’t panic, ladies; it’ll be over tomorrow. It always is.
There are two reasons for the slump, one “internal” and one “external”. The “internal” reason is that the clients, many of whom are businessmen, are concerned that a candidate or party which favors higher taxation and more restrictions on business will be voted in (or else won’t be voted out); such nervousness is not conducive to free spending on whores any more than it is conducive to spending on anything else, so the market slumps until the danger is either past or the clients have figured out what they’re going to do about a danger which has materialized. The “external” reason is politicians who try to fool the sheeple into thinking they’re “tough on crime” by making a big show of arresting hookers (which is rather like proving one’s anti-aircraft defenses by shooting ducks in a barrel). “Busts” of streetwalkers and “stings” of both escorts and customers always dramatically increase in the weeks before an election, which of course makes clients nervous and less likely to try new girls.
Regular readers will remember that the one time I was arrested was in late October; I also wrote about such a bust in my column of October 19th, then there was the FBI raid on Escorts.com, then another example appeared in the Sex Hysteria! website (thank you, Dave!) for October 29th. Now, I’m not going to talk about the fact that the Detroit police in the latter case terrorized a group of people whose only crime was socializing, nor the fact that they stole 70 automobiles and then charged the owners $900 ransom each to get them back; this sort of Chinese banditry is typical of the police in every time and place and will continue to be so until humanity grows up enough to stop giving power and weapons to its least-evolved members. No, the part which is important to my column is this one:
Paulina Grady was among those inside the club during the raid. She said she was strip-searched by male and female officers. “They said whoever didn’t have panties or bras on would be charged with prostitution,” said Grady, who was ticketed for loitering. “They lifted my dress to see if I was wearing panties.” Wayne County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Paula Bridges could not immediately be reached to respond to questions about the incident. Ron Scott, director of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, called the raid “outrageous…If these hadn’t been police officers, they would be charged with home invasion and criminal sexual conduct,” he said.
Detroit, Michigan, USA, October 10th, 2010, and not only do male cops feel free to look up women’s skirts, but to make criminal accusations based upon their underwear choices? It might be funny (in a pathetic sort of way) if it weren’t so outrageously sexist, but it isn’t surprising; just as hookers are always looking for magical “cop tests”, so cops are forever looking for magical “whore tests” to use as “evidence” of prostitution, as if hookers were somehow fundamentally different in some objective way from other women. In the early days of abolitionism it was appearing unescorted on a public street (which as we have discussed before was the reason pimps first appeared), and nowadays it’s carrying condoms in one’s purse. The curious silence of mainstream “feminism” on this issue is all the proof anyone needs of its real agenda having nothing to do with women’s rights: Prostitutes are not politically correct to the neofeminists in charge of mainstream organizations, so any police brutality against us (or even against amateur women whom police suspect of being whores) is ignored even if it’s flagrantly sexist. Can anyone imagine a man being arrested and charged with a crime because he was alone in public, or was carrying condoms, or had no underwear on? Yet these things happen to real women EVERY DAY in this country, with nary a peep from the same “feminist” organizations who have a cow whenever a fictional woman in a movie is portrayed in some way they imagine to be offensive.
Fortunately, not all feminists are faux feminists, and the most egregious of these practices (the use of condoms as “evidence of prostitution”) is under attack in the state of New York by a bill now wending its way through the state legislature which would prohibit police and prosecutors from doing so on the grounds that discouraging prostitutes from carrying condoms is so incredibly irresponsible and dangerous to public health as to constitute institutionalized insanity. Usually I’m not in favor of more laws, but I make an exception
in the case of laws designed to hobble police and prosecutors from persecuting women quite so easily. If this does pass in New York, health advocacy groups will no doubt try it in other civil-rights-friendly legislatures and even cops in other states may abandon the procedure for fear that prostitutes’ defense attorneys may use the proven legal arguments which established those laws in challenges elsewhere.
I’ve never really thought of New York as whore-friendlier than any other state (excluding Nevada), but perhaps it is; Kristin Davis, the madam who provided former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer with call girls, is now trying to succeed her famous client in office by running for Governor with her own Anti-Prohibition Party (whose platform is the legalization of all consensual activities). Her running mate is Tanya Gendelman, who in 1976 fled the former Soviet Union and therefore has firsthand experience of the end result of the direction in which our once-free country is headed. Though they haven’t the proverbial snowball’s chance of winning the election, just winning 50,000 votes would establish them under New York law as a legitimate political party, which is a good start. Twenty years ago nobody espousing this position would have even been able to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot:
Davis and Gendelman…think that characterizing sex workers and adult-escorts as criminals and keeping the practice of prostitution illegal is doing more harm than good. “First and foremost, it is a safety issue for women,” Gendelman said; “it puts women in vulnerable positions.” She said that prostitution should be a consensual business arrangement, and women should legally be allowed to be prostitutes at the age of 21, despite the age of consent for sex in New York being 17. “[Legalizing prostitution] would curtail trafficking from other countries, and the use and abuse of women,” she said. Criminalizing the practice of prostitution empowers pimps, encourages sex-traffickers and makes the women more susceptible to these peoples’ control, because the women are deemed criminals and can’t seek the help of law enforcement, she explained.
Davis campaign web site…says that she “find[s] it stunning that this nation still regards prostitution as a crime. It’s sad that we waste our cops and courts trying to stamp it out, as if a good spin through the justice system will instill miscreants with the morals necessary to fly right. In this case, law enforcement is ineffective to the point of absurdity. Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession for a reason: it will always occur.”
I have to thank Dave of Sex Hysteria! for this one as well; it also appeared on October 29th. Perhaps there was some whore-favorable astrological conjunction that day, because on that same night a program called Dirty Money: The Business of High-End Prostitution appeared on CNBC. Despite the insulting title, the program was actually reasonably sober rather than inflammatory, and allowed a number of escorts (including Amanda Brooks, whose After Hours blog is linked at the right) to speak without nullifying their words by following them with neofeminists, cops or trafficking hysterics. A poll on the show’s website currently stands at 85% of respondents voting for decriminalization. Maybe, just maybe, our day in the court of public opinion is coming, and all our daughters will have to worry about around Election Day will be the same economic slowdown as other businesspeople rather than periodic persecution by power-mad perverts.
I seems to me that the ability to buy sex legally would tend to, would have to quash whatever sex trafficking as might exist. Obviously kidnapping women or underaged girls and forcing them into slavery would remain illegal. The cops who no longer chase girls who work from wish or need could concentrate on chasing real traffickers, if they can find any.
But more than that: what man is going to risk arrest to hire an illegal sex slave when he can get the exact same service all nice and legal? Only if he specifically wants an unwilling slave, or a child, or some such, in which case he has to break the law, and then we’re right back to the extra manpower that can be devoted to stopping him.
Exactly. Criminals are going to behave criminally no matter what laws are in place, but if we stop diverting police resources from harassing normal people there will be that much more money, time and manpower to investigate underage girls and we legitimate sex workers would be free to turn in the bad guys.
There’s some good resources in the Apple, the sex workers’ rights project of the Urban Justice Centre for a start…
http://www.urbanjustice.org/ujc/projects/sex.html
…which has produced useful material on the impact of trafficking raids amongst, I’m sure, much other worthwhile stuff. And PONY, of course.
We’ve the same problem here in the UK of prosecutions using the presence of condoms as evidence. Wouldn’t like to encourage public health, now, would we? But it’s important to have one government department undermining what another government department does, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to waste enough public money.
Thank you, Stephen; that’s a new link for my “Resources” section. 🙂
Back in the 60s and 70s wasn’t there a rebellion on the part of women who were outraged at the inequality of women and their treatment as second class citizens? What I can’t understand is why they aren’t outraged by treatment of other women like this? Why aren’t women raising an absolute shit storm over this kind of physical invasion of privacy, if not outright assault (which is what it’s normally called when you’re forced to do something like this under threat of violence — ie: arrest, physical restraint, etc).
Where are the picketers? How about letters to the news media and petitions to the local government? Why no national coverage by those bastions of concern for civil rights like CNN, MSNBC, and civil liberties organizations? If it has to do with sex, no mainstream political voice will say a word. For all their posturing about humanity, they wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire if you’re involved with anything having to do with sex. What a fucking hypocritical world we live in.
Unfortunately, most women follow their leaders just as most men do, and the neofeminist leaders of mainstream “feminist” organizations are much too busy neutering kids, fighting porn and measuring the proportions of Barbie dolls to concern themselves with little things like women’s rights being flagrantly violated. Besides, it’s their own fault for looking pretty and associating with men; cops never accuse ugly, butch chicks at “feminist” rallies of prostitution. 🙁
MSNBC is supposed to be the Great Liberal News Channel, the lefty answer to FOX. But every weekend they run back eps of DatelineNBC’s “To Catch a Predator.” But hey, that’s OK, because it’s only really bad people who are being mistreated and, besides, you know, sex.
I honestly feel the myth of “liberal” vs. “conservative” has done more to trick stupid people into accepting collectivism than any other concept in history. As long as they have a “bad guy” to hate, they never notice the repressions practiced by “their side”. 🙁
Hold on a sec. To catch a predator is about adults trying to have sex with minors, not consensual sex amongst adults. I dont recall any episodes where the adults were mistreated.
There are no minors on To Catch a Predator. In this show adult men and a few women go online and pretend to be young teenage girls in order to draw adult men into sexual conversations. It would be entrapment even if the perpetrators were working for the police department, but they are not; they are a private vigilante organization whom NBC employs to create lurid spectacles for public consumption. For the truth about this show and the moral retards it enables, visit the website of Corrupted Justice.
I really think we need a Constitutional Amendment to make it a felony for any authority to encourage someone to commit a crime for the purpose of arresting them. This is probably the most evil practice common in law enforcement these days. The Federal Government has even recruited and trained terrorists in recent years just so they’d have some ‘plot’ to foil and show off to the public.
Which is, unfortunately, while there will never be such an amendment. It’s much easier to create criminals than to catch real ones, and it helps the government convince the Great Unwashed that there are far more criminals than there actually are so as to justify increasing police budgets, paramilitary weapons and tactics and incarceration of a far larger percentage of our population than any other country.
To Catch a Predator is a great example of sleazy sensationalistic programming disguised as objective journalism and Maggie’s observation that there are no minors on that show goes right to the heart of the matter. They are basically amateur vigilantes feeding off the stranger-danger hysteria as a means of generating profits, ratings, and careers. It’s about the most parasitic style of reporting (and I use the term very loosely) imaginable since it actually creates the crimes and the criminals it’s reporting on. There is nothing about that show that has even the remotest redeeming value. They can get away with it because it claims to be ridding the world of threats to children, which basically ensures it gets carte blanche from the public and government.
These adults are told that they are talking to people under the age of consent/minors, and then show up on their own free will.
There are more than enough people over 21 they can cyber and then meet up with. If their belief is that the person on the other end is underage, and they still show up, i doubt it’s only to sit around and watch nick at night.
I have little empathy for people who might try to get jiggy with underaged kids.
I guess this is one we’ll just end up having to disagree on.
I have no empathy for them, either, but empathy isn’t necessary for me to to recognize injustice when I see it. These people are being arrested and denied due process (since they’re tried in the court of public opinion with doctored chat logs and edited videotape even if the DA rejects the case as they nearly always do) THOUGH THEY HAVE NOT ACTUALLY COMMITTED A CRIME. If that sort of precedent becomes established as legally acceptable, none of us are safe. 🙁
But getting back to your real point, this whole no underwear or condoms = prostitution is just plain stupid.
[…] have claimed all of the following as evidence: the possession of condoms or a cell phone, the lack of underwear, winking, dressing provocatively, loitering in an area known for prostitution, and many others. […]
[…] US have claimed all of the following as evidence: the possession of condoms or a cell phone, the lack of underwear, winking, dressing provocatively, loitering in an area known for prostitution, and many others. […]