What a Week!

Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day, when a woman could earn a decent wage by selling her body instead? –  Emma Goldman

There were so many developments in hooker news last week that I honestly felt overwhelmed!  A number of them reflected the growing disparity between the official position taken by governments (especially police departments) and that held by the majority of the public.  A perfect example was this article, which many of you may have already seen; it concerns a severely deformed man arrested for trying to hire a prostitute.  Now, I’ve already discussed my philosophy about deformed or disabled men; very often we are their only means of obtaining sex since amateurs won’t even give them the time of day.  There are very few call girls who do not understand this, but I’ve often wondered how many people in the general public really grasp it.  Then I saw this discussion on The Agitator, and words cannot express how pleased I was to see so many people not simply critical of the police persecution of this unfortunate man, but actually angry at the fact that government power is abused to deny him and others like him access to one of the most basic of human pleasures.

I was similarly pleased to see this column on Jezebel; as I’ve mentioned before, the site tends to sit on the feminist fence, catering as often to neofeminists and other decrepit remnants of second-wave feminism as it does to third-wave feminism and to the voices of women who don’t consider themselves feminist in any way.  Thus, the site usually isn’t sex-work-positive enough for my tastes, so it’s especially good to see something like this there.  The commentary, however, is disappointing; it seems largely dominated by neofeminists, trafficking alarmists and advocates of the “Swedish model” rather than by intelligent, free-thinking women who prefer to control their own bodies rather than allowing the Nanny State to do it for them.  Considering that Jezebel caters to a largely female audience, I find that rather pathetic.

Until we as women present a unified front against collective ownership of our bodies, progress will be slow at best; ironically, most of the voices arguing that women are intelligent adults capable of making our own decisions are male!  But even sex workers can’t seem to unite; too many practitioners of legalized forms of whoredom (such as stripping, porn and phone sex work) are only too willing to throw the rest of us under the bus in order to avoid putting their own derrières out on a limb.  Case in point Capri Anderson, the porn starlet who was involved in the recent Charlie Sheen brouhaha.  Apparently, she thinks she’s better than her sisters; in an interview on Good Morning America she simpered that Sheen had called her a whore (if the shoe fits, honey…) and tried to cast her presence in his hotel room that night as somehow unmotivated by profit.  She also announced that she had filed a criminal complaint against him for “harassment in the second degree” (whatever that means) and was going to sue him for assault and false imprisonment.  Unsurprisingly, Sheen responded by beating her to the civil-court punch, filing a suit alleging fraud and attempted extortion which claimed that Anderson only filed charges after her million-dollar blackmail attempt had failed.

Shades of Karen Sypher!  Miss Anderson’s incredible greed, her denial of her own whoredom despite the fact that she is a porn actress who was paid $3500 to spend the night with a rich cokehead, her pretense that she is better than the rest of us despite her absolute and total lack of the most meager shred of the professional ethics adhered to even by the majority of hundred-dollar Backpage girls, and her stunning stupidity in announcing a lawsuit on national television before she actually filed it more than qualify her as the second inductee into my Hall of Shame, alongside the aforementioned Syfwhore.  Congratulations, Capri!  I hope you get everything you so richly deserve.

All justly-earned condemnation aside, Capricious had very little option other than denying her harlotry to the cops, since as everyone knows American law discriminates against women by classifying us as legally incompetent eternal children who are incapable of consenting to any form of sex except those from an approved list, and by criminalizing most means of making more money than men by doing things of which men are incapable.  Yet deluded neofeminists, religious fanatics and media outlets who are happy to lick the boots of cops and call it yummy cannot seem to understand why so many women resist being the chattel of the state.  Here’s a recent example from the Omaha, Nebraska ABC affiliate, in which cops admit their total impotence in halting online hooker ads (despite the much-ballyhooed censorship of Craigslist) and well-intentioned but delusional Salvation Army ladies express confusion about why their program to “help women get out of the cycle of prostitution” has only attracted two escorts despite their claims that escorting is just as dangerous as streetwalking.  If you really want to know the answer, Sister Mary, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to explain it to you.

But while American authorities wring their hands and moan that they just can’t understand why so many women refuse to be told what to do by their “betters” and persist in eschewing dreadful, low-paid menial jobs under overbearing employers for lucrative, often-pleasant jobs in which they work for themselves, other countries have stopped pissing into the wind and instead embraced prostitution as both natural and lucrative for the state.  This recent article describes a new mega-brothel in Spain, conveniently located near the French border.  And while I and many other whores consider brothel work to undercut many of the reasons we entered The Life in the first place, other girls do not feel that way and should be free to work in brothels if they so choose, just as other women prefer to work for Denny’s rather than opening their own restaurants.  As we’ve discussed before on October 29^th and November 1^st, decriminalization in Europe hasn’t stopped pompous bureaucrats from attempting to undermine our rights, but that’s simply the nature of bureaucracy; neither power-hungry politicians nor lie-spewing prohibitionist fanatics can accomplish much to turn back the clock on us short of full-scale revolution.  And mega-brothels can only help to solidify our position; large and prominent businesses not only protect their own interests, but also enrich a number of other nearby and related businesses which will also devote money to stopping any attempts by control freaks to stop the gravy train.  The legal efforts of big, wealthy casinos generally tend to help little truck stops with slot machines and have made both crooked gambling dens and police persecution of back-room card games a thing of the past, and the legal efforts of big, wealthy brothels will also tend to assist small brothels and solitary practitioners of the trade.

But for right now, we in the US are still stuck with busybody control freaks trying to save us from ourselves.  Just as they managed to annoy Craigslist into self-censorship just to stop their braying, so Backpage is now beginning to crawfish; this email was sent to Backpage customers last Monday (November 22^nd):

We have just completed an analysis of the site to determine what necessary changes should be made to better protect our communities.  As a result, Backpage.com has implemented new safety enhancements in the last few weeks as follows:

-Review of all new ads and images in the personals and mature sections of the site.
-Implementation of key word searches to quickly identify possible illegal advertising.
-The blocking of off site html images to block images that violate our site usage policy.
-Implementation of a new content policy to disallow nudity across the site.
-Enlisting of safety experts to help craft further safety strategies.

Please pay close attention to the posting rules on top of the posting form for more guidance.  With postings under review, you may also notice a 20 minute delay in your postings going live.  In addition, pics in your postings not meeting our new policy will be removed.

We believe changes like these will better protect our community.

Gee, thanks, guys; I’m sure all the escorts who advertise with you feel so much safer now that you’re cozying up to the cops to avoid bad publicity.