November | 2010 | The Honest Courtesan

Archive for November, 2010

Happy Birthday, Devil Dogs!

Posted in Call types, Current Events, Tyranny, tagged brothels, cops, East Asia, hysteria, Japan, law, New Orleans, Pennsylvania, psychology, rescue industry, yin and yang on November 10, 2010| 10 Comments »

The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps! – Eleanor Roosevelt

On November 10^th, 1775 the Second Continental Congress ordered Captain Samuel Nicholas to raise two battalions of marines, and he began that task by holding a recruitment meeting at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia. The organization which resulted, the Continental Marines, was later reorganized into the United States Marine Corps, so Marines consider Tun Tavern to be the birthplace of the Corps and November 10^th to be its birthday; U.S. Marines will greet each other today with “Happy Birthday!” so if you know a Marine, whether active duty, reserve or retired, you can be sure he will be pleased if you greet him thus today. You’ll notice I said “retired Marine” rather than “ex-Marine”; as anyone who has ever known one can tell you, there is no such thing as an ex-Marine. “Once a Marine, always a Marine” is not just a slogan but a straightforward fact. Now, I have no intention of giving you a capsule history of the USMC; not only would that be vastly outside the bounds of my subject matter, it would also be silly because there are plenty of sources online if you’re interested. You may think of today’s column as a sort of love letter to the many, many Marine clients I’ve had over the years, some of whom have been among my favorites.

Mae West once said, “I only like two kinds of men: domestic and foreign.” And while that’s pretty much true for me as well, I must admit to a partiality for warriors. There’s just something about a true warrior that makes me rather weak in the knees; I suppose it’s my cavewoman instincts telling me “here is a man who can protect you,” but whatever the reason I cannot deny it. The draw is strongest when he looks the part; the men I find attractive are invariably tall, solidly built, strong-featured, well-groomed and neatly dressed. Short hair is good, and a shaved head even better; to me such grooming says a man is ready for action and has no time for frou-frou haircuts. I also find that mature, experienced warriors (especially military men, and most especially Marines) tend to be well-organized, sensible, self-disciplined and gallant. Obviously, there are exceptions to every rule; lots of men do their time in the military and then promptly forget everything they learned within a few months of discharge, and others never managed to become real warriors (it seems many of these end up in police departments once they return to civilian life). Still others are just bad eggs as in any profession. But some (and these are the ones I’m talking about) internalize the warrior’s nobility and discipline; they wear their business suits as though they were uniforms, keep their rooms and offices tidy, treat women with respect and have a strong personal sense of honor which forbids trying to cheat or harm whores. And all this goes double for Marines.

Did you know Marines are authorized to salute women? True fact, and I’ve had a number of them honor me that way. Because the Naval base in New Orleans houses the headquarters of the 4^th Marine Division, we got an awful lot of Marines as customers, and I can truthfully say that to my knowledge I was never maltreated by one. Both those in uniform and those I merely recognized from their style invariably treated me with courtesy and good manners (though I must admit being called “ma’am” by a client can be a bit weird). I never had one attempt to haggle, though I did have a few younger ones ask on initial phone contact if we had a lower rate. I even had a couple ask if we had a “military discount”, and though we didn’t I have heard of a few independents who do indeed offer one. I can’t even recall ever having a Marine who was a difficult client; most of them are straightforward, appreciative and know what they want, and what the younger ones lack in ability they more than make up for in enthusiasm!

Throughout history, military personnel have been among the most dependable clients for whores, and the US military is no exception; young men deprived of the company of women and often far from home and family have even more pressing need for our services than do other men. But in 2004 the Bush administration, eager to lick the arses of neofeminists and fundies alike, foisted on the Defense Department a strict anti-prostitution policy, under the pretense of (can you guess?) fighting “human trafficking”. This policy requires that military officials “deter activities of DoD Service members, civilian employees, indirect hires” and others “that would facilitate or support [sex trafficking] domestically and overseas.” Domestically, this asinine directive is just as wrongheaded and unenforceable in the military as it is in the civilian world, and overseas it is even more so because prostitution is either totally legal or officially tolerated in a number of countries where US military personnel are either stationed or allowed to take shore leave (including Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan and Korea). It also puts base commanders and other officers in the difficult position of trying to keep their troops healthy and happy while simultaneously obeying orders which, if strictly implemented, would have a devastating effect on troop morale. Given this dilemma, most base commanders do the only thing they can do: Officially declare brothels and other establishments frequented by prostitutes off-limits, then look the other way and do their best not to catch anyone in violation because if they do they must keep up appearances by coming down like the proverbial ton of bricks on the poor schmuck so discovered. This of course makes “trafficking” fanatics furious, especially the “rescue industry”, which has become a major problem in east Asia. And while the official military newspaper Stars and Stripes now follows the party line as one would expect, it was not so when the orders first came down six years ago, as evidenced by this article.

As I mentioned in my column of October 29^th, a group of female academics led by Anne Jordan (director of the Program on Human Trafficking and Forced Labor at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, American University Washington College of Law and author of “Sex Trafficking: The Abolitionist Fallacy”) has pressed President Obama to rescind the Bush administration’s anti-prostitution policy (which would include the military policy), but so far he seems uninterested in such a wise but politically incorrect move, and considering his party’s recent losses I doubt he’ll do anything to make waves unless it’s in the last few weeks of his administration. So at least for now, military administration will continue to create a smoke-screen of compliance to placate prudes and neofeminists while actually following the reasonable policy of looking the other way. Of course, anti-whore military policies are nothing new; regular readers will remember that Storyville was closed in 1917 under pressure from the Secretary of the Navy, and one form of prostitution was criminalized in Japan in 1956 under pressure from the U.S. Army.

Perhaps one day our culture will grow up enough to stop trying to tell adult women what we can do with our bodies and adult men what they can do with adult women, but in the meantime military men in general and Marines in particular will continue to seek us out despite the whimsical notions of those who think Nature can be controlled by legislation. And until our trade is decriminalized, there’s one more nice thing about a military man: a working girl can be sure he isn’t a cop. Nobody can wear two uniforms at once, and a man in camouflage utilities is not in a blue suit with a tin badge.

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Drama Queens

Posted in Current Events, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged acting, bad customers, condoms, cops, Drama Queens, escort review sites, escort services, ethics, law, neofeminism, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rape, restaurants, streetwalkers, West Virginia on November 9, 2010| 30 Comments »

Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress. – Anton Chekhov

Anti-whore activists like to claim we have more than our fair share of drug addicts, thieves, women who were abused as children, women who are unhappy with their work, women who feel trapped in the job, etc; it is unlikely that any of this is true. While there are certainly druggies, dishonest practitioners, neurotics and misfits among our number, I doubt we have any more than any other profession and possibly fewer than some. But there is one type of woman whom I certainly believe we have more of than any other profession except for stripper, actress and singer, and that is the drama queen.

Why should this be? Well, explosive overreaction to conflict or disappointment isn’t unusual among teenage girls; many of us (myself included) tended to wildly exaggerate the importance of everything when we were 13 or 14. Every crush is “love”, every pimple is a disaster, every argument with one’s parents induces screaming and every Saturday night without a date is the end of the world. But most of us learn to control such histrionics as we get older, and most who don’t learn by the end of high school are forced to learn when they enter the work world. A drama queen is one who is so self-absorbed that she just can’t take the hint, and goes on imagining that she is the star of her own movie and that everyone else are just supporting characters. The reason our profession has more than its share of such prima donnas should be obvious; without a rigid work framework under a “boss” there is nothing to discourage a woman with drama queen tendencies, and the freedom, good money and being the center of the undivided attention of adoring males can turn even an ordinarily levelheaded girl into a diva. Though I am usually quite self-possessed, even I tended to be more labile and impatient when I was working, so I can only imagine how escorting can go to the head of a young woman who finds herself a “star” for the first time.

This of course flies in the face of neofeminist propaganda about prostitution; a woman who is “degraded” and “humiliated” does not behave like a spoiled pop star. No, such a woman becomes meek and submissive, which as just about anybody can tell you hardly fits the profile of the average hooker. Even those of us who do not ascend the drama throne tend to be steel magnolias, iron hands in velvet gloves, whose soft, sweet, yielding veneer vanishes in a heartbeat if we’re sufficiently provoked. But the good customers never get to see that in call girls or escorts of quality, whereas anyone who has ever visited a hooker board has seen the (usually but not always) young drama queens in action. And it’s even worse behind the scenes; in dressing rooms of strip clubs, offices of escort services and female-only areas of escort boards these girls are free from even the most minimal constraints they must adopt in order to avoid offending men, and it becomes a huge Kabuki performance. Every bad customer is Satan, every slow week is the Great Depression, every spotty review the end of her career and every publicized bust of a streetwalker the beginning of a pogrom. Older and wiser ladies avoid fanning the flames, but unfortunately drama queens encourage each other so the melodrama never ends and Chicken Little never shuts up.

Alas, it’s part of what we have to deal with; funny how the things the general public (not to mention prohibitionists) imagine to be our biggest problems are not the things we have to worry all that much about. If anything, I think the single largest cause of stress among escorts comes from clients failing to respect our personal boundaries. There are many forms of this, all bad: Asking improper questions, failing to call or show up, attempting to negotiate price, trying to do things to a girl she clearly doesn’t like, attempting to change the rules or reverse the relationship (“But I want to give you pleasure!” or “What do you want to do?”), spying, stalking, prying into her personal affairs…these are the things which upset, worry and embitter most whores, not the “terrible humiliation” of giving a guy head. A friend of mine recently sent me this link; though it is exaggerated for humorous effect and overly dramatic and hostile (unless she has a lot more bad customers than I ever did), every complaint she makes (other than those which apply only to touring girls) is one every hooker has encountered at one time or another, and some often. I disagree with her on a couple of points (refusing to take the money in your hand directly will NOT protect you from arrest, sugar, and drinking with a client is far more dangerous than BBBJ), but otherwise she covers a lot of the same ground I have in various places, especially my Advice for Clients column. And her extended restaurant analogy at the end is both hilarious and dead on target.

In a similar vein…

Whores have no monopoly on histrionic behavior nor, apparently, men on aggravated sexual assault. Here’s the exception that proves the rule, reprinted from The Smoking Gun:

Meet Melissa Lee Williams. The West Virginia woman, 41, is facing assault and weapons charges after allegedly waving a knife at two men who declined her demands to engage in sexual conduct at a West Virginia motor inn. The October 22 incident is detailed in an amusing/gross Jackson County Sheriff’s Department report excerpted here.

According to investigators, Williams–who lives four doors down from her estranged husband at the 77 Motor Inn–showed up at his door and asked Danny Williams and another man to “eat my pussy.” At this point, Williams, pictured in the mug shot at right, “commenced to undress herself,” reported Deputy Ross Mellinger. While Danny Williams “declined said invitation,” the other man, Adam Watson, told cops that he “agreed to perform at her request.” However, as Watson approached Williams, “he became overwhelmed by horrible vaginal odor emitting from Melissa Williams.” Watson, understandably, “declined to proceed any further.” This is when Melissa Williams allegedly “produced a lock-back folding knife,” opened it, and pointed the weapon at her estranged husband. She then reportedly uttered a line never before memorialized in a police report: “Somebody is going to eat my pussy or I’m going to cut your fucking throat.”

When Deputy Mellinger arrived on the scene he observed Williams–who, like the two men, appeared to be intoxicated–nude from the waist down. After pocketing a knife that was on the coffee table in front of Williams, Mellinger arrested her for domestic assault and brandishing a deadly weapon. Williams, who was released from jail after posting $3000 bond, is next due in Jackson County Magistrate Court on February 16.

If this nasty woman had actually managed to hurt someone this might not have been funny, but as it is I find it hilarious. Please, let’s not have any whining about “sexual assault not being funny just because a woman does it to a man”; Mr. Watson was perfectly happy to submit to her demand until prevented from doing so by her improper feminine hygiene, and considering the drunkenness of all involved parties and the fact that she put the knife down before the cops arrived (and who called them, anyway?), I hardly think she ever constituted a credible threat except to the men’s olfactory health.

Another Column on Sex-Worker Rights

This commentary on the introduction of sex-worker rights to the recent UN Human Rights Council is another example of the turning tide of public opinion; though it’s easy to read between the lines and see that Michelle Chen is personally uncomfortable with the idea of sex work, she still recognizes that whores have human rights and deserve protection from the abuses inherent in prohibition. She may wish our trade would vanish, but she has the intellectual sense to recognize it won’t and the moral sense to recognize that “The work itself may represent realities that people find immoral or disturbing. But the people doing the work are more than mere proxies in a culture war; they’re human, and that alone entitles them to equality before the law.” Even more heartening are the replies, which (except for a few token cranks) are overwhelmingly anti-prohibitionist.

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Reaction Formation

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged abortion, dirty, ethics, hysteria, law, New Jersey, pimps, politicians, porn, psychology, Reaction Formation, sex offender registry, slavery, stereotypes, yin and yang on November 8, 2010| 6 Comments »

Disguise our bondage as we will,
‘Tis woman, woman rules us still. – Isaac Bickerstaff: The Sultan (II,i)

The discussion about the psychological motivation of the Whores of Babylon blog’s writer which followed Saturday’s column started me thinking about reaction formation and how common it seems to be among vocal moralists in general and politicians in particular. For those who are unfamiliar with this psychological defense mechanism and don’t have the time to read the Wikipedia article I linked, reaction formation means that the human mind often shields itself from uncomfortable desires or feelings by forming an obsession with the opposite of that thing; in men, the feelings reacted against are very often sexual. Here is an example from the linked article:

A man who is overly aroused by pornographic material who utilizes reaction formation may take on an attitude of criticism toward the topic. He may end up sacrificing many of the positive things in his life, including family relationships, by traveling around the country to anti-pornography rallies. This view may become an obsession, whereby the man eventually does nothing but travel from rally to rally speaking out against pornography. He continues to do this, but only feels temporary relief, because the deeply rooted arousal to an unacceptable behavior such as watching pornography is still present, and underlying the implementation of the defense. At that point he can be said to have developed an obsessional personality above and beyond the defense mechanism.

A man who is uncomfortable with homosexual urges may become violently anti-gay; a religious fundamentalist who is obsessed with fantasies of prostitutes might spend hours every day working on an anti-whore hate site, a politician who feels guilty about seeing call girls may sponsor prohibitionist legislation and cops who lust after us plan elaborate “sting” operations. Nastiest of all are the pedophiles who devote endless hours to attempting to lure others into online pedophilic fantasies for the police, or who are actually paid to examine thousands of child porn images in order to prosecute others for their own perversion. The following is a recent high-profile example, paraphrased from an AP press release.

Neil Cohen, a former New Jersey legislator who championed legislation against child pornography, was sentenced Thursday (November 4^th) to five years in prison or a mental hospital for possession of child pornography; the state Corrections Department will decide which within the next 10 days. He could become eligible for parole under intense supervision within a few months, but will be forced to register as a sex offender and will be barred from public office and using social networking websites; he will also almost certainly be disbarred.

The pale and unsteady Cohen, 59, did not speak during sentencing, but his lawyer told the judge he has been hospitalized for months for severe depression and suicidal ideation and was taking antidepressant medications. Cohen concurred when addressed directly by the judge.

Judge Gerald Council imposed sentence in Mercer County Superior Court. “This is a sad day,” the judge said. “But for this incident, he had an unblemished record.” Cohen pled guilty to distribution of child pornography in exchange for the light sentence, which his lawyer asked the judge to allow his client to serve in a mental institution.

Cohen worked in the state Legislature as a Democrat representing Union County for 17 years, but resigned following his arrest in July 2008; he admitted to viewing images of underage girls on computers in his legislative office and law office. Anthony Picione, the deputy attorney general who prosecuted the case, said 34 images of girls in various stages of undress were found on the computers, and that authorities have been able to match some of them to photos on the list of Missing and Exploited Children. The investigation was triggered when Cohen, in an apparent “cry for help”, printed copies of a number of the images and placed them in his receptionist’s desk.

This story doesn’t surprise me in the least, neither in the behavior of the politician nor in the leniency of the sentence; does anyone reading this believe for one second that a non-politician would’ve been given anything less than ten years? And the behavior of the judge is nothing short of disgusting: “But for this incident, he had an unblemished record.” Boo hoo hoo, I feel so sorry for him. If he hadn’t been a politician, the judge would have made a speech about how horrible a monster he was and how he deserved to be locked up for life. Want to bet he’ll be quietly released from sex-offender registration requirements in a few years? And in the meantime I sincerely doubt he’ll be forced to live under a bridge or in the woods as so many sex offenders are.

While we’re on that subject, here’s an excellent article from the Skeptical Inquirer about child sex abuse hysteria; though the article is four years old things haven’t improved much, and if anything have worsened via conflation with trafficking hysteria. Banning adult prostitution is touted as somehow preventing child sex abuse, and at least one California politician apparently thinks us Jezebels are also somehow responsible for clandestine teenage abortions. Two years ago this week there was a proposal in California to require doctors to notify parents 48 hours before performing an abortion on girls under age 18, and in a debate broadcast on the San Francisco NPR affiliate, proposition supporter Dolores Meehan made this argument to urge voters to support this new restriction:

Proposition 4 is not prohibiting abortion in any way. It doesn’t restrict access. It requires notification so that a physician, before he performs an abortion on a minor, would actually have to get the consent of a parent [or other adult family member]. Why are we putting this out there for the third time? Getting women the right to vote, abolishing slavery didn’t happen in one electoral cycle. At the time those items were seen as an aberration, but certainly when we look back we say that this was good and benefited the common good of our society. In California as a port state our kids are much more susceptible to the sex trafficking industry. In fact, the Department of Justice Organized Crime Task Force doesn’t spend time catching gangsters. They go after human trafficking for the sex trade. Kink.com is a pornography film company that’s located in San Francisco. The opportunities for young girls to be exploited sexually has increased. When the abortion remains secret, the abuse remains secret. Sexual predators will not be able to hide the evidence of their crime by having secret abortions. To date, not one sexual predator has been brought to prosecution by an abortion provider.

Whatever one thinks about the merit of the proposal in and of itself, one has to marvel at the rat’s warren which passes for a brain in some people. In any sane society a conspiracy theory which attempted to present adult films, prostitution and the slave trade as causes of teen pregnancy (and then somehow related the resulting tangle to woman suffrage) would be laughed out of a debate, but when the subject is sex everyone’s brains shift into “neutral” and the most outlandish claims are accepted as reasonable. Obsessive control freaks are allowed to present themselves as champions of freedom, and attempts to restrict women’s sexuality are sold as a crusade to free us from perverted bogeymen.

Since a large percentage of trafficking fanatics are female I doubt reaction formation is the reason for their hysteria, and most male anti-traffickers are probably just anti-whore fanatics in disguise so we know what they’re reacting to. But given the apparent frequency with which moral crusaders are shown to be obsessed with whatever sexual “sin” they crusade against, maybe they should automatically be considered suspects when “investigations” are in the offing. Perhaps if the shoe was on the other foot often enough, fanatics wouldn’t be quite so hasty to inflict their psychodrama on everyone else.

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November Book Reviews

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged archeofeminism, consensual crime, cops, drugs, ethics, law, neofeminism, slavery on November 7, 2010| 11 Comments »

A Renegade History of the United States by Thaddeus Russell

I first became aware of this book after reading Dr. Russell’s article “Why I Got Fired From Teaching American History” in the Huffington Post, and I was immediately intrigued by his statement, “I demonstrated that prostitutes, not feminists, won virtually all the freedoms that were denied to women but are now taken for granted.” So I sent him an email asking whether that statement was elaborated upon in the book, and was delighted when he responded almost immediately in the affirmative. Accordingly, I went out the next day and bought the book at Barnes & Noble, actually paying FULL PRICE for it; though my thrifty soul rebelled from the idea, I was so intrigued I just had to find out what he had to say. I was not disappointed; Dr. Russell’s premise is that our freedoms were not magnanimously “granted” by those in power nor earned by the “don’t make waves” middle class, but rather won by the outcasts who refused to conform to social norms…including, but not remotely limited to, prostitutes. Chapter 4 is entirely devoted to us, and other chapters cover the contributions of drinkers, slaves, various immigrant groups, lovers of “controversial” music and homosexuals.

Throughout the book, Russell refuses to toe the politically correct line on anything; he presents facts (many from primary sources) which self-professed “liberals” and “conservatives” alike would rather nobody knew, so it’s not at all surprising he was denied tenure and “let go” from his teaching position despite overwhelming protests from his students; after all, we can’t have young people learning facts that contradict the official view of history, now can we? Anyone interested in the conflict of the individual vs. the collective needs to read this, as does anyone interested in social history; the rest of you can make up your minds after you read my interview of Dr. Russell, appearing in this column on November 12^th if everything goes as planned.

Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society by Peter McWilliams

This is not a fun book, but it is an important one. Not that it’s a difficult read, mind you; it’s broken into five main sections and dozens of small, digestible chapters, and nearly every page has some sort of interesting or funny quote intended to illustrate the author’s points. It is, however, quite long and a lot of it may anger you; the author intended it to be browsed over weeks rather than plowed through in days. But if you are a thinking person who cares about liberty, read it you must; McWilliams not only discusses the history of society’s treatment of consensual crimes, but presents compelling legal, philosophical, moral, practical and economic reasons why government should abandon the practice of meddling in the personal affairs of individuals. Among the topics covered are prostitution, drug use, gambling, homosexuality, pornography and mandatory seat belt laws.

McWilliams was a bestselling author of self-help books who was probably drawn to this topic because of his homosexuality, and published Ain’t Nobody’s Business in 1993. But three years later, his interest in the topic became more than academic when he was diagnosed with both AIDS and cancer and needed marijuana to control the violent illness which resulted from his drug therapy. He became a medical marijuana activist who testified before the National Academy of Sciences and granted numerous media interviews about his personal experiences with the anti-emetic effects of marijuana, but just two weeks after publishing an article in Daily Variety (December 1997) in which he specifically stated that he used marijuana, a horde of heavily-armed DEA thugs invaded his house and stole his computer and files; he was arrested a few months later in July 1998. The charge was not possession of marijuana but being a “drug lord”; the rather convoluted rationale for this was that as the publisher of Prelude Press he had given an advance to an author for a book on medical marijuana, and that writer had used a portion of the advance to grow his own medical marijuana. Since Prelude Press was the source of the funds the man had used to finance his crop, that made McWilliams a “drug lord” and allowed the Feds to close down his company and seize virtually all of his assets.

Note that by this time California had already legalized medical marijuana, but the federal government decided to act in order to gag a persistent gadfly. One of the conditions of McWilliams’ bail was a weekly urine test, which he could not fail because his elderly mother had put up her house as property bond for his bail and the feds would steal it and throw her out into the street if her son were sent back to jail. So he was forced to be constantly ill and often threw up his medications; without them he quickly grew weaker and was soon wheelchair-bound. The federal judge refused to allow McWilliams or his attorney to mention his terminal illness, the fact that he used marijuana as medicine or the fact that he was permitted to do so under California law, but the kangaroo court which resulted was never finished because on June 14, 2000 McWilliams choked to death on his own vomit.

All of McWilliams’ books are available to read for free on his website; here is the link for this book. For more information on the man himself, see this Wikipedia article.

The Internet Escort’s Handbook, Book 1 (Basic Mental, Emotional and Physical Considerations in Escort Work) and The Internet Escort’s Handbook, Book 2: Advertising and Marketing (Successfully Creating and Selling Your Image Online) by Amanda Brooks

Some of you may recognize Amanda as a regular commenter on this blog, or as the author of After Hours (which is linked in the column on the right); she is an escort, sex worker rights activist and the author of these two books for the neophyte escort. If you are thinking of becoming an escort or have recently become an escort it might be a very good idea for you to pick up book one, and even if you’re a relatively experienced escort who wants to expand her business book two could be very enlightening to you. Don’t take my word for it; follow the links and read reviews and even excerpts from the books. If you decide to buy, you can order them right there from a link on the page. No, this is not a paid endorsement and I’m not getting a percentage; I honestly feel as though Amanda knows a lot more about the business end of escorting than I do and has thought longer and harder about how to increase business rather than just sort of following her instincts as I did, and thus would be a much better teacher for someone who really wants to succeed at it.

Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry by Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander (editors)

This collection of essays by working girls and proto-third-wave feminists was first published in 1987, a time when neofeminism had cemented its stranglehold on feminist discourse about sex work and it was nearly impossible for sex workers to be heard above the din of prohibitionist propaganda. The newer and considerably expanded 1998 edition only serves to embellish the book’s original message, which is completely anti-prohibitionist and highly critical of the lies and distortions promoted by the anti-sex feminist establishment to further its campaign against prostitution by marginalizing and harming prostitutes. As so often happens with books on this subject, the Amazon reviews are interesting in themselves; I was particularly amused by the one totally negative review, “Don’t Waste Your Money”, in which the reviewer simpered that “…the so-called “real” stories of sex workers do not at all seem authentic,” obviously because the prostitutes who wrote the essays weren’t all pathetic drug addicts who were raped as children.

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Jezebel

Posted in Biography, Current Events, History, Perception, tagged agency denial, Aphrodite, archeofeminism, bad customers, bogus studies, condoms, consensual crime, crypto-moralism, dirty, hysteria, Jezebel, law, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, Oregon, pimps, porn, psychology, stereotypes on November 6, 2010| 30 Comments »

The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder. – Angela Carter

I’ve written a lot lately about a change in the wind regarding public opinion about whoring; the more enlightened members of our society appear to be slowly coming to the realization that the concept of a consensual crime simply has no place in a free society, and that for the state to dictate what a woman can do with her own body is not only barbaric, but also cannot be defined as anything other than slavery. And that makes neofeminists and “human trafficking” fanatics the worst kind of hypocrites, because they promote the doctrine that all women should be enslaved to the state in order to prevent a few women from being enslaved by individuals! Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If I must be chattel, I would rather be owned by an individual man whom I can look in the eye, talk to and attempt to influence with my feminine wiles rather than a vast, faceless, amorphous monstrosity which does not even know I exist and has no human feelings to which I can appeal.

But such changes never come without a backlash from the control freaks who feel the psychotic need to judge and condemn others for being different from themselves. Though articles like this one are becoming the norm among rational adults, the cases of arrested development are becoming more and more vicious in their spastic attacks on human sexuality, especially as personified in the persons of whores. Though I have no desire to give a pulpit to these self-appointed guardians of the public morals, some of their behaviors are so revealing of their true motives that calling attention to them actually functions in the same way as turning over a stone reveals the disgusting creatures underneath. Here’s a link to the site of “Morality in Media”, an anti-porn organization, which is currently promoting its “White Ribbon Against Pornography” week; note that despite their faux (and largely self-authored) “studies”, their rhetoric is actually nothing but good old-fashioned religious fundamentalism straight out of revival tents and Carrie Nation. Notice also their chilling slogan: “Promoting a Decent Society Through Law.” Hitler would’ve been proud.

But these people are rank amateurs of hate compared to the lunatic who runs “Whores of Babylon”, a Biblical fundamentalist anti-prostitute hate site which largely consists of gloating over news articles about escorts, strippers and porn stars being murdered or committing suicide interspersed with quotes taken from escort websites and his Biblical “answers” to those quotes, and punctuated with various tirades about sin and damnation. One of the main tabs is called “Why You Deserve Hell”. What a pathetic, bitter, unhappy, fearful life his man must lead! Obviously, it’s never dawned on him that the idea of “Christian hate” is oxymoronic. Take a look at the site if you like, but I warn you that you may feel as though you need to take a bath and clean your computer’s cache after going there.

Of course, there are fanatics on both sides of sexual issues; though I’m all for safe sex, methinks the folks in the following story (paraphrased from an AP original) went a bit too far in their campaign to promote it. They honestly strike me as more than a bit Puritanical, and the toothbrushes sort of emphasize that; it’s a bit like giving trick-or-treaters those obnoxious (but unintentionally funny) fundie comics from Chick Publications.

Daniel and Kathleen Harris, of Silverton, Oregon gave trick-or-treating teenagers condoms in their goodie bags instead of candy as part of what the couple calls their “effort to promote health”; younger kids got toothbrushes with their candy bars. Daniel Cote, the father of one 14-year-old girl who received the condoms, was offended and said it was inappropriate to give them to children without parents’ consent. Kathleen Harris said giving the condoms to the 14-year-old was a mistake; she says their usual practice is to ask teens if they’re 16 or older and to give them a speech on safe sex.

A safe-sex lecture from complete strangers on Halloween; talk about a trick!

But anyway, if you risked optical contamination by looking at that “Whores of Babylon” site, you probably noticed that the guy is also kind of obsessive about Jezebel, a Phoenician princess of the 9^th century BCE who married Ahab, the King of Israel and convinced her husband to allow temples of Phoenician gods to open in Israel. Though this was her native religion and she forced no Israelites to convert to it, the mere presence of these temples inflamed the anger of the fanatical prophet Elisha, who is also remembered for summoning two she-bears to kill 42 little boys because they mocked his baldness (2 Kings 2:23-24). Elisha did not dare to move against the throne while the popular Ahab was alive, but after his death the prophet backed a usurper who overthrew the rightful heir and then ordered the palace eunuchs to hurl Queen Jezebel out a window, then commanded her corpse be left in the street to be eaten by dogs. Jezebel’s last act was to dress in her royal robes, makeup and jewelry so as to die as a queen, but since history is written by the victors this was interpreted as “harlotry”. Thus, Jezebel’s name has come down as synonymous with “evil woman” or “whore”, while the man who murdered a defenseless middle-aged woman was celebrated as a hero.

You may enjoy this parody of traditional Christian readings of the story of Jezebel; as you can probably guess, feminists tend to take a dim view of the traditional interpretation, and have rightfully pointed out that Jezebel was a strong and assertive woman who merely wished to assure freedom for her religion, and who died proudly and on her feet after her sons were murdered in a coup d’état. Like Lilith, she has been adopted as a feminist symbol, and indeed there is a semi-third-wave feminist website named Jezebel.com. The site is pretty uneven, but once in a while they have a good sex worker story, such as this Open Letter from a Stripper; not only does she hit dead on, but a great deal of what she says applies to whores as well. The comments are also worth reading because they illustrate exactly what I was talking about in my first paragraph; with only a couple of exceptions, they’re all sex-work-positive. And though I wish the Jezebel site had more anti-prohibitionist stories (and fewer with the faint odor of the “Nordic Model” about them), stripper-positive features and sex-positive commentary are still indicative of the trend.

In the same vein as the “Open Letter” is this cartoon created by an escort; it’s one of those “instant cartoons” I’m seeing more often lately, and it’s absolutely bang on. It’s very funny, but keep in mind while watching it that all of us occasionally have customers who are exactly like this, though the bad traits usually don’t all appear in one client. Not usually, anyway.

But going back to Jezebel (the site, not the mach-maligned lady), I read there yesterday that Kristin Davis (whom I mentioned in my Election Day column), didn’t get the 50,000 votes she needed to automatically legitimize her Anti-Prohibition party, but she did get almost halfway there with about 23,000 votes. I think the governorship was a bit high to aim, but perhaps she might shop around for a district which will put her into the state legislature. If that many people actually voted for her, there are probably ten times that many who sympathized with her platform but didn’t want to “waste their votes”. Even a quarter of a million sympathizers in New York State is a start.

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Guy Fawkes Night

Posted in History, Holidays, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged cops, holidays, law, politicians, United Kingdom on November 5, 2010| 14 Comments »

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot. – Traditional

Tonight is Guy Fawkes Night in the United Kingdom and some of her former colonies; it is the anniversary of the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, led by Guy Fawkes. The plot was an attempt by Catholic revolutionaries to destroy the House of Lords and assassinate King James I; the day was an official public holiday until 1859, but continued as a popular night of bonfires and fireworks until the present. Traditionally, an effigy of Guy Fawkes was burned in the bonfire, but in recent years effigies of other public figures have joined or replaced “The Guy” in the fire.

Though the tradition ended in the United States after independence and faded out in several Commonwealth countries (it was actually banned in Australia in the 1970s by a paternalistic anti-fireworks law), perhaps non-Brits need to renew the holiday; not as an anti-Catholic demonstration or celebration of a failed revolution, mind you, but as a time to burn tyrants in effigy. Governments need to be reminded (at least annually if not constantly) that they only hold power by the sufferance of all the people, not merely the majority, and that the overthrow of any government by a disgruntled minority is always a possibility. I would like to see most if not all politicians and their minions paying for their power and privilege by being forced to live in a constant state of nervous anxiety; maybe then fewer would choose that path and more would concern themselves with keeping all the citizenry happy rather than merely pleasing barely enough of the population to keep themselves in office. The dictatorship of the majority is, after all, the most oppressive tyranny of all because it has a huge army of sympathizers and informants with which to enforce its demands.

Interrogators have long understood something which both terrorists and pacifists alike fail to understand, which is that human nature tends to respond only to BOTH the promise of reward and the threat of punishment used in tandem. Terrorism fails because it offers only violence, and pacifism fails because it offers only the reward of keeping the non-violent protesters happy, but the classic “good cop, bad cop” scenario works because it offers both. Not even children consistently respond to the promise of the carrot without the threat of the stick; why then should we expect adults to, most especially the self-important adults who set themselves up over their fellows? The civil rights movement worked because Martin Luther King and other peaceful protesters offered an attractive alternative to the race violence which had escalated since soon after the Second World War, but without the looming specter of race war their peaceful protests might never have accomplished anything. In more recent times the peaceful activism of mainstream “gay rights” groups offered an attractive alternative to the disruptive antics of groups like ACT-UP and the quiet violence of “outing”. Perhaps one of the reasons that the prostitutes’ rights movement has languished in futility for four decades is that there is no threatening alternative; maybe the “good girl” activists like those of SWOP, Desiree Alliance and myself need a few “bad girl” groups who run around outing politicians, disrupting fundamentalist religious services and neofeminist meetings, hacking prohibitionist websites and spying on police to publicly expose “stings” so the government will have some compelling reason to consider the reasonable alternative of decriminalization.

With all that in mind, I would like to devote the rest of today’s column to a series of quotes about government in general and the tyranny of mob rule in particular. Yes, it’s a departure from my usual subject, but a lady is entitled to her whims.

Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Lord Acton (1834-1902)

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

William L. Anderson (born ?)

Political elections do not choose leaders of society. Rather, they are an exercise in which groups of people choose individuals who will assist them in looting other groups of individuals.

Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

Dave Barry (born 1947)

Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you’re told.

Iain Benson (born 1955)

Complete equality isn’t compatible with democracy, but it is agreeable to totalitarianism. After all, the only way to ensure the equality of the slothful, the inept and the immoral is to suppress everyone else.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

John Dewey (1859-1952)

Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!

Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

Barry Goldwater (1909-1998)

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Hildegard Hamm-Bruecher (born 1921)

Calm and order can be just as dangerous to democracy as uneasiness and disorder.

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How’s that again? I missed something.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population — the intelligent ones or the fools?

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

Andrew Johnson (1808-1875)

Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigorously, more vigorously, and more severely, than by one.

Henry de Jouvenel (1876-1935)

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.

Helen Keller (1880-1968)

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909-1999)

Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

John V. Lindsay (1921-2000)

Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.

James Madison (1751-1836)

Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Adam Michnik (born 1946)

As a rule, dictatorships guarantee safe streets and terror of the doorbell. In democracy the streets may be unsafe after dark, but the most likely visitor in the early hours will be the milkman.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)

Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power.

P. J. O’Rourke (born 1947)

Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.

Wendell Phillips (1811-1884)

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.

Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Lew Rockwell (born 1944)

The laws of economics tell us that the expansion of the central state can’t go on forever. Its limit is reached when the looted turn on the looters.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Tacitus (56-117)

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

That government is best which governs least.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Governments need armies to protect them from their enslaved and oppressed subjects.

Benjamin R. Tucker (1854-1939)

The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of the absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of modern democracy.

Gideon J. Tucker (1826-1899)

No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.

Alexander Tytler (1747-1813)

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.

Voltaire (1694-1778)

A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady.

It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

George Washington (1732-1799)

Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Anonymous

An armed man is a citizen; an unarmed man is a subject.

The most serious threat to democracy is the notion that it has already been achieved.

When a nation’s government becomes more fearful of its citizens’ rights than protective of them, that nation’s future is only despotism and extinction.

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Sea Change

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged archeofeminism, Backpage, bad customers, condoms, cops, Craigslist, dirty, evidence, law, neofeminism, pimps, politicians, Sea Change, sex offender registry, stereotypes, streetwalkers, Swedish model on November 4, 2010| 10 Comments »

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them, ding-dong, bell. – William Shakespeare, The Tempest (I,ii)

Maybe it’s starting at last. In the past few months I’ve noticed it, a shift in the wind if you will; more and more people are rejecting the spurious arguments of the abolitionists and recognizing that a woman’s right to own and control her body is not merely a euphemism for the right to have an abortion. Polls conducted by respected websites and media outlets show their readers and viewers overwhelmingly in favor of decriminalization, funds for abolitionist “anti-trafficking” fanatics are starting to dry up (so much so that the website of Citizens Against Trafficking actually went down for a week due to failure to pay its bill), and even major organizations are starting to listen to us. Perhaps this is the beginning of a “sea change” in American attitudes toward prostitution which will eventually result in sending the abolitionist movement to a watery grave, where it will lie unlamented by all sane people (and particularly by nymphs).

Here’s one example, an article I have reproduced in its entirety from the SWOP website:

This Friday November 5, 2010, the United Nations Human Rights Council will review the human rights record of the United States as part of a new process – the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The UPR calls for a review of member nations’ human rights records every four years, and this is the first time the U.S. has participated. The Human Rights Council will base its review on the U.S. government’s own self-assessment, as well as reports submitted from civil society organizations. U.S. sex worker advocates are engaged in this process, working to highlight the appalling record that the United States has in regards to communities of people engaging in the sex trade.

A comprehensive national report on sex workers’ rights was prepared by the Best Practices Policy Project and the Desiree Alliance earlier this year. The report draws on the perspectives of networks, such as SWOP USA, and organizations working with sex workers, people in the sex trade and people who are affected by anti-prostitution policies in the United States more generally. Two representatives from the Best Practices Policy Project are currently in Geneva presenting summary recommendations to delegations and encouraging countries to ask the United States questions about its human rights record in regards to sex workers and to include issues pertaining to sex workers in the recommendations they will raise in Friday’s session.

Key recommendations from the report on sex workers are as follows.

The United States should implement comprehensive criminal justice reform that includes measures to stop human rights abuses committed in the name of anti-sex trade laws. This would include repealing laws, including laws against prostitution-related offenses, and eliminate policies, such as “prostitution free zones”, that erode legal protections barring law enforcement from detaining individuals on the basis of how they are perceived or the way they are dressed (ie racial and gender profiling). The application of felony-level charges against sex workers and people living with HIV should be halted as should sex offender registration requirements of those arrested for engaging in prostitution. Criminal justice reform must also address the frequency of abuse of sex workers, or those perceived as such, by law enforcement and other state actors. Similarly, reform must ensure that people involved in the sex trade or profiled as such receive appropriate responses from authorities when they are targeted for violence and other crimes.

The United States should ensure health rights for those engaged, or perceived to be engaged, in sex work and the sex trade. In many jurisdictions in the United States condoms are used as evidence of criminal activity in the enforcement of anti-prostitution laws. Individuals involved in street economies face tremendous stigmatization in health care settings. Sex workers urgently need access to health care services including harm reduction oriented programs, which often are prohibited from receiving federal funding.

The United Sates should reorient national anti-trafficking policy to a rights-based framework and repeal the US governments “anti-prostitution pledge” requirement on foreign aid. Migrants involved in the sex trade who experience exploitation require services and legal support, but the response to human trafficking in the U.S. currently focuses on law enforcement approaches that alienate and traumatize victims. U.S. anti-trafficking policies and practices undermine the health and rights of sex workers domestically and internationally, including requiring recipients of HIV and anti-trafficking funding to adopt a stance condemning sex work. These requirements should be repealed.

Though the US does have the tendency to ignore UN resolutions, a negative human rights report from the Council would kick the soapbox out from under abolitionists who try to drape themselves in the white garment of “concern for women”. It would almost certainly provoke a major shift in abolitionist rhetoric to the “Nordic Model”, and indeed many neofeminist and bluenosed rats, perhaps sensing their anti-whore ship about to sink, have deserted it for the Nordic propaganda in the hopes of winning more women (including a few misguided sex workers) to their cause. But many will rightfully perceive this as a retreat, and that will put the anti-sex forces off-balance. It won’t have much effect on the behavior of sadistic cops or politicians out to make a name for themselves on the backs of whores, but SWOP is on the attack on that front as well, as demonstrated by this press release from last week:

New York City, NY, October 28, 2010 – SWOP-NYC in collaboration with SWOP-USA strongly opposes the misguided campaign against Backpage.com. This campaign is part of a trend of actions against adult services sections online including a recent action against Craigslist.

The campaign against Backpage.com has been framed as a way to “protect innocent women and children” (as per State Attorneys General, Letter to Attorneys for Backpage.com, September 21, 2010, available at: http://ago.mo.gov/pdf/Backpage.pdf ). However, the forced closure of this site will not diminish the prevalence of trafficking and, worse, will substantially harm victims of trafficking and people in consensual sex work.

“This campaign purports to protect people, but it actually has the opposite effect,” explained Liz Coplen, Board Chair of SWOP-USA. “Criminalization and repression of consensual sex work drives sex workers underground, creating the conditions which lead to the exploitation and abuses of trafficking.” The models that have been internationally accepted as best practice for addressing sex trafficking center around working with sex workers to end exploitation and abuse, not further criminalizing and marginalizing the work.

SWOP-NYC, a group of sex workers and allies, adamantly opposes all forms of coerced and forced labor. We strongly support effective efforts to end abuses in the sex industry. “Unfortunately,” states sex workers’ rights activist and attorney Melissa Broudo, “the current discussion seems to perpetuate the false notion that prostitution and trafficking are the same thing. All forms of sex work are perceived as violence against women, which does not reflect the different realities of individuals who advertise on these sites. Heightened criminalization, which stems from this conflation, causes significant harm to sex workers and survivors of trafficking.”

“The Internet provides a venue for communication and commerce for a range of industries,” says Sarah Jenny Bleviss, a new media professional and SWOP-NYC organizer. “These repressive campaigns, forcing the closure of adult venues and communications, undermine first amendment rights and freedom of communication on the Internet as well as the safety of sex workers. Sex workers are in the forefront as targets in a repressive campaign which challenges basic concepts of free speech on the Internet.”

Sex workers are united in their analysis that the closure of adult services pages undermines their safety. “Most people who advertise on these sites are engaged in consensual adult activities,” said Dylan Wolfe of SWOP NYC “But these campaigns assume that all sex workers need to be rescued. They say they are doing us a favor by closing down our advertising options, by removing our freedoms in order to protect us from exploitation. However, the Internet offers a venue in which we can find and screen clients so that we can protect ourselves. These closures undermine our safety.”

“First they complain when they see us on the street, then when we are off the street they try to shut our work down by closing the advertising venues. And they claim it’s to protect us! It’s hypocritical, discriminatory and ultimately makes sex workers more vulnerable to the violence they are supposedly so concerned about,” said Michael Bottoms.

Sex worker activist, Jill Brenneman agrees. “This will result in moving it someplace else or out onto the street, where it can be more dangerous. I noticed this firsthand. If the money’s not coming from one stream, it’s going to come from another. The street for me was always where I would end up working if somebody had shut down the main form of advertising.”

“When these websites close it means more potential for violence, more exploitation, less money to feed and house ourselves, and life circumstances that are less safe for consensual sex workers. Trafficked/exploited people are also placed at greater risk,“ says Robin Dunn of SWOP-NYC and SWOP-CO. “Sites such as Craigslist and Backpage are well-positioned to do more for trafficking victims, by providing training for their employees to help them act appropriately when contacted by someone who has been exploited using their website. Such training (as well as effective and appropriate training for police) would be far more helpful for exploited and trafficked people than shutting down an advertising service and forcing sex workers and trafficking victims into situations that are even less safe.”

We’ve discussed in recent columns (especially September 28^th and October 14^th), how public opinion is beginning to shift in our favor, and columns like this one and this one are becoming far more common. I’ll be quite pleased if I can continue to report such news every few weeks!

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Meretrices and Prostibulae

Posted in History, Tyranny, tagged acting, Aphrodite, archeofeminism, bad customers, bisexuality, brothels, cops, courtesans, holidays, law, male prostitutes, marriage, oral sex, pimps, Rome, sacred prostitutes, sex offender registry, slavery, stage names, streetwalkers, transgender on November 3, 2010| 20 Comments »

Blessed be they as virtuous, who when they feel their virile members swollen with lust, visit a brothel rather than grind at some husband’s private mill. – Cato the Younger

We’ve all heard the “fun fact” about Eskimos having something like 20 different words for “snow”; since the stuff factors so importantly in their lives, it stands to reason that they would talk about it a lot and therefore require words with finer nuances than the few we have (snow, slush, powder, drift, etc). But if the number of words for a concept says something about the importance of that concept to speakers of the language, we must conclude that the Romans were almost obsessed with whores.

Brothel fresco from Pompeii, 1st century

Prostitution was neither illegal nor stigmatized in ancient Rome, and in fact it was not unusual for an independent-minded upper-class woman to become a courtesan; when Augustus decided to encourage reproduction in the upper classes by taxing unmarried adult patricians, many women registered as whores so as to avoid being forced to marry. This loophole was later closed by Tiberius; he simply banned women of senatorial rank from working as prostitutes. But upper-class women of below that rank were otherwise free from the arbitrary regulations inflicted on their lower-class sisters, such as restrictions in the type of clothing they could wear or the hours in which they could do business. They were even exempt from the law which required prostitutes to register (as were actresses, dancers and other part-time prostitutes). But few if any lower-class harlots complied with the law because they could not afford the fees and taxes, and even many middle-class prostitutes chose to gamble by working unregistered, because once a woman’s name, family, birthplace and stage name were recorded in official records it could never be removed; besides, if she got caught a middle-class doxy could simply pay a bribe to be ignored. Registered prostitutes were called meretrices and unregistered ones prostibulae (which as you can probably guess is the source of our word “prostitute”). Meretrices were for the most part mid-range girls; both the more expensive and cheaper girls were all prostibulae. But inside those broad categories were a bewildering variety of terms for whores, especially among the lower-class girls; today’s column is a kind of lexicon of these terms and those for a few other related concepts.

Acca Larentia: A legendary courtesan of very early Rome who left her sizeable fortune to the Roman people and was later deified and revered in a festival called the Larentalia on December 23^rd. She was referred to as the “most noble whore” and was sometimes associated with Lupa, the she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus.

Aedile: The official whose duty was to register prostitutes and arrest those practicing without a license; since he and his men could usually be bribed with money or favors, he is the prototype of the sort of official pimp so common in European countries of later centuries. The aedile’s only positive function from the whores’ point of view was that a meretrix could summon him to enforce payment from a customer who was trying to cheat her.

Aelicariae (“baker’s girls”): Girls who worked outside the temple, selling both sexual favors and small cakes made in the shape of male or female genitalia for sacrifice to Venus or Priapus.

Amasiae: Girls who whored part-time as a form of worship of Venus.

Ambubiae: Professional singers, most of whom whored at least part-time.

Amica (“girlfriend”): A prostitute who also saw female clients.

Ancillae ornatrices: Maidservants who helped brothel-whores or courtesans to clean themselves, fix their hair and repair their makeup between customers. Courtesans hired their own, while brothels supplied them for employees.

Aquarii (“water-boys”): Boy servants in brothels who served wine and other refreshments in addition to carrying water for washing.

Blitidae: Roman “B-girls”, hookers who worked in taverns and took their name from the cheap wine (blitum) sold there.

Bona Dea: A goddess whose festivities included prostitutes engaging in public lesbian activity with one another.

Bustuariae: Professional mourners who prostituted themselves in graveyards between funeral gigs. They usually entertained their customers sitting on tombstones or lying on crypts.

Camp followers: Roman “comfort women”, slave-prostitutes who were made to serve the Roman legions in their endless campaigns; these miserable women’s only relief from constant sex was when they were forced to cook, dress wounds, mend clothes or clean the camp. Such a slave’s only hope for escape from endless exhaustion and degradation was to attract the eye of an officer who could buy her from the army for his personal use.

Casuaria: Roadhouses, which nearly always had brothels in the back.

Ceres: The grain-goddess (the word “cereal” derives from her name); though not specifically a whore-goddess, her clergy tolerated lower-class whores entertaining their clients in the porches and fornices.

Citharistriae: Professional harpists, most of whom whored at least part-time.

Copae: Serving-girls or slave-girls who whored on the side.

Cymbalistriae: Whores who also hired themselves as cymbal-players.

Delicatae: Courtesans from the middle class, some of whom were also actresses; see also famosae.

Diobolares: Very cheap streetwalkers who charged only two obols (only twice the fee of an Athenian brothel-slave).

Diversorium: A boarding-house which rented rooms to prostitutes.

Dorides: The Roman equivalent of incall escorts, who advertised their services by standing naked in the doorways of their homes.

Famosae: Courtesans from the upper classes; see also delicatae.

Fellatrix: A whore who specialized in fellatio; most fellatrices worked in bath-houses.

Flora: Another Roman goddess with a whore-aspect, sometimes associated with Acca Larentia. She was honored with an elaborate public festival from April 28^th-May 3^rd; on the last day a group of prostitutes would strip and perform erotic dances until young men in the audience were enough overcome by lust to throw their clothes off and join the prostitutes in the arena for ritual public sex.

Forariae: Country girls who plied their trade on rural roads.

Fornices: The arches underneath large Roman buildings, in whose shadowy recesses many streetwalkers entertained their clients. Our word “fornication” is derived from this practice.

Temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome, 2nd century BCE

Fortuna Virilis: A goddess popular with lower-class women, worshipped by dedicated acts of prostitution or bathing in men’s public baths (which were frequented by prostitutes).

Gallinae (“hens”): Thief-prostitutes. Some of these were extortionists, others practitioners of cash-and-dash and still others petty thieves; the most dangerous sort were actually just the girlfriends of robbers who lured men into traps.

Ganymede: A homosexual god whose temple was used by male prostitutes just as Ceres’ temple was by female ones.

Isis: An Egyptian goddess whose cult was wildly popular in the Roman Empire, especially among women; the cult may have had some sacred prostitutes but this is not certain. In any case, her priestesses allowed streetwalkers who belonged to the cult to meet their clients in the temple much as Ceres’ priestesses did.

Leno: A brothel-keeper (see lupanar). A female brothel keeper or madam was a lena.

Lupae (“she-wolves”): Wandering streetwalkers who attracted clients by making wolf-cries.

Lupanar: Brothel. The cheap ones were staffed by slaves belonging to the leno, while the better sort simply rented rooms to meretrices who preferred not to work from their homes. Under Roman law, brothels were only allowed to operate from 3 PM until dawn.

Mimae: Mimes, nearly all of whom were at least part-time whores.

Noctiluae (“nightwalkers”): Streetwalkers who specialized in the very late hours.

Nonariae (“nine o’clock girls”): Low-class meretrices whose limited licenses only allowed them to work from 9 PM until dawn.

Pergulae: Balconies, on which high-class meretrices displayed themselves.

Proseda: A meretrix who leased a room in a lupanar.

Quadrantariae: Slave-whores whose fee was about ½ cent in American currency; though obviously this had a lot more buying power then, it was still a pitifully meager fee.

Scorta erratica: Streetwalkers.

Scortum: Strumpet; a general term for any low-class whore.

Stabula: A brothel consisting of one large room where sex took place in full view of other patrons and whores.

Tabernae: Bakeries. Most bakers rented small cells in their cellars to streetwalkers (see also tugurium), but since these premises were frequently raided by aediles looking for unlicensed whores those who used them tried to get in and out as quickly as possible. Bakers of course also supplied cakes to the aelicariae.

Tugurium: A hut rented for an extremely low price to streetwalkers whose clients wanted greater privacy.

Turturillae (“pigeon houses”): Large pigeon coops in which some streetwalkers entertained clients; they were particularly favored by transvestite male prostitutes.

Venerii: Harlot-priestesses of Venus who taught sexual techniques to courtesans; according to some authorities they practiced a spiritual discipline similar to Tantrism.

Venus Volgivava (“Venus the Streetwalker”): An aspect of the goddess Venus, patroness of whores, whose festival was celebrated by prostitutes on April 23^rd.

Vestal Virgins: Though in later times these girls were literal virgins, in pre-republican times they were probably sacred prostitutes whose virginity was ritually reinstated at the close of their term of service so they could marry honorably.

Villicus: The cashier at a brothel, who knew the skills and attributes of the various girls and answered customers’ questions.

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Election Day

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged archeofeminism, asset seizure, condoms, cops, dirty, drugs, Election Day, evidence, law, Madonna/whore, Michigan, neofeminism, New York, pimps, politicians, streetwalkers on November 2, 2010| 18 Comments »

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 19^th, then there was the FBI raid on Escorts.com, then another example appeared in the Sex Hysteria! website (thank you, Dave!) for October 29^th. 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 10^th, 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 29^th. 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.

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Amsterdam

Posted in Current Events, History, Tyranny, tagged Amsterdam, archeofeminism, avails laws, brothels, condoms, cops, dirty, disease, drugs, ethics, Europe, harm reduction, hysteria, law, neofeminism, Netherlands, pimps, sisterhood, social purity, Spain, streetwalkers, Swedish model, transgender on November 1, 2010| 5 Comments »

In the port of Amsterdam
There’s a sailor who drinks
And he drinks and he drinks
And he drinks once again
He drinks to the health
Of the whores of Amsterdam
Who have promised their love
To a thousand other men. – Jacques Brel, “Amsterdam”

With all this talk of the “Nordic Model” lately, I think it’s sad that the neofeminists and the blinkered asses we call politicians whom they ride upon can’t seem to turn their gaze a little to the southwest, across the North Sea to the Netherlands. The Dutch treatment of prostitutes isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s vastly better than the Nordic Model and centuries more advanced than the barbaric American model. And though abolitionists and bluenoses have repeatedly tried (and still continue to try) to suppress our trade, such prohibitions have never really caught on in the historically tolerant Netherlands.

Like most European governments, the Dutch tolerated prostitution throughout the Middle Ages because it was recognized as a “necessary evil” which prevented male sexual passion from getting out of control. Some cities tried to ban it within the city walls, but in 1413 these prohibitionist decrees were themselves prohibited in Amsterdam by a law which stated, “Because whores are necessary in big cities and especially in cities of commerce such as ours – indeed it is far better to have these women than not to have them – and also because the holy church tolerates whores on good grounds, for these reasons the court and sheriff of Amsterdam shall not entirely forbid the keeping of brothels.” It’s amazing how much wiser and more socially progressive Dutch authorities were 600 years ago than American authorities are now, isn’t it?

“Brothel Scene” by Nikolaus Knupfer (1630s)

Unfortunately, this did not last; in the 16th century the rise of Protestantism and occupation by Spain resulted in prohibitionist laws, which in turn resulted in official pimping as it always does. This ended in 1578, when the city of Amsterdam rebelled against Spain, became officially Calvinist and stopped regulating prostitution. Though a number of anti-whore laws were passed throughout the 17^th century, they were unpopular and impossible to enforce and so the police rarely bothered to try; though moralists tried to portray whores as degraded, in paintings they were depicted as beautiful. But as in the United States 200 years later, bluenosed Protestant middle-class morality eventually came to dominate Dutch thinking, and a series of prohibitionist laws (including bans on condoms and other methods of birth and disease control) made the working conditions for Dutch harlots steadily worse until Napoleon conquered the country and instituted mandatory registration and medical examination in 1810 in order to protect his soldiers against venereal diseases. These laws were largely continued after Napoleon, but after the Social Purity movement invaded the Netherlands regulation was replaced by abolitionism as it was in the U.S.

But even then, the Dutch hardheadedly refused to join the lemming-stampede of full prohibition so popular elsewhere; though “living on the avails of prostitution” and owning a brothel were banned in 1911, prostitution itself was not prohibited. As before, these laws proved unpopular and were rarely enforced, and by the 1970s the Dutch government formally adopted the gedoogbeleid (policy of tolerance) on the grounds that attempting to suppress consensual “vices” such as prostitution and drug use does not work and only harms the people it attempts to control. In 1985 Dutch prostitutes founded a rights group named The Red Thread which was highly instrumental in the official legalization of prostitution in January of 1988, but full legalization of brothels took much longer and was only accomplished on October 1, 2000 (at which time the Dutch union FNV began accepting prostitutes as members). Polls show that 78% of Dutch people now consider prostitution to be a job like any other.

In the past few years, however, gangsters from Eastern Europe and Muslim countries have moved into Amsterdam, bringing illegal prostitutes with them. This has of course armed neofeminists and the few prohibitionist politicians (who as elsewhere try to equate voluntary adult prostitution with enslaved underage girls smuggled into the country), and as a result it has become more difficult to get a brothel license and in 2006 the license renewals of 30 established brothels was denied (forcing them to appeal). International news media have produced propaganda and exaggerated stories as they do everywhere, and in March 2007 the famous De Wallen red-light district held an open house day and unveiled a statue honoring prostitutes world-wide. But the hysteria has continued; in September 2007 the city bought several buildings in the red light district and closed about a third of the famous windows, then by the end of 2008 the Mayor announced plans to close a further 200 windows because of “suspected criminal gang activity”. He also closed some of the city’s 70 marijuana cafes and sex clubs, saying “It is not that we want to get rid of our red-light district. We want to reduce it. Things have become unbalanced and if we do not act we will never regain control.” Perhaps that is true, but at the same time a host of new ID and zoning regulations have appeared in the past year and “human trafficking” fanatics have made Amsterdam one of their chief targets. I don’t think abolition is in the works; the Dutch have never taken kindly to it, public opinion is against it and the Dutch prostitutes are too well-organized to permit it. But until prostitution is truly legalized in nearby de facto prohibitionist countries like the UK and France and full-prohibitionist countries like Norway, Sweden and the former Soviet Bloc, there will continue to be problems in the Netherlands. What the abolitionists are trying to represent as a failure in Dutch housekeeping is actually nothing of the kind; even if one’s own house is perfectly clean, if it is surrounded on all sides by filthy neighbors it is inevitable that it will become infested with vermin.

In the meantime, business in De Wallen goes on as usual; in every hotel room there is a free visitor’s guide which contains the following paragraph under the “Police and safety” section: If you visit one of the women, we would like to remind you, they are not always women. Out on the streets, do not shout or use bad language towards these women. Show some respect. If you have any problems with a girl or a pimp, do not hesitate to ask a police officer. We know why you are there and you can hardly surprise us. It is against the law and very dangerous to solicit prostitution on the streets. I find this paragraph interesting on several counts; the first line refers to the fact that roughly 5% of Dutch prostitutes are male (some of them dressed in drag) and another 5% transsexual; a 1997 report showed that of the 1300 male prostitutes essentially all were homosexual prostitutes (just as everyplace else, women don’t pay for sex in Amsterdam). The next line is obviously necessary because of the large number of Brits and Americans who don’t know how to conduct themselves properly around whores, and the last line reflects the arbitrary nature of prostitution regulations: In Amsterdam outdoor prostitution (i.e. streetwalking) is illegal, while in countries with anti-brothel (“bawdy house”) laws it’s the exact opposite!

Until such time as all prohibitions against women doing as we like with our own bodies are removed everywhere, there will continue to be problems associated with prostitution which are not generally associated with other professions (including pimping and sex slavery). And even once that time comes, there will always be a traffic in underage girls just as there will always be traffic in child pornography, dangerous drugs, stolen goods, blackmail information, slaves and other evils. The world is a harsh, unfair and dangerous place and will never be otherwise no matter what fanatics may think, but once consensual behaviors and harmless vices are brought into the open as they have been in Amsterdam, the police are free to pursue real crime which hurts people and legitimate sex or “vice” businesses can assist the state in controlling criminals, just as bars in the United States help prevent underage drinking. As I said at the beginning, the Dutch model is far from perfect, but compared to the sexist tyranny which pollutes the “Land of the Free” it’s a veritable Utopia.

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