I don’t think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing. – Prince Philip
In my column of November 21st I discussed “halfway whores”, and I mentioned that there are websites dedicated to helping potential sugar babies meet with potential sugar daddies. Well, one of those sites is now in the news after a rapist used it to lure a victim into a trap. Here’s the story, paraphrased from the original report in the Orlando Sentinel:
Marcelo Alves was convicted last Friday (December 3rd) of four counts of sexual battery with a deadly weapon for the rape of a 22-year-old woman from Tampa he met on a dating website called SugarDaddyForMe.com; he faces a potential life sentence. In the days before jurors found Alves guilty, his victim related graphic details of the explicit online chats and then phone conversations she shared with a man she knew as “Mark Garcia”; those communications eventually led to an arranged meeting outside a mansion in the Dr. Phillips neighborhood, where Alves, wearing pantyhose over his face, tackled her in an isolated driveway area, put a knife to her neck and told her to “shut up” repeatedly before raping her.
“I kept saying, like, ‘Please don’t kill me,'” the crying victim testified Tuesday. She recalled being raped in the rear passenger area of her car and outside the vehicle, as well. Alves also testified, saying the sex was pre-arranged and consensual, but too many other factors undermined his defense, including the fact that he used a large knife, wore the pantyhose as a mask, lured the victim to an isolated location outside a vacant mansion and portrayed himself as another man online. At the time of the attack in March 2009, Alves helped run the Valencia Community College website as a contract worker. He also had a wife, kids, a nice home — all lost as a result of his actions.
The case, however, illustrates larger issues about the potential dangers of online dating and the way a victim’s character can be impugned when online communications are part of the criminal investigation. Before describing the attacks, the victim explained that she registered with the online dating site, which is designed for men wanting “to mentor, pamper & spoil” and women wanting to be “pampered” by “that classy, caring and mature partner.” The site claims it prohibits “members from offering money in exchange for sex.” A message left with the site’s management this week was not returned.
The victim acknowledged she was looking for just such a Sugar Daddy-type relationship; she had problems paying bills and wanted to meet someone who could help her financially, she testified. So she created an online profile on the site, stating she was “fun, outgoing and crazy.” She even set an allowance on her profile, in other words the monetary amount she expected to receive periodically. Alves, 40, discovered her profile on the site, where he went by the screen name “ReadyToSpoilYou37.” He then contacted her through Yahoo Messenger and they chatted several times, discussing the possibility of sex and also the exchange of money. “We talked about possibly $1,000,” the victim said.
This admission prompted prosecutor Kelly Hicks to ask the victim, “Were you a prostitute?” The victim answered in the negative, claiming that she was willing to meet with the man she knew as Garcia even without the expectation of money. But she said when she arrived for the date, Alves wasn’t the man she expected to be there. Still, defense attorney Timothy Berry asked the victim about the encounter with Alves and about online conversations in which they discussed having sex. Alves testified that he was supposed to pay the woman $1000, but the amount changed as the sex progressed and he refused to pay. The woman then threatened to contact police and say he had raped her, he claimed. But in her closing argument, Hicks stared at Alves, saying the woman involved “is a real victim” of an attack she will remember for the rest of her life”; pointing at Alves, she then said, “That is a real rapist …Find him guilty because he is.”
Jennifer Dritt, executive director of the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence, said casting doubt on a victim’s character or suggesting she somehow deserved what happened are common defense strategies; she also said the case is troubling because of its origins online. “While most online dating relationships don’t end up this way, you really don’t know who you’re talking to,” Dritt said. “I think, potentially, they’re very dangerous. And where money is exchanged, people can have different interpretations of what’s offered and promised.”
Alves, originally from Brazil, told detectives soon after the crime that he had met about 10 other women online in the same way, but denied raping any of them. As for the victim in this case, Alves told the detectives, “I didn’t want to hurt her. I am not like that.” Aside from the sexual battery counts, Alves was also found guilty of false imprisonment, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon while wearing a mask and witness tampering. He is set to be sentenced on February 9th.
I’m very glad to see Alves get what he deserved; like so many other rapists, he clearly considered a whore to be a safe target whom a jury wouldn’t convict him for raping even if they did believe her, and it’s good to see that the jury proved him wrong. But I have to wonder if the outcome would’ve been the same had his victim been a full-fledged professional rather than a would-be sugar baby. From the way the article is written it seems the prosecutor and reporter both wanted to call attention away from the fact that the victim fully intended to transact a compensated sex arrangement; the report coyly refers to SugarDaddyForMe as a “dating site” when it’s obviously much more akin to an escort site, and the prosecutor accepted the victim’s rather incredible claim that she was willing to meet “Garcia” even without the promise of money despite the fact that she was specifically looking for a sugar daddy. Now, obviously it did not behoove the prosecutor to question further because she was trying to convict the rapist; had she been Alves’ defender I’m sure she would’ve tried to roast the poor girl alive.
But what about the reporter? Certainly it’s possible that he’s a bit naive, but it seems more likely he was attempting to downplay the commercial nature of the transaction in a vain attempt to avoid arousing the “dirty whore got what she deserved” crowd. But whatever his motivation, it was not really the right thing to do; pretending that a sugar daddy arrangement is a form of dating rather than “hooking lite” perpetuates the myth that whores are intrinsically different from other women and our clients intrinsically different from other men, which is exactly what vice cops, trafficking alarmists and “Nordic Model” crusaders want the public to think. But such arguments don’t carry the weight they once did; more and more people are awakening to the realization that harlots aren’t really all that different from our amateur sisters, and our clients aren’t at all different from other men. The author of this Jezebel article set up a profile at SugarDaddyForMe for research purposes and was surprised to discover how normal most of the members were; perhaps she can next be prevailed upon to join an escort site, where she will discover exactly the same thing.
Thats because people too readily believe what they are told, especially if it comes from someone who appears should know. Unfortunately, we all know very little and yet believe way too much of what we hear.
What happened to that young woman was tragic.
The very notion that infidelity is “cheating” seems to imply that a sexual relationship is a transaction in which things of value are being exchanged.
Hmm, that’s an interesting point. The other interpretation of the word I can see is that it’s casting a sexual relationship as a game, using “cheating” in the sense of “breaking the rules.”
Actually, my comment would have been better placed under the halfway whore article.
I have a lot of trouble seeing other people’s perspective when it comes to selling sex because, to me, honest, free market transactions are inherently good regardless of the context. So when someone talks about selling sex in negative terms (which is how it is almost universally viewed — often even by those who oppose its criminalization), I get that kind of dumb look that your dog gives you when you try to explain to him why he shouldn’t have chewed the leg off the dining room table.
I were a hooker on the witness stand, I would probably not fare very well. I’m kind of a hot head.
I totally agree; I cannot quite understand how anyone things that giving something of value for free to someone who can’t appreciate it is somehow morally superior to selling it to someone who can; you might as well say that throwing filet mignon to dogs is morally superior to selling it at a fair price in a restaurant. 🙁
Giving that filet mignon to the poor would be morally superior to selling it at a fair price in a restaurant. Not because selling it is bad, but because giving it away is even better.
I’m sorry,Sailor, but I just can’t unconditionally agree with that. Helping a person who’s in trouble (including financial trouble) is indeed a good act; no quibble there. And handouts to needy innocents (i.e. children) are fine as well because they’re not competent to care for themselves. But wholesale freebies often have a debilitating effect; those who get them (and that includes nonhuman animals) tend to grow dependent on them, and fostering dependence in another is not kindness. Furthermore, humans who are given too much for free (i.e. spoiled kids) tend to develop a sense of entitlement which can really ruin their personalities. Up until the recent past men knew that sex was never free, and I think they appreciated it more. But many modern young men have developed a sense of entitlement about sex; they believe it to be something women owe them, and as a result tend to treat women who make the mistake of getting in bed with them (professionally or otherwise) like garbage. When I first started in this business an older girl told me “the less they pay, the more they want,” and she was absolutely right; men who pay full price for sex generally appreciate it, those who get it for a cheap rate usually appreciate it much less, and those who get it for free (without even “paying” in relationship effort) don’t generally appreciate it at all, as too many young girls adrift in the “hookup culture” are discovering to their chagrin. 🙁
Well said, Maggie. Giving can be good. But repeated giving creates dependence. Making someone dependent on handouts is no different than pushing heroin. Unfortunately, that has become a glorified ideal in the current culture whether it be aimed at individuals, corporations, or entire countries.
Exactly so. Here’s a sort of true-life fable for you; a few weeks ago I was getting a pedicure, and the salon tends to keep the television on the Animal Planet or National Geographic cable channels. Well, there was a documentary on about animal attacks, and in this one segment a moray eel bit a diver’s thumb off. Apparently, the eel was old and gentle and had been fed by divers for years, but because of this had lost the ability to hunt for herself. The attack occurred in the slow season, and the marine biologist consulted for the program said the eel might not have eaten much for weeks. The diver who was attacked was feeding her sausage pieces from a plastic bag, but the bag got tangled and as he was trying to open it again the starving animal grew impatient, rushed the bag and bit off his thumb by mistake (apparently confusing it with the sausage).
I can’t help comparing that eel with a man who has an overdeveloped sense of sexual entitlement, rushing to take something by force he has been trained to believe is his by right and for free. 🙁
Hmmm…
Sounds to me like you two may as well be discussing the government welfare system.
That would be another example, yes. People who are dependent on handouts from one entity or group have no choice but to dance to that entity’s tune if they want the bread to keep coming (another example would be desperate message-board escorts who kiss male members’ arses). There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. 🙁
Thank you, Brandy. We’re not talking about the morality or efficacy of giving here, we’re talking about welfare and eels. Thus the less I say from here the better.
🙂
Good thing the eel feeder wasn’t naked.
“People who are dependent on handouts from one entity or group have no choice but to dance to that entity’s tune if they want the bread to keep coming”
Ahh the fine institution of marriage also comes to mind LOL
Too true!
In principle I agree with you here, Maggie. Quoting Heinlein again, TANSTAAFL.
I believe the problem some people have with that specifically is that, in some people’s eyes, TANSTAAFL equates, on the one hand, with lack of empathy, and on the other, with ‘everything has its price’, ‘everything is just about money’. That these things are not a necessary consequence of TANSTAAFL is an often-missed fact.
Its never for free!
That’s true, but lots of moralists and other naive folk like to pretend that it is. 🙁
The media definitely ignores the commercial aspect of many non-prostitutional (I invented a new word!) relationships. And once they place you on the prostitutional side of the line, they basically define everyone the same. All are victims, would leave if they could, are abused, exploited, coerced, and in denial if they disagree with any of these characterizations. You couldn’t find that much similarity among members of a congregation of Southern Baptist snake handlers. To pigeon-hole all hookers world-wide as being all the same is astoundingly ignorant.
Exactly right. It’s the same old Victorian “whore as monster” rhetoric dressed up in 21st-century garb.
Giving something to someone means the person receiving has no sense of its worth. Giving it in exchange for a mutually agreed medium of exchange means the person is likely to cherish it more. Sex is no different, but society frowns upon that because such a transaction is supposedly “amoral.” Ay Dios Mio.
That nonsense is fairly recent, though; the crypto-misogynistic idea that women should give sex away willy-nilly without compensation of any kind first appeared in the late Romantic period of the early 19th century. Many people like to pretend that this is “liberating” for women, when in fact all it does is establish the groundwork for women being considered the collective property of the state rather than the property of one man. Yeah, that’s “social progress” all right. 🙁
“Up until the recent past men knew that sex was never free, and I think they appreciated it more. But many modern young men have developed a sense of entitlement about sex; they believe it to be something women owe them”
Well, I started to restate what happened after President Bill Clinton said that “oral sex wasn’t sex.” He let loose a tidal wave of blowjobs-as-goodnight-kisses thinking and we’ve never been the same. So indeed, girls nowadays do things for free that you used to have to pay whores to do. Or that only “nasty women” did. Once you have a generation of men growing up getting their dicks sucked in Jr High and High School, what else could they possibly think?
“as too many young girls adrift in the “hookup culture” are discovering to their chagrin.”
I don’t get this; as much as I’ve learned from you I’m afraid this one still escapes me. I thought that this is what females wanted…the ability to have sex “like men do.” The ability to engage in casual sex, and be loose, free, and “empowered.” So I really don’t get why living it up in college, like the girl with the Fuck List did, would cause chagrin to the girls.
“That nonsense is fairly recent, though; the crypto-misogynistic idea that women should give sex away willy-nilly without compensation of any kind first appeared in the late Romantic period of the early 19th century. Many people like to pretend that this is “liberating” for women, when in fact all it does is establish the groundwork for women being considered the collective property of the state rather than the property of one man. Yeah, that’s “social progress” all right.”
See now…again. Cornfusement. Because this is the way I was raised, meaning, it was very old school, and that a woman’s virtue & body & favors *meant* something. But I’ve had to adjust my thinking to today’s modern culture where women give it away for free, and by the time a girl is nineteen you may be getting sloppy 132nds. 😐
So if women have been deceived, who deceived them? What did they *think* would be the result of being more sexually accessible to men without requiring payment or a wedding ring?
Nope. It’s what feminists wanted women to want, and convinced many women they wanted, and now the pigeons are coming home to roost and those women are discovering they’ve been lied to. Whores are free and empowered; sluts are working for free to fulfill somebody else’s view of what they “should” do. And that illustrates one of the main differences between archeofeminism and neofeminism; neofeminists are forever telling women how they “should” be, while archeofeminists say “be proud of who and what you are.”
They didn’t think at all, they believed in the catechism that was preached to them even though it flew in the face of logic as religion so often does. 🙁
I agree that there are misunderstandings in this culture, and lots of people are doing things just because they were told this is what they were supposed to do. But there is a little bit of oversimplification here, Maggie. To claim that all sluts (= promiscuous women) are simply doing what they were told is like claiming that all whores are poor victims of society who were forced to do what they do. Speaking frankly, I’ve met a few real-life sluts (and seen a few more online) who couldn’t care less about what feminists think they should be doing; they simply enjoy they lifestyle.
Which is not to say that some people are not doing what they are doing just to fulfill someone else’s agenda. This happens, too. One thing doesn’t prevent the other.
There’s no oversimplification; take a look back up the thread. We weren’t talking about sluts in general, but about women who screw around because they want to “have sex like men do.” The #1 most common reason for noncommercial female promiscuity is daddy issues; girls raised without a father are vastly more likely to be promiscuous than those raised with one.
“Nope. It’s what feminists wanted women to want, and convinced many women they wanted, and now the pigeons are coming home to roost and those women are discovering they’ve been lied to.”
You’ve said this before, but I must admit that I’m still stunned by it.
So in essence you’re saying that the very modern belief of “female sexual empowerment” and women engaging in casual sex is leaving women *less* happy?
What about the college girl with the Fuck List? She can’t be the only girl that has one, and she didn’t seem to be unhappy in sleeping with all those men.
I still don’t get it. Why wouldn’t women be happy with the modern sexual freedoms that they now have & enjoy?
Conforming with an expected pattern of behavior is NOT freedom. In the past women showed restraint in sexual matters because they were expected to; now they’re promiscuous because it’s expected. But the former led to intimacy and the latter often leads to isolation; why do you think they’re unhappy? They’ve given up their birthrights for a bowl of porridge.
Women won’t be sexually free until neofeminism is destroyed and women do what pleases THEM individually, whether that be chastity or serial monogamy or harlotry, without being condemned for it by any group who presumes to tell them what they “should” want.
Ideally, everything would be given away willy-nilly. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world of scarcity, where there is not enough to go around or, at least, enough for everybody to have a lot. So the whole of economics and much of everything else revolves around distribution: who gets what, how, and how much.
One way to deal with this is to set up a system where everybody would have the same amount of goods and services, and if somebody with extra is unwilling to be reduced to the same level as everybody else, well that greedy so-and-so should be MADE to give up his excess. You need a powerful, well-informed State to do this.
This was tried, by about half the world. It didn’t work. States are made up of people, and people given the power to decide, by force of Law and of Arms, who gets what and how much are even more susceptible to corruption than ordinary governments. One or two countries still claim to follow this philosophy, but they do not. Nope, not even China or Cuba. Yeah, I’m talking about communism.
Another way is to make it all a Darwinian struggle, in which those who are able to gather more, be it through hard work, intelligence, or sheer dumb luck, hold on to it all, and those who can not acquire a lot obviously don’t deserve it. Those who have can give something to them f they want, but they don’t have to, and giving to those who don’t deserve it (and they obviously don’t deserve it, or they’d already have it) is seen as sort of immoral.
This too was tried. It didn’t work either. In fact, it left this world even sooner than communism did, and is such an awful way of doing things that communism was invented because of it.
So where does sex fit into all of this? Well, sex isn’t exactly scarce, in the sense that there’s plenty of it available, but the most commonly desired sort of sex requires one person of each gender, and there is a differential desire for what it takes both to do. So the one who wants it a little less, but is needed by the one who wants it more, can demand a bit of something extra.
Or put it this way: for an hour and a half, it’s still Christmas (Happy Holidays, everybody!). If you got a brand new pair of roller skates and I got a brand new key, but you’re a lot more obsessed over how useless your roller skates are without my key than I am about how useless my key is without your roller skates, then I can get something extra out of you for the use of my key, and you’ll probably let my use your roller skates for free (it isn’t really free; it’s part of the price for getting to use my key).
I agree with you again in principle, Maggie, but you’re making the past look too rosy here. It’s not that women were clearly better-off before (oh, there were better and worse times in the past; many things go in cycles). In the past, they also had to conform to expected patterns of behavior (‘be a good girl’, etc., as you yourself said to Scorch on other occasions), and their birthright — the right to dissent and ‘do their own thing’ — was as sold for a bowl of porridge then as it is now.
I think the problem is this: because the new conformism is different from the old one, Scorch — any many people — see it as freedom. ‘We’re not doing anymore what we were forced to do before — therefore we are free. Right?’
No. Not necessarily, of course.
People will only be free when they learn to think with their own heads and decide for themselves how they want to live. Instead we spend a lot of time trying to prove to each other that our own preferences are the best, and that others should live exactly as we do — which, if we’re successful, will only lead to another wave of forced conformism, which will leave some people unhappy — because the truth is, we’re not all exactly alike, and the lifestyle that is good for one person is not for another.
Women (or men for that matter) don’t have freedom if they all have to be sluts, or whores. They don’t have freedom if they all have to be non-sluts, or non-whores, either. They only have freedom when either option is open.
How difficult it is to make people really have all options open is a different matter.
Sailor Barsoom, you make it sound as if anarchy and communism were the two options. Middle ways have been tried, to varying degrees of success. Most Europeans are quite happy with their ‘social democracy’ governments of one kind or another — they will quibble about the differences between France, England, and The Netherlands, but all in all they don’t seem to be too sad because there is a safety network under them. Their productivity is also high, so it doesn’t feel to them as if hand-outs have turned them into lazy lotus-eaters — or so they claim. Personally, I’m of two minds about this, but you make me feel curious about your take on that. What do you think about the European system(s)?
Ah, but my point was that the two extremes (communism and laissez-faire capitalism) were both failures, with laissez-faire biting the proverbial dust even sooner than communism did.
But while about half the world decided to give this new experimental system, communism, a try, the other half saved capitalism by telling laissez-faire to take a hike, installing a safety net, regulating things (yes, sometimes poorly and/or too much), and so on. Marx’s army of displaced workers (at least in that half of the human population) never rose up to overthrow the system because the workers had more sense than to sit around doing nothing until an army’s worth of them were displaced. Nope, they organized and spoke out and MADE capitalism work.
I find it amusing that Marx’s biggest mistake might well have been that he sold his heroes, The Workers, short.
Today, almost every country in the world uses a “mixed economy,” because it works.
Marx’s later works called for exactly this – reforming capitalism from within. These works were not particularly popular in communist countries, for obvious reasons – and they weren’t popular outside of communist countries, for similarly obvious reasons. Point is, yes, it was a mistake, and his biggest – and he realized that.
Fascinating. So Marx caught on long before the Marxists did.
That’s almost worthy of GROUCHO Marx.
“because the truth is, we’re not all exactly alike, and the lifestyle that is good for one person is not for another.”
^This.