The Honest Courtesan

Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. –  Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I’m sure every American over the age of 30 remembers the “Abuse Bowl” myth, which sprang into being full-grown like some deranged, castrating Athena from the head of neofeminists in January of 1993 and was mindlessly repeated by mainstream media for months before being exploded by a few reporters who bothered to check their facts rather than obediently parroting propaganda.  Unfortunately, despite the fact that there isn’t a shred of truth to it, the lie has popped up periodically for the past two decades and recently resurfaced in “sex trafficking” drag.  Neofeminists and their pets and lackeys, determined to convince the sheeple that men are savage apes whose dearest wish is to harm women, doggedly cling to and promulgate the propaganda that Super Bowl Sunday, a good candidate for the most “macho” day in the American calendar, is the occasion on which men abuse women the most.  Of course, there isn’t a particle of truth in it, but the fact that a cherished tenet of dogma is demonstrably false never stops True Believers from instilling it indelibly into the public consciousness by endless repetition.

Since my international readers, those under 30 and those with bad memories may not remember how this particular brand of poison was first released into the water supply, I’ll summarize the events.  On January 28^th, 1993 a coalition of self-proclaimed “women’s groups” called a press conference in Pasadena, California, site of that year’s Super Bowl, and announced that anecdotal evidence and a university study “suggested” that there was as much as a 40% increase in domestic violence incidents (including police reports and hospital admissions) on Super Bowl Sunday.  Within days the reporters had spread this “statistic” everywhere, and activists were quoting it as proven rather than “suggested”.  A psychologist claimed to have ten years of evidence on the phenomenon, a mass mailing advised women “don’t remain at home with him during the game”, a New York Times columnist started calling the event the “Abuse Bowl” and NBC even piously broadcast a commercial before the game to remind men that beating their wives was illegal.  There was only one problem with all of this; it was a total fabrication.  As reported on Snopes.com, a few reporters decided to check the “statistic” before repeating it, and quickly discovered not only that there were no statistics to support the claim, but that the quoted university study had found nothing of the kind.  When the Washington Post and a few other sources reported on the deception, some of those who had spread the myth issued quiet retractions, but most did not, and the “statistic” was still widely cited for more than a decade afterward.

But since “sex trafficking” has replaced “domestic violence” as the cause célèbre of misandrists and their eunuch henchmen, the myth has metamorphosed into a new form.  Apparently all those bad ol’ men who used to release their testosterone-generated energy by beating women now do so by hiring whores instead, especially underage ones.  And since (as we discussed yesterday) investigative journalism has fallen out of favor, this old propaganda in new garb has been repeated unquestioningly by the media for years rather than months, with no mainstream exposé of its falsity in sight.  As I mentioned in my column of November 23^rd, cops and trafficking hysterics now claim that the Super Bowl is the busiest day of the year for prostitution, and there is no more proof for the myth in its current form than its previous one.  Prohibitionists claim that “tens of thousands” of hookers, many or most of whom are underage, descend upon Super Bowl host cities, but when asked for evidence of these extravagant claims they point to a SINGLE instance of two Florida men convicted for pimping a 14-year-old girl through Craigslist on a “Super Bowl special.”  Other than that one news story and anecdotal evidence of cops and FBI agents who claim to have seen these hordes of whores (yet somehow never manage to arrest any unusual number of them), there is absolutely no support for this claim of Super Bowls being “Meccas” for prostitution of any kind, much less involuntary underage prostitution.  But then, neither cops nor anti-sex crusaders ever let the facts get in the way of a good story.

I owned an escort service, y’all; I know whereof I speak.  And I’m here to tell you, good conventions generate far more business for escorts than any sporting event, including the Super Bowl.  But God forbid reporters should actually call up escort services or email SWOP to find out if there’s any truth to the claims straight from the whore’s mouth, as it were; they’d much rather swallow whatever filth those with an axe to grind vomit out.  Here’s a condensed version of an article from the Daily Beast of December 9^th:

Since Craigslist dropped its “erotic services” section Backpage.com has become the nation’s premier venue for the buying and selling of underage girls.  Now The Rebecca Project for Human Rights is trying to shame Backpage into banning its erotic ads before February (when activists expect a spike in sex trafficking around the Super Bowl) by running a series of inflammatory ads in a number of papers owned by Backpage’s parent company, Village Voice Media.  There’s a valid argument that keeping sex ads on responsible sites that cooperate with police when necessary can make it easier to catch traffickers, but there’s also evidence that when mainstream venues for the buying and selling of sex disappear, not all ads migrate elsewhere.

According to a study by the Advanced Interactive Media Group, the end of Craigslist’s erotic services section “put a huge dent in revenue generated by prostitution advertising.” Indeed, nationwide, it dropped by almost 50 percent, from $76 million to $39.2 million. Some of the money that was going to Craigslist went to Backpage and other sites. But a least some of the business seems to have disappeared.  Sex trafficking will probably always exist in some form or another, but the Rebecca Project’s founder makes a convincing case that the ease and accessibility of big, well-known websites make it worse.  She first went after Craigslist after discovering, in her work with girls in the juvenile justice system, that many of them had been bought and sold for sex on the site. The same, she says, is true of Backpage. The widespread availability of underage girls on mainstream forums, she says, creates an impression that paying for sex with children just isn’t that big of a deal.

The campaign has a particular urgency as the Super Bowl approaches, because the game is a magnet for prostitution. During last year’s Super Bowl in Tampa, the Florida Department of Children & Families took custody of 24 minors who’d been brought to the area for prostitution in the days leading up to the game. This year in Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott said recently, “There is an organized effort to bring in children and women for the purpose of human trafficking and for the purpose of the sale of sex.”

I don’t think I have to go over this article line by line; most of my regular readers can almost certainly do it for yourselves by now.  The only things I feel compelled to point out are the typical use of inflammatory, inaccurate language intended to provoke an emotional response (“girls bought and sold for sex” as though their custody actually changed hands, and “children” rather than “adolescents” or “young women”); the absurdity of using Craigslist’s revenues from prostitution advertising as some sort of benchmark when it was government pressure which forced Craigslist to start charging for their previously-free ads in the first place, thus creating a convenient “straw man” for prohibitionists to knock down; and the mention (as in the Arlington, Texas story) of 24 underage hookers arrested in Florida as “proof” of tens of thousands of others hiding in the woodwork somewhere.

Since neofeminists seem so convinced that the Super Bowl poses such a dire threat to America womanhood, one wonders why they haven’t called for it to be banned.  But of course, that will never happen because A) it would deprive them of a convenient scapegoat; and B) such an attack on a cherished American institution (which generates billions in revenues) might wake up indolent reporters enough to investigate the validity of their claims, and they certainly wouldn’t want that!