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Archive for February, 2011

Josie Arlington

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 8, 2011| 12 Comments »

Nowhere in this country will you find a more complete and thorough sporting house than the Arlington…Miss Arlington, after suffering a loss of many thousand dollars through a fire, has refurbished and remodeled the entire place at an enormous expense, and the mansion is now a palace fit for kings. –  Blue Book (Third Edition)

Mary Deubler was born in New Orleans to German immigrant parents on February 8th, 1864, and began working as a prostitute in 1881 under the name Josie Alton.  It is likely that the idea first came from her boyfriend Philip Lobrano, a useless man with whom she stayed until 1890 though they never actually married.  Josie was very attractive, intelligent and industrious and therefore had no trouble supporting Lobrano and several members of her family as well.  She was also, however, notoriously hot-tempered and never shied away from a fight with either customers or other whores, and when she opened her own brothel at 172 Customhouse Street in 1888 (under the name Josie Lobrano), the place soon became notorious for the feistiness of both its madam and the employees she attracted.

Since Josie was a shrewd businesswoman the brothel prospered, but the situation was too unstable to continue for long and on November 2, 1890 a free-for-all broke out which involved nearly everyone in the building.  In the ensuing melee Philip Lobrano shot Josie’s brother Peter, and though he was eventually acquitted she would have nothing more to do with him nor with anyone else who had a reputation for fighting.  Changing her name once again to that by which she is remembered, Josie Arlington, she fired her entire staff and vowed that from then on fighting would not be tolerated in her house; she further decided that only “refined gentlemen” who preferred “amiable foreign girls” would be welcome as customers.  She had apparently decided to operate the highest-class brothel in the entire country, and in the minds of many she eventually succeeded.

The Chateau Lobrano d’Arlington soon developed into the one of the most profitable and highly-respected brothels in the city, and though it is highly doubtful that as many of her girls were imported as she claimed, it is unquestionable that they were amiable; Josie had learned her lesson and immediately ejected anyone who caused trouble, whether employee or customer.  So when Storyville was established in 1898, she had plenty of money to build an opulent four-story, sixteen-bedroom mansion with an onion-domed cupola at 225 North Basin Street.  In keeping with her “foreign” theme this brothel, now called simply The Arlington, had a number of parlors decorated in various national styles including the Turkish Parlor, the Japanese Parlor, the Vienna Parlor and the American Parlor; it also had a Hall of Mirrors and several large dens, all lavishly decorated with paintings, hangings, statuary and furniture.  It was, as the Blue Book expressed it, “absolutely and unquestionably the most decorative and costly fitted-out sporting palace ever placed before the American public.”

Josie lived on the premises with her lover John T. Brady (whom she “took up with” soon after dumping Lobrano) and about a dozen girls at a time, although the number could be as high as twenty during Carnival season.  It was one of the most expensive houses, charging $5.00/hour at a time when the average American workman made 22¢/hour.  The Arlington also offered a live pornographic show called The Circus (I shall leave the details to your imaginations) and various specialties, but there was one common request of that time to which its madam refused to cater: defloration of virgins.  Brothels of the day charged $200 or more for a credible virgin, but Josie absolutely refused to participate in this disreputable trade and insisted that no girl ever had or ever would lose her virginity at The Arlington.  But despite this refusal (or perhaps, in part, because of it) the business was incredibly lucrative and within a few years she bought herself a $35,000 mansion on Esplanade Avenue and a country house and farm in Covington (north of Lake Pontchartrain).

Alas, nothing lasts forever; the Arlington was badly damaged in a fire in 1905 and the business temporarily moved to a set of rooms above a saloon owned by Josie’s friend Tom Anderson.  The building soon acquired the nickname “The Arlington Annex” as a result, and Anderson was so pleased by this he actually had the name painted on the front of the building.  Extensive renovations costing about $5000 were carried out and soon the Arlington was even more elegant than before, but Josie’s mind could not be so easily repaired; she had almost died in the fire, and in the years which followed she became increasingly reclusive and morbid.  She retired in 1909 to her mansion, leased the Arlington to Anna Casey and sold many of her other assets to Tom Anderson, then bought a large plot in the exclusive Metairie Cemetery and built an ornate tomb of red marble with elaborately engraved copper doors.  In front of the tomb stands a beautiful bronze statue of a young girl knocking at the door; she is said to represent a virgin being denied access to the interior of the Arlington.  The project was designed by the noted Albert Weiblen and cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000.

For the next five years, Josie Arlington continued to decline mentally and physically; she became moody and quarrelsome, sinking into dementia in 1913 and dying on February 14th, 1914 – less than a week after her 50th birthday.  She was buried the next day, and though most of the madams in the District sent flowers the actual turnout at her funeral was very poor:  Tom Anderson, Josie’s common-law husband John Brady, her niece (and chief heir) Anna Deubler, regular client Judge Richard Otero and several representatives of the Sisters of Charity, a convent to which Josie had been generous.  A week later Brady and Anna Deubler were married, and though Josie’s father tried to contest her will the couple retained control of the entire estate.

But that isn’t quite the end of the story.  Soon after Josie’s funeral people began to report that sometimes after dark the tomb seemed to burst into flame, with tongues of ghostly, cold fire flickering across the red marble (some claimed it was due to reflection from a nearby traffic light but this could never be proven).  The site soon became a tourist attraction, and before long these visitors began to report an even more terrifying phenomenon:  the statue of the girl at the door sometimes vanished from her post and was said to walk about the cemetery.  Two gravediggers even claimed to have seen her in the act of leaving the tomb!  Naturally, the family was deeply upset and so they eventually had Josie’s remains moved to a different grave and sold the “haunted” tomb to the Morales family.  Though caretakers of the cemetery have been ordered not to point out the tomb to the curious any longer, it is not difficult to find and though no one has seen the phantom fire for at least seven decades there are still occasional claims that the bronze virgin continues her nocturnal wanderings to this day.

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Misrepresentation

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2011| 51 Comments »

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask. –  Victor Hugo

Last Tuesday (February 1st), someone calling herself “Bedelia” tried to reply to my “Numerology” column with the following response.  As regular readers know, I don’t allow troublemakers to post freely on my blog; though I certainly believe in free speech, there are already beaucoup venues for trafficking fetishists, religious fanatics, neofeminists and other undesirables to spread their filth without my having to allow them into my online “house”.  And like the unwanted visitors in the famous Monty Python sketch, once one admits such people they always wreak havoc and there is no guarantee that they’ll ever leave.  I have nothing, however, against caging up such creatures in the back yard and letting my guests look at them while I point out their features of note.  Here is one such trespasser; the first thing I want to point out is that, since she cannot refute the statistical analysis in the post to which she tried to reply, she does not even make the attempt but rather tries to misdirect the reader’s attention from the facts with a lurid story which also serves the rhetorical function of a gambit to establish herself as a more credible authority than I am.  In other words, the reply is a stab at an “end run” around both the statistical facts in the essay and my established reputation.

I was a hooker for ten years in New York.  Nearly every one I worked with had had an ‘entree’ into the life that included a systemic breaking, gang rape, and captivity.  We were working under conditions extremely similar to trafficking.  In my experience most ex-prostitutes are so traumatized they are extremely unlikely to tell people of their experiences.  It took me 14 years to get to the point where I can talk about it anonymously on an online website.

The writer may indeed have experienced this or something like it, but this invalidates neither the experiences of other women nor the demonstrable fact that the vast majority of prostitutes are in the profession voluntarily.  Pay close attention to the cleverly disguised attempt in the second-to-last sentence to cast doubt on the veracity of all of us whores who write online by the implication that “real” prostitutes are too traumatized to do so (she attempts this trick again, though much more directly, in the second excerpt below). It is certainly possible that “most ex-prostitutes” of Bedelia’s experience have indeed been traumatized, but she tells us nothing about what that experience might be.  Is it limited to meetings held by trafficking fanatics, or to holding cells?  And if the latter, on which side of the bars was Bedelia?  It certainly doesn’t involve any interaction with the typical independent internet escort like 60% or more of prostitutes!

If I was raised in a convent I might well believe the statement “most women are celibate”, but that wouldn’t make it true.  And limited experience is no excuse for ignorance or misrepresentation in this age of easily-obtained information; activist Jill Brenneman has written many times about her three years as an involuntary prostitute and she is quite clear on the differences between trafficked sex work and normal sex work.  If Jill knows the difference, so should Bedelia before presuming to set herself up as an authority on the subject.  But even if she’s simply ignorant or misguided, it doesn’t excuse this:

Sexual exploitation is what it is.  Those who try to hide it or whitewash it behind rhetoric are using the voicelessly disenfranchised millions of women who suffer abusive, violence, and rape in prostitution to further their own political ends.  It is possible to be doing this without being conscious of it — Usually when a woman is posing as a prostitute in favor of the sex industry, as Maggie is, she is making money off pimping (or being a madam).  It’s an old trick (no pun intended).

The incredible hypocrisy of the second sentence (I think we all know which people are using women to further their own political ends) is followed by a blatant reiteration of the accusation from the first section above, and though I am the one she directly names the mud is clearly intended to splash on every other sex worker who speaks or writes in favor of decriminalization.  As I pointed out in several recent columns (especially this one and its sequel), trafficking fanatics obviously don’t have a very high opinion of their audience because they clearly expect their statements, no matter how ludicrous, to be accepted at face value.  It’s sad, however, to see that “anyone who would defend a witch (communist, pedophile, etc) must be one herself” is still the weapon of choice for those who dare to challenge the verity of statements and accusations made by witch-hunters.

Every day I wake up thinking of the women I worked alongside, the two who were murdered by my pimp, the one who took a fatal overdose and called our madam asking for help.  THe [sic] madam did not send help, but later did send goons to the dead girls [sic] apartment to remove all signs of the madam’s associaiton [sic].  You see, the madam didn’t want to do anything that would bring attention to her business.

Beside the lurid appeal to emotion, the rest of this is exactly what those of us who support decriminalization constantly point out.  Because our trade is illegal, shady escort services and abusive pimps can conduct their sleazy business unhindered; nasty things thrive in the dark.  And as activists constantly point out, whores are not free to report rapes, theft, overdoses, trafficking or anything else because the cops simply arrest the reporter and ignore her report (a fine example appears in this coming Wednesday’s column).

Nearly all prostitution is backed by organized crime, and this threat on the prostitutes is ever-present.

This is the most blatant lie in the entire piece, and the one which most causes me to doubt the sincerity of the whole thing.  The “organized crime” myth is favored by only one group, the police; even trafficking fanatics prefer to represent most pimps as “networked” but independent operators, with only some large operations backed by organized crime.  Are there escort services owned by the Mafia, massage parlors controlled by Asian organized crime and girls trafficked by Eastern European syndicates?  Undoubtedly, but to declare that mobsters are shaking down “nearly all” independent escorts and buying up agencies wholesale, or that every two-bit pimp is a card-carrying gangster, is like something out of a 1930’s crime movie.

I do think it should not be illegal to be a prostitute.  I believe the best model is the Swedish and Norwegian legislation, where it’s legal to be a prostitute, but not legal to be a pimp or a John.  The Canadian model, where pimping is illegal, but collecting money for sex is not illegal, is an improvement over the US system.

This last paragraph, I think, is the key to recognizing “Bedelia’s” scam; her support for the Swedish Model marks her as a neofeminist, and her claim that the omnipresent male oppressor is organized crime make me suspect she’s a policewoman; I’ve also never heard a real hooker use the word “john” for a customer, though perhaps New York streetwalkers do.  Accusing one’s enemies of criminal motives is also a typical police-style propaganda trick, especially when accompanied by a conscious or unconscious assumption of authority as in the second and fourth excerpts above.  Obviously, there’s no way to be sure of this because she isn’t going to admit it, but I suspect “Bedelia” to be an indoctrinated neofeminist, possibly a policewoman, attempting to win prostitutes and our female supporters over to the “Swedish Model” but too poorly-informed to realize that real escorts and others who know the truth about our lives can spot her a mile off.

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Real People

Posted in Current Events, Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 6, 2011| 15 Comments »

Every harlot was a virgin once. –  William Blake

On many occasions I’ve written about the fact that whores aren’t all that different from everyone else; that is to say we’re different from each other just like everyone else is different, and we no more share a certain “whore personality type” than all amateurs share a “non-whore personality type”.  We’re not all addicts, nor are we all emotionally damaged, nor have we all been molested as children.  We’re not all nymphomaniacs or criminals (except insofar as our societies choose to brand us as criminals), or pimped “sex slaves”, and we don’t all have low-self esteem; in fact a disproportionate number of us have high self-esteem, which anyone who actually bothered to talk to real whores instead of just chanting dogma would realize is almost inevitable.  We have families, children and friends, outside interests, hopes, dreams, fears and needs just like everyone else.  But some people insist on portraying us as somehow inhuman, with dangerous or even fatal results.

A new advertising campaign in Nova Scotia hopes to spread the message that we are real people and therefore deserve the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as everyone else does; here’s a paraphrased version of a story about that campaign which appeared in the Chronicle Herald on Wednesday, January 26th:

At first glance, you might expect the wholesome-looking woman staring from posters in Metro Transit bus shelters to be selling something like milk or granola.Nova Scotia ad “I’m glad my prostitute made me finish school,” says the jarring copy that accompanies the ads for Stepping Stone, a Halifax group that advocates for and offers outreach to street-level sex workers. And then in much smaller type:  “Sex workers are mothers too.”

The controversial campaign was designed by Halifax-based Extreme Advertising and aims to humanize the stereotypes of those practicing the world’s oldest profession.  Violent attacks against prostitutes were Stepping Stone’s motivation for the campaign, according to Anthony Taaffe, the creative director at Extreme.  “People have a bad habit of pigeonholing sex workers as not being people,” he said.  “It’s easy for people to kind of go, ‘Oh, that woman’s just a whore.’  Well, no, that person is also somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter or somebody’s sister or something like that.  So it helps humanize them a little bit.  And I think that’s what we want people to really understand is you might not necessarily agree with what they do for a job, but don’t forget that they’re humans and they deserve the same respect that you give to your brother or your father or your mother.”

“We did want to get people’s attention,” said Rene Ross, the executive director of Stepping Stone.  “And we really wanted folks to see sex workers for what they are, and that is people, and to get people talking about the issue, because the reality is sex workers are criminalized in Canada and they face a great amount of stigma, marginalization and violence.”

Sadly, it would be nearly impossible to launch such a campaign in the United States; nobody would dare to contradict the politically correct view of hookers as infantilized victims to be “rescued” from “pimps”, our customers, or even ourselves.  And in recent years trafficking fetishists have dehumanized us even more, into mere numbers:  The larger a crowd any person vanishes into, the less her individuality can be perceived.  I don’t think it’s done on purpose, but it couldn’t be more effective if it were; by reducing individual women – daughters, sisters, mothers, lovers, friends, wives, professionals, entrepreneurs, priestesses, therapists and any number of others – into mere digits in a huge number like “10,000 prostitutes coming to the Super Bowl” or “300,000 trafficked victims”, the fetishists erase these women’s individuality.  They become mere ants in a mound, grains of rice in a sack, drops of water in a bucket…identical, interchangeable particles who don’t have to be cared about as individual human beings, just treated collectively as part of a “problem” to be “solved”.  Remember the song “Easy To Be Hard” from Hair?

And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?

infantalized prostitutes adUnfortunately, there are a very large number of people who do indeed only care about the “bleeding crowd” while turning their backs on the needs of real human beings.  It’s very easy to claim to be oh-so-concerned about the tens of thousands of “teenage sex slaves” who don’t actually exist, because they don’t have faces and idiosyncrasies and opinions which the “rescuers” might find offensive.  Imaginary sex slaves who can never really be rescued don’t make inconvenient demands like “OK, if you don’t want me to be a whore give me a job which makes just as much money and still allows me to be my own boss and have the flexibility to go to school/be with my kids/write my book/work my other job.”  Real women do, and thus it’s much better for the fanatics not to think about us in that way; numbers can be manipulated, modified and made to do what a skillful manipulator wishes, but real women can’t.  Real women may not wish to repent, to waste their lives enriching others by drudge work, or to parrot whatever lies their “rescuers” wish to put in their mouths, and there’s nothing the prohibitionists hate more than whores who refuse to allow themselves to be pimped to the prohibitionist cause.

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Between the Ears

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , on February 5, 2011| 38 Comments »

Sex is between the ears as well as between the legs. –  H.L. Newbold

There was a big discussion recently in the comments following my July 24th column about male sexuality vs. female; though I insisted that it’s a difference of kind rooted in brain architecture, regular reader Asehpe wondered whether it might not simply be a difference of degree deriving from men’s much higher testosterone levels.  I’m sure all my readers realize that men’s testosterone levels are much higher than women’s, but some of you may not realize just how much higher: the normal male level ranges from 300-600 nanograms/milliliter of blood (ng/mL) while the normal female level is only 10-30 ng/mL.  In other words, the lowest normal male level is still ten times the highest normal female level.  And since degree of sex drive is roughly related to testosterone levels in both sexes, it should come as no surprise that men tend to be such horny beasts in comparison with women.  Because the ovaries produce most female testosterone (a small amount comes from the adrenal gland), women’s levels often drop dramatically after menopause and their sex drives often drop with the level. Some such women get positive results from a testosterone patch, but many others don’t, and some women don’t experience any noticeable dip in sex drive after menopause.  And that brings us to this article by Dr. Ricki Pollycove which was published a week ago Wednesday (January 26th) on Huffington Post; she talks about the complexities of female sexuality and why testosterone isn’t always the answer, and in light of the previous discussion I thought my readers might be interested.  IMHO, it tends to support my position that the male/female sex drive difference is one of brain-based kind rather than testosterone-based degree, but read the article and decide for yourself; here are a few highlights.

…There are many complexities to the science regarding testosterone and its androgen cousins…The actual science of measuring testosterone (T) in women is where a lot of our problems begin.  The levels found naturally in women are less than a tenth of those produced by 30-something aged men.  With such a small female range of “normal,” the individual difference between our cyclic high point (right around ovulation in menstruating women not using hormonal contraception) and the pre-menstrual period low is relatively small.  And on top of this, the T levels between different women vary considerably.  And to make it an even tougher puzzle to solve, a particular T level, as measured by the most accurate blood testing methods, does not correlate with better or worse sexual satisfaction when different women are compared to each other.  So even if you get the best “gold standard” testosterone blood test and “know your numbers” it may not correlate with your personal experience one way or another…

In other words, some women with comparatively low testosterone levels have higher sex drive and better sexual satisfaction than other women with higher levels; there’s no direct correlation between different women.  After my hysterectomy my endocrinologist monitored my hormone levels while we were trying to determine the best hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for me; upon discovering that my post-hysterectomy testosterone levels varied between about 2-5 ng/mL he asked if I had experienced any drop in sex drive and appeared surprised when I told him my desire had actually increased!

…Women who seek improved sexual function…are likely to get a blood test, often to find out that their levels of testosterone are considered “normal”…Depending on the T hormone study (often conducted by departments of psychiatry, where sexuality research is most at home in our culture), the strongest statement that stands up to rigorous science is that among women who complain of lackluster sexual functioning, added T can be of statistically significant benefit IF their blood levels…are below the middle third of the normal range.

What this means in English is that if a woman who complains of low sex drive has a low (10-16 ng/mL) testosterone level, giving her extra testosterone often (but not always) increases that drive, but if her levels are about 17 ng/mL or higher it doesn’t usually have any significant effect.

Part of the problem is how doctors research and measure sexual experience in women…Studies in women are more difficult as compared to men.  Male measures of orgasm/ejaculation are clear cut end points of sexual satisfaction whereas women have a less defined description of what constitutes satisfying sex with a partner.  With the mix of issues surrounding T measurement, absolute levels of T not correlating well with an individual woman’s sexual function and the placebo effect being very powerful with regard to sexual performance (30 to 40 percent improvement with the dummy pills or creams), it’s no wonder we are still stuck with a huge difference of opinion between professionals who take care of women’s hormonal balance…

It’s easy to tell if a man is aroused, and a healthy aroused man should be able to achieve orgasm, but it ain’t necessarily so with women.  The article states that “the ability to achieve orgasm is not highly correlated with T levels” in women, yet women who only think they’re getting a “horniness booster” still show 30% improvement even though it’s all in their minds!

…It may indeed be valuable to learn if your T level is in the lowest third of women, as this group is significantly improved with some added T support.  But the chances are that your blood levels are in the middle or upper third group of women.  You can try DHEA (over the counter) as T support if your blood T level is mid-range or at the bottom third. You may risk getting more pimples, especially on chin, nose, forehead and areas around the mouth with rising T levels, even when in normal ranges.  And too much T is NOT a good thing!  Beyond skin and hair changes (like zits and balding at the temples) there is a higher risk for a variety of diseases, like cardiovascular disease risk, stroke and liver tumors with overdoing it with T…

…The good news is that behavior modification can be a big help for many women.  Don’t take the laptop to bed.  Don’t watch TV in bed, dozing off next to your partner once again without so much as a good cuddle…Are you actually allowing arousal/foreplay activities before you hit the annoyance level?  So go ahead, take a combined approach of a medical and hormone evaluation plus enjoy the full spectrum of behavior modification activities…whatever suggests romance to you.  If we are to enjoy living with our partner beyond acting like parallel parked cars in a garage, it requires intentional efforts long term.

Here’s the meat; though some women’s sexual problems are indeed hormonally based and can benefit from replacement therapy if the levels are unusually low, most women’s sexual problems derive not from what’s going on in their bodies but from what’s going on in their heads.  Dr. Pollycove concludes the article with the statement “don’t just focus on testosterone as it may be less of a factor than we once thought,” and I heartily agree with her.  She and I are both experts in different aspects of human sexuality, but our experiences have in this case led us to the same conclusion via two different routes.  My low testosterone levels never affected my sex drive because I’ve always been open to sex; IMHO what’s going on in a woman’s bloodstream pales into insignificance beside what’s going on between her ears.

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A Distorted Lens

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 4, 2011| 24 Comments »

We do not see the lens through which we look. –  Ruth Benedict

We all see the world through the lens of personal bias, and in the case of those who are not freethinkers this lens is often both highly distorted and not individual.  Indeed, many if not most people wear cultural “spectacles” of which they are not even aware, and the world they see may seem strange and warped to those of us with clearer vision.  I was recently referred to this story about prostitution law in Iceland by “Deep Geek”, who sometimes reads my column on his Talk Geek To Me podcast.  As some of you are no doubt aware Iceland shares with her Scandinavian sisters Norway and Sweden the sick, paternalistic “Nordic Model” of prostitution law which characterizes women as permanent wards of the state who are as psychologically and morally unable to consent to compensated sex as many Americans believe girls under 18 are psychologically and morally unable to consent to any sex.  But the politicians of Iceland, their brains perhaps numbed by the cold of their land and confused by the wild seasonal variations in the amount of daylight received by their pineal glands, add some of their own frightening, extremist rhetoric to the usual propaganda and thereby allow the rest of us a glimpse at the strange shape of the lenses they wear, but cannot see.  The article is paraphrased for clarity:

Gudrún Jónsdóttir is the spokeswoman for Stígamót, the Education and Counseling Center for Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Violence; she claims that between thirty and forty women annually seek help from the organization because of their experiences within  prostitution and the porn industry.  Currently, Stígamót is preparing a shelter for women who want to quit prostitution or have been subject to slave trafficking in the porn industry.  “There are women in Iceland who really need this kind of service.  We have been aware of this need for a long time,” said Jónsdóttir.  She said that it is often very difficult for women to quit prostitution; “We know of women who have already sought help but there have been no tailored solutions for them.  Not all women need to stay in a shelter when they are quitting prostitution but some women really need it because the way out is hard and difficult.  These women are ridden by shame and guilt…they are stuck in a net and need help to break free, both because the industry always drags them back and because they are scared,” said Jónsdóttir.  “I argue constantly that the porn industry is nothing but violence against the women who take part in it.  The consequences of getting involved in this industry are serious and totally comparable to experiencing hardcore violence.  These women find it difficult to live with what they have done and experienced.  We have seen women give up and commit suicide,” she said.

At first, this looks pretty much like any other neofeminist anti-sex rhetoric which demonizes prostitution and pornography.  But look a little more closely; in the United States and most of Europe it’s not usual to claim that adult women are “trafficked” into the porn industry, or that producers actually use force to control them.  And though there are exceptions like Linda Lovelace, in the US it’s pretty rare for anti-porn activists to claim that adult women in porn are literally pimped.  But considering that trafficking fetishists very often make that claim about underage girls, we can see that Icelandic neofeminists essentially view adult women as American extremists view teenage girls:  frightened, malleable and helpless to control their own lives without the help of “rescue” organizations.

Until 2007, Icelandic law was harshly prohibitionist:  “Anyone engaging in prostitution for own upkeep shall be subject to imprisonment for up to two years.”  But in 2007 neofeminists convinced the government that most women who sell sex do so out of desperation or because they are forced into prostitution by others, and prostitution was thus briefly legalized until 2009, when the Nordic Model was fully adopted.  Then in 2010 Iceland went one step further by banning stripping as well; if the rhetoric in the article above is typical, can porn be far behind?  Icelandic prime minister Johanna Sigurðardottir, a declared lesbian, said:  “The Nordic countries are leading the way on women’s equality, recognizing women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale.”  And the female politician behind the stripping ban, Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, said:  “It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold.”

This is, of course, what happens when men allow themselves to be reduced to eunuchs and turn control of their sexuality over to radical lesbian neofeminists.  “Women’s equality”?  Not by any stretch of the imagination.  Iceland infantilizes its female citizens to an even greater degree than Norway and Sweden do, and in the pretense that prostitution and stripping are the selling of women themselves rather than services they freely choose to provide, Iceland essentially declares that women (except for lesbian politicians, of course) have no value other than their sexual characteristics. If it is recognized, as in advanced countries, that women have value outside of our sexual characteristics, then prostitution, porn acting are stripping are clearly seen as simply services a woman might or might not choose to provide.  But in backward regimes like Iceland, a woman has no value other than her sexual characteristics and so sale of those characteristics is seen as sale of the entire woman (since she has nothing else of value to offer).  And because the government of Iceland is unwilling to cede control over women to anyone (including the women themselves), any activities which offend the sensibilities of the rulers must be prohibited, even if it results in their country having almost twice the rape rate of any other country in Europe.

Imagine a woman sitting on a train in a station beside another train; if she looks out the window and sees the other train moving in relation to herself she does not know whether it is her train moving or the other.  And if her thick spectacles prevent her realizing that she is seated facing the back of the carriage, her confusion may be greater still.  Through their distorting lenses, the ruling neofeminists of Iceland see themselves as “leading the way on women’s equality”, when in reality their train is moving swiftly backward toward the repression and restriction of women’s choices that most of Europe abandoned years ago.

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Maggie in the Media

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 3, 2011| 30 Comments »

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. –  Oscar Wilde

Over the past seven months more and more readers have discovered my blog, and the many visits and many links from the websites and Twitter accounts of those who enjoy my essays have made The Honest Courtesan that much easier to find on Google for those looking for information on prostitution and the lives and thoughts of whores.  And that’s a good thing not just for my vanity but also for all sex workers, because every source which presents real information instead of the ugly propaganda spread by the prohibitionists increases our chances of being heard by those in the general public who otherwise might not ever find the truth.  In the past few weeks, I’ve been contacted by three different Dallas-area reporters who discovered my column of November 23rd and decided to consult me about the myth of 10,000 hookers invading Dallas for the Super Bowl.  One of these reporters emailed me a bit too late to make his deadline, but I gave telephone interviews to the other two and found both of them intelligent, inquisitive men who were genuinely interested at getting at the truth rather than simply transcribing press releases from special-interest groups.

Jason Whitely of WFAA-TV in Dallas contacted me on January 12th and interviewed me the next day; though the telephone interview wasn’t used in the final story, I pointed him to the links which appeared in Tuesday’s column (the ones debunking the World Cup and Olympics hysteria).  The report aired on television Monday night and can be seen on the station’s website.  Then last Friday (January 28th) I spoke with Pete Kotz of Village Voice Media; his article appears in this week’s free Dallas Observer newspaper and is also online at the Observer’s website.  I gave him the same links I had given to Mr. Whitely and he also did a lot of independent research himself for the article, so it’s well worth reading both for the information and the joy of seeing another thinking person who recognizes nonsense when he sees it.  My favorite part:

This isn’t to say that the sex trade isn’t alive and well. It is. Nor is it to imply there are no such thing as teen prostitutes. There are. The problem is that most of what we believe remains fixed in a blaxploitation film from 1973, where menacing pimps named Lester beat their weeping charges with diamond-encrusted canes.

Ask Maggie McNeill.

That’s not her real name. It’s the pen name she uses on her website, The Honest Courtesan, where she dispenses wisdom on all things hooker. She ran an escort service in New Orleans for six years, supplying ladies for the 2002 Super Bowl. As she sees it, almost all we believe about the industry is fallacy.

That, and the part about whores’ super invisible powers.  He also independently discovered the Schapiro Group’s report and came to pretty much the same conclusions as we did.

But on Monday good luck came, as the superstition tells us it does, in threes.  The news articles appeared in the evening, but in the morning my column “Numerology” was featured in the “Morning Links” section of The Agitator, generating the best day I’ve had yet: 3486 views, of which 934 came directly from The Agitator and hundreds of others from references, retweets and the like.  My favorite headline from all of these was the one used by Econjeff: “Former prostitute out-researches CNN…and does so in only 90 minutes.”

In the same morning, I received an invitation from regular reader Kelly Michaels to appear in her Nymphtalk Live podcast that evening; I of course jumped at the chance and so my readers can now enjoy the dubious pleasure of listening to me talking about my favorite subject with Kelly for the last 90 minutes of a two-hour podcast (the program opens with a five-minute sexual fantasy and the next half hour is on Tantric masturbation, which I’m sure my readers will find interesting as well).  And though I’m not exactly in love with the sound of my own voice when it isn’t resonating in my own skull cavities, I hope to hear it a lot more often in the future because that will mean I’m getting the word out, telling people the truth about whoring and answering the trafficking fetishists and the Amber Lyons and the Annie Loberts and, if I ever get as brave as Laura Agustín, maybe even the Mira Sorvinos.

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Imbolc

Posted in History, Holidays, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , on February 2, 2011| 4 Comments »

If Candlemas Day be bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year. –  English folk saying

The Celtic holiday called Imbolc was in Ireland called ‘Brigit’s Day’ in honor of their great goddess Brigit, patroness of fire, blacksmithing and healing.  I’ve pointed out before that as Christianity spread most of the old festivals became Christian ones and most of the old gods were declared to be devils and demons, but some gods were far too popular to be demonized and became Christian figures instead.  Many of Mithra’s characteristics were transferred to Jesus and it should be obvious that much of the Blessed Mother’s mythology is inherited from the mother goddesses who came before her.  Odin was identified with Saint Nicholas and Strenia became Befana, and in similar fashion the goddess Brigit became Saint Brigit, explained away as an early Christian missionary who performed miracles and was thus taken for a goddess by the “ignorant” pagans.

Since Brigit’s Day was celebrating by the kindling or tending of sacred fires, her festival became the Christian holiday Candlemas, the day on which all candles to be used in church in the next year are blessed.  These blessed candles were then used on February 3rd, St. Blaise’s Day, to bless the throats of parishioners so as to protect them from ailments of the throat (especially choking).  Note that the symbolism (candles, symbolic of fire, to effect healing) is obviously transferred from Brigit.  Candlemas was also the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (since it falls six weeks after Christmas it is the day on which she would have been “purified” from childbirth and thus allowed back into the temple).  It’s interesting how some symbols are consistent across cultures, since pagans celebrate today as that on which the Great Mother is reborn as the Maiden Goddess (which corresponds nicely to the “restoration” of the Christian mother goddess Mary).

In old Celtic and Germanic belief, all of the cross-quarter days (Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas and Samhain) could be used to predict the weather of the remaining six weeks of the season in reverse; in other words if Lammas was bright and sunny the autumn would come early, whereas if it were cloudy and rainy the summer would last until Mabon.  Thus, it was believed (as shown in today’s epigram) that a bright, clear Imbolc meant cold weather would last until the vernal equinox, while a cold, gloomy one meant the end of winter was near.  But since the relative weather on any given day can be subjectively interpreted (what if it’s partly cloudy and of middling temperature?) the custom arose among Germanic peoples to allow a sacred animal (usually a bear or badger) to prognosticate by observing whether it emerged from hibernation on that day.

The tradition survived into Christian times (though generalized to any animal of the species rather than a particular sacred one) and was carried to Pennsylvania by the German settlers who called themselves “Pennsylvania Deutsch” (later corrupted into “Pennsylvania Dutch”).  In the absence of bears and badgers the tradition became attached to the groundhog (Marmota monax), a sort of large burrowing squirrel, and in North American tradition Candlemas became “Groundhog Day”.  Interestingly, as urbanization made groundhogs harder to find the organizers of Groundhog Day festivals were forced to again choose one sacred animal whose whereabouts could be ascertained on the big day.  The largest such festival is held in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and the sacred groundhog there is named “Punxsutawney Phil”; he is cared for by a priesthood called the “Inner Circle” who also organize the Groundhog Festival every year.  The festival and its attendant celebrations figure prominently in the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, which I can highly recommend both as a comedy and as a psychologically and philosophically intriguing character exploration.

Devotees of the Groundhog Festival, like pagans, consider this a day of joy and celebration; here’s my usual holiday feature, a short essay from my witch friend JustStarshine on the spiritual significance of this day for us.

The Significance of Imbolc

‘Imbolc’ is an old word meaning “in milk” and referred to pregnant ewes, who were viewed as a sign that new life was returning to the land.  In times when there was no certainty that winter would give way to spring and people were living on what had been harvested and salted down from the previous year one can only imagine the relief when they received proof that the wheel had indeed turned.

For witches it’s a time of cleansing and purification – for spring-cleaning, both physically and mentally; a time to sweep away the debris of winter and make way for new ways and ideas, to start afresh with new energy.  On our altars we have snowdrops and other late winter bulbs and white and pale-green candles.  Before beginning our ritual we sweep the area we will be working widdershins, thinking all  the while of the  things we would wish to sweep away from our lives.

We celebrate the fact that the Goddess has returned as Bride, a young maiden dancing joyfully through the land, the first flowers appearing wherever her feet have touched the ground.  She has brought fertility back to the earth.

The whole ritual is dedicated to the first stirrings of the light and we kindle three candles, one for a friend and one for ourselves, asking that we both may cast off all  old worries and concerns.  When we light the third candle for the world we ask for whatever we think would make it a better place, how we can avoid damaging it further and how we can develop a tolerance and understanding of our fellow humans and all the other creatures that inhabit Planet Earth so that all may all live in peace.

I ask that all my readers, no matter what your beliefs may be, experience at this time a cleansing of negative influences from your lives and a fresh influx of new positive ones.  Blessed Be!

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Don’t Buy It

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 1, 2011| 35 Comments »

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. –  Bertrand Russell

Maybe it should be called the “Stupor Bowl”, because it so often seems to induce a sort of catatonic state in Americans which renders them susceptible to astonishingly stupid suggestions.  I first noticed this in the early ‘90s, when advertisers began a massive campaign to convince American women that having a dozen of your husband’s loud, rowdy friends over for the game so you could prepare them elaborate football-themed snacks they would inhale without even noticing, then stay up past midnight cleaning up after them, was some sort of reason to celebrate.  But that paled into insignificance beside the “Abuse Bowl” hysteria of 1993, which claimed that the Super Bowl turned otherwise-normal men into slavering brutes who beat up their wives; neofeminists and their lap dogs ate up the story like Doritos and the somnambulistic US media obediently spread the propaganda without any fact-checking whatsoever.  And NBC, the network which carried the event that year, piously broadcast a commercial before the game to remind men that beating their wives was illegal (because obviously it being just plain wrong pales into insignificance behind the vastly more important fact that politicians have made laws against it).

Alas, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose; this year the equally-ridiculous hysteria is that the Super Bowl turns otherwise-normal men into slavering ephebophiles who purposefully and maliciously seek out underage, enslaved prostitutes.  Neofeminists and their lap dogs have eaten up the story like Doritos and the somnambulistic US media has obediently spread the propaganda without any fact-checking whatsoever.  And a coalition of Christian groups calling themselves “Traffick911” has produced commercials before the game to remind men that statutory rape doesn’t become legal when combined with prostitution (because obviously they think the general public believes that it works the same way that multiplying two negative numbers makes a positive one).  And lest you believe that this campaign is based on a sincere desire to stop enslavement specifically rather than on a moral crusade against all prostitution, I call your attention to this “40-Day Prayer Guide” and “Faith-based awareness tool kit” tucked unobtrusively away at the bottom of the page where lazy reporters aren’t likely to find it.  It makes interesting reading, especially the special prayer for Interstate 35 and the linking of “child sex trafficking” with porn.

I wonder if all the commenters on Jezebel bothered to read as far as the secret Puritan religious agenda before opening wide and taking the big scam all the way down their throats?  Probably not.  One tellingly ignorant aspect of the commercial featured here is the claim that “real men don’t buy sex”; since there is no such thing as free pussy, the only kind of man who doesn’t pay for it is one who takes it by force.  That makes the commercial’s claim actually “only rapists are real men”, which I somehow think is not the message they were trying to send.  Perhaps they meant “real men commit to buying stuff without reading the fine print”, which is essentially the same as “real men are gullible”.  Somehow I doubt that’s what they intended either.

But I digress.  My initial point is that the Super Bowl seems particularly effective at inducing the “buy whatever we sell you” trance; I’ve even seen sex-positive feminists and a number of escorts repeating the “Super Bowl is a sex trafficking Mecca” catechism.  And then there’s this guy, who not only believes the hype but thinks each gypsy whore needs to be paired with a gypsy stripper.  Obviously this isn’t going to happen, and what a nightmare for the girls if it did!  Nobody wants to split her pie with a bunch of itinerant carpetbaggers.  Is it wrong of me to question the City of Arlington’s 300,000 visitor estimate?  Admittedly I don’t understand football, but since as I pointed out before Cowboys Stadium only seats 80,000 people, what will the other 220,000 people will be doing there?  Trafficking the 10,000-100,000 whores, I guess.

Seriously, though, it isn’t just the Super Bowl; the Olympics and World Cup generate similar hypersuggestibility in human populations.  Here’s a detailed examination of the 2006 “World Cup sex trafficking” hysteria in Germany, which you will notice closely resembles our current Super Bowl hysteria in development and degree of exaggeration; the scare can be traced to the soi-disant “Coalition Against Trafficking in Women”, whose hysterical and fallacious propaganda we have discussed before.  Luckily, prostitution is legal in Germany, so it was easy to research and publish an expose of the myth like this one.  And just for good measure, here’s a report by the Sex Industry Worker Safety Action Group which conclusively shows that there is absolutely no correlation between mega sports events and either sex trafficking or a dramatic increase in prostitution.  Also, the Swedish government funded a separate study which also demonstrated the falsity of the World Cup sex trafficking claims.

In 2006 the German authorities uncovered only five cases of “human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation” instead of the imaginary 40,000; in Tampa two years ago there were NO arrests for prostitution during Super Bowl week, and according to this report from the Vancouver Sun:

After the last four [Olympic] Games (Turin 2006, Athens 2004, Salt Lake City 2002, and Sydney 2000), there were almost no confirmed reports on the numbers of sex workers, level of violence or other associated factors.  Notably, almost all anecdotal reports suggested no obvious change in level of activity.  During the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, where sex work is legal, only a marginal increase in prostitution was reported. In Salt Lake City, one confirmed report indicated that city licenses for escort services increased by only 12 per cent in the period leading up to the Winter Games.

In short, there is literally no evidence whatsoever for any measurable rise in prostitution during such events, much less thousands of trafficked sex slaves.  But neither fanatics nor neofeminists nor cops and politicians looking for excuses to further repress citizens ever let the facts get in the way of their agenda, and since major sporting events appear to render the population even more gullible than usual they are the perfect occasions for the dissemination of this kind of propaganda and fear-mongering.

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