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Archive for April, 2011

An Island of Sanity

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on April 10, 2011| 28 Comments »

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. –  Helen Keller

Americans labor under the peculiar delusion that the two official chapters of the Official Big Government Party really are different from one another; this delusion is made possible by the fact that few Americans trouble themselves to learn about the world outside the United States, where most countries have half a dozen political parties which are often very different indeed.  Because of this widespread delusion one will often see partisans ranting and raving about the horrible things the other party is doing, while ignoring the fact that their own party is doing almost exactly the same thing (albeit with some slightly different spin).  One particularly egregious current example is that media feminists are engaging in histrionics about those EEEEEEEEEVIL Republicans trying to restrict abortion rights…while conveniently ignoring the fact that the Democrats (usually the party more likely to kiss feminists’ arses) are quietly working to restrict women’s other sexual rights.  In one recent example, busybodies from BOTH parties in the lower house of the Kansas legislature joined in almost-unanimously (106-16) passing a bill which would have almost certainly put over 2000 strippers out of work.

Fortunately, the Republican leadership of the upper house recognized the bill as an attempt to destroy women’s livelihoods by regulating sexually oriented businesses out of existence and have tabled it (apparently on a permanent basis).  So as in the Harry Reid case, Republicans stood up for women’s right to choose sex work while Democrats went the other way.  Please don’t interpret this as a hurrah for Republicans on my part; next month it’ll be the opposite way.  I’m just pointing out how often politicians change hats, and why American political parties are no more different from one another than two teams of kids formed from among a group of friends for some sport.  No, The Honest Courtesan’s hurrah for the day goes to the editor of  The Topeka Capital-Journal who had the balls to brand the legislators who passed the bill as moral busybodies and to refer to the bill itself as a “waste of time”:

Republican leaders in the Kansas Senate see no reason to spend time working on a bill that probably would regulate adult entertainment clubs and stores out of business.  Neither do we.  A similar bill was introduced and subsequently rejected last year.  There’s no reason to waste more time on the issue this year, especially given other important issues — including budget deficits — facing legislators.

Supporters of the bill — known as the “community defense act” — contend adult entertainment businesses, strip clubs if you will, are host sites for illegal activities ranging from drug sales and prostitution to sex slavery.  We don’t know how much, if any, marijuana or cocaine is being sold at strip clubs across Kansas, but we’re pretty sure that putting the clubs out of business entirely wouldn’t eliminate one dealer or inconvenience one user.  Anyone who wants to buy illegal drugs doesn’t have to go anywhere near an adult club to find them.  As far as the adult clubs in Kansas being hot beds of prostitution and sex slavery, we know of no one who has ever produced specific cases or statistics to back up such claims…

No, the real issue here is that the adult clubs offend the morals of some among us.  We understand that, and know their moral outrage is sincere.  However, legislation that would force all to adhere to the morals of some is bad legislation.  Granted, no one wants a strip club next to their home, their church or their children’s school.  But those are zoning issues that can be handled by local governments without state interference.  The “community defense act” would prohibit full nudity at adult entertainment clubs, force them to close between midnight and 6 a.m., require performers to stay at least 6 feet from the customers and forbid contact between performers and customers.  It also would require new clubs, adult bookstores, video stores, theaters, modeling studios and sexual device shops to be more than 1,000 feet from any church, library, park, school or day care center.

Proponents say the bill, which originated in the House and was passed along to the Senate, is not an attempt to legislate morality or regulate sexually oriented businesses out of existence.  It is exactly that, and no more time should be spent on it.  The clubs, book stores and shops will close their doors when they aren’t generating enough traffic to make a profit.  But as long as communities are supporting them financially, the Legislature should stay out of their business and find other things to do…

Given the wide-eyed eagerness with which the mainstream American media swallows any and every claim about “sex slavery”, an editorial like this is good to see.  Such journalistic integrity won’t stop the moral panic alone, but if enough members of the Fourth Estate speak up sooner or later some politicians are bound to start listening, even if only because they see the writing on the wall and want to be the ones who can say “I told you so” when this witch-hunt collapses as all of them eventually do.

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Pendulum

Posted in History, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 9, 2011| 146 Comments »

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest. –  Arthur Schopenhauer

Last week my blog was discovered by the men’s rights community; they see me as sympathetic to their cause because of my vocal dislike for neofeminism.  And so I am, just as I’m sympathetic to the basic tenets of true feminism.  I have said many times that the idea that men and women are “equal” is political nonsense.  Two things which are equal to each other are the same as one another, and men and women are not the same.  We have equal importance in the scheme of things, but it’s because the genders complement each other, not because they’re interchangeable.  Women are strong in areas men are weak and vice-versa; yin and yang, Earth and Sky, night and day.  In places where political and social systems strongly favor men over women (as in Islamic cultures) feminism is needed, and in places where political and social systems strongly favor women over men (as in modern American culture) a men’s rights movement is needed.

Nature set things up so that the sexes were balanced, and early human civilizations continued that balance.  But over time certain power-hungry men, as the movers and shakers in the outside world, betrayed the trust of women and set things up so that men were not merely the governors of the world but its rulers.  There is a BIG difference between the two; a governor holds power in trust and is accountable to the governed, while a ruler holds power as a right and is not accountable.  And so the “war between the sexes” started, and still continues today some 3000 years later.  Now women are in control and are abusing men as badly the worst patriarchal societies ever did women.  Well, as Pollyannaish as it may sound two wrongs don’t make a right, and the current retributive maltreatment of men is beginning to provoke a backlash as any rational mind could have predicted.  The reason for this is that “-isms” are never satisfied; like all political entities they become solutions in search of problems once their primary goals are attained, and they keep maneuvering for more and more power until the original situation they were formed to remedy is completely reversed, setting the stage for still more conflict as the unbalanced system struggles back toward balance…and beyond.  The pendulum swings one way and then the other, and though it may eventually settle in the middle nobody reading this will live to see it.

Each side of the swing is a reflection of the other, so unsurprisingly men’s rights activists tend to fall into the same errors as feminists did.  Just as most feminists tar all men with the same brush, most MRAs tar all Western women with the same brush; just as many feminists dismiss or belittle the contributions of men, so many MRAs dismiss or belittle the contributions of women.  Weirdest of all, both neofeminists and a certain percentage of MRAs are anti-whore!  The men of this sort constantly use “prostitute” as an insult against amateurs for wanting money spent on them, and while my opinion on this subject is well-known I obviously don’t consider “whore” an insult, and I have a pretty low opinion of any man who does.  If sex with a woman wasn’t worth paying for, the world would be a very different place, yet many MRAs pretend they can “get it for free” or that women are all interchangeable.  Unjust marriage laws have artificially inflated the price of a woman’s favors, yet these silly men attack and insult those women who price sex fairly because they have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement (just as most feminists do) and think they “deserve” to get laid for free (presumably because of their good looks and charming personalities).

One commenter recently said “if men and women are equal then dick is as valuable as pussy”.  Unfortunately for this logic, we are not equal (as I said above) and male sexual participation is not as valuable as female; it is not and could never be, anywhere in the animal kingdom.  The basic rule of reproductive biology is “spread the seed, guard the egg”, which is why men are driven to give it away and why women can charge for it, not to mention the reason societies tend to be more concerned with harm to women than to men; lots of men can die without affecting the birth rate at all, but EVERY dead woman lowers it.  This is an undeniable FACT, no matter how little some men like it.  On the other hand women, though as intelligent as men, are not as good at the kind of analytic objectification which makes technology possible; the dearth of female inventors, composers, engineers, etc is proof of that, and it has nothing to do with education as feminists are so fond of claiming because the situation has not changed in the past century and never will.  This is a FACT, no matter how little some women like it.  Men and women tend to be good at DIFFERENT things, and properly complement each other rather than competing.  And please don’t post a bunch of comments about how Miss So-and-So is a crack engineer and Mr. Whathisname is beating the women off with a stick; the only rule without exception is that which states “all rules have exceptions”.  Or expressed more graphically, there are cases on record of people surviving falls from airplanes without parachutes; care to try it for yourself?

If men’s rights activists were smart, they would STOP mimicking feminists and support prostitutes’ rights rather than insulting an old and noble profession.  Why do you think neofeminists hate prostitutes so much?  Because we let men have sex at a fair price.  The suppression of our trade has contributed to the current feminist control of men, and by attacking us MRAs are doing exactly what the neofeminists want.  The only recipe for peace is to restore things to their ancient balance, and one of the first steps toward doing that is to decriminalize prostitution so men have access to sex on their own terms; this will bring down the artificial inflation in the value of women’s favors and thereby force women to deal rather than demanding.  On the other hand, modern technology allows women to earn as much as men if that’s what they want, which brought down the artificially-inflated price of male labor which made the patriarchal cultures possible.  For the first time in millennia the sexes have the potential to return to their primordial equal footing, and if we can find that balance we stand a good chance of being partners again as the gods intended rather than continuing the present adversarial relationship created by the human pigheadedness amply demonstrated by both genders.

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Subtle Pimping

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 8, 2011| 24 Comments »

What do you call men who take money from prostitutes?  Magistrates. –  Slogan from the English Collective of Prostitutes

Prohibitionists simply adore pimps.  After all, if there were no pimps, it would be a great deal harder for them to convince Mr. and Mrs. Average that prostitution was something other than a victimless “crime”.  But because pimps do exist, the antis (whether neofeminist, politician, cop, Christian or trafficking-fetishist) have a ready-made bogeyman upon whom they can hang claims that all prostitutes are “trafficked slaves”.  There’s only one problem, though; there simply aren’t enough pimps to go around, even using the criminally vague standards favored by the antis.  So in order to rectify this situation, some dedicated politicians have stepped into the breach in order to address this terrible pimp shortage by making money off of whores without giving them anything in return (which is as good a working definition of “pimp” as I can imagine).

This is nothing new; since at least Roman times many governments have set themselves up as pimps by charging disproportionately-high license fees (not to mention fines, taxes, etc) to prostitutes; in many of these jurisdictions the police were allowed to set and charge these fees at will, with the money going directly to the police (or to individual policemen).  And of course many of these cops took the traditional pimp privilege of raping whores at will (and many still do).  But modern governments prefer to do things more subtly, and besides there are those pesky human rights activists and civil rights attorneys running around everywhere interfering in traditional police privileges.  So politicians are turning to more subtle (not to mention profitable) forms of pimping.  The State of Nevada of course pioneered this more subtle modern approach, and I’ve discussed other recent efforts in previous posts on several dates.  But here are two new examples, one an attempt to pimp an untapped market and the other a clever and sleazy maneuver by an aspiring politician.

The first came by way of the Associated Press last Thursday (March 31st) and continues the saga of condom fetishists attempting to force the porn industry to cater to their peculiar preferences:

California workplace safety officials have fined Larry Flynt’s Hustler Video and another porn producer for not using condoms on set to protect sex performers from exposure to disease.  Hustler faces $14,175 in fines for three violations, including failure to provide condoms or other protective equipment, according to a Division of Occupational Safety and Health citation provided to The Associated Press Wednesday.  Hustler “failed to ensure the use of appropriate personal protective equipment, such as condoms” to protect its employees from semen, vaginal excretions and blood in the course of producing adult videos, according to the citation.  The current fines are based on the same section of state law that also requires hospitals to provide nurses with protective gear…Flynt has said in the past that audiences don’t want to watch porn in which actors use condoms.  Hustler was also fined for failing to maintain a written injury and illness policies and for failing to provide workers with vaccines for hepatitis C.  Hustler’s citation stems from a Sept. 14 inspection of a jobs site in response to a complaint from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation…Forsaken Pictures faces $12,150 in fines for similar violations.  The fines were issued March 9…

To porn producers, fines of this size are like parking tickets to individuals: annoying, but not really harmful.  And this exposes Los Angeles’ game, because if the fines were really painful the porn industry might decide to relocate, then the gravy train would stop.  Clearly the state, city and county have no intention to bleed the industry heavily enough to actually hurt it; they’re just using the ridiculous complaints of Michael Weinstein and his condom fetishist pals as a convenient excuse to extract a few more pimp fees.  If the authorities were really concerned about “protecting” porn actors, they’d be trying to do something about the privacy leak.

This sort of behavior from officials doesn’t get me angry; after all, it’s the sort of thing one expects from government officials.  What does anger me is when a whore-turned-politician panders to trafficking fetishists by mouthing blatant lies in order to advance herself at the expense of her sisters:

…Ex-Madam Kristin Davis, who supplied high priced call girls for former Governor Eliot Spitzer, said she will jump in the 2013 New York City Mayor’s Race if the former Governor… makes a bid…“If Spitzer throws his black socks in the ring I may have to throw in my lacy brassiere” said Davis who once ran the most successful high end escort service in US history.  “I had pretty much decided to focus on the sex trafficking issue and not to run for public office again,” said Davis.  “I am working to take the GOLD program, put forward by an advocacy group in Miami to combat sex trafficking nationwide.” Davis kicked off Hope House, a New York based non-profit to fight the conscription of women into prostitution last month.  “The women who worked for me chose to be sex workers,” said Davis.  “80% of the women working as escorts are doing so against their will,” said Davis.  “Until prostitution is decriminalized we must provide an escape from this life for thousands of young women”…

Back in February I called Davis on the carpet for her ludicrous claim that escorts make up only “5% of the world of prostitution…” and though she seems to have increased that to 20% she’s now blatantly claiming the other 80% are coerced, when she knows damned well that’s an outrageous lie.  This obvious attempt to suck up to the prohibitionists makes me so freaking angry that I’m going to let Kelly James say the rest for me (courtesy of this link to her column of March 31st) before I say something even more unladylike than I already have.

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Feminine Pragmatism

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 7, 2011| 27 Comments »

Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws. –  Robert A. Heinlein

I once posted a comment on Brandy Devereaux’s blog in which I apologized for being like one of those friends who comes over to one’s house, goes through the cupboards and helps herself to the tastiest snacks.  Brandy has a nose for news and often posts on sex work stories before I’ve even heard of them; I then get a little email alert from my subscription to her blog, go over and read it and then if I find it interesting enough I steal it.  I don’t only take news stories, either; sometimes she just thinks of things which inspire me to write on the same ideas.  I excuse this wholesale theft on three grounds:  1) she insists she doesn’t mind; 2) I always give her credit; and 3) since our writing-styles are very different my verbose philosophizing often provides a nice counterpoint to her straightforward good sense (and vice versa).

Anyway, on the 30th of March she posted a very nice column about a subject on which I’ve written before:  feminine pragmatism.  As Kipling points out in his poem “The Female of the Species” (one of my personal favorites), because the future of any species rests squarely on the backs of its female members, “the female of the species must be deadlier than the male”.  In humans, this manifests itself as the well-known female disregard for arbitrary rules on which so many males have commented.  As I wrote in my column of December 12th,

…a woman with two children to feed, clothe and house and no husband to help her does not have the luxury of obeying a stupid, arbitrary law written by men which says that she can’t get money to support them in the way which works best for her and doesn’t hurt anyone…A woman is more likely to rely on her own internal moral compass than on laws imposed from outside, which is why the vast majority of the female prison population in any country are incarcerated for consensual crimes such as prostitution, drug use, etc – in other words, things which are arbitrarily defined as “criminal” but are not in any real sense evil.  Essentially, prostitution law punishes women for not being men; the whore is an outlaw because she will not submit to external, paternalistic authority which forbids her using her natural advantages to improve her situation.

That’s the way I expressed it, but Brandy (who, coincidentally, has three children to feed, clothe and house and no husband to help her) wrote about it from her own personal perspective; I wish I could download it directly into the brains of every damned cop, neofeminist and anti-whore politician in America so they could at last grok what we’re talking about:

…This is how I came up with what I call practical prostitution. All the posturing, theorizing, comparing, name calling, etc can be done but it doesn’t make my car payment and it doesn’t put food on the table.  We can argue back and forth all day long about why this and why that and we should this and we should that but it doesn’t fix my car should the fuel pump go out.  I really don’t feel that it is necessary to go get a part time job, apply for welfare or a loan, or go back to college for a better paying job in the future simply because my vehicle needs new tires or because the plumbing in the bathroom broke…

…a few years back where I was in some serious financial difficulties.  I had a full time job that paid my bills.  It didn’t leave much if anything for savings but I was able to live comfortably.  I forget what started it all…[but due to a cascade of bad-check fees I started to] panic…because I know that this can spiral downhill fast if not taken care of now but I still have two more weeks until my next paycheck…One date, $250, DONE.  Caught up and back on track within one day…Did I feel exploited?  Honestly I didn’t care, my bill had to be paid.  Did I feel raped?  Only by the bank.

…I remember reading stories of women turning to prostitution in Haiti after the earthquake.  They needed to eat NOW.  They didn’t care whether the abolitionists thought they were being degraded, de-humanized, exploited, blah blah blah.  They were hungry and dammit you gotta do what you gotta do at the time that you gotta do it.  Fine we need more opportunities for women, women need access to better education, women need this and women need that in order to not look at prostitution as a viable alternative for employment.  That’s all hunky dorey but in the mean time are you willing to give every girl who needs it $5 for a sandwich to make it through today?  I didn’t think so…

Whether a woman becomes a whore due to dire need as in Brandy’s example or merely because it’s the work she’s most comfortable with is immaterial; we all need to pay the bills somehow, and a woman has as much right as a man to use her natural gifts to earn her bread.  From a philosophical standpoint anti-prostitution laws are tyranny, and from a practical standpoint they are ineffective because, as I pointed out in the aforementioned December 12th column, “…women who are going to be whores do so whether it’s illegal in their region or not…Prostitution laws therefore have no demonstrable deterrent value whatsoever, because the illegality of the profession has no observable effect on women’s choice to practice it.  The fact that so many men fail to recognize this demonstrates how little they understand women.”

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Neither Cold nor Hot

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2011| 116 Comments »

So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. –  Revelation 3:16

Many of my readers are probably at least somewhat familiar with the website Jezebel, which describes itself as “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women”; it’s part of the Gawker family of news & commentary sites.  Jezebel’s political bent is more or less third-wave feminist, and though it’s very pro-porn and seems inhospitable to neofeminist anti-prostitution propaganda, its staff also appears vaguely uncomfortable with sex workers; I think of them as something like a gaggle of debutantes volunteering at the local homeless shelter because they think it’s the right thing to do, but unable to really disguise their disgust for the “icky people”.  There are occasional columns about strippers and whores, and once in a while one will see reader comments about sex worker rights, but that’s it; no sex worker rights news, articles condemning persecution of prostitutes, reprinting of any of the many articles debunking prohibitionist rhetoric, nothing like that.  Back at the end of January they even participated in spreading the “Super Bowl sex trafficking” hysteria, obediently repeating the lies promoted by Christian groups who would oppose most of what Jezebel seems to stand for.

I’ve never commented on any of the stories myself; the general tone of the replies is so party-line whitebread “feminist” that I don’t really feel I’d be welcome.  But while writing my December 8th column I read this article about Sugardaddyforme.com in which the author, Sadie Stein, starts a profile on the site for research purposes and discovers to her apparent surprise that the other members are “surprisingly human” (presumably she thought they were all robots, apes and spirits).  So I decided to take a chance by sending her an email, suggesting she start a profile on one of the escort boards so she could discover the same thing about sex workers and their clients.  As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, I got no response whatsoever.  After that, I sort of gave up on using Jezebel as anything but a source of stories which might inspire columns.

Then last Monday (March 28th), I was scanning the site as usual and saw this article attacking Satoshi Kanazawa, which was obviously directly inspired by his column of the night before talking about me!  Though the author, Anna North (who also wrote the aforementioned Super Bowl trafficking story) was clearly familiar with Kanazawa already, the suggestion that she could be “essentially” the same as one of those nasty whores seems to have set her off.  Interestingly, she has nothing bad to say about me (though she does misquote my description of a neofeminist by calling it my definition of a “contemporary feminist”, which as my readers know is not at all the same thing).  Considering that Kanazawa and I aren’t all that far apart on the subject I thought it was interesting that she was so vicious to him but gave me a free pass, presumably because of my sex.  Unfortunately, she also gives a free pass to the neofeminists by weakly describing them as feminists who “insist on lockstep orthodoxy”.  This kind of weak-kneed faux “sisterhood”, refraining from criticizing other women merely because they are women (even if one strongly disagrees with their beliefs), is exactly what caused the collapse of second-wave feminism in the first place; mainstream feminists should have had the sense to ostracize the man-hating, anti-sex crowd back in the 1970s, but instead they passively watched while monsters perverted the movement into a crusade for their own warped agenda.

Another example of Jezebel’s discomfort with the sex trade can be seen in this story (also from March 28th) about hookers’ business cards; apparently some New York politician who’s been living under a rock his entire life just discovered that some low-end escorts pay guys to hand out business cards for them and therefore wants to ban the practice.  Though the author, Irin Carmon, doesn’t seem too fazed by the idea of prostitution and also appears to have a healthy degree of skepticism about the politician’s attempt to paint his effort as “for the children”, take a look at her headline: “Pimps Use Alessandra Ambrosio’s Image To Sell Actual Sex”.  Actually, the (often Hispanic) males who hand out these cards are the hookers’ employees, not their bosses, and they’re usually teenage boys rather than grown men.  But Miss Carmon has clearly bought into the myth that any non-customer male who has anything to do with a whore MUST be a pimp, and her use of the term conjures up a lot of negative stereotypes a real friend of sex workers would not choose to evoke.

And then there’s this one from the day before the other two, which references this New York Times scare piece on the dreaded scourge of teen “sexting”.  Though the author, Morning Gloria, does seem to find the lugubrious tone of the Times article absurd, she yet agrees with its principle that photos of the human body are dirty, bad, wrong and “sexist”, and that something needs to be “done” about girls taking them.  Does she remember that girls of our generation (and at least 60 others before it) were slut-shamed quite effectively without any pictures at all by use of the grapevine (remember the word “reputation”, ladies)?  Hell, no!  Does she point out that the suffering of the girl in the story was caused not by the picture but by the other kids’ stupid parent-taught attitudes about it?  Of course not!  She instead feels compelled to turn the incident into a feminist parable:

And, while we’re at it, why don’t we get to the root of the problem and examine why, exactly, teenage girls only feel valuable insomuch as they’re seen as “sexy?”  How are we talking to our daughters?  When are we complimenting them?  Are we socializing them to be pretty pretty princesses or productive, thoughtful contributors to society?  As long as the greatest compliment that a girl can be paid is “you’re beautiful” and not “you’re smart,” shit like this is going to keep happening, no matter what kooky consequences we cook up for the bullies who attempt to use young women’s sexuality to shame them.

Maybe if the ladies at Jezebel would actually read about evolutionary psychology instead of simply mocking it, they’d understand why normal women (not just teenage girls) want to be seen as sexy, and why “you’re smart” will never have the same impact as “you’re beautiful”.  I was repeatedly and enthusiastically told I was fucking brilliant by nearly every adult I knew from the time I was about five years old, and you know what?  I still consider “you’re beautiful” to be a greater compliment, despite “socialization” to the contrary.  “You can process information well” is a fact, not a judgment; it’s no more a compliment than “you’re of average height” or “you have brown hair”.  There’s no feeling in it, while “you’re beautiful” is almost pure feeling.  If feminists would get over their fear of their own femininity they’d understand that, and Jezebel would be a much less annoying website.

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April Updates

Posted in Current Events, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2011| 32 Comments »

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies are. –  Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s time once again (though relatively early this month) for my monthly collection of articles which hearken back to previous columns.

Think of the Children! (September 30th)

The considerable hysteria around child sexual abuse, which has grown to the proportions of a full-fledged witch hunt in which thousands of lives have been ruined, rests upon the belief that any sexual contact between two humans, at least one of whom is under the local age of consent, is inherently and devastatingly harmful, no matter what the circumstances.  Yet, “playing doctor” was at one time very common among children, even children separated by a few years, and I’m not aware of any claims that practically the entire human race existed in a permanent traumatized state prior to the genesis of sex abuse hysteria in the 1980s.  I’m not talking about rape or exploitative incest (which can be harmful indeed), but rather contact between children who are friends or voluntary contact between adolescents and adults.  At one time it was common for girls of 14 or 15 to marry men in their 30s; are we to believe they were all irreversibly traumatized by it?  And frankly, I’m highly skeptical of currently-fashionable claims that the average teenage boy considers being seduced by an adult woman anything other than fantastically good luck.  What if most of the trauma associated with sexuality involving minors derives not from some mystical property of sex itself, but from the considerable fuss adults make over it when it is discovered (including endless invasive and uncomfortable interviews with creepy strangers asking highly personal questions), not to mention guilt over getting someone else in trouble?

Psychologists Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman asked those questions, and in 1998 published a meta-analysis of 59 child abuse studies which found that, when physical abuse and other such factors were controlled for, university students who had experienced what authorities termed “child sexual abuse” (CSA) reported that “negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense, and that men reacted much less negatively than women.  Basic beliefs about CSA in the general population were not supported.”  But did the therapeutic and law enforcement communities breathe a collective sigh of relief upon hearing the good news that most of those kids weren’t as badly hurt by this “secret epidemic” as previously thought?  Of course not!  Therapists were unhappy at the prospect of a lucrative income stream being interrupted, and cops NEVER welcome the removal of excuses for harassing, controlling and destroying people.  For their pains, the good doctors were widely vilified and even subjected to a vote of censure by the United States Congress, and since then the paper has been largely ignored except for misuse by child molesters attempting to defend their disgusting actions in court.  This is particularly sad because, though child sexual abuse is relatively rare in comparison with physical abuse (beatings, etc), the sexual abuse gets vastly more money and attention due to its lurid appeal; the common problem with serious (sometimes fatal) consequences is therefore pushed aside in favor of a far less common one with less serious consequences.  And that’s a damned tragedy.

Lack of Evidence (December 16th)

I’ve often pointed out that as long as prostitution is criminal not even amateurs are safe because, since prostitution is defined by its motive, no actual evidence of the “crime” is possible and cops are allowed to claim almost anything as “evidence” of it.  Well, a particularly horrible example came to light on March 23rd as Amnesty International reported that Egyptian women arrested in last month’s protests were subjected to “virginity tests” and told that any who “failed” them would be charged with prostitution.  Would these women have still been tortured if prostitution were legal in Egypt?  Undoubtedly, but it would have been impossible to pass off a sort of medical rape as an “evidence-gathering” procedure for any other “crime”.

It’s a Start (December 30th)

It looks like New Orleans may really be serious about curtailing its long tradition of harassing prostitutes; according to a March 25th report by WDSU-TV, the NOPD fired two cops for arresting women on a charge of “loitering for the purpose of prostitution”:

The New Orleans Police Department terminated officers Beau Gast and Thomas McMasters on Friday after an administrative investigation…[which] revealed that both men falsified records and knowingly arrested two women on prostitution charges without a warrant…[both] admitted that they didn’t check to see if either of the women had a prior conviction of prostitution solicitation within the previous year…That check is required by law to arrest anyone on prostitution loitering charges.  Both men said they were aware of the law, but they did not abide by it.  The charges…include…false imprisonment, neglect of duty, failing to take appropriate and necessary police action and creating false and inaccurate reports.  McMasters had been with the force for 13 years and Gast became an officer in 2007, NOPD said.

Thanks to regular reader Joyce for calling the story to my attention.

Check Your Premises (March 10th)

Witch-hunting is apparently still a popular pastime in Salem, Massachusetts, where a journalist was recently convicted of “victimizing” two prostitutes by employing them in his low-end escort service.  The following is paraphrased from a story which appeared in the Eagle-Tribune on March 19th and was sent to me by regular reader Alex:

Former sportswriter Kevin Provencher, 52, was sentenced to 2½ years in jail after he pled guilty in Salem Superior Court to running a “prostitution ring” out of hotels in Andover, Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire.  Assistant District Attorney Melissa Woodard accused Provencher of “taking” half of his employees’ earnings and charging them for the hotel rooms he booked for them.  Provencher carelessly booked rooms for the hookers at the same hotel every weekend, eventually attracting the attention of busybody hotel staff who called the cops on them.  The women earned $240 per hour or $150 per half hour with a 50% agency fee.  Provencher was also charged with intimidating a witness after he “threatened to have his attorney shred the two women apart in the media if they spoke to the police,” Woodard claimed.

The two prostitutes, who were identified only as “Jane Doe” and “Jill Doe” during the hearing, decided not to appear in court but one said she believed Provencher took advantage of her, and the other said that she was held accountable after being arrested, and Provencher should be as well.  Based on these claims, Woodard tried to get Provencher imprisoned for 35 years and was apparently disappointed when she didn’t get her way; “His crime was not a one time lapse in judgement,” Woodard said.  “(Provencher) planned, thought out and ran these services on the expense of these two women.”  Defense attorney Paul Garrity said that his client should only serve probation because he has no prior record, saying that the “side business” was started because the downturn in the newspaper business resulted in a significant salary reduction.  He called it a bad decision on Provencher’s part and said the district attorney’s recommendation was not reasonable.  “To call these women victims is really overplaying this,” Garrity said.  “That’s just not accurate.”  He said the two women and Provencher were “equal players” in the operation, and said there is evidence that the two women still may be active prostitutes.

Of course they were equal players, and of course they’re still working as whores; why shouldn’t they?  They probably have extensive client lists now, and if they get caught again they have learned how to play the victim card by pointing a finger at a driver, boyfriend or other convenient male.  Assuming the threat accusation was a prosecutorial fabrication intended to paint him as a dangerous criminal, Provencher made three major mistakes that I can see; he took too high an agency fee (50% is excessive if he charged the girls for the room), should have changed hotels and enforced discretion, and should have provided a lawyer when the women were arrested.  But his greed and stupidity don’t automatically convert hookers into innocent lambs, except in the eyes of predatory DAs employing trafficking rhetoric to score convictions.

How Old is Oldest? (March 12th)

In this column I mentioned the blog The Scientific Fundamentalist and described a correspondence I had with its author, Satoshi Kanazawa.  He was very interested in what I had to say, and told me he was going to do a follow-up column on what we discussed.  Well, he published that column last Sunday night (March 27th) and not only was I very flattered by his praise, but also very pleased at the huge amount of traffic which came from the links in his post!  That influx enabled me to hit a milestone I’ve been slowly approaching for a few weeks now: 100,000 total views as of the morning of March 28th.  That’s still just a small cloud in the blogosphere, but it’s growing fast (116,208 at the time this was posted) and is a big step toward my first million.  Thanks, Satoshi!

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What the Hell Were You Thinking?

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 4, 2011| 55 Comments »

My point is that, yes, the police should pursue the thief and he should be punished. But at the same time, the police – and I – have the right to say to you “You stupid idiot, what the hell were you thinking?” –  Camille Paglia

In her 1991 essay “Rape and Modern Sex War”, the ever-controversial Camille Paglia called for women to protect themselves from rape by being aware of its origin in male sexuality and avoiding situations in which it is likely to occur; Paglia’s point, with which I wholeheartedly concur, is that “Women who do not understand rape cannot defend themselves against it.”  Mainstream feminists enthusiastically promoted classes which taught women to be aware of their surroundings, to avoid being alone in secluded areas, to refuse strangers entry to their houses, etc.  But these tips are only helpful against stranger rape, the least frequent kind! Paglia’s suggestion that women avoid doing things like being alone with men they haven’t know very long or getting drunk at frat parties in order to avoid the MOST common form of rape, that by acquaintances, was greeted with a firestorm of controversy and accusations that she was “condoning rape” or “blaming the victim”.  She had, of course, anticipated this would happen and in the essay likened such risky behaviors to driving one’s car to New York City and then leaving your keys on the hood (culminating in the epigram above).  This is not blaming the victim; it’s acknowledging reality.  Women are not incompetent children, and must be aware of the possible consequences of our actions in order to avoid undesirable ones.

Whores who don’t know this in the beginning must learn it quickly if they’re to survive.  I doubt very many in our community blame a sister if she’s raped, but at the same time we know that we’re responsible for our own safety and must therefore use caution, backup, screening, referrals, intuition and/or other preventative measures so as to lower the chance of rape (or other types of violence) as much as we can.  A hooker who labors under the delusion that she can go unarmed and unmonitored into the home of a man she has never met without risking rape or worse is a fool and may very well end up a statistic; but amateurs blithely do this all the time, apparently under the same touching belief in the protective power of innocence which causes them to eschew proper condom use.  I don’t care what a “good girl” you are or how “nice” he is, you can still contract syphilis or venereal warts, become pregnant or be raped.  And if something awful does happen, no amount of finger-pointing (or criminal prosecution in the latter case) will undo the damage, so isn’t it better to use a few simple preventative measures you can learn from the pros?

The oldest of these is of course the referral; when my mother was a girl almost nobody would accept a date with a boy she had never met unless they were introduced by mutual friends.  The sexual revolution changed all that, but at the cost of increased risk of acquaintance rape.  I’m not telling you never to accept a date with a stranger, but what I am telling you is that if you don’t have any references as to his past treatment of women then, logically, you have no evidence of his probable behavior when alone with you.  Most internet escorts ask for referrals from other escorts for exactly this reason; if he’s treated others well in the past he’s likely to treat the next girl just as well.  As I mentioned before, some amateurs even use Date Check nowadays, just like pros do.

But even if you’re the sort with romanticized notions about “spontaneity” and a thing for stranger sex, there’s still a simple precaution you can take which will help ensure your safety in most cases:  checking in and out.  Any reputable agency knows exactly where a girl is going and requires her to check in by phone once she arrives and sees everything is OK; if she doesn’t call out by the prearranged time, the agency will call her instead.  Even many independents have a friend or husband with whom they check in and out, and so can amateurs; it’s a simple matter to call one’s sister, roommate, mother or other interested party to report where you are and how long you’ll be there.  Not only does a callout give one an excuse to escape from a situation which has become uncomfortable or potentially dangerous, it also sends a clear message to the man:  People know where I am and how long I’m supposed to be here.  Most of you have probably heard the saying “Locks don’t stop a thief, they just keep honest men honest”; this is the same thing.  It’s difficult to stop someone who intends to commit a crime with malice aforethought; what basic protective measures do is to deter opportunistic crimes.  Locks prevent morally weak people from being tempted to easy thefts, and the knowledge that others know a woman is with him might stop a man with poor impulse control from succumbing to the desire to rape her.  It’s not foolproof, but it does work; I can remember a number of cases in which a “creepy” client’s demeanor changed when I checked in, or when a man who was slipping out of my control was shocked back into civilized behavior by the ringing phone signaling his time was up.

Ladies, this ain’t rocket science.  Nobody’s suggesting you be a scared little bunny holed up in your hutch all the time, nor implying that you’re at fault if a man does something reprehensible to you.  But honestly, is it worth it to you to endure a rape just to prove how independent and gutsy you are, or worse to further your political agenda?  You wouldn’t leave your car keys on the hood; you wouldn’t leave your purse on a park bench; you wouldn’t leave your front door wide open while you went on vacation; you wouldn’t leave your cat alone with an uncaged hamster or a four-year-old with a big plate of cookies; and you shouldn’t trust your personal safety to someone who might be a wolf without taking at least basic protective measures.  Whores deal with horny male strangers for a living, and we don’t trust them blindly; do you honestly think you should?

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Out of Context

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 3, 2011| 29 Comments »

Avoid context and specifics; generalize and keep repeating the generalization. –  Jack Schwartz

In yesterday’s column I examined the original source for the spurious and exaggerated claims about the number of involuntary teenage prostitutes and the average age at which prostitutes enter the trade, namely the 2001 Estes and Weiner study.  Today I’d like to cite the original sources for a few other spurious claims made by prohibitionists, thereby revealing their inapplicability as generally used.  I myself was made aware of these sources via a very long March 13th post from a commenter called “Eva”, responding to the claims of the trafficking robot called “M. Smith” in the reply thread for the Belle de Jour guest blog I mentioned in my column of March 25th; I know that I appreciated the information, and assumed my readers might be equally interested.  Thank you, Eva!

As we’ve discussed before, studies of streetwalkers, especially imprisoned and/or drug-addicted streetwalkers, are a rich source of anti-prostitution propaganda because the life of the average streetwalker is so much more chaotic, dangerous and unsatisfactory than the life of the independent escorts who make up the majority of the profession.  It’s a bit like studying street peddlers and then using that to make pronouncements about every other sector of the retail economy from dollar stores to Ferrari dealerships, with predictably inaccurate results.  A 2005 study (“New Directions in Research on Prostitution” by Ronald Weitzer of George Washington University in Washington, DC) calls attention to a number of these differences; for example, 97% of California escorts surveyed reported an increase in self-esteem after they entered harlotry, compared with 50% of Nevada brothel workers and 8% of streetwalkers (Prince, 1986: 454).  That study (page 497) also reported that the escorts saw their work positively, while the brothel girls were merely satisfied and streetwalkers were largely dissatisfied.  Another study of low-end escorts in the U.S. found that 75% of them felt that their lives had improved since becoming escorts, 25% reported no change and 0% said their lives were worse.  (Decker, 1979: 166, 174).  A Dutch study (Dalder, 2004: 34) gave the same results, and all of the escorts studied by Foltz (1979: 128) took pride in their work and viewed themselves as more sensible than amateurs; “they consider women who are not ‘in the life’ to be throwing away woman’s major source of power and control [sexual capital], while they as prostitutes are using it to their own advantage as well as for the benefit of society.”  And an Australian study found that half of all prostitutes surveyed ranked their work as a “major source of satisfaction” in their lives, and 70% said they would definitely choose prostitution again if they had their lives to live over (Woodward et al., 2004: 39).

Yet over and over again, neofeminists trot out their incarcerated-streetwalker studies as representative of all prostitutes (despite the fact that they’re not even representative of the majority of streetwalkers).  We’re told that “75% of women in prostitution become involved when they are under the age of eighteen,” a figure taken from Benson, C. and Matthews, R. (1995), “Street Prostitution: Ten Facts in Search of a Policy” in International Journal of Sociology of the Law, Vol. 23, pp 395-415.  Another claim is that “45% of prostitutes report childhood sexual abuse and 85% childhood physical abuse”; these figures derive from a paper on streetwalkers by Hester & Westmarland (2004) which was commissioned as part of a crime reduction program.  Or how about “More than half of prostitutes have been raped and 75% beaten by a pimp or customer” and “the mortality rate for prostitutes is 12 times higher than that of other women”?  Both were drawn from the UK government report “Solutions and Strategies: Drug Problems and Street Sex Markets.”  To my knowledge, NO study of mainstream prostitution has ever been done by an officially-sanctioned entity in either the U.S. or U.K.; both countries seem to prefer the rantings of neofeminists and extrapolation from the least-fortunate third of the least-fortunate 15% of the hooker population.

Of course, not all of the statements made by prohibitionists are drawn from streetwalker studies; a few are in fact probably true for most whores, but this is only because they’re true for nearly everyone who works in virtually any field.  I’m speaking of statements like “most prostitutes are driven to it by financial need” and “9 out of 10 prostitutes would like to exit prostitution immediately.”  Well, duh; nearly everyone in every job is driven to it by financial need, and at least 90% of people would like to quit working immediately if they won the lottery or something.  Are these statements supposed to demonstrate that prostitution is pretty much like any other job?  Because one would think that’s what the prohibitionists were trying to disprove.  Perhaps the reason for ridiculous statements like these or “no little girl wants to grow up to be a prostitute” is that many academic neofeminists (who generate most of these bogus statistics) are so isolated in their ivory towers that they really don’t know that there are many jobs far more stressful than prostitution, and that very few people work for anything but purely economic reasons.

Other than outright lies and mumbo-jumbo about the female sexual gestalt, there is one other general class of prohibitionist claims:  statements based on neofeminist gender-war politics.  But these, too can be refuted by proper research, for example Dr. Suzanne Jenkins’ “Beyond Gender: An Examination of Exploitation in Sex Work”.  Neofeminists call prostitution “humiliating” and “degrading”, but Jenkins reports that 72% of escorts feel their self-esteem is higher because of their work.  Neofeminists claim that prostitution constitutes “oppression” of women, but Jenkins’ study shows that 72% of escorts like their work for the independence, 67% for meeting people and 93% for the money.  Neofeminists believe that males have the power in a prostitution transaction, yet Jenkins found that 54% of escorts consider the transaction as equal, 26% said that the whore had power over the client and only 6% perceived the client as having power over them.  Neofeminists also proclaim that men view prostitutes as things to be used, but 77% of Jenkins’ escorts felt their clients respected them.  And what about that neofeminist buzzword, “exploitation”?  Jenkins found that 56.6% of escort felt they had never been exploited by their clients, while only 3% often felt exploited.

Taken out of context, facts become lies and true statements become misrepresentations, and when combined with unrealistic ideology they all become powerful tools of deception.  Make no mistake, the prohibitionists have no compunction against lying; they think of their anti-prostitution campaign as war and intend to win by any means necessary.  But because outright lies are more easily exposed than bogus or misinterpreted facts, the latter are more effective in the long run.  Fortunately, this allows those who care about the truth to undermine those false statements by presenting them in context.  It’s a long, arduous process, but it’s the only way to fight implacable enemies who believe that the end justifies the means.

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A Tale That Grew in the Telling

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 2, 2011| 65 Comments »

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold. –  Aristotle

A few days ago regular reader Joyce sent me this article which had me shaking my head; it’s fairly typical trafficking hype with a celebrity mouthpiece, but it was different in one way which bears note:

…Ashley Judd reveals a moving story about a 14-year-old daughter of a friend of hers who was recently forced into prostitution in Atlanta, Georgia.  “Who are these men who buy children for sex?” asks Judd. “They are our fathers, they are our brothers, our husbands, uncles, cousins, and friends…it is so common”…according to The Daily Beast, 100,000 – 300,000 children between the ages of 12 and 14 years old are victims of the child sex trade in this country.

Those of us who love men and hate seeing them maligned may be so angered by Judd’s evil rhetoric that they may miss the only important aspect of this propaganda piece; I can assure Miss Judd that no man I know and certainly not my father, brother, husband or any uncle or friend (and I doubt any cousins either) has ever “bought a child for sex” or any other purpose.  Nobody I knew even had any basement, attic or shed where such a slave could have been kept, and normal modern men do NOT keep slaves except in the perverted sex fantasies of Judd and her fetishist friends.  Now, I think it’s highly likely that what she really means when she says “buy children for sex” is “hire prostitutes whom they may not realize are under 18”, but it isn’t what she’s saying.

The biggest danger of such rhetoric is that it plays fast and loose with the facts and the tale grows in the telling.  Girls who can’t be told from legal adults become “children”, hiring for a service becomes “buying for sex” as though they were carried home in a plain brown wrapper and stored in a drawer in the nightstand, and a rare event (only about 3.54% of all prostitutes are underage) becomes a “hidden epidemic” and normal, decent men are accused en masse.  But we’ve seen all that before; what makes this article unique is that it affords us the rare opportunity to catch a lie in the actual process of growth.  The author says “according to the Daily Beast, 100,000 – 300,000 children between the ages of 12 and 14 years old are victims of the child sex trade in this country” and helpfully provides us a link.  But if you click on that link you’ll find that’s not what the article says at all; the actual quote is “Between 100,000 and 300,000 children—primarily girls between the ages of 12 and 14—are victims of the sex trade right here in the United States.”  The new claim drops “primarily” and represents all of them as being in that age range.

The “300,000 trafficked children” fantasy grew by exactly such misquotes.  Its original source was a 2001 study by Richard Estes and Neil Weiner of the University of Pennsylvania which guesstimated (by questionable methodology) that “as many as 100,000-300,000 children and youth [of both sexes] are at risk for sexual exploitation” of one kind or another.  Note that even if we accept the shaky methodology, this guess is for BOTH sexes, for “children and youth” (not just children), and most importantly represents those at risk of some form of “exploitation”, not currently involved in one specific form (sex trafficking).  The paper is very revealing; if you peruse it you will see that Estes and Weiner rank types of “exploitation” by frequency, and that domestic and international “sex trafficking” are second and third from the bottom.  Even these highly biased and excitable gentlemen believed that “sex trafficking” affected only a tiny part of their “youth at risk”.  The categories are, in order from most common to least common, sexual molestation by acquaintances, sexual molestation by family members, pornography (including, apparently, just looking at porn), gay sex, stripping, sexual contributions by girls to gangs, pimped prostitution (for girls) and entrepreneurial prostitution (for boys).

Richard Estes and Neil Weiner

Reading the descriptions of these categories is a jaw-dropping experience; one wonders how the authors could possibly have been unaware of the flagrant exposure of their biases (of which there are quite a few).  Just looking at porn is considered somehow exploitative and pederasty is automatically classed as exploitation even if voluntary.  The inclusion of stripping in clubs and working for modeling agencies and escort services reveals that at least some of the “youth at risk” are of legal age to work in such venues, and we are told “Modeling, nude dancing, lap dancing and similar sexually provocative activities frequently are used to lure girls into prostitution; at a minimum, these activities serve as the basis for involving girls in pornography.”  I’ll bet that comes as a surprise to all of my readers who have worked in strip clubs; how did I miss all those pimps hanging around “luring” girls into prostitution or porn acting?  But the most telling example of bias is that, though entrepreneurial (i.e. voluntary) prostitution is listed as a category for boys, it is not for girls; Estes and Weiner automatically class all female prostitutes as involuntary, controlled and exploited!

To sum up, then, what this study actually says is “We can’t be sure because it’s really hard to count, but we think that up to 100,000 (and maybe, possibly as high as 300,000) people of both sexes from puberty until their late teens possibly may at some point come close to being sexually involved with people who are older than them, and this includes stumbling on internet porn, going to work in strip clubs to support themselves after 18, joining gangs and having older boyfriends.  Of these possibilities trafficking is the least common.  Oh, and we don’t accept that women can ever voluntarily engage in prostitution because they’re too stupid to be entrepreneurs; only guys are smart enough to do that.”  But in the past ten years, this tale has grown considerably; the 100,000-300,000 is represented as a proper statistical estimate rather than a broad guess, and as the number currently “exploited” rather than merely “at risk”.  The figure is usually said to represent only girls rather than both sexes and only “children” rather than “children, adolescents and 18-19 year old legal adults”.  But worst of all, the least common of Estes and Weiner’s categories of “sexual exploitation” is represented as its entirety!  The usual quote is something like “100,000-300,000 children are currently exploited by the sex trade in the United States”, which is a far cry from what the study actually says!

But it gets worse; this same study is also the source of the ubiquitous “the average age of entry into prostitution is 14” (or 13, or 12) myth which I exploded in my column of November 27th.  What it actually says is that among underage street prostitutes (i.e. those who were under 18 when interviewed), “The age range of entry…for the boys…was somewhat younger than that of the girls, i.e., 11-13 years vs. 12-14 years, respectively.”  However, the data published with the study does not support this conclusion; as explained in this mathematical analysis, if we assume that the study’s survey figures are reliable, the average age of entry for underage prostitutes (those of 18 or above being specifically excluded by the authors) is 15.91.  The authors do not claim that most prostitutes start at 12-14, but that most underage ones do; furthermore, they don’t claim that most underage prostitutes are currently that age, only that most started at that age (and even that is incorrect).  The widespread misuse is equivalent to the statement “most Americans learn to drive at 16” being warped into “most American drivers are 16.”

Combining all these distortions together finally gives us the Daily Beast’s claim, and though it would take weeks of research to pin down all the stages in the transformation (if we could find them at all), I do note that the combination of the age myth with the number myth is very recent; i.e. the claim that the victims are “primarily girls between the ages of 12 and 14” dates to this year.  Finally, with the new permutation quoted at the top of this column the tall tale has attained wholly ludicrous proportions; since there are only about 5.8 million girls of 12-14 in the U.S., the fanatics are now claiming that about 5% of them are sex slaves, which I fancy is too big a whopper even for the terminally gullible who make up the bulk of the population.

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A Modest Proposal

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 1, 2011| 30 Comments »

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country. –  Jonathan Swift

Though Alaskan politics isn’t usually a major topic of online commentary, this article from the Anchorage Daily News of last Thursday (March 24th) caused quite a stir; it’s about a local politician stating that he favors the criminalization of extramarital sex:

Gov. Sean Parnell’s appointee for the panel that nominates state judges testified Wednesday that he would like to see Alaskans prosecuted for having sex outside of marriage…One blog post on the [website of] Eagle Forum Alaska…[a social conservative organization in which candidate Don Haase holds a leadership position] praised efforts at criminalizing adultery in Michigan, and [Alaska state senator] Paskvan asked Haase if he thought it should be a felony in Alaska.  “I don’t see that that would rise to the level of a felony,” Haase said.

Paskvan:  “Do you believe it should be a crime?”
Haase:  “Yeah, I think it’s very harmful to have extramarital affairs.  It’s harmful to children, it’s harmful to the spouse who entered a legally binding agreement to marry the person that’s cheating on them.”
Paskvan:  “What about premarital affairs — should that be a crime?”
Haase:  “I think that would be up to the voters certainly.  If it came before (the state) as a vote, I probably would vote for it…I can see where it would be a matter for the state to be involved with because of the spread of disease and the likelihood that it would cause violence.  I can see legitimate reasons to push that as a crime.”

Haase then asked why those questions were relevant.  “You are injecting yourself into the judicial system and so I think it’s fair inquiry,” Paskvan replied.  “If you have a motivation to limit who would be advanced to a judgeship…then your beliefs and attitudes are important,” Paskvan said.  Haase said he opposed judicial activism, and cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade as an example.  In his campaign for state House last year, Haase made his opposition to abortion a central theme.  Abortion is also a prominent theme on the Eagle Forum Alaska blog…

You’ll have to pardon my amusement at the general consternation which has arisen in the media over this control freak’s position; it’s another case of “welcome to our world”, since whores constantly have to endure self-appointed “guardians of the public morals” advocating criminalization of our private sex lives, often using these same excuses.  But though many of you read this article last week, most probably missed this related story from this morning’s Huffington Post:

A Texas legislator said he agrees with the Alaskan politician who last week stated that extramarital sex should be illegal, but he proposes a way to minimize social repercussions from the ban while making money for the state.  State Representative Fairlay D. Sloop (D – Telegraph) suggests that Texas create a legal “temporary marriage” similar to that found in Islamic law.

“I know we’ve got this bill pending to ban Texas courts from considering Sharia, but even if that passes it doesn’t mean we can’t make a law similar to one of theirs,” said Sloop in a press conference this morning.  “After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and this would let the state control the spread of disease and even out-of-wedlock pregnancy.”

In Shi’a Islam, the Nikāh al-Mut‘ah (temporary marriage) is a marriage of fixed term which is decided at the outset and automatically dissolves at the end of that time.  The term can be as short as an hour, and the only financial compensation the woman receives is that decided upon when the contract is established.  A reporter familiar with the custom asked Sloop if his proposed Texas version would include the mandatory three-month waiting period between such marriages required in Islamic law.

“Well, that’s something we can hash out if the bill gets that far,” said Sloop; “in its current form there is no such requirement.  I figure that way, we can even tax prostitution without legalizing it.  If a prostitute wants to stay legal, she can just contract a temporary marriage with her john, pay her $10 fee at the courthouse and get married for an hour.  It would also help to fight human trafficking because we could check IDs, and keep underage girls from getting into it.”

While I think Sloop’s proposal hasn’t a snowball’s chance in South Texas of passing, and I’m extremely skeptical of his idea that whores would be willing to limit themselves to unmarried customers and register at the courthouse several times a day merely to stay technically legal, I have to congratulate him for original thinking.  Is his suggestion any more farfetched than the idea that it’s possible to entirely eradicate an institution which has existed since before we were human, or the bizarre neofeminist belief that one woman’s private sexual behavior somehow magically affects every other woman?  And if states have the power to create a new form of marriage which never existed prior to this century, why not the power to create a secular American version of an established form of traditional marriage from another culture?  In some ways, it makes a lot more sense than traditional marriage for the Americans of today.

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