One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behaviour was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people’s experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women. – Rosalind Coward
On February 18th I wrote about the absurd rhetoric employed by federal prosecutors in their persecution of Gregory Carr, one of the owners of Miami Companions, a large interstate escort service targeted by federal prosecutors for (as columnist Darrell Dawsey pointed out) being too successful. Mr. Dawsey quoted prosecutor Barbara McQuade as saying, “Our goal is not to stamp out prostitution. I don’t think we’ll ever do that…but what we are concerned about is deterring criminal organizations from exploiting women as a commodity for profit.” But clearly, McQuade’s stance (also echoed by her lackey Jennifer Blackwell below) has nothing to do with law or justice and everything to do with neofeminist rhetoric…unless, of course, federal prosecutors are also planning cases against modeling agencies, day-care centers, clinics, elementary schools, strip clubs, secretarial pools and every other business which relies primarily or entirely on female labor and therefore “exploits women as a commodity for profit”. In the warped minds of neofeminists, $500/hour escorting is “exploitation”, but cleaning toilets for minimum wage is not.
As regular readers of this blog know, prosecutions for prostitution are based on nothing but hearsay and Kafkaesque parodies of “evidence” such as the presence of condoms or the lack of underwear and are therefore nearly impossible for the accused to win unless she happens to draw an anomalously-sympathetic jury. So I need not tell you that Gregory Carr was found guilty of the “crime” of running a successful business with happy employees (many of whom testified in his behalf); what I will tell you is that he was sentenced day before yesterday (May 12th). Here’s a report edited down from the one which appeared that afternoon in the Detroit Free Press:
A federal judge today sentenced Gregory Carr, the accused mastermind of the Miami Companions sex ring, to 14 months in prison for running a high-priced escort service that charged up to $500 an hour for sex to roughly 30,000 clients nationwide. The government pushed for a 27-month prison sentence. The defense asked for probation. U.S. District Court Judge Arthur Tarnow met both sides in the middle, concluding that Carr, 44, was not a violent man, but that he did deserve prison time for running an illegal operation that made millions and put women in potential danger. “As far as I can tell he was not a thug, or a woman beater, or a man beater, or any kind of beater,” Tarnow said, noting that he had never had a federal prostitution case where no violence was alleged. Still, he told Carr, “you created a situation where that could happen.”
I think most of y’all can spot the various propaganda elements in this paragraph without my help; due to asinine laws an escort service becomes a “sex ring” and its owner a “mastermind” (which of course means that your author was also the “mastermind” of a “sex ring” for six years). But though the prosecutor and her assistant (who no doubt imagine themselves as some sort of superheroines) didn’t get the sentence they wanted, they did succeed in so confusing the judge with their backward neofeminist rhetoric that he proclaimed screening procedures and client verification “put women in potential danger” rather than helping them avoid it. I suppose he imagines that escorts are all passive little dolls who sit inertly on shelves until wound up by “pimps” like Carr. Yes, that term was used; as we’ve seen before, the criminally ignorant apply the term “pimp” to any non-client male who has anything to do with a hooker:
…Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Blackwell pushed for a stiffer sentence, arguing that Carr put women in danger, and made millions doing it. “The fact that you’re a self-proclaimed nice pimp, a Richard Gere pimp, does not detract from the seriousness of the charge,” Blackwell said. “The fact is quite simple. His corporation, his business model, was set up to literally make money off the sweat off women’s backs.”
Umm, Dynagirl? Though Richard Gere played a small-time pimp in his first movie, Report to the Commissioner, he’s not exactly remembered for that outside movie trivia books. He did play a male prostitute in American Gigolo and a client in Pretty Woman; perhaps that’s what you’re thinking of? Well, I guess your rhetoric needn’t make sense as long as it sounds good, right? And since you think it’s a heinous crime to “make money off the sweat off women’s backs,” I anxiously await your lawsuits against women’s sports teams and deodorant manufacturers.
Blackwell and her boss weren’t interested in justice or even (by McQuade’s own admission) upholding the law; their prosecution of Miami Companions in general and Carr in particular is clearly revealed by their own words as nothing but an agenda-driven vendetta against sex work. Contrast this with the sentencing memo (obtained from public records) filed by defense attorney Paul DeCailly last week which references the safety procedures of the agency:
The letters from the former escorts talk about…how respectfully they were treated by the staff and management of the company. Some common themes throughout these letters are Greg’s respectful nature, and the safe environment that MC provided though its screening process. The Court might remember the fight over the client list, and the references to the depth of information that was maintained on the client list…[which] represents more than 30,000 men and women who are known as safe, non-violent, and respectful individuals to meet with, and after viewing the notes contained in the client list…it is clear that any client…who was less than respectful to the escorts was immediately blacklisted, and no further appointments could or would be booked. The Government fought to keep the List protected as though it was some sort of national security document; however, it should be noted that the List has existed for many years, and never once was the information made public.
Earlier in the memo (page 15) DeCailly launches a spirited attack on the vagueness and absurdity of the Mann Act (under which Carr was prosecuted), pointing out its origin in the “white slavery” hysteria of the early 20th century and the fact that though it is a federal law its violation is defined by whether or not the act for which a woman is “transported” is illegal in the state to which she travels…meaning that travel to some states for a given purpose would violate the act, while travel to different states for the identical purpose would not. But the part of the memo which pleased me the most was this harm reduction argument starting on page 19:
In fact, as the Court will read, many of the escorts (who are the Government’s purported victims) have asked the Court to consider that Greg and MC provided them with nothing more or less than a safe alternative to doing what they would do otherwise (and what many of them are doing following Greg’s arrest): working as independent escorts, without the safety net of a client screening service. As a result of Greg’s conduct, these women knew that when they met clients, the clients had been screened, verified, and that they were in a safe situation. If the government really sought to protect these women, it might not have shut down MC at all; while acknowledging that the women were engaging in illegal conduct, the government might have realized (as it acknowledges every day when it dispenses clean needles to heroin addicts) that they are at least engaging in that conduct in a manner which is safer for all involved.
We can only hope that this sort of reasoning becomes far more common in documents submitted to courts in the next few years; perhaps once judges read it often enough it will begin to sink in, providing a shield of skepticism against neofeminist attempts to use the courts as the means by which to effect their own personal inquisitions against women who dare to be sexual and the men who interact with them.
ARGH! HE put women in danger AND made money off it…. Whatever! We need to go after the ‘masterminds’ of Match.com, AdultFriendFinder, AshleyMadison, et al. If that is the argument then any online fee based dating site also needs to be prosecuted. In fact they need to be aggressively persecuted because none of the above have screening procedures!
But wait! Is the argument that he put women in danger OR that he made money from it? Um, which is the more serious accusation here? If it’s the first then BY GOD we need to shut down ANY and EVERY social network! Including but not limited to Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, and the list goes on…..
AND it’s not just women… what about the men? Men are also at risk of being put in danger from these sites. Women have been known to rip men off and have their “boyfriends” mug them…
I know! Let’s all live under a rock due to the potential for getting hurt.
Sorry… fresh off my blog and still on a roll ….
Using the Govt’s bizarre logic we should also prosecute the Commander-in-Chief for endangering the lives of female soldiers who go anywhere near a battlefield zone – we should also prosecute taxi companies for employing females – so many car accidents and violent customers these days… in fact we should be like the Arabs who lock their women in harems and prevent them from going out.
You wrote: ‘In the warped minds of neofeminists, $500/hour escorting is “exploitation”, but cleaning toilets for minimum wage is not.’
I think this sums it up perfectly. The reaction an escort gets when she reveals her profession to anyone unfamiliar with the industry is overwhelmingly negative. Most people are more disgusted than if she said she deodorized bowling shoes, shoveled manure, or worked in a hospital laundry (where the presence of infectious fluids is much greater).
That’s why it’s so ironic that this type of reaction is strongest amongst men and women who self-identify as feminists, because the reaction is based in the outdated historical construct that sex=dirty and women=pure.
Exactly, A.K. Neofeminists are among the staunchest remaining supporters of the Madonna/whore duality,though they vehemently deny it. 🙁
@bdevereaux
Your parallel with match.com and online dating is absolutely sharp.
Somehow, Match.com is fine – but not the “dating service” that this guy maintained.
What utter and complete hypocrisy.
It’s so repugnant to me it makes me want to sue the prosecutors.
Yet another aspect of our “justice” that breeds contempt in the public mind.
Those of us who want NOTHING to do with outright prostitution deserve to have websites where we can meet others without that being part of it. If people deserve websites for escorts, etc., then those who DON’T want that deserve places also. To have 1 without the other is not only unfair but WRONG. What’s sad to me is there’s plenty of the women who follow the evil world system of using men for money, gifts, etc., on the non-outright prostitution websites. They’re everywhere and 1 reason is what they do is “in” with many. People on both sides of the prostitution issue deserve websites that can be great for meeting people. I know at least 1 is great because I found my last sex only friend on there (who was wonderful) and it didn’t cost me a cent to place an ad. Years ago I had ads in magazines that were free except for the cost of a stamp to register and the men could put ads in also for the same cost. I was very glad to see these magazines didn’t take financial advantage of the many sexually frustrated men like some (not all) magazines, clubs, etc., did.
Laura, it isn’t “wrong”, it’s business. Hooker sites and dating sites exist because people start them and maintain them; they aren’t established by government mandate. If you suspect a “free dating” (can’t think of a better term) site might be popular, why not start one? You needn’t charge a dime to clients; it can be supported by advertising. 🙂
In the warped minds of the neofeminists anything other than a tenured position as a PhD. in Women’s Studies (paying $100,000 a year, with no requirement to publish) is exploitation. ANYTHING MEN DO TO WOMEN other than kiss their shoes (not their ass, that would be sex) is exploitation. Men are always guilty and women are always victims. There is no way to satisfy them, no condition for victory, nothing other than death will put a stop to their shrill shrieks and incessant whining.
Why we put up with them baffles me. That so few of them die at the hands of men pushed beyond reasoning thought to lash out at a source of unending torment refutes most of what they say.
I wholly support the toleration of neofeminists; even though I and many others find them immensely annoying, the principle of individual freedom demands we endure their shrieking. However, that same principle also demands they be given NO POWER over the lives of other individuals, and that government ignore their demands for such power; unfortunately politicians are themselves power-mad and have been happy to grant neofeminists such power in return for whatever it is they’re getting from them. Until individual freedoms and a ban against “consensual crimes” are enshrined in the Constitution of every nation on Earth, neofeminists and other collectivists will continue to be a clear and present danger to liberty and the continuing advancement of the human race.
Tolerate in the sense of “allow to live”? Yes. Tolerate in the sense of “Not move heaven and earth to shut down anything they do that is funded with money from non-voluntary contributions (tax money, student dues, etc)? HELL NO! Tolerate them in the Liberal Intellectual Radical Progressive sense of “Don’t every say anything that might, in any light, be construed to insult them”? You MUST be joking. Ridicule is our best defense against these pests.
On a side note, I do occasionally feel sorry for these idiots. Every time I hear the song “Love the One you’re With” the line “There’s a girl right next to you, and she’s just waiting for something to do” makes me CRINGE! I mean, Good God! And that was sung by a supposed Liberal! One of their ALLIES!
*shudder*
Not sorry enough to want to keep PAYING THEIR SALARIES though.
“Tolerate” in the sense of “allow to live, speak, read and act among themselves as they please”. Tolerance does NOT mean providing anyone with state support or allowing them to advocate infringing the rights of others (unless those rights are inalienable by law, in which case they can advocate all they like for all the good it’ll do them).
It is always important to be sure what kind of “tolerance” one is talking about. The Liberal Left Establishment is far too fond of saying “Tolerate” when they mean “Surrender to”.
My philosophy of tolerance was, coincidentally, the subject of last Wednesday’s column. 🙂
I would rather have states endow Women’s Studies departments that are flawed than have no such departments at all. Though I disagree with radical feminists who are prohibitionist, I feel that:
a) there are other causes in which they do much more good than harm
b) the ignorance of undergraduates from some backgrounds is so heinous that anything these departments can do to chip away at it is heroic
c) either change will come from within the department or the department will wither away on its own, but to eliminate it makes martyrs. Please don’t feed the martyrs.
One major problem I have with “women’s studies” is that the very concept infantilizes women. “Women’s studies”, as opposed to “men’s studies” like science, literature, art, history, etc? The very name irresistibly reminds one of terms like “children’s menu”. If women are to ever be considered fully equal to men we have to study real academic subjects rather than the academic equivalent of baby food.
The justification for “Women’s Studies” – that as an academic discipline History has tended to ignore the Female half of society – has a ring of truth to it. If “Women’s Studies” would actually DO some scholarship, they wouldn’t bother me so goddamned much. But they don’t.
If that’s the justification it needs to be classified under the history department and held to the same standards of scholarship and research; anything else is patronizing tokenism.
Not absolutely necessarily. In the 1970’a my father was part of the “Department of Interdisciplinary Studies” a Case Western Reserve. Why? Because the History department had been a little too free with tenure a few years previous and so the History program was full of dead wood. Father (and his fellows in the History of Science program) cobbled up the DIS to get out from under.
I can imagine a Feminist (as opposed to Neofeminist) scholar cobbling up a Women’s Studies program to get out from under a History department full of tenured twits, and doing real scholarship there. These kinds of compromises abound in academia, where all too often a previously intelligent and energetic scholar gets tenure and then apparently has his brain excised and stored in a jar.
But to my knowledge, it hasn’t happened yet.
OK, to understand my positions on Higher Learning, you need to know that I’m a Professor’s Brat. I lived on or around college campuses until I was 18 years old. Further, my Father is a History professor, and my mother was also a history teacher at one point.
Enough background.
Colleges and Universities are almost always institutions for preserving and spreading an intellectual orthodoxy. This was true when the Catholic Church started building some of the first in europe, it was true of the school that the Confucians built in China, and it is true of American Higher Education today.
On top of this, like a rotting cherry on top of a puddle of rancid ice cream, we now have the “Ethnic Studies” programs. There is no actual REASON that they should not be legitimate – or at least as legitimate as any other humanities program – but the fact is that they aren’t. They don’t check credentials (or vermin like Ward Churchill couldn’t get hired), they don’t have any defensible standards for tenure, and they don’t require scholarly publication (screeds don’t count).
On the campuses of privately funded institutions, they are merely embarrassing. On tax-supported campuses they are an outrage.
“In the warped minds of neofeminists, $500/hour escorting is “exploitation”, but cleaning toilets for minimum wage is not.”
Great line.
Thank you! 🙂
Yes, the use of terms such as “sex ring” and “mastermind” amount to instant Guilt by Terminology. Other examples: if the government doesn’t like someone, that person lives not in a house, but in a “compound”. If the government doesn’t like the actions of some other government, it suddenly becomes a “regime”.
George Orwell nailed this kind of nonsense decades ago, but most Americans (and I’m sure citizens of other nations as well) keep getting suckered by the words their “leaders” choose.
My favorite example of that is “perp”. People accused of crimes used to be called “suspects”, but now cops call them “perps” (short for “perpetrators”, i.e. “people who have committed crimes” rather than “suspects”) and the media obediently follow. If I were a mayor or governor I would issue a public announcement pointing this out and ban the use of the term in my jurisdiction, fining any cop or reporter caught using it as a violator of the civil rights of the accused.
Maggie, I know you go on about the neo-feminist, and I agree with you, but it is just another symptom of a much more subtle root cause.
There is a problem with the fundamental idea of equality. Notice that when the founding fathers penned the constitution they didn’t say that all men are equal. Or all people are equal. They said, “All men are created equal.” That is a very, very important distinction and one that we have lost site of as a culture.
When we are born, and we have taken no action at all, we are all deserving of equal treatment. From the time time that we start making our own decisions and choosing our own actions, that is no longer true.
We all realize this on a subtle level, and we pronounce it with sayings like ‘deserving of my respect’, or ‘deserving of my contempt’. Just like we say that a person deserves punishment for his crimes.
Why are we not applying the same logic to non-legal issues? Are neo-feminist deserving of tolerance? No. Had they used their own resources, behaved in a manner that tolerated others as they wish to be tolerated, respected others opinions, and acted in fair and equitable manner, then they would have been deserving of fair and equitable treatment, including tolerance.
But they didn’t, so they don’t. It’s very simple.
In your normal illustration you mention spinach. As long as you don’t criticize me for eating spinach, and I don’t criticize you for not eating spinach, or at the very least, we criticize each other in a mutually respectful way, then we are practicing mutual tolerance and can regard each other as equals in this regard. One you start a campaign denigrating everyone who eats spinach, however, you have violated the ideal of tolerance and are no longer deserving of such.
From a legal standpoint, what they do amounts to slander and libel, depending on the form. From a ethical standpoint, it is hypocritical at best. Which one of those features should we be ‘tolerant’ of. It is not only the message, but the method, that is deserving of contempt. However it is the method that removes their right to tolerance.
The problem with that, Tony, is who decides which methods are acceptable? Not governments, surely? As soon as we start allowing value judgments about rudeness and such we imperil free speech, just as we have done by allowing cops and judges to decide on what is “obscene”. Ina free society we MUST tolerate all speech, even the most hateful, until it crosses over the line to action (and that includes pushing governments to restrict the rights of others or inciting a mob to physical violence that one does not oneself participate in).
We don’t tolerate groups like neofeminists because they deserve it; we tolerate groups like neofeminists because tolerance itself has value.
To put it another way: it isn’t about what they are like; it’s about what we are like.
Now that that’s out of the way: I did not expect to run into Electrawoman and Dynagirl!
“ElectraFreeze, please!”
Precisely.
I thought you might appreciate that. 😉
Apropos of the topic of disproportionate treatment and the demonization of the working girl, I thought you might enjoy this: http://dailyreckoning.com/jon-corzine-whats-going-on/
Well, not “enjoy.” But it’s nice to see a media acknowledgment of this kind of common inequity of the “justice” system.
“…a high-priced escort service that charged up to $500 an hour for sex to roughly 30,000 clients nationwide.”
People are always complaining about how few women there are on the Fortune 500 list. Has anyone pointed out to them that if prostitution we decriminalized there would probably be a few madames on that list? I know this particular ‘ring’ was run by a man, but I bet there are a few other agencies of comparable size run by women. Yet another case of hurting people to ‘help’ them.
Sorry for the comment on an old post. I discovered you on The Agitator last week and have been working through your archives since then.
No need for apology, Angela; I’ve seen new comments on old posts spark new discussions. 🙂
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