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Archive for May, 2011

Parable

Posted in Fiction, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 21, 2011| 19 Comments »

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority.  Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.  –  Giordano Bruno

The land of Vespuccia was a lot like our own; people there lived very much like people do everywhere, and though they had their unique ways and traditions they were, for the most part, a reasonably typical modern country.  But the Vespuccians did have one peculiarity you might consider exceptional:  though they needed and liked to eat as much as everybody else, the average Vespuccian claimed to believe that it was bad and wrong to operate or patronize a restaurant.  I say “claimed to believe” because most of them couldn’t really have felt that way deep down; oh, some of them undoubtedly did, but 7 out of 10 Vespuccians had been to a restaurant at least once in their lives and many ate at such places regularly.  Restaurants were no less common in Vespuccia than in any other country, and indeed they always did a brisk business; restauranteurs were about as well-off as most business owners, and because the work was often difficult but also rewarding there was no shortage of people who decided to prepare food for a living despite the cruel way in which they were publicly treated by their countrymen because of it.

Despite the fact that most sensible people understood the importance of restaurants, almost nobody wanted to say that out loud; chefs and even waiters could not even publicly admit to working in their trades for fear of being ostracized.  Though many people ate brown-bag lunches right out in the open every day, moralists proclaimed that eating was an intimate act which should only be shared with one’s family.  Leaders accused restaurants of spreading disease in their food even though they cooked it more carefully and washed their pots and utensils more thoroughly than most people did at home.  And some jealous women pronounced that restaurants were bad because they themselves couldn’t cook as well as the chefs did, or complained that the mere existence of such establishments degraded and humiliated women because their husbands would expect to be waited on at home and have properly-prepared meals instead of reheated factory-made food which came out of boxes.  Worst of all, some heartless people would laugh when a restaurant was robbed or vandalized, saying that it was their own fault for displaying their fine silverware or claiming that they had enticed the criminals onto the premises with the delicious smells which emanated from them.  Some even turned their backs when restaurants burned down, and there were arsonists who specifically targeted restaurants because they knew there would be no public outcry against them.

But of all the Vespuccians, the ones who treated food professionals the worst were the bankers.  They wouldn’t lend money to those who worked in restaurants nor even let them open bank accounts, and they defended this illegal practice by claiming restauranteurs were dishonest.  They knowingly spread lies about chefs and waiters, repeating the same claims made by the moralists and leaders and jealous women and adding others of their own, such as claiming that restaurants enslaved their staff or hurt people by encouraging them to spend money on something which was quickly used up.  The worst of the bankers even directly stole money from restauranteurs, or else ate there and then walked out without paying their bills.  Even by Vespuccian standards their conduct was reprehensible, but if a restauranteur complained the bankers just insulted them and said they had brought misfortune upon themselves by opening restaurants in the first place; nobody criticized this monstrous behavior because they were afraid the bankers would raise their interest rates or foreclose on their homes.  Some upright people tried to defend the restauranteurs, but it was no use; most others would simply repeat their prejudiced views, and even when it could be proven that the bankers had done wrong people would claim that these were isolated incidents, that only a few bad bankers gave a bad name to the rest, or even that bankers were justified in their conduct because banking was such an important and stressful job.

One day Vespuccia fell on hard times, and so many restaurants went out of business that other people began to fear they might be affected as well.  Some of the public even said that the bankers should relent for a while and offer loans to the restaurants; some of this sentiment was sincere, while the rest was selfishly motivated by people concerned about all the chefs and waiters on the unemployment dole.  So eventually, some of the bankers grudgingly agreed to lend money to the restauranteurs, but even then it wasn’t exactly a fair deal; the bankers said that they needed the deeds to the restaurants as collateral, that they couldn’t promise a specific and constant interest rate and that the loans might be called in without warning as soon as the economic crisis was over.  They refused to put anything in writing, and still happily did business with other bankers who were busily engaged in mistreating restauranteurs as they always had.  Because the restauranteurs were so frightened of losing their businesses, however, many of them started to say among themselves that perhaps these bank loans might be a good idea, and prepared to hand over their papers in exchange for these vague and shaky promises.  But other restauranteurs (who were still doing all right and didn’t need the loans) told the desperate ones that bankers could not be trusted, and that they shouldn’t take this bargain unless the bankers put everything in writing and guaranteed that their property couldn’t be seized later on flimsy excuses.  Then some of the desperate ones answered that it was all well and fine for the ones who weren’t in danger to say such things because they weren’t the ones at risk, and that the promise of a loan under any conditions was better than no loan at all.  And so things went on as they always had, with the banks behaving as usual, the leaders making it easier for the banks to do so and the people refusing to demand change…except for the ones who insisted that Vespuccia should become more like Vinland, a nearby country in which the bankers preferred to harass people who ate at restaurants instead of those who ran them.

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Extra, Extra!

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 20, 2011| 29 Comments »

I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.  –  Ogden Nash

In the days before television and car radios, newspapers sometimes put out “extra” editions in the afternoon if a story came up which was too important or fast-breaking to wait until the regular edition the next morning.  “Extras” were usually short and were hawked by newsboys with stacks of the special edition, shouting “Extra!  Extra! Read all about it!” followed by the headline.  Once radios became portable extra editions became less common because there was no way to get them out quickly enough to beat the radio news to the “scoop”, and once television news became popular in the 1950s extras went the way of the dodo.  Newspapers then concentrated on telling the stories in detail rather than with speed, leaving the “breaking news” to the broadcast media because they knew people would want to read the full story the next morning anyhow.  Unfortunately for publishers, the internet has taken a big bite out of that market share as well by making it possible to publish in-depth print stories as quickly as TV or radio stations can interrupt their “regularly scheduled programming” for the quick & dirty sound-bite-fest which is broadcast news.  Papers are folding (please pardon the pun) or downsizing everywhere, and many publishers are concentrating more heavily on their websites than on print editions in order to keep their businesses afloat.

I run this blog much more like a newspaper than like a TV broadcast; that is, I don’t generally worry too much about getting there “first with the most”, but rather on examining a story through the lens of harlotry.  In other words, The Honest Courtesan may not be the first place you encounter a new story, but you probably won’t encounter my spin on that story in many other places.  When my husband is on the road I try to write two columns every day unless I have other stuff demanding my attention, and unless I’m completely tied up all day (no comments from the peanut gallery, y’all) I can usually manage at least one (my record is four).  What this all boils down to is that I tend to have 10-14 columns “in the pipeline” at once, and if I want to get a new column out quickly while the subject is still topical I just rearrange the dates and push low-priority columns (such as fictional interludes or “harlotographies”) back as needed.  So if I ever tell you to look for a column on a certain day and something different appears, now you know why.  Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to two stories which I would usually hold for my monthly “updates” column, but felt they deserved an “extra” due to their topicality.

Even Worse Than I Had Thought

I had already written yesterday’s column several days before this op-ed column from the MetroWest Daily News came to my attention on Monday (see how that works?)  I considered rewriting it to reference this, but it’s really too good to mention in passing so I decided to do this column instead.  The article, “Puritans With Badges”, is worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll give you a taste of the part that attracted my attention:

…Attorney General Martha Coakley, leading legislators and district attorneys have decided that what Massachusetts really needs is an all-out offensive against prostitution.  They are proposing a new crime: “human trafficking for sexual servitude,” which would allow convicted pimps, madams, or anyone else facilitating the exchange of sex for money to be imprisoned for up to 20 years on the first offense, with a mandatory 10 years in the pen if convicted a second time.  The 20-year sentence would also apply to anyone who recruits someone to engage in a “sexually-explicit performance.”  If you’re planning a bachelor party, better do it soon, since this law would empower Coakley to shut down the “gentlemen’s clubs” and hire-a-stripper operations.  The proposed law considers prostitutes the “victims” of prostitution, so it doubles the sentence for their customers.  “Whoever pays, agrees to pay, or offers to pay another person” for sex can be sentenced to up to 2 1/2 years in jail and a $5,000 fine, “whether such sexual conduct occurs or not”…Personal ads, online or on old-fashioned newsprint, indicate there are lots of consenting Massachusetts adults engaging in the business of pleasure.  Well, we can’t have that, can we?  Here in the land of the Puritans, there are some pursuits of happiness the authorities will not abide…

As you can see, it’s even worse than the NPR article I referenced yesterday made it sound; that one left out the criminalization of stripping in favor of the story of the bill’s poster child.  After reading the column, I sent an email of thanks to the author, Rick Holmes; he responded by asking if he could post my email in his own blog, which had a bit more to say about the issue.  I of course agreed, and was rather impressed with what I saw there; we may be seeing a new addition to “Friends of Whores”.

You Can Trust Us, Really

Honest Courtesan friend Dave Krueger called attention to this May 15th New York Post exclusive in his Agitator guest blog of that same date:

Two NYPD cops are being eyed in the Long Island serial slayings after investigators learned they got into trouble for hiring prostitutes while working for the department, according to sources familiar with the probe.  One cop was forced out of the job in the 1990s when his supervisors learned he spent time pursuing hookers and paying street walkers and down-and-out women for sex while he was supposed to be on patrol…The other officer still works for the NYPD but was stripped of his gun and badge years ago because he allegedly assaulted a prostitute and got arrested during a sting operation.  The woman complained to police supervisors about the officer but no criminal charges were filed and an internal probe went nowhere, sources said.  The patrolman was allowed to return to the force, they said, though he was placed on modified duty — transferred to a paper-pushing job in Manhattan where he’s not allowed to make arrests or respond to emergencies…It’s unclear if the disgraced cops know each other or what evidence investigators might have against them in the serial murders…The cops are not the sole focus of the investigation, which has expanded over the last several weeks, sources said.

Now, as I wrote last month, the police have suspected since at least the end of March that the serial killer might be a cop, yet they’re only now looking into what cops that might be?  As A.K. Smith pointed out in her column of May 16th:

If cops have been working this as a possible serial killer case since December, and have thought at least since March that the killer might be a cop…why are they just now looking at cops with this kind of history?  If it was a child sexual assault and murder you can bet they’d have questioned all the pedophiles in a 60-mile radius the first week.  Another question springs from that:  why are cops so surprised that prostitutes don’t want to come forward with evidence?  Imagine you were the victim of officer #2′s assault, walked into a police station, and saw him (or another of his ilk) sitting behind a desk.  Would you walk out or make a report?

I have nothing more to add, except to say that tomorrow’s column will examine A.K.’s rhetorical questions in a somewhat unusual manner.

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A Procrustean Bed

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 19, 2011| 82 Comments »

One law for the lion and ox is oppression.  –  William Blake

In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a bandit who played a sadistic game with his victims.  He would invite them to lie upon his bed; those who were shorter than the bed were stretched via a rack until they fit, and he chopped off the lower legs of taller men so they, too would fit.  The expression “Procrustean bed” therefore refers to an arbitrarily-determined, ruthlessly-enforced “one size fits all” legal standard, such as that which the State of Massachusetts hopes to impose upon its citizens.  In the minds of these Procrustean legislators, everyone involved in prostitution in any way is either a criminal or a victim, and anyone who cannot be defined as one will automatically be defined as the other.  Regular reader Jason called my attention to this story from NPR affiliate WBUR in Boston:

The Massachusetts House is considering a bill that would change the way the state prosecutes criminals in the sex trade.  The proposal would define the people who manage prostitutes, or “pimps,” as “human traffickers.”  It would also impose much stiffer penalties on pimps and the johns who pay for sex.  Some say the law would help put an end to trafficking by making it easier to prosecute those who benefit from prostitution.  But others say it would do little to curb the sex trade…

Defining anyone involved in transactional sex as a “criminal” is nothing new, but traditionally prostitute, management and client were all considered so.  Unfortunately, the injection of trafficking  mythology into the mixture in order to pander to the current witch hunt requires that the state produce victims other than the amorphous “public decency” or the faceless “state”.  A “human trafficker” requires a human to “traffick”, so the law amputates prostitutes’ legal “legs” (i.e. the presumption of adult self-determination), reducing us to victims unable to walk into or out of prostitution on our own.  And if all whores are victims, all those who assist us in our work must therefore be victimizers.  This Procrustean law defines anyone who “manages” a prostitute (of course, “manage” is not specifically defined) as a “pimp” and all pimps as “human traffickers”, thus stretching escort service owners, drivers, boyfriends and husbands into international gangsters.

As is typical for stories about politically popular but legally abhorrent “feel good” legislation, the article next attempts to distract the reader’s attention from the real issues by telling the horror story of its poster child:

Tanee Hobson, 21, is among the bill’s supporters.  As a teen, Hobson felt unwanted and ugly, and she had little support from her family.  At 14, she ran away from home.  Soon after, she started dating and living with a man…[who later] pushed her into prostitution…One she got into “the life,” it was hard to get out, Hobson says.  She needed the money, she couldn’t go home, and she was addicted to the self-esteem boosts she got every time someone paid to have sex with her.  She makes it clear:  people don’t sell themselves unless they’re desperate.  “I don’t think anyone wakes up one day saying, ‘I want to sell my body for money,’” Hobson said.  “Things have to be going on in your mind, you had to be going through some things to make you want to go to that part where you think your body isn’t worth it.”

In other words, if a 21-year-old former teen runaway who has been brainwashed by prohibitionists says “people don’t sell themselves unless they’re desperate”, that automatically trumps what many thousands of adult women, both anecdotally and in studies, have said.  The Procrustean Prohibitionists have chosen Tanee Hobson as the bed by which we are all to be measured, and because she did not voluntarily choose sex work, the legs of every voluntary adult whore have to be hacked off to her level of self-determination.  The rest of the  paragraph is no better; performing a sexual service is described by the tired and stupid metaphor “selling one’s body”, as though someone else’s soul was going to inhabit it after the “sale”.  The language is of course intended to make the reader think of slavery, and the phrase “she was addicted to the self-esteem boosts she got every time someone paid to have sex with her” is intended to call attention away from something wholly positive (increased self esteem) by evoking the old stereotype of the drug-addict streetwalker.  So is everything which increases self-esteem now to be an “addiction”, or is self-esteem only a bad thing when sex is involved?

The downward spiral next brings this article into the usual propaganda; we are told that the DA, Daniel Conley,

…regrets that his staff used to arrest and charge young women for prostitution while pimps and johns went free.  He is also troubled by the fact that in the United States, on average, girls get into prostitution between the ages of 12 and 14…this harsh reality is one of the reasons Conley decided prosecutors should change the way they approach prostitution.  “I concluded that the best way to deal with this problem is to treat the prostitutes, especially the young ones, as victims,” Conley said.  “It’s classified by our office as human trafficking, instead of just prostitution, because the phrase prostitution or the concentration on the prostitute emphasizes their criminal behavior.  So we strive, in most cases, to take the young woman out of the harmful situation and focus our prosecutorial energies on the pimp, the human trafficker”…Currently, pimps could face three months to two years in prison or a few hundred dollars in fines.  Under the new trafficking law, they could be sentenced to 20 years for selling adults in the sex industry and sentenced to life for exploiting children…if the bill passes, a john could face a maximum of two-and-a-half years, or 10 years for underage prostitution.  The law would also allow courts to seize the money pimps make and give it to their victims.  And it would create a task force to study trafficking and come up with strategies to end it.

As we know, the average age at which a prostitute enters the trade is 24, not 14.  This lie is intended to inflame “think of the children!” hysteria and call attention away from the fact that Conley supports a law which could send a man to prison for two decades for marrying the “wrong kind” of woman or even just driving a hooker to a call, and just for a little Swedish spice he wants adult men sent to jail for over two years for consensual sexual relations with an adult woman.  The law would also drive escort services out of business because none could dare risk having their companies and bank accounts seized in response to a complaint from a disgruntled employee; this would force some escorts who prefer to work with agencies to instead work independently even if they don’t want to.  But of course, the new law would also provide plenty of money for political whores to look for a “solution” to a virtually-nonexistent problem.

The one saving grace of the article is that, though its author lacks the intellectual honesty (or perhaps editorial permission) to interview sex worker rights advocates who might present a true opposing view, it at least pays lip service to fairness by interviewing Cherie Jimenez, the director of a Boston harm reduction project which, though it considers prostitution harmful, also recognizes that it is usually a free choice:

Jimenez…said many people end up in the sex trade because they’re poor and have no other options…[she] says defining everyone who engages in prostitution as a trafficking victim is problematic, because it sensationalizes the sex trade and disempowers the people in it… “When you look at in the context of, oh, these sorry victims, or passive victims…or you have to be enslaved…it’s not like that.  You know, I’ve met young women that are very edgy.  It’s not that they’re passive.  They have incredible strength and resilience…”

But despite this, the article ends on a chilling note from the Massachusetts Attorney General, Martha Coakley; she calls the demonization of clients and employees of prostitutes “fair” and justifies the continued criminalization of so-called “victims” allowed by the new law:  “Keep in mind, the act itself is criminal, so we’re not excusing that criminal behavior,” she said…[but] prosecutors would probably only enforce penalties against people who refuse to accept this kind of help to get out of prostitution.”  This so-called “help” means that in order to have even a chance at avoiding prosecution, arrested “victims” would be forced into re-education camps or the modern equivalents of Magdalene laundries.  Apparently, Coakley isn’t against coercion and enslavement as long as the state does it and it doesn’t result in increased self esteem for anybody.

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May Miscellanea (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 18, 2011| 32 Comments »

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.  –  D.H. Lawrence

The rest of this month’s short articles I hope my readers will find interesting.

Quite Possibly the Most Uptight Nerd Ever

An anonymous commenter posted this link in the commentary for my May 13th column; since it appears in MSN’s Digital Life Today section we might be inclined to consider the implied criticism of Apple to have a top-down origin, but the reporter’s prudish, offended tone is sort of hard to disguise.  In fact, I think she just might be the most uptight computer nerd I’ve yet encountered (which is too bad, because she’s quite pretty):

After June 1, it’ll be possible to hire a prostitute using an iPhone app.  According to ZDNet, dating service Sugar Sugar has managed to get Apple to grant its app a spot in the App Store.  The curious thing about this news is that Sugar Sugar is not an ordinary dating service.  Instead of putting together people who are simply seeking traditional relationships, it links up sugar daddies — wealthy men who are willing to shower young women with money, gifts, and other compensation in exchange for companionship — and their so-called sugar babies.  In more blunt terms:  The service helps prostitutes and their clients connect.

We’ve certainly heard about such services in the past — WhatsYourPrice.com, Craigslist’s darker corners, and an assortment of shady “dating” websites come to mind — but Sugar Sugar’s app is headed to Apple’s App Store, a place known for its strict guidelines and approval process…

The author, Rosa Golijan, then goes on to enumerate all of the App Store guidelines she believes the “app” violates with all the zeal of a crackpot fundie playing records backward to find the hidden Satanic messages.  She claims that the program “nearly” violates guidelines prohibiting “excessively objectionable or crude content” and “pornography”, and that it “promot[es] prostitution — behavior which qualifies as criminal in many places.”  Poor girl; her stays are so tight she must’ve cut off the oxygen to her brain.  Don’t worry, Rosa, I’ll help you understand this before your head explodes:  1)  “Nearly” only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and H-bombs; 2) normal people don’t find dating (even compensated dating) “objectionable”, and matching two people who want to meet (for whatever reason) is not “crude”;  3) “pornography” has a specific meaning, not just “stuff feminists don’t like”; and (last but not least) 4) though I myself have pointed out that sugar babies are a kind of whore, that’s only morally and practically speaking; as far as cops and politicians are concerned, it’s 100% legal.  I’m afraid your indignation, like that of most moralists, has approximately zero basis in reality.

Lest you think this is an isolated incident for Rosa, you may wish to click on the imbedded link for WhatsYourPrice.com above and read Rosa’s nearly-as-bluenosed commentary about that site.

More Prudes

Rosa isn’t the only champion of the New Victorianism in this column today.  A.K. Smith* called my attention to this May 13th article from Forbes about  a new limited-edition book by porn star Ashley Blue, each copy of which contains one of the author’s pubic hairs.  Now, that alone is interesting enough to merit mention in this blog, but it’s not the main aspect of the story I wish to focus on; that would be the story itself – or more specifically, the commentary on it.  As of this writing, three women have logged in to sniff about how “inappropriate” it is to have a story written by a woman about innovative book marketing by a female entrepreneur in the women’s section of a business website; the first also complained that it was “offensive” to post a picture of a book’s cover in an article about that book.  But the author, Susannah Breslin, answered them all with such admirable skill and grace that I truly hope to see a lot more pro-sex-work articles from her.

*While we’re on the subject of books, those of y’all who like detective thrillers might enjoy A.K’s novel Heart of Gold, now available as an e-book.

I’m Sure This One Was Wearing a Bra and Panties

Detroit cops claim that for a woman to be in a public place without underwear is “evidence of prostitution”, but does that also apply to drag queens?

Authorities in Michigan have suspended a Detroit police officer who was allegedly caught having sex with a cross-dressing prostitute in his patrol car.  “He is under investigation [and] is suspended with pay pending the [outcome of the] investigation,” Samuel Blaogun, a spokesman for the Detroit Police Department told AOL Weird News.  The alleged incident reportedly occurred about two weeks ago.  The officer, who has not been identified, was on duty at the time, an official said.  Blaogun declined to go into [further] detail…but Detroit’s WJBK reported that other officers spotted his [parked] patrol car …[and] allegedly caught the officer engaged in “activity” with the prostitute.  Asked whether the prostitute has been arrested, Blaogun replied:  “We are not releasing anything more.  It is under investigation, and…I can’t go into details.”  Police Chief Ralph Godbee has said he is troubled by the allegations and wants the investigation to proceed quickly…[he said] “We expect eight hours’ work for eight hours’ pay.”

I guess only members of the vice squad are allowed to indulge their kinks while on the clock.

Another Super Bowl Invasion

Last Saturday Amanda Brooks informed me that while the trafficking fanatics misdirected the gullible masses with wild tales about 10,000 hookers  descending upon the Dallas-Fort Worth area for the Super Bowl, a real invasion of far greater proportions descended upon the city and was ruthlessly attacked by authorities armed with (I am not making this up) laser beams, though of course this was largely hidden from the outside world.  Maybe we need to get the trafficking fanatics worried about the plight of these poor victims so they’ll stop harassing us.

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May Miscellanea (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 17, 2011| 43 Comments »

We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed.  Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.  –  Camille Paglia

Our monthly collection of articles related at least tangentially to issues covered in this blog.

Walk Like a Slut, Talk Like a Slut

I first saw this story on Huffington Post a couple of weeks ago and didn’t really feel it lay in my sphere of coverage.  But when Dave Krueger, who guest-blogged on The Agitator for the past two weeks, asked for my opinion about the story I thought about it a bit harder and decided I would write about it after all.  For those who are unfamiliar with the story, “SlutWalks” are protests against the sort of attitude displayed by Toronto cop Michael Sanguinetti, who told a group of female students at a safety seminar that the best way to avoid being raped is to “Avoid dressing like sluts.”  While I agree that a woman should take responsibility for her own safety by not carelessly putting herself into dangerous situations, the idea that men are such savages that their passions can be inflamed beyond control by the mere sight of a woman walking down a public street dressed in a provocative manner, is like something one might expect to hear from the nearest Ayatollah.  Getting drunk at a frat party and going upstairs alone with an equally-drunk frat boy will probably get a girl raped even if she buys her clothes from the boys’ department, and blaming rape victims for their manner of dress is a lot like blaming prostitutes for being robbed (see next item) or murdered.  This distinction seems unclear even to the usually-reasonable crowd over at The Agitator, which is part of why I changed my mind about covering the story.  But the final deciding factor was a comment by reader Beste  linking this May 8th Guardian editorial  from anti-porn fanatic Gail Dines and prohibitionist lawyer Wendy Murphy:

…The organisers claim that celebrating the word “slut”, and promoting sluttishness in general, will help women achieve full autonomy over their sexuality.  But the focus on “reclaiming” the word slut fails to address the real issue.  The term slut is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal “madonna/whore” view of women’s sexuality that it is beyond redemption.  The word is so saturated with the ideology that female sexual energy deserves punishment that trying to change its meaning is a waste of precious feminist resources.  Advocates would be better off exposing the myriad ways in which the law and the culture enable myths about all types of women – sexually active or “chaste” alike.  These myths facilitate sexual violence by undermining women’s credibility when they report sex crimes.  Whether we blame victims by calling them “sluts” (who thus asked to be raped), or by calling them “frigid” (who thus secretly want to be overpowered), the problem is that we’re blaming them for their own victimisation no matter what they do.  Encouraging women to be even more “sluttish” will not change this ugly reality…While the organisers of the SlutWalk might think that proudly calling themselves “sluts” is a way to empower women, they are in fact making life harder for girls who are trying to navigate their way through the tricky terrain of adolescence.  Women need to take to the streets – but not for the right to be called “slut”.  Women should be fighting for liberation from culturally imposed myths about their sexuality that encourage gendered violence.  Our daughters – and our sons – have the right to live in a world that celebrates equally women’s sexual freedom and bodily integrity.

Obviously, Dines’ and Murphy’s prohibitionist definition of “sexual freedom” does not include the choice of what to do with our own bodies, since Dines believes we shouldn’t be allowed to be photographed naked and Murphy thinks only her kind of whoredom (namely, law practice) should be legal.  The very fact that these disgusting hypocrites (who condemn the Madonna/whore duality while aggressively promoting their own version of it) are against SlutWalks is sufficient reason for me to endorse them.  A comment on the Facebook page for Boston SlutWalk says that “…the nature of your being is not determined by how many sexual partners you have,” to which I would add “…nor the reason you choose to have sex with them.”

And Speaking of Victim Blaming…

It’s entirely absent from both this May 5th Huffington Post story and the bulk of the commentary which follows it, though the headline writer apparently felt compelled to cater to cheap sensationalism by referring to the girls as “Craigslist prostitutes”:

Two prostitutes were assaulted and robbed in hotel rooms by a man responding to their online ads, and police on Friday were looking for two suspects…A 24-year-old who advertised on the classifieds site backpage.com was robbed of her cash and phone on April 30.  She was sliced in the hand and treated at a hospital, police said.  The second woman, who is 30 years old and advertised on Craigslist, was at the Roosevelt Hotel at about noon on May 1.  Police said the suspect brandished a knife and she struggled with him, until she was choked unconscious and then awoke to discover her money, a phone and a laptop were missing.  She didn’t request medical attention.  Police said the suspects were of similar height and build and were asking anyone with information on their whereabouts to call the New York Police Department’s Crime Stoppers hot line, (800) 577-TIPS…

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for most of the comments on the New York Daily News version of the same story.  Clearly, at least a few people are waking up (despite the best efforts of government agencies and prohibitionists to keep them asleep), but they don’t read the Daily News.

Saddest Story of the Month

I’ve written before about governmental attempts to legislate “sex offenders” out of existence by restricting where they can live so tightly that, apparently, the government believes they’ll just all move away to Pervertland or something.  Of course, any reasonable person would understand that if government makes it impossible for someone to live legally he’ll simply live illegally; what choice did the man from this May 4th Guardian story really have?

Albuquerque authorities arrested a homeless man for failing to notify them that he had moved out of the industrial rubbish bin he listed as his address.  KOB-TV reported that Charles Mader is a convicted sex offender and is required to give the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department a physical address.  Detectives say Mader violated his sex offender registration requirement after moving out of the dumpster and failing to report the move within 10 days.  On Monday, deputies found Mader at a homeless shelter and arrested him…Sheriff’s officials say Mader could face up to three years in jail for failing to register for a third time.

The excuse used by the police was the “failure to notify”, but I’ll bet if some reporter cares to research it he’ll find that there are no homeless shelters in Albuquerque to which the man could legally move due to residency restrictions.  In other words, he was actually arrested for daring to crawl out of the dumpster to which the “justice system” had consigned him.

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Heroines

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 16, 2011| 41 Comments »

Power without self-control tears a girl to pieces.  –  Wonder Woman, in Sensation Comics #19 (July 1943)

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you may have already noticed that I like comic books.  I don’t mean romance comics or Archie comic either; oh, no!  I love superhero comics, horror comics and science fiction comics of the Silver (late ‘50s-early ‘60s) and Bronze (‘70s) Ages.  And though I haven’t purchased a new comic since 1980, I still enjoy adding old ones to my collection or buying reprint editions to fill in the gaps.  I sometimes reread old issues, I enjoy superhero movies and TV shows, and I think the recent trend for people to become real-life superheroes is just about the coolest thing I’ve heard in years.

My affection for the genre began with two male relatives; the first was my cousin Jeff, who as I’ve mentioned before taught me to read.  Since he was only three years older than I he can probably be forgiven for quickly tiring of teaching me from “baby books” and switching to comics instead; one of the earliest ones I remember was a Superman annual full of these crazy Silver-Age “red kryptonite” stories (for those unfamiliar with the mythos, this substance does not weaken Superman as green kryptonite does but instead has weird and unpredictable effects such as giving him amnesia or taking away his powers).  The other influence was my mother’s younger brother, who died of leukemia in his late teens just a few months after I was born; he was made my godfather (a purely sentimental gesture, since he was already terminal at the time) and when I was old enough to understand I was given a few of his things, including his comic books.  Hence my affection for the old sci-fi comics such as Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space which made up the bulk of his collection.  And it was in the pages of the latter that I discovered one of my first heroines, Alanna of Ranagar.

Alanna was the beautiful daughter of Sardath, the most brilliant scientist of the city-state of Ranagar on the planet Rann, which orbited Alpha Centauri.  Sardath invented the “zeta beam”, a means of teleportation by which Adam Strange (a heroic young archeologist from Earth) travelled periodically to Rann, where he fought weird menaces with his intelligence, his courage and the invaluable help of Alanna, with whom he had fallen in love.  She had inherited her father’s formidable mind and was a scientist and adventurer in her own right, and Adam relied upon her wits and skills nearly as much as he relied upon his own.  I was absolutely fascinated with the stories and wanted more than anything to grow up to be as beautiful and smart as Alanna, who (like John Carter’s Dejah Thoris, Sherlock Holmes’ Irene Adler and practically every woman in the works of Robert Heinlein) helped me to develop the mindset which later caused me to reject the false neofeminist duality of “a woman can be valued for beauty or brains but not both”.

Nor was Alanna the only such heroine I discovered in comics; another was Shayera Hol, better known as Hawkgirl, who fought villains alongside her husband Hawkman as the first married couple in comics (that I ever heard of, anyway).  Like Alanna, Shayera was beautiful, intelligent, brave, and dedicated to helping her husband rather than trying to outdo him.  Like Adam and Alanna, the Hawks showed me that the power of a well-matched man-woman team was hard to beat.  The two ladies also shared something else in common; they both appeared in titles edited by the late, great Julius Schwartz, father of the Silver Age of comics and a former literary agent for such luminaries as Robert Bloch,  Ray Bradbury, and H. P. Lovecraft.  Schwartz loved strong women and was a supporter of women’s rights at least since the 1940s; most of the ladies (whether heroine, love-interest or villainess) who appeared in the titles he helmed were interesting, well-developed characters who stood out in sharp relief against the flat, stereotyped females who appeared in most other comics of the time (such as the rightfully-mocked Silver Age version of Superman’s girl friend Lois Lane, whose life was entirely dominated by schemes to trick the Man of Steel into proposing to her).  When I started selecting my own comics around my eighth birthday, I came to love another such heroine: Wonder Woman, whose adventures were overseen by Schwartz as of the July 1974 issue.

Wonder Woman was originally created by William Moulton Marston, the psychologist who invented the polygraph; he had previously written a book encouraging 1930s housewives to use their sexuality to help their husbands break bad habits such as drinking and gambling.  Marston was a kind of male archeofeminist; in 1942 he wrote:

Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.  There isn’t love enough in the male organism to run this planet peacefully.  Woman’s body contains twice as many love generating organs and endocrine mechanisms as the male.  What woman lacks is the dominance or self assertive power to put over and enforce her love desires.  I have given Wonder Woman this dominant force but have kept her loving, tender, maternal and feminine in every other way.

As I discovered many years later to my delight, early Wonder Woman comics were chock-full of bondage and bisexuality; unfortunately, this type of content was quickly suppressed after her creator’s death in 1947, and the character began a long, sad descent until by the mid-‘60s she was nothing more than a joke.  In the late ‘60s she was even de-powered and turned into an Emma Peel clone, and this sorry state of affairs might have persisted had not Gloria Steinem featured her on the cover of the very first issue of Ms. Magazine (July, 1972) and lamented her downfall in an editorial within.  DC Comics took notice; her powers were immediately returned without explanation and for a year (six issues) her title featured reprints with new artwork.  Finally Schwartz, who was well-known for his own super-power of reviving failing titles (he had previously rescued Batman in 1964 and Superman in 1971), was recruited to fix the mess and managed to put the Amazon Princess back on track from the very first issue he edited.  Luckily for me, the Schwartz Wonder Woman was really my first in-depth experience with the character; I previously knew her only from a single early ‘60s issue of my mother’s and her appearance in the Super Friends cartoon show.

Though comics of that time could never have featured prostitutes (except for one late ‘70s story I recall in which Batman got some information from a pretty streetwalker named Maria), I have no doubt that these heroines helped me along my path by teaching me from a very early age that women could be strong without being bellicose, beautiful without being fragile and intelligent without being bossy; that standing up for what’s right isn’t always easy; that it’s a good thing to be who you are even if some others don’t like it; and that a beautiful figure is nothing to be ashamed of.

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Harm Magnification

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 15, 2011| 27 Comments »

A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady.  –  usually attributed to Voltaire

Governments are quick to claim that new and ever-more-intrusive laws solve social problems, but in actuality the opposite is true:  many more social problems are caused by such laws than solved by them, and social progress generally comes from the repeal of oppressive laws rather than the installation of new ones.  How many readers remember the expression “rolling queers”?  At one time, obviously-gay men were more often targeted by muggers than other men were, and even some hoodlums who might not dare to mug anyone else might troll gay-bar areas for potential targets.  In the early ‘80s gay men of my acquaintance considered it enough of a hazard that they took special precautions against it, yet only 25 years later it has become vastly less common.  I’m sure there are some who believe that “hate crime” laws are responsible for this reduction, but this is nonsense; “rolling” had already decreased dramatically long before “hate crime” laws even became popular, much less expanded to include homosexuals.  The reason gay men were targeted for “rolling” wasn’t primarily due to hate but rather to opportunity; while homosexuality was still against the law in many states and gay men were commonly persecuted by police, they were far less likely than others to report the crime and so were “safe” targets even for young bullies who were not brave enough to attack anyone else.  It was not the installation of laws which decreased “rolling” but rather the removal of laws which criminalized homosexuality.

Similarly, prostitutes are victimized by opportunistic criminals and even rapists and serial killers for the simple reason that they perceive us as “safe targets” who, like gay men in the past, dare not go to the police for fear of worse victimization than that suffered at the hands of the criminals.  New “anti-trafficking” laws in many states and countries (many of them with a Swedish flavor) are touted as efforts to “protect” us, but in fact the existing laws are the main source of danger, and more laws will only increase the peril.  But declaring “open season” on marginalized groups is not the only way in which oppressive laws create crime; alcohol Prohibition in the United States essentially created the Mafia, and the drug prohibition nearly every country inflicts on its citizens has created the powerful drug cartels from which so much of the violence of the modern world springs.  Nor is crime the only social ill which springs from prohibitionism; illegal drugs (like the illegal liquor of the 1920s) are often impure and sometimes even poisonous because drug buyers, like prostitutes, dare not go to the police if they are harmed by a suppressed transaction.

The principle of “harm reduction” is the recognition of the phenomenon we’re discussing here, that laws against consensual behaviors nearly always do more harm than good.  Those who advocate harm reduction policies point out that tolerating “vices” not only keeps those who partake in them safer, but also minimizes the damage done to society at large (such as the incalculable damage done to the American economy, justice system and civil liberties by the institutional madness called the “War on Drugs”).  But because lawheads believe laws to always be good, most governments are hostile to harm reduction policies and in fact practice a philosophy we might call “harm magnification”, the stubborn support of prohibitionist laws even in cases where they can be proven to harm both individuals and society as a whole.  The United States is the most aggressive proponent of “harm magnification” policies, but its neighbor to the north is apparently dead-set on taking the title; the Canadian federal government is involved in a battle to reinstate prohibitionist laws which have been clearly demonstrated to endanger prostitutes, and last Thursday (May 12th) the government opened the latest chapter in its repeated efforts to close down a harm-reduction project for heroin addicts:

…Defenders of [North America’s first and only legal injection site]…say it [provides] a form of health care, and that health care is a provincial matter under Canada’s constitution.  The federal government counters that its writ trumps provincial rights because heroin is a federally banned substance.  The case opens before the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa on Thursday, and has drawn international attention…As of 2009, there were 65 injection facilities in 27 cities in Canada, Australia, and western Europe, according to the Canadian Medical Association Journal.  The World Health Organization has called them a “priority intervention” in slowing the spread of AIDS via infected needles.  Insite [the Vancouver facility] receives more than 800 visitors a day on average and has supervised more than a million injections since it opened in 2003, and none has caused a death, according to Insite supervisor Russ Maynard.  Addicts are given clean needles and sterilized water in which to mix their drug.  They bring their own drugs and inject at 12 stainless steel alcoves with mirrors on the walls so nurses on a raised platform can see them…When Insite opened, the Bush administration’s drug czar, John Walters, called it “state-sponsored suicide,” and after a Conservative government was elected in Canada in 2006, it moved to close the site.  Arguing for the government before the British Columbia Court of Appeal in 2009, Robert Frater rejected the notion that Insite was a form of health care, because it was not the ban on drugs that harms addicts…Supporters of Insite point to studies showing sharp drops in deaths from drug overdoses in the district since the drug-injection program was launched…Julio Montaner, president of the International AIDS Society, an association of professionals in the AIDS field, has said the area’s AIDS rate is the worst in the developed world, and can be designated an epidemic.  Montaner, a Canadian, accuses his government of ignoring scientific research and sabotaging a health initiative for society’s weakest citizens…

The Canadian government’s argument in this case, as in its support for anti-whore laws, is a blatant lie.  The ban on drugs indisputably harms addicts for the same reason prostitution bans harm whores:  it pushes them into the shadows and cuts them off from the legal protections everyone else takes for granted.  And that’s not even counting the economic costs to the taxpayers, nor the social cost  which results from empowering government thugs to pry into citizens’ private lives and violate their civil rights in order to accuse them of “crimes” which have no victims.

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Where Are the Victims?

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 14, 2011| 31 Comments »

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.

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Another Friday the Thirteenth

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 13, 2011| 33 Comments »

The powerless worship Luck and Fate.  –  Mason Cooley

Back in August I wrote a column about Friday the Thirteenth in which I pointed out that since Friday is Venus’ day and 13 the number of the moon (and thus the traditional number of witches in a coven), we whores should consider it a day of good luck for us even if superstitious Christians think of it as bad luck for them.  As I said in that column, I don’t really believe in luck; I think we largely make our own luck.  However,

…considering that the reasons for fear of this day are so closely related to the reasons our profession is maligned and suppressed, perhaps whores and those who support our rights should make every Friday the Thirteenth a day to speak out in favor of full decriminalization and an end to the institutionalized persecution of prostitutes.  I therefore ask my readers to start a new tradition today; speak out for us to at least one person who will listen, or if you’re not comfortable doing that openly at least make an anonymous post on some other website in defense of us, or containing a link to this column.  Let’s start getting the word out that whores are no different from other women, and that “a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body” is more than just a euphemism for abortion rights.

It’s been a tough nine months for hookers; though the intelligent, computer-literate segment of the population is clearly in favor of decriminalization by a comfortable margin and more public figures (including judges and police) are daring to question the status quo, we’ve also seen aggressive misinformation campaigns from the trafficking fanatics (aided and abetted by the mainstream media despite the inability of their claims to stand up to even the most cursory examination).  Governments all over the Western world are beginning to recognize in the “Swedish Model” a way to infantilize and control women while convincing the fanatical neofeminists and their brainwashed disciples that they’re actually advancing the cause of women’s rights; in the United States, this is being combined with strategies to enrich police departments and governments by robbing men accused of hiring or assisting prostitutes.  And though a number of intelligent people have come forward to support our right to control our own bodies, the public prefers to listen to empty-headed celebrities like Mira Sorvino, Demi Moore and Ashley Judd, who make a good living in the public branch of our shared profession but wish to suppress the freedom of (or at least destroy the income of) those of us who prefer the private branch.

A number of advocates are working to respond to the lies, propaganda and misinformation wherever we find them, but we can only do so much and we’re often outnumbered by the brainwashed zombie slaves of the “trafficking” witch-hunters.  Also, we’re often accused of distorting facts to make ourselves look good, and no matter how assiduously we work to present a balanced view this is a natural and credible accusation against anyone who advocates for some issue which directly concerns her.  That’s why allies are so important; it’s much harder for the prohibitionists to shout down people who don’t have a dog in the fight, but merely support prostitutes’ rights on moral grounds.  Every Friday the Thirteenth I will ask my readers, especially those of you who aren’t yourselves sex workers, to speak up for us in some way; talk about the issue with someone who will listen, make a post on a discussion board, comment on a news story which spreads disinformation, or even just post a link to this column.  If you aren’t confident in your ability to debate, even a simple phrase like “I think adult women should have the right to decide why and with whom they want to have sex” or “everyone has the right to equal protection under the law” might have a tiny but important impact on those who overhear.  Because in the final analysis, they’re the ones we have to convince; rational people already support some type of prostitution-law reform and fanatics cannot be convinced by argument because their minds are already made up, but the silent majority – the fence-sitters and swing-voters, the ones who answer “unsure” or “no comment” on polls – are the ones who can and must be made to understand that we are not intrinsically different from other women and deserve the same freedoms and protections that non-harlots take for granted.

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A War for Peace

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2011| 57 Comments »

Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.  –  Anton Chekhov

When the Ukrainian feminist group named “Femen” first appeared about three years ago I was predisposed to like them; the fact that they appeared to embrace their sexual power as women (as evidenced by their topless protests and other sexually provocative displays) at first made me hopeful that they would be pro-sex, pro-sex work and pro-woman (as opposed to anti-male like most people who call themselves “feminists” these days).  Alas, I was doomed to disappointment; despite the unusual tactics employed by the group, Femen’s agenda is typically neofeminist – they blather about “patriarchy”, oppose sex work and have fought against decriminalization.  Yet they seem to embrace their female identity and sexuality rather than denying it as neofeminists generally do, and indeed appear to lack the typical neofeminist self-loathing.  And though they talk about politically empowering women, they support imposition of the “Swedish Model” on Ukraine; all in all, I am forced to conclude that Femen, or at least its leaders, go beyond mere neofeminist hypocrisy into outright lunacy.

What called them back to my attention was this article from the May 6th issue of Der Spiegel, sent to me separately (one hour apart) by readers Iain and Josh; more than any other article on the group I’ve ever seen, it reveals the inherent contradictions between their rhetoric and tactics and the things they claim to stand for.

…For two years, [Femen] has been fighting against sex tourism and prostitution in Ukraine, a country that even Google automatically associates with “dating agencies” and “women.”  The advertisements to the right of a Google search for “Ukraine” are for “Single Ukrainian Ladies,” “Women From Ukraine,” or “Partner Search Ukraine.”  Although the group has only a few dozen activists…and around 300 supporters, the topless protests have established a global reputation for Femen.  One year ago, half-naked activists warning against the “Rape of Democracy” stormed the polling station where presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich was casting his vote.  After winning, Yanukovich curbed freedom of speech and the press, and even imprisoned members of his opposition…the SBU, Ukraine’s top secret service, has attempted to intimidate the Femen activists.  They claim that SBU officials even threatened to “break the legs” of the group’s leader if she didn’t cease her attacks on the government.

…The leaders of a Kiev university recently sent summonses to several students because they were engaged in Femen activities.  Then, in the rector’s office, SBU staff interrogated them.  The men asked students “where the money for your campaign comes from” and “for whom you work”…In truth, Femen survives on modest contributions from a handful of donors.  German Helmut Josef Geier, better known as DJ Hell, supports the group.  They also sell fan items on the Internet and auction small pieces of art.  To produce the latter, the activists first paint their breasts yellow and blue, and then they make prints on cloth or canvas.  What would feminists, like Germany’s Alice Schwarzer or America’s Gloria Steinem, have to say about that?  Old school feminists find the topless troops strange.  “They dress like prostitutes”…gender researcher Maria Dmitrieva wrote of Femen in a Russian magazine.  “The display of bare breasts, with or without cause, is certainly not conducive to social discourse.”

“Yes,” sighs [Femen’s leader] Anna Hutsol…”We’re different from classic feminists.  In order to gain a voice, they had to become like men.  But we want a real women’s revolution.  Our naked protests are part of the fight for women’s liberation.  We have the right to use our bodies as weapons.  It was men who made breasts into a secret”…

Hutsol says that (second-wave) feminists have become like men, and I agree; I also agree with her statement that women “have the right to use our bodies as weapons.”  But though the women of Femen defend their own right to use their bodies as swords, they wish to deny other women the right to use theirs as plowshares.  A weapon is nothing but a tool, and if it’s moral to use female sexuality to fight for whatever, how can it not be moral to use it to put food on the table?  In my column of November 19th I condemned American neofeminists for denying the fact that a woman’s right to “choice” over her own sexuality (which they promote so vehemently as a euphemism for abortion) automatically makes prostitution laws illegal and immoral.  But their hypocrisy on that issue seems almost honest and fair in comparison with Femen activists’ claim that it’s moral to work toward suppression of other women’s sexual choices by aggressively flaunting their own.

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