We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles. – David Mamet
Four short articles on subjects we’ve visited before.
How Old is Oldest? (March 12th)
Satoshi Kanazawa is no stranger to controversy, but if he had realized the firestorm his May 15th Scientific Fundamentalist column would touch off he might’ve picked a different subject. The column attempts to explain why interviewers for a large, long-term government study called “Add Health”, who were asked to rate their interviewees’ physical attractiveness, tended to rate black women as less attractive than other women, yet did not rate black men as less attractive than other men. The controversy has been described in many, many articles, but though this May 17th report from Huffington Post is less inflammatory than most it still makes the same basic error all the others do: representing the offending opinion as Kanazawa’s own, when in fact he clearly stated in the article that it was the interviewers who rated the women. Kanazawa was attacked as “racist” and the controversy has resulted in the end of his association with Psychology Today and may even have imperiled his academic position, yet nobody seems interested in recognizing that he didn’t make up the data, he only analyzed it.
Now, Kanazawa’s analysis may, as one of his colleagues at Psychology Today argues, be incorrect; I’m not good enough with statistics to follow the rebuttal. And Kanazawa certainly could have been much more careful with his phraseology; whenever I approach an emotionally-laden topic I choose my words very carefully indeed so my meaning is unmistakably clear. But I’m the Princess of Paranoia and 99.9% of the human race words its essays with far less caution than I employ in the composition of my grocery list. What’s worse, most people read others’ writing even less carefully, with the result that most readers saw the words “black women less attractive”, jumped up screaming “racism!” and instantly began spreading outrage. I can certainly understand why black women would be upset about the article, but the attacks on Kanazawa constitute a classic case of killing the messenger. In a free country we have the right to be mistaken or offensive, and if scientists are to be censored or even lose their jobs for being wrong or pissing people off, you can kiss scientific progress in the Western world goodbye.
Backwards Into the Future (March 30th)
Colorado “authorities” are apparently so certain of the vast profits they’re going to reap from robbing sex workers’ clients, that they’re spending money they don’t yet have to harass other sex workers:
Colorado Springs authorities…assign[ed] seven detectives to spend $700 at a strip club as part of a [March 5th] liquor compliance audit and prostitution sting…[which] found alcohol violations but no prostitution…Lt. John Godsey…says the $700 came from money seized in other undercover investigations. Godsey says $100 per…[man] trying to blend in seems about right…An attorney for the club says the owners voluntarily surrendered the club’s liquor license. The club is now all nude and doesn’t serve liquor.
Readers from civilizations more advanced than Colorado may not understand that last line; in some American states dancers in clubs where liquor is served can only go topless, and clubs which allow fully-nude dancing can’t serve liquor. Presumably, states with such laws believe that exceeding a certain “sin density” in a confined area will cause a degradation of the space-time continuum, or something. In any case, here’s yet another example of armed hooligans being paid to indulge their perversions (in this case trying to trick strippers into crossing one of the arbitrary lines which will excuse their being abducted and humiliated) on company time and at the taxpayers’ expense.
Subtle Pimping (April 8th)
It’s official; Kristin Davis is now the third member of The Honest Courtesan’s Hall of Shame along with Karen Sypher and Capri Anderson. Regular readers will recall that this dishonor is reserved for those whores who have most disgraced our profession by their incredibly disgusting behavior. I first took notice when Davis claimed only 5% of whores were professional and nominated her when she claimed that 80% of escorts are coerced, but these egregious violations of sisterhood had not yet been crowned by a blatant violation of professional ethics until May 19th, when she revealed or claimed (the veracity of the statement doesn’t matter) that disgraced IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was once a client of hers:
Kristin Davis said she provided young women for the IMF chief in 2006…and that one complained about his “aggressive” behaviour. “He was a client of my agency…When men abuse women I’m no longer going to protect their identities”. Mr. Strauss-Kahn…has been charged with sexually attacking a 32-year-old hotel maid at the Manhattan Sofitel…He denies the claims and is being held in Riker’s Island prison. Miss Davis…said Mr. Strauss-Kahn…wanted an ‘All-American girl’, with a fresh face, from the mid-West,” she said. “A girl in January 2006 complained he was rough and angry, and said she didn’t want to see him again”. In September 2006…[another girl] reported that “he was rough”, said Miss Davis, adding: “She told me not to send any new girls to him”…
Davis’ excuse for the ethical violation is pure bullshit; if she truly cared about other women’s safety she wouldn’t be attempting to build her reputation at our expense by promoting bogus statistics which politicians could use to justify further criminalization of our profession. She knows very well that just because a client is rough with a working girl does not mean he’s going to commit rape; if anything, rough consensual encounters may satisfy his urge to overpower women. That’s not to say I approve of such behavior; if I had several girls complain about a client I wouldn’t send anyone else to him, either. But that still doesn’t constitute evidence of rape any more than reading a book about explosives means that a person is guilty of a bombing. Kristin Davis doesn’t care about “men abusing women”; her behavior has made it abundantly clear that she cares only about herself and will say whatever will get her the most attention, whether it’s true or not and no matter whom it hurts.
The Eye of the Beholder (May 11th)
Individual liberties are not subject to restriction merely because they offend others; unless a third party is actually injured no government has the right to ban consensual adult behavior, even if that behavior upsets or disgusts most people. Back in December there was a perfect example when Columbia University professor David Epstein was charged with incest for a three-year relationship with his adult daughter, and recently another father-daughter couple appeared on a TV talk show (as reported in Jezebel on May 17th):
Recently The Steve Wilkos Show…aired a…story about a father and his 18-year-old daughter who had been estranged during the girl’s childhood but reconnected through MySpace when the daughter, Britney, became an adult. They struck up a romantic relationship…The footage—which features Britney and her father, Morgan, in a deep French kiss…is disturbing to say the least, but apparently it gets worse…Wilkos mentions that the couple “provided proof” that they were in a sexual relationship, which one source tells us was “video documentation” and that the “dad had filmed it”…
I don’t mind telling you that I find this creepy, icky, weird and sad on a number of levels and that I’m 95% sure that the woman will regret it at some point in the future, but I could say the same thing about doing cocaine or obsessive levels of body piercing. In the days before reliable birth control and genetic testing incest laws had the valid rationale of preventing inbreeding, but with the advent of those resources (and the descent of eugenics into disfavor) such arguments have lost their former impact. So should we really ban sexual relationships just because others find them skeevy? If you think so, tell that to your friends who support same-sex marriage. Being a free adult means having the “right to be wrong,” to make decisions others find questionable or even distressing and which may even result in considerable harm to oneself. Still not convinced? Take a look at the debate in the comment thread after that article and see how you feel about statements like “Do you actually believe that just because a woman says ‘okay’ to have sex, that everything’s okay?” The arguments against tolerance – that adult women cannot be trusted to make their own sexual decisions, that in a “bad” relationship it’s always the man who is wrong, that there can be a crime without a victim – are the same ones used to rationalize criminalization of sex work and a host of other things. Tolerating others’ unpleasant or even self-destructive behavior is the price we pay for others tolerating ours.
Not sure about your assessment of Davis’ comments on DSK. If two girls both said they didn’t want to see him again, that makes me think that we may not be talking about “rough consensual encounters” so much as “assaults on sex workers who can’t complain to the police about it.” And that is the sort of thing that makes me think someone might not deserve anonymity any more.
Even if that were true, it doesn’t matter. Part of a call girl’s high price is the price for discretion. Prostitutes are just as ethically bound as lawyers, medical professionals and priests to maintain client confidentiality even in circumstances where they might “sing” in order to save their own skins, as when pressed by police or district attorneys for names in return for the promise of leniency. Davis doesn’t even have that excuse; she just wants to make a name for herself, and doesn’t care whom she has to throw under the bus in order to accomplish that. If a currently-active whore were to do what she did her business would dry up in a heartbeat, but since Davis is retired she figures she has nothing to lose; contrast that with the ethical behavior of other high-profile retired whores like Heidi Fleiss, Sydney Biddle Barrows, Norma Jean Almodovar, Deborah Jeane Palfrey or even myself.
Lets assume for the sake of agument that her justification is valid Maggie.
That leaves us with two questions,
1. Why did she send a second girl to a client know to be abusive
2. Why did she wait 5yrs to mention his name?
Ofcourse these two question prove the lie that is about doing the right thing and that it is indeed as you suggested her looking to get some press
I’m not trying to suggest that Davis has acted well, but if the only problem with her behavior was that she wasn’t respecting DSK’s privacy, I’m not sure how much of a problem I think that is. Now, that isn’t the only problem with her behavior; the timing stinks. But Maggie’s discussion made it sound like she thought privacy was the biggest issue, with timing just being another sleazy aspect of the case, while I tend to think that if what Davis says is true, the timing is the big problem, and her speaking up at all isn’t.
His privacy isn’t at issue; her ethics are. To paraphrase Sailor Barsoom, it isn’t about what kind of man DSK is; it’s about what kind of woman Davis is. 🙁
Kristin Davis is so full of shit I’m surprised it’s not coming out of her ears. Next she’s going to say that she sent a couple of her girls to Mars to entertain some aliens.
LOL! 😀
BTB, I think I found out where she got that “80%” nonsense from:
I suspect McTaggart got it from the trafficking fanatics; it’s the most popular WAG for the percentage of “trafficked persons” who are supposedly coerced into prostitution. So by the old “Chinese Whispers” effect it goes from “80% of trafficked persons are used for prostitution” to McTaggart’s “80% of prostitutes are coerced” to Davis’ “80% of escorts are coerced”. So much for her exhaustive research…
I like your David Mamet quote. My favourite on this subject is Mark Twain’s slightly pithier:
“In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either”.
That Twain felt that way suggests that things may not have changed as much as many people (like to) think.
As for the father-daughter relationship, I do recall that family members do tend to find one another attractive. This is generally rendered harmless by the instinct that prevents us from being sexually interested in those with whome we have lived in childhood. So brothers and sisters who were separated very early in life – and thus never lived together – can fall in love if they meet (for the first time) as adults. What society should do about such events is hard to say. A conservative would probably think that the incest taboo should be preserved on general grounds, while a radical might wonder what justification there is for interfering with people’s right to interfere with one another.
Good article in Globe and Mail today recommending that the Canadian Supreme Court throw out all prostitution laws.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/why-the-courts-must-decriminalize-prostitution/article2047000/
Those kinds of articles are so great to see; maybe if Canada decriminalizes there will be more pressure on US border states to do so.
Kanazawa may be an honest researcher with an unfortunate turn of phrase. But that he is a Japanese is against him. The Japanese (speaking culturally) are the world’s most polite appalling bigots. like the Indians they pretend that they no longer maintain a cast system, and like the Indians you REALLY don’t want to be the equivalent of an “Untouchable” (Barakumin) in Japan. Hell, they still require the descendants of Koreans brought into the country as slave labor to hold internal passports. It doesn’t help AT ALL that, to the layman, he is talking about a purely subjective subject.
As to incestuous relationships, I have this thought; Society might be said to have an interest in discouraging relationships that are highly likely to end in serious emotional damage to those involved, because such damage tends to spread. I don’t insist on this point of view, I just throw it out there.
Third piece:
Yeah. Neither of them is doing anything technically illegal.
Extremely creepy. Shudder.
Kanazawa:
You’re not supposed to say inconvenient truths. First law:
If you would speak the truth, you should have one foot in the stirrup.
Subtle pimping:
No honor among thieves. She’s pimping for personal advantage. Stringing up her sisters is no big deal. Sisterhood is always a myth. No-one is an enemy to women like other women – and this goes for almost everything. It takes a woman to truly cut a woman down. Threats from men are either existential or exaggerated. Either a man will kill you and string you up (not many) or in truth he’s easy to deal with.
I agree with you, Maggie. If they’re consenting adults, I don’t see the problem with it. As for children, inbreeding amplifies good genes and amplifies bad genes. I wouldn’t think of going to bed with my mother but if I’d never met her and we ran across each other on Facebook, who knows? Stranger things have happened.
Slightly off topic but here it is: Modern reproductive medicine using anonymous donors is mass producing half siblings who have no clue. It is not unheard of for them to meet up. It is not unusual for them to feel “strangely comfortable” around each other. Big trouble.
I do not have an easy answer. No one will donate without long term anonymity and the desire for kids appears to be overwhelming for lots of people at a certain stage.
Great Blog, btw.
Thank you, Rum! The need for anonymity is even stronger now that sperm donors have been forced to pay child support.
Some jurisdictions are slamming guys who donated sperm with everything from child support to “interpretations of wills. In this case, the sperm donation was pre-technical – back in the 80’s. It was it the UK. They have weird laws there, but not completely alien for us.
Part of a call girl’s high price is the price for discretion. Prostitutes are just as ethically bound as lawyers, medical professionals and priests to maintain client confidentiality even in circumstances where they might “sing” in order to save their own skins
The escort I knew never divulged anything to me. Despite the fact that we talked about lots of thing, not one name ever dropped. She was scrupulous. For that, she got up to $1000 for an evening and night: I guess there was some conversation involved, too. She was good at it, so it would have been a waste otherwise.
Not so much as a single name to me. I’d have been fascinated. I always wondered why the profoundly tight ethics around this issue – she never varied.
I might suggest she had better ethics than some lawyers and judges I’ve known, who tended to flapablap. Or comment when they shouldn’t have.
Perhaps pros do have ethics.
I’ve never even dropped a name to my husband, and when discussing clients in this blog I never even give enough information for readers to guess whom I might mean.
“It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.” – Robert A. Heinlein
and astronomically higher than politicians and other constitutional whores
I have to admit: incest oogs me out. When reading certain online erotica, I skip stories that have “inc” in the story codes.* The law should leave them along if they are both consenting adults? Um… ah… Yeah I guess so. Yuck! but why bring the force of the State into it?
Kanazawa enjoys offending people. No, he didn’t do the study, but he leapt upon it with the gusto of a horny hound dog when he saw it. He’s a shit-stirer, and when you dedicate yourself to stirring shit, sooner or later some of it’s going to splash on you. Oops.
I could support prostitutes having a recognized legal confidentiality privilege, like lawyers, doctors, and clergy.
* And people, if your story includes incest, or bestiality, or snuff, or other common, strong squicks, then please DO use the story codes. That’s what they’re there for: so that the people who like that sort of thing can find it, and so that the people who do not like that sort of thing can avoid it.
I have some statistical background; the criticism of Kanazawa seems largely sound. In short, he looked at small snippets of the data only (mistake #1) and did not carefully measure confounding factors inherent in the nature of the study (mistake #2). Then, he took his results and used them to make overly broad claims with a sensational nature (mistake #3).
There is reasonably strong anecdotal evidence that in America, black women are on average found less attractive. The dating site OKCupid does interesting things with the data they gather from their members: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/
But even if it is true, you have to remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and in America, most of the beholders (85%) aren’t black, and on top of that, most of the beholders are likely at least unconsciously biased against blacks. Perhaps African American women would be found to be more attractive if they were to be rated by Nigerians, Indians, or Vietnamese.
Or as I learned years ago, central/eastern European. Finding black women to be less attractive (sexually) is mostly an anglophile conceit. In three years of living in Germany, I can say that I met few men who wouldn’t dropkick a blonde in the face to get closer to a sub-Sahara bred African woman. And as anyone who’s ever served in the military knows, black/dark skinned men in the teutonic/Scandinavian/Baltic countries have an universal pussy pass.
Then again, this is assuming that attractive=bed worthy, not attractive=marriage-worthy.
Good news:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/why-the-courts-must-decriminalize-prostitution/article2047000/singlepage/#articlecontent
Something VERY interesting about Strauss-Kahn is right before this rape accusation, he was speaking out AGAINST how the IMF operates. Interesting, isn’t it? HHMM…so many times in history those who speak out get accused of things, die in accidents, etc. Please note I’m not saying this could mean he’s innocent or guilty of the charges. He deserves to have a trial to decide that. I just think there might be more to this accusation than meets the eye.
I posted something like that up at reason Hit & Run once… I got my head bitten off from people asking for evidence of negative results from inbreeding… I couldn’t find any real studies on it.
I know in the past, people used to marry cousins a lot (Charles Darwin, for one) and that many people alive today are descendants of cousin marriages.
Inbreeding takes generations to show up; take a look at the problems in royal families (particularly in Egypt and among the Julio-Claudians) and in Arab cultures (where 1st-cousin marriage is extremely common) and you’ll see the issues. But since eugenics has fallen out of favor, we’re not supposed to care if our descendants are burdened with genetic defects; that’s supposedly “inhumane”.
consanguineous marriage is relatively frequent in south asia, though not evenly spread throughout, but in my own family it pops up enough for me to wonder–there is the possibility, especially in some castes that more rigorously enforce the procreational rules (tamil brahmins, etc.), that they manage to preserve highly heritable traits like IQ (high in the case of tambrams) and central obesity (skinny-fat syndrome.)
and as for the jezebel commentariat, i think their retort would be that they do not frown on women making sexual decisions but rather that all consensual sex is by definition conducted like a very wealthy person’s tax return: itemized by desired act/fetish to the very last caress.
RE: AA female attractivness
I was disappointed in your Kanazawa coverage. I expected you would drop some empiric, “boots on the ground” information about the relative desirability of AA prostitutes .
RE: incest
When a sex coupling instinctively creates visceral disgust in a large portion of us, it is because we have an evolutionarily-honed hard-wired biologic aversion to it. It is a biologic perversion. This includes prostitution.
Generally, most men ask for what they want when calling an escort service, and though in New Orleans I did have a certain percentage of callers who specified they didn’t want a black girl I think this was mostly due to the fact that New Orleans is majority black so those men suspected they also represented the majority of escorts. I have never heard of independent black internet escorts having any kind of unusual problems, because obviously any man who didn’t like black girls wouldn’t contact them in the first place.
Could you elaborate on the sentence “This includes prostitution.”?
Sure, Sailor. I’ve described this before, but here goes:
when most people see a young woman with a baby and a husband, we smile and feel that the future is bright. When we see a young woman wasting her youth on prostitution , we instinctively feel repulsed. She is a biologic perversion; a dead-end. We feel the same repulsion from homosexuals, incest, and 55 yr. old women having babies.
Of course (as I have said before) your theory is based on the fallacious notion that whores don’t have babies, which is completely untrue; I am one one of the few prostitutes I know who doesn’t have children, and my childlessness was due to a defect in my uterus, not the fact that I became a hooker several years after my hysterectomy. And in the days before reliable birth control, a prostitute without children was a rare bird indeed. So your “biological dead end” theory simply doesn’t hold water, especially considering that marriage evolved from prostitution rather than the other way around.
Men aren’t “repulsed” by prostitutes; if they were you can be sure the number of them who had used our services would be much lower than 69%. And I don’t think women are so much “repulsed” as they are intimidated, just as they are by any other sexually available woman their husbands might spend resources on.
Is anybody here denying that prostitutes can have babies? Are hookers unusually less fertile than other women? If any of us feel revulsion when we see a prostitute because she is a biological dead end, perhaps the problem is that we have failed to realize that whores can be mommies and mommies can be whores.
Of course, there’s also the whole idea that “it’s icky” somehow equals biological gospel, which I’ll be happy to rip to shreds sometime when it’s daylight. I’ll give you a hint, though: how closely related do two people have to be before it’s icky? Before you answer, you might want to consult both Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin, and maybe watch the movies The Blue Lagoon and The Beatmaster.
In a society where prostitutes are respected, such as Sumeria, there is no “instinctive revulsion,” no “visceral disgust.” Most of the men who go to see prostitutes seem not to have any instinctive, visceral disgusting revulsion. Amsterdam manages not to puke itself to death. New Zealand seems not to be inundated with any more disgust than before, but then again they don’t even seem to be disgusted by wetas, so that might not be a good example. There simply is no innate, instinctive, inborn ick factor to prostitution.
Now, this isn’t to say that nobody finds prostitutes revolting, disgusting, puke-worthy, etc. Obviously, some people do. But this isn’t because of biology; this is because we have been taught that prostitutes are either evil temptresses or the most fucked up losers in the world. It’s easy to feel revulsion for some fucked up loser who is also an evil temptress.
I myself would probably find prostitutes revolting, disgusting, etc. if I believed that press on them. I know better, and so prostitutes don’t disgust me. In fact, I think they’re pretty cool.
Most Americans seem to think we’re cool when they’re not vilifying us; I’ve written about this weird love-hate relationship before.
Maggie,
your shop, your reality.
JZ, I don’t have a problem with people expressing ideas here that disagree with mine. But I reserve the right to politely express why I feel those ideas are incorrect.
This reads as dismissal of a simple observation of fact, that demolishes your central argument.
I find this extremely obnoxious.
@maggie,
I’ll grant you that we live in different worlds. In yours, “69%” of men patronize and adore hookers, admirable hard working hookers have babies, and no one you know gets repulsed at the thought of hookers. I won’t ague with what you see in your world.
In mine, hookers are single moms dependent upon government assistance and have no men committed to them, men express a visceral disgust at the thought of hookers.
Whoa, I never said that most men “adore” hookers, and the 69% figure isn’t mine, it’s Kinsey’s (though it does reflect my experience so I prefer it over the higher and lower figures I’ve seen). However, I’m not sure where you get the idea that hookers are dependent on government assistance; any whore who can’t make enough to support herself needs to find a new job.
Why would someone whjo is earning, tax free, $300 p/d go through all the supervision that comes with public aid?
For the non-whores on public aid, they must pay taxes on it. Many of them got pregnant by accident. Aid to Women with dependent children (WIC) pays for groceries and diapers and that’s it. Some women will trade coupons with other women for cigarettes; that’s the degradation of tobacco addiction.. I grew up on welfare. Welfare used to subsidize moving expenses and furniture and appliances, no more. You should try living on what welfare gives you. You wouldn’t like it very much.
There is no such thing as an ‘instinctual revulsion’ to prostitutes. This is made up in your mind or by whatever church you go to.
By the 1950’s scientists had reduced the number of human instincts to a very small number: We are born with a fear of falling. We have instinctive reactions to danger, such as fight or flight (or as some circles say now, for women, ‘tend and befriend’). Reproduction seems like an instinct but many women refuse this option. Even the instinct to survive can be deeply buried under depression.
Sex might be an instinct – it’s certainly a powerful drive, but my guess is some 15% of the population has no real interest in sex.
As for ‘visceral disgust’, you should speak for yourself. I’d love to be romantically involved with a whore (hell, I’d like to be romantically involved with almost any adult woman). A whore for a wife would be really spicy and kinky.
My husband seems to think so. 😉 If you’d like to ask him what it’s like, read the May Q&A column; you can submit a question for him to answer.
There are some advantages.
Anyway, my intention here is not to antagonize. I read here to understand you.
@Maggie,
certainly you know that in addition to whoring , those that are single moms collect government assistance. (ie. subsidized housing, WIC, food stamps, rent subsidies, free and reduced school lunches, earned income credit, Medicaid, etc. )
69% is preposterous to me. Using a high number serves your view to normalize the practice.
I suppose some do, but that’s hardly limited to prostitutes, now is it? And you may consider it “preposterous” is you like; take it up with Dr. Kinsey. But please don’t accuse me of intellectual dishonesty. I know what I’ve seen, I know what I’ve studied, and I know what I’ve discussed with sex researchers, and 69% is indeed the most reasonable figure. Studies producing higher figures (up to 80%) seem to me flawed by their choice of sample population, and those producing much lower figures (below 40%) are flawed by poor question construction, e.g. “Do you patronize prostitutes?” vs. Kinsey’s “have you ever paid a woman for sex?” The former allows men to dodge the question if they’ve only done it once or they can convince themselves she wasn’t a “real” prostitute (i.e. she was a stripper, a barmaid strapped for cash, etc).
So no, I don’t “use a high number to normalize the practice”; if I were going to do that I think I could come up with a better figure than 6% for the fraction of men who see whores regularly, or 0.285% for the fraction of the female population who are full-time prostitutes. Don’t you?
@jz That sure seems to be a highly generalized, stereotyped, close minded opinion on your part. Let me guess, you think that the majority of whores are drug addicts of below average intelligence as well. Right?
Apparently your time spent reading here hasn’t yielded much comprehensive understanding of whores or whoredom. Considering that this is far from the case for most readers (including Satoshi Kanazawa), it is likely due to plain old intellectual laziness on your part.