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Archive for June, 2011

Here Comes the Groom

Posted in Call types, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 20, 2011| 46 Comments »

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t, they’d be married too.  –  H. L. Mencken

June is named for Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage, and so the Romans considered her month to be a particularly propitious one in which to marry.  And just as in so many other cases I’ve discussed in my various holiday columns, the pagan tradition continued into Christian times despite its original reason being lost.  Because weddings are more common in June so are bachelor parties, and since more bachelor parties means more employment for sex workers June was generally the last good month before the summer doldrums for the ladies of New Orleans.

I’m using the general term “sex workers” here on purpose, because I don’t just mean hookers; at least three kinds of sex worker commonly benefit from bachelor parties, namely porn actresses, strippers and whores.  Some bachelor party participants limit themselves (whether due to money, morality or timidity) to group porn-watching, while many others spend some or all of the evening at a strip club; usually the guys will chip in to buy the groom a few lap dances, and a lot of girls have fun really turning up the heat when they know the dance recipient is going to get married the next day.  Other groups prefer to rent a hotel room and have their own private party, hiring strippers from a club or out of the phone book.  There were two girls from the Gold Club who did a very brisk business (at least two per week and more than that in June) with such parties; they had a whole routine involving stripping, teasing the bachelor and a two-girl show, and though I never got to see one of these parties they must’ve been good because they did most of their business by referrals.  I did a few such jobs during my time as a stripper, but not nearly as many as after I became an escort; some guys feel a stripper just isn’t enough, and prefer to hire escorts to put on a show (either solo or two-girl) and/or give the bachelor his last go ‘round as a free man.

I knew a number of girls who didn’t have the nerve to do such shows alone; though a timid whore is rarely a successful one, the idea of being the only naked woman in a room with a dozen fully-dressed guys is just too much even for most escorts.  But it never bothered me; I recognized that as long as I kept to the better hotels and listened to my gut, I could manipulate the group dynamic to protect me just as easily (if not more so) as an evil leader could manipulate it to precipitate a gang rape.  As long as a woman shows herself to be a real person, the “never hurt a girl” training kicks in and guys stepping over the line can be corrected by a simple stratagem such as slapping the offending hand, wagging a finger and saying with a smile and a wink “Naughty, naughty!  Look, don’t touch!”  This of course provokes laughter and good-natured ribbing of the culprit by the other guys, and his behavior is controlled by peer pressure without bruising his ego.  But it was rare that I even had to do that; in over six years of doing bachelor parties, the only large group of men who ever worked together to victimize me were cops, and since I was tricked into attending that “party” I hardly think it counts.

I had a number of fun and memorable bachelor party experiences over the years, but I think my favorite one was from the client side (so to speak).  It happened in June of 2006, my very last month as an escort, and I had already informed the agencies what my last day was going to be.  One of my husband’s friends was about to get married, and his bachelor party was to be held at the club where I had first worked nine years before.  I asked if they needed me to pick them up afterward; I was going to be working (as was my custom) until 2 AM, and figured they probably wouldn’t be much later than that.  But the groom assured my husband that my kind offer would not be necessary, as the best man wasn’t a drinker and had agreed to be the designated driver.  Well, about midnight my husband called from the club and asked if my offer was still good; I of course said that it was and asked what had happened to the best man.  My husband replied that the guy was apparently a wimp whose wife had him on a very short leash and didn’t approve of strip clubs, so he had promised her he would be home by midnight (thus ruining the evening for everyone else by not telling them beforehand).  But fortunately they had me to call on, so I told them to just keep having fun and call me when they were ready to go home.

About two my husband called again and asked if I had signed off yet; when I told him I had, he asked if I would come and hang out with them for a little while.  When I arrived, he explained that he wanted a lap dance from this one redhead and thought it would be really hot if I arranged it for him.  In the meantime, I tipped a few dancers and one of them came down to the edge of the stage to kiss me, which as you might expect thrilled every guy in the place.  The dancer my husband wanted soon became available, and when they went into the private room the groom waxed effusive about how I was absolutely the coolest wife in the world, inspiring me to treat him to a lap dance as well.  After my husband’s dance the girl came back to the table with him and chatted with me for quite a while about how the club had changed since I had danced there; when we got up to go she asked if she could see my tits and I hiked up my blouse, and the scene which followed was pretty much exactly like the one which had taken place on Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras of the preceding year:  she stood there with my tits in her hands while we talked about the surgeon and what a good job he had done, while every guy in the immediate vicinity enjoyed the show.

Bachelor parties are a male rite of passage, a ceremony celebrating a man’s transition from one stage of life into another; the wise bride does not interfere with the proceedings unless she really wants to give her groom cold feet.  Men have their ways and rituals, just as women have ours, and if a woman wants a man to respect her feelings and needs she should set a good example by respecting his first.  I’m not saying you have to buy your husband lap dances and make out with strippers in front of him; what I’m saying is that if you give him opportunities for indulging his impulses in a controlled fashion, he’ll love and respect you all the more and you’ll win major cool points with his friends in the bargain.

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“Whores In History” Revisited

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 19, 2011| 14 Comments »

I am wholeheartedly on the side of the unrepentant whore, the most maligned woman in history…in [this book she] speaks up to denounce and challenge her oppressors, and thereby overcome the centuries of lies, denial and stereotyping that have been her lot.  Only when she is listened to by the rest of our society will women finally and irrevocably be able to end our division into Good Girls and Bad Girls.  –  Nickie Roberts, from her foreword

My initial bibliography entry for Nickie Roberts’ Whores In History (1992) did not remotely do it justice; it was literally the very first entry I wrote, and I hadn’t really settled on the length of description and depth of detail that I wanted in the reviews.  But now, almost a year later, I feel I owe the book a longer and more elaborate review, especially after my disappointing experience with Aphrodite’s Trade (related in yesterday’s column).  Up until now, all I had to say about Roberts’s monumental work was this rather terse paragraph:

Anyone who is really interested in the TRUE history of prostitution (as opposed to the traditional nonsense promulgated by Western governments and the even more ridiculous variety vomited forth by neofeminists) should read this book.  As a former working girl herself, Nickie Roberts knows the lay of the land and this excellent and exhaustively-researched volume may open a few eyes about the origin and development of the profession and the way many of us see it.

And though that’s absolutely true, it isn’t nearly enough.  In Roberts’ introduction she states,

Everything I had read about prostitution and prostitutes appeared to have been written by men – the client class – mostly academics who claimed scholarly objectivity.  The thought occurred to me that if prostitution truly is the world’s oldest profession, then men writing about it is certainly the second oldest.  From the time ink was invented, it seems that male writers have been obsessed with the whore…Only fairly recently has the subject of prostitution been tackled by feminists, often of the radical/revolutionary tendency; women who have an anti-sex industry axe to grind.  To put it bluntly, the feminist movement has failed the prostitute, and failed her badly, in my view.

This is a crucial point, because it presents the entire philosophy underlying the book:  It is, and was from the beginning intended to be, the first scholarly examination of the history of prostitution written by someone who actually knows about the subject firsthand.  Roberts is not a male scholar looking at the lives and stories and statistics and reports from a male (and therefore an outsider’s) perspective, nor a feminist scholar warping the truth through the distorted lens of misandrist anti-sex rhetoric, but a harlot-scholar writing about a subject she understands because she has lived it.

“To the Sisters”, a Roman brothel sign; one of many plates featured in the book

The study starts in prehistory and then moves from Ancient Greece to Rome to Medieval Europe, then on through the Renaissance and Age of Reason to the 19th and 20th centuries, culminating in a discussion of the origins of the sex worker rights movement.  In each chapter she gives a general sketch of the social conditions of the time as they relate to women in general and whores specifically, then discusses historical events and important personalities (both historical whores and the men who hired them, wrote about them or tried to control them).  Where statistics are available she presents them, though as you might expect this happens much more often in the chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries (just as in any other historical subject).  Her research is exhaustive; the bibliography contains about 150 sources and every important fact and declaration in the 358-page text is carefully attributed.  Though the author certainly expresses her own informed interpretation of the various events and trends, she never stoops to the neofeminist tactic of just making things up; all of her judgments are backed up with solid facts.

I cannot possibly overstate how valuable Whores In History has been to me in writing this blog; whenever I set out to do a column on people or events from a certain period in history I usually scan the chapter which discusses it so as to re-familiarize myself with it, and in many cases Roberts quotes from sources which are not readily available online.  My copy resides in the bookshelf nearest my desk (when it isn’t on the desk), and bears the unmistakable signs of heavy usage and consultation.  I highly recommend this important work to all my whore sisters, to all the men who love and/or support us, and to all those who are interested in the truth about a long-hidden aspect of women’s history.  Used copies can be purchased on Amazon for literally pocket change, and it’s well worth the modest investment.

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New Reviews for June

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2011| 17 Comments »

As is my custom, I’m featuring these reviews of new additions to my review pages in order to call the attention of regular readers (who have presumably already looked at those pages) to them.

Aphrodite’s Trade by Lochlainn Seabrook

Thanks to its ambitious subtitle (“The Hidden History of Prostitution Unveiled”), its beautiful cover art (The Pearls of Aphrodite by Herbert Draper) and its endorsements from a number of luminaries in the prostitutes’ rights field, I was really looking forward to reading this book and was hoping to find in it a supplement to Nickie Roberts’ Whores In History; alas, I was badly disappointed.  Even now I wish I could recommend it to you; the author’s heart is in the right place and some of the points he makes are bang on target, but both content and execution are so critically flawed that I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone who isn’t A) already an expert in the field; B) an obsessive collector of all things whore-related, and C) able to find it cheap.

The book starts out strong with a presentation of the roots of prostitution in biology (such as we’ve discussed here before), and Seabrook even postulates a “prostitution gene” along the same lines as that suggested by Amanda Brooks.  Furthermore, he points out that since marriage was made possible by human females evolving beyond estrus – essentially making ourselves sexually receptive all the time – that it is reasonable to state that marriage evolved from prostitution rather than alongside it; again, no quibbles here.  But rather than stick to his strong point (which appears to be biology), Seabrook then wanders off into some very unconventional (and unsound) notions about history, describing as fact highly dubious New Age ideas about Neolithic social organization and portraying what he calls the “Patriarchal Takeover” as a monolithic event at a specific time, which it absolutely was not; what’s more, he can’t make up his mind about when it was supposed to have happened because he gives three different dates!  And his notions of etymology are even worse; Seabrook appears to believe that because two words resemble each other they must be linguistically related, and the houses of cards he builds from these pseudo-cognates are quite remarkable.

The structure of the book is as flawed as its content; though externally it appears to be a typical small-format trade paperback of 256 pages, it is printed in a large type-face with excessive white space and the essay itself (I hesitate to call it a book) occupies only 75 of those pages; there follow several appendices (only two of which are arguably useful), then a 40-page bibliography and a 75-page index (printed with even more wasted space than the text).  In the final analysis, this is basically a deeply-flawed 30-something page essay padded out to book size.  Save your money and buy Whores In History instead.

Heart of Gold by A.K. Smith

My experience with Heart of Gold was almost the opposite of that with Aphrodite’s Trade.  I was interested in it because of the subject matter and because I like the author’s blog, but I don’t generally care for detective novels and, though I’m not a technophobe, I fully admit to prejudice against e-books because (as you might suspect from my having been a librarian) I’m a bibliophile and I like the experience of reading a physical book with paper pages I can hold in my hands (I especially like the slightly-musty smell of old books).  So when I sat down with it a couple of weeks ago I intended to read just a chapter or two a night; well, that didn’t happen.  I was drawn in almost immediately and found myself saying, “I’ll just read one more chapter” over and over again until I had finished half the book; I only stopped because it was almost one in the morning and I usually go to bed around midnight.  The next day I started reading soon after posting my column, and didn’t stop until I was finished.  Smith’s characters are interesting, her plotting is tight and she managed to keep me guessing as to which of the suspects was threatening the heroine and what his motive might be (I guessed wrong).  Since (as I said previously) I’m not much of a reader of modern detective fiction, I can’t compare it to the work of well-known mystery authors, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and Smith managed to work in a good deal of detail about the realities of escorting in such a way that outsiders will learn some things about our lives without feeling preached to or distracted from the action.  All in all this is a very good first novel, and I look forward to future works.

National Geographic Taboo:  Prostitution (2010)

My husband recorded this documentary, an episode of the National Geographic Channel’s Taboo series, on his computer while on the road and brought it home for me to watch.  I believe the producers were trying to present a balanced view on the subject, but unfortunately this effort was undermined by two things, namely the narrative voice and the presentation of statistically disparate forms of prostitution as though they were equally common.  The show depicted four kinds of prostitution, each for about a quarter of the time:  Australian brothels, Bangladeshi prostitutes in a shantytown  adjacent to a ferry landing, European brothels and streetwalkers in Washington, D.C.  I’m sure my readers are astute enough to have noticed one major omission: the single most common form of prostitution in the Western world, namely escorting, was entirely ignored in favor of lurid concentration on a very small fraction of the American market.  The director seems to have leaned a little on our side; though roughly equal air time was given to the two pro-decriminalization experts (Ronald Weitzer, whose papers I have referenced before, and Jill McCracken, a fellow member of Sex Workers Without Borders) and the one anti-prostitution fanatic (Sheila Jeffreys), the spectacle of Jeffreys pronouncing that a paralyzed man who hired a legal prostitute at a Dutch brothel was guilty of “violence against women” made her look like the hateful monster she is.  Unfortunately, the writer leaned the other way:  Every negative statement about prostitution was expressed as a fact, while every positive one was said to be an opinion.  Statements about the terrible conditions of their lives made by the Bangladeshi prostitutes and the American streetwalkers were reported with the word “is”, while statements made by the legal Australian and Dutch prostitutes were reported with the word “claims”.  In other words we hear that the streetwalker is miserable, but the Aussie brothel girls only claim to be happy.  It’s a subtle bias, but one a less-critical viewer would absorb without noticing.  And in the end, despite eloquent explanations from Weitzer and McCracken that most of the problems of sex work derive from criminalization, I think the overall tone of the program comes off as somewhat anti-prostitution.

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Speaking in Prostitute

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 17, 2011| 195 Comments »

I think if a woman has a right to an abortion and to control her body, then she has the right to exploit her body and make money from it.  We have it hard enough.  Why give up one of our major assets?  –  Kathy Keeton

I’ve been meaning to write a column like this for about two months now, but never quite got around to it until the subject of the conversation was clearly demonstrated by a recent interchange in a comment thread.  Early in April, Emily Hemingway mentioned in an email that she thought it wasn’t a good idea to use the word “whore” in reference to housewives because they might feel that I was trying to say they are just as “dirty” as we are:  “if a few girls think that you are dirty and you push them into a mud puddle, rub their faces in it, throw a few gobs of muck down their shirts, you can’t expect to then tell them, ‘See, now we’re both dirty and we can be friends.’”  She felt that they might think I was pretending that there is NO difference, and that it would create bad feeling.  I replied:

My issue is that prostitution is the only “crime” which is defined entirely by motive.  It’s legal to provide sex in exchange for value as long as the exchange is indirect or dishonest, and it’s even legal to do it directly if there’s a marriage license involved.  So my philosophy is…not “we’re both dirty”…but rather that whoring isn’t dirty, AT ALL.  In fact, we are the only honest businesswomen operating in the otherwise-dishonest field of human sexuality.

Emily then answered:

I agree with you on both of those points; whoring isn’t dirty at all, and we (most whores) are indeed the only honest adults in the conversation on human sexuality.  What I’m disagreeing with is your method of conveying those points.  Others think a whore is a dirty thing, including women.  The answer isn’t to call them a whore back and think they will see themselves as dirty, thus on our side after all.  Because that isn’t what they’ll see – they’ll see you being offensive and insulting, and they’ll shut down…I have no issue with the word ‘whore’, but I acknowledge that other people do and I read things not only for how I see them, but how others will input false beliefs and take away the wrong message.  And I think that’s what is happening.  If this were just us gals emailing, we’d know exactly what was going on with the “wives as a subset of prostitutes” thing.

You’re speaking in Prostitute, and doing so very eloquently, but the problem is that people are listening in Repressive Christian Archetype.

I saw what she was saying, but since I hadn’t really seen it happen on the blog and a number of my non-harlot female readers (especially Andrea) have agreed with the principle, often very vocally, I figured I needn’t say anything yet.  In other words, I knew that Emily was right in principle, but I figured that since nobody seemed to have misunderstood me yet I would cross the housewife-whore bridge when I came to it.  Well, we finally came to it a week ago Tuesday (June 7th); reader JZ asked in a comment, “Why the denigration of housewives?”  and I immediately recognized that this was exactly the situation Emily had anticipated so I answered, “What denigration?  I’m a housewife, and was once before, and so are some of my friends and several regular readers.  Remember, “prostitute” is not an insult to us; it’s merely an observation of fact.”  But that was apparently an insufficient response, as were several other replies from other commenters, because JZ repeated several more times that she saw housewives often denigrated both by me and commenters.  When I asked for a specific clarification, she replied “You call housewives whores.  Simple enough.”

And this, of course, proves Emily’s point exactly.  Despite the fact that I repeated several times that I didn’t consider “whore” or “prostitute” to be insults, the negative connotations of those words were too ingrained in JZ’s perception for her to think of them in any other way.  As Emily had said in her email to me back in April (and both she and I quoted in that comment thread), I was speaking in Prostitute but JZ was hearing in Repressive Christian Archetype.  This is not in any way JZ’s fault; she didn’t invent those negative connotations, and her life-experiences never gave her the opportunity to see them in any other way so until she started reading this blog, she had never heard the term used in any way but as an insult.  So for her and other readers who may not understand my usage of the term, a bit of explanation is in order.

I feel that a woman’s sexual power is one of her greatest assets, and for her to reject that is as foolish as a man would be if he purposefully disdained the use of his physical strength, or any person would be if he intentionally denied himself the facts of a problem so he couldn’t use his thinking ability.  A woman who rejects her sexuality cripples herself and weakens her ability to make her way in the world; to insist that a woman’s sex appeal only be used for her own direct sexual satisfaction and absolutely nothing else is like having a car one only uses to go to movies or parties, but never to work or the grocery store.  A woman who uses her sexuality to make a living for herself, whether by direct cash exchange or some kind of indirect arrangement, is a kind of whore…and there is NOTHING wrong with that.  The stigma traditionally applied to whores is nothing more than the resentment felt by insecure men for a woman who uses her abilities to get what she wants rather than meekly submitting to be chattel, a resentment shared by women who are too timid to do otherwise themselves.  To accept the negative connotation of “whore” (the word or the concept) is to buy into the idea that, as Bernard Shaw put it, “Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men.”

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June Miscellanea (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 16, 2011| 22 Comments »

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.  –  Bertrand de Jouvenel

Today’s column features three egregious examples of government overextending its reach, and one extra item for diehard Maggie fans.

Left or Right?

Adherents of the “liberal vs. conservative” fallacy claim that giving government the power to punish those who hurt others’ feelings (as in “sexual harassment” and “hate speech” laws) is a “liberal” idea, unless of course those “hurt feelings” happen to be religious or to involve sex, in which case it magically becomes “conservative”, unless the rhetoric one uses to support such a law includes language about “demeaning women”, in which case it obediently shifts back to being “liberal” again.    And as everyone knows, “liberal” laws can never be enacted by those “rednecks” in “red states” (itself a term which flies in the face of long-established tradition that red=leftist) like Tennessee.  So one has to wonder how dualists explain the recent law discussed in this June 6th column on The Volokh Conspiracy which criminalizes hurting people’s feelings?

Friday, a new Tennessee law was changed to provide (new material italicized):

(a) A person commits an offense who intentionally:
(4) Communicates with another person or transmits or displays an image in a manner in which there is a reasonable expectation that the image will be viewed by the victim [by telephone, in writing or by electronic communication] without legitimate purpose:
(A) (i) With the malicious intent to frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress; or
(ii) In a manner the defendant knows, or reasonably should know, would frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities; and
(B) As the result of the communication, the person is frightened, intimidated or emotionally distressed.

So the law now applies not just to one-to-one communication, but to people’s posting images on their own Facebook pages, on their Web sites, and in other places if (1) they are acting “without legitimate purpose,” (2) they cause emotional distress, and (3) they intend to cause emotional distress or know or reasonably should know that their action will cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities.  So,

1)  If you’re posting a picture of someone in an embarrassing situation — not at all limited to, say, sexually themed pictures or illegally taken pictures — you’re likely a criminal unless the prosecutor, judge, or jury concludes that you had a “legitimate purpose.”
2)  Likewise, if you post an image intended to distress some religious, political, ethnic, racial, etc. group, you too can be sent to jail if governments decisionmaker thinks your purpose wasn’t “legitimate.” Nothing in the law requires that the picture be of the “victim,” only that it be distressing to the “victim.”
3)  The same is true even if you didn’t intend to distress those people, but reasonably should have known that the material — say, pictures of Mohammed, or blasphemous jokes about Jesus Christ, or harsh cartoon insults of some political group — would “cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities.”
4)  And of course the same would apply if a newspaper or TV station posts embarrassing pictures or blasphemous images on its site.

Pretty clearly unconstitutional, it seems to me.

“Unconstitutional” is an understatement, especially considering that government officials are people and criticism of their policies might indeed “offend” them.  This law is pure, unadulterated totalitarianism and I can’t imagine that it will be allowed to stand even in the current political climate. But in the meantime, I’m glad this blog doesn’t originate in Tennessee.

Decentralization

Kelly Michaels called my attention to government attempts to suppress bitcoins, a decentralized online monetary system which exists on peer-to-peer networks without relying on banks, and therefore leaves no paper trail.  The government’s excuse is that people can use the currency to buy drugs, but it doesn’t take an economic genius to recognize that there’s a lot more at stake than that; if bitcoin can become established the underground economy could explode, destroying the present government monopoly on currency and making a truly free market possible for the first time in several generations.  One thing’s for certain; even if the government manages to quash this particular version of the phenomenon, decentralized currency (i.e. standardized barter) is an idea whose time has come, and attempts to crush it will be about as successful as the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Whores” have been, and for the same social and economic reasons.

It’s Different Because It Involves Sex, Part Umpteen

Despite considerable pressure from soi-disant “conservatives”, federal officials have steadfastly refused to limit the definition of “art” to those creations and performances which are both non-sexual and inoffensive to practically everybody, but apparently the lawheads on a New York State appellate court feel no such compunction and have ruled that dancing isn’t dancing if it’s sexy.  Their motivation?  Music and dance performances aren’t taxable in New York, and as explained in this June 11th AP story, they couldn’t let a little thing like the law get in the state’s way of robbing a strip club:

…Four Appellate Division justices agreed with a state tax appeals commission’s earlier finding that dances onstage or in private rooms at the club Nite Moves in suburban Albany don’t qualify for a state tax exemption as “dramatic or musical arts performances.”  Nite Moves contested a tax bill of nearly $125,000 plus interest on lap dances and admission fees stemming from a 2005 audit.  Its attorney, W. Andrew McCullough said Friday the club has a later, larger bill it is also challenging, and that he would probably appeal the Appellate Division ruling.  McCullough said the impact of the ruling probably won’t be widespread since most establishments featuring exotic dancers as entertainment are bars mainly selling alcohol where other tax rules apply.  “We admit the ballet is a little different and maybe a little more finely tuned,” McCullough said.  Still, the club tried to bolster its artistic argument with testimony from a cultural anthropologist who has studied exotic dance and visited Nite Moves, and who said the lap dances should be considered choreographed performances.

The court said it agreed with the state Tax Appeals Tribunal’s determination that Nite Moves didn’t present sufficient proof that it deserves a tax exemption.  The court noted that the club’s dancers aren’t even required to have formal dance training, “and, in lieu thereof, often rely upon videos or suggestions from other dancers to learn their craft.”

“It was purely and absolutely a value judgment,” McCullough said, citing First Amendment issues about free expression and adult entertainment.

Simply and bluntly put, the appeals court is full of shit.  The only limitations on the First Amendment currently allowed are those for speech which creates a “clear and present danger” (the classic example is shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater) or for obscenity.  Lap dances are hardly dangerous (except to the recipient’s wallet), and if they were declared obscene they would be illegal and therefore prohibited (thus defunct as a cash cow).  Unless they fall under these exceptions they are protected under the First Amendment, and if there’s a definition of “dance” which excludes sexy moves, adherents of the tango and lambada certainly aren’t aware of it.  A government has the right to tax specific activities which occur within its borders, but if the State of New York wants to tax stripping while giving ballet a free pass, it’s going to have to do a lot better than merely saying that exotic dancing isn’t dancing just because it’s sexually stimulating.

I’ve Been a Busy Girl Lately

For the past few weeks I’ve been helping Sex Workers Without Borders (Jill Brenneman’s sex worker rights organization, of which I and several of the bloggers I link are members) to spruce up its website, and Furry Girl also asked me to write a little “Intro to Prostitution” for her new Sex Work Activists, Allies and You website, which launched yesterday.  On Tuesday evening I was interviewed by Deep Geek for his Talk Geek To Me podcast, which also posted yesterday.  And finally, I’ve been asked to contribute some guest columns to a relatively new libertarian blog called Nobody’s Business; I’ll let you know as those are published.

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June Miscellanea (Part One)

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

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.  –  Groucho Marx

My monthly collection of odds and ends on harlotry and related topics.

The View from the North

While the Canadian government does its best this week to imitate the prohibitionist insanity of its southern neighbor*, the majority of the Canadian people (70% in this online poll) lean more in the direction Australia has taken.  And while the typical viewpoint of the American mainstream media is amply demonstrated by the next item in today’s column, the typical view of the Canadian media is demonstrated by this June 3rd editorial from the Globe and Mail entitled “Why the Courts Must Decriminalize Prostitution”.  Just imagine an American newspaper of equal stature printing an editorial whose thrust is summed up by the sentence “If you listen to the people most affected – the prostitutes – it becomes clear that the rational thing is to destigmatize the oldest profession, to help it be practised more safely and sanely, as the normal part of Canadian life that, like it or not, it is.”  Such an editorial would be greeted in the US by missives from outraged Puritans demanding the cancellation of their subscriptions, bleats and moans from trafficking fetishists moaning “Think of the millions of enslaved children!” and moronic replies on the online version of the column.  Nor are Canadian academics cowed by neofeminists as their American colleagues are; this study from the Canadian Review of Sociology demonstrated that most prostitutes are consenting adults who do the work to pay the bills like any other job, that only about 15% are streetwalkers, and that very few are forced into the work by men.  I certainly hope you aren’t surprised.

*Incidentally, the first day of that trial didn’t go too well for the Crown; the chief judge kept interrupting with questions like, “Isn’t it self-evident the laws produce harm and don’t protect sex workers?  If it’s legal, why would you want to make it impossible for them to work?  Isn’t this like passing a law to prevent store owners installing security?”

The Leading Players in the Field, Not

Meanwhile, in the United States, the New York Times published a story about the newest “documentary” in CNN’s Hearstian campaign against “human trafficking”, uncritically reporting that:

Tony Maddox…of CNN International, said of the documentary:  “This wasn’t, ‘We’ll get more publicity if we work with someone high profile, so let’s go find someone high profile.’  This was, ‘Who are the leading players in this field?’ ”  One of them, he said, happened to be a famous actress.

Gee, wasn’t that convenient?  Demi Moore, a “leading player in the field”?  Riiiiiiiiight.  I guess Tony Maddox didn’t dare call on real “leading players” like Laura Agustín or Ann Jordan, because they’d tell him that his manufactured “crisis” doesn’t actually exist and that would be bad for ratings.  An oh-so-sincere Hollywood actress, on the other hand, can be paid to mouth any drivel she’s handed and if it’s already her own pet witch-hunt, that’s even better.

Incidentally, the story reports that the title of Demi’s upcoming (June 26th) CNN special is “Nepal’s Stolen Children”, which talks about “girls as young as 11 who had been forced into prostitution and were rescued by a Nepalese nonprofit.”  Of course, the true social background of the Deuki custom is wholly ignored in favor of imposing Western values on a foreign culture:  “[Moore] goes home with one victim to find out if the girl’s family will accept or reject her.  Rejection is pervasive because of the stigma of sex trafficking in some cultures.”  Yeah, it’s because of “sex stigma”; the NGO’s undoing of what the family perceived as a gift to the gods which would win blessings for them has nothing to do with it.  As I said in my June 8th column, I will not defend slavery just because it is done in the name of religion or tradition.  But haven’t Westerners learned that it’s impossible to win hearts and minds by barging in on an alien culture uninvited, telling them they’re evil, backward sinners and then insisting that we know better than they do how they should live their lives?  Apparently Demi Moore and CNN haven’t.

Kristof’s Totalitarian Fantasy

The hits just keep on coming from the New York Times, which published (on the same day as the previous item) a rather ill-informed article from “Creepy” Kristof, whom regular readers may remember for his lurid columns on “sex slavery” which read as though they were typed with one hand.  Apparently, prostitution isn’t the only topic about which Kristof feels compelled to make pronouncements despite an almost total ignorance of the subject; his beliefs about economics and international politics are apparently just as ill-informed:  “The long trajectory of history has been for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes.  Now we’re at a turning point, with Republicans arguing that we need to reverse course.”  In other words, ever-inflating government is progress, so we should just accept that one day all of our decisions will be made for us by our betters and our only concern will be to slave like good little worker ants until we drop while Big Brother manages our money and our lives.  No wonder Kristof hates whores; it must gall him that we keep most of our income and ignore the laws and regulations designed to “help” us.  This article from Reason exposes Kristof’s claims for the absurdity they are, and includes the picture I’ve featured here in which Congolese women react with shock and amusement to the spectacle of a stupid American man balancing a woman’s basket on his head…which is sort of the way American women might react to an African man with a big goofy grin walking around town with a purse.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

As weird as it may seem, my husband and I often find ourselves nostalgic for the Cold War; the growing resemblance of Russia to the U.S. and the U.S. to the now-defunct U.S.S.R. is in my mind at least as unsettling as the prospect of World War III ever was.  You know how the United States is bucking the widespread trend in the civilized world to make prostitution less criminal?  Well, according to this June 8th story from The Guardian, Mother Russia apparently wants to prove she can be just as pigheaded as Uncle Sam:

Drug dealers are to be “treated like serial killers” and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia’s…parliament.  Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a “total war on drugs” was needed…Russia has as many as 6 million addicts (one in 25 people).  Every year 100,000 people die from using drugs, Gryzlov said in a newspaper.  The scale of the problem “threatens Russia’s gene pool”, he said.  “We are standing on the edge of a precipice.  Either we squash drug addiction or it will destroy us”…Injecting drug-use is also accelerating Russia’s HIV crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes.  An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.  Under legislation promoted by the ruling United Russia party and now being reviewed in parliament, drug addicts will be forced into treatment or jailed, and dealers will be handed heftier custodial sentences…Activists criticised the idea of putting addicts behind bars, pointing to a growing worldwide consensus that treating drug users as criminals has failed as a strategy.  The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them.  Gryzlov, however, claimed that “criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure”…

Several activists condemned Gryzlov’s suggestion to “isolate” drug users from society.  “Sending more people to prison will not reduce drug addiction or improve public health,” said Anya Sarang, president of the Andrey Rylkov Foundation…”What we need instead of this harsh drug control rhetoric is greater emphasis on rehabilitation, substitution treatment, case management for drug users and protection from HIV”…Denis Broun, the Moscow-based director of UNAids for Europe and central Asia…[said] Gryzlov’s proposals could make matters even worse.  “It has been widely shown that criminalising people using drugs simply drives them underground and makes them much harder to reach with preventative measures,” he said.  “This is not an effective strategy for fighting HIV.  Purely repressive measures do not work.”

Well, perhaps there’s a bright side to this; maybe Russia will be able to win the title of “police state which imprisons the largest number of its own citizens” away from the U.S.

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Grace

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 14, 2011| 8 Comments »

I just want to get through the day without having to kick someone’s ass.  –  Slogan on a Xena, Warrior Princess magnet on Grace’s refrigerator door

In late November of 1997, after I had been stripping for about two months, I attended a party at the New Orleans home of the sexologist and sex therapist I’ve referred to as Dr. Helena; I didn’t know her yet but was brought along by one of the other girls from the club, who had met her while she was doing some research on strippers.  Well, my ride found the party boring (too many degrees and not enough booze) and decided to leave; I, on the other hand, was quite enjoying myself and wanted to stay, so I asked my hostess if any of the other guests might give me a ride home.  She immediately turned to a tall woman nearby who looked like a cross between Lucy Lawless and a fortyish Grace Slick and asked, “Would you mind taking Maggie home?”  The woman, to whom I had not yet been introduced, immediately answered, “Sure!” without even asking who the hell Maggie was or where she lived.  And that’s how I met my best friend, and why I’m calling her “Grace” herein.  She’s had such an interesting and eventful life that there’s no way I could possibly do it justice in anything shorter than a book, so I’ll just content myself with a quick overview of some of the coolest things about her.

Grace may be one of the most technically competent women I know; if there’s an industrial skill she doesn’t have at least a working knowledge of, I haven’t discovered it.  When I first met her, she was employed programming industrial computers at a plastics plant in northern Louisiana, but wanted to move to New Orleans to be closer to the music scene because she’s also an accomplished heavy metal and jazz bassist.  Once we became friends (which didn’t take long) I invited her to move in with me; this was beneficial for both of us because she got a place to live and I got access to a vehicle, which enabled me to move from the small suburban club at which I then danced to the more lucrative ones on Bourbon Street.  And when I got totally sick of management bullshit by the autumn of 1999, it was Grace who suggested I would like escorting much better.  And she knew whereof she spoke, because she had done both herself in Atlanta, Georgia in the mid-1980s.

Grace was never ambitious and confident enough to dedicate herself totally to a career in music, but she worked part-time as a studio musician for many years; you know how sometimes on the liner notes of an album you’ll see “bass guitar on such-and-such song by someone you’ve never heard of”?  That’s her.  Oh, she was in a number of bands, but they never seemed to work out; one was locally popular but never got a contract, another broke up and its founder then went on to organize another band which became nationally known, and she was even hired to replace the bassist in a one-hit-wonder band which was trying to make a comeback and failed.  Even her romantic relationships were that way; neither marriage worked out, and the great love of her life was the lead guitarist of what one might call a “one album wonder” rock band of the ‘80s…but she broke up with him after finding out he was married, just a few months before their album (including a song about her) soared to platinum.  She then got back together with him after he had divorced and the band had sunk into near-obscurity, and when I met her they had been permanently split for several years.  You might think these failures would be a source of regret for her, but you’d be wrong; though she was still carrying a torch (albeit a sputtering one) for her ex-flame when we met, she was very philosophical about the rest of her life and sums up all her near-misses with fame by joking, “I almost dated the guy who was almost the drummer for Black Sabbath.”

After my falling-out with Pam, Grace was enthusiastic about starting our own service, and once we got it running profitably she quit her day job in order to answer the phones while Gilda slept and I was out doing calls.  Grace has an easygoing, friendly manner and all the girls liked her, but then as my friend Frank observed there’s not really much not to like about Grace.  And when my husband and I bought our country place in 2002, it was Grace who moved up here and kept it running while we returned to New Orleans to work until 2006.  During that time we spoke on the phone several times a day and though I only saw her about once a month when we came home for long weekends, she kept herself busy with work, music, tinkering, pets and making friends with people around here.  She’s aged quite a bit since her escorting and musician-dating days, but in spirit and personality she’s still the same loveable goofball I’ve known for almost 14 years and hope to know for many more.

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Blasphemy

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 13, 2011| 48 Comments »

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.  Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.  –  Eric Hoffer

It’s fairly common these days to hear people marveling at the fact that neofeminists and religious fundamentalists agree on the prohibition of prostitution and porn, but actually it’s not remotely surprising.  What causes these people’s confusion is that they have bought into the artificial and long-outmoded political framework of “right” and “left”, which was a poor fit to real political landscapes when it was first used in reference to the French Assembly more than 200 years ago and has become completely worthless since the rise of industrial welfare states in the 20th century.  Because pre-industrial societies changed only slowly, the labels “liberal” and “conservative” actually meant something in the 1700s.  But modern telecommunications created a cosmopolitan bazaar of ideas and industrialization made it possible to implement those ideas with astonishing speed, so trying to fit modern politics into an 18th-century dualism is as absurd and futile as attempting to describe modern technology using only the scientific terminology of that period.

Adherents of political dualism classify feminism as “leftist” or “liberal” because it seeks to replace much of the existing social order, but by this same standard we would have to classify Islamic militants as “liberals”…which I hardly think most people would.  Dualists think of religion as inherently “conservative” (even when it wants to turn a society upside-down) because religion has been around for a while; it’s an “old” (therefore “conservative”) way of doing things.  But as I pointed out in my column of April 26th, it’s a mistake to think of neofeminism as anything other than a religion:

Though [secular] religions concern themselves with physical reality and avoid talk of the soul, the Divine or other such esoteric concepts, they are yet religions because they insist on rigid adherence to a morality and interpretation of reality (i.e. an approved set of both “truth” and facts) derived entirely from knowledge revealed in sacred scriptures by the founders of the religion.  The dogma of…neofeminism…must be accepted unquestioningly by adherents; dissidence is suppressed and any scientifically-sound facts which contradict the teachings are denied…the Scandinavian countries infected with institutionalized neofeminism are every bit as irrational and ideologically-driven as the staunchest theocracy.

Neofeminist tenets such as “social construction of gender” and the mystical interconnectedness of all women fly in the face of biology, psychology, physics and common sense, and as I said yesterday the idea that “humans are an exception to every single rule of mammalian biology is religion, not science; it’s no different from the fundamentalist denial of evolution.”  Attempting to comprehend ardent feminism in general and neofeminism in particular as what it claims to be, a political philosophy, will leave a rational person scratching his head over the plenitude of contradictions.  But when one understands it for what it actually is, a religion, it all falls into place.  Now, this is all theoretical for me; though (like most girls my age) I went through a feminist stage in my teens, the kind of dogmatic feminism which qualifies as a religion has never really penetrated the Deep South, and even if it had I was far too critical a thinker to ever embrace its evident absurdities.  But a couple of weeks ago I got an email from a friend of mine who had just read the March 25th column, and I found her “insider” viewpoint to be well worth sharing (with her kind permission):

I grew up with a lot of exposure to feminism.  My stepmother is an ardent feminist with a big collection of feminist books, some of which I read…Second Wave feminism did explicitly preach that all women are interconnected in a giant sisterhood, and that this sisterhood is the only thing that can defeat the patriarchy.  Women born since 1970, raised in bigger cities or suburbs, and college educated, were often taught in their late teens, if not sooner, that womanhood is a single entity.  As ludicrous as it sounds to a sensible adult, I did find the idea appealing when I was 13 and I didn’t know any better.  This appeals to the normal human desire for group membership, which is especially strong during the teen years, so many girls embraced the idea enthusiastically.  Hence this idea of a super-group of all women soon became one of the defining characteristics of feminism.

Camille Paglia said in an interview:  “Next, one of my major criticisms of Naomi [Wolf] is that she has drifted from any kind of ethnic affiliation.  I have constantly said this about her, Susan Faludi, or Gloria Steinem:  that these women are not identifiably anything.  Feminism has become their entire metaphysical, religious, and cultural world view.”  For women raised in liberal, mostly secular families, where there is no clear identification with one’s ethnicity or one’s family’s historical faith, feminism has become their substitute for religion.  They react to any women who behaves in any way that is considered non- or anti-feminist the way religious fanatics react to apostates.

I got my first hint that there was something wrong with feminism from one of the essays in Sisterhood is Powerful [edited by Robin Morgan] called “The Tired Old Question of Male Children”, in which a lesbian advocated figuring out how to reproduce by parthenogenesis and then routinely aborting all male babies to create an all-female human race.  At 13, I knew, there is something wrong with people who would even allow that to be included in their anthology, even if they don’t agree with it.  But it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I really started questioning feminism…Many girls who are raised with these ideas never question them, and then they get these ideas massively reinforced by what they’re taught in college…

I think she’s bang on.  Though the neofeminist leaders must be held accountable for their crimes against society in general and women in particular, the rank and file who parrot their dogma are no more culpable than fundamentalist Christian women who believe that the Bible is literal fact or conservative Muslim women who never question why they must hide their faces and figures under concealing garments.  They have been taught not to think, and they learned their lessons well.  So the predictable reaction of such an indoctrinated feminist to prostitution or porn is the same as that of her conventionally-religious sisters:  she condemns it as sinful, and attacks any defense of it as blasphemy against the catechism which has been drummed into her.

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Public Service Announcement

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2011| 126 Comments »

When a man talks dirty to a woman, it’s sexual harassment.  When a woman talks dirty to a man, it’s $3.95 a minute.  –  Anonymous

Dear Men,

Please stop sending us pictures of your penises; most of us are honestly not interested, and the few who are will ask if they really want them.  No matter what you may think, or what your friends or feminists or dumb magazine articles or stupid TV shows told you, our sexuality really isn’t just like yours with the genders reversed, and most of us find unsolicited “dick pics” rude, insulting, and either unintentionally hilarious or kind of threatening.  If you’re somebody famous and really want to expose yourself (no pun intended) to the possibility of blackmail, please just save us both a lot of trouble and send the money instead of the icky cell-phone photo; it’ll allow you to keep your career intact and spare us both a lot of unwanted media attention.

Love, Women

P.S. – Pictures of your bare chests or flexed arms probably aren’t a good idea either.

I honestly think that the neofeminist propaganda that men and women are psychologically identical except for “social construction of gender” is (from a human relations perspective) probably the most dangerous lie of the past half-century.  All reasonable people used to recognize that men and women are different; everybody understood that, though there was some overlap in certain areas, the sexes were in most aspects as unalike as Mars and Venus.  We don’t look the same, act the same, sound the same or think the same, and when it comes to sex that goes double.  And honestly, why should it be otherwise when it isn’t anywhere else in the animal kingdom?  The notion that humans are an exception to every single rule of mammalian biology is religion, not science; it’s no different from the fundamentalist denial of evolution, and based in the same insecure need to believe that we as humans are even more special than we already are.

This subject comes up often in this column, and with good reason; it’s male-female differences which make prostitution not only possible but sociologically necessary, and the denial of those differences which gave rise to and sustains anti-whore legislation.  The idea that women are just small men with our reproductive organs on the inside rather than the outside is behind the neofeminist agenda of trying to force women to give up all that makes us women and live and work like castrated men, but a different version of it lurks in the minds of many modern men as well.  An awfully large number of guys have bought into this dogma and so truly believe that a woman’s response to male nudity, sexual behavior, dirty talk, etc is going to be EXACTLY THE SAME as a man’s response to female nudity, sexual behavior, etc.  Guys who believe this just can’t fathom that a dude posing in his underwear, socks and shoes is NOT equivalent to a woman doing so in panties, hose and pumps, and they can’t comprehend that for most women unexpected and unsolicited male nudity is threatening rather than seductive.  They just don’t “get” that even if one ignores the whole pursuer/pursued duality, most women simply aren’t all that visual (not to the extent that most men are, anyhow).  But once the doctrine of sexual equivalency has infected a male mind it is nearly impossible to dislodge by any means short of a lobotomy or a major career-destroying scandal, which is why we keep seeing this same ridiculous script being played out in the media over and over and over again.

Last summer, we were subjected to the news that New York Jets football player Brett Favre thought that sending a woman pictures of his cock (on multiple occasions) was a good way to break through her objections to his repeated advances.  The woman, Jenn Sterger, made the mistake of trusting others with the pictures and voicemails while soliciting advice on what to do about the repeated offenses, and one of those sold the material to Deadspin for $12,000, thus exposing Sterger to negative publicity she didn’t want any more than Favre did.  Then in February, we heard about New York congressman Chris Lee sending bare-chested flexing pictures to all sorts of people he was trying to entice into sex, with predictable results.  And now, demonstrating the apparent inability of high-profile New Yorkers to learn from their mistakes, we have yet another entry in the penis picture parade:

[U.S. Representative] Anthony Weiner [a Democrat from New York] insisted he’s staying in office…even as a string of embarrassing new revelations and photos emerged that apparently reveal a hidden, lascivious online life.  At first, Weiner vehemently denied that a photo of an underwear-clad erection, sent via Twitter to a 21-year-old woman, had come from him, insisting he’d been hacked.  But…blogger Andrew Breitbart and his website Big Government rolled out a series of new pictures Monday, including a shirtless shot that appears to depict Weiner flexing and photographing himself.  Breitbart also claimed to have X-rated pictures of Weiner, and other outlets, including Radar Online and ABC News, reported having more damaging information from women Weiner had purportedly communicated with.

“I am deeply ashamed of my terrible actions,” a tearful Weiner told reporters at a remarkable press conference in New York.  “I came here to accept the full responsibility for what I’ve done,” he said, apologizing to his wife of one year, Huma Abedin, and reporters and others he lied to about the initial reports.  He even said he was sorry to Breitbart, who had commandeered the podium for his own impromptu press event before Weiner spoke.  “I’m here to watch myself be vindicated,” said Breitbart, who had faced criticism for his role in the scandal.

“Terrible actions”?  Hardly.  Stupid, embarrassing actions most definitely (especially after the other two high-profile scandals involving nearly-identical behavior in the same state), but hardly “terrible”.  Of course Weiner has already made the obligatory promise to “seek help”, but there is no therapy for poor judgment (which despite what moralists and feminists might claim is his real problem).  I have a rather high opinion of my male readers; I think y’all are a pretty superior bunch and would never do anything as colossally clueless as these celebrated New Yorkers keep doing.  But just in case there are a couple of you out there who get really, really horny and are trying to figure out how best to win a woman’s attention, please learn from Messrs. Favre, Lee and Weiner; you really need to resist the urge to foist unwanted pictures of your sexual anatomy on women you don’t actually know…or even ones you do know, for that matter.

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Handy Figures

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 11, 2011| 22 Comments »

Numbers buzz in my head like wasps.  –  Dr. Lisa Van Horn (Osa Massen) in Rocketship X-M

Today’s column is merely a handy compilation of numbers and figures which have previously appeared in other columns, arranged in order of decreasing magnitude.  Because of the shadowy nature of our trade these are all estimates, but most of the links will lead the reader to the source of the estimate or the column in which I explain how it was calculated.

27 million:  According to a December 2010 “estimate” by “Free the Slaves”, the total number of people “trapped in modern-day slavery”  (see also “800,000” below).

$22.6 million:  Total annual amount the State of Texas spends on imprisoning prostitutes.

800,000:  According to the U.S. State Department’s “Trafficking in Persons” report for 2004, the total number of “human trafficking victims” worldwide (see also “27 million” above and “300,000“, “80,000“, “17,500” and “>10%” below).

443,323:  The total number of active, declared prostitutes in the United States.

100,000-300,000:  According to trafficking fanatics, the number of “trafficked child prostitutes” in the United States; this is the result of a misquote from the 2001 Estes and Weiner study which estimated 100,000-300,000 children, adolescents and young adults “at risk of sexual exploitation”, with sex trafficking as the rarest category of “exploitation”  (see also “15,694“, “17,500” and “2511” below).

80,000:  The number of Filipino women who lost good jobs in Japan due to U.S. State Department meddling, “for their own good” (see also “800,000” above and “>10%” below).

70,000:  The total number of streetwalkers in the US  (see also “443,323” above).

15,694:  The total number of all American prostitutes under 18.

14,500-17,500:  2008 federal estimate of all “trafficked persons” of all ages and employment types (sex, agriculture, etc) in the US.

2511: The total number of coerced (whether “trafficked” or not) prostitutes under 18 in the US.

160x:  High-end estimate of the factor by which the rate of sexually transmitted infections in the promiscuous segment of the general public exceeds that in the escort population  (see also “3-5%“, “2x” and “0.4%” below).

97%:  Percentage of escorts who report an increase in self-esteem after they entered the trade (see also “72%” and “60%” below).

84%:  The percentage of underage prostitutes in New York City who have never even met a pimp.

81%:  Fraction of Swedes who report being “angry” about the criminalization of prostitution clients (contrast with the Swedish government claim that 76% support the law).

80%:  According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, the fraction of “human trafficking” cases involving forced prostitution.  Another popular guess is 46% (from a study by the University of California at Berkeley), and other “authorities” claim numbers as low as 20%.

78%:  Fraction of Dutch citizens who feel that prostitution is a job like any other.

77%:  The percentage of escorts who feel their clients respect them.

75%:  The percentage of escorts who feel the job improved their lives.

72%:  The percentage of all prostitutes who report that their work has increased their self-esteem  (see also “97%” above).

70%:  The percentage of Australian prostitutes who said they would choose the same trade if they had their lives to live over again.

69%:  According to Kinsey (1948), the percentage of men who have paid for sex at least once in their lives.  Other studies have generated numbers as high as 80% and more recent studies much lower ones by careless phrasing (e.g., “employ prostitutes” rather than “have ever paid for sex”), but Kinsey’s is the estimate that best fits my own observations and those of many other pros.

60%:  My own estimate of the fraction of American prostitutes who are escorts (either independent or agency).

54%:  The percentage of escorts who consider the transaction as equal.

>50%:  The fraction of pimped streetwalkers (see below) who control their pimps rather than vice-versa.

<50%:  The percentage of streetwalkers who work with pimps at least part of the time.

33%:  Sweden’s official estimate of the fraction of all Swedish prostitutes who are streetwalkers; note that it is more than twice as high as the standard estimate for Western countries (see “15%” below).

26%:  The percentage of escorts who feel they have power over their clients.

25%:  Estimated decrease in the American rape rate if prostitution were legalized.

25%:  The fraction of Queensland prostitutes with a university degree.

25:  By my own calculations (see link for details), the average age at which American prostitutes enter the trade.

20%:  The percentage of men who see prostitutes at least occasionally.

16:  According to the 2001 Estes & Weiner study, the average age at which underage prostitutes enter the trade (see also “13-14” below).

15%:  The fraction of all Western prostitutes who are streetwalkers.

13-14:  According to prohibitionist propaganda, the average age at which prostitutes enter the trade; this is derived from a purposeful distortion by Melissa Farley of the age at which underage streetwalkers in one study reported they had their first noncommercial sexual contact of any kind.

11%:  In a 1910 study, the fraction of New York prostitutes who reported that they were coerced into the trade (from Russell’s Renegade History of the United States; see also “8%” below).

>10%:  According to the U.S. State Department’s “Trafficking in Persons” report for 2004, the fraction of all “human trafficking victims” who were “enslaved” in Japanese hostess clubs (see also “800,000” and “80,000” above).

10%:  Fraction of Dutch prostitutes who are genetically male; half are male prostitutes (many of them cross-dressers) and the other half transsexuals.

10%:  The percentage of Swedish girls who admit to having accepted money for sex.

10%:  The estimated percentage of streetwalkers in Western countries who are controlled or dominated by pimps  (see also “1.5%” below).

10:  The number of American states which allow prostitutes to be sentenced to prison.

5-10%:  Historically, the percentage of the female population who prostituted themselves at least part-time, varying by time and place (from Roberts’ Whores in History).

8%:  High-end estimate for the fraction of female inhabitants of 1840s London who were employed as prostitutes  (from Roberts’ Whores in History).

8%:  Fraction of underage New York prostitutes who say they were forced into prostitution.

7%:  Fraction of prostitutes targeted by a recent FBI underage prostitution “sting” who actually turned out to be under 18 (no figures are available on what fraction were below the local age of consent).

6%:  The percentage of men who see prostitutes frequently.

5.5%:  Typical percentage of the female inhabitants of a 19th-century European or American city who were employed as prostitutes at any given time (from Roberts’ Whores in History).

3-5%:  Fraction of STD cases in the United States which are either suffered or transmitted by prostitutes;  93% of these are associated with streetwalkers (see also “160x” above and “2x” and “0.4%” below).

4%:  Approximate conviction rate for arrests made in the FBI’s “Operation Innocence Lost”.

3.54%:  The fraction of Western prostitutes who are under 18.

2.3%:  Fraction of women in the general population who report their husbands or boyfriends are “extremely controlling”.

2x:  Factor by which the rate of sexually transmitted infections in the promiscuous segment of the general public exceeds that in streetwalkers  (see also “160x” and “3-5%” above, and “0.4%” below).

<2%:  The fraction of Cambodian prostitutes who say they were coerced into the trade (see also “1.5%” below).

1.5%:  The overall percentage of adult prostitutes in Western nations who are controlled by abusive pimps.

1.2%:  Fraction of women in the general population who report their husbands or boyfriends are “extremely violent”.

1%:  The percentage of modern American women who admit to having prostituted themselves at some point in their lives (from the National Task Force on Prostitution, quoted in Sex Work by Delacoste & Alexander).

0.4%:  The estimated fraction of all STD cases in the United States which are either suffered or transmitted by escorts or brothel workers (see also “160x“, “3-5%” and “2x” above).

0.285%:  The percentage of women in modern Western cultures who work as prostitutes at any given time.

0.014%:  The fraction of missing “children” (most of whom are actually adolescents) who are abducted by strangers; only some of these might be the victims of sex traffickers.

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