There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. – Elie Wiesel
I humbly apologize for misinterpreting the motives of Backpage’s management back in November; emails sent out to Backpage users at that time caused me to accuse them of “crawfishing” and “cozying up to the cops to avoid bad publicity.” Well, I’m eating my words; though Village Voice Media (owners of Backpage) did indeed tighten up the advertising content rules, it was obviously not done to get in bed with control freaks but to cover its collective arse while preparing for a frontal assault. Since the beginning of this year Village Voice has been increasingly vocal in its criticism of “sex trafficking” hysteria and the concomitant persecution of prostitutes, and is now prepared to launch a full pro-decriminalization campaign.
My first hint of the company’s true position came just two days after my criticism appeared, in the online “Blotch” column of the Fort Worth Weekly, a Village Voice property. The article, “Morality, Arlington Style” by Jimmy Fowler, criticized the Arlington, Texas Police Department’s “Scarlet Letter” campaign to shame men who were caught in prostitution “stings” by displaying their pictures on a billboard, and was called to my attention by the fact that he linked to my November 23rd column in the article. But that was (apparently) an isolated blog entry, so I paid it no further mind until late January, when Village Voice reporter Pete Kotz interviewed me for his Dallas Observer article “The Super Bowl Prostitute Myth: 100,000 Hookers Won’t Be Showing Up in Dallas”; during that interview Mr. Kotz told me that unlike Craigslist, Village Voice had no intention of simply rolling over and playing dead for the busybodies.
The next shot was fired on March 23rd in the San Francisco Weekly, with a story entitled “Women’s Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study Is Junk Science” by Nick Pinto; I discussed this story extensively in my column of March 24th, and eagerly awaited the next installment. My first hint at it came on May 26th, when I was contacted by Martin Cizmar of the Phoenix New Times and pointed him toward a few sources; he told me he was working on the story with several other reporters and that it would be published in late June. The story, “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight” by Cizmar, Ellis Conklin and Kristen Hinman, appeared late in the evening of June 28th and uses the widely and justly ridiculed Ashton Kutcher/Demi Moore anti-prostitution ad campaign I mentioned on April 16th as a springboard for examining the fantastically exaggerated claims of “child sex trafficking” fetishists.
First, the story compares the widely-touted “100,000-300,000 trafficked children” myth I debunked back in January with the police arrest records of the 37 largest American cities and found that in the past decade there were only 8263 juveniles arrested for prostitution among them, an average of 827 per year (roughly 22 per city per year). Even if one assumes that these cities together have only half of the underage prostitutes in the U.S., that still gives us fewer than 1700 per year. Ask yourself: Even considering the incompetence of police departments, which is more believable: that police catch roughly 5% of underage prostitutes per year (by my estimate), or that they catch only 0.27% per year?
The article then moves on to the 2001 Estes & Weiner study, the original source of the fabulous number; as I reported in my column of April 2nd, the study “guesstimated (by questionable methodology) that ‘as many as 100,000-300,000 children and youth [of both sexes] are at risk for sexual exploitation’ of one kind or another…this guess is for BOTH sexes, for ‘children and youth’ (not just children), and most importantly represents those at risk of some form of ‘exploitation’, not currently involved in one specific form (sex trafficking).” That “questionable methodology” (such as including all runaways, female gang members, transgender youth and those living within a short drive of the Mexican or Canadian borders as automatically “at risk”) was criticized in the Village Voice article by the University of New Hampshire’s Dr. David Finkelhor, who said “As far as I’m concerned, [the University of Pennsylvania study] has no scientific credibility to it…That figure was in a report that was never really subjected to any kind of peer review. It wasn’t published in any scientific journal…Initially, [Estes and Weiner] claimed that [100,000 to 300,000] was the number of children [engaged in prostitution]. It took quite a bit of pressure to get them to add the qualifier [at risk].” Professor Steve Doig of Arizona State said the “study cannot be relied upon as authoritative…I do not see the evidence necessary to confirm that there are hundreds of thousands of [child prostitutes].” He also said, “Many of the numbers and assumptions in these charts are based on earlier, smaller-scale studies done by other researchers, studies which have their own methodological limitations. I won’t call it ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ But combining various approximations and guesstimates done under a variety of conditions doesn’t magically produce a solid number. The resulting number is no better than the fuzziest part of the equation.” And when pressed by the reporters, Estes himself admitted, “Kids who are kidnapped and sold into slavery—that number would be very small…We’re talking about a few hundred people.”
Not that any of this bothers Maggie Neilson, Ashton & Demi’s “celebrity charity consultant”; she told the reporter “I don’t frankly care if the number is 200,000, 500,000, or a million, or 100,000—it needs to be addressed. While I absolutely agree there’s a need for better data, the people who want to spend all day bitching about the methodologies used I’m not very interested in.” Presumably it would still “need to be addressed” if the number were 827, so why not just say 827? Because, of course, that wouldn’t justify pouring millions down police department and NGO toilets instead of spending it on programs to help actual underage prostitutes (as opposed to phantom multitudes of “trafficked children”): as the article explains, “…though Congress has spent hundreds of millions in tax-generated money to fight human trafficking, it has yet to spend a penny to shelter and counsel those boys and girls in America who are, in fact, underage prostitutes. In March of this year…[two senators] introduced legislation to fund six shelters with $15 million in grants. The shelters would provide beds, counseling, clothing, case work, and legal services. If enacted, this legislation would be the first of its kind…[it] has yet to clear the Senate or the House.”
The article ends with a clear indictment of government attitudes in prohibitionist regimes and an equally-clear statement that sex work is work: “The lack of shelter and counseling for underage prostitutes—while prohibitionists take in millions in government funding—is only one indication of the worldwide campaign of hostility directed at working women.” Village Voice recently told a group of sex worker rights activists that they are behind us, and that this is only beginning of a campaign for decriminalization; this could at last be the public voice we’ve needed for so long, and I eagerly await the next salvo fired in defense of whores.
The best part is Ashton Kutcher’s public temper tantrum. I LOL’ed.
[…] Maggie McNeil puts this particular argument into a broader perspective of Village Voice’s upcoming pro-decrim campaign and ongoing work on the subject. […]
“The lack of shelter and counseling for underage prostitutes—while prohibitionists take in millions in government funding—is only one indication of the worldwide campaign of hostility directed at working women.”
Bravo!
They talk about the poor, poor trafficked victims while at the same time cut funding for youth shelters.
So now AK is on a smear campaign on his twitter feed. Addressing Disney, American Airlines, and Dominos – he is telling them that they are advertising on a place that is a digital brothel and sells humans. I suggest anyone who thinks this is a steaming pile of crap book their next flight on AA, order pizza from Dominos, and buy a ticket to Disneyland. Tell them you and your friends found them on Village Voice.
Ah, the old “sells humans” rhetoric again! As I said in my column of April 16th, “presumably [the “owners” of these “children”] store them in cardboard boxes at the top of the closet when not in use, and a series of dumb commercials will obviously convince them to get rid of those slaves, perhaps by flushing them down the loo like unwanted goldfish.”
The way they think, whatever rhetoric it takes to get people so angry that they can’t think for themselves and will blindly follow… right off the edge of that there cliff over yonder
I just posted this in a couple of places, but anyone who wants to post it elsewhere has my permission:
An Open Letter to Ashton Kutcher from a retired call girl:
Dear Mr. Kutcher,
You claim to be interested in helping victims of sex trafficking; that’s very commendable, and I’d like to help you. In fact, I’m offering you almost half a million supporters who have contacts you and the police don’t: namely, adult voluntary prostitutes in the United States. Here’s what you need to do to get our support:
1) Stop exaggerating, using bogus statistics and outright lying about sex workers, and stop associating with people who do.
2) Stop linking yourself to people who cloak their anti-sex work agenda in “child sex slave” scare tactics.
3) Stop denying our intelligence and agency by supporting “end demand” schemes which infantilize us and rob us of choice, and stop supporting groups which do so.
4) Contact organizations like the Desiree Alliance, Sex Workers Outreach Project or Sex Workers Without Borders, who can provide you with REAL DATA and solid studies, and who will be happy to answer any questions you have about adult voluntary prostitutes.
5) Most importantly, support full decriminalization of adult prostitution so we and our clients can be free to report underage or coerced prostitutes we encounter without fear of arrest.
If you’re interested, just Google “Maggie McNeill”; you’ll find me quickly enough.
[…] going to get into what the discussion was about and all that shiznit. You can read about it on Maggies Blog, Village Voice, Amanda Brooks, and pretty much all […]
All of us are occasionally wrong. This time, I think it must have felt great to have been wrong, and that you eat your words with relish.
They were delicious! 🙂
I anybody from the Village Voice reading this blog right now?
I just wanna say this:
Thank you, and I would love you to do a follow up article on how many anti-trafficking dollars are actually going to providing beds for at-risk youth and trafficked victims. Because we’re just dyin’ to know.
To be frank, I find it incredibly condescending for someone rich, famous and handsome enough to bed any woman he wants to run around telling the average joe how he may or may not go about getting laid. Real men aren’t solipsistic morons.
I have absolutely no problem with some pampered little rich boy telling men they can’t fuck little girls. There isn’t a thing wrong with pedophiles that can’t be cured with the judicious application of a cheese grater.
When he tries to affect voluntary adult prostitutes, however, the fight is fucking on.
That’s what Kutcher is doing, unfortunately. Frankly, he should use his clout to providing beds for trafficked victims and those at-risk of being trafficked.
Agreed. My impression was that he was against all prostitution.
He is until he clearly and distinctly says he isn’t, which he hasn’t. And that asinine “real men” campaign has “prohibition” written all over it; only prohibitionists use the phrase “buy a girl [or woman] for sex” when they actually mean “hire a whore”.
By the way, American Airlines decided to pull their ads from the Village Voice. Let it be known that I won’t fly them again.
Which isn’t a hard decision, because their service sucked the last time I flew with them.
And boycotting Ashton Kutcher isn’t really that hard either. Have any of his movies ever been good?
Seriously, he’s the Clown Prince Joker of the Romantic Comedies.
But then, I really don’t want to be that hard on Kutcher, because it’s the neo-fems and their pet politicians who still the real culprits here.
Don’t kid yourself. Anyone who tries to get the Village Voice’s advertising dollars yanked because of Backpage is waging all-out frontal assault on voluntary prostitution by adults.
He can pretty it up by batting his eyes and wailing about “If it saves one chiiiiiild.., but when it comes down to brass tacks he’s advocating starvation and shut-off notices for the children of prostitutes all over America.
Some stupidity I can ignore. This ain’t it.
Ashton, baby, them’s fightin’ words.
So it’s Kutcher himself who’s causing the advertising boycott?
Well, then, that’s a different matter. I change my mind. Kutcher is the Clown Prince Joker of Romantic Comedies.
Village Voice, I’m with you all the way. I will support your advertisers the best that I can. I hope you will follow my advice above and do an expose on where the money is going in regards these “anti-trafficking” organizations. How much of their money is going to provide beds and meals to homeless youth who are at risk of being trafficked? Because if homeless youth have no place to go, then they are more likely to fall into the hands of a pimp or be forced sell themselves in order have a place to stay. You’ll be surprised when you find out how much money has been cut from shelters for women and children.
However, when you think of how many aspiring actresses under the age of 18 who have been told to spread their legs in order to “make it big” for the past hundred years or so, all of this concern by Hollywood types about “child trafficking” comes as a bit hypocritical, does it not?
That pales into insignificance beside Demi Moore’s trying to stop real sex workers from making a living after she’s made a fortune playing one in movies. 🙁
Yeah, didn’t she make money playing an exotic dancer? I think she’s done at least one or two movies along those lines.
After just about every bodyslide, I strut around all oiled up in my dressing robe, saying, “I like the way it squishes in my boots.”
Trufax. Ask Brandy.
Well Demi sure likes her dancing, too. Observe:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSjcLwHRvjY&w=425&h=349%5D
Alas, youtube thinks it might offend my delicate sensibilities. *sob*
Instead, I give you Dean Winchester.
He makes my ovaries melt. *squee*
It’s freaking hilarious. I’d take a picture if she’d let me LOL
Is it a good or bad thing that I have no clue what all that means? 🙂
Rumor has it she made money in her younger days not “playing” a sex worker at all. I never used to believe that, but this insane campaign of hers has convinced me otherwise; as the Bard wrote, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
I suspect many famous actresses have. And not a few actors.
Oh, yes, and let’s not forget Demi and Ashton hanging out with confessed pimp Snoop Dog, you know, the one who raps about bangin’ his hos:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=cache:jncpB3nkdhwJ:www.okmagazine.com/2010/08/video-ashton-demi-get-down-with-snoop-dog/
Oh, here’s a suggestion. Maybe Demi and Ashton and Julie Bindel and Snoop Dog can get together and discuss Bangin’ Da Hos:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jun/27/glastonbury-snoop-dogg-julie-bindel
I specifically remember that. She was touting the most embarrassingly simplistic “stripping as empowerment” rhetoric during promotion of that movie, too. Now she’s 180 degrees in the other directions. Ah, Hollywood.
Maggie, what mislead people is that it’s 100,000-300,000 GIRLS BOYS AND WOMEN being trafficked. Google & find out the FACTS!! Also, NOBODY has asked for money to be poured into advertising this fact. Trafficking groups are asking for money to help provide SAFE HAVEN for SURVIVORS. And you quote of Ashton saying “I don’t frankly care if the number is 200,000, 500,000, or a million, or 100,000—it needs to be addressed”, left out a very important fact: He SAID, “If it helps ONE girl it’s worth it”. I take it you disagree with that? Well, I DON’T. All the VV needs to do is STOP advertising sex for sale on their backpage. And can I add, American Airlines ROCK!!! As far as VV going to bat for who THEY call, “The next batch of whores”…well excuse me while I go throw up. Frankly, I don’t even believe you’re an “ex-hooker”. I think you print that for attention.
Yeah, Lynn, I “print it for attention” and just imagined everything I’ve written in 360 columns over the past year that you didn’t read. Trafficking fanatics do NOTHING to help anyone but themselves; all they want is to put voluntary adult prostitutes out of business.
You want facts? Try my posts of January 24th, April 2nd and June 11th for starters. Then you might try reading Laura Agustin’s column; she’s been studying migration (what racists like Ashton call “trafficking”) for 15 years.
Finally, I find it fascinating how fanatics like you always accuse prostitutes of lying when we contradict your lurid fantasies. How many prostitutes do you personally know? One? None? I know literally dozens, many of whom post here frequently. Look around you on this blog; you’re surrounded by us right now.
The blame is mine, Maggie. I’m the one that linked your blog. Now I’m going to have to run around screeching, “OMG we’re hookers, idiots!”
Perhaps I should have given this more thought.
Sigh.
Say, how’s your hit count doing? #bonus #partyongarth
About normal; I usually do 1000-1100 per day most days, and right now it’s 1093 with an hour to go.
It might have been my bad, since I tweeted about this post earlier today, then got an argument with the same idiot later on that day. Lynn here is apparently having a good time marching around the interwebs being an asshole for a few hours. I guess that’s the “doing something” these people are so fired up about.
No apologies are necessary from either you or Emily; if I didn’t want her post displayed I wouldn’t have let it through moderation so it’s MY fault. 🙂
Besides, think of how many posts I would’ve had lined up for moderation if my name and link had ended up in the Village Voice story as originally planned; I’d have been trashing, spamming and allowing-with-moderation posts all day!
All the VV needs to do is STOP advertising sex for sale on their backpage.
Oh, sweet baby Jesus.
HOOKERS, woman, You are talking to hookers. FFS, doesn’t anyone here realize that we’re smart, and yet we’re still whores?
Mindblowing, I know. Feel free to take some time to adjust your worldview to a reality where whores exist who can beat you at Jeopardy while piss-faced drunk.
The cliffnotes:
There are not 100k-300k child sex slaves. There is a study which estimates 100k-300k of total children, adolescents and young adults at risk of sexual exploitation. At risk. At risk. Maggie’s said this time and again, and clearly it hasn’t sunk it. At. Risk.
Shutting down sale of sex by voluntary adult prostitutes renders thousands without an income, and their children. Sit down and ask yourself exactly how many women and children you’re willing to sacrifice for one child. Feel free to tell everyone here the answer. And yes, we will laugh at you.
This isn’t funny anymore. You people are just being fucking stupid. I demand someone be unintentionally hilarious.
I wonder how old Lynn is? Judging purely by the naivete level, probably not old enough to be reading my blog.
I’m cutting her a little slack. If Dean Winchester asked me to save the children by shutting down Backpage, I would probably stare at his wee freckles and ducky lips and say, “Huh? Sure. Could you do Blue Steel again?
Of course, I’d wake the fuck up before I said something stupid online about Backpage, but still. It’d take a moment.
Oh, I’m cutting her some as well; that’s why I let the post through. A lot of these young girls that have never been hungry a day in their lives and don’t know a dick from a doorknob can’t fathom ever being whores, so they project that onto all other women. As I said on Laura Agustin’s blog once, it’s like a herd of cows standing around a lioness saying, “but why do you want to eat meat? It’s disgusting! Here, we’ll rescue you from being a carnivore, and you can eat as much of this nice grass as you want! Wouldn’t that be great?”
“All the VV needs to do is STOP advertising sex for sale on their backpage.”
EPIPHANY! The cure to stop human trafficking! Is it really that simple? Oh wait, wasn’t that the excuse for shutting down craigslist? How did that work out again?
Will this also cure cancer and male pattern baldness?
“All the VV needs to do is STOP advertising sex for sale on their backpage.”
And just how is that going to help homeless youth get the shelter that they need? Stopping escort ads on Backpage will not help a single homeless teenager. Not one.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t think you even give a damn about any trafficked victims. Because if you did, you would be spending your energies advocating that monies go toward housing and feeding those who have been trafficked or who are at risk of being trafficked. I don’t see you doing this.
Kutcher isn’t doing this either. I’ve checked. Extensively.
Google FTW.
I googled FTW. It means “For The Win”.
I think FTW should stand for “Fuck The What”.
You’ve seen my inbox, then.
LOLOLOLOLOLOL
I’ve seen it used to mean “Fuck The World,” and I have to admit that this sort of fashionable but pointless hopelessness is sometimes tempting. If I just didn’t give half a damn about anything, I wouldn’t have to feel frustrated and generally bummed out by some of the things in this world.
But, well, things can and do change. Way too slowly, oh sweet Usagi but it’s too slow, but things do change, and sometimes even for the better. Really. So I try to remember that and see if I can find the other half of that damn to give. Usually, I do.
Life sucks and then you die? Well, it doesn’t always suck, and there people working on the dying part.
“If it rescues ONE girl it’s worth it!” – The reason to let backpage continue accepting advertisements in order to give pimps enough rope to hang themselves with. Like I said, if those underage true victims of pimps were not found on backpage, would they have been found at all? Would LE or family even know where to look?
Supposedly a woman is suing Village Voice for an ad that ran when she was 15 years old. Seems to me that she should thank them instead, if she was rescued because of that ad. Sounds like a case of greed to me.
I smell a rat. There’s usually someone else behind the scenes pushing lawsuits like that along.
I suspect that those pushing this lawsuit know that they win brownie points by keeping a lawsuit like this going as long as they can, regardless of whether or not they win, because it smears their opponent.
The “one girl” logic is deeply flawed and you hear this a lot with government programs. Hundreds of millions of dollars are moving because of this and that involves tremendous opportunity cost. I’d think just about anyone, given $50 million, would save more than one girl with it. An advertising campaign that publicized resources for truly exploited women would be much more useful, if a lot less ego-stroking.
We hear “If it saves just ONE child, it’s worth it!” a lot when it comes to anti-drug and pro-abstinence programs, too.
I call bullshit. If I came up with some new math education program for kindergartners, and it cost millions per year, and just one child learned to add, would anybody call my wonderful new math program successful? No, I don’t think that anybody would.
“If it saves just ONE…” is popular with worthless programs because it’s hard to prove that a program put out to millions of people a year for several years has never, ever helped even ONE person. It’s entirely possible that there is a fifteen year old girl alive today, who would have died in childbirth two years ago if the ab-only sex-ed program she was in a year before that hadn’t convinced her to put off sex for two years (she’s getting laid three times a week now, but she’s both careful with the BC and old enough to bear a child without dying). Hey, can you prove that this didn’t happen?
We’ll just leave aside that ab-only/D.A.R.E./anti-prostitution programs hurt a lot more than just one person (and yes, that includes children and teenagers), and the fact that they help few if any children, and we certainly won’t mention that there are already other approaches which are shown to do a better job of attaining stated goals.
Lynn the study in question said 100 to 300 thousand minors were at risk of sexual explotaion. It arrived at these numbers using dubious methods.
“child sex trafficking” was the smallest risk out of all of the categories
Now supose for a moment that 300,000 children per year were being sold into sex slavery, that would mean that since 1990 6 million american children were stolen from their homes to be sold as sex slaves to other americans.
if there were currently 6 million missing kids why arent there 6 million names on the FBI’s mising kids list?
Lynn, also consider that the population of the United States is currently 308,745,538 (2010 census). If there are 300,000 trafficked child prostitutes in this country, then this means that nearly one out of every thousand people in this country is and underaged sex slave.
And if this number of children become trafficked every year, then nearly one out of every fifty people in the USA is, or has been at some point since 1990, a child sex slave.
I doubt (though I haven’t checked; perhaps you’d like to) that one out of every fifty American has even been a child since 1990, much less an enslaved child prostitute.
The major difference between this moral panic and the Satanic Panic of the ’80s and ’90s is that now we have the internet so reasonable people can call attention to all this, whereas last time around the media hysterics went virtually unchallenged. It’ll be interesting to watch the “I told you sos” unfold as this panic collapses in the next few years.
> I doubt (though I haven’t checked; perhaps you’d like to) that one out of every fifty American has even been a child since 1990, much less an enslaved child prostitute.
What? That’s so far from true I’m having a hard time believing that you meant anything like it. Having been a child since 1990 covers everyone younger than 30, roughly speaking.
That’s (very) roughly a third of the population – fifteen times more than your ‘doubted’ limit.
Even with the huge population of Baby Boomers and Post-Boomers skewing the numbers? I might think that the 40-and-up crowd make up a huge percentage of the population.
Well, you’re probably right about it being more than one in fifty, though. The US isn’t Japan, where they expect a third of the population to die off in the next fifty years, despite have the longest life expectancy on the planet.
Lots of LGBT kids are homeless, tossed out onto the streets by their religion-crazed parents. They become a source of underage prostitutes, not because they are “trafficked”, but because they have few other alternatives. The money these Hollywood celebrities make would easily fund shelters for them.
But no- These Celebrities would rather go about talking about an exaggerated problem than actually doing anything about it.
Now for me, I was able to work nights, as a cashier in a convenient store, while underage and no one thought anything about that. Even before I had a fake ID. I was able to sell alcohol while under age, with a fake ID that no one questioned. The only industry that was EVER strict about enforcing the underage thing was the adult industry, in my experience.
Just reading all this, have any of you tried getting on his twitter and tweet him back on this? Just wondering if any of you have. Seems the best way to voice yourself is directly in his face on his twitter..
I personally think as everyone else does this is really more smoke and mirrors and a direct attack on the consenting adults in the sex trade. Inflated numbers, exaggerated stories all designed to scare the public and cause a big knee jerk reaction. I have been an escort for 10+ years now and I have never run across an underage prostitute or even women who were forced in a brothel. I worked at a number of spas in the Houston area years ago. It is not at all what the media is making it out to be. Most of these trafficked women by the way are given a choice of a “TS” card and citizenship here in the States, if they fess up to being trafficked and out the owners, or if they don’t incarceration and deportation. What do you think a traumatized woman under that kind of circumstance is going to do?
I agree, Guilty; I’ve made that point myself before in regard to “trafficked” underage streetwalkers. Once the “authorities” start pressuring an arrested girl to accuse someone, anyone, of being her “pimp” or ‘trafficker”, and rewards her if she gives them a name but punishes her if she doesn’t, what do they think will happen? It’s nothing but a witch hunt, and sadly the United States has been addicted to those since the day it was founded. 🙁
Salem isn’t located in Czechoslovakia. We’re the country that can run reruns of Bewitched for five decades and flock to the latest Harry Potter movie, while at the same time sending children to summer camps where they will be told that both are literally tools of the Devil and that in the good old days Potter would’ve been executed. We’re the country that birthed both Pretty Baby and DatelineNBC: To Catch a Predator (well Chris, at least she wasn’t underage).
[…] McNeill ties into the wildly fluctuating figures that Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore and their prohibit-prostitution […]
[…] that Backpage can police itself (or “cover its collective arse,” as neofeminist blogger Maggie McNeill put it). Clergy and women’s rights groups dismiss the company’s free speech defense as window […]
[…] that Backpage can police itself (or “cover its collective arse,” as neofeminist blogger Maggie McNeill put it). Clergy and women’s rights groups dismiss the company’s free speech defense as window […]
[…] that Backpage can police itself (or “cover its collective arse,” as neofeminist blogger Maggie McNeill put it). Clergy and women’s rights groups dismiss the company’s free speech defense as window […]
Either they have a completely different definition of “neofeminist,” or they have no definition; somebody just saw the word here and jumped to the conclusion that it’s Maggie’s chosen label.
But hey, it means that this blog is getting exposure, and I like it when pretty girls are exposed. }8^)
YES! Great stuff. This exact same thing happened back in the 30’s (if I remeber corectly) and millions were poured into schemes to help American victims of international sex trafficking, though actually only three victims were found (Social Deviance by Stuart Henry). This is just a moral panic as documented by Stanley Cohen in 1979. Decriminalization is the way to go, as legalization results in streetwalkers (the nost vulnerable sex workers) being victimized even more by the criminal justice system, and forced health checks on sex workers but not clients, increased sex trafficking (into illegal brothels, as sone people will not want to open registered, legal brothels) and sex workers not being able to choose their clients or hours, leading some to favour streetwalking. I didn’t know they could take your kids away just for being a sex worker (unless your kids were exposed to it) but I believe you about the ladders thing. Corruption and victimization by authorities is hard to accept because we want to trust them, but I’ve seen and experienced truly unbelievable things from the education department in my local authority, and to a lesser extent the social work dept (though not concerning sex workers).Truth is, America is afraid of female sexuality (as is UK and much of the western world). Shut the right-wing conservative creationists up and you will get a just, honest, sane society. The middle-class family men have wives and fuck sex workers, it’s the virgin/whore dichotomy and it’s a lie. I’m not even sure if all prostitution is the same thing; is a trafficked, drug-addicted or underage streetwalker who earns almost nothing and gets beaten up by a pimp or boyfriend in the same situation as an educated escort doing it part-time while in grad school, earning thousands off each client? I wrote an argument for developing 2 different terms and discourses for sex work in my exam. I studied prostitution and am aware that although I’m selling my virginity right now, my experience is not representative and that educated/middle-class sex workers seem to have radically different experiences from uneducated sex workers or streetwalkers. I love your whole blog btw.
Thank you, Fieara! I wish you the best of luck on your debut. 😉
🙂 Thank you, Maggie! That made me smile 🙂
I LOVE BP, LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT LOOOOOOOOOOVE IT! It’s the best mainstream ad venue for us, and the only one which doesn’t try to pressure/obligate us to a lot of BULLSHIT superfluous interaction with clients outside the context of our appointments, unlike sites like ECCIE, who pretend they’re trying to ‘protect’ us but whose real purpose, IMO, is to pressure women into thinking we ‘have to’ provide unsafe sex acts that spread germs (kissing, bbbj, daty), and encourage mens’ ridiculous fantasy that they can demand constant social interaction from us when we aren’t working. I honestly think the independence and freedom that BP allows us is the real reason why other sites need to constantly bash BP and the women who use it. FUCK THEM, I love BP and I’ll never stop using it as long as it exists.
THANK YOU BP!!! THANK YOU BP ATTORNEYS!!! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON’T GIVE UP THE FIGHT!
woops, I should have clarified, “why other ESCORT websites feel the need to constantly bash BP and the women who use it.”
BP is getting bashed from SO MANY different sources lately, I felt the distinction was important.
[…] “risk factors” were access to a car and proximity to the Canadian or Mexican border. In a 2011 interview, Estes himself estimated the number of legal minors actually abducted into “sex slavery” was […]
[…] do matter. We need to know what is going on in order to make rational and informed decisions. Incorrect understanding of sex work and trafficking have been leading to misguided laws and policies, which have resulted […]
[…] “risk factors” were access to a car and proximity to the Canadian or Mexican border. In a 2011 interview, Estes himself estimated the number of legal minors actually abducted into “sex slavery” was […]