Even while lying, you’ll be believed if you speak with authority. – Anton Chekhov
By now many if not most of you have probably read (or at least heard about) the latest Melissa Farley product, a bogus study for Newsweek (published on July 17th) which purports to “prove” that virtually all men hate women. Blinded by her own unreasoning hatred of men and sex, Farley has at last exposed herself to widespread scrutiny; normally her mad lies are only directed against sex workers (I use the broad term because her hatred isn’t limited to prostitutes), and since these are a minority among women it’s easy for the ignorant to accept her statements as factual. But this time her hubris has resulted in an attack on literally half of the human race, and that’s not such an easy sell. Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the statement: “…buying sex is so pervasive that Farley’s team had a shockingly difficult time locating men who really don’t do it…The use of pornography, phone sex, lap dances, and other services has become so widespread that the researchers were forced to loosen their definition in order to assemble a 100-person control group,” taken together with this one: “the attitudes and habits of sex buyers reveal them as men who dehumanize and commodify women, view them with anger and contempt, lack empathy for their suffering, and relish their own ability to inflict pain and degradation.” If “virtually all men buy sex” and “all sex buyers hate and dehumanize women”, then “virtually all men hate and dehumanize women,” Q.E.D. That kind of sophistry may impress sheltered, middle-class white girls in “Womyn’s Studies” programs, but in the real world it’s about as appropriate as a cow pie on the dining room table and three times as rude. Take a look down the comment thread of that article; with a couple of castrated exceptions every male who replied is pretty damned angry, and rightfully so.
I’ve discussed Farley’s laughable methods before; she begins with a farfetched premise, selects a group that she thinks will prove her “theory”, uses leading questions to garner the desired responses, discards whatever data fails to fit the model, rejects noncomforming answers as evidence of “denial” and then conjures numbers out of qualitative answers without bothering to explain how she did so. Her reports then juxtapose these “findings” with unrepresentative but lurid quotations and her own hateful, unsupported rhetoric; they contain no proper explanation of methodology, are not published in professional journals and are never subjected to peer review or examined by ethics committees. Don’t take my word for it; read her new “study”, then this short but ruthless critique of another Farley client “study” from 2008. Virtually every point the 18 authors make about the earlier paper is true of the new one as well. Nor are psychologists and social scientists the only ones who recognize her as a charlatan; when she appeared as an “expert witness” for the state in the hearings which eventually resulted in prostitution laws being struck down in Ontario last September, Justice Susan Himel found her testimony highly questionable:
I found the evidence of Dr. Melissa Farley to be problematic…her advocacy appears to have permeated her opinions. For example, Dr. Farley’s unqualified assertion…that prostitution is inherently violent appears to contradict her own findings that prostitutes who work from indoor locations generally experience less violence. Furthermore…she failed to qualify her opinion…that [post-traumatic stress disorder] could be caused by events unrelated to prostitution. Dr. Farley’s choice of language is at times inflammatory and detracts from her conclusions. For example, comments such as, “prostitution is to the community what incest is to the family,” and “just as pedophiles justify sexual assault of children….men who use prostitutes develop elaborate cognitive schemes to justify purchase and use of women” make her opinions less persuasive. Dr. Farley stated during cross-examination that some of her opinions on prostitution were formed prior to her research, including, “that prostitution is a terrible harm to women, that prostitution is abusive in its very nature, and that prostitution amounts to men paying a woman for the right to rape her.” Accordingly…I assign less weight to Dr. Farley’s evidence.
This study actually uses a control group, a first for Farley despite being the norm in ethical research. Of course, Farley’s idea of a control leaves much to be desired; she provides essentially no significant information on the group other than that it had 100 members. And Newsweek didn’t even deign to reveal the report at all, obviously because somebody over there was smart enough to recognize it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on and they didn’t want to make it available for refutation (my link to it was located by Brandy Devereaux). Instead, they just printed a few choice quotes and a “trafficked children” narrative, added a lot of rhetoric from prohibitionists and the obligatory scare quotes around words like “choose”, and crowned the steaming pile with a selection of outright lies such as the debunked claim that the Swedish Model “dramatically reduced trafficking” and the outrageous libel that decriminalization and legalization in most countries has created an “explosive growth in demand that generated an increase in trafficking and other crimes”, though mysteriously never in the countries which supposedly caused the problem.
By refusing to publish in any relevant peer-reviewed journal, or indeed to expose herself to meaningful criticism of any kind, Farley seals herself into an echo chamber populated only by academic feminists, credulous reporters and politicians who need the filth she peddles to justify further suppression of sex work. Unlike true academics, she avoids the pressure to publish in journals by pandering to government entities and NGOs with an anti-sex agenda; the current specimen was sponsored by the Hunt Alternatives Fund, the entity behind the anti-male, anti-sex-worker group “Demand Abolition”. This results in her completely losing touch with reality and thereby becoming totally unable to recognize either the hateful bigotry of her rhetoric (she has referred to the vast majority of prostitutes as “house niggers“) or the transparency of her misrepresentations. Take, for example, the statement “Prostitution has always been risky for women; the average age of death is 34, and the American Journal of Epidemiology reported that prostitutes suffer a ‘workplace homicide rate’ 51 times higher than that of the next most dangerous occupation, working in a liquor store.” The flaws with the statement become instantly obvious to anyone who reads the report in question; it is, of course, a study of arrested streetwalkers, and therefore bases its conclusions on the most unfortunate third of the most dangerous segment of prostitution, which is a bit like calculating the mortality rate for soldiers at the front lines of a regional war and then extrapolating that figure to all members of the armed services of every country in the world. Furthermore, the claim that “the average age of death is 34” is badly misstated from the actual finding that the average murdered streetwalker is 34; continuing our analogy, this is exactly the same as concluding “the average soldier dies at 21” by the simple expedient of excluding from the “average” all those who survived! The figure thus produced is as spurious as the ubiquitous “average age at entry is 13” which I have previously debunked. Now imagine that someone used such distorted figures to advocate for more wars in order to “end soldiering”, and you’ll have a picture of the rat’s nest Farley uses for a brain.
Incidentally, that American Journal of Epidemiology article was unearthed and forwarded to me by regular reader Jason Congdon (who also helpfully pointed out several flaws in the article); the Newsweek reporter didn’t want people to see it and so linked the Journal’s website instead. Nor are Jason and I the only ones who felt moved to shred this third-rate propaganda; Tracy Clark-Flory critiqued it in Salon, Charlotte Shane skewered it in Tits and Sass, and Laura Agustín connected it to the bigger picture of U.S. government-sponsored “end demand” anti-sex work schemes in Good Vibrations. Marty Klein of Psychology Today called it “disgusting, dishonest and damaging”. Even Debra Dickerson of Slate, who believes that “…Farley is at least partially right about the potentially dangerous effects of… phone sex and Internet porn,” called the study an insult to readers’ intelligence full of “overblown rhetoric and outlandish conclusions,” and wrote that “an undergrad would earn an easy A pointing out the flaws in…methodology and analysis.” Will any of this sway the opinions of those who already embrace prohibitionist fanaticism? Of course not, but neither did Farley’s piece sway anyone who knows the truth about sex work, and it may have alienated a large number of male fence-sitters and the women who love them.
One Year Ago Today
“Playing the Part” is an answer to the reader question, “How easy is it for a prostitute to play her part if the man concerned is personally unattractive to her?” I think you’ll find it quite interesting.
As a perverse male … I don’t agree with her assumption that all males seek to “commodify” women take pleasure in their ability to inflict pain on them. And … she uses male patronage of prostitutes as proof of her assumption?
I don’t have a lot of experience with males who visit prostitutes … well, with the exception of myself once … but I have a feeling a lot more of them are looking for intimacy rather than dominance. Correct me if I’m wrong here.
I mean – we know that men are “wired” to use extreme measures to find sex – that’s one thing – but I don’t really see an inherent connection between “dominance” or “violence” toward women in that fact alone.
And, underneath that – though most men ARE perverts to one degree or another, I think they are also human and have a great capacity for empathy and caring.
Beyond the “sex drive” – I admire the beauty of women. No, I’m fascinated by it. I want to be near it. When I was single I always wanted to spend my time with my dates in their bedroom – not mine. The reason was – I just “dug” the all the feminine trappings of their bedrooms … the soft pillows, the pink sheets, the stuffed animals …
Men are “wired” for sex – but they are also “wired” to desire to be near this kind of softness and femininity. This isn’t a desire to “dominate” – it’s a desire to “worship” … for many men.
Yeah – I know – there are exceptions to the rule – but I don’t think they are, nor should they be represented as … “the rule”.
Almost nobody agrees with Farley’s bizarre and outrageous assumptions except for other misandrist neofeminists. It would be virtually impossible to spend any time at all talking to and interacting with real men and still believe this garbage; only women who have entirely sealed themselves off from meaningful interaction with men for many years could possibly embrace such demonstrably false rhetoric.
Yeah I know few people agree with her – but there are enough of them to cause all kinds of trouble for society. They place themselves into the educational institutions and the human resources departments of business and they are ALL OVER in government.
Just wish the REAL side of all this could be represented once and awhile. Yes, men almost universally look at every woman as a potential mate … and yes, we undress them with our eyes and think all kinds of thoughts. In the natural sense though – they aren’t unhealthy thoughts. The vast majority of my thoughts on women are about how wonderful they are and how I should strive to provide for, or defend them because they are the only thing in this lousy world that is worth preserving.
This Farley woman though – I would take an ass whipping from a gang of 300 pound Samoans before I helped her out though.
Virtually nobody in government believes her, either, any more than politicians believe in the Swedish Model’s “philosophical” basis. Politicians are evil, not stupid; they don’t believe the neofeminist religion any more than politicians of the past believed in the religions of their times. But religion is a good way to control the masses, and a convenient excuse for tyrannical laws which allow governments to lock virtually anyone up for normal human behavior.
<> /– no, not THAT way 😉
Maggie, would there be any merit with the Adult, Non-trafficked Prostitutes of the USA (i.e. 98% of them) forming a collective, buying a big island somewhere, and then selling us lonely desparate guys a three-day visitor’s visa?
<>
Meh, the comment box has eaten my “tongue in cheek” html tags, drat. 😁
I know it is exactly people from the psychology and sociology camps like Farley who cause more grief than help to a great swath of humanity, not just prostitutes.
Indeed, in my own short time in law, it is these people, above all, who caused more violence to be done to prostitutes by way of instilling warped ideas in the minds of others. I can’t vouch for the experience of others, but in my experience, warped ideas always lead to violence of one form or another.
Not to put too fine a point on things, I have a mother (who was a woman the last time I checked), and I felt nothing of the such towards mum that Farley indicates. I’m not sure if men (like me!) are perverts, but I’m pretty sure Farley is one, plus a psychopath.
No, I don’t reckon Farley’s got a rat’s nest for brains. I don’t slander rats (professional courtesy, you see, myself being a lawyer by training). No, it’s much, much worse in Farley’s case – she has got her OWN brain. (It’s okay, Maggie, I’m not accusing you of defaming rats…)
since my profession was attacked as well, i would really like ms.farley to explain a bit more analytically what this dangerous impact on society phone sex has,instead of using the same old rhetoric about commodification and degradation with no actual arguments..what exactly is commodified?my voice?and if it does,are the girls from information centres commodified as well?or the sex part makes me suddenly a commodity ?what if i told her that there are many times where clients dont want to have phone sex with me but just want to talk about their problems and having someone,a woman, listen to them?how are they violent against women when all they want is to listen to a females voice?and what is that dangerous impact of my service,couples will stop interacting healthily with each other just because phone sex exists?(i have heard that argument about porn).i think that the most sickening part is that theese kind of women are professors(mckinnon,donna hughes),who teach young women nothing but hate,hate towards men,hate towards their own nature,towards the basis of life.i beleive that feminazism isnt a wrong term for them,if in many of their statements you took out the word men and replaced it with the word jews,you could easily have a phrase of mein kampf.
I think they see the porn and phone sex after couples breakdown and decide that that’s the cause of the breakdown rather than the escape from the breakdown.
It makes things easier to deal with by blaming something else than looking at oneself.
>“the attitudes and habits of sex buyers reveal them as men who dehumanize and commodify women, view them with anger and contempt, lack empathy for their suffering, and relish their own ability to inflict pain and degradation.”
Oh please. I don’t even know how many clients I saw in my years in the business, and I’d say the percentage of those who even remotely resembled this was less than 2%. One of my favorite regular clients was a volunteer defender at an abortion clinc, and a tireless worker for women’s rights.
These were men who loved women, who were fascinated by, and enthralled by women. That’s why they sought out different women, and rather than lying, or pressuring, they did it honestly and made a business deal.
These men were not lurking monsters. They were your doctor, lawyer, business associates, brothers, uncles and dads. Even occasionally your preachers and political leaders. You know them.
As for the age of death being 34, seems like I know a lot of women who eventually retired, and are way past 34. Sorry, that number just doesn’t fit the reality I’ve seen.
But then, studies can prove whatever you want them to.
Did you know carrots are deadly? Every one who even so much as touched a carrot in 1893 has died. Its true.
Guess what I was eating when I read this? Guess I’m not long for this world. 😉
One more thing- About the abuse.
I specialized in the PSE end of the work. A very physical, active session. Occasionally, I had clients, including regulars who liked it hard and rough. I never minded, because I could handle that.
In sessions or on video, remember, it’s an act. You prepare yourself, know what you’re getting into and are capable of. What may well look like awful abuse to the casual, uninformed observer was just normal for those involved. But you make it look good.
I’ve seen probably close to a dozen sex workers in multiple countries over the years. All have been pleasant, respectful, adult interactions. That’s all they have in common though, because each experience was different. I don’t understand how all experience could be painted with the same brush.
The only PSE experience that might be construed as degrading went that way because that’s was the expressed preference of the service provider. I guess she’s not entitled to such preferences though, or she doesn’t own her preferences because she’s just damaged goods.
It has never ceased to amaze me that so much crap gets passed off as fact because the authors quote numbers and alleged statistics. It helps if you cherry pick data niblets and throw in phrases like epidemiology. Glad to so that Ms Mcneill pegged this stuff for what it was, is and will be….useless crap
Universities and colleges are hothouses that protect academic opinion from the cold winds of popular scorn. This is occasionally a very good thing, and often more or less harmless. Nobody is much harmed by fatheaded gassy theorizing about mid-17th century romantic poetry in the Balkans. Unfortunately, the same hothouse effect can be protecting the seriously deranged. And when a society has about ten times the institutions of higher learning than it actually needs, some of the hothouse dwellers can get very strange indeed.
Modern academics are all too often like the Victorian British Aristocracy; useless, in excess of requirements, and given to enthusiasms that strike sensible people are peculiar. The difference being that the Aristocracy paid for their foolishness out of decaying private fortunes, while the academics demand (shrilly too) that they be paid out of public funds. In this shrinking economy, we need to demand that the institutions of higher learning that we support exercise some kind of judgement about who they shelter. Academic Freedom should not equate to freedom from intellectual honesty. There is no excuse for the Melissa Farleys and Ward Churchills that infest he American academic scene.
Simon Louis Lajeunesse came to the exact opposite conclusion in his study of men who use porn, including the conclusion that the don’t want women who look like porn stars (just like women don’t generally want men who look the covers of bodice rippers).
The leaps in “logic” in that article are truly stunning. Farley’s research reminds me of my favorite quote. To paraphrase: she uses data like a drunk uses lamp post; for support not illumination. instead of reaching the conclusion that since most men buy sex and most men don’t abuse women (rape and assault rates have plunged), the connection between the two is tenuous if non-existent, she concludes that most men buy sex so most men are monsters.
As a scientist myself, I would point out that narrowing your “control sample” to a very subjective 100 men means you can make big conclusions based on “samples” of 1 or 2 men — a tiny fraction of what anyone would consider statistically significant. The way they selected the control sample reeks of someone who worked the data until they could define a sample and control that produced the required conclusions. That doesn’t even get into the methodology of conflating rigged interviews with actual attitudes and behavior.
Here’s a crazy idea: if we want to know what men who frequent prostitutes are like, why don’t we ask the women who have first-hand experience of even larger samples of clients? I think we know the answer to that.
“uses data like a drunk uses lamp post; for support not illumination.”
I’m using this. It’s brilliant.
Wow! Farley sure knows how to lay on the epithets. That’s her true genius. I refer to the “house negro” comment. Of course, most people who have heard of the term “house negro” know that it means the part of the oppressed class that lives in better conditions and that identifies with the oppressor because of that, and will betray the vast majority of the other oppressed class, referred to as “field negroes”. And of course, “house negroes” are indoor sex workers, and “field negroes” are street-based sex workers.
Inconvenient to Ms. Farley is that the “field negroes” are becoming fewer and fewer each year due to increasing use of the internet and better availability of mobile phones. Which means that the “field negroes” are even becoming tinier than the tiny percentage of sex workers that they’ve always been.
Funny, i answer my work phone about 50 times a day. I get asked if i kiss and cuddle about 30% of those calls and i get ask if i accept violence, degradation or submissive bokings about. 0.0001%.
And i see about 10 clients a week. And i get asked if i need rescuing about 20% of that time, and i have been hurt or disrespected about 0.0001% of those times.
newsweek fails to mention that farley was arrested in the 80s for damaging penthouse magazines as an anti-porn activist
I even tend to forget about that myself, because the damage she’s done as an academic since then is so much more serious. 🙁
1) Does she cover golddiggers in her “research”? Why isn’t Hugh Hefner a big john when he pays his “wives” a stipend to be in his bedroom? Kendra Wilkinson is a hooker.
2) Does she account for harmless scenarios where some middle aged white lady is giving a massage and she initiates the hand job part? I stumbled into the happy ending thing by accident. I have had this done to me where I went to pay 60 dollars for a massage and so wasn’t sure if I would get one or not. I didn’t move her hand to my crotch. it was all initiated by her and she didn’t even demand a tip. I became hooked to massages with happy endings since then and now am no longer that innocent about such sessions. I take care to check the body language and eyes of the therapists. Except for one asian therapist once, I noticed the women had no problems whatsoever and didn’t seem to have that glazed look I saw in the asian therapist. obviously, I prefer women to be in their late 20s or 30s for this kind of thing. I avoid asian massage places because of that trafficking concern. I do visit an independent asian lady who has given me sex in addition to hand jobs.
3) If men were out to view hookers as only commodities(I am sure, sometimes, we do, but not all the time and not for every woman in the paid sex business), why do you see escort review sites where men talk about getting gifts to women, or men who get attached emotionally to some escort or you read about some john rescuing a hooker in a third world country when she tells him how she was kidnapped and forced to do this stuff?
Farley is like a “creation scientist”, John; she ignores any- and everything which disproves her theory, including (but not by any means limited to) the testimony of actual escorts, the existence of male prostitutes and female clients, couple calls, dinner calls, no-sex calls, dominatrices, girls who marry clients, etc, etc, etc…
.Anti trafficking hysteria feeds racism. Richard John, there is absolutely no reason you should be avoiding Asian massage therapists. The idea that all Asian sex workers are trafficked is just as ridiculous as the suggestion that all clients want to hurt women.
I have met one or two Asian workers who were here (in Australia where i work) illegally because they couldn’t apply for the correct working Visa’s that other migrant workers can when crossing borders looking for better work conditions. And i have met one or two Asian workers who are or were in a debt bondage situation, where they owe a large debt to their boss or someone else who assisted their entry into Australia, and a portion of their pay is with held until their debt is repayed. and obviously exploitation is more likely in these situations when your work is underground, illegal, and you owe money.
However I have never met an Asian sex worker who was tricked or forced into sex work. Most of them were doing sex work in their home country, and came here because they believed they could make more money.
And actually, i have spent a lot of time working in Asian brothels *idea for a new post lightbulb* because they often have better pay for the workers. In the city i work in the standard split of a booking cost is about 50 – 60% to the sex workers and the house keeps 40 – 50%. in Asian brothels its usually more like 70% to the worker and 30 % to the house.
However the cops visit Asian businesses more, the Christian outreach group has outed an Asian sex worker in a public hospital out of ‘concern’ for her, and the generally community all think they are trafficked sex slaves. And here i read it is stopping decent good paying customers like Richard John from giving them business.
Trafficking hysteria is massively harming Asian sex workers, and i believe feeds racist stereotypes of submissive Asian women with no agency. My experiences of Asian sex workers couldn’t bee further from that commonly believed picture
Well, i did say I patronize an Asian massage therapist who is independent. I hope your 70% number is correct. BUt it is not just trafficking, but the jaded vibe I get from the employees at such places that fed into my willingness to believe that they are exploited. Well, it’s good to know the other side.
I am not a purist about such matters anyway. When I went to Thailand, the first thing I did was walk over to the nearby soapy massage place and enjoyed it. But my beliefs about this does make me minimize such visits.
Also, I got to credit the sex business for some things. True, it can be an easy out to not engage in real relationships because everything is there for you without effort. But it can also let you not get sexually frustrated and then you can approach new relationships in real life without rushing into them. I have seen some loneyly people I know rush into bad relationships because they are just frustrated without intimate contact.
I see sex workers for so many differnet reasons. Sometimes to fill a TEMPORARY void in life. Sometimes, just to blow off steam. Sometimes, just to fulfil the need to seek out new women , enjoy a nice hour with them and moving on with our own lves. Sometimes, it is just pure perverse desires to do something seedy and the blinking lights of a soapy place in THailand was just too strong of a sexual signal to ignore. I have much appreciation for the profession and it has made me a very happy guy.
Let us not forget how beneficial a sex surrogate is for handicapped people. Or how they can instil confidence in a sexually awkward person. If sex work is just misogynistic , how does one explain male sex work? Gay guys are misgynstic?
Farley is apparently unaware of Pres. Johnson’s order to the DOJ to find a link between porn and violence. After some two years of collating and sifting data, the DOJ could find no such link. The findings were not released. Raygun was even more bent on finding proof that porn causes violence against women; he commissioned Edmund Meese with a lot more resources to find this proof. Meese failed, and again the report went unreleased. You can bet your ass feminists were behind this effort all the way, as were the fundies.
I found out about these reports with a simple search on Google.
If she had questioned a large number of men, she would have found that considerable numbers of men won’t go near whores or other sexworkers because they have a contamination phobia. Not to mention gay men don’t go to whores. Or the men who are asexual, or who are too crippled and broke. If she did a poll to find how many men have struck a woman with intent to hurt, I think she would be badly disappointed. Even when I was seeing whores I never struck a woman, before or after. The violence she sees with whores is there; they get raped and robbed and raped and robbed by the police too. What’s such a Goddamned lie is that all men are like this.
Actually, Gawaine, the Meese Report was released; despite its biased methodology it proved there was no correlation between porn and violence, and despite that proof a conclusion was tacked on that basically said, “well, even though there’s no proof we think porn is bad anyhow.” Take a look at United States of America vs. Sex on my bibliography page.
What I’ve always wanted to ask the nitwits who assert that working in porn degrades women is this;
It is absurdly easy to publish a slick looking magazine these computer-driven days. If it is illegal, porn will still be published and widely available. The only difference will be that if a women feels that her image was in ways to which she did not consent to in writing, she will have little or no legal recourse.
How does this help?
Which is of course the best practical argument for decriminalization. Prostitution cannot be stopped, so it’s evil to subject people to a tyrannical regime in a fruitless attempt to stop them from having sex with one another in a way fanatics don’t like. All it does is make prostitutes’ jobs more dangerous, which is of course exactly what Farley and her ilk want. Once all the rhetoric is stripped away, the truth is that they hate women for being sexual and desirable and having satisfying and comfortable interactions with men. And because they do hate us, they want our lives to be as difficult as possible.
It is real easy… I helped a friend publish a magazine several years using AmiPro when I was in high school. I still have a copy of it.
Hi Maggie. I wonder where male to male sex work fits into this theory?
People like Farley can’t admit it exists. I’ve even been hired twice by unaccompanied women, but I’m sure Farley would claim I was lying about that.
I actually read the “study”(and I use the term VERY loosely), and there was one statement that just jumped off the page and nearly made me pee myself laughing.
“The physical and sexual violence suffered by women in prostitution is an indicator of the violence of sex buyers against women who are bought.”
10 points for the reader who can point out the logical flaw in the statement. I would offer more but questions this easy don’t merit big scores..:P
Oh, oh, I know, I know! It’s like saying ‘the amount of dirt on one’s car is an indicator of how much dirt the owner allows to build up on the car’. This statement is true even if there is NO dirt on the car.
Here is the policy statement from big-oil philanthropist and abolitionist Prof. Swanee Hunt for End Demand prostitution policy:
Taking on prostitution by attacking the demand side, not the supply side
By Swanee Hunt, Denver Post
December 26, 2010
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16930575
Just the usual garbage that totally flies in the face of facts. Since the facts (only about 3.5% of prostitutes are underage, the average age at entry is 24, and only about 8% of underage prostitutes are brought into the business by a pimp) don’t support prohibitionist dogma, they just make things up to make their stories sound good to the credulous.
another christian feminist with crazy ideas taken as gospel by the sick american media. What else is new.
““the attitudes and habits of sex buyers reveal them as men who dehumanize and commodify women, view them with anger and contempt, lack empathy for their suffering, and relish their own ability to inflict pain and degradation.””
Of course, what people who are new to the World of Farley don’t know, is that the types of questions asked and the assumptions held only point toward this conclusion. I’ve had to point this out to a ‘feminist’ I work with, one of that silly group I told you about before Maggie, the types of dishonest methodology used in this research. I mean, Farley would probably ask a question like, “Would you invite a prostitute you saw to your family’s Thanksgiving Dinner?” and then when the answer is, “Uh, no” then it’s extrapolated as, “they view prostituted women with anger and contempt and dehumanize them.” *smh*
How did she earn a doctorate degree again?
“Would you invite a prostitute you saw to your family’s Thanksgiving Dinner?”
“Of course! She’s my wife!”
(Interpret as you will, gentle readers) 😉
What a load of Farley! I might even start saying that, like “Go Cheney yourself.”
I find it impossible to believe that under any reasonable, or even almost reasonable set of criteria she couldn’t find one hundred men who “don’t buy sex.” Were there no poor men available? Musicians with groupies? Gay men? Committed virgins? Certainly what happened was that she was defining “buy sex” in an unreasonable broad way.
Credit where it’s due: “What a load of Farley!” is a Brandyism. 🙂
Hey Brandy!
[raises glass of… mead]
Good one.
Dear Sailor B, I agree 100%! I knew a group of men (the 1’s that I used to see for sex only) that never paid me a cent for sex (which was/is the only way I want it). But, she probably wouldn’t have wanted to hear from me because: I’m committed to practicing things the way I did in the past with sex only friends (per above); a big reason I chose to do this was because of a horrible, sad situation I saw with men being sexually frustrated and also USED like “banks” from the time I was a teenager (the fact I saw that and still do as a horrible, sad situation would be enough for me to be hated by her since all men are thought of as ###*** and don’t deserve anything good); I see sex as 1 of the things in life I personally want to keep as free of cost as possible and make as easy as possible for men to get (she’d say I’m horrible enough for thinking the men are frustrated, should be helped out, etc.), etc. Thanks for mentioning the poor men and I love you mention them as much as possible because they’re as deserving of sex as much as the rich men.
💗
Does Farley know you exist? Does she have an opinion?
If she doesn’t know yet, she eventually will, at which point she’ll brand me a “pimp” like every other sex worker rights activist, especially since I was also a madam.
So, would that make you Maggie “Pimp’ho” Mcneill then?
Sounds like a female professional wrestler from WWF… wait…
Maybe you lovely ladies could sell … wrestling lessons? 😉
[…] own unreasoning hatred of men and sex, Farley has at last exposed herself to widespread scrutiny. A Load of Farley (The Honest […]
I have only just come across this blog-I feel a bit of a chump not noticing it before-can I give the excuse that I live in the UK?
Anyway I wrote to the author of the Newsweek article in the following terms-as you can see I am a bit of an academic geek on this topic
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Attn Leslie Bennetts. The John Next door
I have just come across your article and I would like to make a number of comments. There is in fact a HUGE academic literature on prostitution and what you present is a very distorted picture. As you point out there is a polarized debate-the abolitionist view (Melissa Farley falls into this camp) and a view that sexwork is simply work. For a more sober discussion see ( Weitzer R (2009)Sociology of Sex Work Annu.Rev Sociol 35 213-234-you can obtain a pdf copy by searching Google Scholar)
I am afraid Farley has a history of publishing “research” (often not in peer reviewed journals) which is coloured by her abolitionist views-she classically takes the worst case scenarios from “street walkers” and projects that as typical of the whole spectrum of prostitution (see for instance Weitzer R (2005) Flawed theory and Method in the study of prostitution published in Violence against Women 11, 934-949-again a search in Google Scholar will enable you to download a copy)
I appreciate that journalists are busy people with tight deadlines and little time to research properly but a little effort would have enabled you to present a better and less sensationalised article.
Well, with the internet as big as it has become, Robert, one can’t be expected to notice everything! 😉
About Leslie Bennetts, I suspect that Newsweek didn’t really want a balanced article; they simply had no idea that backlash against the rubbish they published would be so large!
[…] Good critique of the Farley Study The Honest Courtesan has a very good critique of Farley's work and this study: http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2…oad-of-farley/ […]
Please! Farley’s critics are university faculty. Farley is not! Leave your baggage and use the balance and reason that Farley lacks to make less stupid comment.
Farley’s study shows prostitutes enter at an average of 19 years old, not 13. At least cover up your lies, McNeill.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Too rich! Thanks for this moronic comment; it shows me just how desperate prohibitionists are, considering how often she and others like her repeat the “13” nonsense (which can even be found on her so-called “prostitution research” website). Hint: She attributes it to several sources, including “Victimization of Street Prostitutes” by M.H. Silbert and A.M. Pines; a 1985 study with an even more melodramatic name, “Children of the Night” by D. Kelly Weisberg; and something called “Oppression Disguised as Liberation” by Denise Gamache and Evelina Giobbe.
Next time you want to lie, try not to do it in such a way that anyone with a computer can catch you on it.
P.S.- Just so you know, the average hooker enters the trade at 25, not 19. And certainly not 13.
This is the Information Age, Francois. There’s no escaping the Google.
[…] Critique of Melissa Farley’s “Research” The Honest Courtesan […]
[…] Melissa Farley, qui se présente comme une psychologue est en réalité une activiste féministe anti-prostitution. Dont les travaux et la méthodologie font partie de ceux critiqués par Ronald Weitzer, et dont […]
[…] During a trip to speak at the University of Montana about sex trafficking, prostitution abolitionist Melissa Farley visited two of the clubs that our own Bubbles called home for three years. Here’s a primer on the problems with Farley. […]
[…] peer reviewed or using scientific method (noteby – only one study used a control group, ref: http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/a-load-of-farley/) – In court, Justice Susan Himel in 2010, noted her evidence was […]
“That kind of sophistry may impress sheltered, middle-class white girls in ‘Womyn’s Studies’ programs,…”
Although this is purely anecdotal and maybe off-topic, I was blown-away by the number of escorts in my city who based on their profile are in fact in ‘Womyn’s Studies’ programs at the local university here.
Did you by any chance take a screenshot of this? (I’ts 404 now.)
http://prostitutionresearch.com/how_prostitution_works/000219.html
I knew Farley may not be on the level within minutes of watching sex slavery on msnbc.i had never seen the program until this Sunday pm.
[…] Maggie McNeill has Ms Farley’s antics comprehensively covered already for anybody interested; having forced myself to sit and read through all the responses (a course of action I don’t recommend to anybody who hasn’t carefully moved anything breakable from within their reach) I can literally no longer stomach random shiny-faced bigots earnestly telling me what I think and how I feel about everything from my job and my clients to myself (I know) for another second, so I believe I’ll pass on any further detailed dissections for now at least. Hopefully the people at Parliament will share the common sense demonstrated by a good number of their peers already. There’s a list somewhere, which I’ll try to find for next time. […]
[…] A Load of Farley (Maggie McNeill, The Honest Courtesan) […]
[…] For some reason, there was a cultural twitch on the subject this weekend. A group of Congresscritters sent a letter to AG Barr asking if he could take some time off of chasing down 4Chan conspiracy theories to ban porn. Political grifter Joe Walsh took up the call. And even serious pundits like Ross Douthat and David French have vocalized varying levels of support. Their justification ranges from the moral good the nation to the exploitation of women to the supposed connection between porn and violence, often based on dubious claims of massive harm from the likes of anti-sex work crusaders like Gail Dines and Melissa Farley (whose work is…a bit less than perfect). […]