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Archive for August, 2011

Crying For Nanny

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 21, 2011| 35 Comments »

The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.  –  Robert A. Heinlein

In my column of January 9th I pointed out that

…modern culture encourages people…to surrender personal responsibility for their actions.  It’s not the fault of the human for misbehaving; it’s the fault of the drugs/tobacco/video games/porn/ guns/gambling/television/movies or whatever.  Even sex is called an “addiction”…The prostitute who offers a service is no more responsible for clients who come to her when they shouldn’t than an auto manufacturer is responsible for someone who is harmed by driving his car off of the highway, and neither can a client be held responsible for the free choice of a whore.  It’s time for people to stop allowing governments to treat them like children, and the way to accomplish this is to stop acting like children by running to Big Brother every time someone hurts our feelings, or expecting Nanny to remedy every consequence resulting from our own ill-considered actions.  It’s time for modern people to leave their state-run, police-guarded nurseries and grow the hell up.

One of the most potent weapons collectivists use to shoot down personal-responsibility-based arguments against the Nanny State is the “for the children” strategy; since everyone agrees that children lack adult capacity for judgment, clearly they can’t be held accountable to the same level of personal responsibility as adults and must therefore be protected.  That’s the foot in the door; it is quickly followed by the leg (all legal minors are “children”, exactly equivalent to four-year-olds) and then the body (in order to be sure “children” aren’t affected by whatever-it-is we have to prohibit it to adults as well).  Those who would defend an adult woman’s right to whatever sexual arrangements suit her are attacked by the “child sex trafficking” fetishists, who claim that it’s just and ethical to endlessly harass tens of thousands of adult whores in order to make it more difficult for a few hundred teenagers (characterized as “trafficked children”, of course) to ply their trade; furthermore, they believe it’s perfectly legal and sound to file nuisance lawsuits against advertising venues in the hopes of A) becoming wealthy without working for it, and B) establishing the precedent that websites are responsible for user-generated content.  Either they don’t recognize the damage such a precedent would cause to the American economy (as internet companies relocated to countries without such burdensome restrictions and users switched to international ISPs) and the chilling effect it would have on free expression, or they simply don’t care; fortunately, not every court is hell-bent on gutting the First Amendment, so a federal judge recently nipped an attempt at establishing such a terrifying precedent in the proverbial bud:

A federal judge in St. Louis has thrown out a lawsuit accusing Village Voice Media of knowingly allowing a pimp to advertise a teenage prostitute’s sexual services on one of its websites.  The suit filed last year on behalf of the teen sought at least $150,000 in damages.  It claimed that Backpage.com, a website similar to Craigslist, knew prostitution was being facilitated on the site but did nothing to stop it.  U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Mummert dismissed the suit Monday, [writing that] the allegations “do not distinguish the complained-of actions of Backpage from any other website that posted content that led to an innocent person’s injury…Congress has declared such websites to be immune from suits arising from such injuries.  It is for Congress to change the policy that gave rise to such immunity.”  Those comments were in reference to the Communications Decency Act.

The girl’s attorney, Bob Pedroli Jr., was critical of the act and said he would appeal.  “We plan to continue our fight in the courts and we ask everyone who cares about sexual trafficking of children on the Internet to write to their senators and…representatives and tell them to change this law now,” Pedroli said.  Phone messages left with an attorney for Village Voice Media were not returned.

The lawsuit did not list the name of the girl who said she became a prostitute at age 14.  The girl’s pimp, Latasha Jewell McFarland, 28, of St. Louis, was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty in 2010 to federal prostitution charges.  Prosecutors in the criminal case said the girl ran away from home and met McFarland in 2009.  They said McFarland persuaded her to work as a prostitute by telling her she could earn $100 for each sex act, and that McFarland took half the proceeds.  McFarland admitted she posted nude photos of the girl online, bought condoms, arranged meetings and drove the teen to hotels…In her lawsuit, the girl contended that items advertising sex with her were posted on Backpage.com…

Unless Pedroli is wholly incompetent, he knows that the CDA as initially enacted would’ve done exactly what he wanted it to, but the portion of the Act allowing such censorship was struck down by the U. S. Supreme Court practically as soon as it was passed.  And rightfully so; holding companies like Backpage (and by extension WordPress, Facebook, message boards, etc, etc…) legally responsible for the content of posts created by their users would utterly destroy the usefulness of the internet as a venue for individual voices (such as this blog), reducing it to control by monopolies large and complex enough to cope with onerous and intrusive government regulations and slowing its growth to a crawl as each and every new item had to be individually checked to ensure compliance with government standards.  Furthermore, the costs resulting from this level of micromanagement would mean an end to the virtually-free internet as we know it.

Ashton Kutcher has his answer now; during his Twitter tirade of June 29th he posted, “hey @villagevoice hows [sic] that lawsuit from the 15 year old victim who alleges you helped enslave them [sic] going?”  Of course, Ashton’s not bright enough to understand that he should be glad the suit failed, but most reasonable people are and for the moment, at least, that’s still enough.

One Year Ago Today

“Advice for Clients” is a short tutorial on what to do (and what not to do) when making or keeping an appointment with an escort.

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Weird Sisters

Posted in Biography, Diary, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , on August 20, 2011| 19 Comments »

When shall we three meet again/In thunder, lightning, or in rain?  –  William Shakespeare, Macbeth (I,i)

I had a rare “girls’ night out” this week; Kelly Michaels’ travels brought her near enough to my place to justify diverting here, so I welcomed her as a guest Sunday night and then she and I drove to Dallas to meet up with Kelly James, who had been there on tour for several days.  I originally figured we’d just go to dinner and talk a lot, then I’d spend the night there and drive home the next day; Kelly M, however, had different ideas and insisted I bring something fancy to wear so we could go out to a strip club in Dallas she had been meaning to visit for some time.  She didn’t have to ask me twice; it’s been ages since I visited a strip club and since there was a dress I mentioned once before (“Cynthia…convinced me to buy a “liquid silver” dress which I still haven’t ever managed to find an occasion to wear!”)  I knew this was my opportunity.

I never sleep all that well when I know I have a lot to do, but I don’t really need as much sleep now as I did when I was younger so six hours is usually enough.  I woke up early, posted my column and scheduled Tuesday’s to post automatically, answered my correspondence, performed my chores and then woke Kelly up before heading for the shower.  We managed to get out pretty early and arrived in Dallas during rush hour, but fortunately we were going against traffic so it wasn’t too bad.  We met Kelly J. and relaxed in the hotel for a little while before heading over to the Galleria, where Kelly M. got her hair done and we enjoyed a lovely dinner which she insisted on paying for (I considered arguing the point but I know a determined look when I see one).  We left just as the mall was closing and returned to the hotel to get dolled up, finally heading out in search of Kelly’s club.  After one false start (a very nice place which clearly catered to older businessmen, definitely a clubby sort of atmosphere) we got a tip-off which led us to our real destination, a place Kelly had heard about a year before and had never been able to locate specifically.

And that’s when the fun began in earnest.  I always volunteer to be the “designated driver” because I’m not really much of a drinker to start with, and taking that responsibility lets me win cool points for something I probably would’ve done anyway because it seems almost nobody can make a Brandy Alexander these days (when I ordered one in Frank’s presence years ago, he snorted “That’s not a drink, it’s a dessert!”)  So I remember everything that happened, which is probably more than the Kellies can say because they imbibed freely for hours.  Kelly M. is an extremely generous tipper, so it didn’t take long for the dancers to recognize our side of the stage as the place to be (especially on an otherwise-quiet Monday night).  This seems to have intimidated a few of the poorer male clients; one guy came up to the stage, saw how much money Kelly was throwing and returned to his seat with an audible “fuck this!”  So after that, we were careful to leave off when a guy approached the stage so as not to cheat the girls out of opportunities to sell lap-dances.  All three of us are former strippers, after all, so we know how it is.

The club management was, I think, pleased that we were there; not only were we tipping heavily, we were also (especially me) giving the patrons a little something extra to look at, especially when the girls got affectionate with us from the stage.  So it probably isn’t surprising that they didn’t say anything about Kelly M. snapping numerous pictures of us (but not the dancers or customers) with her camera phone.  I was pretty “high on life”, and after the strippers were done for the night I started dancing around in my seat; when the DJ played “Magic Man” by Heart I could no longer restrain myself and got up to dance.  The Kellies tried to convince me to get up on stage so they could throw money at me, but I wasn’t willing to risk that without knowing Texas laws on the subject.  Besides, the few customers still in the place (it was after 2 AM by that point) seemed to be enjoying my performance just fine; one guy kept moving his chair to see me better, then finally just got up to watch openly.  When we went out the men who yet remained outside the front door tried to make time with us, and Kelly M. teased one guy by throwing a few one-dollar bills at him (he laughed but didn’t pick them up, though the cab driver beside him did).

On the way back to the hotel, we found a classic rock station and Kelly M. and I insisted on singing along on “Stairway To Heaven” while Kelly J. attempted to navigate us back to the hotel while drunk.  Somehow we managed it, got undressed for bed while clowning around some more and had a discussion about what the most extreme sexual perversion might be (Kelly J. kept disqualifying my suggestions on the grounds that they were “just disgusting”).  We managed to settle down and get to sleep by just after 4 AM, but not before Kelly M. emailed a few of the pictures to my husband (who was on a different part of the planet at the time and therefore wide awake and at work).  I didn’t get much sleep; my days of being able to lie in bed past 8:30 AM are long gone, but I let the Kellies alone until 10:30 and then roused them sufficiently to drag them to breakfast.  I had to get going soon after that in order to make it home by dark, but I arrived safely (though exhausted) and actually got a little work in that night.

What fun we had!  It really was like a little taste of the old days for me, and my husband was really excited for me as well because he thinks I work too hard and he was very pleased to see me relax and just have fun for a change without trying to accomplish anything.  It was also great to talk shop with a couple of my sisters; one of the drawbacks of our profession (especially under a criminalization regime) is that it tends to be very isolating, and being able to converse freely with other whores is enormously liberating.  I don’t think I’ll be able to do this sort of thing often, but I certainly hope it isn’t years before it happens again; perhaps next time I’ll figure out an excuse to get down to south Texas to meet up with Brandy and Emily.

One Year Ago Today

“Celebrities” discusses clients who are public figures.  Professional ethics forbid name-dropping, but I think you’ll enjoy the column anyway.

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None So Blind

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 19, 2011| 45 Comments »

There are none so blind as them that will not see.  –  English proverb

Judging by the comments, some of my readers still aren’t convinced that “liberal” and “conservative” have become mere insults for political imbeciles to hurl at each other, nonsense words with about as much meaning as “poopyhead” or “cooties”.  In my column of June 13th I pointed out that most neofeminist rhetoric is not that of a “leftist” political philosophy as it’s usually labeled, but rather that of an anti-sex fundamentalist religion; well, today I’d like to show you the other side of that equation:  a writer from a so-called “conservative” think-tank reverently quoting Andrea Dworkin as though she were William F. Buckley in support of the “theory” that…don’t laugh, now…porn causes terrorism:

…pornography now appears frequently in the possession of violent terrorists and their supporters, including Osama bin Laden.  Regarding “smut” found on captured media, in 2010, a Department of Defense al-Qaeda analyst was quoted in The Atlantic:  “We have terabytes of this stuff.”  Terabytes.  That’s a lot of “smut.”  I wonder whether the pornography of today—now ubiquitous and increasingly grotesque—is one of the influences warping the mentality of those who aspire to or who actually go on to engage in ever more grotesque public violence.  Would those terabytes of pornography and such more aptly be dubbed “terrorbytes”?  Why, after all, would an al-Qaeda affiliate, as reported in 2009 from interrogations in Mauritania, select pornography to target new recruits?  We need to know…

…In a powerful 1993 article, Andrea Dworkin maintains that it was no coincidence that the former Yugoslavia was home to both a free-flow of pornography, which was remarkably fluid and unbounded by the standards of that pre-internet time, and then absolutely horrific violence.  She suggests that the wide circulation of pornography functioned as instruction in “a way of being:  dehumanization of women; bigotry and aggression harnessed to destroying the body of the enemy; invasion as a male right.”  In the former Yugoslavia, “the pornography,” Dworkin argues, “was war propaganda that trained an army of rapists who waited for permission to advance.  An atavistic nationalism provided the trigger and defined the targets.”  Ideas, ideologies, and –isms do matter, but they do not exist in isolation.  Consider an ideology like a seed and the disposition of the mind like soil.  The particular nature of the seed determines what may become of it.  Yet at the same time, the elements of the soil are part and parcel of shaping the manner in which the particular seed grows.  A seed in toxic soil can grow into a terrible distortion of the plant it is meant to become.  What happens when a radical ideology adheres in a pornography-saturated mind?

I believe our country needs to invest in research that questions whether it makes a difference when the minds that advocate for extremist ideologies are minds warped by pornography use.  Perhaps the twisting of the mind that results from pornography has an impact—an exceptionally dark, dangerous impact—on how radicalized individuals act out the concepts of their ideology.  Dworkin raised this specter in 1993, but since then, our general public attitude to the presence of pornography in violent conflict seems virtually unchanged.  Just as in 1993, our tendency today is to dismiss it as simply an indicator that “boys will be boys”…[the seizure of many accused terrorists’ personal effects] presents…an opportunity to bring research to bear on whether or not there is a nexus of influence with pornography and the grotesqueness of some modern conflict-violence.  We may need to invest in understanding the impact of pornography on those who use it, particularly on those who also become obsessed with extremist ideologies.  So, I wonder, is anyone in the U.S. government tracking and surveying the presence and types of pornography on these media?  If we have access to the libraries of the personal pornography preferences of those who support and engage in terrorist violence, we may have a window into the dark corners of their minds.  What lurks there?  It may be to our own peril that we would ignore this information before us.  In seeking to understand terrorists, studying their ideas alone is not enough.  We need to study and understand their minds—and in this day and age, this includes, in perhaps more cases than we are aware of, minds shaped by pornography.

As far as I can tell the author, Jennifer S. Bryson, is serious; she has several advanced degrees and has written a raft of articles, plus a Bible coloring book for children (I am not making this up).  So she knows full well who Dworkin is; she just doesn’t care because their ideology is essentially the same:  suppress and control human beings, especially men, and especially especially forms of sex favored by men.  Both Bryson and Dworkin are (were) willfully blind to male sexuality; they do not understand it because they don’t want to.  It’s much easier just to judge others than to admit that one’s own way of looking at the world isn’t the only one, especially if one is a religious fanatic.

There is, of course, a true link between porn and terrorism, though it isn’t a causative one; the total sex segregation of Muslim society, combined with a shortage of available girls due to polygamy and arranged marriages and a sharp divide between “haves” and “have-nots”, means that there are an awful lot of sexually frustrated young men with no jobs, no prospects and severely impaired judgment who have little hope of ever having sex this side of Paradise (where they are taught they will receive 72 virgins of their very own).  Is it honestly that surprising to Bryson and her cronies that these men love porn?  I’d say it was a sign of serious psychological maladjustment if, given their circumstances, they didn’t collect “terrorbytes” (gag) of the stuff.  Terrorists also have cell phones, TVs, books, cars, food and all sorts of other stuff but nobody’s trying to pretend there’s a causative relationship there because (all together now) sex is somehow different.  It reminds me of the way that religious fanatics and cops of the ‘80s made a big deal if teen suicides owned Ozzy Osbourne records or Dungeons and Dragons books…ignoring, of course, all the teen suicides who had sports paraphernalia or other kinds of books and records.

I’m going to let her demand for an increased surveillance state speak for itself, but I must point out that our country already has “invest[ed] in research that questions whether…minds [are] warped by pornography use,” twice in fact; neither Lyndon Johnson’s Presidential Commission (funded shortly after he left office in 1969) nor Ronald Reagan’s Meese Commission (organized in 1985) could find any evidence that porn “warps minds” or indeed has any harmful social or psychological effects whatsoever, though the latter report concluded with a statement roughly equivalent to “despite the lack of evidence, we say it’s harmful anyway”.  As porn has become more widely available the rates of abortion, divorce, domestic violence, forcible rape, teen pregnancy and sex crimes against children have all markedly decreased, and some studies seem to indicate that the increased availability of porn is at least partly responsible for the decrease in rape.  Of course, fanatics (whether “Democrat”, “Republican”, “Christian”, “feminist” or whatever they choose to call themselves) aren’t interested in studies, except for bogus ones which can be made to “demonstrate” whatever they already believe.

One Year Ago Today

“Recognition” explores the awkward situations which can arise when escort and client discover they already know each other.

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August Miscellanea (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 18, 2011| 11 Comments »

A man hears what he wants to hear/And disregards the rest.  –  Paul Simon, “The Boxer”

Several stories about “authorities” seeing and hearing exactly what they want to see and hear.

Give It a Rest

I guess the cops in Arlington, Texas aren’t satisfied with just going “booga-booga, I see you!” to escorts and shaming clients any more, especially since what they imagined would be their big chance to look like big shots fizzled exactly as I and other rational people predicted it would.  So now they’re resorting to harassing strippers and strip-club patrons instead:

Dozens of employees and patrons were arrested late Friday during a raid at the Flashdancer strip club.  In all, 44 people were arrested on narcotic warrants, charges of possession of controlled substances or outstanding felony or misdemeanor warrants, police spokeswoman Tiara Richard said…Richard said the location had a history of illegal drugs and prostitution.  Recently, undercover officers had been at the nightclub where they bought drugs from employees and saw prostitution, Richard said.  No arrests Friday were related to prostitution.  “Based on what they saw, there was a need to take action,” Richard said…

Don’t you just love Copese?  They “saw prostitution”; obviously their Super Police Vision allows them to see other abstractions such as “criminality” and “guilt” as well, which is why their testimony is so much more credible in court than that of us ordinary mortals who lack super powers.  Of course, that raises the question of why such gifted beings are wasting their time bullying strippers instead of pursuing international gangsters or something, but we’re not supposed to think about that.

Trafficking, Trafficking Everywhere!

The American desire to be the world’s moral arbiter, combined with its simple-minded view of reality, has resulted in its attempting to impose “trafficking” mythology on countries which have heretofore largely ignored this largely Euro-American moral panic.  Note the subtly sardonic tone of this July 24th story from New Zealand:

New Zealand is risking an American rebuke over one of this country’s pet aid projects, which brings hundreds of Pacific Islanders here to work for minimum wages picking fruit and grapes, warn high-level US sources.  Wellington sees the recognised seasonal employer scheme as charity, but Washington views it as verging on human trafficking and debt-bonded labour…Last week US Human Trafficking Ambassador Luis CdeBaca came with a delegation to talk with government officials, unions and lobby groups.  No statement followed, but sources say the Americans were alarmed at a lack of recognition of trafficking in New Zealand.  The Americans are investigating bonds used to bring minimum wage workers from Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.  “The burden of illegal costs and debts on these labourers in the source country, often with the support of labour agencies and employers in the destination country, can contribute to a situation of debt bondage,” a source said.

…The Americans also believe trafficking of sex workers – especially from Asia – is taking place.  But Catherine Healy of the Prostitutes Collective told them the collective does not believe this.  “We haven’t come across sex workers who are victims of trafficking yet,” she said, adding the word trafficking was “such a dramatic catch-all…What we are asking for is old-fashioned labour rights.  We explained that sometimes sex workers are made to work exceptionally long shifts and have their money withheld by some brothel operators.”  Healy said some managers and operators are “dreadful to work for” and the Department of Labour should deal with them.  The collective told the Americans it was pleased sex workers had the right to say yes to sex work and that this was getting rid of exploitation.  “[CdeBaca] acknowledged it was important to not conflate prostitution and trafficking, as has been our recent experience in dealing with the American administration and their overall response to sex work”…

I’ve heard several US government officials claim lately that they believe it’s important not to conflate prostitution with trafficking, yet they keep doing it both in this country and in others.  The success of decriminalization in New Zealand must drive prudish American officials bats.  But as for Americans chiding New Zealand about the use of migrant labor in harvesting crops…

{ring! ring! ring!}

“Hello?”

“Hi, Kettle?  This is Pot.  You’re black.”

Waking Up

It’s good to see so many educated people beginning to recognize the truth about sex work, though it’s rather sad to think so many of them (including the self-described “sexologist” who wrote this July 27th Huffington Post article) were ignorant enough to believe all the lies and stereotypes in the first place:

Think “sex worker,” and “affluent,” “educated,” and having a “strong family background” and “access to resources” are not the descriptors that come to mind.  But a University of Arkansas study recently found that many U.S. women joining the “high quality,” illegal prostitution market encompass all of those qualities…Far from desperately trying to fund their next drug high, childrearing expenses, or bills, they bare their wares for the very same reasons most people look for work — for money, stability, autonomy, and job satisfaction.  Such research joins a string of flabbergasting findings on who would consider joining the “world’s oldest profession.”  A British study, published in the journal Sex Education, found that 16.5% of undergraduates would consider sex work, with 93% pointing to money as the primary incentive.  Another Leeds University study, involving over 200 lap-dancers, reported that one in three participants engaged in such work to fund their schooling…a Berlin Studies Centre study has reported that one in three university students in Berlin would consider sex work as a way to pay for their education.  (It further found that over 29% of university students in Paris and 18.5% in Kiev would contemplate such.)  Some 4% of the 3,200 Berlin participants reported already having engaged in some type of sex work, like erotic dancing, Internet performances, or prostitution.  Researchers speculated that greater student workloads and higher fees have made sex work’s high hourly wages quite attractive.

While many people can’t wrap their head around a person’s desire to engage in sex work, this field’s potential to become your “average day job” changes depending on what the sexual exchanges involve.  With the term “sex work” encompassing a wide range of jobs, like erotic modeling, stripping, lap dancing, erotic massage, being a dominatrix, and webcam work, a person can make money doing ‘tamer’ activities than prostitution…Often involving zero physical contact, those sorts of jobs seem much less demeaning and threatening, hence, in some realms, become more socially acceptable.  These “artistic performers,” as they’ll often call themselves, often don’t feel victimized…

Dr. Fulbright, if you consider these findings “flabberga­sting” it’s because you were previously reading anti-sex work propaganda instead of talking to real women (which causes me to question your credibility as a sexologist).  For intelligen­t, educated women to choose sex work is nothing new; we’ve been doing it at least since ancient Sumer, and the Golden-Age Greek hetaerae and Renaissanc­e courtesans were the most educated, accomplish­ed women of their times.  The idea that sex work of any kind, even prostituti­on, is “demeaning and threatenin­g” exists largely in the minds of ignorant outsiders like yourself, not in the minds of the free adult women who make up the vast majority of our profession and always have.

If You Want Something Done Right…

The families of several of the women who were murdered by the Long Island Killer are (unsurprisingly) dissatisfied by the lackluster efforts of police, who (unsurprisingly) don’t appear too anxious to catch what appears to be a cop raping and murdering hookers.  So (as described in this July 30th article from CNN), they’ve decided to hire private detectives and to place Craigslist ads looking for information from other working girls who are too smart to trust cops; as Amber Costello’s sister put it, “I worked for a service when I was younger…We knew we had to protect ourselves. Police were not an option.”  Don’t expect CNN to understand this; they’re too busy pumping up their ratings by advocating further criminalization so more girls like Costello will be murdered in the future.

One Year Ago Today

“The Empress Theodora” is a short biography of the woman who was inarguably the most successful whore of all time; she rose to become a Byzantine empress in life, and an Eastern Orthodox saint after her death.

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August Miscellanea (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 17, 2011| 18 Comments »

Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.  –  Thomas Jefferson

Short articles about laws, laws and more laws, none of which accomplish anything productive.

Because Everyone Knows That Laws Deter Streetwalkers

If I live to be a thousand I will never understand why lawheads believe that more laws will stop people who are already breaking existing laws; they seem wedded to the concept that if we only increase the penalties enough, the offending behavior will stop.  Of course, this is nonsense; most criminologists agree that increasing the severity of a criminal penalty has no demonstrable deterrent value.  For example, despite penalties which are wildly and insanely out of proportion to the offense, drug use has increased over the 40 years of the drug war just as alcohol use increased during Prohibition.  Even the death penalty has no demonstrable deterrent value (except to the individual executed, obviously).  Yet lawheads just keep making new laws and then demanding that cops enforce them and courts incarcerate an ever-increasing number of American citizens.  Here’s the latest example, courtesy of the New York Daily News of July 27th:

Harsher penalties for selling sex near school grounds are now in place…State Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. first proposed the bill that will now slap pimps, prostitutes and johns caught plying their illicit trade within 1,000 feet of a school with automatic felony charges.  “I’m happy,” Diaz said yesterday.  “I think that this is a big step in protecting our children.”  Years of unchecked prostitution in the playground of…the West Farms School…led to the legislation, which is now in effect for schools statewide…

In recent weeks, The Urban Justice Center had urged [Governor] Cuomo to veto the bill in an online petition…”In the modern era, most sex workers who work on the street are engaged in sex work out of desperate need.  They face widespread physical and sexual violence, especially from the police,” the petition stated… Meanwhile, Diaz is calling on the NYPD to make sure the law is enforced.  “You could have as many laws as you want, but if the police do not enforce them, the law becomes nothing,” he said.

This is a textbook example of governmental sledgehammer-enabled egg-breaking.  Somehow there will be enough cops to enforce this statewide, even though there weren’t enough of them to keep an eye on ONE PLAYGROUND in the Bronx.  Let’s put ‘em all in jail!  That’ll learn them dirty whores, pimps and “johns”…which according to Melissa Farley means the majority of the population of New York.

Dirty Amateurs

Those damned dirty amateurs are at it again, having unprotected sex and spreading diseases to their unsuspecting spouses.  Why isn’t there a law against this?  We need to abolish unpaid sex; it’s demeaning to women and as this paraphrased July 26th anecdote incontrovertibly proves, men hate women who give them sex for free and give them diseases on purpose as a way of inflicting violence.  It’s true, I saw a study which proves it and anyone who denies it must be a misogynist too.

A 33-year-old married woman from Delavan, Wisconsin has sued her 35-year-old married lover on the grounds that he infected her with herpes during an unprotected adulterous sexual encounter in January of 2010; she contends that he knew he was infected and is therefore liable under Wisconsin law.  In May of this year she insisted police arrest the man, and when they declined to do so she filed the lawsuit without the help of an attorney; the suit demands $350,000 from the man’s auto and homeowners insurance, the former presumably on the grounds that the sexual encounter took place in his pickup truck.

The man denies giving the woman herpes and suggests she check with her other partners, but she claims he was the only man she cheated on her husband with.  She claims to have experienced panic attacks while driving with her spouse and children, and that her spouse is reluctant to have normal sexual relations because of her diagnosis.

I’m sure her husband’s reluctance to have sex with her has nothing at all to do with the fact that she cheated on him and was caught red…umm, handed.

Selective Blindness

Die-hard partisans are most amazing creatures; they can viciously castigate the “other side” for whatever-it-is, while simultaneously ignoring “their side” doing essentially the same thing.  Case in point the tiresome feminist bleating about the Republicans’ “war on women” while ignoring the one waged by Democrats.  They are enabled to do this by defining knife attacks on amateurs as “aggravated assault” but the same attacks on sex workers as “emergency surgery”.  Case in point:  Barbara and Shannon Kelley’s July 28th Huffington Post article bemoaning the Republican renewal of the gag rule prohibiting funding to health agencies which give information about abortion, while totally ignoring Obama’s continuation of the Bush Era policy of prohibiting funding to health agencies which refuse to demonize prostitutes:

Surely you have heard that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted to reinstate the Global Gag Rule that prevents any family planning agencies that provide information about abortion service from receiving any U.S. foreign aid.  Who gets hurt?  Women, children and anyone who believes the conversation about women’s issues needs to move forward.  But once again, that conversation has been hijacked by the right-wing strategy to frame deeper issues related to women and families in terms of a women’s right to choose…organizations that receive funds cannot use their own money to provide abortion-related information or services, or advocate for liberalized abortion laws.  The rule imposes no similar restrictions on advocacy against such laws…Under the…rule, these organizations face a choice:  either participate in the American right’s global campaign to restrict women’s rights and access to reproductive health care or lose critical U.S. funding.  That funding is crucial for agencies that cover a number of issues related to healthy women and children…What also gets cut out of the equation when these agencies are defunded is access to contraception…the Guttmacher Institute has found that when abortion becomes illegal, abortions don’t decrease — they just become dangerous.  Life-threatening, actually.  And what better way to avoid abortions than to provide contraceptive services.  No brainer, right?  Go figure…But what makes us even more angry is the way the debate on abortion sucks the energy out of the fight for a better world for women and children — here and abroad.  Suddenly, regardless of where we stand on a women’s right to choose, we’re in a defensive position…

Funny thing; nearly every methodologically sound study ever done proves that when prostitution becomes illegal, it doesn’t decrease — it just becomes dangerous.  Welcome to our world, ladies.  Apparently, you don’t think women’s health issues are important when the women choose to make their living providing sexual services to men.  We believe the “conversation about women’s issues needs to move forward” as well, and recognizing that “a woman’s right to choose” must include choosing why she has sex (rather than simply how or with whom) is a big part of that.  By reducing that broad and powerful phrase to a mere euphemism for the right to abortion, “feminists” of your ilk have not only allowed the enemy within our ranks, but actually invited him in.  In furtherance of your narcissistic concerns you either lobbied for the rights of certain women to be restricted or remained silent while others did so, and now you’re crying because the crop which has sprung up is the very one you planted.  Unfortunately, it isn’t just you who will be forced to eat it.

Colossus Blinks

In my July 3rd column I reported that internet behemoth Google had censored Irish human rights campaigners “Turn Off the Blue Light” by cancelling their ad under the false excuse that it was an escort ad when in actuality it led to a site opposing imposition of the “Swedish Model” on Ireland.  The group protested the removal through approved channels and was of course rebuffed, but when they protested in person at Google headquarters in Dublin an amazing thing happened, as reported in the Independent on August 7th:

A small group of campaigners for…rights for Irish sex workers is claiming a victory against internet giant Google…After their complaint was received Google apparently reviewed the situation and agreed to reinstate the advert last month…Google said…”We permit political advertisements regardless of the political views they represent, and apply our policies equally.  Just as the net itself provides space for a thousand political opinions to bloom, Google is committed to being a neutral platform for people to advertise their political messages.”

I reckon a flea in a tender spot can make even an elephant scratch.

One Year Ago Today

My very first miscellanea column, “Legal Sundries” appeared on this date last year; the items covered were the suicide of the “Craigslist Killer”, WWAV’s advocacy for New Orleans prostitutes forced to register as “sex offenders” under the “Crime Against Nature” law, the rationale behind porn being legal despite the fact that it’s paid sex, and men suing women for injuries resulting from cowgirl sex.

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In Denial (Part Two)

Posted in Uncategorized on August 16, 2011| 41 Comments »

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?  –  Angela Carter

In yesterday’s column I pointed out that it’s impossible to draw lines which sharply delineate prostitution from other, totally legal feminine behaviors, and as I pointed out in one of my very earliest columns, “…the woman who is honest about what she wants and what she will give for it is legally persecuted and branded with the name of ‘whore’, while she who is dishonest and cloaks her prostitution by hiding it in a venerable institution is not only rewarded both socially and financially, but is actually allowed to use the machinery of ‘justice’ to collect her fee.”  The laws requiring men to financially support children they sired were enacted in a day when most women had no income of their own, and at that time those laws were just and fair.  But in modern times, ready access to birth control and abortion means no woman needs to have a baby she cannot support, and the misnamed “no fault” divorce laws allow her to walk out on a man for no concrete reason, block his access to his children by a number of easily-implemented stratagems, and still demand he support her children…even if she is more capable of supporting them alone than most normal men would be.  Here’s an example from the August 10th Huffington Post:

Model Linda Evangelista, who once touted she doesn’t get up for less than $10,000 a day, recently asked a New York court to award her $46,000 a month in child support. Is Evangelista’s child support request as unreasonable as the headlines would like us to believe?  Not necessarily.  According to a Bloomberg Businessweek  publication, the child’s father Francois Henri-Pinault’s total compensation as CEO of PPR-SA, a luxury brand corporation, for fiscal year 2010 was roughly $5.2 million…The annual total of the child support requested is less than 11% of Pinault’s annual income from PPR-SA.  Not an outrageous amount.  While the demise of the “Supermodel” may have put a damper on Evangelista’s earnings, she is reported to be worth $8 million, far from an income level where her child is in danger of becoming a public charge.  However…New York law states that in…cases where parental income exceeds $130,000…an award of child support should be based on the child’s actual needs and the amount required for the child to live an appropriate lifestyle…The New York Post reports the majority of the $46,000 a month in child support would cover a 24-hour nanny and personal drivers for the child.  In this case, a 24-hour nanny for a child whose mother has a career like Evangelista’s may be viewed as reasonable by a court.  And while the request of personal drivers for a child may appear excessive and unreasonable to most, a judge may think they are necessary for the child’s lifestyle…Will the Family Court order Pinault to pay $46,000 a month in child support to Evangelista?  Probably not.  Is Evangelista’s child support claim as outrageous as it seems?  Not at all.

I beg to differ.  The author of this article is apparently a lawhead, one of those psychological aberrations who believes that laws can change reality.  It doesn’t matter whether the law defines her claim as outrageous or not; the idea that the “actual needs” of any infant who was not the heir to a throne (and maybe not even then) could possibly come to over $1500/day is beyond absurdity; I daresay most American children cost less to support than that per month.  The words “actual needs” are pretty clear, though obviously courts have chosen to interpret them in some strange fashion which makes sense only to lawyers and spoiled “supermodels”.  The monthly interest on Linda Evangelista’s investments alone could support ten children, pay my entire household budget and still leave enough for her to have fresh sushi flown in from Tokyo three times a week, and that’s not even counting whatever new whoring fees she’s making now.  Why do we as a culture allow women like her to waste the court’s time and to enrich themselves by cynically exploiting a system designed to prevent children from being neglected by amoral fathers?  When I was a working whore, I had the sense to collect my fees in advance; platinum pussy syndrome sufferers like Evangelista need to do the same.  And if they’re going to pretend they aren’t whores, they need to stop demanding the government extract from men monies to which they would not be entitled had those men not had sex with them.

One Year Ago Today

“Aversions” is a discussion of some of the things I, personally, dislike in sex, for the purpose of demonstrating that even a woman as sexually open-minded as I am still has her own idiosyncrasies.

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In Denial (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 15, 2011| 78 Comments »

Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude.  –  Georges Bataille

One of the most important aspects of the fight for sex worker rights is pointing out that prostitution is not only normal and natural, but that it exists on a continuum with other female behavior.  While it’s not entirely accurate to say “all women are whores”, it is accurate to say that there is no clear line delineating prostitution from other female sexuality.  A minority of women never do anything which even remotely resembles transactional sex, and a minority are professionals, and a huge majority occupy the immense grey area between those two extremes, occasionally or frequently trading sex for money or other things they desire, whether with strangers or employers or friends or boyfriends or lovers.  It is precisely because there is no foolproof way to separate prostitution from other sex acts that police must lie and manufacture bogus “evidence”, and also the reason why women who do not consider themselves prostitutes need to be just as opposed to the criminalization of our trade as we are.  If you’re sexually active with a man or men to whom you aren’t married and want to know what a prostitute looks like to police and prosecutors, look in the mirror.

In my column of one year ago today I mentioned that, though ignorant people and even some clients buy into the Hollywood hooker stereotype, Camille Paglia had it right when she wrote “The most successful prostitutes are invisible, because the sign of a prostitute’s success is her absolute blending with the environment.”  Because we really aren’t different from other women, the only time we don’t blend in is when we choose not to.  Streetwalkers often dress to attract attention as a form of advertisement, but criminalization makes this dangerous and the internet makes it unnecessary.  Yet even some whores believe that being a prostitute means wearing garish outfits, standing under lampposts, being indiscriminate in one’s selection of clients or exceeding some arbitrary number of them, and because they don’t do these things they deny that their means of obtaining income qualifies as prostitution.  A July 29th article at Huffington Post  interviewed several such women; they’re “sugar babies”, low-volume unprofessional whores who prefer long-term arrangements.  Some of them are university coeds hoping to defray expenses and avoid onerous student loan burdens; others are career girls who don’t make nearly enough to support themselves as they would like to be supported.  And all of them are prostitutes, though many of them deny it.

The article goes into great detail about what its author, Amanda Fairbanks, prefers to call the “sugar baby phenomenon”, and though she does admit that this sort of relationship has existed since time immemorial and that the only new wrinkle is the rise of websites which make them easier to arrange, she still seems unable to resist using asinine phrases like “selling themselves” (as though ownership changed hands) and “thinly veiled digital bordello”.  Like police, legislators, neofeminists, moralists and even many sugar babies and daddies, Fairbanks just doesn’t seem to be able to wrap her mind around the fact that the only important differences between formal prostitution and many, probably most, male-female relationships are duration, honesty and professional ethics.  She interviews a lawyer who harrumphs about sugar baby arrangements not being “direct exchanges” and therefore not prostitution, ignoring the fact that most high-end escort transactions are no more direct.  She labels as “stark” findings that 17% of British coeds, 33% of German ones and 30% of French ones say they would be willing to do sex work to pay for their education, and quotes a female Kingston University professor who moans that “arrangement-seeking websites are but another invitation for rich men to abuse young, vulnerable women” and laments that today’s young women “were raised to believed that their sexuality isn’t something to be afraid of.”  Women who aren’t afraid of sex and refuse to be burdened with crushing debt due to arbitrary restrictions?  The horror!

Ronald Weitzer and Barb Brents

Not all of Fairbanks’ interviewees are delusional, though; she spoke to Ronald Weitzer (whose studies I’ve linked on a number of occasions), and he pointed out not only that sugar daddy arrangements are indeed prostitution, but also that many sugar babies would find that life hard to walk away from later:  “The more you make, the harder it becomes to transition away from,” says Weitzer, “just like high-end sex workers anywhere.”  And Barb Brents of University of Nevada, Las Vegas, concurs with my analysis:  she says that escorts and brothel girls “…tend to be from working-class or middle-class backgrounds, but a good number are from upper-class families, too,” and adds that women often turn to sex work when they’re unable to make ends meet.  “When people think about sex work, they think of a poor, drug-addicted woman living in the street with a pimp, down on their luck,” says Brents…”In reality, the culture is exceedingly diverse and college students using these sites are but another example of this kind of diversity…These college women [don’t] see themselves as sex workers, but women doing straight-up prostitution often don’t see themselves that way either…Drawing that line and making that distinction may be necessary psychologically, but in material facts it’s quite a blurry line.”

But though a few of the sugar babies to whom Fairbanks spoke were honest about their trade, the majority were not; one particularly self-deluded young woman called “Jennifer” said,

I’m not a whore.  Whores are paid by the hour, can have a high volume of clients in a given day, and it’s based on money, not on who the individual actually is.  There’s no feeling involved and the entire interaction revolves around a sexual act…My situation is different in a number of different ways.  First of all, I don’t engage with a high volume of people, instead choosing one or two men I actually like spending time with and have decided to develop a friendship with them.  And while sex is involved, the focus is on providing friendship.  It’s not only about getting paid.

It would be difficult to pack more fallacies and rationalizations into one paragraph than “Jennifer” has managed here; I won’t break it down, but I suggest she A) talk to a couple of escorts, and B) read about courtesans like Aspasia and Madame de Pompadour, who restricted themselves to one client for many, many years.  In the end, these young women are only fooling themselves; their clients know exactly what they are, and by choosing the path of self-delusion they sell themselves very short:  the average one interviewed got only $500 for an entire night, while most escorts make that in two hours or less.  And Miss “I’m not a whore” took home a paltry $1000 for an entire weekend.

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Top Ten

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2011| 9 Comments »

I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list… –  Sir William Gilbert, “As Someday It May Happen” from The Mikado

I promised in my “Anniversary” column that I’d provide a list of my top ten posts, calculated in a number of different ways, and though I actually made the counts that very day I’ve for some reason not been able to get around to putting the column together until now!  So without further ado, here are the figures as they stood on July 10th.

This first is a list of my top ten columns, as determined purely by number of hits:

Top Ten (# of hits)

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits by 7/10/11
Coming and Going                                  February 10th, 2011                5,970
Courtesan Denial                                    December 4th, 2010                4,637
Meretrices and Prostibulae                     November 3rd, 2010                4,127
Numerology                                            January 24th, 2011                  3,360
Acting and Activism                                 January 8th, 2011                    2,721
Who Did Your Tits?                                 October 1st, 2010                    2,623
January Second                                      January 2nd, 2011                   1,875
Plaçage                                                   November 22nd, 2010             1,771
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day   March 3rd, 2011                       1,574
The Slave-Whore Fantasy (Part One)     December 2nd, 2010                1,537

Some of these are unsurprising, but some appear to make no sense at all; why in the world should a post about the amount of money the State of Texas wastes on locking up hookers be my most popular by 29% above its next-closest competitor?  To understand the reason, one must take image searches into account; for several months this spring, the single most popular search which led to this blog was “Texas county map” or some variation on it, which led to the first illustration in my February 10thcolumn.  Similarly, searches for pictures of Veronica Franco led to the December 4th column, “Pompeii” and “Temple of Fortuna Virilis” both found my November 3rd column, “Mardi Gras tits” turned up this young lovely in my October 1st column, and Googling for illustrations of the fictional planet Gor turned up these Boris Vallejo illustrations in my December 2nd column.  It tickles my sense of irony that thousands of searches for “Mira Sorvino” ended up at my January 8th column about her rude and unprofessional treatment of Dr. Laura Agustín, but I am nothing short of astonished that almost two thousand people cared enough about sofa beds to end up at my column of January 2nd.

Since these results tell us nothing about the content of the columns, I disallowed them and came up with this list:

Top Ten (corrected)

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits by 7/10/11
Numerology                                            January 24th, 2011                  3,360
Plaçage                                                   November 22nd, 2010             1,771
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day   March 3rd, 2011                       1,574
Ashley Madison                                       January 30th, 2011                  1,439
Madame de Pompadour                          December 29th, 2010              1,366
Phryne                                                    July 31st, 2010                         1,133
Storyville                                                 September 3rd, 2010               1,113
Japanese Prostitution                             October 21st, 2010                  1,104
By the Numbers                                       April 20th, 2011                       1,095
Here We Go Again…                                 August 26th, 2010                   1,060

Though many people searched for information on Phryne and Madame de Pompadour, many others found those articles by searching for pictures of the ladies (especially this detail from “Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis” by Henryk Siemiradzki), so I’ll include two runners-up as well:  “Wife Swapping” from November 20th and “November Q & A” from November 27th.

Ranking the top ten posts by the number of comments they elicited gives us a completely different picture:

Top Ten Comments

Name                                            Date                     # of comments by 7/10/11
That Is So Hot!                             April 19th, 2011                       191
Speaking in Prostitute                  June 17th, 2011                       170
Their Lips Are Moving                   April 25th, 2011                        132
Pendulum                                     April 9th, 2011                          128
Creeping Rot                                April 18th, 2011                        123
Public Service Announcement       June 12th, 2011                       120
Savaging                                      March 27th, 2011                     115
Neither Cold Nor Hot                    April 6th, 2011                          114
May Q & A                                    May 31st, 2011                          97
Interview: Jill Brenneman (Pt 4)   February 24th, 2011                  96

With apologies to Eliot, April appears to be the chattiest month!

Most posts seem to have a great deal of interest right away, then trickle off; others seem to attract interest consistently as time goes by.  Here are the posts which show the smallest variation in number of hits from month to month:

Ten Most Consistent (in chronological order)

Name                                                 Date
Do You Party?                                   July 14th, 2010
Modern Marriage                               July 18th, 2010
Phryne                                              July 31st, 2010
A Whore in the Bedroom                  September 9th, 2010
Think of the Children!                       September 30th, 2010
No Other Option                               October 17th, 2010
Wolves                                             October 18th, 2010
Japanese Prostitution                      October 21st, 2010
Wife Swapping                                 November 20th, 2010
Plaçage                                             November 22nd, 2010

Interestingly, there aren’t any posts from this year in this particular list.  Finally, I’d like to finish off with a list of my ten favorite posts which don’t appear on any of the other lists:

Ten Essays Maggie Would Like To See Get More Attention

Name                                                 Date
Advice for Clients                                August 21st , 2010
Five Women in Whitechapel               October 5th, 2010
Heart of Gold                                      October 6th, 2010
The Love-Hate Relationship                October 7th, 2010
Amazingly Stupid Statements             October 10th, 2010
Deadbeats                                          October 30th, 2010
Ban the Super Bowl!                           December 11th, 2010
Social Autoimmune Disorder                January 12th, 2011
Creating Criminals                               January 15th, 2011
A Little Help From Our Friends             March 11th, 2011

Plus ALL of the fictional interludes!

One Year Ago Today

“New Film Reviews”, my first of a number of similar columns, containing my reviews of Doctor Detroit, Full Metal Jacket, An Indecent Proposal, Jesus Christ Superstar, Pretty Woman, Total Recall, Whore and The Wicker Man.

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Spotlight

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 13, 2011| 11 Comments »

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.  –  Paul Deman

Advocates for the decriminalization of prostitution repeatedly point out that when any activity is criminalized, it is pushed into the shadows and thereby attracts the kind of vermin who thrive in the darkness.  Those who prey on others and scavenge profits from their misfortunes cannot stand long exposure to the light of truth, and must either wither or go scurrying back into the woodwork whence they came.  The cockroaches who populate the rescue industry are like this, enriching themselves at the expense of prostitutes and those who do business with us under cover of the thick, greasy smoke of disinformation spread by neofeminists and trafficking fetishists.  But when light is cast onto their activities, they must retreat in order to survive.

Roaches don’t care where their food comes from, and neither do Trevor and Maggie Neilson of Global Philanthropy Group, the “celebrity charity consultants” who make a fine living from Hollywood types who want to look good for the public by giving money to “worthy causes”.  The Neilsons were the ones who suggested Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore dump their excess cash into the “DNA Foundation”, pumping them up with ridiculous stories of 300,000 child sex slaves; this is not to say that the Kutchers are not equally culpable, since any reasonable person should have checked his facts rather than mindlessly parroting nonsense to everyone who would listen.  But the Neilsons might have continued to enjoy their ill-gotten profits (made at the expense of further persecution of voluntary adult whores) had Village Voice Media not decided to shine a light on them; as I reported in my column of July 1st, Maggie Neilson told reporters she didn’t care whether her facts were accurate or not: “I don’t frankly care if the number is 200,000, 500,000, or a million, or 100,000…the people who want to spend all day bitching about the methodologies used I’m not very interested in.”

Within a few days of the Village Voice article, however, Neilson and her husband realized that daylight had intruded into their cozy little crevice.  Though most of the public was still buying the “for the children!” excuse, many others were starting to wake up and the Neilson’s poster boy was having a very public meltdown on Twitter which, though it won a few supporters like American Airlines and Seattle mayor Mike McGinn, actually resulted in even more unwelcome attention.  Maggie Neilson attempted damage control with a July 6th Huffington Post article which trotted out further misinformation wrapped up in logical fallacies and appeals to emotion; that same day, Village Voice property Seattle Weekly published an article which refuted just about every claim the Neilsons and Kutchers had made about Backpage and displayed the erroneous statements as part of a larger pattern of ignorance and disinformation distributed by both couples.  Undeterred, Trevor Neilson followed his wife’s example by writing a July 13th Huffington Post article in which he accused Village Voice Media of doing exactly what he and his wife were trying so desperately to do:  protect their income by lying and otherwise distracting people from looking too closely at the facts.  He even called the company’s exposure of his ignorance “a series of wild columns” in an article which referred to adult escort ads as “children being sold for sex” and pretended that “300,000” is a reasonable approximation for “4”.

Apparently, Neilson woke up soon after writing this silly screed and realized that sooner or later his attack, based as it was on incredible exaggeration and blatant misrepresentation, would collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and might even take his company with it if the far larger Village Voice organization decided to pursue the legal remedies available to the targets of libel campaigns.  Sometime in the last couple of weeks it obviously dawned on him that spreading demonstrably false claims in an attempt to undermine a company’s business constitutes criminal defamation and a “reckless disregard for the truth”, and so he decided to backpedal on his previous position (as reported in the July 25th Seattle Weekly):

Global Philanthropy Group president Trevor Neilson, who on July 14 e-mailed a letter to Seattle Weekly advertisers urging them to withdraw their advertising from the publication on account of ads allegedly involving underage sex trafficking on parent company Village Voice Media’s adult classifieds service, Backpage, today e-mailed a second letter to those same advertisers, stating that he is “no longer calling on advertisers to withdraw their ads from the Village Voice, the Seattle Weekly, or any of their related publications.”

“Over the course of the last week I have had numerous discussions with Village Voice, and have come to believe that they are serious about working diligently to prevent their digital classifieds website from being used by those seeking to exploit children or others,” writes Neilson, who’s been associated with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore and their DNA Foundation on the topic of sexual exploitation of minors.  Shortly after Seattle Weekly and its VVM sister papers ran a cover story which was critical of DNA’s interpretation of numbers surrounding underage prostitution, Neilson brought the issue to the attention of Seattle mayor Mike McGinn, who ultimately responded by pulling city advertising from the pages of Seattle Weekly.  (Unlike the web-based Backpage, which relies on credit card and ISP information to track its users, Seattle Weekly checks the ID of all individuals appearing in the adult classifieds section of its print edition.)  Since Neilson reached out to McGinn, Backpage representatives have met with the mayor and City Councilmember Tim Burgess, as well as the DNA Foundation, to explore security enhancements associated with the site.  Following is the full text of Neilson’s July 25 letter to select Seattle Weekly and Village Voice Media advertisers:

Dear [advertiser]:

I wanted to update you on the situation with Seattle Weekly and Village Voice Media that I emailed you about on July 14.  Over the course of the last week I have had numerous discussions with Village Voice, and have come to believe that they are serious about working diligently to prevent their digital classifieds website from being used by those seeking to exploit children or others.  Currently, I am informed they are looking at ways that new technology can be used to verify the ages of those whose photos appear on their websites.  It is a task that hasn’t been perfected on the web yet but I am assured by Village Voice and Seattle Weekly that the resources, manpower and effort are being marshaled by them in consultation with IT and safety professionals to address the issue.  I am encouraged by their actions in the last week, and believe they have demonstrated a serious commitment to stopping online predators who traffic in underage children or other victims.  Based on these discussions, and what Village Voice and Seattle Weekly have demonstrated, I wanted you to know that I am hopeful that Village Voice Media’s efforts will be successful, and I will do what I can to be helpful in the process.  In light of these efforts and commitments, I am no longer calling on advertisers to withdraw their ads from the Village Voice, the Seattle Weekly, or any of their related publications.

Sincerely,

Trevor Neilson, President
Global Philanthropy Group

As a popular comedian of the late ’60s used to say, “Verrrrry interesting.”  Of course we’ll never know what was really said at those meetings, but any reduction in “child sex trafficking” rhetoric is a welcome change.  And what of Demi and Ashton?  If a recent DNA “tweet” calling attention to this news story is any indication, they may now be attempting to steer their loose cannon toward “end demand” nonsense; in any case, it’s obvious their private war on whores is far from over.

One Year Ago Today

In “Friday the Thirteenth” I examined the possible origins of the popular superstition about the day, and proposed it as an occasion for speaking up for the rights of sex workers.

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Blackball

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , on August 12, 2011| 15 Comments »

As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.  –  English proverb

One year ago today I wrote about nuisance callers who were blackballed from every escort service in New Orleans because they were either total time-wasters or else they were so impossible to deal with that not a whore in town would see them.  Most of these men were clearly disturbed and/or out of control and lacked the income to support a hooker habit, but today I’d like to tell the story of how one particular wealthy man, who could easily have become a client girls were eager to see, instead found himself persona non grata due to nothing other than his own asinine behavior.  Melissa Farley would like to convince the world that all “sex buyers” are “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”; that’s not only a gross exaggeration, but also a literal inversion because in today’s column you will see what becomes of a man who could even somewhat fit the shoes of Farley’s caricatured customer.

It was August of 2000 and the summer doldrums were upon us; the convention season had not yet started, most well-heeled locals had fled the pressure cooker which New Orleans becomes during the Dog Days, and a lot of working girls were on vacation because they wouldn’t miss much.  Since I had only started my own service a few months before, my phone was even more silent than those of more well-established agencies; so when I received a call from a real estate developer who said he wanted a girl who was good at conversation and didn’t mind spending a few hours with him, I looked upon it as a blessing directly from Aphrodite.  I explained my multi-hour rate and he said it would be no problem, so I let Doug and Linda know I’d be out of pocket for a few hours and headed down to the Warehouse District.  As its name indicates, this is an area which once was home to nothing but warehouses, but was at that time undergoing a boom as real estate developers bought up the old buildings cheap and converted them into large hotels, apartment complexes, condominiums and the like.

I had a little trouble finding the address, but eventually I located it as a large hotel-like front door in an otherwise featureless wall on an empty street only a short distance from the river.  As my client soon explained, he had purchased an entire block of small 19th century buildings, sealed the spaces between them with concrete walls, refurbished the outer buildings into apartments and razed the inner ones to create a large courtyard with a swimming pool and tennis court.  The place was empty but for us; he told me there were still a few building inspections and whatnot to come before he could open the place to tenants, and he had decided to celebrate the project’s completion by hiring an escort.  He was well (though casually) dressed and well-spoken, and he seemed completely sincere, so when he explained that he wasn’t sure how long he wanted to see me for, and that he preferred to write me a check at the end, I didn’t instantly walk out.  Oh, I was very uncomfortable with that plan and told him so; I was inexperienced but not stupid.  But he did everything I asked to set my mind at ease; he showed me the business checkbook, whose address matched the one to which I had come and whose check numbers indicated long use.  His name and title were on the business cards whose name agreed with that on the checkbook, and it was the same name on his driver’s license.  There was no way this guy was going to write a bad check, and since he seemed nice and the night was dead anyhow I decided to roll the dice and accept his offer.

Everything was fine at first; he showed me around the property and we talked about a number of subjects for two hours, after which he was ready to bed me.  And that was where things started going wrong, because in bed he was totally the opposite of the way he had been in the living room.  He was incredibly rough, and though I actually like a bit of that, this was beyond the pale.  He kept shoving his fingers into my vagina despite my protests, grabbed my head when I was fellating him, and exuded an aura which was distinctly hostile and unpleasant.  And after he entered me it got worse; after coupling in the regular way for a while he got up, stood beside the bed and without a word grabbed my right ankle and literally dragged me quickly across the bed, causing my head to drop abruptly off of the pillow and jerk hard to the left as he pulled me.  As I’ve explained before, I suffer from vertigo and become dizzy if I lie flat during sex; rapid and unexpected motion has even stronger effects, so as you can imagine his action sent my head into a spin and it was all I could do to keep myself from being sick.  Luckily, he finished quickly after that, and turned out to be one of those men who want the woman to leave as soon as he’s done with her.  So I quickly got dressed and returned to the living room, where he already had the checkbook out; he asked how much I owed him and I said, “three hours is $750.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, “that’s too much.”

I felt anger welling up stronger than my dizziness.  “You agreed to the prices on the phone earlier.”

“Well, I guess I wasn’t listening.  I’ll give you $200.”

“That doesn’t even cover the bedroom time, much less everything else!”

“Well, it’s all you’re going to get; take it or leave it.”  He knew there was nothing I could do to enforce my price; he had tricked me with his smooth talk and I had fallen for it like a stupid amateur (which, to be fair, I had been only eight months before).  He was much bigger than me and judging by his performance in the bedroom unusually strong, and it was also growing increasingly difficult to keep from embarrassing myself by throwing up all over his carpet.  So I took the check, told him that he would regret reneging on our deal, and left; I drove less than two blocks and then pulled over at the corner of Tchoupitoulas Street to lose my dinner in the gutter.  That cleared my head sufficiently for me to drive home without further incident, and on the way I called Doug and told him how the guy had cheated me, and asked him to tell everyone else because I was sick and going home to bed.  He did tell me something that made me feel a little better:  his phone hadn’t rung once since I went into the call.  Even though I was cheated, at least I hadn’t missed a good call because of it.

A few weeks later I felt better about it still, because Doug called me and said, “I think that arsehole who cheated you is trying to get a girl from me; is his name ___________?”  I confirmed that it was indeed him, and Doug decided to mess with him by pretending to look for a girl but not actually doing so.  I’m sure he was eventually able to find someone from one of the two agencies in town who weren’t friendly with the others, but apparently the leopard couldn’t change his spots because a few months later Doug again called me with more good news.  “Hey, remember Mr. Big who likes to cheat working girls?  Well, I just got off the phone with him; he’s drunk and when I told him I couldn’t help him, he started crying and asked me ‘Why won’t anybody come to see me?’  So I told him maybe if he wouldn’t manhandle and cheat women he wouldn’t have that problem.”

Maybe it was wrong of me, but I permitted myself a bit of righteous schadenfreude.  Well, at least he taught me a valuable lesson; I never, ever again got into bed with anyone without payment in full and up front, no matter how nice and respectable he seemed.

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