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Archive for August, 2011

It Looks Good On Paper

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 11, 2011| 22 Comments »

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.  –  H.L. Mencken

American politicians just love “feel good” laws, legislation grounded entirely in emotion and usually labeled with some vague designation including words like “safe”, “protect”, “victim”, “child” or the name of a dead little girl.  Such laws usually result from moral panics or lurid news stories, accomplish little to nothing for actual victims of actual crimes, trample on civil rights and are impossible for legislators to oppose for fear of being labeled “soft on crime” or some equally meaningless adjectival phrase.  And why do politicians love them?  Because they require no research, debate, thinking or other actual work and allow those who support them to blend into the herd, mooing loudly while standing beneath the flag (cue patriotic music).  If a news story reports that a law is passed unanimously or near-unanimously, if the chief executive signs it quickly and with great fanfare,  if it’s promoted by a variety of special interest groups (especially “anti-crime” groups), and most notably if it was sponsored by one member of each half of the Big Government Party, you can bet the farm you’re looking at a feel-good law whose chief function is to misdirect public attention from whatever shenanigans the politicians are up to at the moment.  Here’s a recent example from Illinois, reported on August 6th in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Gov. Pat Quinn on Saturday announced a new law that will give victims of sex trafficking who have been charged with prostitution an opportunity to clear their names through court.  “Sex trafficking is a truly reprehensible crime that preys on the most vulnerable.  Victims deserve a chance to clear their records and rebuild their lives,” Quinn said.  Illinois previously passed the 2006 anti-trafficking law and 2010 Safe Children Act, which helps support victims who were forced into the sex trade and have criminal records as a direct result of being trafficked…Senate Bill 1037 allows defendants who are victims of human trafficking at the time of their prostitution convictions to file a motion to vacate the conviction if the defendant’s participation in the offense was the result of being a victim…Prostitution convictions limit victims’ abilities to access housing, employment education, immigration status and parental rights, according to the governor’s office.  The bill also creates a new filing timeline for victims of sex trafficking because they often endure years of abuse at the hands of traffickers and customers before they are able to seek help.

“The most important thing about Senate Bill 1037 is that it makes sure that the judicial system has a mechanism to ensure that a person who has been the victim of a crime is not automatically considered a criminal,” [bill sponsor Toi] Hutchinson said.  “It is good public policy to protect women and children who have been taken advantage of in this most heinous way.  They can take the necessary steps to rebuild their lives and become functional members of society after suffering trauma of that magnitude.”

“Victims of human trafficking are often forced into prostitution and other crimes against their own will, and too many of them are being prosecuted as criminals,” [bill sponsor Karen] Yarbrough said.  “When we have evidence that involuntary human trafficking was the cause of the crime, even though the victim may not have had the ability or representation to prove it during trial, we must do the right thing and reverse their conviction so they can move on with repairing their lives.”  The bill takes effect Jan. 1 and was supported by a variety of institutions, leaders and anti-crime organizations…

There’s nothing wrong with the core concept in principle; obviously somebody forced to commit a crime should not have to suffer penalties for that crime.  But as we have seen, coerced prostitution is extremely rare (roughly 1.5% of adult prostitutes and less than 16% of underage ones), and the majority of those are involved in coercive relationships rather than the true “sex slavery” the media, trafficking fetishists and politicians are so aroused by; I’d be very surprised if more than a hundred women in the entire state of Illinois (roughly one-tenth of the state’s statistical share of coerced prostitutes) could truly qualify as “trafficked” in any meaningful way.  Even then, the victim would have to be first arrested and convicted of prostitution before being able to take advantage of this law, and that would require her being able to “prove” that she was “trafficked” by whatever criteria the law establishes (one of which is certainly fingering one or more men to take her place in jail).  Furthermore, if the Illinois law is anything like New York’s “Safe Harbor Law”, it’s virtually impossible for the majority of prostitutes to take advantage of it:

The Safe Harbor Act, along with initiatives like it that [Rachel] Lloyd and others are promoting across the country, are NOT simple or solutions for most of us.  First, they don’t stop arrests of young people for prostitution-related offenses, or the police abuses of young people in the sex trades, including police trading sex in exchange for promises of dropping charges.  They also don’t stop arrests of young people in the sex trades that involve “charging up,” i.e. charging young people with weapons or drug-related offenses which may be easier to prove.  Second, while they may stop criminal prosecutions of young people for prostitution-related offenses, these laws do not eliminate detention and punishment of young people involved in the sex trades, they just shift young people from the jurisdiction of the criminal courts to family court systems, where they can remain entangled until the age of 21.  And, in the end, only a very narrow group of people can benefit from these laws.

For example, in order for the Safe Harbor Act to benefit a young person, they must be under 16 and arrested for the first time and must never have been in family court before.  Young people between the ages of 16-18 continue to be charged in adult court.  Even those under 16 who can meet the Act’s criteria must still convince a judge that they are a “victim” of a “severe form of trafficking” – a hurdle that…is almost impossible for young girls of color…When young people can’t respond to police and prosecutors’ pressure to give up a “pimp” they never had they get punished by law enforcement and service providers alike, and find themselves back on the delinquency and detention track.  Even when…[the law] is found to apply to a young person, they must still follow the rules a family court judge sees fit, which can involve attending a court-mandated program…many of which enforce Christianity on participants…

And even if Illinois’ version of the law corrects the problems (which is highly unlikely considering that Lutheran Social Services of Illinois and the Sheriff of Cook County, Tom Dart, are among its supporters), it still leaves unquestioned the idea that the state has the power to regulate women’s sexuality and to punish women for the “crime” of having sex on their own terms, and that the only way for a woman to avoid state-sanctioned persecution is for her to “prove” to busybodies that she was the “victim” of a man or men, thus surrendering her adult agency to the court by admitting to an inability to manage her own sexual affairs.

One Year Ago Today

The conclusion of “Regulars”, in which I discuss those repeat clients who were, for one reason or another, more difficult to deal with.

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Follow the Leader

Posted in Current Events, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on August 10, 2011| 51 Comments »

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.  –  Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade

Some people believe that truly horrific crimes are more common than they used to be, but others point out that while it is highly unlikely that humanity’s prodigious capacity for behaving in a monstrous fashion has increased, modern media undoubtedly publicizes atrocity stories more widely and efficiently than ever before.  Certainly the historical record reports many incidents equal to the worst committed by modern governments, police and serial killers, and our ancestors’ genius at inventing horrible means of torture speaks eloquently of mankind’s pronounced sadistic streak.  But there are more people on Earth now than there have ever been before, so even if the rate at which acts of senseless violence are committed has remained constant, the aggregate number of such acts is vastly greater than it was at any time in history.  And since cities are more densely packed than ever before, the chance of an atrocity occurring in any given place is greater than it was in the past.  And that’s only counting individual actions; when the criminals in question represent governments, the advantages conferred by technology must also be considered.  Modern industrial methods allow far larger numbers of people to be tortured or slaughtered far more quickly and efficiently than in pre-industrial times.  It’s unlikely that anything like the carnage of the “War on Drugs” would’ve been feasible prior to the late 19th century, and though the witch-hunts conducted by Germans of the 16th and 17th centuries (some of which ended in mass burnings) were easily as diabolical as anything their Nazi descendants did, those campaigns took many decades rather than a few years.

Indeed, it may be that most of those in power are not actually greater fiends than most of those they govern, but rather that they simply have greater ability to molest and torture a far greater number of people than those who lack an abusable position, not to mention a vastly greater ability to protect themselves from the consequences of their own evil.  So it’s entirely possible that the punitive mindset of the “authorities” in our society, who think nothing of locking people up for decades for breaking arbitrary rules which restrict what they’re allowed to do for pleasure, is reflected in the actions of the monsters in this Huffington Post story from July 29th; the only difference is that those in power are supported by sycophants and armed thugs who allow them to enforce their sick desire for control on grown strangers rather than their own children.

The family of a 10-year-old found dead in a trunk outside an Arizona home initially claimed the child died while playing hide-and-seek.  But investigators now believe Ame Deal suffocated after her family locked her in the box because she took a popsicle from the freezer without permission.  Phoenix police claim Deal’s grandmother, aunt and two cousins regularly subjected the child to horrific treatment, ultimately culminating in her July 12 death…[which] was classified as a “[cause] unknown” until July 28…after Deal’s cousin Samantha Allen, 23, and her husband, John Allen, 23, admitted putting the child in the trunk and padlocking it, authorities charged the couple with first degree murder…The victim’s aunt, Cynthia Stoltzmann, 44, and grandmother, Judith Deal, 62, were charged with child abuse and kidnapping after reportedly admitting to locking the child in the box on previous occasions.  Witnesses told investigators the child was regularly punished by being locked in the trunk.  They also saw the caregivers force Deal to eat dog feces as punishment, crush cans barefoot and exercise outdoors in “extreme measures”…Deal, who weighed just 59 pounds and was discovered in soiled clothing, died in a box that measured less than 3 feet long, 14 inches wide and one foot tall…Twelve children who lived at the residence have been taken into custody by Child Protective Services…The whereabouts of the child’s mother are unknown and authorities are currently trying to locate [her] biological father.

On second thought, there’s another difference; when ordinary sadists kill people by locking them up in extreme Arizona heat as “punishment” for breaking stupid, arbitrary rules, they’re charged with first-degree murder.  But when sadists with uniforms kill people in almost exactly the same way and for similarly absurd and pointless reasons there are literally no consequences whatsoever.

One Year Ago Today

The first part of “Regulars”, my column about repeat customers.

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One Size Fits All

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 2011| 29 Comments »

Woman’s narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power.  –  Emma Goldman

I’ve often pointed out that marriage is closely related to harlotry; it’s one of the few points on which I agree with neofeminists.  But while they consider that a bad thing, I think it’s a good and practical thing based solidly in human biological, psychological and economic needs (unlike neofeminism).  But if one believes that marriage is no different from prostitution and also accepts the neofeminist/trafficking fetishist proclamation that all prostitution is “human trafficking”, one must inevitably conclude that marriage (especially among those unenlightened brown people who don’t pretend that all marriage is based on “love”) is a form of human trafficking.  And of course, trafficking fetishists have now embraced this twisted logic; at first they only declared that mail-order brides are “trafficked”, but now they’ve apparently decided that the label applies to any marriage contracted for rational rather than irrational reasons, especially if at least one of the parties is non-white.  Laura Agustín’s column of July 29th contains an analysis of this recent article about temporary marriages in Egypt; most of it is dedicated to exposing the contradictions and moralism inherent in such articles (and the incredible incompetence with which they are nearly always written), but it begins with this:

What is gained by using the one word, trafficking, to describe a wide variety of social phenomena?  Campaigners will say that they want to show that everything they have decided is an improper way for women to live or get by must be named and shamed as violence (whether people went along with or initiated the activities or not, as we know).  So we have seen how surrogate motherhood, sex tourism by lgbt people and marriage broking are all glossed as trafficking, with relationships reduced to exploiter and victim.  In the article I’m considering here, several kinds of instrumentally motivated marriages are all called trafficking, and I see no benefit in it at all.  When I hear about a phenomenon, I want the details of how it works:  who does what and how those involved talk about what they are doing.  If some so-called authority with an NGO and an agenda simply tells me here’s another bad thing to condemn and outlaw, give us more support so we can get rid of it I automatically wonder what else is going on.  I am not sure the authority-figure is lying, no.  But I see the moralising and the personal agenda and want to hear from others, too.

I think I can answer the rhetorical question with which Dr. Agustín begins her essay; what stands to be gained is simplicity.  Crusades are not embraced by intelligent, broad-minded people whose minds are capable of complex and nuanced thought, but rather by “true believers” who want to reduce the entirety of human experience to a simple Manichean dualism which does not require judgment or thought.  This is why the “liberal” vs. “conservative” myth remains so popular despite its total inability to describe the modern political landscape; it allows the simple-minded to boil everyone down to “us” vs. “them”, in-group vs. out-group, good vs. evil.  The true believer belongs to whichever “team” indoctrinated him while he was impressionable or chooses the one which seems closest to his own primitive impulses, subdues those personal opinions which contradict his belief-system and labels everyone who disagrees with it as “evil”, “conservative”, “misogynistic”, “infidel” or whatever and either ignores the facts which contradict that simplistic classification or else indulges in tortured logic in order to force all of his enemies into that one ill-fitting box.  In this specific case, the more human interactions can be lumped together as “trafficking” the happier neofeminists and their allies will be, because the simpler their system the more simple-minded people will embrace it.  Of course, as we discussed yesterday the more thinly a term is stretched the more reasonable people will reject the usage, but fanatics aren’t interested in convincing reasonable people; there aren’t enough of them in the world to carry the fanatics to power, and even if there were it wouldn’t be the absolute power they crave.

One year ago today I wrote about how sexually-repressed middle-class white women derailed first-wave feminism and combined it with Protestant Christianity to create the “social purity” movement, which sought to impose middle-class Anglo-American Christian female notions of morality on everyone by characterizing everything which offended them as a “social ills”.  As I have pointed out before, nothing has really changed except the details; the revived “social purity” movement is still a coalition of fundamentalist Christians and middle-class women who embrace a warped version of feminism, and it still attempts to characterize every form of human behavior of which its membership generally disapproves as “evil”.  But while the purity crusaders of a century ago tried to sell sex as something which hurt everyone, their modern descendants have adopted Marxist tactics and now characterize it as exploitation, violence and oppression directed against one segment of society by another, with men as the malevolent “oppressors” and women as their passive, incompetent “victims”.

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Crying Wolf

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , on August 8, 2011| 40 Comments »

But shortly after this a wolf actually did come out from the forest, and began to worry the sheep, and the boy of course cried out “Wolf, Wolf,” still louder than before.  But this time the villagers, who had been fooled twice before, thought the boy was again deceiving them, and nobody stirred to come to his help.  –  Aesop

I’m sure everyone is so familiar with the fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” that the two lines of my epigram are sufficient to call the entire story to mind, yet there are many people who seem to have never internalized its moral and so go about wrongfully shouting “Wolf!” and then reacting with surprise and even offense when nobody listens.  Unfortunately, in modern mass communication the role of the shepherd boy is often played by an entire group, and though it may be that only a small minority of that group plays the “wolf” trick the whole group must bear the stigma.  Feminists in general and neofeminists in particular seem to derive great satisfaction from crying “violence against women!” where no violence of any kind exists, and because of it men and even society in general have grown increasingly skeptical of such claims even when they happen to be true.

The most widespread example of this is in feminist “rape culture” rhetoric which characterizes any form of sex which is not initiated by a woman as “violence” even if it isn’t.  The second-wave mantra “rape is a crime of violence, not of sex” characterized any unwanted sex as intrinsically similar to murder or mayhem, even though it should be obvious to anyone that this simply isn’t true.  Burglary is a violation of its victim’s rights and can leave that victim feeling violated and unsafe, yet nobody would characterize it as violent; Bernard Madoff’s massive fraud totally ruined many of his victims and was certainly a heinous evil, but there was absolutely no violence involved.  The same can be said of a sober man taking advantage of an incapacitated woman; I would definitely classify it as rape, but it isn’t violent.  Using the word “violence” as a synonym for “violation” may be effective rhetoric, but it’s a dishonest use of the language which must inevitably water the word down in the same way that “terrible” has been diluted;  only a century ago it was nearly synonymous with “terrifying”, but now it usually means “of extremely low quality”.

This is obviously not what the neofeminists want; when they refer to prostitution and porn as “violence against women” they intend to associate them in the listeners’ minds with things like brutal beatings, gang rapes, acid attacks and dismemberment.  But since most prostitution transactions and porn movies aren’t remotely violent (and everyone but the most deeply indoctrinated neofeminist stooge knows it), the effect of the rhetoric is the opposite of what they intend; their repeated cries of “wolf” do not induce hallucinations of marauding lupine predators, but rather cause their listeners to ignore the word when it comes out of a female mouth.  I suspect that Melissa Farley realizes this is happening, hence her recent attempt to convince gullible and ignorant women that whores’ clients literally commit violence against them rather than settling for merely defining a completely benign and mutually satisfactory arrangement as “violence” for the crime of violating neofeminist principles.

But it isn’t only the neofeminists whose use of the word is tantamount to the way a well-fed American child uses the word “starving” when his dinner is 15 minutes late; even most mainstream feminists do the same.  Crude comments, verbal or internet-based insults, unwelcome sexual advances unaccompanied by threats, job discrimination, patronizing male attitudes and even the refusal to give in to female demands are all sometimes described by overenthusiastic feminists as “violence” even though none of them are violent by any normal definition of the word.  And now, apparently even male sexual preferences constitute “violence against women”:

Rosario Dawson says of receiving compliments when she lost weight to play a drug addict in Rent:  “I remember everyone asking when I was doing press for the movie, ‘What did you do to look so thin?  You looked great’ and I’m like, ‘I looked emaciated’…It’s a form of violence, in the way that we look at women and how we expect them to look and be — for what sake?  Not health, not survival, not enjoyment of life but just so you could look pretty.”

You heard it here first, guys:  A virtually talentless Hollywood airhead who makes a living off of her looks says that compliments are a form of violence; next thing you know she’ll be comparing a lucrative promotional contract to the Holocaust.  Given that it’s an article of feminist faith that “intelligence” is the most important and desirable female characteristic, these women clearly must not realize how incredibly stupid they sound; maybe it’s time for someone to explain it to them before the wolves come for the rest of us.

One Year Ago Today

“Nothing In the Dark” explains why sensible professionals don’t allow clients to turn off the lights during their appointments.

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The New Victorianism

Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 7, 2011| 62 Comments »

Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence.  –  Friedrich Von Schlegel

In my column of last September 30th I wrote that, as my friend JustStarshine points out, “Western Society has descended into a new Victorianism”:

…we have become shockingly hypocritical about sex and grant our governments tremendous power to suppress it while simultaneously spending tremendous amounts of time and money on it (Victorian London had the largest number of prostitutes per capita of any place and time in history).  We have revived Victorian ideas of government-enforced temperance and “social progress”, and the Victorian “Cult of the Child” has returned with a vengeance.  The…adult myth that children live in some sort of state of Divine Grace which must be protected at all costs and extended as far into adulthood as possible…preaches that children are as emotionally fragile as soap bubbles and the merest hint of sexual imagery before puberty can cause irreversible trauma; its adherents also believe that teenagers (whom they equate with “children”) should be lied to, spied on or even criminally prosecuted to prevent them from engaging in any kind of sexual behavior, and some even believe that adults should not be allowed any form of entertainment or reading material which is inappropriate for even the youngest child, on the grounds that a child “might see it” and thereby be petrified as if he had looked into the eyes of the Gorgon.  Child cultists can be recognized by their stated belief that any degree of tyranny is acceptable “if it saves even one child,” and by their fondness for promoting unconstitutionally broad legislation   lugubriously named after dead little girls.

The Child Cult’s rhetoric is also pressed into service for sex issues which have nothing to do with children; as we have stated before, only 3.54% of all Western prostitutes are underage and the average underage prostitute is 17, which does not legally qualify as a “child” for sexual consent purposes  anywhere in the United States except Arizona, California, Iowa, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee and Wisconsin.  But that hasn’t stopped prohibitionists from resurrecting the late Victorian “white slavery” moral panic under a new name, “child sex trafficking”, and wielding it as a bludgeon against adult whores and our clients with the usual “one child” battle cry.  But lest anyone balk at treating adult women as children, there’s a Victorian answer for that as well; prostitutes are abnormal, defective “victims” of men who have to be protected from our own choices, which are clearly irrational.  Similarly, trafficking fanatics classify brown people as “child races” who are too stupid and unsophisticated to move between countries on their own without being “trafficked” by gangsters, so by the Victorian “white man’s burden” philosophy they need to “save” these poor victims, whether they want to be “rescued” or not.

Like the Victorian “social purity” movement, the modern Puritanism exemplified by trafficking hysteria, prohibitionism and other anti-sex movements was formed from a mixture of Protestant Christianity and decaying feminism.  And just as the voices of first-wave feminists (such as Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman) who espoused sexual liberation for women were drowned out by those whose minds were mired in typical Victorian prudery and therefore considered prostitution, pornography and masturbation to be “social ills”, so the original feminists who embraced the “sexual revolution” were shouted down by the anti-sex neofeminists who turned the feminist movement into a neo-Victorian campaign against sex; women like Catherine MacKinnon, Donna Hughes and Melissa Farley would have been right at home among the “social purity” advocates of a century ago who spread lies about “white slavery” and “diseased whores”.  Some of these anti-sex feminists even consider male masturbation to be a form of marital infidelity; one commenter on an article  about coffee stands with bikini-clad servers wrote: “Have you considered the women and children out there that have been hurt by their daddie’s [sic] affection for porn and worhtless [sic] garbage like this that they bring into their relationships, only to have them fall apart because the ol [sic] man can’t keep his eyes to himself or his hands off himself?!” and stated that her ex-husband “…had a history of this type of voyerism [sic] since before I met him and he promised he didn’t need it anymore after we were together.  An addiction is an addiction and you guys apparently have one to this!  Sow your seeds with a real woman and a real relationship…”  And regular reader Sailor Barsoom reports that “Just before I let my subscription to Playboy run out, I saw, each month, one woman after another writing in to earnestly explain why masturbation is adultery.”

Nor are these Victorian attitudes limited to radical feminists and their followers; they even crop up in articles written by more mainstream types.  I’ve previously mentioned the ambivalent attitude the staff of Jezebel has toward sex work; this pandering article about the recent Melissa Farley propaganda not only claims that sex worker rights have to be “debated” with those who have no stake in the issue, but also that they have to wait until men as a group regularly seek their wives’ and girlfriends’ approval to look at porn.  And this New York Times article (which was called to my attention by regular reader Guilty Pleasures) about Slutwalks displays an attitude common among older feminists;  the article appears to have been originally entitled “Clumsy Young Feminists” and simpers that:

To object to these ugly characterizations is right and righteous.  But to do so while dressed in what look like sexy stewardess Halloween costumes seems less like victory than capitulation (linguistic and sartorial) to what society already expects of its young women.  Scantily clad marching seems weirdly blind to the race, class and body-image issues that usually (rightly) obsess young feminists and seems inhospitable to scads of women who, for various reasons, might not feel it logical or comfortable to express their revulsion at victim-blaming by donning bustiers.

One can practically see the author, blouse buttoned up to her neck, fanning herself furiously to ward off an attack of the vapors.

No social trend lasts forever; the new Victorianism is as doomed as the old one was, and the young women who will help to bury it are joining Slutwalks, buying porn for themselves and shaking their heads at the prudery of their elders just as the young women of the Roaring Twenties did.  Within a decade, the new Victorianism will start to die off along with the Baby Boomers who embraced it, and in the freedom of a new Jazz Age perhaps all of the laws which seek to restrict the sexual behaviors of consenting adults will be tossed out as the quaint, incomprehensible and useless relics of a bygone age.

One Year Ago Today

“How To be a Stupid, Greedy Whore” was my very first column based on a current news story, and also provided the first member of my Hall of Shame.

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Droit du Seigneur

Posted in Current Events, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 6, 2011| 18 Comments »

So easily do weak men put in high positions turn villains.  –  Dmitry Pisarev

Since mammals first evolved, alpha males of many species have collected harems for themselves and kept lower-status males from mating.  Humans are no exception; DNA studies show that though 80% of female humans who have ever lived have descendants, only 40% of males do.  In other words, a minority of males mates with a majority of females, and though modern monogamous systems have evened that number out somewhat they still are by no means equal; nearly every woman eventually has at least one child by somebody, but a large percentage of men never father children.  In a state of nature this was the natural result of women being drawn to strong, dominant, successful men, but as civilization developed men in positions of power developed schemes for mating with as many women as possible, even if their personal characteristics were insufficient to draw those women to them.  Money, fame and political power have always drawn women regardless of what the possessors of those attractants might be like, but for some unscrupulous overlords even that might not be enough.  There is a persistent legend (going back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh) that some tyrants would actually demand the right to deflower all of the virgins in their realm prior to their husbands’ being allowed access to them; in Europe this concept was called jus primae noctis or droit du seigneur, and though the occasional despot may have been able to get away with it for a while, it is extremely unlikely that the custom was ever codified into law or widely practiced because people can only be pushed so far.  Every source which mentions the custom, even Gilgamesh, describes it negatively as something practiced in the past or by a foreign king.

But though it is unlikely that any man in a position of power ever enjoyed the kind of unfettered access to every female in sight described by the legends, that doesn’t stop males from trying it; real sexual harassment (as opposed to the whiny hurt-feelings variety maladjusted or maladjusted women accuse their peers of) results from men attempting to extract sexual favors from the women under them, and as we have discussed before cops are well-known for taking what they want from women, especially if those women are whores living under criminalization regimes.  It is even possible that the strange aversion cops have for condoms (discussed in my column of one year ago today) may derive in part from this primitive impulse, a sort of unconscious “how dare she attempt to stop me from impregnating her?” reaction.  Nor are cops the only members of the so-called “justice system” who believe they have the right to rape women, as revealed in this July 20th story from the Huffington Post:

Albuquerque’s chief criminal judge [Pat Murdoch] was arrested on charges he raped a prostitute…the complaint against him says a detective first heard about the reported attack and the recording from an informant, who helped the investigator buy the video on DVD for $400.  Police then questioned the woman, who said Murdoch solicited her on a prostitution website…she met with the judge about eight times and he paid her about $200 each time…[but] he forced himself on her during one visit, and she returned and secretly recorded a second forced encounter…after making the recording, she began to worry about her safety because when she posed hypothetical situations to the judge about a woman making allegations against him, he replied he would use police and his connections to take care of the situation…Murdoch…sentenced an Albuquerque man to 20 years in prison earlier this year for promoting prostitution, extortion and racketeering…

How dare someone outside the power elite “promote prostitution” and threaten people!  No wonder the judge sentenced him to 20 years; we can’t have the proles getting the idea they can indulge themselves in buying sex or just taking it when that’s a privilege reserved for the Lords of the Earth.  Of course, not all bureaucrats are equal; Judge Murdoch’s victim wouldn’t have had a prayer of getting him arrested had she not managed to film him exercising his judicial privilege, but cops and petty school board employees lack the exalted status of chief judges and can therefore be brought down by mere accusations.  Of course, it kind of helps that these geniuses chose to prey on legal minors in the midst of a “child sex trafficking” witch hunt:

A Florida cop and a school bus monitor were arrested Thursday [July 14th] in connection with a child prostitution ring…police arrested 27-year-old school bus attendant Paul Rosoan Aaron for allegedly forcing two young teens into prostitution, at least one of whom he solicited while on the job…25-year-old Haines City police officer Demetrius Lamar Condry [is accused of being] one of Aaron’s clients.  He, too, is now facing charges.  Condry allegedly…received oral sex from the then-15-year-old victim [while still in uniform with his police radio buzzing], the teen reported in her statement to investigators.  Aaron typically charged between $60 and $100 for similar encounters, though Condry appears to have been given a free pass in exchange for protection from the law…The girl told police she “felt like a sex slave” throughout the seven-month ordeal.  A second victim, then 16, said in court documents that Aaron approached her on the school bus after learning she danced in…[a] gentlemen’s club.  The teen said he promised her better work, luring her and the other victim to his house, where he took down their social security numbers and other identifying information and threatened to have them arrested if they tried to leave…

Among other things, Aaron was charged with two counts of sex trafficking, which somehow seems like a really tasteless pun.  Of course, some whores are too expensive for cops and their ilk to afford, too well-organized to be blackmailed and too experienced to be fooled, in which case the “justice system” makes sure that they pay dearly for excluding the bullies:

Seventeen people were indicted on Wednesday [July 20th] on charges of running a high-end prostitution ring that catered to Wall Street clients who often spent more than $10,000 in a night…the ring pulled in more than $7 million over three years, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said at a news conference.  “The business of high-end prostitution is enormously profitable,” Hynes said.  The prostitution service, named High Class NY, was run 24 hours a day out of an office in Brooklyn and charged from $400 to $3,600 an hour for its services, according to the 144-count indictment.  It also provided customers with cocaine and other narcotics, the indictment said.  Hynes said clients often spent in excess of $10,000 in a single night.  They were “all high-end customers coming from the financial markets.  People with nothing but money,” he said.

Police said the business was extremely sophisticated, running several escort websites and using dummy corporations with misleading names and codes during business-related phone calls.  High Class NY even had a law firm draw up employment contracts for its prostitutes, who described themselves as models and fraudulently agreed to refrain from sexual contact with clients, police said.  “They were on the high-end of sophistication,” said Vice Detective Joe Panico.  Among those indicted were High Class NY owner Mikhail Yampolsky and his wife Bronislava, who allegedly used the proceeds from their business to finance expensive trips to Atlantic City and luxury car purchases, Hynes said.  Also indicted were Yampolsky’s son Alexander, step-son Jonathan, 11 managers and supervisors and two investors, Efim Gorelik and Yakov Maystrovich, he said.  Each of the investors had put $700,000 into High Class NY and were being paid back with interest, he said.  Each of those indicted faces the possibility of 25 years in prison if convicted.  Two prostitutes face separate indictments on prostitution and drug charges.

Remember, “ring” is just a dysphemism for “suppressed business”; this was a large escort service, nothing more.  All this nonsense about “sophistication” is just hot air the cops puff themselves up with to make their “achievement” seem bigger than it is; independent contractor agreements are used by the majority of services, having more than one website isn’t unusual either, and “code” is a term pompous cops use for jargon like “GFE” or “BBBJ”.  Actually, what got these folks busted was their extremely unsophisticated decision to sell drugs as part of their business; that instantly turned it into a federal case with the possibility of decades-long sentences rather than a tough-to-prove pandering lawsuit which wouldn’t likely produce very long sentences.  Escort busts, and to a large extent prostitution laws themselves, are popular with control freaks because they can’t stand the idea of women choosing whom they will have sex with for their own reasons; cops and politicians believe they should be able to have any woman they want, and free-willed whores are a threat to their fantasies of droit du seigneur.

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Leaving the Life

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , on August 5, 2011| 11 Comments »

So we must say Goodbye, my darling,
And go, as lovers go, for ever;
Tonight remains, to pack and fix on labels
And make an end of lying down together.  –  Alun Lewis

One year ago today I told the story of my last few months in New Orleans.  In June of 2006 I was tired and in poor health due to overwork and post-Katrina conditions; I literally hadn’t had a single day off in many months, and the rapidly-shrinking customer pool was being shared among an increasing number of escorts so I was having trouble getting even one call per day, and the long, hot New Orleans summer was just beginning and would certainly exacerbate all the existing problems.  So when my husband decided it was time for me to go home, I didn’t put up much of a fight; though I’m incredibly tenacious, I also know when to quit.  That time, I was ready; the business had changed, my friends were all gone, and it just wasn’t fun any more.  But the first time I retired was a different story entirely.

As my husband told you in the first day of his interview, when I accepted his proposal he asked me to retire from regular escorting; I still ran the agency, drove girls around if needed and did two-girl shows and bachelor parties, but I no longer did regular calls.  I agreed to the condition as a gesture of my commitment to him and I accepted that it was reasonable, but there was a still, small voice inside of me that kept telling me I had quit too early, that I had made insufficient investments and that financial difficulties could destroy our plans.  As it turned out that voice was right, and in January of 2004 we mutually decided I would return to active escorting, but that wasn’t the major issue which troubled me in the first few months after my retirement; the problem was that, as my good friend Dr. Helena had warned me, whoring can be “addictive” (in the popular sense):

The sheer thrill of being offered large sums of money for my sexual favors was the most intoxicating experience of my entire life.  The neofeminists love to pretend that sex work is “demeaning,” but the truth is that a large percentage of women in the trade (including strippers and porn stars) find it more empowering than anything else we have ever done, sometimes even more gratifying than romance.

Basically, I had quit “cold turkey” and was having withdrawal symptoms.  It didn’t sink in at first; I thought it was just nervousness due to the greatly decreased cash flow.  But a couple of months after I retired, my husband was in town on business and his company had booked a hotel room for him literally one block from my apartment.  So as you might expect we were spending a great deal of time together, and one night Doug asked me to meet with one of his girls at one of the downtown hotels (I forget the reason).  Anyhow, as we drove into the Central Business District and I saw all the hotels all lit up, a strange feeling very much like homesickness overwhelmed me, and I started to cry.  My husband of course asked what was wrong and I told him I couldn’t explain it because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.  But he’s not stupid, and he figured it out in a few seconds; my male readers can probably guess that he got angry about it and we exchanged words.  The argument didn’t last long, and ended with my saying something like, “It wouldn’t have meant very much if I had given up a job I hated to be with you, now would it?”

I dried my tears and completed my errand, and when I got back in the car he said he was sorry and that he had an idea to cheer me up.  I still felt awful but I was certainly curious about what he was planning, though I didn’t have long to wait; we went back to his hotel and as soon as we got into the room, he pulled out his credit card and gave it to me.  I was unsure of his intention so I just stood there for a moment until he said, “aren’t you going to fill out the credit card slip?”  Then I realized what he was up to, and I laughed as I pulled out my papers and charged his card, calling it in to a very confused Grace.  It really did work; I felt much better, partly because of his clever gift to me and partly because I knew that in the future I would be able to share those feelings with him without fear of making him angry.

Neofeminists and trafficking fetishists want to believe that all or nearly all prostitutes are coerced slaves who desperately want out of a life of degradation, but nothing could be farther from the truth.  Obviously there are some women who are coerced, though the number is very small; and obviously there are some who could walk away in a heartbeat and never miss it, and would do so if they didn’t have bills to pay and mouths to feed.  But as demonstrated in yesterday’s column and that of July 23rd, most whores are satisfied enough with their jobs to resent attempts to “save” them from it, and I suspect that like me, many retired escorts found leaving the life, even for the best reasons, to be a bittersweet experience.

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August Updates (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 4, 2011| 9 Comments »

Among all the world’s races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation.  This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive.  It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.  –  John Kenneth Galbraith

Stories about the facts behind popular American lies.

Conjuration (May 9th, 2011)

Politicians are always inventing imaginary victims of the moral panic du jour, but they’re usually more subtle about it than these cops from Tennessee:

According to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), Coffee County is one of four major locations across the state for human sex trafficking.  However, not a single report from the Tullahoma Police Department…indicates any human sex trafficking incidents.  The TBI report released in June suggests that [the four] counties each have more than 100 cases…during the past two years.  The numbers were gathered from an anonymous… survey the bureau distributed to law enforcement agencies…although the Tullahoma Police Department and Coffee County Sheriff’s Department were listed as survey participants, officials aren’t sure who – if anyone – received the e-mailed survey.  “We’re unaware that anyone from this office participated…” said Police Chief Paul Blackwell.  “We haven’t found any record that indicates Tullahoma has even one case of human sex trafficking.”

Blackwell suggests it’s highly possible that some agencies interpreted the definition…as something else…“Historically, we have not had anything within the past two years that gives any indication of…trafficking”…TBI Director Mark Gwyn…calls human sex trafficking “sexual slavery at its worst” and went on to explain that “…traffickers are difficult for law enforcement to investigate and a challenge to prosecute” and calls for harsher penalties for the crime.  “Human trafficking and sex slavery in Tennessee is more common that [sic] previously believed possible…children are moved from city to city in the state and sold as prostitutes.  Tennessee, simply because of its geographical position to Atlanta and the large number of interstates that cross the state, is conducive to a traveling business.  Many times those promoting prostitution transport the child victims to large entertainment events or sporting venues where people are traveling through or visiting the state…The report states human sex trafficking is often confused with prostitution…

Hmm, I wonder why human trafficking is often confused with prostitution?  Because the two are purposefully conflated by prohibitionists, maybe?  Or could it be because while there really aren’t many “sex slaves” anywhere (much less in Tennessee), people like Mr. Gwyn encourage those under them to conjure victims out of thin air?  When one realizes that Tennessee “authorities” imagine there can be hundreds of “trafficking victims” in their state (rather than <50 coerced underage prostitutes as statistics indicate), one can understand how those devoid of critical thinking skills can believe there are 300,000 of them in the country.  Two final points: notice the thoroughly-discredited “sporting event sex slaves” myth and Tennessee’s entry in the “largest center of human trafficking” contest.

Dirty Whores (June 24th, 2011)

As I explained in this column, “95-97% of STDs are spread by the good, ‘clean’ members of the general population who can legally screw anybody they like without even the most cursory or sporadic health checks,” and promiscuous non-prostitutes have a venereal disease rate twice that of streetwalkers.  Here’s a Daily Mail article from July 18th reporting on the newest threat to public health…the over-50 crowd:

…For the past few years the Health Protection Agency…has been warning about the staggering rise in STIs among baby-boomers.  Its latest figures show chlamydia infections have increased by…138 per cent since 2001.  Genital herpes is up…142 per cent in ten years, while gonorrhoea is up…14 per cent since 2001.  Cases of genital warts…have risen by 62 per cent in the past ten years…and the diseases themselves are becoming more ferocious.  Just last week, Swedish scientists announced the discovery of a strain of gonorrhoea that had become resistant to antibiotics.  Of course, in numbers, infections among young adults and men who have sex with men are still far greater.  But by putting our heads in the sand about this new, rapidly growing group, we are risking the health of a generation…

These older adults were in secure, stable relationships during the Eighties  –  their first sexual experiences were in the relatively safe years before HIV…even existed…[because of] the Pill…this generation felt free to experiment…[but have never] been the target of public-health campaigns to warn them of the dangers.  Indeed, some patients are almost affronted when I suggest they always use a condom…But STIs do not discriminate between 16 or 60-year-olds  –  we all need to be much more careful.

Note that unlike Americans, British authorities admit that sex workers are not an important vector of STIs.  Perhaps we sex workers should start spreading propaganda about “dirty amateurs” and insisting that y’all undergo weekly “health checks”.  Not that we’d do it if we could, but it would be a lot closer to reality than the “dirty whore” myth.

Against Their Will (July 23rd, 2011)

South Korean prostitutes are battling for their rights, and many are willing to commit suicide rather than be “rescued” by cops doing the bidding of the American government; the following is edited from a July 6th MSNBC story  whose Korean writer is weirdly obsessed with the word “pimp”, no doubt due to ingestion of toxic levels of American propaganda:

The…prostitutes of Yeongdeungpo start the day as if preparing for a siege, stocking their brothels with flammable liquid…large, red-lettered signs warn police that they’re willing to die to protect their livelihoods.  “We can turn on the gas and light the flames,” said…47-year-old…Sohn.  “We know that we don’t have much chance of winning … but we’re ready to die fighting.”  Nearly seven years after tough laws began driving thousands of South Korean prostitutes out of business, the sex workers of the Yeongdeungpo red-light district in Seoul are fighting back, spurred by what they say is an unprecedented campaign of police harassment.  Since April they’ve staged large, sometimes violent, protests…which…have been unusual in their size, organization and fury…at a recent protest, about 20 topless women covered in body and face paint doused themselves in flammable liquid and had to be restrained from setting themselves on fire.

“We are the people who eat, sleep and live here.  Where can we move?” prostitute Jang Se-hee said in an interview inside a large tent where sex workers were discussing how to resist police.  The 36-year-old Jang…said her earnings have plunged from as much as $9,200 a month to about $3,700 since police began harrying the brothels in April…Many brothels have suspended business because of the crackdown.  Signs in those still open show their occupants’ defiance:  “We will die here,” they read, or “I will pour fuel on my body and die gloriously”…Prostitution was banned in South Korea in 1961, but police rarely enforced the law…About 259,000 people, 70 percent of them male customers, have been arrested since the new laws took effect in 2004.  Nearly 4,000 prostitutes have left their brothels, while 1,800 remain, and seven of the country’s 35 major red-light districts have disappeared, according to police records…South Korea runs nine support centers offering vocational training and psychological counseling to former prostitutes where they can work for a monthly salary of about $460 to $920, according to government officials.  Many women, however, find it hard to adjust to new lives and to resist the better pay of sex work.  Despite the social stigma, they drop out of the centers and return to prostitution.

Why on Earth would a woman prefer to make $9200/month working for herself than $920/month working for the government?  It’s just unfathomable!  The story tries to blame the new crackdowns on a 2002 brothel fire, but that’s a contemptible lie for American readers; the truth is that Korean prostitutes are being harassed, hounded, impoverished, driven from their neighborhoods and deprived of their livelihoods to satisfy American ideas of “morality”, as explained in this July 21st article from The Chosunilbo:

The U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report 2011 published on Monday depicts South Korea as a “source, transit, and destination country for men and women subjected to forced prostitution and forced labor.”  But…experts say some of the allegations are unfounded. South Korea is in Tier 1, which groups countries that fully comply with the international minimum standards…[but] many foreigners who come to South Korea for jobs or marriage, are actually forced into prostitution or labor, the report says…it says South Korean women are also forced into prostitution in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Australia, as well as at home.  [It] claims an increasing number of teenagers in South Korea suffer sexual exploitation, more than 95 percent of which is arranged online [and] South Korean men are still clients of child prostitutes in Southeast Asia…But an official with the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said, “The number of brothels has dropped as a result of consistent crackdowns in red-light districts under a special law in 2004.  We protect sex trafficking victims through nationwide counseling centers and other support facilities”…The report recognizes the South Korean government’s anti-trafficking efforts but accuses it of failing to enforce laws strictly or mete out stern punishment…

In other words, the United States has pressured South Korea to close down brothels and imprison more people, and as a result women are being harassed literally to death.  How long will this madness continue before other large countries demand the U.S. stop interfering in the affairs of smaller sovereign nations, especially when that interference results in grievous human rights abuses?

One Year Ago Today

The second part of “The Only Working Girl in New Orleans”, which tells of the only time I was ever arrested.

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August Updates (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 3, 2011| 15 Comments »

How idiotic civilization is!  Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?  –  Katherine Mansfield

Several stories about society’s obsession with regulating and controlling women’s bodies and sexuality.

All Shapes and Sizes (September 8th, 2010)

In this column I wrote:

Porn…tends to make inexperienced young men think that women’s external genitalia are more alike than they actually are.  As a bisexual woman and a call girl who did hundreds of couple calls I can tell you that there is as much variation in vulvas as in penises…some labia are quite wrinkly, others smoother, and they vary in color and appearance…but none of this can be explained to jackasses; girls with unusually-shaped genitalia are sometimes insulted by rude clients, and I’ve even heard of ignoramuses accusing girls of being post-operative transsexuals because their vulvas don’t “look right” to these (usually young) men, who obviously consider themselves some sort of sex experts because they’ve been with a couple of dozen women.  Fortunately, older men have more experience and therefore realize that the genitalia of women, like those of men, come in all shapes and sizes.

For young men who wish to understand how much genital variation there really is, and for women who feel like their genitalia are odd-looking, I present I’ll Show You Mine, a book containing pictures of 60 different women’s vulvas and a little text written by the subjects.  Here’s an illustrated review posted by Story of Tits and Sass on July 15th.

To Protect and Serve (February 9th, 2011)

Police the world over seem to believe that one of the perks of their job is the privilege of using sex workers for their own gratification under guise of law, but it’s pretty rare to see a judge slap them down for it as this one did.  The story is paraphrased from one in the Orlando Sentinel of July 8th:

Six employees of a Daytona Beach Shores nightclub agreed to a total of $195,000 to settle a lawsuit against the city’s police department for a September 2009 incident in which “Public Safety Director” Stephan Dembinsky and 19 other male cops stood around ogling four exotic dancers and two female bartenders while a policewoman felt inside their bikinis for weed.  Dembinsky claimed he had no idea that cops sticking their hands into women’s underwear amounted to a strip search under Florida statutes, which clearly state that strip searches must be conducted by a person of the same sex and any observers must also be of the same sex as the person being searched.  But U.S. District Judge Mary E. Scriven said Dembinsky should have known; in an order she signed in May that denied a motion to have the case dismissed, she wrote “Even if he was unsure of the existence of probable cause, Chief Dembinsky knew that the manner and means of the execution of the strip searches was unlawful, yet, as final policymaker he concedes he did nothing.”

Dembinsky apparently felt he needed 20 cops to serve a search warrant at Biggins Gentleman’s Club after undercover vice cops bought drugs in the club.  None of the six employees in the suit was arrested, but they were searched anyway and one of the women had a single joint; misdemeanor marijuana possession charges against her were later dropped.  Most of the settlement money went to pay legal fees, leaving only $5,000 each for the victims; the decision to pay up was made by the city’s insurance carrier because it was cheaper to settle than to fight the suit.

Some badge-licking editorial comments on other versions of the story mocked the idea that it was possible to strip-search strippers, ignoring both the intimidation factor of 20 cops standing around leering and the fact that no strip club I know of allows patrons to stick their hands inside girls’ bikini bottoms.

Crime Against Society (February 26th, 2011)

One would think that since New Orleans gave cops the option of writing prostitution as a minor offense back in December, and the state recently reduced “crime against nature by solicitation” to a misdemeanor, that New Orleans cops wouldn’t be wasting time and money in prostitution “stings” any more.  Unfortunately, one would be wrong; apparently they wanted to destroy a few more lives with “sex offender” penalties before the change goes into effect.  According to the Times-Picayune:

New Orleans’ narcotics and vice police units conducted a prostitution sting in Mid-City this month, and arrested nine people over two separate occasions.  The New Orleans Police Department arrested four people…at the Rose Motel, in the 3500 block of Tulane Avenue, June 15 for soliciting an undercover officer for crimes against nature.  They also arrested five people…June 21 for the same crime at the same motel…

But this pales beside the mass arrests of three weeks prior, when a total of 51 people were arrested on prostitution or drug-related charges:

Promising an “aggressive” fight to rid the city’s neighborhoods of illegal activity, New Orleans Police Chief Ronal Serpas…said 51 people were arrested on drug and prostitution charges during undercover stings set up during the past three weeks…”People try to destroy the quality of life in neighborhoods” with drug dealing and other illegal activities, Serpas said.  “We’re not going stand for it.  We’re going to be aggressive”…

Of course, the easiest way to rid the city of illegal activity would be to imprison every member of the NOPD, but instead we get this:

For the second time in a month, the New Orleans Police Department has launched a blitz on vice, this time arresting 29 men who allegedly agreed to pay for sex with undercover…female officers…Superintendent Ronal Serpas said police arrested the men in the 9300 block of Airline Drive, the 3500 block of Tulane Avenue and the 7800 block of Chef Menteur Highway during the daytime operation, which took place between June 14 and June 22.  The men were booked with the solicitation of prostitutes and crimes against nature…the targeted areas were chosen because of neighbors’ complaints about illegal activity and information provided by individual districts.  “They (citizens) have children and families and want to use their neighborhoods,” Serpas said…[he] added that prostitution can result in the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases and is often linked to other crimes, such as carjackings or robbery.  “Prostitution is a crime of addiction and violence,” Serpas said…

…as opposed to being a cop, which is a crime of being addicted to violence.  Just so you know, none of those three blocks are “neighborhoods”; they’re industrial areas whose only inhabitants are rats and the residents of cheap motels.  And of course no story of police persecution of whores would be complete without the obligatory lies about disease and violent crime.  I guess Chief Serpas didn’t get the memo about us all being “trafficking victims” now.

For Those Who Think Legalization is a Good Idea (March 22nd, 2011)

While the United States slips further into barbarism and oppression, it’s nice to see that older, more civilized countries understand concepts like “adult agency” and “human rights”.  According to a July 21st story from Samay Live:

There will be no further arrest of any sex workers as prostitution is going to be regularized in India.  The new law will allow sex workers to live with dignity in…the country.  The Supreme Court holds that the right to live with dignity was a constitutional right of sex workers.  A bench presided over by Justice Markandey Katju on Tuesday sought suggestions on formulating conditions which would enable those who wished to “continue working as sex workers” to do so “with dignity.”  The bench constituted a panel comprising senior advocates and NGOs to look into the problems faced by sex workers and give suggestions to protect their fundamental rights…there are over 3 million female commercial sex workers in India and are often harassed by the police in the absence of proper regulation.  However, the prostitution is not illegal but the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 makes certain acts relating to prostitution an offence, which does not create conducive atmosphere for the sex workers and [they] often become victims of police action.

I’m looking forward to the day when India, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and other countries which treat prostitutes like human beings issue a “human rights report” condemning the United States for its abominable brutality against whores and our clients.

One Year Ago Today

The first part of “The Only Working Girl in New Orleans”, in which I describe my experiences as the only available escort after Hurricane Katrina.

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Business Opportunity

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , on August 2, 2011| 9 Comments »

Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.  –  Thomas Jefferson

In my column of July 5th I described how Jean O’Hara took advantage of the bigotry of the white Honolulu elite by buying houses, letting the neighbors know what she did for a living and then allowing herself to be bought out at a huge profit.  Well, almost 70 years later and a quarter of the way around the globe, the scheme still works…though I doubt either the taxpayers of Fredericton, New Brunswick or the employees of the business in question are very happy about it.  The story appeared in the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal on July 13th and came to my attention via the July 14th “link roundup” on the SWAAY website:

The capital city’s only strip bar will be closed…after city council voted to spend $500,000 of taxpayers’ money to shut it down.  Geoff Pawsey, bartender for the past 16 years at the North Star Sports Bar Pub & Eatery, said Tuesday his head is still spinning after council endorsed the plan to purchase the property and served notice to the bar’s staff, including its exotic dancers.  “I’d say at least 30 of us will be out of work,” Pawsey said in an interview.  “The bar had just been given a facelift – a new stage and new poles and mirrors.  I’m terribly disappointed.  This was a bartender’s dream here.  It’s not the Royal York, but it was a busy, busy bar.”

…Holly Ramsay, 27, day manager at the bar…said between 10 and 14 full and part-time staff, plus the five exotic dancers who work at the establishment [some are moms with children and some are students working their way through university], aren’t happy to be bidding the bar goodbye.  “It’s very sad.  I’ve only been here since January, but I’ve seen the improvements and changes,” said Ramsay.  “It’s very sad to see the business is going so well and for the city to decide to do whatever they want to do with it.”  She said staff members were told Monday by the five children of the late Ken Flinn, who ran the business before his death last October, that the city would be purchasing the property for $500,000…

Mayor Brad Woodside said the decision to buy the bar is in the best interests of the city.  “It’s a non-conforming property and it will certainly result in a lot better neighbourhood for the people who have been calling for so many years, and it’s a progressive move that’s in the best interests in the city of Fredericton.”  While there’s some difference of opinion on council about the decision to purchase the property, development committee chairman…Stephen Chase says it’s a good deal, especially after council learned [from police] that the North Star was being eyed by Hell’s Angels for a headquarters in the Fredericton area…But Pawsey said he has never seen any Hell’s Angels sizing up the bar.  “That’s an urban myth,” he said of the police intelligence reports.

…Marilyn Kerton voted against the $500,000 deal, saying the price is too rich for her blood.  “For us to keep purchasing properties without any long-term plans for them and the investment and the cost, I don’t think we should be doing that,” Kerton said.  “It should be something left to the developers.”  If the city’s intention is to make the bar, exotic dancers and hard-drinking patrons disappear, then Kerton isn’t buying it.  “I guess the question that begs to be asked is, does the city go around and purchase properties because they don’t like what’s taking place there, for example a scrap yard, for example other bars or drug houses or other places in the city that we don’t like,” Kerton said…Deputy Mayor David Kelly [also] said the $500,000 price tag is too steep.  “Where do we draw the line on this?  $500,000?  To my knowledge that thing is overpriced by about $150,000.  Personally, I would rather leave that up to a private developer,” Kelly said. “It’s too much money.”

So, what have we learned, kids?  If you want to make a lot of money off of prudes, just use the O’Hara method!  Step One:  Start a business which, though legal, is hated by bluenoses; even if you have to bribe a few people to get it established you needn’t worry, because you’ll eventually get it back along with a substantial profit.  Step Two:  Run a good, clean business so you’ll attract a lot of customers and avoid any entanglements with municipal code Nazis.  Step Three:  Continue step two until a bunch of irresponsible busybodies who think it’s justifiable to use public money to promote their own moral crusades gets into office.  Step Four:  If they don’t buy you out right away, start an idiotic rumor about the Hell’s Angels or some other legal but unpopular group congregating at your business and make sure the local stool pigeon hears about it.  Step Five:  Charge at least 40% more than your business is actually worth.  Step Six:  Repeat until you are as wealthy as you would like to be.

One Year Ago Today

“Whores and Wives” examines the different ways wives react when they discover their husbands have visited whores.

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