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Archive for September, 2011

She Should Know Better

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2011| 15 Comments »

Thus one can observe that those who proclaim piety as their goal and purpose usually turn into hypocrites.  –  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Arianna Huffington isn’t a stupid woman, nor one lacking in (to use Catherine Hakim’s term) erotic capital; like any sensible woman she’s used her brains and her relationships with men to get where she wanted to be, and is now very successful.  And when (in the late ‘90s) she saw signs of the impending economic collapse, she made sure she switched to loudly preaching a simple-minded partisan “liberalism” every bit as loudly as she had previously preached a simple-minded partisan “conservatism” so that when the revolution comes, nobody will be able to accuse her of having said “let them eat cake”.  So I’m not surprised that the majority of articles on her website, Huffington Post, which are not dedicated to straightforward reporting or empty-headed celebrity gossip consist partially or completely of childish partisan name-calling.  And given that “sex trafficking” is the current politically correct moral panic, I am also unsurprised when her website panders to it in furtherance of her transparent efforts to stay on the good side of the Great Unwashed, despite the fact that an educated person should demand facts and a woman who has profited by male associations as handsomely as she has should be a bit more sympathetic to her sisters who do the same thing on a smaller scale.

What I don’t expect, however, is to see stupid, asinine, insulting political stereotypes combined with stupid, asinine, insulting sex worker stereotypes into an article so stupid and asinine that it is bound to insult the intelligence of any reasonable reader…though not (judging by the replies) that of the HuffPo commentariat.  The offending exercise appeared on September 1st:

Following an extensive remodel, the Penthouse Club in Tampa, Fla., is finally ready for next summer’s Republican National Convention.  Club operator DeWayne Levesque has installed two secluded VIP sections, which he hopes will help his club attract a bigger share of the 50,000 visitors expected to descend upon the city on Aug. 27…another strip club owner, Joe Redner, said he has high hopes for what the convention means for business at his all-nude club, Mons Venus.  “I’m guessing we’ll make five times as much in a night as we usually do,” Redner told HuffPost.  “Republicans got plenty of money.  They take it all from poor people,” he said.  Redner said he thinks many convention visitors will be in the market for a lap dance, but newly-released academic research suggests that some will be interested in the darker elements of Tampa’s adult scene, too — sex for sale…

Those who clicked on the embedded link may recognize this “research”; it’s the Cunningham and Kendall foolishness I dissected in my column of June 26th, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of this article.

…Another adults-only perk for conventioneers are scheduled appearances at clubs by well-known female adult film stars.  Agent Brian Gross, who represents actresses Joanna Angel, Ryan Keely and Alexis Ford told HuffPost that “large events … give big name adult stars who dance on the circuit a great opportunity to get in front of a large crowd for their on-stage performances”…X-rated starlets also offer the clubs a competitive advantage, which is critical in an industry that Redner said has been hard hit by the Great Recession.  For those with cash to spend, however, the options abound.  An adult video producer who gave his name as “Brandon” said he plans to offer conventioneers an erotic limo service that includes the company of “models.”

In the first paragraph we were subjected to the old “rich guy kicking beggars” stereotype, and now we get the obligatory scare quotes around the word “models”.  We’re not judgmental, noooooooooo.  As for the idiotic and weaselly phrase “Great Recession”, I call your attention to this column by Emily Hemingway.  We’re in a depression, kiddies, not a recession; you aren’t allowed to include government spending in GDP calculations (since government doesn’t produce anything, it’s basically counting the same money twice).

The next section explains the linked study, repeating its fallacy (which I explained back in June) of equating an increase in escort ads with an increase in number of escorts.  Interestingly, one of the authors of the study actually talked to an escort:

Perhaps surprisingly, the one group of sex workers who didn’t benefit from the 2008 conventions were the high-priced escorts on Eros.com — the kind of women who have been linked to more than a few politicians in the past.  One of the authors of the study, Dr. Scott Cunningham, recalled a high-priced escort who explained the trouble with political conventions.  “She said to me, ‘Scott, there just isn’t enough disposable income at those political things.  But there’s a really great radiology convention up in Chicago, and I always go to that.'”

But did that help him to recognize that his premise was flawed?  Of course not!  I remind my readers of Maier’s Law:  “If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.”  Behold the law in action:

The reality, however, is that most of Tampa’s prostitutes won’t be jetting from one convention to the other.  Conversely, they could end up in the hands of a man like Charles Fox, who ran a brothel in the middle of South Tampa for nearly seven years until he was arrested last month.  According to police, Fox kept up to five women at a time enslaved in a small greenhouse using a combination of fear, drugs, alcohol and violence.  He sold them to men online, controlled their every move, and took 100 percent of their earnings.  Those who protested were tied up, raped, or worse.  For men like Charles Fox, political conventions are a great place to make money, said anti-trafficking advocate Andrea Powell.  “You can be sure a pimp knows when large numbers of men are going to be in the area,” she said in an interview with HuffPost, “and he’ll do whatever he can to get his piece of that business.”

By placing a lurid “sex trafficking” story next to a study the authors claim as credible (though as we’ve seen it isn’t), the credibility of bogus claims attached to that story are enhanced.  Note also the shell game:  a professional escort says there’s no enormous boom from political conventions (just like there isn’t from sporting events, and for similar reasons), and a prohibitionist makes the opposite claim; guess which statement the rest of the article is built on?

Powell is a co-founder of the Fair Fund, which helps rescue trafficked young women, and she said there is absolutely no way for a potential customer to know whether a prostitute has been trafficked.  “This concept that you can differentiate between willing sex work and trafficking is really complicated, because sex work fuels trafficking, and there’s so much money involved,” she said.  “Consider that one girl can have sex with 15 men in a night, at $100 an hour.  This means she’s producing $35,000-$40,000 a month for whoever owns her.”

The independent escorts who make up over 60% of the American market don’t support “sex trafficking” mythology, so in only a few paragraphs the article descends from at least the pretense of objectivity into the Gorean fantasy so beloved of moralists, man-hating neofeminists and male trafficking fetishists with fragile egos. Note that the standard scare number has increased from 10 clients a night to 15, so as to generate bigger bogus income figures, and it only gets worse from there; the rest of the article consists of a farrago of police ignorance about “keeping an eye on Craigs list [sic],” false claims about both that site and Backpage, moralistic pouting about the defeat of the foredoomed “pimping” lawsuit against the latter and the language of escort ads, and the typical ignorant pretense that until recently most whores were streetwalkers.

Obviously, Arianna Huffington herself doesn’t read over every article before it’s posted, but she sets the editorial policies so she’s still responsible.  I recently asked whether Huffington Post was trying to balance its disgusting pandering to trafficking fetishists by allowing Ronald Weitzer to debunk fanatics’ claims, but that clearly isn’t the case; obviously Huffington doesn’t care how many sex workers she has to throw under the bus in order to protect her own reputation among the hoi-polloi by catering to the current fashionable delusions about us.

One Year Ago Today

“The Yellow Rose of Texas” is the story of Emily Morgan, who though she was not strictly a whore used her sexuality to change the course of history and thereby became a legend.

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Setting Women’s Rights Back a Century

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 9, 2011| 42 Comments »

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions.  The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts.  –  Christopher Lasch

Every freethinking woman has heard some form of it:  “You’re setting the cause of women’s rights back a century”.  I’ve heard it upon getting boyfriends’ coffee for them, letting it be known that I was a stripper or escort, being seen with a Camille Paglia book in my hand, etc.  But as with so many pronouncements deriving from belief rather than from logic, it’s exactly backward; it’s the neofeminists and their stooges who have set women on course for a return to Victorian paternalism by enshrining in law the principle that women are delicate, innocent, asexual little flowers who must be protected from beastly men and their carnal lusts at all costs.  “Mandatory prosecution” laws deny a woman’s right to decide whether to press charges on an abusive husband, on the grounds that she can’t be trusted to make the “right” decision.  The “Swedish model” denies that women can consciously choose to have sex for reasons other than lust, loneliness or childish fantasies of romance, and establishes men as women’s moral superiors by holding them liable for women’s actions.  Women who deny being coerced, raped, abused, “trafficked” or whatever by men are said to be suffering from “false consciousness”, the neologism for “weak-mindedness”.  And though majority-male legislatures and government agencies enact these policies, it’s women who propose them in the first place and then lobby tirelessly for their implementation.

Why in the world do they do this?  Can’t they comprehend the precedent they’ve established?  I’m really not sure; it’s difficult to understand the workings of warped, hateful, evil, power-mad minds.  One thing is clear:  they don’t care anything about the happiness or needs of individual women, only their plan for the “advancement” of “womankind” and the destruction of the monolithic, mythical “Patriarchy”.  And like bloodthirsty, obsessed generals they don’t care how much carnage is inflicted on their own troops so long as their side “wins”.  If neofeminist “leaders” tried forcing this monstrous catechism of permanent childhood on mature adult women they wouldn’t get very far, so instead they inflict it on young, naïve, sheltered white girls at expensive universities.  And though the real world has moved on since the heyday of neofeminism, in America’s universities it’s still 1992, bogus rape statistics are spread around like manure and the fluffy-bunny minds of coeds are crammed full of “rape culture” and “female victimization” rhetoric in the hope that they never grow up enough to recognize that they’ve been lied to,  robbed of adult agency and quite possibly used as weapons to destroy the lives of equally naïve, hormone-addled young men they once liked enough to date.

And now, thanks to lawyers on the lookout for new sources of blood, American universities are being forced to implement the male-crushing schemes of neofeminists via threat of ruinous lawsuits and the loss of government funds on which nearly all of them depend.  And when given the choice between senselessly destroying a young man’s academic career and losing money, I don’t need to tell you what they’ll do every time.  Consider this article from Philadelphia magazine:

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Russlynn Ali…[has] disseminated a…letter to all colleges and universities that receive federal aid—which is all but two in the country—detailing how they’re required to combat [what Ali calls “a terrible, alarming trend of campus sexual violence”]…While women’s rights advocates have lauded Ali…a quieter groundswell of protest has charged her with trampling on the rights of young men accused of sexual assault…deans say she’s stripped their ability to deal with delicate he-said-she-said cases in fairer, more nuanced ways…[and her] guidelines impose a paralyzing “nanny state” on…campuses…across the country.  At precisely the time in their lives when young men and women should be exploring what sexuality means, the new rules choke off their freedom, limit their choices, and encourage the canard that all males are unrepentant predators.  What’s more, they position women as helpless victims who require bureaucratic protection from those males—victims with no responsibility for their own behavior.  Heaven help those women when they graduate.

Those who read my column of July 25th will no doubt recognize this as the same “campus rape crisis” hysteria that’s been aggressively marketed by radical feminists since the 1980s, complete with bogus statistics and support from Joe Biden.  But while the government was previously content to throw money at what dispassionate observers recognize as a fairly rare problem, now schools will be required to expel young men on the basis of evidence too flimsy to convict them in court:

…consent [as defined by Ali] has to be active, not passive.  And [a man] has to get [clear verbal] consent every time he wants to move up another base—a policy first instituted at Ohio’s Antioch College in the early 1990s…“If you want to take her blouse off, you have to ask.  If you want to touch her breast, you have to ask.  If you want to move your hand down to her genitals, you have to ask.  If you want to put your finger inside her, you have to ask.”  Reaction to Antioch’s policy…was wildly derisive; eventually, the college closed down.  The policy, however…lives on all over the country…even [if a man has] no way of telling…[how much a woman has been drinking it is] his responsibility to determine if she [is] “incapacitated” [because]…if she [is], any fondling they [do], no matter how great her zeal, [is] sexual assault.  She doesn’t even have to lodge a complaint; the college has to investigate if…[a witness] sees her…and suspects she’s drunk…and then there’s the new…requirement that has raised the most alarm among civil libertarians:  the lowering of the evidentiary standard to that used in civil-rights litigation…a “preponderance of the evidence” is now all that’s required…not the more familiar “beyond a reasonable doubt” of criminal cases or the intermediary “clear and convincing evidence” standard many schools used to employ…Samantha Harris, of the…Foundation for Individual Rights in Education…says the new standard violates accused students’ due process rights…the Supreme Court’s precedents demonstrate that evidentiary standards should be higher, not lower, when so much is at stake, as FIRE argued in a lengthy letter to…Ali.  “We’re not sending these students to prison…but…they’re found guilty of serious criminal offenses.”  Perpetrators are subject to expulsion, which affects their employment and social prospects…Why don’t colleges just turn sexual assault cases over to police to prosecute?  Because there’s rarely enough evidence to convict in a real court of law.

I was a married graduate student the first time I heard about the Antioch policy, and my reaction then is the same as it is now:  If any guy had repeatedly sought verbal permission for everything rather than simply following my non-verbal cues I would’ve been so turned off I would’ve stopped the proceedings immediately, which is of course what the feminists want.  Anyone in her right mind understands that “please don’t do that” or simply repositioning a wandering hand works on any normal man, and real rapists aren’t deterred by a lack of permission.

…the 2007 Justice Department report…researchers didn’t ask the 5,446 female students who took their online survey if they’d been sexually assaulted.  They decided for the young women, who…were deemed too ignorant to know…when researchers asked the young women themselves if they considered what happened to them “rape,” three-quarters… didn’t.  Only three percent said they’d experienced physical or psychological harm.  Only two percent reported what happened to campus security or police.  Asked why they hadn’t, the women said they didn’t consider the incident serious enough (66 percent) and/or that it wasn’t clear a crime or harm was intended (36 percent).  Half said they themselves were partially or fully responsible for what had happened…But the fact that the victims didn’t think of themselves as victims, [university risk management consultant Brett] Sokolow says, misses the point: “They have to learn to say, ‘This is something that was done to me’”…I tell Sokolow that if [my college-age daughter] got drunk and had sex with someone, I’d jolly well expect her to take responsibility.  He isn’t buying it: “She should have the right to strip naked and run through the streets and be unmolested.  She didn’t make that happen; the molester did.”

This is the catechism being preached to young American women:  You are NEVER responsible for your own actions.  No matter how irresponsibly you act, no matter what you say to or do with a man, if someone later convinces you that you were “assaulted”, or if “authorities” rule that you were despite your protests, then you are a helpless, powerless victim without adult agency or volition, no better than an infant.  Heaven help them, indeed.

One Year Ago Today

“A Whore in the Bedroom” explores the implications of my philosophy that “When one has a living creature under one’s care, it is one’s responsibility to take care of that creature’s needs, or else to arrange for someone else to do so.  And if you shirk that responsibility, you only have yourself to blame for the inevitable and foreseeable consequences.”

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They Speak for Themselves

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 8, 2011| 12 Comments »

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?   –  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Usually when I report on a number of short news stories in a column, I have some sort of commentary on them; these stories, however, largely speak for themselves so I present them with only minimal comment.

Well, At Least They’re Consistent

Florida is well-known for its legislative and judicial excesses, but back in the Social Purity Era its legislators apparently decided that fornication should be illegal whether money changed hands or not.  The law has rarely been enforced, but a legislator now wants to get rid of it and other outdated laws; as you might expect, none of his colleagues are interested.  From the August 31st Sun-Sentinel:

…”Cohabitation” of unmarried people is currently a second-degree misdemeanor, punishable by $500 or up to 60 days in jail.  The same penalty applies to cheating husbands and wives — though only to opposite-sex couples.  The laws have been on the books since the late 1800s, but are rarely enforced.  In 2006, though, a Jacksonville woman did take advantage of the law and have her husband arrested for cheating, according to a news report.  (It’s not clear how the case came out.)  Now, Rep. Ritch Workman, R-Melbourne, is on a mission to repeal the statutes penalizing adultery and cohabitation, as well as other laws he finds outdated, like a requirement that all bicycle riders keep one hand on the handle bars.  He filed…the bill last week — it’s HB 4021 — though he hasn’t returned phone calls about it for the past two days.

Nobody else much wants to talk about it either.  Asked how Gov. Rick Scott felt about the measure, spokeswoman Amy Graham replied simply, “This isn’t an issue the governor is focused on.”  The bill has no Senate counterpart.  And given the almost-certain opposition of social conservatives who lobby hard on “family values” issues, it’ll face tough sledding in an election year.  Consider the response of State Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, who previously headed the Florida chapter of the Christian Coalition:  “I’m not ready to give up on monogamy and a cultural statement that marriage still matters,” he said.

I guess Workman hasn’t yet learned that most politicians never want to limit the number of ways they can harass, threaten and persecute people.

Somehow, I Doubt He Thought This Through

Posted September 1st on The Smoking Gun:

A Kansas man who called police yesterday to claim that he was robbed by two female escorts hired via an online service later admitted that he just “wanted a refund” from the women.  Ahmed Hasnain, 26, was arrested on a misdemeanor charge in connection with the bizarre incident at a Motel 6 in Wichita, according to a Wichita Police Department report.  Hasnain…told cops that he had expected only one hooker to show up and “didn’t like that there were two women.”  After paying the pair $160, Hasnain decided that he wanted his money back…So…[he] called 911 at around 5 AM to lodge his complaint. Based on his own statements, Hasnain was charged with patronizing a prostitute. Perhaps he will consider calling the Better Business Bureau the next time he wants to register a consumer complaint.

And perhaps in the future he’ll also reserve 911 for real emergencies, like McDonald’s running out of Chicken McNuggets.

The British Policy on Sex Rays

In the United States, teachers who are discovered to have done sex work in the past are removed from the classroom lest their bodies emit invisible “sex rays” which might contaminate the tender little asexual innocents who discover them by watching porn.  In England, sex-ray phobia is just as prevalent, but apparently bureaucratic inertia protects sex-working teachers despite their being officially condemned.  According to a BBC story from September 1st:

Benedict Garrett, 31…was found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct but left free to continue teaching.  A disciplinary hearing was told pupils at Beal High School in Ilford had seen him in a trailer for a porn film.  Mr Garrett said:  “What is wrong about it?  I can’t see anything…I don’t think I’ve done anything that goes against my values and I worked incredibly hard as a teacher.  What a teacher chooses to do in their life outside that work is up to them.”

…Mr Garrett…whose [stage name] is Johnny Anglais, said he had no plans to return to teaching…He admitted it “might be slightly embarrassing” if students had seen his porn films, but “no more than me starring as a monkey in the school musical”.  He said students should not have seen his pornography work, as it was intended for over-18s, but added:  “It’s perfectly natural.  Get over it.”  He added he did not see himself as a role model, asking:  “If teachers are role models, why do we tolerate teachers who smoke, when smoking is linked to thousands of deaths?  Do we look at teachers who are fat and say you shouldn’t be teaching?  Obesity is linked to thousands of deaths,” he added.  “However, I’ve heard from students who have told me they believe I’m a role model because I’m standing up for what I’ve believe in.”

Norman Wells, from the Family Education Trust, which campaigns against pornography and supports policies which promote marriage, said:  “Benedict Garrett is being naive if he imagines that performing as a stripper and appearing in porn films is compatible with teaching responsible attitudes towards sex and relationships as a teacher of personal, social and health education.  The vast majority of parents would be uncomfortable, to say the least, to have their children taught by someone involved in the sleazy world of the sex industry.”

Presumably, the sleazy world of politics is OK with Mr. Wells.  Maybe Melissa Petro and Tera Myers should move to the U.K.

Michael Weinstein Isn’t Happy About This

More news about the porn performer mentioned in my column of September 1st, from the Huffington Post of two days later:

An adult film performer who tested positive for HIV and caused the porn industry to shut down production as a precaution has been retested and…does not have the virus…production can now resume, said Free Speech Coalition executive director Diane Duke.  “The industry will be abundantly cautious as we try to nail down the reasons for what now appears to have been a false positive result on a previous test,” Duke said.  The actor, who was in Florida, had been slated to work on a shoot for Mofos.com, but production was halted last week when the test came back positive for HIV.  Duke declined to release the performer’s name, age or gender, citing the person’s right to medical privacy.  She also declined to say how her group learned of the case…which…was found at an out-of-state clinic that does not report to California health officials, Duke said.

The porn industry was similarly shuttered in late 2010, after porn actor Derrick Burts was diagnosed as HIV-positive.  His case was confirmed, and he has since left the industry to become an advocate for the use of condoms in pornography.  The Free Speech Coalition is working on a database to track sexually transmitted disease testing among porn actors, a task formerly handled by the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation before it closed in December 2010.  Known as AIM, the San Fernando Valley clinic had catered to porn stars since it opened in 1998.  It was forced to close because of inadequate licensing.

The last line is incorrect; the clinic was actually forced to shut down by an illegal “cease and desist” order from the Los Angeles Department of Public Health, as reported in my column of March 7th.

One Year Ago Today

“All Shapes and Sizes” discusses the huge morphological variety of human genitalia, and addresses (among other things) the oft-asked question, “what is the average penis size, really?”

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More Terminology

Posted in Call types, Miscellaneous, Perception, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 7, 2011| 34 Comments »

We cannot even reproduce our thoughts entirely in words.  –  Friedrich Nietzsche

My column of one year ago today, “Terminology”, was a glossary of terms used by whores and clients; many of them come from the escort review sites which have become very popular on the internet in the past decade.  Today I’d like to look at a few more such terms, including some that I’ve only learned since my first column on the subject; many of these are acronyms used by internet “hobbyists” in reviews, so I simply never encountered them until I started reading more about review sites and corresponding with internet independents.

BCD:  Behind Closed Doors.  This refers to the portion of a date which is spent in the bedroom, i.e. the sexual portion of a session.  It is thus used as a collective reference to sex acts (“BCD activities”) or by girls referring to special “meet over coffee” type deals (“no BCD time”).

BFE:  Boy Friend Experience.  It is obviously built on the pattern of “Girl Friend Experience”, which I defined in my previous column; a client might be described as a “BFE” if he’s very nice and easy to deal with, avoids being pushy or demanding, doesn’t haggle and tries to make the date pleasant for the escort by booking multiple hours, taking her to dinner and/or giving her a gift, carrying on an interesting conversation, etc.

CIM:  Cum In Mouth.  The use of “cum” to mean “semen” is an American vulgarism dating to the 1920s, and the extension of the vulgar spelling to the verb “come” (which has been colloquially used to mean “have an orgasm” since at least the late Middle Ages, just as the equivalent verb is used in other European languages) is more recent still, dating to perhaps the 1960s.  I don’t think I need to tell any female reader how much ejaculating into a woman’s mouth excites most men, but in the post-HIV world very few whores would allow this.  Unfortunately, as I discussed in my column of February 28th,

…in the last decade as escort review sites became steadily more common, many escorts wanted something which would set them apart from the competition.  But the trend really took off just over two years ago when the economy went belly-up; a lot of part-timers lost their regular jobs and therefore needed to bring in more money from hooking, and a lot of amateurs who had never before directly asked for cash flooded into Craigslist and Backpage.  The amateurs had no sense of appropriate professional conduct and the part-timers were desperate to make up the difference from their lost jobs, and so they started to offer things which, while not extremely dangerous like unprotected intercourse, were nonetheless more personal and “edgy” than what had been the norm even as recently as 2007.  And once that happened even many full-time professional escorts were forced to change their policies in order to remain competitive.

Though most escorts who allow this still spit or dribble afterward, there are some who offer “BBBJTCNQNS”, which means “bare back blow job to completion, no quittin’, no spittin’”, which I personally consider most unwise.

DFK:  Deep French Kissing.  Yes, we didn’t used to allow kissing, either; see the entry for CIM above.

DNS:  Do Not See.  Most often used in the formulation “DNS List”, a personal list of men an escort refuses to see because of personal experience, warnings from other girls or statements the listee has made on review boards:  “Any man with an attitude like that goes straight onto my DNS list.”

FBSM:  Full-Body Sensual Massage, a combination of therapeutic massage with sensual touching.  See also levels of massage.

FIV:  Fingers In Vagina, an activity which I’m far from alone in disliking intensely, though some girls do allow it.

LEO:  Law Enforcement Officer, i.e. a vice pig.  Sometimes “Uncle Leo”.

Levels (of massage):  A Level 1 (L1) massage is massage with a “happy ending” (i.e. hand job).  Level 2 (L2) massage includes a blow job, and Level 3 (L3) is full service.

Lurker:  A “hobbyist” who reads escort boards, but does not generally post on them.  Most of these are the good sort of hobbyists, unlike the bad ones who use their experience and that of others to learn how to cheat, manipulate and intimidate inexperienced escorts.

Manmades:  Augmented tits, often abbreviated MMs:  “Maggie has a spectacular set of manmades”.

NBA:  No Blacks Allowed.  Escorts with NBA policies will not see black clients for reasons I already discussed at length in my column for September 18th of last year.

NCNS:  No Call, No Show.  A client who neither showed for his appointment nor called to cancel; a deadbeat.

Nuru massage:  This is not “massage” in the normal sense, but rather consists of the masseuse erotically sliding her naked body up and down against that of her client with the assistance of nuru gel, an odorless, tasteless, colorless and extremely slippery gel made from nori seaweed.  The gel does not dry up and so must be washed off with soap and water; nuru massage thus always ends with a bath or shower.  Nuru massage originated in Japanese bathhouses, or “soaplands”.

Outing:  Publicizing the real name of a client or escort, usually to that person’s family; it is considered one of the most reprehensible actions of which someone is capable and will usually result in the total ostracism of the offender.

Roses:  A rather silly slang term for “dollars” used in the advertising of inexperienced low-end escorts:  “I expect a donation of 150 roses”.

Spinner:  A very thin, petite escort, so called because of the joke that a man can “pick her up and spin her around” while she’s doing cowgirl.

Time waster:  A man who has no real intention of paying for an appointment.  Some of them are lonely and just looking for conversation, and others might like to see a girl but are too nervous or frightened to follow through, but most are just cheapskates trying to get free wanking material.

TOFTT:  Take One For The Team.  This refers to a hobbyist taking the risk of seeing an unreviewed girl in order to report back to his friends about her.

YMMV:  Your Mileage May Vary.  This phrase, borrowed from American automobile advertising, refers to an escort whose performance varies considerably from client to client depending on how she reacts to each individual.

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To Spite Their Faces

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2011| 40 Comments »

The danger [of feminism] is that the study and contemplation of “ourselves” may become so absorbing that it builds by slow degrees a high wall that shuts out the great world of thought.  –  Rheta Childe Dorr

In 867 AD Saint Æbbe the Younger, the Mother Superior of a convent in Coldingham, Scotland, is said to have cut off her nose and urged her nuns to do the same so that approaching Viking raiders would find them repulsive and would therefore not rape them, thus preserving their chastity.  Apparently, the plan worked too well; the Vikings were so disgusted that they burned down the convent.  This legend and others like it (which are actually not unusual among hagiographies) is the probable source of the European idiom “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”, meaning to overreact to a situation in a petulant and self-destructive manner.  Ironically, when I was researching this column I encountered a comment from a good, brainwashed little feminist who insisted that the story couldn’t be true because (all together now), “rape is a crime of power and control, not sex.”  Obviously, 9th-century Scottish nuns must have known of and believed 20th-century American feminist dogma.  And though this silly woman’s denial of reality is somewhat amusing, the more widespread feminist denial of reality is not; if anything, it’s quite sad.  Feminist writers live in an echo chamber where nobody ever questions their highly-questionable interpretation of reality, so when someone comes along and states facts which are as obvious as the nose on one’s face yet contradict feminist dogma, the writers must attempt to shout those facts down.  And if the knowledge would actually give women some advantage in the world, but would require abandoning cherished feminist beliefs in order to put it to use, modern feminists advocate following the example of Saint Æbbe.

Regular readers may remember Dr. Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics, whom I mentioned in my column of January 11th in conjunction with her findings that, as I put it, “many if not most women are simply not interested in all-consuming, male-style careers and prefer to ‘marry up’ or take jobs which allow them to enjoy their lives and concentrate on their families rather than forcing them to sell their souls to corporations as so many men do.”  Now she’s published a new book entitled Erotic Capital which outlines her insight that economists need to consider women’s erotic power as a form of capital alongside the three recognized (and unisex) forms of capital (economic, cultural, and social).  She suggests that there is nothing wrong or immoral with women using their looks and sexuality to get ahead, and that one of the reasons patriarchal societies have suppressed women’s sexuality is to prevent our using that sexuality to our advantage.

Anyone in her right mind knows that women already do this, and anyone who really cares about the happiness and self-actualization of women should be glad someone with Dr. Hakim’s reputation and credentials has pointed it out.  So of course feminists have greeted the book with accolades, pleased to see that young women are being encouraged to use their personal assets in order to succeed, right?   Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!  You’re so funny!  Of course they haven’t, because acting like women and using their female power are things women can do for themselves, without the help of feminist “leaders”, and femininity, flirting and being charming and sweet are anathema to a cult steeped in androgyny, misandry and neo-Victorian prudery.  Furthermore, the idea that young, intelligent third-wave feminists and {gasp!} women who don’t identify as feminists at all might be able to use their feminine charms to outcompete aging, pudgy, bitchy second-wave feminists isn’t going to sit well with the latter, who are naturally going to reject the realization that if female sexuality is indeed a form of capital, they’ve been essentially using cash as toilet paper for decades.

So, how would you expect the Guardian, that bastion of responsible British journalism, to report on Hakim’s book?  Why, by assigning an aging second-wave feminist to interview the author and a younger second-wave disciple to review the book, of course!  The results reinforce nearly every stereotype about how women are supposed to hate other women, but of course these writers are just too busy spiting their faces to recognize what they’re doing to their noses.  The interview by Zoe Williams is so awful I had to read it in three sittings; it’s like a cross between a Hollywood gossip column and Maureen Dowd on a really bad day.  The second paragraph is representative of the whole:

We meet in Covent Garden, over fancy tapas.  She arrives and says, “I must go and brush my hair,” which she really needn’t have done, because I don’t buy her theory.  I don’t care what someone’s hair looks like, I find hair neither impedes nor accelerates a discussion about ideas.  I did not say so, thank God, even in jest, otherwise our encounter could have been even worse than it was.

Because, you know, what a middle-aged feminist cares about is exactly the same as what a man cares about.  And it just degenerates from there.  The review by Elizabeth Day isn’t quite as venomous, but it’s bad enough:

There is so much to object to in this book that it is hard to know where to start…according to Hakim, none of that education or career nonsense that our mothers and our grandmothers fought so hard to give us access to carries much weight any more.  In fact, as the fairer sex, our time would be far better spent getting a spray tan, slimming down our muffin-tops at the gym and emulating the “vivacious” personality of the glamour model Katie Price…That, apparently, is how we can earn more money (the most attractive among us, says Hakim, can earn 12% more than those dumpy trolls who haven’t made the effort) and enjoy more fulfilling relationships with those around us.  I’m sorry.  Did I fall asleep and wake up in the 1950s?  Is Hakim seriously suggesting that prostitution should be legalised, that surrogate pregnancy is an untapped income stream for women, that pimping is a good thing (“a win-win arrangement”) and that the extent of human trafficking has been whipped up by the media to provide “the latest excuse for moral panics and crusades over the sex industry”.  Yes!  Yes, she is!

Prostitution legalized?  The horror!  Call out the Ladies Gospel Temperance League!  I must admit it’s fascinating to watch militant feminists trumpeting their ignorance as wisdom; prostitution is already legal in the U.K. despite tyrannical laws “regulating” it, and as my readers well know the extent of human trafficking has indeed been exaggerated as an excuse for a crusade against the sex industry.  Well, I guess you don’t need facts when you’ve got rhetoric.

Of course, not all female British journalists have their heads up their own bums; Samantha Brick, writing for the Daily Mail, points out that any woman with sense uses her looks and charm to get ahead:

…[Men] adore being flirted with, love to have their egos stroked and…yearn for the attention of an attractive woman…you don’t have to be born beautiful to learn how to use your erotic capital.  I was a shy, overweight, dumpy child, who grew into a self-conscious, spotty, plump teen, the proverbial ugly duckling.  To my surprise, at 16 I transformed into a swan…My confidence grew, along with my flirting skills, my social charms were finessed and, after years of being the wallflower — someone guys confided in rather than chatted up — I was at ease in male company.

…I discovered early on there is no such thing as a free lunch.  It is a transaction between you and the man you are dining with.  The food is irrelevant.  Conversation, flattery, where you’re seated, who your fellow diners are, and, tellingly, who you’re introduced to are what’s important.  In return, the man gets to sit with an attractive woman, who makes him feel good about himself…you grab every opportunity to trade on your erotic capital in order to benefit your own lot in life…Why anyone else wouldn’t behave as I did is beyond me.  While I never slept with anyone, I deliberately wore outfits that the decision-makers appreciate…I’m sexually attentive to my husband and in return I know I can splurge…without guilt — I don’t have to justify or even hide my purchases…I’m 40 and have no intention of letting my erotic power diminish…Define what your best assets are:  long legs, lustrous hair or even if you have a particular talent, exploit it.  It’s time to be realistic because that is the way the world works for successful women.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

One Year Ago Today

“The Biggest Whores” reports on the closure of the Craigslist “adult services” section, explains why escort services are rarely prosecuted even when individual girls are hounded, and speculates on why politicians hate us so much.

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A Thousand Words

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on September 5, 2011| 14 Comments »

A picture is worth a thousand words.  –  American adage

The great majority of my posts fall between 750 and 1500 words, or as we might say the general vicinity of a thousand words.  So in lieu of a column today I present not one but two pictures.

Each dot on these maps represents 1000 prostitutes; those representing adults are 8 pixels wide and those representing underage girls 7 pixels wide (since, after all, it’s tough to tell the difference between a mature adolescent trying to look older and a young adult who may be trying to look younger).  Red dots represent illegal prostitutes, and black dots legal ones; the first map (above) represents the current situation (in which all prostitution is illegal) and the second (below) a country in which only underage prostitution is illegal.

Pretend you’re an agency (governmental or otherwise) trying to locate underage prostitutes to “rescue”, and find them on the first map; then try the second one.  Any questions?

One Year Ago Today

The Second Part of  “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody”, which discusses the lyrics of five songs about prostitutes: “New Orleans Ladies”, “Roxanne”, “867-5309”, “The Taxicab” and “Next”.

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Inappropriate Women

Posted in Miscellaneous, Music, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 4, 2011| 38 Comments »

Don’t go out with women who expect to get money,
Though they may act sweet and call you “honey”.
I wouldn’t make a habit of datin’ her none,
Even if she’s cute and a whole lot of fun.
There’s not much more to relate;
These are inappropriate women to date.  –  Chip Wilson

One year ago today I published “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody”, the first of three columns featuring the lyrics of (and links to) songs about prostitutes; it was followed by a second part the next day, and by “Sweet Painted Ladies” on October 25th.  And since it’s been a while since we visited the theme, I thought another collection of whore songs might be welcome.  As I pointed out last year, “Since most songwriters are male, most of these songs are of course from the male point of view; we’ll start with the two exceptions in observance of the ‘ladies first’ principle.”

Private Dancer (Mark Knopfler)

All the men come in these places
And the men are all the same
You don’t look at their faces
And you don’t ask their names
You don’t think of them as human
You don’t think of them at all
You keep your mind on the money
Keeping your eyes on the wall

(refrain) I’m your private dancer, a dancer for money
I’ll do what you want me to do
I’m your private dancer, a dancer for money
And any old music will do

I want to make a million dollars
I wanna live out by the sea
Have a husband and some children
Yeah, I guess I want a family
All the men come in these places
And the men are all the same
You don’t look at their faces
And you don’t ask their names

(refrain)

Deutch marks or dollars
American Express will do nicely, thank you
Let me loosen up your collar
Tell me, do you wanna see me do the shimmy again?

(refrain)

(refrain)

This song was written in 1982 by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits for their album Love Over Gold, but after the music was recorded he realized it would be deeply inappropriate for a male to sing the lyrics and so the song sat unused until remade by Dire Straits for Tina Turner’s comeback album in 1984.  Though the song (like the musical Sweet Charity before it) uses taxi dancing as a metaphor for prostitution, I daresay few listeners over the age of 15 needed to be told what the song was really about, and the video hints at it even more strongly.  Turner’s world-weary whore who gets through her days by dehumanizing her customers stands in stark contrast to Cher’s character from this rare single:

A Woman’s Story (Nino Tempo, April Stevens and Phil Spector)

There are many who have laid with me
Then got up and walked away from me
And played around with me, like I was a game
Every night was a one night fling
And when I’d given them everything
They never even asked me for my name
Yeah, they never even asked me for my name

Now I found real love! Make no mistake about it
‘Cause now that I feel love
I just can’t live without it!
So if you love me the way I love you
Why can’t we spend our lives as one

My reputation was all over town
As a woman who was passed around
And I knew every wrong way to go
Seen every room with a bed inside it
And if you’ve had nothing tried, I tried it
But from now on I say, hell no!
Oh, from now on I say, hell no!

Oh!, now that I found love! I just can’t live without it!
Now that I feel love, make no mistake about it!
So if you love me the way I love you
Why can’t we spend our lives as one

While the wish of Turner’s character for a husband and children seems about as likely to be granted as her wish for a million dollars, Cher’s character believes she has found true love and is willing to bring up the subject to her beloved.  And perhaps she’ll succeed; unlike Turner’s character she has never reduced her clients to faceless, inhuman sources of income.  If anything, she seems grievously wounded by the fact that many of her customers appear to have dehumanized her.  This song was produced for Cher by Phil Spector for what was to be her first post-Sonny Bono album, but due to cost overruns the project was shelved in favor of the less expensively produced Stars (1975).  “A Woman’s Story” was released as a single, but did not chart and is now extraordinarily difficult to find.

The subject matter of the next song, a #1 hit from October of 1978, is just as dark as that of the first two, but told from the client’s point of view and cloaked in a catchy pop style; lyrics in parentheses are sung by the backup singers.

Hot Child in the City (Nick Gilder)

Danger in the shape of something wild
Stranger dressed in black, she’s a hungry child
No one knows who she is or what her name is
I don’t know where she came from or what her game is

(refrain) Hot child in the city
Hot child in the city
Runnin’ wild and looking pretty
Hot child in the city

So young to be loose and on her own
Young boys, they all want to take her home
And when she comes downtown
The boys all stop and stare
When she comes downtown
She walks like she just don’t care, yeah

(refrain)

Come on down to my place, baby
We’ll talk about love
Come on down to my place, woman
We’ll make love

Hot child in the city
(Hot child in the city)
She’s kinda dangerous
(Hot child in the city)
Young child
(Runnin’ wild and lookin’ pretty)
Young child, runnin’ wild
(Hot child in the city)
Hot child in the city
(Hot child in the city)
(Hot child in the city)
(Hot child in the city)
Hot child in the city
(Hot child in the city)
Hot child in the city
(Hot child in the city)

It is difficult to imagine a song about an underage streetwalker making it to the top of the charts in 2011, unless it was sung as a lugubrious ballad by a pop diva who spelled out its exact meaning in every single interview and parroted inane “300,000 trafficked children” drivel as part of the sales pitch.  But in 1978, the very oldest Baby Boomers were only 30 and hadn’t started taking themselves so seriously yet.  Lest you think the audiences simply didn’t realize what it was about, I assure you that most of my friends certainly did (a couple of years later one of them used to tease me about my budding whorishness by singing it to me), and Nick Gilder stated it point-blank in a Rolling Stone interview.

The subject matter of our last selection for today wasn’t quite so obvious; even in 1973 most radio stations might’ve been reluctant to play it as often as they did had they realized it was an ode to a brothel.

La Grange (Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill & Frank Beard)

Rumor spreadin’ a-’round in that Texas town
’bout that shack outside La Grange
And you know what I’m talkin’ about.
Just let me know if you wanna go
To that home out on the range.
They gotta lotta nice girls ah.

Have mercy.
A pow, pow, pow, pow, a pow.
A pow, pow, pow.

Well, I hear it’s fine if you got the time
And the ten to get yourself in.
A hmm, hmm.
And I hear it’s tight most ev’ry night,
But now I might be mistaken.
Hmm, hmm, hmm.

Ah have mercy.

This well-loved brothel in La Grange, Texas was of course the “Chicken Ranch”, later immortalized as the subject of the hit musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas; in the 1982 movie the madam was played by Dolly Parton.  And this brings us full circle, because one of the songs from that musical, “Texas Has a Whorehouse In It”, was featured in my original column on this subject one year ago today.

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Lulu White

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 3, 2011| 46 Comments »

What it comes down to is this: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, the policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician—these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin.  –  Polly Adler

Business was booming for the whores of late 19th-century New Orleans; there were some 2000 prostitutes and about 40 brothels scattered all over the city, and it is estimated that the gross income of the city’s sex trade at that time amounted to some $15 million per year (about $360 million in 2011 dollars!)  Then, as now, this money flowed through the demimonde and into the conventional economy, enriching merchants, restauranteurs, liquor dealers, furniture stores, shoe salesmen, milliners and landlords, to name just a few.  And considering that many of those businesses were owned by politicians (and the biggest landlord in New Orleans is the Catholic Church), there was a vested interest in keeping those businesses lucrative.  So when the social purity movement reached New Orleans in the 1890s and pressure began to mount for something to be “done about” prostitution, Alderman Sidney Story proposed restricting it to one part of town.  This was enacted into law in 1897, and the newspapers dubbed the resulting district “Storyville” (much to the alderman’s chagrin).  One year ago today I published a short history of prostitution in New Orleans with emphasis on Storyville, and today I’ll tell you about one of its more famous denizens, a madam known as Lulu White.

Lulu White, circa 1900

Her real name was apparently Lulu Hendley, and she was born sometime before 1870 on a farm near Selma, Alabama; she was a quadroon (¼ black) or possibly a light-skinned mulatto, but she claimed to be from the West Indies and to have “not a drop of Negro blood” (though nobody who met her believed this claim).  She arrived in New Orleans in the early 1880s with an older dark-skinned black man who is believed to have been her stepfather (though nothing else is known of him) and immediately began working as a whore, but so ambitious and charming was she that despite average looks and a short, dumpy figure she managed to attract a number of wealthy and influential clients including an oil man, a railroad tycoon and a department-store owner, and by the end of the ‘80s she was a madam with a house of her own.  Further proof of her business skill can be discerned in the fact that, though she was arrested countless times in the ‘80s on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to pandering, by 1892 she had such political influence that her mansion at 166 Customhouse Street was assessed at a mere $300…while a much smaller and plainer house across the street was assessed at $1200.

The Arlington (left, with domed cupola) and Mahogany Hall (right, with tower)

But this house was itself small in comparison with Mahogany Hall, the $40,000 four-story brothel she built at 235 Basin Street (two doors down from The Arlington) when The District was organized in 1897.  Mahogany Hall was an “octoroon parlor”, i.e. a bordello staffed by Creole girls of roughly one-eighth Negro blood; one of these girls, Victoria Hall, was so lovely that Lulu “borrowed” her photo for use in her own ad for the “Blue Book” of 1906 (in which she rather dubiously claimed to be 31, which would’ve made her a madam before she turned 15).  Lulu made a tremendous amount of money, and spent much of it on clothes and jewelry; as Al Rose explains in his 1974 history Storyville, New Orleans:

Vivid is the recollection still alive in certain aging heads, of Lulu descending the “hall’s” swirling staircase, decked out in her gaudy display of diamonds, smiling her celebrated diamond-studded smile, and singing her favorite song, “Where the Moon Shines”.  Attired in a bright red wig and an elaborate formal gown, she wore diamond rings on all her fingers (including thumbs), bracelets up both arms, a diamond necklace, a tiara, an emerald alligator brooch on her chest – the works!

Rose also notes that the 1934 Mae West film Belle of the Nineties was originally entitled Belle of New Orleans and was inspired by Lulu White’s life, but due to the pervasive racism of the time all racial references were suppressed.  Forty years later, the brothel madam in Pretty Baby (1978) was also clearly inspired by Lulu; she wears a red wig and excessive jewelry, and her brothel has a swirling mahogany staircase.

Lulu was a savvy businesswoman who understood the value of diversification and had an appreciation for new opportunities; in 1906 she made a business trip to Hollywood (in her private railway carriage) in order to investigate the potential of the new technological innovation, motion pictures.  She made deals for real estate and production facilities which would’ve made her the owner of the largest studio in town, then returned to New Orleans to get the funds together.  But her next move was one of those critical mistakes which changes history:  she trusted someone who proved untrustworthy, namely her “fancy man”, George Killshaw.  He and Lulu had been together since soon after her arrival in New Orleans, but he was slim, handsome, charming and could easily pass for white, so when Lulu sent him to California to complete the deal for her with $150,000 in cash (about $3.6 million in today’s currency) he decided to drop out of sight and start a new life elsewhere, probably as a white man.

Strangely, Lulu made no effort to find him (probably because she didn’t trust the police), but picked herself up and resumed planning for the future (albeit on a smaller scale).  In 1908 she built a saloon right next door to Mahogany Hall, at the corner of Basin and Bienville Streets;  it opened for business in 1912, but with the arrival of Prohibition in 1919 it ostensibly became a soft drink bar.  By this time, of course, Storyville had been closed (as I explain in last year’s column) to satisfy the prudery of the Secretary of the Navy, and due to the Hollywood disaster the bar was Lulu’s only remaining business.  She secretly sold liquor there, but due to her reputation was repeatedly arrested throughout the ‘20s for violating the Volstead Act.  Eventually she tired of dodging the cops, and in 1929 sold the building to Leon Heymann.  It was one of the few Storyville buildings not bulldozed to construct the Iberville Housing Project in the 1930s, and though it lost its upper story to Hurricane Betsy the year before I was born, the lower story was refurbished and today houses a neighborhood market.

Lulu herself vanished from history after 1931, but is known to have been alive for at least ten years afterward because (as Rose reports) she made a withdrawal from her account at the Whitney National Bank in 1941 and was recognized by the teller; her fate beyond that is unknown, but at the time she would’ve been in her seventies and is not likely to have survived much longer.  There is no death certificate on record in Louisiana, so it is possible she returned to her birthplace to die (though there is no death record in Alabama, either) or else succumbed in some public place and was never identified.  What a sad end for one of the harlot queens of New Orleans; imagine how different Hollywood (and perhaps even America) might’ve been had its largest studio been owned not only by a black woman, but a proud and unrepentant whore!

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September Miscellanea

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 2, 2011| 41 Comments »

The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own.  –  Maxine Hong Kingston

Short articles on the usual subject.

Lipstick on a Pig

If I were to feature every news story of a prostitution bust in the United States, my column would consist of little else.  But this story from the August 15th Washington Examiner was noteworthy both for the appalling size of the operation and for the pathetic attempt to represent the same old police harassment campaign as some sort of feminist social work effort:

…In two separate six-hour periods, District [of Columbia] police arrested 54 men on prostitution solicitation-related charges…The men face up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine, although Bray said most first-time offenders will be sent to a program to help them cope with their sexual desires.  Police also said they arrested 14 women on prostitution-related charges, four men on pandering charges for allegedly trying to coax undercover female officers into working for them as hookers, and two men on robbery charges for allegedly trying to rip off female undercover officers who were posing as prostitutes.  “The majority of the operation was focused on the customer side,” Bray said on Monday.  “We hope that if we do that there will be no customers and prostitution in the city will not be as prevalent”…”We’re also looking for human trafficking victims,” Bray said.  “We want to ID traffickers and pimps who try to trap victims.”

This “end demand” rhetoric is becoming much more common as police departments begin adding “Swedish model” propaganda to their usual ignorant statements in an effort to appeal to neofeminists and other anti-sex religious fanatics.  And the “human trafficking” dogma tacked on at the end there might be funny if not for the chilling, Orwellian language in the second sentence:  “first-time offenders will be sent to a program to help them cope with their sexual desires.”  It makes my skin crawl to see cops parroting neofeminist pathologization of normal male behavior in order to excuse their pogroms; too bad we can’t force cops into a program to help them cope with the sick, sadistic sexual desires that drive them to beat and murder men and rape women.

My Readers Write

I’m very proud of the unusually high literacy level of my readership, and many of my regular readers are writers themselves; thanks to a link on Tits and Sass last Friday I discovered this “Open Letter to Australian Feminists Concerned About Sex Worker Exploitation” written by regular reader Because I’m a Whore, which appeared on Feminaust on August 20th.  I think it’s important because it demonstrates a point I’ve made a number of times before:  As long as our laws allow individual behaviors to be criminalized by government, whores are in danger even in places where our profession has been legalized because the busybodies and control freaks are hard at work trying to get it recriminalized, just as Donna Hughes and her lackies accomplished in Rhode Island two years ago and the last Labour government in Britain almost managed last year.

Seeking Balance?

After allowing Trevor and Maggie Neilson a pulpit from which to vomit out their prohibitionist propaganda, perhaps Huffington Post is trying to establish balance by giving column space to Ronald Weitzer, whose work I’ve cited on a number of occasions.  Weitzer’s article, “Myths About Human Trafficking”, appeared on August 24th and directly refutes the bogus claims and statistics of which the Neilsons and their ilk are so fond.  While I’m pleased to see this, it’s sad that a publication which claims to be “liberal” could have featured writers who advocate crushing individual rights by police tactics in the first place.

Workers’ Paradise vs. Gold Diggers

With rare exception, Marxists are anti-prostitution for obvious reasons:  our trade is capitalism in its purest form.  The communist states of the 20th century proudly boasted (as in my epigram) that they had entirely eradicated prostitution, but of course this was pure poppycock; there is no evidence that prostitution decreased in the Soviet Union, China or any smaller communist state, and if anything it increased as women strove to gain luxuries or even simple necessities amidst the eternal shortages which characterize communist economies.  And though China no longer tries to pretend that prostitution does not exist within her borders, the Chinese government suppresses sex work every bit as brutally as the United States does, and unlike the U.S. it apparently doesn’t even allow whoring conducted under color of matrimony.  According to the August 23rd Sydney Morning Herald:

With divorce rates soaring and widespread worries about a culture of materialism, the Chinese government is now trying to stop women marrying for money…the Supreme Court has ruled that the person who buys the family home, or the parents who advance them the money, will get to keep it in the event of a divorce.  ”Hopefully this will help educate younger people, especially younger women, to be more independent, and to think of marriage in the right way rather than worshipping money so much,” Hu Jiachu, a lawyer in Hunan province, said.  The ruling should help relieve the burden on young men, many of whom fret about the difficulty of buying an apartment.  China’s property bubble has driven property prices in Shanghai up to $7934 per square metre when annual salaries average just $9521.

”There are more and more girls who want to marry rich men and improve their financial position.  It has been a notable increase,” Wang Zhiguo, a consultant at Baihe, a Beijing-based matchmaking website, said.  ”Most pretty girls now try to trade on their beauty.  It is an unhealthy trend and the government is now trying to restrict it.”  Recent statistics show there were 2.68 million divorces last year and divorces have multiplied at almost the same speed as the economy has grown:  by 7 per cent a year for five years.

I wonder what American feminists would think upon hearing their rhetoric coming out of the mouth of an advocate for Chinese social engineering?

Whores On Whores

Politicians are, as I’ve said before, the biggest whores of all, and many if not most of them hate garden-variety whores because we are living proof of their inability to control everybody and everything.  And now you can have a rare look at a few politicians’ uncensored opinions about us courtesy of Wikileaks and Furry Girl, who spent all day August 25th poring over this weeks’ new releases. She shares her results in her Feminisn’t column for August 26th, and though most of the results have to do with the annual State Department exercise in pomposity referred to as the “Trafficking in Persons Report”, there are enough other types of references to be interesting.

Oops

There aren’t many circumstances in which I would excuse a breach of confidentiality, but this is probably one of them:

A federal sex-trafficking case was declared a mistrial last week when a masseuse testifying against an allegedly exploitative massage parlor recognized the defense attorney as a former client.  Liudmyla Ksenych, a Ukranian immigrant, worked at a massage parlor owned by Alex “Daddy” Campbell, where other women testified they were trained to give clients sexual favors and pay Campbell thousands of dollars to avoid deportation…when she left the witness stand last Monday, she told prosecutors that she recognized Campbell’s attorney, Douglas Rathe, as a former client.  Rathe…told U.S. District Court Judge Robert Gettleman that he had visited Ksenych four times for massages and given her a bottle of perfume as a gift, but that “nothing inappropriate” occurred during those visits…“It was a massage — that was all it was…What happened was embarrassing — there was no doubt about it.  [But] I did nothing illegal or nothing that was considered improper.  This was a very unusual circumstance.”

According to the indictment, Campbell is accused of coercing immigrant women into jobs at his massage parlors, confiscating their passports, trapping them in apartments and driving them to and from work and extorting thousands of dollars from them with the threat of deportation…An accomplice has already pled guilty to these crimes.  Neither the prosecutors nor the judge seemed convinced that Rathe’s history with Ksenych interfered with his ability to do his job…and the government offered to withdraw Ksenych as a witness so the trial could continue.  But Campbell, who had already filed a motion for a mistrial on a separate issue…[insisted] he could not trust Rathe, his court-appointed attorney, and would need to be assigned a new defense lawyer…The trial has been rescheduled for January.

Do I really need to point out that the only reason Campbell and his accomplice were able to extort money from these women is that prostitution is criminalized?

One Year Ago Today

“September Updates” was my very first “update” column and featured updates to “Legal Sundries” (August 17th) and “Nothing in the Dark” (August 8th).

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Tyranny By Consensus

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 1, 2011| 53 Comments »

Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigorously, more vigorously, and more severely, than by one.  –  Andrew Johnson

One year ago today I published the first of a number of columns about the efforts of the so-called “AIDS Healthcare Foundation”, a group of rubber fetishists funded by the condom industry who have been trying to drive the porn industry out of California by forcing the California workplace safety authorities (Cal/OSHA) to impose “barrier restrictions” designed for the medical field (condoms, dental dams, goggles, face shields) during sex scenes.  Since the porn industry discovered during the AIDS scare of the ‘80s that virtually nobody will watch heterosexual porn in which the performers use condoms, if AHF is successful in its sleazy game it would force the porn industry to leave California in order to create a viable product – which may even be what they’re after.  For those unfamiliar with the development of this campaign to “rescue” porn performers from their own informed choices, you may wish to read the column of last September 1st and also those from October 15th, December 9th, December 13th, January 12th, March 7th and April 8th before proceeding with this article from the August 17th San Francisco Chronicle:

Los Angeles voters could cast ballots deciding whether porn producers have to require use of condoms on shoots as a condition of getting a filming permit if a health advocacy group succeeds in a new ballot initiative.  AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein announced Tuesday that his group needs 41,138 valid city voter signatures in the next four months to get the issue on the June ballot.  “As a citizen of Los Angeles, I have a responsibility in my own hometown to make sure we limit the spread of disease, but also to ensure the safety of performers in this industry,” said Weinstein, who says his group has hired a firm to gather the signatures.

The proposed ordinance would apply to commercial filming of adult films, and would call on the city to charge adult film producers a “fee sufficient to pay for periodic inspections” for enforcement.  The ballot box query is the latest move in the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s long-standing campaign to require safe sex in pornography.  The group has had three unsuccessful attempts to find a lawmaker to back statewide legislation to mandate condoms in porn.  A lawsuit asking a judge to mandate local health officials to crack down on unprotected sex was also unsuccessful.  Acting in response to an AHF complaint, state workplace safety officials are already working to clarify an existing regulation, which directs nurses and medical professionals to wear gloves at work, to specify condom use in porn, too.

The majority of American commercial porn films are shot in the city’s San Fernando Valley, where the multibillion-dollar industry has long resisted the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s attempts to require safe sex for its performers.  The exact number of productions that occur without permits is unknown, but about 200 permits a month are issued.  In Los Angeles, officials have largely resisted enforcing or strengthening any safe sex mandates on the industry.  Last year, Los Angeles County public health director Dr. Jonathan Fielding said regulating condom use on porn sets is nearly impossible.

Since Weinstein and his fellow perverts have been unable to find a politician, judge or bureaucrat willing to destroy a lucrative industry by denying adult video performers the right to make their own decisions, they now hope to recruit the masses to collectively do the job.  I suspect that this latest effort, like the others, is doomed to fail; though I’m sure there are as many control freaks who derive twisted pleasure from telling adults what to do in Los Angeles as there are anywhere else, I’m sure there are also an awful lot of porn watchers there and as I said, they’re not interested in seeing condom-fetish porn.  On top of that, the adult film industry has deep pockets and if Weinstein succeeds in getting this on the ballot you can bet their ads will cover not only the adult choice issue and the consumer preference angle, but also point out that if this busybody campaign were to succeed, it would almost certainly cost the almost-entirely-broke state yet another lucrative industry.

Not that any of that matters to Weinstein, whose self-appointed “responsibility” to make other adults’ decisions for them results in his descending like a hyena every time a story like this one (from the August 29th Los Angeles Times) appears:

An adult film performer has tested HIV positive, prompting a temporary shutdown Monday of adult film productions across Los Angeles until further testing can confirm the result…”Until we know for sure, we’ve asked the industry to have a moratorium on production,” said Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, a Canoga Park-based porn industry trade group [which]…became aware of the possible HIV case Saturday…[Duke] said she notified adult film production companies across the San Fernando Valley on Monday morning that a performer had tested positive and urged them to temporarily halt productions until further tests were completed…she could not release the performer’s name, age or gender.  Further testing will likely be completed within a week, she added.  Her group will notify performers who had sex with the potentially infected person so they can get tested…Los Angeles County health officials and state health regulators, who have been involved with such testing in the past, were not notified of the test because it was performed out of state, Duke said.

…Last month, Duke’s group launched a new testing database for porn performers, the Adult Performer Health and Safety Services, designed to provide producers and agents with access to results from numerous testing centers.  Duke said it will be at least another month before testing is complete and the database is fully functional.  Adult film performers must be tested every 30 days and show proof of a clean test before they perform, according to voluntary industry standards.  AIM Medical Associates had been operating the industry’s database of test results before it closed in May while fighting a lawsuit that alleged it revealed performers’ private medical information.  The new database will tell producers and agents only whether performers are available for work, not their specific test results as AIM had done, Duke said.

…Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, said the latest possible HIV infection showed an “outrageous disregard for the health and safety of performers and the community at large” and demonstrates why testing is not an adequate substitute for condoms.  He called on L.A. city officials to pull all adult film permits until condoms are mandated.  “How many performers must become infected with HIV and other serious STDs before the industry will clean up its act and government will do the right thing?” he said.

Of course for fanatics, the “right thing” is always whatever they declare it is, implemented by force.

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