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Archive for December, 2011

Yule 2011

Posted in History, Holidays, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on December 21, 2011| 7 Comments »

Shall we liken Christmas to the web in a loom?  There are many weavers, who work into the pattern the experience of their lives. When one generation goes, another comes to take up the weft where it has been dropped.  The pattern changes as the mind changes, yet never begins quite anew.  At first, we are not sure that we discern the pattern, but at last we see that, unknown to the weavers themselves, something has taken shape before our eyes, and that they have made something very beautiful, something which compels our understanding.  –  Earl W. Count, 4,000 Years of Christmas

The winter solstice will occur tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM GMT, which is to say tonight at 11:30 CST.  Tonight is thus the longest evening of the year (or the shortest for my readers in the Southern Hemisphere) and tomorrow the first day of astronomical winter (summer for y’all Down Under).  Alas, our autumn here was quite short this year; the summer outstayed his welcome by several weeks and the winter arrived rudely early, and we’ve already had snow several times (though none of it accumulated, so it looks like we won’t have a white Christmas here).  One year ago today I published a column explaining the reason nearly every culture celebrates a major holiday around this time of year, and including an essay by my friend JustStarshine explaining the spiritual significance of this day for pagans.  But so extensive is the lore around Yule (under its multiplicity of names) that I also included information about it in a number of other columns, including those for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Twelfth Night and King Day (the last of which is celebrated as Christmas Eve by my Russian and Ethiopian readers).  To understand why the latter is so (it’s also the same reason our big solstice festival is celebrated about three days after the solstice) you’ll need to read last year’s Christmas column, linked above.  And if you do live in the antipodes, you might even be interested in my summer solstice column.  I’ll be frightfully busy the next few days with my holiday baking, so I may not respond to comments or emails as quickly as usual, but I’ve pre-posted my columns through the holidays so they’ll still appear about the time you’re used to seeing them every day.

I wish for my readers health, happiness and prosperity in this most joyous season and throughout the coming solar year.  Blessed Be!

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Hanukkah

Posted in History, Holidays, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , on December 20, 2011| 12 Comments »

A great miracle happened there.  –  English meaning of the Hebrew acronym inscribed on a dreidel

Because the Hebrew day traditionally begins at sunset (which is certainly no stranger than the European custom of beginning it at an arbitrary point in the middle of the night), the eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah begins tonight at sunset.  Since the Jewish liturgical calendar is lunar (with intercalary months added seven times every 19 years) the holiday moves back and forth a bit with relation to the modern solar calendar, as does the Christian Easter;  it can begin any time from November 28th to December 27th, thus always falling inside the Christmas season and often overlapping Christmas Day (as it will this year).  And though there is an historical and religious explanation for the observance, what makes it interesting for our purposes is that it demonstrates how holidays and traditions of different religions and cultures can influence each other and often merge.

After the reign of King Solomon in the early 1st millennium BCE Israel broke into two kingdoms, which were later conquered by the Assyrians and Chaldeans (Babylonians) respectively.  After the Babylonians were conquered by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 538 BCE the Jews were granted religious freedom (as was the Persian custom) and allowed to rebuild their temple; the modern dualism of good vs. evil, which originated in the Persian religion Zoroastrianism, appears to have entered Judaism during this period, with the traditional character Satan (who in the Book of Job is merely a sort of prosecuting attorney for Heaven) taking on the role of the Persian Ahriman, the enemy of light and goodness.  Judea then fell successively under the control of Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire (the latter two both Hellenic successor-states to Alexander’s Empire).  During all this time the Jews were allowed religious freedom, but many of them became culturally Hellenized; they spoke Greek, took Greek names and practiced secular Greek customs, just as most modern Jews adopt the customs of countries in which they live.  And it’s a virtual certainty that these Hellenized Jews celebrated popular Greek festivals, just as modern Jews celebrate Thanksgiving and early Christians celebrated Sol Invictus.    The Greek predecessor to the latter was called Kronia, and was celebrated by (among other things) feasting, playing games and lighting candles and lamps.

I’ll bet you can guess what happened next; the conservative Jews condemned what they saw as the apostasy of the liberal ones, and the two camps eventually came into violent conflict over whose leader would become High Priest at Jerusalem.  The liberals (Hellenized Jews) lost and were expelled from the city in 170 BCE, so they lobbied the Emperor Antiochus IV to intercede on their behalf.  In a spectacularly ham-fisted display of power the possibly-insane Antiochus granted the request by invading Jerusalem in 167 BCE, allowing his army to desecrate and loot the temple, then banning the Jewish religion and reconsecrating the temple to Zeus.  As any rational ruler could have predicted, these actions provoked a full-scale revolt and by the end of 165 BCE the Jews under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus (Judah the Hammer) expelled the Seleucids and established the Hasmonean Dynasty.  According to legend, when the temple was reconsecrated on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev there was only enough consecrated oil to keep the sacred menorah lit for one day, yet it miraculously lasted eight days (long enough to prepare another batch).  Thus the festival of Hanukkah (“dedication”) was established to commemorate the occasion.

Now, the important thing to remember in all this is that the Hellenized Jews didn’t just go away; Antiochus’ extreme behavior forced them to side with their own people and settle their differences amicably so as to unite against the Gentiles (the struggle of orthodoxy and isolation vs. liberalism and assimilation didn’t go away, either, and has shaped the Jewish people ever since).  So it’s very possible that the festival of Hanukkah was essentially created to give the Hellenized Jews their own Kronia, just as the Christians later rededicated pagan holidays to their religion; it was from the start a nationalistic observance more like Independence Day or Cinco de Mayo than a religious one like Passover, as indicated by the fact that despite the story of the miracle, it was never established as a solemn holiday and Jews are not forbidden to engage in activities that are prohibited on the Sabbath during Hanukkah.  And though there are special prayers, the holiday was always considered a minor one celebrated more with feasting and merriment than prayer; the feasting was even given a religious justification by reaching back several centuries to the story of Judith, a beautiful widow who used her sexual capital to save her town by seducing the Assyrian general Holofernes, getting him drunk and then beheading him and carrying the grisly trophy back to her people, who rallied to drive off the now-leaderless Assyrian army.

So it remained until the mid-20th century, when American (and to a much lesser extent European) secular Jews began to celebrate it as a “Jewish Christmas”, incorporating many of the secular Christmas traditions (such as gift exchange, Christmas trees and sometimes even Santa Claus) into the celebration.  Thus a holiday which has its roots in one of the ancestors of the modern Christmas has begun to flow back into it again, like the distributary of a river which, after winding through the countryside on its own for a while, eventually rejoins the parent stream.

One Year Ago Today

“December Updates” reports on the final closure of Craigslist’s “adult services” section worldwide, a proposal to block all internet porn in the UK, Lady Gaga’s opposition to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the increasing popularity of so-called “john schools”, amateur use of Date Check, a Julian Assange update, Liverpool’s treatment of attacks on prostitutes as “hate crimes”, and some very cool (though, alas, imaginary) action figures.

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Édith Piaf

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Music, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , on December 19, 2011| 13 Comments »

For me, singing is a way of escaping.  It is another world.  I’m no longer on Earth.  –  Édith Piaf

Édith Giovanna Gassion was born in Paris on December 19, 1915 to Anita Maillard, an alcoholic French/Italian/Moroccan street singer and part-time prostitute whose stage name was Line Marsa.  Legend has it that the future French cultural icon was born on the pavement in front of 72 Rue de Belleville, but her birth certificate names the Hôpital Tenon; this was practically the most conventional aspect of her short, tempestuous life.  Maillard appears to have been entirely lacking in maternal instinct, and when the child’s father (Louis-Alphonse Gassion, a Norman street acrobat) was drafted two months after Édith’s birth, she left the baby with her own mother, Aïcha Saïd ben Mohammed.  The grandmother badly neglected the child, and at some later point (sources vary as to the child’s exact age at the time) either her father or his sister (a tightrope walker named Zaza) took the child to her paternal grandmother, who owned a brothel in Bernay.  Here at last she had a real home; the whores doted on the tiny girl, and when she lost her sight to an attack of conjunctivitis (at an age somewhere between 3 and 7) they pooled their money to send her to the shrine of Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, where she was supposed to have been miraculously cured.  As Édith later said, “Miracle or not, I am forever grateful.”

Sometime between 1922 and 1925, her father reclaimed her and took her on the road with him through the rest of the decade; he performed on street corners and in circuses and nightclubs, and employed Édith to pass the hat among onlookers, counting on her forlorn appearance to elicit sympathy.  She also began to actively contribute by singing, and even at the tender age of ten could draw a crowd.  Her father had various girlfriends during this time, but about 1929 he settled down in Paris with a sweet young thing named Yéyette, who bore him a child in March of 1931; 15-year-old Édith apparently decided the house was becoming too crowded, and so set off with her friend Simone “Mômone” Berteaut to live on the street.  Édith sang and Mômone passed the hat, and when that didn’t raise enough money for a squalid room, meager food and cheap liquor they begged, turned tricks or just slept in parks or alleys.  In 1932 she fell in love with a delivery boy named Louis Dupont and moved in with him, bearing him a child named Marcelle in February of 1933.  Dupont had tried to domesticate Édith, insisting she take “normal” (i.e. menial and low-paying like his) jobs, and the baby was the last straw; she left Dupont for a soldier, abandoning Marcelle as her own mother had abandoned her, and returned to street life in Montmarte and Pigalle.  She did stay in contact with Dupont, however, and when Marcelle died of meningitis at the age of two Édith turned tricks to pay for the funeral.  In the process she became involved with a pimp named Albert, who took a cut from her earnings whether they were from singing or hooking.  She seemed unconcerned with Albert’s usual modus operandi of beating and robbing streetwalkers, but when he started slapping her around and held a gun to her head she left him.

Given the chaos of her life, it is virtually certain she would have soon met a violent death at the hands of some other pimp or criminal had she not been discovered in Pigalle in October of 1935 by Louis Leplée, a former drag queen who now owned one of the most fashionable nightclubs in Paris.  Leplée knew talent when he heard it and offered the dirty, unkempt waif a job; he put her in a simple black dress, selected ten songs for her and billed her as La Môme Piaf (Parisian slang for “Kid Sparrow”) because of her diminutive size (147 cm/4’10”) and sorrowful appearance.  Leplée advertised her debut heavily and many celebrities attended her opening night; among them was Maurice Chevalier, who shouted “She has got what it takes!” during the applause.  In January she cut her first records on the Polydor label, “Les Momes de la Cloche” and “L’Étranger“; the latter was written by Marguerite Monnot, who regularly wrote songs for her thereafter.  But this overnight success was not to last; on the night of April 6th, 1936, Leplée was murdered by gangsters and the tabloids declared his star protégé with the seedy background was a suspect.  And though the police soon decided that she was not involved, Parisian audiences had grown so hostile Édith relocated to Nice and toured Belgium.

After a year she returned to Paris and asked songwriter  Raymond Asso to help her stage a comeback; he changed her stage name to “Édith Piaf”, kept her away from bad influences and asked Monnot to help him write songs drawing on her street background (including her first hit, “Mon Legionnaire”).  Asso became Piaf’s lover and manager and groomed her to become a star, teaching her everything from stage presence to proper table manners.  But when he was drafted in the autumn of 1939, she left him for a successful singer named Paul Meurisse; though this gave her a way into upper-class Parisian life, they were not good for one another and their friend Jean Cocteau based his play Le Belle Indifferent on their relationship (Piaf even starred in the first production of the play).  After the Nazis occupied France in May of 1940 she and Meurisse toured the unoccupied south, but this proved the last straw and upon her return to Paris Piaf moved into a flat above an expensive brothel with her old friend Mômone.

This particular bordello was now reserved for the Gestapo; Piaf befriended a number of their officers and even invited them to parties in her flat.  She also performed for their events and banquets and was therefore accused of collaboration after the war, but she escaped the fate of many other women by claiming to have been a member of the Resistance and pointing to a number of facts that supported the statement:  She dated the Jewish pianist Norbert Glanzberg and helped another Jew, the composer Michael Emer, to escape France; she co-wrote (with Monmot) a subtle protest song named “Où Sont-Ils Mes Petits Copains?” and defied a Nazi request to remove it from her concert repertoire; and it is claimed that during a concert at Stalag 3 she posed for publicity photographs with prisoners that were then used to construct fake papers which allowed them to escape the camp after she smuggled them back in during a second concert.  In her memoirs, Piaf says very little about the war years; being the narcissistic diva that she was, she seems to have considered the Occupation more of a nuisance than anything else.

Sometime during the War her parents both re-established contact with her; she was happy to see her father and supported him until he died in 1944, but her contact with her “poor lamentable mother” was limited to calls from police whenever the woman was arrested for public drunkenness (she died of a morphine overdose in August of 1945).  Meanwhile, Édith had taken up with the promising young singer  Yves Montand in 1944, grooming him as Asso had groomed her; however, she dumped him when his popularity started to rival hers.  She recorded her signature song, “La vie en rose“, in 1946 and went on to international acclaim, touring Europe and the Americas.  At first she was not popular with U.S. audiences (who considered her depressing), but that changed after glowing reviews and she eventually appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show eight times and at Carnegie Hall twice.  While in New York in 1947 she began an affair with Marcel Cerdan, the middleweight boxing champion; he was the great love of her life, and his death in a plane crash in October 1949 started her in a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol which was exacerbated by morphine first prescribed after she was seriously injured in a 1951 auto accident.

Her declining health and mental state did not affect her popularity (both as a singer and an actress), which continued to climb; she married songwriter Jacques Pills in 1952 (with Marlene Dietrich as matron of honor) and divorced him in 1956, then in 1962 she married 27-year-old Théo Sarapo, a Greek hairdresser and would-be singer.  She died of liver cancer on October 11th, 1963, and though the archbishop of Paris denied her a funeral mass because of her “sinful” life, the ceremony was attended by more than 100,000 people.  She is still considered France’s greatest  singer of all time, a national treasure whose gift was considered by many to embody the French soul.

One Year Ago Today

“Christmas Belle” is the story of a Christmas-loving escort named Noel and a most unusual client.

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The Hits Keep Coming

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2011| 13 Comments »

Enough! or Too much!  –  William Blake

As I said in my column of December 9th, there always seems to be an explosion of interesting news articles at the end of the year, and here are seven more updates.  After today, I’m officially done with this sort of thing until January!

Recognition (August 19th, 2010)

In this early post I discussed the awkwardness which results when an escort discovers that she knows a client in real life, but none of the examples I gave can compare with this UPI story from December 3rd:

…Titus Ncube of Bulawayo [Zimbabwe] said he called for a prostitute to come to the hotel room in which he was staying while having marital problems and was shocked when his 20-year-old daughter arrived…Ncube said he collapsed to [the] floor upon recognizing his daughter, who quickly fled, crying.  “I am sorry for what I did,” Ncube said.  “I spoke to my wife and daughter.  I apologized for my actions as I just wanted my family back.  My daughter has stopped doing what she was doing and is going back to school next year.  My marital problems are not over, but we have a counselor who is helping us to get over this most difficult period”…

R.I.P Bob Guccione (October 26th, 2010)

In this article I pointed out that men’s magazine publishers have “to be given credit for pushing the envelope and helping to advance the cause of sexual liberty in the US by bringing both porn and frank discussion of sexual topics (including prostitution) into the mainstream.” Now a new book by Mike Edison explores the history of American men’s magazines in depth so as to prove that assertion, and the author promotes it with “How Sex Magazines Made The World A Better Place” in the December 7th Huffington Post.

Good Fantasy, Bad Reality (October 27th, 2010)

From the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger of December 12th:

A truck driver claims his prostitute fiancee suffocated as they celebrated their engagement with a meth and bondage sex party.  Then he drove from California to Mississippi with the corpse in the cab…and set fire to the truck – with himself and the body inside.  Mark Andrew Rice pleaded guilty to arson and desecrating a corpse and was sentenced Monday to six years in prison…[with] two years…suspended for time served.

Rice, 49…met [Natasha] Carpenter at a truck stop in Texas.  He fell in love after several encounters…and [gave] her an engagement ring…[on] Sept. 15, 2009.  As part of their celebration in Barstow, Calif., Carpenter agreed to let him bind…and…gag…her…When he found her dead, Rice panicked and bought “all the meth his dealer had” and drove to…[Mississippi, where he] planned to say goodbye to his family and kill himself…[but they] took a gun away from him so he climbed into the rig and set it ablaze.  Deputies eventually pulled him from the burning truck…Hancock County authorities believe he would’ve been charged with manslaughter or worse had she died in Mississippi…Prosecutors in San Bernardino County, Calif..said there was “insufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

It’s really quite a sad story, since he seems to have genuinely loved her; I’m guessing the methamphetamine increased her metabolism so that she suffocated more quickly than he allowed for.

Barbie (December 5th, 2010)

In this column I pointed out that “People with a lot of free time and more math skills than sense have published complicated calculations showing that at 1/6 scale, Barbie would be 5’9” tall, with measurements of 36”-18”-33” and a weight of 110#” and that “The campaign to suppress or neuter Barbie derives from the same repressions and insecurities as the campaign to ban porn and abolish prostitution…”  And just as neofeminists aren’t too scrupulous about getting their facts right with regard to porn or prostitution, so they aren’t in their Barbie-attacks either:

Galia Slayen…[told NBC’s “Today” show that] she first created [a 6’ tall] Barbie-like figure — with a 39-inch bust, 18-inch waist and 33-inch hips…for the first National Eating Disorders Awareness week in 2007 while she was [an anorexic] high school student in Portland [Oregon]…”I’m not blaming Barbie [for my illness] — she’s one small factor, an environmental factor,” Slayen said.  “I’m blond and blue-eyed and I figured that was what I was supposed to look like.  She was my idol.  It impacted the way I looked at myself.”

The grotesquely distorted microcephalic figure in the picture (which, as you will note, bears little resemblance to a real Barbie doll) is a perfect symbolic representation of the grotesquely distorted “prostitute” caricatures described by people like Melissa Farley, except that Slayen’s distortion of the math isn’t nearly as severe as that practiced by Farley et al.

Welcome To Our World (January 20th, 2011)

It’s funny how efforts to suppress consensual activities always end up looking a lot alike, as in this December 5th story from the Associated Press:

…Lithuania’s capital [Vilnius] recently introduced a ban on panhandling that not only punishes those who beg but those who give, with fines of up to 2,000 litas ($770).  Outraged rights groups say the ban spells misery for the needy in one of Europe’s poorest countries, as winter kicks in and economic turmoil spreads across the continent…”Begging is a human right,” said Linas Kukuraitis, director of the Lithuanian chapter of Catholic charity group Caritas.  “It was there long before cities emerged.  There have always been those who begged and those who helped them.”

But Vilnius Mayor Arturas Zuokas says the ban will help beggars to find more sustainable ways to make a living.  “Giving money to people on the street is wrong,” Zuokas said.  “By doing this we doom them to stay there forever”…police…are not issuing fines just yet.  Instead they are handing out cards to beggars with addresses and phone numbers of charities and homeless shelters.  Stricter enforcement is expected to begin in January.  The mayor himself rode his bicycle…looking for violators of the ban.  Zuokas made a splash on YouTube earlier this year by riding an armored personnel carrier over a luxury car as a publicity stunt for his crackdown on illegal parking…He said there are plenty of homeless shelters for the poor in Vilnius, “but they stay on the streets because it is a kind of business.”

…Some Asian countries have laws targeting both beggars and almsgivers but European…laws typically focus only on [beggars] and aren’t always strictly enforced.  However, police in Ireland cracked down on panhandlers this year…[and] Austria’s Styria province…introduced a begging ban in February.  None of them punish  almsgivers.  By contrast, Norway, one of the world’s richest countries, abolished a more than 100-year-old vagrancy law in 2005, making it legal to beg in the streets.  It’s also legal in Sweden, Germany, Spain and Portugal…

Note that Sweden and Norway officially believe that beggars have more right to self-determination and making a living in a way that suits them than women do.

Elephant in the Parlor (October 23rd, 2011)

A politician being caught with a prostitute isn’t really news, but for the prostitute to expose the politician is.  This one’s from the December 6th Huffington Post:

The…married mayor [of Medford, New Jersey], accused on a website two months ago of having sex with a prostitute at a California hotel, [has] resigned…The anonymous allegation against…Chris Myers…included a photo of…him in his underwear…[The accuser] claimed to be a prostitute…[whom] Myers contacted…through a male escort website…Myers paid him $500 but didn’t fulfill promises of a car and other gifts…[and that] the broken promise was the reason he was taking his story public.  The website was [soon] taken down…[and though] Myers…refused to comment on the allegations [he] didn’t deny them…His resignation letter…did not mention the scandal…

Saint Death (November 1st, 2011)

The December 10th Miami Herald featured this article on persecution of Umbanda, another syncretism of Christianity with African and Indian beliefs.  The crusade is largely driven by Pentecostal Christians who…wait for it…want to “save” believers from their choices:

…many Brazilians…view Umbanda…as…witchcraft…In many parts of the country, [it] was outlawed until the 1950s, and in the following three decades believers were supposed to register with the police…Brazil’s…1989 constitution enshrined [religious] freedom…but…followers say official disdain and intense prejudice still put their lives and shrines at risk…[they] report on average 100…physical or verbal attacks a year…in…Rio de Janeiro alone…Cases…have increased along with the…power of Pentecostal religions…”There is always a discourse of ‘taking them from the hands of the devil'”…[theologian Fernando] Altemeyer said…Such tensions have come into relief in Sao Goncalo, where Mayor Aparecida Panniset, an outspoken Pentecostal, has been accused of failing to protect Umbanda sites, or even destroying them.  In October, she ignored pleas by religious tolerance activists to stop the demolition of the house where the first Umbanda rituals were held in 1908.  She also turned down requests to meet the activists…then moved ahead with efforts to raze another traditional Umbanda house…

One Year Ago Today

“The Swedish Pimpocracy” shows how the government of Sweden exploits women to “implement a plain old-fashioned tyranny while hiding under the cloak of ‘enlightenment’.”

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A Day Against Hate

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 17, 2011| 38 Comments »

The women I killed were filth-bastard prostitutes who were littering the streets. I was just cleaning up the place a bit.  –  Peter Sutcliffe (The Yorkshire Ripper)

Today is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, which was first established in 2003 by Dr. Annie Sprinkle (in conjunction with Robyn Few, Stacey Swimme and Michael Fowley of SWOP) as a memorial for the victims of serial killer Gary Ridgeway on the eve of his sentencing.  In the ensuing eight years the observance has grown dramatically, with events and vigils in many cities around the world, all intended to call attention to the violence committed against whores by sociopaths, bad customers and especially the police…violence which is largely engendered and enabled by criminalization and the marginalization which grows from it.  In recent years, some of the worst and most widespread violence against us has sprung from sex trafficking hysteria; the propaganda which drives this moral panic paints all prostitutes as pathetic, childlike victims suffering from mental illnesses which render us unable to make decisions for ourselves, thus justifying our abduction, imprisonment, deportation, robbery and rape.  And though the actual violence is most often perpetrated on us by men, many of the chief enablers of the outrage are women:  namely, the neofeminist prohibitionists who use us as scapegoats onto which they can project their own sick fantasies of gender war.

One year ago today I wrote about the origins of both the day and of the red umbrella, which has become the most widely-used symbol of sex worker rights; I urge those readers who are not already familiar with the Day To End Violence to go back and read it.  In that column I reported the first news of the serial murderer now known as the Long Island Killer, whom police have recently decided is only one man after all after a few months of claiming it was more than one (possibly in an attempt to spread panic or to call attention away from the fact that the murderer is very likely a cop).  Even though I do recognize that finding a single psychopath in New York must be a difficult task, I can’t help thinking that the police aren’t exactly trying very hard, especially since there are No Humans Involved and the District Attorney says it was the victims’ fault for being whores anyhow.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that the New York cops are “handling” the case in much the same way as their “brother officers” in Vancouver, BC handled the “investigation” of serial killer Robert Pickton:

RCMP Cpl. Catherine Galliford…said top Mounties had “enough evidence for a search warrant” of serial killer Robert Pickton’s farm in 1999 [but failed to act upon it, allowing] 14 women [to be] brutally murdered [over the next three years].  She says she will testify that both RCMP and Vancouver Police Department officers, even after the Missing Women Task Force was formed in 2001, engaged in sexual liaisons and harassment, watched porn and left work early “to go drinking and partying.”

“The saddest part of this is that the women who were killed were the most vulnerable people in our society, other than children,” she said.  “I will not be testifying on behalf of the RCMP at the inquiry,” she said, saying her first concern is for people whose loved ones didn’t have to die.  “Tell the families,” said Galliford, her voice breaking…”I’ve got their back.”

…Galliford said [that] after the gruesome details had begun to emerge about how Pickton butchered women and scattered their remains at his…farm or dumped them at a Vancouver rendering plant, …a group of RCMP personnel were…constantly “making jokes about sex toys,” laughing and giving each other “fist bumps”…[they told her that] “They wanted to see Willie Pickton escape from prison, track me down and strip me naked, string me up on a meat hook and gut me like a pig,” said Galliford, who also recounted the episode in her formal statement to RCMP…

As this disgraceful conduct demonstrates, the kind of men who victimize whores are the same sort who might victimize any other women, but they choose to act out their impulses on prostitutes because society gives them implicit permission to do so by branding us “criminals” and “undesirables”.

Beside the Long Island Killer, we’ve seen many other stories about violence toward sex workers in the past year.  There was the Florida cop who murdered an escort, the Surrey cops who decided to rob a madam instead of prosecuting men who threatened to burn her and her ladies alive, cops raping streetwalkers in New Orleans, Bakersfield, California and Houston, a judge raping an escort in New Mexico, Canadian government attorneys arguing that prostitutes don’t deserve legal protection, more serial killers in Memphis, Tennessee and North Carolina, police beating and robbing prostitutes in South Africa, and a gang robbing and murdering prostitutes in China…and that’s not counting the innumerable arrests, repeated attacks on our advertising venues and constant, malicious persecution of our clients and family members.  To top it all off, politicians in Ireland, France and even Nevada have agitated for further criminalization of prostitutes, which invariably leads to more violence and less recourse for that violence.  And just three days ago, Google announced that it is donating over $11 million to pro-criminalization organizations in the name of “fighting slavery” (SWAAY has announced protests to be held Wednesday).

Perhaps next year I’ll have fewer such incidents to report, but until the United States and other prohibitionist regimes follow in the footsteps of countries like Australia, misogynistic misfits (both in and out of uniform) will still be encouraged to attack us with little or no fear of consequences for their actions.

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Thought Experiment

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2011| 19 Comments »

The dignity of man is in free choice.  –  Max Frisch

One of the most important negative effects of the popular concept that sex is somehow magically different from all other behaviors is the modern fixation on pimps.  The nightmares of neofeminists and the masturbatory fantasies of trafficking fetishists teem with brutal (and usually dark-skinned) men who force women into prostitution, despite the fact that (as I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions) the abusive, controlling pimp of legend is so rare we can consider him an anomaly.  In fact, the fraction of prostitutes who have such an abusive pimp – roughly 1.5% – is so similar to the percentage of women who report that their husbands/boyfriends are either “extremely violent” (1.2%) or “extremely controlling” (2.3%) that it’s pointless to consider them a different phenomenon, especially when one considers that any non-client male found in the company of a whore will inevitably be labeled a “pimp” by cops or prohibitionists.  The notion that hookers only have relationships with a certain kind of man, who is labeled a “pimp” by outsiders, derives from the Victorian fallacy (alas, still alive today) that we are somehow innately “different” from other women, and therefore our men are different as well.  This is pure nonsense; the only consistent difference between the husbands of harlots and those of amateurs is that ours tend to be less hung up about sex.

Yet the myth, anchored as it is in prohibitionist mythology, male insecurity and Hollywood stereotypes, is a persistent and pernicious one, affecting even those who recognize that most prostitutes are in the trade voluntarily.  A great deal of the milder trafficking rhetoric revolves around locating and identifying “sex slaves” and penetrating their supposed “brainwashing”  in order to “rescue” them, and judges and prosecutors stumble all over themselves when endeavoring to come up with inane and tautological justifications for persecuting so-called “pimps” whom they concede were fair businessmen who worked to protect their girls.  Even among many independent internet-based escorts there’s a low-level hysteria about pimps (as though a man somehow has the power to reach through their cell phones and abduct them into a third-world brothel), and more than one reader has asked how he can avoid “pimped” girls.

I recently received another question of this type, but this time rather than feeding into the false dichotomy of “free” vs. “coerced”, I’ve decided to cut to the heart of the dilemma.  The reader asked, “Is there even a grain of truth in this trafficking stuff, some ‘dark side’ I haven’t really seen despite my extensive experience?  If this stuff DOES happen – how do guys who pay for sex make sure they’re not contributing to hurting a woman this way?”

For the most part, so-called “trafficking” is just people crossing borders to work, sometimes without proper documentation but not always.  This doesn’t mean that every woman in every brothel is there because she wants to be and for no other reason, but does anyone believe that most women who work as hotel maids or Wal-Mart clerks are there out of free choice?  Of course not, but neither were they abducted from their homes, carried off into bondage, threatened and all that jazz.  Yes, there are a few examples of extreme  coercion which are repeated endlessly by the fanatics, often exaggerated or with details omitted, and sometimes even rephrased so as to look like new ones.  But in the overwhelming majority of cases, women do sex work for the same reason they do any other kind of work: because they need money.  The number of women who are “coerced” into sex work is no higher than the number “coerced” into any other kind of work.  If you’re at Wal-Mart, how do you know your cashier doesn’t have a lazy boyfriend at home who forces her to work and takes her money?  You don’t.  And are you somehow wrong or immoral for checking your purchases out in her line if she does?

Let’s imagine a barbershop which caters to a male clientele; they just do regular haircuts, nothing fancy, but all the barbers are female.  Guys come in, get their hair cut, talk to the barbers, perhaps know their names.  Maybe a guy even has a favorite girl who always cuts his hair; she does a good job, is friendly and she’s nice to look at, too.  But what does he really know about her?  Only what she cares to tell him, and nothing more.  He doesn’t know what financial pressures she’s under, how much high-interest debt she has, how psychologically stable she is, if she was sexually abused as a child, whether she’s in the country legally, whether her boss treats her fairly and what her boyfriend is like.  And you know what?  None of that is any of his business unless she volunteers it; it’s outside the bounds of polite business conversation.  If his barber is under financial or emotional duress, is he somehow responsible?  After all, men don’t need to cut their hair; their demand for haircuts has created a market in which poor women are exploited to do work they may hate and possibly don’t want to do.

What if his barber actually has a degree in philosophy from an expensive school which she incurred massive student-loan debt to obtain, and is under threat of arrest from the government if she defaults, but she can’t get a job in this economy so she’s struggling with a debt which at her current rate of repayment will literally never be discharged?  Is she in “debt bondage”, and is the federal government a “pimp” or “human trafficker” for telling her she needs to pay off her debt or else?  If her parents cosigned those loans, the federal “traffickers” even keep her in line with threats to harm her family.  And if a man gets a haircut from her, is he “enabling” that situation…or is he contributing toward her survival until she can find something which pays better?

Adult women are ADULTS.  It isn’t the job of strangers, nor that of “rescue” organizations or the government, to police their private lives.  The essence of freedom, of individuality, of adulthood, is self-determination, and to deny a person that is to infantilize her.  It’s unfortunate that some people get into bad situations, often through no fault of their own.  But unless the victim of such misfortune wants and asks for help, it is demeaning and abusive to force it upon her under the premise that her “rescuer” is better or smarter or wiser or more mature or saner than she is, and therefore more qualified to make decisions for her than she is for herself.  Furthermore, it’s both rude and arrogant for a stranger to presume he has the right to question her on her financial situation, reasons for working and conditions of her relationships with men.  Nobody would behave in such a way toward a barber…so why do people think it’s OK or even necessary to do it to a prostitute?

Ask yourself:  Is sex degrading or dehumanizing?  Is work?  Is being paid?  No?  Then how can sex work be?  Why doesn’t the U.S. government prosecute Nike for its sweatshops in Southeast Asia or Apple for its sweatshops in China, and why aren’t these countries placed on “watchlists” by the State Department for allowing them to exist?  Why don’t we see campaigns to “end demand” for sneakers or iPhones?  Because they don’t involve sex, and that is the only difference.

One Year Ago Today

“Lack of Evidence” examines the wide variety of behaviors, circumstances and personal possessions that police represent as “evidence” of prostitution.

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Girls, Girls, Girls!

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 15, 2011| 27 Comments »

Girls, Girls, Girls
Long legs and burgundy lips
Girls, Girls, Girls
Dancin’ down on Sunset Strip
Girls, Girls, Girls
Red lips, fingertips.  –  Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars & Tommy Lee

I don’t really write about stripping very often, because I have a lot less to say about it than I do about whoring.  Part of that is because in the United States it’s closer to being completely legal than prostitution is, and part of it is because, though it paid the bills for two years and served as my “gateway” into full-fledged harlotry, I didn’t like it nearly as much as I liked escorting.  But despite what some women of each profession might like to believe, strippers and strumpets are sisters under the skin; we’re both sex workers, both persecuted by neofeminists and other religious fanatics, both subject to absurd laws which affect no other jobs and both subject to maltreatment at the hands of the police.  And in recent years, we’ve both been repeatedly targeted by “human trafficking” lies from busybodies who would like to see all sex work abolished; Estes & Weiner considered young strippers as part of their “youth at risk of sexual exploitation”, and Icelandic neofeminists succeeded in closing down strip clubs last year as part of their ever-more-extreme interpretation of the Swedish Model.  Today I’d like to look at three recent American news articles involving strippers; I think you’ll agree that the attitude displayed therein isn’t all that different from that displayed toward whores.

Let’s start with this November 16th article from Riverfront Times:

The Missouri Supreme Court yesterday handed strip club owners yet another loss in their legal fight to overturn a sweeping law  regulating “adult-oriented businesses.”  The law passed in 2010 prohibits exotic dancers from displaying their genitals and most of their breasts, bans the sale of alcohol inside strip clubs and requires the businesses to close at midnight.  Adult bookstore and strip club operators have argued that the law violates freedom of expression under the First Amendment…[and] also claim that Missouri legislators didn’t fully consider the fiscal impact that the bill would have on the economy — with several adult-oriented businesses going out of business since the law went into effect.

In yesterday’s 41-page ruling, the state’s high court sided with a circuit court ruling last year that upheld the law.  In its decision yesterday, the state’s high court [claimed that]…“the restrictions are not content-based limitations on speech but rather are aimed at limiting the negative secondary effects of sexually oriented businesses on the health, welfare and safety of Missouri residents…”  The strip club owners say they may appeal yesterday’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court…

This really isn’t surprising, considering that modern American courts increasingly seem to consider themselves the handmaidens of legislatures rather than equal branches of government as they were intended to be.  The “secondary effects” mythology has become a very popular one because it allows moralists to ignore the total lack of any provable negative effects from sex businesses; you’ll find the same nebulous claims made about porn and prostitution.  But when it comes to statements about sex work, who needs proof?  Wild assertions without a shred of evidence are more than good enough, as this November 30th Huffington Post article proves:

…Attorneys doing business at [Miami’s] Federal Detention Center — a maximum security prison — say the joint is overrun with dancers posing as paralegals.  Lawyers hired by imprisoned drug kingpins pass the women off as legal assistants and authorities let them in, according to a report by Miami New Times.  This being Miami, it was apparently no big deal until other attorneys realized they might start losing clients to those whose billable hours come with a little bada bing.  “They take off their tops and let the guys touch them,” veteran defense attorney Hugo Rodriguez told New Times.  “The majority of these young, very attractive women are noncitizens brought in exclusively for the purposes of visiting the FDC.  Any lawyer can sign a form and designate a legal assistant.  There is no way of verifying it.  The process is being abused.”  The report alleges one ‘paralegal’ was caught having sex with an inmate in a room used for legal meetings, while another was busted stripping in a Special Housing Unit — also known as solitary confinement — and banned from the prison altogether…

This isn’t the first instance of one or more lovely Miami ladies with cartel clients in super max prisons.  In 2009, the Denver Post profiled a woman named Lulu who left the Magic City to be closer to clients who paid her $125 an hour to deliver legal docs and keep a little company.  And just north of Miami in Broward County, there’s less security but a lot more ‘access’ — female corrections employees are the ones getting friendly, with one caught having sex with an inmate in a broom closet.

Well, if lawyers say this is happening, it certainly must be true!  Even if it is, I find it difficult to get all that worked up over, because the U.S. government is ignoring the best way to really punish these so-called “drug kingpins”:  simply decriminalize all drugs, and their empires will crumble overnight.

I’m sure you caught the “human trafficking” trope Mr. Rodriguez threw into his spiel; it’s also the central motif of our last story, from the November 30th New York Daily News:

The Mafia teamed up with the Russian mob to smuggle Eastern European beauties into New York to work as strippers — and even arranged sham marriages to keep them here, the feds say.  Twenty suspects…were arraigned in Manhattan Federal Court…on charges ranging from racketeering to visa fraud.  The schemers allegedly recruited women in Russia and neighboring countries through Facebook and newspaper ads…Visa rules barred them from adult entertainment, so the suspects arranged bogus offers for summer waitressing jobs and had the women apply for seasonal visas, prosecutors said…In the most audacious part of the scheme, the mobsters sent female emissaries to upstate New York to find young, single men willing to marry ex-patriate [sic] ecdysiasts in exchange [for] $5,000.  The nuptials secured green cards so the dancers could continue to work in the clubs.  Asked why the clubs needed to bring strippers from overseas, Hayes said, “Based on what we’ve learned, they were particularly marketable.’  Some of the women didn’t realize they would be giving lap dances when they signed up for visas.  They had to fork over $150 a day for housing, transportation and the right to work, Hayes said…

If this country were run by sane people, you might ask why visa rules bar women from even legal branches of sex work.  But it’s not, so I think you know the answer.  Raise hands, how many believe the girls didn’t know they were going to be strippers?  Now, another show of hands:  how many of them do you think really wanted to travel halfway around the world to make a maximum of $400 a week (before taxes) as waitresses in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S.?

One Year Ago Today

“Ho, Ho, Ho” reports on the first person ever cured of HIV, one celebrity trying to make himself look good, another trying to make her ex-husband look bad and Japan’s answer to Hooters.  Lubbu-lubbu!

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Legal Is as Legal Does

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2011| 32 Comments »

It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.  –  James Fenimore Cooper

Not only do laws on prostitution vary widely from country to country, but even the terminology is different; American and Australian advocates tend to use terms like “legalization” and “decriminalization” the same way, but as Wendy Lyon recently explained in the comment thread for “Across the Pond” they are used somewhat differently in Ireland and the UK.  In fact, she sent me this document showing no fewer than 21 different terminological schemes proposed by different authors!  So I’d like to explain the one I use, which is admittedly less than wholly satisfactory but is understood by most American and Australian activists without much explanation.  The following appeared in “It Is, But It Isn’t”, a guest blog I did for Nobody’s Business this summer:

First of all, you must understand that the way the terms “legalized” and “decriminalized” are used in reference to prostitution is the opposite of the way they’re used in regard to drugs.  When people speak of marijuana being “decriminalized” they mean that merely having it won’t get you jail time, but there are still all sorts of laws surrounding it (sometimes even fines for possession); “legalization” basically means what it sounds like.  In prostitution, on the other hand, “decriminalization” means that transactional sex is viewed as an arrangement between consenting adults in which the state has no legitimate interest (basically like any other sex), whereas “legalization” means it is viewed as a special case and therefore subject to all sorts of laws that aren’t applied to other professions.  For example, prostitution is legalized in Nevada; it’s legal if one does it in certain counties, in a licensed brothel owned by somebody else, and follows a slate of rules so restrictive that about 70% of Nevada prostitutes prefer to work illegally.  Nevada is also a good example of the highly arbitrary character of regulations under legalization schemes; in Canada and the U.K. brothels are banned, but in Nevada they’re the only venue for prostitution that is allowed!  Most European legalization regimes are much more liberal, and those in Australia aren’t tremendously different from full decriminalization (which is what New Zealand has).

As Wendy (and also Stephen Paterson) pointed out, this can be quite confusing because countries such as Canada and the UK (where prostitution itself is legal but practically nothing about it is) are in the same general group as much more liberal regimes such as Germany and Australia!  Take a look at these two recent news stories; both of them are from countries with “legal” prostitution, but what a difference!  The first article appeared on CNN on November 18th:

…Taiwan…is moving towards legalizing the world’s oldest profession, but in practice the trade remains largely underground.  Under the revised Social Order Maintenance Act, which went into effect in early November, prostitution is legal in designated red-light districts, but so far no local governments have been willing to create these zones, rendering prostitution anywhere illegal.  “You [the government] tell us that both the sex worker and the client would not be penalized within the district, but where is it?”  Chung Chun-chu, secretary general of the Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters told the Taipei Times. “So far, none of the local governments have any plans to create red-light districts.”  All 22 county and city mayors have expressed concern that creating prostitution districts would lead to increased crime and plummeting property values…

The new amendment also overturns Article 80 of the act which criminalized prostitutes but not their clients based on its unconstitutionality.  Now, both sex workers and their customers could be fined up to NT$30,000 ($994) for engaging in prostitution outside of these designated areas. Brothel owners operating outside the red-light districts would also face fines of up to NT$50,000 ($1,655).  This law is aimed at protecting women in the sex trade, but Mei Hsiang, a prostitute working in Taipei is worried it will affect her ability to make a living.  “Punishing the clients is worse than punishing us because the clients will not come for fear of being caught and fined and we won’t be able to make a living,” she told  the Taipei Times…

Technically, prostitution is now legal again in Taiwan (after ten years of American-style criminalization), for all the good it will do anyone; some fanatics who want to infantilize whores are even still trying to push the Swedish Model there.  Contrast this asinine situation with the far more reasonable Australian discussion of allowable places for prostitutes to practice our trade which appeared in the November 16th Brisbane Times:

The sex worker whose $30,000 anti-discrimination case against a Moranbah motel was dismissed by the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal has decided to appeal the ruling.  QCAT found no case for discrimination in the charges levelled by the sex worker, known as “GK”, against operators of the Drover’s Rest Motel, and established a precedent for like matters of on-premises prostitution that favoured accommodation providers.

Clashes between hotel and motel operators and sex workers have become more frequent in Queensland’s booming regional mining communities, as brisbanetimes.com.au reported in August.  Accommodation Association of Australia chief executive Richard Munro said the ruling meant accommodation providers now had clear parameters to refuse rooms to prostitutes…“This is different to short-term stays on business trips, this is people setting up their primary place of trade on premises,” he said.  “Members had been concerned about how to handle these situations without breaching anti-discrimination laws.  Now owners and managers have a clear precedent for taking action against conduct they don’t condone with the protection of the law.”

But Jenny King, chair of sex workers rights group Respect Inc, said affected prostitutes should not stop lodging complaints with the Anti-Discrimination Commission Queensland.  “We have seen many sex workers successfully seek compensation for discrimination from motel operators throughout Queensland,” she said…

Queensland Council for Civil Liberties President Michael Cope said that…under liquor laws, a licensee may take steps to ensure business other than the provision of accommodation was not conducted from the motel or hotel.  “It’s a difficult issue,” he said.  “You have a sex worker with the right to ply their [sic] trade, and motel or hotel operators with the right to control their business as they would like.”  And while the scales appear tipped in favour of accommodation providers, Mr Cope said there was still ambiguity surrounding interpretation of the Liquor Licensing Act…

GK brought allegations of discrimination against the Drover’s Rest in July last year on the basis of lawful sexual activity in the area of provision of accommodation.  She also complained that she was asked unnecessary questions about being a sex worker and that she was overcharged because of her status as a sex worker…

What a model of sane, reasonable treatment of prostitution, especially in comparison with the sort of medieval “sin and degradation” nonsense one hears in North America and certain parts of Europe!  The issue is being treated as what it is:  an issue of one businessperson’s rights vs. another’s.  There’s no “human trafficking” hysteria, no “degradation” dogma, no “associated crime” propaganda…just the same kind of give-and-take as one sees in any lawsuit without a sexual component.  Would that all countries could treat the issue so sensibly!

One Year Ago Today

Prohibitionists claim that prostitution is the worst way to make a living imaginable and generally tar it with such melodramatic epithets as “inherently degrading” and “soul-destroying”.  But “Bad Jobs” lists the ten most depressing jobs in America, and you may be surprised to see which socially-acceptable means of employment are at the top of the list.

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The Liars’ Club

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on December 13, 2011| 14 Comments »

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.  –  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Though Michael Weinstein’s sleazy campaign to impose paternalistic rules on porn actors and production companies started long before last December, it was then that he received the perfect Christmas gift in the equally-sleazy Derrick Burts, the conniving little liar whose poorly-planned attempts to deceive the public were revealed in my column of one year ago today.  Burts claimed to be a heterosexual who was faithful to his girlfriend and only “played gay in movies”; he insisted “that the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation (AIM) told him that they’d traced his infection to a ‘known positive’ but wouldn’t tell him who it was, and denied AIM’s public statement that he contracted HIV through personal activity”; furthermore, he insisted “that he only went…to an AHF center in Los Angeles on November 24th after AIM ‘neglected’ him” and that his decision to become AHF’s poster child was purely due to gratitude.  These lies unraveled when a reporter for LA Weekly discovered Burts’ ad on the gay escort site Rentboy, in which he boasted that he was “AIM tested”, strongly implying that he was willing to do unprotected sessions for the right price.  But it was too late; though Weinstein of course claimed the timing was “truly…a coincidence”, on the day after Burts’ AHF-sponsored press conference AIM was shut down by an illegal cease and desist order from the Los Angeles Department of Public Health which was almost certainly obtained via behind-the-scenes machinations on Weinstein’s part.

Burts’ aversion to the truth made him a perfect match for Weinstein, who has an extensive history of employing deceit in pursuit of his goals, which he represents as humanitarian when they are in fact largely commercial (his mandatory-condom campaign is funded by the condom industry) or personal (he “sued Pfizer over Viagra, alleging it encouraged risky sexual behavior…after Pfizer turned down his multi-million dollar funding request…”).  And as demonstrated in this November 30th article from Adult Video News, he encourages his followers and employees to lie as well:

AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) has announced that the ballot initiative created by its front group, “For Adult Industry Responsibility” (“FAIR”), has reached its goal of 64,000 signatures—roughly 29,000 more than required—and that means that in June, Angelenos will be voting on whether to require…adult producers to use condoms and other healthcare measures when filming adult movies before a permit is issued.  If passed by LA voters, the…ordinance would “require any person or entity directly engaged in the creation of adult films who is issued a permit under the authority of the City of Los Angeles…for commercial filming of an adult film to maintain engineering and work practice controls, including the provision of and required use of condoms, sufficient to protect employees from exposure to blood or other potentially infectious materials consistent with state law…”  Also, the ordinance would require [the permit agency, FilmLA] to raise the fee paid by adult companies seeking permits to a level “sufficient to pay for periodic inspections”—and considering how much adult filming goes on in the city on a daily basis, adult producers can be sure that the fee will be far higher than would be paid by a non-adult company in similar circumstances.

But according to attorneys familiar with both the adult industry and governmental affairs, such an ordinance…would be unconstitutional.  “…The authority of the permit department is simply an administrative function, and they’re certainly not authorized to implement so-called health regulations,” opined prominent First Amendment attorney Paul Cambria.  “Usually a permit department, like zoning and all the rest of it, is an administrative task.  In other words, it’s got requirements A-B-C, and if you comply with A-B-C, you get your permit.  But those requirements are germane to the function of that department, and the function of that department is to keep track of filming in Los Angeles and raise revenue from filming operations, but certainly has nothing to do with alleged health concerns or anything that would infringe on an adult’s right to have sex with one another on film without a condom…And that’s aside from the other First Amendment issues we have discussed, like the erotic message of the work and all the rest of it…”

Moreover, it’s questionable whether many of the petition’s signers even knew what they were signing.  One adult industry supporter was told, when asked to sign, that the objective of the petition was to force mainstream studios like Universal to adopt stricter health safeguards, and only mentioned the adult industry and condoms in passing, when in fact the industry is the main focus of the petition.  This reporter was solicited for his signature outside a Best Buy store in Chatsworth by a gatherer who said the petition was to “fight HIV.”  When questioned further, he claimed that there had been six HIV-positive cases in the adult industry in the past year—a claim for which there is no evidence whatsoever…Readers who have had similar experiences or contacts with signature gatherers are urged to report their conversations to this reporter at mark.kernes@avn.com…

Now, compare that with what Weinstein said in this article from the mainstream media, specifically the December 1st  Los Angeles Times:

Weinstein said the foundation has gathered about 64,000 signatures for the initiative, far more than the 41,000 needed to put the measure before city voters in June.  The city now must validate the signatures.  But “we had a very easy time getting these signatures,” Weinstein said.  Support cut “across lines — Democrat and Republican, men and women.  Everyone understood this was an issue of worker protection.”

I’m sure it is “easy” to get ignorant people to do what one wants them to do by lying to them.  But the Liars’ Club hasn’t won yet; the voters may still turn the proposal down (and you can bet the porn industry will actively campaign against it); even if enacted, it may be overturned on a constitutional challenge as described above; and if upheld, there are plenty of other cities in California which would welcome the lucrative porn industry…at which point Weinstein would need to start all over again at the state level.  Regular reader Comixchik (who worked in porn herself) points out that even if that happened, the companies themselves need not move out of state, just the shoots; she also noted that amateur or small independent productions would be impossible to control no matter what happens to the big boys.  Of course, none of this bothers Weinstein; the impossibility of achieving his supposed goal merely means he won’t have to come up with a new scam for a very long time.

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Pigeonholes

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 12, 2011| 40 Comments »

He who allows oppression, shares the crime.  –  Erasmus Darwin

My two main sources of topics are emails from readers (thank y’all very much!) and things I find on other blogs and websites.  I subscribe to a number of them and visit several others daily, and though most of the items I can use are of the “news” variety I also derive inspiration from other people’s blog essays.  When this happens I always give credit, but what’s interesting is that sometimes I go off in a slightly or wholly different direction from the original source.  Regular readers know that one of the blogs which most often inspires me in this way is The Naked Anthropologist, by Dr. Laura Agustín; I first discovered her while researching “Something Rotten in Sweden” and since then I have learned more about the issues surrounding “human trafficking” from her than from any other source.  I highly recommend her column, which provides a wealth of valuable insight into the way problems are defined into existence by people who like to put everything and everyone into tidy little pigeonholes and then become frustrated and angry when people refuse to stay put in their assigned slots.

She and I have both had Nicholas Kristof on our minds lately (and though I can’t speak for her, let me tell you that for me that experience is rather like having a really annoying song stuck in one’s head).  Kristof’s been harping on this whole “sex slave” thing for years now, but it seems as though lately his name and asinine statements keep popping up practically everywhere I look.  Anyhow, Dr. Agustín’s   December 4th column started out by reporting that an article which cited and largely agreed with her about Kristof was apparently censored by the site’s managers:

Writing on Nicholas Kristof’s tweets about saving sex slaves, I said that the important point to criticise is his boast to have caused the closure of six brothels.  Whether you believe that brothels are workplaces or slavery dens, you need to ask what the result will be for those working inside when those sites are suddenly closed down (some answers to that are described in this video).  Someone at In These Times wrote about that article of mine, apparently agreeing with my main points, but the post was taken down the same day, making me wonder if the site owners will not allow any criticism of Kristof.  Is he such a sacred cow for liberal-leaning news-site managers?  Even if they claim to be independent, as it says on their website?  It seems absurd, what harm did their blogger do?

This is especially interesting because In These Times is not entirely hostile to sex workers; Michelle Chen’s “Making Sex Workers Visible in the Village Voice Media Ad Controversy” (which mentioned yours truly and linked this blog) was first published on the site and concluded with the sentences, “Even people who object to sex work on principle or support anti-trafficking crackdowns can’t deny that sex work will always be a part of society, whatever the law says. In their struggle for justice and respect, sex workers don’t need to be “saved” from that reality, but they do need to be heard.”  Yet apparently, questioning Kristof’s motives and/or veracity are Not Allowed.  Dr. Agustín continues:

The writer had called her article ‘Seventh Grader’ is not an insult:  The Naked Anthropologist vs. Nicholas Kristof, in reference to my comment that it is offensive he would ‘refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader‘.  She thought it was silly of me because Kristof writes for a US audience who understand that 12-year-olds belong in seventh grade.  But many people understood what was annoying about Kristof’s comment, and my guess is he himself likes to think of his work as international, since he at least sometimes lives in Cambodia and writes for the New York Times.  The issue here is colonialism, the imposition not just of the words seventh grader but of the whole world view behind them, a world in which people who are 12 are said to be school children and nothing else because 12-year-olds are claimed to have the right to absolute innocence, lives in which neither work nor sex have a part.  Such a claim is questionable in the USA itself, but to transport it wholesale onto a young stranger in Cambodia, a girl glimpsed in a brothel, is to impose an outside interpretation on that girl and the cultural context she’s found in.  You can say, based on your belief of what’s right in your culture, that she’s a seventh grader, but you thereby maintain control of someone not in a position to resist, you exploit and victimise her without knowing anything real about her.  Kristof says she’s a slave, therefore she is one:  is that right?

This is where I veered off in a different direction; Dr. Agustín went on to talk more about Kristof’s colonialist viewpoint (interestingly comparing it to that of the narrator in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), but my mind followed the thread which led from that reductionist (and pigeonholing) term “seventh grader”.  In a comment on her blog, I wrote:

Even in the United States, not all 12-year-olds are in 7th grade; I was 12 until two and a half months into 9th grade.  Nitpicking?  I don’t think so.  The idea that a 12-year-old is a seventh-grader, regardless of her actual grade, life circumstances or maturity level, is no different from the idea that a 16-year-old is a “child” due to being as little as 366 days short of her 18th  birthday.

Americans tend to adhere to the dangerous concept that labels define reality; the majority of people in this country (including most politicians) believe that to belong to a political party defines one’s beliefs, that it’s an “all or nothing” package deal like Christian sects.  And I’ve encountered people who make the bizarre argument that the courtesans of history could not have been prostitutes because they were respected while prostitutes are degraded victims.  The label (whether “prostitute”, “Republican” or “7th grader”) is believed to tell those who hear it everything they need to know about the individual it is used to refer to.

What I’m trying to say in my long-winded way is, you are absolutely right to zero in on Kristof’s use of that term as an important clue to his attitude and aims; it’s your gift for seeing things like that (which others often miss) that make your writing such an eye-opener!

Then in her reply to my comment, she saw something I hadn’t really considered; that the “all or nothing” syndrome I brought up might explain why In These Times censored that article:

Perhaps it is what you say, that Kristof must be all right or all wrong, and since he went to fancy schools and writes for the Times, he must be all right – ergo, I must be all wrong.  It is a very dull way to look at the world.

She also called my attention to the hostile comments on her earlier Kristof article, pointing out that most of them did not understand what was wrong with the label.  Interestingly, a number of the anti-Kristof comments in that thread made the same observations about his creepy fascination with young “sex slaves” as I have on several occasions; one even asked “Would you want him near your daughter?” (I certainly wouldn’t).

Kristof and his ilk (including all who support him and stop their ears to criticism of his motives and methods) want the whole world crammed into tidy little pigeonholes that they define, and because they’ve decided that “prostitution is humiliating” they conclude that all prostitutes are “slaves”, that armed and brutal force is the way to “free” them, and that criminalization and brothel raids are therefore “good” no matter what happens to the victims of those raids once Kristof has gone back to New York.

(UPDATE:  Whether due to Dr. Agustin’s criticism, action by author Lindsay Beyerstein or an honest mistake by In These Times, the vanishing article has been restored; I have updated my link to reflect this.  Thanks to Windypundit for calling it to my attention).

One Year Ago Today

“Mecca” debunks the oft-repeated prohibitionist lie that wherever prostitution is legalized or decriminalized the number of hookers surges dramatically.

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