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Archive for January, 2012

Rhinoceros

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 21, 2012| 28 Comments »

Berenger:  And you consider all this natural?
Dudard:  What could be more natural than a rhinoceros?
Berenger:  Yes, but for a man to turn into a rhinoceros is abnormal beyond question.
Dudard:  Well, of course, that’s a matter of opinion…  –  Eugene Ionesco

In Ionesco’s 1959 absurdist play Rhinoceros (filmed in 1973 with Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder and Karen Black), the inhabitants of the characters’ town begin turning into rhinoceroses.  Though the cause is not explained, there is a strong implication that the transformation is at least partially voluntary, because the more people change the more others join them.  At first the townspeople are outraged, but by the end of the play everyone has become a rhinoceros except for the protagonist, Berenger, who considers joining the rhinos but just can’t force himself to change.  The play is generally interpreted as a political allegory; no matter how ridiculous a mass movement is (Ionesco probably had fascism and communism in mind), nor how ugly and destructive it makes its adherents, it will often continue to grow in popularity until many who once opposed it now defend and may even join it.

The metaphor popped into my head on January 5th while reading the comments on Laura Agustín’s column of the previous day; one of the commenters stated that she knows a sex worker who accepts some of Melissa Farley’s monstrous lies, and I replied:

A lot of sex workers buy into the “trafficking” mythology as well; I’ve read many comments and emails from such women who look around for where the “anti-trafficking” fingers are pointing and fail to realize that the supposed “sex slaves” are them and their friends and associates.  It rather reminds me of Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinoceros, in which the people who haven’t turned into rhinoceroses begin to perceive themselves as ugly outsiders.

It should be obvious that moral panics, like Ionesco’s “Rhinocerism”, are psychologically contagious; most people who are exposed to them are essentially brainwashed into accepting them, the victims of their own herd mentality.  And so insidious is their influence that even some people who should know better are drawn into them, making whatever rationalizations are necessary to resolve the cognitive dissonance caused by the conflict of their knowledge and their desire to go along with the crowd.  Thus many escorts, who intellectually know that the notion of prostitutes as coerced “sex slaves” is ridiculous, accept the “trafficking” hysteria by rationalizing that there is indeed an epidemic of “human trafficking” in other countries, or among streetwalkers, or in other places they conveniently never visit.  Some of them even accept the outrageous claims of numbers and ages, egotistically assuming that they are part of some supposed elite of “free” hookers despite the fact that every other whore they know is equally “free”.  Some even spin idiotic conspiracy theories in which there is a secret network of pimps who magically “get” girls and secretly control them without clients or other escorts being any the wiser.  Many clients, too, are caught up in the hysteria; they worry that girls they hire might be secretly “pimped”, and that patronizing them somehow contributes to that prohibitionist devil, “demand”.

There is only one way to fight this contagious fantasy, and that is by rejecting the entire “trafficking” paradigm.  In a September 2010 essay entitled “Willing Brides and Consenting Homosexuals” Cheryl Overs pointed out the danger of ceding any ground to the prohibitionists on this issue:

…I have noticed emergence of a new term “willing sex workers”.  The danger here is that this term signifies that even those who support decriminalisation of sex work are now accepting the trafficking paradigm by repositioning willing sex workers as a subset of this broader category “sex worker/victim of trafficking or sexual exploitation”…The implications of this slow but clear shift are enormous.  Health and human rights promoting programmes…can now be seen as applicable only to “willing sex workers” while  “unwilling” sex workers deemed to be trafficked or sexually exploited need raids, rehabilitation and anti-trafficking programmes.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about this is that sex workers themselves and other well-meaning folks are buying into the trafficking paradigm…I am not going to argue about how many people are forced into sex work, but even in that overstudied  “hotbed of sex trafficking” Cambodia, the only credible study [showed that] less than 2% of sex workers say they had been sold or coerced (CACHA 2008).  How might this compare to the percentage of married women who were forced into marriage – even in the “hotbeds” of forced marriage?  What percentage of gay men have been forced into sodomy?  We don’t know, but clearly both happen.  But it would be absurd to preface the words “bride” and “gay man” with “willing” or “consenting”.  Can you imagine reports that say that condoms should be distributed to “consenting homosexuals”?  Can you think of anything more absurd, more homophobic or more stigmatising?  Can you think of anything more absurd than describing Kate Middleton as a “willing bride”?  Positioning “willing” and “unwilling” doesn’t contribute to justice for people who have been raped, beaten [or] imprisoned in the course of either marriage [or] homosexuality and no one would suggest that.  Nor would anyone suggest that rejecting the terms “willing brides” and “consenting homosexuals” amounts to a denial that those things happen.  Yet this is exactly what the trafficking paradigm sets out for sex workers…

Perhaps the highest priority for the sex workers rights movement should be…to reject the entire paradigm of trafficking and sexual exploitation.  Only by doing this can we focus on convincing the public and policy makers that public health, human rights and social development outcomes for sex workers depend on justice for all…our slogan says it perfectly – “only rights can stop the wrongs.”

Those with long memories may recognize her point as essentially similar to the one I made in my New Year’s Day column for 2011:  “It isn’t necessary to have an adjective to describe every way in which a given person isn’t  unusual; we assume the usual unless something different is specified, not vice-versa.”  The vast majority of sex workers take their jobs as willingly as anyone takes any job, and it’s no more necessary to say “willing sex workers” than it is to say “willing doctors”, “willing teachers”, “willing cops”, “willing maids” or “willing cashiers”.  The trafficking paradigm is an ugly fantasy which flies in the face of both reality and human nature, and must therefore be rejected completely in order to avoid being swallowed up by it; anyone who claims that the unnaturalness of a man becoming a rhinoceros is “a matter of opinion” is well on his way to becoming one himself.

One Year Ago Today

In “The Specialist” we meet Wanda, a call girl who specializes in clients of a most unusual (and exceptional) nature.

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Welcome To Our World Again

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 20, 2012| 30 Comments »

Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.  –  Edward Gibbon

When I first published “Welcome To Our World” one year ago today, I had no idea I would run into so many examples of rhetoric startlingly similar to that used against prostitutes.  The original column discussed attacks on porn and surrogate motherhood, but since then I’ve discovered articles about undercover cops raping activists, a retarded adult being forbidden to have sex, Gail Dines’ inane anti-porn agenda, nursing mothers sharing milk, a neofeminist who wants fraternities banned, anti-beggar laws in Lithuania and many more.  Today we’ll look at three more; the first is a New York Times article from December 23rd:

When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced this month that the United States would use diplomacy to encourage respect for gay rights around the world, my heart leapt.  I knew her words — “gay people are born into, and belong to, every society in the world”— to be true, but in my country they are too often ignored.  The right to marry whom we love is far from our minds.  Across Africa, the “gay rights” we are fighting for are more stark — the right to life itself.  Here, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people suffer brutal attacks, yet cannot report them to the police for fear of additional violence, humiliation, rape or imprisonment at the hands of the authorities.  We are expelled from school and denied health care…If your boss finds out (or suspects) you are gay, you can be fired immediately.  People are outed in the media — or if they have gay friends, they are assumed to be “gay by association”…

Many Africans believe that homosexuality is an import from the West, and ironically they invoke religious beliefs and colonial-era laws that are foreign to our continent to persecute us…Thanks to the absurd ideas peddled by American fundamentalists, we are constantly forced to respond to the myth…that homosexuality leads to pedophilia…In Uganda, American evangelical Christians even held workshops and met with key officials to preach their message of hate shortly before a bill to impose the death penalty for homosexual conduct was introduced in…2009…the bill was shelved…but the current parliament has revived it and could send it to the floor for a vote at any time…Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon [have] all …recently stepped up enforcement of anti-gay laws or moved to pass new legislation…Not all Ugandans are homophobic.  Some say there are more pressing issues to worry about…and believe we should have the same rights as anyone else.  But they are not in power and cannot control the majority who want to hurt us…

I think the parallel is screamingly obvious, but I feel compelled to point out the bitter irony of the U.S. State Department “encouraging respect” for homosexuals around the world while simultaneously encouraging persecution of sex workers, who are also “born into, and belong to, every society in the world.”  Obviously Clinton’s little sign there doesn’t apply to us.

The second item is a Julian Sanchez article published at Cato on January 3rd:

I’ve yet to encounter a technically clueful person who believes the Stop Online Piracy Act will actually do anything to meaningfully reduce—let alone “stop”—online piracy, and so I haven’t bothered writing much about the absurd numbers the bill’s supporters routinely bandy about…But then I saw the very astute David Carr’s otherwise excellent column on SOPA’s pitfalls, which took those inflated numbers more or less as gospel…The movie and music recording industry have gotten away with using statistics that don’t stand up to the most minimal scrutiny, over and over, for years, to hoodwink both Congress and the general public…

The bogus numbers Carr cites…actually represent a substantial retreat from even more ludicrous statistics the copyright industries long peddled…Intellectual property infringement was supposedly costing the U.S. economy $200–250 billion per year, and had killed 750,000 American jobs…The $200–250 billion number…originated in a 1991 sidebar in Forbes, but it was not a measurement of the cost of “piracy” to the U.S. economy.  It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the global market in counterfeit goods.  Beyond the obvious fact that these numbers are decades old, counterfeiting of physical goods imported in bulk and sold by domestic retail distributors is, rather obviously, a totally different phenomenon…from the problem of illicit individual consumer downloads of movies, music, and software.  The 750,000 jobs number had originated in a 1986 speech…by the secretary of commerce estimating that counterfeiting could cost the United States “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000″ jobs.  Nobody in the Commerce Department was able to identify where those figures had come from…in 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.”  Now, if a single journalist could discover as much with a few days work, minimal due diligence should have enabled highly paid lobbyists to arrive at the same conclusion.  The only way to explain the longevity of these figures, if we charitably rule out deliberate deception, is to infer that the people repeating them simply did not care whether what they were saying was true…

Sanchez  goes on to break down the newer figures, and shows that the actual losses from online piracy to all Hollywood studios combined is about “$446 million—which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.”  The article is well worth reading in its entirety for anyone who cares about internet freedom, but the portion I’ve excerpted here is sufficient to demonstrate that SOPA’s proponents obtain their “statistics” in pretty much the same way as the prohibitionists obtain theirs.

The last one for today appeared in Sexuality Policy Watch on January 8th.  It describes an insidious new Brazilian law which requires pregnant women to register, ostensibly to “help” them but in reality to monitor them; it also defines a fetus as a “person”.

[On December 26th]…the Ministry of Health…[enacted] Provisional Measure 557…without discussing it with women’s health organizations.  MP 557 instituted the National System of Registration, Tracking and Follow-up of Pregnant and Puerperal Women…[which] “aims to ensure better access, coverage and quality of maternal health care, notably for pregnant women at risk”…As soon as that information fell in the hands of social networks, MP was bombarded, even by the courts.  “That MP is really absurd, a fallacy on the part of the federal government, as it does not achieve the purposes for which it was created,” denounced Beatriz Galli [an attorney, women’s rights activist and member of the Bioethics and Biolaw commissions of Brazil’s Bar Association]…“It demonstrates the lack of commitment to issues to which Brazil already …[agreed in] international human rights treaties.  It…has several legal inconsistencies and even unconstitutional articles”…[Galli stated that the act is not empowered to accomplish its stated purpose, the reduction of maternal mortality, and is in actuality designed to define] “the woman…as a vessel for the development of a new human being.  It violates women’s autonomy and dignity, denying them the recognition of freedom of choice…it reduces women to incubators…[it] violates the woman’s private life by creating a compulsory register to control and monitor her reproductive life…[MP 557] aims to create a register of pregnant women, violating the private life and confidentiality of medical information included in patient’s charts and records at a political time when several clandestine abortion clinics are…being closed…Brazilian legislation criminalizes the practice of abortion and is used to close clinics and prosecute hundreds of women…[and now] the State proposes a register for monitoring and tracking pregnant women.”

[Galli also stated that] “According to MP 557, the woman will have the legal ‘obligation’ to have all the children she [conceives], as she will be monitored by the State for this purpose.  Thus, it violates the right to equality prescribed in the Federal Constitution, because only women become pregnant…[it] is a huge setback to women’s reproductive right policies in Brazil…Conservative sectors, both within and outside the government, are trying to establish a new legal order which does not consider women as subjects of constitutional and human rights.”

I’m sure every well-informed whore understands the inevitable results of forcing women to “register” for their own “protection”, and that the Brazilian women affected by this law would recognize our position if it were presented to them.  That’s why I’m actually very pleased to see so many stories like this; the more people are crushed under the wheels of government, the more their personal lives are invaded by official busybodies, and the more they suffer from bogus statistics and lies spread by charlatans hoping to advance their own agendas, the more they will recognize – and sympathize with – the abuses habitually heaped upon prostitutes.

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The Beat Goes On (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 19, 2012| 24 Comments »

The grocery store’s the super mart, uh huh
Little girls still break their hearts, uh huh
And men still keep on marching off to war
Electrically they keep a baseball score.  –  Sonny Bono, “The Beat Goes On”

Three more variations on previous themes.

A False Dichotomy (June 22nd, 2011)

As I’ve pointed out many times, prohibitionist laws (and legalization regimes) are based in the ridiculous notion that sex work is magically different from all other work, and that whores somehow need “protection” from our own choices; accordingly, artificial lines are drawn and false dichotomies constructed between whores and other women, “sex buyers” and other men, streetwalkers and “indoor” workers, “free” and “coerced” prostitutes, those who cross borders to buy or sell sex and those who don’t, etc.  This January 1st op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald by Elena Jeffreys (no relation to Sheila as far as I know) deconstructs a lot of this nonsense:

…Sex workers…  make money from sex work.  The clients…pay for sex work.  This is a relationship, this is negotiation and this is a system in our culture.  Yet our laws, social mores and the morality police tell us it’s scandalous – a one-way ticket to hell.  Or jail, if you live in Sweden.  All this assumes that sex workers and clients are supposedly doing something wrong.  But what makes it wrong?  The government, even when it legalises or reforms laws in favour of sex workers, does not want to be seen to be endorsing sex work – just regulating it for those who are in it and need ”protection”.  What are we being protected from?  Why should it be reasonable to criminalise the negotiation of financial arrangements for sex?  Rape is criminal.  Violent assault is criminal.  But consensual sex with a dollar figure attached to it is not.  In [New South Wales] sex work is decriminalised and workers, clients and health advocates believe it should stay that way.  We are talking about 30 minutes or so of massage, sex, nakedness, talking, showering, then getting on with your life.  Is that evil or wrong?  Negotiate, pay or be paid, have sex, see ya later.

…Now I know what you are thinking.  It’s OK for me.  I’m articulate, educated.  I get articles published by newspapers.  I’ve been president of the Australian Sex Workers Association.  I can see what you might prefer to imagine:  a typical downtrodden, desperate sex worker without any choices or an education, struggling on the streets with pimps breathing down her neck and unable to use condoms.  Facing violence.  Facing addiction.  Facing a personal hell prescribed to her by men who want to pay for quick sex.  Let’s examine some facts.  Sydney’s…street-working area was the first site of condom use in Australia…Why?  Because street-based sex workers knew about HIV and didn’t want to catch a life-threatening disease.  In the brothels…owners were stopping sex workers from using condoms, threatening sacking, and worried about losing business.  But because street-based sex workers were demanding condom use, it made the brothel workers more able to stand up for themselves and demand condom use also…Street-based sex workers are organised about their rights in ways that go unnoticed on night-time TV cop shows…[they] are often imagined as victims…In fact, [they] are victimised by laws, police and lack of access to justice.  Not by clients who spend money to have sex with us.

The same applies to sex tourism…Even if…1 million Australian clients travelled to Thailand for sex tourism, Thai men even at the conservative estimate of 15 per cent visiting sex workers, STILL outnumber potential Australian clients 3 to 1…Thai sex workers [state] that their bread-and-butter income is from local clients and that travelling Anglo men make up only a small – but consistent and welcome – clientele.  What’s more, it is our racist Western attitudes when we see a Thai sex worker with a white, fat, old Western man that lead us to believe she is being victimised by him…But as the sex workers in the Chiang Mai offices of EMPOWER say:  ”Many fat old men are very respectful, kind, entertaining, generous and polite customers.  We don’t discriminate.”

In the words of author and sex worker Juliet November, ”Sometimes sex work is about being gentle with someone’s need for touch; sometimes it’s about being kind toward a man who’s ashamed of his body; sometimes it’s about being friendly and fun with someone who’s lonely; sometimes it’s about holding someone’s vulnerability very lightly in your hands; sometimes it’s about making someone feel desired…sometimes it’s about sharing intimacy, cigarettes and a laugh.”  So let’s rid ourselves of our prejudices and preconceptions and repeat after me:  IT’S OK TO PAY!

Secret Squirrel (July 16th, 2011)

I’ll slightly modify my own previous statement to introduce this January 5th item from Jezebel:  “I guess the concept of ‘trust’ has gone out of style.  And perhaps I’m old-fashioned or idealistic, but I think it would irreparably shatter my relationship with a person if I found out he or she had used this nasty little Secret Squirrel [procedure] on my [underwear]”:

…Infidelity DNA Testing’s incredibly creepy press release asks, “How many times have victims had the horrible feeling that their husband, wife or partner was cheating on them but were afraid to confront their partners without 100% non-disputable proof?”  Really, if there’s anything the Clinton presidency taught us, it’s that all infidelity scenarios are made much better by semen analysis.  And with just a little underwear subterfuge…satisfaction — of a sort — can be yours:

The process is real [sic] simple.  Just provide us an article of clothing preferably underwear or panties and we will do the rest.  We can identify if semen is present, make sure it’s viable for dna [sic] extraction and then do a final comparison to make sure the DNA belongs to the correct person.

He adds, “There is just no legitimate reason or lie that a wife can come up with for having another man’s semen in her panties.”  And why stop with wives?  Users can submit men’s underwear too, to be tested for semen or for incriminating ladyjuices.  The real piece de resistance of creepiness, though, is Infidelity DNA Testing’s  suggestion that you use its semen detection service to find out if “your daughter is having sex.”  Because having your child’s panties analyzed is definitely a better option than talking to her about sex…in order for it to work, your partner (or, cringe, daughter) would have to have unprotected sex and then leave underwear soiled from such sex around for you to find.  If your wife or girlfriend is doing that, chances are she’s also giving you other signs that she’s cheating.  And if you’re even thinking about stealing some of her underwear for DNA analysis, your relationship is probably in trouble.  Actually, I think Infidelity DNA Testing does provide one useful service:  breakup advice.  If you are seriously considering working with them, you should break up.  And this test is actually free!

I totally agree; if you have that little trust for your wife, your relationship is doomed so you might as well save the money and just break up.  With “no fault” divorce it doesn’t matter if she’s cheating anyhow, so why bother?  And if it’s your daughter, you stand to lose a lot more from spying on her than from letting her have sex.

Where Are the Protests? (December 3rd, 2011)

From the December 30th Huffington Post:

A health alert warning residents of Michigan’s Kent County that “possibly hundreds of people have been exposed to HIV” was issued…after the arrest of David Dean Smith, a 51-year-old HIV-positive man who told police he was on a mission to infect as many people as possible, MSNBC reports.  Smith allegedly told Grand Rapids police…that over the past three years, he had engaged in unprotected sex with as many partners as he could – a number he estimated to be in the “thousands” – in an effort to infect them with HIV and kill them…Smith targeted Michigan residents as well as those living many states away, whom he contacted via Yahoo! Personals…It’s unclear why Smith chose to alert authorities of his behavior at this time, but…he has a history of mental illness which includes a recent admission…for threatening suicide….hospital records say that Smith is “sexually aroused by causing pain to females”…

Now, I don’t believe for one second that “thousands” of women gave this loony free bareback pussy.  But as I wrote in the previous column, “Where are all the protests, the online petitions and the expensive full-page newspaper ads demanding that [Yahoo] close its [personals] section?  After all, it’s being used by [psychos] to lure [women] to their deaths!  Sure, [attempted] murder…[isn’t] as bad as prostitution, but [his method involved sex], so surely that counts for something?”

One Year Ago Today

“Hello, Dolly!” is a short birthday tribute to Dolly Parton (she turns 66 today), who has never disguised her admiration for and support of hookers.

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The Beat Goes On (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 18, 2012| 13 Comments »

Charleston was once the rage, uh huh
History has turned the page, uh huh
The miniskirt’s the current thing, uh huh
Teenybopper is our newborn king, uh huh.  –  Sonny Bono, “The Beat Goes On”

What, you thought we were done with updates for the month?  We’re getting so many of these now that I’m soon going to change the way I handle them; look for a new feature, “That Was the Week That Was”, coming February 4th.

Shifting the Blame (January 26th, 2011)

Remember how last year at this time the media was still trying to blame Craigslist every time something bad happened to a hooker?  Well, they eventually realized that Backpage was now the fashionable scapegoat, and since we can’t possibly put the blame where it belongs – the laws which force prostitutes into the shadows where we can be preyed on by evil men in and out of uniform – it must be Backpage’s fault when women are killed.  Here’s what Sex Workers for Choice has to say about the recent murders in Detroit:

Over the past month, 4 women have been murdered in Detroit, MI and another two have gone missing…It is unknown at this time if the cases of the missing women are related to the recent murders, but the possibility certainly seems too unlikely of a coincidence. Police say that 3 out of the 4 murder victims had profiles on Backpage…[which] has responded by reaching out to authorities to aid in the investigation, including helping to identify a number of other websites that the women might have had profiles on.  There is a sense of déjà vu in the rush from the media and other online sources to vilify Backpage as some sort of co-conspirator in the deaths of these women.  The “Craigslist Killer” was the tipping point in helping shut down Craigslist erotic services section, and this…will no doubt fuel the already strong campaign…[against] Backpage.  What these critics ignore is that the true co-conspirator is not these advertising venues, but rather…the laws that isolate us from the protections most others take for granted.  What makes…sex workers a target for violence is not how or where we advertise, but the fact that violent predators know that those crimes…are not investigated or prosecuted as diligently…[because we] are…viewed as criminals that somehow signed on for such violence…Until we have equal rights and equal protection, the predators will continue to seek us out in any and every advertising venue available…

Real People (February 6th, 2011)

It’s interesting that the New York Times, a major proponent of the “whores are passive victims” mythology, should publish this profile of an independent, strong willed streetwalker:

Like many single mothers, Barbara Terry, 52, scrounged for baby sitters and leaned on her own mother while raising her four children and working the night shift.  But Ms. Terry is a prostitute who has worked nearly her entire adult life on the streets of Hunts Point, in the Bronx.  “When they were old enough to understand, I would tell them the truth,” said Ms. Terry, whose daughter and three sons are now grown.  “I’d say, ‘This is how I’m supporting you.’  For me, it’s a business, a regular job.”  Yes, she said, she was arrested more than 100 times, sometimes landing at Rikers Island for several days or weeks — but that never deterred her from returning…Today, Ms. Terry lives nearby in the Bronx, but she hopes to retire in a year or so to a house she bought upstate…“I’ve survived because God was with me,” Ms. Terry said.  “Every Sunday, my mother and grandmother prayed for me out here”…

The story has a heaping helping of lurid detail, but never tries to deny Terry agency or paint her as emotionally damaged.  And though a story like this wouldn’t be unusual in the Canadian media (as you’ll see in the story below), I think it’s the closest thing to “sex work is work” we’re likely to see in the mainstream American media for a very long time.

Harm Magnification (May 15th, 2011)

The Canadian government, like its bloated US counterpart, seems intent on continuing the prohibitionist laws and policies which create crime, expose many thousands of citizens to danger and cause incalculable damage to society.  But unlike their U.S. counterparts, the Canadian media are refusing to be the stooges of their government.  Rather than mindlessly parroting “trafficking”  mythology in order to support anti-prostitute tyranny, Canadian reporters are almost universally laying the blame for harm to sex workers where it belongs:  on the bad laws and the evil actions of the police.  And though the American version of Huffington Post is happy to “cater…to the current fashionable delusions about us”, the Canadian edition is equally happy to go whichever way the wind is blowing up there:

…Repression from police has pushed prostitution into more dangerous, isolated parts of [Montreal], making sex workers more vulnerable to violence, said Anna-Louise Crago…[of the] advocacy group…Stella…”Criminalization and police repression against sex workers, our clients, and our work places make it impossible to work in safer conditions.”  Experts say the same pattern of repression has been repeated in other cities across Canada, making prostitution a more dangerous job.  In Vancouver, police engaged in a decades-long campaign to move prostitutes into the more isolated Downtown Eastside, where…it [was easier] for [serial killer Robert] Pickton and other predators to target women…

It’s not illegal to be a prostitute in Canada, but many of the activities associated with prostitution are classified as criminal offences…the ambivalence has caused confusion in the courts and made it difficult for police to do their job.  Efforts to protect sex workers often appear to be at odds with the police’s attempt to crack down on prostitution.  That seemed to be the case in December when Ottawa police chief Vern White, faced with a possible serial killer targeting prostitutes, warned them to be extra cautious.  Advocacy groups countered that it was the force’s very own tactics of aggressive policing and repression that had forced them into more dangerous situations.  A study…based on interviews with more than 200 sex workers between 2006 and 2008, found a link between prostitutes who reported having been harassed or assaulted by a police officer and the likelihood they were victims of violence in future.  In Montreal, Stella has recorded between 50 and 60 cases of violence, including rape, brutal beatings, and attempted murder against sex workers annually.  Yet only four or five cases reach the courts every year [because] the victims are often afraid to press charges…

…The debate about how to cut back on the violence may end up being settled by the courts.  The [government is] trying to overturn a lower court ruling in which a judge struck down three laws against prostitution, saying they force people in the sex trade to choose between obeying the law and keeping themselves safe.  Sex workers argue that the laws prevent them from working indoors where it’s safer, taking time to talk to a potential client to assess the risk they pose and hiring bodyguards.  The…government maintains that protecting victims of exploitation and supporting the enforcement of existing laws should be a priority…The top court’s ruling in support of the Vancouver safe-injection site Insite has given advocates cause for optimism…”That judgment gives us a lot of hope,” said [Stella’s director Emilie] Laliberte, who is also a former sex worker. “For us, it’s a really important sign that even though the government doesn’t want to respect our rights the courts will.”

American media would obediently echo the government’s ludicrous claim that persecuting whores somehow makes “victims of exploitation” safer, but the Canadian reporter dismisses it in a line.  Perhaps one day the American media may grow that bold again, but probably not for a few years yet.

One Year Ago Today

“January Miscellanea” reported that the Dutch government had announced plans to collect sales tax on prostitution; that the city of Modesto, California recognizes prostitution as a victimless crime yet persecutes hookers anyhow; and that ultra-enlightened Sweden claims prostitutes can infallibly be recognized by our clothing.  And four other items, too!

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Not for Everybody

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 17, 2012| 22 Comments »

A dream to some; a nightmare to others. – Merlin (Nicol Williamson) in Excalibur

One of the central goals of this blog is to help people realize that prostitution is completely natural female behavior; it actually predates marriage in human development and similar behaviors appear even in non-primate species.  Most women will not hesitate to use their “erotic capital” (as Catherine Hakim calls it) to get ahead, and many have no qualms about openly using sex for material gain.  About 10% of all women have directly taken money for sex at least once, and about 1% have actually worked as prostitutes at some time in their lives.  As George Bataille put it, “Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude”; in other words, full-time professional prostitution occupies one end of a whole spectrum of female behaviors on which it is impossible to draw a line separating the whore from the non-whore.

Obviously, only about 5% of all women (the historical percentage of the female population involved in the trade at any given time) feel comfortable enough with formal, professional prostitution to be able to actually make a living at it; in my column of one year ago today I discussed Amanda Brooks’ theory that such women, who often feel drawn to the profession from an early age as I did, might actually be genetically predisposed to it.  In other words, there might be a “hooker gene”, and harlotry might be a sexual orientation just as homosexuality is.  The comparison is an apt one: just as some men find ecstasy in homosexual activity while others are utterly repulsed by it, so for some women whoring is a dream job while others find it a total nightmare.

Those who consider homosexuality “unnatural” might be inclined to use the comparison to argue that prostitution is equally unnatural (despite this view flying in the face of facts); for those who are so tempted, let me point out that motherhood is as natural a role for women as one could ever imagine, yet I doubt any sane person would disagree that there are some women who are totally unfit for it.  No life-path or career is suitable for everyone, and as long as those who are unsuited to a given role avoid it there is no issue.  But when a woman who is repulsed by motherhood becomes pregnant, or one who has difficulties dealing with people is forced into a job in which public contact is unavoidable, nobody should be surprised when serious problems ensue.  And if a woman who dislikes men or has sexual hang-ups (or both) is forced by circumstance into prostitution, the result can be an unmitigated disaster.

I’m not talking about women who simply aren’t cut out for whoredom; there are lots of those, which is why 10x as many women have tried hooking as have actually stuck with it for a time.  The majority of women who directly take money for sex once or a few times simply decide it’s not for them (for whatever reason) and find some other way to make a living.  But there are a small number who should never have even tried it in the first place, yet are driven by necessity, desperation or actual coercion to practice it for weeks, months or even years; such women are among the worst enemies our profession ever had.  Because they hate the work, they tend to see and remember only the negative aspects.  And because many of them are emotionally damaged even before entering prostitution (due to whatever trauma caused them to hate men and/or sex), and virtually all of them became even more damaged by having to endure what for them was a loathsome existence, they either become fanatics on their own or are easily driven to fanaticism by the prohibitionists.  These are the women who call themselves “survivors” and learn to “reframe their experiences”  (i.e. lie to make their stories more lurid and to more closely conform to anti-whore rhetoric).  They are the mainstays of “john schools” and provide ammunition to prohibitionists who represent their highly-embroidered claims as typical of sex work and even multiply the accounts by changing small details so as to make them sound like different-but-similar tales rather than one repeated ad nauseum.  The very worst of them (as typified by Somaly Mam) are so obsessed with their own darkness that they are willing to utterly destroy the lives of any real human beings who get in the way of their quixotic crusades against private behavior that is literally impossible to eradicate as long as humans remain human.

In a world where individuals were allowed control over their own bodies and the decisions of adults (however strange those choices might seem to others) were always respected by the “authorities”, fanatics who were harmed through ill-fortune or harmed themselves through their own poor choices would have no power over other, less damaged individuals.  But unfortunately we do not yet live in such a world; even in jurisdictions which have legalized prostitution to one degree or another, governments believe they have the authority to abrogate the rights of individuals for whatever excuse strikes their collective fancy (provided they can convince the masses to lie still for it).  As we saw in Rhode Island two years ago, a small group of vocal fanatics can easily convince the “authorities” to strip away rights held without challenge for decades, and  one of the chief weapons of such fanatics is the emotionally-damaged “reluctant whore” who refuses to accept that her feelings or experiences are anything other than typical.

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Fictional Interlude: Palindrome

Posted in Fiction, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on January 16, 2012| 31 Comments »

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward,  backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.  –  Ralph Waldo Emerson

The dream had been so lovely; Anna was walking barefoot across a field of wildflowers along the verge of a wood, not in a park but in some unspoiled place without fences, signs or crowds.  The sun was shining on her face and birds were singing, and she came across a stag caught by his antlers in a thicket.  He was absolutely magnificent, but all his great strength was useless against the bramble in which he had become entwined.  She knew that if she left him there he would soon become easy prey for some predator, so she moved slowly, gingerly toward him, intending to pull the thorns away with her bare hands if necessary so he might go free.  But just as she reached out for the nearest of the vines, she was shocked awake by the slamming of the outer door and the braying voice of the guard announcing breakfast.

It was the same thing every day.  There was no earthly reason why any of them needed to wake up at a particular time; it wasn’t like the food was hot or worth getting up for, and even if one of them was going to be released or transferred that rarely happened before noon.  It was just part of the petty sadism which characterized nearly every prison procedure, like the lights being kept on all night and the prisoners being reshuffled every few days to keep friendships from forming.  Anna tried not to let it break her down; for example, once the guard had left she would simply cover her head again and go back to sleep, letting the others take what they wanted from her breakfast tray.  But today was different; the guard actually came into the cell and shook her roughly.

“Get up, Cleopatra; you’re rolling out this morning.”  The guards had lots of stupid, mocking nicknames for her; she tried to ignore that as well.  But the rest of that statement was definitely unexpected.

“What do you mean, rolling out?”

“Just what I said, Princess; your presence has been requested elsewhere.”

Anna knew better than to inquire further; if she expressed any interest at all the guard would refuse to answer on principle.  She’d find out soon enough.  For a moment she wondered if this might not be some sort of mental torture, but quickly realized the guards didn’t have that kind of imagination.  Then she dared to think for a moment that she might have been paroled, but immediately strangled the idea before it could grow into a hope.  It was better just to wait and expect the worst.

Four and a half hours later, the wait finally ended; the guard came back and told her to stand, roughly jerking her by the arm without waiting for her to get up on her own.  She was then hustled to an anteroom and given back her own clothes, the ones she was wearing when she was arrested; they were wrinkled and had a musty odor, but she still preferred them to the horrible, shapeless prison uniform and so she eagerly exchanged the latter for the former, heedless of the guards she knew were leering at her through the two-way mirror.

She then exited through the far end of the room as instructed, where she was met by one of the dress-uniform guards who interacted with government officials and the like; next to her was a woman in a lab coat, accompanied by what Anna assumed was an orderly.  So that’s what this was about; she had been committed to a psychiatric facility.  She wasn’t surprised, and was in fact relieved; the treatment there couldn’t be any worse than it was here.

And indeed, it wasn’t.  The nurse was friendly and the orderly didn’t bully her; the ride was long and peaceful and Anna slept for most of it, and when the nurse woke her it was with a gentle shake rather than the slam of a door.  The state hospital at the end of the journey was still a prison, of course; the doors were just as locked and the guards just as vigilant, but she had a private room with a soft bed and the lights were actually turned off at night.  The food was good and she was able to eat sitting at a real table in the cafeteria rather than from a tray in her lap; there was even a little park, thought it was surrounded on all sides by the walls of the huge facility.

For a whole week, she was largely left to her own devices; she listened to music and read books from the ward’s library, and every night they screened a movie.  Other than the locked doors and the rigid schedule, the only real reminders that she was in a hospital were the various medical tests and questionnaires to which she was subjected, and the technicians were always polite and friendly.  It was so nice, in fact, that Anna began to think that if it weren’t for the lack of privacy this might not be a bad place for a holiday.

Then on the morning of the ninth day, the chief ward nurse told her that she had been assigned a doctor and would start her therapy that afternoon.  Anna actually found herself looking forward to that; everyone else here was so pleasant, she couldn’t imagine the doctor being less so.  For the first time, she allowed herself to accept the idea that maybe it might be nice to be cured of her problem, to be able to live like everybody else and form normal relationships as her friends did.  Perhaps it might even be possible for her to eventually forgive Eve for turning her in; after all, she had done it because she was worried about Anna, and was clearly remorseful when she found out about the brutal way her friend had been treated by the police.

Dr. Lil was a somewhat plump, maternal woman in late middle age, and Anna instantly liked her; she therefore resolved that she would cooperate in every way possible so as to hasten the day when she could rejoin society as a healthy, functioning member, and told the doctor so.

“How wonderful!” she said with genuine emotion.  “I’m so very glad to hear you say that, Anna; you see, it was I who initiated the process to have you transferred here.  I reviewed your case history and interviewed your friends, and I could clearly see you weren’t an incorrigible deviant.”  She opened the folder to refresh her memory.  “Now, in school you never showed any signs of perversion; when did you first start feeling sexual attraction to men?”

(With grateful acknowledgement to the work of Charles Beaumont).

One Year Ago Today

“Convenient and Inconvenient Victims” examines the way that government defines consenting individuals as victims, or else victims as consenting individuals, depending on what’s convenient for the government.

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Universal Criminality

Posted in Current Events, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2012| 142 Comments »

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.  –  Frederick Douglass

For years I’ve warned that the United States was moving toward a state I call “universal criminality”; as I explained in my column of one year ago today, governments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries realized that the easiest and most subtle means of social control is simply to establish so many complex, broad, vague, mutually contradictory and intrusive laws that every single person is in violation of at least some of them at any given time.  Then when any “authority” from the chief executive down to the lowliest cop wants to teach one of the peons a lesson, all he has to do is find a law to charge him with and the machine then proceeds to grind him up psychologically, financially, politically and often physically.

The process began with the “social purity” laws which criminalized behaviors (such as drinking, prostitution or even masturbation) which were previously considered private.  It then grew during the Great Depression, proliferated in the post-World War II era (mostly under the excuse of “security”), and increased exponentially after the mid-1980s, at which point I began to see the writing on the wall.  There are now so many criminal laws that they are literally uncountable; the last serious attempt to enumerate them was made in 1982, and that failed miserably.  The Department of Justice estimates that there are over 4500 federal “crimes” and over 300,000 regulations with felony-level criminal penalties, and that grows by over 50 new “crimes” and innumerable regulations every year.  And that’s only federal crimes; multiply that number by some other x factor (10-40 perhaps?) to estimate the number of state laws, and roughly 40,000 new state laws went into effect on January 1st.  Then there are county and municipal laws…

Obviously it’s impossible for anyone to know all of these, but “ignorance of the law is no excuse”; the requirement for the prosecution to prove mens rea (criminal intent) was discarded sometime in the ‘90s, and juries are routinely instructed that if the prosecution can prove the facts they must vote to convict even if they believe the defendant did not intend to do anything wrong.  Of course, that only applies to citizens; government actors, including cops, lawyers and even judges, are excused as “acting in good faith” even when a defense attorney can prove that a victim has been charged with something that isn’t a crime, or when the cop or lawyer actively breaks laws himself in order to persecute a victim.  Given all these facts, no one can declare with certainty when the goal of universal criminality in the United States was reached, but it’s probable that it happened sometime in the last decade when politicians again used the excuse of “security” to gut the Bill of Rights, shred the last intact portions of the constitution and establish procedures which enshrined police and other government actors as de facto nobles, a ruling class who are subject to neither laws nor common human decency.

Cops are now allowed to arrest anyone for any reason (including “suspicion”); invade the homes of citizens without cause or warrant; maim or murder them (and their children and pets) without consequence; steal their property (and keep it even if the victim is never charged with a crime); and brutalize, rob and arrest anyone who tries to document the behavior.  Citizen complaints are either ignored or handled with token “investigations” by the same department which is accused of the crimes; these “investigations” invariably result in exoneration of the criminal “officers” or infliction of penalties so minor they constitute a further insult to the victims.  Prosecutors can charge one action or group of actions with any of dozens of charges, and will generally reserve several so if the first trial goes against them, they can use the others to get a new trial for the same offense without violating prohibitions against double jeopardy; even with no reasonable grounds for prosecution they can often continue the process indefinitely until they either “win” or bankrupt and ruin the defendant.  They routinely lie, threaten and withhold exculpatory evidence, because the SCOTUS has granted them absolute immunity from either criminal or civil charges for their actions.  And most judges are either tyrants who ignore the law to enforce their own whims, or bored bureaucrats who let cops and prosecutors get away with whatever they like.  However, if any of these employees of the “justice system” commits a crime, it will be swept under the rug, excused completely or “punished” with a sentence several orders of magnitude less than that with which a private citizen would be inflicted.

Want to know what it’s like to live in a police state?  Look around you.  Like the legendary frog, Americans have remained content to sit in the pot while the temperature has gradually increased, and we’re all well and truly cooking now.  The last of our civil liberties are being stripped away at a frightening rate, Congress is moving to take control of the internet, and the president recently signed legislation giving himself the power to use the military to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without charge or trial if they own guns, are missing fingers or have more than 7 days’ worth of food in their houses.  The government no longer even pretends to answer to the people:  half of all Americans now recognize it as “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens”, only 5% of Americans believe that Congress is doing a decent job, and a White House spokesman recently declared the majority of Americans who support marijuana legalization to be “extremists”.  If you haven’t yet read Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” (as featured in my January 7th column), now might be a good time to do so.

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2011 in Review

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 14, 2012| 31 Comments »

London Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. This blog was viewed about 400,000 times in 2011.  If it were competing at London Olympic Stadium, it would take about 5 sold-out events for that many people to see it.  –  WordPress.com presents The Honest Courtesan 2011 in blogging

One of the things I really, really like about WordPress is that it provides lots of statistics; the statistics page displays a bar graph of page views (with tabs to view it in days, weeks or months); a running total of both daily and all-time views (and summary tables breaking it down by weeks, months and years) for the blog as a whole and breaking it down by post and page; numbers and links of all sites and searches which bring visitors to the blog; and the number of clicks on links in my blog (with all figures broken down by day, week, month, quarter, year and all time).  And on top of that, I can see subscribers, comments and even spam totals.  Then, WordPress provides an annual year-end report I’ve decided to share with you; today I want to look at some “top ten” numbers.  Some of the exact figures which don’t appear as such in the official report are only approximate though stated as if exact, because they are displayed for the previous year from the date they are observed; in other words, since I’m writing this on January 4th the figures for January 1st-3rd of last year have been replaced by those from January 1st-3rd of this year.  I think my readers will forgive me for the minor inaccuracy thus produced.

I received a total of 404,824 visitors in 2011 (and that is an exact figure); the average number of hits per day was 1109.  My best month was April, with a total of 47,224 views (1574 per day) and my best day was January 31st, with a total of 3486 views in a single day (thanks to Radley Balko’s featuring a link to “Numerology” on The Agitator).  That site gave me the second-greatest number of referrals for the year, 2815 in all; it was exceeded only by Psychology Today (specifically, Satoshi Kanazawa’s article “Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?”), from which I received 3574 hits in all.  #3 was the WordPress homepage with 2678, #4 Google Reader with 2193, #5 Metafilter with 1858, #6 Facebook with 1365, #7 The Dallas Observer (specifically Pete Kotz’s article “The Super Bowl Prostitute Myth”) with 1119, #8 ECCIE with 868, #9 Kelly Michaels’ Satisfy the Crave with 867 and #10 EconJeff with 668.  I’d also like to acknowledge #11-20, each of whom referred 326-627 hits: Twitter, Canada Adult Fun, USA Sex Guide, The Spearhead, Sina More’s blog, Jaded Haven,  The Player, TER, A Voice for Men and Bound, Not Gagged.  On the other hand, the most often-clicked links on my blog in 2011 were Brandy’s Bedroom with 941 clicks, Vixen for Hire with 643, Bound, Not Gagged with 609, Feminisn’t with 589, Sex Hysteria! with 508, Sincerely, Kelly James with 506, The Naked Anthropologist with 490, After Hours with 470, Stuff Sex Workers Eat with 461 and Harlot’s Parlour with 448.

Google accounted for roughly 95% of all of my search engine hits last year, and the most common search was for some version of “the honest courtesan” (roughly 9013 hits).  Some permutation of “texas counties” or “texas county map” brought in roughly 5628 hits, “veronica franco” brought 3591, “maggie mcneill” and variations 3273, “pompeii” 2608, “mira sorvino” 2271, various “ashley madison” combinations 1727, “sofa bed” 1374, “wife swapping” and variations 1214 and “plaçage” 793 (see “Top Ten” from last August for an explanation of the strange terms).  A few honorable mentions:  “broken condom”, “madame de pompadour”, “hells angels”, “prostitute”, “grimoire”, “mecca”, “phryne”, “mardi gras tits”, “storyville” and “yellow rose of texas”.

Due to image searches (as explained in “Top Ten”) my top ten posts were as follows:

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits in 2011
Coming and Going                                  February 10th, 2011                6,353
Courtesan Denial                                    December 4th, 2010                4,632
Meretrices and Prostibulae                     November 3rd, 2010                4,396
Numerology                                            January 24th, 2011                  3,741
Ashley Madison                                      January 30th, 2011                  3,569
Who Did Your Tits?                                 October 1st, 2010                    3,328
Acting and Activism                                 January 8th, 2011                   2,860
Black Men                                               September 18th, 2010             2,741
Wife Swapping                                       November 20th, 2010              2,547
Plaçage                                                   November 22nd, 2010             2,409

And here’s the corrected list:

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits in 2011
Numerology                                            January 24th, 2011                  3,741
Ashley Madison                                       January 30th, 2011                  3,569
Black Men                                               September 18th, 2010              2,741
Wife Swapping                                       November 20th, 2010               2,547
Plaçage                                                   November 22nd, 2010              2,409
All Shapes and Sizes                               September 8th, 2010               2,012
A Whore in the Bedroom                         September 9th, 2010               1,904
Japanese Prostitution                             October 21st, 2010                  1,852
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day   March 3rd, 2011                       1,831
Handy Figures                                         June 11th, 2011                      1,703

The top post by comment hasn’t changed much since August:

Name                                            Date                     # of comments by 12/31/11
That Is So Hot!                             April 19th, 2011                       195
Speaking in Prostitute                  June 17th, 2011                       171
The Enlightenment Police             October 1st, 2011                    144
Their Lips Are Moving                   April 25th, 2011                        132
Pendulum                                     April 9th, 2011                          131
Creeping Rot                                April 18th, 2011                        123
Public Service Announcement       June 12th, 2011                       120
Savaging                                      March 27th, 2011                     115
Neither Cold Nor Hot                    April 6th, 2011                          114
Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic     December 4th, 2011                 104

…and the nine top commenters (after myself) were Sailor Barsoom with 1302, Laura with 730, Asehpe with 301, Gorbachev with 280, Krulac with 277, Comixchik with 206, Marla with 197, C Andrew with 189 and Aspasia with 101.

Probably the most interesting report to me is the one on where my visitors live, which appears only in the year-end report; I’d really like to see WordPress include it with the other daily data.  It doesn’t give exact numbers and the fractions were calculated on a continent-by-continent basis rather than worldwide, with proportions represented by graphics on a map.  Just eyeballing it, I’d say about 34% of my readers are in North America, 25% in Europe, 17% in Oceania, 12% in Asia, 8% in Africa and 4% in South America.

North America:  93.5% United States, 6.2% Canada and 0.1% Mexico
Europe:  39.7% United Kingdom, 15.2% Germany, 4.3% Norway, 4.1% Ireland and 3.9% Greece
Oceania:  92.4% Australia, 7.4% New Zealand
Asia:  25.5% Singapore, 12.6% India, 8.2% Malaysia, 7.5% The Philippines and 6.5% South Korea
Africa:  45.1% South Africa, 15.2% Nigeria, 13.8% Kenya, 6.7% Egypt and 4.0% Ghana
South America:  47.0% Brazil, 30.7% Colombia, 10.1% Argentina, 4.6% Chile and 3.0% Peru

I’m really pleased by these numbers, especially considering that only about a third of my readers are in my own country; most of the thanks for that go to my readers, who enthusiastically spread links to my posts all over the internet.  You’re helping me to speak out against all the lies, misinformation and tyranny, and thereby hastening the day when prohibitionist propaganda is seen by the average reasonable person with the same skepticism he might view any other outlandish bigotry.

One Year Ago Today

“What’s the Buzz” cites several articles about the “invisible majority” of sex workers, those who pretty much look and act like anybody else you might meet in public.

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Friday the Thirteenth Times Three

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 13, 2012| 32 Comments »

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.  –  P.J. O’Rourke

Today is the third Friday the Thirteenth since I’ve been writing The Honest Courtesan, and there will be three such days this year (today, April 13th and July 13th); as it so happens, three is the maximum number of such days in any given year, though each year has at least one.  In my very first column on the subject (Friday, August 13th, 2010) I explained how the superstition arose and why even superstitious whores should consider it lucky for us rather than unlucky:

Given the origin of beliefs about Friday the 13th…even the superstitious whore has nothing to worry about…since Friday is the day sacred to our patron goddess, and 13 the most feminine of numbers, Friday the 13th should be good luck for whores even if it really were bad luck for Christian men.  Now, I’m not really superstitious; I don’t believe that a day can bring either good luck or bad.  But considering that the reasons for fear of this day are so closely related to the reasons our profession is maligned and suppressed, perhaps whores and those who support our rights should make every Friday the Thirteenth a day to speak out in favor of full decriminalization and an end to the institutionalized persecution of prostitutes.

Nine months later (on Friday, May 13th, 2011) I explained why it’s especially important for my readers who aren’t sex workers to speak out:

A number of advocates are working to respond to the lies, propaganda and misinformation wherever we find them, but…we’re often accused of distorting facts to make ourselves look good, and no matter how assiduously we work to present a balanced view this is a natural and credible accusation against anyone who advocates for some issue which directly concerns her.  That’s why allies are so important; it’s much harder for the prohibitionists to shout down people who don’t have a dog in the fight, but merely support prostitutes’ rights on moral grounds.  Every Friday the Thirteenth I will ask my readers, especially those of you who aren’t yourselves sex workers, to speak up for us in some way; talk about the issue with someone who will listen, make a post on a discussion board, comment on a news story which spreads disinformation, or even just post a link to this column.  If you aren’t confident in your ability to debate, even a simple phrase like “I think adult women should have the right to decide why and with whom they want to have sex” or “everyone has the right to equal protection under the law” might have a tiny but important impact on those who overhear.  Because in the final analysis, they’re the ones we have to convince; rational people already support some type of prostitution-law reform and fanatics cannot be convinced by argument because their minds are already made up, but the silent majority – the fence-sitters and swing-voters, the ones who answer “unsure” or “no comment” on polls – are the ones who can and must be made to understand that we are not intrinsically different from other women and deserve the same freedoms and protections that non-harlots take for granted.

Last time around I also offered a synopsis of prohibitionist victories since the last such day, but since I already offered a similar list just two weeks ago I think that would be inexcusably repetitious.  And though there are several other days dedicated to fighting for sex worker rights (namely International Sex Workers’ Rights Day on March 3rd,  International Whores’ Day on June 2nd and International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers on December 17th), human rights are not something to be discussed only once a year; even six occasions to speak out on the subject are not enough.  For me and many others, every day is Friday the Thirteenth, and so it must remain until people wake up and understand that no collective, “authority” or government has the right to tell women what we can and cannot do with our own bodies.

One Year Ago Today

“Harm Reduction” explains the concept of “conditions of victory” and points out that if someone defines “victory” in a struggle as “the achievement of complete and everlasting perfection” he is doomed to eternal disappointment.  The essay further examines the vital social role played by prostitution and comments on the insanity of attempting to suppress it.

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Symptomology

Posted in Current Events, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 12, 2012| 10 Comments »

Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point…In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.  –  Johan Huizinga

One year ago today I published “Social Autoimmune Disorder”, in which I compared anti-sex worker laws and police activity to autoimmune disorders:

The bodies of societies sometimes also develop such syndromes; the systems which were meant to protect society from invaders or other troublesome organisms are instead turned against some of its own systems, sometimes even vital systems.  And just as in biological autoimmune disorders, those who are affected most are usually women.

There have been further developments in all the cases I mentioned in that column:  Taiwan still suffers from the disorder despite a predicted remission, but in the UK a police official who supports getting rid of bad laws was promoted to assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard.  In the United States the persecution of escort advertising websites has only grown worse, and AHF’s campaign to force porn actors to use its sponsors’ products is about to come to a head; meanwhile, the virulent Swedish strain of social autoimmune disease has continued to spread through Europe.

The most dangerous form of the disease is direct police violence against sex workers; we’ve discussed it often here, but it’s always nice to see it acknowledged in a larger venue, such as this recent Chi Mgbako article from Reality Check:

When we think of violence against sex workers, we conjure up images of dangerous clients and serial killers who target prostitutes…[but] one area that receives scant public attention despite its entrenched global reality is police abuse of sex workers.  The illegal status of sex work in most countries has not eradicated prostitution.  Instead, criminalization has increased sex workers’ vulnerability to human rights abuses and created fertile ground for police exploitation, especially of street-based sex workers.  For example, in South Africa, where sex work has been illegal since the former apartheid regime criminalized it in 1957, police officers often fine sex workers inordinate sums of money and pocket the cash, resulting in a pattern of economic extortion of sex workers by state agents…police [also] confiscate condoms to use as evidence of prostitution; demand sexual favors in exchange for release from jail or to avoid arrest; physically assault and rape sex workers; actively encourage or passively condone inmate sexual abuse of transgender female sex workers assigned to male prison cells; and use municipal laws to harass and arrest sex workers even when they’re engaged in activities unrelated to prostitution…

Police abuse of sex workers…is echoed in documented reports throughout the world, from New York City to Cambodia to Papua New Guinea to Eastern Europe and beyond.  Police are also often impediments to sex workers’ access to justice.  “To gather evidence of a crime against a sex worker, they have to first take it seriously,” argues one sex worker about the lack of police attention to reports of violence.  “If we go to the police to report abuse, we’re made fun of, we’re told ‘you deserve it.’  They chase you away,” notes another sex worker.  In addition, because of the continual police harassment they face, many sex workers don’t bother to officially report abuse to police.  Most sex workers’ experience with criminal justice systems is not as survivors of abuse but as “perpetrators” of the “crime” of prostitution.

Of course, not all police officers abuse sex workers…but the moral stigma that is attached to the criminalization of prostitution often leads to the deeply offensive attitude, on the part of some police, prosecutors, and others, that sex workers somehow consent to abuse.  Prohibitionist legal regimes insist that all sex workers are criminals, making it almost impossible for society to view sex workers as legitimate victims of violent crime when it occurs…Decriminalization would allow sex workers to come out of the shadows and defend their rights, ensuring that the crimes committed against them by police and others will no longer be hidden…Sex workers deserve the basic respect and protection from violence that each nation owes its citizens.

Of course, there are many benighted souls who subscribe to the “NHI” doctrine and therefore believe that prostitutes “deserve” violence; many of these moral retards are lawyers in positions of power.  But laws which criminalize prostitutes have an indirect effect on all women, and sometimes – as illustrated in this December 21st story from the Phnom Penh Post – on the entire society:

Laws and policies the government has enacted to fight crime are hampering efforts to combat public health threats, including HIV/AIDS, and are leading to human rights abuses…“We think that the laws cracking down on drug and human trafficking remain problematic because after their enforcement, we see that condom distribution has gone down and sexually transmitted disease is on the rise,” public health expert Kem Ley told [a government forum]…Health officials identified the 2008 Law on the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation, the 2005 Law on the Control of Drugs and the 2010 village and commune safety guidelines as containing articles and points that have led to harmful consequences in terms of public health and human rights…Sex work is confused with human trafficking, and police crack down harder on sex workers as a result, he said, adding the drug law blurred the lines between users, traffickers and producers…

As one would expect, the government officials insisted that their wonderful laws could not possibly be at fault; social autoimmune disorders thrive in such a climate of denial.  And so the sickness continues until it spreads to other vital social systems…and eventually progresses beyond the point where the patient can be saved.

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