Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for January, 2012

Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 11, 2012| 34 Comments »

I’ve got some news that maybe isn’t news. – Robert Frost, “The Housekeeper”

“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often.  But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”  We’ve all heard this quote with which I opened my column of one year ago today, and though most people would agree on it many soi-disant “journalists” don’t any more.  As I said in that column,

…such things are presented as news every day.  Sometimes…[it’s] because of the unusual size of the dog or the sheer number of people bitten; sometimes it’s just a slow news day, and very often such stories are the equivalent of the patter, lovely assistant and other misdirection used by a conjurer to draw attention away from what he’s actually doing.  But in some cases “dog bites man” stories become newsworthy because the media have succeeded in convincing enough people that dogs actually don’t bite men, so when it happens in a public place silly people are either surprised or must at least pretend to be…[they] either don’t recognize [such stories] as examples of “dog bites man” or else believe that dogs do not in fact generally bite men;  they therefore react by feigning surprise, denying that the story actually describes an incident of canine aggression, or questioning the veracity of the report.

A perfect example of this appeared in Huffington Post on Monday and was called to my attention yesterday by the Human Scorch:

Men and women are more alike than different — that’s been the consensus view for many years among the researchers who study personality differences between the sexes.  But a new study claims this wisdom is wrong.  By correcting for measurement errors, three researchers put forth a study that was published on Wednesday on the Public Library of Science website saying they’ve found that men and women feel and behave in markedly different ways.  They’re almost like “different species,” [said] Paul Irwing, one of the researchers…The research, conducted by Marco Del Giudice of Italy’s University of Turin and Irwing and Tom Booth of the UK’s University of Manchester, involved getting 10,000 Americans to take a questionnaire that measured 15 different personality traits.  According to their analysis, men are far more dominant, reserved, utilitarian, vigilant, rule-conscious, and emotionally stable, while women are far more deferential, warm, trusting, sensitive, and emotionally “reactive.”  The two sexes were roughly the same when it came to perfectionism, liveliness, and abstract versus practical thinking.  “If you translate it into the simplest terms,” said Irwing, “only 18 percent of men and women match in terms of personality profiles, and that’s staggeringly different from the consensus view.”  [That] …view…[is championed by] Janet Shibley Hyde, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, [who in 2005] demonstrated through a meta-analysis of 46 other studies that men and women were actually very similar, not only in personality traits, but in other realms of supposed gender difference, like self-esteem, leadership, and math ability…

In past studies on this topic, researchers would simply add up all the survey responses, according to Del Giudice. This led to imperfect results because of careless responses and misreadings.  Through a sophisticated method called “structure equation modeling,” the researchers claim they were able to remove this random error.  When asked if he could translate this concept for a lay person, Irwing replied: “I teach courses on this and it takes me approximately 20 hours.”  Past research also usually compared one variable at a time, Del Giudice said.  He believes this method led to underestimations of the sex difference because when you actually combine all personality traits, with all their small discrepancies, the result is a much more significant difference.  For example, if you were to examine the difference between men and women’s body types using the traditional method, you would look at torso circumference and waist-hip ratios and torso-leg ratios, one by one.  In Del Giudice’s method, you would crunch all these figures into one much larger number. And that’s what he did with personality…Del Giudice contends that his team didn’t measure “a haphazard list of traits.” Rather, they considered 15 facets that could offer a reasonably complete picture of a person’s personality.

Irwing thinks that some researchers in the past may have been biased in their methods, in order to reduce any gender difference. “It’s for totally laudable reasons,” he said.  “People are very concerned, or were very concerned, that women didn’t get equal opportunities, and that there was a lot of bias in selection processes…[they] are afraid that studies like ours will turn the clock back,” Irwing added.  Hyde is one of those people.  “This huge difference is not only scientifically false,” she said, “it has unfortunate consequences for places like the workplace and education and heterosexual romantic relationships.”  But the authors stand by their results, and are currently drafting a lengthy response to Hyde’s objections.  “I think distorting science because of what you would like to believe, or because of what you think the political consequences are, is very dangerous,” said Irwing.

The study doesn’t speculate as to whether the alleged differences are due to nature or nurture, although Irwing points out the results are consistent with… evolutionary theory.  Even if these differences aren’t indelibly printed in our genes, Hyde believes there’s still cause for alarm.  If men and women have wildly different personalities, “then how can we do the same job men can, and deserve equal pay for equal work?” she asked.  “A married couple have marital difficulties, and they go to the therapist, who says ‘he’s from Mars, you’re from Venus, you’ll never be able to communicate.  It’s hopeless.’  If you have a gender similarities point of view, you just need to work on communicating.”

The reporter’s bias is as impossible to miss as Hyde’s; the doctrine of androgyny is referred to from the first line as “wisdom” and it was “demonstrated” by Hyde, while gender differences are only “supposed” and “alleged”.  But despite what the reporter would like to believe, the dogma that there are no important gender differences was only the “consensus” in certain schools of sociology and psychology; it is not and has never been accepted in neurology, sexology, biology, psychiatry or most schools of psychology, for the simple reason that the data don’t support it without considerable massaging of the sort practiced by Hyde (whom you will note is also a professor of “women’s studies”, a field with all the academic rigor of “scientific creationism” or “UFOlogy”).  No person who lives in the real world (or has ever had children of both sexes) can force himself to believe that men and women are largely the same physically, psychologically or in any other way; everyday experience that the sexes are extremely different can only be reconciled with the doctrine of asexuality by invoking “social construction of gender”, which is of course what agenda-driven people like Hyde promote.  The last two paragraphs reveal that agenda:  Faced with an inability to explain the facts which contradict her “theory”, Hyde falls back on political ideology and myopic nonsense.  The differences between men and women were recognized throughout human history, yet the rift between the sexes has never been greater than it has been since neofeminism and its denial of those differences appeared on the scene some 30 years ago.

Hyde’s claim that a belief in imaginary gender equivalence somehow helps marriages is an exact reversal of the truth:  denying sex differences means that there is only one standard of normal human behavior (in the minds of neofeminists, the female standard); normal male behavior is therefore pathologized, and Hyde’s “communication” invariably becomes one-way.  It’s the belief that men and women are the same which renders attempts to reconcile marital difficulties “hopeless”, because it proceeds from a faulty assumption; until the inhabitants of Mars and Venus know where each other are coming from, there is no way to navigate toward a mutually-acceptable meeting place.

Read Full Post »

A Whore in Church

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2012| 36 Comments »

What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre?  Are they two and not one?  Can they exist separate?  Are not religion and politics the same thing?  –  William Blake, Jerusalem (plate 57)

Ever heard the expression “as nervous as a whore in church” (alternately “sweating like a whore in church”)?  It is, of course, based on the bizarre but popular notion that sex (especially commercial sex) is somehow incompatible with religion, and that a hooker would therefore be nervous at a religious service.  As with so many popular myths about prostitution, nothing could be farther from the truth; whores are morally indistinguishable from women in general, run the gamut from devout to atheistic, and have the same sorts of beliefs (or lack thereof) as other women.  As we’ve discussed many times the earliest professional prostitutes were priestesses who worked in conjunction with temples, and despite the efforts of neofeminists to convince the world that they never existed and those of control freaks to persecute their modern successors for “crimes” against Christian sexual orthodoxy, they demonstrate that not everyone considers sex and religion to be incompatible.  Nor are all religiously-minded harlots pagan; though many are, and many others practice syncretisms of Christianity and paganism, the majority practice whatever religion they were raised in just as so many others do.

Erroneous prejudices like this one can only survive in a climate of ignorance; exposed to the light of truth they tend to wither away.  I know for a fact that many prostitutes are religious because as a whore myself I’ve had the opportunity to talk to and observe the behavior of dozens of my sisters.  I have been asked to pray for them or their families on many occasions, and my operator Gilda (whose story I told one year ago today) did not feel her job as an escort service dispatcher in any way made her less of a Catholic.  Even non-sex workers who take the time to talk to us often have their eyes opened; in a Christmas Eve essay on Huffington Post Rabbi Will Berkovitz told the story of an Italian priest who tried to avoid a group of streetwalkers who worked near his seminary:

The priest confessed he never spoke with the women, studiously avoided eye contact and did his best to never acknowledge their existence.  But as is often the case, willed blindness only works for so long when proximity is coupled with repetition.  And one day, while following his usual protocol of denial, the older prostitute dropped something as he was walking past.  It bounced to a stop at his foot.  Without thinking, the priest’s instinct toward kindness compelled him to pick up the thin wooden object, forcing the encounter he had so dutifully avoided for the past several months.  “It was a knitting needle,” he said, still sounding surprised.  “And out of curiosity, I asked her what she was making.”  The woman responded, “I’m knitting a tapestry for the altar at my church.  It is a gift for God.”

Tears welled up in the priest’s eyes as he recalled her response.  “In my desire to avoid her, I had never noticed the cloth in her hands.  I never bothered to look.  Never thought to ask her story.  And here this woman was knitting a gift for God.”  From that chance encounter he said, he began to learn her history.  Her background.  Her story.  And yet the priest was reluctant to share his experience with his community despite its almost biblical power and impact.

Like the priest (before Fate took a hand), those who willfully avoid thinking of sex workers as “real people” by avoiding any actual interaction with us shield their minds from the truth and can therefore believe whatever ugly nonsense they choose to invent about our immorality, selfishness, unfitness to give charity, danger to “innocent children” or other forms of moral turpitude.

Whores aren’t the only targets of Judeo-Christian prudery, though; in fact, those who embrace such beliefs usually do more damage to themselves than to anyone else by burdening themselves with sexual guilt and convincing themselves that normal sexual impulses constitute an “addiction”.  But though there are plenty of opportunists ready to capitalize on this sick view of human sexuality, there are others who make their living in exactly the opposite way:  selling sex toys to (heterosexual, married) religious couples by packaging and advertising the products without the graphic pictures and tasteless text relied on by secular distributors, and pointing out that satisfying sexual relations strengthen marriages.  And if entrepreneurs can sell dildos and whips to Christians, maybe there’s hope that they may one day return to the practical view of prostitution which characterized the medieval Church.

Read Full Post »

The More the Better

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 9, 2012| 29 Comments »

Familiarity is the test of truth.  –  Mason Cooley

Most of you have probably seen the recent articles bemoaning the fact that the recession has induced a number of women who had never previously done sex work to take such jobs (especially the legal varieties like phone sex operator, stripper or sugar baby).  And as you’ve read here, it’s the same story among escorts.  As Whitney Jefferson of Jezebel pointed out, mainstream articles on the subject tend to be characterized by anti-whore judgmentalism and the pretense of horror, which Jefferson characterizes as an “I can’t believe this is actually happening …in America” tone.  And of course one of the Jezebel commenters, demonstrating an almost total recto-cranial insertion, posted a comment which illustrated that attitude better than the author could have:

It seems like men never have to resort to this kind of stuff.  People seem less squeamish about taking a job at McDonalds than they do about sex work, for obvious reasons.  Some women aren’t comfortable with sex work but feel like it’s either that or starve…I think that it’s problematic that society is able to shrug and say, “eh, at least she can be a stripper or a phone sex operator” despite the fact that lots of women do not want those roles.  Then we can all collectively wash our hands of the responsibility of providing better jobs.

Because in the neofeminist mind, no job could possibly be worse than one with good pay and flexible hours, and to the Neomarxist mind governments are somehow magically able to provide such jobs regardless of market factors…something even Marx himself recognized was impossible: (“A thing cannot have value, if it is not a useful article.  If it is not useful, then the labor it contains is also useless, does not count as labor and hence does not create value.”)  Though Marx might have disagreed, sex work is valuable for the simple reason that real human beings unmotivated by a political agenda are willing to pay their own money for it, which is a far different thing from make-work jobs paid for with stolen money.

But even though I’m opposed to women who aren’t suited to sex work participating in it (for reasons I discuss in my upcoming January 17th column), I don’t think there are really all that many of them.  Because of the noise created by prohibitionists and prudes (like the commenter quoted above), and the outsized footprints left by embittered malcontents who should never have entered the sex trade in the first place, it sometimes seems to the casual observer that there are plenty of unhappy sex workers.  But studies show this simply isn’t the case; though streetwalkers often report being dissatisfied with their jobs (a fact wrongfully extended by lying prohibitionists to the more than 85% of prostitutes who are not streetwalkers, and thence to strippers, porn actresses and even PSOs), most brothel workers are satisfied with theirs and most escorts see theirs positively.  An Australian study even found that half of all prostitutes surveyed ranked their work as a “major source of satisfaction” in their lives, and 70% said they would definitely choose prostitution again if they had their lives to live over.

In other words, despite the claims of yellow journalists and neofeminists the great majority of the inexperienced women entering sex work due to economic pressure find that work no more odious than that of other women forced by economic pressure into other jobs that might not have been their first choice.  As I pointed out in “A False Dichotomy”,

The only people who can truly claim to have made an absolutely free choice to do any kind of work are the Paris Hiltons of the world, those who have a guaranteed inheritance, income and secured future no matter what they choose to do with the present.  Every other person has no choice but to work in some fashion; the choice not to work at all simply doesn’t exist unless one considers starvation an option.  At that point, then, the choice boils down to what kind of work one is able and willing to do.

And that being the case, I think it’s fantastic news that more women are choosing to do sex work.  A great deal of prohibitionism is fueled by the myth that all whores are monsters, criminals, defectives or victims rather than what we actually are:  women using our natural abilities to make a living, just as men use their natural abilities to do so without anyone as much as batting an eyelash.  The more women try sex work, the more people will know a woman who has done it and the more the stigma will evaporate; the less the stigma, the less the support for criminalization.  As it has happened with homosexuality, so it will with sex work; once the majority of women know someone who has done sex work, the majority of men who have employed sex workers will more easily be able to admit it and the more people will recognize prohibitionist propaganda for what it is.

Not so very long ago, gambling was portrayed as a monumental social evil, but Nevada made it easy for many Americans to experience it and by the 1980s Las Vegas had even succeeded in dispelling much of the seedy atmosphere that had frightened more timid souls away.  Indian casinos, riverboat casinos and state lotteries proliferated throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s and the internet brought online gambling, the persecution of which by the federal government is predestined to fail for reasons which should be obvious.  And now it looks like the “gentrification” of Nevada brothels may be starting with the appearance of themed brothels (thanks to Krulac and Dean Clark for sending me that item), which have been popular in Japan for years.

Repression thrives on ignorance; when people see others as human beings they are less likely to support the persecution of those people, and when they see behaviors as normal rather than strange and “scary” they are less likely to support bans on those activities.  The more women try sex work the more people will know someone who has and the less prohibitionists will be able to present lies and exceptions as the norm.  In the present climate of ignorance, women who have bad experiences with sex work are seen as far more representative than they actually are, but with knowledge comes perspective and the recognition that sex work is like any other kind of work:  awful for a few, tolerable for many and perfect for some.

One Year Ago Today

“Grow the Hell Up” examines the support for prohibition which derives from ignorance acting in conjunction with a desire to avoid personal responsibility.

Read Full Post »

Rockin’ Robin

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on January 8, 2012| 18 Comments »

He rocks in the tree-tops all day long
Hoppin’ and a-boppin’ and a-singin’ this song
All the little birds on Jaybird Street
Love to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet. –  Leon René, “Rockin’ Robin”

I’m not a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination; I have nothing against new technology when it offers a definite advantage over the old.  But I also believe in the adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and I refuse to run out and buy or try every new craze simply because it’s new.  I’m perfectly happy with paper books, and I don’t see any pressing need to replace my CDs and DVDs with “files” in a player.  My computer components are connected to one another by wires, and my cell phone is just a phone; when we switched carriers in 2008 and I was forced to give up the old Nextel phone I had used since 2001, the (extremely young) sales people acted like I had plopped an old candlestick telephone on the counter.  And my car…as Kelly Michaels can attest, the youngest part of it was designed in 1972.  If I’m comfortable with something the way it is, I’m simply not interested in replacing it, and I’m not likely to try new technology unless it fulfills some need of mine.

That’s why up until recently, I never bothered with Twitter; I couldn’t see a real use for it, and as my readers may suspect the idea of limiting myself to 140 characters fills me with a sort of vague horror.  As I said in “Extra, Extra!”:

I run this blog much more like a newspaper than like a TV broadcast; that is, I don’t generally worry too much about getting there “first with the most”, but rather on examining a story through the lens of harlotry.  In other words, The Honest Courtesan may not be the first place you encounter a new story, but you probably won’t encounter my spin on that story in many other places.

However, there are times when I urgently want to call my readers’ attention to something, such as an online article whose comment thread has been invaded by prohibitionists in need of immediate countering.  At other times, there are items I really don’t feel a need to write about, but still would like to call attention to.  And then there are the articles which capture my attention and may interest some of my readers, yet don’t fit the format of my blog.  A few months ago, I realized that Twitter would provide a useful way of calling attention to all of these things, but I just couldn’t get motivated to drag myself over to Twitter.com to figure it out.  Then around Yule regular reader Amazing Susan convinced me to take the leap, and showed me how to sign up; I started “tweeting” on December 23rd and a few of you may have noticed the new “Maggie on Twitter” box on the right.  But if you didn’t, and you’d like to receive “tweets” from me, you can click on this link to “follow” me.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to flood you with inane “status reports” about what I had for breakfast or cute things my cat just did; I set up WordPress to send out an automatic “tweet” when my column posts every morning, and other than that most of what I’ve done with it so far (and most of what I’m likely to do in the future) is to “retweet” stuff I find interesting or post links to stories as I mentioned above.  Once I get a lot of followers I’ll probably use it to mobilize comment campaigns against those who spread disinformation as well, and even now I’ll call attention to such opportunities when they arise.

So, there you have it; I’ve just taken one more baby step into the 21st century.  Don’t worry about my getting carried away, though; I’m not going to buy a plasma TV until they’re cheap and my old (c. 2000) set goes kaput.  And I’ve seen enough of my husband’s iPhone to conclude that it’s far more trouble than it’s worth.

One Year Ago Today

“Acting and Activism” discusses empty-headed celebrity activists and describes the rude, ignorant and childish behavior of Mira Sorvino toward Laura Agustín.  Incidentally, the column contains my very first mention of Ashton Kutcher, who repeatedly made a fool of himself so many times last year.

Read Full Post »

Living in Truth

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2012| 17 Comments »

[Political] ideology…is almost a secularized religion.  It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life…it offers an immediately available home:  all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish.  Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home:  the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority.  –  Václav Havel

Václav Havel, the playwright turned politician who was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first of the Czech Republic, died three weeks ago on December 18th.  The next day, Anne Applebaum published an article on Slate about how one of Havel’s writings, an essay named “The Power of the Powerless”, was probably his most important gift to the world outside his own country:

…Havel not only opposed the Communist regime, he articulated a theory of opposition.  His plays – as turgid, alas, as the Communist bureaucrats they are meant to satirize – will not survive, except as curiosities.  But his famous political essay — “The Power of the Powerless” — will live forever.  Its appeal is universal.  I have given Havel’s essay to Iranian friends, and I once discussed it with would-be dissidents in pre-revolutionary Tunis.  In both places it seemed — seems — relevant.

In this essay, Havel didn’t talk about marches or demonstrations.  Instead, he asked the inhabitants of totalitarian countries to “live in truth”:  That is, to go about their daily lives as if the regime did not exist, to the extent that was possible…By the late 1980s, “living in truth” was widely practiced across central Europe.  The first time I went to Poland in 1987, I stayed with friends.  According to the law, I was supposed to register my presence in a private home with the police.  “We don’t do that,” my friends told me.  “We don’t believe the police have the right to know who stays with us.”  I didn’t register — and because thousands of other people didn’t either, that law became unenforceable.

But Havel proposed more than mere civil disobedience.  He also argued in favor of what we would now call civil society, urging the inhabitants of totalitarian states to found small institutions — musical groups, sporting groups, literary groups — which would develop the ”independent life of society,” and prevent their members from being totally controlled from above.  This too was widely practiced, in Prague’s famous underground philosophy seminars, in the illegal printing presses all across the communist world, in Poland’s independent “Flying University,” and, most successfully, in Poland’s independent trade unions…

I was unfamiliar with the essay, but read it and found it even more powerful than Applebaum lets on.  Like so many in the West who have not been directly impacted by the growing police-state here, she fails to see that Havel’s words do not only apply to countries we in the West label “totalitarian”, but to our own society as well.  He points out that in all modern societies – soi-disant “democracies” included – government becomes a bureaucratic machine which runs by itself toward an inevitable end; his advice about “living in truth” is therefore just as important to Americans as it was to people in the former Soviet bloc.  And though the essay contains numerous references to specifics of 20th century Eastern European history with which my readers may be unfamiliar, this may actually enhance your appreciation of the piece rather than distracting from it, because it will help keep you from being seduced by the tempting and comfortable delusion that your country “isn’t like that”.  Mentally replacing Havel’s references with contemporary American ones will help you to see his points:  for example, substitute  “possession of leaves from a common weed” for “possession of banned books”, “buying or selling sex” for “playing rock music” and “Support our Troops” for “Workers of the World, Unite!”

The copy provided in the Slate article had clearly been run through an optical character reader and was thus infested with weird errors of the sort which inevitably result from that not-yet-perfect technology, so I proofread it to correct these errors in order to provide y’all with a clean PDF copy.  It’s not short; 51 pages in all, so it may take you an hour or two.  But it’s not a difficult read and it is, I think, an important one; if you agree pass the link on or download the PDF yourself for email dissemination.  Havel’s philosophy, especially his advice to ignore the lies which support oppression and just live like free, rational people, needs to be spread as widely through the West as it once was through the Soviet Empire.

One Year Ago Today

“Holiday Leftovers” comments on “promoting prostitution”, divorce blackmail, a clueless CNN article, really cheap whores, the right to own and control one’s body, the good sense displayed by Dutch women and history repeating itself in shortsighted criticism of civil rights activism.

Read Full Post »

Little Christmas

Posted in Holidays, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , on January 6, 2012| 29 Comments »

We three kings of Orient are,
Bearing gifts we traverse afar.
Field and fountain, moor and mountain,
Following yonder star.  –  John Henry Hopkins

Today is the feast of the Epiphany, also called Little Christmas or King Day; as I explained in my column of one year ago today it is the day on which legend says the Magi (the “Three Kings”) visited the infant Jesus, and in the Middle Ages was the day on which Christians exchanged gifts rather than Christmas.  Even after the gift-giving shifted back to Christmas Day or Eve in the Renaissance, some cultures continued to give gifts to children on Little Christmas (or more specifically, the gifts are left while they’re sleeping on Twelfth Night).  In Spanish-speaking countries the gifts are left by the Three Kings, but in Italy they’re brought by a witch named Befana.  She’s usually portrayed as old (and there’s a traditional picture of her in last year’s column), but modern Italy being…well, Italy, sexy Befana images like the one here have also become very common.  But while Hispanic and Italian children opened their presents this morning, Russian and Ethiopian children won’t see theirs until tomorrow; for reasons also explained in last year’s column, Christmas Day in those countries falls on January 7th.

In New Orleans, today is the first day of the Carnival season; the first Carnival ball (that of the Twelfth Night Revelers) is tonight, and the others (not to mention the parades) are spread out between now and Mardi Gras, which this year falls on February 21st.  That also means today is the traditional day for taking Christmas decorations down, and the first day for eating king cakes; if any of you outside the New Orleans area want to share that tradition, the recipe appears in my Twelfth Night column from last year.  But remember, the cake can only be made and eaten between today and Fat Tuesday.

So, to my Italian readers, Buona Epifania!  To my Spanish-speaking readers, Feliz Día de Los Reyes! To my Ethiopian readers, Melkam Gena!  And to my Russian readers, S Roždestvom!

Read Full Post »

The Twelfth of Twelve

Posted in History, Holidays, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on January 5, 2012| 57 Comments »

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?  –  William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (II, iii)

As I stated in my column of one year ago today,

Today is the twelfth day of Christmas and tonight is Twelfth Night, traditionally celebrated with parties and feasting.  It is the eve of the Epiphany, the day on which Christian myth holds the Magi arrived to give gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the infant Jesus.  Because of this it was the custom in medieval times to exchange Christmas presents on that day, and Twelfth Night was the celebration preceding the exchange.  Even after the gift exchange moved back to Christmas Day proper in the Renaissance, Twelfth Night continued to be celebrated as the transition between Christmastide and Carnival (which starts tomorrow)…Remember the old Saturnalia inversion of the social order we talked about before?  In Christian times this portion of the festivities was shifted to Twelfth Night celebrations.  The masters waited on their servants and everyone shared a cake which contained a bean; whoever got the bean became the Lord of Misrule, the ruler of the feast.  This went on until midnight, when Christmas ended and the world returned to normal.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was specifically written for the holiday in 1602, though it was not publicly performed until Candlemas of that year (February 2nd, 1602).  As befitting the occasion, the play is full of drinking, feasting, singing, merriment, silliness, chaos and inversions such as Viola’s disguising herself as a man (such “breeches parts” would later become a staple of Restoration theater) and even subtle breaking of the “fourth wall” (in III, iv Fabian remarks, “If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction“).  But the most topsy-turvy character of all is the foolish servant Malvolio, Countess Olivia’s steward, a Puritan who believes it is his place to stop others from having fun (the epigram is spoken to him by another character, Sir Toby Belch).  Malvolio is so full of himself that he not only has the nerve to chastise his social superiors (Sir Toby and his friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek), but also the egotism upon which their revenge feeds:  they send him a faked love-note from his employer asking him to behave in all sorts of absurd ways to supposedly demonstrate his acceptance of her troth.  Olivia (who is not in on the joke) believes that Malvolio has gone insane and allows the conspirators to lock him in the cellar.  At the end he is released, but storms off vowing “I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you.” (V,i)

Alas, this Twelfth Night of 2012, 410 years later, sees our entire society beset by a whole pack of Malvolios.  Because they hate fun and merriment they wish to ban such activities for everybody, usually under the guise of “health”, “law and order” or “helping victims”.  But in an inversion which is not at all festive or in the spirit of good fellowship, these modern Malvolios are the ones who forge documents full of lies in order to make their victims seem mentally ill and/or to have them locked up.  Alas, this “improbable fiction” is all too real, and because it is we can’t count on a resolution by the end of Act V; as I predicted in my column of January 2nd  we’ll eventually be rid of these pompous Puritans, but it will be through our own perseverance rather than the kind intercession of the Great Playwright.

Read Full Post »

First Updates of the Year (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 4, 2012| 29 Comments »

It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the evil to suspect good.  –  Marcus Tullius Cicero

Four more articles which relate to earlier columns.  Male readers who are sensitive should probably skip the third item; you have been warned!

Gorged With Meaning (November 21st, 2011)

In this column I discussed silly British people who, by trying to impress a rigid and incorrect definition of “prostitute” on reality, get all upset upon discovering that young, attractive women are whoring themselves to older, wealthier men as they have since the dawn of civilization.  In this December 14th column from the Daily Mail, Dominique Jackson makes essentially the same point:

…The rise in tuition fees, soaring living costs and government cuts to maintenance grants are all reportedly forcing more and more young women to turn to prostitution and other forms of sex work…I am afraid I have to disappoint but these headlines, with their sly mix of prurience and moral outrage, are not in the least bit new.  The vast majority of students, those who cannot rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad, have always had to come up with ingenious ways of making ends meet.  Intelligent girls…have never been averse to using their patent attractions to part gullible men from their money.  It is, of course, the oldest profession in the world…

Doctor Ron Roberts from Kingston University said their own recent studies showed that the number of students who knew someone who has worked in the sex industry to fund their studies had gone up from three per cent to 25 per cent.  He also said 11 per cent would consider escort work and called the statistics:  ‘worrying’.  Eleven per cent?  Is that all?  I am pretty sure that working as an escort…has crossed plenty more bright young female minds.  Escort work would seem to be the most palatable end of a spectrum which presumably includes pole or lap dancing, stripping and goes through to full-blown intercourse in exchange for money…There was a strictly enforced ban against taking on jobs during term time when I was a university student in the 1980s.  Nevertheless, many of my bolder friends chose to defy the authorities, usually by working a few shifts as a waitress in Brown’s Restaurant, where the only qualification needed was to look good in an absurdly short mini-skirt.  Back then, I wasn’t aware of any of my own peers capitalising on their assets in any more direct way.  However, scores of cannier girls made sure they bagged a boyfriend who they knew could well afford to take them out for nice dinners and, ideally, had a car to boot.  As most women realise, it is more or less the same form of exchange…

I am still in close touch with several dozen young women from my old college…In the best traditions of popular journalism, I carried out a quick straw poll which revealed that the furthest any of these girls had been prepared to go was to stoop to silver service waitressing at the local stately home.  Curiously, though, almost all of them had certainly heard of, or even knew of one or even a couple of fellow students who had indeed, worked as an escort, or funded their studies with the occasional pole dance.  So nobody owned up to turning to sex work themselves, yet the anecdotal evidence that some students definitely do turns out to be overwhelming.  Funny that, isn’t it?

Funny indeed, Dominique; like you, I suspect that many of these ladies took advantage of their natural assets, but simply won’t admit it.

Toys for Tots (November 25th, 2011)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve donated to Toys for Tots every year since I started sex work in 1997, and I’m not remotely alone; last year I mentioned that a friend of mine was offering extra time in exchange for donated toys.  But when the sick, evil minds of cops (and some suburban housewives) see a charity offer like this, they imagine it as the sort of twisted scheme they would come up with to victimize someone, and the piggish, juvenile minds of yellow journalists see only a way to get a story literally at the expense of women and children:

A toy drive during the holidays — but this one unlike any we’ve ever seen before.  An ad posted on an adult escort website promises more time with the woman in exchange for donations to Toys for Tots…The person who answered the phone told me that she was, in fact, Robin Jordan — the woman who was arrested earlier this year and convicted last month for operating an Internet-based prostitution operation out of her Fort Bend County home…The site, which shows an undressed woman in provocative poses, wishes you “Happy Holidays” and claims if you pay for one hour of services and bring an unwrapped gift, your second hour will be free.  “It’s awful, obviously, especially in a neighborhood like this,” said neighbor Jennifer Vontz…”For them to use that just to lure people in, I think that’s just really sad,” said neighbor Valerie Work…

Jordan would not confirm she placed the ads, but by phone earlier told me she would meet for us to hear her side of the story.  Jordan never returned calls when we repeatedly tried to contact her this afternoon, nor did anyone wish to comment at her…home.  The Houston Police Department has launched an additional investigation, based on the evidence we have submitted to them.  We’ve learned Jordan faces a charge of child endangerment in Fort Bend County.  Child Protective Services is also attempting to terminate her parental rights based on this case and the way she allegedly treated her three-year-old daughter.

The fact that it’s “unlike anything he’s seen before” demonstrates the reporter’s colossal ignorance.  My opinion of “child protective services” is well known, and as for the Houston police…I wouldn’t waste my water spitting on them.  The TV station, neighbors and cops involved in this story are all beneath contempt.

Not To Be Taken Internally (December 11th, 2011)

Feminists who believe that only women have unrealistic body-image issues, please take note of this item from the December 13th Huffington Post:

Authorities say a New Jersey man who died after having his penis injected with silicone was trying to get it enlarged…The Essex County prosecutor’s office says 34-year-old Kasia Rivera gave 22-year-old Justin Street the injection in May.  She has pleaded not guilty [to manslaughter] but remains in jail on $75,000 bail…[after] a medical examiner [determined that Street] died of a silicone embolism.  Rivera also faces charges [for] the unauthorized practice of medicine out of her…apartment.  Authorities say they’re investigating whether she gave other people similar injections.

The Liars’ Club (December 13th, 2011)

Maybe the adult film industry won’t have to fight Michael Weinstein’s asinine “your sex life is our business” ballot initiative after all, because according to this December 9th press release from the Free Speech Coalition, the City of Los Angeles is doing it for them:

A lawsuit was filed yesterday by the City of Los Angeles challenging the constitutionality of AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s (AHF) ballot initiative…[which] would force local officials to enforce mandatory condom regulations on adult production sets.  Named as defendants in the suit are various AHF personnel, including AHF President Michael Weinstein.  “Clearly AHF has chosen to squander its donors’ resources by filing frivolous lawsuits and ballot initiatives instead of providing valuable resources toward the prevention and treatment of HIV,” FSC Executive Director Diane Duke said.  “It is heartening to know that the City of Los Angeles will draw the line on AHF’s political grandstanding when it comes to wasting taxpayer dollars.  History has shown us that regulating sexual behavior between consenting adults does not work.  The best way to prevent the transmission of HIV and other STIs is by providing quality information and sexual health service, all of which are successfully provided through adult industry protocols and best practices,” Duke added.

The city’s complaint argues that the ballot proposal is preempted by state regulations that require barrier protection on adult sets and that enforcement of those regulations falls under state jurisdiction.  There have been two previous rulings in complaints filed by AHF, where the judge decided that L.A. County officials are not compelled to enforce regulations on behalf of state health & safety agency Cal/OSHA.  The city also states that the process involved in bringing the ballot measure to the voters would be a “waste” of taxpayer money…[and] that the ballot initiative is potentially unconstitutional; if passed by voters in June, the city raised concerns of more money being spent if the initiative was overturned on constitutional grounds…

I suspect that somebody in LA government woke up and realized how much money the city stands to lose if the adult film industry moves its shoots elsewhere.

One Year Ago Today

“Doublethink” explains the concept from George Orwell’s 1984 and provides real-life examples.

Read Full Post »

First Updates of the Year (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 3, 2012| 16 Comments »

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.  –  Charles DeGaulle

As I said last month, it’s amazing how many of these stories seem to crop up around the holidays!  So without further ado, here’s the first batch of the year.

Real People (February 6th, 2011)

It’s a classic Catch-22; because of criminalization prostitutes need to be discreet, but anonymity allows the prohibitionists to invent lies about us that further support for criminalization.  So it’s always good to see articles that show sex workers are people like anyone else; this one is from the December 12th Daily Sundial, the student newspaper of California State University, Northridge:

 “I started stripping when I was 19 because I had huge debt…” said Jane Doe, 32, a doctoral student at USC…“I loved it…Of all the shit jobs I had ever had, it was the only shit job that was not a shit job.”    Doe’s story is not atypical; according to a recent study on…sex work by Widener University’s Sarah Elspeth Patterson…“10 percent of students know of students who engage in sex work in order to promote themselves financially, with 16.5 percent indicating that they might be willing to engage in sex work to pay for their education”…

For Jessie Nicole, 25, sex work was the only employment option that allowed her to make ends meet and remain a full-time student.  “I was broke,” Nicole said.  “I had a scholarship that paid my tuition and 70 percent of my books, but that doesn’t pay your rent, that doesn’t give you food, and you still have 30 percent of your books.”  Nicole, now the director of SWOP’s Los Angeles chapter, began dating “sugar daddies” when she was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Florida State University, but turned to escorting when she moved to Chicago for graduate school.  “One of the easiest things about escorting in grad school was that I could pay to live and work a couple of hours a week,” Nicole said.  “That was so crucial to me.  I had a thesis to write…[My] time [was] really precious.”

Though sex work helped pay for both Doe and Nicole’s schooling, the cost of education left each of them in an incredible amount of debt.  According to the Widener University study, 2010 college graduates are carrying an average of $25,250 worth of debt…“I did sex work to live and be a student and then I graduated and couldn’t find a job because I have a master’s in humanities,” Nicole said.  “…So I kept doing sex work.  And I’m still using sex work to pay off my student loans”…According to Nicole…many who critique and condemn sex work see the industry as coercive and degrading.  “(Sex work) is a job like any other job,” Nicole said…according to [her], there are more student sex workers than one might think.  “I didn’t (out myself) when I was in school,” Nicole said.  “When I did come out, I found at least three other friends that were doing sex work in Tallahassee at the same time that I was.  I was like, ‘are you fucking kidding?  Is this just my group of friends or is everyone carrying this around?  Why didn’t we work together?’”…

The story also interviews a professional submissive and has a short section on neofeminist anti-whore rhetoric.  Nicole’s last point is very true; in my experience university students are the second largest group among escorts, after young divorcees with kids.

Heroines (May 16th, 2011)

OK, so breast self-examination is a little off-topic, but I’ve mentioned superheroines before so I just had to tell you about this PSA from Mozambique in which Wonder Woman gives herself an exam.  Other ads in the series feature She-Hulk, Catwoman and Storm of the X-Men.  The only thing I want to say is that I find it easier to do my exams topless, but I guess then we wouldn’t know who they were (except for She-Hulk, who’s pretty recognizable in any state of dress).

A Procrustean Bed (May 19th, 2011)

Though this essay was about a Massachusetts law, the principle applies to any part of the US:

…trafficking  mythology…requires that the state produce victims other than the amorphous “public decency” or the faceless “state”.  A “human trafficker” requires a human to “traffick”, so the law amputates prostitutes’ legal “legs” (i.e. the presumption of adult self-determination), reducing us to victims unable to walk into or out of prostitution on our own.  And if all whores are victims, all those who assist us in our work must therefore be victimizers…[such laws define] anyone who “manages” a prostitute (of course, “manage” is not specifically defined) as a “pimp” and all pimps as “human traffickers”, thus stretching escort service owners, drivers, boyfriends and husbands into international gangsters.

Here’s the Big Apple’s version, courtesy of the December 14th New York Times:

…As prostitution has shifted off the streets and into hotels and apartments, the drivers who transport prostitutes have emerged as some of the industry’s most powerful players.  Sofia, who uses a pseudonym because she fears retribution from traffickers, said that when she was enslaved as a prostitute, her drivers organized her schedule, drove her to appointments and took half of her earnings before she turned over the remainder to her pimp…On Wednesday, Sofia will testify, from behind a screen, before a joint hearing of the City Council’s Transportation and Women’s Issues Committees, on two pieces of proposed legislation that would penalize drivers who knowingly transport prostitutes.  The first proposal…would raise the fines on drivers who knowingly transport trafficking victims, and would direct the Taxi and Limousine Commission to add training for all its drivers on the subject of sex trafficking…Sofia estimates that she worked with 70 drivers, who brought her to 5,000 clients…Sofia said that the drivers rarely spoke to her, except when they tried to recruit her away from her pimp.  “They promised us a better life,” Sofia said.  “I know a lot of girls who said they left the pimp they were working with.  In the end they just worked for the driver.”

Is there any truth at all to this story?  Who knows?  It’s hard to take seriously an article whose very first sentence is based in a fallacy (that the majority of prostitution used to take place on the street, which it never has), and which characterizes low-end employees as “the industry’s most powerful players”.  It also uses the phrase “enslaved as a prostitute” but then at the end states that the so-called “slaves” can work for whoever they like (including, logically, themselves).  The huge numbers (70 different drivers?  5000 clients?) sound suspiciously like “reframed experiences” to me, and a lot of dubious assertions are trotted out to justify giving pigs and prosecutors the power to railroad (mostly immigrant) cab drivers as “human traffickers” for the “crime” of giving rides to hookers.

The Enlightenment Police (October 1st, 2011)

French prosecutors with nothing productive to do now want to send Hind Ahmas (whom we met in this column) to prison, as explained in this December 13th article from the Daily Mail:

A 32-year-old mother from France is set to become the first woman ever to be sent to prison for wearing an Islamic veil.  Hind Ahmas refuses to accept the legitimacy of a Paris court which has ordered her to spend 15 days learning her civic duties…Ahmas was not allowed into the hearing…because she refused to remove her face covering.  But prosecutors made it clear to her lawyer, Gilles Devers, that Ahmas now faces two years in prison and a £27,000 fine.  ‘There is no possibility of me removing the veil,’ Ahmas said.  ‘I’m not taking it off.  The judge needs citizenship lessons, not me.’  Ahmas, who has already refused to pay a fine of around £100 for wearing a veil on another occasion, intends to take her case to the European Court of Human Rights…If Ahmas does become the first woman in the world to go to prison for wearing a veil, then it will be seen as a huge propaganda coup for Islamic-rights campaigners.

Mr Sarkozy said the ban on head coverings was not aimed at persecuting Muslims, but merely to make France a more tolerant, inclusive society…But the sight of a young mother being led away to the cells merely because she refuses to take off her veil will cause outrage around the world.  Mr Devers said the veil ban was ‘unconstitutional’, while senior police officers have told judges that it is unenforceable without persecuting women…

Only a politician could believe that it’s possible to create a “more tolerant, inclusive society” by being intolerant and exclusive.

One Year Ago Today

“The Cold, Grey Light of Dawn” provides several examples of “the first feeble rays of light…[creeping] into the brains of those who, while perhaps not actually prohibitionists themselves, have always gone along with government policy on the matter.”

Read Full Post »

Crystal Ball

Posted in History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 2, 2012| 14 Comments »

I wonder what tomorrow has in mind for me,
Or am I even in its mind at all?
Perhaps I’ll get a chance to look ahead and see,
Soon as I find myself a crystal ball.  –  Tommy Shaw

Yesterday I pointed out, as I have in a number of previous essays, that our culture has descended into the general fear of sex, vice and new ideas that was prevalent at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.  Then, as now, new means of mass communication (telephone and radio then, internet now) promoted the rapid dissemination of ideas by individuals, weakening the monopoly on such communication previously held by governments and multinational organizations such as religions.  Furthermore, both eras saw dramatic increases in international migration, driven partly by cheaper travel and partly by rapid shifts in borders and governments; such migration tends to horrify racists and xenophobes, resulting in a moral panic.  In the United States and United Kingdom (and to a lesser extent Europe), public discourse in both eras was largely dominated by vocal, strident and well-funded coalitions of conservative Christians and prudish middle-class women who imagined themselves to be “progressive” (due to their support for women’s rights) but were in fact purely moralistic; these groups bullied the majority with “social problem” and “for the children” rhetoric and purchased sufficient numbers of politicians to inflict their anti-sex, anti-fun “temperance” agenda on both their own countries and any others they politically or economically dominated.

As those of us born before 1980 remember, the first movement died out for quite some time; with the exception of a few burps, retrograde periods and other discontinuities, Western society’s views on personal morality have become progressively more liberal since about 1920 and did not start to dry up again until the 1980s.  In place of Prohibition we got the War on Drugs; fundamentalist Christians and the decaying remnants of second-wave feminism mounted a joint campaign against sex just as fundamentalist Christians and the decaying remnants of first-wave feminism had a century before, and the disintegration of the Soviet Empire released waves of new migrants to give the isolationists nightmares.  In the United States, these forces all coalesced in the months after September 11th, 2001; the average American was convinced that the world was falling apart and that it was time to “do something” against whatever target he could get his hands on…which, as it so often turns out, meant nonconformist women.  A reader recently asked me if I had a crystal ball which might reveal where all this is going. Unfortunately I don’t, but I think we can make some educated guesses based on the way things happened the last time around.  In order to do that, I must first point out that there are actually two intertwined but separate issues here:  the specific “sex trafficking” moral panic which has served as a Trojan horse for so much anti-prostitute activity, and the general trend toward social conservatism and xenophobia which forms the soil in which these revolting fungi grow.

First, the good news:  major moral panics only tend to last about 20 years at the outside.  Some of them are very much shorter, but most of the big ones endure for about the time it takes a generation to grow from infancy to adulthood (during which time a lot of the “leaders” who enable such panics die off or at least retire, and young liberals who reject their elders’ crusades on general principle come into power).  Even in the days when societies changed more slowly this two-decade limit held; for example, though witch hunts periodically racked Europe for almost 300 years (from the late 15th – mid 18th centuries), any individual witch panic in a given place usually lasted only 2-20 years (as typified by the most recent period of literal witch-hunting, the “Satanic Panic”, which began in the early 1980s and subsided by the late 1990s).  Given this pattern, the “human trafficking” hysteria should be dead by the end of this decade; though there were a few alarmists spreading the propaganda (which if one treats it skeptically reads an awful lot like the “Satanic abuse” literature with sex and profit replacing “Satanism” as the supposed motivator) by the mid-‘90s, official designation of it as a “world-wide problem” occurred in 2000 and the genuine hysteria did not begin until about 2003.  As Emi Koyama pointed out in a recent article, “A quick search on a news database shows that there were only three references to ‘human trafficking’ or ‘trafficking in humans’ before 2000.  It was mentioned 9 times in 2000, 41 times in 2001, and broke 100 mentions for the first time in 2005.  In 2010, there were more than 500 references.”

If things run according to form, we can predict that over the next three years skepticism about “trafficking” (especially in regard to its conflation with sex work) will slowly increase, and by about 2015 it will be possible for a major media outlet to publish articles critical of both the statistics and the very concept.  By 2017 public funding for anti-sex worker hate groups will begin to dry up, and by 2019 or 2020 we should expect it to virtually disappear from public discourse except for a wave of books and documentaries by “experts” who couldn’t be bothered to speak out against it while it was going on but are happy to make a quick buck from it after it’s safely over.  Sometime soon after this there may be a pro-sex work backlash against the hysteria, just as public atheism became much more palatable to general audiences after the death of the “Satanic Panic”.  I suspect that at this point the ACLU will finally deign to take up a challenge to prostitution law, and sometime in the late 2020s the SCOTUS will issue a landmark decision overturning prostitution laws on civil rights grounds just as Roe vs. Wade overturned abortion laws and Lawrence vs. Texas overturned sodomy laws.

The comparison with these cases is instructive; though Roe was decided 39 years ago this January 22nd, abortion law is still highly controversial in the United States, and thus it will be with prostitution.  The court’s decision will only invalidate criminalization of the act of prostitution itself, leaving the various states free to enact their own patchwork of legalization schemes.  Some will no doubt adopt models similar to that of Canada and the U.K., criminalizing everything about the business; others may enact something like the Swedish Model (in whatever form it has assumed by that time, which I guarantee won’t be what it looks like today); still others may employ a Nevada-style model and a few may use liberal legalization schemata like that of Germany, establish red-light districts or even wholly decriminalize like New Zealand.  The controversy will become another “abortion” or “gay marriage”, providing a shibboleth with which small-minded people can denote membership in “liberal” or “conservative” groups and a convenient prepackaged position for politicians to employ in marketing themselves to such groups.

Larger cultural trends don’t usually die as quickly or abruptly as do moral panics; in some circles Victorian prudery was already on its way out by the Mauve Decade (AKA the “Gay Nineties”), but in the culture at large it still maintained its hold until wiped away by the First World War and the consequent upheavals in the social order it produced.  Since Europe was affected earlier and far more severely by the war than was the US, the change came earlier there; indeed, it could be argued that isolationism driven by fear of embroilment in European conflicts actually intensified the social crusade in the United States (as demonstrated by passage of the Mann Act in 1910 and the Volstead Act in 1919).  But by the mid-1920s even the United States was changing, and by the late 1930s the old moralism seemed quaint and even ludicrous.  Here, then, is a likely predictor of the course of the current outbreak of Puritanism; it started in the early 1980s just as the last outbreak started in the 1880s, and a large minority is already thoroughly sick of it.  All we’re now waiting for is a catalyst, some huge social upheaval such as a major war, revolution or economic collapse (given what we’re seeing on the news these days, it may have already started) which will give people something real to worry about.  And when that’s over, the current sickness will be swept away as the old busybodies die off; by the late 2030s it will be regarded as a subject for mockery, and though I’ll be too old then (the high side of 70) to be able to fully enjoy the change, it will nonetheless bring me tremendous satisfaction.

One Year Ago Today

“January Second” examines the complicated relationship I’ve always had with this particular date.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »