Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness. – E.M. Cioran
An ad hominem argument (from the Latin argumentum ad hominem, “argument to the man”) is one which attempts to negate a person’s statements by attacking the person himself. Sometimes it’s incorrectly used to denote insults incorporated into a broader position (“Melissa Farley is not only wrong, she’s crazy”), or analyses as to someone’s motive in presenting a line of reasoning which has already been demonstrated to be fallacious (“Melissa Farley must have had some horrible experiences with men to hate them so”), but a true ad hominem is one in which the argument depends entirely upon the personal attack (“Melissa Farley is wrong because she’s so obnoxious”). The Latin word homo (of which hominem is the accusative case) means “man” in the sense of “human being” rather than in the sense of “adult male”, so a better translation of ad hominem might be “to the person”. But in the early 1960s feminists coined the term ad feminam to describe attacks based specifically on the target’s femininity, e.g., “what do you know, you’re just a woman.” And today I’d like to introduce my own term, ad scortum (“to the whore”), the logical fallacy in which someone discounts a person’s argument not on its own merits, but rather on the grounds that she is a prostitute.
Sex worker advocates are used to seeing this one from neofeminists quite often. Sometimes it takes the form of an accusation that a whore’s judgment, opinions or descriptions of events cannot be trusted because her “ordeal” of prostitution has resulted in “false consciousness” or even Stockholm Syndrome. But at other times her demeanor is too composed and her arguments too rational for such an accusation to be remotely credible, and then the neofeminist will resort to a modified ad scortum based not in the mere fact of her harlotry but rather its type: usually this occurs in the form, “you’re not representative”. By this the neofeminist claims that her opponent’s experience in prostitution is highly unusual (generally by its failure to conform to the neofeminist horror and degradation model) and therefore cannot be viewed as a “true” whore’s opinion. In a way it’s a sort of negative ad scortum, a claim that the target isn’t enough of a whore.
As you might expect, I’ve been the target of both versions; cop and religious prohibitionists tend to point to my harlotry as evidence of a hooker bias (as though actually knowing something about a subject before forming an opinion was some kind of disadvantage), while neofeminist prohibitionists tend to claim my education, skin color, intelligence or whatever make me insufficiently whorish for my opinion to count (obviously the NOPD disagreed). Lately I’ve been getting more of the latter type; after Nicholas Kristof “tweeted” my March 19th column I got responses hinting darkly that the only reason I would “defend sex traffickers” is because I’m somehow profiting from “trafficking” myself. This is how the ad scortum works: he who uses it hopes that the hearer will be too busy thinking, “Well, if she can break ONE law…” to realize that I don’t defend sex traffickers; I merely deny 1) that they exist in anything like the numbers fanatics claim; 2) that most women called “trafficked” are “enslaved” in any valid sense of the word; 3) that sex work is intrinsically different from other work; 4) that criminalization is an effective means of reducing victimization in the sex trade; and 5) that governments or NGOs have the duty or even the right to “rescue” people from their own decisions against their will.
But the commenter I see this one from most often is Stella Marr, a self-described “prostitution survivor” who shills online for the prohibitionists in practically every comment thread she can find. At some point in the past few months, either she or whoever’s holding her leash apparently decided that I’m getting too much attention and that my arguments are too cogent, so every time Stella sees some online commenter mention me, she responds with something like this:
I was domestically sex trafficked in New York City for ten years. It’s important to note that Maggie McNeill is an admitted madam. http://tinyurl.com/7ny8dzc
As such the press should not accept her as a ‘sex worker activist.” No one would tolerate a plantation owner who claimed to be a migrant farmworker, right? There’s a built in conflict of interest here which would not be tolerated if she were a mine owner posing as a coal miner.
Why is this OK for prostitution?
Like most neofeminist prohibitionists, Stella supports the “Swedish Model” and so claims to love and support whores while vilifying “pimps” and clients. She can’t bad-mouth me directly without revealing her anti-whore bias, so she has to convince people I’m not a whore at all by casting me as part of her imaginary “oppressor” class, complete with dysphemisms like “admitted” and “posing”. Her little metaphor there is actually fairly clever, if the audience is wholly ignorant of the dynamics of sex work and actually believes that madams (read: abusive female pimps) and whores (read: trafficked streetwalkers) are as different in background as upper-class business owners and downtrodden manual laborers. Stella understands very well it’s not so; in a recent thread on Tits and Sass she played her cards a lot closer to her chest (even to the point of refraining from naming me) because she knew the crowd there wouldn’t accept such a ridiculous comparison. Here was my response:
Tarring all escort service owners with the “pimp” brush is EXACTLY THE SAME as prohibitionists tarring all sex workers with the same brush. There is NO difference. All people are individuals, and need to be judged on their own behavior. Stella has repeatedly dismissed me with “you’re a pimp” and even libeled me on websites because she has a chip on her shoulder about management.
In New Orleans in 2000, virtually the WHOLE escort biz was via phone book; there were a few internet girls, but even they worked with agencies because 90%+ of business was out-of-town gents in hotels. In other words, the only way to make a good living was by having an ad in the phone book, which meant either A) putting one in yourself (at great expense) as I did, or B) working with someone who had (an agency). To insist that someone who has spent thousands of dollars for an ad, secretary and legal retainers should simply let other girls get free advertising, free secretary to monitor their time and check them in and out, and a free lawyer to bail them out if they got popped, is pie-in-the-sky Marxist bullshit; you might as well argue that whores should give ourselves for free to needy men. And to REFUSE to allow other girls to use one’s established infrastructure on the grounds that you won’t take money from them on principle is “killing them with kindness”.
I was the best agency owner in New Orleans, but there were two other good, fair owners as well (both gay men) whom I worked with myself as an escort. If a girl didn’t like one service owner, she was free to go to another one; that’s hardly “taking money” except to a mind hopelessly befuddled with Marxism. I insisted girls keep their own records so we could double-check each other, and I even made advances to dependable girls to buy cars, pay rent deposits, etc. I even wrote an employment letter for one once. If anyone wants to call that “exploitation”, she shows herself to be nothing but an ideologue and therefore in the same ethical boat as Farley, Hughes et al.
The really bizarre thing about ad hominem arguments is their arbitrary character. I’ve been expressing my opinion online for eight years now and I’ve been called a “liberal” and a “conservative”, a “feminist” and a “misogynist”, a “jingoist” and a “cultural relativist”, a “slut” and a “prude”, and any number of other totally-contradictory terms…whatever the accuser felt would invalidate my argument with the particular crowd I was addressing. That’s why the same woman can be simultaneously “too whorish to be taken seriously” and “not whorish enough to know whereof she speaks”; the important thing is to get the audience thinking of anything other than her ideas.
One Year Ago Today
“April Miscellanea (Part One)” reports on Ashley Judd’s amorality; the arrest of President Obama’s friend for soliciting a prostitute; TV producers paying escorts to pretend to be clients of male escorts; a Jezebel story which compares sexual metaphors to forcible rape; the widespread ridicule of Demi & Ashton’s stupid “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign; and the fact that the Long Island Killer may be a cop.
The neo-femmes go into overdrive “you’re not representative” whenever Belle De Jour was mentioned. To which I often respond “denial is not just a river in Egypt”.
Great post, I was wondering when Stella would get some attention. The first time I saw her she posted a truly bizarre series of comments on Lara Augstin’s blog – girl certainly has issues.
The sad thing about Stella Marr is that it’s possible she really did have a bad time as a hooker; perhaps she was a runaway and drug addict and fell in with a bad crowd. But because of all the lies, exaggerations and “reframed experiences”, it’s impossible to tell truth from fabrication in her narrative. And even if everything she said about herself were 100% true, that still gives her no right to use lies and smears to advocate for bad laws that hurt other people any more than the victim of a bad auto accident has the right to use lies and smears to advocate for a ban on private automobiles or the victim of a shooting to use lies and smears to advocate for the confiscation of guns from law-abiding citizens.
Even Marr’s “conflict of interest” argument makes no sense unless she’s claiming that she can prove you never worked as a prostitute at all.
A farm slave who somehow rises to become a plantation owner, and a miner who becomes a mine owner still have valid opinions regarding their original professions, providing they don’t try to hide or deny their rise to management.
What you described is exactly why I never get into on-line debates and arguments. More often than not, you have all manner of wild ad hominem attacks thrown at you, and the entire thing gets derailed, unless you ignore the attack, which often effectively ends the “discussion” anyway, because you are accused of hiding from the accusation.
That’s sort of the beauty of online discussions since if the other guy/girl throws insults at you, or thinly veiled attacks, then you’ve already won a moral victory. Even more so if you can brush them off long enough for them to become steadily more and more deranged.
Her comparison is ridiculous; a better one would be actress and agent or movie director. But since many actors become agents or directors, and both professions are fairly profitable, her absurd simile would then lose its impact. Notice she even felt compelled to include the word “migrant” to call attention away from farmhands who become foremen and then go on to own their own farms.
Fortunately for the greater cause, she fails to recognize that her rhetoric is so clearly Marxist (with its idiotic pretense of labor and management being two classes as separate as serfs and nobles) that most people will reject it out of hand.
“A farm slave who somehow rises to become a plantation owner…”
These people don’t exist according to many “liberals” (especially those who take victimology as their personal religion) who half-ass their way through history classes. When that reality IS presented to them, then the reaction is to deny and waffle.
I’m sure that “liberals” of that sort exist, but I’ve yet to meet one. I’ve seen some in print who might be like that, but not on TV. I’ve been aware for most of my life that there were black slave owners in pre-Civil War America, and the people I heard talking about it were moderate-to-liberal.
You need to be around “liberal” academics and activists who have their own status quo to uphold. These were people who I counted as friends at one point. They:
1. Think all Northerners (then and now) are anti-racist and all Southerners are racist (then and now). Ergo, the Civil War was about the “good white folk” fighting the “evil white folk” to free the poor black slaves.
2. Are dedicated to upholding the “one drop rule” and regard all interracial relations (esp. between black women and white men), essentially before Loving v. Virginia as, “slave rape”. Seriously.
3. Have extreme difficulty in understanding why some older blacks I know prefer the South’s more up-front racism to the “smile in your face/stab you in the back” racism of the North.
I could go on, but I don’t want to derail the thread. If you ever make it to Chicago, I can arrange a meeting with these people. But I have met real, not superficial, liberals who are academics and activists and yes, they are aware of these facts and it is with them that I study the most.
I guess the saddest part is that these people consider themselves to be liberals at all. Then again, it would be hard to call them “conservatives” with a straight face, and I know that a lot of people assume that if you aren’t one, you must be the other.
Number 1 is completely and totally what I was taught in school. I believe it was even codified in the textbooks, although it may have come from the teacher (grade school was some time ago). While I’ve never seen number 2, I have known many people who dismiss anything a black person said/claimed/wrote during slavery or in the decades immediately following, as “oh of course they had to have been lying to appease the whites! They were too scared to say what they really believed,” which is of course that they always agreed with Ms. Born 100 Years Later.
Yup and yup. I would say the textbook probably gave strong hints at that attitude and the teacher filled in the rest.
And I don’t think that I’ve ever encountered #1 anytime in my life, North or South. I have, however, encountered a lot of Southerners bitching about it.
Yes. You’ve said that before. Is there a reason you’re repeating this?
Is there a reason others keep repeating the ubiquity of this thing I can’t find? Probably similar reasons.
So because you can’t find it, it can’t possibly exist. That’s uncharacteristically idiotic of you.
It certainly would be, if I’d said that.
Let me be clear then: I don’t say that it doesn’t exist, but I do say that it’s overstated. Just like I’m sure that some white man some where lost a job some time to a less qualified black gay limping woman or whatever. But to hear some people talk, you’d think that the entire history of employment consisted of nothing else.
They’re also really good at ignoring the slaveowners who treated their slaves fairly, and the slave narratives collected under Roosevelt’s oral history program in the ’30s wherein many former slaves express nostalgia for “them good old days” on the plantation. Distorted narratives aren’t ever right no matter what the motive, and exaggerating the horror stories is as wrong as downplaying or denying them.
Yup! When I pointed out that some owners taught their slaves actual trades which then led to their freedom (knowledge/skill IS power), their reaction is similar to that of modern-day prohibitionists who say “well, that’s not representative.” I guess complexity of experiences is too scary a concept for some people.
That said, I’d never, ever want to have a slave. I like to do my own work or if I need help, I’ll hire someone at a living wage.
They might also have trouble remembering that a large majority of anti-slavery support was not out of sympathy for slaves, but out of a resent that ‘blacks’ were being used to do jobs that the average white working class man was able to do. So it was really more labour politics for some than anything altruistic.
Thaddeus Russell demonstrates that many, perhaps the majority of, abolitionists were upset at the “laziness” and “loose morals” of the slaves, and believed that if they were free they could be more easily forced to adhere to middle-class American ideas of Christian morality.
Just looked Russell up. Interesting fellow. Not expecting him on the History Channel any time soon, but I’d give him a watch if he did show up.
But how do you “demonstrate” such a thing? You find something somebody wrote that says “Those slaves are lazy and have loose morals, and if we take them off the plantations they’ll be better Christians” or some such.
Of course you have white folks who wanted to be able to get paid to pick cotton and other jobs done by slaves, and found slavery rather hard to compete with. Then you had those who didn’t give a damn about the slaves or the poor whites wanting to get paid for the same jobs, but thought that slavery was morally damaging to the slave owners, and then add to that the abolitionists who (and this is controversial today, or so it would seem) actually thought that slavery was bad for the slaves themselves, and thought something should be done. Because in a nation which declares itself to be all about FREEDOM! slavery is a cruel hypocrisy.
I know that it’s considered bad to think that pale penis people can care about dark-skinned penis people (let alone women), but we can, and sometimes do.
I would assume that:
“lazy” = not working without being forced, and
“loose morals” = sex without church marriage. Since they were either not Christians or did not have access to a church and a priest to marry them, this was hardly surprising.
People in all lands and of all political beliefs have always been very creative in finding reasons for excluding certain other people from the benefits of “freedom”.
You’re probably right on both counts. It wouldn’t be the first (and it sure wasn’t the last) time that a group of people were forcibly kept from doing something, and then the fact that they were not doing that something was used as “proof” that they were backward, immoral people.
Prostitutes haven’t set up something like an STD Underwriters Laboratory with free searchable database! See: they don’t care about their customers’ health! And, exactly how are they going to set up this STDUL without getting arrested? Leaving aside for now the fact that protecting their own health also protects the health of their customers.
The abolitionist tracts I’ve read seem to feel that the slaves should work hard just like good Protestants, and that their shirking work in order to get back at their owners instilled bad habits in them. “Loose morals” was a bit more than you propose; like lower-class people everywhere, slaves tended to be promiscuous or to practice serial monogamy, starting and stopping relationships as pleased them rather than as dictated by laws imposed by busybodies. Whores in History points out that the idea of prostitution as a “practice” or “institution” (which forms the basis of “trafficking ” mythology) is a 19th-century one responsible for tremendous oppression on the working class when it was first imposed, because taking money from men one had sex with was inextricably interwoven with the lifestyles of the poor, just as it still is to a lesser extent. With the slaves, it was no different; here were white middle-class people pretending that their moral notions were “normal” and “natural” and everyone else’s a “perversion”, just as moralists and neofeminists do today when railing about the “exploitation” and “slavery” of prostitution.
I don’t find it hard to believe that some slave owners took seriously the Biblical admonition to both slaves and masters to treat each other with fairness. Certainly not every slave owner was the whip-wielding monster we so often see portrayed. Then again, some were.
But there’s another little matter I need to address here, and if you bet yourself a dollar I was going to, then congratulations, you just won money off of yourself. I have a strong tendency, and not without good, good reason, to at least somewhat discount “good old days” reminiscences, whether they be those of former slaves, former masters, current slaves, current masters, or those who have never been either slave or master.
But even with that, I have to keep in mind that the former slaves did not immediately become full citizens, recognized as such by government and countrymen alike. In fact, they were not accorded the same rights, privileges, and respect as whites by either government or their countrymen. So the least bad plantation experiences may well have seemed better, especially when viewed through the distorting lens of nostalgia.
It may have been the late Shelby Foote who said that Jefferson Davis (President of the Confederacy) had a positive view of slavery because the type of slavery he had witnessed in his life was “benign” and gentle. It’s often said that Abe Lincoln held a negative view of the institution because the part of it he witnessed was cruel.
Lincoln, as a kid, made trips down the Mississippi to New Orleans – where he witnessed chattel slavery at it’s worst, with the chains and the auction blocks.
Davis – on the other hand, grew up playing with slaves and was a slave owner himself. He taught them the bible and even instituted “slave justice” whereby slaves who were accused of wrongdoing were “tried” by a jury of other other slaves. I believe he reserved the right to overturn punishment in cases where those “juries” returned overly harsh punishments.
It’s a conundrum that I’m not smart enough to figure out. I DO believe that Davis was a good man at heart. I also believe that Ian Smith, the last PM of Rhodesia was a good man. I have read the memoirs of both men and they claim their only intent was to “civilize” and then “empower” Africans.
I hate was happened to Zimbabwe since the Smith government was forced out of office. Zimbabwe is one of the most beautiful countries in the world and capable of agricultural riches in excess of any ten nations you could name (combined) of the same size. The Mugabe government has RUINED Zimbabwe where it flourished under Smith. I also note that my own ancestors, most of whom were Gauls – were enslaved by the Romans and in the end that enslavement benefited western civilization.
But I just can’t bring myself to justify slavery in that manner.
Ah Stella Marr serves some good purposes…her insane rants have finally caused me to drop the word “prostitute” from my vocabulary after decades and use “sex worker” instead, her endless stream of invective and false accusation, aimed at myself, as well as others have finally caused me to re-examine the more irrational aspects of my blanket prejudice against anyone making money out of someone else selling sex…
But I am not as kind as you Maggie, I have become convinced, over time, that Stella Marr has invented every word of her, remarkably unlikely, story in a cynical attempt to carve out a lucrative career for herself as a “leader” in abolitionism replete with paid speaking gigs and quasi celebrity status. I have seen people do this before with other issues and the pattern and personality type is always the same.
The thought of any organisation sufficiently far removed from reason as to promote this woman having any influence over the fates of genuinely vulnerable women in sex work who do need help is terrifying. Yet it happens.
Here, in Ireland, once the police are involved at all it is quite usual for sex workers to be offered the choice between arrest and engaging with the local abolitionist NGO, Ruhama, (which is controlled by two of the orders who controlled the Magdalene Laundries…for the first 5 years – ’89 – ’94 in parallel),. non-nationals will be accommodated through Ruhama’s affiliate organisations and isolated from everyone but Ruhama and affiliates, EVEN THE POLICE for at least 3 weeks, before being asked to make any statement about trafficking.(and *they* talk about “the Stockholm Syndrome”). Imagine if potential date rape victims were treated that way?
I’m not discounting the possibility that she made it all up, but it really doesn’t matter one way or another. Even if every single word of her narrative were true and undistorted as she states it, that still wouldn’t give her the right to speak for all whores or to overrule our choices.
That is, of course, absolutely true Maggie.
It also always leaves me stunned whenever yet another person, young enough to be my child, with or without claim to sex work experience, *INFORMS* me how I ought to remember and interpret my own experience.
It is surreal…I have been remembering and interpreting all of my experiences for far longer than they have been alive, and I am happy with my ability to do that, and they come along and expect me to ignore the evidence of my own experience and substitute their agenda instead!
I don’t care if she’s the same age as me or were born yesterday – telling a complete stranger how to interpret their own experiences is just plain insulting.
You don’t merely deny trafficking propaganda, you *refute* it, which is more dangerous to the prohibitionists. After all, the existence of the moon can be denied, but it cannot be refuted.
Stella has repeated her story that she was “initiated” into prostitution by being gang raped by her pimp and others – and the “others” also included a cop (who, I guess – was “protection” for the pimp). She speaks of customers – and it appears that every single one was a perverted whore beater – and she apparently saw tens of these guys every day she was forced to work. She talks about repeated visits to the hospital after a day’s work where the doctors thought she may have had an abortion that day (her internals were so wounded).
I mean – if I were going to make up a story for online consumption – I couldn’t make up a more inflammatory story than the one she parrots everywhere online.
Assuming, for five seconds, that her story is true – then doesn’t she have a moral duty to come forward to protect other young women who, we must assume, are out there right now undergoing the same, or similar, ordeal she went through? I don’t recall her ever talking about what happened to her pimp(s) – are they still out there committing these outrages? On the side here – the part of me that “believes” her is OUTRAGED that men like this are even allowed to breath air on this planet – because if I ever came across one of these guys I would rip his head off and shit down his windpipe. So a part of me says … “Hey Stella, let’s go get these freakin’ dudes, huh?”
But – she never comes forward publicly – or even semi-publicly to the police or journalists with her experiences. In fact, if she’s still fearful of the men who did this to her and can’t come forward publicly – then why doesn’t she start an anonymous blog about the problem? All she does is do “drive-bys” comments through other blogs and online newspapers. And – the comments are always almost the same (the one’s I’ve seen).
It’s hard for me to get very excited about her. The telling thing here is … there’s no GRAY to the problem she describes. She describes ALL prostitutes as slaves living a horrible existence. I think I’ve seen her acknowledge that there are some sex workers who can at least “tolerate” their jobs – but those women she describes as being way outside on the fringe of the bell curve.
Oh … and one more thing. Stella Marr can support the “Swedish Model” all she wants but she’ll have to find a new name for it once myself and my four buddies conquer Sweden. That’ll be my first act as King of Sweden – abolishing that law. Second act will be to absolve all whores of having to pay income tax. By the way Maggie – tell your hubby I have one more open seat in the choppah if he wants to come with.
And, by the way Maggie – I know you like to slam on Sweden a lot but ease up on my future “subjects”. 😉
@Krulac, In the movie that Maggie mentioned the other day, “The Client List”, not only does this movie show how sex workers actually tend to be (have real lives, children, financial needs, etc), the show also tends to paint a positive image of the clients as well. I would tend to think the majority of clients are pretty similar to what they show. Maggie could confirm whether my perception is accurate or not. This just makes Stella’s story all the more unbelievable.
That’s a GREAT report Ted because I was afraid that show would degrade into some “woman-hating” hoo-haa just for ratings or something. I like Jennifer Love Hewitt and don’t want to see another “infatuation” of mine shattered into a million pieces! I’m still “smarting” from Julianne Moore’s turn to the dark side. 🙁
Hey! I AM A CLIENT! I’ve never been arrested or spent a night in jail; never hit a woman; I pay my taxes and my credit is spotless! I LOVE women. A used car salesman takes advantage of me – and he better put up his dukes! A woman takes advantage of me – and I’m fine with it as long as she’s pretty (and they ALL are to me) and flashes a bit of cleavage! Isn’t that what life is about?
So yeah – I will be watching JLH’s new show (as long as it doesn’t come on during “dance moms” – I am the only remaining male in the home now – a wife and a daughter and two female dogs “outvote” me for control of the remote! 🙁 )
Stella Marr is not out there blogging to help others, she is blogging to promote her book. If you notice; others blogging about their lives she finds a way to bring up her (website/blog/articles/etc.) It’s all about her.
As someone who hated sex work myself, I can happily confirm that, by far, the vast majority of clients were just nice, normal guys who would rather pay a sex worker than use a girl who had too much to drink in a nightclub.
Maybe twice I came across the kind of violent, degrading experience she describes as a “norm” in sex work…that is what gives her away…
Her personality is so grating, obnoxious and controlling that I find it very hard to believe even the most soulless pimp could put up with her for any length of time.
Hey, thanks for saying that! I think I’ve commented a couple of times before that I really wasn’t in to playing with a girl’s emotions and, I’m really not smart enough to figure out what her motivations for being in a nightclub are. So, for me, it seemed more honest to simply give a girl what she wanted in the form of monetary compensation for the act. When I finally met my wife – I wasn’t clawing all over her for sex but I could be relaxed and evaluate her as the potential woman I’d spend the rest of my life with – and that kind of thing is A LOT more than simply sex.
It’s a funny story – I didn’t want to ruin my chances with her by hitting on her too soon. But then again, if you’re a guy and wait too long to hit on girl – maybe she starts to think you’re gay or … that you’re actually afraid to put a move on her! Well, I couldn’t have that happening so I resolved to “hit her up” on the third date in a manner that was firmly a “come on” but still give her an option to hit the eject button.
She completely fried my plan when SHE hit on me on the second date! Nasty girl she is – the way I like ’em! 😉
And, the thing was – I wasn’t prepared to have sex with her that night or I’d have worn underwear! Yeah, American submariners don’t like underwear. So when she slipped her hand down my jeans to hit second base she ended up on third! Maybe she thought it was weird – but she still married me! 😛
You gotta love a submariner! :o)
Yes, they were mostly just nice guys like you.
Well I’m very sorry you didn’t enjoy your time as a sex worker. I have to say it was always one of my greatest fears that I might hire someone who really hated the job or worse – might be scarred by it.
LIve is so complicated. 🙁
> I’m getting too much attention and that my arguments are
> too cogent, so every time Stella sees some online
> commenter mention me, she responds with something like…”
With any luck, My Lady will soon graduate from the likes of Stella to even more powerful opponents! Don Piatt once said that “A man’s greatness can be measured by his enemies.”
Well, I know Kristof has noticed me, but he’s graduated from libeling individuals to libeling whole organizations (DMSC, Village Voice Media) so he won’t bother. It’s possible Melissa Farley is behind Stella; Dr. Laura Agustin is of the opinion that she dispatches Stella so she can pretend to be “above” that sort of thing.
Now THAT would make “huge” sense Maggie…there is something very familiar about Stella (even her photos) that I cannot quite put my finger on, and it isn’t a good kind of familiar. One of her characters “FreeIrishWoman” is definitely a fiction (supposedly concurrent with me in the same small world and trust me, if there was some kind of annual “blooper” award she would win hands down!). I have been told she is the creation of our local abolitionist NGO, Ruhama…but that seems a bit OTT…probably just another “StellaMarr” fiction.
It makes sense to me, too. A lot of her stuff reads like it came straight out of one of Farley’s screeds.
Stella Marr; read her blogs before she changed her name. Seemed she came from money (Juilliard). She blogs about arguing and being mistreated by her family, I am no psychologist but after her money train was cut instead of making a fresh starting (saving, eating rice every meal, getting a real job) she took the easy way out – Hooking – Call Girl – Being Kept. Don’t know what you think but this all adds up to a spoiled CHILD!
It’s also the demographic that tends to follow people like Farley slavishly. Thanks for the intel, Sandra!
Stella Marr; read her blogs before she changed her name. Seemed she came from money (Juilliard).
Juilliard. Hmm. Maybe not the family so much as the school. As in, she’s a freaking actress (that’d explain the dramatics).
Drama, as in the book she is writing! I have left comment for Stella Marr, she continously deletes the questions posed. She appears to be a “Hot Head” commenting she will debate anyone. DEBATE? Why not just deal with the questions.
I have connections at Juilliard… what time period would she have attended? And drama, music or dance?
It turns out the Julliard claim is bogus; she actually went to Barnard.
You’re kidding. She lied? Hard to believe.
/sarc
Reading some of the links in this column: it occurs to me that during the ten years that Stella was allegedly “sex trafficked”, all she would have had to do, JUST ONCE, is say to a client, “I’m being trafficked, call the FBI please, I need help”. One client out of hundreds over ten years who seemed like they might have had a modicum of humanity. Why didn’t she?
Oh right, all HER clients were disgraceful subhuman perverts.
The more I read about her, the more her story stinks like the Fulton Fish Market.
I read her story and it seems she was actually kidnapped off the street and held at gunpoint. It seems also that her parents put her out on the street. Not an uncommon story. I remember that when I was young and confused and with neglectful parents, there were predators and pimps on every corner trying to reel in girls. I was raped once and nearly raped or kidnapped many other times. Just take a fifteen-year-old girl and put her on the street craving love and attention and totally ignorant about predators, throw in some alcohol and drugs, and you have a potential tragedy just waiting to happen.
Actually, no she wasn’t. She is a total liar, as detailed in “Tangled Web“. TL;DR version: if she ever did sex work, it was after her parents cut her off while she was at school. In other words, she needed money & made a pragmatic decision, just like 98% of sex workers everywhere.
What is “Tangled Web?”
Just click on the link.
Oh sorry, I didn’t see there was a link to click. Well I skimmed that article, and all I could see was that someone who hates her claims to know someone else who hates her who says she is lying. So that is all hearsay and I have no way of knowing who is telling the truth. What I will say and what I implied before is that even if Stella’s story is not true, it’s not really that outrageous or unbelievable given my own experiences and those of other women I know. So to say she is lying because her story is preposterous doesn’t ring true to me. But as it stands I have no reason to believe that she is making stuff up about being kidnapped. Her writing style seems very much like the writing of someone who’s been through something they’re trying to articulate from the inside, and I think that’s very hard to fake, unless you’re a literary genius.
Looking at “Tangled Web” again, it’s pretty absurd. So due to the communications of an “anonymous leaker” whose identity you don’t know, whom you SUSPECT is a real-life acquaintance of Stella Marr, you assert that Stella Marr is a “total liar”? Whoa.
No, due to the ACTUAL EVIDENCE WHICH WAS GIVEN TO ME that I chose not to share in order to give her more respect than she gives those she lies about, I know her to be a liar. And no, I’m not going to share it with you, because there is no need; ask yourself why Amy/Stella has largely vanished from the scene since being outed. And if you want to idolize prohibitionist liars who make ridiculous claims without proof, I suggest this website is not for you.
I’m not idolizing or even siding with anyone. I just thought it was a bit mean how people were saying that she was spoiled and made her own choice when her story says the opposite, and I wanted to point that out. There could be many reasons she has vanished (which I was not aware of), including that she is not interested in being “outed” and bullied and has retreated out of fear. This is the first I have heard or read about actual evidence, and before this statement all I really had to go by is the fact that you, in your other article, said she was a liar but also expressed some doubts as to wether her story is true or not or how much of it is true, and that on this thread as well you imply that she may well have been a victim.
By the way, not everyone who feels sorry for victims is an abolitionist. For me, it’s a human response of empathy.
This column was posted in April 2012; “Tangled Web” was published three months later.
Not to beat a dead horse, but in your own comment above, you say “if she ever did sex work it was after her parents cut her off.” I assumed initially that when you called her a liar you meant that you knew she had never done sex work, but just last week in that comment you said you didn’t know if she did sex work or not. I assume the actual evidence you’re referring to is the fact that you don’t think the dates match up with her being ten years in prostitution. But that’s not enough to call someone a liar. I am fairly certain she is telling the truth, based on what I know about how real experiences sound when they are expressed in writing. I don’t see how you are helping anyone to understand sex work if you only believe in the fluffy, happy stuff, and shove the negative stuff aside or insist it doesn’t exist. Women (and all humans) have a range of experiences both in and out of sex work that are widely varied and that include all kinds of horrors and traumas as well as pleasures and agency.
That has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. Please educate yourself about the horrible lies Stella has spread, and continues to spread, about the lives of sex workers before continuing in this tiresome “I believe her” nonsense. If she had not felt compelled to lie repeatedly about sex work and sex workers from a script literally written by Melissa Farley, this column would never have been written.
Furthermore, your ignorant misrepresentation of my own work as emphasizing only sunshine and rainbows is not only highly insulting, but also makes you look like an ass to anyone who’s read more than a handful of my essays.
I didn’t say anything about sunshine and rainbows. I meant that refusing to believe that women can be forced into prostitution, and taking the default position that they are probably lying or exaggerating if they say they were, is sweeping a whole range of human experience under the carpet. No sex worker should assume that any other is being disingenuous when they talk of their experiences, whether it’s being forced or freely choosing or anything in between. What Stella seems to object to is women who have been on both ends of the business speaking for sex workers, when their interests may have shifted because of their being involved in management. So she is a radical Marxist and you are not.
It is no goddamned such thing, and I’m quite sick of your defending a dangerous liar who wants women criminalized, raped, caged, robbed and marginalized for life…because that is what she supports. In the article I linked she is PROTESTING the UN call for decriminalization; at that point I don’t give a damn what her life was like, she is the enemy. And this is the last comment I will allow through on the subject. End of discussion.
I know you won’t publish this, but here’s a link for you…
You’re right, I won’t. However, I will refer you to the many places in my blog which refer to the truth about FBI “rescues”, and point out that if you were interested in seeking the truth rather than spreading your propaganda you would have already read them. Here’s the most recent one:
And there are many others where that came from.
Actually what you just wrote is totally false. She supports the Swedish model which decriminalizes only the sex workers. In that model women retain all of their rights, and they cannot be jailed (caged) and there is less rape because they have the right to sue police officers and johns who rape them. I would assume that if they have more civil and legal rights they are less marginalized too. The fact that you yourself have to lie about her position in order to shame her is very telling.
You are totally, completely wrong, and since you ignored my instruction you are now totally, completely banned as well. Oh, and please go research the effects of the goddamned Swedish model so you can correct your woeful ignorance before trying to sell it to sex workers. Here, I’ll help you. Now goodbye.
I just realized something.
It is true that most in the North were not interested in ending slavery and were pretty racists. However, that means that the South did not secede because of a threat to their way of life.
The republicans wanted to prevent the expansion of slavery into the new territories, which isn’t too far from the South’s reluctance to add free states to the union without being balanced by other slave states.
So its almost worst for the South that the war “wasn’t really about slavery” because that would have been at least a significant blow to the southern economy. It also wasn’t about states’ rights because the Republicans weren’t intending to end slavery, since they were kinda of racist and most of them didn’t want to end slavery in the first place.
Whether or not states have a right to secede doesn’t matter because the South had no grounds for leaving, since nothing was interfering with their rights. Secession was reacting to the fact that at some point they wouldn’t have the power to stop a potential infringement on their rights to own other people and treat them fairly if they felt like it.
And, yes one of the sides of the civil war was racist by today’s standards and had some propaganda , but the other side practiced chattel slavery so by the messed up standards of warfare, it was still the closest thing to a just war ever. Maybe world war 2, but only if you don’t count the Soviet Union and are cool with strategic bombing.
War is horrific that way.
I just thought of something.
It is true that most in the North were racist and did not care about ending slavery. But that means that the south did not secede to preserve their way of life.
The republicans wanted to prevent slavery from expanding into the new territories, which wasn’t that far from the south’s goals. The South wanted to balance every free state with a new slave state which wasn’t really fair, since it wasn’t a large enough population to do that.
So, it’s almost worse that it “wasn’t about slavery” since removing slavery would be a serious blow to the Southern economy. It couldn’t have been about rights, as the republicans were kinda of racist and didn’t want to end slavery in the South.
It doesn’t matter if a state has a right to secede because they clearly had no reason to invoke that because nothing was infringing with their right to own people and treat them fairly, if they felt like it and thought it would make them money.
And yes, the North was racist, they distorted the truth and after freeing the slaves they gave up half way through helping them. But the South still practiced Chattel Slavery, so by the messed up standards of warfare, it is the closest thing to a just war ever. Maybe World War II, but I’d say it still a toss up if you don’t include the Soviet Union and are cool with strategic bombing.
War is horrific that way.
The people doing the succeeding thought it was about slavery. We in the year 2012 can say “it wasn’t about slavery” all we like. Hey, maybe the people doing the succeeding were all lying about their reasons. But the reasons they gave listed slavery high on the list.
Slavery threatened their way of life, especially that of low-wage workers. Slavery is a very attractive option for business owners (yes, that includes plantation owners) only seeking to increase their bottom line. Why pay a worker when you can have access to free labor? So yes, plenty of Northerners hated slavery, but not because of any fuzzy feelings for the black (or Indian or mixed race) slaves held in bondage. That much is obvious with even a cursory knowledge of postbellum race relations in the North.
They hated something that was wrong for the wrong reasons, that is still better than owning people as slaves.
Motivation counts. What use was it disliking that certain people were held in bondage when those same people were not treated much better outside of bondage?
I would argue that while they would be treated much better, they would be treated better in a critical way, that of an “inferior” person than someone’s else property. Ending slavery was necessary step in ending racial prejudice in both the North and the South.
Furthermore, is anything fundamentally wrong with noticing the practical concerns of something that’s evil. For instance many people interested in decriminalizing prostitution cite numerous practical benefits to doing so. Some are even primarily motivated by that. But does that really take away from the core moral statement that criminalizing behavior between consenting adults is wrong?
People have a lot of negative stereotypes toward Southerners and a good deal of misconceptions about how noble the Civil War really was. But at the same time, the South was clearly in the wrong and ending slavery, though it was almost unintentional, was right.
The problem is that there was a lack of planning on how to integrate the newly freed slaves into society. Here’s millions of people who have only known one way to live and who many resented for being here in the first place. This left them open to violence and exploitation (including low pay for whatever work they did accept because, how would they know what a fair wage was?). Wait, isn’t…isn’t that slavery? There were towns and burgs who didn’t want to take the slaves in (“Well, we don’t want them in our neighborhood!” “We don’t want them either!”) meant that they formed isolated groups ripe for the picking by the KKK or other random groups with similar bigotries. Some towns and burgs hired former slaves but wanted them to live elsewhere (we’ll take your labor, but you can’t be our neighbor), requiring travel which may have been dangerous and expensive. Some found legal ways that provided very unstable income (roaming labor), others, of course, found less than legal ways…which possibly landed them in jail which usually includes hard labor (slavery).
You brought up prostitution but to make the accurate analogy*, you should have brought up modern-day prohibitionist efforts since they see themselves as an exact rebirth of those efforts. It is why they call themselves abolitionists (us sex worker rights activists refer to them as prohibitionists, which they hate). Nicholas Kristof and his “savior” activities (as well as others like him) are case in point for my argument for why motivations count. So, the slaves are free; now what? Concerning American slavery, it’s well-documented that a significant portion of slaves returned to the plantation. There can be numerous reasons for that, including “better the devil you know”. Concerning white sla…ah, trafficking, these freed “slaves” return to the brothel as soon as possible. APNSW has a sigil with a sewing machine, a red circle with the bar through it. That is the alternative offered to these “slaves”, which the majority don’t want because if that was the case they would have went to work in a shop in the first place. Other alternatives are imprisonment, deportation, forced marriage, etc.
*(Note: the analogy you used in your reply would be more appropriate to discussions of miscegenation, which often overlapped with laws against prostitution and concubinage. Especially the Mann Act, and Louisiana’s Bando de Bueno Gobierno of 1786 and State of Louisiana v. Daniel (1917). Additionally, there was the popular belief that the woman in an interracial pairing was a de facto whore and the man in an interracial pairing was a de facto rapist, which led to all sorts of nasty things like lynchings (for the men) and, yes, even ‘honor killings’ or beatings. To say nothing of same-sex interracial pairings, which were known, as in 1630s Jamestown, VA a man named Hugo Davis was convicted for “laying with a Negro”; Negro females were addressed/described as “negress” in those days.)
Were any of those possibilities taken into account and preparations made to prevent the newly freed from falling into worse circumstances? That is the problem with not having the right motivation, especially for such a monumental action. People can’t be left at loose ends and vulnerable to worse treatment (which could be prevented or greatly reduced with proper planning), rendering their “freedom” null. We agree that slavery was bad and needed to be ended.
A lot of former slaves did indeed return to the plantations. But, they had some tiny option to leave if they weren’t treated well. Doing so was a gamble, but it wasn’t a hanging offense… anymore. Some of them went west. Nearly a third of all cowboys in the period we think of as “the wild west” were black. You’d never know this from watching The Lone Ranger or Bonanza, but it’s true. Some former slaves went to Africa. Some formed contracts with former masters, trading continued labor over a period of years for land.
None of which was possible for slaves. The one advantage slavery did offer* is reliability. You didn’t have to look for work; the master would provide plenty of that. And he’d keep you fed and out of the rain, too, because you’re an expensive labor-saving device to have to replace. If he’s also a decent man who, like Thomas Jefferson, makes sure you’re better off physically than the poorest whites, well so much the better. Unless you’re sold off, of course.
* The advantages to the masters are pretty obvious: it’s always good to have a labor-saving device.
Yes. I am well aware of the history of my folks. My point is that returning to the plantation which was supposedly the site of all horrors was not what the abolitionists counted on yet nonetheless occurred because not everyone had viable alternatives. Understand my point now?
I got your point when you made it, and you’re right: we did a lousy job, as a nation, of handling the situation. Forty acres and a mule never happened, nor did any of a number of other things that would have been better than the whole, “OK, you’re free; let us know who that works out” way things were done.
MY point is that, even with all of that, it was better than hereditary chattel slavery. For some individual ex-slaves who had had more kindly masters and who couldn’t ride a horse very well and such it may not have been, but in general, overall, abolition, even handled badly, is better than continuing the system.
Really, aren’t we on the same side of this argument?
Slavery = bad, way the country dealt with population of former slaves = dumb.
Without a doubt, we’re on the same side of the argument. I’ve just read and heard about so many bad things that could have been prevented, from my p.o.v. as a partial descendant of these slaves, but weren’t even considered because the motivations didn’t allow for the post-script, you know?
Ha! Forty acres and a mule. I’ll take the land, they can keep the mule.
Yeah, it was about slavery and the other reasons were only a problem because of slavery in the first place.
But, as various people have pointed out the South didn’t seceded because the North was trying to nobly free the slaves for humanitarian reasons. Slavery and states’ rights weren’t actually under attack. The South just wanted even more political power to try to preserve slavery as long as possible.
But in the early 1960s feminists coined the term ad feminam to describe attacks based specifically on the target’s femininity, e.g., “what do you know, you’re just a woman.
It is not surprising that once again a cis feminist conflates female, or CAFAB for that matter, with feminine. Femininity and femaleness are not the same thing.
Point taken; Camille Paglia discusses the difference and I’ve talked about it myself. What’s CAFAB, though?
Coercively Assigned Female at Birth.
Snark withdrawn, it’s just something that comes up again and again. I had a discussion earlier this week where I said X cis feminist was using femmephobic language, and Y cis feminist said, “I’ve never known X to be misogynistic.”
No worries. 😉
[…] is disregarded by these groups in a variety of ways. For sex work activists like myself, I am dismissed by anti-prostitution campaigners because they describe people like me as privileged, white supremacist activists and my experience […]
Hello Maggie. I came here because of your post at Popehat. Your blog is refreshingly frank about a much suppressed topic. Thank you to you and to Ken.
[…] Criticism is distinguished from insult by its intent; the former is an analysis and can even be constructive, while the latter is simply an attack. So while the two may be indistinguishable to the irrational person (who nowadays is as likely as not to refer to either one as “bullying”), the rational person understands that the two are not interchangeable. Ad hominem arguments provide a useful demonstration of the difference: valid criticisms are specific, coherent and similar to one another even when negative, while the terms used in ad hominem attacks by different people may be all over the map; as I wrote in “Ad Scortum”, […]
“as though actually knowing something about a subject before forming an opinion was some kind of disadvantage”
Trumpf voters clearly believe this to be the case.
Batten down the hatches, kiddies — a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.