April | 2012 | The Honest Courtesan

Archive for April, 2012

Hard Numbers

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged Australia, bogus studies, brothels, cops, ethics, Hard Numbers, harm reduction, hysteria, law, New Zealand, psychology, statistics, streetwalkers, Thailand on April 20, 2012| 27 Comments »

Knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. – Michel de Montaigne

Regular readers know what a large fraction of the American public seems unable to comprehend: that the numbers of “slaves” claimed by trafficking fetishists are not only so outlandish that even some “trafficking” researchers question them, but also completely unsupported by anything police agencies in any country have ever been able to verify. In a textbook example of circular logic, fetishists claim that this somehow proves that “modern slavery” is so insidious it must be pursued with ever-increasing criminalization; of course, it would look exactly the same if “trafficking” were rare, but if one mentions that the fetishists point to their “estimates”…which the various organizations borrow from one another in an immense daisy-chain of incestuous inter-attribution which starts and ends nowhere. On April 2^nd I told you about the incredibly flawed way in which Kevin Bales, frequently quoted as an “authority”, derives his wild guesses:

Bales starts with [a US State Department] “estimate” of unknown derivation, “adjusts” it by a factor based on media reports (which often repeat each other and obviously increase dramatically during a moral panic), presumes without evidence that the proportion of reports to actual incidents is low, multiplies the result by guesses from prohibitionists with an anti-whore agenda, then rounds up. When I made my own estimate of the number of US prostitutes I used solid data from a methodologically-sound survey, and cross-checked it [as explained in my column of one year ago today] via another widely accepted study; the results are both credible and jibe with figures extrapolated from historical data. Bales’ [method], on the other hand…is specifically designed to produce ever-increasing results: wildly-exaggerated “estimates” fuel the hysteria, which in turn generates more media reports, which dramatically increases the “adjustment factor”, thus generating ever-higher “estimates” which ratchet up the hysteria…and so on and on, ad nauseam. The current claim surpasses the population of Australia by a comfortable margin…

Speaking of Australia, government-sponsored researchers in New South Wales have recently released a report which supports the strategy of sex worker advocates over that of the prohibitionists with cold, hard facts. See, the critical problem with the incredibly-inflated claims of prohibitionists isn’t that they’re wrong; it’s that once people accept anyone as an authority on facts, it is far more likely that they will also accept him as an authority on matters of policy. In other words, if John Q. Public thinks the numbers put forth by the Polaris Project and CATW are credible, he’s that much more likely to accept their claims that the best way to control the supposed “crisis” is via increased criminalization of sex work. Rights activists, on the other hand, repeatedly point out that no matter how many or how few “trafficking victims” there are, their exploitation is greatly facilitated by criminalization; removal of the laws which exacerbate the problem is therefore the best way to control it even if it were as widespread as fanatics claim. If we’re right, sexual exploitation should therefore be especially rare in jurisdictions which have decriminalized prostitution…and indeed that is so. New Zealand hasn’t had a case of “sex trafficking” in years, and according to the aforementioned report it has essentially vanished in Sydney as well since 1995 (the date of effective decriminalization in NSW), even if one classes ALL undocumented immigrant prostitutes as “trafficked”:

Some individuals…contend that hundreds of Asian women are trafficked to brothels in Australia but present little evidence. The Federal Government, in response to international anti-trafficking agreements funded a large-scale investigation into these allegations…since 2004, 119 women ‘discovered’ in NSW have been involved in a…Government support program for people trafficked into the sex industry, but there have only been a handful of successful prosecutions…The [research] team found no evidence of recent trafficking of female sex workers in the Sydney brothel survey…or in a clinic study…This was in marked contrast to the 1990s when contacted women from Thailand were common in Sydney…

That report is well worth reading (or at least scanning); it states that New South Wales has “the healthiest sex industry ever documented” and advised the government to scrap most of the few remaining laws. Here are a few excerpts from the recommendations section:

…reforms that decriminalized adult sex work have improved human rights; removed police corruption; netted savings for the criminal justice system; and enhanced the surveillance, health promotion, and safety of the NSW sex industry. International authorities regard the NSW regulatory framework as best practice. Contrary to early concerns the NSW sex industry has not increased in size or visibility, and sex work remains stigmatised…Licensing of sex work (‘legalisation’) should not be regarded as a viable legislative response. For over a century systems that require licensing of sex workers or brothels have consistently failed – most jurisdictions that once had licensing systems have abandoned them. As most sex workers remain unlicensed criminal codes remain in force, leaving the potential for police corruption. Licensing systems are expensive and difficult to administer, and they always generate an unlicensed underclass…[which] is wary of and avoids surveillance systems and public health services: the current systems in Queensland and Victoria confirm this fact. Thus, licensing is a threat to public health…local governments refusing to approve development applications for brothels [results] in substantial legal costs and…has also fostered the growth of brothels masquerading as massage parlours… Government, in consultation with local government and street work communities, should investigate more effective and humane approaches to the problems posed by street-based sex work…Though they are the smallest component of the industry, street sex workers are the major target for police prosecutions because of their high visibility. The aim of the investigation should be to explore methods of reducing the street presence and vulnerability of sex workers by means such ensuring an adequate supply of indoor alternatives; including approving brothels, and supporting more ‘safe house’ facilities…For health and safety reasons and in order to meet best practice in a decriminalised environment the word ‘brothel’ as defined in the legislation, should not apply when up to four private sex workers work cooperatively from private premises. All of the evidence indicates that private sex workers have no effect on public amenity. Exempting this group from planning laws that pertain to brothels will limit the potential for local government corruption. The New Zealand experience provides a successful precedent for the four worker model.

None of these recommendations are remotely surprising to either sex worker advocates (who have been saying the same thing for decades) or libertarians (who constantly point out that many social problems are caused by laws that criminalize private behavior). Of course, American politicians won’t listen right now; they’re on a one-way trip to totalitarianism that cannot be stopped until the train wrecks. But after it does, those charged with sifting through the debris will have the example of freer, more wisely-governed countries to draw from, and hard evidence that disproves the claims of prohibitionists that people need to be driven like cattle and that more laws and police help anyone except those who profit from the police state.

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Two-Way Street

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged archeofeminism, dirty, ethics, marriage, neofeminism, pathologization of males, psychology, tabula rasa, transgender, yin and yang on April 19, 2012| 97 Comments »

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a social construct of a duck. – Helena Cronin

Some of my readers have asked why the dogma of “social construction of gender” irritates me so. It isn’t just because it’s scientifically inaccurate; I don’t get nearly as irate about creationism. One difference is that while the latter is not accepted by nearly anyone who self-identifies as intellectual, the former is; many people who have both the education and the personal experience to recognize it as a fallacy instead choose to accept because it’s a tenet of their political faith (which is no different from “the Bible tells me so.”) But that’s not really the problem; it’s that “social construction of gender” is far more dangerous to human relationships than creationism could ever be. My ex-husband Jack was a creationist, and while it did cause considerable friction in our relationship it wasn’t nearly the level that would have ensued had he demanded I adhere to male norms of behavior because female behavior is only “socially constructed”. Furthermore, even if neither were used as an excuse for government control of individuals (which, alas, both are in the modern US), “social construction” dogma is bound to cause conflict in a mixed-sex group; I couldn’t tell you how many creationists worked at the library, but I can sure tell you which believed in “social construction” because of their unreasonable expectations about co-workers of the opposite sex.

The problem is glaringly obvious if you think about it; if we understand that men and women are different, we expect them to behave differently and make allowance for it when dealing with them. But “social construction of gender” presumes a single baseline, one norm from which all gender-specific behavior is a deviation. If humans were fair-minded and truly believed that all gender expression was equally deviant from an unattainable unisex “norm”, that would be silly and false but not actually harmful. But because humans aren’t perfectly fair-minded this isn’t what happens at all; those who believe in a unisex standard (such as neofeminists or male chauvinists) actually declare their own sex’s behavior as the norm, and the other’s as a pathological deviation from it. Whether the response is to condemn the other sex as hopelessly inferior and therefore creatures to be patronized, or to attempt to force the other to change to conform to the other’s norm, is immaterial; both inevitably result in strife, maltreatment and tyranny.

I discussed one example of this sort of misunderstanding in my column of one year ago today: many women condemn men for being attracted to the characteristics to which Nature has programmed them to be attracted, which is not merely an offense against logic and biology, but against decency and human rights as well. They may even rail loudly against those who are prejudiced against others for physical characteristics they cannot help (such as skin color), but deny that sexual preferences are just as innate because to admit it would undermine their catechism. Why is it OK to decry “fat shaming”, yet insult men who are sexually repulsed by obesity in women? If a woman can’t control her reaction to food, how is a man supposed to control his sexual feelings? The idea is not only nonsense, it exposes the real motive behind most neofeminist teachings: the sick and envious need to keep men from experiencing sex in the way that is enjoyable for them. Dig beneath the surface of any neofeminist policy on sex and you’ll find the same evil, rotten motive.

Another example is in the typical feminist reaction to my old (but still popular and controversial) column “A Whore in the Bedroom”. It’s been called “misogynistic”, “fat-shaming”, “anti-consent” and even “MRA-like”, because it says things they don’t want to hear and conflicts with “social construction of gender”. The basic theme of that column is stated in this passage:

Getting married is a free choice, and carries responsibilities with the privileges. If you refuse to take care of your dog you should give him to somebody who will, and if you refuse to give sex to your husband you should either divorce him or suggest he satisfy his needs elsewhere with your blessing. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too; a man is NOT a woman, and if you expect him to respect your choice not to have sex with him, you in turn must respect his choice to get it from somebody else.

The only way to deny the truth and fairness of that statement is to pretend that sex differences do not exist, that a man’s sex drive is a deviation from the (female) norm and that it is therefore reasonable to insist that a man can “learn” not to need what he needs. This goes beyond the absurd into the totally delusional; one might as well say that a 100-kg man can subsist on the same amount of food as a 60-kg woman, or that women don’t need tampons or birth control pills because men don’t. Relationships are not for the benefit of one person; they are for the benefit of both, and if either partner denies the other things he or she vitally needs (food, sex, money, companionship, personal space, understanding, emotional intimacy, etc) without some compelling reason he or she has no right whatsoever to complain if the other partner gets it from somewhere else or abandons the relationship entirely.

There is one last negative effect of “social construction of gender” I would like to address today; it only affects a very small minority of the population, but that’s no reason to ignore it. As Ayn Rand pointed out, “the smallest minority on earth is the individual”; anyone who wants his own rights protected had damned well better be concerned with those of minorities. The group in question here is transsexuals, whose entire experience is invalidated by the concept that gender is learned. These are people who were raised and conditioned as their biological sex indicated, yet for some reason science does not yet understand feel that they are psychologically and/or spiritually members of the other sex. If gender were indeed “socially constructed” transsexuals should not exist, yet they do; whatever switch in the brain identifies people as male or female is switched the wrong way for them…and that obviously wouldn’t be possible if there were no such switch. The only ways to explain gender identity disorder under a “social construction” model are A) to deny the statements of transsexuals and insist that they were “really” conditioned the wrong way, even if other siblings of the same biological sex were not; or B) to insist that transsexualism is a “choice”, just as fundamentalist Christians insist homosexuality is. For a Biblical literalist to admit that homosexuality is intrinsic to a person’s psychological makeup would refute the Biblical definition of it as a voluntary “sin”, and for a neofeminist to admit that transsexualism is intrinsic to a person’s psychological makeup would refute the fundamental dogma that gender is imposed by society; therefore both of them must deny the facts rather than admit that their cherished belief-systems are in error.

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Much Ado About Nothing

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged anecdote, Australia, bad customers, brothels, dirty, ethics, harm reduction, Latin America, law, Much Ado About Nothing, New Zealand, sex work is work on April 18, 2012| 54 Comments »

We have here recovered the most dangerous piece of lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth. – William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (III, iii)

I’m sure most of you have heard of this by now, but maybe you don’t realize just how much of a non-story it is. So I’ll present it as told by CNN Saturday, then restate it in plain English and share a few comments from others.

A group of Secret Service agents and officers sent to Colombia ahead of President Barack Obama were relieved of duty and returned home amid allegations of misconduct that involved prostitution…they [allegedly] brought back several prostitutes to the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena…None of the agents or officers being investigated was part of the president’s personal protective detail and Obama isn’t based at the hotel…Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee…told CNN that the [agents] brought prostitutes back to their rooms Wednesday night and “one of the women did not leave the room in the morning.” A hotel manager tried to get in the room, and eventually the woman emerged and said “they owed her money”…At least one of the women brought to the hotel talked with police, and complaints were filed with the U.S. Embassy…”There are no allegations of any crime being committed,” [King said]…”It violates the Secret Service code of conduct”…Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter who has written a book about the Secret Service, called the incident “clearly the biggest scandal in Secret Service history”…

Now, here’s the translated version: “Partying g-men hired hookers, but one refused to pay what he owed for extra time and got in an argument over it. Then several busybodies who are more discreet when hiring their hookers freaked out.” Period. End of story. C’mon, y’all, this isn’t news, much less a “scandal” unless you consider buyer’s remorse scandalous. I’ve been hired by a number of agents from the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security, the TSA and probably half a dozen other alphabet-soup agencies, not to mention their managers and the congressmen who supervise them. I’m sure every one of my escort readers can say the same thing. Agents also drink liquor, order room service, watch movies, buy souvenirs, and use hotel toilets. Whoopie. Prostitution isn’t even illegal in Colombia, so if not for these asinine rules requiring virile, high-testosterone grown men to behave like nuns nobody would even have heard of this story because the dude wouldn’t have panicked and called attention to himself; he’d have just paid her and she would’ve left. The end.

It looks to me like aforementioned journalist, Ronald Kessler, may be the primary driver of the hysteria; he’s the one who broke the story to the Washington Post, and here’s what Reason had to say about him and his manufactured panic on Sunday:

…The scandal broke…after police were called over some spirited…haggling about a $47 fee between a local hooker and an agent…a dispute that ends with a police report being filed and sent to the U.S. embassy pretty clearly meets the definition of unprofessional behavior that is unbecoming of the department’s…that besmirches the good reputation of an agency that…that puts in jeopardy the sterling reputation of… Oh, all right: It’s completely in keeping with the history of the DHS, which has in the past few years generated scandals involving contracting scams, bribery, attempted statutory rape and even diploma fraud. Ronald Kessler, tireless author of books about government agencies, tells CBS This Morning the scandal threatens the very fabric of our nation:

Kessler called this latest incident in Colombia “a very shocking scandal.” He…called it “just unbelievable” and a “tremendous embarrassment to the U.S.” He said that the Secret Service personnel’s liaising with prostitutes could expose them blackmail to acquire access to secure areas. “They could have led to an assassination. And if you have an assassination, you nullify democracy. That’s how important the Secret Service is.”

Great use of the irritating verb “liaising” there. But that blackmail stuff seems like a stretch. The value-add of prostitution is that it replaces the tiresome negotiations, performance and cajoling of a hookup with a business transaction that is relatively straightforward. At 47 bucks, it’s a good bet Agent Tightwad was getting a better deal financially than he would have gotten from a sexual liaison purchased with dinner and movie, drinks, dancing, flowers, feigned interest in small talk, and so on…The scandal here — and the only reason the rest of us have now had to hear all about it — is that the agent didn’t want to pay the woman…what she was asking for.

Another Reason article on Monday was even better:

…Americans still make an awfully big ruckus about two consenting adults doing what comes naturally, and one paying the other for what just transpired. Maybe, just maybe, we could stop pretending that exchanging money for sex is such a terrible thing…employers have a right to set certain parameters of behavior for employees who are on the job…But why is commercial sex — a perfectly legal offering in Cartagena, Colombia — so scandalous?…[The agents] may have violated their employers’ rules, but they hadn’t broken any laws in Colombia. Just what were they to be blackmailed with?…is anybody really going to put the president’s life in danger to avoid, at most, divorce court? That’s why the Christian Science Monitor responded…by noting, “[i]n today’s relatively permissive society, it may be hard to believe that a limited peccadillo could lead to treason decades hence.” Likewise, former Secret Service agent Dan Emmet dismisses blackmail concerns as “espionage novel stuff.”

The fact is, Americans are really weird about sex. We may patronize strip clubs to the tune of $3.1 billion per year, and we may support an adult film industry worth $13 billion, but many of us still cherish a national image of righteous frigidity. Raising a national fuss because a few public employees chose sex over reading good books in their off-hours is an American pastime. There’s a better way, though. Maybe…we could just learn to shrug our shoulders…prostitution is a legal business in Cartagena. It’s legal, though heavily regulated, in the state of Nevada. Sex work existed under a similar regime in New Zealand until 2003, when it was decriminalized…and allowed to function in largely free-market conditions. A 2008 government report (PDF) on the results of the legal change concluded that “the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off.” A 2010 Toronto Star article found that most New Zealand sex workers very much liked the deregulated regime, and that they were now far more willing and able to protect their rights through the legal system than before. All of which is to say that treating the sex trade as normal and not freaking out over money for sex would be a good thing…

Of course, this sort of attitude is what we expect from libertarians, the staunchest allies of sex worker rights activists (though many of those activists are too wrapped up in silly PC radicalism to notice it). But this time, they’re not the only ones saying it; in the past few days I’ve seen a number of articles from writers in various regions of the political landscape saying very similar things. The yawning over this tempest in a teapot is so audible, in fact, that yesterday ABC News felt compelled to attempt to stir it up more with allegations of actual security violations:

The U.S. Secret Service agents accused of misconduct in a Cartagena, Colombia, brothel revealed their identities by bragging about their connection to President Obama, according to an exclusive report by ABC News:

Partying at the “Pley Club” Wednesday night, eleven members of the president’s advance team allegedly bragged “we work for Obama” and “we’re here to protect him.” The officials spent the night throwing back expensive whiskey and enlisting the services of the club’s prostitutes, according to a bouncer at the club and a police source.

ABC reports that the agents received services from the “highest category” prostitutes and became combative when the bill arrived. The police were called when the club could not contain the dispute…

So now they’ve changed the alleged venue from a hotel to a brothel. And you know what? I’m still yawning.

One Year Ago Today

“Creeping Rot” reports on the spread of the “Swedish Model” cancer to France.

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Finding What Isn’t There

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, brothels, cops, dirty, East Asia, fantasy, Finding What Isn’t There, hysteria, Korea, law, Nigeria, pimps, sporting events, Swedish model, United Kingdom on April 17, 2012| 79 Comments »

Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter. – Oliver Goldsmith

You know, sometimes you almost have to feel sorry for the trafficking fanatics (emphasis on “almost”): They want so badly for there to be a vast international conspiracy of slavers shuttling helpless, wide-eyed ingénues around the world to feed the demand of millions of perverts who just can’t get enough sex with terrified, crying thirteen-year-old girls, that they’re willing to invest huge sums of money and effort and even stake their public reputations on their filthy, lurid fantasies. Then when reality turns out to be much more mundane, and that (thank Aphrodite) teenage sex slaves are actually scarcer than hen’s teeth, they’re so disappointed one can almost hear them pouting. Some “authorities”, however, are so obsessed with forcing the world to conform to their warped delusions that they refuse to accept the evidence when it’s in front of them and instead demand that their lackeys somehow manufacture hundreds of pimps, “traffickers” and victims from thin air. Here’s a recent example from the UK:

An elite Metropolitan police squad has come under fire in a highly critical report commissioned by the London mayor, Boris Johnson…The report [called “Silence on Violence”] accuses officers of a “heavy handed” approach to brothel raids and of failing to find victims of trafficking…It criticises the police performance and estimates that they have a success rate of less than 1% in finding trafficking victims during brothel raids. Police had predicted an increase in sex trafficking in the runup to the Olympics, but they have admitted that they have failed to find any evidence of a rise in the five Olympics host boroughs…despite a cash injection of £500,000 from the Government Office for London to specifically target the crime…

You know, they could’ve given me £5000 and a round-trip ticket to London and I could’ve saved them a lot of trouble; I would’ve simply shown them Dr. Nick Mai’s study demonstrating there really aren’t that many coerced prostitutes in London, and a whole host of studies that conclusively prove mega sporting events attract neither prostitutes nor “trafficking”, including this recent one specifically commissioned for the London Olympics. In short, they were doing pretty well to find “trafficking victims” in 1% of their raids, because that’s probably just about all there were to find.

…Of particular concern is the failure of police to find girls and women trafficked from west Africa, thought to be the largest group of victims…The Poppy Project…said that women from west Africa are the largest group they work with. Of 197 Nigerian women they have worked with since 2003 just nine were referred to them by the police. “These women are not coming forward to the police so the police need to be more creative about how they find them,” said Abigail Stepnitz Poppy’s national co-ordinator…

Only a person whose head is irretrievably buried in the nether regions of her own alimentary canal could possibly consider encouraging the police to “be creative about finding victims” to be a good idea; for example, Korean police charged with “creatively” producing enough “trafficking victims” to placate the US State Department decided to “create” them out of Korean prostitutes, with horrible results. Most of the people interviewed by report author Andrew Boff were better informed, hence the criticism of typical police terror tactics; he even stated, “By going in, in this way they are driving some of these women further into the shadows. There is evidence of increasing fear of the police amongst sex workers which has resulted in a reluctance to report crime,” and the article states he “called on the police to rethink the way they investigate sex trafficking and to build better relations with sex workers.” Those recommendations may actually result in the report’s being a good thing, but in the long run the necessity of coming up with some arbitrary quota of “victims” to satisfy a politically-motivated narrative is bound to cause serious problems, almost certainly at sex workers’ expense.

But the response of London authorities is positively rational compared with that or their counterparts in Honolulu:

Honolulu…has a federally funded task force to investigate human trafficking. But [an] analysis of every prostitution arrest made in the last year reveals not one sex trafficking victim. In other words, either Honolulu doesn’t have a sex trafficking problem — or local law enforcement isn’t doing enough to investigate it…The police “have had several allegations of human trafficking that they investigated and none of them turned out to be credible,” [city prosecutor Keith] Kaneshiro [said]…

The total absence of trafficking cases alarmed crime experts. “If you have no evidence year after year of any of your prostitution arrests being tied to trafficking, you’re not looking hard enough,” said Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief. Stamper is a proponent of legalization…”I will confess that human trafficking as a law enforcement priority is a fairly new phenomenon…Rarely in the past did we think of prostitutes as victims.” A traditional vice squad strategy of arresting prostitutes can help disrupt the market. But if a trafficking victim’s first encounter with police is being arrested, it’s unlikely she’ll suddenly turn witness for the state, said [Amy] Farrell [of] Northeastern University. “Even if a woman has been a victim, she doesn’t trust them,” she said. “She’s worried about all kinds of retribution from her traffickers. There’s very little possibility in that situation that’s she’s going to provide information.”

…Kathy Xian, one of the main voices behind the local anti-human trafficking movement, says the lack of trafficking victims is a reflection on law enforcement’s approach to the problem — not the problem itself. “The way this system treats the victims in prostitution arrests is not conducive to them admitting to law enforcement what is really going on — that they are being trafficked,” Xian said. “The whole paradigm has to change…If they want to take a bite out of sex trafficking, they cannot arrest the victims, it just does not work.”

…according to local FBI spokesman Tom Simon…”Because Hawaii is the most remote place on planet Earth, traveling here to set up a prostitution ring with coerced sex workers from afar is an expensive prospect…we do not believe that the interstate transportation of coerced sex workers into Hawaii is currently an epidemic,” he said. “The overhead costs for the pimps is simply too high to justify the mass trafficking of coerced prostitutes into Hawaii…Sadly, Hawaii’s prostitution problem appears to be largely homegrown.”

No, Mr. Simon, what’s sad is that people like you feel compelled to define prostitution as a “problem” and to impose your ridiculous, ego-shielding “pimps and hos” mythology on it instead of recognizing it for what it is: a natural way for women to earn a living while providing a vital social service. And though the other three “crime experts” in the story spoke against the standard American model of criminalization, don’t be fooled by them; Stamper is a proponent of legalization with heavy regulation (i.e. establishing the state as pimp), while Farrell and Xian are too obsessed with “exploitation” and seeing whores as “victims” to support decriminalization (I’d be prepared to wager they’re both Swedish Model proponents). And while every one of these so-called “experts” has his or her pet “theory” about why the cops can’t find any “sex traffickers” in Hawaii, nobody but Simon admits that it’s simply because there aren’t any…and even he subscribes to the ludicrous myth of an international pimp cartel whose cost-benefit analysis led them to “traffick” their vast cargoes of pathetic, imprisoned slave-whores on the mainland instead.

One Year Ago Today

“April Miscellanea (Part Two)” asks “Why are Girl Scouts are being taught to believe propaganda instead of thinking critically?”, “Is porn in which women beat up men still ‘violence against women’?”, “What would Orrin Hatch do?” and “What’s the legal definition of prostitution again?”

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Ad Scortum

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged activism, anecdote, escort services, ethics, language, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, New Orleans, pimps, prohibitionist myths, psychology, stereotypes on April 16, 2012| 91 Comments »

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 19^th 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.

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Guided Tour

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged activism, blogging, censorship, courtesans, ethics, neofeminism, stage names, statistics, Twitter on April 15, 2012| 31 Comments »

I will go with thee, and be thy guide,
In thy most need to go by thy side. – Everyman

A personal blog is like its author’s online “home”, and those who read and comment there are like guests. And though the party here generally grew gradually, there have been several periods of explosive growth, most recently from late February to late March. Today’s column is a sort of welcome to all my new readers, but regulars may want to stick around as well because I’m going to give a little tour and I might end up telling you something you don’t already know. So come on in, get comfortable, let me offer you a drink and we’ll get started.

First of all, why “The Honest Courtesan”? I used to have a little box in the right-hand column explaining it, but had to retire it to make room for the Twitter feed at the beginning of the year. The name of my site is the literal translation of the Renaissance Italian term cortigiana onesta, meaning a courtesan who provided real companionship and intellectual stimulation in addition to sex. I learned of the term via Margaret Rosenthal’s book of the same title, which was the story of a Venetian courtesan named Veronica Franco; a movie named Dangerous Beauty was based on it. Notice the two hyperlinks in that last sentence? I use them a great deal (some might even say too much); they’ll take you either to old columns or to outside websites that will give you more information about whatever it is. If you’ve got the time, following them from any given post is a good way for new readers to catch up on my back-catalog.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If you look up above my eyes there, you’ll see some tabs that may come in handy. The “Introduction” is actually just a static copy of my very first column, and will give you some idea of what I’m about if you haven’t figured that out already. Next to it is the “Index” tab; if you move your cursor over it you’ll see drop-downs for a multi-part subject index. The primary index is an alphabetical listing of posts by title, while the subject index is exactly that; both are totally hyperlinked for ease of use. If you want to know what I have to say about any given topic, the subject index is your friend. The next tab is “Resources”, and in the drop-down you’ll find “Bibliography”, “Filmography” and “Quotes”. The resources tab is a catalog of all the supplemental materials (mostly PDFs and a few very large image files) stored in the blog which don’t appear as posts or pages; the bibliography and filmography contain reviews of books and films, and the quote page is a selection of quotes about harlots or harlotry, most of which have appeared as epigrams on one or more of my columns. The last tab, “Offsite”, contains links (newest at the top) to places I’ve been interviewed, discussed at length or published guest blogs; its drop-down features “Links” (which are links to sites which themselves carry permanent links to this blog) and “Criticisms, Witticisms and Praise”, which is a list of cool, witty or otherwise notable statements others have made about me, even if they’re not flattering. These pages (other than the introduction) are all works in progress, so you may want to scan them every so often to see if there’s anything new.

Now let’s move over to the right-hand column, which remains in place no matter what page you visit. At the top is a calendar, which will let you go to whatever I posted on any given day. You’ll notice I post every day, but only once a day; I schedule my columns in advance to automatically publish at 10:01 UTC so all my readers can access them on the proper date, though the local time ranges from late evening in New Zealand to one minute past midnight in Hawaii. Every Saturday (give or take a day) I publish “That Was the Week That Was”, a synopsis of news items from the past week. Many of these are “updates”, stories that remind me of previous columns in some way or another; I provide links to those columns, so that’s another good way for new readers to catch up. Sometimes TW3 (as we call it for short) gets pushed to Friday or Sunday because of some date-dependent column on Saturday, but it will always be one of those three days. Once per month (usually but not always in the middle third) I publish a “fictional interlude”, an original tale with a prostitute as one of the important characters, and once about every 35 days or so I publish a “harlotography”, the biography of a famous whore.

The next box down in the right column is my Twitter feed; it displays my last five “tweets” and features a button to allow you to “follow” me. I use Twitter to call attention to whore-related news stories as I see them, to publicize articles on human rights issues which aren’t really appropriate for my blog, to “retweet” interesting or amusing items from other people and to publicize my daily columns. Even if you have no interest in Twitter you can click on the links you see in that box, and directly below it is another button which will sign you up to receive my daily column via email. Below that is a box with my email address and helpful instructions on how to ensure your message gets past my very aggressive filter-daemon.

If you keep going down that column, the next thing you’ll discover is a set of five boxes containing various links. The first, “A Few References”, contains links to several important columns. “Advice for Clients” and “Maggie’s Amazon Wishlist” are self-explanatory; “Handy Figures” is a list of numerical figures about prostitution with links to where the information can be found, and “Safety in Numbers” is a list of every column or study on this site which contains facts and figures about sex work, including a number of PDFs of scholarly studies. Though both “Handy Figures” and “Safety in Numbers” are posts rather than pages, I periodically update them to reflect new additions. Finally, there’s “House Rules”, which was my column of one year ago today; it contains a few simple guidelines to make everyone’s visit here more pleasant. If you just plan to read without contributing or if you’ve been commenting for a while you can probably ignore it, but if you’re a new commenter it might be a good idea to acquaint yourself with that post. Incidentally, that “one year ago today” link is something you’ll see in every column until early July; sometimes it’s embedded in the column proper and sometimes appended at the end, but it’s always there somewhere and provides yet another way for new readers to catch up. As of July 10^th it will mostly become a part of “That Was the Week That Was”, though individual columns may still have such a reference when appropriate.

The other four link boxes all feature external links. “Friends of Whores” are sites which, though run by non-sex workers, actively support our rights. “Organizations and Allies” are various nonprofit organizations which support sex worker rights; some are sex worker organizations and some have a larger mission which includes sex worker rights or outreach. “Resources” are various reference materials on other sites, and “Whorish Media” are websites by or about sex workers, including a couple of group blogs and some items just for fun. Below the link boxes is a widget that allows you to look up posts by category. Next comes the definition of my own coinage “neofeminist”, and finally a legal disclaimer (basically stating you can borrow my stuff as long as you give me credit).

That concludes this tour of The Honest Courtesan; I hope it proved educational if not entertaining, and that you visit often. And if you have any questions, just ask them in the comment section below and I’ll be happy to answer them.

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That Was the Week That Was (#15)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Manufactured War, Above the Law, agency denial, An Ounce of Prevention, animals, archeofeminism, Backpage, brothels, California, condoms, cops, dirty, disease, Don’t Take My Word For It, East Asia, ethics, Europe, Feet of Clay, Germany, harm reduction, Hollywood, hysteria, India, law, male prostitutes, Mississippi, Neither Cold nor Hot, neofeminism, Never Call the Cops, New York, Not the Leading Players, pimps, pregnancy, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rape, Scapegoats, sex education, Spain, The Immunity Syndrome, The Notorious Badge, TSA, Useful Idiots, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world, Wisconsin, yellow journalism on April 14, 2012| 20 Comments »

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty. – James Madison

Ten updates and two meta-updates.

Welcome To Our World (January 20^th, 2011)

Who else besides prostitutes and drug users are abducted and caged “for their own good”?

A 17-year-old suspected rape victim is being held in a California juvenile detention facility to ensure that she’ll show up to testify against her attacker…“The last thing we ever want to do is put a victim or a witness in custody, but when you have serious crimes of violence and multiple offenses, you have to balance the protection of the community,” [said the]…assistant district attorney…

Once again: never, ever call the cops for any reason, not even if you think you’re dying. Because once you do, they think you are their personal property to dispose of in any way they wish.

A Manufactured War (January 23^rd, 2011)

In the grand tradition of William Randolph Hearst, the New York Times doesn’t just report the news; it exaggerates, distorts and lies in order to make a “good story”. And since it’s been on an anti-whore hobby horse for several years now, that means stuff like this:

…While the rest of Spain’s economy may be struggling, experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming…powered in large part by the desires of young men…The State Department’s 2010 report on trafficking said that 200,000 to 400,000 women worked in prostitution in Spain…[and] 90 percent were trafficked…

No, “experts” say no such thing; those who promote this kind of garbage are mostly just making it up, either pulling numbers from thin air or using overly-broad definitions (such as defining any hooker who works in an area other than her native soil as “trafficked”) and then embellishing the numbers with unwarranted adjectives like “ruthless” and presenting scare stories as “fact”. For more Times duplicity, see “Feet of Clay” below.

Neither Cold Nor Hot (April 6^th, 2011)

Once in a while, Jezebel stands up for sex workers; too bad it isn’t more often:

Sex workers are anti sex-trafficking. It seems obvious…and yet you might not know this because sex workers rights activists have not gotten any air-time from the major anti-trafficking organizations…shutting down advertising sites…means losing the ability to screen clients beforehand…SWOP and other sex worker advocacy groups have ideas around what could actually help trafficking…

Don’t Take My Word For It (September 29^th, 2011)

Three German students may have discovered the secret to heterosexual male prostitution: don’t charge anything or expect much business:

…three business students from the University of Mannheim…offer…female students uncomplicated and anonymous one-night stands…posters…promise “Good Grades through Good Sex.” The young men claim that their project is about emancipation…and…should be recognized as more than a mere coital campaign…Female students who spend their evenings drained and fatigued in the library and are in the mood for a little closeness and intimacy are encouraged to send an email. Then one of the three men will meet with them…[they] claim that five one-night-stands have taken place so far…

Scapegoats (January 26^th, 2012)

Since this report is several years old and was not available on any mainstream news site, I suspect it’s an urban legend circulated among animal-rights types; supposedly an orangutan named Pony was “rescued” from a rural brothel in Borneo, where she was employed as a prostitute and shaved several times a week to make her more presentable. Unless someone manages to dig up a properly-documented article, I must point out that claiming huge numbers of men would pay for sex with an ape seems closely akin to the notion that similar numbers want sex with traumatized prepubescent girls: both are prohibitionist myths intended to smear men in general and whores’ clients in particular.

The Immunity Syndrome (March 5^th, 2012)

Here’s an unsurprising report showing that American states with “abstinence-only” sex education have the highest teen pregnancy rates:

The number of teen births in the U.S. dropped again in 2010…to about 34 per 1,000 girls… Mississippi continues to have the highest teen birth rate, with 55 births per 1,000 girls. New Hampshire has the lowest rate at just under 16 births per 1,000 girls. This is the lowest national rate for teen births since…1940…Researchers…found that teenagers who received…comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to get pregnant or get someone else pregnant. And in 2007, a federal report showed that abstinence-only programs had “no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence.” But 37 states require sex education that includes abstinence, 26 of which require that abstinence be stressed as the best method…research shows that [these] deter contraceptive use among teenagers, thus increasing…risk of unintended pregnancy…

Above the Law (March 8^th, 2012)

Naomi Wolf’s analysis of the TSA’s true motivation is much like mine:

…this week, the Supreme Court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor…Justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because [one of the 9/11 conspirators] could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did Justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices’ decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven’t been introduced into a prison population. Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually…the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations. The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness…the TSA…genital groping policy…is designed to psychologically habituate US citizens to a condition in which they are demeaned and sexually intruded upon by the state…

Useful Idiots (March 15^th, 2012)

More evidence for those who still don’t accept that neofeminist propaganda denying the agency of prostitutes and other non-neofeminist women is inevitably used to classify all women as passive, infantile moral imbeciles:

[Wisconsin governor] Scott Walker…quietly signed three controversial bills on the eve of a holiday weekend…A woman seeking an abortion must [now] undergo an exam and consult with a doctor alone, away from her friends and family. The doctor must determine whether someone is pressuring the woman into the procedure…

Mandatory prosecution laws for domestic violence and Swedish-flavored anti-prostitution laws have established the precedent that women are incompetent to make any decision which involves sex, and that if a woman makes a decision “authorities” don’t like it must be the result of coercion. This merely follows that precedent to its next logical step; look for more like it in upcoming months.

Feet of Clay (April 5^th, 2012)

Thanks to Jacob Sullum of Reason for pointing out this excellent article:

…[Nicholas] Kristof’s own newspaper profits from the sort of advertising for escort services, strip clubs, and other forms of adult entertainment that Kristof has linked to the underworld of child sex trafficking…About.com is “a wholly-owned subsidiary of the New York Times Company”…[which] accounted for 5% of all [company] revenues…in 2011, roughly $100 million…the Times also owns a 49% stake in Metro Boston…[which] also happens to make money from adult advertising…[Kristof’s] salary partly comes from the same ads, and the same allegedly criminal activity, that he tried to pin on Goldman Sachs…Though [it] immediately divested itself of its stake in Backpage.com, that was not enough for Kristof, who told CNBC he would have preferred to see the company apply its investment towards “bringing about change” in the online advertising industry. He added that Goldman Sachs should have sold its 16 percent stake in Village Voice Media to “an anti-trafficking organization.” Will Kristof apply that same standard to the New York Times–and himself? The newspaper and its shareholders must give up over $100 million in annual revenue; are they ready to contribute to the cause? And if not, will Kristof devote his column to campaigning against his employer? Will he appear on CNBC to report “The Times‘ Ties to Sex Trafficking?” If not, why not?

The Notorious Badge (April 9^th, 2012)

In the TV movie The Client List Jennifer Love Hewitt played a mother who becomes an erotic masseuse to make ends meet, and the movie proved so popular it is now a series. I have been told the character and her work are portrayed positively, and this interview with the actress leads me to believe that:

Since the movie has come out and with the upcoming show, have you been approached or contacted by any women who work in the sex industry?

No, I haven’t. I mean, I’m sure maybe once the show starts airing a bit, I might be able to meet some of those women or they might feel more comfortable to come up and say hello and have open discussions about those things…I feel like [prejudices come]…from lack of knowledge and fear and maybe not knowing the whole story…the more that you look into those industries, a lot of those women are single moms doing the best that they can or are someone’s daughter who fell on hard times…of course, some of them…just chose it because that’s what they wanted to do…I respect people doing what they have to do in order to try to live and be happy…

I sent a message to Miss Hewitt offering to answer any questions she might have, but haven’t heard back yet. The comment thread is a story in its own right; it’s full of holier-than-thou comments from the pompous windbags who apparently infest the massage profession nowadays, as discussed in “Full of Themselves”.

Metaupdates

An Ounce of Prevention in That Was the Week That Was (#11) (March 17^th, 2012)

More on Michael Weinstein’s campaign against an anti-HIV drug:

…Thanks to Weinstein’s “leadership” [AHF has] gone from a sizeable healthcare foundation with a good reputation to…a…joke…

A leading AIDS group is battling with FDA over whether the agency should approve the first drug for preventing HIV infection in gay men, and the fight has gotten nasty…the AIDS Healthcare Foundation called for Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to resign over that and other issues, perhaps including egos…Truvada cut the HIV infection in men who have sex with men by 44 percent compared to a placebo…So far, the drug has not been found to work in women…Weinstein worries that the promise of a “magic pill” could reverse progress the AIDS community has made in encouraging condom use over decades…

Mr. Weinstein is actually the only one who’s been branding Truvada as a magic pill, and he’s been citing half truths [and] his own botched survey…Nobody else…has been calling this anything other than…a drug with a promising potential that needs to be truly and thoroughly studied…Maybe it’s time for the AHF to consider whether or not the $366,046 a year they are paying Weinstein is money well spent. Charles Lyons II at Glaser makes exactly $1023 less than Weinstein for running an organization twice the size and scope. And he’s not wasting his group’s time and efforts trying to derail patient care…

The Leading Players in the Field, Not in That Was the Week That Was (#14) (April 6^th, 2012)

Dr. Laura Agustín published two excellent articles on Gloria Steinem’s recent attempt to appoint herself an expert on “prostitution and sex trafficking” in India; her April 6^th column discusses Steinem’s many errors, clichés, distortions, biases and moralistic assumptions, including her bizarre description of sex as “body invasion” (apparently a melodramatic twist on Robin Morgan’s ridiculous definition of rape). And on April 9^th, Agustín describes an absurd tabloid-style news article glorifying Steinem and other White Saviors descending upon India to “rescue” sex workers “with money and might”.

One Year Ago Today

“The Pro-Rape Coalition” demonstrates why those who call themselves “anti-porn” are in reality pro-rape.

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Never Too Many

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged abortion, activism, Aphrodite, archeofeminism, dirty, drugs, ethics, Friday the Thirteenth, harm reduction, holidays, LGBT rights, neofeminism, sisterhood on April 13, 2012| 37 Comments »

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead

It’s Friday the 13^th again; that means today is the day I ask all of my readers who are not sex workers yourselves to speak out in favor of sex worker rights. You don’t even need to spotlight it; if you’re afraid of the “anyone who would defend a witch must be a witch herself” syndrome, include it as part of a longer statement about sexual rights or civil rights in general. With all the talk about birth control rights, abortion rights and marriage rights it’s a small matter to say something like “all people have the right to own and control their own bodies, and that includes birth control, abortion, homosexuality and even prostitution”. The neofeminists have succeeded in confusing the discourse about sexual freedom so much that many people who support abortion rights don’t recognize that the same arguments can be made for sex worker rights; the “gay rights” lobby has focused so much attention on minutiae that its supporters never consider that the right to choose one’s sex partners also includes prostitutes; and though supporters of drug legalization are embroiled in their own bloody battle, I think a word now and again for the similarities of our causes isn’t too much to ask. Our staunchest allies are libertarians, who consistently and regularly speak out for our rights…but they’re fighting so many battles on so many fronts against the government Kraken that they can hardly be expected to concentrate on ours.

Many of my readers are sex workers, retired sex workers or clients, but most are not. I have readers who identify as libertarian, liberal, conservative, socialist, anarchist, minarchist, monarchist and apolitical, and who call themselves Pagans, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics and atheists. Some consider themselves feminists, others men’s rights advocates, others anti-feminists or humanists or transhumanists or environmentalists or intellectuals or just “geeks”. And every day this site is visited from nearly every country on the globe, from Canada to New Zealand, from Argentina to Russia, from Great Britain to South Africa and from Morocco to Nepal to Singapore; I’m told many of you even rely on friends or Google for translation from my often-baroque English. But the one thing you all have in common is a recognition that it is wrong for government to use brute force to suppress the right of individuals to associate with whomever they choose, however they choose and for whatever reason they choose, even if money is involved. And that’s why I ask all of you today, as I will ask you again on July 13^th and on every Friday the 13^th for as long as I continue writing this blog, to say, write, post, tweet, link or otherwise promote the cause of sex worker rights, even if it’s just with an anonymous link to this column on some message board somewhere.

The more skeptical or curmudgeonly among you may be saying to yourselves, “Just how many of these hooker-days does this uppity tart expect us to recognize? We’ve got International Sex Worker Rights Day on March 3^rd, International Whores’ Day on June 2^nd and the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers on December 17^th, plus at least one Friday the 13^th per year…isn’t that enough?” It’s a fair question, but consider: the prohibitionists libel us, insult us, attack us and agitate for our extermination every day. Sex worker rights are human rights, and there can never be too many voices speaking up for them, nor too many occasions on which to speak.

One Year Ago Today

“Who Watches the Watchmen?” examines prohibitionists’ efforts to establish themselves as the sole arbiters of morality, sanity and reality.

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They Still Don’t Get It

Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged archeofeminism, cops, dirty, end demand, ethics, internet, law, lawheads, Nebraska, prohibitionist myths, Shazam!, stereotypes, streetwalkers, They Still Don't Get It on April 12, 2012| 32 Comments »

It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled…constancy. He cannot be…baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence. — Eric Hoffer

On several occasions I’ve mentioned Maier’s Law, “If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.” But when the facts cannot be disposed of because they’re too well-known, the true believer must indulge in complex mental gymnastics which tend to make him look like a complete idiot to anyone unencumbered by the flawed theory. One such unsupportable theory is that prostitution is a “crime” (in a real sense rather than just by arbitrary definition) and that prostitutes are “criminals”. No other major Western nation but the US defines prostitution itself as a crime (though many define various ancillary actions as such), every methodologically-sound study ever done demonstrates that decriminalization virtually eliminates what cops are pleased to call “associated crimes”, and even the vast majority of prohibitionists have shifted to the more-easily-defensible “victimization” model. But to a dyed-in-the-wool lawhead, anyone defined as a criminal must actually be a criminal, just as anyone defined as a “child” must actually be the equivalent of a four-year-old in a real moral and neurological sense (until he commits a “crime”, at which point he instantly transforms into an adult criminal and is treated as such). And so lawhead cops (and their journalist henchmen) must come up with elaborate and ludicrous explanations as to why “prostitution is not a victimless crime” (the Prohibitionist Creed). I presented one rather amusing example one year ago today, and though today’s example isn’t at all funny its descent into tautology is illustrative of the inevitable result of attempts to defend the indefensible. This comes from the Omaha (Nebraska) World-Herald and is encumbered by the pompous title “Omaha Prostitute Speaks Out”:

…Prostitutes don’t have to stand out on the street corner anymore, lean into a car window and negotiate a deal for sex in exchange for money. That’s what the Internet is for, said Melissa Sykes, 23, who is serving time in the Douglas County Jail for prostitution. Like any criminal enterprise, prostitution has evolved. Sykes said the new wave of prostitutes can be self-employed. They post an ad on the Web and just wait for a call. It’s a system that worked for Sykes for about a year, until Wednesday, when she got arrested by an undercover Omaha police officer.

Regular readers are of course familiar with the popular but astonishingly ignorant belief that before the internet, all whores were streetwalkers. But reporter Sam Womack’s ignorance goes even beyond that; I daresay he has never read as much as a single word on the history of prostitution, or he wouldn’t claim that self-employment – the norm in the trade since its earliest beginnings in the mists of prehistory – was some sort of recent innovation. Though he doesn’t say it, the statement carries the reek of the “pimps and hos” myth. But the most telling phrase here is “like any criminal enterprise.” I’m sure Womack isn’t such a fool that he doesn’t understand that businesses use the internet to a far greater extent than any “criminal enterprise” does; he’s just struggling to force Sykes’ story into the “crime” narrative.

City Prosecutor Marty Conboy said Sykes is one of more than 50 people charged with prostitution and solicitation this year. He said the recent crackdown on sex for money in Omaha is part of a larger FBI investigation into human trafficking…but the solicitation and “john” arrests are also crucial. “It’s important to deter the crime, to remind them it is illegal and people are watching. It’s like putting up radar on a busy street,” he said.

It’s obvious that Conboy doesn’t recognize the moral bankruptcy of his statement (or at least hopes we won’t). He claims prostitutes are the “victims” of “traffickers”, but says they need to be arrested as a “deterrent”; that’s like claiming that arresting robbery victims will deter theft. Conboy clearly isn’t stupid; in the next paragraph he states that “while there continues to be a relationship among street prostitution, violence and drug abuse, the same can’t be said for online solicitation…women arrested say they chose this path for economic reasons.” His is the typical moral retardation of the prosecutor, which holds conformity to completely arbitrary laws above real people’s economic survival.

It’s after Conboy’s statement that the story gets most interesting; Womack goes into detail about how and why Sykes became a hooker:

Sykes, a single woman with a 5-year-old son, said she was working at a mall in Portland, Ore., making barely more than enough for gas money. She has her high school diploma and took a few college courses, but lost her financial aid last year…[she] knew a few girls in the sex business and decided to give it a try. Her son remained in Oregon with family…[while she] traveled from city to city…[charging] $120 for 30 minutes and $180 for an hour — definitely more than her mall job paid…

Yet even after hearing this story, Womack doesn’t get it; he doesn’t recognize that Conboy’s whining “the women who move from town to town make enforcing the law difficult” conflicts with his earlier claims about deterring “human traffickers”, nor does it arouse his suspicion that women smart enough to use language which “isn’t explicit enough to bring a criminal charge” in ads suddenly become stupid enough to use such language in person. He apparently went back to the office from the jailhouse, made no attempt whatsoever at further investigation, ignored the clear absurdity of classing a young mother as a “criminal” for asking to be paid a living wage for a service that would have been totally legal if she had done it for free, and typed “the law is the law”. But it’s not Maier’s Law; he hasn’t even bothered to dispense with the facts because he is too deeply invested in lawheadedness to recognize the glaring contradiction.

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A Knight There Was

Posted in Biography, Philosophy, tagged anecdote, ethics, fantasy, New Orleans on April 11, 2012| 14 Comments »

A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie. – Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Prologue 43-46)

As I’ve stated before, I’m often inspired by other bloggers; I’ll read a column and then use it as a springboard from which to go off in a slightly (or even completely) different direction. The most recent example of this was my column for March 18^th, which was inspired by a February 27^th essay of Dr. Laura Agustín’s. Interestingly, the mind of another person who read that column went in the same direction as mine did, imagining the KKK (Kristof, Kara and Kutcher) as Don Quixote-like figures tilting at windmills. But while I understood this to be my own train of thought which was merely set in motion by Dr. Agustín’s essay, this other person seems to have convinced himself that the metaphor actually appeared in her text (which it doesn’t). And while I understood the comparison to be an apt and truthful one, Robert Benz of the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation was enraged by a woman ascribing agency to prostitutes and daring to question the right of men like the triple-K to “rescue” them against their will. She published his letter in her column of March 9^th, and in the comment thread following it we discussed our slightly divergent views of chivalry. As I explained there, my own thought on it evolved like this:

I was a voracious reader of fairy tales, adventure stories and such as a child, and I’m sure it’s colored my thinking so that I tend to think of knights-errant as saving damsels from actual distress rather than voluntary situations they defined as distress for their own purposes. I fully realize that such situations were as rare then as they are now, but suspect that there were very few actual knights-errant in any time period, and more stories about fictional ones.

I’ve also written at length about my favorite cousin Jeff, who certainly thought of himself as a knight; unlike Kristof and Kara, however, he fully understood the difference between women who wanted (and asked for) help and those who did not, and even lectured me more than once about interfering in the lives of people who didn’t want my “help”. So I think my perception of “real” knighthood was influenced by him as well, and he became the standard to which I have compared all other men to this very day.

Some of you may feel that my perception of Jeff was (and is) colored by my love for him, and that’s certainly true; he was by no means perfect. But both he and his closest friends were unusually noble, chivalrous men who really tried to live up to their ideals as much as any mortal can; in my column of one year ago today I mentioned that my ex-husband Jack “once said he would trust Walter to sleep in the same bed with me,” and he felt the same way about Jeff. Some of you have noticed that I’m very generous with my advice and assistance, and if I learned that from anyone it was Jeff; I remember riding along on a number of quests, missions and errands of mercy, often for strangers or near-strangers. For example, he once went with Philippa to help one of her co-workers move. He had never met the woman, and never saw her again after that day, but I remember the disapproving words he had for a group of people from her Christian church who only agreed to help if she bought them lunch, and even then worked only half as hard as he did (what makes this even more ironic is that he was an atheist).

Nor was he lacking in the department of knightly courage; once I saw him put himself in serious danger on another stranger’s behalf. In the early 1980s Lakeshore Drive was the most popular teen hangout in New Orleans, and every Friday and Saturday night throngs of young people parked or cruised along practically the whole length of the avenue. Well, one night (I think it was in May of 1985, so I was 18 and Jeff was 21) a small group of us were sitting in the back of one friend’s pickup, talking and enjoying the lake breeze, when we heard a commotion and saw a young guy (I reckon about 17) running toward us, being chased by a half-dozen others. It did not look like a game; he seemed genuinely afraid and already had a bloody lip, and nobody from the other parked cars seemed inclined to help him until he got to us. Without hesitation, Jeff – who was only 5’11” and perhaps 170# – stepped out between the pursuers and the pursued and said something like, “I don’t know what this guy did to piss you off, and maybe he was even in the wrong. But I’m not going to sit here and watch six against one, so let’s make it six against two instead.”

All around us there was a hush; people were turning their radios down to hear what was going on, and some of the other young men nearby looked as though they might join in if a fight did erupt. But it didn’t; the pursuers mumbled a few lame excuses and then started back in the direction they had come. Perhaps they figured Jeff was a black belt, or that he was armed; perhaps they thought his example might galvanize thirty other young men in the immediate vicinity to gang up on them instead. But whatever the reason, the result was the same; his action had saved a complete stranger from what looked like it might be a serious beating. We never did find out what the quarrel was about; the rabbit had taken advantage of the distraction to run, and had fled without giving an explanation.

“The least he could have done was to thank you,” I said indignantly.

“I helped him because it was the right thing to do,” he replied. “If you only help somebody because you want his gratitude, you’re doing it for the wrong reason.” I’ll never forget that night, nor his words, and I’ve tried to live by them ever since. Maybe that’s old-fashioned and idealistic, but in the face of such an example could I do less? Though he might disapprove of my sharing this story, he’s not exactly in a position to stop me from telling it. And in my humble opinion, the only men who truly deserve praise are those whose praiseworthy actions are performed neither for public recognition nor hope of rewards in heaven (which Jeff did not believe in), but merely because they are right.

One Year Ago Yesterday

“An Island of Sanity” demonstrates the fallacy of popular American political mythology by presenting a case in which Kansas Republicans derailed a bipartisan attempt to restrict women’s sexual rights.

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