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Archive for April, 2012

Oscillation

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 10, 2012| 29 Comments »

Victory passes back and forth between men.  –  Homer, Iliad (VI, 339)

In my column of one year ago yesterday I predicted that the long pendulum swing toward women having greater rights than men was ending, and that the resentment engendered by this swing would soon result in a backlash against women’s rights.  I don’t think I need to point out that this has since begun; in the past year laws against women’s sexual freedom have multiplied dramatically, and that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.  Blinded by their insane hatred of men, neofeminists gave government the rhetoric and public support they needed to restrict women’s sexuality “for our own good”, and they now seem surprised that the poison tree they’ve cultivated for three decades has borne the only fruit it could have borne.  Unfortunately, most women and many men are so lost in a fog of neofeminist dogma that they insist on seeing what is happening as a partisan “War on Women” instead of what it actually is:  a bipartisan assault on all human rights, especially sexual rights.  It isn’t that men are going to gain rights at the expense of women; it’s simply that women are now going to be ground down in the same way men have been ground down over the past twenty years, so that the yoke fits nice and level across all of our backs.

Furry Girl recently called attention to this blog post from Dr. Marty Klein, which I think sums it up pretty well:

…Saying birth control is immoral doesn’t just disempower women—it disempowers people.  Requiring vaginal probes before granting the increasingly rare privilege of abortion doesn’t just trivialize women’s lives—it trivializes people’s lives.  Women shouldn’t complain as women, they should complain as people…That said, let’s stop blaming men (“all-male church,” “mostly-male Congress,” “male-run Fox News,” etc.) for doing all this bad stuff to women.  Women vote to put anti-sex politicians in office…Women support the churches that keep anti-sex politicians in office.  Women buy the newspapers and consume the radio and TV programs (like Rush’s) that promote moral panics about sexuality.  And let’s remember that when women get political power they typically act like men when it comes to sex…virtually every female Republican governor and Congressmember of the last decade has voted to restrict access to abortion and birth control…But again, it’s a mistake to think of this as a war on women.  It’s actually a war on sex.  Anything that makes sex safer, more comfortable, healthier, or more pleasurable for women or men is under fire…

If you don’t believe that, consider Rick Santorum’s promise to aggressively prosecute porn websites and viewers and the Susan G. Komen Foundation-  Planned Parenthood debacle.

But the patronizing pretense that only women can be victims continues.  Take, for example, the once-respected Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent trip down the rabbit hole in which it classes men’s rights and “pickup artist” websites as “hate groups” but completely ignores the violent misandry and sex worker hatred of sites like RadFemHub; presumably, only male anger presents a credible threat, so female hate groups (even those which espouse murder of their enemies) are beneath the SPLC’s notice.  Paul Elam of A Voice for Men reacted to the classification of his site as a “hate group” with an open letter to Richard Cohen of the SPLC:

…The work of AVfM is vital and, despite what you may think, not dissimilar from the goals and aims of the SPLC.  The beneficiaries of SPLC’s labors are more likely than not to be men…Men are more likely than women to be homeless, on society’s bottom rungs.  Men are more likely than women to commit suicide, as well.  America’s exploding prison population, which overwhelmingly includes and victimizes the working class and new poor, contains more than 2 million people, but under 100,000 women.  This disparity has had profound effects on African-American men, as more of them are incarcerated than in post-secondary education.  Young men, ignorant rather than criminal, are placed on lifelong sex offender registries that prevent them from obtaining education and even healthcare, and ensuring that they will never contribute to society.  Relatedly, male attendance in higher education has fallen to 40% and continues to diminish, and men lag far behind women in obtaining advanced degrees.  The performance of boys in our grade, middle and high schools is deteriorating.  Meanwhile, men have become a minority in the workforce, ensuring their further social and economic marginalization, as well as any hope of upward economic mobility…These differences are documented and undeniable.  While society once rallied around the right of a woman to control whether she has a child – and the economic consequences it carries – there is no concomitant outcry to ensure men are not laden with the lifelong obligation of another human being…

It’s time to stop the ruinous Gender War which has been foisted on the human race by fanatics with lunatic agendas.  It should be clear to anyone in his right mind that men and women are equal stakeholders in the fate of humanity, and that any system which places the rights and privileges of one sex above those of the other creates an inherently unstable condition which will inevitably tend to oscillate in an attempt to restore equilibrium.  The pendulum is now headed back to the center, and when it gets there we need to collectively stop it at that point by rejecting the unjust and biased arguments of those who wish to give one sex power over the other; then and only then can men and women work together to defeat the real enemy, the power-mad creatures of both sexes who want to control everyone.

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The Notorious Badge

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 9, 2012| 77 Comments »

It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted strumpets and the lewdest harlots to ramble abroad to plays, to playhouses; whither no sober girls or women, but only branded whores and infamous adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times.  –  William Prynne

Sometimes the idea for a column rattles around in my brain for a long time before I get to it; last month’s “The Profumo Affair”  was suggested by regular reader Marla almost a year before I actually wrote it, and today’s derives from an October 16th, 2010 comment by Sailor Barsoom:  “When I saw the title, “Playing the Harlot”, I thought this was going to be about all the actresses who have ever played prostitutes (i.e. pretty much all of them). I don’t think Elle Fanning has (yet), but Shirley Temple did, at age four.”  I suspect he’s referring to her performance as “La Belle Diaperina” in the one-reel comedy short “Glad Rags to Riches”.  In truth, he’s not much exaggerating; if we extend the term “prostitute” to include all sex workers, halfway whores and gold-diggers, and include bit parts, I think we’d be hard-pressed to find an actress with more than three films to her credit who hasn’t played one.  But that would make a very long column indeed, so I’m not going to go there; instead I’m limiting this to those who have played a full-on professional whore in an important role.  Strippers, fortune-hunters and the like aren’t included, nor minor characters, nor is any role which is more of a MacGuffin than a character, such as the whores in Unforgiven or Doctor Detroit.  And for TV shows, I only included regular characters; tracking one-episode appearances would take a whole website.  Finally, I’m going to skip the extremely famous whores Nell Gwyn, the Madame de Pompadour and Valeria Messalina except to provide these links for their many film portrayals.

This column is more than just an interesting list; in my column of one year ago yesterday  I pointed out that “making money off of whores without giving them anything in return…is as good a working definition of ‘pimp’ as I can imagine.”  All of these actresses have made money off of us by playing members of our profession; some of them have made considerable sums.  Yet none of them with the exception of Dolly Parton have ever as much as breathed a word in public to defend out rights, and some (such as Mira Sorvino) are actively anti-prostitute.  None of them want to acknowledge the fact that up until the late 19th century our professions were indistinguishable; in the case of actresses who do nude and/or love scenes and that segment of whores who have sex on camera, they are still indistinguishable (just ask Sasha Grey or Traci Lords).

Morena Baccarin as Inara Serra in Firefly (2002)
Monica Bellucci as Malèna Scordia in Malèna (2000) & Mary Magdalene in The Passion of The Christ (2004)
Karen Black as Elizabeth Lucy in The Pyx (1973)
Amanda Blake as Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke (1955)
Mae Clarke as Myra Deauville in Waterloo Bridge (1931)
Jamie Lee Curtis as Ophelia in Trading Places (1983)
Rosario Dawson as Gail in Sin City (2005)
Rebecca De Mornay as Lana in Risky Business (1983)
Catherine Deneuve as Séverine Serizy in Belle de Jour (1967)
Doris Dowling as Gloria in The Lost Weekend (1945)
Britt Ekland as Willow in The Wicker Man (1973)
Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels in Klute (1971)
Jodie Foster as Iris in Taxi Driver (1976)
Greta Garbo as Mata Hari in Mata Hari (1931) and as Marguerite Gautier in Camille (1936)
Janet Gaynor as Angela in Street Angel (1928)
Sasha Grey as Chelsea in The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
Melanie Griffith as V in Milk Money (1994)
Helen Hayes as Madelon Claudet in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931)
Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham in I Want To Live! (1958)
Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961) and as Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady (1964)
Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Miriam Hopkins as Ivy Pearson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
Madeleine Kahn as Lili von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles (1974)
Jaime King as Goldie and Wendy in Sin City (2005)
Jennifer Jason Leigh as Tralala in Last Exit To Brooklyn (1989)
Vivien Leigh as Myra Deauville in Waterloo Bridge (1940)
Shelley Long as Belinda Keaton in Night Shift (1982)
Sophia Loren as Aldonza in Man of La Mancha (1972)
Shirley MacLaine as Irma la Douce in Irma la Douce (1963)
Colette Marchand as Marie Charlet in Moulin Rouge (1952)
Giulietta Masina as Maria Ceccarelli in Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Marsha Mason as Maggie Paul in Cinderella Liberty (1973)
Catherine McCormack as Veronica Franco in Dangerous Beauty (1998)
Melina Mercouri as Ilya in Never On Sunday (1960)
Patty Mullen as Elizabeth Shelley in Frankenhooker (1990)
Ona Munson as Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind (1939)
Alla Nazimova as Marguerite Gautier in Camille (1921)
Kim Novak as Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage (1964)
Dolly Parton as Mona Stangley in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)
Lynn Redgrave as Xaviera Hollander in The Happy Hooker (1975)
Donna Reed as Alma “Lorene” Burke in From Here To Eternity (1953)
Julia Roberts as Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman (1990)
Maya Rudolph as Rita in Idiocracy (2006)
Theresa Russell as Liz in Whore (1991)
Susan Sarandon as Hattie in Pretty Baby (1978)
Brooke Shields as Violet in Pretty Baby (1978)
Elisabeth Shue as Sera in Leaving Las Vegas (1985)
Mira Sorvino as Linda Ash in Mighty Aphrodite (1995)
Barbara Stanwyk as Lily Powers in Baby Face (1933)
Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna in Casino (1995)
Norma Talmadge as Marguerite Gautier in Camille (1926)
Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria Wandrous in BUtterfield 8 (1960)
Leigh Taylor-Young as Shirl in Soylent Green (1973)
Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003)
Rachel Ticotin as Melina in Total Recall (1990)
Kathleen Turner as China Blue in Crimes of Passion (1984)
Mae West as Ruby Carter in Belle of the Nineties (1934)
Joanne Whalley as Christine Keeler in Scandal (1989)
Shelley Winters as Polly Adler in A House Is Not a Home   (1964)

These were all the ones I could come up with from memory, rereading my “Filmography” page and searching IMDb, but I’m sure there are plenty of others I haven’t thought of.  Readers, please suggest your favorites in the comments, keeping in mind the criteria in the first paragraph; I’ll edit the column to add those that fit.  Incidentally, you’ll notice something strange going on in the comments below; I moved all the comments from “Filmography” here so I could close them there without losing them.  That’s why some are so old and/or suggest films already in the list.

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Easter 2012

Posted in Holidays, Miscellaneous, tagged , , on April 8, 2012| 14 Comments »

No days such honored days as these! While yet
Fair Aphrodite reigned, men seeking wide
For some fair thing which should forever bide
On earth, her beauteous memory to set
In fitting frame that no age could forget,
Her name in lovely April’s name did hide,
And leave it there, eternally allied
To all the fairest flowers Spring did beget.  –  Helen Hunt Jackson

Like so many Christian holidays, Easter is a pagan festival re-dedicated to Christian purposes.  But as I explained in last year’s column for the holiday, Easter is unusual in that it has retained both the name (in English at least) and most of the symbolism of its pagan antecedents, right down to the theme of rebirth.  In other European languages the holiday instead shares a name with Passover; this is because according to the Gospels Jesus was crucified the day before Passover and rose from the dead on the day after, so the Church calculated Easter by the same means used by Jews to calculate their holiday.  And since the Jewish calendar is lunar, that means Easter moves around and can occur any time from March 22nd to April 25th.

Some pagan readers have wondered why I celebrate some of the sabbats on nearby Christian or American secular holidays (for example, Yule on Christmas and Litha on Independence Day).  The reason is a purely pragmatic one; since my husband travels for his job and his employers have no compunction against getting him home barely in time for holidays, celebrating on the popular days ensures he can be here (he often misses celebrations which have no government-approved holiday in close proximity, such as Mabon).  So our feast to greet spring is today, and that means I’m taking the day off from slaving at my blog to slave instead in the kitchen. C’est la vie.  To all who celebrate today – whether for religious reasons, social reasons or just as an excuse to eat yummy boiled eggs and/or chocolate – I wish you a Happy Easter!

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Fictional Interlude: What Gets Into a Man…?

Posted in Fiction, tagged , , , , , , , on April 7, 2012| 27 Comments »

On two previous occasions (September 2010 and March 2011) I’ve published stories written before I started doing this column, and here’s another one.  I wrote this on March 30th, 1997 (Easter Sunday that year), about six months before I started stripping; it actually came to me in a dream, and I woke up and typed it out before breakfast.  The heroine isn’t a sex worker of any kind, and neither is she me; though I experienced the dream in first person and her brother was “played” by my own brother, she’s a great deal more submissive both to family and convention than I ever was.  Because it touches on themes we’ve visited before I’ve wanted to share the tale for some time now, but since it isn’t at all hooker-related I thought it best to wait until it was at least seasonal.  A lot of my most memorable dreams are vaguely unsettling, and this one is no exception.

On Easter Sunday my brother called me to ask if I wanted to go to church.  I had not actually planned to, but in the face of his request I decided to genuflect to convention and attend Easter mass with him.  By the time I had gotten dressed and made up it was rather late, and we just barely made the last mass of the morning, the high mass, which had actually already started when we arrived.  The church was absolutely jammed as churches are only on Easter, and as we arrived late we were forced to stand in the aisle near the front doors.  Apparently the gentlemen present, secure in their piety by attending church today, felt that there was no need to press the issue by offering a seat to a woman.

The mass was long, as high masses are wont to be, and the priest was young and clearly nervous about performing in front of so many people.  He couldn’t sing at all, and his sermon was long and rambling and extremely predictable.  I could see that the old pastor was regretting his decision to let the younger priest perform the mass, and I was half-regretting my decision to come.

As the priest droned on about how awful a torture crucifixion was, my mind began to wander and my eyes with it.  I looked at my shoes, white lace with flowers, and I began to turn a little, back and forth like the agitator in a washing machine, watching my skirt spin around my legs first in one direction, then the other.  This proved fascinating (or at least more so than the lecture, which had now moved on to how poor the second collection, the one for missions, had been lately) until my brother gently nudged me and looked at me imploringly.  I stopped, and began instead to look at the other women’s dresses.  They were all white or pink or yellow or pastel green, and all very light and springy.  This last was a shame because a late cold front had descended upon us, making the weather unseasonably cold and necessitating the wearing of heavy coats over light Easter dresses.  Not in church, though – the old priest had turned up the heat and that, in combination with the slowness of the proceedings, was making the whole congregation very drowsy.

I looked back to the altar and it crossed my mind that the deacon was a prominent local lawyer.  Trying to make amends?  I wondered, noticing that one of the gentlemen who wouldn’t offer me his seat was also a lawyer.  I started to smile as I wondered if they thought they could fool or bribe the Big Judge like they could the earthly ones, then realized that I myself should not judge and so turned my attention elsewhere.

“Elsewhere” was to the side aisle, where a group of teenagers dressed in some sort of sports uniform were quietly making their way out.  The sermon was over, the second collection (which, I noticed, was pretty scanty in spite of priestly admonitions) was in progress, and the young people were obviously late for a game and had tarried here as long as they were able to.  Fortunately, the front doors of the church opened to a vestibule.  The inner ones, of transparent glass, closed completely before the heavy wooden outer ones opened, so no blast of cold air arrived to chill me.  Something else, however, did.

Something had apparently slipped into the vestibule when the young people left, unnoticed by anyone but me.  It must have come in to escape the cold, because it had adhered to the inner glass doors, as if to get as close to the heat as possible.  What it was, I cannot adequately describe.  It was soft and pink and fleshy, clearly invertebrate and about the size of a cantaloupe.  Its bottom, that is, the side pressed against the glass, reminded me of a cowrie shell.  It had the same long, thin, mouthlike opening ridged with serrated edges, and was of a slightly darker, brownish color than the rest of the thing.  If there was any more to it I do not know, because the condensation on the glass hid it.  I suppose it was the drowsiness, but I did not call it to the attention of my brother or anyone else, at least not for the few moments it took to form the impression I have just described.

In those few moments, a man opened the door.  I don’t know why he was leaving before communion, but he clearly wished to escape undetected because he opened it just a little and slid out while everyone’s attention was fixed on the priest and the Eucharistic prayer.  He noticed the thing, though, and gingerly touched it.  In less time than it takes to tell it was absorbed into his hand; I can only use that word.  It looked like a paper towel soaking up a spill, except faster.  I am sure I gasped, but everyone was rising for communion and in the rumble my little sound was lost.  The man made no sound at all.  He merely looked surprised for a moment, then placed the invaded hand in his coat pocket and calmly walked out of the front doors.

I had never seen the man before, but he had one of those craggy, distinctive faces one never forgets or mistakes for another, and even had he not the shock and horror of that moment would have fixed his visage in my mind forever.  It is important that I make this clear because about a year later he entered local politics.  I was not surprised when this dark horse gained the backing of several prominent politicians and won a powerful local office, nor was I when he recently announced his candidacy for an important national one.  The opinion polls show him far ahead, of course.

One Year Ago Today

“Feminine Pragmatism” points out that “a woman with two children to feed, clothe and house and no husband to help her does not have the luxury of obeying a stupid, arbitrary law written by men which says that she can’t get money to support them in the way which works best for her and doesn’t hurt anyone,” using an example from Brandy Devereaux’s blog.

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That Was the Week That Was (#14)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2012| 26 Comments »

Any law which violates the indefeasible rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.  –  Maximilien Robespierre

Some of you may have noticed that my columns are posting earlier as of this week; I realized that if I posted them at 10:01 UTC every day, all my readers would be able to see (or at least be notified) of them on the proper date (even though it ranges from late evening in New Zealand to one minute past midnight in Hawaii).  That probably won’t matter to most of you, but it corrects a deficiency that’s been annoying me for some time.

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

The brave police of Manatee, Florida have announced their heroic capture of a dangerous criminal …a street woman so desperate she offered sex in exchange for two McDonald’s dollar-menu cheeseburgers.  I’m sure my Floridian readers will sleep more soundly tonight knowing this menace was removed from the streets.

Updates

Crime Against Society (February 26th, 2011)

Though Louisiana’s oppressive “Crime Against Nature By Solicitation” law was reduced to a misdemeanor last year (thus removing the requirement for sex offender registration), Doe vs. Jindal continued because the state refused to release those previously condemned.  On March 29th the judge decided in favor of the sex workers:

…U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman said state lawmakers had no “rational basis” for requiring people to register as sex offenders if they were convicted of a “crime against nature by solicitation”… “The defendants fail to credibly serve up even one unique legitimating governmental interest that can rationally explain the registration requirement imposed on those convicted of Crime Against Nature by Solicitation,” Feldman wrote.  “The Court is left with no other conclusion but that the relationship between the classification is so shallow as to render the distinction wholly arbitrary”…

This is a victory not only for the approximately 400 people released from the tyrannical regime of “sex offender” registration, but for all those fighting to get armed busybodies out of people’s personal lives.

The Soft Weapon (March 24th, 2011)

I exposed the Schapiro Group’s lies twice before the Village Voice did last March, but their voice is much louder than mine, and apparently quite a few heard it because a new petition on Change.org has called for criminal investigation of both the Schapiro Group and the “Women’s Funding Network” (one of billionaire prohibitionist Swanee Hunt’s fronts):

Recently the Village Voice exposed the Schapiro Group…and the Women’s Funding Network…for knowingly deceiving both congress and the public using false data manufactured through fraudulent research…[when] legitimate organizations that serve exploited…minors…are not able to report that they have reached numbers of youth comparable to the inflated numbers of victims…it jeopardizes their credibility and funding…[also] increased funding for law enforcement efforts to combat a vastly inflated threat…is channeled instead into police actions directed not at traffickers, but rather against consenting adult sex workers…We reject the concept that criminalizing members of any population is an effective way to rescue them…Therefore, we, the undersigned, call on the United States Dept. of Justice to investigate the Schapiro Group and the Women’s Funding Network for conspiracy to commit fraud against their donors, the public and the US government…

Needless to say, I urge you all to sign!

Sales Pitch (May 22nd, 2011)

Here’s another study which proves that the “Swedish Model” doesn’t work; this one is from human trafficking expert Ann Jordan, who called the law “a failed experiment in social engineering” and pointed out that “the Swedish government has been unable to prove that the law has reduced the number of sex buyers or sellers or stopped trafficking.”

The Leading Players in the Field, Not (June 15th, 2011)

This was forwarded to me by an academic correspondent; I think it speaks for itself.

Umpteen Thousand People Can’t Be Wrong (November 12th, 2011)

The New York Times continues its crusade against sex workers, this time via a slanted article which refers to a 17-year-old as a “child” and blames Backpage (rather than the unexamined conditions at home which caused her to run away twice) for her becoming an underage prostitute.  Apparently the Times is hoping that Village Voice loses its nerve and backs down on the Backpage adult ads, because it would be forced to reverse course and oppose the fanatics (rather than getting in bed with them) if they succeed in enacting laws that make websites (like that run by the Times) responsible for user-generated content.

Held Together With Lies (April 2nd, 2012)

The UN has released its latest “estimate” of “human trafficking victims”, and though it’s less than 9% of the popular figure popularized by fanatics, it’s still both unsubstantiated and inflated by at least two orders of magnitude:

The U.N. crime-fighting office said Tuesday that 2.4 million people across the globe are victims of human trafficking at any one time, and 80 percent of them are being exploited as sexual slaves.  Yuri Fedotov, the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime…said $32 billion is being earned every year by unscrupulous criminals running human trafficking networks, and two out of every three victims are women…According to Fedotov’s Vienna-based office, only one out of 100 victims of trafficking is ever rescued…

In other words, Fedotov can only support 1% of his claim, or 24,000 people in the entire world.  That’s a lot more believable, but it wouldn’t generate the necessary panic so fanatics multiply it by over 1000x, then refuse to produce even the most tenuous evidence in support of the exaggerated claim.

An Example To the West (April 3rd, 2012)

This article by researcher Matthias Lehmann on the harm criminalization does to Korean sex workers largely covers familiar ground, but also mentions that the prohibitionist Korean laws enacted in 2004 were strongly influenced by the “Swedish Model” and linked this strong criticism of the laws by two Swedish legislators.  Lehmann points out that “sex workers…remain criminalised unless they claim to be victims”, dividing women into “’good women who are worthy of help’ and ‘bad ones who need to be punished’, thus continuing the stigmatisation of women who sell sex.”  Unsurprisingly, this is the version of Swedish legislation now infiltrating the US as well.  The article quotes many of the same sources and developments I’ve reported previously, but I found this announcement very intriguing:

Sex workers often rightly criticise researchers, politicians or the media for distorting the reality of the sex industry.  I am therefore working together with Woo Yun Jin, a Korean visual artist, to develop a graphic novel entirely based on experiences shared with us by sex workers in Korea…[it] will be made available [later this year] in both English and Korean…we [hope this helps] people to better understand that sex workers are part of their communities and deserve the same rights just as everyone else.

Lehmann also provides links to “Research Project Korea” and a number of news articles and resources.

The Rape Question (April 4th, 2012)

More information is better than less, but I’m concerned this could make rape trials even more of a “he said/she said” affair than they already are:

…An in-depth study comparing rape victims with nursing students at the University of Southern Denmark reveals that vaginal injuries are just as likely to result from consensual sex as rape.  [Researcher] Birgitte Schmidt Astrup [said] ‘…The nursing students experience just as frequent vaginal injuries as rape victims, and so these injuries cannot be used for much more than to establish that intercourse has taken place.’  She added that in cases of convictions based on evidence of vaginal injuries, there could now be discussions as to whether there have been miscarriages of justice…all [of the subjects] were examined less than 28 hours after sexual intercourse…vaginal injuries were found in 36 per cent of rape victims and in 34 per cent of the nursing students.  The…students’ results were not affected by whether they had engaged in rough or gentle sex, or whether they had used condoms or sex toys…

Feet of Clay (April 5th, 2012)

The outcry against Nicholas Kristof and his anti-whore crusade continues to grow and generalize; this week I discovered a well-written article from a member of the Occupy movement denouncing Kristof’s transparent attempt to call attention away from his own lies and exaggerations by branding the much-hated Goldman-Sachs “financiers of sex trafficking”:

…It was with some horror…that…I observed several Occupy-affiliated Twitter accounts sharing a link to an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, entitled “Financiers and Sex Trafficking”…It’s easy to see how this could appear to fit in the widespread populist anger against the financial sector that powers Occupy Wall Street…[but] Backpage is mostly used by consenting adults, and Nicholas D. Kristof is a man with a history of trying to use the specters of trafficking and child prostitution as leverage for a campaign that seeks ultimately to further criminalize sex workers…his “rescue” work in developing countries has basically involved riding along with law enforcement and live-tweeting brothel raids, writing himself into the story as the white savior (consequences be damned).  In other words, he is a buffoon, a prime member of the Liberal Class that preserves the status quo by defining the acceptable limits of dissent…Meg…[of] SWOP Chicago…[explained that] “The anti-trafficking crusade is a top-down movement, led by (among others) two right-wing religious conservatives from the Bush Administration (Laura Lederer, Swanee Hunt)…if Occupy Wall Street jumps on the anti-trafficking bandwagon, they’re really just swallowing rhetoric designed by one of the nation’s best consulting firms to further the particular agenda of a few members of the top .0001%”…Trafficking and child prostitution have been invoked to justify criminalizing…sex work since at least the end of the last century…Demand Abolition’s own material [confirms] this…[its] Nation Strategy emphasizes that “Framing the Campaign’s key target as sexual slavery might garner more support and less resistance, while framing the Campaign as combating prostitution may be less likely to mobilize similar levels of support and to stimulate stronger opposition.”

…If Occupy wants to add justice for sex workers to its cause (and it should), then it can carry on doing what the movement has generally done very well:  Don’t pay much attention at all to the self-appointed pundit class at the likes of the New York Times.  Listen to actual workers, the people for whom these issues are an everyday reality, not a hot topic…

Metaupdates

Good News, Bad News in That Was the Week That Was (#10) (March 10th, 2012)

It turn out that the push to impose the Swedish Model on Western Australia is largely a one-woman campaign enabled by a sleazy political deal:

…The government’s prostitution bill proposes to make sex work in residential areas illegal and requires brothel owners, managers and sex workers…to register…Labor is opposed to the legislation…[along with two prominent] Liberal MPs…[so] the government will need [the support of] independent MPs Janet Woollard and Adele Carles…[who] wants…three amendments…[which] would [shift] the criminal focus…to clients…Carles said she had visited Sweden…”They determined that prostitution is not a job.  Prostitution is violence against women”…

But while Carles is the typical neofeminist Swedish dupe , Woollard refuses to back the law unless it bans brothels entirely in five years.  Since that won’t happen, the law probably won’t pass, but I’ll report as the situation develops.

The Crumbling Dam in That Was the Week That Was (#13) (March 31st, 2012)

Ron Weitzer’s article on the recent Canadian decision clarifies a detail I had missed:  “The court gave the government 12 months to appeal the decision allowing bawdy houses, 30 days to rewrite the ‘living off the avails’ law to restrict it to exploitation, and allowed the parties 60 days to appeal the decision to uphold the solicitation/communication law.”  Obviously the government will appeal to keep its brothel ban and these workers will appeal the upholding of the “communicating” law, but as I understand it the avails law is a dead duck in its present form, which is certainly good news.

One Year Ago Today

“Neither Cold Nor Hot” looks at Jezebel’s weird ambivalence about sex work.

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Feet of Clay

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2012| 18 Comments »

You, O king, saw, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before you; and its form was frightening.  This image’s head was of fine gold, its breast and its arms of silver, its belly and its thighs of bronze, Its legs of iron, its feet part of iron and part of clay.  –  Daniel 2:31-33

Because I don’t live in New York and am comparatively new (about two years) to the whole blogging scene, I had actually never heard of Nicholas Kristof until autumn of 2010 (which is only fair, since he apparently hadn’t heard of me until March 18th).  As I’ve since discovered, he’s been trying to make a name for himself for years, but petty little men like Kristof can never climb on their own; they always do so by trying to bring down others, and if that takes lies so be it.  In the last few years he has used “sex trafficking” hysteria (and crusades against prostitutes, brothels and Backpage) to establish himself as a hero to legions of adoring  fans, and while those of us working to dispel the myths about the subject have seen him for what he is for quite some time, it’s only recently that more mainstream writers have begun to call attention to this idol’s feet of clay.

The process started the same day he “tweeted” about my column, March 18th; on that day he published one of his typical lurid “sex slavery” accounts, claiming that Backpage was somehow responsible for the “pimping” of a 16-year-old girl he called “Alissa”.  As regular readers know, Kristof always plays fast-and-loose with the facts in such columns, but this time he went too far; while he usually uses anonymous women’s stories (often without permission) and then distorts and exaggerates them into unrecognizability (to “protect” the women, of course), this time he left enough facts to allow the story to be checked.  So Village Voice (owners of Backpage) did, and guess what?

Nicholas D. Kristof…wrote about an underage victim of human trafficking:  “Alissa says pimps routinely peddled her on Backpage.”  A video that accompanied his online op-ed was headlined:  “Age 16, She Was Sold on Backpage.com”  That is not true.  According to Alissa’s court testimony, she was 16 in 2003.  Backpage.com did not exist anywhere in America in 2003…she…came to the FBI’s attention in August, 2005 [and] was…relocated away from the corners and hotels she worked in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City…In the summer of 2005 Backpage.com did not exist in Boston, New York, Philadelphia or Atlantic City.  Had Kristof followed any of The New York Times’ standards of journalism, he would have known this.  He could have read the court transcripts.  He could have read the testimony…He could have Googled the case and read the coverage in The Boston Globe…Neglecting to do any of the above, Kristof could still have asked us.  Despite extensive correspondence with our attorney, he never mentioned Alissa or sought confirmation about her purported link to Backpage.com at the age of 16.  Instead, he concocted a story to suit his agenda and then asked his readers to boycott Village Voice Media…


It’s possible that Alissa lied either in her testimony or to Kristof, or both; it would be typical of the “reframing of experiences” neofeminist prohibitionists teach to “survivors”.  But given Kristof’s track record, it’s just as likely he made it up without her help.  Jacob Sullum of Reason covered the story on the 21st, and one of the commenters on that column provided a link to a May 2010 article in The Atlantic about the ordeal of Dr. Steven Hatfill, who was railroaded by the FBI for the September 2001 anthrax scare…and as it turns out, Kristof helped to lay the rails:

…Some journalists became convinced there was plenty pointing to Hatfill’s guilt.  Among those beating the drum early and loud…was Nicholas Kristof…[who initially] stopped short of naming Hatfill publicly, instead branding him with the sinister-sounding pseudonym “Mr. Z.”  Without identifying his sources, in a July column Kristof wrote:

If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago.  But he is a true-blue American with close ties to the U.S. Defense Department, the C.I.A. and the American biodefense program…With many experts buzzing about Mr. Z behind his back, it’s time for the F.B.I. to make a move:  either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion.

One of those threads, Kristof reported, pointed to the possibility that Mr. Z was a genocidal racist who had carried out germ warfare to slaughter innocent black Africans.  Kristof addressed his column directly to the FBI:

Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978–80?  There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z has claimed that he participated in the white army’s much-feared Selous Scouts.  Could rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian Army in anthrax and cholera attacks against blacks?

Kristof didn’t mention that the majority of soldiers in the Rhodesian army, and in Hatfill’s unit, were black; or that many well-respected scientists who examined the evidence concluded that the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak emerged naturally when cattle herds went unvaccinated during a turbulent civil war.  Kristof also failed to mention that Mr. Z had served in that war as a lowly private.  To have been involved in some sort of top-secret Rhodesian germ-weapons program “would’ve been like a Pakistani army private being brought in to work on a project at Los Alamos,” Hatfill says today.

Kristof wrote that Mr. Z had shown “evasion” in repeated FBI polygraph examinations.  He also claimed that following the anthrax attacks, Mr. Z had accessed an “isolated residence”…where…“Mr. Z gave Cipro to people who visited it.”  Other journalists would later describe this mysterious residence as a “remote cabin,” a kind of Ted Kaczynski–style hideout where a deranged scientist could easily have prepared anthrax for mailing.  In fact, the “cabin” was a three-bedroom weekend home…in rural Virginia owned by a longtime friend of Hatfill’s, George R. Borsari Jr., an avuncular Washington communications lawyer and retired Army lieutenant colonel.  Borsari says he found speculation that his place had been a haven for spies or bioterrorists laughable.  When an FBI agent asked Borsari if he would allow a search of the property, Borsari said no.  “I told him, ‘I’m not going to be a part of your publicity game,’” Borsari says.  No search was ever conducted, but by then the damage to Hatfill had been done…

Kristof’s grown more ambitious in the past decade; he used to be satisfied with libeling individuals, but now he targets entire corporations.  Nor is it only sex worker rights advocates and libertarians who question Kristof’s motives and methods; consider this March 21st  article (also from The Atlantic) by Teju Cole, in which he compares Kristof to the disgraced “Invisible Children” crusaders:

…This weekend, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof…best known for his…  accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners.  When I saw the Kony 2012 video, I found it tonally similar to Kristof’s approach…I do not accuse Kristof of racism nor do I believe he is in any way racist…But that, precisely, is what worries me…His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally.  He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated “disasters.”  All he sees…is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need…I disagree with the approach taken by…the White Savior Industrial Complex…because there is much more to doing good work than “making a difference.”  There is the principle of first do no harm.  There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them…

I think Cole is being too kind in saying Kristof is good-hearted and not racist; in fact I agree with Dr. Laura Agustín that he’s very much a racist, because he believes his own race and culture’s way of doing things is the right way for everyone.  True charity does not come at the point of a gun, good causes need not be shored up with lies, and worthy idols do not have feet of clay.

One Year Ago Today

“April Updates” discusses the suppressed Rind-Tromovitch-Bauserman study, reports on the Egyptian women subjected to “virginity tests” and two New Orleans cops fired for harassing streetwalkers, criticizes the conviction of a Massachusetts sportswriter for “pimping” and marks the publication of Satoshi Kanazawa’s column about me.

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The Rape Question

Posted in History, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 4, 2012| 52 Comments »

I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire.  –  Robin Morgan

At one time it was a subject rarely spoken of in public; now it sometimes seems that some people talk of little else.  Since the 1970s rape has become one of the most politicized issues of our culture, despite sex being arguably the least appropriate topic for politics imaginable.  The politicization of what could be considered the most personal of crimes began in 1970 with the publication of Carol Hanisch’s second-wave feminist manifesto “The Personal is Political”; as I wrote in my essay “Politicizing the Personal”,

The only problem with [the essay] is, it’s a load of crap; usually, the personal is just personal, and declaring it to be political merely holds the door open for increasingly tyrannical intrusion into people’s private lives.  The idea that “the personal is political” is borrowed from Marxist dogma and basically means that nearly any problem experienced by an individual woman is the result of “systematic oppression.”  If she’s unhappy or has a screwed-up life it isn’t because she’s irrational, poor, uneducated, overly emotional, foolish or unlucky in the genetic lottery, or because she’s made bad choices, or because the world is intrinsically unfair and many people of both sexes are unhappy and have screwed-up lives; it’s because she is oppressed by the Patriarchy.  This is, of course, a fundamentally defeatist, paranoid and narcissistic view which removes responsibility from the individual and places it into a social context that encourages permanent class warfare (or in this case, gender warfare).  Since the two sexes are different by nature and will always be unequal in one way or another, this provided political feminists with a path to political power; women were essentially told that their situation was hopeless unless they supported the schemes of the feminist leadership in its brave and determined struggle against the Male Overlords.

Once one understands this, the reason rape was politicized becomes obvious:  Feminists could claim that rape wasn’t due to the criminal inclinations or loss of control of individual men, but because of a supposed “rape culture” which permeates society and encourages all men to rape and all women to be reduced to an imbecilic state in which we don’t know when we’ve been raped until the feminist saviors enlighten us.  Had this notion been introduced full-blown in 1970 it would have been rejected as the rubbish it is, but it came by slow stages.  Remember, second-wave feminism was at first a movement of strong, independent, educated women; it was tied to the sexual revolution and its earliest adherents recognized that sexual shame is one of the chief ways in which patriarchal societies control women.  The miniskirt was a symbol of that freedom (hence the short uniforms in the original Star Trek, which were a visual demonstration of 23rd-century sexual equality), and prostitutes were active in a number of early feminist groups like WHO (Whores, Housewives and Others, the “others” being lesbians).  So when feminist leaders wanted to call attention to rape, they couldn’t tell the truth about it for fear that women would stop being so sexually independent; they therefore invented the myth that “rape is a crime of power, not lust” so women would continue to put themselves in danger.  The fact is that old ladies who get raped are as anomalous as child prostitutes; the vast majority of rape victims are young, sexually attractive women in unsafe sexual situations. There’s even evidence that conjugal visits reduce the rate of prison rape, and that legalization of prostitution reduces the rape rate.

The “rape is a crime of violence, not sex” mantra soon permeated Western society, and one could write an entire essay on the psychosocial reasons it did; in a nutshell, it’s because the truth – that rape is a natural, though unfortunate, outgrowth of our sexual programming – is scary to men because it reduces them to the level of animals, and to women because it means there is always the risk of rape in heterosexual relations.  By ignoring the 73% of all unwanted sex which isn’t forcible, people of both sexes could pretend there was no elephant in the parlor.  But there were some people who didn’t want that elephant ignored because its presence advanced their political agenda; just as first-wave feminism was eventually taken over by narcissistic middle-class white women, so it was with the second wave, and a cabal of angry lesbians and rape or molestation victims soon coalesced to lead those selfish, shortsighted women around by the nose.  Since the “violence not sex” model did not advance their goals it needed to be replaced, but the propaganda campaign had been so successful it could not simply be tossed out; hence “rape culture”, the dogma that neither men nor women could recognize rape when they saw it due to “cultural conditioning”.  In other words an act both parties agreed was consensual sex might really be rape, not merely in a sort of academic sense but in a real and prosecutable sense.

The shift had already started in the ‘70s with radical feminists like Robin Morgan, whose wholly subjective “rape definition” forms today’s epigram.  That definition in one form or another spread through the emerging neofeminist movement; not only did it conveniently eliminate the need for physical evidence, it also allowed neofeminists to define sex work as “rape”.  But the weaponization of what was at first merely a farfetched radical axiom took some doing; as I explained in “Imaginary Crises”:

…the FBI reported that 8% of all American women would suffer an attempted rape at some point in their lifetimes, and since only about a third of all attempted rapes are completed that just wasn’t enough to create the necessary hysteria…[so] in 1982 Mary Koss of Kent State used… [Morgan’s] definition to design a questionnaire she gave to 3000 coeds, and concluded that 15.4% of respondents had been raped and 12.1% were victims of attempted rape.  But that wasn’t the way the women saw it; only 27% of those she called “rape victims” agreed that they had indeed been raped, while 49% said the incidents were the result of “miscommunication,” 14% called it “a crime but not rape,” and 11% said they were not victimized at all.  In true neofeminist fashion Koss ignored the women’s views of their own experiences and characterized their denial that they were raped (and the fact that 42% of them later voluntarily had sex with their “rapists”) as evidence that they were “confused and sexually naïve” rather than that her theory was wrong.  Koss’ results were published in Ms. magazine in 1985 and quickly became gospel; the “rape” and “attempted rape” figures together added up to 27.5%, a fraction quickly abbreviated to “one in four” and endlessly repeated in pamphlets, articles, “rape prevention” and “sensitivity” classes and protest marches.

Though the worst cultural excesses of early ‘90s neofeminism soon abated, it had already infiltrated academia and government and therefore became far more dangerous despite the fact that fewer women believed in it.  Morgan’s definition is one of the roots of “sex trafficking” hysteria (via the notion of all prostitution as rape), and as I explained at length in “Setting Women’s Rights Back a Century”, “…the catechism being preached to young American women [is]:  You are NEVER responsible for your own actions.  No matter how irresponsibly you act, no matter what you say to or do with a man, if someone later convinces you that you were ‘assaulted’, or if ‘authorities’ rule that you were despite your protests, then you are a helpless, powerless victim without adult agency or volition, no better than an infant.”  In my column of one year ago today I discussed the firestorm which ensued when Camille Paglia suggested that maybe women should take more responsibility for their own sexual behavior around men, and twenty years later it’s still the same every time a man makes a similar suggestion (though less so if a woman does unless she’s a Republican).  There’s a vast difference between blaming the victim in a forcible rape and holding young women as much responsible for their actions while drunk in bed as we would hold them for their actions while drunk behind the wheel.  And until Americans as a group recognize this, the culture wars over rape will be as endless as those over everything else involving sex, thus effectively drawing attention away from the real issues…which is exactly what those in power want.

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An Example to the West

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 3, 2012| 21 Comments »

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.  –  Frederick Douglass

In my column for International Sex Workers’ Rights Day, I mentioned that it was started by an Indian sex worker rights organization named Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), which has over 65,000 members.  Yes, you read that correctly:  sixty-five thousand, in other words more members than all American sex worker rights organizations combined (and multiplied several times).  As I’ve said before about Cambodian activists,

…can you imagine this many American hookers making this kind of effort?  If [they]…can unite against oppression, why can’t we?…sex work activism here is marginal at best; I daresay few Americans realize that the sex worker rights movement even exists.  And it’s our own fault; we’re just too damned afraid to speak up for our own, too afraid of government-inflicted violence, too afraid of social and legal persecution, and too brainwashed by false notions of “sisterhood” to fight the twisted lies spread by neofeminists.

Though the Western cultural imperialists of the “rescue industry” imagine white Westerners to be more “enlightened” than brown-skinned people from poorer countries, and claim that prostitutes in those countries are invariably helpless victims, the opposite is closer to being true:  American whores and our allies have a great deal to learn from Asian sex worker rights organizations, who are anything but helpless.  DMSC recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and you may find this article (via Dr. Laura Agustín’s March 8th column) enlightening:

…a mere passage of two decades can seem irrelevant in the life of Sonagachi—the red-light area in Kolkata and among the largest brothel districts in Asia.  Yet, in these 20 years, 38-year-old Swapna Roy has seen a change in the way people refer to her—from being sneeringly mentioned in the coarse Bengali equivalent of slut, Roy today is a jouno kormi — a sex worker…she is…the joint coordinator of a project which sensitizes around 3,000 sex workers on safe and hygienic practices…“We have come to realize that sex work is like any other work and I’m like any other worker.  In these two decades, we have learnt to appreciate this.”

…Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) [is] a collective of 65,000 sex workers from West Bengal…[which] works for women’s rights and is at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS and related issues…[it] has been responsible for bringing out into the streets—and into middle-class drawing rooms, through newspaper and television coverage—the issues facing sex workers, including the demand for legal sanction for the profession…15 February [marked] 20 years since a team of medical professionals, led by Smarajit Jana of Kolkata’s All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, visited Sonagachi on an HIV intervention research study.  In due course, Dr Jana realized that for the sex workers, their children’s education, access to financial services and fending off police harassment and torture by local thugs was more important than urging a client to use a condom.  So Dr Jana founded DMSC…From 12 members in 1995, DMSC draws its current strength of 65,000 members from 48 branches across the state, each headed by an elected secretary…Some sex workers…have health insurance, while some have got voter identity cards with the Election Commission of India recognizing their [DMSC] membership as valid identity proof.  State Bank of India has also begun to recognize sex work as a profession while opening accounts…DMSC also runs 17 non-formal schools for children of sex workers, and two hostels…Members of Komol Gandhar, DMSC’s cultural wing dedicated to dance, drama, mime and music and run by the children, get invited regularly for paid shows…The Durbar football team, largely comprising children of sex workers, has for the first time in the 2011-12 season, participated in the nursery football league conducted by The Indian Football Association, West Bengal…

“We don’t dissuade adult and willing girls from entering the profession.  It is easy to say sex work is bad, but most girls come from poverty stricken families and are uneducated,” says Purnima Chatterjee, who sits on a self-regulatory board, which works as a watchdog body in all DMSC branches against trafficking and introduction of minor and unwilling girls into the trade…“We know of so many girls who got raped when they went to work as household help or in factories.  Many of them opted to come to Sonagachi and get paid for sex.  Who are we to stop them?” retorts Pushpa Sarkar, who works at Avinash clinic (for sexually transmitted infections) run by Durbar and is also on the self-regulatory board…

Banks recognizing sex work as a profession?  Schools and sports teams for the children of openly-declared prostitutes?  That’s like science fiction in the United States, where fanatical prudes pretend escorts are incapable of charity and government agencies steal their children (a tradition “trafficking” fetishists are trying to export to India).  The industry, ambition, courage and teamwork of Indian sex workers put the weak, diffuse and toothless efforts of their American sisters to shame.

Nor is it limited to India; anti-sex worker groups claim that essentially every whore in Bangladesh is a pathetic slave, but on March 3rd the prostitutes of Dhaka took to the capital’s streets to protest harassment by police and other “authorities”.  Korean hookers are literally battling police for their rights, and videos made by both Cambodian and Thai sex worker rights organizations call international attention to abuses perpetrated by the police at the urging of fanatics like Somaly Mam.  A group of 7000 sex workers in Nairobi plans to take its demand for decriminalization to the high court of Kenya after the city government insisted their trade would remain criminal, and even the whores of Botswana have been able to secure the support of a prominent local human rights group in their bid for rights.  Sex workers in Thailand even produced their own study:

“We have now reached a point…where there are more women in the Thai sex industry being abused by anti-trafficking practices than there are women exploited by traffickers,” [said Chantawipa Apisuk, the director of Thai sex worker rights organization Empower, at the recent release of a report, “Hit & Run: Sex Workers’ Research on Anti-trafficking in Thailand“]…More than 20,000 sex workers make use of Empower’s contact points…and…sex work is now widely regarded as a quasi-legitimate profession, with its own form of employers and self-employed workers.  Inevitably…prostitution remains a crime in the eyes of many…but the kindlier view, that they are victims of human trafficking, isn’t a great deal of help either, Chantawipa said…The “Hit & Run” report is an effort to assess the state of the profession.  More than 200 sex workers helped the foundation conduct a survey over the course of 12 months, in bars, restaurants and brothels across the county and even into Burma and Laos…Migration, it was noted, is part of the “culture” of sex work, and the brokers involved in transporting people are generally seen as helpful.  Most don’t charge exorbitant rates…

But the anti-trafficking law regards sex workers as victims, so those who enforce it believe they are “rescuing” the prostitutes.  That just makes things worse…”Before I was arrested I was working happily, had no debt, and was free to move around the city,” said Nok, a Burmese.  “Now I’m in debt, I’m scared most of the time, and it’s not safe to move around.  How can they call this ‘help’?”  Once “rescued” and after a period of detainment, the foreign workers are deported (only to return at the first chance) and the Thais usually have to undergo vocational training…[Empower’s] aim now is to get the government and other concerned parties to stop using the word “victim”, to stop putting trafficking and sex work in the same category…[the] research project [was launched]…with a one-day exhibition at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, displaying the “Mida Tapestry”, sewn by migrant sex workers as a way to document and show the impact police raids have on their lives.  It carries a second message in that the detained sex workers are regularly forced or offered sewing lessons as a cure-all for social ills.

Everywhere in the regions dismissed as the “third world” by Westerners, sex workers are organizing, protesting and demanding that officials cease hounding and persecuting them.  In many of their countries sex work is every bit as criminal as it is in the US; these activists face the same possibility of brutal reprisals as American sex worker activists do.  But unlike their timid American counterparts, Asian and African sex workers recognize that anything worth having is worth fighting for, and that they aren’t going to win their rights by merely commiserating with each other.

One Year Ago Today

“Out of Context” shows how prohibitionists use studies of imprisoned or addicted streetwalkers to produce bogus “prostitution” statistics, and provides links to several methodologically-sound studies that tell a very different story.

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Held Together With Lies

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , on April 2, 2012| 19 Comments »

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.  –  Dorothy Allison

Lying can be benign.  Yesterday was of course April Fools’ Day, when we employ good-natured lies to amuse each other; people actually pay stage magicians, actors and call girls to lie to them for entertainment purposes.  And of course, without social lies such as, “Pleased to meet you”, “I’m doing fine”,  “No, boss, I don’t mind” and “What a cute baby!” our interaction with others would generate considerably more friction than it does.  But lies employed to harm, control, steal and keep others in ignorance are not at all benign and I am totally opposed to them, especially when they are used by the Powers That Be to excuse invasions of the privacy and rights of individuals.  One year ago today I showed how several major elements of trafficking mythology grew from misquoting, distorting and exaggerating the already-flawed conclusions of the Estes and Weiner study, and today I’ll look at another source of highly dubious guesses masquerading as statistics:  the so-called “Bales Algorithm”.

When I decided to make the day after April Fools’ Day an annual occasion for major trafficking myth debunking, I immediately contacted Dr. Laura Agustín, with whom regular readers are already familiar.  Dr. Agustín is an expert on sex work and migration  who is highly critical of the misogynistic, racist, anti-sex “trafficking” paradigm which characterizes most or all sex work and a large fraction of other migrant labor as “exploitation” or “slavery”, and whenever I write on the subject you will usually find a link to her work somewhere in the essay.  So as you might expect, she is my “go-to girl” for all things “trafficking” related, especially information on the ridiculous claims made by “trafficking” fetishists.  This time she directed me to her December 2nd, 2010 column, which in turn led me to a series of articles in which Jack Shafer of Slate debunked the ridiculous claims of New York Times writer Peter Landesman, whose January 25th, 2004 article “The Girls Next Door” may have been the critical event which really got “sex trafficking” hysteria going (and shaped the Times’ anti-whore campaign and Nick Kristof’s entire career for the next decade).

Landesman, like most who promote hysteria, is mighty short on facts; as Shafer stated in “Enslaved By His Sources”,

Landesman’s 8,500-word breathless hodgepodge of anecdotes, bait-and-switches, non sequiturs, pseudonymous testimonials, and over-the-top hysteria comes nowhere near to proving its thesis:  Although the crime of sex-slavery exists, Landesman cites just two criminal cases involving 10 females.  I continue to harp on Landesman’s unsubstantiated numbers precisely because without their sensationalistic wallop, his months-long Times Magazine investigation collapses upon itself.  Landesman’s notion that every third block in the country harbors a sex-slave brothel can be traced to his reliance on well-meaning sources in government, activist circles, the religious community, and academia whose moral fervor causes them to stretch the truth to make their points about the abomination of sex slavery.  Landesman appears to have fallen captive to these sources, internalized their views, and channeled their agenda into the pages of the Times Magazine.

One of the most important of those sources was Kevin Bales, the founder of a fetishist group named “Free the Slaves”; he claimed to have developed an “algorithm” for estimating the number of “sex slaves” in the US, and Landesman’s popularization of the “estimate” derived therefrom not only influenced future “estimates” by the fanatics, but may have been accepted by the US State Department as part of its method of calculating “sex slave” numbers for its annual “Trafficking in Persons” (TIP) report…we don’t know for sure, because the government refuses to release the methodology (if any) used in preparing the report.  But even if the State Department isn’t influenced by it, the True Believers certainly are; you know that “27 million slaves worldwide” figure we started hearing early last year?  Bales derived it with his so-called “algorithm” in December of 2010.  And that’s highly problematic because…well, see for yourself; this is how Bales explained it to Shafer via email in June of 2005 (emphasis mine):

…The estimate of 30,000 to 50,000 people being held in forced labor in the United States for purposes of sexual exploitation was arrived at in this way:  firstly, we used the State Department’s estimate of 18,000 to 20,000 people being trafficked into the US each year.  (Admittedly, the State Department has not explained the methodology by which they arrived at this estimate, so we use it in the hope that they will soon make their research methods clear.)  Secondly, we adjusted this estimate according to two surveys we have recently conducted.  The first survey was of all media reports of trafficking cases in the US over the past four years.  These reports covered 136 separate cases of forced labor, 109 of which noted the number trafficked totaling 5,455 individuals.  As with most crimes, the number of known and reported cases is a fraction of the actual number of cases occurring.  To the best of our understanding the proportion of known to actual cases for human trafficking is low.  In this survey 44.2% of cases involved forced labor in prostitution and 5.4% involved the sexual abuse of children, totaling 49.6%.  As this is a rough estimate I rounded this up to 50%.  In a second survey of forty-nine service provider agencies in the United States that had worked with trafficked persons, we asked how long each trafficked person they had worked with had been held in forced labor.  The minimum reported time was one month, the maximum was 30 years.  The majority of cases clustered between three years and five years.

So, if 9,000 to 10,000 of the people trafficked into the US each year will be enslaved for sexual exploitation (50% of 18-20,000), and they are likely to remain in that situation for three to five years, then the number of people enslaved for sexual exploitation at any one time in the US could be between 27,000 and 50,000 people.  Since a number of people working in the area of human trafficking have stated that they believe the State Department’s estimate is low, I chose to make our estimate based on the upper end of the State Department figure, thus giving an estimate of 30,000 to 50,000.

Savor the number-crunchy goodness for a moment and let it sink in.  Bales starts with an “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 via another widely accepted study; the results are both credible and jibe with figures extrapolated from historical data.  Bales’ results, on the other hand, bear as much resemblance to the source data as the end product of the digestive process bears to the food which goes in the other end…and that was already nasty to begin with.  Worst of all, Bales’ method 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; by the time the hysteria collapses it will probably exceed that of the United Kingdom.

In any moral panic, the yellow press and those who stand to profit from the hysteria (politicians, government and groups selling a “solution” to the nonexistent “crisis”) have a mutually-reinforcing relationship.  But not all press is sensationalistic, and even in the midst of hysteria there are always a few reporters like Shafer and Jerry Markon of the Washington Post who are willing to tell the truth.  That number inevitably grows larger with time; like any other fad a moral panic is unsustainable because its unchecked growth eventually exhausts the credulity of even the most gullible, at which point the politicians switch to a new hobby-horse, the employees of dozens of NGOs have to get real jobs and the public has to find some new lie to believe in.

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Veneralia

Posted in Biography, Holidays, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , on April 1, 2012| 23 Comments »

You seem to me as Dian in her orb,
As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown;
But you are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus, or those pampered animals
That rage in savage sensuality.  –  William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (IV,i)

The lady in the statue is Cybele, the great mother-goddess of Asia Minor to whom big cats were sacred; she was worshipped in Rome as the Magna Mater in the feast of Hilaria, which started at the calends of April (March 25th) and continued through to yesterday.  In early times these rituals were rather bloody and not at all nice, including castration of a male sacrifice who thus represented Cybele’s lover Attis (the later myth of Aphrodite and Adonis descended from it).  But by the second century CE a bull had replaced the human, in an elaborate sacred drama and sacrifice called a taurobolium.

Today, however, was the feast of Veneralia, a festival dedicated to Fortuna Virilis (“Powerful Fortune”) and to Venus Verticordia (Venus the Changer of Hearts).  Remember how I told you that women worshipped Fortuna Virilis by bathing in men’s public baths?  Well, on Veneralia the image of Venus Verticordia was taken to a men’s bath by her priestesses and ceremonially bathed.  As you can see, Fortuna and Venus had become closely associated by the imperial era and their ceremonies merged; by the second century CE the Magna Mater (due in part to the proximity of their festivals and association with Venus Genetrix) was also added to the mixture and worshipped as Venus Caelestis (Heavenly Venus), while a combined aspect of Venus and Fortuna was called Venus Felix (Venus the Lucky).  Confused?  Don’t feel dumb; I’m sure many Romans were as well.  I’ll do my best to explain it in my column for the 23rd, “Vinalia Urbana“.

But in the meantime, so many readers have asked for more nude pictures I figured it was time to grant their requests in observance of the holiday.  But since the pictures are pretty explicit, I figured it would be better to hide them away on a sub-page and require you to click through to get to it, so that those averse to such things don’t have to see my pussy.  Those who prefer not to go there (and don’t worry, I’m not offended) can click here instead for a fun, cute way to spend a few minutes which doesn’t  involve naked women.

Happy Veneralia!

One Year Ago Today

“A  Modest Proposal” describes some imaginative ideas for sex laws proposed by legislators in Alaska and Texas.

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