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Archive for May, 2012

Fictional Interlude: Vocation

Posted in Fiction, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2012| 15 Comments »

Badness you can get easily, in quantity; the road is smooth, and it lies close by.  But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it.  –  Hesiod

Maru had been done with her packing for hours.  Not that there was all that much to do; the few meager belongings she could call hers had been tied up in a cloak, and she had donned her ornaments and her good gown.  Soon she would leave for the assembly, and when it was over she would bid her friends and family goodbye and accompany the priestess back to the temple.

The narrow dirt  streets of the village were thronged with girls and women eager to hear the priestess speak.  Once per month (on the sixth day after the full moon), a priest or priestess would arrive to address the people; everyone would gather in the square to hear the latest news from other parts of the kingdom, to ask questions and present grievances to be taken to the Priest-King, and to listen to the sermon.  An acolyte also accepted letters to be delivered to other parts of the realm, and handed out any letters from elsewhere.  After dinner would come a talk about vocations, and those youths or maids who wished to return to the capital to be trained for one of the available positions would come forward to give their names, and early next morning would join the priestly entourage on its journey to the next village.

The first and second months of spring were slightly different, though.  Last month the priest of the war-god had come, resplendent in his magnificent armor, to speak only to the men and boys; as usual, several of the youths who had reached manhood in the past year had departed with him to be trained as priests, warriors or (in cases of unusual ability) both.  And this month it was the priestess of the love-goddess, whose meeting was open only to women and girls; Maru had decided several years ago that once she became a woman, she would follow the call to become a temple harlot.  She was widely recognized as the most beautiful maid in the village, and her natural grace and clever mind had long been remarked upon.  More than anything else she wanted an education and a chance to serve her people by caring for the needs of the great men in the service of the Priest-King, and the old women of the village were all certain she would be accepted.

But as she listened to the priestess, Maru began to doubt.  The holy woman was the epitome of poise and grace; her clothes were magnificent and her hair beautifully arranged, and if she had ever spoken in some provincial dialect there was no trace of it now in her perfect elocution.  She was everything Maru could ever wish to be, but she feared it was hopeless; still, she had come this far, and had to try.  All through the long afternoon she worked to reassure herself, but had no appetite at dinner and began to worry that her voice would fail when it came time to speak.

At last, the moment arrived; the call for vocations had been given.  Maru felt herself stand and heard her own voice speak her name, but it was almost as if someone else had accomplished it for her.  She felt every eye upon her, but the tension was broken in an instant when the priestess smiled and said, “I’m so glad you’re joining us, Maru; I’ve had my eye on you for two years now, and I’m sure the goddess is as pleased as I am.”  A great shout broke out among her friends and kin, and she felt she would be suffocated by hugs and kisses.

When she met the priestess in the square at dawn she was given a novice’s gown of plain white linen, and on the journey to the next village some seven hours away the great lady braided her hair and spoke to her as if they were peers, answering every question Maru could think of and listening while the girl told her more about the village and its people than she could possibly want to know.  The acolyte, Zuza, was only about two years older than Maru; she was as friendly as her mistress, and by the time they arrived at their destination Maru felt as though they had been friends for a long time.  Her heart swelled with pride as she saw the way the village girls looked at her, but she followed Zuza’s example and carried herself humbly, as a servant of the priestess.

They travelled thus from town to town for three weeks, and were joined on the way by three more girls; one aspired to the priestesshood, another wished to learn the healing arts and the third was an orphan whom the priestess had accepted as a servant of the temple; had even one more joined their number someone would have had to ride up front with the driver.  At last the tour was over, and on the day of the next full moon they arrived at the city which served as the capital of this province; from here they would depart for the City of the Gods, where the Priest-King ruled and all the great temples stood.  Maru’s father had been to the provincial capital once, years before she was born; but none of her family had ever been to the Royal Seat, which lay so far to the east it would take months to get there even on a fast horse.

But there were no longer any roads upon which to make such a journey; the great thoroughfares crossing the wastelands had fallen into ruin since the end of the Golden Age, and the only practical means of travel across the wilderness was the one they would board in the morning.  Though Maru had heard them described and even seen pictures, nothing could prepare her for the awesome sight of the airship, longer than the main street of her village, gleaming like burnished brass in the last rays of the setting sun.

One Year Ago Today

“The Eye of the Beholder” explains my philosophy of tolerance:  we all have the right to our own preferences, but nobody has the right to impose his own preferences on others.

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Whorearchy

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 10, 2012| 80 Comments »

I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.  –  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

Among the few facts about sex work that everyone agrees upon is that there is a “whorearchy”, a sort of class system among sex workers.  Now, nobody agrees on anything about that system, only that it exists.  Many strippers, dominatrices, porn actresses, etc insist not only that they aren’t whores, but that they’re better than we are; those whose professions have separated enough from ours that they aren’t even considered sex workers any more (such as actresses and especially masseuses) can be very pompous about it.  Prostitutes, on the other hand, sometimes see themselves as better, smarter, more discreet, etc than strippers or porn starlets; sugar babies and other halfway whores deny that they’re sex workers at all; and some unusually self-deluded escorts will even try to draw imaginary lines separating themselves from other hookers.  “Authorities” in criminalization and legalization regimes devote great effort to erecting arbitrary barriers between “tolerable” and “intolerable” varieties of harlotry, and sometimes to cementing the strata in place; cops and prosecutors delight in tricking “legal” sex workers into breaking their ridiculous rules (or falsely claiming that they did) in order to have an excuse for victimizing them; and sex worker advocates expend considerable efforts in hand-wringing and lamentation over “classism”.

two geishasTo a degree, these activists are right; a whore is a whore is a whore, and legal, moral or procedural lines serve only to break people into smaller groups which are more easily dominated by the power-hungry.  If you accept money from someone that he gives due to sexual interest in you, then you are a whore and everything else is just semantics.  When politicians, pundits or rulers use some arbitrary determinant like penetration, duration, location or motivation to bless some harlots while damning others, what they’re actually doing is reducing the size of the group who might oppose them and winning supporters from among those granted legitimacy.  This is why I’m harshly unsympathetic to those who vehemently maintain that their species of sex work or sensual therapy is absolutely not prostitution:  all they’re doing is throwing other women under the bus, and if we had all stuck together from the beginning of second-wave feminism half a century ago, prostitution would’ve been decriminalized long ago and many women who are now dead or damaged might still be alive and healthy.

At the same time, it’s madness to pretend that at the present level of human evolution there can ever be such a thing as a classless society.  Human beings, like other social animals, naturally form cliques, packs and tribes, and such groups inevitably develop hierarchies.  Some people are natural leaders and others natural followers, even outside of a formal structure; the Founding Fathers intended the US to be classless, but look what’s happened to it.  Nor are Marxists and Occupiers correct in their insistence that it’s always the rich who control everything; at our present stage of history money is indeed the single most powerful force, but it hasn’t always been that way and won’t always be in the future.  And those who rail about “the 1%” forget that there are lots of ways to get into that fraction:  birth, popularity, talent, intelligence, ambition, luck, sex appeal, and even plain animal cunning are all paths to riches and power, so pretending that there is still some elite caste inevitably born to the purple is disingenuous in the extreme.  Even those who are uninterested in influence over others sometimes find themselves in a position of leadership or control; some people have superior organizational skills, determination or intelligence which allows them to build infrastructures in which others freely choose to participate in exchange for money or whatever other return the organizer needs.  Such a person suddenly finds himself a manager or director of a company, co-op or club whom others turn to for guidance, even though his only motivation at the start was to make things easier, better or more comfortable for himself and his immediate dependents.

This is why I tend to tune out when sex worker activists start blathering about “privilege” as though it were some specific quality like height, skin color, IQ or income.  There is no single quality in the modern world which confers “privilege” as birth once could, not even money or education.  I’m not denying that some people are underprivileged and others start out with greater advantages, but this is inevitable in a world where everyone is different; even in a hypothetical post-scarcity economy of the future where teaching machines gave everyone a university degree at the age of five, there would still be a plethora of areas in which some had advantages over others.  Furthermore, early advantages no more ensure success than early disadvantages guarantee failure, and in fact a growing number of psychologists point out that too much privilege often makes a child (and the adult he becomes) fragile, maladjusted and less likely to succeed than one who has to struggle to achieve his goals.  It is as pointless to feel guilty about one’s natural advantages as it is to resent those with other advantages one lacks.

What it all boils down to is this:  people are drawn to different kinds of work and have different aptitudes and comfort levels.  Some women like one kind of sex work, some another; some prefer doing lots of low-dollar calls and others a few high-dollar ones.  Some fall into management roles without trying, while others avoid such roles at all costs.  Many if not most sex workers drift or migrate from one kind of work to another, in and out of sex work or from one kind of sex work to another, as their circumstances and needs change; a woman who was safely “legal” yesterday may be “illegal” tomorrow.  This is why it is absolutely imperative that we not allow outsiders to divide us by drawing lines in the sand and turning those on one side of the line against those on the other.  We need to stop obsessing about the whorearchy and pretending it can or should be eradicated, but we also need to oppose those who wish to calcify it in order to employ it as a tool of control.

One Year Ago Today

“Clueless Wonders” introduces my readers to the vice cops of Syracuse, New York, who are so aggressively ignorant and unselfconsciously stupid that they actually boast about it.

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Push Comes To Shove

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2012| 25 Comments »

General rebellions and revolts of a whole people never were encouraged now or at any time.  They are always provoked.  –  Edmund Burke

I’ve written on many occasions about lawheads, those deluded people who believe that legal constructs actually exist in reality.  In the lawhead’s magical view of the world, the words written on paper by human beings with pompous titles have the same validity and power to shape matter and energy as the actual laws of nature such as gravity, inertia, conservation of energy, etc.  Decree that a fruit is a vegetable, and Poof!  That plant’s method of propagation changes right before your astonished gaze.  Legally define a dolphin as a fish, and Presto!  It becomes one, right down to the gills and scales.  Declare that one kind of human being is another kind, and Alakazam!  That person’s form flows like water into the new government-approved shape.  For example, one year ago today I discussed how the US Congress transmogrified thousands of free people into “victims” by magical legislation, and how Attorney General Eric Holder then conjured equal numbers of “criminals” out of thin air (because every victim obviously requires a victimizer).  Of course, those who live in the real world know that none of this is true; King Canute could not hold back the tide by royal command, and politicians cannot turn adults into children by signing a piece of paper that says they are.

But while flora, fauna and environmental forces will stubbornly continue to be what they are despite human hubris, that’s not so with the human mind.  People are social animals, and to a large degree believe or do what they’re told no matter how little it conforms to reality; furthermore, those power-mad enough to make unreasonable or even wholly psychotic laws are also morally retarded enough to send groups of armed thugs to ensure that everyone behave as though their fantasies were indeed fact or face being beaten, robbed, tortured, ostracized, locked in a cage or even murdered.  Laws of this sort therefore split the population into three major groups:  those lawheaded enough to actually believe in the new definition, those willing to pretend that they do out of fear of government-inflicted violence, and those who carry on just as they would if the law did not exist; Vaclav Havel referred to this last strategy as “living in truth”, and recommended it as the best way to exist under a totalitarian regime.  But no matter which of the three groups one falls into, the effect of universal criminality is undeniable; yesterday I referenced an article which proposed that the real source of most problems we associate with adolescence is the artificial restrictions society places on teenagers, and today I’ll explain what that means for society as a whole.

The effect of infantilizing laws or rules on the first of the three groups is the most profound, because they actually internalize the lie that they are incompetent.  In teenagers, this leads to profound anxiety about issues that their parents were only moderately or slightly stressed by.  Every test, every sports game, every project becomes a source of anxiety, and when young people who believe they need the assistance of parents or other older adults to do virtually anything arrive at university, they are so overwhelmed that anxiety, depression and behaviors that are driven by such emotional stress (such as binge drinking and self-mutilation) have steadily increased every year since 1988 – the year the first “Generation Y” kids graduated high school.  And when today’s teens (whose lives have been micromanaged by their parents to a degree that makes ‘80s parents look positively neglectful) hit college age, it’s going to get even worse.  If you think frivolous lawsuits and declining American technical competence are a problem now, just wait until these kids grow up and join the older adults who are even now internalizing government claims that they’re incompetent to make their own decisions about food, entertainment, sex and a plethora of other aspects of their lives previously considered personal.

The problems of the second group are not dissimilar to those of the first, but while the latter are anxious about their own failings, the second group has been conditioned into a state of continual fear which renders them submissive and  pliable to authority figures.  Teens who have always been shielded from negative consequences grow into docile, complacent adults who will meekly submit to any indignity inflicted in the name of “safety” or “security”, and adults who grew up normally but whose resistance has been destroyed by government propaganda and threats are no different:  both become coddling, overprotective parents who create another generation of helpless kids and roll over for any law which promises to “protect” them, no matter how egregiously it infringes on their liberty.  And if such people do have misgivings about such intrusive laws, they’re too frightened to say anything anyhow.

The third group are the strong ones, those whose personalities cause them to question authority, to rebel against arbitrary restrictions, and to do what they like regardless of laws to the contrary.  They are of course labeled “troublemakers” by authorities, and are subjected to increasingly disproportionate and harsh penalties for the smallest infractions of a criminal code grown so vast, vague and complex that it would be impossible to avoid breaking the law even if one wanted to…which the members of this group don’t.  Ever-larger numbers of them are brutalized, robbed and caged for behavior which no moral person would consider wrong, and which in many cases wasn’t even illegal when they were younger.  Criminalization has become America’s reflexive response to any problem or nonconformity, and the burgeoning police state treats even the most minor of crimes as an excuse for maltreatment which more closely resembles the behavior of banana-republic goon squads or the secret police of a totalitarian state than anything one might find in an advanced Western nation.

In yesterday’s column I said, “I’ve often wondered how much less rebellious I might’ve been had the restrictions placed upon me by ‘authorities’ been more reasonable and acknowledged my right to autonomy, independent thought and self-determination,” and I think that’s true of many if not most teenagers.  The rebelliousness we think of as intrinsic to those years isn’t seen in cultures which treat young adults as adults; it’s a product of treating adults like children.  And it’s the same in older adults as in young ones; how many people of any age are driven to break laws simply because they resent being told what to do?  When Portugal decriminalized drug possession, drug use actually declined, and while 38% of American teens have smoked marijuana only 20% of Dutch teens have.  In other words, there is a large segment of the population who are more likely to do something when it’s prohibited, precisely because it is prohibited.  The increase in the number and size of protest movements in recent years should be a warning to the government:  if you treat the entire population like incompetent children subject to arbitrary rules, you shouldn’t be surprised when many of them start acting like juvenile delinquents.

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The Shape of the Spoon

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 8, 2012| 26 Comments »

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.  –  E.M. Forster

Part of the process of growing up is becoming an individual, defining oneself as a unique entity separate from one’s parents and other authority figures; it starts at about the age of two, when we begin to set boundaries by the act of refusal.  From that point there develops a dynamic interaction in which children continually seek to expand their autonomy while parents work to contain that expansion to a greater or lesser degree (depending upon the temperaments of both parent and child).  Wise parents apply only as much constraint as is strictly necessary to keep the child from undertaking risks for which he is unprepared and might seriously harm him, but those less wise and/or more controlling attempt to establish regimes ranging from the somewhat overprotective to the wholly tyrannical.  My mother was somewhere near the middle of this spectrum; as I explained in my column of one year ago yesterday she “seemed bound and determined to control my natural free-spiritedness and to delay my sexual maturation for as long as possible,” and so tried to bind me with rules more appropriate to girls several years younger.  I of course saw these limits as arbitrary and unfair, and therefore disobeyed them in every way I could; because I was clever and resourceful and my mother was not equipped with the spying resources and cultural support available to modern overprotective parents, I was nearly always able to break the rules without getting caught and suffering the consequences.

Unfortunately for modern teens, overparenting has now become the rule rather than the exception, and even those parents who might be inclined to allow a healthy and stimulating degree of autonomy are hampered by ever-increasing legal restrictions on young people, a large fraction of which inflict criminal penalties on parents for the “crime” of actually allowing their offspring age-appropriate levels of autonomy  rather than treating them as helpless children until 18.  Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids   chronicles these outrages, including cases of a mother threatened with “child neglect” for allowing her daughter to bicycle to school, a 12-year-old boy arrested for “walking alone” and a father charged with “child endangerment”  for letting his kids play in the park without hovering over them.  Legal restrictions on young people have constantly increased since the mid-19th century, and our society now expects people to remain irresponsible, incompetent “children” until they’re 18 (in some ways, 21) and then to instantly transform into adults upon reaching a certain date on a calendar, without any preparation for that assumption of responsibility whatsoever.

I recently found a March, 2007 Psychology Today interview with psychologist Robert Epstein in which he explains how Western culture invented the concept of “adolescence” and why it’s terrible both for young people and for society:

In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring.  We call our offspring “children” well past puberty.  The trend started a hundred years ago and now…the whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor.  The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories.  The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time.  All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways…

Imagine what it would feel like—or think back to what it felt like—when your body and mind are telling you you’re an adult while the adults around you keep insisting you’re a child.  This infantilization makes many young people angry or depressed…we have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture.  We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other “children.”  In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil.  Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence…But [in the West] young people can’t own things, can’t sign contracts, and they can’t do anything meaningful without parental permission—permission that can be withdrawn at any time.  They can’t marry, can’t have sex, can’t legally drink.  The list goes on.  They are restricted and infantilized to an extraordinary extent.  In recent surveys I’ve found that American teens are subjected to more than 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many as incarcerated felons.  Psychologist Diane Dumas and I also found a correlation between infantilization and psychological dysfunction.  The more young people are infantilized, the more psychopathology they show.  What’s more, since 1960, restrictions on teens have been accelerating.  Young people are restricted in ways no adult would be—for example, in some states they are prohibited from entering tanning salons or getting tattoos…Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in preindustrial cultures.  In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens, who are in turn highly influenced by certain aggressive industries.  This makes no sense.  Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become.  When young people exit the education system and are dumped into the real world…they have no idea what’s going on and have to spend considerable time figuring it out…

Though I don’t have kids of my own, I clearly remember how the word “child” was applied like a branding iron every time I had an idea of my own or wanted to do something outside the rigid script.  I hated the triviality of the “adolescent” world and longed to escape it, and I’ve often wondered how much less rebellious I might’ve been had the limits placed upon me by “authorities” been more reasonable and acknowledged my right to autonomy, self-determination and independent thought.  And due to the exponential growth of laws restricting even adult behavior, that really hasn’t changed except for the merciful removal of one layer of government (my parents) from my back; I still have to deal with busybodies who think they understand what’s good for me better than I do, and who are dedicated to sticking their noses into every aspect of my private life and punishing me with violence, robbery and forcible confinement if I have the nerve to demand full control over my own body, sexuality, property and life.  Epstein’s article demonstrates that most of the problems we associate with teens derives from the artificial restrictions we place upon them, and tomorrow I’ll show how these problems reflect in miniature the damage a police state inflicts upon our entire culture.

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Terrance

Posted in Biography, tagged , , on May 7, 2012| 12 Comments »

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.  –  Percy Shelley, “Adonais”

Every so often I find myself thinking about people who were important to me but are now gone from my life for one reason or another; one year ago tomorrow I told you about my paternal grandmother, and last month about my cousin Jeff; a year before that it was Liz and Walter.  But recently I’ve been remembering another dear friend whom I’ll call Terrance, and today I’d like to tell you a little about him.

Like most of my male friends, I met Terrance through Jeff, who went to high school with him.  Because he lived in Metairie I didn’t get to see him as often as the friends who lived nearby, but I always enjoyed his visits; besides being sweet and kind, he was very funny and extremely knowledgeable even by the standards of that rather erudite circle.  I sensed that there was something rather unusual about him, but I was too young and inexperienced to be able to put my finger on it until one day in the summer of 1981 when I received a letter from him in which he revealed something he had never told another living soul:  he was gay.  The letter explained that he wanted to share his secret with his friends, and he started with me because he figured a girl would find it less threatening than a boy might; still, he was too shy to tell me to my face, hence the letter.  I immediately sat down and penned a reply, assuring him that I wasn’t going to go “running for the hills” as he had put it, and sharing the fact of my own bisexuality with him.  The next time I saw him in person we talked about it, and I encouraged him to come out to Jeff as well; after that went as well as I had predicted it would, he gradually became more open about it and by the time I arrived at UNO in the summer of 1983 he was “out” to everyone except his parents.

Alas, the easy acceptance with which his nonconformity had been greeted by intelligent, open-minded young Baby Boomers and Generation X-ers ill prepared him for his mother’s response, which was disastrous:  she kicked him out of the house.  Luckily he had a full music scholarship, an adequate job and supportive friends, and he was able to rent a small house in the student ghetto; his possessions were not abundant, and so could be crammed without too much trouble into a pickup truck and station wagon Jeff managed to scrounge.  I still remember the bright, sunny Saturday afternoon on which we helped him move; the wicked old bat wouldn’t let any of his friends into the house, so he had to singlehandedly bring everything to the door, from which we took it to the vehicles.  The estrangement didn’t last long; she had apparently imagined she could scare the queerness out of him by the threat of eviction, and when that didn’t work she soon made up with him so as to regain her ability to meddle in his life.  Fortunately, he was wise enough to decline her offer to move back in, and thereby gained a degree of privacy he could never have attained while living under her roof.

With that privacy came freedom, and he went a bit wild; in only a few short years the young man who had so shyly shared his secret with me had shed his inhibitions and now dove headfirst into the thriving gay subculture of New Orleans.  I clucked and tutted and urged him to be careful; I was concerned that his studies would suffer, and he was such a loving, trusting person I was afraid he would get hurt.  He of course laughed and pointed out the irony of my warning him against excessive promiscuity, but after a few bad experiences and heartbreaks he did slow down somewhat and eventually settled into a committed relationship with a conservative gay man from Michigan.  During all that time, his mother had gone from bad to worse; she couldn’t stand not knowing where he was at every waking minute, so if he didn’t answer her calls to his home and work she would sometimes start calling around to his friends’ houses in an effort to locate him.  The fact that I was included in these calls is a measure of her obsession with spying on him, because she absolutely despised me; he once made the mistake of telling her that I was the one he had come out to, and she apparently blamed me for “encouraging” him (presumably she believed that had I reacted with horror he would’ve stopped being gay).

Terrance had never enjoyed a robust constitution, but toward the end of 1990 he started getting sick a great deal more often, and after a few months of this I urged him to go to the doctor about it.  Eventually he did, and when he told me that he had pneumonia I felt my heart sink.

“Oh, Terry, pneumonia…you know what that could mean?”

“Yeah, I know.  I was tested.”

“And?”

“I’m positive.”

People often turn to me in a crisis because I never go to pieces; I remain calm, cool and levelheaded and never cry until it’s all over.  At that time AIDS was more or less an automatic death sentence (especially for a person who was never healthy to start with), and we both knew it; we sat there for a long time discussing his limited future and how he planned to face the end.  All through that conversation and for the rest of his life he matched my self-control and rationality on the subject, which is all the more impressive because he was the one who was going to die.  He asked me not to tell anyone; he wanted to share it with only a few friends, and to tell them himself, because he did not want to be the object of pity.

We only had to keep his secret for a little over a year; his case was already quite advanced when it was diagnosed, and he did not respond well to the ever-increasing number of medications his doctors prescribed.  At my wedding a few months later, he was too weak to stand for more than a few minutes at a time, and by summer he was completely bedridden.  His mother was at the hospital every day, so he asked me not to visit because he didn’t want to upset her; I was hurt but not offended, because his comfort was the most important thing.  One day he called when she had stepped out for a while, and I sensed he was saying goodbye; from what Jeff told me later, he stopped eating the next day and was gone within 48 hours.  The funeral was held immediately and none of Terry’s friends were invited; in fact, we only knew he was dead because his mother left a message on Jeff’s answering machine a couple of hours before the service, asking him to tell everyone else.  We all gathered the following weekend at Jeff’s house to have a small memorial ceremony for him, and to share our favorite memories of him.  Jack was worried that I didn’t cry, but I overheard Jeff tell him, “She will, but not any time soon.”

He was of course right, but it was longer than usual even for me; in fact, it took several years.  Sometime in the late ‘90s (I believe it was after I had started stripping) I unexpectedly came across something that reminded me of him, and the floodgates opened wide; I cried for a long time, and wept a little every time I thought of him for months thereafter.  Eventually the pain subsided as all pain must, but whenever the mysterious cycles of the heart bring the recollection of things lost to the surface again as they have on the night I write this, a generous portion of the tears I shed are for Terry.

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The Pygmalion Fallacy

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 6, 2012| 92 Comments »

These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.  –  Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) in Star Wars

I am blessed with a high degree of natural skepticism, and therefore see problems in prostitution-related news stories that most others fail to recognize.  Take this story about robotic prostitutes, for example; a number of activists linked or “tweeted” it, but nobody seemed to notice the three glaring errors (and several smaller ones) that render it…well, to be blunt, trash.  Those who remember the comment thread from my story of an eerily-human sex robot will already be familiar with the basic and highly flawed premise: that robot women could be competition for real ones to anyone outside a narrow segment of the population, roughly comparable in size to those who prefer animals to humans or those who find “living” in an online world preferable to the real one.

Machines have already changed the face of manufacturing industries, but what happens when prostitutes find themselves replaced by robots?  Will machines populate our brothels instead of flesh and blood people?  Will the social stigma of paying for sex fade?  And how will the availability of robotic sex partners impact countries whose economies depend, in part, on sex tourism?  In their paper “Robots, men and sex tourism,” which appears in the current issue of the journal Futures, Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars of the University of Wellington’s Victoria Management School explore how robotic prostitutes could provide a solution to many of the problems associated with the sex trade, namely human trafficking and the spread of sexually transmitting [sic] infections…

Right from the start, these “management experts” demonstrate their shocking ignorance of events in their own country.  There’s already a solution to “many of the problems associated with the sex trade” that doesn’t require the invention of electric harlots; it’s called “decriminalization”.  As I’ve demonstrated countless times, most of the so-called “associated problems” only exist due to regulation or criminalization, and almost entirely vanish when people are left alone.  But the next portion of the article is even more clueless; it imagines a robot sex club in the Amsterdam of 2050 and is based on this astonishingly stupid premise:

…The Yub-Yum is a unique bordello licensed by the city council, staffed not by humans but by androids.  This situation came about due to an increase in human trafficking in the sex industry in the 2040s which was becoming unsustainable, combined with an increase in incurable STI’s in the city especially HIV which over the last decade has mutated and is resistant to many vaccines and preventive medicines.  Amsterdam’s tourist industry is built on an image of sex and drugs.  The council was worried that if the red light district were to close, it would have a detrimental effect on the city’s brand and tourism industry, as it seemed unimaginable for the city not to have a sex industry…

As regular readers know, “human trafficking” is largely a false paradigm embraced by racists, xenophobes and prohibitionists as an excuse to criminalize or pathologize the normal international and intranational movement of migrants, many of whom work in informal sectors.  In other words, it’s mostly a “problem” of definition; when a government puts arbitrary restrictions on border crossings and/or defines certain kinds of work as illegal or illegitimate, people who cross borders or do those kinds of work (and those who assist them to do either) are automatically defined as “criminals” regardless of whether there is any exploitation or coercion involved.  The only way for there to be an “increase of human trafficking in the sex industry” in any decade is for restrictions on migration and sex work to increase…which is against the dominant international trend.  To understand the full absurdity of this scenario, remember that “human trafficking” is just the new name for the “white slavery” hysteria of 100 years ago; then imagine a science-fiction scenario written in 1912 postulating a brothel in Berlin of 1950 staffed by eugenically-bred whores developed in response to an explosion of white slavery and Salvarsan-resistant syphilis in the 1940s.  But it gets worse:

…The tourists who use the services of Yub-Yum are guaranteed a wonderful and thrilling experience, as all the androids are programmed to perform every service and satisfy every desire.  All androids are made of bacteria resistant fibre and are flushed for human fluids, therefore guaranteeing no Sexual Transmitted Disease’s [sic] are transferred between consumers.  The impact of Yub-Yum club and similar establishments in Amsterdam has transformed the sex industry alleviating all health and human trafficking problems.  The only social issues surrounding the club is the resistance from human sex workers who say they can’t compete on price and quality, therefore forcing many of them to close their shop windows…

This ridiculous scenario is entirely dependent on not one but two hackneyed examples of prohibitionist propaganda.  The first is of course the perennial myth that whores spread disease; as previously explained, STD rates in the developed world are as much as 160x higher in promiscuous amateurs as in escorts, and prostitution accounts for only 3-5% of all STIs.  If these academics’ totalitarian utopia was truly concerned about such diseases, it would have to outlaw all sexual activity between humans and install omnipresent surveillance to enforce that law.  And there’s a far cheaper and simpler means of preventing fluid transfer between humans than imaginary “bacteria resistant fibre…flushed for human fluids”; it’s called a disposable condom, and it has the additional advantages of being both real and widely available.

The second myth is much more subtle, and you may not have caught it.  Prohibitionists (especially those of the neofeminist ilk) are fond of characterizing men’s interaction with whores as “use”; they constantly speak of hookers “selling their bodies” or clients “objectifying” us.  But as every one of my readers who has ever participated on either side of the equation knows, this is pure bunk; the vast majority of men who hire prostitutes aren’t just looking for warm holes, but rather interaction with real women.  Yeoman and Mars imagine their mechanical sex dolls as “programmed to perform every service and satisfy every desire,” but while the former might be accomplished the latter is a lot more than 38 years away.  There is a vast gulf between successful mimicry of casual human interaction in an environment divorced from body language and other nonverbal cues (i.e. passing the Turing test), and a true human simulacrum indistinguishable from a woman in a sexual interlude; those who proclaim otherwise are in the same intellectual tradition as those who predicted flying cars and robot maids by the year 2000.  It may be that centuries hence the erotic appeal of synthetic whores will exceed that of human ones, but nobody reading this will be alive to see it.

Furthermore, normal men don’t want predictable, “plastic” interactions with women, and in fact escorts with bland and uninteresting personalities are never as much in demand as those with complex, fascinating personalities.  No artificial intelligence can be programmed to merely simulate the nuances of a personality; to pass that test it would need to be endowed with a personality, either by copying that of a human (as in “Ghost in the Machine”) or by creating individual robot brains so complex and intricate they could develop their own personalities (like Rayna Kapec in the Star Trek episode “Requiem for Methuselah”).  But at that point we encounter an ethical dilemma; namely, what is a soul?  Or expressed less metaphysically, what constitutes sentience and individuality for purposes of determining self-ownership?  Any gynoid whose physical form and simulated functions (sweat, tears, scent, epidermal responses, etc) were indistinguishable from those of a human woman, and whose personality was sufficiently unpredictable and unique to pass as that of a woman in the close interaction of a date, would also be sufficiently human to pass any test a court might devise for granting human rights, and would almost certainly be interested in obtaining such.  And then we’re right back where we started, except that the “trafficked slaves” would not be people mislabeled as such by moralists who disapproved of their choices, but sentient beings actually and wholly owned as chattel.

One Year Ago Today

“May Updates (Part Three)” comments on a bizarre neofeminist manifesto in The Wall Street Journal; looks at police fantasies about dangerous whores in Johannesburg and Pittsburgh; introduces the podcast Talk Geek To Me; and announces the end of Escorts.com.

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That Was the Week That Was (#18)

Posted in Biography, Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 5, 2012| 18 Comments »

“That is no excuse,” replied Mr. Brownlow…”the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.”

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass – a idiot.”  –  Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

Two new stories, nine updates and three metaupdates.

The Law is an Ass

Today in “Never call the police for any reason whatsoever”:

…Christina Marie Lopez [of Oregon]…pleaded guilty…to attempted use of a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct…in December…Lopez complained to police and media that a strip club had hired her…[then 17-year-old] daughter…Investigators later obtained surveillance video…”that showed Lopez in the club watching her daughter dance and providing her money”…[but] now 18-year-old Nicole Madril, said…”It’s not like she came in there and got 50 lap dances from me…She came in and gave me money so I could get myself something to eat”…Lopez was sentenced to 3 years in prison, 3 years of post-prison supervision, and must register as a sex offender.  Lopez’s daughter told the judge the sentence was unfair and that it was her own choice to strip.

Lopez obviously forgot about the Law of Shazam; even if her daughter was at most four months shy of her 18th birthday, she was still the exact legal, moral and intellectual equivalent of a newborn infant, and therefore easily controllable by any adult.

Bullies With Badges

Police in riot gear and masks saved Houston from evil harlots Thursday:  “At least six women were in custody…after prostitution stings at three…massage parlors…Investigators said most of the women who were arrested appeared to be under the age of 30 – some as young as teenagers…Investigators said…they were looking into whether any of the women may be victims of human trafficking.”  News flash:  Many Asian women look younger than most white women; those who “looked like teenagers” may have been much older.  The “trafficking” claims were obviously to head off valid criticism of the incredible waste  of this “raid”, but if they were sincere their actions are even more reprehensible, as pointed out in this must-read column from Radley Balko.

Updates

They Just Don’t Get It (April 12th, 2011)

What is wrong with journalists in Pennsylvania?  Their fawning treatment of cops and other “authorities” reads like fellatio porn, and their feigned ignorance of anything whore-related is astonishingly stupid:

Prostitution has plagued any number of internet sites in recent years – notably Craigslist – but now the CBS 3 I-Team has found a new hideout for hookers on…Twitter…used by call girls all the time as a free way to advertise…some prostitutes right in your backyard are even setting up appointments over Twitter, which is used by kids of all ages…“It gives…that ability to reach their customers immediately,” says Rob D’Ovidio, a cyber crime expert at Drexel University.  “If it’s a slow day, and they want to lure in customers, they can quickly get that blurb out there”…

Reading stories like this feels like looking into a dirty toilet; one wonders what sort of filthy mind could write it, despite the fact that “kids of all ages” could see it on TV.  Apparently nobody told Mr. “Cyber Crime Expert” that we’re all “victims” now and that we’re the ones who are “lured” rather than vice-versa.  Except, obviously, in Pennsylvania (where we’re still criminals) and Texas (where they ain’t sure).

Another Small Victory (July 16th, 2011)

A group of US Representatives petitioned the Supreme Court to reverse a lower-court ruling striking down the anti-prostitution pledge; Congressman Chris Smith characterized agencies who provide condoms and testing to all women (without excluding sex workers) as “international groups that promote and enable prostitution and sex trafficking”.  The mindless self-destructiveness of this position becomes evident when one realizes that people like Smith wrongly believe whores to be the major vectors of STIs, yet want us excluded from health programs anyway.  He’s also ignorant on the ruling, which only freed domestic agencies from the ridiculous “pledge”; international ones are still bound by it, which leads me to wonder how this group keeps its funding:

A new NGO in Nicaragua aims to protect the rights of women who voluntarily work in the sex trade, raising the question of whether sex work should be seen as a legitimate job, or should be treated as a component of organized crime that is inherently linked to problems like human trafficking.  Girasoles de Nicaragua…is backed by USAID [and] formed…to fight “stigma, discrimination and violence”…the organization has…deployed 25 employees across the country, reportedly providing some 500 women with health aid, literacy training, and legal support.  It plans to partner with the police in investigating crimes related to the sex trade, and form alliances with other international organizations that promote sex workers’ rights, including Argentina-based network RedTraSex.  The group argues that sex work should be recognized as a respectable form of self-employment…that allows women to support themselves and their families…

The rest of the article, as should be evident from the lede, devolves into the usual “human trafficking cartel” nonsense, branding the group’s statements to reporters “confused” and implying that they know less about their own field than lay people who read “trafficking” propaganda.

Elephant in the Parlor (October 23rd, 2012)

Politician.  Whores.  Yawn.

Michael Wiener, a…[New Mexico] county commissioner …is being asked to resign after a picture of him posing with scantily clad women in a well-known red light district in the Philippines…[was posted by] photographer John Keatley…on his blog.  Wiener…[wrote] that…”NOTHING untoward ever happened…The pictures taken are as innocent as any that could be taken at Twin Peaks or Hooters here“…[but] Keatley said “…It was very obvious to me that he was not respectful to women.  He was there to have a good time”…

Because to the neofeminism-addled mind, “respectful to women” and “good time” are mutually exclusive.

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

“A group of senators has introduced a resolution urging Village Voice Media to take down the ‘adult entertainment’ section of its classified-ads site, Backpage.com.”  Blah, blah, blah.  You know the rest.

Presents, Presents, Presents! (December 29th, 2011)

Darren Thompson sent me an Amazon gift certificate this week, which I used to get several small items:  The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, Pretty Baby and two discs of Warner Brothers cartoons that weren’t on my wish list.  Thank you so much!

Sleazier Than Thou (January 30th, 2012)

Ashley Madison is well known for its lies, deception and sleazy advertising, but this is slimy even for them:

For the past four years, infidelity-based matchmaking site AshleyMadison.com has seen an influx of married women signing up for its services on…the day after Mother’s Day.  According to the site’s founder, Noel Biderman, more married women join the site on that day than on any other…”If that day comes to pass, and once again what [women] experience is a lack of appreciation, affection and respect, that is when the idea of taking on a potential lover takes full form,” Biderman said…

Note found by an amateur on her door.

Guys, very few actual living women sign up for Ashley Madison on ANY day.  The majority of those who do are whores, and the rest aren’t being truthful about their age or weight; Biderman is a lying shyster out to take your money.  That having been said, it’s probably best to be extra-sweet to your wife on Mother’s Day; yes, I know she isn’t your mother, and I agree…but she may not, and that could mean trouble.

Prudish Pedants (March 22nd, 2012)

And all it took was triple jeopardy and lying to the jury about the legality of nullification:

A jury today found fetish filmmaker Ira Isaacs guilty on five counts of violating federal obscenity laws.  He’ll be sentenced on Aug. 6.  It was the third…trial…The first two ended with mistrials…[the] federal prosecutor…said…that Isaacs’ goal…was solely to make money, but Isaacs’ attorney…said…that the case is about testing the First Amendment… Judge George King…told [the jury] that it’s their duty to weigh and evaluate all the evidence and decide the facts based solely on the law, reason and common sense and not their opinion or speculation…

Much Ado About Nothing (April 18th, 2012)

Agent Cheapskate has finally been unmasked as Arthur Huntington, who “lives in Saverna Park, Md. [and] is a married father of two whose wife leads Bible study in the neighborhood…the Secret Service has created new rules forbidding all foreigners but hotel staff in agents’ rooms and barring them from visiting ‘seedy establishments’.”  In other news, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee admitted that the whores were just whores, not spies or international gangsters:  “It does not appear that these guys were targeted.  [It wasn’t] a foreign organization attempting to seduce Secret Service agents…There’s no evidence that any of the women have any involvement with narco-terrorists or any type of terrorist organization.  Basically, they’re prostitutes.”

Which, of course, every hooker in the world already knew.

My Favorite Books (April 26th, 2012)

I think these folks are reading far too much into a discarded first draft, but it’s still interesting:

Newly-discovered draft pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince“…will be auctioned off later this month after a rare public viewing…The first page contains a piece of text that’s partly retained in chapter 19 of the published work. But the second leaf of the work is completely original…In 1943, the text turned from a scribbled manuscript by a relatively unknown author, into a literary phenomenon that has since sold 140 million copies, in about 260 languages.  After The Bible, “The Little Prince” is the most translated book in history, according to the…Saint-Exupery Foundation.  Sadly, the author would never know the extent of his book’s success:  he died shortly after its first publication in a mysterious plane crash in 1944 while on active service in World War II…

Metaupdates

Shifting the Blame in The Beat Goes On (Part One) (January 18th, 2012)

“Two men were held for questioning Tuesday as part of an investigation into the slayings of four Detroit women whose bodies were found in car trunks after three of them placed online escort ads…”

Feminine Pragmatism in TW3 (#13) (March 31st, 2012)

“Octomom” Nadya Suleman, who filed for bankruptcy this week with $1 million in debts and $50,000 in assets, has agreed to do a masturbation video for Vivid for $100,000.  She insists it isn’t really porn (which she has sworn never to do) because it’s a solo act; do you think I should send her a copy of “Little Boxes”?

Good News, Bad News in TW3 (#14) (April 6th, 2012)

Elena Jeffreys explains the probable effects of the sleazy political deal which could impose a version of the Swedish Model on Western Australia:

Adele Carles is no friend of the HIV sector, no friend of STI prevention, and her $5.5 million sex worker ‘rescue’ centre is going to cost the WA Liberals, and any future government, that friendship as well.  What will it cost sex workers?  Our ability to protect ourselves.  Our health.  And our dignity…The…centre is being horse-traded in Western Australia…for votes over Christian Porter’s anti-sex work Prostitution Bill.  Doomed from the start, Porter authored the Bill by not listening to his own policy staff, ignoring sex workers and the sex worker movement, and thumbing his nose at the Liberal’s own ‘numbers people’…With a lack of buy-in from the industry, total opposition from the churches and zero support from both the ALP and the Greens, suddenly Independent MP…Adele Carles, has the power to call the shots…[Carles’ scheme would be funded by] gutting the existing sex worker service and building a new service geared towards the redemption, exit and retraining of sex workers out of the industry rather than the current approach of harm reduction for current sex workers…

One Year Ago Today

“May Updates (Part Two)” reports on harm reduction for untreatable alcoholics, junk science equating a vital food component with hard drugs, and government busybodies trying to “protect” babies from the scourge of mother’s milk.

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Change of Heart

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 4, 2012| 28 Comments »

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place. – Mahatma Gandhi

Last week I published “A Necessary Evil”, in which I pointed out that, though neither circumstances nor numbers can wholly turn an evil action good, they can make it better than the alternative.  Killing someone in self-defense isn’t good, but it is an evil that is excused by circumstance; likewise the collective theft we dignify with the euphemism “taxation” to disguise the fact that it is both involuntary and accomplished via the threat of violence.  In an ideal world, good people would always have the choice to do naught but good, and any evil actions they committed would be the result of moral weakness or loss of emotional control.  But in the real world, good people sometimes have to consciously decide to commit evil acts in order to prevent or combat a greater evil; a whore, for example, might have to lie in order to prevent her discovery, abduction, brutalization and confinement by government thugs who might then impoverish her and consign her children to the hell of state custody.

The slope is a slippery one, and the excuse of “necessity” is often used by tyrants and lesser criminals to rationalize the most monstrous of crimes, such as the wholesale trampling of civil rights modern regimes have enacted under the aegis of “security” and “protecting the children” and the all-important “keeping people from enjoying themselves in ways that don’t benefit the rulers.”  The faculty which determines whether an evil act is truly necessary or just a cloak for selfish motivations is that which we call “conscience”, and those whose moral compasses are either missing or underdeveloped are the world’s greatest enablers of evil because they subordinate their own personal consciences to the pronouncements of external authorities.  In other words, they excuse or even participate in behavior they know to be wrong because an “authority” pronounces that behavior to be “right” in order to further his own purposes.

Of course, the opposite can happen as well; some people accepted as authorities by others have dependable moral compasses, and such people can accomplish tremendous good by helping other good people to recognize evil but popularly-accepted or officially-sanctioned behaviors for what they are.  I don’t just mean great philosophers or spiritual leaders, either; every parent, teacher, writer, celebrity or other person with an audience, however small, has the moral responsibility to ensure that any moral pronouncements he makes truly come from his conscience rather than from a misguided need to advance an agenda at the expense of others’ freedom, happiness and physical needs.  Bloggers obviously fall under this stricture as well, so I always think long and hard about complex moral issues before taking a stand on them one way or another, for fear of inadvertently influencing people to embrace a wrong merely because it might advance a cause in which I personally believe.  Well, there’s an issue I’ve been mulling over for a year and a half now, and I’ve finally decided it’s time to share my judgment on it.  In my column for November 5th, 2010 I wrote:

Interrogators have long understood something which both terrorists and pacifists alike fail to understand, which is that human nature tends to respond only to BOTH the promise of reward and the threat of punishment used in tandem.  Terrorism fails because it offers only violence, and pacifism fails because it offers only the reward of keeping the non-violent protesters happy, but the classic “good cop, bad cop” scenario works because it offers both.  Not even children consistently respond to the promise of the carrot without the threat of the stick; why then should we expect adults to, most especially the self-important adults who set themselves up over their fellows?  The civil rights movement worked because Martin Luther King and other peaceful protesters offered an attractive alternative to the race violence which had escalated since soon after the Second World War, but without the looming specter of race war their peaceful protests might never have accomplished anything.  In more recent times the peaceful activism of mainstream “gay rights” groups offered an attractive alternative to the disruptive antics of groups like ACT-UP and the quiet violence of “outing”.  Perhaps one of the reasons that the prostitutes’ rights movement has languished in futility for four decades is that there is no threatening alternative; maybe the “good girl” activists like those of SWOP, Desiree Alliance and myself need a few “bad girl” groups who run around outing politicians, disrupting fundamentalist religious services and neofeminist meetings, hacking prohibitionist websites and spying on police to publicly expose “stings” so the government will have some compelling reason to consider the reasonable alternative of decriminalization.

As of now, I’m officially removing the “perhaps”.  The lies of prohibitionists, the oppressive laws, the police brutalization, and the official propaganda have to end; the sick need to control what individuals choose to do with their own bodies, energies and property is such a great evil that, in my deeply-considered opinion, the use of lesser evils in combating it is justified.  Not lies, mind you; lying to advance the cause of sex worker rights will in the end only harm us.  I was thinking more in terms of fighting lies with truth, namely truth about our oppressors.  Though I’ve always believed it was wrong to “out” clients under any circumstances, I have had a change of heart:  the situation has become so grave that I will now hail any outing of the sexual practices of prohibitionists, even by the sex workers who would otherwise have the ethical duty to keep their clients’ secrets.  This doesn’t mean I will approve of whores’ exposing clients who have made no public stand on the subject one way or another; what I’m encouraging is the outing of politicians, judges, actors, journalists, preachers and other public figures who have publicly harmed or encouraged oppression of sex workers by their laws, rulings, writings, speeches, interviews and the like.  It’s time the public knew the truth about the men who publicly condemn us or work to make our lives miserable while secretly forming a large segment of our clientele.

Unfortunately, I can’t start the ball rolling myself; when I retired only six years ago prostitution wasn’t nearly as big an issue as it has become, and I’m unaware of any anti-prostitution actions committed by any of my regulars.  I will, however, do this:  if any working girl wants to expose such a figure, I’ll be happy to give her space in this column in which to do so.  The crusade against people engaging in mutually-beneficial consensual private behavior has to stop, and I’m willing to accept the karmic burden of encouraging and enabling harm against the crusaders in order to hasten the day when it does.

One Year Ago Today

“May Updates (Part One)” reports instances of bad cops and bad customers raping whores, a proposal to decriminalize prostitution and drugs in Detroit, and the effects of drug decriminalization in Portugal.

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Floralia

Posted in History, Holidays, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , on May 3, 2012| 13 Comments »

Now every field is clothed with grass, and every tree with leaves; now the woods put forth their blossoms, and the year assumes its gay attire.  –  Virgil

Spring was a festive time of year for Roman prostitutes.  April was the month of their patron goddess, Venus, and opened with Veneralia, the festival of Venus Verticordia;  the 23rd was Vinalia Urbana, on which whores made offerings of myrtle, mint and roses to Venus Erycina at her temple outside the Colline Gate.  Five days later Floralia began, and lasted until today; this was the festival of the goddess Flora, who because of her association with fertility (and an identification or confusion with Acca Larentia) was also revered by prostitutes.  And on the last day of Floralia, May 3rd, a group of them would strip in the arena and perform erotic dances until young men in the audience were enough overcome by lust to throw off their clothes and inhibitions and join them for ritual public sex.

Flora was, as you probably guessed, the Roman goddess of flowers; she was, like her Greek counterpart Chloris, a fairly minor deity until the mid-3rd century BCE.  At that time a disastrous crop failure occasioned a consultation of the Sibylline Books, which directed that a new festival be established in her honor; after a few years the celebration was allowed to lapse, but it was reinstated in 173 BCE after a series of violent storms destroyed many crops, and this time it caught on and was celebrated until the end of the Empire and beyond.  During Floralia, Romans of both sexes eschewed their normal white garments for colorful ones, especially green; they also wore floral wreaths and decorated their homes and other buildings with even more flowers.  Offerings of milk and honey were made to the goddess, and people gave gifts of fruit to one another; hares and goats (both symbolic of fertility) were released into gardens and fields and allowed to run freely about the city.  As one might expect there was also tremendous consumption of wine, accompanied by boisterous singing and dancing (intended to awaken nature), plus games and theatrical performances culminating in the spectacle of the whores I described above.

By the time of the Caesars the festival had grown as popular as Saturnalia, and spread to all corners of the Empire; since nearly all ancient cultures had spring festivities around the same general time, each province made its own contributions and so the celebration survived the advent of Christianity.  In pre-Roman times these May festivals were timed by the phases of the moon or the blossoming of certain plants, but the establishment of the Julian calendar synchronized them with Floralia, and after the Roman decline they became fixed on May Day all over Europe.  Hence the appearance of Flora in the graphic I used for Beltane on Tuesday; the artist obviously wished to acknowledge the origin of the holiday in Flora’s festival.  It’s impossible to tell which traditions other than the crowning of the goddess with flowers came specifically from the Roman observance and which were independent fertility traditions, which are generally sexual in every culture for sympathetic magical reasons.  But it’s good to know that the ritual orgy first celebrated by Roman prostitutes almost 2300 years ago is still remembered specifically in the sexual Neopagan Beltane rituals, and generally in the reputation of May as the month of lust.

One Year Ago Today

“No Fun Shall Be Had” reports on the incredibly asinine behavior of humorless neofeminists who felt compelled to crucify a respected surgeon for making a silly joke they didn’t like.

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Deborah Jeane Palfrey

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 2, 2012| 39 Comments »

If taken into custody, my physical safety and most probably my very life would be jeopardized…rape, beating, maiming, disfigurement and more than likely murder disguised in the form of just another jailhouse accident or suicide would await me.  –  Deborah Jeane Palfrey

Four years ago yesterday, Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found hanged in a shed behind her mother’s home in Tarpon Springs, Florida, the victim of government persecution that literally drove her to her grave.  I’ve been asked if I knew her, and I regret to say that I did not because I’ve been told by those who did that she was a kind, sweet, wonderful person whose philosophy of running an escort service was the same as mine:  treat one’s girls fairly and honestly, as one would like to be treated oneself, and extend the same courtesy to one’s clients.  Indeed, her only important ethical breach is the one forced upon all whores by criminalization:  in order to protect ourselves, our associates and our property we must deny what we are, and officially cloak our legitimate and socially-vital profession under ridiculous disclaimers about “time and companionship”; escort services (including mine) must even require subcontractors to sign documents stating that they agree not to have sex with clients, even though we’d have to let them go if clients repeatedly complained that they obeyed such contracts.  As I discovered in my own (insignificant in comparison to Deborah’s) experience with the injustice system, we are forced to commit felonies such as fraud and perjury in order to escape tyrannical persecution for running a business that is neither wrongful nor fraudulent.

Deborah was born in Charleroi, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1956, the daughter of Frank and Blanche Palfrey.  Mercifully, Frank Palfrey died in 2002 and so was not forced to endure his daughter’s lynching by his government, but Fate allowed her mother no such kindness; she was the person who discovered the lifeless body of her first-born.  The Palfreys moved to Orlando, Florida, but returned to Charleroi in 1966; this was not a happy homecoming for Deborah, who was bullied so mercilessly she eventually asked for and received her parents’ permission to finish high school in Florida.  She earned a degree in criminal justice from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, then paralegal credentials from a law school in San Diego.  But after a few years at this grind she learned what so many women do:  that far from being a liberation as many second-wave feminists pretend, a career can be stifling to the point of unendurability.  In the ‘80s she became a cocktail waitress, then an escort, but discovered (as I did a decade later) that criminalization allows seedy, sleazy escort services to flourish, and so decided to start her own agency.

In 1990, she was entrapped by a police “sting” operation, but was terrified by the prospect of conviction on the bogus felony charges leveled against her (which included “extortion”) and so fled to Montana, where she was captured in 1992 while trying to cross into Canada.  She was returned to California, convicted of “pandering” (i.e. helping whores to advertise) and locked up for 18 months, resulting in a record which ensured she could never again work in the field of her degree.  After her release she founded Pamela Martin and Associates, a Washington, D.C. escort service which she ran mostly by phone and email from her home in California.  Though she probably figured her long-distance management would protect her, in reality it did the opposite because she underestimated the government’s dedication to wasting huge sums of money and thousands of man-hours on persecuting citizens for having sex.  Inspired by the Bush administration’s newly-minted “anti-prostitution policy”, the IRS enlisted the Post Office’s help in “investigating” Pamela Martin; after two years of by-the-book spying failed to turn up anything incriminating they tried to get a warrant to raid her home, but were refused.  Undaunted, the Post Office sent a man and woman in October of 2006 to pose as a couple interested in buying Deborah’s house so she would let them in without a warrant, and while they were there they managed to steal enough “evidence” to secure one.  Thus armed they raided her house, arrested her and froze all of her assets so she could not hire proper legal representation.

The media vultures descended instantly, branding her the “D.C. Madam” and indulging in the usual orgy of lurid speculation and holier-than-thou pomposity which distinguishes any news story involving commercial sex.  This intensified on February 6th, 2007 when Brandy Britton, a former  anthropology professor who had worked for the agency and had a number of important clients, was found hanged; Palfrey assumed a brave demeanor but was almost certainly perturbed about the incident, considering that in 1991 she had already described (in the letter to the judge quoted in my epigram) the fate of arrested whores with clients in high places.  In an apparent attempt to protect herself she appeared on the TV news show 20/20 on May 4th, 2007 and announced that she had retained almost 15,000 client phone numbers, prompting a deluge of phone calls from clients trying to make arrangements to keep their names secret despite the fact that prosecutors already had their hands on the information.  Gambling that full disclosure might help her case and certainly couldn’t expose her to any greater danger, Palfrey and her civil attorney Montgomery Sibley released the phone number database in TIFF format on July 9th, sending CD-ROM copies to hundreds of journalists and activists.  Of course, most powerful men make such arrangements by proxy or at least using aliases and private numbers, but three names from her unreleased client list did leak out:  Louisiana Senator David Vitter, Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias and military strategist Harlan Ullman (who invented the “shock and awe” concept).  The rest of the names were suppressed by judges, but one more was whispered:  then-vice president Dick Cheney.

Thirteen escorts and three politically unconnected clients were given the usual choice described by Harvey Silverglate in Three Felonies a Day:  go on the stand and lie under oath by repeating the script we write for you, and we’ll let you go; or, refuse to cooperate and we’ll bankrupt you, destroy your family and imprison you for decades.  They submitted, sang as directed, and on April 15, 2008 Deborah Palfrey was convicted of money laundering, racketeering and mail fraud (the usual charges government uses to convict people of victimless, consensual “crimes”); she faced a maximum of 55 years in prison, though it’s likely she would have been actually sentenced to about seven or eight years.  She never made it that far:  two weeks later she was dead, giving the court a convenient excuse to vacate her conviction, thus washing its hands of guilt and ensuring no more important names would be exposed.

Her dramatic death unleashed a tidal wave of speculation.  Alex Jones and his Infowars organization pointed out that Palfrey had repeatedly stated in interviews that she would not commit suicide and stated that if she was found dead it would really be murder.  Her mother had no signs that she was suicidal, and some handwriting experts claimed that the suicide note was either forged or written under compulsion.  Journalist Dan Moldea told Time that Palfrey had told him she would commit suicide before enduring prison again, but Jones pointed out that Moldea has a known history of fabricating quotes.  In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether she put the noose around her own neck or it was put there by men in black:  it was murder in any case.  There is no moral difference between directly executing a victim, inducing her to kill herself by threats against her mother and sister, or driving her to suicide via persecution, robbery, psychological torture and the looming threat of a horrible jailhouse death by rape, torture and disfigurement.  “Suicide” has been the preferred method of execution for women who embarrass the rulers of decaying republics since at least Roman times, and the purpose of the kangaroo court which precedes the murder is merely to humiliate the victim, to tantalize her with false hope of acquittal and to allow the sleeping masses the illusion that there is still such a thing as justice.

One Year Ago Today

“Real Heroes” presents for your consideration the New York Initiative, a group of real-life superheroes who have offered their services to protect working girls.

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