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Archive for June, 2012

Reframing

Posted in Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 20, 2012| 12 Comments »

Partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies…By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist…makes truth the principal form of falsehood.  –  Christopher Lasch

I often write about the way prohibitionists “reframe” facts to make them seem different from the way they actually are, both to make their own war on human sexuality look noble and heroic, and to make whores and clients seem evil, criminal or pathetic. Police and academic neofeminists (with the help of the sycophantic media) are especially skilled at this:  escort services or advertising websites are described as “prostitution rings”; dumb luck or shotgun tactics are depicted as brilliant police investigation; status offenses are equated with violent crimes; escorts become either “criminals” or “victims”; their husbands or drivers become “pimps”, “traffickers” or even “gangsters”; young adults are called “children”; productive work is referred  to as “being sold”, “servitude” or even “slavery”; denying the agency of women is described as “protecting” them; abducting and jailing them is called “rescue”; and so on.

Though many prohibitionists lie a great deal and others are simply delusional, good propagandists don’t have to invent anything; they simply omit what they don’t want, “cropping the image” to display only those isolated details of much larger picture that they wish to display.  The most skillful of them artfully edit, rearrange and embellish the facts with emotive language, logical fallacies, euphemisms and dysphemisms, the prose equivalents of dramatic music and cinematic lighting techniques.  Lately, I’ve run into three excellent examples of how this works; none of these have anything to do with sex work, but they graphically illustrate the techniques I’m talking about.  If you wondered why I started the column with that iconic picture of the brave protester in Tianamen Square, and illustrated this paragraph with that cute little kitten, you’re about to get your answer.  As it turns out, the famous image of man against tanks was only a part of the story; here’s another of the same scene which surfaced a few weeks ago: 

It’s obvious that this one was taken a few moments earlier and at a much wider angle; the protester is almost lost in it, and the better-known photo calls attention to him at the cost of losing the incredible scale of the thing.  I don’t believe that the photographer was intending to deceive, but the principle is the same; the first photo tells only a small part of the story.  The same thing goes for the kitten; I myself cropped her out of this picture: 

Seeing that tiny creature in her true surroundings inspires a totally different emotional reaction in the viewer than that elicited by the isolated detail; one might even say that the two pictures tell completely different stories.  But my final example is the most striking of all; a clever film editor used scenes from the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire, accented with new music and a different production design (visual effects, editing style, etc) to create a trailer which makes it seem like a film of an entirely different genre:

In this case, the intent was to amuse rather than deceive; the impact is strongest when the audience already knows that the actual film is a comedy.  But the principle is the same:  skillful manipulation and omission of facts, with the proper emotional cues, can easily turn a mundane or even benign narrative into a tale of horror.

One Year Ago Today

“Here Comes the Groom” discusses a form of call somewhat more common in June:  the bachelor party.

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The Schizoid State

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 19, 2012| 21 Comments »

For men…, however apparently contradictory to common sense, and the very principles of all their knowledge; have let loose their fancies and natural superstition; and have been by them led into so strange opinions, and extravagant practices…that a considerate man cannot…avoid thinking them ridiculous, and offensive to a sober man.  –  John Locke

The human mind is an astonishingly complex system which contains so many separate and often conflicting schemata and cognitive mechanisms, both conscious and unconscious, that there will inevitably be times when the mind holds two contradictory thoughts, ideas or feelings at the same time.  This induces cognitive dissonance, an unstable (and emotionally unpleasant) state which must be remedied in order to restore psychic equilibrium.  The rational person usually resolves the dilemma by conscious introspection, while the typical person generally clings to his beliefs or emotions and denies the facts which conflict with them.  But some deeply delusional individuals are such masters of doublethink that they can accept two completely contradictory cognitions at exactly the same time, and when they reveal these schizoid thought processes to the world via word or deed the rational person cannot help but feel a sort of fascinated pity mingled with fear, disgust or contempt.

Take, for example, the Ukranian protest group Femen, which protests topless because according to founder Anna Hutsol, women “have the right to use our bodies as weapons”.  So far, so good; people have the right to use their bodies as they please.  So why does Femen oppose sex work?

The controversial women’s rights group known for their provocative protests of world affairs, has taken to the streets of Hamburg…armed with…wearable sex toys…their bodies painted with Swastikas and Hitler mustaches, gesturing their way down the streets in similar fashion to Hitler’s regime nearly 70 years ago…chanting, “Sex slavery is fascism”…

So according to Femen, it’s OK to use one’s sex appeal to get in the news, but not to make a living; even by neofeminist standards this is psychotic.  But the cognitive contortions involved are no worse than those in this article about male strippers from The Independent, whose writer (one Francesca Steele) manages to convince herself that male stripping is “empowering” while female stripping is “demeaning” (she tells us that male strippers are “gods on stage”, but female strippers are “objectified”, presumably because the girls make a lot more money than the guys do).  The funniest part?  Steele seems completely oblivious to the fact that most of male strippers’ clients are other men.

The police are another group who are masters of schizoid thinking:

Police in Ottawa are calling a case in which two 15-year-old girls are charged with human trafficking “shocking.”  They say they have never seen anything like it before…[they] allege that on three separate occasions, the girls lured three female victims ranging from 13 to 17 years of age to a city residence…[from which they] were driven to other locations for the purposes of prostitution.  The accused girls face multiple charges, including human trafficking, robbery, procuring, forcible confinement, sexual assault, assault, uttering threats and abduction…the victims were confined and somehow forced to engage in prostitution.  Police said there was no indication pimps or men played any role…

In plain English:  the two 15-year-olds figured out how to place escort ads and talked their three friends into it.  But since anyone under 18 is an innocent, asexual “child”, they couldn’t possibly have gone along for money and kicks; they must have been “forced” by “traffickers”.  Remember:  breaking a law, no matter how stupid or arbitrary, is the one thing which can cause the magic Shazam lightning to strike even one second before midnight on a person’s 18th birthday, thus transforming an innocent child into a ruthless adult criminal.  The Kanadian Kops claim they’ve “never seen anything like it before”, so they must not communicate with their American counterparts; teens here are often arrested for “sexually abusing” their consenting partners and prosecuted for “child porn” when they take nude pictures of themselves.

But the undisputed champion of contradiction, the Schizoid Sultan, the Duke of Doublethink, is New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.  Regular readers are familiar with the way he criticizes others for restricting women’s sexual choices while advocating the restriction of those choices, decries the “exploitation” of women while using lurid “sex slave” porn to sell ads for his employers, and attacks some instances of government meddling while praising others and simultaneously stating that it’s natural and good for government intrusions into private affairs to continually increase.  Even so, I think he surpassed himself last week:

I’m generally an admirer of Obama’s foreign policy, but his policies toward both Syria and Sudan increasingly seem lame, ineffective and contrary to American interests and values.  Obama has shown himself comfortable projecting power — as in his tripling of American troops in Afghanistan.  Yet now we have the spectacle of a Nobel Peace Prize winner in effect helping to protect two of the most odious regimes in the world…[Sudan’s] leader has been charged with genocide, has destabilized the region, has sponsored brutal proxy warlords like Joseph Kony, has presided over the deaths of more than 2.5 million people…and the Obama administration doesn’t want him overthrown?  In addition, the administration has consistently tried to restrain the rebel force here…Likewise, in Syria, the United States has not only refused to arm the opposition but has, I believe, discouraged other countries from doing so…we should make clear that unless the security forces depose Assad in the next 30 days, our Middle Eastern allies will arm the Syrian opposition.  We should work with these allies, as well as with major powers like Russia and China, to encourage a coup…That’s not too much to expect of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Yes, you read that correctly:  Kristof says that Obama should prove he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize by starting two new wars.  I can’t believe that absolutely nobody outside the libertarian press noticed the glaring contradiction, so I suspect that nearly everyone who read any of these stories recognized the conflicts in them immediately…and then promptly discarded such realizations as sources of cognitive dissonance when juxtaposed with their fawning respect for self-proclaimed authorities.

One Year Ago Today

“Whores in History Revisited” is an extended review of a fantastic book I cannot possibly recommend enough.

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Yellow Fever

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2012| 22 Comments »

The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick.  –  L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

Many reasonably-intelligent people in the media and even academia are afflicted with a curious kind of farsightedness; they can see events of the near past (say 25-150 years) with clarity, but are completely unable to recognize their resemblance to modern ones.  The example that leaps immediately to mind is “sex trafficking” hysteria, which as I’ve previously demonstrated bears a remarkable similarity to the Satanic Panic and is virtually indistinguishable from the “white slavery” hysteria; Furry Girl has also pointed out its resemblance to the “crack” panic of the 1980s.  Furthermore, the bizarre, exaggerated stories told by “sex trafficking survivors” look very much like the “recovered memories” of self-proclaimed victims of extraterrestrial visitors and Satanic cults.  Yet somehow, even people who understand the concept of moral panics cannot identify the “trafficking” myth as one of them.  It’s not unlike the way that people recognize tyranny in politicians of the opposing party, but not in those from their own party, or who fail to comprehend that the War on Drugs is no different from Prohibition of the 1920s.

But the example I’d like to address today is yellow journalism, which is the substitution of sensationalism, scaremongering, scandal and bogus research for real reporting and ethical journalism.  The term is most closely associated with flamboyant newspapers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the majority of articles on the subject concentrate wholly on that time, as though it were a phenomenon relegated to the past; in actuality it has become the norm, with once-respectable media outlets such as CNN, the New York Times and the BBC competing with each other to publish the most lurid, judgmental and fact-free stories on sex work and many other issues.

Case in point:  National Geographic.  It would be difficult to imagine a more staid publication, but the TV network which bears its name is simply awful; the few times I’ve watched it I’ve been appalled at the number of errors, distortions, omissions and what I must presume to be outright lies in its programs.  One year ago today I reviewed an episode of its Taboo series ambitiously entitled “Prostitution”, only to discover that its director and writer appear to have been at cross purposes:

…the single most common form of prostitution in the Western world, namely escorting, was entirely ignored in favor of lurid concentration on a very small fraction of the American market.  The director seems to have leaned a little on our side…[but] the writer leaned the other way:  Every negative statement about prostitution was expressed as a fact, while every positive one was said to be an opinion.  Statements about the terrible conditions of their lives made by the Bangladeshi prostitutes and the American streetwalkers were reported with the word “is”, while statements made by the legal Australian and Dutch prostitutes were reported with the word “claims”.  In other words we hear that the streetwalker is miserable, but the Aussie brothel girls only claim to be happy.  It’s a subtle bias, but one a less-critical viewer would absorb without noticing.


This ambivalence seems to be the norm at NatGeo (the network’s attempt at a “hip” nickname for itself); Amanda Brooks recently agreed to appear in another of their shows entitled “Sex for Sale: American Escort” (apparently an attempt to make up for our omission from the Taboo episode).  After being “assured…this was a stand-alone documentary focusing on the US and the legal issues surrounding prostitution”, Amanda agreed to spend two (unpaid) days with them, and this was the result:

…I watched it in horror.  The title alone let me know this was not a serious documentary examining criminalization in the US.  In fact, they barely mention criminalization or its effects.  They don’t bother to figure out that criminalization is the reason for a lot of the pushback they receive when trying to interview agencies…My role was “blink and you’ll miss it,” which was a bit of a relief by the end.  The “undercover” harassment of random agencies in Vegas was nauseating.  I have no love for escort/stripper agencies in Vegas but this show actually made me feel sorry for the people who were just running a business…The supposed pimp-daddy in shades interviewed by Mariana [van Zeller] appears to be a hobbyist indulging in what’s known as “role-play.”  Even [my photographer] thought the guy was fake and she doesn’t deal with pimps, hobbyists or agencies…Focusing the “hidden” camera on the one girl’s boobs was completely uncalled for, especially given the victim-y slant of the whole show.  Exploitation is exploitation, whether it’s a pimp, client, or “hidden” camera.  What turned my stomach the most was the Vegas escort they interviewed/exploited.  Though they obscure her face, at one point they show her site and it was recognizable…I felt ripped off, for sure.  On the other hand, I was also relieved that I didn’t play a more-prominent role in this disaster.  The CNBC documentary I did in 2008, while it ruffled some feathers over its display of websites, treated us with a lot more respect overall and had as balanced a view as it’s possible to get with mainstream media.  I’m still very happy with that documentary.  This effort was not that.  Not even close…

It used to be that one could tell the difference between articles in respectable news sources and those in the tabloids.  But what real distinction is there when the BBC distorts and exaggerates a story in exactly the same way as the New York Daily News?

In this small Mexican town that sends sex slaves to New York, little boys dream of growing up to be pimps…The town of 10,000, about 80 miles from Mexico City, is Mexico’s undisputed cradle of sex trafficking, one end of a pipeline that leads directly to our city’s streets.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s New York field office arrested 32 sex traffickers last year; 26 of them were from Tenancingo.  It’s a family business, and through the decades, the pimps have perfected methods to coerce women into sexual slavery using romance, lies and the threat of violence.  Over the last 20 years they have branched out of Latin America, sending sex workers to New York and other U.S. cities, experts said…Each family sends its youngest and most handsome men across Mexico to pose as salesmen with nice clothes and fancy cars, Munoz Berruecos said.  They woo rural women waiting at bus stops or taking Sunday strolls in the park.  Once the women are seduced, they are coerced into prostitution.  The women are held inside the Tenancingo “security houses” — where some say they were repeatedly raped.  If they have children, the kids are kept in the town for leverage after they are dispatched to red-light districts.  Some go to Mexico City.  Many end up in Queens, where johns can order them for delivery by calling numbers advertised on cards, key chains or bottle openers, authorities say…Officials said each prostitute they bring to New York — where they service up to 35 johns a day — nets the traffickers about $100,000 a year…

Here’s Dr. Laura Agustin’s debunking of the BBC version of the same story.  I only have two things to add in regard to the Daily News version:  note that the number of clients per day has now ballooned to 35, and consider the repeated iterations of (unnamed) “experts said” and “authorities said” (one of Frank Mott‘s defining characteristics of yellow journalism is “a parade of false learning from so-called experts”).  Despite the paper’s blatant exploitation of women to sell advertising you won’t hear a word from “feminists” about it, or about the stereotypes of female stupidity, gullibility and muddle-headedness this sort of story promotes; for neofeminists, that’s OK if it makes men look like monsters and whips up anti-sex sentiment in the hoi-polloi.  And for the media, lying is OK if it rakes in cash, even if that means drowning the reputation won by the hard work of previous generations of reputable journalists in a sea of yellow ink.

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Father’s Day

Posted in Biography, Holidays, tagged , , , , , , on June 17, 2012| 20 Comments »

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; no more nor less.  –  William Shakespeare, King Lear (I,i)

Perceptive long-time readers have probably noticed that while I mention my mother and sisters from time to time and my grandmother and favorite cousin quite frequently, I’ve barely mentioned my father at all.  Some of you may have concluded that he was largely absent from my life for one reason or another, but that would not be the case; it’s just that I honestly don’t have a lot to say about him.  But since today is Father’s Day in the United States and many other countries, I thought I would take the opportunity to provide you with a brief sketch.  Though I’ll speak of him in the past tense because it’s been 15 years since I’ve seen him, he and my mother are both still alive and still reside in the same house where I grew up.

If I were less objective, I would say my father was hard and standoffish, but that would not really be true; while he was traditionally paternal and often trapped in very rigid thought patterns, that was no more true of him than it was of other men of his generation and background.  He was in fact much warmer than his younger brother and several of his contemporary cousins, and though I never met his father (who died in 1960), Maman told me that he was very cold toward his sons; he was an intellectual who married late, and other people I’ve talked to about him (such as my aunt) have said that they believe the only reason he got married in the first place was because that was what an established man was expected to do in the 1930s.  Given this upbringing, I’d say my father was actually a bit on the demonstrative side, though he sometimes had trouble showing it.

My father was always very devoted to my mother; I honestly feel that he’s always been very much in love with her, and since he was not a very verbal person he expressed it the same way he expressed affection to us or Maman:  by doing things.  He would cheerfully embark on major landscaping or construction projects, and never made me feel I was imposing if I asked him to help me with something; the only drawback was that he is the one from whom I inherited my hardheadedness, and if he was to be involved in a project it would be done his way or not at all.  I think these characteristics were what caused him to be less affectionate to me than to my first and third sisters; his rigidity prevented him from understanding my strangeness, his tendency to be non-verbal made it difficult for us to relate, and his devotion to my mother caused him to absorb a lot of her attitude toward me.

So though I never felt rejected by my father exactly, I never really felt accepted by him either; like my mother, he never quite seemed to know what to do with me.  The two preferred sisters were both tomboys who were much like my mother in personality, so that gave him a point of contact with them; my brother and other sister had an amiable if not especially close relationship with him.  When I was young we often watched shows together:  we both enjoyed The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and other nature documentaries, and he was a big Star Trek fan (I never heard him laugh so hard as he did at a rerun of “A Piece of the Action” in the late ‘70s).  Indeed, Star Trek was the subject of the first of only two intellectual discussions I can ever recall having with him, a 1988 conversation in which he stated that he felt the characters in The Next Generation lacked the appeal and chemistry of those in the original series.  He and I were in agreement on that, but six years later argued about the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War after I referred to the facilities in which they were held as “concentration camps”.

But for the most part our interaction was limited to discipline, his telling me I wasn’t doing my chores quickly enough for his liking, my asking him for permission to do this or that (because he was more permissive than my mother), or his chastising me for upsetting my mother (which happened quite frequently in high school).  Other than that, he seemed more distant with every passing year, and I remember how very strange it felt to walk down the aisle with him at my wedding; we had been growing apart for so long that I didn’t really feel that I was his to give away any more (even in the modern social sense, much less the traditional patriarchal sense).  So it’s not remotely surprising he upheld my mother’s decision not to speak with me any more, though I sometimes wonder if he actually knows the reason or just went along with it without question.

I fully realize that in publishing this I am opening the door for prohibitionists to proclaim that I became a whore due to “daddy issues”, thus proving that all whores are mentally unbalanced, blah blah blah.  I’m not worried about it; people like that will twist whatever they have to fit their model, and if they don’t have anything to twist they’ll just make stuff up.  Did my teenage promiscuity result from a lack of attention from my father?  Possibly, but what difference does it make?  We all have childhood troubles, traumas and tragedies, and we are all shaped by them; if we as a society are going to deny agency and free choice to individuals on that basis, absolutely nobody will have free choice.  Ultimately, the hidden currents and tendencies which pushed me toward harlotry are no more germane than those which push others into politics, medicine, science, music, teaching or being a professional busybody, and any given individual’s choices are nobody’s business but his or her own.

One Year Ago Today

“Speaking in Prostitute” examines the misunderstandings which arise when whores and amateurs attempt to have a dialog.

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That Was the Week That Was (#24)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 16, 2012| 32 Comments »

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it.  It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.  –  Nadine Gordimer

Eleven updates and four meta-updates.

Who Did Your Tits? (October 1st, 2010)

Happy 50th birthday, silicone implant!:

…Timmie Jean Lindsey, 80…said she…[went to Dr. Frank Gerow of Houston, who invented the implants in 1962] because she wanted some rose tattoos removed from her chest, and he told her she was the perfect first candidate…“It wasn’t a big deal to me.  I went from a B to a C cup.  But it made men more aware of me.  More men would whistle at me”…She said she feels fortunate she never experienced many of the side effects that plagued other recipients…

The reason she didn’t have any side effects, of course, is because lawyers hadn’t invented them yet.

An Older Profession Than You May Have Thought (October 12th, 2010)

Remember those cute little Adelie penguins?  Well, it turns out that prostitution isn’t their only “perverted” sexual behavior; George Levick of the ill-fated Scott expedition also observed rape, sexual abuse of chicks, homosexuality and necrophilia.  He was so upset by the whole thing that he recorded his findings in Greek so that they couldn’t accidentally be read by English speakers, and those facts were left out of the official accounts until very recently.  I’m not surprised; any bird which practices “cash and dash” is capable of anything.

Another Example of Swedish “Feminism” (May 30th, 2011)

Did you read the one about the Swedish housewife who set herself up a BDSM dungeon in an abandoned bunker?  It became news when two fishermen discovered it and called the cops.  When Aftonbladet told her that many of her neighbors were scandalized she said, “I think it is because many are afraid.  Sweden is not really such a free country when it comes to sexuality…”  Sex workers and their clients wholly agree.

Surplus Women (September 27th, 2011)

Yet another maniac chooses his victims from among sex workers:

A Mississippi sheriff’s investigator hopes surveillance video from Bourbon Street in New Orleans will provide clues about the death of a strip club dancer whose dismembered body washed ashore on the Gulf Coast…22-year-old Jaren Lockhart reported for work Tuesday (June 5th) night and left early Wednesday.  Her torso was found late Thursday in Bay St. Louis.  Other body parts…were found later…Lockhart had been a resident of the Capri Motel…

The Capri is one of those dirty, scary places where only truly desperate girls live, so I suspect she was murdered by a client who promised her extra money to go off with him.  At least the story seems to make some effort to treat her as a person rather than concentrating on her sex work as so many do.

See No Evil (November 26th, 2011)

Res ipsa loquitur:

…Phillip Cosby…objects to [a] donated statue at the Overland Park Arboretum [in Kansas City], because it portrays a woman…taking a photo of herself while her breasts are exposed…he has started an online petition…to start a grand jury investigation…he objects to the statue’s availability to children and is seeking a charge of promoting obscenity.  Overland Park has posted signs at the park about the statue’s content but says it has no immediate plans to remove the sculpture.

A statue has no “content”; any “obscenity” is projected into it by dirty minds.

Neither Addiction nor Epidemic (December 4th, 2011)

Regular reader Franklin Harris wrote a column on sex in film in which he stated:

Movies and television take a lot of heat for promoting supposedly immoral, promiscuous and irresponsible sexual behavior.  But when it comes to movies that actually make sex their main focus, you may be left wondering why anyone has sex in the first place. Sex in these movies is awful, joyless and nothing good ever comes of it.  On second thought, that does sound like a pretty irresponsible depiction of sex, just not the one we’ve been led to expect…despite depressing movies such as Shame and a few high-profile celebrity cases of suspect credibility, one fact remains: There is no such thing as sex addiction…[it] is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, and there is no scientific evidence it exists…

Harris also has sharp words for The Girlfriend Experience and points out the deep irony implicit in Hollywood’s typical condemnation of any kind of sex for pay.  I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see this sort of column becoming ever more common in mainstream media.

Above the Law (March 8th, 2012)

Another cop using his position for rape:  “A former Hopewell [Virginia] police officer was convicted…of sexually abusing three women…In exchange for his pleas, a fourth charge of forcible sodomy was withdrawn by the prosecution.  Baggett faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on each count…”  Notice that cops in these stories are nearly always described as “former” police officers, subtly implying that they were sacked out for their conduct, when in fact that only happened as a direct result of a probable conviction.  Had the case been less clear, Baggett would still be a cop right now.

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

Sex workers in Thailand recently sent a letter to their Prime Minister asking him to stop licking Uncle Sam’s boots:

…Empower alleges that successive Thai governments have sacrificed the rule of law, their international human rights obligations and the well-being of migrant sex workers and their families, in an attempt to please the US government and satisfy the American anti trafficking agenda.  We accuse the United States government of using the issue of human trafficking to coerce its allies into tightening border and immigration controls.  The US agenda has also created a climate where women crossing borders are all seen as suspect “victims” of trafficking…Empower sees the Trafficking in Persons Report issued by the US State Department as subjective and bias [sic] against the Thai Entertainment Industry…

The Naked Emperor (May 15th, 2012)

Though danah boyd (who like e.e. cummings prefers her name uncapitalized) is generally critical of moral panics about kids and the internet, and has said that “the most deadly misconception about American youth has been the sexual predator panic”, she seems to have bought into sex trafficking hysteria…or has she?  This article also seems subtly critical of anti-Backpage crusade; is she, like others, simply afraid to say the emperor is naked?

…when we as a society see technology being used in horrible ways, we want to blame and ban the technology…I know that technology is being used in the commercial sexual exploitation of minors.  I also know that many people have responded to the visibility of “child sex trafficking” on commercial websites by wanting to shut down those commercial websites…my goal is to make sure that we understand what we’re doing so that we actually address the core of the problem, not just the most visible symptoms of it.  Unfortunately, we know very little about how children are advertised, bought, sold, and exploited through the use of technology.  There are plenty of anecdotes, but rigorous data is limited…

Read the article and let me know what you think:  more research is good, but only if it’s conducted in an atmosphere of free inquiry; most of the projects she mentions make unwarranted assumptions and seem tailored to produce specific anti-sex work outcomes.

First They Came for the Hookers… (June 5th, 2012)

I really wish politicians would stop proving me right:

…the government says it will end giving work visas to foreign strippers once and for all…”The problem is, under the current Immigration Act we don’t have the legal authority to deny people visas based on the industry they’re working in,” [said] Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney…”Now we have the power, which we’ll [soon] begin using…to deny visas to people who we think…might have a high chance of trafficking or exploitation”…

Once again, “trafficking” rhetoric is really an excuse for bigotry.

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury (June 9th, 2012)

Anyone who’s read more than a token amount of Bradbury has noticed the libertarian ideas in his work, and in this extremely interesting essay by Ilya Somin of The Volokh Conspiracy he demonstrates that Bradbury was not alone: “Libertarianism is better represented in science fiction and fantasy than in any other literary genre.  From Robert Heinlein to the present day, libertarian writers have been among the leaders in the field.  Even many genre writers who are not self-consciously libertarian have often made use of libertarian themes in their work…”

Metaupdates

Welcome To Our World in February Updates (Part Two) (February 13th, 2011)

A UK organization is fighting for the sexual rights of mentally disabled people:

…Everybody has the right to have sex and relationships…however they choose.  But some people in society, such as people with learning disabilities, aren’t always given the automatic right to have relationships and flourish as sexual beings.  They have to persuade others to “allow” them to do it.  FPA believes passionately that everyone has the right to enjoy sexual health…

I applaud FPA’s efforts; whores also know what it’s like to be denied the right to sex on our own terms.

The Scarlet Letter in TW3 (#19) (May 12th, 2012)

Another example of sex workers fighting oppression via civil courts:

…State-sanctioned forced HIV testing of sex workers also occurs [in places other than Greece]…But in Malawi…sex workers are fighting back…in 2009…police…forced [arrested sex workers] to undergo HIV tests…[and those] who tested HIV-positive were charged with  “spreading disease dangerous to life,”…fourteen [of them] decided to sue the government and challenge the constitutionality of forced HIV testing…

Much Ado About Nothing in TW3 (#19) (May 12th, 2012)

Dania Suarez, the escort whose mistreatment kicked off the Secret service scandal, “has announced plans to open a non-profit organization to support women who have been affected by prostitution” just after turning down “a $500,000 pornography contract with Vivid” in favor of a TV documentary on her life.  As long as she only works with women who genuinely want to leave the trade I’m all for it, but if she turns to “rescue” and/or starts mouthing “child sex trafficking” rubbish, she’ll be following Kristin Davis into the Hall of Shame.

Finding What Isn’t There in TW3 (#23) (June 9th, 2012)

Considering that prostitution is not illegal in either part of Ireland and that police found no “traffickers” or “victims” in their highly-publicized joint raid, all of the residences belonged to “innocent people”; I reckon what this article is trying to say is that half didn’t belong to the people named on the warrants:

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is facing a serious legal backlash after it emerged that as many as half the residences it raided as part of its cross-border anti-prostitution operation with gardai belong to innocent people…the PSNI is now facing a highly embarrassing and potentially very expensive legal fall-out from what appear to have been a series of botched raids based on intelligence that, in some cases, was at least a year out of date…

Though I feel bad for those who were raided, high-profile jackboot buffoonery like this only helps our cause in the long run, because it demonstrates the fact-free basis for police actions and results in ever more editorials like this one:

…”Rape for profit,” stormed Philip Marshall of the PSNI…Everyone would agree if he had freed dozens of sex-slaves and charged their traffickers…So far, though, the only people charged were three Polish girls, who…were…working willingly…is it really worth months of police time…to arrest and shame…three young people?…Or should we consider…offering prostitutes the protection of the law when they are abused or coerced?…Prostitution has always been with us…We can’t legislate it out of existence, but we could legislate to reduce its damage to the health and welfare of those involved.

One Year Ago Today

“June Miscellanea (Part Two)” reports on yet another censorship law, a decentralized online currency system, New York’s declaration that sexy dancing isn’t dancing and more extra-blog activities by yours truly.

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Fictional Interlude: A Haughty Spirit

Posted in Fiction, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 15, 2012| 17 Comments »

Do thou restrain the haughty spirit in thy breast, for better far is gentle  courtesy.  –  Homer, Iliad (IX, 315-317)

Last June I published “A Decent Boldness”, in which I introduced Aella, a young Amazon warrior of the mythic past; the story proved so popular a number of readers requested a sequel.  Well, the Muse has finally inspired me with another of her adventures; if you haven’t read the first story yet, I urge you to do so before proceeding with this one because it’ll make a lot more sense that way.

Hecate take me for my damnable overconfidence!

Phaedra wanted to go by ship, but I said no, I hate the cursed things, and though your home be on an island I want to make as much of the journey safely on land as possible.  My four years at the brothel had allowed me to earn not only wealth, but also knowledge; once word of my presence got around Tartessos a group of kindly scholars began to frequent the place, and I was as interested in learning from them as they were from me.  When I heard that the ancient homeland of my people lay just on the other side of the Pillars of Herakles, I yearned to visit it before returning to our modern domain on the eastern shores of Tethys; and truth be told, had I not had that excuse I would have found another to avoid being cooped up for weeks in close quarters on a frail thing of wood with a lot of rude, smelly men.

I convinced her to ride with me as far as Rehoboth or Graea, where we could surely book a comparatively-short passage to Crete; I painted a lovely picture of riding along beaches, eating fish and crabs from the sea with the good wine and cheese we brought along, sleeping beneath the stars and sharing laughter and kisses away from the prying eyes of crowds.  I dismissed her concerns of dangerous beasts and even more dangerous tribes, boasting of my ability to defeat man or lion.  Eventually she agreed, and the first two weeks were just as I promised.

And now here I lie, gazing helplessly into the barbarian camp where my dearest friend awaits rape, slavery and perhaps torture, and it’s all my fault!  Why did I leave her alone while I explored those ruins?  My time in the soft city has dulled my wits and clouded my judgment, and I forgot that in the wilderness there is too much danger to leave a girl like Phaedra for long without a vigilant sword at her side.  Damn you, eyes, for these annoying tears!  I need you clear that I may assess the situation, hopeless though it may be; I doubt even Queen Myrina and her honor guard could slay so many men without being overwhelmed.  So if Amazon steel will not serve me, perhaps a warrior’s cunning will; Metis, inspire me with a plan!

What’s this?  Though I did not see her brought hither, my time in Man’s World has taught me enough to know the chief will have claimed her for himself, and there is some kind of ruckus at his tent.  Though their babble is as strange to me as Tarshi once was, an argument sounds the same in any tongue…and one that ends with a sword through the gut is serious indeed.  But what could spur a leader to kill his own man so abruptly?  Did he attempt to steal treasure?  Ah, I know; he attempted to sample treasure, or at least the chief thought he did.  Phaedra is very beautiful, and he wishes to keep her all to himself; though there are already many women in the camp, her fair skin and shining grey eyes make her unique.  And that gives me an idea; may my ancestresses forgive me, but I can think of no other way.

First, I must prepare our escape; would that I could find and extract Phaedra as easily as I locate our horses among these inferior nags!  The rest of the camp is at dinner, and the guard is inattentive; may Themis be more merciful to his soul than his people were to my friend.  If I leave the paddock gate open, some of the horses may wander away now and bolt if any commotion starts, and that will mean fewer pursuers.  Fortunately, this terrain provides plenty of cover behind which to secure our mounts.  My helm, shield, breastplate and greaves need be packed away, and my sword, bow and quiver will hang from the pommel securely enough; my face, my wits and a long dagger strapped to my thigh will be my only weapons this night, and my mother’s talisman and the grace of the blessed goddesses my only armor.  They have already granted me one boon:  though the barbarians stole woman and horses, they missed our packs where we had wedged them between rocks to protect them from the blowing dust.

Now for the hard part:  though it is a good thing Phoebe will not rise for hours yet, it means having to find what I need in the dark.  Ah, this isn’t so difficult after all; this flimsy gown Phaedra insisted I bring to present myself at her mother’s house is so much softer to the touch than my other clothes, I can find it with my fingers!  If only the rest could be so simple.  I’ve been watching the way the women of the brothel behave for four years now; have I learned enough to imitate it?  Best to test it before entering the lion’s den; here’s another guard looking for the one I permanently relieved of duty a little while ago.

Quiet, my heart!  Cease pounding so, or he will surely hear!  The dagger is within easy reach should my attempt at seduction (what a strange word!) fail.  Now to step out where he can see me…no, mustn’t strike a defensive stance!  He must think I’m just as useless as the women of his tribe.  He’s suspicious; of course he is!  He isn’t an idiot!  This is transparently a trap, and surely no sane creature could…sheath his sword and approach unarmed, mumbling barbarian gibberish.  A smile and a beckoning finger…and he joins his comrade on the shores of the Styx.  Perhaps my plan may work after all; it seems that any possibility of coupling with a woman causes these men of the West to completely take leave of their senses.

Still, there’s no need to test it more than is necessary; my stealth will carry me to the leader’s tent with far less chance of failure.  Slit one more throat, dodge two women, hide for interminable minutes behind some jars while a group of children tarry before dispersing…then wait while a sentry moves on, and here I am at my destination.  I can hear Phaedra’s voice; the chief apparently knows enough Cretan to suffice for trade, and she is trying to negotiate herself out of the situation by promising a reward if he returns her to me.  He seems to find it funny; has she told him I’m an Amazon?  It’s impossible to tell.

I want so badly to rush in and cut the dog down where he stands, but I’m no fool; as a chieftain he will be at least my equal in fair combat, and the melee will surely draw his guards.  No, this has to be done with finesse…so I let the guards think they’ve overheard me, and pretend to be frightened (o, the humiliation!) when they “capture” me, crying out loudly enough to ensure the leader hears as well.  When he steps out, I catch his eyes with as smoldering a look as I can manage…and he takes the bait, ordering his men to bring me in.

Phaedra’s eyes go wide in horror, but that lasts only for a moment as I rush to her in unfeigned joy and hug her tightly, slipping my dagger from beneath my skirts and placing it between her thighs.  She starts slightly, and I whisper “You’ll know when” before allowing myself to be jerked around roughly by our barbaric captor.  What follows is the hardest battle of my life; I have to force down my loathing, compel myself to keep smiling, to keep chatting, to somehow subtly convince him that his lust for me is greater than his lust for my beautiful friend…to succeed in a form of bloodless combat I have never before attempted.

Victory!  Astarte be praised!  The fool at last imposes himself on me, pushing me back upon the bedding to enter me; I distract him with a great cacophony of moans, encouraging him to ever-louder noises himself while beckoning to Phaedra for my blade.  He dies with a shout indistinguishable from his other bestial noises, and I roll him off of me in disgust.  Shush, my love; we must needs flee in haste and utmost silence.  It is the work of a moment to slide under the back of the tent, and apparently Nike is satisfied with the four men I have already sent her this night, for we meet no more on the way to our steeds.  The sun is high before we dare stop for a short rest, and has set again before we make a hidden camp far above the shore.  But my exhaustion and saddle-soreness, and the cold fare on which we must dine, are all made bearable by the admiration in my dear friend’s eyes, and the songs of praise that pour from her lips until I drop off into a well-earned sleep.

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The Suppression of Virtue

Posted in History, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on June 14, 2012| 59 Comments »

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.  –  Mikhail Bakunin

Though most modern people consider the duality of good and evil to be a universal concept, nothing could be farther from the truth.  Since time immemorial there have been concepts of right and wrong, but the idea that there exists a morality untied to the pronouncements of leaders or deities is a comparatively new one (and indeed, one that still appears to lie beyond the understanding of most humans).  In ancient times (and for a majority of modern people) “right” or “good” behavior is that which obeys the dicta of some authority figure, however arbitrary or contradictory; for example, in the Old Testament Yahweh often orders the Hebrews to break his own commandments, yet that obedience is viewed as virtuous (consider also the story of Abraham, who would’ve obediently sacrificed his son had Yahweh not countermanded the order at the last second).  But during the 2nd millennium BCE, some philosophers began to recognize that there are universal principles of morality which do not depend on laws, and that moral decision is a matter of higher judgment rather than mere mechanistic obedience.

But when personal ethics conflict with laws enforced by violence, something has to give; what is a moral person to do when the right action is prohibited by law or immoral behavior demanded by it?  Even if a person is so dedicated to Good that he is willing to accept state-inflicted violence as the price of being a moral person in a deeply-flawed world, state-sponsored malefactors will inevitably  prevent or undo his good actions as soon as they are discovered, possibly at great cost to those he cares about.  Consider the classic villain trick of compelling the hero to evil actions via threat of grievous harm to someone he cares deeply about; the state uses this monstrous form of compulsion every day by threatening to abduct the children of those it wishes to intimidate and subjecting them to life-destroying abuse and neglect.  Such forms of compulsion are by their very nature evil because they remove the capacity for free moral choice, thereby making good impossible.  A computer, a lower animal which functions purely by instinct, or an inanimate object under the influence of natural laws is capable of neither good nor evil; morality requires free choice, and a sentient being robbed of that choice is reduced to the level of a mechanism or a vegetable.  The act of compelling action therefore exists in the same moral realm as imprisonment, lobotomization or mutilation; it forcibly removes an intrinsic capacity of the sentient being without its consent.

In Gnostic theology, God created the universe in order to make a space where the angels could be away from Him so that they could have free will; the Divine Presence is so overwhelming that no creature can choose to do anything but obey when confronted by it.  And even though that action resulted in the creation of evil, it also brought goodness into existence because without choice there can be neither.  An example of the inverse appears in the novel and film A Clockwork Orange:  when the Ludovico Technique conditions the sadistic young criminal Alex against sex and violence, he becomes unable to defend himself from murderous attacks or sexually contact a consenting woman.  He “ceases…to be a creature capable of moral choice”; he is neither good or evil, but merely a sort of organic robot (hence the title).  All the government cares about is that he refrain from prohibited types of evil; the fact that he can’t actually be good is immaterial (thus proving that politicians are far less wise than 1st-century philosophers).

Modern tyrannies pretend that paternalistic laws coupled with harsh punishments make people “good”, but this is nothing but a low-level, society-wide application of the Ludovico Technique and those oppressed by it are robbed of moral choice.  As Sheldon Richman wrote in a recent Reason article, “social engineers think they need to deprive us of freedom in order to make us moral or in some way better…so they use the law to keep us from discriminating, gambling, eating allegedly fattening foods, taking drugs, smoking in restaurants, abstaining from helping others, leaving our seat belts unbuckled, you name it.”  The article discusses “On Doing the Right Thing”, a 1924 essay by anarchist philosopher Albert Nock, who was nevertheless thoroughly Victorian in his ideas about sex; he clearly held extramarital activity (including sex work) in the same low esteem he afforded to habitual drunkenness.  But despite his personal aversion to “loose living”, he specifically rejects the notion that morality can or should be compelled by law:

…I remember seeing recently a calculation that the poor American is staggering along under a burden of some two million laws; and obviously, where there are so many laws, it is hardly possible to conceive of any items of conduct escaping contact with one or more of them.  Thus, the region where conduct is controlled by law so far encroaches upon the region of free choice and the region where conduct is controlled by a sense of the Right Thing, that there is precious little left of either…living in America is like serving in the army; ninety per cent of conduct is prescribed by law and the remaining ten per cent by the esprit du corps, with the consequence that opportunity for free choice in conduct is practically abolished…a civilisation organised upon this absence of responsibility is pulpy and unsound.

…freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed…we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of…in suggesting that we try freedom, therefore, the anarchist and individualist has a strictly practical aim…the production of a race of responsible beings…our legalists and authoritarians…keep insisting…[that] freedom [allows one] to drink oneself to death.  The anarchist grants this at once; but at the same time he points out that it also means freedom to say…”I never drink.”  It unquestionably means freedom to go on without any code of morals at all; but it also means freedom to rationalise, construct and adhere to a code of one’s own.  The anarchist presses the point invariably overlooked, that freedom to do the one without correlative freedom to do the other is impossible; and that just here comes in the moral education which legalism and authoritarianism, with their denial of freedom, can never furnish…

Even if it were true that an authoritarian nanny-state was a “safer” society (an assertion with which anyone to whom a cop or prosecutor takes a dislike would disagree), that still would not make it a better society.  Moral progress does not begin with authorities bringing stone tablets down from mountains, but with individuals who are free to act openly on their personal principles, thus providing a good example to others.  The more freedom a society allows, the more new ethical concepts enter the marketplace of ideas; the less freedom, the fewer.  People learn by doing, not by being done for; unexercised muscles do not grow, but rather atrophy.  And it is impossible to develop a moral sense without the opportunity to make free moral judgments whose consequences are those which result from the decision itself instead of those arbitrarily inflicted by the state.

One Year Ago Tomorrow

“June Miscellanea (Part One)” reports on the beginning of the Canadian prostitution law appeal, CNN’s bizarre definition of “expert”, more nanny-state cheerleading from Kristof and Mother Russia’s attempt to prove she can be just as pigheaded as Uncle Sam.

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Pick a Color

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 13, 2012| 29 Comments »

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.  –  H.L. Mencken

I once compared American political parties to a group of boys arbitrarily divided into two teams for some sport, and because the differences between them are practically nonexistent it’s impossible to tell them apart without some cosmetic designator, such as the color of their uniforms; otherwise a boy might accidentally throw the ball to a member of the wrong team.  About a decade ago somebody decided to assign the colors red and blue to the Republicans and Democrats respectively; the irony of the fact that red is traditionally the color of the left (in which direction the Democrats supposedly lean) and blue is more often associated with political conservatism (in which direction the Republicans supposedly lean) seems completely lost on the American public, and provides a useful symbol of the total lack of coherent philosophy in either party.

But American political parties are not the only groups whose enumerated principles conflict with one another, and whose actions and policies often directly contradict every one of their stated principles and even work against each other.  Republicans claim to be in favor of smaller government …except for the machinery of war and police oppression.  Democrats claim to be in favor of civil rights and free speech…unless that speech offends someone or those rights prove inconvenient.  “Feminists” claim to be in favor of a woman’s right to control her own life…unless she makes choices of which the feminist establishment does not approve.  Marxists proclaim that every citizen is equal…except for the leaders, who are more equal than everyone else.  Christian  fundamentalists believe that Biblical laws should be literally observed…except for the Old Testament ones about food, slavery and menstruation and the New Testament ones advocating separation of church and state and condemning rigid interpretation of Scripture.

These groups are not based on shared philosophies, no matter what they claim; they are cults, mass movements which require absolute, unthinking conformity from their followers.  These cults exist for one purpose, and one only:  to win political power for their leaders.  Every policy, every strategic decision, every position is intended to advance that one end, either by implementing control mechanisms or by winning converts to serve the leaders as slaves and foot-soldiers.  Irrational, unscientific, contradictory policies (such as the neofeminist ones described in my column of one year ago today) are useful for sorting the sheep from the goats:  anyone who accepts them without question is a reliable lackey, and anyone who questions them is a dangerous malcontent who must be excommunicated.

Cultic groups are often effective at accomplishing their true goals, though of course that never works out too well for the sheep because the promised Utopia never materializes; how could it when so many of the cult’s stated principles contradict each other?  This is why schisms invariably form in mass movements (whether they be political, religious or what-have-you) as soon as they win power:  since only some of the stated goals (as opposed to the real ones) can actually be implemented, those who support one subset of those goals must turn against those who support contradictory ones.  Conversely, it’s also why groups which respect individuality (such as libertarianism) have such difficulty winning their goals; the only way to please everyone in such a group is to have a small number of clearly-stated principles, and unfortunately that doesn’t attract the kind of mob support that a collection of grandiose “free lunch” promises can.

In countries whose political systems give even small, single-interest groups a voice, sex worker rights organizations have had far more success in reforming oppressive laws than in countries like the United States, where it’s necessary to inflate a great big tent with hot air in order to win any degree of political clout.  That’s why mainstream sex worker rights organizations have attempted to utilize the cult approach, promoting a hodgepodge of ideas (many of which are borrowed from neofeminism, Neomarxism and “queer theory” and have absolutely nothing to do with sex worker rights) and demanding lockstep conformity, complete with attacks on those who dare to question the dogma of the “leaders”.  This is like trying to herd cats; many sex workers choose the profession precisely because they’re nonconformists who want to be their own bosses.

As I’ve pointed out before, gay rights activists succeeded with the one-issue strategy by expanding their “tent” to include lesbians, bisexuals and a number of smaller sexual minorities grouped together as “transgender”; sex workers need to do the same thing by fighting attempts to divide us into “legal” and “illegal” sex workers, “high” and “low” class, etc; we also need to win the support of true feminists who recognize that a woman’s right to own and control her body doesn’t just mean abortion.  Decriminalization can only be won by fighting to get government out of individuals’ private lives altogether, not by demanding it let us alone in some ways, but interfere in others and “protect” us in still others while simultaneously abrogating the rights of other people we oppose.  We cannot defeat the control freaks by becoming exactly like them and forming a “Wild Party” whose only distinguishing feature is our red clothes.

One Year Ago Tomorrow

“Grace” is a short biographical sketch of my best friend, whom I’m sure you’ll agree is quite an interesting character.

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Imagination Pinned Down

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2012| 26 Comments »

Memory is imagination pinned down.  –  Mason Cooley

Many people believe that human memory is like a video camera, in that it objectively records perceived events and stores the images and sounds in some sort of indelible medium which can be erased, mislaid or purposefully hidden, but never distorted; the whole principle of “eyewitness testimony” in our legal system derives from this belief.  But as a great deal of research going back to the beginning of modern psychology has demonstrated, it simply isn’t true.  The human mind doesn’t passively record events as a camera does; memory is an active and dynamic process which retains information by fitting it into schemata, mental frameworks which shape our thinking and give meaning to perceptions.  For example, a chess master shown a board in the middle of a real game can quickly memorize the positions of the pieces with a high degree of accuracy and retention, but if shown a board in which the pieces are randomly arranged he cannot memorize the positions any better than anyone else.  This is because in the former case the board layout fits neatly into his highly-developed schema of chess rules and strategy, while in the latter case it’s just a bunch of objects with no discernible order or meaning.

As Victor Frankl observed, human beings have a deep need for meaning; we look for order in even the most chaotic arrangement of objects or events.  The same psychological mechanism which causes us to find pictures in Rorschach’s inkblots also causes us to fit memories into the complex web of schemata by which we interpret the world.  And just as we ignore those topological elements of a cloud or inkblot which do not fit the meaning our minds have imposed upon it, so do we forget or distort elements of a memory which fail to conform to the schema in which we have embedded it, or even invent elements which were not in reality present, but which the schema predicts should be.  This is an extremely important point, so I’ll repeat it:  The human mind often completely fabricates memories in order to impose conformity with one’s weltanschauung.  One simple example involves police lineups:  people will often identify the man whom police imply (subtly or overtly) is their preferred suspect because they believe police to be expert assessors of guilt who would never implicate someone falsely, and this schema of police authority and infallibility actually shapes their memories, sometimes to the point of identifying a person who is later proven to look absolutely nothing like the actual criminal.

Traumatic events tend to induce psychological imbalance which renders the victim even more subject to suggestion by perceived authority figures, which is how False Memory Syndrome develops; a person suffering from depression, anxiety or even nightmares seeks therapy (or has it forced upon her by a court or family) and develops a psychological dependence on a manipulative (and usually agenda-driven) “therapist” who convinces her that all of her problems result from childhood sexual abuse, and then proceeds to “help” her “recover” those memories as one might dig through a closet for a lost videotape.  But memory does not work that way; in reality this procedure does not “recover” existing memories but creates completely new ones which conform to the “therapist’s” narrative, and reconfigures existing ones to agree with the confabulations.  The syndrome was largely responsible for the Satanic Panic, and also for witchcraft hysteria of past centuries; in the latter case the pressure to reshape memories was inflicted by religious authorities and by the culture as a whole rather than by individual agents such as therapists.

It is important to recognize that people who form false memories are neither stupid nor weak-willed, and their memories are not lies but essentially misfiled fantasies.  Everyone files memories for recall by linking them to other cognitive artifacts (memories, ideas, thoughts, beliefs, etc), and when a dream, delusion, fantasy or the like is filed in the same way as a memory the brain treats it as one; moreover, when the false memory is linked to positive reinforcement (such as the approval of a group or authority figure), it is apt to become even more persistent than the memories of real events which lack such powerful associations.  If the false memories serve as the passport into an identity group, they are likely to become the person’s most intense memories because they form an essential keystone of self-identification.

There are a number of psychological criteria shared by the majority of those who are unusually susceptible to remembering experiences that did not happen in objective reality (including alien abductions, demonic possession, cultic victimization, etc); research conducted on such people has revealed that they tend to share a majority of the following characteristics:

*    They are easy to hypnotize
*    As children they played in a fantasy world
*    They believed in fairies, guardian angels, etc.
*    As children they had invisible playmates
*    Even as adults they spent a significant part of their time fantasizing
*    They often believe they have psychic abilities
*    Most have had out-of-body experiences
*    They often believe they have healing powers
*    They are subject to hypnagogic experiences
*    They have very vivid dreams
*    They have good memories
*    They receive messages from unknown forces

Though everyone is susceptible to memory distortion to some degree, those who are so vulnerable that they can be readily convinced that bizarre, unusual, fantastic or even impossible things really did happen to them are called “Fantasy Prone Persons”; they make up roughly 4% of the population.  Most FPPs are also extremely sexual; many of them can achieve orgasm through fantasy alone, and their false memories usually have a strong sexual element, often with powerful BDSM overtones.  Have you ever wondered why supposed “memories” of witchcraft, Satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction and the like often include sexual elements, especially ones in which the person was raped, subjected to bondage, sexually tortured, mind controlled or “hypnotized”, etc?  It’s because they all come from the same shadowy part of the brain, and the identity of the abusers (and other particulars of the false memory) are just window dressing.  Studies demonstrate that these details depend on the individuals’ beliefs and associates:  traditionally-religious FPPs are likely to believe they’ve been possessed by demons or sexually abused by cultists; those with a strong interest in science fiction or UFOs are likely to identify their imaginary tormentors as aliens; and women with an unhappy history of sex work, or who become too immersed in “sex trafficking” porn, remember lurid experiences of vast pimp networks and over a dozen clients a day, etc.

Next time you see one of these “survivor” narratives, compare it to the now-discredited accounts of Satanic ritual abuse and the widely-ridiculed tales of alien medical experiments.  Many “survivors” report savage beatings, being shut for days in scorpion-filled sewage barrels or being dragged down the street behind a pimp’s or client’s car, yet never have any permanent injuries to show for it…just as the McMartin Preschool children bore no scars from anal knife rapes, and alien medical examinations likewise leave no marks.  Consider the eerie similarity of “survivor” narratives and their convergence since the beginning of “sex trafficking” hysteria, just as Satanic abuse narratives resemble those from 16th-century witch trials and alien abduction stories converged after the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Think also about the impossible logistics of the situations described by people like Theresa Flores, who claims to have been “abducted” from her upper-middle-class family home every night for two years and forced to prostitute herself, yet was freed every morning to attend school; supposedly neither her parents nor siblings ever heard her come or go, nor did she ever show any signs of sleep deprivation or psychological trauma sufficient to raise any suspicion.  The same miraculous immunity to detection and circumstance protected the McMartin cultists:  no parent, delivery person or other outsider ever showed up while everyone was downstairs in the secret Satanic temple, and no child ever suffered trauma or said a word about seeing people fly until the “investigators” questioned them.  And nobody else in the neighborhoods from which alien abductees are taken ever see or hear ships, aliens, or hypnotized levitating test subjects.  It’s clear that people who recount such stories believe them, and can therefore easily pass the polygraph tests which are sometimes used to prop up their unbelievable tales.  They are not lying in the strict sense, because they really do remember these events; however, as the dreamlike (or nightmarish) character of their memories and the lack of physical evidence amply demonstrate, their adventures took place in an unreal Twilight Zone rather than in the mundane world where normal events occur.

(With grateful acknowledgement to the observations of Eileen Lang.)

One Year Ago Today

“Public Service Announcement” politely asks men to stop sending women pictures of their penises.

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Willful Ignorance

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 11, 2012| 44 Comments »

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.  –  Robert Browning

One year ago today I published “Handy Figures”, a synopsis of numbers relating to prostitution issues with links to where that information can be found.  None of that information is esoteric; most of it can be found online with a few minutes’ search, and the rest would be available in any decent library.  So while the average person might lack the research skills to locate it, or the critical thinking skills that would enable him to realize he should look for it in the first place, one would hope neither of those things would be true about journalists.  Alas, that would be a vain hope:  with a few notable exceptions, investigative journalism is a lost art, and the bulk of the Fourth Estate is happy simply to swallow any lie put forth by politicians or special-interest groups; nor would the average reporter know how to find the proper information if he had a notion to.  Still, even if that’s true of small media companies it’s almost inconceivable it could apply to the BBC, or Reuters, or The Australian; so when these sources release stories that 45 minutes of research would’ve invalidated, I have no choice but to assume they didn’t find the truth because they didn’t want to, which is a serious moral and ethical lapse.

The least of these sins is that of The Australian, both because it lacks the hefty reputation of the others and because the misinformation isn’t quite as obvious to the uninitiated or obtuse:

Drunken lads’ holidays in Thailand and Indonesia, involving unprotected sex with prostitutes, are boosting Queensland’s HIV rate.  And men from north Queensland are picking up the virus from trips to nearby Papua New Guinea, a country with one of the world’s highest HIV rates.  The alarming hike in the rate of human immunodeficiency virus, a forerunner to AIDs [sic], has led for calls to again push the safe-sex message amid fears young people are becoming lax…Australian Medical Association Queensland president Dr Richard Kidd said the increase in WA and Queensland was likely due to the mining boom in those states.  “Young men, isolated from their families, earning lots of money – and whether they are going to Thailand and having sex with prostitutes or whether prostitutes are coming in from other countries, the data doesn’t quite tell us.  But they are both legitimate concerns”…

Only they aren’t:

Absolute total rubbish, was the response from Sexual Health Services specialist Dr Arun Menon to [newspaper claims]…that the rise in syphilis cases in the North West was due to dubious sex practices in illegitimate brothels in Mount Isa.  “The problem isn’t with sex workers or brothels; it’s with young people aged 15 to 30…” Dr Menon said…

Now, HIV is not syphilis, but protection is protection and the condoms that prevent one will prevent the other; if the rise in syphilis isn’t due to hookers we can be relatively sure the rise in HIV isn’t either.  And how does Dr. Kidd know the “drunken lads” got it from prostitutes?  Did he see the viruses under the microscope wearing microbial fishnets and infinitesimal spike-heeled pumps?  As usual, amateurs who just fall into sex without protection (because “good girls” don’t carry condoms) get a free pass while those “dirty whores” get the blame.

Reuters’ offense is far greater because its reputation demands it consult facts which have been fairly well-publicized rather than repeating urban legends:

Ukraine will use fighters and helicopters to guard its air space and put security and health services on full alert during the European soccer championship, but officials said on Tuesday they could do little to stem a likely flood of prostitutes…social and feminist watchdog groups like the Kiev-based Femen…say the Euro soccer tournament will only give a spurt to the already booming sex industry in Ukraine which demeans the international image of Ukrainian women…

Here, Reuters, let me help you:  The myth that there is some lost tribe of harlots  which wanders the Earth in pursuit of major sporting events is total and utter bullshit which has been disproven by researchers time and time again.  Got it?

But the BBC’s behavior goes beyond the merely sinful; the garbage vomited out in this recent “investigation”  rises to the level of full-scale criminal negligence in its reliance on rumors, repetition of US State Department “estimates” of unexplained derivation, willful misinterpretation of migration and sex work, use of inflammatory language, and embrace of “end demand” rhetoric, when all it had to do for the facts was contact the English Collective of Prostitutes or Dr. Laura Agustín.  This is not new for the BBC; it sponsored the infamous one-sided “debate” at the “End Human Trafficking” event held in Mubarak’s Egypt (without a hint of irony) in December of 2010.  But that was a year and a half ago, and the facts about “trafficking” have become much more accessible to the general public since then…yet the world’s largest news broadcaster continues to promote myths and lies rather than reporting politically-unpopular facts, thus demonstrating its commitment to propaganda and ignorance rather than information and truth.

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