It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! – Samuel T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
My oldest surviving male friend, whom I’ll call “Charlie”, once said to me, “You’re extremely rational, for a woman.” He meant it as a teasing compliment, a way to say something nice while still having a bit of fun with me, and I appreciated it in that spirit. People (mostly men) have been complimenting my rationality for almost 20 years now; regular reader PWS wasn’t the first person to remark that I might be part Vulcan. But other people (for about 30 years now) have expressed the same general idea from a less sympathetic frame of reference; I’ve been called “cold-hearted”, “cruel” and even (in extreme cases, again mostly by men) “inhuman”. That’s very strange to me, because others describe me as “sweet”, “warm”, “kind”, “sympathetic”, “generous”, etc. It’s almost as though they’re describing two different people, but they’re not: water and ice are the same thing, after all, only in different states.
To those I care about, those who approach me as friends, those who seek out my help, and even those who smile at me in the aisles of shops, I am full of the milk of human kindness. But those who harm or insult me or mine, those who approach me with hostility and those who demand my obedience or attempt to control me via threats, find that milk frozen harder than antarctic ice. That’s when my “Vulcan” side comes out, and I treat the threat, human or otherwise, as I would treat any troublesome situation: as a problem to be solved. Allowing oneself to feel sorry for a venomous serpent about to strike is a good way to get killed, and allowing quarter to an implacable enemy is like nursing such a serpent at one’s bosom. I’m all for fairness and rules of engagement, and as I said in Monday’s column I have no desire to harm potentially-innocent bystanders. But only a fool desists from smiting an actively aggressive enemy; any foe who expects mercy from me must first break off combat and retreat.
One would think this would be an elementary concept, yet in the escalating conflict between those who want all individuals free to make their own sexual decisions and the busybodies who want to make those decisions for everyone, advocates like myself are now being asked to feel sympathy for people who would like nothing better than to see our entire profession eradicated, our members enslaved in sweatshops or committed to reprogramming, and our clients imprisoned, humiliated and ruined. On a number of occasions in just the past few weeks I’ve been asked to spare the feelings of people who would as soon put a bullet in my brain as look at me, and who have used every available opportunity to libel, defame and insult sex worker rights activists. To anyone who wants me to empathize with “survivors” who allow themselves to be used as weapons by prohibitionists, I say this: If I were in a country troubled by violent fanatics and I saw a six-year-old girl running toward me with enough high explosives to send me to my ancestors six times over, I would indeed feel sorry for her; I might even cry later and say a prayer for her soul. But I also wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger before she could get close enough to take me with her. And if you think it’s better to let her blow up everyone in the general vicinity just so you can go to Hades with a clear conscience, you’ll have to forgive me for calling you a silly ass.
One final point: most of the people who criticize my apparent lack of compassion for soi-disant “survivors” make the completely unsupported assumption that these women’s statements can be taken at face value, which they cannot; real sex work experiences, like real human experiences in any area, are complex and nuanced, and vary with the individuals who experience them. This is not so with weaponized “survivor” narratives, which are simple, one-dimensional and sensationalistic, and vary very little from the prescribed model invented by Melissa Farley, Donna Hughes, Sheila Jeffreys, et al. Real sex work experiences can often be verified by empirical evidence, such as corroborating accounts and methodologically-sound studies; “survivor” narratives must be accepted on faith, without any valid evidence whatsoever…according to some, even in the face of evidence that proves their falsity. As I explained in “Imagination Pinned Down”, “trafficking” and “survivor” narratives not only strongly resemble each other, but also the tales told by those who claim to have been Satanically abused or abducted by aliens. If these women were as harmless as UFO cultists we could afford the luxury of empathy, but that is not the case; as long as fanatics and governments use them as tools to restrict the rights of millions, we have no choice but to turn a cold, scientific eye to their stories. If someone’s claims that vaccines cause autism were being used as the excuse to ban them, wouldn’t you want those claims proven? How sympathetic would you feel toward self-proclaimed “victims of vaccination” whose efforts might result in the deaths of thousands of children from diseases conquered decades ago? Not very, I’ll wager. I’m sympathetic to women who have truly suffered, or even believe they have suffered, as long as they do not use their trauma as an excuse to interfere with the lives of others. But once they align themselves with dangerous, aggressive enemies, I can’t afford that empathy any longer.
Do you really have to be the ice queen intellectual or the slut whore? Isn’t there some way to be both? – Susan Sarandon
Anniversaries are one of those times at which we’re inspired to look back at the past to see where we’ve been; it’s a bit like sitting on top of a mountain and surveying the route one took to get there. And when I consider all that’s happened here since July 10th, 2010 all I can say is “wow”. Well, that’s not all I can say, or else the column would already be over, but I think you know what I mean. And what makes it even more impressive is looking at the figures I recorded in last year’s anniversary column: then I had written 365 columns, now it’s 731 (not counting the ones in queue you haven’t seen yet or the guest columns I’ve written for other blogs). But while the sheer size of this site has just slightly more than doubled (counting the indexes and other supplemental materials), all the other figures are far more than double. Last year there were about 8300 comments; now there are over 19,000. Then I had just under 250,000 hits; I reached 750,000 late last night and (Athena willing) should hit a million by the end of the year. 87 subscribers have grown to over 300, and that’s not counting the 500+ people who follow me on Twitter. My Google page rank is “5”, which I’m told is very good for a personal blog (Jezebel is only a 7), and that has almost certainly contributed to the number of researchers, reporters and other interested parties who approach me almost every week now with questions, interview requests and the like. I still haven’t managed to make any money from this gig yet, but that’s not why I do this anyhow; the important thing to me is helping the general public to understand that most whores really aren’t weird, scary, criminal, stupid, unethical, emotionally disturbed, victimized by men (except by those employed by governments to persecute us, of course) or any of the other dumb stereotypes with which prohibitionists and other moralists constantly libel us. And judging by the numbers, the fan mail and the reputation I’ve gained among activists, I think it’s safe to say that I’m achieving that to the extent that any one person can.
Last year at this time I started a new feature, “One Year Ago Today”, and though it’s been successful I also think it’s time to retire it as such. I’m still going to call attention to old columns when the text calls for it, of course, but I really don’t want to have to do both “one year ago today” and “two years ago today” features, so I’m going to shift those recaps to two other places: Every day I’ll do both of those on Twitter (non-users will be able to see them in the Twitter feed in the right-hand column), and “That Was the Week That Was” will have a “This Week in 2011” and “This Week in 2010” feature. Another change to TW3 will be a reduction in the number of items I feature there: it takes some doing to keep those columns at under 2000 words, so it will reduce my workload considerably if I extract a few bigger stories and feature them separately in another column (since I can nearly always manage to relate a few to each other). Since the “one year ago” feature will be less rigid now, it’ll be easy for me to leave a gap in the schedule to fit that sort of thing into, and that, too will reduce my workload. Don’t worry, I plan to keep doing a column every day for the foreseeable future; I’ve become more comfortable with shorter columns, which means I’ll be able to turn out daily essays without having to be concerned about padding them or finding more to say than the topic needs.
And that, as it turns out, is pretty much all I want to say on this topic, except for a big thank you to all my readers: thank you for reading what I have to say day after day; thank you for linking me all over the internet; thank you for all the moral support and respect; thank you for many amazing compliments; thank you for the lovely presents; thank you for giving me the opportunity to marry my two beloved professions (harlotry and librarianship) together; and thank you for visiting often enough to amplify my voice so that maybe, just maybe, what I have to say will eventually start reaching the ears of those who need so desperately to hear it.
O what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive! – Sir Walter Scott
As many of you already know, the prohibitionist mouthpiece who calls herself “Stella Marr” has been outed. Last Tuesday evening I was emailed links to a posting she made which carelessly linked her legal name with “Stella Marr” and several other online personas; I quickly made a screen capture of the page, knowing full well that it wouldn’t be long before it was deleted (and it was, only a few hours later, though I also have a link to a cached copy). Later that evening I was contacted by Norma Jean Almodovar, who had even more information than I had been given; due to the nature of some of it, we suspect the anonymous leaker (whose identity we do not know) is a real-life acquaintance who was fed up with Stella’s lies and wanted sex worker rights activists to know the truth.
And what a truth it is; it turns out that Amy (her real first name) is the daughter of a wealthy family who attended Barnard from autumn 1981 until spring 1985, then skipped a year and returned for the 1986-1987 school year; since she did not graduate until spring of 1994 I surmise that she was actually done by 1987 but for some unfinished requirement (a senior thesis perhaps?) that she finally completed in ’94. I further assume that whatever dates she gives (and whatever the truth of the conditions therein), her “ten years in prostitution” ran from early 1985 to late 1993. I was not able to confirm her statement that she attended Julliard, and I assume her claims about Columbia extend from the fact that Barnard is an autonomous part of it despite their well-known rivalry.
Amy’s Google profile describes her as “a writer living in Houston, TX with her beloved husband and labrador [sic] retriever. She is writing a memoir about her experiences as a prostitute in New York City.” Interestingly, the “pimps and hos” nonsense she touts as “Stella” is in sharp contrast to her other claim that she transitioned out of hooking via being “kept” by a wealthy professor for two years; apparently, her “violent and controlling” pimp whom she supposedly saw murder women in front of her just meekly let her go without even demanding a cut. But considering the poor job she did of covering her tracks (I even have records of real estate transactions she conducted), and the fact that she can’t make up her mind whether her benefactor taught at Oxford or Cambridge, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that she left such a gaping logic hole in her invented life story.
How much of that story is real? How much embellished? How much distorted, wildly exaggerated and “reframed”? How much made up out of whole cloth? We simply don’t know and have no way of telling at this time, and I have to wonder if Amy herself even knows any more; given that prostitution is a recurring theme in her writing it seems likely that (as one of my sources stated) she started hooking after her family cut her off. It may be that she then got in over her head, though she wasn’t nearly as traumatized as she pretends; after all, some of the things we found in other names seem to present whoring in a far less negative light. She even owns a WordPress blog called “A Prostitute Reviews Movies”, which she seems to use for writing her screeds before posting them publicly to her own blog; this seems like a rather odd title for someone who also brands herself a “survivor” and blathers about “trigger warnings” and other concepts favored by the tissue-paper feelings crowd. The tipster claimed that her “beloved” husband, a US government bureaucrat, considers her insane and that she started the “Stella Marr” character to get back at him; even if this isn’t true she obviously thrives on attention and craves success as a writer (of fiction, clearly) at any cost. However, I have no wish to cause problems for Amy’s husband, who may be as much her victim as the sex workers and activists she constantly defames and libels; though I have no control over what information others have released and may continue to release, I have redacted her last name from the information and pictures presented here so as not to be the agent of harm to a possibly-innocent man.
Norma Jean Almodovar sent “Stella” an open letter, which you can read here; she also posted the following on several Facebook groups:
Many of us sex worker rights activists have been well aware of the vicious lies told about us by an abolitionist calling herself “Stella Marr.” She has bullied us and lied about us in numerous articles, forums and on her blogs. There was nothing we could do about it because we did not know her real identity. She felt free to spread her falsehoods anywhere and everywhere, knowing that there was nothing we could do as long as her cloak of anonymity protected her.
Now we know who she really is. Someone who knows her well and obviously dislikes her enough to “out” her, has provided us with her true name and other very personal information. When I sent a message to Stella’s Facebook page, letting her know that we know who she really is, she confirmed that it was her by responding with a very nasty message threatening action against me if I posted her real name.
It seems her whole story is a fraud, that she is not who she claims to be (in addition to her fake name), and that she was never the victim of pimps who trafficked her into prostitution. Her real story is much more interesting, but I will not share what I learned if she agrees to publicly apologize to all of us who were defamed by her. A number of you already know who she really is, because the person who outed her originally has shared that info with many other people.
I’d like to propose to our community that we give her the opportunity to make that public apology, and then hopefully she will retire the fictitious character “Stella Marr” whom she created in response to her own personal problems which had nothing to do with a past she never lived. (Think William Hillar, fraudster extraordinaire whose alleged true life story became the basis for “Taken”.)
Should she not take the opportunity to publicly retract her false statements and apologize to all of us who have been psychologically battered by her lies and bullying, perhaps we can consider filing a joint lawsuit against her for doing to us what she claims “pimps” and prostitution do to women.
Feel free to post this message anywhere and everywhere that victims of Stella Marr’s lies might read.
Personally, I hope Amy accepts the offer, admits the lies and retires “Stella” (I for one care nothing for her apology, which would be as insincere as everything else she writes); it would accomplish a great deal more good than fully “outing” her ever could, and would demonstrate the lengths to which prohibitionists will go to spread their propaganda.
Pretty sure mine is the only blog today where a former call girl teaches you how to make potato salad. – Radley Balko
On January 31st, 2011 the award–winning journalist Radley Balko mentioned me in a one-line link on his blog, The Agitator: “Former call girl Maggie McNeil debunks that CNN scare story on underage prostitutes and Backpage.com.” That simple action gave me the best day I had yet had (3486 views), a record that stood for over a year until it was broken on March 18th of this year thanks to a “tweet” from Nicholas Kristof which produced 3522 hits. But Balko was not to be bested by the likes of Kristof, and so trounced him soundly by giving me 4719 hits last Monday (July 2nd). To be sure, it took a bit more than one line and a link this time, so let me explain.
By the time that first link appeared I was already reading The Agitator; it had been pointed out to me by Dave Krueger, who used to write the Sex Hysteria! blog. And I liked it so much, I soon added it to my link boxes; this was not lost on Radley, who on April 17th of last year posted, “I’d like to thank Maggie McNeil for adding me to her blogroll. I’d like to especially thank her for listing me as a ‘friend of whores’. I think I’m going to add that line to my bio.” Cue another big surge in traffic, which made last April 2011 my busiest month until April of this year. In the meantime we’ve occasionally interacted on Twitter or via email, but I honestly didn’t expect him to ask me to be one of five guest bloggers filling in for him over the next few months while he writes a book: that new activity record I mentioned came on the day I published my introductory post, “Who is Maggie McNeill and What the Hell is She Doing Here?” (longtime readers may recognize a shocking similarity to the title and content of my first post on Nobody’s Business, but that’s OK because I ‘fessed up in the modified text and gave NB a link, too).
I’m pleased as punch to be helping out at The Agitator, and not only because it’s sending me traffic and new readers; it’s also extremely flattering to know that a man like Radley respects me enough to entrust me with this sort of gig, and it’s a powerful validation of my work to be considered a peer to people like my fellow bloggers Ken and Patrick from Popehat, Baylen Linnekin of Keep Food Legal, and Drew Johnson, libertarian journalist and opinion editor of the Chattanooga Free Press. It’s also a lot of extra work, however, so I ask my readers to forgive me for employing a measure to decrease that load by 14% while I’m guest-blogging: every Sunday I’m going to do a sequel to this column, in which I call your attention to what I published at The Agitator in the preceding week. And starting next time, I’m also going to point out especially interesting posts from my fellow guests as well.
Most days, Radley posts collections of links to interesting stories, and I’m continuing that tradition; some of the links were for stories I’ve already covered in “That Was the Week That Was” columns (or links to my own columns), but here are the ones that have not previously appeared on this blog:
I like science fiction, but I don’t want to live in it; this Scientology “assessment” juxtaposes mundane (if nosy) inquiries such as “Have you ever been a coward?” and “Have you ever been a professional prostitute?” with such bizarre queries as “Have you ever stolen a body from another being?”, “Have you ever obliterated a language?” and “Have you ever despoiled a planet of its natural resources?”
The Vietnamese National Assembly recently [voted to stop detaining] thousands of sex workers in so-called rehabilitation facilities where they were held without right of appeal and forced to work (including for private companies) without pay…justice advocates…are hoping that drug detention centers…will follow soon…
A new law…is forcing convicted sex offenders to…move into tents. More than 40 sex offenders at the Hand Up Ministries in Oklahoma City had to move out of trailers on the ministry’s property. The new state law limits the number of sex offenders who can live in one dwelling. Ministry founder David Nichols said without a place to live, many offenders won’t register and could go back to prison…”I don’t think that it’s going to lessen crime any. I think it’s going to increase crime”…
So here’s a thing in the Guardian (I hesitate to call a short collection of captioned photos an “article”) about “sex trafficking” in Burkina Faso. Though the author claims that “thousands of girls and women are trafficked from Nigeria to the African hub of Ouagadougou,” and that “many are lured by promises of jobs as hairdressers or nannies,”I was struck by two things: one, that the pictures look to me like any pictures of street or brothel workers in poor countries; and two, that the captions belie the claims of “trafficking”. The caption for the third picture reads, “Juliette, also from Nigeria, has been working at Mercy’s for six years. The 45-year-old sends money home each week to support her four children who live in Benin City.” In other words, she has enough disposable income to support four children, and is free to send it home. The caption for the 12th (and last) picture tells us that “trafficking victims” are free to attend a church whose pastor lectures on the evils of the sex trade, and the one for the 5th is the most telling: “At Mercy’s, women work seven nights a week and pay 2,000 CFA (£2.60) each day to rent a room. Men pay the women 5,000 CFA. This Burkinabe girl has turned up at the brothel looking for work.” In other words the rooms cost these “victims” less than half the price of one call (similar to the rates paid by American hookers), and local girls view it as a worthwhile place to work without being “forced” into it.
Remember that bogus study who authors were so ignorant they equated an increase in ads with migrating whores, and claimed that 0.4% of something constitutes a major fraction? Well, partisan prohibitionists are using it to blame Republicans for “sex trafficking” despite a greater rise in ads during the Democratic convention:
…Huffington Post and Jezebel are running with stories claiming that GOP convention-goers are “hands down” the biggest clients at area strip clubs during political conventions. Along with strip club attendance, conventions also increase prostitution…and child sex trafficking…HuffPo continues…“A Baylor University study found that…conventions ‘increased the count of Craigslist sex worker ads by a substantial amount’”…researchers…found that sex ads increased by between 29% and 44% over their baseline level during 2008′s Republican convention in Minneapolis. Ads increased by between 47% and 77% in Denver, the site of the Democratic convention. Further, the study pointed out that a plurality of convention attendees are members of the media…
A Western Nevada College student claims…that her human sexuality instructor required students to masturbate to pass his class, made them keep sex journals for class discussion, was obsessed with women’s orgasms and told the class “that he will increase their sexual urges to such a height that they won’t be able to think about anything other than sex”…Kubistant told the students that their final exam would be an assignment…which had to address such topics as early sexual exploration, sexual abuse, loss of virginity, homosexual experiences, promiscuity, cheating, arousal, climaxes, masturbation, sexually transmitted diseases and fetishes…
While groups like the soi-disant “European Women’s Lobby” produce ridiculous “end demand” tripe, European sex worker groups are producing ads like this:
…In a magnificent essay, “Be Aware: Nick Kristof’s Anti-Politics“, Elliott Prasse-Freeman…summarises Kristof’s oeuvre into a number of precise strokes: “By playing on his audience’s orientalist, classist and racist fantasies, Kristof fabricates legible narratives out of snapshots of distant worlds. He then crafts stunningly simplistic solutions to the seemingly irrevocable problems that plague those backwards places”…
…if some actors exaggerate their distaste for nudity it’s because they’ve seen what happens to the women who enjoy themselves without penance…And so, a romantic, soft lit, topless scene from a chick flick can unsettle me in ways that a supposedly degrading, adult movie rarely manages to accomplish…I’m not saying that those who willingly participate in uncomfortable scenes are victims because…they get the last say on that matter. However, I would rather watch the person who isn’t trying to numb things out with a bottle of vodka. I’m not naive enough to think that sex workers are free from shitty days at the office but, given their job description, I’m less likely to be watching someone wary of getting their front bottom out, than if I were watching a mainstream actress in a sex scene…If a sex worker speaks out on slipping standards it is correct to condemn the appropriate parties but it is usually an entire industry that is maligned in the process. If a mainstream actor brings a drink on set in brown paper (keeping the latter to hyperventilate into later) we applaud her for her craft and possibly chuck an award her way…
…Connecting funding for victims of sexual assault to strip clubs is the primary reason I don’t like these taxes. It is absolutely offensive to have the government tell us that we—or, rather, our customers—are responsible for rape and domestic violence, and that we should be taxed specifically for that purpose…While strip clubs are certainly a luxury expense…There is…no guarantee that the taxes will be collected from patrons since the tax is on the clubs, not the customers. This means there’s a good chance that the fees dancers pay to work will go up to cover the club’s tax bill…Tracy Clark-Flory wrote about the latest round of state pole taxes at Salon, and spoke with anthropologist Judith Lynne Hanna…[who has criticized] the faulty “secondary effects” studies that blames strip clubs for increasing crime and breaks it down for the propaganda it is. I wrote about the myth of secondary effects here after the Texas Supreme Court’s decision came down, and it’s good they’re being exposed for the shoddy research they are…
Cabbies can pick up all the scantily clad women they want without worrying about being charged with promoting prostitution, Mayor Bloomberg declared…“There’s no penalty for transporting a prostitute or decoy, but only for knowingly engaging in a sex-trafficking operation”…the mayor said…City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras…sponsor of the legislation, said such fears were overblown because her bill was targeted at a small number of cabbies involved in hooker rings…“It’s not the majority of drivers. However, when you have a young girl being driven to 30, 40, 50 johns a night, it is a very big problem.”
Obviously third-grade math skills and a sense of the size of one’s own city are not requirements for a position on the New York city council.
…leading urban planning expert…Paul Maginn said the government’s …reform bill…would do little to move prostitution out of the suburbs. “If you look historically…the sex industry is quite adaptive…they’ll still continue, it’s not going to be eradicated”…Maryanne Kenworthy, owner of the Langtrees brothels in Perth and Kalgoorlie, supports Mr Maginn’s claim…”This government is trying to stamp out escorts, which no country in the world has successfully done…Instead, the industry is going to go completely underground…How many of WA’s 4000 sex workers are going to get a commercial industrial area to work out of? None, they can’t afford to, it costs half a million dollars just to get council approval”…
The Guyana Government today denounced the latest installation of the US State Department report on trafficking in persons…“The Report fails to establish not one single fact. The Task Force notes several inaccuracies and misrepresentations in the Report that must be addressed. What is clear is that the architects of this Report have not made significant progress in improving the veracity, coherence and validity of their annual assessments. The Ministerial Task Force denounces the Report since it comprises unsubstantiated generalisations and repetitive uncorroborated claims. The Task Force strongly recommends that the US State Department seek to improve its methodology, establish proper baselines to guide comparisons, avoid use of anecdotal claims and develop a consistent, understandable, transparent and logical tier ranking system if countries are to benefit from these rituals…”
Wendy Lyon takes a detailed look at the report which inspired Norway’s minister for social affairs to call for the Swedish Model to be scrapped; she discovers that besides the problems we’ve already discussed, the model literally forces sex workers into the street and promotes pimping.
One Year Ago Today
“Imaginary Lines” argues in favor of loosened immigration restrictions, and points out how the current situation helps to drive “trafficking” hysteria.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. – W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
As the would-be leaders of the French Revolution could explain (if they were still alive), the biggest problem with rabble-rousing is that if one succeeds, he will find himself surrounded by aroused rabble. If one is a skilled and charismatic leader one can then turn the mob into a horde and conquer most of Eurasia, but if not (especially in cases where there is no clear leader) it simply remains an angry, hysterical and/or fearful mob which then spills out into the countryside, infringing upon the personal freedom of all and sundry. This is what happens in a moral panic: the Great Unwashed become so fearful of the imaginary threat to God, Country and Our Cherished Way of Life that they…well, panic, and start doing all sorts of fear-crazed things that those behind the hysteria never intended. In the long run this is good for the panic’s chosen scapegoats, but before things fall apart completely there is a period in which the violence becomes much worse, both for the primary targets and for anyone the hysterics accuse of being one of them…and sometimes, when Dame Fortune is in an unusually generous mood, for a few of the panic-mongers themselves.
…anarchist demonstrators clashed with officers when they were denied entrance to a conference on human trafficking. Demonstrators, calling themselves “Occupy Patriarchy” gathered outside the convention center to protest the conference…An interview we were conducting was interrupted by protestors using bullhorns to blast us down repeatedly, accusing us of being part of a larger conspiracy to assist police. Inside…presenters were meeting to discuss ways to end human trafficking and the exploitation of children…But protesters were not there to listen, they were there to demonstrate. They knocked down police barriers and vandalized the doors of the conference center. They say that to focus on this is to distort their message. They say that this conference is just a launching pad for continued repression of sex workers and the further empowerment of police agencies at their expense…
Though I have serious issues with the “Occupy” movement for its naïve espousal of Marxism, I don’t entirely agree with those activists who have criticized “Occupy Patriarchy” for its violence; as I’ve stated before, I don’t believe that peaceful protest alone can successfully challenge an entrenched authoritarian system which has clearly demonstrated its disdain for facts and its willingness to use violence to suppress dissent. The existence of violent protests did not harm the cause of Indian independence nor that of civil rights for racial or sexual minorities in the United States, and I don’t think it will hurt ours either; maybe if we started occupying a few churches the “authorities” would no longer be able to convince the public that we’re all helpless, passive victims, and smashing that narrative to bits is absolutely imperative if we’re ever to be taken seriously. Melissa Gira Grant makes a similar point in an article about one of the increasing number of timid “maybe banning Backpage isn’t the way to go” voices in mainstream political discourse:
…It’s…laws…that deter people who come into contact with someone forced into the sex trade from seeking help. In some states, like Illinois, laws against trafficking are written so broadly that buying a MetroCard or a meal for someone in the sex trade could make you vulnerable to arrest or prosecution yourself, as someone “involved” in trafficking…to accept that “the problem with sex trafficking” is merely one of identifying victims is falling in line with the anti-prostitution campaigners’ frame. It also prevents us from calling their bluff: along with taking down websites like Craigslist and Backpage, they want more money for more cops, even though sex workers and trafficking survivors alike report that cops are likely to be violent towards them in the course of “protecting” them…so-called anti-trafficking activists…have proven…that their primary concern is putting more power in the hands of police to arrest people involved in the sex trade, to drag a wide net and just sort out who is a “victim” (in their understanding) and who is a “perpetrator” later. They aren’t interested in adopting new technologies to better identify victims; they don’t make such a distinction, and why would they, when their endgame is to abolish any evidence of the sex trade?…
New York cab drivers convicted of felony sex trafficking for ferrying prostitutes to illicit liaisons would lose their licenses under new legislation passed on Wednesday by the New York City Council…city taxi and livery drivers would face up to a $10,000 fine and lose their New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission licenses if convicted of a felony related to sex trafficking. The legislation goes to Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his signature…
Philanthropic Divine: “May I beg you to accept this good little book. Take it home and read it attentively. I am sure it will benefit you.” Lady: “Bless me, Sir, you’re mistaken. I am not a social evil, I am only waiting for a bus.”
A [Florida] sheriff’s…deputy was arrested…after unknowingly stepping right into an undercover prostitution sting. Christian Benenati, 40, was arrested and charged with Soliciting Another for Lewdness…[the] off-duty Benenati approached a female officer working undercover…and solicited her for oral sex…the department that set up the countywide sting was the one Benenati works for, and he was nabbed on the street he patrols…
Snaring their own thugs is only one of the unforeseen side-effects of runaway “trafficking” hysteria; I predict we’re going to start seeing more cases like this one, too:
…Barry Laprell Gilton and Lupe Mercado watched, dismayed and helpless, as their 17-year-old daughter was lured away from home by a known Compton gang member…Calvin Sneed. They sought help from law enforcement — to no avail — and later added the girl to several missing and exploited children registries…Prosecutors contend they…gunned [Sneed] down in his car [after discovering] that she was appearing in escort ads, and that she seemed to be working for Sneed…
Buried in the story is the telling detail that the girl left home about a year ago; though I think it highly likely that Sneed was a revolting person who probably would’ve ended up dead one way or another, depicting a teen runaway as an innocent damsel led into whoredom by a mustache-twirling “pimp” is a blatant attempt to hide the real problem behind an increasingly-erratic cultural meme spinning wildly out of control, whose far-flung debris is going to cause a lot more damage before it finally disintegrates.
“My dear Watson,” said he, “I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”
I’m not an egotistical person; I know I have lots of faults. But neither am I delusional; I know that I’m relatively bright, have a good memory and that my personality is unusually dynamic. Because of these factors it’s very, very difficult to win an argument with me; I have a tendency to steamroll anyone who tries. I don’t start arguments, but by Athena I sure finish them. This is the most important reason I refused to get involved with any man after Jack until I could be sure he was A) uninterested in starting arguments; and B) could hold his own against me if one started despite our best efforts. Dr. Helena once asked me what kind of man I wanted, and I replied, “One who can say ‘SHUT UP, MAGGIE!’ if necessary, and make it stick.”
Now, though many of my readers probably guessed all that, random people who haven’t (or won’t) read my essays may not. If they’re laboring under prohibitionist delusions about whores being pathetic, weak, damaged women who can’t stand up for themselves (which, as anyone who’s ever spent any time on a hooker board knows, is about as far from the truth as it’s possible to get), they might expect me to retreat from forceful confrontation by well-adjusted prudes like themselves. This occasionally brings on attack via Revealed Truth about the evils of sex work or “trafficking”; when it’s in the comments here I usually just employ my screening process so as to avoid subjecting my readers either to annoyance or to the unlovely sight of my eviscerating someone with my Medusan agony blade (figuratively speaking, of course).
On Twitter, however, it’s different; I was ingrained from a young age with the principle that it’s rude to ignore people, so when I’m in what I perceive as a public space (rather than my “home” here) I find it difficult to simply ignore drive-by comments directed at me. Since I hate arguments I start out politely and often finish the same way; sometimes the commenter reveals himself to be a troll or buffoon and I can excuse myself in good conscience within a few “tweets”. But other times I am confronted with someone who seems to imagine herself (and it’s nearly always a “her”) some sort of crusader going into battle against the great Sphinx, and to believe that I will surely flee from the light of Divine Wisdom as revealed to her by the Holy Polaris Project or the Prophet Melissa. But since I refuse to take anything on faith or to accept arguments from authority, and they never have any actual facts, they enter these battles of wits only half-armed at best. I still start out polite, but as they continue to reply with nothing other than the equivalents of “nuh uh,” “sez you,” “my mommy says so” or “you’re going to make Baby Jesus cry,” I tend to get a lot more ruthless.
Here’s a recent example, an argument with a proponent of increased regulation of the Amsterdam sex industry; I’ve combined my 140-character replies together and eliminated a few tangential interchanges. The first was my reply to her statement that she had nothing against sex workers who worked by choice, but that draconian measures were needed to prevent coercion:
Huge fractions of the human race are coerced every day. What about lawsuit threats? What about psychological manipulation of family members? Threats issued by creditors? Threats of complaints by neighbors? And governments are the worst “coercers” of all; what are laws backed by threat if not coercion? These things are ALL coercion. To pretend that it’s somehow magically different when a woman is a sex worker is disingenuous.
She then asked why I was opposed to anti-trafficking laws, and I replied:
The whole “trafficking” paradigm is flawed, as pointed out by @LauraAgustin and many others. People cross borders to work; labeling them as “trafficked” (i.e. passive objects of cargo) denies them agency and imposes a simplistic model on a complex human interaction. If “authorities” want to end exploitation of migrants they need to STOP pretending these people are helpless children and reform immigration laws, requirements for work visas, labor rights, etc. Criminalization of immigrants only enables exploitation. In all forms of labor INCLUDING sex work, only rights can stop the wrongs.
She then made a comment that criminalization deters “trafficking”, followed by a snide comment about how she thought it was “hilarious” that American sex workers “think you know better than Dutch police and officials”; my reply:
Criminalization isn’t EVER a solution. And sexworkers DO know our own subject better than cops and politicians in ANY country.
Her reply (verbatim and sic):
no, you dont know better than cops especially and politicians in any country, thats delusion of grandeur, seriously.
As you might imagine, such abject badge-licking ticked me off:
Yes, I DO know better than cops & politicians IN MY OWN FIELD. Drs know better than them in medicine, engineers know better than them in engineering, teachers know better than them in teaching, etc. Cops and politicians are not gods, nor even superior beings. To imagine they are is not only delusional, but dangerous to the liberty & rights of everyone.
After a pause she replied that it was “disturbing” that I “deny sex trafficking”; the accusation had the tone of an accusation of blasphemy. My final reply:
“True Believers” usually do consider it “disturbing” when their beliefs are questioned. People who care about truth aren’t afraid of questions; only those with need to believe myths are. Just because there are presents under your tree does NOT mean they were left there by Santa Claus. The fact that some phenomenon exists in some way does NOT prove any and all “explanations” presented for it. The fact that some people are abused or coerced does NOT automatically mean the entire “sex trafficking by international criminal cartels with millions of victims” paradigm must be true. There are other explanations; those who reject them embrace a religion, not science.
That pissed her off so much she finally stopped replying and blocked me, obviously so my heretical words could no longer sear the purity of her eyeballs. But I wasn’t done for the day yet; oh, no! Just a few hours later well-known prohibitionist mouthpiece Stella Marr decided to address me directly, which is pretty brave for her; usually she prefers to skulk about in places she doesn’t think I’ll read, calling me a “pimp” (like Donna Hughes, she uses the word to mean any sex work manager or agent of either gender). On this particular occasion Stella started by calling me a “liar” for my column “The Odor of Socks”; at first I tried to take the high road, telling her how she could modify her behavior so as not to alienate sex worker rights advocates. But she just kept replying to nearly everything I said by calling me a “liar”, “bully” or “pimp” until I got her into a corner by responding to her Swedish Model cheerleading (“It is not tyranny, Scandinavia is the most civilized part of the world, with the most sexual freedom stop #lying”) by linking to that morning’s column, “The Swedish Cult”, and to the item about Sweden trying to force men to pee sitting down. Faced with points she couldn’t refute she claimed I was making her feel “threatened” because I was a madam, and asked me to please stop replying. I told her I’d stop replying if she did, but she just kept it up, apparently assuming I’d eventually give in to her repeated requests that I stop replying first. Eventually, she realized I wouldn’t relent, but it had gotten quite ugly by that point.
Though the general consensus was that I was more than sufficiently provoked to justify my reaction, I’m still not proud of myself for letting her get me that upset; usually I can stay cool and rational even when badly provoked. But I guess there’s just something especially infuriating about a halfwit having the nerve to attack someone completely out of her intellectual weight class, responding to all my attacks with the rhetorical equivalent of flailing arms and then expecting me to back down when she eventually realizes she’s in way over her head.
One Year Ago Today
“Honolulu Harlots” is the story of the tolerated brothels in World War II-era Hawaii, and the power struggle which eventually doomed them.
Ee’d plebnista norkohn forkohn perfectunun… – Cloud William (Roy Jenson) in “The Omega Glory”
Even when Star Trek was bad, it could have moments that were memorable and said something important. In the deeply-flawed episode “The Omega Glory”, descendants of early Earth colonists (or else the inhabitants of an impossibly-parallel world) fought a bacteriological war between Americans and Chinese which ended in both nations being hurled back into barbarism; the Yangs (Yankees) still have an American flag and a copy of the Constitution, but have forgotten the real meaning of the artifacts. They revere the flag as a totem and recite the “holy words” by rote; today’s epigram is the Yang leader’s rendition of the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution (“We the People, in order to form a more perfect union…”) altered by centuries of repetition without meaning. They live in a tribal culture ruled by chiefs and elders, practice trial by combat, and adhere to a code of religious law completely at odds with the sacred documents they can no longer read. To them, “freedom” is nothing but a “worship word” forbidden to infidels, and the Constitution is taboo for the eyes of anyone but a chief.
The situation presents a useful (if exaggerated) metaphor of modern America; though we have not descended to the barbarism of the Yangs, our law and traditions have drifted ever further from their philosophical and constitutional moorings. The Founding Fathers would not recognize the current legal code of this country, grounded as it is in religion and other dangerous superstitions and “-isms” inimical to the Enlightenment philosophy and thousand-year-old English common law tradition in which it was originally based. Our chiefs and priests of the law claim to revere the Constitution yet violate it at every turn; their sycophantic followers proclaim that interpretation of the “holies” is only for the elite, and rabble like us need merely obey “just authority”. And though “freedom” is still a “worship word” in this country, observing the ovine obsequiousness with which Americans submit to looting, brutality, sexual molestation and demands of literal obeisance to petty officials leads me to the unavoidable conclusion that they have as little understanding of its meaning as the fictional Cloud William did. The title of today’s column is the name by which most Americans refer to this day: not “Independence Day” to acknowledge the actual reason for the observance (a declaration by brave and principled men that they refused to submit to tyranny), but rather just a date on a calendar, an excuse to stay home from work and celebrate their dependence on the overlords who so graciously grant them the holiday.
The oath Cloud William called the Ay Pledgli ends with the words, “…with liberty and justice for all,” and the pairing is not an arbitrary one: liberty and justice are inextricably bound together, and the only way to guarantee the one is to protect the other. When government actors are not only given greater rights and greater legal standing than other citizens, but are in fact insulated from the consequences of their own evil actions against others, the liberty of ordinary citizens becomes subject to the whims of those officials and justice dies. And when individuals, groups or institutions are allowed to commit injustices against others, how can the liberty of those so victimized survive? In trying to explain to the Yangs what their “holy words” really meant, Captain Kirk said, “That which you call Ee’d Plebnista was not written for the chiefs or the kings or the warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people…not…only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well…they must apply to everyone or they mean nothing!” Sometime in the past two centuries, Americans forgot that; individuals and groups used government as a means to deny liberty and justice to others, and thus created the machinery by which their own liberty was stolen. In the real world, there aren’t any wise heroes from outer space to come down and rescue us from our own decadence by explaining the meaning of our sacred truths; we’re going to have to rediscover them for ourselves, without assistance from the stars. Liberty is both a blessing and a burden; justice is both a boon and a solemn duty. And if we continue to abdicate responsibility for both to the least evolved and most barbaric among us, we won’t need a world war to destroy everything our ancestors built.
“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie and Tillie, and they lived at the bottom of a well–” – Lewis Carroll
Long-time readers have probably noticed that as time goes on, my subject matter slowly broadens; when I first started writing two years ago every single column was about prostitution, then I branched off into tangentially-related topics, and now often wander quite far afield. There are a number of reasons for this, of which the four most important are 1) I am not a monomaniac, though I know it sometimes must appear so; 2) I don’t really want my readers to think I’m a monomaniac; 3) It’s easier to write something interesting every day if I allow myself some latitude; and 4) It helps to illustrate my most important theme, which is that whores are normal people with the same range and variety of interests as anyone else. Even so, I’ve been very careful to maintain an organic topical growth and to eschew jarring changes of focus; take today’s column, for instance. It has absolutely nothing to do with harlotry (though there is a tenuous connection via another sexual topic I’ve previously discussed), but it is the fruit of an outer limb connected to the main trunk by successively-smaller branches as follows:
On August 1st, 2010 I published “Lammas”, which opened up the topic of holidays by discussing the fact that many whores are pagans of one kind or another. Then on “Halloween” I mentioned my “otherness” and referred in passing to my love of horror movies, a topic on which I expanded in “Maman” (May 8th, 2011). “Frightful Films” (October 28th, 2011) listed and described my favorite horror movies, then “My Favorite Things (Part One)” (December 1st, 2011) did the same for my favorite non-horror movies; in the comments, a reader asked me to do a column on “My Favorite Books”, which included Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; its sequel “My Favorite Authors” included Lewis Carroll. And though my column for tomorrow will be a philippic about the sorry state of American independence (see last year’s column for an example), I couldn’t let an anniversary of great importance for friends of Alice pass by without comment: tomorrow is the 150th anniversary of Wonderland Day.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a brilliant but shy mathematician and Anglican deacon who taught at Oxford and became a close friend of the family of Christ Church Dean Henry Liddell. Dodgson grew especially close to Mrs. Liddell and the couple’s three daughters Lorina, Alice and Edith; he often took the girls rowing on the Thames, and though the Victorians were less evil-minded than modern people on the subject of adult men and young girls, they were always accompanied on these expeditions by at least one other adult. One such excursion occurred on Friday, July 4th, 1862; Dodgson (then 30 years old) and the girls (13, 10 and 8 respectively) were accompanied by the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and as was their custom they stopped for tea upon reaching Godstow. Typically, the three Liddell sisters would demand that Dodgson tell them a story of his own devising; years later he wrote, “none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her.” The “little listener” was of course Alice Liddell, whose given name was attached to tale’s heroine (though she also had traits borrowed from Lorina, Edith, other girls they knew and even Dodgson himself); and though as he later told Duckworth he “sat up nearly the whole night” writing out what he could remember of the story, he was a perfectionist and so fussed over it, rewrote it and revised it for over two years before presenting the handwritten, self-illustrated Alice’s Adventures Underground to her in November of 1864. A year earlier he had allowed the children of his friend George MacDonald to read the then-unfinished manuscript and they urged him to take it to a publisher; the first edition, with the now-familiar illustrations by Punch cartoonist Sir John Tenniel, was released by Macmillan in 1865 under the pen name “Lewis Carroll”, which Dodgson used to separate his works of fancy from his serious mathematical treatises.
Incidentally, the blonde Alice who appears in those illustrations (and whose image has become inextricably attached to the character) was not based on Alice Liddell, who appears dressed as a beggar child above in an 1858 photo by Dodgson. As you can see she was a beautiful child and grew into a beautiful woman; the photo in the paragraph below (taken in 1872 by Julia Margaret Cameron) depicts King Lear and his three daughters, with Cordelia (far right) portrayed by the 20-year old Alice (the other two are Edith [center] and another sister, Marina). Dodgson was not the only person who was extremely fond of her; a number of contemporary letters and diaries speak highly of her charm and intelligence. But he loved her very deeply, so much so that Mrs. Liddell eventually became uncomfortable with his attentions and took steps to discourage them after some mysterious incident in October of 1862 which is referred to in his diary only by the cryptic phrase “Lord Newry’s business”.
This does not mean that Dodgson was a pedophile, as he is so often portrayed nowadays; much has been made of the fact that he enjoyed photographing little girls nude, but this was actually a very common practice in Victorian England: it was part of the “child cult”, meant to express innocence and purity, and was so mainstream that nude children even appeared on Christmas cards of the period. And though it is true that he enjoyed the company of young girls, he also befriended many adult women, especially married ones. In fact, a number of Carroll scholars (including Martin Gardner and Karoline Leach) have argued that he was in fact the exact opposite of a pedophile: not a man who was sexually attracted to children, but rather one so deeply uncomfortable with his own sexuality that he preferred the company of little girls precisely because he was not attracted to them. His well-documented friendships with married women and the oft-repeated prayer in his diaries to be delivered from the “sin of David” point to an entirely different kink: King David coveted the beautiful Bathsheba and sent her husband, Uriah the Hittite, to die on the front lines of battle so he could possess her. It therefore seems likely that the desire which troubled him so was a fetish for other men’s wives, possibly consummated about 1853, which drove him to avoid temptation by socializing with girls too young to be objects of carnal desire. We can even guess the type of woman to whom he was sexually attracted, yet found emotionally repellent: both Alice books and a number of his other writings feature strong, castrating, dominatrix figures (such as the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen) with weak, ineffectual husbands. Alice’s mother may have been one of these: a bit of student doggerel from the 1860s goes, “I am the Dean and this is Mrs. Liddell/She plays the first, and I the second fiddle.”
Alas, the time which gave Alice’s adventures to the world was as mortal as a bread-and-butter-fly; only three months later Mrs. Liddell began to cool toward Dodgson, and on June 27th of the following year she told him about gossip linking him with either their governess or Lorina (who was 14 and therefore marriageable). The rumors caused a break in their close relationship, and though they remained cordial the rowing trips became a thing of the past. He befriended many other girls in the next four decades, but none of them ever truly replaced Alice in his affections: in a letter he sent her soon after her marriage in 1880 he wrote, “I have had scores of child-friends since your time, but they have been quite a different thing.” She was also his muse for 1871’s Through the Looking-Glass, and no subsequent work dedicated to another girl can match the two Alice books in genius or wit; they are the enduring legacy of that “golden afternoon”, now a century and a half gone, so it is only proper that the occasion be commemorated by those who love them.
One Year Ago Today
In “July Updates (Part Two)”, Georgia learns about the Law of Unintended Consequences, Google reveals its prohibitionism, the European Women’s Lobby demonstrates that it knows less than nothing about male psychology and Seattle police display their abject cowardice.
If “if” were a skiff, we could go fishing. – Louisiana saying
The world is an immense machine made up of an inconceivably-large number of independently-moving parts, any number of which could potentially act upon others in such a way as to precipitate disaster; once entropy is added to the mixture, it becomes literally impossible to predict the total number of things that might go wrong in one’s immediate environment on any given day. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to do so; the overwhelming majority of such possible events are so exceedingly unlikely that they can essentially be ignored. A much smaller subset of possible events is likely enough that the prudent person takes precautions against them; deciding whether an eventuality is worth protecting oneself against is part of the give and take necessary for material existence. A blasé attitude toward likely dangers may soon lead to disaster, while excessive concern over highly unlikely ones will inevitably lead to crippling anxiety; functional people fall somewhere in the middle. For example, any sensible whore insists on measures to protect herself from sexually transmitted infections, but she wouldn’t complete very many calls if she insisted that prospective clients provide recent bloodwork proving that they were free from the Black Death. The former is likely enough to be cause for concern, but the latter is not; a sane and sensible person can tell the difference.
Unfortunately, Western society is no longer sane or sensible; things were bad enough when authoritarian governments enacted criminal laws to intrude into every area of public and private life, but the modern American obsession with “safety”, coupled with the dangerous belief that every mishap can be blamed on some specific person or persons, has created a nightmare scenario: Not only can individuals be ruinously sued for situations they could not realistically have prevented, they can also be prosecuted for refusing to be paralyzed into complete inactivity by anticipation of every remote possibility of danger. Furthermore, modern governments think nothing of inflicting onerous or even ruinous restrictions on the entire population in a futile attempt to prevent rare occurrences; consider the immense economic and societal costs of the numerous measures to “raise awareness” and protect children from abduction, despite the fact that only 0.014% of all “missing” legal minors are abducted by strangers, and the vast majority of those are older teenagers. Or how about attempting to trample the Constitution and make life far more dangerous for escorts by banning Backpage in a futile effort to stop a few dozen underage girls in the entire country from advertising there? Or imposing shockingly paternalistic restrictions on the buying or selling of foodstuffs for millions of people on the off-chance that a tiny number of them with insufficient willpower to either control themselves or violate the ban will be made marginally healthier by such a law?
Besides the intrinsic evil of restricting personal liberty, the tremendous waste of resources that could be better used elsewhere, the suppression of opportunities for moral growth and the generation of innumerable new excuses for arrest and prosecution of individuals, “What if?” laws produce one more important effect: a degeneration in the quality of life for everyone affected by them. After my hysterectomy, the hospital endocrinologist insisted that I should consider other “options” rather than hormone replacement because oral estrogens increase the risk of cancer. In other words, he actually tried to convince me that going through menopause (with its attendant aging effects) at 28 years old was somehow a valid choice, and that a reasonable woman might indeed choose a half-century of old age in order to lower her risk of a terminal disease near the end of that period. Luckily, I was given that choice, but some people are not so fortunate; nanny-state laws often remove options entirely, condemning them to lives of sickness, pain or other conditions which drain life of everything that makes it worth living in the name of “preventing” something that in all likelihood would never have come to pass.
One Year Ago Today
“July Updates (Part One)” reports on the effective repeal of Louisiana’s “Crime Against Nature By Solicitation” statute, the lawhead war against lemonade stands, and the persecution of yet another escort review and advertising site.
If you want to donate but don't want a recurring charge, you can send any amount you like via PayPal to my email address (see below). Be sure to include a note so I can thank you!
All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say “pretty please with sugar on top” first, and then wait for me to say “okey-dokey”.
To those I care about, those who approach me as friends, those who seek out my help, and even those who smile at me in the aisles of shops, I am full of the milk of human kindness. But those who harm or insult me or mine, those who approach me with hostility and those who demand my obedience or attempt to control me via threats, find that milk frozen harder than antarctic ice. That’s when my “Vulcan” side comes out, and I treat the threat, human or otherwise, as I would treat any troublesome situation: as a problem to be solved. Allowing oneself to feel sorry for a venomous serpent about to strike is a good way to get killed, and allowing quarter to an implacable enemy is like nursing such a serpent at one’s bosom. I’m all for fairness and rules of engagement, and as I said in Monday’s column I have no desire to harm potentially-innocent bystanders. But only a fool desists from smiting an actively aggressive enemy; any foe who expects mercy from me must first break off combat and retreat.
One final point: most of the people who criticize my apparent lack of compassion for soi-disant “survivors” make the completely unsupported assumption that these women’s statements can be taken at face value, which they cannot; real sex work experiences, like real human experiences in any area, are complex and nuanced, and vary with the individuals who experience them. This is not so with weaponized “survivor” narratives, which are simple, one-dimensional and sensationalistic, and vary very little from the prescribed model invented by Melissa Farley, Donna Hughes, Sheila Jeffreys, et al. Real sex work experiences can often be verified by empirical evidence, such as corroborating accounts and methodologically-sound studies; “survivor” narratives must be accepted on faith, without any valid evidence whatsoever…according to some, even in the face of evidence that proves their falsity. As I explained in “Imagination Pinned Down”, “trafficking” and “survivor” narratives not only strongly resemble each other, but also the tales told by those who claim to have been Satanically abused or abducted by aliens. If these women were as harmless as UFO cultists we could afford the luxury of empathy, but that is not the case; as long as fanatics and governments use them as tools to restrict the rights of millions, we have no choice but to turn a cold, scientific eye to their stories. If someone’s claims that vaccines cause autism were being used as the excuse to ban them, wouldn’t you want those claims proven? How sympathetic would you feel toward self-proclaimed “victims of vaccination” whose efforts might result in the deaths of thousands of children from diseases conquered decades ago? Not very, I’ll wager. I’m sympathetic to women who have truly suffered, or even believe they have suffered, as long as they do not use their trauma as an excuse to interfere with the lives of others. But once they align themselves with dangerous, aggressive enemies, I can’t afford that empathy any longer.
