The Honest Courtesan

Faith prefers the absurd to the plausible.  –  Mason Cooley

As I pointed out in “Numerology”, the fraction of hookers in Western countries who are underage is extremely small (about 3.5%), and though the ratio is slightly higher in developing countries it’s still always a small minority.  So why is it that there is such a huge pretense among the anti-whore crowd that this isn’t true?  It’s for the same reason that they pretend the great majority of us are coerced (even though only about 1.5% are) and that a huge fraction of us are streetwalkers (even though less than 15% are):  as I’ve said in several interviews, educated adult escorts making six-figure salaries are terrible “poster children”.  We simply aren’t pathetic, and don’t inspire outrage, sympathy and a desire to “do something” among normal people.  To be sure, the rabid anti-sex crowd is probably even more incensed about us than about the victims because we have the temerity to be well-adjusted and successful and to say that prostitution isn’t degrading or traumatic, and there’s nothing a true believer hates more than to see a “sinner” who isn’t suffering; most normal people, however, sensibly find it difficult to get worked up about discreet adult call girls.  So despite the rarity of the “trafficked child” in real life (even among teen streetwalkers, only about 10% are coerced in any concrete way), that’s what the cops and the media harp on again and again and again; it’s as though every student the public ever heard about was a sickly kindergartener with severe separation anxiety.  Here are a few examples, all from the first week of this month; I’ll start with one from Thailand, where journalists aren’t as completely “on board” as the American media with the propaganda that teen girls are always helpless victims:

…four girls engaged in prostitution were arrested by more than 10 police officers…in…Bangkok…after reports were received of underage females engaged in prostitution…the four girls told police they were all high school students…[who] had been convinced or advised by friends to become prostitutes, because they did not have enough money to go out at night…The police will conduct a thorough investigation to track down the real providers behind the illegal prostitution operation.

Though the girls revealed their exact motivation and the exact way they got the idea, the cops refuse to believe them; there MUST be some “real provider” who forced them into whoring, because “innocent children” couldn’t possibly come up with the idea on their own.  It’s a textbook example of Maier’s Law:  the facts do not conform to the theory, and must therefore be discarded.  It’s exactly the same in Dallas, Texas, though US reporters are far more credulous:

…In a city known as a national hotbed for prostitution, a special Dallas police unit is trying new approaches to identify and save underage girls being lured into the street life.  Officers have adopted what they call a “victim-centered approach,” making a list of every known juvenile prostitute and probing their pasts and ways to keep them out of trouble.  And they’re making a new push to use the Web — where for years traffickers have had almost free rein — to find girls and help them before it’s too late.  “We can make survivors out of victims,” said Lt. Fred Diorio, the head of the department’s Crimes Against Children unit.  “That’s what we’re trying to do.  That’s the goal.”  It’s a difficult one to achieve.  While Dallas’ effort has won acclaim for devoting extra resources to combat juvenile prostitution, officials and experts say web trafficking makes it harder to identify the girls and weed out the pimps.  The girls are also sometimes reluctant to help prosecute their pimps and get them behind bars…

That first sentence is about the only accurate and truthful statement in the whole story; Dallas has so many whores it’s a buyer’s market with depressed prices.  I don’t think I have to point out the myths and fallacies in the rest (from “the scary internet is full of sex traffickers” to “all prostitutes have pimps”), but the pompous megalomania inherent in the cops’ claims to magic mind-control powers is worth noting.  And it doesn’t let up:

In June, the police staged a sting they called “Operation Brick and Mortar” — a reference to how the physical building where prostitutes and pimps once congregated had largely migrated to an online setting…

What in Aphrodite’s name is any of that supposed to mean?  Do the cops believe that there used to be a big “pimp and ho” brothel and social club somewhere that was digitized like something in Tron?

…Catherine De La Paz, a veteran detective, was in charge of picking out ads she thought might offer juvenile prostitutes.  Police dialed numbers and contacted each of the 99 ads she picked…they eventually…detained 23 people for prostitution.  Just two were under 18 years old…

If the real purpose of this scheme was “rescuing” coerced underage prostitutes, I think even a cop would have to admit it was ineffective.  But since the real reason is persecuting hookers no matter what the age, it’s all good.  The rest of the story talks about a new gingerbread house under construction in Dallas and theoretical software to magically detect juveniles via stolen pictures on the internet, but it’s conveniently “years away” so there’s plenty of time for them to think up another politically correct excuse to justify whore-hunting by then.

But Texas cops are amateurs at writing lurid “white slavery” porn compared to those in Florida:

Fifteen-year-old C.G. was hanging out with friends in Tampa…when she met a man…who offered her a ride home…but…[took her to] Orlando…[and] force[d] her to become a prostitute.  Authorities say that…teenage girls across the country are forced into the sex industry.  Sometimes, they end up in Central Florida because of the area’s conventions and special events, which make it a lucrative region…The FBI estimates 293,000 children are at risk of becoming victims of sexual exploitation in America…While the national average age of a child involved in prostitution is 12 to 13, in Florida it is 10 to 11 years old…The youngest victim local DCF officials could recall:  an 8-year-old from Central Florida…

And so on, and so on, ad nauseam.  Note the appearance of the gypsy whores myth and the misrepresentation of Estes & Weiner’s high-end guess as an “FBI estimate”, and the latest step in the development of the age myth:  we’ve already seen 12 to 13 described as the average age of underage whores rather than the average age of entry, but the innovation that it’s even lower in some places is new; apparently these math-illiterate cops and reporter believe that there are hordes of 3-year-old “sex slaves” coming into the trade to replace the ones graduating at 18.  Funny thing, that; this foolish excuse for a reporter parrots these ludicrous claims, yet the only actual cases the cops can give details of involve older teens (imagine that).  Does anyone out there honestly believe that if Florida cops had really found an 8-year-old working as a hooker, it wouldn’t have made international news and become the premier “sex trafficking” horror story for the duration of the panic?  Of course it would have, and had the reporter pressed the cops for details she would’ve discovered that they had only heard the story, but that the detective who worked the case was the buddy of the former partner of a guy who transferred out last year and I think he moved to Wyoming.  This goes beyond simple gullibility to criminal negligence; only a total retard could believe these ridiculous tall tales.  But as long as the public accepts everything “authorities” say with the approximate degree of skepticism a toddler affords to the Tooth Fairy, this moral panic will be followed by an endless succession of others, each as absurd as the last.