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Archive for September, 2012

The Young and the Brainless

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 20, 2012| 10 Comments »

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.

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Profound Ignorance

Posted in History, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 19, 2012| 15 Comments »

Learning.  The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.  –  Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

What drives so many economists to write half-witted, misinformed papers about sex work?  Clearly, these aren’t stupid people, and one would imagine it would be impossible to get through graduate school without some understanding of the basics of research; some of them even seem motivated by a genuine (and laudable) desire to explore the facts about prostitution rather than simply accepting anti-whore dogma.  So why do most of them choose to ignore the ample research which already exists and eschew interviewing any of the many sex worker activists who can be found with a simple Google search?  Barely a week goes by that I don’t get emails from reporters, academics, lawyers and others with questions about the topic, and I’m only one of dozens who could clear up these scholars’ misconceptions before they even start…yet they prefer to ignore us and make asses of themselves instead.  In just the past year we’ve seen Yeoman and Mars’ “sex robot” nonsense and Lee & Persson’s horrible combination of the Swedish & Nevada models, both of which reveal a total lack of interdisciplinary research by accepting “sex trafficking” hysteria as factual; we also saw that gypsy-whore foolishness from Scott Cunningham and Todd Kendall, based on the fallacious notion that escort ads are in 1:1 correspondence with the number of hookers in an area.  And now here comes Cunningham again, quoted in an appallingly-inaccurate Daily Beast article based in part on another paper he and Kendall wrote in 2009:

Once upon a time, becoming a prostitute was difficult.  In, say, 1992, you could risk your life as a streetwalker—if you lived near a street where one could walk provocatively and reasonably expect to find customers.  You could make and place an ad for sexual services in your local alternative weekly, at least if you lived in a city—but the responses wouldn’t begin until well after said weekly was printed and distributed.  Of course, there were brothels, massage parlors, agencies, and so on back then, even an escorts section of the yellow pages.  But it wasn’t as if any 20-year-old with a flash of curiosity about sex work could within hours find a client or a pimp and go into business selling herself…

The idiocy starts right from the get-go, and though we can’t blame Cunningham for author Gregory Gilderman’s use of the grating phrase “selling herself” or his casual assertion of the “all whores have pimps” myth, it seems his paper is the source of the patently-false belief (which any veteran 20th century hooker can debunk) that picking up a phone and calling an escort service out of the yellow pages was somehow harder or slower than setting up an online ad oneself.

…“When you take the profile of Internet prostitutes versus street prostitutes, you find there’s more education, and that more work temporarily, then exit,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist…who has studied the impact of the Internet on prostitution markets.  “They also are significantly less likely to work for a pimp.”  [They]…even look different…[Cunningham]  found that when Craigslist first entered a new area…the body weight of the women advertising sex gradually shifted to, in his words, “a more athletic body type.  It moves from less attractive to more attractive in the eyes of the john”…the Internet…hasn’t merely moved online and indoors those who once worked the street, but…created a different sort of sex worker—more educated, younger—and a bigger market of women selling sexual services in the United States and men purchasing those services…

Though Cunningham starts with two true statements (albeit the second is dramatically understated),  he then compares internet escorts to streetwalkers (rather than to pre-internet agency girls) and assumes that the statements of weight in ads are truthful.  Gilderman runs with that, immediately reiterating the fallacy that before the internet most hookers were streetwalkers and making the factually-unsupported statement that prostitution is more widespread now than in the ‘90s.  It gets worse; next he seems to claim that there were escort reviews on Craigslist, that a man could somehow use it to screen girls, and (most incredibly of all) that ads on Craigslist were more reliable than those on escort review boards:

…in the pre-Internet era…there was simply no practical way for a man to compare the looks and prices of large numbers of escorts, anonymously contact them, and receive reliable information that a provider was, in fact, not working for the police.  Craigslist changed that…there had always been sex ads on the Internet…but their presence on Craigslist was something like the difference between a brothel on a side street in the bad part of town and a brothel in the Mall of America…sex work for women between ages 20 and 40 has mostly shifted from an outdoor activity involving street walking to an indoor activity involving online solicitation and communication.  Second, because is it much easier to buy and sell sex, there are simply more prostitutes, and clients, than there were before…

As I’ve stated many times, streetwalkers have always been a minority of whores in every era of human history, and since the advent of modern anti-whore laws a century ago they’ve been a relatively small minority in most places.  The internet has indeed caused some outdoor workers to move indoors, but the shrinkage was from about 15% of the whore population working the street to perhaps 8-10% doing so; it was hardly the seismic shift that reporters and ill-informed academics keep representing it as.  Furthermore, if prostitution has indeed increased in the past 20 years (and I have never seen any credible evidence that it has), it would merely be a rebound toward normal levels from a probable low in the 1970s due to the high availability of “free” sex at the time.  Kinsey found that 69% of men in the 1940s had paid for sex at least once in their lives, and though the tendency of more recent studies to generate lower numbers is due partly to poor question design and partly to underreporting due to increased social stigma since the 1980s, it’s certainly possible and even likely that the increased availability of “free” sex had some impact.  There’s an historical precedent: during the Victorian Era nearly every middle- or upper-class man saw whores occasionally, and there were many more of them; roughly 5.5% of the female population in a typical 19th-century European or American city worked in the trade at any given time, as opposed to less than 0.3% today.  But as more women entered the industrial workforce in the 1910s and 1920s and premarital sex became far more socially acceptable over the same period, both the number of prostitutes and the demand for their services began to drop to today’s unusually-low level.

Turning back to the article, we see it descend into the usual blather about business migrating to Backpage after the closure of Craigslist’s “erotic services” section, where we find this stunningly obtuse statement:

…But while the bulk of the business moved to Backpage, some of the listings that had appeared on Craigslist simply disappeared—strongly suggesting that Craigslist hadn’t merely picked up the listings that previously were in print or scattered around the Web, but had actually increased the size of the market…

The listings didn’t “disappear”; they simply moved back to the personals and personal services sections they inhabited before Craigslist was forced by the first wave of government interference to create the “erotic services” section in the first place.  But since that fact doesn’t fit the theory that the evil internet is tempting innocent women into harlotry, Maier’s Law demands it be ignored.

The rest of the article is mostly the usual lurid fluff; Gilderman pretends TER is the only escort review site, accuses Village Voice Media of only questioning “trafficking” hysteria in order to protect its profits, then quotes from two reluctant hookers (one of them Rachel Lloyd of GEMS) in order to ensure that the readers get the message that sex work is bad, and that “even part-time sex work with apparently harmless men can take its toll.”  That’s to be expected from a hack outfit like The Daily Beast, but I just wish there weren’t so many academic ignoramuses around to give them ammunition.

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Poe Folks

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 18, 2012| 47 Comments »

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.  –  Nathan Poe

About 20 years ago I read an article by an Episcopalian priest in which he proposed that fundamentalism should actually be considered a religion in itself, and the various forms of it (Christian, Muslim, Marxist, feminist, etc) merely sects within that religion.  It was one of those brilliant observations that immediately becomes part of one’s consciousness, and I’ve looked at fundamentalism exactly like that ever since because it makes total sense.  Consider, for example, those who are mystified by fundamentalist Christians forming anti-sex alliances with neofeminists; once one recognizes that they are both merely different varieties of fundamentalism it’s no more confusing than, say, Methodist and Lutheran congregations getting together for some joint charitable enterprise.  That being the case, it’s obvious that Poe’s Law, though first formulated with regard to Christian fundamentalists (specifically, creationists), works just as well with any other form of fundamentalism (or any form of extremism, for that matter).  Furthermore, the law works just as well when reversed; any sincere statement of fundamentalist beliefs will sometimes be mistaken for a parody.

I recently came across an editorial (from Montgomery County, Maryland) which actually demonstrates both the corollary to Poe’s Law and the relativity of fundamentalism. Not only is it hard to tell from a parody (though context convinces me it isn’t one), it’s also impossible to tell which flavor of fundamentalism has rotted the author’s brain; it reads the same whether she’s an anti-sex Christian, an anti-sex Muslim, an anti-sex neofeminist, a typical control-freak Washington-type or something else:

No parent should be shocked that five high school football players hired prostitutes while on a road trip to North Carolina last week…thanks to smartphones and the nearly complete submersion of the sex trade into the digital swamp, ordering three prostitutes to your hotel room is as easy as ordering a pizza…The bold step of ordering up a prostitute on an iPhone often begins as early as middle school, when legions of boys start downloading porn…Now that the family computer and its Net Nanny aren’t the only way to get online, the access to porn and paid sex is in the palms of our children’s hands, 24-7…Mobile porn has become so prevalent among teens that there is even a nonprofit group, Fight the New Drug, and a micro-industry of treatment camps aimed at teens who have a crippling addiction to it.  For teens ogling mobile porn regularly, the next logical step is to act out that fantasy and click on the many ads urging viewers to order up live sex.

As horrified parents, how do we stop this?  The 18 chaperons on the trip…did bed checks at 1:30 and 4:30 a.m…[but] the…boys evaded the best efforts of their chaperons by placing their order at 5 a.m…The problem here isn’t only about limiting access.  There are deeper lessons to address.  The illegal purchase of sex, the fact that most American prostitution is a result of human trafficking and the reality that the plastic, bleached and enhanced world of online sex is a myth that twists ideas of human sexuality and relationships need to be discussed here.  Parents cannot toss aside online porn as the equivalent of the curiosity they remember.  Porn is everywhere…any child of any age with a Nook, a Kindle or an iPad can go from Word Search or Angry Birds to graphic, violent, degrading sex videos in just two clicks.  And for older kids, not only are they awash in unrealistic, desensitizing images, but they are constantly being urged to take it to the next level, to go live.  Families who don’t have uncomfortable but honest discussions about sex, porn and prostitution are putting kids at risk for some scary consequences…

Of course, it’s impossible for this author or others like her to have “honest” discussions with their kids or anyone else, because their heads are crammed full of so much disinformation about sex, porn and sex work that they couldn’t recognize the truth if it was stuck to their faces with cyanoacrylate.  Just in this short rant we’ve got the myths that sex is corrupting, that adolescents are “innocent” and won’t want sex unless they are “urged” to, that a person can become “addicted” to porn, that law equals morality, that most prostitution involves the new bogeyman “human trafficking”, that porn magically causes cognitive disorders, that the majority of modern porn is “violent and degrading”, and probably a few more that I missed.  Unfortunately, this isn’t just a parody; a very large fraction of Americans really believe in this sex-hating Puritan faith of which Christianity, the Republican and Democratic Parties, neofeminism and every other popular belief system are merely denominations.

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Robyn Few

Posted in Biography, Current Events, Harlotography, History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 17, 2012| 21 Comments »

Until prostitutes have equal protection under the law and equal rights as human beings, there is no justice.  –  Robyn Few

Last Thursday, sex workers all over the world were saddened to hear of the death (after a long battle with cancer) of the charismatic and tireless Robyn Few, founder of the Sex Workers Outreach Project USA.  When the day finally arrives on which sex work is recognized in the majority of the world as work like any other, hers will be one of the names remembered as instrumental in achieving it.

Robyn L. Spears was born in Paducah, Kentucky, on October 7th, 1958, to Virginia Owen Spears; she had an older brother and a younger sister and lived in the small community of Lone Oak, Kentucky.  She attended Lone Oak Elementary and Lone Oak Middle School, but dropped out and ran away from home either during or after her 8th grade year, when she was 13 years old.  The causes of her leaving are not clear, but whatever they were she later reconciled with her mother and in fact died while visiting at her home.  Like so many runaways she soon turned to survival sex work, and though she later received vocational training to be a materials tester for concrete and tried a few “straight” jobs such as drafting, she was never satisfied with these and became a stripper soon after turning 18.  As she says in the video below (recorded in Chicago in July of 2008), “I loved it so much; it was so empowering to be able to get up on the stage…I came alive, and for me being paid to dance and to show my body [that] I was so proud of anyway…it was just an amazing experience.”

After stripping for a while she started working in a massage parlor, then later escort services and a clandestine brothel; in her late 20s she married one of her clients and had a daughter, but after her divorce in 1993 (after which she retained her married name, Few) she moved to California and began to take college classes with the intent of earning a degree in theater.  She became interested in marijuana and AIDS activism, but the bills had to be paid so she returned to escorting in 1996 and soon became a madam.  Like so many of us, she never told anybody about her sex work; her activism was directed toward other causes until fate decreed otherwise.

The events of September 11th, 2001 engendered a heightened climate of paranoia, and the enactment of the PATRIOT Act soon made an unprecedented level of funding available to any government agency which could make even a remote claim to “fighting terrorism”.  And though then-Attorney General Ashcroft had been strongly rebuked by Congress for devoting more FBI agents to the “Canal Street Brothel” case in New Orleans than to counterterrorist operations, he had learned his lesson and justified later whore persecutions with flimsy “anti-terrorism” excuses.  Robyn’s agency was accused of having “terrorist suspects” as clients and she was arrested in June of 2002,  then convicted of “conspiracy to promote prostitution” and sentenced to six months house arrest (during which the trial judge allowed her to continue her activism).  After her arrest, she was angry to discover that both neighbors and supposedly “enlightened” activists treated her differently once they knew she had been a prostitute; she threw herself even harder into medical marijuana activism, but began to think about how people’s ignorant attitudes and the oppressive anti-sex work laws could be changed.

Her inspiration came a year after her arrest, in the form of the US Supreme Court decision Lawrence vs. Texas:  Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in his dissenting opinion that “state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult  incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery,  fornication, bestiality, and obscenity  are likewise sustainable only in light of [the overturned Bowers vs. Hardwick decision’s] validation of laws based on moral choices,” and though the other justices tried to pretend otherwise Robyn knew that Scalia was correct, and that the court had opened a door for sex workers’ rights.  So after a Berkeley, California high-school teacher named Shannon Williams was arrested for prostitution in August, Robyn gathered a group of sex workers to protest outside the courthouse at Williams’ arraignment in September.  Unfortunately (but understandably), Williams wanted the whole mess to go away as soon as possible and so had no desire to become the “poster child” for prostitutes’ rights.  Robyn of course backed down, but the fire had been lit; with the help of her partner Michael Foley and sex worker Stacey Swimme (whom she had met earlier that year at a medical marijuana protest), she founded SWOP-USA the following month.

The organization was modeled on SWOP Australia, and Rachel Wotton (who now specializes in sex work with the disabled) was instrumental in securing permission for the American group to use the name and helping to set things up.  Within a few weeks the new organization was contacted by Dr. Annie Sprinkle for assistance in arranging the very first Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers, and for the next year Robyn worked furiously to contact politicians and get the attention of the media so as to let them know that sex workers were not going to quietly accept persecution any more, and were mobilizing like those in many other parts of the world to demand our rights.  But after the failure of “Proposition Q”, a ballot measure she wrote which would have established de facto decriminalization in Berkeley, Robyn and SWOP settled in for the long haul and committed themselves to the slow, arduous task of reversing centuries of stigma and decades of oppressive legislation.

Shortly after the two shorter videos were recorded at the International Conference on the Reduction of Drug Related Harms in Warsaw, Poland (May of 2007), Robyn was diagnosed with cancer; she continued to work tirelessly for the cause all through her chemotherapy, and though the disease appeared to have gone into remission in January of 2010 it returned by July of 2011, and this time proved terminal.  She died on September 13th, 2012 while visiting her mother, and there will be a memorial service on what would have been her 54th birthday (October 7th, 2012) at the Milner and Orr Funeral Home in Lone Oak .  I never had the pleasure of meeting Robyn, but as you can see from the personal accounts on her website and the many expressions of grief all over the internet, those who did speak without exception of her warmth, her strength, her good humor, her courage and her plain human decency.  And though it’s an oft-used phrase, there is no other which sums up the way everyone in the sex worker rights community feels about her passing:  she will be sorely missed.

(I am indebted to the Sin City Alternative Professionals’ Association (formerly SWOP-LV) for information and links, and also to a group of Robyn’s school friends from Lone Oak, who contacted me Sunday morning and filled in a number of vital details I could not find anywhere else.  If anyone reading this can correct an error or omission, please email me with the info.)

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Links #115

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 16, 2012| 37 Comments »

Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.  –  H.L. Mencken

Since this link feature developed from my guest-blogging on The Agitator, it’s only fitting that Radley Balko usually outscores everyone else as a source of links; since I don’t really think he “tweets” or “retweets” that much more than most of the other people I follow, perhaps he and I just have similar ideas of what’s both interesting and worth calling attention to.  This time around every link down to the video is from his Twitter feed, plus the video itself; the first two below the video are courtesy of Lenore Skenazy, and the last two before the cartoon are from Grace.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if a seagull carried off a camera while it was running, this is the video for you.

(Cartoon via Ms. Samantha; following items via Deep Geek, Jesse Walker, Melissa Gira Grant, Pee-wee Herman, Mike Siegel and Amy Alkon.)

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That Was the Week That Was (#37)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Obituary, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 15, 2012| 56 Comments »

You need to tailor your response to the reality. You should not tailor your response to the hype.  –  Ann Jordan

R.I.P. Robyn Few

The founder of SWOP-USA died Thursday (September 13th) at the age of 54 after a long battle with cancer.  She became an activist for HIV and medical marijuana in the early 1990s, but prostitution was at that time simply a way to pay the bills ; that changed after she was targeted for her activism by FBI and arrested in June of 2002.  In October of the following year she founded SWOP-USA on the model of SWOP Australia, and just two months later helped Dr. Annie Sprinkle organize the first Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers.  Biographical details are scarce, but I’m trying to get a proper obituary together for her for this Monday.

Updates

He or She?

Sometimes, men’s transgender paranoia is so severe it can lead to violence:

…20-year-old Christian Ariel Romero met [a] 41-year-old [transgendered prostitute]…and…offered [her] money for sex, Montgomery County police said…[but] when Romero discovered his companion was a man, he…repeatedly stabbed the victim…The judge set bail at $500,000, which [Romero’s lawyer] called harsh…“The defendant is a person who’s 20 years old, never done anything wrong in his entire life.  And the person who is on the other side is…a prostitute…with a track record, a history…”

As is typical in stories involving transgendered people, everyone dances around pronouns and facts are sparse or contradictory; the reporter says the victim was a “man” but she may have been a pre-op transsexual.  And the lawyer’s insinuation that the victim somehow deserved a murderous assault is “NHI” thinking at its most repellent.

All in the Family

Robin Hustle has a great deal more patience than I do; if I had a story of coming out to parents who were in denial about my sex work, I certainly wouldn’t tell it on Jezebel.  The article is intelligent, well-written, right on and even funny, but of course the comments are largely what you’d expect (starting with the very first one, which basically accuses her of lying).  No thanks; I learned my lesson with Feministe.

Follow Your Bliss

A disproportionate number of perverts, rapists and pedophiles have been discovered in a job which allows them to grope and fondle women and children with impunity in public.  Golly gee, who could’ve predicted that?

Crystal Ball

As I predicted, a few journalists are beginning to question the “sex trafficking” hype; though this article reprinted from Christian Science Monitor overstates the credibility of some of the fanatics’ claims and quotes professional victim Stella Marr at length, it also interviews prominent trafficking hysteria critic Ann Jordan, criticizes celebrity opportunists like Ashton Kutcher and flatly states that the scare-figures are wildly exaggerated:

…the…statistic…that there are 100,000 to 300,000 sex slaves in the US – figures repeated by interviewers, blogs, TV hosts and…movie stars…are wrong…the number of actual sex-trafficking victims has been estimated by the US government to be in the tens of thousands, but even those numbers have been criticized as unfounded and far too high; between 2008 and 2010, federally funded human-trafficking task forces opened 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking for investigation.  Among those cases, only 248 suspected sex-trafficking victims under the age of 18 were identified…Hype over such high and inaccurate numbers of “child sex slaves” leads to a misguided response at best…At worst, it siphons financial resources away from preventing other sorts of human trafficking…[and] undermines solutions to problems…that lead to exploited youth in the first place…

Bottleneck

Cause:  Making it essentially impossible for brothels to operate legally.  Effect:  Lots of illegal brothels.

…Elena Jeffreys said when sex work was decriminalised 16 years ago, local councils were given the job of regulating the industry…but…they are now knocking back brothels on moral grounds…”Their job is to regulate the sex industry, not just to blanket knock back every single (brothel) application they get.  There’s some local councils in NSW that have never approved a brothel application and then they wonder why there’s brothels in their suburb that are unapproved”…Ms Jeffreys said there were more than 6000 sex workers in the state and most people would have lived near a brothel or a sex worker at some point without knowing it…

Capricious Lusts

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an American sex worker activist (other than myself) make this enlightened point:

…Controversial model-actress [Gehana Vasisth] recently tweeted that she wanted to open a…high class hygienic brothel where men could come and satisfy themselves…with professional, medically certified commercial sex workers…According to Gehana, legalising prostitution and pornography in India – like it is in the West – will help reduce crimes against women drastically.  “If men can satisfy their carnal desires without any restriction, rape and other crimes against women will be reduced,” she explained…

Metaupdates

How Old is Oldest? in June Updates (Part Three)

Over a year after the controversy which caused his break with Psychology Today, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa is back with a new blog entitled E pur si muove on a relatively new website named Big Think.  And though his debut is not without controversy even there, Kanazawa’s “about” blurb states:

E pur si muove is about science.  Science is the accumulation of pure knowledge for its own sake; it has no other goals or purposes.  In science, only logic and evidence are the arbitrators of the truth; nothing else matters.  No scientific conclusions can ever be good or bad, desirable or undesirable, sexist, racist, offensive, reactionary or dangerous; they can only be true or false.  No other adjectives apply.  If the truth offends people, it is our job as scientists to offend them.  In the memorable words of David Hilbert, Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen.  If what I say as a scientist is wrong, because it is illogical or lacks credible scientific evidence, then it is my problem.  If what I say offends you, then it is your problem.  Get over it.  Prepare to be offended.

And really, that’s pretty much my attitude in this blog as well; I wish Dr. Kanazawa the best of luck with his new site and hope Big Think proves to be more dedicated to free speech than Psychology Today has proven itself to be.

Hard Numbers in TW3 (#16)

Whenever it looks like something might be decriminalized (such as brothel ownership in Brazil), you can bet the police will launch as many “crackdowns” as possible before their window of opportunity closes:

On the eve of June 14…armed members of [Rio’s] Police…and  public prosecutor’s office arrived at a brothel called Centauros…[where] they arrested prostitutes, management and the owner, seized documents, computers…used condoms…and…$150,000…in cash.  The owner…spent a week at a maximum security prison.  The prostitutes were released the same night and found work at other upscale brothels…Quite a lot of drama when you consider that prostitution is not actually a crime in Brazil…But as Rio de Janeiro prepares for its turn on the global stage – as the host of the World Cup in 2014, then the 2016 Summer Olympics – the city is taking drastic action to keep its thriving sex industry out of the spotlight.  Rio has already shuttered 24 sex establishments…and…another 33 venues have been threatened or harassed by the police…It’s the biggest crackdown…in a generation…according to anthropologists Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula da Silva, who have been studying prostitution in Rio since 2004 and have authored almost 20 academic papers on [the subject]…

Prudish Pedants in TW3 (#18)

Keep in mind, California is still under a SCOTUS mandate to reduce its prison population, yet this persecution for profit continues:

Fetish filmmaker and distributor Ira Isaacs’ sentencing was put on hold last month because federal prosecutors intended to present evidence to support…a two-level increase in sentencing…[for] federal crime[s] where the defendant knew or should have known that a victim involved in an offense was a “vulnerable victim”…presumably [this means] an actor or actors involved in films deemed obscene…prosecutors have recommended that Isaacs serve a term of up to seven years and three months in prison, as well as a three-year term of supervised release and a $10,000 fine…[the court also stole] all of his websites…copyrights…computers, servers, props and video equipment.

Against Their Will in TW3 (#20)

Another win-win situation ruined by busybodies:

…The Malay Mail reports [that a] car wash in…Kuala Lumpur…had formed a partnership with a local massage parlour, enabling customers to redeem free sex from the brothel as part of a customer loyalty scheme…police stormed the parlour and found several stamped loyalty cards that had been used by customers…officer Emmi Shah Fadhil [said]…“To get the extra ‘offer’, customers must send their cars for washing nine times within a certain period…The tenth car wash will entitle them to free sex.”  The parlour would usually charge between 130 and 180 Malaysian Ringgit ($40-$55) – cheaper than the $65 price for a full-service car wash.  Prostitution is illegal in Malaysia.  As a result of the raid, nine Vietnamese women aged between 18 and 28 were arrested.

Actually prostitution isn’t illegal in Malaysia; only public solicitation is.  However, for the past four years the Malaysian government has been engaged in a campaign to violently suppress brothels under the guise of “fighting human trafficking” in order to win a pat on the head and a “good doggie” from the US State Department.

See No Evil in TW3 (#24)

An anti-sex fanatic’s crusade to criminalize a lump of bronze continues:

…a bare-breasted sculpture in an Overland Park arboretum has triggered a grand jury investigation into whether the city is promoting obscenity to minors.  The artwork, titled “Accept or Reject” and donated by Chinese artist Yu Chang, depicts…what the artist statement says is the incomplete identity expressed in one’s digital self — critics contend it promotes “sexting” to children…”The statue appeals to an unwholesome obsession with a sexual act” [said petition sponsor Phillip] Cosby…who calls sexting “the most under-prosecuted crime in America”…

Anybody who claims that any crime (other than those committed under color of authority) in America is “under-prosecuted” is certifiably insane.

Sisters in Arms in TW3 (#29)

If abortion is criminalized, do people really want women who get them imprisoned?  Or will this turn into another Swedish Model-like agency-denying thing which only persecutes abortion providers (and maybe men who urge or pay for them)?

Broken Record in TW3 (#32)

Here’s a long but must-read essay by Georgina Perry of Open Doors, a London health organization serving sex workers; she explains how Olympic “sex trafficking” hysteria was amplified by politicians, the police, the media and others, and collapsed when one especially vociferous NGO lost its main source of funding:

For the last three years I’ve been…relegated from a professional considered knowledgeable in her field, to a noisy troublemaker, determined to rail against received wisdom.  I’ve had the data I assiduously collect, analyse and make public quoted back to me by law enforcement agencies, the media and NGOs but with clumsy interpretations skewed to strengthen a particular rhetoric…as the 2012 London Olympics drew inexorably towards us, the whole of the UK suddenly became an expert on my job…[the]experience…left me cynical and at times speechless at the sheer effrontery of those who stood to gain from talking up a story that…is not, has not and is unlikely to ever be a reality…

Naked Truth in TW3 (#35)

Melissa Gira Grant was interviewed on “Behind the News with Doug Henwood” on public radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California this past Thursday; she talked about the rescue industry, agency denial and the neofeminist anti-sex work agenda (starting at 30:00).

This Week in 2011

How “feminist” laws infantilize or pathologize women, how Arianna Huffington panders to hysteria, how politicians judge others but never themselves, and why only some religions have freedom.  Also, an Algerian tribe in which prostitution was normal and accepted and an essay on whores in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This Week in 2010

The importance of caring for husbands sexually, the woman known to history as “The Yellow Rose of Texas”, a few book reviews, a story I wrote when I was 18, “whoredar”, and a little about my lesbian experiences.

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Thoughts On My First Conference

Posted in Current Events, Diary, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 14, 2012| 13 Comments »

Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.  –  John Dos Passos

Last week I attended my very first professional conference, this year’s Southern Harm Reduction and Drug Policy Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, and it went so well it definitely won’t be my last (especially since next years’ one is to be in New Orleans).  Like most conventions, there was so much going on that it would be impossible to attend everything, and even if I tried to write at length about all the events I attended it would be overlong (and probably boring to anyone who wasn’t there; such things are better experienced than described).  So what I’m going to do today is give you an overview of what I did and saw, and tell you about my impressions of the conference as a whole.

I arrived Wednesday evening, and after checking in and catching up on my emails went down to meet Robert Childs of the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, the person who had invited me to attend.  There were a number of others in the lobby as well, and five of us eventually agreed upon a restaurant and went to eat.  I mention this because that dinner, and Thursday’s and Friday’s as well, were just as important a part of the conference to me as the scheduled events; they allowed more personal interaction with people of similar philosophical bent, but different experiences.  That first night, for instance, the group was made up of the young man (Shilo Murphy) who helms the user-run needle exchange in Seattle, three young women from NCHRC who had come into activism via an academic route, and me.  Shilo and I were able to share our experiences and views with the academics in a social setting rather than the professional one in which they normally encounter those affected by prohibitionist policies, and we in turn learned about each others’ fields and about the work going on in the academic and political arenas.

Thursday’s scheduled events were mostly big ones in the main conference room; besides the speeches and presentations on a number of different topics by members of NCHRC, Women With a Vision, drug policy and public health organizations, there was also a protest march which took us to the Georgia State Capitol just a few blocks away.  Some of you may be amused to hear that this was my very first public demonstration of any kind, but keep in mind that until I started in activism just two years ago I had always tried to avoid drawing official attention to myself or any group of which I was a part.

Though I did learn from the content of the presentations (I found the one entitled “Including Armed Service Personnel, Veterans, Cops and Reverends: Harm Reduction and Drug Policy Reform” to be especially interesting and challenging), it was even more important for me to learn from the presenters’ form; though Robert had told me that he was sure I could just “wing” my first two presentations on Friday, I wasn’t even sure how to go about doing that.  But I’m nothing if not a quick learner, and by the end of Thursday I was confident that I wouldn’t make a complete ass of myself (though I still wasn’t sure what I would say in any of them).

Another  important Thursday activity for me was meeting both people I knew by reputation (such as Jessica Land, Reverend Lia Scholl and Deon Haywood of Women With a Vision) and ones I didn’t; the latter group included my roommate Stella Zine (with whom I got along quite well and had several fascinating conversations), Prosecutor Jay Fisher of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (who confirmed that LEAP is also officially opposed to the criminalization of sex work), and Hadley Gustafson and Tessie Castillo of NCHRC.  Late that afternoon Hadley and Tessie interviewed me for the NCHRC website (I’ll embed the video once they’re done editing it), and I went to dinner with Jessica.  We made it back a bit too late for the pool party, but I was exhausted anyway and wanted to get as much sleep as possible before Friday morning.

My first presentation was “Harm Reduction Media”, in which each presenter explained how she uses media in her activism.  That was easy for me, because I just had to talk about blogging.  My next presentation was tougher for several reasons, the first of which was that “Sex Work in the South” is such a broad, loose topic that I really had no idea what to say!  Fortunately I was able to sweet-talk my co-presenters into going before me (the schedule had me up first), and listening to their presentations inspired me.  Other factors:  the audience was at least twice as large, and we had to stand to speak rather than sitting as in the first panel.  But apparently I did well, because I got a lot of praise and a number of people said they couldn’t believe I was unaccustomed to public speaking.  And though I was most intimidated by my third presentation on “Sex Worker Criminalization” because it was on a microphone and in the main room rather than one of the “breakout” rooms, I had been inspired by a presentation on the effects of the drug war and jotted down a number of notes which allowed me to give what I hope was an informative talk.  Afterward I talked for a long time with two other activists (whose names, unfortunately, have escaped me) and was by then so ravenously hungry that I joined the first group I could find who was headed out to dinner.

That turned out to be a serendipitous choice because I spent a lot of time that evening and the next morning talking to two of them, Lorena Flores (who works with undocumented immigrants) and Ronald Martin, a retired NYPD detective who is interested in opening up dialog between the police, sex workers and drug users and is very critical of the criminalization of “paraphernalia” (such as condoms and syringes) which creates a public health hazard by discouraging their use (especially in street populations).  You’re probably surprised that I actually had a pleasant dinner and civil, engaging conversation with a cop, and I reckon I am as well, but that’s the beauty of events like this; they provide a safe space where people of different and even opposite backgrounds can both educate and challenge one another to think differently about the entrenched mechanisms of prohibition which make adversaries out of people who could, under a more just and liberty-centered system, be allies.

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The Phoenix Pharisees

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 13, 2012| 40 Comments »

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.  Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.  –  Matthew 23:27-28

Though most of the news articles I encounter can be handled in a link and a few words in a “That Was the Week That Was” column, some are so rich in content and implication that they demand an entire post to themselves.  This recent item from the Arizona Republic was clearly motivated by a desire to smear its competitor, the Village Voice-owned Phoenix New Times, but that’s just the beginning of the issues here; keep in mind that Phoenix is not only home to the Republic and Village Voice Media, but also to the most corrupt and tyrannical sheriff in America, Joe Arpaio, and that the cops quoted in this story (who claim to be so very concerned with the “victimization” of women) work for a department which routinely ignored rape and child molestation cases (at least 432 of them in all).  One year ago today I advised the attorneys general of 44 states (including Arizona) to get the beams out of their own eyes before attempting to get the mote out of Backpage’s; today I have similar advice for the scribes of the Republic and the Pharisees infesting both the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and Arizona State University:

Nearly 80 percent of the ads posted on the adult-services section of the classified website Backpage.com are for prostitutes, according to an Arizona State University research project…the research project drew on the expertise of law-enforcement officers to identify prostitution ads based on certain commonly used words and phrases and to identify minors based on factors including the girls’ development…offering the first detailed glimpse at content on the classified site that has spawned critics around the country who accuse the site’s parent company, Village Voice Media, of Phoenix, of profiting off prostitution ads and exploiting women and young girls…

As soon as you stop laughing at the moronic conceit that cops who are supposedly “expert” in sniffing out hooker ads could only find 80% of them in a section made up of nothing else, you may want to acquaint yourself with my essay on a similar “study” from the commercial con artists at the Schapiro Group.  Nutshell version:  how could the “researchers” be sure the pictures were even of the advertiser, much less current, much less underage?  This is nothing but wild guessing combined with wishful thinking and the usual cop pretense at “professionalism”.  Oh, and speaking of professionalism:

…The researchers reported 88 girls to Phoenix police who they believed to be under the age of 18.  Phoenix police said they rescued three of the girls though at least one has since been featured on the site…

Those of you who are unfamiliar with the ethics of social studies may not see the problem here:  reporting experimental subjects to the police is such a gross ethical violation it could potentially result in serious consequences for the offending academics if they actually belonged to a professional organization or were subject to a proper ethics board.  Obviously they must not be, which in turn raises questions about their methodology and procedures.

Law-enforcement officers from around the country routinely monitor the site to gather information about the prostitutes who advertise there, along with their pimps and customers…

Because everyone knows that all whores have pimps, and we write about them (and our customers) right there in our ads for all to see.

…The ASU research reinforced the Phoenix vice squad’s belief that the Valley is a hub for prostitution, whether the women and girls are full-time Arizona residents or operating on a circuit rotating among cities in the Southwest…

News flash:  All cities are “hubs” for prostitution for the same reason they’re “hubs” for every kind of business, namely higher customer concentration.  Does the Phoenix vice squad think newspaper readers are so stupid they can’t comprehend that, or is it just that they’re that stupid?

“It illustrates the scope of the problem here in Phoenix,” said Lt. Jim Gallagher, who oversees a unit that attempts to treat prostitutes as trafficking victims while targeting the men and women who control them.  “It confirmed a lot of what we already knew…”

Because if the only tool you have is a hammer…

…Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, the ASU professor in the School of Social Work who spearheaded the study, said she wants to expand the research to other cities in the hopes of better understanding the role of Internet advertising in prostitution and human trafficking.

Of course, she could talk to sex workers about it, but that A) would require de-conflating prostitution and “trafficking”, and B) wouldn’t be nearly as lucrative.

…The ASU researchers, who received some training from Phoenix police on how to identify minors and what code words and acronyms might signal prostitution ads, said none of the minors they flagged were spotted by Backpage…

This is the most outrageous absurdity in the entire absurd article.  Because they were “trained” by the crack experts in the Phoenix police department who don’t even know that Backpage girls often use other people’s pictures, clearly they MUST be 100% accurate in magically discerning which girls are underage just by looking at their ads, and therefore Backpage’s methods must be ineffectual.  Seriously, what are these “researchers” smoking?  And does this reporter possess even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills?  Furthermore, did no editor stop to consider that since the owners of Village Voice Media are suing the sheriff’s office for conspiracy, false arrest and gross civil rights violations, that maybe employees of that department might be just a teensy bit biased against them?  Submitted for your approval:  in a fully-developed fascist state it isn’t necessary for the government to censor the media or ensure academic cooperation via threats of repression, because those institutions are more than willing to violate every standard of professional ethics in their eagerness to assist in the dissemination of propaganda.

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Against Conscience

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2012| 43 Comments »

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.  –  Albert Einstein

So it has come to this:  for a number of years now, it has been literally impossible to live in the United States (and a number of other Western countries) without breaking the law on a regular basis; civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate estimates that the average American commits three felonies every day.  Nobody can pinpoint exactly when the goal of universal criminality, long sought by the ruling class, was finally reached; all we can say is that it was sometime during the 20th century, an era which opened with the criminalization of dozens of private, consensual behaviors (ranging from non-marital sex to intoxicant use) and closed with the “tough on crime” laws, “drug war” escalation and discarding of the concept of criminal intent in the 1990s.  And though I will continue to speak out against the government’s granting itself new excuses to abduct, torture, rob, cage and enslave people (such as California’s Proposition 35, which if passed will become the model for similar laws in every state), the fact of the matter is that it’s several decades too late; any enterprising prosecutor already has a wide variety of local, state and federal recipes to choose from when deciding exactly how he would like to cook any given goose.

A few years ago, Americans who like to imagine themselves as “the political left” eschewed the traditional label “liberal” in favor of the older term “progressive”; this is especially interesting since the progressive philosophy (which holds that the world should be ruled by experts who are “scientifically” trained to know what’s “best for society” and therefore have the right to impose their will on everyone else “for our own good”) is if anything the exact opposite of classical liberalism (which holds that each person has the right to self-ownership and self-determination).  In other words, the shift in nomenclature revealed the truth previous leaders tried to hide under the “liberal” label:  the only philosophical difference between the American political parties lies in the fact that soi-disant “conservatives” think the all-powerful ruling elite should be made up of the wealthy and religious authorities, while soi-disant “progressives” think it should be made up of those “educated” for the task in state-controlled systems.  In practice, however, there is no difference at all.  Both flavors of fascism favor infinite expansion of government power with the ultimate goal of total establishment control of all wealth and every individual; both dole out bread and circuses so as to call attention away from what they’re actually doing.  And if you believe the process can be stopped by elections, legislation and all the other trappings of “democracy”, ask yourself why each of the last four presidents simply continued the policies of his predecessor even if his electoral platform stated the exact opposite, and why Congress is completely impotent to control powerful, entrenched bureaucracies like the TSA.

I don’t pretend to know what the endgame for all this is going to be, but I can tell you one thing:  it will be neither pretty nor peacefully-resolved.  The American government is an immense, blind, idiotic hyper-organism which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of Washington amidst the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes; it acts on instinct alone, and therefore cannot be counted upon to control itself even if its actions can clearly be recognized by rational beings as evil, chaotic and self-destructive.  Because of this, no sane and moral person should accept any of those actions as having even the faintest trace of moral authority; in other words, the laws and regulations produced by the American political system no longer reflect sense, morality, the well-being of society, the will of the people or any other recognizable principle of good government, and are therefore not binding on free people.  Police, prosecutors and other government actors who enforce such laws are not legitimate authorities, but rather the myriad tentacles of a mad, amorphous abomination flailing about wildly in its delirium and killing or maiming everything with which it comes into contact.

Given these facts, how is a moral person to act?  The answer is, by one’s own conscience.  Any resemblance between the laws and moral behavior is now purely coincidental; this is not a problem for those of us who have always relied upon our own moral compasses rather than guidance from authority figures, but those whose personal senses of right and wrong have been stunted through reliance upon external dictates will be much slower to adapt.  It’s true that, as Voltaire said, “It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong”; however, our government is so totally out of control that even following all the laws one knows of to the letter is no guarantee against destruction.  The “law-abiding” citizen is a thing of the past, so it’s better to do what one knows to be right even if it’s illegal, because everyone is constantly in violation of some law anyhow.  It’s time for Americans (and all other subjects of repressive states, which means a large fraction of the world) to start practicing what Vaclav Havel called “living in truth”:  in other words ignoring the lies and proclamations of tyrants and just living like free people, avoiding all contact with government actors whenever possible.  If you’ve never read Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless”, you really ought to; I also highly recommend this recent James L. Payne essay entitled “Civil Noncompliance”, which covers much the same ground but in a much shorter space.  Perhaps American fascism will eventually collapse just as Soviet communism did, but in the interim it needs to be thought of as something like a hurricane or earthquake:  a mindless, super-powerful destructive force that cannot be controlled, but only avoided.

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Somebody’s Daughter

Posted in Current Events, History, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 11, 2012| 12 Comments »

Every girl who worked for me was someone’s daughter.  It would be hugely hypocritical for me to say, “It’s good enough for their daughters, but not for mine”.  –  Becky Adams

Last week Becky Adams, a retired brothel owner, once again ignited controversy among busybodies, moralists and hypocrites by reiterating her statement (first made publicly seven weeks ago) that like many other people, she wouldn’t mind if her daughter followed in her footsteps:

…Becky Adams, 45…insists she would be happy if [her 16-year-old daughter] Emilia chose to be a “high class escort” — and says she would even help to get the teenager started…“Society may judge her but I wouldn’t.  At least prostitution is an honest profession.  I’d much rather she work as an escort than a banker.  I couldn’t understand her wanting to do something morally wrong, something that could jeopardise someone else.”

…Emilia, who is currently working in a shop and at a car showroom while studying travel and tourism, agrees with her mum.  She said:  “I don’t have a moral problem with having sex with strangers…I’m not promiscuous but sex isn’t a massive thing for me.  I certainly don’t regret losing my virginity at 14…One of mum’s girls in particular became more like an aunt to me.  I loved being surrounded by these nice, glamorous women.  It was a happy family.”

Becky is glad that her youngest daughter grew up surrounded by her girls and the tools of the trade, claiming that it has made her more open-minded and relaxed about sex…“I think my work showed Emilia that the reality of prostitution is just very ordinary.  The girls have their shifts and they go to work.  They can have a bad day or a quiet day, just like anybody else…prostitution is a service…Emilia has seen…how it can save marriages — how a man whose wife is fighting cancer will visit a prostitute rather than start an affair.  She’s not shocked by anything as a result…”

Those who can’t understand Adams’ position appear to be suffering from what we might call the Fallacy of Universal Mores, the false belief that everyone feels the same way about sex as they do.  These people, of whom the “no woman could willingly choose prostitution” crowd is a subset, apparently imagine that those who choose sex work are ashamed of ourselves and hate our lives, and would therefore never want our children to make the same choices we did.  They just can’t get it through their thick skulls that some women really don’t find sex work horrible and degrading, and therefore would not oppose daughters taking up the trade if that was what they wanted to do.  Here, for example, is a short film of Ouled-Nail dancers taken in 1938; as I explained in my column of one year ago today the women of this Berber tribe often worked as dancers and prostitutes, and daughters were trained by their mothers.  As you can see, this little girl is already learning her dance moves:

Even among well-adjusted sex workers who say they would mind their daughters taking up the work, the usual reason is not anything prohibitionists imagine, but rather the stigma and the dangers resulting from criminalization.  Some others (myself included) object not on principle, but because of the belief that a specific daughter is not suited to the work; Adams states in the interview that she believes Emilia would do well as an escort but not in brothel work.

But there’s another aspect to the “shocked” reactions which is even more indicative of disordered thinking; as I pointed out in “Mother’s Day”,

…People who [ask, “Would you want your daughter to do it?”]…aren’t concerned with the danger of prostitution, because if they were we’d hear it used as an argument against women joining the military, doing police work or participating in dangerous sports like boxing…Let’s set aside for a moment the obvious point that there are lots of things people wouldn’t want their daughters doing (smoking, excessive drinking, getting pregnant out of wedlock, working at Wal-Mart, going into politics) which aren’t illegal, and the equally obvious fact that we don’t get to choose our offspring’s occupations (though some certainly try).  Let’s consider only that people do lots of things their parents wouldn’t like, and that most prostitutes have parents who would be upset and appalled at the choice.  It’s not your decision whether your daughter becomes a hooker; it’s hers.  And if she does make that choice (which 1% of all Western daughters do for some portion of their lives), do you really want her hounded by cops, forced into dangerous situations, unable to seek legal recourse if she’s robbed or raped, and branded as a pariah for life because of it?  Or would you rather she have the ability to repent what you see as her mistake and leave the job later if she chose?  Finally, is it worth rejecting your own flesh and blood for making a decision with which you disagree, and which hurt nobody except (in your opinion) her?…

Presumably, those who cannot comprehend why a whore would accept her daughter’s decision to practice the same profession believe that the mother should adamantly denounce her own decisions (thus demonstrating that she has poor judgment and is therefore incompetent to give advice on the subject).  Or perhaps they think she should be a hypocrite, indulging in the common parental “Do as I say, not as I do.”  In either case, they apparently hold that a mother should reject her daughter for making a decision she disagrees with.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of thought demonstrated by their reactions, though; after all, these are the same people who support paternalistic laws whose consequences are far more damaging than those of the behaviors they supposedly “protect” people from.

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