Mere parsimony is not economy….Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. – Edmund Burke
Almost two years ago I wrote “Dog Bites Man”, in which I pointed out that despite the well-known maxim, news organizations regularly present typical, ordinary events as though they were newsworthy:
Sometimes they become newsworthy because of the unusual size of the dog or the sheer number of people bitten; sometimes it’s just a slow news day, and very often such stories are the equivalent of the…misdirection used by a conjurer to draw attention away from what he’s actually doing. But in some cases “dog bites man” stories become newsworthy because the media have succeeded in convincing enough people that dogs actually don’t bite men, so when it happens in a public place silly people are either surprised or must at least pretend to be.
The classic example of the latter case is anything involving sex, and most especially anything involving sex work. Though every normal person has sexual feelings and every last one of us is the product of heterosexual intercourse, the American media (and to a lesser extent the British) seem to function under the premise that people having sex is something unusual and worthy of note. And though most men have paid for sex at least once, many do it on a regular basis, at least one of any moderate-sized group of women has taken money for it, and most women have taken some non-monetary thing of value for it, the press inevitably treats information about such transactions as not only newsworthy, but positively scandalous. If the man happens to be some sort of official, it’s even worse:
An undercover FBI agent has been accused in court documents of spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on prostitutes in the Philippines for himself and others during an international weapons trafficking probe last year…The agent, who wasn’t identified in court documents, paid up to $2,400 each time he went to brothels with [Sergio] Syjuco and [two] other [Filipinos] to reward them for their work…[Syjuco and the others are charged with conspiracy and face up to 20 years in prison.] “I have never seen anything like this during my career as a criminal defense lawyer,” [public defender John] Littrell [said]…”I hope that the Department of Justice takes these allegations seriously, does a complete investigation, and ensures that whoever authorized this outrageous misconduct is held accountable”…federal prosecutors acknowledged in court documents that the agent sought nearly $15,000 in reimbursements for “entertainment” and other expenses related to the investigation…
Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: Littrell is totally full of shit, unless by “anything like this” he means operatives being prosecuted for standard operating procedure. Because that’s what this is: standard. Typical. Mundane. Par for the course. Business as usual. What’s more, it has to be that way; human beings are not machines, and they need to eat, drink, bathe, sleep and relax. So if you run an organization which requires its employees to travel, you had better pay for those things when they travel on your business or else you’ll soon find that nobody wants to go on business trips for you. And really, why should they? If it weren’t for you they’d be home spending their time as they like, so it’s only right that you pay for their upkeep while they’re there. Nor is it any of your concern if they spend the money on hookers rather than overpriced dinners; as long as the per diem is the same, why should you care whether the employee spends it at a restaurant, a movie theater, a bookstore or a brothel as long as he’s happy and productive?
By now some of you are saying, “but this wasn’t a case of the agent spending his designated food money on hookers; he was entertaining other people as a reward.” That’s true, but it’s actually no different. The per diem is, in a way, a bribe or reward for travel; it’s always more than is strictly necessary for survival. In other words, it’s money the employer spends to get people to do what he wants them to do, and expense accounts are the same thing except that the people being rewarded are contractors, associates, customers, etc. As I explained in “Perquisites”, “the employee is allowed considerable leeway in spending at restaurants, clubs and other entertainment venues because it is recognized that a little wining and dining goes a long way toward winning customers (and that includes politicians being wooed by lobbyists). In other words, a few hundred dollars worth of food and entertainment can result in many thousands or even millions in business.” It’s no different for government agents; the FBI asked Syjuco and the other Filipinos to do hard, dangerous work dealing with gangsters as part of a weapons “sting”. People don’t do that sort of thing for free, and if taking them out for a good time at a brothel was the way to accomplish it, then how is that different from any other bribe?
Personally, I don’t think the government should be bankrolling elaborate and expensive deceptions designed to trick and bribe foreign nationals into smuggling, nor conducting the barbaric and mindlessly-wasteful “War on Drugs” which creates the drug cartels that drive the vast majority of weapon smuggling in the Western Hemisphere in the first place. But none of that is the source of the outrage; the prosecutors and the media aren’t questioning the morality of the Drug War, that of entrapping people or that of allowing US officials to engage in covert operations in sovereign foreign countries. No, what they’re so incensed about is “spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on prostitutes”, and no amount of inane “human trafficking” rhetoric can make that anything other than moralistic micromanagement. Well, if you’re inclined to sympathize with these hysterics I’ve got news for you: plenty of U.S. taxpayer dollars go into the purses of prostitutes every year; I myself probably banked somewhere in the six figures of such funds over the course of my career. There’s only one way to stop it: shrink the damned government down to a manageable number of employees, entirely eliminate the use of expense accounts and cut out any travel requirement for any government job. Good luck accomplishing that.
“I have never seen anything like this during my career as a criminal defense lawyer,”
LMAO
He’s probably shocked, shocked to find that gambling was going on, too!
While I agree with you on the majority of your post, I have to disagree with the last sentence. Eliminating travel (for any job where you are responsible for people or projects which are not in your immediate locale) is actually less efficient in many cases.
Recent personal case in point: I am responsible for aircraft which are assigned to a number of different areas, some on the east coast, some on the west coast. I took this job about two years ago, but for a variety of reasons had not had a chance to personally visit the west coast sites and had been conducting business via teleconference and phone calls. I finally had a chance to travel west two months ago, and at both west coast locations discovered significant issues that would have caused major disruption to operations had they not been discovered when they were. The key point is that I didn’t discover them in meetings or scheduled events, I found one out over casual conversation at lunch and the other during a chance meeting in a hallway. These weren’t cases where people were hiding things, just where the people involved hadn’t thought to bring them up, or weren’t in the meetings to begin with. These issues would probably not have been discovered until they became crisises had I not been there in person.
In my experience, and I used to travel a lot for various meetings and working groups, this is the norm, not the exception. I do much more work via teleconference now than I used to, and I find that teleconferences are MUCH less efficient comprehensive than a group of people physically present in a room. Not to mention the value of the networking that takes place at lunch and dinner (and/or especially the bar 🙂 ).
You’re not disagreeing with me at all; I reckon the juxtaposition of the two stupid suggestions (“eliminate travel” and “eliminate expense accounts”) with the very sensible one (“shrink the size of the government”) was what did it. I’m really not advocating the two stupid ones; I’m just pointing out none of it can be done if people want the kind of centralized, imperial, all-roads-lead-to-Rome government we have.
I don’t know how they do it in the US, but in most countries, business “entertainment” is synonymous with prostitution and related sex work, plus very expensive alcohol.
Asking agents (diplomats, LEOs, businessmen) of the USA not to pay for prostitutes when in foreign lands would render them largely ineffective, as well as providing the “enemy” with an excellent method of detecting American agents.
Enemy: Get me a girl, preferably a blonde.
US Agent: Um, I can’t do that. How about a nice hamburger instead?
Enemy: Let me guess – CIA? DEA? Anti Trafficking NGO? (Shoots him in the head).
It’s synonymous with those in the US as well; Americans just prefer to live in Fantasyland about it.
I was in especially South Korea and to a much lesser extent Japan and Hong Kong for most of the decade between 1996 and 2006. I knew other men who went to other East Asian countries and talked with them at the saloons and other places when women weren’t arounf of many different nationalities. I am an American man. Even in private business or friends going out on the town, prostitution is what most men do there, and they do it in groups. They often went to the brothels and other venues where prostitutes were. It’s all part of the entertainment system. I don’t know how much things have changed since 2006, but I suspect it is similar now. americans have the worst views of prostitution of any advanced 1st world country I have any awareness.
“…the American media (and to a lesser extent the British) seem to function under the premise that people having sex is something unusual and worthy of note.
Perhaps, but the US media have the protection of the Right to Free Speech to rely upon. The fear of libel is very apparent in the UK, and London has gained a very dubious title as libel capital of the world. I’d say that the UK press/media is inhibited by this fear; the only way they can say exactly what they want to say is when the person is dead. There were no murmurings about the late Jimmy Saville during his lifetime, it’s only now, a year after his death, that we are hearing what “everybody” knew but “nobody” said.
When they spend that money in the country they call it “stimulus”.
I for one am shocked, shocked I say, at the notion that loyal government employees have thoughts of a sexual nature. And that they act on such desires when provided with considerable resources, implicitly for just such a purpose? Well I never!
I always just assumed government workers satisfied themselves by creating delays and hassling regular human beings.
The hypocrisy is amazing, given that government agents are a significant part of the clientele. Indeed in the old East Germany, the prohibitionist regime was basically all of the clients.
(Neo-) Feminists of the Left and moral crusaders on the Right agree; Heterosexual(Strait) men have no right to experience pleasure from women, and how dare they!!!
Now that I’m home and can check my stash of papers, I just wanted to ask about this…
“And though most men have paid for sex at least once, many do it on a regular basis…”
The average of the estimates I’ve seen for lifetime paying for sex are around 15%, and around 4% on an annual basis. I’ve never seen anything in the neighbourhood of >50% (“most”) lifetime prevalence of paying for sex. Do you remember where you got your estimates from? And apologies if you’ve posted this before.
The problem with those numbers is that A) they dropped dramatically at the same time as social attitudes toward prostitution became increasingly negative, in the ’80s and ’90s; B) the drop corresponds with a change in the wording of the questions, from phraseology like “paid for sex” to negative phraseology like “procured a prostitute”; C) they also started to drop after researchers insisted that the number of women cheating MUST be the same as the number of men doing so, ignoring the hooker contribution; D) they don’t jibe with the economics of the trade, which require much larger numbers of participants than that; and E) they don’t jibe with numbers from other Western countries. Kinsey found that 69% of men have paid at least once, and other studies show 20% occasionally and 4% frequently, which matches both my own observations and the economics. One more thing: roughly 5% of modern men admit to losing their virginity with a prostitute, which if one took that 15% seriously would be pretty ridiculous. Those categories look to me as though they’re shifted down one notch; notice there’s not even a category for “frequently”, even though a substantial number of men hire hookers in the weekly to monthly range.
Those are good points…
A) True, although it also corresponded with the shift from convenience sampling towards more representative probability sampling. I’m not sure more biased responses from stigma (etc) can account for the entire ~54 percentage point gap.
B) But even studies using “paid for sex” generate similarly low estimates in the 15-20% range for lifetime prevalence in modern studies.
C) On that note, you may be interested in Brewer et al. (2000, PNAS, 97, 12385-12388) which uses estimates of number of sex workers and their clients to close the constant gap between men and women for self-reported number of sex partners in the last year. I think that stats are skewed too much towards high turn-over, high-volume street workers, but you could get the same results by shifting more towards a greater number of lower-volume escorts/call girls and brothel workers.
D) Wouldn’t that depend on supply (number of workers, how much they work) and demand (number of clients, number of dates wanted)? I agree though that if the prevalence of workers is really anything like ~0.285% among women (from NZ estimates), then you need a lot more than ~1% of the male population hiring them each year (and that’s not even frequent hiring, just the overall annual rate!).
E) Most of the modern studies I’ve looked at have been from other Western countries (e.g., UK, Australia).
All these discrepancies just makes me want to figure out how get a decent estimate of number of clients and how frequently they hire and add that as a component to the study. 😛
Precisely. You need about, oh, say 4% of men hiring regularly, and I can tell you from personal experience that regulars are less than 1/5 of all customers…which brings the “once in a while” guys up to something like 4% x 5 or…whaddaya know, 20%!
Any study that tells me that only 15% of all men have EVER hired an escort is fucking lying.
In defense of the studies, I don’t think they’re “lying”; it’s just that it’s something that’s incredibly hard to study even using perfectly valid methods. The main explanation I can come up with is that while ~0.285% of women are working at any given time, the number working ‘full-time’ is much, much smaller (and so can be sustained by a much smaller client base). But even using the (to my eyes) very small estimates of Brewer et al., that gives something like 22 clients per year per full-time-equivalent worker… which is obviously wrong.
Alternatively, “12 months” may not be a wide enough window to accurately capture the frequency of hiring workers. I know there was a study out of Britain a few years ago that generated a 5-year hiring estimate closer to 4.9% at the high-end of the confidence interval.
No, that 0.285% is for full-timers; the number of dilettantes is much higher. The problem is simply that modern men lie about seeing whores, and the researchers accept their lies. This makes me angry because the bogus studies are then used to frame paying for sex as a fringe behavior, which it isn’t by any stretch of the imagination.
I can only imagine how many of these men had their wives hovering in the background while they answered these telephone interview questions.
“Paid for sex? Why yes, several times a yea… I mean. NO, NEVER! WHAT KIND OF DEVIANT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR!?!?! I LOVE MY WIFE!!!”
Precisely. I think a much more interesting study would be a survey of the attitudes and beliefs of people who do sex work studies.
Would be comparatively easy to do. Maybe early next year when I’m waiting for the grant and ethics applications to clear for the main studies.
“Any study that tells me that only 15% of all men have EVER hired an escort is fucking lying.”
You mean it’s lying about fucking. 😉
Hmmm. I prefer lying fucking (or fucking lying) to fucking standing (or standing fucking). But anything involving fucking is fun!
It seems to me like we want to think humans, especially elected officials, somehow are grown in a hermetically-sealed vacuum in a lab somewhere. Sex is one of the four basic urges universal to all, and it’s time to understand that people like to- oh what’s the word- fuck. That’s it. If people think this is scandalous, wait until they find out the relationship of escorts to soldiers. Mind you, it’s a relationship that goes back thousands of years, but there’s been a willful denial on the subject. Maybe that could be the basis of a new blog post?
No, an old one. 😉
They were spending TAXPAYER DOLLARS on that!??! Oh my GAW-WAWD!!!
Anything these guys spend money on, from prostitutes to pro wrestling, from call girls to cell phones, from whores to hamburgers, is paid for with TAXPAYER DOLLARS. Government agents are paid by the taxpayers.
Sometimes you just want to get in a news editor’s face and say, in your best middle-school voice, “Well duh!”