Congress is furious at the Secret Service for consorting with hookers, which has traditionally been Congress’s role. – Andy Borowitz
Two years ago today I published “Hooker Humor”, in which I shared a few jokes about my profession. It was only a few for one simple reason: though there are hundreds of hooker jokes, the majority of them are tasteless, juvenile, vulgar and rely on offensive stereotypes about our being dirty, diseased, desperate and subhuman. There are, however, some funny, clever and even cute ones out there if one has the patience to look.
The Value of Sex
In the mid-1960s, two young people got married soon after university, where he earned a degree in business administration and she graduated magna cum laude in economics. On their wedding night, she asked him for $20 before they made love; he laughed about it, remembering their discussions about the economic value of women’s labor and the like, and handed her the money with a smile. The same thing happened the next time they had sex, and the next; though he was a bit surprised that she was carrying what he perceived as a kind of joke this far, he was a good sport about it and so made sure he always had a bit put aside in case he got horny.
This went on for 40 years, and even though they had sex less often as time went on she was always enthusiastically available for him (though she did raise her rate to $50 in the early ‘90s). Even before they married they had agreed it made more economic sense for her to stay at home and raise their children, of whom they eventually had four; she was an excellent manager of money, and he was always amazed at how far she could make his salary go even though they sent their kids to the best schools and never wanted for anything.
In later years they experienced a series of financial setbacks which cut into their savings, and as the economy worsened over the past few years the husband started to worry that there was just no way he would be able to retire at 65 as they had planned. Eventually he put aside his ego, sat his wife down at the table and asked her advice about their financial situation. She went to her filing cabinet, brought out a thick envelope and showed him a series of financial statements, stock certificates and the like, explaining that she had invested her earnings from sex in the stock market, and that her good judgment and keen economic instincts had eventually parlayed that long series of small fees into literally millions of dollars. Her husband was overjoyed, and everything was going beautifully until he blurted out, “If I had realized what you were doing, I would have given you all my business!”
Analogy
Joe and Harry were chatting at a bar, and Joe said, “I wish my wife would get off of my back about my watching porn; she claims if I really loved her I wouldn’t need that.”
Harry replied, “Oh, my wife used to say the same thing until I pointed out to her that I love my car, but I still like watching Nascar racing.”
“And that satisfied her?” asked Joe.
“Yep,” said Harry, “but it’s a good thing she didn’t think about the fact that I rent cars when I’m away on business trips.”
Venery
Four Oxford dons were engaged one evening in casual but learned conversation, and the topic turned to collective nouns such as “a pride of lions” or “a gaggle of geese”; since these are also called “venereal nouns”, one of the professors asked what a collection of prostitutes might be called. The four fell into silence for a moment, as they pondered the possibilities.
At last, one spoke: “How about ‘a jam of tarts’?” The others nodded in acknowledgement as they continued to consider the problem.
A second suggested “an essay of trollops.” Again, the others nodded, and soon a third proposed “a flourish of strumpets.” They all then looked to the fourth professor, who was the most senior and learned of them all, and one asked if he had any thoughts on the matter.
He paused for a few moments more and then replied, “An anthology of pros.”
Cheapskate
One evening a man who had worked late was walking toward the train station when he spotted a very attractive streetwalker; since his wife didn’t expect him home for some time he went up to her and asked her price. When she told him it was $100 he exclaimed, “A hundred? Don’t be ridiculous; I’ll give you forty!” She laughed at him and told him where he could put his forty, and he stalked off in a snit.
That weekend, he took his wife out to dinner at a restaurant not all that far from his workplace, and as they were walking back to the car whom should he see but the same streetwalker. He just looked straight ahead, hoping she wouldn’t recognize him, but when they passed she called out, “See what you get for forty bucks?”
The Old Man and the Prostitute
In the Days Before Cell Phones…
A man staying at a hotel in London picked up a tart card from a nearby phone box. Back in his hotel room he rang the number and a woman with a very sexy voice asked if she could be of assistance. “Yes” he said. “I’d like to know if you do bondage and discipline; I’m especially interested in getting a really hard spanking. Would that be something you could provide?”
The woman replied, “I’d really like to oblige you, sir, but if you press 9 first you’ll get an outside line.”
Memory Lapse
A extremely old man decided he wanted sex, so he went to the local stroll and when he saw one woman he really liked, he started flirting with her as if he were making a pass, ignoring her questions about what he wanted. When it became clear that he was just wasting her time, she told him to get lost but he continued bothering her, saying “I sure would like to get some action tonight.”
Exasperated, she cried “You’ve got to be kidding! You’re too old! You’re all finished.”
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.
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites. – George Bernard Shaw
If you haven’t read yesterday’s column, do so before reading this one or you won’t really understand. As I explained then, popular bloggers often get email from parasites asking to contribute guest posts; they always look something like this:
I write for an online education website that is focused on providing information to current and prospective students looking to take some classes online.
Historically, higher education has been the realm of the bourgeoisie, but this is changing as more people gain access to education through online avenues and free resources. I recently read a piece by NPR that told the story of a girl, Naylea Omayra Villanueva Sanchez, who was wheelchair bound and living in the Amazon, but was still attending college through the free University of the People.
In light of this article, I would love to add to the discussion by contributing a post to your blog. I want to focus on the potential, and potential limitations, of free university education, keeping different fields of study in mind.
Here is a link to a writing sample and my resource, take a look and get a feel for my writing style.
Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks in advance.
Best,
Rachel
Though the letter pretends to be from an individual it was clearly sent by a robot; I receive many of these, all of very similar construction except for the topics, and though it pretends to have read my blog the referenced post was clearly chosen via keyword or some such strategy (it’s an update column, not a cohesive essay). The follow-ups which come a couple of weeks later are all identically worded except for the signature, sending address and subject line:
Hi Maggie,
I wanted to follow up with you and make sure you had received my email I sent a little bit ago regarding my blog post idea.
Let me know your thoughts, I would love to work with you. Do not hesitate to get back to me with any questions!
Best regards,
{insert female name here}
As I explained yesterday, I was inspired by Ken White from Popehat to reply to these after receiving five of them in one afternoon; though I think Ken’s are much funnier, I still believe you’ll find my effort amusing.
Rachel Higgins [rachelhiggins711@gmail.com]; Charlotte Kellogg [charlottekellogg10@gmail.com]; Sarah Wenger [sarahwenger97@gmail.com]; Samantha Porter [samantha.porter99@gmail.com]; Alexa Thompson [thompsonalexa6@gmail.com]; Estelle Shumann [Estelle.Shumann@gmail.com]
RE: A Request to Contribute a Blogpost
Dear Rachel, Charlotte, Sarah, Samantha, Alexa and Estelle,
When I first started receiving emails from you and others like you I patiently explained that I’m perfectly capable of writing my own blog posts; in fact, I’ve managed to produce one a day for over two years now, more than 800 in all. What’s more, an awful lot of people tell me that my writing is exceptional; now, it’s possible that some of those are just trying to get in my pants, but considering the sheer number of such compliments, I think it’s safe to assume that at least some of them are sincere (especially since I happen to share their opinion). So as you might expect, I really don’t need any help from complete strangers, especially since there is an extremely high statistical likelihood that said strangers’ writing isn’t remotely of the same level of competence as mine.
But the letters just kept coming, so I started to ignore them and continued to do so until today, when five of you emailed me within three hours of one another; you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that all of your emails were exactly the same except for the subject line and signature! Clearly, this kind of synchronicity cannot be the product of random chance, and since you all have different names and email addresses and certainly wouldn’t try to deceive anyone about being real individuals, I am forced to conclude that the universe is trying to send me a message.
So I have wonderful news for y’all; I have decided that I will indeed allow your guest posts on my blog! Of course, there are a few minor conditions that I’m sure you’ll understand and will be happy to accept. Read them over and get back to me, and if you agree to them we can get started at your earliest convenience!
1) Since I know you must have extensively read my blog before sending your kind offers to help me via guest posting, you’ve noticed that its appearance and characteristics are very uniform, and that also goes for guest posts; I haven’t had very many of those, but you will note that when I did I still picked the titles and illustrations myself, and that I provided commentary on each. I’m sure that, being modern and egalitarian sorts of ladies, y’all wouldn’t want any special treatment, so obviously it won’t be an issue for me to say that I get to entitle each guest post as I see fit, to illustrate it with whatever pictures I think best, and to insert whatever comments or words of explanation I think necessary before, within and after the body of each of them.
2) I schedule tightly and plan my posts weeks ahead of time; furthermore, I have no desire to bore my readers and therefore consider variety very important. Just as I only publish one of each special feature per month, so I will only publish one guest post per month; however, I will expect all of the posts and the appropriate payment for each as soon as possible, but no later than October 31st in any case because I’ll need them for a special Halloween ritual I have in mind.
3) About that payment: it’s against WordPress rules for me to take money in exchange for access to my space, but I’m sure you’ll agree that my time and skills are valuable. In my last job I charged $300 per hour, and obviously you wouldn’t want me to settle for less than that. It should take roughly two hours to format, illustrate, publish and index each of your posts; sometimes, though, it takes a while to find a really fitting epigram, and on top of that I have to moderate any comments made on the post (which might trickle in for weeks afterward). So really, I think 3 hours would be a conservative estimate; therefore I’ll ask $900 per guest post, paid in advance via Paypal or Green Dot Card. This money is only for time and effort, and no other offer is implied nor should it be inferred.
4) One more thing: I’m sure you’ll understand that my safety is important, so I’ll need to screen each of you; please provide your full legal names, addresses, telephone numbers and places of employment so I can make sure you are who you say you are. Don’t worry, I’ll be very discreet; you won’t even know I checked.
Well, that’s about it; let me know your thoughts, because I would love to work with you. Do not hesitate to get back to me with any questions!
And what would you have me do?
Seek for the patronage of some great man,
And like a creeping vine on a tall tree
Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone? – Edmund Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
I really, really hate parasites; there’s just something inherently revolting about creatures that feed off of other beings not by openly and honestly attacking and devouring them, but by insidiously creeping onto or into their bodies, attaching themselves, draining blood or other vital essences and perhaps even multiplying until the unwitting host is dead. Nor is that death the quick, comparatively-merciful one afforded by a hungry hunter, but instead a slow, lingering, debilitating descent into sickness, weakness and eventual expiration which in the end leaves it a pathetic husk of its former self. I’ve never been disturbed by the sight of a carnivore killing its prey, but stray animals literally crawling with fleas and ticks, or biology-text photos of intestines jammed full of ascaris worms, are to me the stuff of nightmares.
That being the case, I’m sure you can guess how I feel about blog parasites, those creatures who attempt to derive their sustenance by infesting healthy, thriving blogs like mine. I don’t mean “scrapers” or plagiarists; though I certainly understand why some bloggers are very incensed by them, they don’t really bother me because their use of my material neither harms my reputation nor decreases my traffic (though I might feel differently if they were making money from my content when I wasn’t, and without acknowledging me). And I have no idea why some commercial entities have tried to frame quoting and linking as “copyright infringement”, nonsensical claims about “deep linking” notwithstanding; links and references are advertising and help a site to grow, and the vast majority of my traffic comes via deep links. In fact, linking is so good for a site that it’s precisely the raison d’être for the most common and debilitating form of blog parasitism, namely comment spam.
Those of you who don’t have blogs yourselves may be blissfully unaware of this plague, which pours into popular blogs every day like a veritable river of leeches. Some of it looks like real commentary, though extremely vague (“Thank you for sharing superb informations”), completely inappropriate (“I’ll be sure to order from you!”) or even composed of inapplicable criticisms (“You should proofread more carefully, this post is full of typos.”) What marks it as spam is that the website link in the poster’s name goes to a commercial site of some sort or to the client of an SEO scammer. Another common type contains nothing other than a number of links, and the most odious form is a gigantic wall of links for various pharmaceuticals, knockoffs of designer accessories, or things advertised in languages I can’t read (most often Russian or Polish).
Fortunately, the Akismet program monitors all comments and shunts spam into a folder for later review and discard; it’s extremely rare that it misses one, but even that goes into the moderation queue where I can catch it and throw it back into the spam folder. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s sometimes too aggressive and mistakes legitimate comments (even from regular posters) for spam, I would simply empty the folder without looking at it because scanning the contents of that folder now takes up a measurable fraction of my time here. But even though that is a drain on my resources, it’s nothing compared to the damage this blog would suffer if it got through; 72% of all attempted comments over the life of the site have been spam, which will give you some idea of how repellent and uninviting the comment threads would be if they got through. Considering that a large portion of the success of this blog comes from the stimulating and entertaining discourse in those threads, I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that these parasites have the power to severely weaken a site by making it look ridiculous and unprofessional and rendering its comment threads virtually inaccessible.
Another (though fortunately vastly less common) kind of comment-thread parasite is one we might call the “Missionary”; this is a guy who searches the internet for comment threads on which he can post long, repetitive and link-filled rants on the topic of his one track (and he never has more than one). For example, there was the guy who tried to post seven column-length comments about the Whore of Babylon on “Harlots of the Bible”, and the more recent lunatic who attempted a couple of dozen long, viciously misogynistic, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory posts on “Pendulum”. One might suggest that perhaps these people might simply get their own blogs, but they don’t because nobody would read them; a blog has to be interesting and to consist of more than one single endlessly-repeated (and generally hateful) idea in order to attract readers, so the missionary sallies forth on his one-man crusade, with the intent of feeding his ego on other bloggers’ hard-won audiences.
The last type I want to talk about today is one I’ll call the “Self-invited Guest”; this comes in the form of an email from some entity representing itself as a woman who asks if “she” could please write a guest post on one’s blog. Keep in mind, this isn’t a famous person or one connected to one’s general topic; I mean, it isn’t Dolly Parton offering to write about her views on decriminalization or something like that. No, this is an endless succession of similarly (not to mention poorly) worded emails offering to make guest posts about industrial organization psychology in the workplace, the great shortage of nurses, the rigors of today’s marketing programs or the joy of free online university courses. At first I replied to them, politely explaining that I’m quite capable of writing all my own posts (thank you very much), and that on the rare occasions when I have a guest blogger it will be someone I know and respect. When they started coming more often I just ignored them, only to find that they would ask repeatedly like a poorly-raised child begging for candy at the supermarket. When Ken White of Popehat receives this sort of trash he replies with absolutely hilarious letters, always about ponies in some way or another; until September 26th I never felt inspired to adopt Ken’s strategy, but on that day I received five identically-worded follow-ups, and soon discovered that Ken had also heard from them (her? it?) again. So I wrote my own response and sent it to all five (plus a new one I had received three days earlier); though I despair of ever reaching Ken’s level of genius in this area, I’ll share my humble attempt in tomorrow’s column.
The thing all these have in common, and what differentiates them in my mind from scrapers and the like, is that they not only want to feed on my work, popularity and traffic, but damage and weaken my blog in the process. Imagine comment threads full of pointless sentences alternating with enormous, ugly ads and hateful crackpottery attached to dreary, inane, inarticulate posts on subjects you couldn’t possibly care less about; how long would you stick around for that? Spammers, hacks and nuts lack the ability to compete with other internet content or to draw an audience on their own, so they attempt to worm their way into a healthy site, drain it for all they can get and then move on to the next victim.
No one can evade the fact that historically, the state is a blood-thirsty monster, which has been responsible for more violence, bloodshed and hatred than any other institution known to man. – Roy A. Childs, Jr.
[A] silly uberfeminist crusader…once called me a sex addict in a national newspaper…To some…[that] would be the gravest insult; to me it was the intellectual equivalent of claiming I am Father Christmas. – Brooke Magnanti
A southwest Missouri woman who says she shared her bed for years with her husband and his sex slave has decided she needs help defending herself against five federal charges. Marilyn Bagley… is charged with conspiracy, sex trafficking, forced labor trafficking, document servitude and use of an interstate facility to facilitate unlawful activity. She and her husband, Edward, are scheduled for trial in February.
Zimbabwe Parliamentarians against HIV and AIDS…wants government to decriminalise commercial sex work…The Director of the Public Personalities against AIDS Trust, Tendai Westerhof, [also] condemned criminalisation of sex workers…“It is disappointing that the country still criminalises sex work…these people suffer a lot as a result of the discriminatory laws…They are raped and cannot report such abuses. As a result, they cannot access health services”…
Though the Australian cops in this story subscribe to fashionable “end demand” malarkey, some of them also admit that client persecution harms streetwalkers:
As a crackdown on kerb crawlers in St Kilda intensifies, street sex workers could be moving…to…Dandenong or Footscray, or [using smartphone] apps to meet clients in unsafe areas. Police tried unsuccessfully for decades to curb the trade by targeting workers…But halfway through the new two-year strategy, they noticed that the switch to targeting clients was having unwanted consequences. ”If we do push them out of the area, they won’t necessarily all leave the industry – and they’ll either adopt online or they’ll go and work in another location”…said [Senior Sergeant Brad Daly]. ”We might be creating things that we haven’t thought of yet”…lawyer Vanda Hamilton works with more than 50 legal and illegal sex workers and said…she feared many were being forced into troubling scenarios. She said the only way to ensure safety was to follow New South Wales’ example by legalising street-sex work…”You’re never going to stop sex work, you’re just going to push it so far underground that you can’t help people”…
Guess what, Brad? Virtually none of them are leaving the industry; they’re just going where you can’t see them.
Less than a month after approving restrictions on Halloween activities by registered sex offenders, the city of Simi Valley has been sued…the…law bans Halloween displays and outside lighting every Oct. 31…[and] requires a sign on the front door in letters at least an inch tall: “No candy or treats at this residence.” Both the prohibition on decorations and the mandatory sign violate free speech rights, according to the lawsuit. A total of 119 registered sex offenders live in Simi Valley…None has been involved in crimes involving children on Halloween, according to police, who say they have no records of any such crime occurring in Simi Valley during Halloween trick-or-treating…
…The Daily Mail…claims [that young men] are addicted…[to] Viagra…[which unlike sex] is a pharmaceutical drug…[which] could [conceivably produce] physical dependency…[their “proof” consists of an]…interview [with] exactly one guy who uses Viagra a lot during sex…and…one…“psychosexual counselor”…who says this is “just a small sample of the problem”…Any studies…Any scientific research in any labs anywhere? Because I…don’t see any. At. All. Reading further down the article I see their real target: porn “addiction”…[and] sexually empowered women…How dare the ladies express interest and enjoyment in sex! Why won’t we just lie back and think of England like we’re supposed to!?…
Mere days after I added it to my Amazon wishlist, a reader who prefers to remain anonymous sent me a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, which I somehow never got around to reading before. Thank you so very much!
Hey, kids! Fight “human trafficking” for fun and profit! Implicate your neighbors! Persecute sex workers! Win big prizes! “To raise awareness of human trafficking…the Department of Justice and Equality in Dublin and the Department of Justice in Belfast will launch a photography and video competition for Third Level students…Research human trafficking and present your understanding of the issue through a photograph or short video…Winners of each category will receive…1st prize €1,000…2nd prize €500…3rd prize €250.”
Here’s an interesting article debunking the fallacious notion that some kinds of porn are more “positive” than others, that “erotica” is intrinsically different from porn and that men can be “taught” to reject the kind of porn they prefer in favor of the kind women prefer…argued from a marketing perspective rather than a traditionally psychological one. One important point: “Human minds are not passive and infinitely malleable receptacles prone to any form of socialization and learning. Successful marketers are well aware of this reality. Ideologues, including some academics in the ivory tower, have much to learn!”
Remember when controversy over contraception was only something we read about in history books or in reference to unusually conservative Catholics? I sure do. But over the last two decades that equine carcass has been dragged out of the glue factory and is once again being set upon by sex-hating control freaks trying to call attention away from the uncontrolled tumescence of government, national debt and the police state. The fact that the public obediently paid attention to this distraction has enabled lots of crazy people, including a group of nuns who produced an anti-contraception video chock full of propaganda because they obviously forgot that lying makes Baby Jesus cry:
This week Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half The Sky premieres on PBS as a two-part miniseries, providing an opportunity for his audience to step into his well-worn white savior shoes…viewers will survey the lives of young women whom Kristof and WuDunn have chosen as the best ciphers for their agenda…to…“turn oppression into opportunity”…[by] proposing dubious schemes for advancing women’s rights—like arresting sex workers in order to “rescue” them from prostitution, or enthusiastically supporting the creation of “sweatshops” to accommodate sex workers and other women in the global south…
In response, Moore & Grant presented a “collective evaluation” of Nicholas Kristof, in other words excerpts from essays by Laura Agustín, Teju Cole and many others (including yours truly). The article is also mentioned in this Buzzfeed article, which shows the outcry is getting big enough for even the usually-oblivious media to notice.
…A 20-year-old Brazilian woman is auctioning off her virginity for a one-time tryst on an airplane…Catarina Migliorini says she’ll donate some of the money to provide housing for poor families in her native Santa Catarina…the Internet bidding [has already] reached $160,000…[and] ends Oct. 15…Migliorini insisted in a statement to the Sao Paulo daily Folha that…”For me, it’s not prostitution…when someone does something once in his or her life, this is not considered a profession. If you take a picture and it comes out good, you are not a photographer because of it”…The Daily Mail reported that Migliorini is [also]…part of an Australian film project called Virgins Wanted. She’s getting $20,000 and a 90-percent cut of the auction price…
The HuffPo comments are, of course, predictably disgusting. Meanwhile, Slate presents this series of portraits of female Iranian singers, who are legally barred from singing on stage for a general audiences because it is “immodest”. This is not a hypothetical reductio ad absurdum; it is the natural result of busybodies having control over women’s interactions with men and attempting to draw imaginary lines between “good” and “immoral” behavior.
Rachel Aimee, one of the founders of the late $pread magazine, covers one specific aspect of the “sex workers as mothers” topic: deciding if, when and how to tell one’s children that one is a sex worker. She interviews an escort, a stripper, a dominatrix, a nude model and a sex educator, and though as you might expect she doesn’t reach a definitive conclusion, she presents a lot of worthwhile food for thought.
A pornographic website has launched a fundraising effort for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, but the nonprofit says it wants nothing to do with the campaign…the…website said it would donate 1 cent for every 30 views of certain videos featuring breasts during October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month…[but the Komen organization said] “We are not a partner, not accepting donations, and have asked them to stop using our name”…
Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers. – William Penn
All too often, the allies of sex workers make arguments that, though well-meant and partially correct, contain some glaring flaw that spreads disinformation, undermines the work of other advocates or, in the worst cases, actually cedes ground to the enemy; today we’ll look at an excellent example of this in a recent essay by Ruth Messinger of the American Jewish World Service. Messinger’s heart is obviously in the right place, and many of the points she makes are right on target; in fact, only about four sentences would have to be removed to make it nearly perfect, and most of the people “tweeting” or linking the post apparently didn’t even catch them. But as the majority of you have probably noticed, these pretty brown eyes don’t miss much.
A few years ago, I traveled to Thailand where I met a sex worker for the very first time…she very succinctly told me about her life: “These were my options: I could be apart from my children for 10 hours each day while working in a sweatshop sewing buttons on shirts, or I could spend the day with my kids and, at night, talk to an interesting Western man, lie down with him for 20 minutes in a familiar, safe place and make a lot of money. Which would you choose?” Like many Americans in my generation, I was taught that prostitution is immoral, “dirty” and coercive…[but] in recent years, I’ve heard countless stories from sex workers themselves [and discovered that they] are much like me: they work hard and they care about their kids. But our lives are radically different in one fundamental way. These women are denied the basic human rights I’ve always had: protection from violence, access to healthcare, and the opportunity to earn a living however I choose.
Nearly everywhere in the world, sex workers are detained, arrested, fined and driven out of their homes or places of work…discriminatory policies enable police to rape and beat sex workers and confiscate their belongings, including condoms, which increases their risk to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Religious groups, police officers and non-governmental organizations routinely carry out violent raids on adult brothels. This violence is often justified as a “rescue operation” and legitimated by anti-prostitution laws…
So far so good; if the whole thing was like that you wouldn’t be reading about it in this context. The problem arises when she bypasses an enemy position without attacking it, thus leaving her flank vulnerable:
…To be clear, not all people involved in sex work are involved by choice. One of the core challenges in fighting for sex workers’ rights is making the distinction between sex work, a chosen profession, and sex trafficking, the forced migration of human beings—often minors—for sexual exploitation and coercive labor. Trafficking is a pervasive global problem, and many governments around the world have rightly passed anti-trafficking legislation…
By pretending there is a bright, clear demarcation between choice and coercion, as though all sex workers were either “happy hookers” or miserable, passive, pathetic slaves, Messinger throws the door wide open to neofeminist inanities such as “false consciousness”, to government demands for licensing and registration, to detention of foreign sex workers, to denying the agency of those who choose to migrate even when they know or at least suspect their conditions will be harsh, to myths about “Stockholm syndrome” and women “afraid to testify against their traffickers”, to imposition of politically-determined definitions of “coercion” and to endless debates about what fraction of sex workers are “coerced”, how to determine whether they are and whether police must accept their word that they aren’t. Furthermore, to accept that “trafficking” (which as we have seen is an essentially-meaningless term used to mean nearly anything governments and fanatics want it to mean) is a “pervasive global problem” is to allow a Trojan horse inside one’s walls, and its cargo is always her very next phrase: “rightly-passed anti-trafficking legislation”. The mythic menace of “trafficking” convinces true believers that it’s somehow a new problem requiring new laws, when in fact the great majority of countries already had laws against abduction, extortion, involuntary servitude, assault, fraud and every other crime which supposedly goes along with “trafficking” long before this moral panic started; those countries which don’t need to enact those laws, not draconian and tyrannically-overbroad laws against an ill-defined menace described with unsupported and ever-inflating numbers.
Messinger herself states that sex workers don’t need “rescue”, but by claiming as she does that “the distinction between trafficking and sex work is crystal clear,” she automatically implies that perhaps “trafficked slaves” do. Even if we ignore the often-deadly mistakes which occur with alarming regularity when thugs with firearms are allowed to smash their way into buildings by surprise, it is clear that defining any group of people as intrinsically helpless, and therefore allowing the state to make decisions for them, inevitably leads to abuse and corruption. If all people were allowed the freedoms she lists in the latter part of her article (including freedom of migration, association, occupational choice and equal protection under the law), there would be far less opportunity for unprincipled predators (with or without official titles) to exploit them, and those who were truly victimized wouldn’t have to be afraid to ask for help.
Anything worth doing is worth doing well. – English proverb
I’m often kidded for eschewing “smart phones”, driving decades-old cars, and the like; though I’m not averse to new technology, neither am I involved in the typical mad dash to embrace it simply because it is new. I tend to react to new ways of doing things with the same skepticism I apply to everything else: I ask, is there really anything wrong with the way I’m doing it now? Does this new approach somehow substantially improve upon it? Does it save time, cost less, give better results, etc? Is the new solution actually inferior to the old in any way? And if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, does the degree of improvement justify whatever trouble or expense is involved in the switch itself? Sometimes, my decision is in favor of change, which is why I embraced Twitter, now make extensive use of embedded video and bought my DVD burner when they were still rather pricey. But other times I conclude that there is insufficient reason for change, or even that the “new and improved” method is anything but; this is why I still make popcorn the old-fashioned way.
My younger readers may not remember a time when popcorn was made in a pot rather than a microwave oven, but this innovation was actually fairly recent (dating to 1989). Since I had already perfected my popping technique about 5 years before that I was, as you might expect, in no great rush to try out this “improvement” (especially since I didn’t even own a microwave oven until 1991). I can’t tell you exactly when I first tried it, but I suspect it was when someone made a bag in the library break room; I can, however, tell you that I was wholly unimpressed with it. Though it smelled just as delicious as regular popcorn, it suffered from the same problem as air-popped corn: the absence of oil in the popping process resulted in dry flakes to which salt would not adhere, thus producing a product roughly as appetizing as Styrofoam. And though the industry rapidly solved that problem with artificial butter and flavor coatings, the last batch I tasted (perhaps three years ago) was still noticeably inferior to proper popcorn, and the plethora of unpopped kernels invariably left behind offend my Scottishness. Furthermore, I’ve always been at a loss to understand why anybody with access to a stove would bother with it; microwave popcorn takes just as long to prepare, and it’s dramatically more expensive.
But a couple of weeks ago, I saw news of concerns that the chemical diacetyl, which is used in microwave popcorn’s butter flavoring, could be much more toxic than previously believed, and though I’m not one to encourage food panics I thought that those readers who are concerned, or who just want to eat real popcorn at home again, might appreciate Maggie’s very own method of preparing perfect popcorn.
What You’ll Need
First, get a bag of cheap popping corn from the grocery store. Don’t waste your money on “gourmet” popping corn; once you get the hang of it you’ll find that even the cheapest generic corn produces exactly the same big, fluffy flakes with very few unpopped kernels. Next, the oil: I usually use a mixture of vegetable oil and bacon grease, but I honestly think you can use soybean oil, rapeseed (canola) oil or whatever other liquid oil (not shortening or butter) you have handy without materially altering the results. You’ll also need butter or margarine; modern “spreads” which are less than 50% fat actually work best, but if you want to use butter or high-fat margarine I’ll tell you how below. You’ll also need a standard-sized brown paper grocery bag, and table salt plus whatever other seasonings you fancy (you can even use seasoned salt or a spice mixture).
The pot is the most critical component of the process. Choose a light two-quart saucepan; I find aluminum works best, but a thin-walled steel pot should do just as well. Do not use a heavy iron or steel pot; it will heat too slowly for this purpose, and its weight will make the vigorous shaking necessary for popping too difficult (and probably damage your burner in the process). Repeated use over high heat will destroy Teflon, so you might select an old pot whose coating has fallen apart. The lid should fit snugly, but not lock on; a too-loose lid may come off while you’re shaking the pot, but a locked one will not allow room for expansion. Once you find a pot that works perfectly, hold onto it; I’ve been using the same one for about 25 years.
The Method
1) Place the pot on the largest available burner and add 3 tablespoons (45 ml) of oil; measure out 1/3 cup (80 ml) of popping corn, open the paper bag and place it nearby on the counter or floor. Finally, place the pot lid upside down within reach, and put a heaping tablespoon (roughly 20 ml) of margarine in it; if using butter or full-fat margarine use half as much and put a scant tablespoon of water (about 10 ml) in the lid as well.
2) Turn the burner to high heat, and pick up one popcorn kernel. When the oil starts to smoke, throw the kernel into it and wait. When it pops, add the rest of the popping corn and then turn the lid over onto the pot; the margarine or butter and water will fall into the hissing oil when you do so. If the oil starts to smoke a lot more before the test kernel pops, proceed as if it had popped because you may have inadvertently chosen a bad kernel. Proper oil temperature is very important; the water (or water component of the margarine) helps to moderate it so most of the corn reaches popping temperature at the same time (rather than over a long stretch of time as microwave popcorn does).
3) As soon as the lid is on, start shaking the pot vigorously back and forth; the idea is to heat the kernels evenly and keep the popped corn from sticking to the pot. You don’t need to look like you’re trying to erode the burner with friction, but don’t be too prissy with it either. After a little while (roughly a minute, maybe less) you’ll start to hear popping; if you’ve done everything right it will all pop pretty quickly after that point, and you may find the popped corn actually lifts the lid off of the pot! Don’t worry if that happens; it means you’ve done everything perfectly.
4) Once the popping slows down turn off the heat, but keep shaking the pot until the popping stops; then, dump the popcorn into the brown paper bag. If you’re making more than one batch, do so; you want to be finished popping before moving on to the next step. A standard paper bag can comfortably fit two batches, but you can make it work for three.
5) Salt the popcorn, then roll the top of the bag down some and hold it tightly. Shake the bag to distribute the salt, turning it upside down and sideways to get good coverage. Taste the popcorn, repeating the salting and shaking process if necessary, then add whatever other spices you like and shake again. If you’re using seasoned salt, this is all one step. Once you’re satisfied, cut the top off of the bag and serve the popcorn from the bottom half.
6) Don’t be discouraged if it isn’t perfect the first time; popping corn is so incredibly cheap you can try again without much waste. The most common problems result from oil temperature: if the popcorn burns you need to shake more or use more water/margarine, but if the corn pops slowly or the finished flakes are small, hard and not puffy, it means you used too much water or margarine. Also, don’t be afraid to experiment with flavors; we like to use Tony Chachere’s or pepper and garlic, but I use all sorts of different things (even grated parmesan cheese). Enjoy!
A new disease? I know not, new or old,
But it may well be called poor mortals’ plague:
For, like a pestilence, it doth infect
The houses of the brain…
Till not a thought, or motion, in the mind,
Be free from the black poison of suspect. – Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour (II, iii)
One of the problems with trying to get people to recognize the problems in the cultural, political and legal status quo is that they have an amazing capacity for seeing exactly what they want to see, and for ignoring contradictory evidence when it’s right in front of them. Jacob Sullum of Reason pointed out a fine example of this in the New York Times obituary of the brilliant and crusading psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who died at the beginning of last month. Sullum wrote:
The New York Timesobituary for Thomas Szasz…says his critique of psychiatry “had some merit in the 1950s…but not later on, when the field began developing more scientific approaches”…In fact, however, Szasz’s radicalism, which he combined with a sharp wit, a keen eye for obfuscating rhetoric, and an uncompromising dedication to individual freedom and responsibility, was one of his greatest strengths…driven by a “passion against coercion,” [Szasz] zeroed in on the foundational fallacies underlying all manner of medicalized tyranny…
In response to the Times’ claim that Szasz’s criticism of the “mental health” industry lacked “merit” after the 1950s, Sullum points out that:
…it was not until 1973 that the…APA…stopped calling homosexuality a mental disorder. More often, psychiatry has expanded its domain. Today it encompasses myriad sins and foibles, including smoking, overeating, gambling, shoplifting, sexual promiscuity, pederasty, rambunctiousness, inattentiveness, social awkwardness, anxiety, sadness, and political extremism…As Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine,observed last year…”there are no objective signs or tests for mental illness…and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology.” In other words, mental illnesses are whatever psychiatrists say they are…
Though I don’t often mention it, I actually minored in psychology and could have turned it into a dual major with only about two more semesters of work. I say this not to grant myself authority, but to explain why I’ve paid such close attention to developments in the field over the past three decades. During that time I’ve often been dismayed or even alarmed by what I see, especially in the area of fad diagnoses of serious mental disorders made for no reason other than to please parents, cater to legal authorities, make money or (worst of all) go along with the crowd. Multiple personality disorder was once considered so rare that DSM-II and DSM-III both classed it as a subtype of dissociative disorder, but in the mid-1980s somebody realized that its description in DSM-III was so vague that practically any mode of behavior could be described as a separate personality, and it soon became a hugely popular fad diagnosis. Until the error was rectified in DSM-IV over 40,000 cases were diagnosed in the US alone, much to the delight of the “repressed memory” crowd, the drivers of the “Satanic Panic” and criminal prosecutors; for example, in 1990 a Wisconsin man was charged with rape for consensual sex with a 26-year-old woman on the grounds that she had multiple personality disorder and the personality of a six-year-old had unexpectedly emerged during intercourse.
In 1994 the APA closed the loophole which allowed over-diagnosis of multiple personalities, but it simultaneously opened (or at least neglected to plug) many others; since then normal behaviors have been increasingly pathologized by quacks, hired guns and those whose professional ethics take a back seat to promoting an agenda. Much of this involves uncommon or even rare disorders being misapplied to much larger groups, such as claims that sex workers commonly suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or that migrant workers who deny being passively “trafficked” do so because of Stockholm syndrome; fully 10% of American schoolboys are now being drugged daily because of quacks misdiagnosing their normal boyishness as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in order to please female teachers and single mothers who subscribe to “social construction of gender” and therefore refuse to accept that normal male behavior is innately different from normal female behavior. But even beyond that, imaginary “disorders” are created to describe perfectly normal human conduct which politicians find inconvenient or fanatics dislike; for example, the totally understandable resentment young people feel when they’re treated as “children” (or spoiled younger kids’ predictable tantrums when they don’t get their own way) is now pathologized as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, and the normal male attraction to adolescent girls is both pathologized by many psychologists and wrongfully conflated with pedophilia in the public mind. The state, of course, uses this omnipathologization as a tool of increasing state control:
…For more than half a century, Szasz stubbornly highlighted the hazards of joining such a fuzzy, subjective concept with the force of law through involuntary treatment, the insanity defense, and other psychiatrically informed policies. Consider “sexually violent predators,” who are convicted and imprisoned based on the premise that they could have restrained themselves but failed to do so, then committed to mental hospitals after completing their sentences based on the premise that they suffer from irresistible urges and therefore pose an intolerable threat to public safety. From a Szaszian perspective, this incoherent theory is a cover for what is really going on: the retroactive enhancement of duly imposed sentences by politicians who decided certain criminals were getting off too lightly—a policy so plainly contrary to due process and the rule of law that it had to be dressed up in quasi-medical, pseudoscientific justifications…
This is the greatest danger of what Szasz termed “the ‘therapeutic state,’ the unhealthy alliance of medicine and government that blesses all sorts of unjustified limits on liberty, ranging from the mandatory prescription system to laws against suicide.” Once mercenary or authoritarian physicians and psychologists get in bed with the government, their authority can be added to its own to justify control not only over persons, but also over foods, drugs, sex acts or anything else they can be bribed or commanded to declare “unhealthy”.
Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed. – Victor Hugo
In anticipation of my favorite holiday, I try to cover as many spooky or horror-oriented subjects as possible in October; it was thus fortunate that I discovered this article on the topic of African witchcraft beliefs a couple of weeks ago. Alas, it’s not one of the sort we can have fun with; instead it’s just another “sex trafficking” hysteria piece. What makes it interesting, however, is that the entire article is a perfect and extended example of “pot calling kettle black”.
In parts of Africa, witchcraft is becoming increasingly linked to a modern form of slavery: human trafficking. Through ritual “oaths of protection”, witchcraft provides a convenient way to traffic and mentally dominate victims, who are easily silenced with the threat that any disobedience will be punished by the spiritual world. This has left the phenomenon hard to detect. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has recently almost doubled its 2005 estimate, and revealed that there are currently 20.9 million victims of trafficking in the world. 3.7 million of these victims reside in Africa. Yet in 2011, there were only 257 prosecutions, 218 convictions and 10,094 victims identified on the continent.
It’s obvious from the very first line that the writer of this story is every bit as credulous as the superstitious Africans about whom she writes; like them, she accepts fantastic claims on the word of “authorities” without asking for any proof whatsoever, and in fact considers the lack of proof to be “evidence” that dark forces are at work. It does not even occur to her to compare the small convictions-to-claimed-victims ratio in Africa with not-dissimilar ratios in Asia, Europe and North America, places where belief in black magic is far less common or profound; had she done so she would have noticed that this supposed “growing trend” has almost no demonstrable effect.
…belief in child witches in Nigeria cuts across all facets of society…For those who live in abject poverty, something that promises to explain their predicament can be very alluring…Consequently, a number of pastor‐prophets…have found their calling…In the European witch hunts of 400 years ago, victims tended to be of lower social status and elderly women. The demographic profile of the contemporary witch-accused are also mainly older women, but include successful younger women and increasingly children…
I think any comment I could make about this paragraph would be wholly superfluous, don’t you?
Over 95% of the children on the streets of Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria have been stigmatised as “witches” by pastors…According to UNICEF, “Living in the street is one of the common consequences of witchcraft accusations and is also an indicator of the scale of the phenomenon”…UNESCO notes that “poverty is the most visible cause of the vulnerability of women and children to trafficking in Nigeria”. An ILO report revealed that of the children who were released to traffickers by their parents in Nigeria, over 72% did so because they could not afford school fees. Half of those children never returned home…
If that first figure is even close to accurate, it’s a true tragedy…yet not so different from American culture, where about half of all homeless teens identify as homosexual or transgendered and another large fraction leave their homes due to some other sexual issue (such as incest). Given that similarity, do we really need “traffickers” to explain why many of these young people take up survival sex work or accept deals to get the hell out of Nigeria to some European country where they might be able to earn a living away from superstitious fanatics? And if the so-called “traffickers” do indeed get them to Europe, do we really need mumbo-jumbo to explain why they don’t want to betray those facilitators to the tender mercies of the same kind of self-important, persecutory authority figure who got them thrown out of their houses in the first place? The reporter also claims in this section that “One Nigerian study revealed that 19% of school children and 40% of street children surveyed had been trafficked,” but since that’s a clear absurdity (if they were “trafficked” how are they still in school?) I’m going to presume the term “trafficked” is being used as a catch-all which includes the sort of child labor which was common in the West until just over a century ago.
…In 2008, the Nigerian National Agency for Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP) advised that 90% of girls that had been trafficked to Europe were taken to shrines to take “oaths of secrecy”…[Detective Andrew] Desmond explains: “…The strong belief in the spirits makes this a powerful weapon for modern day slave traders”…These deeply-held…beliefs…cause huge problems for law enforcement officials who want victims to testify against their traffickers. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) incurred by a trafficking victim will often seem to them to confirm that the spirit world is inflicting retribution upon them…
The strong belief in the “innocence” of “children” makes this a powerful weapon for modern day witch hunters; these deeply-held beliefs cause huge problems for human rights advocates who want law enforcement officials to stop using “sex trafficking” as an excuse for increased persecution of sex workers and our clients. Furthermore, stress incurred by migrant sex workers as a result of police harassment will often seem to officials to confirm that invisible “traffickers” are inflicting fad-diagnosis “psychological” disorders upon them.
I have absolutely no doubt that some clever and manipulative criminals use widespread and entrenched cultural beliefs to control the gullible, but this is true of clever and manipulative people in every culture, including the criminal conspiracy we call “government” and the prohibitionist social engineers behind “sex trafficking” hysteria. And anyone who explains social problems or demonizes people he doesn’t like with unprovable claims of invisible, malevolent forces is the exact moral and intellectual equivalent of the juju men this narrative demonizes and the migrant women it patronizes in order to accomplish its xenophobic, prohibitionist goals.
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In the mid-1960s, two young people got married soon after university, where he earned a degree in business administration and she graduated magna cum laude in economics. On their wedding night, she asked him for $20 before they made love; he laughed about it, remembering their discussions about the economic value of women’s labor and the like, and handed her the money with a smile. The same thing happened the next time they had sex, and the next; though he was a bit surprised that she was carrying what he perceived as a kind of joke this far, he was a good sport about it and so made sure he always had a bit put aside in case he got horny.
