In reality, sex work isn’t stigmatised because it is dangerous. Sex work is dangerous because it is stigmatized. – Laurie Penny
This is a pretty good introduction to Storyville, though it has a few errors and two really odd misinterpretations: she refers to “not on the first floor of any building” as a “district”, and she only counts business owners (rather than individual whores) when discussing income. Worth watching for the pictures.
Since young colonies rarely have anything to recommend them to women, they often have a pronounced gender imbalance; King Louis XV solved the problem in New Orleans by sending a boatload of whores, and George III did the same thing 68 years later for Australia. The ship was named the Lady Juliana, and this recent article draws on a recently-unearthed jail log to tell a little about the ship and its passengers.
…a former Eatontown [New Jersey] detective accepted a plea agreement…[for raping] an informant. His victim…explained to the court…how [Philip] Emanuele used the threat of prison for a theft charge…to coerce her into performing oral sex…When she refused, he raped her…Emanuele acknowledged what he had done in open court, and was sentenced to 5 years of probation for criminal coercion, and 3 years of probation for tampering with evidence…
A New York district attorney has dropped a prostitution charge against former reality TV star Alicia Guastaferro…after further investigation revealed it was unmerited…The D.A. still plans to pursue [other] charges…Guastaferro…[and] attorney James D. Doyle [were found unconscious in Doyle’s car after]…a…motorist…[reported] a car being driven erratically…Guastaferro …told police Doyle pays her $500 to $700 to perform sexual acts and spend the night with him…
Yes, the cops actually filed a prostitution charge on the word of a semi-conscious drunk.
This San Francisco Weekly op-ed by Chris Hall is the best December 17th article by a non-sex worker I have ever seen. It deserves to be read in its entirety, but its tone is illustrated by the statement “…there really is no conversation about sex work…only a monologue by media and politicians with the workers themselves meant to stay silent. December 17 events represent a concerted effort to break that silence.”
Another Christmas present to sex workers from a journalist who isn’t one of us, but gets it; this one was published in The New Statesman by repentant neofeminist Laurie Penny:
…Laws regulating sex work are written…by people who have never done sex work and who have no sustained contact with those who do. The most well-meaning legislation…often backfires, pushing the sex trade further underground and giving the police licence to punish and victimise women…feminist author Ellen Willis termed this handkerchief-clutching zeal to “save” prostitutes, porn actresses and other “fallen” women “neo-Victorianism”…It’s a school of so-called women’s liberation that [believes]…work can’t possibly be the problem, so…If sex workers are victimised by the police and…face higher levels of violence and assault at work, then it can only be because of their dirty moral choice to have sex for money…This isn’t about evidence…It’s about morality, just as it was…when…women organised charity centres to ‘save’ street prostitutes from sin by finding them alternative employment as charwomen, in workhouses or scrubbing the streets…any kind of work, however exploitative and badly paid, must be better than sex work because it doesn’t involve sex, wicked sex, sinful sex…
The equation of images and reality claims another victim:
…Rémy Couture [is a]…Canadian special-effects artist charged with “corrupting morals” by illegally combining sex and gore…[in] two short films depicting the crimes of a necrophiliac serial killer and various photographs of simulated torture and dismemberment that were posted on Couture’s now-defunct website…The prosecution argues that Couture’s work is obscene under Canadian law because “a dominant characteristic” of it is “the undue exploitation of sex” combined with “crime, horror, cruelty and violence.” He faces up to two years in prison for this prohibited mixture…
The word “trafficking” is not to be found in this article, nor are calls for paving to be abolished:
…William Connors…his wife Mary…[and] their sons…were all convicted of conspiracy to require a person to perform forced…labour…the Connors would pick up…homeless drifters or addicts…[who then] lived in squalid caravans…as they moved around the country working on the Connors’ paving and patio businesses…and…were controlled by discipline and violence…[they] were beaten, hit with broom handles, belts, a rake and shovel, and punched and kicked…[they] were often made to strip for a “hosing down session” with freezing water…[and] were paid as little as £5 for a day’s hard labour on jobs that would earn the family several thousand pounds. They were given so little food they resorted to scavenging from dustbins…
And as Furry Girl points out, nobody seems to care if children are forced to act in movies for their parents’ profit, either: “Imagine if anti-sex worker activists treated all forms of entertainment the same way they treat [sex work]…Where are the Nick Kristof-led raids of acting classes for children, the protests against movie studios that utilize under-18 performers, and the arrests of live studio audiences at the taping of TV family sitcoms?”
Furry Girl writes about the way people’s acceptance of unfamiliar things like marijuana use, homosexuality and sex work tends to grow as they get to know real people who are involved with those things, and she proposes an experiment for those shy about coming out:
Go to a bar in the next city over, or a music festival out of town, or just tell the person sitting next to you on the bus or subway. Try openness on for just a day, or even 15 minutes. You will get some bad reactions, but I think it will surprise you how many people won’t be an asshole to you. Be prepared for questions, which you can choose to answer or not.
Amazingly, all 13 victims of an Argentinean “sex trafficking” witch hunt were acquitted of all charges last week: “…the judges said there was no way to prove that Marita, a 23-year-old mother and wife who vanished on…April 3, 2002, was kidnapped and forced into a prostitution ring…For the last decade Marita’s mother, Susana Trimarco, has waged an uphill battle [against]…the people she believed were responsible for her daughter’s disappearance into the netherworld of human trafficking…” Trimarco has insisted from the beginning that her daughter was abducted by “sex traffickers”, despite a total lack of evidence for such an outlandish interpretation of the meager facts. The article points out that Trimarco “almost single-handedly changed the way that human trafficking is viewed…across much of Latin America,” and this is true: with the help of cops and prohibitionists she has succeeded in introducing American-style “sex trafficking” mythology to a culture which has a much healthier view of sex work than that of the US.
Being an ignoramus is no impediment to a career in law:
The California Commission on Judicial Performance…[admonished] Judge Derek Johnson…[for] comments [made] in the case of a man who threatened to mutilate the face and genitals of his former girlfriend with a heated screwdriver, beat her with a metal baton and made other violent threats…Johnson, a former prosecutor in the Orange County district attorney’s sex crimes unit, said…”I’m not a gynecologist but I can tell you something: if someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse the body shuts down…[and] will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case”…since 1980, California law has not required rape victims to prove they resisted or were prevented from resisting.
Several people called to my attention a recent paper claiming that legalizing prostitution increased human trafficking; I pointed out to them that without good data and clear definitions, a prohibitionist can “prove” whatever he likes. But Dr. Laura Agustín said it much better than I did:
I’ve been asked several times to comment on a recently published article, Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?…This study belongs to a trend to use econometric concepts and techniques in a (vain) attempt to prove this or that about prostitution…fancy modelling and sophisticated analysis cannot help when the data being analysed is next to useless…Any critique of this work has to begin by asking how the authors define human trafficking, inflows, legalised prostitution, the prostitution market, trafficked women and legal prostitutes. None of these terms is self-explaining. After more than 15 years, we do not even have agreement about what the fundamental terms mean, so anyone writing in the field has to tell us which definitions they are using and they have to make sure they compare and contrast categories using the same definitions…The best way to understand this work is Garbage in, garbage out…
Metaupdates
Wally Oppal says the scores of women missing and presumed murdered by Robert Pickton and others in the Vancouver area were doubly forsaken – by society and by police. In fact, they were triply forsaken…The law itself forsook many of them, by criminalizing them for selling sex and driving them to the extreme margins…“I cannot ignore the reality that this legal regime played an important role in shaping the relationship between the police and women…potentially affecting…investigations…” Mr. Oppal writes…The report is a death knell for prostitution laws in their current form.
More and more UN officials are coming out in favor of decriminalization:
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health – yes, that’s his full title…has…come down firmly on the side of decriminalising the sex industry. In fact, a 2010 report of his is one of the strongest statements I’ve ever seen in this regard by a UN official…
Tyranny By Consensus (TW3 #47)
A group of adult industry leaders announced…their intent to file a lawsuit soon against Los Angeles County over Measure B…an ill-conceived law that makes it mandatory for adult actors to wear lab coats, goggles and gloves as well as condoms while shooting adult films in the County. The law was funded solely by AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)…The attorneys plan to challenge the law on the [grounds that]…health and safety…issues…fall under…State regulation…[they also] plan to challenge…on constitutional grounds…
One Born Every Minute (TW3 #48)
“Detectives investigating a website offering to pay the tuition fees of female students in return for sex have arrested [Mark Lancaster] on suspicion of inciting prostitution…” WTF? “Inciting prostitution”? How about fraud and sexual assault?
It’s astonishing that these people just can’t understand and accept that nothing has to “be done”, and that student sex workers will get along without their “help” just as they always have: “…ex-brothel madam [Becky Adams] has been enlisted to help…Swansea University…research…what motivates [students] to [do] sex work…” I’ll save them the trouble: the answer is “good money and flexible hours”. Now, where’s my £500,000?
This Week in 2010 and 2011
Beside my two previous columns for December 17th, my two previous columns for Yule, my two previous yuletide fictional interludes and a history of Hanukkah, this week also featured a look at what passes for “evidence of prostitution”, a look at the truth of Swedish “feminism”, a statement of some of my principles, a thought experiment about coercion vs. free choice and a biography of Edith Piaf. Finally, there were also short items on Craigslist, the UK attempt to block all internet porn, PC celebrities, “john schools”, Bronte sister action figures, nanny-state dating advice, Julian Assange, hate crime, an awkward call, men’s magazines, a fatal BDSM accident, Barbie hate, a begging ban, another hooker-hiring politician and religious persecution.
Maggie, I sent you a link to a Washington Post story a few days ago. I understand if you did not want to use it, but I just want to know if it got past your spam filters. Thanks!
It did, but missed the inclusion deadline for this week’s column. It’ll probably be in next week’s.
Let me get this straight:
Susanna Trimarco, a woman who has not seen or heard from her daughter in ten years, knows for a fact that she has been trafficked into prostitution? This looks to me like a version of Munchausen syndrome, where instead the mother is using her missing daughter to draw attention to herself. It’s all very admirable for her to find out what happened to her daughter, I’d do the same in her position. But it’s not okay to accuse people with no proof to show for it.
Thank god for a court that rules on evidence instead of emotion.
If I’m not mistaken, university education used to be paid for by the government at one time. That would lessen the need for students to work while going to school.
Arguably, education (especially at the higher levels) is a signalling good. Having a degree is a marker of being a good employee in the future (even if not a marker of having learned anything worthwhile). So making education more free merely means either that people have consume more of it to create the same signal (i.e., get more degrees, spend more time in class, etc) or that the price will continue going up even after it is subsidized (thereby returning to the original circumstance of students working).
Robert Heinlein in his book “Friday” had the following:
But Californians do not limit themselves to electing, recalling, indicting, and (sometimes) lynching their swarms of officials; they also legislate directly. Every election has on the ballot more proposed laws than candidates. The provincial and national representatives show some restraint — I have been assured that the typical California legislator will withdraw a bill if you can prove to her that pi can’t equal three no matter how many vote to make it so. But grassroots legislation (“the initiative”) has no such limitation.
For example three years ago a grassroots economist noticed that college graduates earned, on the average, about 30 percent more than their fellow citizens who lacked bachelor’s degrees. Such an undemocratic condition is anathema to the California Dream, so, with great speed, an initiative was qualified for the next election, the measure passed, and all California high-school graduates and/or California citizens attaining eighteen years were henceforth awarded bachelor’s degrees. A grandfather clause backdated this benefit eight years.
This measure worked beautifully; the holder of a bachelor’s degree no longer had any undemocratic advantage. At the next election the grandfather clause was expanded to cover the last twenty years and there is a strong movement to extend this boon to all citizens.
Vox populi, vox Dei. I can’t see anything wrong with it. This benevolent measure costs nothing and makes everyone (but a few soreheads) happier.
Awarding people degrees just because it’s nice to have one (and in a novel set in a future where California is an independent nation) has little to do with making college affordable so that people can earn a degree (or fail to do so) irrespective of their own personal monetary wealth.
Also, Heinlein had a problem with democracy in general. It seems to have stemmed from the the fact that people a lot less smart than himself wielded just as much political power: one vote. From Glory Road to Friday, there is this fear that all the dumb votes cast will cancel out all the smart votes, and there are so many dumb people that there just aren’t enough smart people (like Heinlein) to cancel them all out. Thus, democracy gives you the same results as if all decisions were made by just one guy of statistically average intelligence, which is a lot dumber than Heinlein.
And dagnabit, Heinlein has to live under that guy’s dictates! {fumes}
It’s an understandable feeling, this whole “it all averages out to dumb” notion. Turns out it’s wrong, but then Heinlein didn’t have the Internet with its Wikipedia and Foldit and EteRNA and such to show that in fact, the crowd isn’t averaging at all; it’s additive. Thus it turns out that yes, a million men are in fact wiser than one man. But we DO have all that stuff, and so there’s no excuse for us.
And in the novel, there is a prototypical internet available that was remarkably like what we have today as to content. Less so in term of universal access.
The problem, though, is as Kewilson points out, the unintended consequences that end up exacerbating the situation that the policy initiatives were supposed to solve.
When I went to college, I spent 800 dollars for two semester and that included tuition, fees, lab costs, and books. My much younger brother was going to the same state college some 25 years after me was spending 5700 dollars per semester and that didn’t include books or lab fees.
They were floating the idea of the current student loan system when I was in college. And yeah, I had to work part time to make room and board and all the rest. They told us that that wasn’t fair and that some people just couldn’t manage to do both and gee all we need is the gov’t to extend loans and grants and it will all work out, students won’t have to work and they’ll get through college faster and into the workplace.
Except that when you have all that money awash in an economic sector, the economic players in that sector respond accordingly. They raise their prices. And since payment is deferred, the consumer tends to act as if it is a genuine third party system and they don’t make the economic choices necessary to rein in that kind of price increase. So now you have people coming out of undergraduate degrees with student debt loans you used to only acquire if you followed high value degrees like medicine or law. And those degrees had the possibility of paying them off – current undergrad debt loads – which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy – are going to keep people in essential debt peonage for a very long time.
There is some talk about debt forgiveness if you go into certain economic sectors or services that the gov’t wants you to. And that will add an additional layer of unintended consequences.
I admit I posted the Heinlein excerpt partly in humor, but also as an illustration of Kewilson’s point. A lot of this is market signaling. And when that market signaling is distorted, other signals are sought or, as in Kewilson’s example, the same signal is sought in an amplified state. But if a govt messes with these signaling modes enough, you get stagnation, as, for example, France, where employers are afraid to hire new people because they have no idea what they’re going to get and there is a huge downside to getting the wrong kind of worker. So the static unemployment rate stays high and productivity suffers. And so begins a vicious circle that is self-reinforcing.
If you want a walk-back of the current debacle, I do have a plan. The gov’t forgives all student debt presently held and they offset that loss against the universities in the proportion in which they exploited the students. Do a simple cost comparison of university tuition and fees from before the student loan era to the present, adjust for inflation and assess the universities for that amount.
Universities would be forced to cut back on their administrative staff which has bloated in the last 25 years. They would also have to leave the expenditures of their sports programs to the benevolence of their alumni rather than soaking the current generation of students to pay for them. And their per-credithour costs would drop because, without the buffer of a third party payer system, they’d have to deal with what the students could afford. They certainly did when I went to school, before the majority of the perverse incentives were legislated into being.
And my problem with democracy isn’t the stupidity. That’s endemic to the human condition. It’s that it allows others to make third parties pay for their stupidity. I consider that a breach of rights whether it takes place at the ballot box, in the halls of congress, or over a meal between a legislative staffer and a corporate lobbyist.
As to stupidity – everyone does stupid things. But you are more likely to learn from a stupid mistake if you bear the cost of it than if you get to lay it off on someone else. And far to often, gov’t of any form, provide the means of doing just that. Then it gets institutionalized and we throw our hands up in horror at all the negative externalities that then ensue. The education bubble and student loan debt is just one example of that process in action.
Tyranny is tyranny is tyranny, and whether the tyrant is a king, queen, general, plutocrat, party, church, mob or computer is immaterial. The state, whoever its leader and whatever its rationale, has no right to impose its will on any citizen who has not infringed on the rights of anyone else. Period.
I wasn’t talking about any problem YOU might have with democracy; I was talking about Heinlein’s.
I don’t know if your solution to the student debt problem would work or not, but since nothing else is working, perhaps it should at least be considered.
Being an ignoramus is no impediment to a career in law:
Neither is being an ignorant asshole. But I repeat myself, particularly in the context of anyone in the legal system.
The fact that this judge is still on the bench – reprimand be damned – is telling enough. There is no accountability for judicial malpractice unless it becomes a big enough political liability. And apparently this level of abusive ignorance doesn’t rise to that standard. It should.
More good news! Yeah, there’s some bad news too, but it’s of the “same as it ever was, same as it ever was” variety. The news of CHANGE is news of POSITIVE change.
New Orleans really should bring Storyville back. They could have both brothels and museums, and of course bars and betting. Strip clubs. The city could use the help. And if Nevada can legalize the Oldest Profession within its borders, so can Louisiana.
I found it interesting that a couple of cop-apologists on copblock tried to make it out as if a sexual assault never took place, citing the plea agreement.
Apparently they missed the part where the victim turned over ‘semen stained jeans’ to the authorities. I guess it was just a spontaneous emission on the rapist-cop’s part.
And once again we get treated to the tradition – like passive voice – where only ‘ex-cops’ face justice; as if they had already been dismissed from the force before the crime occurred. (See, I get to use my own passive voice. Neat, ain’t it?)
Thank you for the kind words about my SF Weekly piece. I’m really honored, and it’s really satisfying, because writing about December 17 is always a grueling experience. I think I’m going to cut that paragraph out and fucking well frame it.
The compliment was well-deserved, Chris. Many who want to be allies don’t quite “get it”, so it’s really inspiring to find someone who does and expresses himself eloquently to boot. 🙂