I was not the only one who left crying after being pressed to talk in detail about our…sexual experiences and desires…some of the audio we provided could have sounded like it belonged in a porn, rather than in a critique of it. – Beth Brigham
Melissa Gira Grant on how the “gypsy whores” myth directly harms sex workers:
…the modern sex worker is believed to follow a…migratory path…the World Cup, the Grand Prix, the Super Bowl – all supposedly draw thousands of women offering paid sex. It’s…the kind of thing you could imagine in a dusty smut book, or serving as winky fodder for escort agencies and strip clubs in their seasonal marketing….we were told that during the 2012 Olympics, London was to be “flooded” with prostitutes, and that for the 2013 Super Bowl in New Orleans, the city would host a “dark underworld” of illicit sex-for-sale. Like all fantasies, the “roving sporting sex workers” trope [is] mostly harmless…until seized upon by those who find it…politically useful…in London…police raided brothels, arrested sex workers, and threatened them with further arrest if they returned to their neighborhoods…A similar pattern…played out in New Orleans in the days before the Super Bowl…Fox News had a camera crew follow a team of volunteers as they attempted to rescue “sex slaves” from streets and strip clubs…With nearly any woman…a potential target…it may be a minor miracle that the New Orleans police department has reported only eight arrests…
I can’t even imagine living in the looking-glass world prohibitionists inhabit:
…a survey by the Immigrant Council of Ireland has found…that by far the biggest fear about paying for sex was not that they would be caught but that they would have a bad experience or contract a disease…Of the 58 punters [who answered]…16 (27.5%) said they had [at some point changed their minds after meeting the prostitute]…“six stated…the person appeared controlled, five…because the person appeared unhappy, four…because the person appeared too young, two…because the person appeared unwilling, while two…because the person appeared intimidated, ‘hurt or injured’,”…Denise Charlton…said…“We have now heard from the buyers themselves that such laws would be a deterrent…We know too that the image of the happy, independent hooker which is being portrayed by those opposed to new laws is not the reality; 24% of buyers reconsidered a transaction because they believed the women and girls involved were controlled, unhappy, too young, unwilling, or intimidated.”
Beside the fact that 58 self-selected people is too small a sample to “conclude” anything, the figures suggest exactly the opposite of what Charlton claims. Only 27% have ever in their lives encountered such a girl (not 27% of all encounters); furthermore, their refusal testifies against the myth that men will eagerly hire coerced women, and finally the option of reporting those situations to the police would be closed by client criminalization, which is precisely the opposite of the stated goal of “protecting” sex workers.
This must-read profile of neofeminist anti-porn crusader Gail Dines by her ex-disciple Beth Brigham paints a chilling portrait of the brainwashing that goes on in “women’s studies” programs; the similarity to narratives from survivors of other cults is unmistakable, and Brigham’s observation that much of the prohibitionist myth of pimp “recruitment” and “exploitation” of girls more accurately resembles their own behavior is spot on.
Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic
Tracy Clark-Flory can always be counted on to debunk sex hysteria; here’s a short but sweet entry on “sex addiction”:
…“Inventing Sex: The Short History of Sex Addiction”…published in the March issue of the journal Sexuality & Culture, isn’t an objective scientific study. It’s a paper by cultural historians at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, that attempts to document the growth of the concept of sex addiction…the paper’s pull-no-punches thesis [is]: “We argue that this strange, short history of social opportunism, diagnostic amorphism, therapeutic self-interest, and popular cultural endorsement is marked by an essential social conservatism–sex addiction has become a convenient term to describe disapproved sex.”
Many of these points should be familiar, especially if you read my piece on sex addiction’s critics…
This week I received a copy of Soiled Doves, a short history of prostitution in the American West, from Elisabeth Whispers. Thank you, Elisabeth!
Backwards Into the Future (TW3 #6)
“The Push to Decriminalise Sex Work in Kenya” is a discussion paper from an African think tank which “explores the dangers associated with sex work, the protest movement in Kenya to decriminalise it, and the potential benefits of decriminalisation.” I’m sure you can guess what conclusion it reaches.
Wisconsin expands its police state:
Efforts to collect DNA samples would expand to include any adult or juvenile arrested on a felony charge — and anyone convicted of a crime — under a budget proposal Gov. Scott Walker announced…Walker also announced plans…to allow GPS monitoring of certain people receiving first-time restraining orders who are found to be at higher-risk to cause serious harm…and…[an] increase for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force to add five employees to investigate child sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of children…Walker’s plans to expand DNA collection…raised the ire of civil liberties advocates…
If politicians had any sense, they would wait for the outcome of trials involving similar laws before wasting millions on a program that might be recognized as illegal.
…CISPA—the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act…would have effectively [required]…private-sector businesses to hand ordinary citizen data…to the U.S. government in order to thwart primarily cyber…[or] terrorist attacks. This, as you might expect, caused an uproar among the online community…the White House…threatened to veto the bill…But now…two separate reports…suggest CISPA could be heading back to the Congressional table…[and] President Obama…[has also issued] his own executive order…
Upcoming erotic game Custom Maid 3D will be bundled with a very special controller…Ju-C Air…is a wireless masturbation toy that will respond and react in real time to your stroke speed and depth, making this motion control of a very particular sort. Those motions will also cause the in-game characters to react accordingly, too, with different characters reacting, um, differently…Ju-C Air…also has an analog stick and an action button as well as a right and a left click…[so]
players don’t even have to take their hands off their penis while playing…
Wendy McElroy on “Is America a Police State Yet?”:
If you need to ask the question, then the answer is “yes”. But that is a glib response and I do not feel glib about America’s slide through the nine rings of political hell. A police state is generally defined as a totalitarian government that exerts extreme and pervasive social, political and economic control over peaceful citizens…[it] maintains…control through the pervasive surveillance of peaceful citizenry, through a vast number of laws with draconian enforcement, and by converting rights into privileges that can be withheld…This describes America. Surveillance of daily life has soared; even the Supreme Court has consistently expanded the “right” of police to perform warrantless searches. A vast array of laws now dictate the minutia of life, from what you may not eat to the light bulbs you may not use as well products you must buy…A special police force called the Department of Homeland Security…functions without transparency or accountability. Travel, formerly a right, is now a privilege granted by government agents at their whim…The difference between America and a communist regime lay in its institutional protection of the individual against the state. That difference no longer exists.
Backwards into the Future (TW3 #27)
A southern Chinese province has stopped sending prisoners to labor camps, becoming the first in the country to take steps to phase out the much-criticized system…Yunnan’s top law enforcement official Meng Sutie announced…that the province will no longer send people to labor camps on the grounds of threatening national security, petitioning by causing unrest and smearing the image of officials…and…is suspending…sentences for people charged with other offenses, such as drug use and prostitution…
As I’ve previously explained, any totalitarian law which passes nowadays will invariably be used as the model for similar laws in other jurisdictions:
…Nevada Sex Trafficking Bill AB67 [redefines]…Pandering…and…Living from earnings of prostitute…as “sex trafficking,” thus carrying harsher penalties and requiring registration as a sex offender…Does [this] include…family members supported by…a woman working legally in a Nevada brothel? Pages 27-28 redefine terms so broadly as to apply to most consensual adult relationships, including marriage…“‘Prostitution’ means engaging in, agreeing to or offering to engage in sexual conduct with another person in return for a fee, monetary consideration or other thing of value…‘Sexual conduct’ means…any intrusion, however slight, of any part of a person’s body or any object manipulated or inserted by a person into the genital or anal openings of the body of a person…” Is a medical doctor a prostitute for accepting money for a gynecological exam? Is the husband who drove his pregnant wife to the doctor a sex trafficker?…
This article is two years old, but it’s an interesting short history:
Monto, in the heart of Dublin…was once the biggest…red-light district in Europe. Celebrated in song and story, it was where Leopold Bloom went for sexual humiliation and where a young Edward VII was said to have gone for some high-end thrills…At its height…1,600 women worked in Monto…but…within only a few years of the foundation of the State and the accession to power of the Roman Catholic church…War was declared on Monto. The new Catholic state stormed into action and a force of gardai…raided Monto at midnight on March 12, 1925, and literally threw the women working there out on to the street and into the Church-run slave-labour laundries…
New findings on Fredric Wertham, the fanatic who whipped up a moral panic over comic books and almost destroyed the industry in the early ‘50s:
…Wertham’s personal archives…show that the doctor revised children’s ages, distorted their quotes, omitted other causal factors and in general “played fast and loose with the data he gathered on comics,” according to an article by Carol Tilley, published in a recent issue of Information and Culture: A Journal of History. “Lots of people have suspected for years that Wertham fudged his so-called clinical evidence…but there’s been no proof,” Tilley said. “My research is the first definitive indication that he misrepresented and altered children’s own words about comics.” Wertham died in 1981 [but] his archives…weren’t made widely available to researchers until the spring of 2010…
This sort of prohibitionist behavior is already very familiar to regular readers.
The “Juju sex slaves” myth just keeps on going like a zombie; the most telling aspect of the narrative is the way it clearly links “sex trafficking” hysteria to the Satanic Panic, much as the Swedish Könskriget cult does.
Presents, Presents, Presents! (TW3 #50)
Eric Berkowitz , author of Sex and Punishment, on Reason TV:
The Cold, Grey Light of Dawn (TW3 #134)
Filipino sex worker rights advocates call for true decriminalization rather than the legalization erroneously labeled as such by politicians:
…An NGO called “Women Hookers Organizing For Their Rights and Empowerment (WHORE) is treading the thorny path toward government recognition of this history-old job…[an advocate called] Tex said…there are about 500,000 sex workers in the country…“But we are not going for decriminalizing sex workers while criminalizing clients like the Swedish model…It didn’t even work there”…
The article is much better than the propaganda pushed by American journalists; it shows that opponents support criminalization of women and mentions UN support for decriminalization.
Looks like the US isn’t the only regime using this concept:
The Queensland police union is calling for tougher laws to send risk-taking pregnant women into safe houses in an effort to monitor their behaviour…[saying] the rights of an unborn child should be considered ahead of the mother…Union president Ian Leavers says the state should be able to intervene in cases where children are at risk of foetal alcohol syndrome and drug addictions…
Re: Backward, Turn Backward
You’re also relying on those men’s judgement to have been a perfect indicator of whether these girls were underage or coerced. That is unlikely to be the case and it’s likely that they erred on the side of caution.
Exactly so. A look at my “previously asked questions page” will show how preoccupied with it some men are, which isn’t surprising given all the hysteria about it; some of these poor guys have become convinced they must be missing something, and so look for it almost as hard as the fanatics do.
Hal, when you eat your salad, are you concerned that those who picked the tomatoes and lettuce were trafficked? That’s more likely than sex slavery.
Trafficking and slavery do exist, in our capitalist economy. But less in the very open labor market of sex than most places.
I really suspect that down deep, people like Gail Dines really get off on what they do. In our anti-sex society, they can’t admit to wanting sex, so their desires get twisted into strange places, and they crave oppression, and delight to tales of it, mostly in their heads.
I absolutely agree; one of my correspondents had a radfem sock puppet for a long time that she used to spy on their closed boards, and she said a lot of them moan and wail about how they can’t get rid of the BDSM fantasies planted in their heads by “patriarchy”.
That also explains the type of porn that they “research” for future “condemnation”. Exactly what Beth Brigham talked about in her articles about working for Gail Dines. Projection at its finest: more than any “horrible, raping” man, those radfems get off on torture porn.
Dines doesn’t want to acknowledge the wide range of human sexual desires. Sometimes, we just want it rough and nasty. A lot of fantasies head that direction, and in my working career, I found it a profitable, enjoyable specialty. No GFE for me.
But so what? I’m a feminist. I don’t believe that play in the bedroom shapes my life outside it. I believe I should have equal opportunity with men on all the goods of life. I don’t think I ought to have special rights, nor more rights, nor less.
Women like Dine are afraid. Afraid the world is too rough for them, afraid of their own darkest desires. They are little different form religious fundamentalists.
The world is absolutely too rough for them since it’s not lined with 6″ padding.
i absolutely believe the same. Dines lives in fear. She’d never admit it but she is fucking terrified of rape and sex and anything that she doesn’t immediately comprehend for analysis. it’s pathetic. almost makes me think maybe i’m lucky i didn’t have it easy, or i would potentially end up as afraid of life as she is.
Fuggen kiddin me? Get out of town!! 😛
Well I have a premium ECCIE account – and I can read and participate in the men’s forum there. In the New Orleans section – the topic of “pimping” comes up a lot and I can tell you – when a guy finds out a girl is “pimped” most of them view that as a deal killing “turn-off”.
What the vast majority of men are looking for (including me) … is a provider who’s chosen the profession of her own free will. There are A LOT of single Moms in the business and … A LOT of coeds working their way through school. Just from my own experience – I’d say that most of them have a different attitude towards sex than is considered “the norm” for most women. They are very open minded and sexually adventurous so the work seems a good fit for them.
I’m not entirely sure I believe this Ju-C thing. Links or it doesn’t exist 😉
(It is odd that it’s the only story without any attending links. It’s more odd that I hear about this first here rather than from SanCom or other sites of that genre.)
Nothing odd about it; it was a formatting error that interrupted the link, and I’ve fixed it. Usually I catch such errors in the proofreading stage; sorry ’bout that.
It’s a publicity stunt. The Japanese excel at the marketing of sex. I remember an old erotic anime, back in the days of video tape, that came with a pair of pink panties.
It’s odd, of course, because the animated genitals in this game will be blurred out due to the censorship required by Japanese law. (I expect that’s a relic of the occupation that the Japanese have gotten used to,)
I remember reading about that tape.. I believe it was titled “I Give My All” or something like that. Apparently they were so worried about a PTA-style backlash (Horrors! Cartoon porn! Think of the children!) that they bought back all the tapes and dumped them somewhere.
And yes, it’s all MacArthur’s fault… (Maybe not him personally, but still.)
When it comes to the combination of sex and technology, I can believe almost anything from Japan. THEY will produce the full cybersex suit.
Monto:
Thank you for posting this here. The things I learn on a hooker board!
^_~
😉
Maggie, on the flip side of the backwards into the future and the chinese province, here’s a narrative of a korean refugee that describes himself as being “born a political prisoner.” Content alert – this is horribly graphic. I do find it interesting, though, given the historical antipathy between the japanese and the koreans, that this is apparently a japanese hosted website and they apparently go beyond assisting those japanese taken by the North Koreans to those ethnic Koreans who left Japan in the 1960’s in response to N. Korea’s recruiting drive and who now want to return.
http://www.northkoreanrefugees.com/2007-09-atbirth.htm
Gail Dines has apparently managed through sheer bloody-minded horribleness, to get a certain amount of political power in the world. I was reading, in Slashdot of all places, that she got a pull quote on Iceland’s new “Let’s block porn on the Internet” initiative.
“Iceland’s move has been welcomed by Dr Gail Dines, a professor of sociology at Wheelock College in Boston and the author of Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked Our Sexuality.”
Given her bizarre ideas about things like female grooming, I’ll never understand how she became a wealthy figure of influence in our world. It points to something fundamentally sick about the West that it lavishes such great rewards on a person like this:
“we spent our days in cafeterias, restaurants, or her immaculate, spacious home, waxing philosophical. we lived in a bubble, where the reality of what’s outside the brick buildings we were sheltered by was nothing more than examples for our ‘research,’ to be highlighted in newspapers and analyzed in notes.” — on the ex-mentor, Gail Dines (part 2)
i’ll tell you how: by appealing to people’s visceral/emotional responses to her material. she’s theatrical for a reason – she wants people to connect to her content emotionally BEFORE they can critique it. she gets so many people to connect to her emotionally on such personal issues as having one’s boundaries violated, especially but not limited to sexually. then, she’s got an audience so engaged, that everything makes sense to them because they feel a connection there that isn’t really there – like as if she’s one of them. she’s not one of any of us. so she claims she has never been sexually assaulted (which I believe, I think you can only BE soooo afraid of sexual assault if you haven’t gone thru the experience), she’s never been exploited or “prostituted” as she’d call it. never done porn…
she knows damn well that the best way to engage an audience – be it lecture attendees or her students – is to relate to them on a very personal, very vulnerable level. couple that with some shock and it’s easy to pursuade people with manipulated information – and almost any information can be manipulated to work in one’s favor, especially if you are as manipulative as Dines! so that’s how she manages to crap out utter nonsense time and again and still manage to have a following. a following of people who say things like this: “After reading your book Pornland I know that my X got his ideas from porn. He considers it “kinky” and “erotic” and sees no issue with it. Neither do the police. Your book changed my life. I just wrote an anti -porn novel. I hope it makes an impact.” *ugh*
I think you’re absolutely right about that, Beth; fear of the unknown is always worse than fear of any tangible thing or experience. Once you’ve actually been raped it’s no longer an unknown quantity,and you can no longer have that kind of unreasoning fear for it.
The other day I encountered a trafficking statistic that I’ve never heard before, one I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned here.
An Amnesty International volunteer tried to convince me that 25% of Moldovan women had been trafficked to other countries for sex. He didn’t even mean that 25% of Moldovan sex workers were trafficked, but was actually claiming that 25% of the entire female population of Moldova had been “kidnapped by gangs” and “sold for sex”.
I assume this is the original source for the claim:
“The Moldovan Intelligence and Security Service has estimated that 600,000 to one million Moldovan citizens (almost 25 percent of a population of some 4.4 million) are working abroad, most illegally. Only around 80,000 are estimated to be in their destination country legally. Human trafficking is a prominent feature of this enormous outflow.”
Of course, even if that’s accurate, it’s still ludicrous to think that every Moldovan woman illegally working abroad is a victim of sex trafficking.
This crazy statistic doesn’t seem to have taken off yet, as I can only find it repeated on a few sites. For example Christian group Save Our Sisters, who claim that “Women serve as Moldova’s number one export.”
It’ll be interesting to see if this starts being parroted by other anti-trafficking groups.
Whenever I think I’ve seen the most obviously and blatantly false statistic from that lot they manage to come up with one that’s even more laughable.
So, let me get this straight—only WOMEN are either being kidnapped or voluntarily leaving Moldova to find a better life. Absolutely none of the 600,000 to one million Moldovans who have left the country are men. Riiiigggghhhht!
UGH i’m sooo glad DInes’ new right hand is focusing on trafficking *facepalm* specifically the connections between PORN and trafficking #areyoufuckingkiddingme
More sex trafficking stupidity:
“I’m going to keep working. I send money to my son so he can attend a private school, I told the psychologists that I need a job that pays 3,000 pesos ($660) a month in order to quit prostitution. But they haven’t offered me anything. So who’s going to support my kids? I didn’t come to Argentina because I wanted to – I came out of necessity,” the woman said.
La Voz said, however, that most of the women approached in the operation to close down Cordoba’s brothels did accept the airfare home.”
http://polygamyandtrafficking.com/argentina-offers-prostitutes-airfare-home/
I guess if you are a prostitute in this Argentenian state, you must be mentally ill and will be assigned a “psychologist”.
“Trafficking” is supposed to be bad because the “victims” are enslaved, but there is almost always a bait-and-switch in which “trafficking” also simply means assisting immigration. But consider the slavery claims in light of the alleged victims’ chances for public contact and independent action:
1. A girl chained up in the basement (assuming she isn’t there just for a limited-time BDSM session): Definitely enslaved.
2. Farm worker, kept in an isolated area and dependent on the employer for transportation and contact with the outside world: Could be enslaved, but most of them are there by choice, for pay much better than their country of birth.
3. House servant, contact with the outside world generally controlled by the employer (although she *could* just walk out the door, she may or may not have a few $ for a bus ticket or any idea what she could do once she leaves): Could be enslaved, but most of them are there by choice, for pay much better than their country of birth.
4. Brothel girl (or waitress at China One, e.g.): If she wants to get out of there, what is stopping her from appealing to customers or taking advantage of anything that distracts her employer to flee? It could be total ignorance of the society outside, or fear of the police (note that if prostitution is illegal, an operation with several girls and a fixed address can survive only if the police are accomplices). But it’s far, far more likely that the consequence she fears most is being sent back to a country where jobs are scarce, brutally hard, and much lower paying.
5. Streetwalker: Even if she “belongs” to a pimp (and I believe Maggie that most don’t), she is regularly outside on her own, dealing with potential customers and other people out of sight of her pimp. No matter how little she knew when she started, she will soon learn the city transportation systems, and she often comes back with enough money to take the bus out of town. She might be “trapped” psychologically in an abusive relationship, but she has the physical capability of leaving. Definitely not a slave.
6. Escort: Multiply what I said about the streetwalker by several times.
Because Americans think sex is icky, the girl “forced” into prostitution is a much more compelling narrative for human trafficking alarmists than an enslaved house cleaner or lettuce picker. But it’s very unlikely to be real. When there is some pressure beyond the sex worker’s attachment to high pay (or in the more pathological cases, to her drug provider), it’s the *result* of anti-prostitution and anti-immigration laws: they stay because they fear the cops, poverty, or deportation more than they dislike their job. And (except possibly for Kennedys and Bushes) we’ve all worked jobs we disliked!
I agree. I wonder how many foreign prostitutes in America are smuggled over the border vs those who enter on a visa. I suspect a lot more enter on a visa.
seriously… and we have a lot of fucking bullshit to look forward to if Dines’ right-hand woman/fully developed protégé isn’t pulled from her inappropriately placed position at Wheelock under Dines, we’re going to have to deal with a LOT more legislation that in the end only attacks sex workers and makes work more unsafe and life more difficult… not even 30, Dines’ assistant writer (who came in to assist with Pornland after I left) boasts experience with “leadership and organization” with the United States Department of Justice Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force. fucking. FACEPALM. i just wonder what legislation we’re going to see come out of these people next. it’s censorship that seems to be the big thing right now? but that will change, they always find a new angle to attack from…
I wouldn’t say that “gypsy whores” are a myth in Europe, there are lots of Eastern European migrant whores (often Romanian and sometimes actually gypsies) working in Western Europe, but there lots of Eastern European migrant plumbers working in Western Europe. Strangely enough there are no charities or government help for trafficked plumbers, and I’m not aware of any organisation that’s trying to help them out of the industry or advocating laws to punish those who use their services.
But I’m very skeptical about the alleged numbers of migrant whores that follow big sporting events. I’m sure some follow the World Cup and European Cup because these are massive tournaments where masses of travelling football fans are going to be, but the costs of attending these events can run into thousands of Euros. Also there’s often a lot of violence outside football grounds and in the pubs afterwards. Some pubs will close down on matches days to avoid the carnage. I sure some brothels do too, I can’t think that there are many prostitutes who want to be gang banged by a coach party of Ultras, whatever money they’re paying.
The atmosphere at every F1 and Moto GP Grand Prix I have attended is electric, sexy and some grid girls and paddock girls are porn stars and escorts but it has a mixed gender audience and most people who spend the week at Monza or weekend at Silverstone are are staying in tents, there are a lot of parties and sex but I don’t really see it as a venue would prostitutes would earn much money. And whereas the Super Bowl might have good TV viewing figures (at least in America) but it isn’t a particularly well attended event and it’s a national holiday. so wouldn’t make more economic sense for American prostitutes to stay in their home cities and work?
Gypsy Whores
Here’s an idea for a future Fictional Interlude, Maggie: what if there really was a “nomadic harlot tribe” in the modern world, only they weren’t slaves, but some organized group which travels? Maybe not sporting events, but they’d have some agenda beyond “make money” or “get laid” (which many seem to think are the only two things harlots CAN think about).
Backward, Turn Backward
Not only did fewer than a third of these men encounter a coerced, underage, etc. prostitute in their entire lives; they encountered a girl they thought might be coerced, unhappy, etc. And as you point out, even might be was enough for them to not go through with it. So much for the idea that the world is crowded with men you want nothing more than to fuck a terrified child slave.
Blasphemy
is her weird thing with capitalization some sort of statement? ok, ok, i realize that isn’t the important thing, and I didn’t miss it.
Also in the statements, it’s pointed out that both she and Hef make money off of porn. It’s mention that Hef makes a lot more money, but it seems to me that the porn Dines makes her money off of is a lot more hardcore.
Sex Addiction
I might look over my “alcoholism is schizophrenia” thing sometime, spruce it up a bit. Or cedar it up, or maybe larch. Seems to show why it matters what you call something. It isn’t as good as what you and Clark-Flory write, but it might help.
Hey, just re-read it, and also your toad. That toad was a good one.
Backwards Into the Future (TW3 #6)
I know what conclusion it should reach, but what conclusion it does reach depends on things like how much freedom they have (will they lose funding if they make the “wrong” recommendation?) to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
But now I’ve read it, and they come to what really does seem to be the only reasonable conclusion.
Useful Idiots
By advocating and getting this law, people like Walker show how wonderfully tough on crime they are. If the courts strike it down, he still gets the credit for being tough. Indeed, it’s probably to his benefit if the courts strike it down, because then he say that tried, but “the liberals” stopped him from doing this thing that would have made so much difference. WOULD it have made so much difference? Well, now he won’t have to prove it, will he?
The Camel’s Nose.
I wonder if they’re also going to want all the information from…
Ju-C Air
Getting there; getting there.
I particularly liked the guy who said that this is THE FUTURE, and that he’s willing to “give flying cars a pass in lieu of this.”
Pyrrhic Victory
Yes, there’s a lot of bad stuff going on, but is it worse than, say, the 1940s, 1950s? Then the excuse was communism, now it’s terrorism. It isn’t good, but is it actually worse? Are you now or have you ever been, and all that.
Backwards Into the Future (TW3 #27)
Wow. This and the news we just got about Ireland, I’m about ready to bake a cake.
Aaaand, I’ll get back Wednesday, which it officially is now.
I don’t know how that happened. Please feel free to remove everything between “I’m about ready to bake a cake” and “Aaaand, I’ll get back Wednesday, which it officially is now.”
LOL re: capitalization!! you wouldn’t believe how many people don’t notice!! it was born out of my passion for horizontalism; i decided that capitalization was nonsense… but the main reason is aesthetics. i hate the appearance of capitalized letters. it kills the continuity; i’m very visual. but i obviously do use caps sometimes – usually emphasis or abreviations but sometimes names on accident. i don’t really mind what it looks like though, since the last thing i’m trying to do is be any type of academic ::shudder:: now it’s a relief to not have to care!
and you’re right – dines definitely makes money off of porn far more hardcore than anything Hef puts out there!!!!!
melissa grant makes the most fucking bullshit claims. i am not looking forward to the actions of the legislation-happy selection Dines has made to appoint as her replacement, who already has worked the USDOJ “Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force.” i’m concerned and i’m not even working these days!
I guess as long as you’re doing it on purpose. When I’m in chat I often ignore capitalization myself, as there just isn’t time and the main thing is to get something barely readable out there as quickly as possible. And since I can’t type as fast as I can talk… To read an essay and see it admittedly made me twitch a little
haha so sorry !! :-/
Worse Than I Thought
Then again, maybe I should skip the cake. Maybe a cupcake?
Dirty Laundry
Is that Madelene stuff all in the past? Sure. But are we learning from it? Well, some are, but obviously some of us are not.
Thought Control
Let’s just that I’m not exactly shocked.
That Old Black Magic
So decriminalize prostitution, and these women can go to law enforcement. Or a priest to lift the spell. That seems the best thing, if we take Naomi Benjamin’s story at face value.
The Cold, Grey Light of Dawn
Good for WHORE, and good for the reporter, Artemio Dumlao, for covering this so well.
Due Consideration
I have a modest proposal: why don’t we simply lock every pregnant woman in the hospital until the baby is born? Her environment can be carefully monitored to make sure that no cigarettes, alcohol, etc. get to her, and in the case of a miscarriage the investigation will be much easier. Actually, we should probably keep surveillance cameras on her the whole time, just to be safe.
Presents, Presents, Presents (both cases)
Soiled Doves looks like quite a book. Blake Linton Wilfong (The Wondersmith) has written on this topic, but an entire book… very cool. Don’t fail to listen to “The Redshirt Song!”
OK, Sex & Punishment just added to my (already quite long) to-be-read list.
OK, onward I go! Just like a heroic redshirt, I shall fearles… AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!
[…] persistence has won them allies both inside and outside the governments of South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Namibia. The sex worker rights movement was born in the West, but it has […]
The issue of “Thought Control,” might be understood by your regular readers, I like to think of myself as a regular reader, and I still love to read about it. It is nice to know prohibition of the comic book industry has been around since the 1950’s. Just gives illustrators like me more reason to create. The best way to get over on those that claim something is evil that is generally thought provoking, is to make more thought provoking material:
https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/adventvoice/the-courtesan-and-the-dream-weaver