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Archive for March, 2013

Dutch Threat

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 21, 2013| 43 Comments »

Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats out of bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped.  –  John Dos Passos

Die WallenFor some time now, anti-sex politicians have been working to undermine the Netherlands’ legendary tolerance of sex work.  Using the “trafficking” hysteria as an excuse and branding almost any male who has a relationship with a sex worker a “pimp”, these stealth-prohibitionists have made it much more difficult to get a brothel license, and in 2006 tried to revoke the licenses of 30 established brothels.  In September of 2007 the city closed more than a third of the famous windows (by buying the buildings) and commissioned a study, which was published in 2010; it’s 232 pages long and available only in Dutch, but here is the conclusion and summary in English.  Among its more interesting findings: underage prostitution is essentially nonexistent in Amsterdam, as are coercion and other wrongs among the roughly 20% of whores who are independent escorts and the roughly 40% who work from clubs or private incalls.  It estimated the fraction of window prostitutes who were coerced to be 8%, and the fraction of the entire sex worker population involved in “wrongs” of any kind to be about 10%.

Of course, prohibitionists insist that this is a lie (or the result of “brainwashing”, “Stockholm syndrome”, “false consciousness”, etc), and proclaim (without any evidence whatsoever) that a whopping 90% of all Dutch whores are somehow coerced, exploited or otherwise harmed.  Thanks to their efforts a massive police raid in search of “trafficking victims” was launched in April 2011 and found…none.  Not a single blessed one, despite the detention and interrogation of 157 women.  But prohibitionists never let little things like facts stop them, so they continued to push for “reforms” and “action”, all the while desperately searching for any kind of flimsy rationalization for their demands.  But then they got what must have seemed like a godsend:

In the Fall of 2011, Parool and Algemeen Dagblad published the first stories of prostitute “Patricia Perquin”.  She described the ways of the Amsterdam Wallen from the inside.  It is her “true story”, as she later stated on the cover of her book…In revealing articles she led her readers into a world of sex, violence, humiliation, and exploitation…[she described herself as] tall, slim, blond [and] D-cup…[and] says she got into prostitution after having built up a 150,000 Euro debt due to shopping addiction.  She…managed to pay it off in four and a half years…working through ten thousand clients.  Her record is thirty-one in one day.

Patricia Perquin’s articles made a deep impression.  Publishing house Prometheus contracted her for a book.  In March 2012 the bestseller Achter het raam op de Wallen (“Behind a Window in the Wallen”) was released…[and soon] producer Talpa developed a TV series…The stories attracted the attention of Amsterdam Alderman Lodewijk Asscher, now the Deputy Prime Minister…[who was] very busy with [a project to] clean up the Wallen area.  He took Patricia so seriously that he had a number of long conversations with her.  “If one wants to get a realistic picture of what is happening in the Wallen all you need is to read Perquin’s book,” he said.  Her tale strengthened him in his mission:  stricter actions against exploitation.  Perquin penetrated deeply into the world of Amsterdam policymakers…meeting with Mayor Eberhard van der Laan.  “Her book moved me and it gives a very clear picture of what is happening on the Wallen,” he said in the Senate in June 2012, pleading for a quick introduction of a new prostitution law…

Perquin was instrumental in developing some of the “reforms” I’ve recently reported, such as raising the legal age of prostitution to 21 and demanding fluency in the Dutch language of the 70% of sex workers who are not Dutch nationals (thus dramatically expanding the illegal hooker underclass and facilitating exploitation).  Needless to say, the Amsterdam sex work community wanted to know who this prohibitionist shill really was:

The first cracks in her story begin to show when prostitutes call Metje Blaak, former spokeswoman of the prostitution advocacy organization, De Rode Draad.  “Nobody had ever heard of her.  They asked me where Patricia worked.  They wanted to work where she worked because she made such good money.  She had sometimes seven clients in one day, whereas if you do well on the Wallen, you might get four.”  There was also suspicion on Hookers.nl…Valerie Lempereur

Of course, the politicians couldn’t be bothered to check up on her; if they had, they might not have been so quick to lionize her.  After giving a lengthy radio interview, she was recognized by people who knew her in the past not as a sex worker, but rather as a disgraced journalist named Valerie Lempereur:

Lempereur…has worked in both the Netherlands and Belgium, among others for Nieuwe Revu, Story, TV Family, and Het Laatste Nieuws.  Many…well-known people…accuse her of lies and deceit.  In the Nineties Lempereur was fired on the spot by crime reporter, Peter R. de Vries, on account of “fraud and deceit, committed more than once,” he wrote in an open letter to Trouw…She was born [in Zeeland] as Daniël…[and] had [gender-reassignment] surgery many years ago…she was addicted…to heroin…for eight years…and…sentenced to prison for several months, for drug theft…[after she] sneaked into hospitals…to steal the goods, dressed as a nurse…A well-known window owner who wants to remain anonymous, says he knew Valérie around 2000 as a prostitute in the Singel area.  That contradicts the [claim] that Lempereur began working only five years ago, in all innocence.  From the four and half years she [allegedly] worked in the cribs, she also managed for two years a publishing company in Belgium.  It’s not clear how she did that with simultaneously working ten thousand clients on the Wallen.  Her book also doesn’t say a word about the effect of her transsexuality on her work in the crib…

Though the story has been building since March of last year, it was only broken at last by the newspaper De Volkskrant on March 9th, with the following note:

De Volkskrant has repeatedly asked Valerie Lempereur for a reaction on the veracity of her book and articles.  She has neglected our requests.  Instead, she applied twice for a temporary injunction to prevent the revelation of her identity.  Friday night…the judge decided that De Volkskrant can publish this article.

And a good thing, too; the anti-whore momentum has been building so strongly that a socialist representative named Myrthe Hilkens has even been able to start pushing for the Swedish model.  Will the exposure of this fake be able to stop the descent of the Netherlands into prohibitionist madness, or will the busybodies just find a new sock puppet (perhaps they can borrow Justine Reilly from Ruhama?)  Only time will tell.

(I wish to express my deep appreciation to regular reader and die-hard sex worker ally Frans van Rossum, who not only called these articles to my attention but also invested a great deal of time and effort in preparing English translations for me.  Thank you so very much, Frans!)

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The Original Easter

Posted in Holidays, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , on March 20, 2013| 7 Comments »

Now Nature hangs her mantle green
On every blooming tree,
And spreads her sheets o’daisies white
Out o’er the grassy lea.  –  Robert Burns

Blessed OstaraThe apparent path of the sun crossed the celestial equator northbound at 11:02 UTC today, making today the first day of astronomical spring for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and astronomical autumn for those in the Southern.  So if you were wondering why this posted an hour late today, now you have your reason; I couldn’t resist posting at the moment of the equinox.  Spring is my second favorite of seasons, surpassed in my estimation only by autumn; as I age I watch them go buy more and more quickly, flashing by in a rapid succession of days and weeks until they give way all too soon to the extremes of summer or winter…which in turn flash by and give way to the seasons I love, each in its turn, one after another as they have since long before the arrival of Man (and as they will no doubt continue until long after his departure).

The old Germanic name for the holiday, Ostara, is of course the origin for Easter; other Christian festivals adapted from pagan ones share the day but not the name, but in this case it’s the name but not the day!  This is because the Christian rationale for the holiday is tied to the Jewish Passover, and so is calculated in the same way (from the first full moon of spring); in fact, in most European languages the words for Easter and Passover are the same.  I’m glad we retained the older name in English; Ostara was a spring goddess whose name descends from that of the ancient Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess Hausos, of whom the Greek Eos, the Roman Aurora and the Vedic Ushas are all later forms (spring is, after all, the dawn of the year).  There’s a beauty in that continuity:  the timeless celebration of the return of life after winter, with the name of a goddess who has been worshipped in one form or another since many of the most widely-spoken languages in the world were one.

Blessed Be!

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Absolute Corruption

Posted in Current Events, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on March 19, 2013| 32 Comments »

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. – Lord Acton

Bernard Baran in 1984

Bernard Baran in 1984

As I have repeatedly pointed out, sex worker rights is not an isolated “fringe” issue, but rather one deeply tied into other issues including civil rights (especially those of women and sexual minorities), bodily autonomy, moral panics and witch-hunting, universal criminality, the police state, mass incarceration, lies told by “authorities” and the ability of state actors to destroy the lives of individuals with impunity.  Over the past three years I have slowly expanded the scope of my subject matter, but with rare exception I think most of y’all can see how each topic I cover is tied in together.  But every once in a while I run into an item which, while not technically sex-work-related, is nonetheless linked to so many of the same issues that it lies very close to the center of the web.  Today we’ll look at the case of Bernard Baran, who has been brutally victimized by the state for virtually his entire adult life using exactly the same methods (employed by some of the same people) as are still regularly employed against anyone connected with sex work.

The story (as explained in this 2009 article by Radley Balko) starts in the early days of the Satanic Panic, just as it was beginning to blossom in earnest:

Baran was convicted in January 1985 of molesting six children at a pre-Kindergarten daycare facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts…[he] was one of the first people in the country to be prosecuted in the daycare sex abuse panic of the 1980s, a bizarre, nationwide hysteria fed by fears of satanism, homophobia, and a wing of child psychology that used unproven interrogation techniques critics say caused children to recount sexual incidents that never took place…Prosecutor Daniel Ford likely engaged in serious misconduct and open bigotry in winning his conviction…yet…has never been investigated or disciplined for his role in the case…and [is now] a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court…Ford [presented]…an edited video interview…[showing] several children alleging that Baran had sexually abused them.  But edited out was footage in which some of the children denied any abuse by Baran, accused other members of the daycare faculty of abuse or of witnessing abuse, and, most importantly, depicted interrogators asking the same questions over and over—even after repeated denials—until a child gave them an affirmative answer.  Some children were even given rewards for their answers…

The case against Baran was also awash in homophobia.  According to court documents, the first parents to come forward with accusations against Baran in September 1984 had just days earlier registered a complaint with the center upon noticing Baran was “queer” by the way he walked and talked…[when a] child later tested positive for gonorrhea of the throat, Ford used the test…at trial, even though A) the child never accused Baran of forcing him to perform oral sex, B) the child, in fact, specifically denied having sexual contact with Baran on the witness stand, C) Baran tested negative for gonorrhea, D) the boy had told his mother two months prior that his stepfather had orally raped him, and E) on the very day Baran was convicted, charges against the stepfather were turned over to the D.A.’s office for possible prosecution.  Baran’s counsel was never informed of the allegation against the stepfather…Ford implied that Baran’s “lifestyle” made it probable that he contracted gonorrhea at other times and knew how to quickly eradicate it to cover his tracks…An affidavit signed by Baran’s boyfriend at the time also paints Ford as a homophobe…[who] spent an inordinate amount of time asking Baran’s boyfriend about his own sex life, employing variations of the word faggot, and a mocking, drawn-out pronunciation of homosexual…in the ensuing months, Baran’s boyfriend was pulled over by police officers and further harassed on a daily basis, and that Ford told him, illegally, that if he spoke with Baran or Baran’s defense attorney, he would be arrested…

As if this weren’t bad enough, Baran’s defense attorney was incompetent and offered practically no resistance to Ford’s one-man jihad.  Eventually, a group of civil rights attorneys (including Harvey Silverglate) took up the case and began to work toward a new trial; they recognized that the unedited videotapes would show the lengths to which the children were manipulated, and “filed a motion for the tapes in 2000.  For three years, then District Attorney Gerard Downing, who assisted in Baran’s original trial, claimed to be unable to locate the tapes.  When Downing died of a sudden heart attack in December 2003, David Capeless took over as D.A…[and] was able to produce them within months.”  Silverglate and company moved for a new trial in June of 2004, and Baran was released on bond when a judge granted that motion exactly two years later; exactly three years after that prosecutors finally dropped all charges:

…the appeals court added in a footnote that if the state wanted to retry him, Baran could file a motion for a hearing on Ford’s possible misconduct.  By dropping the charges, the D.A. avoided that hearing.  “In my opinion, the possibility of an embarrassing hearing into misconduct by a former prosecutor and now sitting Superior Court judge was the main reason, if not the reason, they decided to drop the charges,” Silverglate claims.  “The appeals court opinion cut a bit too close to the bone for them.”  So while Bernard Baran is free after 22 years…there is no plan to look into the actions of the prosecutor, now a sitting judge, responsible for the conviction.  In his position on the Massachusetts Superior Court for the last 20 years, Ford has presided over some of the state’s most serious criminal trials.  He also serves on a committee that helps determine the state’s rules and guidelines of criminal procedure…

Bernard BaranDuring the 22 years he was imprisoned for “crimes” that existed only in his accuser’s evil minds, “Baran…was raped and beaten more than 30 times, necessitating six different transfers to new…institutions.”  With help from the National Center for Reason and Justice, an organization founded “in 2002 [by] several writers, human and civil rights advocates, and attorneys…to support Baran and others falsely accused of child abuse,”  Baran sued the state and won $400,000 compensation last August.  But when he asked for his records to be expunged, Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley (whom we have seen before)  refused without any valid reason:

At 2 p.m. on February 26, Bernard Baran, represented by attorney John Swomley, [asked] a Massachusetts judge to expunge all records of his arrest and conviction.  Baran wants to go on with his life with a completely clean slate…The State of Massachusetts, however, is inexplicably fighting to keep Baran from expunging the records of his case.  NCRJ calls on the State to serve justice by immediately processing the expungment.  “Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley in the past has had a troubling record with these cases,” says…Swomley…“Now is her chance finally to do something right, something no reasonable person could possibly think unwise.  We were surprised that the State opposed the expungement of Baran’s records…”

I’m sure Swomley is just being diplomatic, because I’m not surprised at all.  Coakley is well-known for her puritanical anti-sex crusades (including a major role in the persecution of Backpage), so her dedication to pillorying Baran is wholly predictable.  And as long as we keep giving unlimited power to the least-evolved members of our society, none of us should be surprised when they then use that power to act out their own twisted fantasies on living human beings.

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Original Sin

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 18, 2013| 47 Comments »

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.  –  Emma Goldman

As I have often pointed out, many of the beliefs presented as “political positions” these days are actually religions, and that includes those which sell themselves as “scientific” or “atheist”.  Any organized group which insists on “rigid adherence to a morality and interpretation of reality…derived entirely from knowledge revealed in sacred scriptures by [its] founders…[and] must be accepted unquestioningly by adherents” is a religion, no matter what it calls itself or whether it has a definable deity; it is based in faith, not science or logic, and any attempt to understand and deal with it as anything other than a religion is doomed to failure.  This is why the “sex trafficking” myth is so pernicious; its adherents believe in it just as Christians believe in the divinity of Jesus, and no weight of evidence is sufficient to convince them otherwise.

Salvation Army bus shelter ad 2I chose Christianity as the subject of that analogy because “sex trafficking” mythology is an outgrowth of Protestant theology; as Yvonne Zimmerman points out in her book Other Dreams of Freedom, “the theoretical basis of US government anti-trafficking efforts derives directly from Protestant theology and traditional ideas of what she calls ‘sexually pure and pious womanhood’.”  The Salvation Army was one of the earliest and most aggressive promoters of the “white slavery” panic (the first iteration of “sex trafficking” hysteria), and is still beating that drum (pardon the pun) today; furthermore, the myth-narrative itself is clearly a development from the Satanic Panic, which was itself merely a recrudescence of the intermittent witch-panics so common in post-Reformation Europe.  At first the “trafficking” fetishists were careful to disguise their campaign as a secular one in order to forge an alliance with neofeminists, but as signs of the disintegration of their manufactured hysteria have multiplied in the past year, they have grown more desperate and careless, exposing the fundamentalist Puritanism which underlies the whole paradigm.

Then on February 28th, the anti-whore crusade experienced a major setback when funding to the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons was sharply reduced as part of more general (but still extremely superficial) cuts in US government spending.  For a short while it looked as though the Trafficking Victims Protection Act might not be re-authorized at all, but at the last minute it was added by Senator Patrick Leahy as a rider to the deceptively-named Violence Against Women Act of 2013, whose passage (despite hysterical claims by whitebread feminists) was a political certainty.  While this extended the unnatural life of the War on Whores until 2017 (note that date), one wouldn’t know it from this article by Janice Shaw Crouse and Brenda Zurita of the conservative Christian group Concerned Women for America, which clearly reveals the true sin-punishing motive behind the “anti-trafficking” cult:

Do senators and representatives even know…[that the bill] they just voted for…included an amendment with egregious problems[?]  The two worst ones are draconian cuts to the…TIP Office…and the…decriminalization of prostitution for minors…The once vaunted TIP Office is now on its way to becoming nothing more than white noise…Ambassador-at-Large John Miller fought hard to protect the office from attempts to dilute its authority and its mission to hold countries accountable in their efforts to end human trafficking through prosecutions and victim protections…[and] the U.S. became the world leader in ending modern-day slavery.  Leahy’s…amendment hands the regional bureaus of the State Department the means to undermine the significance of the annual Trafficking in Persons report…The TIP Office was established to be the central location to direct the United States government’s anti-trafficking efforts.  By dividing that authority, real leadership will be impossible …[the amendment also] slashes the TIP Office funding by more than 70 percent from $7 million to $2 million.  This will make it impossible for the TIP Office to fulfill its statutory mandate as the agency responsible for leading and coordinating the Federal government’s anti-trafficking efforts.  Without a strong TIP Office, the TVPA will never be faithfully implemented and trafficking issue decisions will inevitably be subordinated to such traditional agency concerns as maintaining good relations with foreign governments…

On the domestic side…senators and representatives voted to endorse the decriminalization of prostitution for minors in the United States.  Did they do this because there are many, many minors being arrested for prostitution?  According to the latest Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports, there were only 763 arrests of minors…for “prostitution and commercialized vice” crimes in 2011…the DOJ will encourage states to prohibit the charging or prosecution of a minor for engaging in or attempting to engage in prostitution.  While this sounds like a compassionate thing to do, it may actually lead to an increase in the number of minors in prostitution…gangs are using prostitution to make money…While pimping would still be illegal…imagine what will happen to minors who think that prostituting is a good way to make money…How many of them will join up with a gang or a pimp to sell their bodies and then facing the horrific reality of the decision…Many will see their pimps as their boyfriend [sic] and will not self-identify as a victim [sic] of sex trafficking.  When law enforcement does not have the power to arrest and through that arrest get the minor into a rehabilitation program, minors may remain trapped.  When the judicial system no longer has the authority to keep victims in rehabilitation programs through an arrest charge, the victims will be able to walk away from a shelter anytime they choose.  Most will walk right back into the arms of their pimps…

furious old womanOne can practically see these busybodies’ faces turning purple and the veins standing out on their necks.  While their anger over the partial defunding and potential marginalization of their Holy Mission is understandable, their real apoplexy is reserved for the idea that without the threat of being manhandled and caged by the Soldiers of the Righteous, thousands of junior Jezebels may voluntarily enter into sex work and not even see that they are helpless victims of dirty, dirty sex!!!  And what’s more, without the cudgel of law, girls will be able to make decisions for themselves rather than being forced to endure brainwashing designed to convince them of their sinful, fallen state!

The increasing prevalence of articles like this one, which so transparently emphasize Christian dogma of sexual sin, guilt and punishment, are a welcome development to those who support sex worker rights.  The more closely “trafficking” rhetoric is linked to anti-sex, anti-choice Christian demands such as criminalization of abortion and suppression of casual sex, the more non-Christians and moderate Christians will be repelled from it, and the faster the coalition which has driven the hysteria for a decade will collapse.

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Links #141

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2013| 4 Comments »

I don’t call him my boyfriend.  He’s more a good spirit friend who happens to be from the octopus race.  –  Stephany Fay Cohen

Sometimes it becomes obvious early in the week who’s going to be the lead contributor, but other times it’s close up until posting time.  And once in a while I have actually collected the leader’s links at the top of the draft, only to have him fall behind in the end.  That’s what happened this week; Jesse Walker only surpassed Radley Balko on Friday afternoon, and then by only one link.  All of the links down to the first video are Jesse’s, as is the last part of “welcome to our world”; the first two parts were contributed by Marginal Utilite and Mike Siegel respectively, and the first three links after it are Radley’s.  Both videos were supplied by Grace; the first one features her kind of guy (her own inventions aren’t quite that Goldbergian), and the second is a primer on a  Supreme Court case I’ve mentioned before.  “Warrant” and “judicial overreach” were provided by Gideon’s Trumpet, “unnecessary quotes” by Popehat, “new teeth” by Luscious Lani, “penis thieves” by Michael Whiteacre and “errant shooting” by Aspasia.  This week we’ve also got an unusually-high number of articles by link contributors, as the bylines will show.

From the Archives

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That Was the Week That Was (#311)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2013| 15 Comments »

In the field of human trafficking, I detest data because most of it is made up and bogus.  –  Martina Vandenberg, Human Trafficking Legal Resource Center

Lack of Evidence

It’s good to see the media finally noticing this:

There is no law that says…condoms [are] illegal…and yet NYPD…routinely…[uses them] as…evidence for…prostitution…one city agency conducts a public-health campaign and…[those] who take advantage of it are…promptly arrested by a different city agency—leading to cases being thrown out of court, a suppressed and redacted…study of the problem, and a bill to address the matter in…the state legislature…arresting people because they are in possession of condoms…distributed…by the city itself…looks an awful lot like entrapment…

Nor are the arrests limited to sex workers;Grace Bellavue as I’ve explained many times, laws which violate whores’ rights invariably violate everyone’s.

Real People

I love seeing profiles like this one of Australian escort Grace Bellavue; the more the public sees of real sex workers, the harder it will be for prohibitionists to sell their stereotypes and myths about us.

Check Your Premises

This is only “stunning” to those who believe in the “pimps and hos” myth:

A sex-trafficking case got the hook in…Brooklyn…when prosecutors revealed their victim was advertising herself as an escort…the woman, now 19, who claimed defendant Robert Pannell forced her into prostitution in April 2011…advertised herself online…last month.  The stunning revelation contradicted the accuser’s testimony that her ordeal as a 17-year-old runaway was the only time she ever turned tricks…

Backlash

The Women’s Legal Centre…in Cape Town…provides legal services for sex workers…[who] face routine harassment, intimidation, and…abuse from police…[who] threaten, arrest, or detain [them] for days at a time…many are released only after paying large fines…WLC began its outreach by offering weekly group workshops…[but] soon expanded, employing four former and current sex workers as paralegals…Ralph Evangelous

Recognizing Doubletalk

An internal investigation of the Wilmington [North Carolina] Police Department’s narcotics enforcement team revealed inadequate documentation of funds, poor…supervision…and a “code of silence” cover-up of a March 2012 undercover prostitution operation…Police Chief Ralph Evangelous…[claimed] the undercover operation was in response to a citizen complaint about…escort services…the narcotics enforcement unit came up with a “unique approach” in [which]…more than $2,000 in city funds…were used…

Translation:  The narcotics squad had a party but got caught, and it took the police chief a year to come up with a cock-and-bull excuse.

Peeping Toms

A federal appeals court struck down Virginia’s anti-sodomy law…a decade after…Lawrence v. Texas…The appeal originated in a 2005 case in which a 47-year-old man was convicted of soliciting a 17-year-old girl for sex.  The girl refused and reported the incident to police, resulting in a “crimes against nature” charge…

One Size Fits All

As you might expect, Swedish neofeminists do not like surrogate motherhood  and consider it a form of “human trafficking”:

Surrogate motherhood is a serious crime against women’s human rights…Even when the woman has voluntarily become a surrogate…she gives up the rights to her own body…surrogacy…opens the door for viewing women and children as goods, and to regarding women as containers…having children is not a human right…

Nor, in the minds of neofeminists, is using one’s natural abilities in a way which violates the neofeminist religion.  Though this collectivist stance is evil because it denies women the right to control their bodies, it is more philosophically consistent than that of the US (which allows surrogacy but bans sex work) and Australia (vice-versa).  But lest you believe that Swedish neofeminists are truly motivated by concern for women’s well-being:

Equality Minister Maria Arnholm wants Sweden to keep the right to deport women whose relationships with Swedish spouses end within two years…The…rule was introduced in an effort to clamp down on sham marriages and to put an end to so-called “wife imports”.  But it has been blamed for forcing women to remain in abusive relationships…[and] a 2012 government-ordered inquiry [recommended it] be abolished…The Centre Party’s Women’s Association has also demanded that the…rule be…[replaced with] “immediate action” against “the practice of wife importation”…

It Looks Good On Paper

crazy Steve KozachikProhibitionists just love to tout “diversion programs” which supposedly “help” whores instead of criminalizing them, but if these are so great why do they need cops to force women into them, and why are their standards so strict that very few qualify to avoid jail?  In a recent example from Tucson, Arizona, members of SWOP warned sex workers away from a sting they had learned about, but 13 women still got caught…and only four qualified to escape jail.  The scheme’s organizer Steve Kozachik, a local politician with a reputation as a control freak, claimed SWOP’s protecting women from cops was “unnecessary” and that “This is not anti sex worker.”  Tell that to the nine women whom the prohibitionists “helped” into cages and branded with lifelong criminal records for trying to earn a living.

Politicizing the Personal

Dr. Laura Agustín feels the same way I do about the concept of “empowerment”, as she explains in this older essay she recently republished:

The verb is transitive: someone gives power to another, or encourages them to take power or find power in themselves. It’s used among those who want to help others identified as oppressed…[the] emphasis [is] on the helper and her vision of her capacity to help, encourage and show the way…To empower me as a sex worker you assume the role of acting on me…

Scrambled Eggs

…a California…law prohibits women from being compensated for donating their eggs for medical research, despite payments to subjects in other human research studies…[and] eggs…donated for fertility treatments…[but] a recently introduced bill…would allow women to be compensated…the California Family Council…[claims sponsor Susan] Bonilla’s bill opens up “dangerous medical ground.”  The…anti-abortion group…said eggs should be treated like organs and should not be sold…Bonilla said…”I think women are able to decide for themselves if they want to participate in a clinical trial”…

Saint Death

Jesse Walker published a good short piece on Santa Muerte which includes links to a recent AP article, an FBI scare-screed and an essay comparing anti-Santa Muerte hysteria to the Satanic Panic.

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemicreward bowtie

Neuroskeptic points out the deep connection between addiction rhetoric and crypto-moralism:

…The dopamine theory of addiction is extremely popular today…[but] if you view addiction as essentially about reward (pleasure), surely that means…anything pleasurable could…be addictive?…if…addiction is the direct consequence of over-indulgence in a reward, then aren’t you saying that reward itself is ultimately what’s addictive?…If everything from food to friends to music are rewarding because they trigger dopamine release, then surely all of those things could be ‘addictive’…The more fun, the more (potentially) addictive…this idea – for all its medical, neurobiological, scientific language – actually undermines the concept of addiction as a ‘disease’ and reduces it to what amounts to a moral failing – it casts addiction as over-indulgence…

Finding What Isn’t There

Ministers, the police and social workers have been accused of a “shocking” failure to prevent the spread of modern slavery in the UK, leading to sexual exploitation, forced labour and the domestic servitude of adults and children…Describing government ministers as “clueless”…[about] human trafficking…the most exhaustive inquiry yet conducted into the phenomenon concludes that the approach to eradicating modern slavery is fundamentally wrong-headed.  Instead of helping vulnerable victims…the legal system prosecutes many for immigration offences…

Though I hate to defend government officials, I feel compelled to point out that it’s difficult to adapt to ever-expanding definitions, and impossible to produce enough “victims” to satisfy “estimates” which are essentially just made up.

Obfuscation Via Dysphemisms

Gloria…Giammalva…was [sentenced]…to…[21] months in prison and to be partially responsible for a $600,000 money judgment…U.S. Attorney Trent Shores…[claimed] the conspiracy…charged $30 per encounter, which he said meant that 20,000 commercial sex acts were performed by the women who were exploited…Giammalva…conspired with others in the operation of a multistate prostitution business that coerced and enticed women across state lines to participate in commercial sex acts…

Trim off all the dysphemisms and what remains is:  she owned an escort service and the prosecutor lied about the fee to ratchet up the number of “counts”.

Coming and Going (TW3 #35)

Dallas officials are trying to push their “prostitution diversion” scheme on the rest of Texas as a replacement for locking women up.  While any move away from incarceration is good news, the motivation is a desire to save money rather than a recognition that criminalization of consensual adult behavior is wrong; whores are still regarded as “criminals” to be “rehabilitated”, and all are assumed to be miserable victims who want out of sex work.Chester Brown to Rob Arthur

Book Reviews (October 2012)

When Rob Arthur (author of You Will Die) noticed that Chester Brown (author of Paying For It) had expressed interest in his book in the comment thread of this post, he asked me to forward his email address to Chester and the two of them each sent the other a book.  I am both pleased and honored to have facilitated the meeting of two awesome authors whose works  I greatly enjoyed.

Hard Numbers (TW3 #48)

…Steph Key will introduce new laws to [the South Australian] Parliament…to decriminalise all forms of sex work, after a previous attempt was rejected by one vote in November.  The new Bill, based on a New Zealand model, would…allow local government…regulatory control…but…prevent councils from outlawing brothels simply because they offer sex work…Ms Key and [Status of Women Minister Gail] Gago were confident the new attempt was more likely to pass…

That’s the Ticket! (TW3 #138)

Dr. Brooke Magnanti on Comic Relief’s subscription to prohibitionist lies:

…This figure comes from a paper that surveyed only street-based sex workers, who represent less than 20% of prostitution…we should be…wary of…any group that throws around this number as if it represents sex work in general…Similarly, we are regularly told that the “average” age of entry into sex work is 13. This is actually incredibly mathematically unlikely, unless there is an epidemic of infants being sexually exploited we don’t yet know about. Former librarian and escort Maggie McNeill has broken down why this oft-repeated assumption is incorrect…The Comic Relief site continues: “The UK is a major destination country for trafficked young people. They are at a very high risk of being sexually exploited.”  No source is given for this statement – probably because no such data exists.  Confirmed trafficking cases in the UK are more likely to enter other jobs like agriculture, hospitality, and domestic service than they are to become sex workers…

No Friend of Ours

In the process of criticizing Nevada’s proposed “Everyone is a Sex Trafficker” Act, Jennifer Reed also debunks the “sex trafficking” panic:

…Prostitution in the U.S. was largely legal until changing women’s sexual norms led to a “white slavery” panic that resulted in the closing of brothels with the White-Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act in 1910…The reality was numerous young women were drawn into prostitution for “mundane” economic reasons [but] the ambiguous language of the Mann Act…was used to criminalize forms of consensual sexual behavior for many years…The [American] conception…developed because a crusade against prostitution…[conflated it] with human trafficking, a claim for which there is no evidence, even according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.  An executive summary of human trafficking put forth by the non-profit Center for Health and Gender Equity concludes that “conflating human trafficking with prostitution results in ineffective anti-trafficking efforts and human rights violations because domestic policing efforts focus on shutting down brothels and arresting sex workers, rather than targeting the more elusive traffickers”…investigations…[focus] almost entirely on commercial sex.  It is a structure built on vice squads rather than labor investigators…

Comfort Zone

I wrote:  “…many European countries seem more interested in ‘trafficking’ as an excuse to restrict immigration than as a genuine concern for the human rights of migrants.”  Jim Cusack of The Independent wrote:  “The Department of Justice and the courts are turning down ‘nearly all’ asylum requests from African women who say they fled [to Ireland] to escape sex traffickers in other European countries…”

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Fictional Interlude: Mercy

Posted in Fiction, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , on March 15, 2013| 22 Comments »

Thou art no longer lonely in the world.  –  Nathaniel Hawthorne

I sometimes feel sorry for those who don’t have a calling.  In the course of my life, I meet so many people whose jobs are nothing more than a way to earn a living; not a source of satisfaction or meaning, nor a sacred duty or trust, nor a labor of love, but rather just a means of keeping body and soul together.  Now, that’s not so bad for young men who are working their way through school, or young women who are just marking time until the right man comes along.  But for the poor women forced to lead lives of drudgery, or the men whose sacred fire has been quenched by years at a dead-end job, it must be horrible.

Rappaccini's gardenThat’s why I’m so very thankful to be one of those who feel called to my work; as a young girl in Padua I was well-educated but quite sheltered, and since my dear father left me with more than enough to support me in great comfort I was quite content to while away the years in the study of medicine, philosophy and literature, and to amuse myself puttering in the garden.  And so things might have remained had not Fortune declared otherwise; with the collapse of my country’s economy after the last war I was ruined, and so I took what remained and, like so many of my countrymen, came here to the New World to start a new life.

Though I probably know more of the secrets of the healing arts than all but the most gifted physicians, my learning was drawn entirely from my father’s tutelage and my own extensive studies after his death; I had no diploma from a university to set before the eyes of the stolid old men who ran the hospitals, nor could they be bothered to administer to a woman (let alone one for whom English was not her mother tongue) the practical and oral examinations by which I could have proved my skill.  But while my sex and heavy accent presented barriers to my gaining employment as a doctor, they also provided me with the tools necessary to charm my way into a position as a nurse.  And this proved a blessing in disguise, for it was through that situation that I eventually awakened to my true vocation.

The hospital at which I worked was recognized as a leader in caring for those who had been mutilated by traumatic injuries, both in their immediate care and in the complications that might arise in the months and years to come.  It was soon recognized that I showed not the slightest revulsion or faintness in dealing with even the most horrifying disfigurement, and so naturally I was always assigned to deal with such cases.  I firmly believe that they err who treat all maladies as merely things of the body, and that the spiritual component cannot be neglected; accordingly, I spent as much time as possible conversing with my patients, giving them encouragement in order to prevent their sinking into despair due to the great misfortunes which had come upon them.  My long-term patients and those with chronic complaints soon came to rely upon me to lift their spirits, and would often share their troubles to me.

I had been working there some two years when I had the conversation which changed my life, with a young man who had left most of his lower body behind when he was brought home from the Argonne.  The consequences of his injuries were severe, recurrent and worsening, and the prognosis was that he had not long to live. He often spoke to me of his troubles, and one quiet night when the ward was otherwise empty we were able to have a long and intimate conversation, because there was no one else I had to attend to; it was then he confided the source of his greatest pain to me.

“It’s not the dyin’ part,” he said; “’cause I knew when I went ‘over there’ that there was a chance of that, an’ livin’ as half a man ain’t really livin’ anyhow.  It’s just that – an’ I’m sorry to be so blunt, Bea, but I don’t know how else to say it – well, I sure wish I could’ve enjoyed a lady before I went.”

Then and there, I knew what I had to do.  I had never kissed a man before, but I had seen enough of it in the cinema to know how it was done; moreover, I was fully aware of the effect it would have.  I stole a glance to be absolutely sure we were alone, and then I gave him as long and passionate a kiss as I dared.  A look of wonderment crossed his face, and I whispered a promise in his ear and told him I would return later.  He passed peacefully sometime before morning, with a serene and contented smile on his face.

At first, I found all of my gentlemen in a similar fashion, and arranged to meet them at their homes when I was off duty.  But after a time I realized that it was not only the maimed who needed me, but others as well – the chronically ill, the very old, the hopelessly alienated, the desperately lonely – all of them could benefit from my ministrations. And as I grew more worldly I recognized that I could make a far more comfortable living at my new calling than I ever could as a nurse; furthermore, there were men in want of my help all over this great country, so I could hardly afford to be tied to any one place.  As the years went by I got very good at seeking them out, at determining which of them really needed me and which I should pass by, at securing payment in advance, and at avoiding those who could not accept my profession and would surely have harassed or even imprisoned me had they recognized what I was doing.

Femme Fatale by Sinistral (1992)Now the world is embroiled in another great war, and some say America will soon enter it as well; if that does happen, I will be ready to give peace to its victims.  My father, Heaven forgive him, employed his esoteric skill to “protect” me from men by making it impossible for any living thing to survive contact with my flesh; the process thus rendered me immune to disease and decay, and I look today much as I have for well over a century.  Through decades of experiment I succeeded in rendering casual contact harmless, yet I am still poisonous to the core; any man with whom I am intimate will within hours fall gently and painlessly into the sleep from which there is no awakening.  So though normal relationships and children are forever forbidden to me, I have at last found a vital role in the world as the handmaiden of Death, calling him to those for whom his presence is not dread, but welcome.

(With grateful acknowledgement to the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne).

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Watershed

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2013| 59 Comments »

Reformers are far more common than Feminists…[and] the passion to decide to look after your fellow-men, and especially women, to do good to them in your way is far more common than the desire to put into everyone’s hand the power to look after themselves.  –  Lady Margaret Rhondda

???????????????For every social movement there is a watershed moment, a point at which the struggle ceases to be unceasingly uphill and begins to develop momentum.  Gay rights had its moment in Lawrence vs. Texas, and marijuana decriminalization seems to have reached its this past November with the success of the initiatives in Washington and Colorado.  And though it’s obvious that we have not yet reached that point in sex worker rights (and probably won’t until the collapse of “sex trafficking” hysteria), I do believe we’re beginning to see a few signs that the terrain is starting to level out, and that the crest is no longer at some impossible height above us.

The first of those signs started to appear more than two years ago, with the Himel decision in Canada and a few public statements supporting decriminalization from the odd journalist, cop, feminist or politician.  By last summer, the shift in the wind was discernible:

…decriminalization has slowly become the default position among health officials, even in countries with full or partial criminalization regimes.  This trend culminated…in a UNAIDS commission of experts in health and health law recommending absolute decriminalization of sex work and the sex industry everywhere, thus repudiating criminalization, legalization, the Swedish model, the Nevada model and all other such schemes at one stroke.  Shortly after the release of that report came the International AIDS Conference, whose leaders were clearly embarrassed and apologetic for the United states’ high-handed and asinine refusal to allow sex worker delegates into the country to attend the gathering; the executive director of UNAIDS said it was “outrageous…[that] when we have everything to beat this epidemic, we still have to fight prejudice, stigma, discrimination, exclusion, criminalization.”  An American politician, Representative Barbara Lee of California, actually fought to have sex workers allowed at the conference, and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said, “If we’re going to beat AIDS, we can’t afford to avoid sensitive conversations, and we can’t fail to reach the people who are at the highest risk”…

Since that time, the trend has only accelerated, and Melissa Gira Grant’s “The War On Sex Workers” (published in the February issue of Reason) seems to have stirred things up in a particular group we might call “whitebread feminists”, women who identify as “feminist” because they think they’re supposed to, but make no attempt to actually form coherent positions on anything.  They aren’t rabid neofeminists who equate all heterosexuality with rape, nor “sex-positive” feminists who consider themselves sex workers’ allies, nor members of any one of the various feminist cliques; basically, they’re just the feminist equivalent of rank-and-file members of a political party who happily and obediently espouse all of their group’s positions, no matter how absurd and mutually contradictory, because the group identification matters far more to them than any kind of philosophical consistency.  These women are exemplified by websites like Jezebel and Feministe, whose editorial views are roughly as coherent and rational as Femen’s agenda and whose writers are fond of words like “problematic” (which basically means “forcing me to think about things I’d rather not think about”).

not listeningAnyhow, Melissa’s essay was obviously “problematic” for a number of feminists; though I doubt many of them would have any more interest in a magazine named Reason than a staunch atheist would have in one called Faith, sex worker activists and allies tweeted, reblogged, linked and otherwise spread it so widely about that it eventually found its way inside the bubble.  The first sign it had done so was an article from young neofeminist Meghan Murphy, whose article “There is No Feminist War on Sex Workers” would have been more accurately entitled, “Blah Blah Blah I’M NOT LISTENING! Lalalalala HmmmHmmmHmm…” It attacks Melissa, Laura Agustín and others (without offering any evidence other than “they’re wrong”), refers to whores by the agency-denying label “prostituted women”, cheerleads for the Swedish model (bizarrely characterizing its one-sided criminalization as “true equality”), and then denies that there is a war on sex workers.  No, seriously, I’m not making this up; go see for yourself, then take a look at “Proof of Feminist Women’s Violence Against Prostitutes” on the cleverly-named blog This Old Whore House, which delivers exactly what its title promises.

The day after Murphy’s article appeared, two sex-positive feminists wrote a column for Feministe calling attention to Melissa’s article and presenting the case that “Anti-sex-trafficking ‘feminism’ is anti-woman…To be a feminist, one should actually care about the lives of women.” Those who remember my experience on Feministe will be wholly unsurprised when I say that the comment thread turned into a typical feminist screaming match, including an appearance by the aforementioned Meghan Murphy after the very first reply linked her article.  And just as Jill came along behind my article to label it “unacceptable”, she did the same thing here with a piece of her own entitled “Supporting Sex Workers’ Rights, Opposing the Buying of Sex” in which she declares that feminists can “support” all of our rights except the (obviously unimportant) right to earn a living at our chosen profession (which we didn’t really choose).  Oh, and think of the children!!!!  Its comment thread was, as I’m sure you can guess, much of a muchness with the other.

If it had ended there I wouldn’t be writing this post, because I saw absolutely no growth or change or movement in any of it: the bigots were bigoted, and the sex-positives were defensive, and the fence-sitters continued to ride their unicycles and juggle nonsense.  But then I saw this article from Anna North (formerly of Jezebel) entitled “What Feminism Can Learn from Sex Workers”, in which she stated that “ultimately, non-sex workers shouldn’t make assumptions about what sex workers want, or decide what they need.”  If a woman who has gone on record as believing in both “social construction of gender” and the gypsy whores myth can understand that, maybe there’s hope for whitebread feminists yet.  And since they are the vast majority of women who self-identify as “feminist”, they might well prove the group that pushes us over the top.

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Tullia d’Aragona

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2013| 40 Comments »

It is not holiness, but arrogance displayed
to take away the greatest gift—free will—
bestowed by God from the beginning of time.  –  Tullia d’Aragona, Sonnet XXXV

The existence of courtesans is a glaring refutation of neofeminist dogma about objectification, the eternal victimhood of whores, etc; the fact that the most celebrated, successful and highly-paid harlots of all time were often those who were educated and could match or surpass men in intellectual pursuits throws a huge spanner into the catechism that prostitution is a manifestation of male dominance over women, that our clients hate us, and so on.  Whenever possible, neofeminist historians deny that courtesans were prostitutes, pretend that accomplished women were not really courtesans, or describe them with circumlocutions like, “she chose to cohabit with several men who supported her financially.”  And when all else fails, they simply ignore them.  Fortunately neither male historians nor female ones with less parochial views feel the need to dissemble about such women, and among them Tullia d’Aragona is rightfully viewed as worthy of respect and study.

She was born in Rome sometime between 1508 and 1510 to the courtesan Giulia Ferrarese, who was considered the most beautiful woman of her time.  Giulia was married sometime before that to Costanzo Palmieri d’Aragona, but the marriage seems to have been a family subterfuge to cover up for Costanzo’s wealthier and more important cousin, Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona (who was the illegitimate grandson of Ferdinand I, King of Naples); since cardinals of the Catholic Church were not supposed to hire hookers, his poorer cousin’s marriage of convenience to his favorite lady gave him excuses to be at their house often.  Tullia believed herself to be the cardinal’s daughter and he apparently agreed, because he paid for her education and when he died suddenly in 1519 the family immediately relocated to Sienna (though the exact reason for this is unknown).  She was a brilliant girl, and over the next few years her mother trained her to be a courtesan; in Renaissance Italy it was a trade often passed from mother to daughter, with the mother taking over as guardian, housekeeper and advisor once the daughter was old enough to start working (generally in her late teens).

Salome by Moretto da Brescia (late 1530s)Tullia’s career began when she and her mother returned to Rome in 1526, but unlike most courtesans of her time she preferred to “tour” rather than staying in one place; obviously her stays were much longer than those of modern escorts, but very much shorter than was typical in those less-mobile times.  She is known to have resided for periods in Venice (1528 and 1540), Bologna  (1529), Florence (1531), Adria (1535), Ferrara (1537), and Siena (1543 and 1545), and when she wasn’t anywhere else she was in Rome.  She was able to do this because, though she lacked her mother’s legendary beauty, she had a reputation for intelligence, learning and wit which started literally in childhood, and which had spread throughout northern Italy.  Though she had her share of clients who were nobles, bankers and the like, she was always most popular among the cognoscenti, especially poets and philosophers; she held salons at her residences from at least 1537 on, and her clients and guests encouraged her literary development and helped to popularize her work.  Chief among these was Girolamo Muzio of Ferrara, a courtier who acted as her editor.  Because mind and personality inspire men more than mere beauty (and probably in part because so many of her clients were poets), Tullia’s following was extremely devoted even by a great courtesan’s standards; Emilio Orsini founded a “Tullia Society” of six clients sworn to defend her honor, several men were supposed to have committed suicide for love of her, Filippo Strozzi was recalled from his diplomatic post for divulging Florentine state secrets to her, and Ercole Bentivoglio was said to have gone about carving her name on every tree he could find.

The 16th century was a time of great unrest in Italy; what is now one country was then divided into a number of city-states who were often at war with one another.  The Pope, several city-states and France were at war with the Holy Roman Empire during Tullia’s first few years in the profession, and this and the growth of Protestantism in Germany had created a climate of fear in northern Italy.  Such times always breed conservatism and usually lead to an explosion of authoritarian laws enacted in the name of “safety” and “morality”; just as in our own era, many of those laws were directed against whores.  At that time, nobody was deranged enough to believe that prostitution could be stamped out, so most of the laws merely intended to stigmatize and marginalize harlots by forcing them to live in red-light districts and wear certain kinds of clothes to differentiate them from “good” women.  In order to get around these laws, Tullia decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps by entering into a marriage of convenience to one Silvestro Guicciardi on January 8th, 1543.  We know practically nothing about this man other than that he died young and one of Tullia’s few enemies accused her of complicity in the death; the whole purpose of the arrangement seems to have been to make her officially a married woman so she could ignore the restrictions on courtesans.

By the end of 1545, the political turmoil was so bad that Tullia returned to Florence and placed herself under the protection of Cosimo I de Medici; there she once again established a salon and entered into correspondence with several poets.  But the busybodies just wouldn’t leave her alone; in 1547 she was charged with refusing to wear the harlot clothes demanded by a brand-new law.  This time, however, she appealed directly to the Duke and Duchess, and she was granted an exception due to her skill as a poet and philosopher (ah, whorearchy!)  Soon afterward she dedicated her new book, Poems of Madam Tullia de Aragona and Several Others, to the Duchess; later that year, she dedicated Dialogue on the Infinity of Love to the Duke.  The former was a collection of poems by and about her, many by Florentine nobles and respected literati; the latter was the first neo-Platonic dialogue ever written by a woman.

Tullia d'AragonaBut despite her comfort and literary success in Florence, she felt drawn back to Rome and returned there in October 1548; she seems to have semi-retired as a courtesan at that point, and devoted her remaining years to writing poetry and to hosting an academy of philosophy in her home.  Her son, Celio, was born around this time; like her daughter, Penelope (born 1535), his father is unknown (though some sources erroneously assume it to be her husband, who was already dead).  Her last work was an epic poem entitled Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino  (The Unfortunate, also called Guerrino), a poetic version of the 14th-century prose tale of a nobleman who is captured by pirates as a baby, sold into slavery, escapes and then wanders the world (even venturing into Hell) in search of his parents.  Despite the fact that this is the earliest known epic poem by a woman and that it touches on many strikingly modern philosophical subjects (including gender identity, homosexuality and “otherness”), it has never been translated into English.  She died of unknown causes in 1556, and Il Meschino was published posthumously four years later.

Even in a staunchly patriarchal country and era, the genius of Tullia d’Aragona was recognized and respected, and her work has been periodically reprinted in Italian (several times since the early 1970s).  She was largely unknown in the English-speaking world until quite recently, however; the only English-language reference to her I could find before 1990 was a chapter in Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance from 1976.  Given her intellectual accomplishments, one would think that feminists would be at least as eager to call attention to her as they have to far less accomplished and deserving women…but of course those women were not prostitutes.  Like the Italians of the 1540s, neofeminists would prefer to stigmatize Tullia and consign her to a ghetto for her unrepentant whoredom rather than to admit that prostitutes are just as capable of intellectual and social contributions as anyone else.

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Banishment

Posted in Current Events, History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 12, 2013| 31 Comments »

Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.  –  Derek Jarman

To a very high degree, modern society is losing its taste for overt violence.  As Steven Pinker has pointed out, by any measurable standard we are living in the least violent era in human history, and the level keeps dropping all the time; there is less war, less violent crime, and less collective brutality than ever before.  But while modern people are more likely to fight with lawsuits than with knives and states are more likely to impoverish or incarcerate than to execute, there is still plenty of hate, concentrated on an ever-dwindling population of “safe” targets.  In the West, maltreatment of sexual minorities has always been popular, and though society has placed race, gender, religion, ethnicity and even homosexuality off-limits, open hatred of most sexual minorities is still deemed acceptable both for individuals and for governments.18 People Burned (1528)  The diminishing popularity of open barbarism such as beating, branding, maiming or burning alive led to a shift toward incarceration, but overcrowded prisons and skyrocketing costs make permanent caging of the non-violent unfeasible even when it isn’t actually impossible, so what are sadistic moralists to do?  Increasingly, the answer is the next best thing to imprisonment: exile.

For most of history, the preferred method for dealing with undesirables was to remove them by pushing them to the fringes of society, banishing them from a jurisdiction altogether, or ejecting them from material existence entirely (often by imaginative and grisly means designed to instill fear into the rest of the populace).  Then in the 19th century, all of these were largely supplanted by the one-size-fits-all approach, incarceration; though it was advertised (and still is) as a means of “correcting” errant individuals, it actually serves only two purposes: sequestration and vengeance.  But the United States has carried that inhumane experiment almost as far as is economically and socially possible, and even die-hard adherents of the “lock ‘em all up” mentality are beginning to admit that the system is a human rights disaster; since execution is now widely considered distasteful except for the most heinous murders, it isn’t surprising that banishment is coming back into fashion for “sex criminals”.

Though everyone has sexual impulses, a large fraction of humanity (most especially Judeo-Christian humanity) prefers to pretend that it doesn’t.  When an “upright, wholesome” man or a “pure, chaste” woman sees a “pervert” or whore, he or she is unpleasantly reminded of his or her own sexual needs and thoughts; the urge to remove “sex offenders” from public view is thus a very strong one.  It’s easy for the typical “law-abiding citizen” to pretend he would never steal or kill, so even if a violent criminal remains in the public eye it provokes little discomfort among the righteous; sex “crimes”, however, are a different matter entirely, and require more active and ritualistic “othering” and expulsion.  That’s why the physical location of a brothel or escort’s incall is almost invariably mentioned with pretended horror: “within walking distance of [an] Elementary School” or “a building close to [a] Monastery” or “just a few hundred yards from the courthouse.”  Given the density of schools, churches and government buildings in any typical city it would be unusual if a whore’s workplace was not close to some such edifice, but these statements serve an incantatory purpose rather than an informational one: they are formulae intended to assure the reader or listener that commercial sex is weird and that the speaker or writer wholly disapproves of it.

Once one understands this, “sex offender” residency restrictions make a lot more psychological sense, despite their complete legal insupportability and practical absurdity; obviously, nobody believes that “sex offenders” are incapable of moving from their declared residences, nor that they are so stupid they would prefer to commit “sex crimes” in their own neighborhoods rather than someplace else where they’re less likely to be identified.  The purpose of such laws is to prevent ritual contamination from pariahs, and to remind the citizenry that politicians are courageous defenders of the public morals.  How else can we explain petty evil like this:

[Los Angeles] officials are building a small park in Harbor Gateway…[to force] 33 registered sex offenders to move out of a nearby apartment building.  State law prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school.  By building the park, officials said, they would effectively force the sex offenders to leave the neighborhood…Los Angeles plans to build a total of three pocket parks with the intent of driving out registered sex offenders; two will be in Wilmington.  At one-fifth of an acre, [it] will barely have room for two jungle gyms, some benches and a brick wall…The action marks the latest campaign…to drive sex offenders farther into the fringes of society.  The state law already bans offenders from living in huge swaths of urban areas, pushing them into industrial districts and remote towns and into neighborhoods…that lack schools and parks…

Clustering of “sex offenders” is the inevitable result of these draconian residence policies, and Los Angeles isn’t the only place where politicians are now legislating to “solve” a problem they created themselves:

Shiloni Transformation Ministry has taken a stand against…the Anti-Clustering Law being made statewide in Alabama.  This law was passed in 2010 for the City of Birmingham…as a “test run” for the entire state to adopt this very damaging piece of legislation…[which] effectively disabled our ministry from being able to take in former sex offenders out of prison…HB 85 does state that there is a provision…for half-way houses that are “state approved”…[but] there is no state approval agency or standard set in place…Bill Grier…of Shiloni…[said] “The State of Alabama has…opposed the assistance of any and all convicted sex offenders…This…supports recidivism because they have no structured environment to…enable them to move forward”…the State of Colorado Department of Corrections Study in 2003…found that residency restrictions had no effect on recidivism of sex offenders, but a positive…environment, such as a halfway house or…supportive family, increases an offender’s likelihood of living a productive, successful life once their sentences have been served.

sex offender bridgeGrotesquely-unjust government policies nearly always have to get worse before they get better, and “sex criminal” banishment laws have now reached the tipping point; they are so clearly monstrous that even people who are not themselves directly affected are beginning to oppose them, as in the example above.  It’s going to be a long time before the victims of these registries are freed from rampant persecution, but perhaps sex workers may be somewhat luckier:

A proposal to banish sex workers from Atlanta has stalled amid growing opposition that includes LGBT activists and gay residents…The…City Council’s Public Safety Committee dropped the proposal…instead looking to convene a Working Group on Prostitution to gather recommendations on how to best deter prostitution.  That’s quite a departure from the Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution proposal, which was on a fast track to approval earlier this month…

The vast majority of so-called “sex offenders” are people who were accused of perfectly ordinary human behaviors criminalized by our twisted society; the remainder are far more likely to reoffend if they’re denied normal social interaction.  Neither they nor streetwalkers nor anyone else who hasn’t committed mass murder deserve to be driven out of communities as lepers once were; it’s time to consign such atavistims to the same rubbish-heap of obsolete legal penalties where the pillory, the lash and the headsman’s axe are buried.

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