Just when you thought things could not get worse, the government…instructs universities to criminalize bad jokes, clumsy flirtation, and unpopular social science. – An anonymous Harvard professor
I often reflect that I got my undergraduate degree just in time, because soon after I graduated in 1987 American universities began a sharp decline in academic freedom and personal rights (all in the name of “feminism”) which continues to this day and shows no signs of stopping. To be sure, there were loudmouthed neofeminists at UNO while I was there, but they were A) a small minority, and B) had no political power. They were no more able to impose their bizarre beliefs on the university than the Marxists, the religious fundamentalists or any other pro-oppression fringe group, and faculty and students alike were free to express any opinion, however “offensive” to the dewicate widdle feewings of some sheltered nitwit, without fear of censure or worse. Nobody thought it was weird if an undergrad dated a grad student, or had a sudden attack of the vapors if an English professor talked about Lady Macbeth’s tits, or reported a rather opinionated young lady to the Thought Police for expressing (in no uncertain terms) her highly unorthodox views on Kate Chopin’s writing ability. And though there was an awful lot of sex going on, I can’t recall ever hearing in my four years there of a single student being raped by another student.
Unfortunately, the neofeminists were already hard at work to change all this in order to promote the politically-useful myth of “rape culture”. A bogus study by Mary Koss of Kent State (which declared many women “rape victims” even when they reported otherwise) was published in Ms. magazine in 1985, and politicians were quick to jump on the bandwagon to divert millions in funds for “rape prevention” to campuses whose average sexual assault rate was 1/30 the rate in poor urban neighborhoods. By the early ‘90s repressive speech and “sexual harassment” codes were being imposed on every American university, and by the turn of the century a stifling blanket of political correctness, woven from fear of lawsuits and increasingly-expansive interpretations of “Title IX”, had descended upon American academia. But that still wasn’t enough for the neofeminists; despite a generation of brainwashing, most young women were still unwilling to make the number of rape accusations they needed to satisfy their bloodlust. So in 2007 the Department of Justice conducted a new survey, and like Koss multiplied the results by four via the simple expedient of ignoring what the supposed “victims” thought about their experiences. Using this as “evidence” of “a terrible, alarming trend of campus sexual violence”, in 2011 the Department of Education imposed a terrible, alarming new policy:
…even [if a man has] no way of telling…[how much a woman has been drinking it is] his responsibility to determine if she [is] “incapacitated” [because]…if she [is], any fondling they [do], no matter how great her zeal, [is] sexual assault. She doesn’t even have to lodge a complaint; the college has to investigate if…[a witness] sees her…and suspects she’s drunk…and then there’s the new…requirement that has raised the most alarm among civil libertarians: the lowering of the evidentiary standard to that used in civil-rights litigation…a “preponderance of the evidence” is now all that’s required…not the more familiar “beyond a reasonable doubt” of criminal cases or the intermediary “clear and convincing evidence” standard many schools used to employ…
In other words legal adults are defined as incompetent children if they happen to be female, and guilty until proven innocent if they’re male. The result of this has been, as any fool could have predicted, a witch-hunt against heterosexual male students. Of course, they could avoid that danger by simply refusing to date anyone at the same university, so obviously the list of potential “crimes” had to be expanded:
…both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have mandated the effective abolition of free speech on college campuses, as well as the almost certain conviction of large numbers of students…The ED/DOJ’s disturbing and unconstitutional May 9th letter, mandating changes in sexual assault and harassment procedures and standards, arose out of a joint…investigation…at the University of Montana, Missoula…but…described [the letter] as “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country to protect students from sexual harassment and assault.” In other words, any college or university receiving federal funding (which includes nearly all of them) risks losing that funding, if it does not comply…Henceforth, “sexual harassment,” for which a student must be investigated according to federal regulations, will be defined on campuses throughout the nation as engaging in “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”…including “verbal conduct” (more commonly known as “speech”), from the vantage point of the “victim.” It doesn’t matter if the victim happens to be exceptionally brittle, or subjectively feels “sexually harassed” in situations that other students would deem nothing more than the normal interactions of daily life in a college community.
The inevitable result…is that all students would arguably be guilty of harassment several times a day…playing uncensored rap music…posting something controversial on Facebook, or defending former U.S. Representative Todd Akin in class could now constitute “harassment”…in a hypothetical 500-person lecture…the one person who takes offense to slide five has the power to silence the professor, and to keep the 499 other students from hearing the speech in question. The Supreme Court some time ago referred to this tactic as “burning the house to roast the pig,” and has consistently ruled it unconstitutional…But by the time a challenge makes its way up to the Supreme Court…the bureaucrats will have already succeeded in establishing a permanent cultural change such that students won’t even be tempted to say something of a sexual or even, very likely, a gender-related nature, nor engage in dating activity, that might possibly disturb an overly sensitive fellow student…
Technically, a male student could just as easily use this awful policy against a female one as vice-versa, but I think we all recognize that this is both relatively unlikely and liable to face a much higher – perhaps even normal – burden of proof. Unless something is done to overturn this (and I have little faith that it will be), the neofeminists now have a tool with which they can drive out as many of the remaining minority of male university students as they wish, and dumb down what passes for discourse until it challenges, stimulates and educates exactly nobody.
Well, that whole “higher education” thing was nice while it lasted.
What seems like a straightforward news article can often reveal hidden depths when examined critically by an informed mind; the biases, knowledge gaps and outright lies of both the author and the interviewees then stand out in sharp relief, like a computer-enhanced photo of the Earth taken from a satellite. Many of you probably saw this item about the decline of Nevada brothels, but let’s apply some image enhancement to the picture:
…As state legislators ponder levying an 8% sales tax on brothels and other live entertainment, the director of the Nevada Brothel Association says that a bad economy and an abundance of illegal prostitutes is already killing off the business. “When I started as the lobbyist for the industry in 1985, we had 37 brothels in the state,” [said] George Flint…“Now we have just 18, and 12 to 14 of them are not doing very well”…Since the recession…many women [have gone] into business for themselves so as to avoid handing over 50 percent of their fee to brothel owners.
There’s so much more to see in this short paragraph than meets the uninformed and uncritical eye; let’s take it in order of appearance. First, it’s interesting that brothel owners are complaining about plans to tax them when they themselves agitated in favor of it for years, because they recognize that once a government becomes used to income from an industry it will generally work to build up that industry in order to increase revenues. So I suspect Flint’s complaint is just poor-mouthing intended to set up some request for concessions to the brothel industry or a crackdown on independent operators; despite his claim that it’s the economy which has hurt the brothels, the fact of the matter is that it’s a combination of the internet and women’s social progress. Since 1985, the average American woman’s opportunity cost has risen due to increased education and removal of impediments to employment, and it has been demonstrated that women of higher opportunity cost prefer to work illegally rather than submitting to the relatively exploitative conditions in Nevada brothels. The internet then made it much easier for women to make that choice, and so they have; only a hopeless lawhead could fail to understand that arbitrary “legality” is very far down the list of factors used by the typical woman when considering her means of survival.
As a result…prices for sex have fallen. “Instead of paying $400…these guys can now go out and get the same service for a third of the money,” Flint said.
This is an outright lie, as any man who has ever hired an escort in Vegas will tell you. I don’t know if even the streetwalkers there can be hired for $130, much less an escort, and to pretend that’s the “same service” one receives from a brothel is more like something one might expect to hear from a prohibitionist (in close proximity to phrases like “selling her body” and “prostituted woman”).
State officials estimate that there are some 30,000 sex workers just in Las Vegas…“Look in the phone book, there are what, 100 pages for nude dancers who’ll come to your hotel room?” Flint said. “The big hotels have their own girls. The strip clubs have upstairs rooms. You have a variety of different levels of prostitution in Vegas.” With those many layers, the city has no shortage of problems, from violent pimps to the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV. “Since 1987, we’ve never had a single woman test positive for HIV who worked in a brothel,” Flint said.
I probably don’t need to remind you that whores are not a significant vector for any STI anywhere in the developed world, but you may not realize that the invasive, degrading weekly disease checks required by Nevada law are one of the reasons so many women prefer to work independently or for escort service owners who treat them like adults capable of taking care of their own health. I’ve also previously addressed the “violent pimp” propaganda and explained how politicians and brothel owners spread it in order to maintain public support for the status quo, but of course that’s not how they spin it:
A PPP poll conducted in 2012 found that 66% of Nevada residents believed that brothels should be legal across the state. Few politicians, however, have shown the political will to take on the issue. “My constituents are not ready for it,” former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman…[said] in 2011. “They are always ready to have a good discussion because they are smart people, but they are not ready to legalize prostitution because they have moral objections.”
We’ll pause for a few moments here so everyone can finish laughing at the idea that the majority of Las Vegas residents have “moral objections” to vice businesses, and to give y’all time to clean the coffee off of your monitor screens.
Barring a sudden economic turnaround or what he sees as an unlikely political awakening, Flint sees continued trouble for the brothel industry. “I’m an optimistic guy, but I’m not optimistic that this business will bounce back very quickly,” Flint said.
This is the only wholly truthful statement Flint made in the whole article. As an officially-sanctioned but ersatz replacement for escorts, the brothel industry is doomed; its only hope is gentrification, the transformation of brothels into attractive resorts to which men can take their friends, clients or open-minded wives, places which can offer an experience not available in a hotel room or even a typical incall. When in the 1970s and ‘80s strip clubs went from being seedy dives to upscale gentlemen’s clubs, everyone benefitted except the prohibitionists (who had to invent the myth of “negative secondary effects” to shore up their “sin and degradation” catechism); the same thing will happen as Americans lose their ignorance-spawned fear of bordellos. Here’s some free advice, Nevada brothel owners: stop getting in bed with the prohibitionists and instead work toward decriminalization and eradicating stigma. Then you can invest in turning your businesses into showplaces and possibly even franchise operations, and you’ll make more money than you ever did catering to guys who were just too scared to call “illegal” hookers to come to them.
You want to film something, bitch? Film this! – Nathan Church
Well, I got my computer back Monday, and was exceptionally pleased to see that my wizard of a technician managed to recover everything! I was also pleased to see that when I reconstructed both of last weekend’s columns I had only forgotten two items in each one, and now that they’ve been safely inserted into this weekend’s columns I suppose I can say I’m officially caught up (though I’m still scrambling to get a couple of weeks ahead on my daily columns as I prefer). This week Jesse Walker edged out Radley Balko for the top spot, so everything above the first video is Jesse’s, while the first three below the video are Radley’s. The video itself was made by Commander Chris Hadfield on the International Space Station and provided by Mike Siegel, while the second video was made by Harvey Silverglate and provided by Mistress Matisse. The links below Radley’s were contributed by Chi Mgbako, Amy Alkon, Lenore Skenazy, Furry Girl, and Jack Shafer (in that order), and the last three by John David Galt (“Dubai”), Kevin Wilson (“freedom”) and Walter Olson (“dead fish”).
Feminism still feels like someone rescuing me from the patriarchy so that I may be told what to do by “sisters” who need to get their opinions out of my knickers. – Sarah Woolley
Justice minister Francisco Dominguez’s warning…that…men…who seek [paid] sex…will be…[prosecuted] has roiled [Dominican] workers… “There are customers who’ve called us to tell us that they won’t come”…said Carla Matos…who…said she had to become a prostitute…to raise her children…”What we’ll have to do in a couple of days will be to go out and rob and kill people, because imagine, we can’t do nothing else. I will not let my children starve,” [Jennifer] Paniagua said.
Not only is “prostitution” a tagged skill you can select on LinkedIn, there are actually escorts who advertise their services [there]…[but] LinkedIn…now explicitly bans escorts from using the site…The new user agreement states that you must not: “Create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution” even if [they are] legal where you live…Not only can you list “prostitution” as a skill, you can list a whole lot of other unsavory skills like “rape,” “shoplifting,” “gangs,” “manslaughter,” and “drug trafficking”…
…Shona Langley, a street sex worker support officer, and Charlotte Crossland, a harm reduction nurse…[work for] the Harm Reduction project…[in] Lancashire…twice a week…they load their van with…condoms, panic alarms, needles and bank note checker pens, while Charlotte offers Hepatitis B and other vaccinations…[and] treatment for minor health issues…Shona said: “We don’t judge. We are not here to criticise or bully them into stopping what they do”…
Feminists at Cambridge University lead such privileged, unchallenging lives that they imagine jelly wrestling (girls grappling in gelatin in front of male spectators) has “a significant role to play in the degradation and abuse of women,” and imagine they’ve won a great victory for womankind via a petition which caused the event to be cancelled. Sarah Woolley explains why this is pure bollocks:
…”objectification” is a herd word used by women who can rarely recall the name of their last waitress…If a person sees a woman arse-deep in jelly and regards her as subhuman because of it, then that shit is on them…it takes more than nudity to cancel out a man’s regard for a woman as a human being. There will be misogynists in any crowd but –newsflash- a true woman hater will dehumanise you no matter how you behave or what you wear…Cambridge feminists …[are affiliated] with Object…a group known for lobbying against sex worker rights and for spreading irresponsible misinformation -particularly the fantasy that the Olympics would usher in an “explosion of prostitution.” Also on the list is “Smash Miss Contest” who “set off stink bombs”…at beauty pageants…
…mayoral candidates…argued for tougher penalties. Joseph J. Lhota…[called] for “a john list every day in the newspaper”…Adolfo Carrión Jr…went further, saying he would publish their license plate numbers…the moderator…took note of Edward I. Koch’s controversial directive…to read the names of convicted male customers on air…Christine C. Quinn…said she disagreed with publicizing the names…[but] favored an “incredibly effective” program in Brooklyn…that forces “johns” to sit through a program intended to deter bad behavior…
Translation: “There’s no evidence whatsoever and the real experts say otherwise, but this makes a perfect excuse to ask for more power to stick our noses into people’s private business.”
Prostitutes helped clean up the streets of Murcia, Spain, in an effort to draw attention to…[a] proposed bylaw…aimed at curbing prostitution and sexual exploitation [which] would damage [their] livelihood…”We’ve spoken with neighbors and local business owners and…they’ve told us that there’s no problem as long as we follow some of the requests that they’ve made, such as sticking to a timetable and keeping the streets clean…That’s why we decided to hold a clean-up day. We wanted to show that we…want to get on well with everyone”…
As I predicted, the cancer of incredibly-broad “sex trafficking” laws based on the CASE Act is spreading, now to Pennsylvania:
…House Bill 663, which was unanimously passed 195-0…expands what the state considers “commercial sex acts” and raises the crime of buying or selling people for sex work from a third-degree to a…first-degree felony. Under the new bill, the definition of commercial sex includes being forced to perform “any sexual activity…in which anything of value is given…or received”…
The bill’s sponsor complains that the “current law is vague”, but what he actually means is that it isn’t vague enough.
Another would-be ally misses the bus by not bothering to check with sex workers first; though she makes several very good arguments against criminalization and recognizes from the title on that sex work is work, she also overestimates the role of pimps and the prevalence of street work, accepts the false “sex trafficking” dichotomy, supports regulation and licensing and ends by undermining her own argument with the typical mealy-mouthed disclaimer, “I am not endorsing the act of selling sex.”
Cecilia Flores-Oebanda has…become the face of the Philippines anti-trafficking movement…but now she is fighting a battle that could truly ruin her. Fraud allegations made by Philippine investigators threaten to destroy her reputation and the anti-trafficking organization she’s run for more than two decades…
Nonetheless, the credulous CNN reporters spends about 95% of the story lauding her and repeating her bullshit stories, apparently forgetting about that word “fraud”.
The owners of an over-21s nightclub in Inverness have been issued a licence to introduce lap dancing…Rhoda Grant…said…“The commodification of woman in society is damaging and I would have hoped the objections raised by the Highland Violence Against Women Strategy Group would have been listened to”…
…Osaka Mayor…Toru Hashimoto…told reporters…that Japan’s wartime sex slave system… “were necessary in order to provide relaxation for those brave soldiers who had been in the line of fire”…Hours later [he said]…he’d…told [U.S. military brass] that…there were legal facilities for releasing sexual energy, and that unless soldiers in Okinawa made more use of similar facilities, it would be difficult to control the sexual energy of the marines…
The media have conflated two totally different statements. What Hashimoto said about military personnel needing whores is true and every experienced commander knows it, no matter what political crap the Pentagon may emit. But that isn’t the same as his disgusting rationalization of the enslavement of the comfort women, who were neither professional sex workers nor volunteers.
“anti-trafficking”…essentialises gender and childhood, it confuses and obfuscates, and…it…acts against the interests of many that it purports to serve…the state is directly and inescapably the source of vulnerability…those formally excluded are given…the right NOT to enter, to be protected from movement. The [victim of “trafficking”]…is supposed to return home. Indeed the narrative is that she wants to return home, and part of her innocence and victimhood is that she never wanted to move in the first place…immigration controls are claimed to be a mechanism of protection for migrants, rather than a mechanism of oppression…
…data is often taken from methodologies that are not…estimates…media…have often reported that 79% of trafficking is for sexual exploitation, based on the “Global Report on Trafficking in Persons” by UNODC…[but] the data is of victims identified by state authorities and of convicted traffickers…The internationally recognized definition of human trafficking states the purpose of human trafficking is for exploitation…yet [it] is…equated with sex work or irregular…migration…as a result…data on trafficked persons almost exclusively focused on women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation…
The feminist antiporn group Stop Porn Culture has sponsored a petition…to change the editorial board and title of Routledge’s forthcoming…publication, Porn Studies…Constance Penley…co-editor of The Feminist Porn Book…[said] “[The petition] reveals a total lack of understanding about academic freedom, academic integrity and the nature of scholarship…and…how desperate the antiporn people are to prevent any research being done that might not support their ideological position”…
St. John’s, Newfoundland has just over 200,000 people, which means fewer than 100,000 males. The escort interviewed for this article (“Iris”) says there are about 30 escorts working there full-time, and doing such good business travelling girls are stopping in as well. Now, ask yourself: is it credible that only about 14,000 of those men have ever paid, that the majority of those who did are now regulars and that those working girls are doing well on an average of 1 client per day? Or is it more likely that the claim few men ever pay for sex is completely absurd? As Iris said, “We wouldn’t be doing this well if your husbands and boyfriends and friends weren’t coming to see us. It’s that simple.”
This essay first appeared in Cliterati on April 14th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
Intellectual laziness can manifest itself in many ways, of which one of the most common (and irrational) is black and white thinking. Humans are highly variable creatures whose characteristics, behaviors, beliefs, preferences, tastes, etc are often very different from one another; between the two most extreme points on any scale there are an incalculable number of different positions, and in any population one is likely to find as many different opinions on any given subject as there are people. But one would never know this from talking to the dualist; he insists on pretending that everyone is clustered near the endpoints, and willfully ignores every shade of grey in between. But this view of human reality is not only limited, it’s wrong; on most subjects, only a small minority of individuals can be found in those extreme endpoints, and the great majority fall somewhere in the middle.
What makes this fallacious dichotomization even worse is that people who might not be inclined to think that way often fall into it as a response to someone else’s extreme viewpoint. For example, when faced with the bogus claim that some drug (cannabis, for instance) is universally horrible, destructive and addictive, some supporters of drug decriminalization respond with equally-spurious claims that the drug is a physical or spiritual panacea. The truth is not only in between those two points, but also varies with individuals; any given drug has both beneficial effects and harmful effects, and the proportion of one to the other can vary considerably between individuals. Each individual must decide whether the drug is right for him, and in a free society he is allowed to make that decision for himself without fear of authoritarian violence. And though there are ample moral reasons to support the principle of self-determination, there are practical reasons as well: criminalizing consensual behavior adds artificial harmful effects to those inherent in it, and makes it much more difficult for anyone to make an informed choice because data about criminalized activities is often hidden or distorted.
Sex work provides good examples of this syndrome on both sides of the transaction, worker and client. Under criminalization and even quasi-criminalization (i.e. legalization schemes which criminalize some actions such as solicitation, kerb crawling, brothel-keeping, etc) prostitution is pushed into the shadows due to fear of arrest or other police harassment, thus creating dangers not inherent in the work itself. It also becomes impossible to collect comprehensive and reliable data on the subject, and as a result prohibitionists are free to make the sort of outlandish claims with which everyone is familiar (all sex workers have pimps, we were all abused as children and/or suffer from PTSD, the average age at debut is 13, most of us are coerced, etc, etc, ad nauseam). Unfortunately, in reacting to these lies many sex workers espouse a false dichotomy; as I explained in my column of that name,
…they believe there are two and only two kinds of prostitutes, free-willed high-dollar independent escorts and pimped, coerced slaves. This, of course, is pure poppycock…The only people who…have…absolutely free choice to do any kind of work are the Paris Hiltons of the world, those who have a guaranteed inheritance, income and secured future no matter what they choose to do with the present. Every other person has no choice but to work in some fashion; the choice not to work at all simply doesn’t exist unless one considers starvation an option. At that point, then, the choice boils down to what kind of work one is able and willing to do.
Some harlots absolutely adore their work; others like it but don’t love it; others tolerate it for the high income and flexibility; still others dislike it but prefer it to their other options; and some dislike or hate it but have no other options (due sometimes to literal coercion, but more often to conditions such as drug addiction or a criminal record). The distribution may be fairly even along the spectrum, or it may be a classic bell curve; it’s difficult to be sure because of the issues discussed above. But one thing is certain; the majority lie not on the ends, but somewhere in the middle.
Clients are, if anything, even harder to get data on than sex workers; after all, even in countries where prostitution is decriminalized most men have good reasons to be discreet (including wives and social stigma). In the 19th century nearly every man paid for sex from time to time, but as sexual mores progressively relaxed decade by decade in the 20th, that fraction undoubtedly dropped because at least some men could obtain casual sex without direct payment. In the 1940s Kinsey found that 69% of men had paid for sex at least once in their lives, and though it’s probably lower now (due, again, to the increased availability of “free” sex), it still gives us a reasonable baseline to work from. But when we look at modern claims about this percentage, we find them all over the map. A few studies still produce reasonable figures, but most go wildly in one direction or another due mostly to questions and categorization criteria specifically designed to give the “researcher” exactly what she’s looking for. On the one extreme, early in 2011 the well-known prohibitionist Melissa Farley defined “paying for sex” so broadly she literally couldn’t find any men who hadn’t (and therefore had to redesign the parameters to produce a less-obviously-bogus result). On the other, the General Social Survey claims only 14% have ever paid, a figure so ludicrously low the industry would collapse; reader Kevin Wilson (a research consultant) showed that when taken with other claims from the survey, this would mean the average American sex worker only has about 10 clients per year (a number I exceeded every week of my career).
Obviously, neither of these extreme claims can be true; logic dictates that the fraction of men paying for sex now could neither be higher than it was before the sexual revolution made casual sex socially acceptable, nor too low to support the observable economic reality. The most credible studies I’ve seen indicate that though a slight majority of men have directly paid for sex at least once, most don’t repeat the experience; about 20% of all men do it occasionally and 6% regularly. So once again, we see the same pattern; sex-worker-hiring is neither ubiquitous nor rare but, like most other human behaviors, somewhere in the middle.
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. – George Steiner
Busybodies simply adore dysphemisms; they’re one of the moralists’ chief weapons in transforming a fact of life into a “menace”, a statement into a “shocking revelation”, a thing they dislike into something “seedy” or discussion of a taboo subject into a “conspiracy”. The ignorant, naïve or spineless are actually influenced by these words, while the better-informed and more reasonable may simply dismiss them as empty rhetoric. But when one takes the time to actually look, one begins to see that they’re not simply insulting and manipulative, but ludicrous and self-evidently wrong. Here’s an illustrative example on the South Korean sex industry, which is extremely typical for articles of its kind:
South Korea, a wealthy, powerful Asian…technology hub and stalwart U.S. ally, has a deep, dark secret. Prostitution…[flourishes] in South Korea just under the country’s shiny surface. Despite its illegality…the sex trade is so huge that the government once admitted it accounts for as much as 4 percent of…Gross Domestic Product — about the size of the fishing and agriculture industries combined. Indeed, paid sex is available all over South Korea – in coffee shops, motels, hotels, shopping malls, the barber shop, as well as the so-called juicy bars frequented by American soldiers and the red-light districts which operate openly. Internet chat rooms and cell phones have opened up whole new streams of business for ambitious prostitutes and pimps.
The self-contradiction begins from the very first line: If the sex trade is so all-pervasive, how can it also be said to be a “deep, dark secret”? The fact is that it’s not a secret at all, and never has been; it’s just that the phrase “deep, dark secret” is actually code for another, more obviously subjective word: “shameful”. A secret is something which is hidden, which the South Korean sex industry isn’t; “dark” implies something unpleasant or harmful, which almost nobody in South Korea really believes despite the extensive lip service paid to the notion in Korean culture. Prostitution was only criminalized in 1961 (at the urging of the United States, naturally), and police, whores and clients alike virtually ignored the law for more than 40 years, carrying on just as they always had. But American cultural imperialism refused to be denied, and in 2004 harsh new Swedish-flavored laws were implemented in response to US demands that Seoul “do something” about the nearly-nonexistent “problem” of “sex trafficking”. The fixation with the word “pimp” probably dates to this period; I see it used more often in stories about South Korea than in any other articles (discounting pure prohibitionist hatespew).
The…Ministry for Gender Equality estimates that about 500,000 women work in the national sex industry, though, according to the Korean Feminist Association, the actual number may exceed 1 million. This means that 1 out of every 25 women in the country might be selling their bodies for sex — despite the passage of tough anti-sex-trafficking legislation in recent years. (For women between the ages of 15 and 29, up to one-fifth have worked in the sex industry at one time or another, according to estimates)…
The phrase “selling their bodies for sex” is such a clichéd inanity I almost hesitate to call attention to it, but I find it almost incomprehensible that it’s still being passed around. It’s almost as though some people actually believe that after one transaction whores become spiritual beings (after all, when one “sells” something the buyer generally takes it with him when he leaves) who then, presumably, reincarnate like the Dalai Lama and return to the brothel to “sell” their instantly-grown, identical new bodies again. One wonders what happens to all the old bodies, however; I reckon once the men are done with them, they flush them down the loo like unwanted goldfish or “child sex slaves”. For comparison: if it’s true that 4% of South Korean women work in the sex trade, that’s roughly comparable to 19th-century Europe and America, which given the comparable levels of industrialization and similar social hypocrisy about sex is wholly unsurprising.
Indeed, the sex industry…is so open that prostitutes periodically stage public protest demonstrations to express their anger over anti-prostitution laws. Bizarrely, like Tibetan monks protesting China’s brutal rule of their homeland, some Korean prostitutes even set themselves on fire to promote their cause.
A reporter who lives in New York (where prostitutes periodically stage public protest demonstrations despite criminalization) considers it “bizarre” that people strongly resist tyrannical attempts to destroy their businesses and virtually enslave them. I wonder how he would react to the police violently smashing their way into his office, arresting everyone, forcing him into “rehabilitation”, then consigning him to work he hated at 5-10% of his former salary? Besides, since he apparently believes Korean harlots have the power of voluntary metempsychosis, it seems as though he would consider their behaving like Buddhist monks to be entirely predictable.
…According to the government-run Korean Institute of Criminology, one-fifth of men in their 20s buy sex at least four times a month, creating an endless customer base for prostitutes…
One-fifth of American men buy sex “occasionally” (i.e. closer to four times a year rather than a month) and only 6% “frequently”. If the Korean figure is correct, it makes the claim that the sex industry is a “secret” even more absurd.
From here, the article rapidly proceeds into the typical “child sex slavery” garbage, liberally sprinkled with phrases like “descending into the business of sex” and “illicit trade”; young women are intentionally conflated with “children” in the American style, so that the well-known Asian preference for youth is equated with pedophilia. Furthermore, the age of consent in South Korea is 13, while the age of legal majority is 19 by Western reckoning (20 by the Korean calendar). So when “Yun Hee-jun, a Seoul-based anti-sex trafficker, told the Times: ‘On online community websites, you can easily find information about prices for sex with minors and the best places to go’,” he was being extremely duplicitous; up until 2011 it was completely legal for a South Korean man to have sex with a “minor”, presuming she was at least 13 (which as we know, the vast, vast majority are). But beginning with the 2008 “Trafficking in Persons Report”, the US began to pressure the government to “crack down” on what American law defines as “sex trafficking” (whether it actually is or not), and early in 2011 Seoul decided to “out-Herod Herod” by raising the age of consent to that of legal majority…possibly the highest in the world. It is unclear whether the new law applies to all sex, or only that in which the older person is somehow “superior” to the younger (wealthier, in a position of authority, etc); try googling “age of consent South Korea” and you’ll see that nobody in or out of the country is entirely sure. And that makes moralizing about “underage prostitution” disingenuous at best, and at worst flagrantly dishonest.
Moving on, we find author Palash Ghosh either drinking deeply of the Kool-aid or expecting his readers to. He says that “women from…The Philippines, flock to South Korea to work as prostitutes and ‘bar girls’ (lured by the promises of legitimate work as waitresses or entertainers)”; Dr. Rhacel Parrenas demonstrated that parenthetical comment to be an outright lie. We are also told that “The prevalence of prostitution in contemporary South Korea provides an ironic counterpoint to the passionate political activism of elderly Korean women who relentlessly criticize Japan for their servitude as prostitutes and comfort women during Tokyo’s brutal occupation of their country”, but only a moral imbecile could find irony in the idea that people who choose to do something for good pay under pleasant conditions have very different attitudes about it than those who were forced at gunpoint to do it without any pay under horrific conditions.
The fact that Korea has had a thriving and legal sex industry since at least the Middle Ages is pushed down nearly to the bottom of the story, as is the fact that Park Chung-hee “actually encouraged the sex trade in order to generate much-needed revenue…[from] thousands of U.S. troops stationed in the country.” Ghosh then quickly changes the subject to North Korean refugees who work to pay off “people-smugglers”, and refuses to recognize that the poor conditions under which these unfortunates work are made possible by criminalization. He even seems surprised that Korean sex workers have challenged the 2004 law, the injustice and tyranny of which is easily recognized by anyone whose mind is not enveloped in a fog of dysphemisms and burdened by the misapprehension that they represent something even remotely akin to reality.
The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality–counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. – Joseph Conrad
“You’ve done quite well the past few years, Simon,” said Andrew, looking around the apartment at the expensive furnishings. “Honestly, I’ve always agreed with Dad; I never thought you’d amount to much.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“I’m only trying to say that I was wrong. Not everyone’s good at study, very few have what it takes to succeed at politics, and none of our family has a head for business. But you’ve really managed to capitalize on these new laws.”
Though he lacked Andrew’s intellectual brilliance, Simon was by no means stupid when it came to people; he knew his older brother was sneering at him. “We can’t all be college professors.”
“No, that’s true. And though you started much later, it looks like you’ve passed me in the income department. But aren’t you afraid of getting caught?”
“What do you mean, ‘caught’?”
“Well, bounty hunting is technically illegal; a felony, in fact. And that means you’re just as vulnerable under the Citizen’s Law Enforcement Act as anybody.”
“Not really; they have to tolerate it or the whole system falls apart. You know as well as I do why they passed CLEA: crime rates were skyrocketing while revenues were tanking, and all the available police manpower is tied up suppressing riots and fighting the big crime gangs. Polls show it’s a very popular program; the bounties cost far less than police salaries and benefits, and they’re more than covered by the seized assets of captured criminals.”
“Some people call those riots ‘protests’, and point out that the crime rates wouldn’t be soaring if the government didn’t keep inventing new crimes. Some even say that the program is nothing more than a way to rob the citizenry under color of law.”
“Whatever. You and I both know that’s not going to change anytime soon, and I’m going to get mine while I can. As you pointed out, I haven’t exactly succeeded at any other kind of work.”
“No, you haven’t.” Simon thought for a moment he was going to say something else, but apparently he thought better of it and kept his mouth shut for a change. The conversation turned to the wars in Nigeria and Venezuela, the upcoming Super Bowl and their mother’s health, and after he left Simon got himself a snack and looked over the evening’s plans on his phone. He then showered, shaved and dressed and headed out for his appointment.
He was really looking forward to this one; it had involved considerable research, and as Andrew would happily point out that wasn’t his strong suit. But it looked like the tip would prove worth the money he had paid for it; there was a high bounty on sex traffickers, and his cut of her assets would be worth much more than that. Best of all, he would be able to get the kind of sex he liked best before bringing her in, with no chance of getting in trouble for it.
As arranged, he met “Regina” at an exclusive restaurant and he immediately paid her by bumping phones. The fee was high and the dinner would be as well, but one had to be willing to spend money up front to succeed in this business. For instance, he could never have passed her screening without the pricey undercover alias service to which he paid out four figures a month, nor could he have been reasonably sure she was the woman he was after without expensive software to crack the distortion all escorts now used to protect against facial recognition programs. And the miniature DNA analyzer was vital for ensuring he didn’t open himself up to a ruinous lawsuit by bringing in the wrong person.
But none of this would be worth a damn without the natural skills his pompous ass of a brother could never recognize as such: the hunter’s instinct that helped him track his quarry, and the gambler’s poker face that now allowed him to chat charmingly with a beautiful woman without giving as much as a hint of a sign that he was planning to rape her, abduct her and turn her over to the police for years of prison followed by a lifetime of Registration.
Everything so far had gone according to plan, and when she went to the ladies’ room after dinner he took the opportunity to activate the app which interfaced with the DNA analyzer; it was a positive match. Her surprisingly-flattering mug shot came up on the screen, along with her real name and criminal record: Dorothy Jenkins, born September 29, 1988; convictions for pandering, money laundering and conspiracy. That gave him his threshold; she was fair game.
They returned to her incall, where he was pleased to see that she trusted her screening methods; there was neither bodyguard nor maid, which would make his job even easier. They relaxed for a while, had drinks on the sofa, continued the conversation, and then when the time seemed right headed for the bedroom. She undressed him, caressed him, and massaged his back with a fragrant oil; she then slid off the bed, removed her earrings and did something on her nightstand…and suddenly Simon felt searing pain tear through his entire being. He tried to scream, but couldn’t; every muscle in his body seemed frozen in place. The pain came again, and once more, and then through blurry, watering eyes he saw her bending over him, reading from the screen of her phone. And he heard her voice as though it were at the far end of a tube:
“Simon Bailey, born April 18th, 1985; convictions for assault on a police officer and illegal gambling; suspected of 67 counts of human trafficking for the purpose of exploitation of the Citizen’s Law Enforcement Act. Bounty hunting’s a felony, smart guy, and that makes you fair game.”
Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little. – Mason Cooley
Psychologists still aren’t entirely sure what makes a given thing funny. Oh, there’s been considerable thought about it in the past few decades, but no general consensus on some important details such as why one person finds something funny while another may not. Part of this undoubtedly comes down to taste; for example, while I find absurd situations intrinsically amusing, others may only find them irritating. And while many people find exaggerated depictions of misfortune hilarious, they only make me uncomfortable. This accounts for my mixed reaction to the Three Stooges; though I find ridiculous scenes like Curly fighting a living clam in a bowl of chowder to be extremely funny, the physical slapstick leaves me absolutely cold. Of course, some humor depends on knowledge; those in the know will get the joke, while those who aren’t, won’t. Sometimes the latter may even take a situation very seriously, while the former recognize the irony and so perceive it as ludicrous.
That was the case when I read this recent story about a “sex trafficking” propaganda session held by Shared Hope International at a Washington State high school. What first attracted my attention to it was the fact that though the speaker admits to having been naïve and ignorant at the beginning of her supposed “ordeal”, she is still just as clueless as ever, but doesn’t realize how her words betray that fact to anyone who’s ever done any kind of sex work (or even set foot in a modern strip club). I planned to use the story in TW3 #318, but the more I looked at it the funnier it got, and I realized it needed the full-column treatment. I hope I’m able to help most of you see what I saw, and if not…well, I guess you had to be there.
…Brianna…sketched a scene of lost innocence. She was in Seattle on a whim to party with two older guys she barely knew. She’d lied to her parents, telling them she was at a girlfriend’s house for the weekend. The guys seemed nice enough, attractive, possibly wealthy. But she soon discovered their motives weren’t merely impure, they were also likely criminal. They told Brianna, who’d just turned 18, she could make a lot more money stripping than she could working her other job, waiting tables…
In other words, Brianna is a spoiled, sheltered moron who thinks it’s perfectly safe to spend the weekend with complete strangers 200 km from home without anyone knowing she’s there. That’s not “innocence”; it’s exceptional stupidity. Even so, these guys (if they existed at all) don’t appear to be “criminals” to me, unless telling the truth has been criminalized in Washington; a good-looking 18-year-old girl CAN make a lot more money stripping than waiting tables. Surely Shared Hope and reporter Tyler Graf aren’t denying this?
“The strip club was really loud and really dark — it smelled,” Brianna said…”Everything there was really sticky. It had germs on it.”
My guess is that Brianna has never actually been in a strip club; her description appears to be a combination of something she saw on a TV cop show and what somebody told her about seedy porn theaters, embellished on suggestion of her handlers. Germs!
The guys told her she could make a lot of money with her young looks. So why not get out of La Center? Why not head down to Phoenix, Ariz., and catch some sun? Why not empty her bank account and hand it over? They’d take care of her. In only a few days, the requests became increasingly unreasonable, and she realized something was wrong. What she didn’t know until later was that she was on the brink of entering the sex trade world.
“Increasingly unreasonable”? Really? You mean, more unreasonable than “Hey, why not travel halfway across the country with two dudes you don’t know after turning over your bank account to them?” Because I’m honestly having difficulty thinking of something that could be more unreasonable than that to anyone who was reared outside of a Skinner box and has a greater cerebral capacity than the average stray dog. Though we aren’t told how Brianna “escaped” from these guys, it’s pretty obvious they did not actually intend to harm or (criminally) exploit her; she clearly lacks the intellectual agility to outwit a goldfish, much less a pair of gangsters (even assuming they were relatively obtuse). I’m also very amused by the phrase “sex trade world”, which was clearly shat out by the same Yellow Journalism Phrase GeneratorTM that produced “sex trafficking world” and “sex trafficking trade”.
Brianna’s brush with sex trafficking two years ago is documented in…”Chosen,” which made its premiere…in front of more than 100 La Center High School students. The 20-minute video, produced by…Shared Hope International, is meant to be an educational tool warning teens and others about the dangers of the sex trade.
Shouldn’t that be “sex trafficking trade”? Or is it “sex trade world”? One needs to be precise about these things.
In the video, another young woman details how a pimp groomed her as a young teenager. He bought her expensive gifts before eventually setting her loose at strip clubs in Portland.
I just can’t help picturing her running around the club going “woop woop woop” and “nyah nyah nyah”, then falling on her side on the floor and spinning around in a circle.
Law enforcement officials consider…Interstate 5…to be a major arterial for sex-trafficking operations, especially of underage girls…
Evidence!
“You might think pimps are cool — like, they have lots of money and cars,” senior Olivia Loreth, 19, said. “They get a lot of women because they’re just that cool.”
You might, if you were a complete imbecile.
…Former U.S. Rep. Linda Smith, the founder of Shared Hope International, says she wants the video to be another tool in fighting the rise of human trafficking…
…Smith said more awareness of the realities of sex trafficking needs to be coupled with stronger state laws that punish Johns and pimps but protect victims.
I’m starting to get the giggles every time I see some po-faced twit use the word “john” to mean a client. Even more so when he capitalizes it. And the irony of one of the chief disseminators of “sex trafficking” myths and lies using the phrase “realities of sex trafficking” is just icing on the cake.
Washington has been a leader in this. It’s one of a handful of states that has what’s known as a “Safe Harbor” law, which redefines prostituted minors as victims…
[A new Washington law] will toughen the definition of sex trafficking, making every minor who participates in a sex-for-money scheme the victim of trafficking…
That’s right, the law has the power to rewrite reality like the Lathe of Heaven and make them victims even if they weren’t. Justice!
In the two years since her ordeal, Brianna has rebounded. She often joins Smith to spread the word about the realities of sex trafficking, and she’s enrolled in a nursing program at Clark College.
If I might offer a bit of unsolicited advice, Brianna, I don’t think you’re cut out for nursing; perhaps fantasy-writing or acting would be a closer fit. Or better yet, stand-up comedy.
To make a great distinction between being paid for an hour’s sexual services, or an hour’s typing, or an hour’s acting on a stage is to make a distinction that is not there. – Margo St. James
Forty years ago today (on Mother’s Day of that year), Margo St. James founded COYOTE, the very first sex worker rights organization. Ironically, she was set on that path in 1962 by a cop who decided she looked like a streetwalker and a judge who convicted her of prostitution without any real evidence: “I said in court, ‘Your honor, I never turned a trick in my life!’ he responded, ‘Anyone who knows the language is obviously a professional.’ My crime was I knew too much to be nice girl.” Once she had a criminal record, she found that she could not get any other work, and so decided she might as well do what she had been accused of. And though she only worked for four years, she continued to identify with the hookers and eventually founded an organization called WHO:
…Whores, Housewives and Others. Others meant lesbian, but it wasn’t being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles. The first meeting of WHO was held on Alan Watt’s houseboat. The name COYOTE came from novelist Tom Robbins who dubbed me the COYOTE Trickster…Richard Hongisto, a liberal sheriff elected in San Francisco about that time attended my parties. He had been a cop, and had a sociology degree. I…asked him what it would take to get NOW, and Gay rights groups to support prostitutes’ rights…He said that we needed someone from the victim class to speak out…I decided to be that someone…and I hoped the hookers would join me. The PR people responsible for getting the sheriff elected volunteered to help me with COYOTE…I started organizing internationally with…Jennifer James, an anthropology professor…[who] coined the word decriminalization and was responsible for getting NOW to make it a plank in their 1973 convention. COYOTE published a newsletter from 1974-79 and the Hooker’s Ball became popular, attracting 20,000 people in 1978…
Let that sink in: the largest mainstream feminist organization actually supported sex worker rights for a short time, though the neofeminists destroyed that within just a few years. Still, it looked for a while as though there was nowhere to go but up. COYOTE chapters sprang up in Sacramento and Florida, and similar organizations were formed elsewhere; there was PONY in New York, PUMA in Massachusetts, CUPIDS and PEP in Michigan, KITTY in Kansas City, PASSION in New Orleans, OCELOT in San Diego, KAT in Los Angeles, ASP in Seattle and DOLPHIN in Hawaii. On June 2nd, 1975 French whores in Lyon held the protest which led to the formation of the French Collective of Prostitutes, and a sister organization soon formed in England; they and several others joined with COYOTE “to form the International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights (ICPR), the organization whose work and example helped to win prostitution law reform in a number of European countries and provided an example which inspired similar campaigns in many other parts of the world.” In 1976, COYOTE filed the lawsuit which led to decriminalization in Rhode Island, and by 1977 even well-known journalists and politicians were listening.
Had HIV not arrived on the scene a few years later, criminalization might have been merely a black period of history by now. But arrive it did, swinging the balance of power to the neofeminists and their fundamentalist Christian allies. Margo moved to Europe to help sex worker rights efforts there, and COYOTE was directed by Samantha Miller and Gloria Lockett, who worked to make the organization more responsive to the concerns of minority sex workers and those who weren’t escorts (including strippers, phone sex operators, etc). During the AIDS panic of the ‘80s and the neofeminist ascendance of the ‘90s, COYOTE was too busy fighting disinformation and stigma to make any actual progress, and by the time new organizations like SWOP started to appear around the turn of the century it had run out of steam. Margo (who had returned to the US in 1993) decided to concentrate on sex worker health, and in 1999 COYOTE became the St. James Infirmary, which provides free medical care and social services for sex workers. The only other remaining chapter is the Los Angeles one, which has been inactive since about the same time. But though the mother of all sex worker organizations has ceased to exist in its original form, every current activist group owes it – and Margo – a debt of gratitude for showing that it could be done.
In observance of Mother’s Day, I wanted to address one of the viler applications of the Madonna/whore fallacy, namely the practice of officially abducting the children of sex workers by branding them “unfit parents” on the strength of nothing but the fact that they are sex workers. But I knew that nothing I could write would have the impact of my friend Kelly’s telling of her own story, to which the rest of today’s column is dedicated.
I became involved in the Sex Industry at the age of fifteen, living alone on Fort Lauderdale beach; it’s a haven of teenage prostitution and provided the means for me to take care of myself. I was too young to have a job in Florida without my parents signing, and having no parents meant having no job. For me it was an easy transition from men that fed me and gave me a place to sleep in exchange for sex, to men directly paying me for sex. Even at that early age sex was a commodity that I controlled, and I viewed it as both an industry and a science. But an arrest prompted me to leave that life to marry my husband. I became a mother in 1993 and again in 1996 and 2001; I stayed home and raised those children for thirteen years.
Then in 2007 the housing market crashed; my husband lost his job and could not find another. Christmas was approaching and we were about to lose our home, when after another fruitless day of job-hunting he asked me through tearful eyes to put in ads as an escort again. I wasn’t alone; as the economy continued to decline, more and more women were turning to sex work to make ends meet, and not as reluctantly as you may think. For me, sex work improved my self-esteem and financial position enough that divorce seemed possible for the first time; I had already tried to escape that marriage twice through domestic violence shelters, but they could never help me become economically sound. And now I was thinking of divorce even more: my husband’s jealousy of my growing independence had incited his rage, and he was arrested twice for domestic violence.
The first time his parents quickly bailed him out, but by the second time they were angry at his lack of self control. He thought quickly and told them that his rage had been incited by the “discovery” that I was working as a prostitute; this shocked them into sympathy. No longer was he the villainous wife-beater; suddenly he was viewed only as a whore-beater, and that wasn’t nearly as bad. He didn’t mention that it was his idea, or that he had answered client emails pretending to be me while I visited other clients. His parents told him that the only way that they would bond him out this time was if he took our children and placed them on a plane to his brother (whom the children had never met) in another state. He agreed, and on July 8, 2008 he and his family began a campaign to keep the dirty whore from being anywhere near the children. And it worked: at first the state took custody from both of us, he for domestic violence and me for prostitution, but he quickly signed a case plan and “cooperated”, while I plead not guilty and chose to go to trial; this made me the “hostile” parent.
For five long years I held faith in the justice system…Five years with no school pictures, teacher conferences or chaperoned field trips. Five years of Mother’s Days with no breakfast in bed. I really believed that when the case came to court and a Judge heard about the way that my husband had continued his abusive behavior, the ordeal would be over. Surely the judge would look badly on my husband’s completely withholding visitation from me for six months despite a court order. Surely when the court heard that in his two years of custody he had never taken them to a doctor or dentist, or provided them with the glasses the two younger ones needed, they would be returned to me. Surely when they heard the sad stories that the children recount of living in their father’s home, they would be removed from there. But it didn’t work out that way, because I was a sex worker.
I did not realize at first that the court officials were totally on his side; they expedited his case and delayed mine to ensure that his was finished first, thus earning him reunification with the children. He also left the filing of the divorce papers to me, which delayed matters still further because I knew by that point I would need a good lawyer. I stopped working as an escort and began working as a tantric instructor, but my lawyer told me I had zero chance of reunification doing any kind of sex work; I therefore opened a catering company which moved into a restaurant over the next year and a half. The court had investigators crawling in and out of my restaurant and interviewing my employees, but never bothered to verify that my husband really had a job nor to ask why he hadn’t filed tax returns for over ten years. When it came to trial, the head investigator reported that my restaurant was “questionable” because I subleased the kitchen of an existing pub; she also told the judge that if my work as a tantric instructor wasn’t prostitution, “It is something similar to prostitution.” It didn’t matter that it had been more than a year since I had been involved in that, or that I admitted being previously involved; once a dirty whore, always a dirty whore. Needless to say, the court awarded him full custody. I haven’t finished fighting, though, and as he continues to neglect the children, I will continue to drag this case back to court to ask why I was never considered a “real option” in spite of the details of emotional abuse and neglect that continues in their father’s home.
Maggie was there all along, listening with a sympathetic ear and helping me to understand that the details of the case were not what mattered; she helped me understand that the stated purpose of family court (which of course is to “protect the children”) is not at all what they are truly interested in. When it comes to sex workers, keeping the status quo and punishing the dirty whore was the objective, not only in my case but in many others. The more I saw this theory proven, the more I wondered why more attention is not paid to the issue of families and custody within the sex worker rights movement; I personally found no organizations offering support for custody issues and vowed to change that. I began to notice the reinforcement of the negative stereotype of sex workers on television, and began to contemplate the way that this programming influences decision makers like guardians ad litem, who have little to no education or experience with sex workers. With that I began a Kickstarter project to produce a documentary film in which I will share my experience as a sex worker dealing with family court, and to dispel myths about sex work by looking at my life as I embark upon a typical tour.
This Mother’s Day, I propose that we take a closer look into sex work and the family court; let’s think not only about the rights of sex workers, but of the children that love them and are needlessly removed from their parents. Porn Stars have the right to custody. Strippers have the right to custody. Why should escorts be treated any differently? Sex work should not be considered in custody decisions when it does not affect the children directly, and we as a group need to stand up to demand unbiased treatment in custody decisions. Please visit “Whoremom” at Kickstarter.com to support my effort to educate the public on the reality of being a whore-mom in the state of prohibition.
If you want to donate but don't want a recurring charge, you can send any amount you like via PayPal to my email address (see below). Be sure to include a note so I can thank you!
All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say “pretty please with sugar on top” first, and then wait for me to say “okey-dokey”.
I often reflect that I got my undergraduate degree just in time, because soon after I graduated in 1987 American universities began a sharp decline in academic freedom and personal rights (all in the name of “feminism”) which continues to this day and shows no signs of stopping. To be sure, there were loudmouthed neofeminists at UNO while I was there, but they were A) a small minority, and B) had no political power. They were no more able to impose their bizarre beliefs on the university than the Marxists, the religious fundamentalists or any other pro-oppression fringe group, and faculty and students alike were free to express any opinion, however “offensive” to the dewicate widdle feewings of some sheltered nitwit, without fear of censure or worse. Nobody thought it was weird if an undergrad dated a grad student, or had a sudden attack of the vapors if an English professor talked about Lady Macbeth’s tits, or reported a rather opinionated young lady to the Thought Police for expressing (in no uncertain terms) her highly unorthodox views on Kate Chopin’s writing ability. And though there was an awful lot of sex going on, I can’t recall ever hearing in my four years there of a single student being raped by another student.The Supreme Court some time ago referred to this tactic as “burning the house to roast the pig,” and has consistently ruled it unconstitutional…But by the time a challenge makes its way up to the Supreme Court…the bureaucrats will have already succeeded in establishing a permanent cultural change such that students won’t even be tempted to say something of a sexual or even, very likely, a gender-related nature, nor engage in dating activity, that might possibly disturb an overly sensitive fellow student…
