Sex workers consider the promotion of the Swedish model and other forms of criminalization not just part of an ongoing “debate” on sex work, but a matter of life and death. – Melissa Gira Grant
“A West Virginia sheriff raped a teenager and sodomized her with a cucumber, threatened to kill her if she told, and subjected at least five other women to forced sex, at least once in a courthouse…Brittany Mae Keene sued Barbour County Sheriff John Wesley Hawkins and the Barbour County Commission…[who] essentially let Hawkins conduct a reign of sexual terror against women in his custody…” Hawkins’ victims ranged in age from 16 to 19.
Cops and Condoms (February Updates)
A [Polish] prostitute with HIV has been arrested for…having unprotected sex with clients [although]…she knew she was HIV positive…Fellow sex workers tipped off cops about the woman over fears that her actions would give prostitutes a bad [name]. But officers only arrested her after two of her clients came forward and admitted they had tested positive for HIV…
Election Day (February Updates)
Kristin Davis is running for office again, this time for New York City comptroller against her old client Eliot Spitzer. She was interviewed in The National Review by Charles Cooke (himself an advocate of legalization), and though she claims to be a libertarian she also seems to be advocating the sort of avails and bawdy house laws which may soon be struck down in Canada because they endanger sex workers. Every time she opens her mouth, she reaffirms her membership in my Hall of Shame.
The law doesn’t care if you profit from sex workers, as long as you don’t have any direct contact or actually help us in any way. In a new French video game players manipulate a cartoonish, stereotyped streetwalker who must make $150,000 to “escape her pimp” by performing fake orgasm sounds into a microphone and avoiding hazards like cops and STDs (no skill involved in the latter because whores are just stupid victims of fate). The writer of the linked review also profits by using various prohibitionist tropes to save himself the effort of original thought.
Anthony Weiner found himself caught in another sexting scandal…like the one that destroyed his congressional career, but…won’t drop out of the race for mayor of New York…Weiner admitted sending a woman sexually explicit photos and messages…more than a year after he resigned from the House in disgrace for the same sort of behavior…
Social Autoimmune Disorder (July Updates)
Another example of cops’ filthy efforts to subvert the means by which sex workers attract business and keep ourselves safe: “…a Long Island couple [was arrested for]…running an international escort service called Aphrodite Companions…Vincent and Melissa Lombardo…are currently being held without bond…the only basis…was…postings on…The Erotic Review…”
A South Carolina man targeted a sex offender at random, killed him and his wife and later told deputies he planned to kill others on the state’s sex registry…Jeremy Moody and his wife, Christine, were arrested and charged with murder…Moody only knew 59-year-old Charles Parker in passing, but came to the mechanic’s…home…with plans to kill him…Surveillance cameras outside Parker’s home showed Moody and his wife driving up…and popping the hood on their car as if it wasn’t working…Gretchen Parker wasn’t specifically targeted, but was killed because she was in the house…
Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic
…UCLA researchers say sex addiction does not appear to be a disorder…Nicole Prause and her colleagues monitored…volunteers’ brains while showing them erotic images. “If they indeed suffer from hypersexuality…their brain response to visual sexual stimuli could be expected to be higher, in much the same way that the brains of cocaine addicts have been shown to react to images of the drug”…Prause…thinks that so-called sex rehabs should be examined…
Two readers sent presents for my third
anniversary (they arrived while I was in Las Vegas, so I didn’t know about them until after I got home last Sunday): Kevin Wilson sent Unlearning Liberty, and Krulac sent Absolutely Mad and Blak and Blu. Thanks so very much to both of you!
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Make a note of this one, because you won’t often see a judge side with a sex worker against cops:
A federal judge has ruled that Nebraska cops must return over $1 million confiscated at a traffic stop from a woman who saved the money $1 at a time during her 15 year career as an exotic dancer…Tara Mishra, 33…began putting aside her earnings when she started dancing at age 18…to start her business and get out of…stripping…State troopers confiscated the money in March 2012 when they pulled over Rajesh and Marina Dheri…[who] had been given the cash so they could buy a nightclub in New Jersey. Mishra would own half of the business and the Dheris would own the other half…police did not find any evidence of drug activity…and…analysis found only trace elements of illegal drugs on the cash…[the judge] ordered that Mishra receive cash or a check in the value of $1,074,000 with interest.
Welcome To Our World (TW3 #15)
Another supposed “victim” is caged to force her cooperation in the state’s ugly little morality play: “[An Illinois] woman who claims she was forced to work as a prostitute for her boyfriend remains held…without…bail because she is considered a flight risk and might not return to testify in her boyfriend’s trial…”
Though the story is somewhat amusing, note that “end demand” policies turn innocent whores into unwilling Judas goats: “A man caught with a prostitute in his car told police she was there to show him where to buy tomatoes…officers found the [known sex worker] sitting inside Muhammad Ikhlaq’s car while he withdrew £20 from a cash machine, which he said was to pay for tomatoes…”
The Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, and Good Shepherd Sisters will not apologise to survivors of the Magdalene laundries…Neither will [they] make a financial contribution to the Government’s reparations scheme…Co-operation voluntarily given does not compel the nuns in any legal sense. Their negative response invalidates the Government’s assertion that survivors are being afforded restorative justice. There is no justice without the nuns’ apology
and/or financial reparation…the orders expect an amnesty for gross human rights violations…
Lest you forget, these same orders still receive tremendous amounts of aid and political support from the Irish government for their anti-whore scheme Ruhama.
Just in case you think it’s only Las Vegas “authorities” who hate whores so much they’re willing to make themselves look like idiots by parroting ludicrous prohibitionist drivel, here’s an unusually-ridiculous example from Reno:
An increasing number of the young women…began working as prostitutes while in their teens. They are manipulated by men who control every aspect of their lives…Some girls are branded – or tattooed – with their pimp’s name…others are forced to perform while their children are held ransom, usually at gunpoint…Girls as young as 11 are being exploited…the average age…is 14…Since 2002, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies have rescued about 100 children identified as possible victims of juvenile sex trafficking…That number does not include the adult women being trafficked, which experts say would be impossible to produce because many women don’t acknowledge that they are under the control of a pimp…[Ron] Chalmers heads the…[police division] that focuses on these types of crimes…about 10 years ago, the women arrested…were generally in their 30s to 40s [and] were drug addicts, he said. But today, the prostitution demographics are completely different…They’re much younger than they used to be, he said…”A significant number of what we see, 80 to 90%, are being exploited – forced into the lifestyle”…
You may remember that the claims made in the “Satanic Panic” similarly became much more extreme, bizarre and demonstrably false as the hysteria drew closer to the point of implosion. That last bit is more than just Maslow’s Hammer at work; it’s an example of the incredible mathematical and sociological illiteracy of hysterics. Whenever a person tells you there’s been a major demographic shift in any human behavior in only one decade – from nearly nothing to “80 or 90%” – it’s a safe bet the speaker is an imbecile who is incapable of considering even rudimentary thought experiments like “where did all the old ones go?” We see the same principle at work under the Swedish model, which claims to have dramatically decreased the number of men who have ever paid for sex.
The sex workers in the Solutions Not Punishment Coalition (SNapCO), the Atlanta group which defeated the proposal to banish arrested sex workers from the city, need to get control of their “allies”; not only is the group supporting involuntary diversion programs, its spokeswoman Misty Novitch is belching up the “average debut at thirteen” myth for the media.
It Looks Good On Paper (TW3 #311)
Yet another religiously-based “diversion program” chock full of prohibitionist rhetoric which claims to “help” streetwalkers while refusing to question the justice of the laws by which cops repeatedly victimize them: “Prostituted women” were all sexually abused as children, pimps give us drugs to control us, blah blah blah blah blah…
Council bosses have [suspended] half a dozen [Edinburgh sauna] licences following a string of police raids…[in] a radical shift from the typically pragmatic approach to prostitution which…[kept] sex workers safer and off the streets…Peter Donoghue, 69, a former sauna operator…said: “It was a lot of nonsense. Some girls have worked at the saunas for ten or 12 years. They’ll simply work for escort agencies instead. We’re going to appeal, but I don’t believe we have a chance”…
Save the children and the poor, innocent men from evil harlots!
[Kenyan] women…accused commercial sex workers of invading the town and “stealing” their men…[they] are planning to drive the twilight girls out claiming they are spreading sexually transmitted diseases. The women said the sex workers have taken their men and they are left cold and lonely on their marital beds…sex workers who dress scantily have created a brothel…where secondary school and university students go for cheap sex instead of concentrating on their studies…even primary school children have fallen into the traps…
A 17-year-old journalism intern’s impressions of the Desiree Conference:
I was a bit timid about the idea of going into a conference that was specifically about sex, but my passion against human trafficking led me to go…with…my mom…When I entered…I was…greeted by a woman with such a cheerful presence and smile, that it put me off guard. In fact, this was the common air of everyone there: happiness. Everywhere I looked I found people wearing bright colors, hugging, laughing, and enjoying themselves. I initially thought that at a Sex Worker’s Conference that it was going to be the exact opposite. I was expecting victims — people just out of the Taken film, tears that warned of a gruesome past, and consoling. There was none of that in sight. The media and society has always presented the sex industry as this taboo area…where [the] only people who were in this profession were forced to be…
R.I.P. Petite Jasmine (TW3 #329)
Caty Simon of Tits and Sass interviewed Kemal Ayrikotu of the Red Umbrella Sexual Health and Human Rights Association on the cultural background to the murder of Dora Oezer; Ayrikotu discusses the lack of rights for both sex workers and transgenders, and criticizes LGBT activists who wish to stress that Dora was a transwoman while ignoring that she was a whore (despite the two being nearly synonymous in Turkey). Meanwhile, Melissa Gira Grant wrote on the protests for both Dora and Jasmine: “If you passed by the Turkish or Swedish consulates in New York on [July 19th], you may have seen…sex workers and their supporters holding red umbrellas…the…action accompanied rallies in 36 cities and on four continents…demanding an end to the stigma and violence against sex workers’ communities…”
Targeting Sex Offenders – we really need to do something to correct this situation. I have no love for real sex offenders but the laws for registration encourage vigilante justice against them. Not only that – but I’m pretty certain they are forbidden from owning firearms – so they’re unable to protect themselves – and meanwhile everyone in America has their name, address, criminal history, and a photo. It’s only a matter of time before some idiot goes to the wrong address and blows away a grandmother baking cookies.
“Rubbing Elbows” … Fute Mă!! I hope you got to meet that 17 year old journalist!
She’ll never make a good journalist though … she’s too open minded and honest.
So, we have rape by cop, robbery by cop, we’ve seen plenty of assault and robbery by cop- When will people wake up to the fact that maintaining a paid, armed gang of thugs simply isn’t worth the sense of illusion they afford?
The saddest part is that “no standing gang of armed thugs” was one of the founding principles of this country; it was circumvented for a hundred years by the pretense that the cops weren’t an army, but in the past two decades even that deception has been abandoned.
I’m not trying to bait you Maggie, but does that mean you’re of the opinion that police have always been “gangs of armed thugs” analogous to an army, only without a code of conduct? If not, how far back would we have to go before we find an era where police actually were effective protectors of the community? Because I thought the principle of ‘no standing army’ was geared towards keeping the US out of foreign entanglements (and yes, we’ve seen how that’s turned out), versus allowing communities the ability to set up methods to protect themselves (ineffective as they might ultimately be).
No; that idea is a common misconception supported by wrongly entangling the Constitution with Washington’s farewell address. The reason the Founders wanted no standing army was to prevent the abuses such a force invariably inflicts on the people, as detailed in the Declaration of Independence and demonstrated by modern standing cop-armies.
There is absolutely no doubt that a police force is an armed gang of thugs; it’s only when such a gang is small enough and constrained enough by laws that it can be useful for “protecting” anything other than the desires of those in power.
In that case, if it’s small an constrained, would that mean they are no longer thugs? Or does the mere act of arming them and paying them turn them into thugs? To go even further, is there any country or municipality that meets that criteria of small and constrained? I ask because by regularly reading this blog it’s possible to develop the idea that any given policeman wakes up in the morning and says, “you know, I think I’ll physically assault someone at a traffic stop, rape a woman and then arrest her for prostitution, and finally shoot a family pet on my way home and dare the owner to do anything about it.”
I realize that’s an exaggeration, and I’m writing from the perspective of someone who has not had the experiences with police that you or many others here have. It’s just that, in this big world of ours, I’d think there’s a police force somewhere that actually is run effectively and it not abusive toward those it purports to protect, and could therefore serve as an example to strive toward.
Because (and this is solely my opinion) until this world experiences massive depopulation, there is going to be some use for some sort of police force.
Fire is fire, radioactivity is radioactivity, poison is poison and a thug is a thug; however, ALL of those can be useful if carefully bounded and controlled. It’s only in the latter case that we pretend otherwise.
Then that goes back to the other question I posed in my last reply. Is there any police force that is bounded and controlled in the manner you say? New Zealand, for instance? They seem to be doing something right if they can decriminalize prostitution.
The US police forces after the Warren court but before the drug war weren’t all that bad, nor were traditional English cops. But that’s as dead as the dodo until all consensual crime laws are repealed and police forces are sharply reduced, almost totally disarmed and held responsible for crimes they commit…which isn’t going to happen in the US until there’s some kind of sea change.
Okay, I think we’ve reached a consensus with that last sentence. I’m trying to peg the period in the US you refer to. Are you referring to after Warren was appointed or after he left the Supreme Court? The War on Drugs was ‘declared’ by Nixon in 1971, and Earl Warren was Chief Justice from 1953 to 1969. Therefore, that’s two to 18 years. I would have pegged it a little earlier, possibly either before Prohibition was enacted and then after it was repealed (I won’t include the Prohibition period itself). And since you mention traditional English policemen, I thought many of them were still traditional in the sense that they don’t carry firearms.
“Some jobs are hard because you have to degrade yourself in front of ravenous eyes and tongues. These are jobs that nobody chooses. Being a prostitute, for instance, is a case of necessity; people feel forced into this position when desperate to pay rent, buy drugs or look after a child. As unpleasant as it is, prostitution is a job, and that’s why some members of French developer collective Klondike decided that they would spend a month making a game about it for the No Future contest.” — http://indiestatik.com/2013/07/17/flash-your-boobs-fake-orgasms-get-paid-lupa/
Huge bias above, obviously “These are jobs that nobody chooses. Being a prostitute,” Yes, hypocritical too, to use the stereotypical image of the street walker to get publicity for the game (I doubt they are making sales of this game, contests like these are publicity stunts designed to draw attention to the developer.) Incidentally, I assume (given the games content) that that’s a direct translation from the French (I always thought France was cool, but I’m quickly reevaluating that). Of course, it could also just be the author of the article’s biases on top of the games intrinsic biases.
Contest it was created for: http://oujevipo.fr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=941
This explains why the video game looks like it came out for the Atari 2600. It’s not a real game. There are video games with sex workers in them (in GTA vice city you are encouraged to hire street workers to gain health, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines also has a lot of sex work related characters and plots, as does the more recent Dishonored. None of them are really pro-sex work, but they aren’t as unnuanced as this game. vampire is the most sympathetic, GTA just treats them as part of the background, Dishonored repeats the trafficked women fantasy.)
““Some jobs are hard because you have to degrade yourself in front of ravenous eyes and tongues. These are jobs that nobody chooses. Being a prostitute, for instance, is a case of necessity; people feel forced into this position when desperate to pay rent, buy drugs or look after a child….”
So that’s what these people who say this sort of tripe really think having sex with them is like?
Any kind of sex work is work. And it’s not always fun. But it’s not horrible. I wouldn’t have stayed with the job so long, otherwise. Maybe they ought to ask actual sex workers.
And aren’t most people forced to work to pay the rent and support children?
The sex offender who was murdered was convicted of “third-degree criminal sexual conduct”. It doesn’t even mention if it was of a child; might have been an adult. Such is the person we’re putting a target on.
I know I’m engaging in the sin of thinking here, but how many 14 y/o’s have children to hold at gunpoint? How many pimps are going to spend their entire day pointing guns at children?
Exactly. This is nothing but lurid Victorian melodrama; we can be sure the pimps even have mustaches to twirl.
The only reason grew a mustache.
{goes back to twirling}
You know, I read the story about the $1 million theft-by-cop earlier this week, and my first reaction (post-disgust) was, “The IRS didn’t know that cash existed, but now they do.” This seizure will cost the poor girl more, I’m thinking, when they come for their danegeld.
License To Rape
At least he can be sued. I don’t believe that I have it in me to do what he did, even if I could get away with it. But, if I knew that I was jail-proof, might I do something I shouldn’t? If abusing my power had no consequences beyond getting what I want, am I sure that I’d never abuse it, just a little bit? Well, I’d like to think so, but really, it’s best if we never have to find out. Cops shouldn’t be jail-proof. Even a good man can give into temptation occasionally, and what could be more tempting than that? And a bad man… Yeah, it’s better to not have anybody be jail-proof.
Election Day (February Updates)
I could almost hope she wins, just to kill the idea that a former sex worker can’t be elected to anything. Of course, there are better potential Xs to consider.
Public Service Announcement
He didn’t win the primary, so we won’t have to hear Weiner jokes for the rest of this election cycle.
Counterfeit Comfort
Once again we have the idea that it’s OK to do bad things, as long as you do them to bad people.
Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic
To quote the esteemed philosopher, Iago…
A Broker in Pillage
GOOD for that judge! This is another advantage of a business being legal: your right to the money you earn has some degree of recognition.
End Demand
What’s with these people? Everybody knows that prostitutes are oftentimes tomato experts.
Unclean Situation
I expect that an apology will be made in about thirty years. Or fifty, if some of the people who ran the laundries are young enough to still be around in thirty years.
No Friend of Ours
Maybe instead of insisting that high school students take algebra, we should teach statistics instead. After all, it isn’t 3x^2–2xy+c that politicians and media and activist groups use to fool people. No, it’s “80 to 90%, are being exploited” or “the average age is 14.”
Hussies
Because when I was in primary school, I was always saving up my allowance to hire prostitutes.[/sarcasm]
Do people really believe this stuff?
Rubbing Elbows
I gotta comment on this one. Hip-hip-hooray! for this young woman. She shows us what the true antidote to moral panic is: reality. I don’t often quote the Bible here, but De’Liza Galimidi is a perfect example of John 8:32: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
[…] e continua a usare nei confronti dell’ordine delle Magdalene, che si parli di una sorta di compensazione per le loro vecchie vittime o del loro tentativo di tenere tutte le sex workers sotto il loro controllo ancora una volta. Ma […]