We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice–that is, until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say, “I lost it.” – Sydney J. Harris
Though there are occasions on which the passive voice is useful and appropriate, that is not true most of the time. And when the topic is anything political, it’s almost never correct because it’s nothing more than a means of denying responsibility, or of shifting the apparent focus of the conversation. Though I’m not going to go out of my way to use a bunch of passive-voice constructions to prove a point, I will indicate proper natural uses in today’s text with an asterisk.
For those who don’t remember their grammar that well, passive voice is the sentence form in which the subject is acted upon rather than acting; it often produces weak and awkward sentences, and is thus best avoided by those who aren’t good at such things. For example:
Active voice: I wrote this sentence. Passive voice: This sentence was written by me.
Rather cumbersome, isn’t it? As I said above, there are times when the construction is useful; if Rasputin is the subject of a paragraph, it’s perfectly reasonable and proper to include the sentence, “He was killed by a group of boyars who felt that his influence over the Czarina threatened all of Russia.” Changing the subject from “Rasputin” to “boyars” would not only be jarring, it might even make the point more confusing. The passive voice is also quite useful when the entity which actually initiated an action is unknown: “The package was picked on Tuesday,” or “The cave-paintings were made about 16,000 years ago,” or “A flaming bag of human feces was left on the steps of the police station.” This is why the form is often used by those who wish to avoid responsibility for something*; it can make it sound as though the culprit is unknown when in fact there is little doubt of his identity. The classic political example is “Mistakes were made,” which is bureaucratese for “I made a mistake” or “My office staff made a mistake” or the like. Police reports and press releases are riddled with such constructions, especially when the cops murder someone; in the cartoon world they inhabit, guns and bullets appear to act on their own without any identifiable human agency.
Given this ability of the passive voice to shift the perception of agency, you can be sure it is heavily employed in “trafficking” propaganda*. Over and over we’re told that “girls are sold for sex”, implying that they have no active role and that the legal fiction of a minor’s inability to give consent describes an actual, factual condition of passivity. Saying that a whore “is trafficked” automatically implies the existence of a “trafficker”, some person who “did this to her” after she has been stripped of agency* through the magic of the passive voice. The neofeminist term for a whore, “prostituted woman”, embodies this concept in its very form; it’s impossible to use it without essentially stating that all sex workers are victims of some imaginary “prostitutor”. Its PC alternative, “women in prostitution”, is nearly as bad, though in this case the agency seems to be shifted to an amorphous entity called “prostitution”.
But of all passive constructions, one of the subtlest and most pervasive is the word “problematic”, which is used by prohibitionists* who want to pretend that their ban-campaigns are not only based in reality, but upon some characteristic of the thing to be banned rather than some characteristic of theirs. When a neofeminist says “porn is problematic”, she pretends that there is some issue with porn which generates problems (compare “the disease is contagious” or “this mineral is radioactive”), when the truth is that the problem resides entirely in the heads of those like her. When she says something is “problematic”, what she actually means is “I have a problem with it,” but by use of the passive voice she refocuses attention from where it belongs – her busybody psyche – to the thing she hates. This makes it seem (as in the case of the cop’s gun) that the fault lies in a thing rather than a person, and thereby changes the entire conversation.
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Well, here I am, and here you are, and we’re about to enter our fourth year together. Obviously, not all of you have been here for the whole ride, though an appreciable number have been and an appreciable fraction of new readers do me the honor of trying to work through the enormous backlog. And it is now truly enormous: 1096 columns, six resource pages, six indexes, three link pages, 30,000+ comments, 600+ subscribers, over 1700 Twitter followers and almost 1.7 million total page views from nearly every country on the globe. And thanks to y’all I’ve been able to do all that without compromise or self-censorship, and have in fact been rewarded with an ever-increasing number of opportunities to spread my message that, as I wrote last year, “most whores really aren’t weird, scary, criminal, stupid, unethical, emotionally disturbed, victimized by men [outside government] …or any of the other dumb stereotypes with which prohibitionists and other moralists constantly libel us.”
Of course, those opportunities do take time out of my schedule, which means less time to generate content. As time has gone by I’ve developed an increasing number of ways to shave work-hours off of my week; the Sunday links columns, the single-question Wednesday Q & A columns, the Friday Cliterati reprints and the regular guest columns are all examples of that, and I’m about to implement two more: my holiday posts will now be more greeting than anything else, and there will be a monthly feature in which I take a look back at my columns for that month three years past. This is necessary in order to keep the (very popular) “From the Archives” feature in the Links columns from growing to unmanageable proportions, and will also help new readers to catch up on essays that are still topical without having to deal with three-year-old news long since superseded. As I explained last week, I also plan to write an e-book this autumn, whose chapters will each be a synthesis of several important columns on particular subjects; that will let new readers catch up painlessly, perhaps attract new readers, and maybe even make a little money.
Well, that’s about it, except for the most important part: a gigantic thank-you kiss to all my readers for visiting, reading, linking, and quoting me. Thanks also for the fan mail, the compliments, the invitations, and the presents, and thanks most of all for your continued support and respect.
This is the second part of the story of a Nigerian sex worker in Amsterdam; if you missed the first part yesterday, I urge you to go back and read it first before continuing. I did as little editing as possible because I wanted to allow Onioja her own authentic voice, and the postscript is absolutely verbatim at her request.
An immigrant’s life is hard in any case, but if you come from a country like mine with a dubious reputation in this part of the world, the problems are almost insurmountable. Even in this relatively tolerant country with many official so-called integration programs and requirements for immigrants, every new arrival is marginalized and stigmatized. You feel it right away at border control; the officer is polite and friendly, but despite your visa, your passport is turned inside out and you must show every piece of legal identification paper you have and explain your plans. If you’ve never experienced them, the problems of migration are hard to grasp. It requires enormous courage to leave family and friends behind, but you do it because of dreams and illusions of opportunity that override rational doubts. Unfortunately, my culture is dominated by irrational beliefs and superstitions such as voodoo and belief in evil spirits that can only harm and hurt people. So though I work hard to keep it under control, I also run on fear and worry about evil that may hurt me. I wish I could get rid of it, but it is in my blood like my faith in God; to counterbalance it I nurture love, kindness, and honesty, and I am hungry for logic.
Only some of my colleagues know that I’m a practicing Christian, and some of those who do ask how I can practice a faith that condemns my work as a mortal sin. I say that I don’t practice a faith, I practice life; they don’t understand because they don’t understand what faith is. Faith is irrational. So I choose to go to church to get together with other faithful people to pray and sing in a service that honors God, but I rarely care for what pastors have to say; instead, I use the service for reflection. Being baptized and raised as a Catholic doesn’t mean I signed an agreement with that church to be docile and obedient; I’m not about to be held hostage. Faith doesn’t keep me from using my brains so that I remain stupid and blind to all possibilities, and my brain sees no conflict between sex work and the Lord’s message to love all other people. In fact, sex work lets me use my God-given talents for other people’s benefit better than any job I’ve had.
It also lets me turn liabilities into advantages. For example, in accordance with the tradition in my country I was fully circumcised at such an early age that I have no memories of it; this may be one reason that I’ve never been much drawn toward having sex for my own pleasure. But I don’t miss what I have never had, so to speak, and being circumcised seems to help my work because I don’t get easily distracted when I service clients. After so many years and different clients, I can count on one hand those who have said or shown in some way that they notice the circumcision. Many eyes have been up close, and many fingers have touched me there, but though I look and feel quite different from a woman with intact genitals I’ve had very few reactions. So I often wonder how much real affinity most men have for their partners’ bodies. It’s telling that those who noticed also asked about my other erogenous zones and how to sensitize them; many men don’t seem to know we have other erogenous zones than genitals and nipples.
Because of my superstitions I don’t advertise on the internet or through social media; it would expose me to evil spirits beyond my control. So I had to invent and develop casual methods to meet the right men in places where they usually hang out for leisure, and become accepted there as a black, single, migrant woman. I decided it was better for my work to be myself, an authentic black woman, rather than an inauthentic white woman with a black skin. So I dress in Nigerian gear, wearing Nigerian accessories, bring my music, dance tribal women’s dances with booty shaking and lap work, and talk my language when we make love. My favorite trick to loosen and warm up clients is bringing homemade food such as fufu, which is made to be eaten from a bowl with your fingers, sitting on the floor and no napkins. Getting messy with their fingers and lips breaks the white pattern of what is civilized, and sets the mood for being more “natural”. In their daily life, my Dutch clients are completely removed from nature, which means that having sex comes to them in a more roundabout way than to men back home; they love it of course, but compared to the average man in my country, sexual embarrassment and Puritanism is in this people’s genes. By my standards they’re a bit uptight and formal even when they are at leisure and buttoned down; wouldn’t it be boring if I would only mimic the habits of their culture and not mix in my own?
Sometimes I think that my work gives me the chance to act as a kind of ambassador for integration; I think that if all migrant sex workers did such things, it would make our work even more valuable. Of course, true integration requires those from both cultures to leave their comfort zones and mingle somewhere half way: while white cultural DNA has acquired a sort of anti-black gene, blacks don’t naturally go for the whites either, so while I’m exposing them to our ways I’m also learning to get a handle on theirs. I listen to what they tell and ask, and how they react to what I say and do. My work has thus opened the door to a real understanding of a society so different from my own. I’m also working on integrating and overcoming prejudice, stigmatization, and marginalization in my life outside of work; for example, my kids are in school and I am acquainted with some other mothers. Now and then my kids play after school with kids from Dutch-born parents, but there are also mothers and even teachers who simply neglect me when I say hello. So it’s a long, slow process, and my work has helped me more to move forward than anything else.
Doing sex work for just over six years has made it possible for me against all odds to accomplish what I wanted. I bridged the abyss between my culture and social class – the lowest of the lowest – and this culture. I am now pretty well integrated. I am on the level where the rule has become the kind of personal contacts that leads to an invitation like this – telling my story. I am appreciated and respected, and so is my work; I often get thank-yous and compliments for my performance. I don’t come cheap but I know that my fee is totally appropriate for the quality of my services and my personality. And here is the best part: by doing sex work – in total freedom, the way I want it – I am slowly achieving what I’ve always wanted. And that is, having children in the best possible situation, as part of a society to which we belong, with real opportunities to achieve our goals. If my kids should fail, it’s not for lack of freedom and opportunities. This is what sex work has brought me; no other way of life could have made it possible. Praise the Lord. Amen.
Postscript: Thank you, Maggie McNeill, for this opportunity. Your invitation first scared me, but saying yes and doing the work has been a breakthrough in getting my superstition dismantled. AND I discovered that I have a long story to tell. This is just the beginning. God bless you. I am not a writer (although I might become one), but this dear client gave me generously all the help I needed for now. I owe you a good one, baby!
When a regular reader in Amsterdam mentioned that his regular escort was a Nigerian immigrant, I asked him to ask her if she would be interested in telling her story. The “trafficking” narrative represents such women as passive victims, so I thought it would be very enlightening to hear her point of view in her own words. She was at first slightly reluctant because she isn’t used to writing, but I think she did such a marvelous job that I did as little editing as possible. I’ve allowed her two full days because her story is not only interesting, but important.
I’m Onioja, a Nigerian migrant. I have serious ambitions to build a good life for myself and for my kids in this wealthy white world. That’s the whole reason why I left my country, fourteen years ago, all by myself. For the first seven years I worked as a housekeeper, hotel maid, babysitter, janitor, dishwasher, kitchen prepper, model, dancer, receptionist, or other odd jobs, and in all that time I was never asked for my story; now I’ve been a top tier escort for almost seven years (at least ten times longer than any other job I’ve had), and I get this request. Why? Not because I’m a successful sex worker, I think, but because doing sex work has made me a successful migrant.
For my first three years in Europe I roved from country to country and city to city, like a lonely animal looking for the best place to build her nest and have babies. I began in Paris and saw cities like Dublin, London, Milan, Berlin, Copenhagen, and others before settling in Amsterdam when I was done with traveling and searching. For the next four years I worked sweat and blood in the same jobs, but now locked inside the same one square kilometer; it made me more miserable and depressed, but I couldn’t afford the traveling to move on. I was just barely surviving, making tiny steps forward, one toe before the other. Like most migrants I felt marginalized and stigmatized, unwelcome and exploited, only useful because we are good at cleaning up after others. I didn’t just feel like a servant, but like a machine switched on and off for one mindless activity after the other. I was a prisoner between other prisoners, black migrants like me, ordered around by mostly white managers and supervisors, with rarely a thank you. Economically and socially, we aren’t much better off than back home; we may live in a wealthy country, but always in a sort of hopeless, energy-draining servitude that won’t allow us to integrate and move upward.
The reality is that a new life in a new country doesn’t start at point zero but somewhere around minus one hundred; unless you’re college educated or well trained and certified in a certain profession, it’s practically impossible to find anything better than menial labor. You don’t know the language or how to get around, and to get any job you depend on people from your own country who’ve lived there long enough that they do, and expect to be paid for their help. But when I looked at these know-it-alls, I wondered why they themselves didn’t have what I consider a good life. Why, after living here for years, didn’t they have a single native friend? Why didn’t they speak the language well? Why didn’t they live in white neighborhoods among white people? Why did I see the same poverty and tribal hierarchies I had left behind transferred to a wealthy country? I soon understood that those guys couldn’t help me, and that staying with my own people in their ghetto would effectively kill my ambitions; so, I said goodbye and made myself untraceable. I cautiously plotted my future, taking great care not to make one wrong step; I found myself jobs and gigs, worked myself into the legal system, got all the papers I could get, began paying taxes so that I was entitled to social benefits, and began learning the language in a program for migrants. After one year I passed the exam as the best of the group and was rewarded with the full restitution of my tuition. But the whole process was grueling, and for seven hellish years it looked as if I would never get another opportunity to be myself; I slowly lost my optimism and energy, and my willpower was slowly eaten up. To force my luck, rescue my spirit and boost my resilience so that I wouldn’t give up, I decided to have a child and be a single mother. I didn’t want to marry and become a man’s possession, which would make things worse, but somehow I found a man who was willing to secretly father my children and then back away. And finally, six months after my first child was born, the Lord came to my rescue.
I’d known the owner of my temp agency for about two years, and he was hot for me; this had been my good fortune because it got me to the top of his menial-labor girls. He missed no opportunity to call me in for things we could have arranged over the phone, and I always went because I depended on his favor. I always played with the sexual tension; over the years I learned all sorts of tricks to get work from guys and keep it, but I never surrendered my one big advantage. Guys wanting to get into my panties never offered me cash but promised me paradise. Sure! Their paradise would make me even more dependent and miserable. So I never surrendered, not because I was a good girl but because I was a shrewd bitch who beat them at their own games. Well, one day when we were arranging my next gig, chatting and flirting as usual, he asked me out for dinner, telling me his wife was out of town (in other words, he wanted to sleep with me). I declined in a way that wouldn’t offend him or hurt his feelings, but then out of the blue, he said he was willing to pay me! Pay me for what? For taking me out to dinner? A voice told me to think it over, so I said I would let him know within twenty-four hours.
That night I couldn’t make a decision, but early next morning he reached me at the prep station in my restaurant; he was eager and said he hoped for a yes from me. I heard myself say, “You’re saying that it’s up to me?” I believe that the good Lord inspired me to say this; it was His sign that He had turned the tables. He flashed my future as a sex worker before my eyes, and it was a good future. Right then and thereI realized I had become an independent free woman, and I also saw why: sex made guys dependent on me. They may control the world, but sex is their Achilles heel; if I played it right, sex work would give me control of my life. The restaurant prepper who now talked to the agency owner was a different woman; she didn’t know yet how it would work, but she knew exactly what to say. I took him to the restroom to talk discreetly, and asked him point blank, “Were you planning on paying to have sex with me?” After two seconds of silence he said yes, and I said, “Okay,” very casually as if it was routine. I knew I was now on top of the guy on who my life depended, no longer the other way around. We discussed his wishes and the services I provide; I dictated my rate and further conditions such as no smoking and for me no alcohol, and he accepted. I said I would meet him at the restaurant of his choice. God knows where this all came from. The following evening when it was all over, he was happy with my services and I was in a kind of shock: three hours of work under my control had earned me as much as almost two weeks of humiliating servitude. Sex work would be the God-given way out of being exploited and pimped, and into a life of freedom and dignity.
Now, I’ve heard stories, facts and rumors about pimps but have no first-hand experience because in sex work I never dealt with one and never will. I know pimping is illegal here, but isn’t the migrant labor I suffered a legal form of pimping? Don’t legal businesses make the same big profits as illegal pimps by having us work minimum wage under humiliating circumstances? What’s the difference here? Did I have a real choice to refuse a job? No. It is human exploitation and labor abuse at its worst, but socially permissible because local business depends on it; only in the sex industry it’s criminal because sex work is said to be “dirty”. But sex work can be a God-sent gift; as a sex worker I have dignity and command respect, not because I am a good sex worker but a good human being. Also, going through the long, slow process of learning the business by trial and error, inch by inch, has done more for my independence and integration than the work itself. It took a year and a half until my sex career was so solid that I could give up menial labor altogether; I cut back on it gradually and my agency owner really helped me, not only by being my first client (who was loyal for years afterward), but also by handing me jobs I could combine with being a mother and sex work.
Sex work has also allowed me to express my true personality. Back home I used to pretend to be shy and modest; I was afraid to draw attention. But that’s not me at all! I have a very big ego, maybe too big, and the clients I love being with most are powerful men with big egos, because I love being challenged as much as I love challenging them. It makes the game so much more satisfying and fun, and has made my mind more intelligent. Every day I am grateful to God that He guided me to this work and brings me the kind of clients I need to be more and more part of this culture, which is really my long-term goal. Good, challenging clients help me to develop the qualities that help me become socially more and more independent, in particular independent from doing sex work; though I love doing it, it’s only a stage in my life and I have to look ahead to the time I will eventually have to give it up. I may be a successful migrant but I am still vulnerable, so sex work is only part of my long term vision to integrating in Dutch culture to ensure my future and that of my kids.
In tomorrow’s conclusion, Onioja talks about some of the specific difficulties she faced, how she overcame them and her hopes for the future.
Despite all the rhetoric, when detailed studies are made that explore the actual empirical evidence, suspicions about the dangers of cats are revealed time after time to have little basis in reality. – David Nutt
I’m sorry if I’ve been slow to answer correspondence lately; my husband got home Tuesday and we’ve been working all day, every day since Friday on rebuilding the terrace in our new house (long story short: the combination of a design flaw, overly-optimistic assumptions and the financial crash of 2008 resulted its being ruined). But after Wednesday, it should be all done and I really hope we don’t have any more issues. Our top contributor this week was Radley Balko, with all of the links down to the first video; both of them this week are ones I found a while back, but for some reason never featured. The links between the videos were provided by my cat (“catflakes”), Nun Ya (“cat ban” and “soccer”), Jesse Walker (“chimps” and “journalists”), EconJeff (“place names”), and Wendy Lyon (“Sweden”).
Japanese cops’ increasing adoption of American whore-harassing tactics is extremely troubling: “Tokyo Metropolitan Police…cracked down on a prostitution club…specializing in senior citizens…Officers arrested the 63-year-old manager of club Silk…and one other employee for dispatching a woman, 64, to…an 82-year-old man…” That’s right, Japanese cops now think persecuting old people for consensual sex is an appropriate use of resources.
There was a somewhat uneven piece in the New York Times last week; on the one hand, it portrays the victims of the Long Island Killer as individual women, correctly names many of the reasons women do sex work and (best of all) recognizes that “Escorts face danger not because of the Internet but because they’re still forced to work underground.” But on the other hand, it does not quote even a single sex worker activist, yet does refer to the questionable ideas of Scott “Women Never Lie About their Weight or Take Out Multiple Ads” Cunningham (including his stunningly stupid belief that before the internet most whores were streetwalkers, and his unsupported and false belief that there are more of us now than in the 1990s). After I mentioned my problems with the piece on Twitter, author Robert Kolker contacted me and I expressed my concerns; it turns out he did interview several activists, but didn’t realize that not specifically quoting them would be perceived as a slight. His publisher is also sending me an advance copy of his book about the murders, Lost Girls; I’ll let y’all know what I think about it.
…Jeanett Bjønness of Aarhus University…interviewed 40 Danish women who sell sex on the streets, and it turns out that the women do not regard their sex trading as the biggest problem in their lives…”Sex trading…is perceived as a solution to some problems,” says Bjønness…the people whose job it is to help sex workers…[regard] the women as victims. This rigid view…has the consequence that the women feel walked over, because they do not see themselves as victims…[but rather] as independent women who make rational choices based on the options available to them…
See how easy it is when you actually bother to TALK to us?
…[In his act] a magician named Marty Hahne…pulls a three-pound rabbit out of a top hat…“I just received an 8-page letter from the USDA, telling me that by July 29 I need to have in place a written disaster plan, detailing all the steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such as a tornado, fire, flood, etc.” Hahne and his wife must be specially trained to implement the rabbit plan, which USDA inspectors will review…new [EPA] regulations define ditches, gullies and other property features that catch water as part of America’s navigable waterways under the Clean Water Act…the EPA…would become the de facto owner of people’s ditches and gullies…The Lemonade Freedom group knows that the ridiculous regulations need to be taken seriously…the group…[protests] police actions…to close down children’s lemonade stands…
Pahokee [Florida] residents, church members, and pastors are outraged over…the…first Lake Okeechobee Summer Solstice Festival…The crowd cheered in agreement as…pastors from around the area admonished city officials for allowing festivals containing witchcraft and occult practices into the city…“We are opening ourselves up to things we should not, like belly dancing and magic spells,” said Daniel Mondragon…“God cannot heal our land if we have witches and warlocks violating our community,” said Evangelist Lillian Brown…
Destiny Rescue, an organization whose mission is to rescue sexually exploited children…hunts through Cambodia and Thailand to find these girls…Indiana State University graduate students played with the rescued girls, visited the sex tourism capital of the world and wondered at the hope with which victims create new lives…More than 2 million children are forced into the sex trade every year, according to the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report…Destiny Rescue is…[addressing] the problem….by…training in jewelry making, sewing, working in a café, hair dressing or pursuing an education…Vanessa Granger-Belcher…led the girls through an art activity…in which they drew pictures of their dreams for their lives…
It may amuse you to know that most UN agencies estimate the “annual flow of trafficked people” of all ages into all industries at 0.5 – 1.9 million people, of which 2 million are supposedly “sex trafficked children”. Perhaps the UN should start hiring people with at least 3rd-grade math skills.
In Michelle Visage’s Hooker Makeover, a judge from RuPaul’s Drag Race and her drag queen sidekick turn ordinary women into cartoonish streetwalker stereotypes. Visage was at first defensive when confronted with this on Twitter last Sunday, but within hours she issued a public apology and announced that the show would be cancelled. It’s good to know that at least some people really are listening.
…in July 2011…a massage parlour owner and two associates were arrested…for “organising prostitution”…and…handed a five-year sentence…But [in] appeal…the defendants were found “not criminally responsible” and…acquitted due to “unclear facts and improper application of the law”. The court said manual stimulation did not belong in the realm of prostitution…
Dr. Marty Klein’s review of Dr. Judith Hanna’s book Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy, And A Christian Right discusses the war against strip clubs we’ve mentioned so many times before, and the book itself debunks the usual mythology about “negative secondary effects”, “sex trafficking”, etc. I do have to wonder if Hanna ignores the neofeminist contribution as Klein does in his book, though.
…the Ohio House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill ostensibly aimed at fighting “human trafficking” that makes it a crime to “solicit” a legal act: sex with someone who is 16 or 17 years old. The age of consent in Ohio is 16. Yet under H.B. 130, a 20-year-old who asks a 16-year-old to have sex with him, or a 21-year-old who does the same with a 17-year-old, thereby commits a…felony…and…has to register as a sex offender. But if the teenager broaches the subject, or if the sex proceeds without any explicit verbal reference to it, no crime has been committed…Having sex is fine, as long as you don’t talk about it beforehand… Legislators already define “human trafficking” broadly enough to include consensual sex…Now Ohio is poised to [add] merely talking about consensual sex…
In the months after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, FBI agents conducted surveillance of…Anwar al-Awlaki and uncovered detailed information about his…use of prostitutes…Al-Awlaki lived in a Washington suburb at the time…he visited prostitutes at least seven times and paid up to $400 for sex…[for] a total of $2,320 …agents interviewed the escorts, obtained detailed information about the encounters, and…even reviewed the possible legal charges that might be brought against him…
If you think the wait to find out if your kids got the…results needed to get into uni is stressful, dream on…It’s what happens next that you REALLY should be worrying about…Darling Daughter could easily end up hawking her body to keep her university finances afloat…poverty is pushing students to sell their souls and get jobs in the sex trade. Six per cent could be working as lap-dancers, strippers, escorts or prostitutes to pay their way through studies. Yet more could be manning sex chat-lines…the sex industry is a dark, grubby scene that irrevocably changes people on the inside…No degree is worth it…
So either Jo Davison is speaking from personal experience, or she’s a bigoted ignoramus. Which is it, Jo? Do tell.
…DOMA was struck down in no small part because it picks out a certain class of people and, by denying them recognition of their marriages, denies their families equal freedom and dignity. Can it be denied that polygamous families, whose marital arrangements are illegal, much less unrecognized, are denied equal liberty and are made to suffer the indignity [of] active discrimination?…If the state lacks a legitimate rationale for imposing on Americans a heterosexual definition of marriage, it seems pretty likely that it likewise lacks a legitimate rationale for imposing on Americans a monogamous definition of marriage…
Activist Ye Haiyan…was released from 13 days of detention on June 12 after she scared off three trespassers to her home…Ye first became famous in 2005, when she posted a nude photo of herself online. Under the pen name Hooligan Swallow, Ye raised eyebrows with her bold articles on sex. But she really caught the public’s attention in 2010 when the…NGO she set up…[called] for the legalisation of prostitution…”Pushing for [this]…contradicts the government’s ideology,” she said. “The government does not wish to see this topic being promoted and the mainland media are banned from discussing it”…
This essay first appeared on Cliterati on May 19th; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.
I’m sure you all heard about Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy a few weeks ago; because she inherited a faulty gene from her mother she has a much higher chance than other women of eventually developing breast (87%) and ovarian (50%) cancer, and decided to have the breast tissue removed so as to prevent it before it could start. Now, breast reconstruction was part of the process; had she not made a public announcement, nobody would have known the difference from looking at her (not even in a skin-tight costume). But according to her New York Times article about the procedure, “I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.” The revelation has triggered an avalanche of commentary from all conceivable angles, including praise for her courage, criticism of her decision as extreme, and hand-wringing over the costs of the genetic tests and surgeries. And though one might accuse all of those writers (including me, I’m afraid) of capitalizing on her misfortune to promote their own agendas, none of the comments were quite so nakedly revealing as the avalanche of tweets saying “poor Brad Pitt”, lamenting the demise of her famous “fun bags” or bizarrely declaring that a condition she has had since conception is somehow the karmic result of her being a “home wrecking whore” several decades later.
Revealing, that is, of the common but barbaric belief that women’s bodies are public property. Few people care what any given individual man, whether private citizen or celebrity, does with his body unless drugs are involved, and even then most of the original prohibitionist rhetoric revolved around the effects of male drug use on women (drinkers failing to support their families, cocaine causing rape, opium linked to Chinese prostitution, etc). But the dominant cultural narrative is that whatever any given individual woman does with her body is a legitimate public concern, especially when sex is involved. If Angelina had decided to replace her defective teeth with dentures, I sincerely doubt it would’ve attracted more than a few snide comments about kooky Hollywood types throwing money around; secondary sexual characteristics are, however, quite another thing. Every personal decision made by any woman, no matter how humble or unknown, is considered a legitimate subject for discussion, regulation and even legislation if it relates, however tenuously, to the issue of sex or reproduction. Adult human beings with titles and degrees actually stand up in the second decade of the 21st century and insist with straight faces that any individual woman’s pregnancy and birth control choices are matters of Grave Concern to the State, and that her miscarriages and motivations for engaging in sex are subject to criminal investigation and violent suppression.
The need to control women’s bodies is rooted in the fact that though many men can die or fail to reproduce without adversely affecting the population, every woman who does so reduces the birth rate. But humans haven’t been an endangered species for a long time now, and modern nations don’t depend on biological descent from current citizens to keep the taxes flowing into their coffers. Furthermore, there are a lot of troublesome biological urges we somehow manage to resist enshrining in law; in fact, most laws tend to go in exactly the opposite direction. It’s long past time for humans, and most especially our governments and other powerful institutions, to stop pretending that the bodies and personal choices of individual women are anybody’s business but their own.
…Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive…it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. – from The Declaration of Independence
Two hundred and thirty-seven years ago the majority of Americans decided they had had enough of tyranny, and declared their independence from the government which had by its own actions destroyed any sense of loyalty the people had to it. To be sure, there were many who disagreed; either they were too frightened, or too mindlessly loyal, or too skeptical of the possibility of victory, or too unable to see that the injustices which had been inflicted upon their neighbors would eventually reach them. But a large enough fraction of the populace were ready for revolution, and so it came; a few years of struggle, travail and bloodshed, and a new nation was born. Its primary founding principle, spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, was that some rights are unalienable, that is inherent in all humans, and any government which uses violence to abrogate them without just cause immediately loses its legitimacy; at that time it is not only the right but the duty of free people to resist its dictates, “to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government”.
Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers were only men, not demigods; they left too many gaps and loopholes in the Constitution they devised thirteen years after the Declaration, and the new nation came into the world with an ugly birth defect which almost doomed it eighty-five years later. Furthermore, the violent and imperfect resolution of that flaw created a new and equally-vile one which destroyed many of the safeguards laid down by the Founders and engendered the unchecked growth of government which has now led us right back to where we started. As I pointed out in my column for this occasion two years ago, our government now regularly commits the exact same offenses for which Americans rebelled against King George III, as enumerated in the Declaration:
The federal government has in recent decades erected a multitude of new offices, and sent out swarms of officers to harass the people and eat out ever-increasing portions of the GDP.
The police army has been rendered independent of and superior to local, state and federal laws.
They are heavily armed and quartered among us in every neighborhood.
They are protected by mock trial from punishment for any murders or other crimes which they should commit…
Every year, new taxes, fees and unfunded mandates are imposed on us without our consent.
Many federal offenses are tried before a judge…or…hand-picked [juries]…kept ignorant of salient facts of the cases; or citizens are falsely accused of such heinous crimes, with such disproportionate penalties and necessitating such outrageously expensive defenses, that those accused of them simply plead guilty in return for a lesser sentence. Also, property stolen by the state under ever-expanding “asset forfeiture” laws is not returned even if its rightful owner is never charged with a crime. Each of these procedures essentially deprives its victim of the benefit of trial by jury.
Alas, 2013 is not 1776, and Americans have collectively become some of the most submissive, spineless peasants upon the face of the Earth. Most of them are too frightened, or too mindlessly loyal, or too skeptical of the possibility of victory, or too unable to see that the injustices which have been inflicted upon their neighbors will eventually reach them. “Freedom” has become nothing but a “worship word” devoid of real meaning, and politicians and their toadies distort its very essence by pretending that the American promise is about freedom from adult responsibility and self-determination rather than freedom to pursue self-actualization; by that asinine definition, my pets and livestock are freer than any American. Most of my countrymen meekly and silently allow their bodies and homes to be routinely violated by their overlords, and even when the full extent of the undermining of our unalienable rights is made glaringly obvious by those who still have the “Spirit of ‘76”, you can be sure the bootlickers will line up to demonize them, declare that Big Brother only wants what’s best for us, and suspiciously ask “What do you have to hide, anyway?” Though the country which was once the freest in the world has now descended into fascism, there is as yet no sign of revolution. And even when it does come (as it inevitably must), I can’t imagine the current crop of dependent, conformist weeds producing a form of government even half as effective at preserving individual rights as the one which died of neglect and disinterest barely two centuries after it was brought forth with such high hopes.
I have spent the past 2 hours clicking around your extensive blog and I am quite impressed. Is there a good place to start or is a random trail just as likely to be fruitful?
There’s a post called “Guided Tour” which will give you an overview of all the main sections and features; it also explains how I schedule things (which is extremely regular by blogging standards). My post “IF” explains my very thorough indexing system, “House Rules” lays out my comment policy, and “How Not To Get Your Comments Posted” elaborates on that further.
But if I’m reading your question correctly, what you really want to know is how I suggest a new reader tackle the back-catalog of almost 1100 posts. It used to be possible to start with the old ones and slowly catch up, and a few brave and dedicated (and perhaps a bit masochistic) readers still do that. But if hacking your way across the Amazon Basin with a machete is not your idea of fun, there’s a way that’s probably less daunting. First, subscribe to the blog and read the new columns as they come out; most of them contain links to older columns, which you could then read as they come up. Every Saturday I publish a news column entitled “That Was the Week That Was”, made up of about 16-20 short subsections; each item has its own title, and the vast majority of those titles refer back to older posts (each containing a link to the referenced post). This will lead you to a lot of older columns every week, assuming you have the time! Also, every Sunday I publish a “Links” column, and the bottom section, “From the Archives”, contains links to the posts from that same week for the past two years; you could click on and read any that sound interesting.
You can also follow me on Twitter, where I share lots of interesting links (many of which later end up in the TW3 and Links columns) and also remind readers of my columns from that same day one, two and (very soon) three years in the past. Furthermore, at the end of July I’m introducing a new monthly blog feature (as yet unnamed), which will look briefly at all the columns from that month three years before. Finally, this autumn I plan to put together an e-book where each chapter will be a synthesis of several important columns on particular subjects; this will let newer readers catch up on some older posts in a more convenient format. I hope to have it ready before Christmas, and I’ll announce it in a special column when it’s ready.
I hope all that helps, and that I continue to impress you and all my readers for a very long time to come!
Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
One month ago tomorrow, the United States Supreme Court ruled that it’s perfectly hunky-dory with them if cops take DNA samples from individuals arrested for “serious crimes”. Not convicted of, mind you, or even charged with; merely arrested for is good enough. According to these august legal minds (well, five of ‘em anyhow; Justice Scalia the Unpredictable and the entire distaff side of the court disagreed), no wrong has been committed if the cops respond to a rape by simply arresting every man in the vicinity, forcibly taking their DNA in order to “identify” them (Maryland’s excuse in the case), and then checking every sample against the rape kit. As Scalia wrote, this constitution-shredding rationalization “taxes the credulity of the credulous”:
The Fourth Amendment forbids searching a person for evidence of a crime when there is no basis for believing the person is guilty of the crime or is in possession of incriminating evidence. That prohibition is categorical and without exception; it lies at the very heart of the Fourth Amendment. Whenever this Court has allowed a suspicionless search, it has insisted upon a justifying motive apart from the investigation of crime…
So let’s say that, in the example above, the police find the rapist. Hooray for the diligent CSI heroes! And then what happens to the DNA they took from all the other guys they brought in? Why, it goes into a database, to be used however the police see fit, with no oversight or restraining policy whatsoever:
…a growing number of local law enforcement agencies…have [begun]…amassing their own DNA databases of potential suspects, some collected with the donors’ knowledge, and some without it. And that trend…is expected only to accelerate after the Supreme Court’s recent decision…These…databases operate under their own rules, providing the police much more leeway than state and federal regulations. And the police sometimes collect samples from far more than those convicted of or arrested for serious offenses — in some cases, innocent victims of crimes who do not necessarily realize their DNA will be saved for future searches…[some] agencies [even] pool…their…databases….and…rapid DNA testing devices…could provide a greater incentive for local authorities to build and maintain their own database…
And it’s not only suspects and crime victims: some foolish hookers have voluntarily surrendered their DNA to the cops (supposedly so their bodies can be identified more easily if they’re murdered); equally-foolish parents are giving up that of their kids against the fabulously-unlikely possibility of abduction; in the UK cops regularly file children’s DNA; and in the US the government routinely takes and retains genetic material of newborns without parental consent. And as of yesterday, Mississippi mandates the retention of DNA from babies born to mothers below 16: “The DNA will go into a database from which police may draw if they begin to investigate whether the mother was a victim of statutory rape. The DNA will not go into the statewide criminal database. That means the…father’s DNA is not available for matching for any other types of cases.” It’s not available now, but of course that can change with the stroke of a gubernatorial pen.
But if you’re an adult and you’re never arrested for a serious crime or become a victim of such a crime yourself, and never, ever will be, you’re relatively safe, right? Guess again. Swanee Hunt and her ilk are pushing for the government to retain the DNA of any man caught in an “end demand” sting (using the excuse that Melissa Farley claims that clients commit “lots more crimes” than other men). This is not only possible but likely under Maryland v. King because, as Scott Greenfield explains, there’s no “conceptual ledge” to stop the descent down that slippery slope from “serious crimes” to misdemeanors:
…DNA is collected from people convicted of crimes regardless of this decision, so they are by definition removed from the people affected by it. That leaves only the people who are arrested but not ultimately convicted…Given…the fact that defendants are presumed innocent until convicted, there can be no question as a matter of law that…DNA [is] being seized from innocent people. The argument in King is that these are defendants charged with serious offenses. The purpose of this detail is to distinguish the swabees from people given traffic tickets, from whom DNA is not collected under this law…The problem with this rationale is that the defendants from whom DNA is taken, being innocent, are…innocent of everything. They are innocent of traffic infractions and murder, all at the same time. So what if they’re charged with serious offenses? An innocent person charged with murder is still innocent, and indistinguishable from an innocent person charged with any other crime. Or even the innocent person not charged with a crime, for that matter…
…great, can I have your credit card numbers and your social security number too? No? You mistrust me, a solitary individual against whom you have recourse, yet you willingly subjugate yourself to a faceless, untouchable government? All it takes is an accusation…and…you’re condemned to navigate the panopticon…You know who decides what is a crime and what isn’t? The government. You know who decides who has broken the law? The government. You know who decides whether to prosecute an individual? The government. You know who puts on evidence to prove that someone is guilty of a crime (and usually wins)? The government. You know who uses DNA to prove guilt? The government. You know [who] has people (jurors) blindly following its dictates? The government. You know who you signed over your privacy, your personal information, your DNA to? The government. Think they won’t use it against you tomorrow if they suddenly dislike you? If you answer yes…is it because…you don’t think this sort of thing will happen to you?…the Government isn’t seeking data on “non-privileged” people. It’s all of us. You. Me. The guy down the street. You may think you’re different than me or my typical client. The government doesn’t. They’re the ones who you think will protect you, yet they’ve already proven that they see no difference between you and a criminal…
DNA is a lot less volatile than a fingerprint; it can persist in testable form for decades. If I sell my truck and the buyer then abandons it after kidnapping someone or robbing a convenience store, guess whose DNA is all over the seats and steering wheel? Oh, yeah, mine and my husband’s. We leave DNA all over the place, every day, and if you think the cops wouldn’t use that “evidence” to connect you with a “crime”, guess again; it needn’t even be anything any reasonable person would consider a real crime. Modern technology has made the old witchcraft belief a fact: if an evil person gets ahold of some part of you, no matter how small, he then has power over you. And modern police states want to ensure they have that power, to be used at the whim of any prosecutor, over every single living person within reach.
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Rather cumbersome, isn’t it? As I said above, there are times when the construction is useful; if Rasputin is the subject of a paragraph, it’s perfectly reasonable and proper to include the sentence, “He was killed by a group of boyars who felt that his influence over the Czarina threatened all of Russia.” Changing the subject from “Rasputin” to “boyars” would not only be jarring, it might even make the point more confusing. The passive voice is also quite useful when the entity which actually initiated an action is unknown: “The package was picked on Tuesday,” or “The cave-paintings were made about 16,000 years ago,” or “A flaming bag of human feces was left on the steps of the police station.” This is why the form is often used by those who wish to avoid responsibility for something*; it can make it sound as though the culprit is unknown when in fact there is little doubt of his identity. The classic political example is “Mistakes were made,” which is bureaucratese for “I made a mistake” or “My office staff made a mistake” or the like. Police reports and press releases are riddled with such constructions, especially when the cops murder someone; in the cartoon world they inhabit, guns and bullets appear to act on their own without any identifiable human agency.
When she says something is “problematic”, what she actually means is “I have a problem with it,” but by use of the passive voice she refocuses attention from where it belongs – her busybody psyche – to the thing she hates. This makes it seem (as in the case of the cop’s gun) that the fault lies in a thing rather than a person, and thereby changes the entire conversation.
