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Archive for October, 2013

Imaginary Evils

Posted in Current Events, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2013| 25 Comments »

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on September 1st; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

Temptations of St. Anthony by Bernardo Parentino (c. 1494)Oliver Goldsmith wrote, “Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.”  And the celebrated curmudgeon H.L. Mencken was much more specific about who it was that was most likely to disregard Goldsmith’s advice:  “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them  imaginary.”  One of the most popular imaginary hobgoblins of our time is “human trafficking” usually conceived of as “sex trafficking” despite the fact that the term is used to mean just about anything politicians and others who profit from the panic wish it to mean.  I beg your indulgence of my love for quotations just once more today, in the form of  experimental psychologist N.R.F Maier’s statement of what is now called Maier’s Law: “If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.”  Try to keep all three of those quotes in mind while reading about UK home secretary Theresa May’s recent antics:

A “modern slavery” bill that tightens the laws on human trafficking  will be introduced in an attempt to eradicate an “evil in our midst”,  Theresa May has announced.  The home secretary said that prosecution rates for human trafficking were still “shockingly low” across Europe…New trafficking prevention orders…will be introduced, allowing the courts to impose restrictions on the ability of offenders to own a company, visit certain areas or work with women or young children after their release…A “modern slavery commissioner” will be appointed to ensure that the government and law enforcement agencies are tackling the problem vigorously.  It is also possible that the bill could establish new classes of crime aggravated by a link to human trafficking.  This would allow higher penalties to be imposed for offences involving, for example, drugs or prostitution, if they were part of a trafficking operation…The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: “Labour have been calling for stronger action against human trafficking since 2010…considerable concerns have been raised about trafficked children and young people ending up in children’s homes and then going missing and being trafficked again”…

Well, if there’s anything Britain needs it’s certainly “new classes of crime”; after all, we can’t have the UK lagging behind the US in the number of ways for the police to lock people up, steal their property and trample on their rights.  As for Ms. Cooper, perhaps she should’ve paid more attention to what the Guardian edited out of the story I discussed last week:  the fallacious statement that “[of] children…identified and taken in by social services, 90% will be tracked down by their traffickers and disappear from care…”  But as Maier pointed out, inconvenient facts must be discarded.  A rational mind would conclude that the failure of “authorities” to discover vast numbers of “traffickers” meant that the predictions were wrong in the first place; a politician instead concludes that they just aren’t trying hard enough.  For example, there was Operation Pentameter Two in 2008:

The UK’s biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country…a Guardian investigation…suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.  Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all…

But now Ms. May says that a massive operation using every single police force plus some, and involving hundreds of raids, just wasn’t good enough (despite the fact that then-home secretary Jacqui Smith hailed it as “a great success”).  And then there was “Project Acumen”, which was specifically designed to generate higher numbers than Pentameter:

Project Acumen’s findings are based on interviews with just 210 migrant sex workers at 142 premises in England and Wales…NONE of [them] had been kidnapped, imprisoned or subjected to surveillance.  NONE were established as sold.  ONLY ONE had been subjected to violence, and NONE had been threatened with violence.  At least 202 had known when recruited they would be expected to work as prostitutes.  Of the remaining eight, some may have been misled about their location rather than the work…NONE suffered “threats of denunciation to the authorities.”  NONE had been given false information about migration, or about the law or attitude of the authorities…

Money Down the Toilet
Obviously, that wasn’t trying hard enough either.  Maybe they just weren’t dumping enough money down the “trafficking investigation” loo, or being aggressive enough in their raids; but what about £500,000 expended on brutal tactics when everybody knows there are hordes of “trafficked women” about, namely the Olympics?  Surely that’s enough for Ms. May?  Apparently not:

An elite Metropolitan police squad has come under fire in a highly critical report commissioned by the London mayor, Boris Johnson…The report [called “Silence on Violence”] accuses officers of a “heavy handed” approach to brothel raids and of failing to find victims of trafficking…It criticises the police performance and estimates that they have a success rate of less than 1% in finding trafficking victims during brothel raids.  Police had predicted an increase in sex trafficking in the runup to the Olympics, but they have admitted that they have failed to find any evidence of a rise in the five Olympics host boroughs…despite a cash injection of £500,000 from the Government Office for London to specifically target the crime…

Actually, they were doing well to find “victims” in 1% of their raids, because that’s about all there are to find:

A new study on migration and trafficking in the UK sex industry has challenged the idea that trafficking is the main factor in trapping people in exploitative and abusive employment…[Dr Nick Mai] has found that a majority…[are] not…forced or trafficked into the profession…[and that] difficulties in exercising rights…were more likely to come from the issue of official immigration status than from forced labour.  Many…workers…[enter] the industry because the alternative employment available to them [is] likely to be more exploitative and unrewarding than sex work… 

Abigail Stepnitz of “trafficking” profiteer group The Poppy Project refused to accept that; she said that “the police need to be more creative about how they find [victims],”   presumably by “creating” them out of ordinary sex workers as South Korean “authorities” do.  Perhaps that’s what Ms. May really wants: a vast pogrom which will make Operation Pentameter look like a Boy Scout Jamboree, resulting in the arrest of thousands of sex workers and their being labeled as “trafficking victims” no matter what the reality and despite their protests.  After all, it isn’t like there are any real problems the British government could be spending money and effort on.

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Aileen Wuornos

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2013| 26 Comments »

I killed those men, robbed them as cold as ice.  And I’d do it again, too…I have hate crawling through my system…I am so sick of hearing this “she’s crazy” stuff…I’m trying to tell the truth.  I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.  –  Aileen Wuornos

In my harlotographies, I’ve tried to cover as broad a range as possible: from the ancient to the recently-deceased, from streetwalkers to courtesans, from the noble to the self-centered, from the wise to the deranged and from the famous to the infamous.  Three years ago this month I presented short biographies of the victims of the first known serial killer, and today the first woman to be herself so labeled:  Aileen Carol Wuornos.

Aileen Wuornos as a childShe was born in Rochester, Michigan on February 29th, 1956 to 17-year-old Diane Wuornos, who had married Aileen’s father, Leo Pittman, less than two years before.  Aileen never met him; he was in prison when she was born, and her mother had already filed for divorce.  Pittman was a schizophrenic with a long history of violent behavior, and hanged himself in prison in 1969 while serving another sentence, this time for child molestation.  In January of 1960, Diane abandoned Aileen and her older brother Keith, leaving them with her parents Lauri and Britta Wuornos; they immediately adopted the children and for many years allowed them to believe they were their parents.  Unfortunately, they were just as bad as the real parents; Lauri sexually abused his granddaughter, and Britta was both physically abusive and an alcoholic.  Like many incest victims, Aileen became sexually precocious; she had sexual contact with boys at school in exchange for drugs, cigarettes and other things she wanted, and when she turned up pregnant at 14 she named Keith as the father.  As was typical in 1970 she was sent to a home for unwed mothers, and the baby was given up for adoption.  A few months later Britta died of alcohol-induced liver failure, and Lauri threw his granddaughter out soon afterward.  Though she and her brother were placed in foster homes, Aileen ran away almost immediately and lived in a patch of woods near her old neighborhood, supporting herself via prostitution.

But she did not stay there for long; by 16 she started hitchhiking around the Midwest, working mostly at truck stops, and was arrested for drunk driving in Colorado in May of 1974.  By the beginning of 1976 she had made it to Florida, where she was picked up while hitchhiking by Lewis Fell, the wealthy 69-year-old president of a yacht club.  He immediately fell in love with her and soon proposed; she accepted, and their marriage announcement even appeared on the local paper’s society page in May of 1976.  There the story might have ended had Aileen been merely the victim of a difficult life; as should be clear, however, mental and emotional instability ran deep on both sides of her family, and she was completely incapable of settling down to the comfortable situation of a trophy wife.  Instead, she insisted on drinking at bars and getting into fights; when she was jailed for attacking a bartender while on a trip home to Michigan (after her grandfather’s suicide), Fell came to his senses and had the marriage annulled.  She was arrested July 14th; her brother died of throat cancer three days later, and the annulment went through on the 21st.

Aileen blew through her brother’s $10,000 insurance policy in only a few months and returned to truck-stop prostitution, working her way back down to Florida.  But while she had been quite pretty in her teens, hard living and her volatile temper had faded that luster; it thus became increasingly difficult for her to make a living as a whore.  She was arrested for robbing a convenience store in May of 1981, and again for passing forged checks in May of 1984.  By 1986 she had just about hit bottom: she was arrested for car theft in January, then for attempted armed robbery of a client in June.  Soon after that, however, she met a hotel maid named Tyria Moore at a lesbian bar in Daytona Beach, and they moved in together; for a while Wuornos seems to have been happy in her way, and her earnings picked up enough for Moore to quit her job and let Wuornos support both of them.  But slowly, over the next several years, the chaos which followed Wuornos like a cloud returned and worsened.  In July of 1987, she got in a fight at a bar, then in March of 1988 with a bus driver.  And by the end of the following year, she had returned to where she was when she met Moore, and started robbing her clients…this time, killing them in the process.

Aileen WuornosThe particulars of the case are discussed in exhaustive detail all over the internet if you’re interested, so there’s no need to repeat them here.  Suffice to say that between December 1st, 1989 and November 19th, 1990, Aileen Wuornos murdered seven men – Richard Mallory, David Spears, Charles Carskaddon, Peter Siems, Troy Burress, Charles Humphreys and Walter Antonio, all with the same delicate little .22 caliber purse gun.  Moore was still with her at least until the fourth murder, but sometime after that they broke up and Moore went home to Pennsylvania.  She later admitted to knowing about the first murder, but claimed to have deliberately avoided asking about the others because she didn’t want to know.  Wuornos was a terribly sloppy criminal; she left a string of witnesses, fingerprints and pawned loot across Florida, and had the police been competent she would have been caught much earlier.  Wuornos was finally arrested on January 9th, 1991, and Moore the next day; she agreed to testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution, and even talked Wuornos into confessing on the phone.  In that confession, Wuornos claimed that every single one of the men had tried to rape her, and that she had killed them all in self-defense.

Predictably, credulous feminists swallowed every word and touted her as some kind of heroine; remember, this was the height of child sexual abuse hysteria.  But she was neither a heroine nor the “man-hating lesbian” some pundits claimed; she was merely an unstable sociopath whose restless, violent life had exacerbated her existing problems.  At first, she seemed to enjoy the publicity and continually retold her story to recast herself more and more as the victim, ignoring her public defenders’ entreaties that she remain silent and insisting she be allowed to tell her story in court.  When the jury at her first trial (for Mallory’s murder) compared her absurdly-embellished version with the original videotaped confession, any credibility she may have had disintegrated; it took less than two hours for them to convict her of first-degree murder, and she responded by screaming “I hope you get raped!” at them.  She was sentenced to death.  Before her next trial could start, she decided to “get right with God” by pleading no contest to the murders of Humphreys, Burress and Spears, claiming in her statement that though Mallory (who had a previous conviction for the crime) did indeed rape her, she had only feared the others would and killed them before they could do so.  She was given three more death sentences.

Wuornos spent the next decade on death row, her mental health deteriorating the entire time.  In 2001 she fired her legal counsel and stated that she was giving up appeals, but then insisted that the prison staff were torturing her by contaminating and even poisoning her food so as to drive her to suicide before her execution; she also claimed that they intended to rape her before she died.  During the last few years of her life she gave a a series of interviews to Nick Broomfield, who had already made a documentary about her in 1993 (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer) and was in the process of making another (released in 2003 as Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer); the video below is the last such interview, made the night before her death.

She was executed by lethal injection on October 9th, 2002 after declining a last meal (she wanted only a cup of black coffee).  Her last words were, “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the rock, and I’ll be back like Independence Day, with Jesus June 6th.  Like the movie, big mother ship and all, I’ll be back.”

There are some women I’m proud to share a profession with, and others I’m not; women like Theodora and Skittles show whores at our best, while women like Aileen Wuornos show us at our worst.  But I think her story is an important part of the picture, because it demonstrates once again that there is no one type of woman who sells sex, nor any consistent pattern to our lives and fates.

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It Takes All Kinds

Posted in Miscellaneous, Q & A, tagged , , , , , , on October 9, 2013| 24 Comments »

I don’t have experience in the sex industry, but want to learn what my options are; how can I do this?  How I might get started?  What the pros/cons are for each segment?  What are the specific qualities that are suited for each profession?  I’m 31, intelligent and already have a good job, but I’ve ALWAYS had a desire to make money with sex, though I worry I’m not pretty enough.

Young Girl Bathing by Renoir (1892)Different kinds of sex work are better for different people; for example, I really didn’t like stripping, and I hate domination, but GFE (Girl Friend Experience) escorting was a perfect fit for me.  However, I have friends who stripped for years and love it, and some who enjoy domination much more than escorting.  Unfortunately, I can’t think of any way to figure out which one you like best other than trying them.  Many sex workers try several before settling on the one they like best; some even go back and forth between different types at different times in their lives.  Since you live in a large city it should be relatively easy for you to try a number of things, especially stripping and agency escorting; if you enjoy the work with the agency you could then go on to independent escorting.  The reason I’m suggesting an agency at first is that, since you already have a “straight” job, that would let you get your feet wet without risking undue exposure until you’re sure you’ll like it.  Don’t worry about whether you’re pretty enough; if men make passes at you, you are.  I’ve known some stunning girls who didn’t do as well as others who were just normally pretty, because they had less attractive personalities.  Looks are good bait, but unless there’s some substance underneath she won’t get either repeat business or referrals.  The women who do best at escorting are the ones whose company men really enjoy, and each of the other types of sex work has its own skills and characteristics that are just as important as looks.

One good place to start is my Questions page; about halfway down there’s a section called “mentoring” with questions other ladies have asked me, hyperlinked to the posts where I answered them.   Take a look at those, then go online and look at the strip clubs and escort services nearby.  Most are ALWAYS hiring, so that’s not usually an issue; after that it’s just a matter of getting your courage up!  If you have any other questions after reading those posts, please feel free to ask.

(Have a question of your own?  Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)

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Handy Figures Revisited

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 8, 2013| 28 Comments »

Perfect numbers, like perfect men, are very rare. –  Rene Descartes

Yesterday’s “Frequently Told Lies” inspired me to look back at “Handy Figures“, a compilation of numbers and figures which previously appeared in other columns; I had originally intended to keep updating it, but it somehow seemed wrong to make major alterations to an old column so I lapsed.  Since then, I came up with the idea of duplicating these retrospective-type columns into static pages, and that’s worked out so well I figured it was time to do the same with this useful reference tool.  Much of it is the same as the old column, but there are additional figures and better links, and I’ve rounded my estimates off in response to the justified criticism that very specific numbers don’t look like estimates, but rather exact counts.

huge crowd$32 billion:  Current claim of the total annual income of the “sex trafficking” industry; this was actually the ILO’s 2005 estimate of the value of all forced labor, not forced prostitution.

42 million:  Fondation Scelles’ estimate of the total world whore population; it’s not really bad, but see 19 below.

27 million:  According to a December 2010 “estimate” by “Free the Slaves”, the total number of people “trapped in modern-day slavery”  (see also 2.4 million and 800,000 below).

$22.6 million:  Total estimated annual amount the State of Texas spends on imprisoning prostitutes.

2.4 million:  UNODC estimate of the number of “trafficking” victims worldwide (see also 27 million above; 800,000 and 40,000 below).

800,000:  According to the U.S. State Department’s “Trafficking in Persons” report for 2004, the total number of “human trafficking victims” worldwide (see also 27 million and 2.4 million above; 80,000, 14,500 and >10% below).

450,000:  Estimated number of active, professional prostitutes in the US.

$300,000:  Prohibitionist claim of a typical hooker’s annual income.

100,000-300,000:  According to trafficking fanatics, the number of “trafficked child prostitutes” in the US (see also 16,000, 14,500 and 2500 below).

100,000:  According to one “estimate”, the number of “trafficked” Vietnamese manicurist/whores hidden in nail salons in the UK.

80,000:  The number of Filipino women who lost good jobs in Japan due to U.S. State Department meddling (see also 800,000 above and >10% below).

70,000:  Estimated number of street prostitutes in the US  (see also 450,000 above).

30,000-45,000:  Total number of whores supposedly “trafficked” into Israel from 1991-2006, who magically vanished after a law was passed.

40,000:  The number of “trafficking victims” for which UNODC claims to have actual evidence (see also 2.4 million above and 1362 below).London Olympics logo

10,000-40,000:  Typical “estimates” of the number of whores claimed to flock to mega sport events such as the Super Bowl or Olympics (see also 1 below).

14,500-17,500:  2008 federal estimate of all “trafficked persons” of all ages and employment types (sex, agriculture, etc) in the US.

16,000:  Estimated number of all American prostitutes under 18.

2500: Estimated number of coerced prostitutes under 18 in the US.

1362:  The total number of “human trafficking victims” (all types, not just sex) identified as such in the US from 2000-2007 (see also 14,500 above).

600:  Estimated number of “pimped” underage prostitutes in the entire US who advertise online.

160x:  High-end estimate of the factor by which the rate of sexually transmitted infections in the promiscuous segment of the general public exceeds that in the escort population  (see also 3-5%, 2x and 0.4% below).

133:  The total number of arrests made in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area during the 2.5 weeks before the 2011 Super Bowl, which is now represented by “trafficking” fetishists as the number of “trafficking” arrests (see also 1 below).

97%:  Percentage of escorts who report an increase in self-esteem after they entered the trade (see also 72% and 60% below).

97%:  Fraction of Turkish harlots who prefer to work illegally rather than be registered and subjugated in brothels.

95%:  Fraction of underage New York City street prostitutes who say they sell sex because it is the most dependable way to support themselves.

90%:  Fraction of sex workers in Queensland who prefer to work illegally (see also 97% above).

85%:  Fraction of sexually-active Bahamian teens who are involved in some kind of transactional sex.

84%:  Fraction of underage prostitutes in New York City who have never even met a pimp.

81%:  Fraction of Swedes who report being “angry” about client criminalization (contrast with the Swedish government claim that 76% support the law).

80%:  According to the UNDOC, the fraction of “human trafficking” cases involving forced prostitution (see also 20% below).Brothel Prostitute and Client

78%:  Fraction of Dutch citizens who feel prostitution is a job like any other.

77%:  Fraction of escorts who feel their clients respect them.

77%:  Fraction of Canadians who support decriminalization.

75%:  Fraction of escorts who feel the job improved their lives.

72%:  Fraction of all prostitutes who report that their work has increased their self-esteem  (see also 97% above).

70%:  Fraction of Australian whores who said they would choose the same trade if they had their lives to live over again.

70%:  Fraction of Dutch sex workers who aren’t Dutch by birth.

69%:  According to Kinsey (1948), the fraction of men who have paid for sex at least once in their lives; it is probably somewhat lower now due to the increased availability of “free” sex.

60%:  Fraction of American prostitutes who are escorts (either independent or agency).

54%:  Fraction of escorts who consider the transaction as equal.

>50%:  Of streetwalkers with pimps (see below), the fraction who control their pimps rather than vice-versa.

<50%:  Fraction of streetwalkers who work with pimps at least part of the time.

50:  As of June 2012, the high-water mark in ridiculous claims of the number of clients per night hookers supposedly see.

48%:  The amount by which sexual coercion has decreased in Germany since prostitution laws were liberalized in 2002.

45%:  Fraction of underage New York City street prostitutes who are male.

34:  Though often presented as the average life expectancy of sex workers, this is actually the average age of murdered streetwalkers from one study.

33%:  Sweden’s official estimate of the fraction of all Swedish prostitutes who are streetwalkers; note that it is more than twice as high as the standard estimate for Western countries (see 15% below).

28%:  The factor by which the number of prostitutes rose in Norway after client criminalization.

Prostitute and Her Client by Georges Bottini (1904)26%:  Fraction of escorts who feel they have power over their clients.

25%:  Estimated decrease in the American rape rate if prostitution were legal.

25%:  Fraction of Queensland prostitutes with a university degree.

25:  The average age at which American prostitutes enter the trade.

20%:  Fraction of men who see prostitutes at least occasionally.

20%:  More realistic estimate (heard at Albany Law Symposium) of fraction of all “human trafficking” which is for sexual purposes (see also 80% above).

19:  Prohibitionist group Fondation Scelles’ claim of the average age of all whores worldwide (see 25 above).

16:  The average age at which underage prostitutes enter the trade (see also 13-14 below).

15%:  Estimated fraction of all Western prostitutes who worked on the street prior to the advent of the internet.

13:  According to prohibitionist propaganda, the average age at which prostitutes enter the trade; this is derived from a purposeful distortion by Melissa Farley of the age at which underage streetwalkers in one study reported they had their first noncommercial sexual contact of any kind.

12.5%:  According to a 2005 “estimate” by Atlanta police, the fraction of the city’s Asian population who are “sex slaves” (see also 3% below).

11%:  In a 1910 study, the fraction of New York prostitutes who reported that they were coerced into the trade (from Renegade History of the United States; see also 8% below).

11:  The number of US states which allow prostitutes to be sentenced to prison.

10.5%:  Fraction of Chicagoans charged with buying sex who are actually transgender prostitutes.

>10%:  According to the U.S. State Department’s TIP report for 2004, the fraction of all “human trafficking victims” in the entire world who were “enslaved” in Japanese hostess clubs (see also 800,000 and 80,000 above).

10%:  Fraction of Dutch prostitutes who are genetically male; half are male prostitutes (many of them cross-dressers) and the other half transgender.

10%:  Fraction of Swedish girls who admit to having accepted money for sex.

10%:  Estimated fraction of streetwalkers in Western countries who are controlled or dominated by pimps  (see also 1.5% below).  It is also the fraction of underage streetwalkers who have pimps at all.

<10%:  Fraction of all women accused of being underage hookers who are actually under 18.

5-10%:  Historically, the fraction of women who prostituted themselves at least part-time, varying by time and place (from Whores in History).

8%:  High-end estimate for the fraction of female inhabitants of 1840s London who worked as prostitutes  (from Whores in History).

8%:  Fraction of underage New York prostitutes who say they were forced into prostitution.

7%:  Approximate fraction of sex workers arrested in FBI “Innocence Lost” operations who are actually under 18.

6%:  Fraction of men who see prostitutes frequently.

5.5%:  Typical fraction of women in a 19th-century European or American city employed as prostitutes at any given time (from Whores in History).

3-5%:  Fraction of STD cases in the United States which are either suffered or transmitted by prostitutes;  93% of these are associated with streetwalkers (see also 160x above and 2x and 0.4% below).

4%:  Approximate fraction of school-age girls in the US who would now be “sex slaves” if the “estimates” of hysterics were true.

4%:  Approximate conviction rate for “trafficking” arrests made in the FBI’s “Operation Innocence Lost”.

3.5%:  Estimated fraction of Western prostitutes who are under 18.

3%:  According to “trafficking” hysterics, the fraction of all underage hookers in the entire US who work in Atlanta (see also 12.5% and 16,000 above).

2.3%:  Fraction of women in the general population who report their husbands or boyfriends are “extremely controlling”.

2 hours:  Typical average cost of the least expensive hookers’ services in comparison with the average working man’s pay in most cultures.

2x:  Factor by which the rate of sexually transmitted infections in the promiscuous segment of the general public exceeds that in streetwalkers  (see also 160x and 3-5% above, and 0.4% below).

<2%:  Fraction of Cambodian prostitutes who say they were coerced into the trade (see also 1.5% below).La Bella by Titian (1536)

1.5%:  Overall estimated fraction of adult prostitutes in Western nations who are controlled by abusive pimps.

1.2%:  Fraction of women in the general population who report their husbands or boyfriends are “extremely violent”.

1%:  Fraction of modern American women who admit to having worked as whores at some point in their lives (from Sex Work).

<1%:  The fraction of “brothel” raids in which UK police found someone they could accuse of being “trafficked”; also the fraction of “trafficked” Greek whores.

1:  The number of arrests for “human trafficking” during Super Bowl week in both Miami (2010) and Dallas (2011) (see also 40,000 and 133 above).

0.4%:  The estimated fraction of all STD cases in the United States which are either suffered or transmitted by escorts or brothel workers (see also 160x, 3-5% and 2x above).

0.3%:  Fraction of women in modern Western cultures who work as prostitutes at any given time.

0.014%:  Fraction of missing “children” (most of whom are actually adolescents) who are abducted by strangers for any reason.

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Frequently Told Lies

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 7, 2013| 69 Comments »

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.  –  John 8:32

I recently realized that because the prohibitionists have a set of stock lies they can repeat in an article or internet comment, someone trying to refute them is forced to link to a number of different sources to debunk those lies.  In order to make things easier, I’ve decided to consolidate responses in one place; in a few days I’ll replicate this column as a static page, to which I can add new lies which may appear and new statistics with which to debunk them.  This column only covers factual claims; emotional arguments of the “no little girl dreams of being a prostitute” variety are covered in “Amazingly Stupid Statements”.

Jodie Foster Taxi DriverLIE:  The average age at which a woman enters prostitution is 13.
TRUTH: If this were true, there would have to be huge numbers of toddler-prostitutes to balance the many, many women who start later in life, such as to support themselves after divorce.  Even underage prostitutes start at an average of 15-16, and only 15% of teen hookers (themselves a small minority of all sex workers) enter at an age below 13.  A conservative estimate for the average age at which women enter the trade is 25.  The “average debut at 13” lie was a purposeful distortion by anti-sex crusader Melissa Farley, who misrepresented the average age of first noncommercial sexual contact (which could include kissing, petting, etc) reported by underage girls in one 1982 study as though it were the age they first reported selling sex; the actual average age at which the girls in that study began prostitution was 16.

LIE:  The average age of death for a prostitute is 34.
TRUTH: That figure was derived from a 2003 study which examined all of the reports of murdered street workers in Colorado Springs from 1967-1999, and discovered that the average age of death of those victims was 34.  In other words, nobody who wasn’t murdered was included in the figure.  It’s like using the average age of dead soldiers in a war to proclaim “the average man who joins the military dies at 21”.

LIE:  The demonstrable problems with legalization schemes in places like Nevada and the Netherlands constitute an argument in favor of criminalization.
TRUTH: The demonstrable problems with those legalization schemes constitute an argument in favor of decriminalization.  No sex worker rights organization in the world favors the Dutch or Nevada models, precisely because they do give rise to a host of problems which are prevented by treating sex work as work.

LIE:  85% of prostitutes report childhood sexual abuse.
TRUTH: The original source for this claim was a 2004 study of incarcerated street workers which actually claimed that 45% reported sexual abuse and 85% physical abuse.  Furthermore, there are serious methodological problems with the study, which is typical when biased researchers use an unrepresentative convenience sample and then extrapolate the results to a much larger population with which it does not correlate to any meaningful extent.

LIE:  “End Demand” tactics are an effective means of reducing prostitution.
TRUTH: Economic analysis demonstrates that “end demand” tactics increase the number of sales of sex, especially at the street level.

LIE:  “Human trafficking” is the world’s second most profitable criminal enterprise (or the third most, or most recently the most).
TRUTH:  This myth originated in a UNODC meeting where Kevin Bales (see “27 million” below) said, “…it’s impossible to answer that question.  If I had to guess I would say it was third…”  Ann Jordan surmised that the original source of the myth (later revealed as Bales) was probably thinking about smuggling, certainly a more credible candidate for the position.

Who victimizes sex workersLIE:  Most of the violence to which sex workers are subjected is at the hands of clients or pimps.
TRUTH: Most of the violence suffered by sex workers in regimes where the work is fully or partially criminalized is at the hands of police.

LIE:  Most or nearly all prostitutes are controlled by pimps and forced to work.
TRUTH: In nearly every stable modern society, the rate of coercion for adult prostitutes is about 2% or less, and for underage ones about 8-10%; this is roughly the same as the rate of non-sex-working women who report an abusive or controlling boyfriend or husband.

LIE:  Most prostitutes are driven to it by financial need, and 9 out of 10 prostitutes would like to exit prostitution immediately.
TRUTH: These statements are probably true, but if there is any normal job (not an elite career occupied by a tiny fraction of the population) to which they do not apply, I’d like to know what it might be.  What makes this a lie is the pretense that it applies to sex work to a higher degree than to other jobs, which it does not; one Australian study found that half of all prostitutes ranked their work as a “major source of satisfaction” in their lives, and 70% said they would definitely choose prostitution again if they had their lives to live over.

LIE:  Most prostitutes are “recruited” into the work by pimps.
TRUTH: Most adult sex workers start due to pragmatic concerns, and most underage ones either think of it on their own or are recruited by friends.

LIE:  Most prostitutes suffer symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
TRUTH: This is another of Melissa Farley’s pet lies.  She claims to be able to diagnose PTSD with a 15-minute self-administered questionnaire, despite the fact that the National Center for PTSD states that “brief, single-item, closed-ended questions for each PTSD symptom are…no more valid for making a diagnosis than self-report measures…Proper assessment of PTSD is complex…”  In short, she is not qualified to diagnose this condition, and her method would be quackery even if she were.

LIE:  Nearly all men buy sex OR a small, pathological group of men buys sex.
TRUTH: Though a slight majority of men have paid for sex at least once in their lives, about 20% of them do it “occasionally” (several times per year) and 6% “frequently” (several times per month).

LIE:  100,000-300,000 children are “trafficked” every year in the United States.math is hard
TRUTH: That myth is a distortion of an absurd estimate from the Estes & Weiner study of 2001, which estimated that number of “children, adolescents and youth (up to 21) at risk of sexual exploitation”.  “Sex trafficking” was the least prevalent form of “exploitation” in their definition; other things they classed as “exploitation” included stripping, consensual homosexual relations and merely viewing porn.  Two of the so-called “risk factors” were access to a car and proximity to the Canadian or Mexican border.  When interviewed by reporters in 2011, Estes himself estimated the number of legal minors actually abducted into “sex slavery” as “very small…We’re talking about a few hundred people.”

LIE:  Prostitutes only do the work because they have no meaningful choices.
TRUTH: 93% of escorts say they like their work for the money, 72% for the independence and 67% for meeting people.  And a 2011 study demonstrated  that most American escorts are women with “high opportunity cost”, in other words those who have many other meaningful options.

LIE:  Prostitutes spread disease.
TRUTH: Only about 3-5% of all STIs can be attributed to either side of a sex work transaction, and the rates of infection among professionals are much (often dramatically) lower than among promiscuous amateurs.

LIE:  Prostitution destroys the self-esteem of women involved in it.
TRUTH: Though only a small fraction of street workers report an increase in self-esteem after entering harlotry, they represent less than 15% of all prostitutes.  97% of escorts in one study reported an increase in self-esteem, compared with 50% of Nevada brothel workers; another study found that 75% of escorts felt their lives had improved since starting the work, 25% reported no change and 0% said their lives were worse.  Anyone who has ever personally known any sex workers of any kind knows that if anything, their self-esteem is often too high.

LIE:  Prostitution is associated with crime.
TRUTH: Criminalization is associated with crime.  When “authorities” criminalize a consensual activity, they shouldn’t be too surprised when criminals are then attracted to it.  When’s the last time you heard of anyone arrested for bootlegging or rum-running?

LIE:  “Sex trafficking” increases when prostitution is legalized.
TRUTH: This claim is based on the deeply-flawed Neumayer, Cho and Dreher study, which failed to even define the term “trafficking” in any way which would allow statistical comparison.  The lie was further developed by a report in Der Spiegel which used figures for exploitation among illegal prostitutes to argue against legalization.  In any legalization regime, those sex workers who are defined as being outside the legal structure (i.e. still criminal) are always those at greatest risk of violence and exploitation; to the extent that “trafficking” actually exists, it is generally the illegal nature of sex work which supplies the greatest tool for coercion.  In the decriminalized structures of New Zealand and New South Wales, coercion is virtually nonexistent.

LIE:  Sex work causes rape.
TRUTH: The evidence suggests that sex work of all kinds actually decreases the rates of rape, sexual assault, divorce and several other sex-related social ills.

LIE:  The Swedish model has dramatically reduced prostitution and sex trafficking in Sweden.
TRUTH: The Swedish model cannot be shown to have had any effect on rates of prostitution at all, though it has made the lives of sex workers much more difficult and dangerous.  Norwegian studies demonstrate that their version of the law has increased sex trafficking and the number of prostitutes, and also promoted pimping.

LIE: There are 27,000,000 people enslaved in the world today.trafficking estimate comparison
TRUTH: That number was developed by a “trafficking” fanatic named Kevin Bales using media reports multiplied by arbitrary numbers of his own devising; the more the hysteria, the higher the number of articles and thus the higher Bales’ number grows.  “Trafficking” estimates are all over the map; the official UNODC estimate is less than a tenth as much (2.4 million), and even with vague, loose and ever-expanding definitions of “trafficking” the office has evidence for only about 40,000 in the entire world.

LIE:  A very large fraction of sex workers are below 18.
TRUTH: In legal forms of sex work, virtually none are; in illegal forms the fraction is still very small.  Only about 3.5 % of prostitutes in Western countries are under 18.

That’s all I can think of for now; post any others you’ve seen in the comments and I’ll add them to the static page.

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Links #170

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 6, 2013| 32 Comments »

It’s very strange that [these] alleged demons are aware of our examination timetable.  They only surface when pupils are preparing for the exams.  –  Awebahe Hoeseb

Besides building a two-story residence for the outside cat and kittens who moved into her shop a few months ago (no “cathouse” jokes, please), Grace also managed to contribute the top four links this week.  The first video (“A Whiter Shade of Pale” arranged in J.S. Bach’s style and performed on a pipe organ) was provided by Michael Whiteacre, and the second (a fan-made trailer for an imaginary Wonder Woman movie) by my husband; the links between were supplied by Jesse Walker, Ally Fogg, EconJeff, Aspasia, Jason Kuznicki, Keep Food Legal, Emil Kirkegaard and Lucy Steigerwald (in that order).

From the Archives

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That Was the Week That Was (#340)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 5, 2013| 24 Comments »

It’s better to be shameless than the victim.  –  Gabriela Leite

Acting and Activism

Whenever Mira Sorvino feels neglected by the media, she vomits out a slew of idiotic fables for credulous reporters:  “…this has grown into a highly profitable international business that rakes in $500 billion a year.”  Yes, that’s a “B”; Mira claims “sex trafficking” brings in 25% more than the entire GDP of Sweden (even UNODC only claims $32 billion).  But to a mathematical retard who believes every single whore makes over $250,000 a year and every pimp about $1.5 million, and that there are millions of “trafficked slaves”, I guess $500 billion seems credible.

Make Up Your Damned Mind!

Another runaway clown car of unintentional hilarity:

…prostitution in Richmond [Indiana]…[is like] abandoned and unsafe housing…It’s not clear that stepped-up law enforcement can eliminate the problem…any more than it can stamp out abandoned and hazardous structures.  But what…Richmond Police Department Capt. Bill Shake does so well…is give lie to the notion…that prostitution is a “victimless” crime.  “It is a public safety disorder issue and a quality of life issue…We had three women come to us and complain that they had been approached by men seeking prostitutes.  These are just women…walking to work”…these innocent women…are victimized because their sense of security has been violated.Curly  Local businesses and homeowners…are likewise victims of the sheer brazen starkness of the problem.  But…Shake makes a victimhood case even for the [prostitutes and] Johns…“These ladies need help, and the men need intervention,” he said…

TL;DR version:  “Whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop!  Nyah nyah nyah!”

Where Are the Victims?

This guy sounds like a dangerous criminal:

A brothel manager…tried to help a worker in his massage parlour get the morning-after pill…Staff at the pharmacy called police…[because] the woman…was Romanian…No evidence of trafficking was found, but police [stole] £1,200 cash on the premises, plus another £25,000…at Jones’ home…[his lawyer] said…“The police had visited [the parlour] a number of times…and [said]…as long as there were no drugs or trafficking he would face no action”…

Unfortunately, xenophobia, hysteria and snitching are not crimes.

License To Rape (June Updates)

A woman who…was sexually assaulted by…San Diego Police Officer Anthony Arevalos…settled a lawsuit against the city…for $795,000…Arevalos…was convicted of sexual battery and…in February 2012 was sentenced to almost nine years…the city has paid out $2.3 million in claims [altogether] from Arevalos’ misconduct.  One more case is still pending…[several of the cases alleged] that a culture of covering up officer misconduct permeates the department and allowed Arevalos to harass women for years…

The Eye of the Beholder (June Updates)

The UK's most prohibitionist paper in a rare moment of lucidity

The UK’s most prohibitionist paper in a rare moment of lucidity

Lawheads will be lawheads:

…a 28-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman [were] arrested for [consensual, noncommercial] sex…Kelcey Nicholas…married [Lataura] Jarrett’s mother…when police [broke into] Nicholas’s house…to bust him on another charge, they…found [him having sex]…with Jarrett.  The two share no genetic…relation, nor did Nicholas ever legally adopt Jarrett.  But…the law in West Virginia defines stepdaughters as daughters…[they were] charged with…incest, a felony…[threatening 15 years in] prison…

Perquisites

Big businesses woo valuable employees with (halfway) whores.  Yawn.

…when college sports programs…need…to convince young…men to choose their school, they…use…“hostesses”—college women with pretty, smiling faces…[to] assist high-caliber potential student-athletes when they visit campus…according to Deadspin, [they] “answer questions, and…provide entertainment.”  College football is big business…but…NCAA [rules state that]…programs cannot give recruits “any financial aid or other benefits,” including cash, clothing, or merchandise.  In place of these…programs use the recruits’ official 48-hour visit to show them a good time, an implicit promise of what their years on campus will be like…Even though [former hostesses insist]…that no one…tells hostesses to “lead on” recruits, programs are well aware of how instrumental these women are in helping them land top athletes…

Because Everyone Knows That Laws Deter Streetwalkers

The power to see abstractions must be useful:

Cleveland City Councilman Eugene Miller… [proposes] to toughen penalties for prostitutes, pimps and johns…[saying] he has grown tired of seeing prostitution in his…neighborhood and believes that more severe punishment is the only way to ameliorate the problem…however…Judge Ronald Adrine said…mandatory jail time would contribute to overcrowding…“Are we looking at…a severe problem…Or is this…a solution…looking for a problem?”  Adrine compared the issue to fighting the so-called “war on drugs” with harsh jail sentences.  “We have not been able to incarcerate ourselves out of that problem,” he said…

Kudos to Judge Adrine for having the balls to talk sense.feminist heretic burning

To Spite Their Faces

Cathy Young’s “Is the Patriarchy Dead?” is well worth reading in its entirety, but here’s a sample:

When writer Hanna Rosin recently published an article on Slate.com stating that “the patriarchy is dead,” much of the feminist response amounted to “burn the heretic!”…Ironically, the feminist tendency to shoot the bringer of good news was the very topic of Rosin’s essay…In its present form—as a secular cult that should call itself the Sisters of Perpetual Grievance—feminism is far more a part of the problem than part of the solution.  It clings to women’s wrongs and turns women’s rights into narcissistic entitlement.  It is far too easily prone to bashing men while painting women as insultingly helpless…

An Angel of Mercy

What real help for streetwalkers looks like:

…Becca Stevens offers [them an]…alternative working for the cosmetic company she started called Thistle Farms.  The women make soaps, oils, and other products to sell nationwide…the program…offers free housing, eliminating the worry about paying rent…75 percent…have stayed off the streets.

No cops.  No cages.  No shaming or brainwashing.  Just a fair offer they can choose to accept, or not.

A Broker in Pillage

[Maryland] and federal agents raided Jade Heart Health…and charged its operators with prostitution and human trafficking…Di Zhang…has…[an extensive] real estate portfolio…and part-ownership of a…company that reports…millions of dollars of business in China…federal authorities have launched a civil-forfeiture case to seize five buildings…[worth] nearly $2 million…

Hard Numbers (TW3 #16)Gabriela Leite

…in Brazil…a bill…called the Gabriela Leite Law (in honor of the prostitute and activist who founded the NGO Davida)…[proposes] to [clarify] sex work [law]…Leite…[says] it is necessary to consider prostitution as a profession and avoid the cliché of the prostitute as a victim…The bill…defines a sex worker as any person who is at least 18 years old and able to voluntarily provide sexual services for remuneration.  It proposes to regulate the houses of prostitution, to prevent exploitation…[to] set…a ceiling [on income taxes for sex workers and to]…establish…a retirement option…

First They Came for the Hookers…

If prohibitionists really want to “rescue” sex workers, why do they keep trying to stop us from getting other jobs?

…it’s become increasingly difficult for former adult stars to conceal their past from their employers…[but] employee discrimination cases involving sex workers are usually…“very difficult to win,” says adult entertainment lawyer Michael Fattorosi.  Under current discrimination laws, there are no protections for former sex workers, and…an employee who…failed to disclose a porn past…would be compromised even further; the employer could argue that the employee had been hired under false pretenses…

The Schizoid State

I doubt we’ll ever know the truth about the so-called “teen girl pimps”:

The 16-year-old plead [sic] guilty to…three counts of human trafficking, and one count each of robbery, luring, and making child pornography…The 18-year-old…to human trafficking, robbery, uttering threats, and breach of recognizance…the Crown [claims]…the girls, who were 15, 15, and 16 at the time…recruited…teen girls through Facebook…and [forced] them into prostitution…The third accused, the so-called ringleader…is on trial for…making and possessing child pornography, human trafficking, forcible confinement, procuring…criminal harassment, and uttering threats…

The Widening GyreIlluminati

Though the persecution of a Florida family for homeschooling (including arrests and threats to abduct their children) is reprehensible, it’s unfortunately too common to be newsworthy.  What I find interesting is that because the mother is “the founder of a non-profit organization that rescues and restores victims of sexual trafficking”, it didn’t take long for the peanut gallery to ask, “Is it possible that this is…retaliation from those who are involved in sex-trafficking?” because “the human trafficking forces are far more powerful than most of us know and certainly do not want to believe.”  Since it’s the state of Florida itself that is harassing them, the implication is clear; this hysteria is tracking right on the same course as the Satanic Panic, whose adherents also began to imagine their bogeymen as part of the government shortly before the whole thing imploded.

Capricious Lusts (TW3 #37)

I just wish sex worker activists cared more about establishing our social value than about preserving feminist myths:

The head of Bangkok’s Children and Women’s Protection Unit has defended the role of prostitutes in society, saying their work helps reduce the number of sex attacks.  Pol Col Napanwut Liamsanguan said…without sex workers there would be more…rape…“This is not something disgusting; it is basic human nature…we can’t deny that sex workers are part of our society”… Chantawipa Abhisuk…of the Empower Foundation…said there was no correlation between prostitution and rape…and…Surang Janyam…of the Service Workers in Group Foundation…said she was disappointed to hear a police officer offer such an opinion…

Obviously, the opinion that we’re lazy, superfluous criminals is much better.

That Old Black Magic

This reporter’s details are very confused; were these boys or transgirls?  And if they were already prostitutes, how could they be “forced into the sex trade”?

Paris police have reportedly broken up a major transsexual prostitution ring…Andrea Chichi…is suspected of having forced nearly 90 transsexual prostitutes into the sex trade.  It is alleged he also threatened them with black magic if they refused to obey his orders…“He recruited young boys from…Argentina…and suggested they get plastic surgery from an accomplice”…[a police] source said, noting that the threat…was…commonly used by Nigerian pimps…

The Course of a Disease (TW3 #42)Graham Ellison

Another good anti-Swedish model essay from Dr. Graham Ellison:

…[the client criminalization bill] is premised on a…narrow abolitionist view of sex work, grossly overestimates the extent of “demand” in Northern Ireland, and is out of line with policy developments occurring elsewhere in the United Kingdom and…continental Europe…In spite of the exaggerated claims…there have been only two prosecutions in the past decade…[and] the degree of coercion…is debatable in at least one of these cases…“trafficking” is [a] slippery concept that has been progressively devalued by exaggerated usage…debates about trafficking…can also be read as proxy debates about immigration and…racist sentiments have been embedded in anti-trafficking discourse…

It Looks Good On Paper (TW3 #311)

The Orwellian language in this article about a “sexual exploitation recovery program” (i.e. scheme to brainwash hookers) is especially chilling:  “Selah Freedom expects the new…program to fill quickly and has partnered with the Sarasota and Bradenton Police Departments to bring victims into their care…”  The casual reader probably wouldn’t even realize “bring into care” means “arrest and cage”.  This story is also notable for its oddly-humble “King of the Hill” entry, which only claims the Tampa Bay area as the third-largest “trafficking hub” in Florida rather than in the whole US.

Dysphemisms Galore

Reporter Maria Arkouli just couldn’t resist turning the rather pedestrian story of a whore arrested for practicing prostitution without a license into “sex trafficking” hentai:  “Famous singers…are consigned to prostitution by a ring in Athens which has spread its tentacles throughout Greece and over the Internet…”

The Public Eye (TW3 #324)

The Mote and the Beam (TW3 #332)

When a reporter says something is “surprising”, you can bet it actually isn’t to anyone raised outside of a convent:

Top law enforcement officers…[who] are pushing Congress for greater authority to go after a booming online industry that hosts ads for child sex traffickers…are encountering opposition from an unexpected source — conservative…lawmakers who fear a government clampdown…A coalition of…lawmakers and businesses has drafted a…resolution that…urges Congress to deny state prosecutors the…power they seek…warning that it could discourage investment in new Internet services…

It would do more than that:  it would utterly destroy the internet as we know it, because no website would risk criminal charges for user-generated content like this blog or reader comments on tens of thousands of others.

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Dark Corners

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , on October 4, 2013| 24 Comments »

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on August 25th; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.

Black Mass by Henry de Malvost (1895)The claims made in moral panics are usually so extreme and outrageous that in retrospect they seem wholly absurd.  Few living now could accept the claim that powerful Satanic cults  with connections in every part of society had enslaved hundreds of thousands of teenage girls in order to produce infants for sacrifice as anything other than the plot of an unusually-unrealistic Hollywood horror film, but in the 1980s and early 1990s this fantastical belief spread across the entire United States; journalists treated it as a realistic scenario, and innocent people were railroaded into prison based on utterly ridiculous and totally unsubstantiated testimony elicited from young children who had been tortured by many hours of grueling, coercive interrogation by police and prosecutors.  Viewing the hysteria from a comfortable distance of two decades, one might well wonder how so many people took complete leave of their senses; how could any rational person believe the sort of absolute rubbish that millions accepted, when even the most basic understanding of arithmetic, science or psychology (not to mention simple common sense and ordinary human experience) should have convinced anyone of even average intelligence that the whole thing was quite impossible?

And yet here we are again, in the midst of an equally absurd, equally unsubstantiated moral panic; the “cultists” have now turned into “traffickers” and their motive is said to be profit rather than devil-worship, but otherwise the hysteria is basically the same: incredibly-large numbers of nubile young girls being abducted and confined in a vast yet hidden underworld for nefarious and primarily-sexual purposes.  The fact that there is no actual evidence for any of this, and that the whole thing reads like something a more prudish version of J.K. Rowling might have dreamed up during an acute attack of paranoia, has not stopped it from taking hold of the public imagination even more firmly than the Satanic Panic did (and over a larger fraction of the globe).  Any given “trafficking” scare story falls apart under even the most cursory examination…and yet they persist.  An example from the August 20th Guardian (modified the next morning  after its most extreme claims proved too much for the bulk of the Graun’s readership to swallow) demonstrates just how credulous one has to be to believe the hype:

…a report by the Sunday Times…detailed the growing prevalence of nail salons controlled by human traffickers and staffed by the trafficked, specifically from Vietnam.  Industry insiders estimate that there are 100,000 Vietnamese manicurists working in the UK, despite only 29,000 Vietnamese-born migrants officially being registered in census data.  The workers are often expected to paint nails by day and work in prostitution by night.  Many are children – and even if they’re identified and taken in by social services, 90% will be tracked down by their traffickers and disappear from care…

For comparison, here’s the same paragraph in the modified version:

…A report by the Sunday Times…presented evidence about nail salons staffed by illegal immigrants, specifically from Vietnam.  According to the report, industry insiders estimate that there are 100,000 Vietnamese manicurists working in the UK, despite only 29,000 Vietnamese-born migrants officially being registered in census data…It alleges that some of these illegal migrants are victims of “what appears to be a human-trafficking network” and that they are sometimes forced to work as prostitutes as well as manicurists…

“Growing prevalence” became simple “evidence”; a declaration of “controlled by traffickers” became a mere “allegation”, “often” became “some”…and where did the “trafficked children” go?  Oops.  To the Guardian’s credit, it addressed the numerical claims in a follow-up article:

…the latest ONS data did not include Vietnam in its list of the 60 most common nationalities now resident in the UK.  That list stretched from 545,000 Polish nationals to 13,000 Colombians – so the omission of Vietnam would suggest that the 29,000 figure is incorrect…the Sunday Times article…implies that there are 71,000 hidden Vietnamese nationals in the UK and that every [one]…is a manicurist…between the first quarter of 2005 and the first quarter of this year, 81,886 Vietnamese nationals applied for a UK visa – and almost 73,000 of those visas were subsequently issued…a tiny proportion of those applications are for work permits – just 77 (or 0.6%) of the 13,000 visa applications from Vietnamese nationals in 2012 asked to work in the country.  Can we assume that all the other immigrants lied, and subsequently remained in the country?  Probably not.  Many probably came for tourism or to visit friends and family over here…More problematically, the…article leapt from talking about illegal immigrants to victims of human trafficking and in doing so, seemed to conflate these two, very different groups…the…National Referral Mechanism (NRM)…[identified only] 32 Vietnamese nationals…as potential victims in [the first quarter of this year]…and…a report by the Center for Social Justice…suggested that there were around…25 [trafficked] Vietnamese nationals [in the UK]…

But even those whose math and research skills are both sorely lacking should have been able to see through these claims by simply thinking about their own experiences in nail salons or talking to someone who regularly visits such places.  As it turns out, I am such a person:  I have had my nails done by Vietnamese manicurists every three weeks since December of 1996; that’s almost 300 visits to seven different parlors over the years, and one of those parlors changed ownership twice during the time I regularly went there.  Yes, this is the US and not the UK, but given the similarity of “trafficking” rhetoric in both countries I hardly think that makes a difference.  Here’s what I never saw in all that time:  child manicurists (unless one counts the occasional teenage “polish girl” who is always the salon owner’s Americanized daughter); manicurists who seemed exhausted from double-shifts as hookers; manicurists who seemed frightened or cowed beyond the natural shyness of an Asian lady who doesn’t speak English well; weird vibes from the owners; a parlor with enough room in the back for a brothel.  And here’s what I never heard in years of owning an escort service: word from one single client or escort about a clandestine brothel in a nail parlor.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERABut I must point out that I have an advantage over the authors of both the Times’ scare-story and the Guardian article that credulously parroted it, and over any salon-goers who actually believed the absurd claims:  I actually treat my manicurists like human beings instead of vending machines.  I talk to them, to the extent allowed by the individual’s command of English (in fact, I spent time helping the newly-arrived wife of my current salon-owner to improve hers); I ask about their children and their lives, and share mine with them.  I’ve given advice and rides, brought presents for new babies, received gifts bought on trips back to Vietnam to visit family, gone to eat pho  with them, and brought them eggs when their chickens stopped laying.  I made the effort to familiarize myself with their culture, and to try to understand why they do things the way they do; I’ve seen one of them rise from new immigrant to owner of her own parlor within a few short years, and I’m told that isn’t all that unusual.  Even if the numbers in these articles had not been so ridiculous, I would have recognized them as rubbish for the simple reason that I’ve taken the time to get to know the group about which the claims were made…and as in the case of sex workers and other sexual minorities, that clears out the dark corners where ignorant myths thrive.

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Whimsical Notions

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 3, 2013| 33 Comments »

Perhaps one day our culture will grow up enough to stop trying to tell adult women what we can do with our bodies and adult men what they can do with adult women, but in the meantime military men…will continue to seek us out despite the whimsical notions of those who think Nature can be controlled by legislation.  –  Maggie McNeill

PentagonSome of the worst of all lawheads, those most wedded to the farcical concept that reality can be shaped by the declarations of authorities and most detached from the actual consequences such declarations may have, exist in the rarefied atmosphere of high-level military command.  Even politicians have to be somewhat concerned about the consequences of their decisions, at least when those consequences are apparent to those they rule; after all, if things get bad enough they can be voted out of office.  But military commanders can only be removed from above, not from below; so as long as they please their own masters (which at the very top, means the political establishment), they can count on a long and distinguished career no matter how miserable the troops are or how much morale damage, physical and psychological harm, and  friction with allies their orders may cause.  Moreover, while a politician cannot readily insulate himself from the complaints of those harmed by his ill-considered diktats, it is only too easy for the Top Brass to shut themselves off from the troops and to ignore their responsibility for the results of their stupidity and shortsightedness.

The prevailing belief in the United States is that sex is unnatural.  Now, if asked, most who aren’t totally steeped in religious fanaticism will say the opposite, that sex is normal and natural.  But they don’t actually believe this; what they believe is that children are born “pure” and asexual, and remain so indefinitely until they are “sexualized” by outside contamination which ruins their sacred “innocence”.  Furthermore, they believe that even adults deprived of external sexual imagery or interaction will remain relatively uninterested in sex until such time as the government declares it’s acceptable for them to have it, and that sex without a government license is always harmful to women unless it’s completely buried inside a childish romantic fantasy.   The average American believes that “illicit” (i.e. unlicensed) sex is not only “harmful” in some way he cannot adequately explain, but also excites desire in some way that “good” sex does not, leading to “addiction”, “exploitation”, “negative secondary effects”  and other vague bugaboos for which not the slightest proof exists in reality.  Of course, regular readers know the opposite is true; porn and readily-available prostitution decrease rape and other social ills rather than increasing them, and men deprived of sexual stimulation become erratic and unhealthy  rather than lapsing into a docile, effeminate and celibate state.

A well-run military establishment would recognize that if there really is an “epidemic” of sexual assaults within the corps, the way to solving it is not to embrace moronic feminist assertions that “rape is caused by rage, not lust”, nor to “crack down” on assaults as though servicemen were unruly children in need of being “scared straight”.  No, Toru Hashimoto was right (though he seems unable to grasp the whole “consent” thing); military men do need “legal facilities for releasing sexual energy” in order to avoid problems which in extreme cases can grow into violence.  Unfortunately, the US military establishment is not well-run, and the Pentagon is far more concerned with promoting the government’s current political agenda than with the health and well-being of the troops, and so we get idiocy like this:

The U.S. military is cracking down on troops who support businesses connected to human trafficking, blocking airmen from spending money at so-called “juicy bars” and reminding all personnel of the prevalence of the problem businesses around bases in South Korea.  Leaders in the region have issued a series of directives to remind troops that prostitution and human trafficking are illegal…the three-star general in charge of the 7th Air Force in South Korea issued a stern warning…that…“Airmen…shall not provide money or anything of value to an employee or establishment…for the primary purpose of obtaining…company or companionship”…The prohibitions include paying fees to play darts, pool or other entertainment or buying a drink or a souvenir in exchange for an employee’s company …“disreputable establishments” near Air Force bases…take advantage of people, usually young women, and force them to work in bars.  The employees are subjected to debt bondage and forced to sell themselves as “companions”…

juicy bar protestOf course, we know the truth about this so-called “force”, and understand that for the military to deny these young women the right to make a living by the most lucrative means available to them   keeps them in poverty and may, like “end demand” schemes everywhere, force them into worse situations.  This destructive and wrongheaded policy helps nobody but the politicians who wish to pander to the whimsical notions of fanatics, but harms a great many people:  the young men deprived of an outlet for their natural sexual urges; the young women in host countries deprived of the best means of income available to them; the other young men and women subjected to sexual assault by those whose judgment and self-control has been eroded by a policy no less inhumane than starving them and depriving them of shelter; the businesses cheated of income from a large segment of the population in their areas; and the lower-echelon officers and NCOs who will be blamed for the damage caused by the refusal of their superiors to face reality.

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Your Move

Posted in Perception, Q & A, tagged , , , , on October 2, 2013| 57 Comments »

I have a follow-up question to your column of September 11th, in which a male reader asked how he could get an interested woman to accept money for sex.  It’s kind of the flip-side: how to get an interested man to pay for sex?  I am fine with it being labeled as prostitution, but I think a lot of men aren’t comfortable with the idea of direct payment.  However, I’m done giving it away; I have invested a lot into my appearance & intelligence, and loans and hair don’t pay for themselves!

Dresden chessWhen I was working and a strange man started flirting with me in some public place, I just gave him a card.  My cards were very simple, with just the name of my service, its website address and the phone number.  They were, however, obviously not cut-rate cards; they were glossy black with purple text, and plasticized on the front side.  So though they didn’t actually say much in text, their subtext was obviously THIS WOMAN IS NOT CHEAP.  The tactic rarely yielded a completed appointment; few of them called, and most of those who did couldn’t afford it.  But despite the low success rate from a financial point of view, it was worthwhile to me because it got them to stop wasting my time with a quiet but unmistakable “put up or shut up.”  Or expressed more politely, “your move.”

Now, I have many fine qualities, but sexual subtlety is not among them.  When describing my looks people often use adjectives like “stunning” or “striking”, and with good reason:  my sex appeal is about as gentle and understated as a brick to the face, and some men have even described me as “intimidating”.  So while handing a man a business card and responding to his “Is this what I think it is?” with a straightforward “yep” worked well for me, it might not fit your style at all.  Furthermore, since I gather from your question that you are new to this, you’d probably be pretty uncomfortable with the brazenness of my strategy, which (as explained above) is much better at getting rid of would-be Casanovas than it is at turning them into clients.  I’ve never had the patience to cultivate individual men; I’ve always preferred to just spin my web and wait for the guests to arrive.  So I think the best thing to do here is turn this one over to the commentariat:  Ladies, how would you go about letting a flirter know that there’s a charge for what he’s seeking without scaring him off? OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

(Have a question of your own?  Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)

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