I work for a large company which has many different contracts with both private companies and governmental institutions. I wholeheartedly support most of the work we do, but I’m less happy with our association with law enforcement, which might lead to the abuse of innocent people. Worst of all, in the past few years another division of the company has become involved with the trafficking myth pushers, and it makes my skin crawl. But I’m not high enough in management to have any influence, expressing my views can only do me harm, and good jobs are hard to come by these days. How can I reconcile my conscience with continuing to work there?
As a whore, far be it from me to condemn others for taking “dirty money”; some of my clients were politicians, gangsters, drug dealers, ambulance-chasers and other lowlifes who got their money in morally reprehensible ways. Money cannot be “tainted”, either by sex rays or anything else; as I wrote in “O Tempora! O Mores!”, “if a thief buys food from a grocery store with stolen money, that transaction is the exact moral equivalent of buying food with money that was rightfully his; the grocery store owner is not morally responsible for the thief’s actions unless he somehow caused them himself.” As long as your actions with regard to your employers are moral, it’s not your fault if the money they use to pay you comes from sleazy deals that you were not personally involved in. Besides, it’s probably impossible these days to work for any company larger than a mom-and-pop that doesn’t have some questionable association. If it continues to bother you, perhaps you could make donations to organizations committed to advancing sex worker rights; that way you’ll feel as though you’re helping to undo a little of the wrong your employers are helping to do.
I’m a woman who has never done sex work, and I have a male friend who’s shy and socially awkward; he’s still a virgin at 32. He wants to lose his virginity with a professional, but has made a couple of mistakes and is now hesitant to move forward; one escort tricked him out of some money, and another turned him down when he said he was a virgin. On top of that the higher class escorts all seem to require references which, of course, he doesn’t have. I advised against blindly going to Backpage, but I have no idea what other advice I could give him; can you help?
What your friend needs is an established escort who is “newbie friendly”. This means a lady whose screening methods are not dependent on references; she’s going to ask him for some kind of identifying information, and use it to be sure he isn’t a cop. That’s one of the reasons he should pick only an established escort with a good reputation; it will help him to know she isn’t going to steal his money like that other woman did. Do tell him that a regular escort in his city shouldn’t ask for money in advance; it’s generally only traveling escorts who do that, and it’s better for him to get someone local just in case his nerves get the better of him and it takes a few dates to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. An older woman would probably be best for this; they tend to be much more patient with nervous first-timers and some of them really enjoy breaking younger guys in. Point your friend to my column “The First Time”, and tell him to read the comments, too, because there are a couple from other adult virgins there; “Sensitive Guy” might also be helpful. Finally, you might also direct him to my “Questions” page, which has many links to my answers to previous questions; the first two under “General Sex Work Questions” are especially important, and he might also find some that speak to him in “Requests for Advice” farther down the page.
(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.)
Reblogged this on Pycraftsworld’s Weblog.
Dirty Money …
I agree with you to an extent. In these days, a business pretty much has to be corrupt. As a bouncer in New Orleans – I know my bar owners are involved in shady deals and any judge or person of political importance that walks into the bar doesn’t pay for a single drink – it’s on the house. We don’t let anyone in under 21 – but we’ll waive that rule for a judge who’s escorting a minor. One of the things I learned quick – was how to spot the important people.
It was the same thing in Waikiki back when I “bounced” in Honolulu 30 years ago.
However, the thing is this – the owners HAVE to be in good stead with the “boss hoggs” of NOLA. If I have to go “hands on” with a violent patron – as soon as that patron sobers up the next day he’ll “lawyer up” and come after me and the bar. The “connections” the owner makes keep him (and me) from having to pay bullshit “settlements” to get a guy off our back. The last two times this happened the “patrons” fished for a settlement – and the boss said … “see you in court”. One actually called the bluff – and the judge (a frequent patron) threw the case out.
But I draw a line at people who work for the government who are asked to violate the civil rights of citizens – or who are asked to do bullshit things that are outright disrespectful.
Case in point – the closing of the WWII memorial when the government shutdown. In order to make the shutdown as painful as possible – the WWII memorial (which is an outdoor memorial and not normally policed) was shutdown and barricaded so that the WWII vets couldn’t get in to see THEIR memorial. These guys saved the world and they are dying off at an astonishing rate – so for many, they couldn’t wait for the end of the shutdown.
I actually took time off from work and flew to Washington, DC to pull down those fucking barriers and I was so angry I wanted a fight. It didn’t happen though – we pulled down the barricades while the park police watched and we scattered the fucking things throughout DC. They sent one “phalanx” of officers out at us eventually dressed in riot gear – and half of those were goddamn women.
Anyway – all of us vets were discussing this and one guy said, “Hey they’re just doing their job”. I told the guy … “No job is worth shitting on the men who are responsible for giving you freedom.” And I stand by that. Any park ranger who stayed on duty during that mess was whoring his integrity to the regime.
There is no way I’d stay in a job like that – and this is just one example. There’s no way I’d work for the bastards at the IRS either – SAME THING.
I don’t want to get in another argument with you about the shutdown or get you angry at me again, so I’m stating right up front that I’m in full agreement that what happened at the WWII memorial was disrespectful and uncalled for.
However, I wonder how many of the people who were tasked to put up those barriers did so half-expecting them to be ripped down by you and your colleagues. You say yourself the park police simply watched as you took action. As for that ‘phalanx’ of actual police, you don’t say whether they did anything more than stand there in some foolish, failed attempt at intimidation.
In the final reckoning, were any veterans actually prevented from seeing their memorial? It seemed like action to reopen the memorial happened pretty swiftly. Please correct me if I’m wrong on that account.
As for ‘whoring out their integrity to the regime,’ I wouldn’t underestimate the desire of the average person to keep a steady job in this continuing crappy economy. You’ve got skills and experience I doubt those government employees will have in a million years. I’d pity them before I resort to feeling hatred toward them.
I can’t ever recall being “angry” at you.
The “phalanx” they sent out … I call it that because they marched and maintained tight formation just like the Romans … it consisted of about 30 officers in padded riot gear with shields and batons – and all the shit was brand new and didn’t fit them well. Only a few were armed with a sidearm – and those were secured with special locking holsters and it would have taken the officers five minutes just to draw their own sidearm. Like I said – about half were women. In this particular location, there were about 300 of us – so this was just an outright JOKE. No – they didn’t do anything except stand there looking very scared – especially the women. What pissed me off – is that some MAN sent these women out to control of crowd that was overwhelming MALE – and overwhelming trained in hand-to-hand combat. These women didn’t have the body mass nor the aggression to handle us if it had gone sour. So some COWARD sent these women out to potentially “fight” for him – and I cannot respect a guy like that.
They stood there looking fearful (even the guys – who were in no great shape themselves – there wasn’t a single big guy in the group) for about 15 minutes and then an order was given and they marched back to the truck that brought them. So no problems – even though we were in their faces the whole time, but like I said – some of the vets (certainly not me) were trying to chill people out by saying … “Hey they’re just doing their jobs.”
Also – if they were relying on us to take the barriers down … they could have saved all that trouble by not putting them up in the first place.
And you’re absolutely correct – THE WWII Vets did get into the memorial – riding their wheel chairs (all but one – who was a fucking WWII Submariner and I was wearing a t-shirt from my first boat – so he and I chatted it up and had a great time). So yes – in the end this all worked out but it is STILL an outrage that thousands of us had to take off work and fly to DC at our own expense just to correct the government’s dim witted pettiness.
By the way – one of the WWII Vets was an Army nurse in a wheel chair who was 94 if I remember correctly. Her daughter drove her down to the memorial. This woman had served in field hospitals all across Europe during the march to Berlin. She was NOT in a “rear” area – but had risked her life too. Her brother had died at the Battle of the Bulge – while she was working in a field hospital very near where he was killed. I have “great uncle” who was 19 and his first combat experience was D-DAY – can you imagine that? That’s like … “here – you’re a boxer now boy – jump in that ring there with Mike Tyson.” By the grace of God he survived and fought without a break all the way to Germany – where he was killed by a German machine gunner in a town the allies had already captured. I had another uncle who liberated the concentration camps – and until the day he died he would always cry when he spoke of that work (he rarely spoke of it).
I know there’s a lot of shitheads in government who don’t know what it’s like to be in combat. But I cannot forgive what they did to these vets – in their dying days. Do you have any idea what message it sends to an old vet who is about to depart the planet and he finds his government is no longer appreciative of the sacrifice he (or she) made? Just thinking about this angers me to no end.
So no – I do not have one ounce of respect for the park police who did this. Individually – I condemn every last mother-fucking one of them and I condemn them personally. There is no way I’d hold a job that asked me to do that. If I had a choice – I would sell my ass to a 300 pound Samoan and smile while he sodomized me before I did what these people did.
Oh by the way – the incident with the officers was NOT at the WWII memorial – it was on the road to the White House. We dumped a lot of the barriers on the gates of the White House.
Oh – and one more by the way. You can blame the shutdown on whoever – I don’t care. But in ’95 when the government shutdown, Bill Clinton did not close the outdoor memorials (WWII Memorial didn’t exist then but many others did). So the shutdown can be blamed on whoever you wish to blame it on – but the decision to shit on the vets rests with ONE MAN – a man who has no appreciation for, nor the slightest inclination to learn, the horrors these men and women experienced to defend his right to smoke dope in Hawaii, blame all his problems on productive people, and become the leader of the free world. And his intials are BHO.
Thank you for the clarification, and that I think illustrates why I do have some respect for the vets in your group trying to chill people out. It couldn’t have been easy to take that very unpopular position in that group. We’ll never know, but I wonder if those few managed to keep someone else from doing something rash (like throw a barricade at the officers or attempt to scale the WH fence) that could have caused things to go sour.
“I can’t ever recall being “angry” at you.”
Well, that was based on our exchange several months ago when this story first broke. It looks like I misinterpreted your response, but I was asking whether it could be backed up that Obama personally ordered the barriers. I probably didn’t make it clear at the time, but I didn’t want to defend him or justify his actions, rather I wanted an accusation against his administration to be able for once to ‘stand up in court,’ as it were. There have been so many things this administration has yet to made to answer for, I didn’t see much good coming of throwing one more accusation on the pile.
So again, if I misinterpreted your replies back then to me as being angry with me, I apologize.
” Like I said – about half were women. In this particular location, there were about 300 of us – so this was just an outright JOKE.”
Well, I’m seeing two possible interpretations. Either the people who sent those officers out were attempting to bait your group into starting something, thus justifying a violent crackdown or (much less likely) someone was feeling the same way the vets were and made a token show of force just so they could ‘check the box’. Doesn’t make it right either way, of course.
“Also – if they were relying on us to take the barriers down … they could have saved all that trouble by not putting them up in the first place.”
True enough, but would that have illustrated as dramatically the incompetence of the administration and the dearth of strategic thinking regarding just about anything they do?
“And you’re absolutely correct – THE WWII Vets did get into the memorial – riding their wheel chairs (all but one – who was a fucking WWII Submariner and I was wearing a t-shirt from my first boat – so he and I chatted it up and had a great time). So yes – in the end this all worked out but it is STILL an outrage that thousands of us had to take off work and fly to DC at our own expense just to correct the government’s dim witted pettiness.”
That is what I consider the most important thing. The vets DID get to see their memorial and the moral bankruptcy of the shutdown attempt was exposed for the world to see, all without violence.
“So no – I do not have one ounce of respect for the park police who did this.”
Fine, I wouldn’t respect them either.
“Individually – I condemn every last mother-fucking one of them and I condemn them personally.”
And after you’ve condemned them and torn down their barriers, then what? Again, this is down to our very different backgrounds and you will probably disagree with me, but to me they’re not worth thinking about at all anymore, let alone with an emotion as powerful as hate is. Unless they try to do this again, I’d rather think about how to remove these unqualified people from their positions.
This is a broader point, but I’m often very skeptical of the anger and outrage I see pouring out all over the internet. Unless one translates that into action and results against the thing making you angry, then it’s just wasted time that could be spent more productively. That’s why I’m not discounting your anger, because you had the ability to effect change and, more importantly, you USED it. How many people sounding off on forums, blogs, etc., about how angry they were about this story can say the same?
I used to work at the White House (communications) – last six months of H.W. Bush and first 2.5 years of Clinton. White House Comms has guys record every major newscast every day – then they “compiled” them into a short “aggregate” version for POTUS to watch each and every night. These are military guys making this aggregate newscast – so they would not have left out a story about vets being denied entrance to their memorial.
POTUS KNOWS what’s going on every day – he watches that newscast (or should be).
The first news stories of the vets being denied entrance ran about a week before I got to D.C. – they started when the Mississippi Honor Flight was denied entrance and then tore down the barriers – it was national news.
If POTUS had a problem with the barriers – he would have ordered them taken down immediately after the first news reports happened. He did not – and that fact right there assigns complete ownership of this fiasco to his sorry self.
By the way … I met Peter Ducey from Fox News that day – I spoke to him. He is taller than I am. I didn’t talk to Sarah Palin (what would I say to her? “God I think you’re HOT!” ?? ) – but I got a lot of pictures of her and her husband. A CNN news crew showed up – got yelled at by the crowd and ran off. Al Jazeera was there but weren’t “advertising” themselves as Al Jazeera. I only know they were AJ because I saw their crew interviewing a guy and I overheard them identify themselves as Al Jazeera to him when he asked. Many other people they interviewed didn’t even ask where they were from – so the crowd at large didn’t even know they were there and I wasn’t going to say anything certainly – it would have been bloody they either have big balls or are incredibly stupid for showing up there (probably the latter). Al Jazeera was inside the memorial – Fox News and Peter Ducey did not enter it. Ducey told me it was unlawful for him to enter – and he had been directed by Fox not to. So Fox made their broadcasts from a point outside where the barriers originally stood. I add all this just to illustrate the attention this all got from the press – and the level of bullshit coming from Obama’s supporters when they say he didn’t know this shit was happening.
Most people will say the park rangers were just doing their job. I have a different view – especially in light of the fact that they acted to make the barricades harder to tear down by wiring them together with metal wire. How much will YOU do for a paycheck? These are what? GS-4’s and GS-5’s? Shit they don’t make anything anyway and definitely not enough to make shitting on WWII vets worth it. This says a lot about the CHARACTER of those park rangers. Like I said – I’d gleefully allow myself to be RAPED before I did something like what they did. One only has to read a bit of honest history to know what these guys went through. Now – I am NOT a smart man. I do not have a college degree – so I don’t trifle with bullshit excuses from people who are supposed to be more educated than I am – and they are ALL more educated than I am. If I know what these guys did – everyone should – no excuses. So they knew what they were doing – and sold out their integrity for a pitiful paycheck. They can all burn.
And here’s the thing. I have a lot to lose myself – but I was willing to go up there and break the law and get arrested – and even get into a fight. Had I been arrested – and lost my current job – I would have made a resume that said … “I WAS FIRED FROM MY LAST JOB BECAUSE I BROKE THE LAW TO GET VETERANS INTO THEIR MEMORIALS DURING THE SHUTDOWN.”
I would have had another job within a week – and a much HIGHER paying one. There are all kinds of people in business who will hire someone who stood up to the government – because these business people are sick of the government too. So all of these park rangers could have done the same thing – told their overlords to “FUCK OFF” – gone on Fox News – they’d have had job offers coming out of their asses. NONE of them did it. Why? Because they the lowest form of cretin on the planet. It may be a waste of my time to keep saying it – but it’s my time.
Very well said, krulac! 🙂
Now escorts are asking for references, too? What’s next, we’ll need certification to dine at a steakhouse? 😉
What do you mean, “now”? Some courtesans were asking for them back in classical Greece. It’s just that the internet has made the process so much easier, more are asking; it’s become a virtual necessity under heavy criminalization.
I was just making a little joke.
Unfortunately, the asinine idea that sex workers are “indiscriminate” in customer selection is so prevalent it’s actually written into the legal definition of prostitution in many places.
In the UK, the legal definition of a prostitute (meaning here a streetwalker) is (was?) a woman who sells her body ‘indiscriminately’ or ‘arbitrarily’. Neither ‘indiscriminately’ or ‘arbitrarily’ is absolute, though I don’t know how much discretion is possible. I think, though I’m not certain, that this definition wasn’t part of the law (The Vagrancy Act, 1824) but was developed in court judgements and clarifications.
Wow what a thought-provoking read!
re: 32-yo virgin. Two words: “Australian Holiday”. Or New Zealand. See the Opera House in Sydney or the set where Lord of the Rings was filmed in NZ, and visit a 100% legal hooker. Or two! And why not? You’re on holiday!
I wouldn’t have thought the question of ‘dirty money’ was the issue for the first writer.
In my all-too-extensive experience of working for unethical companies or companies with unethical divisions (fortunately only ever on a short term contract basis) the big problem is the institutional cognitive dissonance that arises from various people trying to keep (or at least imagine) their own hands clean of what some parts of the company are doing. Of course by breaking down the immoral behaviour into discrete distributed tasks the management gives everyone the chance to kid themselves that it’s the other guy doing the dirty stuff and that their own support of that is somehow morally neutral.
So the issue becomes the dysfunctional workplace environment that arises from the sort of ethical and ideological contortions needed to justify what the joint enterprise is doing. It can and does fuck people up.
So I would have thought the first writer was asking what he could do to come to terms with his work environment and his contribution to it, not how he can justify accepting his paycheck.
As so often happens, my editing the question to remove identifying details has left more ambiguity than I might’ve liked. This is the kind of company where the different divisions each have a discrete project; those on that project know exactly who they’re working for (except for payroll, management, etc). The questioner is comfortable with the work HE is doing, but not some of the other projects. I’m afraid I can’t say any more without compromising his confidentiality.
As the person behind the original message that became ‘dirty money’, I’ll try to elaborate without giving away too much about the employer in question.
The company isn’t yet *quite* large enough to exhibit the noted dysfunction, and, for the most part, the management and customer-facing parts of the business are still relatively transparent about our dealings.
As noted in my original missive to Maggie, my major issue is that we’re doing business with, or work for, organizations that seem to be growing more corrupt by the day and/or heavily push the trafficking myth. Given that we have turned down large deals for what amounts to ethical reasons, I can only conclude that we are dealing with these others because the blinders haven’t come off and the people brokering the deals believe we are serving a good cause.
Sure, you can lie to yourself and say “at least *we’re* doing this instead of someone with lower moral or ethical standards,” but, at the end of the day, you’re still furthering some unjust causes. Of course, I’m also old enough to know that it’s practically impossible to work and not, in some way, enable the dirty, corrupt or evil in *some* way, even if you’re just repairing their roof or waiting on them at dinner.
Overall, though, I think we do more good in the world than evil, so I really don’t feel the need to “come to terms” with my support of the business. Also, there are some endeavors that at least reduce the potential harm in one class of dealings, though I really wish we could just avoid the entire vertical. I really must apologize for the vagueness; any real clarity could pinpoint the employer.