October | 2014 | The Honest Courtesan

Archive for October, 2014

That Was the Week That Was (#441)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Procrustean Bed, Above the Law, Ad Absurdum, adolescence, agency denial, bogus studies, Broken Record, Canada, censorship, Check Your Premises, Checklist, condoms, cops, Cops and Condoms, dehumanization, Dysphemisms Galore, escort services, ethics, Europe, Facebook, Florida, Forward and Backward, Germany, Having and Eating Cake, hysteria, I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now, Imaginary Crises, Ireland, Korea, language, law, lawheads, Louisiana, Lower Education, male prostitutes, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Opting Out, Oregon, prohibitionist myths, racism, rape, red-light districts, Schadenfreude, Soap Opera, Sold Out, sporting events, statistics, streetwalkers, stripping, teachers, Texas, The Missing Word, The Public Eye, The Spiral of Absurdity, The Widening Gyre, transgender, Uncommon Sense, United Kingdom, video, Washington DC on October 11, 2014| 15 Comments »

Tattooing of [“trafficking” victims doesn’t]…make much sense outside of sadistic, pornographic fantasy. – Julia Davidson

Check Your Premises

Any teen who won’t behave in the way most adults want to manipulate her into behaving, must be being manipulated by another adult:

It took nearly two decades for Smith to realize she…was a victim of child sex trafficking. “I was what they call a ‘willing victim’,” she said…the media and advocacy organizations depict child sex trafficking as an issue that involves physically abused or helpless children. But “just being a teenager” is a predisposition factor…Smith said she’s a strong advocate for kids who insist they want to live the way they’ve been manipulated by an adult into living…

Above the Law

…an Amite [Louisiana] police officer accused of sexually assaulting women after deceiving them online has been arrested…Grant Carruth…faces…counts of…kidnapping…aggravated rape…sexual battery and…theft…he…identified himself as a narcotics officer, handcuffed them and said they were being arrested…

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

Note the liberal use of dysphemisms, and the pretense that gross proceeds equal net profit:

A…woman was [sentenced] to…10 years in state prison for operating a prostitution ring in…New Jersey…Deanna Ruiz…pleaded guilty to racketeering…over a 15-year-period, she collected millions of dollars…[and] booked more than 6,000 hotel rooms at a cost of $1.087 million…she created several sham companies and used them to launder the money…and…commit tax and unemployment…

How, pray tell, does one “commit tax and unemployment”?

Broken Record

A grassroots advocacy group is trying to raise awareness about increased demands for paid sex during the Pan Am Games…Buying Sex Is Not A Sport…is…faith-based…The link between increased sex trafficking and large sporting events has been a controversial one that is not clearly agreed upon by experts…

Wrong; the experts have declared these “faith-based” claims total fabrications.

The Widening Gyre

They finally realized they could expand the panic by adding male “sex slaves”:

Viktor Berki…Gabor Acs and Andras Janos Vass [ran]…Never Sleep, Inc. [which] involved slaves — who did not speak English and barely got to sleep…Three of the victims…rescued in South Florida were first promised that they would earn thousands of dollars as escorts. But…they were forced to perform sex acts in front of a webcam and engage in prostitution for 18 to 20 hours a day…

Soap Opera

It’s hard to pick one “sex trafficking” trope that’s stupider than all others, but barcode tattoos are definitely in the running:

People traffickers are believed to have marked their victims with symbolic tattoos to assert their ownership over “assets” that can be sold for thousands of pounds…The victims have been “branded like cattle” – a practice commonly seen worldwide for women in the sex trade – to show that they were aged over 18, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said…One Romanian woman – who was whipped and held against her will in Spain – had been tattooed with a bar code and a sum of money that investigators believed was the amount that she would have to earn before the gang…would release her…The NCA said the extent to which tattoos were used was not known…

The extent is very well known: one single case, the one (from 2012) mentioned above. And as I pointed out at the time, it was “…an example of life imitating artifice because these absurd tales have been circulated…for at least six years now.” Dr. Julia Davidson explains just how stupid this trope actually is:

…If thugs were criminally coercing someone into prostitution, why would they care whether she was 17 or 18 years old? Conversely, if they were supplying women to managers of establishments that would only accept…over 18, why would those managers be satisfied by a tattoo, as opposed to identity documents…if tattooing were actually common practice… victim identification would be a far simpler matter…

The Public Eye

Sex workers were among the first not directly involved with the Ferguson protests to spread the word on social media; others like cam girl Sasha Pain are doing even more than that:

…she and two friends…[are] filming protests and sharing them with her audience…Pain…won’t stop working just because she’s on the road. When she has an Internet connection in Ferguson, she’ll make sex tapes and donate proceeds from videos to buy supplies to protect protesters from tear gas…”Everything that I make while I’m here that I don’t need to feed myself, the people I’m with and over my bills is going toward buying food for protesters and gas masks”…

On the Simultaneous Having and Eating of Cake

Portland…strip-club dancers are working…with lobbyists, legislators, and social workers to draft a new set of…regulations slated to hit the House floor…in…February…Generally, laws that regulate strip clubs and other sex industry businesses are handed down from the top by legislators, with little input from the people most directly affected…Whether because of stigmas related to…sex work…or a prevailing misconception that most…sex workers are victims of trafficking, there are very few, if any, legislative precedents that show adult entertainment professionals actually being asked to weigh in…

Checklist

Writer cannot conceive that the reason more people don’t notice “sex trafficking” is that it doesn’t exist on anything like the scale it’s purported to:

…airline employees are now being trained to…carefully watch for…unusual activity…such as when kids don’t answer questions or avoid eye contact when addressed. Other telltale signs might be bruising…or a ravenous appetite…victims…sometimes have been at the mercy of their traffickers for so long they see themselves not as women being pimped out for sex but as girlfriends helping their boyfriend pay the bills…sex trafficking spikes around the Super Bowl…If you see something say something…

Cops and Condoms (TW3 #313)

The sheer wrongness of this cannot be overstated.

Dysphemisms Galore

Korean officials only persecute sex workers in order to please their masters in Washington:

…since the implementation of the 2004 Special Law on Prostitution…the number of red-light districts…has decreased nationwide, from 69 in 2002 to 44 last year. But…the prostitution industry has actually grown…[and] transformed to avoid the confines of the law…pimps posing as ordinary citizens scour the streets to find potential customers…Transformed prostitution businesses have doubled over the past three years as traditional brothels have decreased, swelling to 4,706 in 2013, up from 2,068 in 2010…

The phrase “pimps posing as ordinary citizens” is both hilarious and telling.

Ad Absurdum

Because obviously, “victims” always go around bragging about their “abuse”:

Two teachers at the same Louisiana high school have been charged in the sex abuse of the same male student…Shelley Dufresne, 32, and Rachel Respess, 24, both teach at Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish….an unnamed source…implied that the victim was involved in a threesome with the teachers…at Respess’ apartment after a…football game [on] Sept. 12, and that…the…student had been “bragging to other students that he was having a sexual relationship with teachers”…

A Procrustean Bed (TW3 #339)

For the past year Red Umbrella Project has studied New York’s “trafficking courts”, which define all sex workers as “victims”; to absolutely nobody’s surprise, the majority of those arrested are minorities, and in Brooklyn a stunning 94% of women arrested for “loitering for the purpose of prostitution” (in other words, “looking like a whore”) are black. Since Melissa Gira Grant, Noah Berlatsky and Michelle Chen all went into the findings in detail, I’ll just refer you to those articles.

The Widening Gyre (TW3 #346)

…Samantha Azzopardi, 26, who was found wandering the streets of Dublin last fall, led Irish police to believe that she was a 14-or 15-year-old sex-trafficking victim from eastern Europe…Now…[she] has shown up in Alberta…claiming that her name was Aurora Hepburn, that she was 14 and that she had been the victim of an abduction, sexual assault and torture…Calgary police became suspicious after learning of [the Irish] case…Azzopardi has been charged with public mischief…an offense punishable by up to five years in prison…

The Spiral of Absurdity

Houston is bound and determined to win this pissing contest, no matter how ludicrous the claims it has to make:

Houston is a hub for…sex trafficking…[due to its] size, port location and ethnic diversity…a three-month analysis of ads posted on backpage.com…[found] a higher number of ads per person than were posted for Manhattan and northern New Jersey during this year’s Super Bowl…

This is equivalent to concluding that Houston has more people who are morbidly obese than New York because it has more billboards for barbecue restaurants.

Above the Law (TW3 #407)

For those who think I make too big a deal about the euphemisms prosecutors and reporters use for rape by cops: “Sorrento, Louisiana police chief Earl Theriot pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting an unconscious woman and then lying about it to the FBI…Theriot managed to escape jail time…taking just a $2,500 fine and 2 years probation…” Think he’d have escaped that easily if his crime had been called what it was?

Opting Out (TW3 #408)

The other shoe drops:

Britain’s…Home Secretary Theresa May [said]…that if re-elected next year, the [Conservative] party will introduce civil powers to disrupt people who “spread poisonous hatred” even within the law…police could apply for a court order to disrupt “harmful activity” by restricting an individual’s movements, preventing them from speaking in public or stopping them publishing articles online…

Which views are “harmful” to be determined by the government, of course.

Imaginary Crises (TW3 #410)

…the rate of forcible rapes in 2012 was estimated at 52.9 per 100,000 female inhabitants…Assuming that all…women are uniformly at risk, this means the…probability that an American woman is raped in her lifetime is 2.6 percent and in college 0.2 percent — 5 to 100 times less than the estimates broadcast by the media and public officials…

Forward and Backward (TW3 #415)

…the District of Columbia Council voted…to repeal the District’s “Prostitution Free Zones” law as well as the “Drug Free Zones” law that it was based on…Although a largely symbolic gesture, since the police have already acknowledged not using the zones for the past two years…the debate over the bill shows the importance of removing laws targeting sex workers, and those profiled as such…

The Missing Word

Despite the fact that the exploitation is clearly laid out here, the magic word appears only once, saying that a sting involved “only a tiny piece of the trafficking industry”. One can only surmise that because the smugglers only threatened to sell their “client” to a brothel (a threat made credible by the moral panic), the New York Times figures it isn’t a “real” case of “trafficking”.

Schadenfreude (TW3 #424)

Just a few highlights of this expose of “sex trafficking” fraud Chong Kim’s lies:

…Chong Kim [was] convicted by a Minnesota judge for stealing money from a human-trafficking survivor…She is…on probation…as a result…Chong Kim walks with a cane, which she told me was an injury suffered from her days of sexual slavery…she actually had that disability since she was seven years old, and up until at least 2005, she collected Social Security checks for it…she…frequently claims that she was living in Texas when she got sold into sexual slavery in 1994…she was actually a junior in high school in…Minnesota…The…1994…Yearbook clearly contains a photo of Chong Kim…her…social security number is linked to multiple people…

Uncommon Sense (TW3 #433)

“The myths that circulate about German prostitution legislation are a perfect example of how lies and misconceptions become accepted as ‘truths’ if only they are repeated often enough.” In this short article Matthias Lehmann debunks lies including “the 2002 Act legalized prostitution”, “brothel owners can force sex workers to perform certain acts”, “Job Centres can force job seekers to take up sex work” and “sex trafficking has increased under the law”.

Lower Education (TW3 #438)

…the University of Michigan’s…policy on sexual violence…says: “Examples…include…criticizing the partner sexually [and]…withholding sex and affection“…this policy suggests that under some circumstances, a partner is entitled to sex…there theoretically exists at the University of Michigan some circumstances in which not consenting to sex is against the rules. This is utterly unconscionable, and, frankly, insane…

Sold Out (TW3 #438)

…Facebook…[has backed off of its] “real-name” crackdown on drag queens and performers…and…apologized to all those whom they’ve offended. Though the exact policy changes remain TBA, a source…says Facebook is planning to revert to a “preferred name” policy instead…

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The Face of Trafficking

Posted in Current Events, Perception, The Dark Side, tagged domestic violence, India, marriage, New Jersey, pimps, prohibitionist myths, psychology, The Face of Trafficking on October 10, 2014| 24 Comments »

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on September 14^th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

I am often asked if, by calling “sex trafficking” a myth, I’m saying that there is no such thing as coercion in sex work. The answer, of course, is “not at all”; what I’m saying is 1) that coercion is much rarer than “trafficking” fetishists pretend it is; 2) that the term “trafficking” is used to describe many different things along a broad spectrum running from absolutely coercive to absolutely not coercive, yet all of them are shoehorned into a lurid, melodramatic and highly-stereotyped narrative; and 3) that even situations of genuine coercion rarely bear much resemblance to the familiar masturbatory fantasy of an “innocent” middle-class girl in her early teens abducted by “pimps” from a shopping mall, bus stop or internet chat room. “Let Me Help” discusses the first two factors, but I recently discovered a fine example of the third: a situation of genuine coercion which nonetheless runs counter to many “trafficking” claims.

…Pardip Singh [of Indianapolis, Indiana]…was convicted…of promotion of human trafficking, criminal confinement, intimidation, battery and domestic battery. On May 11, 2012, Singh called several men and told them that for $500 they could come to his…apartment and have sex with a “teacher’s daughter from India”…The first potential client to show up learned that the victim was Singh’s wife and witnessed Singh hit her…that man “told Singh he should not treat his wife that way and then left”…Just after midnight on May 12, 2012…police…responded to a domestic disturbance at the couple’s apartment…the victim, “visibly shaken and crying,” told the officer she needed help…

Right from the start, the true story belies the familiar “trafficking” porn. Singh is clearly no slick, mastermind pimp with insidious hypnotic powers, but a crude bully. He didn’t have a dozen slave-captives confined in dog kennels or controlled via “Stockholm syndrome” or magical mind-control philter, but one wife that he attempted to control through garden-variety brutality. He didn’t advertise her on Backpage or any other site used by sex workers, but by contacting people personally. Though the rescue industry’s professional victims entrance their salivating audiences with tales of daily parades of dozens of callous, uncaring men oblivious to their plight, the very first man who answered Singh’s advert was disgusted by what he found and refused to participate. And while those same prohibitionist shills claim to have been successfully held captive for years, Singh’s wife escaped the very next day after he started trying to “traffic” her.

…Court documents describe a devastating chain of events that began March 13, 2006, when the victim became Singh’s wife in an arranged marriage in their native India…Singh was living in the United States but traveled to India for the marriage…After the wedding, he returned to the United States while his new wife stayed in India to attend college. In 2012, after obtaining a nursing degree, the victim moved to the United States to live with Singh in New Jersey…Within a few weeks, Singh began physically abusing [her]…Singh was angry that the woman’s family did not send the couple more money [so he] took her to Atlantic City to try to get her a job in a strip club…which he believed would generate a more immediate windfall. Singh would not allow the woman to speak with her parents except when he was within earshot…and regularly hit and abused her. During one week when Singh worked as a semi truck driver…he forced [her] to remain in the back of the truck cab during a long interstate trip. At stops, he would get into the back…and force her to have sex with him…The events in Indianapolis occurred about a week later…

The conventional narrative tells us that huge cartels of slick international gangsters abduct teen girls by the tens of thousands and reap vast profits without detection, but what do we see here instead? A greedy, pathetic wife-beater who tricked a grown woman (and university graduate) via a venerable social institution. This sort of “pimp” is much closer to the norm than the racist stereotype in clownish attire, yet I don’t see anyone screaming for the criminalization of marriage. Prohibitionists are fond of saying that sex workers “believe pimps are their boyfriends” because they can’t face the uncomfortable truth that neither emotional attachment nor a license from the state is a guarantee against emotional or economic exploitation in a relationship, and that the main difference between a “pimp” and a “sex trafficking” fetishist’s own abusive spouse is the label.

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Still More Stand-Up Guys

Posted in Biography, Perception, tagged blogging, Colorado, comics, harm reduction, hysteria, Ireland, lawyers, psychology, Stand-Up Guys, Sweden, Swedish model, United Kingdom on October 9, 2014| 13 Comments »

Despite [all], some men stubbornly fight for our rights anyway; I don’t mind saying that I find that sort of obstinacy rather sexy. – Maggie McNeill

It’s already getting close to a year since I’ve compiled a list of men who have spoken out for sex worker rights, in defiance of the popular Swedish-flavored narrative which casts sex work as tantamount to rape and a form of male “oppression” of women. In such a climate, speaking out for sex workers is liable to get one labeled a client or even a “pimp”, so “these days it takes some serious balls for a man to stand up, demand rights for sex workers, and actually sign his real name to the thing.” Here, then, is another list of male allies; remember, this doesn’t include men who are directly involved in our industry, since it’s as personal for them as it is for us. It does, however, include clients who have chosen to “out” themselves for the cause. As before, this is by no means complete; please make any new suggestions in the comments below, so I can include them in a follow-up next year.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance journalist who writes often about feminism, comic books and “geek” culture; he’s been published in Slate, the Atlantic, Wired and many others, and he has a book on the Golden Age Wonder Woman comics out early next year. Follow him on Twitter at @hoodedu.

Magnus Betnér is a Swedish comedian who has dared to mock the Swedish model in front of Swedish audiences in Sweden; that automatically qualifies him for this list. Follow him on Twitter at @Magnusbetner; he tweets in both Swedish and English.

Andy Bodle is a journalist and scriptwriter who has written for the Guardian, the Times, the BBC, and ABC. He is out about having hired sex workers when he was younger, and has written several times debunking “trafficking” claims and arguing for decriminalization from a harm reduction viewpoint. Email him at andybodle@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @_Womanology_

Felix Clay is not a cat, but rather a writer for the humor site Cracked who not only writes sex-positive articles, but even defended sex work in one where he admitted to hiring an escort (though he denied having sex with her). Follow him on Twitter at @Felix_Clay

Leonard Fahrni is a regular reader and an instructor at Metro State University in Denver; beside speaking up in person and in a number of blog posts, he also proved hugely helpful to me when I reached Denver on my tour this past June. Follow him on Twitter at @LeonardFahrni.

Robert King is a professor of applied psychology at University College, Cork, Ireland; he writes the blog Hive Mind at Psychology Today, in which he has on a number of occasions defended the legitimacy of sex work. Email him at r.king@ucc.ie or follow him on Twitter at @DrRobertKing

Ed Krayewski is an editor at Reason who has, like so many libertarian journalists, consistently supported people’s right to do whatever they damned well please with their own bodies, including sell or buy sex. Email him at ekrayewski@reason.com or follow him on Twitter at @edkrayewski

Jay Levy is a Cambridge University researcher whose 2012 PhD looked at Swedish prohibitionism as a form of violence against women; he has also written a book on the subject and discusses it in this video. Email him at j.levy.03@cantab.net.

Nicola Mai is a professor of sociology and migration studies at London Metropolitan University; he not only authored an important study debunking “sex trafficking” myths in the UK, but has also supported decriminalization in both scholarly and popular articles. Email him at n.mai@londonmet.ac.uk.

Robert Murphy is a well-known libertarian economist who, though he has not written on the subject of decriminalization before, did so after attending my presentation in Nashville back in July. Email him via this page or follow him on Twitter @BobMurphyEcon

Jim Norton is a comedian who recently came out as a client and published an article about it (in Time, no less), opening himself to the kind of prohibitionist attack that would cause fainter hearts than his to quail. I don’t know if he ever reads this blog, but I have it on good authority that he owns an autographed copy of Ladies of the Night. Email him via this page or follow him on Twitter at @JimNorton

Peter Brian Schafer is a photographer and regular reader who strives in his work to portray whores with dignity and respect and to debunk the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Email him at hookstrapped@gmail.com

Sam Seder is a comedian, writer, actor, film director, television producer-director, and talk radio host; in the latter capacity, he has debunked ridiculous excuses for the criminalization of sex work and had Melissa Gira Grant as a guest on his show, Majority Report. Contact him while on the air via this page or follow him on Twitter at @SamSeder

Michael Smerconish is a radio (on Sirius XM) and TV (formerly on MSNBC, now on CNN) personality who has made at least one persuasive on-air defense of prostitution from a harm reduction perspective, also mentioning clients with disabilities. Follow him on Twitter at @smerconish

If you’d like to be on the next list of this type, just email me with a link to whatever public statements you’ve made about sex worker rights under your real name, and we’ll see about adding you to the next one (don’t be shy; if you don’t tell me, who will?) In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for “Stand-Up Guys” in my weekly TW3 column, where I’ll mention guys who come to my attention without having to wait another year.

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Wardrobe Choices

Posted in Perception, Q & A, tagged fantasy, Islam, Madonna/whore, marriage, neofeminism, psychology, shame, stereotypes on October 8, 2014| 22 Comments »

My husband wants me to dress as his slut when he takes me out or when he has friends over; is this normal?

I think it’s a mistake to worry too much about what is “normal”. “Normal” men in patriarchal societies tend to want their wives to dress in a way they perceive as modest; this derives from a desire to protect their “property” from those who might trespass or steal it. The more patriarchal the society, the more “modestly” it expects women to dress; in societies where women’s status is higher, women tend to dress more provocatively, and in those where it is lower, they tend to dress more concealingly. There are few if any exceptions, yet neofeminists teach a looking-glass version of reality in which dressing sexily is “objectification” and a manifestation of “patriarchy”, despite abundant real-world evidence that the exact opposite is true. Now, this is not to say that one individual man, or indeed large minorities of men, might not prefer women who “belong” to them dressed in a revealing fashion; however, the majority (“normal”) view has always been the opposite.

Given the language you use (“his slut”) your husband seems to belong to this minority category, which means that in the strictest sense of the word it is not “normal”. So what? Why does it matter whether something is “normal” or not? Most people deviate from the norm in at least a few ways, and nobody seems to think this is a problem except where sex is involved. Don’t concern yourself with whether his request is something the majority of men would want; rather ask how it makes you feel, and how it affects your relationship. Does it make you feel attractive and sexy to dress provocatively, or does it make you feel uncomfortable and ashamed? Does it make your husband happier? Does it seem to spice up your sex life? Do you like or dislike the way others react to you when you dress that way? Do you like to do it in certain circumstances, but not in others? These are the questions you need to ask yourself, rather than whether conventional people would approve. And if dressing like a “slut” at certain times (or even a lot of the time) works for you and makes you both happy, nobody else has a right to condemn you for your wardrobe choices.

(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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Diary #223

Posted in Diary, tagged activism, blogging, Illinois, New Orleans, Oregon, psychology, Washington (state) on October 7, 2014| 13 Comments »

I realize that most people wouldn’t struggle with the process of figuring out a way to designate the individual entries of a new recurring feature. I’m sure many probably wouldn’t bother with it at all; they’d just call this feature “diary” and delineate the individual entries by date (if they gave it even that much thought). But most people don’t view blogs as monumental projects, either; it takes a special kind of obsessive-compulsive thinking to maintain daily posting of (mostly) full essays for four years, and to insist on a fairly rigid format and schedule. You want a window into my crazy librarian brain? Read the intro to “Links and Changes“, then watch the first video in Sunday-before-last’s Links column. Anyhow, I’ve decided to just use the blog week number (as explained in “Links and Changes”) and call it good. This is the second day of the 223^rd week (WordPress starts its statistical weeks on Monday) since I’ve had the blog, hence the title.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here’s an update on my travels. Everything’s all set for New Orleans the weekend of the 25^th, and I know two of the other speakers (Thaddeus Russell and Angela Keaton), so it’ll be fun to visit with them again. I’m finalizing the details of my Seattle tour, and everything should be paid for by the end of the week; I’m staying with friends there, so the only lodging I’ll have to worry about will be my few days in Portland. As of right now, here’s what it looks like: I’ll drive to Kansas City on Tuesday, November 4^th (it’s the nearest Amtrak hub with halfway-decent connections), then take a train to Chicago on the 5^th to speak at Loyola. On the afternoon of the 6^th I’ll depart by train for Seattle, arriving the morning of Saturday the 8^th, then around the 12^th-15^th I’ll do a little side-trip to Portland. I’ll leave Seattle on Tuesday the 18^th, reach Chicago on Thursday the 20^th, take the train back to Kansas City on Friday the 21^st and drive home on Saturday the 22^nd. I’ll probably have more details on my appearances next week, so if you have any ideas please contact me as soon as you can!

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All-Purpose Excuse

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged All-Purpose Excuse, hysteria, Middle East, neofeminism, pathologization of males, politicians, prohibitionist myths, propaganda, psychology, Turkey on October 6, 2014| 46 Comments »

What drivel it all is!… A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other strings called political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they’ll murder their neighbours for using a word they don’t happen to like. – Aldous Huxley

Moral panics never collapse until they completely saturate the culture they infect; once the idiocy has penetrated every available space, then and only then do the conditions become ripe for the dissolution of the entire panic. One of the signs that this saturation point has been reached (or is at least very close) is that politicians and other control freaks begin to use it as an excuse or explanation for almost anything they can think of. We’ve been seeing this building with the “sex trafficking” hysteria for some time now; besides its predictable implementation as an excuse for border controls, workplace surveillance and pogroms against sex businesses, we’ve also seen it employed to justify suppression of bitcoin, armed raids of mines in Alaska, harassment of abortion clinics and even military intervention. It was France who used the latter excuse first, but if you didn’t expect the country that invented the hysteria to follow suit, you haven’t been paying attention:

The Islamic State militant group, which once relied on wealthy Persian Gulf donors for money, has become a self-sustaining financial juggernaut, earning more than $3 million a day from oil smuggling, human trafficking, theft and extortion…The extremist group’s resources exceed that “of any other terrorist group in history,” said a US intelligence official…it…has taken over large sections of Syria and Iraq, and controls as many as 11 oil fields…The group also has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from smuggling antiquities out of Iraq to be sold in Turkey…and millions more…by selling women and children as sex slaves…

It’s interesting that, though the article can tell us exactly where the oil and antiquities are being sold, it’s mysteriously silent on the subject of where all these “child sex slaves” are fetching millions. I have no doubt that there’s at least some of that going on, but to portray it as a major source of funding sounds to me like the same sort of propaganda used to demonize enemies and justify wars for most of human history. Though ISIS is being described as a “terrorist group”, it’s obvious that it’s as much a government as any other military junta:

Its cash-raising activities resemble those of a Mafia-like organization…They are well-organized, systematic and enforced through intimidation and violence…in June…the group began to impose “taxes” on nearly every facet of economic activity, threatening death for those unwilling to pay…

Try not paying the “taxes” assessed by your “legitimate” government and let’s see if it responds in some way other than intimidation and violence. In any case, it was inevitable that “sex trafficking”, as the panic du jour, would be used to justify yet another military adventure; what’s more interesting is when it’s used to rationalize the bloating of a different tentacle of the Leviathan:

…100,000 U.S. kids are forced into prostitution each year, and federal investigators regularly rescue children…trafficking is a $9.8 billion industry in this country. Pimps, who typically control four to six children each, can make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year. The children who are forced into sex work are typically about 12 to 14 years old. They tend to come from disadvantaged backgrounds…Addressing the root cause of the issue involves a commitment to expanding social safety net services for impoverished children. The people working in the field say they simply need more support in order to create a society in which vulnerable girls can thrive…

Regular readers know that I support drop-in shelters and some variant of the guaranteed basic income, but that’s not what people like Tara Culp-Ressler (who has repeatedly rebuffed sex worker activists correcting her bogus claims) want; no, they envision an immense, intrusive bureaucracy with others like themselves in charge, implementing social engineering programs to “create a society in which vulnerable girls can thrive” via such means as ordering physicians to “screen” men with irritable bowel syndrome to “spot potential domestic abusers” (and, presumably, send them for “re-education”).

“Sex trafficking” is the most versatile and effective excuse for expanding the State since communism; “terrorism” so pales in comparison that, as demonstrated by the ISIS story above, “sex trafficking” must be added to it because it simply isn’t strong enough alone. The moral panic can’t last much longer, but I shudder to think which new imaginary menace the statists will dream up next to replace it.

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Links #222

Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged Alabama, Arizona, Canada, censorship, China, contraception, cops, drugs, Facebook, Florida, genitalia, Georgia, Latin America, lawheads, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, prisons, racism, Russia, South Carolina, statistics, surveillance, Sweden, Texas, TSA, video, Wisconsin on October 5, 2014| 1 Comment »

Taking care of a puppy is a full-time job and if I am not there for every moment in the first year of its life I have failed as a parent. – Trish Lemierre

There were lots and lots and LOTS of links this week, but only one video (the first, contributed by Aspasia); so, I decided to let Penn & Teller use doughnuts to illustrate the spectacular failure of the Drug War in only 88 seconds. Everything above the first video was provided by Radley Balko, and the links between the videos came from Grace (“law” and “badge”), Michael Whiteacre (“litigious”), Luscious Lani (“oh-oh”, “potato” and “population”), Dave Krueger (“police state”), Cop Block (“colors” and “snow beat”), Dan Savage (“taser”), Lucy Steigerwald (“cigarettes”), Scott Greenfield (“stolen car”), and Wikileaks (“rude”).

From the Archives

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That Was the Week That Was (#440)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Music, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged A Procrustean Bed, Above the Law, agency denial, An Example to the West, Australia, Bait and Switch, bogus studies, Bottleneck, brothels, California, Cambodia, Canada, Check Your Premises, Colorado, cops, dehumanization, diversion programs, Do As I Say, Dysphemisms Galore, Florida, Georgia, hysteria, Imaginary Crises, India, Indonesia, King of the Hill, language, Latin America, law, Legal Is as Legal Does, Maryland, massage, New Jersey, Ohio, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, Pennsylvania, pimps, politicians, prisons, prohibitionist myths, PSA, racism, rape, red-light districts, rescue industry, Reviews, Rough Trade, sex rays, sexting, streetwalkers, stripping, Surplus Women, sweatshops, Tennessee, The Red Umbrella, The Roof Caves In, The Widening Gyre, Think of the Children!, United Kingdom, Validation, video, violence vs. sex workers, Washington DC, Whither Canada?, Wise Investment, With Friends Like These on October 4, 2014| 15 Comments »

It is an obnoxious and unacceptable conceit, a form of abuse, to deny sex workers their agency. – Graham Scrambler

Think of the Children!

Sex rays are so insidious they can even radiate from pieces of plastic via the principle of sympathetic magic:

A week after Mark Gregory was elected chairman of the Williamson County school board, an online petition was launched …demanding [he] step down from the post because of his role in creating the ButtleOpener, a novelty bottle opener shaped like a female rear end…

The Red Umbrella

Matthew Carney, 18, walked with [a sex worker] to a secluded area…after paying her…But as soon as they were alone Carney…repeatedly [punched] and [kicked] her in the head, causing severe injuries to her face. He then walked off with her handbag…the courageous victim went to the police…[and] Carney was sentenced to seven years in prison…

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

…[Pittsburgh-area cop] Joshua Rush was [arrested]…[for] texting a prostitute he had a sexual relationship with…When police busted [her]…she showed them a string of text messages…in which he allegedly said he would distract officers from [going into her stroll]…

Check Your Premises

Earlier this year, Bensalem [Pennsylvania] police participated in Operation Cross Country…While the overt goal was busting pimps and prostitutes, the underlying objective was to create connections to help law enforcement find and stop child sex trafficking…“You need an approach that develops trust”…

You read that correctly: these cops are so disconnected from reality that they think deceiving, raping and caging women is a good way to “develop trust”.

Validation

It’s always nice to be backed up by academics:

…the wealthy and powerful should not be permitted to swap policy-based evidence for evidence-based policy…Stereotypes of sex workers are simplistic, replete with errors of commission and omission…most public health researchers…respect…sex workers and oppose…any attempt to (further) criminalize them…[but] the weird admix of radical feminists and Christian…right-wingers who [push] “sexual trafficking”…are resistant to data: they…wish the public to believe that [all] sex workers…have been trafficked. Their…”moral crusade” is to legislate for the abolition of the industry…

Public Service Announcement

Just in case you thought only American politicians were this foolish:

…Brooks Newmark quit as Minister for Civil Society after he was caught sending an explicit photograph of himself…to someone he believed was a woman…as part of a tabloid newspaper sting operation …Mr Newmark initiated a private message conversation on a social networking website and sent a graphic picture exposing himself…

Surplus Women

Authorities are looking for the killer of a woman found in Lake Lucerne and identified…as a 36-year-old Bulgarian prostitute…Work colleagues…[contacted] police… because they had not been able to contact her for a long time on her cell phone…

Legal Is as Legal Does

Almost all countries criminalise some aspect of sex work, including…Australia…sex work under “legalisation” is still…conceived of as a crime for which the law makes allowances. These laws that govern sex work can be found in the criminal code…and…the police [enforce the]…regulation. When I asked Jules Kim…of Scarlet Alliance…about the effect of all these regulations on the lives of sex workers in Victoria, she pointed out that many were deeply invasive of privacy…

Intersectionality

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged blogging, child "protective" services, cops, Florida, Madonna/whore, Never Call the Cops, racism, stripping, universal criminality, yellow journalism on October 3, 2014| 38 Comments »

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on September 7^th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

As I’ve previously explained, a large part of the process of writing my blog consists of scanning Twitter (and emails from readers) for likely stories:

The majority of sex work-related items end up in my weekly “That Was the Week That Was” [TW3] news summary, which normally appears on Saturday; other interesting stories appear in my weekly “Links” column, which normally appears on Sunday. Some are worth quoting in a longer discussion, and others aren’t noteworthy enough to get any coverage in my work at all. But every once in awhile a story comes along which is so interesting, funny, horrible, odd or whatever, that I like to analyze it at length.

When I feature a story in a TW3 column, it appears under a subtitle which refers to an earlier, topically-related essay (and contains a link to that essay for further reading). But sometimes I find a story which defies categorization; usually this is because it contains so many different elements that I’m not sure what heading to file it under, so I end up just picking the one I feel is the most important and perhaps noting the others via links. However, I recently discovered an item for which the sheer number of overlapping, intersecting areas of interest constituted a story in itself. Rather than quote the mainstream media’s parrotlike repetition of what the police claim happened (which is itself one of the points I wish to make), let’s instead look at the more objective way it was reported by Elizabeth Nolan Brown in Reason:

…Florida resident Bobbey Jo Boucher went with her 10-year-old daughter to a neighbor’s barbecue and left the girl there when she headed to work, instructing her to go back home when it was over. When the girl didn’t return within a few hours, her grandmother called the…Sheriff’s Office, which called Boucher at work. When the line was somehow disconnected—Boucher says accidentally, police say she hung up—Boucher wound up arrested for obstructing justice. The daughter was fine…she was going to play at church with some neighborhood kids….[who] had left from the barbecue and were riding there on the church bus when police stopped it…Officer Nicholas Carmack…”[reported that another cop claimed that Boucher]…stated ‘I have to get on stage’ and hung up the phone”…a 10-year-old girl who maybe lied to a bus driver to go play with friends at church, who has been out of her working mother’s sight for all of about 2.5 hours, and on whom a missing person report hasn’t yet been filed…[was quickly located by the cops]…and that should be that. But, no, someone must be punished. Officer Carmack really wanted to…take a trip down to [the strip club where Boucher worked] for more information…and he was obstructed by them finding the “missing” child perfectly safe and nearby first…The whole report just oozes with so much condescension …that I feel a little bit slimy reading it. At every point where it’s possible, the cops assume Boucher is a bad, unconcerned mother…Boucher…was eventually arrested, taken to…Jail, and charged with resisting without violence and obstruction. No matter how it shakes out, she already had to miss work, post bond, and owes $78 in “investigative costs recovery”…

The very first point that needs to be made here is that there is no situation, no matter how mundane or extreme, that the police cannot make worse; it is therefore an extremely bad idea to call them for any reason whatsoever, because once they are called they cannot be uncalled and there is a very high likelihood that some innocent person or animal will end up harassed, beaten, tased, pepper-sprayed, arrested, caged, robbed, charged with felonies, murdered or all of the above. In the situation at hand, if the grandmother had heeded this simple principle the child would have eventually come home, possibly been fussed or punished for going off without permission, and the family would not have lost the money the cops’ violent pomposity has already cost them and will continue to cost; Boucher and the child are both very lucky the cops didn’t decide to assault them.

Next, Boucher belongs to not one but three separate groups upon whom American society in general and the police in particular are wont to pour derision: black people, single mothers, and sex workers. Any one of these would probably have resulted in Boucher’s having a harder time with the cops than (for example) a white, married teacher would, and the combination is so likely to lead to evil from the twisted minds of government thugs that one must wonder whether the grandmother was entirely in her right mind when she picked up the phone to call them.

Furthermore, we have recently seen the rapid growth of a dangerous trend of the state involving itself in what used to be considered the province of the family; police and other official busybodies now routinely insert themselves between parent and child, and in the past few months we’ve seen a rising number of cases in which police (especially in Florida) arrest mothers for failing to keep their children under a level of surveillance and restriction of movement more appropriate to a prison than to an ordinary neighborhood. It’s impossible to know where this will end, but it’s rapidly reaching the point where the only sane and reasonable course of action will be to refrain from having children at all. This, however, won’t keep the police away; criminalization of ordinary parental decisions with which any fatuous imbecile with a title disagrees is only a subset of the larger problem of universal criminality.

Finally, there’s the issue I referenced before the quote: the mainstream media no longer question anything the police say, no matter how stupid or self-evidently biased. The New York Daily News credulously parroted the police report, adding insult to injury via editorial inanities like “jiggle joint”, and everyone else obediently fell in line behind so as to generate pageviews at the expense of yet another victim of our terminally-bloated police state. And it’s a safe bet that the majority who read such pap really believe that they, as “good parents” and non-sex workers, are totally safe from the djinni they have allowed to escape his bottle with the promise that he’s only going to go after the “bad people” they don’t like.

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Change in the Air

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged activism, asset seizure, censorship, consensual crime, cops, drugs, hysteria, law, left-right myth, neofeminism, porn, prisons, prohibitionist myths, sex offender registry, social purity, surveillance on October 2, 2014| 33 Comments »

Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor. – Robert Frost

The Nation is the oldest continuously-published weekly magazine in the United States, and describes itself as “The Flagship of the Left”. So when it prints a story with the headline, “Liberals and Feminists, Stop Enabling the Police State”, it’s the rough equivalent of a nun sneaking copies of Luther’s 95 Theses into the hymnals at Easter high mass. For several decades now, self-described “leftists” have done their level best to ignore or deny their part in the creation and expansion of the American police state, despite the fact that its chief rationales – the various wars on consensual behaviors – were birthed, nursed and reared to maturity by the Progressives, the intellectual and spiritual ancestors of today’s statist “left”. This state of denial is especially pathetic when the subject is sexual prohibition; soi-disant “progressives” will reflexively and spasmodically point to the right whenever the subject comes up, their left eyes tightly shut so they don’t have to acknowledge that at least half of the crusade, and the lion’s share of the current rhetoric, is growing out of their own beloved sinister avian appendage. But JoAnn Wypijewski isn’t having any of it; she demands that her compatriots recognize the blood on their hands:

…At the crux of [mass incarceration]…is a hard truth, a moral and political catastrophe…It is the lust for prosecution, the clang of the prison door; and the liberal/progressive/feminist hand in enabling the police state and confusing punishment with justice…any invocation of freedom or human rights or bodily integrity that does not also recognize this is hypocrisy…follow the wire linking Ferguson to swelling violence budgets and shriveled social ones, to “quality of life” policing and spatial control of the poor, to police-cordoned “free speech zones” and mass arrest of protesters, to the border “fence” and Border Patrol surge, to the “cleanup” of Times Square’s XXX underbelly for hypercorporatized, hyperpoliced space, to random police stops and dog sniffs, to random drug testing, to the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, to NSA snooping, to the $350 billion US security business, to TSA full body scans, to drug blimps, to asset forfeiture…to immigrant detention, to “zero tolerance” at schools, to enhanced penalties for “hate crimes,” to sex-offender registries, to civil commitment, to torture as policy, to legalized discrimination, to legalized suspension of constitutional rights for ex-cons, to the redefinition of pimps as “traffickers” who…may be sentenced to life, to vice squad entrapment systems, to law upon law passed amid the clamor for safety, to…the gulag of prisons…that [lock away] about 7 million Americans…

Sex, or fear of it, has been almost as important in the construction of this nightmare state as racism. Just as the legal gains of the civil rights movement were blunted by…the incipient “war on drugs,” the sexual revolution…[was] short-circuited by serial sex panics, police power in loco mariti, Victims’ Rights as a mask for vengeance and the conception of the Sex Offender as a new, utterly damnable category of human being…“Carceral feminists”…elided personal power with state power, eschewed the project of liberation…and took as [their] armor the victim’s mantle…when a 6-year-old is called a sexual harasser for stealing a kiss, and men in civil commitment have their dicks hooked to plethysmographs while forced to watch violent porn as “treatment”…the sex-crime side of the prisoner supply chain shows no sign of slowing…

This is not the only recent article in The Nation which is critical of anti-sex feminism and its cringing enablers in the American left; others have questioned the Swedish model and Canada’s flagrant defiance of its own Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalize prostitution. Nor is The Nation the only major publication to recently publish sex-work-friendly articles; the New Republic recently featured a very positive, accepting article on disabled men who hire sex workers, and the Daily Dot (not remotely in the same class as the other two, but still) published a review of the documentary Becoming Belle Knox which not only condemned anti-sex work bile from both the “right” and “left”, but also correctly categorized “sex work isn’t work” and “emotional connection and sex have to go hand in hand” as myths.

Many of my readers and my fellow activists are so stunned by the incessant “sex trafficking”, anti-whore din that they begin to despair; I would be lying if I said I never felt that way myself. But history shows us that prohibitionist noise is always most cacophonous just before the masses begin to turn against those prohibitions; consider the history of “Drug War” propaganda and anti-gay activism and you’ll see what I mean. Though it’s nearly impossible to find a story about sex work in the mainstream American media that doesn’t consist entirely of tinned prohibitionist rhetoric, parroted police statements and regurgitated neofeminist poison, the truth is beginning to percolate into the alternative press, some magazines and many professional organizations. There has been a subtle but noticeable change in the air over the past two years, and it’s becoming more pronounced with every passing month; within a few years sex work will be a full-fledged controversy like gay rights was in the ‘90s, and that’s the first step toward our inevitable victory.

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