Essentially it boils down to the idea that if the percent of people harmed is low enough, then we don’t have to care. – Francis Walker
Whores are bad, because drugs! And “trafficking”! And disease! And vehicles!
It’s gone from the back alleys to websites like Backpage.com. Some women are no longer working the streets, but rather the keyboard…Huntington [West Virginia] Police Chief Joe Ciccarelli said…it’s really all…to fuel the woman’s drug habit. “While almost universally, the women involved are addicted or drug users…this plague of drug addiction knows no bounds. Somebody who might be your next door neighbor yesterday could be unfortunately a prostitute tomorrow”…most of the ads on…Backpage.com…are trapped in sex trafficking rings…Police say it’s a dangerous situation…for the paying customers, as well. “Certainly, the customers always run the risk of being robbed, or having their vehicles being stolen…communicable diseases that are spread by IV drug users in sexual situations is astronomical.” So what’s being done to stop this? Several local police agencies, including the Charleston Police Department, now run online sting operations… “We’re well aware of what’s going on. Anybody who thinks they can evade us by using some sort of anonymity online is sadly mistaken”…
If this pompous, doughnut-addicted ignoramus knows as little about internet security as he does about sex work, even the most elementary precautions would be more than enough to evade him.
This is all pure nonsense, of course, and dozens of studies (including two US government ones) have found the exact opposite. But look at the cast of characters:
…Patrick Trueman…of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE)…said Congress passes appropriations to fight sex trafficking, child pornography and sexual violence against women, but fails to address the root causes of those crimes. To change that, the NCSE is holding a symposium next week intended to educate lawmakers and congressional staffers about the effects of pornography on society and criminal activity…NCSE said pornography shapes the sexual templates of children and contributes to the rise in sexual dysfunction now experienced by young men…“You have to address what attracts a man to enslave a woman or…have sex with an enslaved woman, and that’s pornography,” Trueman said. Speakers…include…Ernie Allen…and Melissa Farley…
Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic
A clinical psychologist has ruled out “sex addiction” as the motive for a 22-year-old’s manipulation and threats that led to charges of blackmail and fraud…James Charles White…admitted charges of blackmailing one gay sexual partner, and obtaining sexual services from another young and vulnerable victim…by offering large amounts of money which were never paid…White had said he had a sex addiction and was getting help. But defence counsel Phillip Allan said the clinical psychologist’s view was that there was no such thing as sex addiction…
This listicle debunking myths about strippers would be better without the gratuitous whorearchy: “The lie: You can always pay more for “extras”. The truth: There’s no price for that. Nope. Just nope.” Except that some (certainly not all) girls do indeed sell “extras”, and Elle Stranger knows it as well as I do.
Yeah, I’m sure this sex was 100% consensual; we always give it up for free to cops who arrest us because they’re just so damned sexy:
…a young Eastern European sex worker [was arrested] after her apartment was raided because it was being used as a “brothel”…after she and another sex worker…were…questioned [and released, one of]…the [gardai] later returned alone to the apartment and raped her. The garda denied this and said they had “consensual” sex and that he was off-duty at the time…The second woman…gave evidence that she had witnessed the rape…
First They Came for the Hookers…
Strippers and other adult entertainers may soon find themselves having to register with the Monroe County [Florida] government as a way to deter sex trafficking…The Monroe County Commission could opt for a less drastic measure and have adult entertainment clubs “post human trafficking awareness signs printed in both English and in Spanish in conspicuous locations clearly visible to the public and employees”…
The Truth About “The Truth About…”
…Even if false reporting of rape is low, rape as percentage of total sex is even lower and very few people would argue that we don’t really need to care about rape. About the only argument you can make here with any validity would be that rape affects more people than false accusations of rape. But that isn’t a particularly great argument either…On a percentage basis, there aren’t many Jews in the US, nor are there many homosexuals. The percentage of trans-gendered individuals is even smaller. What rights would society be rightfully allowed to deprive those populations of simply because they are in the minority?…
More than two hundred scientists are calling on the Food and Drug Administration to reject the so-called “female Viagra” pill…experts in disciplines ranging from bioethics to sexology say that flibanserin is “minimally effective”…only 9 to 15 percent more effective than a placebo in increasing desire. They also highlight its…side-effects, including hypotension and sudden unconsciousness, and its negative interactions with several drugs, including…alcohol and birth control pills…Flibanserin was rejected by the administration twice before, but an FDA panel recently…recommended it for approval [after]…an effective public relations campaign…blamed…previous rejections on sexism on the part of the FDA. “Approving flibanserin will not only unleash an unsafe drug onto the U.S. market…but will send a message to industry that pressuring the FDA through public relations campaigns can get a drug approved.”
They’re not even trying to be credible any more:
…According to Shared Hope International, 495 victims of child sex trafficking in 46 states and D.C. have been linked to Backpage.com. A study by YouthSpark in Atlanta, Georgia, found 53% of children receiving care from service providers across the country were bought and sold for sex on Backpage.com. With the recent decision of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, many are wondering what’s next for Backpage.com and its impact on the future of the child sex trafficking industry…
That horse bolted decades ago.
”…Even if false reporting of rape is low, rape as percentage of total sex is even lower and very few people would argue that we don’t really need to care about rape.”
This is really not a good argument. Rape is a crime with a victim and this makes every single case important in our society. How many other people have consensual sex has no real import on whether the case should be investigated.
When solving a crime we have to try our best to find the truth, but due process exists to make sure we don’t remove the rights of someone without a valid reason. In that case, weighing the harms and benefits of a law is very important.
Like a medicine, a law will always have side effects and this is what needs to be evaluated. This is not the same as deciding whether the treatment itself is warranted.
Umm, isn’t that precisely the same argument you’re criticising?
I think it is. Falsely reported rape is also a crime with a victim and hence that makes every single case important.
He is comparing the frequency of a crime (rape) within the legal counterpart (consensual sex). This is not the same as comparing the proportions of false and true accusations, which both involve a crime.
Because good or bad legislations can affect the balance between true and false accusations, it is legitimate to discuss how frequent false accusations may be.
It is also not the same as comparing that with discrimination against gay or Jews. In that case there is no valid reason to take away their freedom. In a matter of justice the accused can have some of his rights suspended (but it must be justified and as minimal as possible; that is what due process is for).
I also don’t like these ”even if it did” kind of arguments in general. False accusations can happen quite easily and will certainly increase if people are allowed to accuse more with less proof.
I think your comment on Viagra/flibanserin was pretty insightful François, but you’re all over the shop here. Maybe you should read the whole essay.
Walker makes it clear he doesn’t think the frequency of sex can be relevantly compared to the frequency of rape. You and he are in agreement.
Where you apparently disagree is whether false and true accusation frequency can be relevantly compared.
Maybe legislation can affect the balance between false and true accusations, but to assume the balance is relevant presupposes the comparison is – which it isn’t, regardless of the fact they’re both crimes.
There’s no reason whatsoever to think that false and true accusations are related variables and so no reason to believe policies targeting one would impact the other. I guess if you go to an extreme and postulate a policy that would almost entirely eliminate rape that would make false accusations much less credible and therefore rarer, but now we’re well into the domain of science fiction.
The point Walker is making about Jews, gays and transgender people is that they, like falsely accused rape victims, are a low proportion of the the population. He’s attempting to refute the logic implicit in Professor Twitter’s suggestion that because false rape accusations are rare we should be less concerned about the rights of the falsely accused.
Oh, and BTW, I think you could find quite a few people who would argue that it is valid to take away the freedom of Jews and homosexuals. It ain’t without legal precedent you know. Law and justice are a very long way from being the same things.
I didn’t read the original link yesterday but I did today. I totally agree about the general idea: the ratio of real/false accusation has no bearing on the probability of person XYZ falling victim to a false accusation. However it is relevant when it comes to decide if a policy is a good one or not.
What I mean is that a law or policy can affect both the number of false accusation and the solving of real accusation. To know if a law is acceptable, the benefits have to be compared to the harm it can cause to people’s freedom.
In short, for the sake of argument, if getting a few more false accusations would ensure a solid increase in real and accurate convictions, then it could be an acceptable price to pay. (Of course the new laws that are proposed can only help to get convictions without helping in finding the actual truth, so they are not good)
About homosexual, I did say ”in a matter of justice”, because I know many people can be against them on ”moral” grounds. In our society, where this legal debate about rape is happening, the law cannot remove someone’s freedom except to prevent a real harm. Therefore, under our current legal system, we cannot compare the loss of freedom of an accused to discrimination against a minority.
“In short, for the sake of argument, if getting a few more false accusations would ensure a solid increase in real and accurate convictions, then it could be an acceptable price to pay.”
While that is intuitively clear and right form a quality- and risk-management perspective (i.e. more generally from an Operations Research process optimization perspective), it is completely unacceptable from the point of view of justice. There, you must never increase false convictions. These two perspectives collide in practice, because the first one is a practical consideration and the second one is a theoretical, ethical requirement. In reality, a balance must be struck. Otherwise you can end up with drastically problematic results.
Example: Say, only 10% of rape accusations are fake but 30% or real victims do not get believed (these numbers are completely made up for the sake of the argument). From a quality- and risk-management perspective, the way to deal with this is clear: Believe every accuser unconditionally, and remove all rights of the accused. This gives the best overall cost-benefit factor. In fact, if somebody accuses somebody else of rape, just imprison that somebody else for, say, 10 years without any costly court proceedings and delay. (This is simplified, of course, as there are feedback effects as well.) (This is also basically what some Feminists are seriously asking for.)
Of course, this has nothing at all to do with justice anymore. But it is sound with regard to process optimization, and may even pay off in a global analysis if feedback effects are taken into account.
So why is this a problem? The problem is that it has both chilling effects and a very asymmetric power distribution. The standard case for rape is man-rapes-woman. What does prevent a woman in this scenario from threatening a man to accuse him of rape if she wants something from him? (I believe this already is a customary tactics employed in child custody cases…) Right: Her own ethics, because these tactics are of course only uses by those without any reasonable ethics. But “the law” is for exactly those people, the others do not need it and are in fact negatively impacted by it.
Hence if the law fails to achieve the only thing it can (keeping the ethically-challenged in check) it becomes a problem in itself. And that is where the principle that the law must never foster injustice comes from and why everyone accused falsely must have a realistic chance to clear his or her name, regardless of the more global numbers involved.
Jeez Celos, for an anti-physicalist you seem very keen to reduce everything to equations – regardless of whether they can be so reduced or not.
Utilitarianism isn’t morality. It’s intellectual and ethical bankruptcy.
You seem to have missed that I only use numbers to illustrate a problem. That is not “reducing” things to numbers. Giving illustrative examples is good style when making a complex point. The citation by Blackstone captures the sentiment, but it does not explain the problem. Standing by itself, it has about as much validity as any other “appeal to authority” argument, namely none.
On the contrary, it’s imagining morality can be reduced to, measured by or even illustrated by numbers that is ultimately an appeal to authority. Or more precisely it’s abdicating your own moral responsibility to the ‘authority’ of mechanical/mathematical processes or those most ‘qualified’ to wield them. Morally speaking it’s nothing but a variation of the Nuremberg Defence.
Blackstone’s ratio is a statement of principle. Everyone can understand what a principle is and can adopt it or propose their own (e.g. Ben Franklin restated Blackstone’s ratio as “It is better that 100 guilty go free …” whereas several authoritarian leaders have reversed Blackstone’s ratio).
In the case of judicial sanctions for offending, most people understand they are meant to provide deterrence, punishment, rehabilitation and/or protection for other potential victims (though only the experts of penology and criminology understand that prison systems achieve none of those things). So in nominally democratic countries you hear many voices raised as to what penalties should apply and what they should achieve. That is how it should be.
But should utilitarianism (or any other consequentialist moral system) gain dominance over public policy those who are not considered sufficiently expert to calculate the consequences of a particular policy are excluded from input into it’s development. This is a recipe for a technocracy and a fast track to fascism. It’s how, for example, you got the Iraq war. All the intelligence ‘experts’ agreed that Saddam had WMD that posed a danger to his neighbours so regardless of the fact that majorities in Western belligerent countries were appalled at the thought of an invasion it went ahead regardless.
Maggie, I suggest you’d be better off using better-placed knives than “doughnut-addicted”; it weakens your prose. People like this fellow are more effectively eviscerated using terms that actually apply, rather than what amounts to essentially unrelated pejorative stereotyping.
For instance:
o If this pompous, fear-inciting ignoramus knows as little about…
o If this pompous ignoramus of a spin-doctor knows as little about…
o If this pompous and ignorant excuse for a public servant knows as little about…
Mild alliteration is also a subtle way of increasing the hit:
o If this pompous, pearl-clutching ignoramus knows as little about…
o If this poisonous, rights-trampling ringer of an authority figure knows as little about…
o If this moronic, myth-addled caricature of an authority figure knows as little about…
It is my hope that you will never let up on those who oppress us. Your stand on informed consent represents a great good to, and for, us all.
Calling down the power of alliteration is good, but I can’t help thinking there’s a place in there for the word “pig”.
But “doughnut-addicted” is fine too. Maybe not all cops mainline Krispy Kremes but I think the visual imagery excuses the generalisation.
But what’s really surprised me about this exchange is that there’s Americans who know how to spell “doughnut”.
No offense, but when you have a blog with almost 4 million pageviews I will consider your suggestions on how to “improve” my writing. Until that time, I think it’s just a tad presumptuous, don’t you?
It was a bit presumptuous, sure, but I do actually like a few of fyngyrz’s suggestions, even if there’s nothing wrong with your original doughnut-based cop-mockery. (Oooh, cop-mockery. I like how that flows. Like pig-sticker, or fuck-bucket. Heehee.)
I mean, every option involves the verbal evisceration of pathetic, badge-fondling idiots. Can’t everybody be right? I mean, how can mocking doughnut-addicted, pearl-clutching, poisonously pompous morons be wrong?
(PS: There is a typo in the introduction to the story about the rapist cop; you wrote “they’ve just so damned sexy” instead of “they’re”. Thought you’d maybe want to know?)
Calling my attention to typos is always welcome! 🙂
“Female Viagra” is a chimera. The problem isn’t desire – married women have no difficulty at all getting wet for men who aren’t their husbands. The problem is that humans are just not built for monogamy. Men like to play the field, and women get bored with their partners at the two, four, and seven-year marks. It’s just a fact of life, and no pill is going to fix it without a raft of outrageously over-the top and insidiously subtle side effects.
With the qualification “many-if-not-most”, I generally agree with you. Paul.
I think what clouds the issue of woman’s-loss-of-sexual-interest-in-her-partner is the duration of many-if-not-most women’s sexual interest in a male. Compared to many-if-not-most men’s typical propensity for multiple partners, women’s propensity can give the illusion of female monogamy — for, after all, while he’s (stereotypically) ready to roam even while enjoying continued sex with a partner he’s been with less than one year, she might not manifest loss of sexual interest in him and rise of sexual interest in other men for four years. Those four, give-or-take, year cycles are long enough to mask women’s biological reality from society, from men, and from even themselves.
I suspect that unawareness of and a general uncomfortablemness with this fact, by society which recognizes “asexual motherhood” as its optimal womanhood; by men, who typically can’t bear the truth of a woman no longer desiring one of them; and by women, who (for various combinations of reasons) don’t want themselves to have natures other than instinctively monogamous, fuels the willingness to accept that some drug can “fix” women’s disinterest.
The perverted message that US society has told itself is that “women are essentially monogamous, and therefore loss of interest by a woman for her partner is always a dysfunction; and dysfunctions need to be fixed”. Consequently, US society has set itself up for pharmaceutical panaceas — as in, “fix me, doctor, because a normal woman has sexual desire only for her husband til-death-do-us-part!”
It is not just a chimera, but also a misnomer. Viagra doesn’t increas desire. It simply helps in getting an erections, thus facilitating sexual congress even when the desire may not be lacking. The female Viagra equivalent would be a pill that help them lubricate.
But if the ”Desire Pill” really workerd, wouldn’t that make marital rape accusations even more complicated? If a woman can’t legally consent to sex after a few beers, how can she consent after taking a drug that artifficially increases her sexual desire? What happens if they revoke their consent after the pill wears off?
François’ comment is very insightful, although I thought Viagra did work on women; it’s just that getting a clitoral erection isn’t enough to arouse a woman the way a penile erection leads to arousal for men.
Flibanserin isn’t effective or powerful enough for issues of consent to be really meaningful, but you’re absolutely right in that any arousal-increasing drug that actually worked on women would bring with it a host of ethical problems involving agency & consent, including the strong possibility thatsuch a substance would immediately become the ultimate date-rape drug.
Think about it; if a pill can make a woman want sex (presumably with whoever’s nearby) the potential for abuse is overwhelming. If consent can be chemically manufactured, is it really consent? It’s 1 thing if you knowingly consent to taking the drug, but if it’s slipped in your drink? If you find out after having sex with someone you might not have otherwise? If you never find out?
& any drug that can induce sexual desire in women could probably work on men, as well. Unscrupulous homophobic councilors could use it in an attempt to induce desire for the opposite sex in their gay patients.
These ethical problems are immense & I think intractable, & will prevent anything like this in development from ever getting on the market. I know, because it already has. It’s just too problematic.
Of course, arousal doesn’t automatically force you to act on that desire. It seems likely that any such drug wouldn’t be so strong as to compel you to act, or force you to fuck. You always have a choice. But the drug companies & the FDA are afraid, & I doubt they’ll take a chance on a drug like this. Too dangerous.
My beef with both Viagra and Flibanserin, even if both were clinically perfect drugs, is that their names sound like something a Monty Python Ministry of Silly Names made up.
When I hear “Flibanserin” I think of Ken Nordine’s jazz poem “Flibberty Jib”.
When I hear “Viagra” I think of the plant food “Vigoro”, or sometimes “Niagara” (the famous waterfall), or even “Conagra” (the packaged food conglomerate).
If the drugs worked perfectly, I think better names would be “StudMaker” for Viagra, and “HoochieCoochieCandy” for Flibanserin.
the approval of flibanserin is a real head scratcher, a daily pill with bizarre side effect for, on average, one additional sexual encounter per month. Are they even trying?
And don’t forget the FDA only require positive data from two trials before approving a drug. In all likelihood Sprout Pharmaceuticals farmed out a dozen or more clinical trials then cherry picked the two submitted. Any trials that failed to give the results Sprout wanted are unlikely to see the light of day unless someone submits an FOI request.
Almost half the FDA’s funding comes from drug companies and all members of its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research advisory panel have a history of financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry (and most will return to the industry after their tenures expire) so it wouldn’t pay for them to set the approval bar too high. Nonetheless, a quarter of the panel voted against submitting flibanserin for approval.
From SharedHope’s press release about Backpage:
I guess it’s time to shut down bars and cafes too as some murderers meet their victims there.
Come to think of it, the largest proportion of murders are committed in family homes. It’s time to burn down all the houses!
lol, excellent point. I’m ashamed this idiot is from my state. By this idiot’s fatuous “reasoning” we should clearly outlaw families, & ban friendships & romantic relationships, since that’s how murderers & victims are most likely to be acquainted. Ugh.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation was until recently called Morality in Media, Inc.
Ah yes, pornography, the ‘gateway drug’ to all vice. Don’t let those pesky Presidential Commission findings by that outrageous liberal Nixon fool you; they were clearly influenced by Nixon’s well-known advocacy of free speech.