“Grandpa worked really hard so that we can find out the most sensitive part of the penis” generally isn’t the sort of story family foundations want to tell. – Miro Gudelsky
Another example of amateurs profiting from sex workers’ images while giving us nothing:
As Soho’s sex trade is destroyed, a twee pastiche is being created in its place. A sex-work themed theme-park…Across Soho, the bordello theme is a default. You don’t have to stumble far to find décor suggestive of dimly lit backrooms and women of the night; a fantasy, filmic version of the sex trade. Marketers aren’t afraid to use the trope for all its worth…As the reality of sex work in Soho disappears, its essence has become a marketing tool. Brothel chic. A Disneyland version of what was for many, a life, work – a world that wasn’t particularly exotic or glamorous but simply the thing they did for a certain number of hours a week to pay the bills…
In a city that’s being gentrified by the engineers and startup employees, the Gold Club is perhaps the most outré illustration of San Francisco’s recent excesses, a place where curious crowds come for the cheap fare and stay for the alcohol and extracurriculars. It is also an example of how tone deaf many in the male-dominated tech industry can be. In recent years, critics have called out technology companies for their workforces’ gender imbalances, which some argue foster a boys’ club culture and sexual discrimination…
Why there are few good studies on sex work:
…Even researchers…with adequate funding and support…may find that they’re not always taken very seriously because of the stigma still attached to sexuality…and…unlike colleagues in other fields, sex researchers are often forced to contend with assumptions that their professional interests reflect their personal habits. Few assume that ornithologists harbor a secret wish to be birds, or that medical researchers are drawn to their field due to a history of illness, but sex therapists and researchers are frequently presumed to be incredibly adventurous in the bedroom…
Some stories are so egregiously stupid I just can’t resist editorializing:
A 14-year-old boy in Nova Scotia has been sentenced to…probation…[re-education] and restricted internet access for possession of child pornography…[actually nude pictures of his same-age girlfriend]…the boy…will also have to provide a DNA sample and [the state will steal] his smartphone…[Judge] Atwood laid out his decision to [pretend that] the crime [was] a violent one. He said…that even if…sexting [hurts no one, prudes imagine]…that some day, there will be a [mysterious and indefinable] psychological impact…
First They Came for the Hookers…
If prohibitionists really want to “rescue” sex workers, why do they keep trying to stop us from getting other jobs?
…Miami police officer Sabine Raymonvil…does not deny that she used to work in the porn industry [but]…her work in porn films was completed prior to her becoming a police officer…the requirements to work for the Miami Police Department don’t specifically state anything against porn…[but] she may be terminated because of “conduct unbecoming” an officer…
I don’t really want to think too hard about why someone would leave honest sex work to become a pig, but there you are.
Marching Up Their Own Arses (#349)
How many of these must we endure?
Several organizations that advocate on behalf of both sex workers and survivors of trafficking have written a letter to MSNBC, urging them to cancel Sex Slaves in America, saying it…misleads the viewing public about the realities of both sex work and trafficking…The letter, which you can read in full here, is signed by the Sex Workers Project, the New York Anti-Trafficking Network, Freedom Network, Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive, and Florrie Burke, a longtime human rights advocate…they’re particularly concerned with the way it seems to conflate sex work and human trafficking, and that it could compromise the anonymity of the women it films…In 2013, amid protests and another sternly-worded letter from the same organizations, MSNBC cancelled a program called Slave Hunter, in which a guy named Aaron Cohen claimed to rescue victims of trafficking…
Jada Pinkett Smith is helping to expose the ugly world of sex trafficking…The actress has teamed up with CNN for an hour-long special report…”Children for Sale: The Fight to End Human Trafficking” delves into the gritty underbelly of child sex slavery in America…Smith…traveled to Atlanta — a trafficking hot spot — to sit down with courageous survivors and come face to face with a trafficker…
Presumption of innocence? What’s that?
A D.C. Council member wants to take a page from Spokane, Washington, and several other cities and start impounding the cars of people suspected of soliciting prostitution. Councilman Jack Evans…is calling this rights-infringing nonsense the “Honey, I lost the car” program. As with the Spokane law, it wouldn’t matter whether the person is eventually convicted of any crime or not; if you look to some cops like you’re cruising for sex, that’s all the probable cause they need to snatch your vehicle…
If you thought good old-fashioned Moral Majoritarians were just going to concede Puritanism to fourth-wave feminists, think again…the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE)—a group founded in 1962 as Morality in Media (the name was changed this year)—is holding an anti-pornography summit…[which] features a who’s who of anti-sex-work, anti-science, and anti-free-speech zealots, along with the father of famous kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart…
I was once invited to assist a sacked NSW cop with a similar history.
I’ve gotta admit I went in with a less than open mind because I couldn’t understand how someone who had worked in the NSW sex industry while it was illegal could ever contemplate being a cop. It emerged that her father had been a cop and she was one of those eternal “Daddy’s girls”. I soon discovered she had the greatest capacity for cognitive dissonance I have ever seen. That woman could contradict herself four times in one sentence and seemed incapable of taking in any idea she wasn’t already locked onto.
I asked to be replaced but my colleague was no more able to work with her than was I. In the end the organisation I was with regretfully declined to assist her, which was probably a good thing anyway because what she wanted was to be reinstated into the police force (when she didn’t want something else entirely that is). We’d only decided to help her in the first place because of her previous whistle-blowing.
That MSNBC show is bullshit, but sometimes I wonder if media like that is sort of a good thing. It’s all trying to capitalize on the sensationalism, but the more of it there is, the less sensational the subject matter becomes. And maybe eventually people will just say “meh” when someone tries to talk to them about sex slavery.
At the same time, though, entrenching this narrative in the cultural consciousness cannot be a good thing. So…
The problem is that people will also go ”meh” when they hear about real trafficking. This is the modern version of ”the boy who cried wolf”.
And why is that such a horrible thing? Unless they are some sort of subject matter expert, they have no capability to do anything about it. Have you ever been confronted with a real traficking situation? What would you do if you were? You can’t call the police, they just make things worse.
Better that the general public says ‘meh’ and let the real experts quietly do their work instead of being stampeded into supporting draconian policies they don’t really understand.
Who are the ”real experts” and who gives them money to do whatever they do? If everyone gets so fed up with lies about slavery even groups doing good work may have to close shop.
Human trafficking is a crime and if you really have people abusing someone, the police will have to get involved at some point. Individual citizens are not directly involved in solving crimes, but public opinion influences how public money gets spent, enforcement priorities and police attitude.
Okay, I was being somewhat glib with that last response. However, a philosophy that has been articulated in this blog many, many times is ‘never call the cops for ANY reason’. Couple that with the other conclusion that has been stated here and elsewhere that the state has grown beyond listening to the public, spends money however the political elite sees fit, and therefore must be ‘burned to the ground’ and I wonder how we’re supposed to react when confronted with actual trafficking. If one hundred innocent hookers are to be free, does that then mean one coerced hooker has to suffer? Or should that suffering hooker (or a good samaritan) take matters into their own hands to end that suffering without relying on the state to do it for them?
I would also consider “real experts” to be the ones that don’t scream, boast and brag about how good the work they do is (especially when it’s plain to see it isn’t) and how they need still more money (and the state to have still more power) to do their work, especially when that work does not seem to have any sort of plausible end state or achievable goal in mind. If organizations merely said “we want to ensure all women who experience rape have a chance to heal” or “we want to give coerced hookers the opportunity to escape through offering a safe haven,” that would be one thing. But instead they say “we want to eliminate ALL rape” or “we need to stop ALL human trafficking”, things that will NEVER happen barring some devastating change in human nature.
I don’t personnally subscribe to that ”never call the cops” philosophy. I would just say don’t call the cops unless you’re sure you want to involve them and be careful when dealing with them.
If we don’t have a central police and justice system, how are we to deal with dangerous people? What is a good samaritan supposed to do with the bad guys? Who even decides who’s a bad guy? People who make and enforce laws need to be professionnals to be effective and they need to be public servants to be accountable.
And I don’t think we can just burn down society and somehow come up with something better. It’s not like humanity has a Reset button. With no central government, society ends up being a bunch of little clans fighting each others. Conflict forces clans to better organize and eventually better organized clans take over until you have big central governments. Our freedom and leisure are by-products of the highly organized society we have.
We need to look upon ”government” with a harm reduction mentality. Government is not always pretty, but it’s never going to go away so we have to make it as safe as possible.
I like you, Francois. You’ve just articulated why I have such a problem with the attitude I tried to provide an example of (and questioned) in my last two responses, and I’m actually in total agreement with you.
Thanks! Discussions here are fun.
I think the problem with this kind of thing is that after hearing so many stories of trafficking that people just assume it’s all true and don’t bother to investigate on their own. It must be true, after all everybody says so…
This is the biggest problem. The MSM has such a love affair with the trafficking narrative and have connected it so tightly to consensual adult prostitution that the sheeple believe it is all the same thing
“The Proper Study” – I’m sure movies and TV shows like “Kinsey” and “Masters of Sex” don’t help matters.
“First They Came for the Hookers” – I disagree with your assessment Maggie. I think we ought to consider why this individual is trying to become an LEO. Does that decision automatically make her a “pig” regardless of her motivation might be? Why?
This is something I’ve been pondering for a while. I realize the majority here would like police forces to simply disappear, however I don’t see that happening any time soon. Therefore, wouldn’t we want people with the right motivations to go into that field? People who knew that when they came up against reprehensible practices, there would be support waiting for them outside of the police force? If we dismiss them as “pigs” the minute they begin to consider putting on a badge and assure them they will NEVER have anyone’s support regardless of what they do (or might want to do) to get rid of corruption and deadly practices, why should we be surprised when all we are left with is bad cops? Very few of us have the strength of character of, say, a Frank Serpico (only person I could think of off the top of my head), and even he was hounded out of the country. I wonder how that story might have been different if there had been a structure outside of the police ‘brotherhood’ that he could have turned to for support and protection while he strove to improve matters.
”Subtle Pimping”
I think there is nothing surprising or special about this. People like to have harmless thrills that involve ”bad” or dangerous thing. To the general public, a Prostitution theme park is the same principle as a Pirate theme park. Most people think pirates are criminals in real life, but they find them cool (although it was OK to be a pirate if you had a special license from the king, which makes another funny parrallel with sex workers).
Perquisites:
There is no gender-imbalance in the tech industry. I know about 15 women engineers and STEM-scientists (many with a PhD and one a professor now), and they universally say that there were no hurdles places in their way because of their gender. They are a minority, true, but apparently not many women want to go into the STEM field. As long as a company has about the same gender numbers as the output of the education system has, there is no imbalance.
If you mix a large group and a small group, the small group has to adapt to some degree and the large group will set the tone. As long as the small group is respected that is fine. Of course, the female “anti-sex” faction has basically nobody in the area of competent STEM experts. They are trying to fake some (like “game designers” that have done one pretty bad Flash-game or “kernel hackers” where you are unable to find any meaningful code commits), but that just illustrates that the problem is on their side. “Tone deaf” indeed, but quite the other way round.