Reputation is an idle and mostfalse imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. – William Shakespeare, Othello (II,iii)
Every so often I go to put an item in one of my news columns, only to realize there’s no appropriate heading because I’ve never actually written about the subject. And every once in a blue moon, I find myself asking, “How the hell did I manage never to have written about that?” This is one of those times; though I’ve mentioned it often in passing, I’ve never actually devoted a column to the subject. “It” in this case being escort reviews. For those who have never been involved in a modern escort transaction on either side of the deal, and who haven’t paid much attention to the subject before starting to read this blog, an escort review is a lot like a Yelp review for pretty much any other commercial service; it’s a way for a satisfied customer to let others know that a service provider is a good one, and for a dissatisfied customer to warn others of scams, hidden problems, etc. The best reviews are practically love letters; the worst ones can be downright abusive. And given the nature of the service, they can often be, well, pornographic.
That last is a sticking point with a lot of escorts; though some review boards discourage or disallow graphic details, others encourage them. And even when the narratives are tucked away in a “members only” section, access to that section can either be gained by paying or by…wait for it…writing reviews. So clients who are heavily invested in review board culture are strongly incentivized to write more reviews, and to make them as juicy as possible, even if that means embellishing the facts of the encounter or simply lying. I know I’ve read reviews of myself which caused me to say, “Were we even in the same room? Because I don’t remember half of this.” Yeah, I have reviews, and they’re available out there on the internet; I’m sure the more internet-savvy among you can find them pretty easily. But I don’t encourage them because I don’t really like them; besides the fact that I find them rather crude, there’s also the problem of cops and prosecutors using them as “evidence” in prostitution trials, either against the lady or against the client/review author.
There’s one review board, however, which I absolutely refuse to allow myself to be reviewed on, and that’s probably the biggest one, The Erotic Review (better known as TER). In actuality, there’s nothing I could do to stop someone from reviewing me there if he wanted to, because provider profiles on TER are user-generated rather than provider-generated; however, as far as I know, my clients have so far respected my wish not to be reviewed there {knocks wood}. What have I got against TER, you ask? Well, there are several things. The first is the site’s blatantly “bros before hos” philosophy, as exemplified by the fact that it’s extremely difficult to get a false review removed from the site; one of my friends was able to provide evidence that she was in another part of the country at the time a false reviewer claimed she had been in his city, and that still wasn’t enough. Besides the fact that this allows enemies to plant bad reviews to hurt a provider’s business, it also allows cops to create false profiles for infiltration purposes. The second problem is that TER uses a numerical rating system in which the numbers are tied to specific acts; an escort might be the most beautiful, engaging, charismatic, enchanting creature on the planet, but if she doesn’t do Greek she can’t be a “10” on TER no matter how many reviews praise her to high heaven.
…An ad that ran in 2008 in the Village Voice’s Backpage section read, “DID YOU GET RIPPED OFF AGAIN? Didn’t read her reviews, did you? Don’t let them get away with it…By submitting a review you are not only warning thousands of guys in your area, you hitting them where it hurts…HER WALLET.” It’s a tone set early by the site’s now-estranged founder David Elms…many sex workers…say the site harbors a culture of misogyny and objectification, and exposes them to extortion, legal risks and pressure to perform unwanted acts. Some are categorically against reviews, given the intimate nature of the services being provided…Some argue that [TER] encourages the writing of fake reviews as well, a problem that plagues even sites like Yelp where there aren’t direct financial incentives for contributing. As “Alexis,” a sex worker, put it, “When you’re talking about ‘super users,’ when I see people like that, I see ‘super bullshitters.’”
Many sex workers say the site also threatens to change the nature of their work by pressuring them into acts they don’t want to perform [by threatening them with bad reviews]…A common complaint Katherine Koster, communications director at the Sex Workers Outreach Project, has heard is that TER pressures “sex workers to provide the same service across clients, rather than adapting it to individual clients.” TER reviews are structured around a hierarchy of acts: The site asks reviewers to reserve 8, 9 and 10 performance rankings for “situations where out of the ordinary services are provided,” including blow jobs without condoms, kissing with tongue and anal sex. Koster says the site also rejects reviews without explicit sexual details…
The article also discusses David Elms’ sordid history of extortion, assault and worse; you can read about it there, because I honestly don’t think it’s necessary to know about it to judge TER on its own record. Even if Elms had never done anything immoral, I think the ickiness of his creation speaks for itself.
Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere else. – Mae West
Lately, a number of people (including interviewers, clients and even other whores) have asked me about the different types of sex work I’ve done, when I did them and how I got started. And though this was the subject of a three-part column soon after I began this blog six years ago, there were a few passages I omitted way back then and only wrote about much later, and a couple I think I’ve only spoken about (but never written). So in the interest of collecting everything in one place and filling in the gaps, I hereby present a concise history of my personal journey through harlotry.
An engineer who was a friend of one of my professors had to go out of town on business; his wife, also an engineer, was away as well, but they had been waiting for some time for a contractor to do some work on their house and he had offered to squeeze them in between two long jobs…All I had to do was open the house at 8 AM, supervise the contractors until they left and close up by 6 PM. For this I was to be paid $5/hour, 10 hours a day for seven days, or $350 total; not bad for a broke coed in those days. The contractors got done ahead of schedule, by Friday morning, and the engineer also came home early and arrived about 4 that afternoon. While I was showing him a few things the contractor had asked me to point out, he kept finding excuses to rub up against me and eventually came right out and propositioned me…without hesitation I said, “Can I stay on the clock?” He raised an eyebrow and I elaborated, “I was counting on being paid through the weekend”…It took less than an hour, and when he forked over the whole $350 I felt rather proud of myself…
It didn’t take my whorish little brain long to realize that my sexuality was now monetizable, and I had a number of guys I could subtly hit up for cash in exchange for sex when bills came due. I went on like that until the spring of 1987, when I stupidly agreed to marry Jack (because I was fucking stupid); my hiatus from whoredom lasted until he left me on January 2nd, 1995. The part I haven’t previously mentioned in print was that my ill-fated marriage was bookended by two sugar relationships, but with sugar mamas rather than sugar daddies. Remember, I’ve always been bisexual, and when Jack proposed I agreed only on the condition that I could still have girlfriends. Since the autumn of ’84 I had a sugar mama (in her late 30s then) I was very fond of; she almost never gave me cash, but took me out to dinner and a movie several times a week (especially in ’85). The sexual part of our relationship actually dried up pretty quickly; she was seeing a therapist who thought homosexuality was immature and had convinced her that “Gay is not the way”. I know that seems weird and even unethical to modern ears, but that was not an unusual viewpoint among psychiatric professionals in the ’80s. Anyhow, she met a man in the summer of ’87 and dropped me pretty soon after; I did date girls whenever Jack and I broke up (which was often) from ’87 to ’92, but none of those were pragmatic relationships.
My next foray into whoredom came in the autumn of ’95; I was so distraught after all the events of my Year of Disaster that I just wasn’t able to work anymore, and quit my job. I survived on pure momentum, some help from my mother, frequent handouts from friends and the patronage of another sugar mama, a woman in her late 50s who took me to dinner at least three or four times a week, gave me many presents and even gifted me with small sums of cash that were sufficient to pay the electricity & water bills. I never actually had sex with her, either; she was very attracted to me and was clearly hoping for something in return, but I never actually promised her anything and was able to avoid the half-dozen or so direct passes she made at me over the next year by telling her (honestly) that I was still too messed up to be sexual with anybody. So though I wasn’t technically selling her sex, I was certainly being paid for my emotional labor and for paying attention to her, which is a huge part of GFE and sugar-dating both. She got tired of my coyness by November of ’96, and found Jesus soon after; I’m not sure what part (if any) our relationship played in that.
Almost a year later, at the end of September of ’97, I started stripping; soon after that I met Grace and we moved in together, and her truck allowed me to commute to the clubs on Bourbon Street where I could make more money than I could in the little suburban club where I’d started. By the autumn of ’99 my outstanding debts were paid off and I took a few months off before starting at Pam’s escort service on January 2nd, 2000. I started my own agency by Easter, and also worked for two others after leaving Pam’s; I finally retired from agency escorting in June of 2006, after burning out due to overwork and Hurricane Katrina-induced chronic illness. At that point I moved into the long-term contractual form of prostitution we call “marriage”, and from July of 2006 until July of 2010 I saw no other client but my husband. As most of you know, that didn’t work out as well as I might’ve liked; my retirement seems to have been a major factor in the disintegration of my marriage, and soon after starting this blog in July of ’10 I also returned to sex work, this time as an independent, “partly for pocket money and partly to put myself in the right frame of mind to write the blog.” But as my activism developed I felt less and less willing to hide the fact that I was no longer retired, and as I prepared for my book tour in the spring of ’14 I let a number of trusted friends, patrons and whore sisters in on my secret.
The last step to where I find myself now began last summer; frustrated by the slowness with which I was building a clientele under my work persona, I decided to throw caution to the winds, ditch it and just work under the name I’d so painstakingly built up a reputation under for the previous five years. Since then, what little was left of my anonymity has fallen away or been tossed aside, and I now get as many clients from Twitter and this blog as I do from referrals or my escort ads. I’ve even scheduled an appointment with a gentleman who Googled me after seeing me on KIRO-TV back in January. So in a way, I’ve come full circle: for the first decade, my pragmatic sexual arrangements were conducted under my own name, sans any kind of marketing or work persona; now I’m back to doing everything under the same name, even if it isn’t the one on my birth certificate (nearly all of my friends call me “Maggie” at home), and my work, activism and “real life” are so tangled together as to be nearly indistinguishable. I’ve been charging for my favors in one way or another for over 60% of my life, and I have no plans to stop this side of the grave.
A South Carolina high-school teacher may be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after a student stole her cellphone and distributed partially nude photos from it around the school. Administrators say she should have password-protected the phone. The male student grabbed the phone from…Leigh Ann Arthur’s desk while she was making required…rounds between classes…he went through Arthur’s photos, eventually finding some sexually oriented shots that Arthur says she took for her husband. By the time she returned to the classroom, the student was texting the photos to other students. According to Arthur, he told her: “Your day of reckoning is coming.” One might think that the student would at least face disciplinary action…if not criminal charges of some sort. But thus far, the school has not moved to hold the 16-year-old student accountable at all. Arthur, however, is another story…she resigned when district officials gave her the choice to do so immediately or start the firing process…More than 1,600 people have signed an online petition created by students…in support of their former teacher…
Mainstream anti-trafficking and abolitionist discourses construct the image of the victim by channelling “white slavery” myths. Eastern European women (along with other women from the ex-peripheries of global capital) are attributed a central role…Apart from the restrictions faced by most migrants from the former “eastern bloc” in so-called developed states, eastern European migrant sex workers encounter even tougher barriers…Even when legally residing and working, simply owning a Romanian or Russian passport can make female sex workers the target of rescue, detention, and re-socialisation and/or deportation programmes implemented by governmental agencies and carceral NGOs…The imaginary [status] of [these] countries as sources of “forced prostitution”…coincides with a Cold War hangover and…serve to doubly vilify and infantilise European women sex workers…
Uh-oh, kinksters: sex cops could be coming for you next. According to a new federal court decision, Americans have no constitutional right to engage in consensual BDSM because “sexual activity that involves binding and gagging or the use of physical force such as spanking or choking poses certain inherent risks to personal safety.” Thus officials could constitutionally ban or regulate such activity in the interest of “the protection of vulnerable persons,” the court held. In striking down bans on things like sodomy and adultery, U.S. courts have repeatedly said that citizens have a right to engage in whatever sort of consensual sexual activity they choose within the privacy of their own rooms (that is, as long as money isn’t involved). But federal judges now say that the Constitution “does not prohibit the regulation of BDSM conduct”…
…sex workers in Macedonia…have been awarded protection…against the unlawful treatment of the police and the criminal court. On a November night in 2008, the police carried out [a pogrom]…in which 32 individuals, 23 of whom sex workers, were deprived of liberty. The police unlawfully detained the sex workers longer than 20 hours in inhuman and degrading conditions…without food, water or any possibility for sanitary hygiene. Some of them were left without medical help…The following day, all of them were taken for [involuntary STI] testing without any explanation…fourteen (14) sex workers filed a lawsuit…against the…Ministry of Interior…Seven years [later]…the Primary Court…partially granted the lawsuit of the sex workers and again established that…the police action “Suppression of Street Prostitution” violated the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, i.e. violated the…sex workers’ rights…
A [Florida] sheriff’s deputy was fired and likely will face charges of obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence after he tried to plant [drugs] on a [man cops considered a troublemaker]…Stephen LeBlanc…is accused of persuading a man in [what police call] a known drug neighborhood to help [him]…plant evidence on Thomas Parisi, who LeBlanc in November arrested for spray-painting…“Sex workers are people, too,” and an anti-law enforcement sentiment [on a wall]…LeBlanc then began [stalking] Parisi…to “get him jammed up on more charges,” the sheriff said…
[An] Alabama State Trooper who was…charged with rape and sodomy of an accident victim…has reached a deal with prosecutors that will see him plead guilty to misdemeanor sexual misconduct…Samuel McHenry…put the woman…in his patrol car before [vaginally and anally raping her]…under threat of jail time…McHenry [must] serve six months in the Butler County Jail…in increments at his own discretion…within the next year…pay a $500 fine and restitution, and is ordered not to contact the victim…state law requires he register as a sex offender.
…Little has changed for these workers since the strike in 1975. I spoke to…one of the original St Nizier strikers who now works in her van in Gerland. I asked if she knew that the St Nizier Church occupation was commemorated in Australia and across the world as International Whores’ Day. “No, I didn’t know that. Really?” she said. “And in Australia, are there lots of sex workers? And they aren’t being hassled by the police?” I told her that no, sex work is decriminalised in NSW…
In the press, it was a “wide-reaching sex-trafficking operation” run by Somali Muslim gangs who forced “girls as young as 12” to sell sex in Minnesota and Tennessee. In reality, the operation—which led to charges against 30 individuals, sex-trafficking convictions for three, and an eight year legal battle—was a fiction crafted by two troubled teenagers, a member of the FBI’s human-trafficking task force, and an array of overzealous officials…federal prosecuters had no evidence whatsoever to support their “child sex trafficking conspiracy” case outside the seriously flawed testimony of two teenagers, one of whom had “been diagnosed as insane and was off her medication”…The [cop] was…caught lying to the grand jury and lying during a detention hearing, while Doe and the state’s other primary witness were, according to the court, almost entirely “unworthy of belief”…
The leader of the Phoenix Goddess Temple that offered spiritual and touch-based healing services in exchange for donations has been convicted of operating a house of prostitution…Tracy Elise [was pronounced] guilty…on all 22 counts including 12 of money laundering. She also was convicted of six counts of pandering and one count each of conspiracy to commit illegal control of an enterprise, illegal control of an enterprise, prostitution and operating a house of prostitution…Elise is scheduled to be sentenced on April 8…
The most interesting part of this article for me isn’t the location of historical New York brothels {yawn}, but rather the dogged persistence with which ignoramuses cling to the myth that prostitution was criminalized in the US before the 20th century:
…Sex workers have been operating illegally in New York since before the Revolutionary War. In the early 19th century, prostitutes worked in Five Points — above present day City Hall Park — and along the East River. But it wasn’t until the middle of that century that prostitution concentrated in SoHo and formed the city’s first sex district. While the districts moved northward over time…the manner in which johns found out about the districts remained consistent for decades: cheaply printed guidebooks…patrons needed help finding the city’s illicit brothels that law enforcement mostly turned a blind eye to…
At a hearing on new measures to address human trafficking, California Assemblyman Reggie-Jones Sawyer [said]…”the last time we’ve had this kind of emergency was…the crack-cocaine epidemic.” Sadly, Sawyer was not referencing the ways in which the current popular panic about sex trafficking and governmental responses to it mirror the outlandish, hysteria-based, and detrimental state approach to the war on drugs. Rather, Sawyer sees our attention to the “crack-cocaine epidemic” as something we should now strive to emulate…In many, many respects…officials already are treating sex trafficking in the same way they did the drug war. The dominant legislative response has been increased criminalization of all sorts of commercial sexual activity…
So about a month ago, this ridiculous air hostess person who’s hawking a book started tweeting nonsense about “sex trafficking” (because her wonderful “signs of trafficking” training makes her an expert, donchaknow). And she just couldn’t understand why all us mean hookers attacked her when all she wants to do is rescue people! So she wrote about it, and of course some ass published it:
As a flight attendant, I’ve been trained to spot trafficking in the air…It’s made me take a special interest in the topic, and I was even motivated to speak to my City Council…You…might think human trafficking is a topic we would all agree on. Right? Wrong. I recently learned there are a lot of people who disagree…some sex worker advocates argue we’re creating more victims: That when I speak out against human trafficking, that I’m contributing to the mass incarceration of sex workers…I met a woman in my neighborhood who works with a nonprofit organization that fights trafficking…so trafficking, in my town of Redondo Beach, has become an off-duty interest for me. On the drive to my son’s school, we pass 18 massage parlors — in less than two miles. Every single day I look at these massage parlors, and wonder what might be going on behind those covered up windows surrounded by security cameras…The average person hasn’t had their employer teach them how to stop human trafficking like mine has. The average person doesn’t have a daily reminder that trafficking is going on in the world the way I do…
Poor Heather; the weight of the world is on her shoulders! If she doesn’t defend “sex trafficking” victims in Redondo Beach against us bad ol’ whores, who will?
…A group of sex workers protested…in Hamburg against a new government bill that would force sex workers to register with the state [every two years or, for women ages 18 to 21, every year] and receive counseling. The protesters held symbolic “prostitute cards” to illustrate what it would mean for them to be forced to carry with them registration, said Friederike Strack of the Berlin-based consulting center Hydra…
Well, Seattle’s Annual Sexwork Symposium (SASS) was a resounding success! Last Wednesday Savannah Sly and I co-hosted a panel discussion featuring four well-known activists, then on Thursday SWOP held a protest march and afterward a large number of Seattle sex workers participated in a secret project that you’ll just have to wait to learn about (did I ever say I didn’t have a sadistic streak? If so, I lied.) On Friday we had a health fair and in the evening I did karaoke for the first time; I’ll let you imagine what it sounded like for me to perform a duet with Abby May on “You Oughta Know” and with Savannah on “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’“. No, I don’t sing all that well, but for some reason I sound a lot better on “scorned woman” songs. Go figure. Saturday was the sex worker social in the daytime and the Harlot’s Ball in the evening; my outfit was inspired by Barbarella and it’s just too bad nobody took a picture of me in it (what little of it there was) because people kept coming up to me and telling me that in the low-light conditions I looked naked from a distance (oops, am I teasing again? Sorry.) (Not really.) That came in especially handy when I took over the kissing booth for the last half-hour or so (Yep. Still not sorry.) Finally, Sunday evening we had an art & performance night, complete with a silent auction in which one of the items was a dinner date with me; the pic here was taken by Aidan Allgood outside the theater after the show (too bad you can’t see the boots, but you can see my snaky accessory if you look closely). All in all, it was a very full week, and that’s only the parts I can tell you about…yes, I’m teasing-and-denying again, and I’m still not sorry.
A few days ago, a guy contacted me from my Eros ad, but was reluctant to provide me with the screening info I asked for. I patiently explained to him that sex workers face a number of serious risks in coming to hotels to visit strange men in private, and that screening helps us to stay safe; he replied that there are risks associated with being a client as well, and suggested I might not be the woman in my pictures, or that I might bring along muscle to rob him. Now, my advertising clearly describes who I am, including my book, articles, TV appearances and Twitter feed, but his response made it obvious that he was one of the many clients who don’t bother to read a lady’s ad copy before contacting her; I therefore simply suggested he Google me, since the first 7 pages or so are mostly me. Similarly, a Google image search leaves little doubt that I still look like the pictures on my website and in my ads. Now, I haven’t quite reached the “Don’t you know who I am?” level of celebrity, and it’s possible I never will (and probably better if I don’t). But as hookers go I’m pretty damned well-known, and it’s not exactly difficult to check the statements I make right there in the text of my ad.
Another, kind of arse-backward version of this is when prohibitionists pretend to have “discovered” some very public fact about my life, especially the rather prosaic one that I owned an escort service (which is not only in the bios I give out for writing commissions, speaking engagements, etc but also comes up in nearly every single interview I do). For example, in a recent hate-screed for Logos the prohibitionist arch-fabulist, Melissa Farley, wrote, “We have located 12 people from 8 countries who publicly identify as sex workers or sex worker advocates but who have also sold others for sex or who have been implicated in the management of sex trade businesses in various specific ways…” and included me along with Norma Jean Almodovar, Terri-Jean Bedford, Maxine Doogan and others. Apparently, her editorial “we” weren’t trying very hard; I could double the size of that list off the top of my head. And you know why? Because despite the efforts of prohibitionists to pretend otherwise, there really isn’t some unbridgeable gap between sex workers and management like the chasm between workers and “capitalists” in a Marxist wanking fantasy. A very large fraction of sex workers who’ve been around since before the turn of the century (and the rise of internet advertising) have at some point in their careers played some kind of management role; pretending otherwise can only work if, like my lazy client, the reader doesn’t bother to Google.
As I pointed out a few weeks ago, this isn’t only true for me; alongside my name and words (and often picture) in articles like this one and this one are the names and words (and often pictures) of women I work and socialize with, many of them dear friends like Endza, Mistress Matisse and Savannah Sly, who is now president of SWOP-USA. In fact, I’m now “out” enough that it scares a few of the more timid clients away (though I hardly think it likely I’ll begin to be recognized in public anytime soon); I’m just hoping I can soon get to the point where I don’t have to tell my clients to Google me if they worry about my dearth of reviews.
It’s funny how the number of links is kind of seesawing back and forth right now, though I reckon the relative fullness of my week has a lot to do with that. A lot of that fullness this week was activism, but a good bit of it was…well, as LunchMoney Lewis says, I got bills. The video was provided by Brooke Magnanti, and the links above it by Nun Ya, Tushy Galore, Radley Balko, and Tim Cushing, in that order.
Sweden needs to limit the number of public spaces where people are allowed to smoke, according to a lengthy review of tobacco laws… “One should not be exposed to the temptation to smoke,” concluded the report’s author Göran Lundahl…It suggests that legislation should be extended to include “certain public places outdoors, such as café and restaurant terraces, entrances to establishments and other spaces to which the public has access”…The review also argues that e-cigarettes, herbal cigarettes and other products which simulate tobacco smoking should be banned…
Children as young as five are sexually abusing their peers after being exposed to pornography, a Senate inquiry has been told. In chilling evidence that would shock parents, a [former] child development expert has outlined a [parade] of cases where primary school aged children were coercing classmates into performing sex acts including intercourse. University of South Australia Emeritus Professor Freda Briggs…cited her own work that found fathers were watching online porn with their young sons for “fun” because “that’s what guys do”. The prevalence of internet pornography — especially how children can stumble on it while innocently doing homework — has alarmed…[the] inquiry [on] the harm it is causing children, including sexualising them at a young age…Senator Back said he was keen to explore what could be done to protect children, including seeing whether technological advances had made internet-wide filtering possible…
New Day Ministry Pastor Helen Wolfe…[pretends that] prostitutes proposition her church members before and after church services. “These ladies are literally chasing them to the front door,” she said…[this wonderful Christian threatened] one of them, “Somebody is going to cut you up, somebody is going to kill you…Tell the pimps I’m coming after them.” One of the ladies agreed to come inside the sanctuary and share her story…”I had a good job, a nice home, car, everything, and I got really badly hurt and got on pain pills.” She…[is] no longer be addicted to drugs but continues to work as a prostitute because she can’t find another job…”The pimps are now getting into my pocket,” Helen said. “Now the daycare is decreasing because…they say they get chased down by the prostitutes. I’m going to flip this and get in the pimp’s pocket.” Pastor Helen plans to start taking pictures of people involved in criminal activity outside her church, including the men who pick up the prostitutes, and sending them to the police…
[Rescue industry-supporting BDSM fantasist “One-Hand”] Kristof and [violent prohibitionist “Cuckoo Clock”] McCain were presented with the 2015 Anne Frank Award and the Anne Frank Special Recognition Award, respectively, for their work fighting [advertising websites and consensual sex between adults]…The award ceremony took place February 25 in the Members Room of the Library of Congress…
As politicians grappled with Britain’s EU future at a crunch summit, other more sordid deals were being thrashed out nearby. David Cameron was locked in talks at the European Parliament as the Brussels’ sex trade was thriving from an influx of well-off EU politicans and officials…hundreds of prostitutes from Romania, Albania and Bulgaria were plying their trade. Flooding in to meet increased demand at the time of top EU meetings, they blew kisses to smart-suited men trawling the fleshpots of Rue d’Aerschot. Some offered “40 euros for one sex position or 50 for several”…
The Crown Office has dropped the cases against eleven people charged with brothel offences, prompting criticism of Police Scotland for its high profile raids on Edinburgh’s saunas. Six men and five women were set for a court hearing in November, but prosecutors backed off and have now abandoned the proceedings. Many of Edinburgh’s saunas have effectively operated as brothels since the mid-1980s. The approach had the tacit support of the former Lothian and Borders police force and the council in Edinburgh, which provided saunas with public entertainment licenses…
One of Indonesia’s oldest red-light districts was demolished in an operation overseen by hundreds of police and troops…Dozens of illegal bars and brothels along a…strip in north Jakarta…known…as Kalijodo…were reduced to rubble by excavators….leaving behind nothing but splintered wood, brick and old mattresses…North Jakarta Mayor Rustam Effendi…said…the demolition would make way for a public park. “There was open prostitution there and all kinds of other things as a result, like liquor,” he [said]…During the eviction of residents over the past week, police seized and destroyed large quantities of alcohol…The government last week instructed local authorities to shut down an estimated 100 red-light districts across the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country…
…So you met a hooker and at first you were cool with it. You didn’t freak out when they first told you about their job and you didn’t freak them out with your response. You started seeing each other and maybe you had some reservations but figured you would…talk them into your way of thinking…Or you figured whatever you had with them wasn’t so serious so it didn’t need to be a big deal…But…Over time and as your feelings for them have grown, you’ve found your acceptance for their job has diminished…So now what?…
When New York Times editors were defending the paper’s two-part series on alleged labor abuses in nail salons last year, they repeatedly pointed to the high rate of violations uncovered by a state inspection task force…A spokesperson for the paper later used the same defense when responding to my own critical appraisal of the nail salon series. After Bernstein and I demonstrated that the original articles…by…Sarah Maslin Nir…were filled with blatant mischaracterizations and misquotes from key sources…the…editors clung to the notion that the state’s findings demonstrated that Nir basically got the story right. Now the Timeshas taken a close look at those labor inspections and discovered that they “reveal another reality” that doesn’t match up with Nir’s findings. As reporters Russ Buettner and Kim Barker explain, immigrant nail salon owners were often tripped up by the technicalities of New York State wage and hour regulations…”In two dozen cases, for instance, owners paid employees an equivalent of at least the state minimum wage and overtime for the hours they worked, but because they did not correctly account for the overtime hours, they were still cited for underpayment…” If you exclude those two dozen cases, Buettner and Barker report that 67 nail salons, or a little more than one quarter of those investigated by the state, paid less than the minimum wage. And of those 67, 25 missed the mark by less than $50. In other words, the original Times story argued that three-quarter of nail salons in New York paid less than the minimum wage, but the state inspections have found roughly the opposite to be true…
Once again, the Seattle Times demonstrated its deep prohibitionism and disgusting obsequiousness by publishing this asinine regurgitation of prohibitionist feces its editors eagerly lapped off the boots of King County cops and prosecutors. And when Mistress Matisse called those editors out via Twitter for publishing lies that five minutes of high-school-level Googling would have disproven, they either ignored her or doubled down defending this dumpster fire of an editorial. Fortunately, not every reporter in Seattle feels that “journalism” is a synonym for “fellating authority”; Sydney Brownstone of The Stranger responded thus:
…it’s clear that the Ed Board…has not interrogated the sex work “research” cited by King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg very deeply…The “age of entry” myth—a common one—has been challenged by sex work advocates and research from anti-trafficking group Polaris…the “local” research being cited by Satterberg’s office….[is] a collection of studies that drew flawed, biased conclusions about sex work and trafficking based on small sample sizes of populations that already skewed heavily toward victims of abuse or street workers…when I asked legislators to send me research about the claim that sex workers often come from a background of abuse, I was forwarded a letter from local anthropologist-activist Debra Boyer that incorrectly cited…a famed book on trauma research…[which] had used clinical vignettes from sex workers already in trauma treatment to illustrate the idea that survivors of child abuse are vulnerable to revictimization…[it] did not claim that a majority or plurality of sex workers came from backgrounds of abuse…Even if sex workers did have histories of sexual abuse or assault—histories that many women share, regardless of their occupations—does that mean they’re incapable of making decisions in their own best interest?…
Another shrug-inducing interview with Jami Rodman. At the risk of sounding conceited, I have to tell you there’s nothing here I haven’t covered before (and in greater detail, and far more eloquently); however, I’m still glad to see the facts of our lives getting out there from as many sources as possible, and her conclusion was strong.
…On the 18th of February, my follower count was 34,872. It started going up sharply, by about 500 a day…I remembered seeing a tweet from @Popehat from a few years ago. Someone had maliciously bought the account thousands of followers; this is something people do so they can report the account for the fakes, and try to get them kicked off Twitter. I DM’d a couple of people with experience of both being the target of online harassment and of communicating with Twitter. The response was unanimous: someone is trying to get you banned. Lock your account and start deleting the fake followers…Publishers increasingly expect authors to use social media presence to publicise their work to readers. My publisher likes that social media is embedded in my writing and that I engage with a lot of people online – without the Internet, I would never have become a writer at all…By Friday night the Twitter follower count was touching 40k with no sign of slowing. I didn’t have much choice anymore. I locked the account and started blocking the bots and declining the hundreds of follow requests from fakes coming in. This is an ongoing effort. If you have recently followed me and find yourself blocked, I apologise — there are going to be some false positives in this process…
An offence malum prohibitum…is not naturally an evil, but becomes so in consequence of its being forbidden; as playing at games, which being innocent before, have become unlawful in consequence of being forbidden. – Bouvier’s Law Dictionary (1856)
There’s a kind of contagious evil which has spread among Wisconsin politicians for the past few years; it’s a variety of the violent lie that a woman who has sex for the “wrong” reasons is a “criminal”, coupled with the rather pathetic fantasy that political mumbo-jumbo has the power to “do something” to stop a practice that existed for eons before the first politician tried to “regulate” that dangerous new thing called “fire”. This cheesy extortion scheme takes the form of a pretense that consensual sex can be “fought” by requiring escorts to buy licenses; what it actually does is allow sleazy Wisconsin cops to just arrest whatever women they want to target and charge them with not having licenses instead of actually having to, you know, prove they did anything wrong. As is typical in the modern police state, the mere accusation is enough because, as one particularly porcine individual expressed it, “they know deep down what they’re doing is wrong“. Well, that proves it, then!
Naturally, the cities which pass these odious ordinances don’t actually want or expect anyone to buy them, and they make sure nobody will by requiring background checks, fingerprinting and other cop-worship that no sane whore would ever submit to. And the reason they don’t want anyone to buy the licenses is that the fines for not having them are typically in the thousands of dollars. Here’s a recent story about the latest city to subscribe to this loathsome fad; it is, I’m afraid, a typical representation of the laws, the buffoonish rhetoric used to sell them to the public, and the stenographic journalism with which they’re typically reported:
The Eau Claire city council will take up a proposed ordinance…regarding the licensing of escort services…its real goal is to crack down on illegal prostitution…”I think that we know…that a lot of individuals who advertise as escorts are actually using the escort as a cover to engage in prostitution,” [pompous idiot Douglas] Hoffer said…escorts would be required to be licensed and follow within strict guidelines – differentiating their actions from illegal prostitution…
No, you moron; it’s not that “a lot of” escorts use the job as a “cover”; an escort IS a prostitute. Always has been, always will be. Get that through your fat head. There’s no “differentiating” because there’s no difference.
Combating prostitution has become trickier in recent years, in part to advances in social media. “Most prostitutes advertise online, using online platforms…In order to further investigate the conduct, police have to do more intensive investigations, more explicit acts, more explicit language.”
Hoffer says many communities have similar ordinances on the books…But…The Eau Claire version of the ordinance would punish the unlicensed escort, as well as the customers who purchase their services. “It isn’t just focused on supply, but also demand”…Hoffer said…
In other words, they hit upon the doubly-evil stratagem of extorting ransom from TWO victims instead of one, using another popular morally-bankrupt scheme, “end demand”. Predictably, a prohibitionist arsehole is then quoted complaining that only the buyer should be targeted, because certainly that’s the precedent for other license violations. You know, like all the times we hear about the patients being arrested when someone is found practicing medicine without a license. Applying the slightest bit of logic in comparing these “escort license” laws to other licensing laws reveals that they’re nothing more than cynical attempts to cash in on an activity Wisconsin politicians haven’t got the balls to decriminalize and simply tax, but want to profit from nonetheless. But while most yokels no doubt listen to these pronouncements with their flytraps agape, it’s good to see that some journalists (in this case, the redoubtable Elizabeth Nolan Brown) aren’t fooled for a second:
…the Eau Claire City Council is considering an ordinance that would require anyone advertising as an escort to get an occupational license from the government…police can’t just go around arresting anyone who advertises as an escort. Not yet, anyway. Ostensibly, cops must still interact with the individual and get them to agree to some sort of sexual activity for a fee…Now city officials want to change that. Under their proposed legislation, escorts and escort businesses would have to be licensed by the city and subject to extensive regulations. Any escort operating without a license would be subject to a fine of up to $5,000…Anyone attempting to hire an unlicensed escort could also be charged up to $5,000, as well…the city expects to receive “little to no applications” for such licenses. In other Wisconsin cities with similar schemes—including Milwaukee, Gree Bay, and La Crosse—no licenses have ever been granted…Now law enforcement could simply punish anyone who advertises escort services online but is not registered with the city…Eau Claire City Attorney Stephen Nick…bragged…that it would allow the city to bring in more money in fines while using fewer police resources…
In other words, it’s simply another way to accomplish the primary purpose of 21st-century policing, namely looting the citizenry, while simultaneously accomplishing the primary purpose of 20th-century policing, namely terrorizing the populace by brutalizing despised minorities. It’s a win-win for Wisconsin “authorities”, and a straight loss for anyone who believes in silly old-fashioned concepts like “justice”, “evidence”, and “presumption of innocence”.
No matter how strenuously our enemies fight to hold us down, and no matter how many cops and politicians they conspire with, we must still win in the long run. – “Hands On”
When I first wrote about International Sex Worker Rights Day five years ago, it was to lament the fact that it was only barely observed in the West, and to call for it to be more widely observed. In the intervening years, I’ve gotten what I asked for; the occasion is now celebrated by sex workers in North America and Europe as energetically as it is in Asia and Africa. As I wrote two years ago,
…Though the day caught on fairly rapidly in Asia and Africa, it was still virtually unrecognized in Europe and North America in 2008, and only barely recognized the first time I wrote about it in 2011. But it’s quickly gained ground since then; by 2012 a number of Westerners were writing about it online, and last year it seemed to get even more attention than Whores’ Day…
Last year, I observed it with my sisters by protesting outside the Washington state capitol in Olympia; since then I’ve testified against bad laws before that same legislature twice, and otherwise annoyed Seattle, King County and Washington state officials, calling them out on their lies and tyranny both in print and on television. And this week, I’m participating in Seattle’s Annual Sexwork Symposium (SASS), which we decided works better centered around this day than around December 17th (which was when the first one was held, in 2014). Last night Savannah Sly and I co-hosted a panel discussion featuring Conner Habib, Kristen di Angelo, Deon Haywood and Monica Jones, and today we’re protesting both the court proceedings against the people arrested in the TRB raid and the awful prohibitionist policies of the city, county and state in general. Tomorrow we have a health fair, on Saturday a sex worker social and Harlot’s Ball, and Sunday an art show and silent auction (in which one of the items up for bid is a dinner date with yours truly). Last year I told you that I was going to be doing a lot more hands-on activism, and as you can see I’m as good as my word. And this year I’m telling you that you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Such is the extent of the harm caused by anti-prostitution zealots that we must question whether their actions are fundamentally any less harmful than those they are seeking to “save” women from. – Laura Connelly
…the UK has a rapidly-growing “rescue industry”…that makes its living from identifying and creating victims of “sexual slavery”. It is in its interest to find them. Lots of them. In a sort of sex industry “neighbourhood watch” scheme, some Christian organisations send their congregation out on to the streets to search for sex workers that they can impose victim status upon. Other organisations have infiltrated university campuses. There’s even a “Slave Detective” offering anti-trafficking consultancy. In the face of mounting evidence that they’re doing more harm than good, people recklessly continue on their rescue missions…many do not wish to be saved. If they’re a migrant sex worker, their “rescue” can result in deportation…back to communities where they are shunned or worse still, put to death for bringing shame to their family. Far from helping…the actions of the rescue industry limit the freedom of sex workers. I’ve heard about women having their mobile phones confiscated in trafficking safe houses, to ensure they can’t sell any more sex…
…the…Western Massachusetts Human Trafficking Task Force…is striving to embody…a “paradigm shift” in moving away from law enforcement’s traditional view of those who sell their bodies as criminals or prostitutes and viewing them as victims moved by “force, threat, coercion or all of the above…Now we understand correctly and view them as as vulnerable victims”…
[Rescue industry] organizations…are urging the Ontario government to adopt a private member’s bill to take immediate action to address what they [fantasize is] a crisis. “Sex trafficking is a growing and significant issue in Ontario,” said Cynthia Bland, founder of Voice Found…“The average age when most girls are trafficked into prostitution is 14, and many don’t even recognize that they’ve been trafficked until it’s too late”…Laurie Scott has a private member’s bill that would give police the power to enforce protection orders against traffickers on behalf of the victims…The bill would also allow victims to seek compensation in court and add convicted traffickers to the province’s sex offender registry…Scott’s bill…[is] called the “Saving The Girl Next Door Act”…Ontario has become a “major hub” for human trafficking…
[Typical] Ohio cop…Justin Bentz was found guilty of [rape]…kidnapping and sexual battery. Hours before he raped the girl in June 2015, Bentz had taken a class warning of the dangers of underage sexual assault. But that didn’t stop him from making sexual advances towards the 16-year-old girl after handing her a bottle of 80-proof alcohol, allowing her to get drunk to the point where she could barely stand. However, Bentz insisted the girl had come on to him…She was found by her sister in a closet wearing only a tank top, curled up in the fetal position. Her blood alcohol content was up to .19, more than twice the .08 legal limit. A nurse determined she suffered blunt force trauma to her vaginal area. A DNA test found his semen on her stomach…
On 25 February 2016, multiple high-volume Twitter [advertising] accounts published warnings claiming that the meetup app “Down to Lunch” was a tool for human traffickers…It was an odd claim, since purpose of Down to Lunch was well documented, the app was hugely popular, and there was no information available to substantiate the allegations…on 24 February 2016, a tweet shared a screenshot of an App Store review from a few weeks earlier. The review claimed that Down to Lunch was a covert trafficking app, but the story that it offered (which featured strangers in sunglasses and trench coats, random middle-aged people crashing lunches and talking about photography, and — of course — a creepy van) wasn’t substantiated by any evidence…
A comprehensive bill that would significantly expand Rhode Island’s human-trafficking law was well received by [authoritarians]…Human trafficking is considered to be the world’s fastest-growing criminal enterprise…the legislation has already been adopted by six states, and four others have enacted partial provisions…The bill…imposes substantial penalties on traffickers and those who pay for sex with someone who is trafficked…and forfeiture of property from people involved in trafficking. That could include places that rent to massage parlors…The bill also would establish a permanent council on human trafficking to work on prevention and public awareness…The committee also heard a bill that would require sex traffickers to register as sex offenders…
And just in case you think that’s nothing to worry about, remember that all prostitution is increasingly defined as “trafficking”, and that the definition of “prostitution” is expanding:
…Under a measure passed unanimously by [Oregon] Senators…the offense of “promoting prostitution” will include…receiving goods, services, or anything of value in exchange for aiding, promoting, or “caus(ing) someone to engage” in prostitution…Lawmakers [pretend] the measure is needed in order to prosecute sex traffickers, who [they fantasize] often receive things other than cash…[even though] no one has any evidence of this happening at all, let alone frequently…Sex-worker advocates…say the measure will harm…homeless young people [who] wind up exchanging sexual favors for shelter, food, and other basic needs…Criminalizing these attempts to survive…will just make survival that much harder. While we haven’t gotten dystopian enough quite yet for cops to target conventional dating under this statute, it seems plenty plausible that it would be used to go after…”sugar baby” relationships…
…“There are a lot more of us than you think,” said Caroline McLeod…43 and a single mother of two. And, for the last eight years, she’s been a sex worker. “It is illegal and I’m doing it and it’s all good, for me…So I made a leap of faith and it’s been fabulous”…McLeod got tired of her long workweek at a startup tech job while her daughter spent the day in day care. She said she needed to find a way to provide for her kids and be there as they grew up…However, McLeod doesn’t look for her clients on the street and she doesn’t come from an abusive home like so many of the women who turn to street prostitution…She says she’s never been hurt or had problems with any of her clients, but many women in the sex trade do get roughed up. In fact, law enforcement has shifted its focus to combat prostitution…
Brianna Myers…told an audience of more than 80 the story of how she nearly became a victim of human trafficking…“We’re not here to share fear and paranoia,” said Jo Lembo…for Shared Hope International…[sow] Ariana Ridgely…[oinked that] “Small towns can be even more dangerous than a big city”…Myers offered warning signs that might identify a potential trafficker. “A guy who is always available to you is…just preying on your vulnerabilities”…someone who will [offer a girl compliments] buy her new clothes, make her salon appointments, drive nice cars or take her to big cities…is someone to be wary of, Myers said…Strip clubs are like the minor league baseball equivalent to major league prostitution, Ridgely said. And with the plethora of nude dance clubs in Portland, the city is a “hotbed for trafficking”…
So according to Myers, the only safe boyfriend is a loser who never takes you anywhere or spends any money on you. And the baseball simile may quite possibly be among the ten stupidest things ever said about sex work in the entire history of the profession.
Cindy McCain told a Senate committee…that the U.S. should be the leader in the global fight against human trafficking. “We need to recognize that we have a global problem and it calls for a global solution,” McCain said…She is…[also seeking] to [impose a “sex trafficking” propaganda regime]…in [Arizona] schools…
Sex-for-rent advertisements continue to appear online in southeast Queensland…The advertisements, some subtle, others more overt , target vulnerable women, students and backpackers…Exchanging sex for rent is not illegal in Australia provided it is consensual and does not involve coercion or violence…Gold Coast centre against sexual violence director Di Macleod said the issue had existed for many years…
They “target vulnerable women”? How, exactly? Do the ads say, “Vulnerable women only need apply”, or are prospective tenants required to pass (fail?) some sort of vulnerability test? And most importantly, when will Western society stop treating adult women as if they were wayward kindergarteners?
How do you identify sex-trafficking victims when such cases go largely undetected or unreported?…human trafficking is a lucrative industry that around the globe rakes in $150 billion…victims might be fearful of going to law enforcement and being charged with a crime…Women can be pulled in to commercial sex through gangs or pimps—the former function as delivery services, taking women to houses in the area they control, while the latter focus on hotels and street level prostitution…law enforcement…[works] to identify victims who are afraid to identify themselves.
The portrayal of cops as heroes that sex workers need to be brainwashed into being wary of is enough to make anyone who lives in the real world vomit.
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Every so often I go to put an item in one of my news columns, only to realize there’s no appropriate heading because I’ve never actually written about the subject. And every once in a blue moon, I find myself asking, “How the hell did I manage never to have written about that?” This is one of those times; though I’ve mentioned it often in passing, I’ve never actually devoted a column to the subject. “It” in this case being escort reviews. For those who have never been involved in a modern escort transaction on either side of the deal, and who haven’t paid much attention to the subject before starting to read this blog, an escort review is a lot like a Yelp review for pretty much any other commercial service; it’s a way for a satisfied customer to let others know that a service provider is a good one, and for a dissatisfied customer to warn others of scams, hidden problems, etc. The best reviews are practically love letters; the worst ones can be downright abusive. And given the nature of the service, they can often be, well, pornographic.“situations where out of the ordinary services are provided,” including blow jobs without condoms, kissing with tongue and anal sex. Koster says the site also rejects reviews without explicit sexual details…
