Hi there, boys and girls! It’s time for another anti-whore article so thoroughly and pervasively offensive that I couldn’t bear to just print a short quote and be done. Today’s example is from the prohibitionist, cop-worshipping Los Angeles Times, and was written by one James Queally (Hi James! I hope you enjoy all the tweets and emails I’m asking everyone who reads this to beseige you with, so you learn to consult sex workers next time you’re assigned to do a hit piece on us). But without further ado, let’s look at this slab of rancid tripe:
Night after night, a small group of students and professors from California State University Northridge traveled to Van Nuys last year for an unorthodox mission. In packs of two or four, they searched for young women standing on dark street corners along Sepulveda Boulevard, then waited for the men who would inevitably come calling on them. For eight months, the students and instructors followed the johns and the women they sought sex from along a stretch of the boulevard that officials consider one of the busiest prostitution strolls in Los Angeles.
“Packs” is the right word; these so-called academics actually stalked and spied on other citizens, attempting to catch them in the “crime” of having consensual sex. This could only be more dehumanizing if they shot them with tranquilizer darts and attached radio tags to their ears. If their victims were anyone other than sex workers and clients, these Stasi wannabes could be arrested and charged under stalking laws.
The Cal State group documented the places they met and where they had sex in an attempt to help police and city officials stamp out a decades-old problem…
Were Cal State a private entity, this would be an example of fascism, the marriage of corporate, political & paramilitary (such as police) power. But the fact that Cal State is a public university renders this merely creepy and unethical rather than fascistic; I’m not sure what ethical constraints “urban studies” professors operate under, but if it’s typical of social sciences this is an egregious violation of the consent of the experimental subjects.
…Based on the academic research, Councilwoman Nury Martinez said…she has launched a $780,000 program aimed at eliminating locations where johns and young women, many of whom she [fantasizes] are forced into prostitution under threat of violence…The…study identified up to 40 locations used for illegal sex that could be safeguarded by the addition of street lamps or the trimming of nearby trees…“It has to do with line of sight,” [oinked] Chief [pig] Bob Green…“When people feel like they can hide in the shadows to commit prostitution or take something from your car or steal your car, they’re gonna do it”…
I love the juxtaposition of rhetoric here; these lying sacks of shit will say whatever they think will play best with the audience, but didn’t bother to coordinate their stories. On the one hand, the politician is trying to sell this police-state BS with the typical masturbatory fantasy of teen sex slaves, while the pig prefers the old “whore as criminal” trope and equates a peaceful, consensual transaction with theft (even to the point of vomiting out the moronic phrase “commit prostitution”, which I suggest you compare with “commit teaching”, “commit accounting” or “commit policing”). Neither the reporter nor his editor seemed to be uncomfortable with the horrific phrase “illegal sex”, which only 14 years ago would have included a lot of homosexual activity and within my lifetime included interracial sex. The lack of self-awareness is almost mind-boggling.
…The project is the latest step in a years-long initiative to curb human trafficking and prostitution along Sepulveda Boulevard, Martinez said. The [politician and the pig] came together to spearhead the creation of an anti-trafficking task force in the San Fernando Valley in 2015, a unit that arrested nearly 400 johns last year…Prostitution has been a problem in the area for decades…the sight of women waiting on street corners along Sepulveda was common as far back as the 1980s. But in recent years, Martinez said she has noticed a troubling trend. The corners are now populated by girls, rather than women. “The last couple of years, the age of the women who they traffic on this corridor has gotten younger and younger and younger” she said…The victims, she said, are trafficked to Los Angeles from other major cities, including Las Vegas and Seattle…
Note the conflation of sex work with coercion, an equation only possible in the prudish & misogynistic minds of sex prohibitionists like Martinez, who wants us to believe that she actually pays such close attention to streetwalkers and has such superhuman memory and mathematical skills that she can catalog the apparent ages of women she has seen in a certain area over a stretch of three decades, average them, then plot those averages on a mental graph to note that they are growing younger. Clearly, her superior mutant mind is wasted in politics; imagine what she could’ve accomplished as a physicist or meteorologist. Alternate theory suggested by application of Occam’s Razor: Of course they look younger to the old bat than they used to; twenty-something women seemed old to her when she was a schoolgirl, and now they seem like kids. But in either case, she has to represent the sex workers as passive, doll-like victims, “trafficked” (in dog crates loaded on pallets in tractor-trailers, no doubt) by ninja “pimps” with mind-control powers. Methinks she’s been living too close to Hollywood for too long.
…Henrik Minassians, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at CSUN who led the study, said anyone trying to have sex with an underage girl would have little trouble doing so along the Van Nuys stretch…[his “evidence” is that he claims one of the women he was stalking said to him] “She can bring you underage girls”…before pointing to another woman. At least 10 trafficking victims have been rescued from the area, according to LAPD records. Five of them were just 15 years old, said Lt. Marc Evans, who [presented no evidence for the claim]…
This is what passes for “evidence” in this voyeuristic safari masquerading as science: the claim of one woman against another (who was apparently not interviewed), which could have been motivated by anything from the hope she’d be rewarded for telling these asses what they wanted to hear, to the hope of getting an enemy arrested for pimping. That, and the sexual fantasies of a pig who claims to have found five 15-year-olds but no girls of 14, 16 or 17. The McNeill Rule points toward what “Lieutenant” Evans’ favorite fetish is.
…Martinez hopes the changes will…discourage pimps who are trafficking young women in her district…Minassians said the purpose of the study was to eradicate conditions favorable to…pimps and johns…The use of environmental manipulation to disrupt illicit activity has worked well for other police agencies. When trying to find a way to combat lewd conduct and public sex in recent years, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department began using similar tactics, namely trimming trees and improving lighting, to [attempt to create a panopticon]…
Let’s conclude with the rotten heart of this loathsome screed: the treatment of sex work as a disease to be eliminated. I mean, look at the language; it sounds like they’re talking about draining a bog to get rid of mosquitoes. This is what “government” and “policing” actually mean in this country: treating human beings as animals to be managed, corralled, studied, punished and harvested (for taxes and fines), instead of citizens who have just as much right to be in public places as anyone else. The idea that it doesn’t actually hurt anyone for others to have sex in a dark place outdoors never even occurs to these Puritans; the idea that someone might be doing something where they can’t watch offends them and, apparently, frustrates their voyeuristic impulses.
Tweeted the twit: “If you want to make the city better, how about talking to #SexWorkers, find out what they want & need? #RightsNotRescue”
“Night after night, a small group of students and professors from California State University Northridge traveled to Van Nuys last year for an unorthodox mission.”
I am not much of a writer but I think that sentence makes no sense.
Maggie, I’m not sure if tweeting him will work. His Twitter page is filled to overflowing with the whole Muslim detainee at LAX story. I don’t think you can get a word in edgewise.
This is not about competing with other news or issues. This is about sex workers and their allies speaking up. And if he and other antis choose to ignore such criticism, then call him/them out on that.
And you expect ‘calling him out’ on an ephemeral digital medium will have any lasting impact? Just wait until someone who thinks they’re ‘helping’ Maggie starts sending death threats to this guy. I’m sure that will make him change his tune right quick.
The more folks who speak up on his feed, the harder it is for him to ignore. And if someone did issue a death threat, I’d be the first to condemn it.
But, if you prefer the self-inflicted paralysis of cynicism, so be it.
But they can be ignored, and they will. Unless you are willing to inflict real-world consequences involving his job or at least his professional standing, someone who can write an article like the one Maggie has dissected is not going to be swayed by digital missives from people (who might as well be anonymous) he can easily either block or tune out.
Even if I thought tweets did any good, why flood the reporter, anyway? His credulousness notwithstanding, seems to me he’s doing us a service by exposing these university people who are setting the educational profession of this country back 200 years. Why not flood their feeds?
If anything would get me to agree with the removal of all educational subsides, this is a pretty darn good reason.
Do you have a way to contact the students, based on the information in the article? And why criticize the school while letting Queally off the hook for his lousy journalism? Also, if you’re so convinced that Queally will ignore you, what makes you think the students and teacher behind this will pay attention?
You want a perfect solution in an imperfect world. Sorry, that’s not the way things work.
I know that’s not how things work. I also know that the students and teachers wouldn’t listen to tweets any more than Queally would. I was attempting to point out that, lousy as his work is, Queally wouldn’t have anything to write about if those students and teachers had been stopped from pursuing such a foolish project in the first place.
We can argue about this until the cows come home but it’ll have zero impact on your work after we’re done because I’m already on your side that sex work should be decriminalized. I’m not the one you have to convince to stop writing slanderous articles or making ridiculous safaris to street corners to gawk at their so-called ‘victims’.
I’m not looking for a perfect solution. I’m looking for an effective one. I don’t think flooding someone’s Twitter feed or e-mail box is effective. In-person direct action might be, but in the aftermath of the debacle at Berkeley, I suspect the window for that might be rapidly closing.
I also know it’s an imperfect world too. That’s why humanity is doomed to a never-ending cycle of revolution and tyranny of increasing bloodiness until we either nuke ourselves out of existence or another meteor strike does it for us.
As a long-time activist, I’ve learned that you use what tools are available to you. One person confronting another in person, and several hundreds or thousands of folks confronting the person with tweets, are not mutually exclusive. But discouraging people like you’re doing is mutually exclusive of taking whatever opportunities for action is available to you.
Discouraging you? You think I, an anonymous person on the internet, have the power to discourage you? You give me way too much power and credit.
If you don’t think you have the power to sway people … then why do you keep commenting about how much you doubt the effectiveness of this or that?
And while they are not mutually exclusive, I don’t agree that they are equally effective. Then again, I’m not a long-time activist such as yourself, so I will gladly admit that I can be wrong about most things about it.
Sorry, didn’t see your last reply. Again, I’m an anonymous person on the internet. I don’t even use my real name here. You use yours, and you have the extra clout of being a long-time activist who has actually gone out and accomplished things in the real world. People reading our exchange are far more likely to be swayed by you than by me.
This may surprise you, but I have no problem at all with that.
I apologize for answering your question with another question, but I doubt anything I’ve said tonight has swayed you, has it?
I agree something must be done, I fear it will get lost in the detritus of the refugee ban story. I am open to suggestions.
Mr. Ravenstone,
For what it’s worth, I’ve taken some time to clear my head and in all sincerity, I owe you an apology. I took out my end-of-the-week frustrations on you, and that wasn’t fair.
Accepted, thank you.
If I discovered this kind of activity going on at a campus near me, I would stalk them and put some names, addresses, photos and maybe even home or work locations online. Let’s see whom the community really hates more: people enjoying sex, or busybodies.
Bingo!
I’ll be tweeting the stupid, uniformed now but the ‘academpricks’ need sacking. Since when were students used as volunteer police?