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Guest Columnist: Sasha Castel

Posted in Guest Columns, Miscellaneous, Q & A, tagged anecdote, archeofeminism, blogging, contraception, courtesans, dating, disease, ethics, fantasy, GFE, halfway whores, marriage, naturalness, pragmatism, psychology on October 14, 2013| 26 Comments »

Soon after the publication of September’s guest column, blogger and regular reader Sasha Castel suggested that I do an essay on my beauty hints. But as I told her, that wouldn’t be much of a column because I honestly don’t have any other than “be scrupulously clean, wear your hair in an attractive style and pick clothes that flatter your figure and express your own personal style.” I know I’m very lucky in this respect, but I have excellent natural color so I don’t really require makeup unless I’m really dressing up; when I was working I never wore it unless the client was taking me out. And my hair…well, let’s just say it does what it likes anyhow and I’ve learned to live with that over the past 30 years. However, I suggested that SHE could write a beauty hints guest column…only she’s never been an escort, though she has been a mistress. Is that a kind of sex worker? Some say yes, some emphatically say no, and once again we see the absurdity of trying to draw arbitrary lines between natural female behaviors. Here’s her essay on how to be a good mistress…which not only serves as a worthy sequel to “Keep Doing What You’re Doing“, but also provides excellent advice for a courtesan, an escort with a treasured regular, or even (to a large degree) a wife whose husband fully supports her as mine does. So…what’s the real, substantive difference between these roles again? Why are some legal and some illegal? And how can any rational adult pretend that one is commendable, another is tolerable but the other constitutes “enslavement” or “crime”?

I didn’t set out to become a mistress. I met the man in question (I’ll call him Carlos) in the course of my job. He was well-known, one of the most recognized and praised opera singers in the world. We spoke, liked each other, and went out to dinner. Shortly thereafter, we went to bed, and I became “The Other Woman”. I didn’t want to marry Carlos, just enjoy his company while he was in town. He favored me with meals, drinks, occasional gifts, and most importantly, knowledge and wisdom. I learned a great deal about the music business from him, which served me well in my career. I also learned about being a mistress. Unfortunately, I can’t give advice on how to find a man (on both occasions that I’ve been a mistress, it just happened), although it behooves you to appear nicely dressed and groomed if you’re in the market. But if you do become someone’s mistress, here are seven guidelines that will make the affair a good one, for you and for him.

1. Be available.

If he calls you, go to him. In this situation, your needs are subordinate to his. What a terribly retrograde statement, but true. He is providing the material goods while you are providing the companionship; you can’t do that from a distance. Be with him as often as he wants you to be; if this doesn’t sit well with you, reconsider your position. If it’s a position of equality you want, become someone’s girlfriend rather than a mistress.

2. Be discreet.

Resist the temptation to blab to friends about your hot and powerful new lover. You don’t want to become the object of gossip, and you don’t want to cause problems with his marriage. Use a pseudonym when referring to your dates, and also when storing his number in your mobile phone. Avoid being photographed together. If you wear perfume, apply it with discretion or forego it altogether to avoid olfactory traces left behind. Be certain that all the jewelry and accessories you arrived with are with you as you leave. If you attend events together, and someone introduces you as “Mrs. Carlos”, don’t contradict, just smile and say “how do you do”.

3. Be safe.

Birth control is mandatory, obviously. The Pill or other hormonal methods are best. If you need to take other drugs while on the Pill (especially antibiotics) be aware that they reduce the Pill’s effectiveness, sometimes to catastrophic effect. Make certain you have a clean bill of sexual health before commencing sex; you don’t want to give him (or his wife) an STI. If you are having other sexual relationships at the same time (not recommended), be sure to use a condom, correctly and regularly, to prevent disease transmission. Understand that some STIs like herpes and HPV can still be transmitted through genital contact without penetration.

4. Be fun.

Get into his interests, or take up one of his hobbies, so you can have dates without necessarily involving sex. He’ll be pleased at your enthusiasm, and it takes away some of the pressure on him to perform like a sexual Superman at every encounter.

5. Be caring.

If he doesn’t want to go out, stay in. If he’s sick, take care of him. If he’s craving a food, cook it for him. And above all, LISTEN. I think that just as much as sex, what I provided for Carlos was a sympathetic ear to unburden himself. I listened. In fact, if I were to name the number-one most important quality in a mistress, it would be the ability to listen. Listen to your man, try and understand his problems, offer solutions if they occur to you, but mostly just allow him to speak his mind in a way that he can’t do with his wife. Your empathy and perspective will be as valuable to him as your sexual talents, perhaps more.

6. Be sexy.

Of course, this is the crux of the matter. If he wants to play, do it. He may have secret kinks he’s not comfortable sharing with his wife; indulge them. Does he want to role-play? Tie you up? Have a threesome? Be spanked? If it can be done safely and doesn’t repulse you or harm you, make his fantasies come true. Naturally, the usual rules of sex play apply: sane, safe and consensual. The only fantasy I’d hesitate to enact is any sort of public sex fetish, for purely practical reasons; exposure is not at all sexy.

7. Be realistic.

When it’s over, it’s over. Don’t try to hang on past the affair’s natural life. Enjoy what you had and move on. For the love of all that’s holy, don’t threaten him with exposure if he doesn’t continue seeing you. That’s psycho behavior, and it won’t make him like you: it will have quite the opposite effect. Keep the memories happy, and let him smile privately whenever he thinks of you.

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Guest Columnist: Aspasia Bonasera

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, Philosophy, tagged Africa, Aphrodite, archeofeminism, dirty, Latin America, Madonna/whore, naturalness, Nigeria, paganism, sacred prostitutes on September 9, 2013| 15 Comments »

I’m sure regular readers already know Aspasia, who is not only a regular reader and frequenter commenter, but a blogger whom I’ve linked on several occasions. In a recent correspondence she told me about Oshún; since I’m very interested in the subject of whore goddesses, I was immediately intrigued and asked if she would do this essay, and she graciously consented without any arm-twisting.

Like so many other young women these days, I began to research the old myths of ancient goddesses from all around the world during my early to mid twenties. I was always drawn to sex goddesses like Oshún, Aphrodite, Inanna, etc. We’re all kindred spirits, if you please. Their personality traits, especially those of Oshún and Aphrodite, are very similar: graciousness and generosity (and you’d do well not to anger them), unabashed femininity, sexuality, and sensuality. They display absolute authority over the power of sexuality, which was understood to be the complex thing it is and certainly not a frivolity as our anti-sexuality culture deems it to be. In the pantheon of ori (divine beings) in which Oshún is a member, she is the third most powerful after the Father God Obatalá and Mother Goddess Yemayá. Like them Oshún has a sacred color, yellow, all her own; all other orisha (spirits or gods) must share colors. Oshún isn’t known to many people outside of the Caribbean, Brazil or the Yoruba people found primarily in Nigeria and Benin (though they can also be found in Ghana and among the Krio of Sierra Leone); however, she is known and revered everywhere in the Latin Caribbean and South America where the Yoruban people were taken during the slave trade. In Cuba, where Oshún has been syncretized with Santa Cecilia (patroness of music) and La Virgin de La Caridad del Cobre, she is known as Our Lady of the Caridad del Cobre with a feast day of September 8^th. Cobre means copper in Spanish, and the precious metal figures prominently in the representation of Oshun.

Besides copper, Oshún also favors gold and all things shiny and yellow; this is similar to Aphrodite, who also favors gold and is often (though not always) depicted with golden hair. Tied around Oshún’s hips is a gourd filled with her honey, which she smears on the mouths of men whom she is trying (and always succeeding) to win over; she also smears it upon her own naked body, a frank reference to lovemaking. Similarly, there are stories concerning Aphrodite sharing her goldenness with lucky men she has chosen to be hers…for a time. Both goddesses are sea-born in some fashion with names that reflect those origins: Aphrodite (Greek for “foam-born”) rose from the sea and Oshún was named after the deep “O” sound the Earth made causing a boulder to fall into the water, which made the “shun” sound…or so one patakí (parable) of her naming tells us. She is the goddess of the “sweet” waters and indeed has a river named after her. Oshún is most revered as a goddess of sexuality, sensuality, beauty, love, money, joy, music… la dolce vita. She is the “Divine Epitome” of all that is wonderful about women and femininity, and is renowned for her beauty; in Cuba she is known as La Bella Mulata (“The Beautiful Mulatto Woman”). A patakí explaining the change in Oshún’s physical appearance in Cuba tells us that she changed her appearance to better blend in with the diverse racial mixture found there; her skin color changes from dark brown to golden honey-brown, the latter being another symbol in the representation of Oshún.

But I always noticed something missing from the typical feminist writings on sex goddesses: their whore aspect. All of the sex goddesses, with their consummate love-making skills, also have a connection to money or money-like objects or symbols and yet somehow, following the feminist mindset, never the twain shall meet. Not even within the same goddess! The PC revisions of these goddesses are a disservice to them and to any who want to know about them, even if they don’t feel the same strong pull to their service that I do. Oshún Panchagara is the whore aspect of Oshún. As with Aphrodite, modern-day revisionists avert their eyes from her frankly sexual and overtly whorish aspects and give it a gloss and polish that is absolutely misplaced. I only found out about Panchagara through a book I recently acquired in which a Cuban santero (a male practitioner of Santería; female santera) priest and “son of Oshún” (all followers of Oshún are considered her children) not only mentions this aspect but celebrates it. Baba Raul Canizares writes in Oshún: Santería and the Orisha of Love, Rivers and Sensuality:

In one of her avatars, Oshún Panchagara, she is depicted as a Holy Whore, “La Santa Puta”. This is a controversial aspect of the orisha, rejected as a New World fabrication by modern-day Yoruba revisionists and African-American feminists who feel their goddess is being degraded by depictions of her as a prostitute. These people are actually projecting their own prejudices and morality into the equation. In reality, prostitution has not always been viewed as degrading or immoral. In fact, temple prostitutes, including the famous “vestal virgins” [sic] of ancient Rome, have featured prominently in the history of ancient religions. On and off, prostitution has been legal in Cuba until the late 1960’s. It is only natural that, just as every other profession has a patron saint, prostitutes also enjoy this privilege. In her aspect as Panchagara, Oshún is at her most rambunctious, coquettish, and wild. Panchagara is La Bella Mulata on Steroids, a woman very much in control who chooses who she’ll bless with her sexual favors. Panchagara is in no way a victim, as those who object to her claim, but an empowered female who has chosen prostitution on her own terms and for her gain. Oshún Panchagara has been an inspiration to women who for whatever reason have had to engage in prostitution; she demonstrates that a human being’s sense of self-worth need not be affected by what he or she does for a living.

There is little about Panchagara online, at least nothing as honest as Canizares’ statement. The PC aversion to her frank sexuality, which Canizares also hits upon, can be found here in this article where a modern-day African-American female follower of Oshún seems to have a bad reaction to the “wrong” expression of sexuality as shown by other daughters of Oshún.

Panchagara completes the totality of Oshún. Unabashedly sexual and sensual, a love for money (she was impoverished at one time, resulting in an aversion to being poor), confident in her beauty and allure…that is Panchagara and most every other sex worker I know! As una bella mulata myself, I have a strong kinship with Panchagara. While I am not a santera, I worship Oshún in my own way. She is an endlessly fascinating goddess and saint. Baba Raul Canizares and Migene Gonzalez Wippler are both Cuban and have a wealth of knowledge of Oshún in the Santería/La Religion Lucumi tradition, which is the one that has influenced my worship of Oshun the most. Panchagara is an aspect of Oshún that must not be left out.

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Guest Columnist: Kevin Wilson

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, tagged blogging, bogus studies, Canada, disease, harm reduction, law, neofeminism, prohibitionist myths, psychology, statistics, streetwalkers, underage on August 12, 2013| 15 Comments »

So far, all of my guest columnists have been female; this month I have the pleasure of presenting my first male guest columnist (other than my husband). Kevin is a graduate student in epidemiology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia; he’s also a professional research consultant, which means he gets paid to help people design and conduct their research. I thought you might enjoy reading what an actual scientist had to say about the state of sex work research.

I first came across The Honest Courtesan a little over a year ago after Maggie’s stint as guest-blogger for Radley Balko. Some of the first columns that grabbed my attention were on the topics of bogus research on sex work and baseless numbers feeding malicious public policy, for obvious reasons. Initially I was unconvinced that the field of sex work research was as bad as all that; “Surely, these are just a few hand-picked, exceptionally bad examples”, I thought. I did a review of studies completed to date here in Canada, which has since branched out to the international literature as well. To my surprise, Maggie’s characterization was spot on; studies on sex work often suffered from major flaws that made it hard to take their findings seriously. This was even more surprising considering the fact that research on sex work was no new field; it’s been going on for decades.

Research on a topic rarely starts with expansive, large-scale studies that answer all of our questions on a subject in a single salvo; in young fields, small-scale, low-cost studies help bridge the gap between idle guessing and establishing the first facts about an under-investigated topic. As time goes on, the facts generated from such research are used to develop new hypotheses, which are then tested with more elaborate and rigorous methods. What starts with case studies or focus groups eventually develops into large-scale cross-sectional surveys to accurately portray the population, cohort studies that follow participants for years at a time to establish cause and effect relationships, and eventually systematic reviews and meta-analyses that objectively review what is known about a given topic. As a field adopts increasingly rigorous methods, we can have greater confidence in what we know about the subject. Unfortunately, research on sex work has shown a staggeringly slow progression up this hierarchy of evidence.

One of the first things I noticed when surveying the literature on sex work was the overwhelming number of opinion pieces and editorials, which normally make up a tiny portion of articles published in academic journals. In comparison, authors can routinely be observed arguing for shades of decriminalization and prohibition of sex work in the pages normally reserved for such tedious things as methodological advances and results from new studies. The politics of sex work intrude into the realm of science to an astonishing degree, and I think this is one of the two main causes of the slow rate of advancement in sex work research. As Maggie has pointed out more times than I can count, one side of the debate on the legality of sex work has a vested interest in portraying workers (and clients) as inherently dysfunctional; mass-producing hatchet jobs draped in academic garb is simply a means to that end. Many such “studies” are so poorly designed that anyone picked off the street at random could pull them apart in minutes; they’re a slightly more elaborate version of asking someone whether they’ve stopped beating their wife. The end result is that the academic literature is a minefield of guesswork and kabuki dance posing as, and hidden amongst, earnest attempts to better understand the industry and the people in it.

Aside from the counter-productive dishonesty in the field, the other major limiting factor on the quality of sex work research is that it is really and truly hard to do. The criminalization of sex work in many jurisdictions around the world makes recruiting large numbers of sex workers extremely difficult. Likewise, the social stigma, potential for police to seek workers’ confidential data, and the risk of encountering an unethical quack all likely act to chill sex workers’ willingness to trust researchers enough to participate in studies.

The difficulty in recruiting for studies limits the options of honest investigators. Here in Canada, sex work studies with fewer than 100 participants are par for the course; even recruiting fewer than 50 was relatively common less than a decade ago. This is important because the size of a study’s sample determines how precise the estimates the study generates can be; the more participants an analysis includes, the smaller the margin of error for the results. To put it another way, investigating a population with small samples is like looking at something out of focus; you’re sure something is there, and may even be able to make some educated guesses about what you’re seeing, but the fine details elude you.

Worse still, samples are almost always made up primarily or entirely of street-based “survival” sex workers recruited from addiction rehabilitation programs, which are used as convenient points of contact by researchers. This method means that what is known of the industry is heavily biased towards the most visible and most marginalized segment of the market; the segment where rates of violence, substance abuse, and early age of entry tend to be highest. The low-profile indoor market, which is generally estimated to make up ≈85% of workers (though we have no hard data with which to confirm this in Canada), is vastly under-represented in the literature. Even when indoor workers are included in studies, the sampling hasn’t been designed to represent the sex worker population as a whole, meaning that even our most detailed picture of the industry is blurry and incomplete.

Despite everything you’ve just read I’m still optimistic about the future of the field for two reasons. The first is that the composition of the people doing the research has changed a lot in the last thirty years. While the appearance of HIV/AIDS was a huge political setback for the sex workers’ rights movement, it does appear to have attracted a new group of researchers, and much more rigorous methods, to the fray. My review of the literature leads me to believe that, prior to the 1990s, most work done in the field was in disciplines such as Sociology, Criminology, Political Science and even the dreaded Women’s Studies; terms like feminism and patriarchy can be seen in actual, straight-faced research papers. Epidemiologists and public health researchers began entering the field at some point after that, often tackling sex work research by investigating sexually transmitted infections, addictions issues, and the effect of public policy on workers’ health and safety. Instead of engaging the topic from a political perspective, most modern sex work studies have adopted the dry, technical language and emphasis on coherent, replicable methods that one might expect from proper research. Harm reduction has long-replaced feminism as the dominant framework seen in the literature. The changes haven’t merely been superficial; whereas the studies of thirty years ago recruited <50 participants in one-off focus groups, some modern studies track over 500 sex workers for years at a time. In countries where HIV/AIDS is more endemic (e.g., India), studies recruit workers by the thousand. In short, researchers in the field of sex work are now putting in the hard work needed to get serious, credible answers to the most basic questions in the field; this isn’t the only recent change, though.

The second cause for optimism is the ongoing development and adoption of methods that enable researchers to circumvent some of the barriers to large-scale and representative recruiting of workers for studies, and for the first time put sex work research on par, quality-wise, with other fields. Even the hardest-to-reach participants in the industry (e.g., underage workers) can now be efficiently recruited into large, representative samples that allow for accurate estimates of population size and structure; for the first time, we can credibly answer basic questions such as ‘How many sex workers are there?’, ‘How many work indoors versus outdoors?’, and ‘How many enter the trade underage?’.

It’s probably fair to say that, historically, the sex workers’ rights movement and the academic study of the industry haven’t had a good relationship; much of the time the field has seemed to be implicitly working for the other team. Nevertheless, as the objectivity and quality of research improves, and as we learn more about the industry as a whole, fabricating “facts” about sex work becomes less and less effective a tool for pushing dangerous, wrong-headed policies. As was the case when Canada’s sex work laws were tested in the Supreme Court earlier this year, the ability to decisively cut-down prohibitionist myths in real-time and in front of a panel of judges can be a powerful tool in fighting for sex workers’ rights.

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Guest Columnist: Onioja (Part Two)

Posted in Biography, Guest Columns, Perception, tagged Africa, Catholicism, ethics, genitalia, GFE, naturalness, Netherlands, Nigeria, paganism, racism, sex work is work, witchcraft on July 9, 2013| 18 Comments »

This is the second part of the story of a Nigerian sex worker in Amsterdam; if you missed the first part yesterday, I urge you to go back and read it first before continuing. I did as little editing as possible because I wanted to allow Onioja her own authentic voice, and the postscript is absolutely verbatim at her request.

An immigrant’s life is hard in any case, but if you come from a country like mine with a dubious reputation in this part of the world, the problems are almost insurmountable. Even in this relatively tolerant country with many official so-called integration programs and requirements for immigrants, every new arrival is marginalized and stigmatized. You feel it right away at border control; the officer is polite and friendly, but despite your visa, your passport is turned inside out and you must show every piece of legal identification paper you have and explain your plans. If you’ve never experienced them, the problems of migration are hard to grasp. It requires enormous courage to leave family and friends behind, but you do it because of dreams and illusions of opportunity that override rational doubts. Unfortunately, my culture is dominated by irrational beliefs and superstitions such as voodoo and belief in evil spirits that can only harm and hurt people. So though I work hard to keep it under control, I also run on fear and worry about evil that may hurt me. I wish I could get rid of it, but it is in my blood like my faith in God; to counterbalance it I nurture love, kindness, and honesty, and I am hungry for logic.

Only some of my colleagues know that I’m a practicing Christian, and some of those who do ask how I can practice a faith that condemns my work as a mortal sin. I say that I don’t practice a faith, I practice life; they don’t understand because they don’t understand what faith is. Faith is irrational. So I choose to go to church to get together with other faithful people to pray and sing in a service that honors God, but I rarely care for what pastors have to say; instead, I use the service for reflection. Being baptized and raised as a Catholic doesn’t mean I signed an agreement with that church to be docile and obedient; I’m not about to be held hostage. Faith doesn’t keep me from using my brains so that I remain stupid and blind to all possibilities, and my brain sees no conflict between sex work and the Lord’s message to love all other people. In fact, sex work lets me use my God-given talents for other people’s benefit better than any job I’ve had.

It also lets me turn liabilities into advantages. For example, in accordance with the tradition in my country I was fully circumcised at such an early age that I have no memories of it; this may be one reason that I’ve never been much drawn toward having sex for my own pleasure. But I don’t miss what I have never had, so to speak, and being circumcised seems to help my work because I don’t get easily distracted when I service clients. After so many years and different clients, I can count on one hand those who have said or shown in some way that they notice the circumcision. Many eyes have been up close, and many fingers have touched me there, but though I look and feel quite different from a woman with intact genitals I’ve had very few reactions. So I often wonder how much real affinity most men have for their partners’ bodies. It’s telling that those who noticed also asked about my other erogenous zones and how to sensitize them; many men don’t seem to know we have other erogenous zones than genitals and nipples.

Because of my superstitions I don’t advertise on the internet or through social media; it would expose me to evil spirits beyond my control. So I had to invent and develop casual methods to meet the right men in places where they usually hang out for leisure, and become accepted there as a black, single, migrant woman. I decided it was better for my work to be myself, an authentic black woman, rather than an inauthentic white woman with a black skin. So I dress in Nigerian gear, wearing Nigerian accessories, bring my music, dance tribal women’s dances with booty shaking and lap work, and talk my language when we make love. My favorite trick to loosen and warm up clients is bringing homemade food such as fufu, which is made to be eaten from a bowl with your fingers, sitting on the floor and no napkins. Getting messy with their fingers and lips breaks the white pattern of what is civilized, and sets the mood for being more “natural”. In their daily life, my Dutch clients are completely removed from nature, which means that having sex comes to them in a more roundabout way than to men back home; they love it of course, but compared to the average man in my country, sexual embarrassment and Puritanism is in this people’s genes. By my standards they’re a bit uptight and formal even when they are at leisure and buttoned down; wouldn’t it be boring if I would only mimic the habits of their culture and not mix in my own?

Sometimes I think that my work gives me the chance to act as a kind of ambassador for integration; I think that if all migrant sex workers did such things, it would make our work even more valuable. Of course, true integration requires those from both cultures to leave their comfort zones and mingle somewhere half way: while white cultural DNA has acquired a sort of anti-black gene, blacks don’t naturally go for the whites either, so while I’m exposing them to our ways I’m also learning to get a handle on theirs. I listen to what they tell and ask, and how they react to what I say and do. My work has thus opened the door to a real understanding of a society so different from my own. I’m also working on integrating and overcoming prejudice, stigmatization, and marginalization in my life outside of work; for example, my kids are in school and I am acquainted with some other mothers. Now and then my kids play after school with kids from Dutch-born parents, but there are also mothers and even teachers who simply neglect me when I say hello. So it’s a long, slow process, and my work has helped me more to move forward than anything else.

Doing sex work for just over six years has made it possible for me against all odds to accomplish what I wanted. I bridged the abyss between my culture and social class – the lowest of the lowest – and this culture. I am now pretty well integrated. I am on the level where the rule has become the kind of personal contacts that leads to an invitation like this – telling my story. I am appreciated and respected, and so is my work; I often get thank-yous and compliments for my performance. I don’t come cheap but I know that my fee is totally appropriate for the quality of my services and my personality. And here is the best part: by doing sex work – in total freedom, the way I want it – I am slowly achieving what I’ve always wanted. And that is, having children in the best possible situation, as part of a society to which we belong, with real opportunities to achieve our goals. If my kids should fail, it’s not for lack of freedom and opportunities. This is what sex work has brought me; no other way of life could have made it possible. Praise the Lord. Amen.

Postscript: Thank you, Maggie McNeill, for this opportunity. Your invitation first scared me, but saying yes and doing the work has been a breakthrough in getting my superstition dismantled. AND I discovered that I have a long story to tell. This is just the beginning. God bless you. I am not a writer (although I might become one), but this dear client gave me generously all the help I needed for now. I owe you a good one, baby!

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Guest Columnist: Onioja (Part One)

Posted in Biography, Guest Columns, Perception, tagged Africa, archeofeminism, dirty, naturalness, Netherlands, Nigeria, pimps, pragmatism, psychology, restaurants, sex work is work on July 8, 2013| 87 Comments »

When a regular reader in Amsterdam mentioned that his regular escort was a Nigerian immigrant, I asked him to ask her if she would be interested in telling her story. The “trafficking” narrative represents such women as passive victims, so I thought it would be very enlightening to hear her point of view in her own words. She was at first slightly reluctant because she isn’t used to writing, but I think she did such a marvelous job that I did as little editing as possible. I’ve allowed her two full days because her story is not only interesting, but important.

I’m Onioja, a Nigerian migrant. I have serious ambitions to build a good life for myself and for my kids in this wealthy white world. That’s the whole reason why I left my country, fourteen years ago, all by myself. For the first seven years I worked as a housekeeper, hotel maid, babysitter, janitor, dishwasher, kitchen prepper, model, dancer, receptionist, or other odd jobs, and in all that time I was never asked for my story; now I’ve been a top tier escort for almost seven years (at least ten times longer than any other job I’ve had), and I get this request. Why? Not because I’m a successful sex worker, I think, but because doing sex work has made me a successful migrant.

For my first three years in Europe I roved from country to country and city to city, like a lonely animal looking for the best place to build her nest and have babies. I began in Paris and saw cities like Dublin, London, Milan, Berlin, Copenhagen, and others before settling in Amsterdam when I was done with traveling and searching. For the next four years I worked sweat and blood in the same jobs, but now locked inside the same one square kilometer; it made me more miserable and depressed, but I couldn’t afford the traveling to move on. I was just barely surviving, making tiny steps forward, one toe before the other. Like most migrants I felt marginalized and stigmatized, unwelcome and exploited, only useful because we are good at cleaning up after others. I didn’t just feel like a servant, but like a machine switched on and off for one mindless activity after the other. I was a prisoner between other prisoners, black migrants like me, ordered around by mostly white managers and supervisors, with rarely a thank you. Economically and socially, we aren’t much better off than back home; we may live in a wealthy country, but always in a sort of hopeless, energy-draining servitude that won’t allow us to integrate and move upward.

The reality is that a new life in a new country doesn’t start at point zero but somewhere around minus one hundred; unless you’re college educated or well trained and certified in a certain profession, it’s practically impossible to find anything better than menial labor. You don’t know the language or how to get around, and to get any job you depend on people from your own country who’ve lived there long enough that they do, and expect to be paid for their help. But when I looked at these know-it-alls, I wondered why they themselves didn’t have what I consider a good life. Why, after living here for years, didn’t they have a single native friend? Why didn’t they speak the language well? Why didn’t they live in white neighborhoods among white people? Why did I see the same poverty and tribal hierarchies I had left behind transferred to a wealthy country? I soon understood that those guys couldn’t help me, and that staying with my own people in their ghetto would effectively kill my ambitions; so, I said goodbye and made myself untraceable. I cautiously plotted my future, taking great care not to make one wrong step; I found myself jobs and gigs, worked myself into the legal system, got all the papers I could get, began paying taxes so that I was entitled to social benefits, and began learning the language in a program for migrants. After one year I passed the exam as the best of the group and was rewarded with the full restitution of my tuition. But the whole process was grueling, and for seven hellish years it looked as if I would never get another opportunity to be myself; I slowly lost my optimism and energy, and my willpower was slowly eaten up. To force my luck, rescue my spirit and boost my resilience so that I wouldn’t give up, I decided to have a child and be a single mother. I didn’t want to marry and become a man’s possession, which would make things worse, but somehow I found a man who was willing to secretly father my children and then back away. And finally, six months after my first child was born, the Lord came to my rescue.

I’d known the owner of my temp agency for about two years, and he was hot for me; this had been my good fortune because it got me to the top of his menial-labor girls. He missed no opportunity to call me in for things we could have arranged over the phone, and I always went because I depended on his favor. I always played with the sexual tension; over the years I learned all sorts of tricks to get work from guys and keep it, but I never surrendered my one big advantage. Guys wanting to get into my panties never offered me cash but promised me paradise. Sure! Their paradise would make me even more dependent and miserable. So I never surrendered, not because I was a good girl but because I was a shrewd bitch who beat them at their own games. Well, one day when we were arranging my next gig, chatting and flirting as usual, he asked me out for dinner, telling me his wife was out of town (in other words, he wanted to sleep with me). I declined in a way that wouldn’t offend him or hurt his feelings, but then out of the blue, he said he was willing to pay me! Pay me for what? For taking me out to dinner? A voice told me to think it over, so I said I would let him know within twenty-four hours.

That night I couldn’t make a decision, but early next morning he reached me at the prep station in my restaurant; he was eager and said he hoped for a yes from me. I heard myself say, “You’re saying that it’s up to me?” I believe that the good Lord inspired me to say this; it was His sign that He had turned the tables. He flashed my future as a sex worker before my eyes, and it was a good future. Right then and there I realized I had become an independent free woman, and I also saw why: sex made guys dependent on me. They may control the world, but sex is their Achilles heel; if I played it right, sex work would give me control of my life. The restaurant prepper who now talked to the agency owner was a different woman; she didn’t know yet how it would work, but she knew exactly what to say. I took him to the restroom to talk discreetly, and asked him point blank, “Were you planning on paying to have sex with me?” After two seconds of silence he said yes, and I said, “Okay,” very casually as if it was routine. I knew I was now on top of the guy on who my life depended, no longer the other way around. We discussed his wishes and the services I provide; I dictated my rate and further conditions such as no smoking and for me no alcohol, and he accepted. I said I would meet him at the restaurant of his choice. God knows where this all came from. The following evening when it was all over, he was happy with my services and I was in a kind of shock: three hours of work under my control had earned me as much as almost two weeks of humiliating servitude. Sex work would be the God-given way out of being exploited and pimped, and into a life of freedom and dignity.

Now, I’ve heard stories, facts and rumors about pimps but have no first-hand experience because in sex work I never dealt with one and never will. I know pimping is illegal here, but isn’t the migrant labor I suffered a legal form of pimping? Don’t legal businesses make the same big profits as illegal pimps by having us work minimum wage under humiliating circumstances? What’s the difference here? Did I have a real choice to refuse a job? No. It is human exploitation and labor abuse at its worst, but socially permissible because local business depends on it; only in the sex industry it’s criminal because sex work is said to be “dirty”. But sex work can be a God-sent gift; as a sex worker I have dignity and command respect, not because I am a good sex worker but a good human being. Also, going through the long, slow process of learning the business by trial and error, inch by inch, has done more for my independence and integration than the work itself. It took a year and a half until my sex career was so solid that I could give up menial labor altogether; I cut back on it gradually and my agency owner really helped me, not only by being my first client (who was loyal for years afterward), but also by handing me jobs I could combine with being a mother and sex work.

Sex work has also allowed me to express my true personality. Back home I used to pretend to be shy and modest; I was afraid to draw attention. But that’s not me at all! I have a very big ego, maybe too big, and the clients I love being with most are powerful men with big egos, because I love being challenged as much as I love challenging them. It makes the game so much more satisfying and fun, and has made my mind more intelligent. Every day I am grateful to God that He guided me to this work and brings me the kind of clients I need to be more and more part of this culture, which is really my long-term goal. Good, challenging clients help me to develop the qualities that help me become socially more and more independent, in particular independent from doing sex work; though I love doing it, it’s only a stage in my life and I have to look ahead to the time I will eventually have to give it up. I may be a successful migrant but I am still vulnerable, so sex work is only part of my long term vision to integrating in Dutch culture to ensure my future and that of my kids.

In tomorrow’s conclusion, Onioja talks about some of the specific difficulties she faced, how she overcame them and her hopes for the future.

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Guest Columnist: Sarah Woolley

Posted in Current Events, Guest Columns, Perception, tagged agency denial, animals, BDSM, domestic violence, internet, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, porn, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rape, stereotypes, Swedish model, Twitter, United Kingdom on June 10, 2013| 31 Comments »

Last month’s guest column by Kelly Michaels was so well-received I’ve decided to make it a regular feature on the second Monday of every month. And as soon as I made that decision I knew exactly whom I wanted to ask first: Sarah Woolley, whose writing I’ve linked twice before in TW3 columns. Sarah is a freelance writer who is one of the rare non-whores who “gets it” so completely that she is a valued ally; her essays are not only bang-on perceptive, but also sparkle with the sort of dry English wit that makes her a joy to read.

Rhoda Grant, MSP has published the responses to her consultation on the proposed criminalisation of sex workers’ clients in Scotland. The response from the Paisley Branch of Amnesty International (which supports criminalisation) is receiving a lot of attention for how it was presented and everything that is wrong with it. Jemima101‘s analysis includes a response from Amnesty to say that Paisley’s statement “doesn’t reflect Amnesty’s position. We’ve not commented on the Bill.” Jemima’s piece also lists the human rights groups that support decriminalisation. Meanwhile, Jewel examined the prejudices in Paisley’s statement, and its tendency to use second hand anecdotal evidence, including an employee of a women’s prison who spoke with:

…a young woman who had experienced prostitution of her own volition. The young woman was adamant that she was not a victim and that it had been her choice. Without wishing to patronise her in any way, her forearms were covered in so many scars it was impossible to see any unmarked flesh. To those of us who have been fortunate to have had a (fairly) stable childhood, where abuse has not damaged our understanding of bodily boundaries, her defence of “not being a victim” has a hollow ring.

It is possible to tackle the prejudices in this statement without refuting the existence of individuals with abusive backgrounds. However, it is difficult to do this because abolitionists use discussions of childhood and mental health problems to silence and dismiss sex workers.

The Paisley statement gave me déjà vu for the last time I poked my pretty head into a Q&A session at the Guardian where Naomi Wolf was discussing “What Women Want”. Personally, I want a feminist discussion that won’t hinge upon vajazzles, Barbies, advertising and other La La lands but I’m prepared to make baby steps. Step one is for wider criticism of glib statements like this:

Slow down, Wolf, slow down.

To be fair to Wolf, I too started to think of porn differently after a spurious correlation came to my attention when my favourite Tumblr – “Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn” – alerted me to the high percentage of women who were Crazy Cat Ladies before entering the industry. (Insert pussy joke here). Providing data (I don’t see any coming from Wolf or Paisley) to back up a claim for its own sake is one thing, but using that statistic to critique sex work as an automatically negative outcome of that abuse? I call shenanigans.

Those who investigate or make assumptions, concerning the childhoods of marginalised groups – be they pornographers, kinksters or queer folk – are renowned for already knowing what they want to hear. Namely that no woman in her “right mind” would do that, so we have to discover what made her that way. That’s why there is little call to sift through the childhoods of lawyers and deep sea fishermen. Arguing that sex work is inherently symptomatic of pain leaves those with abuse-free childhoods wondering what induced them into such a terrible career. Was it their parents’ divorce? Were they bitten by an angry stripper as a youth?

Not everyone will thrive in sex work, whether they were abused or not, but discrediting a woman’s choices with one piece of information only stigmatises abuse. I believe that survivors have a right to mature into their own sexual identity and it’s not our call to say which form it should take in the interest of psychological health. Claiming that a sex worker was “probably molested” is familiar to us under the guise of misplaced concerns and punch lines. Take, for example, these Twitter gems:

Gosh. Twitter sure is a handy way of deciding who can’t touch my food.

Presenting rape as a fundamental element to what made a porn star “that way” discourages everyone, not just the woman in the Paisley statement, from discussing the nuances of life after abuse. When survivors contemplate “coming out” they make a decision that concerns far more than “am I ready to make this step?” Comments like the above are examples of the prejudices they will be exposed to when a Wolf in sheep’s clothing refuses to see their lives through anything other than a broken lens. Abused as a child? Want a tattoo? Prepare to discuss whether or not it’s an integral part of “reclaiming your body” or a form of self-harm. And no, you’re not allowed to just think tattoos are awesome. When a woman deviates from what’s “normal” it’s comforting to dismiss her with psychopathology. Charlotte Shane at Tits and Sass responded to those who regard all sex worker past as prologue with this: “Bottom line: Not all sex workers were molested or beaten or criminally mistreated while growing up. Some of them were, just like some doctors and some teachers and some plumbers were.” In other words, the abuser is always the problem. Not the vocation. If someone feels compelled to join an industry to which they aren’t suited, we should ensure that our society isn’t closing off other opportunities with society’s habit of using a sex worker’s resume as a weapon against their reputation. If Wolf and the Paisley Branch want to derive some significance from shaky studies that suggest more abused women sell sexual services than frozen bananas, they need to recognise the women who can reconcile consensual sex with an abusive past. Even if that consent is on camera. Not doing so is just as damaging as denying that some sex workers identify a negative link between their job and their history of abuse.

Some performers will have to stop working because their past catches up with them. Only those women can say if it was their job that was triggering bad memories or something as mundane as a perfume that blindsided them as they waited for a bus. When it comes to triggers, no one gets to choose what penetrates them. There will also always be people for whom sexual spaces, commercial or otherwise, are sanctuaries. No job application should be motivated by a therapeutic need, but it’s a bonus when a community benefits a person’s life. Although she doesn’t work in porn, xoJane’s Emily McCombs has written about enjoying taboo sex in a life after sexual trauma. Emily writes that “A lot of factors go into the creation of a fetish” and one of those for her is “almost certainly trauma”. For her, this element doesn’t make it a foregone conclusion that controversial sex is non-consensual and damaging.

When it comes to the anonymous woman described by the Paisley Branch, the finer points regarding how she feels her experiences inform her choices is not an insight we’ll gain from talking over her. I’m going to wager that explicit imagery doesn’t, as Wolf suspects, “Desensitise people to the humanness” of sex workers. However, we do diminish a woman’s humanity when we demand, regardless of how she perceives things, that the price of her past must be her future.

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Guest Columnist: Kelly Michaels

Posted in Biography, Guest Columns, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, anecdote, dehumanization, domestic violence, ethics, Florida, holidays, Hollywood, law, Madonna/whore, marriage, pragmatism, psychology, restaurants, sex rays, stereotypes, underage on May 12, 2013| 46 Comments »

In observance of Mother’s Day, I wanted to address one of the viler applications of the Madonna/whore fallacy, namely the practice of officially abducting the children of sex workers by branding them “unfit parents” on the strength of nothing but the fact that they are sex workers. But I knew that nothing I could write would have the impact of my friend Kelly’s telling of her own story, to which the rest of today’s column is dedicated.

I became involved in the Sex Industry at the age of fifteen, living alone on Fort Lauderdale beach; it’s a haven of teenage prostitution and provided the means for me to take care of myself. I was too young to have a job in Florida without my parents signing, and having no parents meant having no job. For me it was an easy transition from men that fed me and gave me a place to sleep in exchange for sex, to men directly paying me for sex. Even at that early age sex was a commodity that I controlled, and I viewed it as both an industry and a science. But an arrest prompted me to leave that life to marry my husband. I became a mother in 1993 and again in 1996 and 2001; I stayed home and raised those children for thirteen years.

Then in 2007 the housing market crashed; my husband lost his job and could not find another. Christmas was approaching and we were about to lose our home, when after another fruitless day of job-hunting he asked me through tearful eyes to put in ads as an escort again. I wasn’t alone; as the economy continued to decline, more and more women were turning to sex work to make ends meet, and not as reluctantly as you may think. For me, sex work improved my self-esteem and financial position enough that divorce seemed possible for the first time; I had already tried to escape that marriage twice through domestic violence shelters, but they could never help me become economically sound. And now I was thinking of divorce even more: my husband’s jealousy of my growing independence had incited his rage, and he was arrested twice for domestic violence.

The first time his parents quickly bailed him out, but by the second time they were angry at his lack of self control. He thought quickly and told them that his rage had been incited by the “discovery” that I was working as a prostitute; this shocked them into sympathy. No longer was he the villainous wife-beater; suddenly he was viewed only as a whore-beater, and that wasn’t nearly as bad. He didn’t mention that it was his idea, or that he had answered client emails pretending to be me while I visited other clients. His parents told him that the only way that they would bond him out this time was if he took our children and placed them on a plane to his brother (whom the children had never met) in another state. He agreed, and on July 8, 2008 he and his family began a campaign to keep the dirty whore from being anywhere near the children. And it worked: at first the state took custody from both of us, he for domestic violence and me for prostitution, but he quickly signed a case plan and “cooperated”, while I plead not guilty and chose to go to trial; this made me the “hostile” parent.

For five long years I held faith in the justice system…Five years with no school pictures, teacher conferences or chaperoned field trips. Five years of Mother’s Days with no breakfast in bed. I really believed that when the case came to court and a Judge heard about the way that my husband had continued his abusive behavior, the ordeal would be over. Surely the judge would look badly on my husband’s completely withholding visitation from me for six months despite a court order. Surely when the court heard that in his two years of custody he had never taken them to a doctor or dentist, or provided them with the glasses the two younger ones needed, they would be returned to me. Surely when they heard the sad stories that the children recount of living in their father’s home, they would be removed from there. But it didn’t work out that way, because I was a sex worker.

I did not realize at first that the court officials were totally on his side; they expedited his case and delayed mine to ensure that his was finished first, thus earning him reunification with the children. He also left the filing of the divorce papers to me, which delayed matters still further because I knew by that point I would need a good lawyer. I stopped working as an escort and began working as a tantric instructor, but my lawyer told me I had zero chance of reunification doing any kind of sex work; I therefore opened a catering company which moved into a restaurant over the next year and a half. The court had investigators crawling in and out of my restaurant and interviewing my employees, but never bothered to verify that my husband really had a job nor to ask why he hadn’t filed tax returns for over ten years. When it came to trial, the head investigator reported that my restaurant was “questionable” because I subleased the kitchen of an existing pub; she also told the judge that if my work as a tantric instructor wasn’t prostitution, “It is something similar to prostitution.” It didn’t matter that it had been more than a year since I had been involved in that, or that I admitted being previously involved; once a dirty whore, always a dirty whore. Needless to say, the court awarded him full custody. I haven’t finished fighting, though, and as he continues to neglect the children, I will continue to drag this case back to court to ask why I was never considered a “real option” in spite of the details of emotional abuse and neglect that continues in their father’s home.

Maggie was there all along, listening with a sympathetic ear and helping me to understand that the details of the case were not what mattered; she helped me understand that the stated purpose of family court (which of course is to “protect the children”) is not at all what they are truly interested in. When it comes to sex workers, keeping the status quo and punishing the dirty whore was the objective, not only in my case but in many others. The more I saw this theory proven, the more I wondered why more attention is not paid to the issue of families and custody within the sex worker rights movement; I personally found no organizations offering support for custody issues and vowed to change that. I began to notice the reinforcement of the negative stereotype of sex workers on television, and began to contemplate the way that this programming influences decision makers like guardians ad litem, who have little to no education or experience with sex workers. With that I began a Kickstarter project to produce a documentary film in which I will share my experience as a sex worker dealing with family court, and to dispel myths about sex work by looking at my life as I embark upon a typical tour.

This Mother’s Day, I propose that we take a closer look into sex work and the family court; let’s think not only about the rights of sex workers, but of the children that love them and are needlessly removed from their parents. Porn Stars have the right to custody. Strippers have the right to custody. Why should escorts be treated any differently? Sex work should not be considered in custody decisions when it does not affect the children directly, and we as a group need to stand up to demand unbiased treatment in custody decisions. Please visit “Whoremom” at Kickstarter.com to support my effort to educate the public on the reality of being a whore-mom in the state of prohibition.

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A Visit to Soapland

Posted in Call types, Guest Columns, tagged anecdote, brothels, East Asia, Japan on October 21, 2011| 88 Comments »

One year ago today I published a short history of prostitution in Japan, in which I mentioned that there were many different types of brothels, including bathhouses with sexual services; these are called “soaplands” and they are extremely popular. Well, as it turns out my husband was recently in Japan on business and his host invited him and another gentleman from his company to go along with him to a soapland; he told me about it when he returned and we both felt my readers might be interested in a first-person account of what goes on there. So I’m turning the rest of this column over to him (except for a few concluding remarks from me at the end); if you have any questions just ask them in the comments, and I’ll try to get him to answer them as soon as possible (though it may be next weekend before he manages it).

The soapland we visited was in a largely-residential urban neighborhood where there were several such places, but some are not open to gaijin so we drove around a little until the doorman of one of them flagged us down and showed us a parking place. We exchanged our shoes for slippers at the door, then he took us into an anteroom. The manager greeted us and told us the price (10,400 yen, about $135 US), then asked each of us what sort of girl we would like and took us one at a time beyond a partition to show the girl he thought would best suit that man’s preference; it was much more discreet than the lineups at Nevada brothels. I didn’t care for the first one he showed me, but the second one looked like a Japanese version of Maggie dressed in a slinky gown and high heels, so I was quite happy with her.

She took my hand and escorted me to the third floor; her English was good enough (in combination with sign language) that she could communicate sufficiently for the situation. The room to which she brought me had a normally-floored section where we came in, then the rest of it was like a very large, sunken shower floor with brown tiles. To my right there was a shelving unit with a small dorm-type refrigerator and to my left a massage table; the sunken section had a large Roman-style tub filled to the brim with water. She had me get undressed and put my clothes in baskets she gave me, then she undressed as well and I waited while she got her things ready for the session. After a couple of minutes she called me to come down and had me sit on a stool whose seat was actually two pads with a large gap between so as to expose the whole crotch area.

She turned on the water in the tub, and it immediately started overflowing onto the tile floor. Next, she used a flexible shower fitting to wash my crotch, then scrubbed me completely from head to toe with a scrubby and a strong but pleasant-smelling soap. After washing herself in the same way, she told me to get in the tub; the water was the perfect temperature. She got in the tub with me, sitting between my legs facing me, and rubbed a soft sponge without soap all over my skin; she then started masturbating me underwater, and after I adjusted my position so she wouldn’t have to duck her head under the water she used her mouth for a few minutes as well. That was just a preliminary, though; she got out of the tub, moved the stool aside and brought out an air mattress with a lip running around the edge; it was like a combination air mattress and kiddie pool. She then brought out a large plastic bowl and filled it with what Maggie tells me is called “nuru gel”, a super-slick lubricant that doesn’t dry up.

She called me out of the tub, put a folded towel as a pillow on the air mattress, had me lie down and smeared the gel all over both of us; she then started sliding around on me, rubbing every part of my front with her entire body. It’s hard to describe; it was as though she was using my body for a stripper pole, and slid along my legs and arms like a train on a monorail. Sometimes she went fast, sometimes slow, but it was all good and she was obviously very practiced. After about 20 minutes of this she brought me back to the stool and completely washed us both with the strong soap again, then dried me thoroughly and led me to the massage table. She gave me a gentle and sensual massage, then walked on my back while supporting part of her weight on a bar hanging from the ceiling; she controlled the pressure by supporting her weight with her arms, varying from feather-light to the whole weight of her body. I was very impressed with both her dexterity and her physical fitness. After about 15 minutes of this she told me to flip over, performed oral sex for a little while, then put a condom on me and got into cowgirl position. I can’t ever finish in that position, so after a short time I flipped her over and got on top. Once I was done she removed the condom, washed us both one last time, then dried me and offered me iced green tea from the fridge before I got dressed. Altogether, it was about 90 minutes total. When I exited the building my shoes were at the front door, so anyone walking by could see how many guests were in the establishment.

My husband dictated the above narrative to me and I put it into complete sentences, then turned it over to him for additions and corrections; I’m not sure I really believe that the massage girl looked like a Japanese version of me, but it’s sweet of him to say that so I won’t question it. While he was trying to explain to me what everything looked like, he went digging around on the internet and found the second picture, showing the air mattress and tub (it’s actually a still he extracted from a Japanese video). He found a picture of the stool in the same video, but it was difficult to see clearly so I searched and was able to locate the first picture above. It turns out there’s a specific name for the thing, sukebe isu, literally “pervert chair”. Anyhow, writing this column led us into a discussion of all the kinds of prostitution he’s sampled around the world, and it was actually more than I had previously thought! So perhaps one day I may be able to convince him to do another column on brothels in Tijuana, Australia or Germany, or perhaps the Amsterdam window-girl I encouraged him to see a few years ago.

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Guest Columnist: Norma Jean Almodovar (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Guest Columns, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, anecdote, Backpage, bad customers, censorship, consensual crime, cops, Craigslist, dirty, ethics, harm reduction, hysteria, law, lawheads, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, prisons, psychology, rape, serial killers, slavery, stereotypes, sweatshops, underage on September 17, 2011| 21 Comments »

Today’s column is the second part of a guest blog by veteran sex worker rights activist Norma Jean Almodovar which addresses the ethical and flaws inherent in the authoritarian campaign against Backpage.com.

Says Jamie Fellner, senior counsel for the US Program at Human Rights Watch, “The widespread sexual abuse of children in juvenile facilities shows that public officials either aren’t paying attention or can’t be bothered to do the right thing. The high rates of victimization are powerful testimony to the failure of governments to safeguard the boys and girls in their care.” In none of the cases of more than 17,000 raped juveniles in 2008, did Backpage.com or any other adult classified ads website play any part in their abuse. The government that claims to want to save them, however, did. “More than 50 cases of trafficking or attempted trafficking of minors on Backpage.com have been filed in 22 states in the past three years…” according to the letter released by 45 state Attorneys General, but these numbers pale in comparison to the number of juveniles who are either raped while they are “placed under the protective custody of law enforcement,” or by their local cop, boy scout leader, priest, preacher, or parent.

Are these State Attorneys General all completely ignorant of the findings and statistics from reports that our own government compiles and issues? If they are ignorant of the facts, they are dangerous people and they really ought not be overseeing the prosecution of anyone for anything. If they are aware of the facts and are ignoring them, what exactly is the motive for that? As I stated earlier, this isn’t about the children and never was. As one of the letter’s signatories, Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna would like nothing more than to see Backpage shut down its “escorts” section, just as Craigslist did last year. He commented, “Legal wranglings aside, it will take a cultural shift to change attitudes about prostitution…People look at prostitution and think it’s a choice, but there are very few, if any, volunteers”. What has that to do with “protecting children”? It is already against the law for adults to have sex with minors regardless of payment. It’s called statutory rape. If it is wrong for adults to have sex with minors because it is sexual exploitation, why on earth are we arresting them and subjecting them to worse horrors in jail? Would we arrest underage persons who are raped by priests? Or teachers? Would we arrest the teenage Explorer Scout victims of police officers who can’t keep their hands off the underage females in the scouting program? “Volunteers”? These State Attorneys General want to shut down adult ads to “protect” women because they may or may not “volunteer” to engage in prostitution? Why are we arresting them and putting them in harms’ way in jail where they are all too often forced to engage in sex with the corrections officers and jail guards? I don’t think they ‘volunteer’ to be the sex slaves of their captors!

What kind of precedent are we setting that our government officials would attempt to ban any labor that, in someone else’s opinion, is not done “voluntarily”? Are we now defining “forced labor” as any work that someone would not “choose” to do? How many women “volunteer” to be housekeepers in low end hotels where they must clean up the vomit, feces and urine on the floor left by untidy guests? Even maids at high end hotels have to deal with unruly guests who may rape them – high powered guests like Dominique Strauss-Kahn. How many women “volunteer” to work as domestic servants, cleaning up after households in which the adult males may force their unwanted sexual attentions on them when the wives are not home? Are these States Attorneys General not aware of how many victims of human trafficking are forced into domestic service – in the US and around the world? According to some international reports on human trafficking, the number of women and girls who are forced into domestic service far outnumber those who are “trafficked” into prostitution. Most child domestic workers are between 12 and 17 but some are as young as five or six. Does anyone believe that these children “choose” to become domestic servants? Or the adults who also find themselves trafficked for the purpose of being a domestic slave? Why don’t these politicians care as much about the “forced labor” of those who are so desperate for money that they must work long hours in factories, sewing garments (sweat shops), picking fruits or vegetables or flipping burgers at McDonalds – as they “care” about supposed victims of “sex trafficking”? We arrest women whose only “crime” is that they may not have “volunteered” to work as escorts making $200 an hour or more but we don’t arrest their poor sisters who do not “volunteer” to do menial labor earning minimum wage or less?

If these politicians were to be consistent in their crusade to save victims of human trafficking, they would demand that all classified sites, newspapers, magazines and other media outlets discontinue advertising help wanted for any type of labor (such as domestic service, garment manufacturing, agriculture) into which someone, somewhere in the world is trafficked. Truth be told, many if not most of those who champion for the arrest of prostitutes or their clients on the grounds that all sex work is modern day slavery, hire domestic help so that they can spend their time saving the poor exploited women and children trafficked into the sex trade. Do you think that Demi Moore and her boy toy spouse Ashton Kutcher scrub their own toilets and clean their own home? Are they not aware that in many countries around the world, domestic servitude is the primary destination for victims of human trafficking? Or do they just not care?

Unfortunately for sex workers, the US Government is only concerned about the humans trafficked into prostitution. It is the US Government’s official position that all prostitution must be eliminated, at whatever the cost to those who, for whatever reason and in whatever manner that people make choices, are prostitutes. Regardless of the absurdity of their methods and the harm to those whom they say they want to protect, the US Government has decided that the next multi-billion dollar war against its own citizens is the war against commercial sex. It will not be a pretty war, and just as in the other “wars” against its “immoral” citizens, it will come at the cost of more of our liberties. In their view, what is the value of the first amendment when “women are selling their bodies”? Better that we let cops have laws which allow them to rape and extort the hussies! So let’s chuck the first amendment. Force newspapers and websites to kowtow to “our way of thinking” or be put out of business. That amendment is a nuisance and in the way of all the other government programs to protect us from ourselves anyway.

From the The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, February 2005, Volume 8, Number 1:

Combating sex trafficking, then, is a complicated matter. The moral imperative to rescue women from brothels is compelling when young girls are involved or there is clear evidence of duress, but “rescuing” adult women from brothels against their will can mean an end to their health care and economic survival. In countries and situations in which basic survival is a daily struggle, the distinction between free agency and oppression may be more a gray area than a bright line. Indeed, the Center for Health and Gender Equity observes that sex workers who resist rescues may not do so because they would prefer commercial sex as a lifestyle, other things being equal, but because there are no “viable economic alternatives to feed and clothe themselves and their families.” Conservative U.S. groups that have entered the larger discussion around trafficking through the issue of sex trafficking, such as the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America (CWA) and The Salvation Army, dismiss these complexities. Prostitution, as CWA asserts, is by definition “a form of slavery” and, as such, must be abolished. According to Jennifer Block, writing in Conscience, U.S. Ambassador John Miller, director of the State Department’s Office of Monitoring and Combating Trafficking in Persons, credits conservative organizations’ activism for the political momentum that led to the enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the final year of the Clinton administration. It is no surprise, then, that the Bush administration is interpreting and implementing the TVPA by placing a priority on combating sex trafficking and, by extension, abolishing prostitution.

Oddly though, despite the fact that many radical feminists would like to skewer and pillory the customers of prostitutes, prohibitionists with a moral agenda do not seem to care at all about punishing the men who hire prostitutes – despite their claims to the contrary. There is clearly some other motive at work when a man like Eliot Spitzer can commit a federal felony of interstate trafficking and not only NOT go to prison for decades as you or I would if charged with that crime – but not even get arrested. Or when a man like Republican Senator David Vitter can confess to bizarre fantasies of dressing in diapers, and be re-elected by his conservative constituency – and Randall Tobias, the man in charge of doling out money to international AIDS organizations so long as they signed a pledge to not support decriminalization of prostitution, gets to retire at full pension while Deborah Jeanne Palfrey, the madam who supplied him with women for his happy endings, was convicted and faced 55 years in prison. And then there is former adviser to President Clinton, Dick Morris, who, after his prostitution scandal, became a commentary on Fox News.

I’ve already covered the kid glove treatment of Federal Judge Jack Camp and the Albuquerque Judge who sentenced to probation former Albuquerque cop David Maes who raped a prostitute. Heidi Fleiss client Charlie Sheen admitted to hiring prostitutes AND using drugs – as well as committing domestic violence on his spouses – on a regular basis and continued to be the top grossing television actor on CBS (until he annoyed the writer and producer of the hit show), while Heidi went to prison. Previously unknown actor Hugh Grant had a momentary lapse of judgment and his indiscretion rocketed him to stardom, while his prostitute Divine Brown went to jail. High profile Christian ministers Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, George Rekers, Eddie Long and other members of the clergy get caught hiring prostitutes, either deny their sexual indiscretions or exhibit sufficient remorse, and go on preaching the word of the Lord and continuing to rake in the dough from their understanding and tolerant parishioners. But when teacher and former sex worker Melissa Petro outed herself in an article she wrote about her previous profession, a journalist who decided that Melissa didn’t have a right to be proud of her “shady” past and still be a teacher, took matters in her own hands and forced the school board to “reassign” the “ho”. Melissa is currently unemployed and unemployable. All the sentimental claptrap about “prostitutes having no choices” as a reason to abolish our profession apparently means that if you are a sex worker who puts yourself through college to “better yourself”, and you don’t express remorse about your sordid past when it is exposed, society is going to make certain that you lose that job and then you won’t have any choices at all. As Melissa discovered, once you are branded a prostitute, no one wants to hire you.

We are also told that prostitution should remain illegal because it is a dangerous profession and there are unhinged outcasts of society out there who murder them, but when a woman gets arrested for prostitution, the local newspaper often prints or posts online the woman’s name, photo and in many cases, home address. News sources such as Charleston, South Carolina’s WCIV, Shreveport, Louisiana’s KSLA, and Massachusetts’ Lexington Patch, Wayland Patch and Metrowest Daily News defend this practice because, they say, they print the names and photos of all persons arrested for crimes, except they do not publish the names and addresses of cops who rape prostitutes or who have sex with minors. But the prostitute is supposed to be the victim of sexual exploitation and while some prostitutes may welcome the free advertising to find new customers, it is disingenuous to say the least to assert that prostitution is dangerous on the one hand and post a photo of the home of a “suspected prostitute” for a serial killer to find her without having to troll the streets looking for victims.

How much more evidence does society need to realize that neither the Federal Government or the State Attorneys General are in the least bit concerned for the well being of prostitutes of whatever age? And tell me again why these politicians are demanding that Backpage.com close down its adult ads?

One Year Ago Today

Please don’t eat or drink anything while reading “BDSM (Part Three)”. Trust me on this.

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Guest Columnist: Norma Jean Almodovar (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Guest Columns, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged anecdote, Backpage, censorship, cops, Craigslist, dirty, ethics, FBI, hysteria, law, prisons, psychology, rape, rescue industry, stereotypes, teachers, underage on September 16, 2011| 35 Comments »

It’s my custom to send courtesy copies of an article in which someone is mentioned prominently to that person (unless he’s a celebrity, public official or prohibitionist) so he can alert me to any mistakes or additional information prior to publication. Well, when I sent Tuesday’s column to Norma Jean Almodovar, she replied with an essay she had written and wanted to publish as soon as possible, but had no specific venue in mind. I offered to publish it here if she liked, and she accepted; I am therefore honored to present my very first guest columnist, veteran sex worker rights activist Norma Jean Almodovar, author of Cop To Call Girl, founder and president of the International Sex Worker Foundation for Art, Culture and Education and executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of COYOTE . For those of you who just can’t go a day without reading some of my own writing, I point you to my column of one year ago today, “BDSM (Part Two)” . Now without further ado, I turn this space over to Norma Jean.

Just as they did a year ago with Craigslist, a bunch of politically grandstanding States Attorneys General- cheered on by an overbearing, vociferous gaggle of anti- prostitution zealots and their sycophants from the far left and the far right- got together and wrote a letter to the owners of Backpage.com, demanding that the adult ads on their classified website be shut down “to stop sex trafficking.” Despite the fact that they don’t have a constitutional leg to stand on, these blowhards decided they must force the closure of the adult ads section in this and any other online adult ad classified advertising site.

Although there are numerous other sites which cater solely to the adult crowd seeking other adults for adult activity, such as RentBoy- where virulently anti- gay Christian Psychologist Reverend George Rekers found his young stud travel companion on a trip to Italy- and countless other similar sites, it does not appear that these Attorneys General have much interest in pursuing those sites because many are for gay commercial sex and it is not politically correct to prosecute gays for the same ‘crimes’ they prosecute heterosexual adults. Governments and religious institutions throughout history have attempted to eradicate what many call a scourge (but many others like me feel it is the best job we ever had), but none have been successful even when the punishment faced by those who violate the law is death. So what motivates these particular politicians to attempt to “eliminate” all prostitution at whatever cost?

There are a number of studies which support the premise that the more vocal one is in denouncing another’s ‘immoral’ activities and demanding that they cease, the more likely it is that such a loudmouth is engaged in the very activity that he/she condemns. It is a cliché that sanctimonious politicians pontificate on the importance of family values while having extra-marital affairs, buying the services of a prostitute (underage and adult) or sending text messages to persons who are not their spouses; the vehemently anti-gay politicians and preachers who secretly engage in homosexual relationships. When it is a female politician, look for her husband to be a client of prostitutes, like U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow (D. Michigan).

Considering the enormous pressure being exerted on Backpage -and Craigslist a year ago- if one were cynical, one might think that those who are the most vocal in their demands to shut down adult ads because of the possibility that those ads are for prostitution- are being blackmailed or extorted by those abolitionists. Consider that Eliot Spitzer, who, as New York’s State Attorney General, passionately denounced the evils of prostitution as he vigorously enforced laws against prostitution by day and paid for his ‘sex slaves’ by night… in some cases going out of state and violating the Mann Act, a federal crime called ‘sex trafficking’. Spitzer rose to governorship on the back of political reform and cleaning up corruption. According to many sources, his was a ‘scorched earth’ policy when it came to prosecuting white collar crimes. One target of his wrath were ‘prostitution rings’ against which he had publicly vented with “revulsion and anger announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a select prostitution ring” in 2004. He dispatched his brand of justice in short order and sent them to prison. In hindsight one could speculate that his show of revulsion and anger came not from a sense of moral repugnance at the thought of paid sex professionals but that the ‘select prostitution ring’ he targeted had perhaps been too selective and refused his business in the past? Or did he feel a sense of pride at being able to prosecute the competition of those who did provide him with their sexual services?

Or perhaps the abolitionists knew of Spitzer’s indiscretions and used that information to extort him to be aggressive in prosecuting others who engaged in buying or selling sex? There is no doubt in my mind that if he had not been caught with his pants down, he would be joining the other politicians in their strident crusade to shut down adult ads. So it is not unreasonable to suggest that perhaps some or many of the signers of this letter are in a similar position. History – both distant and recent- suggests that this may be the case…

In July 2011, a high ranking Albuquerque Criminal Judge, Pat Murdoch, was arrested for raping a prostitute. It was not the first time he had hired a sex worker, because the prostitute he hired admitted to previous engagements with the judge. And surely the police were aware of his activities with prostitutes, which may explain why, in 2009, he was so lenient toward an Albuquerque Police Officer -David Maes– who was also charged with raping a prostitute. Thoughtfully, after Maes plead ‘no contest’ to the charges, District Court Judge Pat Murdoch said “sending him to prison would be a harsh sentence for an ex-cop” and gave him 5 years probation. After Judge Murdoch was charged with raping a prostitute, he resigned, and most likely none of his colleague judges will impose a prison sentence on him, knowing that when and if they ever get caught doing the same thing, they will want leniency from the judges who oversee their cases.

Judges like Federal Judge Jack Camp… or Judge Michael Hecht... or Edward Nottingham, the chief federal judge in Denver, Colorado. Despite the fact that an ordinary citizen charged with violating the same laws that Reagan appointee Judge Jack Camp did would have been sentenced to multiple years- perhaps decades- in prison, Judge Camp was allowed to retire at full pension, sentenced to 30 days in prison and 400 hours of community service. He served 15 days.

Back to the States Attorneys General- are they pursuing this because they are being extorted by the prohibitionists or because they really believe that shutting down adult ads is going to somehow stop human trafficking? Surely they are not that naïve, are they? Having been lawyers before they became prosecutors, they know exactly how things work and that prostitution was around long before the internet and will be around long after the internet shuts the sex workers out (or moves them to other websites).

They feign concern for the sexual exploitation of underage persons through the use of adult ads, commenting that “More than 50 cases of trafficking or attempted trafficking of minors on Backpage.com have been filed in 22 states in the past three years…” But none of them mention that in 2011 alone, more than 100 cases of pedophile and child porn possessing police/ district attorneys/ judges were brought to court... NONE of those cases involved Backpage or Craigslist or any other classified website offering adult ads – just a bunch of perverted cops, judges, FBI agents etc. who had access to these young people because they are persons in authority whom no one suspects of diddling their children. These numbers do not include the teachers, preachers, priests, boy scout leaders, Hollywood producers and other persons who are trusted by the community and who do not find their victims on Backpage. The US Government reports that 90% of the cases of child sexual exploitation are at the hands of someone the child knows, like the above cops, teachers, etc. and 68% of the cases of child sexual abuse are at the hands of a family member. So if, as the prohibitionists and their misinformed spokespeople suggest, there are between ‘100,000 to 300,000’ children trafficked into the sex trade every year, and if that represents only ten percent of the victims of child sexual exploitation from strangers, then the number of those sexually exploited by an acquaintance or family member must be in the millions per year. As I mentioned earlier, however, the US Government’s own report says that these hundreds of thousands of human trafficking (which includes adults and those trafficked into many other areas of labor) can’t be found, with all the millions of dollars that they spend and all the government funded agencies looking for them.

Tragically, as many cases as there are of the victims mentioned above, there is an even greater number of underage persons who are subjected to rape and sexual exploitation by persons in authority, and the government is quite aware of it and yet does little to prevent it. In fact, those juveniles are deliberately put in harms’ way at the insistence of the rabid prohibitions who claim they are ‘saving their lives.’ No doubt when the media reports that the FBI or other government agencies have ‘rescued’ dozens of ‘victims of child sexual trafficking’ during a sting operation (and arrest hundreds of adult prostitutes in the process), the general public envisions a militaristic style raid much like our armed forces conduct when they storm into an occupied country and free the enslaved citizens, who then jubilantly rally around our heroic soldiers with cries of gratitude. Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth for the underage victims of sex trafficking. What the media and the government do not tell you is that ‘rescued’ means ‘arrested.’

When the cops and the feds – and for that matter, government agents anywhere in the world- conduct a ‘rescue’ raid, all persons of any age who are suspected of being prostitutes or of being ‘victims of sex trafficking’ are rounded up and herded into custody. Handcuffed. Chained to each other. Put into jail cells. Strip-searched. Treated like vicious criminals. And that is as it should be, according to some wonderful Christian ladies of the Georgia Eagle Forum, or as I like to call their national group- the “Spread Eagle Forum.” Women like Sue Ella Deadwyler, publisher of Georgia Insight, who stated – in opposition to the Republican Georgia state senator Renee Unterman who introduced a bill that would steer girls under the age of 16 into diversionary programs instead of arresting them as prostitutes – “Arrest is a valuable life-saving tool that must be used. We need to hire more cops to arrest the prostitutes.” She said that she believes that arrest is a better deterrent than a proposal for rehabilitation — no matter the age. “Sure there are those who are forced into prostitution, but I think most of them volunteer,” Deadwyler said of under 16-year-old prostitutes. “Many, many children have been scared straight because of arrest.” Of course.

One of her colleagues argues, “We cannot repeal the prostitution law for children, because that law acts as a very real barrier that protects children from sexual predators that would, otherwise, feel free to lure them into prostitution….Have we forgotten that correction oftentimes turns a life around?”

They aren’t the only ones who believe that arresting victims is actually good for them. Newser Staff writer Evann Gastaldo, wrote in her March 4^th, 2011 article: “Why We Must Arrest Child Prostitutes: IT MAY SOUND CRUEL, BUT IT COULD BE THE ONLY THING THAT SAVES THEM. Says she “Decriminalizing child prostitution (and not arresting them) means effectively ‘removing the only safe and secure protection these vulnerable children have from the pimps—being arrested and placed under the protective custody of law enforcement.’” And after one major ‘rescue’ of such victims, the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, stated “We may not be able to return their innocence but we can remove them from this cycle of abuse and violence.”

Umm, I wonder if either he or those nice Christian ladies or the States Attorneys General who are demanding the shutdown of adult ads on Backpage.com have read the US Government Justice Department’s own report on what happens to those children (and adult prostitutes) who are ‘placed under the protective custody of law enforcement…’- the report entitled “Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2008-09”?

As the May 5^th, 2011 issue of the Economist states, “Sexual abuse in prison is distressingly common: the Justice Department estimated that more than 217,000 prisoners, including at least 17,000 juveniles, were raped or sexually abused in America in 2008. A total of 12% of juvenile detainees… surveyed between 2008 and 2009 reported being forced into sex. And that is the number of people, not incidents; most victims are abused more than once. More inmates reported being abused by staff than by other inmates.” So we arrest the victims and put them in jail where they are raped by those who are supposedly protecting them from sexual predators... like themselves. And this of course will ‘turn their lives around’… actually it probably will; if this doesn’t mess up their heads and screw up their lives forever. After the well-meaning Christian ladies and legislators tell them that it is for their own good to experience the trauma of being arrested and going to jail where they are raped by government agents in whose custody they are supposed to be safe, well, they would have to have an extremely strong character to survive the ‘rescue’ envisioned by these moral zealots.

To be concluded tomorrow.

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