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Posts Tagged ‘All About the Men’

If you don’t like that someone has sexual needs that you don’t understand…that is your problem.  –  Ryan Thomas

The Swedish Pimpocracy

It’s illegal to pay for sex in Sweden, unless you film it for everyone to see:

…Swedish health minister Gabriel Wikström…is championing…a…fairtrade perspective…for porn…“In which way has it been produced, and is there consent?  Then you can move forward in minimizing porn that is misogynistic and produced under bad conditions”…

Sex, Lies and Busybodies

Why do so many losers want porn movies to be condom commercials?

A British university is offering to pay young couples £400 to be filmed having sex in a bid to promote the notion that using a condom does not “kill the mood.”  Coventry University is looking for three couples aged between 18 and 25 to have sex on camera.  They will be filmed in “natural settings” such as student accommodation and a car.  It will be “tastefully shot” and use “real couples in loving, consensual relationships,” according to the academics behind the project…Dr. Katie Newby said the videos aim to show that sex can still be fun and sexy even when stopping to put on a condom…The project is being financially backed by the government-funded Medical Research Council…

I make more than £400 about half the times I have sex, and not much less than £400 the other half of the times.

Pyrrhic Victory

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.  But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

Imagine a security camera that can…spot drivers who are texting when they should be watching the road, potentially passing on this information to law enforcement officials that can then issue a ticket…Security cameras with this level of visual intelligence are…worrisome.  Hikvision cites the case of a senior citizen who became lost and was located using the facial recognition built into its cameras.  But a camera that can find a lost child or identify a criminal suspect can just as easily be used for invasive government surveillance, like the case of protesters targeted through facial recognition…

Any Old Port

The real reason people get addicted:

Blunt Instrument

“Safe house” in this context means “jail”:

…[Houston pigs] began a major [pogrom against] the…sex trade…Ying Wen was arrested during an early-morning raid and charged with money laundering…Wen was the owner and operator of Hana Top Spa…Three young women, [fantasized by furiously-masturbating cops as] victims of human trafficking, were removed and placed in a safe house…crime stats over the last three years…show [no increase]…But [myths] of problems near the spa persist…

Note the language representing human women as inanimate objects: “removed and placed in”.  If you have the stomach, read the original for the pompous DA claiming that sex workers are liars and comparing us to filthy insects.

All About the Men

As I’ve written many times, prostitution is a “crime” defined entirely by motive; if a woman has sex for any other reason than profit the same exact behavior is not criminalized, but if she has that motivation in her mind her “legal” acts are magically transformed into “illegal” ones.  Given this bizarre and evil belief that it’s OK to criminalize certain thoughts in the service provider‘s head, it’s not really surprising that prohibitionists also obsess about what’s in the service buyer‘s head as well; most of the propaganda on this is pretty horrifying and better reflects the prohibitionists’ views of sex and women than it does the buyers’.  So it’s really nice to see an article like this, in which a sex therapist thoroughly debunks prohibitionist propaganda about clients by setting forth the many reasons men see sex workers, as revealed by hundreds of sex workers and clients and supported by research.

Surplus Women (#445)

Nothing they can do to this monster would come close to what I’d do to him:

A banker tortured a prostitute for three days, then slashed her throat and hid her body in a suitcase…Rurik Jutting…filmed himself subjecting Sumarti Ningsih, 23, to a horrific ordeal after fuelling himself with booze, cocaine and Red Bull…He forced [the] terrified…Sumarti to lick a toilet bowl before he cut her throat with a serrated knife.  But she did not die immediately so he dragged her to the shower where he sawed through her neck.  Sumarti was one of two Indonesian sex workers killed by Jutting in his luxury [Hong Kong] flat…His second victim, Seneng Mujiasih, 26, was killed five days later. Her throat was also cut…

The Pygmalion Fallacy (#445) 

One would think that so-called “futurists” would have the sense to put their “predictions” far enough in the future that they won’t be disproved quite so soon:

David Levy…says, ‘The very first primitive sex robots will arrive next year…but it will take at least a decade before truly sophisticated sex dolls go on sale.”  The breakthrough point is likely to be when celebrities start to have sex with the dolls, says Levy…”When somebody like Tom Cruise goes on the record and says, ‘I had sex with a robot,’ the whole world will notice”…

Checklist (#633)

Sex workers: Uber now wants its drivers to spy on us and rat us out to the pigs.  I suggest you start using Lyft instead:

An organization that fights [sex workers]…is [colluding with] taxi and ride share drivers.  The partnership between “Ending Child Slavery at the Source” and Uber will [indoctrinate] drivers to [harass]…sex [workers]…Faiza Mathon-Mathieu…hopes the transportation industry can…report people they encounter [to the cops]…“They don’t necessarily know that they’re victims…they are not going to…be seeking help,” said Mathon-Mathieu.  This group hopes Uber drivers will use their interaction with [sex workers] to [betray them]…Guidelines developed by [prohibitionists]…will help these ride share drivers detect someone [to rat on]…“Youth with name or symbols tattooed…if they have multiple phones”…

One Born Every Minute (#645) 

Another sleazy scam artist raping aspiring sex workers:

A Kansas City-area man is accused of duping dozens of women into having sex with him on camera as “rehearsal” for pornographic movies.  Federal prosecutors announced a 21-count indictment…against…Mario Antoine…[who] is accused of creating online aliases as a talent manager, photographer and videographer and claiming to work for fictitious companies in the pornography industry.  Investigators say he promised to pay the women thousands of dollars…[and] when the women complained about not being paid, Antoine forwarded images of the sexual activity to their employers or significant others…

Saving Them From Themselves (#678)

Pro Libertate featured an absolutely scathing denunciation of the district attorney, cops and other “authorities” who worked to turn a group of ordinary teens into “sex offenders” and are being challenged by the parents of one of their victims.  I’m not going to quote it because it really needs to be read in its entirety, but I will say that the author not only correctly characterizes the “officials” as sexual perverts, but includes lovely lines like “They lied, of course.  That’s what police officers are trained to do.”

Send In the Clowns (#682) 

And here some of you thought the clown thing was kind of off-topic for me:

…the recent uptick in creepy clown sightings has correlated with a significant uptick in the demand for clown porn…Now, in a move as disturbing as it was inevitable, Porn.com has purchased ClownSex.com in hopes of cashing in…

Between the Lines (#683)

I’m not getting lazy; I just knew that Liz Brown would do such an awesome job on this, I didn’t feel there was any point in even attempting it myself:

The results have been pouring in from Operation Cross Country X, the FBI’s tenth annual, nationwide sex sting targeting what the agency [pretends is] “underage human trafficking.”  Each year, FBI agents across America team up with [cops]…state attorneys…and others for a few days of posing as people buying or selling sex…This year…According to the FBI, “82 sexually exploited juveniles” were recovered and “239 pimps and other individuals” arrested.  The average age of the minors was just under 16…the bulk of OCCX efforts involved cops contacting adult female sex workers while posing as customers and then arresting them, if not also seizing the women’s money and throwing them in jail…nearly three-quarters of all arrests were for simple solicitation or prostitution…Regardless how old someone selling sex is or how willing their involvement, anyone accompanying them may be arrested as a “pimp”…In Mississippi, a man from out of state who was visiting his 22-year-old daughter was arrested for promoting prostitution because…he was…aware she was doing it…I’ve identified approximately:

  • 534 arrests for prostitution
  • 163 arrests for attempting to pay an adult for sex (solicitation)
  • 145 arrests for charges such as pimping, pandering, promoting prostitution, or contributing to the delinquency of a minor
  • 14 arrests for attempting to pay an undercover-cop pretending to be a teenage-girl for sex
  • 10 people arrested on human-trafficking charges
  • 9 people arrested for “keeping a bawdy place,” in conjunction with massage-parlor prostitution businesses in Virginia…

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[Mary Anne] Franks couldn’t care less who is turned into a felony sex offender, as long as some variation of her pet law is enacted, the hated men go down along with the innocent, and she gets credit for it. – Scott Greenfield

The Red Umbrella

A [Filipino man]…fell to his death while trying to evade police arrest…for allegedly beating up a [sex worker]…the  man [hired] her…and…they had sex [but he] started to beat her after she refused to take [methamphetamine]…

The Mote and the Beam

Here’s a long, confused article on the latest attempt to destroy the internet in the name of “protecting children”.  Among its other lovely features:  it would criminalize advertising “illegal sex” on the internet.  The article is packed with the usual asinine claims (including the ludicrous assertion that 82% of all prostitution advertising is on Backpage) but does state that the proposed law is basically similar to the ones that judges keep striking down as unconstitutional.  You’d think they’d learn, but why bother?  The consequences don’t fall on them.  Politicians are like stupid kids egging somebody’s house:  it only takes them a short time and very little effort to “send a message”, but the mess they leave behind takes others a very long time to clean up.

Moloch

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is weighing whether it’s constitutional to force all juvenile sex offenders to sign up with the state sex offender registry…Pennsylvania law requires  anyone 14…or older who is convicted of [a sex crime]…to register for life…they can petition for removal…only after 25 years, and only if they’ve had no subsequent offenses, even of a non-sexual nature…

John Warhurst
Above the Law

Note that this particular rapist cop works for the same department that wanted to “live tweet” a prostitution sting:  “John Warhurst [was arrested] for sixteen…sex offenses…[including] rape…Warhurst is a Prince George’s County Police Officer…”  In a rather odd twist, his wife was also arrested on similar charges.

Broken Record

If you though a gem and mineral show as “sex trafficking” magnet was ridiculous

…twice a year High Point triples in size with crowds numbering more than 80,000 people…[for] the weeklong Furniture Market…[which] draws more people than any other event in North Carolina.  Unfortunately, with any large crowd there comes the opportunity for anonymity, and sex traffickers are all too eager to take advantage…

What kind of mind calls anonymity “unfortunate”?

The Widening Gyre

Lawheads are willing to shut down a city to stop consensual behavior, but can’t even conceive that maybe their stupid laws are the real problem:

[Cincinnati] police…[have installed] concrete road blocks all along McMicken Avenue…While most agree something must be done to stop human trafficking…some say stopping traffic all together [sic] isn’t the answer…officials plan to keep the closures in place for…three months…[and] are…considering other drastic measures…like publishing the names of people convicted of prostitution related crimes, notifying their spouses and increasing fines…

Thought Controldaily beating

Here’s an excellent article on how the amazing diversity of the Golden Age of comics was destroyed by the repressive Comics Code Authority, a sort of self-lobotomization performed to save the industry from Congressional censorship after Frederic Wertham’s witch hunt:

…Distributors agreed not to carry comic books that didn’t abide by the Code, making it functionally as effective as law…independent women, and people of color, and all sorts of stories that didn’t fit with the compulsory patriotism and cop-worship of the 1950s, essentially vanished from comics for decades…What was left didn’t interest adults nearly as much, and comics slowly began to become less ubiquitous and more associated with pasty adolescent boys…

Little Boxes (TW3 #40)

An American medical student is auctioning off her virginity…Using the alias “Elizabeth Raine” and operating a blog entitled, Musings of a Virgin Whore, the 28-year-old…said she is willing to submit to a medical examination or polygraph as proof to the winning bidder…[and will consummate]…in Australia [to]…circumvent…American prostitution laws…Raine says she does not care about being labeled a prostitute…and…while she does not advocate prostitution she supports [its] “decriminalization and destigmatization”…She has promised to donate 35 percent of the auction proceeds to a charity “that brings education to women in developing countries”…

Caring Professionals

When they’re not infantilizing sex workers and demonizing our clients, they’re doing the exact opposite:

A disabled British retiree has ended up in court after he punched a council official who stopped him from seeing a prostitute.  Alan Thipthorpe, 88, was furious after he was prevented from seeing…Terri-Lee Pearce…[who] had regularly visited his care home.  Swindon council…stopped the visits because [they accused Pearce] of fleecing him out of his life savings…An angry Thipthorpe said…he should be able to spend the money how he wanted…


Under Every Bed

A “sex trafficking” cluck lectures us about the importance of word order, but apparently isn’t too concerned with number agreement:  “There is no such thing as children prostitutes, they are prostituted children who can be found in…any neighborhood and any town.”  Whenever I read something like this, I hear the voices from Chickenman crying “It’s everywhere, it’s everywhere!”

The Pro-Rape Coalition (TW3 #316)

There cannot be a complete ban on Internet pornography in [India]…the government has told the Supreme Court…the…servers…are…quite often located in foreign countries, where such publication is permissible…even if a website is blocked, the same content can be hosted on a different server, may be in a different country, within a few seconds…

Birth of a Movement (TW3 #323)

a few hundred women [marched] down a busy commercial street in Mexico City during a May Day demonstration…to highlight the rights of sex workers… members of la Brigada Callejera (“the Streetwalkers Brigade”)…emphasized that…marchers were in the sex trade of their own free will…Mexico City’s government is currently attempting to redevelop La Merced and close down various hotels that it [pretends] are involved in trafficking…

Magic Formulae

A Minnesota law firm posted a page busting the common myths I’ve often written about, such as the notion that there are certain things cops can’t do or that one is safe if one has some kind of payment ritual.  I’d really like to see more whore-friendly entities posting information like this.

Acting and Activism (Extra Edition)

Another empty-headed actress attacks the less-privileged branches of our shared profession with stupid lies and moronic myths:

Jada Pinkett Smith…[is working on] a CNN documentary…about…sex trafficking.  Jada…had her eyes opened wide by two strippers who made clear to her that strip clubs in Atlanta, ground zero for the sex trafficking industry —are a gateway to…slavery…

Little Tin GodsLTG Ed Brown

Sheriff Ed Brown considers himself to be the owner of every human being…in North Carolina’s Onslow County – but he counsels his subjects not to worry, for his is a benevolent dictatorship administered by quasi-divine people endowed with transcendent wisdom…in [an ad] for his re-election campaign  [Brown wrote] “Those in the law enforcement profession have complete power over you, your life, your family, your loved ones, your rights, your freedom, your future and everything precious to life”…After the ad prompted criticism…Brown objected that his words were misunderstood…Brown apparently can [also] command the very elements themselves to surrender valuable secrets that remain inaccessible to lesser men.  While investigating the murder of…Maria Lauterbach, the Sheriff didn’t bother to collect shoeprints, choosing instead to conduct a forensic investigation using a divining rod made from a coat hanger

Sex Rays

…For months, Amazon has been deleting the wish lists of porn performers, models, and other…adult [entertainers]…Often, Amazon will cite “inappropriate” use of the wish list, such as it being used for “bartering” purposes…even when…there is no real evidence to that effect…Amazon has also deleted adult entertainers’ wish lists on the grounds that they include “inappropriate” items, such as adult toys or DVDs, despite the fact that Amazon offers these products…

Lack of Evidence (TW3 #344)

New York City has agreed to pay $450,000 to settle a lawsuit…by a man who said he was falsely arrested on a prostitution charge outside a Manhattan adult video store…Robert Pinter…says the settlement was a victory for 40 or so men…targeted [because cops] believed [them] to be gay…

A Tale That Grew in the Telling (TW3 #345)

So much for “Sin City”:

…the [Las Vegas] Police co-sponsored [a] “Choose Purity” event…to show young girls what can happen when they don’t wait until marriage to have sex…Typically four things:  sexual assault, gangs, drugs and prostitution.  Avoid sex and avoid those perils, [organizer Regina] Coward said…The room of about 125 parents and children watched recorded interviews with a pimp and prostitutes, learned modern-day slavery exists in the form of the sex trade, and saw grisly images of…a woman who’d lost limbs in a methamphetamine lab explosion and a man who’d had his face partially gnawed off by a meth user…The monologues concluded with each girl getting on a gurney and into a body bag…

Shame, Shame (TW3 #348)

When Mary Anne Franks began her Jihad against revenge porn, it was pointed out that…her law would also criminalize the revelation of Anthony Wiener’s dangerous selfie…Franks adamantly denied her law suffered from significant…deficiencies.  But quietly, while no one was looking, the law morphed to include a…“Sydney Leathers exception”…even though few people know or care who Sydney Leathers is…Then came the viral twit…of a woman whose model plane strayed off course…and some snarky lawyer pointed out that anyone who retwitted it may well have committed a crime under Franks’ law.  Deniers strained to contend that could never happen,  convincing no one.  But it didn’t take long before…Arizona [enacted]…its…revenge porn…law…The crime went from misdemeanor to felony…and it has no “Anthony Wiener Sydney Leathers exception”…The sound you hear is Mary Anne Franks applauding as Crazy Joe Arpaio rounds up as many people…as he can find…

Backwards into the Future (TW3 #352) letter from Njong

Stephanie Wilson was reaching for a receipt inside a paper shopping bag from Saks Fifth Avenue when she found a letter pleading, “HELP HELP HELP”…from a man who…made the bag while being unfairly held in a Chinese prison factory…The note…was signed Tohnain Emmanuel Njong and was accompanied by a small passport-photo sized color picture… DNAinfo New York…located…Njong…who…said he had been teaching English in…Shenzhen when he was arrested in May 2011 and [wrongly] charged with fraud…he was forced to work long days in a factory, starting at 6 a.m. and continuing as late as 10 p.m…in December 2013…he…was put on a plane back to Cameroon…relatives…had believed him to be dead…

Whither Canada? (TW3 #415) 

Can you imagine this in an American paper?

…the government is leaning heavily towards the…Nordic model…as featured in [Joy Smith’s] Tipping Point report…Smith starts with a pre-conceived notion that presumes something which is simply not true, but is rather a sop to her own sensibilities…Eliminate prostitution?  With a law?…Maybe if Smith jumps up and down, holds her breath until she turns blue, and wishes really, really hard that’ll happen.  But I doubt it…

Best part:  the author’s an ex-cop.

All About the Men

Heather Berg’s criticism of Katha Pollitt’s ninnyish “OMG, men might see WHORES!!!1!!” essay from early last month makes the same point I made in “Dilemmas”: workers are not responsible for the moral failings (real or imaginary) of those who employ them.

…By making sex work exceptional, analyses like [these] ask us to forget that the wage system functions precisely by compelling us to work…If only everyone who opposes forcing people to work under threat of poverty and homelessness would join the struggle for a guaranteed annual income…the nature of a product is irrelevant to how we should theorize, legislate, or organize the labor involved in producing it.  Workers are not socially accountable for whatever may come from their work.  To accept otherwise encourages the over-identification with work that management finds so efficient in getting us to do more for less.  It allows capital to extract not only time, but also ethical responsibility from workers…

Though Berg’s view proceeds from a Marxist background and mine from a classical liberal one, we agree on both this subject and on the advisability of a guaranteed income.

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This essay first appeared in Cliterati on April 13th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

Invisible Men propaganda displayProbably the most common stereotype of anti-sex worker feminists is that they’re all misandrists, and on the surface that certainly seems true.  But a closer examination of the issue reveals a deeper motivation which more closely resembles an obsessive concern with men at the expense of women.  Feminists are willing to deny models income in order to deny lads’ mags to men, and would rather see women in the porn industry unemployed rather than know that men can watch porn videos.  “Sex trafficking” fetishists are willing to undermine the entire edifice of civil liberties for both sexes in order to stop men from having access to commercial sex.  Anti-sex worker screeds go on and on about “ending men’s demand for sex”, or “teaching men they aren’t entitled to sex”, or “look at the awful things men say about ‘prostituted women’!”  Men this, men that, men the other thing; men, men, Men, MEN, MEN!  No matter how vociferously prohibitionists insist that their motive is women’s protection or “empowerment”, sex work prohibition has absolutely nothing to do with women:  it’s all about the men.

Nearly every Western society has a long tradition of viewing sex as something “dirty” and “demeaning”; the idea of punishment is inextricably bound up with the concept of “correction”, so buried in the misandrist rhetoric spouted by prohibitionists is the notion that if Big Nanny just spanks men hard enough and often enough, they won’t have those dirty thoughts any more.  The underlying pretext of punishing men for male sexuality, and restricting them from enjoying same, is not to hurt them but rather to “help” them by making them more like (asexual, idealized) women.  To be sure, “fallen” women are to be “helped” as well wherever possible, but when it happens it’s merely a happy byproduct of the campaign to “improve” men; those women who refuse to be “saved” and to dutifully recite the feminist catechism thereafter will be thrown under the bus without the slightest hesitation.  While this motive is obvious in most Christian prohibitionism, it’s often less so in the feminist variety; that is not, however, the case in Katha Pollitt’s remarkably-transparent jeremiad in The Nation, whose lede included the feminist shibboleth “male privilege.”  But rather than quote from Pollitt’s polemic itself, let’s instead look at Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s excellent criticism of it in Reason:

…Pollitt is upset about what she perceives as widespread leftist support for legalized prostitution.  This is, in itself, a strange perception…I am far from alone in noticing a recent surge in anti–sex work passion among progressives.  But more problematic/annoying are the reasons Pollitt gives for criminalizing prostitution, reasons which turn on an unsavory belief that restricting liberty is justified if it leads people to better (read: more progressive) views…Giving sex workers more rights…would also mean giving johns less punishment—a point which Pollitt expects women to find scary.  Have you thought about the fact that men you know might visit prostitutes, young ladies?  “This faceless man could be anyone:  your colleague, your boyfriend, your father, your husband…When feminists argue that sex work should be normalized…they accept male privilege they would attack in any other area…Maybe men would be better partners, in bed and out of it, if they couldn’t purchase that fantasy,” Pollitt [writes]…

Astro-ChicksDespite its “feminist” trappings, Pollitt’s argument rests on the premise that men’s attitudes, ideas and feelings are so important and so central to our society that the state is justified in criminalizing and marginalizing some women and endangering all women in order to shape men in some way.  The goal of making them better bed partners for “good” women justifies dispatching thugs to stalk, entrap, humiliate, brutalize, rape, chain, abduct, cage and torture the “bad” women who want no part of this social engineering project; or failing that, at least to starve, ostracize and endanger them via the “progressive” Swedish model.  In either case, what the prohibitionist philosophy boils down to is that it’s perfectly acceptable for women to be endangered, harmed or even killed if it keeps some men from thinking Bad Thoughts; whether the aim is to control men or to “improve” them, women must be limited, subjugated or even sacrificed to accomplish the goal.  One way or the other, it’s all about making men acceptable to the state and to “good” women, and what happens to “bad” women in the process is neither here nor there.

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