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Posts Tagged ‘archeofeminism’

Fictional Interlude: The Screening

Posted in Fiction, tagged , , , , , , on November 16, 2012| 21 Comments »

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.  –  William James

Walter savored the Cohiba and poured himself a second tumbler of Glenfiddich, then turned to look down on the city.  Since the year this whiskey went into its cask he had worked to build his business, and after the most recent deal he felt that he had at long last arrived.  In all that time he had rarely relaxed, seldom taken a vacation and never allowed himself the luxuries other businessmen did, but all that was about to change; perhaps he might even restrict himself with the kind of business ethics he had always totally disregarded before.  But now that he had finally reached the goal he set himself at eighteen, he could afford morality as easily as he could expensive indulgences.

With that thought, he turned back to his computer screen and hit “send”.  His days of cheap cigars, second-rate liquor and reasonably-priced escorts were over; now he was playing in the big leagues, and could easily spend the money for a companion of real quality.  For him that meant Sibyl, the woman who had fascinated him since he first encountered her website months ago.  Still, he had hesitated; though her price was well within his comfort zone, he found her screening requirements rather daunting.  He did not like the idea of identifying himself so clearly and definitely to a stranger about whom he knew absolutely nothing, but two generous servings of Scotch had helped to steel his resolve and now he was committed.

Walter wasn’t sure how long Sibyl would take to get back to him, but he certainly didn’t expect it to be within minutes.  Perhaps it was just an autoreply, though it didn’t sound like one:

My Dear Mr. Grey,

Thank you for sending the information I requested!  Though I know you’ve been frightfully busy with that important deal you mentioned in your last letter, I was beginning to think you had perhaps changed your mind about meeting me.  I’m glad to see you haven’t, and I look forward to meeting you in person after I’ve finished my screening process, which I’m sure you will understand must be very thorough.  I’ll let you know by Friday afternoon, but as my preliminary inquiries have indicated that you’re exactly the sort of man I like to see, I don’t imagine any difficulties.

Very Sincerely Yours,
Sybil

Friday!  What kind of damned screening could take three whole days?  Walter shrugged, closed the email program, and barely even noticed the fleeting error message which flashed on the screen during the shutdown procedure.

***********************************************************************

He had thought about taking the next day off, but he was a creature of habit and so eventually found himself at his office again, though several hours later than usual.  It was more than early enough; there weren’t really very many loose ends to tie up, and he would’ve been done in plenty of time for a round of golf had he not been required to deal with a long column of annoying emails on a computer which seemed uncharacteristically sluggish, while at the same time dealing with phone calls from the accounting and contract departments.  It was a singularly frustrating day, and while it was not bad enough to completely ruin yesterday’s celebratory mood, it did demonstrate exactly how much the intense negotiations of the past few months had exhausted him; after his date with Sybil this weekend, a long vacation in the Caymans would be in order.  In the meantime, though, a leisurely day tomorrow would help; he had been cooped up in this damned office for so long he kept receiving the bizarre impression that his computer was watching him, and that the screen was its enormous, unblinking eye.

The night’s sleep did not alleviate the delusion at all; if anything, the next day was even worse.  Every screen he passed or used – his plasma TV, the stereo display in his car, even the touch-screen on his iPhone – seemed to be watching his every move, carefully examining him, peering through his clothes and skin to the nerves, dissecting his brain and smearing his soul onto a slide to be viewed under some impossible, intangible microscope.  Walter was far too rational and self-assured to actually believe what he thought he saw; it was perfectly clear to him that this was merely the inevitable but long-delayed result of years of intense stress which would have destroyed a lesser man, but was now catching up to him.  Sybil would do him a world of good, and he had already told his secretary he might be out of touch for weeks after he left for his holiday next Tuesday.  And though there would be far too many screens at the airport and on the airplane for his liking, he would be far away from the hateful things on a lovely beach in the Caribbean.

In the meantime, though, the scrutiny from the peering eyes behind the screens grew almost unbearable.  They watched him from his golf partners’ phones after he turned his off, and later from the windows of stores after he covered the car’s console screen with his jacket.  He felt so surrounded in the restaurant that he was forced to cut his dinner short, and though there was a movie he wanted to see the thought of sitting for over two hours in front of a screen twenty meters wide was absolutely unbearable.  So he instead went directly home, took a bottle and glass into his bedroom, and closed the door so he wouldn’t have to see the huge flat screen in the living room.  He then tried to read for a while, but mostly drank until he sank into terrifying dreams of gigantic, long-lashed eyes prying into every corner of his home.

***********************************************************************

When he at last awoke to the sound of a ringing telephone, the day was already half gone.  The nightmares had finally ceased about dawn, and the beautiful, sultry voice on the other end of the phone heralded a far brighter day than yesterday as Sybil told him that she was done with her screening, and would be happy to see him tomorrow evening as he had requested.  She told him the address at which he could pick her up, and suggested they begin the evening with dinner at a restaurant he had heard good things about, but never tried for himself.  He hung up the phone with a smile on his face and a much lighter heart, and he dismissed the lingering scent of a strange and spicy perfume as a figment of his imagination brought on by the unsettling presence of the television set within view of his breakfast table.

Friday afternoon passed without incident, and Walter enjoyed the postponed movie as much as the reviews had assured him he would.  A lovely late dinner and a good bottle of wine made for the perfect conclusion to the day, and back at home he laughed at yesterday’s ridiculous fears as he flipped channels to relax before bed.  His sleep was peaceful and unhaunted by ghastly disembodied eyes, and he awoke the next morning refreshed and optimistic about his date with Sybil and his life in general.  He had always regarded his doctor’s warnings about overwork with a mixture of amusement and annoyance, but now he recognized that he had been wrong and resolved to apologize at his earliest possible opportunity…after his vacation, that is.

He hurried out for a haircut, had his car washed and went through all the other preparations he would have made for an unpaid date; though he knew Sybil was a professional, he also knew she was very selective and might refuse to see him again if he made a bad impression.  He arrived exactly at the agreed-upon time, having already made an electronic payment to her account yesterday as instructed.  She was more beautiful than he imagined; her face and body were flawless, her style impeccable and her personality enchanting.  The only thing which kept her from total perfection in his eyes was her perfume; it was strange and spicy, yet vaguely familiar and somehow associated with the unpleasant memory of Thursday.  But that one sour note soon vanished into the symphony of her presence, and the disquiet it caused was more than drowned out by his rising passion for her.

The next few hours passed in a blur, and Walter felt as excited and nervous as a teenage boy on the drive back.  Her house was nearly as intriguing as she was, and her parlor adorned with all manner of beautiful, unique and obviously expensive furnishings and curios.  She offered him a drink, then suggested with a mysterious smile that it was time for her to change…but he felt an unaccountable chill sweep over him when she glided off to a shadowy corner of the room and slipped behind an ornate Oriental screen.

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The Angels of Dien Bien Phu

Posted in History, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 11, 2012| 19 Comments »

…All of the men in this war torn land/Salute the nurses of Vietnam.
–  Barry Sadler

Very often a new column brings together a number of threads from previous ones, weaving them together into a new tapestry with a unique pattern forming yet another swath of the grand tapestry of sex work.  Today’s column is one of them; it is a very small section, just a tiny detail in a very large picture that is ignored, glossed over or at best mentioned in passing in most conventional histories.  I’ve linked the other columns from which the threads come, so you can explore them at your leisure.

The story begins somewhere in antiquity, with the rise of the Ouled Nail, a Berber tribe whose women often worked as prostitutes in order to establish themselves before marriage.  Though the custom clearly predates their conversion to Islam about the year 700, it is unknown exactly when it started (though in my story “Dance of the Seasons” I imagine it as already established in Carthaginian times).  Like the Javanese people I described in Thursday’s column, they saw no conflict in continuing their traditional sexual practices, and their Muslim rulers allowed them to do so for over a thousand years.  The French, however, had other ideas; after their conquest of Algeria in 1830 they treated the Nailiyat just as badly as they treated their own home-grown whores,

…[subjecting] them to arbitrary travel and residence restrictions, heavy taxation and ruinously expensive licenses, fees and fines.  By the First World War they were reduced to working in specially-licensed cafes (owned, as usual in such regimes, by the politically-connected) whose management devised ways of extorting even more money from the increasingly-exploited Nailiyat.  Thus deprived of their traditional means of livelihood, many of them jumped at the chance to earn good money in the new Bordels Mobiles de Campagne (BMCs), mobile brothels housed in trailer-trucks which were used to bring whores to soldiers at the front lines or in isolated outposts…

One of the songs in my first hooker songs column is about a French soldier who has a bad experience in one of these BMCs, which were used by the regular army until the concluding events of today’s column and by the Foreign Legion until about 15 years ago; the term is still used by some French people for the white vans which French prostitutes have used since 2003 to circumvent new anti-streetwalking laws.

The First World War ended 94 years ago today, and the occasion was celebrated as Armistice Day until the Second World War, after which it was known as Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth and Veterans Day in the US.  It’s been my custom for the past two years to commemorate the day with a “hookers in war” theme which purely by coincidence has involved the French each time:  two years ago I presented a biography of Mata Hari, and last year I explained how the French revenged themselves upon prostitutes for their humiliation at the hands of the Nazis.  This anti-whore campaign led to the increased repressions which gave rise to the sex worker rights movement and eventually developed into the current insanity of attempting to impose the Swedish Model on France.  Just as they did in 1945, French politicians have chosen a female figurehead for this crusade, this time in the person of a North African woman; I’m sure that isn’t a coincidence, given the association of the Ouled Nail with prostitution in the minds of many French.

That association became, if anything, stronger after World War I; due to French repression the Nailiyat could no longer make a living in the cafes as they once had, and so increasing numbers of them went to work in the BMCs.  Whereas before the only Frenchmen who encountered them were those who travelled to Algeria, for almost four decades any man who had been in the French military had probably had sex with one.  After World War II they were often joined by Vietnamese girls, especially in those BMCs sent to care for the troops in Indochina; thus it was that when about 14,000 French troops were airlifted into the town of Dien Bien Phu, more than 150 km behind the Viet Minh lines, they were accompanied by two BMCs staffed with a total of 18 Vietnamese and Ouled Nail prostitutes (the latter usually described as simply “Algerian”).

Though conventional accounts mention the fifteen nurses who flew in and out to evacuate casualties, these eighteen women who stayed with the men around the clock are often ignored or, if mentioned at all, treated as a kind of joke.  Considering that the French hid their existence from American journalists and military advisors for fear of offending their prudish sensibilities (and thus endangering American support for their war), it is very likely that nobody would even remember them were it not for war correspondent Bernard Fall, who devoted a chapter of his book Street Without Joy to them.  Fall spoke highly of their heroism, especially after the battle began in earnest.  One of the flight nurses, Geneviève de Galard, was stranded when her plane was destroyed on the airfield by enemy fire; she gave the whores a crash-course in assistant nursing and they helped her to care for the sick and wounded and comfort the dying all through April of 1954.  After the fall of the French garrison on May 7th Galard and the Nailiyat continued to care for the wounded until the Viet Minh allowed the French to evacuate them a few weeks later, but the Vietnamese women were arrested.  For her courage and effort Galard was awarded the Légion d´Honneur and the Croix de Guerre TOE; the press dubbed her “L’Ange de Dien Bien Phu” and she was invited to the US, where she was given a ticker tape parade in New York and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for being a “symbol of heroic femininity”.  Meanwhile, the Ouled Nail who had displayed the same courage, resolve and concern for the soldiers were forgotten, while their Vietnamese sisters were carted off and incarcerated in brutal “re-education” camps of the sort which are still being used in Vietnam to this day (though the National Assembly voted this past July to close them for good next year and replace them with simple criminalization punished by fines).

Obviously, I have nothing against Galard, who certainly deserved the honors which were heaped upon her.  However, it is equally certain that her assistants, women who probably were not really told the danger they were being flown into and yet rose to the occasion anyway, deserve far more honor than they received (doubly so for the Vietnamese women).  So I hardly think that, in the absence of any power to confer posthumous knighthoods upon them, anyone has valid cause for complaint if I extend Galard’s title of “angel” to the valiant harlots of Dien Bien Phu.

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Thaïs

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , on October 23, 2012| 21 Comments »

Thaïs the courtesan [conducted] the ceremony.  She was the first after the king to throw her blazing torch into the palace…What was most remarkable was that the sacrilege committed by Xerxes…against the Acropolis of Athens was avenged by a single woman, a fellow-citizen of the victims, who many years later, and in sport, inflicted the same treatment on the Persians.  –  Diodorus of Sicily

In order to give the broadest and most interesting picture of the lives of harlots, I try to choose the subjects of my harlotographies from as wide a range of time periods as possible.  I have decided that I won’t write on anyone who is still alive, but that still means I can cover contemporary figures such as Deborah Jeane Palfrey or Robyn Few, who have passed on very recently.  But on the other end, the boundary isn’t nearly as clear; I would be willing to write about a whore of Uruk or Mohenjo-Daro could I find a biography of one to draw from, but it seems as though Rhodopis of the 6th century BCE may be about as early as I’m able to go; her life story is a mixture of fact, surmise and legend, and though we know the names of earlier whores (such as Shamhat and Rahab), they are largely inhabitants of the sphere of legend.  This is really not so surprising when one considers that we know little more than the names and dates of most kings from earlier times, and virtually nothing about anyone else unless they had some impact on the affairs of kings.

Thaïs was an Athenian hetaera who, unlike most of her profession, enjoyed travel.  Nothing is known of her life prior to 334 BCE, but she must have already achieved quite a reputation as a courtesan because sometime around that date she attracted the attention of Alexander the Great (either directly or through a relationship with his general and close friend Ptolemy) and afterward accompanied him on all of his Persian campaigns.  Her exact relationship with Alexander is unclear; obviously the fact that she was often seen with him demonstrates that he was extremely fond of her, but it is unknown whether she was his lover or Ptolemy’s at this time.  It may be that he merely enjoyed her company; she was said to have been very wise, an accomplished orator and a ready wit with a large repertoire of dirty jokes.

Her most famous (or infamous) contribution to history came soon after Alexander took Persopolis, capital of the Persian Empire.  After allowing his troops to loot the city for several days, Alexander decided to rest here for a few months and set up his headquarters in the Palace of Xerxes.  Historians have varying views about what exactly happened next, but let’s look at some facts and see if we can’t connect the dots:  Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 BCE and, after defeating the Spartans at Thermopylae, occupied Athens.  Immediately after he took possession of the city it (including the Temple of Athena on the Acropolis) was largely destroyed by fire; though this may have been an accident caused by Athenians fleeing Xerxes’ approach, naturally the leaders preferred to claim that the conqueror had done it on purpose, and by the time Thaïs was educated almost 150 years later this was taught as historical fact.

Now, Alexander was a heavy drinker, and after one of his legendary wild parties had been underway for long enough for his judgment to be well and truly numbed, Thaïs stood up and made a speech which convinced him that Xerxes’ act of sacrilege against Athena should be avenged by burning down his palace.  A great procession was arranged in which all the participants either played music or carried torches, and Thaïs ordered the building evacuated; when everyone was safely clear she egged Alexander into hurling his torch into the building, and hers immediately followed.  Everyone else then did the same, and the blaze was so great that it soon spread out of control and consumed the entire palace district, though apparently the neighbors fled quickly because there were no recorded fatalities.

If she ever was Alexander’s lover, she had ceased to be by 327 BCE; in the spring of that year he was smitten by the strikingly beautiful Roxana, Princess of Bactria, who married him and accompanied him until his death four years later.  Whether Thaïs had started with Ptolemy or not, it is certain she ended up with him and bore him three children named Lagus, Leontiscus and Eirene.  After Alexander’s death Ptolemy became the King of Egypt, but though he married Thaïs around this time she did not become his queen because he opted for a political marriage instead.  Her daughter Eirene, however, did become a queen as the wife of Soli, King of Cyprus.

Though history records a few minor references to her children, Thaïs herself lapses into obscurity after their births; we do not even know the year of her death.  Like so many people of pre-modern times we see her only in proximity to great events in which she was involved:  she emerges from shadow into the great circle of light cast by that burning palace, is visible while she crosses the area, and then vanishes again into the darkness on the other side.

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Ice Cream in the Hand

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Q & A, tagged , , , , , on October 16, 2012| 61 Comments »

Women need a reason to have sex.  Men just need a place.  –  Billy Crystal

Here’s another of those reader questions that I felt deserved a whole column:

I find it quite remarkable that you not only understand the changes that occur to a healthy male denied sex, but can also write about it so well, and acknowledge and accept it rather than using it to manipulate and control men.  Can you write a column for men, to help us understand women?  I would very much like a better understanding of how the female sex drive is so easily thwarted.  Most men can’t just turn off their sex drive, even when there are good, practical, and sometimes urgent reasons to do so.  Yet it seems that most women can simply cut theirs off at will, and resume it later when and where they choose.  How does this work?

In a way, I was very lucky to be a late bloomer; as I’ve said before I was quite plain in my early teens, and only started to blossom in my senior year (after I turned 16).  Of course, I didn’t know I was going to blossom, so I recognized when I was 13 that I would need to understand men in order to attract them, rather than simply relying upon my natural gifts as the prettier girls could.  I didn’t realize until much later that though I wasn’t much to look at, I had “a pronounced sexual aura, and coquettishness came naturally to me,” and that these characteristics more than outweighed my plainness in many young men’s estimation.  So I learned everything my cousin Jeff was willing to teach me about men, read everything I could get my hands on about male psychology and carefully observed the behavior of my dates, male friends, brother, father, uncles, cousins and every other guy I interacted with; nor did I cease to learn once my looks caught up with the rest of my charms.

I’m afraid I have to disenchant you on one point, though:  I certainly do manipulate men, and always have since I first discovered I could about the age of 14.  However, I never do so in a harmful or malicious way; I’ve always had a strong sense of fairness (which, again, I have to thank Jeff for encouraging), and I determined while still in high school that any manipulation of men would be such that they would get something out of it, too, and would never regret having given me whatever it was that I wanted.  In other words I tried to make it so that if a guy realized what I had done later, his reaction would not be an angry “That bitch played me like a piano!” but rather “That clever little minx!  Well, she can push my buttons any time!”  When friends realized how well I could do this they started asking me for advice, and like you found my degree of understanding remarkable; one appreciative young friend even called me “the Jane Goodall of men”.

But just as Dame Jane could probably tell you a lot more about chimpanzees than about her own species, so I probably know more about male sexual behavior than that of my own sex.  It’s a matter of both necessity and applicability.  By “necessity” I mean that when interacting sexually with other women I can just go by instinct, but for men I need intellectual knowledge.  And by “applicability” I mean that whatever I learn about any given man tends to work for most other men, but what I know about my own sexuality (or that of any other individual woman) cannot necessarily be applied to most other women.  Female sexual psychology is generally much more complicated than male, so it’s a lot easier for a woman to learn to understand men than it is for a man to understand women, or even for a woman to understand other women!  A big part of the reason for this is that women tend to be sexually fluid; rather than being “target-specific” as men are, women tend to move around the sexual spectrum depending upon their environment, circumstances and experiences.  In other words, though most gay men really are “born that way,” that’s not so true of women, who are much more likely to move between heterosexual and homosexual relationships over time as their conditions change.  So it’s much harder to say “women tend to be like this” because as soon as you think you’ve got it pinned down, a woman’s sexuality may “morph” into something different.  This is why an open-minded woman can often be talked into swinging, BDSM or some other “kink” that she may not really have been interested in to start with; it’s not necessarily that she has a deep psychological affinity for the activity, but rather that she loves the person who does the talking and as a result can “flow” in that direction unless the process is obstructed by guilt, sexual hang-ups, fear, busybody friends or the like.

This is, like a lot of sex, rooted in reproductive biology.  Sperm is cheap; men make about a hundred million of the little bastards every single day, while women produce one single egg per month.  In other words, each individual egg is worth over 3,000,000,000 times as much as each sperm.  Guys can afford to throw sperm around to all and sundry like the cheapest kind of Mardi Gras beads, but women have to be really careful about whom we bestow our eggs upon; it doesn’t take a genius to see how this shapes male and female behavior throughout the animal kingdom.  Furthermore, the biological cost increases exponentially if one of those eggs is fertilized; in a state of nature each pregnancy takes a dramatic toll on a woman’s entire body, while men actually feel better after sending sperm on their way!  Because of this, female placental mammals are even choosier and cock-blockier than our egg-laying cousins, and the human capacity for anticipating consequences magnifies that still more.  Biologically speaking, poor mating decisions have absolutely zero negative impact on a male; he can dump sperm in unhealthy females, in females of different species, in males of his own species or even on the ground and there will still be plenty more where that came from.  But for a female it’s the opposite; every mating choice may have huge (and in humans decades-long) consequences.  The existence of birth control is irrelevant:  I know it exists, and you know it exists, but our hindbrains don’t, and they carry on just as though every act of coitus could lead to pregnancy…which for men means the same in either case, but for women is quite different.

What it boils down to is this:  men typically want sex most of the time because more sex means more offspring, with absolutely no downside.  But because a woman can only get pregnant so many times, and only once a year at most, our sex-response failsafe mechanisms are on hair triggers compared to yours.  It’s not that women can cut off our sex drives at will, but rather that our brains and bodies will cut it off for many more reasons than yours will.  If anything about a potential sexual partner or situation fails any of dozens of tests our brains subject them to, an alarm is tripped, the plug is pulled and the whole system goes down to protect the woman from squandering vital resources on an unhealthy baby or dangerous, troublesome pregnancy.  This is also why older women often lose their sex drives; after menopause their systems are essentially sending back error codes, saying “you can’t get pregnant, so don’t waste energy doing this.”

I’ll leave you with an analogy that I used once before in a comment thread almost two years ago.  Imagine how a woman might react if somebody walked up to her in public and slapped a scoop of ice cream into her hand; she’d probably be pretty upset.  It isn’t that she doesn’t like ice cream; it’s just that she doesn’t want a nasty scoop of cheap vanilla ice cream slapped into her previously-clean hand by some random stranger when she wasn’t even in the mood for dessert!  She wants her favorite flavor of her preferred brand at the right time, served neatly in a cone or dish, maybe with sprinkles, and preferably eaten with someone whose company she enjoys.  If any of those factors are wrong, her experience is lessened; and if more than a couple are wrong, she is much more likely to react with disgust than with pleasure.

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More Hooker Humor

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2012| 12 Comments »

Congress is furious at the Secret Service for consorting with hookers, which has traditionally been Congress’s role.  –  Andy Borowitz

Two years ago today I published “Hooker Humor”, in which I shared a few jokes about my profession.  It was only a few for one simple reason: though there are hundreds of hooker jokes, the majority of them are tasteless, juvenile, vulgar and rely on offensive stereotypes about our being dirty, diseased, desperate and subhuman.  There are, however, some funny, clever and even cute ones out there if one has the patience to look.

The Value of Sex

In the mid-1960s, two young people got married soon after university, where he earned a degree in business administration and she graduated magna cum laude in economics.  On their wedding night, she asked him for $20 before they made love; he laughed about it, remembering their discussions about the economic value of women’s labor and the like, and handed her the money with a smile.  The same thing happened the next time they had sex, and the next; though he was a bit surprised that she was carrying what he perceived as a kind of joke this far, he was a good sport about it and so made sure he always had a bit put aside in case he got horny.

This went on for 40 years, and even though they had sex less often as time went on she was always enthusiastically available for him (though she did raise her rate to $50 in the early ‘90s).  Even before they married they had agreed it made more economic sense for her to stay at home and raise their children, of whom they eventually had four; she was an excellent manager of money, and he was always amazed at how far she could make his salary go even though they sent their kids to the best schools and never wanted for anything.

In later years they experienced a series of financial setbacks which cut into their savings, and as the economy worsened over the past few years the husband started to worry that there was just no way he would be able to retire at 65 as they had planned.  Eventually he put aside his ego, sat his wife down at the table and asked her advice about their financial situation.  She went to her filing cabinet, brought out a thick envelope and showed him a series of financial statements, stock certificates and the like, explaining that she had invested her earnings from sex in the stock market, and that her good judgment and keen economic instincts had eventually parlayed that long series of small fees into literally millions of dollars.  Her husband was overjoyed, and everything was going beautifully until he blurted out, “If I had realized what you were doing, I would have given you all my business!”

Analogy

Joe and Harry were chatting at a bar, and Joe said, “I wish my wife would get off of my back about my watching porn; she claims if I really loved her I wouldn’t need that.”

Harry replied, “Oh, my wife used to say the same thing until I pointed out to her that I love my car, but I still like watching Nascar racing.”

“And that satisfied her?” asked Joe.

“Yep,” said Harry, “but it’s a good thing she didn’t think about the fact that I rent cars when I’m away on business trips.”

Venery

Four Oxford dons were engaged one evening in casual but learned conversation, and the topic turned to collective nouns such as “a pride of lions” or “a gaggle of geese”; since these are also called “venereal nouns”, one of the professors asked what a collection of prostitutes might be called.  The four fell into silence for a moment, as they pondered the possibilities.

At last, one spoke: “How about ‘a jam of tarts’?”  The others nodded in acknowledgement as they continued to consider the problem.

A second suggested “an essay of trollops.” Again, the others nodded, and soon a third proposed “a flourish of strumpets.”  They all then looked to the fourth professor, who was the most senior and learned of them all, and one asked if he had any thoughts on the matter.

He paused for a few moments more and then replied, “An anthology of pros.”

Cheapskate

One evening a man who had worked late was walking toward the train station when he spotted a very attractive streetwalker; since his wife didn’t expect him home for some time he went up to her and asked her price.  When she told him it was $100 he exclaimed, “A hundred?  Don’t be ridiculous; I’ll give you forty!”  She laughed at him and told him where he could put his forty, and he stalked off in a snit.

That weekend, he took his wife out to dinner at a restaurant not all that far from his workplace, and as they were walking back to the car whom should he see but the same streetwalker.  He just looked straight ahead, hoping she wouldn’t recognize him, but when they passed she called out, “See what you get for forty bucks?”

The Old Man and the Prostitute

In the Days Before Cell Phones…

A man staying at a hotel in London picked up a tart card from a nearby phone box.  Back in his hotel room he rang the number and a woman with a very sexy voice asked if she could be of assistance.  “Yes” he said.  “I’d like to know if you do bondage and discipline; I’m especially interested in getting a really hard spanking.  Would that be something you could provide?”

The woman replied, “I’d really like to oblige you, sir, but if you press 9 first you’ll get an outside line.”

Memory Lapse

A extremely old man decided he wanted sex, so he went to the local stroll and when he saw one woman he really liked, he started flirting with her as if he were making a pass, ignoring her questions about what he wanted.  When it became clear that he was just wasting her time, she told him to get lost but he continued bothering her, saying “I sure would like to get some action tonight.”

Exasperated, she cried “You’ve got to be kidding!  You’re too old!  You’re all finished.”

“What did you say?” asked the old man.

“You heard me – you’re all finished.”

“Oh,” he replied, “how much do I owe you?”

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Q & A (September 2012)

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Q & A, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 28, 2012| 67 Comments »

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.  –  Allan Bloom

Only two questions this time, though both are fairly long ones.  If you have one you’d like me to answer, please email me at maggiemcneill@earthlink.net; I’m a bit slow with my correspondence lately but I should still be able to answer you within a few days.

I’m in my twenties and single, but very much do want to get married some day.  I know that as a wife it will be extremely important to keep my husband sexually satisfied as best I can; I also know that if I don’t, I’d much rather he meet his needs with a hooker than an amateur since, like you’ve mentioned time and time again, the former is likely to be discreet and not destroy my marriage.  However, even if I do perform my “wifely duties” well, do you think it’s still inevitable that a man is going to cheat for sexual variety?  And if so, how would one go about having a conversation about it with a husband prospect?  “I’d really prefer if you didn’t cheat on me at all, but if you do, please do it with a professional!”?  I feel like that’d encourage a man who wasn’t even thinking of such a thing to go for it!  I know this is probably a strange thing for me to be stressing over when I’m not even so much as engaged, but I’d love to hear your perspective!

No, it’s not inevitable; roughly 67% of all married men cheat, which still means about 1 in 3 don’t.  And you have to remember that those figures are for all marriages, with bad or inattentive wives mixed in with the good, attentive ones.  I would suspect that if we could figure out a way to only survey the husbands of good wives, that number would be much lower.  It would not, however, be zero; I suspect it would be something like 20%, the fraction of men who see whores “occasionally” (I don’t have any specific rational basis for this comparison; it’s more like an educated guess modified by instinct).  Given that, I don’t think it’s at all silly to have the conversation you suggest at some point.  I’m not suggesting you just blurt it out in the middle of sex or dinner, but sooner or later a related subject is bound to come up and you can segue into it.  He will almost certainly insist that he’ll never do that, and he may even really mean it at the time, but years later if he feels the need he may remember what you said and take the harm-managed path.  Don’t worry about “giving him ideas”; when it comes to sex people will invariably think of such things on their own whether you mention it or not.  Plus, you can certainly stress that you’re not exactly giving your blessing to his hiring hookers, but rather just telling him that the professional option would hurt you less and you’d find it easier to forgive.

Your stressing about it now is indeed “strange” in the sense of “unusual”, but not in the sense of “weird”; in fact, I think it’s a sign of remarkable good sense.  Most girls never even consider these things, and as a result they tend to react that much more badly when faced with the revelation that their husbands are not superhuman paragons of virtue.  In fact, I suspect that a young woman who can think so clearly about an emotional subject like this is much more likely to choose her mate wisely and to consider factors like economics and sexual compatibility rather than simply rushing into marriage in a biochemical haze, and that will dramatically increase your chances for a good match characterized by mutual honesty.

A little over two months ago, I met a whore with whom I share a social chemistry that I never experienced with a woman before, and I feel such intense affection for her that I equally look forward to our conversations after my basic physical need has been satisfied.  At the same time, I respect our professional boundaries; I feel scheduling an appointment with her once a month does the trick.  I have become much more responsible in my personal life. I feel better motivated to tackle life’s challenges, get my sleep and exercise, keep my space clean and organized, feel more at ease around others, and am more affectionate with my family.  I no longer feel as though I have resigned myself to a cheap substitute for a conventional relationship.  Even more bizarre, I have begun to feel that compensating a woman is more natural than conventional relationships.  Have I gone nuts?  Perhaps I’m romanticizing this too much?  Secondly, do you think it’s plausible for a whore to have such a quasi-intimate relationship with a client, genuinely feeling some affection for him that doesn’t cross professional boundaries?

Your question is kind of tangled, but I’m going to tease out what I think are the pertinent strands.  First of all, as I’ve written many, many times before, there really isn’t a bright, clear line between prostitution and dating (or even marriage) as people like to pretend.  All lasting relationships have an economic component, because once the flare of biochemical passion fades there needs to be something more substantial to hold the partners together, and mutual economic benefit is about as strong a glue as there is.  That does not preclude genuine affection, however; most everyone has had the experience of genuinely liking a customer, employee, boss or co-worker despite the fact that the relationship is primarily an economic one, and though I love my husband I also recognize that our socioeconomic arrangement is the bedrock of the relationship.  Expressed another way, economics is the cake, and love the icing, not the other way around as modern Americans like to pretend.  So, answering the last question first:  Yes, a whore can have genuine affection for a client and vice-versa, and since some whores feel no need for sexual companionship outside the job, I can’t see where the opposite couldn’t be true.

Next, you have to remember that the male need for sexual variety is pretty powerful, and more so in some men than others; though some men certainly yearn for a lifetime companion, others may prefer serial monogamy and still others may be perfectly happy with getting their sex from women and their companionship from deep male friendships.  The idea that every man (or every woman, for that matter) must or even should form long-term relationships that combine social, economic and sexual factors is asinine; though such relationships are often rewarding and are probably better for raising children than the culturally-available alternatives, that doesn’t mean they are right for everyone, or that everyone is going to crave them.  So no, you’re not crazy for finding your relationships with whores rewarding and satisfying; what’s more, you need to stop looking a gift horse in the mouth.  If you’re happier, better-adjusted and more productive now than you’ve ever been before, why question it just because closed-minded bigots might not like it?  The only person you have to please is you, and if you’re accomplishing that you’re in an enviable position.  Keep on the way you’re going as long as it works for you, and if you ever arrive at a point where it doesn’t any more you can calmly take stock of the situation and proceed from there.

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Fictional Interlude: Parallel Lines

Posted in Fiction, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , on September 24, 2012| 20 Comments »

The lines I have written that you read between,
The lines on the pages
The lines on the screen
Of lines spoken – I say what I mean.
It’s parallel lines that will never meet.  –  Deborah Harry

The dinner dishes had been rinsed and placed in the washer, the young men were on the veranda talking about yesterday’s football game and the kids were already kissing, cuddling and playing in the family room, but Molly had not seen Jake since dessert.  She walked over to Sarah, squeezed her hand and kissed her cheek, and asked, “Hey, cutie, have you seen my first-born?”

Sarah smiled and said, “I think he’s got a new book going; he’s been on the computer all day and I had to force him to stop for lunch.  Mary said she heard him up late last night, too.”

“That boy and his habits!  He certainly didn’t get them from me,” said Molly in mock exasperation.

“Oh, Molly, it’s harmless.  Sure, he gets a bit anti-social when he first gets an idea and is just starting to outline it, but that never lasts more than a week or two and then he’s back to his old loveable self.”

“Besides,” interjected Karen, “We could use the money; the big truck is on its last legs and the little one just can’t do the same work.”

Molly gently tweaked her nipple and said, “Who invited you into the conversation, nosey?”

Sarah laughed.  “She’s right, though, Molly.  If this one sells as well as his last we could settle all the bills and even make a few investments.”

The older woman sighed. “I know you’re right, but you can’t blame me for worrying about his health.  I’ll bring him some coffee and check on him.”

Jake’s room was the last one at the end of the west wing; he said it was quieter there, and the sunrise would not awaken him if he worked past midnight, as he often did while writing.  Molly knocked on his door, waited for him to call out and then went in.

He turned from the monitor just long enough to see who it was, then turned back with a “Hi, Mama!” and resumed typing.

“Hi yourself, stranger,” she said, coming up behind him to rub his shoulders.  “You fled from the table as though you were going to be sick.”

“Oh, Ma, you know how it is when I get a new idea, and this is going to be a great one.”

“A novel?”

“Maybe a trilogy, or even a series.”

“Well, that’s good!  But you won’t be in any condition to write even one book, let alone three, if you don’t mind your health; Sarah said you didn’t want lunch, and now here you are in your room when we’re all going to be making love in a little while.”

He turned from the screen and took a deep sip of the coffee.  “I’m not trying to offend anyone, honestly.  It’s just that this is such an incredible, unusual idea that I have to outline it all while it’s still fresh in my mind.”

Molly glanced at the file name showing at the top of the word processor screen.  “Parallel Lines,” she read; “Does that mean it’s an alternate-reality kind of thing?”

“Yes, I got the idea while watching a documentary about chimpanzees.”

“How so?”

“Well, you know that there are two kinds of chimps, right?”

She thought for a moment.  “Standard chimps and…bonobos, no?”

“Yes.  And there’s only about a 1.5% genetic difference between us and either species, but behaviorally we’re more like the bonobos.”

“Good thing, too; chimps are brutal, nasty creatures.”

“But just as intelligent as bonobos,” Jake said with excitement.  “So what I started thinking was, what if humans had been behaviorally more like chimps than bonobos?  Where would that parallel line of evolution have taken us?  Female chimps don’t form sexual bonds like humans or bonobos do, so they don’t form the female network which allows women to civilize men.  Thus male chimps maintain juvenile levels of aggression all through life, and because they’re bigger and stronger they can pretty much run the show.  They even form packs and go looking for strange males to kill.”

“But wouldn’t these chimp-like humans necessarily be primitive?  How could they co-operate to form an advanced culture?”

“Well, they’d still have clan and tribal bonds; I think when they developed agriculture the tribes would just get a lot bigger, so instead of roving groups you’d have organized bodies of men fighting between these super-tribes, even when there wasn’t really anything important to fight over.”

“It sounds like a perfectly dreadful world to live in,” said Molly.  “Wouldn’t their sexual development be stunted as well?”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” he mused; “in fact, that’s what I was just trying to work out.  I think they would probably be very sexually possessive, like a dog with a bone.  But it isn’t easy to imagine what effect that sort of behavioral pattern would have on their culture.  Sex is the backbone of society, the social glue that lets us live together in peace; what kind of twisted culture would you get if it weren’t there?”

“I’m sure you’ll describe it brilliantly, as usual,” she said, “but in the meantime I don’t want you turning into a chimp-man due to sex deprivation.  If you won’t play with the whole group tonight, may I at least ask one of the girls to sleep with you later?  I’m sure Della would enjoy that.”

He grinned sheepishly.  “You win, Ma.  Ask her to come in when she’s ready for bed, and I promise I won’t keep her waiting.”

“Deal.  I love you.”

“I love you too, Mama.  And thanks for worrying.”

Molly kissed him on the head, gave him a quick hug and took the now-empty coffee cup, closing the door behind her so as to give him his privacy.  She understood that reading about a place was quite a different thing from living there; but all the same, she thought, it’s probably best that parallel lines can never meet.

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That Was the Week That Was (#38)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 21, 2012| 31 Comments »

Beware of billionaires who want to save your life.  –  Mark Leno

Modern Marriage

Brooke Magnanti on Catherine Hakim’s new book:

…people are still marrying, still making that leap into the conceptual and statistical improbability of ’til death do us part.  And where does that leave affairs, clients of sex workers, enjoyers of porn and the rest of us?…When many couples choose to remain childless, or have no familial wealth to pass on, why are we still doing this, anyway?  Those questions and a lot more are what drives the narrative of…The New Rules: Internet Dating, Playfairs, and Erotic Power.  In it, [Catherine Hakim]…calmly dissects the differences between the cultures where it’s okay to throw a strop at the first sign of relationships going off piste, and those where adultery is not only usual but expected…

Aversions

In a way, this is one of those “dog bites man” things, unless I’m the only one who’s ever noticed that most women are more sexually open when they’re very turned on:

…A small Dutch study…indicate[s] that arousal overrides feelings of disgust and facilitates a woman’s desire to do something that a woman who is not aroused might find flat-out repulsive…Daniel R. Kelly, an associate professor of philosophy at Purdue…explained that disgust is an “extension of our immune system” that helps prevent people from getting infected by making them wary of things, like bodily fluids, that…make people vulnerable…David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas…[said] “Women show far more disgust and especially sexual disgust, than men…It helps to protect women from having sex with the wrong men, such as men who might communicate diseases…show signs of a high ‘parasite load’…have poor hygiene and so on,” he said.  What is interesting about the new Dutch paper, the two experts agreed, is that it suggests the mission to avoid the potentially “dangerous” parts of sex takes a backseat when women are aroused…

Who Did Your Tits?

Color me unsurprised:  “Letting women ‘test drive’ larger breasts before a boob job…[by] wearing a heavily padded bra for two weeks while doing ordinary tasks…[has led to them picking] 30 per cent larger [implants] than they first planned – at least one additional cup size.”  Despite claims from insecure women that they hate having big tits, the fact is that many women wish they had gone bigger, and most do so if the implants need to be replaced.

My Readers Write

This could be considered an update to “Welcome To Our World”, “Neither Cold nor Hot” or the “All in the Family” update in last week’s TW3, but the fact that it was written by regular reader Aspasia (in her own blog) trumps all that:

Jezebel ran two articles…that…highlight the hypocrisy of much of their readership…The first…“How to Tell Your Parents You’re A Prostitute”…[is followed by a] comment thread…rife with the moralizing pearl-clutching of feminists who claim to be supportive of women’s choices…Three days later, came [another] article…[which] criticizes certain choices made by women…and…[was] roundly condemned in the…comment thread…but…[the second author]…merely [did] what the average Jezebel reader does whenever sex workers…are discussed:  stripped a whole group of women of their autonomy, projected her own standards onto them, and criticized their choices…

Uncommon Sense

Prostitutes in…Geneva have formed [Switzerland’s] first sex workers’ union, citing foreign competition and the high cost of rent…[it will be] called…the Sex Workers’ Syndicate [and]…aims to operate alongside the organisation Aspasie, which has advocated for prostitutes in Geneva since 1982.  Aspasie primarily concerns itself with the health and well-being of sex workers, while STTS was mainly founded to address prostitutes’ financial concerns and working conditions…

I reckon that’s good news, though I’m a bit wary of the protectionism implied in that first line; if foreign women are excluded, it could potentially create a  bottleneck.  Of course, the government is working on one of its own:

Switzerland has long been criticised by the international community for allowing prostitution by teens as young as 16.  The government has proposed changes to the criminal code which would make it a crime to hire or sell the services of a prostitute who is younger than 18…[due to] a Council of Europe convention it signed in 2010…young sex workers would not be prosecuted for their actions – only those who seek or sell their services would be held responsible…

The age of consent in Switzerland is 16, but once again we see the magical thinking that money somehow taints sex and the complete lack of consideration about what will happen to those girls once their agency is denied and their once-legal trade is semi-criminalized.

We Told You So

More of this, please:

[A Philippine “anti-trafficking” NGO named] the Visayan Forum Foundation (VF) [has been] accused of fraud by…USAID…At least…$5 million…meant to fund the group’s projects…[is] missing…the warrant that led to the search…said…the foundation…may be in possession or control of “falsified private documents which were used and are being used to defraud…donors”…

Scapegoats

“…Carlos Romero…was arrested…and charged with misdemeanor sexual activity with an animal, by officials in Ocala, Fla., but believes the real outrage is that the Sunshine State is ‘backwards’ towards zoophilia…The victimized animal is a 21-month-old miniature donkey named Doodle he purchased two months ago…”  Whatever you may think of Romero’s preferences, ascribing human sexual hang-ups to a donkey in heat is beyond absurd.

The Last Shall Be First

It’s good to see bigots like this criticized by peers and spotlighted by the media:

An Oklahoma County judge is refusing to let men planning sex-change operations switch to feminine names.  District Judge Bill Graves has denied name changes in two such cases so far…[ruling] both times the requests were made for a fraudulent purpose…His position…has generated criticism of him at the courthouse.  Five other Oklahoma County judges who handle name change requests…routinely grant them in transgender cases.

His reason for this prejudice?  Science!

Graves…has concluded a person cannot really change…sex because the person’s DNA stays the same…“A so-called sex-change surgery can make one appear to be the opposite sex, but in fact they are nothing more than an imitation…petitioner has not even had the surgery…To grant a name change in this case would be to assist that which is fraudulent…Genesis 1:27-28 states: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.  And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …’  The DNA code shows God meant for them to stay male and female.”

You can always tell a legitimate scientific argument by its quotation of Genesis.

Above the Law

As long as bureaucrats have excessive power over individuals, this will keep happening:

[An]…investigator with Florida’s Department of Children and Families has been arrested for “bribery by a public servant, official misconduct, and falsifying records” after he told a woman under his supervision that he would hide the results of her drug-positive urine test if she would have sex with him.  When [she] refused…Andrew Thomas threatened to report her to her probation officer…[he] is the third Florida DCF employee to be charged this year with a sex-related crime.  In August…Peter Crane…was charged with…molesting two five-year-old girls.  In June…Jean Lacroix…was charged with having sex with a teen who was part of a prostitution ring composed exclusively of foster children…

Naked Truth

Fortunately, most of the journalists who contact me are looking for informed commentary on issues rather than a sex-work story they can twist to fit their own agenda, but Charlotte Shane does an excellent job of skewering the twits who pester non-activist sex workers to “get their real stories”.  If you’re not a journalist or academic you’ll enjoy reading this, but if you are either of those you need to read it.

Worse Than I Thought

California’s “Proposition 35” defines virtually all normal sex as “prostitution” and a lot of normal behavior as “coercion”, lists anyone who has anything at all to do with “coerced prostitution” as a “sex trafficker”, and condemns individuals so labeled to decades of prison, lifetime “sex offender” registration and theft of all their property by the state.  It’s so awful, in fact, that even bona fide coerced prostitutes are against it:  “Anabelle sees herself as a victim of sex trafficking. Stories like hers are driving Proposition 35…But Anabelle isn’t supporting [it]…and her arguments — and those of sex workers and their supporters — paint a very different picture of a law that could hurt the people it’s supposed to protect.”  And if that article’s not enough to convince you, how about this slide show?

Metaupdates

Follow Your Bliss
in TW3 (#16)

Another pervert claims to “help” teenage runaways so he can help himself to their sexual favors:

The founder of [a charity for homeless youth named “Stand Up For Kids”] has been charged with repeatedly sexually assaulting a child over a three year period.  Richard Koca, Sr., 69…faces seven felony charges of sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust…The charges…were…sealed…by court order…after KMGH’s report…investigators are preparing for the possibility that more potential victims could come forwarding the case…the organization’s website was no longer accessible online today, and calls to the headquarters went unreturned…

The Pro-Rape Coalition in TW3 (#30)

Sex work-positive journalist Susannah Breslin interviews two porn producers (one of them Ira Isaacs), two actresses and a lawyer about the potential effects of the ramped-up porn prosecutions promised by Mitt Romney should he be the winner of the quadrennial popularity contest.

Feminine Pragmatism in TW3 (#32)

No matter how carefully and thoroughly I scan for items of interest, a few things always slip through the cracks.  While reading about Nadya Suleman using the money from her porn flick to lease a new house, I encountered the sentence “She spent the summer begging for money from fans and offering dates for cash.”  Wait, what?  Sure enough; the linked article is from August 6th:

…Nadya Suleman…has opened a profile on the dating website  WhatsYourPrice.com, TMZ reports…Although some would consider Suleman’s latest venture a dip into the prostitution pool, Gawker’s Louis Peitzman outlines, “yes, there’s something a little sketchy about selling yourself online, but it’s not prostitution unless they’re paying for sex…”

You’ve got to laugh at the moronic mental gymnastics with which some people justify their childish attempts to draw sharp, static lines between complex, fluid behaviors.  Octomom’s done stripping, porn and sugar baby work, but she’s not a whore, noooooo.  And neither is she a pathetic victim like the rest of us “prostituted women”; according to the house-leasing article,

“It has been the most empowering, liberating thing I have ever done,” Suleman told…Dr. Drew about doing porn.  “There is nothing I won’t do to take care of my family…I had full control and power over my choice.  I take full accountability and I’m proud of it.”

So there you are, ladies; in order for your equally-pragmatic choices to be considered valid, you first have to have 14 fatherless kids you can’t support.

This Week in 2011

A two-part guest column from veteran sex worker rights activist Norma Jean Almodovar was followed by criticisms of people who ask questions but refuse to accept the answers and sex workers who waste energy in internecine squabbles.  “Uncommon Sense” (linked above) was then followed by a look at clueless neofeminist whining and a tale of the Ouled Nail.

This Week in 2010

The week began with my three-part column on the intersection of BDSM and whoring, which was followed by columns on why many escorts shun black clients and the physiological differences between genetic women and post-op transsexuals.  I also told the sad story of an escort I called “April” and published my very first (two-part) Q & A column.

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Somebody’s Daughter

Posted in Current Events, History, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 11, 2012| 12 Comments »

Every girl who worked for me was someone’s daughter.  It would be hugely hypocritical for me to say, “It’s good enough for their daughters, but not for mine”.  –  Becky Adams

Last week Becky Adams, a retired brothel owner, once again ignited controversy among busybodies, moralists and hypocrites by reiterating her statement (first made publicly seven weeks ago) that like many other people, she wouldn’t mind if her daughter followed in her footsteps:

…Becky Adams, 45…insists she would be happy if [her 16-year-old daughter] Emilia chose to be a “high class escort” — and says she would even help to get the teenager started…“Society may judge her but I wouldn’t.  At least prostitution is an honest profession.  I’d much rather she work as an escort than a banker.  I couldn’t understand her wanting to do something morally wrong, something that could jeopardise someone else.”

…Emilia, who is currently working in a shop and at a car showroom while studying travel and tourism, agrees with her mum.  She said:  “I don’t have a moral problem with having sex with strangers…I’m not promiscuous but sex isn’t a massive thing for me.  I certainly don’t regret losing my virginity at 14…One of mum’s girls in particular became more like an aunt to me.  I loved being surrounded by these nice, glamorous women.  It was a happy family.”

Becky is glad that her youngest daughter grew up surrounded by her girls and the tools of the trade, claiming that it has made her more open-minded and relaxed about sex…“I think my work showed Emilia that the reality of prostitution is just very ordinary.  The girls have their shifts and they go to work.  They can have a bad day or a quiet day, just like anybody else…prostitution is a service…Emilia has seen…how it can save marriages — how a man whose wife is fighting cancer will visit a prostitute rather than start an affair.  She’s not shocked by anything as a result…”

Those who can’t understand Adams’ position appear to be suffering from what we might call the Fallacy of Universal Mores, the false belief that everyone feels the same way about sex as they do.  These people, of whom the “no woman could willingly choose prostitution” crowd is a subset, apparently imagine that those who choose sex work are ashamed of ourselves and hate our lives, and would therefore never want our children to make the same choices we did.  They just can’t get it through their thick skulls that some women really don’t find sex work horrible and degrading, and therefore would not oppose daughters taking up the trade if that was what they wanted to do.  Here, for example, is a short film of Ouled-Nail dancers taken in 1938; as I explained in my column of one year ago today the women of this Berber tribe often worked as dancers and prostitutes, and daughters were trained by their mothers.  As you can see, this little girl is already learning her dance moves:

Even among well-adjusted sex workers who say they would mind their daughters taking up the work, the usual reason is not anything prohibitionists imagine, but rather the stigma and the dangers resulting from criminalization.  Some others (myself included) object not on principle, but because of the belief that a specific daughter is not suited to the work; Adams states in the interview that she believes Emilia would do well as an escort but not in brothel work.

But there’s another aspect to the “shocked” reactions which is even more indicative of disordered thinking; as I pointed out in “Mother’s Day”,

…People who [ask, “Would you want your daughter to do it?”]…aren’t concerned with the danger of prostitution, because if they were we’d hear it used as an argument against women joining the military, doing police work or participating in dangerous sports like boxing…Let’s set aside for a moment the obvious point that there are lots of things people wouldn’t want their daughters doing (smoking, excessive drinking, getting pregnant out of wedlock, working at Wal-Mart, going into politics) which aren’t illegal, and the equally obvious fact that we don’t get to choose our offspring’s occupations (though some certainly try).  Let’s consider only that people do lots of things their parents wouldn’t like, and that most prostitutes have parents who would be upset and appalled at the choice.  It’s not your decision whether your daughter becomes a hooker; it’s hers.  And if she does make that choice (which 1% of all Western daughters do for some portion of their lives), do you really want her hounded by cops, forced into dangerous situations, unable to seek legal recourse if she’s robbed or raped, and branded as a pariah for life because of it?  Or would you rather she have the ability to repent what you see as her mistake and leave the job later if she chose?  Finally, is it worth rejecting your own flesh and blood for making a decision with which you disagree, and which hurt nobody except (in your opinion) her?…

Presumably, those who cannot comprehend why a whore would accept her daughter’s decision to practice the same profession believe that the mother should adamantly denounce her own decisions (thus demonstrating that she has poor judgment and is therefore incompetent to give advice on the subject).  Or perhaps they think she should be a hypocrite, indulging in the common parental “Do as I say, not as I do.”  In either case, they apparently hold that a mother should reject her daughter for making a decision she disagrees with.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of thought demonstrated by their reactions, though; after all, these are the same people who support paternalistic laws whose consequences are far more damaging than those of the behaviors they supposedly “protect” people from.

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Capricious Lusts

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2012| 99 Comments »

Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society.
–  St. Augustine

Here’s another response to a reader letter which, I felt, merited its own column.

I’m in late middle age, but when I was in my twenties I was what those people you wrote about in “False Target” would call creepy, too.  If there was anything wrong with me, nobody would tell me; they just found “polite” reasons to always want to be somewhere else.  If the trade had been legal, it would have made both my life and theirs easier; I would simply go there, and get what I needed.  Lacking that, I had to carry on as “Creeper” did, hoping that some woman would decide to have a heart.  I would never have forced anyone, but I think I would have taken advantage of someone who’d had a little too much to drink.  I do not consider this rape; many women go along with it on purpose, either because they feel more comfortable or because it makes them feel less responsible.  Any adult who chooses to drink and then does something he/she will regret afterwards is morally responsible for that choice, whether the “something” is to fight, to drive, or to have sex.  If the woman was actually unconscious or drugged against her will, obviously that would be a different story.  But why can’t women understand that most “creeps” are just frustrated, not dangerous?

There are several reasons most women don’t understand the relationship between male creepiness and lack of sex:  inattention to detail is the most important one (it’s obvious if one simply pays attention to male behavior), but another is ignorance about evolution and the biological reasons for the existence of the sex drive.  Oh, I’m sure nearly everyone over the age of ten knows that sex makes babies (even in our prudish, hide-the-truth culture), but society, religion and feminism pile so many layers of romanticism on top of that (especially for girls) that people lose sight of it, and the lies that sex is only a want rather than a need, and that men and women are exactly the same, convince naïve girls that the raging male sex drive is as easily thwarted as their own mellower version.  When a person is starving or eating only poor food he suffers from malnutrition, and when a man’s only sexual release is his own hand he begins to sink into a kind of sexual malnutrition that results first in increasingly extreme fantasies, then really off-the-wall and even grotesque fantasies, then creepiness, and finally (in some cases) proto-rapist behavior or actual rape.  I’ve seen this time and again both in personal life and work; a man who hasn’t had any in a while might talk about or even suggest all kinds of weird stuff, but the moment he achieves release it evaporates.  That’s why some men want to kick a whore out as soon as they’re finished; in the mind of such a man, hiring her in the first place was something “weird” and perverted, and as soon as the pressure is gone and hormone levels have returned to normal he is repulsed by what he did and wants her out the door as soon as possible.

Sex workers of all kinds, but most especially whores, perform a vital service to the community by allowing men to “blow off steam” before they get to the “creepy” stage; even men with less money can hire lower-priced streetwalkers or go to inexpensive massage parlors, so that only the truly destitute will have no recourse (and that’s no different from them lacking food or shelter, anyway).  So, though most men won’t commit forcible rape no matter how frustrated they are, many men will (if frustrated enough) begin to suffer a kind of cloudiness in their moral vision that allows them to rationalize that taking advantage of drunk, incapacitated or even sleeping women is “not really” rape, just as a desperately-hungry man will steal to fill his belly.  It still doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t make such a man an incorrigible monster who deserves imprisonment for decades, either.

I am deeply committed to the principle of harm reduction, which holds that it’s futile and even destructive for society to forbid the various things people do to feel good, and that the proper response of government is to take measures to reduce the harm which results from these things.  Nearly everyone who espouses harm reduction considers prostitution a subject for the philosophy (in other words, they want to reduce the problems associated with the sex trade by eliminating criminalization, providing shelters for teen runaways, helping streetwalkers to exit if they wish, etc), but many of them don’t recognize it as part of the solution for the social problems which result from the disparity in the sex drives of men and women, such as marital infidelity, rape and the kind of sexual exploitation which feminists insist is rape, MRAs insist isn’t and most governments tend to go back and forth about.

For some taboo behaviors, the only harm (or at least the overwhelming bulk of it) results from criminalization; simply put, if the thing were not illegal, little if any harm could be attributed to it (marijuana and many sexual behaviors fall into this category).  For others, the majority of the harm comes from criminalization, and harm-reduction laws and/or free-market solutions would take care of the rest (IV drug use spreads disease, but that can be mitigated by needle exchanges; gamblers can become obsessive and ruin themselves, but this happens far less in legal casinos than in gangster-run backroom gambling).  Activities which involve unwilling participants must obviously remain criminal (in fact, they are the only things which should be), but common sense and harm reduction principles demand that the government should stop obstructing businesses which have been shown to reduce their prevalence.  A number of studies have demonstrated that availability of sexually explicit materials reduces rape, and others uphold the millennia-old wisdom that ready availability of prostitutes does the same thing (one predicts a 25% reduction in the US rape rate were prostitution to be decriminalized here).

If prostitution were decriminalized everywhere, the stigma surrounding it would eventually begin to fade in those whose minds are not warped by anti-sex belief systems, and more men will feel comfortable availing themselves of the services of sex workers before they started to get “creepy”; freed of the frustration and desperation which distorted their personalities they would probably be far more able to attract girlfriends, and the legal system would see far fewer cases of men who had stepped across blurry lines because their mental states had caused them to misread cues or to allow their own compelling needs to obscure the rights of others.  This would not entirely solve the problem of “he said-she said” situations (which will exist as long as the human race does):  young women also need to be taught to behave sensibly  and to reject foolish neofeminist notions of absolute female entitlement and any unwanted sex being equivalent to gun-to-the-head aggravated rape by a stranger; the law must return to the presumption of innocence and stop accepting statements as fact without physical evidence; and society needs to stop preaching the ridiculous, childish, patronizing dogmas that sex is magical, that women are fragile little flowers who must be protected from our own decisions, and that any rape, no matter how iffy or nonviolent, is absolutely the worst thing that can happen to a woman.

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