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John Law

Posted in Current Events, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2011| 10 Comments »

Overload the police with victimless crimes and other minutiae and eventually only creeps and bullies remain cops. –  Rick Gaber

Four short articles about whores and cops drawn from friends’ blogs and correspondent tips.

Get Out of the 19th Century Often?

In Brandy Devereaux’s column of February 10th she called attention to this story from WLBT in Jackson, Mississippi in which the reporters interviewed “Major” Nick Clark of the Hinds County sheriff’s office (I guess a captain isn’t good enough to handle all the crime in the big booming metropolis of Jackson, population 175,000).  Apparently, Colonel Clark is jealous of the big cities’ claims of being major hubs of “human trafficking”, but since neither the Super Bowl nor the Olympics are scheduled to come to Jackson any time soon he has to content himself with the Dixie National Rodeo.  He can’t use the internet too well, though, or he might’ve discovered that claims of prostitution booms at sporting events have been repeatedly debunked.  But his computer illiteracy is unsurprising given his 19th-century views:

“Yeah, unfortunately, they follow the internet, too, and they realize, they’ve got a lot of extra people in town and being the bloodsuckers that they are, they prey on innocent, unsuspecting people and try to find a way to ply their wares,” Clark said.

Apparently, the old Victorian “whore as monster” rhetoric is alive and well in Mississippi, at least in the brain of Brigadier Clark, who obviously hasn’t read the memo that we’re all trafficked victims now.  I guess Field Marshall Clark believes that all the poor, innocent, unsuspecting Christian men of Jackson would never have cheated on their wives if those wanton vampire hussies hadn’t bewitched them.  Hmm, on second thought maybe Grand High Warlord Clark is stuck in the 17th century rather than the 19th.

A Fate Worse Than Death

Apparently February 10th was the day to report on Neo-Victorian attitudes in the American South; Dave’s Sex Hysteria blog for that day featured the news that Georgia apparently believes that prostitution is a fate worse than death, because a proposed law makes patronizing a prostitute below the age of 18 a crime worse than murder.  And what makes this even more bizarre is that the age of consent in Georgia is 16; maybe this legislator’s been reading too much Schapiro Group propaganda.  But wait, there’s more!  Apparently, the people behind this bill have either been talking to Operation Broken Silence or the Surrey Police, because the bill grants the state the power to loot the property of “traffickers”…which are defined so loosely and vaguely that even a whore’s husband could be prosecuted for it.  This of course creates a tremendous financial incentive for anyone and everyone associated with a hooker to be charged with “trafficking” so the government can rob them.  Thus, as usual, voluntary adult prostitutes are persecuted and the real bad guys driven further underground to thrive in the dark.

Big Deal

I’m always fascinated at how big a brouhaha amateurs raise when they “discover” some aspect of harlotry which has existed for years.  Brandy called my attention to this one as well, in her column of February 11th; apparently, some naïve French people are up in arms about a new escort service called Loue Une Petite Amie (literally “Rent a Girlfriend”).  The author of this article excitedly expostulates, “Loue Une Petite Amie…actually allows guys to rent female companions, legally!  The French website assures its clients they have nothing to fear from the law, because this isn’t actually prostitution, but a simple case of renting a person…which apparently isn’t illegal in France.”  It ain’t illegal in the United States either, Bubba; that’s what an escort service is, and you’ll see the phone books are full of them.  It only becomes that bugaboo “prostitution” if the escort offers her client sex for money (or accepts his offer of money for sex), and since smart escorts never do that the police just lie about it.   But in France, prostitution isn’t even illegal, though “living off the avails” is so escort services have to dodge the busybody law by playing dumb just like they do in the States.  In other words, there’s no story here, folks; calm down and go back to your regularly-scheduled moral panic.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Members of the ruling class believe they have the right to all the pleasures forbidden to the citizenry; laws are for the “little people”, and cops may violate them at will.  Oh, sure, those who get caught on camera beating the living hell out of reporters, motorists and women sometimes lose their jobs, but anything less than murder is generally covered up and vice laws are flaunted as a matter of course.  But once in a while somebody in internal affairs gets a bit out of line and forgets he’s supposed to cover up for his “brother officers”; when that happens the responsibility for excuse-making and hand-slapping passes on to higher levels, sometimes all the way to city hall.  That’s what’s going on right now in Raleigh, North Carolina, in this story reported in Sex Hysteria on the 10th; a bunch of cops had sex with a streetwalker and were caught by a hidden camera, triggering internal affairs to act and thereby necessitating a cover-up involving police brass, the district attorney and even the mayor’s office.  How much you want to bet the internal affairs officers end up being punished more severely (after an appropriate excuse is invented, of course) than the cops they caught?  After all, screwing whores is the privilege of cops, but embarrassing politicians is a capital offense.

And lest you think it’s limited to the East Coast, here’s a report of a similar incident from Bakersfield, California thanks to regular reader Joyce.  This cop was a solo sleazebag who according to the police chief “…became interested in prostitution enforcement and has a record of conducting enforcement on prostitutes.”  Any normal person could guess that a male cop who is “interested in prostitution enforcement” either has ulterior motives or serious issues, and should therefore be kept as far from hookers as possible.  Unfortunately, police departments aren’t staffed with normal people and therefore he was given exactly what he wanted, a chance to rape streetwalkers by threatening to run them in.  This has been going on since August, until one of the women he threatened  decided to take her chances by reporting him.  It’s unlikely any of his victims will come forward, but maybe they’ll decide to make an example of him and charge him with “human trafficking” instead of just “disorderly conduct”.

And in New Orleans, a cop was just convicted on Tuesday of kidnapping and attempting to rape a prostitute; she testified that he actually did rape her, but since the defense was allowed to repeatedly refer to her as a whore and as “trash” in addition to badgering her into confused testimony the jury was too unsure to hand down a life sentence.  Well, at least he’ll get a total of 15-90 years, and it’s poetic justice that one of the tactics the prosecutor used to establish him as a sexual deviate was that he had condoms in the trunk of his police car.  I’ll bet that shoe is rather tight on your big foot, isn’t it “officer”?

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O, Canada!

Posted in Current Events, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 7, 2010| 18 Comments »

God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. –  Calixa Lavallée (Robert Weir translation), “O Canada”

Those Americans who wish to understand the difference between decriminalization of prostitution and legalization of it need look no farther than our neighbor to the north.  Decriminalization is based on the philosophy that since sex is a normal human behavior which is completely legal between consenting adults as long as the woman is allowed to hide her price or lie about it, it should also be legal when she honestly tells a man her price up front.  Legalization, on the other hand, is based on the magical thinking that sex is somehow intrinsically different from all other human activity even when there is no chance of conception and must therefore be regulated in a way no other behavior is.  Jurisdictions with legalized prostitution give officials (or in Nevada, rich people with political connections) the power to control women’s bodies and tell whores whom we can see, where we can see them, how we can communicate with them or each other and even how we can spend our money (depending on the jurisdiction).  These laws are invariably arbitrary, unfair, punitive and Draconian and at their worst reduce prostitutes to state property under the control of government-sponsored pimps.

In Canada, prostitution has never actually been illegal, but because control freaks can’t simply let women alone a number of repressive laws have been enacted to criminalize virtually everything prostitutes need to do in order to practice our trade, including keeping one place in which to receive clients, “public communication for the purpose of prostitution” and “living off the avails of prostitution” (i.e. receiving a substantial portion of one’s support from a prostitute). These laws prevent hookers from working legally in their homes, advertising, hiring employees such as maids, secretaries or bodyguards, having roommates or supporting dependent adult family members such as university-age kids.  Canadian prostitutes’ only legal choices are extremely dangerous ones, so just as most whores in Nevada prefer to work illegally due to the repressive prostitution laws in their state, so too do Canadian prostitutes.  But as I reported in my column of September 29th, an Ontario judge recently struck down these laws as the dangerous tyranny they are.  In that column I predicted that parliament would win a stay on the ruling so the politicians could think of some more insidious way to harass and persecute hookers, and that indeed occurred last week (as reported on the Paper Chase website of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law):

The Ontario Court of Appeal on Thursday (December 2nd) ruled that several prostitution-related laws struck down by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice would remain in effect until April 29th, pending an appeal.  Justice Marc Rosenberg issued an extension of the stay requested by lawyers for the federal and Ontario governments to preserve the provisions that were invalidated by the lower court while the appeal process continues.  The OSCJ ruled in September that provisions § 210, § 212 and § 213 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which prohibit the keeping of a “common bawdy house,” engaging in communications for the purpose of soliciting sex and living “on the avails” of the sex trade, were a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The government argued that the judgment should be stayed until the court could conduct a full review of the decision, while the party challenging the laws argued that the stay would “perpetuate the law’s contribution to violence against a vulnerable population.”  Rosenberg applied the RJR-MacDonald Inc. v. Canada test for granting a stay pending appeal, which requires the court to balance convenience and public interest considerations of the issue.  He concluded that it is in the public interest that the judgment be stayed for a relatively short period to permit appellate review of the decision.

Although prostitution is legal in Canada, virtually all of the acts ancillary to exchanging sex for money are not. In 2007, the Sex Professionals of Canada initiated an application with the OSCJ challenging the three provisions overturned in September’s ruling on the grounds that they are inconsistent with the Charter.  The challenge came on the heels of the trial of Robert Pickton, who was accused of murdering 26 women, mostly prostitutes, in the Vancouver area in the 1990s.  Pickton was convicted of six counts of murder in late 2007.

Here’s a report on the predictably-disgusting reaction of Canadian politicians to news of the stay, courtesy of Xtra!, a Canadian Gay and Lesbian news site.  As one might expect, the politicians claim that laws which endanger sex workers actually protect us from “crime”.  But not, of course, crime perpetrated by the police, as discussed in this article on the SWOP Las Vegas website:

A report to be released today by Prostitutes of Ottawa-Gatineau Work, Educate and Resist (POWER) claims that city police officers regularly assault, abuse and harass prostitutes and other sex workers; a few of those interviewed said they’d even been strip-searched by officers in public areas.  The findings have prompted POWER to ask the Ontario Human Rights Commission to conduct a public inquiry into the Ottawa police’s “systemic discrimination” against sex workers.

In an 11-page letter to the rights commission, POWER says the Ottawa Police Service discriminates against sex workers on three prohibited grounds — sex, ethnicity and “perceived disability” and thus “creates tremendous physical and emotional harm” to individuals and fosters “prejudicial and harmful stereotypes” within the community at large.  The release of the report and the call for a public inquiry comes as city police are facing heavy criticism for the abuse and unlawful strip search of Stacy Bonds as well as other incidents of alleged misconduct.  Chris Bruckert, a criminologist at the University of Ottawa who co-authored the report, said Bonds’ experience “sounds a lot like what we’ve been hearing from streetbased sex workers.”

The report is based on interviews with 43 sex workers — 34 women, seven men and two transgender females — done between April 2009 and February 2010.  Twenty-seven were streetbased workers, and the rest mostly worked as escorts in massage parlours.  The report conceals their identities, making their accounts of police mistreatment impossible to verify, but Bruckert said she was “absolutely confident” their stories were reliable.  15 workers identified the police as their main challenge, an assessment based on their abuse of power, the report says.  16 of the street-based workers said they’d experienced police violence; one was allegedly beaten so badly by four officers that she lost sight in one eye, and another said police broke her arm.  Others accused the police of sexual misconduct; one said an undercover officer grabbed her hand and “forcefully put it on his crotch,” and another spoke of an officer who had sex with a number of prostitutes.  Three said they’d been strip-searched on public streets by male officers, and a number said they’d been sexually assaulted while under arrest. One said she was left to sit, naked, in a cell for 24 hours.  Other incidences include illegal confinement, confiscation of property such as sleeping bags and condoms, and “starlight tours” — where police detain people, drive them to the country or suburbs and leave them there.

Inspector Tyrus Cameron, who oversees prostitution enforcement downtown, said that violence against sex workers is unacceptable, and he encouraged those who believe they’ve been abused to file complaints.  But most workers don’t see that as a viable option; their most common complaint is harassment by police when they are clearly not soliciting clients.  All the street-based workers spoke of police disrespect, and more than two-thirds recounted “public shaming rituals.”  Cameron said the force doesn’t condone rude behavior, but claims that most street prostitutes are addicts who “don’t always behave rationally.”  He agreed that officers routinely approach known prostitutes on the street to ask what they are doing.  “Are we trying to dissuade people from going to them?  Absolutely.  We make no apologies for that.”

The report says discrimination against sex workers by the police and public is a product of “whore-phobia,” which casts them as dirty, immoral and hyper-sexualized people forced into sex work by addictions or mental illness. The police, the report notes, are in a position of power.  “When they abuse that power and operate in relation to their own or societal biases and prejudices, the consequences for sex workers can be severe.”

This should all sound pretty familiar to my regular readers; I’ve written about it several times, most recently on November 16th.  But it bears repeating as often as possible to combat those who claim that all police brutality toward hookers consists of “isolated incidents”, and to illustrate why legalization (as practiced in Canada, the UK and many other countries) is no better than criminalization.  Only when our trade is decriminalized – that is, removed from police oversight to the same degree as other common professions – will these sorts of abuses stop.

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Amsterdam

Posted in Current Events, History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 1, 2010| 5 Comments »

In the port of Amsterdam
There’s a sailor who drinks
And he drinks and he drinks
And he drinks once again
He drinks to the health
Of the whores of Amsterdam
Who have promised their love
To a thousand other men. –  Jacques Brel, “Amsterdam”

With all this talk of the “Nordic Model” lately, I think it’s sad that the neofeminists and the blinkered asses we call politicians whom they ride upon can’t seem to turn their gaze a little to the southwest, across the North Sea to the Netherlands.  The Dutch treatment of prostitutes isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s vastly better than the Nordic Model and centuries more advanced than the barbaric American model.  And though abolitionists and bluenoses have repeatedly tried (and still continue to try) to suppress our trade, such prohibitions have never really caught on in the historically tolerant Netherlands.

Like most European governments, the Dutch tolerated prostitution throughout the Middle Ages because it was recognized as a “necessary evil” which prevented male sexual passion from getting out of control.  Some cities tried to ban it within the city walls, but in 1413 these prohibitionist decrees were themselves prohibited in Amsterdam by a law which stated, “Because whores are necessary in big cities and especially in cities of commerce such as ours – indeed it is far better to have these women than not to have them – and also because the holy church tolerates whores on good grounds, for these reasons the court and sheriff of Amsterdam shall not entirely forbid the keeping of brothels.”  It’s amazing how much wiser and more socially progressive Dutch authorities were 600 years ago than American authorities are now, isn’t it?

“Brothel Scene” by Nikolaus Knupfer (1630s)

Unfortunately, this did not last; in the 16th century the rise of Protestantism and occupation by Spain resulted in prohibitionist laws, which in turn resulted in official pimping as it always does.  This ended in 1578, when the city of Amsterdam rebelled against Spain, became officially Calvinist and stopped regulating prostitution.  Though a number of anti-whore laws were passed throughout the 17th century, they were unpopular and impossible to enforce and so the police rarely bothered to try; though moralists tried to portray whores as degraded, in paintings they were depicted as beautiful.  But as in the United States 200 years later, bluenosed Protestant middle-class morality eventually came to dominate Dutch thinking, and a series of prohibitionist laws (including bans on condoms and other methods of birth and disease control) made the working conditions for Dutch harlots steadily worse until Napoleon conquered the country and instituted mandatory registration and medical examination in 1810 in order to protect his soldiers against venereal diseases.  These laws were largely continued after Napoleon, but after the Social Purity movement invaded the Netherlands regulation was replaced by abolitionism as it was in the U.S.

But even then, the Dutch hardheadedly refused to join the lemming-stampede of full prohibition so popular elsewhere; though “living on the avails of prostitution” and owning a brothel were banned in 1911, prostitution itself was not prohibited.  As before, these laws proved unpopular and were rarely enforced, and by the 1970s the Dutch government formally adopted the gedoogbeleid (policy of tolerance) on the grounds that attempting to suppress consensual “vices” such as prostitution and drug use does not work and only harms the people it attempts to control.  In 1985 Dutch prostitutes founded a rights group named The Red Thread which was highly instrumental in the official legalization of prostitution in January of 1988, but full legalization of brothels took much longer and was only accomplished on October 1, 2000 (at which time the Dutch union FNV began accepting prostitutes as members).  Polls show that 78% of Dutch people now consider prostitution to be a job like any other.

In the past few years, however, gangsters from Eastern Europe and Muslim countries have moved into Amsterdam, bringing illegal prostitutes with them.  This has of course armed neofeminists and the few prohibitionist politicians (who as elsewhere try to equate voluntary adult prostitution with enslaved underage girls smuggled into the country), and as a result it has become more difficult to get a brothel license and in 2006 the license renewals of 30 established brothels was denied (forcing them to appeal).  International news media have produced propaganda and exaggerated stories as they do everywhere, and in March 2007 the famous De Wallen red-light district  held an open house day and unveiled a statue honoring prostitutes world-wide.  But the hysteria has continued; in September 2007 the city bought several buildings in the red light district and closed about a third of the famous windows, then by the end of 2008 the Mayor announced plans to close a further 200 windows because of “suspected criminal gang activity”.  He also closed some of the city’s 70 marijuana cafes and sex clubs, saying “It is not that we want to get rid of our red-light district.  We want to reduce it.  Things have become unbalanced and if we do not act we will never regain control.”  Perhaps that is true, but at the same time a host of new ID and zoning regulations have appeared in the past year and “human trafficking” fanatics have made Amsterdam one of their chief targets.  I don’t think abolition is in the works; the Dutch have never taken kindly to it, public opinion is against it and the Dutch prostitutes are too well-organized to permit it.  But until prostitution is truly legalized in nearby de facto prohibitionist countries like the UK and France and full-prohibitionist countries like Norway, Sweden and the former Soviet Bloc, there will continue to be problems in the Netherlands.  What the abolitionists are trying to represent as a failure in Dutch housekeeping is actually nothing of the kind; even if one’s own house is perfectly clean, if it is surrounded on all sides by filthy neighbors it is inevitable that it will become infested with vermin.

In the meantime, business in De Wallen goes on as usual; in every hotel room there is a free visitor’s guide which contains the following paragraph under the “Police and safety” section:  If you visit one of the women, we would like to remind you, they are not always women.  Out on the streets, do not shout or use bad language towards these women.  Show some respect.  If you have any problems with a girl or a pimp, do not hesitate to ask a police officer.  We know why you are there and you can hardly surprise us.  It is against the law and very dangerous to solicit prostitution on the streets. I find this paragraph interesting on several counts; the first line refers to the fact that roughly 5% of Dutch prostitutes are male (some of them dressed in drag) and another 5% transsexual; a 1997 report showed that of the 1300 male prostitutes essentially all were homosexual prostitutes (just as everyplace else, women don’t pay for sex in Amsterdam).  The next line is obviously necessary because of the large number of Brits and Americans who don’t know how to conduct themselves properly around whores, and the last line reflects the arbitrary nature of prostitution regulations:  In Amsterdam outdoor prostitution (i.e. streetwalking) is illegal, while in countries with anti-brothel (“bawdy house”) laws it’s the exact opposite!

Until such time as all prohibitions against women doing as we like with our own bodies are removed everywhere, there will continue to be problems associated with prostitution which are not generally associated with other professions (including pimping and sex slavery).  And even once that time comes, there will always be a traffic in underage girls just as there will always be traffic in child pornography, dangerous drugs, stolen goods, blackmail information, slaves and other evils.  The world is a harsh, unfair and dangerous place and will never be otherwise no matter what fanatics may think, but once consensual behaviors and harmless vices are brought into the open as they have been in Amsterdam, the police are free to pursue real crime which hurts people and legitimate sex or “vice” businesses can assist the state in controlling criminals, just as bars in the United States help prevent underage drinking.  As I said at the beginning, the Dutch model is far from perfect, but compared to the sexist tyranny which pollutes the “Land of the Free” it’s a veritable Utopia.

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One Step Forward…

Posted in Current Events, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 29, 2010| 5 Comments »

I thank Pilotguy for calling my attention to this news story, and to Ant and Kaiju for calling my attention to the news stories discussed in tomorrow’s column.  I ask that my readers email me with links to such stories whenever you see them; I’m only one busy woman, and I sincerely appreciate the extra pairs of eyes looking out for things which might interest my readers and me.

Terri-Jean Bedford and Valerie Scott

Though prostitution is technically legal in Canada, there are a whole raft of laws designed to make it as difficult and dangerous as possible to actually practice the trade; this is of course typical in legalization regimes, unlike criminalization systems (such as the US) where the act itself is illegal.  In Canada, nearly every conceivable action a prostitute might take is prohibited; this includes advertising, practicing her trade in her own house (because that would make it a “brothel”) or the ever-popular “living off the avails” laws which force her to live alone without family or employees.  But three prostitutes challenged those laws last year, and yesterday the Superior Court of Ontario ruled in their favor.  The following is paraphrased from a Canadian Broadcasting Company press release:

Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice ruled Tuesday (September 28th) that Canada’s anti-prostitution laws are unconstitutional in response to a challenge filed last year by a Toronto dominatrix and two prostitutes.  In her ruling, Justice Susan Himel said the Criminal Code provisions relating to prostitution contribute to the danger faced by sex-trade workers, and that it now falls to Parliament to “fashion corrective action.”

“It is my view that in the meantime these unconstitutional provisions should be of no force and effect, particularly given the seriousness of the charter violations,” Himel wrote.  “However, I also recognize that a consequence of this decision may be that unlicensed brothels may be operated, and in a way that may not be in the public interest.”  The judge suspended the effect of the decision for 30 days;  it does not affect provisions dealing with people under 18.

Justice minister Rob Nicholson and Rona Ambrose, minister for the status of women, both said the government is concerned about the decision and “is seriously considering an appeal.”

Terri-Jean Bedford, Valerie Scott and Amy Lebovitch had argued that prohibitions on keeping a common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution and living on the avails of the trade force them from the safety of their homes to face violence on the streets; they asked the court to declare legal restrictions on their activities a violation of charter rights of security of the person and freedom of expression.  The women and their lawyer, Alan Young, held a news conference Tuesday afternoon and expressed elation.  “It’s like emancipation day for sex-trade workers,” said Bedford, adding the ball is now in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s court.  “The federal government must now take a stand and clarify what is legal and not legal between consenting adults in private.”

Scott called it an amazing victory, saying the decision lessens the risk of violence for sex workers.  “We don’t have to worry about being raped and robbed and murdered,” she said. “This decision means that sex workers can now pick up the phone, and call the police and report a bad client.  This means that we no longer have to be afraid, that we can work with the appropriate authorities.”  Moreover, sex workers can set up guilds and associations, health standards, workmen’s compensation programs, as well as pay income tax. “We want to be good citizens and it’s time, now we finally can,” said Scott.

Young handled the case mostly free with the help of 20 of his law students. They were up against nearly a dozen government lawyers.  “Personally, I am overjoyed because this is a great David and Goliath story.  Sex-trade workers are disenfranchised and disempowered, and no one has listened to them for 30, 40 years,” Young said.  The case does not solve the problems related to prostitution, he said; “That’s for your government to take care. Courts just clean up bad laws.  So what’s happened is that there’s still going to be many people on the streets and many survival sex workers who are motivated by drugs and sometimes exploited by very bad men. That’s not going to change,” he added.  “Here’s what changed. Women who have the ability, the wherewithal and the resources and the good judgment to know that moving indoors will protect them now have that legal option.  They do not have to weigh their safety versus compliance with the law.”

A spokesman for Ontario’s attorney general said the office will be reviewing the decision carefully and will consult federal colleagues regarding a potential appeal.  “Ontario intervened and argued that the prostitution provisions of the Criminal Code are constitutional and valid and designed to prevent individuals, and particularly young people, from being drawn into prostitution, to protect our communities from the negative impacts of street prostitution and to ensure that those who control, coerce or abuse prostitutes are held accountable for their actions,” said the statement from the Ontario attorney general’s office.  The government had argued that striking down the provisions without enacting something else in their place would “pose a danger to the public.”  Some prohibitionist groups such as so-called “Real Women of Canada”, which had intervener status in the case, argued that decriminalizing prostitution may make Canada a haven for human trafficking and that prostitution is harmful to the women involved in it.

While prostitution is technically legal, virtually every activity associated with it is not. The Criminal Code prohibits communication for the purpose of prostitution.  It also prohibits keeping a common bawdy house for the purpose of prostitution.  Those laws enacted in 1985 were an attempt to deal with the public nuisance created by streetwalkers. They failed to recognize the alternative — allowing women to work more safely indoors — was prohibited.  The ban on bawdy houses is an indictable offence that carries stiffer sanctions, including jail time and potential forfeiture of a woman’s home, while the ban on communication for prostitution purposes is usually a summary offence that at most leads to fines.  The provisions prevent sex-trade workers from properly screening clients, hiring security or working in the comfort and safety of their own homes or brothels, Young said.  He cited statistics behind the “shocking and horrific” stories of women who work the streets, along with research that was not available when the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the communication ban in 1990.

Now, before you get too excited please note several things.  First, the decision only applies to Ontario; sex workers are still criminals if they move or breathe anywhere else in Canada.  Second, the decision does not take effect for a month, which gives the politicians plenty of time to seek an emergency injunction against the ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada.  Third, you can bet your first-born that those same politicians will appeal the decision in the name of “protecting women” both from ourselves and from those good old bogeymen, the pimps and “human traffickers”.  And fourth, this decision doesn’t stop politicians from making new and equally absurd laws to shackle prostitutes, and each such law would have to be challenged separately.  The fight isn’t over, not by a long shot.

american canadian faceRemember, Canadians aren’t any smarter than Americans; they are just as prone to believe the lies of politicians and neofeminists about the “inherent degradation” and “criminal character” of whores as their neighbors to the south.  The average ignorant Canadian still suffers from the Madonna/whore duality and believes the same stereotypes of dirty, diseased, lustful, not-quite-human whores as the average ignorant American.  The only reason prostitution was even technically decriminalized in the first place was due to the wording of one particular clause in the Canadian constitution; the same type of loophole in the constitution of Rhode Island made prostitution legal there for almost 30 years, yet it was still recriminalized less than a year ago.  And just as an unholy cabal of cops, politicians, neofeminists, bluenosed control-freaks and trafficking alarmists conspired to suppress our right to make an honest living in Rhode Island, you can bet the same forces of tyranny will spare no effort or expense to use whatever lies and propaganda they think necessary to recriminalize it in Canada, assuming the Canadian high court doesn’t simply overturn this decision next week (which it easily could).

So I’m going to refrain from celebrating, hoping or even allowing myself a bit of optimism about this; I’m simply going to watch and wait and comment as things develop.  But there is one ray of light in all this; a judge, and an important one at that, saw through the lies and the propaganda and the hysteria and actually listened to what three members of one of the last remaining oppressed groups on the face of the Earth had to say.  And that, coupled with recent decriminalization of our trade in other Commonwealth countries like Australia and New Zealand, gives me some small hope that our day may at long last be coming.  Not here yet or even near yet, but perhaps on its way in the dim and distant future.

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Pimps

Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2010| 27 Comments »

‘Tis the strumpet’s plague/To beguile many, and be beguil’d by one.  –  William Shakespeare, Othello (IV, i)

In a reply to my column of July 18th, Sailor Barsoom said “Everybody talks about streetwalkers and pimps, but I hear that pimps aren’t as common as they used to be,” to which I replied “They were never as common as they used to be.”  I promised to explain this more fully, and today is the day.  As we have discussed before, most people think the vast majority of whores are streetwalkers; they also believe that nearly all of us have “pimps”, men who dominate and control us, beating us up and taking our money.  Ignorant men like to believe this because it reduces the whore to a slave under male control; cops like to believe it because it lets them pretend they aren’t the chief danger in our lives; neofeminists like to believe it because it feeds into their lurid fantasies of male oppression and the whore as damaged, exploited victim; legislators like to believe it because it gives them an excuse to harass us even in countries where prostitution itself is legal; Hollywood likes to believe it because it’s tawdry and provides material for cheap melodramatics; and moralists like to believe it because it gives them something to “save” us from even though extramarital sex no longer carries a social stigma.  The fact that the pimp as he is generally imagined is actually relatively rare does not matter to any of these people; after all, if the facts do not conform to the theory it is the facts which must be disposed of.

We’ve all played the game of looking for shapes in the clouds, and many have taken the Rorschach test which asks what we see in inkblots.  The ancients made pictures out of the stars, and fundamentalist Christians used to take great pleasure in playing records backward in order to “find” Satanic messages therein.  The human mind is very good at imposing order on chaos, and this is harmless unless we start to delude ourselves that what we see is actually there.  Unfortunately, many people do just that, and others to whom they point out these imaginary patterns usually see exactly what they’re told they will see.  This is a universal tendency of the human psyche, and not one limited to the stupid or weak-minded; many a scientific experiment has been ruined because of “experimenter expectation”, the tendency of even the intelligent mind when confronted with data it does not comprehend to interpret that data according to its preconceptions.  Put more plainly, when any person looks at something he does not understand, he tends to see exactly what he expects to see.  So when an outsider looks at a whore’s life, he tends to interpret every non-customer male who has any kind of relationship with her as a “pimp”, because of course everybody knows that all whores have pimps.

If we’re going to talk about the men who aren’t pimps, it’s probably a good idea to start by defining what a pimp is in the first place.  Once all emotion and exaggeration is stripped away, a pimp is essentially a manager (and indeed some girls even call their pimps that).  He may book calls or provide housing for the girl, advertise for her, protect her, and arrange for bail if she is arrested; in return for these services she pays him a percentage of her earnings.  As in any business, there are good managers and bad ones, and a bad pimp can be very bad indeed; the fees he demands could be wildly out of proportion to the services he provides and he might use coercion, intimidation, violence or even more extreme means to have his way.  But the same thing could be said of husbands or boyfriends; what makes a pimp different?  Now, at this point I must disclose that I am very prejudiced against pimps; the idea of an adult man being supported by a woman grates on my nerves like nails on a chalkboard.  However, I am trying to view this subject dispassionately, and as I said in my July 14th column my dislike for something is insufficient grounds for banning it.  In a way, I’m almost as much of an outsider to the reality of pimps as you are; I have never had a pimp, and only rarely encountered girls who did because they’re quite rare in the world of escorts.  In all fairness, I don’t know for a fact that even those were pimps; it may merely have been my perception.  And though it galls me to have to say this, is a non-abusive pimp really anything different from a low-class, low-rent, unprofessional escort service?  I’ve run into service owners who were only barely above the level of pimps; one in New Orleans whom I will discuss at length later was referred to by escorts who had left her service as “Pimp Mama” because of her lack of concern for her girls and her frequent attempts to control them by threats and histrionics.  Despite my dislike, is it right to oppose pimps merely on principle, even if they treat their girls well and actually give them their money’s worth as good escort service owners do?   In good conscience I must say no.  The government must judge criminality on the behavior of an individual, not merely his status, and the right of individual choice MUST be respected in a free society, even if the majority don’t like that choice.

The stereotypical pimp is male, but in most times and places prostitution was a female business controlled by females; until recently streetwalkers always ran their own shows, and most brothels were owned and managed by women.  The only places in which this was not true were those in which the state controlled the brothels, and even in those most were still run by women and the only men involved were the government bureaucrats sent to collect the state’s cut.  Considering that these governments gave whores nothing but the promise that they would not be beaten, raped and arrested, they could be considered the first pimps.  This system of “toleration” became widespread (most notably in France) in the early 19th century; though prostitution was not technically illegal, the police were given wide powers to “control” prostitutes and generally did so by what later generations called a “protection racket”, squeezing whores of every level for money and beating, raping and/or imprisoning those who refused to pay up.  I find it terribly ironic that modern police tend to be so sanctimonious about pimps when they in fact were the first men to use violence to control and exploit whores, and even today tend to be a much greater danger to those at every level of the profession.

Pimps as we now know them did not appear until just before the turn of the 20th century, when the widespread “purity movement” (an outgrowth of early feminism which was also responsible for such brilliant ideas as Prohibition and attempts to prevent little boys from masturbating) pressured legislatures throughout the West (especially in the US) to ban prostitution outright rather than merely seeking to “control” it.  Since under these new laws women could in many cities be arrested on suspicion of prostitution for simply walking in the street unescorted, streetwalkers began to employ men either to escort them so as to throw the police off, or to keep a lookout at the ends of streets so the whores could rush inside when the cops showed up.  And when a whore was busted despite precautions, a male contact who held some of her money could arrange bail.  In other words, the first true pimps appeared as a direct result of the criminalization of prostitution, which puts modern “anti-pimping laws” on shaky moral ground indeed.  Sadly, this is not the only time in which the government’s excuse for some tyrannical law is the suppression of a problem which would not exist but for other tyrannical laws.  If prostitution were not illegal there would be no need for pimps, and the streetwalkers who keep pimps only do so because they fear the cops more.

Even among streetwalkers, though, the stereotyped abusive pimp is fairly rare.  American studies show that fewer than half of all streetwalkers have pimps, and of those that do the majority of them control the pimps rather than the other way around.  The English Collective of Prostitutes estimates that fewer than 10% of English streetwalkers are encumbered by a “heavy ponce” (abusive pimp) and French estimates are lower still, about 5% of streetwalkers.  Using the English estimate as a median between the higher American and lower French figures, and applying it to our standard 15% estimate of the percentage of all whores who are streetwalkers, we arrive at a figure of roughly 1.5% of all Western prostitutes who are controlled by pimps.  This is a far cry from the “vast majority” claimed by the anti-whore propagandists who infest government and the feminist movement, and similar to most estimates of the number of women with abusive husbands or boyfriends.

Given these figures it seems likely that there are more pimp wannabes in this country than actual pimps.  So, who are all of these men that the authorities and neofeminists claim are pimps?  Many of them are simply boyfriends or husbands of whores; my own husband could have been accused of being a pimp from 2004-2006, a period when my income exceeded his by a narrow margin.  Some are just male friends or roommates, including gay prostitutes.  Others are men employed by escorts or call girls as drivers; some girls prefer not to worry about parking, and it’s nice to know there’s a big burly man nearby who knows exactly which hotel room one is in should a problem arise.  Still others are dependent family members, such as minor sons or invalid fathers or brothers.  The assumption that any man who keeps company with a whore and isn’t a customer must be a pimp has its roots in the old Madonna/whore duality again, specifically the virulent 19th-century “whore as monster” variety, because it pretends that whores are abnormal and therefore incapable of having the same sort of romantic, familial or economic relationships as any other woman.

As I said in the first paragraph, though, most people never let the facts get in the way of their preconceptions, especially when there’s political coin to be made.  So in many countries (such as Canada and the UK) where public opinion and/or feminist pressure has caused laws criminalizing prostitution itself to be repealed, there are still plenty of laws which criminalize nearly everything a prostitute might do either to perform her trade or even just to live, and some of the most pernicious of these are the “living off of the avails” laws.  These laws, supposedly intended to control our old bogeyman the pimp, criminalize any person who is supported even in part by a whore.  So though prostitutes themselves are no longer criminals their boyfriends, university-age dependent children, invalid parents, other prostitutes with whom they share expenses, or anyone else they as much as ASSIST with money are.  Thus whores are once again made pariahs, prohibited by law from having families or even roommates, while the legislators can feel “progressive” about repealing their old discriminatory laws and replacing them with ones intended to “protect” us from domination by males (except, of course, for the male government officials who write laws to control us and collect “fines” from our earnings).  So at the end of the day abusive, controlling pimps who steal whores’ money and give them nothing in return really aren’t that rare after all; they just have government plates on their pimpmobiles and wear uniforms or judicial robes rather than garish outfits with silly hats.

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