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Blake’s 4

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , on February 17, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Continuing my thoughts on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81.  This is the third essay on the series’ characters; the first appeared two weeks ago, and the second last week.

One of the things I love about British television is that even the minor characters, those who appear in only one or a handful of episodes, are often well-developed.  While even Star Trek, a US series with above-average characterization, tended to make the crewmen fated to die interchageable “redshirts”, British shows like Doctor Who and The Avengers were notable for making us really care about characters before ruthlessly disposing of them.  Blake’s 7 doesn’t usually go quite that far; in fact, it’s often rather uneven in the character department.  While some characters (such as Servalan and Avon) are incredibly well-developed, others are ignored so shamefully actors actually left the series over it.  There’s no pattern to it that I can discern; while even some computers have well-developed (if caricatured) personalities (such as the pompous and temperamental ORAC and the painfully-obsequious “Slave” in Season 4), even some of the main human characters are frustratingly underdeveloped.

The uneven treatment is as hard to predict as it is to get used to.  For example, just as we were beginning to see the depths of the original crew member Gan, the loyal but deeply-troubled strongman, he was killed off while saving the others from a collapsing tunnel.  The villain Travis, on the other hand, overstayed his welcome so badly my opinion of most of the episodes in which he appeared is considerably reduced because of his presence; the rather odd decision to replace his actor when the first one left the series, rather than just eliminating the character, only exacerbated his irksomeness.  The only thing I liked about him was that he and Blake knew each other so well they could predict each others’ actions, which made for an interesting arch-enemies dynamic; other than that he was less a villain one “loved to hate” like Servalan, and more one simply hated, full stop.

But despite these problems, Blake’s 7 still had its share of interesting guest characters, some notable for being well-developed and well-played, while others were memorable for other reasons.  Since most of the characters in the show (including the heroes) are villains to one degree or another, most of the guest stars naturally play villains.  The good ones were played by actors such as Brian Blessed and John Abineri, whose work I’ve previously noted and enjoyed in other shows, including Doctor Who; the others included none other than 6th Doctor Colin Baker, demonstrating his patented brand of scenery-chewing (now with more artificial ham flavor!) which once again made me wonder why anyone thought giving him a starring role in anything would be a good idea.  His performance (in the episode “City at the Edge of the World”) was thrown into even sharper relief by that of his primary adversary in the tale, played by none other than Valentine “Black Guardian” Dyall, in a rare non-villainous role (though he did do the voice of God in the hilarious Bedazzled from 1967).  Incidentally, that episode provides a segue into the next topic I wish to discuss, but you’ll have to wait two weeks this time; look for the next installment on March 4th.

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Blake’s 3

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , on February 10, 2022| 5 Comments »

Continuing my thoughts on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81.  The first part was published two weeks ago today, and the second a week later.

If you read any of my Doctor Who megathread or its reprint on this blog, you already know that for me, characters are key in my enjoyment of a TV series.  If the characters are interesting and well-developed, I can overlook some fairly silly story elements and a lot of terrible special effects.  But if they aren’t, I will lose interest pretty quickly regardless of a show’s other virtues.  It’s one of the main reasons I esteem both Doctor Who and (classic & middle-period) Star Trek so highly: both are very character-driven.  And Blake’s 7 has well-developed characters, in spades.  This doesn’t mean I actually like all of them, but most of them are very interesting.  Take the title character, for example; I definitely do not like him because he’s arrogant, egotistical, pigheaded, and duplicitous.  There’s no way I’d follow Blake on a road trip to Disneyland, much less a series of dangerous missions against insurmountable odds.  But unlike a lot of other shows which give us dislikeable characters and then pretend everyone likes them, this show fully admits Blake is a dick, and that people mostly follow him because he’s a symbol of resistance against their incredibly evil, oppressive government (and presumably, was a better leader, strategist, and person before the Federation subjected him to the brainwashing which we are clearly shown he has not fully overcome).  Even after he leaves the show at the end of the second season, Blake’s symbolic presence continues to be so strongly felt that it doesn’t even seem particularly odd that his name remains attached to both the show and the team, despite his being missing and presumed dead.

The character who trusts Blake least is Avon, a sour-faced tech wizard without any scruples against embezzling from the wealthy, who yet displays a rather strict personal code of ethics which includes honest statement of his motives, keeping promises, and even defending those menaced by bullies and tyrants.  He’s the character I enjoyed watching most, and would probably like best as a client, in part because of his wicked, arid sense of humor, which some may have noted is not entirely dissimilar to mine.  The complexity of Avon’s character rivals that of Servalan, so it’s not surprising that the two develop a powerful love/hate relationship in which neither allows his or her admiration and lust for the other to get in the way of their frequent attempts to kill each other.  After the loss of Blake, Avon at first seems reluctant to assume command of the team until eventually forced to by the arrival of Tarrant, a narcissistic hot-shot pilot who waltzes onto the ship and immediately starts ordering everyone else around.  Tarrant was clearly intended as a replacement for Blake, but I like him even less because, while Blake had the redeeming feature of at least being anti-authoritarian, Tarrant’s whole demeanor has the reek of cop about it.  If I were among the crew of the Liberator, I’d have moved into Avon’s camp by the end of the first adventure involving Tarrant, because at least Avon doesn’t assume everyone owes him obedience.

The only other original character to survive until the series finale is the cowardly master thief Vila, who never met a lock he couldn’t open.  Vila is refreshingly honest about his shortcomings; while most cowardly characters attempt to hide their yellow streak from others, Vila is the first to make the Goldsmithian argument that “He who fights and runs away/May live to fight another day”.  Not that it’s likely Vila ever read Goldsmith; while he’s clearly exceptionally intelligent, he’s certainly no intellectual.  But that doesn’t mean he’s a flat or static character; his descent over the course of the series from a man who perhaps likes his drink a bit too much, to an alcoholic whose drinking becomes an actual source of danger to his shipmates, is both subtle and gradual, and by the time we see him openly gulping down the booze onscreen, we realize it has been going on less obviously for more than a season.

Look for much more about the series’ characters, characterization and writing next week.

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Blake’s 2

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , on February 3, 2022| 2 Comments »

Continuing my thoughts on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81.  The first part was published a week ago today.

One of the things I found most notable about the series was its treatment of women.  In the 1970s, there was a lot of talk about what was then still called “women’s lib”, and futuristic societies were generally depicted as more sexually egalitarian.  But while even Star Trek wasn’t ready to depict women in the highest positions of authority (such as starship command or supervillain status), and action chicks were generally superhuman in some way (eg, Wonder Woman or the Bionic Woman), Blake’s 7 casually depicted female characters kicking butt, working as ship captains or judges, and even holding high military posts.  While US shows of the period felt they had to shout and gesticulate about how emancipated their female characters were (Star Trek: The Next Generation is one prime example), Blake’s 7 just presented it as the way things were, with little if any explicit comment on the subject.  And while most US & UK shows still have a tendency to de-sex powerful female characters, Supreme Commander (later President) Servelan was both very powerful and very feminine, showing off a different fashionable outfit in every episode while implementing plans so evil and shockingly-indifferent to human life they would’ve impressed The Master or Darth Vader.  We’re told Servalan comes from a very powerful and connected family, and the implication seems to be that her sexuality played a major role in her ascension to the purple; Jacqueline Pearce portrayed her perfectly as a totally spoiled, amoral, narcissistic psychopath who has always gotten her way and intends to keep it that way.  I really enjoy watching the character; it’s rare that a TV show dares to depict a character so utterly and unrepentantly vile, greedy, treacherous, degenerate, and morally grotesque without making them into a complete caricature.  One episode in particular really displayed her in full; in the third-season episode Children of Auron she uses persuasion and threat to convince those in charge of a cloning facility on a distant and long-independent colony world to produce a batch of clones using her genetic blueprint, so that she will have an army of her own children.  After she is tricked into destroying the entire brood, she weeps for her lost children, because Servalan is so narcissistic she could only truly love herself, and clones are as close to that as she can get.  Thereafter, she only ever wears black, apparently in mourning.

Other female characters in the show tend to also be well-rounded, though there were a few episodes in the second season where the male writers seemed unsure of what to do with the two female crew members and so mostly left them babysitting the ship, a development which caused Sally Knyvette (Jenna) to leave the series at the end of that season.  The telepathic Cally stayed on for another season, but like Next Generation‘s Deana Troi most writers seemed to see her more as a plot device than a person.  Jenna’s replacement, the teenaged mistress-of-all-arms Dayna, is the best of the non-original characters, but Cally’s replacement Soolin never develops much beyond her description, “female gunslinger”.

Meanwhile, in the real world, two episodes (one each in seasons C and D) were written by Tanith Lee, a clever and creative writer who draws heavily on fairy-tale imagery and motifs and rarely disappoints; her second episode, “Sand”, is one of the best in the entire series and provides even more character development for Servalan, who admits to have actually loved another human once, at 18, before “power became my lover”.

Look for much more about the series’ characters, characterization and writing next week.

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Blake’s 1

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , on January 27, 2022| 2 Comments »

Since we’ve finished Doctor Who for now (we’ll watch the most recent shows as they reach DVD), Grace and I turned to watching Blake’s 7, a gift from one of my regular readers who’s enjoyed the Whovian thread.  The set was only available in Region 2, but I have a multi-region player, so it’s all good.  I’ve known about the series since the ’80s, but for some reason I never managed to catch it on PBS.  One thing that struck me immediately was how groundbreaking the series was; it may be difficult for younger folks to believe, but in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s sci-fi series were very episodic.  There were ideas and themes that ran for entire series or seasons, but it was notable when an episode even made reference to the events of an earlier episode, much less continued a big, complex story.  Blake’s 7 changed that pattern; most of the stories were still just stories, but several per season were part of a larger pattern of development.  I don’t know if he’s ever said as much, but it appears pretty clear to me that J. Michael Straczynski was influenced by it in the creation and structure of Babylon 5, which started the same way and grew over 5 seasons to one long, deeply-interconnected saga, setting a new standard in US sci-fi TV.

One of the things I love about British sci-fi is its valuation of characters and storytelling over flashy special effects, and Blake’s 7 definitely has that (though its effects are actually better than those in Doctor Who of this time period).  It’s also fun for me to see so many faces and names I recognize from “Who” in this one; chief among those names is that of Terry Nation, most famous as the creator of the Daleks, who conceived of the show and wrote every episode of the first season (another Straczynski-like feature, though Babylon 5 did that in a later season, not the first).  I was happy to see that Nation’s writing had matured and improved considerably since the ’60s; this is the Nation who gave us “Genesis of the Daleks”, not the guy who phoned in so many earlier Dalek appearances, so the quality of the first season is consistently high.  Another familiar Who name is that of the script editor, Chris Boucher, who had given us Leela (and three excellent Who adventures featuring her) the year before signing on to Blake’s 7.  Boucher’s script editor during his time on Doctor Who was Robert Holmes, who reversed the relationship by penning a number of Blake stories for Boucher.  Holmes was a good fit here; as an idealistic young man he had become a cop, but once he found out the nasty truth about policing he turned to writing, and many of his tales involve noble or charming rascals, scoundrels, anti-heroes battling corrupt authoritarian governments.  But while The Doctor is a bit of a rascal and has no use for cops or permits, Blake’s 7 takes it up a couple of notches by giving us an often-abrasive hero dedicated to bringing down the entire evil Federation, even if it means a lot of people getting hurt in the process (the entire second season demonstrates that pretty clearly); his crew, all criminals themselves (including a smuggler, a cowardly thief, and an extremely arrogant embezzler); and a stolen spaceship (it’s technically only salvaged until the actual owners try to reclaim it).  One last thing for now: among the series’ innovations was the season cliffhanger.  Until then it was highly unusual for a TV series to bait viewers back for the following season by leaving the heroes facing certain death, as in the old movie serials; Blake’s 7 did it every season.  Though it’s now de rigeur for dramatic series to do this, that wasn’t so until the Nineties; even in the Eighties leaving the viewers hanging for more than one week (the typical gap in serials such as Doctor Who) was pretty rare on both UK and US television.

I have a great deal more to say, but it’s so much I’m going to divide it up over several weeks.

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Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night (Review)

Posted in Fiction, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , on November 16, 2020| 8 Comments »

Though I’ve been a Trekkie since childhood, I had never seen all of Deep Space Nine until recently.  The reason is simple: the series premiered in January 1993 and was midway through its third season when my first husband left me without warning.  My life was thrown into turmoil and it took two years for me to get it straight again, during which time money was much too tight for the relative extravagance of cable TV.  So though I saw all of the first two seasons, half of the third, and occasional episodes (at friends’ houses or via borrowed videocassettes) of the fourth and fifth seasons, I got rather lost due to the complex story arcs and decided not to see any more individual episodes until I could rewatch the whole show from the beginning.  I gave Grace the complete series on DVD for Christmas about a decade ago, but still never got around to viewing it until this year, after I moved to Sunset as my primary residence.  As I watched, I soon found that I agree with many reviewers’ opinion that the series is the best of all the Star Trek sequel series; though it was a direct spinoff of The Next Generation I find it very much superior to its parent, not only because of its greater consistency, better writing, and relief from the pressure of being THE Star Trek show of its decade, but also because it discarded the moral oversimplification which (unfortunately) permeates most of The Next Generation in favor of a universe full of greys in which few characters were either moral paragons or cardboard villains.

This realistic portrayal of the ethical tangle that is real life was on full display in a 6th-season episode we watched a couple of weeks ago, “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night“.  In it, Major Kira Nerys discovers that her mother, whom she believed to have died in a concentration camp during her planet’s half-century-long occupation by the militaristic Cardassians, actually survived for seven years after the very young Nerys had last seen her…as a “comfort woman” claimed by the Cardassian governor, Gul Dukat.  At first, Kira (who started the series as a morally rigid, almost puritanical character, and only slowly grew to accept that real life rarely resembles such abstractions) refuses to believe that her sainted mother could have been guilty of collaboration horizontale, then as she explores the truth (with the help of a mysterious alien device which grants her visions of the past), she instead becomes terribly angry with her mother for literally sleeping with the enemy.  But as the vision goes on, she realizes that her mother’s position as the governor’s mistress not only resulted in better living conditions for herself, but also for her husband and children, who might otherwise have died in a labor camp.  By the end of the episode she has not forgiven her mother, but has come to accept that she did what she thought best for her family, just as Nerys herself had to make hard choices (including becoming a terrorist) in her own struggle to survive the occupation.

The episode is not a highly rated one; perhaps the topic is too uncomfortable for many viewers, especially in these neo-Victorian times.  But as a sex worker and hard-nosed pragmatist, I deeply appreciated the show’s willingness to recognize that sex work, even under duress, can almost never be fit into a pat narrative of villain and victim, and its repeated depiction (in this episode and many others) of war as a filthy business from which nobody emerges entirely clean.

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Sex Positive Now

Posted in Guest Columns, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , on October 24, 2019| Leave a Comment »

A while back my friend Allena Gabosch asked me to write an essay for a new collection called Sex Positive Now, and a few days ago I received a press release for the book with the request that I share it.  So without further ado:

Allena Gabosch and Jeremy Shub have written Sex Positive Now , a book about sex-positivity.  The book contains essays and interviews by and with sex positive celebrities, activists and educators along with additional content written by Allena and Jeremy.  The book covers topics including the History of Sex-Positive Culture , Sex Negativity, Cultural Taboos about Porn and Sex Work, Health and Emotions, Intimacy, Relationships, Polyamory, Kink, Tantra/Sacred/ Taoism, Consent, and Community.  Our goal is to support the change of cultural norms around sexuality and relationships so people have the freedom and permission to be the sexual beings they already are.  Pleasure and joy are vital to our wellbeing and sexual shame is a thing of the past.  People are celebrated for their sexuality, gender, who or how they love.  Consensual sexuality in all of its forms is healthy and life affirming.  People can make conscious choices about their sexuality and relationships.  A few of our 55 contributors include Annie Sprinkle, Janet Hardy, Race Bannon, Susie Bright, Buck Angel & Cunning Minx.  If you want to review and promote the book, free ebooks will be available for review.  You can purchase the book at sexpositivenow.com and the book launch will be in Melbourne and Seattle on 28th Oct.

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Book Review: The Pimping of Prostitution

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , on September 21, 2017| 3 Comments »

Julie Bindel, the well-known British “feminist” and prohibitionist, likes to call herself a journalist; however, I can think of a few more apt labels:  Huckster.  Charlatan.  Fruitcake.  And most of all, lazy twit who can’t even keep track of her own lies.  She’s been hawking a new book for a while now, but despite the help of a major UK newspaper giving her plenty of free column-inches in which to vomit out her regurgitated feces, it looks as though it’s going to flop in a big way.  And though I lack the intellectual endurance to even scan her overpriced doorstop, fortunately my friend Brooke Magnanti has far more critical wherewithall than I do, and was happy to volunteer this synopsis so none of y’all have to bother touching it, either.

This week Julie Bindel releases a new text which I have been privileged to see an advance copy of.  Unlike her previous efforts it’s aimed more at a scholarly market than a popular one, with aspirations to be a summary of investigations into sex workers’ organizations.  The newspaper coverage in Britain has been unescapable in the run-up to its release, with Bindel herself penning vicious invectives against sex workers in all the major papers.  Bindel initially crowdfunded the book to the tune of £7000.  Backers could pay £250 for the honor of having lunch with the woman herself (ironic when criminalized sex workers are also often forced to advertise their services as “lunch dates”).  On top of this, the book had an advance from Palgrave, so the punters end up paying twice.  The title, The Pimping of Prostitution, is ironic given anti-sex work crusades demonstrably attract and spend far more money than shoestring operations like rights orgs do; it is offered at an eye-watering $39.99 for the paperback (and an unbelievable $37.99 for the Kindle edition).  But while supporters paid a premium for the content, does the book deliver?

In a word:  no.  While advertised as a scholarly work it lacks any academic rigor.  Most of the references are self-citations of privately published reviews written by Bindel and Melissa Farley.  Peer review?  What peer review?  A few debunked statistics are trotted out as well.  There is no content of note here, which is unsurprising given Bindel’s most famous quote is that if given a gun and forced to choose between shooting a pimp and an academic, she would shoot the academic.  Bindel claims to have interviewed 250 people in 40 countries about sex work – by her own admission they are journalist friends of hers, police, and “regular members of the public who knew very little, if anything, about the sex trade”.  If this were a middle school project it would be laughed out of class for its utter lack of quality.  She notes in the acknowledgments that “the other side” trusted her to “represent their words and views fairly”.  Is that so?  She has called legalization and decriminalization the same thing when they are not.  Despite being told many times sex workers support decriminalization, not legalization, Julie is too dishonest to admit this, setting up a straw (wo)man and knocking it down over and over.

She states over and over again that there is a “pro-prostitution lobby”.  Who?  She never exactly says and cannot produce any paper trail.  That is for the simple reason that it is she and her friends who are lobbying politicians, setting up All Party Parliamentary Groups stuffed with MPs who want to see more women imprisoned, and paying for events to try to sway lawmakers to their ideology.  The other side, such as it is, is sex workers unpaid for standing up for their rights, and a handful of front-line organizations trying desperately to make sure any sense is heard in the prohibitionist din.  In any case, the claim she interviewed sex work activists is false; she has not so much interviewed her opponents as hand-selected people uninvolved in activism or sex work.  Why are her lengthy conversations with Peter Tatchell about gay men and the age of consent here, if not to stoke pedophilia fears on the back of homophobia?  Why does she place so much importance on tearing down sociologist Dr Catherine Hakim, whose area of research this is not?  How is politician Keith Vaz’s relationship with male escorts related to violence against women?  A few contextless quotes from Conner Habib and Janet Mock are thrown in to prove – well, it’s not clear what, actually.  It’s a mystery:  a bunch of unconnected hit jobs padding out an otherwise shoddy book.  The rest is a collection of personal anecdotes, old feminists she once met, and so on.  She also details the time in the ’70s she was pen-friends with imprisoned sex worker Emma Humphreys, while dodging the question of why the laws she supports would still put women like Emma in jail.

When discussing sex workers condescension drips from every sentence and it is clear she is used to having the floor to herself.  Unable to take criticism or debate (the launch party for her book at “independent intellectual venue” Conway Hall expressly forbade sex work activists), disgusted by the humans she so profitably claims to save.  Her schtick would be funny if it didn’t have real and damaging repercussions on people’s lives.  But the main takeaway from the book is its desperation.  The money she raised appears to have gone towards an all-expenses-paid international jaunt with only the slenderest of results to show for it.  The text reads less like a new movement and more like a last gasp.  If this is Bindel’s final shot at the history books than let it also be the epitaph for her career.  Here lies prohibition: illogical, illiberal, and entirely without merit.

If you want real scholarship about sex work, including hard-hitting debunking of Bindel’s lies (and those of her cronies), please purchase Brooke’s new book Sex, Lies and Statistics (with a foreword by yours truly).  And until Monday evening, Brooke is donating 100% of the profits from ALL preorders globally to SWOP Behind Bars, the nonprofit organization which specializes in helping the women Bindel and her ilk want to keep locking up in cages.

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Helping the Cause

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , on March 24, 2017| 1 Comment »

Prohibitionists are fond of claiming that sex worker rights advocates are part of a wealthy, connected and powerful “pimp lobby” from which we draw virtually-unlimited funds; this is not only an outrageous lie, it’s an incredibly hypocritical one.  In truth, prohibitionists receive oceans of funding from governments invested in growing the police state, private corporations who want to look “moral”,  religious groups who want to impose their ideas of morality on everyone, billionaire sociopaths with axes to grind, and well-meaning but ignorant people who believe the “sex trafficking” masturbatory fantasies vomited out by the prohibitionists; advocates for sex workers, on the other hand, are largely self-financed and therefore operating at a loss all the time.  So when we offer products for sale, please understand that you’re not just getting a good book or a fun product, but also helping out those who tirelessly fight for the rights of those whom society has decided do not deserve them.  Here are some things you can currently purchase which will genuinely help some of the most important and powerful voices in our movement:

First, reader Deviant Ollam came up with these clever T-shirts for an imaginary McNeill/Matisse presidential campaign; they’re an excellent conversation starter and 100% of the profits go to o SWOP Behind Bars, which works to help incarcerated sex workers.  If everyone who reads this buys one, just imagine how many women, mostly from very disadvantaged circumstances, will be helped!

Next, Dr. Laura Agustín, author of the blog The Naked Anthropologist and Sex at the Margins, the seminal work on “sex trafficking” hysteria (in which she coined the term “rescue industry”), has written The Three-Headed Dog, a novel dramatizing the problems faced by migrants.  It’s another way of introducing readers to the issues the “sex trafficking” paradigm attempts to paper over, which Dr. Agustín has studied for over 20 years and understands in a way very few others do.

Last but certainly not least, Dr. Brooke Magnanti has re-released her three Belle de Jour books, Secret Diary of a London Call Girl, Further Adventures of a London Call Girl, and London Call Girl:  Playing the Game, in new Kindle editions.  You can buy all three of these blockbuster novels for the cost of a modest meal, and start reading them tonight!  Find out why Brooke became famous, and show some love for a woman who’s done more than almost any other to draw attention to the movement.

Please buy at least one of these, or be a real ally and get them all!  I think I can safely speak for all the ladies I’ve mentioned in today’s column in saying we’re very grateful for your patronage.

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In the News (#712)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 11, 2017| 2 Comments »

Victimless crime creates the surveillance state.  –  Wendy McElroy

Amazingly Stupid Statements

License to Rape

At least the European media aren’t afraid to apply the word “rape” to the actions of rapist cops:

Hundreds of people took to the streets of a Paris suburb…to denounce police brutality, after a 22-year-old black man was…sodomised with a baton during an arrest last week…One [cop] was charged…with rape, while three others were charged with assault…The man suffered severe anal injuries which required surgery and was also treated for damage to the head and face…The severity of his injuries led a doctor to declare him unfit to work for 60 days…[cops] deny the [obvious evidence] and [pretend] they were targeting lookouts for drug dealers…

Decentralization

Wendy McElroy on bitcoin and consensual crime:

…There are people who use bitcoin to buy “immoral goods” (whatever that means) just as there are people who use cash to do so.  As long as the participants are consenting adults, that’s their business.  Not yours, not mine.  The state is the one who interjects violence and harm when it points a gun at peaceful adults…The attack on bitcoin will be framed…as a way to protect vulnerable and misguided individuals who use their own bodies in “unacceptable” ways.  Or it will unfold as a campaign of resentment against those individuals who do not pay their so-called “fair share” toward maintaining the surveillance state.  A moral attack must be met with moral indignation, not an apology…

Broken Record 

How fetishists are trying to back away from the thoroughly-debunked “Super Bowl sex trafficking” trope without abandoning the larger “gypsy whore” myth:

While there was a considerable increase in the number of [sex work] ads surrounding the Super Bowl, other events like a Memorial Day motorcycle rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and various industry conferences had a bigger impact than expected, suggesting that resources devoted to combating the problem of forced prostitution have been misdirected….[“sex trafficking” fetishists fantasize] that traffickers and pimps use online classified services like Backpage.com to advertise their victim’s sexual services…[pigs bizarrely fantasize that] words like “young” and “no pimps” can be indicators that the person in the photo is a trafficking victim…

Imaginary Evils

Since there are virtually no actual “sex trafficking” cases in the UK despite massive, multi-million-pound crusades to discover them, cops keep themselves busy with fantasies of “pimps” lurking behind every ordinary escort ad:

West Midlands Police has confirmed they now [waste] a substantial part of their [time] in [fantasizing about] sex trafficking victims in the region…[based on propaganda from] The Salvation Army…The content of profiles leads to more suspicion…A lot of the prostitutes also claim to be ‘independent’…But [since we know women are too stupid to plan travel or get pictures taken] their profile pictures…[and] the fact they move around the country would…allude to a larger, more organised, illegal operation…

Cops and Robbers

These are the kind of people who call us “bad” women:

…a group of sex workers…operate from one of three houses [in suburban Johannesburg] which were attacked by [a mob which]…marched to their house on [February 5th] and tossed their belongings outside before torching them.  Beds‚ bedding‚ plasma TV sets‚ music systems‚ clothes and money were some of the things that the girls lost in the [unprovoked attack which] locals [rationalized as taking] a stand against what they say are drug dens and brothels run by Nigerian nationals…

Guinea Pigs (#630) 

Maker of fascist surveillance software uses Backpage as a prop for self-fellation:

Marinus Analytics LLC has joined DeliverFund’s International Human Trafficking Analysis Center (iHTAC), a consortium of organizations who’ve partnered to [come up with more ways to profit from hysteria over]…human trafficking…The combined capabilities of Marinus Analytic’s Traffic Jam and DeliverFund’s uniquely qualified personnel allowed [pigs]…to continue [oppressing people] without disruption during the recent Backpage.com’s closure of its adult ads section…

To Molest and Rape child-molester-cop-chris-wilbanks

Lying, tricking someone into doing something wrong, threatening harm to compel behavior…gee, I wonder where he learned to act this way?

A [South Carolina cop] was arrested after federal investigators say that he coerced an 11-year-old girl into sending him a nude picture, then told her to send more naked photographs or he would show the first one to others…Chris Wilbanks…is charged with production of child pornography…[he] posed as a 14-year-old boy nicknamed “Redneck Rick” on social media and talked to the girl, who said she was 12…the girl sent about a dozen pornographic images to Wilbanks and was crying in many of them…

Challenge (#677)

What could be more Orwellian than referring to groups trying to take away women’s rights as “women’s rights groups”?

Two women’s rights organisations are to feature in a High Court challenge to a new law making it illegal for men to pay for sex in Northern Ireland…Space International, a [prohibitionist] group [backed by the nuns who abused women in the infamous Magdalene laundries], and Equality Now, [a group led by a former prosecutor who resigned in disgrace after railroading two innocent black men for rape,] have been granted intervener status in proceedings brought by sex worker Laura Lee…amendments to the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Act breach [sex workers’] human rights to privacy and freedom from discrimination.  Northern Ireland is currently the only UK region to make the purchase of sex a criminal offence…

The Naked Anthropologist (#701) 

Noah Berlatsky reviews Laura Agustín’s new book:

Laura Agustín’s novel The Three-Headed Dog…argues that the notion of innocent young girls exploited, waiting to be rescued by daredevil Kristofs, is a pernicious myth.  People who cross borders generally do so to find a better life.  They end up doing sex work because it can sometimes be the best option available, especially given prejudiced restrictions placed on immigrant entry and employment…Immigrants are often victimized, but they aren’t solely victims…The Three-Headed Dog doesn’t have an exciting rescue narrative…[it shows] exploitation [as]…a fact of life, a constant backdrop too ubiquitous to be felled with a single punch or raid…

The War Goes On 

We have so many more vocal allies now than we did when I started blogging seven years ago!

Last month, authoritarians…forced Backpage, the world’s second-biggest classified-ads website, to shut down its adult section.  A motley crew of elected officials at all levels of government…bullied Backpage and its executives into getting rid of it, supposedly because they were concerned about people being “sex trafficked”…Of course, as Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out, Backpage was already cooperating with law enforcement…something that won them numerous accolades from state and federal cops.  Purely with respect to fighting crime, the government’s victory was somewhere between empty and actively harmful…What’s more, politicians and law enforcement conflate sex trafficking with voluntary prostitution. As…Maggie McNeill has been arguing for years, there are no good data to suggest anything but a tiny fraction of sex workers are trafficked…a lot of prostitutes…used Backpage’s adult section, and the government’s self-indulgent crackdown put their livelihoods at risk…

I Swear To God (#708)

Michelle Chen on how the US tests oppressive tactics abroad before inflicting them domestically:

One of the first policy measures taken by Donald Trump…was reinstating and expanding a piece of presidential policy known as the “Global Gag Rule.”  The policy bars USAID funding for any organization abroad that provides abortions or even presents abortion as a family planning option…In another global campaign to spread “Christian values,” the US government’s long-standing “anti-prostitution pledge” restricts funding from going to any organizations that promote or support sex work.  The oath forces organizations to choose between providing comprehensive services to their constituencies, or cutting back on certain services in order to get US funding…the worst abuses of Washington’s hegemonic power have always taken place in international arenas before creeping inward.  The use of private detention facilities and military contractors in border enforcement and migration detention have been experimental sites for the most exploitative forms of prison profiteering.  It was, after all, the expansion of immigration detention that helped revive the private prison industry across the country, after the traditional prison industry’s profits plateaued after decades of mining black communities to fill its facilities…

Stupor Bowl (#711)

Liz Brown finds the usual total lack of “sex trafficking” at this year’s Super Bowl:

To hear the hysterics tell it, thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of sex-selling women will flock like cockroaches to cities where sports-fans gather, and only some will be there willingly; the rest, including many children, are trucked in by opportunistic pimps and traffickers.  As ample people have pointed out…there’s not a shred of evidence to support this rumor…examinations of actual arrest data in Super Bowl cities shows no corresponding spike in sex trafficking, compelling prostitution, or any other similar charge—despite the verifiable spike in law-enforcement and media attention to the issue…Between the Saturday before the Super Bowl and the Tuesday morning after, no criminal complaints were filed against anyone [in Houston] for sex trafficking, soliciting a minor, pimping, promoting prostitution, compelling prostitution, etc…[the rumor is] what people today like to refer to as “fake news,” and the people who propagate it year after year—police departments looking to justify vice stings and asset forfeiture, missionary groups looking to fundraise or justify federal anti-trafficking grants, sensationalist media, and state and national politicians with human-trafficking measures to promote—are not…“abolitionists” but propagandists, plain and simple.

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Guest Columnist: Chester Brown

Posted in Guest Columns, History, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , on September 12, 2016| 11 Comments »

Chester Brown is one of the most renowned and respected cartoonists in the world; he and I first met online about four years ago and quickly became friends.  And while I did give him a little help with his revised edition of Paying For It, and he drew the cover for my book Ladies of the Night, his new book is the first one I’ve been privileged to see developed from the very first kernel of the idea (shared in a letter to me several years ago) all the way to distribution and book signings.  So once the initial release whirlwind had died down and I figured he might have some time, I asked him if he’d like to do a guest column introducing the book; he sent this the very next day.  Oh, and one more thing:  Chester now has a Patreon account, and if supporting outspoken allies of sex workers is important to you, you really should consider signing up to that.  Just sayin’.

While the subtitle of my new book is Prostitution And Religious Obedience In The Bible, and there are stories about several biblical prostitutes in it, Mary Wept Over The Feet Of Jesus is mostly about the connections that Jesus had to prostitution.  I’m proposing three interrelated ideas:

  • Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a prostitute.
  • Mary of Bethany, the woman who anointed Jesus as a christ, was a prostitute.
  • Jesus’s parables about The Prodigal Son and The Talents indicate that he didn’t see prostitutes and their clients as sinners to be forgiven but, rather, saw paying for sex as socially beneficial.

The Prodigal Son (page 164)I’m not going to try to convince you that I’m right about all that here; that’s what the book is for.  Instead I want to talk about the issue of bias.  Some critics have dismissed my ideas because I have a bias; for example, see this piece in the A.V. Club.  It is true that I have a bias; I’ve been a client of sex workers for seventeen years and do happen to see the profession as socially beneficial.  I’ve made no attempt to hide that fact.  The question is, does having a bias on a particular subject necessarily invalidate one’s views on that subject?  Should Martin Luther King Jr’s views on civil rights have been dismissed because, being a black man, he had a bias?  I think it’s precisely because I have a bias that I was able to see certain things in the Bible that haven’t been obvious to others.  And it’s not like others who’ve written about Jesus and prostitution before me did not have a bias on the subject of sex work; in fact, I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of biblical scholars, past and present, had and have a whorephobic bias against sex work.

Let’s talk about two relatively recent examples that I came across while researching for my book.  Karen King is a biblical scholar whom I have a lot of respect for.  Her fascinating book What Is Gnosticism? transformed my understanding of that subject.  In 2003, she published a book titled The Gospel of Mary Of Magdala.  In it, King translates and analyzes an ancient text known as The Gospel Of Mary, which presents a woman named Mary as Jesus’s wisest disciple.  Most people assume that the woman is Mary Magdalene, and they’re probably right; I would recommend King’s book to anyone who wants to understand this difficult text.  On page 3, King writes that The Gospel Of Mary “exposes the erroneous view that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute for what it is — a piece of theological fiction”.  However, reading the text of the gospel, one finds no mention of prostitution; there’s no indication what Mary’s source of income was.  (Even a spiritual person in first century Palestine needed some sort of income, whether it was from begging or some other source.)  There’s no sign one way or the other in The Gospel Of Mary, as we have it, that Mary was or wasn’t a prostitute, nor is there any mention of sex; furthermore, King doesn’t interpret any of the material as relating to prostitution or sex.  Now, since there are many pages missing in the two surviving manuscripts of the text, it’s possible that one of those missing pages mentioned that Mary was a prostitute.  (I hesitate to get conspiratorial, but perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that certain pages went missing in both surviving manuscripts.)  But even if those missing pages didn’t mention that Mary was a prostitute, that still wouldn’t prove she wasn’t one.  So why does King think that the The Gospel Of Mary PROVES that Mary never had sex for pay?  King doesn’t explain her reasoning, but there can be only one reason:  The gospel presents Mary as the most wise and spiritual of the disciples of Jesus, and King whorephobically assumes that a prostitute could not be wise and spiritual.

In the 2006 book Secrets Of Mary Magdalene, edited by Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer, there’s an essay by the respected historian James Carroll in which, on page 24, he quotes Luke 8:2-3.  In that biblical passage, it’s mentioned that Mary Magdalene and several other women “provided for them [Jesus and the male disciples] out of their own resources.”  Carroll reads this as an indication that Mary and the other women must therefore have been “well-to-do, respectable figures.”  In other words, they could not have been prostitutes, because, of course, only well-to-do, respectable women had money — prostitutes had absolutely no way to get ahold of money.  This isn’t quite as obviously whorephobic as the Karen King example, but it does indicate a desperate over-eagerness to distance Mary Magdalene from prostitution.  Why wasn’t it obvious to Carroll that, while evidence that Mary Magdalene had money could indicate that she was “respectable”, it could just as easily be evidence that she was a prostitute?  There’s a probably unconscious bias going on there, and one sees it over and over while reading books about biblical prostitutes in general and Mary Magdalene in particular.

Tamar (page 27)On the question of whether Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, I don’t have a definite opinion one way or the other.  It’s true that none of the biblical books link Mary Magdalene with the profession, but Jesus was close with Mary of Bethany, who definitely was a prostitute, and it could be that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were the same person.  It’s also possible that they were two separate women, since the name Mary was popular at the time. (See pages 245 to 253 of Mary Wept for more on this.)  A basic rule: when a scholar claims with certainty that Mary Magdalene absolutely could not have been a prostitute, that scholar probably has a bias against sex work.  That doesn’t mean that all of that scholar’s conclusions should be dismissed, any more than my pro-sex work bias means that my conclusions should be dismissed.  All it really means is that readers should keep authorial bias in mind when reading any book.

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