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That Was the Week That Was (#46)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged activism, Africa, agency denial, All in the Family, animals, archeofeminism, Australia, bad customers, Bad Girls, Blackball, brothels, Canada, censorship, Central Asia, Confined and Controlled, cops, Crying Wolf, cult of the child, dirty, disability, Don't Confuse Us With Facts, Down Under, ethics, Europe, Florida, Grace Bellavue, Greece, harm reduction, Hollywood, homosexuality, hysteria, Imagination Pinned Down, India, internet, Kenya, law, Maine, My Readers Write, No Other Option, porn, psychology, Reaction Formation, robots, stripping, The Dogs Do Bark, The More the Better, The Public Eye, The Pygmalion Fallacy, United Kingdom, Useful Idiots, yin and yang on November 17, 2012| 42 Comments »

I am a sex worker and I make my money from clients seeing me. Some clients just happen to have a disability. – Rachel Wotton

When Someone You Love is A Sex Worker

Do you have a sex worker in your family, or are you in a relationship with one? If so, Stacey Swimme of SWOP would like to talk to you. She’s writing a book called When Someone You Love is A Sex Worker, which is intended to support family members and partners, and she recently sent out an email to ask for input:

…I am inviting family members, partners, lovers and friends of sex workers to be interviewed for my book. I’m looking for examples of challenges as well as successes. I want to hear about your fears, disagreements and compromises with the sex worker(s) in your life. It would be a privilege to include your perspective if you have time to do a short interview (about 15-30 minutes) on one of the four dates below. You do not have to provide any identifying information. You’re welcome to provide a fake name…

The four dates are Wednesday November 14^th (at 11AM, 11:40AM, 12:30PM and 1:15PM), Wednesday November 21^st (same time slots), Monday November 26^th (at 9AM, 9:40AM, 10:30AM and 11:15AM) and Tuesday November 27^th (same time slots). If you’re interested please email StaceySwimme@gmail.com with your preferred name, age, city and times from the list that work for you.

Updates

Bad Girls

…farmers are losing thousands of shillings to prostitutes in [Kenya]… social services chairperson Elizabeth Kibii…said the department has received many complaints from farmers who have been robbed… “They either lace the drink with drugs that will make you unconscious or they send one of their own to the room early and hide under the bed. And when he and her partner are busy, the one under the bed walks away secretly with the money”…

All in the Family

Australian whore and activist Grace Bellavue uses the intense story of how she came out to her parents as a springboard for a discussion of whore stigma, in which she convincingly argues that those who oppose prostitution should actually be fighting that stigma rather than perpetuating it. It’s powerful and well worth a read, but skip the comment thread.

Reaction Formation

This sort of story is only “shocking” to the psychologically and sexually illiterate:

An ordained counselor dedicated to “freeing” people from homosexuality has been arrested on charges of molesting…young men…Rev. Ryan J. Muelhauser …was connected with OutPost Ministry…[and] allegedly fondled two young men who were seeking to “cure” themselves of homosexuality, as well as asking them to masturbate for him…

Furthermore, “leading a crusade” against any form of sexual behavior should be considered probable cause for suspicion of practicing that behavior:

A former top [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] official who helped lead the [South Florida] crusade against child sexual exploitation was sentenced…on a child pornography charge. Anthony V. Mangione…possessed up to 150 images of child pornography, some depicting the “extreme abuse of children”…

Crying Wolf

Neofeminist fanatics who foam at the mouth about “rape culture”, insist that normal economic needs constitute “coercion” and pretend that compliments are a form of “violence against women” need to have stories like this one drilled into their brains:

Mah Gul, 20, was beheaded after her mother-in-law attempted to make her sleep with a man in her house in [Afghanistan]…Gul was married to her husband four months ago and her mother-in-law had tried to force her into prostitution several times in the past…The suspect, Najibullah…said the mother-in-law lured him into killing Gul by telling him that she was a prostitute…

That is what sexual coercion, forced prostitution and violence against women actually look like.

My Readers Write

Aspasia writes in her own blog on would-be allies and “concerned parties” who expect sex worker activists to spoon-feed them the way prohibitionists do, and why it’s a bad idea to cater to their demands.

Don’t Confuse Us With Facts

Dean Boland, the lawyer who was fined $300,000 for demonstrating the absurdity of America’s draconian “child pornography” laws, has lost his appeal; the judges ruled that there really is such a thing as sympathetic magic, so that altering the images of children actually and literally harmed them in some tangible way. So much for science, logic or common sense.

Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark

Another “dog bites man” study:

…a group of boys ages 8 to 11 whose fetal testosterone had been measured from amniotic fluid when their mothers were 13-20 weeks pregnant…were shown pictures of negative (fearful), positive (happy), neutral, or scrambled faces while a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine tracked changes in their brain activity. In the boys who had higher levels of fetal testosterone, the brain’s reward system was more responsive to positive…facial cues…[suggesting] those boys have a greater proclivity for “approach-related behaviors,” such as fun-seeking and impulsivity…

Useful Idiots

The US government’s scheme to collect and indefinitely retain DNA from virtually anyone has been challenged a number of times since it was first slipped into the Trojan Horse Act of 2005, and the Supreme Court has finally deigned to rule on it: “…at least 21 states and the federal government have regulations requiring suspects to give a DNA sample upon arrest…[which is then] cataloged in state and federal crime-fighting databases…the justices opted to take on an April decision…from Maryland’s top court, which said it was a breach of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure to take, without warrants, DNA samples from suspects who have not been convicted…”

The Pygmalion Fallacy

The “sex robot” morons are at it again:

Could sex with robots help extend human life spans? Some futurists seem to think so. A Nov. 7 article on the futurist website Transhumanity argues that robot lovers could help extend life spans by giving users mind-blowing “longevity orgasms” far superior in quality to those from human…partners…”[Sexbots will] be more desirable, patient, eager, and altruistic than their meat-bag competition, plus they’ll be uploaded with supreme sex-skills from millennia of erotic manuals, archives and academic experiments, and their anatomy will feature sexplosive devices…They’ll offer us quadruple-tongued cunnilingus, open-throat silky fellatio, deliriously gentle kissing, transcendent nipple tweaking, g-spot massage & prostate milking dexterity, plus 2,000 varieties of coital rhythm with scented lubes“…

Is it just me, or does this one-handed typist sound badly in need of a girlfriend?

Confined and Controlled

The inevitable result of busybody laws which treat women as helpless victims of male sexuality:

[Toronto] City council…adopted…changes to…regulations…Now…strippers can’t sit on patrons’ laps or make contact with breasts, buttocks or pubic areas. And rooms, booths or cubicles for private dances have to be transparent on one side…As the Licensing and Standards Committee was formulating the amendments…its staff consulted with us…but…management at the club I worked in…[collected the surveys] and [filled] them out on our behalf. The manager told me…“This has nothing to do with what you think they want…They want the girls to see all these stupid questions so they can answer, ‘Oh, people touching me…Oh, I don’t like the dark.’ Then they come in the court and say, ‘Look, the girls don’t like the business’”…The city’s data shows that 98 per cent of respondents in the surveys submitted by the [club owner’s association] denied ever being sexually assaulted or touched without their consent, while 67 per cent of strippers who submitted surveys themselves said they had been…

If governments didn’t persecute adult businesses, managers would have no cause to worry and standards could be determined by the sex workers’ needs rather than those of the managers or prohibitionists, who both use the women as pawns in their power game.

Imagination Pinned Down

Quote from the snake catcher himself on a snake expert’s message board: “Sorry but this is ridiculous, I was the one who caught this snake, never did I say anything like that, in fact I stressed to her that it was incredibly unusual for that to happen and quietly doubted it even occurred as she told it.”

The Public Eye

Burlesque as a hobby is less stigmatized than professional stripping, Portland, Maine is unusually tolerant, and a seat on the school board isn’t exactly high office, but it’s still amazing this happened at all: “…Holly Seeliger, a 26-year-old teacher and burlesque dancer, won the District 2 seat on the Portland Board of Public Education, getting 59 percent of the vote…”

Metaupdates

No Other Option (Updates Galore, Part One)

Rachel Wotton’s wonderful charity “Touching Base”, which connects disabled people with sex workers who specialize in helping them, has experienced an upsurge of publicity due in part to the documentary Scarlet Road and in part to the movie The Sessions, which I’ll be discussing in a column two weeks from now. I hope this sympathetic and respectful article in The Age calls even more attention to it, and that one day the US may grow up enough for a branch of the organization to operate here.

Blackball (TW3 #33)

Douglas Fox of Harlot’s Parlour shared an essay written by a male escort named Steve, which demonstrates how governments can ruin a simple idea used effectively by individuals and peer groups for decades:

There’s been a lot of hype about the Nationwide Ugly Mugs Scheme [but it’s useless to most sex workers]…Take…[this] recent…complaint [from] a male sex worker who didn’t get paid by a client who was drunk and told him he kept a knife [nearby]…Extracts from the warning read: “business was agreed to take place at the man’s home which was a flat in a communal block in Basildon…He is described as; 45-49, White, 5ft 9, stocky, shaven grey/white hair, blue eyes and pale complexion, with a local accent and scars to his torso”…No address, no phone number, nothing. Sex workers…need to access real information if we are to protect ourselves. Phone numbers…that look like…“0*********1″ do nothing to help…there are probably about 200 similar blocks of flats in Basildon…[and] the description sounds like every other client who has walked through my door in the last two weeks…

The organization which administers the NUM project made this (typically political) response.

Down Under (TW3 #43)

The Australian government has axed its “Cleanfeed” porn-filtering plan that’s been shrouded in a campaign to fight spam and malware. Backers…pushed the idea for the last five years claiming that the Cleanfeed filter would protect children from predators…The filter even passed a government trial and was expected to be adopted… [but a backlash started] when a secret…Communications and Media Authority blacklist of targeted websites…was outed by Wikileaks…Cleanfeed was opposed by online consumers, lobby groups, ISPs, network administrators, some children’s welfare groups, Google, the U.S. Ambassador to Australia, and a number of government officials. Opponents…feared the filtering would foster Internet censorship and new online restrictions…

The More the Better (TW3 #45)

Apparently some Greek officials believe in “sex rays”, even if the people don’t:

…local officials insisted that a primary school return [brothel owner Soula Alevridou’s] donation…[of] €3,000 to cover the costs of [a] photocopier and a small library…the school was grateful…[but officials were embarrassed by] a brothel madam stepping into a gap created by fiscal recklessness and state profligacy…”We must protect our children,” [said provincial director of education Giorgos Panayiotopoulos]…

This Week in 2010 and 2011

I presented biographies of Mata Hari and Veronica Franco, looked at whore-hatred in World War II France, contemporary Iceland and a fictional future, and examined the truth about federal “sex trafficking” stings, the use of “Swedish model” rhetoric in American police departments, the campaign against Backpage and a fake escort blogger. I also discussed cops who rape, the increasing number of academics telling the truth about sex work, the reason sex worker rights have languished while gay rights thrived, and the difference in sex work news stories between Europe and the US, and featured short items on internet censorship, the government’s intentional hiding of information on “missing children”, the underuse of HPV vaccines, weird search terms, a murderous proposal and “don’t panic” plans.

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Whatever They Need To Say

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, archeofeminism, Bangladesh, brothels, Central Asia, cops, dirty, India, Madonna/whore, prohibitionist myths, red-light districts, stereotypes, streetwalkers, Whatever They Need To Say on August 9, 2012| 27 Comments »

They use thought only to justify their injustices, and speech only to disguise their thoughts. – Voltaire

It’s easy to tell when a crusade of some sort is based in hate, bigotry, greed or other motivations the crusaders prefer to hide: supporters of the exact same campaign in different times and places invent widely-varying justifications for the same meddling and harassment, and those excuses often directly contradict one another. I don’t need to tell regular readers that anti-whore schemes are a perfect example; with the rise of secularism in the 19^th century Protestant interpretations of Christian morality were no longer sufficient grounds for persecuting consensual sexual activity, so the prohibitionists came up with all sorts of “objective” and even “scientific” excuses for the bans:

…Some argued that all whores were driven to the trade by extreme privation or forced into it by pimps, while others claimed it was due to “laziness” and a desire to avoid “real work”. But the most popular view of all was that whores were atavisms, throwbacks to a more primitive human type…since prostitutes were primitive they were also stupid, and thus incompetent to make their own decisions; this of course was used to excuse tyranny like the Contagious Disease Acts…because the government could claim it was forced to arrest, incarcerate and “rehabilitate” prostitutes “for their own good”… Except for the modern replacement of “nature” arguments (whores are born defective) with “nurture” arguments (whores are made defective early in life by sexual abuse), the propaganda is [still the same]…non-prostitutes with no personal experience of normal female sexuality…claim that it’s impossible for a normal woman to choose prostitution, and that all of us are driven to it by extreme privation or forced into it by “pimps” or “traffickers” …we are all victims of child abuse or rape, all drug addicts, blah blah blah. Many prohibitionists openly call us stupid, selfish and neurotic, and even the ones who don’t insist that we’re incompetent to make our own decisions…

The false and arbitrary nature of such claims are particularly obvious when cops talk about the issue, because so many of them can’t seem to make up their minds about which paradigm to use; the results are sometimes hilarious and, one would imagine, embarrassing to the more intelligent sort of prohibitionist:

Deputies arrest[ed] a [touring escort from Canada as]…part of a continuing effort to crack down on what many don’t realize is a dangerous crime…Lt. Chris Reeves with the vice-narcotics unit [said]…“we get a lot of calls from, people’s husbands, daughters, wives that are not working the streets that have to walk to get groceries are getting solicited for sex from these Johns that are roaming the area…People think it’s a victimless crime, however when they are taking HIV, hepatitis home to their spouses or their significant others, that’s a big crisis.” Reeves says some of the prostitutes are victims of human trafficking. “A lot of them are beaten and abused. A lot of these are young girls that have gotten hooked on drugs”…

Reeves can’t seem to make up his mind about whether escorts are ruthless gangsters or pathetic victims, not to mention his conflation of touring escorts with streetwalkers and the “diseased whore” myth thrown in as well. Large American police departments have mostly shifted to the “victim” model in order to capitalize on the “sex trafficking” hysteria, but it’s somewhat different in Bangladesh:

The red light district in Madaripur city is thought to have been in operation for at least 150 years, and the sex workers believe [a] sudden wave of protests [has been] orchestrated by developers trying to take over the valuable land. Last month, about 10,000 people led by a new Muslim group called Islahe Kaom Parishad (the National Reform Council) rallied outside the rambling complex to call for it to be shut down and the 500 sex workers evicted…It is legal as it dates back to before Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, but is now being targeted by hardline activists…[who are] lobbying city authorities on the grounds that the brothel corrupts the town’s young men and must be razed. Sex workers believe the activists are organised by businessmen linked to local politicians, and they report a campaign of intimidation including an explosive device found recently on the site and two attempted arson attacks.

“We told the authorities that we won’t leave the place. Our job is lawful. We also don’t have any underage sex workers here,” said Momo Rani Karmakar, head of the Madaripur sex workers’ union. “We’ve inherited the place from our grandmothers, some of them are still alive. We are like a family here. It’s a conspiracy to grab our land worth [hundreds of thousands of dollars],” she said…government officials say any final decision on redevelopment is still pending. A committee, led by the regional deputy administrator, has been set up and has tried to open talks to encourage rehabilitation of the sex workers…But the sex workers told AFP that they don’t want to leave or switch to other jobs…[they] allege that the real reason behind the protests is the ambitions of a prominent Muslim family who are already erecting a multi-storied building next to the brothel. The Parishad group deny such claims and say they are acting to protect Islamic morals. “The brothel is the main source of criminal activity in the region,” group secretary Ali Ahmed Chowdhury told AFP. “It runs illegal wine shops. Under-aged girls are bought and sold and it’s a big source of the drug trade. It’s shameful work. It is not a profession”…

Though Western-style trafficking rhetoric is tacked on at the end there, it’s clearly an afterthought to the main excuse that evil harlots are corrupting the public morals. In the end, the excuse doesn’t matter; whether the motivation is furtherance of anti-life, vengeance for imagined wrongs or just plain greed, prohibitionists will say whatever they need to say to trick others into going along with their personal jihad.

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Ghost of the Agitator

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged anecdote, apes & monkeys, blogging, censorship, Central Asia, cops, fascism, hysteria, Illinois, imaginative fiction, internet, Louisiana, Never Call the Cops, teachers, TSA, welcome to our world on August 5, 2012| 44 Comments »

Freedom and whores are the most cosmopolitan items under the sun. – Georg Büchner

Well, I’m done with my guest blogging gig at The Agitator; the August crew started on Wednesday, and there will be a third group in September. It was a great experience for me; though it meant a lot of extra work, it allowed me an opportunity to get the message out to a much larger crowd than usual. Radley suggested I use the opportunity to plug my blog as well, and that worked out fabulously: I broke traffic records three times in the first week of guest blogging, and the high point now stands at 4959 visits on July 10^th (which was quite a nice anniversary present!) Some of those turned into new regular readers, to whom I bid a warm welcome; I think y’all are going to enjoy it here.

Speaking of enjoyment, I discovered a new source of it while guest blogging: constructing links columns. Radley does one nearly every day, so I continued his tradition by publishing three of them a week; as you may have noticed over the past few Sundays, I had fun thinking of “teaser” phrases intended to make y’all curious enough to click the links. So much fun, in fact, that I’m loath to give it up, so I won’t; as part of my gradual decrease in workload I will henceforth post a links column each Sunday. This will not replace the “That Was the Week That Was” columns, but will instead act as a supplement to them; the items featured there will mostly be non-hookery things I found interesting that week, and a few sex work items presented without much comment. If you’ve enjoyed the last few Sunday columns, these will be more of the same except presented without introductory comments in most cases. And since I can compose the columns during the week while going about my usual internet-canvassing, I can essentially decrease my workload by 14% while still giving y’all a column every day and providing fodder for interesting comment threads.

I only published one new column over there this week, “The Differences That Aren’t”; it’s an answer to those who feel I’m being disingenuous when I say that sex is no different from any other human activity. I also published two links columns, whose contents are below:

The cat who walks through surveillance .
Nightmarish conditions at a US-funded military hospital in Afghanistan are covered up by US military officials. Don’t look at these pictures unless you have a strong stomach.
In Chicago, cops can steal your car by claiming to discover even a tiny amount of marijuana on one of your passengers.
The conversion of a climate-change skeptic.
TSA concludes that babies and American G-men are unlikely to blow up airplanes.
Fellow guest blogger Ken White on why the freedom to express a negative reaction to another’s speech is just as important as the speech itself.
The apes are rising .
Welcome to our world.
Six important sci-fi ideas that were invented by a hack.
Marines catch “deserter” – five years after his honorable discharge.
Louisiana teachers’ union threatens to sue private schools that accept vouchers.
Do 3-D printers make prohibitions impossible?
Today’s edition of “never call the cops for any reason whatsoever.”
The most important trade agreement that we know nothing about.
Cop chastises man for not being grateful that said cop harassed and humiliated him and frightened his daughter.

And last but not least, here are a few items I’ve collected since Tuesday:

Cop tases 12-year-old girl because her mother has unpaid traffic tickets.
Mississippi man somehow manages to “commit suicide” with a pistol in the back seat of a police car while his hands are handcuffed behind his back, after being searched twice.
Read this Harvey Silverglate article carefully, then think long & hard about what one-issue folks call a “War on Women”. (Here’s background on the Gibson Guitar story.)
A fine example of modern American fascism.
Lost Dr. Who episodes recovered from deep space.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
OK, I’m impressed.
Bay Area home-invasion robbers targeted Asian escorts.
A little good news: ACLU stops police robbery gang in Texas.

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That Was the Week That Was (#31)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged Backpage, brothels, Canada, Celebrities, censorship, Central Asia, cops, Counterfeit Comfort, Denmark, dirty, disease, drivers, ethics, Europe, Gingerbread House, HIV Cure, Hooker Humor, hysteria, India, internet, law, Legalization a Good Idea?, Madonna/whore, massage, O Canada!, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, porn, Presents, prohibitionist myths, Prudish Pedants, See No Evil, sex offender registry, stripping, Surplus Women, Swedish model, The Course of a Disease, underage, United Kingdom, video, violence vs. sex workers, Washington (state), Whorearchy, Wise Investment on August 4, 2012| 50 Comments »

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure. – Eric Hoffer

Celebrities

I’m very glad I never had this kind of celebrity as a client:

…[a] woman [called] Tiffany told TMZ she had “no issues” with [accused Aurora spree killer James] Holmes…”He was really nice…He felt bad that I wasn’t getting more customers while in Colorado, so he called a few days later and we met up again”

Hooker Humor

I could just as well have filed this one as “The More the Better”:

…Miranda Kane is…telling her tales of life as an escort…“My past career was comedy – I am just new to standing up and telling people about it,” she said. The 31-year-old certainly has enough material to draw from for Coin Operated Girl…“I was really big – about 25 stone – and I was never without a date,” she explains. But it would never go further than just one night. “For men, it is like riding a moped. You really want to ride one but you would be embarrassed if your friends saw you”…when the recession hit – which led to the market being flooded with women offering similar services – combined with a loss of weight, she decided it was time for a career change…it is not just the chance to hear a modern take on the world’s oldest career which should bring people through the doors, but the chance to save a bit of money…“It’s £145 cheaper an hour than my normal rate,” she smiles. Coin Operated Girl at the Camden People’s Theatre from Monday, August 6, until Wednesday, August 8, at 9pm…

O, Canada!

Though increasing numbers of Canadians support decriminalization, many Canadian politicians are just as disgusting and dishonest as their American brethren:

The war against human traffickers that prey on our youth is now out in the open. Those profiting from the recruitment of…women and girls into the sex trade…[are] targeting Canadian high school students since they can no longer import young women from abroad to sexually exploit…Many of these victims are terrified to talk about the reality of their experiences, and are effectively muzzled by coaching, manipulation and abuse…All around the globe…women and girls are forced into…the sex industry through coercion, threats, deception, or fraud…The average age of entry into prostitution in Canada is between 12 and 14 years of age. It’s impossible to believe that these young girls and boys are making a rational choice to sell their bodies to 20-40 men a night…Canadians must send a strong message to the pimps…that our children will not be bought or sold.

It’s good to see the claims of these fanatics growing ever more extreme, bizarre and impossible; when the hysteria is over their fall will be that much harder.

HIV-Positive Man Cured in Berlin

…Two men…[with] HIV and cancer have been seemingly cleared of the virus…more than two years after receiving bone marrow transplants, HIV can’t be detected anywhere in their bodies. These two new cases are reminiscent of the so-called “Berlin patient,” the only person known to have been cured of [HIV] infection…Both men…endured…treatment for lymphoma, both had stem cell treatments and both had stayed on their HIV drugs throughout… The donor cells, it appears, killed off and replaced the infected cells. And the HIV drugs protected the donor cells while they did it…

For Those Who Think Legalization is a Good Idea

When will people learn that governments’ use of laws always exceeds the stated purpose of those laws?

Four sex workers from [New Delhi]…have challenged a government eviction order…”There is thus no legislative guidance on the implementation of [the anti-brothel law, so]…absolute discretion is vested on the police administration…[which] has resulted in arbitrariness in action and abuse of power and authority”…the women claimed that they had been staying in the area for decades and not involved in business of running any brothel…”The act never intended to penalise prostitution per se, except in public places…but aimed at curbing…organised prostitution,” the petition said…

Counterfeit Comfort

People are condemned to the “sex offender” registry for many trivial offenses or things that shouldn’t even be crimes, but this is Kafkaesque even by those standards:

In May 2007, my husband and I were asked to assist an acquaintance in putting down a 14-year-old dog…the [owner’s] teenaged daughter…protested the plan vehemently…the day before the planned euthanasia, [police said] the girl had accused him of touching her…since [then] we’ve been fighting a legal system that, without notice, has curtailed our ability to travel, to obtain life insurance, even to petition for redress…police needed no corroboration for the charge; the accusation alone was sufficient, and jail time…was expected…a private investigator…proved the accuser wrong. But…with a minor, it’s all inadmissible…the county [said it] would accept a no-contest plea, but that my husband would still be a registered sex offender for at least 10 years and possibly for the rest of his life. If he didn’t take it, a court date would be set in five to six months, and some jail time would be expected. We were given five minutes to decide. My husband pleaded no contest…

Since then, the Devoys have had to endure constantly-escalating registration requirements and finally started an organization called Reform Sex Offender Laws of Virginia.

Surplus Women

This happened three years ago, but was called to my attention by Krulac last week; just imagine the uproar if he had said “woman” instead of “hooker”. But you know, NHI and all.

See No Evil

The sick American mind at work again, seeing sex where it isn’t and imagining that pictures are magically dangerous to their subjects:

…Lauren Ferrari posted a photo on Facebook of her 5-year-old pretending to nurse her 2-year-old. Within 24 hours, Facebook took the picture down…Stefanie Thomas of the Seattle Police Department’s Internet Crimes Against Children…[opined] that Ferrari’s decision to post the photo was “poor parenting” because it’s impossible to control where that photo might end up…it wasn’t the first time the site has deleted photos of young girls pretending to breastfeed…Last summer…[alarmists] were outraged [about a nursing doll they claimed]…sexualizes children…Tessa Blake… [argues] it is natural for girls to mimic their moms. “My daughter has been lifting up her shirt and ‘nursing’ her babies for years. Are you suggesting this is shameful? What if she feeds her doll with a bottle? Is she not being a kid then, or is it just the breast that’s the problem?” Blake asked…

Presents, Presents, Presents!

A big “thank you” to regular reader Pat Murphy, who sent me a copy of Ronald Weitzer’s new book Legalizing Prostitution. I still don’t know the screen name or contact info of the reader who sent me Prince of Darkness, so whoever it was please let me know!

The Course of a Disease

Though few politicians support it, “sex trafficking” fetishists have succeeded in exposing Denmark to the Swedish rot. Sex worker advocates there are reasonably confident that it hasn’t a chance, so what makes this article notable is the reporter’s attitude:

…despite a report from Norway showing that making it illegal to buy sex in that country…has not resulted in a decrease the number of sex workers…[and has made them] the victims of more violence…[a] parliamentary group…remains focused on criminalising the sex for hire business…”Making it illegal to be a john is a baseless ideological process,” [said] Christian Groes-Green, an assistant professor at Roskilde University…”If they are having problems dealing with real political issues, bringing back the sex debate is just good politics”…

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs

“Sri Lanka police will conduct surprise raids on hotels and guest houses in the country to detect whether underage children are used for prostitution and other sexual acts…” Because, hey, who cares about property rights and tourists’ privacy? It’s for the children!

Prudish Pedants

In the UK as in the US, some porn is arbitrarily deemed illegal due to a vague and wavering line; in Britain it’s “extreme pornography”, defined as “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character” or if it portrays “an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals”:

…the Crown Prosecution Service…[argues] that images of fisting should be classified as “extreme pornography” with the risk to the defendant of three years in custody [and] inclusion on the sex offenders’ register…for [an] image…of [a legal] activity…the Prosecution must prove that the act of fisting is “likely to result in serious injury to a person’s anus”…Before being arrested and charged with these offences, Simon [Walsh] was a successful professional and politician…who, amongst other things, prosecuted police officers accused of disciplinary offences. After being charged, Simon lost both professional and political positions, despite the fact that no pornography was found on any of his work…[or] home computers…the police had to “interrogate” Simon’s personal email account (server) in order to discover a few images they deemed questionable. This…contaminated the only source of evidence; making it impossible to identify whether images attached to emails had in fact been opened and viewed…

Note the emphasized line, especially in light of the fact that the images were in an incoming email and may not have been opened. In other words, it’s highly likely that the police simply sent the images to him, then pretended to “find” the “evidence” as they do with planted drugs.

Whorearchy

Only other peoples’ kind of sex work is bad! Ours isn’t even sexual!

The owner of a Saskatoon exotic dancing business [argues that]…the new…licensing bylaw for adult services…is discriminatory. “We provide entertainment, not sexual favours,” said Bella Kaje, owner of KJ’s Party Favors…”I don’t like what they’re categorizing us with…and…these obscene amounts (for a licence) is more…discrimination” …An adult service agency licence…will cost $500 [plus] $200 for each renewal…[then] $250, plus $100 for each renewal, for [each] performer…[or employee, including] drivers and receptionists…

Meanwhile, across the pond: “Council officials say they will check up on a new ‘tantric temple’ centre which offers clients massages from women in G-strings…owners are insisting that no sexual services will be carried out…” Because erotic massages from naked people aren’t sexual services.

Gingerbread House

Birds of a feather, and all that: “Jerry Sandusky’s ‘The Second Mile’ wants to divert…$2 million dollars in assets…to the Arrow Child and Family Ministry…[in order to prevent] victims from seeking to liquidate his organization’s assets as civil cases are pursued against him…”

Metaupdates

Wise Investment in TW3 (#23)

Yet another gun to the internet’s head is turned aside:

…Section 230 says that websites aren’t liable for third party content…[and has therefore] become the foundation for the entire user-generated content industry…Despite [the] enormous social benefits…state legislators [frequently] consider enacting laws that conflict with Section 230…the Washington state legislature enacted one such law in an overzealous effort to shut down online child prostitution…[but] in Backpage and Internet Archive v. McKenna…a federal judge rejected the Washington legislature’s efforts, turning the case into a major victory for…user-generated content…

This Week in 2011

The erosion of “innocent until proven guilty”, a short biography of the Athenian hetaera Aspasia, and a Canadian town buys a strip club; also, answers to questions about “doggie style”, what happens when a client finishes quickly and whether a whore and client can ever be friends. “August Updates (Part One)” contains items about a book of vulva pictures, cops harassing strippers and streetwalkers, and the beginning of decriminalization in India; “Part Two” discusses invented “sex trafficking” victims, rising STI rates in older amateurs and South Korean whores fighting for their rights.

This Week in 2010

“Genesis of a Harlot” is the three-part story of how I slowly grew toward sex work and “The Only Working Girl in New Orleans” the three-part story of what happened after Hurricane Katrina; “Phryne” was a famous Athenian hetaera, and “Whores and Wives” discusses the varied reactions wives have to discovering their husbands have employed hookers.

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Naked Truth

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, tagged archeofeminism, bad customers, Bangladesh, brothels, Central Asia, dirty, drugs, East Asia, ethics, Europe, India, Latin America, Naked Truth, naturalness, neofeminism, New York, pimps, psychology, red-light districts, sisterhood, streetwalkers, underage on May 23, 2012| 14 Comments »

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. – Václav Havel

One year ago today I published “New Reviews for May”, in which I reviewed two movies (The Pyx and Soylent Green) and a book (Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day). I’ll probably do another review column next month, but today I’d like to look at a combination film review and director interview by someone else, and to share my thoughts on it. The film is Whores’ Glory by Austrian director Michael Glawogger; the reviewer/interviewer is Tracy Quan, retired call girl and author of Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, Diary of a Married Call Girl and Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl; and the publication is The Daily Beast.

Whores’ Glory, a ground-breaking and surprisingly accurate documentary about sex workers in three countries…opened [April 27^th] in New York and Seattle, after provoking considerable buzz at the Toronto and Venice Film Festivals in September…The…film is a riveting journey into three different enclaves in three religious “time zones”—a Bangkok “fish tank” brothel in Buddhist Thailand, a prostitution compound in mainly Muslim Bangladesh, and finally, Reynosa, a Mexican border town where Lady Death (not exactly a Vatican-approved saint) seems to be as popular as the Virgin Mary. La Santa Muerte, as she’s known, is undeniably spooky, and yet Reynosa is refreshing …Whores’ Glory is graceful in its approach to hardship and completely free of judgment about indentured sex work in Bangladesh and crack use in Reynosa. This attitude also extends to religious belief …Whores’ Glory treats religion as something akin to housekeeping. Girls pray for a good night of business in Bangkok; a Faridpur sex worker purifies the doorway of her room with a paper torch…

It’s also refreshing to see the words “surprisingly accurate documentary” and “sex workers” in the same sentence, but even in the midst of a moral panic Europeans do tend to be much more sensible about such things than Americans are. I really want to see this film, but I’m guessing it’ll be a while before it’s available on DVD; in the meantime I’ll just have to take vicarious pleasure in the fact that the truth about sex work is playing for a while on big screens in several major hotbeds of “sex trafficking” hysteria.

Quan discusses all three segments, but it’s the Bangladeshi one I find most interesting; apparently she did, too, because she spends the most time on it:

Faridpur’s City of Joy is a typical Bangladeshi brothel compound managed by a clique of competitive mothers—older prostitutes evolved into madams…With more than 600 women living and working in the City of Joy, there aren’t enough customers at any given time. Many of the brothel’s citizens began working shortly after their first menstruation and would like a different outcome for their daughters. The world outside is hostile to those aspirations and often dangerous, while the brothel itself provides a lifelong safety net…“It’s a female-controlled ghetto,” Glawogger said, “a very closed community, with six or so mothers who have a very strong grip on the whole thing. If a guy is rude to a girl, he never walks on those premises again.” The few resident males are either biological sons or “baboos” (lovers) of the successful madams. A mother, Glawogger said, has perhaps five girls working for her who may be biological daughters or indentured sex workers…How did Glawogger gain access to such a closed matriarchal world? Here, as in Bangkok and Reynosa, participants were paid for their time because, he said, every hour of filming was an hour when they weren’t earning income. But that’s not the whole story. In 2006, Glawogger was visiting Tangail, 45 miles from Faridpur. The women in Tangail’s brothel section had been warned that a mob of religious fundamentalists was planning to purge the brothel quarter…“All the clients and male relatives ran away,” he said, “but the women stayed and they were ready to fight back.” Glawogger’s photographs of women and girls in their saris, some in full makeup, preparing to defend themselves with clubs, sticks, and sickle-shaped kitchen knives appeared in the local media. “Word got around that we were defending the mothers in the press and this spread to other brothels in other towns.” The women of Tangail, who inspired the making of Whores’ Glory, are its unseen heart, and are the reason Bangladesh is central to this film’s journey. Conventional feminism can’t make sense of this fact: the most courageous opposition to fundamentalism in this country comes from Muslim women who are sex workers.

Conventional feminism can’t make sense of anything to do with sex work, because all its dogma proceeds from the faulty assumption that prostitution can somehow be teased apart from other heterosexual behaviors…which as I repeatedly point out, it can’t. This is especially clear in La Zona, the red-light district of Reynosa, about half of whose streetwalkers have pimps to whom they surrender most of their money…yet can walk away from any time they like. Just as in exploitative non-commercial relationships, the binding force is not usually violence or captivity, but rather an unhealthy, dependent form of romantic love. As long as prohibitionists insist on pretending that harlots are somehow different from other women, they’ll never understand; that’s why we need more people like Glawogger, who can help us to demonstrate the truth to the silent majority who can actually learn from it.

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That Was the Week That Was (#19)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Q & A, tagged Africa, archeofeminism, Australia, Backward Turn Backward, bad customers, Because We Say So, brothels, censorship, Central Asia, China, condoms, cops, dirty, disease, East Asia, escort services, ethics, Europe, fantasy, FBI, Greece, harm reduction, hysteria, Illinois, India, internet, Latin America, law, lawheads, Little Boxes, Madonna/whore, Much Ado About Nothing, neofeminism, Nepal, rape, sex work is work, shame, Spain, sporting events, streetwalkers, The Camel's Nose, The First Time, The Immunity Syndrome, The Scarlet Letter, vaccines, violence vs. sex workers, virginity, Whorearchy, witchcraft on May 12, 2012| 26 Comments »

What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore. – Edward Dahlberg

Nine updates and a metaupdate.

Backward, Turn Backward (March 15^th, 2011)

Apparently, Zimbabwe is a colony of the Bizarro World, where whores force men to have sex with them for free:

Three sex workers accused of raping 17 men in Zimbabwe have been freed…[they] were arrested last year after…a police…search of their vehicle revealed more than 30 used condoms…men…said the women forced them to have sex while brandishing weapons. However, DNA evidence…disproved any link between the women and [their accusers]…[there was] widespread speculation that the sex workers were collecting semen for witchcraft.

You’ve gotta love the use of the modern term “sex worker” in that last line.

The First Time (March 20^th, 2011)

Victorian men used to pay big money for whores who could credibly be passed as virgins, and apparently that kink is still around:

…Sweet Girls Premium Escort…is offering a Chinese-born Melbourne high school student [for $12,000]…”She is a virgin, you can tell,” [said] a spokeswoman…”She goes to your place or hotel and you can spend two days together. She does not have a boyfriend and she wants to do it for the money,” she said. The escort agency recruits mostly Asian women aged 18 to 25…The website written in English and Chinese suggests working for the agency “to solve your financial problem within short time”…

The rest of the article is a chorus of “feminists” clucking a lot of nonsense about “financial desperation” (as if anyone ever worked for any other reason), “no woman should have to sell her body” (because a woman is nothing but sex so selling it is equal to selling her entire self) and “double standards” (like the one they’re upholding by suggesting a girl’s virginity is too precious to sell and should instead be pointlessly given away). I wish I had had the sense to sell my virginity; the experience probably would’ve been a lot more interesting than being clumsily mounted by some inexperienced boy in a dark room, and I would’ve had a lot fewer money worries the first few years of university.

The Scarlet Letter (March 29^th, 2011)

Greece has joined the parade of countries using extrajudicial punishment against hookers, and Cheryl Overs explains why this is a bad idea:

Greece has been in the news for prosecuting HIV positive sex workers and posting the women’s photographs on the Internet…public health prosecutions and “naming and shaming” of [HIV+] sex workers occurs…across the world, including in the UK and US. We are also observing a general increase in mandatory HIV testing…Successful HIV prevention is known to depend on a large portion of sex workers and clients using condoms and accessing…treatment …there is sufficient research and experience to compare the results of “rights based” approaches with heavy handed tactics like those used in Greece that have been shown to drive sex industries underground…repeatedly testing a few “legal” sex workers while alienating “illegal” sex workers from services and testing them forcibly in the wake of sporadic raids is not good public health…

Simply put, if hookers know they’ll be shamed and prosecuted for turning up positive, they simply won’t get tested. And if legal workers are forcibly tested, they’ll simply work illegally instead. This isn’t rocket science, but “authorities” seem completely unable to comprehend it.

Because We Say So (June 8^th, 2011)

The crusade to impose Western cultural norms on Nepal has turned low-caste people into persecuted criminals:

…[Members of] the Badi, a Hindu caste that has for centuries been associated with entertainment and prostitution…live in the western districts of Nepal but…work in…cities…including Kathmandu, Mumbai and New Delhi. Four years ago the Nepal government banned the Badis from pursuing their traditional occupation…[and] local communities…[have] used violent methods to compel the Badis to give up their sole means of livelihood…”We didn’t want to continue with prostitution but the government has failed to fulfill its promises of rehabilitation,” says Bishal Nepali, husband of a Badi sex worker. The government did announce a package that included housing, income generation activities and scholarships…but these were never implemented…Nepali society gives little encouragement to Badi girls to pursue other professions and those among them who enter public schools are “often severely harassed by high caste students”…Badis are not allowed to run legitimate businesses. “People fear to buy anything from my shop because they fear the villagers,” says Dinesh Nepali, a Badi male who runs a small shop selling cigarettes, vegetables and soft drinks. “How can we survive like this?”…In 2007, Badi activists threatened to march naked through Kathmandu to embarrass the government into implementing the court-ordered rehabilitation, but that brought nothing except more promises…

September Q & A (September 30^th, 2011)

In response to a questioner who defined using every minute of a call in penetration as “getting what he paid for”, I replied: “…the price doesn’t assume that; it’s like going into a restaurant and complaining because every square centimeter of the plate isn’t covered in food. Though I usually gave a price break for multiple hours, I didn’t do so if I knew the client was doing cocaine because the work of attending to him was much more difficult; the same thing could be said of a client who wants 60 full minutes of pumping. Most girls even give a price break for dinner-date type calls because they’re much easier per hour than calls spent entirely in bed.” Well, here’s a man who apparently had the same attitude as the questioner, but was far less civilized about it:

A 58-year-old Elgin [Illinois] man…tried to strangle a prostitute in a motel room after the woman refused additional sex after more than 30 encounters over a four-day period. Kim P. Brandmire was charged with aggravated battery…[the] woman said the two had rented a room at the motel Thursday and…when she refused to have sex Sunday…Brandmire…choked her…The woman was charged with prostitution…

The realization that it’s sick and sadistic to charge a crime victim with a crime herself never dawns in the lawhead mind.

The Immunity Syndrome (March 5^th, 2012)

Back in March I mentioned in passing that gonorrhea was rapidly becoming immune to all antibiotics; here’s an article from Scientific American which goes into more detail:

…Last summer…the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…demonstrated that up to 1.4 percent of 5,900 gonorrhea bacterial samples from around the U.S. had diminished susceptibility to cephalosporins…gonorrhea…is the second-most reported infectious disease in the U.S., with more than 600,000 new cases a year…if untreated, it can cause widespread organ damage…and infertility…Gonorrhea…[can borrow] DNA from other bacteria to construct new…defenses. It steadily gained resistance…first the penicillins in the 1960s, then the tetracyclines in the 1980s, and…fluoroquinolones…in the 1990s. By 2000 the only class of drugs that could provide [the inexpensive, effective, single-dose cure that] public health strategies rely on…was the cephalosporins. [But] cephalosporin resistance has been emerging in Japan, and moving east and west from there, for at least a decade…Efforts to control STDs may have inadvertently accelerated the spread of resistance. For years standard practice has been to quickly identify an infection, dole out the appropriate treatment and then move on to the next patient. If symptoms return, the assumption has been that the patient was reinfected. Experts now say that such patients may in fact have harbored resistant bacteria that were never killed in the first place—bacteria that the patients possibly spread to others…so far attempts to create a vaccine against gonorrhea have failed…

Even if a vaccine is eventually developed it won’t help the US, where adolescents – the carriers of 35% of all STIs – will certainly be blocked from receiving it by the same parental insanity which already prevents their vaccination against HPV.

Much Ado About Nothing (April 18^th, 2012)

Dania Suarez, the escort Agent Arthur Huntington cheated, was interviewed on the Today show in Madrid:

…the alleged escort at the center of the Secret Service scandal… [described] the…agents…as “stupid,” “idiots”…Dania Londono Suarez told NBC that the Secret Service agents seemed accustomed to soliciting women, saying the three men who approached her were not shy, drinking vodka “like it was water”…U.S. investigators have yet to talk with the single mother after she says she fled Colombia fearing for her life.

Note the dysphemism “alleged”, as though prostitution were criminal (which it isn’t in Colombia); if you don’t understand what Suarez was afraid of, you might want to read my column on Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

Meanwhile, “Army Gen. Charles H. Jacoby…stated in a May 6 memo that troops in Chicago during the [NATO] summit that begins May 20 will not ‘solicit prostitutes or engage in conduct which is unprofessional or unbecoming of a member of the armed forces.’ One military officer called the restrictions ‘an overreaction to recent Secret Service misconduct in Colombia’.”

Hiring whores is “unbecoming” to a soldier? Pardon me while I die laughing.

Little Boxes (April 29^th, 2012)

Dr. Marty Klein published a superb essay entitled “Why Janet Jackson’s Nipple Won’t Go Away”:

You may recall that way back in 2004, Janet Jackson’s right nipple was unexpectedly exposed for exactly one-half second during the Super Bowl halftime show. Grown men cried. Women fainted. Children were driven mad by the brown protuberance. Not surprisingly, the stock market crashed only four years later, soon followed by the meltdown of Japan’s nuclear reactors. To punish the TV network on which the travesty occurred, the…FCC levied enormous fines…Since then, the FCC and our federal courts have been going back and forth in an attempt to design a TV censorship policy that doesn’t involve, um, censorship…So why are two successive presidencies…obsessed with a half-second of nipple? Why are millions more of your tax dollars about to be spent attempting to punish CBS for what they failed to prevent over 8 years ago?…It’s a special kind of politics: coding certain phenomena as sexual…makes them…subject to public control. There is virtually no private sexual behavior in America…the “public-izing” of sex is a key weapon in the War On Sex…

One has to wonder: Do American politicians want to make the US the laughingstock of the entire world, or do they really not comprehend that’s what they’re doing?

Whorearchy (May 10^th, 2012)

In a perfect example of how “authorities” draw lines to divide whores from one another, Spain continues to turn the screws on streetwalkers so as to make it increasingly harder for them to make a living, while brothels are doing fine:

Indignant prostitutes take to the streets in Barcelona, angry at the city’s plans to ban street prostitution. Unemployment in [Spain] has reached 23 percent, and sex workers say this is the only way they can earn a living…the police make their lives difficult as it is and…tightening the law will make it even harder to feed a family. But…[brothels have] been making bigger profits every year since the crisis hit…

Metaupdates

The Camel’s Nose in TW3 (#16) (April 21^st, 2012)

Even if Obama really does keep his promise to veto CISPA, there’s already a contingency plan in the works:

The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms…to build in backdoors for government surveillance…FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans…The FBI [wants to force] social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and…e-mail [to] alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly…The FBI’s proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers…there are [also] indications that the [FCC] is considering reinterpreting CALEA to demand that products that allow video or voice chat over the Internet — from Skype to Google Hangouts to Xbox Live — include surveillance backdoors to help the FBI…

One Year Ago Today

“A War for Peace” turns a critical eye on the antics of Femen, the Ukranian feminist group known for topless protests.

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An Example to the West

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged activism, Africa, An Example to the West, Bangladesh, brothels, Cambodia, Central Asia, cops, East Asia, ethics, harm reduction, India, Kenya, Korea, law, neofeminism, red-light districts, rescue industry, sisterhood, Thailand on April 3, 2012| 21 Comments »

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. – Frederick Douglass

In my column for International Sex Workers’ Rights Day, I mentioned that it was started by an Indian sex worker rights organization named Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), which has over 65,000 members. Yes, you read that correctly: sixty-five thousand, in other words more members than all American sex worker rights organizations combined (and multiplied several times). As I’ve said before about Cambodian activists,

…can you imagine this many American hookers making this kind of effort? If [they]…can unite against oppression, why can’t we?…sex work activism here is marginal at best; I daresay few Americans realize that the sex worker rights movement even exists. And it’s our own fault; we’re just too damned afraid to speak up for our own, too afraid of government-inflicted violence, too afraid of social and legal persecution, and too brainwashed by false notions of “sisterhood” to fight the twisted lies spread by neofeminists.

Though the Western cultural imperialists of the “rescue industry” imagine white Westerners to be more “enlightened” than brown-skinned people from poorer countries, and claim that prostitutes in those countries are invariably helpless victims, the opposite is closer to being true: American whores and our allies have a great deal to learn from Asian sex worker rights organizations, who are anything but helpless. DMSC recently celebrated its 20^th anniversary, and you may find this article (via Dr. Laura Agustín’s March 8^th column) enlightening:

…a mere passage of two decades can seem irrelevant in the life of Sonagachi—the red-light area in Kolkata and among the largest brothel districts in Asia. Yet, in these 20 years, 38-year-old Swapna Roy has seen a change in the way people refer to her—from being sneeringly mentioned in the coarse Bengali equivalent of slut, Roy today is a jouno kormi — a sex worker…she is…the joint coordinator of a project which sensitizes around 3,000 sex workers on safe and hygienic practices…“We have come to realize that sex work is like any other work and I’m like any other worker. In these two decades, we have learnt to appreciate this.”

…Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) [is] a collective of 65,000 sex workers from West Bengal…[which] works for women’s rights and is at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS and related issues…[it] has been responsible for bringing out into the streets—and into middle-class drawing rooms, through newspaper and television coverage—the issues facing sex workers, including the demand for legal sanction for the profession…15 February [marked] 20 years since a team of medical professionals, led by Smarajit Jana of Kolkata’s All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, visited Sonagachi on an HIV intervention research study. In due course, Dr Jana realized that for the sex workers, their children’s education, access to financial services and fending off police harassment and torture by local thugs was more important than urging a client to use a condom. So Dr Jana founded DMSC…From 12 members in 1995, DMSC draws its current strength of 65,000 members from 48 branches across the state, each headed by an elected secretary…Some sex workers…have health insurance, while some have got voter identity cards with the Election Commission of India recognizing their [DMSC] membership as valid identity proof. State Bank of India has also begun to recognize sex work as a profession while opening accounts…DMSC also runs 17 non-formal schools for children of sex workers, and two hostels…Members of Komol Gandhar, DMSC’s cultural wing dedicated to dance, drama, mime and music and run by the children, get invited regularly for paid shows…The Durbar football team, largely comprising children of sex workers, has for the first time in the 2011-12 season, participated in the nursery football league conducted by The Indian Football Association, West Bengal…

“We don’t dissuade adult and willing girls from entering the profession. It is easy to say sex work is bad, but most girls come from poverty stricken families and are uneducated,” says Purnima Chatterjee, who sits on a self-regulatory board, which works as a watchdog body in all DMSC branches against trafficking and introduction of minor and unwilling girls into the trade…“We know of so many girls who got raped when they went to work as household help or in factories. Many of them opted to come to Sonagachi and get paid for sex. Who are we to stop them?” retorts Pushpa Sarkar, who works at Avinash clinic (for sexually transmitted infections) run by Durbar and is also on the self-regulatory board…

Banks recognizing sex work as a profession? Schools and sports teams for the children of openly-declared prostitutes? That’s like science fiction in the United States, where fanatical prudes pretend escorts are incapable of charity and government agencies steal their children (a tradition “trafficking” fetishists are trying to export to India). The industry, ambition, courage and teamwork of Indian sex workers put the weak, diffuse and toothless efforts of their American sisters to shame.

Nor is it limited to India; anti-sex worker groups claim that essentially every whore in Bangladesh is a pathetic slave, but on March 3^rd the prostitutes of Dhaka took to the capital’s streets to protest harassment by police and other “authorities”. Korean hookers are literally battling police for their rights, and videos made by both Cambodian and Thai sex worker rights organizations call international attention to abuses perpetrated by the police at the urging of fanatics like Somaly Mam. A group of 7000 sex workers in Nairobi plans to take its demand for decriminalization to the high court of Kenya after the city government insisted their trade would remain criminal, and even the whores of Botswana have been able to secure the support of a prominent local human rights group in their bid for rights. Sex workers in Thailand even produced their own study:

“We have now reached a point…where there are more women in the Thai sex industry being abused by anti-trafficking practices than there are women exploited by traffickers,” [said Chantawipa Apisuk, the director of Thai sex worker rights organization Empower, at the recent release of a report, “Hit & Run: Sex Workers’ Research on Anti-trafficking in Thailand“]…More than 20,000 sex workers make use of Empower’s contact points…and…sex work is now widely regarded as a quasi-legitimate profession, with its own form of employers and self-employed workers. Inevitably…prostitution remains a crime in the eyes of many…but the kindlier view, that they are victims of human trafficking, isn’t a great deal of help either, Chantawipa said…The “Hit & Run” report is an effort to assess the state of the profession. More than 200 sex workers helped the foundation conduct a survey over the course of 12 months, in bars, restaurants and brothels across the county and even into Burma and Laos…Migration, it was noted, is part of the “culture” of sex work, and the brokers involved in transporting people are generally seen as helpful. Most don’t charge exorbitant rates…

But the anti-trafficking law regards sex workers as victims, so those who enforce it believe they are “rescuing” the prostitutes. That just makes things worse…”Before I was arrested I was working happily, had no debt, and was free to move around the city,” said Nok, a Burmese. “Now I’m in debt, I’m scared most of the time, and it’s not safe to move around. How can they call this ‘help’?” Once “rescued” and after a period of detainment, the foreign workers are deported (only to return at the first chance) and the Thais usually have to undergo vocational training…[Empower’s] aim now is to get the government and other concerned parties to stop using the word “victim”, to stop putting trafficking and sex work in the same category…[the] research project [was launched]…with a one-day exhibition at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, displaying the “Mida Tapestry”, sewn by migrant sex workers as a way to document and show the impact police raids have on their lives. It carries a second message in that the detained sex workers are regularly forced or offered sewing lessons as a cure-all for social ills.

Everywhere in the regions dismissed as the “third world” by Westerners, sex workers are organizing, protesting and demanding that officials cease hounding and persecuting them. In many of their countries sex work is every bit as criminal as it is in the US; these activists face the same possibility of brutal reprisals as American sex worker activists do. But unlike their timid American counterparts, Asian and African sex workers recognize that anything worth having is worth fighting for, and that they aren’t going to win their rights by merely commiserating with each other.

One Year Ago Today

“Out of Context” shows how prohibitionists use studies of imprisoned or addicted streetwalkers to produce bogus “prostitution” statistics, and provides links to several methodologically-sound studies that tell a very different story.

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Double Deal

Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged abortion, agency denial, Central Asia, cops, dirty, ethics, fantasy, India, neofeminism, psychology, rape, rescue industry, Texas on March 23, 2012| 25 Comments »

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

In my column “Doublethink” I explained the term, coined by George Orwell in 1984; it means the ability of a political stooge to simultaneously believe two different and mutually-exclusive ideas. Neofeminists are the undisputed champions of doublethink in today’s world:

On the one hand, neofeminists state that women are just as competent as men, yet insist that women need special legal protections. They observe that women are rational adults who can control our own destinies, yet lobby for paternalistic “mandatory prosecution” laws because they claim women aren’t competent to decide for ourselves whether to press charges against abusive men. They say that women should have control over our own bodies, unless of course we choose to use those bodies for sex work. They recognize that women can think for ourselves, then demand we adhere to neofeminist groupthink or be labeled “traitors”. Many of them openly despise men and consider their characteristic behaviors a pathological deviation from female norms, yet they promote all-consuming male-style careers for women and many even adopt masculine modes of dress and grooming. The heterosexual wing of neofeminism bitches about male sexual behaviors, yet encourages women to act in exactly the same way. And so on, and so on, and so on, ad absurdum.

Politicians are nearly as adept at doublethink as neofeminists are, and both groups use doubletalk and double-dealing to foster doublethink in those they wish to control. My column of one year ago today gave a lesson (complete with quiz!) in how the police (with the assistance of obedient reporters) use doubletalk to promote anti-whore hysteria, and today we’re going to look at another example: the oeuvre of “Two Face” Kristof, who uses his New York Times pulpit to promote an oleaginous mixture of prohibitionism and nanny-statism of the cookie-cutter “left wing” variety. Like the neofeminists whose rhetoric he adopts, Kristof claims to respect women yet denies our agency, and bleats about choice while he advocates treating women like sheep. But to this he adds his own special (though, sadly, not by any means unique) duplicity: representing himself as a crusader against the sexual exploitation of women while sexually exploiting women himself by attracting readers eager to stimulate themselves with his lurid “sex slave” porn. Take a look at his column of March 4^th, called to my attention by regular reader Aspasia:

…Under a new law that took effect three weeks ago with the strong backing of Gov. Rick Perry, [a Texas woman seeking an abortion]…must typically endure an ultrasound probe inserted into her vagina…“It’s state-sanctioned abuse,” said Dr. Curtis Boyd…“It borders on a definition of rape. Many states describe rape as putting any object into an orifice against a person’s will…The new law is demeaning and disrespectful to the women of Texas, and insulting to the doctors and nurses who care for them.” That law is part of a war over women’s health being fought around the country — and in much of the country, women are losing. State by state, legislatures are creating new obstacles to abortions and are treating women in ways that are patronizing and humiliating…

What about the war on women’s sexual freedom, Mr. Kristof? What about the patronizing and humiliating ways that you and other “rescue industry” fanatics treat sex workers? What about the state-sanctioned abuse of women advocated by people like you; don’t you consider arresting prostitutes and our clients at gunpoint to be “demeaning and disrespectful”? And I think every person whose head, unlike yours, resides outside of his own arse will agree that for a woman to endure a cop’s penis being “put…into an orifice against [her] will” doesn’t merely “border on a definition of rape”, it is rape…rape that you and others like you enable, excuse and celebrate.

Kristof and the neofeminists want you to think that abortion rights and sex worker rights are unrelated issues, when it’s clearly obvious to any intellectually honest person they aren’t: a woman’s right to own and control her own body includes not only the right to decisions about the possible consequences of sex, but also the right to decide how, why and with whom she has sex in the first place. But lest you think prostitution is just a blind spot for Kristof, a single example of doublethink in an otherwise self-consistent personal philosophy, consider this impassioned defense of the nanny state in which he states that “The long trajectory of history has been for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes” and argues that non-nanny governments invariably lead to countries like Pakistan…you know, the kind of countries where whores are persecuted as they are in the United States.

If we combine all of Kristof’s various positions in one place, we get something like this: “Only third-world countries allow people to make their own financial choices; advanced countries control their citizens’ lives, except in the case of abortion. Compulsory ultrasounds are rape, and prostitution is rape, but police rape isn’t rape as long as it happens after they abduct a woman against her will from a brothel. Nanny states are good, except when they decriminalize prostitution, at which point they become bad. And third-world dictatorships are bad, so our prostitution policy should be more like theirs.” Rational people, like Alice, simply can’t believe in such self-contradictory nonsense. Unfortunately, we live in a world populated largely by people like the White Queen, who practice believing impossible things every day until doublethink becomes second nature.

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Christmas 2011

Posted in History, Holidays, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged Catholicism, censorship, Central Asia, East Asia, Europe, holidays, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Rome on December 25, 2011| 6 Comments »

Hark, how the bells, sweet silver bells,
All seem to say, throw cares away.
Christmas is here, bringing good cheer
To young and old, meek and the bold.
Ding dong ding dong, that is their song,
With joyful ring, all caroling. – Peter Wilhousky, “Carol of the Bells”

Today is Christmas, the most widely-celebrated festival in the world; though a Christian rationalization was attached to the holiday in late Roman times, its origin (as explained in my column of one year ago today) was completely pagan and many Church fathers of the first millennium (and later, Protestant leaders after the Reformation) tried to suppress its celebration for exactly that reason. It thus became a completely secular celebration, and though Christians in the 19^th century finally embraced it and some of the late 20^th century started a campaign to hog it for themselves, it remains a holiday beloved by hundreds of millions and has become popular even in countries where the Christian minority is relatively small such as Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore and South Korea.

As I explained on Yule, I set up all my columns this season to post automatically so if you’re a subscriber (and if you aren’t, why not sign up?) you received the notification for this one just after we’ve finished breakfast, and soon we’ll be opening presents and looking to see what Santa Claus brought us. I’ll be cooking most of the day and my husband will be enjoying a well-earned respite from his many travels (and probably watching one of the videos that a little elf told me will be in his stocking). I wish all of my readers a very, very Merry Christmas, and the opportunity to spend this most joyous season free from care and in the company of those you love.

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Further Developments

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Tale That Grew in the Telling, activism, censorship, Central Asia, cops, cult of the child, dirty, FBI, Hollywood, hysteria, law, Madonna/whore, Pennsylvania, porn, sex rays, stage names, The Crumbling Dam, Think of the Children!, Whores in the News on November 18, 2011| 72 Comments »

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (chapter 2)

One year ago today I published “November Miscellanea (Part Two)”, which explained how the U.S. government isn’t interested in prosecuting the trafficking of minors for sexual purposes when huge corporations like Time-Warner do it; reported that a Fox newsreader publicly advised another journalist to patronize sex workers; and linked an article called “10 Tips for Dealing with Cops”. And though I already published a three-part “November Updates” column two weeks ago, several more interesting stories have surfaced and so I present this special extra update edition.

Think of the Children! (September 30^th, 2010)

Child Cultists apparently believe that sexually-active adults emit invisible “sex rays”, and that if any of that sex wasn’t entirely vanilla the intensity of those “sex rays” increases exponentially and never, ever fades away. Therefore no such person, no matter how long ago she committed these dreaded acts, can ever again be allowed with 10 meters of children lest her pervy emanations induce the dreaded “premature sexualization”, which might {Gasp!} cause innocent children to have sexual thoughts or feelings at some point before the magical Advent of Shazam at exactly midnight on their 18^th birthdays. Here, courtesy of TMZ, is the latest example of a shameless harlot recklessly endangering children with her dangerous presence:

Porn legend Sasha Grey says she will NOT back out of a national elementary school reading program — despite pressure from parents — claiming she will “not live in fear” of her XXX past…Grey…participated in the “Read Across America” program at Emerson Elementary School in Compton, CA last week. Afterward, the school received complaints for letting Grey around the kids. For the record, Grey has been out of the adult business for 2 years. Now, Sasha has released a statement … saying, “I committed to this program with the understanding that people would have their own opinions about what I have done, who I am and what I represent…I am an actor. I am an artist. I am a daughter. I am a sister. I am a partner. I have a past that some people may not agree with, but it does not define who I am. I believe in the future of our children, and I will remain an active supporter and participant in education-focused initiatives.”

Good for Sasha; I just hope she doesn’t allow herself to be shamed into quitting as Tera Myers was.

Whores in the News (October 29^th, 2010)

On October 27^th of last year the FBI raided the offices of Escorts.com, and reports I received from working escorts in the ensuing months convinced me that the company had been taken over by the feds and was being used in an attempt to entrap working girls. Fortunately, the operation was sloppy and heavy-handed and nobody with two brain cells to rub together was fooled; the site was closed entirely at the end of May and since the big pigs were unable to sexually victimize women as they intended, they contented themselves with stealing six and a half million dollars instead:

Two Philadelphia-based companies have been charged with running a website used by prostitutes and escort services to advertise…National A-1 Advertising Inc. and R.S. Duffy Inc. agreed to plead guilty to money laundering conspiracy and will forfeit $4.9 million, pay a $1.5 million fine and serve 1½ years of probation, according to court documents…the companies…operated Escorts.com beginning in 2007. Prostitutes and escort services paid to advertise on the site, while customers were charged subscription fees. The companies have forfeited the domain name. National A-1 also operates phone-sex lines and a pornographic website. Those portions of its business are unaffected by its plea agreement in the escorts.com case…The government said it reserves the right to prosecute individuals associated with the companies.

As we’ve pointed out before, companies aren’t responsible for the content of their advertising so the government had no case even if there was a federal law against advertising sexual services, which there isn’t. But federal prosecutors are empowered with a whole arsenal of nuisance charges (“money laundering” and “conspiracy” being chief among them) with which to hound individuals and corporations to death based on the flimsiest of evidence or even no evidence at all, so National A-1 and R.S. Duffy clearly decided that paying the ransom demand was simply the cheapest and quickest way to get on with their corporate lives.

October Updates, Part Three (October 4^th, 2011)

In my update to “A Tale That Grew in the Telling” I discussed the way stories get distorted in the process of rumor-spreading, becoming progressively more lurid and exaggerated. Here, via Furry Girl, is a perfect example from journalist Anderson Cooper: after the tsunami which struck Sri Lanka on December 26^th, 2004, a man on a motorcycle took two injured children to a hospital. Some bystander decided he was actually kidnapping them, and it was so reported in a Sri Lankan newspaper; by the time the story reached New York a few days later dozens of storm orphans were being abducted into sexual slavery. It’s rather like And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, except not at all cute.

The Crumbling Dam (October 14^th, 2011)

Speaking of Furry Girl, I reported last month that she had to resort to a mobile billboard company for her sex worker rights ad after all the regular billboard companies rejected it (despite the fact that they’ve carried anti-prostitution ads in the past). Well, her billboard finished its run on November 9^th, and here’s a report from her (with photos) telling about how it went. Let’s hope her next project finds an advertising company which is more interested in making money than in promoting a moral view via censorship of paying advertisers.

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