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Posts Tagged ‘cosmetic surgery’

First Updates of the Year (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged archeofeminism, California, censorship, condoms, cops, cosmetic surgery, dating, dirty, disease, ethics, genitalia, Gorged With Meaning, harm reduction, holidays, Hollywood, hysteria, law, lawheads, Madonna/whore, naturalness, New Jersey, Not To Be Taken Internally, porn, psychology, restaurants, sex rays, stage names, stereotypes, stripping, Texas, Toys for Tots, United Kingdom, yellow journalism, yin and yang on January 4, 2012| 29 Comments »

It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the evil to suspect good. – Marcus Tullius Cicero

Four more articles which relate to earlier columns. Male readers who are sensitive should probably skip the third item; you have been warned!

Gorged With Meaning (November 21^st, 2011)

In this column I discussed silly British people who, by trying to impress a rigid and incorrect definition of “prostitute” on reality, get all upset upon discovering that young, attractive women are whoring themselves to older, wealthier men as they have since the dawn of civilization. In this December 14^th column from the Daily Mail, Dominique Jackson makes essentially the same point:

…The rise in tuition fees, soaring living costs and government cuts to maintenance grants are all reportedly forcing more and more young women to turn to prostitution and other forms of sex work…I am afraid I have to disappoint but these headlines, with their sly mix of prurience and moral outrage, are not in the least bit new. The vast majority of students, those who cannot rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad, have always had to come up with ingenious ways of making ends meet. Intelligent girls…have never been averse to using their patent attractions to part gullible men from their money. It is, of course, the oldest profession in the world…

Doctor Ron Roberts from Kingston University said their own recent studies showed that the number of students who knew someone who has worked in the sex industry to fund their studies had gone up from three per cent to 25 per cent. He also said 11 per cent would consider escort work and called the statistics: ‘worrying’. Eleven per cent? Is that all? I am pretty sure that working as an escort…has crossed plenty more bright young female minds. Escort work would seem to be the most palatable end of a spectrum which presumably includes pole or lap dancing, stripping and goes through to full-blown intercourse in exchange for money…There was a strictly enforced ban against taking on jobs during term time when I was a university student in the 1980s. Nevertheless, many of my bolder friends chose to defy the authorities, usually by working a few shifts as a waitress in Brown’s Restaurant, where the only qualification needed was to look good in an absurdly short mini-skirt. Back then, I wasn’t aware of any of my own peers capitalising on their assets in any more direct way. However, scores of cannier girls made sure they bagged a boyfriend who they knew could well afford to take them out for nice dinners and, ideally, had a car to boot. As most women realise, it is more or less the same form of exchange…

I am still in close touch with several dozen young women from my old college…In the best traditions of popular journalism, I carried out a quick straw poll which revealed that the furthest any of these girls had been prepared to go was to stoop to silver service waitressing at the local stately home. Curiously, though, almost all of them had certainly heard of, or even knew of one or even a couple of fellow students who had indeed, worked as an escort, or funded their studies with the occasional pole dance. So nobody owned up to turning to sex work themselves, yet the anecdotal evidence that some students definitely do turns out to be overwhelming. Funny that, isn’t it?

Funny indeed, Dominique; like you, I suspect that many of these ladies took advantage of their natural assets, but simply won’t admit it.

Toys for Tots (November 25^th, 2011)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve donated to Toys for Tots every year since I started sex work in 1997, and I’m not remotely alone; last year I mentioned that a friend of mine was offering extra time in exchange for donated toys. But when the sick, evil minds of cops (and some suburban housewives) see a charity offer like this, they imagine it as the sort of twisted scheme they would come up with to victimize someone, and the piggish, juvenile minds of yellow journalists see only a way to get a story literally at the expense of women and children:

A toy drive during the holidays — but this one unlike any we’ve ever seen before. An ad posted on an adult escort website promises more time with the woman in exchange for donations to Toys for Tots…The person who answered the phone told me that she was, in fact, Robin Jordan — the woman who was arrested earlier this year and convicted last month for operating an Internet-based prostitution operation out of her Fort Bend County home…The site, which shows an undressed woman in provocative poses, wishes you “Happy Holidays” and claims if you pay for one hour of services and bring an unwrapped gift, your second hour will be free. “It’s awful, obviously, especially in a neighborhood like this,” said neighbor Jennifer Vontz…”For them to use that just to lure people in, I think that’s just really sad,” said neighbor Valerie Work…

Jordan would not confirm she placed the ads, but by phone earlier told me she would meet for us to hear her side of the story. Jordan never returned calls when we repeatedly tried to contact her this afternoon, nor did anyone wish to comment at her…home. The Houston Police Department has launched an additional investigation, based on the evidence we have submitted to them. We’ve learned Jordan faces a charge of child endangerment in Fort Bend County. Child Protective Services is also attempting to terminate her parental rights based on this case and the way she allegedly treated her three-year-old daughter.

The fact that it’s “unlike anything he’s seen before” demonstrates the reporter’s colossal ignorance. My opinion of “child protective services” is well known, and as for the Houston police…I wouldn’t waste my water spitting on them. The TV station, neighbors and cops involved in this story are all beneath contempt.

Not To Be Taken Internally (December 11^th, 2011)

Feminists who believe that only women have unrealistic body-image issues, please take note of this item from the December 13^th Huffington Post:

Authorities say a New Jersey man who died after having his penis injected with silicone was trying to get it enlarged…The Essex County prosecutor’s office says 34-year-old Kasia Rivera gave 22-year-old Justin Street the injection in May. She has pleaded not guilty [to manslaughter] but remains in jail on $75,000 bail…[after] a medical examiner [determined that Street] died of a silicone embolism. Rivera also faces charges [for] the unauthorized practice of medicine out of her…apartment. Authorities say they’re investigating whether she gave other people similar injections.

The Liars’ Club (December 13^th, 2011)

Maybe the adult film industry won’t have to fight Michael Weinstein’s asinine “your sex life is our business” ballot initiative after all, because according to this December 9^th press release from the Free Speech Coalition, the City of Los Angeles is doing it for them:

A lawsuit was filed yesterday by the City of Los Angeles challenging the constitutionality of AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s (AHF) ballot initiative…[which] would force local officials to enforce mandatory condom regulations on adult production sets. Named as defendants in the suit are various AHF personnel, including AHF President Michael Weinstein. “Clearly AHF has chosen to squander its donors’ resources by filing frivolous lawsuits and ballot initiatives instead of providing valuable resources toward the prevention and treatment of HIV,” FSC Executive Director Diane Duke said. “It is heartening to know that the City of Los Angeles will draw the line on AHF’s political grandstanding when it comes to wasting taxpayer dollars. History has shown us that regulating sexual behavior between consenting adults does not work. The best way to prevent the transmission of HIV and other STIs is by providing quality information and sexual health service, all of which are successfully provided through adult industry protocols and best practices,” Duke added.

The city’s complaint argues that the ballot proposal is preempted by state regulations that require barrier protection on adult sets and that enforcement of those regulations falls under state jurisdiction. There have been two previous rulings in complaints filed by AHF, where the judge decided that L.A. County officials are not compelled to enforce regulations on behalf of state health & safety agency Cal/OSHA. The city also states that the process involved in bringing the ballot measure to the voters would be a “waste” of taxpayer money…[and] that the ballot initiative is potentially unconstitutional; if passed by voters in June, the city raised concerns of more money being spent if the initiative was overturned on constitutional grounds…

I suspect that somebody in LA government woke up and realized how much money the city stands to lose if the adult film industry moves its shoots elsewhere.

One Year Ago Today

“Doublethink” explains the concept from George Orwell’s 1984 and provides real-life examples.

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December Miscellanea

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged Austria, carnival, Colorado, cops, cosmetic surgery, dirty, drugs, end demand, Europe, Higher Education, hysteria, internet, law, male prostitutes, New Mexico, Not To Be Taken Internally, psychology, Sweden, The Clueless Leading the Hysterical, transgender on December 11, 2011| 15 Comments »

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair. – Susan Sontag

…and as usual, we give the most freakish and emotionally disturbed of all power over us, like a medieval Carnival celebration writ large and practiced all year ‘round. In today’s collection, I’ve saved those for last.

Not To Be Taken Internally

It’s not too often an article leaves me at a loss for words, but…see for yourself, in this November 19^th story from NBC Miami:

A Miami Gardens transgender woman is facing charges of practicing medicine without a license after police say she injected a patient’s rear with everything but the kitchen sink in an illegal cosmetic surgery procedure. Oneal Ron Morris, 30, was arrested Friday after an investigation by Miami Gardens Police and the Florida Department of Health. According to police, the victim saw Morris in May and was injected in her buttocks with a substance consisting of cement, “Fix a Flat,” mineral oil and super glue…the amateur incision was then sealed with super glue…[and] the victim was later hospitalized with a serious medical condition…Morris, who police say is a man but appears to look like a woman and sports an apparently enhanced rear herself in arrest photos, was being held on $7,500 bond. It was unknown whether she has an attorney…

Since then, other victims like this one have come forward. Take a look at Morris’ photo at right and ask yourself, “Would I trust this person’s judgment regarding cosmetic procedures?” The only other thing I have to say is from “February Updates”: “ladies, please, real plastic surgeons do NOT make house calls to hotel rooms!” Nor, I might add, do they perform procedures at parties.

Higher Education

OK, according to American law filmed harlotry magically becomes legal. I wonder how this scheme (reported on November 29^th in the Huffington Post) would fly in the US?

The world’s first international sex school has opened which claims to teach its students how to be better lovers. But far from being a cheap thrill, one term at the “hands on” International Sex School in Vienna will cost pupils £1,400. Swedish-born “headmistress” Ylva-Maria Thompson says anyone over the age of 16 can enroll at what she describes as “the world’s first college of applied sexuality”. Students live in a mixed sex dormitory block where they’re expected to practise their homework. “Our core education is not theoretical, but very practical. The emphasis is on how to be a better lover”, the new school head added. “Sexual positions, caressing techniques, anatomical features. And we teach people hands on.”

Thompson is better known for her art exhibitions, including one which displayed 100 casts of Swedish women’s genitals. Raunchy adverts for the school showing a couple making love have already been banned by Austrian TV. “This is wrapped up in a very stylish way but it is just selling sex,” one protestor commented.

One has to laugh at the protester’s inane statement, because selling sex is legal in Austria. I do have to wonder if Thompson’s students could be prosecuted in her native country, though.

Poetic Justice

I hope you’ll forgive me for indulging myself in a moment of schadenfreude, courtesy of Hypervocal:

If you needed any real-world evidence as to why you should never put your name on a building while you’re still alive, former Arapahoe County [Colorado] Sheriff Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. has you covered. The National Sheriff Association’s 2001 “Sheriff of the Year” was arrested on [November 29^th], suspected of trafficking methamphetamine, according to CBS Denver. The 68-year-old Sullivan served as Arapahoe County [Colorado] Sheriff for 19 years before retiring from his elected post in 2002. The investigation leading up to his arrest…began on Nov. 17^th when several police informants connected Sullivan to the use and distribution of meth. “As part of the investigation authorities say Sullivan agreed to meet a male informant and provide the man drugs in exchange for sex”…

Here’s the kicker: Sullivan, who is being held on $250,000 bond, is sitting in the Arapahoe County Jail. His new home is better known by its updated name: The Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility. Current Arapahoe County sheriff, Grayson Robinson, said Sullivan will likely be charged with a felony count drug count, with additional charges against him and other suspects to follow. If he is convicted of the class-five felony, he faces one to six years in prison…

This story could almost have served as an update to “Wholesale Hypocrisy” or even “Reaction Formation”, since the CBS report notes that this “dedicated, loyal, available,” dope-dealing “hero” who posted bond for drug suspects on numerous occasions over the past few years was simultaneously “an active participant in state and local methamphetamine task forces, helping craft a state plan to deal with the scourge of methamphetamine.” Well, I guess they went straight to the source. I wonder if he’ll be prosecuted as a “human trafficker” too, since he offered to pay for sex and Colorado politicians claim that “end demand” initiatives will “cut down on the enormous public harm that comes from human trafficking”. Alas, it’s much more likely he’ll just get the usual slap on the wrist after his defense says he fell off of his bicycle or became an addict due to some act of wonderful, selfless heroism.

The Clueless Leading the Hysterical

As students of hysteria know, the vast majority of panics would be extremely short-lived if people actually bothered to investigate the moronic claims made by authority figures such as “the average age at which a woman enters prostitution is 13” or “there is a 40% increase in domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday” (as described in my column of one year ago today). Of course, they never do, and neither do the self-proclaimed “authorities” themselves. All it takes is for some glorified security guard in Arizona to declare that teenagers are using vodka-soaked tampons to get drunk without booze breath and before you know it cops and media from sea to shining sea are reporting it as Gospel. The idea of thinking critically about the claim or simply visiting The Straight Dope or Snopes or Mythbusters or The Honest Courtesan never occurs to these yo-yos, and the result is stuff like this November 30^th story from Huffington Post:

The New Mexico Attorney General’s Office is warning parents that an increased sighting of depictions of a cartoon-like bear that is linked to pedophiles could be an indication of increased child sex offender activity in the Albuquerque area. “Our ICAC unit has received reports that the Pedobear window sticker has been sighted in Albuquerque on at least two vehicles recently,” said New Mexico Attorney General Gary King. The concept of the Pedobear was made popular a couple years ago on the Internet forum 4chan. The bear illustration was a joke aimed at people who were inadvertently creepy about children. The bear, however, has since been embraced by pedophiles, according to the attorney general’s office. The Pedobear, they allege, “has a sexual interest in underage girls” and has spread from use among an online subculture to the mainstream…

Last year flyers circulated of a Pedobear masquerading as a TSA agent, and in May a man dressed as the Internet-based Pedobear was escorted by police from the San Diego Comic Con event, where he had been distributing candy to children. It is not illegal for people to display the Pedobear image in public. Some people may be displaying them as a joke, but the attorney general’s office said they are taking the bear images seriously and are trying to get the word out. “We are very concerned about the potential link between the Pedobear symbol and pedophiles; we also want to increase public awareness of the potential danger to children, especially young girls,” King said.

Because, you know, pedophiles are usually strangers who wear funny costumes to attract the attention of every single adult in the area before swooping down on unsuspecting prepubescent girls, only they’re not. Of course, this is Albuquerque, the city which seems determined to win some kind of award for police and governmental corruption, incompetence and all-around control freakishness. Still, they’re just taking their cues from San Diego, which started this particular nonsense last year with a hilarious two-page flyer that sounds like it was composed by the bastard child of a cop and a failed writer of vintage Hollywood ad copy. The sick minds of police are compelled to project their own internal ugliness onto the external world, so it’s inevitable that they would fantasize that a tool of community self-policing is “really” a badge of criminality that they have to “protect” people from by imposing further tyranny.

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Don’t Confuse Us With Facts

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged censorship, cosmetic surgery, dirty, Don't Confuse Us With Facts, ethics, harm reduction, hysteria, law, lawheads, lawyers, Ohio, Oklahoma, porn, underage on November 9, 2011| 12 Comments »

Nothing is more damaging to a state than that cunning men pass for wise. – Francis Bacon

The advocate system which underlies the Western machinery of “justice” is, in a way, the exact opposite of science, though they both claim to have the same goal: discovering the truth. But while everyone in science is presumed to be on the same side, and an ethical scientist who has made a discovery wants others to share his information and to test his hypotheses by trying to prove them wrong, lawyers do things the other way around. Those who represent the accusatory side (the state or plaintiff) do everything in their power to find the defendant/respondent guilty of whatever it is he’s accused of, even if they know he isn’t, and those on the defense will similarly attempt to exonerate their client even if they know he’s guilty. Furthermore, either side is allowed to hide critical information from the other; it’s considered the responsibility of each side to demand that the other side turn over its information (a process called “discovery”), and if it fails to do so in exactly the right way the other side is allowed to hide that information, even if it results in an innocent man being imprisoned or executed. Furthermore, the United States Supreme Court recently ruled (in a case involving former New Orleans district attorney Harry Connick) that even if a prosecutor maliciously hides exculpatory evidence, and even if this monstrous act sends an innocent man to prison for 18 years (14 of them on death row), that said prosecutor hasn’t done anything wrong and is immune to lawsuits filed by his victim.

In short, the two systems are incompatible, and when they clash it is science which must lose because the scientist practices full disclosure, while the lawyer tells only those facts which are to his advantage. The result is that most of what passes for “science” in courtrooms is junk science at best, when it isn’t outright lying by hired guns posing as scientists to advance an agenda or simply to earn a paycheck. A large proportion of forensic “science” has long been attacked by legitimate scientists as undependable or totally bogus, but prosecutors like it because splatter or bite-mark analysis, dog behavior, and other highly subjective, error-prone “techniques” can be used to “prove” whatever the prosecutor wants proven; this may be acceptable to the moral cripples whose job is to cage as many humans as possible for as long as possible, but it isn’t “science” by any stretch of the imagination. In science, every possibility must be considered; in prosecution, the only one which is presented to a jury for consideration is the one which tends to make the defendant look guilty, whether it’s “shaken baby syndrome” or the mysterious “diseases” supposedly caused by silicone in the chest wall but not anywhere else in the body, or in any woman who isn’t American.

And despite what you may have seen on television, judges are downright hostile to science in the courtroom when it calls established procedures or the basis of laws into question:

[Dean] Boland, a Lakewood, Ohio, lawyer who specializes in technology cases, was ordered by a federal judge to pay [$300,000] to two unidentified minors whose stock photos Boland used to create…[artificial] images of children engaged in sexual conduct…[in order] to aid his testimony as an expert witness in courts in Ohio and Oklahoma. “The court concludes that a constitutionally effective defense to a child pornography charge does not include the right to victimize additional minors by creating new child pornography in the course of preparing and presenting a defense,” U.S. District Judge Dan Polster in Cleveland said in an opinion, rejecting Boland’s claim that his use of the images was constitutionally protected. Boland used the morphed images to show how difficult it is for people possessing child pornography to determine whether the images depict real children or were created artificially…Boland said he plans to appeal the judgment. “This ruling has the potential to affect the ability of people to get fair trials across the country,” [he] said…

…Boland used the images to aid his expert testimony in three criminal prosecutions for possession of child pornography. In one hearing, prosecutors questioned whether Boland’s use of the images violated the law against possession of child pornography. In 2007, Boland entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with prosecutors in Cleveland, avoiding a criminal conviction. As part of the agreement, Boland apologized in a local legal publication and admitted the images violated federal law, according to an appeals court decision. That same year, the guardians of the children whose photographs were used sued Boland for digitally altering the stock shots. Polster [originally] dismissed the claims, calling it a “difficult and troubling case.” That decision was reversed on appeal and the case was returned to Polster, who granted summary judgment for the two children…awarding $150,000 to each.

Note the sleaziness of the prosecutors’ circumvention of Boland’s defense tactic by attempting to charge him with a felony, despite the fact that they knew with certainty that the child porn was artificial. Personally, I think he was most unwise in creating artificial child porn images; his point could have been made by “morphing” adult photographs in the same way. But the fact remains that the prosecutors’ desire to “win” inspired them to call attention away from Boland’s undoubtedly effective defense tactic with the legal equivalent of an ad hominem attack. “Difficult and troubling” indeed; the message being sent here is that a mere image can be illegal even if its creation hurt nobody, but that creating artificial child porn is apparently acceptable to the court as long as the models are paid outrageous sums. Judges and prosecutors don’t want to be confused with facts that point out the absurdity of the laws; to them, facts are only acceptable when they can be bent to fit their own legalistic purposes, and lies dressed up as science will do just as well.

One Year Ago Today

“Drama Queens” refutes the neofeminist claims that prostitution is “humiliating” by pointing out that if anything, many whores’ self-esteem is too high, and that there are far more prima donnas among us than beaten-down victims. The column also contains a couple of news items and a humorous criticism of clients from a rather bitter escort.

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October Q & A

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, Tyranny, tagged cosmetic surgery, dating, dirty, disease, ethics, fantasy, genitalia, Hollywood, Madonna/whore, nanny state, oral sex, pimps, psychology, stereotypes, yin and yang on October 24, 2011| 42 Comments »

Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer. – Pablo Picasso

One year ago today my second monthly Q & A column appeared, and this will be my last regular one; as part of my gradual decrease in workload, I’ve decided to handle questions individually as they appear rather than waiting to share them all together at the end of the month. So don’t worry, I’ll still be answering your questions; I simply won’t be doing it at one set time every month.

What do you think of female sex tourists? There’s a Wikipedia page on it and it’s a phenomenon that’s been going on for a while. Since you’ve pointed out that it’s hard for gigolos to succeed, I thought it was interesting that a whole tourist industry is propped up by horny women.

Female sex tourists A) are not as common as the media would have you believe; B) gravitate to a few specific places, thus concentrating their numbers*; C) are usually just doing it as a one-time fling, and D) are still mostly looking for romance and excitement, which is why they seek this in exotic places rather than at home.

*It’s the same way that the government taking literally a fraction of a cent per dollar on property taxes adds up to millions.

Why are most pimps black? And when Heidi Klum stated that she fell in love with Seal when she saw his penis through his gym shorts, was she telling the truth?

I’m not sure what the two of these have to do with one another, but since the question was presented like this I’ll go with it. Most pimps aren’t black; that’s a Hollywood stereotype further promoted by the rap music industry. Even if black men represent a disproportionate percentage of all pimps (which they may or may not), they still aren’t the majority. As for Heidi Klum, only she knows the truth, but whores (including models who trade on their sexiness) are notorious for using the Myth of the Wanton to drum up business. Every time you hear one do that, just think of the streetwalker in Full Metal Jacket saying “Me so horny, me love you long time.” Same deal. Guys eat that shit up, so hookers capitalize on it. Furthermore, I doubt any sane woman has ever “fallen in love” with a man from seeing his penis; even very visual women aren’t generally attracted to disembodied parts, and only really maladjusted or hopelessly naïve women confuse lust with love.

Do you have any sympathy with the parents (especially fathers) of prostitutes? If you had children, would you want them to work as sex workers? Would it be your first preference? I ask because, ultimately, for something to be ethical, it must be acceptable behavior for anyone, not something that is deemed as acceptable but not for one’s self or one’s own.

I don’t have a right to determine what my children do with their lives, and neither does anyone else outside of royalty. If Denise had wanted to be an escort I would’ve helped her, but she wanted to be a scientist so I helped her to achieve that instead. As for fathers, while I sympathize with a man’s desire to protect his “little girl” he has to let go sometime, and any man who thinks that a modern American girl isn’t having sex with guys is a fool. And if he acknowledges that she’s having casual sex but thinks it’s “better” for her to spread her legs for a lot of penniless nitwits for free rather than to do it for a carefully-screened clientele for big bucks, I honestly can’t help him.

However, I disagree with your final statement; I think recreational drugs should be legal, but I’d still have a fit if I found out Grace, Denise or my husband were doing cocaine. The state has no right to tell people what to do with their own bodies, but that doesn’t mean an individual has to quietly accept what she perceives as self-destructive behavior in a loved one, though she must also recognize that loved one has free will and must ultimately decide the course of her own life. Furthermore, there’s nothing wrong with parents holding their children to what they think of as a higher standard, as long as they understand that A) they only have authority over their own kids, and B) once those kids become adults they may have different ideas. One of the standard maternal replies to, “But Susie’s allowed to do such-and-such” was always “I’m not Susie’s mother, I’m yours.” And the state is not and should not attempt to be anyone’s mother.

I have a blog and have to deal with all sorts of spam comments, but I never see any on yours; how do you stop them all?

In a word, Akismet. It’s a feature of WordPress, and you can also get it for blogs on other domains. I don’t know how it does its magic, but it’s phenomenal; the whole time I’ve had this blog only ONE spam comment has ever made it through, and it still had to go through the same moderation as all comments from new email addresses do, so I caught and deleted it before any of my readers had to be annoyed by it. At the same time, it’s pretty rare that a good comment is flagged as spam (maybe two or three times a month), and that’s usually because it contains multiple links; even then, it’s easy to “unspam” such comments and let them through. I feel for anyone who doesn’t have this useful software; according to my statistics, over a third of all comments are spam (as of today, 8679 spam vs. 11,879 real comments). I recently encountered a blog post with five comments, all but one of which were spam!

In light of the controversy around this topic, I completely understand if you don’t want to answer it in a column, but I read a number of sex worker blogs, and on every single one where the topic has come up, the women have preferred circumcised men. So I have a two-fold question: 1) Is this because the average uncircumcised man doesn’t care for it properly, and therefore the odds of getting a non-gross dick are better if the guy is circumcised? 2) Would you recommend circumcision for ADULT men? OR is the preference minor enough that it won’t matter in practice?

That did create a lot of controversy, didn’t it? But I’m no stranger to controversy, so here goes: I think most women prefer the way a circumcised penis looks; it seems clean and neat, kind of like a shaved face or (to many women including me) a bald head. There’s also the hygiene issue; it’s rare to find an uncircumcised man who keeps it up to female standards of cleanliness. Women are really obsessive about keeping all of our folds, nooks and crannies scrupulously clean, so it’s pretty off-putting when a guy can’t even keep one little easily-accessible spot clean and dry. Even when men do keep it clean, it’s still kind of soft and moist in there (I don’t know if that’s sweat or pre-come or what, but most women find it pretty icky). One very telling aspect of surveys is that women who claim to prefer uncircumcised penises also usually report disliking oral sex; there’s a peculiar taste and unpleasant sensation involved in blowing a “natural” cock, though I discovered it could mostly be alleviated by pulling the skin back, thoroughly cleaning the area with a warm, damp washcloth and then keeping the skin retracted while I worked. But if his skin wasn’t fully retractable, or he complained about my pulling it back, I just put a condom on before blowing him. For professional girls, disease is a big issue; on circumcised men any symptoms are generally clear and obvious, but a foreskin presents a worrisome hiding place for possible nastiness, so there’s a practical concern there as well as an aesthetic one. And then some men have problem foreskins, though that’s fairly rare.

I don’t personally know any men who were circumcised as adults, though I did meet a few professionally and all of those who mentioned it were happy with the decision. IMHO it’s an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” situation; if an uncircumcised man has a good sex life and no foreskin problems, why spend the money and go through the discomfort? But if he has foreskin issues, or frequent bad reactions from chicks, or plans to see hookers very often, it’s probably a worthwhile investment.

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Politicizing the Personal

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Words, tagged agency denial, BDSM, cosmetic surgery, fantasy, Japan, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, Norway, Politicizing the Personal, porn, psychology, stereotypes, tabula rasa, yin and yang on September 26, 2011| 51 Comments »

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. – Alice Walker

In 1970 Carol Hanisch published a second-wave feminist manifesto entitled “The Personal is Political”, and its title soon became a big feminist catchphrase. The only problem with that is, it’s a load of crap; usually, the personal is just personal, and declaring it to be political merely holds the door open for increasingly tyrannical intrusion into people’s private lives. The idea that “the personal is political” is borrowed from Marxist dogma and basically means that nearly any problem experienced by an individual woman is the result of “systematic oppression.” If she’s unhappy or has a screwed-up life it isn’t because she’s irrational, poor, uneducated, overly emotional, foolish or unlucky in the genetic lottery, or because she’s made bad choices, or because the world is intrinsically unfair and many people of both sexes are unhappy and have screwed-up lives; it’s because she is oppressed by the Patriarchy. This is, of course, a fundamentally defeatist, paranoid and narcissistic view which removes responsibility from the individual and places it into a social context that encourages permanent class warfare (or in this case, gender warfare). Since the two sexes are different by nature and will always be unequal in one way or another, this provided political feminists with a path to political power; women were essentially told that their situation was hopeless unless they supported the schemes of the feminist leadership in its brave and determined struggle against the Male Overlords.

There are many kinds of power, but the inherent simple-mindedness of second-wave feminism recognized only one type, political power, because it was the one political feminists craved and also the one women in the postwar era had least of. Power had to be portrayed as something entirely external to the individual, which helps to explain how neofeminism was able to take control of the movement so quickly; if women realized that one of the greatest (and biologically speaking, the greatest) forms of power, namely sexual power, was already ours from birth, the Neomarxist catechism would be revealed as absurd and organized political feminism would collapse. So neofeminists intentionally reversed the truth, portraying sex as something men used to control women rather than the other way around. Second-wave feminism had launched itself by proclaiming that a woman could not take power for herself; she had to be empowered from outside (by a benevolent government controlled or at least influenced by political feminists). Neofeminism merely established a dogma designed to cut women off from their own natural powers by alienating them from their own bodies and femininity, the sources of those powers. To use a concrete analogy, the only way to consistently sell baby formula is to dry up women’s own milk or to convince them that nursing is unhealthy, disgusting or morally wrong.

“Empowered” is a deceptively simple word; it seems straightforward enough until you realize its underlying assumptions. To “empower” someone is to grant her power; it automatically implies A) that she hasn’t got any in the first place, and B) that such power is the speaker’s to give. Using the word in an active sense (“we need to empower women”) establishes the speaker or his organization as the intrinsic superior and benefactor of the person or persons so “empowered”, and using the word in a passive sense (“an empowered woman”) robs the person so “empowered” of agency, reducing her to the passive recipient of someone else’s benevolence just as people were imagined to be “granted” rights by a king in archaic political theory. Consider the way bureaucrats from Western nations use the word in reference to the people of developing nations, and you will understand how neofeminists and politicized second-wave feminists view other women.

The word “disempowered” is equally patronizing because it implies that the one so “disempowered” (usually a woman) is a weak, passive, vegetable organism who can be “empowered” or “disempowered” at will by her political masters as easily as one installs or removes batteries from a toy. With all that in mind, take a look at this article by Tracy Clark-Flory from the September 12^th Salon:

…a new study investigates the link between a country’s relative gender equality and the degree of female “empowerment” in the X-rated entertainment it consumes. Researchers at the University of Hawaii focused on three countries in particular: Norway, the United States and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1^st, 15^th and (yikes) 54^th on the United Nations’ Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). To simplify their analysis, their library of smut was limited to explicit photographs of women “from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation.” Then they set out to evaluate each image on both a disempowerment and an empowerment scale, using respective measures like whether the woman is “bound and dominated” by “leashes, collars, gags, or handcuffs” or “whether she has a natural looking body.” Their hypothesis was that societies with greater gender equity will consume pornography that has more representations of “empowered women” and less of “disempowered women.” It turned out the former was true, but…the latter was not. “While Norwegian pornography offers a wider variety of body types — conforming less to a societal ideal that is disempowering to the average woman — there are still many images that do not promote a healthy respect for women,” the researchers explain…

All researchers have biases which negatively impact the objectivity of their studies, but it’s rare that any outside of “women’s studies” are so glaringly obvious. These academics are clearly laboring under the delusion that sexual desires are “socially constructed”, revealing a deep ignorance of biology and evolutionary psychology. Furthermore, they clearly accept without question insulting and ignorant neofeminist beliefs about BDSM, have what I can only interpret as bigotry against cosmetic surgery and promote the degrading collectivist notion (perhaps related to the neofeminist gestalt myth) that it is “unhealthy” for men to be attracted to whatever kind of women they’re attracted to because it might make less attractive women feel bad. Flory, who is generally pro-sex and pro-sex work, sees the flaws in these assumptions:

…One explanation might be that…cross-cultural biological imperatives are reflected in pornography. Some of the study’s disempowerment markers could be more a reflection of the gender disparity in porn’s audience. The researchers note, “In a large portion of hardcore pornography…the erect penis is the most important organ” and “women are often used as little more than receptacles for the penis.” Is that because of sexism or because porn viewers, who are largely men, identify with…the male member?

…You can’t so easily equate dominance with empowerment and submission with disempowerment. Take, as one example, that the researchers designate a woman in an “authoritative” position as a sign of empowerment. That formula can be easily upended — clearly, submission feels empowering to plenty of people. It’s also awfully subjective: The popular line within the BDSM community is that it’s the submissive that has all the power, because they’re the ones calling the shots…sex isn’t always empowering or disempowering, equitable or inequitable — it’s much too complicated for that.

The researchers’ appalling ignorance of BDSM is apparent in their interpretation of dominatrix characters as a sign of female “empowerment”, despite the fact that such characters are as much archetypal male fantasy figures as are female slaves. Actors play roles; to assume that an actress playing a dominatrix role is somehow more “empowered” than one in a sub role is as ridiculous as assuming that the actor playing a king in an historical drama must be the star simply because his character is more important inside the fantasy world of the movie. But the most important point to note is the researchers’ patronizing assumption that male porn viewers are so impressionable that their level of “respect for women” can essentially be programmed by the content of their wanking material, and that women are such passive, childlike beings that mere images on a screen can grant them “power” or take it away.

One Year Ago Today

“Imaginary Victims” examines the difficulty trafficking fetishists have in coming up with even a few poster children to represent the phantom multitudes upon which their propaganda depends.

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August Q & A

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, tagged agency denial, cosmetic surgery, East Asia, ethics, genitalia, marriage, porn, psychology, racism, yin and yang on August 30, 2011| 22 Comments »

In fact, now I come to think of it, do we decide questions, at all? We decide answers, no doubt: but surely the questions decide us? It is the dog, you know, that wags the tail—not the tail that wags the dog. – Lewis Carroll

It’s time once again for me to answer questions from readers; the first such column appeared on September 21^st of last year, and we’ve been doing it every month since then!

What are your views on polygamy, polygyny, polyandry and the poly lifestyle in general? I ask because I am a polyamorist with two boyfriends and am quite a happy person. They are, of course, free to pursue other women, that’s just the way our dynamic is set up at the moment. Do you believe that it is acceptable that both men and women should enter into group relationships with free consent, or do you view these relationships as too susceptible to becoming coercive and therefore abusive environments?

My view on polyamory is that whatever works for any number of people is nobody else’s business, as long as they’re honest with one another. In my view, two boyfriends means thrice as much work, but if you enjoy it nobody has the right to tell you it’s “wrong” or unhealthy. And frankly, I think all the cultural brouhaha about “coercion” is doomed to vanish before much longer; everyone coerces everyone else to one degree or another, and unless the coercion is forcible, i.e, by threat of violence or other serious consequences, I can’t see where it’s the business of the state to interfere in it. What’s worse is the astonishing hypocrisy of “authorities” pontificating about coercion while dispatching armed thugs to enforce all of their own coercive demands by use of threats against life, liberty and property.

I have a question, I hope you don’t regard it too puerile. I think a lot of us men spend some time wondering about women’s preferences in regard to men; what I mean is, how big is big for a man, what is the real average and what look or type do most women really prefer? I mean, I know what porn suggests women vastly prefer, but I wonder how realistic that is.

I don’t think it’s puerile at all; after all, I did considerable obsessing about my flat-chestedness until I got my boob job, and that’s kinda-sorta the female equivalent of men worrying about penis size. On top of that, men tend to be much more quantitative than women are, and penises aren’t the only thing about which men tend to believe that “bigger is better”. Because I do recognize that this issue is an important one for men, I tackled it less than two months into my blog in my column of September 8^th, 2010, and then again more briefly in my December Q & A column.

I’m a white girl who is very attracted to Asian men, and if I happen to mention this men of other ethnicities (especially white men) get completely, irrationally unhinged; it’s even happened with male friends whom I know only from internet forums. They have no vested interest in my life, possibly live hundreds or thousands of miles from me, and are frequently in committed relationships of their own. Yet, my mere mention of my preference sends them right over the edge. Once or twice, I’ve had female friends excoriate me because I’m not open to dating other ethnicities – like the equal opportunity laws should apply to my dating life as well. This is rare though, it’s usually males who have a real problem with my interracial dating preferences. What do you think this is about?

I think there are a couple of different things going on here. First, there’s still a lot of unconscious racism in people and many are uncomfortable with those who date or marry outside their race; they often won’t say anything to people of their own sex who do it, but they’ll attack members of the opposite sex. I think that’s due to vanity; they hate being told they haven’t even got a chance because of your preference, even if they weren’t interested or available anyway. I once had a short guy jump all over me for liking tall men; like your male friends, he only knew me on the internet and was happily married. And I’ve read a number of scathing opinions from black women about black men who date white women, even if the black men in question are celebrities and/or the women commenting are in committed relationships.

Your female friends, however, are a different story; I think that’s just a case of what my friend Philippa used to call the “enlightenment police”, the people who think their ideas about proper living need to apply to everyone else’s personal preferences. In that sense, they’re something like militant vegans or people who take it as a personal affront that I have no interest in watching Brokeback Mountain.

Some form of this question has been asked several times about several different columns: I enjoyed your column of (x date), but it was rather superficial and I wanted to know why you didn’t mention y?

Unlike most bloggers, I maintain a fairly tight column format; I publish every day, and with rare exceptions (higher or lower) every essay runs 750-1500 words (it was a bit higher when I started, but I eventually found this length most comfortable and, more importantly, sustainable). And even though some of my columns are only tangential to my primary subject, harlotry, I try not to wander too far afield. Because of both of these factors, length and scope, I’m often only able to give a cursory overview of a very broad and complex subject. I have faith in my readers, however, and I always encourage them to further exploration of any topic about which they’d like to know more than the mere introduction I’m able to provide herein.

One Year Ago Today

“Red Shoes Lady” tells the story of my relationship with my “little girl”, Denise; you’ll understand the title after reading it.

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Top Ten

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged acting, anecdote, Aphrodite, blogging, cops, cosmetic surgery, courtesans, dirty, drugs, ethics, Madonna/whore, marriage, neofeminism, psychology, Rome, sacred prostitutes, statistics, stereotypes, Texas on August 14, 2011| 9 Comments »

I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list… – Sir William Gilbert, “As Someday It May Happen” from The Mikado

I promised in my “Anniversary” column that I’d provide a list of my top ten posts, calculated in a number of different ways, and though I actually made the counts that very day I’ve for some reason not been able to get around to putting the column together until now! So without further ado, here are the figures as they stood on July 10^th.

This first is a list of my top ten columns, as determined purely by number of hits:

Top Ten (# of hits)

Name Date # of hits by 7/10/11
Coming and Going February 10^th, 2011 5,970
Courtesan Denial December 4^th, 2010 4,637
Meretrices and Prostibulae November 3^rd, 2010                4,127
Numerology January 24^th, 2011 3,360
Acting and Activism January 8^th, 2011 2,721
Who Did Your Tits? October 1^st, 2010 2,623
January Second January 2^nd, 2011 1,875
Plaçage November 22^nd, 2010 1,771
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day March 3^rd, 2011                       1,574
The Slave-Whore Fantasy (Part One) December 2^nd, 2010                1,537

Some of these are unsurprising, but some appear to make no sense at all; why in the world should a post about the amount of money the State of Texas wastes on locking up hookers be my most popular by 29% above its next-closest competitor? To understand the reason, one must take image searches into account; for several months this spring, the single most popular search which led to this blog was “Texas county map” or some variation on it, which led to the first illustration in my February 10^thcolumn. Similarly, searches for pictures of Veronica Franco led to the December 4^th column, “Pompeii” and “Temple of Fortuna Virilis” both found my November 3^rd column, “Mardi Gras tits” turned up this young lovely in my October 1^st column, and Googling for illustrations of the fictional planet Gor turned up these Boris Vallejo illustrations in my December 2^nd column. It tickles my sense of irony that thousands of searches for “Mira Sorvino” ended up at my January 8^th column about her rude and unprofessional treatment of Dr. Laura Agustín, but I am nothing short of astonished that almost two thousand people cared enough about sofa beds to end up at my column of January 2^nd.

Since these results tell us nothing about the content of the columns, I disallowed them and came up with this list:

Top Ten (corrected)

Name   Date # of hits by 7/10/11
Numerology January 24^th, 2011 3,360
Plaçage November 22^nd, 2010 1,771
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day March 3^rd, 2011                       1,574
Ashley Madison January 30^th, 2011 1,439
Madame de Pompadour December 29^th, 2010 1,366
Phryne July 31^st, 2010                         1,133
Storyville September 3^rd, 2010 1,113
Japanese Prostitution October 21^st, 2010                  1,104
By the Numbers April 20^th, 2011                       1,095
Here We Go Again… August 26^th, 2010                   1,060

Though many people searched for information on Phryne and Madame de Pompadour, many others found those articles by searching for pictures of the ladies (especially this detail from “Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis” by Henryk Siemiradzki), so I’ll include two runners-up as well: “Wife Swapping” from November 20^th and “November Q & A” from November 27^th.

Ranking the top ten posts by the number of comments they elicited gives us a completely different picture:

Top Ten Comments

Name   Date                     # of comments by 7/10/11
That Is So Hot! April 19^th, 2011 191
Speaking in Prostitute June 17^th, 2011 170
Their Lips Are Moving April 25^th, 2011 132
Pendulum April 9^th, 2011 128
Creeping Rot April 18^th, 2011 123
Public Service Announcement June 12^th, 2011 120
Savaging March 27^th, 2011                     115
Neither Cold Nor Hot April 6^th, 2011 114
May Q & A May 31^st, 2011 97
Interview: Jill Brenneman (Pt 4)   February 24^th, 2011 96

With apologies to Eliot, April appears to be the chattiest month!

Most posts seem to have a great deal of interest right away, then trickle off; others seem to attract interest consistently as time goes by. Here are the posts which show the smallest variation in number of hits from month to month:

Ten Most Consistent (in chronological order)

Name Date
Do You Party? July 14^th, 2010
Modern Marriage July 18^th, 2010
Phryne July 31^st, 2010
A Whore in the Bedroom September 9^th, 2010
Think of the Children! September 30^th, 2010
No Other Option October 17^th, 2010
Wolves October 18^th, 2010
Japanese Prostitution October 21^st, 2010
Wife Swapping November 20^th, 2010
Plaçage November 22^nd, 2010

Interestingly, there aren’t any posts from this year in this particular list. Finally, I’d like to finish off with a list of my ten favorite posts which don’t appear on any of the other lists:

Ten Essays Maggie Would Like To See Get More Attention

Name Date
Advice for Clients August 21^st , 2010
Five Women in Whitechapel October 5^th, 2010
Heart of Gold October 6^th, 2010
The Love-Hate Relationship October 7^th, 2010
Amazingly Stupid Statements October 10^th, 2010
Deadbeats October 30^th, 2010
Ban the Super Bowl! December 11^th, 2010
Social Autoimmune Disorder January 12^th, 2011
Creating Criminals January 15^th, 2011
A Little Help From Our Friends March 11^th, 2011

Plus ALL of the fictional interludes!

One Year Ago Today

“New Film Reviews”, my first of a number of similar columns, containing my reviews of Doctor Detroit, Full Metal Jacket, An Indecent Proposal, Jesus Christ Superstar, Pretty Woman, Total Recall, Whore and The Wicker Man.

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Social Construction of Eunuchs

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged censorship, cosmetic surgery, Europe, India, neofeminism, psychology, Social Construction of Eunuchs, Sweden, tabula rasa, transgender, yin and yang on July 18, 2011| 26 Comments »

The dream of reason produces monsters. – Francisco Goya

It is impossible to overstate the evil which springs from the dogma of “social construction of gender”, the discredited notion which teaches that the only natural differences between the sexes are physical ones, and that all psychological ones are “socially constructed”. Those who believe in this mythology ignore the evidence of nature and the discoveries of science in favor of promoting the view that if one raised a boy as a girl he would grow up to act like a girl, and vice-versa. The most shocking refutation of the doctrine was the case of David Reimer, a Canadian boy born in 1965 whose penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision and who, on the advice of “social construction of gender” fanatic John Money, was then raised as a girl. Money repeatedly lied about the case for years afterward, claiming the reassignment was 100% successful and that David (then called “Brenda”) showed no male traits whatsoever. In truth, the victim of Money’s evil, agenda-driven experiment was deeply maladjusted, bullied by both girls and boys and by the age of 13 was so deeply depressed that he told his parents he would commit suicide if they forced him to see Money again. The parents eventually told him the truth about his sex and he started living as a boy, but never recovered from the torture inflicted in the name of this bizarre theory and, faced with a dissolving marriage, committed suicide in 2004.

But despite the Reimer case and volume upon volume of anthropological, biological, psychological, biochemical, neurological and anecdotal evidence, monsters all over the world are still willing to sacrifice their children’s happiness (and perhaps their sanity) on the altar of this mad belief. The most vociferous proponents are of course the neofeminists, who simply don’t care how many lives they destroy in order to establish their asexual dystopia; this June 27^th story from the Daily Mail describes a preschool in Sweden (where else?) which is trying to force children to be asexual, androgynous beings by means of a bizarre regime which bans both pronouns and books about heterosexual couples or biological families:

A pre-school in Sweden has decided to stop calling children ‘him’ or ‘her’ in a bid to avoid gender stereotypes…as part of the [country’s] efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood…the taxpayer-funded school also carefully plans the colour and placement of toys and the choice of books to assure they do not fall into stereotypes. The school opened last year and is on a mission to break down gender roles – a core mission in the national curriculum for Swedish pre-schools…“Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing,” says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. “Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be”…Lego bricks and other building blocks are intentionally placed next to the kitchen, to make sure the children draw no mental barriers between cooking and construction. Meanwhile, nearly all the children’s books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children. There are no “Snow White,” “Cinderella” or other fairy tales.

Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Rajalin says the staff also try to help the children discover new ideas when they play. “A concrete example could be when they’re playing ‘house’ and the role of the mom already is taken and they start to squabble,” she says. “Then we suggest two moms or three moms and so on”…Staff at the school try to shed masculine and feminine references from their speech, including the pronouns him or her – ‘han’ or ‘hon’ in Swedish. Instead, they’ve have adopted the genderless [and synthetic] ‘hen’…

Jay Belsky, a child psychologist at the University of California, Davis, said he’s not aware of any other school like Egalia, and he questioned whether it was the right way to go. “The kind of things that boys like to do – run around and turn sticks into swords – will soon be disapproved of,” he said. “So gender neutrality at its worst is emasculating maleness.”

So Egalia gives the children “a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be,” unless of course the girls want to be “girlie, nice and pretty” or the boys “manly, rough and outgoing.” Obviously, encouraging children to be what they are is bad, but encouraging them to play at living in lesbian communes isn’t. The child psychologist quoted at the end is completely right; the doctrine that all children start from a unisex baseline invariably presumes that feminine behavior is the norm, because the vast majority of preschool and grammar school teachers (not to mention the vast majority of people who feel compelled to inflict social engineering on schoolchildren) are female. Male behavior is therefore automatically regarded as a deviation from the norm, a pathology to be “treated” with punishment and even medication.

Of course, that’s in the West; in India, rather than trying to emasculate boys they’re trying to masculinize girls. And they’re not limiting themselves to brainwashing toddlers like the Swedes; oh, no! The Indian approach is one of which Dr. Money would have approved, as described in this June 27^th article from the Telegraph:

Madhya Pradesh state government is investigating claims that up to 300 girls were surgically turned into boys in one city after their parents paid about £2,000 each for the operations. Women’s and children’s rights campaigners denounced the practice as a “social madness” that made a “mockery of women in India”. India’s gender balance has already been tilted in favour of boys by female foeticide – sex selection abortions – by families who fear the high marriage costs and dowries they may have to pay. There are now seven million more boys than girls aged under six in the country. Campaigners said the use of surgery meant that girls were no longer safe even after birth…Doctors confronted in the investigation claimed that girls with genital abnormalities were being sent to the city’s clinics to be “surgically corrected” and that only children born with both male and female sexual characteristics were eligible for the procedure. But campaigners said the parents and doctors were misidentifying the children’s conditions to turn girls into boys.

The surgery, known as genitoplasty, fashions a penis from female organs, with the child being injected with male hormones to create a boy. Dr V P Goswami, the president of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics in Indore, described the disclosures as shocking and warned parents that the procedure would leave their child impotent and infertile in adulthood. “Genitoplasty is possible on a normal baby of both the sexes but later on these organs will not grow with the hormonal influence and this will lead to their infertility as well as their impotency. It is shocking news and we will be looking into it and taking corrective measures,” he said. “Parents have to consider the social as well as the psychological impact of such procedures on the child”…

India is obviously far saner and more civilized than Sweden; whereas in the former this abomination is the result of base human traits like greed and ignorance, in the latter it is the result of a mechanistic social agenda. While the intelligentsia of India recognize it as madness, the intelligentsia of Sweden are either too brainwashed or too frightened to protest. And while the Indian government rightfully condemns mutilating children’s bodies and has ordered an investigation into the outrage, the Swedish government both encourages and finances a systematic attempt to mutilate children’s minds. But despite the differences, both of these forms of child abuse are the unnatural outgrowths of the anti-humanistic doctrine called social construction of gender.

One Year Ago Today

On July 18^th, 2010 I published the ever-popular “Modern Marriage”, in which I propose that modern marriages based in romance have a lot more in common with the extramarital affairs of the past than with traditional marriages based in economics.

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July Miscellanea

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged anecdote, Another Small Victory, censorship, condoms, cosmetic surgery, dirty, disease, hysteria, law, porn, PSA, psychology, Secret Squirrel, surveillance, transgender on July 16, 2011| 29 Comments »

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Short articles about those who believe images are more powerful than reality.

Secret Squirrel

I guess the concept of “trust” has gone out of style. And perhaps I’m old-fashioned or idealistic, but I think it would irreparably shatter my relationship with a person if I found out he or she had used this nasty little Secret Squirrel gizmo on my computer (reproduced exactly as it appeared):

The P0rn Detection Stick is a thumb drive device that will search through all the images on your computer. Scan them for p0rnographic content, and create a report of suspected p0rnographic images. It even scans deleted images and Internet cache files so there’s no hiding Internet activity. This means even if Internet Explorer cache files are deleted, many images can still be recovered and scanned for p0rnography. Best of all, no software is installed on the target machine so they don’t know you’ve performed a search. You can even securely delete objectionable images…Paraben’s P0rn Detection Stick allows you to find images that potentially can include p0rnographic contents. Paraben’s P0rn Detection Stick scans an arrangement of images to determine attributes that indicate the image may be of a p0rnographic nature. It uses sophisticated, analytical processes; consisting of thousands of algorithms. These include 11 different detection methods to provide enough information to reliably distinguish between p0rnographic and non-p0rnographic images.

The thing that boggles my mind most about this ad is the repeated substitution of zero for lower-case “o”; seriously, it hurts my brain even worse than it hurts my eyes, because I cannot comprehend any possible reason for it. Is it supposed to be “kewl”, like the substitution of “z” for “s” in “hip-hop” writing? Or is it something even more stupid?

As annoying as that is, though, it’s inconsequential besides the morally bankrupt philosophy behind the device. Since cops already have their own methods of doing this, the target purchasers must be wives and parents (who stand more to lose from spying than from their husbands or kids looking at porn) and employers (who are pretty desperate if they can’t think of a better reason to fire somebody than that). Am I wrong, or is this a symptom of a serious social illness?

Second Verse, Same as the First

Are these guys like lemmings or something? Well, at least this one was from someplace other than New York; here’s the story from the New Orleans Times-Picayune of June 28^th:

Kenner City Councilman Joe Stagni admitted today that he sent a picture of himself in his underwear to a city employee 18 months ago…”I had an inappropriate but consensual relation (sic) with an adult female and we exchanged improper electronic communications which ended (in) 2009,” Stagni, 47, said in a prepared statement. Stagni’s personal smartphone was used to send a text message and the picture to Annamaria Pizzolato, who was Kenner’s internal auditor at the time…”I do not know how a communication appeared on any public transmission or equipment,” Stagni said.

Pizzolato forwarded the image to the work e-mail account of Danna Morris, who was Kenner’s information technology director at the time…”Once you do that, it’s stuck in the city server,” said city attorney Keith Conley, who released the image as part of a public records request. He said it is the only such image that he knows about. Morris…abruptly resigned in April 2010 amid an investigation of computer irregularities. Mayor Mike Yenni fired Pizzolato in September…

Fun Fact for my readers: I was living in Kenner (home of New Orleans International Airport) when I started my escort service; it’s one of those little suburban towns (like Arlington, Texas or the various suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) which has a narcissistic obsession with its own self-importance. This comment on the online story says it all:

No he shouldn’t resign. And I disagree with those who say this is a personal matter- they should publicly embrace his behavior. This man, who imagines someone wants to see his stout belly in a wife-beater in a grainy photo- this man EPITOMIZES Kenner. He is the ultimate expression of that city, the living symbol of its values and class, and should be its next mayor. Perhaps one day they’ll, um, erec- make that, construct- a statute of this photo outside City Hall. Here’s to you, Mr. Stocky Half-Naked Kenner City Council Guy.

OK, Sure

Words fail me.

A 21-year-old woman from North London has spent thousands of dollars on surgical procedures to look like a drag queen. Collagen Westwood told The Daily Mail she’s thrilled if she gets mistaken for a man dressing up as a woman. “I’ve admired drag queens since I was a little girl,” she said. “They’re glamorous and beautiful — what woman wouldn’t want to look like that? I have a couple of different wigs that I wear when I go out, and people are always assuming I’m a transvestite. I love it when people mistake me for a man. It doesn’t offend me — I think drag queens look fantastic.” Westwood has had her lips plumped and her nose straightened and says she plans to have some ribs removed so she can fit into smaller corsets. She said she counts Dead or Alive singer Pete Burns as one of her idols.

A few random thoughts:

“Collagen”? Ummmm….no.

“Glamorous and beautiful”? Obviously, she and I aren’t thinking of the same drag queens.

“What woman wouldn’t want to look like that?” {raises hand}

Westwood wants to be mistaken for a man, but since drag queens want to be referred to as “she”, which pronoun does Westwood use?

But no matter how outré I think this is, and no matter how much I think she’ll regret it in ten years or so, I insist that she has a right to do as she pleases with her own body, money and life. Of course, I also have the right to mock her for it.

Another Small Victory

It is my stated position that decriminalization in the U.S. will arrive via judicial fiat, just as abortion and other sexual rights did; the political establishment won’t even let the issue onto the table, and prohibitionists dump millions per year into confusing the public with “sex trafficking” hysteria and myths about pimps, disease and “degradation of women”. But courts aren’t supposed to take public opinion into account when considering issues of individual rights, and many (perhaps even a growing number) do not. This story from July 6^th tends to support my view:

A federal appeals court today ruled that the United States cannot force organizations…to “denounce” prostitution…as a condition for applying for or using U.S. international HIV and AIDS funding…The court found that the “prostitution pledge” or “anti-prostitution loyalty oath,” as it came to be known, was not constitutional because it compels organizations to adopt and espouse a government viewpoint, and that “[c]ompelling speech as a condition of receiving a government benefit cannot be squared with the First Amendment…because it requires recipients to take the government’s side on a particular issue. It is well established that viewpoint-based intrusions on free speech offend the First Amendment.”

The pledge was originally inserted by…Congressman Chris Smith as an amendment to the 2003 U.S. Global Leadership Act Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria…as ultimately interpreted by the Bush Administration…the pledge required organizations to promise not to “promote or support prostitution” while implementing U.S.-funded programs…The Obama Administration, to the dismay of public health and human rights advocates, has kept the pledge in force.

The pledge…was and has continued to be criticized by the global public health and human rights communities for a number of reasons. Among other problems, the language of the pledge is incredibly vague and does not effectively define what constitutes “promoting” prostitution…programs recognized around the world for their successes in working with marginalized populations such as sex workers…have been de-funded…[and] health workers [became] quasi-law enforcement agents, undoing years of work building trust among vulnerable populations…[the pledge] prevented U.S. organizations…from supporting the efforts of sex worker collectives to promote universal condom use, safe sex practices, to defend themselves against police violence and corruption, or to fight to secure their basic human rights…the ruling, while a critical step forward… applies only to U.S. non-profit groups and does not lift the pledge requirements from international…NGOs in other countries…

A small victory to be sure, but I think an important one; it’s another stone in the growing pile which will form the foundation of sex worker rights in the United States.

One Year Ago Today

My column for July 16^th, 2010 was the first of a two-part column on couple calls, those in which an escort entertains an established (married or dating) couple. If you haven’t read it already I think you’ll be interested, and the third picture is probably one of the cutest I’ve ever included in this blog.

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In Their Own Words

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, tagged Australia, cosmetic surgery, dirty, harm reduction, hysteria, law, neofeminism, porn, psychology, racism, rape, Rhode Island, stereotypes on June 10, 2011| 50 Comments »

The act which men commonly perform on prostituted women is penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse. There is nothing “natural” about that act. – Sheila Jeffreys

The first part of the report I excerpted in yesterday’s column discusses Sheila Jeffreys, Australia’s best-known anti-prostitution fanatic. Because prostitution is legal in Australia, Jeffreys is widely recognized as the emotionally disturbed lunatic she is and the report presents her as such:

In her book, The Idea of Prostitution, she argued that…clients of sex workers (or in her terminology ‘prostituted women’) are more accurately described as ‘batterers’, ‘rapists’, and ‘prostitution abusers’. In the same book, Jeffreys made the quite startling claim that: “The act which men commonly perform on prostituted women is penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse. There is nothing ‘natural’ about that act”. This is consistent with, “her firm belief that men maintain power over women by the act of sexual intercourse, and that heterosexuality is therefore bad for women”. In 1979, she stated that feminists who sleep with men are enemy collaborationists and to her sexuality is the basis of oppression of women by men. Consistent with this belief, Jeffreys has described marriage as a form of prostitution, whereby women guarantee men sex in return for subsistence. Even in today’s society, in which women are better educated and hold professional employment, Jeffreys contends that, “the right of men to women’s bodies for sexual use has not gone but remains an assumption at the basis of heterosexual relationships”. In essence, Jeffreys regards every married woman as a prostitute. In 1973, Jeffreys decided to abandon both her heterosexuality and femininity. She has said: “I gave up beauty practices, supported by the strength of thousands of heterosexual and lesbian women around me who were also rejecting them. I stopped dying my hair…and cut it short. I stopped wearing make-up. I stopped wearing high heels and, eventually, gave up skirts. I stopped shaving my armpits and legs”…Jeffreys has also argued that western beauty practices such as makeup, high heels, and cosmetic surgery, are harmful cultural practices…

Most American politicians undoubtedly recognize the extremist insanity of American neofeminists, but because they are politically useful they are allowed to speak before legislatures and other government organs and everyone in those assemblies pretends that the poisonous filth they spew is something other than the hateful product of diseased minds. But since the Australian government has no need for Jeffreys or her ilk, she is presented as she actually is and damned by her own words. Today’s column follows in that same vein; I’ve assembled a few quotes from other neofeminists in order to show the true colors of those who oppose women’s right to sex work (both in prostitution and porn).

The best example of the way American politicians conveniently ignore the fanaticism, appalling misandry and sheer ugliness of prohibitionists is Donna M. Hughes, architect of recriminalization in Rhode Island and bridge between soi-disant conservatives and radical feminists. In a number of articles and speeches Hughes has displayed a shocking level of racism (especially toward Asians and Germans) and prejudice against women who are sexual, even referring to respected sex educator Megan J. Andelloux in these words: “Then a tattooed woman, calling herself a “sexologist and sex educator,” spoke against the [criminalization] bill. She is also a reporter for a prostitutes’ magazine called $pread. (I couldn’t make this stuff up!)” But bigotry is actually the least of Hughes’ faults; she is inordinately fond of scare quotes (using them even for such common words as “good”, “bad” and “it”), enamored of weird, cumbersome passive-voice constructions such as “information about finding women in prostitution,” and so obsessed with the word “pimp” that she often emits strange phrases like “woman pimp” or “pimp agency”. But IMHO the strangest of her oddities is her bizarre tendency to describe mundane ideas and actions using portentous language so as to make them sound sinister:

Men write about “good” and “bad” experiences buying women in prostitution. They have “good” experiences when women comply with everything the men want them to do, focus all their attention on the men, and pretend they like the men and enjoy the sex acts (sometimes known as a GFE – “GirlFriend Experience”)…Men have “bad” experiences when women will not do everything they want, or are disinterested, perfunctory, and try to minimize the physical contact with them.

In other words, a customer paying for a service is satisfied when the service provider is friendly, competent and responsive to his preferences, and dissatisfied when the service provider is rude and performs badly. I somehow doubt Miss Hughes would consider a rude mechanic who ignored her complaints and failed to fix her car to be a “good” mechanic, yet this paragraph implies that the buyer of a service has no right to expect to get what he paid for.

Here are a few other choice and representative quotes revealing the true mindset of some of the women who want to control other women’s bodies and minds:

Julie Burchill

When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.

Nikki Craft

Pornography, most often, dehumanizes women. It reduces us to fetishized objects and provides a blueprint and support network for men who commit acts of sexual terrorism.

(Though this quote is fairly typical neofeminist anti-porn rhetoric, it is notable in that Craft has a long history of using her First Amendment right to free speech to speak out against the First Amendment).

Gail Dines

The man “makes hate” to the woman, as each sex act is designed to deliver the maximum amount of degradation. Whether it be aggressive fellatio or violent sodomy, the goal of porn sex is to illustrate how much power he has over her. Yet the women are still portrayed as enjoying these scenes. Images like these are commonplace on the internet and shape the way men think about sex, relationships and intimacy.

Andrea Dworkin

Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.

Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.

One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible.

Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks.

Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

(Yet, Dworkin apologists now insist that “she never hated men.”)

Melissa Farley

It is not possible to protect the health of someone whose “job” means that they will get raped on average once a week.

Just as we know that violent men from all social classes batter women, so we also know that the difference between pimps who terrorize women on the street and pimps in business suits who terrorize women in gentlemen’s clubs is a difference in class only, not a difference in woman hating.

Women who ‘choose’ prostitution are sexually abused as kids at much higher rates than other women…Other ways that they ‘choose prostitution’ include poor or no education and no job that pays the rent. Prostitution is a choice based on lack of survival options.

(The first quote is from an argument against harm reduction policies such as condom distribution, the second from a tirade against strippers and the third from a denial that women like me [or most other sex worker advocates] actually exist).

Sheila Jeffreys

When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression…

Catharine MacKinnon

Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children.

Men who are in prison for rape…were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and call it sex. The only difference is they got caught.

Kate Millet

Prostitution, when unmotivated by economic need, might well be defined as a species of psychological addiction, built on self-hatred through repetitions of the act of sale by which a whore is defined.

Robin Morgan

I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire.

I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.

Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.

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