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Village Voice Strikes Again

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2011| 79 Comments »

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.  –  Elie Wiesel

I humbly apologize for misinterpreting the motives of Backpage’s management back in November; emails sent out to Backpage users at that time caused me to accuse them of “crawfishing” and “cozying up to the cops to avoid bad publicity.”  Well, I’m eating my words; though Village Voice Media (owners of Backpage) did indeed tighten up the advertising content rules, it was obviously not done to get in bed with control freaks but to cover its collective arse while preparing for a frontal assault.  Since the beginning of this year Village Voice has been increasingly vocal in its criticism of “sex trafficking” hysteria and the concomitant persecution of prostitutes, and is now prepared to launch a full pro-decriminalization campaign.

My first hint of the company’s true position came just two days after my criticism appeared, in the online “Blotch” column of the Fort Worth Weekly, a Village Voice property.  The article, “Morality, Arlington Style” by Jimmy Fowler, criticized the Arlington, Texas Police Department’s “Scarlet Letter” campaign to shame men who were caught in prostitution “stings” by displaying their pictures on a billboard, and was called to my attention by the fact that he linked to my November 23rd column in the article.  But that was (apparently) an isolated blog entry, so I paid it no further mind until late January, when Village Voice reporter Pete Kotz interviewed me for his Dallas Observer article “The Super Bowl Prostitute Myth: 100,000 Hookers Won’t Be Showing Up in Dallas”; during that interview Mr. Kotz told me that unlike Craigslist, Village Voice had no intention of simply rolling over and playing dead for the busybodies.

The next shot was fired on March 23rd in the San Francisco Weekly, with a story entitled “Women’s Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study Is Junk Science” by Nick Pinto; I discussed this story extensively in my column of March 24th, and eagerly awaited the next installment.  My first hint at it came on May 26th, when I was contacted by Martin Cizmar of the Phoenix New Times and pointed him toward a few sources; he told me he was working on the story with several other reporters and that it would be published in late June.  The story, “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight” by Cizmar, Ellis Conklin and Kristen Hinman, appeared late in the evening of June 28th and uses the widely and justly ridiculed Ashton Kutcher/Demi Moore anti-prostitution ad campaign I mentioned on April 16th as a springboard for examining the fantastically exaggerated claims of “child sex trafficking” fetishists.

First, the story compares the widely-touted “100,000-300,000 trafficked children” myth I debunked back in January with the police arrest records of the 37 largest American cities and found that in the past decade there were only 8263 juveniles arrested for prostitution among them, an average of 827 per year (roughly 22 per city per year).  Even if one assumes that these cities together have only half of the underage prostitutes in the U.S., that still gives us fewer than 1700 per year.  Ask yourself:  Even considering the incompetence of police departments, which is more believable: that police catch roughly 5% of underage prostitutes per year (by my estimate), or that they catch only 0.27% per year?

The article then moves on to the 2001 Estes & Weiner study, the original source of the fabulous number; as I reported in my column of April 2nd, the study “guesstimated (by questionable methodology) that ‘as many as 100,000-300,000 children and youth [of both sexes] are at risk for sexual exploitation’ of one kind or another…this guess is for BOTH sexes, for ‘children and youth’ (not just children), and most importantly represents those at risk of some form of ‘exploitation’, not currently involved in one specific form (sex trafficking).”  That “questionable methodology” (such as including all runaways, female gang members, transgender youth and those living within a short drive of the Mexican or Canadian borders as automatically “at risk”) was criticized in the Village Voice article by the University of New Hampshire’s Dr. David Finkelhor, who said “As far as I’m concerned, [the University of Pennsylvania study] has no scientific credibility to it…That figure was in a report that was never really subjected to any kind of peer review.  It wasn’t published in any scientific journal…Initially, [Estes and Weiner] claimed that [100,000 to 300,000] was the number of children [engaged in prostitution].  It took quite a bit of pressure to get them to add the qualifier [at risk].”  Professor Steve Doig of Arizona State said the “study cannot be relied upon as authoritative…I do not see the evidence necessary to confirm that there are hundreds of thousands of [child prostitutes].”  He also said, “Many of the numbers and assumptions in these charts are based on earlier, smaller-scale studies done by other researchers, studies which have their own methodological limitations.  I won’t call it ‘garbage in, garbage out.’  But combining various approximations and guesstimates done under a variety of conditions doesn’t magically produce a solid number.  The resulting number is no better than the fuzziest part of the equation.”  And when pressed by the reporters, Estes himself admitted, “Kids who are kidnapped and sold into slavery—that number would be very small…We’re talking about a few hundred people.”

Not that any of this bothers Maggie Neilson, Ashton & Demi’s “celebrity charity consultant”; she told the reporter “I don’t frankly care if the number is 200,000, 500,000, or a million, or 100,000—it needs to be addressed.  While I absolutely agree there’s a need for better data, the people who want to spend all day bitching about the methodologies used I’m not very interested in.”  Presumably it would still “need to be addressed” if the number were 827, so why not just say 827?  Because, of course, that wouldn’t justify pouring millions down police department and NGO toilets instead of spending it on programs to help actual underage prostitutes (as opposed to phantom multitudes of “trafficked children”):  as the article explains, “…though Congress has spent hundreds of millions in tax-generated money to fight human trafficking, it has yet to spend a penny to shelter and counsel those boys and girls in America who are, in fact, underage prostitutes.  In March of this year…[two senators] introduced legislation to fund six shelters with $15 million in grants. The shelters would provide beds, counseling, clothing, case work, and legal services.  If enacted, this legislation would be the first of its kind…[it] has yet to clear the Senate or the House.”

The article ends with a clear indictment of government attitudes in prohibitionist regimes and an equally-clear statement that sex work is work:  “The lack of shelter and counseling for underage prostitutes—while prohibitionists take in millions in government funding—is only one indication of the worldwide campaign of hostility directed at working women.”  Village Voice recently told a group of sex worker rights activists that they are behind us, and that this is only beginning of a campaign for decriminalization; this could at last be the public voice we’ve needed for so long, and I eagerly await the next salvo fired in defense of whores.

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May Miscellanea (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 17, 2011| 43 Comments »

We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed.  Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.  –  Camille Paglia

Our monthly collection of articles related at least tangentially to issues covered in this blog.

Walk Like a Slut, Talk Like a Slut

I first saw this story on Huffington Post a couple of weeks ago and didn’t really feel it lay in my sphere of coverage.  But when Dave Krueger, who guest-blogged on The Agitator for the past two weeks, asked for my opinion about the story I thought about it a bit harder and decided I would write about it after all.  For those who are unfamiliar with the story, “SlutWalks” are protests against the sort of attitude displayed by Toronto cop Michael Sanguinetti, who told a group of female students at a safety seminar that the best way to avoid being raped is to “Avoid dressing like sluts.”  While I agree that a woman should take responsibility for her own safety by not carelessly putting herself into dangerous situations, the idea that men are such savages that their passions can be inflamed beyond control by the mere sight of a woman walking down a public street dressed in a provocative manner, is like something one might expect to hear from the nearest Ayatollah.  Getting drunk at a frat party and going upstairs alone with an equally-drunk frat boy will probably get a girl raped even if she buys her clothes from the boys’ department, and blaming rape victims for their manner of dress is a lot like blaming prostitutes for being robbed (see next item) or murdered.  This distinction seems unclear even to the usually-reasonable crowd over at The Agitator, which is part of why I changed my mind about covering the story.  But the final deciding factor was a comment by reader Beste  linking this May 8th Guardian editorial  from anti-porn fanatic Gail Dines and prohibitionist lawyer Wendy Murphy:

…The organisers claim that celebrating the word “slut”, and promoting sluttishness in general, will help women achieve full autonomy over their sexuality.  But the focus on “reclaiming” the word slut fails to address the real issue.  The term slut is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal “madonna/whore” view of women’s sexuality that it is beyond redemption.  The word is so saturated with the ideology that female sexual energy deserves punishment that trying to change its meaning is a waste of precious feminist resources.  Advocates would be better off exposing the myriad ways in which the law and the culture enable myths about all types of women – sexually active or “chaste” alike.  These myths facilitate sexual violence by undermining women’s credibility when they report sex crimes.  Whether we blame victims by calling them “sluts” (who thus asked to be raped), or by calling them “frigid” (who thus secretly want to be overpowered), the problem is that we’re blaming them for their own victimisation no matter what they do.  Encouraging women to be even more “sluttish” will not change this ugly reality…While the organisers of the SlutWalk might think that proudly calling themselves “sluts” is a way to empower women, they are in fact making life harder for girls who are trying to navigate their way through the tricky terrain of adolescence.  Women need to take to the streets – but not for the right to be called “slut”.  Women should be fighting for liberation from culturally imposed myths about their sexuality that encourage gendered violence.  Our daughters – and our sons – have the right to live in a world that celebrates equally women’s sexual freedom and bodily integrity.

Obviously, Dines’ and Murphy’s prohibitionist definition of “sexual freedom” does not include the choice of what to do with our own bodies, since Dines believes we shouldn’t be allowed to be photographed naked and Murphy thinks only her kind of whoredom (namely, law practice) should be legal.  The very fact that these disgusting hypocrites (who condemn the Madonna/whore duality while aggressively promoting their own version of it) are against SlutWalks is sufficient reason for me to endorse them.  A comment on the Facebook page for Boston SlutWalk says that “…the nature of your being is not determined by how many sexual partners you have,” to which I would add “…nor the reason you choose to have sex with them.”

And Speaking of Victim Blaming…

It’s entirely absent from both this May 5th Huffington Post story and the bulk of the commentary which follows it, though the headline writer apparently felt compelled to cater to cheap sensationalism by referring to the girls as “Craigslist prostitutes”:

Two prostitutes were assaulted and robbed in hotel rooms by a man responding to their online ads, and police on Friday were looking for two suspects…A 24-year-old who advertised on the classifieds site backpage.com was robbed of her cash and phone on April 30.  She was sliced in the hand and treated at a hospital, police said.  The second woman, who is 30 years old and advertised on Craigslist, was at the Roosevelt Hotel at about noon on May 1.  Police said the suspect brandished a knife and she struggled with him, until she was choked unconscious and then awoke to discover her money, a phone and a laptop were missing.  She didn’t request medical attention.  Police said the suspects were of similar height and build and were asking anyone with information on their whereabouts to call the New York Police Department’s Crime Stoppers hot line, (800) 577-TIPS…

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for most of the comments on the New York Daily News version of the same story.  Clearly, at least a few people are waking up (despite the best efforts of government agencies and prohibitionists to keep them asleep), but they don’t read the Daily News.

Saddest Story of the Month

I’ve written before about governmental attempts to legislate “sex offenders” out of existence by restricting where they can live so tightly that, apparently, the government believes they’ll just all move away to Pervertland or something.  Of course, any reasonable person would understand that if government makes it impossible for someone to live legally he’ll simply live illegally; what choice did the man from this May 4th Guardian story really have?

Albuquerque authorities arrested a homeless man for failing to notify them that he had moved out of the industrial rubbish bin he listed as his address.  KOB-TV reported that Charles Mader is a convicted sex offender and is required to give the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department a physical address.  Detectives say Mader violated his sex offender registration requirement after moving out of the dumpster and failing to report the move within 10 days.  On Monday, deputies found Mader at a homeless shelter and arrested him…Sheriff’s officials say Mader could face up to three years in jail for failing to register for a third time.

The excuse used by the police was the “failure to notify”, but I’ll bet if some reporter cares to research it he’ll find that there are no homeless shelters in Albuquerque to which the man could legally move due to residency restrictions.  In other words, he was actually arrested for daring to crawl out of the dumpster to which the “justice system” had consigned him.

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He Said, She Said

Posted in Current Events, Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 4, 2011| 10 Comments »

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality. –  Max Beerbohm

As I’ve discussed before, BDSM is an exercise in trust, and not merely of the submissive for the dominant; in noncommercial male-dominant situations he must also trust her not to turn on him and misrepresent the situation to disapproving and ignorant “authorities” who will then accuse him of rape, torture and worse.  I examined one such case on October 27th, and in recent weeks another appeared; here’s how it was reported on February 15th in the Huffington Post:

A Wisconsin woman looking for New York City housing on Craigslist made an agreement with a 45-year-old man living in Brooklyn:  She’d cook and clean in exchange for free rent. But when she arrived this month, she told police, she was handcuffed to a radiator and made to be the man’s sex slave for eight days, acknowledging she left the apartment at least once and returned.

The man, John Hopkins, has been charged with rape, assault and unlawful imprisonment and was being held on $350,000 bail…Officers found the 27-year-old woman Saturday in the studio apartment in the fetal position, shaking, on the bed.  A rope was bolted near the bed where he tied her to rape her, she said.  Handcuffs she said were used to shackle her to the radiator were found nearby.  By the bed, officers found a bag with a ball-gag, whip and a rope.  The woman was taken to a hospital with rectal hemorrhaging and bruising.  Authorities withheld her name because of the nature of her complaint.

Authorities were called to the apartment Saturday after the woman’s mother contacted authorities in Wisconsin.  The woman apparently had broken free that day and contacted her mother, saying she was going to kill herself because she couldn’t bear to be locked up anymore, police said.  It’s not clear why she didn’t call 911 herself.  Police arrived and found both the man and woman in the apartment.

The woman told police she met Hopkins online, and he bought her a one-way ticket to New York City on February 4th.  He met her at the airport, and the two took a taxi to his apartment…Once inside…he told her she was going to be his slave.  Hopkins forced her to call him “master” and let her leave only to go to work, the documents said.  She had a job as a chef at a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and she left at least once but for some reason returned, authorities said, though it’s not clear why.  When she did, she was handcuffed again.  During the eight days, she was blindfolded, gagged and repeatedly raped and forced to perform oral sex, according to court documents.

It’s clear there is an awful lot of information missing from the story as presented; the most obvious problem is the seemingly contradictory statements about her comings and goings.  At one point it says she “left at least once and returned”, but it also says Hopkins “only let her leave to go to work”…did she call her mother on the first day of work, or had she been in and out before?  She clearly couldn’t keep a job just reporting to work once in eight days.  And if she wanted to escape badly enough to call her mother for help, why on Earth did she go back to the apartment instead of simply waiting at the restaurant?  I immediately suspected that Hopkins and the woman had an online BDSM relationship and he eventually talked her into coming to New York to live it for real, but when she got there she discovered it was a case of “good fantasy, bad reality”.

Hopkins’ version appeared in the New York Daily News five days later:

John Hopkins said he has one question for the…woman who has accused him of rape:  “Why did you do this to me?”… Hopkins…recalled responding to the ad his accuser posted on Craigslist two years ago looking for sex…[and] said they started to meet up for role-play sex sessions that involved him tying her up as the “slave” while he acted as “master.”  “I didn’t rape her,” insisted Hopkins, who works as an audio engineer.  “Everything we did was role-playing.  In the game of role-play, the ‘slave’ actually has the power.”

Hopkins…faces a first-degree rape charge and a litany of other charges…Hopkins said that [the woman’s] account is a lie.  “Everything they’re saying I did was consensual,” Hopkins said.  “She could have left if she wanted to, but she didn’t.”  Hopkins said his kinky sex games with the 27-year-old Midwest woman continued until a few weeks ago when she started drinking heavily.  She left his home, was then kicked out of her friend’s apartment on the upper West Side and claimed she crashed in Central Park one night, where she was attacked…”I’m convinced those are where the scratches came from,” he said.  “I didn’t do any of that.”

Hopkins said the woman returned to his place Friday where she downed half a bottle of vodka.  He said he phoned her mother to tell her the situation and she spoke to her daughter, a sushi chef, for half an hour.  When they hung up, her mother then called the cops and Hopkins was swiftly arrested, Hopkins said.  “I got railroaded,” he said.  “A woman says anything happened to them in New York State, and they believe her and not the man.  It’s not fair.”

Note the scare quotes around the word “consensual” in the headline, indicating the authors’ total ignorance of BDSM (they obviously don’t believe a woman could ever consent to it despite the fact that a great many do); also note that though the first story was plastered all over the media the follow-up got almost no press at all.  IMHO Hopkins’ story, though it has a few iffy elements, holds more water; except for the duration it’s pretty much what I had already guessed.  But it should be relatively easy to determine which story is true; if the woman only arrived in the city eight days ago on a one-way airline ticket as she claims, there will be a record of it.  Also, though Craigslist deletes old ads someone may be able to dig up a cached copy of the index showing the apartment ad the woman claims to have answered (like Gawker did for Chris Lee’s ad, as reported in Wednesday’s column).  Was she drunk when the police arrived as Hopkins claims, and what about the friend she supposedly stayed with one night?  And then, as reported in The Gothamist, there are the emails:

Hopkins’ attorney Andrew Stoll said the pair did not meet on Craiglist and, “All of the acts in question were consensual acts between two adults who freely agreed to every aspect of their relationship.”  He showed emails the woman allegedly sent to Hopkins, including one from during the alleged imprisonment, “i yearn to serve my Master better.  can i cook for you tomarrow?  i love you so much.”  Stoll said, “These accusations only arose when my client called the complainant’s mother, to tell her that her daughter needed some emotional help, and should probably go back home.”

What a sad, sorry mess.  One of the two is lying and the one telling the truth is a fool.  If the woman isn’t lying she was a damned fool to fly across the country to move in with a complete stranger in New York, and if Hopkins isn’t lying he was a damned fool to continue a BDSM relationship with a woman he knew was emotionally unstable (though the cops didn’t find her restrained there was evidence of rough anal sex).  Due to the current semi-legal status of BDSM it’s possible for a monster like the one who captured Jill Brenneman to pass a nonconsensual relationship off as consensual, and in other cases for disturbed women to represent consensual relationships as nonconsensual (as Hopkins alleges happened in his case).  Until the right of consenting adults to do as they please in private is recognized, confusion and hysteria take the place of rational analysis and situations are more likely to be interpreted as the observers want to see them rather than as they actually happened.

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Thinking with the Wrong Head

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 2, 2011| 58 Comments »

A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past. –  Queen Elizabeth I

It seems that politicians just can’t help making asses of themselves; yesterday I discussed three such cases who probably still don’t realize how stupid they look to rational people, but today we’ll look at one who destroyed his reputation and his political career through actions which appear to display a complete inability to foresee the totally foreseeable.  Of course, that would presume than Congressman Chris Lee was thinking with the big head rather than the little one, which he obviously wasn’t.  Here’s the story, condensed and paraphrased from one which appeared on Gawker last Friday (February 25th):

Three hours after Gawker’s February 9th publication of a photo of Chris Lee standing in the mirror shirtless, along with the story of the married Republican congressman from New York’s attempt to pick up a woman via the Craigslist personals, he had resigned.  His sudden exit took many people by surprise, but apparently Lee’s rapid retreat may have been intended to cover up something more scandalous:  two D.C.-area transgender women contacted Gawker, each with a separate story about exchanging emails with Lee.  One produced an ad that Lee allegedly posted on Craigslist in search of trans women; the other sent us a never-before-seen photo that she says Lee sent her after they started chatting by email.

The first report came from a pre-op transgender woman from Arlington, Virginia whom Gawker called “Fiona”; she said she had replied to a “casual encounters” ad on Craigslist in mid-January and used the “e-mail this posting to a friend” function to send a copy to herself:

Sexy Classy guy for passable TS/CD – m4t – 39 (Cap Hill)
Date: 2011-01-14, 8:55PM EST

New to area. Very fit classy, successful guy. 39, 6ft 190lbs, blond/blue. smooth hard body. Looking for a sexy ts/cd that i can spoil. I promise not to disappoint.

Craigslist personals are removed within seven days of posting, but since Google caches Craigslist index pages Gawker was able to confirm that an ad with precisely the same headline was posted on the evening of January 14.  The headline and ad itself are similar to the previously-revealed flirtation, such as the words “fit” and “classy”, and dates to the same evening; it also featured the same shirtless Blackberry picture, though cropped to hide Lee’s face.  Yes, that’s right:  a member of Congress posted a personal ad seeking transsexuals and crossdressers and even included a picture of himself, all without thinking twice, apparently.  Like the woman in the first incident Fiona is 34 and black, and she discovered his identity in the same way the first woman did:  “I copied and pasted his email into Facebook, and that’s when his picture of him and his wife and his little boy showed up.  Then I clicked on the link and realized he was a politician from New York, and I was like OMG.”  She emailed him a few more times before telling him in an email on January 21 that she knew who he really was, and he never replied.  But that same day, Lee sent an email to his staff saying that his Gmail account may have been hacked.

The second report came from a transvestite prostitute Gawker called “Holly”, whose Craigslist ad Lee allegedly answered.  “Holly” demanded money from the site for email transcripts, but did provide a new picture before backing out of the deal.  This photo clearly resembles Lee; the man in the photo has the same physique, is standing in the same pose and is holding the same red Blackberry, although the photo was clearly taken in a different setting and he’s wearing different pants.

Lee has not yet spoken publicly about the incident, except to say in his letter of resignation that he made “profound mistakes” and “regret[s] the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents.”  But if Lee was using the Internet to meet up with transsexuals and cross-dressers his rapid resignation makes sense; he may have thought if he quit immediately he could avoid having his kink exposed.

Lots of politicians hire prostitutes, and lots of them have a queer streak, but most of them have the sense to hire professionals from a discreet, upscale agency rather than trolling Craigslist or, even worse, placing their own ads to attract liaisons!  But Lee didn’t stop there; no, he used his regular email address instead of setting up another one for his “hobby”, and then he sent real pictures showing his face not merely to one person but to at least three!  It’s impossible to pass this off as a momentary lapse of reason; his actions delineate a clear pattern which every experienced whore should recognize.  As I’ve discussed before, men tend to get very weird when they’re sexually frustrated; their fantasies get steadily kinkier and they are wont to take bigger and bigger risks to fulfill them as control over their actions shifts from the top of the torso to the bottom.  Most public figures have the sense to hire discreet professionals long before reaching the point of total loss of judgment, but obviously Lee did not and the results aren’t pretty.  I don’t feel sorry for any politician’s self-made messes, but I do pity his wife and the people of his congressional district whom he hurt with his spectacularly poor judgment.  Perhaps if our society were to grow up enough to stop persecuting harlots, men like Chris Lee would find it easier to deal with sexual tension before it causes a very messy public scandal.

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February Q & A

Posted in Call types, Miscellaneous, Q & A, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 28, 2011| 32 Comments »

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious. –  George Bernard Shaw

My monthly dip into the electronic mailbag for questions from my readers.

Maggie, I live in (an American city), do you know someone who works here?  I don’t know how to find someone like you.  Can you tell me how?

Most of the escorts I’ve known personally lived in New Orleans, and because there’s a fairly high turnover in our profession I probably couldn’t help you directly even for that city.  I can give you some general pointers, though.  You can always go to the phone book for an escort service, but nowadays unless you’re in a rush you’re probably better off going to the internet.  Eros Guide is a popular escort advertising site, but it’s mostly limited to larger urban areas so if you’re not in one of those it’s not very much good.  If you Google “escorts” and the name of your city you’ll see ads for escort service sites there, and of course there’s Backpage; the disadvantage of that site is that, though some quality girls advertise there, there are also a large percentage of part-timers and very low-end escorts.  Your best option if you’re patient is probably a hooker board; there are a number of large ones such as The Erotic Review, Big Doggie and ECCIE which vary in popularity in different parts of the United States, plus a whole host of smaller regional ones.  Besides the escort ads, there are also customer-generated reviews of most of the girls which will give you an idea what to expect from them.

The disadvantage of both escort boards and Backpage is that cops can find them just like you can, and can create fake escort ads on Backpage or fake client profiles on the boards in order to further their usual sleazy attempts to victimize hookers and/or customers.  Big Doggie was the subject of a major sting a few years ago and Montgomery County, Maryland infested TER last year, so use caution and only contact established escorts with a number of reviews.

Would you please give us a few pointers on how to perform oral sex on a man?

I think I can do this without being pornographic; at least I’ll give it a try!  The problem most women have with fellatio lies in the unconscious assumptions they make about it, and if you correct those mistaken assumptions you’ll be well on your way to a professional performance with very little instruction from me or anyone else.  The two most important things to remember are: 1) Your mouth is not a vagina; and 2) A man’s penis is analogous to a woman’s clitoris.

The first one may seem obvious, but it’s apparently not; I’ve done enough couple calls and two-girl calls to see a lot of really amateurish blow jobs.  Now, I have heard many guys say “there is no such thing as a bad blow job,” and though I believe them I also recognize that there’s a vast spectrum of experience between “not bad” and “fantastic” and if you didn’t want to be closer to the “fantastic” end you wouldn’t have asked the question.  Though both mouth and vulva have lips, only those on the face have the power of volitional movement, and the vagina has neither tongue nor teeth (legends of vagina dentata notwithstanding).  From a mechanical standpoint and psychological considerations aside, if you aren’t using your lips, tongue and (very gently) teeth you might as well just be doing cowgirl.

Most of my readers probably knew about the second factor as well, but let’s look at what it really means from a practical standpoint.  All fetuses have a “sex button” which, if exposed to testosterone, develops into a penis.  But from a neurological standpoint, this development is a lot like blowing up a balloon; the number of nerves doesn’t change, they’re just stretched over a larger area.  Compared to the clitoris, the nerve density in the shaft of a man’s penis is actually pretty low; the area of highest comparable nerve density is in the glans penis, or “head”.

Given these facts I think you can figure out for yourself what’s wrong with the typical woman’s technique.  She uses her mouth as though it were a mobile vagina, forgetting she has lips, a tongue and teeth (the latter often to her male companion’s great chagrin), and she spends most of her time stimulating the least sensitive part of the penis.  Start by concentrating on the “head”, using the lips and tongue, and paying attention to his reactions; do more of whatever gets a good reaction and less of whatever gets little reaction.  The well-known bobbing motion is good later in the process, but it’s a mid-game maneuver rather than the whole thing as many women seem to believe.  Don’t worry about deep throat or other fancy maneuvers; you can learn those later.  Concentration on using the right part of your anatomy on the right part of his is at least 80% of the secret.

Why do so many more escorts kiss nowadays?  It used to be pretty rare.

There are also more who will do Greek and more who will allow unprotected oral sex to completion.  We started to see that in the last decade as escort review sites became steadily more common; many escorts wanted something which would set them apart from the competition.  But the trend really took off just over two years ago when the economy went belly-up; a lot of part-timers lost their regular jobs and therefore needed to bring in more money from hooking, and a lot of amateurs who had never before directly asked for cash flooded into Craigslist and Backpage. The amateurs had no sense of appropriate professional conduct and the part-timers were desperate to make up the difference from their lost jobs, and so they started to offer things which, while not extremely dangerous like unprotected intercourse, were nonetheless more personal and “edgy” than what had been the norm even as recently as 2007.  And once that happened even many full-time professional escorts were forced to change their policies in order to remain competitive.  The good news is that (judging by the chatter on hooker boards) there is still almost universal censure of the rare, desperate whore who will offer bareback full service; let’s hope it stays that way.

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An Educated Idiot

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2011| 28 Comments »

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. –  Bertrand Russell

I recently stumbled on this article at Wired Magazine and was immediately impressed with the incredible stupidity and ignorance of its author, who apparently believes that if he watches one flock of pigeons in one city for a while he can safely make pronouncements about swallows in Capistrano, hawks in Africa and Adelie penguins in Antarctica.  Even with all my experience I hesitate to make general statements about all hookers everywhere, but Sudhir Venkatesh doesn’t; after talking to a bunch of streetwalkers and low-end escorts who used to be streetwalkers in New York City, he apparently considers himself expert enough to make pronouncements about “sex workers” in general.  This article has to be seen to be believed, but I warn regular readers that the only part which won’t have your jaw dropping in astonishment is the angry commentary from real whores below the main article.  So, I’ll just cover some of the highlights.

What is it like to be a prostitute?  The answer depends on whether you work out of a client’s car or a $500-a-night hotel room.  In 1999, I set out to study the effects of efforts to bring the suburban middle class back to New York City.  The gentrification of Times Square made for a unique social experiment:  What happens to sex workers when they are pushed off the streets and into the outer boroughs?  I had little idea at the time that I’d be documenting the rise of an entirely new, upper-end “indoor” market, in which streetwalkers have given way to a professional class.  The economies of big cities have been reshaped by a demand for high-end entertainment, cuisine, and “wellness” goods.  In the process, “dating,” “massage,” “escort,” and “dancing” have replaced hustling and streetwalking.  A luxury brand has been born.  These changes have made sex for hire more expensive.  But luxe pricing has in turn helped make prostitution, well… somewhat respectable.  Whereas men once looked for a secretive tryst, now they seek a mistress with no strings attached, a “girlfriend experience,” and they are willing to pay top dollar for it.

Let this sink in for a moment.  Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia, has apparently never heard of courtesans and seems to sincerely believe that upscale prostitution, stripping and massage parlors were all born in the past decade in New York City.  This represents such profound historical and sociological ignorance it literally boggles the mind.  The next paragraph is more of the same:

Technology has played a fundamental role in this change.  No self-respecting cosmopolitan man looking for an evening of companionship is going to lean out his car window and call out to a woman at a traffic light.  The Internet and the rise of mobile phones have enabled some sex workers to professionalize their trade.  Today they can control their image, set their prices, and sidestep some of the pimps, madams, and other intermediaries who once took a share of the revenue.  As the trade has grown less risky and more lucrative, it has attracted some middle-class women seeking quick tax-free income.

Undoubtedly, the rise of the internet has made it a lot easier for girls to be completely independent, but even agency girls are independent contractors and there were personals ads and referral services long before the internet was invented.  The internet has also allowed girls who might once have worked the street to inexpensively advertise to a wider audience and stay more safely indoors while doing so.  In this one respect, his findings aren’t far off-base; the problem arises when he attempts to extrapolate information gleaned from streetwalkers and ex-streetwalkers (“I followed 290 women, 170 of whom made enough (at least $30,000) to separate them from streetwalkers”) to the entire sex worker population.  And his bizarre assertion that high-end prostitution is a product of computers and cell phones would certainly surprise Phryne, Theodora, Mata Hari, Madame Pompadour or even Josie Arlington.

After interviewing 120 streetwalkers and 170 low-end escorts ($30,000 a year is very low-end, especially in New York) Venkatesh feels confident enough to pronounce that “escorts” (not low-end escorts, all escorts) earn about 50 percent more per transaction than streetwalkers (after saying the latter make about $75 per transaction), are “beaten twice a year, on average,” and “keep working to pay for clothing and shoes.”  Just a bit of perspective here:  In New Orleans (a cheaper market than New York) during the time period of the study agency escorts charged an average of $300 (of which they kept $200) and independents $200, and I never met a girl who was literally beaten by a client, ever.  And I guess they’ve never heard of things like “rent”, “food”, “gasoline”, “electricity bills” and “children” up at Columbia.  He also declares that independent escorts “have to” pay for drugs for clients, which is as amazingly stupid an assertion as any in this mess; it would be a foolish escort indeed who agreed to bring drugs to a client since the very request screams “cop”, and the idea that she would pay for such out of her own pocket leads me to believe that some of these girls were pulling Venkatesh’s leg.

It just goes downhill from there; we are told that nearly all escorts have a day job (in reality a minority do), that a boob job will increase earning potential about 50% (obviously he’s never heard of “spinners”), and that bottle-blondes make more money (they don’t; I got just as many requests for brunettes).  “Caitlyn” sold this sucker on the idea that mid-range escorts spend $2000 per month on shoes, and he somehow got the notion that a girl with four regulars making $80,000 a year is “high-end” in New York.  The professor says all sex workers (even, apparently, strippers and PSOs) “always” carry two cell phones because “Guys sometimes grab a woman’s mobile to gain a sense of power and control” (perhaps that happens to New York streetwalkers from time to time, but I’ve never heard of it) and that “If the client wants to skip the condom, there’s usually a 25 percent surcharge” (no, there’s usually a boot out the door for such a request, and even among desperate street girls or semi-pros who agree to it there’s no “usual” charge because desperation is not a predictable thing).  But in the end, he reveals his methodological flaws in spades:  though 61% of his interviewees had used Craigslist at one time or another, according to his graphs only 8-15% advertised via “personal referral or other”, with that “other” containing every other means of internet advertising including Backpage, Eros, personal websites, review boards, etc, etc, etc…in other words, his “study” ignored somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of the whores in New York.

The only remotely interesting thing about the study (outside of its author’s capacity for self-delusion) is that he claims to have encountered 290 streetwalkers and low-end escorts but only 11 pimps.  Considering that like most people he was probably predisposed to overestimate the percentage of girls with pimps the number is a tantalizingly low 3.8%; unfortunately his worthless methodology renders even that number unusable, which is too bad because otherwise it would’ve been a great statistic to quote.

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Wild Guessing (Part Two)

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 28, 2011| 56 Comments »

I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty. –  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

The Schapiro Group’s newest sex trafficking manifesto revolves around their highly dubious claim that it is possible to scientifically guess the ages of women in photographs with a degree of certainty that allows those guesses to be equivalent to fact:

The key to the technique described in the marble example [see yesterday’s column] comes from the phrase “if  we knew from previous experience.”  The problem is, there is no scientifically reliable previous experience on which to base the probability that a girl selling sex who looks quite young is, indeed, under 18 years.  Therefore, we conducted a separate study to serve as this previous experience.  Basically, the study involved asking a random sample of  100 adults to guess the ages of  a variety of  females in photographs.  Some of  these pictures were of females whose ages were known (teenagers to young adults), and some were not…the pictures of  unknown girls came from erotic services postings on the Atlanta Craigslist web site…subjects were posed provocatively (e.g., a picture of  a female licking her lips).  Pictures of females of  unknown ages were selected because the subject appeared “young.”  In selecting the pictures, multiple reviewers agreed that there was at least some chance that each of  the females of  unknown ages in the pictures was actually under 18.  This is how we operationalize “young” throughout the study.  Study participants viewed each of  these pictures and estimated the age of each pictured female.  Importantly, study participants rated the average age of females from Craigslist (whose ages we did not know) the same as the average age of  pictured females whose ages we did know.  Study participants were balanced by race and gender, though the results indicated conclusively that participant demographics did not have an impact on age estimations, nor did the demographics of  the pictured females have an effect.

…study participants tend to overestimate the ages of provocatively posed females…across all ratings of known-age females, participants tended to assume the females were 2.5 years older than they actually were.  When a girl under 18 poses provocatively, participants tended to overestimate her age by 7-8 years, whereas when the subject was closer to age 22 or 23, the age estimate was much more accurate than the average overestimate of 2.5 years.  In fact, women age 24 and over tend to be estimated as younger than they actually are when posed provocatively.  This effect, which is represented by a curvilinear mathematical equation, allows us to speak definitively about the probability that a female of  a given estimated age is actually under age 18.  In fact, the study showed that any given “young” looking girl who is selling sex has a 38% likelihood of being under age 18.  Put another way, for every 100 “young” looking girls selling sex, 38 are under 18.

Reread that if you need to; the truth is cleverly hidden, but there.  Assuming that everyone could agree on what is “provocative” (which men and women don’t, but we’ll leave it there anyhow), the only ages of which the authors could be certain were the ones whose ages were known, none of whom were prostitutes!  This experiment might have been somewhat valid if the ages of ALL the pictured women were known, but since the experimenters improperly introduced an “x” factor into what should have been a controlled experiment there is absolutely NO way to know which percentage of the girls were actually under 18.  This is such a glaringly obvious mistake that I can’t believe the authors were unaware of it; what seems more likely is that they initially conducted a proper study which produced results too low to satisfy them (like New Zealand’s 3.54%, perhaps) and so were forced to redesign the study with an unspecified percentage of photographs of unknowable age (“some” is not a valid mathematical expression of percentage) in order to get the results they wanted.  Simply put, there is no way for the authors to know whether the girls of unknown age (who, since they came from Craigslist escort ads, were presumably automatically considered “provocatively” posed whether they were or not) were 7-8 years younger than they appeared, 2.5 years younger or actually older; the 38% figure is therefore completely invalid even if 100 cherry-picked experimental subjects were a large enough sample to derive such conclusions (which they aren’t).

The paper then goes into a long obfuscation about escort services (designed, no doubt, to convince the reader that the authors know what they’re talking about) which as I discussed in my previous column on these scammers ignores the fact that the vast majority of escorts tend to revise their ages down.  The section contains such portentous sentences as “Escort service operators have told our callers they have 17 year-old escorts specifically” and “we also know that many of  these phone numbers go to just a handful of call centers.”  Since the age of consent in Texas is 17 and many escort services have multiple phone numbers, these sentences actually have no semantic value but are included to make the services seem “shady”.  The use of the term “call center” makes it sound as though a third party was answering the phone, which is entirely incorrect; multiple phone numbers go to one business, not multiple businesses to one external “answering service”.  But even if they did, what of it?  Many doctors may use the same answering service; does that make them criminals?  The whole thing degenerates into a silly song and dance about “CSEC victims per service” which in the end translates (again) into “we guessed”.

The next section starts out with a statement which is either unbelievably ignorant or an egregious lie: “As of  November 2010, the tracking data do not include any content from Craigslist, as it closed the ‘adult services’ section of  its website in the U.S.  Recently the story was completely different. There were many websites, but only one main source for paid sex services ads in states across the U.S.: Craigslist.”  Yes, this paper is actually making the astonishingly stupid and easily disproved claim that prior to this year, there were essentially no other online sources of escort ads worth noting.  Backpage, Eros and all the various hooker boards did not, according to the Schapiro Group, exist.

This stunning idiocy is followed by the comparatively subtle “There were an estimated 52 CSEC victims advertised each day across all major websites…the data show that many of  these girls do not stay long on these sites, a finding that is consistent with the notion that many girls are trafficked state-to-state.”  Now,  this is a sensible statement if one makes the unwarranted presumptions that all young prostitutes are involuntary, controlled by others, and “trafficked” from place to place; unfortunately for the Schapiro Group, none of those presumptions are true.  The reason many of the ads disappear quickly is very simple:  Many young girls decide to try escorting, place an ad, discover in a call or two that they don’t like it, and never renew the ad.  Every escort service owner has had to deal with young girls who quit after their first call or two; this is no different from any other entry-level job (telemarketing, for example, has a very high attrition rate).  The only reason the authors’ assertions are not instantly perceived as ridiculous by their target audience is that they all buy into the underlying assumption that sex work is intrinsically different from all other work.

After a few more pages of mumbo-jumbo to justify still more guessing, the authors present their final numbers drawn from a hat, then claim that these self-generated numbers exceed the number of women who die by suicide, homicide, accidents, AIDS and childbirth combined.  Yes, I realize that comparing prostitution with causes of death is like comparing apples to hamburgers, but obviously the Shapiro Group hopes its readers won’t catch the non sequitur.  The rest of the paper consists of self-congratulatory statements about the “reliability” and “credibility” of their guesses (apparently they’ve never heard of that inconvenient thing called “peer review”) and advising readers on how to use the propaganda to convince legislators to divert money from programs dedicated to helping real victims by “provid[ing] you with a high degree of  perceived credibility among various audiences.”  I don’t think it would be inappropriate for me to apply the term “shameless” in this context.

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Shifting the Blame

Posted in Current Events, Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 26, 2011| 18 Comments »

Many think that assigning blame settles matters. –  Mason Cooley

I reckon the American yellow press is just reluctant to give up a good villain after spending so much effort creating it.  It’s been months now since Craigslist decided to stop being the whipping boy of every politician with an anti-whore agenda and every fourth-rate reporter hoping to lead a lynch mob, but apparently the New York Post (a tabloid rag in the grand old Hearst tradition) didn’t get the memo.  This article is slightly paraphrased to correct the Post’s clumsy grade-school level composition and remove inflammatory and unnecessary terms, but you can look at the original for the full effect.

All four of the corpses found near a Long Island beach in December were young prostitutes who advertised their services on Craigslist and were likely slain by a serial killer, authorities said Monday (January 24th).  After identifying one of the bodies as Megan Waterman, 22, of Maine, officials revealed that the three other skeletons found wrapped in burlap bags at Gilgo Beach were all Craigslist escorts who were killed shortly after meeting their murderer.  Using DNA evidence, the other victims were identified as Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, of Norwich, Connecticut; Amber Lynn Costello, 27, of North Babylon, New York; and Melissa Barthelemy, 24, of Buffalo, New York.

The killer’s last known victim, Costello, disappeared from North Babylon only five months ago on September 2nd; Waterman was last seen at a Hauppauge, New York Holiday Inn on June 6th of last year, and Brainard-Barnes vanished from Manhattan in July 2007.  Barthelemy was last seen in The Bronx on July 12th, 2009 and was reported missing six days later after her mother and sister received calls from her cell phone.  “Do you know what your sister does for a living?” the male caller asked, according to Barthelemy’s mother.  “Your sister’s a whore, don’t be like your sister.”

Though my version sticks to the facts, that’s never good enough for the Post, which felt compelled to subtitle the article “Craigslist creep killed 4 hookers” and open it with the phrase “Craigslist was a hit list”; the rest of the article was peppered with boyfriends described as rappers, pimps and drug dealers.  Indeed, the serial killer himself is eclipsed by references to Craigslist, as though the Post were trying to blame the website for the murders; I daresay that’s a bit of a stretch even for a tabloid.  The AP version is, as you might expect, a bit more subdued, and contains additional details, including a number of brilliant and sensitive comments from the district attorney:

Investigators did not identify a suspect, or say how the women were killed, but were looking into what clients they might have met shortly before they disappeared.  One of the women was reported missing nearly 3½ years ago; another was seen as recently as last September.  “Their deaths are a direct result of their business as prostitutes,” Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota told reporters.  “I sincerely hope that people who are engaged in a similar business as these four young women would come forward.  They certainly must have some information.”

Police were looking for another missing Craigslist escort when they happened upon the bodies near the beach.  They have since said that the person they were originally looking for, a woman from New Jersey, was not among the dead.  Authorities said Monday that case is still under investigation.  Police Commissioner Richard Dormer initially suggested that a serial killer might be involved when the bodies were found in December, but detectives later became tight-lipped about the matter.  But on Monday, Spota said that “the actual cause of deaths appear to be substantially similar” and that “it appears the same person or persons are responsible.”  Spota and Dormer refused to say how the women died.  The case has some similarities to a 2006 New Jersey case, in which four prostitutes’ bodies were found in a drainage ditch just outside Atlantic City and about a mile from the beach; those killings remain unsolved.

District Attorney Spota says that the deaths of the women was a “direct result of their business as prostitutes”; obviously he must have the same words of wisdom for the families of cops killed in the line of duty.  Perhaps one day the gang of a criminal Mr. Spota convicts will kill him as well, and if that happens I’m sure he’ll accept his fate knowing that it was a “direct result of his business as district attorney.”  Brandy Devereaux had some choice words for jackasses like Mr. Spota, including a number of links to new stories about other people he would no doubt say deserved to die because of their choices to be highway workers, psychiatric counselors and Wal-Mart employees.  But please note that Mr. Spota’s second quoted sentence surpasses the first in sheer cluelessness; after telling sex workers it’s our fault if we’re killed, he suggests we come forward to be arrested (no doubt so he can increase his conviction rate).  I guess he thinks whores are as stupid as he is evil and pompous.

Interestingly, Police Commissioner Dormer had more sense and sensitivity:  “What activities these victims may have engaged in prior to their murders does not matter,” Dormer said Monday.  “They were young women whose lives were cut tragically short.”  At least Commissioner Dormer recognizes that murderers are responsible for murders; if the New York Post was in charge of the investigation it would no doubt be sending cops over  to interrogate Craigslist personnel, and if District Attorney Spota were running the show he would no doubt be subjecting hookers to the third degree.  Obviously those motivated by advertising revenues or votes would rather persecute those they can get their filthy hands on in lieu of the yet-unknown (and therefore inaccessible) party who actually committed the crimes.

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New Year’s Eve

Posted in Current Events, Holidays, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 31, 2010| 14 Comments »

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne. –  Robert Burns

Well, here we are on the 7th day of Christmas and the last of the year.  I started this blog back in July because I’ve been wanting to write a book about this subject since 2004 but could never make myself sit down to write it.  See, if writing were running, I’d be a sprinter; I come on very strong for a short period of time and then wind down, so while I do quite well with essays and tolerably well with short stories, books and novels are quite beyond my ability.  Now, don’t say “Oh, that’s not true!” because it is; knowing one’s limitations is not defeatism, it’s simply realism.  My style of composition is wholly feminine; what I mean by that is, women tend to see things as unified wholes while men tend to see them as collections of attributes.  The masculine viewpoint is very helpful when writing long works; each portion of the book can be considered separately and then combined into one long work.  This is not to say women cannot write like this; of course they can, and many do it very well, but I’m not among them.  Try as I might, I’ve never been able to construct stories or articles; each work forms as an organic whole in my mind, which as you might expect limits me to a few hundred words at a time.  Ever notice that a couple of times a month I write a column which sort of rambles?  Those are the ones which did not form whole, and I’m usually less than satisfied with the results.  And a novel written that way would be a shambles.

But then early last spring my husband pointed out that I actually can write very long works as long as the whole is composed of small, independent parts.  And that gave me the idea to do a blog; one essay a day, each one a distinct small unit, with a single underlying theme but no overarching plan. Each day’s column is a thing unto itself and can be read in isolation, so though the whole amount of text here is more than enough for a book I only had to think of it, plan it and write it one short essay at a time.  If I ever get a book offer, it’ll consist of a series of essays (either selections from the blog or articles of the same type) rather than one unified whole.  Anyhow, once I came up with the idea I was still paralyzed for a while; I had no idea how to go about it, nor what it would cost.  Then early in July I followed a link from a message board discussion on Wonder Woman (yes, I’m a fan) to this post on the Human Scorch’s blog; I was impressed with the way it looked and since I knew Scorch from another board I timidly asked him how I could start one of my own.  He gave me a link to WordPress and I found it spectacularly easy to use…and the rest, as they say, is history.  Scorch, have I ever adequately thanked you for the tip and the design pointers?  If not, THANK YOU!!!

I was asked a few months ago how I manage to write a coherent column every single day, and I replied that a lot of this stuff has been bouncing around in my head for years.  Most of my early columns were adapted from chapters of my aborted book, the ever-popular essay “Modern Marriage” was edited down from a longer one written in 1997, and “Painted Devil” was an idea which first came to me over 20 years ago but never quite gelled until I realized the heroine needed to be a courtesan.  Since I arrived fairly late to this whole blog scene I felt it was important to get a lot of material in place in a relatively short period of time, and since my husband travels a great deal for his job I have a lot of time to kill when he isn’t home; I therefore had both the time I needed and the drive to do it, though frankly I’m surprised that I’ve actually managed to publish a column every single day without fail since the beginning.  There were a few times when I honestly thought I would be caught flatfooted, but all I had to do was visit the websites linked in the right column there and I would always find a subject on which to write.

Sooner or later, though, I’ve got to run out of steam, and since my husband’s travel schedule is much heavier in the second half of the year than in the first I won’t have as much free time for the next six months as I did for the last.  I’m therefore allowing myself a couple of days off per week from here on out; I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do it yet but I promise the off-days won’t be back to back so those who like to read every day will only be disappointed for one day at a time.  Since I write most of my columns in advance (this one was written on Monday) I can take both Saturday and Sunday off and still publish prewritten columns on those days, so I’ll probably end up skipping Sunday and Wednesday or something like that, but we’ll see. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting!  In fact, by lightening my work load a bit I hope to prevent future burnout.  And though my husband has been extremely supportive of this venture and reads every column (though not always right away if he’s on the road), I have no intention of neglecting him to keep up my present daily pace.

What a year it’s been!  Just in the six months I’ve been writing we’ve seen the first two inductees to my Hall of Shame, the suicide of the “Craigslist Killer”and the subsequent censorship of Craigslist, the invalidation of prohibitionist laws by the Supreme Court of Ontario, the Melissa Petro scandal, sleazy schemes by the American government to censor the internet and divert federal funds to persecute voluntary adult prostitutes, the presentation of a report condemning U.S. abuses of prostitutes to the U.N. Human Rights Council, the infiltration of the morally reprehensible “Swedish Model” into American police department rhetoric, the exposure of a sexual predator masquerading as an escort blogger, repeated attacks against the porn industry by condom fetishists, numerous incidents of violence against whores, the rather suspicious persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the discovery of a potential cure for HIV.  And while trafficking rhetoric has become increasingly popular with governments, public sentiment has largely turned to decriminalization.  And though I haven’t said anything directly about the new TSA molestation procedures at airports, I think most of you can probably guess where I stand on the issue.

I wish all of my readers a Happy New Year, and I hope to continue providing you with interesting reading for a very long time to come!

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December Updates

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 20, 2010| 20 Comments »

In poison there is physic, and these news,
Having been well, that would have made me sick,
Being sick, have in some measure made me well. –  William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 (I, i)

A collection of links, comments and items relating to previous columns.

The Biggest Whores (September 6th)

In this column I reported that Craigslist had bowed to governmental pressure and blocked its adult services section from being accessed in the United States, though it was still available to everyone outside the reach of American censorship.  But now the website has apparently bowed to pressure from the Canadian government and prohibitionist groups and removed the section entirely, thus allowing all those who advertised in it to return to posting free and unmonitored ads in other sections of the website.  An article in yesterday’s New York Post reported:

The popular classified ad website Craigslist has pulled the adult services section from its websites around the world; the section has been removed from international Craigslist sites in Canada, Asia, Europe, South America and Africa.  The adult services section was removed from US Craigslist sites in September after complaints from 17 states that it facilitated prostitution.  The section was replaced on US sites with the word “censored,” but its removal from international sites came without announcement or comment from Craigslist.  A spokeswoman for the site declined to comment on the removal of the section.

Craigslist apparently believes this will silence the fanatics, and it certainly may as the crusaders move on to annoy Backpage.  Of course, it’s also possible that a few of them will recognize that most of the whores who advertised on Craigslist are still there in the personals, massage, etc as they used to be and demand that Craigslist control them, such as by creating a ghetto in which their ads can be confined and then requiring payment so courts can order the info turned over to them.  Oh, wait, that’s what they just forced them to close.  Oops.

Think of the Children! (September 30th)

In this column I wrote:

The dogma of [the Cult of the Child] preaches that children are as emotionally fragile as soap bubbles and the merest hint of sexual imagery before puberty can cause irreversible trauma; its adherents also believe that teenagers (whom they equate with “children”) should be lied to, spied on or even criminally prosecuted to prevent them from engaging in any kind of sexual behavior, and some even believe that adults should not be allowed any form of entertainment or reading material which is inappropriate for even the youngest child, on the grounds that a child “might see it” and thereby be petrified as if he had looked into the eyes of the Gorgon.  Child cultists can be recognized by their stated belief that any degree of tyranny is acceptable “if it saves even one child,” and by their fondness for promoting unconstitutionally broad legislation lugubriously named after dead little girls.

Until the Cult of the Child again goes into decline, you can be sure we’ll keep seeing proposed legislation of this type.

Yesterday (October 20th)

In this column I opined:

What’s going to be needed [to achieve decriminalization] is for some big moneybags like Bill Gates to get behind sex worker rights so we can advertise and thereby attract a bunch of empty-headed Hollywood stars who are looking for a new cause to adopt.  In the minds of the hoi-polloi, the opinion of one celebrity who knows nothing about the subject is worth the life-experiences of a thousand veteran whores, and once the cause becomes “sexy” enough all of a sudden people will be coming out of the woodwork to support it.

Here’s a case in point from yesterday’s MTV News.  Neither Lady Gaga nor Katy Perry have horses in this race; they’re not in the military, they’re not homosexual and they’re not male.  Yes, it affects lesbians too, but let’s be honest here; the opposition to the repeal of DADT came overwhelmingly from men for reasons which should be obvious.  Yet somehow, the public considers the opinions of pop-tarts with no personal experience in the issue to be more important than those of activists who actually know what they’re talking about.

Something Rotten In Sweden (November 13th)

In this column I talked about the rise of “Swedish Model” rhetoric in American police departments; by pretending that all whores are degraded victims, they can hide the outrageous sexism of prostitution laws from the gullible.  One example of this infiltration is the increasing popularity of  “john schools”, government programs which hire brainwashed ex-streetwalkers to scream neofeminist victimization propaganda at men arrested for soliciting prostitutes.  Brandy Devereaux recently published a column in which she reports on a recent proposal for one of these so-called “schools” in Colorado, then explains her ideas of what a real “john school” might be like.

Barbie (December 5th)

In my column on Barbie I mentioned that I played with mine as though she were an action figure, and then I saw this hilarious spoof advertisement for toys that, unfortunately, do not actually exist.  For those who slept through 19th-century English lit, I should mention that Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte avoided the Victorian prejudice against female authors by publishing their works under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

Not So Different (December 8th)

For years now internet escorts have employed sites like Date Check to screen potential clients, and now our amateur sisters have gotten into the act with some of the very same sites, proving once again that the line between prostitution and dating is far too fine to justify criminalizing the former but not the latter.  And just as governments think escorts are mental incompetents who must be protected from ourselves, so they apparently think the same about women who date online; New York’s “Internet Dating Safety Act” now requires dating sites to post common-sense safety tips, like “meet in a public place,” for those who are too dimwitted to be dating without a chaperone in the first place.  And the nanny state being what it is, I’m sure other states (and eventually the federal government) will follow New York’s lead.

Bits and Pieces, Part Two (December 10th)

For weeks there have been conflicting stories about what Julian Assange has actually been accused of, but now Sweden has finally bothered to release a report detailing the exact claims.  Assange calls the case a “smear attempt” filled with “incredible lies,” but even if the report is exactly true (and it may very well be), that doesn’t change the fact that Sweden, as pointed out in Saturday’s column, doesn’t expend nearly this much energy catching alleged rapists who have not embarrassed governments.

The Red Umbrella (December 17th)

I don’t really approve of the concept of “hate crimes”; after all, if a man kills me just because I’m in his way I am no less dead than if he kills me because he hates me.  But if we’re going to have any “hate crime” laws at all, it’s only fair that whores be among the protected groups because, as we discussed on Friday, we get far more than our share of violence.  Well, the city of Liverpool is now treating violence against sex workers as a “hate crime”; what a difference from the United States, where the police themselves are among the worst perpetrators of that very same crime!

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