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Ban the Super Bowl!

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged Backpage, bogus studies, cops, Craigslist, dirty, domestic violence, escort services, Florida, hysteria, language, neofeminism, pimps, slavery, sporting events, stereotypes, underage on December 11, 2010| 16 Comments »

Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I’m sure every American over the age of 30 remembers the “Abuse Bowl” myth, which sprang into being full-grown like some deranged, castrating Athena from the head of neofeminists in January of 1993 and was mindlessly repeated by mainstream media for months before being exploded by a few reporters who bothered to check their facts rather than obediently parroting propaganda. Unfortunately, despite the fact that there isn’t a shred of truth to it, the lie has popped up periodically for the past two decades and recently resurfaced in “sex trafficking” drag. Neofeminists and their pets and lackeys, determined to convince the sheeple that men are savage apes whose dearest wish is to harm women, doggedly cling to and promulgate the propaganda that Super Bowl Sunday, a good candidate for the most “macho” day in the American calendar, is the occasion on which men abuse women the most. Of course, there isn’t a particle of truth in it, but the fact that a cherished tenet of dogma is demonstrably false never stops True Believers from instilling it indelibly into the public consciousness by endless repetition.

Since my international readers, those under 30 and those with bad memories may not remember how this particular brand of poison was first released into the water supply, I’ll summarize the events. On January 28^th, 1993 a coalition of self-proclaimed “women’s groups” called a press conference in Pasadena, California, site of that year’s Super Bowl, and announced that anecdotal evidence and a university study “suggested” that there was as much as a 40% increase in domestic violence incidents (including police reports and hospital admissions) on Super Bowl Sunday. Within days the reporters had spread this “statistic” everywhere, and activists were quoting it as proven rather than “suggested”. A psychologist claimed to have ten years of evidence on the phenomenon, a mass mailing advised women “don’t remain at home with him during the game”, a New York Times columnist started calling the event the “Abuse Bowl” and NBC even piously broadcast a commercial before the game to remind men that beating their wives was illegal. There was only one problem with all of this; it was a total fabrication. As reported on Snopes.com, a few reporters decided to check the “statistic” before repeating it, and quickly discovered not only that there were no statistics to support the claim, but that the quoted university study had found nothing of the kind. When the Washington Post and a few other sources reported on the deception, some of those who had spread the myth issued quiet retractions, but most did not, and the “statistic” was still widely cited for more than a decade afterward.

But since “sex trafficking” has replaced “domestic violence” as the cause célèbre of misandrists and their eunuch henchmen, the myth has metamorphosed into a new form. Apparently all those bad ol’ men who used to release their testosterone-generated energy by beating women now do so by hiring whores instead, especially underage ones. And since (as we discussed yesterday) investigative journalism has fallen out of favor, this old propaganda in new garb has been repeated unquestioningly by the media for years rather than months, with no mainstream exposé of its falsity in sight. As I mentioned in my column of November 23^rd, cops and trafficking hysterics now claim that the Super Bowl is the busiest day of the year for prostitution, and there is no more proof for the myth in its current form than its previous one. Prohibitionists claim that “tens of thousands” of hookers, many or most of whom are underage, descend upon Super Bowl host cities, but when asked for evidence of these extravagant claims they point to a SINGLE instance of two Florida men convicted for pimping a 14-year-old girl through Craigslist on a “Super Bowl special.” Other than that one news story and anecdotal evidence of cops and FBI agents who claim to have seen these hordes of whores (yet somehow never manage to arrest any unusual number of them), there is absolutely no support for this claim of Super Bowls being “Meccas” for prostitution of any kind, much less involuntary underage prostitution. But then, neither cops nor anti-sex crusaders ever let the facts get in the way of a good story.

I owned an escort service, y’all; I know whereof I speak. And I’m here to tell you, good conventions generate far more business for escorts than any sporting event, including the Super Bowl. But God forbid reporters should actually call up escort services or email SWOP to find out if there’s any truth to the claims straight from the whore’s mouth, as it were; they’d much rather swallow whatever filth those with an axe to grind vomit out. Here’s a condensed version of an article from the Daily Beast of December 9^th:

Since Craigslist dropped its “erotic services” section Backpage.com has become the nation’s premier venue for the buying and selling of underage girls. Now The Rebecca Project for Human Rights is trying to shame Backpage into banning its erotic ads before February (when activists expect a spike in sex trafficking around the Super Bowl) by running a series of inflammatory ads in a number of papers owned by Backpage’s parent company, Village Voice Media. There’s a valid argument that keeping sex ads on responsible sites that cooperate with police when necessary can make it easier to catch traffickers, but there’s also evidence that when mainstream venues for the buying and selling of sex disappear, not all ads migrate elsewhere.

According to a study by the Advanced Interactive Media Group, the end of Craigslist’s erotic services section “put a huge dent in revenue generated by prostitution advertising.” Indeed, nationwide, it dropped by almost 50 percent, from $76 million to $39.2 million. Some of the money that was going to Craigslist went to Backpage and other sites. But a least some of the business seems to have disappeared. Sex trafficking will probably always exist in some form or another, but the Rebecca Project’s founder makes a convincing case that the ease and accessibility of big, well-known websites make it worse. She first went after Craigslist after discovering, in her work with girls in the juvenile justice system, that many of them had been bought and sold for sex on the site. The same, she says, is true of Backpage. The widespread availability of underage girls on mainstream forums, she says, creates an impression that paying for sex with children just isn’t that big of a deal.

The campaign has a particular urgency as the Super Bowl approaches, because the game is a magnet for prostitution. During last year’s Super Bowl in Tampa, the Florida Department of Children & Families took custody of 24 minors who’d been brought to the area for prostitution in the days leading up to the game. This year in Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott said recently, “There is an organized effort to bring in children and women for the purpose of human trafficking and for the purpose of the sale of sex.”

I don’t think I have to go over this article line by line; most of my regular readers can almost certainly do it for yourselves by now. The only things I feel compelled to point out are the typical use of inflammatory, inaccurate language intended to provoke an emotional response (“girls bought and sold for sex” as though their custody actually changed hands, and “children” rather than “adolescents” or “young women”); the absurdity of using Craigslist’s revenues from prostitution advertising as some sort of benchmark when it was government pressure which forced Craigslist to start charging for their previously-free ads in the first place, thus creating a convenient “straw man” for prohibitionists to knock down; and the mention (as in the Arlington, Texas story) of 24 underage hookers arrested in Florida as “proof” of tens of thousands of others hiding in the woodwork somewhere.

Since neofeminists seem so convinced that the Super Bowl poses such a dire threat to America womanhood, one wonders why they haven’t called for it to be banned. But of course, that will never happen because A) it would deprive them of a convenient scapegoat; and B) such an attack on a cherished American institution (which generates billions in revenues) might wake up indolent reporters enough to investigate the validity of their claims, and they certainly wouldn’t want that!

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As Young As Possible

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged age of consent, agency denial, Backpage, bad customers, bogus studies, Craigslist, dirty, escort services, ethics, fantasy, Georgia, hysteria, language, law, lawheads, pimps, psychology, Shazam!, stereotypes, underage on November 29, 2010| 13 Comments »

When you assume, you make an ass of “u” and me. – Felix Unger, The Odd Couple

I was asked by Brandy Devereaux to take a look at this study by the Schapiro Group, a marketing research firm hired by a prohibitionist group which like so many others uses the excuse of “child trafficking” to attack adult prostitution. As I expected, I found a deeply flawed study which reaches the exact conclusions it was designed to reach; what was especially interesting about this one, though, was the absolute transparency of the bias and the egregiousness of its errors. Like most prohibitionist propaganda this report (which you may want to at least skim before proceeding) disguises inconvenient truths by covering them with emotionally-loaded language, but this isn’t its only problem: that dubious distinction goes to the fact that its basic premise, that compensated sex with a girl slightly below 18 is more illegal than compensated sex with one of 18 or greater, is entirely false. The age of consent in Georgia is 16, not 18, and since prostitution is illegal in Georgia anyhow it is no more illegal for a man to purchase services from a 16- or 17-year-old whore than it is to purchase them from an 18-, 36- or 72-year-old one.

No study whose design reflects a biased viewpoint can hope to be remotely scientific; this even applies to the “hard” sciences, and is exponentially more so in the social sciences. But since most biases are unconscious, it usually takes an expert eye to find them hiding between the lines of the studies they engender. That was not true in this case; the very first line sets out the bias quite clearly: “This report details a first-of-its-kind study to quantify, describe, and understand demand for CSEC [Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children] in Georgia. It paints a clear picture of the adult men who exploit adolescent females by paying for sex with them.” By incorrectly (and perhaps intentionally) claiming that some young women who are legally permitted to consent to sex in Georgia are underage, redefining adolescents as “children”, and assuming that transactional sex even with one legally entitled to give consent is intrinsically exploitative, the study abandons all pretense to objectivity from the very beginning. The depth of the bias is further confirmed at the top of page 4:

The [Chicago] study looked primarily at psychological and life history determinants of the decision to purchase sex as an adult. While this is valuable to examine, searching for individual “abnormalities” will always lead CSEC advocates astray; CSEC can only exist as a commercial enterprise if it is a sadly normal practice in our society. The same can be said of prostitution broadly, and the results of the Chicago study bear this truth out. Men who purchase sex tend to come from normal backgrounds and seem no more likely to suffer from apparent pathologies than the rest of the adult male population. There simply appears to be no magic bullet in determining what individual qualities and experiences lead a man to purchase sex. Prostitution is a societal problem, not an individual problem.

Prostitution in general is defined as a “problem”, and employment of a whore is assumed to be pathological despite the fact that 70% of men have done it at least once and 20% do it occasionally. If a real scientist read a study which showed that prostitutes’ clients come from normal backgrounds and demonstrate no unusual psychological characteristics, he would conclude that they were indeed normal men. But a biased sociologist reading the same report cannot accept those results and so hints darkly at hidden psychopathology.

It is clearly this bias which caused the designers of the study to miss the obvious age of consent issue, and thereby render their entire study completely useless. While some of the girls involved in so-called “CSEC” are undoubtedly below 16, the study was not designed to determine how many men would have sex with a truly underage girl vs. how many with a girl who was merely below the age at which the study’s sponsors feel they should be allowed to consent. The results are thus contaminated, because there is no way of knowing how the men might have responded differently had they believed the imaginary teen prostitute to be 15 rather than 16. Another contaminating bias lies in the obvious inability of the researchers to separate the legal concept of competence from the psychological one. I use the term “lawhead” to mean a person suffering from the delusion that laws define reality; to a lawhead, any person whom the law declares incompetent to decide something is actually incompetent to do so. Thus, a lawhead truly believes (to borrow an analogy from regular reader Sailor Barsoom) that at midnight on his 18^th birthday, a person says “Shazam!” and is instantly transformed from all-child to all-adult, from the equivalent of a 5-year-old to the equivalent of a 50-year-old. Obviously this is absurd, but it is equally obvious that the sponsors essentially believe it. Since they mistakenly believe any girl under 18 is not legally able to consent to sex, they also believe that such a girl is literally unable to consent; thus she must have been forced into prostitution and is therefore exploited. This chain of dependent assumptions turns a mundane reality these people find uncomfortable (that some girls below 18 are both legally and practically able to consent to sex with adult men) into a lurid sex fantasy (that every single prostitute below the age of 18 is a helpless victim of “child traffickers”) which furthers their prohibitionist agenda.

The researchers placed fake escort ads in such venues as Craigslist and Backpage; the ads contained young girls posed and photographed so as to make them appear older. We are not told how young the models were except that they were under 18; if all of them were 16 or 17 even the most minimal factual basis of the study collapses, and even if they were 14 or 15 they were still posed so as to make them appear (by the admission of the authors) 6-8 years older than their actual age. In this lies another fatal flaw: As I have said on several occasions, the most common request is “as young as possible”, and because of this escorts habitually lie about their ages. Considering that even most amateur women do the same thing, it is both ridiculous and grossly insulting to the intelligence of the male population to presume that all men everywhere are so gullible as to believe every age figure they are given by women; I think it is much more likely that most men tend to ignore the age they are told and instead judge by appearance. So even when (as described on page 11-12) the false “operators” implied to the men that the girl in the ad was under 18, we have no way of knowing whether the callers actually believed this claim or just assumed it was a provocative lie. Since the age of consent in Georgia is 16, this allows a two-year “fudge factor” which makes it absolutely impossible to know if even a SINGLE caller actually believed he was going to hire a truly underage (15 or younger) girl; most may have believed they were actually going to meet with girls in their late teens or early twenties pretending to be 16 or 17. But the study’s authors, ignorant as they are of the behavior of real prostitutes and disdainful as they are of the moral character of customers, presume the exact opposite: That the men “knew” they would be hiring an underage girl and did not care. The report states (page 1) “While many of the men who exploit these children are not seeking adolescent females per se, the study also shows that just under half are willing to pay for sex with a young female even when they know for sure she is an adolescent.” In fact, as we have seen, they know nothing of the kind!

The final catastrophic error in this so-called “study” derives from the authors’ indulgence in the gross logical fallacy of assuming without evidence the total truth of their own beliefs, and then proceeding to extrapolate erroneous deductions from the false conditions they have designed. Let me explain; the authors presume that not only are the great majority of prostitutes underage, but that they are all dominated or controlled by “traffickers” who prefer to “push” the younger girls for some reason. We know that absolutely none of these assumptions is true, but the experiment reflects them: the imaginary “traffickers” who control the imaginary underage prostitutes in their false ads prefer to only send older girls if the clients ask for them or specifically refuse the girl in the picture once they learn she may be under 18. Based on the presumption that this fantasy reflects the real world, the authors then reach the wholly absurd conclusion that any man who does not specifically forbid an underage girl from virtually ANY online ad whatsoever will definitely end up with such a girl. Based on this long chain of ridiculous assumptions they state “The numbers are staggering — 12,400 men each month in Georgia pay for sex with a young female, 7,200 of whom end up exploiting an adolescent female.” This assertion is made on page 1 and repeated numerous times throughout the paper despite the fact that it is so unsupported as to constitute a flagrant lie.

I’ll leave you with a few more false and inflammatory statements from the report:

Our interviewer posed as an “operator”; a person who brokers the purchase of multiple females.

I guess a clinic receptionist “brokers the purchase of multiple doctors”, then?

This is a common situation for men who buy sex from females pictured on the internet. Very often the phone is answered by an operator who can either connect the customer with the female pictured in the advertisement, or with a variety of other females as well.

Actually, it isn’t. The vast majority of girls who advertise on Craigslist, Backpage and other such ad sites are independents who answer their own phones.

After all, how can an adult male have sex with a female and not know she is an adolescent?

Because as we all know, at midnight on “magic 18” a woman’s body changes instantly and totally from flat-chested and boy-hipped to curvaceous and fully adult.

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What a Week!

Posted in Current Events, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Backpage, bad customers, brothels, cops, Craigslist, dirty, disability, drugs, ethics, Europe, Hall of Shame, Hollywood, hysteria, law, Nebraska, neofeminism, porn, psychology, restaurants, sisterhood, Spain, stage names, Swedish model, What a Week! on November 28, 2010| 8 Comments »

Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day, when a woman could earn a decent wage by selling her body instead? – Emma Goldman

There were so many developments in hooker news last week that I honestly felt overwhelmed! A number of them reflected the growing disparity between the official position taken by governments (especially police departments) and that held by the majority of the public. A perfect example was this article, which many of you may have already seen; it concerns a severely deformed man arrested for trying to hire a prostitute. Now, I’ve already discussed my philosophy about deformed or disabled men; very often we are their only means of obtaining sex since amateurs won’t even give them the time of day. There are very few call girls who do not understand this, but I’ve often wondered how many people in the general public really grasp it. Then I saw this discussion on The Agitator, and words cannot express how pleased I was to see so many people not simply critical of the police persecution of this unfortunate man, but actually angry at the fact that government power is abused to deny him and others like him access to one of the most basic of human pleasures.

I was similarly pleased to see this column on Jezebel; as I’ve mentioned before, the site tends to sit on the feminist fence, catering as often to neofeminists and other decrepit remnants of second-wave feminism as it does to third-wave feminism and to the voices of women who don’t consider themselves feminist in any way. Thus, the site usually isn’t sex-work-positive enough for my tastes, so it’s especially good to see something like this there. The commentary, however, is disappointing; it seems largely dominated by neofeminists, trafficking alarmists and advocates of the “Swedish model” rather than by intelligent, free-thinking women who prefer to control their own bodies rather than allowing the Nanny State to do it for them. Considering that Jezebel caters to a largely female audience, I find that rather pathetic.

Until we as women present a unified front against collective ownership of our bodies, progress will be slow at best; ironically, most of the voices arguing that women are intelligent adults capable of making our own decisions are male! But even sex workers can’t seem to unite; too many practitioners of legalized forms of whoredom (such as stripping, porn and phone sex work) are only too willing to throw the rest of us under the bus in order to avoid putting their own derrières out on a limb. Case in point Capri Anderson, the porn starlet who was involved in the recent Charlie Sheen brouhaha. Apparently, she thinks she’s better than her sisters; in an interview on Good Morning America she simpered that Sheen had called her a whore (if the shoe fits, honey…) and tried to cast her presence in his hotel room that night as somehow unmotivated by profit. She also announced that she had filed a criminal complaint against him for “harassment in the second degree” (whatever that means) and was going to sue him for assault and false imprisonment. Unsurprisingly, Sheen responded by beating her to the civil-court punch, filing a suit alleging fraud and attempted extortion which claimed that Anderson only filed charges after her million-dollar blackmail attempt had failed.

Shades of Karen Sypher! Miss Anderson’s incredible greed, her denial of her own whoredom despite the fact that she is a porn actress who was paid $3500 to spend the night with a rich cokehead, her pretense that she is better than the rest of us despite her absolute and total lack of the most meager shred of the professional ethics adhered to even by the majority of hundred-dollar Backpage girls, and her stunning stupidity in announcing a lawsuit on national television before she actually filed it more than qualify her as the second inductee into my Hall of Shame, alongside the aforementioned Syfwhore. Congratulations, Capri! I hope you get everything you so richly deserve.

All justly-earned condemnation aside, Capricious had very little option other than denying her harlotry to the cops, since as everyone knows American law discriminates against women by classifying us as legally incompetent eternal children who are incapable of consenting to any form of sex except those from an approved list, and by criminalizing most means of making more money than men by doing things of which men are incapable. Yet deluded neofeminists, religious fanatics and media outlets who are happy to lick the boots of cops and call it yummy cannot seem to understand why so many women resist being the chattel of the state. Here’s a recent example from the Omaha, Nebraska ABC affiliate, in which cops admit their total impotence in halting online hooker ads (despite the much-ballyhooed censorship of Craigslist) and well-intentioned but delusional Salvation Army ladies express confusion about why their program to “help women get out of the cycle of prostitution” has only attracted two escorts despite their claims that escorting is just as dangerous as streetwalking. If you really want to know the answer, Sister Mary, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to explain it to you.

But while American authorities wring their hands and moan that they just can’t understand why so many women refuse to be told what to do by their “betters” and persist in eschewing dreadful, low-paid menial jobs under overbearing employers for lucrative, often-pleasant jobs in which they work for themselves, other countries have stopped pissing into the wind and instead embraced prostitution as both natural and lucrative for the state. This recent article describes a new mega-brothel in Spain, conveniently located near the French border. And while I and many other whores consider brothel work to undercut many of the reasons we entered The Life in the first place, other girls do not feel that way and should be free to work in brothels if they so choose, just as other women prefer to work for Denny’s rather than opening their own restaurants. As we’ve discussed before on October 29^th and November 1^st, decriminalization in Europe hasn’t stopped pompous bureaucrats from attempting to undermine our rights, but that’s simply the nature of bureaucracy; neither power-hungry politicians nor lie-spewing prohibitionist fanatics can accomplish much to turn back the clock on us short of full-scale revolution. And mega-brothels can only help to solidify our position; large and prominent businesses not only protect their own interests, but also enrich a number of other nearby and related businesses which will also devote money to stopping any attempts by control freaks to stop the gravy train. The legal efforts of big, wealthy casinos generally tend to help little truck stops with slot machines and have made both crooked gambling dens and police persecution of back-room card games a thing of the past, and the legal efforts of big, wealthy brothels will also tend to assist small brothels and solitary practitioners of the trade.

But for right now, we in the US are still stuck with busybody control freaks trying to save us from ourselves. Just as they managed to annoy Craigslist into self-censorship just to stop their braying, so Backpage is now beginning to crawfish; this email was sent to Backpage customers last Monday (November 22^nd):

We have just completed an analysis of the site to determine what necessary changes should be made to better protect our communities. As a result, Backpage.com has implemented new safety enhancements in the last few weeks as follows:

-Review of all new ads and images in the personals and mature sections of the site.
-Implementation of key word searches to quickly identify possible illegal advertising.
-The blocking of off site html images to block images that violate our site usage policy.
-Implementation of a new content policy to disallow nudity across the site.
-Enlisting of safety experts to help craft further safety strategies.

Please pay close attention to the posting rules on top of the posting form for more guidance. With postings under review, you may also notice a 20 minute delay in your postings going live. In addition, pics in your postings not meeting our new policy will be removed.

We believe changes like these will better protect our community.

Gee, thanks, guys; I’m sure all the escorts who advertise with you feel so much safer now that you’re cozying up to the cops to avoid bad publicity.

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Hidden Hordes of Hookers

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Backpage, bogus studies, cops, Craigslist, dirty, FBI, Florida, hysteria, law, Pennsylvania, pimps, prohibitionist myths, sporting events, stereotypes, Texas, underage on November 23, 2010| 18 Comments »

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. – Mark Twain

The “sex trafficking” witch hunt continues, this time courtesy of the State of Texas. Though these articles are a dime a dozen these days, this one is of particular interest because it’s so all over the place; the terms “prostitute”, “sex worker” and “escort” are used interchangeably and with no apparent logic, as are “human trafficking”, “prostitution” and “the illegal sex trade”; because the word “trafficking” is not used to refer to one specific concept, I have placed it in quotes wherever it appears. The guesstimates used in the article vary wildly even by the usual shoddy police standards, facts and opinions are arranged so haphazardly I didn’t even try to put them into a more logical order, and there seem to be at least three different prohibitionist philosophies clashing in this abortion they call a “task force”. But my readers over the age of 30 with good memories may recognize the tone and pattern of the article: It very closely resembles the sort of nonsense which appeared every week in all the mainstream news media at the height of the Satanic Panic in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and the FBI plan to bring nearly two dozen extra staffers to assist local law enforcement with combating “human trafficking” during Super Bowl XLV; the plans were first mentioned Wednesday at a meeting of the state’s “Human Trafficking Prevention Task Force” at Arlington City Hall. Abbot opined that the Super Bowl is one of the biggest draws for prostitution, claiming: “There is an organized effort to bring in children and women for the purpose of ‘human trafficking’ and for the purpose of the sale of sex.”

As in the “Satanic Panic”, grandiose claims are made and a huge conspiracy is alleged to exist without any proof whatsoever. Read the last sentence carefully; what’s the phrase “human trafficking” doing there? Is he using it to mean the transportation (which appears earlier in the sentence) or the forced prostitution (which appears directly after it)? Or is he just throwing it in there because it’s a buzzword right now, like “23 skidoo” or “Where’s the Beef?”

He also said the “trafficking” has been well-documented at the last two Super Bowls, but the scale of the problem is difficult to quantify; he claimed that one Florida group estimated that tens of thousands were brought to the area to work in the illegal sex trade at a recent Super Bowl, but he said during his speech he only expects hundreds of sex workers to be trafficked into this area when the Super Bowl is held February 6^th at Cowboys Stadium. “We’re trying to get ahead of that problem by organizing in advance,” he said. Abbott said that many surveys rank Texas as one of the worst states for “human trafficking”. The estimates are that about 10,000 people are “trafficked” through Texas in the sex trade in a year. Joseph Ullmann, an FBI special agent who handles crimes against children cases, said agents working at the last few Super Bowls have told him the scale of prostitution was “incredible.”

Cowboys Stadium seats 80,000 people, of whom 10,000 or more will be whores.

The “problem” is “well-documented”, but apparently not well enough to actually produce a reasonable estimate. Just so you know, neither “hundreds” nor “tens of thousands” is anything close to reality; judging by what I saw in New Orleans, it’s more like a couple of dozen. Touring girls don’t wait for major sporting events that will drive up the prices of hotel rooms, and conventioneers are a far more lucrative market that sports fans, most of whom attend with their families. But as Dave points out in Sex Hysteria!, making wildly exaggerated Criswell-like predictions of the number of hookers who will descend upon a major sporting event has become a popular pastime of prohibitionists. Notice the pretense that escorts are “brought in” or “trafficked into the area”; obviously we’re not competent to drive, buy plane tickets or otherwise arrange our own travel. The last sentence is particularly ludicrous; it makes it sound as though streetwalkers were hawking their wares in the stadium like hot-dog vendors.

While numbers vary, Abbott mentioned a couple of cases related to recent Super Bowls. Two Florida men were recently convicted on federal charges for attempting to pimp a 14-year-old girl through the Craigslist website for a “Super Bowl special,” according to stories in Tampa area newspapers. Craigslist has since shut down its “adult services” section because of complaints about prostitution advertisements. The Florida Department of Children & Families took into care 24 children who were brought to the Tampa area in 2009 to serve as prostitutes in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, according to other news reports.

So of the “tens of thousands” of “trafficked children” estimated by the Florida group in the previous paragraph, the cops were able to find…one. Unless you believe those unspecified and unattributed “other news reports”, in which case it was 24. But still nobody questions these figures. And they just couldn’t resist throwing Craigslist in there, though of course the sentence is an outright lie; Craigslist didn’t shut down adult services due to “complaints” but rather due to threats and harassment by government entities, i.e. censorship.

Sandy Skelaney, a program manager at Kristi House, a Miami-based child advocacy organization, said she doesn’t know of any reliable numbers for “child trafficking” and the Super Bowl. But she said that during the street outreach in the days leading up to this year’s Super Bowl in South Florida, the group counted about four times the number of prostitutes as they would typically see. “It’s [Super Bowl] synonymous with sex and drugs and partying,” Skelaney said. She said she didn’t think the problem was worse now. What’s different, she said, is people’s awareness of the overlap between prostitution and “trafficking”.

Sandy is apparently being as honest as her blinders allow her to be, though she unsurprisingly confuses brainwashing with “awareness”.

The attorney general’s office expects to have as many as a dozen staffers in North Texas to help with “human trafficking” enforcement. Abbott said they would deal exclusively with those crimes and leave prostitution cases to local law enforcement. Ullmann told the task force that the FBI plans to supplement its local staff with 10 additional agents, officers, analysts and a supervisor. He said analysts will be scouring websites, such as Backpage.com, looking for possible illegal activity. The analysts will “keep us [agents] on the street where we need to be rather than sitting in front of a computer,” he said.

That’s right, the FBI (a federal agency) will be assisting cops in persecuting adult prostitutes, even though prostitution is not a federal offense. Just let that sink in for a moment, and I’m sure you can imagine all sorts of things Uncle Sam can do once that precedent is firmly established.

Arlington Police Lt. Jerry Hataway said his department has increased its focus on prostitution and related crimes in the last few years. Besides the sting operations and posting photos of prostitution clients on billboards, officers have started contacting escorts directly. He said officers will text, call and e-mail suspected sex workers advertising their services in Arlington and warn them that officers are aware of them. “Each day, 70 to 100 of these advertising are being contacted by my unit, trying to deter them and move them elsewhere,” Hataway said. If past experience holds true, the numbers of escort ads could increase significantly by the end of January, just before the February 6^th game. Ullmann said that’s when more out-of-town and out-of-state phone numbers will start showing up on the ads. “That’s usually your first clue that they’ve arrived,” he said.

Clearly, Arlington, Texas is such a Mecca for prostitution that they can harass 70 to 100 new girls EVERY DAY and yet still not get them all! Obviously, Lt. Hataway has the same kind of ego problem as Chief Lisecki of Green Tree, Pennsylvania, another town under attack from veritable hordes of whores. I’m honestly not sure what to think of this strategy; clearly it isn’t based in “trafficking” rhetoric because at least the Arlington Police department seems to recognize that the escorts are autonomous agents who are not in need of “rescue” from “traffickers”. But really, what are they telling them? “Officers are aware of them”? Translation: “I spend all day on the public dole looking at online hooker ads and I saw yours.” Whoop dee doo. When I had my escort service the ad was there in the phone book all day, every day; I’m sure plenty of cops were “aware” of it. Unless sleazy cops can trick a girl into a room with them there’s nothing they can do, and that’s exactly why persecuting victimless crimes has absolutely no lasting effect other than to waste public funds.

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Sea Change

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged archeofeminism, Backpage, bad customers, condoms, cops, Craigslist, dirty, evidence, law, neofeminism, pimps, politicians, Sea Change, sex offender registry, stereotypes, streetwalkers, Swedish model on November 4, 2010| 10 Comments »

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them, ding-dong, bell. – William Shakespeare, The Tempest (I,ii)

Maybe it’s starting at last. In the past few months I’ve noticed it, a shift in the wind if you will; more and more people are rejecting the spurious arguments of the abolitionists and recognizing that a woman’s right to own and control her body is not merely a euphemism for the right to have an abortion. Polls conducted by respected websites and media outlets show their readers and viewers overwhelmingly in favor of decriminalization, funds for abolitionist “anti-trafficking” fanatics are starting to dry up (so much so that the website of Citizens Against Trafficking actually went down for a week due to failure to pay its bill), and even major organizations are starting to listen to us. Perhaps this is the beginning of a “sea change” in American attitudes toward prostitution which will eventually result in sending the abolitionist movement to a watery grave, where it will lie unlamented by all sane people (and particularly by nymphs).

Here’s one example, an article I have reproduced in its entirety from the SWOP website:

This Friday November 5, 2010, the United Nations Human Rights Council will review the human rights record of the United States as part of a new process – the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The UPR calls for a review of member nations’ human rights records every four years, and this is the first time the U.S. has participated. The Human Rights Council will base its review on the U.S. government’s own self-assessment, as well as reports submitted from civil society organizations. U.S. sex worker advocates are engaged in this process, working to highlight the appalling record that the United States has in regards to communities of people engaging in the sex trade.

A comprehensive national report on sex workers’ rights was prepared by the Best Practices Policy Project and the Desiree Alliance earlier this year. The report draws on the perspectives of networks, such as SWOP USA, and organizations working with sex workers, people in the sex trade and people who are affected by anti-prostitution policies in the United States more generally. Two representatives from the Best Practices Policy Project are currently in Geneva presenting summary recommendations to delegations and encouraging countries to ask the United States questions about its human rights record in regards to sex workers and to include issues pertaining to sex workers in the recommendations they will raise in Friday’s session.

Key recommendations from the report on sex workers are as follows.

The United States should implement comprehensive criminal justice reform that includes measures to stop human rights abuses committed in the name of anti-sex trade laws. This would include repealing laws, including laws against prostitution-related offenses, and eliminate policies, such as “prostitution free zones”, that erode legal protections barring law enforcement from detaining individuals on the basis of how they are perceived or the way they are dressed (ie racial and gender profiling). The application of felony-level charges against sex workers and people living with HIV should be halted as should sex offender registration requirements of those arrested for engaging in prostitution. Criminal justice reform must also address the frequency of abuse of sex workers, or those perceived as such, by law enforcement and other state actors. Similarly, reform must ensure that people involved in the sex trade or profiled as such receive appropriate responses from authorities when they are targeted for violence and other crimes.

The United States should ensure health rights for those engaged, or perceived to be engaged, in sex work and the sex trade. In many jurisdictions in the United States condoms are used as evidence of criminal activity in the enforcement of anti-prostitution laws. Individuals involved in street economies face tremendous stigmatization in health care settings. Sex workers urgently need access to health care services including harm reduction oriented programs, which often are prohibited from receiving federal funding.

The United Sates should reorient national anti-trafficking policy to a rights-based framework and repeal the US governments “anti-prostitution pledge” requirement on foreign aid. Migrants involved in the sex trade who experience exploitation require services and legal support, but the response to human trafficking in the U.S. currently focuses on law enforcement approaches that alienate and traumatize victims. U.S. anti-trafficking policies and practices undermine the health and rights of sex workers domestically and internationally, including requiring recipients of HIV and anti-trafficking funding to adopt a stance condemning sex work. These requirements should be repealed.

Though the US does have the tendency to ignore UN resolutions, a negative human rights report from the Council would kick the soapbox out from under abolitionists who try to drape themselves in the white garment of “concern for women”. It would almost certainly provoke a major shift in abolitionist rhetoric to the “Nordic Model”, and indeed many neofeminist and bluenosed rats, perhaps sensing their anti-whore ship about to sink, have deserted it for the Nordic propaganda in the hopes of winning more women (including a few misguided sex workers) to their cause. But many will rightfully perceive this as a retreat, and that will put the anti-sex forces off-balance. It won’t have much effect on the behavior of sadistic cops or politicians out to make a name for themselves on the backs of whores, but SWOP is on the attack on that front as well, as demonstrated by this press release from last week:

New York City, NY, October 28, 2010 – SWOP-NYC in collaboration with SWOP-USA strongly opposes the misguided campaign against Backpage.com. This campaign is part of a trend of actions against adult services sections online including a recent action against Craigslist.

The campaign against Backpage.com has been framed as a way to “protect innocent women and children” (as per State Attorneys General, Letter to Attorneys for Backpage.com, September 21, 2010, available at: http://ago.mo.gov/pdf/Backpage.pdf ). However, the forced closure of this site will not diminish the prevalence of trafficking and, worse, will substantially harm victims of trafficking and people in consensual sex work.

“This campaign purports to protect people, but it actually has the opposite effect,” explained Liz Coplen, Board Chair of SWOP-USA. “Criminalization and repression of consensual sex work drives sex workers underground, creating the conditions which lead to the exploitation and abuses of trafficking.” The models that have been internationally accepted as best practice for addressing sex trafficking center around working with sex workers to end exploitation and abuse, not further criminalizing and marginalizing the work.

SWOP-NYC, a group of sex workers and allies, adamantly opposes all forms of coerced and forced labor. We strongly support effective efforts to end abuses in the sex industry. “Unfortunately,” states sex workers’ rights activist and attorney Melissa Broudo, “the current discussion seems to perpetuate the false notion that prostitution and trafficking are the same thing. All forms of sex work are perceived as violence against women, which does not reflect the different realities of individuals who advertise on these sites. Heightened criminalization, which stems from this conflation, causes significant harm to sex workers and survivors of trafficking.”

“The Internet provides a venue for communication and commerce for a range of industries,” says Sarah Jenny Bleviss, a new media professional and SWOP-NYC organizer. “These repressive campaigns, forcing the closure of adult venues and communications, undermine first amendment rights and freedom of communication on the Internet as well as the safety of sex workers. Sex workers are in the forefront as targets in a repressive campaign which challenges basic concepts of free speech on the Internet.”

Sex workers are united in their analysis that the closure of adult services pages undermines their safety. “Most people who advertise on these sites are engaged in consensual adult activities,” said Dylan Wolfe of SWOP NYC “But these campaigns assume that all sex workers need to be rescued. They say they are doing us a favor by closing down our advertising options, by removing our freedoms in order to protect us from exploitation. However, the Internet offers a venue in which we can find and screen clients so that we can protect ourselves. These closures undermine our safety.”

“First they complain when they see us on the street, then when we are off the street they try to shut our work down by closing the advertising venues. And they claim it’s to protect us! It’s hypocritical, discriminatory and ultimately makes sex workers more vulnerable to the violence they are supposedly so concerned about,” said Michael Bottoms.

Sex worker activist, Jill Brenneman agrees. “This will result in moving it someplace else or out onto the street, where it can be more dangerous. I noticed this firsthand. If the money’s not coming from one stream, it’s going to come from another. The street for me was always where I would end up working if somebody had shut down the main form of advertising.”

“When these websites close it means more potential for violence, more exploitation, less money to feed and house ourselves, and life circumstances that are less safe for consensual sex workers. Trafficked/exploited people are also placed at greater risk,“ says Robin Dunn of SWOP-NYC and SWOP-CO. “Sites such as Craigslist and Backpage are well-positioned to do more for trafficking victims, by providing training for their employees to help them act appropriately when contacted by someone who has been exploited using their website. Such training (as well as effective and appropriate training for police) would be far more helpful for exploited and trafficked people than shutting down an advertising service and forcing sex workers and trafficking victims into situations that are even less safe.”

We’ve discussed in recent columns (especially September 28^th and October 14^th), how public opinion is beginning to shift in our favor, and columns like this one and this one are becoming far more common. I’ll be quite pleased if I can continue to report such news every few weeks!

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Think of the Children!

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged cops, Craigslist, cult of the child, dirty, Hollywood, hysteria, law, Madonna/whore, masturbation, neo-Victorianism, porn, psychology, sex rays, stage names, stereotypes, stripping, teachers, Think of the Children! on September 30, 2010| 71 Comments »

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet – when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round. – Elizabeth Bowen

The witch friend who writes the descriptions of pagan holidays for me pointed out a few months ago that Western Society has descended into a new Victorianism. As in the Victorian Era we have become shockingly hypocritical about sex and grant our governments tremendous power to suppress it while simultaneously spending tremendous amounts of time and money on it (Victorian London had the largest number of prostitutes per capita of any place and time in history). We have revived Victorian ideas of government-enforced temperance and “social progress”, and the Victorian “Cult of the Child” has returned with a vengeance. The persistent adult myth that children live in some sort of state of Divine Grace which must be protected at all costs and extended as far into adulthood as possible has experienced cyclic popularity at least since the time of the Ancient Greeks, but rarely has it been interpreted in the extreme manner which began in the 1980s. The dogma of this modern cult 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.

One of the earliest victims of this cult was comedian Paul Reubens, better known by the name of his famous character “Pee-Wee Herman”; in 1991 he was arrested in a raid of a Sarasota, Florida adult movie theater by “detectives” who perjured themselves by claiming that they had observed him masturbating yet gave erroneous details of his anatomy including the claim that he was left-handed. As regular readers know, vice cops habitually make up lurid stories in order to persecute people for consensual acts, but once the media got ahold of the story Reubens’ career was essentially over. His award-winning children’s show was pulled from television, his line of toys vanished from stores and self-proclaimed “child experts” appeared on television advising parents to tell their children that “Pee-Wee” had done a bad thing and must be punished for it (I never heard even one suggest telling kids about “innocent until proven guilty”)…all because an adult character actor out of costume had the bad luck to choose to take in an adult movie on the night some vice cops decided to get their jollies by arresting people there. Then just as he was beginning to emerge from a long period of seclusion, in 2002 Los Angeles police raided his home and charged him with “child pornography” after finding a 1960s era art photography book which included some teenage nudes. After two years of harassment all charges were dropped, but Reubens’ career is only now beginning to recover thanks largely to old fans who never deserted him and young adult fans who watched his show as children.

Reubens’ case is representative because he was never accused of any inappropriate behavior toward children; those who persecuted him seemed to feel that the mere fact that an adult man had been discovered in a harmless sexual pursuit (watching a legal adult movie in a legal public theater) made him somehow tainted, and that if children merely watched his shows or played with his toys their “innocence” might somehow be magically damaged. A similar mindset appears to be at work in the case of Melissa Petro, a 30-year-old art teacher in the Bronx who has been “reassigned” pending an “investigation” which will no doubt result in her suspension. The reason for this? She wrote an article for The Huffington Post in which she admitted to a brief flirtation with whoring.

The following article is adapted from an article in The New York Post and edited to correct for the Post’s lax journalistic standards by removing such judgmental tabloid terminology as “tattooed former hooker and stripper”, “sexcapades”, “shenanigans” and “money honey”.

The Post has learned that former sex worker Melissa Petro has been teaching art in a Bronx elementary school for three years, and though well-liked by students has perhaps unwisely posted online accounts of past sexual experiences. But earlier this month, she admitted in an essay to a short-lived job as a prostitute.

“From October 2006 to January 2007, I accepted money in exchange for sexual services I provided to men I met online in what was then called the ‘erotic services’ section of Craigslist.org,” wrote Petro on The Huffington Post, using her real name and picture. The attached biography identifies Petro, who has an MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School, as a “former sex worker, researcher, writer, educator, and feminist.”

Her revelation seems to have caused ignorant parents to believe that she is somehow different from the woman she was a few weeks ago. “I don’t want nobody that used to do that to be around my kid,” said Grace Ventura, whose son is in third grade. “People like that should not be allowed to be anywhere near children.” Yocelyn Quezada said perhaps Petro had “managed to turn her life around,” but she still fumed that a former prostitute was teaching two of her three kids. “She’s not a good role model. I do not want my daughters to find out about this,” Quezada said, “and I do not want my daughters to be around that kind of person.”

Despite predicting in one online posting that “that this would be a conversation I’d someday be compelled to have,” Petro declined twice to speak with The Post. Principal Kerry Castellano referred questions to the Department of Education’s press office, which said Petro had been reassigned to administrative duties pending an investigation. Petro’s posts also indicate that she was warned by at least two school staffers — including one administrator — that her refusal to be more cautious about her history could land her in hot water. “In an off the record conversation, a sympathetic administrator kindly asked if I couldn’t publish under a pseudonym. I wish, for her sake, I could,” Petro recently wrote in The Rumpus, an online magazine.

Petro, who earns $61,000 a year as a teacher, also wrote that a co-worker had warned her that some of her colleagues were beginning to Google her. “There have been lots of rumors going around about her for a while now,” one school worker told The Post. “I wouldn’t want my kid to be in a school where she is.”

Now, unlike many of my colleagues I can’t really say I feel sorry for Miss Petro; unlike Reubens, she went into her trouble by her own choice and with open eyes. Though she was only a whore for four months she certainly learned of the need for discretion in our profession, and by choosing to reveal her real name and picture she knew very well what would happen. I smell a lucrative book deal and perhaps even some sort of test case, and that makes it very difficult for me to think of her as a victim. What makes this case interesting is not the predictable results of her voluntary actions, but the reactions of the 21^st century Child Cultists the reporter obviously hand-picked for the story. Clearly, nobody thinks that third graders are reading the Huffington Post, and since nobody questioned her ability as a teacher they obviously believe that her sexual history somehow renders her magically taboo; “People like that should not be allowed to be anywhere near children,” huffs one parent in the story, as though sexuality were a radiation which might contaminate the tissue-paper bodies of children. Like the Victorians, this woman clearly conceives of whores as monsters incapable of feminine sensibilities.

And then there’s this story, paraphrased from an AP article:

Sesame Street announced that it won’t air a taped segment featuring pop star Katy Perry appearing with the popular Muppet Elmo. The clip was previewed on Youtube and apparently sparked considerable negative feedback from people who felt that her clothing was “inappropriate” for a kid’s show. Though the clip will not air and has been removed from the official Sesame Street YouTube channel, it is still available elsewhere on YouTube and on Perry’s website.

Watch the video and tell me that you see anything intrinsically unwholesome about it. Apparently some dirty-minded people think that the slight jiggle of Perry’s tits above the top of her dress will “traumatize” young children; if that’s the case I cause irreparable damage to dozens of kids every time I walk into Wal-Mart. The problem here isn’t the fact that (like every child’s own mother) Perry has mammary glands, but rather her provocative stage persona, which even though it isn’t displayed here still magically radiates from her image and can destroy the “innocence” of children through the television set.

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Fallout

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, agency denial, Australia, Backpage, censorship, Craigslist, escort review sites, law, neofeminism, New Zealand, Prohibition (alcohol), psychology, Rhode Island, sisterhood, social purity on September 28, 2010| 7 Comments »

Results are what you expect, and consequences are what you get. – Anonymous

The “Law of Unintended Consequences” is the principle that in any complex system, the actions of people or governments can result in consequences that the originator of those actions neither intends nor desires. One excellent example of this is Prohibition, which was intended to morally purify the American scene but instead almost singlehandedly created organized crime in the US. Politicians are forever attempting to ban or control complex physical, economic or social phenomena by simply passing laws; ignorant people hail such attempts as “progressive”, but the wise recognize that such behavior is exactly equivalent to that of a primitive medicine man attempting to control the weather by shaking a rattle and doing a dance.

In the past few years sex workers in the United States have been subjected to a long series of persecutions and official attempts at collective character assassination unlike any other since the days of the Social Purity Movement at the beginning of the last century. As I suggested in my column of the day before yesterday, it is very likely that the primary reason for this is the widespread trend toward decriminalization of our profession in most countries and the growing public acceptance of our work in the US and other nations which still adhere to the barbaric principle that women’s bodies are owned by the state. Since nobody likes having his property taken away, politicians and neofeminists (who believe they own women’s souls) have therefore mounted a campaign to arrest this disturbing tendency before it results in our emancipation, and to this end have resurrected the old White Slavery bogeyman as we’ve discussed several times before. They have repeatedly sent this reanimated monster forth to attack the most visible of targets, resulting in the recent recriminalization of prostitution in Rhode Island (where it was technically legal for 30 years) and the highly-touted censorship of the adult services section of Craigslist, where many low-end and semi-professional hookers advertised. And now they’ve sent their misshapen abomination against Backpage, which is used even by many midrange escorts; if this trend is allowed to continue, how long would it be before the tyrants decided to go after true escort websites such as Eros?

But if the politicians expected the Great Unwashed to cheer their victory against evil classified ads and clamor for their appointment as dictators, they were very much disappointed. Though the neofeminists and “child trafficking” hysterics praised the action, the response from the general public was distinctly underwhelming; there was no clear consensus among the masses as to whether censoring Craigslist was “good” or “bad”, and many, many analysts have pointed out that the closing merely drove the real criminals farther underground. Indeed, even some prohibitionist organizations who would love to see every whore in America locked up (thus depleting the female population to a tremendous degree and filling every jail and prison in the country to overflowing) whined that prostitutes would simply move their advertising elsewhere, which is absolutely true.

These repressive actions have also inspired a groundswell of resistance, both from prostitutes’ rights organizations and from more general human and women’s rights ones, not to mention free speech advocates. 77% of respondents in a recent debate at The Economist voted in favor of legalization, and several pro-sex work online petitions such as this one have appeared in recent days. But perhaps most important was the release of this statement by the Third Wave Foundation, a well-funded feminist group which opposes the groupthink and anti-sex policies of mainstream feminism:

We do not believe that sex work is a cause of that violence or oppression, nor do we believe that seeking to prohibit safe and consensual sex work or the demand for it is the solution to eradicating gender-based inequity or violence. In fact, these attempts to criminalize sex work often have the unintended consequence of leaving young people even more vulnerable. Prohibitions on sex work — even when targeted at third-parties such as customers and advertising venues — criminalize young people and force them further underground in order to meet their survival needs. As a result, they are more vulnerable to violence and isolated from one another and from rights advocates.

THIRD WAVE SUPPORTS YOUNG PEOPLE ENGAGED IN SEX WORK AND IMPACTED BY THE SEX TRADE AS CRITICAL PARTNERS IN ENSURING HEALTH AND JUSTICE.

We at Third Wave are deeply concerned about the ways in which young women and transgender youth may be subject to abuse and violence in any aspect of their lives. Over the last decade of supporting this work, we have learned that young people come to sex work and the sex trade through a wide range of experiences that include choice, circumstance, and coercion. Our community of grant partners and allies includes sex workers, people involved in the sex trade and street economies, and people who have been trafficked. Regardless of how young people are involved in or are impacted by the sex trade, they must be considered partners in the work of advocating for rights and achieving justice.

WE RECOGNIZE AND AFFIRM A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEX WORK AND TRAFFICKING, AND URGE POLICYMAKERS AND ALLIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCACY TO APPROACH THESE ISSUES WITH RESPECT FOR THAT DIFFERENCE.

These are nuanced and deeply complex concerns. Pursuing a plan of action to address violence, coercion, or trafficking without considering the needs and leadership of young people with direct experience in sex work and the sex trade will result in solutions that do not fully address the harms that young people face. Nor will advocates benefit from the depth of their expertise.

WITH OUR SUPPORT, YOUNG PEOPLE ENGAGED IN SEX WORK AND WHO ARE IMPACTED BY THE SEX TRADE ARE ORGANIZING IN THEIR COMMUNITIES AND ACHIEVING WINS.

Across the US, our grant partners are supporting one another to create smart solutions that are rooted in their day-to-day realities. They conduct research on the needs of their own communities, mapping the complex social service systems that they must navigate successfully in order to seek support. They operate their own health care clinics with state and city-level health partners. They advocate for and participate in city taskforces that address youth housing needs. They have developed their own programs to secure legal advocacy for their communities. They organize and train one another to work within criminal/legal systems to advocate for their rights. Together, they create innovative new models for peer support and education rooted in harm reduction principles and respect for young people’s power to make change in their own lives.

WE VALUE THE FULL RANGE OF EXPERIENCES OF YOUNG PEOPLE WHO DO SEX WORK AND ARE IMPACTED BY THE SEX TRADE, AND SUPPORT WORK THAT BUILDS THEIR POWER AND AGENCY.

It is a step forward for policymakers and advocates to recognize that young people who do sex work or who are impacted by the sex trade are not criminals. We must also recognize that not all young people who do sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade are victims.

Partnerships between young people and adult allies must support the vision and leadership of young people. We work in collaboration with young people to secure the resources they need to continue creating a healthy and just world. We urge policymakers who seek to protect young people from violence to include young people’s expertise at every level of their decision-making. We also urge our community partners and allies to center the voices and experiences of young people who do sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade when advocating for their human rights.

Third Wave has been advocating for sex workers since the beginning of this century, but this is its strongest statement yet against prohibition, the equation of voluntary adult prostitution with “human trafficking” and the neofeminist dogma that all sex workers are victims. Here’s hoping that their efforts and those of all of our other advocates will at last begin to make an impression on the thick skulls of politicians by forcing them to recognize that their ill-conceived and wrongheaded attempts to suppress prostitution even further are alienating a great many taxpayers. The popularity of the so-called “Tea Party” movement shows exactly how sick many people are of big government, and it doesn’t get much bigger than using propaganda and outright lies to suppress consensual adult behavior; I can’t even begin to guess how much money governments in the US might save if prostitution were decriminalized as it was in New Zealand seven years ago. In 2008 a report on the Prostitution Reform Act was prepared; it should be required reading for every government official in every state of the US. I’ve added a link to it in my “resources” box at the right for those who are interested, but its findings are summed up in its abstract:

The PRA has been in force for five years. During that time, the sex industry has not increased in size, and many of the social evils predicted by some who opposed the decriminalisation of the sex industry have not been experienced. On the whole, the PRA has been effective in achieving its purpose, and the Committee is confident that the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off under the PRA than they were previously.

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Out of Control

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged archeofeminism, Backpage, BDSM, cops, Craigslist, ethics, fantasy, Hollywood, law, neofeminism, Out of Control, psychology, rape, sacred prostitutes, statistics on September 24, 2010| 18 Comments »

A country without bordellos is like a house without bathrooms. – Marlene Dietrich

As I’ve pointed out before, male sexuality tends to get out of control when untended. I’m sure every sexually experienced female reader knows exactly what I’m talking about; if for some reason you can’t give your man any tail for a while his sexual fantasies and sex talk usually start to get stranger and more extreme as the days go by, and your normal man’s sexuality may go from vanilla to kinky to perverted to weird to just plain sick. Most men don’t really want to do the more unusual stuff they’re talking about, but they sure as hell think about it, and one can only imagine how bad it gets for men who don’t have regular bed partners. Whores, of course, don’t have to imagine; we see all the time what happens when an untended male fire spreads beyond its proper boundaries and endangers others. If the untended male is in the right (or rather, wrong) position these can even become wildfires which threaten entire populations and can cause millions of dollars of damage.

The most common way in which the uncontrolled male sex drive can be dangerous is of course rape, though amazingly enough there are many people who deny this. Back in the early 1970s (before neofeminists took over the movement), leading feminists wanted to call attention to the problem of rape, yet didn’t want to scare women by also calling attention to the fact that male sexuality is inherently predatory. In other words, they did not want to risk reversing the gains of the “sexual revolution” by allowing the average woman to realize that sex has a powerful, profound and untamable dark side and that consequently, sexual freedom carries risks. Note the strong taint of Neomarxism already rearing its ugly head here; the feminist “elite” felt that most women were too immature or stupid to be allowed to take responsibility for themselves and so had to be lied to for the “greater good”. So the myth that “rape is a crime of violence, not of sex” was invented and aggressively promoted; once this slogan became ingrained in the public consciousness it even proved useful in deflecting the monstrous old rapist criminal defense that the victim actually wanted to be raped. If rape had nothing to do with sex, her actions or state of dress or whatever obviously had nothing to do with it.

A crime victim should not be blamed for attracting a criminal, but the notion that rape has nothing to do with lust is arrant nonsense. Most rapes are committed not by angry strangers with guns, but by horny acquaintances who are very much attracted to the victim (as revealed to the general public during the whole “date rape” brouhaha of the early 90s). 65% of rape victims are between 12 and 30 and 29% between 12-17; the rape rate for girls of 16-19 is four times that of women in general. Does that sound to you like something that has nothing to do with sexual attraction? The very idea is asinine. And then there’s the “elephant in the parlor” of penile erection; it’s necessary for penetration, yet as any heterosexual non-virgin could tell you it only occurs when a man is sexually excited. Feminists somehow managed the nigh-miraculous feat of getting nearly everyone in American society to drink the “rape has nothing to do with sex” kool-aid despite the fact that most of the people repeating this inane mantra are adults who know very well that rape cannot be accomplished unless the rapist is sexually aroused! Sometimes they’ll elaborate even further by saying “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power and control” – despite the fact that BDSM exists precisely because power and control are inextricably bound up with sex!

But despite its absurdity, the “rape as asexual” dogma continues to be promulgated in the US by both government and neofeminists for the very good reason that if women realized that rape is largely caused by sexual frustration, they would collectively demand that prostitution be legalized and that would NOT satisfy the prohibitionist agenda. A number of cross-cultural studies such as this one have shown that in every culture where prostitution is legalized, the rape rate dramatically decreases; the author of the linked paper predicts a 25% decrease in rape in the US if prostitution were legalized. That’s right, the neofeminists and politicians know what’s best for women, so they allow an extra 25,000 of us to be raped every year rather than bury their opposition to a venerable institution which also provides income for many tens of thousands of other women. But I’m sure all the women who were raped by sex-mad men this year can rest assured in the knowledge that their torture was not in vain; after all, it was necessary to advance the holy neofeminist cause of preventing heterosexual males from having convenient access to sex.

Phillip John Eide (AKA “Xavier Von Erck”), the unemployed 26-year-old self-confessed computer gamer and wrestling aficionado from Portland, Oregon who founded “Perverted Justice”.

But rape is only the least of the problems which can be caused by frustration-induced perversion, because it affects only one woman at a time; some frustrated men manage to gain sexual gratification at the expense of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of victims. Vice cops are a perfect example; consider the one I mentioned on August 6^th who got such a sadistic sexual thrill out of tricking and arresting whores that he needed to talk about it in order to excite himself after he retired, or the ones who tried to get themselves off by entrapping me, or the ones who lie in order to get streetwalkers declared “sex offenders” for several decades. Another example is provided by the maladjusted computer geeks and online gamers who staff organizations like “Perverted Justice”; these creeps get their jollies by pretending to be young teenage girls in online chat rooms and drawing men into graphic sexual conversations with them, then publishing the conversations online or digging up details on their victims (by hacking personal records if necessary) and harassing them mercilessly by phoning them and their families, calling their employers to report them as “pedophiles”, etc. The American television network NBC actually gave these perverts a TV show for several years, but were forced to drop it in the face of mounting lawsuits from the families of people whose lives they had ruined, such as Louis Conradt, the district attorney (talk about feeding on their own!) in Texas who committed suicide when police and NBC camera trucks showed up on his lawn because of an online conversation with one of these predatory perverts. The website Corrupted Justice is dedicated to fighting these frustrated monsters whose out-of-control sexuality has destroyed the lives of over 1000 men with no due process whatsoever.

The Injustice Perverts are allowed to get away with their sadistic game because they claim one of the oldest excuses in the world, that they’re doing it to “protect children”. As defined by control fetishists, the term “child” is a protean one, morphing to mean whatever it is convenient to mean. And apparently in the minds of state attorneys, it can be used to mean “adult prostitutes using online advertising”. Yes, flushed with their imaginary “victory” over Craigslist, the Perverts General of 21 American states (Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia) have now directed their lurid fantasies of widespread white slavery rings trading underage girls on public websites toward Backpage.com, another popular internet classified site. One can imagine these undersexed lawyers sitting in their bathrooms at night, furiously masturbating themselves to thoughts of nubile young slave girls bought and sold in an eBay of flesh; then going in to work the next day and, their minds disordered by lack of sexual contact with the professionals they dare not hire in election years, lashing out at websites based conveniently in less sexually-repressed regions while describing their sick fantasies in graphic detail via press releases.

It’s time for society to recognize the tremendous harm done by sexually frustrated males and to address it not in the judgmental, punitive ways favored by neofeminists, but rather in a compassionate, pragmatic way which recognizes that these men only behave this way due to repression of their natural impulses. It is not possible to legislate a problem out of existence, and the Pollyannaish “just say no” approach ignores the primordial power of the male sex drive, a force so great it was deified by the ancients. Since Western society has apparently decided that it is no longer the responsibility of wives to provide for their husbands’ sexual needs, and since unmarried men have nobody to provide for them in the first place, we need Vestals to tend the fires of male passion in order to keep them from becoming dangerous conflagrations. Fortunately, society already has such priestesses, the daughters of an ancient order going back to the very beginning of human history but long discredited and suppressed by the jealous priests of other orders. All we ask is that politicians, hypocrites and neofeminists step back, stop harassing us, and let us do our jobs.

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The Biggest Whores

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Backpage, censorship, cops, Craigslist, dirty, escort services, ethics, internet, law, lawyers, pimps, politicians, psychology, stereotypes, streetwalkers, The Biggest Whores, underage on September 6, 2010| 8 Comments »

A fox may steal your hens, sir,
A whore your health and pence, sir,
Your daughter rob your chest, sir,
Your wife may steal your rest, sir,
A thief your goods and plate.

But this is all but picking,
With rest, pence, chest and chicken;
It ever was decreed, sir,
If lawyer’s hand is fee’d, sir,
He steals your whole estate. – John Gay (air from The Beggar’s Opera)

Many of you may have already heard this news; my version is paraphrased from an AP original:

Craigslist appears to have surrendered to political pressure over erotic ads posted on its website, shutting down its adult services section Saturday (September 4th) and replacing it with a black bar that simply says “censored.” The move comes just over a week after a group of state attorneys general claimed there weren’t enough “protections” against potentially illegal ads promoting prostitution. It’s not clear if the closure is permanent, and it appears to only effect ads in the United States.

The listings again became a convenient political scapegoat after the jailhouse suicide last month of a former medical student who was awaiting trial in the killing of a masseuse he met through Craigslist. Critics have likened the services to “virtual pimping”, while Craigslist maintained the site was carrying ads even tamer than those published by some newspapers.

Like many other free online forums, Craigslist typically does not review ads before they are posted by users. But in 2008, under pressure from 40 state attorneys general, Craigslist began requiring posters to provide a working phone number and pay a fee for placing an ad in what is now the adult services section. Several months later, Craigslist adopted a manual screening process in which postings are reviewed before publishing. But despite these efforts at conciliation, officials continued to claim Craigslist was still not doing enough to stop illegal ads from appearing. The company said Saturday it would issue a statement on the matter, though it didn’t say when.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, one of the 17 attorneys general who sent last week’s threat letter, said in a statement that he welcomed the change and was trying to verify Craigslist’s official policy going forward. In an August 24th letter, the state attorneys general said Craigslist should remove the section because it couldn’t adequately block potentially illegal ads promoting prostitution and child trafficking.

Authorities point to the case of 24-year-old Philip Markoff as a prime example of the dangers posed by Craigslist services. The former medical student was accused of killing a masseuse he met through the hugely popular classified advertising site, which was founded by Craig Newmark. Markoff committed suicide in the Boston jail where he was awaiting trial.

Craigslist’s adult services section carried ads for everything from personal massages to a night’s companionship, which critics say veered into prostitution. Craigslist’s CEO Jim Buckmaster said in a May blog posting that the company’s ads were no worse than those published by the alternative newspaper chain Village Voice Media. He cited one explicit ad which included the phrase: “anything goes $90.”

John Palfrey, a Harvard University law professor and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said the move from Craigslist was still a victory because it moved the ads off a highly visible location. “Will people be able to find these ads online? The answer is almost certainly,” he said. “Will they be able to find these on legitimate sites? I think the answer is probably not.”

Regular readers will remember my previous columns on this subject, August 17^th and August 26^th; this is merely the latest verse in the same old song of tyranny. Hypocritical politicians, frustrated by their complete impotence in the ongoing war to stop middle-class men from enjoying the same convenient access to women that they themselves enjoy, found a high-profile scapegoat in Craigslist and have pursued it for several years now. This result was therefore both inevitable and unsurprising; if not even Standard Oil or AT&T could stand up to the massed power of politicians out to make political coin, how could a comparatively tiny internet ad company hope to? I am pleased to note, however, that Craigslist got in one final dig by calling a spade a spade: Rather than simply removing the section, its place was covered by a black bar saying “censored”, which is the bald truth.

Though regular readers are probably almost as good by now at translating these anti-prostitution articles as I am, let’s look at some of the low points in this one. First there’s the idea of an “illegal ad”; as far as I know, only an ad which violates “truth in advertising” laws can be illegal. An ad for an illegal service is still itself legal unless some local law specifically prohibits the advertisement, which is why escort services can have phone book ads. Then in the second paragraph we are again subjected to the moronic “subjugated whore” stereotype; an ad placed by a woman for her own services magically becomes “pimping” when sex is involved because (all together now) everybody knows all whores have pimps. If a woman places an ad in Craigslist for maid services, is Craigslist a “virtual slave-dealer” because some maids in history were slaves? In the fourth paragraph we are again insulted by the equation of voluntary adult prostitution with “child trafficking”, and in the fifth paragraph we are treated to the bizarre notion that while ads for personal services are too dangerous to allow, personals ads which allow inexperienced, naïve adult women to meet complete strangers are not. Obviously, this is because all whores are imbeciles who are incompetent to make our own decisions and therefore need to be protected (all together again) “for our own good”. But the last paragraph is simultaneously the funniest and saddest of all; a Harvard Law professor is such an ignorant imbecile that he proclaims Craigslist the most “legitimate” source of online prostitution ads, when it is in fact regarded by both escorts and clients as the least legitimate one!

Though the politicians will crow, strut and preen like cartoon pimps, claiming a great “victory” over lawlessness and loose women (or “victims of human trafficking”, whichever one we are this week in that particular politician’s district), they have as usual accomplished exactly nothing. Escort services and established independents don’t advertise on Craigslist, nor do streetwalkers; most of the girls who do are either low-end independents or “semi-pros” with “regular” jobs who are just doing it for a little extra money. There are many other internet classified sites (such as Backpage) which accept erotic ads, not to mention the plethora of escort websites and local newspaper ads as mentioned in the news article. And surely these lawyers recognize that they haven’t even succeeded in getting the girls off of Craigslist; they’ll just go undercover in “therapeutic services” (i.e. massage) or the personals (watch for a spike in “women seeking men” ads) which don’t cost anything and are completely anonymous, thus removing the danger of Craigslist being forced to surrender their records via court order. If anything, this “victory” has actually cost the busybodies a weapon they could use to victimize low-end escorts, thus proving that they really don’t care about reality, just appearances.

Of course, that’s the way it always is; ever wonder why escort services are legal (and rarely attacked by government-employed lawyers)? It’s because lawyers are among our best customers, and they don’t want to cut off easy access to easy women by persecuting the services. So they allow the cops to harass streetwalkers and play sadistic little tricks on escorts and call girls, knowing full well that even if a few high-quality girls are scared out of the profession by police shenanigans there will still be plenty of others available just by opening the yellow pages and picking up the phone. These sleazy sons of bitches don’t care how many individual girls get hurt; most of them prefer endless variety anyhow and consider individual escorts to be a disposable commodity. This is illustrated by the anecdotal evidence that though easily 10% of my clientele were lawyers, I don’t recall a single regular who was.

Lawyers by their very nature are bigger prostitutes than any escort could ever be; we only hire our services, but lawyers sell their souls. A prostitute is willing to pretend to like a man in private for an hour, but a lawyer is willing to pretend to like him, believe him and espouse his cause for weeks, months or years, not merely in private but for all the world to see. Most prostitutes reject customers who seem dangerous or for whom we feel strong antipathy; few lawyers would reject the business of even the most frightening, reprehensible or morally repugnant client. And while we are willing to speak little white lies in order to stroke a man’s ego and make him feel good about himself, most lawyers are willing to vomit forth the most abominable falsehoods in order to destroy the lives of men they believe to be innocent or secure the release of men they believe to be both guilty and dangerous. How most of them must hate us! The subtlety of our whoring makes the egregiousness of theirs all the more obvious in comparison, and one of us can make more money with no formal education than the majority of lawyers can make after years of expensive and grueling law school. Worst of all, Pompous Q. Snob, Esquire is forced to swallow his pride and pay up if he wants pussy from one of us, just like any of the “little men” he looks down upon. Other men and unprofessional women may be awed by his credentials, titles, and position, but the only thing we care about is his cash.

Since politicians exceed other lawyers in whoredom by the same degree to which lawyers exceed the most mercantile of prostitutes, their hatred of us is that much greater and is magnified by the fact that our lives are a constantly reiterated affirmation of their complete inability to control everything and everyone; no matter how many of their perverse desires we may grant in bed, we deny them their greatest psychosexual thrill: The illusion of power over others, which they crave above all else. Most people are willing to crawl to the politician, licking his boots in order to gain a few scraps from his table, but the whore merely laughs at him and reverses the relationship while providing living proof of the inability of his profession to eradicate or control ours. But desires thus frustrated always seek a scapegoat, and Craigslist is simply the latest. As long as society allows its least mature, least spiritually evolved members to hold positions of leadership, and as long as we collectively allow governments to attempt to dictate the consensual behavior of individuals, this kind of thing will continue to happen with depressing regularity.

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Here We Go Again…

Posted in Current Events, History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged cops, Craigslist, dirty, fantasy, Here We Go Again, hysteria, law, neofeminism, Prohibition (alcohol), psychology, Rhode Island, slavery, social purity, stereotypes, underage, United Kingdom on August 26, 2010| 18 Comments »

The more things change, the more they stay the same. – Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Despite what the naïve and the chronically optimistic like to believe, human nature does not change; individual people are the same today as they were at the beginning of human civilization some twelve thousand years ago. And while we have made some social progress in that time, it is by no means the one-way trip imagined by the idealists but rather a zigzagging course full of false starts, backslides, missteps, blind alleys and going in circles. Societies often ignore the obvious solutions to their problems, make problems out of things which aren’t, and return time and again to the same old nonsense despite the fact that it has never worked in the past.

In my column of August 9^th I talked about the “white slavery” hysteria concocted by the social purists of the late 19^th century to provide an excuse so the general public would swallow their foolish and repressive campaign against prostitution. Proponents of this hysteria purported that tens of thousands of young girls were being abducted by slave traders and forced to serve in brothels in foreign countries, and they demanded tougher laws against voluntary adult prostitution in order to combat it. The fact that extensive (not to mention expensive) investigations found absolutely no evidence for any of this reassured almost nobody, as is typical in a moral panic. Fortunately, such manufactured hysterias tend to vanish like the insubstantial shadows they are in the harsh light of true crises, and the “white slavery” hysteria was no exception; by the end of the First World War it had abated. Unfortunately, it is impossible to formulate concise laws against nonexistent threats, so legislation born of such hysteria is nearly always incredibly broad and unconstitutionally vague; the Mann Act was just such a piece of legislation, and it was for decades employed as a vehicle for malicious persecution until the U.S. Congress finally limited its scope in 1986 to actual criminal acts rather than undefined “immoral purposes”.

But just as Prohibition returned in the guise of the “War on Drugs”, and the witch hysteria of the 16^th century returned as the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and ‘90s, so the “white slavery” hysteria has returned as the contemporary hysteria over “human trafficking”. As in the first two decades of the 20^th century, exorbitant claims are made about the extent of the sex slave trade in Western countries and used to justify laws against voluntary adult prostitution; all over the United States prostitution laws which were defended only a decade ago on “moral” grounds or by the excuse that prostitution attracts crime (a vague and bizarre notion in itself) are now being defended on the grounds that they are “needed” to combat “human trafficking” despite the fact that these laws were enacted long before the current moral panic. It’s a bit as though governments were trying to defend 1930s laws against marijuana use on the grounds that they were “needed” to combat the use of methamphetamine, or justifying 19^th-century laws against homosexuality on the grounds that they were “needed” to combat the spread of AIDS, except of course for the fact that methamphetamine and AIDS actually exist in the countries with those laws.

The hysteria is particularly troubling in the United Kingdom, where prostitution has been technically legal (though still persecuted) for several decades; it is obvious that the new “white slavery” hysteria-mongers intend to turn back the clock on prostitution rights if allowed. Thus the potential damage is greater than in the US, where prostitution is suppressed anyhow and the renamed “white slavery” hysteria is just the latest excuse in a long parade of stupid, dishonest, hypocritical rationalizations for tyranny against women. Since Stephen Paterson’s blog about UK prostitution law has already published an exhaustive summary of the claims made by “human trafficking” alarmists contrasted with the actual truth about those claims, it would be silly of me to attempt to cover the same ground over again; instead, I’ll just provide a link to the article here, and enthusiastically recommend it to my readers. Another excellent article, from The Guardian of last October 20^th, can be found here.

Just as at the end of the 19^th century, the “white slavery”/”human trafficking” hysteria springs from the neurotic perversion of sexually-repressed middle-class white women who have derailed the feminist movement into their own personal crusade against men, sex and those who provide men with fair access to sex (i.e. whores). But unlike a hundred years ago, “moral purity” won’t really play with the average voter any longer, so the neofeminists (IPC calls them “fundamentalist feminists”) have been forced to hide their hatred of us behind the pretense that they wish to “save” us, as discussed yesterday.

Since I really do want you to read the various things I’ve linked above (especially the Wikipedia article on moral panics and the Stephen Paterson blog), I’m going to do something unusual today and cut my column short so as to give you the time to do so. But I’ll leave you with this second entry in the “Here We Go Again” department, a paraphrase of an AP article which describes a renewal of the control freaks’ war against Craigslist which I mentioned in my column of August 17^th.

The attorneys general of seventeen of the United States announced Tuesday (August 24^th, 2010) that they have sent a joint letter calling on Craigslist to get rid of its adult services category because they say the website cannot adequately block potentially illegal ads; they say Craigslist is not completely screening out ads that promote prostitution and child trafficking. The site creators pledged in 2008 to improve their policing efforts. The states which participated in this exercise in tyranny were Arkansas, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia; fortunately, Craigslist is based in San Francisco, California (the home of the American prostitutes’ rights movement) and is therefore not subject to the laws of those 17 states.

Note the linking of adult prostitution with child trafficking as though they were related; note also that prostitution was technically legal in Rhode Island from 1980 to 2009 (though still persecuted as in the UK) but was outlawed again on November 3 of last year, thus proving the statements I made in the first paragraph. I’m sure nobody will be surprised when I tell you that the new law was championed by a privileged white woman and supported by cops who claimed they needed it to “conduct sting operations at brothels where women and children were abused and enslaved by pimps and sex-traffickers.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

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