I disagree that legal minors “cannot” consent to sex. Our society doesn’t allow them to consent due to the possible consequences. It does, however, allow them to consent to some other things due to the potential consequences being (correctly or incorrectly) perceived as acceptable. When we pretend that legal minors are incapable of consent, we infantilize them and open the door to bad-faith arguments like this one. There is no magical moment of “Shazam!” at which teens are mystically imbued with the ability to consent, but there are various arbitrary legal lines at which society recognizes their consent to various things as valid. Some may have been making valid choices for YEARS by the time the State recognizes those choices as valid; some may not ever be capable of making valid choices, even though legally allowed. That is, unfortunately, the only way large societies have yet figured out to recognize rights without somehow testing ever single person for decision-making ability every year from 13 to 30 (a process which would itself be ripe for abuse and political manipulation). The only real solution to all the conflicting ages of responsibility is to stop letting the State micromanage so many different areas of our lives, and to stop letting it criminalize so very many decisions people of any age make over their own lives and bodies.
Posts Tagged ‘cult of the child’
Legal Fiction
Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged adolescence, agency denial, consensual crime, cult of the child, psychology, Shazam!, Still a Child, The Shape of the Spoon, Too Young To Know on June 10, 2021| 5 Comments »
Links #516
Posted in Music, Obituary, tagged cult of the child, drugs, ethics, imaginative fiction, Missouri, politicians, racism on May 24, 2020| 4 Comments »
How dare you! – Greta Thunberg
Here’s yet another unusual song cover to prove that “cultural appropriation” is awesome; it was provided by Radley Balko, and the links above it are from Franklin Harris, Rick Pettit, Kevin Wilson, Popehat (x2), The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, and Stephen Lemons, in that order.
- R.I.P. Fred Willard.
- The shopping cart test.
- How to solve all problems.
- Antidepressants or Tolkien?
- Buying a TV set while black.
- Retro-future tech is mighty cool.
- The best satire cleaves closely to the truth.
From the Archives
- Clubs need to learn that the bad old days of exploiting dancers are over.
- Another “sex trafficking” hysteria film for future generations to laugh at.
- Rubmaps may be the new prohibitionist bogeyman to replace Backpage.
- One of the best feminist arguments for decriminalization I’ve ever seen.
- Most of this is the usual garbage, but there’s one rather amusing point.
- This will be much more common due to the ramped-up war on whores.
- Finally setting the record straight on decriminalization in Rhode Island.
- Strippers are spearheading the movement for sex worker labor rights.
- Liz Brown, Kaytlin Bailey & Maya Morena on “sex trafficking” hysteria.
- Despite propaganda, what they’re targeting are ordinary escort sites.
- Better to be seen as dangerous seductresses than pathetic “victims”.
- Attractive women have been used to market sports for generations.
- Anti-human rights groups voice support for “Cuckoo Clock” McCain.
- A retrospective of my work from May 2015 and (mostly) May 2016.
- Post-Backpage, anti-whore pogroms turn back to low-hanging fruit.
- Mar Brettmann is a sleazy opportunist selling anti-whore snake oil.
- You are not “accountable” to government; it is accountable to you.
- Another twist in the New Zealand migrant sex worker controversy.
- Because mentioning their sex practices wasn’t quite lurid enough.
- Grown woman pretends to be harmed by lame ’40s elevator joke.
- Most “prostitution” cases come apart like wet toilet paper at trial.
- Another fashion magazine comes out on the side of sex workers.
- How to totally destroy your relationship with your teen offspring.
- Even Reuters is starting to listen to sex workers about “rescue”.
- An unbelievable number of useful idiots complained about this.
- A rare case where a rapist of sex workers is actually convicted.
- Even some mainstream journalists saw though Copmala’s lies.
- Not an outcome one would expect in prohibitionist New York.
- This sleazy tactic started in Canada, then spread to the UK.
- More racist cop sexual fantasies about Nigerian juju rituals.
- In a post-apocalyptic future, a predator stalks human prey.
- Abolishing due process for whores established a precedent.
- Cops, fascism, Grumpy Cat, Tim Conway and much more.
- Being well-educated doesn’t mean knowing everything.
- Touring the Scottish Highlands with Brooke Magnanti.
- Another good anti-prohibition article at New Republic.
- Marijuana prohibition will soon be a thing of the past.
- We did warn you this wouldn’t stop with sex workers.
- A “dark underworld” that’s somehow “in plain sight”.
- Rape victims are increasingly treated like criminals.
- Dare I hope for a return of “creepy clown” hysteria?
- Traveling in a good, though exhausted, headspace.
- What our government calls a “correctional facility”.
- Cops, Greek, cake, nightmares and much more.
- Please, David Rosen, become a prohibitionist.
- These are some of the nuns behind Ruhama.
- Pictures of Brooke Magnanti & me in the UK.
- Why do people have such trouble with this?
- I’m not going to bother quoting this trash.
- Do you give discounts for regular clients?
- The state says this isn’t a punishment.
- Then they came for the strippers…
- A pretty typical “leader”, really.
- This totalitarian idea won’t die.
- Just 1500 isolated incidents.
- On replacing my old car.
- The end of the internet?
- Rapist cop of the week.
- Welcome to the future.
- It’s already here.
Child Saint
Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, tagged California, cult of the child, Israel, propaganda, psychology, Sweden on November 18, 2019| 14 Comments »
I find the fixation on Swedish climate hysteric Greta Thunberg fascinating; she resembles one of the “child saints” who often appear in cults and relatively young religions, and are held by the True Believers of that faith to be especially pure in their prophetic pronouncements from the deity or other metaphysical source. Thunberg just parrots the same old apocalyptic “the world will end in 12 years” nonsense as other fanatics trying to hijack genuine concern for climate change to support their mad social engineering schemes, but her worshipers imagine that her complete lack of adult life experience and her scant knowledge of either meteorology or economics somehow makes the silly pronouncements more true when she repeats them (especially if she screams at adults while doing so). And when sensible people (or even foolish ones who pretend climate change isn’t real because they find it inconvenient) correctly point out the absurdity of venerating a troubled teenager who isn’t actually an expert in anything (except perhaps histrionics) as the font of all wisdom on a very complex scientific subject, the Gretists get as offended as any fundamentalist Muslim confronted with a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.
The most interesting and disturbing part of the phenomenon is the proliferation of icons of Thunberg serving simultaneously as objects of veneration for the faithful and, presumably, as a sort of scarecrow to the infidels. I mean, what’s the intended message of this one from a cafeteria in Tel Aviv? “Holy Saint Greta, bless our utensils that we may endure these raw vegetables thou hast given us to sustain our sinful bodies…”? As one who attended Catholic schools for a dozen years, I find this very familiar. Then there’s the giant mural in San Francisco, whose unmistakeable “Big Brother” vibe reveals a hilariously-huge blind spot on the artist’s part, unless of course he’s intentionally trolling One Atmosphere, the patrons who paid for the ugly thing. Naturally, their spokespeople uttered all the usual fashionable nonsense about “raising awareness” and “sending a message”, but don’t want people thinking too hard about the fact that the project used over 700 cans of petrochemical-based aerosol spray paint (plus sealers, plus the detergents used to prepare the surface, plus transportation costs for the workers, plus…) As you can probably guess, this observation met with some pushback from her disciples on Twitter, who claim that the environmental impact from the project is negligible; actually, I agree with that, but I’m not the one who tries to shame people out of using plastic straws or spray deodorant, or who flies two crew members across the Atlantic so she can make a big show of crossing the ocean in a sailboat instead of flying only one person (herself). But in religion, facts are not important; only symbols and “messages” are. And apparently Thunberg’s devotees think her “message” is important enough to justify littering the Earth with creepy testaments to their adoration. 
The Cult
Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged adolescence, cult of the child, hysteria, psychology, sex rays, tabula rasa on October 4, 2019| 6 Comments »
I’ll be so glad when the current incarnation of the Cult of the Child ends. After almost 40 years of mass cultural child-worship I’m so sick of it I want to puke. This isn’t the first time Western society has been obsessed with the bizarre belief that “children” (which doesn’t only mean actual children, but also biological adults the law defines as “children”) are spiritually “pure” and asexual, while simultaneously being blank slates for “socialization” to write upon, and yet magically wise, so that any stupid opinions they vomit out of their ignorant, inexperienced heads come straight from the gods. The Victorians were also obsessed with this mawkish nonsense, and it made several other short-lived appearances in overcivilized cultures over the previous millennia.
In the current incarnation of this perennial madness, “children” are held to have no legal rights, yet at the same time to be prophets no one is allowed to criticize. “Children” are adored like cultic icons, and their ignorant opinions (contaminated by adolescent hormonal emotions and uncontaminated by anything like advanced study of whatever the opined-upon topic might be) held to be above criticism, yet they are denied even the most basic freedoms enjoyed by “children” or young adults in every other culture, past or present. Teens have fewer rights than active-duty military, yet their immature fantasies about how the world works (or “should” work) are revered like the utterances of sibyls and there’s even talk of giving them the right to vote (while denying them the ability to consent to sex, drink, or even do a lot of the basic things adults take for granted). It’s typical self-contradictory religious madness.
The point of society is to prepare children for their future lives as adults; it is not to artificially “protect” them from reality by shielding them from anything that might upset them and congratulating them for accomplishments they should’ve mastered at half their current age, nor to coddle them by pretending their immature notions are actually deep and mature thoughts. And it certainly isn’t to keep them stunted and trapped in an artificially-extended childhood like china dolls in a display case, nor to limit the rights of adults to those appropriate for people who still believe that supersonic flying reindeer are a reasonable concept.
In the News (#937)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Broker in Pillage, agency denial, asset seizure, Backpage, California, Cambodia, censorship, child "protective" services, Colorado, comics, cops, cult of the child, Dangerous Speech, dehumanization, drugs, Election Day, fascism, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Negative Secondary Effects, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, politicians, pregnancy, Property of the State, Pyrrhic Victory, rape, See No Evil, sex offender registry, sex rays, Shame Shame, slavery, Spain, streetwalkers, stripping, Surplus Women, surveillance, The Caribbean, To Molest and Rape, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Virginia, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on May 18, 2019| 3 Comments »
Women…are being undermined by a system that should be supporting them. – Joan Phillips
Over the past [two] years, two women were murdered in [DeKalb County, Georgia]…one…in 2017…[and] the…second…a few months ago…[but sociopathic] neighbors…[are more concerned with] solicitation [on a local stroll than the deaths of two human beings]…They said they see it in early mornings when school kids are waiting for the bus…A [WSB-TV] photographer also rode along with DeKalb County police to…listen…to [copaganda about] human trafficking…
Note that this is the same copsucking TV station which we saw demonizing people’s religion a few days ago.
…[the] vastly profitable and largely unregulated [sex industry] has…become infested with criminality, turning Spain into a global hub for human trafficking and sexual slavery…the scale of the problem…is staggering…the [new prohibitionist] Spanish government [claims] that up to 90% of women working in prostitution could be victims of trafficking…[Spanish cops claim to have] rescued 5,695 people from slavery but acknowledge that thousands more remain under the control of…gangs operating with impunity…
Most journalists abandoned most of their ethics long ago:
Last June, Florida Today decided to…scrap its traditional gallery of mug shots…an increasing number of editors…have recognized that the American style of crime reporting— picking sensational cases with the most odious details, printing mug shots and full names, and not providing contextual information on crime and statistics in stories —needs a long-overdue overhaul. Still, on the internet, the salacious news story and the quest for “hits” too often subsumes conscientious reporting. Despite the fact that most prisoners will be released, permanent digital punishment in the form of salacious reporting or mug shots hinders reentry…
Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (#627)
It’s so good to see more widespread recognition of this:
…Dr Joan Phillips said while there was a lot of [hoohah about “sex trafficking”] in the Caribbean…it seem[s] to be [simply] a matter of people moving for…work…She argued that too often, Caribbean countries were made to feel that “something needs to be done” about [what the US calls] human trafficking and that it needs to be done now…“we in the Caribbean…are being pushed to look at something that we are not sure…is happening but because of the political and economic influence of US foreign policy we need to do something or we will lose funding”… she argued…that…[US bureaucrats and politicians do] not take into consideration the willing movement of people to work in various settings including nightclubs…“The…issue with the sex [trafficking] paradigm is that poor women are becoming poorer and…the systems that have been put in place [to supposedly help them] are lip service…we need to look at…the ideology about trafficking in a totally different way…Caribbean governments have to…deci[de]…whether they accept the foreign policy of the US and talk about this sexual trafficking and put all this law in place and not focus on…the bigger issues…poverty, vulnerability, lack of education, the need for support for children, unemployment and so on”…
Anything to avoid the word “rape”:
A Richmond [Virginia cop] has been indicted by a…grand jury…Michael Bryson…has been charged with a misdemeanor count of…sexually abusing the victim against their will by force, threat, intimidation, or ruse…
This is beginning to look like the beginning of the end of the War on Drugs:
A referendum in Denver to decriminalize psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms”, appears to have passed by a narrow margin…But the activists who worked to get the issue on the ballot say their fight was the beginning of a larger movement…Cindy Sovine, a political consultant who worked on the initiative [said]…”Whether you’re using this plant for a medical reason, or a spiritual reason, or a recreational reason, you should not be going to jail or losing your children for it”…
The government’s entire case against Backpage is based on lies and wanking fantasies:
The Arizona Republic recently…claim[ed] prosecutors had revealed “new evidence”, which demonstrated that Michael Lacey, a former owner of the now defunct classified ad website Backpage.com, was aware of and complicit in sex trafficking taking place on the site. This so-called evidence consisted of internal Backpage emails from 2012…where Lacey and others discuss how to respond to an inquiry from…Nicholas Kristof, a notorious prig, who, in preparation for an opinion piece, had asked Backpage to comment on the case of a 13 year-old girl alleged…[by disgraced racist prosecutor Lauren Hersh to have been] advertised on Backpage…The…quote from [Lacey’s] email…reads…”We do how many million ads, and he picks out one, tells us by the end of the day and wants our total response by a.m.? Of course there are kids who get through the system. As there are in bars. This makes pursuit of solution…more critical rather than scoring political points”. Given…that Backpage regularly cooperated with law enforcement in order to catch perpetrators who were misusing the site, only a latter-day Inspector Javert would look at such an email and assume that it established guilt. It would be far easier to draw the opposite conclusion, that the email’s author does not want underage individuals accessing Backpage…
Do you really need more evidence of the link between anti-sex work and anti-abortion campaigns?
Phalla was a surrogate paid to carry [a] baby for a couple in China. Now, due to [totalitarian] measures enacted by Cambodian authorities late last year…Phalla is among dozens of women forced to raise [someone else’s] child…If she doesn’t, she faces up to 20 years in prison for human trafficking…Phalla had a caesarean birth in August [while pigs lurked and watched]…Three months later, she and her newborn were released on bail, on the strict condition that she did not give the child away and [was forced] to raise the child until she turned 18…Phalla must present herself — baby in hand — to a local police office once a month. She cannot change her address without the investigating judge’s permission, and failing to meet these bail conditions could result in her arrest…
Forced parenthood. Registered “sex offender” type treatment. “Human trafficking” as a catch-all. Get it yet?
Another prosecution for drawings of fictional characters:
The former commander of the 49th Medical Support Squadron at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico will face a civilian trial later…over accusations of possessing [what prosecutors call] virtual child pornography, and will also be court-martialed in August. Lt. Col. Keith Vollenweider…[is said to have] knowingly possessed “visual depictions, such as drawings, cartoons and virtual images, that depict minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct”…
Note that people have been similarly charged for possessing Japanese manga books because the characters appear “child-like” by Western aesthetic standards.
Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services…has a practice of obtaining blank [child abduction] orders pre-signed by judges. Social workers then fill out the documents with the necessary information after they’ve been signed by a judge and then use them to [abduct] children from parents who[m somebody decided to accuse of something]…no judge actually reviews these orders, or the evidence used to justify separating a family, before signing them. This…galling abuse of…basic civil liberties…only came to an end after an investigative report by WDRB…spotlighted the practice…
San Francisco…is…on track to be the first municipality in the United States to [officially] ban use of facial recognition technology by the city government…the bill also requires all other types of surveillance technologies—like automatic license plate readers, predictive policing software, and cell phone surveillance towers—to only be adopted by city agencies following a public notice and vote by the Board of Supervisors. The bill also requires [bureaucratic] policies for how surveillance technologies will [supposedly] be used by the city government…A similar proposal to ban the use of facial recognition across the bay in Oakland…will be debated later this month…There was [already] some pushback from [copsuckers and badge-lickers, especially those who]…give [cops access to] their private surveillance camera[s]…
Nobody will be safe until this odious, contemptible practice is recognized as unconstitutional:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed three bills into law…that significantly limit police’s ability to [steal] property…11 other states…have passed laws requiring convictions before forfeitures in some or all cases…Three states have abolished civil forfeiture altogether. In Hawaii, a bill banning civil forfeiture is currently awaiting the governor’s signature…the new Michigan laws…still…[allow people to] be pressured by [cops] to sign away their property [under threat]…
Negative Secondary Effects (#933)
A lot of people are growing sick of the oppression of sex workers:
Hundreds of people have signed a petition backing workers at a strip club weeks after calls were made for its licence to be revoked. [Prohibitionists who paid men to secretly film dancers without their consent claim their snitches] saw dancers performing sex acts at Spearmint Rhino in Sheffield…An open letter with the petition backing the workers at the club said: “We believe sex work should not be stigmatised as uniquely or especially oppressive to women in the context of widespread misogyny and male violence against women. Sex work is legal, and advocating to take away women’s choice to do safe, legal work is anti-feminist and anti-worker”…
In the News (#936)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Procrustean Bed, A Woman's Point of View, abortion, agency denial, censorship, China, cops, Cops and Robbers, cult of the child, Denmark, dirty, Disaster, drugs, Facebook, fascism, Florida, Georgia, Guinea Pigs, Haiti, harm reduction, Hawaii, hysteria, illegal aliens, internet, law, Madonna/whore, marriage, Massachusetts, neofeminism, New Zealand, Ohio, One Size Fits All, Oregon, Pakistan, Permanent Record, porn, pragmatism, propaganda, Property of the State, racism, rape, Real People, Saint Death, sex offender registry, sex rays, shame, streetwalkers, surveillance, teachers, Texas, Thailand, Things We Choose To Do Together, Think of the Children!, Top Cop, Worse Than I Thought on May 15, 2019| 2 Comments »
We don’t know what we’re doing. – rare true prohibitionist statement
…My mother came to Denmark as a marriage migrant. She received a tourist visa in Thailand, came to Denmark, and put an ad in the local newspaper with the headline “Thai Woman Seeking”. The man who became my stepfather answered. They got married, and shortly thereafter I came to Denmark to live with them…People have always looked down on my mom or pitied her. They have condemned my stepfather. And they have felt misplaced sympathy for me…If my mother had not migrated from Thailand, I would probably still be in Isaan today. I would have two or three children and work in my family’s rice paddies, at a factory, or have some other kind of low paying job. Maybe I would have to migrate to Bangkok to work an unskilled job at a factory, leaving my children in the care of their grandparents in those months where there is no work to be done in the fields. Maybe I would have to work in the sex industry in Pattaya and send home money to my children and my mother, because sex work is the field where you earn the most as an unskilled female labourer…Why are the women who change their lives by selling sex or by getting married scorned?…Why do we look down on women who simply use the opportunities they have been given? There is no right or wrong way to migrate. There are just women trying to create better lives for themselves and their children with whatever cards they have been dealt…
Pakistan…arrested eight Chinese nationals [and accused them of] trafficking Pakistani girls to China and forcing them into prostitution…and organ trade…Pakistani…[cops also] raided a wedding ceremony…and arrested the Chinese groom…after…[calling the] marriage [false]…
If this keeps up, soon we’ll just be able to abolish nearly all laws and call everything cops choose to accuse anyone of “human trafficking”. Think of the time and labor savings! Threaten everyone with life in prison, let them plead down to one of a few minor and equally-vague offenses like “money laundering”, “conspiracy”, “racketeering” or “hate”, then put them on ankle monitors for a decade or two. International Utopia!
Another bunch of racist vigilantes playing games with people’s lives:
This is the story of a group of [busybodies] so agitated by news of [women of] other [races running lucrative businesses instead of doing menial labor for whites]…that they launched a vigilante response…[like all busybodies] the women weren’t affected by the massage parlors personally. They’d been driving right by them for [their whole lives] without noticing them at all…But the spas loomed large for the women after they learned [how much money migrant]…women…from China [could make]…as prostitutes [without having to kowtow to bourgeois white Boston puritans]…“We decided as a group we want to [harass] the women”…
First they tried to spy on them, then sic the pigs on them; when the cops told them luggage and TV sets were not evidence of “sex slavery” they decided to start a new NIMBY club called “Operation Rescue”. Go ahead and read the whole thing if you want a deep dive into the tiny, ugly, racist minds of women who aren’t satisfied with merely keeping the brown folks in line by occasionally calling the cops on them for existing in public spaces.
Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together:
Juan Leon-Gomez…was arrested…after a mother reported that her daughter was missing…the [now-pregnant] 11-year-old was found in [Leon-Gomez’s] bedroom closet…[he] was already the subject of an ongoing sexual assault investigation involving the girl…Ohio’s new “heartbeat bill”, which is slated to take effect in mid-July, means that the 11-year-old girl could be forced to carry the child to birth, regardless of the fact that she was raped…
“Narco saints,” or patron saints of the drug cartels, are making the criminals even bolder…[according to racist propaganda the] Drug Enforcement Administration…has [been trying to push for over a decade]…with…li[ttle success except among bootlickers and deeply credulous cops]…Atlanta DEA [pig]…Robert Murphy…[imagines] shrines of “narco saints”…are [magically] facilitating the flooding of Georgia streets with illegal drugs including heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and fentanyl…[via their magic powers] to recruit and embolden the…[drug dealers this pig tellingly refers to as] soldiers…[illiterate redneck] District Attorney Tracy Graham Lawson says she was so alarmed by the “narco saints”…she [went to church and then] used [stolen] money to bring an expert [propagandist] from Texas to [indoctrinate] local [cops so they’d have another convenient excuse to murder Hispanic men on sight]…“Why it’s so dangerous…is they believe they’re [bulletproof warriors] and they’re not afraid of death,” Lawson said…
Obviously this sex-ray contaminated money would have “sexualized” the childen!
Robert Kraft tried to donate $100,000 to a charity that educates children in Haiti—but it rejected the money because of allegations he [had consensual] sexual [contact with an adult woman]…“The last thing I wanted was a donation from Robert Kraft,” [said] Patrick Moynihan of The Haitian Project…“I could not be [sensible]. I had to [be a prudish moron who cares more about virtue signaling than the education of children in poverty]”…
Sex workers need to bury all prohibitionists of every kind in lawsuits:
Nicole Gililland…had been doing well as a nursing student at Southwestern Oregon Community College…She was making the dean’s list and was about a year away from graduating…when…the college decided to run her out of school after it found out she used to perform in porn. This February, she filed a federal lawsuit against the school and some of its personnel, charging them with breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and subjecting her to a hostile educational environment. Experts say this…could be the first time a plaintiff has used Title IX to make an accusation of discrimination based on a person’s status as a current or former sex worker…
Just a reminder that one of Palantir’s first contracts was helping cops spy on sex workers:
Palantir, the CIA-funded data analysis company founded by billionaire Trump adviser Peter Thiel, provided software at the center of a 2017 operation targeting unaccompanied children and their families…newly released Homeland Security documents show….[that] Palantir…spokespe[ople were lying when they claimed]…that Palantir software is strictly involved in criminal investigations as opposed to deportations…Far from detached support in “cross-border criminal investigations,” the materials released this week confirm the role Palantir technology played in facilitating hundreds of arrests, only a small fraction of which led to criminal prosecutions…
A Woman’s Point of View (#805)
The push for decrim in Hawaii isn’t dead yet:
…Harm Reduction Hawaii…sponsor[ed] presentations by Dame Catherine Healy…on May 9 and 10. She is a former sex worker and advocate for sex worker rights. In 1986 she was a cofounder of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective. She was made a Dame of the British Empire due to her long time work aimed at…decriminalization of prostitution in 2003. Recent reports from the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women indicate there is no evidence of sex trafficking there. This is in a country with four times the population of Hawaii…We believe evidence-based approaches need to supplant the sorts of hysteria that has often taken over the public press in discussions over sex work…
Facebook has the money to protect itself from the monster it helped unleash on the internet:
Under FOSTA/SESTA…Section 230 no longer protects platforms from liability in cases where third-party content is [claimed by a prosecutor or ambulance-chaser to be] somehow connected to sex trafficking…Facebook support[ed this censorship] effort…But now [it] has been forced to send lawyers to defend itself from two lawsuits brought in Houston, Texas, under the same FOSTA/SESTA law that [it] backed…and it…is…argue[ing] that Section 230 of the CDA protects the firm from being held liable for the activities of users, no matter what those activities may be…[even though] thanks to [Facebook’s own support of] FOSTA/SESTA, that protection no longer exists…
A lawsuit filed by Harris County seeks to [rob and harass] sex workers in the Bissonnet Track, a Houston [stroll]…The lawsuit, which targets 86 “nuisance” individuals, is [intended to bleed marginalized people with] fines in addition to…criminal charges. [SWERFs are angry that] the measure ignores the[ir preferred narrative] that most sex workers are victims [because they want sex workers starved, evicted and enslaved in sweatshops rather than openly criminalized]…
Florida prohibitionists are now tripling down on their awful anti-whore laws:
Florida lawmakers just voted to create a public registry of people [accused by cops of] attempting to pay for sex. After an initial defeat…the registry—arguably the worst part of a new Florida crime bill capitalizing on human-trafficking propaganda—was revived and reinserted before the measure’s passage…The final version…creates a database of [adults caught in cop sting operations]…targets strip clubs, and mandates that a slew of state workers and businesses jump through new hoops to accommodate a few politicians’ latest attempt to get their names in the press…The Soliciting for Prostitution Public Database will list anyone who has been convicted of, or plead guilty, to “soliciting, inducing, enticing, or procuring another to commit prostitution, lewdness, or assignation” [which of course includes sex workers arranging duos or giving references or other help to other sex workers]…The new measure also classifies strip clubs as “adult theaters”—then makes it a first-degree misdemeanor criminal offense for the operator of any adult theater to fail to keep proper records. The law also creates wide new categories of workers and businesses that are [forced to endure]…anti-prostitution and pro-surveillance propaganda disguised as tips for teaching bystanders how to prevent human trafficking…
Just in case you needed another reason to be disgusted by this power-mad sociopath:
Kamala Harris is making the potential punishment of social media platforms that don’t censor what she [represents] as hateful speech a focal point of her presidential campaign…[she] wants social media to do more to stop…ideas [she disapproves of, such as sex worker rights] from being expressed and spread online. It’s not clear what she thinks the companies should specifically do, but she’s definitely laying the blame on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube for the existence and proliferation of angry people online…what she wants with her prosecutor background is to force compliance with whatever rules she puts into place and use the threat of punishment to shut down resistance…just [like] California parents who were threatened with jail time because of her support for criminal truancy laws…or [her repeated and illegal]…attempt[s] to bring pimping charges against the publishers of Backpage…
In the News (#916)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged activism, An Example to the West, asset seizure, blogging, Blunt Instrument, brothels, California, cell phones, censorship, comics, cops, cult of the child, dehumanization, dirty, Disaster, drivers, ethics, fantasy, Feminine Pragmatism, Germany, Held Together With Lies, Japan, law, Mind Reading, Mongolia, Policing for Profit, politicians, porn, pragmatism, propaganda, psychology, Pyrrhic Victory, racism, rescue industry, robots, Secret Squirrel, See No Evil, sex toys, sex work is work, South Carolina, surveillance, The Pygmalion Fallacy, The Spiral of Absurdity, Top Cop, Uganda, Uncommon Sense, violence vs. sex workers, Virginia, Welcome to the Future on February 27, 2019| 3 Comments »
Harris’s contempt for sex workers lies at the heart of her hypocrisy. – Stephen Lemons
Wherever there are men making money, there will be enterprising women working to get some of it:
…Mongolia’s mining boom started in the early 2000s and mining now accounts for around 20 per cent of Mongolia’s gross domestic product. The growth…has created a spike in internal migration to mining areas – most notably Ömnögovi…The coal route from the Tavan Tolgoi coal deposit to the Chinese border is synonymous with sex work fuelled by the mining industry…In contrast to the stigma…in the city…the border area [i]s accepting and open…four or five women travel to the border area with a driver and rent a ger (a traditional round felted tent) to stay…If [truck] drivers don’t have cash, they pay in fuel: 40 or 50 litres of diesel for one act, 100 litres for one hour. The women then resell the fuel when they can…Ulaanbaatar…is [by contrast] a harsh environment for women working in the trade…sex [workers] in…sauna[s] in the capital…[are beaten by] police and customers…ultra-nationalists target sex workers on the street and shave their heads to disgrace them…
Despite the obligatory “sex trafficking” disinformation and nonsense sprinkled throughout, the article is not a bad look at sex work in a part of the world few Westerners know anything about.
Are the Japanese the only people left on Earth who can tell fantasy from reality?
The United Nations has proposed an international initiative…to tighten…restrictions and prohibition of…child pornography…However…child pornography…”is defined…as ‘any representation of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities…includ[ing]…visual material such as photographs, movies, drawings and cartoons…including when…such material represents…non-existing children”…
Massage parlors are popular targets of “anti-trafficking” pogroms because they’re low-hanging fruit:
One South Carolina [politician] is working to shut down massage parlors…Mandy Powers Norrell proposed legislation that could close those places for good. “It will give labor, licensing, and regulation the authority to close them down and prosecute any [women] found there,” [she bloviated]…
Cops will never stop doing this as long as the state keeps giving them pretexts:
…In case after case, [motorists were robbed by cops claiming]…the cash was found near drugs. Yet few…ever were arrested. They were caught in one of the most aggressive [robbery] operations in [South Carolina, where the]…police…[stole] nearly $50,000 from…motorists over a two-year period…$135 for every person living in Nichols. That’s six times more per resident than any other police department in the state…
Ugandan sex workers demand their rights:
Human and women rights activists have appealed to Members of Parliament not to criminalise prostitution as they debate and pass the pending Sexual Offences Bill of 2015…”These arrests are mostly carried out to solicit bribes from sex workers and harass them. Few of them get to trial. The provision, is therefore, unnecessary since it is unenforceable,” [said] Macklean Mary Kyomya…of Alliance of Women Advocating for Change…activists brandished placards reading…”outlaw poverty not prostitution…rights not rescue…my body, my business”…
Conditioning squares to accept intrusive monitoring of every aspect of their lives:
…Devices worn on employees’ bodies are an increasingly valuable source of workforce health intelligence for employers and insurance companies. It’s fueling a boom in the use of wrist-borne health and fitness monitors such as those made by Fitbit, Garmin and Apple…the information is not covered by federal rules that protect health records from disclosure. And when it’s combined with data such as credit scores, employees are giving up more insights about themselves than they realize…In general, employees in such programs [“voluntarily”] sign up for digital health monitoring. They are lured by cash, reduced premiums, or reimbursements for co-payments and deductibles…Fitbit is moving aggressively to sign up companies. It added a call service that [nag]…workers…via text messages and phone calls…whose data shows they are falling short of their [assigned “fitness goals”]…
You amateurs really think being spied on like this is OK? No wonder fantasies of whores “enslaved” by exploitative bosses who spy on their every move are so popular; it’s just amateurs projecting their work conditions onto us.
The dystopian future of Minority Report has arrived:
The use of PredPol—a predictive policing software…is far more widespread than previously reported…PredPol claims to use an algorithm to predict crime in specific 500-foot by 500-foot sections of a city, so that police can…surveil specific areas more heavily…PredPol [has] contract[s or] negotiation[s]…with…South Jordan, UT; Mountain View, CA; Atlanta, GA; Haverhill, GA; Palo Alto, CA; Modesto, CA; Merced, CA; Livermore, CA; Tacoma, WA; and the University of California, Berkeley…Los Angeles, Elgin [CA], Oakland [CA], Richmond [CA]…Milpitas [CA]…Santa Cruz, CA; Morgan Hill, CA, Fairfield, CA, Los Gatos/Monte Sereno, CA; Campbell, CA; Salinas, CA; Alhambra, CA; Lansing, MI; Seattle, WA; San Francisco, CA; Columbia, SC…Manhattan, KS…Little Rock, AK; Kent, England; Reading, PA; “and many more”…Predpol explicitly encourage[s] police departments to dedicate their resources towards petty crime…Shahid Buttar, the Director of Grassroots Advocacy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)…[explains] it’s impossible to expect unbiased results from predictive policing technology, because the data it analyzes is structurally biased. Predictive policing is “driven by…data that itself reflects longstanding and pervasive bias…If you overpolice certain communities, and only detect crime within those communities, and then try to provide a heat map of predictions, any AI will predict that crimes will occur in the places that they’ve happened before”…
The Spiral of Absurdity (#743)
Bay Area prosecutors were trying to prove that a man arrested during a prostitution sting was guilty of pimping charges, and among the [supposed] evidence was a series of Instagram DMs he’d allegedly sent to a woman…with high heels and money bag emoji placed at the end…[a hired gun claiming to be] an expert…in sex trafficking…[fantasized under oath that] the high heels and bags of money supported the interpretation that the defendant was accused of sex trafficking, essentially translating to “wear your high heels to come make some money.” Another message from the defendant included the crown emoji, which was said to signify that the “pimp is the king”. Ultimately, the ruling didn’t hinge on the interpretation of emoji, but [that didn’t stop prosecutors from trying to destroy lives based on the masturbatory fantasies of people who’ve never done sex work in their lives]…
Yet another registration regime fails miserably, as we keep telling y’all:
Only 76 of the reportedly 200,000 women (0.038%) who work as prostitutes in Germany have registered for state services [and of course politicians can’t understand why]…sex workers [can] register for state-run health insurance, pensions and unemployment benefits…[but the price after a new and paternalistic] law was enacted…in 2017 [is] regist[ration with pigs, mandatory “counseling”, prying into their private lives by social workers and compulsory] regular health [inspections]…most prostitutes…register under some different professional category in order to continue working anonymously…
Never underestimate the human capacity to obsess about things that don’t exist:
…sex robots are rapidly becoming a part of…national [fantasies] about the future of sex and relationships….a number of companies are currently developing [human-shaped sex toys]…with a few already on the market…A 2017 survey suggested almost half of Americans think that having sex with robots will become a common practice within 50 years [the same fraction who think Donald Trump is intelligent and genetically-modified foods are dangerous]. As a [pompous windbag]…I’m interested in the legal and policy questions that sex robots pose…How will [masturbating] with a sex [doll] affect the human [soul]? Would sex with a child[-shaped toaster] be ethical?…
These articles are so deeply stupid, I just can’t take them at all seriously any more. Despite the claims in the title, “sex robots” are not here, and never will be in the form envisioned by both fetishists and prohibitionists. And the dolls (that’s all they are, silicone dolls) which people insist on incorrectly calling “robots” are inanimate objects which raise no more “ethical issues” than a Baby Alive or a tablet computer.
Held Together With Lies (#858)
We haven’t seen this concentration of ludicrous claims in a couple of years now:
[The rescue industry] is the business of stealing freedom for profit. [Sex workers labeled against their will as] victims of trafficking are deprived of their basic human rights, dehumanized, brutalized and objectified [by police]…Human trafficking business is [fantasized] to generate $100 billion annually, more than Apple, Starbucks, Microsoft, and Nike combined…there are 40.3 million victims of human trafficking globally…we [masturbate furiously while fantasizing] that there are countless victims, some only young teens…in our own communities…Sex trafficking data is scarce and has many gaps, due to [our making it up as we go]…
As usual, ridiculous numbers are slung about in self-contradictory fashion, mis-citing sources (the 40.3 million fantasy is from the NGO “Walk Free Foundation”, not the ILO as claimed) and claiming knowledge while admitting there is none. So naturally I had to correct the wording a bit.
It’s the hypocrisy, stupid. That’s what pundits from The Nation to the Washington Post fail to grasp about the onetime romance between former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and California Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris. Harris’s apologists would have people believe that discussion of the relationship, which occurred two decades ago when Brown held the powerful post of Speaker of the California Assembly and Harris was a lowly deputy district attorney in California’s Alameda County, is sexist, racist, or both. Viewed in light of Harris’s ongoing war on sex workers, however, her advantageous liaison with Brown indicates that she has no problem applying different rules to herself than she does to others…Maggie McNeill [said]…“I have absolutely nothing against the fact that she used her sexuality to get by in the world…What I do have a problem with, is that having gained that power, she used it to attack other women for doing the same thing”…
…with Tumblr’s strict adult-content ban…kinky bloggers fled the site–searching for, and trying to build, new communities. One of the fastest growing of these sites is relative newcomer newTumbl, which has gained about 40,000 blogs since it launched on December 31. True to its name, the site closely resembles Tumblr–at least the NSFW parts that are now banned…MojoFire, a site created by members of the BDSM community but aspiring to host all types of content, has not yet launched. Yet others were already in the works before the Tumblr porn ban and have seen a large influx of refugee bloggers. For instance, Pillowfort–another site meant for a broad community–has been straining with the arrival of former Tumblr users, forcing it to limit new sign-ups…MakeLoveNotPorn…[has] provided a hub for user-generated “social sex” videos since 2009…
Children’s World
Posted in Perception, Tyranny, tagged adolescence, censorship, cult of the child, dirty, prohibitionist myths, psychology, sex work is work on September 3, 2018| 8 Comments »
Instead of raising children in an adult world…we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world. – Hugh Hefner
Up until the nineteenth century in the West (and much later in most of the world), people understood that the point of childhood was to prepare for adulthood. As psychologist Robert Epstein pointed out, “In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring…In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence…” And yet nowadays, we have artificially extended childhood not just past puberty, but in some ways into the third decade of life; people who though most of human history would’ve been working in a profession, been married, and even held positions of responsibility are now un-ironically referred to and treated as “children”. The confusion between the biological reality of childhood and the increasingly-extended legal concept is so profound that many people quite seriously label sex between someone over 18 and a 17-year-old young adult (above the age of consent in over 80% of the world) as “child rape”, as though the 17 year old were actually (rather than just statutorily) a complete incompetent who might as well be 4 for all the rights she has. But I’ve discussed this topic on a number of essays, including “The Shape of the Spoon” and “Still a Child“; it’s not really the infantilization of young adults (under the misapprehension that they aren’t adults) which I want to address today, but rather the infantilization of adults that everyone agrees are indeed adults.
I realize that’s probably not very clear, so I call your attention to today’s epigram, and also to Robert Heinlein’s statement that “The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.” Or the very concept of “family friendly”, which not only pretends that all families have young children, but that the entire family should be limited to what is appropriate for the youngest. Furthermore, the bluenoses and control freaks want to seal all of society, even older adults who have no dependent spawn, into a worldwide nursery where everything conforms to their idea of what is “safe” for young children; these Procrustean prudes want to censor books, television, movies, the internet and even society until they are satisfied that nothing exists, even in private, which might confuse or upset a 7-year-old. Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the War on Sex (of which the War on Whores is only the front lines), whose excesses and violence are excused under the banner of “child protection”; sex workers are repeatedly infantilized both in our intellectual and emotional capacities, and in a pretense of fact. It’s no accident that one of the most ludicrous myths of the “sex trafficking” hysteria, the notion that the average sex worker debuts at the age of 13, is also one that prohibitionists cling to most doggedly and repeat most obsessively: it implies that we are all psychologically and emotionally locked into a juvenile state due to the supposed “trauma” of our work in a way that the dogma we were all molested as children (or have daddy issues or whatever) can only hint at. But even this trope isn’t as revealing as the astonishingly stupid statement that “no little girl dreams of growing up to be a prostitute”; leaving aside the evident absurdities of this non-argument (which I’ve previously discussed), consider what it is actually saying: that adults (or at least adult women) should only be allowed to do work, or presumably any activity for that matter, which a young child can comprehend. Obviously, even those who vomit out such idiocies don’t really believe them; nobody complains that “no little girl dreams of being a middle manager” or “no little boy dreams of being an accountant”. No, it only applies to sex…which is what “family friendly” means too, despite that every family owes its existence to sex. What it all boils down to is, people who are uncomfortable with their own sexual feelings want to keep everyone else from having any kind of sexual life that hasn’t been sanitized into unrecognizability, and “the children” are just a convenient excuse.
Guest Columnist: Jeremy Malcolm
Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, Tyranny, tagged censorship, Counterfeit Comfort, cult of the child, Disaster, Hollywood, hysteria, internet, law, politicians, propaganda, psychology, sex offender registry on June 11, 2018| 6 Comments »
Jeremy Malcolm is the founder and director of the Prostasia Foundation, the first sex-positive and pro-civil rights child protection organization. He’s an IT and intellectual property lawyer and consultant, and a member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum; prior to Prostasia he was Senior Global Policy Analyst at Electronic Frontier Foundation. When he asked me to be on Prostasia’s advisory council I gladly accepted, and when it came time to start getting the word out I naturally offered this space.
As a child, I remember how terrified I was by a rerun of the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the lead character attempts to sound the alarm about a stealth alien invasion of Earth. In the final scene of the movie, mounting panic overcomes him as realizes that he is too late, and that the vehicles passing him by on the roadside are already carrying the alien pods that contain the seeds of humanity’s doom. The movie was widely interpreted as a cold war allegory, because it reflected how the public fear of infiltration of the United States by communists had been worked up into such a frenzy by Senator Joseph McCarthy that it empowered the government (for a while) to get away with taking repressive measures in response—measures that would never otherwise have been considered justified outside of wartime. Although the red scare has passed, the public feeling of creeping terror about existential threats to our society, and the shrewd and calculating management of that feeling, remains part and parcel of contemporary politics today. So much so, that international relations scholars have a specific a word used to describe what happens when governments manipulate public fear in this way: it’s called securitization.
When a public policy issue is not merely politicized, but securitized, it is constructed in such a way that authorities assert the right to take extraordinary and otherwise impermissible measures in response. Whatever the issue happens to be—it might be terrorism, ebola, or migration, for instance—if politicians are able to whip up enough hysteria about the threat that it poses to the integrity and long-term survival of a society, concerns about human rights, public debate, and due process can be hand-waved away. Too much is at stake—our lives, our liberty! And very often too: our children. So it is that we often observe this pattern of rhetoric when child protection laws are put forward. It is quite right that we should do all that we can constitutionally do to protect children from sexual abuse, and that the political process should be a part of this. It’s also normal that politicians will selectively use the evidence that supports laws that they favor. But a healthy political process is one in which that evidence is at least open for debate, and in which the effects of proposed laws on our rights and freedoms as a society are carefully scrutinized. These democratic safeguards are frequently bypassed when it comes to child protection laws, because of how child sexual abuse is securitized, framed as an existential threat that has to be purged from society at any cost. This construction of the issue transforms Congress from what should be – a sober, deliberative legislative body (a filter for the views of the people, as Alexander Hamilton would have it) – into a mirror of a society in moral panic, willing to accept with a minimum of scrutiny almost any measure that purports to address the problem.
Proponents of such laws know this full well, which is why they invest heavily in fueling and manipulating the moral panic that gives child protection this privileged status in political discourse. One way in which they do this is by playing on emotions, rather than evidence—and since child protection involves very strong emotions anyway, all that might be needed to push a law over the line might be the performative retelling of the story of the victim chosen to be the law’s public face (Megan’s Law, the template for America’s ubiqituous, although ineffective, sex offender registration laws, is a good example of this). It was much the same in the case of FOSTA/SESTA too, for which it was a movie about sex trafficking, along with a series of increasingly fever-pitched (if largely fictitious) stories about the commercial child sex trafficking industry, that made the law unassailable against evidence of its flaws. In the end, all but two Senators voted for a law that has actually made the fight against sex trafficking harder, while also harming sex educators, putting adult sex workers in physical danger, and seeing a rash of privatized censorship sweeping the Internet. Even aside from these laws’ harmful side-effects, they aren’t even fit for purpose, because the vast majority of sexual offending isn’t a result of child sex trafficking, nor is it committed by those who are already registered sex offenders.
In fact, notwithstanding popular belief to the contrary, most child sex offending isn’t even committed by pedophiles. That’s not to say that prevention interventions can’t be aimed at these groups, but if that’s where we stop then we are barely scratching the surface of the problem. Politicians and the public alike rely a lot on the stereotype of the child sexual abuser as a creepy old man hanging around a schoolyard in a van, or the brazen sidewalk pimp with links to organized crime. Just as the stereotype of the psycho serial killer represents the much larger problem of violence in America, it can be perversely comforting to be able to focus our attention on these sorts of outlying abusers, as it helps us feel that we have a handle on the problem.
What was scariest about Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn’t the fear an alien might come and kill you or a loved one. The most terrifying part of the movie (spoiler alert!) was the revelation that your loved one was already an alien, and you didn’t even know it. The “red scare” was so scary not because of the reds over the ocean, but because of the reds under the bed. So too, potential child abusers are in every neighborhood, and in many families; they don’t identify (nor would be clinically diagnosed) as pedophiles, and they certainly aren’t going to be prevented from offending by laws aimed at the sex industry or at those who have offended in the past. It’s a sobering thought. But the good news is that the scale of the problem doesn’t have to make us feel paralyzed into inaction. There are things that we can do—it’s just that politicians aren’t going to do them, or at least not for as long as self-righteous morals campaigners and “tough on crime” ideologues control the child protection agenda. What’s needed is a broader primary sex-positive prevention approach that respects the civil and human rights of all. Prostasia Foundation is the first child protection organization to simultaneously champion such an approach, while also criticizing laws and policies that while putatively for child protection, are really nothing more than child protection theater. Formed following the passage of FOSTA/SESTA by a diverse group including child sexual abuse survivors, civil rights campaigners, medical health professionals, and sex industry experts, we are currently crowdfunding with the aim of a full launch next month, and we could use your support.
In the News (#832)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, brothels, censorship, cops, cult of the child, Devil's Advocate, Disaster, Droit du Seigneur, Elephant in the Parlor, hysteria, Imagination Pinned Down, internet, Kentucky, law, New York, Ohio, Original Sin, politicians, prohibitionist myths, psychology, robots, streetwalkers, tabula rasa, The Proper Study, The Widening Gyre, Twitter, underage on April 25, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Because our political class believes in myths, not solid evidence, they keep creating policies directed at an imaginary bogeyman, not real criminals. – Jenny Heineman & Brooke Wagner
A Tale That Grew in the Telling
A MILLION!!!!!
La Porte County [Indiana] Prosecutor John Espar [fed ludicrous propaganda to] local residents at First Baptist Church on human trafficking…He [lied that] the rate of sex crimes spiked between 1998 and 2007 with the growing popularity of Internet usage, which gave offenders access to children…to whom they did not have access previously…As many as one million children are exploited for commercial sex annually…children who become victims typically do so between the ages of 12 and 14…“So many of these (sex) workers, even if they’re not realizing it at this point in their lives, are still victims of exploitation”…
Ric Curtis, who headed the Jon Jay study, is still debunking prohibitionist lies:
As they crack down on sex workers and pass outrageous new laws, our politicians and moral crusaders make some bold claims: Hundreds of thousands of children…at an average age of 13…is any of this true?…from 2012 to 2014, we spent nine months walking a [stroll] in Las Vegas…We handed out condoms and other harm-reduction material…The primary investigator, Ric Curtis, designed the study based on his experience collecting data from other “hard to reach” populations…The study had several teams collecting data in major cities across the US that had been dubbed as “hubs of sex trafficking”…after interviewing 949 people across 6 cities…[we found] the assumptions that inform government policy on sex workers are merely myths. And those myths are easily disproved once you bother to get the data, which we did…In our subsample of youth under the age of 18…engaged in survival sex…24%…had a pimp…liberally defined as someone with whom the respondent shared their earnings…one young woman’s experience stood out as representative …Rena, who was 16 at the time of the interview, laughed when we asked if she had a pimp. She tipped her head toward one of her friends. “That’s my pimp,” Rena giggled. She was an 18-year-old woman who helped Rena use the internet to get clients and was herself engaged in survival sex. The two young women pooled their money together to meet their shared living expenses…Rena’s friend could be considered a sex trafficker under the current legal regime…
Though pimps are not common, a disproportionate number of the ones who do exist are cops:
Police are choosing to allow brothels to operate providing they create a safe environment for women, one former detective – now a brothel owner – has told the BBC…Despite it being illegal to operate a brothel in England and Wales – although not illegal to buy and sell sex – Karl says he has no moral qualms about breaking the law because he does not agree with it, and he says he is not exploiting the women who work for him…
New York is way behind cities like Seattle, Phoenix & Houston in promoting the hysteria:
Inside a handsome brick building on a tree-lined street near Brooklyn’s Prospect Park lay one of the city’s dirtiest secrets…two 16-year-old girls were allegedly being kept inside as sex slaves…the teens’ captors forced them to strip to their underwear, pose for Backpage.com ads and have sex with up to 10 johns a day…thousands of sex slaves being trafficked under the noses of New York City residents every day…[vice cop] Jim Klein [said]…“It’s modern-day slavery”…the average victim is…as young as 12…“One guy kept [a girl] in a dog cage because she wasn’t cooperating”…a…14-year-old…was found locked in a closet surrounded by pots of urine…
Welcome back to the 16th century:
Priests attending an annual exorcism conference in Rome are set to discuss whether pornography has a demonic influence. Over 250 priests and theologians as well as criminologists and psychologists from 51 countries have gathered at the week-long Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation conference…attendees will discuss the prevalence of pornography in modern society, and consider if it is a “modern cultural phenomenon of an evil that harms people,” and to what extent it may have what he described as a demonic influence…
Imagination Pinned Down (#551)
Stereotypic conformation in progress:
Jessa Dillow Crisp has spent the better part of the last decade learning who she is…as a child victim of human trafficking. Now, she works to help others who are or have been in the same situation. She is co-founder and executive director of Bridgehope…As a child…in…Canada, Crisp was abused and sold into the sexual human trafficking sector by her family…she would eventually be sold to a circuit operating in the United States…“during the 2010 Winter Olympics, it was…sadistic pain and horrific evil.” Clarksville Police Chief Mark Palmer said that he sees more sex trafficking in the way of consensual sex workers, not forced abusers…during large events like Thunder Over Louisville or the Kentucky Derby…her identity was also stripped away by her abusers, who controlled where she went, what she ate, how she sat, how she talked…Some of the signs are behavioral, like having a…phone, the connection to [a partner]…styles of dress that [busybodies claim] are way beyond their years…
Most professional “survivors” don’t last long; it’ll be interesting to see if this one graduates to including classic elements like brutal clients and being dragged behind a car.
Your periodic reminder that a child-shaped toaster is still a toaster:
…in the United States, Rep. Dan Donovan…introduced legislation to ban [child-shaped sex] dolls, in a bill named Curbing Realistic Exploitative Electronic Pedophilic Robots, otherwise known as the CREEPER Act…some [actual experts] suggest…dolls could be used to deter the real-life fulfillment of pedophilic urges…[but politicians and other prohibitionists pretend human sexual impulses are learned and can be eliminated via threats of violence] Donovan [claims] “Once a child sex abuser tires of practicing on a doll, it’s a small step to move on to an innocent child…[puritans pretend] these dolls reinforce, normalize, and encourage pedophilic behavior”…
Ken White explains the latest wrinkle in the Stormy Daniels case:
…Conventional wisdom is that federal courts are better for the defense and more likely to enforce arbitration agreements. However, federal judges move faster and abide by deadlines and rules more closely, and are substantially less tolerant of bullshit than state judges. If substantial portions of your defense are premised on bullshit and delay, don’t remove to federal court…the main issue is whether the nondisclosure agreement [is]…enforceable. If [so]…Trump…could conceivably get a gag order against Clifford and get massive damages against her for breaching the confidentiality agreement, and could do so through a private arbitration proceeding instead of in public…
It’s complicated, so you’ll need to read the whole thing.
The US’ latest attempt to silence sex workers…has begun to chill free speech across the internet. A number of websites have had to either shut down or actively distance themselves from the notion that they support sex work. And the problem is only going to get worse as time goes on…It’s not just…adults-only websites and platforms that are now having to crack down on discussions of sex. Microsoft and Google have moved to alter their terms of service…and…not even private discussions are safe…Microsoft…claim[ed] the right to examine your content…[and] Google is purging adult content from private Drive accounts…sex workers are attempting to protect themselves against the bill by building platforms beyond the reach of American authorities….Red Umbrella Hosting…offers judgment-free, anonymous and sex-worker-friendly hosting. Then there is Switter…launched in response to FOSTA-SESTA and Twitter’s alleged shadowbanning practices. In a few short weeks, it has already acquired nearly 23,000 followers…
But it didn’t take long for Switter to feel the government’s boot:
[Last] Wednesday, Cloudflare terminated its content delivery network services for…the weeks-old Switter…Cloudflare has confirmed…that the company terminated service to Switter because of FOSTA, but also said it’s “a very bad law”…When [Switter] organizers…reached out to Cloudflare for explanation, they were met with a vague notice that Switter violated the company’s Terms of Service…Switter moved to a new content delivery network and is still up, but Cloudflare’s decision to terminate service was jarring…Cloudflare, historically, has been a vocal supporter of the open internet…
And here’s a heads up from a confidential source: the sleazebags behind FOSTA are butthurt that everyone sees their tyranny for what it is and they’re preparing for a major PR offensive to convince people that censorship isn’t censorship. The first of it started on Sunday.
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