Divided We Fall | The Honest Courtesan

Posts Tagged ‘Divided We Fall’

In the News (#632)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged Acting and Activism, Alaska, Blunt Instrument, brothels, cops, Cops and Robbers, Divided We Fall, Doubling Down, Droit du Seigneur, escort services, hysteria, I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now, law, LGBT rights, Maine, Minnesota, Monsters, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, prohibitionist myths, racism, rescue industry, Safe Targets, stripping, Texas, The Public Eye, The Rescuers, The Widening Gyre, Traffic Jam, transgender, Virginia, Washington DC on April 23, 2016| 3 Comments »

The only issue is that the people having sex are consenting to it and anything else is an arbitrary moral judgement which no one has the right to make. – Stephanie Farnsworth

The Rescuers

Harassing streetwalkers to scare away their clients has become a popular “Christian” pastime:

Valerie Carter…has been prowling some of the toughest highways in Richmond, Virginia…for the past eight years. She and her “streetwalking ministry” volunteers look for women and girls caught up in the local sex trade……they…pray with the women, hug them, give them a list of resources to help them get out of the trade. They keep the visits short to avoid putting the women at risk of beatings from their pimps…Carter says. “No one dreamed about being in this kind of business.” But they are in it, most of them unwillingly. Someone else makes money by exploiting them, whether it’s a pimp or a trafficker…

Acting and Activism

Apparently, she’s less human rights lawyer and more Hollywood propagandist these days:

Amal Clooney took her first trip to Dallas to…[speak] before a sold-out crowd at the annual New Friends New Life luncheon…The event raised more than $1 million for the anti-trafficking organization, which [claims to] offer…counseling, housing and other services to 1,400 formerly trafficked teens and women every year…

In actuality, the “services” this organization “offers” are the usual things: feel-good bullshit like art therapy and a photocopied list of government welfare programs.

Droit du Seigneur

I just love watching them eat their own:

Federal prosecutors…have indicted two DEA employees for moonlighting as strip club owners and then purportedly lying about it to their bosses…Special Agent David Polos and Greg Glover, a telecommunications specialist, have been charged with conspiracy and making false statements in connection with the forms they submitted to renew their national security clearances…Polos and Glover conspired to conceal their ownership of the New Jersey strip joint, “Twins Go-Go Lounge”, and that Polos also failed to disclose an “intimate relationship” with one of its foreign dancers that lasted for months…the government [alleges]…prostitution, drug use, employment of illegal immigrants, and running the club during “DEA business hours”…

Divided We Fall

Go, Stephanie Farnsworth!

The fact that many LGBT people end up in sex work is an issue often overlooked rather conveniently by many activists and charities. Sex work is still talked about in moralizing terms, and the…image of the LGBT world in recent campaigns has been that of white cisgender gay people in long term relationships, often with children…The heart of the demand for LGBT rights is the idea that all people should be granted autonomy over their lives and bodies, that anyone should be allowed to sleep with who they choose and that it only concerns the people in the relationship and not the government or bigots…People enter into sexual relationships for all kinds of reasons. It is rarely a fairytale of two people falling in love. Sometimes it is for fun, but many engage in [transactional] sex…or…to shut their partner up. The list is endless and every reason is valid…It is simply hypocritical for LGBT activists to fight for bodily autonomy but deny it to sex workers, and given the huge numbers of people within the community who engage in sex work it also throws a lot of LGBT people under the bus…

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

…Norman Ochs is facing charges for allegedly hiring prostitutes…The 76-year-old was charged…with four crimes. Each misdemeanor count carries up to a 93-day jail sentence…

Blunt Instrument

Massage parlors are popular targets of “anti-trafficking” pogroms because they’re low-hanging fruit and the sex workers, nearly always immigrants, can easily be pressured to “co-operate” or be deported:

…federal law enforcement has rebranded as a sort of national ministry for vice prevention…Department of Homeland Security (DHS) investigators and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials conducted a widespread raid on Korean massage parlors in New York City, which the feds allege were…fronts for commercial sexual activity…11 massage-parlor owners were…charged with conspiracy to launder money and to violate the federal Travel Act…informants…who…[are] “cooperating with law enforcement in the hope of receiving a more lenient sentence”…[say] the alleged prostitution…was not being forced upon the staff. Any money earned from such endeavors was split between workers and business owners, and workers were free to come and go as they pleased…Nonetheless, the indictment refers to the massage parlors as “commercial sex trafficking businesses”…

Monsters

Though the reporter couldn’t resist mentioning a past criminal charge, at least NBC refrained from publishing her mugshot: “…a transgender woman who may have been working as a prostitute…Keyonna Blakeney…was found dead, with trauma to the upper body, in a [hotel in] Montgomery County [Maryland]…”

Cops and Robbers

The rescue industry provides many opportunities for wealthy white folks to play cowboy:

Adam LaRoche is a 36-year-old who played Major League baseball for 12 seasons before causing a ruckus by retiring earlier this year…the first baseman, a conservative Christian, “spent 10 days in November in Southeast Asian brothels, wearing a hidden camera and doing undercover work to help rescue underage sex slaves”…LaRoche…[and] Milwaukee Brewers pitcher…Blaine Boyer… “tried to determine the age of the girls…and identify their bosses”…

Safe Targets (#512)

My friend Tara Burns, still doggedly fighting for sex workers in Alaska, with the help of Maxine Doogan of ESPLERP:

…What Burns and Maxine Doogan really want is for prostitution to be decriminalized. That’s the mission of the advocacy group they started, Community United for Safety and Protection (CUSP)…[but in the meantime] they’re after the next best thing: improved safety and protection for those in Alaska’s sex industry and equal protection as citizens under the law…The two women…stayed in Juneau the entire legislative session, pushing for the passage of Senate Bill 21…[which] grants prostitutes immunity for prosecution when they come forward as a victim or witness of a violent crime…

Doubling Down

This is mostly just ignorant cheerleading for a do-nothing law, but it contains a repetition of the moronic statement, “It is estimated that here in the United States more than 100,000 children are victims of human sex trafficking each year.” For an analysis of what that would actually look like in the real world, click on the subtitle above. I reckon it’s a good thing Aleeshia Carroll is majoring in social work, because basic math is obviously far out of her grasp.

The Widening Gyre (#616)

Misinterpreting ordinary interactions is common at the height of a moral panic:

The propaganda-created panic over sex trafficking in your own backyard!!!! has claimed yet another victim…Amanda Kalidy…was shopping at Target [in Edmond, OK] with her 4-year-old daughter when another young girl began following them and repeatedly asking her daughter for candy. Kalidy says she asked the other child where her mom was, but the girl, who looked about 9 years old, did not answer. Later the girl offered her daughter some gum. That’s when Kalidy noticed a “strange” man nearby. Obviously, the only explanation for the situation is that the man wanted to steal Kalidy’s daughter so he could sexually exploit her and was using this other child as bait…She reported the incident to a Target manager, who allegedly told her that that’s “what [sex traffickers] do is target places like Target.” For the record, there have been zero reported cases of sex traffickers kidnapping children from Target in the history of the United States…

The Public Eye (#618)

Color me unsurprised:

The Las Vegas Madam: The Escorts, The Clients, The Truth is the tell-all memoir of Jami Rodman, the madam who came to fame by employing…Suzy Favor Hamilton...this book was…written more to play to outsiders’ expectations than to advocate for the people Rodman worked with…What really got to me, though, wasn’t the manner in which Rodman chose which stories to tell, focusing on titillating accounts such as nonconsent roleplays gone wrong and customers with pedophilic ageplay fetishes. It was her disdainful attitude toward other sex workers and the industry…the book certainly doesn’t foster sex worker solidarity, nor does it paint a nuanced picture of escorts…At one point, Rodman cites statistics from [Melissa Farley‘s] “Prostitution Research”, a site which is heavily affiliated with rescue industry organizations…it became painfully clear to me that she was buying into the flawed statistics, salacious reporting, and misleading accounts of the wider industry put forward by abolitionists rather than trusting her own sex work experiences and those of the many women she worked with whose lives stand in direct contrast to prohibitionist tropes. It’s funny that she quotes a website which would label her a trafficker…

Traffic Jam (#619)

Of course, even if Weyker and the department lose, the money won’t come out of their pockets. But the more lawsuits against the cops, the better:

A dozen or more people who say they were harmed by a discredited sex trafficking case soon could be suing the St. Paul Police Department and Sgt. Heather Weyker, according to the attorney representing…Yassin Abdirahman Yusuf [who] is seeking $20 million in damages for the more than four years he spent in jail on sex trafficking charges based on exaggeration and lies…[Attorney Robert] Bennett said he has another nine or 10 people preparing to sue, and other lawyers have several more. Earlier this month, Hamdi Ali Osman…filed the first suit arising from the dismissed charges, seeking $12 million…

Read Full Post »

The Big Table

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, tagged BDSM, bisexuality, Divided We Fall, homosexuality, law, LGBT rights, Madonna/whore, male prostitutes, transgender on February 22, 2016| 11 Comments »

A few days ago, Mistress Matisse called readers’ attention to this really dumb article about a television show I’ve never seen. Now, I didn’t give a shit about Friends back when everyone was talking about it, and I certainly don’t give a shit about it now; I’m sure you can therefore guess how infinitesimal my level of interest was in an article belaboring the totally obvious point that a show that went off the air twelve years ago (thank you, IMDb) doesn’t perfectly fit modern ideas of political correctness. But I was very interested (read: deeply disgusted but totally unsurprised) by this quote from Ray Bradford, the “director of entertainment media” for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), discussing an episode of the show in which Kathleen Turner played the drag-queen father of one of the characters: “When I looked at Kathleen Turner’s character, there was nothing tragic about it. It was not a story line depicting her as a killer or a psychopath or a sex worker or anything like that.” Read that again if you need to. Yes, that’s a media mouthpiece for a very large and respected gay rights group, specifically one whose mission is to combat harmful stereotypes, openly defaming sex workers by speaking of us in the same breath as killers and psychopaths. Now, you know, I’m not saying Bradford is evil; I’m not trying to depict him as a murderer or a child molester or a queer or anything like that. But one would expect that someone whose job description involves talking to the public about slurs against sexual minorities would, I don’t know, refrain from using slurs against sexual minorities maybe?

One might indeed expect that if one hadn’t been paying attention for the past couple of decades, that is. When Friends first debuted, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” was a common gay rights chant. But by the time the show was cancelled a decade later, the movement had undergone a dramatic transformation. Leathermen, stone butches, drag queens, kinky queers, transpeople, HIV patients and sex workers were slowly and gradually ushered back into the closet so vanilla picket-fence gay men and lesbians who wanted to get married, adopt kids and/or join the military could say to the Establishment, “Look, we’re just like you!” and thereby attract corporate donors to Pride parades and “marriage equality” drives that are perfectly happy to demonize polygamists, kinksters, whores and others who aren’t so interested in begging the government to license their sexuality. Wait your turn, we were told; don’t worry, we’ll get around to you. Except that once middle-class white mostly-monogamous gay men & lesbians won their place at the big table, what happened? Whitewashing Stonewall, which was started by black transwomen and drag sex workers. Siding with the fascist establishment against a transwoman who exposed government wrongdoing. Participating in the demonization of “sex offenders”. Vomiting out “it’s illegal” as an argument against sex work, though gay sex was illegal in many states only 13 years ago. Pretending that promiscuous stranger sex isn’t a major part of the lives of many queer men. Forgetting that sex workers were the only partners available to many closeted gay men for much of the 20th century. Promoting anti-whore crusades to cash in on rescue industry dollars. Ignoring anti-queer persecution which doesn’t affect bourgeois gays.

Gay, Inc has thrown sex workers and other “undesirables” under the bus for over a decade now; in their view, the “rainbow” only properly has three colors (and they ain’t too sure about that third one). The Rentboy raid was the direct result of this bigotry; had the LGBT “community” devoted its energies to securing the basic rights of all sexual minorities instead of wasting them in trying to force Christian fundamentalists to bake fucking overpriced cakes for their fucking bourgeois weddings, we’d be well on the way to decriminalization by now. Ray Bradford and GLAAD aren’t anomalies; they’re typical of what passes for “gay rights” organizations these days. And principled LGBT folk should take their vile, disgusting, hateful, bigoted attitude as a wake-up call.

Read Full Post »

In the News (#572)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Obituary, Perception, Tyranny, tagged adolescence, agency denial, Backpage, Canada, cops, dehumanization, dirty, Divided We Fall, drugs, FBI, Florida, Germany, Harm Magnification, hysteria, Illinois, Indiana, Lack of Evidence, language, law, Madonna/whore, Michigan, Moloch, Pennsylvania, porn, prisons, rape, Rough Trade, sex offender registry, So Close and Yet So Far, South Carolina, The Proper Study, They Still Don't Get It, Torture Chamber, Uncommon Sense, United Kingdom, video, What's In a Name?, yellow journalism on September 16, 2015| 7 Comments »

Crowding what I do into the larger umbrella of “sex work,” without its own name, makes it seem as if I’m supposed to experience what I do as shameful. – Charlotte Shane

What’s In a Name?

I agree with Charlotte Shane on words like “prostitute”:

I’ve called myself a prostitute for about as long as I’ve been one…it felt like the most accurate term given the service I provide, and I like the solidarity of it, the refusal to kowtow to class-related stigma or what is sometimes called the “whorearchy”…I believe the difference between “escort” and “prostitute” is that one term relies on euphemistic window dressing while the other is unapologetic and unashamed…I’m at odds with the party line in this stance, though…Increasingly, prostitute is…regarded as a slur…Taking euphemisms on permanently and in a political context, outside of marketing material or work-related correspondence, feels to me like ceding way too much power. The state forces me to use certain language to protect myself in some contexts; I don’t want to willingly employ that language in all others…

Rough Trade

One rather nasty side-effect of prohibition is that it gives moral retards like Mary Mitchell leave to vomit their odious bigotry all over the pages of major newspapers:

Authorities say Roy Akins went to Backpage.com and agreed to pay a prostitute $180 for sex. When the unidentified woman showed up at his…home…Akins…pulled a gun. I imagine most prostitutes in this situation would have run straight to a pimp. But after leaving Akins’ home…the…woman called the police…I’m grateful [Akins] isn’t being accused of snatching an innocent woman off the street…the way this case is being handled makes it look like sex trafficking is a legitimate business…because this incident is being charged as a criminal sexual assault — when it’s actually more like theft of services — it minimizes the act of rape…For law enforcement to put what happened to a Backpage.com prostitute on a par with [real] rape victims…is an insult.

A few observations:

“I imagine most prostitutes…would have run straight to a pimp.” I’ll leave you to imagine what she’s doing while she “imagines” this.
Note the conflation of sex work and sex trafficking, and the badge-licking idolization of the clownish tyrant Tom Dart.
For another example of a woman using the “theft of services” slur, see the original of this title.
Given that last line, would Mitchell be more sympathetic toward the rape of a prostitute like me, who advertises somewhere other than Backpage?

Lack of Evidence

It’s rare to see someone attempt this defense with a straight face:

Lisa Marie Carroll, 34, was charged with one misdemeanor count of prostitution…Police [pretend] that she offered to perform various sex acts…for [specific] pricing…”I did not agree to have sex with that cop…I’m an escort companion and go on dates and sometimes clients make a donation and that doesn’t have to do with sex”…[a sleazebag cop accompanied her] to her room where…they both undressed and laid in bed. The [cop then tried to get her to commit to specific prices for specific acts] “And I said, ‘No, honey. This is not how this works'”…A little while later, [the cops invaded] her house…

She’s lucky; many Pennsylvania cops rape women in order to arrest them.

Harm Magnification

Kerry Porth discusses the Harper government’s campaign to harm as many people as possible via increased prohibition:

…After winning a majority government in 2011, the Harper government quickly…introduced mandatory minimum sentencing for drug possession…despite warnings from current and former law enforcement from the United States…and respected Canadian drug policy experts…the Harper government has waged a costly war against Insite…[and] established 26 new requirements…that are costly, onerous and designed to prevent future sites from opening. Then…the…government…reintroduced the old laws [that the Supreme Court had struck down] and introduced a prohibition on the purchase of sex and the explicit advertising of sexual services for the first time in Canadian history. Despite a great deal of florid rhetoric about the government’s desire to ensure the safety of sex workers, the real intent behind the new laws was memorably stated by Senator Donald Plett: “Of course we don’t want to make life safe for prostitutes; we want to do away with prostitution. That’s the intent of the bill”…

The Proper Study

…a…new Canadian study…concludes the average porn user holds, if anything, more egalitarian views regarding women than non-users. Many pornography aficionados might even be “useful allies” in women’s struggles for equality in work, income and public office, the researchers…argue…Taylor Kohut…and his colleagues analyzed data from 35 years of the General Social Survey…the 23 per cent who reported having watched an “X-rated” movie in the previous year were no more or less likely than porn abstainers to identify as feminists, or voice support for the traditional family. And the blue-movie watchers expressed on average more positive attitudes toward women in positions of power, and less negative attitudes toward abortion and women in the workforce than those who refrained from pornography…

Divided We Fall

Unfortunately, this revolting attitude is not unusual among picket-fence queers:

…had there been a sequel to [Pretty Woman], it would have been salacious. We would watch Richard Gere struggle with the fact that his girlfriend was a confirmed whore and had been with hundreds, maybe even thousands of men…There would be a scene at a dinner party when other women were whispering about Julia Roberts, all of them knowing that she could be found at one time on Hollywood Boulevard spreading her legs for any man with $200 in his pocket…I have been poor…and never once was selling my ass an option…When you make a choice to work in the sex industry…you are immediately shrinking your dating pool…I would never subject myself to a How-was-your-day,-honey? conversation with a partner who took anonymous loads for a living…

Moloch

The robed simian who presided over this case planned to use this young man to “send a message” about having sex without a state license to do so; he should be caged for several years and then put on the “sex offender” registry for life.

A young man from Indiana who had consensual sex with a 14-year-old girl who told him she was [17] has been removed from Michigan’s sex offender registry pending his resentencing. Zach Anderson [who was 19 at the time]…spent 75 days in jail after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor. He was given a five-year probation that banned him from using computers or the Internet and also had faced 25 years on Michigan’s sex-offender registry. But…Anderson’s lawyer successfully argued prosecutors failed to remain neutral on a key part of the plea deal, which would have erased Anderson’s record if he stayed out of trouble…Anderson’s resentencing will be Oct. 21…

What “crime”? He had consensual sex with a physically-adult woman he believed to be a peer. The concept of strict liability is an abomination in any civilized society.

They Still Don’t Get It

The jaw-dropping stupidity of this article takes precedence over the FBI money grab it talks about:

At the click of a mouse, almost anyone can buy a girl online, anytime…ads with identical phone numbers can be traced to other cities…a sign, police say, that the women are on the move with their traffickers. Some ads even state “only in town for three days, special.” That’s the pattern of traffickers, always on the move, according to…Charlie Benton, who is known locally as the foremost law enforcement expert on sex trafficking. The ads give no clue, though, which women are being forced to sell themselves or are under 18. And the men who often answer the phone aren’t about to volunteer that information…

Yes, that’s what touring looks like to the warped mind of a pig obsessed with BDSM masturbatory fantasies involving adolescents. Guys, have you EVER called an independent escort’s ad and had a man answer? Ever? It’s almost idiotic enough to distract the reader from the FBI agent asking for more money to fulfill his sick dream of attempting to entrap and cage literally every single escort on Backpage.

Reframing

So Close and Yet So Far

Why do so many would-be allies insist on including vile, insulting garbage like this in otherwise-supportive essays?

…You may not approve of prostitution, and many quite reasonably do not. It raises serious, ethical questions. Having sex with people for money is degrading. It transforms an intimate and private act into a commercial transaction. It can pose a threat to those involved, especially women…

Torture Chamber

This is what our society refers to as “correction”:

…Gesnerson Louisius…was slammed in the back of his head with a bar of soap stuffed inside a sock. Six inmates pinned him down, and one grabbed him by his throat, as two others dragged him across the carpeted floor by his ankles…The young prisoners, between the ages of 18 and 20, kept demanding that he pay them money to stop the beating, but Louisius refused…The extortion ritual is so common and well known by both inmates and corrections officers that it has a name. It’s called a “test of heart”…Hakiem Blount, 18, grabbed a broom and began pushing it into Louisius rectum…as far up as he could push it…there were no video cameras in the room, and the one corrections officer assigned to the dorm that afternoon was inexplicably nowhere to be found…Louisius…lost a lot of blood. His rectum was ruptured and he underwent an emergency colostomy…he…served out the rest of his three-year prison term while wearing a colostomy bag, and had five or six surgeries in prison that likely cost Florida taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars…

Uncommon Sense (#557)

The Professional Association Erotic and Sexual Services [of Germany] (BesD) criticises the draft bill by the Ministry for Family Affairs for a “Prostitutes Protection Law” in the strongest terms…the BesD concludes, “A law that pretends to aim at strengthening the right to self-determination of a group of people but then denies them the maturity to make their own decisions, attempts to paternalistically ‘protect’ them from those decision, needlessly interferes with their basic rights, and that, quasi in passing, also creates regulations to save society from this group of people, allegedly in need of protection, via arbitrarily expandable ordinances…should be rejected in its entirety.” Instead, the association calls for a complete decriminalisation of sex work…

R.I.P. Candida Royalle

Elizabeth N. Brown on Candida’s legacy:

Candida Royalle is the kind of sex positive, free-speech-friendly artist and advocate that…is…relatively rare in feminist circles…[she] founded the (now defunct) nonprofit Feminists for Free Expression (FFE), which described its mission as “working to preserve the individual’s right to read, hear, view and produce materials of her choice without the intervention of the state ‘for her own good'”…The group opposed speech-censoring legislation; defended free speech in court cases, on college campuses, and in the media; and opposed the book, movie, and music banning efforts that were popular at the time. Royalle and FFE’s other leaders believed that “freedom of expression is especially important for women’s rights” and that the suppression of sexist messages “will neither reduce harm to women nor further women’s goals”…

Read Full Post »

In the News (#560)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Year Later, Above the Law, acting, Acting and Activism, Arizona, asset seizure, brothels, Canada, Checklist, cops, dirty, Divided We Fall, Do As I Say, end demand, ethics, Hollywood, hysteria, If It Were Legal, Ireland, law, Law of the Instrument, LGBT rights, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, neofeminism, Obfuscation via Dysphemisms, Oklahoma, Oregon, politicians, rape, sex rays, Sex Rays (updates), streetwalkers, Texas, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Where Are the Victims?, Worse Than I Thought, yellow journalism on August 5, 2015| 7 Comments »

There’s never been a rational argument against the legalization of prostitution, and as far as I know there never will be. – J.R. Ireland

Where Are the Victims?

Irish judges just love stealing sex workers’ money and giving it to our worst enemies:

Two Hungarian women working as prostitutes in Ireland described their brothel keeper as a “second mother” and a friend…Diana Karacsony (aged 32) was ordered to pay €10,000…to Ruhama…Detective Garda David Kenny told…[the court] that there was no evidence that any of the 25 Hungarian…prostitutes were trafficked, coerced or “anything other than willing”…

If It Were Legal

The girls who did this better hope no other sex workers ever learn their names:

…Lydia…was…outed by a tabloid as a part-time sex worker, a situation which cost her a public-sector career and lost her friends…[she] says the [Lord] Sewel [scandal] “feels like a betrayal”. Sex workers already have a lot to contend with…and client trust is something they need to rely on…“It’s like a doctor-patient relationship. That’s why people pay good money to see us. Outing a client goes against…[our] ethical code”…Sinead [says] “Client-sex-worker confidentiality is something almost sacred”…

Divided We Fall

Another good essay urging queer folk to support sex worker rights, this one from Hawk Kinkaid:

…While it’s great that gay men and lesbians are building wedding registries…and openly holding hands…many of our most high profile spokespeople risk encouraging a spineless edit of history…We must challenge our collective desire to strip a story that subverts a normative way of seeing the world. We as LGBT individuals and allies must tap our recent tragedies and triumphs to prevent our own story from disappearing into the exact same narrative most embraced by the bigots who used that norm against us…Conversations about [Stonewall] selectively ignore significant components of the rioters’ identities, often…excluding the fact that many of these individuals were hustlers and street workers…

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic

It’s funny, but the marketing for this movie makes it look more like a lurid drama than like the fantasy it is. Because surely, everyone knows that there’s no such thing as an “addiction to escorts”, right? RIGHT???

Above the Law

As often as we hear of incidents like this, I’ll bet they’re only a fraction of the ones that actually occur:

A Portland [cop named Jeromie Palaoro] is on paid [vacation] and under criminal investigation after a woman accused him of demanding sex acts and a massage…The…victim, a…relationship and sex coach, says she was trying to report details of an alleged assault at the time…Roni Reid-James…was staying at a hotel…while visiting her boyfriend. She…called police on him [after he]…attacked her at his mother’s home on July 4…Palaoro, one of the officers who responded, called and texted her late that night…then showed up at her hotel room around 3:30 a.m…pulled out his gun and set it on a table…then took off all his clothes and ordered her to massage him…staying in the hotel room for seven hours…he [also]…groped her and asked for sexual favors…

…because very often, this is what happens at trial:

A…Dallas [cop]…facing 20 years in prison after he…[raped] a woman who had passed out on his couch was offered a plea deal…that spared him any jail time or having to register as a sex offender…if Oscar Araiza does not get arrested for another five years…the conviction will be wiped off his record…Araiza…maintains the sex was consensual, even though the woman ran out of his home at 3:30 a.m. and called police, accusing him of rape. Araiza, who had scratches on his arms and neck, claimed the woman assaulted him after agreeing to have sex with him…

Law of the Instrument (#20)

Remember the guy who was charged with “sex trafficking” because he dragged a girl off of her bicycle in a rape attempt?

Ireland is using anti-trafficking laws to prosecute crimes unrelated to trafficking…The Trafficking in Persons Report…said there were no convictions for sex or labour trafficking in Ireland last year and urged the Government to do more to identify victims. It found that…the State…“continued to prosecute a high number of non-trafficking crimes as trafficking cases, including child molestation cases”…

But the US never prosecutes as “trafficking” things that don’t involve coercion, no sirree!

Worse Than I Thought

The Polaris Project says the more laws, and the more broad and carceral those laws are, the better:

…The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) reported that 381 individuals were arrested…on human trafficking charges from Jan. 1, 2007, to Aug. 31, 2014, and 484 were arrested for pushing [?] prostitution…47 of these individuals have been convicted of human trafficking and 124 have been convicted for compelling prostitution…98 individuals were incarcerated in Texas prisons for convictions of either…The FBI has long identified Interstate 10 as a significant corridor when it comes to trafficking…

Obfuscation Via Dysphemisms

Yes, they actually sent a SWAT team after whores:

Six people were arrested and at least a dozen others were detained…when Tulsa police and the FBI conducted a room-to-room raid at a Tulsa motel believed to be the home of a large-scale drug and prostitution operation…[a cop mouthpiece] said…“Given the high-risk nature of the warrant, the Tulsa Police Special Operations Team (SOT) was used to clear each of the rooms”…

Checklist

This one’s hilarious even by CNN’s low standards:

…Airports are…hubs for human trafficking…But…by being aware of the telltale signs that someone is being trafficked, you may be able to keep them from a life of modern slavery…do not confront suspected traffickers or attempt to rescue suspected victims — instead…alert the airport authorities….victims may be less well dressed than their companions…a barcode tattoo, or a tattoo with “Daddy” or even a man’s name could be a red flag that the person is a victim…A child being trafficked for sexual exploitation may be dressed in a sexualized manner, or seem to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol…

Fetishists simultaneously believe that “pimps” have magical mind-control powers, and that they’re so stupid they create these obvious “telltale signs”.

Sex Rays

Readers inclined to claustrophobia should probably refrain from thinking too much about the smallness and narrowness of these people’s minds:

The EXXXOTICA Expo is…”the largest adult event in the USA dedicated to love and sex”…but the venue is the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center — run by the City of Dallas — and that has some unhappy…The Dallas Women’s Foundation says it takes issue with the sponsors of the Expo, which include online escort services. They say those businesses contribute to the sex trafficking and exploitation of young women and children. “There is a huge correlation between pornography, sex trade, violence against women, and trafficking,” [Roslyn] Thompson said…Dallas police estimate more than 400 women a night may be part of sex trafficking in the city…”We are deeply troubled by the fact that the EXXXOTICA Expo is being hosted here in Dallas, not to mention in a facility that is named to honor one of the Dallas Women’s Foundation founders”…

Here’s hoping the building is so contaminated by sex rays it has to be torn down or turned into a huge brothel.

A Year Later

It’s rare to see an essay like this in the US, but not in Canada:

…it’s impossible for me to take any argument against legal prostitution seriously. They are all broadly the same – a ridiculous amalgamation of moralizing bluster, cherry-picked and often inaccurate statistics, and a mendacious willingness to fall back on accusations of sex-trafficking or rape or exploitation when their arguments have been soundly defeated…But…no matter how continuously it is shown that outlawing prostitution does more harm than good, the same arguments wiggle their way back into view and re-assert themselves as if they had never been countered. So today, in Canada, we have the same gibberingly absurd arguments being uttered yet again in order to support the continued suppression of legal prostitution…in direct contravention of a Canadian Supreme Court decision…They merely…declare that they are in no way in breach of the Supreme Court decision because they’re letting prostitutes work – they’re just arresting all their potential clients. It’s…almost impressive in its underhanded lack of conscience…

Do As I Say, Not As I Do (#542)

Actually, he’s right; this does give an inaccurate image of cops. They are vastly more likely to rape sex workers than to peacefully do business with us:

Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor announced…that he is firing five officers accused of being involved in a prostitution ring…The…chief…said that he’s saddened that the incident gives an image of the department that is not accurate…

Acting and Activism (#559)

Can denying people the choice to decide what they do with their own bodies…ever be an advancement of their human rights? That’s what a sensationalist campaign led by radical feminists is claiming. They are protesting against Amnesty’s leaked proposal that consenting sex work should be decriminalised, and…the…campaign has garnered the support of a number of Hollywood A-listers, including…Anne Hathaway…Perhaps…[her] experience of playing Fantine…in Les Miserables made her feel like she had a glimpse of the reality of life as a sex worker. As far as representations of sex work go, that film’s all-singing, all-dancing portrayal of early 19th century Paris is perhaps more accurate than the ludicrous distortion its star now finds herself attached to…

Read Full Post »

In the News (#557)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Against Their Will, agency denial, Ashley Madison, California, condoms, cops, Divided We Fall, Drawing Lines, East Asia, evidence, First They Came for the Hookers, Germany, Gingerbread House, Hollywood, hysteria, India, internet, law, LGBT rights, Malaysia, Minnesota, Monsters, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, Pennsylvania, politicians, prisons, prohibitionist myths, rescue industry, Seizing Power, stripping, Surplus Women, The Public Eye, transgender, Uncommon Sense, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers on July 25, 2015| 35 Comments »

One of the most dangerous aspects of our work is the swarm of moral, political and legal authorities…who treat us like children and victims and, when we won’t behave like children and victims, criminalize us in a manner that sometimes leads to fatal exchanges. – Fleur de Lit

Ashley Madison

Though I’m tempted to gloat, real people are being endangered here; furthermore, the hackers’ professed motives are horrific:

Data stolen by hackers from AshleyMadison.com, the online cheating site that claims 37 million users, has been posted online…The breach was confirmed in a statement from Avid Life Media Inc…the company said it would offer all users the ability to fully delete their personal information from the site — an option that was previously only available for a fee…the hackers, who identify as “The Impact Team,” got a hold of “sensitive internal data” not only for AshleyMadison, but also for other hookup sites owned by the company, Cougar Life…and Established Men… which promises to connect “young, beautiful women with successful men”…The Impact Team is threatening to expose all customer records unless Avid Life Media takes AshleyMadison and Established Men offline “permanently in all forms”…

The hackers described Ashley Madison as “a “prostitution/human trafficking website for rich men to pay for sex” and added, “too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion“.

Against Their Will

A 23-year-old woman’s pregnancy has blown the lid off a prostitution racket allegedly being run in an Ulhasnagar rehabilitation centre, which is supposed to be a safe home for women rescued from prostitution…no men, except for those who may be working at the centre, are allowed in…Senior police inspector Dhananjay Dhopavkar of Hill Line police station said, “What can we do? This centre has no security. The women living there have been freely moving in and out of the place”…Dhopavkar added that the centre has been allowing sex workers to continue engaging in prostitution while living there…

Surplus Women

A man aged 91 has confessed to the murder of a prostitute outside a Soho nightclub nearly 70 years ago. The British expat walked into a police station near his home in Canada to admit to the killing in 1946 after he had been diagnosed with cancer. He said he had shot the woman…after she had cheated him out of money…detectives scoured through old files of the unsolved murders…and the…man picked out a picture of…Margaret Cook…It is thought to be the longest gap between a crime and a confession in British criminal history.

Divided We Fall

Much more of this, please:

…Gay culture has a long history of sex work, from 1950s “hustle” bars where “straight” guys paid a commission to the bartender in order to hook up with gay johns, to 1990s go-go bars where queer dancers were often there to display their wares to potential clients…Gay literature celebrated sex work in the ’80s and ’90s…Plenty of gay men have written memoirs of their sex work…A disproportionate number of trans and queer youth…have done sex work for survival…[yet] at a time when we should be decriminalizing sex work, there’s a movement in the LGBT world to pretend sex work doesn’t exist, isn’t a queer and trans issue, isn’t something we’ve historically embraced…It’s time the LGBT community get behind legalization of sex work and embrace rather than distance ourselves from the unique role LGBT people have historically played in the sex industry. Legalization actually makes a safer world for the women and men who do sex work, and it destigmatizes something as old as time. Yes, especially now, in this new age of marriage equality and post-gay parenting and our happy white-picket-fence lives, there’s a need for us to stand up for the least-protected class of people, LGBT sex workers, and demand their rights now, too.

Gingerbread House

Another paint-by-numbers “sex trafficking” tall tale:

…the Twin Cities metro area is among the nations’ 13 largest centers for child prostitution with Minneapolis as the home base of a large domestic prostitution ring…More than 50 percent of all domestic prostitution victims are classified as runaway youth...living on the street…in almost all cases, youth are not choosing this life. Traffickers/pimps recruit youth who may…be struggling…One…group of concerned citizens has been meeting and praying about…A Christian-based, safe housing facility focused on girls ages 12-18 with equine therapy…ranch residents will get guidance to realize their deep value and potential through the love of Jesus Christ…as they heal and transition into permanent housing…“We’ve heard that Highway 2 is a corridor to Duluth for sex trafficking – from the reservations to the ports and to the oil fields,” said [a prohibitionist]. “We often don’t think it’s here in our own town but it is”…“If…men…would understand that if they stopped using [girls] the problem would go away. They need to realize the feeders into sex trafficking, like porn”…

Monsters

Hey, Gay Inc: if prostitution weren’t criminalized, transwomen couldn’t be arrested for being profiled as prostitutes:

…Meagan Taylor was…visiting Des Moines with a friend who is also transgender, and they were staying at a hotel…where…police showed up at their hotel room….[after the staff called the cops on] “two males dressed as females…[because the] staff was worried about possible prostitution activity”…[the pig stole her hormone pills and] charged [her] with possession of prescription drugs without a prescription…Taylor could be there for months…There is…no good reason for a 22-year-old nonviolent person like Taylor to be locked up indefinitely…the real offense is a private business calling police on paying guests because they didn’t conform to gender stereotypes…

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (#318)

People are starting to recognize the “Trafficking in Persons” report as a political weapon:

…the State Department is preparing to certify that Malaysia has made significant strides in fighting human trafficking — upgrading it to a Tier 2 “watch list”. The timing couldn’t be better for the Malaysian government, which is eager to join the Obama administration’s landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade deal…that aims to unite nearly 40 percent of the world’s GDP into one free-trade zone…[but] anti-trafficking campaigners say that no real progress has been made. “Human trafficking and forced labor are as bad as ever here,” [said] Charles Santiago, a member of the Malaysian parliament…But in order for Malaysia to join the trade deal, it is crucial that its status be upgraded…legislation…[prohibits negotiation] with countries that have been designated Tier 3…”If we get Tier 2, it will be a blatant display of American hypocrisy…they might as well throw the entire TIP in the trash”…

Of course, Malaysia’s problem isn’t SEX “trafficking”, so it’s all good.

Drawing Lines

Kudos to Margaret Corvid for being willing to eat crow with a good heart:

New sex worker writers often justify their sex work with respectability politics. I did it. I fucked up with my very first piece, in a big venue, the Guardian, contrasting my sex work to that of hypothetical trafficked workers, so-called “miserable slaves”. Even after taking feedback about that mistake, it took me a while to quit using my own favorable personal circumstances to make sex work more palatable to my readers. I think that I did it because I was intoxicated with the power of my writing, and I thought my experience was important. Guess what—sometimes it’s not…

Uncommon Sense (#420)

German politicians are determined to wreck their fairly-decent sex work system:

A proposed law reform would require Germany’s sex workers to carry licenses at all times. It would mandate their clients wear condoms. And it would authorize police to check up on these things without notice…“News travel fast, especially in small towns and villages,” said Undine de Riviere, a sex worker and spokeswoman of the Professional Association of Erotic and Sexual Services…“Many sex workers only work part-time. It would be a big problem if their main employer would know about it. You can imagine what the parents of their children’s friends would think”…

Lack of Evidence (#439)

I did tell you so:

In a trend bristling with public-health implications, Sacramento sex workers are forgoing condoms because they fear they can be arrested for possessing them, say activists and clinic workers. “We have a huge epidemic of sex workers who are not using protection because of the police activity,” said Kristen DiAngelo, who heads up a local branch of the Sex Workers Outreach Project…multiple street workers relayed similar tales of intimidation: cops emptying their purses and photographing condoms as evidence, and even poking holes in their rubbers before handing them back while laughing…

The Public Eye (#549)

Funny, but I started sex work at 30 because “I wanted my body to belong to me again”. Still, it’s good to see basically-positive articles on sex workers appearing in Cosmo.

First They Came for the Hookers… (#555)

Notice how bad laws often follow fads?

…if a controversial bill dubbed the “stripper registry,” is revived…all exotic dancers in Pennsylvania would be required to pay a $50 registration fee with the Department of State. Dancers would need to provide full name, aliases, place and date of birth, height, weight, hair color, eye color, home address, telephone number, place of employment, a copy of their photo identification and a separate passport-sized photograph of themselves. It also would require dancers to report whether they were victims of sex trafficking or had been convicted of a crime. Other provisions in the bill would limit alcohol sales and ban lap dances in clubs. Amid a flurry of public criticism, the legislation, originally intended as an anti-sex-trafficking bill, was…shelved — for now…

Seizing Power

…I always know sex workers are in for a jolly good ride when an influential abolitionist invokes Pretty Woman…Tom Dart did just that when he persuaded Mastercard and Visa to stop allowing their credit cards to be used…for adult service ads on…Backpage…”We cannot turn a blind eye…and pretend this is some twisted Pretty Woman situation,” Dart told CNN…I am struggling to imagine what “a twisted Pretty Woman situation” looks like, so I’ll just say that the several dozen sex workers I know personally and professionally – and all those I’ve encountered in online forums and communities and at conferences – generally understand, because we do sex work and don’t just watch it on TV, that it isn’t like Pretty Woman. In fact, it isn’t like it’s depicted in most films, songs, photographs, paintings or any other media, including some documentaries…

Read Full Post »

In the News (#530)

Posted in Current Events, Guest Columns, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Amsterdam, avails laws, brothels, Buttons Bags & Banknotes, Canada, Catastrophic Consequences, Chauvinism, Divided We Fall, First They Came for the Hookers, guest columnist updates, Guinea Pigs, Hall of Shame, law, LGBT rights, neofeminism, Netherlands, Nevada, New York, New Zealand, politicians, pragmatism, prohibitionist myths, Rhode Island, sex rays, Sex Rays (updates), sex work is work, Shift in the Wind, stripping, The Hooker Vote, The Missing Word, United Kingdom, Worse Than I Thought on April 18, 2015| 37 Comments »

The war on sex offenders poses perhaps the greatest political challenge for those seeking to dismantle the carceral state. – Marie Gottschalk

Divided We Fall

Gay folk who promote anti-whore crusades are about the sleaziest sleaze there is:

A Kiwi couple needs public help in a quest to take part in a…bootcamp which would help their dream of putting a stop to the forced sex trade industry. In 2013 Xavier Hartstonge and partner Jesse North created the not-for-profit organisation SweatsHope with the vision of halting the forced sex trade industry in…India…Six people will be selected to receive an all-expenses paid trip to…spend two weeks working with a business coach, life coach and personal trainer…The organisers hope to turn it into a reality TV show. Hartstonge…says we all know the sex trade is happening, yet we choose to close our eyes…“It’s about empowerment, showing these women they do have the choice and no longer have to do this…It’s modern day slavery and should no longer be tolerated”…

Yes, that’s a gay man demonizing a kind of sex he isn’t interested in. Breathe deep of the putrid stench of that irony.

The Hooker Vote

The fact that Hof endorsed Ron Paul in ’12 should tell you that this has nothing to do with the candidates’ actual positions. From a press release that was probably sent to everyone who blogs on sex work: “Prostitutes at Dennis Hof’s…Moonlite Bunny Ranch…announce their support of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign…” The so-called “Hookers For Hillary” campaign’s embrace of “health care reform” seems primarily an attempt to demonize “illegal” sex workers by casting us as vectors of disease who need to be micromanaged by the benevolent state and licensed pimps like Hof lest we spread plague like a host of scarlet-clad Typhoid Mary Magdalenes.

Shift in the Wind

Is Al Jazeera swinging away from anti-whore hysteria again?

…Because sex work is legal in Ecuador…are, for the most part, allowed to conduct their work openly, without fear of being arrested. In other cities such as Kampala, Uganda; Manila, the Philippines; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Islamabad; Skopje, Macedonia; and Kiev, Ukraine, where it is illegal, sex workers conduct their work in the shadows, which makes it more likely that they will be subject to violence and limits their power to negotiate safe sex…For refugee sex workers in particular, an arrest for prostitution could jeopardize their asylum claim or result in deportation. The high stakes of getting caught thus force them to take even greater risks, such as working alone or on the least safe stretches of road…refugees, notably those clustered in cities, often engage in sex work. But international institutions need to do much more than just turn a blind eye to this informal form of employment. By publicly acknowledging refugee sex workers and establishing support protocols, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other international organizations could help them do their work more safely and ensure their rights — to health, information and dignity — are respected…

Worse Than I Thought

Landlords of massage parlors, spa managers and even motel managers who knowingly allow prostitution on their premises could face prison and fines under [new Rhode Island laws]…The pandering law…would be amended to include those who allow prostitution on their premises, because they derive money from the illegal activity. That includes landlords, managers, owners of spas or businesses, or any other place where commercial sex is practiced or allowed. Under both bills, the penalties for a first offense would be one to five years in prison, and fines between $2,000 and $5,000…

It’s like they’re competing with each to see who can inflict the most mindlessly-draconian sentences:

People who solicit prostitutes would face increased penalties under a bill that [unanimously] passed the Florida House…The penalty for a first offense would increase from a second-degree misdemeanor to a first-degree misdemeanor. A second offense would be a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a third offense would be a second-degree felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison…

Amsterdam (#45)

Dutch “authorities” outlaw more aspects of sex work, then feigning surprise when the number of illegal whores increases:

The number of licensed brothels and escort agencies in the Netherlands fell to 674 in 2014, compared with 1,127 in 2006…The figures also show six out of 10 local authorities have no licensed sex business within their boundaries….researchers say the decline may be due to the rise in the online sex industry…Justice minister Ard van der Steur says it is difficult to get a grip on the size of the unlicensed industry but that exploitation, human trafficking and forced prostitution are a serious issue…

Chauvinism

You’ll notice that none of these laws really affect picket-fence queers:

…Gay rights groups have made great strides in repealing anti-sodomy laws on federal and state levels, and these efforts should be commended. And yet, prosecutions for sex crimes are growing faster than any other type of crime, with an exponentially rising rate of arrests and convictions. Gay men are arrested in cruising stings, HIV-positive men are sent to prison for merely being sexually active, and sex workers and clients are arrested for victimless crimes. Much of these prosecutions disproportionately affect queer folk, despite advances in civil rights for LGBT people. Have the baldly homophobic laws of the 20th century really gone away? Or are they merely being repackaged and rebranded for a more gay-friendly public?…

Buttons, Bags & Banknotes

Read this essay by rapid neofeminist Sarah Ditum, keeping in mind that the source of all this bile is that a man went to a strip club:

…Lapdancing is a kind of entertainment that trades on power — men’s power over women, the economic supremacy that gives men the disposable income to buy a woman right out of her clothes, the ritualised submission of the naked women pantomiming sexual frenzy for the men in suits, the little assertions of possession that comes every time a man crosses the line and puts his hand on the skin he’s paying to see. Feminism is the politics of rejecting men’s power over us. Not eroticising that power, not exploiting it to rinse a little cash benefit out of our own inferiority, but refusing it…Ask…how feminism can tolerate any [sex work]…

First They Came for the Hookers…(#341)

Licensed strip clubs are no longer allowed in Saskatchewan, but the government says it will make an exception for charitable events once a year. Premier Brad Wall announced…that his government would reverse its decision to allow licensed strip clubs because of concerns about human trafficking and sexual exploitation…

Sex Rays

…the Dutch central bank has fired a 46-year-old female employee claimed to have been working after hours as a highly paid prostitute – specialising in sadomasochism. The woman, who had been with the central bank for eight years…had allegedly been offering her services under the name “Conchita van der Waal”, advertising under the motto: “the kinkier the better”. Ms van der Waal also offered to engage in sexual role play…one of the roles in which she was photographed online was that of an SS commandant…the…bank’s code of conduct…forbids “indecent behaviour” – and stipulates that no employee should act in a way which could harm the reputation of the bank or lead to negative publicity…

Catastrophic Consequences

Sex workers in Edinburgh are facing increased health risks following the controversial police crackdown on saunas…Fewer women are attending the specialist NHS clinic set up to support them – and…sexually transmitted infections have increased. Sex workers are also giving up on condoms, with saunas refusing to stock them because police can use possession of them as evidence of selling sex…many women had moved away from saunas and now operated from other venues, like flats or lap-dancing bars…

The Missing Word

…The US’s current anti-trafficking policy…produces a tangle of finite good and possibly infinite harmful effects…stories of “sex slaves” produced by some advocates and propagated with alacrity by the media and accepted by…US law makers—has permitted…an incoherent spectrum of immigration and criminal law enforcement operating without much critical oversight, let alone public understanding…the media here [follows a]…template of treating exploited (male) workers as migrant labours while reserving the term “trafficking” for (female) “sex trafficking victims”…

Guinea Pigs

Pay attention to this: a motel chain is systematically ratting out guests to cops:

The popular hotel chain, Motel 6, has recently decided to partner with the police to violate the rights of their guests. Without the consent of the guest, or even informing them whatsoever, Motel 6 employees will now turn over the guest information to the police, who will then run a background check on the subject…I highly doubt that all, or even 10%, of the 1,100 Motel 6’s in North America have a huge sex trafficking problem. I doubt many of them have real “major” crime issues at all. Yet, Motel 6 is allowing the police to run the names of all their guests, regardless of probable cause, incident, or reasoning…

Guest Columnist: Kaytlin Bailey

There’s the old chestnut that’s supposed to help you relax in front of an audience, “imagine them in their underwear,” and its dark twin — the classic nightmare of being naked in public. For comedians, the Naked Comedy Showcase provides a chance to experience both scenarios…According to New York host and producer, Kaytlin Bailey, “It’s a rush…there’s something about being in the survival mindset and that amount of adrenaline that really brings the performer in to the room and they’re present from moment to moment and that’s great to watch.” The brainchild of Boston-based comedian, and nudist Andy Ofiesh, Bailey took over hosting and producing duties in…2014 and has been playing to standing-room-only crowds ever since…

Read Full Post »

In the News (#511)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Music, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Whore in Church, Amsterdam, Anatomy of a Boondoggle, animals, Arizona, Australia, brothels, Buried Truth, Catholicism, Choke Point, cops, Craigslist, cult of the child, dirty, Dirty Amateurs, disease, Divided We Fall, Egypt, evidence, hysteria, Illinois, language, Mind Over Matter, neofeminism, Netherlands, Oregon, Paint By Numbers, politicians, porn, prohibitionist myths, psychology, red-light districts, rescue industry, robots, Scapegoats, sex rays, sex work is work, sporting events, stripping, Stupor Bowl, Swedish model, The Public Eye, The Pygmalion Fallacy, The Rescuers, Too Young To Know, transgender, United Kingdom, universal criminality, Whatever They Need To Say on February 7, 2015| 12 Comments »

The enormous variations in prostitutes’ life stories make it impossible to fit them in binary categories like “forced” and “voluntary”. – Linda Duits

The Rescuers

The youth of the Christian Union conducted a demonstration…in the Red Light District, but the prostitutes wanted nothing to do with it…Mariska Majoor of PROUD, the sex workers’ union…[said] “The Christian fundamentalists make customers afraid while the…women in the Wallen just want to work”…PROUD performed a counteraction to make it clear that sex workers do not need to be saved by Christian fundamentalists…

Dirty Amateurs

Cruising for sex on Craigslist personal ads resulted in a 15.9 percent increase in HIV infections after the website entered various U.S. markets, according to a recent study by the University of Minnesota …Jason Chan…found that HIV incidence began to increase about a year after Craigslist entered a market, then climbed through the study period…the association…occurred only with respect to personal ads — not professional escort services. Chan figures that sex workers took more precautions than people seeking sex in a social context…

Scapegoats

Universal criminality in action. Can’t prove a charge? Just add another in mid-trial that you don’t actually have to prove:

A factory worker has been jailed for four years after he was cleared of having sex with a Shetland pony but convicted of outraging public decency. Alan Barnfield was…spotted putting something around the neck of the…pony and leading it and another horse to the darkened end of the paddock. Worried residents called police and he was found “sweating profusely and smelling strongly of horses”…the outraging public decency charge was only added halfway through the trial [because] it…carried an unlimited sentence whereas the main charge…[only] carries a two-year maximum. The second charge was added when lawyers…realised that…[they would] actually [have]…to…prove…[the main charge]…

Too Young To Know

Anyone who whose memory extends back to a time earlier than the age of eighteen should know that the doctrine of “sexualization” is total bullshit, yet people believe it anyway. Will Matheson argues that since humans are naturally sexual, the actual problem is what we might call “Puritanization”, the societal suppression of those healthy, natural urges. It’s a good essay, and I’m not just saying that because he quotes me right below Carl Sagan.

Whatever They Need To Say

This cannot be repeated too many times:

One of Amsterdam’s most iconic landmarks is being torn down. The lights have been switched off in the famous Red Light District…the city’s politicians…have undertaken a massive gentrification project under the guise of rescuing women from the sex trade. Project 1012 is…buying up brothels with public funds [and] re-selling the realty to “high-grade” enterprises: dining, design and fashion…It was then Alderman Lodewijk Asscher…who managed to “sell” the project…[by pretending] that sex work is inextricably bound up with exploitation, oppression and human trafficking…This…cannot be substantiated with scientific data…Project 1012 has never been about the faith of sex workers, but about…ownership…of valuable real estate…That’s why brothel owners had to leave, despite the fact they were never charged with actual crimes, let alone convicted. They merely needed to be branded as social pariahs…

Buried Truth

Surprising no one:

A preacher who claimed that Starbucks flavour their coffees with semen has admitted that he…has been tempted himself by the gay lifestyle. “Absolutely, no doubt about it. I spent three and a half years in prison…I was tempted, but I didn’t yield to temptation…”

The Pygmalion Fallacy (#137)

A hi-tech “teledildonics” contraption…lets lonely men thrust into an artificial vagina – and have a robot dildo penetrate webcam girls in time to their thrusts…They’ll have to be quite brave – the Shockspot produces 18lb of thrust…

What could possibly go wrong?

Paint By Numbers

“Fighting sex trafficking” by standing on lawns is so passé:

A group dedicated to saving young women from forced prostitution…[stood around on] Interstate-5 off-ramps for hours in the rain. Interstate 5 is…where [prohibitionists pretend truckloads of]…sex trafficking victims are taken from Washington to Mexico. A group of people in Portland…did something about it…[by standing around holding] bright pink signs…

Stupor Bowl

I think we can safely close the lid on the coffin of the “gypsy whores” myth; “Video Vigilante” Brian Bates (no friend of sex workers) is celebrating its demise, and a Phoenix criminal defense attorney mocked it with a poem which also lampooned cops and crusading prosecutors:

‘Twas the night before the Superbowl, when all through the state,
Not a hooker was stirring, who wasn’t a fake;
The cops posted their escort ads on the internet with care,
In hopes that potential Johns soon would surf there;

The police were nestled all smug on their hotel room beds,
While visions of entrapped soon-to-be sex offenders danced in their heads…

…The wrinkles on the face of the undercover cop
Gave the look of old age even with the tube top,
When, what to the client’s disbelieving eyes should appear,
But a detective with cuffs, claiming her age should’ve been clear…

Mind Over Matter

Nobody has any damn business telling people that their reasons for having sex are “wrong”:

Rashida Jones doesn’t think women are deriving pleasure from amateur porn. “It’s performative, women aren’t feeling joy from it,” Jones said…while promoting Hot Girls Wanted, a documentary she produced on the amateur porn industry…”It’s fulfilling a male fantasy…what is the real cost to your soul and to your psyche?”

Yes, she thinks having sex can damage one’s soul. But neofeminism isn’t a religion, noooooooo.

Choke Point

In what seems to be a retreat from its Operation Choke Point initiative, the FDIC has…[instructed] banks to judge their relationships with their customers on a case-by-case basis, rather than refusing to provide…services to entire categories of industries…[even] leading banks to close the…accounts of many churches…[because] a large percentage of [their] contributions [are] in cash…The Washington Times…argues that [this] effectively ends Operation Choke Point…

The Public Eye (#423)

This author is too deeply soaked in prohibitionist thinking to write a proper story, but the words of the sex workers shine through anyway:

…the critically acclaimed Sex Workers’ Opera…[was] scripted…to…speak out against…criminalisation…UK…policies are…geared towards rescuing “sex slaves”…but for…sex workers…there is nothing more terrifying than the idea of “being rescued”…In one skit, the cast compares [Swedish model proponents] to naïve fishermen, who tell others to go and fish in safer seas where there are, in fact, no fish…

A Whore in Church (#425)

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

A group of nuns and residents who live near a west suburban strip joint…[alleged] prostitution and liquor law violations…at the club, which they…have been seeking to shut down…the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo and others [now] claim Club Allure…promotes and allows certain touching and “high friction rubbing” that could be considered prostitution…They also say the club…violates…liquor laws by serving alcohol in close proximity to the nuns’ convent…

Anatomy of a Boondoggle (#439)

Good riddance to bad rubbish:

A private investigator who gets paid by councils to have undercover sex inside illegal brothels has been fired after withholding information about a prostitute whom he met on a job…the investigator was accused…by [prohibitionist NGO] Brothel Busters…of having “deliberately omitted” important details…to…protect…an illegal sex worker, with whom he had become “enchanted”…

Divided We Fall (#445)

Prostitution charges are such a convenient bludgeon against minorities:

A court in Cairo has sentenced a 25-year-old transwoman named Malooka Aldlouah to six years in prison under a law that criminalizes “debauchery”. Aldlouah may be the first person sentenced…since an appeals court announced…it would uphold the acquittal of 26 men accused of participating in a “gay sex party”…in December…police [pretended] that [Aldlouah] had posted “hardcore” videos on YouTube that were intended to advertise sexual services including “sadistic sex”. But a review of [her] YouTube and Facebook accounts…showed only videos of her dancing clothed…and none had been posted within the past year…

Sex Work is Work (#507)

A group of South African sex worker rights activists have published “A Guide to Respectful Reporting and Writing on Sex Work“, a hefty 4.7 meg compilation which covers everything from recommendations on language and stock photographs to admonitions against outing sex workers. Given that it’s in English, it shouldn’t be too hard to adapt for American usage.

Read Full Post »

In the News (#506)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Mound of Filth, A Tale That Grew in the Telling, A Year Later, abortion, Above the Law, agency denial, Arizona, Arkansas, Broken Record, Business As Usual, Canada, cops, dirty, Divided We Fall, False Witness, fantasy, harm reduction, Harm Reduction updates, hysteria, I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now, Illinois, Italy, language, law, Learning Curve, LGBT rights, marriage, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Number Puzzle, prohibitionist myths, psychology, Public Property, rape, sex rays, sex work is work, sporting events, statistics, streetwalkers, Sweden, Swedish model, video, Washington DC, yellow journalism on January 21, 2015| 3 Comments »

I am the secret ingredient in a lot of healthy marriages, because when he’s seeing me, both of you are getting the amount of sex you want. – April Adams

Harm Reduction

As I always say, we save far more marriages than we wreck:

…if your husband is seeing me, it’s because he wants to stay married…Imagine if instead of me it was the babysitter, your neighbor, your best friend…I’m a professional. I am discreet, but more than that I am discrete: My time, attention, and sexuality are measured in hours, beyond which he is yours. And importantly, I don’t love your husband and never will…I will never be a threat to your marriage because when I’m off the clock I don’t want anything to do with either of you…

Divided We Fall

I wish gay people stuck up for whores as often as whores stick up for them:

A gay man…in…Italy…who worked as a chef in a restaurant was often harassed by his manager…one night, his manager told him that he “had to prove to the rest of the staff [I] was not gay by having sex with a prostitute…I met Marta, a Romanian girl. I explained her the situation and she accepted. We went back to the restaurant, where my manager spoke with her and told her what she had to do…We then went to a room to have sex, but I could not manage…The manager then gave €40 to the prostitute while my colleagues started asking the woman whether I was gay or straight. She replied I was fine, but they did not believe her.” A few days after the episode, Marco decided to sue his manager…

Above the Law

Cops say it’s not “fair” that they were fired, merely for gang-raping a teenage girl at gunpoint:

They were arrested for sexual abuse involving a minor, but now…[Illinois cops] Steven…Bonynge…and Seth Degelman [have filed suit]…the victim was “slightly under the age of 17.” In other words, she was 16…Bonynge…used a weapon in the commission of the [rape]…

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

A man’s career is destroyed for seeking consensual sex:

Basketball analyst and former NBA player Greg Anthony was suspended indefinitely by CBS…after he was arrested on a charge of soliciting a prostitute in a Washington, D.C., hotel room…Anthony…issued a statement…apologizing to his wife, family and colleagues…Anthony was suspected of using a computer as part of the crime, and that his arrest was part of an undercover operation targeting prostitution. The hotel is less than a mile from the White House…

What possible fucking difference does the computer or the hotel’s location make? Does the reporter wish the audience to fear that the President was endangered by evil sex rays?

Broken Record

This would be hilarious except that the “authorities” are destroying real people’s lives in furtherance of a rather pedestrian wanking fantasy:

The Detroit Auto Show draws thousands to the Motor City. And…that means…the demand for sex spikes…The Department of Homeland Security is fighting the transport of mostly young women, many of them underage, against their will. “When you have a big international event like this…there is a sex trafficking industry that springs up around it,” [fantasized] Special Agent Michael Ball. They are likely lurking at the bars and hotels…Pimps [use] websites like Priceline.com to book hotel rooms…websites like Backpage.com have…graphic catch lines like, “meat is fresh.” Code, for someone new has been brought to town…Officials want you to be on the lookout for young people…[with] tattoos on the neck or thigh…

That Was the Week That Was (#449)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Tale That Grew in the Telling, Absolute Corruption, agency denial, apes & monkeys, asset seizure, Austria, bogus studies, brothels, Canada, Catholicism, Check Your Premises, Coming and Going, cops, disease, diversion programs, Divided We Fall, drugs, Enabling Oppression, Germany, Greece, harm reduction, Held Together With Lies, Hollywood, hysteria, India, Ireland, Islam, Michigan, Monkey Business, neofeminism, New York, Not the Leading Players, Ohio, Original Sin, Policing for Profit, politicians, prohibitionist myths, psychology, Repeat Offenders, rescue industry, Romania, Russia, Scapegoats, Sexual Predators, Shift in the Wind, survivors, Sweden, Swedish model, Texas, The Course of a Disease, The Public Eye, The Scarlet Letter, The Widening Gyre, Uncommon Sense, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers on December 5, 2014| 9 Comments »

The idea that prostitution should be stopped by non-sex workers…devalues and dehumanizes people who are struggling to make ends meet. – Svati Shah

Check Your Premises

Oh, the mental gymnastics:

…Law enforcement and [feminist] groups [pretend that] tough…penalties are an appropriate response to pimps who prey on vulnerable young women…But at times, the law enforcement efforts that are meant to target the pimps also sweep up the women who assist them in their crimes, women who often are also victims themselves…

Blah blah “sold for sex”, blah blah “sex-trafficking network”, blah blah “control over her”, blah blah “enslaved to their pimps”. You get the idea.

Repeat Offenders

There’s something deeply disturbing about Catholic nuns aiding and abetting the police state; it’s even more disturbing when the collaborators name their operation after a Biblical whore famous for hiding fugitives from the police:

Sister Ancy Mathew …founded a charity called Rahab…and accompanied officers…raiding flats where trafficked women might be held…Women who have been trafficked into Britain to become sex workers have invariably been lied to, and have often been encouraged by the criminals who control them to fear police. As a result, few trust the police enough to be able to open up…about what they know after they have been freed…

Enabling Oppression

Even the more perceptive survivors of forced prostitution recognize that criminalization enables it:

…I would never have had to go through that terrible situation if prostitution was legalized…If it was legal, I would have signed a contract, I would have known what I was getting myself into, and I could have held the recruiters accountable for their actions…

The Scarlet Letter (TW3 #19)

A woman that had been arrested in 2012 for allegedly working illegally as a prostitute and accused of intentionally causing clients serious bodily harm, has died from a drug overdose…she also left behind a suicide note. Katerina…was among 12 HIV-positive women…whose names and photographs were published on the Greek police’s website in 2012…Positive Voice, a group that helps people with HIV, had denounced the incident as an unacceptable breach of ‘medical confidentiality…Katerina…served a one year prison sentence and was released after a court…[found] no evidence [she] engaged in illegal prostitution…

The Widening Gyre

Evidence? This is Sweden, we don’t believe in evidence:

Sweden’s Security Service has expressed concerns about a rapid rise in the number of Swedes heading to Iraq and Syria to fight for Isis, as Sweden’s official coordinator against violent extremism suggests some girls are being forced to make the journey…she said that while many young people choose to join…others – especially girls – are…”trafficked” to the middle east and southern Asia…

Sexual Predators

Yakopovich believes cops should relax, have fun, rape a few whores and laugh at their tears:

Police say they are cracking down on prostitution…Lt. Vince Yakopovich said…”We always try to take the time and say, ‘Hey, drop what you are doing and let’s go'”…Local motels are cooperating for the most part…

Coming and Going (TW3 #311)

In the long run, tight budgets work in our favor:

Dallas County’s prostitution diversion [scheme]…was meant to serve as a model for the state’s largest counties. But some officials, including those in Collin and Denton County, have passed on the state’s mandate…that counties with more than 200,000 people start [similar schemes]…Officials…say…prostitutes…in their jurisdictions …aren’t at the street level…and [harassing them] requires more [expensive]…investigations…

The Leading Players in the Field, Not (TW3 #316)

…Gloria Steinem went to India earlier this year…with Ruchira Gupta…of Apne Aap…Feminists in India…disagree with Steinem’s take on prostitution…Steinem…repeatedly calls Apne Aap a “grass roots” organization, which would imply that it has little or no international profile, and primarily works with local people…[but] Apne Aap…receives funding from outside India regularly, and…is part of the international trafficking industrial complex, that combination of non-governmental organizations, governments, and money that has enabled the strange rise of the idea that “trafficking”, whatever it may be (chattel slavery, forced prostitution, any prostitution, forced labor, illegal migration, and/or debt bondage) is a universal problem requiring huge resources to resolve…

Original Sin (TW3 #322)

Pope Francis and other leaders of the world’s main religions…signed a joint declaration to work together to eradicate modern slavery…by …2020…they declared that “Modern slavery, in terms of human trafficking, forced labor and prostitution…is a crime against humanity”…

A Tale That Grew in the Telling (TW3 #329)

If something’s in a movie, it must be true!

When Tim Matsui began working on his project about the sex trafficking of teenagers around Seattle in 2012, he followed a group of police officers…The Long Night, a film…directed by…Matsui and funded by the [rescue industry] is a gut-wrenching [fantasy] of the effects of sex trafficking on seven people, including victims, survivors and law enforcement officers…

Policing for Profit

Wally Kowalski, an engineer living in a farmhouse in rural southwest Michigan, came home one day…to find his property swarming with cops…Kowalski has a license to grow and distribute medical pot to several low-income people who depend on the drug…state police…seized his power generator—even though it had nothing to do with his marijuana plants—and some expensive equipment. They also destroyed the plants. Kowalski [said]…they grabbed anything likely to be sold at a police auction…”When they found my bank accounts here in my office, they let out a yell. They said, ‘Here’s the bank accounts, we got him.’ It’s like the happiest thing for them, to find my bank accounts.” The police froze his accounts, rendering him unable to make payments on his student loans or other bills…The authorities haven’t charged Kowalski with a crime…

Scapegoats (TW3 #334)

Once again, vanillas reveal themselves as the true perverts:

A report in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour describes an unusual field trip made by Canadian researcher Debra W. Soh – to a furry convention…she had expected to find herself in a dimly-lit orgy “filled with couples – or groups – of costumed folks engaging in kinky sex” but she saw nothing of the kind. In fact, she saw nothing sexual at the whole convention except some erotic…fan art that was on sale. Instead, the furries were chatting, playing board games, smoking, and so on…

Absolute Corruption (TW3 #349)

Former day care owners who spent 21 years in prison…[for Satanic panic] convictions…are struggling to convince prosecutors that they should be fully exonerated. Dan and Fran Keller…were freed on bond last year when the only physical evidence against them was found to be a mistake…But…prosecutors remain unwilling to proclaim them innocent [despite the fact that everyone knows their conviction was the product of a witch hunt]…[their] claim…will be decided by…conservative judges [who protect the status quo and]…will be guided by the recommendations of [the] judge…who [convicted them in] 1992…and…has already twice ruled that they had failed to prove their innocence.

The Course of a Disease (TW3 #410)

…a few weeks ago in Parliament…Labour MP Fiona MacTaggart added two clauses to the Modern Slavery Bill that would criminalise the clients of sex workers in England and Wales…MacTaggart and her supporters hoped to bring the Nordic Model here with almost no notice or debate…The English Collective of Prostitutes…lobbied their MPs on the phone or in person, and parliamentarians were blasted with anti-criminalisation briefings from left-wing Labour MP John McDonnell…Supporters Women Against Rape pointed out that: “To target men who have not been accused of violence just because they purchase sexual services, diverts police time and resources away from reported rapes”…MacTaggart has claimed that the majority of sex workers were coerced in some fashion – a view based on discredited statistics, and one for which she has been taken to task before…

Shift in the Wind (TW3 #430)

Rare honesty in a mainstream American newspaper:

Let’s be honest. Paying for sex has been around a long time, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Recent court cases have established sexual rights and privacy in protecting what consenting adults do behind closed doors, but those rights end for people who wish to exchange sex for money…some people do not believe sex workers should have the same legal rights as other workers. A study recently published in The Lancet found that even partial criminalization…such as the Swedish model…places sex workers at equal risk for human-rights violations and exploitation. Trying to stop demand will not stop prostitution…Nearly every industrialized nation has made prostitution partially legal or outright legal. It’s time America does the same thing…

Special thanks to Mark Bennett for the unlocked version of the story.

Uncommon Sense (TW3 #433)

Any amount of criminalization of sex work allows cops to play their evil games:

Five people were arrested…after police raided brothels in Germany…Austria, Bosnia and Romania. More than 900 [cops]…took part in the raids…Police also seized cash, computers, hard drives, business records and one pistol. Stuttgart prosecutors [demonized the sex workers’ relationships and told lurid “trafficking” tales]…

The Public Eye (TW3 #439)

She’s a victim! So let’s help her by making her homeless, too! “Connected‘s Kate McGrew has revealed that she’s found it hard to find somewhere to live since revealing she is a sex worker on the reality show…”

Monkey Business (TW3 #442)

Let’s hope this legal rationale of why chimps aren’t “persons” is extended to fetuses, too:

…petitioner requests that this Court enlarge the common-law definition of “person” in order to afford legal rights to an animal. We decline to do so, and conclude that a chimpanzee is not a “person” entitled to the rights and protections afforded by the writ of habeas corpus…chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions. In our view, it is this incapability…that renders it inappropriate to confer upon chimpanzees the legal rights…that have been afforded to human beings…

Held Together With Lies (TW3 #447)

…thousands of…sex slaves in Russia are…waiting for a good samaritan [sic] to come along and save them…since the government and society in general prefer to look the other way, anti-trafficking activists [pretend]…Russia…is now at once a destination, origin and transit country for sex slaves…and…ranked as the country with the sixth-biggest slave population in the world…in a fresh annual report by the…Walk Free Foundation…

Divided We Fall (TW3 #447)

Twenty-five Toronto city councillors have signed a letter asking Premier Kathleen Wynne to take…Bill C-36…to the Ontario Court of Appeal to determine if it is constitutional. The new legislation, which received royal assent last month, will become law on Saturday…”we work to promote measures that increase public safety…In particular, we are united in our efforts to end violence against women…Bill C-36 has introduced…unsafe conditions into Canadian society, bringing foreseeable detriment and real danger to some of the most vulnerable women we represent”…The letter will be presented at City Hall on Friday (Dec. 5), which is the National Day for Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women and the 25th anniversary of the Montreal massacre…

Read Full Post »

That Was the Week That Was (#447)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, advertising, Arkansas, avails laws, Backpage, bogus studies, brothels, California, Canada, censorship, Check Your Premises, cops, Divided We Fall, Europe, Finding What Isn’t There, Florida, games, Having and Eating Cake, Held Together With Lies, hysteria, I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now, law, LGBT rights, Maryland, Missouri, neofeminism, New York, Not What They Expected, pathologization of males, politicians, pregnancy, prohibitionist myths, rape, Scapegoats, See No Evil, semen, shame, Soap Opera, Social Construction of Eunuchs, South Africa, stripping, surveillance, Sweden, Swedish model, The Mote and the Beam, The Scarlet Letter, The Widening Gyre, underage, universal criminality, Useful Idiots, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world, Whither Canada? on November 22, 2014| 5 Comments »

This is a moral crusade, dressed up as concern for women. – RCMP Superintendent John Ferguson

The Scarlet Letter

In Anaheim, California, anyone convicted of buying sexual services will have their names and mug shots indefinitely posted to a city web page…The Anaheim district attorney’s office says the scarlet HTML is meant to deter sex traffickers, which makes about as much sense as posting jaywalker mugshots in order to deter car thieves…”Public shaming as a form of punishment goes back to the days of Puritan colonists,” writes Los Angeles Times‘ Emily Foxhall…even…Melissa Farley…[admits] she’s unaware of any evidence that this kind of shaming results in long-term behavior change…

Follow the Leader

In September 2012, President Obama issued an executive order asserting a zero tolerance policy for government contractors who violated human trafficking laws. He specifically targeted recruitment fees that workers in southeast Asia frequently pay for work with military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq…recruitment fees essentially create a system of indentured servitude. Workers usually take out high-interest loans in their home country to pay the fee, and the payments can trap them in their new jobs. Recruiters often mislead workers about their salary and the location of their job—promises of high-paying jobs in Jordanian hotels turn into custodial positions on U.S. military bases in warzones…The government says it has a zero tolerance policy, and yet there’s fairly credible allegations that these guys have been involved in trafficking and they continue to win government contracts,” says Steven Watt…at the ACLU…

See No Evil

Do Polish stuffed animal toys usually come with genitals?

Winnie the Pooh…has been banned from a Polish playground because of confusion about his sexuality and consternation at his attire. Council members were debating which character should become the face of a new playground in the small town of Tuszyn, and…some on the board raised questions about Pooh’s “dubious sexuality” and “inappropriate” attire, and one even condemned the fictional character as a “hermaphrodite”…Ryszard Cichy…[said] “It is half naked which is wholly inappropriate for children…Pooh who is only dressed from the waist up”…[another council member fantasized that A.A. Milne]…”cut [Pooh’s] testicles off with a razor blade because he had a problem with his identity”…

Scapegoats

Maybe this guy thought it was a genital-equipped Polish stuffed horse?

[Florida] police have arrested and charged a 19-year-old man in a troubling case of alleged indecent exposure. Police accuse Sean Johnson of entering a Walmart…and committing a sex act on a stuffed horse…[then] putting [it] back on the shelf…

Above the Law

…A woman says she was raped in jail by a Ferguson [jail guard] while she was pregnant last year, according to a federal lawsuit…against the city and…Jaris Hayden…[who] now faces four felony charges…[the victim had been arrested because her] license plates were expired…and…During [her] booking, Hayden said to her, “You smell good,” and, “This will teach you a lesson”…

Useful Idiots

Sen. Dianne Feinstein…is once again attempting to swell federal power and erode civil liberties by preying on fears about sexual exploitation….[with] the Combat Human Trafficking Act, a bill that would expand federal and state wiretapping authority, mandate that the Department of Justice…spend more time investigating and prosecuting [sex workers’ clients]…and increase criminal penalties for buyers by legally defining them as human traffickers…this is going to lead to increased harassment of…sex workers and enhanced monitoring of any space where they congregate…the bill also provides a potential direct mandate for DOJ to target sex workers and their clients…Feinstein’s press [pretends that] “83 percent of sex trafficking victims are American citizens, and the average victim is first trafficked between ages 12 and 14″…Yes, they’re actually claiming that American citizens make up all but 13 percent of global sex trafficking victims. It’s a bold move even within the typically-dubious realm of sex-trafficking statistics (the idea that the average victim is first-trafficked at 12-years-old is also suspect)…

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

This stinks on ice:

Little Rock Police have arrested a…[fireman] at a massage parlor after an undercover sting. Edwin Harris…worked at a business called Asian Massage…a female undercover detective paid for a massage in which she says Harris engaged in sexual contact…Harris was the only person charged at the business…

Social Construction of Eunuchs (TW3 #48)

…Dataspelsbranchen, a Swedish games industry organization, has been given a 272,000 kronor (roughly $36,672) grant by the state…to study and create a system that would provide ratings for games released in Sweden indicating the level of sexism and/or whether or not the game promotes gender equality…their study…will also include analysis of developers already working to promote diversity and gender-equality in order to help others learn from their experience.

On the Simultaneous Having and Eating of Cake (TW3 #338)

Dancers at a strip club are due more than $10 million in back wages and tips, a federal judge ruled…And additional claims are headed for trial in the class action case, meaning there ultimately could be further awards to roughly 1,900 women who worked at Rick’s Cabaret in Manhattan between 2005 and 2012…Houston-based RCI Hospitality Holdings Inc., said it planned to appeal…

Held Together With Lies (Hysteria on Parade)

How much higher can this nonsense go?

Nearly 36 million people worldwide, or 0.5% of the world’s population, live as slaves, a survey by…Walk Free says…India has the most slaves overall and Mauritania has the highest percentage. The total is 20% higher than for 2013 because of [broader] methodology. The report…uses slavery in [the inflammatory] modern [misuse] of the term, rather than [correctly]…

The Widening Gyre (TW3 #346)

A 14-year-old [South African] girl could be charged with perjury after lying about being held against her will and sold as a sex slave by her aunt…following her mother’s death…The teen alleged that her aunt later locked her in a room with six old men and one of them raped her…it was later established that the teenager had fabricated the story…

Welcome To Our World (TW3 #405)

Would anyone but a modern American “journalist” portray intercourse as a new and novel way to get pregnant?

Once upon a time, when single women and infertile couples wanted a baby, they would pay a sperm bank…thousands of dollars…But now…donors make their sperm available by offering to have sex for free. It’s a surprising — and some say unconventional — method of making a baby called “natural insemination”…

Finding What Isn’t There (TW3 #413)

…few can agree on how widespread [sex trafficking] is, or how best to address it. This troubles former RCMP superintendent John Ferguson: “Are there victims? Yes. Is this a systemic problem? The evidence tells us no.” (Between 2005 and 2009, the RCMP reviewed 242 potential international human-trafficking cases, but made no convictions.) He points to the absence of information: Canada has no standardized system for the collection of such data. Ferguson also points to a 2003 RCMP report that claimed each year 600 women and girls are trafficked into the country for forced sex work; the report has since been discarded by the RCMP itself…

The Mote and the Beam (TW3 #419)

…The use of Backpage.com as a tool to catch criminals represents an interesting paradox. While its critics deplore the ease and visibility the site offers to [sex workers]…those exact qualities make the site invaluable for people looking to [persecute them]…A small but growing number of law enforcement…begrudgingly defend Backpage…Three states have tried to take down [the site with unconstitutional] laws that…Backpage.com successfully [challenged]…and…the SAVE Act is almost certainly not legally viable for the same reasons…

Not What They Expected

Prince George’s County bucks the trend by claiming its “sex trafficking” rate has gone down…which is, of course, as much of a lie as the “King of the Hill” idiocy:

For the second consecutive year, Prince George’s County should see a reduction in human trafficking and prostitution, according to…police…Sgt. David Coleman…attributes the downward trend to the work of his unit and cross-agency initiatives like the county’s Human Trafficking Task force…“When we create a hostile business environment, it moves elsewhere.”

Divided We Fall (TW3 #427)

…Bill C-36…has everything to do with moralism and pearl-clutching white saviours in Ottawa forcing a socially conservative agenda through…This is the same government trying to kill C-279, a bill that would ensure trans people are protected under…hate crimes provisions…Sex workers have started a letter-writing campaign to ask [Ontario Premier Kathleen] Wynne to refer the law to the Ontario Court of Appeal for a constitutional reference…[and] to instruct provincial Crown Attorneys not to enforce the new law until the Ontario court has ruled on its constitutionality. Terri-Jean Bedford was the first to ask Wynne to intervene last month. Next, sex worker rights advocate Nikki Thomas posted her own open letter. And another. And another. Legal experts across Canada call the law blatantly unconstitutional…[Manitoba] actually plans to send sex workers to “camps” for “educational workshops” hosted by the evangelical Salvation Army…Handing over our most vulnerable citizens to questionable religious groups has not ended well historically…Gay men and women should be the most vocal allies of sex workers. There was a time when the same arguments were made to keep being gay a criminal offence…

The Mote and the Beam (TW3 #428)

A coalition of civil liberties, publishing, and online commerce groups are asking Congress to oppose a piece of anti-speech, anti-sex work legislation known as as the “Stop Advertising Victims of Exploitation” (SAVE) Act…[which] would create harsh new criminal liabilities for websites and publishers, allow federal agents to censor online ads, make it harder for adult sex workers of all sorts to safely connect with clients…and…expose anyone advertising online to new privacy infringements…The SAVE Act would…create extensive record-keeping requirements for any…service…that hosts adult advertisements…require anyone posting an adult ad to submit photo identification…enable the Department of Justice…to ban certain “euphemisms” or “code words” from online advertising entirely, and…make websites that host user-generated ads criminally liable…even if they do not have actual knowledge that an ad for illegal activity appears on their sites…

Check Your Premises (TW3 #432)

It’s astonishing that supposedly rational adults in the Canadian government need this explained to them:

One of the lead detectives in the teen pimping investigation wants men who [hire] women for sex to ensure their clients [sic] are over 18 and are willing participants, but an advocate for sex workers warns doing so might put johns in an legal quandary…Carolyn Botting [imagines that sex workers will show clients their drivers’ licenses, but]…Chris Bruckert, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa, said…the federal government’s new prostitution laws…will put johns in an awkward situation…“If in fact they do call police because they suspect someone is underage or in a situation of exploitation, they’re actually setting themselves up to be criminally charged”…

Soap Opera (TW3 #441)

In which a common type of tattoo is recast as a “brand”.

…Reliable statistics are [nonexistent], but [trafficking fanatics pretend that] hundreds of thousands of women and girls…are sold for sexual exploitation in America’s $9.5bn human-trafficking industry. According to the US Department of Justice, 300,000 of those at risk are children. Branding, whether by tattoo or intentional scarring, has become a disturbing characteristic of…Pimp-led prostitution…Polaris Project [pretends to have]…come across hundreds of women and children who have had their arms, backs, legs, faces, breasts and even eyelids and gums marked with pimp’s names and gang tags or with barcodes, sexual slang words or dollar signs…it is now systemic in America…

Whither Canada? (TW3 #446)

My beloved partner “Isabelle”…is a sex worker in Toronto…[who] lives in my home about half of the time…We occasionally buy things together. We sometimes pool money for grocery trips. Occasionally, one of us picks up something for the other at the corner store…A couple months ago, I had some unanticipated emergency expenses resulting in negative cash flow. Isabelle jumped right in to save me, contributing her money to my monthly housing expense…In short, we’re partners…It’s…against the law as of Dec. 6. Section 286.2 subsection 1 of the code specifically criminalizes “everyone who receives a financial or other material benefit, knowing that it is obtained by or derived directly or indirectly from (sex work).” It’s an indictable offence, subject to a prison term of up to 10 years…

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Visit my bookstore
This Month
May 2026

S M T W T F S

1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

« Apr
Old Posts
Old Posts
Call me

Enter your email address to follow "The Honest Courtesan"; you'll be notified by email whenever Maggie posts something new.

Email Address
Become a Blog Patron

If you want to donate but don't want a recurring charge, you can send any amount you like via PayPal to my email address (see below). Be sure to include a note so I can thank you!
Contact Maggie

If you’d like to ask me a question, click here.

If you made a comment and it doesn’t appear within a few hours, click on this one.

If you’d like to alert me to an interesting item, use this one.

And if you have a request, bouquet or brickbat or just want to introduce yourself, this is the one for you.
A Few References
Boring but necessary legal stuff

All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say “pretty please with sugar on top” first, and then wait for me to say “okey-dokey”.

Frank commentary from a semi-retired call girl

Posts Tagged ‘Divided We Fall’

Visit my bookstore

This Month

Old Posts

Call me

Become a Blog Patron

Contact Maggie

A Few References

Boring but necessary legal stuff