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Posts Tagged ‘Egypt’

Mythbusters

Posted in Current Events, History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 22, 2012| 12 Comments »

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.  –  John F. Kennedy

Yesterday I defined a “myth” as “a framework or paradigm used to explain and interpret observable phenomena in the absence of (or contrary to) hard data, usually via the involvement of a supernormal force or entity which is not discernible by ordinary means and therefore must be taken on faith.”  Some myths arise naturally, while others are specifically designed by rulers, priests, politicians or other would-be dictators as a means of social control.  For example, Alexander the Great’s successor Ptolemy I of Egypt combined the Greek god Hades and the Egyptian gods Apis and Osiris into a new god named Serapis, so as to have a deity all his subjects could worship; half a millennium later the Roman Emperor Elagabalus combined the Roman Sol, the Persian Mithra and the Syrian El-Gabal into a single god named Sol Invictus for much the same reason; and 13 centuries after that Catholic priests combined the Blessed Mother with the Aztec mother-goddess Tonantzin to produce Our Lady of Guadalupe in order to convert the Aztecs.  Similarly, the modern Swedish government has created a mythology of “state feminism” to control brainwashed “feminist” women and to suppress men and uppity women.  In my column of one year ago today I discussed a study which busted that particular myth wide open (though as I discussed yesterday, that won’t stop true believers from embracing it); today I’d like to observe that anniversary by sharing two other articles which bust modern myths, and one in which ignorant modern busybodies “bust” an ancient one.

Let’s start with one I myself have busted before: the “disease as punishment for sin” narrative, which holds that prostitutes and other people with “immoral” lifestyles carry more venereal diseases than those who simply “fall” into extramarital sex on occasion.  This is of course related to the ridiculous notion that only “bad girls” make rational decisions about sex, with predictable results:

[According to a new study] people who cheat on their partners are more likely to have unsafe sex than those in open relationships who don’t need to hide their sexual straying…[they] were less likely to use condoms, and less likely to discuss their history of sexually transmitted diseases…compared with people in open relationships who had sex with someone other than their primary partner…The results suggest those who are unfaithful have a higher risk of acquiring a sexually transmitted disease, and possibly transmitting it to their partner, than those in open relationships…The researchers found that 48 percent of unfaithful people reported using a condom  during their sexual digression, compared with 66 percent of individuals in an open relationship…34 percent of unfaithful individuals reported talking about their sexual history and previous STD testing before engaging in sex, compared with 63 percent of those in open relationships.  The cheaters were also less likely to cover or sterilize sex toys before using them, compared with those in open relationships.  Previous research has shown unfaithful people do not accurately perceive the effect their cheating will have on their partners’ mental health, and the new results suggest those who cheat also misperceive, or do not accept, the physical health risks of sex outside their relationship…

A great deal of the basis for “trafficking” mythology lies in myths about international migration, which are more prevalent now than at any time since the 1910s.  For example, everybody knows that the US is being flooded with ever-increasing numbers of Mexican immigrants, right?  Wrong:

…Douglas Massey, the founder and co-director of  Princeton’s Mexican Migration Project…[demonstrates] that…

• We are not being flooded with illegal Mexican migrants.  The total number of migrants from Mexico has varied very little since the 1950s.  The massive influx many have written about never happened.

• Net illegal migration has stopped almost completely.

• Illegal migration has not stopped because of stricter border enforcement, which Massey characterizes as a waste of money at best and counterproductive at worst.

• There are indeed more undocumented Mexicans living in the United States than there were 20 years ago, but that is because fewer migrants are returning home — not because more are sneaking into the country.

• And the reason that fewer Mexican citizens are returning home is because we have stepped up border enforcement so dramatically.

…If Congress had done nothing to secure the border over the last two decades…there might be as many as 2 million fewer Mexicans living in the United States today…heightened border enforcement…[shifted] the problem.  Unable to cross where they traditionally had — into California and Texas — Mexican migrants instead…[made] the dangerous Sonoran Desert crossing into Arizona…then moved on to other states.  Arizonans who complained during the 1990s and early 2000s about a surge in illegal migration were not imagining things.  But it was the American government…that…had channeled the flow of migrants into their backyard.

…migration traditionally was seasonal and cyclical.  Young men would head to El Norte in search of agricultural or construction work, earn money, and then return home.  But when it became too risky and too expensive to migrate seasonally, migrants simply chose to stay in the United States.  Because they no longer were returning home regularly, they could look for work farther from the border.  They also settled down and had families, which made them even less likely to leave…

Behold the Law of Unintended Consequences at work.  It is literally impossible for a government to stop or even control complex and widespread social phenomena by passing laws, especially prohibitionist laws; such legislation never stops what it’s intended to stop, and invariably creates a host of new problems.  But that never stops lawheads, who are always looking for something to ban…even if their target has been around for thousands of years before they were born:

A photograph of a naked woman and a swan was taken down after a police officer complained that it appeared to “condone bestiality”…the Scream gallery in Mayfair had exhibited the [depiction of the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan] for a month with no complaints from the public…But a Metropolitan police officer…saw the Derrick Santini image from a bus…and two uniformed officers went to the gallery…“They said the photograph suggested we condoned bestiality, which was an arrestable offence”…said [Jag Mehta, the gallery’s sales director].  “It’s crazy.  Perhaps the cultural references were lost on them.”  As the exhibition was already over, they took down the artwork…“We would of course have fought to keep the piece up otherwise.  If anyone wants to view it, we still have it at the gallery” [said gallery owner Jamie Wood]… Miss Mehta said the myth of Leda’s rape by Zeus was an acceptable form of erotica in Victorian times.  However, this argument failed to impress the police.  “They said they didn’t know anything about the myth,” she said.  “They asked if we had had any complaints and we said quite the contrary.  Lots of people were intrigued by it”…

Somehow I’m not surprised that the coppers were unfamiliar with the myth, or that their perverted minds saw only ugliness and sin where everyone else saw art.  But that’s what happens when two mythologies clash…especially when one set of believers is willing to threaten the other with violence in order to impose its own mythology on everyone.

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One Size Fits All

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 2011| 29 Comments »

Woman’s narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power.  –  Emma Goldman

I’ve often pointed out that marriage is closely related to harlotry; it’s one of the few points on which I agree with neofeminists.  But while they consider that a bad thing, I think it’s a good and practical thing based solidly in human biological, psychological and economic needs (unlike neofeminism).  But if one believes that marriage is no different from prostitution and also accepts the neofeminist/trafficking fetishist proclamation that all prostitution is “human trafficking”, one must inevitably conclude that marriage (especially among those unenlightened brown people who don’t pretend that all marriage is based on “love”) is a form of human trafficking.  And of course, trafficking fetishists have now embraced this twisted logic; at first they only declared that mail-order brides are “trafficked”, but now they’ve apparently decided that the label applies to any marriage contracted for rational rather than irrational reasons, especially if at least one of the parties is non-white.  Laura Agustín’s column of July 29th contains an analysis of this recent article about temporary marriages in Egypt; most of it is dedicated to exposing the contradictions and moralism inherent in such articles (and the incredible incompetence with which they are nearly always written), but it begins with this:

What is gained by using the one word, trafficking, to describe a wide variety of social phenomena?  Campaigners will say that they want to show that everything they have decided is an improper way for women to live or get by must be named and shamed as violence (whether people went along with or initiated the activities or not, as we know).  So we have seen how surrogate motherhood, sex tourism by lgbt people and marriage broking are all glossed as trafficking, with relationships reduced to exploiter and victim.  In the article I’m considering here, several kinds of instrumentally motivated marriages are all called trafficking, and I see no benefit in it at all.  When I hear about a phenomenon, I want the details of how it works:  who does what and how those involved talk about what they are doing.  If some so-called authority with an NGO and an agenda simply tells me here’s another bad thing to condemn and outlaw, give us more support so we can get rid of it I automatically wonder what else is going on.  I am not sure the authority-figure is lying, no.  But I see the moralising and the personal agenda and want to hear from others, too.

I think I can answer the rhetorical question with which Dr. Agustín begins her essay; what stands to be gained is simplicity.  Crusades are not embraced by intelligent, broad-minded people whose minds are capable of complex and nuanced thought, but rather by “true believers” who want to reduce the entirety of human experience to a simple Manichean dualism which does not require judgment or thought.  This is why the “liberal” vs. “conservative” myth remains so popular despite its total inability to describe the modern political landscape; it allows the simple-minded to boil everyone down to “us” vs. “them”, in-group vs. out-group, good vs. evil.  The true believer belongs to whichever “team” indoctrinated him while he was impressionable or chooses the one which seems closest to his own primitive impulses, subdues those personal opinions which contradict his belief-system and labels everyone who disagrees with it as “evil”, “conservative”, “misogynistic”, “infidel” or whatever and either ignores the facts which contradict that simplistic classification or else indulges in tortured logic in order to force all of his enemies into that one ill-fitting box.  In this specific case, the more human interactions can be lumped together as “trafficking” the happier neofeminists and their allies will be, because the simpler their system the more simple-minded people will embrace it.  Of course, as we discussed yesterday the more thinly a term is stretched the more reasonable people will reject the usage, but fanatics aren’t interested in convincing reasonable people; there aren’t enough of them in the world to carry the fanatics to power, and even if there were it wouldn’t be the absolute power they crave.

One year ago today I wrote about how sexually-repressed middle-class white women derailed first-wave feminism and combined it with Protestant Christianity to create the “social purity” movement, which sought to impose middle-class Anglo-American Christian female notions of morality on everyone by characterizing everything which offended them as a “social ills”.  As I have pointed out before, nothing has really changed except the details; the revived “social purity” movement is still a coalition of fundamentalist Christians and middle-class women who embrace a warped version of feminism, and it still attempts to characterize every form of human behavior of which its membership generally disapproves as “evil”.  But while the purity crusaders of a century ago tried to sell sex as something which hurt everyone, their modern descendants have adopted Marxist tactics and now characterize it as exploitation, violence and oppression directed against one segment of society by another, with men as the malevolent “oppressors” and women as their passive, incompetent “victims”.

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April Updates

Posted in Current Events, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2011| 32 Comments »

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies are. –  Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s time once again (though relatively early this month) for my monthly collection of articles which hearken back to previous columns.

Think of the Children! (September 30th)

The considerable hysteria around child sexual abuse, which has grown to the proportions of a full-fledged witch hunt in which thousands of lives have been ruined, rests upon the belief that any sexual contact between two humans, at least one of whom is under the local age of consent, is inherently and devastatingly harmful, no matter what the circumstances.  Yet, “playing doctor” was at one time very common among children, even children separated by a few years, and I’m not aware of any claims that practically the entire human race existed in a permanent traumatized state prior to the genesis of sex abuse hysteria in the 1980s.  I’m not talking about rape or exploitative incest (which can be harmful indeed), but rather contact between children who are friends or voluntary contact between adolescents and adults.  At one time it was common for girls of 14 or 15 to marry men in their 30s; are we to believe they were all irreversibly traumatized by it?  And frankly, I’m highly skeptical of currently-fashionable claims that the average teenage boy considers being seduced by an adult woman anything other than fantastically good luck.  What if most of the trauma associated with sexuality involving minors derives not from some mystical property of sex itself, but from the considerable fuss adults make over it when it is discovered (including endless invasive and uncomfortable interviews with creepy strangers asking highly personal questions), not to mention guilt over getting someone else in trouble?

Psychologists Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman asked those questions, and in 1998 published a meta-analysis of 59 child abuse studies which found that, when physical abuse and other such factors were controlled for, university students who had experienced what authorities termed “child sexual abuse” (CSA) reported that “negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense, and that men reacted much less negatively than women.  Basic beliefs about CSA in the general population were not supported.”  But did the therapeutic and law enforcement communities breathe a collective sigh of relief upon hearing the good news that most of those kids weren’t as badly hurt by this “secret epidemic” as previously thought?  Of course not!  Therapists were unhappy at the prospect of a lucrative income stream being interrupted, and cops NEVER welcome the removal of excuses for harassing, controlling and destroying people.  For their pains, the good doctors were widely vilified and even subjected to a vote of censure by the United States Congress, and since then the paper has been largely ignored except for misuse by child molesters attempting to defend their disgusting actions in court.  This is particularly sad because, though child sexual abuse is relatively rare in comparison with physical abuse (beatings, etc), the sexual abuse gets vastly more money and attention due to its lurid appeal; the common problem with serious (sometimes fatal) consequences is therefore pushed aside in favor of a far less common one with less serious consequences.  And that’s a damned tragedy.

Lack of Evidence (December 16th)

I’ve often pointed out that as long as prostitution is criminal not even amateurs are safe because, since prostitution is defined by its motive, no actual evidence of the “crime” is possible and cops are allowed to claim almost anything as “evidence” of it.  Well, a particularly horrible example came to light on March 23rd as Amnesty International reported that Egyptian women arrested in last month’s protests were subjected to “virginity tests” and told that any who “failed” them would be charged with prostitution.  Would these women have still been tortured if prostitution were legal in Egypt?  Undoubtedly, but it would have been impossible to pass off a sort of medical rape as an “evidence-gathering” procedure for any other “crime”.

It’s a Start (December 30th)

It looks like New Orleans may really be serious about curtailing its long tradition of harassing prostitutes; according to a March 25th report by WDSU-TV, the NOPD fired two cops for arresting women on a charge of “loitering for the purpose of prostitution”:

The New Orleans Police Department terminated officers Beau Gast and Thomas McMasters on Friday after an administrative investigation…[which] revealed that both men falsified records and knowingly arrested two women on prostitution charges without a warrant…[both] admitted that they didn’t check to see if either of the women had a prior conviction of prostitution solicitation within the previous year…That check is required by law to arrest anyone on prostitution loitering charges.  Both men said they were aware of the law, but they did not abide by it.  The charges…include…false imprisonment, neglect of duty, failing to take appropriate and necessary police action and creating false and inaccurate reports.  McMasters had been with the force for 13 years and Gast became an officer in 2007, NOPD said.

Thanks to regular reader Joyce for calling the story to my attention.

Check Your Premises (March 10th)

Witch-hunting is apparently still a popular pastime in Salem, Massachusetts, where a journalist was recently convicted of “victimizing” two prostitutes by employing them in his low-end escort service.  The following is paraphrased from a story which appeared in the Eagle-Tribune on March 19th and was sent to me by regular reader Alex:

Former sportswriter Kevin Provencher, 52, was sentenced to 2½ years in jail after he pled guilty in Salem Superior Court to running a “prostitution ring” out of hotels in Andover, Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire.  Assistant District Attorney Melissa Woodard accused Provencher of “taking” half of his employees’ earnings and charging them for the hotel rooms he booked for them.  Provencher carelessly booked rooms for the hookers at the same hotel every weekend, eventually attracting the attention of busybody hotel staff who called the cops on them.  The women earned $240 per hour or $150 per half hour with a 50% agency fee.  Provencher was also charged with intimidating a witness after he “threatened to have his attorney shred the two women apart in the media if they spoke to the police,” Woodard claimed.

The two prostitutes, who were identified only as “Jane Doe” and “Jill Doe” during the hearing, decided not to appear in court but one said she believed Provencher took advantage of her, and the other said that she was held accountable after being arrested, and Provencher should be as well.  Based on these claims, Woodard tried to get Provencher imprisoned for 35 years and was apparently disappointed when she didn’t get her way; “His crime was not a one time lapse in judgement,” Woodard said.  “(Provencher) planned, thought out and ran these services on the expense of these two women.”  Defense attorney Paul Garrity said that his client should only serve probation because he has no prior record, saying that the “side business” was started because the downturn in the newspaper business resulted in a significant salary reduction.  He called it a bad decision on Provencher’s part and said the district attorney’s recommendation was not reasonable.  “To call these women victims is really overplaying this,” Garrity said.  “That’s just not accurate.”  He said the two women and Provencher were “equal players” in the operation, and said there is evidence that the two women still may be active prostitutes.

Of course they were equal players, and of course they’re still working as whores; why shouldn’t they?  They probably have extensive client lists now, and if they get caught again they have learned how to play the victim card by pointing a finger at a driver, boyfriend or other convenient male.  Assuming the threat accusation was a prosecutorial fabrication intended to paint him as a dangerous criminal, Provencher made three major mistakes that I can see; he took too high an agency fee (50% is excessive if he charged the girls for the room), should have changed hotels and enforced discretion, and should have provided a lawyer when the women were arrested.  But his greed and stupidity don’t automatically convert hookers into innocent lambs, except in the eyes of predatory DAs employing trafficking rhetoric to score convictions.

How Old is Oldest? (March 12th)

In this column I mentioned the blog The Scientific Fundamentalist and described a correspondence I had with its author, Satoshi Kanazawa.  He was very interested in what I had to say, and told me he was going to do a follow-up column on what we discussed.  Well, he published that column last Sunday night (March 27th) and not only was I very flattered by his praise, but also very pleased at the huge amount of traffic which came from the links in his post!  That influx enabled me to hit a milestone I’ve been slowly approaching for a few weeks now: 100,000 total views as of the morning of March 28th.  That’s still just a small cloud in the blogosphere, but it’s growing fast (116,208 at the time this was posted) and is a big step toward my first million.  Thanks, Satoshi!

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Acting and Activism

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 8, 2011| 37 Comments »

Lots of people act well, but few people talk well. This shows that talking is the more difficult of the two. –  Oscar Wilde

The Founding Fathers thought that by banning titles of nobility in the United States, they could ensure that the only differences between people would be those arising from differences in natural ability, wealth and the like.  Unfortunately, they could not have predicted the invention of telecommunications and the rise of that peculiar phenomenon which originated in the United States but has now infected the rest of the world:  the celebrity.  Daniel Boorstin, in his 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, defined a celebrity as one who “is known for his well-knownness”; this is usually paraphrased as “famous for being famous.”  Celebrities are a sort of modern nobility, people who are given respect and even power far out of proportion to anything they might have earned had they not appeared in a movie or on television.

I couldn’t help but think about this a couple of days ago when Laura Agustín was interviewed in a shamefully-underexposed (judging by the lack of commentary) column on Huffington Post about her participation in a BBC-sponsored “debate” at the recent “End Human Trafficking” event in Egypt.   I put “debate” in quotes because it was a debate in name only;  Laura alone was pitted against the head of Interpol, an ex-victim of trafficking, a guy who personally “rescues sex slaves” and an actress named Mira Sorvino. In the interview, Laura said:

It was an incredibly stacked deck, four against one, so it was never going to be a real debate.  But I went for the chance to reach the television audience.  The BBC World Service is a 24-hour international news channel watched all over the planet, so in my head I was reaching people interested in trafficking issues anywhere who might have doubts about the way trafficking is usually talked about… I try to break down these huge generalizations.  Some people are working in conditions that look like traditional slavery, but a lot are undocumented migrants with debts to pay, workers under the age of 18 and people who would rather sell sex than do any of the other jobs open to them.  People who say there are 30 million slaves in the world are including all those and many more.

Now, I don’t watch television nor see very many movies, so when I read this column I had no idea who Mira Sorvino is besides the contextual revelation that she is a film actress.  So I looked her up on the IMDb and discovered that her only characteristics which might be considered related to the subjects of prostitution and/or human trafficking are that she has a degree in Mandarin Chinese, wrote a highly-lauded paper on race relations in China and played a hooker in the Woody Allen movie Mighty Aphrodite; the last fact irresistibly reminded me of the much-ridiculed American television commercial of the 1980s in which an actor intoned in all seriousness, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” as though that made him a medical authority.  But her fame was apparently more important to the UN and BBC than her lack of credentials, because she was not only invited to participate in the debate but allowed to take it upon herself to “back-seat moderate” as well, which is rather like someone acting as both judge and prosecutor:

I am not sure she understands that she’s allied with abolitionists.  I had only spoken a few times when she began waving her hand to get the moderator’s attention.  She demanded to know what I was doing there, why I was being allowed to speak.  She seemed to think she could over-ride the BBC.  I don’t mind people having different ideas from mine but implying I don’t have the right to speak?  [The BBC Moderator] asked me if I wanted to respond, so I said in the British tradition debate means dissent, and the BBC invited me because I have a different point of view.  Sorvino came across as wanting to censor me, which is shocking in a ‘goodwill ambassador’, isn’t it?  I don’t know quite what they are supposed to do, but acting outraged every time I spoke, keeping up a running commentary to people near her (including Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore), is certainly not ambassadorial.

The audience’s response?

People applauded, as though attacking me were a heroic act.  Someone heard her use the term ‘holocaust denier’, too…I think the event participants did not understand what the BBC was doing there and thought the panel should be just stating conclusions.  Maybe they thought the BBC was there to cover the event!  But that would be weird, since such go on all the time — they are hardly newsworthy.  Someone had not explained, and they took it out on me just because I questioned some of the statements made.

My only commentary on this would be to mention Godwin’s Law, and to quote Laura Agustín herself: “Beware movie stars who see themselves as crusaders.”  I’ve opined before (in my column of October 20th) that what the sex worker rights movement needs is “a bunch of empty-headed Hollywood stars who are looking for a new cause to adopt…[because] in the minds of the hoi-polloi, the opinion of one celebrity who knows nothing about the subject is worth the life-experiences of a thousand veteran whores”; obviously, Mira Sorvino, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher need not apply.

But perhaps we could try Arnold Schwarzenegger; he’s European, highly charismatic, politically involved and looking for a new gig now that his tenure as Governor of California is over.  And he has recently shown at least some sympathy for prostitutes; regular readers may remember the story of Sara Kruzan, an underage hooker who was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing her pimp and was until recently all but ignored by trafficking fetishists.  Well, earlier this week her sentence was reduced by Schwarzenegger in one of his last actions as governor.  The Arnold stopped short of a full pardon, but his action will at least allow Miss Kruzan to be paroled.  Maybe SWOP needs to start aggressively wooing him as a spokesman; can’t you just see it? “Terminate laws against prostitution now!”  After all, he’s almost as much a subject-matter expert as Mira Sorvino; he’s never played a whore, but he did play a pregnant man once.

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Playing the Harlot

Posted in History, Perception, Q & A, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 16, 2010| 21 Comments »

And they shall burn thine houses with fire, and execute judgments upon thee in the sight of many women: and I will cause thee to cease from playing the harlot, and thou also shalt give no hire any more. –  Ezekiel 16:41

In the replies to my column of October 10th, Bredstik asked a question which I first started to type a reply to, but then quickly realized it deserved a whole column.  Here is his question:

I feel compelled to ask possibly a few more…

Generic statements, so I don’t have to write a whole book, in order to frame the questions below. Truthfully, I’m having a hard framing the question succinctly so I’m trying to carefully blurt out what’s in my head as clearly as possible….hope it makes sense…

In the U.S. (and other places), the major religions are monotheistic. Of these, when they speak of ‘God’, it is basically identified/understood as being male (as a protector/father figure). There is no balancing feminine “force” in these religions that gives the feminine side equal consideration/status/dominance. Male “ideals” are predominant, female ones are … not as dominant . Even though the core teaching of the morals/ethics of these religions are frequently non gender specific, there is a sense that there is a male deity watching over and guiding things/events.

Question(s):
Do you think that religious views are *the* major factor in people believing what they do about prostitution (girls needing to be protected, male dominance, immoral, etc)?

Regardless of the answer above, do you have any info/data/good links/thoughts on how prostitution is viewed differently by countries (in current times, nothing ancient) where there is balanced or less pronounced “male dominant” deity (are prostitutes socially better off, worse off, or basically the same)?

I don’t think monotheism is really the culprit as much as patriarchal culture is.  Despite neofeminist dogma about prostitution being a manifestation of patriarchy, the truth is actually the opposite:  Prostitutes had our highest status in the ancient Goddess-centered cultures because we were rightfully viewed as the gateway between mortal men and the great Feminine Principle.  It wasn’t until the patriarchal cultures succeeded in subordinating the Earth Mother to the Sky Father that our status started to slip, and that preceded monotheism in most of the Western world by several centuries.  For example, by the 6th century BCE  free temple prostitutes in Athens had largely been supplanted by slave-girls given to the temple as donations, and the Athenian leader Solon tried to eradicate secular prostitution by establishing cheap state-owned brothels and persecuting streetwalkers (as discussed more fully in my July 31st column).  In general, male-dominated governments are not really happy about being unable to control prostitutes, and maladjusted men are unhappy that women they don’t own can demand (and get) generous compensation for their sexual favors while men cannot make similar demands from women.  Just look at all the TV and movie fantasies (such as Hung) of male prostitutes who can make a good living from an adoring female clientele, or of male pimps controlling harems of beautiful hookers.  These shows are about as realistic as your average cartoon, yet insecure men love to make and watch them because they’re a fantasy inversion of the uncomfortable truth:  That women control male access to sex, always have, and always will.

That having been said, I think Judeo-Christian religion is a major source of the West’s extreme version of the Madonna/whore dichotomy (and thus an aggravating factor in the generally shoddy Western treatment of prostitutes).  To understand the reason for this, it’s necessary to go back to the origins of the Hebrew people.  The Hebrews were one of a number of Semitic tribes who probably entered Egypt during the rule of their Hyksos kinsmen in the 17th-16th centuries BCE; thus, they became rather unpopular when the native Egyptians overthrew their foreign overlords and restored native rule with the 18th dynasty (“Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.” – Exodus 1:8).  And though it is highly unlikely that they were actually enslaved as in the traditional conception, it is very likely that they were subject to severe discrimination and probably persecution as well.  Then sometime around 1300 BCE, a lesser Egyptian prince whom history calls Moses forged himself a bloodline and in partnership with the Hebrew leader Aaron offered to lead the tribe back to Canaan, land of their ancestors.

Moses was no fool; though he had been passed over (no pun intended) as heir to the throne he had been schooled in leadership as every prince was, and well understood what was needed to forge a loose agglomeration of related clans into a nation worth ruling.  He seems to have favored the monotheistic model of his ancestor Akhenaton, but transferred Aton’s characteristics to the Hebrew deity El-Shaddai, whom Moses referred to as Yahweh (“I Am that I Am”).  Unfortunately for Moses’ plans, the Hebrews were not yet ready for monotheism and were perfectly happy to continue in the polytheistic ways of their ancestors and cousins.  Moses soon recognized the need for a set of strict laws and customs which would unify his followers into one tribe, a “chosen people” separate and distinct from all the related peoples of Canaan; when he decided to codify the laws and pronouncements he attributed to Yahweh, he therefore included prohibitions against nearly everything the Canaanites did.  If you’ve ever wondered why Mosaic law bans such innocuous activities as eating shellfish, now you know; the desert-dwelling Hebrews were unused to them anyhow, so Moses forbade them as a “Canaanite food”.  Since the Canaanites were a settled agricultural people (unlike the Hebrews, who were nomadic herdsmen) they had a well-established system of religious fertility rituals, most of which had sexual components.  Hence the plentiful sexual prohibitions in Mosaic law:  By specifically banning the Hebrews from every kind of sexual behavior which formed a part of one Canaanite religious ritual or another (including male homosexuality and women having sex with animals), Moses kept the Hebrews from participating in those rituals and thereby prevented them from being tempted away from the cult of Yahweh.

But barring Hebrew women from becoming temple prostitutes certainly didn’t keep the Hebrew men from patronizing native ones, so the successors of Moses (the Judges and later the prophets) developed a robust tradition of condemning harlots and harlotry wherever they saw them.  Since the Hebrews were staunchly patriarchal and thereby had the same public misgivings about our profession as every other patriarchal culture (discussed above), they developed unusually vicious anti-whore rhetoric which was if anything only intensified in their religious heirs, the Christians and Muslims.  But while most majority-Muslim countries still have official bans on prostitution, most enlightened majority-Christian countries allow it to one degree or another (though many of these, such as Canada and the UK, practice institutionalized hypocrisy by decriminalizing prostitution itself but criminalizing every activity which is involved in its practice).

Here is a map of the world which shows the legal status of prostitution country by country.  Nations where prostitution is banned are red, those in which it is restricted in some way are beige, and those in which it is at least technically legal are green; there is also a table below the map which explains the exact legal status country by country.  Note the illustrious company the United States chooses to be in; practically every other “red” nation is either a majority-Muslim state, a totalitarian one or one which has only recently emerged from totalitarianism.  Contrast this with the green nations:  All of Western Europe, most of Australia, all of the Western Hemisphere except for the US and a few tiny, poverty-stricken third-world states, and even several African countries.  The few “restricted” countries include Japan (where every kind of prostitution except “full service” is legal), India (much like Canada but worse), Norway and Sweden (where it is illegal to buy sex but not to sell it).

Looking at Bredstick’s final question in light of this map, I think we can safely say that there is very little correlation.  The patriarchal Judeo-Christian sky father is indeed pre-eminent in the prohibitionist Muslim countries and the US, but Europe, Australia and certainly South America are primarily Christian and yet grant their women rights denied to us in the US.  China and the former Soviet Bloc countries have no officially recognized religion, yet engage in the same paternalistic control of women’s bodies as the largely-Christian United States.  The two countries Sailor Barsoom mentioned which have prominent female deities (Japan and India) are not exactly known for the high status of their women, and they restrict their whores with the same kind of arbitrary legalism as is present in de facto criminalization countries such as the UK.  If I had to pick one factor which seems to correlate most closely with the legalization status of prostitutes, it would be the general attitude toward sex in that country; most Europeans and Hispanic people have far healthier attitudes toward sex than the prudish Americans, Muslims and Marxists who run the majority of prohibitionist states.

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