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Posts Tagged ‘evidence’

Links #148

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged animals, asset seizure, Australia, clowns, cops, disease, evidence, FBI, Florida, Google, hysteria, Illinois, internet, LGBT rights, Michigan, nanny state, neofeminism, Never Call the Cops, New York, Pennsylvania, porn, prisons, surveillance, teachers, Texas, United Kingdom, universal criminality, video, welcome to our world on May 5, 2013| 13 Comments »

Daddy, I love you so much that I want to cut your head off and carry it around so I can see your face whenever I want. – Unnamed child

There was an unusual degree of backlash against the police/nanny state this week; unfortunately, it was more like thrashing about a bit in a fitful sleep than actually waking up, considering that 80% of Americans think that it’s perfectly OK for the government to restrict civil liberties for “safety”, and 26% think they haven’t been restricted enough yet. And though one of the week’s top stories should have been a former FBI agent’s revelation that the US government now records every single domestic telephone call without bothering to get a warrant, I’ll bet this was the first most of you even heard of it. There, I figured I’d get the worst of it out of the way up front; most of the rest aren’t quite so bad. Jesse Walker was our top contributor this week; you can thank him for the first video and all the links above it. The second video was provided by Nick Tolman, and the first three links between the two by my cat, Wendy Lyon and Luscious Lani (in that order). The next three were supplied by Grace (except for “AIDS patients” via Women With a Vision), and the rest by Brooke Magnanti (“Google”), Teller (“conjoined twins”), Walter Olson (“poor pets”), Kevin Wilson (“Muppets”), EconJeff (“porn law”), Scott Greenfield (“stop & frisk”), and Lenore Skenazy (“tools”).

From the Archives

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That Was the Week That Was (#316)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged A Whore in the Bedroom, A Working System, activism, Africa, agency denial, An Example to the West, Australia, avails laws, Backpage, Barbie, bogus studies, brothels, California, censorship, Central Asia, Change a Few Words, condoms, consensual crime, cops, dirty, disability, Divided We Fall, drugs, end demand, evidence, Feminine Pragmatism, Held Together With Lies, hysteria, Illinois, India, infidelity, internet, Lack of Evidence, language, Latin America, Legalization a Good Idea?, LGBT rights, male prostitutes, marriage, Minnesota, Missouri, neofeminism, Not the Leading Players, Ohio, politicians, porn, pragmatism, Prohibition (alcohol), psychology, Real People, rescue industry, Reviews, screening, sex education, sex work is work, Something Rotten In Sweden, Swedish model, Texas, The Immunity Syndrome, The Pro-Rape Coalition, The Story Behind the Story, transgender, Uncharted Seas, video, We Told You So, Where Are the Victims?, Wise Investment on April 20, 2013| 25 Comments »

The truth doesn’t have a sound bite. – Hadil Habiba

A Whore in the Bedroom

While working as a high-class escort for nine years, Rebecca Dakin saw hundreds of married men turn to her to fulfill sexual needs not being met by their wives. In 2009, she…became an infidelity counselor, using her experience…to teach women about how to satisfy their husbands…Dakin says that the number one reason men look outside of their relationships for sex is because they’re not getting enough of it at home…other reasons…include…feeling bored by the sex they receive…or feeling hesitant to share their intimate desires and fantasies with their spouse…

November Book Reviews

Thaddeus Russell lectures on A Renegade History of the United States at the recent New Hampshire Liberty Forum:

Barbie

The pathetic losers who believe young girls can perform complex calculations in their heads are at it again, informing us that if Barbie were both alive and life-sized she wouldn’t have room for intestines. That’s ironic, because it’s obvious that doofuses who obsess about plastic dolls have no room in their heads for comprehending that the smaller any animal is, the more slender its proportions tend to be, and that kids don’t actually notice this kind of stuff in any case.

Real People

It’s surprising that this article on Bay Area sex workers (including Kitty Stryker and Siouxsie Q) who cater to the tech sector appeared on CNN, of all places; the phrase “human trafficking” occurs only once, in a very short passage about a vice cop. Maybe a few people over there are starting to wake up (or just seeing the writing on the wall). The same holds true in the next item:

Feminine Pragmatism

The anti-whore rhetoric in this New York Times piece about Afghan sex workers is minimal, and the word “trafficking” entirely absent:

…Mazar…is…Afghanistan’s unofficial capital of prostitution…[this is] partly [due]…to the city’s culture, which is considerably more forgiving of vice than is the rest of the country. Alcohol, though still illegal, can be found without too much trouble. Women…can be seen socializing with men in…public parks, a rare sight even in Kabul…In recent years, the city’s economy has flourished as its proximity to Central Asia and its relative peace and stability have transformed it into a trading hub…The sex trade has [always] existed in one form or another…even under the ultraconservative rule of the Taliban. But officials here say the rapid spread of mobile technology has made the business easier to manage and harder to detect…Women…host clients in a series of apartments…The point of contact is typically a man who orchestrates the meet-ups by cellphone. This has made the business tough to infiltrate for those police officials eager to crack down…[sex workers] are almost always impoverished and typically divorced or widowed, struggling to support a family…they risk death if they are discovered…

The Pro-Rape Coalition

“The Supreme Court [of India] sought response from the government on a plea to block and ban porn sites on the internet, particularly those showing child pornography…The petition filed by Indore-based advocate Kamlesh Vaswani said watching obscene videos is not an offence but it is one of the major causes for crime against women…” As we know, this is the exact opposite of the truth.

Where Are the Victims?

Even the police state seems unable to explain what legitimate public interest is served by jailing a 69-year-old quadriplegic polio victim who breathes through a ventilator for the “crime” of having sexual feelings. In 2011 he was “convicted” of helping sex workers find safe clients by running a screening service, and apparently the terms of his probation demand he not be sexual in any way; unsurprisingly, he has been caught violating that condition twice so far.

We Told You So

…As part of a legal settlement, Tennessee-based Stop Child Trafficking Now…will agree to follow a list of requirements if it returns to Missouri…some of the stipulations include [detailing] how donated funds will be spent in the Kansas City area…[and] an accurate depiction of the organization’s accomplishments. A 41 Action News investigation…followed the money trail and fact-checked some of SCTNow’s bold claims made on its website…hundreds of thousands of dollars [went] to fund private “special operatives” teams to gather undercover intelligence about child sex trafficking…[but] when pressed for more details, SCTNow could not point to a single case in the country where information lead to an arrest or prosecution…

Divided We Fall

The Gambia introduced…new laws…criminalising male prostitution [and] cross-dressing…Any man or boy who solicits, is “attired in the fashion of a woman” in a public place or who “practises sodomy as a means of livelihood or as a profession” now faces a hefty fine and jail term of up to five years…

Where’s the outcry from picket-fence gay activists? {sound of crickets} I reckon they don’t want to be soil their newfound respectability by speaking up for drag hookers any more.

Change a Few Words

Dr. Laura Agustín on how all prohibitionism is the same:

…outlawing activities accomplishes only one thing…It tells citizens that government has decided something is Wrong…Sending A Message is the principle …behind the Swedish state’s…law against buying sex, and…behind all the [others]…who want the law for their countries. Everyone wants to be seen to be Taking a Stand against immoral behaviour. Try bringing evidence into the conversation and you will quickly learn how irrelevant it is; you can find Swedish promoters themselves saying things like We know it doesn’t work but we want to be in the forefront of Gender Justice…Any other claim about what prohibitionist laws achieve when they outlaw social activities like sex, drinking and drugs is not supported by evidence. That’s because, after the law is passed and the message is sent, individuals deal with prohibition deviously…So buyers and sellers of drugs, alcohol and sex become creative, some of them maintaining a disapproving stance in public at the same time…

This is, of course, why self-reporting about paying for sex has become so absurdly inaccurate.

The Immunity Syndrome

A new Ohio law bans teachers from discussing “any gateway sexual activity or health message that encourages students to experiment with sexual activity” and allows parents to sue for “damages” if they claim a teacher has done so. What exactly are “gateway sexual activities”, you ask? The law doesn’t say, but we know that in Tennessee they include hand-holding.

An Example to the West

Add Latin America to the list of regions that do sex work activism more effectively than the US:

A new study, designed and carried out by the network of female sex workers in Latin America and Caribbean (REDTRASEX), has documented legislation that affects sex work – as well as detailing what this means in practice…independent sex work is not prohibited in any of the countries studied. What is criminalized…is proxenetism (or ‘pimping’) and…“immoral” behaviours or disturbances to the peace or public order are applied in relation to sex work. Furthermore…confusing sex workers…with trafficked persons…silences the legitimate voices of sex workers and actually blocks discussions on how to end human trafficking. This creates a framework of legitimacy for police repression and state violence…[and] results in a culture of secrecy around sex work, increasing stigma and the vulnerability of sex workers…

The study is available in Spanish, and I’ll provide the English translation as soon as it’s available.

The Leading Players in the Field, Not (TW3 #14)

Gloria Steinem is at it again, now in collusion with rescue industry NGO Apne Aap: “On April 18, human rights activists Gloria Steinem and Ruchira Gupta will kick off a two-day symposium at Smith College, ‘Trafficking Sex: Politics, Policy, Personhood’…” Note the unintentional irony of prohibitionists borrowing the term “personhood” from their anti-abortion rights soulmates.

Held Together With Lies (TW3 #28)

Despite a total lack of evidence (“[trafficking] convictions [declined] 13 percent”), Chicken Licken and other overly-excitable barnyard fowl ordered EU member states “to get a move on with adopting tough new rules against human trafficking or face sanctions as a first report on the problem showed ‘modern-day slavery’ worsening”. Obviously math isn’t the typical politician’s strong suit, but one would think even they could comprehend that the larger estimates might have something to do with the fact that they “[broadened] the definition of the crime” two years ago; now they’re claiming “the trafficking business is second-only in illegal activity to the weapons trade”, up from the equally-bogus assertion that it was third. Anyone want to take bets on whether it will rise to first before the hysteria collapses?

Wise Investment (TW3 #31)

“Texas lawmakers…[want to criminalize] advertisements soliciting prostitution…‘the Backpage Bill’…would make it a felony to buy such advertising and might press Backpage.com to get out of the business.” It will do nothing of the kind and these politicians know it. But because they don’t pay the cost of defending tyrannical and patently-unconstitutional laws, they’re perfectly happy to buy votes from control freaks at taxpayer expense.

Lack of Evidence (TW3 #41)

The news that “San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón has agreed to make a ban on using condoms as evidence of prostitution permanent” is good (though as a policy rather than a law it could be revoked at a moment’s notice), but dig Gascón’s bizarre and Orwellian claim around mid-article that criminalization and police harassment of women are for our “protection”.

Uncharted Seas

…we’ve been hearing it for years. Gay marriage is a slippery slope! A gateway drug! If we legalize it, then what’s next? Legalized polygamy? We can only hope…let’s not forget that the fight doesn’t end with same-sex marriage…Legalized polygamy in the United States is…constitutional, feminist, and sex-positive…we really can make our own choices. We just might choose things people don’t like…Arguments about whether a woman’s consensual sexual and romantic choices are “healthy” should have no bearing on the legal process…It’s condescending, not supportive, to minimize them as mere “victims” without considering the possibility that some of them have simply made a different choice…

A Working System (TW3 #136)

A Sydney madam has been found guilty of keeping young Malaysian students in sexual servitude…Chee Mei Wong, 39, forced the six young women to work up to 20 hours a day in the Diamonds brothel…and ordered them to perform unusual sex acts against their will so they could pay ”debts”…

Something Rotten in Sweden (TW3 #138)

More on the ugly campaign of disinformation currently being waged by “End Demand Illinois”:

…Who are the organizers of this campaign trying to communicate with? My suspicion is…people who already have a soft analysis of prostitution gleaned from watching 20/20…or true crime TV shows about sex trafficking busts…who is going to step up and be “in favor” of “modern day slavery” or “sex trafficking?” …I really want to know what it’s going to take for people to actually think about how complicated the sex trade is, and that it’s not all the same, and that ads that make us all the victims of overwhelming violence don’t do anything to actually improve our circumstances…

For Those Who Think Legalization is a Good Idea (TW3 #313)

Remember, prostitution was recently re-confirmed as legal in India, but brothels are still illegal; it’s therefore a simple matter for cops to redefine a business as a “ring”, label women of 20 to 25 as “girls”, call their arrest a “rescue” and describe imprisonment under psychological torture as “rehabilitation”. That way the money from the US and NGOs keeps rolling in.

The Story Behind the Story

…Fox 2000…[is] adapting Go the Fuck to Sleep for the big screen…the bedtime-story parody, written by Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Ricardo Cortés, has become something of a viral hit…It is unclear how the filmmakers plan to turn what is essentially a nursery rhyme with one punchline…into an entire feature- length film…

I hope this proves lucrative for Ricardo and also opens more doors for him.

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That Was the Week That Was (#314)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Obituary, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Broker in Pillage, A War for Peace, activism, Africa, agency denial, Anatomy of a Boondoggle, apes & monkeys, asset seizure, Australia, Birth of a Movement, brothels, Change of Heart, comics, condoms, cops, Counterfeit Comfort, dirty, disability, Dutch Threat, escort services, Europe, evidence, France, harm reduction, hysteria, Iowa, Ireland, Islam, Lack of Evidence, language, law, Madonna/whore, Middle East, Mississippi, Monkey Business, Montana, Naked Truth, neofeminism, Nevada, New Zealand, No Other Option, Ohio, Pennsylvania, porn, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rape, sex offender registry, slavery, streetwalkers, The More the Better, The Naked Anthropologist, The Pro-Rape Coalition, The Widening Gyre, Trafficking Everywhere!, Under Every Bed, underage, United Kingdom, video, Where Are the Victims?, witchcraft, Zimbabwe on April 6, 2013| 25 Comments »

There are people who believe that migrant women who sell sex need to be saved; that they must want to go home; that they must want another job and they have 200-year-old ideas about what those jobs should be. –
Laura Agustín

R.I.P. Carmine Infantino

My favorite comic book artist of all time has passed away at the age of 87. It’s impossible to overstate his influence on the industry, nor how iconic his style was for those of us who grew up with Silver Age comics. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, take a moment to look at this portrait of one of my favorite heroines and this 8-page story (written by Gardner Fox).

Anatomy of a Boondoggle

Cops do this all the time, but Pittsburgh-area cops are especially shameless:

Homestead Officer Ronald DePellegrin, 48, admits that he allowed Diana Gross, 26, to give him oral sex before he informed her that he was actually a cop…attorney…Michael Waltman…says DePellegrin’s conduct is unacceptable…”The police…are engaging in the exact type of…activity that they’re…[allegedly] trying to protect the community from”…

Lack of Evidence

You know how I keep pointing out that prostitution laws harm all women?

What do you do when you’re detained by powerful officials, everything you say is presumed deceptive, arbitrary “evidence” is held against you, and you’re treated like a moral deviant?…It happened three times in two weeks — being detained by U.S. border officials…my…“sexy underwear” were mentioned…[and my] condoms…were looked upon scathingly…[one official told me] that adultery was a crime in America — a crime that he could deny me entry for…I was detained, yelled at, patted down, fingerprinted, interrogated, searched, moved from room to room…without food, water or being told what was going on…

The Pro-Rape Coalition

Furry Girl explains how laws supposedly intended to “protect children” were really intended to harass the porn industry:

…”2257″ is shorthand for the…irritatingly-named Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act…when you appear in adult productions in the US, you as the performer/model must give the production company/photographer two forms of identification and sign…paperwork promising that you are over 18…fake IDs [exist]…and any contract a minor signs is void anyway [so this]…doesn’t do a thing to guarantee age…Any random person can search for companies reselling and licensing adult content, and with a purchase, buy performer’s legal names, social security numbers, and addresses…a determined stalker can comb through enough adult content resellers and have a good shot at finding their target…Independent pornographers…have to choose between a fear of federal prosecutions and prison time…and a fear of…stalkers coming to our homes to rape or assault us…

Where Are the Victims?

A man convicted of crimes related to promoting prostitution was sentenced…to…eight years in prison. Kevin J. Barker…had about 35 women working for him…Barker would get $80 and women would get $80 per call and…anything after that was negotiable…

Trafficking, Trafficking Everywhere!

One of the few concessions New Zealand has made to “sex trafficking” hysteria (and one of the few things that keep it from absolute decriminalization) is its ban on international students in sex work. Of course this creates a bottleneck which leads, predictably, to the very type of exploitation the law is supposedly intended to prevent. The New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective of course understands this and is calling on the government to end the restriction; Catherine Healy explains:

Just recently I was dealing with a case of a young woman who…had gone into this agreement with a brothel operator who said…I’ll look after your money until you need it to pay for your student fees, and of course when that time arrived, the money wasn’t handed over…She couldn’t stomp off to the police, she couldn’t talk to…the university, so really…the law…contributed to her exploitation…back in 2003…the then minister of immigration had hatched this dopey clause in the 11^th hour, and we said look, this will have the opposite effect of what you’re intending…

None So Blind

Funny how religious fanatics are always ready to make convenient exceptions:

A Kuwaiti woman who once ran for parliament has called for sex slavery to be legalized – and suggested that non-Muslim prisoners from war-torn countries would make suitable concubines. Salwa al Mutairi argued buying a sex-slave would protect decent, devout and “virile” Kuwaiti men from adultery because buying an imported sex partner would be tantamount to marriage…[she] even suggested that it would be…better…for women in warring countries as they might die of starvation…offices could be opened to run the sex trade in the same way that recruitment agencies provide housemaids…

To sum up: prostitution under individual control = sin. Compulsory prostitution under government control = good.

Counterfeit Comfort

…If Governor Bryant [of Mississippi] signs “Lenora’s Law,” sex offenders who violate the state’s registry system will wear a GPS tracking device…[the law] also [extends] the residence buffer for sex offenders to 3,000 feet from a school…”These are people who have proven they won’t obey the law,” said [bill sponsor Will] Longwitz. “Now…we will know where sex offenders are at all times, and can prevent them from striking again”…

No, these are usually people who can’t obey the law because its requirements have become increasingly-difficult to comply with:

Michael Byars’ effort to modify [Iowa] sex offender laws was a case study for effective citizen activism…until…he was arrested and fired from his job…[because] he didn’t update the state sex offender registry to reflect his voluntary, unpaid and, so far, largely successful attempt to persuade lawmakers to change the law…Byars…was convicted in 2008 of lascivious acts with a child…[for] a short, consensual relationship with a 13-year-old high school freshman while he was an 18-year-old high school senior. The conviction…saddled him with a lifetime…sentence that requires him to check in regularly with a parole officer and stringently limits his interaction with children, including his own son…

24-year-old Byars was such an amazingly successful lobbyist that an opponent called the cops, claiming that his advocacy is a “job” and demanding he be arrested for failing to register it (despite the fact that when he tried to do so he was told it was unnecessary). The cops were of course happy to comply, because we can’t have those dirty girlfriend-daters demanding their rights.

Naked Truth

Via Reason TV, Tracy Quan speaks with Shereen El Feki in “Sex and the Citadel: Does the Arab Spring need a Summer of Love?”

The Widening Gyre

Observable fact: 16-year-old leaves home. Conclusion: sex trafficking!

…Vancouver police are investigating the disappearance of 16-year-old Isabella Castillo, and her family…thinks she’s caught up in sex trafficking because one of her friends told them they’d seen her around with another girl who is known in the local sex-trafficking world. That girl is used by sex traffickers to recruit other girls by befriending them. She then lures them in, grooms them and gets them to run away. The girls are never heard from again…

“The local sex trafficking world?” Was it really necessary for cops and fanatics to fill the family’s head full of this kind of nonsense? Young women don’t leave home because they’re induced to run away by “traffickers”; they leave because home has become intolerable for some reason, often sexual abuse. And if they enter the sex trade it’s because the laws have made that their only means of support, not because they’re “trafficked”.

Zimbabwe

I wish I had all the magical powers Zimbabwean harlots do:

A prostitute in Bulowayo, Zimbabwe…[apparently] died during an encounter with a customer…[but] came back to life just as officials placed her in a metal coffin…she suddenly woke up in a panic screaming, “You want to kill me!” at the officers…Seeing a woman presumed to be dead spring back to life shocked onlookers, many of whom ran away in fear…

The More the Better (TW3 #32)

Apparently the word “legal” is not part of this reporter’s vocabulary: “Vicksburg [Mississippi] mayoral candidate Linda Fondren and her husband once owned a [brothel] in Nevada…it’s not clear…if the Fondrens are still involved…[and] Linda…denies she ever was…” After the actual evidence, the fact that Mr. Fondren once publicly defended adults’ right to have consensual sex with other people is presented (presumably on the “only a witch…” principle).

Monkey Business

…chimpanzees…have the ability to “think about thinking”…according to new research…researchers…required them to…name what food was hidden in a location…chimpanzees named items immediately and directly when they knew what was there, but…sought out more information before naming when they did not already know…

The Naked Anthropologist

Dr. Laura Agustín is currently in Ireland (speaking at the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair today), and gave this short interview about “trafficking” hysteria and related prohibitionist schemes.

Change of Heart (TW3 #41)

Alexis Wright…has reached a plea deal with prosecutors in the Kennebunk prostitution case…[agreeing] to plead guilty to theft, tax evasion and prostitution…clients…who have been charged so far include a former mayor, a…hockey coach, a minister, a lawyer and a firefighter…

No Other Option (TW3 #132)

Another interview (this one in Reveal) with Becky Adams about her plans for a brothel for the disabled: “More than 700 people have already agreed to work for a reduced price…’We’re expecting the local council to object, but we are prepared to take the argument all the way to the European Court of Human Rights‘”…

Dutch Threat

[In November 2000]…a Swedish radical feminist named Alexa Wolf…showed her “documentary”…Shocking Truth…[which]…shows what seems to be a rape scene…Wolf…[slowed] down the film making it appear as the woman was helpless and drugged…[thus creating] a moral panic…The pay per view-channels promised that there would be no “violent porn”…Video stores removed porn from the shelves. 57% of the Swedish population wanted to ban ALL porn…in conservative Norway we had more or less the same reaction…The woman seen “drugged and raped” in the film…is…award winning porn actress…Mila Shegol [who stated in an interview that] she was not on drugs, she was not raped, it was all acting, she actually took part in directing the scenes…she was not a suffering, oppressed or exploited woman, and she had no idea there had been made a documentary about her alleged rape…

A Broker in Pillage (TW3 #312)

Here’s that weird “pay back” euphemism again: “A…brothel owner who made thousands exploiting vulnerable women was…ordered to pay back…£75,000 of his sordid gains within six months [or] he [will] be locked up for…two years…” Because money gained via business is “sordid”, but that gained via extortion is “just”.

Birth of a Movement (TW3 #312)

“The French senate has voted to repeal a law banning ‘passive’ soliciting for sex… opponents said it put sex workers in a precarious situation…and…[led] to police abuse…”

A War for Peace (TW3 #313)

Muslim women have launched a campaign to send a message to “sextremist” collective Femen. “Muslimah Pride Day” was organised in response to Femen’s self-declared “Topless Jihad Day”, a day of topless protests around the world to support Tunisian Femen activist Amina Tyler…

Under Every Bed

Montana lawmakers are looking at ways to prevent and punish human trafficking in response to reports of increased prostitution [among]…people who have come to find work in the Bakken oil boom…there is no actual proof that trafficking is a problem in Montana, said…Rep. Sarah Laszloffy…But without the language on the books…authorities [lack] the tools needed to track it…

And more importantly, the way to clean up on “trafficking” grants! Already, selfless volunteers are working to make sure “authorities” have sufficient disinformation to block out real facts:

…Melissa Woodward…helps train law enforcement about how to spot a child that may have been sold into prostitution…”Does she have physical markings on her? Tattoos that are often visible…things like wearing very provocative clothes…”

You heard it here first, kids! Tattoos, sexy clothes and looking for work are all signs of “sex trafficking”! If you see a woman with any of those telltale signs, call the cops immediately so she can be “rescued” into the nearest jail!

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Awakening

Posted in Current Events, History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, anecdote, condoms, consensual crime, cops, disease, evidence, harm reduction, hysteria, India, law, LGBT rights, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, New York, streetwalkers, Twitter, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers on April 5, 2013| 31 Comments »

This essay first appeared on Cliterati on March 10^th; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.

In the early days of second-wave feminism, sex workers were widely recognized as having fought for women’s rights for centuries; 1970s whores marched and protested right alongside of housewives and lesbians, and for a while it looked like the cause of sex worker rights would become a mainstream one. But just as it had happened in first-wave feminism, a cabal of white, middle-class, sexually-repressed women commandeered the movement for themselves and elbowed sex workers out; once the AIDS scare began in the early 1980s their victory was complete, and sex worker rights languished as a marginal cause for a generation while gay rights advocates managed to build a powerful coalition which has not only won legal protections for gay people, but dramatically reduced bigotry toward them (especially among the young).

Finally, the sex worker rights movement began to pick up again around the turn of the 21^st century; prostitution was decriminalized in some places and liberalized in others, and sex worker unions and other alliances have gained rapidly in power and prominence. Unfortunately, the prohibitionists are not stupid; they noticed that there had been a sea change in public opinion against interfering in private sexual arrangements between consenting adults, and so created the “sex trafficking” hysteria as a means of rallying the public behind criminalization again. As the “Nation Strategy” of Swanee Hunt’s Demand Abolition organization states, “Framing the Campaign’s key target as sexual slavery might garner more support and less resistance, while framing the Campaign as combating prostitution may be less likely to mobilize similar levels of support and to stimulate stronger opposition.” In other words, “since people now recognize it’s wrong for the government to stick its nose into private bedrooms, we have to pretend this is really about something else.”

But nobody stays asleep forever, and over the past couple of years I’ve begun to see strong signs of a public awakening on this issue despite the lullabies and sleeping-draughts assiduously administered by prohibitionists both inside and outside of government. Canadian public support for criminalization has rapidly eroded in the wake of the Himel decision, and several UN agencies have come out in favor of decriminalization for both health and human rights reasons (specifically repudiating restrictive forms of “legalization” such as those in Sweden, Nevada and the Netherlands). After last summer’s “Sex Worker Freedom Festival” in Kolkata (an answer to the exclusion of sex workers from the International AIDS Conference in Washington), an article in the Guardian called Indian sex workers “a shining example of women’s empowerment”, The Lancet published a pro-decriminalization statement, and several British politicians have strongly criticized the incredible waste of money which resulted from the “trafficking” hysteria around the London Olympics.

Then in just the past few months, the stirrings have become extremely pronounced. Melissa Gira Grant’s “The War on Sex Workers” in February’s Reason magazine touched off angry denunciations from radical feminists but soul-searching and even changes of heart from moderates. On February 28^th, I spoke at a symposium at Albany Law School and was not only enthusiastically received, but found several academics and a UN official whose views were not far from mine. Then on International Sex Worker Rights Day, a group of activists (including Dr. Brooke Magnanti and myself) took to Twitter to reveal some of the abuse we’ve received from prohibitionists under the hashtag #whenantisattack, opening the eyes of many to the brutality of those who wish to suppress our profession:

…Magnanti is forced to live in secrecy, her number taken to the top of any 999 summons list because of the innumerable threats she has received…Her family’s privacy has been invaded to find the “causes” of her choice and her personal appearance derided, not least within what might otherwise be called the sisterhood…[this abuse] would seem crazed were it not for MSP Rhoda Grant, who is sponsoring an “end demand for sex trafficking” bill in the Scottish parliament, declaring violence against sex workers a price worth paying to secure her proposals. As Magnanti tweeted: “Let that sink in. Politician thinks it’s OK if people die b/c of her bill. No one bats an eyelid.”

Is it not time we came to terms with prostitution? Instead, the prostitute herself…becomes the target for culture’s anxieties about sex…whore-bashing…is somehow deemed acceptable…said bashing includes a cohort of feminist critics who…[argue that]…sex workers cannot know their own minds, or be in control of their bodies, and thus consent…Hatred of prostitutes has implications for all women who desire to determine their sexual existences. These obviously stigmatised targets allow a kind of thin-end-of-the-wedge, sanctioned misogyny…

Meanwhile, across the pond, Molly Crabapple wrote about the indefensible behavior of New York police:

…The NYPD will arrest you for carrying condoms, but that depends entirely on who you are. If you’re a middle-class white girl like me, you’re probably safe. But say you’re a sex worker or a queer kid kicked out of your home. Say you’re a trans woman out for dinner with your boyfriend…Maybe some quota-filling cop thinks you look like a whore. Then you’re not safe at all. Like most laughably cruel tricks of the justice system, you probably wouldn’t know that you could be arrested for carrying condoms until it happened to you…the polite middle classes trivialize arrest…They don’t realize that the constant threat of arrest is traumatic, unless it happens to them or their kids.

…How does something so egregious keep happening? Because sex workers don’t matter…to power…Horrors are acceptable when they’re not happening to the dominant class…LGBT civil rights and sex worker advocacy groups are fighting against the use of condoms as evidence. Mainstream feminism is not. A movement that rightly and vociferously fought pharmacists who refused to fill birth control prescriptions has remained largely silent about women being jailed for carrying another contraceptive. Mainstream feminism might remember that the war on women always starts with the war on whores…Until 1996, Ireland locked up unmarried moms and rape victims in Magdalene Laundries, where nuns worked them to death to cleanse their imaginary sins. The nuns built those Magdalene Laundries to imprison sex workers. Tens of thousands of women died within their walls, of every walk of life except the very wealthiest…

Sex worker advocates have been talking and writing about this (not only in New York but in many places all over the world) for years, but Molly’s article is being widely linked and “tweeted” as though it were saying something new. Please don’t take that as a complaint, because it most certainly isn’t; in fact, it’s the exact opposite. I’m extremely grateful to those outside the sex worker rights movement who are beginning to call attention to our situation and to repeat and amplify our arguments to a much wider audience; with their help, I’m hopeful that sex worker rights will once again become a mainstream feminist, health, human rights and civil liberties issue as it was starting to become in my childhood, and that the majority of the next generation of young people will view persecution of sex workers with the same distaste as most of the current one sees persecution of gay people, and most of my own generation sees race prejudice.

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That Was the Week That Was (#311)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged activism, Africa, agency denial, Arizona, Australia, Backlash, bogus studies, California, Check Your Premises, Comfort Zone, Coming and Going, condoms, cops, crypto-moralism, diversion programs, escort services, ethics, evidence, Finding What Isn’t There, Grace Bellavue, Hard Numbers, hysteria, illegal aliens, Ireland, It Looks Good On Paper, Lack of Evidence, language, Latin America, law, LGBT rights, marriage, Mexico, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, neofeminism, Nevada, New York, No Friend of Ours, Obfuscation via Dysphemisms, Oklahoma, One Size Fits All, Peeping Toms, politicians, Politicizing the Personal, prohibitionist myths, psychology, Real People, Reviews, Saint Death, Scrambled Eggs, streetwalkers, Sweden, Texas, That's the Ticket!, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Virginia, welcome to our world on March 16, 2013| 15 Comments »

In the field of human trafficking, I detest data because most of it is made up and bogus. – Martina Vandenberg, Human Trafficking Legal Resource Center

Lack of Evidence

It’s good to see the media finally noticing this:

There is no law that says…condoms [are] illegal…and yet NYPD…routinely…[uses them] as…evidence for…prostitution…one city agency conducts a public-health campaign and…[those] who take advantage of it are…promptly arrested by a different city agency—leading to cases being thrown out of court, a suppressed and redacted…study of the problem, and a bill to address the matter in…the state legislature…arresting people because they are in possession of condoms…distributed…by the city itself…looks an awful lot like entrapment…

Nor are the arrests limited to sex workers; as I’ve explained many times, laws which violate whores’ rights invariably violate everyone’s.

Real People

I love seeing profiles like this one of Australian escort Grace Bellavue; the more the public sees of real sex workers, the harder it will be for prohibitionists to sell their stereotypes and myths about us.

Check Your Premises

This is only “stunning” to those who believe in the “pimps and hos” myth:

A sex-trafficking case got the hook in…Brooklyn…when prosecutors revealed their victim was advertising herself as an escort…the woman, now 19, who claimed defendant Robert Pannell forced her into prostitution in April 2011…advertised herself online…last month. The stunning revelation contradicted the accuser’s testimony that her ordeal as a 17-year-old runaway was the only time she ever turned tricks…

Backlash

The Women’s Legal Centre…in Cape Town…provides legal services for sex workers…[who] face routine harassment, intimidation, and…abuse from police…[who] threaten, arrest, or detain [them] for days at a time…many are released only after paying large fines…WLC began its outreach by offering weekly group workshops…[but] soon expanded, employing four former and current sex workers as paralegals…

Recognizing Doubletalk

An internal investigation of the Wilmington [North Carolina] Police Department’s narcotics enforcement team revealed inadequate documentation of funds, poor…supervision…and a “code of silence” cover-up of a March 2012 undercover prostitution operation…Police Chief Ralph Evangelous…[claimed] the undercover operation was in response to a citizen complaint about…escort services…the narcotics enforcement unit came up with a “unique approach” in [which]…more than $2,000 in city funds…were used…

Translation: The narcotics squad had a party but got caught, and it took the police chief a year to come up with a cock-and-bull excuse.

Peeping Toms

A federal appeals court struck down Virginia’s anti-sodomy law…a decade after…Lawrence v. Texas…The appeal originated in a 2005 case in which a 47-year-old man was convicted of soliciting a 17-year-old girl for sex. The girl refused and reported the incident to police, resulting in a “crimes against nature” charge…

One Size Fits All

As you might expect, Swedish neofeminists do not like surrogate motherhood and consider it a form of “human trafficking”:

Surrogate motherhood is a serious crime against women’s human rights…Even when the woman has voluntarily become a surrogate…she gives up the rights to her own body…surrogacy…opens the door for viewing women and children as goods, and to regarding women as containers…having children is not a human right…

Nor, in the minds of neofeminists, is using one’s natural abilities in a way which violates the neofeminist religion. Though this collectivist stance is evil because it denies women the right to control their bodies, it is more philosophically consistent than that of the US (which allows surrogacy but bans sex work) and Australia (vice-versa). But lest you believe that Swedish neofeminists are truly motivated by concern for women’s well-being:

Equality Minister Maria Arnholm wants Sweden to keep the right to deport women whose relationships with Swedish spouses end within two years…The…rule was introduced in an effort to clamp down on sham marriages and to put an end to so-called “wife imports”. But it has been blamed for forcing women to remain in abusive relationships…[and] a 2012 government-ordered inquiry [recommended it] be abolished…The Centre Party’s Women’s Association has also demanded that the…rule be…[replaced with] “immediate action” against “the practice of wife importation”…

It Looks Good On Paper

Prohibitionists just love to tout “diversion programs” which supposedly “help” whores instead of criminalizing them, but if these are so great why do they need cops to force women into them, and why are their standards so strict that very few qualify to avoid jail? In a recent example from Tucson, Arizona, members of SWOP warned sex workers away from a sting they had learned about, but 13 women still got caught…and only four qualified to escape jail. The scheme’s organizer Steve Kozachik, a local politician with a reputation as a control freak, claimed SWOP’s protecting women from cops was “unnecessary” and that “This is not anti sex worker.” Tell that to the nine women whom the prohibitionists “helped” into cages and branded with lifelong criminal records for trying to earn a living.

Politicizing the Personal

Dr. Laura Agustín feels the same way I do about the concept of “empowerment”, as she explains in this older essay she recently republished:

The verb is transitive: someone gives power to another, or encourages them to take power or find power in themselves. It’s used among those who want to help others identified as oppressed…[the] emphasis [is] on the helper and her vision of her capacity to help, encourage and show the way…To empower me as a sex worker you assume the role of acting on me…

Scrambled Eggs

…a California…law prohibits women from being compensated for donating their eggs for medical research, despite payments to subjects in other human research studies…[and] eggs…donated for fertility treatments…[but] a recently introduced bill…would allow women to be compensated…the California Family Council…[claims sponsor Susan] Bonilla’s bill opens up “dangerous medical ground.” The…anti-abortion group…said eggs should be treated like organs and should not be sold…Bonilla said…”I think women are able to decide for themselves if they want to participate in a clinical trial”…

Saint Death

Jesse Walker published a good short piece on Santa Muerte which includes links to a recent AP article, an FBI scare-screed and an essay comparing anti-Santa Muerte hysteria to the Satanic Panic.

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic

Neuroskeptic points out the deep connection between addiction rhetoric and crypto-moralism:

…The dopamine theory of addiction is extremely popular today…[but] if you view addiction as essentially about reward (pleasure), surely that means…anything pleasurable could…be addictive?…if…addiction is the direct consequence of over-indulgence in a reward, then aren’t you saying that reward itself is ultimately what’s addictive?…If everything from food to friends to music are rewarding because they trigger dopamine release, then surely all of those things could be ‘addictive’…The more fun, the more (potentially) addictive…this idea – for all its medical, neurobiological, scientific language – actually undermines the concept of addiction as a ‘disease’ and reduces it to what amounts to a moral failing – it casts addiction as over-indulgence…

Finding What Isn’t There

Ministers, the police and social workers have been accused of a “shocking” failure to prevent the spread of modern slavery in the UK, leading to sexual exploitation, forced labour and the domestic servitude of adults and children…Describing government ministers as “clueless”…[about] human trafficking…the most exhaustive inquiry yet conducted into the phenomenon concludes that the approach to eradicating modern slavery is fundamentally wrong-headed. Instead of helping vulnerable victims…the legal system prosecutes many for immigration offences…

Though I hate to defend government officials, I feel compelled to point out that it’s difficult to adapt to ever-expanding definitions, and impossible to produce enough “victims” to satisfy “estimates” which are essentially just made up.

Obfuscation Via Dysphemisms

Gloria…Giammalva…was [sentenced]…to…[21] months in prison and to be partially responsible for a $600,000 money judgment…U.S. Attorney Trent Shores…[claimed] the conspiracy…charged $30 per encounter, which he said meant that 20,000 commercial sex acts were performed by the women who were exploited…Giammalva…conspired with others in the operation of a multistate prostitution business that coerced and enticed women across state lines to participate in commercial sex acts…

Trim off all the dysphemisms and what remains is: she owned an escort service and the prosecutor lied about the fee to ratchet up the number of “counts”.

Coming and Going (TW3 #35)

Dallas officials are trying to push their “prostitution diversion” scheme on the rest of Texas as a replacement for locking women up. While any move away from incarceration is good news, the motivation is a desire to save money rather than a recognition that criminalization of consensual adult behavior is wrong; whores are still regarded as “criminals” to be “rehabilitated”, and all are assumed to be miserable victims who want out of sex work.

Book Reviews (October 2012)

When Rob Arthur (author of You Will Die) noticed that Chester Brown (author of Paying For It) had expressed interest in his book in the comment thread of this post, he asked me to forward his email address to Chester and the two of them each sent the other a book. I am both pleased and honored to have facilitated the meeting of two awesome authors whose works I greatly enjoyed.

Hard Numbers (TW3 #48)

…Steph Key will introduce new laws to [the South Australian] Parliament…to decriminalise all forms of sex work, after a previous attempt was rejected by one vote in November. The new Bill, based on a New Zealand model, would…allow local government…regulatory control…but…prevent councils from outlawing brothels simply because they offer sex work…Ms Key and [Status of Women Minister Gail] Gago were confident the new attempt was more likely to pass…

That’s the Ticket! (TW3 #138)

Dr. Brooke Magnanti on Comic Relief’s subscription to prohibitionist lies:

…This figure comes from a paper that surveyed only street-based sex workers, who represent less than 20% of prostitution…we should be…wary of…any group that throws around this number as if it represents sex work in general…Similarly, we are regularly told that the “average” age of entry into sex work is 13. This is actually incredibly mathematically unlikely, unless there is an epidemic of infants being sexually exploited we don’t yet know about. Former librarian and escort Maggie McNeill has broken down why this oft-repeated assumption is incorrect…The Comic Relief site continues: “The UK is a major destination country for trafficked young people. They are at a very high risk of being sexually exploited.” No source is given for this statement – probably because no such data exists. Confirmed trafficking cases in the UK are more likely to enter other jobs like agriculture, hospitality, and domestic service than they are to become sex workers…

No Friend of Ours

In the process of criticizing Nevada’s proposed “Everyone is a Sex Trafficker” Act, Jennifer Reed also debunks the “sex trafficking” panic:

…Prostitution in the U.S. was largely legal until changing women’s sexual norms led to a “white slavery” panic that resulted in the closing of brothels with the White-Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act in 1910…The reality was numerous young women were drawn into prostitution for “mundane” economic reasons [but] the ambiguous language of the Mann Act…was used to criminalize forms of consensual sexual behavior for many years…The [American] conception…developed because a crusade against prostitution…[conflated it] with human trafficking, a claim for which there is no evidence, even according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. An executive summary of human trafficking put forth by the non-profit Center for Health and Gender Equity concludes that “conflating human trafficking with prostitution results in ineffective anti-trafficking efforts and human rights violations because domestic policing efforts focus on shutting down brothels and arresting sex workers, rather than targeting the more elusive traffickers”…investigations…[focus] almost entirely on commercial sex. It is a structure built on vice squads rather than labor investigators…

Comfort Zone

I wrote: “…many European countries seem more interested in ‘trafficking’ as an excuse to restrict immigration than as a genuine concern for the human rights of migrants.” Jim Cusack of The Independent wrote: “The Department of Justice and the courts are turning down ‘nearly all’ asylum requests from African women who say they fled [to Ireland] to escape sex traffickers in other European countries…”

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Checklist

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged agency denial, bogus studies, Checklist, dirty, domestic violence, drivers, evidence, hysteria, Ireland, neofeminism, propaganda, psychology, stereotypes on March 11, 2013| 10 Comments »

One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis. – Karl Kraus

One of the most insidious forms of propaganda for imaginary crises is the rigged “quiz” or checklist, which is nothing more than an elaborate use of the “false choice” principle. As I explained in “Misdirection”,

“False choice” is the principle that if a person is given a choice, he believes he has acted freely; a magician uses this when he asks you to pick a card from a doctored deck. As Teller points out, “You think you’ve made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties.”

A checklist is really just a quiz without the question marks; “the person does x” is the semantic equivalent of “does the person do x?” Such a list gives the illusion of a process of elimination or accumulation of evidence through its resemblance to real diagnostic lists or questionnaires, thus fooling the mark into believing such a process has taken place. But in reality the rigged checklist is designed so that many or even most people in the target group will be “proven” to fulfill the requirements for whatever-it-is. Melissa Farley is well known for using such “tests”; one rigged questionnaire is designed to “discover” that 67% of sex workers have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and another to “prove” that virtually all men “dehumanize and commodify women, view them with anger and contempt, lack empathy for their suffering, and relish their own ability to inflict pain and degradation.” Of course, this is nothing new; neofeminists have for at least three decades produced checklists designed to brand all normal men as members of some pathological category such as “rape supporters” (in the early ‘90s it was “batterers”, though the rigged lists common at that time gave way about 15 years ago to more psychologically valid tests as the hysteria died off).

In the past decade the practice has spread into other moral panics; the “Sexual Addiction Screening Test” manages to “diagnose” a large segment of the population with a psychological disorder which does not even exist, and Laura Agustín recently called attention to this “sexual exploitation” checklist from an Irish-government-sponsored group with the ridiculous name “Blue Blindfold”:

People who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation sell sex on the street or in brothels, massage parlours, lap dancing clubs, and in private houses.

They move from one brothel to another or work in various places.

They are escorted whenever they go and or return from work and other activities.

They have tattoos or other marks indicating ‘ownership’ by the exploiters.

They work long hours or have few, if any, days off.

They sleep where they work.

They live or travel in a group, sometimes with other women who do not speak the same language.

They have very few clothes.

They have clothes that are mostly the kind typically worn for prostitution.

They only know how to say sex-related words in the local language or in the language of the client group.

They have no money of their own.

They are not able to show an identity document.

They are afraid to reveal who is controlling them and lie about their story.

Their mobile phone keeps ringing when they are out.

While a couple of these might indeed be signs of something odd going on, the rest could apply to all sorts of people. Aspasia pointed out that mothers “work long hours and have few, if any, days off”, and that it’s not unusual for restaurant staff to work at multiple places. Brooke Magnanti argued that most of the criteria apply to single women on holiday in foreign countries, and Jemima and I both added that clothes “typically worn for prostitution” are those typically worn by women, period. The last two are almost guaranteed “yeses”, the last for many modern young people and the penultimate because any statement of the suspected “victim” which disagrees with the “trafficking” narrative will automatically be taken as a “lie” due to fear of imaginary “pimps”. When I was working again in New Orleans from 2004-2006, seven out of the thirteen applied to me, counting the “afraid to reveal”; it would have increased to eight if some busybody stranger had demanded that I show her my ID.

I’ve often ridiculed turgid “trafficking estimates”, but if one considers checklists like this one and the absurdly-broad definitions of “trafficking” thrown about by fetishists, I’m actually surprised that the claims are only in the tens of millions.

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International Sex Worker Rights Day

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged abortion, activism, asset seizure, Australia, consensual crime, cops, end demand, evidence, France, harm reduction, holidays, India, Latin America, law, Madonna/whore, nanny state, neofeminism, sisterhood on March 3, 2013| 15 Comments »

Sex worker rights are human rights, and there can never be too many voices speaking up for them, nor too many occasions on which to speak.
– Maggie McNeill

Three times a year, there are days set aside by the sex worker community to make a concerted effort to call public attention to governments’ systematic denial of our rights, implemented by often-brutal police and supported by prohibitionists who want to see our trade eradicated no matter how many of us are hurt or even killed by the process. Though many of them deny this and insist they really want to “help” us, their chosen tactics (which include stalking, infantilization, pathologization, impoverishment, abduction, confinement, deportation and brainwashing, to name just a few) reveal the truth to anyone whose thinking is not clouded by dogma. So even though activists like myself call attention to this marginalization and maltreatment every day, it’s good to have several annual occasions on which our unified voices can ring out together to pierce the haze of ignorance, disinformation and disinterest. Those occasions are: the Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers (December 17^th, the anniversary of the 2003 sentencing of the Green River Killer); Whores’ Day (June 2^nd, the anniversary of the 1975 protest in which over 100 French prostitutes occupied the Church of St. Nizier in Lyon); and today, Sex Worker Rights Day (the anniversary of a 2001 festival in Kolkata attended by over 25,000 Indian sex workers despite efforts from prohibitionist groups who tried to prevent it by pressuring the government to revoke their permit). The symbol of sex worker rights used for all these days (and sex worker protests in general), the red umbrella, originated in yet another 2001 protest event, this one in Venice, Italy; it was adopted as the official emblem of the sex worker rights movement by the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE) in 2005.

In addition to all of these days I’ve added my own; every Friday the 13^th I ask all of my readers who are not themselves sex workers to speak up for us, to show the prohibitionists and scoffers that we have many allies outside of our own movement. Now, I’m well aware that this is often difficult; many who truly feel that sex work should be decriminalized, and sex workers freed from persecution, nonetheless fear speaking out because they are afraid of being stigmatized as prostitutes (if female) or clients (if male). Several readers who have bought or sold sex asked me to suggest pro-decriminalization arguments that do not betray personal interest, and last Friday the 13^th I provided some suggestions; since I’ve been asked the question again lately, I’d like to take this opportunity to repeat those suggestions.

If you’re generally…civil rights-oriented in your politics it’s easy; all you have to do is argue for decriminalization from a perspective of “people have the right to do what they like with their own bodies”. As I’ve pointed out in the past, every court decision…which upholds abortion rights also upholds the right to sex on one’s own terms, even if money is involved (abortion isn’t free, after all); ditto court decisions overturning sodomy laws…And obviously, the arguments for drug decriminalization also apply to prostitution. If you’re an atheist or skeptic, that’s easy too; in addition to the arguments above you can make statements like “prostitution laws are based on religion and xenophobia, not facts” and “the sex trafficking hysteria is a moral panic like the Satanic Panic and the Red Scare”.

The harm reduction perspective is another good one, and is the approach generally favored by advocates who have a human rights background or strong religious affiliation (including some members of the Catholic clergy): Prostitution has always been with us and we can’t make it go away with laws any more than the “Drug War” has made drugs go away. All the Drug War has done is to subject innocent people to invasion of their privacy and make drug users vulnerable to impure drugs, not to mention all those caught in drug-related violence; similarly, anti-prostitution laws help nobody and force prostitutes into the shadows where they can be harmed and exploited. Furthermore, many governments (including those of New Zealand, New South Wales and Brazil) have recognized that illegal prostitution invariably leads to police corruption, just as alcohol Prohibition did and drug prohibition still does.

Finally, there’s the feminist approach: why does society have the right to tell women they can’t make a living with their natural sex-based attributes when it allows men to do so with boxing, bodyguard work, etc? Furthermore, laws against prostitution invariably subject women’s dress and mannerisms to police scrutiny; women are accused of prostitution for dressing sexily, acting sexily, carrying condoms in their purses, being in certain areas, not wearing underwear, etc. This is “slut shaming” with criminal consequences.

Though women have traditionally taken the brunt of civil rights abuses resulting from prostitution law, this has changed in the last few years; “end demand” rhetoric has resulted in men being persecuted just as intensely as women (though not more intensely, despite the claims of those who support such campaigns). Furthermore, anti-prostitution laws (especially when re-branded as “anti-sex trafficking efforts”) are used as excuses for mass arrests of both men and women, confiscation of their property, collection and retention of their DNA and intrusive surveillance. This is why you should care about the rights of sex workers even if you aren’t one, don’t know any and have no intention of ever hiring one: laws which oppress marginalized minority groups are only the thin end of a wedge which is invariably driven deeper, blow by blow, until it is forcibly stopped.

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That Was the Week That Was (#51)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged acting, activism, Argentina, Australia, bogus studies, California, Canada, censorship, condoms, cops, crypto-moralism, dirty, evidence, Gorged With Meaning, harm reduction, Hollywood, hysteria, Lack of Evidence, Latin America, law, Legitimate Outrage, License To Rape, Madonna/whore, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York, One Born Every Minute, porn, Profound Ignorance, psychology, rape, See No Evil, Shift in the Wind, slavery, Storyville, The Crumbling Dam, The More the Better, The New Victorianism, The Red Umbrella, Traffic Jam, Tyranny by Consensus, United Kingdom, video, violence vs. sex workers, welcome to our world, Where Are the Protests? on December 22, 2012| 15 Comments »

In reality, sex work isn’t stigmatised because it is dangerous. Sex work is dangerous because it is stigmatized. – Laurie Penny

Storyville

This is a pretty good introduction to Storyville, though it has a few errors and two really odd misinterpretations: she refers to “not on the first floor of any building” as a “district”, and she only counts business owners (rather than individual whores) when discussing income. Worth watching for the pictures.

Since young colonies rarely have anything to recommend them to women, they often have a pronounced gender imbalance; King Louis XV solved the problem in New Orleans by sending a boatload of whores, and George III did the same thing 68 years later for Australia. The ship was named the Lady Juliana, and this recent article draws on a recently-unearthed jail log to tell a little about the ship and its passengers.

License To Rape

…a former Eatontown [New Jersey] detective accepted a plea agreement…[for raping] an informant. His victim…explained to the court…how [Philip] Emanuele used the threat of prison for a theft charge…to coerce her into performing oral sex…When she refused, he raped her…Emanuele acknowledged what he had done in open court, and was sentenced to 5 years of probation for criminal coercion, and 3 years of probation for tampering with evidence…

Lack of Evidence

A New York district attorney has dropped a prostitution charge against former reality TV star Alicia Guastaferro…after further investigation revealed it was unmerited…The D.A. still plans to pursue [other] charges…Guastaferro…[and] attorney James D. Doyle [were found unconscious in Doyle’s car after]…a…motorist…[reported] a car being driven erratically…Guastaferro …told police Doyle pays her $500 to $700 to perform sexual acts and spend the night with him…

Yes, the cops actually filed a prostitution charge on the word of a semi-conscious drunk.

The Red Umbrella

This San Francisco Weekly op-ed by Chris Hall is the best December 17^th article by a non-sex worker I have ever seen. It deserves to be read in its entirety, but its tone is illustrated by the statement “…there really is no conversation about sex work…only a monologue by media and politicians with the workers themselves meant to stay silent. December 17 events represent a concerted effort to break that silence.”

The New Victorianism

Another Christmas present to sex workers from a journalist who isn’t one of us, but gets it; this one was published in The New Statesman by repentant neofeminist Laurie Penny:

…Laws regulating sex work are written…by people who have never done sex work and who have no sustained contact with those who do. The most well-meaning legislation…often backfires, pushing the sex trade further underground and giving the police licence to punish and victimise women…feminist author Ellen Willis termed this handkerchief-clutching zeal to “save” prostitutes, porn actresses and other “fallen” women “neo-Victorianism”…It’s a school of so-called women’s liberation that [believes]…work can’t possibly be the problem, so…If sex workers are victimised by the police and…face higher levels of violence and assault at work, then it can only be because of their dirty moral choice to have sex for money…This isn’t about evidence…It’s about morality, just as it was…when…women organised charity centres to ‘save’ street prostitutes from sin by finding them alternative employment as charwomen, in workhouses or scrubbing the streets…any kind of work, however exploitative and badly paid, must be better than sex work because it doesn’t involve sex, wicked sex, sinful sex…

See No Evil

The equation of images and reality claims another victim:

…Rémy Couture [is a]…Canadian special-effects artist charged with “corrupting morals” by illegally combining sex and gore…[in] two short films depicting the crimes of a necrophiliac serial killer and various photographs of simulated torture and dismemberment that were posted on Couture’s now-defunct website…The prosecution argues that Couture’s work is obscene under Canadian law because “a dominant characteristic” of it is “the undue exploitation of sex” combined with “crime, horror, cruelty and violence.” He faces up to two years in prison for this prohibited mixture…

Where Are the Protests?

The word “trafficking” is not to be found in this article, nor are calls for paving to be abolished:

…William Connors…his wife Mary…[and] their sons…were all convicted of conspiracy to require a person to perform forced…labour…the Connors would pick up…homeless drifters or addicts…[who then] lived in squalid caravans…as they moved around the country working on the Connors’ paving and patio businesses…and…were controlled by discipline and violence…[they] were beaten, hit with broom handles, belts, a rake and shovel, and punched and kicked…[they] were often made to strip for a “hosing down session” with freezing water…[and] were paid as little as £5 for a day’s hard labour on jobs that would earn the family several thousand pounds. They were given so little food they resorted to scavenging from dustbins…

And as Furry Girl points out, nobody seems to care if children are forced to act in movies for their parents’ profit, either: “Imagine if anti-sex worker activists treated all forms of entertainment the same way they treat [sex work]…Where are the Nick Kristof-led raids of acting classes for children, the protests against movie studios that utilize under-18 performers, and the arrests of live studio audiences at the taping of TV family sitcoms?”

The More the Better

Furry Girl writes about the way people’s acceptance of unfamiliar things like marijuana use, homosexuality and sex work tends to grow as they get to know real people who are involved with those things, and she proposes an experiment for those shy about coming out:

Go to a bar in the next city over, or a music festival out of town, or just tell the person sitting next to you on the bus or subway. Try openness on for just a day, or even 15 minutes. You will get some bad reactions, but I think it will surprise you how many people won’t be an asshole to you. Be prepared for questions, which you can choose to answer or not.

Traffic Jam

Amazingly, all 13 victims of an Argentinean “sex trafficking” witch hunt were acquitted of all charges last week: “…the judges said there was no way to prove that Marita, a 23-year-old mother and wife who vanished on…April 3, 2002, was kidnapped and forced into a prostitution ring…For the last decade Marita’s mother, Susana Trimarco, has waged an uphill battle [against]…the people she believed were responsible for her daughter’s disappearance into the netherworld of human trafficking…” Trimarco has insisted from the beginning that her daughter was abducted by “sex traffickers”, despite a total lack of evidence for such an outlandish interpretation of the meager facts. The article points out that Trimarco “almost single-handedly changed the way that human trafficking is viewed…across much of Latin America,” and this is true: with the help of cops and prohibitionists she has succeeded in introducing American-style “sex trafficking” mythology to a culture which has a much healthier view of sex work than that of the US.

Legitimate Outrage

Being an ignoramus is no impediment to a career in law:

The California Commission on Judicial Performance…[admonished] Judge Derek Johnson…[for] comments [made] in the case of a man who threatened to mutilate the face and genitals of his former girlfriend with a heated screwdriver, beat her with a metal baton and made other violent threats…Johnson, a former prosecutor in the Orange County district attorney’s sex crimes unit, said…”I’m not a gynecologist but I can tell you something: if someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse the body shuts down…[and] will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case”…since 1980, California law has not required rape victims to prove they resisted or were prevented from resisting.

Profound Ignorance

Several people called to my attention a recent paper claiming that legalizing prostitution increased human trafficking; I pointed out to them that without good data and clear definitions, a prohibitionist can “prove” whatever he likes. But Dr. Laura Agustín said it much better than I did:

I’ve been asked several times to comment on a recently published article, Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?…This study belongs to a trend to use econometric concepts and techniques in a (vain) attempt to prove this or that about prostitution…fancy modelling and sophisticated analysis cannot help when the data being analysed is next to useless…Any critique of this work has to begin by asking how the authors define human trafficking, inflows, legalised prostitution, the prostitution market, trafficked women and legal prostitutes. None of these terms is self-explaining. After more than 15 years, we do not even have agreement about what the fundamental terms mean, so anyone writing in the field has to tell us which definitions they are using and they have to make sure they compare and contrast categories using the same definitions…The best way to understand this work is Garbage in, garbage out…

Metaupdates

The Crumbling Dam (TW3 #35)

Wally Oppal says the scores of women missing and presumed murdered by Robert Pickton and others in the Vancouver area were doubly forsaken – by society and by police. In fact, they were triply forsaken…The law itself forsook many of them, by criminalizing them for selling sex and driving them to the extreme margins…“I cannot ignore the reality that this legal regime played an important role in shaping the relationship between the police and women…potentially affecting…investigations…” Mr. Oppal writes…The report is a death knell for prostitution laws in their current form.

Shift in the Wind (TW3 #43)

More and more UN officials are coming out in favor of decriminalization:

The UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health – yes, that’s his full title…has…come down firmly on the side of decriminalising the sex industry. In fact, a 2010 report of his is one of the strongest statements I’ve ever seen in this regard by a UN official…

Tyranny By Consensus (TW3 #47)

A group of adult industry leaders announced…their intent to file a lawsuit soon against Los Angeles County over Measure B…an ill-conceived law that makes it mandatory for adult actors to wear lab coats, goggles and gloves as well as condoms while shooting adult films in the County. The law was funded solely by AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)…The attorneys plan to challenge the law on the [grounds that]…health and safety…issues…fall under…State regulation…[they also] plan to challenge…on constitutional grounds…

One Born Every Minute (TW3 #48)

“Detectives investigating a website offering to pay the tuition fees of female students in return for sex have arrested [Mark Lancaster] on suspicion of inciting prostitution…” WTF? “Inciting prostitution”? How about fraud and sexual assault?

Gorged With Meaning (TW3 #49)

It’s astonishing that these people just can’t understand and accept that nothing has to “be done”, and that student sex workers will get along without their “help” just as they always have: “…ex-brothel madam [Becky Adams] has been enlisted to help…Swansea University…research…what motivates [students] to [do] sex work…” I’ll save them the trouble: the answer is “good money and flexible hours”. Now, where’s my £500,000?

This Week in 2010 and 2011

Beside my two previous columns for December 17^th, my two previous columns for Yule, my two previous yuletide fictional interludes and a history of Hanukkah, this week also featured a look at what passes for “evidence of prostitution”, a look at the truth of Swedish “feminism”, a statement of some of my principles, a thought experiment about coercion vs. free choice and a biography of Edith Piaf. Finally, there were also short items on Craigslist, the UK attempt to block all internet porn, PC celebrities, “john schools”, Bronte sister action figures, nanny-state dating advice, Julian Assange, hate crime, an awkward call, men’s magazines, a fatal BDSM accident, Barbie hate, a begging ban, another hooker-hiring politician and religious persecution.

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That Was the Week That Was (#48)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, Africa, agency denial, Australia, Backlash, brothels, cell phones, Coming and Going, Coming Out, condoms, Confined and Controlled, cops, dehumanization, dirty, disease, Drama Queens, drugs, end demand, escort services, Europe, evidence, Hall of Shame, Hard Numbers, hysteria, India, Ireland, language, law, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, New York, Nigeria, One Born Every Minute, pimps, porn, psychology, scams, Social Construction of Eunuchs, South Africa, statistics, stereotypes, streetwalkers, Sweden, Swedish model, Switzerland, tabula rasa, The Course of a Disease, Train Wreck, Uncommon Sense, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Where Are the Protests?, yin and yang on December 1, 2012| 27 Comments »

The reality is that those who target sex workers do so because sex work is so stigmatised and criminalised and perpetrators perceive sex workers as easy targets. – Alex Bryce

Pet Peeves

Ah, validation:

The Associated Press has nixed “homophobia”…and a number of other terms from its Style Book…”-phobia…an irrational, uncontrollable fear…[is unacceptable] in political or social contexts,” including “homophobia” and “Islamophobia”…AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn [said]…”Homophobia…[is] just off the mark. It’s ascribing a mental disability to someone…Instead, we would use something more neutral [like] anti-gay…”

Drama Queens

The big story of the week was sent to me by over a dozen readers:

…A new study…suggests that porn stars have higher self-esteem, a better quality of life and body image, and are more spiritual than their non-adult entertainment counterparts. Researchers compared the self-reports of 177 porn actresses to a sample of women matched on age, ethnicity, and marital status. Comparisons were conducted on sexual behaviors and attitudes, self-esteem, quality of life and drug use. The study found that porn actresses were more likely to identify as bisexual and to say they enjoyed sex. They also reported having sex for the first time at a younger age, 15, than their counterparts in the control group, 17. Porn stars were no more likely to have had endured sexual abuse than those in the control group…

Had the study been of sex workers in general, the results would’ve been almost exactly the same. Of course, neofeminists instantly launched into tirades of denial, like this exceptionally bizarre one from Sheila “Penis-in-Vagina Sex is Unnatural” Jeffreys:

“Pornography is likely…to be more severe than other forms of prostitution in its effects…The women are penetrated over long periods of time, often hours…having to take a number of drugs to survive the pain…painkillers [are] also used in prostitution inside the vagina…muscle relaxants and drugs to disassociate mind from body to survive the violation, such as marijuana and heroin. Women who are interviewed whilst still in prostitution give very different responses from those who have left, often to protect their sense of self”…Jeffreys [also] said…women were unlikely to benefit in any way from working in the adult industry…

That’s right, ladies, the Great Oracle Sheila says we use “painkillers inside the vagina” to “survive the violation”. I guess I just don’t remember because of false consciousness and all.

Social Construction of Eunuchs

Another hint at Swedish neofeminists’ endgame: “One of the largest toy chains in Sweden published a gender-neutral Christmas catalogue, which pictured boys playing with dolls and girls holding toy machine guns…Top Toy has produced children’s Christmas catalogues in Denmark and Sweden…though the catalogues’ page layouts are the same in both countries, the gender of the pictured kids is reversed in the Swedish edition…” In Sweden, the word “neutral” apparently mean “reverse”; keep that in mind if you ever have to drive a Saab or Volvo.

One Born Every Minute

An English con-man set up a website named “SponsorAScholar.co.uk” to trick naïve coeds into having sex with him as a supposed “audition” for a sugar daddy referral service. The Independent sent a young female reporter to meet the “assessor” in the upscale venue he named – a McDonald’s in Woolwich – but a male reporter posing as a potential client was told there was a “waiting list”. The website (which has since vanished) was even registered with bogus information, yet most non-sex workers commenting online do not seem to understand that the whole deal was a scam. These are the same people who believe that they are more qualified to make judgments about whores’ lives than we are.

The Course of a Disease

It appears that “Swedish model” rot won’t be penetrating India anytime soon: “A lawyer…[contends] that it is illegal to arrest the customer of a sex worker…Representing…[a group of men victimized by a police sting], advocate Prabhanjan Dave pointed out that there is no provision under the Prevention of Immoral Trafficking Act…under which a customer can be made an accused…”

Attempts to impose the tyranny on Scotland and Northern Ireland continue, however; this excellent essay by Alex Bryce, coordinator of the UK Network of Sex Work Projects, criticizes the “narrow ideological belief that consenting sex between two adults is wrong if…money is involved and that all sex work is…an act of violence against women.” He explains the horrible effects the model has had in Sweden and points out that its proponents think their prudish beliefs are more important than real people; Rhoda Grant, for example, “claimed that damage to individual sex workers was a ‘price worth paying’” for her goal of demonizing male sexuality and infantilizing women.

Bryce’s overview of the negative effects, however, doesn’t go into quite the detail that this thorough overview on Glasgow Sex Worker does; police tactics in Swedish model jurisdictions (and those employing its nasty little sister, “end demand”) include verbal, physical and sexual harassment of whores, condom criminalization, accusing transgender workers of buying sex and videotaping women engaged in sex acts. In neofeminist “thought”, consensually appearing in porn is “rape” or “exploitation”, but being the nonconsensual subject of police porn-making isn’t.

Confined and Controlled

The New York Times bemoans the fact that Indian whores are using cell phones to go independent, making it harder for their betters to control them. Busybody bureaucrats and self-appointed saviors moan that this will undoubtedly cause an HIV epidemic because whores are just too stupid to use condoms on their own without “officials” watching over them like children in a kindergarten:

Millions once bought sex in…Kamathipura…but prostitutes with inexpensive mobile phones are luring customers elsewhere…endangering the astonishing progress India has made against AIDS. Indeed, the recent closings of hundreds of ancient brothels…may one day cost them, and many others, their lives…[because] independence has made prostitutes far harder for government and safe-sex counselors to trace…

Just in case the reader recognizes that these whores are demonstrating autonomy and agency, the reporter hastens to assure him that “Vicious madams still exist, human trafficking is still rampant [and] village girls are still duped into the trade.” Because the only things scarier to prudes than sexually-transmitted diseases are women in control of their own sexuality.

Hall of Shame

Regular readers know my “Hall of Shame” is reserved for those who have dishonored our profession by their sleazy, stupid, unethical behavior, and today I have the great displeasure to announce its fifth inductee, escort Jenna Shea:

…Shea…famously recounted intimate details of her sexual exploits with several rappers during [a radio] interview …has once again been revealing her clients. Her latest conquest is allegedly a Houston Rockets star, who is reported to have recently paid $20,000 for an evening…Shea has openly bragged about her popularity amongst the athletic community on her twitter profile: “I get paid by the NBA so much, I should be signed to a team #literally while u basic hoes watch from tv FOH”…

For outing clients, buying into whorearchy and demonstrating a truly epic level of tackiness, Jenna Shea becomes the first escort in the HoS (joining a halfway whore, a porn actress, a madam and a brothel owner). NB: This story comes via a site named “Girl Directory”, which Aspasia discovered is dangerous to link on WordPress; to see the original article Google the name of the whore plus the name of that site.

Coming Out

Jessie Nicole on the benefits and difficulties of coming out as a sex worker; the more stories like this one are published, the harder it will be for prohibitionists to promote their lies about our work.

Train Wreck

The predictable result of government anti-whore propaganda in Nigeria:

The Nigerian Women’s Trust Fund (WF) and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) have [petitioned the government]…to stop the war…currently being waged against women in Abuja by the Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB). For over a year unidentified armed men under the authority of the AEPB have brutalised women…on the pretext of “eradicating commercial sex workers in Abuja”…[all kinds of women] have been forcibly abducted and taken to purported installations of law enforcement…tortured into ‘confessing’ and forcibly transferred to an alleged rehabilitation camp…maintained by the Society Against Prostitution and Child Labour in Nigeria (SAPCLN)…

The Giving Season

I asked y’all to avoid giving to the Salvation Army due to its anti-whore stance and promotion of “sex trafficking” hysteria, but Aspasia has gone one better by compiling this list of worthy charities to which you might consider contributing instead. And if you want to protest more directly, you could print the illustration and shove it into bell-ringers’ kettles in place of money.

Metaupdates

Backlash (TW3 #10)

…Sex work activists argue that enforcing [criminalization] absorbs significant resources that, given South Africa’s high crime levels, would be better deployed elsewhere. A recent study by the Women’s Legal Centre (WLC), Sisonke…and the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) found that seven out of ten surveyed sex workers reported some form of abuse by police…The study, titled “Stop harassing us! Tackle real crime!”, draws on interviews with 308 sex workers…its findings indicate that police may be the primary abusers of sex workers…[and that] the existing legal framework encourages police corruption and abuse…

Hard Numbers (TW3 #20)

Politicians decide “sending a message” is more important than safety, logic or human rights: “A…bill to decriminalise prostitution in South Australia has been withdrawn from state parliament. Status of Women Minister Gail Gago…said she would now work with interested MPs who supported decriminalisation to consider an alternative model…”

Uncommon Sense (TW3 #38)

Swiss prostitution laws vary from canton to canton, and Zurich seems determined to greatly increase the number of women who work illegally:

Zurich…officials [claim that sex work] has got out of control…street prostitution is being moved to three designated areas to try to make it safer and more discreet…sex workers…will have to be at least 18 years old…brothels [will] have to [buy] licences…[for] 300 francs…[plus] inspection fees. And street prostitutes will have to fork out 40 francs for their own licences subject to having a work permit, being registered with a health insurer and taking counselling sessions with the Flora Dora advisory service…they will [also] need to buy a [five-franc] ticket from a machine [every night they work]…

As if the naked paternalism and infantilization of mandatory “counseling” isn’t bad enough, registration schemes never work because most hookers don’t want to be on any list accessible to bureaucrats. Welfare official Michael Herzig claims that currently “…pimps…decide the prices”, but from what I’ve heard from European sex workers pimps are even rarer there than in the US; I guess the city of Zurich is trying to change that by installing itself as the omnipimp.

Coming and Going (TW3 #39)

Anna Gristina is finally free, and when district attorney Cyrus Vance tried to look tough by referring to her as a “pimp” who “rented women’s bodies for profit” (because obviously hookers are mindless, passive vegetables who stay wherever we’re put), her lawyer had this to say: “She pled out to a sting operation by one cop — who paid $2,000 in taxpayers money to watch two women engage in cunnilingus…So who’s the pimp?”

Where Are the Protests? (TW3 #45)

A 22-year-old man [named Hai Van Vo] who was smuggled into the UK from Vietnam in a shipping container has been jailed for…27 months…[for] running [a] cannabis farm [and] will be deported when he is released…Vo had had little contact with the outside world…had no bed and worked to instructions given to him by others…

This Week in 2010 and 2011

My two previous columns about Toys for Tots and my two previous ones on whores’ age of debut were accompanied by essays on the history of harm reduction, a fake “trafficking study” done by marketers, a thoroughly awful madam, confusing images with reality, and the true motivations of the rescue industry and sex-abuse investigators. We also looked at my favorite movies, more hooker songs and short items on safety, Charlie Sheen, escort ads, a mega-brothel and cops persecuting a disabled client.

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That Was the Week That Was (#41)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Q & A, Tyranny, tagged Africa, agency denial, anal sex, Australia, Backpage, Backwards into the Future, bogus studies, brothels, California, censorship, Change of Heart, child "protective" services, condoms, cops, disease, Down Under, ethics, Europe, evidence, harm reduction, Housewife Harlotry, hysteria, Lack of Evidence, language, Latin America, law, License To Rape, Maine, Malawi, marriage, Mexico, Netherlands, pimps, porn, rape, Saint Death, Saving Them from Themselves, See No Evil, sexting, So Close and Yet So Far, stage names, stereotypes, streetwalkers, Texas, The More the Better, The Rape Question, Tyranny by Consensus, Umpteen Thousand People, Uncommon Sense, United Kingdom, video, Without Let or Hindrance, yin and yang on October 13, 2012| 14 Comments »

Prostitution has a social value, and it’s necessary in a city.– Daniël Termont

Without Let or Hindrance

Those who have dealt with “Child Protective Services” know that they are granted powers of which the Inquisition would have been envious. They routinely abduct people’s children on the flimsiest of pretexts, often on hearsay and without even a warrant, and once this happens parents may never regain custody; if they do it is after years of jumping through ridiculous and ever-changing hoops, playing endless games of “Mother May I?” with power-mad bureaucrats, submission to outlandish violations of their rights and privacy, hundreds of hours in court and total financial ruin…and that’s not even counting the emotional damage to the children. On Wednesday, an activist named Kathi Duran began a hunger strike on the steps of the California state capitol to call attention to these abuses; as expected, she was arrested almost immediately. She asked me to call attention to her protest and share this press release, and I’m happy to do so and will provide updates as I get them.

Updates

License To Rape

This result doesn’t happen nearly often enough:

An ex-Houston police officer [named Abraham Joseph]…was sentenced to life in prison…for raping a waitress…Joseph could have received as little as five years…but jurors chose the maximum sentence instead.

News articles always refer to criminal cops as “ex-cops”, implying they had already been fired when they committed the crimes.

Lack of Evidence

The San Francisco Police Department announced…that [it] will [temporarily] stop using condoms as evidence in prostitution cases…Under current city policy, police cannot confiscate condoms…But…police sometimes broke the policy…A July report from Human Rights Watch criticized San Francisco, along with New York, Washington, DC and Los Angeles, for [the practice]…

Spam received by a reader; if this isn’t a hoax, the cops, voyeurs or pimp wannabes who set it up labor under truly mythic levels of ignorance and disinformation.

December Q & A

Sex educator Debby Herbenick on the need for more research on anal sex: “…In an incredibly short period of time, anal sex has become a common part of Americans’ sex lives. As of the 1990s, only about one-quarter to one-third of young [Americans]…had tried anal sex at least once. Less than 20 years later, my research team’s 2009 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior found that as many as 40-45 percent…in some age groups had…[yet] taboos persist and…the list of what we don’t know about anal sex is far longer than the list of what we do. This makes it difficult for sex educators to feel truly confident in answering people’s very real and important questions…”

Backwards into the Future

Add Malawi to the list of countries whose legal experts understand human rights better than those in the US; one of them said that “Despite the fact that Malawi has not outlawed sex work…police officers on night patrols pounce on sex workers and…charge…[them] with rogue and vagabond…This is a clear violation of rights of sex workers…” He also commented on the unsanctioned compulsory HIV testing I reported in TW3 (#24), stating that it “is not recommended by…UNAIDS” and “it is impractical and unworkable and more effective results can be reached by supporting sex workers’…access [to] testing, prevention, and support…”

Housewife Harlotry

No, marriage isn’t prostitution; not at all:

…Several [New York] attorneys have shared the craziest [prenuptial agreements] they’ve penned…[including] items like “no piano playing while the husband is home”, cash bonuses…if either is caught cheating and an agreement to terminate a pregnancy if one should occur…[some include]a weight clause…[another] said [the wife] would never wear green and if she did, her husband [could]…destroy the item…One husband demanded “wife not allowed to cut her hair”…

The article also mentions the wives’ demands, including husbands being home by a certain time and (surprise!) being paid for sex.

Saving Them From Themselves

Amanda Hess adds to our list of good articles about “sexting” hysteria:

When Polaroid inventor Edwin Land introduced the first commercial instant camera…in 1948, he ushered in what Christopher Bonanos …in The Atlantic calls a “magnificent new era” in photography…for “instant, shareable nudie pics”…The new…format for…nude photographs—sexting—[is]…basically the same: instant explicit photographs, taken under the radar, shared between lovers and friends. In a recent report on a new study of teen sexting…dating “expert” Dr. Wendy Walsh favored terms like “embarrassment,” “shame,” “risky,” and “pressure” to describe the photographic form. And negative terms like those permeate the…discussion around teen photo sharing, though for years research has shown that the media-wide concern-trolling is overblown…

Tyranny By Consensus

On November 6^thLos Angeles county will decide whether to impose AHF’s “condoms in porn” measure; this video explains the real motive behind the whole thing:

Uncommon Sense

…In Ghent’s red-light district, as in many other cities, prostitutes sit in windows to attract potential clients. According to the new law in Ghent, women must wear something in addition to lingerie and may not dance or make suggestive gestures…[Mayor Daniël] Termont…stressed that the measures were intended to reduce the nuisance caused by customers…rather than to victimise the workers.

Saint Death

This US Army report on the Santa Muerte belief refers to it as a “death cult” (technically true, but the phrase has false and pejorative connotations), declares that it isn’t a “true” religion and states that “Although not all members of the cult are criminals, all live an existence that is dominated by crime.” I’m sure that bartenders, taxi drivers and prostitutes (who are not criminalized in Mexico) might disagree that their lives are “dominated by crime”, though cops (another large segment of her devotees) probably wouldn’t.

Umpteen Thousand People Can’t Be Wrong

It’s good to see some journalists finally starting to listen to us:

…Backpage’s critics say they are facilitating sex slavery…[but] all the figures quoted in the media come from a single source, a consultancy called AIM Group…[whose] methodology is shaky at best…they ignore major adult ad networks and mainstream ad networks that accept adult ads…and traffic, revenue and share-of-market numbers, even accurate ones, are no indication of how many…ads…actually convert into…transaction[s]…nor what subset of those…are with a minor or…coerced [person]…Backpage publishes about 3.2 million…ads a month…about 11 percent…are listed in…Adult Services…Backpage removes over a million ads a month…[mostly] for spam and fraud…Only 1.6 percent of the [removed] ads…are from the Adult Category…Only 2 percent of that 1.6 percent, or about 400…a month, are suspected of advertising a minor. Backpage reports those…immediately (and under no legal obligation) to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). In other words, about 1/25 of 1 percent (.04 percent) of the ads Backpage removes…are suspected of advertising a minor for sexual services, a number that represents 1/100 of one percent (.01 percent) of its…ad volume…

Instead of the usual prohibitionists, the article interviewed folks like researcher Ron Weitzer and Kate D’Adamo of SWOP.

The More the Better

…Lucinda Latimer…whose real name is Jan…was…broke, isolated and almost suicidal… she had sold her car and had no idea where her next penny was coming from when she saw a documentary on former career women who turned to the sex industry to make a living. Previously, she had [earned] up to £1000 a night as a graphologist…but ill health and the break-up of her marriage forced her back to Perthshire…[she now does phone sex work and] what has struck her about the men is how normal and pleasant most are and how well educated…Trying to hide her work would have made it shameful and sordid…[so] Jan decided to speak out…she has written…The Diary of a Rookie Phone Sex Floozie, and is about to launch volume two…

The Rape Question

Jezebel’s “sex advice” columnist gives a reader advice on how to shove her finger up a guy’s arse without his consent because she wants “to massage someone’s prostate goddamnit!”. Take note of the tepid protests to the columnist’s suggestions on how to trick and bully him into it, then imagine the firestorm if a male writer gave a man advice on how to pressure a woman into something because he wants “to fuck some chick in the arse goddamnit!”

Change of Heart

I’m never happy to see a sister pilloried, but I suspect the police decision to expose her customers is going to backfire so badly that this may have some positive results in the long run:

[Alexis Wright has]…been charged with running a prostitution business out of her Zumba dance studio [in Kennebunk, Maine] and secretly videotaping her encounters…Police have begun issuing summons to Wright’s customers and will release the names in the weeks ahead. Townspeople say they’ve heard that lawyers, doctors, law enforcement officials, a television personality and other well-known people in town are included in a detailed clientele list police found. A lot of people would rather not see the names made public because it will hurt families, children and careers…

So Close and Yet So Far

Another would-be ally undermines her own case by accepting the false claims of prohibitionists:

…In the Netherlands, prostitution is legal. Nonetheless, over 60% of the women involved in prostitution are involved in the sex trade illegally. The Mayor [of Amsterdam] and others refer to these as ‘trafficked’ – either because they are exploited and involved in the sex trade against their will…or because they are illegal workers brought to the country to work voluntarily in conditions different from those they expect…the argument for legalization included belief that it would…decrease trafficking, it has had the opposite effect…prostitution has gone from a predominantly home-grown industry to one very heavily dependent on illegal foreign workers…a [recent law criminalizes hiring]…a prostitute who is not registered with the government…But…this…means that…[the] information must be public so that…[clients] can verify that the sex worker is…licensed…[this] invades the privacy of both…prostitutes and…customers…

Prohibitionists intentionally confuse legalization and decriminalization, ignore the bottleneck effect of registration, pretend that correlation equals causation and conflate “unregistered” with “trafficked”, and the author, Dr. Nancy Darling, fails to question any of it.

Metaupdates

See No Evil in TW3 (#24)

Ilfracombe, the English town which claims to be unique in the world by being absolutely whore-free, proves it can be as prudish about lumps of bronze as anyplace in the Bible Belt: “Damien Hirst refers to ‘Verity’ as a ‘modern-day allegory for truth and justice’…[but hundreds of local residents and law officials]…call the 66-foot bronze statue of a half-exposed pregnant woman ‘soft porn masqueraded as art’…”

Down Under in TW3 (#40)

Australian sex worker activist Christian Vega has more to say on that “end demand” story from St. Kilda:

…As I read through [the article] the stench of bovine excrement almost made my eyes water…street sex work doesn’t relocate itself to another suburb on the other side of town…there is not an itinerant population of these workers who move en masse from one place to the next like migrating wildebeest across the African savannah…It’s more comfortable for people to think that sex work doesn’t happen in their community…and…that street sex workers must board a shuttle from planet Whore to our neighbourhoods under the cover of darkness before disappearing as the sun rises…

I think I like that imagery at least as much as my own.

This Week in 2010 and 2011

A federal judge enjoyed pleasures he persecuted others for and escaped with a slap on the wrist because officials always have different rules for their own class than for others; they’re also hilariously clueless about sex work and are only beginning to realize what a scam the “anti-trafficking” industry is. I discussed America’s weird love-hate relationship with prostitutes, what a 1947 sci-fi story can teach us about the nanny state, how sex workers arrive at our prices and how prostitution is a much older profession than most people think, and I related the story of a famous whore-obsessed preacher, told some hooker jokes, shared my answers to some amazingly stupid prohibitionist statements and presented two spooky stories for the Halloween season.

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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

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A Few References

Boring but necessary legal stuff