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Posts Tagged ‘fantasy’

Barbie

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged Barbie, dirty, fantasy, Germany, halfway whores, hysteria, neofeminism, psychology, sex rays, stage names on December 5, 2010| 16 Comments »

I could do without balding old men but my budget couldn’t! – Lilli

When she first appeared on June 24^th, 1952, Barbra Millicent Roberts was called “Lilli” and worked in Germany as a secretary who had no compunction against using her pronounced charms to get money and presents from rich men; by 1955 she had become a full-fledged doxy and made a tremendous amount of money from gentlemen admirers. She soon became well-known and popular in sexually-liberated Germany, and though her advertising said she was “always discreet,” her wardrobe made her “the star of every bar” and little girls came to idolize her despite the objections of their prudish parents. Then in 1959, an American businesswoman convinced her that if she came to the US she could be a star; she commuted back and forth to Germany until 1964, when she gave up sex work for good and moved permanently to the US. Since then, she has worked as a fashion model (and more recently an actress) as famous for her imagination and extensive wardrobe as for her stunning figure, and though her beginnings as a whore still provoke controversy among the easily provoked she is beloved of millions of little girls who know her by her nickname: Barbie.

The iconic doll started out as a cartoon character named Lilli created by Reinhard Beuthien for the Bild-Zeitung tabloid newspaper in Hamburg, Germany. She was a clever, sexually liberated “party girl” and proved so popular that in 1953 the Bild-Zeitung decided to market a Lilli doll. Max Weissbrodt of the German toy company O&M Hausser designed the doll from Beuthien’s drawings, and she went on sale in 1955. Lilli was advertised as a doxy (i.e. an escort-level prostitute) and sold in bars, tobacco shops and similar adult businesses as a gag gift for men. But despite the protests of prudes who felt she was inappropriate for children, some mothers did indeed buy Lilli dolls for their daughters and she soon became as popular a children’s toy as she had been a novelty gift. Other toy companies capitalized on her popularity by selling clothes, furniture and other accessories in her size, and both Lilli and her accessories were marketed in Italy, Scandinavia and even the United States. She became such a celebrity that in 1958 a movie entitled Lilli – ein Mädchen aus der Großstadt (“Lilli — a Girl from the Big City”) was made about her; its star, Ann Smyrner, was chosen via a contest in the Bild-Zeitung.

Lilli’s name was also applied to such products as perfume, wine and costume jewelry, but her popularity faded with the decade; the last Lilli cartoon appeared on January 5, 1961 and the American rights to the doll were purchased by the toy giant Louis Marx and Company, who began marketing her in the US as “Miss Seventeen” in 1961. But several years earlier (1956, to be exact) Ruth Handler, one of the founders of the Mattel toy company, had bought three Lilli dolls while in Europe; she changed the doll’s design slightly, giving her rooted hair and bare feet (rather than molded shoes) and renamed her Barbie after her daughter. The Mattel version made her debut at the New York Toy Fair on March 9, 1959, a date now used as Barbie’s official birthday. She was an overnight success, selling 350,000 units by the end of the first year; by the time Marx released its version of Lilli two years later Barbie was so well-established Marx was perceived as the imitator rather than vice-versa. Marx tried to sue Mattel for patent infringement, but the suit failed and Mattel acquired all rights to Lilli in 1964, at which time German production ceased.

According to Mattel, Barbie’s full name is Barbra Millicent Roberts; in a series of juvenile novels published in the 1960s, her parents were named George and Margaret Roberts and she lived in the fictional Willows, Wisconsin. Her social circle has included her androgynous boyfriend Ken, her teenage sister Skipper, her friends Kelly, Krissy, Francie, Midge, the twins Stacie and Todd, black couple Christie and Steven and the Hispanic Teresa. She has had several dozen different pets, a large number of vehicles and careers ranging from model to stewardess to astronaut. In recent years, a computer-animated Barbie has appeared in a number of videos, mostly based on fairy tales.

But like any attractive woman who dares to be sexual, Barbie has inflamed the passions of losers everywhere. People with a lot of free time and more math skills than sense have published complicated calculations showing that at ¹/₆ scale, Barbie would be 5’9” tall, with measurements of 36”-18”-33” and a weight of 110#. University Central Hospital in Helsinki, Finland actually announced that Barbie lacks the 17 to 22 percent body fat required for a woman to menstruate; it’s good to know that the Finns are so healthy that University Hospital has nothing more important to do than speculate on the menstrual irregularities of plastic dolls. Most of this nonsense is based on the ludicrous notion that little girls have such a highly-developed sense of proportion that they can actually perform these ratios in their little heads without the help of calculators, neofeminists or bored Finnish doctors. And that, in the words of the late, great Douglas Adams, is a load of dingo’s kidneys. The smaller a representation of the human figure, the more exaggerated its proportions can be without looking abnormal; when the cumbersomely-named “Happy To Be Me” doll was released in 1991, feminists applauded and little girls collectively shrugged; to anyone without a tape-measure, a calculator and an agenda, they don’t look all that different in clothes. Then the following year, middle-class feminists with no actual problems started spinning their heads around and foaming at the mouth because ONE of the 270 possible phrases “Teen Talk Barbie” might say was “Math class is tough!” Apparently, these women were concerned that the phrase would magically leach math skills from the brains of young girls and thereby render them unable to calculate the proportions and body mass index of dolls.

The neofeminists’ real problem with Barbie has nothing to do with her figure or academic credentials; they hate her because she is unashamedly sexual, just as they hate all women who are unashamedly sexual. The campaign to suppress or neuter Barbie derives from the same repressions and insecurities as the campaign to ban porn and abolish prostitution; neofeminists are uncomfortable with any sexual depiction or function of women, even tiny plastic women. The oft-repeated rhetoric that Barbie “causes little girls to develop unrealistic expectations” (one wonders what caused those same unrealistic expectations in the millennia preceding 1959, but we’ll let that go for now) is a cover for their real fear, that Barbie might help young girls to see themselves as sexual beings rather than androgynous eunuchs. Child cultists worry about sex rays emanating from any adult who is not completely asexual, but neofeminists worry about sex rays emanating from hunks of plastic instead. Note how often the tempests-in-teapots surrounding Barbie are sexual in nature; for example, a Barbie dressed as the superheroine Black Canary was attacked by fundies and neofeminists alike as “dominatrix Barbie”, and alarmists in high places claim the new “video girl Barbie” could help those omnipresent “pedophiles” to make child porn. Shades of Melissa Petro! Just because she was a hooker in her youth, the lunatics want to brand poor Barbie as a kiddie-porn producer. My Barbie certainly would never have done anything like that; besides, she was too busy travelling to other planets, spying on the Russians and ditching wimpy Ken to date my brother’s G.I. Joe.

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Courtesan Denial

Posted in History, Perception, tagged courtesans, dirty, ethics, fantasy, law, lawheads, pimps, psychology, stereotypes, Swedish model on December 4, 2010| 16 Comments »

It makes no difference whether youth is corrupted by a philosopher or a courtesan. – Glycera (a hetaera of the late 4^th century BCE)

In my column of September 21^st I mentioned that many call girls are now choosing to label themselves as “courtesans” whether they fit the definition or not, but in recent weeks I’ve encountered the exact opposite phenomenon: People (mostly men) trying to claim that courtesans in the classical world were not prostitutes. Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat with the help of Dictionary.com:

cour·te·san [kawr-tuh-zuhn, kohr-, kur-] –noun

a prostitute or paramour, esp. one associating with noblemen or men of wealth.

Also, cour·te·zan.

Origin:
1540–50; < MF courtisane < It cortigiana, lit., woman of the court, deriv. of corte court

And since a number of the claims were made specifically about Phryne:

he·tae·ra [hi-teer-uh] –noun, plural -tae·rae [-teer-ee]

1. a highly cultured courtesan or concubine, esp. in ancient Greece.

2. any woman who uses her beauty and charm to obtain wealth or social position.

Also, hetaira.

Origin: 1810–20; < Gk hetaíra (fem.) companion

You might also consult the Wikipedia article, which begins with the following sentence: “In ancient Greece, hetaerae (in Greek ἑταῖραι, hetairai) were courtesans, that is to say, sophisticated companions and prostitutes.”

Veronica Franco, 1546-1591

Those deniers who try to claim that courtesans in general or hetaerae in particular were literally not prostitutes are clearly steeped in willful ignorance, because prior to a few weeks ago I have literally never heard anyone try to claim that courtesans (with the exceptions of the Japanese geisha) did not provide sex for pay. Indeed, the Renaissance Italian term cortigiana onesta, (literally “honest courtesan”) meant a courtesan who provided real companionship and intellectual stimulation in addition to sex. “Courtesan” immediately implied sex; it was only the modifier “honest” which added the GFE aspect. But I don’t think most of the deniers believe that courtesans literally were not prostitutes; rather, I suspect that they are lawheads engaged in a process of doublethink designed to protect their minds from having to deal with the fact that the EXACT SAME profession which was legal and respected in many preindustrial cultures is illegal and demonized in ours. Remember, to a lawhead laws actually define reality; if prostitution is criminalized it must be because prostitutes are actually criminals, and therefore unlike the sophisticated hetaerae. It’s sort of like claiming that the Jews in concentration camps could not possibly be descended from ancient Hebrews because the latter had a kingdom. To admit that educated, cultured prostitutes in ancient Greece were no different from educated, cultured prostitutes of today is to admit that the law is arbitrary, and that is anathema to a lawhead.

It may be instructive to examine the way in which one of these deniers tried vainly (and pompously) to promote his beliefs; this example comes from a science fiction board called Star Destroyer on which someone posted a link to my ever-popular column on Phryne. The response appears to be from a moderator who angrily attacked my column, claiming that it “mangle[s] so much of ancient society and customs that it just reeks of ignorance.” Considering the following paragraph from his reply, I think it’s fair to label that statement as a serious case of projection:

I mean, even making a huge deal of being a well-educated woman who provided companionship (no, this was not just sex – think of more than an even higher-regarded [sic] and less sexual version of a Geisha) to men of her choosing…and saying she was a prostitute is just missing the point entirely. In fact, the blogger seems to miss the entire point, being more interested in equating Solon with a pimpmonger [sic] etc. She is making connections where none are in her quest to equate herself with Phryne and establish a parallel between prostitution in ancient Greece and today.

This is such a farrago of denial that it’s difficult to conceive that the author believes a word of it himself. “A well-educated woman who provided companionship…to men of her choosing…and saying she was a prostitute is just missing the point entirely.” How’s that again? What he accuses me of is actually what the law does: Reducing something good and noble to something tawdry. Many modern call girls (including myself) are quite educated and most of us are just as selective about our clientele as the hetaerae were. “This was not just sex…” As regular readers of my column know, it’s not just sex with us, either, and very often there is no sex at all. This recent column by Charlotte Shane talks about exactly that; if the commenter was at all informed on this subject he would have known it as well, but I guess it’s easier just to deny without proof. The next phrase (“…less sexual version of a Geisha…”) is even weirder; since (as I explained in my column of October 21^st) geisha were legally forbidden to sell sex outside the walled districts since the beginning of the 19^th century, and modern geisha probably don’t do it at all, I’m at a bit of a loss to understand how this writer believes the hetaerae could be any “less sexual” without being entirely celibate.

Hetaera, by Phintias c. 510 BCE

The denial continues in the next sentence, in which he accuses me of “equating Solon with a pimpmonger” (I presume he wanted to write either “pimp” or “whoremonger” and got stuck in the middle). Nothing I said about Solon was speculation; it’s all in the historical record. But this writer seems to take issue with my refusal to give Solon’s misogynistic laws and persecution of independent whores a free pass on the strength of his historical reputation. The commenter’s apparent idolization of all things classical permeates his last and most telling sentence; please, pray tell, what nonexistent “connections” I invented, and how the same profession in two different societies could somehow not be parallel? The idea that I had to “establish” such a parallel by sophistry is ludicrous in the extreme. Selling sex is selling sex, selling female companionship is exactly that, and an ethical and educated prostitute in any culture or time does both. The author blusters and fumes and accuses me of deception…yet cites no sources to refute my statements and instead makes a series of highly emotional, totally irrational and demonstrably false statements in a spastic attempt to protect his own mind from the uncomfortable truth that there are whores of all classes from brothel-slave to courtesan in every culture in history, and the only difference between modern whores of any stratum and our ancient sisters of the same level is that modern law equates us all with streetwalkers, and in “Nordic Model” regimes with brothel-slaves.

I suspect that we will see “courtesan denial” become more and more common as “Nordic Model” and trafficking propaganda seep into the consciousness of lawheads over the next few years. Since the phenomenon appears to be in its infancy, this affords us a rare opportunity to track the dissemination of a spurious idea; I therefore ask that my readers keep an eye out for arguments (whether in primary articles or in replies to them) claiming that courtesans, hetaerae, oiran, temple prostitutes, etc were somehow fundamentally different from modern call girls, and please send me a link to such statements when you spot them.

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The Slave-Whore Fantasy (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, archeofeminism, bad customers, cops, drugs, fantasy, illegal aliens, law, Madonna/whore, neo-Victorianism, Ohio, pimps, psychology, rape, slavery, streetwalkers, Swedish model, The Slave-Whore Fantasy, violence vs. sex workers on December 3, 2010| 19 Comments »

A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view. – Henrik Ibsen

Yesterday I theorized that trafficking fetishists promote the fantasy that all prostitutes are helpless slaves because this belief forms a defense against the uncomfortable truth that women are in control of male sexuality. The recognition that there is a large group of strong, independent, sexually aware women who derive their support from male sexual needs is deeply humiliating to insecure men, so their minds create a fantasy inversion of the truth by insisting, like the Victorians, that women are essentially asexual beings who could not possibly use sexuality to our advantage. But while the Victorians believed that prostitutes were animalistic atavisms, essentially apelike beings in human form, modern “Nordic Model” tyrants and the trafficking extremists who borrow their rhetoric insist that all women are innocent, asexual children who cannot possibly engage in prostitution by choice; they claim that the vast majority of prostitutes are slaves under the control of male “pimps”, and that even demonstrably independent prostitutes are not truly competent and are therefore exploited by their clients. The trafficking fetishist subscribes to an elaborate Gorean fantasy of helpless, enslaved women bought and sold by ruthless pimps and sexually depraved clients; in this fantasy-world men control women’s sexuality, unlike the real world where the exact opposite is true.

Obviously, some slaves are used for prostitution, but as I have pointed out on numerous occasions the fact that slaves are also used for agricultural labor and mining does not mean all farm workers and miners are slaves. A recent news story from Ohio points out the difference between a free prostitute and a sex slave in a rather dramatic fashion; this story is paraphrased from one which appeared on Cincinnati.com:

William Hobert Manis of Hamilton, Ohio is accused of holding a prostitute captive in a closet for 10 days, during which period he raped her 18 times. After she escaped by jumping from an attic window, neighbors summoned police and the 44-year-old Manis was arrested on 18 counts of rape and one of kidnapping and held on $200,000 bond, which his friends are now trying to raise. Mike Hamilton of Milford says Manis’ supporters don’t believe the accusations; “There is no way he could’ve held anybody hostage without us knowing,” he said. He claims that he and others visited Manis’ residence repeatedly throughout the 10-day period of the alleged crimes.

But authorities say evidence backs up the 22-year-old woman’s account of her bizarre confinement – and on Monday (November 29^th) she described how Manis kept it secret. As he socialized with friends, Manis kept her bound, gagged and under orders not to shift her position at all – or face consequences. “He would hog-tie me, and tell me not to move. When he came back, if he saw I had changed position at all, he would strip me naked and put me in the attic – and it was as cold in there as it was outside,” she said. “That was my punishment…He would let me out only when he wanted to talk to me, rape me, feed me or bathe me.”

Butler County Assistant Prosecutor Jason Phillabaum said that based on the victim’s testimony, police findings and Manis’ criminal record, there is ample evidence to proceed against Manis – and that the case deserves “focused attention and aggressive prosecution.” In 1996-97, Manis served prison time in Ohio for aggravated assault, and some years earlier for nonviolent crimes in North Carolina. In 1992, Hamilton police arrested Manis on four counts of rape and a kidnapping, but that case was dismissed. Manis is linked to the white supremacist group Aryan Nations, Hamilton police said – and his accuser says Manis described his alignment with that group. “He basically told me his whole life story,” she said, including his nickname, “Wild Bill.”

“I don’t think he planned on letting me go, or he wouldn’t have told me so much,” she said. “I think he could have killed me at any time.” She says Manis, whom police said receives disability payments, told her he had been hired to kidnap her and other young women so they could be sold as sex slaves. “He decided he wanted to keep me,” she said. “I think his intention was to keep me as his ‘pet.’”

The young woman met Manis as she worked on East Avenue, prostituting herself to support her drug habit. She said that when Manis walked up to her November 16, he seemed “totally normal”, and the two chatted as they walked to his rented home in the city’s historic district. But soon after arriving Manis turned violent and tried to shove his knit cap into her mouth; though she tried to flee he overtook her, struck her in the head with a pair of handcuffs, then restrained her and bound her mouth with tape. Manis soon noticed she couldn’t breathe, she said, so he removed the tape and replaced it with a rope and sock. He would only remove the gag from her mouth to allow her to drink soda pop and water, then every second day, he would ration out spaghetti, Ramen noodles and chili. While she ate, he spouted off political and social ideology, but she was not allowed to speak; “If I spoke, I got punched.” He made her urinate on herself and would wash her body, she said, to ensure its cleanliness; “He was very obsessed with things being clean,” she said.

She marked the passage of time by watching the daylight which showed through the cracks of the closet door each morning. “I was scared to go to sleep at night because I needed to be aware of what was going on at all times,” she said. “I thought there was a chance he would kill me every day.” She wasn’t sure how she would survive, she just knew she had to because of her two small children. Then on Friday (November 26), she got a chance to escape; in his haste to meet his landlord about a furnace repair, Manis forgot to nail the closet door shut as he usually did. She noticed this, so while he was downstairs she forced the door open, then jumped out a front window two stories to the ground, landing hard on her backside. Still cuffed at both wrists and ankles, she managed to get to her feet and shuffled to the house next door, where the neighbor called the police. “I didn’t care if I was going to be paralyzed by making that jump – I was coming home to my kids,” she said.

It should be pretty obvious to anyone reading this account that the victim was acting independently of male control when she met with Manis, and applied all her efforts to escaping him; it should also be obvious that he chose her as a victim precisely because she WAS a prostitute. And why were charges for the same type of crime dropped in 1992? Care to bet that victim was another streetwalker whom the prosecutor decided was not a “credible witness”? International slavers who trick girls into prostitution generally confine them to brothels in countries other than those in which they were born and prevent escape by threatening their families with reprisals, and since they are “criminals” themselves (prostitutes and illegal aliens both) they dare not go to the even-scarier police for help. Small-time pimps often force addicts into prostitution by threatening to cut off their drug supply; they, too, cannot go to police due to their “illegal” activities (prostitution and drug abuse). In every case, prohibitionist laws ASSIST traffickers and enslavers of women, despite official claims to the contrary.

Yet the trafficking fetishists continue to promote their perverted fantasy, despite the fact that it results in verifiable harm to real women. What kind of unbalanced mind could honestly believe that middle-class escorts, expensive call girls and even independent streetwalkers like the girl in the story could possibly be “trafficked”, coerced or controlled by anyone without clients noticing? Do these fanatics imagine that touring escorts are manipulated from afar via voodoo, or that I carried my “pimp” around in the trunk of my Mercedes and he watched me through concrete walls with x-ray binoculars so he could manipulate my behavior via remote-control to an electrode implanted in my hypothalamus? This stuff isn’t even good science fiction, yet millions of people accept it as fact and dangerous, oppressive public policy is based on the juvenile sexual fantasies of insecure, irrational men and the paranoid delusions of women who are so deeply damaged that they’re willing to believe any outlandish claim about men or sex as long as it’s bad.

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The Slave-Whore Fantasy (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, BDSM, cops, dirty, end demand, fantasy, hysteria, law, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, pimps, psychology, rescue industry, slavery, stereotypes, Swedish model, The Slave-Whore Fantasy on December 2, 2010| 19 Comments »

Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution. – Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

It seems that in the past few years, and especially this year, the gap between those who want the US to join the developed world on prostitution and those who want us to align ourselves with theocracies and totalitarian states has dramatically increased; while most Americans used to sit on the fence on this issue, debate now seems to have become polarized between those in favor of decriminalization and those who support increased demonization and prohibition. Nearly every week now I read an article like this one in which an intelligent, informed person calls for an end to prohibition and the ensuing waste of public funds which results from the completely ineffective attempts to enforce the unenforceable. This particular story is about the newest “strategy” employed by the city of Arlington, Texas – an electronic billboard on which the mug shots of men arrested in prostitution stings are posted. The author rightfully compares the tactic to the stocks used by the Puritans, and even includes a link to my column of November 23^rd (for which I am very grateful). Arlington, as you may recall from that column, is also the city which is trying to scare touring escorts away by sending them booga-booga emails like this one:

From: youneverknow@arlingtontx.gov

Hello. You are hereby informed that your escort service posting on (insert website here) is in violation of Arlington’s Sexually Orientated [sic] Business Ordinance and other laws. In order to operate as an escort in the City of Arlington, you are required to obtain a license and present that license upon request. If you are caught operating without that license, you may be arrested and fined an amount up to $2000.00. For further information, please contact the Arlington Police Department Vice Unit.

Judging by these tactics (designed to hinder prostitutes without arresting them) and the crucifixion of clients without due process, it seems as though the Nordic Model infection has spread to northeast Texas. The vector for this sickness is of course “trafficking” hysteria, and it isn’t limited to the cops; take a look at the response (in the linked article) from one Jeff Kladec, who writes (among other drivel): “Prostitution is typically ONE consenting adult (the john) and one slave. Most women in prostitution (even where it is legal, so legalizing it doesn’t help) are forced through physical violence to give the money to their pimps, not allowed (through violence or threats to their families) to leave the lifestyle, and want to get out…Prostitution is not a “choice” for women, and more often than not, is a way for some evil people to kidnap children as young as 12 (in the US they are 12, in other countries, 5 or younger); they drug these children, and they are forced into this lifestyle…Prostitution is not a profession, or a lifestyle, or a choice; it is slavery. Do some research.”

The “all whores are slaves” propaganda also permeates this column from a recent issue of The New York Times; thanks to regular reader Maria for calling it to my attention. The writer, Nicholas Kristof, apparently spends a great deal of his time working to “rescue sex slaves”; obviously I don’t know his motivations and so can make no accusation, but the phrase “reaction formation” leaps unbidden to my mind. The column is careful to avoid most of the usual prohibitionist claims, but subtly implies that sex worker activists such as myself are being less than truthful: He says of an enslaved Chinese prostitute, “Those who think that commercial sex in this country is invariably voluntary — and especially men who pay for sex — should listen to her story.” No sane person claims that commercial sex is “invariably” voluntary; Kristof certainly knows that as well as we do, but by implying otherwise he make those who support prostitutes’ rights look either ignorant or dishonest. I’ll use his words to make a much more honest statement: “Those who think that commercial sex in this country is invariably involuntary — and especially men who support witch hunts against prostitutes — should listen to my story.” I’ll make a deal with you, Mr. Kristof; for every horror story you give me to read, I’ll give you a “happy hooker” story to read. But you won’t take that deal, because facts which do not conform to your sex fantasy must be discarded. All pretense is dropped in the concluding paragraph, however, which clearly reveals its “Nordic Model” underpinnings: “There are no silver bullets, but the critical step is for the police and prosecutors to focus more on customers (to reduce demand) and, above all, on pimps. Prostitutes tend to be arrested because they are easy to catch, while pimping is a far harder crime to prosecute…Nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s time to wipe out the remnants of slavery in this country.”

The “anti-trafficking” movement has largely absorbed the propaganda of the “Nordic Model” because it allows prohibitionists to attack our livelihood and suppress our profession without openly attacking us and thereby revealing their misogyny. But the “Nordic Model” is even more misogynistic than traditional abolitionism; established prostitution law at least presumes that women are capable of moral choice and should be held accountable for our actions, but the “Nordic Model” is based on the astonishingly sexist premise that women are psychologically and morally incompetent to make our own sexual choices. To “Nordic model” proponents in general and trafficking fanatics in particular, all women are eternal children who are psychologically unable to consent to sex for any reason but a childish, fairy-tale version of “love”, and therefore any prostitute must be the victim of evil “pimps”. This sort of belief system is very appealing to crypto-sexists who secretly believe women are inferior to men, yet cannot say it out loud nowadays except by disguising it in neofeminist rhetoric. Female proponents of this system are so blinded by their hatred of men and sex that they cannot see the dangerous precedent it establishes, but those male proponents who are not driven by reaction formation are almost certainly drawn to the propaganda because it allows them a socially acceptable venue for their paternalism.

Male trafficking fetishists are also, more importantly, seeking a defense against the frightening truth that the vast majority of women are fully in control of their own sexuality, and therefore male sexuality. As described in my column of July 20^th, insecure men have a deep and abiding need to believe that sex is not under female control; one way to maintain this belief is the Myth of the Wanton, which holds that women (or at least sexual women) have a male-like sex drive, but another is to hide (as Victorians like Victor Hugo did) in a belief system which teaches the exact opposite. The male trafficking fetishist immerses himself in a lurid, exciting and adolescent fantasy that female sexuality is always controlled by men (pimps and customers), and that all heterosexual women who are not owned by husbands are instead owned by “pimps” and “traffickers”. If they simply used this fantasy to masturbate or in sessions with professionals it would be harmless, but unfortunately they project it outward and insist society accept it as fact and proceed accordingly. To men such as Mr. Kladec and Mr. Kristof, I have this to say: You aren’t fooling us, so I suggest you buy yourself the complete set of Gor novels, enjoy them in the privacy of your own home, and stop trying to force the rest of us to indulge your sexual fantasies without paying for the privilege.

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As Young As Possible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Halfway Whores

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged acting, dating, disease, drugs, ethics, fantasy, Halfway Updates, internet, law, marriage, naturalness, psychology, restaurants, stereotypes, stripping on November 21, 2010| 26 Comments »

Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away. – Alberto Giacometti

Yesterday I talked about wife-swapping, and pointed out that a married female “swinger” is essentially a whore who works for barter. But they’re not the only women in modern society who are not called prostitutes and whose trade is not illegal, yet are more profoundly immersed in whoredom than I ever was. They call themselves dancers, models, actresses, hostesses, party girls, students and even professional women, and most of them do actually spend time at some other “regular” job outside of hooking. But most of them make far more money from selling sex or trading it for “presents” and “help” than they do from their “real” jobs, and they are immune to police persecution because they pretend it isn’t a business. In other words, society rewards them for their dishonesty. This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about this; it was the subject of my third column back in July, and featured prominently in the ever-popular “How To Be a Stupid, Greedy Whore” about a month later. I’m not planning to break any new philosophical ground here, so if you haven’t read those two columns you may wish to do so now. What I want to look at today is the price these harlots-in-denial pay for their immunity to legal persecution, and to point out that many of them are far sleazier and much less trustworthy than those of us who are not ashamed to call ourselves what we are.

Because only prostitutes advertise openly, whores-in-hiding have to attract customers by looking pretty and hanging around in places where they can be seen by men, preferably wealthy ones; this is why most of them are strippers, models, hostesses and the like. But others choose to seek customers more subtly, and so hold down “regular” (i.e. non-sex appeal related) jobs by day and spend their evenings and weekends hanging around nightclubs, casinos, etc. All of this is, of course, tremendously time-consuming; though small fish are fairly common it might take days, weeks or even months to land the sort of big fish needed to justify the time expenditure. Even those who are making money as models, waitresses, etc have to spend lots of time at a lower pay rate between good clients. And this means that, as in all other walks of life, the price of increased safety is decreased freedom. In order to protect herself from arrest and the social stigma attached to prostitution, the semi-pro has to give up a great deal of her free time and work for somebody else. The “party girl” has it worst of all; since she has a “respectable” job unrelated to sex, she can’t really troll during work hours and so has the equivalent of a second full-time job. And the most successful of these stealth strumpets pay the highest price in freedom; they become the mistresses or “kept women” of wealthy men and must be at the beck and call of their patrons. Call girls get these offers as well, but few of us accept them; as I told the occasional men who offered me such deals, “I already have a car, and I prefer to decide for myself who has a key to my house.” And when I did at last accept such an offer, it included love, trust and marriage rather than being decided entirely by mercantile concerns.

As you might expect, half-whores need to be very physically attractive in order to attract clients; since they do not openly promise sex, their looks alone have to carry the deal until the bargain is struck. And this means that a large percentage of them are empty boxes; they think their looks are enough, lack the skills and ethics of true professionals, don’t depend on repeat business and are not subject to bad reviews because most of their clients are as deeply in denial as they are and like to stroke their own egos by pretending they don’t pay for pussy. Unlike real whores (who have lives of our own), many semi-pros are only interested in shopping, “beauty culture” and the like, and it’s not uncommon for them to take payment in drugs or expensive trivialities such as garish jewelry and designer clothes. I’m not saying all of them are like this, but it’s much easier for a girl with no responsibilities, plans for the future or real personal depth to get by in this manner than it is for a woman with kids, a mortgage or a retirement plan (who can’t afford to take payment in cocaine or Prada) or an actual personality (who would go crazy if she had to spend all her time around rich losers in expensive public places).

Karen Sypher (in middle)

Besides the lack of character, skill and professionalism, there are several other disadvantages to dalliance with a semi-pro, the greatest of which is that she comes with a blank price tag and no contract. A man has no real idea how much she’s going to cost him in the long run nor what he’s going to get for his money, and since she lacks both professional ethics and the Damoclean sword of legal, professional or social consequences for her actions there is no guarantee she won’t renege on the deal or even try to blackmail her patron (as in the case of Karen Sypher, the stupid, greedy whore discussed in the column of that name). Think of how many cases you’ve heard of in which a mistress exposes a famous patron vs. how many instances of call girls exposing clients and I think you’ll see where I’m coming from. Even when this doesn’t happen, the state of denial in which they continually exist creates problems of its own; for example, half-hookers will often dress in clothes no professional escort would ever wear in public because they pretend they have nothing to hide, while we know damned well that we do. Even worse, many of them think nothing of blurting out their job titles or even talking shop when introduced to their client’s friends, acquaintances or business contacts; if such a potentially-embarrassing meeting occurred in public I was always a saleswoman, secretary or whatever the occasion called for, but the dancer or model might very well answer truthfully when asked, oblivious to the fact that she has given away far more of her client’s business than she should have.

There is, however, one type of harlette with whom a gentleman can avoid most of the issues and probably come as close as possible to a professional experience without actually hiring a full-fledged prostitute, and that is the sugar baby. This arrangement, which once required both hunting and luck on the man’s part to obtain, has now been made much easier by the internet. A quick Google search will reveal a number of websites in which young coeds or shop girls can advertise for gentlemen who wish to patronize them (and vice versa). The two meet and discuss details, and if they can agree on how much money he will pay her per week and how many times she’ll provide sex in that period, a bargain is struck and she gains a regular prepaid client, he a young, low-volume whore. Obviously, such girls lack the skills (and usually the open-mindedness) of real professionals, but for sugar daddies the attraction engendered by the youth, inexperience and dependence of their nubile mistresses outweigh their sexual deficiencies. And for the girl who lacks the nerve, pragmatism and disregard for conventional morality necessary to become an independent whore yet still needs free time for her studies (or just wants it for a real social life), the sugar baby arrangement is a satisfactory compromise.

Though we’ve necessarily discussed halfway whores in their modern forms, they are not by any means a modern growth; for as long as civilization has existed beautiful but low-born young women have risen in condition by becoming the concubines or mistresses of wealthy men, and in tomorrow’s column we’ll look at one form of the arrangement which was both common and accepted in New Orleans of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

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Wife Swapping

Posted in Call types, Miscellaneous, tagged anecdote, BDSM, bisexuality, disease, ethics, fantasy, halfway whores, infidelity, law, marriage, New Orleans, psychology, yin and yang on November 20, 2010| 44 Comments »

There’s only one thing wrong with wife swapping. You get another wife. – Scott Roeben

The accepted and more politically correct term for it is of course “swinging”, but frankly I prefer the older term, and it isn’t just because I’m sexually submissive and it’s a lot more descriptive than the rather vague, bland “swinging”. No, the main reason I prefer “wife swapping” is that it’s a hell of a lot more honest. Blah blah blah “sexist”, blah blah blah “objectification”, blah blah blah “ignores the woman’s experience”, blah blah blah. The fact is that, with a few exceptions, most women who swing do so to please their husbands, and so become whores whose price is exactly equal to that of all other women in the “swinging” community. Rather than exchanging cash, a “swinging” wife accepts as her price the other woman’s services to her husband. It is a barter arrangement, so “wife swapping” is both accurate and to the point in a way the mealy-mouthed “swinging” could never be.

The line between the two is narrower than you might think. I’ve known a few married hookers who started out as swingers and then realized that if they were going to do strange men anyhow they might as well get paid for it, and I’ve also known a few retired hookers whose husbands missed the turn-on of their wives with other men and so suggested swinging. Despite neofeminist obfuscation to the contrary, the real mental line which has to be crossed to become a prostitute is the barrier against having sex with strange men; once one has made that mental adjustment, being paid comes naturally. Yes, there are sluts who will rant and rave and fume that they’re “better” than whores because they don’t take cash in hand, but since most of them expect gifts, vacations, spending money, etc their posturing is either denial or excuse-making. And just let one of them get pregnant (because she was too stupid to take precautions, too scheming or fearful to take Plan B and too whatever to get an abortion) and watch how quickly she starts negotiating her price.

There is, of course, one other difference in the United States: Except in locations where adultery is against the law, swinging is legal while prostitution isn’t. Wrap your head around that, now: Both involve women having sex with strange men in return for something, both are often arranged via internet or alternative newspaper ads, both usually involve male infidelity, both are considered shocking by prudes, and both could result in spreading venereal disease if appropriate precautions are not taken. Yet the one which allows a woman sex completely on her own terms and enables her to directly fund her chosen lifestyle is illegal. Let the prohibitionists make whatever excuses they like, because they have no clothes on.

Obviously, most women who swing will never officially become hookers; they aren’t brave enough to go solo, they don’t need the money, they don’t want to risk arrest, they like being picky about whom they see, they enjoy the “club” social atmosphere of swinger groups, etc. And since swingers can be found among all types of people, most swapped wives are average looking just as most of the population is, so even if they wished to turn pro they probably wouldn’t really be able to make much of a living at it. And it’s probably for the best they don’t or can’t; the professional community doesn’t need a bunch of enthusiastic but completely ignorant amateurs glutting the market and undercutting our prices!

But beside the few swinger/whores, the communities intersect in another way: couple calls. A couple call is one way for a husband to ease a reluctant wife into swinging; it also eliminates one potential human factor, and if the wife becomes upset at the sight of her husband with another woman the only consequences are financial rather than social. Even experienced swingers might occasionally hire a call girl, since this allows them a freer (and usually higher-quality) choice of play companions with no strings attached. In couple calls the woman’s reaction is usually the “X” factor (though I did have one experience in which it was the other way around), but in swinging trouble can go either way because both parties have to deal emotionally with “competition”. I daresay everyone who has ever known swingers has heard horror stories of jealousy, drama and the like; there is no way to tell how often such things happen among neophyte swingers, though they would have to be rare among experienced ones or else they would never have gone that far. The biggest potential cause of problems among established swingers isn’t jealousy but rather rules violations.

In an escort-client relationship, the rules are clear and firmly enforced by the professional, but when everyone involved is an amateur motivated only by emotions there is a great deal more potential for drama and even disaster; it is therefore absolutely imperative that everyone is on the same page and the expectations, etiquette and ground rules are firmly established from the beginning. Like BDSM, swinging requires a high degree of trust between the partners, and either activity can intensify a strong relationship or destroy a weak one. And though I do not know this for a statistical fact, I strongly suspect (from personal observations and anecdotal evidence) that in swinging it is the woman who is more often than not the weak link. The reason should be obvious; while most men have no problem separating sex from emotion and can enjoy shagging strange women for the pure carnal joy of the act, many women have a tendency to become emotionally attached to men with whom they have sex (even some escorts have to wrestle with such feelings on occasion). If her own marriage is strong this might present no problem as long as they avoid too many encounters with the same couple, but if her marriage is weak she may attach to her lover more strongly than to her husband, with serious consequences for both marriages. And if she still harbors some resentment for being talked into wife swapping in the first place, those consequences might be catastrophic.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was rather a wild child in university; I experimented, was frequently invited into threesomes and became for a while (at her invitation) the mistress of an older girlfriend’s husband. So as you might expect, I knew a number of sexually unconventional couples, and among them three with “open marriages”. I think these are rarer now than they were in the ‘80s, probably because they don’t usually work. An “open marriage” is essentially swinging without any rules; both parties are allowed to sleep with whomever they want, whenever they want, and as you might expect one invariably does it a lot more often than the other. In all three cases I knew, the wife “wore the pants” and eventually became involved with a shy, easily-dominated boy in his late teens for whom she eventually left her weak husband; I discussed the aftermath of one of the cases in my column of August 19^th. The reason I mention this is because it demonstrates the need for mutually-acceptable rules to which both partners strictly adhere; obviously these marriages were all “flawed from the forge”, but even a good marriage can be harmed by swinging if the rules are unclear and feelings get hurt.

One final difference between swinging and “hobbying” is demonstrated by two news articles I recently read; the first reports that swinging clubs’ business is way down due to the bad economy, while the second claims that prostitution has actually increased. Assuming both statistics are correct, I think we can pretty safely guess the reason for the disparity; while swinging also involves the wife (who is liable to nix money being spent on sex when times are tough), visiting whores only involves the husband, who may be no less prone to “let the little head do the thinking” when money is tight than otherwise.

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Unreal Princesses

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged bad customers, cops, ethics, fantasy, hysteria, internet, psychology, rape, stage names, transgender, yin and yang on November 14, 2010| 12 Comments »

O what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive! – Sir Walter Scott

Some of my readers may be familiar with The Real Princess Diaries, the blog of a supposed escort and sex educator named “Alexa di Carlo”. The blog was very popular (over 2 million visitors in its lifetime) but also quite controversial due to the fact that many of “Alexa’s” posts were…well, creepy. “She” advocated unsafe sex practices, said a lot of things which revealed an astonishing ignorance of our world and attacked and tried to discredit sex and/or prostitutes’ rights activists. The reason for all these things is that she was, as many of us suspected all along, a dude pretending to be a woman. On October 22^nd a blog called Expose a Bro revealed that “Alexa”, an escort hobbyist named “Matt” and a precocious teenage girl named “Caitlain” were all aliases of a civil-service computer programmer named Thomas Bohannan who played his various online personas off of one another in order to excite himself, manipulate escorts and solicit nude pictures from teenagers. I cannot possibly tell the story as well as you can read it directly from the source, nor could any commentary I might make on the downfall of “Alexa” be remotely as brilliant and dead-on as that written by Furry Girl in her blog of last Wednesday (November 10^th).

But the whole tawdry affair got me thinking about the larger issue of why so many men like to get up in what I call “cyberdrag”. Obviously, as I discussed in my column of September 20^th there are plenty of men in real life who like to dress in drag for one reason or another, but on the internet it practically constitutes an epidemic. Since I cannot believe that every guy who pretends to be a woman in chat rooms is a transsexual, a transvestite or even a closet homosexual, something else must be going on…but what the hell is it? I suspect the major reason is attention; women get more attention than men, so an easy way for a lonely geek to stand out in a crowded chat room would be to present himself as female. The fact that he’s not homosexual might be immaterial for the same reason trolls delight in sowing discord in order to provoke angry replies: to the immature psyche all attention is good attention. Just as the troll values insults equally with compliments, so the heterosexual gender-bender might value male attention equally with female. And just as the troll may find a sense of power in being able to manipulate others’ emotions, so too perhaps the gender-bender relishes the power an attractive woman has over men. This theory is supported by the fact that female personas adopted by males are always claimed to be sexy and young; I daresay no chat-room gender-bender ever pretended to be a fat old grandmother!

Another possibility is plain male horniness; if a heterosexual man wants to create an interactive pornographic story with someone else to wank himself to, the game will require one participant of each gender. And since vastly more men than women are interested in “cybersex”, the chances are highly in favor of any willing parties he meets being male; he therefore needs to create a female character in order to get a two-way interaction going. If this theory is correct such a man isn’t really identifying with his adopted female persona; he’s just writing words for her character to create a porn story. Some other practitioners of “cyberdrag” are certainly homosexual or gender-confused; still others may be cops or reaction-forming perverts pretending to be young girls in order to entrap men in sexual conversations. It puts me in mind of a signature line I once saw: “The internet: Where men are boys, women are men and children are cops.” And also, this video.

So, which of these, if any, was Bohannan’s motivation? It appears to have been mostly about attention, power and sexual gratification; his “Alexa” persona gained him plenty of attention from fans and allowed him to function as a sort of uber-troll messing with people’s reputations offline as well as on, and his pose as an “expert” perhaps gave him the respect he could not command in his dead-end job. Also, as “Alexa” he could forge his own escort referrals to “her” favorite client, “Matt”, who was a fan of the sort of misogynistic porn activities I discussed in my column of October 28^th. In the final analysis, though, I have to agree with the writer of Expose a Bro: The man was a sociopath and needed to be “outed” in order to protect people from his malevolent manipulation.

I’m going to cut the column short today to give you more time to read Expose a Bro and Furry Girl’s Feminisn’t, but I want to leave you with one more thought: Please notice how this genuine predator was exposed. It wasn’t by an expensive multi-state FBI operation arresting hundreds of women who were just trying to make a living and feed their kids, nor by sleazy cops pretending to be hookers and/or clients, nor by neofeminists or trafficking activists working to “rescue” people, nor by crusading journalists courageously fighting “for the children”. He was found out by a number of perceptive members of the sex worker community, working to remove dangerous vermin from our midst. Similarly, a group of prostitutes in Dayton, Ohio recently helped to catch a serial rapist (paraphrased from Brandy Devereaux’s TCAA site):

A tip from an outraged prostitute led to Friday’s arrest of a suspected serial rapist, one of whose alleged victims was a 15-year-old girl snatched off the street on her way home from school. “We received a call from a ‘lady of the night’ who was appalled that the girl had been raped,” Sgt. Tom Flanders said following the arrest of Billy Balidbid, 26, of Fairborn. “She said she’d seen the sketch of the suspect and said he had contact with him…She got the ball rolling.” That led detectives to other prostitutes who said they had been beaten and raped by the suspect. Though police did not have a name, they had enough information on the suspect’s behaviors and patterns to set up a sting. Friday morning before dawn, when Balidbid pulled up to an officer disguised as a prostitute, detectives swooped in for the arrest…from the information that Balidbid gave detectives, they have connected him to at least five other rapes dating back to early this summer.

What the prohibitionists refuse to recognize is that if we were allowed to, we could do this ALL THE TIME. If prostitution were decriminalized we could report those who rape us, attempt to manipulate us or give our honorable profession a bad name by exploiting young girls. If you really want to fight “human trafficking”, lobby for decriminalization so we can work with the police and root out the predators where they live.

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Deadbeats

Posted in Call types, tagged anecdote, bad customers, cell phones, fantasy, masturbation on October 30, 2010| 15 Comments »

If I want my time wasted, I’ll waste it myself. – Mason Cooley

One of the banes of an escort’s existence, second only to cops, is constituted by time wasters and deadbeats; the former are men who pretend to be interested in our services but never actually arrange anything, and the latter those who make appointments with no intention of keeping them (or who get cold feet but don’t have the balls to call and cancel). Time wasters are a mere annoyance, but a deadbeat costs a girl time, fuel, and possibly another fee if she turned one down in order to keep the supposed appointment with the deadbeat. Those who at least open the door, admit their change of heart and pay a cancellation fee aren’t so bad, but those who won’t even open the door are in my mind utterly reprehensible.

One sort of time waster is the stroker; he tries to get the girl to talk sexy on the phone (or to send him provocative emails) so he can play with himself, thus stealing her services in addition to wasting her time. This type is pretty easily detected because reputable escorts won’t discuss sex via any form of electronic communication, so if a guy keeps pressing for it anyway one simply hangs up on him. Of course some of them do it while one describes oneself, which is pretty hard to avoid but at least is over with quickly. But I once had a stroker who was far more bold; he asked on the phone what would happen if he didn’t like me, and as usual I replied that he would owe me a $50 cancellation fee. So he asked me to come over and let me in, then said he “wasn’t sure” if he liked me or not. When I asked him what he meant, he told me that he wanted to see me without my clothes before making his final decision.

“I don’t think so,” I laughed. “I don’t take my clothes off until you pay up.”

So he paid me, and I disrobed and turned this way and that while he ogled every inch of my body before saying, “No, I don’t want you to stay. Please give me my money back.”

Now, I didn’t just fall off of the turnip truck; I knew very well what this cheapskate was up to. He figured he’d get himself a strip show for $50, then wank himself as soon as I walked out the door. So I handed him $200. Immediately he reacted; “You said the cancellation fee was $50!”

“That’s for me just showing up; I provided you with a service by taking my clothes off, so I’m charging you double.”

“That’s not fair!” he whined.

“Not fair? Are you for real?” I asked calmly. “You must think I’m some kind of idiot. I know what you’re up to, and you’re lucky I gave you back as much as I did. A less honest girl would’ve kept the whole thing. Of course, if you want to try to take it back by force…”

“No, no, I’m not going to do that!” he assured me, and I left the room after advising him not to try this sort of thing with anyone else. At least I felt reasonably certain that I had ruined his mood and made him unable to use his mental image of my nude body for the purpose he had planned.

The single most common excuse I got for cancellation from the ones who actually opened their doors was, “You’re not what I expected.” Now, I’ve mentioned before my reasonably thorough description of myself, and 99% of my clients were ecstatically happy with my looks and presentation. So, given that nearly every man who said this was either under 30 or not much over it, I am forced to conclude that either A) he really had less money than stated and when he saw a clear-eyed woman of discernable presence rather than a drugged-up trollop he knew better than to attempt to bargain me down to $100; or B) he had fantasies based on stereotypical images and was disappointed that I wasn’t wearing garish makeup and some ridiculous outfit. I can’t be sure, though, because they would never explain themselves more fully.

Once I had agreed to go a particularly long way for a client, out to the nearby town where I grew up. It was a quiet night, but I still made the young man understand that I was doing him a favor by coming out that far (I was the only working girl in New Orleans who would). And then he opened the door and came out with that same stupid statement; I was utterly furious. “Not what you expected?” I asked. “What the hell did you think five foot five, 125 pounds, 34 triple D-25-36 with long curly brown hair and brown eyes would look like?”

“I dunno,” he said, standing there with an asinine Gomer Pyle smirk.

“Are you blind or just stupid?” I then asked, resisting the urge to slap him.

“A little of both, I guess,” he said with the smirk still on his moronic face. He of course refused the cancellation fee as well; judging by the condition of his trailer I doubt he had 50¢ much less $50. I honestly considered calling my husband from the nearby car to beat the crap out of him, but I thought better of it and just left.

Most of them, of course, don’t even bother to open their doors; if they’re scared, playing games or just passed out drunk they don’t even come near the door (the light visible through a peephole darkens when someone puts his head there to look out). One of the ways I always tried to protect girls from such games was by insisting that they call hotel clients on their room phones rather than cell phones; this ensured that the client was genuinely in that room and often that he was the registered guest if the hotel asked (as many do) that a caller confirm the guest’s name before putting it through. If a client did not respond to repeated knocking, it was a simple matter to pull out one’s cell phone and call the room again; if he was asleep or passed out this would usually awaken him so one could ask him to open the door. In the case of a true deadbeat, however, this mattered very little; he knew his victim was out there, and he knew that she knew he was in the room, but what could she do? Well, in some cases, embarrass the crap out of him by writing “deadbeat” or “asshole” or some such on his door in lipstick. I myself never did this unless I was absolutely certain he was in there and refusing to answer, and not even always then. But there were some times that the stupid game made me so angry I just had to waste his time or piss him off as he had done to me.

On one memorable occasion I got a call from an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Metairie (the largest suburb of New Orleans) and since it was a warm, dry evening I went in my convertible. As I got out of the car a kid about 14 years old suddenly appeared at my side and asked me which house I was going to; though it was early evening this made me suspicious. “I hardly think it’s any business of yours, sugar.”

“If you’re going to (the house number), they aren’t there,” he said. Of course, it was the same number my supposed client had provided, but given that I had to park several doors down on the opposite side of the street the only way he could’ve known that was if he had given it to me himself.

“I’ll check it myself if you don’t mind,” I said; of course he was correct and nobody was there.

As I got back into my car, he leaned over my door and asked “Are you an escort?”

“I think you already know the answer to that,” I said, starting the car.

“What do escorts do?” he asked.

“Call me back in about seven years and I’ll tell you,” I said. “Now get off of my running board and don’t bother us again, OK?” He complied, but never stopped alternating between looking at my face and staring at my tits. I really couldn’t bring myself to be angry; he had succeeded in fooling me on the phone, and one expects juvenile pranks from a juvenile. Adult men have no such excuse.

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Scary Movies

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged acting, archeofeminism, bad customers, BDSM, disease, fantasy, Hollywood, naturalness, neofeminism, oral sex, porn, psychology, rape, yin and yang on October 28, 2010| 26 Comments »

Pornography does not inspire violence, but you can break a leg trying to imitate it. – Mason Cooley

Like most women, I don’t really care much for porn. I have nothing against it in principle; I understand most guys like it and I consider neofeminist claims that all porn encourages violence against women to be ludicrous. I’m just not as visually-stimulated as guys are; though I find some erotic pictures to be stimulating, I generally like stories better so porn movies without interesting stories tend to bore me. My extensive sexual experience also makes me hypersensitive to fakery, so what passes for “acting” in most porn annoys me and the ridiculously unrealistic and unfeminine behavior of many of the actresses actually turns me off. In addition to all this, I also understand firsthand how difficult some of the actions and positions are to achieve or maintain, which takes me out of the action and shatters my willing suspension of disbelief.

Let me give you an analogy; when you watch a movie or television show which involves some aspect of your profession, don’t you find yourself watching it with a far more critical eye than you might watch another program? If there is a character who is supposed to be a member of your profession, don’t you unconsciously dissect everything that character says or does without even meaning to? And if the situation, “facts” or character wanders too far from reality, doesn’t it tend to ruin your appreciation of the show because you just can’t ignore the mistakes? If I watch a movie about doctors or scientists or detectives, I know that they’re making mistakes and diverging from reality, but because I’m not a doctor, scientist or detective I can ignore that because I don’t usually recognize the mistakes when I see them. But since my business is sex, I understand it intimately; I know what’s comfortable or even possible and what isn’t, and I know how people tend to behave in real life. So when movie trickery, camera angles and staged situations are used to make it look as though, say, a really punishing activity is going on for a tremendously long time, I automatically recognize that such tricks have been used and my mind pulls back out of it as abruptly as you might pull back when you see the zipper on the monster costume or the wires holding the spaceship model up. And then there’s character motivation; when I see some porn chick get into a room with three strange guys I ask “why is she doing this?” If they just included a scene where the men paid her I would enjoy it a lot more, though I understand it might have the opposite effect for guys.

Porno movies, like all movies, are fantasies, but since sex is a real-life activity some men seem unable to separate porn from reality where whores are concerned. I really don’t know if most men try to act out things they see in porn with their wives or girlfriends because most of the porn available when I was dating (early to mid ‘80s) was pretty basic so there was little there we didn’t already do (except maybe big orgy scenes). I would suspect at least some do, but many try it with escorts for the obvious reason that we are professionals and our business is to cater to male fantasy. The only problem with that is, a lot of porn is unreal even when the willingness of the woman is assured by sufficient payment. There are four main reasons for this: 1) Clients are not porn stars; 2) Not all women have the same abilities and characteristics, so just because Slutyoni Soverydeep can take a 10” cock to the hilt with her knees pressed against her shoulders doesn’t mean every woman can; 3) Porn movies are not filmed in real time, so what seems to take 15 minutes might have been filmed over several hours and two dozen takes with breaks in between; and 4) Porn movies are filmed under rigidly controlled conditions with prescreened actors posed carefully by a director and photographed from the best angles with crew all over the place so that everything is safe; consent has already been obtained from everyone before filming starts and nobody has to worry about being arrested in the middle of a scene.

I hope you can see where this is going. A middle-aged, overweight businessman on blood pressure medication could not perform like a 28-year-old porn star even IF the film was done in one take, but Aphrodite knows he’ll try. And then there’s the girl; porn starlets have their specialties and their movies feature those specialties and avoid things they aren’t good at, but some clients expect every working girl to be skilled at every specialty of every porn starlet he’s ever seen, even though the stars themselves aren’t! Then, some clients want to try things which look easy on film, but are difficult in real life; or they forget that when porn actresses say how great something feels they may be ACTING, and in reality that position or activity might be uncomfortable, unpleasant or even acutely painful for the woman. Finally, some men forget about the safety factor; porn actresses know their coworkers and are surrounded by chaperones, and they’re all regularly tested for diseases. But hookers are alone with men they do not really know and are therefore not usually willing to participate in activities which may risk their safety (such as choking or bondage) or health (such as ingestion of semen or “bareback” penetration).

Obviously, most girls don’t mind catering to reasonable porn-inspired requests; I never minded guys giving me “facials” or ejaculating onto my tits, and I pretty much expect to be slapped on the rump periodically when being taken from behind. Many girls even specialize in the “Porn Star Experience”, an energetic performance which includes such porn staples as cowgirl, deep throat, loud noises and dirty talk, etc. But porn can also have a more widespread effect; it was after porn models started shaving or waxing off all of their pubic hair that many strippers and escorts followed suit and many clients came to expect it, and since the advent of “squirting” videos (showing women expelling fluid due to “G-spot” stimulation) a lot of girls now advertise themselves as “squirters” and some men will seek them out.

Rocco Siffredi, one of the most popular creators of the milder sort of misogynistic porn

But in the last decade or so a lot of porn has been getting a lot more misogynistic. Now, hear me out; y’all know I don’t use that word lightly. I don’t simply mean (as the neofeminists do) that the on-screen whores are catering to their on-screen male partners or off-screen male customers; that isn’t “misogyny”, it’s simply good business. Nor do I equate onscreen male dominance (either implied or overt) with “misogyny”; as a sexually submissive woman I recognize that domination does not automatically imply hatred, no matter what the neofeminists (and even many mainstream vanilla women) seem to believe. I and many other women are strongly aroused by the fantasy of being captured, controlled, forced and/or enslaved by men, even to the point of being whipped; I therefore can’t see how it suddenly becomes “misogynistic” for a man to share that fantasy. But from what I’ve seen, read and been told, a lot more porn is moving away from the stylized enslavement-fantasy of BDSM and toward realistic-seeming depictions of assault, violent rape and undeserved cruelty (including strangulation, mutilation, etc). One popular subgenre shows forceful irrumation to the point of tears, gagging and even vomiting, which is definitely outside of my comfort zone.

Of course, this is all filmed under controlled conditions; the women are in no more danger than actors who are “murdered” in a thriller. Even if their physiological reactions to being slapped, gagged, choked or whatever are real, there are still a dozen people standing around to stop things if they get out of hand. But anything which appears in porn is going to inspire some clients to want to try it, and indeed there have always been some girls who will allow themselves to be choked, gagged or whatever. The problem lies in the fact that, because of our prohibitionist laws, this kind of activity generally takes place nowadays outside of the controlled environment provided in the past by brothels. As the prevalence of such practices increases, more and more girls will cater to them, especially girls in depressed markets like Dallas who are desperate to win a larger market share at any cost. In an ongoing BDSM relationship such risky practices are at least bounded by procedures the couple has established (safewords, etc), but in a typical hooker/client session there is no established trust or procedure, and I cannot help but think that when an inexperienced dominant tries a risky behavior he saw in a movie on an inexperienced submissive he has just met, possibly even without securing her permission first, it is a recipe for trouble and possibly even tragedy.

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