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Posts Tagged ‘halfway whores’

Sugar, Sugar

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, tagged archeofeminism, contraception, dating, East Asia, ethics, halfway whores, Madonna/whore, psychology, shame on December 19, 2012| 11 Comments »

Men will bear many things from a kept mistress, which they would not bear from a wife. – Samuel Richardson

A complex reader question which needed a complex answer:

I’m a highly-educated girl from a well-to-do background, with a blossoming artistic and academic career. I have absolutely no real economic need, but I have a fierce desire for financial independence and a sugar arrangement seems to me the best option. I’m not ashamed of it but I am deeply concerned about possible repercussions. On the one hand, I don’t care if people are shocked, but on the other I don’t want my loved ones hurt by gossip and slander, and I’m worried that I’d be denying myself a chance in highly public careers, lest my youthful ‘activities’ be outed. Worse still, I live in Asia – where norms governing sexuality are even more stifling than in the West. How did you deal with the judgment from family and peers, and how do you explain your job to people? On the practical side, would you advise against juggling more than one sugar daddy at a time? Are there terms and conditions I must look out for? How do I ensure that transactions are processed, that I’m legally protected, and that there are medical precautions beside testing, condoms & pills? Finally, the few friends I’ve talked to strongly advise me against being a sugar baby, and I’m concerned that I’ll lose my self-respect; do many sex workers face this inner conflict all the time? How do they resolve it? Can sex and love be completely divorced – even for a sex worker?

Sorry for asking so many questions, but I don’t know anyone else to ask; I sincerely believe that your advice immensely helps a hidden generation of young workers like me.

I don’t mind a lot of questions, but since there are so many please forgive me if I fail to cover any of your concerns! Let’s start with one caveat: I’ve never been a sugar baby per se; though I have had official boyfriends and husbands who supported me, it isn’t really the same thing because of the stigma against sugar arrangements. So the only advice I can give on the subject is via comparison with professionalized harlotry, or by what I’ve heard from friends. However, I’m sure I have some readers who have had bona fide sugar daddies, and they may add their own advice to mine so be sure you read the comment thread below.

Your first concern is a very real one: if you think you might want some sort of public career in the future, sex work of any kind presents a considerable risk to that plan. Even totally legal forms of sex work such as compensated dating carry a social stigma, which as you rightly observe can be powerful enough to derail a reputation even decades down the road. If you sugar-date under your own real name, it is an absolute certainty that the arrangement will come back to haunt you; even if you use a carefully-guarded alias and post no face-showing pictures on the internet there is a chance of later exposure. In my case, I wasn’t concerned about what strangers thought because I had no plans to ever return to a “straight” career; furthermore, I was estranged from my family, and prepared to lose the goodwill of any friend who could not accept my choices. So in my case, I could simply be honest about my career with friends, and had a plausible cover story for neighbors and casual acquaintances. But if you’re not prepared to risk that (and I certainly don’t blame you if you aren’t), maintaining a strictly-segregated double life is probably the only way…though of course that carries its own costs and risks. I suggest you read my essay “Coming Out”, which discusses the pros and cons at some length.

In answer to your second question, I don’t think it’s ever wise to bite off more than one can chew. Were I you I would start with only one patron at a time, get used to that, and then when and if you feel ready to juggle a second gentleman you can do so then rather than rushing into it now. I would be very clear with the patron on how many hours a week you’re willing to give him; that way if he later tries to overstep his bounds you can remind him that this was discussed at the outset. Other issues will certainly arise just as they do in other types of relationships, and just as in those cases you’ll have to deal with them as they appear and learn from your mistakes. As for the rest, I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking; in the absence of an ironclad written contract there is always “wriggle room” for both parties, so any legal issues, like time allotment, should be clearly discussed at the beginning. It might be a good idea to insist on payment in cash until you learn to trust your patron, but medical concerns are a different matter: those are present even in monogamous romantic relationships, so I would advise never letting your guard down on that front. Always use condoms, stay on the pill (or get an IUD) and discreetly check him for signs of disease every time you’re with him.

Finally, there’s the self-esteem issue, which I’m afraid nobody can answer for you. Some women never have any conflict about it; others feel so conflicted and “dirty” that they develop considerable guilt issues which can indeed create problems for them. If you start to feel that way, it’s best for everyone that you stop immediately no matter how much you’ll miss the extra money; it’s not worth damage to your psyche, and unhappy former sex workers are some of the worst menaces to the cause of sex worker rights. The vast majority of women are between those two extremes: because we’re all exposed to stupid, unhealthy social attitudes about sex it’s not always easy to shake them off, so some situations do lead to guilt or other bad feelings while others may be exactly the opposite. But that’s like anything else in life; considering that most women can manage to feel guilty about any number of things (food, personal choices, perceived selfishness, etc) it’s hardly realistic to expect that sex – whether romantic, recreational or commercial – would be wholly exempt. I can answer your last question very definitely, though: yes, love and sex can certainly be divorced. One simply has to recognize that sex is not a magical, sacred thing which is taboo outside of a sacrament, but rather an ordinary human activity which, like any other activity, can be used for whatever purpose one requires.

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Whorearchy

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged activism, archeofeminism, BDSM, brothels, cops, courtesans, dirty, escort services, ethics, halfway whores, law, lawheads, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, porn, psychology, sisterhood, stereotypes, streetwalkers, stripping, Whorearchy on May 10, 2012| 80 Comments »

I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy. – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

Among the few facts about sex work that everyone agrees upon is that there is a “whorearchy”, a sort of class system among sex workers. Now, nobody agrees on anything about that system, only that it exists. Many strippers, dominatrices, porn actresses, etc insist not only that they aren’t whores, but that they’re better than we are; those whose professions have separated enough from ours that they aren’t even considered sex workers any more (such as actresses and especially masseuses) can be very pompous about it. Prostitutes, on the other hand, sometimes see themselves as better, smarter, more discreet, etc than strippers or porn starlets; sugar babies and other halfway whores deny that they’re sex workers at all; and some unusually self-deluded escorts will even try to draw imaginary lines separating themselves from other hookers. “Authorities” in criminalization and legalization regimes devote great effort to erecting arbitrary barriers between “tolerable” and “intolerable” varieties of harlotry, and sometimes to cementing the strata in place; cops and prosecutors delight in tricking “legal” sex workers into breaking their ridiculous rules (or falsely claiming that they did) in order to have an excuse for victimizing them; and sex worker advocates expend considerable efforts in hand-wringing and lamentation over “classism”.

To a degree, these activists are right; a whore is a whore is a whore, and legal, moral or procedural lines serve only to break people into smaller groups which are more easily dominated by the power-hungry. If you accept money from someone that he gives due to sexual interest in you, then you are a whore and everything else is just semantics. When politicians, pundits or rulers use some arbitrary determinant like penetration, duration, location or motivation to bless some harlots while damning others, what they’re actually doing is reducing the size of the group who might oppose them and winning supporters from among those granted legitimacy. This is why I’m harshly unsympathetic to those who vehemently maintain that their species of sex work or sensual therapy is absolutely not prostitution: all they’re doing is throwing other women under the bus, and if we had all stuck together from the beginning of second-wave feminism half a century ago, prostitution would’ve been decriminalized long ago and many women who are now dead or damaged might still be alive and healthy.

At the same time, it’s madness to pretend that at the present level of human evolution there can ever be such a thing as a classless society. Human beings, like other social animals, naturally form cliques, packs and tribes, and such groups inevitably develop hierarchies. Some people are natural leaders and others natural followers, even outside of a formal structure; the Founding Fathers intended the US to be classless, but look what’s happened to it. Nor are Marxists and Occupiers correct in their insistence that it’s always the rich who control everything; at our present stage of history money is indeed the single most powerful force, but it hasn’t always been that way and won’t always be in the future. And those who rail about “the 1%” forget that there are lots of ways to get into that fraction: birth, popularity, talent, intelligence, ambition, luck, sex appeal, and even plain animal cunning are all paths to riches and power, so pretending that there is still some elite caste inevitably born to the purple is disingenuous in the extreme. Even those who are uninterested in influence over others sometimes find themselves in a position of leadership or control; some people have superior organizational skills, determination or intelligence which allows them to build infrastructures in which others freely choose to participate in exchange for money or whatever other return the organizer needs. Such a person suddenly finds himself a manager or director of a company, co-op or club whom others turn to for guidance, even though his only motivation at the start was to make things easier, better or more comfortable for himself and his immediate dependents.

This is why I tend to tune out when sex worker activists start blathering about “privilege” as though it were some specific quality like height, skin color, IQ or income. There is no single quality in the modern world which confers “privilege” as birth once could, not even money or education. I’m not denying that some people are underprivileged and others start out with greater advantages, but this is inevitable in a world where everyone is different; even in a hypothetical post-scarcity economy of the future where teaching machines gave everyone a university degree at the age of five, there would still be a plethora of areas in which some had advantages over others. Furthermore, early advantages no more ensure success than early disadvantages guarantee failure, and in fact a growing number of psychologists point out that too much privilege often makes a child (and the adult he becomes) fragile, maladjusted and less likely to succeed than one who has to struggle to achieve his goals. It is as pointless to feel guilty about one’s natural advantages as it is to resent those with other advantages one lacks.

What it all boils down to is this: people are drawn to different kinds of work and have different aptitudes and comfort levels. Some women like one kind of sex work, some another; some prefer doing lots of low-dollar calls and others a few high-dollar ones. Some fall into management roles without trying, while others avoid such roles at all costs. Many if not most sex workers drift or migrate from one kind of work to another, in and out of sex work or from one kind of sex work to another, as their circumstances and needs change; a woman who was safely “legal” yesterday may be “illegal” tomorrow. This is why it is absolutely imperative that we not allow outsiders to divide us by drawing lines in the sand and turning those on one side of the line against those on the other. We need to stop obsessing about the whorearchy and pretending it can or should be eradicated, but we also need to oppose those who wish to calcify it in order to employ it as a tool of control.

One Year Ago Today

“Clueless Wonders” introduces my readers to the vice cops of Syracuse, New York, who are so aggressively ignorant and unselfconsciously stupid that they actually boast about it.

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That Was the Week That Was (#17)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged An Example to the West, anecdote, bad customers, Brazil, brothels, censorship, Coming and Going, condoms, cops, drivers, East Asia, Election Day, ethics, evidence, halfway whores, Handy Figures, harm reduction, hysteria, India, Ireland, Latin America, law, Maggie in the Media, Middle East, Much Ado About Nothing, neofeminism, New York, Not the Same Tree, Presents, rescue industry, Schadenfreude, sex work is work, Sisters In Arms, statistics, stereotypes, streetwalkers, stripping, Tennessee, The Camel's Nose, United Kingdom on April 28, 2012| 29 Comments »

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business. – Eric Hoffer

Eleven updates and two metaupdates.

Election Day (November 2^nd, 2010)

The campaign to ban police and prosecutors from using condoms as “evidence of prostitution” is ramping up; last week a group of public health and human rights advocates spoke to the New York legislature, and supporters now have their own website. Find out what you can do to help end this public health nightmare; success in New York will reinforce efforts in other states.

Maggie in the Media (February 3^rd, 2011)

My column on the Secret Service scandal attracted quite a lot of media attention. Last Friday James Wolcott of Vanity Fair quoted me, writing “Maggie McNeill, whose always provocative and independent-thinking blog The Honest Courtesan provides “a whore’s-eye view on current events,” is unable to stifle a yawn over the unholy fuss being made over the Secret Service agent and the underpaid escort, which has flowered into a hothouse scandal…” On that same day I spoke to Abby Ellin of ABC News, whose story appeared on Monday:

“If it had happened here, the woman couldn’t have gone to the police and said, ‘These guys are trying to cheat me out of money.’ Instead, she would have been hurt and cheated, and Mr. Agent Man would have gone home and patted himself on the back for having gotten one over on her,” said Maggie McNeill, a former New Orleans call girl and the founder of The Honest Courtesan.

She also wrote:

But while they acknowledge the potential dangers to national security, sex workers in the United States think the “breach” argument is another form of discrimination against prostitutes. “If the issue is attracting attention or bragging about being in the security detail, then it would be a problem if they brought in any outsider,” said McNeill. “If that’s the case, then what difference does it make if she’s a prostitute or an accountant?”

The next day, Newstrack India drew on the ABC story for its own report, which said: “Maggie McNeill, a former New Orleans call girl and the founder of The Honest Courtesan, and others have said that the policy was ridiculous, and that criminalizing prostitution was not only a human rights violation, but also a safety and labour issue.” Meanwhile, I was contacted by the producer of The O’Reilly Factor to be on Tuesday’s show, but I didn’t want to show my face on national television and O’Reilly understandably wanted someone he could look in the eye; instead they got Sienna Baskin of the Sex Workers Project, whom I am told held her own very well (probably better than I could’ve, because O’Reilly would almost certainly have flustered me).

Not the Same Tree (February 18^th, 2011)

Northern Ireland has railroaded convicted its first “sex trafficker”:

Matyas Pis was…convicted of controlling prostitution…The [two] women said they asked…Pis to book their air tickets, and he provided them with an apartment…Judge Burgess said the women were not being held against their will, but he could not ignore that “human trafficking is a global problem and we should not be blind to the fact that it is happening right now in Northern Ireland…”

So obviously this judge would convict men for having consensual sex on the grounds that he heard somewhere that 1 in 4 women have been raped.

What’s the Legal Definition of Prostitution Again? (April 17^th, 2011)

I wasn’t going to say anything about this article criticizing a new halfway whore site, because it’s sadly typical of Jezebel’s stealth anti-sex work oeuvre. But then Lolo de Sucre of Tits and Sass published this thoroughly awesome takedown entitled “Jezebel Blogger Saves Unwitting Women from Accidentally Prostituting Themselves ‘in Fucking Thailand or Some Shit’”, which you absolutely must read; her caption for this picture is especially brilliant.

Handy Figures (June 11^th, 2011)

Dr. Brooke Magnanti referenced this column and two others in a new article on the methodological deficiencies of prohibitionist “studies”. Meanwhile, an otherwise-uninteresting news article led me to this equally-uninteresting 2006 item which nonetheless contained one interesting statistic: 49% of Indian men are now willing to admit they’ve paid for sex, which is much closer to the truth than the laughably low figures many American “researchers” produce via poorly-phrased questions.

Sisters in Arms (July 14^th, 2011)

Tennessee joins the list of states defining miscarriage as murder; this article quotes and links others from Knox News, RH Reality Check, Think Progress and The Tennessean. Had enough yet, neofeminists and nanny-staters? Because the policies you support provide the precedents for these abominations.

Schadenfreude (November 28^th, 2011)

Great news about Kristof’s “hero”, fanatical anti-whore activist Somaly Mam:

[At a UN panel] Somaly Mam…[falsely claimed] that when police raided her Afesip centre in Phnom Penh in 2004, eight of the girls were…murdered…83 women…[were taken to the] centre…after a raid…on the Chai Hour 11 Hotel, where it was alleged that underage girls were providing sexual services…However, the following day, the centre itself was raided by government officials and members of the detained women’s families, and the women released…Somaly Mam [claimed] these officials colluded with the owners of the hotel, but a number of the women released [insisted] to reporters that they…resented being “rescued”. It was also disputed that any of the women were underage…No reports…suggested any of the women…were missing…[and] the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights [expressed] surprise at Mam’s…claim…[Pierre Legros, Mam’s ex-husband and] Afesip’s international director at the time of the raids, also denied that any…girls were murdered…he said that previous claims by his ex that their daughter had…been kidnapped and gang-raped in revenge for her mother’s activism were also untrue…[the] daughter had simply run off with her boyfriend…the lack of evidence of Mam’s claims…seriously [undermines] her credibility. Observers had for some time felt that Mam had become preoccupied with her identity as an international celebrity…

Presents, Presents, Presents! (December 29^th, 2011)

On Tuesday I received a DVD of The Thing from Lord Oberon, then yesterday the UPS man brought me John Stossel’s new book No, They Can’t from Elisabeth Whispers. Thank you both so much for thinking about me!

An Example to the West (April 3^rd, 2012)

The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) held its conference in Istanbul last week, and unlike similar events in the United States, sex worker rights groups were welcomed there as important participants. Dr. Laura Agustín wrote about the proceedings:

…I was at this event most of last week, part of a group promoting a vision of sex work, migration and feminism that emphasizes agency, the state of being in action, taking power, making decisions even when presented with few options. We overtly challenged the reductionist, infantilising ideology that has come to dominate mainstream policy and faux journalism (like The New York Times’s) by attending many sessions and commenting…

TrustLaw reported on the conference as well, highlighting Agustín’s contribution and also quoting the EMPOWER Foundation:

“We are forced to live with the modern lie that border controls and anti-trafficking policies are for our protection…We have been spied on, arrested, cut off from our families, had our savings confiscated, interrogated, imprisoned and placed into the hands of the men with guns…all in the name of ‘protection against trafficking’”…one woman [said]: “At a restaurant you get a menu and you look at all the options before you pick out your selection …Some restaurants have a huge menu and some only have a few dishes – either way the process is the same. Vegetarians may not understand when you choose a steak, and others may not understand when we choose to do sex work.”

Much Ado About Nothing (April 14^th, 2012)

Since the public stubbornly refuses to get worked up over the “news” that G-men hire whores, the news media is casting its net more widely: “…anonymous sources [said] that Secret Service employees received sexual favors from strippers at a club in San Salvador and took prostitutes to their hotel rooms…in March 2011.” Stop the Presses! Men buying sex while travelling on business! Why, that’s never happened before in the history of the world! Contrast that non-story with this, which SHOULD have caused a scandal last December but was instead ignored by the American media:

A former Brazilian prostitute plans to sue the United States embassy and five of its personnel for injuries sustained outside a strip club [on December 29^th]…Romilda Aparecida Ferreira…[is suing] for injuries, medical expenses, lost income, and psychological trauma after an embassy van ran over her and left her stranded in the club parking lot with a broken collarbone, punctured lung and other injuries…A civil suit would compound a case in which Brazilian prosecutors have already said they are considering criminal charges…Little noticed at the time, the incident in Brasília…gained traction this week…

It was “little noticed” because the American media didn’t give a damn about several apes in uniform mutilating a hooker (NHI and all that). But now that it can be tangentially hooked to a “prostitution scandal” it’s suddenly news.

Ad Scortum (April 16^th, 2012)

In order to combat prohibitionist claims that satisfied, well-adjusted sex workers are “not representative”, Greta Christina has invited us to tell our stories in a thread from which prohibitionists and other non-sex workers are specifically excluded. If you’re a present or past sex worker of any kind (it’s not limited to whores) please contribute; the thread is already over 100 responses long!

Metaupdates

Coming and Going in That Was the Week That Was (#12) (March 24^th, 2012)

In yet another sign that the anti-whore tide may be receding, The New York Daily News published this article strongly criticizing Anna Gristina’s treatment:

…in Florida, a judge granted $150,000 bail for George Zimmerman, who is charged with the murder of Trayvon Martin. Last week, a career criminal named Ivan Ramos was arrested after allegedly raping, sodomizing and robbing a young woman…Facing 15 years, an obvious flight risk and a clear threat to the community, Ramos was given $300,000 bail. Meanwhile, Anna Gristina…has been held on $2 million bond since Feb. 22 on a nonviolent charge of promoting prostitution…[which usually results in] probation and carries a maximum sentence of two to seven years…two weeks ago five male hotel clerks were charged…with the same exact crime [and] released on their own recognizance, without posting a dime in bail…What’s more obscene? A woman charged with promoting the world’s oldest profession that attracts governors, U.S. senators, congressmen and Secret Servicemen? Or this flagrant abuse of judicial power that’s turned the Blind Lady of Justice into a streetwalker?

The Camel’s Nose in That Was the Week That Was (#16) (April 21^st, 2012)

American readers, have you called your congressman about CISPA yet? If not, you’d better hurry:

Up until [Thursday] afternoon, the final vote on CISPA was supposed to be [Friday]. Then, abruptly, it was moved up…and the House voted in favor of its passage…248-168…[after] an absolutely terrible change (…amendment #6)…[in] what the government can do with shared information…Astonishingly, it was described as limiting the government’s power…though it in fact expands it…Previously, CISPA allowed the government to use information for “cybersecurity” or “national security” purposes. Those purposes have not been limited or removed. Instead, three more…have been added: investigation and prosecution of cybersecurity crime, protection of individuals, and protection of children…Basically it says the 4^th Amendment does not apply online, at all…[and] the government could do whatever it wants with the data…CISPA is now a completely unsupportable bill that…eliminates …all privacy laws for any situation that involves a computer…

The government’s doubletalk was so masterful it even succeeded in convincing some CISPA opponents that the changes limited its power, but as Leigh Beadon explains in this follow-up to her article above, that’s totally false.

One Year Ago Today

“The Coffee Klatsch” provides samples of the blogs of three other hookers with whom I’m friendly.

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The Sky is Falling!

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged archeofeminism, censorship, cops, dirty, halfway whores, hysteria, internet, law, Michigan, naturalness, porn, psychology, The Sky is Falling!, yellow journalism on February 20, 2012| 18 Comments »

“Oh, Foxy Loxy, the sky is falling!” said Turkey Lurkey. “How do you know?” said Foxy Loxy. “Goosey Loosey told me,” he replied. “And Goosey Loosey, how do you know?” “Ducky Lucky told me”. “Ducky Lucky, how do you know?” “Henny Penny told me.” “Henny Penny, how do you know?” “Chicken Licken told me.” “And Chicken Licken, how do you know?” “Part of it fell on my head!” “Make haste, then,” said Foxy Loxy, “and all come into my den!” – English folktale

I’m sure everyone remembers the story of Chicken Licken (or Chicken Little, as she is called in America); some natural object (usually an acorn) falls on her head and she runs about shouting, “The sky is falling!” The other barnyard fowl then join the panic until a clever fox offers them shelter in his den, where he quickly devours the foolish birds. The tale appears in many forms from all over the globe, including a 2500-year-old Tibetan version in which the animal who starts the panic is a hare, the frightening event a ripe fruit falling with a loud “plop” into a pond, and the predator a tiger. Weaker modern versions in which the silly animals escape disaster subvert the moral of the tale, which could be stated as “Those who panic due to perfectly natural events or hearsay will be taken advantage of by the clever but unscrupulous.” The “trafficking hysteria” is obviously an example of this, with ridiculous geese running about squawking “The sky is falling!” merely because someone else told them it was.

In real life, panics are usually a little more complicated; they are set off by a combination of events rather than one, and unfortunately do not generally end with the rapid devouring of the idiots who started the hysteria. But the phenomena which trigger them are still nearly always perfectly natural ones; in the case of “trafficking” hysteria, for example, the triggers are women trading sex for money, people ignoring arbitrary laws which wrongfully restrain them from what they need to do, people crossing borders to work, and xenophobia. The first two also combine with another natural event, young people doing things of which their elders disapprove, to produce a different but related moral panic we’ve discussed several times recently: university students having compensated sex to pay their bills. As Dominique Jackson pointed out, this isn’t remotely new; older men have always sought younger women since time immemorial (even when, as in my column of one year ago today, they get in trouble for it), and young women have always been willing to capitalize on it (as well they should).

But the fact that these things are as natural as the fall of a nut doesn’t stop media Chicken Lickens and Turkey Lurkeys from getting into a panic over them, as demonstrated by these two recent items which appeared on EconJeff’s blog. The first one appeared in Click On Detroit January 17^th and Jeff commented on it the following day; since I have nothing to add to his insightful comments I’ll just embed an excerpt from the news story in boldface before quoting him:

A pornographic website features college co-eds having sex in dorms, and recent videos…feature students from the University of Michigan. The DareDorm.com producers have posted advertisements on websites to recruit new students for new movies. Anthony Kalil, a student at U of M, has heard about the campus porn invasion. He knows students are being offered up to $10,000 to do the videos. But he also knows the ramifications of shooting an X-rated movie. “For somebody to let a crew in to film something like that, you’re ruining yourself and you’re ruining your friends. It’s just not a good idea,” Kalil said. “It’s definitely a decision that you are going to have to deal with for the rest of your life. Twenty years down the road and you have kids, they go on the Internet, they are going to see mommy and daddy when they were drunk in college”…

Can you imagine? Students having sex in the dorms? Video cameras? The internet? Money? What is the world coming to? Surely the end times are near! …Note the use of students (presumably carefully selected for their negative views) to provide the illusion that Channel 4 is engaged in reporting rather than running an anti-sex editorial. Could they really not find a single student with something positive to say about getting lots of money for doing very little work? …Suppose that you can get $10K for a video. At typical local wages for undergrads, that means putting in, say, two or three hours of time rather than 1000. Those 1000 hours could be spent, say, studying. They might allow an aspiring student to take harder classes or complete a harder major than he or she otherwise would. Is that necessarily a bad tradeoff? …In the age of Facebook and surveillance cameras does anyone really think that one video on Dare Dorm is going to ruin someone’s life, as suggested by the undergraduates interviewed for the story? How exactly will someone’s children find their parents’ Dare Dorm video from among the zillions of porn videos on the internet? …Note to Channel 4: there are lots of important things to report on in the Detroit metro area. This is not one of them.

I must point out that Jeff is a professor of economics, not a sex worker rights advocate, yet I couldn’t say this any better. The very next day, he posted a commentary on a local news item about “the medium-term paid relationship services market, informally known as the sugar babies market…[which] lies somewhere between paid escorts who charge by the hour or day and particularly mercenary marriages…[note] the obligatory scary remarks from local law enforcement (playing double duty here as moral scolds)…” The story appeared on January 18^th in MLive:

Students at Jackson-area colleges and universities are among the “College Sugar Babies” signed up on a worldwide dating-for-dollars website. SeekingArrangement.com, which touts itself as the country’s leading…[compensated] dating website…recently released its top 20 list of colleges and universities with the largest number of sugar baby signups in 2011. [Local institutions]…did not make that list, but they did have…[a total of 33] students…who registered as “sugar babies” last year…SeekingArrangement.com advertises “mutually beneficial relationships” and has garnered national [media] attention…One in every two “sugar babies” who join the website today are college students, and college “sugar babies” now make up 40 percent of the site’s population, [a recent press] release said. The numbers and universities are identified by students who register on the site using their “.edu” email address. They automatically receive a free premium membership upgrade and are classified as “College Sugar Babies,” which receive three times more inquires from potential “Sugar Daddies”…

The website does not promote a direct exchange for sex, so using it does not directly violate the law, said Jackson County Sheriff Steve Rand. However, he said the website is potentially dangerous. “The Internet is the wild, wild west and there ain’t no sheriff,” Rand said. “It’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt on a site like this. It’s a recipe for disaster”…

Legal adults using their time and assets sensibly without busybody interference from self-appointed “sheriffs”? The horror! Sheriff Rand says it’s only “a matter of time” before “disaster” strikes; considering that this sort of thing has been going on for at least 12,000 years, I presume he imagines we’re overdue for “somebody to get hurt” and that the sky will be falling any minute now.

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Gorged With Meaning

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged archeofeminism, cops, evidence, Gorged With Meaning, halfway whores, law, Madonna/whore, naturalness, psychology, stage names, stereotypes, streetwalkers, United Kingdom on November 21, 2011| 9 Comments »

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us. – Jean Baudrillard

Language is one of the most important ways humans organize the universe; by giving things names we gain control over them, place boundaries on them, enable ourselves to describe them to others who do not know about them. The ancients believed that names conferred magical power over people, and hid their true names from strangers; whores do much the same thing by using stage names when dealing with clients. And while naming is a useful tool, it’s extremely important to remember that such names are artificial and reside only in the minds of humans. Mark Twain portrayed Eve as naming the dodo because “it looks like a dodo”, but obviously any other name would do as well as long as everyone agreed upon it. And thereby hangs the tale; very often people try to apply different words to the same thing, or to use specific terms in an overly-broad fashion or general terms in an overly-specific one. Even worse, they sometimes draw up elaborate definitions for a general term based upon observation of one specific example, and then either insist that their characteristics apply to all members of the class, or else deny that something belongs to the class based upon the fact that it doesn’t fit the definition. If, for example, my definition of “bird” includes the ability to fly, I might exclude ostriches and domestic turkeys, and if it included the presence of wings I might exclude the kiwi. On the other hand, if my definition included only beaks and hard-shelled eggs, I might feel justified in classifying a platypus as a bird.

A bird?

I’m sure y’all can see where I’m going with this. Having defined words like “whore” and “prostitution”, people then attempt to impose the definition upon reality instead of adapting the definition to fit reality. At its most basic prostitution is the exchange of sex for something of value, and until governments sought to control it that was good enough. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t sharply demarked from other female behavior, or that some women did it only occasionally while others made a profession of it, or that there was no absolute distinction between a concubine, a mistress and a regularly-patronized courtesan; people used whatever term seemed the best fit for the specific case. But once patriarchal society began to impose laws and restrictions on women’s sexual behavior the label “whore” carried consequences, which became much more serious once Western societies began to actually criminalize our trade a century ago. Furthermore, when governments began attempting to draw lines between the whore and the not-whore they began to discover that it wasn’t quite so easy as they might’ve liked; since the “crime” of “prostitution” was defined entirely by motive, the “authorities” quickly found that a too-tight definition allowed the great majority of harlots to escape their clutches, while a too-loose definition criminalized the majority of the unmarried female population.

When the social scientists decided to study prostitution, things grew still more confusing; their arbitrary definitions sometimes conflicted with the legal ones, and since the only group which everyone agreed fell safely inside the sphere of whoredom were the streetwalkers (who were also highly visible), both researchers and cops directed their (usually unwelcome) attention to them…and soon began to apply their observations, opinions, beliefs, fantasies and guesses about streetwalkers to every other whore. The result? What was once recognized as a broad and indistinct spectrum of female behaviors was now mischaracterized as a distinct, narrow “social problem”; women judged by the “authorities” to be prostitutes were considered degraded or victimized “criminals”, while those judged not to be were as pure as the driven snow: It was the old Madonna/whore duality codified into law.

Not a bird.

This sharp distinction is, of course, pure nonsense; as I explained in my column of one year ago today, there are many women who are far more steeped in whoredom than I ever was, but who are not legally classified as “prostitutes” because they pass some arbitrary legal “whore test”. Among these are “sugar babies”, who are not defined as prostitutes because they only have one client at a time (a legal absurdity which will not be lost on anyone who has read much about courtesans). Young, attractive women have prostituted themselves on this basis to older men since the beginning of civilization, but now that the internet has streamlined the process and made it more visible the usual busybodies are running about, predicting the imminent collapse of the sky. This writer of this October 29^th article from the Daily Mail picks up where the writer of the Huffington Post article discussed in my column of last August 15^th left off:

Events that offer to set up wealthy older men with young cash-strapped women, dubbed ‘Sugar Daddy Parties’, are about to hit Britain after becoming popular in the U.S…The ‘matchmakers’ justify the events by insisting that all participants are consenting adults and ‘nobody has to do anything they don’t want to’ but critics say the parties are bordering on prostitution. And the scenes from New York venues that have hosted the get-togethers, showing pretty young women hanging off the arms off much older men only add to the sleaziness factor. On average, fees of $500 per date is said to be common in the U.S., but arrangements worth between $10,000 and $20,000 per month have also been agreed upon in the past, according to its organiser…

The confusion and discomfort of the writer, a lawyer she quotes and some of the women in both articles derive from what I described above: the attempt to impress definitions on reality rather than observing it for what it is. The cognitive chain goes something like this: “Young women are taking money for sex, which is what prostitutes do; prostitutes are degraded, drug-addicted criminal human trafficking victims, therefore SOCIETY IS DOOMED!!!!!!” To a rational person, of course, the chain would go in exactly the opposite direction: “Young women are taking money for sex, which is what prostitutes do; these young women are just trying to better their lives or make a living like anyone else, so maybe that’s what most prostitutes are like as well”. Seeing the world as it is brings clarity and understanding; forcing an ill-fitting interpretation upon it brings nothing but confusion and stress.

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TANSTAAFL

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, The Dark Side, tagged brothels, California, cops, drivers, drugs, ethics, fantasy, halfway whores, law, marriage, psychology, yin and yang on November 6, 2011| 96 Comments »

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. – unknown origin, popularized by Robert A. Heinlein

It should be obvious, yet many reasonably intelligent people refuse to recognize it; one cannot get something for nothing. It’s a basic law of the universe; everything has to come from somewhere. In human terms, if someone offers something at no apparent cost to the recipient, it means that someone else has borne that cost; if the giver and recipient are close friends we call this a “gift”, but if they are strangers or near-strangers it nearly always means that the donor wants something of value from the recipient. In most cases, what he wants is both obvious and fair; for example, literal “free lunch” buffets at bars are subsidized by more expensive drinks and draw increased traffic to the business. But when the goods being offered for “free” are very expensive and the donor’s motivation is not readily apparent, it would behoove the recipient to be very wary and to remember another popular adage: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

Case in point: this October 16^th story from the Los Angeles Times, called to my attention by regular reader Gorbachev:

David Dutcher met Sharon on Match.com in late 2008, a few months after separating from his wife. “We had a lot in common,” he recalled. Sharon loved four-wheel-drive trucks and sports…[and] was tall, slender, blond and beautiful. She moaned that she had not had sex in a long time. She told him he had large, strong hands and wondered if that portended other things. She described his kisses as “yummy.” “It felt a lot like Christmas,” said Dutcher, 49, a tall, burly engineer with wavy red hair. On their second date, Sharon suggested they join one of her friends “who was partying because she had closed a real estate deal,” Dutcher said. They drove to an Italian restaurant…[where] Sharon’s friend, “Tash,” was…pounding down shots. The women fiddled with Dutcher’s tie and massaged his neck and shoulders. [Tash] unbuttoned her blouse to reveal generous cleavage. “I am way over my head with these girls,” he remembered thinking. “I hadn’t been out dating in a while.”

Sharon had trouble finishing her tequila shots and asked Dutcher to help…[then she] suggested going to a house with a hot tub that Tash was housesitting, Dutcher said. He followed them in his truck. Within a few minutes, a flashing red light appeared in his rearview mirror. The officer said he had been swerving. Three months later, Dutcher’s wife filed a motion in their divorce case, telling the court that her soon-to-be former husband had been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving and that she feared for their children’s safety. The judge ordered that Dutcher’s visits be supervised.

Then, earlier this year, Dutcher received a letter from…[the district attorney which] contained a transcript of a police interview with Christopher Butler, a private detective and the subject of a state and federal criminal investigation…[The letter said that] the women…worked for Butler’s detective agency. Sharon…was a former Las Vegas showgirl. A man who once worked for Butler…told authorities Butler arranged for men to be arrested for drunk driving at the behest of their ex-wives and their divorce lawyers — and that entrapment was only one of many alleged misdeeds. Butler, 49, a former police officer, was arrested in February. In addition to setting up at least five DUIs, he sold drugs for law enforcement officers and helped them open and operate a brothel…Butler said his accomplices reasoned that they could shield their illegal businesses because any complaints would be investigated by a state-run narcotics task force, which one of the officers headed.

…In May, the FBI took over the probe, interviewing Dutcher and other ex-husbands arrested on suspicion of drunk driving. A federal grand jury indicted Butler and two of the officers in August and September. The charges included drug dealing, running a prostitution business and illegal possession of a weapon. More indictments are expected. A third officer, implicated by Butler in the DUIs, faces state charges of accepting bribes to make arrests…Butler paid his decoys $25 an hour for four-hour minimums. The women worked in pairs. One drank heavily with the target and the other drove. Butler videotaped the encounters from a nearby table. When the man got into his vehicle, Butler tipped off police…

[After getting the letter from the D.A.] Dutcher…contacted others he had learned had been set up, including Declan Woods, a contractor arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence in 2007. Woods’ ex-wife was represented by Mary Nolan, the same divorce attorney who worked for Susan Dutcher…Woods’ ordeal began with a call for a kitchen remodel estimate. The prospective client turned out to be an attractive, flirtatious brunet [sic]. She told him she was new in town, a writer, and wondered what he was doing that night. He said he planned to grab dinner at a local cafe…The woman showed up with a friend that evening. They went to a nearby bar, where the three drank…the brunet [sic] was so aggressive he twice pushed her off his lap…Looking back, he said, he should have realized something was wrong. “Things like that don’t happen to blokes like me,” said the British-born Woods. “But the alcohol kicks in, you are having a good time, and you think, what the hell.” The women suggested going to a house with a hot tub. Woods hopped into his truck and followed them. He was pulled over almost immediately…

Prosecutors offered to help Dutcher and Woods remove their DUI convictions and approved the dismissal of charges against the three other men. Dutcher obtained a court order last month to expunge his conviction. Even though the men had been drinking, prosecutors said Butler’s stings violated a little-used 19^th century law that makes it a felony to conspire to subject another person to arrest. The female decoys have not been charged…

Before I get to my main point, I’d like to call your attention to a few details. First, that “Sharon” and her friends have absolutely no self-respect, selling their sexual services for half of what a cheap streetwalker might charge. Furthermore, they demonstrate the topsy-turviness of the American legal system; being paid to flirt with a man, lie to him and set him up for arrest in a sleazy plot to deny him visitation with his kids is apparently legal, but being paid a mutually agreeable fee to honestly provide sex isn’t, and I’ll bet “Sharon” thinks she isn’t a whore. Furthermore, why haven’t the lawyers who paid Butler to frame their clients’ husbands been charged with conspiracy along with Butler and the cops? And though it’s almost a throwaway detail in the story, here’s another example of cops doing the sort of things they get paid to nail other people to trees for doing.

But the main lesson is this: Guys, Penthouse letters are fiction. “Things like that” don’t happen to blokes like Woods, Dutcher or anybody else. The Myth of the Wanton is just that; a myth. Women who look like Las Vegas showgirls don’t advertise on Match.com, and if they say they haven’t had sex in a long time they either didn’t want it or else they’re lying. They don’t throw themselves at dumpy, goofy-looking, middle-aged guys who aren’t rich or famous, and they ABSOLUTELY DO NOT offer three-ways in hot tubs with their gorgeous friends on the first or second date…unless they’re whores. And if they haven’t asked you to pay them, somebody else has. Free pussy is every bit as mythical as free lunch; if a strange woman offering sex doesn’t ask for cash, she wants something else. If that “something else” is obvious or you can figure it out, and it’s a price you’re willing to pay, by all means go ahead and I hope you have a great time. But please, think with the big head; if you know a chick is out of your league and she’s acting in a way no other woman has ever behaved toward you before, you need to recognize that something is wrong. Sooner or later the bill will be presented, and you may find it’s a lot more than you bargained for.

One Year Ago Today

“Jezebel” starts with control freaks who get off on policing other people’s sexuality, moves on to the lady whom the column is named after, and ends up with the website of the same name. All that, and adult cartoons, too.

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We Told You So

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, bogus studies, dehumanization, dirty, end demand, ethics, fantasy, halfway whores, hysteria, language, law, neofeminism, politicians, rescue industry, Swedish model, We Told You So on October 9, 2011| 46 Comments »

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so. – Gore Vidal

Sex worker rights activists have been pointing out for years that the rescue industry has a vested interest in stoking the fires of “sex trafficking” hysteria so that millions in government money flows into their coffers; to this end, they inflate statistics, create bogus studies designed to siphon funds from other programs, use dysphemisms, distorted terminology, empty-headed celebrities and more bogus studies to convince the public that sex work is a social disease, and just plain lie about sex work and sex workers in order to keep the gravy train rolling. Nor are NGOs the only beneficiaries of this lucrative witch-hunt; small countries who depend on American handouts are only too happy to throw whores and clients into prison in order to show their overlords that they’re “doing something about sex trafficking”. But in this age of belt-tightening, the U.S. government is beginning to look a little more closely at those who reap huge profits “combating” a virtually-nonexistent “problem”, and discovering – Surprise, surprise, surprise! – that they aren’t actually accomplishing anything:

An Iowa senator is calling for action after audits revealed at least six recipients of grants to fight human trafficking made unauthorized expenditures and incurred questionable costs. Six audits completed between 2007 and 2009 reported more than $2.72 million in unsupported, unallowable or questioned costs of the $8.24 million total the Department of Justice awarded to the six grant recipients. “These select individual audits signal to me that there is a bigger problem,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley…during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. “The inspector general audited seven trafficking grantees and found serious problems in all seven.”

During the hearing on the reauthorization of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which provides grants and resources for trafficking victims, advocates, law enforcement and prosecutors, Grassley questioned whether the Department of Justice is awarding money to the appropriate organizations. “Holding grant programs accountable will help to ensure that services really go to those in need,” Grassley…said in a statement. “Before we reauthorize another dollar, we need strong oversight language included in legislation – to ensure that failing grantees will not be rewarded with additional taxpayer dollars.”

…One audit discovered that the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs in Chicago, which was awarded $2 million, did not have adequate documentation for $902,122 in salaries and $174,479 in fringe benefits. Another inspector general audit in 2008 found that, although the Office of Justice Programs’ human trafficking grant programs have “built significant capacities to serve victims,” the programs have not “identified and served significant numbers of victims”…

…The Office for Victims of Crime, which awards grants to task forces and other grant recipients that provide direct services to victims in their communities, has developed a detailed checklist for applicants seeking money for human trafficking work…Applicants must list detailed information on the number of human trafficking victims they have previously served and disclose how long they have provided services to these victims…The office also reviews the budget and program strategy of each applicant…

Unfortunately, the Department of Justice seems to be treating these misappropriations as honest mistakes or instances of incompetence rather than recognizing them for what they are: embezzlement perpetrated via deliberate fraud. We can only hope the audits eventually uncover a number of cases too egregious to ignore, and that there is enough of an outcry to trigger criminal investigations and aggressive prosecutions. All moral panics eventually end, and this one has gone on for a decade already – longer if one recognizes that many of its themes have continued virtually unchanged since they played major roles in the Satanic Panic and domestic violence/rape epidemic hysteria of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and that “child sex trafficking” hysteria is partially an outgrowth of the child sex abuse panic (now in its 29^th year). And when such panics end, they often do so in a flurry of recriminations and finger-pointing.

The signs are starting to appear, slowly but surely; online polls are overwhelmingly in favor of either legalization or decriminalization, and the comments on stories about prostitution busts range from criticism to derision to outright hostility against the police. Articles such as this one from the September 23^rd Guardian are becoming much more common:

According to the documentaries running on near-constant repeat on CNN and MSNBC, men all around America are just waiting to buy women for sex, fuelling what is referred to as a “multibillion dollar industry”…Attorneys general, mayors and sheriffs across the United States are using the same tabloid statistics and rationale to set public policy. They claim that the way to end exploitation in the sex trade is to “end demand” for the sex trade – that is, end men’s desire for sex they can pay for. The notion that men’s desire to buy actual people fuels the sex trade has gone so mainstream that when aspiring celebrity philanthropist Ashton Kutcher launched a public service campaign against prostitution this year, he called it “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls“.

The problem is, real people buy sex [not people] and real people sell sex…When politicians, social service providers and celebrity philanthropists insist that sex workers are selling ourselves, they engage in the same kind of dehumanisation that they claim johns do to us. When they claim that men can buy us, they rob us of our power and our choices…Combined with the myth that all prostitution involves men buying women, the “end men’s demand” rhetoric in the media and anti-prostitution campaigns plays into some of the most damaging attitudes toward sex workers. There’s nothing feminist or new in the current wave of anti-prostitution reformers, who claim…that all sex work is “sexual enslavement”. Sex workers know that what creates demand for the sex trade is not men “enslaving” us for sex, but the…demands of childcare, loan officers, debt collectors, landlords and dependant family members – in short, the demands most working people struggle to meet…to focus only on ending men’s demand for sex is a cheap way out. In this way, sex workers’ needs are reduced only to what happens during the sex transaction; it ignores the rest of our lives outside the sex trade. By advancing this myth of male demand and sex workers being powerlessly enslaved in catering to it, the media and politicians fixate on the power of male desire more than sex workers ever do…When they base their campaigning not on the reality of the sex trade, but on their fantasies, it is sex workers who most suffer.

The comments to this article were almost entirely positive, making the few “trafficking robots” stand out like turds on a table.

But speaking of Ashton (as we have twice already in this column, so let’s go for three), if we’re lucky he may not have the money or the will to continue his anti-whore campaign for much longer:

…Sara Leal, the woman who reportedly slept with Ashton Kutcher…on…his sixth wedding anniversary [September 24^th]…met with an attorney…[and] Star magazine is reporting that Kutcher’s marriage to Demi is over…the couple has been living apart and will split a $290 million fortune. Kutcher was [previously] caught cheating with 21-year-old Brittney Jones in 2010 and…[told] Leal…that he and his wife were “separated, but the public just didn’t know yet.” Ashton was in San Diego Friday night partying with friends at Fluxx nightclub and had sex with Leal at the nearby Hard Rock Hotel, according to the website TheDirty.com [which reports that Leal wants $250,000 for her story]…Leal has not decided what – if any – action she is taking but wanted to meet with an attorney “to explore all of her options”…

What’s that you say, Ashton? “Real men don’t buy girls”? Well, you sure bought this one, honey, at about 1000x the going rate (which as it so happens is the title of my column from one year ago today). If you had just hired an escort (oops, I mean “bought a girl”) instead of dealing with a halfway whore (who by your own ridiculous definition was “trafficked”, BTB) you wouldn’t be in this fix, but because you believed your own stupid propaganda you’re about to learn the hard way that free pussy is the most expensive kind.

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In Denial (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged archeofeminism, courtesans, ethics, evidence, halfway whores, law, Madonna/whore, marriage, naturalness, psychology, stereotypes on August 15, 2011| 78 Comments »

Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude. – Georges Bataille

One of the most important aspects of the fight for sex worker rights is pointing out that prostitution is not only normal and natural, but that it exists on a continuum with other female behavior. While it’s not entirely accurate to say “all women are whores”, it is accurate to say that there is no clear line delineating prostitution from other female sexuality. A minority of women never do anything which even remotely resembles transactional sex, and a minority are professionals, and a huge majority occupy the immense grey area between those two extremes, occasionally or frequently trading sex for money or other things they desire, whether with strangers or employers or friends or boyfriends or lovers. It is precisely because there is no foolproof way to separate prostitution from other sex acts that police must lie and manufacture bogus “evidence”, and also the reason why women who do not consider themselves prostitutes need to be just as opposed to the criminalization of our trade as we are. If you’re sexually active with a man or men to whom you aren’t married and want to know what a prostitute looks like to police and prosecutors, look in the mirror.

In my column of one year ago today I mentioned that, though ignorant people and even some clients buy into the Hollywood hooker stereotype, Camille Paglia had it right when she wrote “The most successful prostitutes are invisible, because the sign of a prostitute’s success is her absolute blending with the environment.” Because we really aren’t different from other women, the only time we don’t blend in is when we choose not to. Streetwalkers often dress to attract attention as a form of advertisement, but criminalization makes this dangerous and the internet makes it unnecessary. Yet even some whores believe that being a prostitute means wearing garish outfits, standing under lampposts, being indiscriminate in one’s selection of clients or exceeding some arbitrary number of them, and because they don’t do these things they deny that their means of obtaining income qualifies as prostitution. A July 29^th article at Huffington Post interviewed several such women; they’re “sugar babies”, low-volume unprofessional whores who prefer long-term arrangements. Some of them are university coeds hoping to defray expenses and avoid onerous student loan burdens; others are career girls who don’t make nearly enough to support themselves as they would like to be supported. And all of them are prostitutes, though many of them deny it.

The article goes into great detail about what its author, Amanda Fairbanks, prefers to call the “sugar baby phenomenon”, and though she does admit that this sort of relationship has existed since time immemorial and that the only new wrinkle is the rise of websites which make them easier to arrange, she still seems unable to resist using asinine phrases like “selling themselves” (as though ownership changed hands) and “thinly veiled digital bordello”. Like police, legislators, neofeminists, moralists and even many sugar babies and daddies, Fairbanks just doesn’t seem to be able to wrap her mind around the fact that the only important differences between formal prostitution and many, probably most, male-female relationships are duration, honesty and professional ethics. She interviews a lawyer who harrumphs about sugar baby arrangements not being “direct exchanges” and therefore not prostitution, ignoring the fact that most high-end escort transactions are no more direct. She labels as “stark” findings that 17% of British coeds, 33% of German ones and 30% of French ones say they would be willing to do sex work to pay for their education, and quotes a female Kingston University professor who moans that “arrangement-seeking websites are but another invitation for rich men to abuse young, vulnerable women” and laments that today’s young women “were raised to believed that their sexuality isn’t something to be afraid of.” Women who aren’t afraid of sex and refuse to be burdened with crushing debt due to arbitrary restrictions? The horror!

Ronald Weitzer and Barb Brents

Not all of Fairbanks’ interviewees are delusional, though; she spoke to Ronald Weitzer (whose studies I’ve linked on a number of occasions), and he pointed out not only that sugar daddy arrangements are indeed prostitution, but also that many sugar babies would find that life hard to walk away from later: “The more you make, the harder it becomes to transition away from,” says Weitzer, “just like high-end sex workers anywhere.” And Barb Brents of University of Nevada, Las Vegas, concurs with my analysis: she says that escorts and brothel girls “…tend to be from working-class or middle-class backgrounds, but a good number are from upper-class families, too,” and adds that women often turn to sex work when they’re unable to make ends meet. “When people think about sex work, they think of a poor, drug-addicted woman living in the street with a pimp, down on their luck,” says Brents…”In reality, the culture is exceedingly diverse and college students using these sites are but another example of this kind of diversity…These college women [don’t] see themselves as sex workers, but women doing straight-up prostitution often don’t see themselves that way either…Drawing that line and making that distinction may be necessary psychologically, but in material facts it’s quite a blurry line.”

But though a few of the sugar babies to whom Fairbanks spoke were honest about their trade, the majority were not; one particularly self-deluded young woman called “Jennifer” said,

I’m not a whore. Whores are paid by the hour, can have a high volume of clients in a given day, and it’s based on money, not on who the individual actually is. There’s no feeling involved and the entire interaction revolves around a sexual act…My situation is different in a number of different ways. First of all, I don’t engage with a high volume of people, instead choosing one or two men I actually like spending time with and have decided to develop a friendship with them. And while sex is involved, the focus is on providing friendship. It’s not only about getting paid.

It would be difficult to pack more fallacies and rationalizations into one paragraph than “Jennifer” has managed here; I won’t break it down, but I suggest she A) talk to a couple of escorts, and B) read about courtesans like Aspasia and Madame de Pompadour, who restricted themselves to one client for many, many years. In the end, these young women are only fooling themselves; their clients know exactly what they are, and by choosing the path of self-delusion they sell themselves very short: the average one interviewed got only $500 for an entire night, while most escorts make that in two hours or less. And Miss “I’m not a whore” took home a paltry $1000 for an entire weekend.

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June Updates (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged acting, Acting and Activism, Aphrodite, BDSM, California, cops, dirty, domestic violence, drugs, ethics, fantasy, halfway whores, He Said-She Said, hysteria, law, License To Rape, Madonna/whore, politicians, psychology, racism, rape, Virginia, yin and yang on June 3, 2011| 11 Comments »

I repeat … that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist. – Benjamin Disraeli

More updates to old stories; this time they’re all about alleged abuse of power.

License to Rape (November 16th)

As Dave Krueger asked in his May 16^th guest blog on The Agitator, “Why is it called crime when other people do it, but “misconduct” when a cop does it?” Rapes, assaults and even murders committed by cops are habitually downplayed, excused or even ignored as in this report on the rampant abuse in the San Diego police department from the May 16^th Atlantic:

In San Diego, ten police officers are currently accused of serious misconduct in unrelated cases that include allegations of rape, stalking, drunk driving, domestic abuse, and sexual assault. One of the officers has been charged with sexually assaulting five women while he was on duty. Another is alleged to have told a woman that she’d be arrested unless she agreed to have sex with him.

The most interesting take on the rash of misconduct comes from the Voice of San Diego, where a sharp enterprise story chronicles the rise and fall of a departmental anti-corruption unit…[which] police chief [Bill Landsdowne] doesn’t have any plans to bring…back…Elsewhere in the story, I noticed this: “Mayor Jerry Sanders…described the rash of incidents as an embarrassment and echoed Lansdowne’s assertion that it was correlated to stress among officers.” Rape, stalking and sexual assault caused by stress? It’s hard to have faith in city leaders after that explanation, but here’s hoping that they reconsider and bring back proactive anti-corruption measures – and that other police departments follow suit.

Just imagine if anyone but a cop tried to use “stress” as an excuse for rape; he’d probably be penalized for insulting the judge’s intelligence. But when the rapist is a cop, officials not only believe him, they actually invent the excuse for him.

Acting and Activism (January 8th)

Trafficking “expert” Mira Sorvino is at it again, this time promoting Sacramento, California as the “leading destination for sex traffickers”, a title I’ve also heard claimed in the past few months by New York, Dallas, Miami, Portland, Atlanta and the entire state of Ohio, to name just a few. The writer seems to believe that the Academy Award doubles as an advanced degree in criminology, sociology or both:

Human trafficking is a serious crime that can be found in the Sacramento area and requires not just law enforcement but also community participation to combat, panelists said Tuesday at a Congressional field briefing that included Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino. US Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) hosted the hearing at Rancho Cordova City Hall to highlight the fact that Sacramento’s convergence of interstate highways and large immigrant population has made it a leading destination for sex traffickers. In 2006, Sacramento was named the city with the second highest rate of child prostitution in the US, according to FBI statistics…Human trafficking is a hidden crime, officials said, and accurate statistics for communities including Carmichael, Elk Grove, Fair Oaks and Rosemont are difficult to calculate. “I did not know Sacramento was a boomtown for this issue,” said Sorvino, whose film credits include Mighty Aphrodite and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. “This is a crime that represents the worst evil there is, that doesn’t spare children.”

It pretty much degenerates from there into the usual collection of politicians mouthing canned outrage, with a statement from a prohibitionist group and the mention of an undocumented horror story. One politician even claimed that “Sacramento is leading the nation in getting at child sex trafficking,” which I guess makes sense since they claim to be the top destination for it (though I think those other cities might argue the point since they all seem to covet the dubious distinction). Yet somehow Mira, that font of prostitution wisdom (deriving, no doubt, from playing a hooker in Mighty Aphrodite), didn’t know that Sacramento was having a trafficking boom, probably because they just made it up in order to attract federal and NGO funds to the area to boost its sagging economy, one of the worst in the state.

One last thing: Anybody else notice the vaguely racist implications of the claim that Sacramento’s “large immigrant population has made it a leading destination for sex traffickers”? I guess those dirty immigrant perverts are all using their food stamps and the wages from the jobs they stole from real Americans to “buy children for sex” as Mira’s friend Demi puts it.

He Said, She Said (March 4th)

Sooner or later guys are going to start realizing that playing BDSM games with women they don’t know very well is like trusting a stranger with the keys to one’s house. In the current climate of “sex abuse” hysteria, any man who does stuff like this without a signed contract, or who exceeds the parameters of that contract, is a bloody fool. The following is edited from a May 19^th AP report:

Single mothers, former drug addicts and other beaten down young women who came to wealthy businessman Henry Allen Fitzsimmons for a chance to climb out of their financial hole knew his help came with a catch. In exchange for an allowance, a place to live and promise of a college education, they agreed to be spanked if they broke his rules. At least six of the women say he his corporal punishment went too far, including one who says he sexually assaulted her, and the 54-year-old Virginia Beach restaurant owner faces felony charges. “These women are victims. They’re single moms. They need their bills paid,” prosecutor Tom Murphy said at a court hearing Thursday. “It’s bizarre, there’s no doubt.” Fitzsimmons’ attorney claims his slight, white-haired client is the victim, taken advantage of by women half his age who knew what they were getting into and filed charges only after a falling out. “He’s not a danger,” Fitzsimmons’ attorney, Moody “Sonny” Stallings Jr., told the AP. “Strange, but he’s not a danger to anybody.”

A judge on Thursday allowed a grand jury to decide whether to indict Fitzsimmons on two felony abduction charges and three felony object sexual penetration charges filed against him. Six other assault and sexual battery charges were dropped because prosecutors acknowledged the women had agreed to the spankings. For months, Fitzsimmons gave each of the women $200 weekly, promised to pay for their college tuition, treated them to lavish nights on the town and even bought one a car as part of his so-called Spencer Scholarship Plan. They were spanked if they violated rules, such as failing to call Fitzsimmons or drinking alcohol…None of the women filed charges until Fitzsimmons in April accused one of them of stealing money and fired her from his restaurant, the oceanside Envy Bar and Grill, where many of them worked. A week later, six women began filing charges. On Thursday, that former employee’s complaint was dropped, along with those of two other women whose only complaints were that they had been spanked. “Who’s the victim here?” Stalling asked in court. “They were taking the money and all of a sudden when the mother gets fired they all run down to the police station and want to file charges…They’re trying to say he preys on these women…These aren’t 15-years-olds. These are all adults and they’re getting the money from this old guy.”

So why aren’t these women being charged with prostitution? Is there one reader over the age of 14 who fails to see these relationships as sexual? Fitzsimmons paid a whole harem of whores $200/week plus tuition and expensive treats to play a BDSM game with him, and then (depending on who you believe) he either got slightly more sexual or else they decided to kill the fabled goose and collect the gold from his carcass. Bimbos who play with fire and then cry to Nanny when they get their fingers burned only perpetuate the notion that women are too stupid, weak and gullible to be allowed control over our own sex lives.

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May Miscellanea (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, tagged cops, dirty, ethics, evidence, halfway whores, law, Madonna/whore, Michigan, Most Uptight Nerd Ever, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, porn, psychology, sporting events, stage names, streetwalkers, Texas, transgender on May 18, 2011| 32 Comments »

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule. – D.H. Lawrence

The rest of this month’s short articles I hope my readers will find interesting.

Quite Possibly the Most Uptight Nerd Ever

An anonymous commenter posted this link in the commentary for my May 13^th column; since it appears in MSN’s Digital Life Today section we might be inclined to consider the implied criticism of Apple to have a top-down origin, but the reporter’s prudish, offended tone is sort of hard to disguise. In fact, I think she just might be the most uptight computer nerd I’ve yet encountered (which is too bad, because she’s quite pretty):

After June 1, it’ll be possible to hire a prostitute using an iPhone app. According to ZDNet, dating service Sugar Sugar has managed to get Apple to grant its app a spot in the App Store. The curious thing about this news is that Sugar Sugar is not an ordinary dating service. Instead of putting together people who are simply seeking traditional relationships, it links up sugar daddies — wealthy men who are willing to shower young women with money, gifts, and other compensation in exchange for companionship — and their so-called sugar babies. In more blunt terms: The service helps prostitutes and their clients connect.

We’ve certainly heard about such services in the past — WhatsYourPrice.com, Craigslist’s darker corners, and an assortment of shady “dating” websites come to mind — but Sugar Sugar’s app is headed to Apple’s App Store, a place known for its strict guidelines and approval process…

The author, Rosa Golijan, then goes on to enumerate all of the App Store guidelines she believes the “app” violates with all the zeal of a crackpot fundie playing records backward to find the hidden Satanic messages. She claims that the program “nearly” violates guidelines prohibiting “excessively objectionable or crude content” and “pornography”, and that it “promot[es] prostitution — behavior which qualifies as criminal in many places.” Poor girl; her stays are so tight she must’ve cut off the oxygen to her brain. Don’t worry, Rosa, I’ll help you understand this before your head explodes: 1) “Nearly” only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and H-bombs; 2) normal people don’t find dating (even compensated dating) “objectionable”, and matching two people who want to meet (for whatever reason) is not “crude”; 3) “pornography” has a specific meaning, not just “stuff feminists don’t like”; and (last but not least) 4) though I myself have pointed out that sugar babies are a kind of whore, that’s only morally and practically speaking; as far as cops and politicians are concerned, it’s 100% legal. I’m afraid your indignation, like that of most moralists, has approximately zero basis in reality.

Lest you think this is an isolated incident for Rosa, you may wish to click on the imbedded link for WhatsYourPrice.com above and read Rosa’s nearly-as-bluenosed commentary about that site.

More Prudes

Rosa isn’t the only champion of the New Victorianism in this column today. A.K. Smith* called my attention to this May 13^th article from Forbes about a new limited-edition book by porn star Ashley Blue, each copy of which contains one of the author’s pubic hairs. Now, that alone is interesting enough to merit mention in this blog, but it’s not the main aspect of the story I wish to focus on; that would be the story itself – or more specifically, the commentary on it. As of this writing, three women have logged in to sniff about how “inappropriate” it is to have a story written by a woman about innovative book marketing by a female entrepreneur in the women’s section of a business website; the first also complained that it was “offensive” to post a picture of a book’s cover in an article about that book. But the author, Susannah Breslin, answered them all with such admirable skill and grace that I truly hope to see a lot more pro-sex-work articles from her.

*While we’re on the subject of books, those of y’all who like detective thrillers might enjoy A.K’s novel Heart of Gold, now available as an e-book.

I’m Sure This One Was Wearing a Bra and Panties

Detroit cops claim that for a woman to be in a public place without underwear is “evidence of prostitution”, but does that also apply to drag queens?

Authorities in Michigan have suspended a Detroit police officer who was allegedly caught having sex with a cross-dressing prostitute in his patrol car. “He is under investigation [and] is suspended with pay pending the [outcome of the] investigation,” Samuel Blaogun, a spokesman for the Detroit Police Department told AOL Weird News. The alleged incident reportedly occurred about two weeks ago. The officer, who has not been identified, was on duty at the time, an official said. Blaogun declined to go into [further] detail…but Detroit’s WJBK reported that other officers spotted his [parked] patrol car …[and] allegedly caught the officer engaged in “activity” with the prostitute. Asked whether the prostitute has been arrested, Blaogun replied: “We are not releasing anything more. It is under investigation, and…I can’t go into details.” Police Chief Ralph Godbee has said he is troubled by the allegations and wants the investigation to proceed quickly…[he said] “We expect eight hours’ work for eight hours’ pay.”

I guess only members of the vice squad are allowed to indulge their kinks while on the clock.

Another Super Bowl Invasion

Last Saturday Amanda Brooks informed me that while the trafficking fanatics misdirected the gullible masses with wild tales about 10,000 hookers descending upon the Dallas-Fort Worth area for the Super Bowl, a real invasion of far greater proportions descended upon the city and was ruthlessly attacked by authorities armed with (I am not making this up) laser beams, though of course this was largely hidden from the outside world. Maybe we need to get the trafficking fanatics worried about the plight of these poor victims so they’ll stop harassing us.

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