Hall of Shame

Posts Tagged ‘Hall of Shame’

That Was the Week That Was (#48)

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

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

Pet Peeves

Ah, validation:

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

Drama Queens

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

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

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

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

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

Social Construction of Eunuchs

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

One Born Every Minute

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

The Course of a Disease

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

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

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

Confined and Controlled

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

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

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

Hall of Shame

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

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

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

Coming Out

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

Train Wreck

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

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

The Giving Season

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

Metaupdates

Backlash (TW3 #10)

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

Hard Numbers (TW3 #20)

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

Uncommon Sense (TW3 #38)

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

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

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

Coming and Going (TW3 #39)

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

Where Are the Protests? (TW3 #45)

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

This Week in 2010 and 2011

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

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That Was the Week That Was (#24)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, Africa, An Example to the West, animals, Backpage, bad customers, BDSM, Canada, censorship, cops, cosmetic surgery, dirty, disability, disease, East Asia, Europe, Finding What Isn’t There, First They Came for the Hookers, Hall of Shame, Hollywood, hysteria, Ireland, Kansas, Latin America, law, Malawi, Mississippi, Much Ado About Nothing, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, New Orleans, Older Than You Thought, psychology, rape, See No Evil, stereotypes, stripping, Surplus Women, Sweden, Swedish “Feminism”, Texas, Thailand, The Naked Emperor, The Scarlet Letter, tits, underage, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Virginia, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world, Who Did Your Tits? on June 16, 2012| 32 Comments »

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. – Nadine Gordimer

Eleven updates and four meta-updates.

Who Did Your Tits? (October 1^st, 2010)

Happy 50^th birthday, silicone implant!:

…Timmie Jean Lindsey, 80…said she…[went to Dr. Frank Gerow of Houston, who invented the implants in 1962] because she wanted some rose tattoos removed from her chest, and he told her she was the perfect first candidate…“It wasn’t a big deal to me. I went from a B to a C cup. But it made men more aware of me. More men would whistle at me”…She said she feels fortunate she never experienced many of the side effects that plagued other recipients…

The reason she didn’t have any side effects, of course, is because lawyers hadn’t invented them yet.

An Older Profession Than You May Have Thought (October 12^th, 2010)

Remember those cute little Adelie penguins? Well, it turns out that prostitution isn’t their only “perverted” sexual behavior; George Levick of the ill-fated Scott expedition also observed rape, sexual abuse of chicks, homosexuality and necrophilia. He was so upset by the whole thing that he recorded his findings in Greek so that they couldn’t accidentally be read by English speakers, and those facts were left out of the official accounts until very recently. I’m not surprised; any bird which practices “cash and dash” is capable of anything.

Another Example of Swedish “Feminism” (May 30^th, 2011)

Did you read the one about the Swedish housewife who set herself up a BDSM dungeon in an abandoned bunker? It became news when two fishermen discovered it and called the cops. When Aftonbladet told her that many of her neighbors were scandalized she said, “I think it is because many are afraid. Sweden is not really such a free country when it comes to sexuality…” Sex workers and their clients wholly agree.

Surplus Women (September 27^th, 2011)

Yet another maniac chooses his victims from among sex workers:

A Mississippi sheriff’s investigator hopes surveillance video from Bourbon Street in New Orleans will provide clues about the death of a strip club dancer whose dismembered body washed ashore on the Gulf Coast…22-year-old Jaren Lockhart reported for work Tuesday (June 5^th) night and left early Wednesday. Her torso was found late Thursday in Bay St. Louis. Other body parts…were found later…Lockhart had been a resident of the Capri Motel…

The Capri is one of those dirty, scary places where only truly desperate girls live, so I suspect she was murdered by a client who promised her extra money to go off with him. At least the story seems to make some effort to treat her as a person rather than concentrating on her sex work as so many do.

See No Evil (November 26^th, 2011)

Res ipsa loquitur:

…Phillip Cosby…objects to [a] donated statue at the Overland Park Arboretum [in Kansas City], because it portrays a woman…taking a photo of herself while her breasts are exposed…he has started an online petition…to start a grand jury investigation…he objects to the statue’s availability to children and is seeking a charge of promoting obscenity. Overland Park has posted signs at the park about the statue’s content but says it has no immediate plans to remove the sculpture.

A statue has no “content”; any “obscenity” is projected into it by dirty minds.

Neither Addiction nor Epidemic (December 4^th, 2011)

Regular reader Franklin Harris wrote a column on sex in film in which he stated:

Movies and television take a lot of heat for promoting supposedly immoral, promiscuous and irresponsible sexual behavior. But when it comes to movies that actually make sex their main focus, you may be left wondering why anyone has sex in the first place. Sex in these movies is awful, joyless and nothing good ever comes of it. On second thought, that does sound like a pretty irresponsible depiction of sex, just not the one we’ve been led to expect…despite depressing movies such as Shame and a few high-profile celebrity cases of suspect credibility, one fact remains: There is no such thing as sex addiction…[it] is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, and there is no scientific evidence it exists…

Harris also has sharp words for The Girlfriend Experience and points out the deep irony implicit in Hollywood’s typical condemnation of any kind of sex for pay. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see this sort of column becoming ever more common in mainstream media.

Above the Law (March 8^th, 2012)

Another cop using his position for rape: “A former Hopewell [Virginia] police officer was convicted…of sexually abusing three women…In exchange for his pleas, a fourth charge of forcible sodomy was withdrawn by the prosecution. Baggett faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on each count…” Notice that cops in these stories are nearly always described as “former” police officers, subtly implying that they were sacked out for their conduct, when in fact that only happened as a direct result of a probable conviction. Had the case been less clear, Baggett would still be a cop right now.

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

Sex workers in Thailand recently sent a letter to their Prime Minister asking him to stop licking Uncle Sam’s boots:

…Empower alleges that successive Thai governments have sacrificed the rule of law, their international human rights obligations and the well-being of migrant sex workers and their families, in an attempt to please the US government and satisfy the American anti trafficking agenda. We accuse the United States government of using the issue of human trafficking to coerce its allies into tightening border and immigration controls. The US agenda has also created a climate where women crossing borders are all seen as suspect “victims” of trafficking…Empower sees the Trafficking in Persons Report issued by the US State Department as subjective and bias [sic] against the Thai Entertainment Industry…

The Naked Emperor (May 15^th, 2012)

Though danah boyd (who like e.e. cummings prefers her name uncapitalized) is generally critical of moral panics about kids and the internet, and has said that “the most deadly misconception about American youth has been the sexual predator panic”, she seems to have bought into sex trafficking hysteria…or has she? This article also seems subtly critical of anti-Backpage crusade; is she, like others, simply afraid to say the emperor is naked?

…when we as a society see technology being used in horrible ways, we want to blame and ban the technology…I know that technology is being used in the commercial sexual exploitation of minors. I also know that many people have responded to the visibility of “child sex trafficking” on commercial websites by wanting to shut down those commercial websites…my goal is to make sure that we understand what we’re doing so that we actually address the core of the problem, not just the most visible symptoms of it. Unfortunately, we know very little about how children are advertised, bought, sold, and exploited through the use of technology. There are plenty of anecdotes, but rigorous data is limited…

Read the article and let me know what you think: more research is good, but only if it’s conducted in an atmosphere of free inquiry; most of the projects she mentions make unwarranted assumptions and seem tailored to produce specific anti-sex work outcomes.

First They Came for the Hookers… (June 5^th, 2012)

I really wish politicians would stop proving me right:

…the government says it will end giving work visas to foreign strippers once and for all…”The problem is, under the current Immigration Act we don’t have the legal authority to deny people visas based on the industry they’re working in,” [said] Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney…”Now we have the power, which we’ll [soon] begin using…to deny visas to people who we think…might have a high chance of trafficking or exploitation”…

Once again, “trafficking” rhetoric is really an excuse for bigotry.

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury (June 9^th, 2012)

Anyone who’s read more than a token amount of Bradbury has noticed the libertarian ideas in his work, and in this extremely interesting essay by Ilya Somin of The Volokh Conspiracy he demonstrates that Bradbury was not alone: “Libertarianism is better represented in science fiction and fantasy than in any other literary genre. From Robert Heinlein to the present day, libertarian writers have been among the leaders in the field. Even many genre writers who are not self-consciously libertarian have often made use of libertarian themes in their work…”

Metaupdates

Welcome To Our World in February Updates (Part Two) (February 13^th, 2011)

A UK organization is fighting for the sexual rights of mentally disabled people:

…Everybody has the right to have sex and relationships…however they choose. But some people in society, such as people with learning disabilities, aren’t always given the automatic right to have relationships and flourish as sexual beings. They have to persuade others to “allow” them to do it. FPA believes passionately that everyone has the right to enjoy sexual health…

I applaud FPA’s efforts; whores also know what it’s like to be denied the right to sex on our own terms.

The Scarlet Letter in TW3 (#19) (May 12^th, 2012)

Another example of sex workers fighting oppression via civil courts:

…State-sanctioned forced HIV testing of sex workers also occurs [in places other than Greece]…But in Malawi…sex workers are fighting back…in 2009…police…forced [arrested sex workers] to undergo HIV tests…[and those] who tested HIV-positive were charged with “spreading disease dangerous to life,”…fourteen [of them] decided to sue the government and challenge the constitutionality of forced HIV testing…

Much Ado About Nothing in TW3 (#19) (May 12^th, 2012)

Dania Suarez, the escort whose mistreatment kicked off the Secret service scandal, “has announced plans to open a non-profit organization to support women who have been affected by prostitution” just after turning down “a $500,000 pornography contract with Vivid” in favor of a TV documentary on her life. As long as she only works with women who genuinely want to leave the trade I’m all for it, but if she turns to “rescue” and/or starts mouthing “child sex trafficking” rubbish, she’ll be following Kristin Davis into the Hall of Shame.

Finding What Isn’t There in TW3 (#23) (June 9^th, 2012)

Considering that prostitution is not illegal in either part of Ireland and that police found no “traffickers” or “victims” in their highly-publicized joint raid, all of the residences belonged to “innocent people”; I reckon what this article is trying to say is that half didn’t belong to the people named on the warrants:

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is facing a serious legal backlash after it emerged that as many as half the residences it raided as part of its cross-border anti-prostitution operation with gardai belong to innocent people…the PSNI is now facing a highly embarrassing and potentially very expensive legal fall-out from what appear to have been a series of botched raids based on intelligence that, in some cases, was at least a year out of date…

Though I feel bad for those who were raided, high-profile jackboot buffoonery like this only helps our cause in the long run, because it demonstrates the fact-free basis for police actions and results in ever more editorials like this one:

…”Rape for profit,” stormed Philip Marshall of the PSNI…Everyone would agree if he had freed dozens of sex-slaves and charged their traffickers…So far, though, the only people charged were three Polish girls, who…were…working willingly…is it really worth months of police time…to arrest and shame…three young people?…Or should we consider…offering prostitutes the protection of the law when they are abused or coerced?…Prostitution has always been with us…We can’t legislate it out of existence, but we could legislate to reduce its damage to the health and welfare of those involved.

One Year Ago Today

“June Miscellanea (Part Two)” reports on yet another censorship law, a decentralized online currency system, New York’s declaration that sexy dancing isn’t dancing and more extra-blog activities by yours truly.

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Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged brothels, ethics, Hall of Shame, harm reduction, hysteria, law, Madonna/whore, Nevada, pimps, prohibitionist myths, sporting events, stereotypes, United Kingdom on June 4, 2012| 28 Comments »

A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself. – Titus Livius

Long-time readers may remember that I have a Hall of Shame for the recognition of whores who have dishonored our profession by their sleazy, stupid, unethical behavior. Those of you who are newer to the blog may never have encountered a post on such a personage, and that’s a good thing; the reason you haven’t is that there have only been three so far, and the last one was inducted one year ago today in “June Updates (Part Three)” (which also discusses the Satoshi Kanazawa “racism” controversy, persecution of strippers in Colorado and a strong test of my libertarian sensibilities). Well, today I’m going to add number four, but first I’d like to recap the other three.

I announced my Hall of Shame in my very first column, and less than a month later inducted its first member: Karen Sypher, who as I explained in “How To Be a Stupid, Greedy Whore” won the dishonor for her “astonishing stupidity, appalling immorality and truly mythic greed”. The second member, Capri Anderson, was awarded her position less than four months later for her “incredible greed, her denial of her own whoredom despite the fact that she is a porn actress who was paid $3500 to spend the night with a rich cokehead, her pretense that she is better than the rest of us despite her absolute and total lack of the most meager shred of the professional ethics adhered to even by the majority of hundred-dollar Backpage girls, and her stunning stupidity in announcing a lawsuit on national television before she actually filed it.”

The third nominee, former madam Kristin Davis, took a bit longer to earn her place of infamy; in February of last year she attracted my attention by embracing trafficking rhetoric in order to enrich herself, and by repeating prohibitionist claims that professional escorts represent a tiny minority of all whores. She then compounded her sins by claiming that 80% of us are coerced when she knows damned well that’s exaggerated by a factor of forty, and I was considering adding her to the list when she clinched it by talking about a famous client not to protect girls or protest prohibitionism, but rather to see her own name in the news again.

The newest member has been irritating me for a while now, but at first I didn’t consider him due to his gender. But after the latest incident I realized that was sexist of me, and not in a good way; his offenses are very similar to Kristin Davis’ and despite the fact that he was never a prostitute himself, he certainly represents our profession to the American public because he owns a brothel in Nevada. I won’t keep you in suspense: the fourth member of the Honest Courtesan’s Hooker Hall of Shame is Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of the Nevada brothel system, but my dislike for a way of doing business is insufficient grounds for labeling it a disgrace. So despite my revulsion at Hof’s aggressive attempts to export the exploitative Nevada model, I’ve kept my mouth shut about him personally until news of the latest outrage came to my attention:

…Dennis Hof…has written the mayor of London in advance of the Summer Olympics in late July-early August. It seems Hof is speaking this week at the Oxford Union on legal prostitution. He’d like to meet with Mayor Boris Johnson to propose a legal brothel, a temporary UK branch of the Bunny Ranch, to operate during the Olympics. The separate, drug-free, safe facility with health checks would compete with the crime-ridden, sleazy, human-trafficking sites that Hof says various mobs bring to such global events, despite official attempts to shoo them away. But Hof says the “well intentioned efforts (of every Olympics host city) to eradicate the world’s oldest profession becomes folly as the unintended results inadvertently place its’ [sic] control into the hands of gangsters, drug dealers and murderers. It’s a strategic miscalculation that is repeated time and time again in the futile hope of an outcome different than all of those that have come before.” Hof’s facility, he says, would also provide valuable tax revenue to the city while removing the black market of illegal prostitution…

Now, there isn’t the proverbial snowball’s chance that the UK will adopt the Nevada model, so even if this crony capitalist were to succeed in winning a license to pimp no woman would be obliged to submit to the degradation, virtual imprisonment and abrogation of consent that American whores are forced to accept in order to be declared “legal” in Nevada. No matter how vile I personally consider his business model, there is nothing immoral about it as long as whores have a free choice whether to work there or not; furthermore, the restrictions of the Nevada system are largely state-imposed and not the fault of Hof or other brothel owners. However, it’s one thing to say, “I recommend you adopt this exploitative system which enriches me while failing to do what it’s actually supposed to do, namely reduce the social problems caused by criminalization”, and another thing to capitalize on prohibitionist rhetoric he must know to be false if he’s actually done any research at all on legalization (and if he hasn’t done that research, he has no damned business speaking on the subject).

Hof promotes trafficking hysteria and repeats the “human trafficking follows mega sports events” myth; he exploits the “organized crime controls prostitution” myth and labels independent brothel and escort service owners “gangsters” (when that title is more correctly applied to businessmen who enrich themselves via shady insider deals with corrupt government); he claims that the Nevada system eradicates “illegal prostitution” while knowing full well that over 99% of Nevada prostitutes prefer to work illegally; and he represents himself as an advocate of freedom while actually promoting the single most unsatisfactory and exploitative legalization scheme in the entire world: I’m sure you’ll agree that these criteria more than qualify him for my Hall of Shame.

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J’accuse

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged bad customers, cops, dirty, ethics, Hall of Shame, J’accuse, Madonna/whore, rape, stereotypes on July 21, 2011| 25 Comments »

Power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. – Rudyard Kipling

I’m sure most of you have been following the whole Dominique Strauss-Kahn unpleasantness, at least in a cursory fashion; and I know some of you are interested in what I think about it, because several of you have asked me. Unfortunately, I honestly don’t know what to think, so I’ll just settle for synopsizing the mess and concluding with my analysis of the way the media has covered it and the unpleasant conclusions I am forced to draw from that coverage.

The affair started on Saturday, May 14^th when Dominque Strauss-Kahn, a prominent French socialist and manager of the International Monetary Fund since 2007, was arrested on charges that he had sexually assaulted a Guinean maid named Nafissatou Diallo in his room at the Manhattan Sofitel. The police made a great Roman triumph of parading him before the cameras (as they are wont to do in these barbaric times), and he was thrown into a high-security prison and denied bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk. He resigned from his IMF post on Wednesday, May 18^th, and the next day he surrendered his passport and was released to house arrest (at his daughter’s New York home) under condition of electronic monitoring.

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers insisted that the encounter with the maid was consensual, but as I pointed out in my column of one year ago today it is a rare woman who has sex with a stranger without some other motivation, and as Laura Agustín pointed out it is unlikely “that a migrant person who has managed to obtain a steady job with an employer of some reputation, Sofitel, would risk losing that job. Her employment is important to the case because for a migrant it means legal security of a kind not easily available, and on the basis of this alone I find it hard to imagine Diallo would fabricate an accusation against a guest, or engage in a sexual romp with one, for that matter.” I agree, but at the same time I also agree with Furry Girl that it is a big mistake to automatically believe in the truth of every allegation of sexual assault. So when Kristin Davis attempted to capitalize on DSK’s misfortune by tattling on his supposed past behavior with escorts, I responded by inducting her into my Hall of Shame and pointing out that “just because a client is rough with a working girl does not…constitute evidence of rape any more than reading a book about explosives means that a person is guilty of a bombing.”

In other words, I was (and remain) extremely uncertain about the case and was therefore unwilling to say anything one way or another. I remained silent when a French reporter accused him of trying to rape her in 2002 and when a new book accused him of raping a Mexican maid and trying to “jump” at least 14 other women; then I waited to see if anything would come of Diallo’s hiring a French lawyer to dig these women up. But on July 2^nd the tabloid New York Post reported that prosecutors had told them Diallo was a “pathological liar and scam artist” who was accused of defrauding other immigrants from her country with a pyramid scheme, lying to prosecutors and on her immigration papers and tax forms, falsely claiming to have been gang-raped in Guinea and saying to her boyfriend (on a phone line monitored at his end, in an Arizona jail), “Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.” So why is all this pertinent to this blog? She’s also accused of prostituting herself to Sofitel guests.

Needless to say, Diallo has sued the Post; it is equally needless to say that the case against DSK quickly unraveled after the counter-accusations. If this woman really did subject an innocent man to an extortion scheme, she deserves whatever she gets; as I said in my June 4^th column, being a sexually aggressive arsehole does not make a man a rapist, and false rape accusations hurt all women by making the “authorities” more cynical about future rape accusations. But that’s not the most important feature of this whole thing, which is the way that our profession is being slandered yet again. It wasn’t enough just to say she had been accused of fraud and extortion; oh no! The Post’s headline screamed, “DSK MAID A HOOKER”, because as we all know that’s much worse than being a pathological liar and scamming one’s own people. Considering that sources close to the case say the accusation isn’t even true (and that seems likely considering her libel suit doesn’t mention the other allegations), why would the Post use that particular insult (and other media follow it like lemmings) when there are other, more solid and serious accusations to choose from? Well, for one thing, sex sells. But more importantly, branding Diallo as a whore allows the media to evoke the filthy lie that prostitutes cannot be raped, thus letting Strauss-Kahn off the hook (perhaps a consummation devoutly to be wished by media bigwigs who embarrassed themselves by convicting him in the court of public opinion practically as soon as he was arrested).

This is the real story, and the real shame on the American people: nobody would’ve dared to say Strauss-Kahn must be a criminal because he is French, or Diallo one because she is black; nobody but the most fanatical neofeminists would’ve pre-convicted DSK for being a man, and none but the most bitter misogynists would’ve pre-convicted Diallo for being a woman. Likewise rich or poor, privileged or underprivileged, politician or peasant. But let someone be accused of being a prostitute, and there are still far too many in this country (especially among the police, religious fanatics and neofeminists) who instantly accept that as irrefutable evidence of innate moral corruption and pronounce that any woman who could “degrade” herself by {gasp!} having sex and making a living at the same time, is capable of any crime no matter how depraved.

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June Updates (Part Three)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Backwards into the Future, bad customers, censorship, Colorado, cops, ethics, Eye of the Beholder, Hall of Shame, How Old is Oldest?, hysteria, law, psychology, racism, rape, sisterhood, stereotypes, stripping, Subtle Pimping on June 4, 2011| 49 Comments »

We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles. – David Mamet

Four short articles on subjects we’ve visited before.

How Old is Oldest? (March 12^th)

Satoshi Kanazawa is no stranger to controversy, but if he had realized the firestorm his May 15^th Scientific Fundamentalist column would touch off he might’ve picked a different subject. The column attempts to explain why interviewers for a large, long-term government study called “Add Health”, who were asked to rate their interviewees’ physical attractiveness, tended to rate black women as less attractive than other women, yet did not rate black men as less attractive than other men. The controversy has been described in many, many articles, but though this May 17^th report from Huffington Post is less inflammatory than most it still makes the same basic error all the others do: representing the offending opinion as Kanazawa’s own, when in fact he clearly stated in the article that it was the interviewers who rated the women. Kanazawa was attacked as “racist” and the controversy has resulted in the end of his association with Psychology Today and may even have imperiled his academic position, yet nobody seems interested in recognizing that he didn’t make up the data, he only analyzed it.

Now, Kanazawa’s analysis may, as one of his colleagues at Psychology Today argues, be incorrect; I’m not good enough with statistics to follow the rebuttal. And Kanazawa certainly could have been much more careful with his phraseology; whenever I approach an emotionally-laden topic I choose my words very carefully indeed so my meaning is unmistakably clear. But I’m the Princess of Paranoia and 99.9% of the human race words its essays with far less caution than I employ in the composition of my grocery list. What’s worse, most people read others’ writing even less carefully, with the result that most readers saw the words “black women less attractive”, jumped up screaming “racism!” and instantly began spreading outrage. I can certainly understand why black women would be upset about the article, but the attacks on Kanazawa constitute a classic case of killing the messenger. In a free country we have the right to be mistaken or offensive, and if scientists are to be censored or even lose their jobs for being wrong or pissing people off, you can kiss scientific progress in the Western world goodbye.

Backwards Into the Future (March 30^th)

Colorado “authorities” are apparently so certain of the vast profits they’re going to reap from robbing sex workers’ clients, that they’re spending money they don’t yet have to harass other sex workers:

Colorado Springs authorities…assign[ed] seven detectives to spend $700 at a strip club as part of a [March 5^th] liquor compliance audit and prostitution sting…[which] found alcohol violations but no prostitution…Lt. John Godsey…says the $700 came from money seized in other undercover investigations. Godsey says $100 per…[man] trying to blend in seems about right…An attorney for the club says the owners voluntarily surrendered the club’s liquor license. The club is now all nude and doesn’t serve liquor.

Readers from civilizations more advanced than Colorado may not understand that last line; in some American states dancers in clubs where liquor is served can only go topless, and clubs which allow fully-nude dancing can’t serve liquor. Presumably, states with such laws believe that exceeding a certain “sin density” in a confined area will cause a degradation of the space-time continuum, or something. In any case, here’s yet another example of armed hooligans being paid to indulge their perversions (in this case trying to trick strippers into crossing one of the arbitrary lines which will excuse their being abducted and humiliated) on company time and at the taxpayers’ expense.

Subtle Pimping (April 8th)

It’s official; Kristin Davis is now the third member of The Honest Courtesan’s Hall of Shame along with Karen Sypher and Capri Anderson. Regular readers will recall that this dishonor is reserved for those whores who have most disgraced our profession by their incredibly disgusting behavior. I first took notice when Davis claimed only 5% of whores were professional and nominated her when she claimed that 80% of escorts are coerced, but these egregious violations of sisterhood had not yet been crowned by a blatant violation of professional ethics until May 19^th, when she revealed or claimed (the veracity of the statement doesn’t matter) that disgraced IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was once a client of hers:

Kristin Davis said she provided young women for the IMF chief in 2006…and that one complained about his “aggressive” behaviour. “He was a client of my agency…When men abuse women I’m no longer going to protect their identities”. Mr. Strauss-Kahn…has been charged with sexually attacking a 32-year-old hotel maid at the Manhattan Sofitel…He denies the claims and is being held in Riker’s Island prison. Miss Davis…said Mr. Strauss-Kahn…wanted an ‘All-American girl’, with a fresh face, from the mid-West,” she said. “A girl in January 2006 complained he was rough and angry, and said she didn’t want to see him again”. In September 2006…[another girl] reported that “he was rough”, said Miss Davis, adding: “She told me not to send any new girls to him”…

Davis’ excuse for the ethical violation is pure bullshit; if she truly cared about other women’s safety she wouldn’t be attempting to build her reputation at our expense by promoting bogus statistics which politicians could use to justify further criminalization of our profession. She knows very well that just because a client is rough with a working girl does not mean he’s going to commit rape; if anything, rough consensual encounters may satisfy his urge to overpower women. That’s not to say I approve of such behavior; if I had several girls complain about a client I wouldn’t send anyone else to him, either. But that still doesn’t constitute evidence of rape any more than reading a book about explosives means that a person is guilty of a bombing. Kristin Davis doesn’t care about “men abusing women”; her behavior has made it abundantly clear that she cares only about herself and will say whatever will get her the most attention, whether it’s true or not and no matter whom it hurts.

The Eye of the Beholder (May 11^th)

Individual liberties are not subject to restriction merely because they offend others; unless a third party is actually injured no government has the right to ban consensual adult behavior, even if that behavior upsets or disgusts most people. Back in December there was a perfect example when Columbia University professor David Epstein was charged with incest for a three-year relationship with his adult daughter, and recently another father-daughter couple appeared on a TV talk show (as reported in Jezebel on May 17^th):

Recently The Steve Wilkos Show…aired a…story about a father and his 18-year-old daughter who had been estranged during the girl’s childhood but reconnected through MySpace when the daughter, Britney, became an adult. They struck up a romantic relationship…The footage—which features Britney and her father, Morgan, in a deep French kiss…is disturbing to say the least, but apparently it gets worse…Wilkos mentions that the couple “provided proof” that they were in a sexual relationship, which one source tells us was “video documentation” and that the “dad had filmed it”…

I don’t mind telling you that I find this creepy, icky, weird and sad on a number of levels and that I’m 95% sure that the woman will regret it at some point in the future, but I could say the same thing about doing cocaine or obsessive levels of body piercing. In the days before reliable birth control and genetic testing incest laws had the valid rationale of preventing inbreeding, but with the advent of those resources (and the descent of eugenics into disfavor) such arguments have lost their former impact. So should we really ban sexual relationships just because others find them skeevy? If you think so, tell that to your friends who support same-sex marriage. Being a free adult means having the “right to be wrong,” to make decisions others find questionable or even distressing and which may even result in considerable harm to oneself. Still not convinced? Take a look at the debate in the comment thread after that article and see how you feel about statements like “Do you actually believe that just because a woman says ‘okay’ to have sex, that everything’s okay?” The arguments against tolerance – that adult women cannot be trusted to make their own sexual decisions, that in a “bad” relationship it’s always the man who is wrong, that there can be a crime without a victim – are the same ones used to rationalize criminalization of sex work and a host of other things. Tolerating others’ unpleasant or even self-destructive behavior is the price we pay for others tolerating ours.

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Subtle Pimping

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged California, condoms, cops, dirty, disease, ethics, Hall of Shame, Hollywood, hysteria, law, Nevada, pimps, porn, sisterhood, stereotypes, Subtle Pimping on April 8, 2011| 24 Comments »

What do you call men who take money from prostitutes? Magistrates. – Slogan from the English Collective of Prostitutes

Prohibitionists simply adore pimps. After all, if there were no pimps, it would be a great deal harder for them to convince Mr. and Mrs. Average that prostitution was something other than a victimless “crime”. But because pimps do exist, the antis (whether neofeminist, politician, cop, Christian or trafficking-fetishist) have a ready-made bogeyman upon whom they can hang claims that all prostitutes are “trafficked slaves”. There’s only one problem, though; there simply aren’t enough pimps to go around, even using the criminally vague standards favored by the antis. So in order to rectify this situation, some dedicated politicians have stepped into the breach in order to address this terrible pimp shortage by making money off of whores without giving them anything in return (which is as good a working definition of “pimp” as I can imagine).

This is nothing new; since at least Roman times many governments have set themselves up as pimps by charging disproportionately-high license fees (not to mention fines, taxes, etc) to prostitutes; in many of these jurisdictions the police were allowed to set and charge these fees at will, with the money going directly to the police (or to individual policemen). And of course many of these cops took the traditional pimp privilege of raping whores at will (and many still do). But modern governments prefer to do things more subtly, and besides there are those pesky human rights activists and civil rights attorneys running around everywhere interfering in traditional police privileges. So politicians are turning to more subtle (not to mention profitable) forms of pimping. The State of Nevada of course pioneered this more subtle modern approach, and I’ve discussed other recent efforts in previous posts on several dates. But here are two new examples, one an attempt to pimp an untapped market and the other a clever and sleazy maneuver by an aspiring politician.

The first came by way of the Associated Press last Thursday (March 31^st) and continues the saga of condom fetishists attempting to force the porn industry to cater to their peculiar preferences:

California workplace safety officials have fined Larry Flynt’s Hustler Video and another porn producer for not using condoms on set to protect sex performers from exposure to disease. Hustler faces $14,175 in fines for three violations, including failure to provide condoms or other protective equipment, according to a Division of Occupational Safety and Health citation provided to The Associated Press Wednesday. Hustler “failed to ensure the use of appropriate personal protective equipment, such as condoms” to protect its employees from semen, vaginal excretions and blood in the course of producing adult videos, according to the citation. The current fines are based on the same section of state law that also requires hospitals to provide nurses with protective gear…Flynt has said in the past that audiences don’t want to watch porn in which actors use condoms. Hustler was also fined for failing to maintain a written injury and illness policies and for failing to provide workers with vaccines for hepatitis C. Hustler’s citation stems from a Sept. 14 inspection of a jobs site in response to a complaint from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation…Forsaken Pictures faces $12,150 in fines for similar violations. The fines were issued March 9…

To porn producers, fines of this size are like parking tickets to individuals: annoying, but not really harmful. And this exposes Los Angeles’ game, because if the fines were really painful the porn industry might decide to relocate, then the gravy train would stop. Clearly the state, city and county have no intention to bleed the industry heavily enough to actually hurt it; they’re just using the ridiculous complaints of Michael Weinstein and his condom fetishist pals as a convenient excuse to extract a few more pimp fees. If the authorities were really concerned about “protecting” porn actors, they’d be trying to do something about the privacy leak.

This sort of behavior from officials doesn’t get me angry; after all, it’s the sort of thing one expects from government officials. What does anger me is when a whore-turned-politician panders to trafficking fetishists by mouthing blatant lies in order to advance herself at the expense of her sisters:

…Ex-Madam Kristin Davis, who supplied high priced call girls for former Governor Eliot Spitzer, said she will jump in the 2013 New York City Mayor’s Race if the former Governor… makes a bid…“If Spitzer throws his black socks in the ring I may have to throw in my lacy brassiere” said Davis who once ran the most successful high end escort service in US history. “I had pretty much decided to focus on the sex trafficking issue and not to run for public office again,” said Davis. “I am working to take the GOLD program, put forward by an advocacy group in Miami to combat sex trafficking nationwide.” Davis kicked off Hope House, a New York based non-profit to fight the conscription of women into prostitution last month. “The women who worked for me chose to be sex workers,” said Davis. “80% of the women working as escorts are doing so against their will,” said Davis. “Until prostitution is decriminalized we must provide an escape from this life for thousands of young women”…

Back in February I called Davis on the carpet for her ludicrous claim that escorts make up only “5% of the world of prostitution…” and though she seems to have increased that to 20% she’s now blatantly claiming the other 80% are coerced, when she knows damned well that’s an outrageous lie. This obvious attempt to suck up to the prohibitionists makes me so freaking angry that I’m going to let Kelly James say the rest for me (courtesy of this link to her column of March 31^st) before I say something even more unladylike than I already have.

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February Updates (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, News, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged condoms, Cops and Condoms, dirty, disease, Election Day, ethics, Hall of Shame, harm reduction, Harm Reduction updates, hysteria, law, stereotypes, streetwalkers, stripping, United Kingdom on February 12, 2011| 19 Comments »

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change. – William Shakespeare, Sonnet 123

As so often happens, a number of stories have come up recently which remind me of past columns; this time there were so many that I’ve divided them up into two parts.

Cops and Condoms (August 6^th)

I’ve written on a number of occasions about the self-destructive male aversion to condoms and the absolute necessity for vigilance on whores’ part to prevent clients from pulling some sneaky trick to get inside a girl “bareback”. I’ve also pointed out that even most streetwalkers are scrupulous about condom use. This story published on the Fox News website on February 2^nd (thanks to regular reader Joyce for the link!) illustrates the reason why clients and hookers both should insist on proper protection:

A 45-year-old Denver woman was arrested Tuesday [February 1^st] and accused of knowingly spreading HIV while allegedly working as a prostitute…prosecutors say Frances Woodke — who has known for years that she is HIV positive — offered sex to an undercover police officer for $23. Woodke is being charged with two misdemeanors — prostitution and solicitation for prostitution — and a felony count of prostitution with knowledge of AIDS…the woman has pleaded guilty twice before to attempted prostitution with knowledge of AIDS — spending time in prison for the charges in 2000 and again in 2008, according to the Denver district attorney’s office. “It’s going to be difficult for us on the law enforcement side to identify people she put at risk — if there are people she put at risk,” said Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver district attorney’s office.

What the DA’s spokeswoman is alluding to in the last sentence is that we don’t know that Woodke ever offered any of her clients unprotected sex; she may not have. But I think it should be obvious that any whore desperate enough to offer her services for pocket change would probably find the lure of extra money for “bareback” irresistible if any man were insane enough to make such an offer. And though the chance of female to male HIV transmission via intercourse isn’t all that high, the chance does exist and such a careless man, if infected, would then be free to carry HIV to any other girl he hired. Girls, never go “bareback” with a man to whom you aren’t deeply committed no matter how generous the offer (if you’re a professional) or how much you “love” him (if you’re an amateur). And guys, please think with the big head when seeing hookers and insist on protection yourself – and if your date offers unprotected intercourse, RUN!

Election Day (November 2^nd)

If Kristin Davis had managed a miracle she be Governor of New York right now, but alas, she didn’t get enough votes even to keep her Anti-Prohibition Party alive. And though she can restart the party later by petition, this article which appeared in the New York Daily News last Tuesday (February 8^th) tells us what she’s doing in the meantime…and it sounds fishy:

Kristin Davis…plans to use her notoriety to help victims of sex trafficking. She’s starting a nonprofit called Hope House to provide shelter and social services for women in need. Before serving a four-month prison term for prostitution, Davis claims to have run the highest-grossing escort service in U.S. history, supplying call girls to the likes of Eliot Spitzer. She ran for governor last year on a platform of legalizing prostitution, pot and gambling.

Because of her prominence, she says that “hundreds” of women who have suffered in the sex industry have come to her to tell their stories and seek help. To her dismay, she found there were few places to direct them…Hope House will offer women food, shelter, security and medical care, ranging from HIV testing to drug treatment and psychiatric counseling, Davis says. Her plan is to open the full-scale shelter by 2013. She says a 24-hour emergency help line, similar to suicide hotlines, should be up within the next few months. Ultimately, Davis hopes to build the organization into something larger and more ambitious…

…Will people be surprised to see an advocate for legal prostitution crusading against its evils? They shouldn’t be, according to Davis. She says her critics “don’t understand the disparity between a woman who chooses to work and women who have been forced.” Her old agency represented what she calls the “‘Pretty Woman’-ish,” professionalized side of the sex trade — a slice she says accounts for “5% of the world of prostitution…I never forced a girl to do anything,” she explains. “It’s a completely different business model.”

Kristin, Kristin, Kristin. I understand you have a need to reinvent yourself, and your idea of a charity to help coerced girls appears to be a noble one. But you know damned well that there aren’t enough trafficked girls to support anything “larger and more ambitious” than a shelter; maybe if you extend your help to subsistence level hookers, drug addicts and teenage runaways selling sex to survive you might have something. Please, don’t feed the trafficking hysteria by requiring whores to claim they’ve been “trafficked” or coerced in order to earn your help; just needing help should be enough, even if that need was the result of a girl’s own poor choices. And finally, don’t throw the rest of us under the bus with idiotic exaggerations; 5%? You know damned well it’s about 60%, so let’s not launch yet another deception-fueled “rescue” organization when you could do something real and good.

Harm Reduction (January 13^th)

In this column I talked about the principle of harm reduction, which holds that because humanity is not perfectible laws which attempt to eradicate vices are not only doomed to fail, but actually create worse evils. Early Christian thinkers understood this and obviously Reverend Paul Turp does as well, as reported in this story published in The Independent on January 30^th:

…Reverend Paul Turp – the inspiration for Father Adam Smallbone in the BBC comedy Rev…this weekend strongly criticised a London council for attempting to “impose a moral code” on residents and visitors by outlawing lap dancing, sex shops and adult cinemas in the area. Hackney council voted last week for what it called a “nil” policy, banning any new strip venues from opening and holding out the likelihood that four existing clubs will lose their licences as they come up for renewal. The policy was approved despite more than 66 per cent of people who took part in a public consultation on the plans saying “no” to the ban.

Reverend Turp…said he was “hugely disappointed” with the decision, adding that it will “push the business underground, resulting in more women working dangerously on the streets” and will add to the people who turn to his church for help. The clergyman, who provides refuge for 17 homeless people, as well as caring for alcoholics, addicts and prostitutes, said: “The council have created a problem where there wasn’t one to begin with. They deliberately disregarded the views of the people.”

The local authority’s clampdown on strip clubs derives from the 2010 Policing and Crime Act, which gives councils greater authority in the licensing of strip clubs…[and] removes sex establishments’ rights of appeal if licence renewal is refused. Bill Parry-Davies, a solicitor who is representing two of the existing clubs, said the local authority had abused its powers and plans further legal moves to challenge the ban: “Hackney’s policy seems ideologically driven, regardless of its consequences in the real world. It’s regressive. People fought to protect women by introducing licensing. The courts will want to look very closely at a policy which seeks to deny a licensee’s right of appeal and the courts’ jurisdiction in such a manner.”

…Mr Turp warned that, unless overturned legally, the policy was likely to lead to danger for strip club workers and disruption for members of the public: “A wretched mistake has been made. Hackney 30 years ago was a very dodgy place. I remember the struggle to get these places licensed. Now they are well run and safe.”

Maybe we need to get the Reverend Turp to do a lecture tour in the States; perhaps some self-professed “conservative” politicians would be more inclined to listen to common sense if it came from a clergyman.

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What a Week!

Posted in Current Events, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Backpage, bad customers, brothels, cops, Craigslist, dirty, disability, drugs, ethics, Europe, Hall of Shame, Hollywood, hysteria, law, Nebraska, neofeminism, porn, psychology, restaurants, sisterhood, Spain, stage names, Swedish model, What a Week! on November 28, 2010| 8 Comments »

Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day, when a woman could earn a decent wage by selling her body instead? – Emma Goldman

There were so many developments in hooker news last week that I honestly felt overwhelmed! A number of them reflected the growing disparity between the official position taken by governments (especially police departments) and that held by the majority of the public. A perfect example was this article, which many of you may have already seen; it concerns a severely deformed man arrested for trying to hire a prostitute. Now, I’ve already discussed my philosophy about deformed or disabled men; very often we are their only means of obtaining sex since amateurs won’t even give them the time of day. There are very few call girls who do not understand this, but I’ve often wondered how many people in the general public really grasp it. Then I saw this discussion on The Agitator, and words cannot express how pleased I was to see so many people not simply critical of the police persecution of this unfortunate man, but actually angry at the fact that government power is abused to deny him and others like him access to one of the most basic of human pleasures.

I was similarly pleased to see this column on Jezebel; as I’ve mentioned before, the site tends to sit on the feminist fence, catering as often to neofeminists and other decrepit remnants of second-wave feminism as it does to third-wave feminism and to the voices of women who don’t consider themselves feminist in any way. Thus, the site usually isn’t sex-work-positive enough for my tastes, so it’s especially good to see something like this there. The commentary, however, is disappointing; it seems largely dominated by neofeminists, trafficking alarmists and advocates of the “Swedish model” rather than by intelligent, free-thinking women who prefer to control their own bodies rather than allowing the Nanny State to do it for them. Considering that Jezebel caters to a largely female audience, I find that rather pathetic.

Until we as women present a unified front against collective ownership of our bodies, progress will be slow at best; ironically, most of the voices arguing that women are intelligent adults capable of making our own decisions are male! But even sex workers can’t seem to unite; too many practitioners of legalized forms of whoredom (such as stripping, porn and phone sex work) are only too willing to throw the rest of us under the bus in order to avoid putting their own derrières out on a limb. Case in point Capri Anderson, the porn starlet who was involved in the recent Charlie Sheen brouhaha. Apparently, she thinks she’s better than her sisters; in an interview on Good Morning America she simpered that Sheen had called her a whore (if the shoe fits, honey…) and tried to cast her presence in his hotel room that night as somehow unmotivated by profit. She also announced that she had filed a criminal complaint against him for “harassment in the second degree” (whatever that means) and was going to sue him for assault and false imprisonment. Unsurprisingly, Sheen responded by beating her to the civil-court punch, filing a suit alleging fraud and attempted extortion which claimed that Anderson only filed charges after her million-dollar blackmail attempt had failed.

Shades of Karen Sypher! Miss Anderson’s incredible greed, her denial of her own whoredom despite the fact that she is a porn actress who was paid $3500 to spend the night with a rich cokehead, her pretense that she is better than the rest of us despite her absolute and total lack of the most meager shred of the professional ethics adhered to even by the majority of hundred-dollar Backpage girls, and her stunning stupidity in announcing a lawsuit on national television before she actually filed it more than qualify her as the second inductee into my Hall of Shame, alongside the aforementioned Syfwhore. Congratulations, Capri! I hope you get everything you so richly deserve.

All justly-earned condemnation aside, Capricious had very little option other than denying her harlotry to the cops, since as everyone knows American law discriminates against women by classifying us as legally incompetent eternal children who are incapable of consenting to any form of sex except those from an approved list, and by criminalizing most means of making more money than men by doing things of which men are incapable. Yet deluded neofeminists, religious fanatics and media outlets who are happy to lick the boots of cops and call it yummy cannot seem to understand why so many women resist being the chattel of the state. Here’s a recent example from the Omaha, Nebraska ABC affiliate, in which cops admit their total impotence in halting online hooker ads (despite the much-ballyhooed censorship of Craigslist) and well-intentioned but delusional Salvation Army ladies express confusion about why their program to “help women get out of the cycle of prostitution” has only attracted two escorts despite their claims that escorting is just as dangerous as streetwalking. If you really want to know the answer, Sister Mary, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to explain it to you.

But while American authorities wring their hands and moan that they just can’t understand why so many women refuse to be told what to do by their “betters” and persist in eschewing dreadful, low-paid menial jobs under overbearing employers for lucrative, often-pleasant jobs in which they work for themselves, other countries have stopped pissing into the wind and instead embraced prostitution as both natural and lucrative for the state. This recent article describes a new mega-brothel in Spain, conveniently located near the French border. And while I and many other whores consider brothel work to undercut many of the reasons we entered The Life in the first place, other girls do not feel that way and should be free to work in brothels if they so choose, just as other women prefer to work for Denny’s rather than opening their own restaurants. As we’ve discussed before on October 29^th and November 1^st, decriminalization in Europe hasn’t stopped pompous bureaucrats from attempting to undermine our rights, but that’s simply the nature of bureaucracy; neither power-hungry politicians nor lie-spewing prohibitionist fanatics can accomplish much to turn back the clock on us short of full-scale revolution. And mega-brothels can only help to solidify our position; large and prominent businesses not only protect their own interests, but also enrich a number of other nearby and related businesses which will also devote money to stopping any attempts by control freaks to stop the gravy train. The legal efforts of big, wealthy casinos generally tend to help little truck stops with slot machines and have made both crooked gambling dens and police persecution of back-room card games a thing of the past, and the legal efforts of big, wealthy brothels will also tend to assist small brothels and solitary practitioners of the trade.

But for right now, we in the US are still stuck with busybody control freaks trying to save us from ourselves. Just as they managed to annoy Craigslist into self-censorship just to stop their braying, so Backpage is now beginning to crawfish; this email was sent to Backpage customers last Monday (November 22^nd):

We have just completed an analysis of the site to determine what necessary changes should be made to better protect our communities. As a result, Backpage.com has implemented new safety enhancements in the last few weeks as follows:

-Review of all new ads and images in the personals and mature sections of the site.
-Implementation of key word searches to quickly identify possible illegal advertising.
-The blocking of off site html images to block images that violate our site usage policy.
-Implementation of a new content policy to disallow nudity across the site.
-Enlisting of safety experts to help craft further safety strategies.

Please pay close attention to the posting rules on top of the posting form for more guidance. With postings under review, you may also notice a 20 minute delay in your postings going live. In addition, pics in your postings not meeting our new policy will be removed.

We believe changes like these will better protect our community.

Gee, thanks, guys; I’m sure all the escorts who advertise with you feel so much safer now that you’re cozying up to the cops to avoid bad publicity.

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How To Be a Stupid, Greedy Whore

Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, tagged condoms, dirty, ethics, Hall of Shame, Kentucky, law, stereotypes on August 7, 2010| 38 Comments »

The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels; the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid — these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money’s worth. – Polly Adler

I’ve written a few times about women who pretend they aren’t whores, but are. In My Humble Opinion, any woman who takes money in exchange for sex is by definition a whore. It doesn’t matter if she is married to her customer or not, nor whether the price is discussed before or after the act; and it doesn’t matter if the money is granted by a divorce court or blackmailed out of the customer or taken in the form of gifts or squeeze or salary or “child support”. If a woman takes any form of compensation from a man that he would not have given but for their sexual relationship, she is a whore whether she admits it or not. The only difference between such women and those legally defined as prostitutes is that most prostitutes are honest and bound by professional ethics, while whores-in-denial are not. So if any woman (especially the one whom I discuss in today’s column) decides to take issue with my inclusion of her in my profession, all I have to say is “If the shoe fits…” If you don’t want to be defined as a whore, don’t take money from men with whom you have sex, and if you’re going to take money from them at least have the decency to give them what they pay for as true professionals do.

Karen Sypher (in middle)

This news item came to my attention yesterday; it’s about a whore with a terminal case of what we call Platinum Pussy Syndrome, the pathological belief that her favors are worth vastly more than those of other women. If this stupid bitch had simply charged a fair fee and given her customer his money’s worth we would never have heard of her, but because she developed delusions of grandeur and tried to victimize her client rather than trading fairly with him she dishonored both her family and our profession and will spend several of her declining years in prison (to say nothing of the bad karma she has incurred). Of course, when she gets out she’ll be assured of a book deal (promoted on the daytime talk show circuit) in which she whines about how she was “victimized”, but that will merely prove my point all the more. Obviously, this entire column is only my opinion; I can’t know what was going through her mind, and the only facts I have are those determined by the court, but I think those facts speak for themselves.

The following is paraphrased from an AP article:

A Louisville, Kentucky woman was convicted Thursday (August 5, 2010) of demanding millions of dollars from Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino to keep their one-night stand in a restaurant secret, then falsely claiming he raped her after he reported the extortion to the police. Karen Cunagin Sypher, a 50-year-old former car-show model, was found guilty of three counts of extortion, two counts of lying to the FBI and one count of retaliating against a witness. She stared at the ceiling as the verdict was read, while one of her sons wept openly. Neither Sypher nor her attorney commented as they left federal court following her eight-day trial, but one of her sons, Jacob Wise, sneered “Thanks for taking my mother away, guys,” at prosecutors. (Nice way to shift blame there, Jake! – Maggie)

The case involved a 2003 sexual encounter between Pitino and Sypher at a table inside a restaurant closed for the night; some months later she told him she was pregnant and he gave her $3000 for an abortion, but he then heard nothing more from her until last year, when he received three threatening phone calls and two letters demanding cash and gifts to keep the tryst secret. One of the letters showed to the jury was a handwritten note from Sypher that asked for cars, tuition for her children and her mortgage to be paid off. Pitino reported the blackmail attempt to the police and testified that Sypher “came on to him” (witnesses described her as “persistent and flirty” that night) and that the sex was consensual; after she was charged, Sypher unsurprisingly retaliated by accusing Pitino of rape.

Unfortunately for Sypher, her threatening phone calls were recorded and played back in court; jury foreman Glen Elder told The Associated Press that the panel went through the charges line by line and there were no disagreements during about five hours of deliberations over two days, while other jurors said the recordings “played a major part” in their decision. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 26 years in prison, but under federal sentencing guidelines, the penalty will likely be lighter; Sypher will remain free until her sentencing on October 27th.

Now, let’s look at how this greedy, incompetent amateur botched the whole deal. First off, it’s both incredibly unethical and amazingly stupid to ask for payment after delivering the service rather than agreeing on a price beforehand; unethical because it allows price-gouging, and stupid because there is no guarantee that the client will pay up. If he refuses to pay it can’t even be considered a rape since no price was mentioned in advance.

Next, I think it’s safe to infer that this idiot didn’t require Pitino to use a condom, because if she had he wouldn’t have believed her claim of pregnancy. Clearly, she was laboring under the delusion we talked about yesterday, that “good girls” don’t use condoms; I would point out that “good girls” also don’t seduce strangers, screw on restaurant tables, blackmail people and make false accusations of rape, but that would be stating the obvious. According to the popular delusion (shared by police as also discussed yesterday), asking him to use a condom would have made her a whore; funny, I would think it was the request for money which defines whoredom, but I guess I’m just silly that way.

Then there was the request for an exorbitant amount of money; $3000 for an encounter which both testified lasted mere minutes is far beyond the going rate even for a porn star. But Pitino was foolish enough to pay up, and Sypher netted $2570 on the deal ($3000 less the $430 the abortion actually cost, according to medical records presented at the trial). That’s more than I’ve ever made in a few minutes, and had she been less greedy, stupid and evil she would’ve walked away with a fat fee for a very easy call. But as I said at the beginning we’re dealing with a serious case of Platinum Pussy Syndrome, which in its terminal stages can induce brain rot leading to the delusion that one’s sexual favors really are worth ten (or a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand) times those of other women. I might theorize that she contracted it via car show modeling, except that I’ve also done that without developing even the most minor symptom of the disorder.

And I’m very glad I didn’t; over the course of six years Sypher (is that her name or her IQ?) seems to have developed delusions so grandiose that they destroyed both her ability to perceive reality and her minimal capacity for moral judgment. She not only decided that her amateurish performance was worth millions of dollars, but that it was morally acceptable to demand retroactive payment years after the fact and to attempt to collect it via threats rather than by honest negotiation. And when her scam was foiled she descended to that most reprehensible of actions, the bogus rape charge; such accusations not only harm the accused, but also cast doubt onto truthful accusations made by other women. The “Potiphar’s wife” dodge is the last refuge of a moral imbecile who has been caught doing something she shouldn’t; it is a repugnant act of infantile self-centeredness which places her reputation above the personal safety of all of her sisters.

Unfortunately, Karen Sypher is not alone; as I pointed out in my column of July 12th, whores-in-denial vastly outnumber those of us who are honest about it, and while we are persecuted for our honesty their dishonesty is rewarded and abetted by the legal system. Had Syfwhore stopped with her demand for “abortion money,” she wouldn’t even have been technically guilty of breaking any man-made law because our paternalistic legal system holds men accountable for the voluntary sexual behavior of adult women (except for legally-defined prostitutes, but that’s a discussion for another day). Since she did not quit while she was ahead, however, her astonishing stupidity, appalling immorality and truly mythic greed qualify her as the first inductee into my Hall of Shame, a list of whores (whether admitted or not) who have dishonored our profession by their incredibly disgusting behavior.

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