The Honest Courtesan

The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own.  –  Maxine Hong Kingston

Short articles on the usual subject.

Lipstick on a Pig

If I were to feature every news story of a prostitution bust in the United States, my column would consist of little else.  But this story from the August 15^th Washington Examiner was noteworthy both for the appalling size of the operation and for the pathetic attempt to represent the same old police harassment campaign as some sort of feminist social work effort:

…In two separate six-hour periods, District [of Columbia] police arrested 54 men on prostitution solicitation-related charges…The men face up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine, although Bray said most first-time offenders will be sent to a program to help them cope with their sexual desires.  Police also said they arrested 14 women on prostitution-related charges, four men on pandering charges for allegedly trying to coax undercover female officers into working for them as hookers, and two men on robbery charges for allegedly trying to rip off female undercover officers who were posing as prostitutes.  “The majority of the operation was focused on the customer side,” Bray said on Monday.  “We hope that if we do that there will be no customers and prostitution in the city will not be as prevalent”…”We’re also looking for human trafficking victims,” Bray said.  “We want to ID traffickers and pimps who try to trap victims.”

This “end demand” rhetoric is becoming much more common as police departments begin adding “Swedish model” propaganda to their usual ignorant statements in an effort to appeal to neofeminists and other anti-sex religious fanatics.  And the “human trafficking” dogma tacked on at the end there might be funny if not for the chilling, Orwellian language in the second sentence:  “first-time offenders will be sent to a program to help them cope with their sexual desires.”  It makes my skin crawl to see cops parroting neofeminist pathologization of normal male behavior in order to excuse their pogroms; too bad we can’t force cops into a program to help them cope with the sick, sadistic sexual desires that drive them to beat and murder men and rape women.

My Readers Write

I’m very proud of the unusually high literacy level of my readership, and many of my regular readers are writers themselves; thanks to a link on Tits and Sass last Friday I discovered this “Open Letter to Australian Feminists Concerned About Sex Worker Exploitation” written by regular reader Because I’m a Whore, which appeared on Feminaust on August 20^th.  I think it’s important because it demonstrates a point I’ve made a number of times before:  As long as our laws allow individual behaviors to be criminalized by government, whores are in danger even in places where our profession has been legalized because the busybodies and control freaks are hard at work trying to get it recriminalized, just as Donna Hughes and her lackies accomplished in Rhode Island two years ago and the last Labour government in Britain almost managed last year.

Seeking Balance?

After allowing Trevor and Maggie Neilson a pulpit from which to vomit out their prohibitionist propaganda, perhaps Huffington Post is trying to establish balance by giving column space to Ronald Weitzer, whose work I’ve cited on a number of occasions.  Weitzer’s article, “Myths About Human Trafficking”, appeared on August 24^th and directly refutes the bogus claims and statistics of which the Neilsons and their ilk are so fond.  While I’m pleased to see this, it’s sad that a publication which claims to be “liberal” could have featured writers who advocate crushing individual rights by police tactics in the first place.

Workers’ Paradise vs. Gold Diggers

With rare exception, Marxists are anti-prostitution for obvious reasons:  our trade is capitalism in its purest form.  The communist states of the 20^th century proudly boasted (as in my epigram) that they had entirely eradicated prostitution, but of course this was pure poppycock; there is no evidence that prostitution decreased in the Soviet Union, China or any smaller communist state, and if anything it increased as women strove to gain luxuries or even simple necessities amidst the eternal shortages which characterize communist economies.  And though China no longer tries to pretend that prostitution does not exist within her borders, the Chinese government suppresses sex work every bit as brutally as the United States does, and unlike the U.S. it apparently doesn’t even allow whoring conducted under color of matrimony.  According to the August 23^rd Sydney Morning Herald:

With divorce rates soaring and widespread worries about a culture of materialism, the Chinese government is now trying to stop women marrying for money…the Supreme Court has ruled that the person who buys the family home, or the parents who advance them the money, will get to keep it in the event of a divorce.  ”Hopefully this will help educate younger people, especially younger women, to be more independent, and to think of marriage in the right way rather than worshipping money so much,” Hu Jiachu, a lawyer in Hunan province, said.  The ruling should help relieve the burden on young men, many of whom fret about the difficulty of buying an apartment.  China’s property bubble has driven property prices in Shanghai up to $7934 per square metre when annual salaries average just $9521.

”There are more and more girls who want to marry rich men and improve their financial position.  It has been a notable increase,” Wang Zhiguo, a consultant at Baihe, a Beijing-based matchmaking website, said.  ”Most pretty girls now try to trade on their beauty.  It is an unhealthy trend and the government is now trying to restrict it.”  Recent statistics show there were 2.68 million divorces last year and divorces have multiplied at almost the same speed as the economy has grown:  by 7 per cent a year for five years.

I wonder what American feminists would think upon hearing their rhetoric coming out of the mouth of an advocate for Chinese social engineering?

Whores On Whores

Politicians are, as I’ve said before, the biggest whores of all, and many if not most of them hate garden-variety whores because we are living proof of their inability to control everybody and everything.  And now you can have a rare look at a few politicians’ uncensored opinions about us courtesy of Wikileaks and Furry Girl, who spent all day August 25^th poring over this weeks’ new releases. She shares her results in her Feminisn’t column for August 26^th, and though most of the results have to do with the annual State Department exercise in pomposity referred to as the “Trafficking in Persons Report”, there are enough other types of references to be interesting.

Oops

There aren’t many circumstances in which I would excuse a breach of confidentiality, but this is probably one of them:

A federal sex-trafficking case was declared a mistrial last week when a masseuse testifying against an allegedly exploitative massage parlor recognized the defense attorney as a former client.  Liudmyla Ksenych, a Ukranian immigrant, worked at a massage parlor owned by Alex “Daddy” Campbell, where other women testified they were trained to give clients sexual favors and pay Campbell thousands of dollars to avoid deportation…when she left the witness stand last Monday, she told prosecutors that she recognized Campbell’s attorney, Douglas Rathe, as a former client.  Rathe…told U.S. District Court Judge Robert Gettleman that he had visited Ksenych four times for massages and given her a bottle of perfume as a gift, but that “nothing inappropriate” occurred during those visits…“It was a massage — that was all it was…What happened was embarrassing — there was no doubt about it.  [But] I did nothing illegal or nothing that was considered improper.  This was a very unusual circumstance.”

According to the indictment, Campbell is accused of coercing immigrant women into jobs at his massage parlors, confiscating their passports, trapping them in apartments and driving them to and from work and extorting thousands of dollars from them with the threat of deportation…An accomplice has already pled guilty to these crimes.  Neither the prosecutors nor the judge seemed convinced that Rathe’s history with Ksenych interfered with his ability to do his job…and the government offered to withdraw Ksenych as a witness so the trial could continue.  But Campbell, who had already filed a motion for a mistrial on a separate issue…[insisted] he could not trust Rathe, his court-appointed attorney, and would need to be assigned a new defense lawyer…The trial has been rescheduled for January.

Do I really need to point out that the only reason Campbell and his accomplice were able to extort money from these women is that prostitution is criminalized?

One Year Ago Today

“September Updates” was my very first “update” column and featured updates to “Legal Sundries” (August 17^th) and “Nothing in the Dark” (August 8^th).

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