Madonna/whore | The Honest Courtesan

Posts Tagged ‘Madonna/whore’

A Serpent’s Tooth

Posted in History, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Aphrodite, archeofeminism, brothels, courtesans, dirty, East Asia, ethics, Europe, harm reduction, law, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, psychology, rape, sacred prostitutes, slavery, social purity, stereotypes, yin and yang on October 16, 2011| 43 Comments »

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child. – William Shakespeare, King Lear (I, iv)

The hubris which is an unfortunate but intrinsic characteristic of the modern mind leads the one so afflicted to believe that modern people are invariably more sophisticated, more moral and more “enlightened” than our ancestors were, and in many ways we are; we know more about the universe, have access to a greater range of ideas and experiences, tend to have greater respect for individual differences, have largely eradicated the worst forms of slavery and are far less violent. But in other ways we have remained static, oscillated or even declined, and unfortunately the latter condition applies to sex work. Since the beginnings of civilization the status of the whore has progressively (though not steadily) declined; as I said in my column of one year ago today:

Despite neofeminist dogma about prostitution being a manifestation of patriarchy, the truth is actually the opposite: Prostitutes had our highest status in the ancient Goddess-centered cultures because we were rightfully viewed as the gateway between mortal men and the great Feminine Principle. It wasn’t until the patriarchal cultures succeeded in subordinating the Earth Mother to the Sky Father that our status started to slip…by the 6th century BCE free temple prostitutes in Athens had largely been supplanted by slave-girls given to the temple as donations, and the Athenian leader Solon tried to eradicate secular prostitution by establishing cheap state-owned brothels and persecuting streetwalkers…In general, male-dominated governments are not really happy about being unable to control prostitutes, and maladjusted men are unhappy that women they don’t own can demand (and get) generous compensation for their sexual favors while men cannot make similar demands from women.

Though in the West courtesans held high status from ancient Greece until the turn of the 20^th century, the number of women who could qualify for the title and the number of men who could afford them steadily decreased. In the East, government control over the lives of harlots slowly increased, and while we were tolerated in Europe until the 16^th century the Reformation ushered in an age of anti-whore rhetoric (derived from the preaching of the ancient Hebrew prophets, as described in last year’s column) which slowly but inexorably grew until it combined with the social engineering agenda of the late 19^th century “social purity movement” and resulted in our profession being not merely controlled but outlawed on a large scale for the first time in history. And though these laws have been repealed or softened in most civilized countries, they continue in others (such as the U.S. and various theocratic or repressive regimes), and even the countries where we aren’t classified as criminals generally view prostitution as a “social ill” to be tolerated or controlled. Worst of all, Victorian moralists pronounced us subhuman and modern prohibitionists continue their rhetoric, declaring us childlike “victims” suffering from “false consciousness” and unable to make adult decisions for ourselves.

This is all particularly galling because, as our ancestors knew, we serve a valuable social function. In the most ancient societies we were honored not merely for our connection to the Goddess, but also for our role in managing the power of male sexuality, and though in later patriarchal societies we were controlled, contained or tolerated, nobody was stupid enough to suggest that we should be eradicated. But thanks to the delusional idealism of the social purity crusaders, we are now viewed by many as not merely unnecessary, but an active harm to society…a society which would collapse into sexual chaos without us. The tide is starting to turn; some cultures have again admitted that ours is an acceptable trade, and many individuals recognize that we serve a vital social role. But it’s still a pleasant surprise to see an editorial like this one from the September 27^th Vancouver Sun:

We, as a society, do not value the services of sex workers. Sex work is productive work with many direct and indirect benefits to the mental and physical well-being of society…Through our inaction and misguided policies based on this attitude we have created a more dangerous situation for the most vulnerable workers…It’s a huge challenge to change Canadian law given the ambivalence and hypocrisy surrounding this issue but…nothing will change for the better unless we start to appreciate what sex workers do.

And though they’re not seeking recognition for the goodness of her work as a madam but rather for a good deed a person of any profession could have performed, it’s still nice to see people seeking a pardon for their ancestor saying that they’re proud of her:

…when the massive concrete dam below Cora Brooks’ house suddenly broke apart in September 1911, sending 260 million gallons of water churning down the narrow valley toward Austin [Pennsylvania], her quick phone call into town gave many enough warning to run to high ground. The torrent of water obliterated the industrial town, but the woman saved all but 78 of its residents. Three months later, when Cora Brooks pleaded guilty to the charges of running a “house of ill repute” and selling liquor without a license, the town came to her defense. “Had it not been for her, undoubtedly hundreds more lives would have been lost,” residents said in a letter to the sentencing judge. “Large numbers of people were fed by her, and the suffering and distressed rendered aid and assistance.”

“Cora Brooks,” the judge declared, “proved she was not only human, but humane,” and he released her with a $200 fine. But the conviction still stands, and Cora’s distant relatives are now asking Gov. Tom Corbett to pardon her of her public sins. “She was the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold,” says Margo Baker Crosby. Yes, she was a thorn in the side of the town’s elite, “but that was part of her charm…She needs to be recognized for her good deeds that saved that town”…the director of Potter County’s tourist promotion agency, [Cora’s great-grandson] David Brooks…said…He’s over the embarrassment of her trade. “I’m proud,” he said. “If you’re going to be known for something, saving the town isn’t bad.”

Maybe one day in the distant future, men like David Brooks will be able to say they’re proud of whore ancestresses because of their work, rather than in spite of it. But I doubt that will be anytime soon.

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The Crumbling Dam

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged avails laws, brothels, California, Canada, censorship, dirty, disease, drugs, harm reduction, law, Madonna/whore, St. James Infirmary, stereotypes, The Crumbling Dam on October 14, 2011| 17 Comments »

Justice will only exist where those not affected by injustice are filled with the same amount of indignation as those offended. – Plato

One year ago today I pointed out that though the still-contested Himel decision striking down Canada’s anti-prostitution laws in Ontario was “only one tiny crack in a very large and solid dam,” that “many such tiny cracks can weaken even the toughest structure so that one day it may yield to other pressures upon it.” That column reported another such crack: a judge in British Columbia allowed a similar challenge to the prostitution laws to proceed despite the efforts of prohibitionists to block it on a technicality. And now just in time for the anniversary of that decision, I’m happy to report yet another constitutional challenge, as reported on October 7^th by CTV:

Canada’s prostitution laws are facing another constitutional challenge from a woman charged with keeping a bawdy house. And the lawyer mounting the case says other charges laid against sex workers in BC are in trouble because anyone can use a charter challenge as a defense in court. “It’s the same experts, the same evidence…the constitutional challenge is not out of reach the way it was two years ago,” said Joven Narwal…[who] represents a woman who was charged with keeping a bawdy house, living on the avails of prostitution, and procuring a person into the sex trade after Vancouver police raided…[her business just] days after an Ontario judge ruled that Canada’s prostitution laws are unconstitutional…In B.C., former sex worker Sheryl Kiselbach challenged the same laws, though the case is tied up in legal delays.

Putting those two cases together means anyone has access to the research and arguments to build a charter challenge, said Narwal. “It’s easier now to the extent that you know which evidence is necessary, which experts will be necessary,” he said. There are some 90 solicitation charges being prosecuted right now in B.C., and two groups of bawdy house charges. “They’re all compromised to the extent that anybody who is going to fight is going to sue constitutional arguments,” said SFU Criminologist John Lowman. B.C. prosecutors admit this will mean a harder fight in court, but they won’t be deterred. “If a charter challenge is raised, that will be more complicated,” said Crown spokesman Neil MacKenzie. “If that happens more often, we’ll just deal with it on a case by case basis.”

Obviously, prosecutors “won’t be deterred”; it isn’t their own money they’re wasting, and the fight is at least half of the sadistic fun for them. But that struggle is about to get a lot more difficult (and probably less fun) as the cracks in their prohibitionist dam keep multiplying. Remember Insite, the Vancouver harm reduction project the Canadian government was trying to close down? Well, the Canadian Supreme Court has unanimously decided in Insite’s favor, and legal experts are already predicting that this will undoubtedly help the sex worker rights case (thanks to Kelly Michaels for calling this October 7^th Vancouver Sun story to my attention):

Canadian courts could strike down the country’s anti-prostitution laws if judges follow the logic of a landmark Supreme Court ruling on drug policy that came out last week. Experts say the biting unanimous decision preventing the closure of North America’s only safe-injection site for drug addicts has implications for a challenge to Canadian adult prostitution laws that is working its way through the courts. The court said closing the Insite clinic violated addicts’ basic rights to life and security, given evidence that the clinic reduced the risks from drug addiction. “I think it’s going to be cited in many, many cases,” said Errol Mendes, law professor at the University of Ottawa. He said the ruling’s logic can apply in a prostitution case that is likely to end up at the Supreme Court…Ontario’s Court of Appeal is expected to rule on the case soon. If it and then the Supreme Court uphold Himel’s decision, the federal government will have to find another way to restrict prostitution, or perhaps accept legalized brothels of the sort found in Nevada.

Both Himel’s ruling and the Insite ruling found government actions did not meet the “principles of fundamental justice” that underpin Canadian legislation…A lawyer in the prostitution case agreed that the Insite case was significant for his challenge…Canada’s Supreme Court is less politicized than the U.S. court, and few lawyers expect that to change even after Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper names two new judges, probably within months. Experts said the Insite decision showed that the government could not ignore scientific evidence to push a legal agenda that opposes drug use or prostitution. Significantly, the Supreme Court did not examine whether the trial judge was right to conclude that Insite saved lives, focusing on how the government had to react to that evidence. This might make it easier for the Ontario court to dismiss requests from government lawyers to reexamine the facts of the prostitution case…

Those cracks aren’t just legal, but social as well; as I reported in last year’s column and several other places, public support for criminalization in Canada is rapidly eroding and a number of newspapers have taken a pro-decriminalization stance. I’m willing to bet that ad campaigns like this one from Nova Scotia have helped by showing that prostitutes are “regular people”, thus fighting police propaganda that we’re all criminals and prohibitionist propaganda that we’re all damaged victims. Thus, I’m very pleased to see that St. James Infirmary has launched an ad campaign along very similar lines, and considering the story was featured on Huffington Post it may even find its way into the mainstream media:

…St. James Infirmary’s new media campaign promoting the rights of local sex workers…[is] a collaboration between [the infirmary]…and artists Rachel Schreiber and Barbara DeGenevieve…[and] features portraits of sex workers and supporters — spouses, partners, family members and health care professionals — putting faces to the people who work in the industry…”We wanted to make visible the workers who tend be invisible,” said Schreiber…”Sex workers aren’t people hanging out in a dark alley somewhere; they are nurses, teachers and mothers. Our goal is to demystify sex workers. They are just everyday people.” Schreiber believes that because of the mystery and invisibility surrounding the sex industry, workers have trouble accessing the resources they need — an issue she’s hoping the campaign will bring to light…the recent controversy surrounding Ashton Kutcher’s anti-sex trafficking campaign caught her eye…“When the focus of so much media attention is on the trafficking, it doesn’t leave room for anything else — like the resources to keep those who choose to work in this industry safe and healthy, and to give those who feel like they don’t have a choice a way out.” According to Schreiber, the problem with the media attention is that it fuels enforcement rather than support. “Many of the sex workers we assist at St. James choose to do what they do. And they have needs and rights just like everyone else,” said Schreiber. “And for those who feel stuck due to financial situation, the answer is in getting them the help they need, not in having them arrested.”

The result of the project: an honest, sincere and informational campaign across San Francisco. Schreiber originally planned to house the campaign on billboards across the city, but both Clear Channel and CBS Outdoor rejected the campaign, telling Schreiber that “sex worker [is] not a family friendly term”…But Titan 360, the ad company that supports BART, Muni and AC Transit, happily agreed, posting Schreiber’s photographs on Muni busses all over San Francisco. “We’re hoping this starts a dialogue,” said Schreiber. “And we want sex workers to be a part of that dialogue.”

Furry Girl’s sex worker rights billboard was similarly rejected by ad companies, but she finally located one who would take it. As in so many areas, the United States lags behind the rest of the developed world on sex worker rights. But when the prohibitionist dam crumbles in Canada, the cracks are bound to spread south; it’s good to see a few of them are already appearing.

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The Enlightenment Police

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged censorship, crypto-moralism, Europe, France, hysteria, Islam, law, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, The Enlightenment Police, welcome to our world on October 1, 2011| 145 Comments »

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or in other words a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read and say and eat and drink and wear. – Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay

My friend Philippa had a gift for coming up with memorable phrases, two of which I’ve used as the titles of previous columns (“Good Fantasy, Bad Reality” and “No Fun Shall Be Had”). “The enlightenment police” was her term for, as I stated in my August 30^th column, “people who think their ideas about proper living need to apply to everyone else’s personal preferences.” The “enlightenment police” differ from plain old garden-variety moralistic busybodies chiefly in their rhetoric, which eschews traditional terms like “sin” and “salvation” in favor of terms like “oppression” and “empowerment”. But they are exactly like other moralists in their absolute faith in their own righteousness, their infantilization of adults who have beliefs which disagree with theirs and their willingness to “rescue” others at the point of a gun.

One of the interesting things about tyranny is the way it creates empathy between groups who might otherwise have nothing to do with one another. It would be difficult to conceive of two kinds of women who were farther apart on the modesty scale than whores and Muslim women who observe hijab, yet we are both targeted by “enlightenment police” armed with neofeminist rhetoric who are willing to deny our rights, to rob us of agency and to oppress us in the name of “freeing” us from “male oppression” no matter what we might want for ourselves. And because of that, the struggles and statements of the French Muslim women from this story in the Guardian of September 19^th may seem eerily familiar to prostitutes and those who support our rights:

…In April, France introduced a law…[banning] Muslim women in full-face veils, or niqab…from any public activity including walking down the street, taking a bus, going to the shops or collecting their children from school. French politicians in favour of the ban said they were acting to protect the “gender equality” and “dignity” of women. But five months after the law was introduced, the result is a mixture of confusion and apathy. Muslim groups report a worrying increase in discrimination and verbal and physical violence against women in veils. There have been instances of people in the street taking the law into their hands and trying to rip off full-face veils, of bus drivers refusing to carry women in niqab or of shop-owners trying to bar entry. A few women have taken to wearing bird-flu-style medical masks to keep their faces covered; some describe a climate of divisiveness, mistrust and fear. One politician who backed the law said that women still going out in niqab were simply being “provocative”.

[Hind] Ahmas…was attacked in the street [by] a man and woman…[who] called her a whore and told her to go back to Afghanistan. “My quality of life has seriously deteriorated since the ban. In my head, I have to prepare for war every time I step outside, prepare to come up against people who want to put a bullet in my head. The politicians claimed they were liberating us; what they’ve done is to exclude us from the social sphere. Before this law, I never asked myself whether I’d be able to make it to a cafe or collect documents from a town hall. One politician in favour of the ban said niqabs were ‘walking prisons’. Well, that’s exactly where we’ve been stuck by this law.” But despite all the fanfare surrounding the niqab ban, no woman has yet been punished under the law for wearing one. The first real test will come on Thursday [September 22^nd], when a local judge in Meaux, east of Paris, will decide whether to hand out to Ahmas and a friend the first ever fine. [As this follow-up explains, they were fined €120 and €80 respectively and will immediately appeal to France’s supreme court]…Now, human rights lawyers are suggesting it could soon be overturned.

Only the French police can [legally] confront a woman in niqab. They can’t remove her veil but must refer the case to a local judge, who can hand out a…fine, a citizenship course, or both. Some police have wrongly given on-the-spot fines, which were later annulled. Others appear to ignore women in niqab walking down the street, perhaps because they feel they have more important crimes to be stopping. The interior ministry says that since the law came into force in April there have been 91 incidents of women in niqab being stopped by police outside Paris and nine incidents in the Paris region…The French justice ministry says “fewer than 10” cases are currently going through the courts and the lack of fines shows the state favours “dialogue” not punishment. But Gilles Devers, a lawyer acting for Ahmas and several other women in niqab, argued punishments were not being handed out because the niqab law contravenes European human rights legislation on personal liberties and freedom of religion. As soon as a fine is imposed, there will be an appeal right up to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, which could rule against the law and expose the French state as a laughing stock.

If the French law is challenged in this way, the result would be crucial for Muslims across the continent. Belgium introduced its own niqab ban this summer, punishable not just by a fine but seven days in prison. In Italy, the far-right Northern League has resuscitated a 1975 law against face coverings to fine women in certain areas of the north. Silvio Berlusconi’s party is now preparing an anti-niqab law. Denmark is preparing legislation to limit the wearing of niqabs; politicians in Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland are pushing for outright bans. Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, blogged this summer: “The way the dress of a small number of women has been portrayed as a key problem requiring urgent discussion and legislation is a sad capitulation to the prejudices of the xenophobes.”

…There are no reliable statistics on who wears the niqab in France and whether they have kept wearing it since the law. It is estimated that only a few hundred women wear it, mostly French citizens. Muslim associations say a minority of women have taken off the niqab or moved abroad…An Open Society Foundation report on women in niqabs in France…found that of a sample of 32 women in niqab, none had been forced to wear the full veil. Many said they would refuse to take if off after the law came in, adding that they would avoid leaving home, or move abroad…

A few hundred women, yet they’ve managed to back the French government against the wall and may yet defeat its attempt to control them. There are almost 450,000 of us; why can’t we do the same? We need to expose the “enlightenment police” for what they are: busybody control freaks who don’t give a damn about women’s dignity, but are happy to use it as an excuse for oppression.

One Year Ago Today

“Who Did Your Tits?” tells the story of how and why I went from not-quite-A to DDD, and how it affected my life.

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Surplus Women

Posted in Current Events, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged bad customers, cops, dehumanization, dirty, drivers, FBI, Georgia, harm reduction, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, North Carolina, psychology, rape, serial killers, South Carolina, stereotypes, streetwalkers, Surplus Women, Tennessee, violence vs. sex workers on September 27, 2011| 89 Comments »

What I did is not such a great harm, with all these surplus women nowadays. – Rudolf Pleil (“The Death Maker”)

Though idealists prefer to deny it, Man is a predatory animal in whom the killer instinct is as natural as the sexual impulse. An infant, given the power to do so, would destroy anyone who displeased him; it is only through maturation and socialization that we learn to curb our murderous impulses, or at least to restrict them to non-humans. And thereby hangs the tale; some humans never internalize the wrongfulness of violence and only avoid it out of self-preservation (i.e., to avoid being caught and punished), while others find socially-sanctioned outlets for their violent impulses or sublimate them into non-physical forms. But in all these cases there is still usually a thick enough layer of civilization that the individual is reluctant to attack others he perceives as being like himself, and this is where the process of dehumanization comes in; if he can convince himself that someone is somehow deserving of violence, or better still is less than human, he thereby shakes off the psychic fetters imposed by his upbringing which prevent him from attacking (or even killing) other humans.

Cops provide the classic example of this syndrome; though most of them are capable of functioning normally in society without victimizing others, many of them rationalize brutal, animalistic violence as acceptable if their victims are “criminals”, and with the vast expansion of laws in the past century that classification is no longer limited to genuine malefactors. But even most cops reserve their most murderous rages for those officially (or personally) designated as subhuman, such as Jews, Gypsies or black people. Many police departments use the slang term “NHI”, meaning “no humans involved”, for crimes committed against individuals that police consider not worth investigating; the term seems to have originated in Southern California in the 1960s and gained more widespread usage in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Does anyone doubt that if crimes committed against such individuals are ignored by police when a stranger commits them, that they will not be actively covered up when committed by a “brother officer”? And since prostitutes are included in the “NHI” category, we are all too often raped, robbed, beaten or otherwise victimized by cops with almost complete impunity.

Because of our “outsider” status, it’s very easy for the weak-minded to dehumanize whores. Under a criminalization regime we are “criminals”, according to Judeo-Christian tradition we are “sinners”, to aging wives we are “homewreckers” and to insecure men we represent the unacceptable truth that women are in control of the sexual sphere; even neofeminists like Melissa Farley represent us as helpless, passive, faceless victims of men, thus justifying their constant attacks on our lives and livelihoods despite their claims of universal sisterhood. Sometimes dehumanization is very subtle, as in the case of the clients who raped me or the trafficking fanatic in my column of one year ago today who was quick to attack a real prostitute for daring to be something other than an undifferentiated thing to be “rescued”; other times it’s horribly overt, as in this hate-comment I received on the same column.

But the most extreme dehumanization of prostitutes occurs in the minds of serial killers, who target us with terrifying regularity. Sometimes the reason is practical; as the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, expressed it, “I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.” Few people notice missing streetwalkers, and because of “NHI” attitudes police aren’t usually very eager to investigate such cases until mutilated corpses start turning up. But in other cases such as that of Jack the Ripper, the killer’s psychosis is specifically focused on prostitutes, probably because they are living representations of a female sexuality he hates and fears. And recently-identified serial killer John Boyer, whose story appeared in the Huffington Post on September 18^th, appears to have been somewhere in the middle:

Long-haul trucker John Boyer…[is] accused of at least three slayings and is suspected in a fourth. Boyer has pleaded guilty to killing a woman in North Carolina and faces murder charges..in Tennessee and South Carolina…The similarities of the cases and the apparent lack of remorse from Boyer have investigators encouraging their counterparts along highways around the Southeast to review unsolved killings and missing person files. Even his own attorney in the North Carolina case felt uneasy around him and wondered what else he might have done.

“I think there are a lot more. There’s no telling. This guy traveled all over the country. Hopefully we’ll get more of these cases solved through DNA,” said detective Scott Smith of the Hickman County, Tenn., sheriff’s office. In the case Smith investigated, Boyer picked up 25-year-old prostitute Jennifer Smith in April 2005 and brought her to an abandoned parking lot just off Interstate 40. The two argued over money, and Boyer strangled the victim with the seat belt of his truck, dumped her body from the cab, and drove off…her body was found in 2005 by a highway worker, but it took two years for investigators to match DNA found on her body to a sample Boyer gave after pleading guilty in North Carolina. Boyer confessed to the killing…but he also went on a tirade against women…

The investigator was chilled by the hatred toward women from a man who had never been married and lived with his mother near Augusta, Ga…Darlington County, S.C., Sheriff’s Capt. Andy Locklair immediately got the same impression when he stepped into an interview room to question Boyer about a killing in that state. The first thing Boyer said to him was: “What [bitch] are you here about?” [The body]…of 34-year-old Michelle Haggadone…was found in April 2000 beneath pine straw at a parking area on Interstate 20 near Florence, about 30 miles from the truck stop where Boyer had picked her up. Boyer immediately denied killing Haggadone, lashing out at Locklair and an investigator with him. “He said he had slept with a lot of prostitutes and a lot of them were detectives’ daughters or prosecutors’ daughters,” Locklair said…”I’m not a behavior science expert, but he has some deep, deep issues with women.” Haggadone was strangled with a wire or cord after the two argued over the price of her services, authorities said. Her body went unidentified for a decade, until a DNA sample from a relative matched a sample from her body…Locklair and another investigator realized several aspects of the crime, like what the victim was doing and where and how she was killed, matched the earlier slayings linked to Boyer…[who] will be taken to Tennessee to face a first-degree murder charge after his North Carolina sentence ends. Boyer is serving a sentence of up to 12 years…after pleading guilty in 2007 to second-degree murder for killing Scarlett Wood in Wilmington four years earlier. Boyer said he was doing drugs with the 31-year-old prostitute when they had an argument, he pushed her, and she struck her head on furniture…but an autopsy found Wood suffered broken ribs and facial bones, and her pelvic bones showed signs of a stabbing.

…Boyer is [also] a prime suspect in the death of 26-year-old Rose Marie Mallette, who was reported missing in 2001, said New Hanover County Sheriff’s Det. Ken Murphy, a cold case investigator in Wilmington. The reported prostitute’s remains were found wrapped in a blanket in an industrial area of the city a year later, the back of her skull crushed…Monica Caison, founder of Community United Effort Center for Missing Persons in Wilmington, said investigators need to look at three cases where women disappeared over five months in 1995 in Brunswick County, N.C., just west of Wilmington. “We have a lot of unsolved missing persons in the general area…Mr. Boyer was known to frequent… that alone warrants a second look,” Caison said. At least two of the unsolved cases involve woman who were small and slightly built, like Boyer’s other alleged victims…

According to this two-year-old story from the Telegraph, Boyer’s not alone; the FBI suspects a number of serial killers are working as long-haul truckers, the better to cover up their monstrous deeds. Undoubtedly Boyer is responsible for at least a few of these 500+ unsolved murders, but the others are still out there. Still, as an FBI agent quoted for the article said, “Many of the victims have been prostitutes and other women with high-risk lifestyles…We don’t want to scare the public and make it seem like every time you stop for gas you should look over your shoulder.” And though he tacked on the obligatory “they didn’t deserve to die,” I think the general gist of his statement is clear; it isn’t real women who need to worry, only surplus ones.

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Politicizing the Personal

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Words, tagged agency denial, BDSM, cosmetic surgery, fantasy, Japan, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, Norway, Politicizing the Personal, porn, psychology, stereotypes, tabula rasa, yin and yang on September 26, 2011| 51 Comments »

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. – Alice Walker

In 1970 Carol Hanisch published a second-wave feminist manifesto entitled “The Personal is Political”, and its title soon became a big feminist catchphrase. The only problem with that is, it’s a load of crap; usually, the personal is just personal, and declaring it to be political merely holds the door open for increasingly tyrannical intrusion into people’s private lives. The idea that “the personal is political” is borrowed from Marxist dogma and basically means that nearly any problem experienced by an individual woman is the result of “systematic oppression.” If she’s unhappy or has a screwed-up life it isn’t because she’s irrational, poor, uneducated, overly emotional, foolish or unlucky in the genetic lottery, or because she’s made bad choices, or because the world is intrinsically unfair and many people of both sexes are unhappy and have screwed-up lives; it’s because she is oppressed by the Patriarchy. This is, of course, a fundamentally defeatist, paranoid and narcissistic view which removes responsibility from the individual and places it into a social context that encourages permanent class warfare (or in this case, gender warfare). Since the two sexes are different by nature and will always be unequal in one way or another, this provided political feminists with a path to political power; women were essentially told that their situation was hopeless unless they supported the schemes of the feminist leadership in its brave and determined struggle against the Male Overlords.

There are many kinds of power, but the inherent simple-mindedness of second-wave feminism recognized only one type, political power, because it was the one political feminists craved and also the one women in the postwar era had least of. Power had to be portrayed as something entirely external to the individual, which helps to explain how neofeminism was able to take control of the movement so quickly; if women realized that one of the greatest (and biologically speaking, the greatest) forms of power, namely sexual power, was already ours from birth, the Neomarxist catechism would be revealed as absurd and organized political feminism would collapse. So neofeminists intentionally reversed the truth, portraying sex as something men used to control women rather than the other way around. Second-wave feminism had launched itself by proclaiming that a woman could not take power for herself; she had to be empowered from outside (by a benevolent government controlled or at least influenced by political feminists). Neofeminism merely established a dogma designed to cut women off from their own natural powers by alienating them from their own bodies and femininity, the sources of those powers. To use a concrete analogy, the only way to consistently sell baby formula is to dry up women’s own milk or to convince them that nursing is unhealthy, disgusting or morally wrong.

“Empowered” is a deceptively simple word; it seems straightforward enough until you realize its underlying assumptions. To “empower” someone is to grant her power; it automatically implies A) that she hasn’t got any in the first place, and B) that such power is the speaker’s to give. Using the word in an active sense (“we need to empower women”) establishes the speaker or his organization as the intrinsic superior and benefactor of the person or persons so “empowered”, and using the word in a passive sense (“an empowered woman”) robs the person so “empowered” of agency, reducing her to the passive recipient of someone else’s benevolence just as people were imagined to be “granted” rights by a king in archaic political theory. Consider the way bureaucrats from Western nations use the word in reference to the people of developing nations, and you will understand how neofeminists and politicized second-wave feminists view other women.

The word “disempowered” is equally patronizing because it implies that the one so “disempowered” (usually a woman) is a weak, passive, vegetable organism who can be “empowered” or “disempowered” at will by her political masters as easily as one installs or removes batteries from a toy. With all that in mind, take a look at this article by Tracy Clark-Flory from the September 12^th Salon:

…a new study investigates the link between a country’s relative gender equality and the degree of female “empowerment” in the X-rated entertainment it consumes. Researchers at the University of Hawaii focused on three countries in particular: Norway, the United States and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1^st, 15^th and (yikes) 54^th on the United Nations’ Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). To simplify their analysis, their library of smut was limited to explicit photographs of women “from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation.” Then they set out to evaluate each image on both a disempowerment and an empowerment scale, using respective measures like whether the woman is “bound and dominated” by “leashes, collars, gags, or handcuffs” or “whether she has a natural looking body.” Their hypothesis was that societies with greater gender equity will consume pornography that has more representations of “empowered women” and less of “disempowered women.” It turned out the former was true, but…the latter was not. “While Norwegian pornography offers a wider variety of body types — conforming less to a societal ideal that is disempowering to the average woman — there are still many images that do not promote a healthy respect for women,” the researchers explain…

All researchers have biases which negatively impact the objectivity of their studies, but it’s rare that any outside of “women’s studies” are so glaringly obvious. These academics are clearly laboring under the delusion that sexual desires are “socially constructed”, revealing a deep ignorance of biology and evolutionary psychology. Furthermore, they clearly accept without question insulting and ignorant neofeminist beliefs about BDSM, have what I can only interpret as bigotry against cosmetic surgery and promote the degrading collectivist notion (perhaps related to the neofeminist gestalt myth) that it is “unhealthy” for men to be attracted to whatever kind of women they’re attracted to because it might make less attractive women feel bad. Flory, who is generally pro-sex and pro-sex work, sees the flaws in these assumptions:

…One explanation might be that…cross-cultural biological imperatives are reflected in pornography. Some of the study’s disempowerment markers could be more a reflection of the gender disparity in porn’s audience. The researchers note, “In a large portion of hardcore pornography…the erect penis is the most important organ” and “women are often used as little more than receptacles for the penis.” Is that because of sexism or because porn viewers, who are largely men, identify with…the male member?

…You can’t so easily equate dominance with empowerment and submission with disempowerment. Take, as one example, that the researchers designate a woman in an “authoritative” position as a sign of empowerment. That formula can be easily upended — clearly, submission feels empowering to plenty of people. It’s also awfully subjective: The popular line within the BDSM community is that it’s the submissive that has all the power, because they’re the ones calling the shots…sex isn’t always empowering or disempowering, equitable or inequitable — it’s much too complicated for that.

The researchers’ appalling ignorance of BDSM is apparent in their interpretation of dominatrix characters as a sign of female “empowerment”, despite the fact that such characters are as much archetypal male fantasy figures as are female slaves. Actors play roles; to assume that an actress playing a dominatrix role is somehow more “empowered” than one in a sub role is as ridiculous as assuming that the actor playing a king in an historical drama must be the star simply because his character is more important inside the fantasy world of the movie. But the most important point to note is the researchers’ patronizing assumption that male porn viewers are so impressionable that their level of “respect for women” can essentially be programmed by the content of their wanking material, and that women are such passive, childlike beings that mere images on a screen can grant them “power” or take it away.

One Year Ago Today

“Imaginary Victims” examines the difficulty trafficking fetishists have in coming up with even a few poster children to represent the phantom multitudes upon which their propaganda depends.

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Fictional Interlude: Dance of the Seasons

Posted in Fiction, History, Philosophy, tagged Africa, archeofeminism, ethics, Madonna/whore, naturalness, psychology on September 22, 2011| 14 Comments »

As I said in my column on the Ouled Nail, the tribe’s origins are lost to history, but we can be certain their dancers were already entertaining travelers by the time the Arabs appeared in the 7^th century CE. And since the antecedents of the Berbers were painting on the rocks at Tassili some 2000 years before the last glaciers retreated from Europe, it may be that their customs are very ancient indeed and could perhaps be related to the myth that North Africa was ruled by the Amazons in the time of Atlantis. I will not ask you to imagine a period so remote; for the purpose of this story, I ask that you grant me only that the dancing harlots of Algeria were already practicing their customs as I described them roughly 1000 years before the advent of the Arabs.

“Grandmother, what are they like, the men from the sea? Mother says they are different from our men and even from the nomads and merchants.”

“And so they are; they have great wealth and learning, but they are filled with a restlessness which drives them to change the world, so that they are often ill at ease with even their own customs, much less those of others.”

The girl’s face clearly registered her confusion, so her grandmother said “I shall tell you a story of one such man, a regular patron of mine for many years, and then perhaps you will understand.

“The Wheel of the Year had turned all the way ‘round once again, and the sun had come to the place in his dance which signaled it was time for us to go down to the city. And so my husband and brother loaded our camels and we bade them goodbye and rode down to seek our fortunes as I had fourteen times before, and as my mother and her mother before her had ridden in their turns. I was married by that time and so no longer danced or allowed men to come in to my room, but my two younger sisters needed my guidance and that year my own eldest daughter, your mother, was at last old enough to begin working for her own fortune.

“I knew the way well and there were no mishaps, and this well pleased your mother, for she was full of the fire of youth and would have chafed at any delay in her debut. It was all I could do to restrain her enthusiasm sufficiently to enforce rest upon our arrival; given her way she would have been dancing for her first coins ere the sun set! But the next day was soon enough; as I told her there was no need for haste, and she would not be any the poorer at season’s end for having rested from her journey.

“The next night we laughed, her aunts and I, as I had known we would; all the years of lessons could not have prepared her for the exhaustion of body and mind one feels after one’s first day of dancing for strangers. But she had done well, and the men had been kind, and I knew that by the time the merchants from Carthage started to appear in a few weeks she would be ready to impress them as I had done at her age. And this was important, as it will be for you, for in addition to their gold they bring pearls, incense, perfumes, raisin wine and fine purple cloth, and other precious things from across the sea. But to gain these treasures one must employ all of her charms to stand out from the other girls, for Carthage is a great city and her men have seen wonders and lain with the beauties of many nations.

“Soon they came as they always did, few in number but with sufficient guards to protect the expensive goods they brought to our land to trade; they were met by nomads bringing gold, ivory and precious stones and sometimes even the elephants the Carthaginians prize for their army. And when the trading was done for the day they wanted entertainment, and I am proud to say your mother won their money with as much skill as some girls who had been dancing for years. I knew that they were led by a man who was very fond of me, Mago by name, because he had already sent one of his servants to ask if he might visit me that evening as had been his custom for fourteen years.”

“But surely you did not lie with him!”

“No, child; when I found a husband I gave up earning money thus, as you will when your turn comes. But he still enjoyed dining with me and talking to me, and as the needs of his body could be satisfied by my younger sisters he was content to respect my vows. But I found my old friend in a strange humor that evening; he was strangely silent at dinner, and ate little of the fine food I had prepared for him. He seemed overwhelmed with melancholy, and asked me strange questions he had never asked before; ‘Why do you live in this way?’ he asked, and ‘Do you not want better for your daughter?’ It quickly became clear to me that it was the presence of your mother which had affected him so; he knew of our customs, and indeed had met my own mother in the days when she travelled to town with me. But because he had come to know me, it seemed to him a different thing for me to train my own daughter as a harlot than for others to do so.

“‘This is the way of our people,’ I told him, ‘and it has ever been so since the days when antelope grazed on the grasses of this land which is now a desert. I learned the craft from my mother, as she learned from hers, and so on back to the Great Mothers of the beginning. And as I have taught my daughter so she shall teach hers, and each shall dance and work and love in her season until the end of the world.’ But my words only agitated him; he spoke of ‘progress’, and ‘sacrifice’, and the latter word came with great bitterness and eyes shining with unshed tears. I told him I did not understand, and he said that it was our job to build a better world for our children, one which was kinder to them; I replied, ‘any changes we make to the world are mortal, just as the things of the world itself. Did you not yourself tell me long years ago that Carthage is the daughter of an older empire, now since fallen into ruin? And no doubt that empire was built on the bones of another, and one day great Carthage herself must die as we all die. Each learns from those that have come before, as we learn our trade from our mothers; each dances in her youth, and accumulates wealth and stature, and brings forth offspring and then moves on. Summer gives way to autumn, and autumn to winter; we can teach and advise the young, but they must earn their own rewards. We cannot do it for them, nor force them to live in a way appropriate to the mature or old.’

“But it was no use; he heard my words but there was a secret pain in him, something of which he would not speak, and he looked upon your mother and sighed with profound sadness. Then he took from his satchel a great treasure, a jar of the purple dye worth twenty times its weight in gold, and presented it to me in trust for your mother, ‘To hasten the day when she can buy a house and have daughters of her own,’ he said. Then he embraced us both and left, and never again did I see him after that night, though she and I returned every season, always staying in the same house, until she married.”

Dihya sat quietly for a moment, and then shook her head and said, “Strange indeed.” And then, “Thank you, grandmother,” and excused herself to join a group of her friends she had espied through the window.

Her mother had remained quiet throughout the story, but after the girl had quit the room she spoke. “Though almost twenty years have passed I well remember that night, and often have I thought upon the man who endowed me with such a valuable gift, yet asked for nothing in return. Was it merely a token of his love for you?”

“No, it was more than that,” the older woman said. “He and I were both reasonably certain that he was your father.”

One Year Ago Today

The second part of my very first Q & A column.

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Guest Columnist: Norma Jean Almodovar (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Guest Columns, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, anecdote, Backpage, bad customers, censorship, consensual crime, cops, Craigslist, dirty, ethics, harm reduction, hysteria, law, lawheads, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, prisons, psychology, rape, serial killers, slavery, stereotypes, sweatshops, underage on September 17, 2011| 21 Comments »

Today’s column is the second part of a guest blog by veteran sex worker rights activist Norma Jean Almodovar which addresses the ethical and flaws inherent in the authoritarian campaign against Backpage.com.

Says Jamie Fellner, senior counsel for the US Program at Human Rights Watch, “The widespread sexual abuse of children in juvenile facilities shows that public officials either aren’t paying attention or can’t be bothered to do the right thing. The high rates of victimization are powerful testimony to the failure of governments to safeguard the boys and girls in their care.” In none of the cases of more than 17,000 raped juveniles in 2008, did Backpage.com or any other adult classified ads website play any part in their abuse. The government that claims to want to save them, however, did. “More than 50 cases of trafficking or attempted trafficking of minors on Backpage.com have been filed in 22 states in the past three years…” according to the letter released by 45 state Attorneys General, but these numbers pale in comparison to the number of juveniles who are either raped while they are “placed under the protective custody of law enforcement,” or by their local cop, boy scout leader, priest, preacher, or parent.

Are these State Attorneys General all completely ignorant of the findings and statistics from reports that our own government compiles and issues? If they are ignorant of the facts, they are dangerous people and they really ought not be overseeing the prosecution of anyone for anything. If they are aware of the facts and are ignoring them, what exactly is the motive for that? As I stated earlier, this isn’t about the children and never was. As one of the letter’s signatories, Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna would like nothing more than to see Backpage shut down its “escorts” section, just as Craigslist did last year. He commented, “Legal wranglings aside, it will take a cultural shift to change attitudes about prostitution…People look at prostitution and think it’s a choice, but there are very few, if any, volunteers”. What has that to do with “protecting children”? It is already against the law for adults to have sex with minors regardless of payment. It’s called statutory rape. If it is wrong for adults to have sex with minors because it is sexual exploitation, why on earth are we arresting them and subjecting them to worse horrors in jail? Would we arrest underage persons who are raped by priests? Or teachers? Would we arrest the teenage Explorer Scout victims of police officers who can’t keep their hands off the underage females in the scouting program? “Volunteers”? These State Attorneys General want to shut down adult ads to “protect” women because they may or may not “volunteer” to engage in prostitution? Why are we arresting them and putting them in harms’ way in jail where they are all too often forced to engage in sex with the corrections officers and jail guards? I don’t think they ‘volunteer’ to be the sex slaves of their captors!

What kind of precedent are we setting that our government officials would attempt to ban any labor that, in someone else’s opinion, is not done “voluntarily”? Are we now defining “forced labor” as any work that someone would not “choose” to do? How many women “volunteer” to be housekeepers in low end hotels where they must clean up the vomit, feces and urine on the floor left by untidy guests? Even maids at high end hotels have to deal with unruly guests who may rape them – high powered guests like Dominique Strauss-Kahn. How many women “volunteer” to work as domestic servants, cleaning up after households in which the adult males may force their unwanted sexual attentions on them when the wives are not home? Are these States Attorneys General not aware of how many victims of human trafficking are forced into domestic service – in the US and around the world? According to some international reports on human trafficking, the number of women and girls who are forced into domestic service far outnumber those who are “trafficked” into prostitution. Most child domestic workers are between 12 and 17 but some are as young as five or six. Does anyone believe that these children “choose” to become domestic servants? Or the adults who also find themselves trafficked for the purpose of being a domestic slave? Why don’t these politicians care as much about the “forced labor” of those who are so desperate for money that they must work long hours in factories, sewing garments (sweat shops), picking fruits or vegetables or flipping burgers at McDonalds – as they “care” about supposed victims of “sex trafficking”? We arrest women whose only “crime” is that they may not have “volunteered” to work as escorts making $200 an hour or more but we don’t arrest their poor sisters who do not “volunteer” to do menial labor earning minimum wage or less?

If these politicians were to be consistent in their crusade to save victims of human trafficking, they would demand that all classified sites, newspapers, magazines and other media outlets discontinue advertising help wanted for any type of labor (such as domestic service, garment manufacturing, agriculture) into which someone, somewhere in the world is trafficked. Truth be told, many if not most of those who champion for the arrest of prostitutes or their clients on the grounds that all sex work is modern day slavery, hire domestic help so that they can spend their time saving the poor exploited women and children trafficked into the sex trade. Do you think that Demi Moore and her boy toy spouse Ashton Kutcher scrub their own toilets and clean their own home? Are they not aware that in many countries around the world, domestic servitude is the primary destination for victims of human trafficking? Or do they just not care?

Unfortunately for sex workers, the US Government is only concerned about the humans trafficked into prostitution. It is the US Government’s official position that all prostitution must be eliminated, at whatever the cost to those who, for whatever reason and in whatever manner that people make choices, are prostitutes. Regardless of the absurdity of their methods and the harm to those whom they say they want to protect, the US Government has decided that the next multi-billion dollar war against its own citizens is the war against commercial sex. It will not be a pretty war, and just as in the other “wars” against its “immoral” citizens, it will come at the cost of more of our liberties. In their view, what is the value of the first amendment when “women are selling their bodies”? Better that we let cops have laws which allow them to rape and extort the hussies! So let’s chuck the first amendment. Force newspapers and websites to kowtow to “our way of thinking” or be put out of business. That amendment is a nuisance and in the way of all the other government programs to protect us from ourselves anyway.

From the The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, February 2005, Volume 8, Number 1:

Combating sex trafficking, then, is a complicated matter. The moral imperative to rescue women from brothels is compelling when young girls are involved or there is clear evidence of duress, but “rescuing” adult women from brothels against their will can mean an end to their health care and economic survival. In countries and situations in which basic survival is a daily struggle, the distinction between free agency and oppression may be more a gray area than a bright line. Indeed, the Center for Health and Gender Equity observes that sex workers who resist rescues may not do so because they would prefer commercial sex as a lifestyle, other things being equal, but because there are no “viable economic alternatives to feed and clothe themselves and their families.” Conservative U.S. groups that have entered the larger discussion around trafficking through the issue of sex trafficking, such as the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America (CWA) and The Salvation Army, dismiss these complexities. Prostitution, as CWA asserts, is by definition “a form of slavery” and, as such, must be abolished. According to Jennifer Block, writing in Conscience, U.S. Ambassador John Miller, director of the State Department’s Office of Monitoring and Combating Trafficking in Persons, credits conservative organizations’ activism for the political momentum that led to the enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the final year of the Clinton administration. It is no surprise, then, that the Bush administration is interpreting and implementing the TVPA by placing a priority on combating sex trafficking and, by extension, abolishing prostitution.

Oddly though, despite the fact that many radical feminists would like to skewer and pillory the customers of prostitutes, prohibitionists with a moral agenda do not seem to care at all about punishing the men who hire prostitutes – despite their claims to the contrary. There is clearly some other motive at work when a man like Eliot Spitzer can commit a federal felony of interstate trafficking and not only NOT go to prison for decades as you or I would if charged with that crime – but not even get arrested. Or when a man like Republican Senator David Vitter can confess to bizarre fantasies of dressing in diapers, and be re-elected by his conservative constituency – and Randall Tobias, the man in charge of doling out money to international AIDS organizations so long as they signed a pledge to not support decriminalization of prostitution, gets to retire at full pension while Deborah Jeanne Palfrey, the madam who supplied him with women for his happy endings, was convicted and faced 55 years in prison. And then there is former adviser to President Clinton, Dick Morris, who, after his prostitution scandal, became a commentary on Fox News.

I’ve already covered the kid glove treatment of Federal Judge Jack Camp and the Albuquerque Judge who sentenced to probation former Albuquerque cop David Maes who raped a prostitute. Heidi Fleiss client Charlie Sheen admitted to hiring prostitutes AND using drugs – as well as committing domestic violence on his spouses – on a regular basis and continued to be the top grossing television actor on CBS (until he annoyed the writer and producer of the hit show), while Heidi went to prison. Previously unknown actor Hugh Grant had a momentary lapse of judgment and his indiscretion rocketed him to stardom, while his prostitute Divine Brown went to jail. High profile Christian ministers Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, George Rekers, Eddie Long and other members of the clergy get caught hiring prostitutes, either deny their sexual indiscretions or exhibit sufficient remorse, and go on preaching the word of the Lord and continuing to rake in the dough from their understanding and tolerant parishioners. But when teacher and former sex worker Melissa Petro outed herself in an article she wrote about her previous profession, a journalist who decided that Melissa didn’t have a right to be proud of her “shady” past and still be a teacher, took matters in her own hands and forced the school board to “reassign” the “ho”. Melissa is currently unemployed and unemployable. All the sentimental claptrap about “prostitutes having no choices” as a reason to abolish our profession apparently means that if you are a sex worker who puts yourself through college to “better yourself”, and you don’t express remorse about your sordid past when it is exposed, society is going to make certain that you lose that job and then you won’t have any choices at all. As Melissa discovered, once you are branded a prostitute, no one wants to hire you.

We are also told that prostitution should remain illegal because it is a dangerous profession and there are unhinged outcasts of society out there who murder them, but when a woman gets arrested for prostitution, the local newspaper often prints or posts online the woman’s name, photo and in many cases, home address. News sources such as Charleston, South Carolina’s WCIV, Shreveport, Louisiana’s KSLA, and Massachusetts’ Lexington Patch, Wayland Patch and Metrowest Daily News defend this practice because, they say, they print the names and photos of all persons arrested for crimes, except they do not publish the names and addresses of cops who rape prostitutes or who have sex with minors. But the prostitute is supposed to be the victim of sexual exploitation and while some prostitutes may welcome the free advertising to find new customers, it is disingenuous to say the least to assert that prostitution is dangerous on the one hand and post a photo of the home of a “suspected prostitute” for a serial killer to find her without having to troll the streets looking for victims.

How much more evidence does society need to realize that neither the Federal Government or the State Attorneys General are in the least bit concerned for the well being of prostitutes of whatever age? And tell me again why these politicians are demanding that Backpage.com close down its adult ads?

One Year Ago Today

Please don’t eat or drink anything while reading “BDSM (Part Three)”. Trust me on this.

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Size Matters

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged Aphrodite, Arizona, brothels, Catholicism, cops, dirty, drugs, ethics, law, lawheads, Madonna/whore, paganism, Prohibition (alcohol), sacred prostitutes, Size Matters, stage names on September 14, 2011| 33 Comments »

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution. – Alexander Hamilton

I’d like to thank all the readers who called the story about the raid on the Phoenix Goddess Temple to my attention; I first heard about the temple back in February when the Phoenix New Times published an article on it. When I read that article, I have to admit I was a bit confused, bemused and appalled. Some of their professed beliefs sounded a bit hokey to me, I thought it was odd and irregular to have males claiming to represent the female principle, and I was rather offended by the practitioners calling themselves “goddesses” (which is either hubris or garden-variety megalomania). But I could make similar statements about a lot of religious beliefs, just as I’m sure others find fault with mine; I have no right to tell others what they can or can’t believe, nor do I have the power to look into their hearts to divine whether those beliefs are sincere or merely some kind of dodge.

Police and prosecutors, however, have no such principles; like the healers of the Goddess Temple they profess themselves to be gods (of the little tin variety) and imagine that they have the ability to read minds and thereby determine guilt or insincerity. And since they have heavily-armed goon squads enforcing their pronouncements, no matter how divorced from reality those pronouncements might be, I was utterly mystified at the Temple’s allowing a reporter to describe exactly what went on in their rituals, even to calling their practice “new age prostitution”; it was as though they somehow failed to realize that they were inviting a pogrom. Of course, the cops are doing their usual strutting, crowing and slandering; the ones interviewed by Phoenix New Times for this September 8^th follow-up story made the typical claims of having the witch-doctor-like magical ability to see guilt (“This was no more a church than Cuba was fantasy island”), projected their own criminality onto their victims (“They hid behind religious freedom to protect their crimes”) and lied (in the passive voice, of course) about their persecution tactics (“there are policies we follow, guidelines we use so we don’t entrap people…you can presume in this case that acts of prostitution were arranged.”)

As usual, the comments on online reports of the story are largely of the “why aren’t you losers fighting real crime?” variety; it’s clear that the computer-literate segment of the public is overwhelmingly in favor of either decriminalization or legalization, and equally clear that the self-proclaimed overlords aren’t listening. But this time there’s another type of comment, ones based in the religious freedom angle; though comments on a pagan site (called to my attention by regular reader Tonja) seemed divided between “we need to support their right to religious freedom” and “those dirty criminals give pagans a bad name”, the comments on mainstream sites were actually more uniformly supportive of the Temple and critical of the cops. And though some of the pagan commenters agreed with some atheist commenters (such as Furry Girl) that the law doesn’t allow exemption for religions, that really isn’t true; there are a number of cases of religions being granted exemptions for victimless crimes. For example, during Prohibition the Catholic Church was officially allowed to use sacramental wine, and American Indians are allowed to use peyote in religious ceremonies, despite the fact that it’s a felony for anybody else.

The truth is, religions get special legal treatment all the time, as long as they’re big enough (the “Native American Church” isn’t that large, but has a large political support base because Indians are practically the definition of an oppressed minority). There are lots of different pagan groups in the United States, but because they aren’t unified they can’t lobby for special treatment like the big boys can. The same goes for sex workers; if we were better organized (like certain other sexual minorities who have in recent years almost completely reversed their historical mistreatment) it would be much more difficult for the prohibitionists to shout us down. Because at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter whether a minority group is persecuted for the race, beliefs, ancestry, politics or sexual practices of its members; all that matters is that it is large enough and loud enough to be heard over the greatly-amplified voices of cops and politicians pontificating through their bullhorns about why it’s right and moral to oppress them.

One Year Ago Today

“Flavor of the Month” is essentially an autobiography of my bisexuality.

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The Girls from Tarzana

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged anecdote, bad customers, brothels, California, censorship, France, Hollywood, imaginative fiction, Madonna/whore, Mars, rape, slavery on September 12, 2011| 18 Comments »

…in this splendid novel…Mr. Burroughs has…given you as remarkable a heroine as you might expect. For the Girl was a member of “the oldest profession in the world,” and the hero was foreman of the grand jury. – Editorial foreword to The Girl from Farris’s

Near the end of June, regular reader Americanus sent me an email containing the following passage:

…the French military had a group called “Mobile Field Brothels”…The women were all volunteers from French Algeria and part of a tribe known as the Ouled Nail…[who] teach their young women the arts of dancing and prostitution. The young women then go out and…[work] to gain a large enough dowry…once they do, they return to the tribe and marry without any resentment on the part of the men.

I found this exciting not merely as a great column topic, but also because I had encountered the term “Ouled Nail” before. I’m sure regular readers have noticed that I have an exceptional memory, and can often recall unusual words encountered years before. And I remembered exactly where I had seen this one; in The Return of Tarzan, the ape-man escapes his enemies with the assistance of an Ouled Nail. In the book, the term is used synonymously with “dancing girl”, and I was thrilled to discover the extra dimension which linked this character to my own profession. But Tarzan’s friend is not the only harlot to appear in his creator’s oeuvre, and so I’d like to follow yesterday’s column on the Ouled Nail with one on whores in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Each of the works cited contains a link to a free online copy, so if you intend to read them please be warned that this column contains spoilers. Also note that The Return of Tarzan and The Gods of Mars are sequels to Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars, respectively.

As I’ve said before, when my beloved cousin Jeff taught me to read he preferred to use his own favorites rather than “baby books”, and the authors to whom he introduced me over the next few years are still among my favorites. One of these was Burroughs, who is most famous as the creator of Tarzan but also wrote several other series and many stand-alone works in a career which stretched from 1912 to his death in 1950. Burroughs is generally considered a “men’s author”, and that is a shame because his books are full of romance and strong, interesting female characters; I honestly believe that one of the reasons I found traditional romance novels boring was that in Burroughs’ stories I found love intertwined with adventure in settings which excited my young imagination. And though he was in many ways a product of the Victorian Era (born 1875), he had some very liberal views about nudity and sex which, though restrained in his earlier works by commercial necessity, are much more obvious in his writings of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

While researching yesterday’s column I revisited The Return of Tarzan and discovered that, though Burroughs’ understanding of the Ouled Nail is clearly faulty, he does hint at their prostitution in a passage from chapter 7: “The frightened Ouled-Nails were crouching at the tops of the stairs which led to their respective rooms, the only light in the courtyard coming from the sickly candles which each girl had stuck with its own grease to the woodwork of her door-frame, the better to display her charms to those who might happen to traverse the dark enclosure.” The story takes place in 1910, after the French authorities had restricted the Nailiyat to working for licensed cafes, and the girl who tips Tarzan off to the planned attack and helps him to escape his pursuers is depicted as a slave, abducted by marauders and sold to the café owner. She senses Tarzan’s nobility by the way he speaks to her and the respectful manner in which he tips her after her dance, and so alerts him to his danger at great risk to herself. Of course Tarzan rescues her from the café and returns her to her father, and in chapter 10 she again risks her life to rescue him from another band of nomads hired by the villainous Nikolas Rokoff to accomplish what two previous groups of hirelings had failed to do. Not all of the whores Tarzan encounters are so principled; in chapter 3 of the same book, Rokoff hires a Parisian streetwalker to lure Tarzan into an ambush by calling for help, and after he defeats his assailants she lies to the police, telling them that the ruffians had tried to save her from an attempted rape by Tarzan.

Burroughs also tried his hand at contemporary drama; the heroine of The Efficiency Expert (1921) is a prostitute called “Little Eva” who befriends the hero when he works for a while as a waiter at a cabaret she frequents. Her belief in him inspires him to apply for the titular position, and her unflagging support keeps him going when he is later accused of murder; he is acquitted due largely to evidence she collects herself, and only her death in an influenza epidemic keeps him from marrying her. I’ve never quite forgiven Burroughs for the poor girl’s fate, though I’m sure he could not have used the ending I wanted in an Argosy title of that time. June Lathrop, the heroine of The Girl from Farris’s (1920) dodges the censors in a different way; though in the first scene she escapes from a brothel and we assume throughout the novella that she is a (reformed) prostitute, it is revealed at the end that she was actually the victim of a bigamist who had merely housed her in a room rented from the brothel owner. Thus, she is free to marry the hero without provoking outrage in the readership.

Burroughs pushed the envelope a little farther in The Girl from Hollywood (1922), whose titular character, Shannon Burke, is an actress who becomes the kept woman of a director who “auditions” her on the “casting couch” and then gets her addicted to morphine in order to control her. While shooting on location at the Rancho del Ganado (a fictionalized version of Burroughs’ own Tarzana ranch, on which the town of Tarzana, California was later built) she befriends the Pennington family (based on the Burroughs family), who help her to break her addiction and even forgive her for her sordid past. The standards of the day did not allow Burroughs to allow an unrepentant whore a happy ending, and indeed the one heroine who is specifically described as a prostitute (and not excused via enslavement or downplayed as a kept woman) has to be killed off at the end as in Camille. However, I think it’s clear that in all of these cases he does his best to show that the mere fact of a “sinful” life does not make a woman “bad”, and indeed his fictional analog even bestows his blessings on a relationship between such a woman and his own fictional son!

My final example (and certainly the most coy treatment of the subject) is Thuvia, Princess of Ptarth on the planet Mars. Burroughs’ Martians believe in a physical paradise at the South Pole of their planet, presided over by a race of living gods called the Therns; those who are very old (their natural lifespan is over a thousand years) or tired of life can make a Pilgrimage to this paradise and never return to the outer world. But as the hero John Carter discovers in The Gods of Mars (1913), the whole thing is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by the evil and cannibalistic Therns, and those who make the Pilgrimage are captured and either eaten or enslaved. Some years before Carter’s arrival, the beautiful but moody young Thuvia makes the Pilgrimage (for reasons never disclosed) and becomes the plaything of a Thern leader. After her rescue by John Carter (who exposes the whole horrible scam to the world) she returns home and is treated like a virgin despite the fact that after years as the slave of a degenerate cult she absolutely could not be in any literal sense. The only thing I can guess is that, though Martian standards of female chastity are Victorian in their rigidity, an exception is made for rape; and though most Martian noblewomen would rather commit suicide than submit to violation, Thuvia instead chose to live. This is but one of the enigmas surrounding Thuvia, who is certainly one of the most interesting characters in the series; I believe her to be, like the Ouled Nail of Sidi Aissa, one of the earliest examples in the development of Burroughs’ recognition that there was something not quite right in the conventional ideas of female sexual morality prevalent in his time.

One Year Ago Today

“Greek God”, a short story I wrote in 1985, is the earliest example of my writing which has ever appeared on this blog.

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To Spite Their Faces

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, tagged archeofeminism, dirty, ethics, Madonna/whore, marriage, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, psychology, rape, sisterhood, To Spite Their Faces, United Kingdom, yin and yang on September 6, 2011| 40 Comments »

The danger [of feminism] is that the study and contemplation of “ourselves” may become so absorbing that it builds by slow degrees a high wall that shuts out the great world of thought. – Rheta Childe Dorr

In 867 AD Saint Æbbe the Younger, the Mother Superior of a convent in Coldingham, Scotland, is said to have cut off her nose and urged her nuns to do the same so that approaching Viking raiders would find them repulsive and would therefore not rape them, thus preserving their chastity. Apparently, the plan worked too well; the Vikings were so disgusted that they burned down the convent. This legend and others like it (which are actually not unusual among hagiographies) is the probable source of the European idiom “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”, meaning to overreact to a situation in a petulant and self-destructive manner. Ironically, when I was researching this column I encountered a comment from a good, brainwashed little feminist who insisted that the story couldn’t be true because (all together now), “rape is a crime of power and control, not sex.” Obviously, 9^th-century Scottish nuns must have known of and believed 20^th-century American feminist dogma. And though this silly woman’s denial of reality is somewhat amusing, the more widespread feminist denial of reality is not; if anything, it’s quite sad. Feminist writers live in an echo chamber where nobody ever questions their highly-questionable interpretation of reality, so when someone comes along and states facts which are as obvious as the nose on one’s face yet contradict feminist dogma, the writers must attempt to shout those facts down. And if the knowledge would actually give women some advantage in the world, but would require abandoning cherished feminist beliefs in order to put it to use, modern feminists advocate following the example of Saint Æbbe.

Regular readers may remember Dr. Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics, whom I mentioned in my column of January 11^th in conjunction with her findings that, as I put it, “many if not most women are simply not interested in all-consuming, male-style careers and prefer to ‘marry up’ or take jobs which allow them to enjoy their lives and concentrate on their families rather than forcing them to sell their souls to corporations as so many men do.” Now she’s published a new book entitled Erotic Capital which outlines her insight that economists need to consider women’s erotic power as a form of capital alongside the three recognized (and unisex) forms of capital (economic, cultural, and social). She suggests that there is nothing wrong or immoral with women using their looks and sexuality to get ahead, and that one of the reasons patriarchal societies have suppressed women’s sexuality is to prevent our using that sexuality to our advantage.

Anyone in her right mind knows that women already do this, and anyone who really cares about the happiness and self-actualization of women should be glad someone with Dr. Hakim’s reputation and credentials has pointed it out. So of course feminists have greeted the book with accolades, pleased to see that young women are being encouraged to use their personal assets in order to succeed, right? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! You’re so funny! Of course they haven’t, because acting like women and using their female power are things women can do for themselves, without the help of feminist “leaders”, and femininity, flirting and being charming and sweet are anathema to a cult steeped in androgyny, misandry and neo-Victorian prudery. Furthermore, the idea that young, intelligent third-wave feminists and {gasp!} women who don’t identify as feminists at all might be able to use their feminine charms to outcompete aging, pudgy, bitchy second-wave feminists isn’t going to sit well with the latter, who are naturally going to reject the realization that if female sexuality is indeed a form of capital, they’ve been essentially using cash as toilet paper for decades.

So, how would you expect the Guardian, that bastion of responsible British journalism, to report on Hakim’s book? Why, by assigning an aging second-wave feminist to interview the author and a younger second-wave disciple to review the book, of course! The results reinforce nearly every stereotype about how women are supposed to hate other women, but of course these writers are just too busy spiting their faces to recognize what they’re doing to their noses. The interview by Zoe Williams is so awful I had to read it in three sittings; it’s like a cross between a Hollywood gossip column and Maureen Dowd on a really bad day. The second paragraph is representative of the whole:

We meet in Covent Garden, over fancy tapas. She arrives and says, “I must go and brush my hair,” which she really needn’t have done, because I don’t buy her theory. I don’t care what someone’s hair looks like, I find hair neither impedes nor accelerates a discussion about ideas. I did not say so, thank God, even in jest, otherwise our encounter could have been even worse than it was.

Because, you know, what a middle-aged feminist cares about is exactly the same as what a man cares about. And it just degenerates from there. The review by Elizabeth Day isn’t quite as venomous, but it’s bad enough:

There is so much to object to in this book that it is hard to know where to start…according to Hakim, none of that education or career nonsense that our mothers and our grandmothers fought so hard to give us access to carries much weight any more. In fact, as the fairer sex, our time would be far better spent getting a spray tan, slimming down our muffin-tops at the gym and emulating the “vivacious” personality of the glamour model Katie Price…That, apparently, is how we can earn more money (the most attractive among us, says Hakim, can earn 12% more than those dumpy trolls who haven’t made the effort) and enjoy more fulfilling relationships with those around us. I’m sorry. Did I fall asleep and wake up in the 1950s? Is Hakim seriously suggesting that prostitution should be legalised, that surrogate pregnancy is an untapped income stream for women, that pimping is a good thing (“a win-win arrangement”) and that the extent of human trafficking has been whipped up by the media to provide “the latest excuse for moral panics and crusades over the sex industry”. Yes! Yes, she is!

Prostitution legalized? The horror! Call out the Ladies Gospel Temperance League! I must admit it’s fascinating to watch militant feminists trumpeting their ignorance as wisdom; prostitution is already legal in the U.K. despite tyrannical laws “regulating” it, and as my readers well know the extent of human trafficking has indeed been exaggerated as an excuse for a crusade against the sex industry. Well, I guess you don’t need facts when you’ve got rhetoric.

Of course, not all female British journalists have their heads up their own bums; Samantha Brick, writing for the Daily Mail, points out that any woman with sense uses her looks and charm to get ahead:

…[Men] adore being flirted with, love to have their egos stroked and…yearn for the attention of an attractive woman…you don’t have to be born beautiful to learn how to use your erotic capital. I was a shy, overweight, dumpy child, who grew into a self-conscious, spotty, plump teen, the proverbial ugly duckling. To my surprise, at 16 I transformed into a swan…My confidence grew, along with my flirting skills, my social charms were finessed and, after years of being the wallflower — someone guys confided in rather than chatted up — I was at ease in male company.

…I discovered early on there is no such thing as a free lunch. It is a transaction between you and the man you are dining with. The food is irrelevant. Conversation, flattery, where you’re seated, who your fellow diners are, and, tellingly, who you’re introduced to are what’s important. In return, the man gets to sit with an attractive woman, who makes him feel good about himself…you grab every opportunity to trade on your erotic capital in order to benefit your own lot in life…Why anyone else wouldn’t behave as I did is beyond me. While I never slept with anyone, I deliberately wore outfits that the decision-makers appreciate…I’m sexually attentive to my husband and in return I know I can splurge…without guilt — I don’t have to justify or even hide my purchases…I’m 40 and have no intention of letting my erotic power diminish…Define what your best assets are: long legs, lustrous hair or even if you have a particular talent, exploit it. It’s time to be realistic because that is the way the world works for successful women.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

One Year Ago Today

“The Biggest Whores” reports on the closure of the Craigslist “adult services” section, explains why escort services are rarely prosecuted even when individual girls are hounded, and speculates on why politicians hate us so much.

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Posts Tagged ‘Madonna/whore’

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