Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Madonna/whore’

The Fur Is Flying

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 22, 2011| 28 Comments »

Your argument defends an ideology; mine defends the truth.  –  Mason Cooley

Furry Girl has been in the news lately; her project to fund the first-ever sex worker rights billboard in the United States has succeeded, and it will be going up in Los Angeles in the next two weeks.  That has received a small amount of attention in local mainstream media, but as usual something negative has received a lot more, and more widespread, attention.  It started when “feminist” porn starlet Madison Young gave birth a few weeks ago, and decided to create an exhibition entitled “Becoming MILF” around the event (for those unfamiliar with the acronym, it means “Mother I’d Like to Fuck”).  As Tracy Clark-Flory’s August 16th Salon article puts it:

…The idea was that she would explore how she now embodies a contradiction, the dichotomy to end all dichotomies — that of the Madonna and the whore.  At the show’s opening, she served up self-made breast milkshakes and displayed a baby quilt made of burp cloths and “porn star panties.”  Surely it goes without saying that this sort of art doesn’t appeal to everyone, or most, but it’s brought about criticism from the unlikeliest of sources:  a fellow pornographer.

Furry Girl strongly criticized Young’s behavior on Twitter, calling her a “revolting person” and pointing out that her display would appeal to “baby fetishists” and “pedos”.  But most importantly she wrote, “It’s funny to see how many feminist kinksters don’t think consent matters when it comes to creating erotic art w/ a baby.”  Apparently Young and her supporters (whom Furry Girl calls “the sexy mommy mob”) angrily “tweeted” back and, well, the fur started to fly.  Bloggers blogged, Twitterers tweeted and pundits issued forth punditry; Flory wrote her article and Jezebel commented on it…and as usual everyone missed the point.

Furry Girl and I are usually on the same page.  That’s not to say we agree about everything; she’s a vegan and I’m an omnivore, some of the things she finds sexy are definite turn-offs for me, and while she revels in her “furriness” I obsessively pluck or epilate every single hair that dares to appear anyplace other than my scalp, eyebrows, eyelashes or mons veneris.  But when it comes to issues of sex work, liberty, feminism and common sense, we rarely disagree:  One especially important point in which we both believe is that sex work activists need to stop trying to look weird and wild and kinky and instead reach out to the mainstream Americans who support criminalization precisely because they believe we’re weird and wild and kinky.  IMHO we need to stress the ways in which whores are like other women, not the ways in which we’re different; as FG puts it, “I want sex work issues to stop being marketed as though they are of interest only to kinky hipsters, leftists, and sex radicals.”  So when a friend called my attention to this Tuesday night, I decided to see what Furry Girl herself had to say about it.  I didn’t have long to wait, as she commented on the affair Wednesday morning:

I am utterly baffled that I have to explain these things, but the sexy mommy mob is still hysterical after my comments on Twitter last week that feminist darling Madison Young is creepy-as-fuck for how she uses her baby as a non-consenting prop for her sexual politics and porn marketing…since people are asking me for a “statement,” and the sexy mommy mob is intent on growing this “story” into some kind of national outrage, I might as well clearly explain my position in one place…

The big take-home point that some people are missing:  It’s all about context.  I am against breast feeding in places where people go to masturbate…It’s hard to plead “there is absolutely nothing sexual about these photos/videos” when they are posted in sexualized spaces and/or crafted to look sexy…if she would never want to encourage people to jerk off to photos of her baby, she should stop posting them in a place where she typically posts porn…This issue is also about consent.  The baby is not consenting to being used as a marketing gimmick for her mother’s porn persona…I am against people using their children as props to serve an agenda…

I never said that no woman should be allowed to breast feed.  I am not against breast feeding in public or private, I am against doing it in sexualized contexts.  I would feel the same way if someone whipped out a baby at a swinger’s club, so it’s not just about the internet or porn.  I never said that sex workers…should not be allowed to have children, or that mothers can’t be sexy.  I have a number of kinky and sex working friends who are parents, and I know some sexy moms.  They, however, possess good sense and  boundaries and don’t force their offspring to be a part of their exhibitionism and work…I never said that no one should be allowed to photograph their kids or photograph breast feeding.  I didn’t comb through the Flickr pages of strangers until I found a random mother to criticize.  I’m specifically talking about a porn star who is using her baby as an attention-getting prop in sexualized contexts…

A bubble-dweller

I hate what stuff like this does to the credibility of sex workers and pornographers as a whole.  People like me try to tell regular folk that porn and sex work is about consenting adults, not weird stuff with kids and/or the non-consenting.  To the sexy mommy mob, Madison is the greatest hero of her generation, but what about the other 99.999999% of America, the majority we need to get on our side in order to make any advancements for sex workers?  If you seal yourself in the safe bubble of San Francisco, surrounded by adoring fans, then of course you’re not going to care how you might be damaging the movement for acceptance of sex workers and porn.  I’m surprised that people like Gail Dines and Melissa Farley haven’t seized upon Madison’s baby fetish as yet another way to attack all of us.  This is exactly the sort of thing they live to hold up as a non-representative example of how we’re all horrible people…Donna Hughes threw a fit a year ago when a small sexuality conference apparently allowed in a high school senior…If letting a consenting 17-year-old hear about sexuality is enough for the antis to launch a campaign that says kink bloggers are basically child molesters, I wonder what they would think of a porn star sexualizing the breast feeding of a baby?  But of course, if the antis get wind of the controversy that Madison and her fans are so desperately trying to publicize, she will not be the one addressing the hard questions.  She has her feminist porn “revolution” to worry about, and the rest of us – especially her baby girl – can go eat cake.

I don’t follow Twitter and therefore didn’t see the original comments, but from what I’ve read they’re a bit stronger than the sort of things I would’ve said.  That’s not at all unusual, however; as I pointed out in my column of June 4th, “I’m the Princess of Paranoia and 99.9% of the human race words its essays with far less caution than I employ in the composition of my grocery list.”  That having been said, Furry Girl’s explanatory essay is very clear and eminently sensible.  And as usual, I find myself in complete agreement with her.

One Year Ago Today

“Presents” is a column about the thoughtful extras clients often give in addition to the fee.

Read Full Post »

August Miscellanea (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 18, 2011| 11 Comments »

A man hears what he wants to hear/And disregards the rest.  –  Paul Simon, “The Boxer”

Several stories about “authorities” seeing and hearing exactly what they want to see and hear.

Give It a Rest

I guess the cops in Arlington, Texas aren’t satisfied with just going “booga-booga, I see you!” to escorts and shaming clients any more, especially since what they imagined would be their big chance to look like big shots fizzled exactly as I and other rational people predicted it would.  So now they’re resorting to harassing strippers and strip-club patrons instead:

Dozens of employees and patrons were arrested late Friday during a raid at the Flashdancer strip club.  In all, 44 people were arrested on narcotic warrants, charges of possession of controlled substances or outstanding felony or misdemeanor warrants, police spokeswoman Tiara Richard said…Richard said the location had a history of illegal drugs and prostitution.  Recently, undercover officers had been at the nightclub where they bought drugs from employees and saw prostitution, Richard said.  No arrests Friday were related to prostitution.  “Based on what they saw, there was a need to take action,” Richard said…

Don’t you just love Copese?  They “saw prostitution”; obviously their Super Police Vision allows them to see other abstractions such as “criminality” and “guilt” as well, which is why their testimony is so much more credible in court than that of us ordinary mortals who lack super powers.  Of course, that raises the question of why such gifted beings are wasting their time bullying strippers instead of pursuing international gangsters or something, but we’re not supposed to think about that.

Trafficking, Trafficking Everywhere!

The American desire to be the world’s moral arbiter, combined with its simple-minded view of reality, has resulted in its attempting to impose “trafficking” mythology on countries which have heretofore largely ignored this largely Euro-American moral panic.  Note the subtly sardonic tone of this July 24th story from New Zealand:

New Zealand is risking an American rebuke over one of this country’s pet aid projects, which brings hundreds of Pacific Islanders here to work for minimum wages picking fruit and grapes, warn high-level US sources.  Wellington sees the recognised seasonal employer scheme as charity, but Washington views it as verging on human trafficking and debt-bonded labour…Last week US Human Trafficking Ambassador Luis CdeBaca came with a delegation to talk with government officials, unions and lobby groups.  No statement followed, but sources say the Americans were alarmed at a lack of recognition of trafficking in New Zealand.  The Americans are investigating bonds used to bring minimum wage workers from Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.  “The burden of illegal costs and debts on these labourers in the source country, often with the support of labour agencies and employers in the destination country, can contribute to a situation of debt bondage,” a source said.

…The Americans also believe trafficking of sex workers – especially from Asia – is taking place.  But Catherine Healy of the Prostitutes Collective told them the collective does not believe this.  “We haven’t come across sex workers who are victims of trafficking yet,” she said, adding the word trafficking was “such a dramatic catch-all…What we are asking for is old-fashioned labour rights.  We explained that sometimes sex workers are made to work exceptionally long shifts and have their money withheld by some brothel operators.”  Healy said some managers and operators are “dreadful to work for” and the Department of Labour should deal with them.  The collective told the Americans it was pleased sex workers had the right to say yes to sex work and that this was getting rid of exploitation.  “[CdeBaca] acknowledged it was important to not conflate prostitution and trafficking, as has been our recent experience in dealing with the American administration and their overall response to sex work”…

I’ve heard several US government officials claim lately that they believe it’s important not to conflate prostitution with trafficking, yet they keep doing it both in this country and in others.  The success of decriminalization in New Zealand must drive prudish American officials bats.  But as for Americans chiding New Zealand about the use of migrant labor in harvesting crops…

{ring! ring! ring!}

“Hello?”

“Hi, Kettle?  This is Pot.  You’re black.”

Waking Up

It’s good to see so many educated people beginning to recognize the truth about sex work, though it’s rather sad to think so many of them (including the self-described “sexologist” who wrote this July 27th Huffington Post article) were ignorant enough to believe all the lies and stereotypes in the first place:

Think “sex worker,” and “affluent,” “educated,” and having a “strong family background” and “access to resources” are not the descriptors that come to mind.  But a University of Arkansas study recently found that many U.S. women joining the “high quality,” illegal prostitution market encompass all of those qualities…Far from desperately trying to fund their next drug high, childrearing expenses, or bills, they bare their wares for the very same reasons most people look for work — for money, stability, autonomy, and job satisfaction.  Such research joins a string of flabbergasting findings on who would consider joining the “world’s oldest profession.”  A British study, published in the journal Sex Education, found that 16.5% of undergraduates would consider sex work, with 93% pointing to money as the primary incentive.  Another Leeds University study, involving over 200 lap-dancers, reported that one in three participants engaged in such work to fund their schooling…a Berlin Studies Centre study has reported that one in three university students in Berlin would consider sex work as a way to pay for their education.  (It further found that over 29% of university students in Paris and 18.5% in Kiev would contemplate such.)  Some 4% of the 3,200 Berlin participants reported already having engaged in some type of sex work, like erotic dancing, Internet performances, or prostitution.  Researchers speculated that greater student workloads and higher fees have made sex work’s high hourly wages quite attractive.

While many people can’t wrap their head around a person’s desire to engage in sex work, this field’s potential to become your “average day job” changes depending on what the sexual exchanges involve.  With the term “sex work” encompassing a wide range of jobs, like erotic modeling, stripping, lap dancing, erotic massage, being a dominatrix, and webcam work, a person can make money doing ‘tamer’ activities than prostitution…Often involving zero physical contact, those sorts of jobs seem much less demeaning and threatening, hence, in some realms, become more socially acceptable.  These “artistic performers,” as they’ll often call themselves, often don’t feel victimized…

Dr. Fulbright, if you consider these findings “flabberga­sting” it’s because you were previously reading anti-sex work propaganda instead of talking to real women (which causes me to question your credibility as a sexologist).  For intelligen­t, educated women to choose sex work is nothing new; we’ve been doing it at least since ancient Sumer, and the Golden-Age Greek hetaerae and Renaissanc­e courtesans were the most educated, accomplish­ed women of their times.  The idea that sex work of any kind, even prostituti­on, is “demeaning and threatenin­g” exists largely in the minds of ignorant outsiders like yourself, not in the minds of the free adult women who make up the vast majority of our profession and always have.

If You Want Something Done Right…

The families of several of the women who were murdered by the Long Island Killer are (unsurprisingly) dissatisfied by the lackluster efforts of police, who (unsurprisingly) don’t appear too anxious to catch what appears to be a cop raping and murdering hookers.  So (as described in this July 30th article from CNN), they’ve decided to hire private detectives and to place Craigslist ads looking for information from other working girls who are too smart to trust cops; as Amber Costello’s sister put it, “I worked for a service when I was younger…We knew we had to protect ourselves. Police were not an option.”  Don’t expect CNN to understand this; they’re too busy pumping up their ratings by advocating further criminalization so more girls like Costello will be murdered in the future.

One Year Ago Today

“The Empress Theodora” is a short biography of the woman who was inarguably the most successful whore of all time; she rose to become a Byzantine empress in life, and an Eastern Orthodox saint after her death.

Read Full Post »

August Miscellanea (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 17, 2011| 18 Comments »

Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.  –  Thomas Jefferson

Short articles about laws, laws and more laws, none of which accomplish anything productive.

Because Everyone Knows That Laws Deter Streetwalkers

If I live to be a thousand I will never understand why lawheads believe that more laws will stop people who are already breaking existing laws; they seem wedded to the concept that if we only increase the penalties enough, the offending behavior will stop.  Of course, this is nonsense; most criminologists agree that increasing the severity of a criminal penalty has no demonstrable deterrent value.  For example, despite penalties which are wildly and insanely out of proportion to the offense, drug use has increased over the 40 years of the drug war just as alcohol use increased during Prohibition.  Even the death penalty has no demonstrable deterrent value (except to the individual executed, obviously).  Yet lawheads just keep making new laws and then demanding that cops enforce them and courts incarcerate an ever-increasing number of American citizens.  Here’s the latest example, courtesy of the New York Daily News of July 27th:

Harsher penalties for selling sex near school grounds are now in place…State Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. first proposed the bill that will now slap pimps, prostitutes and johns caught plying their illicit trade within 1,000 feet of a school with automatic felony charges.  “I’m happy,” Diaz said yesterday.  “I think that this is a big step in protecting our children.”  Years of unchecked prostitution in the playground of…the West Farms School…led to the legislation, which is now in effect for schools statewide…

In recent weeks, The Urban Justice Center had urged [Governor] Cuomo to veto the bill in an online petition…”In the modern era, most sex workers who work on the street are engaged in sex work out of desperate need.  They face widespread physical and sexual violence, especially from the police,” the petition stated… Meanwhile, Diaz is calling on the NYPD to make sure the law is enforced.  “You could have as many laws as you want, but if the police do not enforce them, the law becomes nothing,” he said.

This is a textbook example of governmental sledgehammer-enabled egg-breaking.  Somehow there will be enough cops to enforce this statewide, even though there weren’t enough of them to keep an eye on ONE PLAYGROUND in the Bronx.  Let’s put ‘em all in jail!  That’ll learn them dirty whores, pimps and “johns”…which according to Melissa Farley means the majority of the population of New York.

Dirty Amateurs

Those damned dirty amateurs are at it again, having unprotected sex and spreading diseases to their unsuspecting spouses.  Why isn’t there a law against this?  We need to abolish unpaid sex; it’s demeaning to women and as this paraphrased July 26th anecdote incontrovertibly proves, men hate women who give them sex for free and give them diseases on purpose as a way of inflicting violence.  It’s true, I saw a study which proves it and anyone who denies it must be a misogynist too.

A 33-year-old married woman from Delavan, Wisconsin has sued her 35-year-old married lover on the grounds that he infected her with herpes during an unprotected adulterous sexual encounter in January of 2010; she contends that he knew he was infected and is therefore liable under Wisconsin law.  In May of this year she insisted police arrest the man, and when they declined to do so she filed the lawsuit without the help of an attorney; the suit demands $350,000 from the man’s auto and homeowners insurance, the former presumably on the grounds that the sexual encounter took place in his pickup truck.

The man denies giving the woman herpes and suggests she check with her other partners, but she claims he was the only man she cheated on her husband with.  She claims to have experienced panic attacks while driving with her spouse and children, and that her spouse is reluctant to have normal sexual relations because of her diagnosis.

I’m sure her husband’s reluctance to have sex with her has nothing at all to do with the fact that she cheated on him and was caught red…umm, handed.

Selective Blindness

Die-hard partisans are most amazing creatures; they can viciously castigate the “other side” for whatever-it-is, while simultaneously ignoring “their side” doing essentially the same thing.  Case in point the tiresome feminist bleating about the Republicans’ “war on women” while ignoring the one waged by Democrats.  They are enabled to do this by defining knife attacks on amateurs as “aggravated assault” but the same attacks on sex workers as “emergency surgery”.  Case in point:  Barbara and Shannon Kelley’s July 28th Huffington Post article bemoaning the Republican renewal of the gag rule prohibiting funding to health agencies which give information about abortion, while totally ignoring Obama’s continuation of the Bush Era policy of prohibiting funding to health agencies which refuse to demonize prostitutes:

Surely you have heard that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted to reinstate the Global Gag Rule that prevents any family planning agencies that provide information about abortion service from receiving any U.S. foreign aid.  Who gets hurt?  Women, children and anyone who believes the conversation about women’s issues needs to move forward.  But once again, that conversation has been hijacked by the right-wing strategy to frame deeper issues related to women and families in terms of a women’s right to choose…organizations that receive funds cannot use their own money to provide abortion-related information or services, or advocate for liberalized abortion laws.  The rule imposes no similar restrictions on advocacy against such laws…Under the…rule, these organizations face a choice:  either participate in the American right’s global campaign to restrict women’s rights and access to reproductive health care or lose critical U.S. funding.  That funding is crucial for agencies that cover a number of issues related to healthy women and children…What also gets cut out of the equation when these agencies are defunded is access to contraception…the Guttmacher Institute has found that when abortion becomes illegal, abortions don’t decrease — they just become dangerous.  Life-threatening, actually.  And what better way to avoid abortions than to provide contraceptive services.  No brainer, right?  Go figure…But what makes us even more angry is the way the debate on abortion sucks the energy out of the fight for a better world for women and children — here and abroad.  Suddenly, regardless of where we stand on a women’s right to choose, we’re in a defensive position…

Funny thing; nearly every methodologically sound study ever done proves that when prostitution becomes illegal, it doesn’t decrease — it just becomes dangerous.  Welcome to our world, ladies.  Apparently, you don’t think women’s health issues are important when the women choose to make their living providing sexual services to men.  We believe the “conversation about women’s issues needs to move forward” as well, and recognizing that “a woman’s right to choose” must include choosing why she has sex (rather than simply how or with whom) is a big part of that.  By reducing that broad and powerful phrase to a mere euphemism for the right to abortion, “feminists” of your ilk have not only allowed the enemy within our ranks, but actually invited him in.  In furtherance of your narcissistic concerns you either lobbied for the rights of certain women to be restricted or remained silent while others did so, and now you’re crying because the crop which has sprung up is the very one you planted.  Unfortunately, it isn’t just you who will be forced to eat it.

Colossus Blinks

In my July 3rd column I reported that internet behemoth Google had censored Irish human rights campaigners “Turn Off the Blue Light” by cancelling their ad under the false excuse that it was an escort ad when in actuality it led to a site opposing imposition of the “Swedish Model” on Ireland.  The group protested the removal through approved channels and was of course rebuffed, but when they protested in person at Google headquarters in Dublin an amazing thing happened, as reported in the Independent on August 7th:

A small group of campaigners for…rights for Irish sex workers is claiming a victory against internet giant Google…After their complaint was received Google apparently reviewed the situation and agreed to reinstate the advert last month…Google said…”We permit political advertisements regardless of the political views they represent, and apply our policies equally.  Just as the net itself provides space for a thousand political opinions to bloom, Google is committed to being a neutral platform for people to advertise their political messages.”

I reckon a flea in a tender spot can make even an elephant scratch.

One Year Ago Today

My very first miscellanea column, “Legal Sundries” appeared on this date last year; the items covered were the suicide of the “Craigslist Killer”, WWAV’s advocacy for New Orleans prostitutes forced to register as “sex offenders” under the “Crime Against Nature” law, the rationale behind porn being legal despite the fact that it’s paid sex, and men suing women for injuries resulting from cowgirl sex.

Read Full Post »

In Denial (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 15, 2011| 78 Comments »

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

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

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

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

Ronald Weitzer and Barb Brents

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

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

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

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

Read Full Post »

Top Ten

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2011| 9 Comments »

I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list… –  Sir William Gilbert, “As Someday It May Happen” from The Mikado

I promised in my “Anniversary” column that I’d provide a list of my top ten posts, calculated in a number of different ways, and though I actually made the counts that very day I’ve for some reason not been able to get around to putting the column together until now!  So without further ado, here are the figures as they stood on July 10th.

This first is a list of my top ten columns, as determined purely by number of hits:

Top Ten (# of hits)

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits by 7/10/11
Coming and Going                                  February 10th, 2011                5,970
Courtesan Denial                                    December 4th, 2010                4,637
Meretrices and Prostibulae                     November 3rd, 2010                4,127
Numerology                                            January 24th, 2011                  3,360
Acting and Activism                                 January 8th, 2011                    2,721
Who Did Your Tits?                                 October 1st, 2010                    2,623
January Second                                      January 2nd, 2011                   1,875
Plaçage                                                   November 22nd, 2010             1,771
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day   March 3rd, 2011                       1,574
The Slave-Whore Fantasy (Part One)     December 2nd, 2010                1,537

Some of these are unsurprising, but some appear to make no sense at all; why in the world should a post about the amount of money the State of Texas wastes on locking up hookers be my most popular by 29% above its next-closest competitor?  To understand the reason, one must take image searches into account; for several months this spring, the single most popular search which led to this blog was “Texas county map” or some variation on it, which led to the first illustration in my February 10thcolumn.  Similarly, searches for pictures of Veronica Franco led to the December 4th column, “Pompeii” and “Temple of Fortuna Virilis” both found my November 3rd column, “Mardi Gras tits” turned up this young lovely in my October 1st column, and Googling for illustrations of the fictional planet Gor turned up these Boris Vallejo illustrations in my December 2nd column.  It tickles my sense of irony that thousands of searches for “Mira Sorvino” ended up at my January 8th column about her rude and unprofessional treatment of Dr. Laura Agustín, but I am nothing short of astonished that almost two thousand people cared enough about sofa beds to end up at my column of January 2nd.

Since these results tell us nothing about the content of the columns, I disallowed them and came up with this list:

Top Ten (corrected)

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits by 7/10/11
Numerology                                            January 24th, 2011                  3,360
Plaçage                                                   November 22nd, 2010             1,771
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day   March 3rd, 2011                       1,574
Ashley Madison                                       January 30th, 2011                  1,439
Madame de Pompadour                          December 29th, 2010              1,366
Phryne                                                    July 31st, 2010                         1,133
Storyville                                                 September 3rd, 2010               1,113
Japanese Prostitution                             October 21st, 2010                  1,104
By the Numbers                                       April 20th, 2011                       1,095
Here We Go Again…                                 August 26th, 2010                   1,060

Though many people searched for information on Phryne and Madame de Pompadour, many others found those articles by searching for pictures of the ladies (especially this detail from “Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis” by Henryk Siemiradzki), so I’ll include two runners-up as well:  “Wife Swapping” from November 20th and “November Q & A” from November 27th.

Ranking the top ten posts by the number of comments they elicited gives us a completely different picture:

Top Ten Comments

Name                                            Date                     # of comments by 7/10/11
That Is So Hot!                             April 19th, 2011                       191
Speaking in Prostitute                  June 17th, 2011                       170
Their Lips Are Moving                   April 25th, 2011                        132
Pendulum                                     April 9th, 2011                          128
Creeping Rot                                April 18th, 2011                        123
Public Service Announcement       June 12th, 2011                       120
Savaging                                      March 27th, 2011                     115
Neither Cold Nor Hot                    April 6th, 2011                          114
May Q & A                                    May 31st, 2011                          97
Interview: Jill Brenneman (Pt 4)   February 24th, 2011                  96

With apologies to Eliot, April appears to be the chattiest month!

Most posts seem to have a great deal of interest right away, then trickle off; others seem to attract interest consistently as time goes by.  Here are the posts which show the smallest variation in number of hits from month to month:

Ten Most Consistent (in chronological order)

Name                                                 Date
Do You Party?                                   July 14th, 2010
Modern Marriage                               July 18th, 2010
Phryne                                              July 31st, 2010
A Whore in the Bedroom                  September 9th, 2010
Think of the Children!                       September 30th, 2010
No Other Option                               October 17th, 2010
Wolves                                             October 18th, 2010
Japanese Prostitution                      October 21st, 2010
Wife Swapping                                 November 20th, 2010
Plaçage                                             November 22nd, 2010

Interestingly, there aren’t any posts from this year in this particular list.  Finally, I’d like to finish off with a list of my ten favorite posts which don’t appear on any of the other lists:

Ten Essays Maggie Would Like To See Get More Attention

Name                                                 Date
Advice for Clients                                August 21st , 2010
Five Women in Whitechapel               October 5th, 2010
Heart of Gold                                      October 6th, 2010
The Love-Hate Relationship                October 7th, 2010
Amazingly Stupid Statements             October 10th, 2010
Deadbeats                                          October 30th, 2010
Ban the Super Bowl!                           December 11th, 2010
Social Autoimmune Disorder                January 12th, 2011
Creating Criminals                               January 15th, 2011
A Little Help From Our Friends             March 11th, 2011

Plus ALL of the fictional interludes!

One Year Ago Today

“New Film Reviews”, my first of a number of similar columns, containing my reviews of Doctor Detroit, Full Metal Jacket, An Indecent Proposal, Jesus Christ Superstar, Pretty Woman, Total Recall, Whore and The Wicker Man.

Read Full Post »

One Size Fits All

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 2011| 29 Comments »

Woman’s narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power.  –  Emma Goldman

I’ve often pointed out that marriage is closely related to harlotry; it’s one of the few points on which I agree with neofeminists.  But while they consider that a bad thing, I think it’s a good and practical thing based solidly in human biological, psychological and economic needs (unlike neofeminism).  But if one believes that marriage is no different from prostitution and also accepts the neofeminist/trafficking fetishist proclamation that all prostitution is “human trafficking”, one must inevitably conclude that marriage (especially among those unenlightened brown people who don’t pretend that all marriage is based on “love”) is a form of human trafficking.  And of course, trafficking fetishists have now embraced this twisted logic; at first they only declared that mail-order brides are “trafficked”, but now they’ve apparently decided that the label applies to any marriage contracted for rational rather than irrational reasons, especially if at least one of the parties is non-white.  Laura Agustín’s column of July 29th contains an analysis of this recent article about temporary marriages in Egypt; most of it is dedicated to exposing the contradictions and moralism inherent in such articles (and the incredible incompetence with which they are nearly always written), but it begins with this:

What is gained by using the one word, trafficking, to describe a wide variety of social phenomena?  Campaigners will say that they want to show that everything they have decided is an improper way for women to live or get by must be named and shamed as violence (whether people went along with or initiated the activities or not, as we know).  So we have seen how surrogate motherhood, sex tourism by lgbt people and marriage broking are all glossed as trafficking, with relationships reduced to exploiter and victim.  In the article I’m considering here, several kinds of instrumentally motivated marriages are all called trafficking, and I see no benefit in it at all.  When I hear about a phenomenon, I want the details of how it works:  who does what and how those involved talk about what they are doing.  If some so-called authority with an NGO and an agenda simply tells me here’s another bad thing to condemn and outlaw, give us more support so we can get rid of it I automatically wonder what else is going on.  I am not sure the authority-figure is lying, no.  But I see the moralising and the personal agenda and want to hear from others, too.

I think I can answer the rhetorical question with which Dr. Agustín begins her essay; what stands to be gained is simplicity.  Crusades are not embraced by intelligent, broad-minded people whose minds are capable of complex and nuanced thought, but rather by “true believers” who want to reduce the entirety of human experience to a simple Manichean dualism which does not require judgment or thought.  This is why the “liberal” vs. “conservative” myth remains so popular despite its total inability to describe the modern political landscape; it allows the simple-minded to boil everyone down to “us” vs. “them”, in-group vs. out-group, good vs. evil.  The true believer belongs to whichever “team” indoctrinated him while he was impressionable or chooses the one which seems closest to his own primitive impulses, subdues those personal opinions which contradict his belief-system and labels everyone who disagrees with it as “evil”, “conservative”, “misogynistic”, “infidel” or whatever and either ignores the facts which contradict that simplistic classification or else indulges in tortured logic in order to force all of his enemies into that one ill-fitting box.  In this specific case, the more human interactions can be lumped together as “trafficking” the happier neofeminists and their allies will be, because the simpler their system the more simple-minded people will embrace it.  Of course, as we discussed yesterday the more thinly a term is stretched the more reasonable people will reject the usage, but fanatics aren’t interested in convincing reasonable people; there aren’t enough of them in the world to carry the fanatics to power, and even if there were it wouldn’t be the absolute power they crave.

One year ago today I wrote about how sexually-repressed middle-class white women derailed first-wave feminism and combined it with Protestant Christianity to create the “social purity” movement, which sought to impose middle-class Anglo-American Christian female notions of morality on everyone by characterizing everything which offended them as a “social ills”.  As I have pointed out before, nothing has really changed except the details; the revived “social purity” movement is still a coalition of fundamentalist Christians and middle-class women who embrace a warped version of feminism, and it still attempts to characterize every form of human behavior of which its membership generally disapproves as “evil”.  But while the purity crusaders of a century ago tried to sell sex as something which hurt everyone, their modern descendants have adopted Marxist tactics and now characterize it as exploitation, violence and oppression directed against one segment of society by another, with men as the malevolent “oppressors” and women as their passive, incompetent “victims”.

Read Full Post »

The New Victorianism

Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 7, 2011| 62 Comments »

Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence.  –  Friedrich Von Schlegel

In my column of last September 30th I wrote that, as my friend JustStarshine points out, “Western Society has descended into a new Victorianism”:

…we have become shockingly hypocritical about sex and grant our governments tremendous power to suppress it while simultaneously spending tremendous amounts of time and money on it (Victorian London had the largest number of prostitutes per capita of any place and time in history).  We have revived Victorian ideas of government-enforced temperance and “social progress”, and the Victorian “Cult of the Child” has returned with a vengeance.  The…adult myth that children live in some sort of state of Divine Grace which must be protected at all costs and extended as far into adulthood as possible…preaches that children are as emotionally fragile as soap bubbles and the merest hint of sexual imagery before puberty can cause irreversible trauma; its adherents also believe that teenagers (whom they equate with “children”) should be lied to, spied on or even criminally prosecuted to prevent them from engaging in any kind of sexual behavior, and some even believe that adults should not be allowed any form of entertainment or reading material which is inappropriate for even the youngest child, on the grounds that a child “might see it” and thereby be petrified as if he had looked into the eyes of the Gorgon.  Child cultists can be recognized by their stated belief that any degree of tyranny is acceptable “if it saves even one child,” and by their fondness for promoting unconstitutionally broad legislation   lugubriously named after dead little girls.

The Child Cult’s rhetoric is also pressed into service for sex issues which have nothing to do with children; as we have stated before, only 3.54% of all Western prostitutes are underage and the average underage prostitute is 17, which does not legally qualify as a “child” for sexual consent purposes  anywhere in the United States except Arizona, California, Iowa, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee and Wisconsin.  But that hasn’t stopped prohibitionists from resurrecting the late Victorian “white slavery” moral panic under a new name, “child sex trafficking”, and wielding it as a bludgeon against adult whores and our clients with the usual “one child” battle cry.  But lest anyone balk at treating adult women as children, there’s a Victorian answer for that as well; prostitutes are abnormal, defective “victims” of men who have to be protected from our own choices, which are clearly irrational.  Similarly, trafficking fanatics classify brown people as “child races” who are too stupid and unsophisticated to move between countries on their own without being “trafficked” by gangsters, so by the Victorian “white man’s burden” philosophy they need to “save” these poor victims, whether they want to be “rescued” or not.

Like the Victorian “social purity” movement, the modern Puritanism exemplified by trafficking hysteria, prohibitionism and other anti-sex movements was formed from a mixture of Protestant Christianity and decaying feminism.  And just as the voices of first-wave feminists (such as Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman) who espoused sexual liberation for women were drowned out by those whose minds were mired in typical Victorian prudery and therefore considered prostitution, pornography and masturbation to be “social ills”, so the original feminists who embraced the “sexual revolution” were shouted down by the anti-sex neofeminists who turned the feminist movement into a neo-Victorian campaign against sex; women like Catherine MacKinnon, Donna Hughes and Melissa Farley would have been right at home among the “social purity” advocates of a century ago who spread lies about “white slavery” and “diseased whores”.  Some of these anti-sex feminists even consider male masturbation to be a form of marital infidelity; one commenter on an article  about coffee stands with bikini-clad servers wrote: “Have you considered the women and children out there that have been hurt by their daddie’s [sic] affection for porn and worhtless [sic] garbage like this that they bring into their relationships, only to have them fall apart because the ol [sic] man can’t keep his eyes to himself or his hands off himself?!” and stated that her ex-husband “…had a history of this type of voyerism [sic] since before I met him and he promised he didn’t need it anymore after we were together.  An addiction is an addiction and you guys apparently have one to this!  Sow your seeds with a real woman and a real relationship…”  And regular reader Sailor Barsoom reports that “Just before I let my subscription to Playboy run out, I saw, each month, one woman after another writing in to earnestly explain why masturbation is adultery.”

Nor are these Victorian attitudes limited to radical feminists and their followers; they even crop up in articles written by more mainstream types.  I’ve previously mentioned the ambivalent attitude the staff of Jezebel has toward sex work; this pandering article about the recent Melissa Farley propaganda not only claims that sex worker rights have to be “debated” with those who have no stake in the issue, but also that they have to wait until men as a group regularly seek their wives’ and girlfriends’ approval to look at porn.  And this New York Times article (which was called to my attention by regular reader Guilty Pleasures) about Slutwalks displays an attitude common among older feminists;  the article appears to have been originally entitled “Clumsy Young Feminists” and simpers that:

To object to these ugly characterizations is right and righteous.  But to do so while dressed in what look like sexy stewardess Halloween costumes seems less like victory than capitulation (linguistic and sartorial) to what society already expects of its young women.  Scantily clad marching seems weirdly blind to the race, class and body-image issues that usually (rightly) obsess young feminists and seems inhospitable to scads of women who, for various reasons, might not feel it logical or comfortable to express their revulsion at victim-blaming by donning bustiers.

One can practically see the author, blouse buttoned up to her neck, fanning herself furiously to ward off an attack of the vapors.

No social trend lasts forever; the new Victorianism is as doomed as the old one was, and the young women who will help to bury it are joining Slutwalks, buying porn for themselves and shaking their heads at the prudery of their elders just as the young women of the Roaring Twenties did.  Within a decade, the new Victorianism will start to die off along with the Baby Boomers who embraced it, and in the freedom of a new Jazz Age perhaps all of the laws which seek to restrict the sexual behaviors of consenting adults will be tossed out as the quaint, incomprehensible and useless relics of a bygone age.

One Year Ago Today

“How To be a Stupid, Greedy Whore” was my very first column based on a current news story, and also provided the first member of my Hall of Shame.

Read Full Post »

Aspasia

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2011| 19 Comments »

Now, since it is thought that he proceeded thus against the Samians to gratify Aspasia, this may be a fitting place to raise the query what great art or power this woman had, that she managed as she pleased the foremost men of the state, and afforded the philosophers occasion to discuss her in exalted terms and at great length.  –  Plutarch, Pericles (XXIV)

One year ago today, in my biography of the famous courtesan Phryne, I described the state of prostitution in Athens of the Golden Age and even mentioned Aspasia, the mistress of the great Athenian leader Pericles.  It is therefore fitting that today I present a biography of that lady, quite possibly the best-known of all the hetaerae, who is thought to have died just ten years before Phryne was born.  So famous and respected is she, in fact, that as I discussed in Thursday’s column some whore-haters are now trying to convince the world that she was not a courtesan at all.

Aspasia was born about 470 BCE in Miletus, the wealthiest Greek city-state of its time.  She was the daughter of the wealthy Axiochus and was superbly educated, then moved to Athens in her late teens.  The reason for the move is unclear, but it is possible she accompanied her older sister, who had married an Athenian statesman.  In any case her beauty and education allowed her to become a hetaera, and she may also have owned a brothel but this is not certain.  Sometime in her early twenties she became Pericles’ mistress, and after he divorced his wife in 445 BCE she moved in with him, bearing his son Pericles the Younger a few years later.  Aspasia soon became as noted for her intelligence, erudition and aptitude at conversation as for her beauty, and she not only served as an advisor to her lover but inspired others as well; Plutarch wrote that Athenian men would bring their wives to visit in hope that they would learn the art of conversation from her.  They were able to do this because she opened Pericles’ house to visitors, attracting the best and brightest of Athenian society (including the philosopher Socrates).

Like all politicians Pericles had his enemies, and though the ancient Greeks were far more sensible about sex and whores than modern Americans, Aspasia was still a tempting target.  Since the hetaerae were well-respected it was not enough to merely point out that Pericles lived with a courtesan, but brothel-keeping was considered mere crass commercialism, so the stories of her keeping a brothel may have been either invented or embellished in order to imply conflict of interest on her part (in the same way a First Lady’s business deals might be scrutinized or ridiculed today).  Aspasia became especially unpopular when in 440 BCE Athens sent troops against Samos in support of Miletus; the campaign was difficult and the Athenians sustained heavy losses, and many critics claimed that Pericles’ decision to enter the war was based solely on the fact that Miletus was Aspasia’s native city.

Over the next ten years, Pericles’ political opponents spread a number of slanders against him, some of which made their way into comic poetry and plays of the time, and a few of which resulted in lawsuits and spurious criminal charges not just against Pericles but also against his friends.  Aspasia was charged with “corrupting the morals” of Athenian women to entice them into “satisfying Pericles’ perversions”, and though she was acquitted (thanks to an impassioned defense by Pericles) not all of his friends fared so well; the great sculptor Phidias was accused of embezzling gold which he should have used on the statue of Athena in the new Parthenon, and thanks to a false witness he was convicted and died in prison in 430 BCE.  When the Peloponnesian War broke out in 431, some people found a way to blame Aspasia again; the war resulted from Sparta’s attacking Athens in defense of its ally Megara, against which Pericles had declared a trade embargo.  The poet Aristophanes claimed that the embargo had been declared in retaliation for the abduction of two of Aspasia’s employees; he wrote, “…some young drunkards go to Megara and carry off the courtesan Simaetha; the Megarians, hurt to the quick, run off in turn with two harlots of the house of Aspasia; and so for three whores Greece is set ablaze.”

Roman copy of a what is thought to be Aspasia’s funerary stele

In 429, plague broke out in Athens; the exact disease is unknown but it claimed both Pericles’ sister and his two legitimate sons, and later the great man himself.  The loss of so many dear to him cast him into a deep depression in which he spent the last few months of his life; Aspasia could not console him, and his low spirits almost certainly contributed to his death.  When it became clear that Pericles was near death, the Assembly granted citizenship to his son by Aspasia (Athenian citizenship required that both parents be citizens) so he would have an heir, and that son later became a general himself as his father had been.  After Pericles’ death Aspasia was kept by another general and statesman named Lysicles, to whom she bore a son in 428; that same year Lysicles was killed in battle, and there are no contemporary accounts of Aspasia’s life thereafter.  Most historians believe she died around 400 BCE because she was a friend of Socrates’ and was well-known to his student Plato, but died before Socrates’ execution in 399.

Even in the male-dominated world of ancient Athens, Aspasia was admired for her intellect, learning and oratorical skills; she appears as a character in a number of plays and dialogues, including those of Plato.  Socrates is known to have recommended her as a teacher (pointing out her positive influence on Pericles), and to defer to her as being more knowledgeable than he in the area of male-female relations.  Even her enemies respected her; one comedic attack on Pericles portrayed him as politically incompetent without her, and a more vicious one claimed that his choosing to live with a hetaera full-time (rather than to marry an ordinary woman and visit a courtesan as needed) was a sign of sexual degeneracy.

It is striking that, though absolutely nobody in ancient times questioned Aspasia’s superior mind and abilities, some modern scholars (though supposedly more egalitarian than the ancients) have done so on the grounds that a mere harlot couldn’t possibly be all that; others whose neofeminist bias is more pronounced have proclaimed the opposite, that no woman who was so learned and respected could possibly have been a courtesan because all “prostituted women” are humiliated, degraded and victimized by the Patriarchy.  Both of these groups claim her portrayals in the contemporary comedies as their “evidence”, ignoring the fact that descriptions of both her intellectual abilities and her status as a hetaera exist outside of the comic literature. And as Roger Just of the University of Kent points out, the fact that she was so educated and accomplished proves that she was a courtesan, because only women who were outside the normal social sphere were so educated.  Wives were defined as below men, but hetaerae were not.  Fortunately,  the courtesan deniers are but a small minority, and their silly notions will in a few decades be largely forgotten as the twisted belief system which spawned them fades into history.  As the real Aspasia eventually triumphed over those who would destroy her, so will her reputation eventually triumph over those who would deny her status as one of the greatest whores of history.

Read Full Post »

Profanation

Posted in History, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 28, 2011| 41 Comments »

Come, Shamhat, take me away with you
To the sacred Holy Temple, the residence of Anu and Ishtar.  –  The Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet I)

Peer review is the process by which scholars are kept honest and mistakes in methodology or data are discovered; it means that studies are first published in academic journals where other scholars in the field can read them, criticize their flaws, attempt to reproduce the results and otherwise ensure that flawed or even falsified studies are discredited before being quoted by other authors and thereby contaminating the pool of knowledge.  Though the process can certainly discover cases of outright lying or misrepresentation, its main purpose is to discover honest errors and cut through the bias under which even sincere scholars may misinterpret their findings.  One could not ask for a better example of the necessity of the process than the 2001 Estes and Weiner study, which would have been trashed had it been peer reviewed, but was instead published without review and subsequently spawned the “300,000 trafficked children” and “average age of entry into prostitution is 13” myths.

Estes & Weiner weren’t the only scholars whose anti-whore biases caused them to make ridiculous assertions, nor is sociology the only field afflicted by such bias.  On June 26th I pointed out the ignorant prejudice which utterly ruins a recent study by two economists, and we’ve discussed the absurd contentions of the neofeminists many times; in my column of one year ago today I described the convoluted process by which neofeminist “researchers” like Melissa Farley design studies to produce the exact conclusions the researchers want them to produce, and unfortunately these bogus studies go unchallenged because most of their authors’ peers are themselves affected by the same bias.  Neofeminism has so infected many universities that it’s virtually impossible to find any social science which it has not tainted to one degree or another, and when combined with Christian prudery and plain old Anglo-American Puritanism the result is a widespread prejudice against prostitutes which tends to pollute the scholarly detachment of many academics and to make it far less likely that their erroneous and often asinine pronouncements about our profession will be properly criticized.

Though deeply-held beliefs have always influenced the interpretations of past events made by historians who adhere to those beliefs, the idea that it is acceptable to literally rewrite history, to project modern attitudes upon those who lived in other times and places, is a comparatively recent phenomenon.  Even the ancient historians, fond as they were of editorialization, generally accepted that different people have different customs and that those in the past might behave in a manner very different from the Greek or Roman ways with which the writer was acquainted.  But modern Marxist, feminist and “queer” scholars often make the bizarre assumption that many if not most people in history shared the scholar’s notions and prejudices, and that historical behavior which violates modern doctrines must be explained away or reinterpreted with a Marxist, feminist or “queer” spin.  As a result, scholars addled by neofeminism (who insist that prostitution is “violence against women”) feel compelled to reject, deny and reinterpret every historical instance of prostitutes with high status.

Now, this isn’t really new; even the ancient Hebrew writers often conflated zonah (whore) with kedeshah (sacred harlot), using the two words interchangeably throughout the prophetic books.  And a few Victorian writers preferred either to portray the courtesans of old as something entirely different from modern prostitutes, or else to use them as proof of the inherent moral turpitude of pagan cultures.  In the 20th century, the occasional bluenosed professor harrumphed that Theodora and Aspasia couldn’t have been courtesans because no whore could be that intelligent or respected, and that the plain fact of their harlotry was supposedly “invented” by those who were trying to defame them.  The idea that being a courtesan was not dishonorable in ancient or medieval Greece does not appear to register in the minds of these stuffy academics; they were raised to think of “whore” as an insult and like many modern people could not imagine it as anything else.  But these were isolated cases; for the most part, scholars recognized that the notion of prostitution as a social ill is largely Judeo-Christian, and the notion that it should actually be abolished dates only to the late 19th century.

All that started to change about 20 years ago, when neofeminist anti-sex views began to permeate academia.  At first there were only a few such revisionist papers, but in the past decade a new crop of courtesan deniers has sprung up, and many of them have not limited themselves to denying the harlotry of our most famous sisters; instead they have gone straight for the root like crazed gophers, making the grandiose claim that the entire concept of sacred prostitution is a “myth”.  All the records of it from the Middle East, the Far East, India, Greece, Rome and Central America?  Fabrications and misinterpretations, according to these neofeminist “historians”.  As one of them expressed it, sacred prostitution is “more of a construct of the 19th Century Western European mindset than a true representation of the facts,”  those “facts” being of course that prostitution is “violence against women” and a manifestation of “patriarchy”, and therefore it is impossible that prostitutes could ever have been priestesses.  Their chief support for this notion is that the only Greek historian who describes the Babylonian version of the practice is Herodotus (who had a tendency to embellish many of his stories) and that some of the Mesopotamian texts which mention sacred prostitution also describe things like kings feasting with the gods.  Of course by that same token we must also disbelieve that the Sumerians had cities, agriculture, weapons and all the other things described in these same texts, but since none of those things contradict neofeminist dogma it is only prostitution which is suspect.  And somehow, casting doubt on Sumerian texts is held to “disprove” sacred prostitution everywhere in the world.  Modern prohibitionists have succeeded in establishing formal persecution of the last sacred prostitutes on the planet, the devadasis of India and the deukis of Nepal, and now in their hubris they wish to retroactively wipe out our tradition back to the beginning of civilization, profaning the memory of the sacred whores of antiquity by denying they ever existed.

Read Full Post »

Harlots of the Bible

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , on July 22, 2011| 17 Comments »

Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.  –  Matthew 21:31

Today is the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, whom Western tradition represents as a repentant prostitute; I discussed the legend in last year’s column for this day.  But though the Bible does not support the idea that Mary Magdalene was a whore, it does mention a number of other ladies of my profession and today I’d like to present an overview of their stories.

The first notable mention of a harlot occurs in Genesis 38, and as might be expected of an episode taking place about the 15th century BCE the harlot concerned was a temple prostitute…or to be exact, a woman disguised as a temple prostitute.  The Hebrew Levirate law required that a man marry his brother’s childless widow so the dead brother might have descendants to inherit his name and property and the widow would have children to support her in old age.  The patriarch Judah had three sons:  Er, Onan and Shelah, but Er died suddenly before giving his wife, Tamar, any children.  Er’s younger brother, Onan, married her as duty demanded, but he hated his dead brother and refused to give him descendants, so though he had sex with Tamar he withdrew before ejaculation and “spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother” – (Genesis 38:9).  Yahweh was very unhappy about this combination rape and dereliction of duty and accordingly slew Onan; weirdly enough, Christian preachers of the early 18th century used this as evidence that God disliked masturbation (“spilling seed on the ground”) and referred to the act as “onanism”, thus demonstrating that they entirely misunderstood the nature of Onan’s transgression.

“Tamar and Judah” by Horace Vernet (1840)

In any case, Shelah should have next inherited the duty but he was too young to marry, so Judah asked Tamar to wait; however, when the boy came of age the father did not uphold his promise.  The clever girl therefore travelled to a nearby town whither Judah had driven his sheep to have them shorn, and disguised herself as a veiled Canaanite temple prostitute (the Hebrew word used is kedeshah, a sacred prostitute, rather than zonah, a common one) in order to entice her father-in-law to hire her.  The plan worked; he promised to pay her a kid from his flock, and as a bond he left his signet ring, bracelets and staff.  Of course, she had no interest in payment; what she wanted was the child due her, so after the act was done she left without waiting for the kid to be delivered, and when her pregnancy began to show three months later she presented the identifying items as proof of her child’s lawful parentage.  Judah confessed that he had been tricked into doing his duty, Tamar had twins and everything worked out for the best; the sons became the ancestors of the tribe of Judah, i.e. the Jews.

Tamar was not the only Biblical harlot with important descendants.  In the second chapter of Joshua two Hebrew spies lodged in the house of a harlot named Rahab while in Jericho, and she hid them from searchers in return for their promise that when they invaded her city she and her family would be spared.  Why did she do this for two strangers?  Self-interest was certainly a major factor, but hospitality laws probably came into play as well; in the ancient Near East a host had a sacred responsibility for the safety of those under his roof, which is why Lot was willing to turn his own daughters over to the Sodomite rape-gang in Genesis 19:4-8 rather than give up the disguised angels who were his guests.  Also, Rahab seems to have been rather disgusted by the spineless response of her countrymen to news of the Hebrew victories (“your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you…neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you” – Joshua 2:9-11).  In any case, Joshua kept the pact to which his spies had committed him and Rahab and her family were spared; she married one of the Hebrews and became the ancestress of either several prophets or of Jesus himself, depending on which Biblical scholar one chooses to believe.

The First Book of Kings (chapter 3, verses 16-28), tells the famous story of King Solomon’s judgment over two harlots who shared a house; one overlaid her baby and he died, so she switched the body for the other woman’s child.  The King ordered that the living baby be split with a sword and half given to each, whereupon the real mother instantly renounced the infant to save its life.  But there’s a strange detail at the end of the story; we are told “all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king”, which is a strange reaction unless one recognizes the politics behind it.  Solomon, you see, was not the rightful heir; he was the son of David’s concubine Bathsheba, and the throne should have gone to his elder brother Adonijah but Solomon was the cleverer politician and contrived a coup.  Immediately upon taking the throne he spread the story of the judgment over the harlots, which was in actuality a parable:  the wrongful mother (Solomon) was willing to let the baby (Israel) be split with a sword (divided by civil war), but the rightful mother (Adonijah) could avoid the butchery by relinquishing parental (royal) rights.  No wonder the people were afraid!

In Solomon’s parable Israel was the child of a whore, but by Ezekiel’s time (early 6th century BCE) she was portrayed as a whore herself.  Ezekiel (whose feast, coincidentally, was yesterday) repeatedly prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem for its “betrayal” of Mosaic Law, and one of his parables painted the now-divided Hebrew kingdom (northern Samaria and southern Judah) as a pair of harlot sisters who enjoy their work entirely too much.  He describes their “whoredoms” in great and lurid detail, mentioning several times that their clients bruised their tits (Ezekiel 23:3, 8 and 21), and he seems especially fascinated with the size of their clients’ penises and the volume of their seminal discharge (“For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.” – Ezekiel 23:20).  I’ll bet you never studied that passage in catechism or Sunday school!

But what about the woman whose name is practically synonymous with “whore”, namely Jezebel?  Well, as I already explained in my column of that name, she was a Phoenician princess who married King Ahab of Israel and dutifully built temples to her own gods in her adopted land, thus earning the wrath of the fanatical prophet Elisha.  After Ahab’s death Elisha backed a usurper who overthrew the rightful heir and had Queen Jezebel hurled from a window of the palace to her death.  The association of her name with harlotry appears to derive from the fact that when she knew death was near she made up her face and dressed in full royal regalia so as to die a queen, plus the fact that Elisha, like Ezekiel in later centuries, used the word “whoredom” as a metaphor for turning from Yahweh to other gods.  Of course, Jezebel wasn’t a Hebrew so her adherence to her native gods can hardly be considered apostasy, but little details like that (and the fact that in Phoenicia, makeup wasn’t considered the exclusive province of harlots as it was in Israel) don’t matter much to homicidal religious maniacs.

“The Whore of Babylon” by William Blake (1809)

Nor to mystical visionaries like St. John the Divine, who in the 1st century CE portrayed Jezebel as a sort of succubus: “…thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.  And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.  Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.” (Revelation 2:20-22)  John was one of those Christians who followed in the footsteps of the Hebrew prophets by using whores as symbols for everything filthy; the most famous is of course the Whore of Babylon from Revelation 17:

And there came one of the seven angels…saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:  With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication…and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.  And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:  And upon her forehead [was] a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.”

Though modern Christian fundamentalists believe the Whore of Babylon to be a literal person, this is a fairly recent interpretation; most Biblical scholars believe she was a symbol for Rome, and Martin Luther and other leaders of the Reformation taught that she was a symbol for the Catholic Church.  But whichever interpretation one accepts, with Babylon the transformation is complete; the whores of the oldest parts of the Bible are strong, realistic and positively-portrayed women, but as the centuries wore on and women’s status sank the harlot became a symbol for increasingly negative and abstract concepts.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »