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Posts Tagged ‘naturalness’

Gorged With Meaning

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 21, 2011| 9 Comments »

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

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

A bird?

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

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

Not a bird.

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

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

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

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Elephant in the Parlor

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 23, 2011| 27 Comments »

People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.  –  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

On September 30th I saw a Gawker article whose headline announced “Top Tea Partier Parties With Hookers”, then I yawned, clicked onto another item and promptly forgot about the non-news story for a couple of days until some other source reminded me of it.  Apparently, there are people in this country who have memories so short they can’t remember the last story of a politician caught looking for or hiring a whore, or the one before that, or the one before that, or the many dozens before that (or this one which broke Friday).  I know that Gawker is the online equivalent of a tabloid, but “politician hires prostitute” is the political equivalent of “dog bites man”, a commonplace event which really isn’t the least bit newsworthy.

But since there may be a few of you out there who still believe in the Tooth Fairy, I reckon I need to say this declaratively:  most male politicians hire prostitutes from time to time.  And this really shouldn’t be surprising because 69% of all Western men have directly paid for sex at least once in their lives, 20% do it occasionally and 6% regularly.  I say “directly paid” because as I’ve pointed out many times before, nearly all heterosexual men have paid for it indirectly…and I’m sure a good percentage of them are honest enough to recognize that.  Furthermore, roughly 1% of Western women have worked as prostitutes at some point in their lives, and if Sweden is representative perhaps ten times that number have accepted money for sex at least once (which, incidentally, is similar to historical percentages of the female population working as whores).  Yet the widespread myth that “only desperate men pay for sex” and its sister, “only desperate, damaged women accept money for sex,” persist despite the fact that at least seven out of ten men and one out of ten women repeating or hearing the statements know for a fact from personal experience that they aren’t true …and many, many more know secondhand.

Prostitution is the elephant in the American parlor; though most men and a sizeable fraction of women see it standing there, they refuse to talk honestly about it lest they upset their half-blind old Auntie who either can’t see it or has mistaken it for a large and rather oddly-shaped sideboard or ottoman.  And so they allow her to prattle on about the weather and the price of tea and how the immigrants are ruining this country, listening quietly as she makes wholly absurd statements about that piece of furniture she doesn’t recognize as an elephant and agreeing with her even though they can clearly see that she’s spouting utter nonsense.  Why do they do this?  I suspect it’s the result of cognitive dissonance caused by the conflict of what they know personally and intellectually to be true and that which they have been taught to believe.  For example, 46% of Americans continue to support the criminalization of marijuana even though most of them have used it themselves; many insist that teen sexuality can be curbed by keeping them in ignorance despite the fact that their own ignorance never stopped them when they were teens; and most support Draconian and disproportionate sentences for all crimes despite the fact that everyone breaks some laws on occasion.

A politician hires whores more often than other men do for the same reason a dog licks his genitals:  because he can.  The average politician has a lot more money and a vastly greater sense of his own entitlement than the average non-politician, but a lot more to lose should he be discovered with a mistress; a professional is therefore the obvious choice.  Yes, some of them (like Anthony Weiner or Bill Clinton) are foolish enough to obtain their extracurricular nookie from amateurs…who then, predictably, talk and get them in trouble.  But most of them have more sense, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the normal frequency categories were shifted up one step for politicians; i.e., 20% hiring hookers frequently, 69% occasionally and virtually all of them at least once in their lives.  This is, of course, merely an educated guess, but ask yourself:  Why is it that the client lists of state-destroyed escort services like Miami Companions or Pamela Martin and Associates are literally never revealed?

This makes the public behavior of politicians toward prostitutes to be all the more despicable.  Most of the legislators who vomit bile against us, most of the attorneys general who try to shut down our advertising venues, most of the judges who sentence us and most of the police chiefs who hunt us like animals are all customers; as I pointed out in “The Biggest Whores”, they hate us precisely because they need us:  “Most people are willing to crawl to the politician, licking his boots in order to gain a few scraps from his table, but the whore merely laughs at him and reverses the relationship while providing living proof of the inability of his profession to eradicate or control ours.”  And this is why it’s so rare that an escort service gets busted; politicians…

…don’t want to cut off easy access to easy women by persecuting the services.  So they allow the cops to harass streetwalkers and play sadistic little tricks on escorts and call girls, knowing full well that even if a few high-quality girls are scared out of the profession by police shenanigans there will still be plenty of others available…These sleazy sons of bitches don’t care how many individual girls get hurt; most of them prefer endless variety anyhow and consider individual escorts to be a disposable commodity.

Expressed more graphically, they don’t mind poaching as long as the whole herd isn’t wiped out.

Of course, politicians are still human (albeit the worst and least-evolved specimens of humanity), so they can get caught up in hysteria just like other people can.  Undoubtedly, there are many politicians who genuinely believe in the “child sex trafficking” hysteria, confusing the “elephant in the parlor” of prostitution with the “heffalump in the parlor” of pedophilia (as discussed in my column of one year ago today) and obsessing over lurid fantasies of 300,000 barely-pubescent sex slaves.  But even most of those politicians still have their whores, not only because they can rationalize their own escorts as among the “rare” non-coerced sex workers, but also because of the time-honored credo of the overlord, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

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Moondance

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2011| 16 Comments »

Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
‘Neath the cover of October skies
And all the leaves on the trees are fallin’
To the sound of the breezes that blow
An’ I’m trying to please to the callin’
Of your heart strings that play soft and low
And all the night’s magic seems to whisper and hush
And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush.  –  Van Morrison, “Moondance”

The modern disconnect with the natural world which has given rise to neofeminism, “social construction of gender”, the militant “animal rights” movement and many other bizarre beliefs and practices is completely alien to me.  When one lives in the country surrounded by plants and animals it is impossible to reduce the calendar to an official fiction, to pretend that shifting clocks changes the time, to imagine that sex-based characteristics and sexual behaviors are instilled by socialization rather than arising naturally as they do in every other animal, or to believe that things like predatory male sexuality, prostitution, sexual dominance and submission and the physical or behavioral characteristics to which people are attracted derive from “patriarchy” rather than evolution and neurochemistry, and can be eliminated by laws and giving little boys dolls to play with (as discussed in my column of one year ago today).  And once one spends even a short time each day watching dogs, cats, livestock and wildlife it is no longer possible to comfort oneself with the ridiculous idea that humans are a kind of angelic being totally and completely separate from all other forms of biological life, or to adhere to the naïve notion that it is either possible or desirable to completely eliminate from the human world what the “enlightenment police” glibly refer to as “cruelty” (a concept which bears about as much resemblance to actual cruelty as a teddy bear has to a grizzly).

It’s not as easy for the inhabitants of New Orleans to isolate themselves from Nature as it is for the inhabitants of most large cities; it is probably the greenest of all American cities, and the total percentage of ground covered with concrete there is very low indeed.  The living Earth beneath the city does not accept her bondage lightly, and constantly expresses her displeasure by undermining houses, creating holes in the roadways, and introducing water into every place which is not hermetically sealed.  Nor do the other life-forms who share the environment respect man-made borders; insects, reptiles and small mammals brazenly invade human dwellings on a scale unheard-of elsewhere, and even the plants slowly creep in while nobody is watching and destroy whatever gets in their way.  And I haven’t even mentioned the hurricanes.

Despite all this some still try, shutting themselves up in climate-controlled offices all day and climate-controlled houses all night, and moving between the two as quickly as possible.  I honestly think they’re in the minority, though, or at least they used to be, which is probably part of the reason neither neofeminism nor any other belief system which relies on rejection of Nature has ever caught on there (or anywhere else in the Deep South).  And I never even tried to join their number, nor do I think I could have had I wanted to.  The tides which ebb and flow in every woman were always particularly strong in me, and that wasn’t the only natural factor which was; the combination of my sinus problems and the bursitis in a cracked rib (incurred in an auto accident when I was in my late teens) allowed me to predict the weather with a high degree of accuracy for most of my twenties, and as I wrote in my column for last Halloween my spirits have always invariably lifted as autumn arrives and the leaves begin to turn.

October usually enjoys a particular sort of cool weather, a crisp breeziness quite unlike that one might experience on an early spring day or a comparatively warm winter one; this is October Weather, my name for that special atmospheric condition I associate with turning leaves and the imminent arrival of my birthday.  In New Orleans I was often cheated of it; October Weather might not come ‘til November and then immediately depart, or some years it might not appear at all.  In fact, one of the reasons I chose to move to the upper South from my native country was the promise of more distinct seasons, including a long, colorful autumn.  The odd, late, chaotic autumns we’ve had the past few years due to the changing climate have caused me considerable annoyance, but they’re still more dependable than what I got in New Orleans so I reckon I can’t complain.  But when that weather did arrive I was filled with a sort of wild, witchy joy; I wanted to stay out late, to suck the fragrant air into my lungs and fly through the night under the harvest moon with my hair streaming behind me.  As a young teen I often sneaked out in the middle of the night to enjoy such weather, and after I arrived at UNO I would wander about the campus on such evenings or ride my bicycle to midnight movies at the Robert E. Lee Theater a few miles away.  More than once I invited my cousin Jeff or whatever boy I was dating to moonlight picnics on such evenings; since UNO was largely a “commuter college” with a low resident population the campus was virtually deserted at night, so we had our pick of sites.

Jeff was a big fan of Van Morrison’s, and there were three of his songs which Jeff particularly associated with me:  “Brown-Eyed Girl”, “Tupelo Honey” and the one which forms my epigram; one of the things which let me know that my husband might be “the one” was that he associated those same songs with me.  And though as I age my reaction to October Weather isn’t nearly as strong as it was in my teens and twenties, on clear, cool October nights I still feel the urge to go out and dance in the dry leaves under the moon.

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Fictional Interlude: Dance of the Seasons

Posted in Fiction, History, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , 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 7th 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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She Should Know Better

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2011| 15 Comments »

Thus one can observe that those who proclaim piety as their goal and purpose usually turn into hypocrites.  –  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Arianna Huffington isn’t a stupid woman, nor one lacking in (to use Catherine Hakim’s term) erotic capital; like any sensible woman she’s used her brains and her relationships with men to get where she wanted to be, and is now very successful.  And when (in the late ‘90s) she saw signs of the impending economic collapse, she made sure she switched to loudly preaching a simple-minded partisan “liberalism” every bit as loudly as she had previously preached a simple-minded partisan “conservatism” so that when the revolution comes, nobody will be able to accuse her of having said “let them eat cake”.  So I’m not surprised that the majority of articles on her website, Huffington Post, which are not dedicated to straightforward reporting or empty-headed celebrity gossip consist partially or completely of childish partisan name-calling.  And given that “sex trafficking” is the current politically correct moral panic, I am also unsurprised when her website panders to it in furtherance of her transparent efforts to stay on the good side of the Great Unwashed, despite the fact that an educated person should demand facts and a woman who has profited by male associations as handsomely as she has should be a bit more sympathetic to her sisters who do the same thing on a smaller scale.

What I don’t expect, however, is to see stupid, asinine, insulting political stereotypes combined with stupid, asinine, insulting sex worker stereotypes into an article so stupid and asinine that it is bound to insult the intelligence of any reasonable reader…though not (judging by the replies) that of the HuffPo commentariat.  The offending exercise appeared on September 1st:

Following an extensive remodel, the Penthouse Club in Tampa, Fla., is finally ready for next summer’s Republican National Convention.  Club operator DeWayne Levesque has installed two secluded VIP sections, which he hopes will help his club attract a bigger share of the 50,000 visitors expected to descend upon the city on Aug. 27…another strip club owner, Joe Redner, said he has high hopes for what the convention means for business at his all-nude club, Mons Venus.  “I’m guessing we’ll make five times as much in a night as we usually do,” Redner told HuffPost.  “Republicans got plenty of money.  They take it all from poor people,” he said.  Redner said he thinks many convention visitors will be in the market for a lap dance, but newly-released academic research suggests that some will be interested in the darker elements of Tampa’s adult scene, too — sex for sale…

Those who clicked on the embedded link may recognize this “research”; it’s the Cunningham and Kendall foolishness I dissected in my column of June 26th, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of this article.

…Another adults-only perk for conventioneers are scheduled appearances at clubs by well-known female adult film stars.  Agent Brian Gross, who represents actresses Joanna Angel, Ryan Keely and Alexis Ford told HuffPost that “large events … give big name adult stars who dance on the circuit a great opportunity to get in front of a large crowd for their on-stage performances”…X-rated starlets also offer the clubs a competitive advantage, which is critical in an industry that Redner said has been hard hit by the Great Recession.  For those with cash to spend, however, the options abound.  An adult video producer who gave his name as “Brandon” said he plans to offer conventioneers an erotic limo service that includes the company of “models.”

In the first paragraph we were subjected to the old “rich guy kicking beggars” stereotype, and now we get the obligatory scare quotes around the word “models”.  We’re not judgmental, noooooooooo.  As for the idiotic and weaselly phrase “Great Recession”, I call your attention to this column by Emily Hemingway.  We’re in a depression, kiddies, not a recession; you aren’t allowed to include government spending in GDP calculations (since government doesn’t produce anything, it’s basically counting the same money twice).

The next section explains the linked study, repeating its fallacy (which I explained back in June) of equating an increase in escort ads with an increase in number of escorts.  Interestingly, one of the authors of the study actually talked to an escort:

Perhaps surprisingly, the one group of sex workers who didn’t benefit from the 2008 conventions were the high-priced escorts on Eros.com — the kind of women who have been linked to more than a few politicians in the past.  One of the authors of the study, Dr. Scott Cunningham, recalled a high-priced escort who explained the trouble with political conventions.  “She said to me, ‘Scott, there just isn’t enough disposable income at those political things.  But there’s a really great radiology convention up in Chicago, and I always go to that.'”

But did that help him to recognize that his premise was flawed?  Of course not!  I remind my readers of Maier’s Law:  “If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.”  Behold the law in action:

The reality, however, is that most of Tampa’s prostitutes won’t be jetting from one convention to the other.  Conversely, they could end up in the hands of a man like Charles Fox, who ran a brothel in the middle of South Tampa for nearly seven years until he was arrested last month.  According to police, Fox kept up to five women at a time enslaved in a small greenhouse using a combination of fear, drugs, alcohol and violence.  He sold them to men online, controlled their every move, and took 100 percent of their earnings.  Those who protested were tied up, raped, or worse.  For men like Charles Fox, political conventions are a great place to make money, said anti-trafficking advocate Andrea Powell.  “You can be sure a pimp knows when large numbers of men are going to be in the area,” she said in an interview with HuffPost, “and he’ll do whatever he can to get his piece of that business.”

By placing a lurid “sex trafficking” story next to a study the authors claim as credible (though as we’ve seen it isn’t), the credibility of bogus claims attached to that story are enhanced.  Note also the shell game:  a professional escort says there’s no enormous boom from political conventions (just like there isn’t from sporting events, and for similar reasons), and a prohibitionist makes the opposite claim; guess which statement the rest of the article is built on?

Powell is a co-founder of the Fair Fund, which helps rescue trafficked young women, and she said there is absolutely no way for a potential customer to know whether a prostitute has been trafficked.  “This concept that you can differentiate between willing sex work and trafficking is really complicated, because sex work fuels trafficking, and there’s so much money involved,” she said.  “Consider that one girl can have sex with 15 men in a night, at $100 an hour.  This means she’s producing $35,000-$40,000 a month for whoever owns her.”

The independent escorts who make up over 60% of the American market don’t support “sex trafficking” mythology, so in only a few paragraphs the article descends from at least the pretense of objectivity into the Gorean fantasy so beloved of moralists, man-hating neofeminists and male trafficking fetishists with fragile egos. Note that the standard scare number has increased from 10 clients a night to 15, so as to generate bigger bogus income figures, and it only gets worse from there; the rest of the article consists of a farrago of police ignorance about “keeping an eye on Craigs list [sic],” false claims about both that site and Backpage, moralistic pouting about the defeat of the foredoomed “pimping” lawsuit against the latter and the language of escort ads, and the typical ignorant pretense that until recently most whores were streetwalkers.

Obviously, Arianna Huffington herself doesn’t read over every article before it’s posted, but she sets the editorial policies so she’s still responsible.  I recently asked whether Huffington Post was trying to balance its disgusting pandering to trafficking fetishists by allowing Ronald Weitzer to debunk fanatics’ claims, but that clearly isn’t the case; obviously Huffington doesn’t care how many sex workers she has to throw under the bus in order to protect her own reputation among the hoi-polloi by catering to the current fashionable delusions about us.

One Year Ago Today

“The Yellow Rose of Texas” is the story of Emily Morgan, who though she was not strictly a whore used her sexuality to change the course of history and thereby became a legend.

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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.

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Anniversary

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on July 10, 2011| 48 Comments »

Writing is like prostitution.  First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.  –  Moliere

One year ago today, I started this blog in order to have a soapbox from which to share my views on my profession; I wanted to do my small part in getting the word out that whores aren’t really different from other women and that laws suppressing our trade are evil, oppressive and unfounded in even the most tenuously defensible legal precedent.  I also hoped to help men and women to understand each other a little better, to find a creative outlet for my writing skills and perhaps even to entertain people along the way.  The Honest Courtesan has been more successful than I ever would’ve guessed; though I intended from the very beginning to post every day for at least the first year, I was pretty tired at the end of December and publicly worried that I would not be able to keep up the pace.  But then I got my second wind, changed the way I did a few things so as to make the process a bit less grueling, and managed to accomplish my initial goal without burning out or once missing a deadline.  After 365 posts, 8300+ comments, almost 250,000 hits and 87 subscribers, I don’t think it would be prideful of me to say that this blog is a success; I am respected by my readers and peers, complimented often, quoted and linked all over the internet and regularly contacted by journalists and other professionals for my expert opinions.  And that’s probably more than an overeducated middle-aged whore with a big mouth deserves.

So now I really am going to slow down just a teensy little bit, not only to give myself a breather but also to make time for all the guest blogging, editing, activism and other outside projects my popularity has attracted.  I’m still going to post every day (gods willing), but on holidays and perhaps a couple of other days per month my columns will be much shorter (though most will continue at the present 750-1500 word range, which I find very comfortable).  Because there are far too many past columns for any new reader who isn’t completely obsessed to even hope to slog through, starting tomorrow I’m introducing a new daily feature called “One Year Ago Today”, which will be a link and a short description of the column from that date the previous year; this will enable interested new readers to catch up gradually.  Most days the feature will probably be just a PS at the end of the regular column; other days it may actually be embedded in a new column on the same subject, and on still other days (such as holidays) the column may only consist of the link and a few new or introductory thoughts on the subject of the earlier column.

One of the projects on which I’d like to work is one which many of my readers have asked for, namely a collection of my best columns.  It’s quite easy to publish electronically nowadays, and I’d also like to explore doing a limited run of paper copies (to start, more can always be printed if need be) for no other reason than it would do my little librarian’s heart good.  I also feel like it might let me reach an audience which doesn’t generally read blogs.  The columns I select will have to be modified a little; hyperlinks will have to be replaced by quotes and attributions, and references to earlier columns which don’t appear in the collection subsumed in the text, that sort of thing, but I should be able to do those pretty quickly once I start.  Before I do anything else, though, I’ll need to know which columns to include, so I’d like your help in figuring that out.  Please comment to this post or send me an email listing your ten favorite columns from the past year.  You don’t need to rank them because I’m going to score them simply by the number of lists on which they appear, ignoring the order they appear in; if you can’t think of ten just put as many as you like.  Then at the beginning of August I’ll do a column in which I list the top ten columns calculated in a number of different ways:  The top ten by number of page views, the same list corrected by removing columns usually found by popular image searches, the top ten by number of comments, my favorite ten and your favorite ten.  And all of those will go into the book.

Thank you so very much for reading, for responding, and for making this project more fun and rewarding than I ever would’ve imagined it would be.  And most especially thank you all for your kind words and unflagging support, without which I think I would’ve run out of juice long ago.  Here’s to the next year!

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New Reviews for June

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2011| 17 Comments »

As is my custom, I’m featuring these reviews of new additions to my review pages in order to call the attention of regular readers (who have presumably already looked at those pages) to them.

Aphrodite’s Trade by Lochlainn Seabrook

Thanks to its ambitious subtitle (“The Hidden History of Prostitution Unveiled”), its beautiful cover art (The Pearls of Aphrodite by Herbert Draper) and its endorsements from a number of luminaries in the prostitutes’ rights field, I was really looking forward to reading this book and was hoping to find in it a supplement to Nickie Roberts’ Whores In History; alas, I was badly disappointed.  Even now I wish I could recommend it to you; the author’s heart is in the right place and some of the points he makes are bang on target, but both content and execution are so critically flawed that I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone who isn’t A) already an expert in the field; B) an obsessive collector of all things whore-related, and C) able to find it cheap.

The book starts out strong with a presentation of the roots of prostitution in biology (such as we’ve discussed here before), and Seabrook even postulates a “prostitution gene” along the same lines as that suggested by Amanda Brooks.  Furthermore, he points out that since marriage was made possible by human females evolving beyond estrus – essentially making ourselves sexually receptive all the time – that it is reasonable to state that marriage evolved from prostitution rather than alongside it; again, no quibbles here.  But rather than stick to his strong point (which appears to be biology), Seabrook then wanders off into some very unconventional (and unsound) notions about history, describing as fact highly dubious New Age ideas about Neolithic social organization and portraying what he calls the “Patriarchal Takeover” as a monolithic event at a specific time, which it absolutely was not; what’s more, he can’t make up his mind about when it was supposed to have happened because he gives three different dates!  And his notions of etymology are even worse; Seabrook appears to believe that because two words resemble each other they must be linguistically related, and the houses of cards he builds from these pseudo-cognates are quite remarkable.

The structure of the book is as flawed as its content; though externally it appears to be a typical small-format trade paperback of 256 pages, it is printed in a large type-face with excessive white space and the essay itself (I hesitate to call it a book) occupies only 75 of those pages; there follow several appendices (only two of which are arguably useful), then a 40-page bibliography and a 75-page index (printed with even more wasted space than the text).  In the final analysis, this is basically a deeply-flawed 30-something page essay padded out to book size.  Save your money and buy Whores In History instead.

Heart of Gold by A.K. Smith

My experience with Heart of Gold was almost the opposite of that with Aphrodite’s Trade.  I was interested in it because of the subject matter and because I like the author’s blog, but I don’t generally care for detective novels and, though I’m not a technophobe, I fully admit to prejudice against e-books because (as you might suspect from my having been a librarian) I’m a bibliophile and I like the experience of reading a physical book with paper pages I can hold in my hands (I especially like the slightly-musty smell of old books).  So when I sat down with it a couple of weeks ago I intended to read just a chapter or two a night; well, that didn’t happen.  I was drawn in almost immediately and found myself saying, “I’ll just read one more chapter” over and over again until I had finished half the book; I only stopped because it was almost one in the morning and I usually go to bed around midnight.  The next day I started reading soon after posting my column, and didn’t stop until I was finished.  Smith’s characters are interesting, her plotting is tight and she managed to keep me guessing as to which of the suspects was threatening the heroine and what his motive might be (I guessed wrong).  Since (as I said previously) I’m not much of a reader of modern detective fiction, I can’t compare it to the work of well-known mystery authors, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and Smith managed to work in a good deal of detail about the realities of escorting in such a way that outsiders will learn some things about our lives without feeling preached to or distracted from the action.  All in all this is a very good first novel, and I look forward to future works.

National Geographic Taboo:  Prostitution (2010)

My husband recorded this documentary, an episode of the National Geographic Channel’s Taboo series, on his computer while on the road and brought it home for me to watch.  I believe the producers were trying to present a balanced view on the subject, but unfortunately this effort was undermined by two things, namely the narrative voice and the presentation of statistically disparate forms of prostitution as though they were equally common.  The show depicted four kinds of prostitution, each for about a quarter of the time:  Australian brothels, Bangladeshi prostitutes in a shantytown  adjacent to a ferry landing, European brothels and streetwalkers in Washington, D.C.  I’m sure my readers are astute enough to have noticed one major omission: the single most common form of prostitution in the Western world, namely escorting, was entirely ignored in favor of lurid concentration on a very small fraction of the American market.  The director seems to have leaned a little on our side; though roughly equal air time was given to the two pro-decriminalization experts (Ronald Weitzer, whose papers I have referenced before, and Jill McCracken, a fellow member of Sex Workers Without Borders) and the one anti-prostitution fanatic (Sheila Jeffreys), the spectacle of Jeffreys pronouncing that a paralyzed man who hired a legal prostitute at a Dutch brothel was guilty of “violence against women” made her look like the hateful monster she is.  Unfortunately, the writer leaned the other way:  Every negative statement about prostitution was expressed as a fact, while every positive one was said to be an opinion.  Statements about the terrible conditions of their lives made by the Bangladeshi prostitutes and the American streetwalkers were reported with the word “is”, while statements made by the legal Australian and Dutch prostitutes were reported with the word “claims”.  In other words we hear that the streetwalker is miserable, but the Aussie brothel girls only claim to be happy.  It’s a subtle bias, but one a less-critical viewer would absorb without noticing.  And in the end, despite eloquent explanations from Weitzer and McCracken that most of the problems of sex work derive from criminalization, I think the overall tone of the program comes off as somewhat anti-prostitution.

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Speaking in Prostitute

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 17, 2011| 195 Comments »

I think if a woman has a right to an abortion and to control her body, then she has the right to exploit her body and make money from it.  We have it hard enough.  Why give up one of our major assets?  –  Kathy Keeton

I’ve been meaning to write a column like this for about two months now, but never quite got around to it until the subject of the conversation was clearly demonstrated by a recent interchange in a comment thread.  Early in April, Emily Hemingway mentioned in an email that she thought it wasn’t a good idea to use the word “whore” in reference to housewives because they might feel that I was trying to say they are just as “dirty” as we are:  “if a few girls think that you are dirty and you push them into a mud puddle, rub their faces in it, throw a few gobs of muck down their shirts, you can’t expect to then tell them, ‘See, now we’re both dirty and we can be friends.’”  She felt that they might think I was pretending that there is NO difference, and that it would create bad feeling.  I replied:

My issue is that prostitution is the only “crime” which is defined entirely by motive.  It’s legal to provide sex in exchange for value as long as the exchange is indirect or dishonest, and it’s even legal to do it directly if there’s a marriage license involved.  So my philosophy is…not “we’re both dirty”…but rather that whoring isn’t dirty, AT ALL.  In fact, we are the only honest businesswomen operating in the otherwise-dishonest field of human sexuality.

Emily then answered:

I agree with you on both of those points; whoring isn’t dirty at all, and we (most whores) are indeed the only honest adults in the conversation on human sexuality.  What I’m disagreeing with is your method of conveying those points.  Others think a whore is a dirty thing, including women.  The answer isn’t to call them a whore back and think they will see themselves as dirty, thus on our side after all.  Because that isn’t what they’ll see – they’ll see you being offensive and insulting, and they’ll shut down…I have no issue with the word ‘whore’, but I acknowledge that other people do and I read things not only for how I see them, but how others will input false beliefs and take away the wrong message.  And I think that’s what is happening.  If this were just us gals emailing, we’d know exactly what was going on with the “wives as a subset of prostitutes” thing.

You’re speaking in Prostitute, and doing so very eloquently, but the problem is that people are listening in Repressive Christian Archetype.

I saw what she was saying, but since I hadn’t really seen it happen on the blog and a number of my non-harlot female readers (especially Andrea) have agreed with the principle, often very vocally, I figured I needn’t say anything yet.  In other words, I knew that Emily was right in principle, but I figured that since nobody seemed to have misunderstood me yet I would cross the housewife-whore bridge when I came to it.  Well, we finally came to it a week ago Tuesday (June 7th); reader JZ asked in a comment, “Why the denigration of housewives?”  and I immediately recognized that this was exactly the situation Emily had anticipated so I answered, “What denigration?  I’m a housewife, and was once before, and so are some of my friends and several regular readers.  Remember, “prostitute” is not an insult to us; it’s merely an observation of fact.”  But that was apparently an insufficient response, as were several other replies from other commenters, because JZ repeated several more times that she saw housewives often denigrated both by me and commenters.  When I asked for a specific clarification, she replied “You call housewives whores.  Simple enough.”

And this, of course, proves Emily’s point exactly.  Despite the fact that I repeated several times that I didn’t consider “whore” or “prostitute” to be insults, the negative connotations of those words were too ingrained in JZ’s perception for her to think of them in any other way.  As Emily had said in her email to me back in April (and both she and I quoted in that comment thread), I was speaking in Prostitute but JZ was hearing in Repressive Christian Archetype.  This is not in any way JZ’s fault; she didn’t invent those negative connotations, and her life-experiences never gave her the opportunity to see them in any other way so until she started reading this blog, she had never heard the term used in any way but as an insult.  So for her and other readers who may not understand my usage of the term, a bit of explanation is in order.

I feel that a woman’s sexual power is one of her greatest assets, and for her to reject that is as foolish as a man would be if he purposefully disdained the use of his physical strength, or any person would be if he intentionally denied himself the facts of a problem so he couldn’t use his thinking ability.  A woman who rejects her sexuality cripples herself and weakens her ability to make her way in the world; to insist that a woman’s sex appeal only be used for her own direct sexual satisfaction and absolutely nothing else is like having a car one only uses to go to movies or parties, but never to work or the grocery store.  A woman who uses her sexuality to make a living for herself, whether by direct cash exchange or some kind of indirect arrangement, is a kind of whore…and there is NOTHING wrong with that.  The stigma traditionally applied to whores is nothing more than the resentment felt by insecure men for a woman who uses her abilities to get what she wants rather than meekly submitting to be chattel, a resentment shared by women who are too timid to do otherwise themselves.  To accept the negative connotation of “whore” (the word or the concept) is to buy into the idea that, as Bernard Shaw put it, “Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men.”

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Parable

Posted in Fiction, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 21, 2011| 19 Comments »

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority.  Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.  –  Giordano Bruno

The land of Vespuccia was a lot like our own; people there lived very much like people do everywhere, and though they had their unique ways and traditions they were, for the most part, a reasonably typical modern country.  But the Vespuccians did have one peculiarity you might consider exceptional:  though they needed and liked to eat as much as everybody else, the average Vespuccian claimed to believe that it was bad and wrong to operate or patronize a restaurant.  I say “claimed to believe” because most of them couldn’t really have felt that way deep down; oh, some of them undoubtedly did, but 7 out of 10 Vespuccians had been to a restaurant at least once in their lives and many ate at such places regularly.  Restaurants were no less common in Vespuccia than in any other country, and indeed they always did a brisk business; restauranteurs were about as well-off as most business owners, and because the work was often difficult but also rewarding there was no shortage of people who decided to prepare food for a living despite the cruel way in which they were publicly treated by their countrymen because of it.

Despite the fact that most sensible people understood the importance of restaurants, almost nobody wanted to say that out loud; chefs and even waiters could not even publicly admit to working in their trades for fear of being ostracized.  Though many people ate brown-bag lunches right out in the open every day, moralists proclaimed that eating was an intimate act which should only be shared with one’s family.  Leaders accused restaurants of spreading disease in their food even though they cooked it more carefully and washed their pots and utensils more thoroughly than most people did at home.  And some jealous women pronounced that restaurants were bad because they themselves couldn’t cook as well as the chefs did, or complained that the mere existence of such establishments degraded and humiliated women because their husbands would expect to be waited on at home and have properly-prepared meals instead of reheated factory-made food which came out of boxes.  Worst of all, some heartless people would laugh when a restaurant was robbed or vandalized, saying that it was their own fault for displaying their fine silverware or claiming that they had enticed the criminals onto the premises with the delicious smells which emanated from them.  Some even turned their backs when restaurants burned down, and there were arsonists who specifically targeted restaurants because they knew there would be no public outcry against them.

But of all the Vespuccians, the ones who treated food professionals the worst were the bankers.  They wouldn’t lend money to those who worked in restaurants nor even let them open bank accounts, and they defended this illegal practice by claiming restauranteurs were dishonest.  They knowingly spread lies about chefs and waiters, repeating the same claims made by the moralists and leaders and jealous women and adding others of their own, such as claiming that restaurants enslaved their staff or hurt people by encouraging them to spend money on something which was quickly used up.  The worst of the bankers even directly stole money from restauranteurs, or else ate there and then walked out without paying their bills.  Even by Vespuccian standards their conduct was reprehensible, but if a restauranteur complained the bankers just insulted them and said they had brought misfortune upon themselves by opening restaurants in the first place; nobody criticized this monstrous behavior because they were afraid the bankers would raise their interest rates or foreclose on their homes.  Some upright people tried to defend the restauranteurs, but it was no use; most others would simply repeat their prejudiced views, and even when it could be proven that the bankers had done wrong people would claim that these were isolated incidents, that only a few bad bankers gave a bad name to the rest, or even that bankers were justified in their conduct because banking was such an important and stressful job.

One day Vespuccia fell on hard times, and so many restaurants went out of business that other people began to fear they might be affected as well.  Some of the public even said that the bankers should relent for a while and offer loans to the restaurants; some of this sentiment was sincere, while the rest was selfishly motivated by people concerned about all the chefs and waiters on the unemployment dole.  So eventually, some of the bankers grudgingly agreed to lend money to the restauranteurs, but even then it wasn’t exactly a fair deal; the bankers said that they needed the deeds to the restaurants as collateral, that they couldn’t promise a specific and constant interest rate and that the loans might be called in without warning as soon as the economic crisis was over.  They refused to put anything in writing, and still happily did business with other bankers who were busily engaged in mistreating restauranteurs as they always had.  Because the restauranteurs were so frightened of losing their businesses, however, many of them started to say among themselves that perhaps these bank loans might be a good idea, and prepared to hand over their papers in exchange for these vague and shaky promises.  But other restauranteurs (who were still doing all right and didn’t need the loans) told the desperate ones that bankers could not be trusted, and that they shouldn’t take this bargain unless the bankers put everything in writing and guaranteed that their property couldn’t be seized later on flimsy excuses.  Then some of the desperate ones answered that it was all well and fine for the ones who weren’t in danger to say such things because they weren’t the ones at risk, and that the promise of a loan under any conditions was better than no loan at all.  And so things went on as they always had, with the banks behaving as usual, the leaders making it easier for the banks to do so and the people refusing to demand change…except for the ones who insisted that Vespuccia should become more like Vinland, a nearby country in which the bankers preferred to harass people who ate at restaurants instead of those who ran them.

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