Nebraska | The Honest Courtesan

Posts Tagged ‘Nebraska’

In the News (#631)

Posted in Call types, Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged abortion, Above the Law, advertising, agency denial, All-Purpose Excuse, Arizona, Australia, Backpage, Big Sister, Broken Record, brothels, Business As Usual, cops, Couples, disability, evidence, Germany, hysteria, Iceland, Ireland, It Looks Good On Paper, Kentucky, Lack of Evidence, law, Louisiana, Madonna/whore, Massachusetts, Middle East, Nebraska, Ohio, prohibitionist myths, rape, sacred prostitutes, Size Matters, Skin To Skin, slavery, South Carolina, Swedish model, The Face of Trafficking, The Last Shall Be First, Traffic in Nonsense, transgender, Under Every Bed, underage, video, Virginia, Washington (state), Where Are the Victims?, Wisconsin on April 20, 2016| 7 Comments »

Tracy’s community…turned away from her in an inane focus on protecting the look of the gates rather than the garden that thrives beyond them. – Maya Yonika

Couples

A disabled Australian couple gets help from a sex worker:

…a…fall had long-lasting consequences on Jenni’s health generally and on our sex lives. Her prolonged and mostly unsuccessful recovery resulted in Jen having further reduced mobility in and out of bed. It meant we had to take extreme care not to touch or bump her foot…We tried different toys and different positions without joy. Two years after the fall we were at a point where we had to make a decision to either give up on enjoying sex or to investigate the possibility of allowing a third person into our bed…we arranged for sex worker, Joanne, to begin working with us. With each visit we had to remind ourselves that she wasn’t there to make “love” to us. Rather, in the same way that our support staff ensure that we remain in good physical health – by showering, feeding, and dressing us – Joanne helps us to maintain good sexual health…we successfully approached the ACT government to extend the funding of our disability care support to cover these conjugal support services. In December 2015, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) agreed that, in our situation, a modest allowance for conjugal support service would be reasonable and necessary…

Lack of Evidence

It appears to me that the cops have no actual evidence:

A North Augusta [South Carolina] woman has been arrested on multiple charges of Prostitution. Kristen Perry…was arrested [April 6th and]…is facing 21 charges of Sex/Prostitution 1st Offense. She is accused of placing ads on Backpage.com between December 2015 and February 2016 offering sex for money…The ads contained sexually suggestive photos and language…The ads were accompanied by a phone number confirmed to belong to Perry…The IP address from which the ads were posted was traced back to her residence…

A good lawyer should be able to beat this easily; if anyone knows her please ask her to call me (email me for the number). I definitely want to help her if possible. Arresting escorts based solely on ads is an extremely dangerous precedent that cannot be allowed to stand.

Where Are the Victims?

There weren’t any actual victims, but we just have to cage people, because SEEWEEUSS UFFENSE!

Chunjie Wang…of…Dublin…organised four brothels…for seven months..[in] 2011…Judge Melanie Greally noted the case did not involve the trafficking or exploitation of prostitutes…but…said the seriousness of the offence meant a custodial sentence was unavoidable and sentenced Wang to 18 months imprisonment…

It Looks Good On Paper

“Adult sex trafficking victims who get caught working as prostitutes could receive immunity from prostitution under a new Nebraska law…Nebraska already provides legal immunity to juvenile sex trafficking victims…” Except that as I’ve explained many times, these laws are nothing but Potemkin villages, empty legal husks designed to please the ignorant while actually sparing virtually nobody from the injustice system:

…Wisconsin…advocacy groups…want to pass what is known as “safe harbor” legislation, which prohibits prosecuting individuals under 18 for prostitution…Republican legislators who fear it will hinder law enforcement’s ability to intervene and help trafficking victims…Minors can complete a program or other requirements in exchange for a dismissal of the charge, or they can admit to charges but assert they were being trafficked at the time…Proponents believe that by refusing to prosecute minors, law enforcement will be able to establish trust and gain access to information that will allow them to more successfully prosecute traffickers…Custody may also be necessary to ensure the child does not return to his or her trafficker…

Translation of that last part: “Authorities” want to be able to lock up minors indefinitely and subject them to coercive interrogation tactics in order to prosecute others in their place.

Big Sister

The Swedish model is based in xenophobia, and it shows in rhetoric designed to rationalize its failure:

Ever greater numbers of tourists in Iceland…are feeding into the market for prostitution…Snorri Birgisson of the Reykjavik Metropolitan Police [pretends] “It is usually foreigners visiting Iceland for a short time”…It is [fantasized] that prostitutes who come to Iceland are “managed” by somebody and transported from country to country…

The Last Shall Be First

One battle in the bathroom wars has just ended. Or maybe a truce has been hammered out for the time being. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court has ruled in favor of a female-to-male trans student who was banned from using his school’s boys bathroom…the…Court, whose rulings also cover North Carolina (site of a contentious new law covering similar issues)…has ordered the lower court to hear his discrimination lawsuit…Go here to read recent Reason musings on North Carolina’s new bathroom law…I’m willing to bet the farm that even within a few years, if not sooner, we will all look back on the absolute panic evinced over the issue of unisex bathrooms and wonder just what the fuck we were all smoking…

Above the Law

“Roanoke [Virginia cop Francisco Alberto Duarte] is awaiting trial on a felony count of forcible sodomy“, and in Louisiana, “A Calcasieu Parish sheriff’s deputy has been fired [and criminally charged] after he was accused of inappropriately touching a woman…Cody Onxley…called the woman and went to her house under false pretenses.”

Broken Record

Farm machinery causes “sex trafficking”!

…[cops] have also found victims at this year’s National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville and expect to find others at the Kentucky Derby…traffickers…stay mobile, moving victims from city to city to major sporting and entertainment events…truckers are getting the word out through the national campaign Truckers Against Trafficking, with an event this weekend at the Kentucky Exposition Center…the truckers…are in a position to spot victims at convenience stores and truck stops, popular spots for traffickers…

Under Every Bed

It’s weirdly fascinating to watch small cities insist that they’re just as infested with bogeymen and imaginary victims as cities with much larger populations:

…slavery…still exists. Even in Spokane. The reasons for this, [prohibitionists pretend], include Washington having an international border and a large seaport [and] many diverse immigrant communities…Because of the I-90 corridor, Spokane gets a lot of traffic and homeless in the area…former madam Cheryl Larson [lied that]…one girl could make $10,000 in a weekend during Bloomsday…

Note the racism, interstate highway nonsense and outlandish claims about income. That article ends with an appeal for amateur surveillance, as does this one:

…[Cops] in Springfield say the western Massachusetts city is beginning to see a noticeable rise in human trafficking…Jamie Bruno spoke before the Springfield Violence Prevention Task Force…to [pretend] that human trafficking has become a problem in the city and is expanding…Bruno says it’s pivotal that parents are aware of what their children are doing with friends…

Business As Usual

I smell a rat. What probably happened here is that some cop raped a sex worker in a particularly violent and/or loathsome way and they’re trying to paper it over with a “policy”:

…Cleveland Police have been told to temporarily stop making prostitution arrests…[because] the Department is suddenly developing a new policy. The memo says, “All prostitution (sex for money) related Vice enforcement shall cease immediately…Advise your Detectives under no circumstances shall they have a suspected prostitute get into a vehicle with them or have any physical contact with…Police…We are formulating a policy that will cover procedures for these types of details”…

Remember, the actual policies don’t make a difference because even when raping whores is expressly forbidden, cops just do it anyway and then claim they didn’t.

All-Purpose Excuse

It’s especially good for money grabs:

Nine hundred police officers have taken part in a raid on one of Germany’s biggest brothels in Berlin, making six arrests over alleged human trafficking and tax fraud. The operation follows months of investigation into the Artemis brothel…[whose] managers are accused of evading some €17.5m (£14m; $19.7m) in social security payments since 2006. Prosecutors allege that staff at Artemis were forced to pretend to be self-employed to avoid the payments…

In case you’re bad at math, that’s 150 cops per arrest, ten times the number NOPD used to arrest me.

The Face of Trafficking

What a large-scale, organized forced prostitution scheme actually looks like:

In a case involving 75 female victims, Syrian women who were promised well-paid jobs in restaurants and hotels in Lebanon were locked up upon arrival in two hotels north of Beirut and forced into prostitution. Some of the women reported being forced to have sex with up to 20 clients a day, and those that refused to work as prostitutes were repeatedly raped and tortured until they submitted…On March 27, Lebanese security forces raided the hotels, detaining eight guards and setting the women free from the Chez Maurice and Silver Hotel in Maamelteine. The three-story Chez Maurice had the look of a prison, with bars on the balconies and windows, and a whip lying visible on one of the guards’ tables. The health ministry has also sealed a clinic belonging to gynecologist Riad al-Alam, who authorities say performed abortions for the trafficked women who got pregnant. The women have said they were not allowed to leave the clinic except to have an abortion…

Remember, fetishists pretend this sort of thing is common worldwide, even where there isn’t social chaos precipitated by war.

Size Matters (#619)

An excellent essay on the Tracy Elise case:

…Five years ago, Tracy was…the [focus] of a six-month long undercover prostitution investigation of what was then known as the Tantric Temple of Phoenix Arizona. [Cops] fully armed with riot gear and machine guns, raided the space and arrested Elise along with several other women…Tracy was thrown into jail without trial for the following two years, her bail set at a million dollars…Tracy’s case is inexorably woven into some of the most pressing and cutthroat social biases of our day when it come to sex and relationship. These biases hold us so powerfully within their grip that if one so much appears to cross the line, we’re perfectly content to quietly dismiss a woman like Tracy while she faces a potentially lifelong jail sentence…the…need to belong innately necessitates an “other”… that thing that separates “me” from “them”…as news of the Phoenix raids came to light, the bulk of western Tantrics, in order to uphold their personal ideals and image, turned away from Tracy and her case. A woman who calls herself a “Tantric master” even spoke out against Tracy on a major news channel in her effort to “protect Tantra’s name”…

Read Full Post »

Lies Piled on Lies

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, cops, It Looks Good On Paper, language, law, Nebraska, prohibitionist myths, surveillance, Under Every Bed on March 25, 2016| 6 Comments »

Lying lips are abomination to the Lord: but they that deal truly are his delight. – Proverbs 12:22

I go through lots of news items every week. Most end up in one of the two news columns or the links column; others end up not being interesting enough to feature; still others inspire me to write whole columns around them. But a few are such monumental aggregations of bullshit, with lies heaped atop other lies, that I feel compelled to blow them up with dynamite; this is one of them, made subtly more ludicrous by the fact that some editor apparently thought it was an outstanding piece of journalism (see that little “editor’s pick” label above the headline?)

…Linda Burkle…[of] the Salvation Army, shared [a tragedy porn] story with state lawmakers in the hopes of sparking new legislation against human trafficking. She read the woman’s story from a paper, telling it in the first person, as if she was the victim…

It’s rare that a prohibitionist literally speaks for a sex worker, but that’s what we see here. Whether the supposed victim actually exists or is just a figment of Burkle’s masturbatory fantasies is immaterial; it’s a total abomination for an amateur to actually represent herself as a sex worker, even in the guise of a [melo]dramatic recitation, in a naked attempt to urge more criminalization of the people she’s temporarily representing herself to be one of. This is no different from what Rachel Moran does, except that Moran at least pretends to be an ex-whore full time; this nasty bitch will set down the burden of whore stigma as soon as she finishes her appeal for greater police violence against us.

…In January, Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks introduced a bill that would protect juvenile sex workers from prosecution…

Except that it won’t. “Safe harbor” laws are total bullshit; they’re nothing but worthless “feel-good” legislation that help nobody but very rare “perfect victims”. The majority of underage sex workers, such as Latesha Clay, do not qualify as “victims” under the laws and are still prosecuted while the pigs and DAs trumpet their “victimhood” as an excuse to ratchet criminal penalties for consensual behavior up yet another notch.

…An estimated 300,000 American men, women and children are victims of…trafficking, according to the Polaris Project…Sex trafficking is a $9.5 billion industry in the U.S…Police are finding that some dealers have switched from trafficking drugs to trafficking people because the “product” can be sold over and over…From 2010 to 2015, the Omaha Child Exploitation Task Force rescued more than 100 women and girls from sex trafficking. Their average age was 20 — the youngest 13, the oldest 40. In a survey done by the Women’s Fund of Omaha…agencies in Nebraska reported they identified sex trafficking victims younger than 17 at least 176 times in the past year…

I’m sure you’ll recognize these tired lies, but if you don’t that’s what the embedded links are for. One interesting thing about these lies is the way they change shape; for example, the usual “300,000 sex trafficked children” has here transmogrified into the much-more-conservative (though still bogus) “300,000 men, women and children”. Those “task force” numbers? More bullshit; they probably represent arrested sex workers, but there’s no way to know because there’s no link to any data. It’s just an unsupported claim from those paragons of honesty, the cops. And that last sentence is even more absurd; they “identified” 176 “trafficking victims”? Using “signs” like this, perhaps? We’re not even told what happened to these supposedly “identified victims”; we’re just supposed to take it on faith that they exist.

…Nikki Siegel, outreach director for The Bay…outreach program for at-risk youth, said she’s encountered trafficked teenagers, but until recent years, she didn’t realize that’s what they were…

If the only tool you have is a hammer…

“I found a lot of girls who were exploiting themselves”…

May the gods save us from idiots. Any definition of “exploitation” which includes things one chooses for oneself is utterly meaningless, because it must encompass all volitional activity someone else dislikes.

…In September, the Lincoln Police Department was involved in a national sex trafficking sting by invitation from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois. In all, 1,032 people were arrested. Of those, 961 were would-be sex buyers, and the rest traffickers…

That would be Swanee Hunt’s privately-funded pogrom, which results in dramatic increases in police violence against sex workers while referring to them as “victims”.

…It wasn’t until 2010 that Congress expanded the definition of trafficking to include mental punishment by traffickers as well as physical…

More reeking bullshit. “Force, fraud or coercion” has been the accepted definition since the TVPA in 2000. Where did this “fact” come from? Who knows? Maybe the reporter just thought it sounded good.

…Cindy Hultine…of…the…Set Me Free Project…described the relationship between a trafficker and victim as “mental bondage.” Many young girls don’t understand what is happening to them…

In other words, women don’t get to define our own relationships; “authorities” get to say what our relationships are, and if we disagree we’re in “mental bondage”, AKA “false consciousness”.

…Many people…wonder why they don’t run away or ask someone for help…“It’s called survival sex,” [political appointee Stephen] O’Meara said…

No, that isn’t what survival sex is. Survival sex means trading sex for basic necessities like food or shelter, or for just enough cash to acquire those things.

…[Prohibitionist Sriyani] Tidball…[says] buying sex should come with harsher punishments…“I have never met a woman who wanted to sell themselves”…

This is a common but incredibly venomous prohibitionist lie. It isn’t just the moronic dysphemism “sell themselves”, though that’s bad enough; it’s the total negation of the agency of all sex workers everywhere, with the implication that anyone who disagrees is dysfunctional. Either Tidball is consciously lying, or she’s delusional, or she’s never actually climbed down from her ivory tower to talk to any whores.

…Former state Sen. Amanda McGill, who helped pass legislation to decriminalize prostitution of minors…

No, she didn’t; she gave courts the power to commit them to “treatment” of indefinite duration.

…“We definitely need to help (the public) understand that these are really victims, that these women, even if they’re 25, the trafficking probably started when they were 12 or 13 with sexual abuse,” she said…

McGill says that any woman who was ever raped, molested or otherwise sexually violated should forever be a ward of the state, unable to make sexual decisions for herself. That’s what prohibitionists call “decriminalization”.

…The Omaha project visited…middle and high school students about trafficking. “Human trafficking is a form of modern day slavery,” Cindy Hultine told them. “Pimps are slave owners.” She also spoke directly to their parents, telling them to continue the “stranger danger” education…and to monitor social media accounts…

And so we close with a representative of the Establishment appropriating the imagery of historical black slavery for a campaign to breed paranoia, encourage mass surveillance and give more power to the cops who beat, murder, cage and otherwise destroy the lives of so many black citizens. This is the real face of “anti-trafficking”: yet another means by which the ruling class tricks the peasantry into giving it more power to oppress minorities…power which will then, inevitably, be extended to oppress everyone, including the useful idiots who thought the government would keep them “safe” from the imaginary menaces it told them were lurking among us.

Read Full Post »

In the News (#616)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, agency denial, Australia, Bad Fantasy-Good Reality, cops, dehumanization, disease, Eye of the Beholder, homosexuality, hysteria, Korea, law, Monsters, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oops, pimps, prisons, rape, Reviews, statistics, Sweden, Swedish model, Texas, Thailand, The Course of a Disease, The Swedish Pimpocracy, The Widening Gyre, They Still Don't Get It, Traffic Circle, transgender, United Kingdom, video, Washington (state) on February 27, 2016| 7 Comments »

What emerges from [DoJ “sex trafficking” statistics] is an interesting portrait of a solution in search of a crisis. – Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Book Reviews

My friend Brooke Magnanti has written her first crime novel, and here’s a video promo for it:

Here are the other four videos in the series, and you can buy the book on Amazon.

Oops

Most incompetent pimp ever:

A Seattle-area sex offender accused of offering to pimp an undercover police detective has been charged with promoting prostitution. Jerry G. Wood Jr. is alleged to have offered to protect the detective in exchange for 40 percent of her prostitution earnings. What protection Wood might have provided is unclear – the 39-year-old was hospitalized rather than jailed after his arrest due to a claimed medical malady…Wood offered to provide her with “many Microsoft and Amazon clients who call him for ladies,” the detective told the court…

Above the Law

No, NBC, this is not “bribery”; it’s rape.

…federal deportation officer…Arnaldo Echevarria…demanded and pocketed $78,000 in bribes from…immigrants in exchange for hiding the fact that they were in the country illegally…He also demanded sex from two of the immigrants, and one of them got pregnant…Echevarria encouraged her to have an abortion, but she had the child — and he continued to [rape] her afterward…

They Still Don’t Get It

These types of stories are often stunningly incoherent:

…Members of the Child Exploitation Task Force…[arrested] 15 [adults]…14 are facing prostitution charges and one was arrested on a warrant for probation violation…Julie Shrader [of] Rejuvenating Women…[imagines] prostitution is a real problem [in Omaha, Nebraska]…and with every bust comes hope that this will be their chance to leave the business…“They need intense trauma counseling.” She [pretends that] according to research, only one to three percent of prostitutes voluntarily stay in the business…“these guys that are buying these girls are sex addicts and they need help, too…The girls have been so desensitized to sex that it doesn’t mean anything to them and to survive they sell themselves”…

So if a guy has sex prohibitionist dislikes he’s an “addict”, but a woman who does is “desensitized”. And they all need “help” to be brainwashed into Shrader’s way of thinking.

King of the Hill

WE’RE NUMBER FOUR! WE’RE NUMBER FOUR!

…Statistics from the National Human Trafficking Resource Center in Washington, DC show human trafficking cases in Ohio are some of the highest in the nation…Ohio reported 289 human trafficking cases in 2015…the fourth-highest tally in the nation, behind only California, Texas and Florida…

Monsters

Unless prisons in Western Australia are guarded much more closely than those in the US, she’s facing a lot worse than mere “discrimination”:

…a trans woman living with HIV, who is a sex worker…has been moved to a men’s prison…“People For Sex Worker Rights in WA spokeswoman Rebecca Davies told reporters [the prisoner] was distressed… “Someone who identifies as a woman has been put in a male prison where they’re probably going to be subject to discrimination, possibly abuse from other prisoners”…the woman…was arrested over allegations of unprotected sex with a male client, resulting in charges of grievous bodily harm…

Seeking Sappho

I am a woman in her mid-40s, in a same-sex relationship, suffering the same problem as many couples out there: The sex part has died. Absolutely everything else is wonderful…I decided last year to start looking into escort services, and I’ve grown to love my time as a female client.

The Eye of the Beholder (#340)

Do Swedish politicians think about anything else other than who’s allowed to fuck whom?

The youth wing of the Swedish Liberal party has filed a motion to legalize necrophilia and incest. Liberal Youth of Sweden said that just because it is “viewed as unusual and disgusting”, does not mean that the…acts should be illegal. They want to legalize sex between two consenting siblings over the age of 15, and sex with a corpse if there is a written permission made before the person died…The controversial announcement was quickly criticised by…several senior figures within the mother party. Former Liberal MP Carl B Hamilton lashed out at the youth wing, calling them “nitwits”, accusing them of craving publicity over politics…

But outlawing consensual sex between adults based on a motive is totally sensible, and not at all done for publicity.

Traffic Circle

In a series of three articles the Queen of Whore Allies, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, mines a Department of Justice report for government “sex trafficking” statistics. The first part shows that highly-touted “tough on crime” laws don’t actually increase arrests or prosecutions; the second part demonstrates that most arrests are bogus and don’t even result in prosecutions; and the third part is a frightening look at government ideas about sexual thoughtcrime.

The Widening Gyre (#546)

These are getting funnier and funnier:

In a Facebook status shared by more than 139,000 people, Texas mom Amanda Cropsey Florczykowski tells of a harrowing run-in with child sex traffickers at an unnamed store in Longview. Florczykowski is “convinced” that her two-year-old daughter was the target of a brazen ring of traffickers who literally pluck children out of their mothers’ arms in checkout lines. Luckily, with her wits and the Lord at her side, Florcyzkowski was able to thwart the nefarious gang, retrieve her child, and use the experience as a warning to others…Longview, Texas…police…reviewed surveillance video and…the interaction in question lasted approximately “two seconds”…this isn’t the first time a “strange encounter” in a chain-store checkout line has spurred rumors of roving, calculating criminals intent on abducting women and children in public. Last spring, for instance, an Oklahoma woman was convinced that she’d been the target of intended abduction at her local Hobby Lobby…

I think it’s safe to say we’ve reached the “possessed toaster” level of hysteria.

Bad Fantasy, Good Reality (#586)

Korean cops are learning US-style agency negation:

South Korean police have alerted Thai police to a crackdown on prostitution rings…that resulted in the arrest of 48 Thai women and five prostitution brokers…Some of the women entered South Korea as tourists after the brokers promised them jobs in massage parlours but were forced to work as prostitutes…Of the 48 Thais arrested on Thursday, 12 [have] already been deported…Thai police would determine if the women arrested in the raids were victims or chose to do sex work…

The Swedish Pimpocracy (#606)

It’s illegal to pay for sex in Sweden, unless you’re using it as a defense against rape charges:

A Swedish doctor who kept a woman locked up in a soundproofed bunker for almost a week has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. Stockholm District Court…[found] Martin Trenneborg guilty of kidnapping the woman…[but] not guilty of aggravated rape. He was also told to pay 180,000 kronor ($21,200) in damages to the victim…”They had sexual intercourse, but that was consensual. She’s a sex worker and he paid for the sex he had,” his defence lawyer Mari Schaub [said]…

The Course of a Disease (#606)

Governments now think they own their citizens:

British men who [hire] prostitutes while abroad…should be prosecuted in the UK under new laws that make paying for sex illegal, according to a report…commissioned for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Prostitution by the [prohibitionist] group End Demand…

Read Full Post »

In the News (#603)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Tale That Grew in the Telling, Amnesty At Last, bad customers, Bad Girls, Bait and Switch, California, cell phones, Choke Point, cops, dirty, Europe, Florida, Gingerbread House, hysteria, If Men Were Angels, India, law, Lying Down With Dogs, masturbation, Monsters, Nebraska, Nigeria, Philippines, prisons, prohibitionist myths, sex work is work, shame, Texas, Thinking with the Wrong Head, transgender, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, What Were You Thinking? on January 13, 2016| 3 Comments »

Sex workers are not able to negotiate…for their rights, or for access to the justice system when their livelihood is a crime. – Elizabeth Edwards

Bad Girls

Men: pay your whores! Ladies: get the money up front!

Sex workers in…southern Nigeria…have been attacking their customers for failing to pay…Sex workers in Asaba had been increasing their charges and said that they had warned the men. The men in question claimed that they did not know about the new charges…“They agreed to pay us 8,000 nairas each and…the following morning they were giving us 4,000 nairas as against our bargain and we decided to attack them and beat them mercilessly”…Anabel Onweh said…police…found that the men had been left with their clothes torn and had been forced to drink toilet water…

Lying Down With Dogs

What wonderful company the US is in!

…The police operation that resulted in her arrest was codenamed Model Girl. An unimaginative choice, but perhaps an indication of whom the police considered their main target…Pamela…was…convicted of working as a prostitute. She is serving her 18-month sentence at a rehabilitation centre for trafficking victims…on the outskirts of Tirana…There have been several attempts to decriminalise prostitution in Albania but all of them have failed. Politicians claim public opinion would not support such a change…

Thinking With the Wrong Head

Given the activities depicted in the pics, I sincerely doubt they were intended for a woman:

A popular Christian family vlogger has released a video with his wife to explain the X-rated selfies he’s been sending to a woman he met online. Austin Null and his wife Britt (along with the nonconsensual help of their two young children) make rambling videos about their “adventures” in daily life…like grocery shopping and going to church…They have over 350k subscribers on YouTube. But their latest video, posted December 30th and titled “WE NEED TO TALK”, takes a decidedly more somber tone. In it, Austin explains that he’s been having an online affair for the past five months, an admission no doubt tied to the very NSFW nude selfies he’s been sending her that have surfaced online…

A Tale That Grew in the Telling

Fetishist claims that “black holes” are vacuuming up girls in India at a frightening rate; can the sci-fi movie version be far behind?

A girl is reported missing every eight minutes in India. Approximately 16 million girl children are believed to have been trafficked into the sex trade…In fact, profits from human trafficking have more than tripled over the past 10 years…the lure of becoming a trafficker is the potential of colossal earnings in a context of impunity…the steady rise in the trafficking of girls bears evidence that [prohibitionist laws are]…more cursory than effectual…Missing…[makes grafitti that is claimed to] draw attention to the plight of such girls…that…continue to go missing into the black holes of the bestial underbelly of the society…

Beneath the purple prose are some pretty flagrantly-false claims: a wild guess is not a “fact”, decades in prison for imaginary of exaggerated offenses is nothing like “impunity”, there is zero evidence for a “rise” in anything, laws used to harass sex workers are branded as too weak…either the author is a shameless liar, or she’s absolutely barking mad.

Gingerbread House

“Re-parenting” and “restructuring their normal”. In other words, “re-education”.

Rejuvenating Women, an Omaha [prohibitionist] organization, wants to purchase a group home and use it to restore the lives of former prostitutes, but it needs [other people’s money]…Last year, Rejuvenating Women ran a restoration home in south Omaha for seven months. The organization had six visitors, and during that time their rent doubled and they had to close…the group needs a place to help rebuild the lives of women rescued from prostitution, with some 2,000 estimated victims in the state…”A lot of these girls haven’t been parented”…program coordinator McKenzie Motl said…”what we are going to do is re-parenting, restructuring their normal”…It starts with [re-]educating the public that prostitution is sexual slavery. “They are sold to up to 20 men a day, up to 20 men,” [Julie] Shrader said. “Sold for sex over and over and over”…

“2000 victims”. In Nebraska. I picture Shrader moaning that last quote while restructuring herself with a Hitachi.

What the Hell Were You Thinking? (#335)

The UK version of an app which first premiered in Ireland over two years ago:

Matt Haworth…developed the [National Ugly Mugs] app based on the charity’s body of knowledge and feedback from sex workers themselves. Spreading alerts as quickly as possible is a vital part of the app’s offering…The app checks incoming numbers with its database of rogue punters, and also features a kind of panic button, which workers can press if they feel unsafe…The button can be used to report bad clients, call the police, or log that the worker felt unsafe so NUM can check in with them later to offer services and support. The app has been tested in Manchester to a positive response, and is currently undergoing a bigger pilot in London…

Subtle Pimping (#401)

If there are so many “sex trafficking victims”, why do they need to keep making up stories about it?

…Chris Bohjalian’s new novel The Guest Room…tackles the white-hot topic of human sex trafficking. Bohjalian dissects this gruesome global epidemic in a story that starts with a bachelor party…Bohjalian takes us back to Armenia…to tell…how girls…are tricked and forced into becoming sex slaves. It is a subject getting worldwide attention and this novel will help bring it to the surface…

Some novelists are even declared “sex trafficking experts” on the basis of their BDSM fantasies.

If Men Were Angels

“Youth pastors” are nearly as bad as cops:

A…youth pastor in Anson [Texas] is…out of a job after police say he had an inappropriate relationship with an underage girl in his youth group…Callan Rice…was…fired by Bethel Assembly…after he was caught meeting privately with the girl…Rice had sexual contact with the girl and has confessed to the crime…

Monsters (#442)

…U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Joseph Scott Pemberton was sentenced to six to twelve years in Philippine prison for killing Jennifer Laude, a trans Filipina sex worker, in October 2014. His sentence was downgraded from the usual 20 to 40 years for homicide…in part because Laude failed to disclose to Pemberton that she was trans…Trans sex workers in Olongapo keep their status secret from service members as a matter of course…The mayor’s office has convened a task force to prevent violent incidents involving trans women and U.S. military service members from occurring in the future, which encourages trans sex workers to disclose their trans status early on. But, because disclosing would inevitably lose them clients, there’s little sign of meaningful change to the conditions that led to Laude’s death…

Sex Work is Work (#446)

Margaret Corvid writes on “What a Sex Worker Can Teach You About Working for Yourself“, her main points being “Under-promise and (sometimes) over-deliver“; “You’re the boss! You can fire a shitty client“; “Your time and emotional labor are worth money“; “Get your money first“; and “You’re not a robot“.

Amnesty At Last

“…let’s hope some politicians (even in the deeply prohibitionist US) begin to recognize that the wind is shifting, and decide to stand with Amnesty and sex workers as we look toward the future and away from the fear of consensual sex“:

A representative is hoping to pass a bill that would legalize prostitution in New Hampshire for consenting adults…Elizabeth Edwards…said her bill was influenced by an Amnesty International study that supports worldwide [decriminalization] for sex workers…according to House Majority Leader Dick Hinch, strong efforts will be made to be sure the bill doesn’t pass because “society is just not ready for that…We’re going to put a full court press in from the leadership standpoint to make sure that (the bill) doesn’t have a lot of daylight to it,” Hinch said. [Prohibitionists pretend] legalizing sex work would spread disease, increase violence and encourage sexual predators…

Choke Point (#593)

Half a dozen credit card networks discriminate in keeping “bad lists” that prohibit the selling of adult-oriented materials, psychic services and paraphernalia such as bongs and hookahs, according to a class-action suit filed..by convenience store operator Abu Maisa [which] alleges that Google, Intuit, Square, Stripe, Flint Mobile and PayPal each incorporate a “bad list” that sets boundaries of what the operator can and can’t sell. Abu Maisa…has been so handcuffed on the types of products it sells, it can’t even offer Penthouse magazine…for fear…its accounts would be shut…the suit…[notes] that the practice is contrary to California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act [which states that]…all persons are entitled to full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments, including both private and public entities…

Bait and Switch (#597)

Until Gay, Inc is ready to throw its full weight behind decriminalization, this will keep happening:

…the Polk County Sheriff’s Department…arrested a total of 95 suspects, including sex workers, their clients, and others…Of the 50 charged with prostitution 4 were specifically identified as “a transgender,” “a transvestite,” or “transsexual”. In addition to outing the trans status of these individuals, the news release repeatedly misgendered the individuals and published their birth names on the Sheriff’s website. Despite not having been convicted of a crime, many of these suspect’s places of work, previous legal history and whether they were on public assistance and how much were reported…This kind of shameful, irresponsible policing and reporting is not new in Polk County…The Sheriff seems to take tremendous pride in criminalizing people’s way of survival and publicly degrading them…Unfortunately, Polk County is not alone in using these reprehensible and dangerous tactics…In Illinois, for example, the Cook County Sheriff Office was called out in 2012 for outing transgender women online and listing them as “johns” after their arrests for solicitation, apparently based on the fact that their ID listed them as male…

Read Full Post »

In the News (#601)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged Ad Absurdum, advertising, agency denial, Alaska, Ashley Madison, California, Check Your Premises, China, cops, Cuckoo Advertising, Denmark, dirty, end demand, Europe, hysteria, Illinois, Japan, Japanese Prostitution, Korea, language, Latin America, law, Legal Is as Legal Does, License To Rape, Naked Truth, Nebraska, North Carolina, Not Your Rescue Project, Paint By Numbers, Peru, porn, pragmatism, prohibitionist myths, See No Evil, Served Cold, Shazam!, slavery, sporting events, Stupor Bowl, The More the Better, Twitter, United Kingdom, Utah on January 3, 2016| 4 Comments »

You take a lot of steam out of the “not representative” argument…when you have…escorts in North America…advocating the same message as devadasi sex workers in India or bar hostesses in Kenya. – Anlina Sheng

Check Your Premises

Reading the self-contradictory sexual fantasies of prohibitionists makes me feel like I need a shower:

Last year, Rockford [Illinois vice pigs] arrested 95 women…and two men…[but in 2015 they] arrested 18 women…and 41 men…[then pretended this was some kind of “progress”. Deputy cheif pig] Doug Pann [vomited out the lie that] “No one chooses to be a prostitute. At some point in their life, they were forced or coerced into this lifestyle. The people causing the harm are the pimps and johns.” Pimps are men who control women who sell their bodies…[prohibitionist] Jennifer Cacciapaglia [profits from the state persecution of sex workers]…Chief Deputy [Pig] Mark Karner said….”you cannot paint with a broad brush prostitutes as victims”…police have to respond to complaints from neighbors who see a woman standing on a street corner…[bigots whine] about “bringing down my property values, bringing crime to my neighborhood.” Cacciapaglia [denies sex workers’ humanity and agency, claiming instead]…”those women would not be there if the men were not buying them”…Pann said…police need the cooperation of prostituted women to go after pimps, but the women won’t talk because they fear being abused…pimps are “vicious monsters, incredibly dangerous,” Cacciapaglia said…

See No Evil

In case you think Denmark’s “sexually liberal”:

An exhibition combating negative self-image in a square in Copenhagen has been closed down by police. Photographer Mathilde Grafström snaps women who don’t have traditional model looks, for a photo series called Female Beauty…Police have denied permission for her photos to be displayed in Copenhagen’s Nytorv square, with Grafström filing a complaint against them and condemning their view of the female body as “offensive”…

The More the Better (#32)

Perhaps one day we’ll arrive at the point where, “She was so desperate to raise money she got a better job!” sounds as ridiculous to most people as it does to me:

Megan Clara, 20, says she was gutted last year when her son Ashton, five, complained that he didn’t receive the same expensive presents as his mates. The single mum, who survived on £80 a week…vowed to make Christmas 2015 one to remember – and has spent the year making adult films, earning £500 a scene, to give her family a five-star festive celebration…

Japanese Prostitution (#131)

…a decades-long standoff over Korean women forced into sexual slavery by Japan’s WWII military…[was settled on December 28^th]…Both sides compromised…so no one got everything they wanted. Nationalists in Japan are angry over Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s apology. Some South Koreans say President Park Geun-hye settled for far too little money – about $8 million – and that Japan still hasn’t taken legal responsibility for atrocities during its colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945…tens of thousands of women from around Asia, many of them Korean, were sent to front-line military brothels to provide sex to Japanese soldiers. But only 46 known former Korean sex slaves, most in their late 80s and 90s, still live, and with time running out and with frustration growing, this deal is seen by many here as the best to be had from a hawkish Abe government. “Insisting that Japan take legal responsibility is the same thing as saying we don’t want to resolve the issue of comfort women,” said Jin Chang Soo, an analyst at the Sejong Institute think tank, who called the deal an important step forward…

Ad Absurdum

An 18-year-old “man” and a 17-year-old “girl”. SHAZAM!

Authorities arrested an 18-year-old man…for promoting the prostitution of a minor…Philip Scott Pleasants took a 17-year-old girl to meet different “Johns,” or clients, in [North Carolina]…Pleasants was [caged]…in the New Hanover County Jail under a $250,000 bond…

Cuckoo Advertising

Will gullible reporters ever stop publishing Ashley Madison ads for free?

Ashley Madison claims it has added 4 million members…since a hack on the adultery dating site revealed the identities of thousands of cheating spouses…A rolling count on the homepage claims it has more than 43 million members, up from the 39 million users counted when the site was hit by a group of hackers dubbed the “Impact Team”…the site [also] had 70,000 fake female profiles used to lure men to pay fees for credits on the site. Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison’s parent company, has not commented on the hack since an August statement and would not comment on the new numbers…

Paint By Numbers

Why do anything special? Just pretend your unsold product “raises awareness of sex trafficking” and watch the profits roll in!

Elisa Wolcott…a University of Nebraska at Omaha art major…has cast, fired and sanded 2,000 ceramic birds in order to raise awareness about sex trafficking in Nebraska. Her project, “2000 Souls,” is meant to represent the number of women across the state who have been forced into prostitution. While numbers [don’t exist]…the Governor’s Task Force on Human Trafficking [decided to pretend]…that at least 47 school-age girls — and likely many more — become victims of sex trafficking in Nebraska each year…her goal was to display the birds in a public setting. She landed on the airport as her ideal venue. It’s a place where people come and go by the thousands, where a constellation of birds suspended in air will draw attention…and where, perhaps, [she might make a lot of money from a moral panic]…

Naked Truth (#401)

“If you want to understand the state of the sex trade…in 21st century America, look no further than the following books. All published in 2015, they offer inside glimpses of the personal and political aspects of sex work…in ways that are both entertaining and enlightening…I surveyed some current and former sex workers about what they’ve been reading recently, too…” The list includes Coming Out Like a Porn Star by Jiz Lee, Drawing Blood by Molly Crabapple, Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in the Alaska Territory by Catherine Holder Spude, $pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry, Best Sex Writing of the Year edited by Jon Pressick, Prose & Lore (issue 5) by the Red Umbrella Project, and Love Not Given Lightly by Tina Horn.

Not Your Rescue Project

Sex workers…have formed such a vibrant, vocal part of the internet that it’s hard to imagine an online world without them. And with that visibility has come a reduction in the stigma related to sex work. After all, it’s a lot harder to assume that sex workers are mindless, manipulated fuckbots when they’re tweeting thoughts on feminism, racial justice, or the newest Star Wars film…sex workers…handily dismantled the myths and misconceptions that pop culture had fed me over the years. For many years, I felt a bit alone in my sex work wokeness. Most of my friends…seemed to harbor [a] rather antiquated…attitude that…sees sex work as abuse rather than legitimate employment. But lately it’s felt like something has changed. Over the course of 2015, sex workers have repeatedly been in the media…In fact, when millennial icon Lena Dunham came out against Amnesty International’s support for the decriminalization of sex work, she was excoriated in the media—the same media that, several years earlier, might have applauded her for that very stance…Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook are helping a whole new generation learn about the ins and outs of the world’s oldest industry…

License to Rape (#562)

Prohibition turns the body of every citizen into a “crime scene”, which can be violated by cops at will:

A video uploaded to Facebook shows a gang of cops from the Fort Myers Police Department and Lee County Sheriff’s Office brutally violating a man on the roadside, after pulling him over for a rolling stop. Screams of agony can be heard echoing from the trees as the man’s arm is twisted almost to the breaking point and his rectum is invaded by the gloved hand of a drug war enforcer. The cops can be heard saying, “Stop resisting! Just relax!” as the victim continues to scream and kick in pain. Five officers are initially involved in subduing the man and searching his vehicle, and then another joins the fun by posing with gun in hand facing the onlookers…the anal cavity search was carried out in full view of the public, including a female onlooker…Todd Crisp, a family member of the victim, said that at least one of the cops, Arturo Gonzales, routinely harasses Crisp and his family, and this was just the latest episode…

Legal Is as Legal Does (#575)

According to Hong Kong “authorities”, I operate a “brothel”:

…Sex work in Hong Kong is legal, if it is practised in one room with one person only and nobody else but the sex worker profits from the exchange. This means that sex workers cannot have managers or security personnel. The places where they work are called one-woman brothels. Foreign sex workers cannot work with a tourist visa – they are often detained as they breach a condition of their stay by working without the appropriate permit. Waiting for clients on the street or soliciting money for sex services is also illegal, and that may include anything from a verbal offer to gestural insinuation, or even just eye contact…[on September 17th] police arrested 62 alleged prostitutes from mainland China and Taiwan…for [such technicalities]…Pang Wing-chau…is a volunteer working with Zi Teng, a sex workers’ support association. “Although police operations happen on a regular basis, there were more raids than usual in the last three months because of…the District Council elections…politicians ask the police to do more arrests just to get votes”…

Stupor Bowl (#593)

The “gypsy whores” myth has been so discredited, politicians can’t even get reporters to parrot it any more, and so must write their own propaganda:

Early next year, Super Bowl 50 will come to Santa Clara. With increased tourism, we predict a spike in human trafficking…it’s estimated that 40 percent of the human trafficking activities on the West Coast come through the Bay Area airports…A shadow network shuttling women, men, girls, boys, even babies…trafficking is an estimated $150 billion industry worldwide, exploiting nearly 21 million victims around the world. It remains the world’s fastest-growing criminal enterprise…we have the capacity and the capability to stop such atrocities from happening in our own backyard…it is only a matter of time until we eradicate human trafficking…

Served Cold (#595)

Despite the ICE, the odor of this is unmistakable:

Two Utah nonprofit organizations raised money to help an international group of law enforcement officials arrest child sex traffickers in Peru…Dan Baird…of Crack the Crowd [claimed without presenting evidence that]…”A total of 36 people were freed from slavery, including 11 children; two of those were 4 years old and 7 years old, I mean really young kids”…Some Utah police departments regularly work to rescue victims through undercover child sex trafficking stings…”The ability for us to remove victims from their circumstance and [lock them up]” said Sgt. Jason Ackerman [in a sentence fragment]…Ackerman oversees undercover sex trafficking operations…monitoring child sex trafficking rings in “public hotels, they are out of houses and on the streets”…

Read Full Post »

That Was the Week That Was (#425)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Procrustean Bed, A Whore in Church, activism, agency denial, An Example to the West, Backwards into the Future, BDSM, bogus studies, Brazil, Broken Record, California, Cambodia, Canada, Catholicism, Check Your Premises, China, Choke Point, condoms, cops, Damned If You Don't, disability, drivers, drugs, Dutch Threat, Feminine Pragmatism, Hollywood, hysteria, Illinois, Korea, law, Libertarianism Happens, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Netherlands, One Born Every Minute, porn, pragmatism, prisons, prohibitionist myths, Property of the State, rape, rescue industry, Rhode Island, Schadenfreude, sex rays, Somewhere in the Middle, sporting events, stripping, teachers, Tennessee, The Roof Caves In, Think of the Children!, Tyranny by Consensus, United Kingdom, Utah, Whither Canada?, yellow journalism on June 20, 2014| 17 Comments »

I’m hungry, I don’t need respect, I don’t need honour, I just want three meals a day. – Elderly Korean sex worker

Think of the Children!

A teacher who describes note-passing as “scary”? The jokes write themselves.

A…woman has been charged with prostitution at the Tewksbury [Massachusetts] Public Library…a…plain clothes detective claimed Brittany Macintyre…handed him a pen and…paper. The two passed notes back and forth until she allegedly asked for $60 in exchange for a sex act…one library patron [said] “I’m quite shocked because a lot of kids come here and I’m a teacher, so it’s pretty scary”…

Feminine Pragmatism

Koreans could once be sure that their children would look after them in their old age, but no longer…As a result, some elderly women are turning to prostitution…”Bacchus Ladies” [are] older women who make a living by selling tiny bottles of the popular Bacchus energy drink to male customers. But often that’s not all they’re selling. At an age when Korean grandmothers are supposed to be venerated as matriarchs, some are selling sex…they invested their savings in the next generation. In a Confucian society, successful children are the best form of pension. But attitudes here have changed just as fast as living standards, and now many young people say they can’t afford to support themselves and their parents…The government…is scrambling to provide a welfare system that works [but] in the meantime…[the elderly] have no savings, no realistic pension, and no family to rely on…

One Born Every Minute

A neuroscientist who claimed to have fathered 58 children while running [an]…insemination service preyed on three women desperate to become mothers by sexually assaulting them…during the…process…[Professor Gennadij] Raivich told one alleged victim she had to give him oral sex repeatedly in order to get a sperm sample. He told another she was more likely to get pregnant if she orgasmed…

Tyranny By Consensus

…Michael Weinstein [spoke to]…the press…on the…condom mandate bill…armed with what he claimed to be the smoking gun that justified his campaign to force condoms down performers’ throats…a survey done by the UCLA School of Public Health which, according to Weinstein, proved that there was a “public health danger” involving porn performers…Weinstein presented this “pictographic” which attempted to…paint a picture of porn performers as oppressed, drugged out, abused, exploited, and basically unable to think for themselves…[so] the state absolutely had to step in and rescue them with condoms…Both AVN’s Mark Kernes and The Real Porn Wikileaks have done fine efforts to debunk this agitprop, but there are some points that even their efforts do manage to miss which deserve additional attention…

A Procrustean Bed (First Updates of the Year)

The evil clownishness continues:

[Rhode Island Senator] Gayle Goldin…is urging her…colleagues to…reject [a “sex trafficking” bill which]…conflates sex trafficking with prostitution…the bill as written could mean that [a] cab driver [who carries a whore to a call could be convicted of] sex trafficking…Goldin said [a] slight change [to her original wording] has fouled the intent of the legislation. It “would mean that the penalties intended specifically for the traffickers could also be used to penalize sex workers themselves,” she [wrote]…

A Whore in Church

This is absurd on so many levels:

The Roman Catholic sisters whose convent fence-line is mere inches from a flashy new strip club…were unable to prevent the business from opening last year. But they haven’t given up…and…the Village Board of Melrose Park voted to join the nuns…in a lawsuit against…Club Allure…and the Village of Stone Park, which granted its license to operate…One of the main arguments in the lawsuit is expected to center on a provision of state law that…prohibits such businesses from operating within 1,000 feet of a place of worship…

Broken Record

I don’t know what’s more pathetic, Rachel’s idea of “big events” or her mathematical illiteracy:

Soon hundreds of thousands will pack [Omaha, Nebraska] for the College World Series…any big event…creates a bigger opportunity for…prostitution…Rachel Davis escaped such a life 15 years ago…[and] now helps others get out…“During…the world series…the Olympic Swim Trials, the Berkshire meeting…quotas…go up to $2,000 a night”…

Damned If You Don’t

…Among those arrested [in a Sacramento, California sting] was the Rev. John Oselsky…who…stopped at a fast food parking lot…to purchase a meal when he was approached by two women who knocked on his vehicle window…Oselsky…speaks fluent Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian. But his English is not good…Oselsky never…offered money [and] had [only] $13 in his wallet…

An Example To the West (TW3 #39)

Brazilian prostitutes…played a football match …in World Cup host city Belo Horizonte…to raise awareness about sex workers’ rights…the women set up an impromptu pitch using traffic cones for goalposts and played to the enthusiastic cheers of onlookers. The prostitutes, calling themselves the Naked Football Club — though in fact they played in the green and yellow uniforms of Brazil — teamed up with the visiting evangelicals from the United States to take on a local university team…

Libertarianism Happens To People

…Mark Shurtleff…Utah attorney general…set up a unit…[which] sent armed police to raid businesses that were suspected of employing undocumented workers…Shurtleff…also…[over]saw a dramatic increase in the use of SWAT teams and…opposed an important ballot initiative to rein in the abuse of civil asset forfeiture…[now] Shurtleff…[is] under investigation for allegedly violating campaign finance law…and…”accused law enforcement agents of using ‘Dirty Harry’ tactics when they searched his house, breaking through his door and pointing automatic weapons at his children…“

Somewhere in the Middle

…Chris Atchison…[has] been studying [sex workers’ clients] for about 20 years…[and] doesn’t think…there is…such a thing as a “typical john”…”People who purchase sexual services come from all walks of life…[and] all racial and ethnic categories…they don’t all [have]…identical reasons or…identical needs…Some…are physically disabled. Some of these individuals have great social stigmas, social-anxiety disorders. And some are individuals who…just…are lacking a partner, a widower, and so on and so forth…most [clients] would never hurt their escorts, from whom they mainly seek “companionship”…

Check Your Premises (Hysteria on Parade)

Another warped view of touring:

…Taken from one hotel to the next, she’s been forced to have sex with men for money again and again. And there are many more like her. Hundreds of young women and girls are coerced into doing this on any given day, police…say. Most are…sent along what’s commonly described as The Pipeline, which takes them to cities such as Montreal, here to Ottawa and all the way to Windsor. Shipping girls along circuits such as The Pipeline is a crucial component to a trafficker’s success. The constant movement helps pimps avoid police detection, isolates the women and girls from their family and friends, and attracts a larger clientele by offering up fresh-faced girls…

Backwards into the Future (TW3 #352)

…dozens of prominent legal experts…are calling for the abolition of the police-run “custody and education” system, which…resembles the “re-education through labor” system in all but name, and has no basis in Chinese law…which forbids the state to deprive citizens of their freedom without any basis in legislation. The first…facilities began to be built in 2002, in line with a 1993 directive from…the State Council, which ordered that those found engaging in sex work should be given “legal and moral” education, subjected to tests for sexually transmitted diseases and organized to take part in productive work…a person can be incarcerated by police for up to two years without trial for involvement in the sex industry, whether as a sex worker or a client…

Dutch Threat (TW3 #418)

Another excellent essay from Felicia Anna:

…the [Dutch] minister of Justice Ivo Opstelten presented…the government’s…new campaign against human trafficking…[with] an overview of the results of the last campaign…[which] got 392 anonymous tips…[this was] 93% more…then the years before…[but] 392 reports out of 20,000 estimated legal working prostitutes in Holland isn’t very much. In fact, it’s only about 2%…while the police [claimed] in their own ‘report’ “Schone Schijn“…that it was somewhere between 50 and 90%…of those 392 reports…the police only decided to investigate 250…a whopping 28 arrests where made, which comes down to about 7% of the total amount of reports…This means that only 7% of the reports leads to an actual arrest, and…93% of the cases are false alarm…In short, people report it much more then before, but the actual number of people arrested has not changed at all…

Choke Point

A mysterious group of business people will spend up to $5 million campaigning against…”Operation Choke Point”…The United States Consumer Coalition says the…operation unfairly targets legal businesses by choking off their access to banks and third-party payment processors…Brian Wise, a partner in the Washington strategic communications shop Wise Public Affairs, began forming USCC at the beginning of the year. A Facebook site was launched in March, and the group has stepped up its media campaign…[to] highlight…business that…have been hurt by Choke Point…

Property of the State

Tennessee moves to criminalize smoking during pregnancy:

When newborn babies begin to withdraw from powerful drugs, they shriek at a high, telltale pitch. Cut off from the substances they ingested through their mothers, they convulse, projectile vomit or writhe from skin-scorching diarrhea. Their tiny bodies shudder violently…Tennessee…has made its mark in trying to understand what triggers the painful symptoms in babies going through nicotine and opioid withdrawal. Researchers and insurers alike are looking for ways to reach out to and treat pregnant women with addictions…

The Roof Caves In

“The Somaly Mam Foundation has pledged to change its name following the resignation of its founder…executive director Gina Reiss-Wilchins says the organisation has ‘been working tirelessly to chart the best path for…rebranding, renaming, and re-launching our organisation’…” Meanwhile, there’s a petition for the New York Times to fire Nick Kristof for his lies and his perpetuation of Mam’s scam. But as Dr. Laura Agustin points out, it’s a mistake to concentrate on Mam and Kristof:

…if some [donors] do stop funding SMF, they will simply shift support to other similar institutions engaged in the same cause…And some new figure with the ability to stir feelings will eventually emerge from the hundreds of groups now dedicated to sex trafficking…The current fuss about Kristof and Mam reproduces the cult of personality that caused trouble in the first place. To focus on individuals is to avoid addressing structures. A couple of self-promoting showoffs pale beside proliferating government machinery that now churns out salaries and prestige for thousands worldwide caught up in a movement based on fraud.

Whither Canada? (TW3 #423)

…In what was billed as a national day of action, rallies against the government’s new prostitution legislation were [held] in several cities…Dozens of demonstrators gathered around red umbrellas…in a downtown Toronto park to speak out against the proposed law, which would…”simply move sex workers out into more isolated and more marginalized areas of the city”…said Jean McDonald, head of…Maggie’s …She said that…the Conservatives are “spitting in the face” of the Supreme Court’s landmark prostitution decision and ignoring the vital input of sex workers…

Schadenfreude (TW3 #424)

Noah Berlatsky on Chong Kim and Eden:

…Breaking Out, an anti-trafficking organization, announced that [it]…had been unable to confirm [her tale and]…is contemplating legal action against her. Kim’s supposedly true story was the basis for a 2012 film, Eden…the…exploitation tropes…are clustered about so densely and insistently that it’s hard to believe anyone missed them. There are women-in-prison shower scenes…The trope of giving prisoners kittens to love is straight out of Caged from 1950…There’s also some S&M fetish (again a staple of the genre), and…stylized violence a la Tarantino…To just point out the most obvious issue, the movie details a copious number of murders, several of them committed by the main character herself. This is standard issue for a Hollywood film, but in real life, this amounts to mass murder, including the killing of multiple law-enforcement personnel…where’s the massive investigation? Why is this being covered in an entertainment review, rather than on the front page?…

TRPWL presented a catalog of the many inconsistencies in Kim’s story, including her omission of the fact that she was convicted of fraud in 2009.

Read Full Post »

Links #199

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Tyranny, tagged Africa, animals, bogus studies, California, censorship, comics, cops, drugs, Google, internet, lawyers, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Never Call the Cops, New York, Norway, Oregon, sex education, Texas, Things We Choose To Do Together, video on April 27, 2014| 5 Comments »

How I love the way I get them to swallow all the sludge I hand out!
– The Prodigy

Some people might look upon the situation in the first video with horror; I see it as a thing of beauty and a fine example of spontaneous order. The video has been making the rounds, but was first called to my attention by Radley Balko (who also provided all the links above it). The second video was contributed by Kevin Wilson, and the links between the videos by Cop Block (“thoughtcrime” and “together”), Aspasia (“whip”), Carol Fenton (“police state”), Jesse Walker (“Spider-man”), Popehat (“lawheads”), and AL 360 (“price”).

From the Archives

Read Full Post »

That Was the Week That Was (#406)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged A Broker in Pillage, Above the Law, activism, agency denial, An Example to the West, asset seizure, At Least They're Consistent, brothels, California, Canada, Catastrophic Consequences, censorship, cops, dirty, drugs, evidence, France, Germany, guest columnist updates, Hall of Shame, harm reduction, hysteria, Illinois, Imaginary Lines, India, internet, Juxtaposition, language, law, Little Tin Gods, Louisiana, Madonna/whore, masturbation, Middle East, Nebraska, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, neofeminism, New Jersey, Not the Leading Players, Number Puzzle, O Canada!, Oops, politicians, porn, Presents, Profit from Panic, prohibitionist myths, rape, sex offender registry, streetwalkers, stripping, Surplus Women, The End of the Beginning, The More the Better, The Public Eye, Twitter, underage, United Kingdom, video, violence vs. sex workers, Virginia, Where Are the Protests?, witchcraft on February 8, 2014| 10 Comments »

The movement of sex workers has become successful because they have learned to recognise themselves as workers. – Samarjit Jana

R.I.P. Gloria Leonard

Porn star and men’s magazine publisher Gloria Leonard died on February 3^rd after suffering a stroke at her Hawaii home on the night of January 31^st; she was 73, but had been in good health. Like me, she was already over 30 when she began sex work and had already had a previous career (in her case, as a stockbroker). She was hired as publisher of High Society in 1977 and still continued to star in and direct movies for several years afterward; she also pioneered one of the first phone sex lines in 1983. During the feminist “porn wars” she became an outspoken advocate of sex work, and served as president of the Free Speech Coalition from 1998-2001.

Juxtaposition

Compare and contrast this:

Notified by The Street of its investigation that revealed that escort services were using Twitter, Rep. Chris Smith…urged that Congress investigate…to initiate a crackdown on Twitter, Backpage, Craigslist and other social media “that are the conduit for this terrible exploitation of women”…

And this:

Saudi Arabia’s feared religious police authority has decided to launch a war against what it described as vice and sorcery accounts on Twitter…The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice said it had formed special teams to track those accounts and arrest those who are behind them…[for] “spreading vice and witchcraft…we are determined to eliminate these accounts before they become widespread and out of control”…

Oops

[Indian] police have [difficulty] acting on tip-offs about prostitution activity…[because] moral boundaries are changing at different rates and what some call illicit sex is…[to] others…usual dating practice…In September…18 couples…in “compromising positions” were rounded up from rooms in a hotel in…Ludhiana and detained under the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act. Dharampal Singh…who led the raid, [said]…“Every couple says that they are there by consent or are dating [secretly]”…which is not uncommon in a society where families still arrange marriages and frown on premarital sex…

Well, At Least They’re Consistent

A [Virginia] state law that makes it a crime to have sex outside of marriage remains on the books after an effort to decriminalize it failed…Lawmakers…had concerns over potential loopholes the change would make in relation to incest and other sex crimes…[bill sponsor] Mark Sickles…[said] members want to make sure the bill is redrafted correctly and sent to the state Crime Commission for review before it is taken up again. Eight people were convicted of fornication last year…

Surplus Women

…[In 2007] Bonnie Barrett…was murdered by [Derek Brown]…who police believe was imitating Jack the Ripper…Bonnie worked as a…sex worker in Whitechapel…and…Jackie [Summerford] believes better policing could have prevented her…death. She is one of several women who are today launching a campaign on the Change.org petition website to change the way police interact with those in the sex trade. She says… “They deserve to be protected, not ignored by police”…

Meanwhile, “Police have arrested a man [for]…the murder of…Maria Duque-Tunjano [last week]…Robert Richard Fraser…[is also suspected in]…an attack on another sex worker on January 18…”

Imaginary Lines (November Updates)

The Gibson guitar company, having had its federally seized wood returned to it, is celebrating with the release of a new product made from that very wood: the Les Paul Government II Series…available in one color: “Government Tan.”

Where Are the Protests?

I guess rugs just aren’t as sexy as whores:

…researchers documented more than 3,000 cases of forced labor in India’s handmade carpet sector…factories and shacks where workers toil 10 to 12 hours a day for six to seven days a week were “cramped, filthy, unbearably hot and humid, imperiled with stray electrical wires and rusty nails…and contaminated with grime and mold”…Workers were subjected to frequent beatings and abuse and…suffered from…long-term health issues because of the grueling nature of the work. Many…suffered from eye disease or loss of vision due to insufficient light. Some developed spinal deformation…The average adult worker was paid between 21 and 24 cents an hour, while children were paid less…These carpets are sold in a number of major retail chains including, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s, Target, Sears, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Ethan Allen, IKEA and others…

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic

Brigham Young University wants young Mormons to “rescue” their friends from the scourge of wanking by ratting on them to religious “authorities”:

Presents, Presents, Presents!

Thank you to new reader Xavier Naff for Vampyres, a lesbian vampire movie I first read about over 20 years ago but have never actually seen. I’m told it’s very interesting on several levels.

Above the Law

Chicago police strip-searched three people on the street, and forced the woman to discard her bloody tampon while five male officers watched and made jokes about her body…Caprice Halley, Tevin Ford, and Willie Douglas…sued the City of Chicago and its Officers Wherfel, E. Doughtery, A. Granat, D. Balesteri, B. Rodekohr, J. Reckard, R. Federici, and T. Conlon…In May 2013, Halley and Ford were passengers in Douglas’ car, when they were confronted by police in an unmarked car driving toward them the wrong way down a one-way street…

Beside the vaginal probing of the woman, these uniformed molesters also shackled Douglas to a house’s burglar bars, pulled down his pants and spread his buttocks. “Wherfel [then] took a small bag of heroin from her own sock and falsely claimed she had found it in Halley’s waistband”…

An Example to the West

“A six-day conference of sex workers began [in Kolkata]…discussions [include] issues concerning their well-being as well as those relating to trafficking of minors and pension to old sex workers…”

Hall of Shame

Your periodic reminder that Dennis Hof is a revolting excuse for a human being:

…Denis Hof…started pondering an expansion north of the border after he heard about the Supreme Court striking down prostitution laws in this country…“The smart residents will understand that it’s going to stop the sex trafficking that’s going on now. You got a huge sex trafficking problem…Our way would slow that down substantially”…

Yes, he’s spreading “sex trafficking” lies in Canada in hopes of lining his own pockets at independent sex workers’ expense.

The Public Eye

Here’s a short interview with Melissa Gira Grant in New York Magazine about her new book, Playing the Whore; in it she discusses Nick Kristof, Gloria Steinem, Jill Filipovic and other prohibitionists who claim they want to “rescue” us from our own choices.

Profit from Panic (TW3 #40)

California State University, Stanislaus…senior Hannah Noonan took a proactive approach to educate her peers…through the creation of…“Crate Human Awareness,” a graphic installation displayed in a heavily traversed area of the campus…“My desire is to educate others that humans are being kidnapped and sold into slavery, prostitution, pornography, and organ harvesting”…humans are typically smuggled in crates of this type…according to Noonan…

A 22-year-old art major said it, so it must be true!

The Leading Players in the Field, Not (TW3 #44)

Gloria Steinem continues her journey into irrelevance:

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem today described prostitution as “commercial rape” and said it was wrong to term prostitutes as sex workers. “Prostitution involves body invasion and so it is not like any other work. So how can you call it sex work? Prostitution is the only word you should use”…

That “body invasion” nonsense says almost all you need to know.

Above the Law (TW3 #313)

A New Jersey State [prison guard is going to]…prison for…[threatening] four prostitutes into having free or cut-rate sex with him…Juan R. Stevens pleaded guilty to official misconduct in return for…five years in prison…two before he’s eligible for parole…[he] also forfeits his state job and is permanently barred from public employment in New Jersey…

The End of the Beginning

A New Hampshire house committee has just passed a bill 18-1 (!!!) that would prohibit the establishment or existence of sex offender residency restrictions in that state. This…is completely unheard of. It’s one thing to simply not pass residency restriction bills, but it’s quite another to pass a law that explicitly prohibits them…[the bill’s sponsor] argued that restricting housing for sex offenders pushes them “underground,” in campgrounds, under bridges and to other places the police cannot monitor…

Guest Columnist: Sarah Woolley (TW3 #324)

Cathy Reisenwitz in Daily Caller:

It just couldn’t be clearer. “Amnesty International is opposed to the criminalization or punishment of activities related to the buying or selling of consensual sex between adults.” Thus begins a recently leaked document from the famed human rights organization calling for an end to prohibitions on sex work…Amnesty…defines sex work as work, making a clear delineation between employment and slavery…As Maggie McNeill details, anti-prostitution campaigners paint the typical sex worker as a child slave, while governments use anti-trafficking laws to restrict migration. And that ill-intended confusion muddies the entire debate…as Amnesty International points out, “Criminalizing or otherwise punishing people for their choices in selling or buying consensual sex in any way fails to address these structural inequalities, and rather serves to further disempower individuals”…

A Broker in Pillage (TW3 #330)

The federal government must pay nearly $40,000 to cover the legal fees of a California woman who successfully sued to reclaim more than $1 million of her money [stolen by police] during a Nebraska traffic stop…Tara Mishra…[earned] the money…as an exotic dancer…and…[gave it to friends] to invest in a New Jersey nightclub…The government’s claim that the money was tainted with drug residue was of little value, the judge said, as…nearly all cash in circulation is drug-tainted…

Little Tin Gods

The Jefferson Davis Parish sheriff’s office claims that eight survival sex workers there were murdered by a serial killer. However, all the women knew one another well; several were related to one another, and every one of them was a drug informant to a sheriff’s office which is notoriously corrupt even by Louisiana standards. Read this long, thorough investigative report on the murders, and I suspect you’ll come to the same conclusion I did the very first time I heard about the case.

Number Puzzle (TW3 #350)

“Alice Schwarzer…accused news magazine Spiegel…of trying to damage her reputation by reporting on her [paying]…‘a six-figure sum’…in back taxes [for]…her Swiss bank account…she…accused Spiegel of acting in the interest of [prostitutes]…”

Catastrophic Consequences

Edinburgh City Council has scrapped the licensing of saunas and massage parlours…but it [does] not mean the saunas [will] close…Scot-Pep…said…”With Police Scotland persisting in its policy of using condoms as evidence of sex work against the explicit recommendations of the World Health Organisation, workers will fear to keep large quantities of condoms on their premises, as this could be used to criminalise women.”

Here’s a more surprising reaction to the news:

Edinburgh University Students’ Association (EUSA) has voted to publicly support the rights of sex workers…approximately 70 students…voted overwhelmingly in support of the motion…[which] stipulates that EUSA officially advocate the decriminalisation of sex work, offer its support to sex workers who are students at the University of Edinburgh, as well as endorsing sex workers’ rights organisations, “such as SCOT-PEP and Sex Workers’ Open University”…

The More the Better (TW3 #404)

Franck Ribery and…Karim Benzema were acquitted on charges of soliciting an underage prostitute…the…judge ruled there wasn’t enough proof the men were aware that…Zahia Dehar…was a minor at the time…

O, Canada! (TW3 #405)

More on the Canadian sex worker intimidation scheme; note they are only just realizing now that most escorts advertise online:

[Halifax, NS] police who worked in a recent nationwide sex-trade operation are seeing a shift toward online communicating…A joint news release issued by a number of Canadian sex-work support groups said the operation uses deception and intimidation…male officers posed as clients to book appointments, but then had several officers arrive…and demand entry. They…[interrogate] her…demand to see her identification and search her premises and possessions…Fiona Traynor…of Stepping Stone…criticized the police news release for saying the sex workers were under some level of control. “There’s no [evidence] of…that,” she said…

Read Full Post »

Links #184

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged child "protective" services, cops, drugs, Illinois, imaginative fiction, internet, Italy, Nebraska, Never Call the Cops, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, propaganda, surveillance, Tennessee, TSA, United Kingdom, universal criminality, video, weaponry on January 12, 2014| 12 Comments »

Davidson foisted himself upon the trolley after the staff member became so scared that she ran from the train. – STV News

Finding good videos for this column is a more uneven process than finding good links; sometimes there are so many they get backed up for weeks, and sometimes so few I have to go looking for them. Today’s first video is a revolting bit of TSA propaganda designed to condition children to submit to the police state; it was called to my attention by Mark Bennett when it first appeared in December, but due to the holidays it got pushed back until now. I’m glad it did, however, because the second video, a parody of the first, was only posted on Thursday (thanks to Kevin Wilson for spotting it). Everything above the first video was contributed by Radley Balko, and the links between the videos by Lucy Steigerwald, Brooke Magnanti, Dave Barry, Mistress Matisse, Mike Riggs, Jason Kuznicki, Popehat, Grace, Aspasia, and Mike Siegel (in that order). Finally, I present this very special link by request from Popehat.

From the Archives

Read Full Post »

That Was the Week That Was (#330)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Broker in Pillage, Across the Pond, activism, Africa, agency denial, asset seizure, avails laws, Banishment, brothels, Catholicism, condoms, cops, Cops and Condoms, Counterfeit Comfort, disease, diversion programs, Election Day, end demand, End Demand (updates), escort review sites, escort services, Europe, France, games, Georgia, Hall of Shame, Hussies, hysteria, Illinois, Ireland, It Looks Good On Paper, Kenya, License To Rape, Middle East, Nebraska, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, Nevada, New York, No Friend of Ours, Pennsylvania, politicians, Presents, prohibitionist myths, PSA, psychology, rape, rescue industry, RIP Petite Jasmine, Rubbing Elbows, sex offender registry, sexting, Social Autoimmune Disorder, South Carolina, stereotypes, streetwalkers, stripping, Subtle Pimping, Swedish model, transgender, Turkey, Unclean Situation, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Welcome to Our Updates, West Virginia, yellow journalism on July 27, 2013| 20 Comments »

Sex workers consider the promotion of the Swedish model and other forms of criminalization not just part of an ongoing “debate” on sex work, but a matter of life and death. – Melissa Gira Grant

License To Rape

“A West Virginia sheriff raped a teenager and sodomized her with a cucumber, threatened to kill her if she told, and subjected at least five other women to forced sex, at least once in a courthouse…Brittany Mae Keene sued Barbour County Sheriff John Wesley Hawkins and the Barbour County Commission…[who] essentially let Hawkins conduct a reign of sexual terror against women in his custody…” Hawkins’ victims ranged in age from 16 to 19.

Cops and Condoms (February Updates)

A [Polish] prostitute with HIV has been arrested for…having unprotected sex with clients [although]…she knew she was HIV positive…Fellow sex workers tipped off cops about the woman over fears that her actions would give prostitutes a bad [name]. But officers only arrested her after two of her clients came forward and admitted they had tested positive for HIV…

Election Day (February Updates)

Kristin Davis is running for office again, this time for New York City comptroller against her old client Eliot Spitzer. She was interviewed in The National Review by Charles Cooke (himself an advocate of legalization), and though she claims to be a libertarian she also seems to be advocating the sort of avails and bawdy house laws which may soon be struck down in Canada because they endanger sex workers. Every time she opens her mouth, she reaffirms her membership in my Hall of Shame.

Subtle Pimping

The law doesn’t care if you profit from sex workers, as long as you don’t have any direct contact or actually help us in any way. In a new French video game players manipulate a cartoonish, stereotyped streetwalker who must make $150,000 to “escape her pimp” by performing fake orgasm sounds into a microphone and avoiding hazards like cops and STDs (no skill involved in the latter because whores are just stupid victims of fate). The writer of the linked review also profits by using various prohibitionist tropes to save himself the effort of original thought.

Public Service Announcement

Anthony Weiner found himself caught in another sexting scandal…like the one that destroyed his congressional career, but…won’t drop out of the race for mayor of New York…Weiner admitted sending a woman sexually explicit photos and messages…more than a year after he resigned from the House in disgrace for the same sort of behavior…

Social Autoimmune Disorder (July Updates)

Another example of cops’ filthy efforts to subvert the means by which sex workers attract business and keep ourselves safe: “…a Long Island couple [was arrested for]…running an international escort service called Aphrodite Companions…Vincent and Melissa Lombardo…are currently being held without bond…the only basis…was…postings on…The Erotic Review…”

Counterfeit Comfort

A South Carolina man targeted a sex offender at random, killed him and his wife and later told deputies he planned to kill others on the state’s sex registry…Jeremy Moody and his wife, Christine, were arrested and charged with murder…Moody only knew 59-year-old Charles Parker in passing, but came to the mechanic’s…home…with plans to kill him…Surveillance cameras outside Parker’s home showed Moody and his wife driving up…and popping the hood on their car as if it wasn’t working…Gretchen Parker wasn’t specifically targeted, but was killed because she was in the house…

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic

…UCLA researchers say sex addiction does not appear to be a disorder…Nicole Prause and her colleagues monitored…volunteers’ brains while showing them erotic images. “If they indeed suffer from hypersexuality…their brain response to visual sexual stimuli could be expected to be higher, in much the same way that the brains of cocaine addicts have been shown to react to images of the drug”…Prause…thinks that so-called sex rehabs should be examined…

Presents, Presents, Presents!

Two readers sent presents for my third anniversary (they arrived while I was in Las Vegas, so I didn’t know about them until after I got home last Sunday): Kevin Wilson sent Unlearning Liberty, and Krulac sent Absolutely Mad and Blak and Blu. Thanks so very much to both of you!

A Broker in Pillage

Make a note of this one, because you won’t often see a judge side with a sex worker against cops:

A federal judge has ruled that Nebraska cops must return over $1 million confiscated at a traffic stop from a woman who saved the money $1 at a time during her 15 year career as an exotic dancer…Tara Mishra, 33…began putting aside her earnings when she started dancing at age 18…to start her business and get out of…stripping…State troopers confiscated the money in March 2012 when they pulled over Rajesh and Marina Dheri…[who] had been given the cash so they could buy a nightclub in New Jersey. Mishra would own half of the business and the Dheris would own the other half…police did not find any evidence of drug activity…and…analysis found only trace elements of illegal drugs on the cash…[the judge] ordered that Mishra receive cash or a check in the value of $1,074,000 with interest.

Welcome To Our World (TW3 #15)

Another supposed “victim” is caged to force her cooperation in the state’s ugly little morality play: “[An Illinois] woman who claims she was forced to work as a prostitute for her boyfriend remains held…without…bail because she is considered a flight risk and might not return to testify in her boyfriend’s trial…”

End Demand

Though the story is somewhat amusing, note that “end demand” policies turn innocent whores into unwilling Judas goats: “A man caught with a prostitute in his car told police she was there to show him where to buy tomatoes…officers found the [known sex worker] sitting inside Muhammad Ikhlaq’s car while he withdrew £20 from a cash machine, which he said was to pay for tomatoes…”

Unclean Situation

The Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, and Good Shepherd Sisters will not apologise to survivors of the Magdalene laundries…Neither will [they] make a financial contribution to the Government’s reparations scheme…Co-operation voluntarily given does not compel the nuns in any legal sense. Their negative response invalidates the Government’s assertion that survivors are being afforded restorative justice. There is no justice without the nuns’ apology and/or financial reparation…the orders expect an amnesty for gross human rights violations…

Lest you forget, these same orders still receive tremendous amounts of aid and political support from the Irish government for their anti-whore scheme Ruhama.

No Friend of Ours

Just in case you think it’s only Las Vegas “authorities” who hate whores so much they’re willing to make themselves look like idiots by parroting ludicrous prohibitionist drivel, here’s an unusually-ridiculous example from Reno:

An increasing number of the young women…began working as prostitutes while in their teens. They are manipulated by men who control every aspect of their lives…Some girls are branded – or tattooed – with their pimp’s name…others are forced to perform while their children are held ransom, usually at gunpoint…Girls as young as 11 are being exploited…the average age…is 14…Since 2002, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies have rescued about 100 children identified as possible victims of juvenile sex trafficking…That number does not include the adult women being trafficked, which experts say would be impossible to produce because many women don’t acknowledge that they are under the control of a pimp…[Ron] Chalmers heads the…[police division] that focuses on these types of crimes…about 10 years ago, the women arrested…were generally in their 30s to 40s [and] were drug addicts, he said. But today, the prostitution demographics are completely different…They’re much younger than they used to be, he said…”A significant number of what we see, 80 to 90%, are being exploited – forced into the lifestyle”…

You may remember that the claims made in the “Satanic Panic” similarly became much more extreme, bizarre and demonstrably false as the hysteria drew closer to the point of implosion. That last bit is more than just Maslow’s Hammer at work; it’s an example of the incredible mathematical and sociological illiteracy of hysterics. Whenever a person tells you there’s been a major demographic shift in any human behavior in only one decade – from nearly nothing to “80 or 90%” – it’s a safe bet the speaker is an imbecile who is incapable of considering even rudimentary thought experiments like “where did all the old ones go?” We see the same principle at work under the Swedish model, which claims to have dramatically decreased the number of men who have ever paid for sex.

Banishment

The sex workers in the Solutions Not Punishment Coalition (SNapCO), the Atlanta group which defeated the proposal to banish arrested sex workers from the city, need to get control of their “allies”; not only is the group supporting involuntary diversion programs, its spokeswoman Misty Novitch is belching up the “average debut at thirteen” myth for the media.

It Looks Good On Paper (TW3 #311)

Yet another religiously-based “diversion program” chock full of prohibitionist rhetoric which claims to “help” streetwalkers while refusing to question the justice of the laws by which cops repeatedly victimize them: “Prostituted women” were all sexually abused as children, pimps give us drugs to control us, blah blah blah blah blah…

Across the Pond (TW3 #324)

Council bosses have [suspended] half a dozen [Edinburgh sauna] licences following a string of police raids…[in] a radical shift from the typically pragmatic approach to prostitution which…[kept] sex workers safer and off the streets…Peter Donoghue, 69, a former sauna operator…said: “It was a lot of nonsense. Some girls have worked at the saunas for ten or 12 years. They’ll simply work for escort agencies instead. We’re going to appeal, but I don’t believe we have a chance”…

Hussies

Save the children and the poor, innocent men from evil harlots!

[Kenyan] women…accused commercial sex workers of invading the town and “stealing” their men…[they] are planning to drive the twilight girls out claiming they are spreading sexually transmitted diseases. The women said the sex workers have taken their men and they are left cold and lonely on their marital beds…sex workers who dress scantily have created a brothel…where secondary school and university students go for cheap sex instead of concentrating on their studies…even primary school children have fallen into the traps…

Rubbing Elbows

A 17-year-old journalism intern’s impressions of the Desiree Conference:

I was a bit timid about the idea of going into a conference that was specifically about sex, but my passion against human trafficking led me to go…with…my mom…When I entered…I was…greeted by a woman with such a cheerful presence and smile, that it put me off guard. In fact, this was the common air of everyone there: happiness. Everywhere I looked I found people wearing bright colors, hugging, laughing, and enjoying themselves. I initially thought that at a Sex Worker’s Conference that it was going to be the exact opposite. I was expecting victims — people just out of the Taken film, tears that warned of a gruesome past, and consoling. There was none of that in sight. The media and society has always presented the sex industry as this taboo area…where [the] only people who were in this profession were forced to be…

R.I.P. Petite Jasmine (TW3 #329)

Caty Simon of Tits and Sass interviewed Kemal Ayrikotu of the Red Umbrella Sexual Health and Human Rights Association on the cultural background to the murder of Dora Oezer; Ayrikotu discusses the lack of rights for both sex workers and transgenders, and criticizes LGBT activists who wish to stress that Dora was a transwoman while ignoring that she was a whore (despite the two being nearly synonymous in Turkey). Meanwhile, Melissa Gira Grant wrote on the protests for both Dora and Jasmine: “If you passed by the Turkish or Swedish consulates in New York on [July 19^th], you may have seen…sex workers and their supporters holding red umbrellas…the…action accompanied rallies in 36 cities and on four continents…demanding an end to the stigma and violence against sex workers’ communities…”

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Visit my bookstore
This Month
November 2026

S M T W T F S

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

« Oct
Old Posts
Old Posts
Call me

Enter your email address to follow "The Honest Courtesan"; you'll be notified by email whenever Maggie posts something new.

Email Address
Become a Blog Patron

If you want to donate but don't want a recurring charge, you can send any amount you like via PayPal to my email address (see below). Be sure to include a note so I can thank you!
Contact Maggie

If you’d like to ask me a question, click here.

If you made a comment and it doesn’t appear within a few hours, click on this one.

If you’d like to alert me to an interesting item, use this one.

And if you have a request, bouquet or brickbat or just want to introduce yourself, this is the one for you.
A Few References
Boring but necessary legal stuff

All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say “pretty please with sugar on top” first, and then wait for me to say “okey-dokey”.

Frank commentary from a semi-retired call girl

Posts Tagged ‘Nebraska’

Visit my bookstore

This Month

Old Posts

Call me

Become a Blog Patron

Contact Maggie

A Few References

Boring but necessary legal stuff