neo-Victorianism | The Honest Courtesan

Posts Tagged ‘neo-Victorianism’

That Was the Week That Was (#51)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged acting, activism, Argentina, Australia, bogus studies, California, Canada, censorship, condoms, cops, crypto-moralism, dirty, evidence, Gorged With Meaning, harm reduction, Hollywood, hysteria, Lack of Evidence, Latin America, law, Legitimate Outrage, License To Rape, Madonna/whore, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York, One Born Every Minute, porn, Profound Ignorance, psychology, rape, See No Evil, Shift in the Wind, slavery, Storyville, The Crumbling Dam, The More the Better, The New Victorianism, The Red Umbrella, Traffic Jam, Tyranny by Consensus, United Kingdom, video, violence vs. sex workers, welcome to our world, Where Are the Protests? on December 22, 2012| 15 Comments »

In reality, sex work isn’t stigmatised because it is dangerous. Sex work is dangerous because it is stigmatized. – Laurie Penny

Storyville

This is a pretty good introduction to Storyville, though it has a few errors and two really odd misinterpretations: she refers to “not on the first floor of any building” as a “district”, and she only counts business owners (rather than individual whores) when discussing income. Worth watching for the pictures.

Since young colonies rarely have anything to recommend them to women, they often have a pronounced gender imbalance; King Louis XV solved the problem in New Orleans by sending a boatload of whores, and George III did the same thing 68 years later for Australia. The ship was named the Lady Juliana, and this recent article draws on a recently-unearthed jail log to tell a little about the ship and its passengers.

License To Rape

…a former Eatontown [New Jersey] detective accepted a plea agreement…[for raping] an informant. His victim…explained to the court…how [Philip] Emanuele used the threat of prison for a theft charge…to coerce her into performing oral sex…When she refused, he raped her…Emanuele acknowledged what he had done in open court, and was sentenced to 5 years of probation for criminal coercion, and 3 years of probation for tampering with evidence…

Lack of Evidence

A New York district attorney has dropped a prostitution charge against former reality TV star Alicia Guastaferro…after further investigation revealed it was unmerited…The D.A. still plans to pursue [other] charges…Guastaferro…[and] attorney James D. Doyle [were found unconscious in Doyle’s car after]…a…motorist…[reported] a car being driven erratically…Guastaferro …told police Doyle pays her $500 to $700 to perform sexual acts and spend the night with him…

Yes, the cops actually filed a prostitution charge on the word of a semi-conscious drunk.

The Red Umbrella

This San Francisco Weekly op-ed by Chris Hall is the best December 17^th article by a non-sex worker I have ever seen. It deserves to be read in its entirety, but its tone is illustrated by the statement “…there really is no conversation about sex work…only a monologue by media and politicians with the workers themselves meant to stay silent. December 17 events represent a concerted effort to break that silence.”

The New Victorianism

Another Christmas present to sex workers from a journalist who isn’t one of us, but gets it; this one was published in The New Statesman by repentant neofeminist Laurie Penny:

…Laws regulating sex work are written…by people who have never done sex work and who have no sustained contact with those who do. The most well-meaning legislation…often backfires, pushing the sex trade further underground and giving the police licence to punish and victimise women…feminist author Ellen Willis termed this handkerchief-clutching zeal to “save” prostitutes, porn actresses and other “fallen” women “neo-Victorianism”…It’s a school of so-called women’s liberation that [believes]…work can’t possibly be the problem, so…If sex workers are victimised by the police and…face higher levels of violence and assault at work, then it can only be because of their dirty moral choice to have sex for money…This isn’t about evidence…It’s about morality, just as it was…when…women organised charity centres to ‘save’ street prostitutes from sin by finding them alternative employment as charwomen, in workhouses or scrubbing the streets…any kind of work, however exploitative and badly paid, must be better than sex work because it doesn’t involve sex, wicked sex, sinful sex…

See No Evil

The equation of images and reality claims another victim:

…Rémy Couture [is a]…Canadian special-effects artist charged with “corrupting morals” by illegally combining sex and gore…[in] two short films depicting the crimes of a necrophiliac serial killer and various photographs of simulated torture and dismemberment that were posted on Couture’s now-defunct website…The prosecution argues that Couture’s work is obscene under Canadian law because “a dominant characteristic” of it is “the undue exploitation of sex” combined with “crime, horror, cruelty and violence.” He faces up to two years in prison for this prohibited mixture…

Where Are the Protests?

The word “trafficking” is not to be found in this article, nor are calls for paving to be abolished:

…William Connors…his wife Mary…[and] their sons…were all convicted of conspiracy to require a person to perform forced…labour…the Connors would pick up…homeless drifters or addicts…[who then] lived in squalid caravans…as they moved around the country working on the Connors’ paving and patio businesses…and…were controlled by discipline and violence…[they] were beaten, hit with broom handles, belts, a rake and shovel, and punched and kicked…[they] were often made to strip for a “hosing down session” with freezing water…[and] were paid as little as £5 for a day’s hard labour on jobs that would earn the family several thousand pounds. They were given so little food they resorted to scavenging from dustbins…

And as Furry Girl points out, nobody seems to care if children are forced to act in movies for their parents’ profit, either: “Imagine if anti-sex worker activists treated all forms of entertainment the same way they treat [sex work]…Where are the Nick Kristof-led raids of acting classes for children, the protests against movie studios that utilize under-18 performers, and the arrests of live studio audiences at the taping of TV family sitcoms?”

The More the Better

Furry Girl writes about the way people’s acceptance of unfamiliar things like marijuana use, homosexuality and sex work tends to grow as they get to know real people who are involved with those things, and she proposes an experiment for those shy about coming out:

Go to a bar in the next city over, or a music festival out of town, or just tell the person sitting next to you on the bus or subway. Try openness on for just a day, or even 15 minutes. You will get some bad reactions, but I think it will surprise you how many people won’t be an asshole to you. Be prepared for questions, which you can choose to answer or not.

Traffic Jam

Amazingly, all 13 victims of an Argentinean “sex trafficking” witch hunt were acquitted of all charges last week: “…the judges said there was no way to prove that Marita, a 23-year-old mother and wife who vanished on…April 3, 2002, was kidnapped and forced into a prostitution ring…For the last decade Marita’s mother, Susana Trimarco, has waged an uphill battle [against]…the people she believed were responsible for her daughter’s disappearance into the netherworld of human trafficking…” Trimarco has insisted from the beginning that her daughter was abducted by “sex traffickers”, despite a total lack of evidence for such an outlandish interpretation of the meager facts. The article points out that Trimarco “almost single-handedly changed the way that human trafficking is viewed…across much of Latin America,” and this is true: with the help of cops and prohibitionists she has succeeded in introducing American-style “sex trafficking” mythology to a culture which has a much healthier view of sex work than that of the US.

Legitimate Outrage

Being an ignoramus is no impediment to a career in law:

The California Commission on Judicial Performance…[admonished] Judge Derek Johnson…[for] comments [made] in the case of a man who threatened to mutilate the face and genitals of his former girlfriend with a heated screwdriver, beat her with a metal baton and made other violent threats…Johnson, a former prosecutor in the Orange County district attorney’s sex crimes unit, said…”I’m not a gynecologist but I can tell you something: if someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse the body shuts down…[and] will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case”…since 1980, California law has not required rape victims to prove they resisted or were prevented from resisting.

Profound Ignorance

Several people called to my attention a recent paper claiming that legalizing prostitution increased human trafficking; I pointed out to them that without good data and clear definitions, a prohibitionist can “prove” whatever he likes. But Dr. Laura Agustín said it much better than I did:

I’ve been asked several times to comment on a recently published article, Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?…This study belongs to a trend to use econometric concepts and techniques in a (vain) attempt to prove this or that about prostitution…fancy modelling and sophisticated analysis cannot help when the data being analysed is next to useless…Any critique of this work has to begin by asking how the authors define human trafficking, inflows, legalised prostitution, the prostitution market, trafficked women and legal prostitutes. None of these terms is self-explaining. After more than 15 years, we do not even have agreement about what the fundamental terms mean, so anyone writing in the field has to tell us which definitions they are using and they have to make sure they compare and contrast categories using the same definitions…The best way to understand this work is Garbage in, garbage out…

Metaupdates

The Crumbling Dam (TW3 #35)

Wally Oppal says the scores of women missing and presumed murdered by Robert Pickton and others in the Vancouver area were doubly forsaken – by society and by police. In fact, they were triply forsaken…The law itself forsook many of them, by criminalizing them for selling sex and driving them to the extreme margins…“I cannot ignore the reality that this legal regime played an important role in shaping the relationship between the police and women…potentially affecting…investigations…” Mr. Oppal writes…The report is a death knell for prostitution laws in their current form.

Shift in the Wind (TW3 #43)

More and more UN officials are coming out in favor of decriminalization:

The UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health – yes, that’s his full title…has…come down firmly on the side of decriminalising the sex industry. In fact, a 2010 report of his is one of the strongest statements I’ve ever seen in this regard by a UN official…

Tyranny By Consensus (TW3 #47)

A group of adult industry leaders announced…their intent to file a lawsuit soon against Los Angeles County over Measure B…an ill-conceived law that makes it mandatory for adult actors to wear lab coats, goggles and gloves as well as condoms while shooting adult films in the County. The law was funded solely by AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)…The attorneys plan to challenge the law on the [grounds that]…health and safety…issues…fall under…State regulation…[they also] plan to challenge…on constitutional grounds…

One Born Every Minute (TW3 #48)

“Detectives investigating a website offering to pay the tuition fees of female students in return for sex have arrested [Mark Lancaster] on suspicion of inciting prostitution…” WTF? “Inciting prostitution”? How about fraud and sexual assault?

Gorged With Meaning (TW3 #49)

It’s astonishing that these people just can’t understand and accept that nothing has to “be done”, and that student sex workers will get along without their “help” just as they always have: “…ex-brothel madam [Becky Adams] has been enlisted to help…Swansea University…research…what motivates [students] to [do] sex work…” I’ll save them the trouble: the answer is “good money and flexible hours”. Now, where’s my £500,000?

This Week in 2010 and 2011

Beside my two previous columns for December 17^th, my two previous columns for Yule, my two previous yuletide fictional interludes and a history of Hanukkah, this week also featured a look at what passes for “evidence of prostitution”, a look at the truth of Swedish “feminism”, a statement of some of my principles, a thought experiment about coercion vs. free choice and a biography of Edith Piaf. Finally, there were also short items on Craigslist, the UK attempt to block all internet porn, PC celebrities, “john schools”, Bronte sister action figures, nanny-state dating advice, Julian Assange, hate crime, an awkward call, men’s magazines, a fatal BDSM accident, Barbie hate, a begging ban, another hooker-hiring politician and religious persecution.

Read Full Post »

Eros and Phobos

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged BDSM, censorship, drugs, fantasy, harm reduction, Hollywood, hysteria, imaginative fiction, Madonna/whore, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, porn, psychology, rape, yin and yang on October 29, 2012| 15 Comments »

You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. – Camille Paglia

As Paglia pointed out, second-wave feminists were fighting a losing battle in trying to paint sex as a wholly good, positive, non-scary, sunshine-and-rainbows thing in order to make it palatable to the naïve young coeds and sheltered housewives they hoped to liberate from the rigid traditional roles of Madonna and whore. Though their motives were commendable, no good can come from hiding the truth and infantilizing those one hopes to help; the dark, chthonian power of sex is so important to its function and appeal that the only way to disguise it was to indulge in an ever-escalating (and ultimately futile) series of myths and denials which paved the way for the anti-sexual, anti-humanistic tyrannies of neofeminism. Rape had to be absurdly presented as an asexual power exercise, which of course meant that BDSM had to be rejected because its very nature refuted the claim that power could be cleanly divorced from sex; the second-wavers also didn’t want women thinking too hard about how much of a turn-on being overpowered or restrained (by the right man under the right conditions) can be. Similarly, porn had to be demonized by creating arbitrary and fanciful distinctions between it and erotica, and because scary situations can arise in sex work it also had to be amputated from the mutilated, sanitized body of “good” sex. At first this was a tough sell to women who had enjoyed the taste of sexual freedom in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but once the feminist establishment succeeded in stoking the fires of rape paranoia, all that had to be done was to define all “unacceptable” sex as rape, and AIDS hysteria drove the last nails into the coffin.

If sex were that easily buried, however, the human race would have died off long ago. The efforts of the neofeminists and crypto-moralists to enforce a rigid sexual orthodoxy were as doomed to failure as those of Christianity (even when allied with the State since the late 19^th century) had been. As the “light side” of sex was locked into ever-tighter bondage by the forces of law and middle-class mores, the “dark side” grew correspondingly stronger. The more sexless marriage became, the more popular whores grew; the more chaste the popular media, the more explicit the pornography. Beneath the orderly facade of Victorian Europe and America the buried majority of sexuality grew in the darkness, erupting forth in fusions of lust and horror ranging from the literary (Bram Stoker’s wildly-popular Dracula and its many imitators) to the grotesque (the lurid spectacles of Paris’ Grand Guignol theater) to the terrifyingly real (the sex-driven crimes of Jack the Ripper). It is no accident that erotic horror waned in popularity as sexual mores loosened in the 1920s, and vanished almost entirely by the end of the 1930s; contrast the tame sexuality of The Wolf Man (1941) with that of Dracula (1931) and other pre-code horror movies and you’ll see what I mean.

As the mass media grew in the 1960s and 1970s, they became harder to censor; the internet has made it nearly impossible. Because of this, the character of horror fiction has become less reliable as a means of examining the relationship between sex and fear; though a great deal of horror literature and art is still highly erotic, most 21^st-century horror is now comparatively asexual and most erotica lacks any element of fright or violence (despite the claims of neofeminists). But at the same time, the deep relationship between fear and sex is still clearly visible if one only cares to look: the trappings of BDSM would be equally at home in a gothic horror setting, the rape fantasy is as popular as ever and the lurid fantasies of “sex trafficking” fetishists can be found in mainstream news outlets every day, forced up from the collective unconscious by the pressure of the return to Victorian levels of prudery. Nor does one always have to look outward to find the connection; I’m sure many of my readers have realized that the things that sexually excite them most are often related to things that frighten them. For example, some of you may recall my mentioning that I have a phobia of being trapped (including in traffic jams), and I think even the veriest psychological amateur could recognize that I have a tremendous aversion to authority. Yet at the same time, I’m turned on by bondage and themes of dominance and submission.

Why should this be? Is there some evolutionary reason that the emotions of fear and arousal should be so closely related that they’re often intermingled? Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa suggested that fear of death might stimulate a male to want to mate in order to pass on his genetic material one last time, but obviously that wouldn’t apply to females; yet the sex-fear link is at least as strong in us as in men (as evidenced by the enduring fascination of sexualized monsters such as vampires). My personal theory is that in women it’s a defense mechanism evolved to prevent trauma in forced-mating situations where a woman might very well be terrified, but needs to relax and go with the flow so as to minimize injury and maximize the possibility of conception; this idea is supported by the fact that when a woman has sex, the area of the brain stem which controls “fight or flight” response is activated, and activity in the amygdala and hippocampus (which regulate fear and anxiety) is suppressed. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of Todd Akin’s astonishingly ignorant “theory” that biological mechanisms evolved for the convenience and peace of mind of individuals rather than for the continuation of the species.

There’s one final possibility, either an alternate explanation or another, additional factor. Human beings evolved to be risk-takers and novelty seekers; it is the driving force behind our curiosity, the exploratory urge which caused us to spread over the entire globe and our tendency to become bored and dissatisfied with unchanging routines. Most humans are always in search of new experiences, and many seek adventures and thrills even when those thrills are frightening. Horror movies, thrill rides and mind-altering substances give a controlled thrill, the exhilaration of an adrenaline rush without the danger of a real life-or-death situation. And since sex is another “safe” thrill, another stimulus which produces feelings of excitement without the need for “fight or flight”, it may be that the feelings are easily confused by the brain’s limbic system in much the same way as pain and pleasure are in some people. In other words, the intermixture of fear and sexual arousal, like that of pain and pleasure, may simply be an accident of our neurological wiring rather than something which had a specific survival function. But whichever explanation is correct, there is no denying that sex and fear are deeply intertwined, and that attempting to separate them by shame, social engineering or government edict will be just as spectacularly ineffectual as attempting to suppress other human drives, urges and behaviors by those same means.

Read Full Post »

Too Young To Know

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged adolescence, age of consent, brothels, cops, cult of the child, dirty, ethics, harm reduction, law, naturalness, neo-Victorianism, pimps, psychology, streetwalkers, Too Young To Know, underage on August 2, 2012| 29 Comments »

Most adults would not dream of belittling, humiliating, or bullying (verbally or physically) another adult. But many of the same adults think nothing of treating their adolescent child like a nonperson. – Laurence Steinberg

I’ve written before about the “Cult of the Child”, that strange Victorian belief system which has made a comeback in the past few decades and teaches that children exist in what cultists term “innocence”, a state of divine grace which can only be violated by direct or indirect action of adults. The die-hard child cultist imagines that if children (and their definition of that term extends far beyond that Nature uses) could somehow be kept from “bad influences”, they would be pure, asexual little angels until granted the right to be otherwise by the adults who ~~own~~ take care of them. Furthermore, child cultists believe that the longer childhood is extended, the better; many parents are now working assiduously to carry it at least into college.

This is insanity; in pre-industrial cultures people assumed adult responsibilities as soon as they could, usually by about 14, and in those cultures there was no such thing as adolescent rebellion. Indeed, the concept of adolescence itself is a relatively modern one, dating to the establishment of compulsory education and child labor laws in the late 19^th century. And though I don’t think anyone wants to see 8-year-olds working on assembly lines again, it isn’t necessary to restrict teenagers as we do in order to prevent that. Though these laws are intended to protect teenagers, there is considerable evidence they have the opposite effect; as psychologist Robert Epstein explains,

…infantilization makes many young people angry or depressed…In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil…But [in the West] young people can’t own things, can’t sign contracts, and they can’t do anything meaningful without parental permission—permission that can be withdrawn at any time…They are restricted and infantilized to an extraordinary extent…American teens are subjected to more than 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults…and even twice as many as incarcerated felons…[there is] also…a correlation between infantilization and psychological dysfunction. The more young people are infantilized, the more psychopathology they show. What’s more, since 1960, restrictions on teens have been accelerating…

I’m not arguing that teens should be given adult responsibilities as soon as they hit puberty; modern culture is too complex for that now. But what I am saying is that Americans as a group suffer from the peculiar delusion that if a little of something is good, a LOT of it is better; if you believe that, how about a nice plate of salt for dinner? Some restrictions on teens are helpful to them, but equating them with toddlers helps no one, neither the teens nor the parents who are held legally liable if they are somehow unable to control young people who may be just as competent, intelligent, resourceful and strong-willed as they are. And nowhere is this more true than in the area of sex; it is the hormones of puberty that drive young people to have sex, not knowledge or culturally-induced “sexualization”, yet Americans are committed to the self-destructive delusion that if we keep teens in ignorance about sex they’ll stay “innocent” and never think of having it themselves (in exactly the same way dogs, cats and other animals remain celibate for life unless humans teach them to have sex).

With rare exception, teen runaways leave home for a reason; they’re not lured away by “bad influences” or abducted by “traffickers”, but rather pushed away by factors such as physical or sexual abuse or parental rejection of their homosexuality or transsexuality. But because our laws define people under 18 as chattel, they can be arrested by cops and forced back into the situation from which they fled, or else sentenced to “child welfare” systems so horrible many of them return to the street as soon as possible. Child labor laws keep them from getting regular work (and such work would expose them to capture by police anyway), which leaves them with roughly three alternatives: theft, begging or prostitution; the latter is nearly always the easiest and most lucrative. The “trafficking” dogma is based in the “innocence” fallacy: the child cultists want to believe teenagers could never think of prostitution on their own, but this is total nonsense; teen runaways don’t need to be forced or indoctrinated into a form of exchange which predates the human species, and in fact (as revealed by a recent DoJ-funded study) 90% of them are not. Yet, nearly all current programs for dealing with teen prostitutes are based on exactly the opposite assumption, and if such a girl denies she has a “pimp” she is assumed to be lying.

Anyone who buys the “trafficking” narrative (or its underlying assumptions) might not understand why I was so critical of disguised prisons like “Freedom Place”, but even those who recognize it for what it is might rightly ask, “What’s the alternative?” Here are a few ideas that have been suggested by sociologists, human rights activists, sex worker rights activists and others who have looked at the issue from a harm reduction perspective rather than from a moralistic or legalistic agenda:

1) There is no material difference between sex for compensation and sex for social reasons except that those who fall into the latter are less likely to use condoms or good judgment. So, the state needs to pick an age of consent and stick to it, thus eliminating criminalization of motives for having sex. This is not to say that the state shouldn’t set some higher age at which a brothel or escort service can legally hire a girl, as long as the state recognizes that doing so means that the only sex work an underage teen can do will be on the street, and that the law isn’t going to stop her if that’s what she intends to do.

2) Stop pretending sex is some horrible, life-destroying thing; treat AoC violation like any other status offense such as underage drinking, and place the consequences equally on the minor and whoever assisted her. Furthermore, strict liability (i.e. penalties are inflicted even if the accused can convince a judge or jury he honestly didn’t know he was breaking a law) is an abomination no matter what the crime.

3) Stop pretending that people under 18 are “innocent children”; if the state intends to criminalize sex below a certain age, it needs to do so and eliminate the legal fiction that teens are literally unable to give consent. When a young adult is held responsible for violating a law (however arbitrary or unjust in her eyes) she can deal with the consequences, but pretending she’s a passive victim denies her agency and subjects her to indefinite confinement and open-ended, dishonest punishment.

4) Recognize that 90% of underage whores sell sex to survive, because laws prohibit their doing any other profitable work and applying to any standard job would expose them to arrest and return to whatever situation they’re running away from. They don’t hook because some “pimp” abducted them from their perfect, loving parents; they hook because they ran away from some awful situation and they’re hungry, cold and dirty. If the state really wants to reduce the number of runaways selling sex, it should establish (or allow charitable organizations to establish) drop-in shelters where runaways can come for food, a shower and a bed without fear of arrest. If you allow such shelters to confine the young people, or let even one cop ever walk through that door or hang around outside to harass them, the project is doomed.

5) If the state wants to reduce the number of runaways in the first place, it’s going to have to make it easier for minors to lodge civil complaints against parents for sex abuse and other serious mistreatment, seeking not criminal penalties but emancipation against parental approval; this should be granted not on factual findings, but on the basis of competency tests.

This isn’t a perfect world, and nobody is suggesting that any of these suggestions will create a Utopia in which no teen ever suffers or is exploited ever again. The philosophy of harm reduction is that rejecting compromise solutions because they “send a bad message” sacrifices real human lives on the altar of an unattainable perfection, and that the greatest good we can hope for is to establish policies which reduce the harm from people’s own (perhaps unwise) actions, and eliminate the harm inflicted by the brutal and mindless enforcement of ill-considered and moralistic laws.

Read Full Post »

Same As It Ever Was

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged crypto-moralism, dirty, disease, drugs, law, lawheads, neo-Victorianism, New York, racism, restaurants, Same As It Ever Was, social purity, streetwalkers, welcome to our world on March 19, 2012| 16 Comments »

Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. – David Byrne, “Once In a Lifetime”

Metaphors are at best imperfect; no matter how alike two things are, there are bound to be some differences. The same thing goes for historical cycles; no two eras can be exactly the same. That having been said, there are so many parallels between our era and the Victorian that it’s positively eerie; as I said in my New Year’s Day column,

…a coalition of conservative Christians and small-minded, narcissistic, middle-class white “feminists” has succeeded in selling its ideas of social engineering to the society at large, resulting in an ever-increasing mountain of restrictions on private “vices” such as sex and drug use. Once again we are being told that sex is “harmful”, especially to “children” (meaning anyone under 21), that prostitutes are the mentally defective “victims” of evil men, that there is a secret international conspiracy to sell millions of women and children into sexual slavery to satisfy “sinful” male lusts, and that women are eternal, sexless Trilbys who require paternal protection from mustachioed male Svengalis. Once again white Westerners are being urged to take up the “White Man’s Burden” and work to shepherd the degraded, childlike brown races from their inferior state by forcing them to accept our vastly superior culture (for their own good, of course). And once again plain, honest language is avoided in favor of vague, polysyllabic euphemisms designed to hide meaning rather than convey it, as discussed in my column from last New Year’s Day.

Given all this it’s no surprise that anti-sex worker fanatics refer to themselves as “abolitionists” and like to fantasize that there are “more slaves now than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade”, or that they write in an overblown, lurid style drawn straight from the penny dreadfuls. Health fascists employ rhetoric one might expect from the likes of Sylvester Graham or John Harvey Kellogg, and then there’s snobbish, racist social engineering like the latest from New York:

…[Proposed]…legislation…would ban eating in the New York City subway system…[on the grounds] that [it] breeds rats. It’s far from clear that the proposed ban would be enforceable…[and] the claim that noshing leads to litter and filth harks back to racial and class stereotypes from the Victorian era…[when] social reformers tried to crack down on working-class public eaters and food vendors — many of whom were immigrants — by linking them to squalor, disease and shame. To 19^th-century guardians of public morality, the newfangled habit of eating outside the home was a menace to body and soul. The oyster stalls of downtown Manhattan were an assault on the family values of the dinner table. The “hot-corn girls” who sold their wares on the streets were no better than prostitutes. Public eating was a gateway sin that led to drinking and debauchery.

As I pointed out in my column of one year ago today, the “gateway” argument is employed by lawheads to argue in favor of logically-unsupportable bans on consensual activity by claiming (without proof, of course) that the activity in question “leads” inevitably to serious consequences:

“Eating in public may beget a certain freedom of manner and nonchalance in little ladies and gentlemen,” Putnam’s magazine warned in 1853, “but we fear the practice is not calculated to promote the health either of the mind or the body.” For children, the magazine hinted darkly, eating in public was worse than unhealthy — it was bad for their morals. All this sermonizing about public morals was a euphemism for a more concrete threat: the growing populations of Irish, German, Italian and Jewish immigrants…for the families flooding into Ellis Island every day, street peddling was often the first step up the ladder of capitalism. Street food cost less than restaurant fare, because vendors didn’t have to pass on the already skyrocketing cost of rent to their customers…Well into the 20^th century, social reformers lobbied the city to crack down on immigrant pushcart vendors…[arguing] that eating in public was “unhygienic” and led to diseases like cholera.

You can hear an echo of Victorian finger-wagging nowadays from lawmakers who pit public eating against cleanliness, godliness and that elusive quality we refer to as being “civilized”… but…in many of the great cities of the world, public eating and all of its glorious manifestations…are occasions for celebration and communion, not shame and punishment…To be sure, some foods…travel well [and] others…not so much. And some subway passengers do throw their leftovers on the…tracks. But instead of criminalizing a biological necessity like eating, we should enforce the already existing laws against littering…we don’t want to end up like Washington, where transit police officers, during an undercover crackdown in November 2000, infamously arrested and handcuffed a 12-year-old girl for eating French fries. (The officers who searched her book bag, according to the girl, asked if she had any drugs or alcohol in addition to her fries)…

Because, you know, French fries are a “gateway drug” which inevitably lead to shooting up heroin. Yes, that’s an absurd exaggeration, but to whores and our clients it sounds no more ridiculous than the common assertion that having sex with someone for practical reasons (rather than “love”) and being honest about one’s expectations up front, somehow inevitably leads to violent crime.

The idea that denying oneself physical pleasures, from sex to tasty food to chemical stimulants, is a good in and of itself arrived in North America with the Puritans and grew dramatically during the 19^th century (as described in Warner’s All or Nothing). But the notion that it is somehow justifiable to impose one’s own personal beliefs or preferences on society as a whole is the deformed spawn of the Social Purity Era, and its reappearance is yet another symptom of Neo-Victorianism.

Read Full Post »

Knights Erroneous

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged Africa, brothels, California, cops, dirty, drivers, East Asia, end demand, ethics, Europe, fantasy, Hollywood, hysteria, India, Knights Erroneous, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, psychology, sex work is work, slavery on March 18, 2012| 42 Comments »

He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Don Quixote imagined himself a knight errant and set off on a quest to save damsels, defeat villains and right all wrongs. But since there were neither monsters to slay nor damsels in distress, his madness conjured them out of mundane people and things and he frequently interfered in other people’s business. Fortunately, everyone else (including his “squire”, Sancho Panza) saw reality as it was, so Quixote’s ability to actually hurt others was minimal. We have of late been invaded by a veritable army of Quixotes, but unlike their mostly-harmless fictional progenitor these modern knights erroneous have managed to convince much of the world that hotels and brothels are prisons, husbands and businessmen international gangsters and whores pure, victimized damsels to be rescued from a Fate Worse Than Death.

The most famous of these quixotic crusaders is of course Nicholas Kristof, who imagines himself the savior of both whores and passive, childlike brown people everywhere. He’s well-known for riding in on a nag he imagines to be a charger and “rescuing” girls from brothels with the “help” of local police…who often subject them to abuse the second Kristof rides off to proclaim his latest triumph in the New York Times, just as the servant boy Don Quixote “rescued” was beaten by his master as soon as his “savior” was out of sight. Dr. Laura Agustín has written a number of articles exposing Kristof; one of the best and most comprehensive of these is “The Soft Side of Imperialism”, published on January 25^th. A month later the same newsletter, Counterpunch, carried another of her essays; this one’s on an academic charlatan named Siddharth Kara, who like Kristof is revered by trafficking fetishists:

It is good luck for Good Men that sex slavery has been identified as a terrible new phenomenon requiring extraordinary actions. In the chivalric tradition, to rescue a damsel in distress ranked high as a way knights errant could prove themselves, along with slaying dragons and giants. Nowadays, Nicholas Kristof is only one of a growing number of men seeking attention and praise through the rescue of a new kind of distressed damsel – poorer women called sex slaves. In this noble quest, women who prefer to sell sex to their other limited options are not consulted but must be saved…

Siddharth Kara, another man seeking saintliness, uses lite economics – another trendy way to get noticed these days. His Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery…is not a scholarly work. Neither based on methodological research nor reflecting knowledge of literature that could give context to the author’s experience, the book reads like the diary of a poverty tourist or the bildungsroman of an unsophisticated man of moral sentiments demonstrating his pain at unfathomable injustices. This places Kara in the tradition of colonial writers who believed that they were called to testify to the suffering of those not lucky enough to be born into comfortable Western society. Scholarship is virtually absent from his list of references, whether on migration, trafficking, slavery, feminism, sexualities, criminology, gender, informal-sector labor, or the sex industry and prostitution…Sex Trafficking is touted by anti-slavery and End Demand campaigners as presenting hard data, incisive analysis and up-to-date economics, but it reads more like an account of knight-errantry…

…Kara reads like a bull in a china shop, bumbling into brothels, stressing and sometimes endangering young women, pressing them to provide him with conversation, annoying goons, and throwing money around. The absence of academic supervision to control his preconceptions, critique his lack of methodology, or check his spin makes one wonder what Columbia University Press thought they were doing publishing it…For a man setting out to report on sex as business he is priggish. Bothered by old men who ogle young girls, he admits “I felt ashamed to be male”…Exalted sensibility and anachronistic rhetoric further link Kara to nineteenth-century moral crusaders like Josephine Butler, famous for saying if she were a prostitute she would be crying all day. Kara knows little about present-day migration and mobility. Meeting a Lithuanian woman in Italy and a Nigerian woman in Bangkok cause him to suspect they were trafficked, as though obtaining travel documents and tickets were too difficult for women to manage alone. Not finding slaves in the United States, he concludes there must be less demand and therefore less slavery, but also that the United States is “too far away” (from what?), as though contemporary air travel had not rendered distance almost irrelevant…

…Kara is not interested in migration…[or] “trafficking”…preferring slave trading for the movement of people and slavery for the jobs they get. He claims that slavery is back on a large scale, but his is a cartoon version of master and slave, free of any social complexity and the ambiguities of human interaction…Finally forced to recognize that slavery could sometimes represent “a better life” (p. 199), he is nonetheless blind to the possibility that people in bad situations may be able to exploit them and is obviously ignorant of slavery studies far evolved from abolitionist reductionism. Slave narratives, slave archaeology, ethnobiology, and historical research all have illuminated social systems in which slaves were not wholly passive nor owners unidimensionally crushing…He claims that “sex slaves” are the best earners for masters because they are sold “literally thousands of times before they are replaced” (p. 24), confusing an owner’s sale of a slave with a slave’s sale of sexual services to customers. Would he do this if another service were involved, like hairdressing? If a salon owner buys a slave to be a hairdresser who then sees many customers and produces money for her owner, would Kara say the hairdresser is sold thousands of times? Or would he see that her labor is sold, albeit unjustly…

Agustín goes into considerable detail about this man’s awesome degree of ignorance, and after reading her article one is forced to wonder if the trafficking fanatics bother to read anything before praising it, or if they automatically pronounce a work “important” and “well-researched” if it generally supports their beliefs. Kara proclaims that there is little sex slavery in the US, which is certainly true but directly contradicts “trafficking” dogma. Maybe the fetishists didn’t get that far in the book, or at least assume those they’re preaching to won’t.

Two days later on her own blog Agustín presented her view of recent grandstanding by Ashton Kutcher, another Galahad wannabe whose sexual habits, alas, disqualify him for the role. Like Kristof he tags along on police raids, but unlike Kristof he doesn’t want to get out of easy driving distance of the nearest Starbuck’s:

Ashton Kutcher is branching out from child sex trafficking and child sex slavery to child pornography, undoubtedly on the advice of publicists who want him associated with all things scarily sexy about children. This…contributes to the blurring of distinctions amongst people who sell sex, no matter what age they are. Distinctions are necessary if one would like as many different people as possible to enjoy autonomy and rights, and one would think most people would like that, but alas they don’t when exchanging money for sex is concerned…

Being part of police raids is clearly the In Thing for Rescuers. Nicholas Kristof went giddy over the AK-47s he saw at Somaly Mam’s raid, and Mira Sorvino [is] playing a New York cop-turned-Border-Patrol-agent in a TV mini-series called Human Trafficking…So I am hardly surprised that Ashton asked to tag along on a police raid of pedophile homes in California (if that is really what they were, which is not proven). But something creepy is getting normalised here: Celebrities now routinely side with police in order to show their seriousness about trafficking, and, in a circular move, get their knowledge about trafficking from the police. Ashton won’t have known anything about the people whose homes were invaded except what the cops told him (he wasn’t allowed inside). But he doesn’t have to know more, because this is a publicity stunt…What happened to Hollywood’s historic liberal slant that caused actors and writers to stand up against big government? Gone with the wind of trafficking.

I was originally planning to present the Kutcher story in “That Was the Week That Was #9”, but Agustín’s analysis was so much more interesting than the rather-dry story I decided to present it as part of this parade of arse-backward “heroes” committed to destroying women’s lives for their own personal glory.

One Year Ago Today

“Ching Shih” was an early 19^th century whore whose charms and intelligence allowed her to become the most successful pirate in history.

Read Full Post »

Crystal Ball

Posted in History, Tyranny, tagged censorship, dirty, Europe, hysteria, law, Madonna/whore, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, Prohibition (alcohol), psychology, Russia, United Kingdom on January 2, 2012| 14 Comments »

I wonder what tomorrow has in mind for me,
Or am I even in its mind at all?
Perhaps I’ll get a chance to look ahead and see,
Soon as I find myself a crystal ball. – Tommy Shaw

Yesterday I pointed out, as I have in a number of previous essays, that our culture has descended into the general fear of sex, vice and new ideas that was prevalent at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th centuries. Then, as now, new means of mass communication (telephone and radio then, internet now) promoted the rapid dissemination of ideas by individuals, weakening the monopoly on such communication previously held by governments and multinational organizations such as religions. Furthermore, both eras saw dramatic increases in international migration, driven partly by cheaper travel and partly by rapid shifts in borders and governments; such migration tends to horrify racists and xenophobes, resulting in a moral panic. In the United States and United Kingdom (and to a lesser extent Europe), public discourse in both eras was largely dominated by vocal, strident and well-funded coalitions of conservative Christians and prudish middle-class women who imagined themselves to be “progressive” (due to their support for women’s rights) but were in fact purely moralistic; these groups bullied the majority with “social problem” and “for the children” rhetoric and purchased sufficient numbers of politicians to inflict their anti-sex, anti-fun “temperance” agenda on both their own countries and any others they politically or economically dominated.

As those of us born before 1980 remember, the first movement died out for quite some time; with the exception of a few burps, retrograde periods and other discontinuities, Western society’s views on personal morality have become progressively more liberal since about 1920 and did not start to dry up again until the 1980s. In place of Prohibition we got the War on Drugs; fundamentalist Christians and the decaying remnants of second-wave feminism mounted a joint campaign against sex just as fundamentalist Christians and the decaying remnants of first-wave feminism had a century before, and the disintegration of the Soviet Empire released waves of new migrants to give the isolationists nightmares. In the United States, these forces all coalesced in the months after September 11^th, 2001; the average American was convinced that the world was falling apart and that it was time to “do something” against whatever target he could get his hands on…which, as it so often turns out, meant nonconformist women. A reader recently asked me if I had a crystal ball which might reveal where all this is going. Unfortunately I don’t, but I think we can make some educated guesses based on the way things happened the last time around. In order to do that, I must first point out that there are actually two intertwined but separate issues here: the specific “sex trafficking” moral panic which has served as a Trojan horse for so much anti-prostitute activity, and the general trend toward social conservatism and xenophobia which forms the soil in which these revolting fungi grow.

First, the good news: major moral panics only tend to last about 20 years at the outside. Some of them are very much shorter, but most of the big ones endure for about the time it takes a generation to grow from infancy to adulthood (during which time a lot of the “leaders” who enable such panics die off or at least retire, and young liberals who reject their elders’ crusades on general principle come into power). Even in the days when societies changed more slowly this two-decade limit held; for example, though witch hunts periodically racked Europe for almost 300 years (from the late 15^th – mid 18^th centuries), any individual witch panic in a given place usually lasted only 2-20 years (as typified by the most recent period of literal witch-hunting, the “Satanic Panic”, which began in the early 1980s and subsided by the late 1990s). Given this pattern, the “human trafficking” hysteria should be dead by the end of this decade; though there were a few alarmists spreading the propaganda (which if one treats it skeptically reads an awful lot like the “Satanic abuse” literature with sex and profit replacing “Satanism” as the supposed motivator) by the mid-‘90s, official designation of it as a “world-wide problem” occurred in 2000 and the genuine hysteria did not begin until about 2003. As Emi Koyama pointed out in a recent article, “A quick search on a news database shows that there were only three references to ‘human trafficking’ or ‘trafficking in humans’ before 2000. It was mentioned 9 times in 2000, 41 times in 2001, and broke 100 mentions for the first time in 2005. In 2010, there were more than 500 references.”

If things run according to form, we can predict that over the next three years skepticism about “trafficking” (especially in regard to its conflation with sex work) will slowly increase, and by about 2015 it will be possible for a major media outlet to publish articles critical of both the statistics and the very concept. By 2017 public funding for anti-sex worker hate groups will begin to dry up, and by 2019 or 2020 we should expect it to virtually disappear from public discourse except for a wave of books and documentaries by “experts” who couldn’t be bothered to speak out against it while it was going on but are happy to make a quick buck from it after it’s safely over. Sometime soon after this there may be a pro-sex work backlash against the hysteria, just as public atheism became much more palatable to general audiences after the death of the “Satanic Panic”. I suspect that at this point the ACLU will finally deign to take up a challenge to prostitution law, and sometime in the late 2020s the SCOTUS will issue a landmark decision overturning prostitution laws on civil rights grounds just as Roe vs. Wade overturned abortion laws and Lawrence vs. Texas overturned sodomy laws.

The comparison with these cases is instructive; though Roe was decided 39 years ago this January 22^nd, abortion law is still highly controversial in the United States, and thus it will be with prostitution. The court’s decision will only invalidate criminalization of the act of prostitution itself, leaving the various states free to enact their own patchwork of legalization schemes. Some will no doubt adopt models similar to that of Canada and the U.K., criminalizing everything about the business; others may enact something like the Swedish Model (in whatever form it has assumed by that time, which I guarantee won’t be what it looks like today); still others may employ a Nevada-style model and a few may use liberal legalization schemata like that of Germany, establish red-light districts or even wholly decriminalize like New Zealand. The controversy will become another “abortion” or “gay marriage”, providing a shibboleth with which small-minded people can denote membership in “liberal” or “conservative” groups and a convenient prepackaged position for politicians to employ in marketing themselves to such groups.

Larger cultural trends don’t usually die as quickly or abruptly as do moral panics; in some circles Victorian prudery was already on its way out by the Mauve Decade (AKA the “Gay Nineties”), but in the culture at large it still maintained its hold until wiped away by the First World War and the consequent upheavals in the social order it produced. Since Europe was affected earlier and far more severely by the war than was the US, the change came earlier there; indeed, it could be argued that isolationism driven by fear of embroilment in European conflicts actually intensified the social crusade in the United States (as demonstrated by passage of the Mann Act in 1910 and the Volstead Act in 1919). But by the mid-1920s even the United States was changing, and by the late 1930s the old moralism seemed quaint and even ludicrous. Here, then, is a likely predictor of the course of the current outbreak of Puritanism; it started in the early 1980s just as the last outbreak started in the 1880s, and a large minority is already thoroughly sick of it. All we’re now waiting for is a catalyst, some huge social upheaval such as a major war, revolution or economic collapse (given what we’re seeing on the news these days, it may have already started) which will give people something real to worry about. And when that’s over, the current sickness will be swept away as the old busybodies die off; by the late 2030s it will be regarded as a subject for mockery, and though I’ll be too old then (the high side of 70) to be able to fully enjoy the change, it will nonetheless bring me tremendous satisfaction.

One Year Ago Today

“January Second” examines the complicated relationship I’ve always had with this particular date.

Read Full Post »

New Year’s Day 2012

Posted in Current Events, History, Holidays, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, censorship, dirty, holidays, hysteria, law, Madonna/whore, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, pimps, racism, sex rays, social purity, stereotypes on January 1, 2012| 22 Comments »

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true. – Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It seems like such a short time ago that the new century began, yet here we are starting its twelfth year. It’s still so new-and-all that some people are still saying “two thousand twelve”; I guess they don’t realize how positively Victorian that sounds. Come on, say it with me: “twenty twelve”. Doesn’t that sound better? I’ve been saying “twenty” since at least 2002, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll still be hearing the “two thousand” thing until 2040 or later (assuming I’m still around then).

But then, maybe the Victorian stodginess is appropriate to this new era. Modern culture has returned to Victorianism in so many ways; as in the “social purity” era, a coalition of conservative Christians and small-minded, narcissistic, middle-class white “feminists” has succeeded in selling its ideas of social engineering to the society at large, resulting in an ever-increasing mountain of restrictions on private “vices” such as sex and drug use. Once again we are being told that sex is “harmful”, especially to “children” (meaning anyone under 21), that prostitutes are the mentally defective “victims” of evil men, that there is a secret international conspiracy to sell millions of women and children into sexual slavery to satisfy “sinful” male lusts, and that women are eternal, sexless Trilbys who require paternal protection from mustachioed male Svengalis. Once again white Westerners are being urged to take up the “White Man’s Burden” and work to shepherd the degraded, childlike brown races from their inferior state by forcing them to accept our vastly superior culture (for their own good, of course). And once again plain, honest language is avoided in favor of vague, polysyllabic euphemisms designed to hide meaning rather than convey it, as discussed in my column from last New Year’s Day.

The good news is, the Victorian Era didn’t last forever and neither will the Neovictorian. Sooner or later it must give way to a new version of the Roaring Twenties, in which the stifling prudery of early 21^st-century culture is swept away until it returns again to afflict some future unfortunate generation after most of those who remember how awful it was have passed on.

Read Full Post »

Thought Experiment

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, archeofeminism, brothels, China, cops, dirty, drivers, East Asia, ethics, fantasy, Hollywood, hysteria, neo-Victorianism, pimps, stereotypes, sweatshops, Thought Experiment on December 16, 2011| 19 Comments »

The dignity of man is in free choice. – Max Frisch

One of the most important negative effects of the popular concept that sex is somehow magically different from all other behaviors is the modern fixation on pimps. The nightmares of neofeminists and the masturbatory fantasies of trafficking fetishists teem with brutal (and usually dark-skinned) men who force women into prostitution, despite the fact that (as I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions) the abusive, controlling pimp of legend is so rare we can consider him an anomaly. In fact, the fraction of prostitutes who have such an abusive pimp – roughly 1.5% – is so similar to the percentage of women who report that their husbands/boyfriends are either “extremely violent” (1.2%) or “extremely controlling” (2.3%) that it’s pointless to consider them a different phenomenon, especially when one considers that any non-client male found in the company of a whore will inevitably be labeled a “pimp” by cops or prohibitionists. The notion that hookers only have relationships with a certain kind of man, who is labeled a “pimp” by outsiders, derives from the Victorian fallacy (alas, still alive today) that we are somehow innately “different” from other women, and therefore our men are different as well. This is pure nonsense; the only consistent difference between the husbands of harlots and those of amateurs is that ours tend to be less hung up about sex.

Yet the myth, anchored as it is in prohibitionist mythology, male insecurity and Hollywood stereotypes, is a persistent and pernicious one, affecting even those who recognize that most prostitutes are in the trade voluntarily. A great deal of the milder trafficking rhetoric revolves around locating and identifying “sex slaves” and penetrating their supposed “brainwashing” in order to “rescue” them, and judges and prosecutors stumble all over themselves when endeavoring to come up with inane and tautological justifications for persecuting so-called “pimps” whom they concede were fair businessmen who worked to protect their girls. Even among many independent internet-based escorts there’s a low-level hysteria about pimps (as though a man somehow has the power to reach through their cell phones and abduct them into a third-world brothel), and more than one reader has asked how he can avoid “pimped” girls.

I recently received another question of this type, but this time rather than feeding into the false dichotomy of “free” vs. “coerced”, I’ve decided to cut to the heart of the dilemma. The reader asked, “Is there even a grain of truth in this trafficking stuff, some ‘dark side’ I haven’t really seen despite my extensive experience? If this stuff DOES happen – how do guys who pay for sex make sure they’re not contributing to hurting a woman this way?”

For the most part, so-called “trafficking” is just people crossing borders to work, sometimes without proper documentation but not always. This doesn’t mean that every woman in every brothel is there because she wants to be and for no other reason, but does anyone believe that most women who work as hotel maids or Wal-Mart clerks are there out of free choice? Of course not, but neither were they abducted from their homes, carried off into bondage, threatened and all that jazz. Yes, there are a few examples of extreme coercion which are repeated endlessly by the fanatics, often exaggerated or with details omitted, and sometimes even rephrased so as to look like new ones. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, women do sex work for the same reason they do any other kind of work: because they need money. The number of women who are “coerced” into sex work is no higher than the number “coerced” into any other kind of work. If you’re at Wal-Mart, how do you know your cashier doesn’t have a lazy boyfriend at home who forces her to work and takes her money? You don’t. And are you somehow wrong or immoral for checking your purchases out in her line if she does?

Let’s imagine a barbershop which caters to a male clientele; they just do regular haircuts, nothing fancy, but all the barbers are female. Guys come in, get their hair cut, talk to the barbers, perhaps know their names. Maybe a guy even has a favorite girl who always cuts his hair; she does a good job, is friendly and she’s nice to look at, too. But what does he really know about her? Only what she cares to tell him, and nothing more. He doesn’t know what financial pressures she’s under, how much high-interest debt she has, how psychologically stable she is, if she was sexually abused as a child, whether she’s in the country legally, whether her boss treats her fairly and what her boyfriend is like. And you know what? None of that is any of his business unless she volunteers it; it’s outside the bounds of polite business conversation. If his barber is under financial or emotional duress, is he somehow responsible? After all, men don’t need to cut their hair; their demand for haircuts has created a market in which poor women are exploited to do work they may hate and possibly don’t want to do.

What if his barber actually has a degree in philosophy from an expensive school which she incurred massive student-loan debt to obtain, and is under threat of arrest from the government if she defaults, but she can’t get a job in this economy so she’s struggling with a debt which at her current rate of repayment will literally never be discharged? Is she in “debt bondage”, and is the federal government a “pimp” or “human trafficker” for telling her she needs to pay off her debt or else? If her parents cosigned those loans, the federal “traffickers” even keep her in line with threats to harm her family. And if a man gets a haircut from her, is he “enabling” that situation…or is he contributing toward her survival until she can find something which pays better?

Adult women are ADULTS. It isn’t the job of strangers, nor that of “rescue” organizations or the government, to police their private lives. The essence of freedom, of individuality, of adulthood, is self-determination, and to deny a person that is to infantilize her. It’s unfortunate that some people get into bad situations, often through no fault of their own. But unless the victim of such misfortune wants and asks for help, it is demeaning and abusive to force it upon her under the premise that her “rescuer” is better or smarter or wiser or more mature or saner than she is, and therefore more qualified to make decisions for her than she is for herself. Furthermore, it’s both rude and arrogant for a stranger to presume he has the right to question her on her financial situation, reasons for working and conditions of her relationships with men. Nobody would behave in such a way toward a barber…so why do people think it’s OK or even necessary to do it to a prostitute?

Ask yourself: Is sex degrading or dehumanizing? Is work? Is being paid? No? Then how can sex work be? Why doesn’t the U.S. government prosecute Nike for its sweatshops in Southeast Asia or Apple for its sweatshops in China, and why aren’t these countries placed on “watchlists” by the State Department for allowing them to exist? Why don’t we see campaigns to “end demand” for sneakers or iPhones? Because they don’t involve sex, and that is the only difference.

One Year Ago Today

“Lack of Evidence” examines the wide variety of behaviors, circumstances and personal possessions that police represent as “evidence” of prostitution.

Read Full Post »

Setting Women’s Rights Back a Century

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, bogus studies, dirty, drugs, hysteria, law, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, psychology, rape, Setting Women's Rights Back, stereotypes, yin and yang on September 9, 2011| 42 Comments »

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. – Christopher Lasch

Every freethinking woman has heard some form of it: “You’re setting the cause of women’s rights back a century”. I’ve heard it upon getting boyfriends’ coffee for them, letting it be known that I was a stripper or escort, being seen with a Camille Paglia book in my hand, etc. But as with so many pronouncements deriving from belief rather than from logic, it’s exactly backward; it’s the neofeminists and their stooges who have set women on course for a return to Victorian paternalism by enshrining in law the principle that women are delicate, innocent, asexual little flowers who must be protected from beastly men and their carnal lusts at all costs. “Mandatory prosecution” laws deny a woman’s right to decide whether to press charges on an abusive husband, on the grounds that she can’t be trusted to make the “right” decision. The “Swedish model” denies that women can consciously choose to have sex for reasons other than lust, loneliness or childish fantasies of romance, and establishes men as women’s moral superiors by holding them liable for women’s actions. Women who deny being coerced, raped, abused, “trafficked” or whatever by men are said to be suffering from “false consciousness”, the neologism for “weak-mindedness”. And though majority-male legislatures and government agencies enact these policies, it’s women who propose them in the first place and then lobby tirelessly for their implementation.

Why in the world do they do this? Can’t they comprehend the precedent they’ve established? I’m really not sure; it’s difficult to understand the workings of warped, hateful, evil, power-mad minds. One thing is clear: they don’t care anything about the happiness or needs of individual women, only their plan for the “advancement” of “womankind” and the destruction of the monolithic, mythical “Patriarchy”. And like bloodthirsty, obsessed generals they don’t care how much carnage is inflicted on their own troops so long as their side “wins”. If neofeminist “leaders” tried forcing this monstrous catechism of permanent childhood on mature adult women they wouldn’t get very far, so instead they inflict it on young, naïve, sheltered white girls at expensive universities. And though the real world has moved on since the heyday of neofeminism, in America’s universities it’s still 1992, bogus rape statistics are spread around like manure and the fluffy-bunny minds of coeds are crammed full of “rape culture” and “female victimization” rhetoric in the hope that they never grow up enough to recognize that they’ve been lied to, robbed of adult agency and quite possibly used as weapons to destroy the lives of equally naïve, hormone-addled young men they once liked enough to date.

And now, thanks to lawyers on the lookout for new sources of blood, American universities are being forced to implement the male-crushing schemes of neofeminists via threat of ruinous lawsuits and the loss of government funds on which nearly all of them depend. And when given the choice between senselessly destroying a young man’s academic career and losing money, I don’t need to tell you what they’ll do every time. Consider this article from Philadelphia magazine:

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Russlynn Ali…[has] disseminated a…letter to all colleges and universities that receive federal aid—which is all but two in the country—detailing how they’re required to combat [what Ali calls “a terrible, alarming trend of campus sexual violence”]…While women’s rights advocates have lauded Ali…a quieter groundswell of protest has charged her with trampling on the rights of young men accused of sexual assault…deans say she’s stripped their ability to deal with delicate he-said-she-said cases in fairer, more nuanced ways…[and her] guidelines impose a paralyzing “nanny state” on…campuses…across the country. At precisely the time in their lives when young men and women should be exploring what sexuality means, the new rules choke off their freedom, limit their choices, and encourage the canard that all males are unrepentant predators. What’s more, they position women as helpless victims who require bureaucratic protection from those males—victims with no responsibility for their own behavior. Heaven help those women when they graduate.

Those who read my column of July 25^th will no doubt recognize this as the same “campus rape crisis” hysteria that’s been aggressively marketed by radical feminists since the 1980s, complete with bogus statistics and support from Joe Biden. But while the government was previously content to throw money at what dispassionate observers recognize as a fairly rare problem, now schools will be required to expel young men on the basis of evidence too flimsy to convict them in court:

…consent [as defined by Ali] has to be active, not passive. And [a man] has to get [clear verbal] consent every time he wants to move up another base—a policy first instituted at Ohio’s Antioch College in the early 1990s…“If you want to take her blouse off, you have to ask. If you want to touch her breast, you have to ask. If you want to move your hand down to her genitals, you have to ask. If you want to put your finger inside her, you have to ask.” Reaction to Antioch’s policy…was wildly derisive; eventually, the college closed down. The policy, however…lives on all over the country…even [if a man has] no way of telling…[how much a woman has been drinking it is] his responsibility to determine if she [is] “incapacitated” [because]…if she [is], any fondling they [do], no matter how great her zeal, [is] sexual assault. She doesn’t even have to lodge a complaint; the college has to investigate if…[a witness] sees her…and suspects she’s drunk…and then there’s the new…requirement that has raised the most alarm among civil libertarians: the lowering of the evidentiary standard to that used in civil-rights litigation…a “preponderance of the evidence” is now all that’s required…not the more familiar “beyond a reasonable doubt” of criminal cases or the intermediary “clear and convincing evidence” standard many schools used to employ…Samantha Harris, of the…Foundation for Individual Rights in Education…says the new standard violates accused students’ due process rights…the Supreme Court’s precedents demonstrate that evidentiary standards should be higher, not lower, when so much is at stake, as FIRE argued in a lengthy letter to…Ali. “We’re not sending these students to prison…but…they’re found guilty of serious criminal offenses.” Perpetrators are subject to expulsion, which affects their employment and social prospects…Why don’t colleges just turn sexual assault cases over to police to prosecute? Because there’s rarely enough evidence to convict in a real court of law.

I was a married graduate student the first time I heard about the Antioch policy, and my reaction then is the same as it is now: If any guy had repeatedly sought verbal permission for everything rather than simply following my non-verbal cues I would’ve been so turned off I would’ve stopped the proceedings immediately, which is of course what the feminists want. Anyone in her right mind understands that “please don’t do that” or simply repositioning a wandering hand works on any normal man, and real rapists aren’t deterred by a lack of permission.

…the 2007 Justice Department report…researchers didn’t ask the 5,446 female students who took their online survey if they’d been sexually assaulted. They decided for the young women, who…were deemed too ignorant to know…when researchers asked the young women themselves if they considered what happened to them “rape,” three-quarters… didn’t. Only three percent said they’d experienced physical or psychological harm. Only two percent reported what happened to campus security or police. Asked why they hadn’t, the women said they didn’t consider the incident serious enough (66 percent) and/or that it wasn’t clear a crime or harm was intended (36 percent). Half said they themselves were partially or fully responsible for what had happened…But the fact that the victims didn’t think of themselves as victims, [university risk management consultant Brett] Sokolow says, misses the point: “They have to learn to say, ‘This is something that was done to me’”…I tell Sokolow that if [my college-age daughter] got drunk and had sex with someone, I’d jolly well expect her to take responsibility. He isn’t buying it: “She should have the right to strip naked and run through the streets and be unmolested. She didn’t make that happen; the molester did.”

This is the catechism being preached to young American women: You are NEVER responsible for your own actions. No matter how irresponsibly you act, no matter what you say to or do with a man, if someone later convinces you that you were “assaulted”, or if “authorities” rule that you were despite your protests, then you are a helpless, powerless victim without adult agency or volition, no better than an infant. Heaven help them, indeed.

One Year Ago Today

“A Whore in the Bedroom” explores the implications of my philosophy that “When one has a living creature under one’s care, it is one’s responsibility to take care of that creature’s needs, or else to arrange for someone else to do so. And if you shirk that responsibility, you only have yourself to blame for the inevitable and foreseeable consequences.”

Read Full Post »

To Spite Their Faces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

One Year Ago Today

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

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Visit my bookstore
This Month
June 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

« May
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 ‘neo-Victorianism’

Metaupdates

Visit my bookstore

This Month

Old Posts

Call me

Become a Blog Patron

Contact Maggie

A Few References

Boring but necessary legal stuff