neofeminism | The Honest Courtesan

Posts Tagged ‘neofeminism’

That Was the Week That Was (#13)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, archeofeminism, Australia, avails laws, brothels, California, Canada, censorship, comics, cops, dirty, Divided We Fall, Down Under, East Asia, Elephant in the Parlor, ethics, Europe, FBI, Feminine Pragmatism, France, harm reduction, Hollywood, hysteria, Israel, J’accuse, Knights Erroneous, law, lawheads, LGBT rights, Malaysia, Middle East, neofeminism, New York, pimps, porn, pragmatism, Presents, See No Evil, Sex Lies and Busybodies, sisterhood, Spain, stage names, stereotypes, streetwalkers, Subtle Pimping, Swedish model, The Course of a Disease, The Crumbling Dam, TSA, Washington DC, Whores in the News on March 31, 2012| 15 Comments »

Beware of purity workers [who are]…ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force. – Josephine Butler

Two new items, ten updates and four metaupdates.

Lysistrata

Aristophanes’ comedy depicts an Athenian woman who convinces the women of both Athens and Sparta that the only way to end the Peloponnesian War is to withhold sex from their husbands; in the play, as in real life, the problem is getting all the women to cooperate. The ridiculous sex strike American activists plan for April 28^th is foredoomed to failure (as if a one-week strike could have any effect anyhow) because the wives of those making the objectionable laws won’t be participating, and even if they did the politicians would simply go to their regular pros. But if all the whores cooperated…

…The largest trade association for luxury escorts in the Spanish capital has gone on…strike…for bankers until they go back to providing credits to Spanish families, small- and medium-size enterprises and companies…a…spokeswoman [said] “…We have been on strike for three days now and we don’t think they can withstand much more.” She has revealed that bankers have made some pitiful attempts to use their services by pretending to be engineers or architects…The bankers reportedly became so desperate that they even decided to call in the government for mediation…

Zero Information

Well, not zero exactly, but I couldn’t resist my first title beginning with “Z”.

A man who police say sometimes poses as a female prostitute to flag down motorists was arrested…Terrence Elliott…had been warned several times in the past few weeks…But Elliott was also found with a…crack pipe…and…charged with possession of drug paraphernalia [and]…loitering…

What the hell does this mean? Is Elliott a drag prostitute, or does he dress in drag to rob or panhandle? News stories are a lot more informative when they actually contain information.

Updates

Feminine Pragmatism (April 7^th, 2011)

Because this was practically inevitable, she was a fool for waiting until her marketability dried up:

At the height of her fame…Octomom aka Nadya Suleman was offered a lot of money to show her body. Vivid even offered her a $1 million deal to star in one of their films. At the time…[she] swore she would never do nudity. But dignity doesn’t feed 14…babies so…she [started] doing fetish photoshoots and now…topless shoots…However, she’s not commanding the same price she used to. TMZ reports that days away from being foreclosed upon, Nadya has decided to go naked for…Closer. Sources say she only made $10,000…

Subtle Pimping (April 8^th, 2011)

“Making money off of whores without giving them anything in return…is as good a working definition of ‘pimp’ as I can imagine…”

…On Friday, March 30^th…[the] 2012 Hooker Beauty Pageant…[will be held] in Hollywood…According to…[organizer] Natalia Fabia, the word “hooker” could be loosely defined as (excuse the pun) “someone who sells one’s talents and abilities, talent, or name for money, (but it also means) a rad, strong, talented, tough, colorful, independent, stylish, and beautiful woman.” This pageant is Fabia’s platform for highlighting real women in Hollywood’s music and art scene…

Umm, how about highlighting real hookers – or more specifically, our mistreatment? I googled Fabia and found no statements about sex worker rights or decriminalization, and nothing about part of the proceeds from her “hooker art” or publicity stunts going to hooker organizations, hooker rights advertising, outreach to street hookers…in short, she’s pimping our image.

Down Under (June 9^th, 2011)

Australia continues to be what Sweden wants so desperately to be: the world leader in demonstrating the proper way to deal with prostitution:

[A new study shows that]…New South Wales…is the best place in the world [for]…prostitutes…”Jurisdictions that try to ban or license sex work always lose track as most of the industry slides into the shadows,” [said]…Professor Basil Donovan…of [the] Kirby Institute… “In NSW, by contrast, health and community workers have comprehensive access to and surveillance of the sex industry. This has resulted in the healthiest sex industry ever documented.” The report, prepared for the NSW government, found…[that most] sex workers surveyed also reported being “well adjusted and comfortable with their occupation”…

The Crumbling Dam (October 14^th, 2011)

Today the Ontario Court of Appeal delivered a landmark decision on …prostitution laws…All five judges…found that…the provision restricting “common bawdy houses” is grossly disproportionate and overbroad, and…that the provision restricting “living on the avails”…is overbroad because it would criminalize non-exploitive relationships…However, three of the five…upheld the provision criminalizing communicating for the purpose of prostitution, holding that the purpose of the provision…is legitimate and must be weighed against the harms it causes…The…decision will most certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada…

Here’s the full decision. If there’s any justice in the universe, the Supreme Court will not only uphold the decisions of both lower courts overturning the bans on brothels and avails laws, but also reinstate Justice Himel’s decision overturning the “communicating” law.

Elephant in the Parlor (October 23^rd, 2011)

Not news, but I want to catalog as many of these as possible:

…John Edwards is denying a report that he used the services of a prostitute in New York…a call girl for…Anna Gristina told investigators she had sex with Edwards for money back in 2007…“Mr. Edwards categorically denies that he was involved with any prostitute or service”… said…a statement. “These allegations are false, defamatory, and he puts those who would publish or repeat them on notice that they acting [sic] with actual malice”…

I’m publishing and repeating them, and I fully admit malice toward career politicians, especially those who bear a huge part of the blame for America’s sky-high medical bills.

Divided We Fall (November 16^th, 2011)

Gay activists could’ve demonstrated a commitment to supporting sex worker rights this week when “[Malaysian]…Deputy Minister…Datuk Mashitah Ibrahim…said…’The (LBGT) issue…can lead to prostitution, drug abuse, psychological problems and also mental illness…Part of the LBGT problem is caused by natural reasons, such as being born with two private parts…’” but instead many of them were just as indignant about being compared to prostitutes as they were with the mental illness and hermaphrodite stuff. I guess once you win your rights in the West it’s OK to join in with stigmatizing other groups who haven’t yet, just to show you’re part of the gang.

See No Evil (November 26^th, 2011)

An inability to tell fantasy from reality would normally be considered evidence of psychosis, but in law enforcement it’s a job requirement:

…the Canadian government [has] dropped all criminal charges against Ryan Matheson, [an] American…charged with…child pornography [due to] Japanese comic book images on his laptop…Matheson accepted a plea deal…[in] which he admitted to “a non-criminal regulatory offense…”

Presents, Presents, Presents! (December 29^th, 2011)

I got three new presents this week! Ted sent me The Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner, and Gumdeo sent me the movie New Orleans and a Cuddly Cthulhu! Thank y’all both so much for thinking of me!

The Course of a Disease (February 16^th, 2012)

Apparently Canadian neofeminists, angry at their inability to infect their native land with the Swedish Disease, have decided to poison the well in a country which is already sickening:

[Canadian MP Joy Smith] has taken it upon herself to encourage Knesset members [via email] to support recent legislation…which will make paying for sex services a criminal offense…“Israel now has the opportunity to pass progressive legislation and to be a leader in the fight against this form of modern slavery,” Smith wrote in the email. “I urge you to support MK Zuaretz’s bill and help make Israel a country that others aspire to emulate. The world is watching and waiting for Israel to take this important step and eliminate the demand to purchase sex…”

Obviously, Israeli reporters don’t bother to check their facts any more than American ones do; this one erroneously states that “most” Western countries have adopted some form of the Swedish Model, and swallows the easily-debunked prohibitionist lie that most prostitutes are coerced.

Above the Law (March 8^th, 2012)

Apparently, the American federal government believes it’s only OK to grope people if one puts on a uniform and does it without their permission: “[Bryant Jermaine Livingston, a TSA] manager at [Dulles International Airport] has lost his job after being arrested on prostitution-related charges…” The story explains that Livingston was running a kind of cheap temporary brothel in a hotel room, stupidly returned to the same hotel and was ratted out to the Gestapo of Montgomery County, Maryland by the irate manager.

Metaupdates

J’accuse in November Updates (Part Three) (November 4^th, 2011)

“in France…it’s OK to be a whore as long as you have no friends, family, employees, assistants, managers or other human contact other than customers”, and if you’re an official who has embarrassed Paris one too many times, you can be charged with the horrible crime of helping legal workers to conduct their legal business: “…Dominique Strauss-Kahn…is under investigation for “aggravated pimping” for his alleged participation in a prostitution ring in France…”

Whores in the News in Further Developments (November 18^th, 2011)

It’s now official; the government will steal $6.4 million from the former owners of Escorts.com. As usual, the state’s claims read like an FBI drama, with heroic cops “investigating” hardened criminals; in reality, the feds botched an attempt to take over the site surreptitiously in order to use it to entrap thousands of escorts and clients. The bogus “money laundering” charge was just a way for them to recoup their losses; despite FBI claims to the contrary, federal judges have repeatedly ruled that “facilitating prostitution” is not a federal crime and websites are not responsible for the content of ads.

Sex, Lies and Busybodies in That Was the Week That Was (February 4^th, 2012)

Sean McBride, AKA “John Curtis”, has resigned as head of “The Grey Man”. After it was discovered that a group of Thai children the group claimed to have rescued from “sex traffickers” were in fact ordinary village schoolchildren, Curtis issued a series of increasingly-absurd and self-contradictory “explanations” (including one on this blog), mostly based on a paranoid fantasy that a competing “rescue group” had conspired with the Thai government to discredit him. But after new revelations that McBride routinely lied about the age of “victims” and the number “rescued”, he stepped down voluntarily before he was thrown out. Good riddance to bad rubbish; let’s hope every one of the con artists who profit by the persecution of whores is similarly exposed, and soon.

Knights Erroneous in That Was the Week That Was (#12) (March 24^th, 2012)

I’m pleased to see the number of voices raised in criticism of Nick Kristof’s anti-whore crusades is growing; ever-larger numbers of writers are pointing out the absurdity of the claims made by “trafficking” fetishists and calling attention to the harm this moral panic inflicts on women. I suspect The Guardian will be one of the first major media outlets to officially denounce the hysteria; it’s published a number of articles on the subject, most recently last Monday:

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is on the move and his latest target is the Village Voice. This attack appears to be part of a broader campaign to shut down the sex industry and to rescue and rehabilitate women and girls working in it. Kristof’s allies range from women’s rights organizations to religious organizations…the critical lens applied to Kony2012…must [also be applied]…to the crusades against sex trafficking…when women and girls are “rescued” by the anti-trafficking organizations, they may be taken to state-run rehabilitation homes that have jail-like conditions. Human rights and sex worker organizations have long documented what rehabilitation might mean for a sex worker: overcrowded conditions, a lack of healthcare, and violence at the hands of the police and guards…

It’s wonderful to see statements like these in a large newspaper, and even more heartening to read the many supportive comments beneath.

One Year Ago Today

In “March Q & A” I answer questions about cunnilingus, men pretending to be women online, and the sex drives of middle-aged escorts.

Read Full Post »

Q & A (March 2012)

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Q & A, The Dark Side, tagged Africa, agency denial, anecdote, archeofeminism, bad customers, bisexuality, bogus studies, condoms, disease, drugs, East Asia, ethics, Japan, Madonna/whore, marriage, neofeminism, pregnancy, prohibitionist myths, psychology, stereotypes, streetwalkers on March 29, 2012| 17 Comments »

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions. – Claude Lévi-Strauss

This time I answer three questions from readers, and present a fourth which the reader answered herself before I could get to it, then shared the information with me.

Several times you’ve mentioned how Kegels keep you at ‘near-virginal’ tightness. Please give us all the details of your routine and how it works. And how do you tell when it’s working? Do you consciously ‘grip’ your partner’s penis during intercourse? (Don’t you get tired?) As an older woman who has had children, I’d sure be interested to know what I can do to restore vaginal tightness (without surgery).

I’ve never had a full-term birth, so I never had the extreme dilation required for it. Also, I was always unusually small and tight, so I have a natural advantage in that department (though I would probably have needed a C-section if I had carried to term). That having been said, the Kegels really do help unless your muscles are too distended to work on (such as if you had tearing or an episiotomy during birth). I’ve been doing it since I was in my late teens, so I never let mine get very far along, but if you’ve never done it you may need to get a Kegels exerciser (it looks something like a dumbbell) to help you (they’re available online, or your gynecologist may know a place you can get one locally). I don’t really have a routine per se; I just do them whenever I think about it, even in the car or while sitting at the keyboard (it’s almost like a kind of fidgeting for me now). If you need the exerciser you of course won’t be able to do it “wherever” and you’ll need a routine; again, your gynecologist may tell you a “best way to do it” but I would think twice a day (say, before you get dressed and again when getting undressed in the evening) would be plenty. You might also be interested in this Wikipedia article on the exercise, which includes descriptions of the different exercisers available.

Since mine are very toned, I can actually feel the flexing, and obviously I get feedback from my husband; when I was still working, the reactions of my customers gave me constant feedback that I was indeed accomplishing something. I don’t constantly “grip” my partner’s penis during the whole process of intercourse, only when I feel like he needs extra stimulation or if I am faking an orgasm (I can simulate the rhythmic contractions by conscious effort). But since you’re just starting out, consciously “gripping” in the early part of intercourse (until you become too “lost in the moment” to keep it up) might be an excellent exercise and also give you feedback from your partner (men will usually say something if they notice you’re doing it; one client teasingly called me a “show-off”). If you’re very worried about not doing it correctly, some of the more expensive exercisers actually use springs and some kind of indicator to show the relative pressure you’re exerting. The PCG is like any other muscle; when it’s in good shape, exertion is not tiring unless you do it very strenuously or for a very long time; when it’s out of shape, exerting it will be tiring at first (but you’ll build up strength quickly).

Did you ever, heaven forbid, have a run-in with a client or co-worker who was HIV-positive? If an escort were to find she was HIV-positive due to an unscrupulous client, would she leave the field or continue working so her income doesn’t immediately end? Though I’ve always used protection with escorts, I’ve become a bit paranoid about it lately.

Though it’s extremely important to use protection when having sex with anybody outside of a committed relationship, the greatest danger isn’t from HIV but rather from syphilis and gonorrhea. HIV is especially scary to most people because it can kill and is at present incurable, though modern therapeutic regimens have greatly reduced its lethality. But despite the damage it can do to a person’s immune system, HIV is actually an extremely wimpy virus; studies have shown the chance of transmission from male to female via unprotected vaginal intercourse may be as low as 0.1%, and the chance of transmission from female to male under the same circumstances is lower still. In fact, the sexual transmission of HIV from a woman to a man is so incredibly rare some have described it as a “myth”, though I’m not prepared to go that far. Repeated unprotected intercourse with infected partners obviously increases the chance of transmission (though some African women appear to have natural immunity), and the chances are higher in heterosexual anal sex, higher still in homosexual anal sex and highest of all with needle sharing…but even that gives only a 10% per incident chance of infection.

I’ve never met or personally known of an escort who was HIV positive, though I’m sure they exist and one does occasionally read of streetwalkers who are. Because such cases are far more likely to have been transmitted through IV drug use rather than sexual contact, I suspect it’s likely such a woman would keep working to feed her habit, so if you’re extremely paranoid about HIV you might not want to hire a hooker whom you suspect injects drugs. But aside from that, considering the infinitesimally low female-to-male HIV transmission rate I honestly don’t think it’s anything you need to be concerned about, especially if you always use condoms and only see escorts who do the same.

One of the things I’ve worried about as a client is the notion that a lot of hookers were molested as children; do you think that’s accurate? Also I quit seeing one addicted provider because I do not want to help her buy the drugs which are apparently killing her. Do a large percentage of providers have such a habit? Lastly, do you think many or most providers are lesbians when it comes to their own sexual fulfillment?

The idea that a disproportionate number of whores use drugs, were molested as children, etc is propaganda used by prohibitionists to imply that our decisions are not valid ones due to “trauma”, and that the state therefore has the right to overrule those choices “for our own good”. Most of these pseudo-statistics are drawn from studies of streetwalkers in prisons or drug rehab facilities; it’s a bit like interviewing unsuccessful hot-dog-cart operators and then using the results to make pronouncements about all restaurants from McDonald’s to 5-star palaces. I discuss the syndrome (and provide links to evidence) in “Out of Context“.

The number of escorts who are addicted to drugs is roughly the same as the number of salesmen, lawyers and other professionals of similar income level who are. If you feel uncomfortable contributing to such a habit, by all means use someone else’s services…but do the same if you discover your lawyer, contractor or whoever have similar bad habits. As for lesbianism, I’ve never perceived it as more common among escorts than in the general population (and I’ve known quite a few escorts). I believe the majority of women are bisexual to one degree or another, but many are afraid to experiment with it due to social pressure. Since whores are already sexual outsiders, more of them are likely to experiment with bisexuality (and certainly it makes a nice change if one sees a lot of clients). But the number of personally exclusive lesbians among pros is not, in my opinion, any higher than among amateurs.

I’m trying to find the Japanese term for Western girls who go to Japan to work in the sex trade. I know about Miss Gone-Overseas, but need the reverse term.

Longtime readers may remember that the term karayuki-san (“Miss Gone-Overseas”) was applied to late 19^thcentury Japanese girls who went to work as prostitutes in China, Korea and Thailand; by the 1910s the Japanese government began to see this as harmful to Japanese prestige and so enacted a series of initiatives designed to discourage it and to encourage the girls who had already gone to come home. I didn’t know the opposite term but promised to look for it, but before I could make good the reader discovered the answer herself and shared it: the term is japayuki.

One Year Ago Today

“The Scarlet Letter” discusses the drive toward increasingly vicious anti-whore and anti-client tactics, including unconstitutional shame-based punishments inflicted without due process.

Read Full Post »

Misdirection

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, Tyranny, tagged anecdote, contraception, end demand, harm reduction, law, left-right myth, Misdirection, neofeminism, politicians, rape, Swedish model, universal criminality, yin and yang on March 28, 2012| 24 Comments »

The present age…prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence…for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. – Ludwig Feuerbach

I’m doing a regular Q & A column tomorrow, but every so often I get a question whose answer is complex enough (and general enough) to justify a full column; this is one of those times. The author also very cleverly flattered me, ensuring a thorough answer.

I was wondering why you have not mentioned the birth control and Planned Parenthood controversy that has been going on, specifically the GOP attacks on its existence and availability. I realize that it has been widely covered, but I would be (selfishly) interested in your thoughts, since they are usually quite logical and minus any hysteria or posturing. I’m also pretty alarmed by where the GOP is heading with their pronouncements–if all the career girls are to be stuck in the kitchen cooking, how much worse will the sex-loving girls have it? I’m a current career girl and previously a sex-loving girl, so doubly-damned. BTW, your articles on rape and the role of prostitutes in mopping up excess male sexuality were truly a light bulb moment for me. Literally, I had NEVER once thought that out, but once explained, I could only marvel that I’d never seen it before. And I’m a firm third-wave feminist, well-read and far too well-educated about biology to believe that nonsense about how gender is just “conditioning”…yet I was so blinded by what “everyone knows” I never thought about the function that prostitution plays in a healthy society.

In a recent article for Smithsonian, Teller (the short, silent half of Penn & Teller, my all-time favorite magicians) explains “how magicians manipulate the human mind”, and points out that a number of their principles are also used by non-entertainers for less benign reasons. Two of these principles are involved in the whole birth control “controversy”; one is misdirection, and the other what we might call “false choice”. Misdirection is when the magician (or politician) gets his audience to look someplace he wants it to look in order to draw attention away from someplace he doesn’t want it to look; magicians accomplish this by showmanship, comedy or lovely assistants, and politicians by manufactured controversies they can loudly posture about. “False choice” is the principle that if a person is given a choice, he believes he has acted freely; a magician uses this when he asks you to pick a card from a doctored deck. As Teller points out, “You think you’ve made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties.”

The whole birth control “controversy” is nothing other than a smoke screen (on which both parties collaborate) to draw attention away from the real issues, such as the collapsing economy and ever-increasing police state. We don’t have two parties in the US any more; we have two chapters of one party, the Big Centralized Government Party, and their differences are purely cosmetic. That’s why I cringe when I hear women buy into the idea that the GOP is their enemy…it certainly is, but so is the Democratic Party. They both want women safely denuded of rights and placed in farms where we can be kept “safe” and docile; all they differ on is which holding pen is best (kitchen vs. cubicle). And though one might say that Republicans want us forced to produce babies, one might also say the Democrats want to imprison the babies we do have in government indoctrination centers (i.e. crappy public schools) where they’re taught to shut up, sit down and do as they’re told…and both want those kids arrested if they disobey or “make trouble”. They both spread “sex trafficking” myth to suppress whores, both support ever-expanding police and government surveillance powers, both have refused to consider ending the drug war, both support universal criminality, and both support “end demand” schemes which criminalize men and define women as retarded adolescents.

So though I’ve touched on the controversy a little on Twitter and mentioned it obliquely in columns, I don’t think it would be productive to discuss it as an isolated phenomenon…because it isn’t. The closest I got was probably in “Legislators Gone Wild” last March, in which I pointed out that a lot of the misogynistic legislation (from both sides of the aisle despite the claims of Democrats) is a predictable backlash against the anti-male policies of the past two decades, which have created a huge pool of resentment in mostly-male legislators (as any practical psychologist could’ve told them it would).

I’m really glad you found the articles on rape (and prostitution’s role in preventing it) enlightening; I’m afraid they’ve allowed anti-sex neofeminists to brand me a “rape apologist” (a propaganda term explained in my column of one year ago today along with many others), because the only way they can keep the believers in line is to teach them not to think about it. The idea that seeking to understand the causes of a crime, and to discover inobtrusive preventative measures that work, is somehow “apologizing” for that crime, is a favorite of totalitarians everywhere; anything that interferes with criminalization, punishment and police suppression must be shouted down as “soft on crime”. Demonization of human beings who harm others ignores the fact that they’re human beings, and just as flawed as everybody else. Those who desire to suppress a particular group (men, blacks, the poor, etc) don’t want their followers thinking too hard about why the members of that group commit anti-social behaviors (i.e. crimes), and they oppose anything that discourages members of the target group from committing crimes, because if they don’t commit crimes the state has no excuse to brutalize them and lock them up. In a very real sense prohibitionists of all types are pro-crime, because they WANT people of the group they hate beaten and caged, not helped to stay straight.

Read Full Post »

Ape and Angel

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged agency denial, California, dirty, ethics, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, psychology, stripping, tabula rasa, United Kingdom, yin and yang on March 27, 2012| 64 Comments »

The question is this—Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence the contrary view, which is I believe, foreign to the conscience of humanity. – Benjamin Disraeli

Charles Darwin first proposed the theory of evolution via natural selection a little over 150 years ago, yet despite mountains of proof there are still huge numbers of insecure people who, like Disraeli, reject it out of hand because they are afraid of the implications of recognizing humans as a kind of animal, connected deeply to all other animals on Earth by the legacy we carry around in every cell of our bodies. These are people who are unable or unwilling to recognize their own worth as individuals, and therefore require some magical proclamation of uniqueness bestowed upon them by an authority figure. In a way, it’s the ultimate “victim politics”; none of us, these people believe, are worthy for ourselves, but rather only as members of a designated “special” group. They therefore fear and reject their own bodies, whose earthy needs such as food, elimination and sex are no less compelling than those of every other animal. But of those basic needs only one of them, sex, can be avoided without resulting in death; therefore it is the one which must be denied most vociferously by those who wish to believe themselves closer kin to the angels than the apes.

Not all those who deny the ape beneath our skins are members of traditional religions; as I pointed out in my column of one year ago today, neofeminists do the same thing due to their violent rejection of their own feminine biology. “Social construction of gender” is just a more subtle version of “scientific creationism”; it recognizes that sex differences in all other animals arise from instinct encoded in their DNA, yet denies that humans are subject to the same biochemical forces. Though some adherents of this catechism may also be creationists, most probably believe in some patchwork rationalization such as the myth that our large brains somehow make us “immune” to sexual and sex-role instincts (yet not immune to hunger, thirst, pain, fear, anger, love, sorrow, etc). In any case, the neofeminists teach that humans, unlike every other mammal, have no innate sexual or sex-role drives whatsoever, and that all these are bestowed through the mystic force known as “social construction”, breathed into our nostrils by the omnipotent Collective. The most deluded adherents of this cult believe in something like the Calvinist religious doctrine of predestination; once a person’s personality has been determined by the almighty Patriarchy (the collective entity which acts as both Devil and Demiurge in neofeminist myth), a “false consciousness” is established which only salvation through baptism in the Holy Spirit of Neofeminism can dispel. If any person believes her choices to be acts of free will, but she behaves in a manner at odds with neofeminist dogma, she is said to be suffering from “false consciousness” which renders her decisions equally false. Only actions wholly in accord with neofeminist teachings are “correct” and free of Patriarchal conditioning.

Sane, rational people understand that the mere fact of a biological drive does not compel a human (or even a dog) to act upon it; retrievers can be trained not to eat the game in their mouths, human men can suppress the urge to mate with an unwilling woman because they know it isn’t right, and I can suppress the urge to eat something right now because I want to lose two kilograms I allowed to accumulate over the holidays. But like all prohibitionists, neofeminists believe that moderation is evil and only a total ban on the particular “sin” with which they’re obsessed (in this case, male-initiated sex) is good. Any indulgence in an urge of the flesh is viewed as a triumph of the Dark Powers, a little taste of death to the “enlightened” consciousness. Fortunately, this sort of black-and-white morality isn’t the norm in the rightmost portion of the IQ bell curve; as any whore or stripper can attest, many of our clients are medical doctors, scientists, engineers and other highly intelligent men who recognize that sexual drives are natural, and indulging them won’t rot their brains or cause the collapse of civilization. Indeed, one man who is probably on nearly everyone’s list of the brainiest specimens of homo sapiens on the planet isn’t afraid to treat himself to commercial sex:

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking spends a lot of time talking about the universe and what it might all mean but when…[he] isn’t talking to sold out crowds he can be seen spending his time in sex and strip clubs. The Daily Mail is reporting that the 70-year-old has visited various swinger clubs, sex clubs and strip clubs over the years including a Southern California swingers party which he was brought to by his nurses and assistants…he paid for private shows with various naked dancers at the Freedom Acres Club in Devore which he visited on a “handful of occasions”…While Cambridge officials deny that Hawking has made “regular” stops at strip and sex clubs they do admit that he visited a club “once a few years ago with friends while on a visit to California.”

Stringfellow’s Gentlemen’s Club in London Owner Peter Stringfellow told the Daily Mail that he actually had a chance to meet…Hawking at his club. “I remember asking him if he’d like to have a conversation with me about the universe, or if he’d just like to watch the girls. The answer was quite simply: ‘The girls’. “ So there you have it, when Stephen Hawking’s not busy trying to solve the mystery’s [sic] of our universe he’s doing what millions of other men do, he stares at naked women…

I think we can assume Hawking hires the occasional hooker as well; despite his paralysis he has been married twice and has three children. And I also think everyone can agree that neither sex nor ogling crumpet has damaged the great scientist’s intellectual capacity in the slightest; acknowledging the ape does no harm to the angel.

Read Full Post »

Book Reviews (March 2012)

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged agency denial, anal sex, archeofeminism, censorship, dirty, drugs, ethics, Europe, harm reduction, hysteria, law, lawheads, neofeminism, psychology, Shazam!, sisterhood, social purity on March 26, 2012| 6 Comments »

One can never read all the books in the world, nor travel all its roads. – Anonymous

In “Presents, Presents, Presents!” I mentioned a few books readers sent me for my birthday and Christmas, and despite being frightfully busy for the past couple of months I’ve managed to read four of them so far. Also, Dr. Sadie Allison sent me a copy of her new “how to” on anal sex and asked if I’d let her know what I thought, so I figured now was as good a time as any for a new book review column.

All or Nothing: A Short History of Abstinence in America by Jessica Warner

Throughout history there have been those who abstained from one vice or another, and religious devotees who abstained from all or most of them. But Protestant reformers like Martin Luther rejected the concept that anything should be abstained from completely as some Catholic religious orders practiced; instead, they preached the virtue of moderation. But less than two generations after Luther abstinence was back in fashion among the Puritans, and by the 18^th century it became an inextricable part of evangelical Protestantism. Warner traces the development of the notion that moderation is undesirable, which caught on in America as it never could have in Europe because it was based in the sort of misguided optimism we’ve discussed before, the notion that man is perfectible. She shows how in the late 19^th century abstinence went from a personal choice to a thing to be imposed upon society by force (i.e. prohibitionism), and how it eventually permeated American culture in general and led to modern excesses such as anti-sex laws, dietary fascism and the “War on Drugs”.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Though I had heard about this book before, I became interested in reading it through Satoshi Kanazawa’s discussion of the epilogue to its sequel; I really wanted to read Superfreakonomics, but it seemed silly not to read the first one first so that’s what I did, and I found it fascinating. Levitt is an economist who isn’t good at math and isn’t interested in analyzing the things one generally associates with economics, but instead wants to explore “the hidden side of everything”. What that “everything” entails is most easily demonstrated by telling you the names of the book’s six chapters: “What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have In Common?”, “How is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?”, “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms?”, “Where Have All the Criminals Gone?”, “What Makes a Perfect Parent?” and “Perfect Parenting Part II; or: Would a Roshanda By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet?” Need a bit more enticement? The star of chapter 3 is Sudhir Venkatesh, the answer to the title of chapter 4 is “Roe vs. Wade”, and chapter 2 (in combination with material from All or Nothing) provided the inspiration for “Circle”.

Harmful To Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex by Judith Levine

There is almost nothing in this book that will be new to regular readers; Levine’s position is essentially identical to my own. She points out that only in America is sex in general and sex among legal minors in particular treated as pathological; that sexuality starts at an early age, surges at adolescence and develops throughout the teens rather than springing into existence at midnight on a person’s 18^th birthday; that the suppression of teen sexuality is far more harmful than teen sex itself; that keeping kids in ignorance creates a whole host of problems which only barely exist in Europe; that the “predator panic” has caused grievous harm to society in general and kids in particular; that sexuality is natural and involuntary, and that sexual impulses cannot merely be ignored; that normal childhood behaviors, especially in boys, are now pathologized and even criminalized; etc, etc, etc. What makes the book worth reading is Levine’s backing up her points with exhaustive research, and providing numerous examples which you can be sure I’ll employ in future columns on the subject. As so often happens with books on sexual topics, the few negative reviews on Amazon actually serve as positive reviews to those who recognize them for what they are.

Tickle My Tush by Sadie Allison

Dr. Sadie has released several previous manuals (covering subjects ranging from sex positions to toys) through her own imprint, Tickle Kitty, and in this new book promises “Mild-to-Wild Analplay Adventures for Everybody.” I must admit I had a little anxiety about reading it; though I have no hang-ups about my own bottom, “pegging” and prostate massage are just not my cup of tea. I needn’t have worried; though there’s plenty of information here, Dr. Sadie’s playful, light style presented it in a way calculated to reduce the squick-out factor to approximately nought. The book is a quick read, divided into chapters and short “subchapters” of two pages or less each, with plenty of illustrations; it’s designed to be perused by couples together, and to be easily consultable later. After a general overview she moves on to discuss safety, hygiene and anatomy before proceeding to topics arranged in order of increasing “wildness”, starting with massage of the butt cheeks and ending up with positions. One especially clever feature of the book is two different “FAQ” chapters, one at the beginning (the sort of questions asked by total neophytes) and the other at the end (the sort asked after reading the book or enjoying some experience with analplay). The only thing I didn’t care for was her use of “cute” words for the body parts and activities, but that’s just me; I totally understand that she was trying to avoid being clinical, and I think most readers will probably be much more comfortable with, for example, “o-ring” rather than “sphincter”.

A Vindication of the Rights of Whores edited by Gail Pheterson

This volume, published in 1989, provides a snapshot of the whores’ rights movement of a quarter-century ago through essays from a number of different writers and almost five dozen contributors, including a number whose names you already know (such as Annie Sprinkle, Margo St. James and Norma Jean Almodovar). The second part of the book is comprised of a series of transcripts from the first and second World Whores’ Congresses (in 1985 and 1986), including the World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights. I found the book especially interesting in two ways: First, it gives a window onto the very beginnings of “Third Wave” feminism by raising the issue of sexual self-determination and presenting a series of statements from feminists who attended the Second Congress and became convinced that their previous belief in prostitution as “exploitation” or “violence against women” was ignorant and incorrect. Second, it contains what may be the earliest published statement against “trafficking” mythology, considering that few people outside activism or feminism even knew what the term meant until a decade later: “The ICPR objects to policies which give women the status of children and which assume migration through prostitution among women to be always the result of force or deceit…”

One Year Ago Today

“A Foregone Conclusion” is the story of the short, failed career of Markus, the “prostidude” of the Shady Lady Ranch in Nevada.

Read Full Post »

Target Audience

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged anecdote, blogging, censorship, ethics, hysteria, neofeminism, psychology, racism, sisterhood on March 25, 2012| 47 Comments »

Only the educated are free. – Epictetus, Discourses (II, i)

Every once in a while this site is discovered by someone from an online community which doesn’t overlap the sex work or libertarian circles to any great degree, and if that person goes out and “tells her friends” by linking me, there’s generally a huge increase in traffic for a few days or even weeks. Many who arrive via these mass migrations aren’t used to honesty and free thought unencumbered by dogma; some find the change refreshing and become regular readers, while others don’t like it, don’t “get” what I’m about and aren’t really interested in finding out. And that’s totally fine; humans are all individuals, and everyone has different opinions. I don’t even mind when someone dislikes my style or disagrees with my conclusions; most of my readers disagree with me from time to time, some always disagree with me on certain subjects, and a few have told me they disagree with me most of the time but still enjoy my writing or like my challenging their preconceptions. I think that’s absolutely fantastic; it shows me that my readers are largely intelligent people who know their own minds, individuals rather than herd-dwellers. But what annoys and saddens me is when ideologues decide that I’m so dangerous to their agenda they must go out of their way to misrepresent my writings to others, either by outright lies or by taking words and passages out of context. They do this to keep those others from hearing what I have to say by either A) scaring them away from reading me at all; or B) installing a preconception filter in their minds, like a preacher who tells his listeners what the “Satanic message” says before he plays the record backward and thereby ensures that the weak-minded will hear exactly that.

For any given issue there are three positions: Those who are strongly for it, those who are strongly against it, and those who don’t have a strong opinion either way. And no matter what fanatics and demagogues may tell you, the third is nearly always the largest group on any issue. When trying to sway public opinion, therefore, the wise writer or speaker targets that middle group, the “silent majority”. It’s silly to waste energy in trying to convince those who are already convinced (“preaching to the choir”), and pointless to argue with those who are dogmatically committed to the opposite view (one can’t reason a person out of a position he didn’t reason himself into). But the members of that third group, if they can be won, will decide the way the wheel turns. They are the ones who took it for granted that black and white people couldn’t live together peacefully, but now abhor racism; they’re the ones who accepted the claim that homosexuals were perverts, yet now agree with equal conviction that they shouldn’t be mistreated. And they’re the ones that in the United States believe that whores are pathetic losers, degraded victims or depraved criminals, but in most other Western nations disagree with that notion. They’re the ones the “trafficking” fetishists have drawn into their moral panic, and the ones who will drop that panic like yesterday’s fad once the majority recognize it as a lie.

Most activists spend a lot of time spinning their wheels, either by standing around agreeing with each other like a gaggle of “New Age woman” stereotypes, or by shouting at people who might as well be brick walls for all the good it will do. But the wise activists (and wisdom is found as frequently in the evil as in the good) understand that neither of those groups are the ones they need to reach, and so work on disseminating information (if pro-freedom) or disinformation (if anti-life). Since I’m in favor of free thought and free choice I encourage my readers to find out everything about the subjects on which I write; I accept disagreement and welcome correction, and I share the facts that might undermine my position alongside those that reinforce it. I trust in the capacity of human beings to make the right decision when they have all the information. Ironically, the prohibitionists feel that way, too, but since they want people to make the wrong decision instead, to choose the path of fear, darkness and submission over that of enlightenment and freedom, it’s necessary to ensure that they don’t have all the information. The easiest way to do this is by hiding it, but that doesn’t work too well in the internet era. So instead, they have to emit so much noise that their opponents’ message is drowned out, and the scholarly works are buried in vast mountains of propaganda leaflets. The most effective mask of truth is emotion; if a thought-controller can get his audience sufficiently angry or frightened or disgusted, its members will be unable to think clearly enough to recognize the truth when they hear it and may even attack those who try to share it with them.

One year ago today I described an interaction between pro- and anti-rights commenters on a sex worker rights article; the pro-rights people appealed to reason, provided links to facts, and pointed out that they had no desire to impose their decisions on anyone else but rather advocated that every woman be free to control her own body and sexuality. The prohibitionists, on the other hand, appealed to emotion, provided only unsubstantiated propaganda and insisted that they had a right to control other women’s sexuality due to their bizarre myth that all women are as interconnected as serpents growing out of some immense gorgon’s head. Because neither side had a clear majority, neither could drown out the other…and that’s fine, because it allows people to make up their own minds based on the arguments as presented. But when a column of mine was reprinted on Feministe last month, something entirely different happened: at first, there were both critical and non-critical comments, but soon a small group of neofeminists recognized my blog for what it is and took swift action to stop my message from getting through. They apparently went trolling to find passages they could spin in a negative way, recognizing that once they told the “true believers” what the “hidden message” was, they would see that and only that even if they went looking for themselves. In short order this blog was branded “racist, misogynist, fat-shaming and transphobic” despite the evident absurdity of each of those claims; I’m surprised they didn’t add “homophobic” for a grand slam.

But though nobody dared to protest for fear of being tarred with the same ridiculous (but to that crowd, horrifying) brush, nonetheless I picked up a dozen new subscribers by the time my traffic from Feministe subsided. Despite the vicious attempt to silence me, despite the wailing cacophony of PC terminology with which they tried to drown me out, I still found several members of my target audience: namely, sensible people who know the truth when they see it and appreciate those who let them make decisions for themselves rather than telling them what they’re allowed to think.

Read Full Post »

Double Deal

Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged abortion, agency denial, Central Asia, cops, dirty, ethics, fantasy, India, neofeminism, psychology, rape, rescue industry, Texas on March 23, 2012| 25 Comments »

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

In my column “Doublethink” I explained the term, coined by George Orwell in 1984; it means the ability of a political stooge to simultaneously believe two different and mutually-exclusive ideas. Neofeminists are the undisputed champions of doublethink in today’s world:

On the one hand, neofeminists state that women are just as competent as men, yet insist that women need special legal protections. They observe that women are rational adults who can control our own destinies, yet lobby for paternalistic “mandatory prosecution” laws because they claim women aren’t competent to decide for ourselves whether to press charges against abusive men. They say that women should have control over our own bodies, unless of course we choose to use those bodies for sex work. They recognize that women can think for ourselves, then demand we adhere to neofeminist groupthink or be labeled “traitors”. Many of them openly despise men and consider their characteristic behaviors a pathological deviation from female norms, yet they promote all-consuming male-style careers for women and many even adopt masculine modes of dress and grooming. The heterosexual wing of neofeminism bitches about male sexual behaviors, yet encourages women to act in exactly the same way. And so on, and so on, and so on, ad absurdum.

Politicians are nearly as adept at doublethink as neofeminists are, and both groups use doubletalk and double-dealing to foster doublethink in those they wish to control. My column of one year ago today gave a lesson (complete with quiz!) in how the police (with the assistance of obedient reporters) use doubletalk to promote anti-whore hysteria, and today we’re going to look at another example: the oeuvre of “Two Face” Kristof, who uses his New York Times pulpit to promote an oleaginous mixture of prohibitionism and nanny-statism of the cookie-cutter “left wing” variety. Like the neofeminists whose rhetoric he adopts, Kristof claims to respect women yet denies our agency, and bleats about choice while he advocates treating women like sheep. But to this he adds his own special (though, sadly, not by any means unique) duplicity: representing himself as a crusader against the sexual exploitation of women while sexually exploiting women himself by attracting readers eager to stimulate themselves with his lurid “sex slave” porn. Take a look at his column of March 4^th, called to my attention by regular reader Aspasia:

…Under a new law that took effect three weeks ago with the strong backing of Gov. Rick Perry, [a Texas woman seeking an abortion]…must typically endure an ultrasound probe inserted into her vagina…“It’s state-sanctioned abuse,” said Dr. Curtis Boyd…“It borders on a definition of rape. Many states describe rape as putting any object into an orifice against a person’s will…The new law is demeaning and disrespectful to the women of Texas, and insulting to the doctors and nurses who care for them.” That law is part of a war over women’s health being fought around the country — and in much of the country, women are losing. State by state, legislatures are creating new obstacles to abortions and are treating women in ways that are patronizing and humiliating…

What about the war on women’s sexual freedom, Mr. Kristof? What about the patronizing and humiliating ways that you and other “rescue industry” fanatics treat sex workers? What about the state-sanctioned abuse of women advocated by people like you; don’t you consider arresting prostitutes and our clients at gunpoint to be “demeaning and disrespectful”? And I think every person whose head, unlike yours, resides outside of his own arse will agree that for a woman to endure a cop’s penis being “put…into an orifice against [her] will” doesn’t merely “border on a definition of rape”, it is rape…rape that you and others like you enable, excuse and celebrate.

Kristof and the neofeminists want you to think that abortion rights and sex worker rights are unrelated issues, when it’s clearly obvious to any intellectually honest person they aren’t: a woman’s right to own and control her own body includes not only the right to decisions about the possible consequences of sex, but also the right to decide how, why and with whom she has sex in the first place. But lest you think prostitution is just a blind spot for Kristof, a single example of doublethink in an otherwise self-consistent personal philosophy, consider this impassioned defense of the nanny state in which he states that “The long trajectory of history has been for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes” and argues that non-nanny governments invariably lead to countries like Pakistan…you know, the kind of countries where whores are persecuted as they are in the United States.

If we combine all of Kristof’s various positions in one place, we get something like this: “Only third-world countries allow people to make their own financial choices; advanced countries control their citizens’ lives, except in the case of abortion. Compulsory ultrasounds are rape, and prostitution is rape, but police rape isn’t rape as long as it happens after they abduct a woman against her will from a brothel. Nanny states are good, except when they decriminalize prostitution, at which point they become bad. And third-world dictatorships are bad, so our prostitution policy should be more like theirs.” Rational people, like Alice, simply can’t believe in such self-contradictory nonsense. Unfortunately, we live in a world populated largely by people like the White Queen, who practice believing impossible things every day until doublethink becomes second nature.

Read Full Post »

Prudish Pedants

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged California, censorship, condoms, cops, Denmark, dirty, ethics, Europe, fantasy, Hollywood, internet, law, lawheads, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, porn, Prudish Pedants, psychology on March 22, 2012| 30 Comments »

The nudes of art are not so distant from pornography as prudish pedants pretend. – Mason Cooley

The label “pornography”, like the word “prostitution”, represents an attempt by lawheads to pretend that their personal hang-ups about sex can be reduced to a rule by which “good” sex can be distinguished from “bad” sex, a bright, clear taboo line which it is not permissible for anyone, even in private, to cross. Ironically, the neofeminist position on the issue is actually more coherent than that of the government; it simply states that any sex not initiated and totally controlled by a woman for her own pleasure (and for no other reason) is fundamentally wrong. The more radical neofeminists (such as Sheila Jeffreys) go even further, declaring that any heterosexual sex is a tool of male oppression. Obviously, this is mad-dog lunacy, but at least it’s consistent lunacy; lawheads, by contrast, try to come up with ridiculous “tests” by which prostitution can be distinguished from other female sexual behavior and pornography can be distinguished from erotica or sex scenes in “literature”. We’ve often discussed the former, but today I’d like to look at the latter.

Gloria Steinem opined that “Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality,” and though many anti-porn feminists still try to promote that as a valid definition, anyone who’s seen more than three porn films (or read more than two erotic stories) knows it doesn’t hold water. D.H. Lawrence was a far better writer than Steinem, but his definition is even more vague: “Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.” Very clear, D.H.; I’m sure many a judge has found that a precise and usable rule. And speaking of judges, the most honest (though least helpful) “definition” of this type was that pronounced by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his famous concurring opinion on Jacobellis vs. Ohio (1964):

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case [Les Amants (1958)] is not that.

Though later courts attempted to use high-sounding words like “contemporary community standards” and pseudo-objective criteria such as “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific values” to disguise Stewart’s axiom with a veneer of respectability, the naked truth is that the only meaningful difference between the “obscene” and the acceptable is the opinion of some “authority”. The inanity of the whole thing has been laid bare in the federal obscenity prosecution of fetish filmmaker Ira Isaacs:

……Isaacs argues that the disgust evoked by works such as Hollywood Scat Amateurs 7 and Japanese Doggie 3 Way is a crucial part of what makes them artistic. “My intent is to be a shock artist in the movies I made,” he testified, “to challenge the viewer in thinking about art differently…to think about things they’d never thought about before.” Similarly, [defense lawyer Roger] Diamond argued that the films have political value as a protest against the government’s arbitrary limits on expression, illustrating the “reality that we may not have the total freedom the rest of the world thinks we have”…Isaacs…faces a possible penalty of 20 years in prison…but if the jurors want to blame someone for making them sit through this assault on their sensibilities, they should not blame Isaacs. They should blame the Justice Department, which initiated the case during the Bush administration, and the Supreme Court, which established the absurdly subjective test they are now supposed to apply. Will they take seriously Isaacs’ references to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Piero Manzoni, or will they dismiss his artistic name dropping as a desperate attempt to give his masturbation aids a high-minded purpose?

There is a third possibility…they could reject the very notion of sending people to prison for distributing sexual material, no matter how icky, produced by and for adults…AVN correspondent Mark Kernes reports that in his jury instructions [the judge], who had worried aloud about the possibility of nullification while the jurors were outside the courtroom, was “careful to note that even if the jury disagreed with the law, it was still their duty to follow it.” Nonsense. Yes, this is the same obscenity case that was interrupted by the fuss over images on Judge Alex Kozinski’s computer, a controversy that ultimately led to a mistrial…

As it turns out, this one ended in a mistrial as well thanks to two women who refused to convict a man for making movies. This is called “jury nullification”, and it’s a power the Founding Fathers intended juries to have, despite vigorous attempts by the “justice system” to hide and deny that fact. Two mistrials should send a clear message to prosecutors that (at least in Southern California) most people don’t want self-appointed censors telling them what they can see, but power-mad “justice department” officials discarded the prohibition against double jeopardy long ago and may keep trying Isaacs until they achieve the desired result. It’s certainly possible; though social conservatives represent California as Sodom, there are enough anti-porn busybodies there to push through the “condoms in porn” law which will soon drive the lucrative industry from Los Angeles…and one city, nearby Simi Valley, wants to make sure it doesn’t migrate there:

…”The bottom line is we don’t want to be known as the porn capital of the world,” said Mayor Bob Huber, who is one of those pushing for a measure similar to one the L.A. City Council approved in January…Under its proposed law, the city would require producers to hire on-set medical professionals, who would attest to appropriate condom use. At the end of a shoot, the producers would have to send their unedited video to the police department, where employees would scrutinize it…The city’s preemptive strike is pointless, said Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition…”Very little filming is done in Simi Valley, and I doubt that the production studios are planning any increase at all in the area…However, I am amused at the thought of Simi Valley hiring people to sit around and view porn on taxpayer dollars. I wonder what the training for that would look like.”

More laws, more power, more intrusion, more tax money wasted enforcing the whims of control freaks. Westerners have allowed the anti-sex crowd to make them so afraid of mere images that they’ve given governments vast censorship powers. And when such power is handed over to an uncontrolled entity whose chief goals are to grow and consume (more money and more power), this sort of mishap is inevitable:

Reminiscent of the mooo.com screwup in the US, where Homeland Security’s ICE division “accidentally” seized 84,000 sites and plastered them over with a warning graphic about how they’d been seized by the US government for child porn, the Danish police similarly “accidentally” had 8,000 legitimate sites declared as child porn sites that needed to be blocked. Among the sites listed? Google and Facebook. Visitors to those sites…were greeted with the following message (translated, of course): The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police [NITEC], who assist in investigations into crime on the internet, has informed Siminn Denmark A/S, that the internet page which your browser has tried to get in contact with may contain material which could be regarded as child pornography…Upon the request of The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police, Siminn Denmark A/S has blocked the access to the internet page.

And people wonder why so many people around the world were so concerned about the threat of something like SOPA — which would make DNS blocking at the ISP level a lot more common…this “accident”…“began when an employee at the police center…placed a list of legitimate sites in the wrong folder…Before [he became] aware of the error, two ISPs retrieved the list of sites”…The fact that just one employee can change the list seems wide open to abuse. And the fact that the list seems somewhat automated beyond that is even more problematic…

Even if you don’t live in Denmark or the US, you still ought to be concerned; the US government has now claimed the right – and has the practical power due to much of the internet’s backbone being located on American soil – to seize any domain ending in .com, .org, .net, .biz, .cc, .tv and .name no matter what country it’s registered and based in. And that means if federal prosecutors want to, they can impose prudish American standards of “obscenity” on the great majority of internet content in the entire world.

One Year Ago Today

“March Miscellanea” reports on a Florida vice squad spokesman who can’t make up his mind, South African police taking revenge against those who protested on International Sex Workers’ Rights Day, and the efforts of Indian prostitutes to get avails laws repealed.

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 »

That Was the Week That Was (#11)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged A Moral Cancer, A War for Peace, An Ounce of Prevention, Arizona, California, Canada, censorship, condoms, cops, courtesans, crypto-moralism, dirty, disease, drugs, ethics, Europe, harm reduction, hysteria, India, Iran, law, lawheads, Maggie in the Media, Middle East, neofeminism, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, pimps, porn, Real People, red-light districts, serial killers, Sex Lies and Busybodies, sex rays, stereotypes, streetwalkers, stripping, Surplus Women, Switzerland, teachers, The Cold Grey Light of Dawn, The More the Better, The Prudish Giant, The Sky is Falling!, Think of the Children!, Uncommon Sense, underage, United Kingdom, video, violence vs. sex workers on March 17, 2012| 8 Comments »

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry. – William F. Buckley

Twelve updates and three meta-updates.

Think of the Children! (September 30^th, 2010)

Richard B. Haydock is not amused.

In California, crime is whatever school officials say it is: “…Stacie Halas, a…teacher at Richard B. Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard, was removed from the classroom…after pupils reported spotting her in a series of X-rated clips. ‘Maybe it’s not a crime as far as the penal code is concerned, but we feel it’s a crime as far as moral turpitude is concerned,’ said [superintendent] Jeff Chancer…” Because we certainly can’t have “sex rays” corrupting the innocent minds of nasty little snitches who watch internet porn and even make videos of their own: “…a boy and a girl engaged in oral sex during class at Richard B. Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard…[and] students…videotaped the…act on their cell phones…School officials have placed the teacher on paid administrative leave. They won’t say what actions, if any, have been taken against the students…”

Thanks to EconJeff for alerting me to the Richard B. Haydock Grammar-School Gomorrah, and see “Metaupdates” below for more “sex ray” hysteria.

The Cold, Grey Light of Dawn (January 3^rd, 2011)

Mainstream feminists are slowly coming to the realization that neofeminist attitudes hurt women, and Oregon State University graduate student Virginia Martin argues that they even hurt feminism itself:

Stereotypes and misinformation about sex work…only foster distrust and separation…between men and women…we were assigned a reading…that [claimed] “activists…are working…to eradicate prostitution – a practice rarely distinguishable from sex trafficking – by ending the demand for it” …prostitution is a consensual act between two adults and sex trafficking is slavery therefore making it nonconsensual by nature. Additionally, the tenet that ending prostitution would simultaneously end human trafficking is naïve and juvenile…The assumption that all sex workers…are oppressed and need saving is incorrect and an oversimplification of a complex issue…

Maggie in the Media (February 3^rd, 2011)

I’ve appeared on several other websites lately. ”Sluts, Whores & More Ongoing Insanity” on Amazing Women Rock (March 5^th) is a spirited defense of sex workers and a criticism of those who use words like “slut”, “whore” and “prostitute” as insults. It prominently features myself and this blog as examples of Amazing Susan’s point that “Being educated and independent AND in control of one’s sexuality are not mutually exclusive.” The London School of Attraction published a two-part interview with me last Monday and Tuesday, and on Thursday I published a guest column on Nobody’s Business entitled, ”Rick Santorum vs. Marc Randazza: A Dichotomy of Zealotry“.

Real People (February 6^th, 2011)

“Healing Power of Sex Work” by Wrenna Robertson is an excellent essay which includes short profiles of a number of different sex professionals. Wrenna herself is a 36-year-old stripper who entered the profession at 18 to pay for university and never left despite earning two degrees and publishing a book, I’ll Show You Mine, which I mentioned last August.

A Moral Cancer (March 6^th, 2011)

Politicians have long held that election or appointment to political office automatically grants degrees in medicine and pharmacology, but in the UK just being a cop confers expertise in oncology research:

…After a “drugs factory”…was raided, local yokel police passed on this dire admonition to a wide-eyed public:

Police are warning that when cannabis plants reach the final stages of maturity the odour they release has carcinogenic properties…Officers who deal with the plants use ventilation masks and protective suits and people who have plants in their home, especially anyone with young children, may be exposing their family to a health risk.

…Of course, that’s complete horse shit…Those who have bothered to actually look into the topic before making fools of themselves…know that…the terpenes, which are distinctive for marijuana’s distinctive odors, are in fact anti-cancer agents…

The Harborough Mail was apparently so embarrassed by its own gullibility that the story was pulled, as you already discovered if you tried to click that link.

A War for Peace (May 12^th, 2011)

Just because Femen is clueless in proper application of topless protests doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the concept, as nursing mothers have demonstrated. And now exiled Iranian women are protesting their homeland’s misogynistic policies in the same way: “After a nude photo and short video of a popular Iranian actress baring her breast…several online campaigns have sought to raise awareness about repression of women in Iran. The latest…came from a group of European-based Iranians posing…to promote…the Nude Photo Revolutionary Calendar…”

Uncommon Sense (September 20^th, 2011)

American “authorities” often justify their brutal mistreatment of streetwalkers by labeling them a “public nuisance”, but the Swiss prefer a more pragmatic and civilized approach:

Residents of…Zurich [voted]…to build dedicated garages…in [order to move] streetwalkers away from residential zones…The site will be shielded from sight by signs, be fitted with showers and toilets and will feature a gynaecologist for any medical problems and volunteers from the Flora Dora women’s group for any advice. The…site aims to eliminate…Zurich’s Sihlquai area, where about 60 streetwalkers work every night. Besides nightly traffic jams…[residents complain of] used condoms…[and other] trash…Ursula Kocher, who heads Flora Dora…said that the proposal had the support of the prostitutes themselves, as it could offer better security…

So the residents are happy, the hookers are happy and the politicians are happy. What a concept!

Surplus Women (September 27^th, 2011)

Canadian police now believe that more than 30 unsolved murders of prostitutes in Edmonton, Alberta, may be the work of a serial killer:

…Since 1975, the bodies of at least 30 women…have been found…[and] dozens more are…listed as missing. Staff Sgt. Gerard MacNeil is…convinced a serial killer is still on the loose…”I can’t say whether that person is alive, whether they are in custody for other offences, or whether they have left the province…” [he said]. Project KARE, a joint task force between the RCMP and Edmonton police, was formed in June 2003 to investigate the deaths of women living high-risk lifestyles…members…hit the streets two to four times a week to connect with sex trade workers…The response from the women themselves has been warm…”Ninety-five percent of girls talk to us…[they] know exactly what we do and who we are. They understand we are not trying to bust them for doing their job…we are there to…make sure they are doing OK”…

But despite stories like this, fanatics who support criminalization still refuse to comprehend that it creates conditions which are far more dangerous for women.

An Ounce of Prevention (October 15^th, 2011)

Michael Weinstein opposes HIV prevention measures:

…HIV/AIDS researchers are testing an injectable version of a drug normally used to treat people already infected…[in hope of developing] a long-lasting version that may be given to people who aren’t HIV-positive, but are at high risk of becoming so. Three clinical trials have shown that antiretroviral drugs may help prevent uninfected people from acquiring HIV…but…the AIDS Healthcare Foundation…has filed a petition urging the Food and Drug Administration not to approve…[the drugs] for use by uninfected people. The group [claims] that people won’t take the drug as indicated and that they’ll stop using condoms or other prevention methods…

AHF’s true concern is that since they can’t provide such a drug, it would cut into their profits.

The More the Better (January 9^th, 2012)

Despite the incredibly annoying headline, “Streetwalker to Cat Walker”, I was pleased to see another example of a sex worker accepted into the mainstream:

Former call girl Zahia Dehar has unwrapped her debut lingerie collection…in Paris…The Chanel designers says Zahia is, “a very French courtesan, like Liane de Pougy or the Belle Otéro“. She became notorious a couple of years ago when the then underage prostitute was allegedly paid thousands of dollars for sex with some of France’s most famous footballers. Her face caught the attention of magazine editors and she has since appeared in magazines like V and Vanity Fair.

Coincidentally, La Belle Otero is the subject of this month’s harlotography, coming on March 30^th.

The Sky is Falling! (February 20^th, 2012)

The pompous Michigan sheriff quoted in this column opined that “It’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt” from a sugar baby arrangement, but I doubt he was thinking of this sort of thing: Bob Caldwell, the 63-year old editor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Oregonian, died of a heart attack last Saturday while visiting his 23-year-old sugar baby. The cops magnanimously decided not to pursue prostitution charges against the understandably distraught young woman, but that mercy obviously didn’t extend to protecting the dead man’s reputation or sparing the feelings of his wife and three daughters.

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (March 3^rd, 2012)

Once again, Indian charities demonstrate a wisdom far in advance of that of the self-important Americans who insist that they know what’s best for Indian sex workers:

…in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district…[there is] a bank…[which] serves only prostitutes…A vast majority of the area’s 4,000 sex workers have accounts with…Sangini, Hindi for “female friend.” As Sangini sees it, sex workers with even a modest financial buffer are able to refuse clients wanting unprotected sex. And savings build confidence, providing the wherewithal to change professions if they choose. Often, women will leave their passbooks here so husbands or pimps don’t discover and squander their earnings. Men can deposit but can’t withdraw funds without the woman’s permission, says Diane Cross, the charismatic social worker running the bank…“We get lambasted by churches that we’re encouraging prostitution,” says Krishna Sarda, head of the India800 Foundation, a civic group funded by grants that’s underwriting Sangini’s $75,000 annual budget. “The idea you can stop this trade altogether is cloud-cuckoo-land. Our focus is on trying to stop the exploitation”…

Metaupdates

Sex, Lies and Busybodies in That Was the Week That Was (#3) (February 11^th, 2012)

“…Arizona…[has] been targeted as [one possible home]…for the adult business…But…Maricopa County attorney Bill Montgomery said…’Under Arizona law, anyone paid to appear in a pornographic movie may be guilty of the crime of prostitution, which carries mandatory jail time as well as the possibility of other penalties’…” I hate to agree with a district attorney, but anyone who thinks that porn acting isn’t prostitution is either delusional or a hopeless lawhead. Americans don’t need more ridiculous laws exempting certain kinds of sex work from persecution under certain arbitrary conditions; what we need is for the government to stop interfering in the private affairs of adults altogether.

Think of the Children! in Metaupdates (March 2^nd, 2012)

Another good, clean, moral organization refuses charity from nasty, dirty whores:

The [cash-starved] Lennox Little League…[returned a $1200 donation from a gentlemen’s club named] Jet Strip…president Robert Aguirre told KTLA…”It was a shocker to us. We do not want the money from the strip club…” [The club’s manager]…said that the club has been giving back to the community for years, [donating to]…raise money for school supplies for [underprivileged] children…[and contributing] to…sheriff’s deputies…This isn’t the first time a Jet Strip donation has been returned. In 1993, according to Yahoo! Sports, the American Red Cross refused a $5000 donation from the club…

The Prudish Giant in That Was the Week That Was (#9) (March 4^th, 2012)

PayPal…is backtracking on its policy against processing sales of e-books containing themes of rape, bestiality or incest after protests from authors and anti-censorship activist groups. PayPal’s new policy will focus only on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text…The service will still refuse…to process payments for text-only e-books containing child pornography themes…[but]…will…focus on individual books, rather than entire classes of books…E-book sellers will be notified if specific books violate PayPal’s policy, and the company is working on a process through which authors and distributors can challenge such notifications…

If people would always resist infringements on our rights this vehemently, even governments would be compelled to back down.

One Year Ago Today

“Jill Brenneman Q & A (Part Two)” concluded the feature drawn from the comment threads of the Jill Brenneman interview columns.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Visit my bookstore
This Month
April 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

« Mar
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 ‘neofeminism’

Updates

Metaupdates

Metaupdates

Visit my bookstore

This Month

Old Posts

Call me

Become a Blog Patron

Contact Maggie

A Few References

Boring but necessary legal stuff