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Posts Tagged ‘Nepal’

That Was the Week That Was (#19)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Q & A, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2012| 26 Comments »

What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore.  –  Edward Dahlberg

Nine updates and a metaupdate.

Backward, Turn Backward (March 15th, 2011)

Apparently, Zimbabwe is a colony of the Bizarro World, where whores force men to have sex with them for free:

Three sex workers accused of raping 17 men in Zimbabwe have been freed…[they] were arrested last year after…a police…search of their vehicle revealed more than 30 used condoms…men…said the women forced them to have sex while brandishing weapons.  However, DNA evidence…disproved any link between the women and [their accusers]…[there was] widespread speculation that the sex workers were collecting semen for witchcraft.

You’ve gotta love the use of the modern term “sex worker” in that last line.

The First Time (March 20th, 2011)

Victorian men used to pay big money for whores who could credibly be passed as virgins, and apparently that kink is still around:

…Sweet Girls Premium Escort…is offering a Chinese-born Melbourne high school student [for $12,000]…”She is a virgin, you can tell,” [said] a spokeswoman…”She goes to your place or hotel and you can spend two days together.  She does not have a boyfriend and she wants to do it for the money,” she said.  The escort agency recruits mostly Asian women aged 18 to 25…The website written in English and Chinese suggests working for the agency “to solve your financial problem within short time”…

The rest of the article is a chorus of “feminists” clucking a lot of nonsense about “financial desperation” (as if anyone ever worked for any other reason), “no woman should have to sell her body” (because a woman is nothing but sex so selling it is equal to selling her entire self) and “double standards” (like the one they’re upholding by suggesting a girl’s virginity is too precious to sell and should instead be pointlessly given away).  I wish I had had the sense to sell my virginity; the experience probably would’ve been a lot more interesting than being clumsily mounted by some inexperienced boy in a dark room, and I would’ve had a lot fewer money worries the first few years of university.

The Scarlet Letter (March 29th, 2011)

Greece has joined the parade of countries using extrajudicial punishment against hookers, and Cheryl Overs explains why this is a bad idea:

Greece has been in the news for prosecuting HIV positive sex workers and posting the women’s photographs on the Internet…public health prosecutions and “naming and shaming” of [HIV+] sex workers occurs…across the world, including in the UK and US.  We are also observing a general increase in mandatory HIV testing…Successful HIV prevention is known to depend on a large portion of sex workers and clients using condoms and accessing…treatment …there is sufficient research and experience to compare the results of “rights based” approaches with heavy handed tactics like those used in Greece that have been shown to drive sex industries underground…repeatedly testing a few “legal” sex workers while  alienating “illegal” sex workers from services and testing them  forcibly in the wake of sporadic raids is not good public health…

Simply put, if hookers know they’ll be shamed and prosecuted for turning up positive, they simply won’t get tested.  And if legal workers are forcibly tested, they’ll simply work illegally instead.  This isn’t rocket science, but “authorities” seem completely unable to comprehend it.

Because We Say So (June 8th, 2011)

The crusade to impose Western cultural norms on Nepal has turned low-caste people into persecuted criminals:

…[Members of] the Badi, a Hindu caste that has for centuries been associated with entertainment and prostitution…live in the western districts of Nepal but…work in…cities…including Kathmandu, Mumbai and New Delhi.  Four years ago the Nepal government banned the Badis from pursuing their traditional occupation…[and] local communities…[have] used violent methods to compel the Badis to give up their sole means of livelihood…”We didn’t want to continue with prostitution but the government has failed to fulfill its promises of rehabilitation,” says Bishal Nepali, husband of a Badi sex worker.  The government did announce a package that included housing, income generation activities and scholarships…but these were never implemented…Nepali society gives little encouragement to Badi girls to pursue other professions and those among them who enter public schools are “often severely harassed by high caste students”…Badis are not allowed to run legitimate businesses.  “People fear to buy anything from my shop because they fear the villagers,” says Dinesh Nepali, a Badi male who runs a small shop selling cigarettes, vegetables and soft drinks.  “How can we survive like this?”…In 2007, Badi activists threatened to march naked through Kathmandu to embarrass the government into implementing the court-ordered rehabilitation, but that brought nothing except more promises…

September Q & A (September 30th, 2011)

In response to a questioner who defined using every minute of a call in penetration as “getting what he paid for”, I replied:  “…the price doesn’t assume that; it’s like going into a restaurant and complaining because every square centimeter of the plate isn’t covered in food.  Though I usually gave a price break for multiple hours, I didn’t do so if I knew the client was doing cocaine because the work of attending to him was much more difficult; the same thing could be said of a client who wants 60 full minutes of pumping.  Most girls even give a price break for dinner-date type calls because they’re much easier per hour than calls spent entirely in bed.”  Well, here’s a man who apparently had the same attitude as the questioner, but was far less civilized about it:

A 58-year-old Elgin [Illinois] man…tried to strangle a prostitute in a motel room after the woman refused additional sex after more than 30 encounters over a four-day period.  Kim P. Brandmire was charged with aggravated battery…[the] woman said the two had rented a room at the motel Thursday and…when she refused to have sex Sunday…Brandmire…choked her…The woman was charged with prostitution…

The realization that it’s sick and sadistic to charge a crime victim with a crime herself never dawns in the lawhead mind.

The Immunity Syndrome (March 5th, 2012)

Back in March I mentioned in passing that gonorrhea was rapidly becoming immune to all antibiotics; here’s an article from Scientific American which goes into more detail:

…Last summer…the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…demonstrated that up to 1.4 percent of 5,900 gonorrhea bacterial samples from around the U.S. had diminished susceptibility to cephalosporins…gonorrhea…is the second-most reported infectious disease in the U.S., with more than 600,000 new cases a year…if untreated, it can cause widespread organ damage…and infertility…Gonorrhea…[can borrow] DNA from other bacteria to construct new…defenses.  It steadily gained resistance…first the penicillins in the 1960s, then the tetracyclines in the 1980s, and…fluoroquinolones…in the 1990s.  By 2000 the only class of drugs that could provide [the inexpensive, effective, single-dose cure that] public health strategies rely on…was the cephalosporins.  [But] cephalosporin resistance has been emerging in Japan, and moving east and west from there, for at least a decade…Efforts to control STDs may have inadvertently accelerated the spread of resistance.  For years standard practice has been to quickly identify an infection, dole out the appropriate treatment and then move on to the next patient.  If symptoms return, the assumption has been that the patient was reinfected.  Experts now say that such patients may in fact have harbored resistant bacteria that were never killed in the first place—bacteria that the patients possibly spread to others…so far attempts to create a vaccine against gonorrhea have failed…

Even if a vaccine is eventually developed it won’t help the US, where adolescents – the carriers of 35% of all STIs – will certainly be blocked from receiving it by the same parental insanity which already prevents their vaccination against HPV.

Much Ado About Nothing (April 18th, 2012)

Dania Suarez, the escort Agent Arthur Huntington cheated, was interviewed on the Today show in Madrid:

…the alleged escort at the center of the Secret Service scandal…  [described] the…agents…as “stupid,” “idiots”…Dania Londono Suarez told NBC that the Secret Service agents seemed accustomed to soliciting women, saying the three men who approached her were not shy, drinking vodka “like it was water”…U.S. investigators have yet to talk with the single mother after she says she fled Colombia fearing for her life.

Note the dysphemism “alleged”, as though prostitution were criminal (which it isn’t in Colombia); if you don’t understand what Suarez was afraid of, you might want to read my column on Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

Meanwhile, “Army Gen. Charles H. Jacoby…stated in a May 6 memo that troops in Chicago during the [NATO] summit that begins May 20 will not ‘solicit prostitutes or engage in conduct which is unprofessional or unbecoming of a member of the armed forces.’  One military officer called the restrictions ‘an overreaction to recent Secret Service misconduct in Colombia’.”

Hiring whores is “unbecoming” to a soldier?  Pardon me while I die laughing.

Little Boxes (April 29th, 2012)

Dr. Marty Klein published a superb essay entitled “Why Janet Jackson’s Nipple Won’t Go Away”:

You may recall that way back in 2004, Janet Jackson’s right nipple was unexpectedly exposed for exactly one-half second during the Super Bowl halftime show.  Grown men cried.  Women fainted.  Children were driven mad by the brown protuberance.  Not surprisingly, the stock market crashed only four years later, soon followed by the meltdown of Japan’s nuclear reactors.  To punish the TV network on which the travesty occurred, the…FCC levied enormous fines…Since then, the FCC and our federal courts have been going back and forth in an attempt to design a TV censorship policy that doesn’t involve, um, censorship…So why are two successive presidencies…obsessed with a half-second of nipple?  Why are millions more of your tax dollars about to be spent attempting to punish CBS for what they failed to prevent over 8 years ago?…It’s a special kind of politics:  coding certain phenomena as sexual…makes them…subject to public control.  There is virtually no private sexual behavior in America…the “public-izing” of sex is a key weapon in the War On Sex…

One has to wonder:  Do American politicians want to make the US the laughingstock of the entire world, or do they really not comprehend that’s what they’re doing?

Whorearchy (May 10th, 2012)

In a perfect example of how “authorities” draw lines to divide whores from one another, Spain continues to turn the screws on streetwalkers so as to make it increasingly harder for them to make a living, while brothels are doing fine:

Indignant prostitutes take to the streets in Barcelona, angry at the city’s plans to ban street prostitution.  Unemployment in [Spain] has reached 23 percent, and sex workers say this is the only way they can earn a living…the police make their lives difficult as it is and…tightening the law will make it even harder to feed a family.  But…[brothels have] been making bigger profits every year since the crisis hit…

Metaupdates

The Camel’s Nose in TW3 (#16) (April 21st, 2012)

Even if Obama really does keep his promise to veto CISPA, there’s already a contingency plan in the works:

The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms…to build in backdoors for government surveillance…FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans…The FBI [wants to force] social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and…e-mail [to] alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly…The FBI’s proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers…there are [also] indications that the [FCC] is considering reinterpreting CALEA to demand that products that allow video or voice chat over the Internet — from Skype to Google Hangouts to Xbox Live — include surveillance backdoors to help the FBI…

One Year Ago Today

“A War for Peace” turns a critical eye on the antics of Femen, the Ukranian feminist group known for topless protests.

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June Miscellanea (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 15, 2011| 27 Comments »

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.  –  Groucho Marx

My monthly collection of odds and ends on harlotry and related topics.

The View from the North

While the Canadian government does its best this week to imitate the prohibitionist insanity of its southern neighbor*, the majority of the Canadian people (70% in this online poll) lean more in the direction Australia has taken.  And while the typical viewpoint of the American mainstream media is amply demonstrated by the next item in today’s column, the typical view of the Canadian media is demonstrated by this June 3rd editorial from the Globe and Mail entitled “Why the Courts Must Decriminalize Prostitution”.  Just imagine an American newspaper of equal stature printing an editorial whose thrust is summed up by the sentence “If you listen to the people most affected – the prostitutes – it becomes clear that the rational thing is to destigmatize the oldest profession, to help it be practised more safely and sanely, as the normal part of Canadian life that, like it or not, it is.”  Such an editorial would be greeted in the US by missives from outraged Puritans demanding the cancellation of their subscriptions, bleats and moans from trafficking fetishists moaning “Think of the millions of enslaved children!” and moronic replies on the online version of the column.  Nor are Canadian academics cowed by neofeminists as their American colleagues are; this study from the Canadian Review of Sociology demonstrated that most prostitutes are consenting adults who do the work to pay the bills like any other job, that only about 15% are streetwalkers, and that very few are forced into the work by men.  I certainly hope you aren’t surprised.

*Incidentally, the first day of that trial didn’t go too well for the Crown; the chief judge kept interrupting with questions like, “Isn’t it self-evident the laws produce harm and don’t protect sex workers?  If it’s legal, why would you want to make it impossible for them to work?  Isn’t this like passing a law to prevent store owners installing security?”

The Leading Players in the Field, Not

Meanwhile, in the United States, the New York Times published a story about the newest “documentary” in CNN’s Hearstian campaign against “human trafficking”, uncritically reporting that:

Tony Maddox…of CNN International, said of the documentary:  “This wasn’t, ‘We’ll get more publicity if we work with someone high profile, so let’s go find someone high profile.’  This was, ‘Who are the leading players in this field?’ ”  One of them, he said, happened to be a famous actress.

Gee, wasn’t that convenient?  Demi Moore, a “leading player in the field”?  Riiiiiiiiight.  I guess Tony Maddox didn’t dare call on real “leading players” like Laura Agustín or Ann Jordan, because they’d tell him that his manufactured “crisis” doesn’t actually exist and that would be bad for ratings.  An oh-so-sincere Hollywood actress, on the other hand, can be paid to mouth any drivel she’s handed and if it’s already her own pet witch-hunt, that’s even better.

Incidentally, the story reports that the title of Demi’s upcoming (June 26th) CNN special is “Nepal’s Stolen Children”, which talks about “girls as young as 11 who had been forced into prostitution and were rescued by a Nepalese nonprofit.”  Of course, the true social background of the Deuki custom is wholly ignored in favor of imposing Western values on a foreign culture:  “[Moore] goes home with one victim to find out if the girl’s family will accept or reject her.  Rejection is pervasive because of the stigma of sex trafficking in some cultures.”  Yeah, it’s because of “sex stigma”; the NGO’s undoing of what the family perceived as a gift to the gods which would win blessings for them has nothing to do with it.  As I said in my June 8th column, I will not defend slavery just because it is done in the name of religion or tradition.  But haven’t Westerners learned that it’s impossible to win hearts and minds by barging in on an alien culture uninvited, telling them they’re evil, backward sinners and then insisting that we know better than they do how they should live their lives?  Apparently Demi Moore and CNN haven’t.

Kristof’s Totalitarian Fantasy

The hits just keep on coming from the New York Times, which published (on the same day as the previous item) a rather ill-informed article from “Creepy” Kristof, whom regular readers may remember for his lurid columns on “sex slavery” which read as though they were typed with one hand.  Apparently, prostitution isn’t the only topic about which Kristof feels compelled to make pronouncements despite an almost total ignorance of the subject; his beliefs about economics and international politics are apparently just as ill-informed:  “The long trajectory of history has been for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes.  Now we’re at a turning point, with Republicans arguing that we need to reverse course.”  In other words, ever-inflating government is progress, so we should just accept that one day all of our decisions will be made for us by our betters and our only concern will be to slave like good little worker ants until we drop while Big Brother manages our money and our lives.  No wonder Kristof hates whores; it must gall him that we keep most of our income and ignore the laws and regulations designed to “help” us.  This article from Reason exposes Kristof’s claims for the absurdity they are, and includes the picture I’ve featured here in which Congolese women react with shock and amusement to the spectacle of a stupid American man balancing a woman’s basket on his head…which is sort of the way American women might react to an African man with a big goofy grin walking around town with a purse.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

As weird as it may seem, my husband and I often find ourselves nostalgic for the Cold War; the growing resemblance of Russia to the U.S. and the U.S. to the now-defunct U.S.S.R. is in my mind at least as unsettling as the prospect of World War III ever was.  You know how the United States is bucking the widespread trend in the civilized world to make prostitution less criminal?  Well, according to this June 8th story from The Guardian, Mother Russia apparently wants to prove she can be just as pigheaded as Uncle Sam:

Drug dealers are to be “treated like serial killers” and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia’s…parliament.  Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a “total war on drugs” was needed…Russia has as many as 6 million addicts (one in 25 people).  Every year 100,000 people die from using drugs, Gryzlov said in a newspaper.  The scale of the problem “threatens Russia’s gene pool”, he said.  “We are standing on the edge of a precipice.  Either we squash drug addiction or it will destroy us”…Injecting drug-use is also accelerating Russia’s HIV crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes.  An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.  Under legislation promoted by the ruling United Russia party and now being reviewed in parliament, drug addicts will be forced into treatment or jailed, and dealers will be handed heftier custodial sentences…Activists criticised the idea of putting addicts behind bars, pointing to a growing worldwide consensus that treating drug users as criminals has failed as a strategy.  The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them.  Gryzlov, however, claimed that “criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure”…

Several activists condemned Gryzlov’s suggestion to “isolate” drug users from society.  “Sending more people to prison will not reduce drug addiction or improve public health,” said Anya Sarang, president of the Andrey Rylkov Foundation…”What we need instead of this harsh drug control rhetoric is greater emphasis on rehabilitation, substitution treatment, case management for drug users and protection from HIV”…Denis Broun, the Moscow-based director of UNAids for Europe and central Asia…[said] Gryzlov’s proposals could make matters even worse.  “It has been widely shown that criminalising people using drugs simply drives them underground and makes them much harder to reach with preventative measures,” he said.  “This is not an effective strategy for fighting HIV.  Purely repressive measures do not work.”

Well, perhaps there’s a bright side to this; maybe Russia will be able to win the title of “police state which imprisons the largest number of its own citizens” away from the U.S.

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Because We Say So

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 8, 2011| 29 Comments »

Will the advancing waves obey me, Bishop, if I make the sign?”
Said the Bishop, bowing lowly, “Land and sea, my lord, are thine.”
Canute turned towards the ocean–“Back!” he said, “thou foaming brine.
From the sacred shore I stand on, I command thee to retreat;
Venture not, thou stormy rebel, to approach thy master’s seat:
Ocean, be thou still!  I bid thee come not nearer to my feet!”
But the sullen ocean answered with a louder, deeper roar,
And the rapid waves drew nearer, falling sounding on the shore;
Back the Keeper and the Bishop, back the king and courtiers bore.  –  William Makepeace Thackeray, “King Canute”

Lawheads are probably the single greatest obstacle to human freedom on the planet; it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and oppression come of the ludicrous notion that a government has the power to legislate reality.  Modern lawmakers, unfortunately, are craftier than King Canute; they avoid demonstrating their impotence by attempting to command the moon and tides, and instead concentrate on forcing others to pretend that their pretenses are real by defining behaviors they wish to suppress as crimes and “social ills”.  Using violence and force to compel others to give up their preferred lifestyle can then be labeled “rehabilitation”, and enslaving priestesses in sweatshops can be represented as “helping” them.  The following appeared on May 11th on the website God Discussion.com:

Despite the fact that the tradition of Deuki temple prostitution was formally abolished in Nepal with the 1990 constitution which declared human trafficking and exploitation illegal, many women are still living in temples in the provinces of Western Nepal as Deuki Temple prostitutes.  In the Nepalese Deuki tradition, common in western Nepal, a young girl, usually from a poor family, would be sold to a rich family by her parents.  The rich family would then offer her to the gods to serve as a temple prostitute in exchange for the blessings and favor of the gods.  Alternatively, a poor family might simply leave its daughter in the temple as gift to the gods and pray that the gods reward them with good fortune.  Once a girl is so offered she is abandoned to her own means.

Deukis are expected to support themselves by providing sacred sex services to male visitors to the temple.  According to a longstanding western Nepalese tradition, sex with a Deuki was spiritually cleansing and offered the man opportunity of remission of his sins.  NGOs have been providing assistance to Deuki prostitutes in Nepal to start a new life, and provide education for their fatherless children.  The NGOs have been working on self-employment programs in skill development centers set up for the Deukis.  But a new report shows that the efforts at rehabilitating the Deukis in Nepal have not been entirely successful.  A local NGO estimates the number of Deukis yet unreached by rehabilitation efforts in western Nepal at about 2000.  The report states that the younger Deukis have benefited more from the program than older ones and that the greater proportion of women still living as Deuki prostitutes are older ones unable to acquire new skills and benefit from the self-employment and skill acquisition programs.

Dutta Ram Badu, manager of Swaraj Samajhikk Sanstha, one of the NGOs helping the Deukis says, “The young women have changed their lives for the better by taking advantage of the various trainings, but the government has not shown interest in the older women.”  Some have suggested that the older Deukis could be helped by setting up homes for them where they may form self-help communities with cottage industries in such vocations as needle work.  Child labor and prostitution remains a major social ill in Nepal and most of the human trafficking is across [the] Nepalese border into India.

It would be difficult to invent a better example of lawhead propaganda than this one.  The stink of racist paternalism pervades the article from the very first sentence:  an ancient religious tradition dating back into prehistory is defined as “human trafficking and exploitation”, and the author appears surprised that it did not obediently vanish upon being “formally abolished”; I am irresistibly reminded of the pundits who predicted that the 18th Amendment would magically remove the desire for liquor from the minds of Americans.  Then in the second paragraph we are told that “rehabilitating” (brainwashing) the priestesses into factory and sweatshop workers “has not been entirely successful” (in other words, it hasn’t been at all successful).  One of the “rescuers” who is “helping” the Deukis to “change their lives for the better” by becoming wage-slaves believes the only reason the older ones don’t “take advantage of training” is that the government has not “shown interest in” them (i.e., it hasn’t forcibly thrown them out of the temples as the “rescuers” desire).

Am I defending the practice of selling children to temples?  No, of course not, but just because I’m opposed to agricultural slavery and sweatshops doesn’t mean I think farms and factories should be banned.  The Nepalese law throws the baby out with the bathwater; it would have been a simple matter to outlaw slavery, require Deukis to be of the local age of consent and to enter the temple voluntarily, and then to provide “rehabilitation” to those who wished to leave.  But no, as is typical of governments the world over Nepal instead prefers to define problems into existence and then attempt to “solve” them by brute force.

When I want to break an egg I do so on the side of a bowl, then discard the shell; if I need the yolk separated I crack the egg into a separator, then gently shift it around until the white drains into a bowl and the unbroken yolk is left behind.  But if a government wishes to break an egg it does so with a sledgehammer, then has to laboriously pick all the bits of shell out of the egg, clean up the splattered mess on the walls and counters, frequently replace bowls shattered by accident and repeatedly sterilize the sledgehammer.  And since it’s impossible to keep a yolk intact in the process, all recipes involving separated whites or yolks must be banned and meringues, macaroons, waffles and angel food cake must be labeled “contraband”.  But lest citizens consider this tyranny, a modern regime then demonstrates its immense compassion by forcing those who create or enjoy such treats into “rehabilitation” by telling them that raw vegetables are much better…and proving the point by giving them nothing else to eat.

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