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Monday Links

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged animals, asset seizure, Australia, Colorado, comics, consensual crime, cops, dehumanization, drugs, Europe, Florida, hysteria, internet, Japan, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Zealand, Norway, Oregon, Pennsylvania, psychology, robots, teachers, video, Washington (state), weaponry, yin and yang on January 28, 2013| 36 Comments »

Although we recognize that patriotism is often the handmaiden of dehumanization, we haven’t yet given up the notion of Manichean struggle between evil and good. – Zach Weiner

Surprised to see this on Monday? Next week it’ll be on Tuesday, and so forth until it arrives back in its normal Sunday slot on March 17^th. The reason for this is that I wanted to do something a little different while the TW3 columns are borrowing the Links columns’ numbers, and beside it’s nice for a change. We’ve only got one video this week, but that’s OK because I really wanted to share this large graphic of Venn diagrams which Radley Balko discovered on Reddit; the graphic puts Balko just barely ahead of Grace this week because each of them contributed three links (Balko the three above the graphic, and Grace “old people”, “crumpled paper” and “spiders”). The video (a parody of early ’70s anti-drug films) and the link just above it were provided by my cat, and the links between the graphic and the video by Amy Alkon (“Hello Kitty”), Popehat (“printers”), Eugene Volokh (“Uncanny Valley”), Michael Whiteacre (“Shirley Temple”), Mike Siegel (“drug war” and “Leviathan”), Nun Ya (“flaming cheese”), Jesse Walker (“lone villain”), and Brooke Magnanti (“bakemono”).

Women who write crap like this on Jezebel are the same ones who think that hookers are “exploited” and that clients have “power” over us.
Japanese official says old people should hurry up and die to save the government money.
Kindergartener suspended as “terrorist” for talking about her pink “Hello Kitty” bubble gun.
Schoolgirl called “murderer”, threatened with arrest for crumpled paper.
There are 86,000 unprotected printers you can access via the internet.
Masahiro Mori’s seminal robotics article, “The Uncanny Valley”.
Shirley Temple joins Twitter, asks who Honey Boo Boo is.
Obviously, the drug war isn’t quite bad enough yet.
Flaming cheese shuts down Norwegian highway.
“The lone villain with an army of automata.”
A rare victory against Leviathan.
Bakemono fashion.
More of this, please.
Wendy McElroy on zombies.
A little learning is a dangerous thing.
The most beautiful spiders you’ll ever see.
Gareth Morgan, feline genocide proponent.

From the Archives

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New Year’s Eve 2012

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, anecdote, asset seizure, Australia, blogging, bogus studies, California, cops, end demand, Europe, harm reduction, holidays, hysteria, law, neofeminism, Norway, rescue industry, sex work is work, stereotypes, Swedish model, TSA, universal criminality, violence vs. sex workers on December 31, 2012| 14 Comments »

New Year’s Eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. – Hamilton Wright Mabie

When I was still a sweet young thing, I didn’t really understand what older people meant when they told me that time would speed up as I aged. But nowadays, when the months fly by faster than weeks seemed to in my teens, I at last understand; oh boy do I understand! And here I am writing another New Year’s Eve column despite the fact that I remember last New Year’s Eve as clearly as I remember the last 4^th of July and Halloween night! A great deal has happened since then, though, and as is my custom I’m going to take this opportunity to remind you of some of it.

As I predicted, we’ve begun to see increased skepticism about the vaguely-defined concept of “human trafficking”; it’s only a little so far, and the rescue industry, the media, insecure men and governments are still heavily invested in it. But ever-larger numbers of ordinary women are turning to sex work and talking about it, more established sex workers are writing about their experiences, more journalists are accepting us as real people, more academics are confirming that what we’ve been saying all along is the truth, and that decriminalization is the solution to most problems associated with sex work. But we’re not out of the woods yet; though the lies of “trafficking” charlatans are being exposed at an increasing rate, and growing so outrageous and bizarre that they increasingly need to rely on paid shills to sell their bill of goods, sex workers all over the world must still fight fiercely against abuses perpetrated by police and NGOs who are largely bankrolled and encouraged by American prohibitionists, and even strippers are suffering increased attacks. Meanwhile, the Swedish model continues to plague the Earth, though it is being challenged by facts and beaten back in some places, and may soon lose its grip on Norway. California recently enacted a law which allows almost anyone to be classified as a “sex trafficker”, and even Australia, long at the forefront of sex worker rights, suffered its share of setbacks and prohibitionist assaults this year.

Nor is the burgeoning police state content with trying to control sex workers and our clients; food is another favorite target, as is the internet, and the number of excuses cops use to literally rob people increases all the time. Uniformed thugs of all types are being given more and broader excuses to sexually assault people, and though a few of them are punished, they nearly always get far more lenient sentences than ordinary men; sex workers, by contrast, are targeted for increased abuse by programs sold to the public as “helping” or “rescuing” them.

I opened a Twitter account just over a year ago, and now have almost a thousand followers; my article about the Cartagena scandal attracted national media attention, and helped to boost my traffic enough to reach my first million page views in October; the rate has remained so high I’ll reach 1.2 million in the next few days. That’s a good thing because the more people read my work, the more the message gets out that whores are human beings like everyone else, that the “sex trafficking” narrative is a myth, and that recognizing our work as work is the only way to help those who really are exploited and abused in it. The increasing absurdity of prohibitionists’ claims and the increasing support for decriminalization among human rights activists and the medical community shows me that we’re past the height of the “trafficking” panic, and on course for it to collapse by 2017 as I predicted last year. Perhaps by the time I write my next New Year’s Eve column we’ll be able to see more definite signs of decay, and thereby know we’re just a little closer to the day when sex workers are no more oppressed than anybody else.

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That Was the Week That Was (#43)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, activism, Africa, agency denial, apes & monkeys, Australia, Backwards into the Future, bogus studies, Cambodia, Canada, censorship, Change of Heart, comics, consensual crime, cops, dirty, disease, Down Under, East Asia, escort services, ethics, Europe, First They Came for the Hookers, harm reduction, hysteria, Imagination Pinned Down, India, Ireland, It's Different Because It Involves Sex, Latin America, Much Ado About Nothing, Naked Truth, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, New Orleans, New York, New Zealand, Norway, pimps, porn, Presents, psychology, Rwanda, Safe Targets, Schadenfreude, Shift in the Wind, streetwalkers, stripping, Swedish model, The Course of a Disease, True Colors, violence vs. sex workers, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world on October 27, 2012| 8 Comments »

She was not sold to a brothel like they said…the people here always pitied and loved her. – Men Voeun

Safe Targets

How would this have played out if prostitution were fully legal in Canada?

Calgary police have arrested an Ontario man accused of making fake emergency calls…claiming that distraught women were being held against their will, either at gunpoint or knifepoint. “It is alleged two individuals were responsible for numerous calls to police in an attempt to reveal and disrupt competition in the escort business. These same individuals are also believed responsible for extorting escorts by calling or threatening to call police if the women refused to work for the two accused”…

Backwards into the Future

Add Rwanda to the list:

Commercial sex workers must be protected from assault and any other kind of mistreatment, lawmakers said…criminalisation of prostitution denies sex workers easy access to crucial services, with devastating consequences on their health, their clients and partners of their clients…The legislators called for more support to sex workers by encouraging and facilitating them to form and join cooperatives…[and] called for the review of the Penal Code…to avoid cases where the law might…be a liability to society…

Down Under

Dr. Marty Klein’s post about his trip to Australia discusses the absurdity of prohibitionism, properly brands “sex trafficking” a moral panic and starts by teaching me something I actually did not know:

…in Australia…it [became] legal to PURCHASE and POSSESS adult porn in 1983. But all Australian states ban the SALE of X-rated video…Enforcement…is very low, so there is a gray market…[and] Australians buy it anyway…the government loses tax revenue, as well as respect. The foolishness of attempting to ban a popular, victimless activity like watching adult porn is even more obvious when considered in light of Australia’s decriminalizing of most adult prostitution in 1992…

It’s Different Because It Involves Sex, Part Umpteen

Predictably, the New York state appeals court agreed with tax officials against a strip club. Unpredictably, the dissenting judges clearly “get it”:

…A very divided New York Court of Appeals has ruled that lap dances are not art…“The court split 4-3, with the dissenting judges saying there’s no distinction in state law between ‘highbrow dance and lowbrow dance’”…Judge Robert Smith pointed out…that the majority ruling here does not actually comply with the…state’s legislation… “[T]he only question…is whether the admission charges that the State seeks to tax were paid for dance performances. There is not the slightest doubt that they were…It does not matter if the dance was artistic or crude, boring or erotic. Under New York’s Tax Law, a dance is a dance…I do not read Hustler magazine; I would rather read the New Yorker. I would be appalled, however, if the State were to exact from Hustler a tax that the New Yorker did not have to pay, on the ground that what appears in Hustler is insufficiently “cultural and artistic”…discrimination on the basis of content would surely be unconstitutional”…

Presents, Presents, Presents!

I enjoyed Chester Brown’s Paying For It so much I asked him which of his other books I should read next, and he responded by generously sending me four of them: Louis Riel, I Never Liked You and two short works which are not commercially available. Thank you so much, Chester; I’m very much looking forward to reading them!

Above the Law

…Tacoma police said when Sylvester Haliburton tried to convince a prostitute he was an undercover police officer, she didn’t believe him, and when she tried to get out of his car, Haliburton wouldn’t let her…police…are looking into the possibility that he committed similar crimes before…

Much Ado About Nothing

I don’t think I can adequately explain how ridiculous this looks to any experienced escort; there’s about a 70% chance that the “shocked” officials have done the same thing themselves, and a better than 95% chance they knew others who did:

An investigation into the U.S. Secret Service prostitution scandal…contradicts Secret Service director Mark Sullivan’s adamant assertion before Congress that “this just is not part of our culture”…The report…revealed that one of the agents who was in Cartagena…admitted to soliciting a prostitute on two previous occasions…and…mentioned allegations of similar misconduct by agents on trips to Romania and China…

Meanwhile, Dania Londoño (her last name was previously reported as “Suarez”) is writing a book.

Naked Truth

Melissa Gira Grant on how the equation of “human trafficking” with prostitution harms the more than 75% of people whose exploitative labor conditions are not sex-related; I strongly suspect it won’t be long before The Guardian officially adopts an anti-trafficking hysteria editorial position.

True Colors

On May 24^th the offices of New Orleans activist group Women With a Vision were destroyed by arson, but you can’t keep good women down:

As of October 1, 2012, we are well on our way to securing a new home for WWAV, and have a targeted reopening date of January 1, 2013. In anticipation…we have officially closed our temporary office location…Please call 504.301.0428 for further information on how to access services while we are rebuilding.

You can also call that number to donate, or just go to their website.

First They Came for the Hookers…

The extension of “sex trafficking” hysteria to stripping continues:

Albuquerque city councilors…adopted a host of new regulations for strip clubs aimed at discouraging human trafficking, prostitution and other crimes. The ordinance sets out record-keeping requirements on the identity of performers and calls for signs to be posted telling employees how to report human trafficking. It also prohibits “adult cabaret entertainment” in private areas of the club that aren’t open and visible to others…Voting “no” were…Rey Garduño…[who] repeatedly questioned whether anyone had actually been arrested for human trafficking in an Albuquerque strip club…[and Trudy] Jones…[who] asked why other businesses that might involving the trafficking of minors weren’t covered by the bill. She mentioned hotel maids and landscaping workers…

Though I’m disgusted by the registration, infantilization and attacks on women’s livelihood, I’m encouraged by the questions asked by the two dissenters.

Imagination Pinned Down

What, no UFOs or Satanists?

…a British woman has claimed that she spent five years being raised by monkeys in a Colombian forest…Marina Chapman says the colony of capuchins cared for her after she was kidnapped and then abandoned…[she] survived by catching birds and rabbits with her bare hands until hunters found her…took [her] to a nearby city and sold her to a brothel. However, she managed to escape to Britain and…worked as a housemaid…[her] story has been made into a book…and TV crews plan to make a documentary…Chapman believes she was born…about 1950 and…was kidnapped when she was five before being abandoned in the jungle.

Shift in the Wind

Three UN agencies have officially called for total decriminalization across Asia, specifically naming New Zealand and New South Wales as examples:

…[A] study issued…by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)…examines 48 countries in Asia and the Pacific to assess laws, legal policies and law enforcement practices that affect the human rights of sex workers and…effectiveness of HIV responses. Where sex work has been decriminalized, there is a greater chance for safer sex practices… “evidence from the jurisdictions…that have decriminalized sex work – New Zealand and New South Wales (Australia) – indicates that the approach of defining sex work as legitimate labour empowers sex workers, increases their access to HIV and sexual health services and is associated with very high condom use rates”…

Metaupdates

Welcome To Our World in February Updates (Part Two)

From Ireland, another example of the inevitable result of the idea that sex is a horrible thing from which the “innocent” must be “protected”:

…One would assume that [40-year-old Mandy Finlay]…is entitled to enjoy an intimate sexual life with her partner…[but] not only is [that] socially unacceptable…it is also a crime…the…Sexual Offences…Act, 1993, criminalises sexual relations between two adults with intellectual disability…who are not married. This includes mild disability and autism…

Schadenfreude in TW3 (#17)

Somaly Mam has been caught in another huge lie:

For years now, the scarred face of Long Pros has symbolized…sex slavery in Cambodia…“My eye was stabbed by a brothel owner,” Ms. Pros recounted in [Nicholas Kristof’s documentary] Half the Sky…with blood still flowing from the destroyed eye socket, Ms. Pros said that she was still forced to have sex with clients…”when I returned home, my mother and father didn’t want me around”…[but] Pros’ parents…denied that their daughter was ever a victim of human trafficking, had ever been enslaved in a brothel, or had lost her right eye at the hands of a savage brothel owner. Long Hon, 60, and Sok Hang, 56, described…their daughter’s…eye condition: a non-malignant tumor that had developed when she was just 7 years old…[and] was…removed by an eye surgeon…in 2005 when she was 13…Te Sereybonn, the…director of the…hospital…said that…medical staff…contacted [Somaly Mam’s organization] to…admit Ms. Pros to one of their vocational training programs…it had nothing to do with the sex industry…

The parents’ statement was confirmed by doctors and medical records. Brandee Baker of the Somaly Mam Foundation insisted that the girls’ parents, doctors and medical records were all wrong and wrote in an October 21^st email to reporters, “you are now bullying victims of sex slavery…” Furthermore, Keo Thea, chief of Phnom Penh’s anti-human trafficking police bureau, said he had no record of any complaint about a brothel girl stabbed in the eye, and even the type of the supposed attack has changed; in its first published form in 2008, Pros claimed to have “lost her eye after a pimp kicked her in the face.”

Neither Addiction nor Epidemic in TW3 (#20)

As I’ve stated before, “sex addiction” is not the same thing as hypersexuality; the latter is a real disorder which may be included in DSM-V, while the former isn’t and won’t be. But since “sex addiction” is too good a myth to discard just yet, we’ll just lie by redefining the former to mean the latter: “…New research shows that sex addiction is indeed a mental health disorder–one that can be easily and accurately diagnosed…It’s formally called ‘hypersexual disorder,’ and it’s much more than enjoying sex a little too much…” I shall now prove the existence of the Tooth Fairy by redefining the word “fairy” to mean “ache”.

The Course of a Disease in TW3 (#26)

Here’s something rather unusual: a short anti-Swedish model play. I have included it not for its dramatic qualities (which are, I’m sorry to say, essentially nonexistent), but rather as evidence of the fact that there is considerable anger toward the model in Norway, home of those who inspired the play. Furthermore, its central philosophical point is that since all sex is transactional in some way, the Swedish model technically outlaws sex completely.

Change of Heart in TW3 (#41)

This article about the journalistic ethics of outing Alexis Wright’s clients is an excellent example of a journalist just starting to wake up. Though he recognizes “end demand” as bunk and rightfully compares persecution of sex work to persecution of homosexuals, he doesn’t actually challenge the morality of the laws per se; furthermore, though he understands that stigma can harm families, he thinks only of the clients’ families rather than those of the hookers. Still, this is a big improvement over most of the American journalistic establishment, and therefore deserves recognition.

This Week in 2010 and 2011

Three of these columns were about Japan: there was a brief history of Japanese prostitution, my husband’s experience at a “soapland” bath house, and a study of Filipinas working at hostess bars. I also presented the stories of two eccentric New Orleans characters, two columns full of hooker songs, and two columns in which I answered questions about anonymity, the fraction of men who hire us, hotels, STDs, female sex tourists, pimps, parents, spam and circumcision. Finally, we looked at the “pedophilia” heffalump and the prostitution elephant, a thorny BDSM case, the ethics of egg-selling and short articles on Bob Guccione, Clarence Thomas, Gardasil, funny album covers, horror comics and vampire whores.

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That Was the Week That Was (#32)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, Australia, Broken Record, brothels, Business Opportunity, California, carnival, censorship, cops, dirty, Down Under, ethics, Europe, Feminine Pragmatism, Finding What Isn’t There, Hollywood, hotels, hysteria, law, lawheads, Legal Is as Legal Does, Michigan, neofeminism, New Orleans, New Zealand, Norway, pimps, porn, prohibitionist myths, Prudish Pedants, rape, Saving Them from Themselves, sexting, sporting events, stereotypes, stripping, Swedish model, Texas, The Course of a Disease, The More the Better, The Notorious Badge, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers on August 11, 2012| 29 Comments »

The reality is that the law has made it more difficult for women in prostitution. – Anniken Hauglie

Down Under

You think we should tell this “lobby group” that Australian governments already know they’re lying, or just let them waste their money? “A sex industry lobby group in Tasmania is pushing for the introduction of laws which penalise the clients of prostitutes…Dr Christy Giselsson from the Nordic Model Australian Coalition, says the group believes changing the focus of the legislation would reduce the demand for sex workers. ‘For example in Sweden it’s been shown to halve street prostitution’…” In any case, someone definitely needs to tell this reporter that Swedish Model proponents are NOT “sex industry lobby groups”.

Business Opportunity

Another example of politicians wasting other people’s money to fight a legal sex business: “Fighting plans for a brothel at Narellan last year came at a cost of almost $60,000 for Camden Council but councillors described the battle as a fight they had to have…Mayor Greg Warren (pictured) said the council’s position to refuse the sex premises reflected the concerns of the community…owner Greg Hall said the money…could have been better spent on community projects. ‘There are thousands of places it could have been spent than to waste it in court for a decision we all knew was going to get through anyway,’ he said…”

Saving Them From Themselves

Detroit school officials plan to fight the scourge of “sexting” by searching students’ phones and computers:

School officials in a Detroit suburb announced they may search student cell phones and laptops, in an effort to tackle the problem of teenage “sexting”…The rule did not result from any particular incident, but was “just a matter of being proactive,” [said] Rich Machesky, Troy’s assistant superintendent…Students could refuse a search request…in which case the district would contact the child’s parents instead…The ACLU is concerned over how broad the policy is and whether school officials would then hand off students’ phones to the police…While sexting is not illegal…kids who text can be prosecuted under child pornography laws and can be sentenced with 20 years in prison if convicted. Even having sexually explicit photos on your phone is a four-year felony…

Because obviously nude pictures are far more dangerous to “children’s” lives than spending 20 years in prison.

They All Axed For You

Anyone who’s ever lived in New Orleans knows about Hubig Pies, tasty little treats which come in a large variety of flavors and put other commercial snack pastries to shame. Unfortunately, their century-old factory burned down before dawn on July 27^th and it may be quite some time before it’s rebuilt. This video may be of interest to my readers because it provides an extended example of the “Yat” dialect spoken by a woman who sounds like a very typical New Orleans character.

Legal Is As Legal Does

Two stories from different Australian states demonstrating the weird situations that arise from legalization. The first is from Queensland, and updates an item from the original column: “A sex worker has won an anti-discrimination case against motel owners in a Queensland mining town who refused to rent her a room…[she] had stayed at the motel 17 times in two years until [the] owners…discovered…she was bringing clients to her room…[her] lawyer argued many people used the telephone or internet at the motel for business, and a bed was no different.” The owners argued that the worker’s activities were “disturbing” other guests, which is of course nonsense if she had been there 17 times before without incident. Furthermore, how is paid sex any more “disturbing” to other guests than giveaway sex?

The second item is from a town in Victoria, where sex work is legal but “brothels” (the term is defined so loosely it can mean virtually anything police want it to mean) must be licensed:

Police suspect an illegal brothel has been operating in a residential street…[in] Bendigo…[they] raided a house…and took a woman back to the station for questioning…“We believe she’s a sex worker involved in an illegal brothel at that address,” [a detective] said. “We’re waiting for a Chinese interpreter to come so we can interview her”…[a neighbor] was concerned about the well-being of the [sex worker]…“She’s very friendly – a lovely young lady.”

According to a comment on the story, Bendigo is practically the only city in Victoria without a brothel, which may explain why its government feels the need to harass women on technicalities.

The More the Better

Perhaps one day we’ll arrive at the point where, “He was so desperate to raise money he actually opened a legal business!” sounds as ridiculous to most people as it does to me:

A New Zealander was so desperate to fund his dream to compete in the London 2012 Olympics that he opened a brothel…[after] Logan Campbell…lost his bid for Olympic glory in Beijing in 2008, he was too strapped for cash to take his [taekwondo] career to the next level and train full-time…So…to make the $200,000 he needed to go to London, he opened a 14-room brothel in Auckland. Campbell…wants to repudiate the perception that he was a pimp selling women on a street corner. New Zealand decriminalised prostitution in 2003. “I sold the brothel so I don’t really want to talk about it now, OK?” he said. “It’s a legal business in New Zealand. It’s completely different from other countries in the world…No one was forced into the industry, and they’re not doing it because they are in poverty because we have a really good welfare system”…

Above the Law

It’s a start; now we need to work on getting similar sentences for the thousands of real cops who regularly do the same thing. Note the incredible concluding sentence: “A man who faked being a Texas law officer and demanded free sex from a prostitute has been sentenced to 35 years in prison…The woman submitted to [Raul Garza III] but later called police when he allegedly wanted suggestive photos of her 10-year-old daughter. Garza…testified he never committed a crime and just refused to pay the prostitute.”

Finding What Isn’t There

Most of this overblown and sensationalistic article is just repetition of the usual “sex trafficking” myths and exaggerations combined with the characteristic cop-culture strutting and bragging, but it’s notable for the accusation that the Department of Justice is “ignoring child sex trafficking victims” because it isn’t creating enough of them to support the hysterical predictions. That sound you hear is me clapping quite slowly.

Broken Record

While it’s nice to see an article actually leading off with the truth about sex work around major sporting events, I feel I must comment on this historian’s absurd exaggeration:

…Georgina Perry, who works at Open Doors, a support project…[for] East London prostitutes…says the Olympics are never good for the sex trade. “All the studies show there’s no increase in sex workers,” she says of past Olympics…Gone, it seems, are the good old days for your average harlot when the best athletes gathered. “Prostitution was a huge deal in the ancient Games,” says historian Tony Perrottet, author of The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games. The original festival attracted 40,000 sports fans — all male — to the remote religious sanctuary. “Brothel owners … brought in teams of beautiful girls from around Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor.” Any good prostitute would try to get to the Olympics, and earn in five days what would normally take her a year to make…

This is nothing but another permutation of the stupid “50 clients a night” idiocy. It is simply not physically possible for any full-time whore to make in 5 days what she could make in 360, unless perhaps she came from some rural district where she usually only got one client a day, managed 12 per day at the Olympics (difficult but doable), and charged six times her usual fee.

Metaupdates

Feminine Pragmatism in TW3 (#13)

Behold the lawhead psychosis in action:

Cash-strapped Nadya Suleman…has turned to various X-rated money-making ventures to help pay the bills – all with the encouragement of Orange County (Calif.) Child Protective Services. “They’re on my side–they’re supporters,” Suleman [said]…“It’s ironic. Once I talked with a CPS worker in regards to the adult stuff, she was like, ‘Are you really doing that?’ Well, it’s not illegal. More power to you!’ So it was almost like a green light–like, ‘Do what you need to do to take care of your family’”…A rep for the Orange County…Social Services Agency…[said] “The law allows a wide latitude in parenting styles and in parenting vocations. I don’t think that anybody would ever want it any other way. So as long as children remain free from harm or danger…then the Social Services Agency would not become involved.”

Unless the mother is a whore, of course, which automatically makes her less fit than Octomom.

The Course of a Disease in TW3 (#26)

Norwegian study demonstrates that the Swedish Model causes “sex trafficking”:

Prior to the 2009 Sex Purchase Act, Norway had one of Europe’s smallest and least organized markets for prostitution. Women…voluntarily…sold sex…without the interference from any pimp. The introduction of the law has made this process more complicated, according to a report in the Stavanger Aftenblad…”The women are very vulnerable towards the police and to a greater extent on the network and support that pimps can offer,” said [researcher] Guri Tyldum…”The criminalization intended to demonstrate that prostitution is not wanted in Norway. The risk is that the most dangerous and serious form of prostitution that remains,” she said…Norway’s Ministry of Justice has announced an evaluation of the sex purchase act.

This is not only what we’ve said for over a decade, it’s the inevitable result of putting the desire to “send a message” above the needs of real people.

The Notorious Badge in TW3 (#27)

Upon reading this I was irresistibly reminded of Sarah Woolley’s article:

I felt really exposed. It didn’t hit me until the first moment where the scene called for me to expose myself, because what came over me was such shame. Which was weird, because they weren’t my breasts, and it was what I had signed up to do….I started to cry, and if you look closely at those scenes when I’m opening my blouse, I’m smiling, but not in my eyes…I was just feeling really emotional and trying to hide it.

Boo fucking hoo. Women like this (Jessica Alba is another one) piss me off to no end. If you’re such a prudish twit you supposedly “cry” from partial nudity with FAKE TITS, I have a suggestion: restrict yourself to playing nuns, and leave the sex worker parts to grown women.

Prudish Pedants in TW3 (#31)

Good news for Simon Walsh, but I have to wonder how this would have turned out had the same thing happened in America:

A man who was tried this week…for possessing images of “extreme” sexual acts has just been cleared on all counts…David Allen Green, solicitor and legal correspondent for the New Statesman, said: “This was a shameful and intrusive prosecution which should never have been brought. It was bad law to begin with, but a good man has had his sex life examined in open court for no good reason. There are serious questions for the CPS to answer about bringing this prosecution.”

This Week in 2011

The bittersweet experience of “Leaving the Life”; “authorities” using their power to rape whores; “The New Victorianism”; the effects of defining everything as “violence against women” or “human trafficking”; what it looks like when individuals behave as “authorities” do; and the truth about “safe harbor” laws.

This Week in 2010

Cops’ weird anti-condom neurosis; “How To Be a Stupid, Greedy Whore”; why hookers should never let clients turn off the lights; how self-proclaimed “feminists” have been betraying women for 130 years; and a two-part column about regular clients.

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That Was the Week That Was (#27)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A False Dichotomy, acting, Acting and Activism, Africa, Australia, Backwards into the Future, brothels, Dirty Amateurs, disease, drivers, East Asia, Europe, fantasy, Feet of Clay, First They Came for the Hookers, Good News-Bad News, Higher Education, Hollywood, hysteria, If It Were Legal, Latin America, law, lawheads, Nevada, New York, Nigeria, Norway, Oklahoma, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, porn, prohibitionist myths, sex education, sex offender registry, sex work is work, stereotypes, stripping, Swedish model, The Course of a Disease, The More the Better, The Notorious Badge, The Widening Gyre, underage, video, Vietnam on July 7, 2012| 29 Comments »

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. – Rita Mae Brown

Twelve updates and four metaupdates.

Acting and Activism (January 8^th, 2011)

Yet another actor tries to prop up a sagging career with a flying leap onto the “trafficking” bandwagon: Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan is going to Myanmar this week on a…mission to help combat child trafficking…UNICEF announced…that…Chan will…meet with officials of the Social Welfare Ministry and…police…

Backwards Into the Future (March 30^th, 2011)

Add Vietnam to the list of countries which aren’t known for their spectacular record on human rights, yet are doing better on the issue than the US:

The Vietnamese National Assembly recently [voted to stop detaining] thousands of sex workers in so-called rehabilitation facilities where they were held without right of appeal and forced to work (including for private companies) without pay…justice advocates…are hoping that drug detention centers…will follow soon…

Saddest Story of the Month (May 17^th, 2011)

Well, it’s not quite as bad as arresting someone for moving out of a dumpster...

A new law…is forcing convicted sex offenders to…move into tents. More than 40 sex offenders at the Hand Up Ministries in Oklahoma City had to move out of trailers on the ministry’s property. The new state law limits the number of sex offenders who can live in one dwelling. Ministry founder David Nichols said without a place to live, many offenders won’t register and could go back to prison…”I don’t think that it’s going to lessen crime any. I think it’s going to increase crime”…

Nichols is correct, but don’t expect the fanatics to listen.

A False Dichotomy (June 22^nd, 2011)

So here’s a thing in the Guardian (I hesitate to call a short collection of captioned photos an “article”) about “sex trafficking” in Burkina Faso. Though the author claims that “thousands of girls and women are trafficked from Nigeria to the African hub of Ouagadougou,” and that “many are lured by promises of jobs as hairdressers or nannies,”I was struck by two things: one, that the pictures look to me like any pictures of street or brothel workers in poor countries; and two, that the captions belie the claims of “trafficking”. The caption for the third picture reads, “Juliette, also from Nigeria, has been working at Mercy’s for six years. The 45-year-old sends money home each week to support her four children who live in Benin City.” In other words, she has enough disposable income to support four children, and is free to send it home. The caption for the 12^th (and last) picture tells us that “trafficking victims” are free to attend a church whose pastor lectures on the evils of the sex trade, and the one for the 5^th is the most telling: “At Mercy’s, women work seven nights a week and pay 2,000 CFA (£2.60) each day to rent a room. Men pay the women 5,000 CFA. This Burkinabe girl has turned up at the brothel looking for work.” In other words the rooms cost these “victims” less than half the price of one call (similar to the rates paid by American hookers), and local girls view it as a worthwhile place to work without being “forced” into it.

If It Were Legal (June 26^th, 2011)

Remember that bogus study who authors were so ignorant they equated an increase in ads with migrating whores, and claimed that 0.4% of something constitutes a major fraction? Well, partisan prohibitionists are using it to blame Republicans for “sex trafficking” despite a greater rise in ads during the Democratic convention:

…Huffington Post and Jezebel are running with stories claiming that GOP convention-goers are “hands down” the biggest clients at area strip clubs during political conventions. Along with strip club attendance, conventions also increase prostitution…and child sex trafficking…HuffPo continues…“A Baylor University study found that…conventions ‘increased the count of Craigslist sex worker ads by a substantial amount’”…researchers…found that sex ads increased by between 29% and 44% over their baseline level during 2008′s Republican convention in Minneapolis. Ads increased by between 47% and 77% in Denver, the site of the Democratic convention. Further, the study pointed out that a plurality of convention attendees are members of the media…

Dirty Amateurs (August 17^th, 2011)

MTV had the good sense to protect itself against STD-based liability claims from the cast members of Jersey Shore; there oughta be a law that these damned dirty amateurs get checked weekly by a government doctor, and arrested if they test positive.

Higher Education (December 11^th, 2011)

Something tells me that Professor Kubistant needs to find a regular escort:

A Western Nevada College student claims…that her human sexuality instructor required students to masturbate to pass his class, made them keep sex journals for class discussion, was obsessed with women’s orgasms and told the class “that he will increase their sexual urges to such a height that they won’t be able to think about anything other than sex”…Kubistant told the students that their final exam would be an assignment…which had to address such topics as early sexual exploration, sexual abuse, loss of virginity, homosexual experiences, promiscuity, cheating, arousal, climaxes, masturbation, sexually transmitted diseases and fetishes…

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

While groups like the soi-disant “European Women’s Lobby” produce ridiculous “end demand” tripe, European sex worker groups are producing ads like this:

It’s also available in 16 other languages.

Feet of Clay (April 5^th, 2012)

It’s nice to see the attacks on Nicholas Kristof continuously increasing:

…In a magnificent essay, “Be Aware: Nick Kristof’s Anti-Politics“, Elliott Prasse-Freeman…summarises Kristof’s oeuvre into a number of precise strokes: “By playing on his audience’s orientalist, classist and racist fantasies, Kristof fabricates legible narratives out of snapshots of distant worlds. He then crafts stunningly simplistic solutions to the seemingly irrevocable problems that plague those backwards places”…

And if you like that one, here are plenty more.

The Notorious Badge (April 9^th, 2012)

Sarah Woolley’s excellent article from XOJane explains “Why I Wince Through Hollywood Sex Scenes and Not Porn”:

…if some actors exaggerate their distaste for nudity it’s because they’ve seen what happens to the women who enjoy themselves without penance…And so, a romantic, soft lit, topless scene from a chick flick can unsettle me in ways that a supposedly degrading, adult movie rarely manages to accomplish…I’m not saying that those who willingly participate in uncomfortable scenes are victims because…they get the last say on that matter. However, I would rather watch the person who isn’t trying to numb things out with a bottle of vodka. I’m not naive enough to think that sex workers are free from shitty days at the office but, given their job description, I’m less likely to be watching someone wary of getting their front bottom out, than if I were watching a mainstream actress in a sex scene…If a sex worker speaks out on slipping standards it is correct to condemn the appropriate parties but it is usually an entire industry that is maligned in the process. If a mainstream actor brings a drink on set in brown paper (keeping the latter to hyperventilate into later) we applaud her for her craft and possibly chuck an award her way…

First They Came for the Hookers… (June 5^th, 2012)

Bubbles Burbujas on the problems with “pole taxes”:

…Connecting funding for victims of sexual assault to strip clubs is the primary reason I don’t like these taxes. It is absolutely offensive to have the government tell us that we—or, rather, our customers—are responsible for rape and domestic violence, and that we should be taxed specifically for that purpose…While strip clubs are certainly a luxury expense…There is…no guarantee that the taxes will be collected from patrons since the tax is on the clubs, not the customers. This means there’s a good chance that the fees dancers pay to work will go up to cover the club’s tax bill…Tracy Clark-Flory wrote about the latest round of state pole taxes at Salon, and spoke with anthropologist Judith Lynne Hanna…[who has criticized] the faulty “secondary effects” studies that blames strip clubs for increasing crime and breaks it down for the propaganda it is. I wrote about the myth of secondary effects here after the Texas Supreme Court’s decision came down, and it’s good they’re being exposed for the shoddy research they are…

The Widening Gyre (July 6^th, 2012)

The inherent racism of “trafficking” mythology isn’t usually as obvious as it is in this June 8 cartoon.

Even though the law’s supporters say “We simply cannot have drivers knowingly profiting from the sex trade, willingly taking prostitutes from john to john, job to job,” we’re also supposed to believe this:

Cabbies can pick up all the scantily clad women they want without worrying about being charged with promoting prostitution, Mayor Bloomberg declared…“There’s no penalty for transporting a prostitute or decoy, but only for knowingly engaging in a sex-trafficking operation”…the mayor said…City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras…sponsor of the legislation, said such fears were overblown because her bill was targeted at a small number of cabbies involved in hooker rings…“It’s not the majority of drivers. However, when you have a young girl being driven to 30, 40, 50 johns a night, it is a very big problem.”

Obviously third-grade math skills and a sense of the size of one’s own city are not requirements for a position on the New York city council.

Metaupdates

Good News, Bad News in TW3 (#10) (March 10^th, 2012)

As per my epigram, an example of governmental insanity in Western Australia:

…leading urban planning expert…Paul Maginn said the government’s …reform bill…would do little to move prostitution out of the suburbs. “If you look historically…the sex industry is quite adaptive…they’ll still continue, it’s not going to be eradicated”…Maryanne Kenworthy, owner of the Langtrees brothels in Perth and Kalgoorlie, supports Mr Maginn’s claim…”This government is trying to stamp out escorts, which no country in the world has successfully done…Instead, the industry is going to go completely underground…How many of WA’s 4000 sex workers are going to get a commercial industrial area to work out of? None, they can’t afford to, it costs half a million dollars just to get council approval”…

The More the Better in TW3 (#11) (March 17^th, 2012)

Zahia Dehar isn’t doing too badly for a “trafficked child”: “There aren’t many fashion designers who can say they got their starts as underage prostitutes. But Zahia Dehar…first earned her fame as the center of a high-profile sex scandal involving three elite European soccer players in 2010…[then] crossed over into fashion, earning praise from Karl Lagerfeld and a cover shoot for V‘s Spain edition…”

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs in
TW3 (#25) (June 23^rd, 2012)

It’s good to see at least a few small countries standing up to Uncle Sam’s bullying:

The Guyana Government today denounced the latest installation of the US State Department report on trafficking in persons…“The Report fails to establish not one single fact. The Task Force notes several inaccuracies and misrepresentations in the Report that must be addressed. What is clear is that the architects of this Report have not made significant progress in improving the veracity, coherence and validity of their annual assessments. The Ministerial Task Force denounces the Report since it comprises unsubstantiated generalisations and repetitive uncorroborated claims. The Task Force strongly recommends that the US State Department seek to improve its methodology, establish proper baselines to guide comparisons, avoid use of anecdotal claims and develop a consistent, understandable, transparent and logical tier ranking system if countries are to benefit from these rituals…”

The Course of a Disease in TW3 (#26) (June 30^th, 2012)

Wendy Lyon takes a detailed look at the report which inspired Norway’s minister for social affairs to call for the Swedish Model to be scrapped; she discovers that besides the problems we’ve already discussed, the model literally forces sex workers into the street and promotes pimping.

One Year Ago Today

“Imaginary Lines” argues in favor of loosened immigration restrictions, and points out how the current situation helps to drive “trafficking” hysteria.

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That Was the Week That Was (#26)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged Australia, bad customers, Bad Fantasy-Good Reality, Bell Hook & Kettle, Between the Lines, brothels, Canada, censorship, Check Your Premises, Coming and Going, cops, Counterfeit Comfort, dirty, East Asia, Europe, FBI, France, Google, Hooters Japanese Style, hysteria, Illinois, internet, Japan, law, Louisiana, My Favorite Updates, neofeminism, New York, Norway, pimps, porn, psychology, restaurants, serial killers, sex offender registry, stereotypes, streetwalkers, Surplus Women, Swedish model, Texas, The Course of a Disease, underage, United Kingdom, Vietnam, What a Week!, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on June 30, 2012| 69 Comments »

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority. – Joseph Addison

We’re halfway through the year already! Here’s a new item followed by eight updates and four metaupdates.

Feeding On Their Own

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (one of the goons behind the toothless threats against Backpage and a major promoter of the “gypsy whores” myth) has accused Google (which gave $11 million to anti-whore groups) of failing to enable Abbot’s snooping. I’m not really concerned with the conflict itself; I’m just glad to see two supporters of trafficking hysteria at each other’s throats. Maybe Abbott will be too busy fighting Google to persecute as many consenting adults as usual, and if this costs Google a lot of money they’ll have less to give to prohibitionists this year. Let’s hope this becomes a trend; perhaps Martha Coakley will sue CNN next.

Updates

Reading Between the Lines (November 11^th, 2010)

The last time the FBI diverted federal funds to conduct local prostitution busts under the guise of “fighting sex trafficking” I had a full report to dissect, but this time they’re playing coy; though press releases for “Operation Cross-Country 6” crow about the “rescue” of 79 “children” and the arrest of 104 “pimps”, no mention is made of the hundreds of adult women who were no doubt arrested as well (over 800 of them if the proportions are similar to those of the last raid). As for those “children”: most underage whores are about 17 so the majority of these probably are as well, though we’re only told they were “as young as” 13 (which would be true if only one was). Statistically, 66 of these “child sex slaves” have never even met a pimp, so where did 104 “pimps” come from? The answer is that most of them are probably male or transgender prostitutes, cast as “pimps” to fit the narrative. I’ll write more on this when more complete data becomes available, but in the meantime here’s an analysis of local reports compiled by the ever-thorough Emi Koyama.

Hooters, Japanese Style (December 15^th, 2010)

Japanese cops are adopting American-style prudishness and repression:

…police…arrested five employees affiliated with a restaurant chain that features female staff members in revealing clothing. Nikkan Gendai…sees the bust as another example of the demise of another popular form of salaryman entertainment…Attired in bikinis that expose their midriffs, the girls perform dance routines…and shake their hips as they take food orders…“After these girls get off work, they’ll attract stalkers,” says lawyer Toshi Okabayashi…“Since this type of employment could also develop into a hotbed for prostitution, the police cannot overlook these places.” The lawyer adds that these recent arrests are intended to set an example…

I’m not sure why the police should be concerned with “hotbeds of prostitution” when the trade is essentially legal in Japan; that “set an example” bit is chilling.

Check Your Premises (March 10^th, 2011)

Another man convicted of “child pornography” for taking photos of a woman with whom he was legally having sex:

…Marshall Hollins had a 17-year-old girlfriend…perfectly legal in Illinois, where the age of consent for sex is 17. Yet because Hollins took pictures…he was convicted of three child pornography offenses and sentenced to eight years in prison…the Illinois Supreme Court rejected Hollins’…arguments…While 17 might be old enough to have sex, the court said, allowing the event to be photographed entails additional risks that arguably require another year’s worth of maturity and wisdom…dissenting Justice Anne M. Burke noted…that…”all five photographs…are extreme closeups of the couples’ genitals,” including neither faces nor “visible identifying marks such as scars or tattoos”…

So in the American mind, the “risk” of creating an unidentifiable “dirty” picture outweighs that of creating a human life.

Surplus Women (September 27^th, 2011)

This rather bizarre item from The Sun presents a sympathetic view of an accused serial killer, but dismisses the three Winnipeg sex workers he may have murdered in a single phrase. Well, at least it doesn’t dwell in lurid and loving detail on the women’s profession as an equivalent American article would.

Bell, Hook and Kettle (December 6^th, 2011)

Though the Salvation Army claims that whores are all “victims” who need rescue, it apparently feels differently about homosexuals:

…In talking to…Serena Ryan and Pete Dillon on their Salt and Pepper radio show [audio here]…Major Andrew Craibe, a media relations director for one of the [Salvation Army’s] Australian branches, had this exchange with the hosts:

Ryan: According to the Salvation Army, [gay people] deserve death. How do you respond to that, as part of your doctrine?
Craibe: Well, that’s a part of our belief system.
Ryan: So we should die.
Craibe: You know, we have an alignment to the Scriptures, but that’s our belief.

The doctrine they’re referring to is…the Salvation Story: Salvationist Handbook of Doctrine, which borrows heavily from Romans 1:18-32…the Salvation Army has officially distanced itself from Craibe’s remarks…

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

The Norwegian body politic may yet fight the Swedish cancer into remission:

Norway should rip up a law that criminalizes sex buyers, Oslo’s social affairs chief believes, as a new report shows a marked rise in violence against prostitutes…Anniken Hauglie [said]…”The reality is that the law has made it more difficult for women…It’s our political responsibility to take this feedback seriously”…the Pro Sentret report indicates that the law has…made prostitutes much more susceptible to violence at the hands of their clients as the sex trade moves further underground…Many of the women also said the new law had scared off many of their more reliable customers, while troublesome and violent clients were relatively undeterred…

The fact that the ban hasn’t decreased prostitution may also help: “In 2011, the number of prostitutes…rose by 28 percent compared to the previous year, according to…Pro Sentret, the country’s official help centre for prostitutes…”

Meanwhile, in France:

…Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the [French] women’s rights minister…said in an interview that she would be organising a conference of experts on how to contain the sex-trade and human-trafficking… “Since the 19^th century and…Josephine Butler, Britain and France have been the core countries in the international mobilisation against prostitution. I really hope that these common roots are still alive”…

I hope so, too; though Josephine Butler was against prostitution personally and promoted the idea of whores as “victims”, she also opposed the idea of using laws to control or “abolish” it.

Yellow Fever (June 18^th, 2012)

If you thought 20 clients a night was a bit hard to believe, and 35 a night wholly absurd, how do you feel about 50?

Tamara Vandermoon…ran away when she was 12, the same age she turned her first trick…before she knew it she was prostituting herself up to 50 times a night, the money going to her pimp or to feed [her] drug habit…When it comes to child and adolescent sex-trafficking in the United States, the FBI ranks Minneapolis-St. Paul among the top 13…With its tangle of highways…its year-round sporting events and frequent conventions, millions pass through on any given day…many teens who wind up in the sex trade are runaways targeted by men who coerce or threaten them through physical or psychological abuse…

It would be hard to imagine a more ludicrous collection of myths and fallacies in one short article. Besides the turgid client count there’s the ridiculous belief that a large number of highways constitutes evidence that a city is a “sex trafficking” hub, the myth that sporting events attract whores and the lie that most teen whores are recruited by “pimps”, and that’s just in the first six bite-sized paragraphs (before it descends into badge-licking, “trafficking” platitudes and “end demand” rhetoric). I almost feel I should stand up and applaud.

My Favorite TV Dramas (June 27^th, 2012)

William Shatner gets it, even if the former mayor of Ilfracombe doesn’t:

Star Trek actor William Shatner…[appeared on] the BBC show Have I Got News for You…When he mispronounced the town’s name, guest panellist Charlie Brooker said he had made it sound “deeply sexual” and Shatner replied: “The place is laced with prostitution.” [Paul Crabb, Former Mayor of Ilfracombe] emailed Shatner’s agents: “As Captain James T Kirk, Mr Shatner has been to places where no man has gone before, however, [this]…clearly shows he has never been [here]. If he came, we could show him that there is no prostitution in Ilfracombe”…In an email…Shatner replied that prostitution “commonly means sex for something of value…I would be hard pressed to believe that sex was not being had in Ilfracombe for something of value, perhaps a lengthy marriage, children or a valuable career. In any event, my apologies for having singled out Ilfracombe as a potential haven for prostitution…”

N.B: With 10,840 people, Ilfracombe might have as many as 15 whores.

Metaupdates

Counterfeit Comfort in TW3 (#8) (February 26^th, 2012)

Louisiana just won’t give up trying to destroy people’s lives:

A new Louisiana law requires sex offenders…to state their criminal status on their Facebook or other social networking page…[it] builds upon existing sex offender registration laws, in which the offender must notify immediate neighbors and a school district of his or her residency near them…The law states that…[a registrant] “shall include in his profile…an indication that he is a sex offender or child predator and shall include notice of the crime for which he was convicted, the jurisdiction of conviction, a description of his physical characteristics… and his residential address”…

In other words, he’s “required” to provide lunatics with detailed instructions to make it easier to murder him. No doubt other states will follow Louisiana’s lead, despite the fact that onerous sex offender notification requirements are known to increase the risk of re-offense by socially isolating the registrant.

Coming and Going in TW3 (#17) (April 28th, 2012)

Anna Gristina finally left prison Tuesday evening after her bail was reduced to a more reasonable figure:

…A Manhattan judge signed…Anna Gristina’s $250,000 bond package, clearing the way for her to be released with an ankle bracelet…Gristina, 44, is a mother of four who tends to rescued pigs…but prosecutors say she also was the madam of an upscale sex service for 15 years…Gristina has said she was merely starting a matchmaking service, not peddling prostitutes…

Tracy Quan published an interesting article on Gristina’s defense which points out, as I have before, that the line between matchmaking and “pandering” is a purely arbitrary one.

Bad Fantasy, Good Reality in TW3 (#20) (May 19^th, 2012)

Dr. Kimberly Hoang was not satisfied with merely publishing the truth about Vietnamese sex workers in her dissertation; she also gave an interview to Vietnamese media:

…Dr Kimberly Kay Hoang…[said] “Most people assume that women engaging in the sex industry do so because they are kidnapped, forced, or coerced into sex work…However, few studies have been able to furnish empirical evidence to support these claims…Legalizing this work would provide women with the same legal rights as other working people”…

What a Week! in TW3 (#22) (June 3^rd, 2012)

As part of the process of licensing what will be Australia’s largest brothel, Urbis think tank did a study on the effects of brothels on neighborhoods. Its findings?

There is not a definitive relationship between the opening and expansion of…brothels and any increase in crime.

There is no proven correlation between decreases in property value and the location of sex premises in an area.

There is no evidence that anti-social behaviour in inner city areas can be attributed to the clients or staff of sex premises.

So, sex industry premises, much like other contentious uses such as funeral parlours, can cause a level of discomfort for some members of the community. At the same time, the sex industry has a role to play in the social and economic vibrancy of cities and sex premises are a legal and legitimate land use.

One Year Ago Today

“June Q & A” defines my own terms “archeofeminism” and “neofeminism”, discusses the Indonesian “Obedient Wives Club” and offers assistance to a man who has difficulty achieving orgasm with a partner.

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The Course of a Disease

Posted in Current Events, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Australia, brothels, Canada, censorship, cops, Denmark, dirty, disease, East Asia, end demand, Europe, France, hysteria, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, law, Middle East, neofeminism, New Zealand, Norway, porn, Sweden, Swedish model, The Course of a Disease, United Kingdom on February 16, 2012| 20 Comments »

This sickness doth infect the very life-blood of our enterprise. – William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One (IV,i)

If you pay any attention at all to the “debates” amateurs indulge themselves in over how prostitution should be “handled” or “regulated” (discussions that rarely, if ever, involve actual prostitutes), you’ve encountered the term “Swedish Model” (AKA “Nordic Model”). My column of one year ago today contained a simple explanation of this “model”, its shockingly sexist basis and a short synopsis of its progress at that time:

The Swedish Model…is based on the premise that women are moral imbeciles who are psychologically incompetent to determine the conditions under which we will consent to sex, and the state therefore assumes the right to set those conditions for us. Like girls under the age of consent in most countries, women in Swedish Model countries are neither allowed to consent to certain sex partners, nor can they be held liable for their actions if they violate the law; since only men are considered fully competent to make sexual decisions, Swedish Model law only punishes men for violating that law. Up until now only three Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden and Iceland) had such a low opinion of women’s competency, but despite the total lack of demonstrable positive results the Swedish disease appears to be spreading; several jurisdictions in the United States appear to be flirting with it, a neofeminist group presumed to “demand” that Canada adopt it last year, Labour MSP Trish Goodman has repeatedly tried to force it through the Scottish parliament, and England only narrowly averted it by replacing its last Labour government. The latest country to jump on the repressive, misogynistic bandwagon is Ireland…

Though I have nothing to add about the model itself, I thought a report on how the various patients exposed to this political disease were faring might prove instructive.

Sweden: “Patient Zero” is like a psychotic HIV-positive man who makes an effort to give it to as many others as possible. The Swedish government is actually proud of its deeply-twisted view of male-female relations and works hard to export it, even to the point of producing pamphlets and sending representatives to lie to other governments about its “success”. But despite its grandiose claims about overwhelming public support for the “model”, its attempts to brainwash toddlers so as to ensure future support for it and its harsh suppression of women who dare to challenge its “philosophical” basis, the truth is that 81% of Swedes say they are “angry” about the law and 10% of Swedish girls report having taken money for sex at least once. A few brave Swedish politicians keep opposing the law while others use their positions to run clandestine brothels, and there is no evidence sex work has decreased even one iota, just as it never decreases under any criminalization regime.

Australia: The Aussies appear highly resistant to this particular malady, and have even attempted to help others overcome it by releasing a report which “dismiss[es] it as a load of politically-motivated codswallop unsubstantiated by facts.”

Canada: The efforts of neofeminists to infect this portion of the Commonwealth have failed dramatically, and despite government efforts to dehumanize prostitutes and deny them rights, the opinions of the public, the media and the courts are all moving toward decriminalization. At the time of this writing a constitutional challenge against the anti-whore laws is in progress, and the Himel Decision striking down the laws in Ontario is still being discussed by an appeals court.

Denmark: Though sex worker advocates are fighting it and few politicians support it, “sex trafficking” fetishists have even succeeded in exposing this usually-sensible country to the Swedish disease. Though the fetishists would like to believe they have a chance of full infection, Laura Agustín tells me advocates there are reasonably confident that it hasn’t a chance.

Europe: Despite the fact that individual European countries have their own prostitution policies and most are quite happy with their own versions of legalization, the soi-disant “European Women’s Lobby” managed to scam public funds to produce a ridiculous “end demand” commercial; some highly-placed officials were not at all pleased by the fact that the Swedish-born (and openly anti-whore) “Commissioner for Home Affairs” gave public funds to a fringe group to advance a personal agenda.

France: The French have long had a love-hate affair with filles de joie which rivals that of the United States in its depth and intensity; after the Second World War whores became the scapegoats for Gallic self-loathing and the country has been officially “abolitionist” since 1960 (except in the military, which provided its troops with whores until about 15 years ago). France is now “considering” the Swedish Model, but those who support it are in conflict with those pushing total criminalization. And since France doesn’t shy away from criminalizing clothes and opinions, why not motivations for sex as well?

Iceland: The Swedish infection is so acute in this westernmost outpost of Scandinavia that it might well prove terminal. In addition to prostitution, Iceland has also criminalized stripping and is working on banning porn; this climate has bred a large group of misandrist vigilantes who use the laws to stalk and attack men and who demand censorship powers over all print, electronic and internet communication in the country.

Ireland: Irish sex worker advocates have fought the massed forces of prohibitionists for a year now, despite interference from anti-whore behemoth Google and media-supported “sex trafficking” hysteria very similar to that in the American media; as in the US, the chief struggle for Irish prostitutes is simply to be heard (much less considered) above the Puritanical din raised by neofeminists, fanatical Christians and control-freak politicians. I’ll be keeping an eye on Turn Off the Blue Light and Feminist Ire for further developments; the matter seems poised to come to a head in the spring.

Israel: The Knesset (Israeli parliament) “Ministerial Committee on Legislation” unanimously approved a client criminalization bill on February 12^th; it now passes to the full legislature for consideration. And if this recent editorial from the Jerusalem Post (which portrays all women as helpless moral imbeciles at the mercy of caricatured mustache-twirling male villains) is any indication, Israeli plague carriers are just as willing to use outrageous claims and blatant lies to promote their agenda as those in the US and Scandinavia.

Norway: The second country infected by this vile illness hasn’t completely succumbed yet; as I reported on February 5^th the country’s official report to UNAIDS listed significant public health and human rights problems which it directly blamed on the ban. Of course, the opinion of one government department won’t change anything, but since Norway isn’t as politically invested in the “model” as Sweden is, it could be some small sign of hope.

United Kingdom: This patient offers the most hopeful prognosis after Canada; despite a close brush with an especially virulent case in 2010, Britain now seems to be moving in the direction of decriminalization. The Association of Chief Police officers supports it, as does the new assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, and in December several politicians met with Tim Barnett, the British-born New Zealand MP who sponsored decriminalization there. Recent developments in Scotland could lead to problems, but it’s too soon yet to tell.

United States: The US State Department continues to pour money into “anti-trafficking” campaigns which encourage persecution and abuse of prostitutes in countries which depend on American charity (especially in the Far East), and while these campaigns aren’t directly tied to the “Swedish Model” they often feature “end demand” rhetoric which directly meshes with it. In addition, wealthy American individuals with personal agendas and corporations eager to capitalize on popular hype continue to bankroll “rescue” operations which victimize women and children and “end demand” efforts which result in the arrest and officially-sanctioned robbery of hundreds of men.

All in all, then, I think we can be guardedly optimistic about the danger of this epidemic continuing to spread. Though some countries (Ireland and the US) seem to be sinking into the disease, others (such as Canada and the UK) appear not only to have avoided the sickness, but to be headed in the healthy direction of family members like Australia and New Zealand. In most countries (such as France and Denmark) it looks like business as usual, and though two of the three full-blown cases appear to be worsening, the third has shown a few faint signs of improvement. I’ll continue to keep all the patients’ charts up to date, and let y’all know as the prognosis changes for each one.

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That Was the Week That Was (#2)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Moral Cancer, condoms, cops, crypto-moralism, Denmark, dirty, disease, Europe, harm reduction, law, Norway, politicians, psychology, Sales Pitch, streetwalkers, Swedish model, Tennessee, The Last Shall Be First, transgender, yin and yang on February 5, 2012| 23 Comments »

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things. – G.K. Chesterton

Welcome to the second installment of my new weekly feature (introduced yesterday); once I catch up, all the stories appearing in “That Was the Week That Was” columns will be ones I discovered within the previous week. But for now, let’s look at a few items from week 2 of 2012:

The Last Shall Be First

I’ve often stated that humans have a distressing tendency to elevate the least-evolved among us – those who desire control over others – to positions of power, but it’s rare that a politician gives such a clear and graphic demonstration of that truth as the one thoughtfully provided by Tennessee state representative Richard Floyd on January 12^th:

…Richard Floyd…[is] the sponsor of [a] bill (HB 2279), which [would institute a $50 fine for anybody who does not use the public restroom or dressing room that matches the sex on his birth certificate; since Tennessee law does not allow for the sex to be changed on birth certificates, this would make it illegal for transgender people to utilize public accommodations that match their gender. Floyd said]…“I believe if I was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there — I don’t care if he thinks he’s a woman and tries on clothes with them in there — I’d just try to stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry. Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk. We cannot continue to let these people dominate how society acts and reacts. Now if somebody thinks he’s a woman and he’s a man and wants to try on women’s clothes, let him take them into the men’s bathroom or dressing room”…This bill is nothing short of an outright attack on transgender people…Even individuals passing through one of Tennessee’s airports or bus stops could be targeted for these fines, just for being transgender.

The bill was introduced January 9th and withdrawn by its co-sponsor on the 12th, effectively killing it and deeply upsetting Floyd. In an interview on WTVF in Nashville, Floyd explains that his bill “protects everybody”:

“I’m just sick and tired of society having to adjust to every little alternate lifestyle or little whim of someone who thinks they’re different,” Floyd says. “We’ve got the tail wagging the dog. If things go in the future like Washington wants them to go, people will be marrying their dogs and cats and horses. We can’t continue to let society go down a slippery slope of depravity and survive as a society. We can’t do it.”

Well, that’s different! And here you thought he was just a bigoted ignoramus, when in reality he was using the Scalia argument.

Update to “A Moral Cancer” (March 6^th, 2011)

The article described in this column intended to create panic over a minor increase in a rare form of cancer caused by HPV spread through oral sex. I described those who write such articles as “crypto-moralists”, people who…

…avoid words like “sin” and eschew religious rhetoric, and may not recognize their own moralism even if confronted with it. Such people are always (perhaps unconsciously) looking for ways to prove that vices really are objectively “bad”; they delight in cirrhosis and emphysema, secretly love syphilis and AIDS and pore over each new “discovery” about the deleterious health effects of good-tasting foods with the same rapt attention as a normal person might read a letter from his accountant informing him that his taxes had decreased.

Here’s the latest exercise in crypto-moralism, courtesy of the Guardian of January 13^th:

…Eating 50g of processed meat every day – the equivalent to one sausage or two rashers of bacon – increases the risk [of pancreatic cancer] by 19%, compared to people who do not eat processed meat at all. For people consuming double this amount…the increased risk jumps to 38%, and is 57% for those eating 150g a day. But experts cautioned that the [lifetime] risk of pancreatic cancer was relatively low…one in 77 for men and one in 79 for women. Nevertheless, the disease is deadly – it is frequently diagnosed at an advanced stage and kills 80% of people in under a year. Only 5% of patients are still alive five years after diagnosis. The latest study, published in the British Journal of Cancer…found inconclusive evidence on the risks of eating red meat overall, compared to eating no red meat…

The article goes on to say that smoking causes a third of all cases of pancreatic cancer, and that obesity is a major cause as well. Now, let’s look at the math; what they’re actually saying is that if you eat a serving of bacon every single day for your entire adult life, your chance of contracting pancreatic cancer “jumps” from about 1 in 78 to 1 in 65…slightly less than the likelihood of terminal flu and a tiny fraction of the odds of perishing by heart disease, cancer or stroke. So by all means, give up foods you enjoy in order to reduce your already-minuscule chance of croaking from a rare illness, but don’t imagine these “warnings” are anything other than disguised Puritanism.

Update to “Sales Pitch” (May 22^nd, 2011)

The Swedes claim that criminalizing the clients of prostitutes has almost wiped out prostitution in Sweden and Norway; they claim that it’s “impossible to run a brothel in Sweden”, that sex workers have not been harmed in any way, and that the vast majority of Swedes “enthusiastically support” the ban. All in all they claim a lot of things, none of them true; on January 15^th Wendy Lyon reported the results of an official Norwegian government study:

…Norway’s 2010 Progress Report to UNAIDS…states that since the sex purchase ban was introduced…“it has become more difficult to…gain admittance to prostitution circles…sex workers no longer want to carry condoms and lubricants out of fear that they will be used by the police as [evidence]…support and health services for sex workers…argue that due to increased competition and greater stress on the market, sex workers are forced to offer clients [more] unprotected sex…[and] sex workers in escort services are forced to sell sex at the customer’s arena, which makes them more vulnerable to violence and abuse.”

…More detail appears in [an] appended…survey…with data compiled by the Norwegian Directorate of Health in conjunction with other government departments and NGOs…Part B…was answered by six NGOs…On the issue of obstacles [to effective HIV prevention, treatment, care and support, they]…state: “…police enforcement has affected the sex workers’ relation to other services, such as harm reduction services, as many refuse to associate with anything or anyone that may give the police a suspicion of sex work. Condoms are used as evidence, hence the sex workers position for negotiation with the client about safe sex [has] been weakened…”

…But has the ban achieved its aim of reducing the amount of prostitution and trafficking? …“[A harm reduction centre]…estimated that the number of sex workers…in Oslo is reduced by 16%…However, [because] these estimates…are based on those who have had contact with support services or placed advertisements, researchers maintain that these data are unreliable because not all prostitutes get counted…there has been a significant reduction in registered sex workers from Nigeria and Central and Eastern Europe residing temporarily in Norway…Reports from Denmark and Luxembourg indicated [that] many Nigerians have moved [there]…The number of registered Thai sex workers on the other hand, has increased…” I’m unclear as to why the number (as opposed to the proportion) of Thai sex workers should have increased since the ban, but this otherwise seems to validate a few points that I’ve made…first, that criminal laws are a poor method for getting people out of prostitution; second, that the effect of prostitution laws cannot be viewed in isolation from the effect of migration policies; and third, that what may seem to be a “reduction” in prostitution is all too often merely a diversion…If those Nigerians and CEE sex workers had been trafficked or otherwise exploited in Norway, and undoubtedly some of them were, they’re still being exploited in Denmark or Luxembourg or wherever. Norway’s law hasn’t done a thing to help them, it just made them someone else’s problem…

Of course, this is exactly what sex workers have been saying for years, but now that one of their own government bureaus has said it maybe someone will listen (not that I’m not going to hold my breath or anything).

One Year Ago Today

“Between the Ears” presents evidence that “most women’s sexual problems derive not from [low testosterone levels], but from what’s going on in their heads.”

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The Hits Keep Coming

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged Africa, agency denial, bad customers, Barbie, BDSM, bogus studies, censorship, drivers, drugs, Elephant in the Parlor, ethics, Europe, fantasy, Good Fantasy-Bad Reality, Ireland, law, male prostitutes, marriage, Mississippi, neofeminism, Norway, politicians, porn, Recognition, Saint Death, streetwalkers, Sweden, Swedish model, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world, witchcraft on December 18, 2011| 13 Comments »

Enough! or Too much! – William Blake

As I said in my column of December 9^th, there always seems to be an explosion of interesting news articles at the end of the year, and here are seven more updates. After today, I’m officially done with this sort of thing until January!

Recognition (August 19^th, 2010)

In this early post I discussed the awkwardness which results when an escort discovers that she knows a client in real life, but none of the examples I gave can compare with this UPI story from December 3^rd:

…Titus Ncube of Bulawayo [Zimbabwe] said he called for a prostitute to come to the hotel room in which he was staying while having marital problems and was shocked when his 20-year-old daughter arrived…Ncube said he collapsed to [the] floor upon recognizing his daughter, who quickly fled, crying. “I am sorry for what I did,” Ncube said. “I spoke to my wife and daughter. I apologized for my actions as I just wanted my family back. My daughter has stopped doing what she was doing and is going back to school next year. My marital problems are not over, but we have a counselor who is helping us to get over this most difficult period”…

R.I.P Bob Guccione (October 26^th, 2010)

In this article I pointed out that men’s magazine publishers have “to be given credit for pushing the envelope and helping to advance the cause of sexual liberty in the US by bringing both porn and frank discussion of sexual topics (including prostitution) into the mainstream.” Now a new book by Mike Edison explores the history of American men’s magazines in depth so as to prove that assertion, and the author promotes it with “How Sex Magazines Made The World A Better Place” in the December 7^th Huffington Post.

Good Fantasy, Bad Reality (October 27^th, 2010)

From the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger of December 12^th:

A truck driver claims his prostitute fiancee suffocated as they celebrated their engagement with a meth and bondage sex party. Then he drove from California to Mississippi with the corpse in the cab…and set fire to the truck – with himself and the body inside. Mark Andrew Rice pleaded guilty to arson and desecrating a corpse and was sentenced Monday to six years in prison…[with] two years…suspended for time served.

Rice, 49…met [Natasha] Carpenter at a truck stop in Texas. He fell in love after several encounters…and [gave] her an engagement ring…[on] Sept. 15, 2009. As part of their celebration in Barstow, Calif., Carpenter agreed to let him bind…and…gag…her…When he found her dead, Rice panicked and bought “all the meth his dealer had” and drove to…[Mississippi, where he] planned to say goodbye to his family and kill himself…[but they] took a gun away from him so he climbed into the rig and set it ablaze. Deputies eventually pulled him from the burning truck…Hancock County authorities believe he would’ve been charged with manslaughter or worse had she died in Mississippi…Prosecutors in San Bernardino County, Calif..said there was “insufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

It’s really quite a sad story, since he seems to have genuinely loved her; I’m guessing the methamphetamine increased her metabolism so that she suffocated more quickly than he allowed for.

Barbie (December 5^th, 2010)

In this column I pointed out that “People with a lot of free time and more math skills than sense have published complicated calculations showing that at ¹/₆scale, Barbie would be 5’9” tall, with measurements of 36”-18”-33” and a weight of 110#” and that “The campaign to suppress or neuter Barbie derives from the same repressions and insecurities as the campaign to ban porn and abolish prostitution…” And just as neofeminists aren’t too scrupulous about getting their facts right with regard to porn or prostitution, so they aren’t in their Barbie-attacks either:

Galia Slayen…[told NBC’s “Today” show that] she first created [a 6’ tall] Barbie-like figure — with a 39-inch bust, 18-inch waist and 33-inch hips…for the first National Eating Disorders Awareness week in 2007 while she was [an anorexic] high school student in Portland [Oregon]…”I’m not blaming Barbie [for my illness] — she’s one small factor, an environmental factor,” Slayen said. “I’m blond and blue-eyed and I figured that was what I was supposed to look like. She was my idol. It impacted the way I looked at myself.”

The grotesquely distorted microcephalic figure in the picture (which, as you will note, bears little resemblance to a real Barbie doll) is a perfect symbolic representation of the grotesquely distorted “prostitute” caricatures described by people like Melissa Farley, except that Slayen’s distortion of the math isn’t nearly as severe as that practiced by Farley et al.

Welcome To Our World (January 20^th, 2011)

It’s funny how efforts to suppress consensual activities always end up looking a lot alike, as in this December 5^th story from the Associated Press:

…Lithuania’s capital [Vilnius] recently introduced a ban on panhandling that not only punishes those who beg but those who give, with fines of up to 2,000 litas ($770). Outraged rights groups say the ban spells misery for the needy in one of Europe’s poorest countries, as winter kicks in and economic turmoil spreads across the continent…”Begging is a human right,” said Linas Kukuraitis, director of the Lithuanian chapter of Catholic charity group Caritas. “It was there long before cities emerged. There have always been those who begged and those who helped them.”

But Vilnius Mayor Arturas Zuokas says the ban will help beggars to find more sustainable ways to make a living. “Giving money to people on the street is wrong,” Zuokas said. “By doing this we doom them to stay there forever”…police…are not issuing fines just yet. Instead they are handing out cards to beggars with addresses and phone numbers of charities and homeless shelters. Stricter enforcement is expected to begin in January. The mayor himself rode his bicycle…looking for violators of the ban. Zuokas made a splash on YouTube earlier this year by riding an armored personnel carrier over a luxury car as a publicity stunt for his crackdown on illegal parking…He said there are plenty of homeless shelters for the poor in Vilnius, “but they stay on the streets because it is a kind of business.”

…Some Asian countries have laws targeting both beggars and almsgivers but European…laws typically focus only on [beggars] and aren’t always strictly enforced. However, police in Ireland cracked down on panhandlers this year…[and] Austria’s Styria province…introduced a begging ban in February. None of them punish almsgivers. By contrast, Norway, one of the world’s richest countries, abolished a more than 100-year-old vagrancy law in 2005, making it legal to beg in the streets. It’s also legal in Sweden, Germany, Spain and Portugal…

Note that Sweden and Norway officially believe that beggars have more right to self-determination and making a living in a way that suits them than women do.

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

A politician being caught with a prostitute isn’t really news, but for the prostitute to expose the politician is. This one’s from the December 6^th Huffington Post:

The…married mayor [of Medford, New Jersey], accused on a website two months ago of having sex with a prostitute at a California hotel, [has] resigned…The anonymous allegation against…Chris Myers…included a photo of…him in his underwear…[The accuser] claimed to be a prostitute…[whom] Myers contacted…through a male escort website…Myers paid him $500 but didn’t fulfill promises of a car and other gifts…[and that] the broken promise was the reason he was taking his story public. The website was [soon] taken down…[and though] Myers…refused to comment on the allegations [he] didn’t deny them…His resignation letter…did not mention the scandal…

Saint Death (November 1^st, 2011)

The December 10^th Miami Herald featured this article on persecution of Umbanda, another syncretism of Christianity with African and Indian beliefs. The crusade is largely driven by Pentecostal Christians who…wait for it…want to “save” believers from their choices:

…many Brazilians…view Umbanda…as…witchcraft…In many parts of the country, [it] was outlawed until the 1950s, and in the following three decades believers were supposed to register with the police…Brazil’s…1989 constitution enshrined [religious] freedom…but…followers say official disdain and intense prejudice still put their lives and shrines at risk…[they] report on average 100…physical or verbal attacks a year…in…Rio de Janeiro alone…Cases…have increased along with the…power of Pentecostal religions…”There is always a discourse of ‘taking them from the hands of the devil'”…[theologian Fernando] Altemeyer said…Such tensions have come into relief in Sao Goncalo, where Mayor Aparecida Panniset, an outspoken Pentecostal, has been accused of failing to protect Umbanda sites, or even destroying them. In October, she ignored pleas by religious tolerance activists to stop the demolition of the house where the first Umbanda rituals were held in 1908. She also turned down requests to meet the activists…then moved ahead with efforts to raze another traditional Umbanda house…

One Year Ago Today

“The Swedish Pimpocracy” shows how the government of Sweden exploits women to “implement a plain old-fashioned tyranny while hiding under the cloak of ‘enlightenment’.”

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Politicizing the Personal

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Words, tagged agency denial, BDSM, cosmetic surgery, fantasy, Japan, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, Norway, Politicizing the Personal, porn, psychology, stereotypes, tabula rasa, yin and yang on September 26, 2011| 51 Comments »

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. – Alice Walker

In 1970 Carol Hanisch published a second-wave feminist manifesto entitled “The Personal is Political”, and its title soon became a big feminist catchphrase. The only problem with that is, it’s a load of crap; usually, the personal is just personal, and declaring it to be political merely holds the door open for increasingly tyrannical intrusion into people’s private lives. The idea that “the personal is political” is borrowed from Marxist dogma and basically means that nearly any problem experienced by an individual woman is the result of “systematic oppression.” If she’s unhappy or has a screwed-up life it isn’t because she’s irrational, poor, uneducated, overly emotional, foolish or unlucky in the genetic lottery, or because she’s made bad choices, or because the world is intrinsically unfair and many people of both sexes are unhappy and have screwed-up lives; it’s because she is oppressed by the Patriarchy. This is, of course, a fundamentally defeatist, paranoid and narcissistic view which removes responsibility from the individual and places it into a social context that encourages permanent class warfare (or in this case, gender warfare). Since the two sexes are different by nature and will always be unequal in one way or another, this provided political feminists with a path to political power; women were essentially told that their situation was hopeless unless they supported the schemes of the feminist leadership in its brave and determined struggle against the Male Overlords.

There are many kinds of power, but the inherent simple-mindedness of second-wave feminism recognized only one type, political power, because it was the one political feminists craved and also the one women in the postwar era had least of. Power had to be portrayed as something entirely external to the individual, which helps to explain how neofeminism was able to take control of the movement so quickly; if women realized that one of the greatest (and biologically speaking, the greatest) forms of power, namely sexual power, was already ours from birth, the Neomarxist catechism would be revealed as absurd and organized political feminism would collapse. So neofeminists intentionally reversed the truth, portraying sex as something men used to control women rather than the other way around. Second-wave feminism had launched itself by proclaiming that a woman could not take power for herself; she had to be empowered from outside (by a benevolent government controlled or at least influenced by political feminists). Neofeminism merely established a dogma designed to cut women off from their own natural powers by alienating them from their own bodies and femininity, the sources of those powers. To use a concrete analogy, the only way to consistently sell baby formula is to dry up women’s own milk or to convince them that nursing is unhealthy, disgusting or morally wrong.

“Empowered” is a deceptively simple word; it seems straightforward enough until you realize its underlying assumptions. To “empower” someone is to grant her power; it automatically implies A) that she hasn’t got any in the first place, and B) that such power is the speaker’s to give. Using the word in an active sense (“we need to empower women”) establishes the speaker or his organization as the intrinsic superior and benefactor of the person or persons so “empowered”, and using the word in a passive sense (“an empowered woman”) robs the person so “empowered” of agency, reducing her to the passive recipient of someone else’s benevolence just as people were imagined to be “granted” rights by a king in archaic political theory. Consider the way bureaucrats from Western nations use the word in reference to the people of developing nations, and you will understand how neofeminists and politicized second-wave feminists view other women.

The word “disempowered” is equally patronizing because it implies that the one so “disempowered” (usually a woman) is a weak, passive, vegetable organism who can be “empowered” or “disempowered” at will by her political masters as easily as one installs or removes batteries from a toy. With all that in mind, take a look at this article by Tracy Clark-Flory from the September 12^th Salon:

…a new study investigates the link between a country’s relative gender equality and the degree of female “empowerment” in the X-rated entertainment it consumes. Researchers at the University of Hawaii focused on three countries in particular: Norway, the United States and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1^st, 15^th and (yikes) 54^th on the United Nations’ Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). To simplify their analysis, their library of smut was limited to explicit photographs of women “from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation.” Then they set out to evaluate each image on both a disempowerment and an empowerment scale, using respective measures like whether the woman is “bound and dominated” by “leashes, collars, gags, or handcuffs” or “whether she has a natural looking body.” Their hypothesis was that societies with greater gender equity will consume pornography that has more representations of “empowered women” and less of “disempowered women.” It turned out the former was true, but…the latter was not. “While Norwegian pornography offers a wider variety of body types — conforming less to a societal ideal that is disempowering to the average woman — there are still many images that do not promote a healthy respect for women,” the researchers explain…

All researchers have biases which negatively impact the objectivity of their studies, but it’s rare that any outside of “women’s studies” are so glaringly obvious. These academics are clearly laboring under the delusion that sexual desires are “socially constructed”, revealing a deep ignorance of biology and evolutionary psychology. Furthermore, they clearly accept without question insulting and ignorant neofeminist beliefs about BDSM, have what I can only interpret as bigotry against cosmetic surgery and promote the degrading collectivist notion (perhaps related to the neofeminist gestalt myth) that it is “unhealthy” for men to be attracted to whatever kind of women they’re attracted to because it might make less attractive women feel bad. Flory, who is generally pro-sex and pro-sex work, sees the flaws in these assumptions:

…One explanation might be that…cross-cultural biological imperatives are reflected in pornography. Some of the study’s disempowerment markers could be more a reflection of the gender disparity in porn’s audience. The researchers note, “In a large portion of hardcore pornography…the erect penis is the most important organ” and “women are often used as little more than receptacles for the penis.” Is that because of sexism or because porn viewers, who are largely men, identify with…the male member?

…You can’t so easily equate dominance with empowerment and submission with disempowerment. Take, as one example, that the researchers designate a woman in an “authoritative” position as a sign of empowerment. That formula can be easily upended — clearly, submission feels empowering to plenty of people. It’s also awfully subjective: The popular line within the BDSM community is that it’s the submissive that has all the power, because they’re the ones calling the shots…sex isn’t always empowering or disempowering, equitable or inequitable — it’s much too complicated for that.

The researchers’ appalling ignorance of BDSM is apparent in their interpretation of dominatrix characters as a sign of female “empowerment”, despite the fact that such characters are as much archetypal male fantasy figures as are female slaves. Actors play roles; to assume that an actress playing a dominatrix role is somehow more “empowered” than one in a sub role is as ridiculous as assuming that the actor playing a king in an historical drama must be the star simply because his character is more important inside the fantasy world of the movie. But the most important point to note is the researchers’ patronizing assumption that male porn viewers are so impressionable that their level of “respect for women” can essentially be programmed by the content of their wanking material, and that women are such passive, childlike beings that mere images on a screen can grant them “power” or take it away.

One Year Ago Today

“Imaginary Victims” examines the difficulty trafficking fetishists have in coming up with even a few poster children to represent the phantom multitudes upon which their propaganda depends.

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