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Posts Tagged ‘Prohibition (alcohol)’

Polly Adler

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 12, 2012| 9 Comments »

If I was to make my living as a madam, I could not be concerned either with the rightness or wrongness of prostitution, considered either from a moral or criminological standpoint.  I had to look at it simply as a part of life, which exists today as it existed yesterday…The operation of any business is contingent on the law of supply and demand, and if there were no customers, there certainly would be no whorehouses.  Prostitution exists because men are willing to pay for sexual gratification, and whatever men are willing to pay for, someone will provide.  –  Polly Adler

One thing that must strike anyone who has read extensively on the history of prostitution is the way that mainstream writers are so often tolerant, sympathetic or even enthusiastic about whores of the past (even into recent times), yet so judgmental of those who have worked in the last few decades.  In “Courtesan Denial” I stated that “I suspect that they are lawheads engaged in a process of doublethink designed to protect their minds from having to deal with the fact that the EXACT SAME profession which was legal and respected in many preindustrial cultures is illegal and demonized in ours.”  But in the past 19 months I’ve come to realize that theory is inadequate for the simple reason that even past whores whose work was illegal in their own day are often glamorized; the dividing line seems to be not the Industrial Revolution or the advent of large-scale prohibitionism about a century ago, but rather the appearance of second-wave feminism.  Harlots who lived before the advent of the feminist saviors are given a free pass (like Dante’s “virtuous pagans” of pre-Christian times), but their modern sisters should “know better” and are thus condemned as infidels for rejecting the anti-sex work Gospel.  Of course, that doesn’t explain why so many people celebrate the fun times of violating alcohol Prohibition while demonizing modern drug use, but a theory has to start somewhere.

Case in point, Pearl “Polly” Adler (April 16th, 1900 – June 11th, 1962), a Russian Jew who was sent to New York ahead of her parents (Morris and Gertrude Adler) and eight younger siblings in 1914.  When the First World War interrupted her family’s plans to join her, young Polly was forced to support herself by working in a sweatshop that made corsets; though she tried to attend school at the same time, it just didn’t work out that way.  At the age of 17 she was raped by a foreman she was dating, and after an abortion decided that since she was “ruined” anyhow she might as well profit by it.  She made good contacts in the Broadway theater crowd and soon moved in with an actress and part-time working girl; in 1920 that roommate introduced Polly to her first client, a bootlegger named Tony, who kept her in an apartment on Riverside Drive.  Before long she was providing space and management for other girls, and thanks to her wit, charm, intelligence and business acumen she was soon clearing $100/week ($1100 in 2012 money).

That modest initial success grew by leaps and bounds; by 1924 she was known as the “Queen of Tarts” and opened her best-remembered brothel, the Majestic, at 215 West 75th Street.  The building featured hidden stairways and secret doors so clients could escape in case of a police raid, which was necessary because it was more than just a place where men went to have sex; it was a club where patrons of both sexes came to drink, play cards or games, and enjoy conversation, and Adler made as much money selling bootleg gin as she did collecting her cut from the girls.  The place was lavishly decorated and the walls were lined with books, many recommended by members of the Algonquin Round Table (including Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker), who became regulars soon after it opened.  Other regulars included actor John Garfield, boxer Jack Dempsey, mayor Jimmy Walker and gangster Lucky Luciano.  Her place was so well-known that she could not escape being shut down eventually, but she bribed her way out of trouble and simply moved the operation elsewhere…eleven times by the end of the decade.  It is very likely that bribes and kickbacks to cops and politicians constituted her largest operating expense.

After the stock market crashed in October of 1929, Adler’s fortunes began a slow decline.  In 1930 she was subpoenaed to testify before the Seabury Commission, a probe of a huge conspiracy by cops, prosecutors and judges to frame innocent people (often for prostitution) so they could be robbed of their life savings under threat of imprisonment.  Because she knew that testifying would probably not be a good idea for her she fled to Miami, where she remained until she grew homesick and tried to sneak back into town in May of 1931; informants sold her out immediately and she was hauled before the Commission the next day.  Not that it did the investigators any good; Adler claimed (perhaps conveniently) a poor memory, and provided almost no information of worth.  And though the Commission ended with the fall of many of her political connections, it actually made her business easier because she no longer had to pay out so much in graft – a godsend in the deepest part of the Great Depression.

Still, getting re-established wasn’t easy, and gangster Dutch Schultz became Adler’s business partner (bankrolling the venture in return for half the profit).  The two were friends, and Schultz often hid from his rivals or the police at her brothel.  This caused her considerable stress, because she was terrified that she or her girls (of whom she was extremely protective) would be killed by assassins trying to “hit” Schultz.  Still, the period proved fairly lucrative for her, and she once again attracted a celebrity clientele (including then-rising star Milton Berle).  She was only arrested twice in the next five years, but the second time – at 5 a.m. on March 5, 1935 – actually stuck.  The police had carried out an expensive, protracted, modern-style investigation as part of mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s campaign against “incorporated filth”, and she was charged with “maintaining an objectionable apartment” (at 30 East 55th Street) and “possessing a motion picture machine with objectionable pictures”.  Public sympathy was with her; a New York Daily News editorial thundered, “It is this crusading against personal and private habits and instincts — the sex instinct, the deep rooted human fondness for gambling — which is futile and sickening, just as the prohibition of liquor was.”  But the evidence was steep and so, in an early example of plea-bargaining, she pled guilty to the bawdy house charge on May 6th in exchange for dismissal of the more serious obscenity rap.  She paid a $500 fine and was sentenced to 30 days, of which she served 24; she spent the time scrubbing floors on the order of a warden who declared she must be taught the value of “honest work”.

Polly was back in business by the end of July, but things were never the same again; clients’ tastes were becoming more utilitarian, and upscale, full-service brothels like hers were declining in popularity.  She was arrested for the 17th time on January 15th, 1943; that was the last straw for her.  A year later she left New York (for only the second time in 30 years) and moved permanently to Los Angeles, where she fulfilled her lifelong dream of an education and obtained a university degree in 1949.  She then set to work on her memoirs, which were ghostwritten by the novelist Virginia Faulkner and published in 1953.  The book, A House Is Not a Home, became a bestseller and was made into a movie starring Shelley Winters which was released in 1964; unfortunately Polly did not live to see it, since she died of cancer in 1962.

But while the book is terribly honest and shows both good and bad aspects of “the Life” equally, the censors wouldn’t allow anything positive to be said about whores and so the finished film bears only a vague resemblance to it.  What remains is essentially a 98-minute morality play on the evils of harlotry, populated by fallen women who are victimized by men’s lust and so get addicted to drugs and/or commit suicide while “Polly” stands helplessly by; though it appeared over a decade before the advent of neofeminism, the anti-sex crowd couldn’t have written a better screed.  Oh, well, at least the people illegally drinking were depicted as enjoying themselves, even if the girls violating a still-current prohibitionist law were not.

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Circle

Posted in History, tagged , , , , , , , on March 14, 2012| 18 Comments »

There would be no literature, no art, no music, no statesmanship if we relied on the prohibitionist for works of genius.  –  Clarence Darrow

I’ve written on a number of occasions about the origins of modern prohibitionist rhetoric in the second half of the 19th century, and explained how the “white slavery” panic (as “human trafficking” was called then) arose from a combination of racism, xenophobic fears of immigration and the urge to impose Protestant Christian ideas of morality (including alcohol prohibition) on everyone.  As I wrote in “Rooted in Racism”, “The First World War gave Europeans something real to worry about, but the panic continued in the United States until the Great Depression served the same function.”  I thought it might be instructive to take a look at one of the larger prohibitionist organizations of the period, which at its height in the early ‘20s boasted over 4 million members, but fell to 30,000 by 1930.  Its story not only demonstrates the mentality of prohibitionists, but presents cause for optimism in the way that this once-powerful movement fell rapidly into disrepute and eventually became nothing more than a marginalized group of social pariahs no reasonable person would want to be associated with.

The organization was founded in 1915, drawing its inspiration from a similar (but long defunct) one which operated for a while in the 1860s.  Its members were overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Scandinavian Protestants who felt great anxiety over increasing immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, whose inhabitants they viewed as lazy and sexually depraved; they therefore wanted tighter immigration controls in general, but were especially concerned with protecting women and girls from rape and “white slavery”.  Indeed, most of the original founders were members of a group dedicated to demanding “justice” for Mary Phagan, a young woman who had been raped and murdered (allegedly by a Jewish businessman named Leo Frank).  The group advertised itself as protector of the home and womanhood, and grew at an astonishing pace in the next five years, driven by sensationalized media coverage and reports that it had been endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson.  Though chapters sprang up all over the US (and to a lesser extent Canada), it was primarily an urban movement which had its greatest political power in Indiana and its most rapid growth in Detroit, Dayton, Dallas and Atlanta.

All prohibitionist groups attempt to exercise social control by lobbying politicians to make more repressive laws and encouraging more aggressive enforcement of existing laws.  This one was no exception; it backed sympathetic politicians, assisted police in enforcing morality laws (just as the Hunt Alternatives Fund does today), and spied on violators of alcohol prohibition, then bullied cops into arresting them and courts into prosecuting them (just as “Big Sister” does to Icelandic punters).  It released propaganda to support its causes, and found a number of allies in the media who were willing to disseminate it via newspapers and radio.  Many people joined the crusade due to this hype, and though a large proportion of them soon left when they discovered it wasn’t to their liking, there were enough new recruits to replace those lost to attrition.

Eventually, though, the moral panic which energized the organization faded as all moral panics must; its members became increasingly desperate for attention and hungry for the power they felt slipping through their fingers.  In 1927 some chapters began stepping outside the law to enforce their agenda, and the media rapidly turned against them.  Newspaper editor Grover C. Hall wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of editorials attacking the once-popular mass movement for what he called its “racial and religious intolerance”; other papers followed suit, and by 1930 it was all but gone.  Not completely, though; in fact, it’s managed to hold on to the present day, and still has about 6000 members.  I’m sure most of you have even heard of it; its name is taken from the Greek word for “circle”, kuklos.  It’s called the Ku Klux Klan.

One Year Ago Today

“Man’s Inhumanity To Whores” presents examples of stigmatization of prostitutes to demonstrate how our mistreatment harms all women.

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Crystal Ball

Posted in History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 2, 2012| 14 Comments »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Year Ago Today

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

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Size Matters

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 14, 2011| 33 Comments »

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.  –  Alexander Hamilton

I’d like to thank all the readers who called the story about the raid on the Phoenix Goddess Temple to my attention; I first heard about the temple back in February when the Phoenix New Times published an article on it.  When I read that article, I have to admit I was a bit confused, bemused and appalled.  Some of their professed beliefs sounded a bit hokey to me, I thought it was odd and irregular to have males claiming to represent the female principle, and I was rather offended by the practitioners calling themselves “goddesses” (which is either hubris or garden-variety megalomania).  But I could make similar statements about a lot of religious beliefs, just as I’m sure others find fault with mine; I have no right to tell others what they can or can’t believe, nor do I have the power to look into their hearts to divine whether those beliefs are sincere or merely some kind of dodge.

Police and prosecutors, however, have no such principles; like the healers of the Goddess Temple they profess themselves to be gods (of the little tin variety) and imagine that they have the ability to read minds and thereby determine guilt or insincerity.  And since they have heavily-armed goon squads enforcing their pronouncements, no matter how divorced from reality those pronouncements might be, I was utterly mystified at the Temple’s allowing a reporter to describe exactly what went on in their rituals, even to calling their practice “new age prostitution”; it was as though they somehow failed to realize that they were inviting a pogrom.  Of course, the cops are doing their usual strutting, crowing and slandering; the ones interviewed by Phoenix New Times for this September 8th follow-up story made the typical claims of having the witch-doctor-like magical ability to see guilt (“This was no more a church than Cuba was fantasy island”), projected their own criminality onto their victims (“They hid behind religious freedom to protect their crimes”) and lied (in the passive voice, of course) about their persecution tactics (“there are policies we follow, guidelines we use so we don’t entrap people…you can presume in this case that acts of prostitution were arranged.”)

As usual, the comments on online reports of the story are largely of the “why aren’t you losers fighting real crime?” variety; it’s clear that the computer-literate segment of the public is overwhelmingly in favor of either decriminalization or legalization, and equally clear that the self-proclaimed overlords aren’t listening.  But this time there’s another type of comment, ones based in the religious freedom angle; though comments on a pagan site (called to my attention by regular reader Tonja) seemed divided between “we need to support their right to religious freedom” and “those dirty criminals give pagans a bad name”, the comments on mainstream sites were actually more uniformly supportive of the Temple and critical of the cops.  And though some of the pagan commenters agreed with some atheist commenters (such as Furry Girl) that the law doesn’t allow exemption for religions, that really isn’t true; there are a number of cases of religions being granted exemptions for victimless crimes.  For example, during Prohibition the Catholic Church was officially allowed to use sacramental wine, and American Indians are allowed to use peyote in religious ceremonies, despite the fact that it’s a felony for anybody else.

The truth is, religions get special legal treatment all the time, as long as they’re big enough (the “Native American Church” isn’t that large, but has a large political support base because Indians are practically the definition of an oppressed minority).  There are lots of different pagan groups in the United States, but because they aren’t unified they can’t lobby for special treatment like the big boys can.  The same goes for sex workers; if we were better organized (like certain other sexual minorities who have in recent years almost completely reversed their historical mistreatment) it would be much more difficult for the prohibitionists to shout us down.  Because at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter whether a minority group is persecuted for the race, beliefs, ancestry, politics or sexual practices of its members; all that matters is that it is large enough and loud enough to be heard over the greatly-amplified voices of cops and politicians pontificating through their bullhorns about why it’s right and moral to oppress them.

One Year Ago Today

“Flavor of the Month” is essentially an autobiography of my bisexuality.

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Lulu White

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 3, 2011| 46 Comments »

What it comes down to is this: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, the policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician—these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin.  –  Polly Adler

Business was booming for the whores of late 19th-century New Orleans; there were some 2000 prostitutes and about 40 brothels scattered all over the city, and it is estimated that the gross income of the city’s sex trade at that time amounted to some $15 million per year (about $360 million in 2011 dollars!)  Then, as now, this money flowed through the demimonde and into the conventional economy, enriching merchants, restauranteurs, liquor dealers, furniture stores, shoe salesmen, milliners and landlords, to name just a few.  And considering that many of those businesses were owned by politicians (and the biggest landlord in New Orleans is the Catholic Church), there was a vested interest in keeping those businesses lucrative.  So when the social purity movement reached New Orleans in the 1890s and pressure began to mount for something to be “done about” prostitution, Alderman Sidney Story proposed restricting it to one part of town.  This was enacted into law in 1897, and the newspapers dubbed the resulting district “Storyville” (much to the alderman’s chagrin).  One year ago today I published a short history of prostitution in New Orleans with emphasis on Storyville, and today I’ll tell you about one of its more famous denizens, a madam known as Lulu White.

Lulu White, circa 1900

Her real name was apparently Lulu Hendley, and she was born sometime before 1870 on a farm near Selma, Alabama; she was a quadroon (¼ black) or possibly a light-skinned mulatto, but she claimed to be from the West Indies and to have “not a drop of Negro blood” (though nobody who met her believed this claim).  She arrived in New Orleans in the early 1880s with an older dark-skinned black man who is believed to have been her stepfather (though nothing else is known of him) and immediately began working as a whore, but so ambitious and charming was she that despite average looks and a short, dumpy figure she managed to attract a number of wealthy and influential clients including an oil man, a railroad tycoon and a department-store owner, and by the end of the ‘80s she was a madam with a house of her own.  Further proof of her business skill can be discerned in the fact that, though she was arrested countless times in the ‘80s on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to pandering, by 1892 she had such political influence that her mansion at 166 Customhouse Street was assessed at a mere $300…while a much smaller and plainer house across the street was assessed at $1200.

The Arlington (left, with domed cupola) and Mahogany Hall (right, with tower)

But this house was itself small in comparison with Mahogany Hall, the $40,000 four-story brothel she built at 235 Basin Street (two doors down from The Arlington) when The District was organized in 1897.  Mahogany Hall was an “octoroon parlor”, i.e. a bordello staffed by Creole girls of roughly one-eighth Negro blood; one of these girls, Victoria Hall, was so lovely that Lulu “borrowed” her photo for use in her own ad for the “Blue Book” of 1906 (in which she rather dubiously claimed to be 31, which would’ve made her a madam before she turned 15).  Lulu made a tremendous amount of money, and spent much of it on clothes and jewelry; as Al Rose explains in his 1974 history Storyville, New Orleans:

Vivid is the recollection still alive in certain aging heads, of Lulu descending the “hall’s” swirling staircase, decked out in her gaudy display of diamonds, smiling her celebrated diamond-studded smile, and singing her favorite song, “Where the Moon Shines”.  Attired in a bright red wig and an elaborate formal gown, she wore diamond rings on all her fingers (including thumbs), bracelets up both arms, a diamond necklace, a tiara, an emerald alligator brooch on her chest – the works!

Rose also notes that the 1934 Mae West film Belle of the Nineties was originally entitled Belle of New Orleans and was inspired by Lulu White’s life, but due to the pervasive racism of the time all racial references were suppressed.  Forty years later, the brothel madam in Pretty Baby (1978) was also clearly inspired by Lulu; she wears a red wig and excessive jewelry, and her brothel has a swirling mahogany staircase.

Lulu was a savvy businesswoman who understood the value of diversification and had an appreciation for new opportunities; in 1906 she made a business trip to Hollywood (in her private railway carriage) in order to investigate the potential of the new technological innovation, motion pictures.  She made deals for real estate and production facilities which would’ve made her the owner of the largest studio in town, then returned to New Orleans to get the funds together.  But her next move was one of those critical mistakes which changes history:  she trusted someone who proved untrustworthy, namely her “fancy man”, George Killshaw.  He and Lulu had been together since soon after her arrival in New Orleans, but he was slim, handsome, charming and could easily pass for white, so when Lulu sent him to California to complete the deal for her with $150,000 in cash (about $3.6 million in today’s currency) he decided to drop out of sight and start a new life elsewhere, probably as a white man.

Strangely, Lulu made no effort to find him (probably because she didn’t trust the police), but picked herself up and resumed planning for the future (albeit on a smaller scale).  In 1908 she built a saloon right next door to Mahogany Hall, at the corner of Basin and Bienville Streets;  it opened for business in 1912, but with the arrival of Prohibition in 1919 it ostensibly became a soft drink bar.  By this time, of course, Storyville had been closed (as I explain in last year’s column) to satisfy the prudery of the Secretary of the Navy, and due to the Hollywood disaster the bar was Lulu’s only remaining business.  She secretly sold liquor there, but due to her reputation was repeatedly arrested throughout the ‘20s for violating the Volstead Act.  Eventually she tired of dodging the cops, and in 1929 sold the building to Leon Heymann.  It was one of the few Storyville buildings not bulldozed to construct the Iberville Housing Project in the 1930s, and though it lost its upper story to Hurricane Betsy the year before I was born, the lower story was refurbished and today houses a neighborhood market.

Lulu herself vanished from history after 1931, but is known to have been alive for at least ten years afterward because (as Rose reports) she made a withdrawal from her account at the Whitney National Bank in 1941 and was recognized by the teller; her fate beyond that is unknown, but at the time she would’ve been in her seventies and is not likely to have survived much longer.  There is no death certificate on record in Louisiana, so it is possible she returned to her birthplace to die (though there is no death record in Alabama, either) or else succumbed in some public place and was never identified.  What a sad end for one of the harlot queens of New Orleans; imagine how different Hollywood (and perhaps even America) might’ve been had its largest studio been owned not only by a black woman, but a proud and unrepentant whore!

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August Miscellanea (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 17, 2011| 18 Comments »

Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.  –  Thomas Jefferson

Short articles about laws, laws and more laws, none of which accomplish anything productive.

Because Everyone Knows That Laws Deter Streetwalkers

If I live to be a thousand I will never understand why lawheads believe that more laws will stop people who are already breaking existing laws; they seem wedded to the concept that if we only increase the penalties enough, the offending behavior will stop.  Of course, this is nonsense; most criminologists agree that increasing the severity of a criminal penalty has no demonstrable deterrent value.  For example, despite penalties which are wildly and insanely out of proportion to the offense, drug use has increased over the 40 years of the drug war just as alcohol use increased during Prohibition.  Even the death penalty has no demonstrable deterrent value (except to the individual executed, obviously).  Yet lawheads just keep making new laws and then demanding that cops enforce them and courts incarcerate an ever-increasing number of American citizens.  Here’s the latest example, courtesy of the New York Daily News of July 27th:

Harsher penalties for selling sex near school grounds are now in place…State Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. first proposed the bill that will now slap pimps, prostitutes and johns caught plying their illicit trade within 1,000 feet of a school with automatic felony charges.  “I’m happy,” Diaz said yesterday.  “I think that this is a big step in protecting our children.”  Years of unchecked prostitution in the playground of…the West Farms School…led to the legislation, which is now in effect for schools statewide…

In recent weeks, The Urban Justice Center had urged [Governor] Cuomo to veto the bill in an online petition…”In the modern era, most sex workers who work on the street are engaged in sex work out of desperate need.  They face widespread physical and sexual violence, especially from the police,” the petition stated… Meanwhile, Diaz is calling on the NYPD to make sure the law is enforced.  “You could have as many laws as you want, but if the police do not enforce them, the law becomes nothing,” he said.

This is a textbook example of governmental sledgehammer-enabled egg-breaking.  Somehow there will be enough cops to enforce this statewide, even though there weren’t enough of them to keep an eye on ONE PLAYGROUND in the Bronx.  Let’s put ‘em all in jail!  That’ll learn them dirty whores, pimps and “johns”…which according to Melissa Farley means the majority of the population of New York.

Dirty Amateurs

Those damned dirty amateurs are at it again, having unprotected sex and spreading diseases to their unsuspecting spouses.  Why isn’t there a law against this?  We need to abolish unpaid sex; it’s demeaning to women and as this paraphrased July 26th anecdote incontrovertibly proves, men hate women who give them sex for free and give them diseases on purpose as a way of inflicting violence.  It’s true, I saw a study which proves it and anyone who denies it must be a misogynist too.

A 33-year-old married woman from Delavan, Wisconsin has sued her 35-year-old married lover on the grounds that he infected her with herpes during an unprotected adulterous sexual encounter in January of 2010; she contends that he knew he was infected and is therefore liable under Wisconsin law.  In May of this year she insisted police arrest the man, and when they declined to do so she filed the lawsuit without the help of an attorney; the suit demands $350,000 from the man’s auto and homeowners insurance, the former presumably on the grounds that the sexual encounter took place in his pickup truck.

The man denies giving the woman herpes and suggests she check with her other partners, but she claims he was the only man she cheated on her husband with.  She claims to have experienced panic attacks while driving with her spouse and children, and that her spouse is reluctant to have normal sexual relations because of her diagnosis.

I’m sure her husband’s reluctance to have sex with her has nothing at all to do with the fact that she cheated on him and was caught red…umm, handed.

Selective Blindness

Die-hard partisans are most amazing creatures; they can viciously castigate the “other side” for whatever-it-is, while simultaneously ignoring “their side” doing essentially the same thing.  Case in point the tiresome feminist bleating about the Republicans’ “war on women” while ignoring the one waged by Democrats.  They are enabled to do this by defining knife attacks on amateurs as “aggravated assault” but the same attacks on sex workers as “emergency surgery”.  Case in point:  Barbara and Shannon Kelley’s July 28th Huffington Post article bemoaning the Republican renewal of the gag rule prohibiting funding to health agencies which give information about abortion, while totally ignoring Obama’s continuation of the Bush Era policy of prohibiting funding to health agencies which refuse to demonize prostitutes:

Surely you have heard that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted to reinstate the Global Gag Rule that prevents any family planning agencies that provide information about abortion service from receiving any U.S. foreign aid.  Who gets hurt?  Women, children and anyone who believes the conversation about women’s issues needs to move forward.  But once again, that conversation has been hijacked by the right-wing strategy to frame deeper issues related to women and families in terms of a women’s right to choose…organizations that receive funds cannot use their own money to provide abortion-related information or services, or advocate for liberalized abortion laws.  The rule imposes no similar restrictions on advocacy against such laws…Under the…rule, these organizations face a choice:  either participate in the American right’s global campaign to restrict women’s rights and access to reproductive health care or lose critical U.S. funding.  That funding is crucial for agencies that cover a number of issues related to healthy women and children…What also gets cut out of the equation when these agencies are defunded is access to contraception…the Guttmacher Institute has found that when abortion becomes illegal, abortions don’t decrease — they just become dangerous.  Life-threatening, actually.  And what better way to avoid abortions than to provide contraceptive services.  No brainer, right?  Go figure…But what makes us even more angry is the way the debate on abortion sucks the energy out of the fight for a better world for women and children — here and abroad.  Suddenly, regardless of where we stand on a women’s right to choose, we’re in a defensive position…

Funny thing; nearly every methodologically sound study ever done proves that when prostitution becomes illegal, it doesn’t decrease — it just becomes dangerous.  Welcome to our world, ladies.  Apparently, you don’t think women’s health issues are important when the women choose to make their living providing sexual services to men.  We believe the “conversation about women’s issues needs to move forward” as well, and recognizing that “a woman’s right to choose” must include choosing why she has sex (rather than simply how or with whom) is a big part of that.  By reducing that broad and powerful phrase to a mere euphemism for the right to abortion, “feminists” of your ilk have not only allowed the enemy within our ranks, but actually invited him in.  In furtherance of your narcissistic concerns you either lobbied for the rights of certain women to be restricted or remained silent while others did so, and now you’re crying because the crop which has sprung up is the very one you planted.  Unfortunately, it isn’t just you who will be forced to eat it.

Colossus Blinks

In my July 3rd column I reported that internet behemoth Google had censored Irish human rights campaigners “Turn Off the Blue Light” by cancelling their ad under the false excuse that it was an escort ad when in actuality it led to a site opposing imposition of the “Swedish Model” on Ireland.  The group protested the removal through approved channels and was of course rebuffed, but when they protested in person at Google headquarters in Dublin an amazing thing happened, as reported in the Independent on August 7th:

A small group of campaigners for…rights for Irish sex workers is claiming a victory against internet giant Google…After their complaint was received Google apparently reviewed the situation and agreed to reinstate the advert last month…Google said…”We permit political advertisements regardless of the political views they represent, and apply our policies equally.  Just as the net itself provides space for a thousand political opinions to bloom, Google is committed to being a neutral platform for people to advertise their political messages.”

I reckon a flea in a tender spot can make even an elephant scratch.

One Year Ago Today

My very first miscellanea column, “Legal Sundries” appeared on this date last year; the items covered were the suicide of the “Craigslist Killer”, WWAV’s advocacy for New Orleans prostitutes forced to register as “sex offenders” under the “Crime Against Nature” law, the rationale behind porn being legal despite the fact that it’s paid sex, and men suing women for injuries resulting from cowgirl sex.

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Harm Magnification

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

A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady.  –  usually attributed to Voltaire

Governments are quick to claim that new and ever-more-intrusive laws solve social problems, but in actuality the opposite is true:  many more social problems are caused by such laws than solved by them, and social progress generally comes from the repeal of oppressive laws rather than the installation of new ones.  How many readers remember the expression “rolling queers”?  At one time, obviously-gay men were more often targeted by muggers than other men were, and even some hoodlums who might not dare to mug anyone else might troll gay-bar areas for potential targets.  In the early ‘80s gay men of my acquaintance considered it enough of a hazard that they took special precautions against it, yet only 25 years later it has become vastly less common.  I’m sure there are some who believe that “hate crime” laws are responsible for this reduction, but this is nonsense; “rolling” had already decreased dramatically long before “hate crime” laws even became popular, much less expanded to include homosexuals.  The reason gay men were targeted for “rolling” wasn’t primarily due to hate but rather to opportunity; while homosexuality was still against the law in many states and gay men were commonly persecuted by police, they were far less likely than others to report the crime and so were “safe” targets even for young bullies who were not brave enough to attack anyone else.  It was not the installation of laws which decreased “rolling” but rather the removal of laws which criminalized homosexuality.

Similarly, prostitutes are victimized by opportunistic criminals and even rapists and serial killers for the simple reason that they perceive us as “safe targets” who, like gay men in the past, dare not go to the police for fear of worse victimization than that suffered at the hands of the criminals.  New “anti-trafficking” laws in many states and countries (many of them with a Swedish flavor) are touted as efforts to “protect” us, but in fact the existing laws are the main source of danger, and more laws will only increase the peril.  But declaring “open season” on marginalized groups is not the only way in which oppressive laws create crime; alcohol Prohibition in the United States essentially created the Mafia, and the drug prohibition nearly every country inflicts on its citizens has created the powerful drug cartels from which so much of the violence of the modern world springs.  Nor is crime the only social ill which springs from prohibitionism; illegal drugs (like the illegal liquor of the 1920s) are often impure and sometimes even poisonous because drug buyers, like prostitutes, dare not go to the police if they are harmed by a suppressed transaction.

The principle of “harm reduction” is the recognition of the phenomenon we’re discussing here, that laws against consensual behaviors nearly always do more harm than good.  Those who advocate harm reduction policies point out that tolerating “vices” not only keeps those who partake in them safer, but also minimizes the damage done to society at large (such as the incalculable damage done to the American economy, justice system and civil liberties by the institutional madness called the “War on Drugs”).  But because lawheads believe laws to always be good, most governments are hostile to harm reduction policies and in fact practice a philosophy we might call “harm magnification”, the stubborn support of prohibitionist laws even in cases where they can be proven to harm both individuals and society as a whole.  The United States is the most aggressive proponent of “harm magnification” policies, but its neighbor to the north is apparently dead-set on taking the title; the Canadian federal government is involved in a battle to reinstate prohibitionist laws which have been clearly demonstrated to endanger prostitutes, and last Thursday (May 12th) the government opened the latest chapter in its repeated efforts to close down a harm-reduction project for heroin addicts:

…Defenders of [North America’s first and only legal injection site]…say it [provides] a form of health care, and that health care is a provincial matter under Canada’s constitution.  The federal government counters that its writ trumps provincial rights because heroin is a federally banned substance.  The case opens before the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa on Thursday, and has drawn international attention…As of 2009, there were 65 injection facilities in 27 cities in Canada, Australia, and western Europe, according to the Canadian Medical Association Journal.  The World Health Organization has called them a “priority intervention” in slowing the spread of AIDS via infected needles.  Insite [the Vancouver facility] receives more than 800 visitors a day on average and has supervised more than a million injections since it opened in 2003, and none has caused a death, according to Insite supervisor Russ Maynard.  Addicts are given clean needles and sterilized water in which to mix their drug.  They bring their own drugs and inject at 12 stainless steel alcoves with mirrors on the walls so nurses on a raised platform can see them…When Insite opened, the Bush administration’s drug czar, John Walters, called it “state-sponsored suicide,” and after a Conservative government was elected in Canada in 2006, it moved to close the site.  Arguing for the government before the British Columbia Court of Appeal in 2009, Robert Frater rejected the notion that Insite was a form of health care, because it was not the ban on drugs that harms addicts…Supporters of Insite point to studies showing sharp drops in deaths from drug overdoses in the district since the drug-injection program was launched…Julio Montaner, president of the International AIDS Society, an association of professionals in the AIDS field, has said the area’s AIDS rate is the worst in the developed world, and can be designated an epidemic.  Montaner, a Canadian, accuses his government of ignoring scientific research and sabotaging a health initiative for society’s weakest citizens…

The Canadian government’s argument in this case, as in its support for anti-whore laws, is a blatant lie.  The ban on drugs indisputably harms addicts for the same reason prostitution bans harm whores:  it pushes them into the shadows and cuts them off from the legal protections everyone else takes for granted.  And that’s not even counting the economic costs to the taxpayers, nor the social cost  which results from empowering government thugs to pry into citizens’ private lives and violate their civil rights in order to accuse them of “crimes” which have no victims.

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Not the Same Tree

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 18, 2011| 27 Comments »

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. –  William Blake

Those who foolishly insist on viewing the world through the filter of dogma are blind to everything that dogma will not admit, even when the truth lies right before them.  The ass who looks at prostitution with neofeminist blinkers on sees only what her driver wants her to see, and no more; prohibitionists are told that prostitution “victimizes” or “exploits” women, and their eyes remain so fixed on that false image that they can see neither the harm their policies do to prostitutes nor the dangerous precedent they set for women’s rights and the legal assumptions about women’s competence and right to self-determination.  Those without those blinkers can turn their heads and look freely at all parts of a situation, and thus may see a very different picture from those blinded by the brainwashing.

I found an obvious case of this on Brandy Devereaux’s blog last Monday (February 14th); it led me to this article on MLive.com, a Michigan news website, and I was struck by the contrast between the clear sight of Darrell Dawsey (the journalist who wrote it) and the blindness of the officials who appear in it.  I’m so impressed with the article, in fact, that I’m willing to overlook its truly annoying title in favor of its abstract: “A recent post-mortem of high-profile sex ring Miami Companions, which was broken up by federal agents last year, highlights the glaring inconsistency and imbalance in how we tackle the ‘crime’ of prostitution.”

On May 12, Gregory Carr, who prosecutors say masterminded Miami Companions, will be sentenced for running what the feds had dubbed one of the biggest sex rings in the country….But none of the 30,000-plus clients who paid as much as $500-an-hour for sex were ever outed.  The so-called black book that contains their names remains in an FBI office in Tampa under tight security.  And Barbara McQuade, U.S. attorney for southeast Michigan, said she has no plans to release the book — nor does she need it now that she has guilty pleas.  “Our goal is not to stamp out prostitution.  I don’t think we’ll ever do that,” she said.  “But what we are concerned about is deterring criminal organizations from exploiting women as a commodity for profit.”

“Ring” is of course a dysphemism for “suppressed business”.  When the 18th amendment went into effect in 1920 liquor dealers suddenly became “bootlegging rings”, and when the 21st amendment ended Prohibition in 1933 those “rings” magically turned back into businesses.  The word “ring” is a pejorative term intended to conjure up images of seedy gangsters meeting around tables in the back rooms of pool halls.  And the reason the “black book” isn’t being released has nothing to do with guilty pleas and everything to do with the fact that a number of prominent citizens – including some of McQuade’s bosses – are listed in that book.  “Ring” indeed.  But McQuade goes from disingenuous to asinine in the last line, considering that every commercial employer in America exploits women (and men, too) as a “commodity for profit”.  How is an escort service different from a theatrical agency or a temp agency, whose sole product is living humans of certain desired characteristics?  It of course isn’t, unless you believe that sex is somehow intrinsically different from every other human activity.

Apparently, McQuade can tolerate prostitution as long as it remains a mom-and-pop endeavor.  But grow that business from two girls on a street corner to a Web-based ring with international ties, then, suddenly, prostitution becomes deserving of federal wrath.  She’s not so much interested in busting the men who pay for sex, she says.  Or the women who provide it — as long they keep their sex ring small.  Her problem seems to be less with the act than with the scale of it:  “We’re not trying to be the morality police,” McQuade said.  “We try to go after what we perceive to be more important offenders, those who are engaged in organized criminal activity.”  But here’s the thing:  As long as prostitution is illegal, it’s all “organized criminal activity.”  Whether the sex workers are independent contractors or part of a larger group, they’re all providing pretty much the same service.  Why is it suddenly worse because some middle manager is making flight arrangements or work schedules?

I wanted to stand up and clap when I read that last part, starting with “But here’s the thing.”  McQuade claims her office isn’t trying to regulate morality, but of course that’s exactly what it’s doing whether she admits it or not.

.. McQuade’s stance [is] mired… in some common…perceptions about pimps…they can be abusive and low down…But there’s no evidence that Carr coerced any of these women…they worked when they wanted to and pursued other interests when they didn’t. Miami Companions simply made it easier, and probably more lucrative, for them to do what they wanted to do…Carr’s worst crime, as far as I can tell, seems to be getting paid to serve as a middle man in the sex industry. Is he really substantively any worse than, say, Hugh Hefner?  It seems a little disingenuous for McQuade to acknowledge that prostitution is an ineradicable trade on one hand, but then to declare it intolerable only when folks actually make money at it (which, of course, is the point of selling sex in the first place).

So what about sex workers who enjoy the trade and want the opportunity to earn more money and meet more clients?  What about the women who get into the game of their own volition, independent “working girls” who tolerate no pimps but who still see the value in growing their network?  How many clients can a “sex ring” have before McQuade determines that it’s become too big to succeed?  Despite McQuade’s clear acknowledgment of the intractability of the world’s oldest profession, the feds’ message seems to be that our government is fine with prostitution — as long as you’re not too good at it.

I don’t have anything else to add.  Thank you, Mr. Dawsey, both for your defense of women’s right to work in the profession of our choice and also for just being a rational human being.

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Creating Criminals

Posted in History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2011| 18 Comments »

There’s no way to rule innocent men.  The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.  Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them.  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.  Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?  What’s there in that for anyone?  But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. –  Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

In my column of August 9th I defined my own coinage “lawhead” as “one who believes that man-made laws are actually based in objective reality like physical laws; he is unable to comprehend that the majority of laws are completely arbitrary, and therefore views a violation of a ‘vice law’ with the same horror that normal people reserve for rains of toads or spontaneous human combustion.  Though lawheads are a minority of the population they are disproportionately represented in positions of power, with the result that once a law is on the books it cannot usually be removed by any means short of armed insurrection.”  Lawheads are most dangerous when they work in close association with control freaks, those who know very well that laws are arbitrary but enact them anyway so as to have more excuses to threaten, intimidate, arrest, fine and imprison the citizenry.

These laws are usually designed with sufficiently diabolical cleverness so as to fool the Great Unwashed into thinking they do indeed have a basis in reality, especially when enacted in conjunction with a moral panic (such as “national security”, “child welfare” or the like). But even when they aren’t, there are sufficient numbers of lawheads around to ensure that these tyrannical laws are rarely, if ever removed.  And even when they are, for every repressive statute which is struck down ten more have been enacted in the meantime.  Governments don’t care HOW universal criminality is achieved, so long as it is; if it isn’t accomplished by prohibiting drinking it will be by banning smoking, and if not by forbidding homosexuality and abortion it’ll be by denying privacy and the right to self-defense.  And as we’re seeing in many places, control freaks are equally happy demonizing our clients as they ever were demonizing whores.  The important thing is to define as many people as possible as criminals, thereby inducing a social autoimmune disorder for which government can be touted as the cure though it is actually the cause.

One example of this were the Jim Crow laws designed to control free blacks in the latter half of the 19th century; all manner of things were made illegal for black people so that governments would have the excuse to monitor, harass and persecute them.  But after the successes of the civil rights movement in the middle of the 20th century, government somehow succeeded in casting itself as the great savior of black Americans even though it was government which had created the laws which criminalized them in the first place.  The Jim Crow laws were a clumsy attempt at control because they directly targeted one obvious segment of the population and thus A) did not intimidate everyone; and B) disallowed those in the targeted group any illusion of escape through “correct” behavior.  By comparison, the anti-prostitution laws which proliferated a generation after the first Jim Crow laws affected almost 10% of women and 70% of men and were thus far more effective means off social control; a generation after that alcohol prohibition was even more efficient at creating criminals out of previously law-abiding citizens.

At the stroke of a pen, the 18th Amendment magically transformed tens of millions of ordinary Americans, no different from their neighbors, into criminals, and many millions of others lost respect for all law and authority due to the rigor with which the asinine prohibition law was enforced.  Deprived of legal sources of alcohol Americans turned to those who could supply it, thus enriching true criminals (gangsters and smugglers) and enticing many who might not otherwise ever have crossed the line into the now-lucrative bootlegging market.  Hundreds of thousands were blinded, paralyzed, and killed by poisonous moonshine or industrial alcohol because there was no longer supervision of product contents.  Official corruption ran rampant, courts and prisons were clogged with people who were not considered criminals a few years earlier, federal police powers were dangerously expanded and civil liberties were bulldozed in order to enforce a law which was unjust and unenforceable to begin with, and billions were wasted on enforcement while billions more were lost in tax revenues.

This was, of course, utterly incomprehensible to lawheads; those who made statements on the subject in 1920 predicted that the law would magically remove the desire for liquor from the American mind.  The Internal Revenue Service predicted that the law would be instantly effective, but that it would take six years for all existing private liquor supplies to be used up.  And Prohibitionists both inside and outside the government questioned neither the ability to legislate state-defined morality into existence nor the rectitude of attempting to do so.  And the fact that the so-called “Noble Experiment” failed miserably in less than a decade (calls for its repeal were widespread and vocal by 1929) did absolutely nothing to penetrate the thick skulls of lawheads and control freaks, who have in the intervening 80 years continued to support other prohibitionist bans and even foisted upon us a host of new ones.

Each of these bans – from marijuana to prostitution to pseudoephedrine – have had exactly the same effects:  None of them have affected demand one iota, nor hampered those who wish to partake.  All of them have enriched criminals and increased true crime and bloodshed.  All of them have enticed millions who might not otherwise have committed crimes into participating in the lucrative black markets created by their prohibition.  All have increased the danger to users or sellers of the banned product or service (and even to innocent bystanders), often to fatal levels.  All have given rise to rampant corruption, overwhelmed court and prison systems, dangerously expanded governmental powers, negated civil liberties and billions wasted on enforcement and lost in tax revenues.  And each has admirably accomplished what it was enacted to accomplish:  the redefinition of large segments of the population from citizens to criminals, thus allowing government yet another excuse to deprive them of their rights, goods and freedoms.

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Harm Reduction

Posted in History, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 13, 2011| 80 Comments »

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation. –  Emma Goldman

My column of January 9th spawned a lively debate about male infidelity among several escorts and other interested parties; the central issues seemed to be whether a husband’s infidelity is different whether he sees a whore or has an affair, and whether it bothers us that we facilitate that infidelity.  Those of you who read that thread probably noticed that, with the exception of the factual issues of comparative frequency, I largely stayed out of the discussion; that was a conscious choice on my part.  When new reader Joyce made her very passionate post, I suspected it would inspire strong and interesting responses and so I decided to keep my big mouth shut for a change and let things develop without my influence.  I was gratified to notice that, despite personal variations on the details, all the prostitutes who contributed were largely on the same page as I am, and I think that’s a good thing for reasons which will soon become clear.

Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society. – St. Augustine (354-430)

“Harm reduction” is the modern name given to an ancient idea:  Since neither the world nor human beings are perfect, there will always be evil and misfortune, and all we can hope for is to reduce the level of harm caused by those negative factors.  In my column of November 26th I pointed out that the Catholic Church “recognized that human beings are imperfect and incapable of total adherence to any code of behavior.  So rather than setting up impossible standards which many if not most people would often fail to meet (as we do today), the Church fathers recognized the need for safety valves which would allow people to blow off steam and thereby avoid great wrongs and mortal sins by tolerating lesser wrongs and venial sins.”  This pragmatic view fell into disfavor after the Reformation, when Protestant views on “progress” and the perfectibility of man first appeared; those views, reinforced by the many scientific discoveries and technological innovations of the period, gained in popularity throughout the Age of Reason and by the 19th century practically constituted a cultic belief that tomorrow would always be better than today and that mankind and society could be “perfected” just as scientific theories or technological devices could be.  Tolerance for prostitution, alcohol and other “vices” were replaced by a rigid, punitive belief that these “social ills” could be eliminated entirely, and governments (which never pass up an excuse for repression) responded to the popular belief by prohibiting just about every “vice” imaginable and empowering police and courts to harass, arrest and imprison people for behaviors which were previously considered outside the purview of government.

So widespread did this belief-system become that the First World War was commonly referred to as “The War to End All Wars”; many people actually believed that it would purge the very desire for war out of mankind and result in a new world order of peace and prosperity.  Clearly, that did not happen, and many intellectuals realized it even before the war was over.  Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a growing number of people realized that just as the Great War had not eliminated armed conflict, and just as Prohibition had not ended the demand for alcohol, so the war against prostitution had not curtailed it in the least.  And out of that philosophical soil eventually grew the doctrine of “harm reduction”, the realization that our ancestors had it right in the first place:  Human beings are not perfectible and attempts to threaten and beat vice out of them do vastly more harm than good.  The philosophy of harm reduction was further bolstered by the growing popularity of cultural pluralism:  If people have the right to differing ideas, beliefs and political views, what is the moral basis for banning behaviors which harm nobody else and are not even viewed as vices in some cultures?

Those mired in the traditional Protestant or secular authoritarian mindsets argue that harm reduction is defeatist; while they usually admit that neither humanity nor society is perfectible, they argue that giving up on restricting vices “sends the wrong message” and actively encourages such behaviors.  I’m not going to address this position’s underlying assumption that the prevailing idea of rectitude is the correct one, nor the abhorrent notion that any government has the right to enforce its ideas of “correct” behavior on citizens who do not harm others; either of those would be a full column in itself. Instead, I would like to call the reader’s attention to an aspect of game theory called “conditions of victory”; though this may sound esoteric it refers to the simple concept that the participants in any contest may have different criteria for winning that contest.  In a child’s game of tag, the condition of victory for “it” is to tag someone, and the condition of victory for everyone else is to escape being tagged.  More complex games such as war have much more complex differences; King Leonidas knew he could not possibly defeat the vastly larger Persian force at Thermopylae, so he did not try to do so.  His strategy was intended to delay Xerxes, not to stop him, and in that he succeeded.  Thus, though the Greeks lost the battle they won the game; the limited resources which would not allow victory under one set of conditions did allow it under another.  The United States has defined victory in its “Drug War” as the total elimination of all recreational drugs; under these unrealistic conditions victory is completely impossible.  But if those conditions were changed to “reduce the social and economic impact of recreational drugs below x level”, victory is not only possible but can be achieved at a very reasonable cost and in a fairly short time.

Because men are biologically programmed to seek sexual variety, most men will do so; at least two-thirds of married men will at least occasionally seek extramarital sex.  No woman has any way of knowing whether the man she chooses will be a member of the minority who is able to resist temptation, so if she defines a “successful marriage” as one in which her husband never strays she is playing Russian Roulette with at least four bullets.  But if she defines it as one in which her husband’s probable infidelities cause no overt damage, difficulty or social consequences, all she need do is keep him from getting involved with amateurs.  As I wrote in my column of July 21st, whores allow men to cheat in a managed fashion and thereby minimize harm to their wives and children.  Far from being a “social evil” as it usually referred to in the United States, prostitution is a positive good because it provides a controlled outlet for male sexual impulses which might otherwise cause tremendous problems, including (but by no means limited to) rape and broken marriages.  While it’s true that for a wife to discover her husband has been patronizing whores might damage their marriage, would an affair or constant pressure for unwanted sex do any less?  Prostitution is not a panacea for the differing sexual needs between the sexes, but it does greatly reduce the problems; it is the definitive example of the principle of harm reduction.

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