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A Fictional Interlude for October

Posted in Fiction, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , on October 13, 2010| 11 Comments »

By popular demand (and thank you so much for letting me say that truthfully!) here is another little tale with a prostitute protagonist.  Happy Halloween, dear readers…

Dry Spell

Every once in a while, things slow down for one reason or another; we are, after all, a luxury, and if the gentlemen have pressing things they must spend their money on, why then they haven’t got as much for things they might like to spend it on.  Every girl who’s been in this business for a couple of years learns the seasonal variations and comes to expect the periodic unpredictable ones; one develops a philosophical attitude toward it.  “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” as Ecclesiastes put it.  “A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing…” that’s certainly the verse that applies here.  But one might wish they wouldn’t refrain for quite so long.  Because it has been a long dry spell indeed, probably the longest one I’ve ever seen.

Oh, I knew it would be when we heard about the stock market crashing on the radio; all the girls sat around listening, and though most of the younger ones didn’t really understand what was happening Madam Theresa tried to explain it to them.  I didn’t understand it all as well as Madam did, but I knew enough to know that we were in trouble.  Though she tried to hide it Madam was plenty worried; enough of her money was tied up in stocks that her financial future (and with it ours) was in considerable doubt, and since most of our clients were businessmen even the ones who weren’t ruined were not going to have any money to spend on good-time girls for quite a while.

I wish I had been wrong, but I wasn’t.  Madam put on a brave face:  We were all set for the “holiday slump” anyhow, she reminded us; it’s just starting a few weeks early this year is all.  Why, by mid-January things will start to pick up just like they always do.  And though this made the young ones feel better, one doesn’t get to be top girl in a first-class bordello without knowing how to read people; I knew that Madam didn’t believe a word she was saying.  She told me in secret that she was determined to ride this thing out and support all the girls for as long as need be; no girl of hers was going to be turned out on the street, she said.  And I knew she meant it, but I also knew that good intentions don’t put bread on the table.

And as the weeks became months, what was on the table gradually dwindled to not much more than bread.  Fortunately Madam owned her house outright, but there were taxes to be paid and bills for electricity and telephone service and gas and water, and unlike us the staff were on salary; all that left precious little for meat and extras.  But since we had recently taken a big shipment of imported liquor drink was not in short supply, and it pained me to see that by springtime Madam was rarely without a glass in her hand.

We still had a few faithful regulars; some were rich men who passed the crisis unscathed, others had spread their wealth more carefully than most and so were still doing all right, and a few were in professions or owned businesses which people always need no matter what.  But even they did not spend as freely as they once did, and though I was not privy to Madam’s business affairs I can do sums well enough to know that she was falling behind every month.  Before too long Madam was no longer wearing some of her more expensive jewelry, and original paintings and antique furniture were quietly and gradually replaced by prints and modern furniture.  The less popular girls went back to their families or took whatever menial work they could get, and even a few of the popular girls decided they were better off being kept by bankers or bootleggers than having to go without nice clothes and perfume.  By summertime things seemed to stabilize, though at a much lower level than before; there was enough business to support the girls who were left, and though Madam couldn’t have been making much I don’t believe she was losing money, either.  If things had stayed that way I think it would have eventually been OK, but apparently Fate had decreed otherwise.

See, up until the Crash we had a good relationship with the local mob; Madam bought their liquor and provided the bigwigs with hospitality and everyone was happy.  But I guess they were hurting like most people, so they gradually started getting a lot more demanding than in the old days.  Madam didn’t like to air her dirty laundry in front of the girls, but I’m not deaf and gangsters aren’t known for their discretion.  First they took issue with our smaller liquor orders, then they wanted girls to “service” some of the lower echelons, and then they actually started demanding a cut of her nearly-nonexistent profits.  Eventually things degenerated completely, and the boss left in a huff one night, yelling that Madam would soon wish she had “been smart.”

Later that night I awoke to the smell of smoke and shouts of  “Fire!” from downstairs; I ran down and joined our cook, Tillie, in beating it with blankets while her husband Jake, our handyman, got the water hose.  It seemed to take Jake forever, and I wondered if the gangsters who had set the fire (an “accident” so soon after that warning was just too convenient to be believable) had also stolen or cut the hose.  By the time he got there the whole kitchen was full of smoke and I couldn’t see a thing, but eventually we did get it out (though the kitchen was utterly ruined).

Madam had wisely continued our fire insurance even through the hard times, so it was soon repaired, yet nothing was ever the same again.  It was as though the fire had burned out Madam’s spirit; she started drinking again as she had right after the crash, and cried a great deal.  And though she still talked to me as much as she ever had, it seemed as though she would not listen to my answers; she was lost in her own little world.  While I had previously been the most popular girl in the house, now it seemed as though the clients were suddenly uninterested in me; they just passed me by, and none even wanted to talk to me.  Sometimes they even got up and moved to a different part of the room when I sat down next to them; it’s enough to cause a girl to seriously doubt herself.  But I won’t, I won’t…it’s just a dry spell, and it will end; they always do.  To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and…and…

“So you think this is the one?” David asked, examining the old photograph and then glancing at the typed pages in the folder.  “Beatrice Elaine Becket, August 16th, 1901 to October 13th, 1931.  Why her?  Nobody’s ever seen her clearly, after all.”

“Just an educated guess,” said Dr. Wayne.  “Of all the former residents of this house, she’s the only one known to have actually died on the premises, and the disturbances began only a few months later.”

The graduate student was still leafing through the papers in the file.  “So this was a whorehouse, right?  And this chick was one of the whores?”

The older man frowned.  “A little respect for the dead if you please, David.  Yes, it was a brothel, the finest in the city in its day.  But after the Crash of ’29 its fortunes dwindled, and after Beatrice’s death the Madam became an alcoholic and the place really ran down until it was closed after a police raid in 1936.”

“She was really attached to the girl, huh?”

“Yes, and blamed herself for her death.  The local crime boss was putting considerable pressure on her and she was resisting, so they lit a fire as a warning.  It was probably just intended to scare her into capitulating but it got out of control, and when Beatrice tried to help put it out she was overcome by the smoke.  The cook, Matilda Johnson, is still alive; I interviewed her last week and she still cries when she talks about that night.”

“So, Doc, what do you think she wants?  Revenge on the guys who lit the fire?”

“You’ve been reading too many ghost stories.  Look at the facts; this is a very gentle sort of manifestation, not like a vengeance-driven haunting at all.  She usually appears as nothing more than a warm spot or a scent of jasmine, but some witnesses have reported a sense of physical proximity as well.”

“In other words, they feel as though someone’s standing or sitting next to them.”

“Exactly.  Maybe we’ll make a parapsychologist out of you yet.”

David smirked, and then asked “So, are we going to bring Maria in on this one?”

“No, not this time,” said Dr. Wayne.  “In 44 years this apparition has never appeared in the immediate presence of a woman; whatever her motivation may be, it seems both benign and entirely focused on adult men.”

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Fallout

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 28, 2010| 7 Comments »

Results are what you expect, and consequences are what you get. –  Anonymous

The “Law of Unintended Consequences” is the principle that in any complex system, the actions of people or governments can result in consequences that the originator of those actions neither intends nor desires.  One excellent example of this is Prohibition, which was intended to morally purify the American scene but instead almost singlehandedly created organized crime in the US.  Politicians are forever attempting to ban or control complex physical, economic or social phenomena by simply passing laws; ignorant people hail such attempts as “progressive”, but the wise recognize that such behavior is exactly equivalent to that of a primitive medicine man attempting to control the weather by shaking a rattle and doing a dance.

In the past few years sex workers in the United States have been subjected to a long series of persecutions and official attempts at collective character assassination unlike any other since the days of the Social Purity Movement at the beginning of the last century.  As I suggested in my column of the day before yesterday, it is very likely that the primary reason for this is the widespread trend toward decriminalization of our profession in most countries and the growing public acceptance of our work in the US and other nations which still adhere to the barbaric principle that women’s bodies are owned by the state.  Since nobody likes having his property taken away, politicians and neofeminists (who believe they own women’s souls) have therefore mounted a campaign to arrest this disturbing tendency before it results in our emancipation, and to this end have resurrected the old White Slavery bogeyman as we’ve discussed several times before. They have repeatedly sent this reanimated monster forth to attack the most visible of targets, resulting in the recent recriminalization of prostitution in Rhode Island (where it was technically legal for 30 years) and the highly-touted censorship of the adult services section of Craigslist, where many low-end and semi-professional hookers advertised.  And now they’ve sent their misshapen abomination against Backpage, which is used even by many midrange escorts; if this trend is allowed to continue, how long would it be before the tyrants decided to go after true escort websites such as Eros?

But if the politicians expected the Great Unwashed to cheer their victory against evil classified ads and clamor for their appointment as dictators, they were very much disappointed.  Though the neofeminists and “child trafficking” hysterics praised the action, the response from the general public was distinctly underwhelming; there was no clear consensus among the masses as to whether censoring Craigslist was “good” or “bad”, and many, many analysts have pointed out that the closing merely drove the real criminals farther underground.  Indeed, even some prohibitionist organizations who would love to see every whore in America locked up (thus depleting the female population to a tremendous degree and filling every jail and prison in the country to overflowing) whined that prostitutes would simply move their advertising elsewhere, which is absolutely true.

These repressive actions have also inspired a groundswell of resistance, both from prostitutes’ rights organizations and from more general human and women’s rights ones, not to mention free speech advocates.  77% of respondents in a recent debate at The Economist voted in favor of legalization, and several pro-sex work online petitions such as this one have appeared in recent days.  But perhaps most important was the release of this statement by the Third Wave Foundation, a well-funded feminist group which opposes the groupthink and anti-sex policies of mainstream feminism:

We do not believe that sex work is a cause of that violence or oppression, nor do we believe that seeking to prohibit safe and consensual sex work or the demand for it is the solution to eradicating gender-based inequity or violence. In fact, these attempts to criminalize sex work often have the unintended consequence of leaving young people even more vulnerable. Prohibitions on sex work — even when targeted at third-parties such as customers and advertising venues — criminalize young people and force them further underground in order to meet their survival needs. As a result, they are more vulnerable to violence and isolated from one another and from rights advocates.

THIRD WAVE SUPPORTS YOUNG PEOPLE ENGAGED IN SEX WORK AND IMPACTED BY THE SEX TRADE AS CRITICAL PARTNERS IN ENSURING HEALTH AND JUSTICE.

We at Third Wave are deeply concerned about the ways in which young women and transgender youth may be subject to abuse and violence in any aspect of their lives. Over the last decade of supporting this work, we have learned that young people come to sex work and the sex trade through a wide range of experiences that include choice, circumstance, and coercion. Our community of grant partners and allies includes sex workers, people involved in the sex trade and street economies, and people who have been trafficked. Regardless of how young people are involved in or are impacted by the sex trade, they must be considered partners in the work of advocating for rights and achieving justice.

WE RECOGNIZE AND AFFIRM A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEX WORK AND TRAFFICKING, AND URGE POLICYMAKERS AND ALLIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCACY TO APPROACH THESE ISSUES WITH RESPECT FOR THAT DIFFERENCE.

These are nuanced and deeply complex concerns. Pursuing a plan of action to address violence, coercion, or trafficking without considering the needs and leadership of young people with direct experience in sex work and the sex trade will result in solutions that do not fully address the harms that young people face. Nor will advocates benefit from the depth of their expertise.

WITH OUR SUPPORT, YOUNG PEOPLE ENGAGED IN SEX WORK AND WHO ARE IMPACTED BY THE SEX TRADE ARE ORGANIZING IN THEIR COMMUNITIES AND ACHIEVING WINS.

Across the US, our grant partners are supporting one another to create smart solutions that are rooted in their day-to-day realities.  They conduct research on the needs of their own communities, mapping the complex social service systems that they must navigate successfully in order to seek support.  They operate their own health care clinics with state and city-level health partners.  They advocate for and participate in city taskforces that address youth housing needs.  They have developed their own programs to secure legal advocacy for their communities.  They organize and train one another to work within criminal/legal systems to advocate for their rights.  Together, they create innovative new models for peer support and education rooted in harm reduction principles and respect for young people’s power to make change in their own lives.

WE VALUE THE FULL RANGE OF EXPERIENCES OF YOUNG PEOPLE WHO DO SEX WORK AND ARE IMPACTED BY THE SEX TRADE, AND SUPPORT WORK THAT BUILDS THEIR POWER AND AGENCY.

It is a step forward for policymakers and advocates to recognize that young people who do sex work or who are impacted by the sex trade are not criminals. We must also recognize that not all young people who do sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade are victims.

Partnerships between young people and adult allies must support the vision and leadership of young people. We work in collaboration with young people to secure the resources they need to continue creating a healthy and just world. We urge policymakers who seek to protect young people from violence to include young people’s expertise at every level of their decision-making. We also urge our community partners and allies to center the voices and experiences of young people who do sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade when advocating for their human rights.

Third Wave has been advocating for sex workers since the beginning of this century, but this is its strongest statement yet against prohibition, the equation of voluntary adult prostitution with “human trafficking” and the neofeminist dogma that all sex workers are victims. Here’s hoping that their efforts and those of all of our other advocates will at last begin to make an impression on the thick skulls of politicians by forcing them to recognize that their ill-conceived and wrongheaded attempts to suppress prostitution even further are alienating a great many taxpayers. The popularity of the so-called “Tea Party” movement shows exactly how sick many people are of big government, and it doesn’t get much bigger than using propaganda and outright lies to suppress consensual adult behavior; I can’t even begin to guess how much money governments in the US might save if prostitution were decriminalized as it was in New Zealand seven years ago.  In 2008 a report on the Prostitution Reform Act was prepared; it should be required reading for every government official in every state of the US.  I’ve added a link to it in my “resources” box at the right for those who are interested, but its findings are summed up in its abstract:

The PRA has been in force for five years. During that time, the sex industry has not increased in size, and many of the social evils predicted by some who opposed the decriminalisation of the sex industry have not been experienced. On the whole, the PRA has been effective in achieving its purpose, and the Committee is confident that the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off under the PRA than they were previously.

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Storyville

Posted in History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 3, 2010| 7 Comments »

All you old-time queens, from New Orleans, who lived in Storyville
You sang the blues, try to amuse, here’s how they pay the bill
The law step in and call it sin to have a little fun
The police car has made a stop and Storyville is done.  –  Clarence Williams, “Farewell To Storyville”

Storyville postcard, circa 1910

The story “Painted Devil” (which appeared in my column of August 23rd) took place in New Orleans of the early 1880s, as most of you probably surmised; in it I alluded to a few historical details which would be familiar to educated New Orleanians but may have left others scratching their heads, especially my mention of Storyville in a reply at the end.  I therefore decided to give you a quick history of prostitution in the Crescent City, culminating in the history of Storyville.

New Orleans was founded on May 7, 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and named for Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of France at the time.  Besides being terribly primitive like all new colonies, New Orleans was hot, mosquito-infested and disease-ridden and therefore had nothing to recommend it to women, so Bienville petitioned King Louis XV for help in 1721.  The monarch responded by releasing all the prostitutes in La Salpêtrière prison and deporting them to New Orleans, where they of course resumed their trade.  So many of the early female inhabitants of the city were whores that when a priest suggested to one of the first governors of Louisiana that he banish all “disreputable women”, the governor replied, “If I send away all the loose females, there will be no women left here at all.”  In 1728, the Ursuline nuns started to import convent-raised middle-class French girls as wives for the middle and upper-class male colonists and continued to do so until 1751; these were called “casket girls” (filles à la cassette) because the French government issued them small chests of clothing.

Most of the female population were still either whores or former whores, but this concerned few people other than the priests; prostitution in New Orleans was neither regulated nor suppressed at any time during the 18th century.  The colony was ceded to Spain by the Treaty of Paris (1763) and remained Spanish territory until 1801, when Napoleon reclaimed it, then sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.  Obviously, the puritanical Americans could not allow things to stand as they were, so though prostitution was still legal a series of regulations were imposed to allow the police to arrest streetwalkers for “vagrancy” or harass madams for “brothel keeping”.  Most of these cases were dropped long before trial because the men who owned brothels or rented rooms to streetwalkers wanted their tenants back at work, and paid bribes or hired lawyers to ensure that outcome.  New Orleans’ first actual anti-prostitution law was the 1857 Lorette ordinance which prohibited prostitution on the first floor of buildings; it was soon declared unconstitutional, but the advent of the American Civil War gave the city fathers more important things to worry about.

New Orleans was captured by the Union Navy in May of 1862 and placed under martial law with General Benjamin Butler in command; he was known as “Beast Butler” for his tyrannical orders and “Spoons Butler” for his habit of stealing the silverware of every Southern house he stayed in during the war.  Butler seized $800,000 from the Dutch consulate, imprisoned French and English citizens (including diplomats), arrested clergymen for refusing to pray for President Lincoln, and within days of occupying the city issued his infamous General Order #28, which stated that if any woman should “…show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and shall be held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation”, in other words a prostitute.  This order provoked widespread outcry even in the North and was officially protested by both England and France; it was almost certainly the cause of Butler’s dismissal from the post only seven months later.

Mansions housing expensive brothels on Basin Street, circa 1900

After Butler’s removal the lower-class whores of New Orleans thrived on the business generated by lonely soldiers far from home, and by the end of the war a whole string of brothels had opened along the old Basin Canal; the road which connected them was named Basin Street after the canal, and the brothels there and all over the city continued to thrive during the Reconstruction on the money brought in by the Carpetbaggers, unscrupulous Northern businessmen who flocked to the South to take advantage of its weakened economic condition.  Most of these merchants built their mansions along Nyades Road to the nearby town of Carrolton; the road was renamed St. Charles Avenue and the railway which ran along it was eventually converted to a streetcar line which is still used today.

By 1897 there were brothels all over the city, so Alderman Sidney Story proposed to limit the trade to one district specifically zoned for the purpose.  The district chosen was the Basin Street area where most of the larger and better bordellos had grown up during the Occupation and Reconstruction; specifically, it was the zone bounded by Iberville, Basin, St. Louis, and N. Robertson streets.  Residents simply referred to the area as “The District”; only contemporary newspapers and later historians called it “Storyville” after the official who had proposed it.  The brothels ranged from 50¢ “cribs” (originally a San Francisco term) to mid-range houses charging $1-$5, up to a row of elegant mansions along Basin Street where the girls charged $10, a great deal of money in a day when the average workman earned 22¢/hour.  The most expensive fee was probably that charged by Madame Kate Townsend, who though she had long retired from active whoring would still agree to see an important client if he was willing to pay her exorbitant fee of $50/hour!

A catalog named The Blue Book was published periodically by the wealthier brothels; its title page was inscribed with the motto of the Order of the Garter (honi soit qui mal y pense, “shame to him who evil thinks”) and its interior contained descriptions of each house and its featured girls, a price list and a description of any special services offered.  The most lavish of the mansions was probably the Arlington (named for its owner, Josie Arlington) at 225 Basin Street, described in The Blue Book as “absolutely and unquestionably the most decorative and costly fitted-out sporting palace ever placed before the American public.”  The Arlington was a four-story edifice with a distinctive onion-domed cupola, crammed with expensive paintings and statuary and featuring various parlors decorated in the styles of foreign countries.  Josie Arlington herself was a remarkably ethical woman; in a day when verifiable virgin whores brought a whopping $200 or more and previously-wealthy Creole families who had fallen on hard times often sent their beautiful, cultured daughters to the best brothels, she absolutely refused to allow virgins to be “defiled or exploited” by her business.  In fact, the tomb in which she was originally buried (though her body was later moved to foil curiosity-seekers and the structure was sold to the Morales family) features a bronze figure of a young girl who is thought to symbolize a virgin being turned away from the door of the Arlington.

Black, white and Creole brothels (the latter staffed by beautiful “quadroon” or “octoroon” girls, 1/4 or 1/8 black respectively) coexisted in Storyville, but these were all for white clients; black men were legally barred from hiring any girl in the District.  However, brothels where black girls accepted black clients were tolerated in a separate district nearby; they were technically illegal but neither the police nor the regulators ever harassed them.  And though Jazz did not originate in Storyville as is commonly believed, it was played by musicians in the more expensive houses and was therefore first heard in Storyville by many out-of-town clients, becoming inextricably associated with it in those gentlemen’s minds.  “Jelly Roll” Morton and “Pops” Foster started out as musicians in Storyville brothels, and Louis Armstrong’s mother worked in one of the houses after she was abandoned by his father.

Considering its success and the amount of revenue it brought to the city, Storyville might still exist today if not for the prudery of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, a teetotaler who considered the district as a “bad influence” on the sailors at the nearby Naval base during World War I.  The District was therefore closed by federal order in 1917 over the strong objections of the New Orleans city government and Mayor Martin Behrman, who said “You can make prostitution illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.”  The closing of the District is dramatized in this scene from the movie New Orleans (1947), in which Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong perform the haunting “Farewell to Storyville”; though most of the working girls were forcibly evicted, new brothels opened in secret both there and in other parts of the city, streetwalkers proliferated and some of the earliest call girls appeared.  Many of the old houses were converted into dance halls, cabarets and restaurants, and after the beginning of Prohibition many speakeasies and gambling dens joined the clandestine brothels.  Frequent police and federal raids failed to hinder operations, so in the early 1930s the city government (at federal urging) bought or seized most of the area and leveled every building (even the beautiful mansions on Basin Street) to make room for the squalid Iberville Housing Project, which remains a blight on the city to this day.  Basin Street was even renamed “North Saratoga”, though the original name was restored by popular demand in the 1950s.

Sadly, the current political establishment in New Orleans prefers to pretend that Storyville never existed; even an historical marker at the site mentions several jazz musicians who were “on the scene here”, but glosses over the industry which employed them with the vague and inaccurate phrase “legalized red light district” (as we have seen, prostitution was not illegal there before so it could not be “legalized”).  Though New Orleans cannot contravene state law, city government is allowed to determine police department policy and could certainly order that prostitution is to be tolerated; instead they play the kind of sleazy games I described in my columns of August 4th, 5th and 6th, and thereby dishonor the memory of thousands of women who helped build the city.

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Here We Go Again…

Posted in Current Events, History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 26, 2010| 18 Comments »

The more things change, the more they stay the same. –  Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Despite what the naïve and the chronically optimistic like to believe, human nature does not change; individual people are the same today as they were at the beginning of human civilization some twelve thousand years ago.  And while we have made some social progress in that time, it is by no means the one-way trip imagined by the idealists but rather a zigzagging course full of false starts, backslides, missteps, blind alleys and going in circles.  Societies often ignore the obvious solutions to their problems, make problems out of things which aren’t, and return time and again to the same old nonsense despite the fact that it has never worked in the past.

In my column of August 9th I talked about the “white slavery” hysteria concocted by the social purists of the late 19th century to provide an excuse so the general public would swallow their foolish and repressive campaign against prostitution.  Proponents of this hysteria purported that tens of thousands of young girls were being abducted by slave traders and forced to serve in brothels in foreign countries, and they demanded tougher laws against voluntary adult prostitution in order to combat it.  The fact that extensive (not to mention expensive) investigations found absolutely no evidence for any of this reassured almost nobody, as is typical in a moral panic.  Fortunately, such manufactured hysterias tend to vanish like the insubstantial shadows they are in the harsh light of true crises, and the “white slavery” hysteria was no exception; by the end of the First World War it had abated.  Unfortunately, it is impossible to formulate concise laws against nonexistent threats, so legislation born of such hysteria is nearly always incredibly broad and unconstitutionally vague; the Mann Act was just such a piece of legislation, and it was for decades employed as a vehicle for malicious persecution until the U.S. Congress finally limited its scope in 1986 to actual criminal acts rather than undefined “immoral purposes”.

But just as Prohibition returned in the guise of the “War on Drugs”, and the witch hysteria of the 16th century returned as the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and ‘90s, so the “white slavery” hysteria has returned as the contemporary hysteria over “human trafficking”.  As in the first two decades of the 20th century, exorbitant claims are made about the extent of the sex slave trade in Western countries and used to justify laws against voluntary adult prostitution; all over the United States prostitution laws which were defended only a decade ago on “moral” grounds or by the excuse that prostitution attracts crime (a vague and bizarre notion in itself) are now being defended on the grounds that they are “needed” to combat “human trafficking” despite the fact that these laws were enacted long before the current moral panic.  It’s a bit as though governments were trying to defend 1930s laws against marijuana use on the grounds that they were “needed” to combat the use of methamphetamine, or justifying 19th-century laws against homosexuality on the grounds that they were “needed” to combat the spread of AIDS, except of course for the fact that methamphetamine and AIDS actually exist in the countries with those laws.

The hysteria is particularly troubling in the United Kingdom, where prostitution has been technically legal (though still persecuted) for several decades; it is obvious that the new “white slavery” hysteria-mongers intend to turn back the clock on prostitution rights if allowed.  Thus the potential damage is greater than in the US, where prostitution is suppressed anyhow and the renamed “white slavery” hysteria is just the latest excuse in a long parade of stupid, dishonest, hypocritical rationalizations for tyranny against women.  Since Stephen Paterson’s blog about UK prostitution law has already published an exhaustive summary of the claims made by “human trafficking” alarmists contrasted with the actual truth about those claims, it would be silly of me to attempt to cover the same ground over again; instead, I’ll just provide a link to the article here, and enthusiastically recommend it to my readers.  Another excellent article, from The Guardian of last October 20th, can be found here.

Just as at the end of the 19th century, the “white slavery”/”human trafficking” hysteria springs from the neurotic perversion of sexually-repressed middle-class white women who have derailed the feminist movement into their own personal crusade against men, sex and those who provide men with fair access to sex (i.e. whores).  But unlike a hundred years ago, “moral purity” won’t really play with the average voter any longer, so the neofeminists (IPC calls them “fundamentalist feminists”) have been forced to hide their hatred of us behind the pretense that they wish to “save” us, as discussed yesterday.

Since I really do want you to read the various things I’ve linked above (especially the Wikipedia article on moral panics and the Stephen Paterson blog), I’m going to do something unusual today and cut my column short so as to give you the time to do so.  But I’ll leave you with this second entry in the “Here We Go Again” department, a paraphrase of an AP article which describes a renewal of the control freaks’ war against Craigslist which I mentioned in my column of August 17th.

The attorneys general of seventeen of the United States announced Tuesday (August 24th, 2010) that they have sent a joint letter calling on Craigslist to get rid of its adult services category because they say the website cannot adequately block potentially illegal ads; they say Craigslist is not completely screening out ads that promote prostitution and child trafficking.  The site creators pledged in 2008 to improve their policing efforts.  The states which participated in this exercise in tyranny were Arkansas, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia; fortunately, Craigslist is based in San Francisco, California (the home of the American prostitutes’ rights movement) and is therefore not subject to the laws of those 17 states.

Note the linking of adult prostitution with child trafficking as though they were related; note also that prostitution was technically legal in Rhode Island from 1980 to 2009 (though still persecuted as in the UK) but was outlawed again on November 3 of last year, thus proving the statements I made in the first paragraph.  I’m sure nobody will be surprised when I tell you that the new law was championed by a privileged white woman and supported by cops who claimed they needed it to “conduct sting operations at brothels where women and children were abused and enslaved by pimps and sex-traffickers.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

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Traitors to Their Sex

Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 2010| 36 Comments »

There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women. –  Madeleine K. Albright

From the very beginning, feminism has been a movement as divided in its sensibilities as women are divided in ours.  While many early feminist leaders were concerned with issues which affected all women of every class and situation (such as reproductive freedom and social, legal, economic and educational equality) and by their efforts reshaped Western society for the better, the majority of rank-and-file feminists (especially in the US and UK) were unimaginative middle-class white women who were primarily concerned with their own peeves rather than the very real needs of women who were lower-class, nonwhite or unconventional.  But whenever I dare to make statements like this, I am often countered with a disingenuous “Feminists are just people who want women to have equal rights with men.”  If only that were true!  Certainly some feminists were and are like that, and Goddess bless them for it, but then as now most simply used the movement as most people use any political or social movement, namely as an excuse to control others.  While the best and brightest early feminists were working to win rights for individual women and thereby strengthen liberty for all people, the majority were working to do the exact opposite by imposing their own prudish, repressed, Christian, Victorian and feminine sexual morality on the 85% or more of society who were none of those things.

These conflicting attitudes about freedom of choice vs. conventional Victorian sexual morality can be seen in the person of Josephine Butler (1828-1906), who recognized that English law of the time (especially the Draconian “Contagious Disease Acts”) stripped prostitutes of their rights as Englishwomen and so campaigned tirelessly for the repeal of those laws for 16 years.  At the same time, Butler (like most Victorians) believed that women were essentially asexual, and so could not accept that any woman might freely choose to exploit the male sexual appetite in order to earn a living; the very idea was anathema to her rigid Christian thinking.  She therefore concluded that it was actually whores who were the exploited ones, childlike victims of male lust who had been forced into lives of “degradation” by male oppression.  Like so many people both then and now, Butler was so convinced that her opinions were “right” that she imagined anyone who believed differently must be suffering from some form of impaired judgment.

Butler was very charismatic and attracted many middle-class feminists to her cause, but after the repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts in 1886 prostitutes were no longer the cause célèbre; when they refused to repent their whoredom and embrace “honest work” and conventional morality the feminists abandoned their sympathy like yesterday’s newspaper and declared war on our entire profession, vowing to abolish it entirely.  Butler founded the Social Purity Alliance, an organization dedicated to imposing middle-class Victorian standards of chastity (i.e. repugnance for sex) onto men, and it was but the first of a host of similar organizations which sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1880s and ‘90s.  Though the movement boasted a number of high profile men (such as William Booth of Salvation Army fame and the American health-farm proprietor John Kellogg, who touted corn flakes as a “cure” for masturbation in adolescent boys), the overwhelming majority of its members were female.  And though many of these came from conservative Christian backgrounds, many others were former Butlerites; middle-class “feminists” had shown their true colors and abandoned the drive to win rights for the disenfranchised in favor of one which aimed to restrict the rights of everyone.  One goal of the social purity movement was the imposition of universal temperance (eventually resulting in Prohibition in the US), but the more important one for our purposes was the war on whores.  While male rulers had always been largely content to “control” or ghettoize prostitutes, the purity crusaders vowed to wipe us from the face of the Earth, and their newfound political clout (which increased dramatically after women were given the vote in almost every Western nation in the first two decades of the 20th century) resulted in an unprecedented wave of harsh, repressive laws directed against the women who so offended the retarded sexual sensibilities of their privileged bourgeois sisters.

The purity crusaders used many propaganda weapons against prostitutes, but chief among these were disease scares and the “white slavery” hysteria.  As several times before in history, whores were vilified as dirty plague-carriers, and this campaign of misinformation was so well-organized that the notion is still deeply imbedded in the public consciousness a century later despite ample evidence to the contrary.  But the “white slavery” propaganda was even more effective; the unholy alliance of middle-class feminists and puritanical religious zealots managed to convince the public, the media and governments that there was a huge international trade in underage girls, abducted and forced into sexual slavery in foreign countries.  The fact that there was absolutely no evidence for such a vast conspiracy made no difference whatsoever; the public devoured lurid stories of child prostitution, and throughout the Western world (especially in English-speaking countries) voluntary adult prostitution was banned or severely restricted under the excuse of combating involuntary prostitution of “children”.  The brothels were closed, girls were forced into the streets, and the pimp as we know him today first appeared; in the name of “freeing” women from male “exploitation”, these so-called “feminists” had actually surrendered many women into a new form of male domination.

The war on whores reached its peak in the 1920s, but ran out of steam when the Great Depression gave middle-class feminists something more important to worry about; that was followed closely by the Second World War.  But once Hitler was safely buried and the dust began to settle, the stifling conformity of the 1950s inspired a new generation of feminists.  As in the first wave of feminism a hundred years before, the best and brightest feminists concerned themselves with the big issues and the rights of individual women, while the majority of rank-and-file feminists were once again unimaginative middle-class white women who were primarily concerned with their own peeves rather than the very real needs of women who were lower-class, nonwhite or unconventional.  One of the big issues this time around was sex; as I discussed in my column of July 20th scientific inquiry had at last exploded the myths about female sexuality which drove so much of the first feminists’ agenda, and for the first time in modern history “respectable” women were free to think and talk about a subject previously restricted to their whore sisters; the so-called “sexual revolution” had arrived.

Unfortunately, the evaporation of the social purity movement had not resulted in an equivalent evaporation of the morality laws it had foisted on the populace, especially in the United States; far too many Americans are subject to a peculiar delusion I call “lawheadedness”.  A “lawhead” is 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.  Despite the fact that in the 1960s many Americans became far more accepting of prostitution and other sex businesses, this was insufficient to cause prostitution law to even be questioned, much less repealed.

In the sexually “liberated” climate of the 1960s, many true feminists found this situation abhorrent.  They rightfully recognized that laws against prostitution are discriminatory in the extreme because they criminalize the only profession which is overwhelmingly practiced by and controlled by women; these early second-wave feminists understood that repression of prostitution is the repression of a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own body, just as surely as banning abortion or birth control was.  And since feminists were working to abolish the latter laws, it only made sense that they should work to abolish anti-prostitution laws as well.  But by the early ‘70s the first-wave pattern was starting to repeat itself; the white, middle-class feminists who made up the majority of the movement monopolized debate and elbowed the hookers out, forcing us to start our own separate rights organizations such as COYOTE and the English Collective of Prostitutes.  As yet there was no open hostility between whores and mainstream feminists, but sexually-repressed caricatures like Kate Millet were working to change that; here’s a quote from Millett which defines her view:

Prostitution, when unmotivated by economic need, might well be defined as a species of psychological addiction, built on self-hatred through repetitions of the act of sale by which a whore is defined.

Recognize the Victorian rhetoric?  It’s the old “whores are subhuman” dressed up in modern pop-psychology drag.  Millett and others like her started to pull feminism in a Neomarxist direction, transforming what had been a positive movement about making women equal partners with men into a vicious political organization whose catechism was the old Marxist poison of class warfare, except with “patriarchy” substituted for “bourgeoisie” and “women” substituted for “proletariat”.

By the end of the ‘70s feminism was in turmoil, torn between the true feminists and the sick, bitter Neomarxists and their “gender war” rhetoric.  But once AIDS appeared on the scene the war was over, and the misandrists had won; the modern Puritanism engendered by the AIDS scare shifted the balance of power to the anti-sex position, and sex workers of every kind (including everyone from porn stars to lingerie models) were demonized as gender-war “Uncle Toms”, as typified in this quote from anti-whore activist Julie Burchill:

Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism.  Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women’s sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another.  When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.

There is the Neofeminist position in all its histrionic, collectivistic, misogynistic, anti-sexual, completely-detached-from-reality putrescence; whores are evil, Burchill is saying, because by our comfort with sex we make prudish women like her look bad.  Like the “learned” men of the 19th century she portrays us as stunted creatures incapable of free moral choice, “things to be done to” in her words; note, however, that it is Burchill who so characterizes us, not her imaginary “patriarchy”.

So in almost exactly a century, we’ve come full circle.  As in 1910, we’re still being blamed for spreading disease despite ample evidence to the contrary.  As in 1910, authorities justify laws banning voluntary adult prostitution with the excuse that such bans somehow magically help them combat child prostitution and white slavery (only now they call it “human trafficking”).  As in 1910, we are characterized as subhuman monsters somehow different from other women.  And as in 1910, our worst enemies are not men, but a certain type of twisted control-freak woman who is perfectly happy to kick her sisters in the teeth in order to advance her own selfish, prudish, repressive agenda.

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