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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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Top Ten

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2011| 9 Comments »

I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list… –  Sir William Gilbert, “As Someday It May Happen” from The Mikado

I promised in my “Anniversary” column that I’d provide a list of my top ten posts, calculated in a number of different ways, and though I actually made the counts that very day I’ve for some reason not been able to get around to putting the column together until now!  So without further ado, here are the figures as they stood on July 10th.

This first is a list of my top ten columns, as determined purely by number of hits:

Top Ten (# of hits)

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits by 7/10/11
Coming and Going                                  February 10th, 2011                5,970
Courtesan Denial                                    December 4th, 2010                4,637
Meretrices and Prostibulae                     November 3rd, 2010                4,127
Numerology                                            January 24th, 2011                  3,360
Acting and Activism                                 January 8th, 2011                    2,721
Who Did Your Tits?                                 October 1st, 2010                    2,623
January Second                                      January 2nd, 2011                   1,875
Plaçage                                                   November 22nd, 2010             1,771
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day   March 3rd, 2011                       1,574
The Slave-Whore Fantasy (Part One)     December 2nd, 2010                1,537

Some of these are unsurprising, but some appear to make no sense at all; why in the world should a post about the amount of money the State of Texas wastes on locking up hookers be my most popular by 29% above its next-closest competitor?  To understand the reason, one must take image searches into account; for several months this spring, the single most popular search which led to this blog was “Texas county map” or some variation on it, which led to the first illustration in my February 10thcolumn.  Similarly, searches for pictures of Veronica Franco led to the December 4th column, “Pompeii” and “Temple of Fortuna Virilis” both found my November 3rd column, “Mardi Gras tits” turned up this young lovely in my October 1st column, and Googling for illustrations of the fictional planet Gor turned up these Boris Vallejo illustrations in my December 2nd column.  It tickles my sense of irony that thousands of searches for “Mira Sorvino” ended up at my January 8th column about her rude and unprofessional treatment of Dr. Laura Agustín, but I am nothing short of astonished that almost two thousand people cared enough about sofa beds to end up at my column of January 2nd.

Since these results tell us nothing about the content of the columns, I disallowed them and came up with this list:

Top Ten (corrected)

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits by 7/10/11
Numerology                                            January 24th, 2011                  3,360
Plaçage                                                   November 22nd, 2010             1,771
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day   March 3rd, 2011                       1,574
Ashley Madison                                       January 30th, 2011                  1,439
Madame de Pompadour                          December 29th, 2010              1,366
Phryne                                                    July 31st, 2010                         1,133
Storyville                                                 September 3rd, 2010               1,113
Japanese Prostitution                             October 21st, 2010                  1,104
By the Numbers                                       April 20th, 2011                       1,095
Here We Go Again…                                 August 26th, 2010                   1,060

Though many people searched for information on Phryne and Madame de Pompadour, many others found those articles by searching for pictures of the ladies (especially this detail from “Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis” by Henryk Siemiradzki), so I’ll include two runners-up as well:  “Wife Swapping” from November 20th and “November Q & A” from November 27th.

Ranking the top ten posts by the number of comments they elicited gives us a completely different picture:

Top Ten Comments

Name                                            Date                     # of comments by 7/10/11
That Is So Hot!                             April 19th, 2011                       191
Speaking in Prostitute                  June 17th, 2011                       170
Their Lips Are Moving                   April 25th, 2011                        132
Pendulum                                     April 9th, 2011                          128
Creeping Rot                                April 18th, 2011                        123
Public Service Announcement       June 12th, 2011                       120
Savaging                                      March 27th, 2011                     115
Neither Cold Nor Hot                    April 6th, 2011                          114
May Q & A                                    May 31st, 2011                          97
Interview: Jill Brenneman (Pt 4)   February 24th, 2011                  96

With apologies to Eliot, April appears to be the chattiest month!

Most posts seem to have a great deal of interest right away, then trickle off; others seem to attract interest consistently as time goes by.  Here are the posts which show the smallest variation in number of hits from month to month:

Ten Most Consistent (in chronological order)

Name                                                 Date
Do You Party?                                   July 14th, 2010
Modern Marriage                               July 18th, 2010
Phryne                                              July 31st, 2010
A Whore in the Bedroom                  September 9th, 2010
Think of the Children!                       September 30th, 2010
No Other Option                               October 17th, 2010
Wolves                                             October 18th, 2010
Japanese Prostitution                      October 21st, 2010
Wife Swapping                                 November 20th, 2010
Plaçage                                             November 22nd, 2010

Interestingly, there aren’t any posts from this year in this particular list.  Finally, I’d like to finish off with a list of my ten favorite posts which don’t appear on any of the other lists:

Ten Essays Maggie Would Like To See Get More Attention

Name                                                 Date
Advice for Clients                                August 21st , 2010
Five Women in Whitechapel               October 5th, 2010
Heart of Gold                                      October 6th, 2010
The Love-Hate Relationship                October 7th, 2010
Amazingly Stupid Statements             October 10th, 2010
Deadbeats                                          October 30th, 2010
Ban the Super Bowl!                           December 11th, 2010
Social Autoimmune Disorder                January 12th, 2011
Creating Criminals                               January 15th, 2011
A Little Help From Our Friends             March 11th, 2011

Plus ALL of the fictional interludes!

One Year Ago Today

“New Film Reviews”, my first of a number of similar columns, containing my reviews of Doctor Detroit, Full Metal Jacket, An Indecent Proposal, Jesus Christ Superstar, Pretty Woman, Total Recall, Whore and The Wicker Man.

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Profanation

Posted in History, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 28, 2011| 41 Comments »

Come, Shamhat, take me away with you
To the sacred Holy Temple, the residence of Anu and Ishtar.  –  The Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet I)

Peer review is the process by which scholars are kept honest and mistakes in methodology or data are discovered; it means that studies are first published in academic journals where other scholars in the field can read them, criticize their flaws, attempt to reproduce the results and otherwise ensure that flawed or even falsified studies are discredited before being quoted by other authors and thereby contaminating the pool of knowledge.  Though the process can certainly discover cases of outright lying or misrepresentation, its main purpose is to discover honest errors and cut through the bias under which even sincere scholars may misinterpret their findings.  One could not ask for a better example of the necessity of the process than the 2001 Estes and Weiner study, which would have been trashed had it been peer reviewed, but was instead published without review and subsequently spawned the “300,000 trafficked children” and “average age of entry into prostitution is 13” myths.

Estes & Weiner weren’t the only scholars whose anti-whore biases caused them to make ridiculous assertions, nor is sociology the only field afflicted by such bias.  On June 26th I pointed out the ignorant prejudice which utterly ruins a recent study by two economists, and we’ve discussed the absurd contentions of the neofeminists many times; in my column of one year ago today I described the convoluted process by which neofeminist “researchers” like Melissa Farley design studies to produce the exact conclusions the researchers want them to produce, and unfortunately these bogus studies go unchallenged because most of their authors’ peers are themselves affected by the same bias.  Neofeminism has so infected many universities that it’s virtually impossible to find any social science which it has not tainted to one degree or another, and when combined with Christian prudery and plain old Anglo-American Puritanism the result is a widespread prejudice against prostitutes which tends to pollute the scholarly detachment of many academics and to make it far less likely that their erroneous and often asinine pronouncements about our profession will be properly criticized.

Though deeply-held beliefs have always influenced the interpretations of past events made by historians who adhere to those beliefs, the idea that it is acceptable to literally rewrite history, to project modern attitudes upon those who lived in other times and places, is a comparatively recent phenomenon.  Even the ancient historians, fond as they were of editorialization, generally accepted that different people have different customs and that those in the past might behave in a manner very different from the Greek or Roman ways with which the writer was acquainted.  But modern Marxist, feminist and “queer” scholars often make the bizarre assumption that many if not most people in history shared the scholar’s notions and prejudices, and that historical behavior which violates modern doctrines must be explained away or reinterpreted with a Marxist, feminist or “queer” spin.  As a result, scholars addled by neofeminism (who insist that prostitution is “violence against women”) feel compelled to reject, deny and reinterpret every historical instance of prostitutes with high status.

Now, this isn’t really new; even the ancient Hebrew writers often conflated zonah (whore) with kedeshah (sacred harlot), using the two words interchangeably throughout the prophetic books.  And a few Victorian writers preferred either to portray the courtesans of old as something entirely different from modern prostitutes, or else to use them as proof of the inherent moral turpitude of pagan cultures.  In the 20th century, the occasional bluenosed professor harrumphed that Theodora and Aspasia couldn’t have been courtesans because no whore could be that intelligent or respected, and that the plain fact of their harlotry was supposedly “invented” by those who were trying to defame them.  The idea that being a courtesan was not dishonorable in ancient or medieval Greece does not appear to register in the minds of these stuffy academics; they were raised to think of “whore” as an insult and like many modern people could not imagine it as anything else.  But these were isolated cases; for the most part, scholars recognized that the notion of prostitution as a social ill is largely Judeo-Christian, and the notion that it should actually be abolished dates only to the late 19th century.

All that started to change about 20 years ago, when neofeminist anti-sex views began to permeate academia.  At first there were only a few such revisionist papers, but in the past decade a new crop of courtesan deniers has sprung up, and many of them have not limited themselves to denying the harlotry of our most famous sisters; instead they have gone straight for the root like crazed gophers, making the grandiose claim that the entire concept of sacred prostitution is a “myth”.  All the records of it from the Middle East, the Far East, India, Greece, Rome and Central America?  Fabrications and misinterpretations, according to these neofeminist “historians”.  As one of them expressed it, sacred prostitution is “more of a construct of the 19th Century Western European mindset than a true representation of the facts,”  those “facts” being of course that prostitution is “violence against women” and a manifestation of “patriarchy”, and therefore it is impossible that prostitutes could ever have been priestesses.  Their chief support for this notion is that the only Greek historian who describes the Babylonian version of the practice is Herodotus (who had a tendency to embellish many of his stories) and that some of the Mesopotamian texts which mention sacred prostitution also describe things like kings feasting with the gods.  Of course by that same token we must also disbelieve that the Sumerians had cities, agriculture, weapons and all the other things described in these same texts, but since none of those things contradict neofeminist dogma it is only prostitution which is suspect.  And somehow, casting doubt on Sumerian texts is held to “disprove” sacred prostitution everywhere in the world.  Modern prohibitionists have succeeded in establishing formal persecution of the last sacred prostitutes on the planet, the devadasis of India and the deukis of Nepal, and now in their hubris they wish to retroactively wipe out our tradition back to the beginning of civilization, profaning the memory of the sacred whores of antiquity by denying they ever existed.

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Harlots of the Bible

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , on July 22, 2011| 17 Comments »

Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.  –  Matthew 21:31

Today is the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, whom Western tradition represents as a repentant prostitute; I discussed the legend in last year’s column for this day.  But though the Bible does not support the idea that Mary Magdalene was a whore, it does mention a number of other ladies of my profession and today I’d like to present an overview of their stories.

The first notable mention of a harlot occurs in Genesis 38, and as might be expected of an episode taking place about the 15th century BCE the harlot concerned was a temple prostitute…or to be exact, a woman disguised as a temple prostitute.  The Hebrew Levirate law required that a man marry his brother’s childless widow so the dead brother might have descendants to inherit his name and property and the widow would have children to support her in old age.  The patriarch Judah had three sons:  Er, Onan and Shelah, but Er died suddenly before giving his wife, Tamar, any children.  Er’s younger brother, Onan, married her as duty demanded, but he hated his dead brother and refused to give him descendants, so though he had sex with Tamar he withdrew before ejaculation and “spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother” – (Genesis 38:9).  Yahweh was very unhappy about this combination rape and dereliction of duty and accordingly slew Onan; weirdly enough, Christian preachers of the early 18th century used this as evidence that God disliked masturbation (“spilling seed on the ground”) and referred to the act as “onanism”, thus demonstrating that they entirely misunderstood the nature of Onan’s transgression.

“Tamar and Judah” by Horace Vernet (1840)

In any case, Shelah should have next inherited the duty but he was too young to marry, so Judah asked Tamar to wait; however, when the boy came of age the father did not uphold his promise.  The clever girl therefore travelled to a nearby town whither Judah had driven his sheep to have them shorn, and disguised herself as a veiled Canaanite temple prostitute (the Hebrew word used is kedeshah, a sacred prostitute, rather than zonah, a common one) in order to entice her father-in-law to hire her.  The plan worked; he promised to pay her a kid from his flock, and as a bond he left his signet ring, bracelets and staff.  Of course, she had no interest in payment; what she wanted was the child due her, so after the act was done she left without waiting for the kid to be delivered, and when her pregnancy began to show three months later she presented the identifying items as proof of her child’s lawful parentage.  Judah confessed that he had been tricked into doing his duty, Tamar had twins and everything worked out for the best; the sons became the ancestors of the tribe of Judah, i.e. the Jews.

Tamar was not the only Biblical harlot with important descendants.  In the second chapter of Joshua two Hebrew spies lodged in the house of a harlot named Rahab while in Jericho, and she hid them from searchers in return for their promise that when they invaded her city she and her family would be spared.  Why did she do this for two strangers?  Self-interest was certainly a major factor, but hospitality laws probably came into play as well; in the ancient Near East a host had a sacred responsibility for the safety of those under his roof, which is why Lot was willing to turn his own daughters over to the Sodomite rape-gang in Genesis 19:4-8 rather than give up the disguised angels who were his guests.  Also, Rahab seems to have been rather disgusted by the spineless response of her countrymen to news of the Hebrew victories (“your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you…neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you” – Joshua 2:9-11).  In any case, Joshua kept the pact to which his spies had committed him and Rahab and her family were spared; she married one of the Hebrews and became the ancestress of either several prophets or of Jesus himself, depending on which Biblical scholar one chooses to believe.

The First Book of Kings (chapter 3, verses 16-28), tells the famous story of King Solomon’s judgment over two harlots who shared a house; one overlaid her baby and he died, so she switched the body for the other woman’s child.  The King ordered that the living baby be split with a sword and half given to each, whereupon the real mother instantly renounced the infant to save its life.  But there’s a strange detail at the end of the story; we are told “all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king”, which is a strange reaction unless one recognizes the politics behind it.  Solomon, you see, was not the rightful heir; he was the son of David’s concubine Bathsheba, and the throne should have gone to his elder brother Adonijah but Solomon was the cleverer politician and contrived a coup.  Immediately upon taking the throne he spread the story of the judgment over the harlots, which was in actuality a parable:  the wrongful mother (Solomon) was willing to let the baby (Israel) be split with a sword (divided by civil war), but the rightful mother (Adonijah) could avoid the butchery by relinquishing parental (royal) rights.  No wonder the people were afraid!

In Solomon’s parable Israel was the child of a whore, but by Ezekiel’s time (early 6th century BCE) she was portrayed as a whore herself.  Ezekiel (whose feast, coincidentally, was yesterday) repeatedly prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem for its “betrayal” of Mosaic Law, and one of his parables painted the now-divided Hebrew kingdom (northern Samaria and southern Judah) as a pair of harlot sisters who enjoy their work entirely too much.  He describes their “whoredoms” in great and lurid detail, mentioning several times that their clients bruised their tits (Ezekiel 23:3, 8 and 21), and he seems especially fascinated with the size of their clients’ penises and the volume of their seminal discharge (“For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.” – Ezekiel 23:20).  I’ll bet you never studied that passage in catechism or Sunday school!

But what about the woman whose name is practically synonymous with “whore”, namely Jezebel?  Well, as I already explained in my column of that name, she was a Phoenician princess who married King Ahab of Israel and dutifully built temples to her own gods in her adopted land, thus earning the wrath of the fanatical prophet Elisha.  After Ahab’s death Elisha backed a usurper who overthrew the rightful heir and had Queen Jezebel hurled from a window of the palace to her death.  The association of her name with harlotry appears to derive from the fact that when she knew death was near she made up her face and dressed in full royal regalia so as to die a queen, plus the fact that Elisha, like Ezekiel in later centuries, used the word “whoredom” as a metaphor for turning from Yahweh to other gods.  Of course, Jezebel wasn’t a Hebrew so her adherence to her native gods can hardly be considered apostasy, but little details like that (and the fact that in Phoenicia, makeup wasn’t considered the exclusive province of harlots as it was in Israel) don’t matter much to homicidal religious maniacs.

“The Whore of Babylon” by William Blake (1809)

Nor to mystical visionaries like St. John the Divine, who in the 1st century CE portrayed Jezebel as a sort of succubus: “…thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.  And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.  Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.” (Revelation 2:20-22)  John was one of those Christians who followed in the footsteps of the Hebrew prophets by using whores as symbols for everything filthy; the most famous is of course the Whore of Babylon from Revelation 17:

And there came one of the seven angels…saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:  With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication…and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.  And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:  And upon her forehead [was] a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.”

Though modern Christian fundamentalists believe the Whore of Babylon to be a literal person, this is a fairly recent interpretation; most Biblical scholars believe she was a symbol for Rome, and Martin Luther and other leaders of the Reformation taught that she was a symbol for the Catholic Church.  But whichever interpretation one accepts, with Babylon the transformation is complete; the whores of the oldest parts of the Bible are strong, realistic and positively-portrayed women, but as the centuries wore on and women’s status sank the harlot became a symbol for increasingly negative and abstract concepts.

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A Girl Who Can’t Say No

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on July 17, 2011| 11 Comments »

I’m jist a girl who cain’t say no,
I’m in a turrible fix
I always say “come on, let’s go!”
Jist when I orta say nix.  –  Oscar Hammerstein II

Like Ado Annie from Oklahoma! I have trouble saying “no.”  Of course, she was singing specifically about male advances, while I’m not; it’s true that as a lass I was, well, highly amenable to suggestions of that sort, but that isn’t really what this column is about.  Whether due to nature or upbringing I’ve always been a “pleaser”; since a very young age I’ve always derived greater satisfaction from making other people happy than from concentrating on my own desires.  By my early twenties I had developed the ability to refuse people I disliked or whom I recognized as trying to take advantage of me, but I never really tried very hard to build up a resistance to people I liked or requests which appeal to my morals, sensibilities or vanity.  Yes, it has been suggested to me many times that I really should learn to worry more about my own needs than those of others, but as the song goes, “How can I be what I ain’t?”  It seems more important to me to be comfortable in one’s own skin than to conform to the notions promoted by what Philippa used to call the “Enlightenment Police”, so I’ll go on jumping up to wait on family or guests in my house, doing favors for people and sharing my time and/or money as seems right to me.

Durga would find my job a piece of cake, but she’s a goddess and all.

One of the things which “seems right” to me is sex work activism; people often ask how I manage to continue churning out columns every single day, considering that some of them take hours to write, and even the ones which flow quickly often require considerable research (including finding proper pictures and epigrams).  And then there’s the correspondence; in addition to moderating and replying to on-site comments I answer every single email I get (at length if necessary), and though some of my answers do double-duty as Q&A column entries others do not.  I also take the time to scan a number of websites for items I can write about, to comment on other blogs or news stories, and to call important or interesting items to the attention of those in my network so they can reply to them or write about them as well.  In addition to those daily activities, I am sometimes asked to give interviews like this one from last Thursday with blogger Nicci6; or to write guest columns, such as the prostitution essay I did for SWAAY and the guest blogging I’ve been doing for the libertarian blog Nobody’s Business, which the more observant among you may have noticed was added to “Friends of Whores” a few weeks ago.

Why do I invest 8-12 hours a day at all this?  Because I think it’s important.  Maybe it’s because the nuns managed to convince me that I have an obligation to use my gifts for a greater good,  or perhaps it’s just my nature.  But whatever the reason, I do derive a sense of satisfaction and rightness from my work, a feeling that it’s my small contribution to making the world a better place than it was before I started (I like to think so, anyway).  And besides, as my regular readers know my husband travels on business a great deal; my work gives me a worthwhile and productive way to spend my time while he’s gone.  That’s not to say I neglect it while he’s home; I get as far ahead as possible while he’s on the road, and do as much work as I can while he’s sleeping (I need about two hours less than he does), checking his own correspondence, reading his magazines and such.  So while I don’t fall behind exactly, I do tend to take longer to get to “extras”; if you ever have cause to wonder why it took me longer than usual to answer an email or moderate a comment, it’s probably because most of my time and energy is going to my husband rather than the blog that week.

But lest any of you take today’s column as some sort of veiled plea for fewer comments, letters, requests or anything else, please put that notion out of your mind; for all the hard work and demands on my time, I feel happier and more satisfied than I have since I retired, and my husband has often remarked on the difference.  I call your attention to the latter part of the song which forms today’s epigram:

Other girls are coy and hard to catch
But other girls aint havin’ any fun
Every time I lose a wrestling match
I have a funny feeling that I won.

One Year Ago Today:  The second part of my column on couple calls.  Enjoy.

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“Whores In History” Revisited

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 19, 2011| 14 Comments »

I am wholeheartedly on the side of the unrepentant whore, the most maligned woman in history…in [this book she] speaks up to denounce and challenge her oppressors, and thereby overcome the centuries of lies, denial and stereotyping that have been her lot.  Only when she is listened to by the rest of our society will women finally and irrevocably be able to end our division into Good Girls and Bad Girls.  –  Nickie Roberts, from her foreword

My initial bibliography entry for Nickie Roberts’ Whores In History (1992) did not remotely do it justice; it was literally the very first entry I wrote, and I hadn’t really settled on the length of description and depth of detail that I wanted in the reviews.  But now, almost a year later, I feel I owe the book a longer and more elaborate review, especially after my disappointing experience with Aphrodite’s Trade (related in yesterday’s column).  Up until now, all I had to say about Roberts’s monumental work was this rather terse paragraph:

Anyone who is really interested in the TRUE history of prostitution (as opposed to the traditional nonsense promulgated by Western governments and the even more ridiculous variety vomited forth by neofeminists) should read this book.  As a former working girl herself, Nickie Roberts knows the lay of the land and this excellent and exhaustively-researched volume may open a few eyes about the origin and development of the profession and the way many of us see it.

And though that’s absolutely true, it isn’t nearly enough.  In Roberts’ introduction she states,

Everything I had read about prostitution and prostitutes appeared to have been written by men – the client class – mostly academics who claimed scholarly objectivity.  The thought occurred to me that if prostitution truly is the world’s oldest profession, then men writing about it is certainly the second oldest.  From the time ink was invented, it seems that male writers have been obsessed with the whore…Only fairly recently has the subject of prostitution been tackled by feminists, often of the radical/revolutionary tendency; women who have an anti-sex industry axe to grind.  To put it bluntly, the feminist movement has failed the prostitute, and failed her badly, in my view.

This is a crucial point, because it presents the entire philosophy underlying the book:  It is, and was from the beginning intended to be, the first scholarly examination of the history of prostitution written by someone who actually knows about the subject firsthand.  Roberts is not a male scholar looking at the lives and stories and statistics and reports from a male (and therefore an outsider’s) perspective, nor a feminist scholar warping the truth through the distorted lens of misandrist anti-sex rhetoric, but a harlot-scholar writing about a subject she understands because she has lived it.

“To the Sisters”, a Roman brothel sign; one of many plates featured in the book

The study starts in prehistory and then moves from Ancient Greece to Rome to Medieval Europe, then on through the Renaissance and Age of Reason to the 19th and 20th centuries, culminating in a discussion of the origins of the sex worker rights movement.  In each chapter she gives a general sketch of the social conditions of the time as they relate to women in general and whores specifically, then discusses historical events and important personalities (both historical whores and the men who hired them, wrote about them or tried to control them).  Where statistics are available she presents them, though as you might expect this happens much more often in the chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries (just as in any other historical subject).  Her research is exhaustive; the bibliography contains about 150 sources and every important fact and declaration in the 358-page text is carefully attributed.  Though the author certainly expresses her own informed interpretation of the various events and trends, she never stoops to the neofeminist tactic of just making things up; all of her judgments are backed up with solid facts.

I cannot possibly overstate how valuable Whores In History has been to me in writing this blog; whenever I set out to do a column on people or events from a certain period in history I usually scan the chapter which discusses it so as to re-familiarize myself with it, and in many cases Roberts quotes from sources which are not readily available online.  My copy resides in the bookshelf nearest my desk (when it isn’t on the desk), and bears the unmistakable signs of heavy usage and consultation.  I highly recommend this important work to all my whore sisters, to all the men who love and/or support us, and to all those who are interested in the truth about a long-hidden aspect of women’s history.  Used copies can be purchased on Amazon for literally pocket change, and it’s well worth the modest investment.

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New Reviews for June

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2011| 17 Comments »

As is my custom, I’m featuring these reviews of new additions to my review pages in order to call the attention of regular readers (who have presumably already looked at those pages) to them.

Aphrodite’s Trade by Lochlainn Seabrook

Thanks to its ambitious subtitle (“The Hidden History of Prostitution Unveiled”), its beautiful cover art (The Pearls of Aphrodite by Herbert Draper) and its endorsements from a number of luminaries in the prostitutes’ rights field, I was really looking forward to reading this book and was hoping to find in it a supplement to Nickie Roberts’ Whores In History; alas, I was badly disappointed.  Even now I wish I could recommend it to you; the author’s heart is in the right place and some of the points he makes are bang on target, but both content and execution are so critically flawed that I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone who isn’t A) already an expert in the field; B) an obsessive collector of all things whore-related, and C) able to find it cheap.

The book starts out strong with a presentation of the roots of prostitution in biology (such as we’ve discussed here before), and Seabrook even postulates a “prostitution gene” along the same lines as that suggested by Amanda Brooks.  Furthermore, he points out that since marriage was made possible by human females evolving beyond estrus – essentially making ourselves sexually receptive all the time – that it is reasonable to state that marriage evolved from prostitution rather than alongside it; again, no quibbles here.  But rather than stick to his strong point (which appears to be biology), Seabrook then wanders off into some very unconventional (and unsound) notions about history, describing as fact highly dubious New Age ideas about Neolithic social organization and portraying what he calls the “Patriarchal Takeover” as a monolithic event at a specific time, which it absolutely was not; what’s more, he can’t make up his mind about when it was supposed to have happened because he gives three different dates!  And his notions of etymology are even worse; Seabrook appears to believe that because two words resemble each other they must be linguistically related, and the houses of cards he builds from these pseudo-cognates are quite remarkable.

The structure of the book is as flawed as its content; though externally it appears to be a typical small-format trade paperback of 256 pages, it is printed in a large type-face with excessive white space and the essay itself (I hesitate to call it a book) occupies only 75 of those pages; there follow several appendices (only two of which are arguably useful), then a 40-page bibliography and a 75-page index (printed with even more wasted space than the text).  In the final analysis, this is basically a deeply-flawed 30-something page essay padded out to book size.  Save your money and buy Whores In History instead.

Heart of Gold by A.K. Smith

My experience with Heart of Gold was almost the opposite of that with Aphrodite’s Trade.  I was interested in it because of the subject matter and because I like the author’s blog, but I don’t generally care for detective novels and, though I’m not a technophobe, I fully admit to prejudice against e-books because (as you might suspect from my having been a librarian) I’m a bibliophile and I like the experience of reading a physical book with paper pages I can hold in my hands (I especially like the slightly-musty smell of old books).  So when I sat down with it a couple of weeks ago I intended to read just a chapter or two a night; well, that didn’t happen.  I was drawn in almost immediately and found myself saying, “I’ll just read one more chapter” over and over again until I had finished half the book; I only stopped because it was almost one in the morning and I usually go to bed around midnight.  The next day I started reading soon after posting my column, and didn’t stop until I was finished.  Smith’s characters are interesting, her plotting is tight and she managed to keep me guessing as to which of the suspects was threatening the heroine and what his motive might be (I guessed wrong).  Since (as I said previously) I’m not much of a reader of modern detective fiction, I can’t compare it to the work of well-known mystery authors, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and Smith managed to work in a good deal of detail about the realities of escorting in such a way that outsiders will learn some things about our lives without feeling preached to or distracted from the action.  All in all this is a very good first novel, and I look forward to future works.

National Geographic Taboo:  Prostitution (2010)

My husband recorded this documentary, an episode of the National Geographic Channel’s Taboo series, on his computer while on the road and brought it home for me to watch.  I believe the producers were trying to present a balanced view on the subject, but unfortunately this effort was undermined by two things, namely the narrative voice and the presentation of statistically disparate forms of prostitution as though they were equally common.  The show depicted four kinds of prostitution, each for about a quarter of the time:  Australian brothels, Bangladeshi prostitutes in a shantytown  adjacent to a ferry landing, European brothels and streetwalkers in Washington, D.C.  I’m sure my readers are astute enough to have noticed one major omission: the single most common form of prostitution in the Western world, namely escorting, was entirely ignored in favor of lurid concentration on a very small fraction of the American market.  The director seems to have leaned a little on our side; though roughly equal air time was given to the two pro-decriminalization experts (Ronald Weitzer, whose papers I have referenced before, and Jill McCracken, a fellow member of Sex Workers Without Borders) and the one anti-prostitution fanatic (Sheila Jeffreys), the spectacle of Jeffreys pronouncing that a paralyzed man who hired a legal prostitute at a Dutch brothel was guilty of “violence against women” made her look like the hateful monster she is.  Unfortunately, the writer leaned the other way:  Every negative statement about prostitution was expressed as a fact, while every positive one was said to be an opinion.  Statements about the terrible conditions of their lives made by the Bangladeshi prostitutes and the American streetwalkers were reported with the word “is”, while statements made by the legal Australian and Dutch prostitutes were reported with the word “claims”.  In other words we hear that the streetwalker is miserable, but the Aussie brothel girls only claim to be happy.  It’s a subtle bias, but one a less-critical viewer would absorb without noticing.  And in the end, despite eloquent explanations from Weitzer and McCracken that most of the problems of sex work derive from criminalization, I think the overall tone of the program comes off as somewhat anti-prostitution.

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June Miscellanea (Part One)

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

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

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

The View from the North

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

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

The Leading Players in the Field, Not

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

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

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

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

Kristof’s Totalitarian Fantasy

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

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

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

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

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

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

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Because We Say So

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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June Updates (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2011| 12 Comments »

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent.  Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers.  The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well meaning but without understanding.  –  Louis D. Brandeis

Our monthly collection of short articles hearkening back to previous columns.

The Camel’s Nose (October 2nd)

Al Franken may not know much about intellectual freedom, but…

Back in October I told you about the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act,” (COICA), a proposed law which would have allowed the government to censor wide swaths of the internet; less than two months later I reported that the Senate Judiciary Committee (including “internet freedom champion” Al Franken) had unanimously voted to allow the bill to move one step closer to becoming law.  Fortunately, as this January 18th article from CNET reports, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon single-handedly kept the bill from the Senate floor; unfortunately, according to this May 12th article from the same source, the bill’s sponsor has reintroduced it under a new name:

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) today introduced a revised version of a controversial bill that would give the Department of Justice and individuals new powers to enforce copyright and trademark law against “rogue” and “pirate” Web sites that offer unlicensed copies of protected content or which sell illegal knock-offs of brand-name goods.  The new bill was long expected. A late draft leaked out last week.  The proposed law, “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property” or Protect IP, includes several revisions to a draft introduced last year, known then as “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act,” or COICA.  The drafters of Protect IP have tried to respond to some of the most severe criticisms of COICA, which was seen as dangerously vague on its definition of the kinds of Web sites that, under the proposal…Registries and other Internet infrastructure providers were especially concerned with provisions that could have required any provider of domain name look-up services to comply with court orders to block access to the underlying IP address of a condemned domain name…

But critics have already condemned the new version, noting that it not only failed to remove some of the most dangerous features of COICA, but has also added expansive provisions that the earlier draft didn’t include.  TechDirt‘s Mike Masnick, for example, notes that the narrower definition of an “Internet site dedicated to infringing activities” in Protect IP is still both broad and vague.  And the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Abigail Phillips wrote…that “Despite some salient differences…in the new version, we are no less dismayed by this most recent incarnation than we were with last year’s draft”…Like COICA, Protect IP expands the web of enforcement techniques by requiring advertising networks and financial transaction providers to cut ties to domains found to violate the law.  But the new version now adds search engines and others to the list of providers who can be conscripted into complying with court orders.  Protect IP would require “information location tools” to “take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible,” to remove or disable access to the site associated with a condemned domain, including blocking hypertext links to the site…Perhaps most worrisome of all, Protect IP adds a provision that allows copyright and trademark holders to sue the owner/operator of a domain directly.  Again, the provision applies only to nondomestically-registered domains, but it allows the private party, like the government, to sue the domain name itself if the registrant does not have a U.S. address.  That’s important because in all cases, once a suit is initiated, the plaintiff can ask the court to issue an injunction or restraining order effectively shutting the site down…Thus, with minimal court proceedings and perhaps without any opportunity for the defendant to respond or participate, the draft law would enable the Department of Justice or a private party to effectively shut down a nondomestic Web site, putting the burden on the owner/operator to prove that the site is not “dedicated to infringing activities” as defined in the law…

The “guilty until proven innocent” mechanism of the law, not to mention its “breaking an egg with a sledgehammer” philosophy, are all too familiar to whores; perhaps I should’ve filed this under “Welcome To Our World” instead.

No Other Option (October 17th)

On May 18th Svenska Dagbladet carried this article about German “sex assistants”, whores who minister specifically to the elderly and disabled.  Since few of my readers read Swedish (I certainly can’t!) and some may lack access to translation software, I’ll paraphrase the entire article herein.  IMHO the most interesting thing about the article is its positive, accepting tone despite the fact that it was published in a Swedish newspaper, which I think you’ll agree tends to support my May 22nd statements about the true opinion of the Swedish public on the subject of sex work.

In Sweden, Catharina König would be guilty of prostitution, but in Germany she receives calls from health professionals and desperate parents.  “When people ask what I do, I usually say that I work with people with disabilities, and add that it’s sensual and erotic work.  And then they look at me with big eyes,” she laughs.  Five years ago (at the age of 47) she became unemployed, then stumbled across an article on “sex assistants”, people who help the disabled or elderly people to experience sex.  “I felt that it could be something for me, but I didn’t know if I could pull it off.  In my head, I had images of drooling and disfigured people,” she says.

Catharina König went to the Institute for Autonomy for the Disabled, a college which trains sex assistants.  Her clients are mostly elderly men in retirement homes or younger disabled men.  Sometimes, she says, they just want to see a female body, or caress it; sometimes they need help getting an orgasm.  And often they just want to lie in bed holding someone.  Many of her calls come from nursing home staff; they see that the elderly or disabled are suffering, depressed or aggressive but cannot help them.  In the case of younger people who live at home, it’s usually the mother who calls.  “Recently I was at home with a 40-year-old man who had never been with a woman, Catharina said; “At first he was terrified.  But then it became so soft and nice.”

One of Catharina König’s regulars is 58-year-old Peter, who has a spastic paralysis of the limbs.  “I am not an Adonis whom women turn to look at, but like most other men I yearn for a woman and her body,” says Peter, who wished to remain anonymous.  “In principle, I think that one should not pay for sex, but the disabled have so many disadvantages in society I claim my right to do so.”  When asked what he thought about the fact that in Sweden he would be labeled a criminal, Peter said he considers that an insulting idea.

Christina König agrees.  “Sure I’m a sex worker; I sell sexual services.  But it’s so much more than that; I’m trying to give people the feeling that they are beautiful.  It’s wrong to try to punish that.  Besides, in Germany prostitution is permitted since January 2002; the law considers the buying and selling of sexual services to be a commercial transaction, provided they are done voluntarily.  Brothels are permissible, and prostitutes pay taxes and the same charges as other self-employed people.”

Today there are many brothels which advertise that they are accessible to the disabled; their amenities include ramps for wheelchairs and staff who understand and can help.  The Association for Sexual Services, a German sex worker organization, estimates that half of the country’s nursing homes for the elderly or disabled allow prostitutes to visit their residents.  Many prostitutes have discovered this as a niche; most are a little older and have life experience, says Marion Detlef, a social worker at Hydra (an organization which provides services to sex workers in Berlin).  Detlef said that there is good cooperation with the old people’s homes, and more recently with nursing homes for the disabled as well.  “It’s still a big taboo for many people.  But even in church-based institutions, there is a growing understanding that all people have sexual needs.  As it says in the Bible, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’”

What a sensible, enlightened view!  And what a contrast from the monstrous, asinine official attitudes toward sex work we see in nearly every story coming out of the U.S. these days.

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