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In the News (#586)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Acting and Activism, Africa, Alaska, Backpage, Bad Fantasy-Good Reality, California, censorship, cops, end demand, End Demand (updates), Hollywood, hysteria, If Men Were Angels, Kenya, King of the Hill, language, Mother Learns From Her Children, Parable, Pennsylvania, prohibitionist myths, rape, Safe Targets, Saving Them from Themselves, serial killers, sexting, shame, Surplus Women, Texas, Thailand, The Lion and the Ox, The Scarlet Letter, Things We Choose To Do Together, underage, United Kingdom, Vendetta, Washington (state), Wisconsin on November 7, 2015| 9 Comments »

Social policies do not have to be so dumb. – Laura Agustín

The Scarlet Letter

This article is so stupidly evil it’s almost fascinating:

A plan to publicly shame those who solicit sex with minors moved forward…with a draft ordinance covering Los Angeles County expected next week…Don Knabe has been pushing for a “shame campaign” since late last year…the…ordinance that would provide for the publication of names and booking photos of those convicted of soliciting prostitution or loitering with intent to solicit prostitution…Sheila Kuehl…questioned the practice of arresting people for loitering with intent, saying she thought the allegation amounted to “mind reading”…The Los Angeles Times editorial board, when Knabe first made his proposal, called the plan “anachronistic” and said it amounted to “sensationalism”…

Parable

Noah Berlatsky with another analogy for the absurdity of prohibition:

Should young women be allowed to enter the music industry? That seems like a preposterous question. But consider: Kesha…filed a lawsuit against her former producer Dr. Luke…alleging that he had sexually, physically, and mentally abused her for a decade…Kesha’s lawsuit also alleges that Sony music refused to take steps to stop the abuse, and even covered up for it…The situation is not rare; producers and managers like Phil Spector and Ike Turner have physically and mentally abused their artists for years…Shouldn’t there be laws in place to prevent women from entering an industry such as this where they can be abused and harmed? It should be clear why this is a bad idea. Heavy-handed restrictions on women would hurt women, not protect them. To make it illegal for women to be musicians and pop stars would be abusive and unfair in itself…And yet, when it comes to sex work, restricting women’s options in the name of “protecting” them is suddenly seen as reasonable, logical, and necessary…

Saving Them From Themselves

How many more kids’ lives have to be destroyed before we stop the cops?

Police in a Pennsylvania school district have charged at least three kids—one of them just 11 years old—with distributing sexually explicit pictures of other minors. They…face juvenile detention, expulsion, and a variety of other life-altering consequences. This is somehow in their best interests—and the interests of kids everywhere—authorities claim…The levelling of charges…should not be viewed as some low-cost precondition to keeping kids safe, but a horrible, life-derailing consequence in and of itself…But we live in a country where paranoid delusions about safety provide cover for police to enforce absurd laws that make life miserable for kids…

Surplus Women

Kenyan police are investigating the murders of 10 women working as prostitutes, a record number of attacks in one month that has led to fears of a serial killer…campaigners have called on the government to legalise prostitution and offer proper protection to vulnerable women. The police commander in the town of Nakuru, where four bodies were found, said an intense manhunt was under way…Hassan Barua said security had been improved in the area, but would not comment on whether one suspect was wanted for multiple murders…

Bad Fantasy, Good Reality

Because they are?

When the issue of sex workers in Thailand is brought up, any discussion is usually characterized with words of “exploitation”, “coercion”, and “human trafficking”. However…Some…girls…[feel] that sex work [is] a means of emancipating themselves economically…A prevailing attitude…[is] that they feel better being paid for the sex they provide, rather than providing sex to a husband in a dead end relationship that they get nothing for. This was most prevalent in those who had been married before…Some even talk about providing sex as helping clients with a basic need…What was most common with those sex workers who had been prudent financially, was a satisfaction with their career as a sex worker…

The Mother Learns From Her Children

…Sex worker rights activists from around the world will join researchers and experts to present evidence to parliament in support of the decriminalisation of sex work. The day-long symposium, organised by the English Collective of Prostitutes and hosted by shadow chancellor John McDonnell, is an opportunity for parliamentarians and the public to sidestep the charged emotion of international debates on the nature of sex work and hear crime-related, humanitarian, and public health analyses from leading academics and campaigners…The symposium will compare the outcomes of Sweden’s criminalisation of the buying of sex with the full decriminalisation model that has flourished in New Zealand…activists from Thailand, Taiwan, Canada and South Africa will explain how criminalisation, rescue and rehabilitation programs have affected sex workers there. Rachel West, an American sex worker rights activist, will explore how a recent surge in anti-trafficking policing has disproportionately affected black sex workers and their clients…

The Lion and the Ox

Laura Agustín on the uselessness of the term “human trafficking”:

…There are young people now who have grown up surrounded by campaigning against trafficking, unaware there is conflict about how to define the term. Some want to dedicate energy to combating what is figured as a modern social evil. Some compare themselves with 19th-century anti-slavery advocates and feel outraged that anyone would question what they are doing…after…the idea of trafficking began its ascent…we who were interested in migration, sex work and labour policy realised it was useless for gaining equity or rights…the assumption is this human mobility to work is fomented by criminals who use force and coercion against their victims…Behind this over-simplification and over-focus on sex lie real social inequalities and oppressions: migration policies that favour middle- and upper-class jobs, out-of-date notions of the formal economy and productive labour, young people who want to get away from home, job-seekers willing to take risks to make more money, laws that make commercial sex illegal, laws that make sweatshops illegal and…more. To lump all this under a single term simply disappears the array of different situations, encourages reductionism and feeds into a moralistic agenda of Good and Evil…

King of the Hill (#421)

“The Harvard of sex trafficking” has now morphed into “The Harvard of pimp school”. Or was it really the other way around? Does it really matter, when both phrases are utterly ludicrous?

Milwaukee has become “the Harvard of pimp school” and Wisconsin is a hub of human trafficking, a [self-declared] expert has said in the wake of an FBI sting last month in which nine adolescents were [arrested]…meaning Milwaukee is tied with Las Vegas for the third highest number of young people [arrested]…Denver topped the list, with 20…and Detroit was next with 19. Over the past four years, however, Milwaukee has consistently ranked among the top five cities in the nation for [arrests of underage sex workers]…

If Men Were Angels

Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together:

A…Houston mother of two says she was raped in her hospital bed by a doctor…she reported the rape to nurses who responded with cold skepticism. She had to wait nearly two years for police to collect the alleged attacker’s DNA and make an arrest. And now…Dr. Shafeeq Sheikh…may get off scot-free in civil court. And Texas law may entitle her to only modest compensation from Sheikh’s employer at the time of the rape, the prestigious Baylor College of Medicine…Baylor doctors staff Ben Taub, which is a public hospital owned by Harris County. The doctor isn’t the only one who can deploy the “government unit” shield. Baylor lawyers have successfully argued that the college itself can be construed as a government entity and is entitled to the same protections a county institution would enjoy…Baylor can argue it is immune to the claim altogether…and…the Texas Supreme Court has ruled that rape in some circumstances is covered by medical malpractice laws…

Acting and Activism (Traffic Updates)

Anderson’s right at home in a movie based on ridiculous, exaggerated conspiracy theories:

Gillian Anderson wasn’t expecting to appear in the movie Sold. The actress, known for her role on The X-Files, had initially been approached by…director Jeffrey Brown…about just being part of the film’s campaign. She immediately said yes because she felt passionate about…sex trafficking…”High school students go missing and they are…forced into prostitution where there is violence and they don’t get paid for being a sex slave…And they get brainwashed into being a part of a community and they are terrified for their lives to escape”…

Safe Targets (#452)

Tara Burns, Maxine Doogan and two others on “sex trafficking” in Alaska:

…Last year a woman dialed 911 in Anchorage and reported that she had been a victim of sex trafficking. When the [cops]…decided to follow up with her they…traveled to where she was working as an independent escort and…posed as a customer to book an appointment with her and meet her in a sexual context. Then [they] placed her in handcuffs, threatened her with felony charges, and told her nobody would be able to “actually” love her as she was. In response to a…complaint about this incident, the Department of Public Safety explained that this is a common “strategy of building rapport” with victims…

Vendetta (#518)

“Oakland City Council Takes Stand Against Sex Workers“. Seriously.

On October 20…[Oakland, California] endorsed…The “CEASE Network”…a project of Demand Abolition, a Boston-based program dedicated to “eradicating the illegal commercial sex industry” by going after “demand.” That means targeting clients…Demand Abolition is a program of Hunt Alternatives, the foundation of Swanee Hunt…the daughter of…oil tycoon H.L. Hunt…The groups fund law enforcement and public media campaigns and advocate for stronger legal penalties…when police agencies and district attorneys broadly target demand, they end up wasting resources on arrests and prosecutions that further criminalize adult sex workers and their clients…the Demand Abolition approach…[threatens] marginalized workers in the sex industry. That was a concern of government officials in San Francisco, which last year ended a brief partnership with Demand Abolition after facing a backlash from…sex workers…

End Demand (#576)

My friend Savannah Sly is quoted extensively in this article about the fascist BEST program:

…a new public-private coalition that aims to have sites like backpage.com blocked in…workplaces…free speech advocates and…sex workers…are critical of the BEST Employer Alliance’s methods, warning that it errors on the side of censorship and endangers sex workers…If third-party Web hosting were akin to aiding in criminal activity, then Facebook and Twitter would quickly cease to exist…By pressuring credit card companies to divest, and now by pressuring employers to block the site en masse, the anti-Backpage set hopes to slowly choke the site out of its users…Savannah Sly, the director of…SWOP…said…”This painting of all clients as pedophiles reminds me of how we use to paint all homosexual men as pedophiles…If you shut down Backpage adult listings…You’re denying thousands and thousands of workers who need money. And if you shut down all of Backpage, you’re punishing hundreds of thousands of people who want access to roommate listings, sale items, general classifieds…all for the crimes of a very, very small few”…

In fact, I’m relatively sure she was riding in my car while giving this interview.

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In the News (#577)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, activism, Amnesty At Last, brothels, cops, Dutch Threat, Dysphemisms Galore, Five Women in Whitechapel, Having and Eating Cake, hysteria, Ireland, language, law, lawheads, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, Netherlands, New Excuse, Ohio, pimps, Played Out, prisons, prohibitionist myths, psychology, racism, robots, Rooted in Racism, serial killers, Something Done Right, Storyville, stripping, Sweden, The Pygmalion Fallacy, United Kingdom, video, West Virginia on October 7, 2015| 34 Comments »

Mainstream feminism rejects sex work as an acceptable choice. So…I don’t describe myself as an adherent to a political philosophy that wants to eliminate me. – Mistress Matisse

Five Women in Whitechapel

Almost certainly not:

…They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper [is] more than 800 pages in length…Michael Maybrick was a hugely popular singer and composer in the Victorian era, who is virtually forgotten today – for reasons that Robinson believes are no accident…Maybrick was close friends with Sir Arthur Sullivan and the painter Frederick Leighton, among many other prominent public figures. Both Sullivan and Leighton were Freemasons, as was Michael Maybrick. He was…on the Supreme Grand Council of Freemasons, whose members also included the Prince of Wales…Maybrick was 47 at the time of the murders; a bachelor and, [author Bruce] Robinson believes, homosexual…

Yes, it’s a new version of the Masonic theory.

Above the Law

When you’re a cop, rape becomes “official misconduct”:

A [Tennessee cop]…who resigned amid allegations of [raping prisoners]…pleaded guilty…to one count of official misconduct…Judge John Dugger sentenced Jeff Sowers to 18 months in jail…Dugger denied a request by Sowers’ attorneys for judicial diversion, which would have allowed for Sowers’ record to be expunged after his sentence…

The Pygmalion Fallacy

Such a lot of stupid writing on something that not only doesn’t exist, but will never exist in the way and on the timescale these idiots are wanking to the fantasy of:

…a recent report claims intimacy between robots and humans will be more common than that between two people by 2050. The work, written by futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson, purports that engaging in virtual sex acts will be as prevalent in 2030 as our engagement with porn today, and that the majority of people will own sex toys that employ an alternate reality in some way come 2035…

Storyville (#139)

…Over the last 150 years, rights for sex workers have…diminished, according to West Virginia University journalism professor Alison Bass. In her book Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law…Bass surveys the history of laws regulating prostitution in America and abroad. In the past and today, Bass finds, sex workers have been marginalized by stigma that portrays them as immoral, dangerous, even diseased figures. But while the stigma hasn’t changed, the laws have—in many cases…for the worse…

Dutch Threat

Lawheads are completely unable to comprehend the bottleneck effect:

Entrepreneurs in Amsterdam who want to open a brothel must speak at least one common language with the sex workers they rent space to, according to a…ruling handed down by the European Court of Justice. The court [claimed] the decision as…a way to guarantee the safety of the women, [reduce] human trafficking, and…help prevent pimping…and [pretended it] was…not discriminatory in any way…the court also noted the Council of State’s notion that the seeming overreach in authority was meant as a protection of public order, and that being able to converse with a sex worker allows a brothel owner the possibility of stopping child prostitution…

Dysphemisms Galore

Because nobody would care about a headline reading, “Man minds his daughter while mother works”:

A Michigan man held his 9-month-old daughter in a motel room while the baby’s mother had sex with another man for money…Derohn Wilburn…is charged with…felony promoting prostitution and misdemeanor child endangering…Melissa Coleman…is charged with misdemeanor child endangering and prostitution…police released the baby to a family member. She was unharmed…

Played Out

I don’t know who Robert Fullinwider is, but I thank him for taking the time to read through Moran’s drek so as to be able to rip it to shreds:

…Moran is not content to offer her particular life-story…She also sets herself up as the Universal Prostitute, a woman whose experiences define prostitution and trump the “experiences” of anyone else — sex worker, academic, or otherwise — who views prostitution differently than she does. She is not content to let her story speak for itself but instructs the reader on the proper conclusions to draw, and engages in arguments based on her experiences and “research”…Moran writes: prostitutes are “coerced” into prostitution (pp. 49, 227); they have no “choice” (p. 161); they have no “free will” (p. 201); they act out of “desperation” and “destitution” (pp. 43, 96)…Moran…[claims] she didn’t consent to prostitution because “it is not possible to consent to a lifestyle you don’t comprehend” (p. 50). Yes it is. People do it all the time. “I didn’t know marriage was going to be like this!” “I didn’t know how stressful being a parent would be!” “I didn’t know military life would be this tough!” [She claims] she didn’t consent to prostitution because she wasn’t an adult and children can’t consent (pp. 50-51). Yes they can. Society frames laws that say people below certain ages can’t “consent” – to contracts, to mortgages, to sexual relations, and the like – but the “no consent” here is a legal fiction…a sixteen year-old girl who finds prostitution utterly repulsive, revolting, and disgusting, and who is “desperate to escape,” yet who passes up on an opportunity to get out of the trade because she’s unwilling to be bound by any rules, is a person who’s made a choice— a bad choice, to be sure, but a real choice…Moran…speaks of allowing herself to be coerced (an odd locution) into prostitution by her boyfriend. What did her boyfriend do? Did he beat her? Did he threaten her? No, he “suggested” that she turn tricks; he “encouraged” her (pp. 47, 186)…Moran seems to think you haven’t acted freely unless you are as happy as a lark with what you’ve chosen (p. 227); that you are not self-determining unless you are “controlling the totality of your life” (p. 175). These are just fundamentally unserious engagements with the notions of freedom and self-determination. We always act under constraints, we never control the totality of our lives, and we are often unhappy with what we’ve chosen, just less unhappy than with the alternatives…

Rooted in Racism (#429)

Sweden’s “liberal reputation” is bullshit:

…a recent report by the United Nations…concludes that a rising level of racist violence and “Afrophobic” hate crimes in Sweden are “an extensive social problem”. “There continues to be a general Swedish self-perception of being a tolerant and humane society, which makes it difficult to accept that there could be structural and institutional racism faced by people of African descent,” says the report…The country’s official [lie] of equality and respect for human rights “blinds” it to the racism faced by African-Swedes, it says. Hate crimes against the 200,000 or so black people…in Sweden increased by more than 40% between 2008 and 2014…with more than a fifth of incidents last year involving violence…

On the Simultaneous Having and Eating of Cake (#505)

On Working It, the magazine at the center of the stripper labor rights movement in Portland:

…Each magazine brings together about 50 pages of writing and art by sex workers from around the country. In addition to permanent sections including “Client Hall of Shame” “Best/Worst Tip$” “Tales from your Shift” and art, each volume of Working It has a theme…After Danzine went dormant, [Matilda] Bickers and Portland’s sex worker activism also went relatively dormant. [SWOP] took over Danzine’s bad date list. In 2005, Bickers and her friends tried to start a dancer union — “but that failed miserably, and I was really burnt out for a while,” Bickers says. In the following years, Bickers worked at strip clubs and…graduated from Portland State University. “I kind of never stopped doing sex worker activism,” Bickers says…

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic (#550)

The history of the concept of sex addiction is a complex, somewhat contentious one…I’ve often cited the concept back to the initial writings of Patrick Carnes…Now, three New Zealand historians have contributed a wealth of astounding, rich and often surprising information to the issue…Sex Addiction, A Critical History…represents a remarkable detailing of the troubling, often hidden, history of this concept…Reay and his coauthors found powerful writings by Hatterer from the 1960’s and 70’s, where he blamed a sexually addictive process for sexual excesses. Powerfully, they detail [Dr. Lawrence] Hatterer’s disturbing history of treating homosexuality as an illness, and the way he treated homosexuality “like an alcoholic”…in his writings…from its inception, the concept of sex addiction has been applied to treatment of homosexuality as an illness…

If You Want Something Done Right…

I have the most awesome friends:

…Mistress Matisse…heard about Heather’s experience and was determined to help. Through other sex workers she tracked Heather down, called her and booked a flight to West Virginia. She showed up at Heather’s door…organized fund-raising, lined up medical assistance and connected Heather with nonprofit help. This isn’t a new role for Matisse. She’s worked as a sex worker in various capacities since she was 19. But as she’s gotten established in Seattle, she says, “I have gotten to the point in my career where it is in many ways self-sustaining.” As a result, she’s had more time to devote to activism. Matisse was there to help Heather because she’s made it her business to help sex workers who are in crises. I talked to Matisse about her activism, her work with Heather and why sex workers are the best ones to help sex workers…

Amnesty At Last

Here’s an NPR show which purports to present a “discussion” of the Amnesty International position statement on decriminalization, but which was designed from the get-go to promote prohibitionist propaganda by stacking the panel three to one (Swanee Hunt, Rachel Moran and Andrea Powell) vs. Maxine Doogan. Unfortunately for the antis, Maxine had logic and facts on her side and acquitted herself quite well. What you won’t hear: Sol Finer of SWOP-Seattle called into the live show and Moran absolutely lost her mind, screaming and shouting at Sol in such a clearly unbalanced manner that the tirade was edited out of the archived version of the show. So much for NPR’s commitment to the truth.

New Excuse (#576)

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Delightful Conversation

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, The Dark Side, tagged abortion, Alaska, Bad Girls, Craigslist, Delightful Conversation, hysteria, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, psychology, serial killers on April 4, 2014| 4 Comments »

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on March 16^th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

In early December, Elytte and Miranda Barbour were arrested on a charge of murder in the first degree, three weeks after getting married and moving from North Carolina to Pennsylvania:

[The Barbours]…lured a man to his death with an ad on…Craigslist…because they wanted to kill someone together…Elytte Barbour [said]…he and…Miranda…[lured] Troy LaFerrara…[with an escort] posting…Elytte [said]…Miranda…regularly…made anywhere from $50 to $850 by meeting with men for such activities as having dinner together or walking around a mall. The ads she placed…all said upfront that sex was not part of the deal…“She is not a prostitute…she…meets with them and has delightful conversation”…

Generally, when a couple commits murder together, the man is the leader and the woman the follower. But from the moment I read this report, I strongly suspected that this time it was the wife who was the psychopath and the husband her weak-willed assistant. Why? Because she actually expected him to believe that the ridiculous “time and companionship only” disclaimer was literally true, and he actually did. And a man who can “tenderly be led by th’ nose as asses are” in such a fashion is also the sort who can be convinced that killing somebody for fun is a reasonable idea. After this story broke I waited for over two months for the other shoe to drop as I knew it inevitably must, and on February 16^th came the awaited thud:

[Miranda Barbour claims]…she killed many more victims…the 19-year-old…[said] she participated in at least 22 killings in the past six years in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California. “When I hit 22, I stopped counting…I can pinpoint on a map where you can find them”…Barbour [said] she had her first experience with killing when she [was] just 13, shortly after she…joined a satanic [sic] cult in Alaska…she [says that she] felt no remorse for her victims and…killed only “bad people”…

While this bizarre fantasy was believed by the reporter to whom she first spoke of it, the credulous cop who called it “the real deal”, and a friend she first met in one of the psychiatric hospitals where she has spent much of her young life, just about everyone else realized that the idea of a 13-year-old female serial killer who murdered dozens without even being suspected is patently absurd:

Miranda’s father, Sonny Dean…is not the only one who doubts his daughter’s story…If she really killed 22 to 99 people in the span of six years in four different states…that means she was getting away with murder every few weeks to every few months since the age of 13. It would make her America’s most prolific serial killer. “Miranda lives in a fantasy world made up in her own mind,” Sonny said. “She craves attention, is selfish, dishonest and manipulative”…at…16, Miranda [had told a friend] she was a member of a “gang” that was “comprised mostly of men”…[and] “mentioned having been raped by multiple men at once”…[after returning from her first episode of running] away from home when she was 12…she told her mother, Elizabeth Dean, that she’d been “out prostituting” and had met a 25-year-old man named Forrest, who was “into satanic [sic] stuff” and was now her “ruler”…

Miranda claimed to have been “branded” with a swastika and Forrest’s name, but though her mother found large cuts on her they were not words or other recognizable symbols. Several years later, after her parents divorced, Miranda claimed…

…that she [had become] pregnant…[and] the cult members…”tied her to a bed, gave her drugs and [gave her] an ‘in-house abortion.'” Miranda’s mother…[immediately] took her daughter “to a doctor, who said there were no signs of an ended pregnancy”…

When she later really did become pregnant, she claimed that Forrest was the father, but that he had since been murdered; she also claimed to be a “high-ranking official in the satanic [sic] world” at the age of 17, when a judge decided it was better to send her to live with her uncle in North Carolina. There she met Elytte, won him from his pregnant girlfriend, and talked him into eloping to Pennsylvania with her, where they committed the murder to “bring them closer together”. And while it’s obvious that Miranda is capable of murder, it also seems very likely this was her first one. She was never unsupervised in most of the places she claims to have killed, and…

…Alaska State Troopers issued a statement that there is “no evidence” that Miranda committed any murders in the state. Members of Seeking Alaska’s Missing, a statewide support group, are also skeptical. Authorities where Miranda lived in North Carolina said that their only unsolved homicide cases date back to Miranda’s infancy, and thus would’ve been impossible for her to have committed them. Experts have said she doesn’t fit the profile of a serial killer, who are rarely women [and] are typically older…

According to Miranda’s mother, a person claiming to be Forrest called about Miranda’s baby after she moved to North Carolina (and after Forrest had supposedly been murdered). But though her mother seems to believe in the existence of this “Satanic cult”, I do not; while it’s entirely possible Miranda belonged to a group of maladjusted teenagers playing at being a “cult”, her ideas about the behavior of such groups bear far more resemblance to pop-culture depictions than to anything real. The notion of uncatchable serial killers preying on “bad people” seems borrowed from the television series Dexter, the “branding” motif should be familiar to anyone who’s been following the “sex trafficking” hysteria, and imaginary “forced abortions” appear over and over again in the “recovered memory” literature and latter-day descendants of the “Satanic Panic”. As I’ve explained before, those suffering from such delusions and confabulations remember them just as clearly as you remember what you did yesterday, or even more clearly if your day wasn’t very interesting. And over time, the false memories invariably become more detailed, more extreme and more lurid, and conform ever more closely to whatever narrative the deluded person has embraced (such as the belief-system of a political or religious group). Miranda Barbour’s story already bears some resemblance to those of “sex trafficking survivors” (branding, gang rape, enslavement, exploitation of adolescent girls by older men, etc), though for now she is not only claiming her prostitution was voluntary, but also that it wasn’t even prostitution. However, this affair is not yet over and Barbour’s tale is not done changing; I won’t be at all surprised if she soon “remembers” being the victim of “sex trafficking”, and her “Satanic ruler” turns into a “pimp”.

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Aileen Wuornos

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, tagged bisexuality, cops, domestic violence, Florida, hysteria, marriage, Michigan, neofeminism, prisons, psychology, rape, serial killers, streetwalkers, underage, video on October 10, 2013| 26 Comments »

I killed those men, robbed them as cold as ice. And I’d do it again, too…I have hate crawling through my system…I am so sick of hearing this “she’s crazy” stuff…I’m trying to tell the truth. I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again. – Aileen Wuornos

In my harlotographies, I’ve tried to cover as broad a range as possible: from the ancient to the recently-deceased, from streetwalkers to courtesans, from the noble to the self-centered, from the wise to the deranged and from the famous to the infamous. Three years ago this month I presented short biographies of the victims of the first known serial killer, and today the first woman to be herself so labeled: Aileen Carol Wuornos.

She was born in Rochester, Michigan on February 29^th, 1956 to 17-year-old Diane Wuornos, who had married Aileen’s father, Leo Pittman, less than two years before. Aileen never met him; he was in prison when she was born, and her mother had already filed for divorce. Pittman was a schizophrenic with a long history of violent behavior, and hanged himself in prison in 1969 while serving another sentence, this time for child molestation. In January of 1960, Diane abandoned Aileen and her older brother Keith, leaving them with her parents Lauri and Britta Wuornos; they immediately adopted the children and for many years allowed them to believe they were their parents. Unfortunately, they were just as bad as the real parents; Lauri sexually abused his granddaughter, and Britta was both physically abusive and an alcoholic. Like many incest victims, Aileen became sexually precocious; she had sexual contact with boys at school in exchange for drugs, cigarettes and other things she wanted, and when she turned up pregnant at 14 she named Keith as the father. As was typical in 1970 she was sent to a home for unwed mothers, and the baby was given up for adoption. A few months later Britta died of alcohol-induced liver failure, and Lauri threw his granddaughter out soon afterward. Though she and her brother were placed in foster homes, Aileen ran away almost immediately and lived in a patch of woods near her old neighborhood, supporting herself via prostitution.

But she did not stay there for long; by 16 she started hitchhiking around the Midwest, working mostly at truck stops, and was arrested for drunk driving in Colorado in May of 1974. By the beginning of 1976 she had made it to Florida, where she was picked up while hitchhiking by Lewis Fell, the wealthy 69-year-old president of a yacht club. He immediately fell in love with her and soon proposed; she accepted, and their marriage announcement even appeared on the local paper’s society page in May of 1976. There the story might have ended had Aileen been merely the victim of a difficult life; as should be clear, however, mental and emotional instability ran deep on both sides of her family, and she was completely incapable of settling down to the comfortable situation of a trophy wife. Instead, she insisted on drinking at bars and getting into fights; when she was jailed for attacking a bartender while on a trip home to Michigan (after her grandfather’s suicide), Fell came to his senses and had the marriage annulled. She was arrested July 14^th; her brother died of throat cancer three days later, and the annulment went through on the 21^st.

Aileen blew through her brother’s $10,000 insurance policy in only a few months and returned to truck-stop prostitution, working her way back down to Florida. But while she had been quite pretty in her teens, hard living and her volatile temper had faded that luster; it thus became increasingly difficult for her to make a living as a whore. She was arrested for robbing a convenience store in May of 1981, and again for passing forged checks in May of 1984. By 1986 she had just about hit bottom: she was arrested for car theft in January, then for attempted armed robbery of a client in June. Soon after that, however, she met a hotel maid named Tyria Moore at a lesbian bar in Daytona Beach, and they moved in together; for a while Wuornos seems to have been happy in her way, and her earnings picked up enough for Moore to quit her job and let Wuornos support both of them. But slowly, over the next several years, the chaos which followed Wuornos like a cloud returned and worsened. In July of 1987, she got in a fight at a bar, then in March of 1988 with a bus driver. And by the end of the following year, she had returned to where she was when she met Moore, and started robbing her clients…this time, killing them in the process.

The particulars of the case are discussed in exhaustive detail all over the internet if you’re interested, so there’s no need to repeat them here. Suffice to say that between December 1^st, 1989 and November 19^th, 1990, Aileen Wuornos murdered seven men – Richard Mallory, David Spears, Charles Carskaddon, Peter Siems, Troy Burress, Charles Humphreys and Walter Antonio, all with the same delicate little .22 caliber purse gun. Moore was still with her at least until the fourth murder, but sometime after that they broke up and Moore went home to Pennsylvania. She later admitted to knowing about the first murder, but claimed to have deliberately avoided asking about the others because she didn’t want to know. Wuornos was a terribly sloppy criminal; she left a string of witnesses, fingerprints and pawned loot across Florida, and had the police been competent she would have been caught much earlier. Wuornos was finally arrested on January 9^th, 1991, and Moore the next day; she agreed to testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution, and even talked Wuornos into confessing on the phone. In that confession, Wuornos claimed that every single one of the men had tried to rape her, and that she had killed them all in self-defense.

Predictably, credulous feminists swallowed every word and touted her as some kind of heroine; remember, this was the height of child sexual abuse hysteria. But she was neither a heroine nor the “man-hating lesbian” some pundits claimed; she was merely an unstable sociopath whose restless, violent life had exacerbated her existing problems. At first, she seemed to enjoy the publicity and continually retold her story to recast herself more and more as the victim, ignoring her public defenders’ entreaties that she remain silent and insisting she be allowed to tell her story in court. When the jury at her first trial (for Mallory’s murder) compared her absurdly-embellished version with the original videotaped confession, any credibility she may have had disintegrated; it took less than two hours for them to convict her of first-degree murder, and she responded by screaming “I hope you get raped!” at them. She was sentenced to death. Before her next trial could start, she decided to “get right with God” by pleading no contest to the murders of Humphreys, Burress and Spears, claiming in her statement that though Mallory (who had a previous conviction for the crime) did indeed rape her, she had only feared the others would and killed them before they could do so. She was given three more death sentences.

Wuornos spent the next decade on death row, her mental health deteriorating the entire time. In 2001 she fired her legal counsel and stated that she was giving up appeals, but then insisted that the prison staff were torturing her by contaminating and even poisoning her food so as to drive her to suicide before her execution; she also claimed that they intended to rape her before she died. During the last few years of her life she gave a a series of interviews to Nick Broomfield, who had already made a documentary about her in 1993 (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer) and was in the process of making another (released in 2003 as Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer); the video below is the last such interview, made the night before her death.

She was executed by lethal injection on October 9^th, 2002 after declining a last meal (she wanted only a cup of black coffee). Her last words were, “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the rock, and I’ll be back like Independence Day, with Jesus June 6^th. Like the movie, big mother ship and all, I’ll be back.”

There are some women I’m proud to share a profession with, and others I’m not; women like Theodora and Skittles show whores at our best, while women like Aileen Wuornos show us at our worst. But I think her story is an important part of the picture, because it demonstrates once again that there is no one type of woman who sells sex, nor any consistent pattern to our lives and fates.

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That Was the Week That Was (#335)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Arkansas, asset seizure, blogging, brothels, Cambodia, Canada, cell phones, censorship, Chauvinism, China, Coming and Going, Confined and Controlled, consensual crime, cops, cult of the child, Deafening Silence, dehumanization, dirty, diversion programs, drugs, East Asia, end demand, Europe, evidence, Eye of the Beholder, Florida, gangs, Gullible's Travels, Hall of Shame, harm reduction, hotels, hysteria, internet, Iran, Ireland, Italy, King of the Hill, Latin America, law, lawheads, LGBT rights, Lying Down With Dogs, Middle East, Moloch, nanny state, neofeminism, North Carolina, Obfuscation via Dysphemisms, Oklahoma, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, Opting Out, Policing for Profit, porn, prisons, prohibitionist myths, red-light districts, rescue industry, Russia, screening, serial killers, Sex Lies and Busybodies, sex offender registry, sex work is work, Sold Out, sporting events, streetwalkers, Surplus Women, Switzerland, Texas, That Old Black Magic, The Public Eye, Uncommon Sense, Under Every Bed, United Kingdom, universal criminality, Universally Criminal updates, violence vs. sex workers, Virginia, Washington (state), What Were You Thinking?, Wisconsin, Wise Investment, witchcraft, Worse Than I Thought, yellow journalism, Zurvivor on August 31, 2013| 17 Comments »

The Olympics are always a chance for hosts to do some moral cleansing, and drive away undesirables by brute force. – Scott Long

Lying Down With Dogs

“The lawyer of a man convicted of building and promoting pornographic websites [in Iran] says a death sentence against his client has been converted to life imprisonment…blogger Saeed Malekpour will spend the rest of his life in jail…” There aren’t too many other countries barbaric enough to sentence a man to life in a cage for “dirty” pictures, but I can think of at least one other.

The Eye of the Beholder (June Updates)

“The [Arkansas] Senate passed a bill…that would ban non-traditional…body art procedures, particularly scarification and dermal implants…”

Wise Investment

Pay attention, sex worker activists:

The children of three women who were murdered by Robert Pickton have filed lawsuits against the police and the serial killer…They allege the Vancouver police and the RCMP failed to properly investigate reports of missing women and failed to warn women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that a serial killer was likely at work, despite having evidence implicating Pickton in the disappearance of sex workers as early as 1997 and 1998…

Surplus Women

The suspicious deaths of two prostitutes…has sparked a major investigation…The bodies of Jill Lyons and Karen Nabors, who both worked as online escorts, were discovered in an apartment building in Vancouver. Ms Lyons, 45, was discovered dead in her own apartment on August 12…The body of Ms Nabors was discovered on August 25, also in her own apartment, and police…suggest…the 48-year-old was murdered…

Gullible’s Travels

Another ludicrous mini-panic from the clowns who brought you idosing, jenkem and vodka-soaked tampons:

“Parents, lock up your shower supplies”…is an actual quote from an announcement made…at a middle school just outside of Richmond, VA…of…a new practice called “shamboiling”…where shampoo is brought to a rapid boil and then the fumes are inhaled for a hallucinogenic effect…one thing is certain…shamboiling is catching on quickly and…is potentially deadly…The Sheriff’s department is urging parents to check their shampoos for [ammonium lauryl sulfate] and to take the necessary precautions to keep these chemicals away from children…

Here’s the debunking on Snopes.

Universal Criminality

A perfect example of how laws against consensual behavior are used by repressive governments to harass those they dislike:

Police have detained a Chinese-American…on suspicion of visiting a sex worker in Beijing as authorities crack down on bloggers. Charles Xue [AKA Xue Manzi], who has over 12 million followers on Sina Weibo…regularly reposts reform-minded content…Among those questioning the motive behind the arrest was the editor of the state-run Global Times newspaper. “Cannot rule out the possibility that authorities are arresting Xue Manzi…to give him a hard time,” Hu Xijin wrote…in a blog posting that later disappeared…

Sex, Lies and Busybodies

Yet another “sex trafficking” opportunist exposed:

The founder of…anti-human trafficking NGO Sisha, Steve Morrish, announced…he was stepping down from his position due to a raft of allegations accusing him of financial impropriety…Sisha’s alleged financial problems were revealed publicly…on August 8 in…the Cambodian blog Penhpal. The posting alleged that money donated to Sisha…“has instead been siphoned off to pay for the NGO’s operating expenses”…

Moloch

Is this idiotic enough yet? Can we stop now?

A 10-year-old girl…identified as “Ashley,” was charged by police for aggravated sexual assault…[for] playing doctor…a neighbor saw the children and called the mother of a 4-year-old boy…[whom] Ashley was inappropriately touching…Ashley’s mother…was not allowed to sit-in on the 45-minute questioning of her daughter…

Gail Dines threatens Radisson hotels

Confined and Controlled

If this were intended to increase sex workers’ range of options, it’s would be fine; however, it’s clearly intended as a confinement system: “Several communities in Italy have launched a campaign to ban street prostitution and reintroduce brothels, which have been banned since 1958…”

Worse Than I Thought

As I predicted last year, the cancer keeps spreading:

…[new] legislation…in North Carolina….increases punishments for sex traffickers, i.e. pimps, as well as for purchasers, i.e. johns. It also focuses on “treating minors involved in prostitution as the victims they are, instead of criminals,” [the bill’s sponsor] said…”The legislation also offers hope to women who escape a life of prostitution by allowing them…relief to expunge their criminal pasts once they get treatment and help”…[another law] requires pimps to register as sex offenders…

As I’ve explained before, “safe harbor” laws are bullshit that help almost nobody; “treatment” means (usually religious) “re-education”, and a “pimp” means just about anyone prosecutors decide to railroad.

Obfuscation Via Dysphemisms

Tulsa cops continue to justify persecution of adult women by pretending they’re “trafficked”: “Human trafficking has developed into a booming enterprise in Oklahoma…on a given night, the Vice Unit may deploy undercover police officers to respond to as many as 40 online advertisements posted by ‘escorts’ in preparation for prostitution stings that sometimes uncover cases of human trafficking…” Note the misplaced scare quotes, around “escorts” rather than “trafficking”.

The Public Eye

Jessica Land interviews Dr. Melissa Ditmore, a prominent academic ally, on her research, The Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, sex worker projects and organizations, and international issues.

That Old Black Magic

Here’s an interesting article on the connection between harlotry and witchcraft:

…Prostitutes were widely believed to be specialists in erotic magic, especially the use of philtres to sway the feelings of those around them…For example, a woman may resort to a binding spell, to handicap rivals in the trade or lock down a steady client…These women were also sought by those outside the trade for their magical expertise. Those in troubled marriages might consult a prostitute to concoct a love potion to rekindle the affections of a wayward spouse…

King of the Hill

Most of this CNN story is the usual lurid “sex trafficking” rubbish, but I want to call attention to a fascinating new development: “king of the hill” stories are now specifically claiming their subjects are the “third-busiest area for sex trafficking in the United States” (see also “Under Every Bed” below) rather than just “one of the busiest” or “in the top ten”. As usual, the Department of Justice is credited for the “statistic” despite the fact that neither it nor any other agency keeps any kind of state-by-state “trafficking” statistics. I suspect the “third largest” designation arose through confusion with the claim that “human trafficking is the third-largest criminal enterprise” (though that one’s been upgraded to second), but it will be interesting to see how many claim to be the “third largest” before anyone in the mainstream media starts to awaken.

What the Hell Were You Thinking? (TW3 #135)

A new Irish company named Safe IQ “develops safety products and services for sex workers…and raises awareness of the need for [them] to have the same protections as other workers.” Here’s its first product:

Ugly Mugs for Android is a [free] mobile phone app that automatically screens incoming and outgoing calls and text messages and alerts the phone user if the…number…is listed in the UglyMugs.ie database…When a sex worker encounters a dangerous person, they [sic] can report the incident to the ugly mug scheme, and a warning will be made available to all sex workers…

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (TW3 #312)

Only a hopeless lawhead could imagine that closing red-light districts will make prostitution go away:

Hundreds of sex workers confronted the mayor of Indonesia’s second-largest city…angrily denouncing the closure of the Klakah Rejo district…The crowd later tore down a “Prostitution-Free Town” billboard erected by officials…”What’s going on?”…the mayor [said]…”We’re trying to help but they are refusing.” Surabaya is also home to Dolly, reputedly the largest red-light district in South-East Asia. The mayor said that one and other red-light districts would be closed as the city aimed to be prostitution-free by 2014.

Under Every Bed

Wisconsin is one of “the top three states” for sex trafficking, according to…Michelle Mayefske… Not all prostitution is trafficking. Some women, referred to as “renegades,” simply decide to sell sex and are not controlled or managed by anyone, but “that is very, very rare,” she said…“Gangs are now turning from drugs to human trafficking…[because] drugs can be sold only once and then they’re gone, whereas…a woman or a child can be sold over and over and over…Georgia, California and Wisconsin have the highest rates of sex trafficking in the United States, so we are in the top three”…

1) This is the second time I’ve heard this “renegade” bullshit; neither I nor anyone I asked knows where it comes from. 2) I think Mayefske is extremely confused about the concept of “sale”. 3) She needs to talk to Florida.

Chauvinism

Veteran human rights activist Scott Long argues that activists who compare Russia’s anti-gay purge to the Nazi campaign against Jews are not only wrongheaded, but missing the most obvious comparison:

If Western gay…activists want to know what Putin’s decree will mean in practice: ask a sex worker…Before every big sporting event, the same rhetoric reverberates: Prostitutes are going to take over this town…The predictions are nearly always couched as concern for “trafficked” women, but they…come down to…anxieties over nuisances to “normal” neighbors, and…the reputation of the host city…What major sporting events bring is not an “explosion” in prostitution, but an explosion in repression…not in evil Russia, but in liberal Canada and the UK, countries that value human rights, except for sex workers, who aren’t human…Yet in London, few powerful voices opposed the Olympic rollback of sex workers’ freedom — and certainly few LGBT activists…

Deafening Silence

“The treatment of sex workers in Cuba, including confinement for the purpose of ‘re-education’, was raised by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women…the…committee said it was “deeply concerned” about Cuba’s reluctance to address the issue of prostitution…” The United States’ confinement and “re-education” of sex workers, however, causes the committee no concern at all. Funny how that works.

Sold Out

…two of the largest and most well funded LGBT rights groups in the US have stayed quiet about Manning…whose revelations about the US Army’s actions epitomize social justice in action…the [silence of the] Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD…has been deafening… the HRC…[has] the financial backing of…Lockheed Martin…Booz Allen Hamilton…[and] Northrop Grumman…GLAAD has…Goldman Sachs…and Verizon…

Coming and Going (TW3 #331)

Kate Zen takes a long, thorough look at Texas’ “prostitution diversion” program and its founder, Kathryn Griffin; she examines the program’s lack of any of the normal benefits of such schemes, its close relationship to the rescue industry, its pervasive Christian moralism and its ignoring all of the actual reasons women turn to prostitution in favor of a sin and victimization narrative.

Policing for Profit

Federal and state law-enforcement officers poured into Tukwila [Washington]…seizing three motels whose operators are suspected of participating in illegal drugs and prostitution…U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan…said that the three hotels…have accounted for 17 percent of all calls for police services in the past year…investigators believe the owners actively profited from criminal activity…Durkan said…[her] office will…actively use…seizures to force compliance…

Uncommon Sense (Extra Edition)

Though most English-language media is pretending Zurich’s tippelzone scheme is something new, it is nothing of the kind; this article lists a number of other cities in Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands with similar setups.

Zurvivor (Extra Edition)

…Donald Hill was acquitted…on a charge of [paying]…Alexis Wright, after a judge ruled prosecutors were not able to prove that money was exchanged. The ruling could affect any additional charges of individuals alleged to have engaged Wright’s services…

Opting Out

An example of why “porn filters” are a spectacularly bad idea:

A man using the British Library’s wi-fi network was denied access to…Hamlet because the text contained “violent content”…the…library said the fault was caused by a newly installed wi-fi service from a third-party provider. One security expert said the incident highlighted the “dysfunction” of internet filters…Prof Ross Anderson…[said] internet filters were “pointless” and that it was “completely inappropriate” to have one in the British Library…

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That Was the Week That Was (#333)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged A Working System, Above the Law, Across the Pond, activism, adolescence, Africa, agency denial, Arizona, Australia, Backpage, Broken Record, brothels, California, censorship, contraception, cops, Crime Against Society, Do As I Say, drugs, end demand, homosexuality, hysteria, internet, Ireland, Japan, Japanese Prostitution, Korea, language, law, LGBT rights, Madonna/whore, Malawi, marriage, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Monsters, Mumbo Jumbo, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oops, Oregon, pregnancy, prohibitionist myths, Puppet Show, rape, rescue industry, scams, serial killers, sex education, sex offender registry, Shazam!, slavery, Sold Out, South Africa, streetwalkers, Surplus Women, The Immunity Syndrome, The Public Eye, The Widening Gyre, transgender, Under Every Bed, underage, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Which I Doubt, Wise Investment on August 17, 2013| 10 Comments »

The quick blow job is for [affluent white women’s] husbands…So in your mind it doesn’t affect you, but the wrong mouth on your husband’s dick could affect you. – Deon Haywood

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

He went home; she’s locked in a cage.

An on-duty Oregon State Police detective was caught…with a prostitute in a bush…Richard Narvaez, 50…was placed on suspended leave without pay…cited and released, the…woman…was arrested on probation violation warrants and on suspicion of public indecency and prostitution…

A Working System

Note the bottleneck effect:

Armed robbers posing as clients…have launched a series of raids on brothels [in Sydney], targeting eight premises in the past three weeks…one of the gang enters…to book a…session…then…[is] joined by up to three others armed with guns or knives…Police…believe the number of attacks might be even greater because [unlicensed] brothels were reluctant to report crimes…

Crime Against Society (August Updates)

Women With A Vision responds to anti-whore propaganda:

The Times-Picayune’s…articles…dubbed “Uneasy Street”, are an…example of…[sensationalism]…that leads to increased criminalization of marginalized communities…The video…claims that once sun sets…“An even darker world emerges”…There is a darker side to Tulane Avenue. But it’s not the one shown. It’s the stories of mothers, daughters, friends, and wives struggling to survive in a city that has offered them little resources. It’s women dealing with substance abuse or addiction. It’s women who cannot be hired by traditional employers simply because they are transgender. It’s the women who have been too busy struggling to be able to get a formal education to make them employable. It’s the stories of human beings, worthy of dignity, respect, and far more than this series of articles has afforded them…

See “The Public Eye” for an interview with WWAV’s director, Deon Haywood.

Oops

Tumi Megalane, 32, of Tshwane, South Africa, said she had the shock of her life when she found her boyfriend [Ronny Mokoena], who is a pastor, at a brothel…[then] learned that he was married…the pastor told his wife that Megalane was a prophet, who was helping him with spiritual guidance.

Surplus Women

A…37-year-old [Detroit woman]…is in critical condition after she was discovered beaten…burned and possibly sexually assaulted…less than 24 hours before and…a mile away…a 22-year-old woman was discovered in the same condition…Both women are prostitutes…

A third woman was found in the same condition a few days later, on August 3^rd. Interestingly, Fox News did not feel compelled to identify the victims as sex workers in the headline, and the New York Daily News doesn’t mention the third victim’s profession at all.

TANSTAAFL

…a trio of Bay Area teens [Nazario Cruz and Jose Urias, both 19, and an underage girl]…posed as a young woman whose fantasy was to have sex while rolling around in…cash…When the victims would arrive…the suspects…would rob them…Three robberies have been confirmed so far…One of the victims allegedly stole $2,000…from his job in order to roll around with the fictitious woman…

The Immunity Syndrome

American hypocrisy says it’s fine to pay people not to have sex:

A 2010 study in Malawi, supported by the…Gates Foundation, shows…conditional cash transfers successfully reduced sexual activity amongst teenagers…Mississippi…[resembles] Malawi…in its high rate of teenage sex and pregnancy…partly…[because] sex education in Mississippi is oriented around abstinence…Can we pay Mississippi teenagers to stop having sex…And to have safe sex if they do?…

Above the Law

Police forces are being ordered to face up to corruption by officers who commit sexual offences against vulnerable women and young people…169 officers…are under investigation for predatory sexual behaviour…ranging from rape to voyeurism…the former partner of…[one] who was jailed last year…speaks out against his actions…

That cops rape women, especially sex workers, isn’t news because it happens constantly; such stories only become newsworthy when the cops are held accountable to some degree, as in this item from Cape Town: “A…police captain will appear in…court…for allegedly raping a prostitute…[she] managed to escape from [his] vehicle and took down the registration number…”

The Widening Gyre

Another bizarre “sex trafficking” rumor debunked by Snopes:

In August 2013 [a] warning about sex traffickers with Slavic…accents posing as door-to-door booksellers was spread via social media sites such as Facebook …The story was false. That there are ”pushy” door-to-door book and magazine sellers about doesn’t mean those vendors are looking for children to abduct…into the sex trade, nor is it suspicious that such salespeople might ask…questions about children in the area. The latter is simply a…sales technique for locating potential customers for children’s books, and being ”pushy” is hardly an unusual quality for those who engage in…door-to-door sales…

Snopes reports that the story appeared in Gilbert, Arizona, Winona, Minnesota and all over Missouri. The company running the sales program believes the rumor started in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma; since that’s a suburb of Tulsa, this should surprise nobody.

Wise Investment (TW3 #31)

Do politicians really just not get it?

…a federal judge ruled [that a New Jersey law]…conflicts with federal law and likely is unconstitutional as well…[the] law…[would have penalized] anyone who knowingly publishes or disseminates any ad for a commercial sex act that includes the depiction of a minor. The law was challenged…by Backpage.com…[which] notes that federal courts in Tennessee and Washington have issued permanent injunctions against similar laws in those states…

Japanese Prostitution (TW3 #131)

New evidence [demonstrates]…that Japan’s…army directly managed Asian women for sexual slavery, dealing a fresh blow to Tokyo’s denials of responsibility…a diary that a Korean manager of Japanese brothels wrote…between August 1942 and December 1944…shows that the Japanese army received revenue-related reports from military brothels, examined the bodies of sex slaves and regulated the relocations of sexual entertainment facilities…[Professor] Park Han-yong…[said] “This diary is a historical record that shows the Japanese military…[was] involved in the forced mobilisation of Korean women for sexual slavery”…

Under Every Bed

If real freedoms weren’t being endangered by these yokels, this absurd language and looking-glass logic would be hilarious:

Human flesh is being sold for sex…and it’s happening online…”It was a rarity to see a prostitution case anywhere in North Dakota. Now, my agents are telling me they’re beginning to see it with some regularity,” says…Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem. There’s no way to tell exactly how many people are involved in human trafficking. The best estimates say about 100,000 children may be victims in the U.S. And…there’s no reason to believe it’s not happening here…

Monsters

Dwayne Jones was relentlessly teased in high school for being effeminate until he dropped out. His father not only kicked him out…at…14 but also helped jeering neighbors push the youngster from the rough Jamaican slum where he grew up. [On July 22^nd Dwayne, now 16]…was…beaten, stabbed, shot and run over by a car when he showed up at a street party dressed as a woman…

The Public Eye (TW3 #318)

Here’s another interview with Carol Leigh, this time in a small but mainstream publication; the more interviews like this Americans see, the harder it will be for the prohibitionists to spread lies about us. And here’s one in Tits and Sass with Deon Haywood of Women With a Vision, talking about activism, human rights and whorearchy.

Which I Doubt

Remember how I’ve said that prosecutors ignore women’s statements that they don’t have pimps so they can repackage ordinary hooking as “sex trafficking”?

The Brooklyn DA…[told] prosecutors…not to make written records of early interviews with sex-trafficking victims…so the information could be withheld from defense attorneys…“When these girls first come in, they often deny they have been hit or pimped. We were told not to write down those statements,” a law-enforcement source said…

Marie Duplessis

Dr. Laura Agustín on imagery of the “fallen woman” in La Traviata, a topic she has discussed more generally before: “…Violetta always has a scene on the floor to drive home her moral abjection…People who fall get back up right away; if they can’t, they are too injured. In Violetta’s case the injury is moral…”

Sold Out

A gay therapist explains “Why Queers Should Care About Sex Offenders”:

…sex offenders are referred to as participating in deviant sexual behavior, having deviant sexual fantasies, and being inherently “deviant” themselves…The same methods historically used by the government to imprison and pathologize homosexuality and gender variation are being used today to justify the extreme marginalization, lifetime institutionalization, and oppression of people who have violated sex laws…[including] public nudity, [urination or] masturbation, peeping, photographing or videotaping without consent, consensual sex with a 17-year-old, sexting, and downloading unlawful pornography…At one point, the idea of the predatory, untamable homosexual was…widely held…the very fact that a man…[desired] another man was reason enough to criminalize his existence…While mainstream…perception of queer people is shifting, it affirms monogamous sex between married…gay and lesbian adults. Gender variation and other forms of sexual desire and behavior…still face condemnation…

To really drive the point home, read the comment thread as well.

Puppet Show (TW3 #329)

Laura Lee explains why Ruhama shill Rachel Moran could never have been a Dublin sex worker:

…Moran and I worked in Dublin at the same time, the early nineties. I worked in the same brothels, for the same escort agencies and had regular contact…with the same women, she says she stood on street corners with. One of those…is now a prominent activist…[who swears]…that she has never set eyes on Moran until her book launch…Moran…should know…[the names of brothel owners, but doesn’t; she] says that in seven years of sex work she never met one client who showed her a shred of empathy or kindness. That’s incredible. Because in all of my time there, I met some lovely guys…the language employed by Moran…is literally like she is reading from a script…a…co-activist…confirmed that Ruhama…offered her money to “turn” and campaign for their side. In fact, they offered her a book deal and a tour too, exactly as Moran has now…

The activist Laura speaks of (who prefers to remain anonymous) also told me the same thing over a year ago.

Across the Pond (TW3 #330)

Anyone who actually professes to believe that laws can make a major city “brothel-free” should be disqualified from office on grounds of stupidity:

…officials are putting together “exit” services to help the dozens of sex workers who face having their place of work closed down…Edinburgh’s decades-old policy of licensing saunas…appears to be coming to an end. A police raid in June led to seven individuals being charged with brothel-keeping and living off immoral earnings…A local newspaper…[quoted] one prostitute…[as] saying: “I just can’t get my head around why they want to close us. The police could end up putting women at risk of getting raped, or murdered like in Ipswich”…

Don’t be afraid, unnamed sex worker; Ipswich claims to have “eradicated” street prostitution!

More than 220 teenagers…at risk of slipping into the dangerous world of the sex trade have had their lives rescued since the launch of Ipswich’s prostitution strategy…street prostitution and kerb crawling has been eradicated from the town…however off-street prostitution and sexual exploitation remains an issue…

In truth, of course, they’ve merely pushed it so far underground that the danger has been increased even more, which is the only thing prohibition ever accomplishes.

Broken Record (TW3 #332)

It’s even worse than I suspected; the victims of the Sturgis “sting” were entrapped by “age-regressed photographs of women who now are adults”. The state has charged people with imaginary crimes against nonexistent people for years, but this kind of pseudoscientific quackery is a new low.

Mumbo Jumbo

“Trafficking” mythology gets more farfetched all the time; embedded in this mixture of agency denial porn, arse-backward bootlicking and cheerleading for bullshit “safe harbor” laws is the claim that many of the underage sex workers arrested in the vast “Innocence Lost” boondoggle “may also be charged for possessing the cocktail of drugs that traffickers use to create dependency and compliance in the children they sell.” This is the first I’ve heard of this magical mind-control philter, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.

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That Was the Week That Was (#50)

Posted in Biography, Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged A Tale That Grew in the Telling, Above the Law, activism, Against Their Will, Alaska, Australia, Austria, Backpage, bad customers, brothels, censorship, cops, Creeping Rot, Crime Against Society, cult of the child, dirty, East Asia, end demand, Europe, FBI, Follow Your Bliss, Georgia, guest columnist updates, holidays, hysteria, India, internet, Ireland, Korea, law, LGBT rights, License To Rape, Louisiana, marriage, My Readers Write, neofeminism, Netherlands, New Orleans, New York, Not An Addiction, Ohio, Philippines, porn, Presents, psychology, rape, serial killers, sex education, sex offender registry, sex rays, sex toys, Shifting the Blame, Small Choice, Somehow I Doubt..., stripping, Swedish model, teachers, The Course of a Disease, The Immunity Syndrome, Think of the Children!, Toys for Tots, Uncharted Seas, United Kingdom, Vietnam, violence vs. sex workers, Washington (state), What a Week!, Wise Investment on December 15, 2012| 11 Comments »

Rhoda Grant…believes sex workers are imbeciles who should be denied the right to earn a living and subjected to state-sanctioned sexual assault to ensure that they comply with the dictates imposed upon their profession. – Kate Gould

New Book Reviews

An interview with Xaviera Hollander, now a 69-year-old hotelier in Amsterdam. Here’s my favorite bit:

It’s not as if she became a prostitute through lack of options. She speaks five languages. She was once voted Holland’s best secretary. She reads Philip Roth and Dostoyevsky. She…calls herself “a theatrical entrepreneur.” Yet she has never regretted her main career choice. “To get paid for what you enjoy? Is good, no?”

Think of the Children!

[Carol Ann Eastman,] an English teacher…in North Canton, Ohio…[published] a raunchy erotic novel [entitled Schooled] under the pseudonym Deena Bright…According to The Repository…Eastman’s students are responsible for outing [her]… the novel follows a teacher who has steamy sexual encounters with fellow teachers…[and] former students…to get revenge on her two-timing husband…many local parents feel Eastman shouldn’t teach high school…if she also publishes bawdy fiction…[she] agreed to a five-day suspension without pay for violating the…computer use policy…

License To Rape

It’s a sad statement about our society that this was necessary:

…jurors…won’t hear about [the] prostitution conviction…[of a woman who] says [Denver cop Hector] Paez arrested her…in May 2010, drove her to a secluded spot and coerced her into performing oral sex by threatening to take her to jail. Paez’s defense…asked to question the woman about…a prostitution charge…[but] Judge John Madden said…”The information is highly unfairly prejudicial and (runs) a significant risk of confusing the issue”…The woman…has told jurors about her history of theft and heroin addiction. Prosecutor Doug Jackson said it is precisely that troubled past that…made her an appealing target…

Meanwhile, in Ireland: “A [policeman was]…arrested…after a woman alleged he had raped her…he…was among a number of gardaí working on a…brothel…raid…[he later] went to one of the properties…and committed the alleged rape…”

Shifting the Blame

Lucius Crawford, 60, was arrested for stabbing a woman and has now “confessed to three murders, including the slaying of a Bronx prostitute…Long Island authorities are investigating if he is connected to the mass murder of sex workers in Suffolk County…”

Not an Addiction

In a word: No.

Confessed serial killer Israel Keyes was a murder addict…”Israel Keyes didn’t kidnap and kill people because he was crazy…[or] because his deity told him to or because he had a bad childhood. Israel Keyes did this because he got an immense amount of enjoyment out of it, much like an addict gets…out of drugs,” said Anchorage, Alaska, police Detective Monique Doll…

Against Their Will

Careful reading finds the most interesting details tucked away in news stories: “Senators [in the Philippines support]…strengthening the law against human trafficking… the bill…[would] ensure added protection for…law enforcers, who have been recipients of harassment suits for ‘lawful acts done in good faith during authorized rescue operations’…” In other words, it makes cops and bureaucrats immune to lawsuits filed by sex workers who were “rescued” against their will.

My Readers Write

Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon just can’t understand why some women prefer not to identify as feminist, so Aspasia brilliantly explains it to her. Of course Williams won’t read it and wouldn’t understand if she did, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.

Somehow, I Doubt He Thought This Through

…[Scott Pipher was] charged with hiring a prostitute…[after] he called police to complain that the woman “shorted him 10 minutes”…[the] investigation…[also] led to the arrests of two alleged prostitutes…Pipher is named on the Web sites National Blacklist and Bad Boy Client List as…being “notorious for booking out-calls and then not answering his door or phone”…

Though the author uses phrases like “so-called escort”, it’s interesting that she thought to consult those sites and didn’t bother to define “out-call” [sic].

Guest Columnist: Norma Jean Almodovar

On an information page prepared by Norma Jean for the students of Dr. Rhacel Parrenas, I encountered the following chart: examine it and consider the amount of money, manpower and press devoted to “human trafficking” in comparison with the vastly more common (and real) violent crimes.

Follow Your Bliss

Moon Tae-Hwa stares at his computer, dizzy and nauseous from the hours of porn he’s viewed…He feels no shame — only a righteous sense of mission…Moon is among the most successful members of the “Nuri Cops”…a squad of nearly 800 volunteers who help…censors by patrolling the Internet for pornography in their spare time…pornography is illegal in South Korea, though…easy…to find…”It’s like shoveling snow in a blizzard,” Moon conceded…

The Nuri Cops: selflessly devoting their lives to watching porn so others can’t.

Presents, Presents, Presents!

This week Korhomme sent me a copy of Sex and Punishment, a history of attempts to regulate sexual activity (see picture below). Thank you very much!

The Immunity Syndrome

Compare and contrast with similar kerfuffles in the US:

…Ganz schön intim (“Really Quite Intimate”) is a 152-page…[sex education] publication…[which] includes detailed…information on masturbation, homosexuality and intersexuality…[conservative and religious groups]…called it “disturbing” and “a discredit to the so-called core family”…[and] called for [it] to be withdrawn…the government in Vienna and the pamphlet’s producers…[are] largely unmoved by the brouhaha…

Above the Law

How police privilege and anti-prostitution laws endanger all women:

…Forest Park [Georgia] police arrested Omar Shannondoah Chester…[after he] forced [a woman] into his apartment…beat her…[and] stated, “I am an FBI agent and you are under arrest for prostitution”…When she said she was not a prostitute, and her children were outside, he…[let her] go…[she] then ran out…and called police…

Small Choice

If this article had been published in the US, you can bet it would be warped to fit the “trafficking” paradigm. But since it’s from Al Jazeera, the problems are discussed without denying the women’s agency or the advantages of their arrangement:

…commercial brokers fly Korean men into Vietnam to meet women, and many tie the knot within a week. The South Korean government is concerned these marriages could breed greater social problems. So it is investing to increase these couples’ success rates [via] “orientation” classes [for Vietnamese women]…some marriages crumble [if] Vietnamese women [marry] for money only. Another factor is the…average 17 years’ difference [between spouses], according to researchers Daniele Belanger and Tran Giang Linh…there have been reports of South Korean men beating and killing their foreign wives…[and] migrant wives committing suicide…International marriages, however, have worked out for many couples in South Korea. Belanger and Linh have written that “marriage migration” has empowered Vietnamese women. Girls who once served their families have now become decision-makers thanks to the [economic] leverage granted to them…

Uncharted Seas

Gay activist Alex Andreou on “Why I’m Conflicted About Marriage Equality”:

I…fear that it will create an added pressure to conform. I recall fighting…in…the late eighties…hand-in-hand with transsexual prostitutes and militant dykes…being chased by police and beaten with clubs. What we were fighting for was an acceptance of all different ways of expressing love and sexuality; it was a desire for more, not less, sexual liberation…What we have instead is an attempt to absorb that sexual freedom into conformism. Instead of dragging the world into liberation, we have somehow managed to drag the LGBT community into neo-Puritanism…

Longtime readers will remember I made the same point in “Divided We Fall”.

Metaupdates

Creeping Rot (July Updates, Part Two)

The European Women’s Lobby (a group so detached from reality that it believes a video of a dude performing cunnilingus on a bunch of women will somehow turn men off to paying for sex), claiming to represent over 200 (unnamed) women’s groups, last week “demanded” the European Union impose the Swedish model on member states despite the fact that it does not actually have that power. The English Collective of Prostitutes responded with a well-linked nine-point refutation of the EWL’s absurd, unsupported claims; guess which one got worldwide media coverage?

Toys for Tots (First Updates of the Year, Part Two)

The Platinum Cabaret…in Fayetteville, Ark…is…offering free lap dances in exchange for donations to Toys for Tots…“As long as it’s done in a legal manner, as long as people are bringing us new, unwrapped toys, we don’t get into how they were gathered and what the process was,” [said] John Staples, coordinator for Toys for Tots…But another Toys for Tots chapter wasn’t quite as forgiving when…Pleasures — an adult toy store in Huntsville [Alabama] –- [offered] any customer who brings in a gift for Toys for Tots their choice of a complimentary sex toy…”Toys for Tots should not be advertised at an adult store,” [said] Ret. Major Brian A. Murray…

Considering how much money US Marines collectively spend on sex workers every year, it’s absurd for some Marines to make nonsensical anti-sex work statements just to please prudes.

Crime Against Society (TW3 #14)

As I reported, people who were on Louisiana’s “sex offender” registry due to the overturned “crime against nature by solicitation” law can petition to be removed. According to Deon Haywood of WWAV, “around 75 people have already had themselves removed from the registry, and around 100 people are waiting for a judge to hear their motions…We haven’t had one person that’s been rejected…”

What a Week! (TW3 #22)

I’m sure this had absolutely nothing to do with the owner’s winning a judgment against the city a few months ago: “State and federal police have raided inner-city Sydney brothel Stiletto, owned by gambling identity Eddie Hayson…A spokeswoman for NSW police said the search warrant was attached to a joint operation codenamed Polaris making investigations ‘into a drug and money laundering syndicate’…” Unsurprisingly, they found absolutely nothing.

Wise Investment (TW3 #31)

Officials admit that they knew their law to hold websites criminally liable for third-party content was unconstitutional:

The state of Washington has abandoned its defense of legislation…that could have exposed website operators to legal liability…The Internet Archive, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation…worried that [the law] could effectively make its archives of the Web illegal…so it joined a lawsuit by Backpage.com…now Washington state officials have…[agreed] to permanently block the law…[and] will pay $200,000 to defray the plaintiffs’ legal expenses, and Washington state attorney general Rob McKenna will “work with the…legislature to repeal the current unconstitutional version” of the law.

A Tale That Grew in the Telling (TW3 #35)

You’d think that in the age of ultra-realistic digital effects, people would recognize that just because someone made a movie doesn’t mean the subject is real: “[Sunitha Krishnan] has rescued thousands of women from prostitution and [has taken]…her advocacy to films, through [Ente,] a depiction of a real life sex-trafficking story…The activist…says she has received death threats and been targeted by acid attacks and even beaten up over a dozen times…” All the beatings have succeeded, yet not one of the acid attacks or death threats have? How convenient!

The Course of a Disease (TW3 #49)

Kate Gould is not a sex worker, but she’s done her homework and clearly “gets it”. Her attack on Rhoda Grant’s Swedish model campaign, “Why I’m Opposed to Criminalising the Purchase of Sex”, is excellent, but the comment thread is suffering from the usual influx of lie-vomiting trafficking fanatics and deserves input from rational sex worker supporters (hint, hint). Meanwhile, here’s Dr. Brooke Magnanti on how the proposed law as written will actually (like California’s Proposition 35) criminalize many human interactions virtually nobody would call “prostitution”.

This Week in 2010 and 2011

This week I exploded lots of lies, including ones about adolescents, the Super Bowl, decriminalization, STIs in porn, the purpose of a law, prostitution terminology and “sex trafficking”, and Julian Assange. We also looked at bad jobs and the meaning of “legalization”, and saw a sleighful of short articles on HIV, halfway whores, maid cafes, sex rays, spiders, Rachel Wotton, Jill Brenneman, an important “trafficking” study, pompous masseuses, politician sex crimes, France, a pervert prosecutor, lethal butt injections, “sex school”, schadenfreude, Pedobear and strippers.

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That Was the Week That Was (#26)

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

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

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

Feeding On Their Own

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

Updates

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

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

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

Japanese cops are adopting American-style prudishness and repression:

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

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

Check Your Premises (March 10^th, 2011)

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

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

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

Surplus Women (September 27^th, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, in France:

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

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

Yellow Fever (June 18^th, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metaupdates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Year Ago Today

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

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That Was the Week That Was (#23)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Music, News, Obituary, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged Africa, archeofeminism, Australia, avails laws, Backpage, Canada, censorship, condoms, cops, dirty, disease, Don’t Take My Word For It, Down Under, drivers, Europe, fantasy, Feminine Pragmatism, Finding What Isn’t There, gangs, Hard Numbers, harm reduction, Higher Education, Hollywood, hysteria, Illinois, imaginative fiction, internet, Ireland, Kenya, law, male prostitutes, marriage, Michigan, neofeminism, Part of the Picture, porn, psychology, serial killers, sex rays, Shifting the Blame, streetwalkers, stripping, Swedish model, Texas, The Course of a Disease, The Scarlet Letter, Think of the Children!, Traffic Jam, transgender, video, Washington (state), Wise Investment on June 9, 2012| 23 Comments »

Only death goes deeper than sex. – Mason Cooley

One obituary, ten updates and three metaupdates.

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

The beloved fantasist died Wednesday morning at the age of 91; he was one of my favorite authors and wrote one of my favorite books and one of the scariest stories of all time. Here are a story and an article from Bradbury himself (courtesy of the New Yorker), my tribute tale “Penelope”, lovely remembrances from Neil Gaiman and regular reader Hal 10000, and a video from singer and comedienne Rachel Bloom; Bradbury had a great laugh when he saw it and gave her an autographed copy of The Martian Chronicles.

Updates

Think of the Children! (September 30^th, 2010)

So, school personnel, think you’re safe because you’ve never done sex work and/or don’t have direct contact with kids? Think again:

…Des Moines school superintendent Nancy Sebring resigned last week…for sending sexy emails at work…Sebring was forced out of her position because school district staffers discovered…emails she’d sent…to an adult man with whom she was engaged in a consenting sexual relationship…district…policy forbids using school computers…for personal correspondence…

Had the emails been about him taking her to a movie nobody would’ve said boo; she was sacked for being sexual, because sex rays can flow through the school’s computer system or become embedded in memo paper and thus imperil students (i.e. helpless, asexual fetuses) in a different part of town.

The Scarlet Letter (March 29^th, 2011)

Public shaming of whores and clients without due process is evil and twisted enough, but this takes it to a new level of piggishness:

…[In Chicago] a disproportionate number of transgender individuals are apparently being arrested for patronizing or soliciting for prostitution…Transgender “buyers” are much more likely than non-transgender buyers to be black…[and] are also, on average, almost 10 years younger. We should note that 10.5% of the arrestees were transgender, a shocking statistic…It seems much more likely that these individuals were “sellers,” not “buyers”…

As the Swedish Rot begins to pervade more American jurisdictions, it has become less politically popular to arrest women; so, Chicago cops simply lie and accuse transgender hookers of being clients instead due to their biological gender. Since neofeminists hate transgender people anyway, this is a bonus for them.

Down Under
(One Year Ago Today)

Australian politician Craig Thomson is under fire for misappropriation of funds, and though less than 6% of those funds were spent on whores guess what everyone’s talking about? Kelly Hinton of Project Respect comments:

…The question of whether or not [Thomson] actually did this has been lost…as a woman…dared not only to come forward publicly saying she could identify him from a photo, but accepted money to do so. It seems that what she has to say is irrelevant – we have already scrutinized, judged, degraded and discredited her in a public trial by media… from all sides. Owners of escort businesses and brothels in Sydney…have been quick to discredit her (and ultimately, other women in the sex industry)…[by] depicting [them] as stupid…[or] manipulative…Mr Thomson is quoted as saying: “To buy a story from a prostitute is cheque book journalism at its worst”…Is he suggesting that because she has been in the sex industry, we must assume she has no morals, is a liar and will do anything for money?…

This is yet another demonstration of why sex work must be completely decriminalized: any arbitrary limitation which doesn’t apply to other people besides hookers will be used as a weapon by those in power:

…A local sex worker…said prostitution laws in Queensland were much harsher than in other Australian states…sex workers may only enlist the services of a registered bodyguard and a driver. They are not permitted to have a receptionist book their service or handle payments. Detective Superintendent Brian Wilkins…said enforcing these laws helped prevent the exploitation of sex workers…

So to “protect” the girls, cops trick and arrest them, “helping” them into a criminal record and “helping” the state to some of their money. I’m sure they’re very grateful.

Part of the Picture (August 29^th, 2011)

Behold the result of the childish belief that pictures of sex are magically different from all others:

Young women who report that their romantic partners look at porn frequently are less happy in their relationships than women partnered with guys who more often abstain… said…Destin Stewart [of]…the University of Florida…Discovering explicit material on a partner’s computer “made them feel like they were not good enough, like they could not measure up”…women who reported that their boyfriends or husbands looked at more pornography were less likely to be happy in their relationships than women who said their partners didn’t look at pornography very often. When women were bothered by their partner’s porn use, saying, for example, that they believed he was a porn addict or that he used porn more than a “normal” amount, they were also more likely to have low self-esteem and to be less satisfied with both their relationship and their sex life…that doesn’t prove that porn necessarily caused the women’s self-esteem to drop…women who feel bad about themselves might seek out or stay with porn-loving guys more often than secure women…

Or, women who believe in nonsense like “porn addiction” might be labeling a normal amount of porn-watching “excessive”, or might even be classifying as porn materials that more secure women don’t think of that way (e.g., I don’t call Playboy porn). Or, a woman with self-esteem problems, or who is dissatisfied with her relationship, could be much less interested in sex, which drives her man to look at more porn. There’s just no way to tell anything at all from sloppy studies like this, but that sure didn’t stop the anti-sex crowd from trying.

Wise Investment (September 19^th, 2011)

I’m really pleased to see more sex businesses counterattacking with civil litigation. Escort review and message board ECCIE is suing a blogger who refers to the owners as “pimps” and has repeatedly accused them of “human trafficking” (sound like anybody we know?); the buffoon doesn’t seem to comprehend that actual felony accusations cross the line from criticism into libel. Meanwhile, Backpage is suing the state of Washington to prevent implementation of a new law which would require escorts to place ads on websites in person rather than over the internet, and would hold any website (including Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc) criminally liable for outside submissions, which as the lawsuit points out would “bring the practice of hosting third-party content to a grinding halt.” Apparently federal judge Ricardo Martinez recognizes the implications, because he has temporarily blocked enforcement of the new law while the suit proceeds.

Don’t Take My Word For It (September 29^th, 2011)

When one of Dan Savage’s readers asked him for advice on how to become a straight male escort, he enlisted the aid of an expert:

“There is no gigolo industry,” says Dominick, the former escort who writes Ask Dominick, an advice column…at Rentboy.com…“What STUD is seeking is a fantasy—one that has been fueled by cultural products like American Gigolo and HBO’s Hung,” says Dominick. There are no reputable agencies…that book male escorts to see female clients, just as there are no websites like Rentboy.com for straight male escorts. “The fact of the matter is, almost all clients for escorts are male…” When [Dominick] was working as an escort in New York City, his ads stated that he was available for male or female clients. “Over three years, I went on exactly one call with a female client…and one call with a married couple for a cuckolding scene, which was initiated by the husband. During that same period, I averaged about 5.5 calls per week with men”…

Higher Education (December 11^th, 2011)

I think you’re probably better off just learning on the job (from the Spanish with Google’s help):

A “serious” Spanish company offers a €100 course in “professional prostitution”, at least according to a poster…in the city of Valencia…adult students (both male and female) are trained to charge for sex. They learn the Kama Sutra, both common and uncommon positions, and the use of toys; the number of classes is optional according to student needs. Upon graduation, a student can apply to be a teacher in the school, or explore a world of other possibilities to “make big money quickly and easily”…

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

Swedish Model proponents just won’t give up trying to inflict their filth on Canadian society, and are even trying to hijack the term “decriminalization”:

The Quebec Council for the Status of Women is calling on the government to decriminalize prostitution, and instead go after the clients and escort agencies…[The group claimed] the average age young women become involved in the sex trade is between 14 and 15 years old. Many, they say, have been sexually abused as children…[and that] bodies need to stop being objectified, including in strip clubs…

Finding What Isn’t There (April 17^th, 2012)

The Irish Police have been forced to admit that prohibitionists are full of crap:

…Gardai…are examining information gathered in last week’s…raids on apartments that were being used mainly by foreign prostitutes…all the young women who were detained or questioned said they were working in the sex trade here voluntarily…Gardai disagree with claims by Catholic and feminist groups that there are high levels of human trafficking involved in Ireland’s sex trade…

Hard Numbers (April 20^th, 2012)

This account from a Congolese whore clearly demonstrates why criminalization and legalization schemes are dangerous both for women and for public health:

When Redempta…came to Kenya, she quickly had to find a source of income to feed and house herself and her two younger siblings. But as an illegal immigrant with no knowledge of local languages, her options were very limited. “I met some women from my country…and they introduced me to sex work…When I refuse to have sex with [men] without a condom, some threaten to report me to the police. They say they will tell the police I stole from them…I don’t have any papers to allow me [to stay] here, so I just have sex with them without a condom when they want.” Redempta sometimes has up to eight clients in two days, but…has only been tested for HIV once in the last two years. “I just tested once when they conducted a public one [testing campaign], but I fear going to a facility to test for HIV. I don’t know what the health workers will tell me when I go there because I am not a Kenyan,” she said…

Metaupdates

Shifting the Blame in TW3 (#18) (May 5^th, 2012)

These are obviously the same two who were questioned before: “Two men have been arrested in connection with the Backpage.com murder investigation…[they] were questioned by homicide detectives and will be held pending expected charges.”

Feminine Pragmatism in TW3 (#18) (May 5^th, 2012)

Nadya Suleman accepted a topless dancing gig in order to promote her porn video and says “that she would accept adult entertainment offers, although she ‘wouldn’t even kiss somebody for money’.” But despite her “dreams of building a business ‘empire’ that will pay for food, shelter and college educations for her 14 children” and her “hopes to become a role model for other women facing major struggles”, she backed out of the contract after “the club’s bartender said [in a TV interview]: ‘She must be a little crazy, normal people don’t have that many children’… and…the club’s manager said that ‘maybe after a few shows she gets comfortable, we’ll see more’ [than just her tits].” Wake up, Octomom; your kids can’t eat your pride, and if you’re that easily offended how the hell do you hope to handle Howard Stern’s comments when you ride a Sybian on his show on June 20^th?

Traffic Jam in TW3 (#21) (May 26^th, 2012)

Another gang leader was sentenced on “human trafficking” charges for the prostitution of female gang members; the story is chock full of the sort of melodramatic language one expects from a 1930s B-movie and of course portrays female gang members as innocent lambs.

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That Was the Week That Was (#18)

Posted in Biography, Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged Another Small Victory, archeofeminism, Ashley Madison, Australia, Backpage, bad customers, brothels, Bullies With Badges, censorship, cops, dirty, disease, East Asia, Elephant in the Parlor, Feminine Pragmatism, Good News-Bad News, harm reduction, hysteria, imaginative fiction, infidelity, internet, Latin America, law, lawheads, Madonna/whore, marriage, Michigan, Much Ado About Nothing, My Favorite Updates, neofeminism, Never Call the Cops, New Mexico, Nicaragua, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Philippines, politicians, porn, Presents, prohibitionist myths, Prudish Pedants, red-light districts, serial killers, sex offender registry, Shazam!, Shifting the Blame, stripping, Swedish model, Texas, They Just Don’t Get It, Twitter, Umpteen Thousand People, underage, violence vs. sex workers on May 5, 2012| 18 Comments »

“That is no excuse,” replied Mr. Brownlow…”the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.”

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass – a idiot.” – Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

Two new stories, nine updates and three metaupdates.

The Law is an Ass

Today in “Never call the police for any reason whatsoever”:

…Christina Marie Lopez [of Oregon]…pleaded guilty…to attempted use of a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct…in December…Lopez complained to police and media that a strip club had hired her…[then 17-year-old] daughter…Investigators later obtained surveillance video…”that showed Lopez in the club watching her daughter dance and providing her money”…[but] now 18-year-old Nicole Madril, said…”It’s not like she came in there and got 50 lap dances from me…She came in and gave me money so I could get myself something to eat”…Lopez was sentenced to 3 years in prison, 3 years of post-prison supervision, and must register as a sex offender. Lopez’s daughter told the judge the sentence was unfair and that it was her own choice to strip.

Lopez obviously forgot about the Law of Shazam; even if her daughter was at most four months shy of her 18^th birthday, she was still the exact legal, moral and intellectual equivalent of a newborn infant, and therefore easily controllable by any adult.

Bullies With Badges

Police in riot gear and masks saved Houston from evil harlots Thursday: “At least six women were in custody…after prostitution stings at three…massage parlors…Investigators said most of the women who were arrested appeared to be under the age of 30 – some as young as teenagers…Investigators said…they were looking into whether any of the women may be victims of human trafficking.” News flash: Many Asian women look younger than most white women; those who “looked like teenagers” may have been much older. The “trafficking” claims were obviously to head off valid criticism of the incredible waste of this “raid”, but if they were sincere their actions are even more reprehensible, as pointed out in this must-read column from Radley Balko.

Updates

They Just Don’t Get It (April 12^th, 2011)

What is wrong with journalists in Pennsylvania? Their fawning treatment of cops and other “authorities” reads like fellatio porn, and their feigned ignorance of anything whore-related is astonishingly stupid:

Prostitution has plagued any number of internet sites in recent years – notably Craigslist – but now the CBS 3 I-Team has found a new hideout for hookers on…Twitter…used by call girls all the time as a free way to advertise…some prostitutes right in your backyard are even setting up appointments over Twitter, which is used by kids of all ages…“It gives…that ability to reach their customers immediately,” says Rob D’Ovidio, a cyber crime expert at Drexel University. “If it’s a slow day, and they want to lure in customers, they can quickly get that blurb out there”…

Reading stories like this feels like looking into a dirty toilet; one wonders what sort of filthy mind could write it, despite the fact that “kids of all ages” could see it on TV. Apparently nobody told Mr. “Cyber Crime Expert” that we’re all “victims” now and that we’re the ones who are “lured” rather than vice-versa. Except, obviously, in Pennsylvania (where we’re still criminals) and Texas (where they ain’t sure).

Another Small Victory (July 16^th, 2011)

A group of US Representatives petitioned the Supreme Court to reverse a lower-court ruling striking down the anti-prostitution pledge; Congressman Chris Smith characterized agencies who provide condoms and testing to all women (without excluding sex workers) as “international groups that promote and enable prostitution and sex trafficking”. The mindless self-destructiveness of this position becomes evident when one realizes that people like Smith wrongly believe whores to be the major vectors of STIs, yet want us excluded from health programs anyway. He’s also ignorant on the ruling, which only freed domestic agencies from the ridiculous “pledge”; international ones are still bound by it, which leads me to wonder how this group keeps its funding:

A new NGO in Nicaragua aims to protect the rights of women who voluntarily work in the sex trade, raising the question of whether sex work should be seen as a legitimate job, or should be treated as a component of organized crime that is inherently linked to problems like human trafficking. Girasoles de Nicaragua…is backed by USAID [and] formed…to fight “stigma, discrimination and violence”…the organization has…deployed 25 employees across the country, reportedly providing some 500 women with health aid, literacy training, and legal support. It plans to partner with the police in investigating crimes related to the sex trade, and form alliances with other international organizations that promote sex workers’ rights, including Argentina-based network RedTraSex. The group argues that sex work should be recognized as a respectable form of self-employment…that allows women to support themselves and their families…

The rest of the article, as should be evident from the lede, devolves into the usual “human trafficking cartel” nonsense, branding the group’s statements to reporters “confused” and implying that they know less about their own field than lay people who read “trafficking” propaganda.

Elephant in the Parlor (October 23^rd, 2012)

Politician. Whores. Yawn.

Michael Wiener, a…[New Mexico] county commissioner …is being asked to resign after a picture of him posing with scantily clad women in a well-known red light district in the Philippines…[was posted by] photographer John Keatley…on his blog. Wiener…[wrote] that…”NOTHING untoward ever happened…The pictures taken are as innocent as any that could be taken at Twin Peaks or Hooters here“…[but] Keatley said “…It was very obvious to me that he was not respectful to women. He was there to have a good time”…

Because to the neofeminism-addled mind, “respectful to women” and “good time” are mutually exclusive.

Umpteen Thousand People Can’t Be Wrong (November 12^th, 2011)

“A group of senators has introduced a resolution urging Village Voice Media to take down the ‘adult entertainment’ section of its classified-ads site, Backpage.com.” Blah, blah, blah. You know the rest.

Presents, Presents, Presents! (December 29^th, 2011)

Darren Thompson sent me an Amazon gift certificate this week, which I used to get several small items: The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, Pretty Baby and two discs of Warner Brothers cartoons that weren’t on my wish list. Thank you so much!

Sleazier Than Thou (January 30^th, 2012)

Ashley Madison is well known for its lies, deception and sleazy advertising, but this is slimy even for them:

For the past four years, infidelity-based matchmaking site AshleyMadison.com has seen an influx of married women signing up for its services on…the day after Mother’s Day. According to the site’s founder, Noel Biderman, more married women join the site on that day than on any other…”If that day comes to pass, and once again what [women] experience is a lack of appreciation, affection and respect, that is when the idea of taking on a potential lover takes full form,” Biderman said…

Note found by an amateur on her door.

Guys, very few actual living women sign up for Ashley Madison on ANY day. The majority of those who do are whores, and the rest aren’t being truthful about their age or weight; Biderman is a lying shyster out to take your money. That having been said, it’s probably best to be extra-sweet to your wife on Mother’s Day; yes, I know she isn’t your mother, and I agree…but she may not, and that could mean trouble.

Prudish Pedants (March 22^nd, 2012)

And all it took was triple jeopardy and lying to the jury about the legality of nullification:

A jury today found fetish filmmaker Ira Isaacs guilty on five counts of violating federal obscenity laws. He’ll be sentenced on Aug. 6. It was the third…trial…The first two ended with mistrials…[the] federal prosecutor…said…that Isaacs’ goal…was solely to make money, but Isaacs’ attorney…said…that the case is about testing the First Amendment… Judge George King…told [the jury] that it’s their duty to weigh and evaluate all the evidence and decide the facts based solely on the law, reason and common sense and not their opinion or speculation…

Much Ado About Nothing (April 18^th, 2012)

Agent Cheapskate has finally been unmasked as Arthur Huntington, who “lives in Saverna Park, Md. [and] is a married father of two whose wife leads Bible study in the neighborhood…the Secret Service has created new rules forbidding all foreigners but hotel staff in agents’ rooms and barring them from visiting ‘seedy establishments’.” In other news, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee admitted that the whores were just whores, not spies or international gangsters: “It does not appear that these guys were targeted. [It wasn’t] a foreign organization attempting to seduce Secret Service agents…There’s no evidence that any of the women have any involvement with narco-terrorists or any type of terrorist organization. Basically, they’re prostitutes.”

Which, of course, every hooker in the world already knew.

My Favorite Books (April 26^th, 2012)

I think these folks are reading far too much into a discarded first draft, but it’s still interesting:

Newly-discovered draft pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince“…will be auctioned off later this month after a rare public viewing…The first page contains a piece of text that’s partly retained in chapter 19 of the published work. But the second leaf of the work is completely original…In 1943, the text turned from a scribbled manuscript by a relatively unknown author, into a literary phenomenon that has since sold 140 million copies, in about 260 languages. After The Bible, “The Little Prince” is the most translated book in history, according to the…Saint-Exupery Foundation. Sadly, the author would never know the extent of his book’s success: he died shortly after its first publication in a mysterious plane crash in 1944 while on active service in World War II…

Metaupdates

Shifting the Blame in The Beat Goes On (Part One) (January 18^th, 2012)

“Two men were held for questioning Tuesday as part of an investigation into the slayings of four Detroit women whose bodies were found in car trunks after three of them placed online escort ads…”

Feminine Pragmatism in TW3 (#13) (March 31^st, 2012)

“Octomom” Nadya Suleman, who filed for bankruptcy this week with $1 million in debts and $50,000 in assets, has agreed to do a masturbation video for Vivid for $100,000. She insists it isn’t really porn (which she has sworn never to do) because it’s a solo act; do you think I should send her a copy of “Little Boxes”?

Good News, Bad News in TW3 (#14) (April 6^th, 2012)

Elena Jeffreys explains the probable effects of the sleazy political deal which could impose a version of the Swedish Model on Western Australia:

Adele Carles is no friend of the HIV sector, no friend of STI prevention, and her $5.5 million sex worker ‘rescue’ centre is going to cost the WA Liberals, and any future government, that friendship as well. What will it cost sex workers? Our ability to protect ourselves. Our health. And our dignity…The…centre is being horse-traded in Western Australia…for votes over Christian Porter’s anti-sex work Prostitution Bill. Doomed from the start, Porter authored the Bill by not listening to his own policy staff, ignoring sex workers and the sex worker movement, and thumbing his nose at the Liberal’s own ‘numbers people’…With a lack of buy-in from the industry, total opposition from the churches and zero support from both the ALP and the Greens, suddenly Independent MP…Adele Carles, has the power to call the shots…[Carles’ scheme would be funded by] gutting the existing sex worker service and building a new service geared towards the redemption, exit and retraining of sex workers out of the industry rather than the current approach of harm reduction for current sex workers…

One Year Ago Today

“May Updates (Part Two)” reports on harm reduction for untreatable alcoholics, junk science equating a vital food component with hard drugs, and government busybodies trying to “protect” babies from the scourge of mother’s milk.

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