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That Was the Week That Was (#316)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged A Whore in the Bedroom, A Working System, activism, Africa, agency denial, An Example to the West, Australia, avails laws, Backpage, Barbie, bogus studies, brothels, California, censorship, Central Asia, Change a Few Words, condoms, consensual crime, cops, dirty, disability, Divided We Fall, drugs, end demand, evidence, Feminine Pragmatism, Held Together With Lies, hysteria, Illinois, India, infidelity, internet, Lack of Evidence, language, Latin America, Legalization a Good Idea?, LGBT rights, male prostitutes, marriage, Minnesota, Missouri, neofeminism, Not the Leading Players, Ohio, politicians, porn, pragmatism, Prohibition (alcohol), psychology, Real People, rescue industry, Reviews, screening, sex education, sex work is work, Something Rotten In Sweden, Swedish model, Texas, The Immunity Syndrome, The Pro-Rape Coalition, The Story Behind the Story, transgender, Uncharted Seas, video, We Told You So, Where Are the Victims?, Wise Investment on April 20, 2013| 25 Comments »

The truth doesn’t have a sound bite. – Hadil Habiba

A Whore in the Bedroom

While working as a high-class escort for nine years, Rebecca Dakin saw hundreds of married men turn to her to fulfill sexual needs not being met by their wives. In 2009, she…became an infidelity counselor, using her experience…to teach women about how to satisfy their husbands…Dakin says that the number one reason men look outside of their relationships for sex is because they’re not getting enough of it at home…other reasons…include…feeling bored by the sex they receive…or feeling hesitant to share their intimate desires and fantasies with their spouse…

November Book Reviews

Thaddeus Russell lectures on A Renegade History of the United States at the recent New Hampshire Liberty Forum:

Barbie

The pathetic losers who believe young girls can perform complex calculations in their heads are at it again, informing us that if Barbie were both alive and life-sized she wouldn’t have room for intestines. That’s ironic, because it’s obvious that doofuses who obsess about plastic dolls have no room in their heads for comprehending that the smaller any animal is, the more slender its proportions tend to be, and that kids don’t actually notice this kind of stuff in any case.

Real People

It’s surprising that this article on Bay Area sex workers (including Kitty Stryker and Siouxsie Q) who cater to the tech sector appeared on CNN, of all places; the phrase “human trafficking” occurs only once, in a very short passage about a vice cop. Maybe a few people over there are starting to wake up (or just seeing the writing on the wall). The same holds true in the next item:

Feminine Pragmatism

The anti-whore rhetoric in this New York Times piece about Afghan sex workers is minimal, and the word “trafficking” entirely absent:

…Mazar…is…Afghanistan’s unofficial capital of prostitution…[this is] partly [due]…to the city’s culture, which is considerably more forgiving of vice than is the rest of the country. Alcohol, though still illegal, can be found without too much trouble. Women…can be seen socializing with men in…public parks, a rare sight even in Kabul…In recent years, the city’s economy has flourished as its proximity to Central Asia and its relative peace and stability have transformed it into a trading hub…The sex trade has [always] existed in one form or another…even under the ultraconservative rule of the Taliban. But officials here say the rapid spread of mobile technology has made the business easier to manage and harder to detect…Women…host clients in a series of apartments…The point of contact is typically a man who orchestrates the meet-ups by cellphone. This has made the business tough to infiltrate for those police officials eager to crack down…[sex workers] are almost always impoverished and typically divorced or widowed, struggling to support a family…they risk death if they are discovered…

The Pro-Rape Coalition

“The Supreme Court [of India] sought response from the government on a plea to block and ban porn sites on the internet, particularly those showing child pornography…The petition filed by Indore-based advocate Kamlesh Vaswani said watching obscene videos is not an offence but it is one of the major causes for crime against women…” As we know, this is the exact opposite of the truth.

Where Are the Victims?

Even the police state seems unable to explain what legitimate public interest is served by jailing a 69-year-old quadriplegic polio victim who breathes through a ventilator for the “crime” of having sexual feelings. In 2011 he was “convicted” of helping sex workers find safe clients by running a screening service, and apparently the terms of his probation demand he not be sexual in any way; unsurprisingly, he has been caught violating that condition twice so far.

We Told You So

…As part of a legal settlement, Tennessee-based Stop Child Trafficking Now…will agree to follow a list of requirements if it returns to Missouri…some of the stipulations include [detailing] how donated funds will be spent in the Kansas City area…[and] an accurate depiction of the organization’s accomplishments. A 41 Action News investigation…followed the money trail and fact-checked some of SCTNow’s bold claims made on its website…hundreds of thousands of dollars [went] to fund private “special operatives” teams to gather undercover intelligence about child sex trafficking…[but] when pressed for more details, SCTNow could not point to a single case in the country where information lead to an arrest or prosecution…

Divided We Fall

The Gambia introduced…new laws…criminalising male prostitution [and] cross-dressing…Any man or boy who solicits, is “attired in the fashion of a woman” in a public place or who “practises sodomy as a means of livelihood or as a profession” now faces a hefty fine and jail term of up to five years…

Where’s the outcry from picket-fence gay activists? {sound of crickets} I reckon they don’t want to be soil their newfound respectability by speaking up for drag hookers any more.

Change a Few Words

Dr. Laura Agustín on how all prohibitionism is the same:

…outlawing activities accomplishes only one thing…It tells citizens that government has decided something is Wrong…Sending A Message is the principle …behind the Swedish state’s…law against buying sex, and…behind all the [others]…who want the law for their countries. Everyone wants to be seen to be Taking a Stand against immoral behaviour. Try bringing evidence into the conversation and you will quickly learn how irrelevant it is; you can find Swedish promoters themselves saying things like We know it doesn’t work but we want to be in the forefront of Gender Justice…Any other claim about what prohibitionist laws achieve when they outlaw social activities like sex, drinking and drugs is not supported by evidence. That’s because, after the law is passed and the message is sent, individuals deal with prohibition deviously…So buyers and sellers of drugs, alcohol and sex become creative, some of them maintaining a disapproving stance in public at the same time…

This is, of course, why self-reporting about paying for sex has become so absurdly inaccurate.

The Immunity Syndrome

A new Ohio law bans teachers from discussing “any gateway sexual activity or health message that encourages students to experiment with sexual activity” and allows parents to sue for “damages” if they claim a teacher has done so. What exactly are “gateway sexual activities”, you ask? The law doesn’t say, but we know that in Tennessee they include hand-holding.

An Example to the West

Add Latin America to the list of regions that do sex work activism more effectively than the US:

A new study, designed and carried out by the network of female sex workers in Latin America and Caribbean (REDTRASEX), has documented legislation that affects sex work – as well as detailing what this means in practice…independent sex work is not prohibited in any of the countries studied. What is criminalized…is proxenetism (or ‘pimping’) and…“immoral” behaviours or disturbances to the peace or public order are applied in relation to sex work. Furthermore…confusing sex workers…with trafficked persons…silences the legitimate voices of sex workers and actually blocks discussions on how to end human trafficking. This creates a framework of legitimacy for police repression and state violence…[and] results in a culture of secrecy around sex work, increasing stigma and the vulnerability of sex workers…

The study is available in Spanish, and I’ll provide the English translation as soon as it’s available.

The Leading Players in the Field, Not (TW3 #14)

Gloria Steinem is at it again, now in collusion with rescue industry NGO Apne Aap: “On April 18, human rights activists Gloria Steinem and Ruchira Gupta will kick off a two-day symposium at Smith College, ‘Trafficking Sex: Politics, Policy, Personhood’…” Note the unintentional irony of prohibitionists borrowing the term “personhood” from their anti-abortion rights soulmates.

Held Together With Lies (TW3 #28)

Despite a total lack of evidence (“[trafficking] convictions [declined] 13 percent”), Chicken Licken and other overly-excitable barnyard fowl ordered EU member states “to get a move on with adopting tough new rules against human trafficking or face sanctions as a first report on the problem showed ‘modern-day slavery’ worsening”. Obviously math isn’t the typical politician’s strong suit, but one would think even they could comprehend that the larger estimates might have something to do with the fact that they “[broadened] the definition of the crime” two years ago; now they’re claiming “the trafficking business is second-only in illegal activity to the weapons trade”, up from the equally-bogus assertion that it was third. Anyone want to take bets on whether it will rise to first before the hysteria collapses?

Wise Investment (TW3 #31)

“Texas lawmakers…[want to criminalize] advertisements soliciting prostitution…‘the Backpage Bill’…would make it a felony to buy such advertising and might press Backpage.com to get out of the business.” It will do nothing of the kind and these politicians know it. But because they don’t pay the cost of defending tyrannical and patently-unconstitutional laws, they’re perfectly happy to buy votes from control freaks at taxpayer expense.

Lack of Evidence (TW3 #41)

The news that “San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón has agreed to make a ban on using condoms as evidence of prostitution permanent” is good (though as a policy rather than a law it could be revoked at a moment’s notice), but dig Gascón’s bizarre and Orwellian claim around mid-article that criminalization and police harassment of women are for our “protection”.

Uncharted Seas

…we’ve been hearing it for years. Gay marriage is a slippery slope! A gateway drug! If we legalize it, then what’s next? Legalized polygamy? We can only hope…let’s not forget that the fight doesn’t end with same-sex marriage…Legalized polygamy in the United States is…constitutional, feminist, and sex-positive…we really can make our own choices. We just might choose things people don’t like…Arguments about whether a woman’s consensual sexual and romantic choices are “healthy” should have no bearing on the legal process…It’s condescending, not supportive, to minimize them as mere “victims” without considering the possibility that some of them have simply made a different choice…

A Working System (TW3 #136)

A Sydney madam has been found guilty of keeping young Malaysian students in sexual servitude…Chee Mei Wong, 39, forced the six young women to work up to 20 hours a day in the Diamonds brothel…and ordered them to perform unusual sex acts against their will so they could pay ”debts”…

Something Rotten in Sweden (TW3 #138)

More on the ugly campaign of disinformation currently being waged by “End Demand Illinois”:

…Who are the organizers of this campaign trying to communicate with? My suspicion is…people who already have a soft analysis of prostitution gleaned from watching 20/20…or true crime TV shows about sex trafficking busts…who is going to step up and be “in favor” of “modern day slavery” or “sex trafficking?” …I really want to know what it’s going to take for people to actually think about how complicated the sex trade is, and that it’s not all the same, and that ads that make us all the victims of overwhelming violence don’t do anything to actually improve our circumstances…

For Those Who Think Legalization is a Good Idea (TW3 #313)

Remember, prostitution was recently re-confirmed as legal in India, but brothels are still illegal; it’s therefore a simple matter for cops to redefine a business as a “ring”, label women of 20 to 25 as “girls”, call their arrest a “rescue” and describe imprisonment under psychological torture as “rehabilitation”. That way the money from the US and NGOs keeps rolling in.

The Story Behind the Story

…Fox 2000…[is] adapting Go the Fuck to Sleep for the big screen…the bedtime-story parody, written by Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Ricardo Cortés, has become something of a viral hit…It is unclear how the filmmakers plan to turn what is essentially a nursery rhyme with one punchline…into an entire feature- length film…

I hope this proves lucrative for Ricardo and also opens more doors for him.

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That Was the Week That Was (#133)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged acting, activism, agency denial, Alabama, An Example to the West, Another Small Victory, Backpage, Between the Ears, brothels, California, carnival, censorship, comics, condoms, cops, courtesans, disease, Don’t Buy It, Election Day, Feminine Pragmatism, First They Came for the Hookers, France, halfway whores, harm reduction, hysteria, internet, Ireland, It's That Time Again, Korea, law, LGBT rights, marriage, naturalness, Neither Cold nor Hot, neofeminism, Nevada, New Orleans, North Dakota, porn, pragmatism, prohibitionist myths, Prudish Pedants, psychology, rape, Reviews, sex education, sporting events, stereotypes, stripping, Swedish model, Texas, The Course of a Disease, The Immunity Syndrome, The Sky is Falling!, True Colors, Tyranny by Consensus, United Kingdom, What Were You Thinking?, Whorearchy on January 19, 2013| 33 Comments »

The supposition that all women…engaged in sex work…are the victims of trafficking and under the control of criminal gangmasters is, at best, delusional. – Paul Maginn and Graham Ellison

Between the Ears

Dr. Marty Klein explains that it isn’t only women who are ill-served by the medicalization of sexual dysfunction:

As a sex therapist, I see men…who…describe themselves as having…erectile dysfunction. I say, “So, you don’t get erect when you want to. Let’s call it that.” Conceptualizing their situation as ED is frequently part of the problem. They think their penis is suffering some pathology; more often, the pathology is in their expectations…I ask these men lots…of questions…and…we [often] discover that their uncooperative penis is actually behaving in an understandable, fairly reasonable way…Sometimes Viagra is part of the problem—it reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong with their penis…but if there isn’t…Viagra can’t fix it…

What the Hell Were You Thinking?

Judgy Bitch asks why it’s OK to advise people on how to protect themselves from robbery or worse while travelling (“Pay attention to how you are dressed, Don’t be drunk, Don’t flash your valuables, Keep an eye on who is watching you, Travel with friends, Use your body language to let predators know you are not easy prey [and] If you sense a problem, get the hell out of there”), but giving the exact same advice to young women is “victim blaming”. Because obviously it’s far more important to sacrifice naïve young women on the altar of feminist politics than to actually help them protect themselves in the real world.

Neither Cold nor Hot

It’s sometimes amusing to watch the debutantes at Jezebel getting the vapors over sex work; this article by Madeleine Davies about sex workers coming to North Dakota in order to fill the woman shortage caused by an oil boom can’t make up its mind whether the men are “Neanderthals” and “criminals”, or the helpless victims of scarlet women “filtering in from across the country to profit off the needs of the desperate male residents.”

Feminine Pragmatism

You’d almost think gossip reporters were historical ignoramuses who didn’t know that up until a century ago, the professions of actress and whore were indistinguishable:

Desperate for money, troubled actress Lindsay Lohan is…working as a professional escort, [said] her father…and other insiders…“The dates last for days, and the guys pay for everything…as well as jewelry and other gifts”… One of Lindsay’s most high profile clients is…Prince Haji Abdul Azim [of Brunei]…and wealthy…painter Domingo Zapata reportedly supported…[her] for months…

It’s That Time Again

Super Bowl time, that is; this year it’s in New Orleans, and though the “authorities” haven’t quite learned not to humiliate themselves with ludicrous “gypsy whore” fantasies, you may have noticed there was a lot less hype about it than before:

…The NOPD…[arrested] two suspected prostitutes and their alleged pimp, while also rescuing [the] 4-year-old…son of one of the suspected prostitutes…Detectives say the group placed ads on…backpage.com, which…is expected to be buzzing with sex solicitation during the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras…[State] Trooper Melissa Matey…said…”We do know those human trafficking cells are attracted to those large scale events, where…there’s gonna be a lot of tourists and…a lot of money to be made”…

I literally laughed out loud at “human trafficking cells”; apparently hookers are equated with terrorists and revolutionaries now.

Don’t Buy It (TW3 #6)

In reference to the “gypsy whores” myth, the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women asked, “What’s the Cost of a Rumour?” In the case of the London Olympics, we can now provide an answer:

Scare-mongering over an outbreak of sex trafficking during the Olympics resulted in half a million pounds being wasted…London Assembly Member…Andrew Boff said that just four cases of trafficking were discovered last year – despite an extra £500,000 being diverted to police…“a huge amount of time, money and resources was poured into this search, which turned out to be nothing more than tilting at windmills”…

The Sky is Falling!

Seekingarrangement.com has a clever advertising department; every so often they come out with a “press release” which announces that “more coeds than ever” are signing up as sugar babies. Of course, the only thing vaguely “new” about this is they’re doing it on a website, but people like to pretend otherwise. At least these two examples are refreshingly free of moral censure.

The Immunity Syndrome

Alabama state Rep. Patricia Todd…is trying yet again to delete a particularly idiotic provision of Alabama’s sex education law…[which] requires…classes to teach…that gay sex…is a “criminal offense”…[though] that law was invalidated in 2003 by…Lawrence vs. Texas…

Another Small Victory (TW3 #18)

Many sex worker rights activists seem to have misunderstood the implications of the news that “the Supreme Court has agreed to review a First Amendment dispute over whether the United States can force private health organizations to denounce prostitution as a condition to get AIDS funding”; had the Supreme Court refused to hear the government’s appeal, the lower court’s ruling overturning the pledge would have stood. And while it’s certainly possible that the SCOTUS may leave the ruling intact or even expand it by striking down the ban for international organizations as well (which the first ruling did not), neither outcome is likely considering that this court has firmly established itself as the handmaiden and apologist for the excesses of the executive and legislative branches. One very odd aspect of the linked article is that the call for total decriminalization by WHO and other UN agencies is described as “support[ing] lesser penalties for prostitution”, which is rather like describing the eradication of smallpox as “lessening the symptoms of the disease”.

Whorearchy

Here’s another woman who does not see herself as supporting state control of women’s lives, bodies and choices:

…I recently told my hairdresser that I was a go-go dancer and she replied by telling me that she would have totally stripped if she were my age but that she “didn’t have the body for it”…Even people at…the club where I primarily work…will put money on my platform as if it’s going to get them a lap dance or something…I’m not trying to be condescending towards strippers…but I…take pride in the fact that while strippers are ultimately hired to give guys boners, I was at least semi-hired for my talent…I don’t deny…that it takes some level of sexuality to be a successful club dancer, but there’s a big difference between wearing a push-up bra…and shoving my tits in some grandpa’s face…

For one who’s “not trying to be condescending”, she sure does a good job.

True Colors

Women With A Vision has purchased a new building to replace the office destroyed by arson, but it’s going to need “massive repairs” and renovation; that’s going to be very expensive, so please consider contributing to further their work in helping poor and marginalized women, including sex workers.

First They Came For the Hookers…

News on two of the ladies from this column who were fired for past sex work:

…Sarah Tressler…[lost] her reporting gig at the Houston Chronicle after…[being] exposed…[as the blogger] “Angry Stripper”…[but] she just landed a new job at The San Antonio Express-News as a breaking news reporter…Stacie Halas, a California…teacher who was fired for her porn star past [and recently lost her appeal] was [also]…offered a new job…[by] Dennis Hof of…[the] Moonlite Bunny Ranch…

Even if Halas is interested in going back to sex work she could do a lot better as an independent escort than by allowing herself to be exploited by Hof or others like him.

Prudish Pedants (TW3 #37)

A federal judge in California thinks it’s a wise use of public funds to lock up a 61-year-old filmmaker for four years for the “crime” of grossing out a cherry-picked group of a dozen people in Los Angeles. Future law students will marvel at the self-destructive absurdity of our era.

An Example To the West (TW3 #39)

In September, I reported that a Korean whore had submitted a constitutional challenge to her country’s prostitution law; it has now been accepted:

…Judge Oh Won-chan…filed the case with the Constitutional Court after accepting a petition from a 41-year-old prostitute on trial for violating the law…the judge’s request doesn’t question the part of the law that punishes buyers of sex. “We don’t punish a woman acting as a concubine or a wife for hire,” Oh said…[he] also questioned the effectiveness of the law, saying authorities should focus on punishing brothel owners and pimps…

Let’s hope the Korean government doesn’t respond with Swedish-style legislation, which only makes the struggle for rights more difficult.

The Course of a Disease (TW3 #42)

Criminologist Graham Ellison has written another excellent editorial against criminalization in Northern Ireland, this time with the help of Dr. Paul Maginn of the University of Western Australia:

…The…proposals…are…premised more on ideological and religious beliefs…than a concrete evidence-base…History tells us that prohibition is an ineffective policy remedy…a few simple facts…dispel the stereotypes about sex work…only an exceptionally small proportion [are street workers]…there is no evidence to suggest that sex workers’ drug dependency is greater than the general population…[they] come from all manner of social class and educational backgrounds…the majority…are there because…the pay is…better than what they could get in other occupations…If Lord Morrow is sincere about his intentions to help women involved in ‘prostitution’, he should consider decriminalisation.

Book Reviews (October 2012)

The French edition of Chester Brown’s Paying For It has been chosen by the Angoulême International Comics Festival as an official selection, which will undoubtedly give it more well-deserved attention. Congratulations, Chester!

Election Day (TW3 #45)

A judge has granted a preliminary injunction against the narrow portion of California’s tyrannical CASE Act which was challenged by the EFF and ACLU:

…Prop 35 is…beset with problems. The biggest was its requirement that registrants turn over a list of all their Internet identifiers and service providers to law enforcement…the court found that there was a clear chilling effect on speech because registrants would have to disclose their identity either before they speak, or within 24 hours after speaking somewhere online…Allowing the government to monitor and record a wide swath of innocent Internet activity…is a dangerous trend that can easily expand, as law enforcement’s inevitable thirst for information fails to be quenched…

Unfortunately, there is as yet no organized challenge against the aspects of the law which criminalize a wide variety of normal sexual behaviors and virtually any association with sex workers.

Tyranny By Consensus (TW3 #51)

A leading adult film producer has launched a lawsuit against Los Angeles County over a…measure requiring porn actors to wear condoms, saying the law infringes on first amendment rights and was driving the industry out of Southern California. Vivid Entertainment, which was joined in the lawsuit by porn stars Kayden Kross and Logan Pierce, claims the mandate was both an unconstitutional prior restraint on freedom of expression and a financial burden that studios could not bear…lead plaintiffs’ attorney Paul Cambria said…it was not economically feasible to digitally remove the condoms in post-production because the studios were competing with rivals elsewhere who had no such restrictions.

It’s interesting that the lawsuit doesn’t bring up the very real physical harm condoms can inflict on actresses under porn-filming conditions.

The Course of a Disease (TW3 #52)

Those who wish to inflict the Swedish model on England and Wales have set up a fake “consultation” on the matter which is designed to trick the unwary into providing them ammunition via leading questions and outright lies about decriminalization. The survey is referred to as a “call for evidence”, but as Laura Agustín points out this is “a misnomer as they are just asking for opinions and feelings – no evidence at all.” Go ahead and respond to the survey (it’s fairly short), but follow Aspasia’s example by phrasing your answers carefully, since most are of the “have you stopped beating your wife?” variety. The deadline is February 4^th at 16:00 GMT.

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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 (#27)

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

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

Twelve updates and four metaupdates.

Acting and Activism (January 8^th, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A False Dichotomy (June 22^nd, 2011)

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

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

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

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

Dirty Amateurs (August 17^th, 2011)

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

Higher Education (December 11^th, 2011)

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

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

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

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

It’s also available in 16 other languages.

Feet of Clay (April 5^th, 2012)

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

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

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

The Notorious Badge (April 9^th, 2012)

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

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

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

Bubbles Burbujas on the problems with “pole taxes”:

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

The Widening Gyre (July 6^th, 2012)

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

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

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

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

Metaupdates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Year Ago Today

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

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That Was the Week That Was (#25)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Q & A, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged A Narrow View, Above the Law, Africa, agency denial, Amsterdam, bad customers, brothels, California, censorship, Congo, cops, Cosmopolitan, cult of the child, East Asia, end demand, escort review sites, ethics, Europe, Forward and Backward, harm reduction, hysteria, Illinois, internet, Ireland, Japan, law, Law of the Instrument, lawheads, Little Boxes, massage, Middle East, Naked Truth, neofeminism, Netherlands, Nevada, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, rape, Reframing, Rough Trade, See No Evil, sex education, Social Construction of Eunuchs, Spain, streetwalkers, stripping, Sweden, Swedish model, The Course of a Disease, The Immunity Syndrome, The More the Better, underage, United Kingdom, video, violence vs. sex workers, Wholesale Hypocrisy, Wyoming on June 23, 2012| 34 Comments »

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough. – William James

Sixteen updates and two metaupdates.

Rough Trade (Part One) (July 25^th, 2010)

Ah, synchronicity; the same week this early essay was featured on Debatbond to introduce the topic “Can a prostitute be raped?”, two California lawyers presented their own views on the subject in court. Representing the “no” position:

Prosecutors dropped rape charges…against…Michael Stanford…[Defense attorney Roberto] Dulce said…the alleged victim was a prostitute and…the sexual contact between her and Stanford was consensual…In a dispute over money, the woman accused Stanford of rape…Dulce said he had witnesses who would testify that they, too, had engaged in sex with the woman…

Yet she didn’t accuse the other “witnesses” of rape, probably because they didn’t rape her. I think we can guess what happened; “dispute over payment” means he cheated her, but since Fresno isn’t Cartagena he got away with it. The story says the charge was dropped because “the alleged victim could not be found for Stanford’s trial”; she was probably afraid to go into a building full of cops. It might have been different in Modesto: “[Judge Linda McFadden]…denied a motion to overturn a grand jury indictment against…police officer…Lee Freddie Gaines…The alleged victim…testified…that she was working as a prostitute…[when Gaines] handcuffed her and demanded oral sex…”

Amsterdam (November 1^st, 2010)

Despite a total lack of evidence, Dutch police and anti-whore politicians keep beating the “sex trafficking” drum:

…Amsterdam…plans to force brothel owners to submit a business plan to the city describing what measures they are taking to ensure sex workers are healthy and not being exploited…in recent years both the city and national government have become increasingly critical of the industry. [They claim] many prostitutes are victims of human trafficking or coerced by pimps…

It’s impossible to prove a negative (“whores are not coerced”); that’s why the burden of proof is supposed to be on the accuser. And greater legal restrictions will only force whores into the shadows, providing greater opportunity for coercion as they always do.

December Q & A (December 28^th, 2010)

Not even doctors and scientists are immune to idiotic male-ego-boosting myths:

…A stem cell expert is looking to treat sex workers with their bodies’ own stem cells, so they can have tight, toned vaginal muscles…“The idea…was tried…by a team of scientists in Japan. They recruited commercial sex workers who wished to give up the trade and get married…” said Dr Himanshu Bansal…The clinical trial involved mostly young women, some of them mothers, who were worried that their vaginal muscles were too lax…

I hate to break this to you, guys, but your penises are not as big as babies. Not even close. No amount of sex, commercial or otherwise, can loosen the vaginal muscles; only babies do that. Notice that “some of them mothers?” The truth is “most of them.”

I Really Shouldn’t Even LOOK at an Issue of Cosmopolitan (January 18^th, 2011)

I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s willing to say out loud that Cosmo’s “sex advice” is ludicrous; Ben Reininga writes “Ridiculous Tips for a Miserable Sex Life”, which this month features his hilarious picks for Cosmo’s 44 most ridiculous tips of all time. Enjoy.

A Narrow View (April 29^th, 2011)

An organization of young Chicago sex workers fights for their rights against a system which treats them as infantilized victims:

When youth who live on the streets and work in the sex trade…are victimized…often the institutions that are supposed to help them…do more harm than good. [Leaders of]…the Young Women’s Empowerment Project…said, “We don’t dictate a young person’s future and make decisions for them, we support them to make it on their own”…While many organizations dealing with sex workers aim to help them leave sex work, YWEP maintains that it is a valid individual choice and practices a harm reduction philosophy…

Social Construction of Eunuchs (July 18^th, 2011)

Apparently forced feminization of little boys isn’t enough for Swedish neofeminists any more:

…Vänsterpartiet, [a feminist socialist party,] tabled a motion that would require office washrooms to be genderless with a sit-down-only requirement…Party speakers cited medical research they said shows men empty their bladders more efficiently while seated…[which] reduces the risk for prostate problems…[motion author] Viggo Hansen…[said] the move does not represent an attempt to meddle in the bathroom habits of citizens…

Wholesale Hypocrisy (October 12^th, 2011)

It’s always refreshing to see judges slap witch-hunters down:

Instead of presenting prostitution-related charges against former University of New Mexico President F. Chris Garcia and others to a grand jury this week, prosecutors are now discussing the future of the case…[after] Judge Stan Whitaker…ruled that neither a website, an online message board nor a computer amount to a “house of prostitution or a place where prostitution is practiced, encouraged or allowed”…Garcia’s attorney, Robert Gorence…last month called on District Attorney Kari Brandenburg “to…[exonerate] Dr. Garcia” after owning up to “the mistake she made when she bought in to APD’s flawed investigation and exaggerated charges…[Garcia] never received a penny from any such activities nor did he control or direct the activities of women who advertised as escorts”…

As another legal expert stated, “Connecting people to do whatever they want to do is not illegal, it never has been.” And as Melissa Gira Grant succinctly put it, “Data is not prostitution.”

Forward and Backward (November 22^nd, 2011)

While American prohibitionists continue to demand that whores’ advertising be censored, Spain has moved into the 21^st century: “…the Spanish parliament reversed a 2010 ban on advertising by…prostitutes and brothels…[in order] to stimulate Spain’s poor economy. The sex industry spent approximately €40 million annually on advertising, according to a 2007 report…” Perhaps if the economy continues to worsen, American politicians may eventually wake up; this is, after all, the same reason alcohol Prohibition was repealed in 1932.

The More the Better (January 9^th, 2012)

This article about University of Wyoming students who work as strippers is not only fairly sensible, but includes these encouraging words from Women’s Studies (!) professor Susan Dewey:

“It is a reality that some women see sex work as a form of liberation…in recent years…trafficking has become conflated with sex work…I have many students who will use [the] terms prostitution and trafficking synonymously, interchangeably. This is very, very problematic because when you say to someone ‘you do not have the right to do something legally’ that’s one thing…but when you say to a person ‘you think are making a choice but you’re actually not, because no person with self-respect would make that choice,’ that’s a real problem.”

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

This week Scottish Labour MP Rhoda Grant was defeated in her attempt to fast-track Swedish Model legislation without allowing opponents to speak:

The proposal…must now go out to consultation, instead of taking a quicker route through the Scottish Parliament. Ms Grant argued a previous attempt to pass such a law meant the issues had already been aired…A similar proposal in 2010 was opposed by ministers, who feared it would push the sex trade underground. Critics of such legislation believe that making workers in the sex trade less visible to the authorities would place them in greater danger…

Here’s an example of how different the US and UK can be sometimes: one of the groups opposed to client criminalization is the Association of Chief Police Officers. Dr. Brooke Magnanti’s excellent essay on the issue concludes with the eminently-quotable line, “It’s time we started acting like grownups and stopped pretending that making something illegal makes it cease to exist.”

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (March 3^rd, 2012)

The new “Trafficking in Persons Report” has been released; Algeria, Central African Republic, Congo, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Kuwait, Libya, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Zimbabwe are now on Tier 3, “Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so” (those “standards” are defined by the US via methods it neither discusses with anyone else nor even explains). Several other countries were raised to Tier 2 after they stepped up pogroms against whores (as Malaysia did in 2008), and Israel was promoted to Tier 1 (probably due to its flirtation with the Swedish Model).

The Immunity Syndrome (March 5^th, 2012)

Parents in Onalaska, Washington are reportedly “furious” that a school principal honestly answered students’ questions in a sex education class; apparently, the parents expected her to lie, and one of them said that talking about sex in a sex education class is “just the same as raping somebody.”

Above the Law (March 8^th, 2012)

The British government has finally admitted that cops are allowed to trick women into having sex while spying on them: “[Home Office Minister Nick] Herbert said it was important police were allowed to have sex with activists because otherwise it could be used as a way of outing potential undercover officers…” In other words they’re allowed to do whatever they like, including rape, in order to accomplish whatever it is they want to do.

Little Boxes (April 29^th, 2012)

The inevitable result of trying to make artificial distinctions between consensual behaviors:

The owner of a [Las Vegas] massage business…says she’s losing crucial business because of a [new] city law requiring her to close at 10 p.m…”If we don’t get an extension, I’ll be closed within a month…The daytime does not pull in what we need to cover. It is barely paying the rent for that space and utilities.” Mayor Carolyn Goodman said changing the ordinance for the Johnsons would set a precedent for more than 50 other “massage establishment” licensees…

As I’ve said before, “attempting to define sexuality…as being in the… ‘legal’ category rather than the…‘illegal’ one is a tacit acknowledgement that such lines of demarcation are valid and that government has the right to draw them…even if one wins the battle, the government can simply re-draw the line to include one’s entrenched position.” The Johnsons are learning that the hard way.

Naked Truth (May 23^rd, 2012)

I’m going to use this title for articles written by current or former sex workers in mainstream sites or publications. This time, two outstanding pieces by Tits and Sass contributors: “The Ways We Don’t Talk About Wealth” by Charlotte Shane in The New Inquiry, and “Can Sex Workers Transition to a Cashless Economy?” by Susan Shepard (AKA Bubbles Burbujas) in Forbes.

Reframing (June 20^th, 2012)

My friend LilyRose sent me a link to this “reframed” trailer, which is exactly the opposite of the Mrs. Doubtfire one and just as clever:

Metaupdates

Law of the Instrument in TW3 (#20) (May 19^th, 2012)

Think about these stories next time you hear some “authority” blathering about how “trafficking” has increased. The first one comes via Wendy Lyon: “A 30-year-old man…[was] charged with an offence under the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act…[after] travelling to Ireland [to meet] a child, having…communicated with that child on two or more previous occasions with the intent of doing an act that would constitute sexual exploitation…” And here’s another one from Minneapolis, Minnesota:

[Mickey Cupkie]…has been charged under Minnesota’s new Sex Trafficking law for having sex with two teen prostitutes, ages 15 and 17…The girls were runaways, says Minneapolis Police Sgt. Grant Snyder…He says pimps picked the girls up…and then placed an add [sic] on Backpage.com…Ramsey County Attorney John Choi says he hopes the charges send a message to the Johns…

Said message being, “’trafficking’ means whatever we want it to mean, and if girls act alone we’ll just invent pimps and ‘traffickers’ to fit the narrative.”

See No Evil in TW3 (#21) (May 26^th, 2012)

Even Sweden gets it right once in a while: “Swedish news outlet The Local reports that their Supreme Court has overturned the conviction of manga translator Simon Lundström on child pornography charges…The court’s decision reflects the viewpoint of free speech advocates…that sexually explicit manga images are…not child pornography…”

One Year Ago Today

“Lola Montez” was one of the most colorful courtesans of the 19^th (or any other) century.

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That Was the Week That Was (#21)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged Africa, agency denial, Arizona, Backwards into the Future, California, censorship, comics, condoms, cops, crypto-moralism, dirty, diversion programs, drivers, drugs, East Asia, ethics, Europe, Feet of Clay, gangs, Japan, Japanese Prostitution, Latin America, law, Little Boxes, Much Ado About Nothing, Namibia, Nebraska, Netherlands, porn, psychology, Pyrrhic Victory, Real People, Sales Pitch, See No Evil, sex education, Sex Lies and Busybodies, sex offender registry, sex work is work, South Dakota, surveillance, Sweden, Swedish model, Texas, The Immunity Syndrome, Thou Shalt Not, Traffic Jam, video on May 26, 2012| 25 Comments »

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion. – David Cronenberg

Eleven updates and two metaupdates.

Japanese Prostitution (October 21^st, 2010)

This is just so awesome:

…alibi-ya provide women in the…sex industry with a reputable but totally fictitious identity…[using] things like fake business cards, references and employment certificates…[and] even…fake [bosses] for birthday speeches and other family events…Shintaro Sakamoto runs an alibi-ya in Tokyo. “We provide assistance to mainly hostesses and prostitutes,” he said. “We help them to rent apartments, and we help them get their kids into nursery schools”…[if] parents ring the office their daughter supposedly works at, the alibi-ya will be ready with the deception, explaining their daughter is in a meeting and will call back shortly. The alibi-ya will then ring the woman’s mobile and tell her to call home. Even the caller ID is fixed so it looks like the woman is calling from the landline in her fake office. There is nothing illegal about the service…

Real People (February 6^th, 2011)

Louise and Martine Fokkens are 69-year-old identical twins in Amsterdam who have worked as whores since the age of 19, owned their own brothel for a time and set up the first trade union for prostitutes. A new documentary, Meet the Fokkens, looks at the colorful lives of these very unconventional ladies.

See No Evil (November 26^th, 2011)

I only wish lunacy like this was confined to Sweden; unfortunately, it happens all over the West now:

…Simon Lundström was convicted of possessing child pornography…despite the fact the “manga images” used to convict him featured no real children…The punishment Lundström faces is relatively minor – a fine of around $780…but…still marks him as a sex offender…[plus he lost] his job [as a manga translator and]…can no longer offer his services as a “manga expert”…the prosecution…argued that the images could be used to entice children…and even went as far as to suggest the artists…could have used real children as models…

Sex, Lies and Busybodies (January 27^th, 2012)

The Los Angeles City council has apparently begun to recognize that its stupid condom law is unenforceable:

The city administrative officer has asked for a 90-day extension…[citing] “complexities”…In recent weeks the…panel has heard from a contingent of vocal…industry officials who say the ordinance is faulty and unneeded…adult industry attorney…Allan Gelbard…[said] the…extension may give the panel more time to logically think things through. “Perhaps, if they take a more thorough look at the constitutional issues involved…they will realize what a mistake…this ordinance truly was”…

The Immunity Syndrome (March 5^th, 2012)

It now appears the damage done by “abstinence-only sex education” may be even worse than previously believed:

Sixty percent of young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 may not truly understand how proper use of contraception can prevent pregnancy, according to a new study from the Guttmacher Institute, which reports abstinence-only sex education may be leaving young adults with a subpar understanding of sexual health. Forty percent of respondents…said birth control was not important because “when it is your time to get pregnant, it will happen”…Although…69 percent of women and almost half of the men… agreed they were “committed to avoiding pregnancy,” they seemed to question whether contraceptive devices such as condoms or birth control pills were an effective way to achieve that goal…

Thou Shalt Not (March 6^th, 2012)

Alas, the US does not have a monopoly on crypto-moralism:

…according to a study…in the…journal Pediatrics…young adults who listen to…music…with ear buds are almost twice as likely as non-listeners to smoke pot…And those who attend concerts or frequent dance clubs are nearly six times as likely as homebodies to go on a binge-drinking bender. These findings are based on survey results collected from 944 low-income students…in the Netherlands…[who] ranged in age from 15 to 25…Risky music-listening behavior was defined as listening to music at 89 dBA for at least an hour per day…That music exposure can cause noise-induced hearing loss…[and] “increased feelings of isolation, depression, loneliness, anger, and fear”…But that’s not where the health risks end. The researchers found that…those who put themselves at risk…were:

* 1.99 times more likely to [have] used cannabis in the last four weeks;
* 1.19 times more likely to smoke cigarettes daily; and
* 1.10 times more likely to have sex without using a condom every time.

…those who put themselves at risk by attending noisy concerts and clubs were:

* 5.94 times more likely to have consumed five or more alcoholic drinks in a row at some point in the last four weeks;
* 2.03 times more likely to have sex without using a condom every time; and
* 1.12 times more likely to smoke cigarettes every day.

…The researchers…say…public health officials…could design practical interventions, such as handing out condoms along with earplugs at concert venues, or by printing messages about alcohol abuse on concert ticket stubs…

Remember, kids, rock and roll is dangerous! But at least it can’t make you as clueless as people who actually get paid to write rubbish like this, or who publish articles about adult behavior in a magazine for pediatricians.

Feet of Clay (April 5^th, 2012)

Walter Olson on Nick Kristof’s latest exercise in fatuity:

Is there a New York Times columnist as insufferably moralistic, or as neglectful of facts that contradict his argument, as Nicholas Kristof? Last week Kristof mounted yet another of his high-horse save-the-children campaigns, this time against…Anheuser-Busch. Kristof asks readers to join his boycott of the leading brewer for…permitting its output to be sold…just across the state line from the Oglala Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Though notionally dry, the reservation is in practice wracked with alcoholism…Unlike Kristof’s column and blog post, the Times‘ earlier reporting on the dispute at least makes a few concessions about how the tribe’s alcoholism…has more complicated origins than [a new] lawsuit would make it seem. For example, it quotes Oglala members who say the unusual Pine Ridge policy of complete alcohol prohibition…has been a failure…Kristof by contrast appears to have swallowed the lawsuit’s contentions in one hearty draft…

Olson goes on to point out that under Nebraska law, brewers have no control over distribution of their product by state-licensed wholesalers; in other words Anheuser-Busch couldn’t stop beer from being sold near the reservation even if it shared Kristof’s belief that “enlightened” white people should “protect” childlike non-whites from their own choices.

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

I hope this keeps up; if they fire every government operative who has ever hired a whore, the few remaining bureaucrats will be too busy filling out forms to have any time to intrude in the private lives of citizens:

Three Drug Enforcement Administration agents are under investigation for allegedly hiring prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia…Sen. Susan Collins…[said] “It’s disturbing that we may be uncovering a troubling culture that spans more than one law enforcement agency…the evidence…indicates that this likely was not just a one-time incident”…

Senator Collins, that is the understatement of the century.

Little Boxes (April 29^th, 2012)

Amanda Brooks has a knack for discovering oddities like “Fake Internet Girlfriend”, which describes itself as “a service that allows our clients to discreet [sic] employ real females to pretend to be their girlfriend online and communicate with them as if they were dating the person on various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter or in some cases in gaming communities like World of Warcraft.” So if it’s more important to you to look like you have a girlfriend than to just use that money to actually have sex (which could potentially relax you enough that you might actually attract a real girlfriend), this is for you. Of course they insist that they aren’t an escort service, and I‘ll grant that…but honestly, isn’t this on the periphery of sex work? It’s not at all unusual for a client to pay a girl just to have someone to talk to or to be seen with in public, with no sex involved; is this so different?

Pyrrhic Victory (May 17^th, 2012)

For those who felt I was being an alarmist about drones:

…Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas…is considering using rubber bullets and tear gas on its drone…“It’s simply not appropriate to use any of force, lethal or non-lethal, on a drone,” [said] Catherine Crump [of the ACLU]…“An officer at a remote location…[Tasing or targeting] people…[could be considered] unconstitutional force…”

Today, remotely-piloted aircraft armed with tasers and tear gas; tomorrow autonomous killer robots with machine guns. And y’all thought that was just dystopian science fiction.

Traffic Jam
(May 20^th, 2012)

Phoenix, Arizona joins the “major sex trafficking hotspot” competition, implements a version of the Swedish Model and violates the separation of church and state in one fell swoop: “…Phoenix has become a hot spot for sex trafficking in part because we’re a destination point and our major highways…Rather than arrest sex trafficking victims, Project Rose enables officers to bring them to Bethany Bible Church…” where they get all these wonderful services as long as they claim to be “trafficked” and invent a bunch of “leads” to keep the police happy. Look for the creative claim that “trafficked children” are kept in “dog crates” to show up in more trafficking porn over the next few months.

In this article I also pointed out that the practice of young female gang members contributing to gang finances via prostitution is now being called “sex trafficking”, and as Emi Koyama explained in a recent post about a public forum on the topic, the government recognizes the truth:

…a [government] representative…was invited to make a statement, which she was completely unprepared for…she slipped the information that confirmed what many activists knew was the case but most government experts were smart enough to conceal: that the U.S. Attorney’s Office views domestic minor sex trafficking as “primarily gang-related,” and has moved the issue to its “gang unit”; transnational human trafficking on the other hand was moved to the civil rights unit…human trafficking is becoming yet another way for young men of color to be criminalized and imprisoned…

Metaupdates

Backwards into the Future in TW3 (#6) (February 19^th, 2012)

Once again, Namibians prove that they understand human rights better than Americans do:

The Executive Director of…Rights Not Rescue, Nicodemus ‘Mama Africa’ Aochamub says…”we are thankful that Kazenambo Kazenambo [a government minister who called for legalization of sex work] is brave to stand up for us, but we…prefer that sex work be decriminalised…With legalising, we will work under municipal laws such as registration…red-light districts and [forced]…medical checks [and] identification cards…Time has come for sex work to be regarded like any other employment”…

Sales Pitch in TW3 (#9) (March 4^th, 2012)

Wendy Lyon on what a “sex trafficking” trial reveals about the “Swedish Model”:

…last week several men were convicted for what Swedish prosecutors have called one of the largest trafficking rings of its kind…You can read…about it here, here and here…but there are a couple things…worth drawing attention to. The first is…[that “there was no lack of buyers”]…one of the women…[said] she had seven or eight customers on her very first night. This doesn’t say much for the supposed deterrent effect of the sex purchase ban. The second is the breakdown of [clients’] ages…36% were born in the 1960s, 21% in the 1970s and 30% in the 1980s…nearly a third…were teenagers when the ban was introduced in 1999: further evidence (as I discussed here) that it hasn’t had the normative effect it was supposed to have on younger men. The 17-year-old’s conviction is interesting for another reason…Sweden’s age of majority is 18, which means that he is legally still a child…The ideology underlying the sex purchase ban is that women cannot choose to sell sex; evidently, however, Swedish law considers that male children…can choose to buy it. In other words, when it comes to trading sex for money, adult women are less competent than male children. Could there be any clearer illustration of how this law infantilises women?

One Year Ago Today

“Chupacabra” compares the truth about pimps to their oversized legend.

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That Was the Week That Was (#15)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Manufactured War, Above the Law, agency denial, An Ounce of Prevention, animals, archeofeminism, Backpage, brothels, California, condoms, cops, dirty, disease, Don’t Take My Word For It, East Asia, ethics, Europe, Feet of Clay, Germany, harm reduction, Hollywood, hysteria, India, law, male prostitutes, Mississippi, Neither Cold nor Hot, neofeminism, Never Call the Cops, New York, Not the Leading Players, pimps, pregnancy, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rape, Scapegoats, sex education, Spain, The Immunity Syndrome, The Notorious Badge, TSA, Useful Idiots, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world, Wisconsin, yellow journalism on April 14, 2012| 20 Comments »

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty. – James Madison

Ten updates and two meta-updates.

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

Who else besides prostitutes and drug users are abducted and caged “for their own good”?

A 17-year-old suspected rape victim is being held in a California juvenile detention facility to ensure that she’ll show up to testify against her attacker…“The last thing we ever want to do is put a victim or a witness in custody, but when you have serious crimes of violence and multiple offenses, you have to balance the protection of the community,” [said the]…assistant district attorney…

Once again: never, ever call the cops for any reason, not even if you think you’re dying. Because once you do, they think you are their personal property to dispose of in any way they wish.

A Manufactured War (January 23^rd, 2011)

In the grand tradition of William Randolph Hearst, the New York Times doesn’t just report the news; it exaggerates, distorts and lies in order to make a “good story”. And since it’s been on an anti-whore hobby horse for several years now, that means stuff like this:

…While the rest of Spain’s economy may be struggling, experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming…powered in large part by the desires of young men…The State Department’s 2010 report on trafficking said that 200,000 to 400,000 women worked in prostitution in Spain…[and] 90 percent were trafficked…

No, “experts” say no such thing; those who promote this kind of garbage are mostly just making it up, either pulling numbers from thin air or using overly-broad definitions (such as defining any hooker who works in an area other than her native soil as “trafficked”) and then embellishing the numbers with unwarranted adjectives like “ruthless” and presenting scare stories as “fact”. For more Times duplicity, see “Feet of Clay” below.

Neither Cold Nor Hot (April 6^th, 2011)

Once in a while, Jezebel stands up for sex workers; too bad it isn’t more often:

Sex workers are anti sex-trafficking. It seems obvious…and yet you might not know this because sex workers rights activists have not gotten any air-time from the major anti-trafficking organizations…shutting down advertising sites…means losing the ability to screen clients beforehand…SWOP and other sex worker advocacy groups have ideas around what could actually help trafficking…

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

Three German students may have discovered the secret to heterosexual male prostitution: don’t charge anything or expect much business:

…three business students from the University of Mannheim…offer…female students uncomplicated and anonymous one-night stands…posters…promise “Good Grades through Good Sex.” The young men claim that their project is about emancipation…and…should be recognized as more than a mere coital campaign…Female students who spend their evenings drained and fatigued in the library and are in the mood for a little closeness and intimacy are encouraged to send an email. Then one of the three men will meet with them…[they] claim that five one-night-stands have taken place so far…

Scapegoats (January 26^th, 2012)

Since this report is several years old and was not available on any mainstream news site, I suspect it’s an urban legend circulated among animal-rights types; supposedly an orangutan named Pony was “rescued” from a rural brothel in Borneo, where she was employed as a prostitute and shaved several times a week to make her more presentable. Unless someone manages to dig up a properly-documented article, I must point out that claiming huge numbers of men would pay for sex with an ape seems closely akin to the notion that similar numbers want sex with traumatized prepubescent girls: both are prohibitionist myths intended to smear men in general and whores’ clients in particular.

The Immunity Syndrome (March 5^th, 2012)

Here’s an unsurprising report showing that American states with “abstinence-only” sex education have the highest teen pregnancy rates:

The number of teen births in the U.S. dropped again in 2010…to about 34 per 1,000 girls… Mississippi continues to have the highest teen birth rate, with 55 births per 1,000 girls. New Hampshire has the lowest rate at just under 16 births per 1,000 girls. This is the lowest national rate for teen births since…1940…Researchers…found that teenagers who received…comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to get pregnant or get someone else pregnant. And in 2007, a federal report showed that abstinence-only programs had “no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence.” But 37 states require sex education that includes abstinence, 26 of which require that abstinence be stressed as the best method…research shows that [these] deter contraceptive use among teenagers, thus increasing…risk of unintended pregnancy…

Above the Law (March 8^th, 2012)

Naomi Wolf’s analysis of the TSA’s true motivation is much like mine:

…this week, the Supreme Court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor…Justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because [one of the 9/11 conspirators] could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did Justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices’ decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven’t been introduced into a prison population. Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually…the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations. The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness…the TSA…genital groping policy…is designed to psychologically habituate US citizens to a condition in which they are demeaned and sexually intruded upon by the state…

Useful Idiots (March 15^th, 2012)

More evidence for those who still don’t accept that neofeminist propaganda denying the agency of prostitutes and other non-neofeminist women is inevitably used to classify all women as passive, infantile moral imbeciles:

[Wisconsin governor] Scott Walker…quietly signed three controversial bills on the eve of a holiday weekend…A woman seeking an abortion must [now] undergo an exam and consult with a doctor alone, away from her friends and family. The doctor must determine whether someone is pressuring the woman into the procedure…

Mandatory prosecution laws for domestic violence and Swedish-flavored anti-prostitution laws have established the precedent that women are incompetent to make any decision which involves sex, and that if a woman makes a decision “authorities” don’t like it must be the result of coercion. This merely follows that precedent to its next logical step; look for more like it in upcoming months.

Feet of Clay (April 5^th, 2012)

Thanks to Jacob Sullum of Reason for pointing out this excellent article:

…[Nicholas] Kristof’s own newspaper profits from the sort of advertising for escort services, strip clubs, and other forms of adult entertainment that Kristof has linked to the underworld of child sex trafficking…About.com is “a wholly-owned subsidiary of the New York Times Company”…[which] accounted for 5% of all [company] revenues…in 2011, roughly $100 million…the Times also owns a 49% stake in Metro Boston…[which] also happens to make money from adult advertising…[Kristof’s] salary partly comes from the same ads, and the same allegedly criminal activity, that he tried to pin on Goldman Sachs…Though [it] immediately divested itself of its stake in Backpage.com, that was not enough for Kristof, who told CNBC he would have preferred to see the company apply its investment towards “bringing about change” in the online advertising industry. He added that Goldman Sachs should have sold its 16 percent stake in Village Voice Media to “an anti-trafficking organization.” Will Kristof apply that same standard to the New York Times–and himself? The newspaper and its shareholders must give up over $100 million in annual revenue; are they ready to contribute to the cause? And if not, will Kristof devote his column to campaigning against his employer? Will he appear on CNBC to report “The Times‘ Ties to Sex Trafficking?” If not, why not?

The Notorious Badge (April 9^th, 2012)

In the TV movie The Client List Jennifer Love Hewitt played a mother who becomes an erotic masseuse to make ends meet, and the movie proved so popular it is now a series. I have been told the character and her work are portrayed positively, and this interview with the actress leads me to believe that:

Since the movie has come out and with the upcoming show, have you been approached or contacted by any women who work in the sex industry?

No, I haven’t. I mean, I’m sure maybe once the show starts airing a bit, I might be able to meet some of those women or they might feel more comfortable to come up and say hello and have open discussions about those things…I feel like [prejudices come]…from lack of knowledge and fear and maybe not knowing the whole story…the more that you look into those industries, a lot of those women are single moms doing the best that they can or are someone’s daughter who fell on hard times…of course, some of them…just chose it because that’s what they wanted to do…I respect people doing what they have to do in order to try to live and be happy…

I sent a message to Miss Hewitt offering to answer any questions she might have, but haven’t heard back yet. The comment thread is a story in its own right; it’s full of holier-than-thou comments from the pompous windbags who apparently infest the massage profession nowadays, as discussed in “Full of Themselves”.

Metaupdates

An Ounce of Prevention in That Was the Week That Was (#11) (March 17^th, 2012)

More on Michael Weinstein’s campaign against an anti-HIV drug:

…Thanks to Weinstein’s “leadership” [AHF has] gone from a sizeable healthcare foundation with a good reputation to…a…joke…

A leading AIDS group is battling with FDA over whether the agency should approve the first drug for preventing HIV infection in gay men, and the fight has gotten nasty…the AIDS Healthcare Foundation called for Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to resign over that and other issues, perhaps including egos…Truvada cut the HIV infection in men who have sex with men by 44 percent compared to a placebo…So far, the drug has not been found to work in women…Weinstein worries that the promise of a “magic pill” could reverse progress the AIDS community has made in encouraging condom use over decades…

Mr. Weinstein is actually the only one who’s been branding Truvada as a magic pill, and he’s been citing half truths [and] his own botched survey…Nobody else…has been calling this anything other than…a drug with a promising potential that needs to be truly and thoroughly studied…Maybe it’s time for the AHF to consider whether or not the $366,046 a year they are paying Weinstein is money well spent. Charles Lyons II at Glaser makes exactly $1023 less than Weinstein for running an organization twice the size and scope. And he’s not wasting his group’s time and efforts trying to derail patient care…

The Leading Players in the Field, Not in That Was the Week That Was (#14) (April 6^th, 2012)

Dr. Laura Agustín published two excellent articles on Gloria Steinem’s recent attempt to appoint herself an expert on “prostitution and sex trafficking” in India; her April 6^th column discusses Steinem’s many errors, clichés, distortions, biases and moralistic assumptions, including her bizarre description of sex as “body invasion” (apparently a melodramatic twist on Robin Morgan’s ridiculous definition of rape). And on April 9^th, Agustín describes an absurd tabloid-style news article glorifying Steinem and other White Saviors descending upon India to “rescue” sex workers “with money and might”.

One Year Ago Today

“The Pro-Rape Coalition” demonstrates why those who call themselves “anti-porn” are in reality pro-rape.

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The Immunity Syndrome

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, tagged adolescence, censorship, dirty, disease, Europe, harm reduction, hysteria, internet, marriage, Netherlands, porn, pregnancy, psychology, sex education, The Immunity Syndrome on March 5, 2012| 29 Comments »

They told me I was everything. ‘Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof. – William Shakespeare, King Lear (IV, vi)

Adults in Western countries often say that teenagers think they’re immortal and invulnerable, and to some degree that’s true. Really, how could it be otherwise? They have the energy and optimism of youth, their bodies are generally as healthy as they’re ever going to be and very few of them have seen a peer die. And unless they grew up in extreme poverty, they generally haven’t been ground down by the world and developed the permanent mental stoop that most adults have, the attitude Thoreau referred to as “quiet desperation”. Young men are generally far more eager to go to war than are experienced campaigners, and young women far more likely to take the sort of risks that make their mothers cringe. Add to that raging hormones and inexperience, and it’s not remotely surprising that teens have the highest STD rate of any demographic group (35% of all cases in the US), or that a small percentage of teenage girls end up pregnant when they absolutely did not want to be.

But does it have to be that way? Certainly their inexperience is a major factor; people of any age who aren’t used to something (sex included) are more apt to make mistakes than those with plenty of experience. And the fact that cognitive skills continue to develop until the mid-20s probably has something to do with it as well. But if you look at the first paragraph above again, you’ll see that several of those factors can be summed up in a single word: ignorance. The most important reason adolescents get in trouble over sex is that they don’t really understand that bad things can happen to them, nor how to reduce the chances of negative outcomes. And the primary reason they don’t understand is that adults not only refuse to explain it to them, but in many cases actively block access to sex information…or even worse, actually lie to adolescents about it. And the most egregious of these lies, such as “sex is better if neither of you knows what you’re doing on your wedding night”, are so patently false that they cause teens to doubt everything else adults are telling them – including the things that are true.

The teenage birth rate in the US is 34.3 births per 1000 girls aged 15 to 19, down from a 20^th century high of 61.8 in 1991. Proponents of “abstinence-only sex education” claim the credit for this, since that fad started in 1992 and became popular in 1996. But when one considers that the present figure is still far greater than that of any other industrialized nation, in fact fully eight times the rate in the Netherlands, any rational person is forced to conclude that maybe keeping kids ignorant of sex isn’t exactly the best way of preparing them for life, and that perhaps we should worry more about protecting their health and futures than their imaginary “innocence”. This becomes even more clear when one reads interviews with teen mothers in which they express shocking ignorance of the mechanics of menstruation and conception, and often state that they believed they were somehow immune to pregnancy. The same goes for STDs; American teenagers seem completely unaware that they’re in the highest-risk group for infection and proceed as though their “love” will create a magical shield protecting them from all disease (and possibly pregnancy as well).

The reason for the drop, if you ask me, isn’t the increasing tendency of adults to try to “protect” teens by keeping them in ignorance, but rather the increasing inability of adults to keep them in ignorance, thanks to the internet (which has grown as teen pregnancy rates have dropped). But it’s still not remotely enough; even if proper sex-education programs were implemented from coast to coast tomorrow our STD and teen pregnancy rates still probably wouldn’t drop to those of Europe due to our deep cultural weirdness about sex; we are, after all, the only Western country in which sex work is so thoroughly equated with pathology and criminality. In other words, mere sex education isn’t enough; learning about biological mechanisms and potential problems is only half the picture. Few of the people reading this were as thoroughly supervised and spied on as modern teens are, and governments in a number of countries (especially the US) want to increase that so as to keep them from discovering any information about sex other than what “authorities” choose to provide. Not that this can ever be effective, any more than bans on prostitution or drugs are. But just as drug criminalization leads inevitably to dangerously impure substances, and just as criminalization of prostitution allows sleazy characters to thrive on both the service and customer sides of the business, so does suppression of information reduce the quality of that which gets past the ban. A recent op-ed by Michelle Griffin in the Brisbane Times proposes that we do the exact opposite and actually encourage teens to read porn (the operative word here being “read”); since they’re thinking about it anyway and can see crappy internet porn at the click of a mouse, access to non-clinical descriptions of sexuality will help to educate them just as Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden helped to educate Griffin (and me), discovering Dad’s stash of Playboy educated many young boys and watching farm animals educated kids for the past 10,000 years.

I have absolutely no hope that this sensible attitude will catch on in the United States any time soon; if the manufactured “controversy” over birth control and abortion is any indication, this country is moving backward rather than forward. But we’d best do something soon; though HIV may soon be preventable, gonorrhea is rapidly becoming immune to all antibiotics, and a third of all infections are in teenagers. People used to say (and some still apparently believe) that rape was worse than death; in a world of incurable venereal diseases, American parents will soon have to decide if preserving their kids’ so-called “innocence” is more important than preserving their lives.

One Year Ago Today

“Godwin’s Law” discusses the ways people use and misuse the familiar internet principle, and argues that sometimes Nazi analogies are entirely appropriate.

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A Moral Cancer

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged A Moral Cancer, condoms, crypto-moralism, dirty, disease, hysteria, internet, oral sex, psychology, sex education, vaccines on March 6, 2011| 13 Comments »

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. – H.L. Mencken

Moralists are never afraid to pronounce that all manner of social ills and personal problems derive from sex (though many of them are magically rendered harmless through a spell cast by a priest after purchasing a sacred scroll from the Holy State). But there is another, much larger group we might call crypto-moralists; they avoid words like “sin” and eschew religious rhetoric, and may not recognize their own moralism even if confronted with it. Such people are always (perhaps unconsciously) looking for ways to prove that vices really are objectively “bad”; they delight in cirrhosis and emphysema, secretly love syphilis and AIDS and pore over each new “discovery” about the deleterious health effects of good-tasting foods with the same rapt attention as a normal person might read a letter from his accountant informing him that his taxes had decreased. And when they encounter some connection between an illness and a sexual activity they can’t resist slanting the story to blame the activity rather than the lack of prophylactic measures, which is rather like blaming a person’s choking on the type of food consumed rather than on his eating it too quickly.

These are the sorts of thoughts which passed unbidden through my mind when I recently read this article from USA Today which essentially claims that blow jobs cause cancer:

There’s a worrisome uptick in the incidence of certain head and neck cancers among middle-aged and even younger Americans, and some experts link the trend to a rise in the popularity of oral sex over the past few decades. That’s because the human papillomavirus (HPV) is a major trigger for these cancers, and HPV can be transmitted through this type of sexual activity. “It seems like a pretty good link that more sexual activity, particularly oral sex, is associated with increased HPV infection,” said Dr. Greg Hartig…[of] the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine…

According to Dr. William Lydiatt…of…the University of Nebraska Medical Center…the overall incidence of head and neck cancers is going down, largely because fewer people are smoking…but the incidence of cancers of the tonsil and base of the tongue have been going up over the past decades…and those are the ones that are more likely to test positive for HPV. “It’s gotten to the point now where 60 to 70% of all tonsil cancers in the U.S. are HPV-related,” Lydiatt said.

Although the link between HPV and these types of cancers is indisputable, the association with oral sex is strong but a little more speculative…A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that younger people with head and neck cancers who tested positive for oral HPV infection were more likely to have had multiple vaginal and oral sex partners in their lifetime. In the study, having six or more oral sex partners over a lifetime was associated with a 3.4 times higher risk for [these]…cancers…having 26 or more vaginal-sex partners tripled the risk…cancers of the tonsil and base of the tongue have been increasing every year since 1973, and…”widespread oral sex practices among adolescents may be a contributing factor in this increase.”

Because, you know, it couldn’t have anything at all to do with “virginity pledges” which increase the chance teens will engage in oral sex without looking for signs of STDs or using condoms because those topics aren’t covered in their “abstinence-only sex education”. And it certainly couldn’t be blamed on the fact that a vaccine for HPV has been out for years, but parents aren’t letting their daughters receive it because only “bad girls” need to prevent venereal diseases (which is also why the STD rate is five times as high among university students as among streetwalkers).

…So does the increase in incidence mean that recent generations are having more sex than their grandparents? “The general consensus on the street is that because people’s (sexual) practices have changed over time, we’re seeing an increase in these cancers,” said Hartig. “I don’t know why they’re having more oral sex (but) the concept of having oral sex is something that seems less obscure to you than it did to your parents or grandparents.”

“The thought would be that the baby boomers — the ’60s and early ’70s generation — probably had more freedom in sexual relationships in general, including oral sex,” added Dr. Bert W. O’Malley Jr…[of] the University of Pennsylvania. And at least in terms of oral sex, that appears true for those younger than boomers. The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that, in 2002, some 90% of males and 88% of females aged 25 to 44 reported ever having oral sex…comparable figures from 1992 showed that about three-quarters of men aged 20 to 39 and closer to 70% of women aged 18 to 59 having ever given or received oral sex.

Why does every generation want to believe it invented sex? Anybody who thinks that oral sex was “obscure” to his parents and grandparents is living in a fantasy world. If your grandmother was upper-class and educated at a private all-girl school it was almost certainly obscure to her, but you can bet your grandfather knew about it. And if your grandmother was working class or middle class and/or attended public school, especially a coed public school, so did she. Suffering Sappho, some of my generation’s grandparents were in high school or university during the “Roaring Twenties”; if you believe they were less aware of oral sex than you are, you need to read more about that era.

But if the rate at which teenagers engage in it has really increased since 1992, doesn’t that mean something? Sure it does; good ol’ “abstinence only sex education” started in 1992 and really took off in 1996. But obviously preaching abstinence and denying information on birth control can’t possibly be the cause, so let’s blame…the internet! Yeah, that must be it! The internet causes oral sex, which causes cancer, therefore the internet causes cancer. Q.E.D.

The silver lining is that the HPV-related head and neck cancers are eminently more treatable than those attributable to smoking or drinking, even though they tend to be diagnosed at a later stage…about 85% of non-smoking people with HPV-positive tumors survive…and tongue and tonsil cancers remain relatively rare in the United States. The other good news — at least for the younger set — is that there is a relatively new vaccine to prevent against HPV infection. It’s not going to help those who are already infected, but it…could help those who aren’t yet infected with the ubiquitous virus.

Of course, the part about how even with the “uptick” this type of cancer is both rare and highly treatable, and especially the part about it being preventable, has to wait for the very end of the article. After all, we wouldn’t want to do anything that might interfere with our attempt to blame teen sex for a cancer epidemic that doesn’t actually exist.

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February Updates (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged bad customers, cops, cosmetic surgery, dirty, disease, Don’t Buy It, drugs, hysteria, law, Maggie in the Media, Pennsylvania, pimps, sex education, sporting events, stereotypes, streetwalkers, stripping, Swedish model, Texas, underage, United Kingdom, Walking Stereotype Sues Whore, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world on February 13, 2011| 9 Comments »

…and now you know the rest of the story. – Paul Harvey

More short news stories hearkening back to the dim and distant past, namely late January and early February.

Welcome To Our World (January 20^th)

Here’s another example of people using the same arguments we use, except for a different issue. I wonder how many soi-disant “liberals” out there (especially in Sweden) would accept the idea that a severely retarded man has the right to make choices about his own sexuality, while simultaneously rejecting the concept that an intellectually-normal adult woman has that same right. This is paraphrased from an article which appeared in the Telegraph on February 4^th:

An English judge has ordered a severely retarded 41-year-old man to be placed under “close supervision” by the authorities who provide his housing in order “to prevent any further sexual activity on his part” after the local council complained that his “vigorous sex drive” was inappropriate for someone with an IQ of 48. They claimed he did not understand what he was doing, and an official psychiatrist even tried to prevent his being given sex education on the grounds that it would leave him “confused”. The 41 year-old had been in a relationship with a man whom he lived with and told officials “it would make me feel happy” for it to continue.

The judge said the case was “legally, intellectually and morally” complex as sex is “one of the most basic human functions” and the court must “tread especially carefully” when the state tries to curtail it, but he agreed that the man, known only as Alan, should not be allowed to have sex with anyone on the grounds that he did not have the mental capacity to understand the health risks associated with his actions. The judge concluded: “I therefore make a declaration that at the present time Alan does not have the capacity to consent to and engage in sexual relations…in such circumstances it is agreed that the present régime for Alan’s supervision and for the prevention of future sexual activity is in his best interests.”

Under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, judges have the power to make life or death decisions for people deemed to lack the intelligence to make them for themselves – such as ordering that they undergo surgery, have forced abortions, have life-support switched off or be forced to use contraception. The judge in Alan’s case said sexual consent requires an understanding and awareness of the “mechanics of the act”, “that there are health risks involved” and that sex between a man and a woman may lead to pregnancy. He said that the psychiatrist thought Alan “believed that babies were delivered by a stork or found under a bush”, and that “sex could give you spots or measles”. On that basis the judge ruled that Alan did not have the capacity to consent to sex, but also ordered that the council should provide him with sex education “in the hope that he thereby gains that capacity”.

If ignorance about sex is grounds for a court order forbidding it, neofeminists and religious fundamentalists need to start worrying. And if ignorance about a specific aspect of sex (e.g., prostitution) provides similar grounds, trafficking fanatics and Swedish Model proponents had better get used to celibacy.

Walking Stereotype Sues Whore (January 22^nd)

We all knew this would turn out this way, but it’s still good to see. Thanks to Brandy Devereaux and regular reader Joyce for calling my attention to this UPI press release on the 8^th:

A federal judge in New York tossed a lawsuit alleging a stripper who performed sex acts in a tourist’s Las Vegas hotel room did not fulfill her obligations…”Plaintiff’s claims do not arise under a federal statute or the U.S. Constitution,” [Judge Loretta] Preska wrote in the ruling…Preska said Blackman should have filed the suit in Nevada, “where a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claim occurred.” The judge said she decided not to transfer the suit because it “would not be in the interest of justice.”

January Updates (January 25^th)

Is an update to an update a meta-update? The first “January Update” story was about a woman who died during her sixth boob job; well, this one wanted to enlarge her bum but the result was the same (from Yahoo News, February 9^th):

A woman who had a cosmetic injection in her buttocks at a hotel near the Philadelphia airport died early Tuesday…Detectives said the woman and three companions traveled from London and were staying at the Hampton Inn…Two of them had traveled to the city in November to have their buttocks enlarged and, on Monday, one received another injection while the other had a hip augmentation…the 20-year-old woman who had the buttocks injection later complained of chest pains and trouble breathing. Paramedics were called, and she was taken to Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital where she died…

Police were seeking two people involved in the cosmetic procedures…[which] they believe… were arranged over the Internet. “We’re not quite sure right now if that person performing that procedure is licensed or unlicensed,” said Lt. John Walker.

I‘m not quite sure why a woman would want her derrière enlarged, but I suppose there are some who might need it. In any case…ladies, please, real plastic surgeons do NOT make house calls to hotel rooms! You get what you pay for, and botched cosmetic procedures are just as dangerous as any other botched medical procedure.

Don’t Buy It (February 1^st)

Among the people duped by all the hype about the Super Bowl being a bonanza for “sex trafficking” was a wannabe pimp from Austin, as reported in this paraphrased story from the Dallas News of February 7^th:

Anthony Ladell Winn, a 35-year-old felon from Austin, forced a 14-year-old girl and her 20-year-old sister to come to work as prostitutes in Dallas because he thought “there was big money to be made during the Super Bowl”, but Dallas police caught him before the sisters arranged any dates. Winn was arrested early Sunday on felony charges of attempting to compel prostitution by force and trafficking of persons.

Area authorities had been bracing for a possible influx of prostitutes and human trafficking victims in the run-up to Super Bowl XLV. Authorities say it can be extremely difficult to accurately measure whether such crimes spike and why, but as critics predicted there was no increase in reported prostitution cases, perhaps due in part to the icy and cold conditions, police said. Dallas police reported 23 adult prostitution arrests from Wednesday through Sunday, though they noted they do not know how many were related to the festivities or people surrounding the Super Bowl. “We didn’t see that as being a drastic increase in our normal enforcement numbers,” said Assistant Chief Tom Lawrence. Sergeant Byron Fassett of the Child Exploitation Squad said the Winn case was the only arrest of its kind thought to be related to the Super Bowl. “I don’t know that I saw on the street level any more activity than any other normal night that we would have run an operation,” said Fassett. He claimed that “there’s no real statistical data to prove it one way or the other.”

I’ll discuss the broader implications of this in Tuesday’s column, but note the most important part of this article: Despite attempts to blame the epic failure of their ridiculously overblown estimates on the weather or to make bullshit statements like that last line, the Dallas police had to admit that Aunt Maggie and the other voices of reason were right all along: THE SUPER BOWL IS NOT A MECCA FOR TRAVELLING PROSTITUTES, and there was no “explosion” of “trafficked children”. Of course, virtually nobody in the media will remind the public of this next time it happens, and the Winn case will be used as “proof” that there were tens of thousands of others out there who didn’t get caught.

Maggie in the Media (February 3^rd)

Kelly Michaels was so pleased with her January 31^st show that she’s asked me to join her on Nymphtalk Live for about a half-hour every Monday night, and I’ve agreed. Here’s the link to last Monday’s show, and tune in tomorrow night for the next one!

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