This essay first appeared in Cliterati on May 26th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
Reductio ad absurdum is a form of argument which follows the logical consequences of the thing argued against until they reach a point the opponent must agree is false, ridiculous, harmful or otherwise undesirable. Laws against consensual behavior could easily be defeated by such arguments were those who support them open to considering their possible consequences; unfortunately they never are, and so the laws are enacted and those harmful consequences must happen in fact to real human beings before most people will even begin to consider that they should be repealed. It takes even more than that to move the really staunch prohibitionists, especially those whose power or livelihood depends upon criminalizing as much of the spectrum of human behavior as possible; no matter how awful the consequences of their beloved laws, no matter how great the costs in money and ruined lives, no matter how damaging to the fabric of society or destructive to the principle of justice, they will just keep chanting “the Law is the Law” or “society needs to send a message” or “perhaps you want to legalize murder as well” while shutting their eyes, ears and hearts to the evil their policies cause. The chief weakness of the reductio ad absurdum technique is that some people are unable to recognize absurdity when they see it, or else unwilling to admit it when they do. And when the situation involves sex and adolescents, some people will adamantly refuse to acknowledge the wrongfulness of even the most outrageous outcomes:
…Kaitlyn Hunt, 18, faces two felony counts of “lewd and lascivious battery on a child”…after the parents of her 15-year-old girlfriend pressed charges…Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother, Kelley Hunt-Smith, wrote in [a] statement posted to Facebook…”They were out to destroy my daughter. [They] feel like my daughter ‘made’ their daughter gay”…police arrived at the family’s home Feb. 16 and put her daughter in handcuffs…Indian River County [Florida] Sheriff Deryl Loar said that age difference, not sexual orientation, determined prosecution…”If this was an 18-year-old male and that was a 14-year-old girl, it would have been prosecuted the same way,” Loar said…The state attorney’s office has offered Kaitlyn Hunt a plea deal which includes two years’ house arrest and a year of probation, which would stay on her adult record and limit her career choices…
I have absolutely no doubt that the sheriff is telling the truth, but that only increases the absurdity rather than acting as a defense as he seems to believe. Age of consent laws are currently justified by the pretense that they “protect” girls below that age from adult “sexual predators”, but that was neither their original rationale nor is it the way they’re usually applied: 80% of young men prosecuted under these laws have an established, consensual relationship with the so-called “victim”, and fewer than half are more than six years older; 55% of them are under 21, and 75% under 24. In other words, the great majority of such prosecutions are initiated to eradicate and punish boyfriends of whom the girl’s parents do not approve; as in the case at hand, the age difference is merely a convenient excuse.
But while one might (justifiably or otherwise) raise the specter of teen pregnancy or venereal disease to object to a heterosexual relationship, one would be hard-pressed to find such grounds for a lesbian one; though a few STIs (namely vaginosis, chlamydia, herpes, HPV, trichomoniasis and pubic lice) can be spread from woman to woman, several of these could also be contracted via behavior that even the most bloodthirsty prosecutor would hesitate to use as the basis for a criminal charge. And really, does anyone believe that the younger girl’s parents were truly concerned about the possibility of their daughter contracting a disease whose name they probably can’t even spell? If so, would Kaitlyn’s providing a clean blood test have caused charges to be dropped? OK, I’m indulging in a bit of reductio ad absurdum myself there, but I think y’all can see what I’m driving at. None of the possible negative side effects of this relationship, whatever they might be, justifies destroying a young girl’s entire life; morally infantile rubbish like “it’s the law” or “we mistreat everybody equally” is even worse. And if those of us who are sane can agree that these laws create monstrous injustices when inflicted on young women, perhaps we can also agree that they’re just as horrible when inflicted on young men.
Japanese cops’ increasing adoption of American whore-harassing tactics is extremely troubling: “Tokyo Metropolitan Police…cracked down on a prostitution club…specializing in senior citizens…Officers arrested the 63-year-old manager of club Silk…and one other employee for dispatching a woman, 64, to…an 82-year-old man…” That’s right, Japanese cops now think persecuting old people for consensual sex is an appropriate use of resources.
There was a somewhat uneven piece in the New York Times last week; on the one hand, it portrays the victims of the Long Island Killer as individual women, correctly names many of the reasons women do sex work and (best of all) recognizes that “Escorts face danger not because of the Internet but because they’re still forced to work underground.” But on the other hand, it does not quote even a single sex worker activist, yet does refer to the questionable ideas of Scott “Women Never Lie About their Weight or Take Out Multiple Ads” Cunningham (including his stunningly stupid belief that before the internet most whores were streetwalkers, and his unsupported and false belief that there are more of us now than in the 1990s). After I mentioned my problems with the piece on Twitter, author Robert Kolker contacted me and I expressed my concerns; it turns out he did interview several activists, but didn’t realize that not specifically quoting them would be perceived as a slight. His publisher is also sending me an advance copy of his book about the murders, Lost Girls; I’ll let y’all know what I think about it.
…Jeanett Bjønness of Aarhus University…interviewed 40 Danish women who sell sex on the streets, and it turns out that the women do not regard their sex trading as the biggest problem in their lives…”Sex trading…is perceived as a solution to some problems,” says Bjønness…the people whose job it is to help sex workers…[regard] the women as victims. This rigid view…has the consequence that the women feel walked over, because they do not see themselves as victims…[but rather] as independent women who make rational choices based on the options available to them…
See how easy it is when you actually bother to TALK to us?
…[In his act] a magician named Marty Hahne…pulls a three-pound rabbit out of a top hat…“I just received an 8-page letter from the USDA, telling me that by July 29 I need to have in place a written disaster plan, detailing all the steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such as a tornado, fire, flood, etc.” Hahne and his wife must be specially trained to implement the rabbit plan, which USDA inspectors will review…new [EPA] regulations define ditches, gullies and other property features that catch water as part of America’s navigable waterways under the Clean Water Act…the EPA…would become the de facto owner of people’s ditches and gullies…The Lemonade Freedom group knows that the ridiculous regulations need to be taken seriously…the group…[protests] police actions…to close down children’s lemonade stands…
Pahokee [Florida] residents, church members, and pastors are outraged over…the…first Lake Okeechobee Summer Solstice Festival…The crowd cheered in agreement as…pastors from around the area admonished city officials for allowing festivals containing witchcraft and occult practices into the city…“We are opening ourselves up to things we should not, like belly dancing and magic spells,” said Daniel Mondragon…“God cannot heal our land if we have witches and warlocks violating our community,” said Evangelist Lillian Brown…
Destiny Rescue, an organization whose mission is to rescue sexually exploited children…hunts through Cambodia and Thailand to find these girls…Indiana State University graduate students played with the rescued girls, visited the sex tourism capital of the world and wondered at the hope with which victims create new lives…More than 2 million children are forced into the sex trade every year, according to the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report…Destiny Rescue is…[addressing] the problem….by…training in jewelry making, sewing, working in a café, hair dressing or pursuing an education…Vanessa Granger-Belcher…led the girls through an art activity…in which they drew pictures of their dreams for their lives…
It may amuse you to know that most UN agencies estimate the “annual flow of trafficked people” of all ages into all industries at 0.5 – 1.9 million people, of which 2 million are supposedly “sex trafficked children”. Perhaps the UN should start hiring people with at least 3rd-grade math skills.
In Michelle Visage’s Hooker Makeover, a judge from RuPaul’s Drag Race and her drag queen sidekick turn ordinary women into cartoonish streetwalker stereotypes. Visage was at first defensive when confronted with this on Twitter last Sunday, but within hours she issued a public apology and announced that the show would be cancelled. It’s good to know that at least some people really are listening.
…in July 2011…a massage parlour owner and two associates were arrested…for “organising prostitution”…and…handed a five-year sentence…But [in] appeal…the defendants were found “not criminally responsible” and…acquitted due to “unclear facts and improper application of the law”. The court said manual stimulation did not belong in the realm of prostitution…
Dr. Marty Klein’s review of Dr. Judith Hanna’s book Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy, And A Christian Right discusses the war against strip clubs we’ve mentioned so many times before, and the book itself debunks the usual mythology about “negative secondary effects”, “sex trafficking”, etc. I do have to wonder if Hanna ignores the neofeminist contribution as Klein does in his book, though.
…the Ohio House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill ostensibly aimed at fighting “human trafficking” that makes it a crime to “solicit” a legal act: sex with someone who is 16 or 17 years old. The age of consent in Ohio is 16. Yet under H.B. 130, a 20-year-old who asks a 16-year-old to have sex with him, or a 21-year-old who does the same with a 17-year-old, thereby commits a…felony…and…has to register as a sex offender. But if the teenager broaches the subject, or if the sex proceeds without any explicit verbal reference to it, no crime has been committed…Having sex is fine, as long as you don’t talk about it beforehand… Legislators already define “human trafficking” broadly enough to include consensual sex…Now Ohio is poised to [add] merely talking about consensual sex…
In the months after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, FBI agents conducted surveillance of…Anwar al-Awlaki and uncovered detailed information about his…use of prostitutes…Al-Awlaki lived in a Washington suburb at the time…he visited prostitutes at least seven times and paid up to $400 for sex…[for] a total of $2,320 …agents interviewed the escorts, obtained detailed information about the encounters, and…even reviewed the possible legal charges that might be brought against him…
If you think the wait to find out if your kids got the…results needed to get into uni is stressful, dream on…It’s what happens next that you REALLY should be worrying about…Darling Daughter could easily end up hawking her body to keep her university finances afloat…poverty is pushing students to sell their souls and get jobs in the sex trade. Six per cent could be working as lap-dancers, strippers, escorts or prostitutes to pay their way through studies. Yet more could be manning sex chat-lines…the sex industry is a dark, grubby scene that irrevocably changes people on the inside…No degree is worth it…
So either Jo Davison is speaking from personal experience, or she’s a bigoted ignoramus. Which is it, Jo? Do tell.
…DOMA was struck down in no small part because it picks out a certain class of people and, by denying them recognition of their marriages, denies their families equal freedom and dignity. Can it be denied that polygamous families, whose marital arrangements are illegal, much less unrecognized, are denied equal liberty and are made to suffer the indignity [of] active discrimination?…If the state lacks a legitimate rationale for imposing on Americans a heterosexual definition of marriage, it seems pretty likely that it likewise lacks a legitimate rationale for imposing on Americans a monogamous definition of marriage…
Activist Ye Haiyan…was released from 13 days of detention on June 12 after she scared off three trespassers to her home…Ye first became famous in 2005, when she posted a nude photo of herself online. Under the pen name Hooligan Swallow, Ye raised eyebrows with her bold articles on sex. But she really caught the public’s attention in 2010 when the…NGO she set up…[called] for the legalisation of prostitution…”Pushing for [this]…contradicts the government’s ideology,” she said. “The government does not wish to see this topic being promoted and the mainland media are banned from discussing it”…
Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum. – Thomas Szasz
A few months ago, when Amsterdam raised the legal age for prostitution from 18 to 21, one sex worker commented that this was a good idea because a woman of 18 is “still a child”. Now, I’m not going to rehash the obvious arguments which made the rounds when the prohibitionist fad of raising the legal drinking age to 21 seized America like some kind of suicidal mania; nor will I point out that any sane and reasonable person must recognize that selecting leaders, driving a car, getting married and joining the military all have more serious effects on both the individual and society as a whole than the specific reasons one might choose to have sex; nor explain that narrowing a legal bottleneck invariably results in more people doing whatever-it-is illegally (except insofar as I just mentioned them). Instead, I’d like to briefly consider this bizarre legal fiction that a person capable of reproduction can nonetheless be a “child” in any meaningful way, and to wonder how far this trend can go before it collapses into complete absurdity.
The delusion that some adults are actually children is a fairly recent one, dating back only to late 19th century. In “The Shape of the Spoon” I quoted psychologist Robert Epstein on why it’s so spectacularly stupid and destructive:
…the whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor…This infantilization makes many young people angry or depressed…we have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other “children.” In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence…But [in the West] young people can’t own things, can’t sign contracts, and they can’t do anything meaningful without parental permission—permission that can be withdrawn at any time…American teens are subjected to more than 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many as incarcerated felons…What’s more, since 1960, restrictions on teens have been accelerating…
I’m not saying that young people should be given adult responsibilities at about 13 as they once were, and I certainly don’t think Epstein is either; what I am saying is that referring to teenagers as “children” and pretending that label represents anything other than a legal fiction is not only counterproductive and generative of psychopathology, but also inevitably gives rise to the evil absurdities I regularly mock by comparing them to young Billy Batson turning instantly into a super-powered adult with the magic word “Shazam!” The idea that equal-to-four-year-olds suddenly become equal-to-forty-year-olds at a mystic ritual moment is idiotic in every respect, but nowhere is it more ridiculous than in the area of sex: “…it is the hormones of puberty that drive young people to have sex, not knowledge or culturally-induced ‘sexualization’, yet Americans are committed to the self-destructive delusion that if we keep teens in ignorance about sex they’ll stay ‘innocent’ and never think of having it themselves…” That quote is from “Too Young To Know”, wherein I address the issue of prostitution by legal minors:
There is no material difference between sex for compensation and sex for social reasons except that those who fall into the latter are less likely to use condoms or good judgment. So, the state needs to pick an age of consent and stick to it, thus eliminating criminalization of motives for having sex. This is not to say that the state shouldn’t set some higher age at which a brothel or escort service can legally hire a girl, as long as the state recognizes that doing so means that the only sex work an underage teen can do will be on the street, and that the law isn’t going to stop her if that’s what she intends to do…
But obviously the rulers of Amsterdam are far wiser than some sex-addled harlot, and obviously have some foolproof magical means of absolutely preventing women below 21 from working, just as they effectively stop every single “illegal” whore from doing so now.
Ahem.
Anyhow, is there actually any factual basis to the notion that some biological adults are somehow childlike in any way that could be reasonably declared a valid cause for restricting their rights to some degree? Well, kind of, but not in any sense where the numbers 18 or 21 would be significant. A lot of brain research suggests the frontal lobes aren’t fully mature until about 25, so maybe we should prohibit university-age people from voting, drinking, marrying or doing meaningful work (most especially enlisting in the military). But still other research suggests the brain isn’t fully mature until the 30s or even 40s, so perhaps we had better declare anyone below 40 “still a child”. Or maybe that should only apply to men; a recent highly-publicized “study” by television network Nickelodeon (which I’m sure was conducted with unimpeachably-rigorous scientific methodology) trumpeted that while women mature at 32, men don’t do so until 43. Obviously, we need to declare people younger than those ages “juveniles”, restrict their sexual and labor choices and try them in special juvenile courts.
The fact of the matter is, the brain keeps changing throughout life; while it’s getting more powerful in some respects it’s weakening in others, and any increase in maturity after 30 is offset by a loss of adaptability and plasticity. It is the height of fatuity to declare that the rights of some biological adults should be restricted due to incomplete brain development, because some fail to attain by 50 the cognitive abilities others have at 15. The only fair measure of adult competence is experience, and the only way to gain that experience is by doing; that cannot be accomplished in a playpen. Perhaps we need to return to the medieval practice of dividing growth into thirds: people are given some limited responsibilities at 7, assume self-governance at 14 and take on full citizenship at 21. But however we divide it, one thing is clear: only an imbecile equates a person of 16 with one of 12 or 6, and no law grounded in such imbecility is worthy of obedience or even serious consideration.
This essay first appeared on Cliterati on April 28th; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.
The ancients believed that there was power in names, and that they could be employed in spells designed to control or harm the thing so named. Beings of power were believed to know when their own names were spoken aloud, and might turn unwelcome attention upon the speaker (hence the expression “Speak of the Devil…”); similarly, evil spirits who overheard a topic being discussed aloud might take glee in ruining something good or exacerbating something bad, which is why people still knock wood or say “God willing” after talking about a positive development, or speak about disease and misfortune in hushed tones or euphemisms. Given the traditional importance of offspring, it’s no surprise that taboos developed around the act which creates them, nor that our ancestors couched everything related to that act in euphemisms and evasion and hid the generative organs from the sight of malign entities who might hex them.
The world has changed a great deal, and children are no longer vital helpers for our farms, caretakers of our twilight years and inheritors of our property; furthermore, few of us believe in evil spirits or magic words any longer. Yet the superstitions around sex continue; we pretend that it is magically different from all other human behavior, that the normal rules do not apply where it is concerned, that doing it in the “wrong” way or for the “wrong” reason is somehow ritually unclean or even harmful, that rules and laws are necessary to control it, and that violating such rules is a Very Serious Matter indeed. The most atavistic among us even claim that the sight of pictures of humans engaging in sex is “harmful” to those for whom the apparent position of the sun has not yet returned eighteen times (a number of great cabalistic significance, no doubt) to the same astrological orientation as it was at their birth; moreover, the very existence of these pictures is claimed to inflict magical harm on women, whether we gaze upon them or not!
Given the enduring popularity of these fantastical beliefs, it’s no surprise when politicians and others who pander to the lowest common denominator embrace them. But when a commercial enterprise does so, the results can be absolutely ridiculous; it’s not possible to please both those who are sexually mature and those who believe that their salvation depends on depriving other people they don’t even know of sexual entertainment, but by Aphrodite they sure will try! Take Amazon, for example:
[In April], without warning, Amazon removed the ability of anything rated “adult” to show up in a search on its main website. Upmarket porn is still there; but to find it, you have to…search specifically for the title…Previously, this sort of filtering had only been applied to books which contained things like incest…but now it’s…all erotic fiction. Even 50 Shades of Grey, one of the most ubiquitous books in the world right now, is caught by the filter. Obviously, this makes it much harder to find very ordinary smut…This level of prudishness, of trying to protect adults from themselves, is pathetic. It’s yet another example of pre-emptive, absurdly risk-averse censorship, appeasing a probably non-existent offended user...
…the classic Hitachi Magic Wand…has always been marketed as a “muscle massager” and currently features lovely pictures of 1980s-era models on its box, innocently placing the wand on their necks or shoulders…it has been a perennial bestseller in sex toy shops across the country and has been used in hundreds, if not thousands, of pornographic films. It’s so popular that a number of companies not affiliated with Hitachi create accessories for it—especially caps that pop over the head to turn the wand into things like a male masturbation sleeve or an insertable g-spot stimulator. Why do people love it? Simply put, it’s one of the strongest vibes out there. Most vibrators are battery-operated or rechargeable, but the Magic Wand plugs into a wall socket for maximum power. Its long handle houses a relatively large motor, and its tennis-ball-sized head shakes so vigorously that prolonged use can leave body parts numb and tingling. For some people, this supercharged toy is the only thing that can ensure an orgasm…It is also extremely sturdy and will last for decades.
Despite its popularity, its…manufacturer has been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the Magic Wand’s reputation as a sex toy. Hitachi…also makes…many other products, and it doesn’t want its brand name to be primarily associated with orgasms…[so it] had decided to stop manufacturing the Magic Wand altogether. [US distributor] Vibratex, sensing the wailing, gnashing of teeth and possible rioting that would ensue if this came to pass, convinced the company to keep producing it, but remove the Hitachi name..in June, the Hitachi Magic Wand will be re-launched as the Original Magic Wand, with new packaging and a slightly different design…
Unlike ultra-puritan Apple and Paypal, Amazon and Hitachi are more than happy to profit from sex; they simply want their connection with it to be obscured. Like writing “f**k”, this will fool exactly nobody and just makes those who indulge in the practice look juvenile and rather pathetic. Obscuring or avoiding words while maintaining the reality to which those words refer is no different from my grandmothers whispering words like “cancer” or Harry Potter characters referring to Voldemort as “He Who Must Not Be Named”; it’s a primitive attempt to hedge off evil by keeping a taboo subject behind a veil.
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. – George Steiner
Busybodies simply adore dysphemisms; they’re one of the moralists’ chief weapons in transforming a fact of life into a “menace”, a statement into a “shocking revelation”, a thing they dislike into something “seedy” or discussion of a taboo subject into a “conspiracy”. The ignorant, naïve or spineless are actually influenced by these words, while the better-informed and more reasonable may simply dismiss them as empty rhetoric. But when one takes the time to actually look, one begins to see that they’re not simply insulting and manipulative, but ludicrous and self-evidently wrong. Here’s an illustrative example on the South Korean sex industry, which is extremely typical for articles of its kind:
South Korea, a wealthy, powerful Asian…technology hub and stalwart U.S. ally, has a deep, dark secret. Prostitution…[flourishes] in South Korea just under the country’s shiny surface. Despite its illegality…the sex trade is so huge that the government once admitted it accounts for as much as 4 percent of…Gross Domestic Product — about the size of the fishing and agriculture industries combined. Indeed, paid sex is available all over South Korea – in coffee shops, motels, hotels, shopping malls, the barber shop, as well as the so-called juicy bars frequented by American soldiers and the red-light districts which operate openly. Internet chat rooms and cell phones have opened up whole new streams of business for ambitious prostitutes and pimps.
The self-contradiction begins from the very first line: If the sex trade is so all-pervasive, how can it also be said to be a “deep, dark secret”? The fact is that it’s not a secret at all, and never has been; it’s just that the phrase “deep, dark secret” is actually code for another, more obviously subjective word: “shameful”. A secret is something which is hidden, which the South Korean sex industry isn’t; “dark” implies something unpleasant or harmful, which almost nobody in South Korea really believes despite the extensive lip service paid to the notion in Korean culture. Prostitution was only criminalized in 1961 (at the urging of the United States, naturally), and police, whores and clients alike virtually ignored the law for more than 40 years, carrying on just as they always had. But American cultural imperialism refused to be denied, and in 2004 harsh new Swedish-flavored laws were implemented in response to US demands that Seoul “do something” about the nearly-nonexistent “problem” of “sex trafficking”. The fixation with the word “pimp” probably dates to this period; I see it used more often in stories about South Korea than in any other articles (discounting pure prohibitionist hatespew).
The…Ministry for Gender Equality estimates that about 500,000 women work in the national sex industry, though, according to the Korean Feminist Association, the actual number may exceed 1 million. This means that 1 out of every 25 women in the country might be selling their bodies for sex — despite the passage of tough anti-sex-trafficking legislation in recent years. (For women between the ages of 15 and 29, up to one-fifth have worked in the sex industry at one time or another, according to estimates)…
The phrase “selling their bodies for sex” is such a clichéd inanity I almost hesitate to call attention to it, but I find it almost incomprehensible that it’s still being passed around. It’s almost as though some people actually believe that after one transaction whores become spiritual beings (after all, when one “sells” something the buyer generally takes it with him when he leaves) who then, presumably, reincarnate like the Dalai Lama and return to the brothel to “sell” their instantly-grown, identical new bodies again. One wonders what happens to all the old bodies, however; I reckon once the men are done with them, they flush them down the loo like unwanted goldfish or “child sex slaves”. For comparison: if it’s true that 4% of South Korean women work in the sex trade, that’s roughly comparable to 19th-century Europe and America, which given the comparable levels of industrialization and similar social hypocrisy about sex is wholly unsurprising.
Indeed, the sex industry…is so open that prostitutes periodically stage public protest demonstrations to express their anger over anti-prostitution laws. Bizarrely, like Tibetan monks protesting China’s brutal rule of their homeland, some Korean prostitutes even set themselves on fire to promote their cause.
A reporter who lives in New York (where prostitutes periodically stage public protest demonstrations despite criminalization) considers it “bizarre” that people strongly resist tyrannical attempts to destroy their businesses and virtually enslave them. I wonder how he would react to the police violently smashing their way into his office, arresting everyone, forcing him into “rehabilitation”, then consigning him to work he hated at 5-10% of his former salary? Besides, since he apparently believes Korean harlots have the power of voluntary metempsychosis, it seems as though he would consider their behaving like Buddhist monks to be entirely predictable.
…According to the government-run Korean Institute of Criminology, one-fifth of men in their 20s buy sex at least four times a month, creating an endless customer base for prostitutes…
One-fifth of American men buy sex “occasionally” (i.e. closer to four times a year rather than a month) and only 6% “frequently”. If the Korean figure is correct, it makes the claim that the sex industry is a “secret” even more absurd.
From here, the article rapidly proceeds into the typical “child sex slavery” garbage, liberally sprinkled with phrases like “descending into the business of sex” and “illicit trade”; young women are intentionally conflated with “children” in the American style, so that the well-known Asian preference for youth is equated with pedophilia. Furthermore, the age of consent in South Korea is 13, while the age of legal majority is 19 by Western reckoning (20 by the Korean calendar). So when “Yun Hee-jun, a Seoul-based anti-sex trafficker, told the Times: ‘On online community websites, you can easily find information about prices for sex with minors and the best places to go’,” he was being extremely duplicitous; up until 2011 it was completely legal for a South Korean man to have sex with a “minor”, presuming she was at least 13 (which as we know, the vast, vast majority are). But beginning with the 2008 “Trafficking in Persons Report”, the US began to pressure the government to “crack down” on what American law defines as “sex trafficking” (whether it actually is or not), and early in 2011 Seoul decided to “out-Herod Herod” by raising the age of consent to that of legal majority…possibly the highest in the world. It is unclear whether the new law applies to all sex, or only that in which the older person is somehow “superior” to the younger (wealthier, in a position of authority, etc); try googling “age of consent South Korea” and you’ll see that nobody in or out of the country is entirely sure. And that makes moralizing about “underage prostitution” disingenuous at best, and at worst flagrantly dishonest.
Moving on, we find author Palash Ghosh either drinking deeply of the Kool-aid or expecting his readers to. He says that “women from…The Philippines, flock to South Korea to work as prostitutes and ‘bar girls’ (lured by the promises of legitimate work as waitresses or entertainers)”; Dr. Rhacel Parrenas demonstrated that parenthetical comment to be an outright lie. We are also told that “The prevalence of prostitution in contemporary South Korea provides an ironic counterpoint to the passionate political activism of elderly Korean women who relentlessly criticize Japan for their servitude as prostitutes and comfort women during Tokyo’s brutal occupation of their country”, but only a moral imbecile could find irony in the idea that people who choose to do something for good pay under pleasant conditions have very different attitudes about it than those who were forced at gunpoint to do it without any pay under horrific conditions.
The fact that Korea has had a thriving and legal sex industry since at least the Middle Ages is pushed down nearly to the bottom of the story, as is the fact that Park Chung-hee “actually encouraged the sex trade in order to generate much-needed revenue…[from] thousands of U.S. troops stationed in the country.” Ghosh then quickly changes the subject to North Korean refugees who work to pay off “people-smugglers”, and refuses to recognize that the poor conditions under which these unfortunates work are made possible by criminalization. He even seems surprised that Korean sex workers have challenged the 2004 law, the injustice and tyranny of which is easily recognized by anyone whose mind is not enveloped in a fog of dysphemisms and burdened by the misapprehension that they represent something even remotely akin to reality.
There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His prophet. – The Shahada
Most modern religions have some basic profession of faith, a terse (as in Islam or Buddhism) or lengthy (like Christianity’s Nicene Creed) formula which encapsulates the most basic tenet or tenets of that belief system. Like most cults, “trafficking” religion has its professions of faith as well, and the most important one – which can be found in nearly every single article written by or about “Traffickists” – is their version of the Shahada: “A lot of people think trafficking doesn’t happen in [the place about which I’m speaking], but it does.” What is most interesting about this statement is that it almost acknowledges the lack of demonstrable proof, but then attests that the True Believer accepts the “trafficking” faith anyway. Many “trafficking” creeds are like that, especially now that skepticism is starting to show its face among the proselytes; if one compares recent stories about the panic, one can’t help noticing that many more words are spent refuting facts that cast doubt onto the mythology than used to be typical even a year ago. This article from the Baton Rouge Advocate is a perfect example:
Judging by the “End Human Trafficking” billboards and the work of a Baton Rouge-based anti-trafficking group building a shelter in Livingston Parish, sex trafficking is a significant problem in south Louisiana…nevertheless, reliable statistics on the full extent of the problem remain elusive. “A lot of people think trafficking doesn’t happen in Louisiana or in Baton Rouge, but it does,” said Lee Domingue, co-founder with his wife, Laura, of the awareness organization Trafficking Hope…Louisiana law defines sex trafficking as the inducement of a commercial sex act from an adult by force, fraud or coercion, or from a minor irrespective of force, fraud or coercion. Transporting the victim is not required for a violation of the law; facilitating the sex act or benefiting, financially or otherwise, from it is enough to trigger a violation.
This incredibly expansive definition, especially that avails clause, is used to classify as “trafficking” things that no reasonable person would include under the label, then to pretend that the mythic narrative applies to all of it. The fanatics even admit this is so, though they don’t recognize they’re doing it:
The term “trafficking” and its description as “modern-day slavery” can be misleading for both victims and the public, said Judy Benitez…of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault. “It puts the image in our heads of girls being physically restrained or handcuffed or put in a cage, but that is usually not the case,” she said. “Usually it’s more akin to a domestic violence situation where…they could leave, but there are a variety of factors making them unwilling to do so.” Those factors include threats of harm, intimidation, bullying, blackmail and coerced or forced drug use to the point of addiction and dependence…Although the girls do not admit to having been trafficked, Edwards said, the signs are unmistakable…
In other words, if “authorities” don’t like a woman’s choices they simply deny her agency and brand her a “victim”, then go looking for a “victimizer”. This is particularly true if she’s a young woman beneath the Age of Shazam; obviously she is a “child”, exactly equivalent to a five-year-old, and therefore unable to feed herself, find shelter or money, read a map or reason that if one is running away from something, it might be a good idea to put some distance between oneself and the place from which one is fleeing:
“If a child has been missing, or has run away for a month or two, you know somebody is taking care of that child and you start to ask questions about who that person is and why,” [Edwards] said. “Then if you find the child has gone to Tennessee or Florida or Alabama, has crossed state lines, those are things that really raise eyebrows.”
Because clearly, American state borders are patrolled like those between Cold War-era East and West European countries, and thus form solid barriers like the chalk lines of cabalistic summoning circles to anyone who has not yet been struck by the Mystic Lightning of Adulthood. But just in case anyone might see through this infantilizing myth of “innocence”:
…Trafficking Hope spokeswoman Molly Venzke declined The Advocate’s request to be put in contact with a trafficking victim willing to speak about the experience. “We cannot offer that, especially because we haven’t been able to put someone through the process of 18 months of restoration,” she said, adding that it would be exploitative to do an interview…at this point…
Well, something’s exploitative, but it isn’t an investigation into “trafficking” claims. The reporter isn’t completely asleep:
…the lack of data held up a 2011 reauthorization of the federal [Trafficking Victims Protection Act] because, as U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley…noted in committee, without more precise numbers, the government cannot determine whether funding to fight trafficking has been effectively spent…the U.S. government [has] no effective mechanism for estimating the number of victims…
But let’s not dwell on that too long; denying the agency of those who make decisions we don’t like is SO much more rewarding:
“Sex trafficking victims are easily manipulated by their traffickers and have mixed emotions, often believing they love the person”…said [Katherine Green of the Louisiana Human Trafficking Task Force]. “They don’t see themselves as victims at all because it’s a different normality they’ve had to survive.”
“Different normality” = “false consciousness”. And of course we have to demonize clients and imaginary bogeymen, too:
…The reluctance of victims to testify can be frustrating for law enforcement officers who want to get traffickers off the streets and guide victims to the services they need, said Bobby Gaston…with the Louisiana Sheriffs Association…“Many of the cases we thought were trafficking turned out to be prostitution because we couldn’t prove they were being forced…they were so deathly afraid of their ‘johns’ (the purchasers) or traffickers (the pimps) that they wouldn’t give us good (information).”
Oops, we almost forgot to drag in “end demand” rhetoric, and to refer to the crusaders as “experts”:
…Sex trafficking would not exist if there were not a market for sexually exploited individuals, the experts said. “Everything for sale has to have a market of people willing to buy, and that has never been a problem in this realm,” Benitez said. “But nobody wants to talk about that”…Domingue said he supports the idea of “john schools,” where men who purchase sexual favors would learn more about the damaging effects on the women involved…
And last but certainly not least, no “trafficking” screed would be complete without an iteration of the “gypsy whores” myth:
…law enforcement and service organizations are gearing up to respond to the influx of commercial sex activity they believe will inevitably accompany the Super Bowl in New Orleans on Feb. 3…
All mocking aside and all things considered, however, this story actually gives cause for optimism. The “Super Bowl sex trafficking” myth was relegated to a single line only six sentences from the end; the myth as a whole has never caught on in South Louisiana, and has not been heavily hyped by the larger media outlets in the area; and finally, only three out of 18 comments on the story were uncritical, and several of the others contained statements such as, “This looks like a solution in search of a problem”, “shameless yellow journalism…If there are no statistics to substantiate this imaginary problem, why are you writing articles about it?”, “Trying to convince people that they were abused sounds like the suppressed memory racket of years past that ruined a lot of lives”, and “you cannot get $ to stop prostitution so you call it Human Trafficking”. And that is very encouraging indeed.
Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher…announce[d] their decision to continue the…DNA Foundation, [which] will [now] be called “THORN: Digital Defenders of Children”…the foundation will focus on battling digital crimes, especially…[child] sexual exploitation. “For the past three years we have focused our work broadly on combating child sex trafficking…technology plays an increasingly large role in this crime and in the sexual exploitation of children overall…We believe that the technology-driven aspect of these crimes demands its own attention and investment”…
In other words, one of their advisors realizes that “sex trafficking” hysteria is on the way out, and suggested they shift the foundation’s efforts toward a crusade with a longer shelf life.
In an article published today…CalOSHA made it clear that when Measure B’s text refers to “condoms,” it is actually referring to the full roster of “barrier protections” set forth in California Code of Regulations…the section labeled “Personal Protective Equipment”…reads, “Where occupational exposure remains after institution of engineering and work practice controls, the employer shall provide, at no cost to the employee, appropriate personal protective equipment such as, but not limited to, gloves, gowns, laboratory coats, face shields or masks and eye protection“…CalOSHA admits that now that…enforcement will not be just about condoms, but will require that no person’s bodily fluids or “possibly contaminated” areas of skin will be allowed to touch the “skin, eyes, mouth or other mucous membranes” of another person—and what that quite obviously boils down to is, there’ll be no sex in sex movies after Measure B is put into force…
Krulac meant to send me a copy of The Night Walker soundtrack for my birthday, but a mixup in the order meant it didn’t arrive until Monday. That doesn’t matter to me one bit; I’ve wanted this disc for a very long time, and for me horror isn’t limited to Halloween. Thank you so very much, Krulac!
Uganda will pass a new law against homosexuality by the end of 2012 as a “Christmas gift” to its advocates…Rebecca Kadaga [claimed] that Ugandans were “demanding” the law. Homosexual acts are already illegal…but the bill…proposes jail terms…including a life sentence in certain circumstances. It prohibits the “promotion” of gay rights and calls for the punishment of anyone who “funds or sponsors homosexuality” or “abets homosexuality”. But a clause which calls for the death penalty against people found guilty of “aggravated homosexuality” – defined as when one of the participants is a minor, HIV-positive, disabled or a “serial offender” – is to be dropped…The bill was strongly condemned last year by Western leaders…[and] international donors have threatened to cut off aid to Uganda if the country does not do more to protect the rights of gay people…
Though Kadega claims the law was “demanded” by Ugandans, in reality it has been pushed since 2009 by Christian fundamentalists from the US who have bought Ugandan politicians to advance their agenda of hate.
It’s good to see yet another evil “controlling prostitution” charge defeated: “Marie McKinlay, 40, was said to have employed dozens of high-class escort girls…that made her more than £350,000 between 2008 and 2011…But…was cleared of controlling prostitution for gain over two and a half years after insisting she had been no more than an agent…” Remember, in the UK escort prostitution is legal; only working together for safety or working from a specific place are illegal. However, police often accuse women of “controlling prostitution” so as to have an excuse to rob them under the “Proceeds of Crime Act”.
The Florida Classic weekend draws football fans from across the state…but…is also known for attracting another type of tourist: prostitutes…Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation…Director Larry Zwieg [said] his agency launched an undercover operation…to catch the women who are in town to find illegal work — and the men seeking their services. “We’ve noticed a pattern” among the prostitutes, Zwieg said. “They go from city to city, where ever there is a particular event going on”…Authorities say it’s a familiar story whenever there’s a large event…Sometimes, the prostitutes…are…victims of child-sex trafficking…Child-welfare experts say many teens who are trafficked don’t see themselves as victims and won’t cooperate with authorities. The girls are often fearful of their pimp or his associates. The FBI estimates 293,000 children are at risk of becoming victims of sexual exploitation in America…
Let’s see: we’ve got the “gypsy whores” and the cop insistence that they’ve “noticed” something which doesn’t exist; then agency denial, the pretense that all underage hookers are “trafficked”, and the dogma that the reason whores won’t confirm police masturbatory fantasies is due to fear of nonexistent pimps. Then top it all off with a misattribution of Estes & Weiner’s magic number to the FBI instead. Remarkable.
Cambridge historian Mary Beard on the arbitrariness of law, the Shazam! fallacy, and what the age of consent in Great Britain has to do with “white slavery”, “child” prostitution and William Stead, the Victorian version of Nicholas Kristof. Stead arranged to “buy” a girl from her destitute alcoholic mother by telling her that he wanted the girl as a servant for a wealthy family, but then claimed in his series of articles, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, that the mother had knowingly sold the girl into “white slavery”. Beard points out that the articles were “probably as inaccurate and exaggerated as some more recent newspaper campaigns have been in the area of child sex. But the articles kick-started pressure…so the age of consent was raised, while, with a certain illogicality, the minimum age of marriage for girls remained 12 until 1929.”
The truth of this is buried under such a heap of dysphemisms it’s very tough to sort out what’s really going on here. As I’ve explained before, “money laundering” is a bogus charge used to persecute and loot suppressed businesses; you’ll notice all the other “crimes” they’re charged with are either consensual activities or else vague administrative infractions. Note the anti-Village Voice propaganda and the way these “officials” reduce women to infantilized, passive objects:
Taking action to break up a tri-state, prostitution-based money laundering operation, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman and NYPD Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly today announced the unsealing of a 180-count indictment charging 19 individuals and one corporation with enterprise corruption and a variety of underlying crimes, including money laundering, falsifying business records, narcotics sales and prostitution…investigators found two women who were the victims of human trafficking…and…brought them to a safe haven…Somad Enterprises…created, monitored, facilitated and employed online (on Backpage.com, for example) and print (in the Village Voice, for example) advertisements and cable television commercials to knowingly and systematically promote prostitution for its clients’ large- and small-scale prostitution businesses – or pimps for which Somad and its employees, as well as the prostitution business clients, profited handsomely…Commissioner Kelly said, “All anyone has to do is open a copy of the Village Voice to get a good sense of how classified advertising and prostitution go hand in hand, particularly in the prostituting of Asian women. Our focus remains the profiteers and johns engaged in promoting prostitution – not the women exploited by them”…
No matter how this turns out, it’s part of the picture which will eventually force people to realize that sex workers are no different from anyone else:
…Mark Suben, the DA in Cortland County [New York]…since 2008…[said] he had lied about his past…”[Reports]…have…[alleged] that I was involved in the adult film industry about 40 years ago…Those allegations are true…I was an actor in adult films for a short period in the early 70s. I was also an actor in…soap operas and commercial advertisements.” He apologized for his actions and said he used “bad judgment” by acting in porn and by lying about it. He…will not resign…IMDB…says Suben…[under the name] Gus Thomas appears in films such as Lecher and The Love Witch…
…”Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)” [is] a controversial new child psychiatric disorder proposed for inclusion in…DSM-5…kids will be deemed DMDD if they show “severe recurrent temper outbursts that are grossly out of proportion in intensity or duration to the situation”…Pittsburg psychiatrists David Axelson and colleagues have just shown that the…concept is deeply flawed…[the committee introduced DMDD as a replacement for the recent fad diagnosis] “child bipolar disorder” – a disease considered extremely rare everywhere else…
…Parents of a child who was turning 16 apparently hired two strippers…and invited the boy’s friends…the mother of a 15-year-old…[said] she was shocked when her son told her about the lap dances given to teens…Jim Murphy, Saratoga County District Attorney…[said] “a parent…could be charged with endangering the welfare of a child”…the party was in a private room at the bowling alley…[which] could be in trouble with the State Liquor Authority…[and] the D.A. says the strippers could face charges for having sexual contact with minors…
In other words, Murphy sees nothing wrong with trying to destroy the lives of at least five people (possibly more) over something he would’ve given his eyeteeth to experience when he was 16.
The government of Denmark has rejected the Swedish model, rightfully recognizing that the scheme harms prostitutes, is largely unenforceable and wastes resources. Though prohibitionists were “disappointed”, human rights advocates and the two-thirds of the Danish population who are opposed to the Swedish evil will no doubt be pleased.
Emi Koyama’s slide presentation at a recent harm reduction conference described how Portland, Oregon’s bad date line, which was started by a sex worker peer organization, changed when it was taken over by social service agencies. Hint: not only didn’t it improve…
Delusions that shrink to the size of a woman’s glove,
Then sicken inclusively outwards:
…the incessant recital
Intoned by reality, larded with technical terms,
Each one double-yolked with meaning and meaning’s rebuttal. – Philip Larkin
Usually I can see through to the truth of a prostitution news story, despite the credulity of reporters, the obfuscatory efforts of police and the liberal use of dysphemisms. But every so often one comes along that’s so convoluted I just can’t say anything about it with any degree of certitude. This is one of those times; I’ll point out its problems and share my observations and impressions, but don’t expect a neat conclusion because I haven’t got one.
A Wilmington [North Carolina] high school student is facing federal charges for crimes related to prostitution. Her mother says her daughter is a victim of sex trafficking. Laura Berte says…Alexandrea …has been missing since July. She contacted law enforcement but says they were reluctant to place her daughter on a missing persons list since she was 19 at the time. Berte said she continued to push a few more times, until a Wilmington police officer helped put Alexandrea on the missing persons national database…Alexandrea…who just turned 20 this week, was recently pulled over in Tennessee for a traffic stop. When troopers ran her name, they discovered she was on a national missing persons list. However…[she] also had three other young women in the car along with a small amount of marijuana, several gift cards and cell phones…
No matter what the mother claims about her daughter’s mental capacity (see below), she is a legal adult, as were the other three women; if any of them had been one day below 18 you can bet she would have been described as a “child” (or at least a “girl”) rather than a “young woman”. “Federal charges for crimes related to prostitution” would almost certainly mean the Mann Act in this context, considering she was from North Carolina but arrested in Tennessee; though the story does not make it clear I suspect she was driving and that the rental was in her name, which makes her a “trafficker” under American agency-nullifying prohibitionist policies which insist that women are imbeciles who cannot make our own business decisions. That’s especially ironic in light of the mother’s claims, as you’ll see.
After getting a tip, Laura found her daughter on backpage.com [sic]. Like many people, she was unaware of the online adult services site, which experts say makes it easy for traffickers to advertise girls all over the country with anonymity. In 2010, Craigslist put a stop to advertising adult services, but Backpage soon picked it up. Experts say Backpage makes around $20 million a year for these ads. Laura Berte said she discovered that, within five weeks, her daughter had been advertised for sex in at least as many states…
I certainly hope you expected a reference to the Backpage witch-hunt; no “domestic sex trafficking” story is complete without it. Note the absurd oversimplification of the flow of advertising on adult sites and the subtle erosion of Alexandrea’s agency by the passive-voice “had been advertised for sex”, implying that she did not place the ads herself; also remember that one of the defining characteristics of yellow journalism established by noted historian Frank Mott is “a parade of false learning from so-called experts”.
…”It’s just so traumatic for me to…comprehend that…my daughter has been lured into this kind of lifestyle. I feel like she’s been kidnapped. I feel like somebody stole my baby.” Laura Berte said her daughter has a mental capacity of a 9 year old…”My daughter’s not a criminal…She doesn’t have the mental capacity to come up with this idea on her own. This is bigger than her and bigger than most people in this community know, and it’s happening right underneath our noses…The quality [of Alexandrea’s Backpage photos] led me to believe someone is investing time and money.”
As we’ve seen before, parents and “authorities” often claim that adult women have “the mental capacity of a child” when they wish to present her as the “victim” in some unusual sexual situation which somehow went wrong. But as usual, this claim doesn’t hold water; if Alexandrea supposedly had the “mental capacity of a 9 year old”, then how did she get a driver’s license? Why was she not under some sort of conservatorship? And why haven’t local officials made statements to the Feds corroborating the mother’s claims? I think it’s pretty obvious that the mother believes what she wants to believe; her daughter couldn’t possibly be a dirty, nasty whore, so an invisible conspiracy must have “kidnapped” her, “lured” her into this “lifestyle” (a word which is nearly always pejorative), and apparently manipulated her from afar with mind-control rays.
National human trafficking experts say one third of all runaways are trafficked or exploited for sex within the first 48 hours after they go missing…Local experts say…North Carolina…happens to be one of the top ten states for human trafficking with contributing factors such as poverty and location. Many girls have been trafficked up and down the East Coast, making North Carolina a drive-thru destination. Women trafficked from New York to Miami have also likely been trafficked through North Carolina…
Really? Fucking really? Apparently these so-called “experts” (see Mott’s rule above) haven’t bothered to read any actual studies, which show that 84% of underage prostitutes (much less “all runaways”) have never even met a “pimp” even after they’ve been on the streets for months or years. If a third were “exploited for sex” every 48 hours, virtually all of them would be within a month…and methodologically sound studies say exactly the opposite. On a lighter note, here’s North Carolina’s entry in the “top human trafficking hub” pissing contest.
…North Carolina does not see ‘pimping’ as a felony…
Well, even a stopped clock…
…even if a minor gets arrested for prostitution, they could serve time as an adult. Experts say that’s a fault within the system since minors would clearly be trafficking victims…
Oh, clearly. Because everybody knows that teenagers are innocent children up until the magical Moment of Shazam, and therefore could not possibly conceive of the idea of selling sex.
…There were three other women in the car at the time – one was an 18 year old from Lumberton [North Carolina]. Another woman was from North Carolina [?] and the third was from Kansas. Everyone but Allie was released…
Considering the current “sex trafficking” hysteria, this is the most interesting detail in the whole story, and the one which engenders the most confusion in my mind; if it weren’t for this, I would feel almost completely certain about every statement I’ve made so far. If these other girls were hookers, too, why were they let go instead of being forcibly “rescued”, and why weren’t they charged for the marijuana? If they weren’t hookers, what’s the basis of the Mann Act charge against Alexandrea? Is she supposed to have “trafficked” herself? Or is the reporter as mistaken about the federal charges as she is about nearly everything else in this train wreck? Given the tendency of embarrassing journalistic debacles to vanish from the national media, I don’t expect any more on this one; however, I’m going to ask my contacts in North Carolina to keep an eye out for a follow-up in the local media and I’ll let you know if I find out anything more.
Update: A reader sent me this brief item which confirms that “Alexandra” (I’m not sure if this or the unusual spelling in the other story is correct) has been charged under the Mann Act, as I surmised.
The problem is really simple. You either close down a house of prostitution or you leave it open. You can’t satisfy both those who want it open and those who want it closed. – Fredric Wertham
Banned Books Week is usually the last week of September, but for some reason I’ve been unable to ascertain it is being held in the first week of October this year; it thus started yesterday and ends this coming Saturday. And though, as I said in last year’s column on the subject, “I’m usually pretty skeptical of ‘Official Whatchamacallit Week’ type things…I find the idea of a week specifically dedicated to reading books which busybodies want to stop people from reading to be irresistibly subversive.” Last year I specifically discussed book-banning and listed the most-challenged books of 2010; four of them (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Brave New World, The Hunger Games series and What My Mother Doesn’t Know) were back on 2011’s list, where they were joined by the Internet Girlsseries byLauren Myracle, The Story of Life on the Golden Fields series by Kim Dong Hwa, My Mom’s Having a Baby by Dori Hillestad Butler, the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, the Gossip Girl series by Cecily Von Ziegesar and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. But this year, I’d rather talk briefly about the defective mind of the would-be censor, and how we as a culture have made it easier for him to get his way.
First of all, let’s make one thing clear: the urge to censor is a mental illness. No normal person wants to control what other people think, and no sane person could believe that he can control what anyone else thinks. Only a psychotic believes that he can be directly affected by the thoughts inside another person’s brain, yet time and again would-be censors attempt to circumvent the principles of liberty and individual rights by claiming exactly that; somehow, we are asked to believe, what individuals see and think can magically affect others and is therefore subject to the same sort of restrictions as violent actions are.
In earlier times, it was enough to say that books, pictures or thoughts were “sinful”, because people imagined “evil” as some sort of tangible thing that could affect everyone around it (presumably via invisible “evil rays”). And though that sort of booga-booga nonsense would be laughed out of the conversation now if expressed directly, it still sells quite well as long as it’s expressed indirectly by referring to unproven “negative secondary effects” or burbling inane and incomprehensible neofeminist drivel about how all women are as mystically interconnected as a hydra’s heads. And of course, just about anything (no matter how repressive and totalitarian) can be sold to the Great Unwashed if it’s depicted as being intended to “protect” children, with “protect” in this case being interpreted to mean “lock into a permanent passive and vegetative state”. Young people, we are told, can somehow be “harmed” by encountering ideas and concepts that they are “not ready for”, like the protagonist of an H.P. Lovecraft story driven mad by the blasphemous cosmic truths he discovers in some forbidden eldritch tome. Foremost among these “dangerous” truths are supposed to be facts about the functions of their own bodies, but considering that many of our laws declare that they don’t actually own those bodies until they’re 18, I suppose it all makes a kind of twisted sense once one accepts the outlandish initial premise.
Of course, demands to censor some content don’t even need these sorts of perverse mental gymnastics; those who wish to ban criticism of any given group need only point to the actions of some violent psycho who attacked a member of that group, then pretend that he was “incited” to the violence by the criticism; minority groups are the biggest perpetrators of this odious censorship tactic, but more recently politicians and religious fanatics have adopted it as well and fearful Europeans and Americans are listening. The problem with these people is that they fail to comprehend the principle of legal precedent; once one exception to free speech is made (whether for “obscenity”, “violent rhetoric”, “hate speech”, flag burning, Holocaust denial or whatever), it’s that much easier to make another exception, and another, and another…
The important thing to remember when listening to any demand for censorship is that no matter what excuse the censor presents to attain his goal, he is ultimately lying. It’s not really about “public safety”, or the “children”, or “community standards”, or whatever else he may claim; it’s about the fact that his leaky mind is unable to keep unwelcome thoughts out, so he demands that society do it for him. Fredric Wertham was a child psychiatrist who wrote Seduction of the Innocent, an attack on comic books in which he made the sort of claims which have since become de rigueur for anyone trying to censor music, movies, television, video games, the internet, etc: namely, that the “bad” item harms children and/or adolescents by giving them “bad thoughts” they wouldn’t otherwise have in their “innocent” Rousseauian state. Wertham’s book triggered the Kefauver Hearings which eventually resulted in over 15 years of stifling self-censorship under the repressive Comics Code, but this did not satisfy him; nothing less than a total ban on all comic books would have. My epigram is from “It’s Still Murder: What Parents Still Don’t Know About Comics Books”, a rant published in the April 9th, 1955 Saturday Review of Books (and quoted in an excellent article on the subject recently published on the website of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund); I chose it because it reveals not only Wertham’s real thought processes, but those of any prohibitionist. Set aside for a minute the absurdity of comparing comics to a brothel and recognize what he’s saying here: to the prohibitionist, it doesn’t matter if a brothel has no negative effects on its neighborhood; it doesn’t matter how it’s run or whether its employees and customers are happy; and it doesn’t even matter if he never goes there, doesn’t know anyone else who goes there and never even sees it. Just the very fact that it exists upsets him, and nothing short of its closure will satisfy him. This is why it’s impossible to negotiate with censors or to cede even the most insignificant-seeming patch of ground to them: they will view any compromise not as an end result, but as the first step toward their eventual goal of a total ban on whatever it is they don’t want to think about.
If American sheriffs had the humor, wisdom, and modesty of Sheriff Andy Taylor; if their deputies were allotted one bullet which had to be carried in a pocket; this site would be unnecessary. – Patrick from Popehat
As I explained in last Sunday’s column, I’m currently guest-blogging on The Agitator along with Ken and Patrick from Popehat, Baylen Linnekin of Keep Food Legal, and Drew Johnson, libertarian journalist and opinion editor of the Chattanooga Free Press. For the duration of that gig, every Sunday I’m going to do a sequel to the first column, in which I call your attention to what I published at The Agitator in the preceding week, and starting today to what my fellow guest-bloggers have posted also; Sunday is also the day I’ll feature pictures of my own pups in Radley’s “Sunday Afternoon Dog Blogging” feature.
…portraying Rodney King as a hero, or as a villain, plays into the central narrative of our criminal justice system, one that offers the ultimate excuse for cutting corners, giving police the benefit of the doubt, looking the other way at constitutional violations, putting our thumbs on the state’s end of the scales of justice. He got what he deserved — that’s what one side says, cutting through facts and law and reasoned analysis to pure us vs. them. He didn’t deserve that, says the other side, unwittingly lending support to the implicit argument that there are some who do. But deserve’s got nothing to do with it. Heroism and villainy have nothing to do with it. We have to demand that everyone be treated justly, whether our viscera tell us that they do not deserve the rule of law at all. Rodney King should have been spared excessive force not because he’d earned respite, but because we extend it to everyone…because it’s…foolish and perilous to let the state (or the mob) decide who deserves rights and who doesn’t…
On Tuesday I published “By Any Other Name”, a composite essay drawn from several previous columns on this site about terms for hookers and when it’s appropriate to use them; I also cross-posted my Friday the 13th column and a whole lot of links:
On Wednesday I reported that Islamists had called for the Great Pyramids of Egypt to be destroyed as “symbols of paganism”, but fortunately that turned out to be a hoax (though as I pointed out Thursday, a sadly credible one). I also got spanked for misinterpreting what was going on in this clam video, and so tried to make up for it with “New Orleans Ladies” for “Five Star Friday” and this unusual performance of “What a Wonderful World” on Thursday.
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Reductio ad absurdum is a form of argument which follows the logical consequences of the thing argued against until they reach a point the opponent must agree is false, ridiculous, harmful or otherwise undesirable. Laws against consensual behavior could easily be defeated by such arguments were those who support them open to considering their possible consequences; unfortunately they never are, and so the laws are enacted and those harmful consequences must happen in fact to real human beings before most people will even begin to consider that they should be repealed. It takes even more than that to move the really staunch prohibitionists, especially those whose power or livelihood depends upon criminalizing as much of the spectrum of human behavior as possible; no matter how awful the consequences of their beloved laws, no matter how great the costs in money and ruined lives, no matter how damaging to the fabric of society or destructive to the principle of justice, they will just keep chanting “the Law is the Law” or “society needs to send a message” or “perhaps you want to legalize murder as well” while shutting their eyes, ears and hearts to the evil their policies cause. The chief weakness of the reductio ad absurdum technique is that some people are unable to recognize absurdity when they see it, or else unwilling to admit it when they do. And when the situation involves sex and adolescents, some people will adamantly refuse to acknowledge the wrongfulness of even the most outrageous outcomes:
But while one might (justifiably or otherwise) raise the specter of teen pregnancy or venereal disease to object to a heterosexual relationship, one would be hard-pressed to find such grounds for a lesbian one; though a few STIs (namely vaginosis, chlamydia, herpes, HPV, trichomoniasis and pubic lice) can be spread from woman to woman, several of these could also be contracted via behavior that even the most bloodthirsty prosecutor would hesitate to use as the basis for a criminal charge. And really, does anyone believe that the younger girl’s parents were truly concerned about the possibility of their daughter contracting a disease whose name they probably can’t even spell? If so, would Kaitlyn’s providing a clean blood test have caused charges to be dropped? OK, I’m indulging in a bit of reductio ad absurdum myself there, but I think y’all can see what I’m driving at. None of the possible negative side effects of this relationship, whatever they might be, justifies destroying a young girl’s entire life; morally infantile rubbish like “it’s the law” or “we mistreat everybody equally” is even worse. And if those of us who are sane can agree that these laws create monstrous injustices when inflicted on young women, perhaps we can also agree that they’re just as horrible when inflicted on young men.
