Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Shazam!’

Banned Books Week

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2011| 68 Comments »

Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second.  –  Phil Kerby

Every year, the last week of September is Banned Books Week, a celebration of intellectual freedom sponsored by the American Library Association.  Since I haven’t actually worked as a librarian since 1995 I have a tendency to forget about the event until just after it’s over, but since I didn’t exactly have a venue from which to speak about it in my stripping and escorting days it hardly mattered.  Last year I remembered just in time to mention it in “The Camel’s Nose”, published on the very last day of the observance, but this year I was fortunate enough to spot a press release a full week ahead of time, which gave me ample opportunity to write this.  I’m usually pretty skeptical of “Official Whatchamacallit Week” type things, but I find the idea of a week specifically dedicated to reading books which busybodies want to stop people from reading to be irresistibly subversive.

As this map indicates, we don’t really have a lot of censorship challenges in Louisiana; even though the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom estimates that only about 20% of all book challenges are reported, the dearth of Louisiana-based incidents is supported by my own experience.  Perhaps it’s the same laissez-faire French attitude which renders most South Louisianans unable to get worked up about nudity, or maybe it’s that other libraries there took the same practical approach we did.  If anyone came in with a complaint about a book, we simply asked them to fill out a form we had for just such an eventuality; it asked the complainant to fill in the page numbers on which the offending passages occurred, to explain what his complaints about those passages were, and to write a short essay explaining how he felt those passages were objectionable within the context of the book.  Only once in my library career did I have to issue such a form, to a group of “holy rollers” from the local fundamentalist church who had got the bright idea that they were going to challenge some book (I honestly can’t remember which).  Needless to say, neither form nor complainants ever came back.

Nowadays, the vast majority of censorship attempts are advanced under the “Think of the Children!” banner, and therefore the number of challenges to books in literature curricula and school libraries dwarfs those aimed at other types of libraries; once public libraries are added to that figure what remains is negligible.  Since ALA began keeping statistics in 1990, there have been a total of 4048 reported challenges to books assigned for classes, 3659 reported challenges to books in school libraries and 2679 to books in public libraries…and only 798 to all other institutions combined.  Here, too, Louisiana tends to be very tolerant; in high school I was assigned many of the books which are frequently challenged or banned, and remember that I was taught by nuns!

The images in this column represent many frequently-banned books; two of them are from ACLU posters which are here in PDF form.  The ten most often challenged books of last year, and the excuses would-be censors gave for demanding their banning, were as follows:

1)  And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson

This children’s book in which two male penguins adopt and hatch out an egg was challenged on grounds of homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and “unsuited to age group”, a clever dodge which allows censors to pretend that they wouldn’t object to the book if it were assigned to children who were older than theirs.  Of course, the fact that the excuse is used even in high school challenges exposes it for what it is.

2) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

This semiautobiographical novel about a young Indian who decides to transfer from the reservation school to an all-white high school was challenged on grounds of offensive language, racism, religious viewpoint, sex education, sexual explicitness, violence, and “unsuited to age group”.  One noteworthy point: though we tend to think of censorship as the province of so-called “social conservatives” (and indeed, “sexually explicit” and “offensive language” are still the two most frequent excuses), so-called “social liberal” excuses such as violence, racism, sexism and “insensitivity” have become gradually more popular in the last two decades.

3)  Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

This classic dystopian novel was challenged for reasons of “insensitivity”, offensive language, racism and sexual explicitness; a Missouri challenge from 1980 sniffed that “it makes promiscuous sex look like fun”  (your point being?) and in 1993 a California parents group objected that the sexual norms in the fictional culture contradicted the school’s “abstinence only” sex education course.

4)  Crank, by Ellen Hopkins

This semiautobiographical novel has been compared favorably to Go Ask Alice (another frequent target of the thought police); it depicts the narrator’s struggle with addiction to crystal methamphetamine and was challenged because of drugs, offensive language, racism and sexual explicitness.

5)  The Hunger Games (series), by Suzanne Collins

These novels of a dystopian future were challenged due to sexual explicitness, violence and “unsuited to age group”.

6)  Lush, by Natasha Friend

This story of a teenage girl coping with her father’s alcoholism was challenged for drugs, sexual explicitness, offensive language and “unsuited to age group” (because obviously young teenagers never have alcoholic parents).

7)  What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

This verse novel of teenage angst was challenged on grounds of sexism, sexual explicitness, and of course “unsuited to age group” because real teenage girls never think of sex until they turn 18; before that they’re innocent, virginal “children”.

8)  Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich

It’s rare that a nonfiction book makes it into the most-challenged list, but I guess Ehrenreich’s exploration of the plight of the working poor is just too uncomfortable to contemplate for people who think living hand-to-mouth as a waitress or Wal-Mart clerk is preferable to making a good living as a prostitute.  The official reasons for challenges were drugs, offensive language, political viewpoint, religious viewpoint and “inaccuracy” (because obviously the challengers were all economists).

9)  Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie

It’s a collection of stories by queer youth.  Need I say more?  Reasons: homosexuality, sexual explicitness.  Big surprise.

10)  Twilight (series), by Stephanie Meyer

Well, maybe the censors are right once in a while…just kidding!  The challenges weren’t based on lack of quality or sparking an inane fad, but because the books are sexually explicit, promote a religious viewpoint, feature violence and (all together now) are “unsuited to age group”.  I wonder if any of the censors would feel differently if they realized these books are actually abstinence propaganda?

I haven’t read any of these books except for Brave New World, and therefore can’t vouch for their quality.  But that never stops censors; few of them bother to read works before trying to ban them, which is why our little complaint form stopped them cold.  They just complain about the presence of certain “dirty” words or passages without making the least attempt to judge the work as a whole, and many of them don’t even go that far; they simply parrot the complaints of others in their club, church or other social group.

It’s bad enough when parents censor their own kids’ reading; though I have many complaints about my mother’s overprotectiveness I must give her credit for never, ever censoring our reading material.  When a public librarian once tried to stop me from taking out adult books (I was eleven if I recall correctly) my mother left standing instructions that I was to be allowed to read and borrow anything I liked, without restriction.  But far too many parents go in exactly the opposite direction; they not only want to restrict the intellectual freedom of their own children, but that of other people’s children as well.  And while I don’t think society should interfere in a parent’s child-rearing decisions (and censorship only encourages the kids to read the forbidden material anyhow), campaigning to restrict the personal rights of others to do as they like because it offends one’s own sense of morality or propriety is totally unacceptable in a free society.

One Year Ago Today

“Out of Control” discusses the dangers posed by unbridled male sexual impulses and points out that current American laws sabotage the mechanisms evolved by society to channel those impulses.

Read Full Post »

Sisters In Arms

Posted in Current Events, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2011| 23 Comments »

A free government is a complicated piece of machinery, the nice and exact adjustment of whose springs, wheels, and weights, is not yet well comprehended by the artists of the age, and still less by the people.  –  John Adams

I wonder how much longer it will be before it starts to dawn on most reasonably-intelligent women that neofeminist-sponsored male-chauvinist legislation has established (and continues to strengthen) a legal precedent that adult heterosexual women are morally and emotionally incompetent to make our own decisions, and that male legislators and prosecutors can and will use such precedents to control women and, if the process goes unchecked, reduce us all to lifelong wards of the state to be used and disciplined as it sees fit.  The Swedish Model, mandatory domestic violence prosecution laws, sexual harassment laws and anti-sex-work laws all establish that women are (as St. Peter expressed it) the “weaker vessel”, unable to make rational adult decisions on any matter involving sexual relationships with men, and that it is therefore permissible for the state to strip us of the right of decision in such matters.  This precedent is now being creatively applied by evil prosecutors in a way no neofeminist ever could have expected…though of course every cynic did.

The following is from a June 24th article in The Guardian:

Rennie Gibbs…became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006…when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy.  When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death – they charged her with the “depraved-heart murder” of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.  Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby.  But her case is by no means isolated.  Across the US more and more prosecutions…seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.  “Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws,” said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW).  “It’s turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights.”

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby.  On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.  Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days.  In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

In Alabama at least 40 cases have been brought under the state’s “chemical endangerment” law…[which was] designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes.  Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way…Six months [after her baby died soon after birth, she] was arrested at home and charged with “chemical endangerment” of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.  “That shocked me, it really did,” Kimbrough said.  “I had lost a child, that was enough.”  She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which if she loses will see her begin a 10-year sentence behind bars…

Women’s rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion…[by] stretching protection laws to include foetuses, in some cases from the day of conception.  In Gibbs’ case defence lawyers have argued before Mississippi’s highest court that her prosecution makes no sense.  Under Mississippi law it is a crime for any person except the mother to try to cause an abortion.  “If it’s not a crime for a mother to intentionally end her pregnancy, how can it be a crime for her to do it unintentionally, whether by taking drugs or smoking or whatever it is,” Robert McDuff, a civil rights lawyer asked the state supreme court.  McDuff…[said] that he hoped the Gibbs prosecution was an isolated example.  “I hope it’s not a trend that’s going to catch on.  To charge a woman with murder because of something she did during pregnancy is really unprecedented and quite extreme.”  He pointed out that anti-abortion groups were trying to amend the Mississippi constitution…[to] widen the definition of a person…to include a foetus from the day of conception…Paltrow sees what is happening to Gibbs as a small taste of what would be unleashed were the constitutional right to an abortion ever overturned.  “In Mississippi the use of the murder statute is creating a whole new legal standard that makes women accountable for the outcome of their pregnancies and threatens them with life imprisonment for murder.”

At least 38 of the 50 states…have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.  South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law.  National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned.  Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy.  In other states laws designed to protect children against the damaging effects of drugs have similarly been twisted to punish childbearers.

As I wrote in my column of one year ago today, I despise cocaine and I think it’s incredibly irresponsible to take it while pregnant, but Gibbs was 15 years old; thus we see yet another example of the Kafkaesque illogic which permeates modern law.  When it comes to sex Gibbs is classified as a “child”, a poor naïve innocent whose lover would no doubt be sitting in prison for “rape” right now if he were 18 or older.  But let her miscarry and Shazam! she suddenly changes from innocent “child” to an adult with a “depraved heart”.  And if that’s not absurd enough for you, consider that since late-term abortions are legal in Mississippi, had she taken a drug to cause miscarriage on purpose she would not be in any trouble; it’s only accidentally killing one’s baby that’s illegal.  By any stretch of the imagination that constitutes a total moral inversion.  Also note the popular absurdity (mentioned in three places herein, and pivotal to the whole “Caylee’s Law” hysteria) that a law can “protect” the weak from violence; it can do no such thing.  All a law can do is to provide for vengeance after the violence is accomplished.  These prosecutor’s aren’t “renegades” as the article calls them; they are doing exactly what they’re paid to do, instill fear of the government in the population.

It’s not going to get better by itself, ladies, nor will it get better at all if you continue to smoke the neofeminist crack and waste your time reading “women’s studies” texts and essays on “feminist criticism” of movies.  If you want to be treated as adults you’re going to have to fight for ALL adult women to be treated as adults, even when they do things you don’t like.  If you want to own and control your body, you’re going to have to allow ALL women to own and control their bodies.  Unless you want women punished for unhealthy or unwise choices during pregnancy, you’re going to have to allow others that option outside pregnancy.  And unless you want your body to be the property of the State, you had best forget your idiotic war against your allies, normal individual men, and stop getting into bed with the politicians who will tell you any pretty lie you want to hear so they can trick you into a position to be raped.

Read Full Post »

A False Dichotomy

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 22, 2011| 41 Comments »

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.  –  Virginia Woolf

The neofeminist prohibitionists claim that all prostitutes are helpless victims of male dominance, slaves to “patriarchal oppressors”, and even many Americans who are rational but ill-informed have come to believe enough of the propaganda that they think “most” of us are coerced; even some escorts have bought into this notion sufficiently that they believe there are two and only two kinds of prostitutes, free-willed high-dollar independent escorts and pimped, coerced slaves.  This, of course, is pure poppycock; human relationships and even free will itself are never as cut-and-dried as either the neofeminists or the dualists want to pretend.  The notion that all prostitutes (or all workers, or all humans) must be either free or enslaved is a false duality which ignores both the realities of the human condition and the necessities of material existence.

The only people who can truly claim to have made an absolutely free choice to do any kind of work are the Paris Hiltons of the world, those who have a guaranteed inheritance, income and secured future no matter what they choose to do with the present.  Every other person has no choice but to work in some fashion; the choice not to work at all simply doesn’t exist unless one considers starvation an option.  At that point, then, the choice boils down to what kind of work one is able and willing to do.  I’d just love to be paid to do what I’m doing right now – namely, writing about whatever I want to write whenever I want to write it, without answering to anybody – but in the real world very few people who aren’t already bestselling authors get that opportunity.  Conversely, there are lots of things I’m quite able to do, but wouldn’t be willing to do regularly for pay.  As I’ve described before, I eventually settled on sex work as the best way to get everything I wanted career-wise (high income, flexibility, freedom from arbitrary schedules and rules and no confiscatory “withholding”)  while doing something I was already good at.  In other words, escorting provided the greatest advantages for the least compromise.  Eventually I made a slightly different choice, namely housewifery, when I came to a point in my life where it provided an even better fit than escorting had; the money was less and the responsibility greater, but the work was lighter and IMHO even more pleasant.

And I’m not remotely alone; millions of women all over the world and throughout history have chosen prostitution for similar reasons to mine.  Each of them took stock of her assets, needs and preferences and decided that whoring was the best way to accomplish her goals. The neofeminists claim that only women with no other choice decide to become prostitutes, but that’s as ridiculous an assertion as it is simplistic; there are many, many poor, unskilled women in this world who would never choose whoredom, and many, many educated, talented women who do.  Harlotry is not right for everyone, but then neither is teaching, nursing, motherhood, secretarial work or any other career.  All but a very small number of us must work, and everyone who isn’t actually compelled by force to do some particular form of work has some choice, however limited it may be.

But what about those who are literally compelled?  Obviously there are cases like the “comfort women”, but in modern times such forcible enslavement is comparatively rare, as our friend Jill Brenneman can tell you.  Some of what the rescue industry calls “slavery” is actually debt bondage (a condition with which I daresay much of the American middle class is intimately familiar), but some of it isn’t even that; as Laura Agustín has discussed on numerous occasions, a great deal of the “trafficking” mythology is rooted in the racist assumption that people (especially women) from undeveloped countries are childlike simpletons who can easily be manipulated by oh-so-superior Westerners, and so they are “enslaved” by the evil white men and can only be “rescued” by the good white men.  The “rescuers” presume that any foreign woman selling sex in Europe or the US is “trafficked”, when in reality the majority of them come of their own free will and the people who are labeled as “traffickers” are usually simply those who transported them and/or arranged for false papers.  Not to be outdone, the fanatics are now trying to claim that the reason migrants deny being enslaved is not because it’s the truth, but rather because they’re suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome”!  They simply cannot accept that some people really do prefer doing sex work to being virtual slaves in a sweatshop, and that they migrate not because they’re passively “trafficked” but because they’re actively looking for a better life than they could find in their own countries.

Of course, pointing any of this out to a trafficking fanatic will merely trigger an avalanche of “enslaved children” rhetoric.  But even that isn’t as it’s represented; as I’ve pointed out before, fewer than 250 underage prostitutes in America report having been coerced into the trade, and their average age at the time they become prostitutes is 16 rather than the 13 claimed by trafficking fetishists.  Considering that 16 is of legal age to consent to sex in 39 American states, I hardly think that qualifies as a “child”.  And in the developing world, 16 is in many cases an adult no matter what the UN may declare; even in the West the concept of 18 as a “magic number” of adulthood is a relatively recent one, and in most of the world such a distinction simply doesn’t exist.  Despite the efforts of ivory-tower idealists to declare adolescents “innocent children”, the fact is that legal minors often do leave home, sometimes with good reason, and many of them survive by selling sex…with nary a pimp nor “trafficker” in sight.

And what of the pimps?  Even though they’re pretty rare, certainly we can all agree that for a man to force a woman into prostitution and then take her money is wrong, can’t we?  Well…sort of.  I’d agree that for a man to use force and intimidation to control a woman is wrong, but the percentage of prostitutes with abusive, controlling pimps is very similar to the percentage of women with abusive, controlling husbands or boyfriends; some men are just bastards and some women are (for whatever reason) willing to put up with it, and whores are no exception.  At the most basic level, what is a pimp but a man who is supported by a woman’s work?  Sex work is work like any other, so a prostitute supporting a pimp who lacks a literal hold on her is no morally different from any other woman supporting her husband or boyfriend with any other kind of work.  Personally, I think for a wife to support an able-bodied man who isn’t a full-time student is pretty creepy, but I wouldn’t want it to be illegal because people have the right to make their own decisions, even if I or others think those decisions are bad, stupid or self-destructive.  Besides, so-called “anti-pimping” laws do much more harm than good; under many legalization regimes it is illegal (usually felonious) to “live off the avails” (i.e. derive a large portion of one’s support from someone else’s prostitution), which means that a prostitute is barred from being married, supporting adult family members such as university-age children or invalid parents, or even hiring employees such as secretaries or bodyguards.  Such laws are so obviously discriminatory that they were struck down last September in Ontario and Indian sex workers are fighting them, too.

Real life is not like a silent melodrama; the baddies do not all wear black hats and sport waxed moustaches, and many of the women who are tied to the railroad tracks are there because they consented to be and will not appreciate ham-fisted attempts at “rescue”.  There is a whole spectrum between the party girl whoring herself for thrills and the chained sex slave, and the number of prostitutes at the one end is no higher than that at the other.  The vast majority of us, like the vast majority of the human race, exist in the murky grey area between absolute freedom and abject slavery, trying our best to balance the pursuit of happiness with the toil necessary for survival.

Read Full Post »

Conjuration

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2011| 15 Comments »

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.  –  Wendell Phillips

Lawheads suffer from a sort of collective hubris; they honestly believe that a government can define reality by proclamation.  If lawmakers define a particular object or substance as “evil”, Presto!  It actually becomes evil in the minds of lawheads, even if it wasn’t the day before.  Define teenagers as children, and Alakazam!  They magically transform into helpless toddlers no matter what the lawhead’s senses and personal experience tell him.  But this legislatorial thaumaturgy is not limited to mere transmogrification; lawheads even believe in the power of governments to violate the Law of Conservation of Energy by conjuring things and events out of thin air.

A recent example of lawhead belief in these miraculous powers can be found in this article from the Washington Times of April 28th:

More than 80 percent of the 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking investigated by law enforcement agencies between January 2008 and June 2010 involved adult prostitution or the exploitation and forced prostitution of children, a Justice Department report released Thursday says.  The report, written by the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), says 48 percent of the investigated incidents involved adults, while 40 percent uncovered the exploitation or forced prostitution of children.  The remainder, about 350 cases, involved allegations of labor trafficking…Under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, according to the report, human trafficking is defined as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person to perform labor or a commercial sex act through force, fraud or coercion [but] any commercial sex act performed by a person under age 18 is considered human trafficking, regardless of whether force, fraud or coercion is involved…

I’m sure even the sleepiest reader caught the bit of legal legerdemain in the last line; though the crime of “human trafficking” is clearly (and sensibly, except for the weird and unnecessary singling out of sex work from other kinds of labor) defined in the first part of the sentence, legislators conjure “victims” out of thin air by defining ANY prostitution by someone under 18 – even a fully-cognizant and willful act of prostitution by one who looks much older – as “human trafficking”, despite the total absence of either force or anyone to apply that force!  Long-time readers may remember that I was universally taken for “about 25” since I was 16, and that my first act of outright prostitution was an opportunistic one shortly after my 18th birthday; had this asinine law been in effect at that time, and had the opportunity arisen just three months earlier, I would have magically become a “victim” of “human trafficking” – and presumably, a “trafficker” would have obediently materialized to “exploit” me.

But the other sleight-of-hand here is a bit more subtle and appears in the first line.  See it?  “More than 80 percent of the…suspected incidents of human trafficking investigated by law enforcement agencies…involved…prostitution…” That sounds like a serious problem until one realizes that the “authorities” choose which incidents to investigate, and just because 80% of those they pursued involved allegations of sex trafficking does NOT mean that 80% of all incidents (or even all reported incidents) involved it.  Sex attracts the attention of cops just as it attracts the attention of anyone else, and one “teen prostitute” is vastly more likely to be reported and investigated than hundreds of sunburned guys picking vegetables.  Furthermore, carefully compare the first two lines with the third; did you notice the missing word?  In the reference to forced labor the word “allegation” is clearly stated , but it’s omitted in reference to prostitution in order to make those cases seem like proven ones when in fact they, too were mere allegations; according to the actual (conveniently not linked to the Times article) BJS report, only 30% of them were “proven” even by the lax standards of the Bureau of Justice.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr…[called] human trafficking… “modern-day slavery”…[and] said it was “an affront to human dignity,” adding that men, women and children were being exploited for sex and labor in “virtually every corner of our nation.”

Abracadabra!   Having defined victims into existence, Holder then waves his magic wand and disperses them to “virtually every corner of our nation.”  The word “virtually” is a bit ironic, since these victims are “virtual” in the computer science sense, in other words “nonexistent in physical reality”.

…According to the report, more than four-fifths of the confirmed victims of sex trafficking — about 83 percent — were U.S. citizens, while 95 percent of the confirmed victims of labor trafficking were either illegal immigrants or foreign nationals working legally in the U.S.  The report also said the confirmed victims of human trafficking were predominantly female and that among the confirmed sex trafficking victims, they were “overwhelmingly female” at 94 percent and made up 68 percent of the labor trafficking victims as well.  Most of the confirmed sex trafficking incidents involved the prostitution of children (about 60 percent) compared with adult prostitution (about 40 percent)…

Hocus-pocus!  Since we define “victims” any way we find convenient, these “statistics” are worse than meaningless; they’re made to order from nothing.  And considering that A) anyone under 18 is defined as a “child”; B) the definition of “sex trafficking” is ludicrously broad for those individuals; C) “child sex trafficking” is the witch hunt du jour; and D) “authorities” determine both which cases to investigate and the standard by which cases are “confirmed”, I’m actually amazed that only 60% of the “confirmed” cases involve “child prostitution”.  Perhaps Holderini felt that pulling too many “child victims” out of his hat might attract undue scrutiny from the audience and thereby reveal that his performance relies entirely on smoke and mirrors.

Read Full Post »

As Young As Possible

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 29, 2010| 13 Comments »

When you assume, you make an ass of “u” and me. –  Felix Unger, The Odd Couple

I was asked by Brandy Devereaux to take a look at this study by the Schapiro Group, a marketing research firm hired by a prohibitionist group which like so many others uses the excuse of  “child trafficking” to attack adult prostitution.  As I expected, I found a deeply flawed study which reaches the exact conclusions it was designed to reach; what was especially interesting about this one, though, was the absolute transparency of the bias and the egregiousness of its errors.  Like most prohibitionist propaganda this report (which you may want to at least skim before proceeding) disguises inconvenient truths by covering them with emotionally-loaded language, but this isn’t its only problem: that dubious distinction goes to the fact that its basic premise, that compensated sex with a girl slightly below 18 is more illegal than compensated sex with one of 18 or greater, is entirely false.  The age of consent in Georgia is 16, not 18, and since prostitution is illegal in Georgia anyhow it is no more illegal for a man to purchase services from a 16- or 17-year-old whore than it is to purchase them from an 18-, 36- or 72-year-old one.

No study whose design reflects a biased viewpoint can hope to be remotely scientific; this even applies to the “hard” sciences, and is exponentially more so in the social sciences.  But since most biases are unconscious, it usually takes an expert eye to find them hiding between the lines of the studies they engender.  That was not true in this case; the very first line sets out the bias quite clearly: “This report details a first-of-its-kind study to quantify, describe, and understand demand for CSEC [Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children] in Georgia.  It paints a clear picture of the adult men who exploit adolescent females by paying for sex with them.”  By incorrectly (and perhaps intentionally) claiming that some young women who are legally permitted to consent to sex in Georgia are underage, redefining adolescents as “children”, and assuming that transactional sex even with one legally entitled to give consent is intrinsically exploitative, the study abandons all pretense to objectivity from the very beginning.  The depth of the bias is further confirmed at the top of page 4:

The [Chicago] study looked primarily at psychological and life history determinants of the decision to purchase sex as an adult.  While this is valuable to examine, searching for individual “abnormalities” will always lead CSEC advocates astray; CSEC can only exist as a commercial enterprise if it is a sadly normal practice in our society.  The same can be said of prostitution broadly, and the results of the Chicago study bear this truth out.  Men who purchase sex tend to come from normal backgrounds and seem no more likely to suffer from apparent pathologies than the rest of the adult male population.  There simply appears to be no magic bullet in determining what individual qualities and experiences lead a man to purchase sex.  Prostitution is a societal problem, not an individual problem.

Prostitution in general is defined as a “problem”, and employment of a whore is assumed to be pathological despite the fact that 70% of men have done it at least once and 20% do it occasionally.  If a real scientist read a study which showed that prostitutes’ clients come from normal backgrounds and demonstrate no unusual psychological characteristics, he would conclude that they were indeed normal men.  But a biased sociologist reading the same report cannot accept those results and so hints darkly at hidden psychopathology.

It is clearly this bias which caused the designers of the study to miss the obvious age of consent issue, and thereby render their entire study completely useless.  While some of the girls involved in so-called “CSEC” are undoubtedly below 16, the study was not designed to determine how many men would have sex with a truly underage girl vs. how many with a girl who was merely below the age at which the study’s sponsors feel they should be allowed to consent.  The results are thus contaminated, because there is no way of knowing how the men might have responded differently had they believed the imaginary teen prostitute to be 15 rather than 16.  Another contaminating bias lies in the obvious inability of the researchers to separate the legal concept of competence from the psychological one.  I use the term “lawhead” to mean a person suffering from the delusion that laws define reality; to a lawhead, any person whom the law declares incompetent to decide something is actually incompetent to do so.  Thus, a lawhead truly believes (to borrow an analogy from regular reader Sailor Barsoom) that at midnight on his 18th birthday, a person says “Shazam!” and is instantly transformed from all-child to all-adult, from the equivalent of a 5-year-old to the equivalent of a 50-year-old.  Obviously this is absurd, but it is equally obvious that the sponsors essentially believe it.  Since they mistakenly believe any girl under 18 is not legally able to consent to sex, they also believe that such a girl is literally unable to consent; thus she must have been forced into prostitution and is therefore exploited.  This chain of dependent assumptions turns a mundane reality these people find uncomfortable (that some girls below 18 are both legally and practically able to consent to sex with adult men) into a lurid sex fantasy (that every single prostitute below the age of 18 is a helpless victim of “child traffickers”) which furthers their prohibitionist agenda.

The researchers placed fake escort ads in such venues as Craigslist and Backpage; the ads contained young girls posed and photographed so as to make them appear older.  We are not told how young the models were except that they were under 18; if all of them were 16 or 17 even the most minimal factual basis of the study collapses, and even if they were 14 or 15 they were still posed so as to make them appear (by the admission of the authors) 6-8 years older than their actual age.  In this lies another fatal flaw:  As I have said on several occasions, the most common request is “as young as possible”, and because of this escorts habitually lie about their ages.  Considering that even most amateur women do the same thing, it is both ridiculous and grossly insulting to the intelligence of the male population to presume that all men everywhere are so gullible as to believe every age figure they are given by women; I think it is much more likely that most men tend to ignore the age they are told and instead judge by appearance.  So even when (as described on page 11-12) the false “operators” implied to the men that the girl in the ad was under 18, we have no way of knowing whether the callers actually believed this claim or just assumed it was a provocative lie.  Since the age of consent in Georgia is 16, this allows a two-year “fudge factor” which makes it absolutely impossible to know if even a SINGLE caller actually believed he was going to hire a truly underage (15 or younger) girl; most may have believed they were actually going to meet with girls in their late teens or early twenties pretending to be 16 or 17.  But the study’s authors, ignorant as they are of the behavior of real prostitutes and disdainful as they are of the moral character of customers, presume the exact opposite:  That the men “knew” they would be hiring an underage girl and did not care.  The report states (page 1) “While many of the men who exploit these children are not seeking adolescent females per se, the study also shows that just under half are willing to pay for sex with a young female even when they know for sure she is an adolescent.”  In fact, as we have seen, they know nothing of the kind!

The final catastrophic error in this so-called “study” derives from the authors’ indulgence in the gross logical fallacy of assuming without evidence the total truth of their own beliefs, and then proceeding to extrapolate erroneous deductions from the false conditions they have designed.  Let me explain; the authors presume that not only are the great majority of prostitutes underage, but that they are all dominated or controlled by “traffickers” who prefer to “push” the younger girls for some reason.  We know that absolutely none of these assumptions is true, but the experiment reflects them:  the imaginary “traffickers” who control the imaginary underage prostitutes in their false ads prefer to only send older girls if the clients ask for them or specifically refuse the girl in the picture once they learn she may be under 18.  Based on the presumption that this fantasy reflects the real world, the authors then reach the wholly absurd conclusion that any man who does not specifically forbid an underage girl from virtually ANY online ad whatsoever will definitely end up with such a girl.  Based on this long chain of ridiculous assumptions they state “The numbers are staggering — 12,400 men each month in Georgia pay for sex with a young female, 7,200 of whom end up exploiting an adolescent female.”  This assertion is made on page 1 and repeated numerous times throughout the paper despite the fact that it is so unsupported as to constitute a flagrant lie.

I’ll leave you with a few more false and inflammatory statements from the report:

Our interviewer posed as an “operator”; a person who brokers the purchase of multiple females.

I guess a clinic receptionist “brokers the purchase of multiple doctors”, then?

This is a common situation for men who buy sex from females pictured on the internet.  Very often the phone is answered by an operator who can either connect the customer with the female pictured in the advertisement, or with a variety of other females as well.

Actually, it isn’t.  The vast majority of girls who advertise on Craigslist, Backpage and other such ad sites are independents who answer their own phones.

After all, how can an adult male have sex with a female and not know she is an adolescent?

Because as we all know, at midnight on “magic 18” a woman’s body changes instantly and totally from flat-chested and boy-hipped to curvaceous and fully adult.

Read Full Post »

Reading Between the Lines

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 12, 2010| 16 Comments »

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.  The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. –  Joseph Goebbels

The following article appeared on the FBI website on Tuesday; since it is from a public entity I will reprint it verbatim.  Read it carefully, recognizing what it says and what it doesn’t say; I’ll interpolate my comments between paragraphs.

Over the past 72 hours, the FBI, its local and state law enforcement partners, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) concluded Operation Cross Country V, a three-day national enforcement action as part of the Innocence Lost National Initiative.  The operation included enforcement actions in 40 cities across 34 FBI divisions around the country and led to the recovery of 69 children who were being victimized through prostitution.  Additionally, nearly 885 others, including 99 pimps, were arrested on state and local charges.

The very first thing which should jump out at you is “885 others, including 99 pimps, were arrested on state and local charges.”  How do they know that 99 were pimps?  Were they wearing garish clothes and funny hats?  Or perhaps they had ID cards in their wallets which said “pimp”?  What this obviously translates into is that 99 of the people arrested have been accused of being pimps on the basis of their male gender, which means the other 786 people arrested were all adult female prostitutes.  Let that number sink in for a moment; this heroic “task force” action to supposedly rescue 69 “children who were being victimized through prostitution” (i.e. underage prostitutes, most of them 16-17) was actually just an excuse for the FBI to help local cops bust nearly 800 hookers, mostly streetwalkers and massage parlor girls but probably a number of escorts as well (there’s no way to tell until and unless an investigative journalist ferrets out the identities of those 786 unidentified “others”).  I think most of y’all can probably see why they’re not identified; it wouldn’t look too good if a raid on those who “prostitute women and children across many states” actually victimized hundreds of  “prostituted” women.

“Child prostitution continues to be a significant problem in our country, as evidenced by the number of children rescued through the continued efforts of our crimes against children task forces,” said Shawn Henry, executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch.  “There is no work more important than protecting America’s children and freeing them from the cycle of victimization.  Through our strategic partnerships with state and local law enforcement agencies, we are able to make a difference.”

Let’s see now, the last propaganda figure I saw said there were 200,000 “prostituted children” in the US, and your raid just rescued how many?  69.  Allowing both figures are correct (which is generous indeed), that’s 0.0345%.  Offhand, I’d call that a colossal failure and therefore nothing to brag about.  “There is no work more important than protecting America’s children and freeing them from the cycle of victimization.” If you really believe that, why do you continue to support a strategy which clearly doesn’t work?  Why not try something new, like, oh, I don’t know, decriminalizing adult prostitution so we and our clients can help y’all find the underage girls and bust their pimps?  “Through our strategic partnerships with state and local law enforcement agencies, we are able to make a difference.” 0.0345% is not a difference.  If you were robbed of $2000 and the cops succeeded in recovering 69¢ of it, would you consider that something for them to swagger and crow about?  I sure wouldn’t.

Task Force operations usually begin as local actions, targeting such places as truck stops, casinos, street “tracks,” and Internet websites, based on intelligence gathered by officers working in their respective jurisdictions.  Initial arrests are often violations of local and state laws relating to prostitution or solicitation.  Information gleaned from those arrested often uncovers organized efforts to prostitute women and children across many states.  FBI agents further develop this information in partnership with U.S. Attorney’s Offices and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) and file federal charges where appropriate.  To date, the 39 Innocence Lost Task Forces and Working Groups have recovered over 1,200 children from the streets.  The investigations and subsequent 625 convictions have resulted in lengthy sentences, including multiple 25-years-to-life sentences and the seizure of more than $3.1 million in assets.

This paragraph is the gold mine.  “Task Force operations…[target] such places as truck stops, casinos…and Internet websites, based on intelligence gathered by officers working in their respective jurisdictions.” What all this high-falutin’ talk translates into is “prostitution stings”.  “Initial arrests are often violations of local and state laws relating to prostitution or solicitation.” In other words, popping hookers; this is their attempt to justify literally “making a federal case” out of misdemeanor prostitution busts.  “Information gleaned from those arrested often uncovers organized efforts to prostitute women and children across many states.” This is the most ominous-sounding sentence in the whole story, but do you understand what it means?  It means they threaten clients and escorts with unending federal and state persecution (including but not limited to Mann Act prosecutions, IRS audits and “Child Protective Services” Gestapo actions) unless they cough up their usernames and passwords for escort advertising websites and review boards (“organized efforts to prostitute women…across many states”) so the FBI and local cops can set up stings for escorts.

“… the 39…Task Forces and Working Groups have recovered over 1,200 children from the streets…and [have resulted in] 625 convictions…” Let’s assume the arrest rate in this particular “task force” is the same as that in the other 38; that means they’ve arrested about 15,391 people so far, of which 13,669 were whores.  But out of all that, they’ve only scored 625 convictions, or 4.06%.  Now, I’m not exactly an expert in law, but something tells me a 4% conviction rate isn’t very good; given the ease with which the Feds railroad people, I would call it terrible.  What we have here is a boondoggle on a massive scale, resulting in a diversion of federal funds to arrest women for violating local laws under the aegis of “protecting children.”

In the spring of 2003, the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, in partnership with the Department of Justice’s CEOS and NCMEC, formed the Innocence Lost National Initiative to address the growing problem of children forced into prostitution.  “The leadership of the FBI and the Justice Department in attacking domestic child trafficking and prostitution is historic,” said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  “Once again, Operation Cross Country has awakened the nation to the fact that today, American children are being marketed and sold for sex in American cities.  These kids are victims.  This is 21st century slavery.  We are proud to be a part of this extraordinary partnership to rescue children, save lives, and bring the pimps and operators to justice.”

This program brings state and federal law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and social service providers all from around the country to NCMEC, where the groups are trained together.  In addition, CEOS has reinforced the training by assigning prosecutors to help bring cases in those cities plagued by child prostitution.  The FBI thanks the over 2,100 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers representing 186 separate agencies who participated in Operation Cross Country and ongoing enforcement efforts.  The charges announced today are merely accusations, and all defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty in a court of law.

The last two paragraphs are basically nothing but hot air full of the usual misidentifications and conflations; teenagers are defined as “children”, advertising or review websites referred to as “operators” or “pimps”, the problem is “ever-increasing” (which again means their tactics are ineffective), and putting people to sleep is described as “awakening” them.  Fortunately, not everyone is subject to propaganda-induced hypnosis; I leave you with this article by Joanna Chiu about the so-called “Innocence Lost” scam, courtesy of (appropriately enough) RealityCheck.org.

(Special thanks to Brandy Devereaux for featuring a “sneak preview” of this column on her TCAA site).

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts