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Posts Tagged ‘social purity’

They Speak for Themselves

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged At Least They're Consistent, bad customers, California, censorship, condoms, dirty, disease, escort services, ethics, Florida, hysteria, Kansas, law, politicians, porn, sex rays, social purity, Somehow I Doubt..., stage names, stereotypes, stripping, teachers, United Kingdom on September 8, 2011| 12 Comments »

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice? – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Usually when I report on a number of short news stories in a column, I have some sort of commentary on them; these stories, however, largely speak for themselves so I present them with only minimal comment.

Well, At Least They’re Consistent

Florida is well-known for its legislative and judicial excesses, but back in the Social Purity Era its legislators apparently decided that fornication should be illegal whether money changed hands or not. The law has rarely been enforced, but a legislator now wants to get rid of it and other outdated laws; as you might expect, none of his colleagues are interested. From the August 31^st Sun-Sentinel:

…”Cohabitation” of unmarried people is currently a second-degree misdemeanor, punishable by $500 or up to 60 days in jail. The same penalty applies to cheating husbands and wives — though only to opposite-sex couples. The laws have been on the books since the late 1800s, but are rarely enforced. In 2006, though, a Jacksonville woman did take advantage of the law and have her husband arrested for cheating, according to a news report. (It’s not clear how the case came out.) Now, Rep. Ritch Workman, R-Melbourne, is on a mission to repeal the statutes penalizing adultery and cohabitation, as well as other laws he finds outdated, like a requirement that all bicycle riders keep one hand on the handle bars. He filed…the bill last week — it’s HB 4021 — though he hasn’t returned phone calls about it for the past two days.

Nobody else much wants to talk about it either. Asked how Gov. Rick Scott felt about the measure, spokeswoman Amy Graham replied simply, “This isn’t an issue the governor is focused on.” The bill has no Senate counterpart. And given the almost-certain opposition of social conservatives who lobby hard on “family values” issues, it’ll face tough sledding in an election year. Consider the response of State Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, who previously headed the Florida chapter of the Christian Coalition: “I’m not ready to give up on monogamy and a cultural statement that marriage still matters,” he said.

I guess Workman hasn’t yet learned that most politicians never want to limit the number of ways they can harass, threaten and persecute people.

Somehow, I Doubt He Thought This Through

Posted September 1^st on The Smoking Gun:

A Kansas man who called police yesterday to claim that he was robbed by two female escorts hired via an online service later admitted that he just “wanted a refund” from the women. Ahmed Hasnain, 26, was arrested on a misdemeanor charge in connection with the bizarre incident at a Motel 6 in Wichita, according to a Wichita Police Department report. Hasnain…told cops that he had expected only one hooker to show up and “didn’t like that there were two women.” After paying the pair $160, Hasnain decided that he wanted his money back…So…[he] called 911 at around 5 AM to lodge his complaint. Based on his own statements, Hasnain was charged with patronizing a prostitute. Perhaps he will consider calling the Better Business Bureau the next time he wants to register a consumer complaint.

And perhaps in the future he’ll also reserve 911 for real emergencies, like McDonald’s running out of Chicken McNuggets.

The British Policy on Sex Rays

In the United States, teachers who are discovered to have done sex work in the past are removed from the classroom lest their bodies emit invisible “sex rays” which might contaminate the tender little asexual innocents who discover them by watching porn. In England, sex-ray phobia is just as prevalent, but apparently bureaucratic inertia protects sex-working teachers despite their being officially condemned. According to a BBC story from September 1^st:

Benedict Garrett, 31…was found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct but left free to continue teaching. A disciplinary hearing was told pupils at Beal High School in Ilford had seen him in a trailer for a porn film. Mr Garrett said: “What is wrong about it? I can’t see anything…I don’t think I’ve done anything that goes against my values and I worked incredibly hard as a teacher. What a teacher chooses to do in their life outside that work is up to them.”

…Mr Garrett…whose [stage name] is Johnny Anglais, said he had no plans to return to teaching…He admitted it “might be slightly embarrassing” if students had seen his porn films, but “no more than me starring as a monkey in the school musical”. He said students should not have seen his pornography work, as it was intended for over-18s, but added: “It’s perfectly natural. Get over it.” He added he did not see himself as a role model, asking: “If teachers are role models, why do we tolerate teachers who smoke, when smoking is linked to thousands of deaths? Do we look at teachers who are fat and say you shouldn’t be teaching? Obesity is linked to thousands of deaths,” he added. “However, I’ve heard from students who have told me they believe I’m a role model because I’m standing up for what I’ve believe in.”

Norman Wells, from the Family Education Trust, which campaigns against pornography and supports policies which promote marriage, said: “Benedict Garrett is being naive if he imagines that performing as a stripper and appearing in porn films is compatible with teaching responsible attitudes towards sex and relationships as a teacher of personal, social and health education. The vast majority of parents would be uncomfortable, to say the least, to have their children taught by someone involved in the sleazy world of the sex industry.”

Presumably, the sleazy world of politics is OK with Mr. Wells. Maybe Melissa Petro and Tera Myers should move to the U.K.

Michael Weinstein Isn’t Happy About This

More news about the porn performer mentioned in my column of September 1^st, from the Huffington Post of two days later:

An adult film performer who tested positive for HIV and caused the porn industry to shut down production as a precaution has been retested and…does not have the virus…production can now resume, said Free Speech Coalition executive director Diane Duke. “The industry will be abundantly cautious as we try to nail down the reasons for what now appears to have been a false positive result on a previous test,” Duke said. The actor, who was in Florida, had been slated to work on a shoot for Mofos.com, but production was halted last week when the test came back positive for HIV. Duke declined to release the performer’s name, age or gender, citing the person’s right to medical privacy. She also declined to say how her group learned of the case…which…was found at an out-of-state clinic that does not report to California health officials, Duke said.

The porn industry was similarly shuttered in late 2010, after porn actor Derrick Burts was diagnosed as HIV-positive. His case was confirmed, and he has since left the industry to become an advocate for the use of condoms in pornography. The Free Speech Coalition is working on a database to track sexually transmitted disease testing among porn actors, a task formerly handled by the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation before it closed in December 2010. Known as AIM, the San Fernando Valley clinic had catered to porn stars since it opened in 1998. It was forced to close because of inadequate licensing.

The last line is incorrect; the clinic was actually forced to shut down by an illegal “cease and desist” order from the Los Angeles Department of Public Health, as reported in my column of March 7^th.

One Year Ago Today

“All Shapes and Sizes” discusses the huge morphological variety of human genitalia, and addresses (among other things) the oft-asked question, “what is the average penis size, really?”

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Lulu White

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged archeofeminism, brothels, Catholicism, cops, Hollywood, law, New Orleans, Prohibition (alcohol), restaurants, social purity, stage names on September 3, 2011| 46 Comments »

What it comes down to is this: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, the policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician—these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin. – Polly Adler

Business was booming for the whores of late 19^th-century New Orleans; there were some 2000 prostitutes and about 40 brothels scattered all over the city, and it is estimated that the gross income of the city’s sex trade at that time amounted to some $15 million per year (about $360 million in 2011 dollars!) Then, as now, this money flowed through the demimonde and into the conventional economy, enriching merchants, restauranteurs, liquor dealers, furniture stores, shoe salesmen, milliners and landlords, to name just a few. And considering that many of those businesses were owned by politicians (and the biggest landlord in New Orleans is the Catholic Church), there was a vested interest in keeping those businesses lucrative. So when the social purity movement reached New Orleans in the 1890s and pressure began to mount for something to be “done about” prostitution, Alderman Sidney Story proposed restricting it to one part of town. This was enacted into law in 1897, and the newspapers dubbed the resulting district “Storyville” (much to the alderman’s chagrin). One year ago today I published a short history of prostitution in New Orleans with emphasis on Storyville, and today I’ll tell you about one of its more famous denizens, a madam known as Lulu White.

Lulu White, circa 1900

Her real name was apparently Lulu Hendley, and she was born sometime before 1870 on a farm near Selma, Alabama; she was a quadroon (¼ black) or possibly a light-skinned mulatto, but she claimed to be from the West Indies and to have “not a drop of Negro blood” (though nobody who met her believed this claim). She arrived in New Orleans in the early 1880s with an older dark-skinned black man who is believed to have been her stepfather (though nothing else is known of him) and immediately began working as a whore, but so ambitious and charming was she that despite average looks and a short, dumpy figure she managed to attract a number of wealthy and influential clients including an oil man, a railroad tycoon and a department-store owner, and by the end of the ‘80s she was a madam with a house of her own. Further proof of her business skill can be discerned in the fact that, though she was arrested countless times in the ‘80s on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to pandering, by 1892 she had such political influence that her mansion at 166 Customhouse Street was assessed at a mere $300…while a much smaller and plainer house across the street was assessed at $1200.

The Arlington (left, with domed cupola) and Mahogany Hall (right, with tower)

But this house was itself small in comparison with Mahogany Hall, the $40,000 four-story brothel she built at 235 Basin Street (two doors down from The Arlington) when The District was organized in 1897. Mahogany Hall was an “octoroon parlor”, i.e. a bordello staffed by Creole girls of roughly one-eighth Negro blood; one of these girls, Victoria Hall, was so lovely that Lulu “borrowed” her photo for use in her own ad for the “Blue Book” of 1906 (in which she rather dubiously claimed to be 31, which would’ve made her a madam before she turned 15). Lulu made a tremendous amount of money, and spent much of it on clothes and jewelry; as Al Rose explains in his 1974 history Storyville, New Orleans:

Vivid is the recollection still alive in certain aging heads, of Lulu descending the “hall’s” swirling staircase, decked out in her gaudy display of diamonds, smiling her celebrated diamond-studded smile, and singing her favorite song, “Where the Moon Shines”. Attired in a bright red wig and an elaborate formal gown, she wore diamond rings on all her fingers (including thumbs), bracelets up both arms, a diamond necklace, a tiara, an emerald alligator brooch on her chest – the works!

Rose also notes that the 1934 Mae West film Belle of the Nineties was originally entitled Belle of New Orleans and was inspired by Lulu White’s life, but due to the pervasive racism of the time all racial references were suppressed. Forty years later, the brothel madam in Pretty Baby (1978) was also clearly inspired by Lulu; she wears a red wig and excessive jewelry, and her brothel has a swirling mahogany staircase.

Lulu was a savvy businesswoman who understood the value of diversification and had an appreciation for new opportunities; in 1906 she made a business trip to Hollywood (in her private railway carriage) in order to investigate the potential of the new technological innovation, motion pictures. She made deals for real estate and production facilities which would’ve made her the owner of the largest studio in town, then returned to New Orleans to get the funds together. But her next move was one of those critical mistakes which changes history: she trusted someone who proved untrustworthy, namely her “fancy man”, George Killshaw. He and Lulu had been together since soon after her arrival in New Orleans, but he was slim, handsome, charming and could easily pass for white, so when Lulu sent him to California to complete the deal for her with $150,000 in cash (about $3.6 million in today’s currency) he decided to drop out of sight and start a new life elsewhere, probably as a white man.

Strangely, Lulu made no effort to find him (probably because she didn’t trust the police), but picked herself up and resumed planning for the future (albeit on a smaller scale). In 1908 she built a saloon right next door to Mahogany Hall, at the corner of Basin and Bienville Streets; it opened for business in 1912, but with the arrival of Prohibition in 1919 it ostensibly became a soft drink bar. By this time, of course, Storyville had been closed (as I explain in last year’s column) to satisfy the prudery of the Secretary of the Navy, and due to the Hollywood disaster the bar was Lulu’s only remaining business. She secretly sold liquor there, but due to her reputation was repeatedly arrested throughout the ‘20s for violating the Volstead Act. Eventually she tired of dodging the cops, and in 1929 sold the building to Leon Heymann. It was one of the few Storyville buildings not bulldozed to construct the Iberville Housing Project in the 1930s, and though it lost its upper story to Hurricane Betsy the year before I was born, the lower story was refurbished and today houses a neighborhood market.

Lulu herself vanished from history after 1931, but is known to have been alive for at least ten years afterward because (as Rose reports) she made a withdrawal from her account at the Whitney National Bank in 1941 and was recognized by the teller; her fate beyond that is unknown, but at the time she would’ve been in her seventies and is not likely to have survived much longer. There is no death certificate on record in Louisiana, so it is possible she returned to her birthplace to die (though there is no death record in Alabama, either) or else succumbed in some public place and was never identified. What a sad end for one of the harlot queens of New Orleans; imagine how different Hollywood (and perhaps even America) might’ve been had its largest studio been owned not only by a black woman, but a proud and unrepentant whore!

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Part of the Picture

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, tagged censorship, dirty, Europe, harm reduction, hysteria, infidelity, law, marriage, masturbation, neofeminism, Part of the Picture, porn, psychology, social purity, yin and yang on August 29, 2011| 81 Comments »

Faith…tries to retain a primitive mental condition on merely sentimental grounds. It is unwilling to give up the primitive, childlike relationship to mind-created and hypostatized figures; it wants to go on enjoying the security and confidence of a world still presided over by powerful, responsible, and kindly parents. – Carl Jung

The universe is a very complex place. When human civilization was young we weren’t really able to grasp how complex, so we imagined that most things were largely as they appeared to be and that the mysteries of the world were all caused by intelligent, free-willed beings like ourselves, only more powerful. Thus was religion born; in its earliest form it served to explain the world, to give emotional comfort and to provide a unifying structure over related (but separate) groups of people, thus allowing organization of tribes into cities and nations. But as time went on, humans developed science (which explained things better than religion ever did), civil government (which organized things at least as well as religion ever did), and social and political philosophies which…well, two out of three ain’t bad. And thus religion became a solution in search of a problem, and so it remained until the increasing complexity and uncertainty of the modern world caused many people, overwhelmed by a world they could not understand, to retreat into religions and religion-like belief systems which promised them simplicity and certainty. Since these systems are rigid and simplistic, they cannot possibly describe the world as it is; they therefore exclude facts which do not fit the picture by denying or simply ignoring them. A simple, static view of the world is impossible unless one considers only part of the picture.

Sex is one of the most complex of human realities; it is dark, violent, chthonic, animalistic and occurs in a bewildering multiplicity of forms, yet forms the basis of our most powerful emotions and most enduring social relationships and is an intrinsic part of the human life-cycle (every one of us is the product of heterosexual copulation). Small wonder that it makes nearly everyone uncomfortable to one degree or another, and that humans have been trying to control it, individually and collectively, since practically the dawn of civilization. Primitive societies and religions had few sexual laws, but as humanity aged cultures felt an increasing need to make laws against sexual behavior they considered somehow disturbing. Due to the fact that though the mother of a child is always known, the father never actually was until DNA testing was invented, most of these laws at first concentrated on controlling female sexuality so paternity could be ascertained with a reasonable degree of certainty (in theory, anyhow); the laws which applied to males mostly dealt with incest, bestiality and that sort of thing. For reasons we’ve discussed before Judaism had an unusually high number of sex laws, and when the followers of a certain 1^st-century rabbi managed to build their sect into an international phenomenon those sex laws went with them; when combined with the Platonic distrust of the material world absorbed from the Gnostics, they engendered a rejection of sexuality more aggressive and complete than that of any previous religion.

But though Europe was entirely Christian in name by the end of the first millennium CE, a pagan view of sexuality was still the norm among most of the population (especially the lower classes) until the Protestant Reformation, when the Church’s light-handed supervision of politics and broad tolerance of what it considered minor vices were replaced in many areas by near-theocratic governments and total suppression of vice. Laws derived from religious teachings became more and more common, ebbing and flowing in waves until the “social purity” crusade of the late 19^th century succeeded in establishing anti-sex laws based in a rigid, Protestant interpretation of Christian morality over virtually the entire Western world. And though these laws are still the norm in the United States, they are beginning to erode here and have already largely decayed in most other Western countries. Those of us who believe in self-determination, individual liberty and other such rational principles feel this is a good thing, but those who are disturbed by moral complexities and afraid of self-reliance yearn for a time when puritanical notions of Christian morality were enforced at gunpoint. So they join religious groups whose avowed doctrine is the eradication of “sin” and the promotion of laws against prostitution, porn, homosexuality and other behaviors they perceive as “immoral”.

But lest one believe that these people are thoroughgoing hypocrites, consider this August 21^st article from CNN about various Christian anti-porn “therapy” programs (the link seems very temperamental, so I’ve saved it in PDF form just in case you can’t get it to work). Most of those interviewed are men who have bought into the twisted delusion that masturbation or even looking at pictures of women to whom they aren’t married is a form of infidelity, largely based on a literal reading of Matthew 5:28 (“whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart”) and an 18^th-century interpretation of the story of Onan. This is really nothing new; the idea that some kind of “therapy” can prevent masturbation and “lascivious thoughts” dates to the end of the 19^th century. What is new, though by no means surprising, is the fusion of Christian dogma with feminist rhetoric and “sex addiction” pop psychology; “addiction” is portrayed as an outside force which tempts the “pure” mind to fall into “sin” and thus causes it to depart from “God’s plan”, just as devils were once imagined to do. Some of the programs are simply ordinary therapy with a Christian component; others are a more equal fusion, and still others rely largely or entirely on the imagined power of prayer to exorcise unholy lust. Web-based services hawk porn-detection spyware that sends copies to the user’s spouse or a friend in order to shame him into refraining. And as you can probably guess, practitioners of each method strongly criticize all the other ones.

Nor is it only men who join these programs; because women are generally less at ease with normal sexuality than men are, the majority of anti-sex crusaders are and always have been women. In the past female sexuality was not a subject “proper” women would discuss in reference to themselves, so the fingers of accusation were (and still are, in the case of neofeminists) pointed outward at other women. But now that female sexuality has been removed from the dark cupboard in which it was kept for centuries, women who are uncomfortable with their own sexuality are now free to hop on the self-loathing bandwagon and pronounce themselves “sex addicts” and “porn addicts” just like men. The CNN story rightfully treats Crystal Renaud’s “Dirty Girls Ministries” as part of the larger Christian anti-porn, anti-masturbation movement, but an article in the September Utne Reader rather oddly chooses to portray it as an isolated phenomenon. Considering the magazine’s target audience this was probably done in order to sell the “feminist” angle, but I wonder if the fact that some feminists really do believe male masturbation to be adultery might not have something to do with it. Whatever the reason, the writer, like a Christian anti-sex “therapist”, is only presenting part of the picture.

One Year Ago Today

“Whore Madonnas” offers an anecdotal refutation of the Madonna-whore duality by relating the stories of three women who only became whores because they were Madonnas first.

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Peeping Toms

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged asset seizure, cops, dirty, law, lawheads, LGBT rights, Louisiana, marriage, Peeping Toms, sisterhood, social purity, Utah on July 27, 2011| 28 Comments »

There is no reason to believe that there is one law for families and another for nations. – Mohandas Gandhi

The state of cognitive dissonance in which supporters of big government live is truly stupefying; it requires acceptance of the notion that an action which is wrong for one person, and even worse if repeated by many people, somehow becomes not merely acceptable but moral if practiced by governments or their representatives. If one man steals it’s “theft”, if many do it together it’s “looting”, but when the perpetrator is a government it becomes either “asset forfeiture” or “eminent domain”. We could make similar statements about such crimes as assault, trespassing, perjury, extortion, bribery, kidnapping and murder. And though we rightfully revile individuals who go peeking into others’ windows to spy on them, especially if the window is in a bathroom or other private place, governments seem to consider voyeuristic intrusion into the bedrooms of citizens to be not merely a right, but a moral imperative.

Though religions (especially Judeo-Christian ones) have long felt entitled to dictate the sexual behavior of their followers, civil governments have generally pursued the subject with less enthusiasm and vice laws have therefore repeatedly gone in and out of favor since the Fall of Rome. As regular readers know, the last great proliferation of such laws came with the social purity movement of the late 19^th century, and though this mountain of busybody legislation has been slowly worn away since the beginning of the 1930s, in the United States the rate of erosion has been intermittent and progress at removing this vast insult to liberty has been impeded at every step of the process by the kind of people who stay up late at night trying to imagine what their neighbors might be doing behind drawn blinds.

But in 2003 the United States Supreme Court struck terror into the hearts of control freaks from sea to shining sea with its Lawrence vs. Texas decision, which declared sodomy laws unconstitutional. John Lawrence and Tyron Gardner were having consensual homosexual relations in Lawrence’s Houston apartment one September night in 1997 when a Houston cop (summoned by a false domestic disturbance call from a jealous neighbor who was in love with Garner) literally peeked in the back window, saw the two having sex and entered like a big hero with gun drawn to arrest the dirty fags and thereby save the unsuspecting citizens of Texas from perverts in their midst. They pled no contest to violating Texas’ sodomy law but their appeals went all the way to the SCOTUS, which overturned their conviction, the law under which they had been charged, all similar laws in every state and the 1986 Bowers vs. Hardwick decision, which had essentially ruled that sodomy laws were OK because the Founding Fathers hated homos. Justice ~~Torquemada~~ Scalia vehemently opposed the entire decision, but especially the overturning of Bowers because, as he correctly pointed out, “state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’s validation of laws based on moral choices.” (Actually, there are valid arguments for laws against adultery and bestiality that aren’t based in Christian morality, but we’ll leave that for another time).

Though homosexuals (rightfully) hailed the ruling as a giant step forward for individual sexual freedom, the whore-haters were not to be outmaneuvered so easily; they quietly inserted an “anti-prostitution pledge” into a major humanitarian aid bill and began to ramp up the “human trafficking” hysteria, thus preemptively blocking any attempt to argue that prostitution laws were unconstitutional under Lawrence by intentionally and deceptively conflating a now-technically-legal activity with a serious (but extremely rare) crime specifically prohibited by the 13^th amendment to the Constitution. Meanwhile in Louisiana, felony persecution of whores continued unabated thanks to the Louisiana legislature’s foresight in having enacted (back in 1982) a separate “Crime Against Nature by Solicitation” law which allowed the state to continue torturing adults for life if they dared to mix behavior protected under Lawrence with the capitalistic principles on which the entire American system was founded. But the tide released by Lawrence is still dissolving prudery everywhere; the anti-prostitution pledge was struck down by an appeals court on July 6^th, and facing the specter of Doe vs. Jindal Louisiana reduced the penalty for “Crime Against Nature by Solicitation” to the same as those for simple prostitution. And now, as Scalia predicted, Utah’s law against polyamory is under attack:

…On Wednesday [July 13^th], the Brown family — the husband, four wives, and 16 children who star in the reality TV show [Sister Wives]…file[d] a lawsuit in federal court in Utah. The family members say the state’s anti-bigamy law is unconstitutional and that Supreme Court precedent backs them up…Brown and his four wives knew they were taking a risk when they signed the deal with the network TLC. But Robyn Brown, wife No. 4, told viewers they wanted to make a point. “It’s OK for us to live this way, honestly,” she said. “I’m sorry — but this is a nation of freedom of choice. We should have this choice, and I want my kids to know that.”

…Kody Brown is legally married to only one wife; the three others are his “spiritual wives.” But [Utah] law says it’s a crime if a married person purports to marry or cohabits with another person. Prosecutors say they’ll decide whether to bring charges against the Browns in the next two or three weeks. In the meantime, the Browns have moved to Nevada and are suing in federal court. Their lawyer, Jonathan Turley, says the state is persecuting model citizens for living out their religious values. “There is no allegation of child abuse, no allegation of child brides, no allegations of so-called collateral crimes,” says Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University Law School. “But prosecutors have stated publicly that they believe the family is committing a felony every night on television.” Turley says prosecutors look the other way when it comes to nonpolygamous relationships. “You can have multiple lovers; you can have adulterous affairs and not be subject to prosecution,” he says. “But the minute you refer to her as your spiritual wife, you become a potential criminal defendant.”

This isn’t about personal rights, says Marci Hamilton. It’s about a state’s ability to regulate marital relationships. Hamilton, an expert on polygamy law and a professor at Cardozo School of Law, says there is a mountain of evidence that polygamy is bad for women and children…”This isn’t a lifestyle choice,” she says. “This is a culture in which men must rule and women are not equal. Three women are equal to one man, nine women are equal to one man — and the children are second-class citizens.” Hamilton says there have been more than 100 challenges to polygamy laws, including in Utah, and all have failed.

But Turley may have powerful ammunition: the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas. In that case, the majority ruled that the state could not prosecute people for engaging in private, consensual sexual behavior…Turley’s case is exactly what some have feared — and Justice Antonin Scalia predicted. In his scathing dissent in the Lawrence decision, Scalia said the ruling calls into question any law trying to rein in “immoral and unacceptable” sexual behavior…”Under this principle, it really is anything goes,” says Robert George, who teaches constitutional law at Princeton University. “State laws to protect public morality by prohibiting what have been regarded as immoral sexual conduct just can’t stand constitutional scrutiny,” George says. “So, if they accept the logic of their own principles, then Turley is going to win this in a knockdown”…

I hope they do win. Too long have we allowed busybodies and control freaks to use laws intended to protect the innocent (in the case of bigamy laws, women who unknowingly marry predatory men who are already married to others) as clubs to beat all nonconforming sexual behavior into a bloody pulp. If multiple adult women choose to share one man, or if people of the same sex choose to live together, or if one person wants to be the sexual slave of another, or if a woman agrees to provide sexual favors to a man for a price, it is nobody’s business but theirs and appeals to “protecting women and children” are nothing but sleazy attempts to pimp those women and children to serve the perverted needs of control freaks. As I pointed out in my column of one year ago today, pimping was invented by governments, and it’s pretty obvious that government representatives like Marci Hamilton (who apparently forgets that children are always second-class citizens) are still the most numerous practitioners of the behavior. Scalia’s analysis is correct, but his morality is wrong. In the wake of Lawrence vs. Texas government suppression of individual, consenting adult sexual behavior is doomed, and that is a very good thing.

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The Proper Study

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged censorship, dirty, disease, ethics, law, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, psychology, social purity, stereotypes, streetwalkers, The Proper Study, United Kingdom on July 13, 2011| 7 Comments »

The proper study of mankind is Man. – Alexander Pope

I began my column of June 29^th with a discussion of how most 19^th-century “research” into prostitution was “nothing more than Christian anti-whore propaganda dressed up in scientific garb so as to support the dominant sociological view that normal women were pure and asexual, and therefore any woman who was sexual had to be some sort of monster.” It was, in other words, merely a pseudoscientific rationalization of the old Madonna-whore duality, whose origins I examined in my column of one year ago today. To “prove” this popular prejudice, educated men with impeccable credentials used the time-honored method of beginning with a theory, determining which “facts” would support that theory, examining a group most likely to generate the desired results and then discarding or explaining away any evidence which tended to disprove it. Unfortunately for the reputations of these scholars, scientific investigation was all the rage in the latter half of the 19^th century, and before too long other, more honest investigators began to realize that the evidence was not as it had been represented and that the truth about prostitution was far more complex than they had initially thought. Of course, by that point nobody was listening; the racket from the social purity bandwagon was drowning out any contrary voice, and before too long it became politically incorrect to dare question the notion that prostitution was a pernicious evil which could be stamped out by a combination of ambitious brainwashing and violent suppression.

For almost half a century after the social purity movement ebbed, sociologists and psychologists largely ignored prostitution; most were content to accept the party line and to direct their attention elsewhere. But once Alfred Kinsey had published his groundbreaking study of human sexuality, a few researchers again began to turn their interest to the subject and soon discovered that due to the trade’s suppression it was not so easy to study as it had been in the days before criminalization made whores reluctant to speak to anyone they perceived as an authority figure. The only prostitutes readily available were therefore those who were currently incarcerated, which due to their higher visibility and comparatively lower income (thus no money for bail) were mostly destitute streetwalkers. By the 1960s any sociologists old enough to have personally visited legally-tolerated brothels (outside of Honolulu or the Far East) were already retired, and the 20^th-century vice of overspecialization had led to most experts in any given field being shockingly ignorant in others (such as history); most of them were therefore content to accept the now-popular stereotype that prostitute=streetwalker, and to arrive at the erroneous conclusion that data collected on incarcerated streetwalkers could be held valid for all streetwalkers, and therefore all prostitutes. Furthermore, most of the research grants then (as now) came from governments who were not particularly interested in having the basis of their prohibition laws challenged by studies demonstrating that prostitutes were not degenerate criminals, pathetic drug addicts, etc.

The ‘70s saw the rise of tailor-made “studies” designed to “prove” whatever the sponsors wanted proved; they first appeared in advertising, were seized upon by politicians and then spread like a cancer among those with motives for manipulating the public’s perceptions. And so it should come as no surprise that governments fighting moves to decriminalize prostitution hired anti-sex activists like Melissa Farley to craft bogus “research” which would support their conclusions. As in the 19^th century they began with a theory, devised a means of proving that theory, examined a group most likely to generate the desired results (incarcerated streetwalkers) and then discarded or explained away any evidence which tended to disprove it. And as in the 19^th century, most people accepted their conclusions because they didn’t know any better. But just as before, more honest investigators have in recent years began to study our trade, and as before these proper studies completely refute the false ones promoted by those with an agenda.

I’ve already mentioned the work of Ronald Weitzer of George Washington University on numerous occasions, and quoted from a number of other studies in my column of April 3^rd. I mentioned a recent study which debunked the idea that most underage prostitution is forced and one which demonstrated that sex crime rates are lower in countries with legal prostitution, and my columns of May 22^nd, May 25^th, June 9^th and June 15^th all covered recent studies which found exactly what we’ve been saying all along: that the great majority of prostitutes are women who choose the work for valid reasons, that most of us work indoors, that we enjoy our work and are not coerced, etc. And now here’s a new one from Wales, called to my attention by Brandy Devereaux.

I have to admit I find the attitude of the interviewed researchers amusing; they seem to have been surprised by their findings, which is to be expected since they were criminologists rather than sociologists and were therefore proceeding from a biased viewpoint revealed in their use of phrases like “sell their bodies”, “dangerous game” and “complacent about the risks of the job”, and acceptance of myths like the high incidence of venereal disease among prostitutes and the existence of large numbers of “trafficked women” (despite the fact that their study found neither). But to their credit, they accepted their own findings rather than discarding them and even concluded in their report that “These women definitely don’t want to be saved – they have made a choice and we have to respect that choice – Government policy needs to recognise that the sex industry has been around forever and it’s not going to go anywhere.” As studies like this accumulate, even the staunchest proponents of prohibition will no longer be able to hide behind bogus studies; they will eventually be forced to admit that their laws have nothing to do with “protecting” or “saving” anyone and are based on nothing other than a desire to impose a specific morality on society.

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Independence Day

Posted in History, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged asset seizure, consensual crime, cops, drugs, holidays, law, social purity, United Kingdom on July 4, 2011| 47 Comments »

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. – from The Declaration of Independence

Two hundred and thirty-five years ago today the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, originally written by Thomas Jefferson and then modified by the assembled Congress into the form which was actually signed. It was the carefully-considered reaction to a long series of grievances which had been building for thirteen years, most prominently a dramatic increase in taxation and increasingly-harsh suppression of the civil rights of the American colonists. For almost a century (since the Glorious Revolution of 1688) the accepted view in England was that Parliament was supreme throughout the Empire; in other words, that anything Parliament did was ipso facto constitutional because there was no higher authority. But the American revolutionaries, inspired by the philosophy of John Locke, held that government is a social contract between the governor (king, parliament or whatever) and the governed, which granted the right of rule as long as the government upheld its end of the contract. And though the government has the right to establish laws and make other decisions as it sees fit, some rights are unalienable, that is they are inherent in all humans from Nature or God, and no government has the right to unduly restrict or abrogate those rights without just cause. Parliament was therefore not supreme but limited by its unwritten social contract with the people; the Declaration pronounced that Parliament and the King had violated that contract and enumerated the ways in which they had done so.

The words of the Declaration’s second paragraph (quoted above) set forth this philosophy with admirable clarity, and what reasonable and moral person could disagree? The rights of every person to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are, as the Declaration avers, self-evident, as is the right of a group of people to choose the government which works for them. This paragraph is followed by a long section describing the ways in which the Congressional representatives held that King George III had broken the social contract and thereby made the colonists’ rebellion not merely a right but a duty; here are a few important examples from this section:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance…

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power…

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States…

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury…

In colonial times, laws were upheld by elected officials (sheriffs, constables and the like) employing deputies or the local militia when necessary; citizens largely protected themselves, and the only American city with a standing police force was Philadelphia (and it was quite small). By the time of the War Between the States only a handful of large cities had such forces, and like sheriff’s deputies they dressed in plain clothes and had no formal ranks. But in the latter half of the 19^th century police forces grew far more numerous and assumed a paramilitary character, with uniforms and ranks but lacking the regimentation and strict discipline of a true military organization. The Social Purity movement spawned a vast proliferation of laws, and by the beginning of the 20^th century police were routinely dispatched against citizens who only a few years before would have been considered completely law-abiding. Both the powers given police and the gap between them and other citizens continued to expand as the century wore on and the number and intrusiveness of laws proliferated, and at some point police began to routinely refer to non-cops as “civilians”…ignoring the fact that they, too, are civilians, as they answer to the civil authority. The last shift came with the inflation of the “War On Drugs” in the 1980s, and federal grants now allow police departments across the country to purchase automatic weapons, armored vehicles, grenades and other military hardware, which they then use against American citizens who have harmed no one. Police departments have become increasingly militarized, and have been granted unprecedented powers to invade homes, brutalize and murder citizens, steal their property and abrogate their rights in violation of the Constitution and every law of common sense and decency. The police have become, in short, a vast, decentralized, undisciplined army which is not subject to any law, nor are individual cops held responsible for any crimes they commit.

The federal government has in recent decades erected a multitude of new offices, and sent out swarms of officers to harass the people and eat out ever-increasing portions of the GDP.

The police army has been rendered independent of and superior to local, state and federal laws.

They are heavily armed and quartered among us in every neighborhood.

They are protected by mock trial from punishment for any murders or other crimes which they should commit on the inhabitants of the states.

Every year, new taxes, fees and unfunded mandates are imposed on us without our consent.

Many federal offenses are tried before a judge rather than a jury, or else juries are hand-picked and then kept ignorant of salient facts of the cases; or citizens are falsely accused of such heinous crimes, with such disproportionate penalties and necessitating such outrageously expensive defenses, that those accused of them simply plead guilty in return for a lesser sentence. Also, property stolen by the state under ever-expanding “asset forfeiture” laws is not returned even if its rightful owner is never charged with a crime. Each of these procedures essentially deprives its victim of the benefit of trial by jury.

Jefferson’s words are clear, and just as self-evident as they were in 1776: “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

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Déjà Vu

Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, bogus studies, Déjà Vu, dirty, drivers, fantasy, Germany, hysteria, Italy, Madonna/whore, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, pimps, psychology, racism, Russia, sex work is work, social purity, stereotypes, streetwalkers, underage, United Kingdom on June 25, 2011| 22 Comments »

You railers of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, you the pious, the moral, the respectable, as you call yourselves, who stand on your smooth and pleasant side of the great gulf you have dug, and keep between yourself and the dregs, why don’t you bridge it over or fill it up…Why stand you there mouthing with sleek face about morality? What is morality? – an anonymous whore in a letter to The Times, 1858

Yesterday’s column was inspired by scanning the 19^th-century sections of Whores in History while preparing to write my column of June 19^th, and while researching it I was struck by how little most anti-prostitute rhetoric has changed since the Victorian Era. Oh, many of the moralists now cloak their need to control others in neofeminist jargon instead of Christian jargon, but that makes very little difference and today I’d just like to point out a few examples of it so you can see exactly what I mean.

The general consensus among Victorian “scholars” was that normal women had no sex drive whatsoever, so it was therefore impossible for any normal woman to choose to be a prostitute. Some argued that all whores were driven to the trade by extreme privation or forced into it by pimps, while others claimed it was due to “laziness” and a desire to avoid “real work”. But the most popular view of all was that whores were atavisms, throwbacks to a more primitive human type, and many a 19^th-century researcher (especially in Germany, Italy and Russia) eagerly sought prostitutes (always streetwalkers, of course) who would allow themselves to be studied and measured; Cesare Lombruso of Italy claimed that all prostitutes, without exception, had receding foreheads and large jaws, and that some had “exaggerated” growth of the labia or clitoris. He and his cronies claimed that this cherry-picked “evidence” proved that “primitive” African and American Indian women shared these same features, thus demonstrating that whores were more like “savages” than like highly-evolved Europeans. And since prostitutes were primitive they were also stupid, and thus incompetent to make their own decisions; this of course was used to excuse tyranny like the Contagious Disease Acts discussed in yesterday’s column, because the government could claim it was forced to arrest, incarcerate and “rehabilitate” prostitutes “for their own good.”

Sound familiar? Except for the modern replacement of “nature” arguments (whores are born defective) with “nurture” arguments (whores are made defective early in life by sexual abuse), the propaganda is virtually identical. In both cases non-prostitutes with no personal experience of normal female sexuality (then it was men, now it’s lesbian neofeminists) claim that it’s impossible for a normal woman to choose prostitution, and that all of us are driven to it by extreme privation or forced into it by “pimps” or “traffickers”. As in Victorian times streetwalkers are studied and the observations are then manipulated and distorted to fit the “theory”, which is applied to all prostitutes; we are all victims of child abuse or rape, all drug addicts, blah blah blah. Many prohibitionists openly call us stupid, selfish and neurotic, and even the ones who don’t insist that we’re incompetent to make our own decisions. Just as in Victorian times, these bogus claims are used to rationalize tyranny like the Swedish Model or American-style criminalization on the grounds that it’s “for our own good”. And though one doesn’t hear the claim that we’re “lazy” from neofeminists very often (because they couldn’t blame that on the almighty Patriarchy), it’s still very popular among religious or lawhead prohibitionists (hence the popular decriminalization slogan, “sex work is work”).

By the late 19^th century the varying nonsense claims about prostitutes were eclipsed by the lurid propaganda of the social purity movement, which promoted the “white slavery” and “child prostitution” scares in order to further its agenda. I’ve written about this moral panic, and its modern reincarnation as the “human trafficking” (and more specifically “child sex trafficking”) hysteria on a number of occasions, but this time I’m going to let Nickie Roberts have the floor. This is a passage from Whores in History describing the “white slavery” hysteria:

…the social purity campaign looked to the lurid to create its agenda, its two abiding themes being ‘white slavery’ and child prostitution. The ‘white slave trade’, supposedly an organized international traffic in women, was a Victorian fantasy which formed part of the stock repertoire of melodrama in fiction and theatre at this time. The typical story involved innocent white adolescent girls who were drugged and abducted by sinister immigrant procurers, waking up to find themselves captive in some infernal foreign brothel, where they were subject to the pornographic whims of sadistic, non-white pimps and brothel-masters. Middle-class moralists were convinced that a ‘traffic in women’, operated by well-established underworld networks, was going on under their very noses, and they had little difficulty in whipping up a public panic about this non-existent outrage. In fact the reformers based their evidence for the ‘white slave trade’ on the actual international migration of whores, which had begun to be a sizeable phenomenon during the latter part of the century. With the internationalization of capitalism and the opening of trade routes to the far outposts of the Empire, millions of people were on the move, migrating from Europe to hoped-for better lives in the Americas and the colonies. Whores were no exception; taking the migratory option to escape poverty and oppression in their home countries, they travelled thousands of miles to live and work in the cities of the USA, Latin America, Egypt, South Africa and Asia. Men often moved with them, acting as chaperones and intermediaries who would on arrival in foreign cities introduce whores to sex-trade contacts.

How few words we would have to change for this passage to apply to “human trafficking” hysteria! But this was published in 1992, almost a decade before the hysteria was reborn under its new name and Laura Agustín began writing on the way voluntary migration of prostitutes is intentionally misrepresented as an organized slave trade. Let’s hope this iteration of the hysteria collapses more quickly than the last one, and that this time we as a culture can drive the stake through its heart well enough to keep it from crawling out of its well-deserved grave ever again.

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Dirty Whores

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, bad customers, brothels, condoms, cops, crypto-moralism, dirty, Dirty Whores, disease, Europe, evidence, France, hysteria, law, Madonna/whore, prohibitionist myths, psychology, sex offender registry, social purity, statistics, stereotypes, streetwalkers, United Kingdom on June 24, 2011| 31 Comments »

Prostitution is pregnant with disease, a disease infecting not only the guilty but contaminating the innocent wife and child in the home with sickening certainty almost inconceivable; a disease to be feared as a leprous plague; a disease scattering misery broadcast, and leaving in its wake sterility, insanity, paralysis, and the blinded eyes of little babes, the twisted limbs of deformed children, degradation, physical rot and mental decay. – The Social Evil in Chicago (1911)

In ancient times disease was usually viewed as a punishment from the gods; bacteria are, after all, invisible to the naked eye, and until the development of the germ theory the advent of illnesses seemed mysterious and even supernatural. The idea that disease is caused by invisibly-small organisms or “seeds” actually dates to Roman times, but because it could not be proven that such organisms existed until after the invention of the microscope in the 17^th century, the theory was never universally accepted even in the medical community, much less among the general public. And even after Pasteur and others had proven the existence of pathogens, the notion of illness as a punishment for sin never wholly disappeared; rather, it merely mutated into a different form thanks to the realization that cleanliness (which, as the aphorism informs us, is next to godliness) tended to greatly reduce the risk of sickness. Those who led “clean”, well-ordered, regimented and “godly” lives became ill much less often, and gossips might even explain an exception by whispering that the sufferer had deviated from “proper” behavior in some way. Since the popularization of the germ theory was contemporary with the “Social Purity” movement, the former neatly dovetailed with the latter in the minds of a large number of Britons and Americans and helped reinforce the push to outlaw “dirty” behaviors such as drinking, extramarital sex (especially with prostitutes) and even masturbation.

Even in ancient times prostitutes recognized that certain diseases were more common among their number than in others, but these illnesses of the Classical Era seem to have been viewed as more of a nuisance than anything else; gonorrhea was completely unknown in Europe before the 11^th century, and though lesions consistent with some forms of syphilis have been identified in Roman remains, the absence of any clear description of it in the medical literature supports the theory that this was a milder strain to which most people were resistant. As gonorrhea seems to have come back from the Middle East with the Crusaders, so syphilis seems to have returned to Europe with Columbus; though the “great pox” was well-established among Pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, the first recorded European outbreak occurred among French troops in 1495, and they seem to have contracted it from Spanish mercenaries. This cannot be taken as evidence of rampant homosexuality in the French Army, however, because this early form of the disease was highly contagious even through casual contact and was both more virulent and far more lethal; fortunately Europeans soon developed an immunity to this “proto-syphilis”, and by 1546 it had mutated into the venereal form known today.

By the mid-17^th century European whores had largely figured out the visible signs of contagion, but unfortunately both syphilis and gonorrhea can sometimes be transmitted by asymptomatic individuals and so even though the rate of infection among better-informed prostitutes was lower than among other promiscuous individuals (such as members of the upper classes), it was still higher than among the less-promiscuous middle classes, giving rise to the bourgeois notion of prostitutes as carriers of disease. By the early 19^th century all but the least fortunate streetwalkers were scrupulous about examining customers; in French brothels the madam herself generally performed the check before allowing a client access to any of her staff, and in English and American establishments the whores were quite as careful as modern girls, lacking only latex condoms as the final precaution. As one customer of a Storyville brothel (quoted in Whores in History) wrote, “She approached and seized my genital organ in such a way as to determine whether or not I had the gonorrhea. She did this particular operation with more knowledge and skill than she did anything else before or after.” But despite such published accounts and the research of medical doctors like William Acton (who despite his moral opposition to prostitution pointed out that whores were consistently healthier than other working-class women due to their precautions and relative affluence), the myth of the “diseased whore” grew and in 1864 the English Parliament passed the first of several Contagious Disease Acts, which were rationalized as measures to root out venereal disease in the armed forces but were actually nothing more than anti-prostitution laws.

The Act created a police “morals squad” which was empowered to define any woman in London as a “common prostitute”, at which point she was arrested and hauled in chains before a magistrate who could order her to undergo a medical examination; if she refused (due to such minor details as, say, not actually being a prostitute) she could be confined to a “Lock Hospital” (basically a prison with a medical staff), forcibly examined and detained for up to 90 days, during which time the staff attempted to scare her out of prostitution while “treating” her with mercury, a largely-ineffective “cure” which even many Victorian doctors opposed. Many were not sick when they arrived, but contracted other diseases (which of course were always interpreted as venereal) from the unsanitary conditions in which they were confined. If she survived the “cure”, an unmarried woman so imprisoned would generally emerge to find her children had been sent to workhouses and her possessions sold to pay her rent. As if all this wasn’t bad enough, a second Act in 1866 expanded the powers of police, forced prostitutes to register and condemned them to “health inspections” every two weeks; the third Act (in 1869) expanded the system to most of the country and inspired an NGO whose members “helped” the police by reporting any promiscuous or troublesome woman (or any one who offended them) as a “prostitute”, who was dragged away and registered no matter what she said in her own defense.

The Acts were so broad that they caught up huge numbers of unmarried working-class women in their dragnet, and so tyrannical that they even offended the sensibilities of many middle-class people. One of these, Josephine Butler, campaigned tirelessly against the Acts for 16 years, collecting a large following and eventually winning their repeal in 1886. Unfortunately, like so many “rescuers” Butler blamed prostitution itself (rather than society’s attempts to suppress it) for the misfortunes of whores, and after her victory turned her efforts to the abolition of the profession. Her activism, and more importantly that of the sexually-repressed middle-class Christian female “purity crusaders” she inspired, resulted in the wave of prohibitionist laws which inundated Europe and North America for the next three decades; by 1918 prostitution was illegal virtually everywhere in the Western world.

And though the tide of busybody regulation of individual sexual activity has largely receded in most of the civilized world, the United States remains submerged in it and some things are the same now as they were in the 19^th century. Busybody moralists still profess that their efforts to infantilize whores, rob us of agency, hunt us down and destroy our livelihoods are “for our own good”; amateur women are still victimized by laws designed to “get” prostitutes, sex workers still face the prospect of our children being abducted and our goods pillaged by the State, crypto-moralists still believe that puritanical eating regimens and disinfection of everything are the keys to health, and the “dirty whore” stereotype is as popular as ever. Though the incidence of venereal disease is twice as high in the promiscuous segment of the general population as among streetwalkers and only 3 to 5% of venereal disease in the United States is related to prostitution (compared to 35% from adolescents), the myth doggedly persists that whores spread disease. When one further considers that some studies have shown STD rates up to 80x higher in streetwalkers than in other types of prostitutes, this means that the incidence of STDs in promiscuous non-prostitutes is up to 160x that in escorts, and that escorts and brothel workers together account for only about 0.4% of the sexually transmitted disease in the United States. Yet every legalization regime includes mandatory (and often invasive) “health checks”, while 95-97% of STDs are spread by the good, “clean” members of the general population who can legally screw anybody they like without even the most cursory or sporadic health checks and face neither stigma nor revocation of their professional credentials should they turn up infected.

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Savaging

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, archeofeminism, cops, dirty, law, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, pregnancy, psychology, sisterhood, social purity, Swedish model, tabula rasa, yin and yang on March 27, 2011| 133 Comments »

When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women. – Julie Burchill

Domestic sows are often subject to a perverse and horrifying behavioral abnormality called “savaging”, or cannibalistic infanticide; in plainer language, they eat their own young. The behavior is thought to be caused by fear, stress or unsanitary conditions, but it is also noted that sows which have done it once are prone to do it again. Though humans are not subject to this behavior in a literal sense, there are a number of women who tend to viciously attack others as part of a broader rejection of their own femininity; I call them neofeminists. And like disturbed sows, neofeminists reserve their most vicious attacks for those one would least expect them to target, in this case other women.

The reason, I suspect, lies in the differing ways in which men and women view our bodies. For a man, the body is a vehicle; he gets signals from it such as hunger, pain, sexual desire, etc and though he’s forced to respond to those signals he still views them as something outside his ego. In the sea of organic life a male is someone on a raft: He is supported by the sea and can perceive it all around him, and it has powerful and often overwhelming effects on him, but he is ALWAYS outside of it and indeed fears being swallowed up by it. But for women our psyches are inextricably bound up in the body; we are immersed in that sea, swimming in it, surrounded by it on all sides, and the signals from it are not merely messages from somewhere else but thoughts in our own brains. No man can understand the way women think of food or sex, and pregnancy might as well be science fiction to them. Starting in the early teens the female body undergoes catastrophic changes (unlike the comparatively gradual and subtle male ones) and every month we are reminded of the fact that Mother Nature is in control and we have little choice but to obey her demands. This is not merely a physical thing but a mental one; our feelings, perceptions and thoughts are altered by the internal tides and they’re only a pale reflection of the changes produced by pregnancy.

So it should come as no surprise that some female intellectuals reject their own femininity, in extreme cases violently so by embracing male dress, grooming, mannerisms and lifestyles. It isn’t about “male power” as they claim publicly; it’s about rejecting female powerlessness over our bodies, a state they wrongfully blame on men because the truth, that it’s the doing of the bitch goddess Nature, is too overwhelming. Men and political systems can be fought, but Nature cannot be, so neofeminists adhere to the ridiculous “social construction of gender” ideology as a way of whistling past the graveyard. Because they’re so miserable and maladjusted they resent anyone who isn’t, and from this resentment grows envy of men for being free of the tyranny of a female body, and envy of women who have learned to live comfortably with it. Envy inevitably decays into hate, and the ultimate targets of that hatred are prostitutes because we not only embrace our bodies and use them to enrich ourselves in a way denied to neofeminists, but also because we enable men to procure sex on their own terms rather than having to dance to every ridiculous demand made by some woman with an exaggerated sense of her own irreplaceability.

The neofeminists are fond of pretending that prostitution is an outgrowth of patriarchy, but this is clearly absurd; the highest status of the prostitute is found in the ancient semi-matriarchal cultures, and the lowest in the most patriarchal ones. Married women in such cultures often resent the freedom and power of the prostitute, and as in the case of the neofeminists such resentment gives rise to hatred. But it wasn’t until the decay of first-wave feminism that this hatred actually turned into widespread legislative repression, and even then the persecution was represented as a self-evident moral issue. A century ago there was no need for moral crusaders to lie about whores; the truth of our lives was enough to justify a war on our profession according to the prevailing Christian morality of the time. But after the sexual revolution relaxed the sexual mores of amateurs, it became much more difficult for anti-whore crusaders to whip up public feeling against us with the mere truth, so lies became necessary.

First came the traditional police lies about prostitution “attracting crime”, which equated escorts with streetwalkers and ignored the fact that it’s criminalization which creates the “crime” of prostitution in the first place. But when prostitutes started participating in second-wave feminism and sympathy for us began to grow, early neofeminists found it necessary to construct elaborate lies about our degradation, bad childhoods, drug abuse, etc so as to destroy our credibility without openly attacking us (which at the time would’ve been recognized as the flagrant violation of sisterhood it is). Whores then became victims who, though blameless, couldn’t be taken seriously because we were so screwed up.

This mythology is still the prevailing one, and gave rise to the Swedish Model and the “sex trafficking” cult, but unfortunately for its adherents there are a certain number of outspoken harlots who dare to challenge that view and prove its fallaciousness by simply showing ourselves to be intelligent, reasonable and well-adjusted women who aren’t “victimized” by anybody. And because the internet has made us far more visible than we used to be, a new and even more vicious lie became necessary. Neofeminists now claim that though the vast majority of prostitutes are trafficked, coerced victims, those of us who speak out for sex worker rights are a tiny minority who actually participate in the degradation of other women! Some neofeminists prefer the subtle approach, claiming that though we may indeed be free and happy our “bad example” helps to make the sexual enslavement of “millions” possible, while others (such as those I discussed Friday) prefer the more overt approach typified by the Julie Burchill epigram to this column. But a few (such as those who seem to have schooled “Bedelia”) have actually dreamed up a conspiracy theory of “Elders of Zion”-like proportions. These lunatics imagine a vast, powerful “pimp lobby” funded by pornography which actively promotes sex trafficking and “paid rape” (yet somehow lacks the influence to get prostitution decriminalized even in Nevada), and that sex worker advocates such as the leaders of SWOP, well-known writers such as Tracy Quan and Belle de Jour, and even bloggers like myself and a number of my readers are all in the employ of this “pro-prostitution” cabal.

Nobody who hates femininity as much as the neofeminists do can possibly be accepted by rational people as speaking for all women, but few of their followers are rational and the politicians who embrace their rhetoric do so not out of belief, but expediency (neofeminist dogma gives them an excuse for more repressive legislation). So I welcome neofeminists’ increasingly overt attacks on sex workers; the more vicious they grow, the less the public will accept that they speak for all women, and the zanier their pronouncements about vast pimp conspiracies become the less their arguments will be taken seriously by normal people. Sooner or later, the only people listening to their nasty grunting and squealing will be the few benighted souls who choose to inhabit the same philosophical sty.

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Amsterdam

Posted in Current Events, History, Tyranny, tagged Amsterdam, archeofeminism, avails laws, brothels, condoms, cops, dirty, disease, drugs, ethics, Europe, harm reduction, hysteria, law, neofeminism, Netherlands, pimps, sisterhood, social purity, Spain, streetwalkers, Swedish model, transgender on November 1, 2010| 5 Comments »

In the port of Amsterdam
There’s a sailor who drinks
And he drinks and he drinks
And he drinks once again
He drinks to the health
Of the whores of Amsterdam
Who have promised their love
To a thousand other men. – Jacques Brel, “Amsterdam”

With all this talk of the “Nordic Model” lately, I think it’s sad that the neofeminists and the blinkered asses we call politicians whom they ride upon can’t seem to turn their gaze a little to the southwest, across the North Sea to the Netherlands. The Dutch treatment of prostitutes isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s vastly better than the Nordic Model and centuries more advanced than the barbaric American model. And though abolitionists and bluenoses have repeatedly tried (and still continue to try) to suppress our trade, such prohibitions have never really caught on in the historically tolerant Netherlands.

Like most European governments, the Dutch tolerated prostitution throughout the Middle Ages because it was recognized as a “necessary evil” which prevented male sexual passion from getting out of control. Some cities tried to ban it within the city walls, but in 1413 these prohibitionist decrees were themselves prohibited in Amsterdam by a law which stated, “Because whores are necessary in big cities and especially in cities of commerce such as ours – indeed it is far better to have these women than not to have them – and also because the holy church tolerates whores on good grounds, for these reasons the court and sheriff of Amsterdam shall not entirely forbid the keeping of brothels.” It’s amazing how much wiser and more socially progressive Dutch authorities were 600 years ago than American authorities are now, isn’t it?

“Brothel Scene” by Nikolaus Knupfer (1630s)

Unfortunately, this did not last; in the 16th century the rise of Protestantism and occupation by Spain resulted in prohibitionist laws, which in turn resulted in official pimping as it always does. This ended in 1578, when the city of Amsterdam rebelled against Spain, became officially Calvinist and stopped regulating prostitution. Though a number of anti-whore laws were passed throughout the 17^th century, they were unpopular and impossible to enforce and so the police rarely bothered to try; though moralists tried to portray whores as degraded, in paintings they were depicted as beautiful. But as in the United States 200 years later, bluenosed Protestant middle-class morality eventually came to dominate Dutch thinking, and a series of prohibitionist laws (including bans on condoms and other methods of birth and disease control) made the working conditions for Dutch harlots steadily worse until Napoleon conquered the country and instituted mandatory registration and medical examination in 1810 in order to protect his soldiers against venereal diseases. These laws were largely continued after Napoleon, but after the Social Purity movement invaded the Netherlands regulation was replaced by abolitionism as it was in the U.S.

But even then, the Dutch hardheadedly refused to join the lemming-stampede of full prohibition so popular elsewhere; though “living on the avails of prostitution” and owning a brothel were banned in 1911, prostitution itself was not prohibited. As before, these laws proved unpopular and were rarely enforced, and by the 1970s the Dutch government formally adopted the gedoogbeleid (policy of tolerance) on the grounds that attempting to suppress consensual “vices” such as prostitution and drug use does not work and only harms the people it attempts to control. In 1985 Dutch prostitutes founded a rights group named The Red Thread which was highly instrumental in the official legalization of prostitution in January of 1988, but full legalization of brothels took much longer and was only accomplished on October 1, 2000 (at which time the Dutch union FNV began accepting prostitutes as members). Polls show that 78% of Dutch people now consider prostitution to be a job like any other.

In the past few years, however, gangsters from Eastern Europe and Muslim countries have moved into Amsterdam, bringing illegal prostitutes with them. This has of course armed neofeminists and the few prohibitionist politicians (who as elsewhere try to equate voluntary adult prostitution with enslaved underage girls smuggled into the country), and as a result it has become more difficult to get a brothel license and in 2006 the license renewals of 30 established brothels was denied (forcing them to appeal). International news media have produced propaganda and exaggerated stories as they do everywhere, and in March 2007 the famous De Wallen red-light district held an open house day and unveiled a statue honoring prostitutes world-wide. But the hysteria has continued; in September 2007 the city bought several buildings in the red light district and closed about a third of the famous windows, then by the end of 2008 the Mayor announced plans to close a further 200 windows because of “suspected criminal gang activity”. He also closed some of the city’s 70 marijuana cafes and sex clubs, saying “It is not that we want to get rid of our red-light district. We want to reduce it. Things have become unbalanced and if we do not act we will never regain control.” Perhaps that is true, but at the same time a host of new ID and zoning regulations have appeared in the past year and “human trafficking” fanatics have made Amsterdam one of their chief targets. I don’t think abolition is in the works; the Dutch have never taken kindly to it, public opinion is against it and the Dutch prostitutes are too well-organized to permit it. But until prostitution is truly legalized in nearby de facto prohibitionist countries like the UK and France and full-prohibitionist countries like Norway, Sweden and the former Soviet Bloc, there will continue to be problems in the Netherlands. What the abolitionists are trying to represent as a failure in Dutch housekeeping is actually nothing of the kind; even if one’s own house is perfectly clean, if it is surrounded on all sides by filthy neighbors it is inevitable that it will become infested with vermin.

In the meantime, business in De Wallen goes on as usual; in every hotel room there is a free visitor’s guide which contains the following paragraph under the “Police and safety” section: If you visit one of the women, we would like to remind you, they are not always women. Out on the streets, do not shout or use bad language towards these women. Show some respect. If you have any problems with a girl or a pimp, do not hesitate to ask a police officer. We know why you are there and you can hardly surprise us. It is against the law and very dangerous to solicit prostitution on the streets. I find this paragraph interesting on several counts; the first line refers to the fact that roughly 5% of Dutch prostitutes are male (some of them dressed in drag) and another 5% transsexual; a 1997 report showed that of the 1300 male prostitutes essentially all were homosexual prostitutes (just as everyplace else, women don’t pay for sex in Amsterdam). The next line is obviously necessary because of the large number of Brits and Americans who don’t know how to conduct themselves properly around whores, and the last line reflects the arbitrary nature of prostitution regulations: In Amsterdam outdoor prostitution (i.e. streetwalking) is illegal, while in countries with anti-brothel (“bawdy house”) laws it’s the exact opposite!

Until such time as all prohibitions against women doing as we like with our own bodies are removed everywhere, there will continue to be problems associated with prostitution which are not generally associated with other professions (including pimping and sex slavery). And even once that time comes, there will always be a traffic in underage girls just as there will always be traffic in child pornography, dangerous drugs, stolen goods, blackmail information, slaves and other evils. The world is a harsh, unfair and dangerous place and will never be otherwise no matter what fanatics may think, but once consensual behaviors and harmless vices are brought into the open as they have been in Amsterdam, the police are free to pursue real crime which hurts people and legitimate sex or “vice” businesses can assist the state in controlling criminals, just as bars in the United States help prevent underage drinking. As I said at the beginning, the Dutch model is far from perfect, but compared to the sexist tyranny which pollutes the “Land of the Free” it’s a veritable Utopia.

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