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Posts Tagged ‘social purity’

Wolves

Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2010| 34 Comments »

If courtesans and strumpets were to be prosecuted with as much rigour as some silly people would have it, what locks or bars would be sufficient to preserve the honour of our wives and daughters? –  Bernard Mandeville

When I was a lass, we were taught that men only wanted one thing, and that it was the responsibility of women to control access to that thing.  Everyone, male and female, over the age of 12 understood this principle for the first 12,000 years of human civilization, then suddenly less than one human lifetime ago started to deny it.  We could talk about the reasons all day long, and in fact we have at length in this column before.  Dependable birth control, the Sexual Revolution, misguided feminism, the “social construction of gender” lie, the “rape is not sexual” lie, the Cult of the Child’s catechism of trying to keep little girls ignorant of sex until marriage, and the naïve modern belief that Nature is “fair” (born of the complete disconnection of modern urbanites from the natural world they claim to be so concerned about) are among the many causes of this phenomenon, but no matter what weight we give to which factor the result is the same.  The typical modern woman under the age of 40 or 50 is totally, completely clueless about the powerful, primal, dangerous, predatory nature of male sexuality and daily engages in the equivalent of dancing around in front of a pack of hungry Siberian wolves with rare steaks strapped to her naked body while insisting that said wolves are really herbivorous and only believe themselves to be carnivorous due to “social construction of dietary preferences”; and, that if they try to eat her she will simply “kick them in the balls” and thereby render them as harmless as kittens.

OK, I’m exaggerating.  A little.  My analogy breaks down because human men have minds and most of them are both civilized and have the instinctive tendency to protect women.  That does not, however, change the fact that they’re still wolves and they’re always hungry, and the only reason they aren’t ripping those steaks off of your body (and maybe eating you for dessert) is because of their own powers of self-control backed up by fear of the consequences.  It’s not because they’re “enlightened” or “modern”, it’s not because they were given unisex toys when they were kids and it certainly ain’t because they’re afraid of your magical waif fu combat ability.  It’s just that most of them are too civilized, decent and self-controlled to take steaks you don’t want to give.  Oh, they might try to talk you or trick you into giving them up, and I certainly wouldn’t go to sleep in the presence of a strange wolf, but most of them aren’t going to be ripping them from your body without asking.  But where do men’s nigh-superhuman abilities of self-control come from?  They’re learned, of course; over many centuries males have developed a set of behaviors designed to bring vicious young cubs into the pack and instill in them the ability to control their passions.  These patterns of male society may seem harsh to women, but they have to be in order to control male passions and thereby turn young savages into adult gentlemen.

In the last generation, however, we have seen a breakdown in these male institutions due to the well-intentioned but frighteningly ignorant meddling of women.  In the past, men largely stayed out of women’s business and women stayed out of men’s, and society stayed in balance.  But once the neofeminists and their “social construction of gender” fairy tales came into favor, all this changed; male-only institutions were forced to admit women, and women did not like what they saw, largely because they had absolutely no idea what they were looking at.  If one presumes that all gender is “socially constructed” then obviously there is only one “normal” pattern of human behavior and everything else is pathological.  And since the neofeminists obviously can’t consider female behavior abnormal, they automatically presume that male behavior is, and furthermore conclude that if young boys are feminized then everything will be wonderful and we’ll all go skipping down the road to Candyland together.  Except for one thing:  Male behavior isn’t automatically pathological, it’s just male.  And those young wolf cubs who are being forced to wear fleeces and eat grass won’t grow up to be sheep; they’ll grow up to be either very screwed-up wolves or else very angry, maladjusted wolves who hate sheep and don’t have any clue as to how to behave in a wolf-pack.

One example of a male norm which women have undermined is teaching boys to control their feelings; naïve women bleat about how terrible this is, and how men should be encouraged to “show their feelings”.  What kind of insanity is this?  The average man is six inches taller than the average woman and outweighs her by fifty pounds; he has three times her upper-body strength, twice her muscle mass and about 1.5x her bone mass.  If she gets angry and hits him, it stings; if he gets angry and hits her, it can cause major damage.  I’m perfectly happy with men controlling their feelings, thank you very much, and so should you be unless you think being beaten and/or raped on a regular basis is a good thing.  It’s because I trust my husband’s self-control that I feel safe screaming at him when I’m angry; if he felt as free to “show his feelings” as I do he would beat the hell out of me every time I dared to provoke him in that way.

Another male social mechanism almost completely destroyed by female meddling is hazing.  In any male group which faces danger together (such as military, firemen, police etc) there are certain rites of passage to which newcomers are subjected; these can appear quite brutal to female eyes and indeed I myself was horrified by such practices until I took the time to research the psychology behind them so as to attempt to understand rather than arbitrarily imposing my own female sensibilities on a male institution where they did not belong.  Here is what I learned:  Because such groups face danger together, they have to  have absolute faith in one another.  Every man must know that his brothers can be counted on in a crisis, that they will not buckle under the strain.  Hazing is the way in which newcomers are tested; they are exposed to psychological stress, even mild torture, and are expected not to break.  If they pass the test they become part of the brotherhood, and if they fail they wash out.  The process is harsh but absolutely necessary; if a man can’t even take teasing and insults from his comrades, how the hell will he survive being shot at by people who want to kill him?  By equating adult male hazing rituals with mere mean-spirited high-school bullying, well-meaning but ignorant women have removed an important and time-tested weeding process from military and paramilitary organizations.

We’ve talked about the consequences of uncontrolled male sexual passion in this column before, most recently on September 24th and October 2nd.  But what I didn’t really discuss in those columns is the reason why we’re seeing more of this behavior despite the claims of social engineers that modern men are more “enlightened” and “sensitive” than their forefathers.  Certainly the reasons are complex, but I believe one important cause is the pathologization of normal male behavior.  If both society and individual men recognize the intensity of male passion and the need to control it, social mechanisms like ingrained stoicism and hazing evolve to teach men to control their passions and institutions like prostitution and violent sports arise to allow them to expend their energies in socially acceptable ways.  Some men have milder passions, stronger wills, wise wives or all of the above and will never have need of these outlets, while others need them very much (as evidenced by the study I linked on the 24th showing that decriminalized prostitution reduces rape rates).  19th-century social purity laws which insisted that males be publicly held to female sexual standards were ridiculous enough, but at least in those days men were still allowed to act like men in every other way.  Ever since the advent of “social construction of gender”, however,  men are expected to act like women and are viciously punished if they do not.  Every day in the US men are fired or sent to re-education camps for telling dirty jokes or hanging pictures of pin-up girls in their lockers, and five-year-old boys are arrested for stealing kisses from little girls, yet no politician has the balls to stand up and decry any of this as unjust and insane.

Modern boys are being taught that normal male behavior is sick, perverted and wrong, yet at the same time the social constructs which taught them to control their passions have largely been dismantled.  Boys are encouraged to “show their feelings”, then punished when they do so.  This is a recipe for instilling sociopathy on a massive scale, and if the behavior of young men on the internet is any indication the damage is already very widespread.  Perhaps some of my older male readers may consider me to be overstating the problem, but I doubt many of my younger ones feel that way.  And though some of my female readers may not believe me either, that’s because they aren’t whores.  We frequently have to listen to customers talking about their frustration on this subject, and we constantly see the evidence of it in their behavior and sometimes-twisted desires.  Modern American society needs to stop punishing boys for being boys, and to cease its relentless persecution of the women who work to keep the wolves fed so our prissy domesticated sisters needn’t get saliva on their dainty little hands.

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The Love-Hate Relationship

Posted in History, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 7, 2010| 9 Comments »

The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone’s sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice. –  Alison Neilans

Yesterday I talked about the “hooker with a heart of gold” stock character, and I mentioned that she has appeared in literature, especially Western literature, for millennia.  But there is no doubt in my mind that she appears more often in American films and television programs than in those of all other countries combined (even if we allow for the larger volume of media from the US), and more often than not she is even allowed a happy ending.  Given that (as we discussed yesterday) such portrayals tend to indicate a positive or at least tolerant attitude toward prostitutes, one might feel safe in stating that most Americans have a soft spot for whores.  Yet at the same time, the US has the most oppressive, punitive, evil-minded laws against prostitutes of any country outside the Muslim world, which would certainly lead one to conclude that most Americans hate whores with a passion.  What’s going on here?  Is there some explanation for America’s weird love/hate relationship with working girls?  Yes, I think so; I believe it derives from the two separate and opposing, yet interlocked and seemingly inextricable, traditions upon which the United States was founded.

The vast spaces and distant location of the North American continent made it the ideal place for the displaced, disaffected and dissatisfied of Europe to go in search of their dreams.  For some it was a place where they could build their own fortunes and own land they could otherwise never have; for others it was a place where they could practice their own brand of religion free from the state-imposed religions of Europe, and for some it was simply a place they could start over again.  The key concept in all these dreams was of course Freedom (with a capital “F”), specifically freedom from monarchial tyranny.  If there was ever a sacred concept in American thought, it would have to be Freedom.  Of course, as with most sacred concepts, later generations tended to forget what the words actually meant, but we’ll come back to that later.

The practical capitalists sought the freedom to create wealth; most of them were highly educated gentlemen of the Enlightenment who were well-versed in history and philosophy and many of them saw the potential to create a Utopian state, free from religious or secular oppression, autocracy and the accumulated impedimenta of roughly 1300 years of European governmental tradition.  So when they decided to throw off English rule and strike out on their own, their new government incorporated Roman-style checks and balances long since abandoned  by European governments, but was otherwise based on the radically new theory of the social contract, the idea that governments were of and for the people rather than vice-versa.  Though later abrogated and warped by power-hungry politicians in order to subvert its original philosophy, the American constitution was originally designed to keep the government from getting too large and consuming wealth as the Roman and later European governments had; it was intended to allow individual achievement while preventing the strong from preying on the weak.  So from the very beginning there was a strong current of respect for individuality in the American character, coupled with an admiration for those who break the rules and do things their own way as the Founding Fathers had.

But at the same time, a vast number of the early settlers in the North American colonies were members of various religious sects which were unpopular in Europe.  Some of these (such as the Quakers) were unpopular because they tended to disagree with kings a little too often, but most of the others were shunned because they were humorless party-poopers who were always preaching to everyone about what awful things fun and pleasure (especially sex) were.  Modern Americans tend to whitewash and idealize the so-called “Pilgrim Fathers” who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, but the fact of the matter is that they were a bunch of dour, prudish Bible-thumpers who would not be welcome at many modern Thanksgiving feasts.  And though one might think at first glance that these sour-minded wet blankets would reject the pursuit of happiness so important to the Founding Fathers, one would be wrong; after all, it takes hard work, perseverance and sacrifice to make a fortune, and the Puritan Protestants were all about hard work and sacrifice. As these traditions met and interacted, the Protestant work ethic became inextricably bound up in the American Dream and the idea of wealth as a God-given reward for a pure and godly life became inextricably bound up in American Protestantism.  And as the United States expanded westward, they became more and more intertwined until it was difficult to see where one started and the other left off.  19th-century notions of scientific and social progress soon joined the mixture, creating rich and fertile soil for the growth of the Social Purity movement imported from England in the second half of the century.

As I discussed yesterday, the whore is by her very nature a rebel who refuses to accept the conventional restrictions on female behavior laid down by traditional patriarchal cultures; as such, she has an undeniable appeal to a people whose entire nation was founded in rebellion against the established order.  Americans love rebels; though the North won the War Between the States, the brave struggle of the South against unbeatable odds was romanticized in American culture for about a century after the war’s end, and outlaws such as Jesse James and D.B. Cooper still inspire folk following despite their crimes.  Witness, for example, the popular American support for the JetBlue Air Steward who told off a nasty passenger and made a colorful exit from the plane back in August.  Given that predilection and the fact that whores are the ultimate capitalists, it should come as no surprise that many Americans tend to look kindly on us.  I think this also explains the American fascination with streetwalkers in particular; the mythic streetwalker is a solitary figure who walks through the dirty, dangerous urban landscape in much the same way as the mythic cowboy rides alone through the dirty, dangerous landscape of the legendary Wild West. With her outrageous clothes and no-nonsense attitude, she makes as powerful a filmic image as the cowboy does, and indeed her Western equivalent, the “soiled dove” or saloon girl, is often paired with the cowboy.  This is, I think, the reason for the persistent tendency to imagine all prostitutes as being streetwalkers; when the average person hears the word “prostitute” or any of its synonyms, the condensed image of a century of Hollywood streetwalkers strolls unbidden through his mind.

The other major root of the American character, however, lies buried deep in the cold and stony soil of New England, nourished by four hundred years of Puritan prudery and nursed by the likes of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards.  That aspect is not amused by the harlot, nor does it find her even slightly endearing.  It finds our refusal to submit to male domination appalling, our refusal to obey every Biblical injunction shocking, our avoidance of “honest work” outrageous and our making a living from ess-ee-ecks completely unacceptable.  “Fornication!” screams Mather; “Sin and Damnation!” screams Edwards, and this dark, dismal part of the American psyche is ready to drag the whore to the pillory, whip her soundly and brand her forevermore with a scarlet letter.

For the first century of the new nation, Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam argued and wrestled and struggled over their harlot daughters; this conflict generally resulted in our profession existing in a sort of twilight status, neither completely legal nor strictly illegal.  This was especially true in areas which were not quite mainstream America yet; prostitution thrived in places like New Orleans, San Francisco and the “wild” western territories which had not yet become permeated with the stink of Puritan repression.  Unfortunately, that all changed around the turn of the 20th century; the Civil War had established the pre-eminence of the federal government over those of the states, the now-huge country required an equally huge bureaucracy to run, mass communications and rapid steam transit made it possible to enforce Northeastern ideas of rigid, centralized government on the more freewheeling and independent populations of the Southern and Western states, and the Social Purity crusaders descended on the country like a plague of locusts, banning everything which carried a hint of decadence and “sin” about it.  By 1918 prostitution was illegal everywhere in the United States, and with a few rare exceptions has remained so ever since.  The average American has in recent decades dropped into a fearful sleep haunted by nightmares of terrorists, illegal aliens, “liberals” or “conservatives”, human traffickers, Satanists and “pedophiles” and he covers his head with a pillow and cries for Big Brother to protect him from the products of his own imagination.  The cowboy has been “deconstructed” and the proud whore has been turned into a helpless victim, and the only places in which they retain their old status in the American mind are those shared fantasies we call movies and television shows.

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Fallout

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 28, 2010| 7 Comments »

Results are what you expect, and consequences are what you get. –  Anonymous

The “Law of Unintended Consequences” is the principle that in any complex system, the actions of people or governments can result in consequences that the originator of those actions neither intends nor desires.  One excellent example of this is Prohibition, which was intended to morally purify the American scene but instead almost singlehandedly created organized crime in the US.  Politicians are forever attempting to ban or control complex physical, economic or social phenomena by simply passing laws; ignorant people hail such attempts as “progressive”, but the wise recognize that such behavior is exactly equivalent to that of a primitive medicine man attempting to control the weather by shaking a rattle and doing a dance.

In the past few years sex workers in the United States have been subjected to a long series of persecutions and official attempts at collective character assassination unlike any other since the days of the Social Purity Movement at the beginning of the last century.  As I suggested in my column of the day before yesterday, it is very likely that the primary reason for this is the widespread trend toward decriminalization of our profession in most countries and the growing public acceptance of our work in the US and other nations which still adhere to the barbaric principle that women’s bodies are owned by the state.  Since nobody likes having his property taken away, politicians and neofeminists (who believe they own women’s souls) have therefore mounted a campaign to arrest this disturbing tendency before it results in our emancipation, and to this end have resurrected the old White Slavery bogeyman as we’ve discussed several times before. They have repeatedly sent this reanimated monster forth to attack the most visible of targets, resulting in the recent recriminalization of prostitution in Rhode Island (where it was technically legal for 30 years) and the highly-touted censorship of the adult services section of Craigslist, where many low-end and semi-professional hookers advertised.  And now they’ve sent their misshapen abomination against Backpage, which is used even by many midrange escorts; if this trend is allowed to continue, how long would it be before the tyrants decided to go after true escort websites such as Eros?

But if the politicians expected the Great Unwashed to cheer their victory against evil classified ads and clamor for their appointment as dictators, they were very much disappointed.  Though the neofeminists and “child trafficking” hysterics praised the action, the response from the general public was distinctly underwhelming; there was no clear consensus among the masses as to whether censoring Craigslist was “good” or “bad”, and many, many analysts have pointed out that the closing merely drove the real criminals farther underground.  Indeed, even some prohibitionist organizations who would love to see every whore in America locked up (thus depleting the female population to a tremendous degree and filling every jail and prison in the country to overflowing) whined that prostitutes would simply move their advertising elsewhere, which is absolutely true.

These repressive actions have also inspired a groundswell of resistance, both from prostitutes’ rights organizations and from more general human and women’s rights ones, not to mention free speech advocates.  77% of respondents in a recent debate at The Economist voted in favor of legalization, and several pro-sex work online petitions such as this one have appeared in recent days.  But perhaps most important was the release of this statement by the Third Wave Foundation, a well-funded feminist group which opposes the groupthink and anti-sex policies of mainstream feminism:

We do not believe that sex work is a cause of that violence or oppression, nor do we believe that seeking to prohibit safe and consensual sex work or the demand for it is the solution to eradicating gender-based inequity or violence. In fact, these attempts to criminalize sex work often have the unintended consequence of leaving young people even more vulnerable. Prohibitions on sex work — even when targeted at third-parties such as customers and advertising venues — criminalize young people and force them further underground in order to meet their survival needs. As a result, they are more vulnerable to violence and isolated from one another and from rights advocates.

THIRD WAVE SUPPORTS YOUNG PEOPLE ENGAGED IN SEX WORK AND IMPACTED BY THE SEX TRADE AS CRITICAL PARTNERS IN ENSURING HEALTH AND JUSTICE.

We at Third Wave are deeply concerned about the ways in which young women and transgender youth may be subject to abuse and violence in any aspect of their lives. Over the last decade of supporting this work, we have learned that young people come to sex work and the sex trade through a wide range of experiences that include choice, circumstance, and coercion. Our community of grant partners and allies includes sex workers, people involved in the sex trade and street economies, and people who have been trafficked. Regardless of how young people are involved in or are impacted by the sex trade, they must be considered partners in the work of advocating for rights and achieving justice.

WE RECOGNIZE AND AFFIRM A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEX WORK AND TRAFFICKING, AND URGE POLICYMAKERS AND ALLIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCACY TO APPROACH THESE ISSUES WITH RESPECT FOR THAT DIFFERENCE.

These are nuanced and deeply complex concerns. Pursuing a plan of action to address violence, coercion, or trafficking without considering the needs and leadership of young people with direct experience in sex work and the sex trade will result in solutions that do not fully address the harms that young people face. Nor will advocates benefit from the depth of their expertise.

WITH OUR SUPPORT, YOUNG PEOPLE ENGAGED IN SEX WORK AND WHO ARE IMPACTED BY THE SEX TRADE ARE ORGANIZING IN THEIR COMMUNITIES AND ACHIEVING WINS.

Across the US, our grant partners are supporting one another to create smart solutions that are rooted in their day-to-day realities.  They conduct research on the needs of their own communities, mapping the complex social service systems that they must navigate successfully in order to seek support.  They operate their own health care clinics with state and city-level health partners.  They advocate for and participate in city taskforces that address youth housing needs.  They have developed their own programs to secure legal advocacy for their communities.  They organize and train one another to work within criminal/legal systems to advocate for their rights.  Together, they create innovative new models for peer support and education rooted in harm reduction principles and respect for young people’s power to make change in their own lives.

WE VALUE THE FULL RANGE OF EXPERIENCES OF YOUNG PEOPLE WHO DO SEX WORK AND ARE IMPACTED BY THE SEX TRADE, AND SUPPORT WORK THAT BUILDS THEIR POWER AND AGENCY.

It is a step forward for policymakers and advocates to recognize that young people who do sex work or who are impacted by the sex trade are not criminals. We must also recognize that not all young people who do sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade are victims.

Partnerships between young people and adult allies must support the vision and leadership of young people. We work in collaboration with young people to secure the resources they need to continue creating a healthy and just world. We urge policymakers who seek to protect young people from violence to include young people’s expertise at every level of their decision-making. We also urge our community partners and allies to center the voices and experiences of young people who do sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade when advocating for their human rights.

Third Wave has been advocating for sex workers since the beginning of this century, but this is its strongest statement yet against prohibition, the equation of voluntary adult prostitution with “human trafficking” and the neofeminist dogma that all sex workers are victims. Here’s hoping that their efforts and those of all of our other advocates will at last begin to make an impression on the thick skulls of politicians by forcing them to recognize that their ill-conceived and wrongheaded attempts to suppress prostitution even further are alienating a great many taxpayers. The popularity of the so-called “Tea Party” movement shows exactly how sick many people are of big government, and it doesn’t get much bigger than using propaganda and outright lies to suppress consensual adult behavior; I can’t even begin to guess how much money governments in the US might save if prostitution were decriminalized as it was in New Zealand seven years ago.  In 2008 a report on the Prostitution Reform Act was prepared; it should be required reading for every government official in every state of the US.  I’ve added a link to it in my “resources” box at the right for those who are interested, but its findings are summed up in its abstract:

The PRA has been in force for five years. During that time, the sex industry has not increased in size, and many of the social evils predicted by some who opposed the decriminalisation of the sex industry have not been experienced. On the whole, the PRA has been effective in achieving its purpose, and the Committee is confident that the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off under the PRA than they were previously.

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Here We Go Again…

Posted in Current Events, History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 26, 2010| 18 Comments »

The more things change, the more they stay the same. –  Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Despite what the naïve and the chronically optimistic like to believe, human nature does not change; individual people are the same today as they were at the beginning of human civilization some twelve thousand years ago.  And while we have made some social progress in that time, it is by no means the one-way trip imagined by the idealists but rather a zigzagging course full of false starts, backslides, missteps, blind alleys and going in circles.  Societies often ignore the obvious solutions to their problems, make problems out of things which aren’t, and return time and again to the same old nonsense despite the fact that it has never worked in the past.

In my column of August 9th I talked about the “white slavery” hysteria concocted by the social purists of the late 19th century to provide an excuse so the general public would swallow their foolish and repressive campaign against prostitution.  Proponents of this hysteria purported that tens of thousands of young girls were being abducted by slave traders and forced to serve in brothels in foreign countries, and they demanded tougher laws against voluntary adult prostitution in order to combat it.  The fact that extensive (not to mention expensive) investigations found absolutely no evidence for any of this reassured almost nobody, as is typical in a moral panic.  Fortunately, such manufactured hysterias tend to vanish like the insubstantial shadows they are in the harsh light of true crises, and the “white slavery” hysteria was no exception; by the end of the First World War it had abated.  Unfortunately, it is impossible to formulate concise laws against nonexistent threats, so legislation born of such hysteria is nearly always incredibly broad and unconstitutionally vague; the Mann Act was just such a piece of legislation, and it was for decades employed as a vehicle for malicious persecution until the U.S. Congress finally limited its scope in 1986 to actual criminal acts rather than undefined “immoral purposes”.

But just as Prohibition returned in the guise of the “War on Drugs”, and the witch hysteria of the 16th century returned as the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and ‘90s, so the “white slavery” hysteria has returned as the contemporary hysteria over “human trafficking”.  As in the first two decades of the 20th century, exorbitant claims are made about the extent of the sex slave trade in Western countries and used to justify laws against voluntary adult prostitution; all over the United States prostitution laws which were defended only a decade ago on “moral” grounds or by the excuse that prostitution attracts crime (a vague and bizarre notion in itself) are now being defended on the grounds that they are “needed” to combat “human trafficking” despite the fact that these laws were enacted long before the current moral panic.  It’s a bit as though governments were trying to defend 1930s laws against marijuana use on the grounds that they were “needed” to combat the use of methamphetamine, or justifying 19th-century laws against homosexuality on the grounds that they were “needed” to combat the spread of AIDS, except of course for the fact that methamphetamine and AIDS actually exist in the countries with those laws.

The hysteria is particularly troubling in the United Kingdom, where prostitution has been technically legal (though still persecuted) for several decades; it is obvious that the new “white slavery” hysteria-mongers intend to turn back the clock on prostitution rights if allowed.  Thus the potential damage is greater than in the US, where prostitution is suppressed anyhow and the renamed “white slavery” hysteria is just the latest excuse in a long parade of stupid, dishonest, hypocritical rationalizations for tyranny against women.  Since Stephen Paterson’s blog about UK prostitution law has already published an exhaustive summary of the claims made by “human trafficking” alarmists contrasted with the actual truth about those claims, it would be silly of me to attempt to cover the same ground over again; instead, I’ll just provide a link to the article here, and enthusiastically recommend it to my readers.  Another excellent article, from The Guardian of last October 20th, can be found here.

Just as at the end of the 19th century, the “white slavery”/”human trafficking” hysteria springs from the neurotic perversion of sexually-repressed middle-class white women who have derailed the feminist movement into their own personal crusade against men, sex and those who provide men with fair access to sex (i.e. whores).  But unlike a hundred years ago, “moral purity” won’t really play with the average voter any longer, so the neofeminists (IPC calls them “fundamentalist feminists”) have been forced to hide their hatred of us behind the pretense that they wish to “save” us, as discussed yesterday.

Since I really do want you to read the various things I’ve linked above (especially the Wikipedia article on moral panics and the Stephen Paterson blog), I’m going to do something unusual today and cut my column short so as to give you the time to do so.  But I’ll leave you with this second entry in the “Here We Go Again” department, a paraphrase of an AP article which describes a renewal of the control freaks’ war against Craigslist which I mentioned in my column of August 17th.

The attorneys general of seventeen of the United States announced Tuesday (August 24th, 2010) that they have sent a joint letter calling on Craigslist to get rid of its adult services category because they say the website cannot adequately block potentially illegal ads; they say Craigslist is not completely screening out ads that promote prostitution and child trafficking.  The site creators pledged in 2008 to improve their policing efforts.  The states which participated in this exercise in tyranny were Arkansas, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia; fortunately, Craigslist is based in San Francisco, California (the home of the American prostitutes’ rights movement) and is therefore not subject to the laws of those 17 states.

Note the linking of adult prostitution with child trafficking as though they were related; note also that prostitution was technically legal in Rhode Island from 1980 to 2009 (though still persecuted as in the UK) but was outlawed again on November 3 of last year, thus proving the statements I made in the first paragraph.  I’m sure nobody will be surprised when I tell you that the new law was championed by a privileged white woman and supported by cops who claimed they needed it to “conduct sting operations at brothels where women and children were abused and enslaved by pimps and sex-traffickers.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

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Traitors to Their Sex

Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 2010| 36 Comments »

There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women. –  Madeleine K. Albright

From the very beginning, feminism has been a movement as divided in its sensibilities as women are divided in ours.  While many early feminist leaders were concerned with issues which affected all women of every class and situation (such as reproductive freedom and social, legal, economic and educational equality) and by their efforts reshaped Western society for the better, the majority of rank-and-file feminists (especially in the US and UK) were unimaginative middle-class white women who were primarily concerned with their own peeves rather than the very real needs of women who were lower-class, nonwhite or unconventional.  But whenever I dare to make statements like this, I am often countered with a disingenuous “Feminists are just people who want women to have equal rights with men.”  If only that were true!  Certainly some feminists were and are like that, and Goddess bless them for it, but then as now most simply used the movement as most people use any political or social movement, namely as an excuse to control others.  While the best and brightest early feminists were working to win rights for individual women and thereby strengthen liberty for all people, the majority were working to do the exact opposite by imposing their own prudish, repressed, Christian, Victorian and feminine sexual morality on the 85% or more of society who were none of those things.

These conflicting attitudes about freedom of choice vs. conventional Victorian sexual morality can be seen in the person of Josephine Butler (1828-1906), who recognized that English law of the time (especially the Draconian “Contagious Disease Acts”) stripped prostitutes of their rights as Englishwomen and so campaigned tirelessly for the repeal of those laws for 16 years.  At the same time, Butler (like most Victorians) believed that women were essentially asexual, and so could not accept that any woman might freely choose to exploit the male sexual appetite in order to earn a living; the very idea was anathema to her rigid Christian thinking.  She therefore concluded that it was actually whores who were the exploited ones, childlike victims of male lust who had been forced into lives of “degradation” by male oppression.  Like so many people both then and now, Butler was so convinced that her opinions were “right” that she imagined anyone who believed differently must be suffering from some form of impaired judgment.

Butler was very charismatic and attracted many middle-class feminists to her cause, but after the repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts in 1886 prostitutes were no longer the cause célèbre; when they refused to repent their whoredom and embrace “honest work” and conventional morality the feminists abandoned their sympathy like yesterday’s newspaper and declared war on our entire profession, vowing to abolish it entirely.  Butler founded the Social Purity Alliance, an organization dedicated to imposing middle-class Victorian standards of chastity (i.e. repugnance for sex) onto men, and it was but the first of a host of similar organizations which sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1880s and ‘90s.  Though the movement boasted a number of high profile men (such as William Booth of Salvation Army fame and the American health-farm proprietor John Kellogg, who touted corn flakes as a “cure” for masturbation in adolescent boys), the overwhelming majority of its members were female.  And though many of these came from conservative Christian backgrounds, many others were former Butlerites; middle-class “feminists” had shown their true colors and abandoned the drive to win rights for the disenfranchised in favor of one which aimed to restrict the rights of everyone.  One goal of the social purity movement was the imposition of universal temperance (eventually resulting in Prohibition in the US), but the more important one for our purposes was the war on whores.  While male rulers had always been largely content to “control” or ghettoize prostitutes, the purity crusaders vowed to wipe us from the face of the Earth, and their newfound political clout (which increased dramatically after women were given the vote in almost every Western nation in the first two decades of the 20th century) resulted in an unprecedented wave of harsh, repressive laws directed against the women who so offended the retarded sexual sensibilities of their privileged bourgeois sisters.

The purity crusaders used many propaganda weapons against prostitutes, but chief among these were disease scares and the “white slavery” hysteria.  As several times before in history, whores were vilified as dirty plague-carriers, and this campaign of misinformation was so well-organized that the notion is still deeply imbedded in the public consciousness a century later despite ample evidence to the contrary.  But the “white slavery” propaganda was even more effective; the unholy alliance of middle-class feminists and puritanical religious zealots managed to convince the public, the media and governments that there was a huge international trade in underage girls, abducted and forced into sexual slavery in foreign countries.  The fact that there was absolutely no evidence for such a vast conspiracy made no difference whatsoever; the public devoured lurid stories of child prostitution, and throughout the Western world (especially in English-speaking countries) voluntary adult prostitution was banned or severely restricted under the excuse of combating involuntary prostitution of “children”.  The brothels were closed, girls were forced into the streets, and the pimp as we know him today first appeared; in the name of “freeing” women from male “exploitation”, these so-called “feminists” had actually surrendered many women into a new form of male domination.

The war on whores reached its peak in the 1920s, but ran out of steam when the Great Depression gave middle-class feminists something more important to worry about; that was followed closely by the Second World War.  But once Hitler was safely buried and the dust began to settle, the stifling conformity of the 1950s inspired a new generation of feminists.  As in the first wave of feminism a hundred years before, the best and brightest feminists concerned themselves with the big issues and the rights of individual women, while the majority of rank-and-file feminists were once again unimaginative middle-class white women who were primarily concerned with their own peeves rather than the very real needs of women who were lower-class, nonwhite or unconventional.  One of the big issues this time around was sex; as I discussed in my column of July 20th scientific inquiry had at last exploded the myths about female sexuality which drove so much of the first feminists’ agenda, and for the first time in modern history “respectable” women were free to think and talk about a subject previously restricted to their whore sisters; the so-called “sexual revolution” had arrived.

Unfortunately, the evaporation of the social purity movement had not resulted in an equivalent evaporation of the morality laws it had foisted on the populace, especially in the United States; far too many Americans are subject to a peculiar delusion I call “lawheadedness”.  A “lawhead” is one who believes that man-made laws are actually based in objective reality like physical laws; he is unable to comprehend that the majority of laws are completely arbitrary, and therefore views a violation of a “vice law” with the same horror that normal people reserve for rains of toads or spontaneous human combustion.  Though lawheads are a minority of the population they are disproportionately represented in positions of power, with the result that once a law is on the books it cannot usually be removed by any means short of armed insurrection.  Despite the fact that in the 1960s many Americans became far more accepting of prostitution and other sex businesses, this was insufficient to cause prostitution law to even be questioned, much less repealed.

In the sexually “liberated” climate of the 1960s, many true feminists found this situation abhorrent.  They rightfully recognized that laws against prostitution are discriminatory in the extreme because they criminalize the only profession which is overwhelmingly practiced by and controlled by women; these early second-wave feminists understood that repression of prostitution is the repression of a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own body, just as surely as banning abortion or birth control was.  And since feminists were working to abolish the latter laws, it only made sense that they should work to abolish anti-prostitution laws as well.  But by the early ‘70s the first-wave pattern was starting to repeat itself; the white, middle-class feminists who made up the majority of the movement monopolized debate and elbowed the hookers out, forcing us to start our own separate rights organizations such as COYOTE and the English Collective of Prostitutes.  As yet there was no open hostility between whores and mainstream feminists, but sexually-repressed caricatures like Kate Millet were working to change that; here’s a quote from Millett which defines her view:

Prostitution, when unmotivated by economic need, might well be defined as a species of psychological addiction, built on self-hatred through repetitions of the act of sale by which a whore is defined.

Recognize the Victorian rhetoric?  It’s the old “whores are subhuman” dressed up in modern pop-psychology drag.  Millett and others like her started to pull feminism in a Neomarxist direction, transforming what had been a positive movement about making women equal partners with men into a vicious political organization whose catechism was the old Marxist poison of class warfare, except with “patriarchy” substituted for “bourgeoisie” and “women” substituted for “proletariat”.

By the end of the ‘70s feminism was in turmoil, torn between the true feminists and the sick, bitter Neomarxists and their “gender war” rhetoric.  But once AIDS appeared on the scene the war was over, and the misandrists had won; the modern Puritanism engendered by the AIDS scare shifted the balance of power to the anti-sex position, and sex workers of every kind (including everyone from porn stars to lingerie models) were demonized as gender-war “Uncle Toms”, as typified in this quote from anti-whore activist Julie Burchill:

Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism.  Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women’s sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another.  When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.

There is the Neofeminist position in all its histrionic, collectivistic, misogynistic, anti-sexual, completely-detached-from-reality putrescence; whores are evil, Burchill is saying, because by our comfort with sex we make prudish women like her look bad.  Like the “learned” men of the 19th century she portrays us as stunted creatures incapable of free moral choice, “things to be done to” in her words; note, however, that it is Burchill who so characterizes us, not her imaginary “patriarchy”.

So in almost exactly a century, we’ve come full circle.  As in 1910, we’re still being blamed for spreading disease despite ample evidence to the contrary.  As in 1910, authorities justify laws banning voluntary adult prostitution with the excuse that such bans somehow magically help them combat child prostitution and white slavery (only now they call it “human trafficking”).  As in 1910, we are characterized as subhuman monsters somehow different from other women.  And as in 1910, our worst enemies are not men, but a certain type of twisted control-freak woman who is perfectly happy to kick her sisters in the teeth in order to advance her own selfish, prudish, repressive agenda.

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Pimps

Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2010| 27 Comments »

‘Tis the strumpet’s plague/To beguile many, and be beguil’d by one.  –  William Shakespeare, Othello (IV, i)

In a reply to my column of July 18th, Sailor Barsoom said “Everybody talks about streetwalkers and pimps, but I hear that pimps aren’t as common as they used to be,” to which I replied “They were never as common as they used to be.”  I promised to explain this more fully, and today is the day.  As we have discussed before, most people think the vast majority of whores are streetwalkers; they also believe that nearly all of us have “pimps”, men who dominate and control us, beating us up and taking our money.  Ignorant men like to believe this because it reduces the whore to a slave under male control; cops like to believe it because it lets them pretend they aren’t the chief danger in our lives; neofeminists like to believe it because it feeds into their lurid fantasies of male oppression and the whore as damaged, exploited victim; legislators like to believe it because it gives them an excuse to harass us even in countries where prostitution itself is legal; Hollywood likes to believe it because it’s tawdry and provides material for cheap melodramatics; and moralists like to believe it because it gives them something to “save” us from even though extramarital sex no longer carries a social stigma.  The fact that the pimp as he is generally imagined is actually relatively rare does not matter to any of these people; after all, if the facts do not conform to the theory it is the facts which must be disposed of.

We’ve all played the game of looking for shapes in the clouds, and many have taken the Rorschach test which asks what we see in inkblots.  The ancients made pictures out of the stars, and fundamentalist Christians used to take great pleasure in playing records backward in order to “find” Satanic messages therein.  The human mind is very good at imposing order on chaos, and this is harmless unless we start to delude ourselves that what we see is actually there.  Unfortunately, many people do just that, and others to whom they point out these imaginary patterns usually see exactly what they’re told they will see.  This is a universal tendency of the human psyche, and not one limited to the stupid or weak-minded; many a scientific experiment has been ruined because of “experimenter expectation”, the tendency of even the intelligent mind when confronted with data it does not comprehend to interpret that data according to its preconceptions.  Put more plainly, when any person looks at something he does not understand, he tends to see exactly what he expects to see.  So when an outsider looks at a whore’s life, he tends to interpret every non-customer male who has any kind of relationship with her as a “pimp”, because of course everybody knows that all whores have pimps.

If we’re going to talk about the men who aren’t pimps, it’s probably a good idea to start by defining what a pimp is in the first place.  Once all emotion and exaggeration is stripped away, a pimp is essentially a manager (and indeed some girls even call their pimps that).  He may book calls or provide housing for the girl, advertise for her, protect her, and arrange for bail if she is arrested; in return for these services she pays him a percentage of her earnings.  As in any business, there are good managers and bad ones, and a bad pimp can be very bad indeed; the fees he demands could be wildly out of proportion to the services he provides and he might use coercion, intimidation, violence or even more extreme means to have his way.  But the same thing could be said of husbands or boyfriends; what makes a pimp different?  Now, at this point I must disclose that I am very prejudiced against pimps; the idea of an adult man being supported by a woman grates on my nerves like nails on a chalkboard.  However, I am trying to view this subject dispassionately, and as I said in my July 14th column my dislike for something is insufficient grounds for banning it.  In a way, I’m almost as much of an outsider to the reality of pimps as you are; I have never had a pimp, and only rarely encountered girls who did because they’re quite rare in the world of escorts.  In all fairness, I don’t know for a fact that even those were pimps; it may merely have been my perception.  And though it galls me to have to say this, is a non-abusive pimp really anything different from a low-class, low-rent, unprofessional escort service?  I’ve run into service owners who were only barely above the level of pimps; one in New Orleans whom I will discuss at length later was referred to by escorts who had left her service as “Pimp Mama” because of her lack of concern for her girls and her frequent attempts to control them by threats and histrionics.  Despite my dislike, is it right to oppose pimps merely on principle, even if they treat their girls well and actually give them their money’s worth as good escort service owners do?   In good conscience I must say no.  The government must judge criminality on the behavior of an individual, not merely his status, and the right of individual choice MUST be respected in a free society, even if the majority don’t like that choice.

The stereotypical pimp is male, but in most times and places prostitution was a female business controlled by females; until recently streetwalkers always ran their own shows, and most brothels were owned and managed by women.  The only places in which this was not true were those in which the state controlled the brothels, and even in those most were still run by women and the only men involved were the government bureaucrats sent to collect the state’s cut.  Considering that these governments gave whores nothing but the promise that they would not be beaten, raped and arrested, they could be considered the first pimps.  This system of “toleration” became widespread (most notably in France) in the early 19th century; though prostitution was not technically illegal, the police were given wide powers to “control” prostitutes and generally did so by what later generations called a “protection racket”, squeezing whores of every level for money and beating, raping and/or imprisoning those who refused to pay up.  I find it terribly ironic that modern police tend to be so sanctimonious about pimps when they in fact were the first men to use violence to control and exploit whores, and even today tend to be a much greater danger to those at every level of the profession.

Pimps as we now know them did not appear until just before the turn of the 20th century, when the widespread “purity movement” (an outgrowth of early feminism which was also responsible for such brilliant ideas as Prohibition and attempts to prevent little boys from masturbating) pressured legislatures throughout the West (especially in the US) to ban prostitution outright rather than merely seeking to “control” it.  Since under these new laws women could in many cities be arrested on suspicion of prostitution for simply walking in the street unescorted, streetwalkers began to employ men either to escort them so as to throw the police off, or to keep a lookout at the ends of streets so the whores could rush inside when the cops showed up.  And when a whore was busted despite precautions, a male contact who held some of her money could arrange bail.  In other words, the first true pimps appeared as a direct result of the criminalization of prostitution, which puts modern “anti-pimping laws” on shaky moral ground indeed.  Sadly, this is not the only time in which the government’s excuse for some tyrannical law is the suppression of a problem which would not exist but for other tyrannical laws.  If prostitution were not illegal there would be no need for pimps, and the streetwalkers who keep pimps only do so because they fear the cops more.

Even among streetwalkers, though, the stereotyped abusive pimp is fairly rare.  American studies show that fewer than half of all streetwalkers have pimps, and of those that do the majority of them control the pimps rather than the other way around.  The English Collective of Prostitutes estimates that fewer than 10% of English streetwalkers are encumbered by a “heavy ponce” (abusive pimp) and French estimates are lower still, about 5% of streetwalkers.  Using the English estimate as a median between the higher American and lower French figures, and applying it to our standard 15% estimate of the percentage of all whores who are streetwalkers, we arrive at a figure of roughly 1.5% of all Western prostitutes who are controlled by pimps.  This is a far cry from the “vast majority” claimed by the anti-whore propagandists who infest government and the feminist movement, and similar to most estimates of the number of women with abusive husbands or boyfriends.

Given these figures it seems likely that there are more pimp wannabes in this country than actual pimps.  So, who are all of these men that the authorities and neofeminists claim are pimps?  Many of them are simply boyfriends or husbands of whores; my own husband could have been accused of being a pimp from 2004-2006, a period when my income exceeded his by a narrow margin.  Some are just male friends or roommates, including gay prostitutes.  Others are men employed by escorts or call girls as drivers; some girls prefer not to worry about parking, and it’s nice to know there’s a big burly man nearby who knows exactly which hotel room one is in should a problem arise.  Still others are dependent family members, such as minor sons or invalid fathers or brothers.  The assumption that any man who keeps company with a whore and isn’t a customer must be a pimp has its roots in the old Madonna/whore duality again, specifically the virulent 19th-century “whore as monster” variety, because it pretends that whores are abnormal and therefore incapable of having the same sort of romantic, familial or economic relationships as any other woman.

As I said in the first paragraph, though, most people never let the facts get in the way of their preconceptions, especially when there’s political coin to be made.  So in many countries (such as Canada and the UK) where public opinion and/or feminist pressure has caused laws criminalizing prostitution itself to be repealed, there are still plenty of laws which criminalize nearly everything a prostitute might do either to perform her trade or even just to live, and some of the most pernicious of these are the “living off of the avails” laws.  These laws, supposedly intended to control our old bogeyman the pimp, criminalize any person who is supported even in part by a whore.  So though prostitutes themselves are no longer criminals their boyfriends, university-age dependent children, invalid parents, other prostitutes with whom they share expenses, or anyone else they as much as ASSIST with money are.  Thus whores are once again made pariahs, prohibited by law from having families or even roommates, while the legislators can feel “progressive” about repealing their old discriminatory laws and replacing them with ones intended to “protect” us from domination by males (except, of course, for the male government officials who write laws to control us and collect “fines” from our earnings).  So at the end of the day abusive, controlling pimps who steal whores’ money and give them nothing in return really aren’t that rare after all; they just have government plates on their pimpmobiles and wear uniforms or judicial robes rather than garish outfits with silly hats.

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