Striving toward a goal puts a more pleasing construction on our advance toward death. – Mason Cooley
Anthony trudged down the filthy street, pulling his cloak down as far as he could to keep out the evening rain. Anyone who observed his erratic course would have thought him drunk, but every sane Roman was out of the beastly weather and Anthony’s weaving route was shaped by the necessity of avoiding puddles while yet getting close enough to the signs to read them in the darkness without having to uncover his head.
He had occupied himself thus every night for most of a week, making inquiries and crossing palms with sestertii in an effort to discover the location of his quarry, and he was beginning to despair; he felt as though he had walked every muddy, narrow, winding back-street in the city, and the foul weather had dampened his spirits as thoroughly as it had his clothes. His schoolboy Latin was insufficient to the task at hand, and his outlandish accent and incredible ignorance of mundane matters marked him as a barbarian at best and a madman at worst; he feared that small-time hucksters were now pointing him out to one another as one who could be taken for a few coins merely by pretending to know of the strumpet he sought so assiduously. If he spent much more he would be unable to pay her fee, however nominal it might be; he therefore resolved that if he could not find her by the end of the night (or maybe sooner than that), he would simply pass her by, move on to the next name on his list and return here after he had done enough research to limit his possibilities to a few easily-investigated locales.
The very worst disappointment was the sheer number of bad leads; in any era the stage-names of whores tended to be predictable and repetitive, and some girls were willing to pretend to be the one for whom he was looking. But so far, none of the six Lyciscas he had met had been the right one; each had been too old, too young, too thin, too ugly or too dark to be the Lycisca he wanted to hire. So tonight, he would follow a different strategy; he would simply go into each lupanar he found, quiz the villicus about the women available that night, and then ask the name of any who fit the correct description rather than supplying them with the means of deceiving him in order to deplete his rapidly-diminishing funds still further.
But just when he was ready to give up, Fortuna smiled upon him. The streets and the buildings had all begun to look alike, so he was not surprised when the cashier at one of the brothels greeted him as a returning customer; he was about to turn to go when he realized he had been asked a question in which the name “Lycisca” had been embedded.
“What you saying?” Anthony asked, realizing the grammatical error as soon as the words were out of his mouth.
“I said, aren’t you the fellow who was looking for Lycisca a few days ago?”
“Yes,” he replied wearily, expecting another con.
“Well, she’s here tonight. She wasn’t last time you came, so I tried to give you another girl,” he said with a grin. “But I promise, this is really the Lycisca you’re looking for. Here, I’ll call her out where you can see her in the light.”
Anthony guessed that the willingness of the villicus to make this extra effort was due to the poor traffic on such a foul night, but he just couldn’t get his hopes up…and then he saw her. The quality of her blonde wig was out of place in such a cheap establishment, and the quality of her health out of place in a low-end Roman prostitute. Despite her imposture of a common whore he could see the hauteur and breeding in her manner, and the difference between her Latin and that of the plebeians with whom he had been dealing for the past few days was obvious even to his foreign ears. He quickly paid her fee and tipped the cashier extra for remembering him, returned with her to her grimy little room and eagerly did what he had come so far and worked so hard to do.
He awakened to firm but gentle shaking, and opened his eyes to the smiling face of Leon, the one orderly he genuinely liked.
“Good morning, Professor! I’m sorry to disturb you, but I know you don’t want to miss breakfast!”
“Good morning, Leon. And thank you for waking me.”
“Did you scratch another name off of your list last night?” Then in response to the older man’s puzzled expression, “It’s the only time you oversleep.”
“How well you know me! Yes, I’ve just returned from a tryst with Valeria Messalina, Empress of Rome.”
“How’d you get an empress to sleep with you? I thought you just saw hookers?”
“Messalina was, as you young people say, ‘kinky’. She liked to sneak out of the palace while her husband was asleep and work as a common prostitute.”
“Wow, is that so? How was she?”
He considered for a moment, cleaning his glasses before putting them on. “Neither as talented as Nell Gwyn nor as beautiful as La Belle Otero, but she made up for that with her sheer exuberance.”
“Gee, Professor, I sure wish I could learn that astro-whatsis…”
“Astral projection.”
“…astral projection,” he repeated, “so I could visit all those historical places like you do.”
“Well, Leon, it takes years of study and practice, but I’m sure you could learn if you set your mind to it.”
“Naw,” he said sheepishly, helping Anthony with his bathrobe, “I’m just big and dumb, I was never good at studies. Who’s the next lady you plan to see?”
“I think I shall brush up on my Greek,” he said wistfully; “I seem to have a yen for empresses these days.”
There is nothing holy nor sacred to those who have abandoned God and reason in order to follow their perverse desires. – François Rabelais, Gargantua (chapter 31)
Fair warning: what you’re about to read may make you feel ill. Writing it made me feel both queasy and dirty; I put it off for as long as I could, but I wanted to get done with it completely – including the posting and indexing – early enough so that I could be sure of regaining my appetite by dinnertime. I probably don’t need to tell regular readers that I’m made of pretty stern stuff; my husband is only one of the many who have described me as “hard as nails”. But the minds of some people are so wholly vile and disgusting that reading about their loathsome behavior, their indefensible motivations and their twisted rationalizations makes me feel as though I have been hurled into a tank full of raw sewage and leaves my heart pounding and my hands shaking. The people to whom I refer are sexual predators, those subhuman monsters who are so completely devoid of even the most basic human decency and moral scruples that they think nothing of using other human beings to satisfy their perverted sexual needs, inflicting grievous physical and emotional harm on their victims and sometimes scarring them for life. Worse still, these revolting vermin form associations with other like-minded scum, pooling their resources and cunning so as to more effectively snare unsuspecting victims. It would be bad enough to merely know that these freaks existed, but to see them defended, excused and even glorified in a major newspaper is almost more than I can bear:
…“This is Lushous,” she said in a soft, seductive voice. “You want to come see me today?” The client had found her on backpage.com, where she promoted herself as a busty woman…eager for company…“For half an hour, it’s just $40, baby. Tell me what you want to do.” Lushous wanted to use handcuffs. She was actually an undercover…cop. If the man on the phone actually came…he’d be walking right into the department’s latest sting operation…Sharing Room 241 with her was another undercover officer with a nickname, a square-jawed, blue-eyed cop known as Pretty Boy. He pored through a stack of printed Web ads…[and] called each one. “Are you doing out-calls today, sweetie?” They had arranged the room so it would seem like they were just lonely travelers. Pretty Boy hung a crushed black suit on the rod and placed a used bar of Old Spice deodorant near the sink. He ditched his uniform for a T-shirt and blue jeans but kept on his wedding ring. Lushous ruffled the sheets on the queen-size bed. She had lozenges to keep her voice smooth. She placed a package of condoms on the side table…In 242, about six officers were on hand to help with arrests and the paperwork. In 247, there were two female officers to attract men looking for a woman not of Lushous’s type. Lushous is curvy and black; the two other female officers are white and thin…In 248, a detective posted $10 ads in the adult-services section of backpage.com…“Hello, my name is…” he began typing, trying to dream up a seductive name for the colleague next door. He then tapped out, “B-R-A-N-D-I”…Ten minutes later, Brandi’s phone started to ring. “…Am I busy? No…Yes, those are my pictures.” After she hung up, the man texted her, “Are you affiliated with law enforcement?” She rolled her eyes. Every caller asked this question, under the common delusion…that a cop was legally obligated to say yes. “No,’’ she texted back. “Are you?”…
I think that’s enough to give you the idea; the cops’ sociopathy is made even more revolting by the reporter’s glowing, fetishized praise, almost as loving and lurid as a Nick Kristof description of the tortures inflicted upon imaginary teenage girls. But in spite of themselves, the yellow hack and the blue swine managed to produce one paragraph that was true, though not in the way they meant it: “For police officials, prostitution is not victimless crime…Sex workers are prone to being raped and robbed. Some are victims of sex trafficking. The men who visit them are sometimes assaulted…” That’s all true, but the victimizers – those doing most of that raping, robbing, assaulting and abduction into coercion and captivity – are the police, and they do it with the support of the government and many of the more ignorant and deluded members of the public.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go take a shower.
The tribune of the people was being conveyed in an essedum, lictors with laurel preceded him; among whom, on an open litter, a mime actress was being carried; whom honorable men, citizens of the municipalities, coming out from their towns under compulsion to meet her, saluted not by the name by which she was notorious on the stage, but by that of Volumnia. A raeda followed full of pimps, thoroughly despicable companions; then his neglected mother was following the girlfriend of her filthy son as though she were a bride. – Cicero, Second Philippic
Cytheris was born a slave in the latter days of the Roman Republic, about 70 BCE. Her parents were probably Greek, and her name (deriving from Cytherea, one of Aphrodite’s bynames) may not be the one she was originally assigned at birth, but rather one she adopted (or was given) later when it became clear what her profession would be. She was the property of the wealthy and ambitious Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus, an enthusiastic patron of the theater, who had her trained as a mime and introduced her to the theater in her early teens. Roman mime was not the silent niche-art it is today, but rather a blend of singing, dancing and acting, much of it improvised; it is therefore more closely akin to vaudeville than to Mummenschanz or Marceau. As I mentioned in “Meretrices and Prostibulae”, most mimes – like most actresses for centuries before and millennia after – were also prostitutes, and Cytheris was probably in the group of mimes who in 55 BCE began the tradition of ending the Floralia with a striptease (the public sex was not added until imperial times).
Cytheris so excelled at both the public and private aspects of her art that her master freed her sometime in the late 50s, but his action was not motivated by altruism; though she was legally free she was still an actress and whore and thus could not hope to rise very high in stratified Roman society. Furthermore, she was bound to her patron by a restrictive contract which kept her from choosing her employment freely, and she was obligated to give him free performances (of both kinds) when asked. In other words he was no longer her master, but he was still her pimp; this is exactly why he freed her. No man of knightly or senatorial rank could associate with a slave-whore unless she belonged to him, but as an ostensibly free delicata she could be hired by the noble Romans Eutrapelus hoped to influence. Cytheris was no exploited victim, however; she remained extremely loyal to her patron for the rest of her life, and he treated her more like a modern businessman would treat an extremely valued assistant than like something out of a prohibitionist fantasy.
About 49 BCE Cytheris became involved with Mark Antony, who openly made her his mistress after Caesar appointed him Master of the Horse (second in command) in the summer of 48. Their relationship did not last much longer; he was forced to give her up by the end of 47 BCE, but the reason it ended is worthy of note because it reveals Antony’s two main personality flaws (politically speaking) and foreshadows his eventual downfall. Though his family connections predestined him to high office, his heart was never really in it; as a youth he was well-known for drinking, gambling and general partying, and even as a man he was well-known for being fond of the company of theater people, especially mimes. But the second flaw was the tragic one: Antony had the unfortunate tendency to fall in love with his mistresses, which of course led to his doom once he took up with Cleopatra only six years later.
Nobody in Rome cared if prominent citizens had affairs with courtesans or other women of lower social class, no matter how many patricians knew about it; what was important was that it be kept out of sight of the plebeians, and given no official recognition. But Antony seemed unable to maintain this necessary discretion, either with Cytheris or later with Cleopatra. Rather than treating his mistresses as a Roman statesman should, he acted like a young man in love who wants the world to know about his wonderful lady. While Caesar was off in Africa wiping out the last army loyal to Pompey, Antony made administrative rounds in Italy with the great procession the conservative Cicero (who knew Cytheris personally and disliked her intensely) describes in the epigram: he essentially treated a courtesan like a wife, even to the point of having her addressed by her nomen (inherited from her former master) as though she were a matron, rather than by the cognomen under which she was famous. When Caesar came back to Rome, he was extremely unhappy about this and insisted that Antony break off relations with her (Cicero mocks Antony by using the word “divorce”) and cultivate a more respectable image.
For the next four years Cytheris worked as a courtesan, being occasionally called upon to seduce one politician or another as her patron required; though he supported Antony until the end, he knew how to play politics and courted the favor of both Caesar’s party and the opposition. Only one of Cytheris’ regular clients from this period has a famous name: Marcus Junius Brutus, who later became one of Caesar’s assassins. Her next major conquest came around 43 or 42, when she took up with the soldier-politician Cornelius Gallus, who was also an accomplished poet; Gallus was so smitten with her that he eventually composed four books of poetry in her honor. It was the tradition in Roman love poetry for the poet to use a pseudonym for his lover; the name so chosen had to have the same number and stress pattern of syllables as the real woman’s name, and so Cytheris became “Lycoris”. The last of these books was written in 40 BCE, after she had left him; when Antony and Octavian began the first of several major quarrels Gallus supported the latter, so Eutrapelus reassigned her to Quintus Fufius Calenus, one of Antony’s generals.
The flower “lycoris” was named after her.
By the time Octavian became Augustus and the Republic became an Empire, Cytheris (now in her early 40s) had largely vanished from history. Gallus’ poetry about her was both popular and highly regarded, thanks in part to Virgil’s tenth Eclogue (published about 38 BCE), which was on the subject of Gallus’ pining away for her. Though Virgil also called her “Lycoris” as Gallus had, her identity was an open secret and she was held in great honor among the mimae; both “Cytheris” and “Lycoris” were popular stage names for the next 300 years. Though we do not know how she spent her later years, we can hazard a guess: the new Imperator loved mime, so as one might expect it grew even more popular during his reign; once she grew too old to work as a delicata any longer, the former consort to a ruler probably returned to the stage, ending her days performing as an archimima (lead comedienne) to thunderous applause.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. – Thomas Pynchon
I’m getting so many questions nowadays that I find myself stacking them months in advance (these were answered in late October). That’s just silly, so I’m going to start answering these individually in short columns rather than saving them up for the ends of months. If you have a question of your own, please email me at maggiemcneill@earthlink.net.
My girlfriend and I are interested in engaging the services of a sex worker as an ongoing part of our relationship. While there seem to be many online resources, we’d like to understand how to narrow down the choices to someone who will be of the high caliber (we are in Dallas). Any guidance on how to sift through all of the information to make sure we connect with a reputable person?
Living in Dallas has its advantages and disadvantages for you; on the one hand you’ll have more selection than in most cities and may pay less, but on the other hand you have many more names and profiles to go through. Unfortunately, due to criminalization it’s hard to be “sure” of anything in this business, but I have a couple of suggestions that will help you. First of all, make use of ECCIE, the most popular escort review board in the Dallas area. Find a woman you both like who advertises that she enjoys working with couples, and check her reviews; even if none of them are for couple calls specifically, that shouldn’t really matter because her friendliness, reliability, customer service and the like will be just the same for a couple as they are for an individual. If anything, a good escort will be even more on her “best behavior” with another woman present. Once you find someone who seems right to both of you, contact her in whatever way she asks on her website, providing all the information she asks for, and make sure you specify it’s for a couple. Don’t be surprised if her rate is a little higher for a couple than for a man alone, but it probably won’t be double (if it is you may want to consider someone else, because unlike dealing with two male clients, a couple is NOT twice the work). Let her know that you’ve discussed this together and you’re both game; you’d be surprised how often men will inquire about couple calls without discussing the matter with their ladies first! By assuring her that you’re not wasting her time you are more likely to start out on the right foot.
It’s possible that even if you do all your homework, the experience may not be as good as you wanted; remember, there are three interpersonal reactions to consider here rather than only one. If that happens, it doesn’t necessarily mean three-ways aren’t for y’all; it may just mean the chemistry in that particular case was wrong, and you need to try another escort. Have y’all read my two part “Couples” column? The second part gives examples of a nearly-perfect couple call, and a disastrous one; it may help y’all to gather your thoughts before proceeding.
You’ve often warned against people seeking escorts via Backpage, but what if there isn’t any alternative? My state is mostly rural, and barely listed on sites like ECCIE (if at all).
It’s not quite fair to say that I’ve warned people against Backpage; what I actually said is that if you really want to play it safe, maximize the chance of finding exactly what you want and minimize the chances of a run-in with cops, it’s probably better to contact only established, well-reviewed escorts. It’s definitely true that Backpage has a larger fraction of amateurs, set-up traps, scammers and low-quality girls, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some good girls there as well; in fact, most of the active escorts I know use Backpage in addition to the hooker boards, especially when travelling. In order to use Backpage safely you should probably avoid very young girls and those whose advertising seems to indicate a lack of experience and good judgment; vulgar phraseology is a dead giveaway, and very low prices are a sure sign of a scam. If the lady seems established but the ad is recent she is probably on tour, so try to find previous ads in whatever city she claims to come from. Even if a girl doesn’t advertise on one of the review boards, that doesn’t necessarily mean nobody has reviewed her; check for that in her home city (e.g., “Heather from Backpage” or the like; if she changes her stage name frequently you don’t want to see her anyhow). Tineye is a very useful tool; with it you can search to see if her picture has appeared elsewhere, and if you discover (or even just suspect) that the picture is stolen stay far away, because that signifies either a scam or cops. Finally, trust your instincts and use common sense, and insist on talking to her by phone at least once for a few minutes before meeting; I always advise escorts to do that in order to feel clients out, and it works the same way from your side as from hers.
I’ve seen references to screening of clients from you and from escort ads; I gather it involves getting enough information about the client to be sure that he’s not a cop, but exactly what information is asked for? How does one “pass” a screening without also exposing oneself in the event that the whore is arrested, as in the Kennebunk case?
As in so many other cases, the answer is “it depends.” Escorts aren’t only trying to screen out cops, but rather any kind of dangerous or exceptionally troublesome characters. That’s why so many depend on referrals: other escorts can report not only whether a potential client is what he represents himself to be, but whether he’s unnecessarily rough, habitually late, prone to haggle or stand girls up, etc. For an escort whose primary screening is the checking of references, the necessary information threshold is really quite low: she simply needs to be reasonably sure that the man with whom she’s dealing is the true owner of the alias to which the references refer. Most simply assume that he is, which is a safe assumption in the vast majority of cases (but obviously doesn’t preclude cops managing to pressure him into turning over his information for them to misuse). Other escorts ask for much more information, possibly including work telephone numbers and the like; some will only see men who have been screened by a verification service such as P411. And a large fraction simply trust their guts, as nearly all of us did in the days before the internet had quite so much information on it.
When I owned my agency, I never kept records for any clients who paid cash; the only information I had for them was names, phone numbers and addresses on the day’s notebook page, which was shredded at the end of the night (and would have been shredded immediately had cops started pounding on my door). However, a client can’t count on that; most escorts and agencies do indeed keep records, sometimes very detailed ones. So there’s only one real way for a client to ensure he can pass most screenings, yet not reveal anything cops or prosecutors could make use of: he must establish a consistent and unvarying “hobby” alias with a name, screen name, email address and phone number which he never changes, yet bear no ties to his real information; fortunately, prepaid cell phones and anonymous webmail make this easy. He must then find a few girls who will see him on instinct, use them as references for other girls, and thus build up a reputation. He won’t be able to hire every escort he might fancy because some insist on verifiable identifying data, but a well-established alias will get him in most women’s doors as long as he continues to treat every lady he dates honorably.
I lifted him onto my horse in front of me and succeeded in getting him safely to the Fort. Capt. Egan on recovering, laughingly said: “I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains.” I have borne that name up to the present time. – “Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane”
The legend of the American “Wild West” era is such a powerful and enduring one that it’s sometimes difficult to remember that it lasted only one generation, from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the 20th century; many of those who either played important roles in the story of westward expansion, or who were notable for other reasons, found themselves literally legends in their own time by the early ‘90s. One of these was Martha Jane Canary, a woman who would probably have lived and died in obscurity had she been born in a different place and time; like so many other women she made the best choices she could among the opportunities available to her, and found to her considerable surprise that they had resulted in fame (but not, alas, fortune). She was born on May 1, 1852 to Robert and Charlotte Canary of Princeton, Missouri, the eldest of six children (two boys and four girls). In 1865 the family headed west to Virginia City, Montana, but after Charlotte died of pneumonia en route Canary decided to push on to Salt Lake City. They arrived in 1866 but he died only a year later, so 15-year-old Martha Jane became head of the family; she packed up the wagon and moved them to Piedmont, Wyoming, where she took whatever jobs she could find. She is known to have worked as a dishwasher, a cook, a nurse, a driver, a dancer and a whore.
Jane does not seem to have cared that much for sex work; though it would have been the most lucrative of her jobs, her heart belonged to the Great Outdoors. She had been an avid rider since childhood, and as related in her 1896 autobiography, “Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane”: “While on the way the greater portion of my time was spent in hunting along with the men and hunters of the party, in fact I was at all times with the men when there was excitement and adventures to be had. By the time we reached Virginia City I was considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age.” Since she is believed to have been functionally illiterate this short document was almost certainly ghostwritten, and many of the claims it makes are at odds with known facts. For example, it states she worked as a scout under several generals (including the infamous Custer) from 1871-1873 and took part in the Indian wars; in truth, she did not secure her first scouting job until 1874. It also attributes her nickname to an incident which supposedly occurred in 1873; my own theory is that it was actually her stage name, perhaps derived from a drunken attempt by either a client or Jane herself to say her last name.
The pamphlet did not lie about her skills, however, which were sufficient to win her a man’s job; some historians believe that she actually disguised herself as a man, and was dismissed after the truth was discovered in 1875. In the spring of that year she accompanied General Crook to the Big Horn River, and was sent to Fort Fetterman with important dispatches; after fording the ice-cold Platte River she rode 145 km straight, and as might be expected she became seriously ill and was hospitalized for two weeks (during which time her sex was naturally discovered). However, it is also possible that her superiors knew full well that she was a woman (see picture at right) and that she was fired for the same reason she lost so many jobs in later years: she had a tendency to get rip-roaring drunk and start shooting at people (though she is not known to have ever hit one). In any case, she soon ended up in Fort Laramie, Wyoming, where she met Wild Bill Hickok; she became good friends with him and accompanied him to Deadwood, South Dakota, and it is clear that she already had a reputation by this time because their arrival was announced in the July 15, 1876 Black Hills Pioneer with the headline, “Calamity Jane has arrived!” Though Jane only knew Hickok for a few months, she fell deeply in love with him and was therefore understandably upset when he was shot in the back by Jack McCall during a poker game on August 2, 1876, even if she didn’t really go after McCall with a meat cleaver as she later recounted. After Hickok’s death she began to claim that they had been married several years before and that she had borne him a daughter named Jean on September 25, 1873, but gave the child up for adoption when they separated. Though this is not generally considered a credible claim, a woman named Jean Hickok (who claimed to be that very child and had an impromptu birth certificate written by a minister in a Bible) was entered into the Social Security rolls on September 6, 1941.
Jane stayed in Deadwood after Hickok’s death, supporting herself by prospecting and occasionally working for Dora DuFran, owner of Deadwood’s largest brothel. It was during this period that she won her reputation for courage and golden-heartedness, thanks especially to two incidents in particular: in the spring of 1877 she rescued the passengers of a stagecoach by catching up to it and taking over the reins after the driver was shot by hostile Indians, and in the autumn of 1878 she spent weeks nursing the victims of a smallpox epidemic; three men died, but the rest all survived thanks to her faithful ministrations. She left Deadwood sometime in 1879, apparently working as an ox-team driver to earn enough to buy a ranch and inn near Miles City, Montana in 1881. The settled life of an innkeeper did not long appeal to Jane; she sold the place only two years later and wandered across the West for a while, eventually ending up in El Paso, Texas, where she supposedly married one Clinton Burke and bore him a daughter, Jessie, on October 28th, 1887. As usual, other records conflict with her autobiography, including court records from November 1888 stating that she did “unlawfully bed, cohabit and live together” with a man named Charles Townley; she has also been linked with a Robert Dorsett and a William Steers, all during the time she was supposedly married to Burke and running another hotel in Boulder, Colorado. The only detail we can be sure about is that her daughter did indeed exist, because the girl accompanied her when she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1893; Jane gave her up for adoption in October of 1895 by placing her with St. Mary’s Convent in Sturgis, South Dakota.
Calamity Jane had always been a heavy drinker, and by the time she turned 40 it was out of control; though all she had to do for Buffalo Bill was sit on a stage and tell tall tales about her supposed adventures, her drinking eventually led to his firing her for undependability and excessive use of profanity in her shows. He had a soft spot for her, though, and always rehired her whenever she came looking for a job again. In 1896 she worked for a circus named the Kohl & Middleton Dime Museum, which produced “Life and Adventures” as a 7-page souvenir booklet; even after she was fired by the circus for the usual reasons, she had the booklet reprinted and supported herself between gigs by selling autographed copies of it. This went on until 1901, when she was fired from the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York after being arrested for public drunkenness. Buffalo Bill gave her the money to go home to South Dakota, where she returned to Dora DuFran’s brothel and was given a job as cook and housekeeper. While on a visit to Terry, South Dakota, she died of “inflammation of the bowels” on August 1, 1903, and was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery next to Wild Bill Hickok.
As we’ve seen, the lives of whores are often full of conflicting details, and this is more true of Jane than of most. Even other people’s perceptions of her varied wildly; one citizen of Deadwood later described her as “nothing more than a common prostitute, drunken, disorderly and wholly devoid of any conception of morality,” while another said she was “generous, forgiving, kind-hearted [and] sociable,” and one of her biographers stated that “her story is mostly an account of uneventful daily life interrupted by drinking binges.” But whatever the objective truth might be, the legend of Calamity Jane – adventurer, wanderer, entertainer and golden-hearted whore – will be told and retold for as long as people write stories against the mythic backdrop of the Wild West.
Books are never far from a scholar’s hands, just as songs are never far from a singer’s lips. – Chinese proverb
Though I was a voracious reader from the age of four until my early thirties, I’m just so very busy these days writing that I don’t have nearly as much time for reading. More accurately, I don’t have as much time for book reading; I still spend plenty of time reading articles online. If I didn’t set aside about 15 minutes in the morning and a similar amount at bedtime, however, I probably wouldn’t get to read books at all any more (which is why it takes me so long to get through the rather large stack of books generously sent by my readers). These four books have something else in common: they were all written by people who read this blog (at least from time to time). Three of these are my most recent reads, but I read Sex at the Margins about a year and a half ago and just recently realized that I had neglected to review it.
By the time I go to bed in the evening I am often so exhausted that I fall asleep over whatever book I’m trying to read, even if it’s something I like a lot (such as reprints of Silver Age sci-fi comics). But I had no such problem with Paying for It; I repeatedly found myself saying, “I’ll just read for a few more minutes,” and finished it in a very few days. If I had to sum up this book in a single word, it would be “sincere”; it’s an honest and frank illustrated journal of Brown’s experiences with Toronto hookers, starting with how he came to prefer paying for sex over the serial monogamy he had (like most people) previously practiced, and ending with his becoming a long-term regular of one exceptional lady and planning the book. Along the way he shares his thoughts, impressions, joys, concerns and misgivings, and also his conversations with friends who had internalized prohibitionist propaganda; he depicts several arguments, discussions and debates with them in comic form, and also includes 23 appendices in which he effectively refutes prohibitionist arguments. For me, the most fascinating aspect of the book was its revelation of the author’s internal monologue, which is presented so matter-of-factly that its honesty is irrefutable; it’s one thing for a client to say “this is what I was thinking” when speaking directly to me, and another thing entirely for him to share with the world even those thoughts which could be perceived as unflattering to himself. Though die-hard neofeminists will continue to believe that all clients are evil exploiters no matter what evidence is presented to them, I believe this book is powerful enough to sway many of those who are “on the fence” about the subject, and I really hope it gets the extensive exposure and brisk sales it deserves.
The term “groundbreaking” is regularly and carelessly thrown about in reviews on books which cover controversial topics, but in this case it is wholly accurate and entirely deserved. Regular readers are already familiar with Dr. Agustín, whose blog The Naked Anthropologist I have often quoted and linked, but what you may not realize is how much those of us fighting “sex trafficking” hysteria owe to her and especially to this book. She started studying the intersection of migration and sex work back when “human trafficking” still meant the smuggling of undocumented immigrants across international borders, and hers was among the first voices raised in protest when the moral panic around it went into high gear in 2004. Sex at the Margins doesn’t only challenge the mythology of millions of passive, helpless, exploited victims, but also clearly and thoroughly explains what is really going on with most of those labeled “trafficked”, how their actions are viewed through a sexist, racist and colonialist prism to interpret them as some kind of global disaster, and why it’s so important to listen to what migrants (in sex work or otherwise) have to say about their own experiences rather than forcing an ignorant, biased interpretation onto them. Furthermore, the book has not only helped many people (including me) to understand these phenomena, but has also given us the language to talk about it: for example, the term “rescue industry”, now a common one in sex worker rights discourse, was coined by Dr. Agustín and first widely disseminated herein.
Dr. Magnanti, as the big yellow sticker the publisher has pasted on the cover reminds us, had already published a number of books as Belle de Jour, the stage name she used as a London call girl while working on her PhD in Forensic Pathology. But this is her first written specifically as a scientist and statistician, and I hope it’s at least as successful as her previous books because she thoroughly and effectively debunks nine myths about sex (including “sex addiction”, “premature sexualization”, “negative secondary effects” and myths about porn, prostitution and “sex trafficking”). She does this not only by presenting facts and studies which disprove the myths, but also by demonstrating how the entire approach of those who create, define and spread them is designed not to discover the truth, but rather to promote a predetermined agenda by picking and choosing only those facts, pseudo-facts and opinions which can be made to fit the desired pattern and excluding the rest. Her writing is sharp, clever and compelling, and she has a gift for coining useful terms like “constellation maker” (one who chooses which data points to include in the desired “picture” just as the ancients chose which stars made up a constellation). Though she is generally more polite to the prohibitionists than I tend to be, let that not be mistaken for her being soft on them: she convincingly demonstrates that those who manufacture and define sex myths are fully aware of what they’re doing, and in fact her last chapter refutes the claim that prohibitionists are largely well-meaning, if deluded. The book has not yet been released in the United States, but is available from a number of British vendors who offer international shipping for a competitive price.
Rob Arthur defines a taboo as “a topic that a culture prevents its people from discussing freely,” and this book is based around the philosophy that “taboos are a burden on society…[and] hinder progress toward greater happiness.” Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while knows the truth of that statement: if it weren’t for the general ignorance about sex in general and sex work in particular, an ignorance maintained by sexual taboos, no reasonable person would accept laws against consensual sexual behavior and the ridiculous lies about the harms which supposedly result from sexuality would be widely recognized as the ravings of miserable prudes. Arthur also discusses taboos against drugs and bodily wastes, though the latter doesn’t get nearly as much space as sex and drugs because there is no vast, expensive and oppressive “War on Poo” whose chief result is human misery. In a sense, You Will Die is two books in one; it is written in a pleasant, conversational style and presents fascinating, often obscure facts in such a way as to make it a great pleasure read, but is both exhaustively researched and so extensively footnoted that it will make an important addition to my reference library. Note: I read this book in the third edition, but the link and picture are for the fourth, which will be available in a few weeks; Rob consulted me while updating the section on prostitution and sent me a copy as a thank-you.
For all the talk about women involved in the sex industry as “victims”, there is no apparent appetite for actually speaking with them in order to assess what the real issues are. – Graham Ellison
Sex Work is Work
“Nairobi Mayor George Aladwa has warned…sex workers that they risk being arrested if they will not stop conducting their business in Central Business District…The mayor urged the sex workers to use their talents in seeking income…” This is, of course, exactly what he is threatening them for doing.
Indiana school officials believe that sex radiation is so dangerous that exposed students must be quarantined in order to contain the contamination:
Some students…in Anderson, Ind. [who] got a peek of their teacher’s bare breasts on a school-issued iPad…have been suspended and threatened with expulsion…Joshua Troutt, 13…and three other students were in their classroom, playing a game on [the] iPad…[and when] one of the students pressed a button…[the] photograph…was revealed. “It’s not our fault that she had the photo on there,” Troutt said. “We couldn’t do anything not to look at it…She had to have pressed something to make all of her [iPhone] photos synch on there”…
Let that be a lesson to you, kids: never tell any authority figure about anything unusual that happens, ever.
Even though the prosecutor euphemistically refers to armed robbery and grand larceny as “improper use of forfeiture funds”, it’s still a pleasure to see this coming up to trial at last: “Former Romulus [Michigan] Police Chief Michael St. Andre, his wife, and five…detectives pled not guilty…to using asset forfeiture funds…[from] narcotics and prostitution investigations to buy…narcotics and prostitutes… The officers are accused of spending $40,000 in forfeiture funds in one year…[and] St. Andre also used $75,000 from drug forfeiture funds to buy a tanning salon…for his wife.”
Yet again: As long as government actors have excessive power over individuals, this will keep happening:
A woman in Maryland who was allegedly raped…by a deputy sheriff has filed a $15 million lawsuit against the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office…Lamar McIntyre allegedly…took [the woman, who was awaiting trial] into an isolated holding cell and told her to get naked, [forced her into] oral…and vaginal sex without a condom…”[slapped] her buttocks extremely hard”…[then] took pictures with his camera phone…McIntyre [then] took the woman to the court room “as if nothing ever happened”…McIntyre…admitted to police that he was involved…
Dr. Brooke Magnanti’s Telegraph article on “sex trafficking” hysteria covers familiar ground, but she’s always a pleasure to read. Furthermore, because she was born in Florida but did sex work in the UK, she qualifies as “trafficked” herself under the official criteria. She mentions several useful statistics:
…of the trafficking referrals made to police in the UK, one in four are men, and domestic and agricultural exploitation counts for six of every 10 cases…Liz Kelly and Linda Regan of the University of North London attempted to estimate the number of women brought into the UK for sex in 1998 by surveying [police] reports…they came up with…71…[but this] included…women who willingly arrived…for sex work…In 2007…[Operation] Pentameter Two resulted in five convictions…406 arrests were made…153 of those…were released without charge. Most of the rest were charged with immigration breaches and unrelated offences. Twenty-two were prosecuted for trafficking; 7 of those were acquitted. Ten of the remaining lot turned out not to have coerced the women they brought into the country. This left five actual traffickers…none of [whom] were detected specifically by actions in the Pentameter Two effort…
She also mentions that the “80% of sex workers are coerced” claim promoted by MP Fiona Mactaggart (and repeated ad nauseum by other prohibitionists) originally came from a 1982 survey of San Francisco streetwalkers.
“People want to believe that any behavior they dislike…is either wholly voluntary or the result of ‘socialization’…but…[these are] better explained by evolution and neurology than by ludicrous tabula rasa notions. Why they prefer to believe that people are programmed by “society” or “the Patriarchy” than to acknowledge we are programmed by Nature I cannot say; perhaps they fear that instinct is harder to overcome than learning and therefore choose to deny the terrifying reality…” More on this same line of thought from Dr. Gad Saad:
…“blank slate” explanations are ubiquitous in the social sciences…men stray from their marriages…due to their viewing of pornography …people succumb to juicy burgers…[because of] those alluring advertising jingles…women [suffer]…eating disorders…[due to] media images that attack [their] self-worth…young [men’s]…violent and reckless behaviors…[are caused by] video games…these arguments are pure fiction…rooted in a perfectly erroneous view of human nature. Each of [these] is linked to evolutionary and biological principles that have little to do with…socialization…the blank slate view [is] so pervasive…[because] it caters to…the endless pursuit for hope…[and] provides people with the illusion of control. Alter the supposed culprit environmental cause and the issue will apparently be resolved…
Though this item from the East Bay Express is largely based around the harm Proposition 35 will do if enacted, it is less an analysis of the proposed law and more an honest and accepting profile of a number of sex workers in the San Francisco Bay area, including regular reader Jolene Parton. The more articles like this we see, the harder it will be for prohibitionists to support the lie that well-adjusted sex workers are an unrepresentative minority.
Since it’s apparent that prudes prefer their daughters to die than to have sex, this study was necessary no matter how totally obvious its conclusions were from the start:
There did not appear to be any difference in the sexual behaviors of adolescent girls who received the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine and their unvaccinated peers…Among girls ages 11 and 12 enrolled in a large, managed-care organization, there were no between-group differences in the rate of pregnancy…sexually transmitted infection, or receipt of contraceptive counseling…In addition, the average age at the first composite outcome was no different between vaccinated and unvaccinated girls…
…the experimental vaccine…was given to 18 women with cervical dysplasia, a precancerous condition…caused by a chronic HPV infection…after vaccination, the women produced immune cells that were capable of attacking and killing HPV-infected cells…this…could clear chronic HPV infections, and prevent precancerous cells from becoming cancerous…it’s possible a [similar] vaccine…could treat other types of cancer caused by HPV, such as some head and neck cancers…
Dominique Strauss-Kahn is trying to get his “aggravated pimping” charge dismissed; apparently he’s just noticed that Western society, following behind the US like a flock of obedient sheep, is trying to “criminalize lust”:
…That defense and the investigation, which is facing a critical judicial hearing in late November, have offered a keyhole view into a clandestine practice in certain powerful circles of French society: secret soirees with lawyers, judges, police officials, journalists and musicians that start with a fine meal and end with naked guests and public sex with multiple partners…the most perplexing question in the Strauss-Kahn affair is how a career politician…was blinded to the possibility that his zest for sex parties could present a liability, or risk blackmail…
It’s only “perplexing” to female American journalists whose dedication to a PC agenda has totally conquered any critical thinking skills they may once have had. Another one who’s just waking up to reality is Hubert Delarue, the lawyer for one of Strauss-Kahn’s co-defendants, who apparently thinks halfway whores are something new: “Prostitution was…for a certain type of population…[but] today…there are occasional prostitutes, and sometimes they’re top models who try to make ends meet. They aren’t miserable women on the sidewalk.”
Vietnam will free about 900 sex workers…from compulsory rehabilitation centres…when a newly amended…law comes into effect…[next] July…Since July [of] this year, sex workers have no longer been sent to…[the] centres…but…fined up to five million dong [$240 US] instead…drug addicts will continue to be sent to detoxification centres…
I really like this trend of brothels funding athletics: “…[Members of] a cash-strapped Greek soccer team…are wearing…practice jerseys emblazoned with the logos of the Villa Erotica and Soula’s House of History, a pair of…bordellos recruited to sponsor the team after drastic government spending cuts left the country’s sports organizations facing ruin. One team took on a deal with a local funeral home and others have wooed kebab shops, a jam factory, and producers of…feta cheese…”
…Lord Morrow’s Bill…is ill-thought through, confusing and based on rather dubious evidence. Sex trafficking is conflated solely with prostitution…and…is…accompanied by increasingly fantastical (and unsubstantiated) media claims about the number of “victims”…[yet] there has…been only one prosecution of a “trafficker”…and the women he “trafficked” were two Czech prostitutes that flew of their own volition to Belfast to operate out of [an] apartment that they rented from [him]…
The author, criminologist Graham Ellison, goes on to ridicule the impossible claims made about the Swedish model’s “success” and to correctly present it as the agenda of fundamentalist neofeminists and Christians.
Argentina’s Supreme Court has ruled that a woman rescued from a prostitution ring must be allowed to have the abortion she wants…Argentina allows legal abortions in rape cases or to protect a woman’s health. But politicians, doctors and judges often continue to block them…and…in this case, a judge intervened…saying there was no proof of rape even though the woman had been kidnapped and forced into prostitution…
This decriminalization video was produced by an organization named “Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights”; when will American human rights organizations take this unambiguous a stand against prostitution law?
Prostitution has a social value, and it’s necessary in a city.– Daniël Termont
Without Let or Hindrance
Those who have dealt with “Child Protective Services” know that they are granted powers of which the Inquisition would have been envious. They routinely abduct people’s children on the flimsiest of pretexts, often on hearsay and without even a warrant, and once this happens parents may never regain custody; if they do it is after years of jumping through ridiculous and ever-changing hoops, playing endless games of “Mother May I?” with power-mad bureaucrats, submission to outlandish violations of their rights and privacy, hundreds of hours in court and total financial ruin…and that’s not even counting the emotional damage to the children. On Wednesday, an activist named Kathi Duran began a hunger strike on the steps of the California state capitol to call attention to these abuses; as expected, she was arrested almost immediately. She asked me to call attention to her protest and share this press release, and I’m happy to do so and will provide updates as I get them.
An ex-Houston police officer [named Abraham Joseph]…was sentenced to life in prison…for raping a waitress…Joseph could have received as little as five years…but jurors chose the maximum sentence instead.
News articles always refer to criminal cops as “ex-cops”, implying they had already been fired when they committed the crimes.
The San Francisco Police Department announced…that [it] will [temporarily] stop using condoms as evidence in prostitution cases…Under current city policy, police cannot confiscate condoms…But…police sometimes broke the policy…A July report from Human Rights Watch criticized San Francisco, along with New York, Washington, DC and Los Angeles, for [the practice]…
Spam received by a reader; if this isn’t a hoax, the cops, voyeurs or pimp wannabes who set it up labor under truly mythic levels of ignorance and disinformation.
Sex educator Debby Herbenick on the need for more research on anal sex: “…In an incredibly short period of time, anal sex has become a common part of Americans’ sex lives. As of the 1990s, only about one-quarter to one-third of young [Americans]…had tried anal sex at least once. Less than 20 years later, my research team’s 2009 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior found that as many as 40-45 percent…in some age groups had…[yet] taboos persist and…the list of what we don’t know about anal sex is far longer than the list of what we do. This makes it difficult for sex educators to feel truly confident in answering people’s very real and important questions…”
Add Malawi to the list of countries whose legal experts understand human rights better than those in the US; one of them said that “Despite the fact that Malawi has not outlawed sex work…police officers on night patrols pounce on sex workers and…charge…[them] with rogue and vagabond…This is a clear violation of rights of sex workers…” He also commented on the unsanctioned compulsory HIV testing I reported in TW3 (#24), stating that it “is not recommended by…UNAIDS” and “it is impractical and unworkable and more effective results can be reached by supporting sex workers’…access [to] testing, prevention, and support…”
…Several [New York] attorneys have shared the craziest [prenuptial agreements] they’ve penned…[including] items like “no piano playing while the husband is home”, cash bonuses…if either is caught cheating and an agreement to terminate a pregnancy if one should occur…[some include]a weight clause…[another] said [the wife] would never wear green and if she did, her husband [could]…destroy the item…One husband demanded “wife not allowed to cut her hair”…
The article also mentions the wives’ demands, including husbands being home by a certain time and (surprise!) being paid for sex.
When Polaroid inventor Edwin Land introduced the first commercial instant camera…in 1948, he ushered in what Christopher Bonanos …in The Atlantic calls a “magnificent new era” in photography…for “instant, shareable nudie pics”…The new…format for…nude photographs—sexting—[is]…basically the same: instant explicit photographs, taken under the radar, shared between lovers and friends. In a recent report on a new study of teen sexting…dating “expert” Dr. Wendy Walsh favored terms like “embarrassment,” “shame,” “risky,” and “pressure” to describe the photographic form. And negative terms like those permeate the…discussion around teen photo sharing, though for years research has shown that the media-wide concern-trolling is overblown…
On November 6th Los Angeles county will decide whether to impose AHF’s “condoms in porn” measure; this video explains the real motive behind the whole thing:
This US Army report on the Santa Muerte belief refers to it as a “death cult” (technically true, but the phrase has false and pejorative connotations), declares that it isn’t a “true” religion and states that “Although not all members of the cult are criminals, all live an existence that is dominated by crime.” I’m sure that bartenders, taxi drivers and prostitutes (who are not criminalized in Mexico) might disagree that their lives are “dominated by crime”, though cops (another large segment of her devotees) probably wouldn’t.
…Backpage’s critics say they are facilitating sex slavery…[but] all the figures quoted in the media come from a single source, a consultancy called AIM Group…[whose] methodology is shaky at best…they ignore major adult ad networks and mainstream ad networks that accept adult ads…and traffic, revenue and share-of-market numbers, even accurate ones, are no indication of how many…ads…actually convert into…transaction[s]…nor what subset of those…are with a minor or…coerced [person]…Backpage publishes about 3.2 million…ads a month…about 11 percent…are listed in…Adult Services…Backpage removes over a million ads a month…[mostly] for spam and fraud…Only 1.6 percent of the [removed] ads…are from the Adult Category…Only 2 percent of that 1.6 percent, or about 400…a month, are suspected of advertising a minor. Backpage reports those…immediately (and under no legal obligation) to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). In other words, about 1/25 of 1 percent (.04 percent) of the ads Backpage removes…are suspected of advertising a minor for sexual services, a number that represents 1/100 of one percent (.01 percent) of its…ad volume…
Instead of the usual prohibitionists, the article interviewed folks like researcher Ron Weitzer and Kate D’Adamo of SWOP.
…Lucinda Latimer…whose real name is Jan…was…broke, isolated and almost suicidal… she had sold her car and had no idea where her next penny was coming from when she saw a documentary on former career women who turned to the sex industry to make a living. Previously, she had [earned] up to £1000 a night as a graphologist…but ill health and the break-up of her marriage forced her back to Perthshire…[she now does phone sex work and] what has struck her about the men is how normal and pleasant most are and how well educated…Trying to hide her work would have made it shameful and sordid…[so] Jan decided to speak out…she has written…The Diary of a Rookie Phone Sex Floozie, and is about to launch volume two…
Jezebel’s “sex advice” columnist gives a reader advice on how to shove her finger up a guy’s arse without his consent because she wants “to massage someone’s prostate goddamnit!”. Take note of the tepid protests to the columnist’s suggestions on how to trick and bully him into it, then imagine the firestorm if a male writer gave a man advice on how to pressure a woman into something because he wants “to fuck some chick in the arse goddamnit!”
I’m never happy to see a sister pilloried, but I suspect the police decision to expose her customers is going to backfire so badly that this may have some positive results in the long run:
[Alexis Wright has]…been charged with running a prostitution business out of her Zumba dance studio [in Kennebunk, Maine] and secretly videotaping her encounters…Police have begun issuing summons to Wright’s customers and will release the names in the weeks ahead. Townspeople say they’ve heard that lawyers, doctors, law enforcement officials, a television personality and other well-known people in town are included in a detailed clientele list police found. A lot of people would rather not see the names made public because it will hurt families, children and careers…
…In the Netherlands, prostitution is legal. Nonetheless, over 60% of the women involved in prostitution are involved in the sex trade illegally. The Mayor [of Amsterdam] and others refer to these as ‘trafficked’ – either because they are exploited and involved in the sex trade against their will…or because they are illegal workers brought to the country to work voluntarily in conditions different from those they expect…the argument for legalization included belief that it would…decrease trafficking, it has had the opposite effect…prostitution has gone from a predominantly home-grown industry to one very heavily dependent on illegal foreign workers…a [recent law criminalizes hiring]…a prostitute who is not registered with the government…But…this…means that…[the] information must be public so that…[clients] can verify that the sex worker is…licensed…[this] invades the privacy of both…prostitutes and…customers…
Prohibitionists intentionally confuse legalization and decriminalization, ignore the bottleneck effect of registration, pretend that correlation equals causation and conflate “unregistered” with “trafficked”, and the author, Dr. Nancy Darling, fails to question any of it.
…As I read through [the article] the stench of bovine excrement almost made my eyes water…street sex work doesn’t relocate itself to another suburb on the other side of town…there is not an itinerant population of these workers who move en masse from one place to the next like migrating wildebeest across the African savannah…It’s more comfortable for people to think that sex work doesn’t happen in their community…and…that street sex workers must board a shuttle from planet Whore to our neighbourhoods under the cover of darkness before disappearing as the sun rises…
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites. – George Bernard Shaw
If you haven’t read yesterday’s column, do so before reading this one or you won’t really understand. As I explained then, popular bloggers often get email from parasites asking to contribute guest posts; they always look something like this:
I write for an online education website that is focused on providing information to current and prospective students looking to take some classes online.
Historically, higher education has been the realm of the bourgeoisie, but this is changing as more people gain access to education through online avenues and free resources. I recently read a piece by NPR that told the story of a girl, Naylea Omayra Villanueva Sanchez, who was wheelchair bound and living in the Amazon, but was still attending college through the free University of the People.
In light of this article, I would love to add to the discussion by contributing a post to your blog. I want to focus on the potential, and potential limitations, of free university education, keeping different fields of study in mind.
Here is a link to a writing sample and my resource, take a look and get a feel for my writing style.
Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks in advance.
Best,
Rachel
Though the letter pretends to be from an individual it was clearly sent by a robot; I receive many of these, all of very similar construction except for the topics, and though it pretends to have read my blog the referenced post was clearly chosen via keyword or some such strategy (it’s an update column, not a cohesive essay). The follow-ups which come a couple of weeks later are all identically worded except for the signature, sending address and subject line:
Hi Maggie,
I wanted to follow up with you and make sure you had received my email I sent a little bit ago regarding my blog post idea.
Let me know your thoughts, I would love to work with you. Do not hesitate to get back to me with any questions!
Best regards,
{insert female name here}
As I explained yesterday, I was inspired by Ken White from Popehat to reply to these after receiving five of them in one afternoon; though I think Ken’s are much funnier, I still believe you’ll find my effort amusing.
Rachel Higgins [rachelhiggins711@gmail.com]; Charlotte Kellogg [charlottekellogg10@gmail.com]; Sarah Wenger [sarahwenger97@gmail.com]; Samantha Porter [samantha.porter99@gmail.com]; Alexa Thompson [thompsonalexa6@gmail.com]; Estelle Shumann [Estelle.Shumann@gmail.com]
RE: A Request to Contribute a Blogpost
Dear Rachel, Charlotte, Sarah, Samantha, Alexa and Estelle,
When I first started receiving emails from you and others like you I patiently explained that I’m perfectly capable of writing my own blog posts; in fact, I’ve managed to produce one a day for over two years now, more than 800 in all. What’s more, an awful lot of people tell me that my writing is exceptional; now, it’s possible that some of those are just trying to get in my pants, but considering the sheer number of such compliments, I think it’s safe to assume that at least some of them are sincere (especially since I happen to share their opinion). So as you might expect, I really don’t need any help from complete strangers, especially since there is an extremely high statistical likelihood that said strangers’ writing isn’t remotely of the same level of competence as mine.
But the letters just kept coming, so I started to ignore them and continued to do so until today, when five of you emailed me within three hours of one another; you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that all of your emails were exactly the same except for the subject line and signature! Clearly, this kind of synchronicity cannot be the product of random chance, and since you all have different names and email addresses and certainly wouldn’t try to deceive anyone about being real individuals, I am forced to conclude that the universe is trying to send me a message.
So I have wonderful news for y’all; I have decided that I will indeed allow your guest posts on my blog! Of course, there are a few minor conditions that I’m sure you’ll understand and will be happy to accept. Read them over and get back to me, and if you agree to them we can get started at your earliest convenience!
1) Since I know you must have extensively read my blog before sending your kind offers to help me via guest posting, you’ve noticed that its appearance and characteristics are very uniform, and that also goes for guest posts; I haven’t had very many of those, but you will note that when I did I still picked the titles and illustrations myself, and that I provided commentary on each. I’m sure that, being modern and egalitarian sorts of ladies, y’all wouldn’t want any special treatment, so obviously it won’t be an issue for me to say that I get to entitle each guest post as I see fit, to illustrate it with whatever pictures I think best, and to insert whatever comments or words of explanation I think necessary before, within and after the body of each of them.
2) I schedule tightly and plan my posts weeks ahead of time; furthermore, I have no desire to bore my readers and therefore consider variety very important. Just as I only publish one of each special feature per month, so I will only publish one guest post per month; however, I will expect all of the posts and the appropriate payment for each as soon as possible, but no later than October 31st in any case because I’ll need them for a special Halloween ritual I have in mind.
3) About that payment: it’s against WordPress rules for me to take money in exchange for access to my space, but I’m sure you’ll agree that my time and skills are valuable. In my last job I charged $300 per hour, and obviously you wouldn’t want me to settle for less than that. It should take roughly two hours to format, illustrate, publish and index each of your posts; sometimes, though, it takes a while to find a really fitting epigram, and on top of that I have to moderate any comments made on the post (which might trickle in for weeks afterward). So really, I think 3 hours would be a conservative estimate; therefore I’ll ask $900 per guest post, paid in advance via Paypal or Green Dot Card. This money is only for time and effort, and no other offer is implied nor should it be inferred.
4) One more thing: I’m sure you’ll understand that my safety is important, so I’ll need to screen each of you; please provide your full legal names, addresses, telephone numbers and places of employment so I can make sure you are who you say you are. Don’t worry, I’ll be very discreet; you won’t even know I checked.
Well, that’s about it; let me know your thoughts, because I would love to work with you. Do not hesitate to get back to me with any questions!
You need to tailor your response to the reality. You should not tailor your response to the hype. – Ann Jordan
R.I.P. Robyn Few
The founder of SWOP-USA died Thursday (September 13th) at the age of 54 after a long battle with cancer. She became an activist for HIV and medical marijuana in the early 1990s, but prostitution was at that time simply a way to pay the bills ; that changed after she was targeted for her activism by FBI and arrested in June of 2002. In October of the following year she founded SWOP-USA on the model of SWOP Australia, and just two months later helped Dr. Annie Sprinkle organize the first Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers. Biographical details are scarce, but I’m trying to get a proper obituary together for her for this Monday.
…20-year-old Christian Ariel Romero met [a] 41-year-old [transgendered prostitute]…and…offered [her] money for sex, Montgomery County police said…[but] when Romero discovered his companion was a man, he…repeatedly stabbed the victim…The judge set bail at $500,000, which [Romero’s lawyer] called harsh…“The defendant is a person who’s 20 years old, never done anything wrong in his entire life. And the person who is on the other side is…a prostitute…with a track record, a history…”
As is typical in stories involving transgendered people, everyone dances around pronouns and facts are sparse or contradictory; the reporter says the victim was a “man” but she may have been a pre-op transsexual. And the lawyer’s insinuation that the victim somehow deserved a murderous assault is “NHI” thinking at its most repellent.
Robin Hustle has a great deal more patience than I do; if I had a story of coming out to parents who were in denial about my sex work, I certainly wouldn’t tell it on Jezebel. The article is intelligent, well-written, right on and even funny, but of course the comments are largely what you’d expect (starting with the very first one, which basically accuses her of lying). No thanks; I learned my lesson with Feministe.
As I predicted, a few journalists are beginning to question the “sex trafficking” hype; though this article reprinted from Christian Science Monitor overstates the credibility of some of the fanatics’ claims and quotes professional victim Stella Marr at length, it also interviews prominent trafficking hysteria critic Ann Jordan, criticizes celebrity opportunists like Ashton Kutcher and flatly states that the scare-figures are wildly exaggerated:
…the…statistic…that there are 100,000 to 300,000 sex slaves in the US – figures repeated by interviewers, blogs, TV hosts and…movie stars…are wrong…the number of actual sex-trafficking victims has been estimated by the US government to be in the tens of thousands, but even those numbers have been criticized as unfounded and far too high; between 2008 and 2010, federally funded human-trafficking task forces opened 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking for investigation. Among those cases, only 248 suspected sex-trafficking victims under the age of 18 were identified…Hype over such high and inaccurate numbers of “child sex slaves” leads to a misguided response at best…At worst, it siphons financial resources away from preventing other sorts of human trafficking…[and] undermines solutions to problems…that lead to exploited youth in the first place…
Cause: Making it essentially impossible for brothels to operate legally. Effect: Lots of illegal brothels.
…Elena Jeffreys said when sex work was decriminalised 16 years ago, local councils were given the job of regulating the industry…but…they are now knocking back brothels on moral grounds…”Their job is to regulate the sex industry, not just to blanket knock back every single (brothel) application they get. There’s some local councils in NSW that have never approved a brothel application and then they wonder why there’s brothels in their suburb that are unapproved”…Ms Jeffreys said there were more than 6000 sex workers in the state and most people would have lived near a brothel or a sex worker at some point without knowing it…
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an American sex worker activist (other than myself) make this enlightened point:
…Controversial model-actress [Gehana Vasisth] recently tweeted that she wanted to open a…high class hygienic brothel where men could come and satisfy themselves…with professional, medically certified commercial sex workers…According to Gehana, legalising prostitution and pornography in India – like it is in the West – will help reduce crimes against women drastically. “If men can satisfy their carnal desires without any restriction, rape and other crimes against women will be reduced,” she explained…
Over a year after the controversy which caused his break with Psychology Today, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa is back with a new blog entitled E pur si muove on a relatively new website named Big Think. And though his debut is not without controversy even there, Kanazawa’s “about” blurb states:
E pur si muove is about science. Science is the accumulation of pure knowledge for its own sake; it has no other goals or purposes. In science, only logic and evidence are the arbitrators of the truth; nothing else matters. No scientific conclusions can ever be good or bad, desirable or undesirable, sexist, racist, offensive, reactionary or dangerous; they can only be true or false. No other adjectives apply. If the truth offends people, it is our job as scientists to offend them. In the memorable words of David Hilbert, Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen. If what I say as a scientist is wrong, because it is illogical or lacks credible scientific evidence, then it is my problem. If what I say offends you, then it is your problem. Get over it. Prepare to be offended.
And really, that’s pretty much my attitude in this blog as well; I wish Dr. Kanazawa the best of luck with his new site and hope Big Think proves to be more dedicated to free speech than Psychology Today has proven itself to be.
Whenever it looks like something might be decriminalized (such as brothel ownership in Brazil), you can bet the police will launch as many “crackdowns” as possible before their window of opportunity closes:
On the eve of June 14…armed members of [Rio’s] Police…and public prosecutor’s office arrived at a brothel called Centauros…[where] they arrested prostitutes, management and the owner, seized documents, computers…used condoms…and…$150,000…in cash. The owner…spent a week at a maximum security prison. The prostitutes were released the same night and found work at other upscale brothels…Quite a lot of drama when you consider that prostitution is not actually a crime in Brazil…But as Rio de Janeiro prepares for its turn on the global stage – as the host of the World Cup in 2014, then the 2016 Summer Olympics – the city is taking drastic action to keep its thriving sex industry out of the spotlight. Rio has already shuttered 24 sex establishments…and…another 33 venues have been threatened or harassed by the police…It’s the biggest crackdown…in a generation…according to anthropologists Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula da Silva, who have been studying prostitution in Rio since 2004 and have authored almost 20 academic papers on [the subject]…
Fetish filmmaker and distributor Ira Isaacs’ sentencing was put on hold last month because federal prosecutors intended to present evidence to support…a two-level increase in sentencing…[for] federal crime[s] where the defendant knew or should have known that a victim involved in an offense was a “vulnerable victim”…presumably [this means] an actor or actors involved in films deemed obscene…prosecutors have recommended that Isaacs serve a term of up to seven years and three months in prison, as well as a three-year term of supervised release and a $10,000 fine…[the court also stole] all of his websites…copyrights…computers, servers, props and video equipment.
…The Malay Mail reports [that a] car wash in…Kuala Lumpur…had formed a partnership with a local massage parlour, enabling customers to redeem free sex from the brothel as part of a customer loyalty scheme…police stormed the parlour and found several stamped loyalty cards that had been used by customers…officer Emmi Shah Fadhil [said]…“To get the extra ‘offer’, customers must send their cars for washing nine times within a certain period…The tenth car wash will entitle them to free sex.” The parlour would usually charge between 130 and 180 Malaysian Ringgit ($40-$55) – cheaper than the $65 price for a full-service car wash. Prostitution is illegal in Malaysia. As a result of the raid, nine Vietnamese women aged between 18 and 28 were arrested.
Actually prostitution isn’t illegal in Malaysia; only public solicitation is. However, for the past four years the Malaysian government has been engaged in a campaign to violently suppress brothels under the guise of “fighting human trafficking” in order to win a pat on the head and a “good doggie” from the US State Department.
…a bare-breasted sculpture in an Overland Park arboretum has triggered a grand jury investigation into whether the city is promoting obscenity to minors. The artwork, titled “Accept or Reject” and donated by Chinese artist Yu Chang, depicts…what the artist statement says is the incomplete identity expressed in one’s digital self — critics contend it promotes “sexting” to children…”The statue appeals to an unwholesome obsession with a sexual act” [said petition sponsor Phillip] Cosby…who calls sexting “the most under-prosecuted crime in America”…
Anybody who claims that any crime (other than those committed under color of authority) in America is “under-prosecuted” is certifiably insane.
If abortion is criminalized, do people really want women who get them imprisoned? Or will this turn into another Swedish Model-like agency-denying thing which only persecutes abortion providers (and maybe men who urge or pay for them)?
Here’s a long but must-read essay by Georgina Perry of Open Doors, a London health organization serving sex workers; she explains how Olympic “sex trafficking” hysteria was amplified by politicians, the police, the media and others, and collapsed when one especially vociferous NGO lost its main source of funding:
For the last three years I’ve been…relegated from a professional considered knowledgeable in her field, to a noisy troublemaker, determined to rail against received wisdom. I’ve had the data I assiduously collect, analyse and make public quoted back to me by law enforcement agencies, the media and NGOs but with clumsy interpretations skewed to strengthen a particular rhetoric…as the 2012 London Olympics drew inexorably towards us, the whole of the UK suddenly became an expert on my job…[the]experience…left me cynical and at times speechless at the sheer effrontery of those who stood to gain from talking up a story that…is not, has not and is unlikely to ever be a reality…
Melissa Gira Grant was interviewed on “Behind the News with Doug Henwood” on public radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California this past Thursday; she talked about the rescue industry, agency denial and the neofeminist anti-sex work agenda (starting at 30:00).
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The very worst disappointment was the sheer number of bad leads; in any era the stage-names of whores tended to be predictable and repetitive, and some girls were willing to pretend to be the one for whom he was looking. But so far, none of the six Lyciscas he had met had been the right one; each had been too old, too young, too thin, too ugly or too dark to be the Lycisca he wanted to hire. So tonight, he would follow a different strategy; he would simply go into each lupanar he found, quiz the villicus about the women available that night, and then ask the name of any who fit the correct description rather than supplying them with the means of deceiving him in order to deplete his rapidly-diminishing funds still further.
