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The Public Eye

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged archeofeminism, Australia, Canada, dirty, drugs, ethics, Madonna/whore, massage, naturalness, porn, prohibitionist myths, psychology, Real People, sex work is work, stage names, stereotypes, stripping, The More the Better, The Public Eye on August 30, 2012| 37 Comments »

Repression thrives on ignorance; when people see others as human beings they are less likely to support the persecution of those people, and when they see behaviors as normal rather than strange and “scary” they are less likely to support bans on those activities. – Maggie McNeill

As far as I’m concerned, the single most important mission of this blog is to make people understand that whores are no different from anybody else, and that prostitution is part of the normal continuum of female behaviors which is not easily distinguished from others (certainly not well enough to base laws around). As I wrote in “Real People”,

On many occasions I’ve written about the fact that whores aren’t all that different from everyone else; that is to say we’re different from each other just like everyone else is different, and we no more share a certain “whore personality type” than all amateurs share a “non-whore personality type”. We’re not all addicts, nor are we all emotionally damaged, nor have we all been molested as children. We’re not all nymphomaniacs or criminals (except insofar as our societies choose to brand us as criminals), or pimped “sex slaves”, and we don’t all have low-self esteem; in fact a disproportionate number of us have high self-esteem, which anyone who actually bothered to talk to real whores instead of just chanting dogma would realize is almost inevitable. We have families, children and friends, outside interests, hopes, dreams, fears and needs just like everyone else. But some people insist on portraying us as somehow inhuman, with dangerous or even fatal results.

Under the “Real People” tag you’ll find lots of examples of articles which illustrate the humanity of sex workers of all kinds, and under “The More the Better” ones about sex workers moving into the mainstream; last week I found three such articles, so I felt it was time for another column spotlighting them (and calling attention to the others). The first appeared in The Gloss and was appropriately entitled “How I Started Seeing Sex Workers as Real People”:

…the truth is that some of the strongest, most diverse, and compelling women I know are sex workers. For me, this was a revelation…my first novel [was]…about a [prostitute] named Edie…[but] she wasn’t…real…[because] I didn’t know anything about sex workers. After a year of trying to write my way into Edie’s world, I [realized]…that…if I was going to write convincingly, I needed to track down a woman with an honest perspective and experience. So, one night, I began to peruse the now-defunct erotic section on Craiglist for research. There I found the ad that started it all…

The author, Emilie Allen, contacted an escort named Jasmin who not only helped her develop “Edie”, but also inspired her to make a documentary called Sex/Touch/Work about Jasmin’s business, an erotic massage establishment in Ottawa. In the process of filming she discovered exactly what I keep talking about:

…I’ve met some crazy cool ladies from roller derby queens, to the Aussies trying to make a buck on their working holiday, to women studies graduate students, to single moms. Actually, it’s the mothers that I’ve been most impressed with. There are a lot of moms out there who moonlight as sex workers. The good money and flexible hours afford them the time and resources that properly raising a child requires. With mouths to feed, most moms take their job seriously and make the best sex workers because they know a secret: men don’t always come to them for sex. A lot of clients are looking for a far more basic pleasure: a sense of care which touch provides…our filming…has brought this up time and again. Clients of erotic massage parlors speak of the touch aspect of the experience much more than they do of the final release…I’d like to suggest that it’s time we move away from our socially engrained fears of women’s bodies and sexualities. People always want to talk about the sex stuff when I tell them about this project (Isn’t it so degrading?). But the women I’ve come to know and love aren’t anti-feminist in the least; a lot of the time they’re simply being paid to touch, to care, no more no less. I for one, see absolutely nothing wrong with that. To want to be touched is no crime, and to know how to touch in a way that makes another person feel cared for is a gift. And if that touch happens to be erotic, what’s the difference?

Allen’s statement about mothers making excellent sex workers, though obvious to anyone who has ever actually known any sex workers, is apparently inconceivable to the “authorities” who all too often use sex work as an excuse to abduct women’s children. This profile of porn actress Stormy Daniels discusses the subject at length:

…Mothers are a powerful influence in our lives and responsible for raising thriving, well-adjusted human beings. We have created a romanticized image that mothers are supposed to be sexless…so when we hear about a porn star who is a mom, it shatters our expectations, and many draw conclusions that these moms can’t be good parents…the 33-year-old Daniels says, “I had to work really hard and prepare a lot to have a baby because…I can’t work while I’m pregnant. I did two years of work in one year.” Wicked Pictures provided Daniels the extended time off for maternity leave and made it possible for her to return to work when she was ready. Daniels’s fans have been supportive of her becoming a mom…but…[she] has had to contend with some ugly criticism. She kept her pregnancy a secret to avoid negativity, but hateful personal attacks surfaced against her and her newborn child when someone congratulated her on Twitter after the birth of her daughter, who is now 19 months old…moms who work in the adult industry are thought to be incapable of nurturing healthy children and imparting good values because their lifestyles and careers are perceived to be immoral…

When the time is right, Daniels intends to be honest with her daughter about her career. She’s adamant about preparing her for the negative backlash she might experience from people opposed to the adult industry. “I’ll tell her Mommy has a job that some people don’t approve of, but Mommy’s proud of it and it’s for adults,” she says. Yet she also thinks it’s important to describe her career to her daughter in a filtered, age-appropriate way. Just like how police officers, bartenders, and emergency-room doctors wouldn’t share all the details of their job with their children, Daniels believes that discussing the adult industry should be no different…Daniels is not an anomaly in the adult industry, and when I asked if other adult actresses have children, Daniels says at least half do but fans just don’t know it…

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say close to two-thirds of all escorts have children, and in fact as I’ve explained before many of them enter sex work for precisely that reason. But while most of us in the United States struggle merely to be accepted as normal citizens, some in more enlightened countries have much higher ambitions:

…Penthouse Pet and stripper Zahra Stardust has launched a bid to become Sydney’s next lord mayor by being nominated as the Sex Party’s candidate for the council’s top job…Stardust, a human rights lawyer who wants to be known as a feminist stripper, is joined by four others on her party’s ticket in the upcoming Sydney Council elections…Sex Party president Fiona Patten said…the party wanted to bring its policies into the local arena. The Sex Party wants Sydney to operate as a 24-hour city, increase the presence of drug-injecting rooms, lobby for the decriminalisation of personal drug use and end discrimination against sex industry workers…

I don’t really think Sydney is ready for a stripper mayor, but the very fact that she can run for the office without being persecuted by government actors and crucified by the media says a lot about the comparative immaturity and bigotry of American society.

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A Different View

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged anecdote, blogging, ethics, harm reduction, law, lawheads, neofeminism, stage names on July 20, 2012| 28 Comments »

Democracy feeds on argument, on the discussion as to the right way forward. This is the reason why respecting the opinion of others belongs to democracy. – Richard von Weizsacker

Those who wish to control others, to attack consensual actions with criminal laws, and to eliminate options which make them uncomfortable, believe that morality is set in stone; they think that right and wrong are as separate and distinct as black and white, and that they and only they have the direct proclamation from Godhead about which is which. Nor is this kind of thinking limited to traditional religions; most mass movements, including political parties and various “-isms”, have the same type of rigid and unyielding perspective on human behavior. Rational people, however, understand that morality is a process of weighing out various factors, comparing the relative right and wrong of each, in order to come to the most just, least harmful decision possible; it is not merely a matter of blind, robot-like obedience to some ultimate moral authority which instantly excuses any cruelty, harm or absurdity as long as “The Law” is followed to the letter.

Because the real world is an unimaginably complex, constantly changing set of phenomena, it is literally impossible to control it with a rigid set of laws; attempting to establish such a regime inevitably causes far more harm than good, and therefore it’s a pretty safe bet that any movement whose members all spout the same rhetoric, make the same moral pronouncements and otherwise march in lockstep conformity is not on the side of Good. Such mass movements want only to impose their own Order upon the chaotic universe, and for the most part dissent or disagreement within such a movement tends to be dealt with harshly. It’s absolutely true that this makes a doctrinaire, parochial movement much more efficient than one bound only by mutual goals and a respect for individual differences; while the former marches forward in mechanical synchronization, the latter tends to creep along like some immense amoeba, often attempting to go in multiple directions at once as its various independent parts disagree about nearly everything. This is of course why those who support individual liberty above all else have problems competing with groups whose leaders have no moral qualms about telling the rank and file what to do and how to think; it’s also the reason the cause of sex worker rights has so much difficulty in its struggle against the prohibitionists, who are unified by a shared dogma and thus need not concern themselves with moral judgment.

Efficiency, however, is not the same as moral rectitude; in fact, as I explained above it’s more often the opposite because a legalistic doctrine attempts to impose mechanistic order upon individual free-willed beings, thus robbing them of the opportunity for moral growth. Members of authoritarian groups are like battery hens, living creatures bound tightly into place to serve the needs of their masters rather than being free to follow their own paths. This is an abomination; it is anti-life, and I am committed to opposing it in all its forms. I believe every person must come to his own conclusions, which is why I’m so very careful about making pronouncements on complex moral issues. As I explained in “Change of Heart”:

…every parent, teacher, writer, celebrity or other person with an audience, however small, has the moral responsibility to ensure that any moral pronouncements he makes truly come from his conscience rather than from a misguided need to advance an agenda at the expense of others’ freedom, happiness and physical needs. Bloggers obviously fall under this stricture as well, so I always think long and hard about complex moral issues before taking a stand on them one way or another, for fear of inadvertently influencing people to embrace a wrong merely because it might advance a cause in which I personally believe.

About two weeks ago I made a moral decision regarding a course of action about the prohibitionist mouthpiece who calls herself Stella Marr; I decided that sharing some (though not all) of the information which had been given to me about her might help to undermine her ability to advance the prohibitionist cause through her lies. It was not an easy decision, but I believe it was the correct one, as explained in last week’s “Heart of Ice”; many others in the sex worker rights community agree with me to a greater or lesser degree, but some do not, and that’s a GOOD thing because if we all agreed about an issue as complicated and thorny as this one, it would mean we must be falling into the same kind of grotesque conformity as our persecutors demand of their followers. And that wouldn’t be good for either the individuals in our movement or for the movement itself; one of the three different sources who spilled the beans about Stella to me is a member of a large prohibitionist group, who told me that she and many others are soul-sick about their leader’s tyrannical insistence that all members speak with one voice. In other words the prohibitionist groups gain efficiency at the expense of their members’ emotional health and the long-term integrity of the organization.

Internal dissent, though it decreases efficiency, is a good thing; in the long run a group of allied individuals is far stronger than a mindless horde which falls apart should the leadership fail. That’s why I think it’s extremely important that you, my readers, decide for yourselves the morality of this issue. I’ve already laid out my own case in the aforementioned column, and though I’ve seen a number of arguments explaining why different people think I was wrong (including some in the comments to that column and the “outing” column itself), the best one in my opinion was “To Go Beyond is as Wrong as to Fall Short” by Jenny DeMilo. Jenny is no fan of Stella’s; her essay starts with “She’s nuts, that’s clear…tinfoil hat wearing, frantic OCD and inconsistent in her writing style kinda nuts…she uses all the language the abolitionists use, she…says she has seen prostitutes murdered before her and tells tales of pimps and hos that is the stuff of TV movies. She thinks we’re all trafficked victims and she’s called activists “pimps” for fighting for the rights of sex workers…She offends me as a sex worker, she offends me as a free thinking woman, she offends me as a human.” But despite Jenny’s personal dislike of “Stella” she still thinks my actions and those of others were wrong, and she wasn’t afraid to tell me in no uncertain terms. I respect that, and I think her voice deserves to be heard; please give it a read. Not in spite of the fact that she disagrees with me, but rather because she does; she says so not because an authority told her to believe it, but because her own moral compass pointed that way. Authoritarian systems become corrupt because nobody dares to disagree with the authorities, but free thinkers are kept honest by the open dissent of other free thinkers.

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Pull the String!

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, tagged anecdote, BDSM, bisexuality, drugs, fantasy, Hollywood, imaginative fiction, nostalgia, porn, stage names, stripping, video on July 18, 2012| 28 Comments »

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. – Criswell

If the primary purpose of a movie is to entertain, it makes sense that a film can be “so bad it’s good”; some movies are just so incredibly, amazingly, jaw-droppingly bad that we can’t help finding them funny. So it’s not surprising that people are still watching the work of the late Edward D. Wood, Jr., arguably the worst filmmaker of all time. There are bad writers, bad directors and bad producers, but Wood managed to be outstandingly bad at all three: his scripts make no sense and are laden with ludicrous dialog and wholly illogical plots; his direction ranges from the incompetent to the incomprehensible, and his production values are practically nonexistent. Wood’s dedication to keeping costs down is exemplified by his commitment to exposing as little film as possible, and his employment of stock footage even when it was wholly inappropriate. And though it’s not unusual for directors to favor certain groups of actors, it is highly doubtful that any such regular cast was as completely devoid of talent as Wood’s stable, which often included the director himself.

The clip above is from Wood’s first full-length film, Glen or Glenda (1953), a semi-autobiographical piece in which Wood revealed his transvestism to the world. Like all Wood’s early work it gave a prominent role to the destitute, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi, seen here as a narrator mumbling incomprehensible commentary of his own devising. Lugosi died just as Wood was about to start filming his magnum opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space, but the would-be auteur was undeterred; he incorporated silent screen tests of Lugosi into the movie and cast his wife’s chiropractor as a stand-in for the rest. The fact that the doctor looked nothing like the deceased horror icon was disguised by the simple expedient of having him walk around with his Dracula cape over his face. Plan 9 is certainly Wood’s best-known creation, and was probably responsible for the resurgence of interest in his work after it was named “Worst Film of All Time” in Harry & Michael Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards (1980); however, it lacks one of Wood’s characteristic cinematic elements: lesbian bondage scenes, which appear in most of his movies from Glen or Glenda to Orgy of the Dead (1965):

Wood was only responsible for the script of this one, but it serves as a harbinger of his later work directing soft-core (and eventually hard-core) porn; in it, the “Emperor of the Dead” (Criswell) presides over a ceremony in which ten undead topless dancers perform in a graveyard. My cousin Alan and I rented it one Saturday afternoon in ’96, and this scene became a running joke for us; for years afterward he might suddenly hold up some random object and say, “And what is this?” To which I would reply, “A symbol, Master!” Anyone who hadn’t seen the flick probably thought we were complete morons, but that’s half the fun of a private joke.

I first discovered Wood’s oeuvre in high school, but I only recently found out that he also tried to break into television via several series pilots, all of which were thought lost until one of them was discovered in a private collection. Less than a year after filming Plan 9 Wood wrote, produced and directed “Final Curtain”, the pilot for a horror anthology series to be called Portraits of Terror. It’s as absurd, pretentious and just plain bad as anything Wood ever did, but is less than 23 minutes long; the star is Duke Moore and its narrator Dudley Manlove (both from Plan 9), but look for Wood himself (under a pseudonym) as the only other on-screen character.

Rod Serling it’s not, but if poor Wood hadn’t drank himself to death just two years before the renaissance of interest in his work, he might’ve at last found the fame he craved on the talk-show circuit, and perhaps even made a good living directing kitschy music videos in the 1980s.

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Tangled Web

Posted in Biography, Perception, tagged anecdote, ethics, hysteria, neofeminism, pimps, psychology, stage names on July 9, 2012| 123 Comments »

O what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive! – Sir Walter Scott

As many of you already know, the prohibitionist mouthpiece who calls herself “Stella Marr” has been outed. Last Tuesday evening I was emailed links to a posting she made which carelessly linked her legal name with “Stella Marr” and several other online personas; I quickly made a screen capture of the page, knowing full well that it wouldn’t be long before it was deleted (and it was, only a few hours later, though I also have a link to a cached copy). Later that evening I was contacted by Norma Jean Almodovar, who had even more information than I had been given; due to the nature of some of it, we suspect the anonymous leaker (whose identity we do not know) is a real-life acquaintance who was fed up with Stella’s lies and wanted sex worker rights activists to know the truth.

And what a truth it is; it turns out that Amy (her real first name) is the daughter of a wealthy family who attended Barnard from autumn 1981 until spring 1985, then skipped a year and returned for the 1986-1987 school year; since she did not graduate until spring of 1994 I surmise that she was actually done by 1987 but for some unfinished requirement (a senior thesis perhaps?) that she finally completed in ’94. I further assume that whatever dates she gives (and whatever the truth of the conditions therein), her “ten years in prostitution” ran from early 1985 to late 1993. I was not able to confirm her statement that she attended Julliard, and I assume her claims about Columbia extend from the fact that Barnard is an autonomous part of it despite their well-known rivalry.

Amy’s Google profile describes her as “a writer living in Houston, TX with her beloved husband and labrador [sic] retriever. She is writing a memoir about her experiences as a prostitute in New York City.” Interestingly, the “pimps and hos” nonsense she touts as “Stella” is in sharp contrast to her other claim that she transitioned out of hooking via being “kept” by a wealthy professor for two years; apparently, her “violent and controlling” pimp whom she supposedly saw murder women in front of her just meekly let her go without even demanding a cut. But considering the poor job she did of covering her tracks (I even have records of real estate transactions she conducted), and the fact that she can’t make up her mind whether her benefactor taught at Oxford or Cambridge, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that she left such a gaping logic hole in her invented life story.

How much of that story is real? How much embellished? How much distorted, wildly exaggerated and “reframed”? How much made up out of whole cloth? We simply don’t know and have no way of telling at this time, and I have to wonder if Amy herself even knows any more; given that prostitution is a recurring theme in her writing it seems likely that (as one of my sources stated) she started hooking after her family cut her off. It may be that she then got in over her head, though she wasn’t nearly as traumatized as she pretends; after all, some of the things we found in other names seem to present whoring in a far less negative light. She even owns a WordPress blog called “A Prostitute Reviews Movies”, which she seems to use for writing her screeds before posting them publicly to her own blog; this seems like a rather odd title for someone who also brands herself a “survivor” and blathers about “trigger warnings” and other concepts favored by the tissue-paper feelings crowd. The tipster claimed that her “beloved” husband, a US government bureaucrat, considers her insane and that she started the “Stella Marr” character to get back at him; even if this isn’t true she obviously thrives on attention and craves success as a writer (of fiction, clearly) at any cost. However, I have no wish to cause problems for Amy’s husband, who may be as much her victim as the sex workers and activists she constantly defames and libels; though I have no control over what information others have released and may continue to release, I have redacted her last name from the information and pictures presented here so as not to be the agent of harm to a possibly-innocent man.

Norma Jean Almodovar sent “Stella” an open letter, which you can read here; she also posted the following on several Facebook groups:

Many of us sex worker rights activists have been well aware of the vicious lies told about us by an abolitionist calling herself “Stella Marr.” She has bullied us and lied about us in numerous articles, forums and on her blogs. There was nothing we could do about it because we did not know her real identity. She felt free to spread her falsehoods anywhere and everywhere, knowing that there was nothing we could do as long as her cloak of anonymity protected her.

Now we know who she really is. Someone who knows her well and obviously dislikes her enough to “out” her, has provided us with her true name and other very personal information. When I sent a message to Stella’s Facebook page, letting her know that we know who she really is, she confirmed that it was her by responding with a very nasty message threatening action against me if I posted her real name.

It seems her whole story is a fraud, that she is not who she claims to be (in addition to her fake name), and that she was never the victim of pimps who trafficked her into prostitution. Her real story is much more interesting, but I will not share what I learned if she agrees to publicly apologize to all of us who were defamed by her. A number of you already know who she really is, because the person who outed her originally has shared that info with many other people.

I’d like to propose to our community that we give her the opportunity to make that public apology, and then hopefully she will retire the fictitious character “Stella Marr” whom she created in response to her own personal problems which had nothing to do with a past she never lived. (Think William Hillar, fraudster extraordinaire whose alleged true life story became the basis for “Taken”.)

Should she not take the opportunity to publicly retract her false statements and apologize to all of us who have been psychologically battered by her lies and bullying, perhaps we can consider filing a joint lawsuit against her for doing to us what she claims “pimps” and prostitution do to women.

You can read the email I sent to her as well as my refutation of her recent blog article which claims all of us sex worker rights activists are pimps (and therefore have no right to speak at colleges and universities or to fight for the rights of prostitutes) here.

Feel free to post this message anywhere and everywhere that victims of Stella Marr’s lies might read.

Personally, I hope Amy accepts the offer, admits the lies and retires “Stella” (I for one care nothing for her apology, which would be as insincere as everything else she writes); it would accomplish a great deal more good than fully “outing” her ever could, and would demonstrate the lengths to which prohibitionists will go to spread their propaganda.

One Year Ago Today

The conclusion to an interview in which my husband answers questions submitted by readers.

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The Golden Afternoon

Posted in Biography, History, Miscellaneous, tagged anecdote, BDSM, cult of the child, dirty, fantasy, holidays, imaginative fiction, Madonna/whore, marriage, psychology, stage names, United Kingdom on July 3, 2012| 14 Comments »

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie and Tillie, and they lived at the bottom of a well–” – Lewis Carroll

Long-time readers have probably noticed that as time goes on, my subject matter slowly broadens; when I first started writing two years ago every single column was about prostitution, then I branched off into tangentially-related topics, and now often wander quite far afield. There are a number of reasons for this, of which the four most important are 1) I am not a monomaniac, though I know it sometimes must appear so; 2) I don’t really want my readers to think I’m a monomaniac; 3) It’s easier to write something interesting every day if I allow myself some latitude; and 4) It helps to illustrate my most important theme, which is that whores are normal people with the same range and variety of interests as anyone else. Even so, I’ve been very careful to maintain an organic topical growth and to eschew jarring changes of focus; take today’s column, for instance. It has absolutely nothing to do with harlotry (though there is a tenuous connection via another sexual topic I’ve previously discussed), but it is the fruit of an outer limb connected to the main trunk by successively-smaller branches as follows:

On August 1^st, 2010 I published “Lammas”, which opened up the topic of holidays by discussing the fact that many whores are pagans of one kind or another. Then on “Halloween” I mentioned my “otherness” and referred in passing to my love of horror movies, a topic on which I expanded in “Maman” (May 8^th, 2011). “Frightful Films” (October 28^th, 2011) listed and described my favorite horror movies, then “My Favorite Things (Part One)” (December 1^st, 2011) did the same for my favorite non-horror movies; in the comments, a reader asked me to do a column on “My Favorite Books”, which included Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; its sequel “My Favorite Authors” included Lewis Carroll. And though my column for tomorrow will be a philippic about the sorry state of American independence (see last year’s column for an example), I couldn’t let an anniversary of great importance for friends of Alice pass by without comment: tomorrow is the 150^th anniversary of Wonderland Day.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a brilliant but shy mathematician and Anglican deacon who taught at Oxford and became a close friend of the family of Christ Church Dean Henry Liddell. Dodgson grew especially close to Mrs. Liddell and the couple’s three daughters Lorina, Alice and Edith; he often took the girls rowing on the Thames, and though the Victorians were less evil-minded than modern people on the subject of adult men and young girls, they were always accompanied on these expeditions by at least one other adult. One such excursion occurred on Friday, July 4^th, 1862; Dodgson (then 30 years old) and the girls (13, 10 and 8 respectively) were accompanied by the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and as was their custom they stopped for tea upon reaching Godstow. Typically, the three Liddell sisters would demand that Dodgson tell them a story of his own devising; years later he wrote, “none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her.” The “little listener” was of course Alice Liddell, whose given name was attached to tale’s heroine (though she also had traits borrowed from Lorina, Edith, other girls they knew and even Dodgson himself); and though as he later told Duckworth he “sat up nearly the whole night” writing out what he could remember of the story, he was a perfectionist and so fussed over it, rewrote it and revised it for over two years before presenting the handwritten, self-illustrated Alice’s Adventures Underground to her in November of 1864. A year earlier he had allowed the children of his friend George MacDonald to read the then-unfinished manuscript and they urged him to take it to a publisher; the first edition, with the now-familiar illustrations by Punch cartoonist Sir John Tenniel, was released by Macmillan in 1865 under the pen name “Lewis Carroll”, which Dodgson used to separate his works of fancy from his serious mathematical treatises.

Incidentally, the blonde Alice who appears in those illustrations (and whose image has become inextricably attached to the character) was not based on Alice Liddell, who appears dressed as a beggar child above in an 1858 photo by Dodgson. As you can see she was a beautiful child and grew into a beautiful woman; the photo in the paragraph below (taken in 1872 by Julia Margaret Cameron) depicts King Lear and his three daughters, with Cordelia (far right) portrayed by the 20-year old Alice (the other two are Edith [center] and another sister, Marina). Dodgson was not the only person who was extremely fond of her; a number of contemporary letters and diaries speak highly of her charm and intelligence. But he loved her very deeply, so much so that Mrs. Liddell eventually became uncomfortable with his attentions and took steps to discourage them after some mysterious incident in October of 1862 which is referred to in his diary only by the cryptic phrase “Lord Newry’s business”.

This does not mean that Dodgson was a pedophile, as he is so often portrayed nowadays; much has been made of the fact that he enjoyed photographing little girls nude, but this was actually a very common practice in Victorian England: it was part of the “child cult”, meant to express innocence and purity, and was so mainstream that nude children even appeared on Christmas cards of the period. And though it is true that he enjoyed the company of young girls, he also befriended many adult women, especially married ones. In fact, a number of Carroll scholars (including Martin Gardner and Karoline Leach) have argued that he was in fact the exact opposite of a pedophile: not a man who was sexually attracted to children, but rather one so deeply uncomfortable with his own sexuality that he preferred the company of little girls precisely because he was not attracted to them. His well-documented friendships with married women and the oft-repeated prayer in his diaries to be delivered from the “sin of David” point to an entirely different kink: King David coveted the beautiful Bathsheba and sent her husband, Uriah the Hittite, to die on the front lines of battle so he could possess her. It therefore seems likely that the desire which troubled him so was a fetish for other men’s wives, possibly consummated about 1853, which drove him to avoid temptation by socializing with girls too young to be objects of carnal desire. We can even guess the type of woman to whom he was sexually attracted, yet found emotionally repellent: both Alice books and a number of his other writings feature strong, castrating, dominatrix figures (such as the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen) with weak, ineffectual husbands. Alice’s mother may have been one of these: a bit of student doggerel from the 1860s goes, “I am the Dean and this is Mrs. Liddell/She plays the first, and I the second fiddle.”

Alas, the time which gave Alice’s adventures to the world was as mortal as a bread-and-butter-fly; only three months later Mrs. Liddell began to cool toward Dodgson, and on June 27^th of the following year she told him about gossip linking him with either their governess or Lorina (who was 14 and therefore marriageable). The rumors caused a break in their close relationship, and though they remained cordial the rowing trips became a thing of the past. He befriended many other girls in the next four decades, but none of them ever truly replaced Alice in his affections: in a letter he sent her soon after her marriage in 1880 he wrote, “I have had scores of child-friends since your time, but they have been quite a different thing.” She was also his muse for 1871’s Through the Looking-Glass, and no subsequent work dedicated to another girl can match the two Alice books in genius or wit; they are the enduring legacy of that “golden afternoon”, now a century and a half gone, so it is only proper that the occasion be commemorated by those who love them.

One Year Ago Today

In “July Updates (Part Two)”, Georgia learns about the Law of Unintended Consequences, Google reveals its prohibitionism, the European Women’s Lobby demonstrates that it knows less than nothing about male psychology and Seattle police display their abject cowardice.

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Rhodopis

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged archeofeminism, courtesans, Egypt, Europe, fantasy, Middle East, pimps, slavery, stage names on June 7, 2012| 12 Comments »

The Egyptians relations affirm that Rhodopis was a most beautiful Curtizan; and that on a time as she was bathing her self, Fortune, who loveth to doe extravagant and unexpected things, gave her a reward… – Aelian, Various Histories (XIII, xxxiii) (tr. Thomas Stanley)

As I pointed out in my biography of La Belle Otero,

…the details of [the] lives [of courtesans] tend to be vague and often contradictory…[because] when one is in the business of selling an illusion, the details of one’s life may become as fluid and embellished as advertising copy, and one’s biographers are forced to choose between conflicting reports from letters, rumors, the rose-tinted memories of favored clients, the gossip of rivals and the propaganda of moralists.

But though many fanciful tales are told of courtesans from Acca Larentia to Mata Hari, none are as romantic and enduring as the story of Rhodopis, which eventually became one of the world’s most beloved fairy tales.

She was a Thracian enslaved in Samos sometime in the first half of the 6^th century BCE; her birth name may have been Doricha, but since the source of this information is Strabo (who lived 500 years later), we cannot be certain. She was the slave of Iadmon, who also owned Aesop, the great fabulist; by this we may infer that Iadmon was an enlightened man who educated his slaves well and allowed them considerable freedom. Sometime in her teens she was sold to Aesop’s original owner Xanthes, a merchant who traded extensively with Egypt (one of the traditions of Aesop’s life is that he was Ethiopian, which would make sense in the context of Xanthes’ business). It is unclear whether she started working as a hetaera for Iadmon or if it was her second master who first employed her thus, but the fact that she was educated (as other Greek women were not) indicates that this was the career for which she was intended from the start. Her stage name, like those of many hetaerae, was based on a physical feature: “Rhodopis” means “rosy cheeks”.

Xanthes took her to Naucratis, the first permanent Greek colony in Egypt, where she quickly became very popular. She had not been working a very long time when she was hired by the merchant Charaxus, elder brother of the poetess Sappho; he soon fell in love with her and purchased her freedom for a very dear price, for which he was scolded by his sister in verse. It is from this now-lost poem that Strabo derived the name Doricha; some sources say the lyric also chided Rhodopis for taking advantage of her brother’s good nature by stealing his property (i.e. accepting her freedom rather than becoming his slave). This helps us to pin down the time somewhat; Herodotus tells us that the reigning pharaoh was Amasis II, whose reign began in 570 BCE, and Sappho is believed to have died not long after that. Rhodopis remained in Naucratis and became very successful; she was religiously devout and tithed to the temple at Delphi, which had to be rebuilt after being destroyed in a fire (the Pharaoh also donated 1000 talents of gold as a gesture of friendship toward the Greeks). Large contributors were commemorated by iron spits engraved with their names; Herodotus (who lived a century later) said that he counted ten inscribed with hers, which gives you some idea of her wealth.

This is all that can be considered historical about Rhodopis; the rest belongs to the realm of legend and fantasy. The first of these stories, which began shortly after her death, claimed that she had built the third of the Great Pyramids. This is of course ridiculous; it was actually built by Menkaure in the 4^th Dynasty, about 2500 BCE. The story may have arisen through confusion of Rhodopis with the legendary 6^th dynasty Queen Nitocris, possibly due to the name of her city (Naucratis); Nitocris was herself confused with Menkaure because her throne name was said to have been Menkaura. Herodotus thoroughly debunked the idea that Rhodopis had anything to do with pyramid-building, but did repeat the legend of Nitocris…who may not have existed at all. Historians believe that she appeared in the historical record due to a mistake in a catalog of pharaohs compiled during the reign of Ramses II, and that previously independent legends were then attached to her. Incidentally, Herodotus’ account of Nitocris’ life inspired the young Tennessee Williams’ first published story, “The Vengeance of Nitocris”, which appeared in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales; this story in turn inspired H.P. Lovecraft to mention her in two of his tales, thus bringing her into the Lovecraftian tradition drawn on by many writers since. And Ramses II, who inadvertently created her legend, himself inspired Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. It’s almost like I planned all this to fit together, isn’t it?

The confusion of Rhodopis and Nitocris (a lady of very different background and temperament) was no doubt facilitated by the legend that the former also became the Queen of Egypt. Strabo repeats the story, already old in his time, that after Rhodopis had become successful and wealthy she bought a fine house with a pool in the garden. And while she was bathing there one day, an eagle swooped down and stole one of her sandals, carried it to nearby Sais, and dropped it in Pharaoh’s lap. The monarch was of course fascinated by this strange omen and by the richness and beauty of the sandal, and so sent men throughout the capital and other nearby cities to discover who the owner of the dainty lost shoe might be. Rhodopis’ maids had of course gossiped about the singular occurrence at their mistress’ bath, and by this word came to Pharaoh, who summoned the hetaera to the palace. When he beheld her beauty he interpreted the omen as a sign he should marry her, and she therefore became Queen of Egypt and they lived happily ever after.

Though there is no clear historical record of the latter part of Rhodopis’ life, we do know the names of Amasis II’s consorts and she is not among them. It’s certainly possible that she became one of his concubines; she would be neither the first nor the last courtesan to become a royal mistress, and an earlier folk tale may have become attached to her name because of it. But in the end, it doesn’t matter because the magical romance of a king and a commoner enabled by a lost slipper proved greater than either of the living people who inspired it, and Rhodopis – or as we have called her since 1697, Cinderella – is undoubtedly the only whore ever to inspire a Walt Disney movie.

One Year Ago Today

“Full of Themselves” reveals the incredible pomposity of certain women who would be considered sex workers but for the existence of an arbitrary legal line.

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The Odor of Socks

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged archeofeminism, censorship, Crippling Thought, ethics, internet, neofeminism, pimps, prohibitionist myths, stage names, stereotypes, survivors, Swedish model on June 1, 2012| 30 Comments »

What! Would you make no distinction between hypocrisy and devotion? Would you give them the same names, and respect the mask as you do the face? Would you equate artifice and sincerity? Confound appearance with truth? Regard the phantom as the very person? Value counterfeit as cash? – Molière, Tartuffe (I, v)

The internet has made it much more difficult to lie about an entire group of people; now that everyone can blog, “tweet” and otherwise self-publish the members of that group can speak up for themselves, thus revealing the truth for everyone to see. As I pointed out in “Objectification Overruled”,

…the average person doesn’t deal with members of any given minority nearly as often as with members of the majority, and if hate or fear toward that group can be maintained he isn’t likely to have an intimate enough relationship with any of its members to learn that the prejudice and propaganda are false. If black people or Jews are segregated into ghettos and prohibited from frequent interaction with the majority, members of that majority don’t get the opportunity to learn the truth about them; and if homosexuals and whores are criminalized they are afraid to expose themselves…

The internet, however, allows whores to write about our lives without revealing our legal names to cops and prosecutors, and blogs like this one expose large numbers of people to the fact that most hookers are pretty much like anyone else, with a wide variety of temperaments, personalities, interests, educational levels, personal histories, etc. Needless to say, this makes prohibitionists very angry; their whole strategy relies on convincing the public that the vast majority of us are broken dolls with bad childhoods, a history of sexual abuse, poor education and a total absence of other options (either because of extreme deprivation or because we were literally enslaved by evil “pimps”). As I’ve pointed out to a number of journalists, can you imagine prohibitionists using me as a poster child? “This poor, eloquent, 33-year-old masters-degreed librarian with high self esteem had no choice but to accept sexual slavery?” They’d be laughed out of the marketplace of ideas so fast their pointy heads would spin. No, they have to make it seem as though people like me are fabulous beasts in stark contrast to emotionally damaged “child” prostitutes who are regularly dragged down streets behind pimps’ cars without sustaining life-threatening injuries or being seen by any witnesses. But how can they accomplish that when there are so many of us telling the truth? “Well, Maggie’s not representative, nor is Brandy, nor Kelly, nor Emily, nor Aspasia, nor Norma Jean, nor Brooke, nor Audacia, nor Tracy, nor Charlotte, nor Elena, nor Cheryl, nor Melissa, nor Sina, nor Ariane…” It begins to get pretty damned unbelievable as that list increases in length.

When I was in library school I once did a research paper on collection packing; I called it “Censorship by Commission” (as opposed to traditional censorship, which is accomplished by omission). Collection packing is when an unethical librarian purchases (with library funds) a large number of books representing a minority view, so that a casual library patron will believe that view is more mainstream than it actually is. For example, an unscrupulous creationist librarian might obtain as many books on “scientific creationism” as she could find and file them alongside books on geology and evolutionary theory, instead of consigning them to the religion section or the 001.9 ghetto where they belong. Prohibitionists do this as well; they present the “reframed experiences” of “survivors” to support their claims, but since these are a small minority the usual approach (as practiced by Farley, Kristof, et al) is to present the same stories over and over again with slightly-altered details so as to “pack the collection” of available narratives.

This can only go so far against the huge number of vocal whores, however; even the most credulous of prohibitionist marks will eventually notice that while we regularly post new material and interact with our readers, the supposed plethora of “human trafficking victims” are represented only in third person. And so a new weapon has become necessary: the sock puppet. Every tool can be used for good or ill, and while the anonymity of the internet makes it possible for whores to speak out without fear of arrest or other persecution, it also allows trolls to set up multiple accounts so as to create phantom “supporters” of their views. Some writers and activists suspect that a number of “big names” are directly behind the ever-increasing number of supposed “survivors” who write in an eerily-similar manner and tend to tell the same stories, but I think it’s far more likely that some of the copious grant money flowing from the likes of the US State Department, the Hunt Alternatives Fund and Google is going to hire full-time shills (some “survivors” but most just ghostwriters) to write blogs, post in comment threads and insult activists on Twitter.

You may feel I’m being paranoid, but I have several strong reasons for believing this. First, the number of such accounts has increased dramatically in the past year; if terrible experiences in prostitution were common, one would’ve expected that the proportion of “survivor” narratives to “happy hooker” narratives would have remained relatively constant for the past decade (with perhaps a gradual increase as “trafficking” hysteria grew). But that isn’t the case; the proportion has instead grown quickly in just the last few months. Second, these narratives appear to pop up just where they can do the most damage (such as in places considering the Swedish Model) rather than in areas such as Australia where they wouldn’t have a great deal of effect. Third, they often seem to be targeted against specific writers; for example, few if any self-professed “prostituted women” ever called themselves “call girls” before, but since January the phrase (which is especially associated with the works of Tracy Quan, Brooke Magnanti and yours truly) is suddenly popping up in the blog titles and screen names associated with neofeminist-flavored anti-sex worker propaganda. Finally (and in my mind most damningly), the style of many of these accounts is the same: they use the same terms, the same tactics and the same idiosyncratic phrases; they rely on the same propaganda techniques and commit the same logical fallacies; and they tend to tell the same stories and rely on the same sources (though this last is true of most anti-sex worker activists). These various online personas are either maintained by one small group of prohibitionists, or else a somewhat larger group of professionals working from a style sheet as the writers of Doc Savage and Tom Swift books did. But in either case, the result is the same: a number of mysterious “women” who share similarly stylized and melodramatic pimp-dominated “histories” in prostitution, and whose blogs, comments and “tweets” all bear the unmistakable odor of dirty socks.

One Year Ago Today

“Mind Reading” looks at “authorities” who claim to be able to read minds and unerringly discern the motives of people they wish to persecute.

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Deborah Jeane Palfrey

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged bad customers, California, censorship, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, escort services, ethics, Florida, psychology, rape, Rome, sisterhood, stage names, Washington DC on May 2, 2012| 39 Comments »

If taken into custody, my physical safety and most probably my very life would be jeopardized…rape, beating, maiming, disfigurement and more than likely murder disguised in the form of just another jailhouse accident or suicide would await me. – Deborah Jeane Palfrey

Four years ago yesterday, Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found hanged in a shed behind her mother’s home in Tarpon Springs, Florida, the victim of government persecution that literally drove her to her grave. I’ve been asked if I knew her, and I regret to say that I did not because I’ve been told by those who did that she was a kind, sweet, wonderful person whose philosophy of running an escort service was the same as mine: treat one’s girls fairly and honestly, as one would like to be treated oneself, and extend the same courtesy to one’s clients. Indeed, her only important ethical breach is the one forced upon all whores by criminalization: in order to protect ourselves, our associates and our property we must deny what we are, and officially cloak our legitimate and socially-vital profession under ridiculous disclaimers about “time and companionship”; escort services (including mine) must even require subcontractors to sign documents stating that they agree not to have sex with clients, even though we’d have to let them go if clients repeatedly complained that they obeyed such contracts. As I discovered in my own (insignificant in comparison to Deborah’s) experience with the injustice system, we are forced to commit felonies such as fraud and perjury in order to escape tyrannical persecution for running a business that is neither wrongful nor fraudulent.

Deborah was born in Charleroi, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1956, the daughter of Frank and Blanche Palfrey. Mercifully, Frank Palfrey died in 2002 and so was not forced to endure his daughter’s lynching by his government, but Fate allowed her mother no such kindness; she was the person who discovered the lifeless body of her first-born. The Palfreys moved to Orlando, Florida, but returned to Charleroi in 1966; this was not a happy homecoming for Deborah, who was bullied so mercilessly she eventually asked for and received her parents’ permission to finish high school in Florida. She earned a degree in criminal justice from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, then paralegal credentials from a law school in San Diego. But after a few years at this grind she learned what so many women do: that far from being a liberation as many second-wave feminists pretend, a career can be stifling to the point of unendurability. In the ‘80s she became a cocktail waitress, then an escort, but discovered (as I did a decade later) that criminalization allows seedy, sleazy escort services to flourish, and so decided to start her own agency.

In 1990, she was entrapped by a police “sting” operation, but was terrified by the prospect of conviction on the bogus felony charges leveled against her (which included “extortion”) and so fled to Montana, where she was captured in 1992 while trying to cross into Canada. She was returned to California, convicted of “pandering” (i.e. helping whores to advertise) and locked up for 18 months, resulting in a record which ensured she could never again work in the field of her degree. After her release she founded Pamela Martin and Associates, a Washington, D.C. escort service which she ran mostly by phone and email from her home in California. Though she probably figured her long-distance management would protect her, in reality it did the opposite because she underestimated the government’s dedication to wasting huge sums of money and thousands of man-hours on persecuting citizens for having sex. Inspired by the Bush administration’s newly-minted “anti-prostitution policy”, the IRS enlisted the Post Office’s help in “investigating” Pamela Martin; after two years of by-the-book spying failed to turn up anything incriminating they tried to get a warrant to raid her home, but were refused. Undaunted, the Post Office sent a man and woman in October of 2006 to pose as a couple interested in buying Deborah’s house so she would let them in without a warrant, and while they were there they managed to steal enough “evidence” to secure one. Thus armed they raided her house, arrested her and froze all of her assets so she could not hire proper legal representation.

The media vultures descended instantly, branding her the “D.C. Madam” and indulging in the usual orgy of lurid speculation and holier-than-thou pomposity which distinguishes any news story involving commercial sex. This intensified on February 6^th, 2007 when Brandy Britton, a former anthropology professor who had worked for the agency and had a number of important clients, was found hanged; Palfrey assumed a brave demeanor but was almost certainly perturbed about the incident, considering that in 1991 she had already described (in the letter to the judge quoted in my epigram) the fate of arrested whores with clients in high places. In an apparent attempt to protect herself she appeared on the TV news show 20/20 on May 4^th, 2007 and announced that she had retained almost 15,000 client phone numbers, prompting a deluge of phone calls from clients trying to make arrangements to keep their names secret despite the fact that prosecutors already had their hands on the information. Gambling that full disclosure might help her case and certainly couldn’t expose her to any greater danger, Palfrey and her civil attorney Montgomery Sibley released the phone number database in TIFF format on July 9^th, sending CD-ROM copies to hundreds of journalists and activists. Of course, most powerful men make such arrangements by proxy or at least using aliases and private numbers, but three names from her unreleased client list did leak out: Louisiana Senator David Vitter, Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias and military strategist Harlan Ullman (who invented the “shock and awe” concept). The rest of the names were suppressed by judges, but one more was whispered: then-vice president Dick Cheney.

Thirteen escorts and three politically unconnected clients were given the usual choice described by Harvey Silverglate in Three Felonies a Day: go on the stand and lie under oath by repeating the script we write for you, and we’ll let you go; or, refuse to cooperate and we’ll bankrupt you, destroy your family and imprison you for decades. They submitted, sang as directed, and on April 15, 2008 Deborah Palfrey was convicted of money laundering, racketeering and mail fraud (the usual charges government uses to convict people of victimless, consensual “crimes”); she faced a maximum of 55 years in prison, though it’s likely she would have been actually sentenced to about seven or eight years. She never made it that far: two weeks later she was dead, giving the court a convenient excuse to vacate her conviction, thus washing its hands of guilt and ensuring no more important names would be exposed.

Her dramatic death unleashed a tidal wave of speculation. Alex Jones and his Infowars organization pointed out that Palfrey had repeatedly stated in interviews that she would not commit suicide and stated that if she was found dead it would really be murder. Her mother had no signs that she was suicidal, and some handwriting experts claimed that the suicide note was either forged or written under compulsion. Journalist Dan Moldea told Time that Palfrey had told him she would commit suicide before enduring prison again, but Jones pointed out that Moldea has a known history of fabricating quotes. In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether she put the noose around her own neck or it was put there by men in black: it was murder in any case. There is no moral difference between directly executing a victim, inducing her to kill herself by threats against her mother and sister, or driving her to suicide via persecution, robbery, psychological torture and the looming threat of a horrible jailhouse death by rape, torture and disfigurement. “Suicide” has been the preferred method of execution for women who embarrass the rulers of decaying republics since at least Roman times, and the purpose of the kangaroo court which precedes the murder is merely to humiliate the victim, to tantalize her with false hope of acquittal and to allow the sleeping masses the illusion that there is still such a thing as justice.

One Year Ago Today

“Real Heroes” presents for your consideration the New York Initiative, a group of real-life superheroes who have offered their services to protect working girls.

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That Was the Week That Was (#16)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Manufactured War, An Angel of Mercy, bad customers, Brazil, brothels, censorship, condoms, cops, Counterfeit Comfort, dirty, drugs, escort services, Europe, Follow Your Bliss, Give It a Rest, Hard Numbers, harm reduction, hysteria, internet, language, Latin America, law, Much Ado About Nothing, Nevada, Never Call the Cops, New York, Not the Same Tree, porn, Presents, sex offender registry, Spain, stage names, stereotypes, streetwalkers, stripping, Texas, The Camel's Nose, To Protect and Serve, underage, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Washington DC on April 21, 2012| 25 Comments »

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. – William Pitt

Nine updates and two meta-updates; two other news stories from this week will be treated in greater depth in my columns for April 29^th and May 6^th.

The Camel’s Nose (October 2^nd, 2010)

Meet CISPA, formerly known as SOPA, alias PIPA, née COICA:

…some people are calling it “worse than SOPA,” and it’s sponsored by a congressman who thinks the death penalty should be considered for Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking military information to Wikileaks. Be worried: they think we stopped paying attention after SOPA — so they made…the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (PDF) (aka H.R. 3523)…[which] has the support of companies such as AT&T, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft…and many more. A full list of all 28 corporate supporters is here. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), is also trying to get tech press to tell you…CISPA is “nothing like SOPA.” Don’t believe it. CISPA’s primary function is to remove legal barriers that might keep Internet companies from giving all your communication and information to the government. It allows “cyber entities” (such as Internet service providers, social networks like Facebook and cell phone companies like AT&T) to circumvent Internet privacy laws when they’re pressured by Homeland Security to hand over or shut down — well, almost anything of yours online that the government wants, no warrant needed…

Here’s a handy graphic (click to enlarge) you can download or link and spread everywhere, and here’s a very comprehensive “tool kit” from Anonymous. Don’t ignore this, y’all; the fascists figured out they needed to give more to the big tech companies, so this time we have to defeat it without corporate support.

To Protect and Serve (February 9^th, 2011)

Another sex worker murdered by cops, and another victim of so-called “non-lethal” tasers:

Adult performer Sledge Hammer…[whose legal name was Marland Anderson, died on April 13^th] after…police…shot [him numerous times] with a Taser…Anderson…“had a mild form of schizophrenia, and it wasn’t a problem until he started smoking pot and taking various things for depression,” [friend and film director Stoney] Curtis explained…On Sunday night…Anderson suffered a severe anxiety attack and his girlfriend, adult performer Alexa Cruz, called 911 to prevent him from harming himself…police showed up with an ambulance and…“instead of trying to talk to him or grab him and get him to the ground, or the paramedics giving him a sedative, they decided to break out their tasers and just tasered him excessively until the point where he went into cardiac arrest,” Curtis said…

Once again: never, ever call the cops for any reason, not even if you think you’re dying. Because once you do, they think you are their personal property to dispose of in any way they wish.

Not the Same Tree (February 18^th, 2011)

This article about a Scottish escort service owner convicted of “human trafficking” is a perfect illustration of how the warped minds of police, prosecutors and prohibitionists project crime and evil into everything they see, and how they and their media lackeys use dysphemisms, distortion and exaggeration to create monsters out of businesspeople:

Scotland’s first convicted sex trafficker…revealed the secrets of the seedy vice empire that raked in a fortune – before landing him in jail. Stephen Craig…described how he and…Sarah Beukan…ran their infamous Scottish Elite Escorts and recruited girls to join their prostitution ring. Craig also claimed that footballers, actors and comedians were among the biggest clients…and…admitted taking a third of the money paid by punters to his girls…Craig denied making threats to girls or forcing them to sell their bodies…a police officer claimed one witness said Craig threatened to pour boiling water down her throat…But Sheriff Sam Clark said there was “no pressure, force or threat” on women who worked for him. Craig now faces a proceeds of crime investigation. He said…“Police say Sarah and I made £20,000 a week…[but actually] we probably split about £5000 on a good week”…

“Seedy vice empire”. “Infamous”. “Prostitution ring”. “Sell their bodies”. “Taking money” to mean “charging fees”. The lurid accusations totally unsupported by fact, and the wild exaggeration of his income so the cops can steal more of his property and savings. I wish there were some way to make these asses fully cognizant of how ridiculous they’re going to look once Western society fully awakens from “sex trafficking” hysteria.

Give It a Rest (August 18^th, 2011)

Remember the Texas strip club which cops were trying to destroy via harassment of dancers and customers? Apparently, they either succeeded in driving the owner over the edge or else just decided to get rid of him by the time-honored method of framing:

Ryan Walker Grant, co-owner of Flashdancer topless club in Arlington, was arrested after an FBI investigation revealed he tried to hire Mexican hitmen to kill two Arlington city officials whom he blamed for the closure of his business…Grant [allegedly told the FBI plant that]…he stood to lose $800,000 a year if Flashdancers closed for good…

Follow Your Bliss (November 29^th, 2011)

Though most “child sex slave” fetishists restrict themselves to writing lurid newspaper stories, this one sought the opportunity for “hands-on” experience “helping” underage hookers:

A counselor at a new…shelter for prostituted children groped and propositioned a girl there…prosecutors in Seattle contend Ralph Nathaniel Wells accosted the then-16-year-old girl in late January. Wells, 32, had been employed by the shelter as an overnight counselor…the girl said Wells called her out of her room several times…[and] made inappropriate comments and sexual advances, pulled on her clothing and touched her. Wells was suspended without pay immediately…

Obviously Wells bought his own organization’s propaganda that the girl was “prostituted” (i.e. a passive object without volition) and a “child”, and therefore too stupid and helpless to turn him down and report his sleazy behavior.

Presents, Presents, Presents! (December 29^th, 2011)

I got two new presents this week! On Monday I received a copy of Never On Sunday from Martin English, and on Tuesday a new book named The Origins of Sex from another reader who prefers to remain anonymous. Thank you both so very much!

An Angel of Mercy (January 25^th, 2012)

You don’t have to be a Catholic nun to do outreach to streetwalkers; Cyndee Clay is a lapsed Mormon who heads Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS) in Washington, DC. In this interview with Metro Weekly she talks about sex work stigma, “prostitution-free zones”, police harassment, harm reduction and the services HIPS provides, including “…weekly support groups…daily maintenance groups for active drug users…case management, linkage to care and services, including HIV testing and drop-in syringe access…our bad-date sheet” and condom distribution.

Much Ado About Nothing (April 18^th, 2012)

Well, the story’s beginning to make a lot more sense now; it turns out the argument wasn’t over $47 as initially reported, but rather $770 (the difference between the $800 fee Agent Asshole agreed to and the $30 he tried to give her instead). Some of the agents are now making the sophomoric claim that they didn’t know their dates were whores, which is not only unbelievable to anyone in the know, but also flies in the face of reports that they met the women in a brothel. And Dania (the lady who was cheated) insists that contrary to what the bouncer and cops claim, the agents were very discreet and she had no idea they were Secret Service.

But despite media efforts to sex up the story and to overdramatize its importance (“Eleven Secret Service agents…and nine military servicemen are under investigation for hiring 20 or 21 hookers”) the American people seem refreshingly unmoved. My own perceptions and those of several of my sources indicate that more people are concerned with the agent’s trying to cheat a sex worker than the fact that he hired her. A reporter who interviewed me yesterday (I’m not sure when it will appear) felt that the real story was that Colombia’s system protects women by allowing them access to police, and a Vanity Fair article which quotes yours truly points out that the whole scandal is a convenient misdirection from the issues of the Cartagena summit, which Washington doesn’t want the public thinking too hard about. Spirit Airlines mocked the scandal in a promotion, and Dennis Hof of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch opined that Secret Service agents should only hire American whores. But most interesting (and heartening) of all is the reaction in many mainstream media sources (including Forbes), which might be synopsized in the words used by Reason’s J.D. Tuccille: “Maybe, just maybe, we could stop pretending that exchanging money for sex is such a terrible thing.”

Hard Numbers (April 20^th, 2012)

Brazil follows the example of our friends Down Under in recognizing that it is attempts to ban or regulate prostitution that cause the problems “authorities” associate with it, and that decriminalization is the best way to eliminate those issues:

A proposal before the Senate…[eliminates] criminal penalties for owners of brothels. The legal experts…want to end what they call the moral “cynicism” of the current legislation. In practice, they say, the ban on brothels only serves to corrupt police who extort money and services from the owners of the establishments…Prostitution itself is not illegal in Brazil, nor is it regulated by the government…the change will…permit labor unions to establish a link between the employees and the employer as is the norm in countries such as Germany and Holland. ”It is a historical claim to the movement for prostitutes,” [said] Roberto Dominguez…legal advisor to the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes…

Metaupdates

Counterfeit Comfort in That Was the Week That Was (#8) (February 26^th, 2012)

In their quest for absolute power over the lives of their subjects, politicians can’t let little things like justice, decency or the law stop them. After a federal judge overturned a Louisiana law banning victims of the “sex offender” registry from social media, tyrants in New York realized the same thing would probably happen if they enacted a similar law, so they used political pressure to force online companies to do their dirty work for them:

Back in 2008, New York passed a law requiring…sex offenders to register all email addresses and social network accounts with the government…[now] Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has announced the first wave of an initiative called “Operation: Game Over”…[in which] over 3500 sex offenders’ online gaming accounts with companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Blizzard have been banned completely. AG Schneiderman applauds the effort with “We must ensure online video game systems do not become a digital playground for dangerous predators. That means doing everything possible to block sex offenders from using gaming networks as a vehicle to prey on underage victims”…[But as] the New York Civil Liberties Union [points out]…“the problem…is almost non-existent. Children are almost always abused by people they know – a friend or family member – not by people they interact with while playing video games online.”

…Not only are these people blocked from playing with children through these services, they are also blocked from playing with friends and family members. We are further eroding the ability for these people to reintegrate themselves with society, and for what? While New York and those gaming companies that partnered with the state continue the witch hunt, they will surely earn some brownie points with parents. After all, that is really what matters in an election year…Who cares if justice is actually being served? Sex offenders are expendable. They aren’t real people. At least you can keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night.

A Manufactured War in That Was the Week That Was (#15) (April 14^th, 2012)

While I contended myself with dispatching the New York Times’ scare story on “sex trafficking” in Spain via a quick shotgun blast, Dr. Laura Agustín preferred to vivisect it instead. I think you’ll find the result well worth your time.

One Year Ago Today

“Faerie Tale” is exactly that…but probably not in the way you’re thinking.

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Guided Tour

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged activism, blogging, censorship, courtesans, ethics, neofeminism, stage names, statistics, Twitter on April 15, 2012| 31 Comments »

I will go with thee, and be thy guide,
In thy most need to go by thy side. – Everyman

A personal blog is like its author’s online “home”, and those who read and comment there are like guests. And though the party here generally grew gradually, there have been several periods of explosive growth, most recently from late February to late March. Today’s column is a sort of welcome to all my new readers, but regulars may want to stick around as well because I’m going to give a little tour and I might end up telling you something you don’t already know. So come on in, get comfortable, let me offer you a drink and we’ll get started.

First of all, why “The Honest Courtesan”? I used to have a little box in the right-hand column explaining it, but had to retire it to make room for the Twitter feed at the beginning of the year. The name of my site is the literal translation of the Renaissance Italian term cortigiana onesta, meaning a courtesan who provided real companionship and intellectual stimulation in addition to sex. I learned of the term via Margaret Rosenthal’s book of the same title, which was the story of a Venetian courtesan named Veronica Franco; a movie named Dangerous Beauty was based on it. Notice the two hyperlinks in that last sentence? I use them a great deal (some might even say too much); they’ll take you either to old columns or to outside websites that will give you more information about whatever it is. If you’ve got the time, following them from any given post is a good way for new readers to catch up on my back-catalog.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If you look up above my eyes there, you’ll see some tabs that may come in handy. The “Introduction” is actually just a static copy of my very first column, and will give you some idea of what I’m about if you haven’t figured that out already. Next to it is the “Index” tab; if you move your cursor over it you’ll see drop-downs for a multi-part subject index. The primary index is an alphabetical listing of posts by title, while the subject index is exactly that; both are totally hyperlinked for ease of use. If you want to know what I have to say about any given topic, the subject index is your friend. The next tab is “Resources”, and in the drop-down you’ll find “Bibliography”, “Filmography” and “Quotes”. The resources tab is a catalog of all the supplemental materials (mostly PDFs and a few very large image files) stored in the blog which don’t appear as posts or pages; the bibliography and filmography contain reviews of books and films, and the quote page is a selection of quotes about harlots or harlotry, most of which have appeared as epigrams on one or more of my columns. The last tab, “Offsite”, contains links (newest at the top) to places I’ve been interviewed, discussed at length or published guest blogs; its drop-down features “Links” (which are links to sites which themselves carry permanent links to this blog) and “Criticisms, Witticisms and Praise”, which is a list of cool, witty or otherwise notable statements others have made about me, even if they’re not flattering. These pages (other than the introduction) are all works in progress, so you may want to scan them every so often to see if there’s anything new.

Now let’s move over to the right-hand column, which remains in place no matter what page you visit. At the top is a calendar, which will let you go to whatever I posted on any given day. You’ll notice I post every day, but only once a day; I schedule my columns in advance to automatically publish at 10:01 UTC so all my readers can access them on the proper date, though the local time ranges from late evening in New Zealand to one minute past midnight in Hawaii. Every Saturday (give or take a day) I publish “That Was the Week That Was”, a synopsis of news items from the past week. Many of these are “updates”, stories that remind me of previous columns in some way or another; I provide links to those columns, so that’s another good way for new readers to catch up. Sometimes TW3 (as we call it for short) gets pushed to Friday or Sunday because of some date-dependent column on Saturday, but it will always be one of those three days. Once per month (usually but not always in the middle third) I publish a “fictional interlude”, an original tale with a prostitute as one of the important characters, and once about every 35 days or so I publish a “harlotography”, the biography of a famous whore.

The next box down in the right column is my Twitter feed; it displays my last five “tweets” and features a button to allow you to “follow” me. I use Twitter to call attention to whore-related news stories as I see them, to publicize articles on human rights issues which aren’t really appropriate for my blog, to “retweet” interesting or amusing items from other people and to publicize my daily columns. Even if you have no interest in Twitter you can click on the links you see in that box, and directly below it is another button which will sign you up to receive my daily column via email. Below that is a box with my email address and helpful instructions on how to ensure your message gets past my very aggressive filter-daemon.

If you keep going down that column, the next thing you’ll discover is a set of five boxes containing various links. The first, “A Few References”, contains links to several important columns. “Advice for Clients” and “Maggie’s Amazon Wishlist” are self-explanatory; “Handy Figures” is a list of numerical figures about prostitution with links to where the information can be found, and “Safety in Numbers” is a list of every column or study on this site which contains facts and figures about sex work, including a number of PDFs of scholarly studies. Though both “Handy Figures” and “Safety in Numbers” are posts rather than pages, I periodically update them to reflect new additions. Finally, there’s “House Rules”, which was my column of one year ago today; it contains a few simple guidelines to make everyone’s visit here more pleasant. If you just plan to read without contributing or if you’ve been commenting for a while you can probably ignore it, but if you’re a new commenter it might be a good idea to acquaint yourself with that post. Incidentally, that “one year ago today” link is something you’ll see in every column until early July; sometimes it’s embedded in the column proper and sometimes appended at the end, but it’s always there somewhere and provides yet another way for new readers to catch up. As of July 10^th it will mostly become a part of “That Was the Week That Was”, though individual columns may still have such a reference when appropriate.

The other four link boxes all feature external links. “Friends of Whores” are sites which, though run by non-sex workers, actively support our rights. “Organizations and Allies” are various nonprofit organizations which support sex worker rights; some are sex worker organizations and some have a larger mission which includes sex worker rights or outreach. “Resources” are various reference materials on other sites, and “Whorish Media” are websites by or about sex workers, including a couple of group blogs and some items just for fun. Below the link boxes is a widget that allows you to look up posts by category. Next comes the definition of my own coinage “neofeminist”, and finally a legal disclaimer (basically stating you can borrow my stuff as long as you give me credit).

That concludes this tour of The Honest Courtesan; I hope it proved educational if not entertaining, and that you visit often. And if you have any questions, just ask them in the comment section below and I’ll be happy to answer them.

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All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say “pretty please with sugar on top” first, and then wait for me to say “okey-dokey”.

Frank commentary from a semi-retired call girl

Posts Tagged ‘stage names’

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