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That Was the Week That Was (#327)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Music, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, anal sex, bogus studies, brothels, Cambodia, Celebrities, Check Your Premises, China, consensual crime, cops, Denmark, escort services, Europe, FBI, Feminine Pragmatism, First They Came for the Hookers, Florida, Gorged With Meaning, hysteria, Indiana, internet, Islam, Japan, Japanese Prostitution, language, law, Little Boxes, marriage, massage, New York, Ohio, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, paganism, pragmatism, Presents, prohibitionist myths, rescue industry, Schadenfreude, Shazam!, Shifting the Blame, Size Matters, Something Rotten In Sweden, streetwalkers, stripping, Subtle Pimping, surveillance, The Immunity Syndrome, tits, True Colors, Uncharted Seas, United Kingdom, universal criminality, video, violence vs. sex workers, virginity, Washington DC, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world on July 6, 2013| 37 Comments »

We need to listen to [sex workers]…rather than feeling sorry for them…and then actually take what they say seriously. – Jeanett Bjønness

Japanese Prostitution

Japanese cops’ increasing adoption of American whore-harassing tactics is extremely troubling: “Tokyo Metropolitan Police…cracked down on a prostitution club…specializing in senior citizens…Officers arrested the 63-year-old manager of club Silk…and one other employee for dispatching a woman, 64, to…an 82-year-old man…” That’s right, Japanese cops now think persecuting old people for consensual sex is an appropriate use of resources.

Welcome To Our World

Pearl-clutching, bigoted prudery is especially revolting in young men:

There’s a brand new, ultra-creepy fad in China…”Increasing numbers of adults have been hiring wet nurses so they can consume breast milk for its nutritional value”…it’s revolting. Everything about this scenario should appall the reader, from the very idea of an adult suckling from another adult to the possibility that someone should be so desperate for money that they have to sell their services in this manner. It’s every bit as wrong as prostitution…

Actually, I agree with his last sentence 100%; it’s exactly as wrong as prostitution, which is to say not at all.

Shifting the Blame

There was a somewhat uneven piece in the New York Times last week; on the one hand, it portrays the victims of the Long Island Killer as individual women, correctly names many of the reasons women do sex work and (best of all) recognizes that “Escorts face danger not because of the Internet but because they’re still forced to work underground.” But on the other hand, it does not quote even a single sex worker activist, yet does refer to the questionable ideas of Scott “Women Never Lie About their Weight or Take Out Multiple Ads” Cunningham (including his stunningly stupid belief that before the internet most whores were streetwalkers, and his unsupported and false belief that there are more of us now than in the 1990s). After I mentioned my problems with the piece on Twitter, author Robert Kolker contacted me and I expressed my concerns; it turns out he did interview several activists, but didn’t realize that not specifically quoting them would be perceived as a slight. His publisher is also sending me an advance copy of his book about the murders, Lost Girls; I’ll let y’all know what I think about it.

Feminine Pragmatism

Wow, what a surprise!

…Jeanett Bjønness of Aarhus University…interviewed 40 Danish women who sell sex on the streets, and it turns out that the women do not regard their sex trading as the biggest problem in their lives…”Sex trading…is perceived as a solution to some problems,” says Bjønness…the people whose job it is to help sex workers…[regard] the women as victims. This rigid view…has the consequence that the women feel walked over, because they do not see themselves as victims…[but rather] as independent women who make rational choices based on the options available to them…

See how easy it is when you actually bother to TALK to us?

Something Rotten in Sweden (July Updates, Part One)

Wendy McElroy on the government’s attempts to exert total control by regulating even the smallest economic activity:

…[In his act] a magician named Marty Hahne…pulls a three-pound rabbit out of a top hat…“I just received an 8-page letter from the USDA, telling me that by July 29 I need to have in place a written disaster plan, detailing all the steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such as a tornado, fire, flood, etc.” Hahne and his wife must be specially trained to implement the rabbit plan, which USDA inspectors will review…new [EPA] regulations define ditches, gullies and other property features that catch water as part of America’s navigable waterways under the Clean Water Act…the EPA…would become the de facto owner of people’s ditches and gullies…The Lemonade Freedom group knows that the ridiculous regulations need to be taken seriously…the group…[protests] police actions…to close down children’s lemonade stands…

Size Matters

Yes, this is in the United States, a country which supposedly guarantees freedom of religion:

Pahokee [Florida] residents, church members, and pastors are outraged over…the…first Lake Okeechobee Summer Solstice Festival…The crowd cheered in agreement as…pastors from around the area admonished city officials for allowing festivals containing witchcraft and occult practices into the city…“We are opening ourselves up to things we should not, like belly dancing and magic spells,” said Daniel Mondragon…“God cannot heal our land if we have witches and warlocks violating our community,” said Evangelist Lillian Brown…

Schadenfreude

White saviors go on a fun trip to Asia, where they “rescue” brown urchins by teaching them to sew, wait table and draw with crayons:

Destiny Rescue, an organization whose mission is to rescue sexually exploited children…hunts through Cambodia and Thailand to find these girls…Indiana State University graduate students played with the rescued girls, visited the sex tourism capital of the world and wondered at the hope with which victims create new lives…More than 2 million children are forced into the sex trade every year, according to the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report…Destiny Rescue is…[addressing] the problem….by…training in jewelry making, sewing, working in a café, hair dressing or pursuing an education…Vanessa Granger-Belcher…led the girls through an art activity…in which they drew pictures of their dreams for their lives…

It may amuse you to know that most UN agencies estimate the “annual flow of trafficked people” of all ages into all industries at 0.5 – 1.9 million people, of which 2 million are supposedly “sex trafficked children”. Perhaps the UN should start hiring people with at least 3^rd-grade math skills.

Presents, Presents, Presents!

This week I received The Sexual History of London from Sasha and Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop from Kevin Wilson. Thank you both very much!

The Immunity Syndrome

As I’ve mentioned before, teens who make “virginity pledges” are much more likely than others to engage in anal sex in order to remain what we used to call “technical virgins”. The hilarious Garfunkel and Oates have written a song about it; if you enjoy it, you may also like their earlier lampoon of Christian anti-sex weirdness, “Sex With Ducks”.

Subtle Pimping (TW3 #13)

In Michelle Visage’s Hooker Makeover, a judge from RuPaul’s Drag Race and her drag queen sidekick turn ordinary women into cartoonish streetwalker stereotypes. Visage was at first defensive when confronted with this on Twitter last Sunday, but within hours she issued a public apology and announced that the show would be cancelled. It’s good to know that at least some people really are listening.

Ruined Maids

Regular reader Isolde Holland discovered this poem and shared it with me:

“An Old Whorehouse” by Mary Oliver (born 1935)

We climbed through a broken window,
walked through every room.

Out of business for years,
the mattresses held only

rainwater, and one
woman’s black shoe. Downstairs

spiders had wrapped up
the crystal chandelier.

A cracked cup lay in the sink.
But we were fourteen,

and no way dust could hide
the expected glamour from us,

or teach us anything.
We whispered, we imagined.

It would be years before
we’d learn how effortlessly

sin blooms, then softens,
like any bed of flowers.

Little Boxes

A Chinese court has declared that “happy endings” aren’t prostitution:

…in July 2011…a massage parlour owner and two associates were arrested…for “organising prostitution”…and…handed a five-year sentence…But [in] appeal…the defendants were found “not criminally responsible” and…acquitted due to “unclear facts and improper application of the law”. The court said manual stimulation did not belong in the realm of prostitution…

Unsurprisingly, the cops insist that they know the law better than judges.

First They Came for the Hookers

Dr. Marty Klein’s review of Dr. Judith Hanna’s book Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy, And A Christian Right discusses the war against strip clubs we’ve mentioned so many times before, and the book itself debunks the usual mythology about “negative secondary effects”, “sex trafficking”, etc. I do have to wonder if Hanna ignores the neofeminist contribution as Klein does in his book, though.

Check Your Premises (TW3 #26)

Ohio wants to criminalize obtaining clear consent:

…the Ohio House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill ostensibly aimed at fighting “human trafficking” that makes it a crime to “solicit” a legal act: sex with someone who is 16 or 17 years old. The age of consent in Ohio is 16. Yet under H.B. 130, a 20-year-old who asks a 16-year-old to have sex with him, or a 21-year-old who does the same with a 17-year-old, thereby commits a…felony…and…has to register as a sex offender. But if the teenager broaches the subject, or if the sex proceeds without any explicit verbal reference to it, no crime has been committed…Having sex is fine, as long as you don’t talk about it beforehand… Legislators already define “human trafficking” broadly enough to include consensual sex…Now Ohio is poised to [add] merely talking about consensual sex…

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (TW3 #27)

Another small country stands up to American bullying: “Cambodia…lashed out at the U.S. State Department for downgrading the country’s ranking in its annual report on human trafficking, saying cultural barriers were hampering government efforts to combat the problem…”

Celebrities (TW3 #31)

The fact that the FBI thought a dude paying for sex was somehow noteworthy says a lot about the FBI. The fact that CNN misunderstands what the newsworthy aspect of this is says even more about CNN.

In the months after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, FBI agents conducted surveillance of…Anwar al-Awlaki and uncovered detailed information about his…use of prostitutes…Al-Awlaki lived in a Washington suburb at the time…he visited prostitutes at least seven times and paid up to $400 for sex…[for] a total of $2,320 …agents interviewed the escorts, obtained detailed information about the encounters, and…even reviewed the possible legal charges that might be brought against him…

Gorged With Meaning (TW3 #49)

This article is a few months old, but its hysterical pearl-clutching is so hilarious I just had to share it:

If you think the wait to find out if your kids got the…results needed to get into uni is stressful, dream on…It’s what happens next that you REALLY should be worrying about…Darling Daughter could easily end up hawking her body to keep her university finances afloat…poverty is pushing students to sell their souls and get jobs in the sex trade. Six per cent could be working as lap-dancers, strippers, escorts or prostitutes to pay their way through studies. Yet more could be manning sex chat-lines…the sex industry is a dark, grubby scene that irrevocably changes people on the inside…No degree is worth it…

So either Jo Davison is speaking from personal experience, or she’s a bigoted ignoramus. Which is it, Jo? Do tell.

Uncharted Seas (TW3 #316)

Another mainstream pro-polygamy article, in The Economist no less:

…DOMA was struck down in no small part because it picks out a certain class of people and, by denying them recognition of their marriages, denies their families equal freedom and dignity. Can it be denied that polygamous families, whose marital arrangements are illegal, much less unrecognized, are denied equal liberty and are made to suffer the indignity [of] active discrimination?…If the state lacks a legitimate rationale for imposing on Americans a heterosexual definition of marriage, it seems pretty likely that it likewise lacks a legitimate rationale for imposing on Americans a monogamous definition of marriage…

True Colors (TW3 #323)

Activist Ye Haiyan…was released from 13 days of detention on June 12 after she scared off three trespassers to her home…Ye first became famous in 2005, when she posted a nude photo of herself online. Under the pen name Hooligan Swallow, Ye raised eyebrows with her bold articles on sex. But she really caught the public’s attention in 2010 when the…NGO she set up…[called] for the legalisation of prostitution…”Pushing for [this]…contradicts the government’s ideology,” she said. “The government does not wish to see this topic being promoted and the mainland media are banned from discussing it”…

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Hussies

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged Alabama, Facebook, fantasy, Florida, hotels, Hussies, language, Madonna/whore, marriage, neo-Victorianism, prohibitionist myths, psychology, shame, stereotypes, stripping, video, yin and yang on June 24, 2013| 46 Comments »

Being the bloodsuckers that they are, they prey on innocent, unsuspecting people and try to find a way to ply their wares. – “Major” Nick Clark

The one small mercy (and believe me, I really had to stretch to find one) of neo-Victorianism is that we haven’t heard much of the myth of the wanton lately. For those who may not even remember it, this is the formerly-universal belief among men that:

…the lust of women is stronger than that of men, and that women thus draw men into sin; the widespread interpretation (though certainly not the original meaning) of the story of the Fall is that Eve’s offering Adam the apple is symbolic of her tempting him into carnality, and to this very day Muslim men pontificate from the pulpit (and on the internet) about the greater lustfulness of women. The Classical Greek philosophers taught that woman was like an animal always in heat, and the mythology of every part of Eurasia is full of temptresses, seductresses, succubae, enchantresses, whores and other wanton women whose entire reason for existence seems to consist of luring men into sex…

The idea generally fell out of favor in the West during the Victorian Era, and though it experienced a brief revival in some circles during the sexual revolution I had thought it largely out of fashion again except among some sex-positive feminists who insist that the ladies are generally just as randy as the gents despite the inconvenient fact that women never seem to want it enough to pay for it, and almost never to behave in any other way that demonstrates the voracious sex drive typical in most men. Yes, there are some individual women whose sex drive is greater than that of some individual men (especially among the beaten-down variety so common in the modern West), but the fact that there are mountains whose peaks are closer to sea level than the bottoms of many valleys does not invalidate the general statement “mountains tend to be higher than valleys”. Yet every once in a while, we see somebody playing fast and loose with cherry-picked statistics and calling it “groundbreaking research”, usually to sell a book:

…Even to the most casual observer of human history, it isn’t news that women’s sexuality has been feared, suppressed and lied about. But What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by journalist Daniel Bergner uses groundbreaking sex research to show the ways in which our supposedly enlightened society still has female sexuality backward — completely, utterly, profoundly…gender stereotypes have shaped scientific research and blinded researchers to evidence of female lust and sexual initiation throughout the animal kingdom, including among humans. It reveals how society’s repression of female sexuality has reshaped women’s desires and sex lives. Bergner, and the leading sex researchers he interviews, argue that women’s sexuality is not the rational, civilized and balancing force it’s so often made out to be — that it is base, animalistic and ravenous, everything we’ve told ourselves about male sexuality…In fact, he argues, “one of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale”…

I totally agree that women’s sexuality can be base and animalistic, that it isn’t all that well-adapted to monogamy, and that a lot of the reason it appears otherwise (and that so many women are functionally asexual) is cultural pressure. But to say that this means that the female sex drive is as ravenous as men’s is to ignore that male sexuality is also shaped and suppressed by cultural pressure, especially from women, and that functionally asexual men are extremely rare. Here’s a comical video showing what the world might look like if women really were as horny as men:

Very few people nowadays believe this nonsense, but there’s a limited form of it which seems to be crawling out of the woodwork again: the notion that while “good” women (Madonnas) are sexually pure, “bad” women (whores) are predatory succubae always on the prowl for “good” men:

…Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill…[said] a number of strippers had come to his work [and] even to his home in the middle of the night…his “Facebook was hijacked and women sent me pictures of themselves half-naked”…McGill’s wife, Heather, decided that she had enough and…posted a message to his Facebook page: “I am very blessed to be the wife of a God fearing, hard working, ministry minded, loving father and husband and it is not just my right but my duty to lovingly serve him by protecting him!…We have children that look at our face books [sic] from time to time! Shame on you! You know who you are. Next time everyone will know who you are!! For I will publicly share your name before we ‘unfriend’ you”…

And when we ravenous harlots aren’t stalking “God-fearing” men (to ruin their paladinhood, no doubt) we’re attacking their wives:

…Anna Burgese, the…wife of a wealthy…Philadelphia homebuilder, claims in [a] federal lawsuit that as many as 10 prostitutes pounced on her in the…lobby [of the W hotel in Miami Beach] on Jan. 19. They mistakenly believed that she was encroaching on their turf…Instead of helping Burgese catch the attackers, the suit contends that the “prostitute-friendly’’ hotel put the women in a taxi to facilitate their escape…over the past decade, Miami Beach’s prostitution rings have taken on a more sophisticated and sinister side, involving sex-trafficking and women from Eastern European countries, known as “B-girls,’’ who fleece deep-pocketed tourists…Burgese claims that the assault was unprovoked and that the prostitutes threw her face-first against a stone wall in front of hotel employees. Her husband…fought the women off with his crutches…

How fondly I remember those sinister old times, getting together in huge gangs of “high-priced escorts” to beat up aging debutantes at the W in New Orleans! And sometimes, just for an extra-sophisticated change of pace, we’d all sashay in formation over to the Windsor Court to slash the tires of Rolls-Royces and Ferraris, or perhaps to the Hyatt Regency to ride up and down in the glass elevator, running out at each floor to scrawl obscenities on people’s doors with lipstick and dump room service leftovers into the ornamental pool in the lobby. And every time guests would complain, the “prostitute-friendly” staff would whisk us off in taxicabs with “Born To Be Wild” blaring on the stereo. What carefree days those were, before all these God-fearing enemies of trafficking appeared to beat us off with their crutches and “unfriend” us on Face Books! I swear, it just makes a girl want to join the packed crowd down at the nearest male stripper club to lose herself among all the hundreds of other base, animalistic and ravenous hussies.

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Book Review: America’s War on Sex

Posted in Perception, Tyranny, tagged abortion, BDSM, censorship, consensual crime, contraception, crypto-moralism, dirty, hysteria, internet, law, LGBT rights, neofeminism, politicians, porn, prohibitionist myths, psychology, sex education, stripping on June 6, 2013| 36 Comments »

The…expression “culture war”…suggests two sides of equal strength…wanting to conquer each other. But what we commonly call the “culture war” is not like this at all. Those who hate and fear sexuality (erotophobes) are attacking those who appreciate or tolerate sexuality (erotophiles). And while erotophiles are not attempting to force erotophobes to live more sexually adventurous lives, erotophobes insist that both sides – everyone – live according to their erotophobic values. – Marty Klein

That’s a slightly-abridged version of the first few sentences of America’s War on Sex, Dr. Marty Klein’s analysis of the ongoing campaign to repress any and all consensual sexual activity that does not conform to the most prudish and narrow standards of the most prudish and narrow-minded Americans. In fifteen chapters (alternating short and long, with the long ones divided into subsections) he closely examines the way that organized prohibitionists have colluded with a repressive government to wage a scorched-earth campaign on sex education, reproductive rights, porn, “indecency” on television, adult businesses (including strip clubs), the internet and sexual minorities (including gays, polyamorists and BDSM aficionados). Klein is an engaging writer and doesn’t pull his punches; his highly-readable style is reminiscent of good glossy-magazine journalism, complete with insert boxes and bullet-pointed facts. He tears apart all the major prohibitionist arguments and provides statistics to refute claims about “premature sexualization”, “negative secondary effects”, supposed harm caused by porn, and other myths used by the prohibitionists to pretend their anti-sex crusade is based in something other than pure dogma.

In fact, his arguments are so well-made that the book’s two major deficiencies are thrown into even sharper relief, and thus become far more annoying than they would be in a weaker text. Some of you may have noticed one of them already, but if you haven’t take a look back at the list of chapter topics in the previous paragraph. That’s right; prostitution is completely absent. Though Klein mentions it in passing two or three times, it’s always in conjunction with something else and is never elaborated upon; there isn’t even an index entry for “sex work”, “prostitution” or any other synonym. And though he discusses police campaigns against swinger’s clubs, he can’t spare a few paragraphs for the organized persecution of whores which is the longest continuously-active front in America’s war on sex (going on 100 years now). While Klein dares to say that porn is a healthy expression of sexuality, he doesn’t even suggest that buying or selling sex in a more direct way is not pathological; though he vigorously attacks the bogus statistics prohibitionists use to attack other forms of sex work, he makes no such effort against bogus claims about hookers; and while he does not hesitate to point out the myths and exaggerations by which prohibitionists disguise their bigotry against other sexual minorities, he is utterly silent about the “sex trafficking” hysteria (which was already two years old and rapidly growing when the book was published in 2006).

The other problem is in a way worse, because it represents a dangerous distortion rather than a simple omission. And while it could be argued (however unconvincingly) that Klein left whores out for fear of alienating his target audience, there is no excuse for his willful mischaracterization of the identity of the enemy; it’s as though an author writing about World War II blamed the whole thing on the Nazis and acted as though the Japanese didn’t exist. Though Klein doesn’t spare any ammo in attacking one end of the Anti-sex Axis, conservative Christianity, he doesn’t even bother to aim at the other end: neofeminism. Though James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and their ilk are quoted extensively and debunked thoroughly, there is no mention of Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Gail Dines, Melissa Farley or any of the others who have caused at least as much damage to sexual freedom as their Christian allies. Indeed, the neofeminists are arguably much more dangerous because they appeal to a much wider demographic; consider that while the Christian prohibitionists have adopted a great deal of neofeminist rhetoric, the opposite is not true.

I do not believe that Klein engaged in deliberate obfuscation in either of these cases; given the honesty and devotion to individual liberty (including support for sex worker rights) he displays on his own website, Sexual Intelligence, I rather suspect his publisher may have had something to do with the missing subject matter. If his editor had neofeminist leanings it might’ve been impossible to get pro-sex worker text or criticism of feminist catechism past her; on the other hand, we don’t know that he even tried. These twin flaws aren’t fatal, but they are most assuredly crippling; the book is still worth a read, but it isn’t nearly as good as it could have been, or as I had hoped it would be.

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Late Bloomer

Posted in Q & A, tagged blogging, dirty, GFE, marriage, psychology, shame, stripping, yin and yang on June 5, 2013| 7 Comments »

I grew up in a conservative Christian family, didn’t start dating until my twenties and married in my early thirties to a beautiful woman with whom I have great kids; my family life is wonderful, but my sex life is not. Though I’ve used pornography off and on since I was a teenager, I was quite naive about sex and was a virgin when I married. My wife doesn’t really enjoy sex and sometimes is averse to it, so sex has become very mechanical. Two years ago I started going to strip clubs to find some relief from my sexual frustration, and I met a beautiful dancer who is a very intelligent college student. I enjoyed talking with her and often would tip her $100 just to talk for 30 minutes, then last month she told me she had started escorting for a few clients she had met in the clubs. It was awkward with her the first time, but by the third I was fully relaxed and uninhibited, and I felt like a huge knot inside me was untied.

I discovered your blog around the same time as I started seeing my lady friend in private, and it has been a great encouragement to me; I have a few questions I hope you can help me with. First, my wife and I are in counseling for our sexual problem, but do you think she can potentially grow sexually and be freed from her inhibitions? Should we be seeing a sex therapist rather than a regular marriage counselor? With regard to my companion, I would like to know if you have any general advice (since I’m such a late bloomer), and also if there are things I can do besides being a good client (clean, on time, respectful of boundaries, courteous, and donation upfront), to show her that I really appreciate her.

Most of all, I thank you for showing care to clients like myself. It is meaningful to learn from your experiences and benefit from them. It seems unfair that I haven’t even paid you for your advice!

From what you’ve said, you have a good marriage in every way except for sex, and you don’t want to ruin that; so you need to be careful and discreet so neither your wife nor any neighbors or church members find out. Since you’ve been reading my blog you understand that sex workers are caring professionals who help men (including many like yourself) to deal with sexual urges you couldn’t otherwise explore, but your wife and others probably wouldn’t understand and there would be major unpleasantness. I’m very glad to see that you didn’t mention any sense of shame or guilt with your escort; if anything, it looks exactly the opposite to me (“I felt like a huge knot inside me was untied.”) But it’s also important that you not let yourself get carried away; when a person has been sexually repressed for years as you were, the feeling of sexual release can be intoxicating, and can interfere with your judgment. So keep seeing your escort (who sounds really perfect for you), but if you start getting feelings as though you’re falling in love with her you need to step back mentally and recognize that it’s the hormones talking.

A sex therapist might indeed help more than a general counselor if your problem is due to culturally-inflicted hang-ups rather than other issues merely reflected into the bedroom. However, it’s important that A) you find the right one; B) you are very patient; and C) your wife really and truly wants to get over her hang-ups. It won’t be easy, and she will probably never be as uninhibited as your escort; after all, you yourself know the kind of brainwashing she got, and it’s much worse for women than for men. I’m assuming she is in her thirties, and it’s not unusual for a woman to mature sexually during that period; however, if she’s much past 35 and you don’t see any signs that she really wants to loosen up, I’m afraid the prognosis isn’t very good. I’m not saying it’s hopeless because human nature is a complex thing, but in order to correct a sexual problem one has to recognize it as a problem in the first place, and some sexually repressed people simply refuse to admit that it is.

You may find “Advice for Clients” helpful, plus my answers to reader questions in two previous Q & A columns; however, it seems to me that you already know a lot of that. It’s not necessary for you to compensate me in any tangible way, but if you really want to you could send me something from my Amazon wish list; please don’t feel you have to, though.

(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)

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Pimping the Pimp

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, consensual crime, cops, end demand, fantasy, hysteria, language, law, neofeminism, Nevada, Pimping the Pimp, pimps, politicians, prohibitionist myths, racism, rescue industry, stereotypes, stripping on June 4, 2013| 27 Comments »

For the life of me I have never met a person even remotely like the stereotypical pimp, and yet I “know” they exist, largely because I have been told so over and over again. – Brooke Magnanti

Myths don’t just lay down and die; they take a whole lot of killing, and like Rasputin they often get right back up again after one thinks they’re done for. After all, I’m sure most of you who remember the Satanic Panic thought it was gone for good once it was laid to rest in the mid-nineties; you couldn’t have known it would be back a decade later in a new guise. So even though regular readers have watched me hack apart the myth that Nevada is sex work-friendly on several occasions, my axe will not rest until it’s completely dismembered and its mangled bits are burned together with the remains of the sex trafficking hysteria (with which it has become entangled the past few years). The Nevada variety of the panic is even more fixated on the lurid, racist stereotype of the “pimp” than is typical in other places, and that is particularly evident in this article; every passage in which the word appears irresistibly brings into my mind the rather revolting image of a telephone interview in which the reporter-interviewer and cop-interviewee are both masturbating furiously while sharing the fantasy which any sex worker or ethical researcher will tell you has essentially no basis in fact whatsoever despite its popularity with the aforementioned cops and reporters. And now that I’ve infected you with that mindworm, let’s take a look at the work of fiction in question:

There was a time when the term “human trafficking” stirred images of Third World immigrants working their fingers to the bone in sweat shops, sewing the latest fashions at a warehouse in the garment district of some major American city…Over the past decade or so, however, the definition of human trafficking has been evolving to include the women working the bars, strip joints, dance clubs, outcall or escort services, massage parlors and street corners in search of tricks or johns. And now a modern-day abolitionist movement that includes Las Vegas law enforcement officials, the state attorney general’s office, legislators and grass-roots activists — supported in many cases from local pulpits — wants to reclassify the pimps who dominate the world’s oldest profession as modern-day slave traders…

Reporter Tom Ragan wastes no time in packing as many distortions, dysphemisms, euphemisms and other departures from fact as he possibly can in his opening lines. No, there was never a time when “human trafficking” meant sweatshops to the average American; in the ‘90s the term was largely used as a synonym for “people smuggling” (carrying willing but undocumented immigrants across borders for a fee), and when the panic was recycled from the old “white slavery” and Satanic panics by a coalition of neofeminists and religious fundamentalists in the first few years of this century, it was already synonymous with prostitution. The direction of “evolution” in the narrative was from “sex trafficking” to labor trafficking rather than vice-versa, and that happened because governments recognized they could use it as an excuse for restricting immigration. Cops use it as a way to get the feds to pay for their hooker-rolling parties, and prosecutors as a weapon with which to cage people for decades for consensual activities; they both love it as another means of gathering loot and for putting down uppity whores by pretending that we’re “dominated” by pimps despite the fact that few of us have even ever met a pimp, much less been “dominated” by one. But by far the vilest bit of propaganda here is that word “abolitionist”, which is used by prohibitionists to pretend they’re all about “freeing” people when in reality they’re only interested in grinding peaceful adults under their boots and “helping” them into prison. And given the highly-uneven racial application of every kind of prohibitionist law, including those against sex work, the word “abolition” in this context is a slap in the face to black Americans.

The next paragraph lauds AB 67, which I’ve already discussed, and contains this scintillating quote:

“The heat is on the pimps; they’re just users and abusers,” said Alexis Kennedy, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas criminal justice professor…“And it’s important to address them first and foremost. When you reduce the supply, you reduce the business. The places that have been most successful are the ones who go after the customers and the pimps, not the prostitutes.”

Kennedy is either an ignoramus or a liar, and I honestly don’t know which is worse in an academic; there is no evidence that ANY criminalization strategy has ever reduced prostitution, no matter who they “go after”. Any fool could understand this; pimps are so rare that even if the law executed them all there would be no discernible effect on the trade, and since clients are just typical men every “end demand” strategy ends up targeting the hookers again anyhow. “End demand” is effective at one thing, though: reinforcing the legal precedent that women are moral imbeciles who cannot be trusted to make decisions about sex. This is briefly mentioned in the next section of the article, which contains its only good quote:

…Michael Horowitz, the conservative think tank fellow considered the father of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, has even harsher words for what has become of…the anti-trafficking movement…“Now it’s just one big federal entitlement program, and everybody is more worried about where they’re going to get their next grant and whether they are going to get it.”

But that is little more than an aside, and the story soon returns to sexier fare:

…the [Las Vegas] Police Department…painted a grim picture…in a pitch for a federal grant to combat human trafficking: “Trafficking of minor girls to Las Vegas…for the purposes of prostitution, has and continues to be a highly desired destination for pimps”…

After that, the exercise devolves into a succession of hilariously-wrong claims and tortured, pearl-clutching statements. Strip clubs are “where pimps/traffickers lure young women from…around the world to be groomed as ‘Exotic dancers.’ These pimps look to ‘Turn them out’ into a life of prostitution after exposing them to ways to sexualize their interaction with men through exotic dance.” A prohibitionist “appears in churches…to recount horrific stories of abuse by pimps…[but] offers few details.” Touring escorts are said to have been “trafficked into…Las Vegas, their bodies exploited and sold for sex.” The words “daddy”, “family” and “bottom” are said to be “slang associated with prostitution”. The Salvation Army’s profitable ($500,000) slice of the “anti-trafficking” pie is mentioned, and the incestuous interaction between vice cops and fundamentalist churches is described at length. But while the prohibitionists compare whores to Biblical slaves (meaning the Hebrews in Egypt, not the slaves held “justly” by the Hebrews throughout the rest of the book), they ignore the fact that the founder of their religion enjoyed socializing with sex workers, and once said to his own culture’s equivalent of cops and government lawyers: “Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” Amen.

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Image Enhancement

Posted in Current Events, Perception, tagged brothels, consensual crime, dirty, disease, escort services, ethics, internet, law, lawheads, Nevada, pimps, politicians, pragmatism, prohibitionist myths, psychology, streetwalkers, stripping on May 20, 2013| 16 Comments »

Images are the brood of desire. – George Eliot

What seems like a straightforward news article can often reveal hidden depths when examined critically by an informed mind; the biases, knowledge gaps and outright lies of both the author and the interviewees then stand out in sharp relief, like a computer-enhanced photo of the Earth taken from a satellite. Many of you probably saw this item about the decline of Nevada brothels, but let’s apply some image enhancement to the picture:

…As state legislators ponder levying an 8% sales tax on brothels and other live entertainment, the director of the Nevada Brothel Association says that a bad economy and an abundance of illegal prostitutes is already killing off the business. “When I started as the lobbyist for the industry in 1985, we had 37 brothels in the state,” [said] George Flint…“Now we have just 18, and 12 to 14 of them are not doing very well”…Since the recession…many women [have gone] into business for themselves so as to avoid handing over 50 percent of their fee to brothel owners.

There’s so much more to see in this short paragraph than meets the uninformed and uncritical eye; let’s take it in order of appearance. First, it’s interesting that brothel owners are complaining about plans to tax them when they themselves agitated in favor of it for years, because they recognize that once a government becomes used to income from an industry it will generally work to build up that industry in order to increase revenues. So I suspect Flint’s complaint is just poor-mouthing intended to set up some request for concessions to the brothel industry or a crackdown on independent operators; despite his claim that it’s the economy which has hurt the brothels, the fact of the matter is that it’s a combination of the internet and women’s social progress. Since 1985, the average American woman’s opportunity cost has risen due to increased education and removal of impediments to employment, and it has been demonstrated that women of higher opportunity cost prefer to work illegally rather than submitting to the relatively exploitative conditions in Nevada brothels. The internet then made it much easier for women to make that choice, and so they have; only a hopeless lawhead could fail to understand that arbitrary “legality” is very far down the list of factors used by the typical woman when considering her means of survival.

As a result…prices for sex have fallen. “Instead of paying $400…these guys can now go out and get the same service for a third of the money,” Flint said.

This is an outright lie, as any man who has ever hired an escort in Vegas will tell you. I don’t know if even the streetwalkers there can be hired for $130, much less an escort, and to pretend that’s the “same service” one receives from a brothel is more like something one might expect to hear from a prohibitionist (in close proximity to phrases like “selling her body” and “prostituted woman”).

State officials estimate that there are some 30,000 sex workers just in Las Vegas…“Look in the phone book, there are what, 100 pages for nude dancers who’ll come to your hotel room?” Flint said. “The big hotels have their own girls. The strip clubs have upstairs rooms. You have a variety of different levels of prostitution in Vegas.” With those many layers, the city has no shortage of problems, from violent pimps to the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV. “Since 1987, we’ve never had a single woman test positive for HIV who worked in a brothel,” Flint said.

I probably don’t need to remind you that whores are not a significant vector for any STI anywhere in the developed world, but you may not realize that the invasive, degrading weekly disease checks required by Nevada law are one of the reasons so many women prefer to work independently or for escort service owners who treat them like adults capable of taking care of their own health. I’ve also previously addressed the “violent pimp” propaganda and explained how politicians and brothel owners spread it in order to maintain public support for the status quo, but of course that’s not how they spin it:

A PPP poll conducted in 2012 found that 66% of Nevada residents believed that brothels should be legal across the state. Few politicians, however, have shown the political will to take on the issue. “My constituents are not ready for it,” former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman…[said] in 2011. “They are always ready to have a good discussion because they are smart people, but they are not ready to legalize prostitution because they have moral objections.”

We’ll pause for a few moments here so everyone can finish laughing at the idea that the majority of Las Vegas residents have “moral objections” to vice businesses, and to give y’all time to clean the coffee off of your monitor screens.

Barring a sudden economic turnaround or what he sees as an unlikely political awakening, Flint sees continued trouble for the brothel industry. “I’m an optimistic guy, but I’m not optimistic that this business will bounce back very quickly,” Flint said.

This is the only wholly truthful statement Flint made in the whole article. As an officially-sanctioned but ersatz replacement for escorts, the brothel industry is doomed; its only hope is gentrification, the transformation of brothels into attractive resorts to which men can take their friends, clients or open-minded wives, places which can offer an experience not available in a hotel room or even a typical incall. When in the 1970s and ‘80s strip clubs went from being seedy dives to upscale gentlemen’s clubs, everyone benefitted except the prohibitionists (who had to invent the myth of “negative secondary effects” to shore up their “sin and degradation” catechism); the same thing will happen as Americans lose their ignorance-spawned fear of bordellos. Here’s some free advice, Nevada brothel owners: stop getting in bed with the prohibitionists and instead work toward decriminalization and eradicating stigma. Then you can invest in turning your businesses into showplaces and possibly even franchise operations, and you’ll make more money than you ever did catering to guys who were just too scared to call “illegal” hookers to come to them.

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That Was the Week That Was (#320)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged Across the Pond, agency denial, An Angel of Mercy, animals, Australia, bogus studies, brothels, California, Canada, censorship, Check Your Premises, Comfort Zone, condoms, cops, Cops and Condoms, dehumanization, disability, Dominican Republic, drivers, end demand, escort services, evidence, Feminine Pragmatism, Finding What Isn’t There, Florida, Germany, harm reduction, hysteria, illegal aliens, Illinois, internet, Ireland, Japan, Japanese Prostitution, Lack of Evidence, Latin America, law, neofeminism, New York, Objectification Overruled, Pennsylvania, Philippines, politicians, porn, pragmatism, prohibitionist myths, rescue industry, scams, Scapegoats, Schadenfreude, sex work is work, Skin To Skin, slavery, So Close and Yet So Far, Somewhere in the Middle, Spain, statistics, streetwalkers, stripping, The Naked Anthropologist, The Proper Study, The Prudish Giant, United Kingdom, video, Whorearchy, Worse Than I Thought on May 18, 2013| 19 Comments »

Feminism still feels like someone rescuing me from the patriarchy so that I may be told what to do by “sisters” who need to get their opinions out of my knickers. – Sarah Woolley

Lack of Evidence

The Fourth District Court of Appeal…deemed West Palm Beach’s “loitering with intent to commit prostitution” ordinance unconstitutional…[because it was] “overbroad and vague” It… cited a 1993 Florida Supreme Court ruling [striking down]…a similar law [in Tampa for discriminating]…against previously convicted prostitutes. [The earlier decision stated that]…“All Florida citizens enjoy the inherent right to window shop, saunter down a sidewalk, and wave to friends and passerby with no fear of arrest”…

Meanwhile, in California, “Two women suspected of loitering with the intent to commit prostitution were arrested at a Burbank hotel…after officers reportedly discovered incriminating text messages, condoms and oils in their possession…”

Check Your Premises

“…Baltimore City police officer [Lamin Manneh]…and his…wife [Marissa Braun were]…charged with human trafficking…19-year-old [Braun was caught in a sting]…and…investigators charged the pair with human trafficking because Braun looked so young…” You read that correctly; she’s been charged with “trafficking” herself.

Feminine Pragmatism

Justice minister Francisco Dominguez’s warning…that…men…who seek [paid] sex…will be…[prosecuted] has roiled [Dominican] workers… “There are customers who’ve called us to tell us that they won’t come”…said Carla Matos…who…said she had to become a prostitute…to raise her children…”What we’ll have to do in a couple of days will be to go out and rob and kill people, because imagine, we can’t do nothing else. I will not let my children starve,” [Jennifer] Paniagua said.

The Prudish Giant

From the “progressive” Huffington Post:

Not only is “prostitution” a tagged skill you can select on LinkedIn, there are actually escorts who advertise their services [there]…[but] LinkedIn…now explicitly bans escorts from using the site…The new user agreement states that you must not: “Create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution” even if [they are] legal where you live…Not only can you list “prostitution” as a skill, you can list a whole lot of other unsavory skills like “rape,” “shoplifting,” “gangs,” “manslaughter,” and “drug trafficking”…

Yes, the writer did seriously equate consensual sex with rape and murder. Dr. Brooke Magnanti comments on the absurdity and futility of the whole thing.

An Angel of Mercy

…Shona Langley, a street sex worker support officer, and Charlotte Crossland, a harm reduction nurse…[work for] the Harm Reduction project…[in] Lancashire…twice a week…they load their van with…condoms, panic alarms, needles and bank note checker pens, while Charlotte offers Hepatitis B and other vaccinations…[and] treatment for minor health issues…Shona said: “We don’t judge. We are not here to criticise or bully them into stopping what they do”…

Scapegoats

[David Beckman of Illinois]…faces a charge of misdemeanor animal cruelty after police said he sexually abused his pet peacock…police learned the bird died while they were investigating Beckman about an alleged case of indecent solicitation of a child…

Objectification Overruled

Feminists at Cambridge University lead such privileged, unchallenging lives that they imagine jelly wrestling (girls grappling in gelatin in front of male spectators) has “a significant role to play in the degradation and abuse of women,” and imagine they’ve won a great victory for womankind via a petition which caused the event to be cancelled. Sarah Woolley explains why this is pure bollocks:

…”objectification” is a herd word used by women who can rarely recall the name of their last waitress…If a person sees a woman arse-deep in jelly and regards her as subhuman because of it, then that shit is on them…it takes more than nudity to cancel out a man’s regard for a woman as a human being. There will be misogynists in any crowd but –newsflash- a true woman hater will dehumanise you no matter how you behave or what you wear…Cambridge feminists …[are affiliated] with Object…a group known for lobbying against sex worker rights and for spreading irresponsible misinformation -particularly the fantasy that the Olympics would usher in an “explosion of prostitution.” Also on the list is “Smash Miss Contest” who “set off stink bombs”…at beauty pageants…

Worms in the Apple

New York City’s wallowing in the “end demand” sewer produced this grotesque display of political pandering:

…mayoral candidates…argued for tougher penalties. Joseph J. Lhota…[called] for “a john list every day in the newspaper”…Adolfo Carrión Jr…went further, saying he would publish their license plate numbers…the moderator…took note of Edward I. Koch’s controversial directive…to read the names of convicted male customers on air…Christine C. Quinn…said she disagreed with publicizing the names…[but] favored an “incredibly effective” program in Brooklyn…that forces “johns” to sit through a program intended to deter bad behavior…

And no, “john schools” are not “incredibly effective”.

Finding What Isn’t There

…police admit they do not know the scale of trafficking in Victoria’s illegal brothels and cannot say how many…there are. The cloak of anonymity and secrecy surrounding the industry makes it hard for police to investigate, Senior Sergeant Marilynn Ross told [a parliamentary] inquiry…”we suspect that in a small number of…licensed brothels human trafficking is occurring…on a…larger scale”…

Translation: “There’s no evidence whatsoever and the real experts say otherwise, but this makes a perfect excuse to ask for more power to stick our noses into people’s private business.”

Whorearchy (TW3 #19)

Prostitutes helped clean up the streets of Murcia, Spain, in an effort to draw attention to…[a] proposed bylaw…aimed at curbing prostitution and sexual exploitation [which] would damage [their] livelihood…”We’ve spoken with neighbors and local business owners and…they’ve told us that there’s no problem as long as we follow some of the requests that they’ve made, such as sticking to a timetable and keeping the streets clean…That’s why we decided to hold a clean-up day. We wanted to show that we…want to get on well with everyone”…

Worse Than I Thought

As I predicted, the cancer of incredibly-broad “sex trafficking” laws based on the CASE Act is spreading, now to Pennsylvania:

…House Bill 663, which was unanimously passed 195-0…expands what the state considers “commercial sex acts” and raises the crime of buying or selling people for sex work from a third-degree to a…first-degree felony. Under the new bill, the definition of commercial sex includes being forced to perform “any sexual activity…in which anything of value is given…or received”…

The bill’s sponsor complains that the “current law is vague”, but what he actually means is that it isn’t vague enough.

So Close and Yet So Far

Another would-be ally misses the bus by not bothering to check with sex workers first; though she makes several very good arguments against criminalization and recognizes from the title on that sex work is work, she also overestimates the role of pimps and the prevalence of street work, accepts the false “sex trafficking” dichotomy, supports regulation and licensing and ends by undermining her own argument with the typical mealy-mouthed disclaimer, “I am not endorsing the act of selling sex.”

Schadenfreude (TW3 #43)

Another rescue industry icon is exposed as a con artist:

Cecilia Flores-Oebanda has…become the face of the Philippines anti-trafficking movement…but now she is fighting a battle that could truly ruin her. Fraud allegations made by Philippine investigators threaten to destroy her reputation and the anti-trafficking organization she’s run for more than two decades…

Nonetheless, the credulous CNN reporters spends about 95% of the story lauding her and repeating her bullshit stories, apparently forgetting about that word “fraud”.

Across the Pond (TW3 #45)

Scottish local governments seem unusually resistant to anti-sex business hype:

The owners of an over-21s nightclub in Inverness have been issued a licence to introduce lap dancing…Rhoda Grant…said…“The commodification of woman in society is damaging and I would have hoped the objections raised by the Highland Violence Against Women Strategy Group would have been listened to”…

Japanese Prostitution (TW3 #131)

A perfect demonstration of how the “sex trafficking” paradigm confuses those whose minds it pollutes:

…Osaka Mayor…Toru Hashimoto…told reporters…that Japan’s wartime sex slave system… “were necessary in order to provide relaxation for those brave soldiers who had been in the line of fire”…Hours later [he said]…he’d…told [U.S. military brass] that…there were legal facilities for releasing sexual energy, and that unless soldiers in Okinawa made more use of similar facilities, it would be difficult to control the sexual energy of the marines…

The media have conflated two totally different statements. What Hashimoto said about military personnel needing whores is true and every experienced commander knows it, no matter what political crap the Pentagon may emit. But that isn’t the same as his disgusting rationalization of the enslavement of the comfort women, who were neither professional sex workers nor volunteers.

Skin To Skin

A centre in Nuremberg is offering a course to sex industry professionals on how to cater to the sexual needs of disabled clients. Those who complete training successfully attain a certificate in “sexual accompaniment and assistance”…

Comfort Zone

It’s great to see ever-larger numbers of academics openly declaring that the “trafficking” narrative is largely an excuse for restricting migration:

“anti-trafficking”…essentialises gender and childhood, it confuses and obfuscates, and…it…acts against the interests of many that it purports to serve…the state is directly and inescapably the source of vulnerability…those formally excluded are given…the right NOT to enter, to be protected from movement. The [victim of “trafficking”]…is supposed to return home. Indeed the narrative is that she wants to return home, and part of her innocence and victimhood is that she never wanted to move in the first place…immigration controls are claimed to be a mechanism of protection for migrants, rather than a mechanism of oppression…

And here’s a UN official on bogus data and bad definitions:

…data is often taken from methodologies that are not…estimates…media…have often reported that 79% of trafficking is for sexual exploitation, based on the “Global Report on Trafficking in Persons” by UNODC…[but] the data is of victims identified by state authorities and of convicted traffickers…The internationally recognized definition of human trafficking states the purpose of human trafficking is for exploitation…yet [it] is…equated with sex work or irregular…migration…as a result…data on trafficked persons almost exclusively focused on women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation…

Cops and Condoms (TW3 #313)

…If we’re honest, many of us do see condoms as robbing us of pleasure, stealing some excitement and spontaneity…and dulling the intensity of sexuality…These factors are the primary reasons that still only 60 percent of teenagers claim to use condoms…[and] usage declines as people grow older. The number one reason…is the reduction of pleasure…[but] criticism of the condom opens one to…demonization…Bill Gates’…plans to make a condom that “is felt to enhance pleasure”…came under ideological fire. Gawker called the argument that condoms reduce sensitivity one for “creeps” and “pervs,” while Popular Science reacted by concluding “men are idiots.” Salon likened any criticism of the condom’s detrimental effect on sexuality to “whining“…

The Naked Anthropologist (TW3 #314)

The Proper Study (TW3 #319)

The feminist antiporn group Stop Porn Culture has sponsored a petition…to change the editorial board and title of Routledge’s forthcoming…publication, Porn Studies…Constance Penley…co-editor of The Feminist Porn Book…[said] “[The petition] reveals a total lack of understanding about academic freedom, academic integrity and the nature of scholarship…and…how desperate the antiporn people are to prevent any research being done that might not support their ideological position”…

Somewhere in the Middle

St. John’s, Newfoundland has just over 200,000 people, which means fewer than 100,000 males. The escort interviewed for this article (“Iris”) says there are about 30 escorts working there full-time, and doing such good business travelling girls are stopping in as well. Now, ask yourself: is it credible that only about 14,000 of those men have ever paid, that the majority of those who did are now regulars and that those working girls are doing well on an average of 1 client per day? Or is it more likely that the claim few men ever pay for sex is completely absurd? As Iris said, “We wouldn’t be doing this well if your husbands and boyfriends and friends weren’t coming to see us. It’s that simple.”

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Unintentional Hilarity

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, dirty, end demand, hysteria, law, lawheads, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rescue industry, stripping, underage, Unintentional Hilarity, Washington (state) on May 14, 2013| 26 Comments »

Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little. – Mason Cooley

Psychologists still aren’t entirely sure what makes a given thing funny. Oh, there’s been considerable thought about it in the past few decades, but no general consensus on some important details such as why one person finds something funny while another may not. Part of this undoubtedly comes down to taste; for example, while I find absurd situations intrinsically amusing, others may only find them irritating. And while many people find exaggerated depictions of misfortune hilarious, they only make me uncomfortable. This accounts for my mixed reaction to the Three Stooges; though I find ridiculous scenes like Curly fighting a living clam in a bowl of chowder to be extremely funny, the physical slapstick leaves me absolutely cold. Of course, some humor depends on knowledge; those in the know will get the joke, while those who aren’t, won’t. Sometimes the latter may even take a situation very seriously, while the former recognize the irony and so perceive it as ludicrous.

That was the case when I read this recent story about a “sex trafficking” propaganda session held by Shared Hope International at a Washington State high school. What first attracted my attention to it was the fact that though the speaker admits to having been naïve and ignorant at the beginning of her supposed “ordeal”, she is still just as clueless as ever, but doesn’t realize how her words betray that fact to anyone who’s ever done any kind of sex work (or even set foot in a modern strip club). I planned to use the story in TW3 #318, but the more I looked at it the funnier it got, and I realized it needed the full-column treatment. I hope I’m able to help most of you see what I saw, and if not…well, I guess you had to be there.

…Brianna…sketched a scene of lost innocence. She was in Seattle on a whim to party with two older guys she barely knew. She’d lied to her parents, telling them she was at a girlfriend’s house for the weekend. The guys seemed nice enough, attractive, possibly wealthy. But she soon discovered their motives weren’t merely impure, they were also likely criminal. They told Brianna, who’d just turned 18, she could make a lot more money stripping than she could working her other job, waiting tables…

In other words, Brianna is a spoiled, sheltered moron who thinks it’s perfectly safe to spend the weekend with complete strangers 200 km from home without anyone knowing she’s there. That’s not “innocence”; it’s exceptional stupidity. Even so, these guys (if they existed at all) don’t appear to be “criminals” to me, unless telling the truth has been criminalized in Washington; a good-looking 18-year-old girl CAN make a lot more money stripping than waiting tables. Surely Shared Hope and reporter Tyler Graf aren’t denying this?

“The strip club was really loud and really dark — it smelled,” Brianna said…”Everything there was really sticky. It had germs on it.”

My guess is that Brianna has never actually been in a strip club; her description appears to be a combination of something she saw on a TV cop show and what somebody told her about seedy porn theaters, embellished on suggestion of her handlers. Germs!

The guys told her she could make a lot of money with her young looks. So why not get out of La Center? Why not head down to Phoenix, Ariz., and catch some sun? Why not empty her bank account and hand it over? They’d take care of her. In only a few days, the requests became increasingly unreasonable, and she realized something was wrong. What she didn’t know until later was that she was on the brink of entering the sex trade world.

“Increasingly unreasonable”? Really? You mean, more unreasonable than “Hey, why not travel halfway across the country with two dudes you don’t know after turning over your bank account to them?” Because I’m honestly having difficulty thinking of something that could be more unreasonable than that to anyone who was reared outside of a Skinner box and has a greater cerebral capacity than the average stray dog. Though we aren’t told how Brianna “escaped” from these guys, it’s pretty obvious they did not actually intend to harm or (criminally) exploit her; she clearly lacks the intellectual agility to outwit a goldfish, much less a pair of gangsters (even assuming they were relatively obtuse). I’m also very amused by the phrase “sex trade world”, which was clearly shat out by the same Yellow Journalism Phrase Generator^TM that produced “sex trafficking world” and “sex trafficking trade”.

Brianna’s brush with sex trafficking two years ago is documented in…”Chosen,” which made its premiere…in front of more than 100 La Center High School students. The 20-minute video, produced by…Shared Hope International, is meant to be an educational tool warning teens and others about the dangers of the sex trade.

Shouldn’t that be “sex trafficking trade”? Or is it “sex trade world”? One needs to be precise about these things.

In the video, another young woman details how a pimp groomed her as a young teenager. He bought her expensive gifts before eventually setting her loose at strip clubs in Portland.

I just can’t help picturing her running around the club going “woop woop woop” and “nyah nyah nyah”, then falling on her side on the floor and spinning around in a circle.

Law enforcement officials consider…Interstate 5…to be a major arterial for sex-trafficking operations, especially of underage girls…

Evidence!

“You might think pimps are cool — like, they have lots of money and cars,” senior Olivia Loreth, 19, said. “They get a lot of women because they’re just that cool.”

You might, if you were a complete imbecile.

…Former U.S. Rep. Linda Smith, the founder of Shared Hope International, says she wants the video to be another tool in fighting the rise of human trafficking…

…which is “an extension of the ‘pro-life’ cause.” Finish your sentences, Linda.

…Smith said more awareness of the realities of sex trafficking needs to be coupled with stronger state laws that punish Johns and pimps but protect victims.

I’m starting to get the giggles every time I see some po-faced twit use the word “john” to mean a client. Even more so when he capitalizes it. And the irony of one of the chief disseminators of “sex trafficking” myths and lies using the phrase “realities of sex trafficking” is just icing on the cake.

Washington has been a leader in this. It’s one of a handful of states that has what’s known as a “Safe Harbor” law, which redefines prostituted minors as victims…

What does it mean?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!?

Here’s an example of Washington’s “leadership”, and the truth about “safe harbor laws”. I know this bit isn’t funny, but it does demonstrate Smith’s duplicity and Graf’s credulity.

[A new Washington law] will toughen the definition of sex trafficking, making every minor who participates in a sex-for-money scheme the victim of trafficking…

That’s right, the law has the power to rewrite reality like the Lathe of Heaven and make them victims even if they weren’t. Justice!

In the two years since her ordeal, Brianna has rebounded. She often joins Smith to spread the word about the realities of sex trafficking, and she’s enrolled in a nursing program at Clark College.

If I might offer a bit of unsolicited advice, Brianna, I don’t think you’re cut out for nursing; perhaps fantasy-writing or acting would be a closer fit. Or better yet, stand-up comedy.

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That Was the Week That Was (#317)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged adolescence, Africa, agency denial, Anatomy of a Boondoggle, Another Small Victory, Australia, avails laws, Big Sister, Bogeymen, bogus studies, Bottleneck, brothels, Canada, censorship, condoms, cops, Cops and Condoms, cult of the child, disease, drivers, escort services, Europe, fantasy, First They Came for the Hookers, Florida, Germany, Hall of Shame, harm reduction, Held Together With Lies, Hollywood, hysteria, Iceland, internet, language, law, left-right myth, Little Boxes, massage, Mississippi, neofeminism, Nevada, New Zealand, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, pimps, Poe Folks, porn, pragmatism, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rape, See No Evil, sex offender registry, sex work is work, stereotypes, stripping, Swedish model, Texas, The End of the Beginning, The More the Better, The Notorious Badge, The Widening Gyre, Too Young To Know, Uganda, underage, video on April 27, 2013| 17 Comments »

The laws just don’t make sense. They don’t help sex workers. They don’t protect sex workers. They increase their risks and they make it harder for them to do their jobs. – Chris Bruckert

Cops and Condoms

Ugandan men are even worse about condoms than American and European ones; the sex workers interviewed for this article say that only about 20% of clients will agree to use one, even when the worker tells them she is HIV+. The problem is that many workers there will provide bareback (“live” in Ugandan slang) on demand, so a woman who insists on condoms is at a competitive disadvantage.

See No Evil

A New Zealand court has sentenced a man to three months in prison for downloading cartoon porn. Ronald Clark has previous convictions for sexually abusing a minor, but the Japanese hentai he watched…[involved only] drawings…[and these were not even of humans, but rather] “elves and pixies, which led to concerns the images were linked to child sexual abuse…“

The More the Better (TW3 #4)

Heidi Fleiss…is…helping to renovate Dennis Hof’s Love Ranch…in Crystal, Nevada… “this…was very similar to a women’s penitentiary…You had to go through all these weird bars and buzzers, and someone’s peering out the little peephole, scoping you up and down… It was really a creepy feeling.” [Fleiss says she wants the brothel to be] “…not the dirty little secret where people drive up and sneak in…and then afterwards they’re full of shame…It’s something where people are so proud to be here, not only do they come back, but bring their friends back.”

The Notorious Badge (TW3 #15)

In The Client List…Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a struggling housewife who takes a rub-down side job in order to support her kids after her husband disappears. The show…has always struck us as more campy nonsense than an accurate portrayal of the erotic massage business. But how could we tell? We asked an escort to watch the show and help us tell fact from fiction…

Little Boxes

Young people being pragmatic and sensible about sex? We can’t have that!

…around 85 per cent of sexually active teens in the Bahamas are engaging in some kind of transactional sex…the majority of middle and high schoolers…are not sexually active. But of those who are, the majority are involved in risky behaviour…Transactional sex…differs from prostitution in the sense that only a portion of the needs of the person providing the sex are met through the practice…“Many young people put themselves through high school and college in this way…They feel that if a man wants to deal with them he has to pay in some way and they are not prostituting themselves by doing this,” [NGO official Prodesta] Moore said…

Somehow I doubt an American court would accept “this isn’t prostitution because I have another source of income” as a defense.

First They Came for the Hookers…

What selfless devotion to duty! Several different Oklahoma “law enforcement” agencies partied for four months at a strip club in order to “keep the citizens safe” from the scourge of private, consensual sex!

A Coweta strip club was busted on prostitution charges…Cherokee County deputies [investigated] the Secret Cavern strip club [for] a total of four months…[Alcohol Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission] agent [Pedro] Zardeneta…[said] “different agencies from different parts of the state worked well together to keep the citizens safe”…

The Widening Gyre

Dear “Sex Trafficking” Fetishists, please keep up the good work; we couldn’t possibly make y’all look as ridiculous as y’all make yourselves look:

Dear Michelle Obama…you were recently quoted as saying that Beyonce is a great “role model” to your two daughters…I think it’s time to stop suggesting to very young girls that ultimate feminine success…comes with the…expectation for them to undress…Variations of Beyonce’s body suit can be found in brothels, strip clubs and red light districts across the world – where sex is for sale…Remember that in the USA, the average age of a girl when she is trafficked for sex for the first time is 13…by drug dealers who promise her a celebrity lifestyle, clothes like the ones Beyonce wears…we are feeding a demonic myth that women must make themselves sexually available to enjoy ultimate success…It can take years of a young girl’s life away from her when she tries to escape a life of abuse at home…only to be sold for sex, beaten, and made addicted to drugs…

Bogeymen

A study conducted by a University of Ottawa criminology professor has confirmed what sex workers and those in the industry have said and known for years — the laws meant to protect sex workers from exploitation by targeting people who work in the industry but don’t actually do sex work end up putting those who do at much greater risk…These could include drivers…security personnel…website designers or photographers…receptionists…or the more traditional pimps or madams…Under current Canadian laws, all of those people, even the ones doing jobs that have mainstream counterparts, could be criminally charged…[despite the fact that] anything a third party could do to exploit a sex worker is already illegal if it were done to someone else…

Too Young To Know

Another sign of the decay of “sex trafficking” hysteria: even the most ignorant, dysphemism-riddled “sex trafficking” scare story chock-full of bogus statistics (“About one-third [of runaways] will be approached by a sex trafficker within 48 hours…the average life span for victims is seven years“) may admit to some real truth these days; this one, for example, recognizes that “pimps” don’t abduct screaming girls from their middle-class homes. It will be interesting to watch as they start contradicting each other.

Bottleneck

…Jules Kim – migration project manager at Scarlet Alliance…told the [federal] inquiry into slavery and human trafficking…[that] the current “scatter-gun” approach in which police look for trafficking victims by raiding Asian brothels was an “enormous waste of time, resources and misdirected energy…that has resulted in a gap between law enforcement bodies and…sex industry workers…People change the nature of their work to avoid that harassment…because constant raids on your business have an implication…None of the cases involved deception or trickery of the fact the person would be doing sex work. Instead of an evidence-based approach addressing real vulnerabilities, Australia’s approach continues to try to detect the mythical trafficking victim and trafficker that is a media-driven stereotype”…

Poe Folks

According to a report released in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, watching porn only affects [young adult] sexual behavior in a negligible way. Other influences such as personality type, educational and family background and poverty hold more girth than viewing sexually explicit material. The study…surveyed 4,600…people between the ages of 15 and 25 living in the Netherlands during 2008-2009…

Another Small Victory (TW3 #133)

The fight in the SCOTUS over the “anti-prostitution pledge” began Monday. On the side of Good: The Open Society Foundation, the ACLU, the Cato Institute, the Gates Foundation and even such unlikely supporters as Fox News, the New York Times and MSNBC. On the side of Evil: The usual suspects, including the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Here’s Melissa Gira Grant’s look at the battle-lines as they were set up on Monday; note the important point that the whole thing has been framed as a question of free speech (hence the support of otherwise-hostile media outlets) rather than a referendum on the rectitude of the War on Whores. No matter which way this goes, the persecution will go on until our “allies” stop vomiting out moronic filth like “Sex work is everywhere. It is a brutal system. It is an exploitative system. Nobody thinks it’s OK.”

Big Sister (TW3 #138)

An excellent article, though I must point out that only someone hopelessly mired in the “left-right” myth could seriously consider Iceland “ultra-liberal”:

Ultra-liberal Iceland wants to ban online pornography…[as] the latest step in its attempts to eliminate the sex industry entirely. In 2009 it introduced fines and jail terms for those who patronise prostitutes (whom it treats as victims). In 2010 it outlawed strip clubs…No country has yet wholly succeeded in controlling commercial sex, either through legalisation or criminalisation…Iceland’s proposal is in its early stages and may lose momentum after an election on April 27^th, which the government is expected to lose. But its plan puts it in some odd company. Saudi Arabia similarly bans strip clubs, prostitution and pornography…Prostitution has proved hard…to police and stamp out…[but] regulating pornography is hardest of all. Distributing and selling it has been illegal in Iceland since 1869…[but] a ban would be legally dubious, technically unfeasible and ineffective, argues Smari McCarthy…of the International Modern Media Institute…In an open letter to Ogmundur Jonasson, the interior minister, he and other opponents compared banning online pornography to repression in China, Iran and North Korea. Iceland’s constitution forbids censorship…and…Studies in America, Denmark, Germany…Sweden…China, Finland and Japan…show that as pornography became increasingly available, the number of rapes in those countries remained stable or even decreased…

Anatomy of a Boondoggle (TW3 #314)

Florida rapists are cleverer, excusing themselves via the moral panic du jour:

…Police in Florida [went nude] during an undercover prostitution investigation at a Hallandale Beach massage parlor…and…arrested three women…attorney…Howard Finkelstein…said. “It is seedy, back-alley, icky, and we don’t want our cops doing that, especially so when it’s meaningless.” But Florida ranks third in the nation in the number of reported cases of human trafficking…”This is not just an act of solicitation, but an organized crime effort,” [said] Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy…”It is not just a street-walker. It is a more sophisticated operation…”

The More the Better (TW3 #314)

She hated it so very much that she married a client and went on to own a brothel. That’s deep hatred, y’all!

Linda Fondren, a mayoral candidate in Vicksburg, Miss., not only admits to a past life in prostitution, she says her husband was one of her Johns. “I was a working girl in a legal brothel over 30 years ago. It’s true, my husband was my client…[we’ve] been married for 28 years”…Fondren tried to hold off making that admission for weeks…she…[says] she only did it to support herself after she got pregnant at age 14 and…her mom died of cancer…“I hated it. I hated it.” She also said that she would not support legal prostitution if elected…

That last bus-throwing line earns her a nomination for my Hall of Shame, though she’ll have to be still more disgusting to actually be inducted.

Held Together With Lies (TW3 #316)

Step 1: Define some normal behavior as a problem. Step 2: Redefine it so you can claim it’s “growing”. Step 3: Increase “regulation” so as to narrow the bottleneck for “legal” behavior:

After years of dispute, Germany’s center-right governing coalition has agreed to enact tougher penalties for human trafficking and forced prostitution…and [to] more strictly regulate the commercial activities of brothels…brothel operators will need special authorization…authorities will be required to enforce hygienic standards and operators will be screened for prior criminal offences…recently, a report by the European Union…showed that human trafficking in Europe has risen sharply.

Step 4 (early next year): Complain that “criminality” has increased, and repeat step 3. Proceed until full criminalization is achieved.

The End of the Beginning

Down near the end of this article about another idiotic and dangerous “sex trafficking” law is a reason for hope: “A bill focused on tightening punishments for pimps…[which] would require some to register as sex offenders, is progressing in [Texas]…Opponents believe the…requirement for sex offender registration may overwhelm an ‘overly broad database that includes too many offenders who are not threats to the community’…” In other words, these opponents recognize the “pimp menace” as hype and the “sex offender registry” as far too large. The same could be said for the reporter covering this story in which a Florida police department is claiming that the law says it “has to” humiliate so-called “sex predators” with huge red warning signs in their yards; she seems extremely skeptical of these theatrics, and asks a number of very sensible questions which the police chief of course answers dishonestly and smugly.

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Vice Versa

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Q & A, tagged anecdote, fantasy, Hollywood, male prostitutes, psychology, stripping, yin and yang on April 24, 2013| 11 Comments »

A reader asks:

I read your post and answer to the question: “How does one find a male prostitute for a straight female?” Is there really a market for females that want male prostitutes? Could you recommend a male prostitute that a man could fashion himself after (both physically and mentally)? And could you recommend any books, websites or articles on the topic?

I’m afraid there just isn’t much of a market for heterosexual male prostitutes, which is why that reader had so much trouble finding one. While every town in the world has female hookers and most make much more than they could at other jobs for which they’re qualified, men who want to do sex work usually deal mostly with men. This isn’t to say that no woman ever pays a man for sex, but those who do so are statistical outliers and therefore not a dependable source of income. The English sex worker Sensuous Amanda expressed it quite well:

Whilst I won’t say there is no market for straight male escorts, I will tell you that it is a teeny tiny market and it is awash with bright eyed hopefuls. As far as I know, even the successful guys do it part time and have another job to pay the rent…Boys, go for it if you want, but don’t rely on it for income. For instance, my ex – a tall strapping chap, pretty good looking, in his early 30s at the time – advertised his services. He’d seen what I was earning and decided that he wanted in on the action. He never made a sodding penny. Nothing. Not so much as an email or a call. Not even a timewaster.

That article also suggests a helpful model: Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. No, he wasn’t a sex worker, but that’s exactly the point; as Amanda writes, “in general, women don’t want [it]…to be a charade. We want a man to be all of those things to us because he wants to be. Not because we’ve just handed him a wad of twenties…” Or as I expressed it in “Just Drawn That Way”, “it is a rare woman indeed who will pay for sex with a man [because] it is an undeniable statement that he is not attracted to her, and that invalidates the primary reason for which [most women] might seek unprofitable, non-relationship sex.” People try to refute that by pointing to female sex tourists, but the exception proves the rule because what these women are looking for is adventure and romance rather than sex per se, which is why they seek this in exotic places rather than at home. Furthermore, you must remember that dollars, pounds and euros go a long way in such locales; what constitutes a generous fee there might be only a small sum in the Global North. That matters because women tend to be cheap tippers, especially where sex is concerned; as I explained once before, “A friend of mine who owned a male stripper service in addition to his escort service eventually had to stop offering so-called ‘bachelorette parties’ because none of his boys would do them anymore. The reason they gave? ‘Women are lousy tippers and they’re more interested in the buffet than the dancers.’” The good, dependable income in sex work is from male clients, whether the sex worker is male or female; as Amanda put it, “You wanna be a male escort? Fine, you go for it sweetie. You wanna make real money as a male escort? Lube up, bend over and take one for the team.”

I don’t know of any other resources for heterosexual male escorts, but by serendipity one of them (who says he has 15 years of experience) posted a reply just a few weeks ago on the very same Sensuous Amanda post I quoted above. He confirmed that he couldn’t make enough to live on, points out the difficulties of trying to see more than two to three clients a week, and explained that his sessions have to be open-ended on time rather than by the hour as with female escorts. He has a lot to say that I think you’ll find enlightening, including the fact that 75% of his clients were couples; this of course reinforces what I said above, because if it weren’t for the man’s interest in the fantasy you can be sure his wife wouldn’t be there.

(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)

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