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Posts Tagged ‘survivors’

Not for Everybody

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 17, 2012| 22 Comments »

A dream to some; a nightmare to others. – Merlin (Nicol Williamson) in Excalibur

One of the central goals of this blog is to help people realize that prostitution is completely natural female behavior; it actually predates marriage in human development and similar behaviors appear even in non-primate species.  Most women will not hesitate to use their “erotic capital” (as Catherine Hakim calls it) to get ahead, and many have no qualms about openly using sex for material gain.  About 10% of all women have directly taken money for sex at least once, and about 1% have actually worked as prostitutes at some time in their lives.  As George Bataille put it, “Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude”; in other words, full-time professional prostitution occupies one end of a whole spectrum of female behaviors on which it is impossible to draw a line separating the whore from the non-whore.

Obviously, only about 5% of all women (the historical percentage of the female population involved in the trade at any given time) feel comfortable enough with formal, professional prostitution to be able to actually make a living at it; in my column of one year ago today I discussed Amanda Brooks’ theory that such women, who often feel drawn to the profession from an early age as I did, might actually be genetically predisposed to it.  In other words, there might be a “hooker gene”, and harlotry might be a sexual orientation just as homosexuality is.  The comparison is an apt one: just as some men find ecstasy in homosexual activity while others are utterly repulsed by it, so for some women whoring is a dream job while others find it a total nightmare.

Those who consider homosexuality “unnatural” might be inclined to use the comparison to argue that prostitution is equally unnatural (despite this view flying in the face of facts); for those who are so tempted, let me point out that motherhood is as natural a role for women as one could ever imagine, yet I doubt any sane person would disagree that there are some women who are totally unfit for it.  No life-path or career is suitable for everyone, and as long as those who are unsuited to a given role avoid it there is no issue.  But when a woman who is repulsed by motherhood becomes pregnant, or one who has difficulties dealing with people is forced into a job in which public contact is unavoidable, nobody should be surprised when serious problems ensue.  And if a woman who dislikes men or has sexual hang-ups (or both) is forced by circumstance into prostitution, the result can be an unmitigated disaster.

I’m not talking about women who simply aren’t cut out for whoredom; there are lots of those, which is why 10x as many women have tried hooking as have actually stuck with it for a time.  The majority of women who directly take money for sex once or a few times simply decide it’s not for them (for whatever reason) and find some other way to make a living.  But there are a small number who should never have even tried it in the first place, yet are driven by necessity, desperation or actual coercion to practice it for weeks, months or even years; such women are among the worst enemies our profession ever had.  Because they hate the work, they tend to see and remember only the negative aspects.  And because many of them are emotionally damaged even before entering prostitution (due to whatever trauma caused them to hate men and/or sex), and virtually all of them became even more damaged by having to endure what for them was a loathsome existence, they either become fanatics on their own or are easily driven to fanaticism by the prohibitionists.  These are the women who call themselves “survivors” and learn to “reframe their experiences”  (i.e. lie to make their stories more lurid and to more closely conform to anti-whore rhetoric).  They are the mainstays of “john schools” and provide ammunition to prohibitionists who represent their highly-embroidered claims as typical of sex work and even multiply the accounts by changing small details so as to make them sound like different-but-similar tales rather than one repeated ad nauseum.  The very worst of them (as typified by Somaly Mam) are so obsessed with their own darkness that they are willing to utterly destroy the lives of any real human beings who get in the way of their quixotic crusades against private behavior that is literally impossible to eradicate as long as humans remain human.

In a world where individuals were allowed control over their own bodies and the decisions of adults (however strange those choices might seem to others) were always respected by the “authorities”, fanatics who were harmed through ill-fortune or harmed themselves through their own poor choices would have no power over other, less damaged individuals.  But unfortunately we do not yet live in such a world; even in jurisdictions which have legalized prostitution to one degree or another, governments believe they have the authority to abrogate the rights of individuals for whatever excuse strikes their collective fancy (provided they can convince the masses to lie still for it).  As we saw in Rhode Island two years ago, a small group of vocal fanatics can easily convince the “authorities” to strip away rights held without challenge for decades, and  one of the chief weapons of such fanatics is the emotionally-damaged “reluctant whore” who refuses to accept that her feelings or experiences are anything other than typical.

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A Short Glossary of Prohibitionism

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2011| 47 Comments »

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling? –  Bertrand Russell

Prohibitionists have their own terms for nearly everything involving prostitution and their quixotic war against it; some of these are merely jargon of the sort which can be found in any specialized group, but others are euphemisms, dysphemisms or just plain distortions intended to disguise the truth about harlotry (easily discovered nowadays in blogs like this one) and portray it as something ugly, criminal and exploitative of women.  So today I’d like to look at a few of these terms, defining them in plain English, so that my readers will understand what the prohibitionists are actually trying to accomplish by their use.

Abolitionist:  A prohibitionist.  They prefer the term “abolitionist” because they’re working to “free the slaves”.  The comparison is a better one than they imagine; though the modern view of abolitionists is wholly positive, in reality most of them (as documented in Russell’s Renegade History of the United States) had an incredibly patronizing attitude toward black people and many of them considered the chief evil of slavery to be the loose sexual morals of the slaves.

Apologist:  Anyone who answers propaganda with facts: “Maggie McNeill is a trafficking apologist.”

Backlash:  Resistance to injustice perpetrated in the name of “feminism”.

Bought and sold:  Engaged in any business transaction involving female sexuality or sex characteristics:  “We’re picketing this clinic because gynecologists are bought and sold here.”

Car dragging:  A common component of reframing experiences.  It’s not unusual to hear a survivor tell the story that she was dragged for blocks down the street by either her pimp or a john, but there are never any witnesses, scars, or police or hospital reports to verify the account.  One might point out that real incidents of dragging usually cause major injuries and are often fatal, but the credulous audiences of such tales never think of that.

Consent:  The clearly spoken (never merely implied) agreement to engage in sexual conduct with a male on the part of an adult woman over 18 (even if the legal age of consent where she lives is lower) unless the one who uses the term disapproves of whatever it is she’s consenting to.  Consent can be revoked retroactively without any time limit.  See also rape.

Degradation:  Participation in any sexual activity of which the majority of neofeminists or other prudes disapprove.  See also rape.

Denial:  A psychological state characterized by a sex worker of any kind remembering the events of her life as they actually happened rather than as prohibitionists wish to believe they happened.  See also reframing experiences.

Dworkin, Andrea:  American neofeminist (1946-2005) who dreamed up a large portion of the inane “rape” rhetoric which characterizes the anti-porn and anti-prostitution planks of the neofeminist platform.  Criticism of any of Dworkin’s scriptures, including her violently pornographic novel Ice and Fire, is tantamount to blasphemy in neofeminist prohibitionism.

End demand:  The prohibitionist strategy which hinges upon lowering the average male sex drive to below that of the average female by harassment, threats and brainwashing.  The male’s higher testosterone level is considered immaterial because all gender differences, including sex drive, are “socially constructed”.  See also Swedish model.

Exploitation:  Any business transaction involving sex or sex appeal in which a woman is the payee, no matter how highly paid she is.  Swimwear modeling and $1000/hour escorting are exploitation, but cleaning toilets for minimum wage is not.

Farley, Melissa: American neofeminist (born 1942) skilled at creating bogus “studies” designed to produce anti-prostitution, anti-porn and anti-BDSM results.  Farley utilizes such tactics as interviewing streetwalkers in jails and rehab facilities, discarding the responses which do not conform to her beliefs (see denial), and then fallaciously applying the results to all prostitutes.  Whenever a prohibitionist starts quoting statistics, one can be sure that the name “Farley” will appear prominently in the list of sources.

Feminist:  The label neofeminists erroneously apply to themselves; see also sex-pozzies.

Hughes, Donna:  American neofeminist (born 1954) who couldn’t make it as a geneticist because science kept inconveniently disproving her neofeminist beliefs, so she moved into the ghetto of “women’s studies” where nobody would challenge her faith with facts.  Because she is a strong supporter of criminalization she appeals as much to Christian fundamentalist prohibitionists as to neofeminist ones, and was instrumental in the 2009 re-criminalization of prostitution in Rhode Island.

Human trafficking:  Prostitution, acting in porn, international marriage brokering or surrogate motherhood, especially in (but not limited to) cases in which a woman moves from one place to another for the work.  Moving out of a third-world hellhole to do sex work in a Western nation is “human trafficking”, but working in a sweatshop in one’s own country is not (see also exploitation).

Humiliation:  See degradation.

John:  A term for the client of a prostitute which is used almost exclusively by those outside prostitution (especially prohibitionists, police and the media).

John school:  An end demand scheme in which men caught in prostitution “stings” are forced to endure being screamed at by survivors.

Majority:Small minority; usually proceeded by the adjective “vast”:  “The vast majority of prostitutes are trafficked slaves”.

Nordic model:  See Swedish model.

People in prostitution:  See prostituted woman.

Pimp:  Any male who associates with any sex worker (including strippers and porn actresses) but is not a customer.  Husbands, boyfriends, drivers, bodyguards, service owners and even some landlords are all “pimps”.  See also exploitation.

Pimp lobby:  The anti-prostitute neofeminist equivalent of the Illuminati, a vast international organization funded by pornography whose agenda is the decriminalization of prostitution so that prostitutes can operate openly and independently without the need for pimps.

Pornography:  To neofeminists, any visual representation of the female body unless made by and for lesbians.  To Christian fundamentalists, any visual representation of a nude human body, period.

Pro-prostitution:  Since neofeminists represent prostitution as a form of rape, this seemingly innocuous term is actually a slur implying that sex worker rights advocates promote rape.

Pro-trafficking lobby:  See pimp lobby, pro-prostitution.

Prostituted woman:  A whore.  Modern prohibitionist rhetoric teaches that since no woman would voluntarily hire herself for sexual services, all prostitution is involuntary and coerced even if the woman states otherwise (see denial).  Hence this term, which casts the prostitute as a victim to whom something is done rather than a competent adult making a free choice.

Rape:  Any heterosexual behavior in which the man acts without the woman’s clearly expressed consent, even if that consent is implied.  Consent can be retroactively withdrawn at any time, thus converting past sexual encounters into “rape” even if the man believes he obtained consent.  Since the consent of individual women is subject to collective neofeminist approval, any heterosexual activity of which a majority of neofeminists disapprove (including but not limited to sex work and BDSM) is automatically rape even if the individual woman involved gives consent.  Some extreme neofeminists (including Andrea Dworkin) preach that all heterosexual relations are tantamount to rape because heterosexual women are essentially too stupid to “truly” consent.

Reframing experiences:  Lying.  “Survivors” are encouraged to “reframe their experiences” in order to make prostitution, johns or whatever seem worse than they actually were.

Research:  Designing leading questions to be asked to a carefully-selected sample of sex workers in order to elicit the desired responses, then discarding those responses which do not fit the “theory”.  See also Melissa Farley.

Selling:  See bought and sold.

Sex-pozzie:  Dismissive term for a sex-positive feminist, one who believes in the social goals of feminism but rejects neofeminist anti-sex rhetoric in favor of the heretical notion that adult women are competent to make their own individual sexual decisions.

Sexual violence:  Similar to rape, but not limited to physical contact: “Exploitation of strippers is a form of sexual violence.”

Slave:  In the rhetoric of trafficking fanatics, a prostituted woman.

Survivor:  An unhappy ex-streetwalker or genuine trafficking victim brainwashed by prohibitionists into parroting their rhetoric, often accompanied by reframing experiences; they are the primary tools exploited by john schools.

Swedish model:  An insidious form of prohibitionism based upon the neofeminist premise that adult women are forever the equivalent of legal minors, neither able to consent to sex acts of which the state does not approve, nor held liable if they consent to those acts.  Since men are fully competent adults, however, they are unilaterally liable just as they would be in statutory rape cases.

Victim:  A term whose meaning varies widely depending on the type of prohibitionism.
1)  In 20th-century prohibitionism, a prostitute’s client or the client’s wife.
2)  In neofeminism, a woman.
3)  In Swedish model or trafficking rhetoric, a sex worker.
4)  In Christian prohibitionism, either #1, #3 or both (varies by group).
5)  In “progressive” American institutional prohibitionism, a prostitute with a pimp, except for those arrested or raped by the police (who deserve what they get and are therefore not victims).

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Misrepresentation

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2011| 51 Comments »

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask. –  Victor Hugo

Last Tuesday (February 1st), someone calling herself “Bedelia” tried to reply to my “Numerology” column with the following response.  As regular readers know, I don’t allow troublemakers to post freely on my blog; though I certainly believe in free speech, there are already beaucoup venues for trafficking fetishists, religious fanatics, neofeminists and other undesirables to spread their filth without my having to allow them into my online “house”.  And like the unwanted visitors in the famous Monty Python sketch, once one admits such people they always wreak havoc and there is no guarantee that they’ll ever leave.  I have nothing, however, against caging up such creatures in the back yard and letting my guests look at them while I point out their features of note.  Here is one such trespasser; the first thing I want to point out is that, since she cannot refute the statistical analysis in the post to which she tried to reply, she does not even make the attempt but rather tries to misdirect the reader’s attention from the facts with a lurid story which also serves the rhetorical function of a gambit to establish herself as a more credible authority than I am.  In other words, the reply is a stab at an “end run” around both the statistical facts in the essay and my established reputation.

I was a hooker for ten years in New York.  Nearly every one I worked with had had an ‘entree’ into the life that included a systemic breaking, gang rape, and captivity.  We were working under conditions extremely similar to trafficking.  In my experience most ex-prostitutes are so traumatized they are extremely unlikely to tell people of their experiences.  It took me 14 years to get to the point where I can talk about it anonymously on an online website.

The writer may indeed have experienced this or something like it, but this invalidates neither the experiences of other women nor the demonstrable fact that the vast majority of prostitutes are in the profession voluntarily.  Pay close attention to the cleverly disguised attempt in the second-to-last sentence to cast doubt on the veracity of all of us whores who write online by the implication that “real” prostitutes are too traumatized to do so (she attempts this trick again, though much more directly, in the second excerpt below). It is certainly possible that “most ex-prostitutes” of Bedelia’s experience have indeed been traumatized, but she tells us nothing about what that experience might be.  Is it limited to meetings held by trafficking fanatics, or to holding cells?  And if the latter, on which side of the bars was Bedelia?  It certainly doesn’t involve any interaction with the typical independent internet escort like 60% or more of prostitutes!

If I was raised in a convent I might well believe the statement “most women are celibate”, but that wouldn’t make it true.  And limited experience is no excuse for ignorance or misrepresentation in this age of easily-obtained information; activist Jill Brenneman has written many times about her three years as an involuntary prostitute and she is quite clear on the differences between trafficked sex work and normal sex work.  If Jill knows the difference, so should Bedelia before presuming to set herself up as an authority on the subject.  But even if she’s simply ignorant or misguided, it doesn’t excuse this:

Sexual exploitation is what it is.  Those who try to hide it or whitewash it behind rhetoric are using the voicelessly disenfranchised millions of women who suffer abusive, violence, and rape in prostitution to further their own political ends.  It is possible to be doing this without being conscious of it — Usually when a woman is posing as a prostitute in favor of the sex industry, as Maggie is, she is making money off pimping (or being a madam).  It’s an old trick (no pun intended).

The incredible hypocrisy of the second sentence (I think we all know which people are using women to further their own political ends) is followed by a blatant reiteration of the accusation from the first section above, and though I am the one she directly names the mud is clearly intended to splash on every other sex worker who speaks or writes in favor of decriminalization.  As I pointed out in several recent columns (especially this one and its sequel), trafficking fanatics obviously don’t have a very high opinion of their audience because they clearly expect their statements, no matter how ludicrous, to be accepted at face value.  It’s sad, however, to see that “anyone who would defend a witch (communist, pedophile, etc) must be one herself” is still the weapon of choice for those who dare to challenge the verity of statements and accusations made by witch-hunters.

Every day I wake up thinking of the women I worked alongside, the two who were murdered by my pimp, the one who took a fatal overdose and called our madam asking for help.  THe [sic] madam did not send help, but later did send goons to the dead girls [sic] apartment to remove all signs of the madam’s associaiton [sic].  You see, the madam didn’t want to do anything that would bring attention to her business.

Beside the lurid appeal to emotion, the rest of this is exactly what those of us who support decriminalization constantly point out.  Because our trade is illegal, shady escort services and abusive pimps can conduct their sleazy business unhindered; nasty things thrive in the dark.  And as activists constantly point out, whores are not free to report rapes, theft, overdoses, trafficking or anything else because the cops simply arrest the reporter and ignore her report (a fine example appears in this coming Wednesday’s column).

Nearly all prostitution is backed by organized crime, and this threat on the prostitutes is ever-present.

This is the most blatant lie in the entire piece, and the one which most causes me to doubt the sincerity of the whole thing.  The “organized crime” myth is favored by only one group, the police; even trafficking fanatics prefer to represent most pimps as “networked” but independent operators, with only some large operations backed by organized crime.  Are there escort services owned by the Mafia, massage parlors controlled by Asian organized crime and girls trafficked by Eastern European syndicates?  Undoubtedly, but to declare that mobsters are shaking down “nearly all” independent escorts and buying up agencies wholesale, or that every two-bit pimp is a card-carrying gangster, is like something out of a 1930’s crime movie.

I do think it should not be illegal to be a prostitute.  I believe the best model is the Swedish and Norwegian legislation, where it’s legal to be a prostitute, but not legal to be a pimp or a John.  The Canadian model, where pimping is illegal, but collecting money for sex is not illegal, is an improvement over the US system.

This last paragraph, I think, is the key to recognizing “Bedelia’s” scam; her support for the Swedish Model marks her as a neofeminist, and her claim that the omnipresent male oppressor is organized crime make me suspect she’s a policewoman; I’ve also never heard a real hooker use the word “john” for a customer, though perhaps New York streetwalkers do.  Accusing one’s enemies of criminal motives is also a typical police-style propaganda trick, especially when accompanied by a conscious or unconscious assumption of authority as in the second and fourth excerpts above.  Obviously, there’s no way to be sure of this because she isn’t going to admit it, but I suspect “Bedelia” to be an indoctrinated neofeminist, possibly a policewoman, attempting to win prostitutes and our female supporters over to the “Swedish Model” but too poorly-informed to realize that real escorts and others who know the truth about our lives can spot her a mile off.

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December Updates

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 20, 2010| 20 Comments »

In poison there is physic, and these news,
Having been well, that would have made me sick,
Being sick, have in some measure made me well. –  William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 (I, i)

A collection of links, comments and items relating to previous columns.

The Biggest Whores (September 6th)

In this column I reported that Craigslist had bowed to governmental pressure and blocked its adult services section from being accessed in the United States, though it was still available to everyone outside the reach of American censorship.  But now the website has apparently bowed to pressure from the Canadian government and prohibitionist groups and removed the section entirely, thus allowing all those who advertised in it to return to posting free and unmonitored ads in other sections of the website.  An article in yesterday’s New York Post reported:

The popular classified ad website Craigslist has pulled the adult services section from its websites around the world; the section has been removed from international Craigslist sites in Canada, Asia, Europe, South America and Africa.  The adult services section was removed from US Craigslist sites in September after complaints from 17 states that it facilitated prostitution.  The section was replaced on US sites with the word “censored,” but its removal from international sites came without announcement or comment from Craigslist.  A spokeswoman for the site declined to comment on the removal of the section.

Craigslist apparently believes this will silence the fanatics, and it certainly may as the crusaders move on to annoy Backpage.  Of course, it’s also possible that a few of them will recognize that most of the whores who advertised on Craigslist are still there in the personals, massage, etc as they used to be and demand that Craigslist control them, such as by creating a ghetto in which their ads can be confined and then requiring payment so courts can order the info turned over to them.  Oh, wait, that’s what they just forced them to close.  Oops.

Think of the Children! (September 30th)

In this column I wrote:

The dogma of [the Cult of the Child] preaches that children are as emotionally fragile as soap bubbles and the merest hint of sexual imagery before puberty can cause irreversible trauma; its adherents also believe that teenagers (whom they equate with “children”) should be lied to, spied on or even criminally prosecuted to prevent them from engaging in any kind of sexual behavior, and some even believe that adults should not be allowed any form of entertainment or reading material which is inappropriate for even the youngest child, on the grounds that a child “might see it” and thereby be petrified as if he had looked into the eyes of the Gorgon.  Child cultists can be recognized by their stated belief that any degree of tyranny is acceptable “if it saves even one child,” and by their fondness for promoting unconstitutionally broad legislation lugubriously named after dead little girls.

Until the Cult of the Child again goes into decline, you can be sure we’ll keep seeing proposed legislation of this type.

Yesterday (October 20th)

In this column I opined:

What’s going to be needed [to achieve decriminalization] is for some big moneybags like Bill Gates to get behind sex worker rights so we can advertise and thereby attract a bunch of empty-headed Hollywood stars who are looking for a new cause to adopt.  In the minds of the hoi-polloi, the opinion of one celebrity who knows nothing about the subject is worth the life-experiences of a thousand veteran whores, and once the cause becomes “sexy” enough all of a sudden people will be coming out of the woodwork to support it.

Here’s a case in point from yesterday’s MTV News.  Neither Lady Gaga nor Katy Perry have horses in this race; they’re not in the military, they’re not homosexual and they’re not male.  Yes, it affects lesbians too, but let’s be honest here; the opposition to the repeal of DADT came overwhelmingly from men for reasons which should be obvious.  Yet somehow, the public considers the opinions of pop-tarts with no personal experience in the issue to be more important than those of activists who actually know what they’re talking about.

Something Rotten In Sweden (November 13th)

In this column I talked about the rise of “Swedish Model” rhetoric in American police departments; by pretending that all whores are degraded victims, they can hide the outrageous sexism of prostitution laws from the gullible.  One example of this infiltration is the increasing popularity of  “john schools”, government programs which hire brainwashed ex-streetwalkers to scream neofeminist victimization propaganda at men arrested for soliciting prostitutes.  Brandy Devereaux recently published a column in which she reports on a recent proposal for one of these so-called “schools” in Colorado, then explains her ideas of what a real “john school” might be like.

Barbie (December 5th)

In my column on Barbie I mentioned that I played with mine as though she were an action figure, and then I saw this hilarious spoof advertisement for toys that, unfortunately, do not actually exist.  For those who slept through 19th-century English lit, I should mention that Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte avoided the Victorian prejudice against female authors by publishing their works under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

Not So Different (December 8th)

For years now internet escorts have employed sites like Date Check to screen potential clients, and now our amateur sisters have gotten into the act with some of the very same sites, proving once again that the line between prostitution and dating is far too fine to justify criminalizing the former but not the latter.  And just as governments think escorts are mental incompetents who must be protected from ourselves, so they apparently think the same about women who date online; New York’s “Internet Dating Safety Act” now requires dating sites to post common-sense safety tips, like “meet in a public place,” for those who are too dimwitted to be dating without a chaperone in the first place.  And the nanny state being what it is, I’m sure other states (and eventually the federal government) will follow New York’s lead.

Bits and Pieces, Part Two (December 10th)

For weeks there have been conflicting stories about what Julian Assange has actually been accused of, but now Sweden has finally bothered to release a report detailing the exact claims.  Assange calls the case a “smear attempt” filled with “incredible lies,” but even if the report is exactly true (and it may very well be), that doesn’t change the fact that Sweden, as pointed out in Saturday’s column, doesn’t expend nearly this much energy catching alleged rapists who have not embarrassed governments.

The Red Umbrella (December 17th)

I don’t really approve of the concept of “hate crimes”; after all, if a man kills me just because I’m in his way I am no less dead than if he kills me because he hates me.  But if we’re going to have any “hate crime” laws at all, it’s only fair that whores be among the protected groups because, as we discussed on Friday, we get far more than our share of violence.  Well, the city of Liverpool is now treating violence against sex workers as a “hate crime”; what a difference from the United States, where the police themselves are among the worst perpetrators of that very same crime!

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Bits and Pieces (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, News, Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 9, 2010| 12 Comments »

So many men, so little time. –  Mae West

There’s been another explosion of short news stories of note lately, none of which are really long enough (or quite topical enough) to merit a column; one might describe them as stocking stuffers if Santa was in a really strange mood and mixed coal in with treats.  We’ll start with the top story, released yesterday:

Derrick Burts, the porn actor who tested HIV positive in October has outed himself and now demands that condoms should be required in all porn.  The 24-year-old opportunist performed under the names Cameron Reid and Derrick Chambers, but now claims that “he wishes he had known more about the risks of contracting sexually transmitted diseases in the industry.”  Burts claims that he contracted HIV during oral sex in a gay porn shot in Florida, but isn’t sure.  Condoms had been used for penetration in that instance, as it often is in gay porn, but not during oral sex.  He claims that AIM told him that they’d traced his infection to a “known positive” but wouldn’t tell him who it was, citing patient confidentiality; AIM denies that and said Burts was told he’d contracted HIV through personal activity.  Predictably, Burts denies that, claiming “There is no possible way.  The only person I had sex with in my personal life was my girlfriend.”  But in the months before he tested positive for HIV, he had also contracted chlamydia, gonorrhea and herpes.  Burts also claims that AIM deliberately misled the public to try to tamp down fears about infection in the industry, and excuses the fact that he now works for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation by claiming that AIM didn’t follow up for his care.

Am I the only one who is incredibly disgusted by people who get hurt due to their own adult choices and then react by loudly advocating that the nanny state henceforth deny those same choices to others?  A gay guy born several years after AIDS was first discovered now claims he didn’t know you could get HIV through unprotected sex?  Either he’s incredibly stupid or he thinks everyone else is.  His claim that AIM told him that he contracted HIV through oral sex (despite the fact that, as I have said before, there has never been a single documented case of oral HIV transmission) is even less credible than his claim to his beard that he wasn’t screwing other guys outside of film sets.  And his going to work for the moralistic control freaks at AHC demonstrates that he can’t tell the difference between professional nudity and personal transparency.

Melissa Petro, on the other hand, apparently can; in a new column on Huffington Post she reveals that she was completely open about her background when applying to be a teacher:

I was also a former sex worker.  Of this, I made no secret.  My academic and creative writing has appeared in numerous publications online and in print since 2006.  My work is included in the NY Times acclaimed anthology Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys:  Professionals Writing on Love, Sex, Money and Work as well as in Sex Work Matters: Power and Intimacy in the Sex Industry.  I have presented at multiple conferences on the issue of women’s participation in the sex industry and regularly participate in literary readings around the city.  My thesis at the New School, completed the same semester I was accepted into the Fellows program, was entitled “Selling Sex.”

It was not until the tabloid New York Post decided to out her that the school suddenly decided her “sex rays” were dangerous to children.  I still believe that Miss Petro was incredibly unwise in revealing her past with her real name and picture, but in light of these revelations I’m willing to consider the possibility that her actions may have been due to incredible naivety about the trustworthiness of the bureaucrats who run the public school system rather than the desire to court publicity via self-martyrdom.

I’m not so willing to give Annie Lobert the benefit of the doubt, since she is obviously another member of the “do as I say, not as I do” club.  She’s also completely full of shit, because even though she claims to have been an escort for 16 years before being “born again”, she spouts neofeminist drivel about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder mixed with Bible-beating and TV-friendly nonsense about “pimps”; her so-called “Prostitution Glossary” contains not ONE SINGLE TERM from the escort world, unlike the real one which appeared in my column of September 7th.  I have no idea if these terms are real ones from the narrow little world of pimped streetwalkers, but even if they are how the hell does a former escort know about them and why is she representing them as general industry terms?  Either she’s lying about having been an escort or lying about our lives to pander to the male “pimps and hos” masturbatory fantasy; either one constitutes “bearing false witness” in my book.  Shame, shame, Annie; Jesus doesn’t like liars.

Speaking of popular delusions about harlotry, Huffington Post recently featured a two-part series about an NPR radio program about “child sex trafficking” (i.e. underage prostitution) in Oakland, California.  Now, I’m sure that the interviews themselves are honest and the stories representative of the lives of underage streetwalkers in Oakland, California.  The problem lies in the fact that the true stories are peppered with bogus police “trafficking statistics” and, as usual, the distinction between escort and streetwalker is deliberately smeared and voluntary adult prostitution is conflated with coerced underage prostitution.  Here’s one particularly sneaky example, deceptively entitled “The Story of an Escort”:

Youth Radio’s investigation of online sex classifieds found countless “escort reviews”  like this one on a Bay Area review site, featuring partially nude photos of a young woman and the following description: “I have the charm of the girl next door, the sexiness of your newest crush, the sophistication of your business partner, and the youth of a college girl.”  Youth Radio called the woman whose phone number was posted with the ad and she agreed to an interview if we didn’t use her name.  She said she is 24 years old and that while a pimp coerced her into prostitution as a teenager, she now worked on her own – a so-called renegade or rogue.

First of all, that is an ad, not a review; reviews are written by clients.  But that bit of misinformation pales into insignificance beside the last line:  Not only is the fact that she walked away from her pimp and set up her own business presented as unusual (because obviously we can’t admit that most hookers can take care of ourselves without the help of cops and other “rescuers”, and that pimps aren’t all-powerful and inescapable slavemasters), the bogus terms “renegade” and “rogue” imply some sort of pimp-run establishment which, simply put, does not exist.  “Renegade” implies that independent escorts are ostracized outsiders in the escort world, and “rogue” implies they are rare, when in actuality it’s the other way around.  As I discussed in my column of July 27th, true pimps (as opposed to boyfriends, shady escort services and male employees) are in the minority even among streetwalkers and vanishingly rare among escorts.  “Hobbyists” dislike seeing girls with pimps and other escorts look down on them and/or work toward convincing them to dump their “managers” and do it themselves.  In the escort world, it is the pimped girls who are the rare outcasts, not the other way around!

Tomorrow we’ll look more at the government campaign to spread disinformation about prostitution and other subjects, and the shockingly widespread compliance of the mainstream news media with the rapidly-developing Ministry of Truth.

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