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Posts Tagged ‘tabula rasa’

Ape and Angel

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged agency denial, California, dirty, ethics, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, psychology, stripping, tabula rasa, United Kingdom, yin and yang on March 27, 2012| 64 Comments »

The question is this—Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence the contrary view, which is I believe, foreign to the conscience of humanity. – Benjamin Disraeli

Charles Darwin first proposed the theory of evolution via natural selection a little over 150 years ago, yet despite mountains of proof there are still huge numbers of insecure people who, like Disraeli, reject it out of hand because they are afraid of the implications of recognizing humans as a kind of animal, connected deeply to all other animals on Earth by the legacy we carry around in every cell of our bodies. These are people who are unable or unwilling to recognize their own worth as individuals, and therefore require some magical proclamation of uniqueness bestowed upon them by an authority figure. In a way, it’s the ultimate “victim politics”; none of us, these people believe, are worthy for ourselves, but rather only as members of a designated “special” group. They therefore fear and reject their own bodies, whose earthy needs such as food, elimination and sex are no less compelling than those of every other animal. But of those basic needs only one of them, sex, can be avoided without resulting in death; therefore it is the one which must be denied most vociferously by those who wish to believe themselves closer kin to the angels than the apes.

Not all those who deny the ape beneath our skins are members of traditional religions; as I pointed out in my column of one year ago today, neofeminists do the same thing due to their violent rejection of their own feminine biology. “Social construction of gender” is just a more subtle version of “scientific creationism”; it recognizes that sex differences in all other animals arise from instinct encoded in their DNA, yet denies that humans are subject to the same biochemical forces. Though some adherents of this catechism may also be creationists, most probably believe in some patchwork rationalization such as the myth that our large brains somehow make us “immune” to sexual and sex-role instincts (yet not immune to hunger, thirst, pain, fear, anger, love, sorrow, etc). In any case, the neofeminists teach that humans, unlike every other mammal, have no innate sexual or sex-role drives whatsoever, and that all these are bestowed through the mystic force known as “social construction”, breathed into our nostrils by the omnipotent Collective. The most deluded adherents of this cult believe in something like the Calvinist religious doctrine of predestination; once a person’s personality has been determined by the almighty Patriarchy (the collective entity which acts as both Devil and Demiurge in neofeminist myth), a “false consciousness” is established which only salvation through baptism in the Holy Spirit of Neofeminism can dispel. If any person believes her choices to be acts of free will, but she behaves in a manner at odds with neofeminist dogma, she is said to be suffering from “false consciousness” which renders her decisions equally false. Only actions wholly in accord with neofeminist teachings are “correct” and free of Patriarchal conditioning.

Sane, rational people understand that the mere fact of a biological drive does not compel a human (or even a dog) to act upon it; retrievers can be trained not to eat the game in their mouths, human men can suppress the urge to mate with an unwilling woman because they know it isn’t right, and I can suppress the urge to eat something right now because I want to lose two kilograms I allowed to accumulate over the holidays. But like all prohibitionists, neofeminists believe that moderation is evil and only a total ban on the particular “sin” with which they’re obsessed (in this case, male-initiated sex) is good. Any indulgence in an urge of the flesh is viewed as a triumph of the Dark Powers, a little taste of death to the “enlightened” consciousness. Fortunately, this sort of black-and-white morality isn’t the norm in the rightmost portion of the IQ bell curve; as any whore or stripper can attest, many of our clients are medical doctors, scientists, engineers and other highly intelligent men who recognize that sexual drives are natural, and indulging them won’t rot their brains or cause the collapse of civilization. Indeed, one man who is probably on nearly everyone’s list of the brainiest specimens of homo sapiens on the planet isn’t afraid to treat himself to commercial sex:

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking spends a lot of time talking about the universe and what it might all mean but when…[he] isn’t talking to sold out crowds he can be seen spending his time in sex and strip clubs. The Daily Mail is reporting that the 70-year-old has visited various swinger clubs, sex clubs and strip clubs over the years including a Southern California swingers party which he was brought to by his nurses and assistants…he paid for private shows with various naked dancers at the Freedom Acres Club in Devore which he visited on a “handful of occasions”…While Cambridge officials deny that Hawking has made “regular” stops at strip and sex clubs they do admit that he visited a club “once a few years ago with friends while on a visit to California.”

Stringfellow’s Gentlemen’s Club in London Owner Peter Stringfellow told the Daily Mail that he actually had a chance to meet…Hawking at his club. “I remember asking him if he’d like to have a conversation with me about the universe, or if he’d just like to watch the girls. The answer was quite simply: ‘The girls’. “ So there you have it, when Stephen Hawking’s not busy trying to solve the mystery’s [sic] of our universe he’s doing what millions of other men do, he stares at naked women…

I think we can assume Hawking hires the occasional hooker as well; despite his paralysis he has been married twice and has three children. And I also think everyone can agree that neither sex nor ogling crumpet has damaged the great scientist’s intellectual capacity in the slightest; acknowledging the ape does no harm to the angel.

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That Was the Week That Was (#5)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged Africa, Australia, brothels, California, Canada, censorship, condoms, cops, cosmetic surgery, disease, end demand, Europe, Florida, genitalia, Good News-Bad News, harm reduction, hysteria, Islam, law, marriage, neofeminism, Netherlands, psychology, rescue industry, Scientific Detachment, semen, South Africa, St. James Infirmary, Swedish model, tabula rasa, teachers, The Camel's Nose, The Dogs Do Bark, The Enlightenment Police, underage, Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world, Who Did Your Tits?, yin and yang on February 18, 2012| 11 Comments »

The good news is that Jesus is coming back. The bad news is that he’s really pissed off. – Bob Hope

Three new stories and six updates from the fifth week of 2012.

Good News, Bad News

Sometimes, reading stories about prostitution law is like the classic joke format. GOOD NEWS: 77% of Canadians support decriminalization of prostitution and UNAIDS has condemned criminalization of sex work (including the “Swedish Model”, “end demand” schemes and the rescue industry) as a danger both to sex workers and to public health:

…Forced rescue and rehabilitation practices lower sex workers’ control over where and under what conditions they sell sexual services and to whom, exposing them to greater violence and exploitation…this leads to social disintegration and a loss of solidarity and cohesion (social capital) among sex workers, including reducing their ability to access health care, legal and social services. Low social capital is known to increase vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections among sex workers and therefore has a detrimental impact on HIV prevention efforts…undermining sex worker organisations is one of the most important negative effects of law enforcement practices…anti-trafficking efforts typically ignore the possibility of engaging sex workers as partners…[even though they] are often best placed to know who is being trafficked into commercial sex and by whom, and are particularly motivated to work to stop such odious practices…Organised groups of sex workers are also best placed to establish safe working norms within the sex industry, and influence other[s]…to ensure that trafficked adults and children are not retained in sex work…

BAD NEWS: Western Australia is starting to buy into the “trafficking” narrative:

Federal police have launched an operation to rescue people trafficked into WA for forced labour, prostitution and servile marriages. There are fears that an increasing number of women are being brought to Perth and forced into the city’s sex industry. Supt Glyn Lewis…said human trafficking was insidious and abhorrent and many victims were never found…There have been only 14 convictions for human trafficking since legislation came into force in 2003. People working in the area in Perth fear trafficking is a real and emerging issue “under the radar” of authorities and the public. Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans said the problem had to be addressed…

None of these people stop to consider that maybe the reason that there are so few convictions and “many victims were never found” is that there was no crime in the first place. But hey, we can’t let facts get in the way of hysteria and fear-mongering by cops and religious groups.

Scientific Detachment

The ability to look at sensitive subjects dispassionately and to present evidence without emotion is an admirable one, but as Professor G.S. Brindley (the doctor who developed the first medical treatment for erectile dysfunction) discovered in 1983, it’s probably best not to assume that the majority of one’s audience possesses that capacity to any great degree. This January 27^th article on the Discover magazine blog explains, and since synopsizing it in any way would do it a disservice, I’ll just leave you with the link.

Fundraiser for St. James Infirmary

I’ve been asked to publicize an online fundraiser for St. James Infirmary, which provides compassionate healthcare and social services for sex workers in San Francisco. It will be held tomorrow (February 19^th, 2012) at 3 PM EST on BlogTV; even if you can’t attend please spread the word!

Week 5 of 2012 Updates

Nothing in the Dark (August 8^th, 2010)

This story demonstrates not only the reason for considering condoms a “safety net” against disease rather than a first line of defense, but also the reason I’m hesitant to entrust my health to a government bureaucracy:

…South Africa’s leading anti-AIDS group said…that…faulty condoms are among more than 1.35 million handed out at the African National Congress’ 100^th birthday party…[they were] recalled but the Treatment Action Campaign said no warning has been issued to people that they may have carried away defective condoms…The third recall in less than five years raises questions about the quality of some of the 425 million-plus condoms that the government gives away each year, and the competence of the South African Bureau of Standards [SABS] that is supposed to ensure their quality…In 2007, the government recalled more than 20 million defective condoms…but recovered only 12 million…a [previous] recall…[resulted after] a testing manager at [SABS took] a bribe to certify the faulty contraceptives…

[AIDS activist Sello Mokhalipi] said people started coming with complaints about the condoms…three days after the celebrations ended…”We poured water into the condoms and they were leaking, not just in one place, they were leaking like a sieve,” he said. Looking at them, “you can see there are small pores” like pinpricks…the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce, said many of the 10,000 to 15,000 prostitutes they work with often complain about the free government condoms…[so] they instead use a brand provided by an international charity…South Africa’s government sources its condoms from several companies and rebrands them with its colorful CHOICE packaging, in bright blue, red, yellow and green…

Any time there’s a lucrative government contract, there’s going to be graft. And anything sourced out to the lowest bidder…

Who Did Your Tits? (October 1^st, 2010)

Most women who have boob jobs feel they confer psychological and/or financial benefits, but I never considered this possibility:

A 41-year-old Florida woman says the breast augmentation surgery she had three months ago saved her life…her ex-fiancé’s new girlfriend…attacked her…stabbing her repeatedly in the left side of her chest…the knife had punctured the implant and she was soaked with saline. Doctors say the salt water and walls of the implant prevented a deadly blow.

The Camel’s Nose (October 2^nd, 2010)

Yet another spooge sneaker; this one is so reprehensible he constitutes a one-man argument in favor of sex offender registries:

…Mark Berndt, a third-grade teacher [at Miramonte Elementary School in California]…is charged with committing lewd acts on 23 boys and girls, ages 6 to 10, between 2005 and 2010…[he] was removed from classwork in January 2011 and fired within the month, but only parents of children identified as victims were told…some angry parents…complained that they only learned of the investigation through the media after Berndt’s arrest this week. School officials and investigators said proper procedures were followed…but…two former students…said school officials were informed about [Berndt’s] odd behavior two decades ago…

…Berndt is suspected of snapping nearly 400 photographs of…students, some with a giant Madagascar cockroach from a classroom terrarium on their faces. Others were blindfolded or had clear tape over their mouths, and some were shown with a spoonful of milky liquid placed near their lips…The photo sessions were treated as a game and some children were given sperm-laced cookies to eat as treats…The investigation began in the fall of 2010 when a film processor became suspicious about the photographs and turned them over to…police…an investigator…found a blue spoon…in a trash can [in Berndt’s classroom] that appeared to be the one seen in the photographs, but it took months before analysis determined there was semen on the spoon and more time before DNA testing matched it to Berndt…Meanwhile, investigators kept trying to identify children in the photographs…

I would hope that prosecutors build their cases on photographic and DNA evidence, and that they, cops and parents have the sense not to question the children or (even worse) subject them to the ordeal of trial participation; adult eyewitness testimony is unreliable at best, and that of children is often worse than useless. Alas, I fear that’s a vain hope; adults just can’t resist traumatizing young children by subjecting them to frightening and confusing interrogations and filling their heads full of horrible images, thus exploiting them just as monstrously as the criminal did.

Welcome To Our World (January 20^th, 2011)

I think my readers can answer David Reber’s questions, which he seems to consider rhetorical:

…What could a teacher possibly know about education? Countless arguments used to denigrate public school teachers begin with the phrase “in what other profession…” and conclude with practically anything the anti-teacher pundits find offensive about public education…In what other profession, indeed. In what other profession are the licensed professionals considered the LEAST knowledgeable about the job? You seldom if ever hear “that guy couldn’t possibly know a thing about law enforcement – he’s a police officer”, or “she can’t be trusted talking about fire safety – she’s a firefighter.” In what other profession is experience viewed as a liability rather than an asset? You won’t find a contractor advertising “choose me – I’ve never done this before”, and your doctor won’t recommend a surgeon on the basis of her “having very little experience with the procedure”. In what other profession is the desire for competitive salary viewed as proof of callous indifference towards the job? You won’t hear many say “that lawyer charges a lot of money, she obviously doesn’t care about her clients”, or “that coach earns millions – clearly he doesn’t care about the team”…For no other profession do so many outsiders refuse to accept the realities of an imperfect world. Crime happens. Fire happens. Illness happens…People accept all these realities, until they apply to public education…

Well, Mr. Reber, there is at least one other…

The Enlightenment Police (October 1^st, 2011)

One would think the usually-sensible Dutch would have waited to see what the European High Court will do with the French version of this first:

The Dutch…government plans to ban Muslim face veils…”People should be able to look at each other’s faces and recognize each other when they meet,” the interior affairs ministry said…The ban will also apply to balaclavas and motorcycle helmets when worn in inappropriate places, such as inside a store, Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Verhagen told reporters, denying that this was a ban on religious clothing…The face-veil law, which still needs to win approval in both houses of parliament, excludes clothing worn for security reasons such as that worn by firemen and hockey players, as well as party clothing such as Santa Claus or Halloween costumes. The ban does not apply to religious places, such as churches and mosques, nor to passengers on airplanes or en route via a Dutch airport…

Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark (January 11^th, 2012)

Since neofeminists insist that all gendered behavior is “socially constructed”, I’m sure they’ll deny these findings just as creationists deny fossils and carbon dating:

Testosterone makes us overvalue our own opinions at the expense of cooperation, research from…University College London has found…Problem solving in groups can provide benefits over individual decisions as we are able to share our information and expertise. However…collaborating too closely can lead to an uncritical groupthink, ending in decisions that are bad for all…research has shown that people given a boost of the hormone oxytocin tend to be cooperative. Now…researchers have shown that…testosterone has the opposite effect — it makes people act less cooperatively and more egocentrically.

Dr Nick Wright and colleagues…[tested] 17 pairs of female volunteers who had previously never met…On one…day…[they] were given a testosterone supplement; on the other day, they were given a placebo. [Men were not used because supplements can trigger a drop in their own testosterone production, invalidating the results]…as expected, cooperation [in a task] enabled the group to perform much better than the individuals alone…but, when given a testosterone supplement, the benefit of cooperation was markedly reduced. In fact, higher levels of testosterone were associated with individuals behaving egocentrically…”Most of the time, this allows us to seek the best solution to a problem, but sometimes, too much testosterone can help blind us to other people’s views,” [said Dr. Wright.] “This can be very significant when we are talking about a dominant individual trying to assert his or her opinion in, say, a jury”…

One Year Ago Today

“Not the Same Tree” showcases a Detroit reporter’s excellent and very perceptive article about the federal persecution of an escort service.

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Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged Aphrodite, archeofeminism, lawheads, marriage, neofeminism, pathologization of males, psychology, tabula rasa, The Dogs Do Bark, yin and yang on January 11, 2012| 34 Comments »

I’ve got some news that maybe isn’t news. – Robert Frost, “The Housekeeper”

“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” We’ve all heard this quote with which I opened my column of one year ago today, and though most people would agree on it many soi-disant “journalists” don’t any more. As I said in that column,

…such things are presented as news every day. Sometimes…[it’s] because of the unusual size of the dog or the sheer number of people bitten; sometimes it’s just a slow news day, and very often such stories are the equivalent of the patter, lovely assistant and other misdirection used by a conjurer to draw attention away from what he’s actually doing. But in some cases “dog bites man” stories become newsworthy because the media have succeeded in convincing enough people that dogs actually don’t bite men, so when it happens in a public place silly people are either surprised or must at least pretend to be…[they] either don’t recognize [such stories] as examples of “dog bites man” or else believe that dogs do not in fact generally bite men; they therefore react by feigning surprise, denying that the story actually describes an incident of canine aggression, or questioning the veracity of the report.

A perfect example of this appeared in Huffington Post on Monday and was called to my attention yesterday by the Human Scorch:

Men and women are more alike than different — that’s been the consensus view for many years among the researchers who study personality differences between the sexes. But a new study claims this wisdom is wrong. By correcting for measurement errors, three researchers put forth a study that was published on Wednesday on the Public Library of Science website saying they’ve found that men and women feel and behave in markedly different ways. They’re almost like “different species,” [said] Paul Irwing, one of the researchers…The research, conducted by Marco Del Giudice of Italy’s University of Turin and Irwing and Tom Booth of the UK’s University of Manchester, involved getting 10,000 Americans to take a questionnaire that measured 15 different personality traits. According to their analysis, men are far more dominant, reserved, utilitarian, vigilant, rule-conscious, and emotionally stable, while women are far more deferential, warm, trusting, sensitive, and emotionally “reactive.” The two sexes were roughly the same when it came to perfectionism, liveliness, and abstract versus practical thinking. “If you translate it into the simplest terms,” said Irwing, “only 18 percent of men and women match in terms of personality profiles, and that’s staggeringly different from the consensus view.” [That] …view…[is championed by] Janet Shibley Hyde, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, [who in 2005] demonstrated through a meta-analysis of 46 other studies that men and women were actually very similar, not only in personality traits, but in other realms of supposed gender difference, like self-esteem, leadership, and math ability…

In past studies on this topic, researchers would simply add up all the survey responses, according to Del Giudice. This led to imperfect results because of careless responses and misreadings. Through a sophisticated method called “structure equation modeling,” the researchers claim they were able to remove this random error. When asked if he could translate this concept for a lay person, Irwing replied: “I teach courses on this and it takes me approximately 20 hours.” Past research also usually compared one variable at a time, Del Giudice said. He believes this method led to underestimations of the sex difference because when you actually combine all personality traits, with all their small discrepancies, the result is a much more significant difference. For example, if you were to examine the difference between men and women’s body types using the traditional method, you would look at torso circumference and waist-hip ratios and torso-leg ratios, one by one. In Del Giudice’s method, you would crunch all these figures into one much larger number. And that’s what he did with personality…Del Giudice contends that his team didn’t measure “a haphazard list of traits.” Rather, they considered 15 facets that could offer a reasonably complete picture of a person’s personality.

Irwing thinks that some researchers in the past may have been biased in their methods, in order to reduce any gender difference. “It’s for totally laudable reasons,” he said. “People are very concerned, or were very concerned, that women didn’t get equal opportunities, and that there was a lot of bias in selection processes…[they] are afraid that studies like ours will turn the clock back,” Irwing added. Hyde is one of those people. “This huge difference is not only scientifically false,” she said, “it has unfortunate consequences for places like the workplace and education and heterosexual romantic relationships.” But the authors stand by their results, and are currently drafting a lengthy response to Hyde’s objections. “I think distorting science because of what you would like to believe, or because of what you think the political consequences are, is very dangerous,” said Irwing.

The study doesn’t speculate as to whether the alleged differences are due to nature or nurture, although Irwing points out the results are consistent with… evolutionary theory. Even if these differences aren’t indelibly printed in our genes, Hyde believes there’s still cause for alarm. If men and women have wildly different personalities, “then how can we do the same job men can, and deserve equal pay for equal work?” she asked. “A married couple have marital difficulties, and they go to the therapist, who says ‘he’s from Mars, you’re from Venus, you’ll never be able to communicate. It’s hopeless.’ If you have a gender similarities point of view, you just need to work on communicating.”

The reporter’s bias is as impossible to miss as Hyde’s; the doctrine of androgyny is referred to from the first line as “wisdom” and it was “demonstrated” by Hyde, while gender differences are only “supposed” and “alleged”. But despite what the reporter would like to believe, the dogma that there are no important gender differences was only the “consensus” in certain schools of sociology and psychology; it is not and has never been accepted in neurology, sexology, biology, psychiatry or most schools of psychology, for the simple reason that the data don’t support it without considerable massaging of the sort practiced by Hyde (whom you will note is also a professor of “women’s studies”, a field with all the academic rigor of “scientific creationism” or “UFOlogy”). No person who lives in the real world (or has ever had children of both sexes) can force himself to believe that men and women are largely the same physically, psychologically or in any other way; everyday experience that the sexes are extremely different can only be reconciled with the doctrine of asexuality by invoking “social construction of gender”, which is of course what agenda-driven people like Hyde promote. The last two paragraphs reveal that agenda: Faced with an inability to explain the facts which contradict her “theory”, Hyde falls back on political ideology and myopic nonsense. The differences between men and women were recognized throughout human history, yet the rift between the sexes has never been greater than it has been since neofeminism and its denial of those differences appeared on the scene some 30 years ago.

Hyde’s claim that a belief in imaginary gender equivalence somehow helps marriages is an exact reversal of the truth: denying sex differences means that there is only one standard of normal human behavior (in the minds of neofeminists, the female standard); normal male behavior is therefore pathologized, and Hyde’s “communication” invariably becomes one-way. It’s the belief that men and women are the same which renders attempts to reconcile marital difficulties “hopeless”, because it proceeds from a faulty assumption; until the inhabitants of Mars and Venus know where each other are coming from, there is no way to navigate toward a mutually-acceptable meeting place.

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Umpteen Thousand People Can’t Be Wrong

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Backpage, censorship, dirty, ethics, hysteria, language, law, lawheads, neofeminism, pimps, prohibitionist myths, Shazam!, slavery, stereotypes, streetwalkers, tabula rasa, Umpteen Thousand People, underage on November 12, 2011| 32 Comments »

Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant. – John Simon

One of the more insidious forms of lawheadedness is the widespread belief that political fictions have a basis in reality. For example, neofeminism rests on the confusion of legal equality with actual equality, in other words the belief that because the law generally treats the sexes alike that means they actually are alike. Another such belief is that the legal equation of teenagers with children (both are “legal minors”) means that teenagers actually are children in some real way, and that a man who is attracted to a hot 16-year-old is therefore a “pedophile”. But possibly the most dangerous confusion of all is the idea, common in the modern world, that because leaders are chosen and a few legal questions decided by majority vote, it also means that the truth can be decided the same way. We often hear some permutation of the phrase which forms today’s title, but it’s total and complete nonsense: the majority not only can be wrong, on subjects requiring specialized or firsthand knowledge, it nearly always is wrong. I can assure you that no matter how many people vote on it, no matter how many signatures one collects on a petition, no matter how many self-appointed “leaders” demand it, facts will stubbornly remain in place. You can’t make men and women psychologically identical by majority vote, you can’t raise the speed of light by petition and you can’t legislate pi to be a rational number. And no matter how many people claim that “children are being sold for sex” on Backpage, it’s still pure bullshit.

Where do we even start with this? First of all, no prostitute (voluntary or involuntary) is “sold for sex” or “sells her body”; as has been pointed out many times by many whore-activists, the act of selling automatically includes a change of ownership: if the supposed purchaser does not take possession of the goods supposedly “sold”, no sale has taken place. I still own my body, therefore I have never sold it; the same can be said for any other prostitute, either above or below the local age of consent. And since nobody is alleging that anyone ever advertised on Backpage to literally sell a girl as a slave, with ownership changing hands, the statement that “children [or anybody else] are sold for sex [or any other purpose] on Backpage” is prima facie fraudulent.

Next, there’s that word “children” again; every supposed case I’ve ever seen lists the alleged prostitute’s age as 13-17. I doubt anyone other than a hopeless lawhead would consider a 17-year-old to be a “child” in any meaningful sense, and considering that the age of consent in some American states is as low as 14, clearly the legislatures of those states don’t consider someone of that age to be truly a “child” either. That leaves 13-year-olds, most of whom are biologically capable of pregnancy and are therefore not children. Using the phrase “underage prostitutes are often advertised on Backpage” wouldn’t have nearly the emotional impact as “children sold for sex”, but at least it would be true, wouldn’t it?

In a word, no. See, there’s still that passive voice issue: “are sold for sex” or “are advertised” imply that the whore is the passive subject of some “trafficker”, but as we have seen fewer than 16% of underage prostitutes have even met a pimp, and 75% of them work only on the street. There are fewer than 16,000 underage prostitutes in the U.S.; if only a quarter are other than streetwalkers, and if only 16% of <4000 girls are “pimped”, we’re looking at about 600 “pimped” underage girls in the entire country who aren’t streetwalkers…and the majority of those probably work in clandestine brothels rather than even attempting to advertise online. The F.B.I.’s lugubriously named “Operation Innocence Lost” barely even bothers with the internet; as reported in my column of one year ago today, most of the young hookers they arrest (excuse me, “rescue”) are caught on the street or at truck stops. Altogether, there are probably about 100 prostitutes in the entire country who meet all the hysterics’ criteria (underage, pimped online advertisers), or about 2 per state…sad, but hardly enough to justify shutting down an entire advertising venue on the grounds that those 2 girls might possibly choose to advertise on the targeted venue rather than one of the many other sites available. It would be like banning peanuts because they’re the agent of a common food allergy and 11 people die each year from all food allergies combined.

But since the fanatics are so fond of saying “if even ONE CHILD is saved it will be worth it!!!!11!!eleven!!”, I hardly think that they’ll respond to this logic, so let’s look at the final issue: a pesky thing called the Constitution. A federal judge recently ruled that, as previously established many times, internet advertising venues are not responsible for user-generated content. Nor is the case a generic one; the ruling specifically dismissed a lawsuit by a former teen prostitute who claimed Backpage was responsible for an ad she was persuaded (not forced) to allow a pimp to place. Of course, the attorneys general of 44 states (who apparently labor under the delusion so common to state-employed lawyers, that the law is whatever they want it to be) greeted this ruling with a toothless demand that Backpage take down its adult services section; Backpage ignored the demand because, as the attorneys surely recognized themselves, it had no legal validity.

As one might expect, this inspired the fanatics to redouble their efforts (as Santayana tells us fanatics are wont to do) by starting a petition to “force” Backpage to stop doing what it’s legally and morally entitled to do, namely give adult women a low-cost place to advertise an honest and necessary service. And as Laura Agustín reported, a group of 36 clergymen took out a full-page ad in the October 25th New York Times to make the same demand. Their “open letter” begins with the spectacularly asinine statement “It is a basic fact of the moral universe that girls and boys should not be sold for sex”; I’ve already pointed out the absurdity of the phrase “sold for sex” above, and Laura Agustín says the rest perfectly:

There are no rules of the moral universe because there is no moral universe, even about children and sex, not to mention about the exchange of money for sex. The idea that there is some absolute place where everyone will agree on morality is an illusion held by some people with little imagination, who universalise their own experiences. On top of that fantasy they build campaigns in which all other moral senses are turned into crime, sin and perversity.

Dr. Agustín also called attention to this Huffington Post coverage of the story, illustrated with a picture of Demi Moore exploiting an old Indian woman for her publicity. I wonder if she asked the woman to move into position for the photo? If so, the woman was “trafficked”. And if Moore paid her, she was “sold for publicity”. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? And to those of us who recognize that sex isn’t some magical sacred taboo which destroys anyone who uses it in a way prudes pronounce “wrong”, the mythology of “sex trafficking” sounds just as stupid…no matter how many people believe it.

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The Punitive Mindset

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged censorship, Connecticut, consensual crime, cops, dirty, harm reduction, law, lawheads, neofeminism, porn, prisons, psychology, rape, tabula rasa, The Punitive Mindset, yin and yang on October 20, 2011| 63 Comments »

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable. – George Bernard Shaw

Some euphemisms are just so absurd it’s a wonder they aren’t the subject of constant public ridicule; one of these is “Department of Corrections”, a common American phrase meaning “Prison Department”. It also has a number of derivatives like “correctional institution” (prison) and “correctional officer” (jailer). But surely, no sane person believes that prisoners are being “corrected” or rehabilitated in any way; in fact, the evidence is the opposite, that locking criminals up for long periods of time merely makes them worse, and imprisoning those who break minor laws destroys their lives and/or turns them into career criminals. The reasons for this should be obvious; prisons are little more than schools for crime, where those who are not thoroughly violent when they get in are forced to become more violent to survive. Furthermore, excessive sentences remove prisoners from society for so long they forget how to behave among normal people and internalize the prison mode of behavior so that it’s difficult to “unlearn” when they get out, especially since criminal background checks, offender registries and other post-incarceration punishments often prevent former prisoners from ever returning to normal society. These measures create a permanent criminal underclass who can never make a good living or otherwise reintegrate, so their incentives to return to crime (or enter it for the first time if their initial incarceration was for a consensual “offense”) are very strong indeed. Women who cannot get “regular” jobs can always fall back on prostitution or marriage, but for male ex-convicts there aren’t many options for a worthwhile income other than drug dealing.

None of this makes any difference to lawheads, who defend their punitive mindset with tautologies, a priori statements and asinine slogans derived from TV cop show theme songs. They take sadistic pleasure in seeing others suffer even if that suffering undermines rehabilitation, endangers society at large and costs the state tremendous amounts of money. The prevalence of such warped mentalities in the United States can be demonstrated by the fact that we have only 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners and that since 1980 the incarceration rate has grown wildly out of proportion to the crime rate, largely thanks to mandatory sentencing laws, “three strikes” laws and the War on Drugs. Nor are these perverts satisfied with caging human beings; oh, no! They constantly agitate for longer sentences and harsher treatment of prisoners, both during their imprisonment and after their release. And when badge-licking sadism gets into bed with political correctness and neofeminist “social construction” mythology, the result is just plain revolting:

A group of prisoners has begun a letter-writing campaign to protest what they see as an unfair ban on pornography inside [Connecticut’s] correctional institutions. The Department of Correction announced in July that it would be banning all material that contains “pictorial depictions of sexual activity or nudity” from the prisons beginning next summer. The state says the ban is intended to improve the work environment for prison staffers, especially female staffers, who might be inadvertently exposed to pornography. “While it is not supposed to be displayed, it is still visible to staff, whether it be on the inside of a foot locker or underneath their bunks, so they are still exposed to it,” said Correction Department spokesman Brian Garnett. “And secondarily, is the fact that this is contrary to our rehabilitative efforts, particularly when it comes to sex offenders.”

OK, let’s see if we can follow the “logic” here; they’re applying “hostile work environment” rhetoric derived from “sexual harassment” law to prisons? The mind boggles; one would think any sane being with the most rudimentary knowledge of human sexual behavior would recognize that for a woman, the inside of a men’s prison would be practically the archetype of a “hostile work environment”. And if a woman is able to see under a male prisoner’s bunk or into his foot locker, porn is the least thing she has to worry about being “exposed” to. And how, pray tell, is access to material which the great majority of adult males view regularly somehow “contrary to rehabilitative efforts”? Looking at porn is one of the few normal male things prisoners can do, and contrary to anti-porn claims it seems to reduce the rate of sex offense rather than increasing it.

…Bill Dunlop, a law professor at Quinnipiac University, said there is a constitutional argument to be made. But, he said the courts have generally sided with prison officials, as long as they can prove the ban has a legitimate goal other than to simply suppress material that some people might find objectionable — such as maintaining safety in the prisons, or keeping the material out of the hands of sex offenders. “The courts don’t require the prison officials to look for other ways of achieving those goals without infringing on First Amendment rights, to the extent that they would for government outside the prison,” he said. “Based on the press release and the notice to the prisoners, it looks as though it’s in the general area of regulations that have been upheld in the past.” But the state’s total ban on sexually explicit material appears to go beyond bans that the Supreme Court has upheld in the past, he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut…is not representing any of the inmates and doesn’t advocate for pornography in prisons, but is concerned that the ban could be enforced in an arbitrary and overly broad manner. “Similar regulations have been used to censor an image of the Sistine Chapel, newspapers and magazines with lingerie ads and the novel Ulysses,” Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut, said in a statement.

…The ban has the support of the union that represents prison guards. Lisamarie Fontano, president of Local 387 of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, said she has been pushing for such a ban for several years, and has received complaints from female employees who have been sexually harassed by inmates using pornography. “It’s a betterment to all to have it gone,” she said. “Some inmates don’t want it, because their own sexual and mental issues were being forced onto them, even though it shouldn’t be there in the first place.” Prisoners also use pornography as currency in prison, trading the pictures for other things of value, she said…

Given that prison guard unions, like all public employee unions, wield power far out of proportion to their numbers (the California prison guards’ union is thought to be the most powerful union in the United States), I have no doubt that the ban will be supported by the courts. I don’t believe for one second that Fontano or any other female freaking prison guard is so lost in neofeminist La-la Land that she honestly believes that male sexual desire derives from looking at porn; she just wants to create her own sadistic mental porn by depriving male prisoners of one more simple human pleasure.

One Year Ago Today

“Yesterday” is a cynical rumination on what it will take to get the mainstream media to stop acting as prohibitionist propaganda organs, and to really get the cause of sex worker rights moving, using lessons learned from gay rights activism.

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Moondance

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, tagged anecdote, archeofeminism, dirty, holidays, naturalness, neofeminism, New Orleans, psychology, tabula rasa, yin and yang on October 18, 2011| 16 Comments »

Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
‘Neath the cover of October skies
And all the leaves on the trees are fallin’
To the sound of the breezes that blow
An’ I’m trying to please to the callin’
Of your heart strings that play soft and low
And all the night’s magic seems to whisper and hush
And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush. – Van Morrison, “Moondance”

The modern disconnect with the natural world which has given rise to neofeminism, “social construction of gender”, the militant “animal rights” movement and many other bizarre beliefs and practices is completely alien to me. When one lives in the country surrounded by plants and animals it is impossible to reduce the calendar to an official fiction, to pretend that shifting clocks changes the time, to imagine that sex-based characteristics and sexual behaviors are instilled by socialization rather than arising naturally as they do in every other animal, or to believe that things like predatory male sexuality, prostitution, sexual dominance and submission and the physical or behavioral characteristics to which people are attracted derive from “patriarchy” rather than evolution and neurochemistry, and can be eliminated by laws and giving little boys dolls to play with (as discussed in my column of one year ago today). And once one spends even a short time each day watching dogs, cats, livestock and wildlife it is no longer possible to comfort oneself with the ridiculous idea that humans are a kind of angelic being totally and completely separate from all other forms of biological life, or to adhere to the naïve notion that it is either possible or desirable to completely eliminate from the human world what the “enlightenment police” glibly refer to as “cruelty” (a concept which bears about as much resemblance to actual cruelty as a teddy bear has to a grizzly).

It’s not as easy for the inhabitants of New Orleans to isolate themselves from Nature as it is for the inhabitants of most large cities; it is probably the greenest of all American cities, and the total percentage of ground covered with concrete there is very low indeed. The living Earth beneath the city does not accept her bondage lightly, and constantly expresses her displeasure by undermining houses, creating holes in the roadways, and introducing water into every place which is not hermetically sealed. Nor do the other life-forms who share the environment respect man-made borders; insects, reptiles and small mammals brazenly invade human dwellings on a scale unheard-of elsewhere, and even the plants slowly creep in while nobody is watching and destroy whatever gets in their way. And I haven’t even mentioned the hurricanes.

Despite all this some still try, shutting themselves up in climate-controlled offices all day and climate-controlled houses all night, and moving between the two as quickly as possible. I honestly think they’re in the minority, though, or at least they used to be, which is probably part of the reason neither neofeminism nor any other belief system which relies on rejection of Nature has ever caught on there (or anywhere else in the Deep South). And I never even tried to join their number, nor do I think I could have had I wanted to. The tides which ebb and flow in every woman were always particularly strong in me, and that wasn’t the only natural factor which was; the combination of my sinus problems and the bursitis in a cracked rib (incurred in an auto accident when I was in my late teens) allowed me to predict the weather with a high degree of accuracy for most of my twenties, and as I wrote in my column for last Halloween my spirits have always invariably lifted as autumn arrives and the leaves begin to turn.

October usually enjoys a particular sort of cool weather, a crisp breeziness quite unlike that one might experience on an early spring day or a comparatively warm winter one; this is October Weather, my name for that special atmospheric condition I associate with turning leaves and the imminent arrival of my birthday. In New Orleans I was often cheated of it; October Weather might not come ‘til November and then immediately depart, or some years it might not appear at all. In fact, one of the reasons I chose to move to the upper South from my native country was the promise of more distinct seasons, including a long, colorful autumn. The odd, late, chaotic autumns we’ve had the past few years due to the changing climate have caused me considerable annoyance, but they’re still more dependable than what I got in New Orleans so I reckon I can’t complain. But when that weather did arrive I was filled with a sort of wild, witchy joy; I wanted to stay out late, to suck the fragrant air into my lungs and fly through the night under the harvest moon with my hair streaming behind me. As a young teen I often sneaked out in the middle of the night to enjoy such weather, and after I arrived at UNO I would wander about the campus on such evenings or ride my bicycle to midnight movies at the Robert E. Lee Theater a few miles away. More than once I invited my cousin Jeff or whatever boy I was dating to moonlight picnics on such evenings; since UNO was largely a “commuter college” with a low resident population the campus was virtually deserted at night, so we had our pick of sites.

Jeff was a big fan of Van Morrison’s, and there were three of his songs which Jeff particularly associated with me: “Brown-Eyed Girl”, “Tupelo Honey” and the one which forms my epigram; one of the things which let me know that my husband might be “the one” was that he associated those same songs with me. And though as I age my reaction to October Weather isn’t nearly as strong as it was in my teens and twenties, on clear, cool October nights I still feel the urge to go out and dance in the dry leaves under the moon.

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Politicizing the Personal

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Words, tagged agency denial, BDSM, cosmetic surgery, fantasy, Japan, Madonna/whore, neofeminism, Norway, Politicizing the Personal, porn, psychology, stereotypes, tabula rasa, yin and yang on September 26, 2011| 51 Comments »

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. – Alice Walker

In 1970 Carol Hanisch published a second-wave feminist manifesto entitled “The Personal is Political”, and its title soon became a big feminist catchphrase. The only problem with that is, it’s a load of crap; usually, the personal is just personal, and declaring it to be political merely holds the door open for increasingly tyrannical intrusion into people’s private lives. The idea that “the personal is political” is borrowed from Marxist dogma and basically means that nearly any problem experienced by an individual woman is the result of “systematic oppression.” If she’s unhappy or has a screwed-up life it isn’t because she’s irrational, poor, uneducated, overly emotional, foolish or unlucky in the genetic lottery, or because she’s made bad choices, or because the world is intrinsically unfair and many people of both sexes are unhappy and have screwed-up lives; it’s because she is oppressed by the Patriarchy. This is, of course, a fundamentally defeatist, paranoid and narcissistic view which removes responsibility from the individual and places it into a social context that encourages permanent class warfare (or in this case, gender warfare). Since the two sexes are different by nature and will always be unequal in one way or another, this provided political feminists with a path to political power; women were essentially told that their situation was hopeless unless they supported the schemes of the feminist leadership in its brave and determined struggle against the Male Overlords.

There are many kinds of power, but the inherent simple-mindedness of second-wave feminism recognized only one type, political power, because it was the one political feminists craved and also the one women in the postwar era had least of. Power had to be portrayed as something entirely external to the individual, which helps to explain how neofeminism was able to take control of the movement so quickly; if women realized that one of the greatest (and biologically speaking, the greatest) forms of power, namely sexual power, was already ours from birth, the Neomarxist catechism would be revealed as absurd and organized political feminism would collapse. So neofeminists intentionally reversed the truth, portraying sex as something men used to control women rather than the other way around. Second-wave feminism had launched itself by proclaiming that a woman could not take power for herself; she had to be empowered from outside (by a benevolent government controlled or at least influenced by political feminists). Neofeminism merely established a dogma designed to cut women off from their own natural powers by alienating them from their own bodies and femininity, the sources of those powers. To use a concrete analogy, the only way to consistently sell baby formula is to dry up women’s own milk or to convince them that nursing is unhealthy, disgusting or morally wrong.

“Empowered” is a deceptively simple word; it seems straightforward enough until you realize its underlying assumptions. To “empower” someone is to grant her power; it automatically implies A) that she hasn’t got any in the first place, and B) that such power is the speaker’s to give. Using the word in an active sense (“we need to empower women”) establishes the speaker or his organization as the intrinsic superior and benefactor of the person or persons so “empowered”, and using the word in a passive sense (“an empowered woman”) robs the person so “empowered” of agency, reducing her to the passive recipient of someone else’s benevolence just as people were imagined to be “granted” rights by a king in archaic political theory. Consider the way bureaucrats from Western nations use the word in reference to the people of developing nations, and you will understand how neofeminists and politicized second-wave feminists view other women.

The word “disempowered” is equally patronizing because it implies that the one so “disempowered” (usually a woman) is a weak, passive, vegetable organism who can be “empowered” or “disempowered” at will by her political masters as easily as one installs or removes batteries from a toy. With all that in mind, take a look at this article by Tracy Clark-Flory from the September 12^th Salon:

…a new study investigates the link between a country’s relative gender equality and the degree of female “empowerment” in the X-rated entertainment it consumes. Researchers at the University of Hawaii focused on three countries in particular: Norway, the United States and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1^st, 15^th and (yikes) 54^th on the United Nations’ Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). To simplify their analysis, their library of smut was limited to explicit photographs of women “from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation.” Then they set out to evaluate each image on both a disempowerment and an empowerment scale, using respective measures like whether the woman is “bound and dominated” by “leashes, collars, gags, or handcuffs” or “whether she has a natural looking body.” Their hypothesis was that societies with greater gender equity will consume pornography that has more representations of “empowered women” and less of “disempowered women.” It turned out the former was true, but…the latter was not. “While Norwegian pornography offers a wider variety of body types — conforming less to a societal ideal that is disempowering to the average woman — there are still many images that do not promote a healthy respect for women,” the researchers explain…

All researchers have biases which negatively impact the objectivity of their studies, but it’s rare that any outside of “women’s studies” are so glaringly obvious. These academics are clearly laboring under the delusion that sexual desires are “socially constructed”, revealing a deep ignorance of biology and evolutionary psychology. Furthermore, they clearly accept without question insulting and ignorant neofeminist beliefs about BDSM, have what I can only interpret as bigotry against cosmetic surgery and promote the degrading collectivist notion (perhaps related to the neofeminist gestalt myth) that it is “unhealthy” for men to be attracted to whatever kind of women they’re attracted to because it might make less attractive women feel bad. Flory, who is generally pro-sex and pro-sex work, sees the flaws in these assumptions:

…One explanation might be that…cross-cultural biological imperatives are reflected in pornography. Some of the study’s disempowerment markers could be more a reflection of the gender disparity in porn’s audience. The researchers note, “In a large portion of hardcore pornography…the erect penis is the most important organ” and “women are often used as little more than receptacles for the penis.” Is that because of sexism or because porn viewers, who are largely men, identify with…the male member?

…You can’t so easily equate dominance with empowerment and submission with disempowerment. Take, as one example, that the researchers designate a woman in an “authoritative” position as a sign of empowerment. That formula can be easily upended — clearly, submission feels empowering to plenty of people. It’s also awfully subjective: The popular line within the BDSM community is that it’s the submissive that has all the power, because they’re the ones calling the shots…sex isn’t always empowering or disempowering, equitable or inequitable — it’s much too complicated for that.

The researchers’ appalling ignorance of BDSM is apparent in their interpretation of dominatrix characters as a sign of female “empowerment”, despite the fact that such characters are as much archetypal male fantasy figures as are female slaves. Actors play roles; to assume that an actress playing a dominatrix role is somehow more “empowered” than one in a sub role is as ridiculous as assuming that the actor playing a king in an historical drama must be the star simply because his character is more important inside the fantasy world of the movie. But the most important point to note is the researchers’ patronizing assumption that male porn viewers are so impressionable that their level of “respect for women” can essentially be programmed by the content of their wanking material, and that women are such passive, childlike beings that mere images on a screen can grant them “power” or take it away.

One Year Ago Today

“Imaginary Victims” examines the difficulty trafficking fetishists have in coming up with even a few poster children to represent the phantom multitudes upon which their propaganda depends.

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Inevitability

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged Aphrodite, archeofeminism, marriage, psychology, sisterhood, tabula rasa, yin and yang on August 27, 2011| 59 Comments »

When anything goes, it’s women who lose. – Camille Paglia

I’m sure most of you have noticed that all over the internet and even in the real world, feminists are bemoaning the fact that most young women nowadays don’t identify as feminists. Some of them disingenuously blubber “but feminists are only people who think men and women should be equal!” thus completely ignoring the excesses committed in the name of “feminism” by the neofeminists and those who let them take control of the feminist movement three decades ago. Others simper about “ingratitude” and puff themselves up about all the “victories” won by second-wave feminism, ignoring that A) as Thaddeus Russell points out, most of the important rights were won by whores, not feminists; B) other important rights (like woman suffrage) were won by first-wave feminists now long dead; C) the widespread employment of women throughout the early 20^th century (and especially in the Second World War) had already started an inexorable process of increasing equality of which second-wave feminism was more a symptom than a cause; and D) those rights which were indeed won by second-wave feminists are overshadowed by the damage they’ve done to gender relations in the Western world and especially in the United States. And then there are the neofeminists, shrieking about how all men are evil oppressors and sex is a tool of the Patriarchy; is it any wonder young girls who like men and enjoy life want to distance themselves as much as possible from these harpies?

It was inevitable that any philosophy whose entire rationale is dedicated to ignoring biology (and at its worst, driving a wedge between the sexes) would eventually fade away and die; Mother Nature will have Her way, and those who ignore Her do so at their own peril. But feminism isn’t gone yet, and the word is still a politically correct one even if the tenets attached to it are losing popularity, so we’re now seeing all sorts of ideas grouped together under the umbrella of “third wave feminism”, which collectively understands that there is such a thing as biology, that men and women are different, and that there is no single “correct” way for women to behave (which is the movement’s single greatest break from orthodox first- and second-wave feminism). So it’s not at all surprising to me to see a woman who clearly rejects “social construction of gender”, and advocates that young women reclaim our gender’s natural role as sexual gatekeepers, still wanting to call herself a feminist. Her name is Toni Nagy, the article in question appeared in Huffington Post on August 10^th, and while some of her phraseology is odd (by “dry humping” she seems to mean snogging and petting rather than literal dry humping) and she hits a few sour notes (such as using “whore” as a synonym for “slut” and failing to recognize the role actual whores play in mopping up the male sexual overflow), her general premise is sound and archeofeminist:

How many people’s mouths would you stick your finger in? A lot. I would stick my finger in a lot of people’s mouths. But how many people would you let stick their finger in your mouth? Not as many! There is a biological difference between the way women and men experience sex, and each gender should view and treat sex in its own way. I think women need a velvet rope and a self-important doorman for their vaginas, monitoring who gets access. If you’re not on the list, you are not coming inside. I am not suggesting a return to an archaic repression of female sexuality, expecting women to be virgins even after they have given birth. The double standard of the male stud and female slut is not only outdated, but also makes no sense. Who are all these guys sleeping with if no one is supposed to put out? Most likely any self-possessed woman is going to spend at least one period of her life on a whore tour and still have the t-shirt to match. Discovering different sides of your sexual self is often achieved through multiple partners, and I think sampling the variety is part of the human experience. But after you have indulged your inner whore, there comes a time to embrace your inner prude as well.

… The more you orgasm, the more oxytocin is released in your brain, which is the “bonding hormone.” Most likely, you will feel physically and physiologically attached to that guy whose penis was inside you. Go figure. Even if you think you don’t “want anything serious” you probably still wonder, question, ponder “where is this all going?” Of course, not all sex has to be about relationships, but denying the connection between emotions and sex is ignoring the complexity…That is why I am an advocate for dry humping. It honors the involvedness of sex, giving you time to actually sort out how you both feel about each other, but still leaves something to build up to. And the likelihood of you feeling like crap because a guy you wiggled around with never called is less than if he actually penetrated your panties. But if you are both attracted to each other, the dry humping session will only make you more so.

This is the thing about attraction. Because of birth control, be it medicinal or condoms, women have the freedom to sleep with men they would never procreate with. But the majority of studies indicate that baby making potential is the main facilitator of lust. From smell indicating a compatible immune system and gene pool for breeding, to pheromones, to symmetry, to signs of fertility. We are pushed by our animal instincts towards making more humans…Yet if you audition people with the dry hump, your restraint will not only benefit you, but your fellow female sisters as well. By being a little prude, you are helping the male species remember that being inside a woman’s body is actually a really big deal…Going home with someone who bought you a beer is hardly worth letting them inside your body. The harder a guy has to work to get into your pants, the better he will treat the girl wearing them. I don’t think I have ever regretted waiting to sleep with someone, but I sure as shingles have regretted sleeping with someone too soon.

Anyone who’s ever done sex work and talked to other girls or paid attention on hooker boards knows the truth of Nagy’s last point: as an older girl told me when I first started, “the less they pay, the more they want.” As I’ve discussed before, I would sometimes deal a little if the client was polite and claimed not to have $300, but the lower I went the less appreciative the client, and my standing advice for working girls is NEVER to charge less than $200 for any block of time, no matter how short; anything less than that is too close to free for most men to appreciate. My amateur sisters can learn from this; even though you don’t charge a set fee, you need to set some “price” (length of relationship, certain conditions being met, etc) and stick to it if you want the men you sleep with to actually appreciate you.

One Year Ago Today

“Marilyn” is the story of one of the first girls who worked for me, whom I still think about frequently…and rarely without tears.

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Social Construction of Eunuchs

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged censorship, cosmetic surgery, Europe, India, neofeminism, psychology, Social Construction of Eunuchs, Sweden, tabula rasa, transgender, yin and yang on July 18, 2011| 26 Comments »

The dream of reason produces monsters. – Francisco Goya

It is impossible to overstate the evil which springs from the dogma of “social construction of gender”, the discredited notion which teaches that the only natural differences between the sexes are physical ones, and that all psychological ones are “socially constructed”. Those who believe in this mythology ignore the evidence of nature and the discoveries of science in favor of promoting the view that if one raised a boy as a girl he would grow up to act like a girl, and vice-versa. The most shocking refutation of the doctrine was the case of David Reimer, a Canadian boy born in 1965 whose penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision and who, on the advice of “social construction of gender” fanatic John Money, was then raised as a girl. Money repeatedly lied about the case for years afterward, claiming the reassignment was 100% successful and that David (then called “Brenda”) showed no male traits whatsoever. In truth, the victim of Money’s evil, agenda-driven experiment was deeply maladjusted, bullied by both girls and boys and by the age of 13 was so deeply depressed that he told his parents he would commit suicide if they forced him to see Money again. The parents eventually told him the truth about his sex and he started living as a boy, but never recovered from the torture inflicted in the name of this bizarre theory and, faced with a dissolving marriage, committed suicide in 2004.

But despite the Reimer case and volume upon volume of anthropological, biological, psychological, biochemical, neurological and anecdotal evidence, monsters all over the world are still willing to sacrifice their children’s happiness (and perhaps their sanity) on the altar of this mad belief. The most vociferous proponents are of course the neofeminists, who simply don’t care how many lives they destroy in order to establish their asexual dystopia; this June 27^th story from the Daily Mail describes a preschool in Sweden (where else?) which is trying to force children to be asexual, androgynous beings by means of a bizarre regime which bans both pronouns and books about heterosexual couples or biological families:

A pre-school in Sweden has decided to stop calling children ‘him’ or ‘her’ in a bid to avoid gender stereotypes…as part of the [country’s] efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood…the taxpayer-funded school also carefully plans the colour and placement of toys and the choice of books to assure they do not fall into stereotypes. The school opened last year and is on a mission to break down gender roles – a core mission in the national curriculum for Swedish pre-schools…“Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing,” says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. “Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be”…Lego bricks and other building blocks are intentionally placed next to the kitchen, to make sure the children draw no mental barriers between cooking and construction. Meanwhile, nearly all the children’s books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children. There are no “Snow White,” “Cinderella” or other fairy tales.

Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Rajalin says the staff also try to help the children discover new ideas when they play. “A concrete example could be when they’re playing ‘house’ and the role of the mom already is taken and they start to squabble,” she says. “Then we suggest two moms or three moms and so on”…Staff at the school try to shed masculine and feminine references from their speech, including the pronouns him or her – ‘han’ or ‘hon’ in Swedish. Instead, they’ve have adopted the genderless [and synthetic] ‘hen’…

Jay Belsky, a child psychologist at the University of California, Davis, said he’s not aware of any other school like Egalia, and he questioned whether it was the right way to go. “The kind of things that boys like to do – run around and turn sticks into swords – will soon be disapproved of,” he said. “So gender neutrality at its worst is emasculating maleness.”

So Egalia gives the children “a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be,” unless of course the girls want to be “girlie, nice and pretty” or the boys “manly, rough and outgoing.” Obviously, encouraging children to be what they are is bad, but encouraging them to play at living in lesbian communes isn’t. The child psychologist quoted at the end is completely right; the doctrine that all children start from a unisex baseline invariably presumes that feminine behavior is the norm, because the vast majority of preschool and grammar school teachers (not to mention the vast majority of people who feel compelled to inflict social engineering on schoolchildren) are female. Male behavior is therefore automatically regarded as a deviation from the norm, a pathology to be “treated” with punishment and even medication.

Of course, that’s in the West; in India, rather than trying to emasculate boys they’re trying to masculinize girls. And they’re not limiting themselves to brainwashing toddlers like the Swedes; oh, no! The Indian approach is one of which Dr. Money would have approved, as described in this June 27^th article from the Telegraph:

Madhya Pradesh state government is investigating claims that up to 300 girls were surgically turned into boys in one city after their parents paid about £2,000 each for the operations. Women’s and children’s rights campaigners denounced the practice as a “social madness” that made a “mockery of women in India”. India’s gender balance has already been tilted in favour of boys by female foeticide – sex selection abortions – by families who fear the high marriage costs and dowries they may have to pay. There are now seven million more boys than girls aged under six in the country. Campaigners said the use of surgery meant that girls were no longer safe even after birth…Doctors confronted in the investigation claimed that girls with genital abnormalities were being sent to the city’s clinics to be “surgically corrected” and that only children born with both male and female sexual characteristics were eligible for the procedure. But campaigners said the parents and doctors were misidentifying the children’s conditions to turn girls into boys.

The surgery, known as genitoplasty, fashions a penis from female organs, with the child being injected with male hormones to create a boy. Dr V P Goswami, the president of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics in Indore, described the disclosures as shocking and warned parents that the procedure would leave their child impotent and infertile in adulthood. “Genitoplasty is possible on a normal baby of both the sexes but later on these organs will not grow with the hormonal influence and this will lead to their infertility as well as their impotency. It is shocking news and we will be looking into it and taking corrective measures,” he said. “Parents have to consider the social as well as the psychological impact of such procedures on the child”…

India is obviously far saner and more civilized than Sweden; whereas in the former this abomination is the result of base human traits like greed and ignorance, in the latter it is the result of a mechanistic social agenda. While the intelligentsia of India recognize it as madness, the intelligentsia of Sweden are either too brainwashed or too frightened to protest. And while the Indian government rightfully condemns mutilating children’s bodies and has ordered an investigation into the outrage, the Swedish government both encourages and finances a systematic attempt to mutilate children’s minds. But despite the differences, both of these forms of child abuse are the unnatural outgrowths of the anti-humanistic doctrine called social construction of gender.

One Year Ago Today

On July 18^th, 2010 I published the ever-popular “Modern Marriage”, in which I propose that modern marriages based in romance have a lot more in common with the extramarital affairs of the past than with traditional marriages based in economics.

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June Q & A

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, tagged agency denial, archeofeminism, East Asia, ethics, fantasy, marriage, neofeminism, oral sex, orgasm, psychology, tabula rasa, transgender, yin and yang on June 30, 2011| 12 Comments »

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers. – Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s time once again for me to answer reader questions! If you have one of your own, please email it to me and I’ll be happy to answer you to the best of my ability.

I wondered could you give me a quick definition of archeofeminism and how it differs from neofeminism?

What I call “archeofeminism” is the exact opposite of “neofeminism”. “Archeofeminism” (from the Greek “archeo-” meaning “old”) is the recognition that men and women are already socially equal by nature, and the only way in which we become socially unequal is by the actions of laws. Archeofeminists recognize that men and women are by our very natures different; we think differently, act differently and want different things, so though it’s good for a society to say “individuals can pursue whatever path they like,” it’s stupid to expect that large numbers of women will ever want to act and live like men, and forcing people to pretend otherwise is tyranny.

“Neofeminism” (from the Greek “neo-” meaning “new”) is the belief that there are no natural behavioral differences between the sexes and that all gender (other than genital dimorphism) is “socially constructed”. Neofeminists believe that if infant boys were “socialized” in the same way as girls they would act exactly like girls, even into manhood. Furthermore, since neofeminists don’t believe in sex differences they believe the female standard of behavior is the only “right” one, and that male behavior is therefore pathological. Paradoxically, they also believe that power systems arising from natural male behaviors (such as corporate and professional hierarchies and externalized validation) are preferable to less competitive female norms, and that women “should” seek externalized achievement, competition and validation as men do. The upshot of all this is that they advocate the brutal legal suppression of all traditional gendered behavior, whether public or private; they believe that women who make their livings by traditional female paths such as sex work or marriage should be forced into male-like careers, and that sex should be entirely controlled by the state so as to promote neofeminist ideas of “equality”. Ultimately, most of them would probably like to see the development of parthenogenesis so that men can be entirely eradicated.

Since you’re a former sex worker and current wife I’m interested in your take on the “Obedient Wives Club”, a bunch of wives who blame high divorce rates and the like on wives not satisfying their husbands. They’re obviously a fringe group, but I get the sense they’re getting at something real. How many husbands with neo-feminist influenced wives are unhappy?

In some aspects of their beliefs they’re in the general vicinity of something real, while in others they’re pretty distant. It’s obviously a dramatic overstatement to claim that “all” male-female issues are the fault of rebellious wives; if couples took the trouble to find out what each needed from the other and to clearly set forth their expectations and make honest compromises and realistic promises, there would be a lot fewer unhappy marriages. IMHO a lot of the dissatisfaction and unhappiness of modern women derives from neofeminist teachings, specifically the ones which concentrate on a woman’s “rights” in a marriage while pretending that the man has none, the denial that relationship sex is transactional, and the refusal to accept that most men are by nature dominant and tend to feel unhappy and restless if they feel their lives are out of control. A wife who constantly argues about everything and insists that even the smallest details of domestic arrangements be negotiated (except for sex, over which she retains absolute control) is going to make her husband miserable…and usually herself as well.

I’m sure you’ve read about how transsexuals and closeted homosexuals are usually unhappy as teenagers; they have far higher suicide rates than other adolescents and their early relationships are nearly always troubled. Why? Because they’re trying to be something they’re not. When one is forced by social pressure to conform to a mode of behavior at odds with one’s guts, one is bound to be miserable and to make others miserable as well. Certainly there are some women who really do prefer to “wear the pants” in a relationship, or who really do enjoy discussing everything to death, but the majority of women are unconsciously disappointed when their husbands allow them to run all over them, and it rots the relationship from within. This is because most women are attracted to strength and competence in men, and find male weakness and submissiveness repulsive. The neofeminists claim that’s due to “social construction of gender”, but tell that to lions, bears, elephants and most other mammals. Most women who try to convince themselves that they don’t want a strong man, and indeed tell every man within earshot the same thing, are miserable if they get what they claim to want and miserable if they don’t because their minds and their spirits are going north and south. This does not mean I believe this club is right in espousing unquestioning obedience; though some women can handle that sort of relationship and even thrive in it, it isn’t for everyone. Most women absolutely do want their voices to be heard and their wishes considered; they just don’t want a spineless wimp.

For the sexual part, they’re pretty close to the mark, though they again assign too much weight to the woman’s behavior. Men crave sexual variety, so even if a wife gives a man everything he wants in bed he may still stray, and if he does so she had better hope he goes to one of those prostitutes the club hopes to drive out of business rather than some available bit of amateur tail. I do think that most men’s need for variety can be satisfied by sexual experimentation and fantasy inside the marriage, though, and that a wife who gives a husband what he wants in bed as often as he wants it, dramatically increases the chance for a happy, fulfilling marriage for both parties.

I haven’t had very many sexual relationships in my life, and have become so used to masturbation that I can’t have orgasms with other people. I would very much like to be able to orgasm with my girlfriend, but haven’t been able to yet; do you think that a professional sex worker could teach me to have an orgasm with a partner?

I think it’s certainly possible that an experienced pro might be able to teach you, but of course it depends on your finding the right one. I suspect your problem might be due to performance anxiety, which means a man worrying that he won’t do a good job, that his partner will be unsatisfied or even look down on him (especially if he climaxes too quickly). Men who suffer from this worry so much that they often can’t climax at all, which is much worse than coming quickly! The main cause of the problem (which is far more common than it used to be) is that men are constantly bombarded with the ridiculous idea that women just want to be pounded for hours, and that if the man orgasms too quickly the woman is angry. While in many cases that may be true to a degree, what men think is “too quickly” and what is really too quickly are two different things; as long as a man can keep going for five minutes, that’s plenty for most girls no matter what porn tells you (especially if he gives her plenty of foreplay). Many women can’t even achieve orgasm from intercourse at all, and for those oral or manual stimulation is much more important than an interminable simulation of a piston in a cylinder.

The reason a good pro might help is that you don’t have to care about her satisfaction; she is there to help you with YOUR needs, and therefore you can orgasm any time you like without having to worry as you might with a woman you love. It may take a few sessions before you can achieve orgasm with an escort, and you’ll have to decide for yourself whether several sessions with one girl or with different girls might be better (my instinct is toward the latter because you don’t really want to get too comfortable with one woman; the idea is for her to be a stranger). If I’m right, once you are able to orgasm with a woman you should be able to achieve it with your girlfriend because the mental block will be broken. It’s certainly worth a try, and if it doesn’t work you can always try a sex therapist. The most important thing is that you don’t get discouraged; if your anxieties are causing the problem, the more you worry the worse it will get.

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