Traffic Jam | The Honest Courtesan

Posts Tagged ‘Traffic Jam’

In the News (#680)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, asset seizure, Aversions, brothels, California, Canada, censorship, Check Your Premises, clowns, cops, dating, drugs, escort review sites, Facebook, Feminine Pragmatism, Finding What Isn’t There, Florida, Frequently Told Lies, Germany, hysteria, I Saw My Brain, Italy, language, Latin America, law, male prostitutes, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Now They Notice, Panopticon, politicians, pragmatism, prohibitionist myths, Pyrrhic Victory, racism, rape, Send In the Clowns, South Carolina, stripping, surveillance, The Prudish Giant, To Molest and Rape, Traffic Jam, Uncommon Sense, United Kingdom, universal criminality, Washington DC on October 12, 2016| 3 Comments »

Sex workers are getting paid for what we do – you ain’t. – Miranda Kane

Aversions

The older I get, the more deeply weird (and frankly, kind of disgusting) the idea of giving strangers sex for free seems to me. So I’m fascinated by the looking-glass prohibitionist notion that being paid for sex is somehow degrading, especially when I read stuff like this about what amateur dating (which I’ve never really engaged in per se) is like:

…It is not, in fact, sex-work that puts me off men. It’s dating them. When I was a sex worker, when a client came to see me, he knew I was a luxury item. My Dos and Do Nots were clear from the start, and if he asked me to do something I didn’t want to, I said no and that’s as far as it went…sex workers see the best part of men – they’re polite, friendly…On a date I’m just one click away from rejection…The sex workers of Twitter created the hashtag of #banfreebies, an ironic take on what people expect of us as obviously being so “oppressed and exploited”. Remember that, won’t you, the next time he rolls over and starts snoring and you have to bring out the Rampant Rabbit…

And since I’m bisexual, I feel it needs to be noted that women aren’t really much better.

Check Your Premises

It’s pretty bad when they can’t even maintain their own paradigm for more than a sentence:

Nine people were arrested in Suisun City [California] in a human trafficking operation…Detectives posed online as would-be ‘johns’ to contact prostitutes [that they pretended to believe to be] underage…Once the…sex workers arrived, they were [arrested] and [cops tried to pressure them into claiming to be]…victims of sex trafficking…Seven women…between the ages of 18 and 28 were arrested…

Uncommon Sense

Is there any other kind of work that is so consistently treated as a subject for abstract “debate” by outsiders?

German porn star Natalie Hot will appear in court…to defend her right to work as a “webcam girl”…from her detached house in Ampfing, Bavaria. The town is home to 6,000 residents, several of whom have lodged legal complaints over their neighbour’s chosen profession. Hot is challenging a decision by local authorities that prevented her from undressing on camera, threatening a penalty of €2,000 if she doesn’t adhere to the ban. Their reasoning is that her house is in a specific land-use area, which does not allow for commercial use…A judge will now rule whether the room Hot uses for her work could be considered a “home office”, a label which would allow her to continue her work…

Finding What Isn’t There

You know how freshwater crabs wave their claws around and foam at the mouth when one throws them in salt water to purge them? Picture that:

There are no statistics to back up her claims, but the country’s Chief Immigration Officer Annette Mark believes the sex trafficking problem in Antigua & Barbuda is more prevalent than perceived…Mark [fantasizes that] nightclubs and strip clubs…are to be blamed for the [nonexistent epidemic]…She said…“what is unfortunate is that the women who come seem to be willing participants, so it’s difficult to [force them to pretend] that they are victims of trafficking”. According to Mark, while women [use sex work]…as a means of income, it is part of a slave trade…

Pyrrhic Victory

Not a police state, no sirree:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced an ambitious plan to [equip]…10 bridges and tunnels leading into the city…with facial recognition and license plate reading technology, giving police a comprehensive record of every car making the crossing…

I Saw My Brain

More terrifying insanity from the pocket police-state that is Polk County, Florida:

If you happen to be heading over to Polk County Florida, be sure to check to see if you have anything on or about your person that may have someone’s business name on it…That’s what Tim Troller found out when an ever vigilant deputy saw a Sunshine State Dairy Farms milk crate strapped to his BMX bike. Polk County takes broken windows policing to the extreme, a milk crate strapped to your bike is a major indicator that you are a career criminal, or as the Polk County Sheriff’s Office spokes-prevaricator Debbie Horstman put it, undoubtedly with a straight face… “Deputies are…looking for people who are doing even the smallest crime, because, what we’ve learned is, those who will go out and steal a milk crate, for example, are the same people who are probably breaking into cars, breaking into your house”…

Frequently Told Lies

Caty Simon on the “sex work leads to drug use” myth:

You’ve heard the story: A troubled woman prostitutes herself. To numb the pain of belonging to this sordid underground world, she begins to use drugs…and her life continues to spiral out of control…“Multiple studies repeatedly and consistently … refute this narrative,” [says] Melbourne-based sex worker Fae Adams…In a study conducted in Sydney in the 1990s, for example, a sample group of 120 sex workers were found to be lighter drinkers than a sample group of women health care workers. They were only 15 percent less likely to abstain from illegal drugs than the control groups of students and health workers. And a 2002 British study correlated “problematic” drug use among sex workers with teenage drug use pre-dating entry into the industry, as well as homelessness and convictions…Yet the trope about using drugs to make sex work tolerable persists—and many drug-using sex workers find it infuriating because of how it reduces and flattens their lives and strips them of their choices…

Feminine Pragmatism (#553)

Stupid assumptions about sex work often result in incredibly stupid concepts like the idea that working independently is somehow noteworthy, or that making a law against one aspect of the work is the same as criminalization:

Italy has yet to exit from…the worst [recession] in its postwar history — and the protracted crisis has seen the number of Italian sex workers surge more than 26 percent from 2007 to 2015…The extended downturn also has fueled a proliferation of “good” women generating badly needed income by engaging in prostitution on the side as “house practitioners”…35 percent of the 20,000 prostitutes in Italy, or some 7,000 women, are house practitioners…Michel Venturelli, a criminologist who has researched the issue…[says] “It’s do-it-yourself domestic sex work”…The Italian parliament banned prostitution in 1958, shuttering brothels. Since then it’s been chaotic in the sex-for-sale industry…

No, the parliament didn’t “ban prostitution”, as the article itself mentions later; it banned brothels, but even while those were legal many if not most sex workers worked outside of them. The only “chaos” is in the minds of cops, prohibitionists and reporters who listen to them.

Traffic Jam (#619)

Remember what happened the last time Minnesota “authorities” claimed they had busted a “sex trafficking gang”?

About a dozen people were arrested in cities across the U.S…for running what authorities [pretend is] a sophisticated sex trafficking operation in which hundreds of women were brought from Thailand to America under fraudulent visas and forced to work as prostitutes to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in bondage debts. The women – including one who was forced to have sex with strangers for 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week- were not allowed to move about freely and were “effectively modern day sex slaves”…The arrests, along with the recent arrest of the organization’s boss in Belgium, will effectively dismantle the operation, said Alex Khu, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Minneapolis…

You may also recall that “sophisticated operations” is the excuse pigs use to rape sex workers. And if you haven’t yet read Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s analysis of very similar claims made against Seattle-area Korean sex workers and clients, now would be the time. See more of Liz’s work below.

To Molest and Rape

The ever-vigilant Liz Brown looks at several cases of rape & sexual abuse by cops, several of which I haven’t yet covered:

…Allen Large…of the Horry County [South Carolina] Sheriff’s Office…was recently indicted by a grand jury on five counts of…[raping] multiple victims…Large…is also the subject of multiple civil lawsuits accusing him of activity such as sexual assaulting a woman who came to him to report a sexual assault, sexual harassment, and threatening to interfere with a woman’s child-visitation rights if she wouldn’t participate in nude “catfight” videos…Horry County [cop] Luke Green was indicted for [raping a sex worker]…during a prostitution arrest and the same with a confidential police informant…On September 21, New Jersey [cop] Ed Leopardi [committed]…suicide…[because he] was under investigation for [anally raping] a sex worker at a Trenton police K-9 training facility…”then allegedly wiped his penis on the headquarters’ curtains”…

The Prudish Giant (#641)

It’s impossible to express how much this delights me:

On [October 4^th] Facebook introduced Marketplace, a new section on its mobile app that allowed its users to buy and sell things with their friends and strangers. By the evening, the social giant was apologizing for an issue with the section, which featured some posts that would not have been out of place on the…Silk Road…Illegal drugs. Dogs. Guns. Sexual services. Baby hedgehogs…Mary Ku, a director for product management…who had cheerfully introduced the Marketplace app in a blog post earlier in the day, issued a statement saying that a technical issue had prevented Facebook’s reviewing system from identifying posts that violated its commerce policies and community standards…

Now They Notice (#666)

Note that we aren’t hearing a peep out of Gay, Inc about this any more:

The chief executive officer of a once-popular male escort website pleaded guilty…to promoting prostitution in a federal case that prompted accusations of anti-gay bias…Under a plea deal, Hurant agreed not to appeal a sentence of two years or less in prison. His company also cannot appeal a penalty of $10 million or less…

Send In the Clowns

Watching how the clown panic develops is an example of a moral panic in miniature. For example, note how the skateboard carried by this hoaxer myseteriously transformed itself into an “ax” for a more imaginative witness. Everybody wants to get into the act; sales of clown masks have soared by 300% from this month last year, and the website Atlas Obscura has produced this interactive map of sightings which they say will be regularly updated. They’ll need to expand it, though; the hysteria has spread to Canada and also the UK:

A masked man carrying a knife left a group of children aged 11 and 12 “upset and distressed” when he jumped out on their way to [school in]…County Durham…in Suffolk, a boy “younger than a teenager” was chased by “several people dressed as clowns”…Tom Jackson…a first year student at Leeds Beckett University [said]…he was “very scared” when he saw a man dressed as a clown near an underpass…Northumbria Police issued an appeal and warning after a series of incidents in Newcastle involving people dressed as clowns jumping out and scaring schoolchildren. A 13-year-old boy was arrested…following [the] reports…In Essex, two…schoolgirls were approached by two people dressed as clowns who asked them if they wanted to attend a birthday party…People on social media have also reported clown sightings in Cheshire, North Wales, Dundee, Norwich, London, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield. A man dressed as a clown “wearing a hockey mask and a blood-stained poncho” was captured on camera in…Greater Manchester…

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In the News (#656)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Across the Pond, agency denial, brothels, Catholicism, cell phones, censorship, Check Your Premises, dehumanization, drivers, Florida, Guinea Pigs, hotels, If It Were Legal, internet, King of the Hill, lawheads, left-right myth, Little Boxes, Madonna/whore, No Escape, Ohio, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, Pennsylvania, porn, prisons, prohibitionist myths, propaganda, rape, Schadenfreude, streetwalkers, stripping, surveillance, Thailand, The Pro-Rape Coalition, Torture Chamber, Traffic in Nonsense, Traffic Jam, United Kingdom, What a Week!, Wisconsin on July 20, 2016| 3 Comments »

When something goes wrong, we never call [the cops]…we know they will arrest us. – Maria, a Romanian sex worker in London

Check Your Premises

Florida cops claim to be “helping” marginalized women by brutalizing them and giving them criminal records which will make them forever ineligible for on-the-books jobs:

Seven women have been arrested in a prostitution operation along US 19 in Pasco County…Many of the women have been arrested before for the same crime…Captain Chris Beaman…said prostitutes lead dangerous lives, sometimes targeted by serial killers or human traffickers…Beaman said business owners are afraid of becoming victims of crimes themselves…

The article goes on to say that some business owners are “elated” at the pogrom, which is exactly why we now live in a police state.

Across the Pond

Is anyone really surprised by the fact that young migrant women bear the brunt of police harassment under a system which declares them infantile “victims”?

…Between 2010 and 2014, the number of young women [18 to 25] the police arrested in London for prostitution-related crime nearly trebled…The increase contrasts with steep falls in the number of arrests of men and across all the other ages for crimes related to prostitution…Laura Watson, from the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), calls the rise in arrests of young women “horrifying…The police use public concern for young people’s wellbeing to justify targeting and ‘saving’ young people from working as sex workers by arresting them…No alternatives are given, just criminalization”…treating young prostitutes as victims does more harm than good…

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs

When will lawheads learn that whores cannot be made to vanish by proclamation?

Thailand’s…sex industry is under fire, with the tourism minister [fantasizing she can] rid the country of its ubiquitous brothels and a spate of police raids in recent weeks…Those who work in the industry say curbs on commercial sex services would hurt a flagging economy…Tourism Minister Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul played down the role of the sex industry in drawing visitors…”We want Thailand to be about quality tourism. We want the sex industry gone,” she said…

Would somebody from Las Vegas care to school the minister on the likely outcome of her Disneyfication fantasy?

If It Were Legal (#27)

Let’s hope this myth is dead, or at least nearly so, by the next election:

As thousands prepare to descend on Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention, a coalition is helping spread the word about a crime that often accompanies large gatherings…Experts say trafficking tends to spike around large-scale events…”It’s definitely a concern,” Hugh Organ, associate executive director at Covenant House PA, said…”But it’s not anything like the Super Bowl.” The Super Bowl is the top human trafficking event in the United States, Organ said…

Of course, other people whose names don’t sound like something Bart Simpson would ask Moe the Bartender to page are saying similar things about Republicans:

…The top strip clubs in Cleveland, Ohio, are all preparing for the inevitable influx of horny, cash-flinging Republican out-of-towners who will drop by during next week’s GOP convention…A huge gathering of drunk, lustful Republicans—much like drunk, lustful Democrats, or drunk, lustful registered independents, or drunk, lustful Green Party members—is sure to be great for business…Jeff Kallam, general manager at the Crazy Horse Cleveland strip club…insists…“Republicans love strippers, so we’re just hoping to make some money”…

Traffic Jam (#29)

“Pimp” classification schemes are some of the most painfully stupid tropes of this whole panic:

…The Empower Youth Program…[has] identified five “disguises” that a person looking to exploit someone may take on to gain trust.
1 – Pretender — Someone who pretends to be something s/he is not, such as a boyfriend, a big sister, a father, etc.
2 – Provider — Someone who offers to take care of an individual’s needs, such as for clothes, food, a place to live, etc or their wants, like cool cell phones, purses, parties, etc.
3 – Promiser — Someone who promises access to great things, like an amazing job, a glamorous lifestyle, travel, etc.
4 – Protector — Someone who uses physical power or intimidation to protect (but also control) an individual.
5 – Punisher — Someone who uses violence and threats to control an individual. When the previous disguises have been exhausted, an exploitative person often becomes a Punisher to maintain control…

King of the Hill

If interstate highways are so dangerous, why aren’t prohibitionists calling for them to be banned?

The internet makes commercial sex largely invisible, but northeast Wisconsinites need only pull up a map and draw a line down Interstate 41 to see where much of it happens. The corridor of cities along I-41 — Milwaukee, Fond du Lac, Oshkosh, Appleton and Green Bay — is not only convenient for those working the sex trade, but is another form of control for a pimp, since women and girls who don’t feel familiar with their surroundings are less likely to flee. “It’s a major thoroughfare,” said Carl Waterstreet, a [moron with a penchant for stating the obvious]…

Torture Chamber

Calling a prison an “immigration centre” doesn’t make it any less of a prison:

The Home Office is refusing to reveal if any female detainees have been sexually assaulted or raped inside Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre…A member of staff reportedly told a newspaper that “disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests” of people involved with Yarl’s Wood such as Serco, the private company that runs the facility…

Schadenfreude (#434)

Super-ally Anne Elizabeth Moore has published a new book, collecting her comic-strip-format exposes of the deep connection between the rescue and garment industries:

…The through line of Threadbare is that, due to a combination of US trade policies with developing nations…and cultural restrictions on women working outside the home, the garment industry is the only legal job available to the majority of women in the world. But…when there are no other legal job opportunities…women will do what they can to get by…So, where the garment trade exists, there is generally a healthy sex trade as well, and it’s often tolerated or legal until the US steps in and criminalizes it, often as a rider in trade deals. These are presented as “anti-trafficking” measures…the garment industry supports the arrests of, and finances the supposed rehabilitation of, women who leave the garment trade, forcing them to return to these low-paying, high-risk jobs that more often than not include a likelihood of sexual exploitation…

Little Boxes (#504)

Sex workers who pretend they aren’t are almost as bad as prohibitionists:

There’s been plenty written about the Power of Human Touch…That’s the concept of the professional cuddling company Snuggle Buddies…Professional cuddling is not meant to be sexual. It’s a point [Lisa] VanArsdale can’t emphasize enough, though she seems aware of the fact that clients may not fully understand, even when respecting the rules…The Snuggle Buddies website addresses these rules plainly in the contract its clients must agree to electronically. Clothes are required, sexual requests are forbidden, and anyone who doesn’t abide by the cuddling contract—even with rogue questions asked via email—is blacklisted…Strip clubs and prostitutes offer the fulfillment of more promiscuous desires, anyway…

Every sex worker has some kinds of physical contact she won’t allow; having an especially long and/or strict list doesn’t magically make you into a non-whore.

What a Week! (#648)

It’s a “shock”, except to people who habitually go through life with their heads outside of their own rectal cavities:

Dr Emily Cooper…carried out dozens of interviews…which she said “smashed” her preconceived ideas about massage parlours…and how they affect people’s lives…“They evoke feelings of safety and security via their often 24-hour presence, they are distractions from the mundane hours of work, they contribute economically via the use of taxi services and other amenities for clients and sex workers, and finally, a role that is never reported, the sex workers are also neighbours and friends who ‘put the bins out like everybody else’”…

Guinea Pigs (#650)

If you think that American whores don’t have to worry about prohibitionist nuns as our Irish sisters have to, think again:

Through a $100,000 matching grant the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph has helped the Exchange Initiative and two developers create TraffickCam, an app that helps [cops hunt down sex workers like animals]…TraffickCam allows anyone with a smartphone to help [expand universal surveillance] by uploading photos of hotel rooms when they travel…Sex [workers sometimes] post photos of [themselves] in hotel rooms in their online advertisements. [Cops] can use these…to find [sex workers to arrest]…

Traffic in Nonsense (#651)

NPR is a hotbed of empty-headed prohibitionism, so it was only a matter of time before they lauded “Truckers Against Trafficking”:

…”Trafficking happens everywhere,” [Kylla] Lanier says. “It’s happening in homes, in conference centers, at schools, casinos, truck stops, hotels, motels, everywhere. You know, it’s an everywhere problem, but truckers happen to be everywhere.” And these days TAT stickers, wallet cards and posters — showing a phone number for a sex trafficking hotline — are becoming ubiquitous in the trucking industry. TAT [indoctrinates] drivers to try to spot sullen, hopeless-looking children, teens and young adults. Perhaps they’re wearing revealing clothing, or maybe have tattoos like bar codes or men’s names that might indicate ownership…

The Pro-Rape Coalition (#653)

Pro-censorship loon wants parents to panic about “artificial necrophilia”. I am not making this up:

…Internet pornography is a real problem for the 66 million American parents with children under 18. Parents don’t have to believe that such material is a direct cause of sexual violence to be driven a little crazy by it. It’s bad enough that it’s giving our sons and daughters some very creepy ideas about how they’re supposed to look and act…Two bills passed by Congress to restrict minors’ access to pornography over the past two decades were struck down by the Supreme Court because they infringed on adults’ First Amendment rights…In addition to making pornography hard to contain, the internet is making it weirder and weirder…The fetish that’s trending right now…is necrophilia — “artificial snuff films”…I…don’t want my preteens watching actors having sex with corpses, even fake corpses, before they’ve begun to date…

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In the News (#632)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged Acting and Activism, Alaska, Blunt Instrument, brothels, cops, Cops and Robbers, Divided We Fall, Doubling Down, Droit du Seigneur, escort services, hysteria, I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now, law, LGBT rights, Maine, Minnesota, Monsters, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, prohibitionist myths, racism, rescue industry, Safe Targets, stripping, Texas, The Public Eye, The Rescuers, The Widening Gyre, Traffic Jam, transgender, Virginia, Washington DC on April 23, 2016| 3 Comments »

The only issue is that the people having sex are consenting to it and anything else is an arbitrary moral judgement which no one has the right to make. – Stephanie Farnsworth

The Rescuers

Harassing streetwalkers to scare away their clients has become a popular “Christian” pastime:

Valerie Carter…has been prowling some of the toughest highways in Richmond, Virginia…for the past eight years. She and her “streetwalking ministry” volunteers look for women and girls caught up in the local sex trade……they…pray with the women, hug them, give them a list of resources to help them get out of the trade. They keep the visits short to avoid putting the women at risk of beatings from their pimps…Carter says. “No one dreamed about being in this kind of business.” But they are in it, most of them unwillingly. Someone else makes money by exploiting them, whether it’s a pimp or a trafficker…

Acting and Activism

Apparently, she’s less human rights lawyer and more Hollywood propagandist these days:

Amal Clooney took her first trip to Dallas to…[speak] before a sold-out crowd at the annual New Friends New Life luncheon…The event raised more than $1 million for the anti-trafficking organization, which [claims to] offer…counseling, housing and other services to 1,400 formerly trafficked teens and women every year…

In actuality, the “services” this organization “offers” are the usual things: feel-good bullshit like art therapy and a photocopied list of government welfare programs.

Droit du Seigneur

I just love watching them eat their own:

Federal prosecutors…have indicted two DEA employees for moonlighting as strip club owners and then purportedly lying about it to their bosses…Special Agent David Polos and Greg Glover, a telecommunications specialist, have been charged with conspiracy and making false statements in connection with the forms they submitted to renew their national security clearances…Polos and Glover conspired to conceal their ownership of the New Jersey strip joint, “Twins Go-Go Lounge”, and that Polos also failed to disclose an “intimate relationship” with one of its foreign dancers that lasted for months…the government [alleges]…prostitution, drug use, employment of illegal immigrants, and running the club during “DEA business hours”…

Divided We Fall

Go, Stephanie Farnsworth!

The fact that many LGBT people end up in sex work is an issue often overlooked rather conveniently by many activists and charities. Sex work is still talked about in moralizing terms, and the…image of the LGBT world in recent campaigns has been that of white cisgender gay people in long term relationships, often with children…The heart of the demand for LGBT rights is the idea that all people should be granted autonomy over their lives and bodies, that anyone should be allowed to sleep with who they choose and that it only concerns the people in the relationship and not the government or bigots…People enter into sexual relationships for all kinds of reasons. It is rarely a fairytale of two people falling in love. Sometimes it is for fun, but many engage in [transactional] sex…or…to shut their partner up. The list is endless and every reason is valid…It is simply hypocritical for LGBT activists to fight for bodily autonomy but deny it to sex workers, and given the huge numbers of people within the community who engage in sex work it also throws a lot of LGBT people under the bus…

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

…Norman Ochs is facing charges for allegedly hiring prostitutes…The 76-year-old was charged…with four crimes. Each misdemeanor count carries up to a 93-day jail sentence…

Blunt Instrument

Massage parlors are popular targets of “anti-trafficking” pogroms because they’re low-hanging fruit and the sex workers, nearly always immigrants, can easily be pressured to “co-operate” or be deported:

…federal law enforcement has rebranded as a sort of national ministry for vice prevention…Department of Homeland Security (DHS) investigators and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials conducted a widespread raid on Korean massage parlors in New York City, which the feds allege were…fronts for commercial sexual activity…11 massage-parlor owners were…charged with conspiracy to launder money and to violate the federal Travel Act…informants…who…[are] “cooperating with law enforcement in the hope of receiving a more lenient sentence”…[say] the alleged prostitution…was not being forced upon the staff. Any money earned from such endeavors was split between workers and business owners, and workers were free to come and go as they pleased…Nonetheless, the indictment refers to the massage parlors as “commercial sex trafficking businesses”…

Monsters

Though the reporter couldn’t resist mentioning a past criminal charge, at least NBC refrained from publishing her mugshot: “…a transgender woman who may have been working as a prostitute…Keyonna Blakeney…was found dead, with trauma to the upper body, in a [hotel in] Montgomery County [Maryland]…”

Cops and Robbers

The rescue industry provides many opportunities for wealthy white folks to play cowboy:

Adam LaRoche is a 36-year-old who played Major League baseball for 12 seasons before causing a ruckus by retiring earlier this year…the first baseman, a conservative Christian, “spent 10 days in November in Southeast Asian brothels, wearing a hidden camera and doing undercover work to help rescue underage sex slaves”…LaRoche…[and] Milwaukee Brewers pitcher…Blaine Boyer… “tried to determine the age of the girls…and identify their bosses”…

Safe Targets (#512)

My friend Tara Burns, still doggedly fighting for sex workers in Alaska, with the help of Maxine Doogan of ESPLERP:

…What Burns and Maxine Doogan really want is for prostitution to be decriminalized. That’s the mission of the advocacy group they started, Community United for Safety and Protection (CUSP)…[but in the meantime] they’re after the next best thing: improved safety and protection for those in Alaska’s sex industry and equal protection as citizens under the law…The two women…stayed in Juneau the entire legislative session, pushing for the passage of Senate Bill 21…[which] grants prostitutes immunity for prosecution when they come forward as a victim or witness of a violent crime…

Doubling Down

This is mostly just ignorant cheerleading for a do-nothing law, but it contains a repetition of the moronic statement, “It is estimated that here in the United States more than 100,000 children are victims of human sex trafficking each year.” For an analysis of what that would actually look like in the real world, click on the subtitle above. I reckon it’s a good thing Aleeshia Carroll is majoring in social work, because basic math is obviously far out of her grasp.

The Widening Gyre (#616)

Misinterpreting ordinary interactions is common at the height of a moral panic:

The propaganda-created panic over sex trafficking in your own backyard!!!! has claimed yet another victim…Amanda Kalidy…was shopping at Target [in Edmond, OK] with her 4-year-old daughter when another young girl began following them and repeatedly asking her daughter for candy. Kalidy says she asked the other child where her mom was, but the girl, who looked about 9 years old, did not answer. Later the girl offered her daughter some gum. That’s when Kalidy noticed a “strange” man nearby. Obviously, the only explanation for the situation is that the man wanted to steal Kalidy’s daughter so he could sexually exploit her and was using this other child as bait…She reported the incident to a Target manager, who allegedly told her that that’s “what [sex traffickers] do is target places like Target.” For the record, there have been zero reported cases of sex traffickers kidnapping children from Target in the history of the United States…

The Public Eye (#618)

Color me unsurprised:

The Las Vegas Madam: The Escorts, The Clients, The Truth is the tell-all memoir of Jami Rodman, the madam who came to fame by employing…Suzy Favor Hamilton...this book was…written more to play to outsiders’ expectations than to advocate for the people Rodman worked with…What really got to me, though, wasn’t the manner in which Rodman chose which stories to tell, focusing on titillating accounts such as nonconsent roleplays gone wrong and customers with pedophilic ageplay fetishes. It was her disdainful attitude toward other sex workers and the industry…the book certainly doesn’t foster sex worker solidarity, nor does it paint a nuanced picture of escorts…At one point, Rodman cites statistics from [Melissa Farley‘s] “Prostitution Research”, a site which is heavily affiliated with rescue industry organizations…it became painfully clear to me that she was buying into the flawed statistics, salacious reporting, and misleading accounts of the wider industry put forward by abolitionists rather than trusting her own sex work experiences and those of the many women she worked with whose lives stand in direct contrast to prohibitionist tropes. It’s funny that she quotes a website which would label her a trafficker…

Traffic Jam (#619)

Of course, even if Weyker and the department lose, the money won’t come out of their pockets. But the more lawsuits against the cops, the better:

A dozen or more people who say they were harmed by a discredited sex trafficking case soon could be suing the St. Paul Police Department and Sgt. Heather Weyker, according to the attorney representing…Yassin Abdirahman Yusuf [who] is seeking $20 million in damages for the more than four years he spent in jail on sex trafficking charges based on exaggeration and lies…[Attorney Robert] Bennett said he has another nine or 10 people preparing to sue, and other lawyers have several more. Earlier this month, Hamdi Ali Osman…filed the first suit arising from the dismissed charges, seeking $12 million…

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In the News (#619)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, activism, agency denial, Alabama, Arizona, Australia, BDSM, Birth of a Movement, California, Checklist, cops, drugs, Europe, Florida, France, gangs, Germany, hysteria, Imagine the Sky, law, Minnesota, New Excuse, Peeping Toms, prohibitionist myths, racism, rape, Romania, Rooted in Racism, Russia, sacred prostitutes, sex rays, sexting, Size Matters, South Carolina, teachers, Tennessee, Think of the Children!, Traffic Jam, Twitter, Uncommon Sense, universal criminality, Universally Criminal updates, violence vs. sex workers, Wise Investment on March 9, 2016| 8 Comments »

Sex workers are still most commonly depicted in the mainstream media as victims, pests or, in the odd case, saints. – Eurydice Aroney

Think of the Children!

That the pictures were stolen is immaterial; she was fired for having a sex life:

A South Carolina high-school teacher may be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after a student stole her cellphone and distributed partially nude photos from it around the school. Administrators say she should have password-protected the phone. The male student grabbed the phone from…Leigh Ann Arthur’s desk while she was making required…rounds between classes…he went through Arthur’s photos, eventually finding some sexually oriented shots that Arthur says she took for her husband. By the time she returned to the classroom, the student was texting the photos to other students. According to Arthur, he told her: “Your day of reckoning is coming.” One might think that the student would at least face disciplinary action…if not criminal charges of some sort. But thus far, the school has not moved to hold the 16-year-old student accountable at all. Arthur, however, is another story…she resigned when district officials gave her the choice to do so immediately or start the firing process…More than 1,600 people have signed an online petition created by students…in support of their former teacher…

Rooted in Racism

Mainstream anti-trafficking and abolitionist discourses construct the image of the victim by channelling “white slavery” myths. Eastern European women (along with other women from the ex-peripheries of global capital) are attributed a central role…Apart from the restrictions faced by most migrants from the former “eastern bloc” in so-called developed states, eastern European migrant sex workers encounter even tougher barriers…Even when legally residing and working, simply owning a Romanian or Russian passport can make female sex workers the target of rescue, detention, and re-socialisation and/or deportation programmes implemented by governmental agencies and carceral NGOs…The imaginary [status] of [these] countries as sources of “forced prostitution”…coincides with a Cold War hangover and…serve to doubly vilify and infantilise European women sex workers…

Peeping Toms

The late Justice Scalia was of course right about this; Lawrence vs. Texas actually overturned all laws against consensual adult sex, including those against prostitution. But now that picket-fence gays have their seat at the big table, they’re not going to say much while further court decisions attempt to turn Lawrence into a “monogamous vanilla amateurs only” club:

Uh-oh, kinksters: sex cops could be coming for you next. According to a new federal court decision, Americans have no constitutional right to engage in consensual BDSM because “sexual activity that involves binding and gagging or the use of physical force such as spanking or choking poses certain inherent risks to personal safety.” Thus officials could constitutionally ban or regulate such activity in the interest of “the protection of vulnerable persons,” the court held. In striking down bans on things like sodomy and adultery, U.S. courts have repeatedly said that citizens have a right to engage in whatever sort of consensual sexual activity they choose within the privacy of their own rooms (that is, as long as money isn’t involved). But federal judges now say that the Constitution “does not prohibit the regulation of BDSM conduct”…

Wise Investment

Every decision like this, in any country, brings us closer to the goal:

…sex workers in Macedonia…have been awarded protection…against the unlawful treatment of the police and the criminal court. On a November night in 2008, the police carried out [a pogrom]…in which 32 individuals, 23 of whom sex workers, were deprived of liberty. The police unlawfully detained the sex workers longer than 20 hours in inhuman and degrading conditions…without food, water or any possibility for sanitary hygiene. Some of them were left without medical help…The following day, all of them were taken for [involuntary STI] testing without any explanation…fourteen (14) sex workers filed a lawsuit…against the…Ministry of Interior…Seven years [later]…the Primary Court…partially granted the lawsuit of the sex workers and again established that…the police action “Suppression of Street Prostitution” violated the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, i.e. violated the…sex workers’ rights…

Universal Criminality

When a cop wants to destroy someone, universal criminality makes it so easy:

A [Florida] sheriff’s deputy was fired and likely will face charges of obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence after he tried to plant [drugs] on a [man cops considered a troublemaker]…Stephen LeBlanc…is accused of persuading a man in [what police call] a known drug neighborhood to help [him]…plant evidence on Thomas Parisi, who LeBlanc in November arrested for spray-painting…“Sex workers are people, too,” and an anti-law enforcement sentiment [on a wall]…LeBlanc then began [stalking] Parisi…to “get him jammed up on more charges,” the sheriff said…

Above the Law

Just imagine any non-cop getting a deal like this for aggravated rape:

[An] Alabama State Trooper who was…charged with rape and sodomy of an accident victim…has reached a deal with prosecutors that will see him plead guilty to misdemeanor sexual misconduct…Samuel McHenry…put the woman…in his patrol car before [vaginally and anally raping her]…under threat of jail time…McHenry [must] serve six months in the Butler County Jail…in increments at his own discretion…within the next year…pay a $500 fine and restitution, and is ordered not to contact the victim…state law requires he register as a sex offender.

The Birth of a Movement

Yesterday, an English version of Eurydice Aroney’s French radio documentary “The Revolt of the Prostitutes” was broadcast on Australia’s ABC network. To promote it, she wrote this article on the occupation of the Church of St. Nizier in 1975, the event which gave birth to the international sex worker rights movement. I was especially touched by this passage:

…Little has changed for these workers since the strike in 1975. I spoke to…one of the original St Nizier strikers who now works in her van in Gerland. I asked if she knew that the St Nizier Church occupation was commemorated in Australia and across the world as International Whores’ Day. “No, I didn’t know that. Really?” she said. “And in Australia, are there lots of sex workers? And they aren’t being hassled by the police?” I told her that no, sex work is decriminalised in NSW…

Traffic Jam (#323)

See the resemblance to the “Satanic Panic” yet?

In the press, it was a “wide-reaching sex-trafficking operation” run by Somali Muslim gangs who forced “girls as young as 12” to sell sex in Minnesota and Tennessee. In reality, the operation—which led to charges against 30 individuals, sex-trafficking convictions for three, and an eight year legal battle—was a fiction crafted by two troubled teenagers, a member of the FBI’s human-trafficking task force, and an array of overzealous officials…federal prosecuters had no evidence whatsoever to support their “child sex trafficking conspiracy” case outside the seriously flawed testimony of two teenagers, one of whom had “been diagnosed as insane and was off her medication”…The [cop] was…caught lying to the grand jury and lying during a detention hearing, while Doe and the state’s other primary witness were, according to the court, almost entirely “unworthy of belief”…

Size Matters (#337)

Sadly, this was a foregone conclusion:

The leader of the Phoenix Goddess Temple that offered spiritual and touch-based healing services in exchange for donations has been convicted of operating a house of prostitution…Tracy Elise [was pronounced] guilty…on all 22 counts including 12 of money laundering. She also was convicted of six counts of pandering and one count each of conspiracy to commit illegal control of an enterprise, illegal control of an enterprise, prostitution and operating a house of prostitution…Elise is scheduled to be sentenced on April 8…

Imagine the Sky

The most interesting part of this article for me isn’t the location of historical New York brothels {yawn}, but rather the dogged persistence with which ignoramuses cling to the myth that prostitution was criminalized in the US before the 20^th century:

…Sex workers have been operating illegally in New York since before the Revolutionary War. In the early 19^th century, prostitutes worked in Five Points — above present day City Hall Park — and along the East River. But it wasn’t until the middle of that century that prostitution concentrated in SoHo and formed the city’s first sex district. While the districts moved northward over time…the manner in which johns found out about the districts remained consistent for decades: cheaply printed guidebooks…patrons needed help finding the city’s illicit brothels that law enforcement mostly turned a blind eye to…

New Excuse

Sometimes politicians’ rhetorical devices are blatantly transparent:

At a hearing on new measures to address human trafficking, California Assemblyman Reggie-Jones Sawyer [said]…”the last time we’ve had this kind of emergency was…the crack-cocaine epidemic.” Sadly, Sawyer was not referencing the ways in which the current popular panic about sex trafficking and governmental responses to it mirror the outlandish, hysteria-based, and detrimental state approach to the war on drugs. Rather, Sawyer sees our attention to the “crack-cocaine epidemic” as something we should now strive to emulate…In many, many respects…officials already are treating sex trafficking in the same way they did the drug war. The dominant legislative response has been increased criminalization of all sorts of commercial sexual activity…

Checklist (#514)

So about a month ago, this ridiculous air hostess person who’s hawking a book started tweeting nonsense about “sex trafficking” (because her wonderful “signs of trafficking” training makes her an expert, donchaknow). And she just couldn’t understand why all us mean hookers attacked her when all she wants to do is rescue people! So she wrote about it, and of course some ass published it:

As a flight attendant, I’ve been trained to spot trafficking in the air…It’s made me take a special interest in the topic, and I was even motivated to speak to my City Council…You…might think human trafficking is a topic we would all agree on. Right? Wrong. I recently learned there are a lot of people who disagree…some sex worker advocates argue we’re creating more victims: That when I speak out against human trafficking, that I’m contributing to the mass incarceration of sex workers…I met a woman in my neighborhood who works with a nonprofit organization that fights trafficking…so trafficking, in my town of Redondo Beach, has become an off-duty interest for me. On the drive to my son’s school, we pass 18 massage parlors — in less than two miles. Every single day I look at these massage parlors, and wonder what might be going on behind those covered up windows surrounded by security cameras…The average person hasn’t had their employer teach them how to stop human trafficking like mine has. The average person doesn’t have a daily reminder that trafficking is going on in the world the way I do…

Poor Heather; the weight of the world is on her shoulders! If she doesn’t defend “sex trafficking” victims in Redondo Beach against us bad ol’ whores, who will?

Uncommon Sense (#557)

If any job indicates a need for “counseling”, it’s politician:

…A group of sex workers protested…in Hamburg against a new government bill that would force sex workers to register with the state [every two years or, for women ages 18 to 21, every year] and receive counseling. The protesters held symbolic “prostitute cards” to illustrate what it would mean for them to be forced to carry with them registration, said Friederike Strack of the Berlin-based consulting center Hydra…

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In the News (#575)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged A Load of Farley, A Procrustean Bed, A Whore in Church, agency denial, An Example to the West, Broken Record, California, Check Your Premises, China, cops, diversion programs, Florida, Hollywood, hysteria, Indiana, Ireland, King of the Hill, Korea, language, Legal Is as Legal Does, Marching Up Their Own Arses, New York, Ohio, porn, scams, sex work is work, The More the Better, Traffic Jam on September 30, 2015| 4 Comments »

Registration is a pretext to persecution. – Matthias Lehmann

Check Your Premises

Res ipsa loquitur: “Police officers in central Florida say they’ve rescued eight women from a prostitution trafficking ring…the eight women were charged with various sex crimes…”

Legal Is as Legal Does

As is typical for outsiders, this reporter just doesn’t get it:

In Hong Kong, as in England and Wales, the buying and selling of sex is not illegal, but brothel keeping, organising prostitution, living off the earnings of prostitution and soliciting in a public place all are…The police have certainly focused more on human trafficking and the evils of the sex trade…sex workers from elsewhere…must expect strict enforcement action, there will often be cases when they can be given an immunity from prosecution in return for testifying against their pimps and traffickers, who, after all, are the real villains…By and large, Hong Kong’s approach to sex work is aligned with Amnesty International’s policy…

His “realistic” legalization in Hong Kong is not “aligned” in any way with decriminalization, and still allows cops to harass sex workers at will.

The More the Better

Here’s an interesting listicle of 7 famous people who did sex work in their youths; it includes Maya Angelou, Roseanne Barr, Rupert Everett, Kathleen Hanna, Amanda Palmer, Dee Dee Ramone and Malcolm X. Hanna & Palmer were strippers, but the other five were all prostitutes; it’s a damned shame that Barr has turned prohibitionist in the last few years, but Everett did exactly the opposite.

A Whore in Church

The internet allows extreme specialization:

…Sprinkling one’s erotica with its fair share of Yiddish and Hebrew takes a fair bit of ingenuity and chutzpah—especially when the person behind the sexy prose is not only an Orthodox Jewish woman but one committed to following halacha, a collection of Jewish religious laws…But Shosha Pearl (not her real name) has been writing specifically frum (a term to describe religiously observant Jews) erotica since 2012—and has never found it in conflict with being an Orthodox Jew…

Broken Record

Much of the “sex trafficking” hysteria has descended into self-parody:

Not everything is fun and games with the start of the Kern County Fair. Advocates against human trafficking say, during this time there an increase in prostitution and soliciting…the big annual event draws in traffickers and customers…

King of the Hill

Every so often, “Cuckoo Clock” McCain skitters out of her nest in Arizona to vomit poison on some other state:

This scourge is especially evident in Ohio…one of the worst regions in the U.S. for sex trafficking…1,000 juveniles are forced into the sex trade each year in Ohio…There is no such thing as a child prostitute. We must call child sex trafficking what it really is: rape…The charges for the buyers of child sex should be statutory rape, child endangerment, or sexual assault of a minor – charges that “johns” are now rarely arrested for…

And you know why? Because “child” prostitution is actually quite rare. Only about 3.5% of sex workers are under 18, and the great majority of that already-small segment are either 16 or 17.

An Example To the West (#133)

But not, unfortunately, despite the orders of Seoul’s masters in Washington:

…A…rally and march, marking the 11th anniversary of Korea’s anti-prostitution statute, was organized by the Hanteo National Union, which represents some 15,000 sex workers and business people in red-light districts. Sehee Jang…said that her group…“focuses on abolishing the prostitution ban”…When South Korea made prostitution a punishable offense in 2004, the decision reversed many decades of de facto (if unreliable) decriminalization…Now, according to Korea’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, “prevention, protection and prosecution” are the correct approach to prostitution, despite contrary recommendations from public health experts and human rights groups…

Traffic Jam (#318)

How many moronic prohibitionist plays can the market bear?

…Part social commentary, part experiment, The Game will enlist the help of five male volunteers for each night of its run. The men in question have no idea what they will be asked to do by the play’s cast members…what the volunteers can expect is to re-enact scenarios that have come directly from the experiences of Irish sex workers. [Grace] Dyas’s objective, she says, is to give the audience pause to consider their own views on sex work in Ireland, for better or worse…”The men are here to redress misogyny and give a voice to these women’s stories”…Dyas and her cast have spent weeks immersed in both sides of the story…she says…“Maybe you have to legislate to protect the most vulnerable people, and maybe the right to sell sex is trumped, ultimately, by the right not to sell sex”…

The phrase “both sides” is prohibitionist code for “Swedish model”.

A Procrustean Bed (#339)

Another jurisdiction officially classifies women as passive objects without agency:

Indianapolis…plans to create a prostitution court…police will still arrest the men and women who engage in prostitution…[bureaucrat] Julie Fidler [said]…”They need mental health counseling…if we are ever to get them out of the life”…”People think it’s just about punishment,” said Sgt. John Daggy…Experts say more than 70 percent of women who engage in prostitution have been sexually molested as children…

Every time his name comes up, I remind readers that one of Daggy’s jobs is to make excuses for cops who rape sex workers.

A Procrustean Bed (#502)

Michelle Chen takes another look at the prohibitionist shitshow that is New York’s “sex trafficking court”:

Jenna Torres was about to start college on the day she was arrested for prostitution. Then she became a criminal…a lawyer…urged her to plead guilty and participate in the city’s Human Trafficking Intervention Court (HTIC) system…“I never agreed to the things they charged me of, but they arrested me anyway.” And she agreed to cop a plea and attend court-mandated “treatment” sessions in exchange for having the charges dismissed. But the criminal procedure cost her more than she imagined. After cycling through holdings, which left her hospitalized with a urinary-tract infection that Torres attributes to the unsanitary facilities, she wended her way through a few weeks of mandatory counseling sessions…[classes were]…made nearly impossible by her court intervention. She scrambled between court dates and counseling sessions…By the time she “graduated” from the program, she had dropped school…the city’s scheme to divert sex workers from the criminal-justice system has often further criminalized them, by treating all people arrested for prostitution as one-dimensional victims—presuming that they are undeserving or incapable of asserting power or self-determination over their labor or their bodies…

Sex Work is Work (#507)

It looks like Huffington Post is slowly turning away from prohibitionism as the wind changes direction; here’s a recent article by Katherine Koster of SWOP offering “a few tips to the media about how to ethically report on sex work“. The list includes “Stop publishing the mugshots, full names and addresses of people arrested for prostitution”, “Check your source’s stats and research”, “Ask questions, especially about race, class and collateral damage”, “Use multiple sources, and don’t omit relevant information and/or counterpoints”, “Quote people involved in the sex trade, and publish letters and op-eds by current and former sex workers”, and “Stop mis-gendering sex workers, and stop relying on racist and sexist stereotypes”.

Marching Up Their Own Arses (#537)

Three of the five sex workers who publicly alleged that A&E reality series 8 Minutes lied to them filed a lawsuit against the network and Relativity Media…The show purported to help sex workers leave “the life,” but…the show never delivered on its promises, which they said included assistance with employment, housing, and medical needs…Kamylla, Gina, and Jazzy claim breach of contract, fraudulent inducement, negligent misrepresentation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. In addition, Gina and Jazzy claim invasion of privacy; although she was filmed for the series, no episode with Kamylla was ever broadcast…

A Load of Farley (#570)

Mark Draughn wonders what it would matter if Farley’s latest nonsense claims were true:

…The moral and ethical aspects of specific actions should not be confused with the general moral and ethical tendencies of the individuals who perform them…A bad person doing good things doesn’t make the good things bad…asking whether clients of prostitutes have good attitudes toward women is missing the point. Prostitution is labor if the women get paid and choose to do it of their own free will, it’s abuse if the women get abused, and if the women are forced into it, it’s rape and human trafficking. We don’t need to do social surveys to get this right. What we need to do is make sure that sex workers are free to choose, and then we need to trust that they will make the best choices about who they accept as clients.

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In the News (#563)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Procrustean Bed, agency denial, Alaska, Australia, Available Weapon, brothels, Canada, cell phones, cops, Eternal Vigilance, Europe, FBI, Germany, hysteria, law, Most Uptight Nerd Ever, New York, prohibitionist myths, Pyrrhic Victory, rape, Repeat Offenders, rescue industry, Rhode Island, Romania, Rough Trade, Safe Targets, Something Rotten In Sweden, streetwalkers, surveillance, The Widening Gyre, Traffic Jam, video, Welcome to the Future, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on August 15, 2015| 10 Comments »

My not existing is more important to [prohibitionists] than my safety.
– Tara Burns

Rough Trade

Tara Burns offers a personal account of how criminalization harms sex workers:

…the FBI brought Operation Cross Country to Alaska…arresting 10 customers near Anchorage…Out in my cabin…I didn’t hear about the sting…until I got to town to work and learned that two of my regular customers had been arrested…Fear of the FBI had spread…and…I had only one client scheduled. I…had an inquiry from a new client…he was a clusterfuck of red flags. But I felt desperate, so I told him to come on over…I didn’t blame this guy for taking advantage of the opportunity offered to him by a legal system that condones my rape. I blamed the system that told him women like me could be raped with impunity. I blamed the system that scared away good clients and left me with this…

Safe Targets

The reporter blames the advertising venue, and the cops blame the victims. God forbid anybody blame either the rapists or the prohibitionist laws that made their victims vulnerable:

Fernando Sandel…Isaiah Rivera…and Joey Cruz…were detained [for the rape and robbery of three sex workers]…the women were…sprayed in the face with Mace or another debilitating substance, or placed in a precarious position — before being raped and subsequently robbed of cash or other valuables…representatives for Backpage.com could not be reached…a spokesman for the Police Department said, “You run the risk of meeting anybody when you engage in that kind of activity.”

If the women had been maids who advertised in the Yellow Pages, would the Times have tried to contact the phone company for comment, and would the cop mouthpiece have helpfully vomited out “You run the risk of meeting anybody when you engage in that kind of activity”?

Godwin’s Law

I resisted this at first because, well, Godwin’s Law! But when everyone started to praise it I succumbed, and found it extremely funny and well-done.

A Procrustean Bed

What actually happened here is anybody’s guess; prosecutors had a narrative to uphold, and used threats and promises to get everyone involved to pretend it’s true:

Ricky T. Wallace…of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, was sentenced…to 12 years in federal prison for trafficking a 17-year-old[woman]…for the purposes of commercial sexual activity…he also brought a 20-year-old woman from the Boston area to Rhode Island where she was directed to pose in photographs that were posted on Backpage.com and then offered for commercial sexual activity…Two co-defendants in this matter, Kemont Bowie…and Raechyl Spooner…are scheduled to be sentenced in September…

The women are treated as though they were volitionless dolls, picked up and passively “trafficked” in the trunk of a car.

Pyrrhic Victory

Older readers will remember that when we were kids, one of the reasons communism was bad was that communist countries didn’t allow their people to travel freely:

Canadians who travel to regions of the world that are hotbeds of Islamic terrorism could be prosecuted under legislation that would be enacted under a re-elected Conservative government…The…government has already made it a crime to leave Canada with the aim of taking part in terrorist activities. This new measure would go further, criminalizing the act of travel to specific countries. “There is absolutely no right in this country to travel to an area under the governance of [people we label as] terrorists. That is not a human right,” [Stephen Harper] told supporters…

Traffic Jam

Huffington Post asked a prohibitionist, a legalization proponent and my friend Mistress Matisse about “sex trafficking”; here’s what Matisse had to say:

…There [is] not…a hugely widespread problem in the US of people being forced to have sex for money…The terrifying numbers and statistics quoted by anti-traffickers have been debunked over and over. “Sex trafficking” is the boogeyman of our day, just as ritual Satanic child abuse was in the 80’s and 90’s. So saying “I’m an anti-sex trafficker” simply means “I’m anti-sexwork.” Nonetheless, the myth of “sex trafficking” is a very useful idea…the Rescue Industry…get lots of money from government grants and private donations. The myth of widespread, organized sex trafficking also dovetails neatly with America’s love affair with mass incarceration…So police, politicians, and Rescue Industry NGO’s work hard to conflate sex work with “sex trafficking”, because it suits their purposes…

The Widening Gyre

Lock up your children! Sex traffickers are EVERYWHERE!!!

Pedophilia in the U.S. is “unprecedented” and has reached an almost “epidemic level,” according to…FBI…[bureaucrat] Joseph Campbell. Although the FBI rescued 600 children* last year, the FBI believes that tens of thousands of children are still being sexually exploited. Hundreds of children are sold every night for sex, the BBC reported in a [scare story]…”The level of pedophilia is just unprecedented right now,” Campbell said…”it just seems to be almost an at epidemic level”…Women from the East Coast to the Midwest tell “frighteningly similar and horrific stories,” reported the BBC…

As I explained in “Mind-witness Testimony“, the striking similarity of “sex trafficking” accounts is an argument against their veracity, not for it.

*Translation: “arrested a couple of hundred underage sex workers and abducted the children of hundreds of adult sex workers”.

Available Weapon

As long as these laws are on the books, cops can use them against any woman they like:

In March 2012…several [pigs] stormed into a…spa and arrested a woman…[they performed an] invasive strip [on her and stole] thousands of dollars…the woman, Min Liu, was soon charged with prostitution…the woman’s employer…Bin Cheng [is] the wife of J. Robert Port…investigations editor at The Times Union of Albany…Port accused the police of targeting his wife’s business in retaliation for a series of articles…that called into question the tactics and practices of an Albany County sheriff’s drug unit…Ms. Cheng…was not at the spa during the raid, nor was she ever charged with any crime, but the implication [was] that she was involved in nefarious activities…A…judge in Albany last month dismissed the charge…against Ms. Liu, after county prosecutors concluded that the case should be dropped “in the interest of justice”…

Quite Possibly the Most Uptight Nerd Ever (#418)

I’ve got news for you, Pia: we don’t want our market disrupted, and the power is already in our hands; that’s why we can charge.

Last year, Berlin-based entrepreneur Pia Poppenreiter created Peppr, an app that connected clients to sex workers…[but] the booking process didn’t really facilitate “on-demand”…[also] escorts…preferred more control over their profiles. Poppenreiter killed the service and went back to square one, consulting heavily with the women who work in the industry to find out what might actually work: “Because I still believe after all that this market needs be disrupted”…Today she launches the new concept, Ohlala, in Berlin first but with an English language rollout soon…A key aspect is this is that the old tradition of women being “picked” by men is turned on its head and puts the power back in the hands of the women… If Ohlala is successful it could remove the middle-men from the escort business entirely…

You mean middlemen like Poppenreiter & Company? Or some imaginary other kind of middleman?

Eternal Vigilance

Because prohibitionists are determined to cut off sex workers’ noses to spite their own faces:

…Hornsby Shire Council, one of several Sydney councils that has employed undercover investigators to try to close down “illegal” brothels, says the NSW government is better placed to license and regulate such premises…Janelle Fawkes…of the Scarlet Alliance…said decriminalisation had been highly successful in NSW and it was only councils calling for changes. “This is about some councils shirking responsibility to implement decriminalisation and to do their part of what is a very effective whole-of-government model of regulation…NSW has reaped the benefits of decriminalisation over the last 20 years and there will be widespread outcry by the health sector if it is…replaced on a whim to appease councils who refuse to work within the intent of the laws”…

Yellow Fever (#509)

Remember “trafficking town”? Not to be outdone, Al-Jazeera wants us to believe in a whole “sex trafficking” country:

…in…Romania…most teenage girls…as young as 13 — have long quit school, with many disappearing into the realm of sex trafficking…one-third of Romania’s trafficking victims are underage girls…According to ADPARE, a [rescue industry] group…fueling the problem is the region’s emergence as a sex industry destination…Since its 2007 accession to the EU, Romania has become a major sex market in Europe — a development that can be seen…in online advertising of Romanian erotic massage parlors…

Something Rotten in Sweden (#510)

Seattle politicians just keep doubling down: “Human rights? What are those?”

…Decriminalization supports the very root of sex trafficking…the demand for commercial sex. By chilling the demand for sex buying, we chill the economic incentives for sex trafficking. Sex buying [magically] causes harm — we must have no illusions about that. The vast majority of women in prostitution are physically assaulted by the men who buy them — one study showed 86 percent. The women are 18 times more likely to be murdered, and their death rate is 200 times higher. An estimated 90 percent of prostituted people worldwide are pimped. Proponents of decriminalization suggest that “sex work” is just another form of labor. In fact, it is exploitation of the worst kind…

Debut at 13, “Our children are at risk”, hundreds of “child sex slaves”, “pimps”, etc; you get the idea. The most shockingly appalling statement is that “decriminalization [is a]…failed experiment”, which is about as blatant a lie as it’s possible to make.

Repeat Offenders (#535)

Why is it that prohibitionists who want to “rescue” sex workers invariably push them into menial garment-related work, like laundering or sewing?

…Sex worker support centre St Kilda Gatehouse is ramping up the sewing classes it has run for two years, teaching sex workers to hand stitch, mend and style garments…Andie Patchett said the informal and encouraging environment had been empowering for the women wanting to exit the industry…Ms Patchett said the classes were “a bridge” out of the sex industry…As an incentive to complete the program the women will be given an essential piece of sewing and craft equipment at the end of each week, in the hope they will graduate with a complete sewing kit and machine…

In the 19th century, sewing provided such a meager living that seamstresses nearly always supplemented the work with prostitution; indeed, “seamstress” was often a euphemism for “whore”. Yet in an age of cheap, mass-produced garments, these fanatics expect women to support themselves by sewing? Completely delusional.

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In the News (#534)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Mound of Filth, activism, Amsterdam, Arizona, Bread and Circuses, Broken Record, cops, Do As I Say, Dutch Threat, escort review sites, Europe, Florida, hysteria, Louisiana, Netherlands, Nevada, Original Sin, porn, prohibitionist myths, streetwalkers, surveillance, The Widening Gyre, Traffic Jam, Ukraine on May 2, 2015| 5 Comments »

In the Red Light District by day, one can barely earn dry bread. – Mariska Majoor

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

One inevitable consequence of consensual crime laws: police corruption:

For years Ukraine’s police force has profited handsomely from the country’s multi-million dollar sex industry, demanding both payment in cash and payment in kind…the political elite has always known about the problem but never really wanted to talk about it…After a three-month investigation, ministry officials…caught Kiev’s vice squad raking in an average of €325,000 per month from the capital’s sex trade…

Broken Record

Once again: Nevada is NOT whore-friendly:

Las Vegas police will be increasing patrols this week as they expect a rise in prostitution because of fans descending on the city for the weekend’s big…Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao fight. Former Las Vegas escort Annie Lobert [lied]…that prostitution will likely increase 10 times over the norm this week…

The Widening Gyre

WINK News has a new warning for parents about a possible scam aimed at recruiting teens into the world of human sex trafficking. We discovered a new flyer popping up in at least one Florida county advertising…up to $300 a week after school and on weekends, with transportation provided. It does not specify what type of work it is advertising…The Polk County Sheriff’s Office is currently investigating, but experts say it has all the signs of a human trafficking scam… “I think parents should be concerned a great deal about this,” said Alex Olivares…[of] the Florida Gulf Coast University Human Trafficking Resource Center. Olivares says sex trafficking is more common in SWFL than people realize, with traffickers preying on kids at schools, shopping malls, and on the internet…warning signs [include]…tattoos of names on their neck or on the inside of their bottom lip, or if they have sexually explicit social media profiles…

Original Sin (#321)

When sex is involved, people believe even the stupidest claims:

…Unfortunately, there are many in our society that are blind to the link between porn and sex trafficking…Countless women have been kidnapped, abused, drugged, threatened, and coerced into doing porn…there is no way for [the porn viewer] to tell if what they are watching was made illegally or if all parties are there willingly…porn directly fuels the demand for sex traffickers to make money by selling video of their sex slaves to porn sites…

Traffic Jam (All Traffick, All the Time)

Schools are rewarded for “finding” what the government wants found:

…the U.S. Department of Homeland Security…has identified Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) as a pilot school in its Blue Campaign to raise awareness about human trafficking…Homeland Security describes its Blue Campaign as a unified collaboration with law enforcement, government, non-government and private organizations to combat human trafficking…and bring those who exploit human lives to justice…

If the concept of a university collaborating with cops and a surveillance agency isn’t enough to chill you to the bone, you haven’t been paying attention.

A Mound of Filth

…the Where Hope Lives program at the Phoenix Dream Center…offers safe refuge and specialized counseling so that victims of sexual exploitation in all of its forms, including prostitution, sex trafficking, abuse and stripping, can be restored as functioning members of society…Dominique Roe-Sepowitz…says…”It looks like sex trafficking is only a problem in certain cities in the U.S., but that is because they are the only ones looking“…Roe-Sepowitz also helped to create a program called Project Rose…which…is currently on hold because of the Phoenix police’s lack of extra manpower…

Bread and Circuses

In some places, cops don’t even pretend it’s about “rescuing” sex workers:

The Lafayette Metro Narcotics Task Force arrested eight people in a prostitution sting…[five men]…and [three women]…two more women were detained and released pending further investigation related to suspected prostitution. The task force’s sting targeted upscale escorts and their clients who utilize social media…

Dutch Threat (#528)

Amsterdam Prostitutes are anything but amused that the municipality…has temporarily closed eighteen window brothels in the red light district. The sex workers therefore filed a lawsuit against the city. To support their claim, the prostitutes occupied the premises concerned…[The government claims that the windows were closed due to] forced prostitution…How long the occupation will last is unknown…

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In the News (#524)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged activism, bogus studies, brothels, California, Canada, Challenge, condoms, cops, Do As I Say, Down Under, Florida, hysteria, India, Ireland, law, New Zealand, porn, stripping, Swedish model, The Last Shall Be First, The Pro-Rape Coalition, Traffic Jam, transgender, Tyranny by Consensus, Under Every Bed, Who Watches the Watchmen?, Wisconsin, Worse Than I Thought on March 25, 2015| 4 Comments »

When two consenting adults have sex behind closed doors and if money changes hands then that is none of the state’s business. – Laura Lee

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Police in eastern India were left red-faced when a raid on a sex district discovered four of their own along with a convicted murderer whom they were supposed to be…transporting…to hospital for a check-up…

Who Watches the Watchmen?

I’m really happy to see the media slowly growing more skeptical of ludicrous statistical claims:

…[Several news sources claimed that] “According to the FBI’s latest study, more than 58,000 kids were abducted by non-relatives in one year”…The number is derived from data collected between 1997 and 1999, mainly from a telephone survey in 1999…these numbers come from an era that predates the wide use of mobile phones, which allow parents to keep much closer track of their children…this is an estimate, based on a survey, not based on actual incidents…Two key components of the 58,000 figure are children who are reported missing by their caretakers or children who were missed by the caretaker for at least an hour but no report was filed…These incidents may meet a legal definition of “abduction” but generally do not conform to the public’s understanding of an abduction…The number of stereotypical kidnappings is significantly smaller: 115…the most recent (2014) FBI data on abductions by a stranger in a single year is 332…

Down Under

A Porirua man is facing two rare charges of failing to use a condom during sex with a prostitute. The safe-sex law is thought to have been applied only about seven times since the Prostitution Reform Act was passed in 2003…Before prostitution was decriminalised, sex workers were not able to complain about clients not wanting to use condoms…[The man] said he knew the prostitute would not have consented to his taking the condom off, so he did it without her knowledge…

Tyranny By Consensus

I certainly hope you saw this coming:

Since Los Angeles County passed a 2012 law requiring all male porn performers to wear condoms, some Californians have been trying to extend the requirement throughout the state. Legislation to this effect failed last summer, but activists are now seeking to put the matter before voters in 2016…If…Michael Weinstein gets his way, he could be subsidized by the state to sit around reviewing porn. Under the proposed condom measure…”Weinstein would be placed in charge of monitoring any adult film produced in California to determine if condoms were used…If a condom wasn’t readily apparent in each scene, Weinstein would be deputized by the Attorney General to review the raw footage of the production, and file lawsuits against anyone involved in the production, including but not limited to the producers, distributors, agents, and anyone with a demonstrable ‘financial interest’ in the production”…To remove Weinstein from this role would require a majority vote from both houses of the state Legislature…

Under Every Bed

Small towns can’t credibly claim to be “sex trafficking hubs”, so they call themselves “stops” instead:

Hundreds of social workers, police officers, clinicians and concerned locals gathered…to learn about the growth of…sex trafficking in southeastern Wisconsin…the Human Trafficking Forum…explored the causes and symptoms of what they call “modern-day slavery”…Every 10 minutes, a woman or child is trafficked in the U.S, resulting in more than 15,000 victims each year*. An official with the Department of Homeland Security…described Kenosha as a “stopping spot” between Chicago and Milwaukee…[a cop bloviated that] “Twelve and 13-year-olds are the primary target, that’s middle schoolers. We need to get the word out to parents and teachers”…

Canadian cops are just as absurd:

…Is there human trafficking in Guelph [Ontario, population 121,668]? “Absolutely”…[lied cop Patty] Pronovost…girls as young as 12 are exploited by pimps…classified ad sites like Backpage…are popular among prostitutes and pimps…The average age of a girl entering the sex trade is 14. On average, they would see 10 to 15 customers each day, but 30 in one day is not uncommon…

I wish 30 clients a day really were “not uncommon”; if that were true my bank account wouldn’t be in the sorry shape it’s in.

*15,000/year = 1.7/hour = 1/35 minutes ≠ 1/10 minutes.

Challenge

My friend Laura Lee does it again:

A sex worker is using European human rights legislation to try to overturn a new law in Northern Ireland that makes it illegal to pay for prostitutes. Dublin-born law graduate Laura Lee is launching an unprecedented legal challenge that could go all the way to Strasbourg, against a human trafficking bill which includes banning the payment for sex among consenting adults…

Traffic Jam (#439)

Nearly two years ago, Monica Jones was…arrested for prostitution during a massive police sweep. Now, she’s in Geneva, Switzerland, taking her case to the United Nations. The arrest in May 2013 was not the first time the cops had harassed Jones, and she fought back, successfully challenging the charges in court while rising to become an outspoken activist and a widely recognized human rights advocate. Beating her own charges was not enough for Jones, and now she is using her story to challenge the United States’ prostitution policies on the global stage. The UN Human Rights Council is preparing its quadrennial review of the US’s human rights record in May, and this week Jones and advocates from across the world are lobbying the council’s member countries on policy recommendations…

The Last Shall Be First (#513)

A bill that would ban transgender people from using their preferred public bathrooms has now…been amended to make an exception for some transgender people who have legally changed their gender on government documentation. In essence, it means transgender people would need to have their papers on them to pee…[the bill’s sponsor] claims that the ordinance would prevent male sex offenders and other perverted, unsavory characters from entering women’s bathrooms and that it’s a matter of public safety. Of course…such incidents…are almost unheard of in other states and municipalities that have passed protections for transgender individuals…

The Pro-Rape Coalition (#523)

The fact that money is tight and online porn free couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this; it must be video games!

Strip clubs, with flashy signs advertising nude dancers, once had a strong footing in downtown centres across Canada. But…an adult industry insider says strip clubs are an endangered species being killed off by lack of demand…Tim Lambrinos…[said] “It seems that young Canadian males are more distracted with other types of interests — Game Boys, plugging in things and so on”…Toronto had 63 strip clubs a decade ago, now it only has 14. Lambrinos admits licensed clubs are plagued with the perception they are tied to crime and unsavoury characters, but…that doesn’t match with the reality. “In terms of crime, even public complaints, the licensed adult entertainment clubs were the bottom of the list…There were nail salons and hair salons and barber shops, restaurants that got far more complaints”…

Worse Than I Thought (#523)

A new “sex trafficking” law is so bad (HOW BAD IS IT?) that at least one “anti-trafficking” NGO has denounced it:

Looking to criminalize our way out of something hasn’t worked in any other issue and won’t work here…Services shouldn’t have to push victims to cooperate with law enforcement in order to receive funding…We need to be removing children from the judicial system, not increasing their involvement…being a trafficker is a specific crime and not just a catch-all for everyone who did something wrong to a child…This bill buys into a sensationalized presentation of a complex issue, to which the criminal justice system is somehow the solution…

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In the News (#521)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged All Shapes and Sizes, All-Purpose Excuse, brothels, cops, disability, domestic violence, Florida, genitalia, guest columnist updates, Having and Eating Cake, hysteria, law, LGBT rights, Like a Horse and Carriage, Madonna/whore, marriage, Minnesota, neofeminism, New York, Oklahoma, Politicizing the Personal, porn, prohibitionist myths, rescue industry, Schadenfreude, sex work is work, Skin To Skin, South Africa, Spain, Texas, The Last Shall Be First, Traffic Jam, transgender on March 14, 2015| 3 Comments »

The public never wants to hear that their fear-based and/or moral-routed legislation isn’t solving a problem. – Gracie Passette

All Shapes and Sizes

The world’s first successful penis transplant has been reported by a surgical team in South Africa. The 21-year-old recipient…lost his penis in a botched circumcision…the operation was a success and the patient was happy and healthy…Full sensation has not returned [but]…the man is able to pass urine, have an erection, orgasm and ejaculate…

Politicizing the Personal

I’m always pleased when someone whose name isn’t Maggie McNeill attacks the concept of “empowerment”:

I was disappointed when…Woman’s Hour decided to debate the question “can porn empower women?” This question not only relies on misguided assumptions that limit the framing of the debate, it also misses the point…it doesn’t matter whether porn performers are empowered or not by their work – they still have agency, and they still have rights. Porn is one of the least marginalised jobs within the sex industry, but it still suffers from the same fallacy as every other discussion about sex work – the idea that it is only a legitimate choice if it is “empowering”. We don’t hold other industries to this standard…Why do we only expect “empowerment” of sex work, and not of other jobs?…We don’t demand that waitresses feel “empowered” in their jobs for us to recognise their agency in choosing the work, and we don’t tell other workers who serve male customers that they can’t be feminist. The empowerment fallacy is only applied to the sex industry – and it’s deeply insidious…

The Last Shall Be First

Another potty-obsessed politician wants to enforce his hangups with violence:

A Texas lawmaker has filed a bill that would prohibit schools from allowing transgender students to use restrooms in accordance with their gender identity…Gilbert Pena [wants]…districts…held liable for $2,000 in exemplary damages — plus actual damages, court costs and attorneys fees — if employees knowingly allow transgender students to use [the proper] restrooms…In other words, the bill would place a bounty on the heads of transgender students, offering rewards to peers who report them for going to the bathroom…

Traffic Jam

The more one looks, the more continuity one sees between the Satanic Panic & “sex trafficking” hysteria:

…1978’s The Minnesota Connection [was] written by “preacher-cop” Al Palmquist…[and] billed as…the true account of Palmquist’s battle with sex trafficking victims, but it contains so many factual flaws that you must use air quotes while saying the words “true story”…[for several years before the book Palmquist gave lectures on] how Satanists use subconscious, subliminal, “mystical calls” in advertising and rock music to attract folks to the occult and its leaders who ply them with drugs so they can get them to worship Satan…[when] this Satanism stuff [didn’t gain] any traction…Palmquist [turned]…to fight the human demons in this word: Pimps…he…[became] fixated on the notion of a “Minnesota Pipeline” that [delivered] women to pimps in New York…

On the Simultaneous Having and Eating of Cake

Prostitutes in Spain are to be entitled to labour rights and would be able to claim unemployment benefits when not in work, a court has ruled. Judge Juan Augustín Maragall ruled…that prostitutes should be given contracts by brothel owners, who would pay social security contributions on their behalf. The civil court decision was made after a massage parlour…was raided by labour inspectors…The owner argued that the workers were autonomous and not officially employed, however authorities stated that as there was a employer and employee working relationship, it constitutes a form of contract so social security payments should be made…

Like a Horse and Carriage

Of course, some gay activists are against this because it denies them special privileges, and the Democrats are angry it was proposed by a Republican:

Something remarkably libertarian has just happened in Oklahoma. The state’s House of Representatives voted…to end government licensing of marriages…citizens…will instead file “certificates of marriage” or file affidavits of common law marriage with the clerks after it’s all done with…these certificates will stand as proof of marriage for Oklahoma law…So this isn’t some phony “separate but equal” plan to protect marriage from “the gays.” Any Oklahoma statute that operates off of marital status or provides benefits or privileges based on marital status will accept either of these non-license certificates…they will get all the same rights and privileges under Oklahoma law…

Skin To Skin

We’ve seen several stories about Charlotte Rose, but this one concentrates on her work with the disabled; longtime readers know how important I consider that specialization. The article also touches on “sexological bodywork”, the latest attempt by some whores to draw a line between themselves and others which casts them as “good” and “important” and the others as “bad” and “criminal”.

Guest Columnist: Kelly Michaels

Things had been going a lot better for my friend Kelly Michaels; her abusive ex-husband had decided he wasn’t actually interested in having custody of their children, making her battle to keep them moot. But recently, the problems started again and rapidly escalated:

…It came to my attention that my ex-husband and daughter were concealing the fact that Jillian was engaging in extreme self mutilation, yet he failed to get her help…Jillian…[notified] me [via text message] that she is running away…I had the person that we share a home with pick her up [instead]…[and] took Jillian to Melbourne, believing that I was acting under Fl statute 787.03 Paragraph C…the abuse registry…[opened] an investigation…[but when I brought] my daughter to a hospital…[the cops] held me, and told me that I may be arrested for Kidnapping, along with anyone else that spoke to the child after leaving her fathers home…

She is trying to raise money for her defense and that of the friends who helped her to take her daughter out of danger; to contribute go to the link above, and if you can help connect Kelly with an experienced criminal defense and/or child custody attorney please contact me via via email as soon as possible.

Schadenfreude (#404)

Remember the Dallas outfit cashing in on “sex trafficking” tours? Here’s a description of what one is like:

…I went on something called a human-trafficking bus tour and have been struggling since to make sense of what happened…Never leaving the safety of the bus, we learned from our tour leader that some of the massage parlors have been busted for selling sex. (!) The strip clubs…we saw, the tour-leaders explained, shared some common traits with other strip clubs, and those other strip clubs were busted for various types of illegal activity…Children At Risk…is…led by Dr. Bob Sanborn [and]…describes human trafficking as a major problem in Texas, though…their research…appears to be overblown…What we [actually learned] from the tour…is that there are definitely places in Dallas where sex-related things have occurred…

All-Purpose Excuse

This article on the rapid and entirely unchecked metastasis of the Department of Homeland Security mentions, among many other things, its role in promoting “sex trafficking” hysteria. It’s a great example of how governmental powers claimed to fight one supposed enemy are invariably expanded to everyone else.

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In the News (#510)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged activism, advertising, agency denial, Arizona, bogus studies, Bottleneck, Broken Record, Business As Usual, Canada, Colorado, cops, Cuckoo Advertising, dirty, diversion programs, Do As I Say, end demand, FBI, genitalia, Gorged With Meaning, halfway whores, hysteria, Ireland, Italy, law, Monsters, Nevada, pimps, politicians, prohibitionist myths, rape, sex work is work, Shift in the Wind, Something Rotten In Sweden, sporting events, statistics, streetwalkers, stripping, Stupor Bowl, Swedish model, The Course of a Disease, The Mote and the Beam, Theatrics, Traffic Jam, transgender, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Washington (state) on February 4, 2015| 14 Comments »

This Government only won an election, not the right to become our Mammy. – Ian O’Doherty

Another Reason Not To Do Cowgirl

This isn’t actually the reason I dislike cowgirl, but it makes a good excuse:

“Woman on top” is the most dangerous sex position, according to a new scientific study…”cowgirl”…is responsible for half of all penile fractures…”doggy-style”…is behind 29 per cent…[and] “man on top”…just 21 per cent…

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

…a prostitute…asked for the $100 that [a client] agreed to for 30 minutes of her company. She then explained that if the man wanted sex, he would have to pay an additional $150…the man became angry and demanded his $100 back…he…shoved her across the room…then unzipped her jeans…she began kicking him…and he punched her in the head twice…then pinned her down and removed the $100 from…her bra. He then left the apartment…[investigating cops] discovered [the client’s phone number] belonged to a Las Vegas [cop named Michael Kitchen]…

Broken Record

Cows cause “sex trafficking”!

Federal and local [cops arrested] six child victims of domestic sex trafficking and…two alleged traffickers during the 2015 National Western Stock Show…large events with a national draw bring an…increase in child sex trafficking, the FBI said…agencies have been using big events…most notably last year’s Super Bowl — to…[arrest so-called] victims…Colorado is a breeding ground for human trafficking because of the major interstates crisscrossing it…

Shift in the Wind

The prestigious Adam Smith Institute comes out against laws that deny sex workers’ agency, drawing on data from Ric Curtis’ latest study. Before too much longer, prohibitionists won’t be able to claim their crap is based on anything more than a political agenda. Of course, that hasn’t stopped the creationists from getting laws passed, but it’ll be a great comfort when normal, educated people mock prohibitionism as they mock creationism today.

Bottleneck

We are remarkably dishonest when it comes to the sex industry…objections to nakedness-for-cash…blur into vague, emotive statements with very little actual meaning…”Farcical” and “dangerous” are two of the words I heard used last week to describe the UK’s licensing of sexual entertainment, and those words are absolutely accurate: the situation is a mess…any venue offering lap dancing, pole dancing or striptease is classified as a “sex encounter venue”. Local councils have the power to veto licences for SEVs and, if they wish, declare a “nil” policy, meaning no SEVs whatsoever on their turf…this translates to councils up and down the country granting or denying licences inconsistently. They’re given and revoked for no apparent reason, licensing fees are topsy turvy and, in some authorities, restrictive policy is such that councils are effectively trying to ban what is a lawful activity…

Theatrics

Anti-whore theatrics are always ludicrous, but this is one of the most ridiculous ones I’ve seen yet:

Two female Italian councillors have embarked on an unusual quest to clamp down on…prostitution – by dressing up in miniskirts and confronting kerb-crawlers with a hidden camera. The stunt had been initiated by Mayor Dimitri Russo…and councillors Anastasia Petrella and Stefania Sangermano…[who pretend sex work has a] damaging effect…on their town…when punters would stop for the fake prostitutes, they were confronted by the mayor and a cameraman, leaping out from behind parked cars…

The self-important pomposity of politicians is demonstrated by the fact that nobody involved seems to realize how idiotic a spectacle they present.

Monsters

…this [story] from…Louisville, KY…has all the disrespectful AP Stylebook violations…when writing about…murders of African-American trans women. Using mugshot photo in WHAS-TV story: CHECK. Using victim’s dead name: CHECK. Misgendering her throughout the story: CHECK. Surprised…WHAS-TV…didn’t…insert…whatever criminal record they could find since they found the mugshot…Ms. Edwards…was found shot to death at the Fern Valley Motel…on January 9…LMPD is searching for…Henry Richard Gleaves in connection with this homicide…[if] those of you in the Louisville area or Indianapolis area where Ms.Edwards was from…have some pics of her or know her femme name, please get it to me ASAP…

Cuckoo Advertising

Will these “reporters” never wake up?

With tuition costs soaring in Canada, many students are turning to a new…way of paying for school: Renting yourself out for paid dates. SeekingArrangement.com, which brings together prospective “sugar babies” with deep-pocketed “sugar daddies,” says it has seen a 42-per-cent increase in the number of students signing up on its site in the past year…the University of Toronto [has]…the fastest-growing number of sugar babies, with 195 new sign-ups last year…followed by Montreal’s McGill University, with 161 sign-ups…

The idea that selling sex is a “new” way to pay for schooling is utterly hilarious.

The Course of a Disease (#401)

Another rare Irish denunciation of prohibition:

…As a member of the Government which published the…Bill…which adopts the illogical position of criminalising the client but not the sex worker, [Alan] Farrell no doubt feels he is the vanguard of an administration which wants to protect women, but…saying that you are against…forcing [women] into sexual slavery is not the same as saying you are against…informed consent between two adults…In a world where most civilised countries have recognised prostitution as a morally neutral fact of life which can be regulated and taxed – where it is simply another arm of the leisure industry – we have replaced our inherently immature and prudish attitudes about sex work with…one which says that all prostitutes are victims and all Johns are sexual predators…his assertion that: “In my opinion, it is simply unacceptable that a man or a woman would purchase a person’s body for sexual gratification” is entirely irrelevant but also rather instructive, because a man who has legislative power has just admitted that he thinks two grown-ups having a private transaction is “unacceptable”…

Stupor Bowl

Even though the mainstream media are now admitting that the “gypsy whores” myth is bullshit (at least in regard to the Super Bowl), they just can’t let go of that “sex trafficking” carcass yet. The Washington Post‘s debunking is marred by extensive quoting of cops and of Dominique Roe-Sepowitz’s bogus “study” that claimed (among other idiocy) that “84% of [escort] ads indicated possible sex trafficking“, and the Bowling Green News helpfully explains that “sex trafficking” doesn’t increase around sporting events because “in reality it occurs everywhere, 24/7” and is caused by TV commercials.

Traffic Jam (#422)

It looks as though the horrible Project ROSE may be kaput, though of course Sepowitz has to save face by denying that the mountain of ethics complaints against it had anything to do with that: “…Roe-Sepowitz, who…helped organize Project Rose, said that program has been put on hold, but she said it was due to officer availability, not controversy…” The day that Crazy Joe Arpaio won’t provide “officers” for an anti-sex pogrom will be a very frigid one in Hell.

The Mote and the Beam (#428)

…The sheer number of anti-sex trafficking bills that have been introduced in the new Congress (17)…should tell us something. Either sex trafficking has suddenly reached epidemic proportions in America, or it’s become the showboat du jour for preening politicians. Most signs point to the latter. Of the 11 anti-trafficking bills passed by the House [last week]…most…merely add layers of bureaucracy and authorize funding to pad these layers…but…H.R. 181…is exactly the kind of thing federal officials will use to entrap folks into agreeing to sex with an imaginary 17-year-old and then send them to prison for a few decades…every week I read multiple local-news reports from around the country about “sex trafficking stings”…[that] result in nothing but the arrest of adults engaged in consensual prostitution…H.R. 181 would be federalizing [this]…

Gorged With Meaning (#434)

I’m not sure what the headline writer means by saying “Belle Knox is Remaking Herself as a Libertarian Activist“; she’s been an avowed libertarian since she first came on the scene a year ago, and has been active in Students for Liberty for most of that time. The part of this interview that caught my attention the most was this one:

…On the Students for Liberty website, Weeks identifies her “favorite figures in liberty” as Ayn Rand, economist Milton Friedman, and two other activists whose careers have included both sex and politics: porn star Nina Hartley and former call girl Maggie McNeill…

Business As Usual (#506)

This reporter’s faith that cops never do anything they aren’t supposed to, like raping whores during “prostitution stings”, would be touching if it weren’t so horribly misplaced. Even worse? He quotes prohibitionist Kathleen Barry, calling her a “prostitution expert” (which is like calling Carrie Nation a “wine expert”), and giving her a platform for her vile “end demand” propaganda.

Something Rotten in Sweden (#507)

Prostitutes are victims…King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg…told a packed Town Hall audience in attendance for an anti-sex trafficking panel…But…how does acknowledging the existence of consensual adult sex workers nullify all anti-trafficking efforts?…it contradicted the panel’s own stated intentions of respecting marginalized individuals’ humanity…sex workers in the audience, however, had different opinions about how to best protect—and distinguish—at-risk youth and self-employed adults…

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