Yellow Fever

Posts Tagged ‘Yellow Fever’

In the News (#667)

Posted in Current Events, Guest Columns, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged adolescence, agency denial, Another Fine Mess, Australia, California, Canada, Celebrities, censorship, Check Your Premises, cops, Devil's Advocate, Don't Call It Trafficking, Droit du Seigneur, end demand, Eternal Vigilance, guest columnist updates, I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now, internet, language, Mexico, Mississippi, Monsters, Passive Voice, pragmatism, prohibitionist myths, racism, rescue industry, scams, Schadenfreude, streetwalkers, Swedish model, The More the Better, transgender, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, Yellow Fever on August 27, 2016| 3 Comments »

Most of the whores l’ve met are women who question things, who value their independence over social norms. – Kaytlin Bailey

Droit du Seigneur

He didn’t rape her, but he sure seems to think it was his privilege to fuck her:

A Mississippi cop was fired…after a video that went viral on social media shows him lurking in his patrol car near a high school, trying to coax a teenaged girl into cutting class, pressuring her into accompany him to “room” to have sex instead. [Darryl Stasher] said he “wanted to do more than just talk.” He then assured the teen nobody would find out what they were doing, and that he’d “take care of her”. “Oh. So you saying you ain’t fucking,” a disappointed [Stasher] can be heard asking after the student declined his advances that were caught on camera in the 49 second clip…

Schadenfreude

It’s always so sweet when a rescue industry scam is exposed:

For years, Jenny Williamson…has [hawked] her [fantasy] of rescuing girls from sex traffickers, spreading the Gospel while [raking in] hundreds of thousands…[she] has regaled audiences with the litany of horrors these girls suffer…Courage House [was]…closed…effective June 14, amid a flurry of state inspections that found numerous violations, including inadequate staffing levels…[despite] assets of…$1.4 million…Courage House was cited 16 times in the first six months of this year…10 were classified by the state as Type A, or serious enough to have an immediate impact on clients’ health, safety or personal rights…former workers [describe] Williamson as a temperamental leader with no child-development background who micromanaged her trained staff and became…swept up in her own publicity…staff members were…abruptly fired for…expressing concerns over [her inclusion]…of clients’ confidential information in fundraising or publicity efforts…[including] identifiable images of [inmates]…on the company’s Facebook page…[Williamson] routinely “paraded the girls around” for marketing purposes…Arlicia Lorentty, who was a social worker/case manager in the home in 2015, said…“Everything was a photo op”…girls were…[forced to attend] a Christian church…whose leaders and congregation have been heavily involved in Courage House…

The More the Better

There’s no “if” about it; Melania Trump is or was a sex worker. Even if she was never an escort as rumors allege (and I think it very likely that she was indeed one), she posed for nude photos (including a lesbian scene) and is now a trophy wife…and sorry, ladies, but both of those are definitely kinds of sex work. When people started mocking her for using an incompetent speechwriter, I defended her not on the grounds of the political beliefs she claims to profess, but on the grounds that she is a fellow whore doing her job (which for a wife means emotionally & socially supporting her husband) and should not be mocked merely because he happens to be a delusional narcissist. Margaret Corvid has more to say about the new rumors:

…when you share those allegations, pointing and laughing, saying “Look!”, calling her a liar, calling her a whore, saying that she is unfit for the White House because she was photographed sexually, you are stepping on everyone who does sex work in this country every day—most of whom are much more vulnerable than Melania Trump…[she] isn’t a liar for covering up sex work…[because] it…is necessary for survival in a country where selling sex is illegal and where it is so stigmatized that it can get you fired from your “mainstream” job, get your kids taken away, and destroy your reputation for life…

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

…that Canada’s new law is “protecting” sex workers from making money from lonely old men:

Two Sydney men have pleaded guilty and were fined…in connection with a prostitution sting…after…Judge Brian Williston ruled that [entrapment isn’t entrapment when it’s politically popular]…Gordon Ernest MacLean, 66, and John Howard MacLean, 66…were fined a total of $500 after the judge waived costs and surcharges. They also must submit a DNA sample…

Because obviously, the cops never know when these hardened “sex criminals” may strike again.

Monsters

[Mexican] police do little to protect the transgender community and [rarely investigate trans sex workers’] deaths…Mexico has one of the highest rates of transphobic violence in the world, according to a recent report by the Cornell University Law School in New York and the Transgender Law Center…The number of documented murders of transgender people rose to 46 in 2012 from four in 2008, with actual figures likely to be significantly higher…transgender women in particular have suffered from a fierce backlash against same-sex marriage and other advances…

Passive Voice

Even though it’s a year old, this tutorial in how the past exonerative tense works is too brilliant to pass up. It’s also too brilliant for me to risk butchering by any attempt at synopsis, so do yourself a favor and go read it.

Devil’s Advocate

This article could’ve appeared under so many headings; “Cops and Robbers” due to the vigilantism and “Bait and Switch” because of the sleazy entrapment tactics (“18” in big letters and “15” in fine print, for example, when any whore can tell you horny guys rarely read past the pictures). But I think the fact that the state convicted two men for non-crimes against a “person” who does not even exist puts it in this category:

The creators of the “Tinder Experiment” set up a fake profile of a [a fake 18-year-old girl pretending to be] 15…in a bid to [entrap careless, stupid men]…They then secretly filmed conversations and face-to-face meetings with the men before shaming them online. Those videos were removed and their website shut down by police, but [the sleazy pigs were still happy]…to use the information from the “experiment” [to destroy lives]…Nicolaos Katsamas was…sentenced last month to two- and-a-half years’ jail…Tobias Kilsby was also jailed for two years…Detective Senior Constable Tas Gagatsakis [admitted that]…Tinder is [only] for users 18 and over…

Don’t Call It Trafficking

This isn’t called “trafficking”, while the same demographic choosing to sell sex to survive is:

…Island View…housed more than 100 [“troubled teens”]…aged 13-17, and charged parents at least $10,000 a month…the staff tormented and abused them — pitting teens against each other, physically restraining them, secluding them, medicating them with high doses of powerful antipsychotics and forcing them to sit without speaking for hours or days at a time…[after a lawsuit] it…closed…[and] a new company, Family Help & Wellness, took over the property. The facility began to operate under a different name, Elevations RTC. It continues to bring in new students today…39 of the 48 employees listed on Elevations’ website worked for Island View…At least 1,500 [teens] in 30 states alleged that they were abused at private treatment facilities in 2005 alone…The troubled-teen industry is almost entirely unregulated…Congress has repeatedly refused to intervene…Parents who send their children to residential treatment centers like Island View often hire independent contractors, colloquially known as “transporters,” to forcibly [abduct] their kids…

Yellow Fever (#509)

Remember Tenancingo, the Mexican town which was supposedly infested with “pimps” but actually had only two (plus employees) and 26 supposed “victims”? Apparently Canada wants a “pimp town” too, and naturally they claim it’s the country’s largest black community. But they’re not racists, no sirree!

One of the first things you notice when you enter this community northeast of Halifax is a large billboard that tells you you’re in “Canada’s Largest Black Community”…every driver here acknowledges oncoming drivers — even strangers — with a wave of the hand. It’s not the welcome you expect in a place that has repeatedly been described as the birthplace of North Preston’s Finest, a violent gang that specializes in trafficking young women and girls as young as 14 in the sex trade…residents, even local police…insist the claims about a criminal gang originating in North Preston are exaggerated, misleading or manufactured by outsiders who don’t know their community…But police [and other prohibitionists] outside the province…[masturbate furiously to fantasies of] a community that has churned out generations of ruthless pimps who are spread across the country and unafraid to use brute force to punish women in their “stable” if they step out of line…

Guest Columnist: Kaytlin Bailey

My friend Kaytlin’s one-woman show is part of the Fringe Festival:

Cuntagious [is] a one woman show, written by Kaytlin Bailey – now a stand up comedian, once a sex worker…“the first run was really a coming out process. I performed the show before I told my family. I knew most of the audience members personally, so they were very supportive…when you come out, other people come out. I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me to tell me their own experience with sex work, I love that”…

I’ve seen the show twice, and I will again when she brings it back to Seattle; you really should, too.

Another Fine Mess (#547)

As I and many others have said, sex drives technological development. And I think that’s what the prudes are really afraid of:

…The World Wide Web turned 25 this month…The sexualized female body has, from the beginning, been the catalyst for attempts to regulate what’s on the Web, ultimately shaping what the Internet looks like today. Only a couple of years after Berners-Lee began to worry about an incoming flood of photos of nude women, Congress was gripped by the “great Internet sex panic of 1995”…the Communications Decency Act…was signed into law on Feb. 8, 1996, and thousands of websites went dark in protest…provisions that criminalized sending or displaying to a minor “any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communications” that were sexual in a “patently offensive” way…[were determined by] the Supreme Court…[to be] unconstitutionally vague and [were] struck…down…Yet another part of the widely loathed CDA — one the Supreme Court has never heard any challenges to — also helped bring about the Web we now know. Section 230 immunizes service providers from lawsuits over the speech of their users. It’s the law that lets Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, Yelp, Craigslist and Reddit exist. Without its provisions, a service such as Twitter could be sued into nonexistence if an individual user sent a single defamatory tweet…

Eternal Vigilance (#617)

Rent in exchange for sex isn’t “free”; it has been paid for with sex:

A room in return for sex…the…landlord cashing in on desperate, vulnerable and homeless women in London. A recent report has unveiled a disturbing attempt to exploit homeless women by offering free accommodation in return for sexual favors…There are hundreds of listings…by men either obliquely or explicitly (some very explicitly) offering free housing to women for sex….they also include men who are expressly targeting adverts at homeless women…

How are the ads “explicitly targeting homeless women”? Do they read, “only homeless women need apply” and require proof of homelessness? This looks to me like nothing more than Puritans upset about the fact that some women are comfortable paying our rent (and other expenses) with sex.

Check Your Premises (#636)

Another cop so disconnected from reality that she thinks she can “build communication with sex workers” while stealing their income by harassing their clients:

A new strategy to tackle prostitution in [Redbridge, London] will see the police’s focus shift from the sex workers to [demonized clients and partners]…Insp Gellatley’s team aims to disrupt clients while engaging in a relationship of trust with prostitutes. “We are trying to build communication with the sex workers” [she said]…

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In the News (#585)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, advertising, animals, Business As Usual, California, Capricious Lusts, Checklist, Coming and Going, cops, diversion programs, East Asia, escort services, Guinea Pigs, Higher Education, hysteria, internet, language, pimps, politicians, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rape, scams, Scapegoats, Texas, The Face of Trafficking, The Lion and the Ox, The More the Better, Twitter, United Kingdom, video, Where Are the Protests?, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on November 3, 2015| 18 Comments »

I support sex workers because I was one…it’s a job that’s needlessly shunned by society when frankly we should be worshiped. – Margaret Cho

Where Are the Protests?

Note that absolutely none of the “human trafficking” cases mentioned in this story involve prostitution:

…the West Midlands branch of Hope for Justice has rescued 82 people so far this year. Many of those were unknown to police…few cases of modern slavery have gone through the criminal justice system. Only 130 cases that involved human trafficking were successfully prosecuted in 2014-15, representing just one prosecution for every 100…victims [claimed by fetishists]…

That last statement is roughly equivalent to my claiming to be a millionaire, but the bank will only let me have 1% of my money.

Higher Education

A website which purported to connect students with internships in every industry functioned in that manner for five years, from June of 2010. But at some point after August 1^st of this year, the site was taken over by some sort of scammer who planned to use it to exploit wannabe sex workers by offering to “teach them the trade” via an “internship program”. In other words, a crooked escort service or group of services was trying to trick newbie whores into working for them for free. Once the sex worker community got ahold of the link and started tweeting it around, the site vanished at some point in the last few days.

The More the Better

She’s been all over Twitter since, interacting with and following outspoken sex workers:

Margaret Cho…opened up about her former life as a sex worker to her thousands of Twitter followers Thursday, saying of herself and her fellow sex workers: “we were tough and proud…Sex work is simply work. For me it was honest work. I was a sex worker when I was young. It was hard but well paid. There’s no shame in it”…

Scapegoats

[Connecticut] resident Timothy T. Cutcher denies having sex with dogs or any of his relatives. However, the 23-year-old man told the Reflector it’s true he’s addicted to sex…Cutcher said he’s “borderline mentally disabled”…

No, it isn’t true, because there is no such thing as “sex addiction”.

Above the Law

A few hundred down, tens of thousands to go:

…In a yearlong investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse. The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action. California and New York — with several of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies — offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. And even among states that provided records, some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records…

Yellow Fever

Alison Bass on the yellow journalism which permeates coverage of sex work:

When it comes to the coverage of sex work or trafficking, the mainstream media seems to forget a basic journalistic principle — the need to get their facts straight…anti-trafficking groups have spread grossly inaccurate and inflated statistics about the number of women and children being trafficked for paid sex in the United States…[Gloria] Steinem…points to the Nordic Model “as being the only system that seems to work for women in the trade.” In fact, the opposite is true…sex workers themselves say that the…decriminalized model that New Zealand adopted in 2003 is a much more successful approach…why [do] otherwise respectable media drop their journalistic standards when reporting on the sex trade…Is it because they’re so desperate to be politically correct…or is it because the mere mention of women’s sexuality sends normally methodical journalists into a tizzy of sensationalistic misinformation?…

The Lion and the Ox

As I predicted almost 4 year ago, we’ve now reached the point where a mainstream publication can feature an article like this:

…”Trafficking”…is less a clear-cut crime than a call to moral panic. The vagueness of the definition allows or even encourages governments, organizations, and researchers to claim that there are tens of millions of trafficking victims worldwide on the basis of little more than hyperbolic guesses…the term “sex trafficking”…seems to have been developed by anti-prostitution feminists in the 1990s…to describe the migration of women from the collapsing Soviet Union to the United States…Obama also uses the term to refer to children pressed into military service and agricultural laborers forced to work under poor conditions or without pay…the term…often is used to refer to cases in which there is no migration at all…in practice, trafficking does not mean “modern-day slavery.” Nor does it mean being transported across borders for purposes of sexual exploitation. Instead, it usually refers to one or more of the following: being underage and selling sex; illegally immigrating; being subjected to any kind of forced labor or abusive labor practices; engaging in consensual sex work…

Capricious Lusts

The author of this piece fails to link the relevant statistics, so even though what he’s saying is generally true in essence, there’s no way to know if the correlation is as close and unmistakable as is claimed here:

…In October of 2014 the Seattle police department implemented the “Buyer Beware” program…he rate of rape shot up 150% compared to October 2013. November 2014 the rate of rape shot up 225% compared to November 2013. December 2014 the rate of rape shot up 80% compared to December 2013. Statistics for 2015 are not yet available…The rape rate from January 2013 to September 2013 compared to the rape rate from January 2014 to September 2014 were nearly identical with the rate in 2014 being up a slight 4% for the nine month period. Once the “Buyer Beware” program was implemented in October and the correlating jump in rape for the final three months of 2014, the final three months of 2014 compared to the final three months of 2013, the rape rate was up 151%. That brought the year over year rate up 28%…

Coming and Going (#335)

Here’s a long, thorough look at Kathryn Griffin and her “prostitution diversion” scam in Houston:

…Griffin is currently under fire from sex worker and human rights advocates who say her tough-love, one-size-fits-all approach is flawed and fails to respect basic human dignity. People who are arrested for prostitution are not necessarily poor and dependent on drugs, and so-called “rescue-and-recovery” operations that lump sex workers in with victims of sex trafficking have lead to human rights abuses across the globe. Many activists say Griffin’s habit of thrusting her clients into the limelight…isn’t just manipulative, it’s dangerous…Kamylla claims she never offered [an undercover cop] sexual intercourse, but she could not afford a lawyer. She called [the 8 Minutes] team…and…asked if they could help her with legal representation. Instead of connecting Kamylla with an attorney, they connected her with…Griffin…At the time, Adrian Garcia was the sheriff of Houston, and in April he resigned to run for mayor of Houston. Sex worker activists began connecting the dots on social media. It turned out that Griffin has Garcia to thank for her program in the Houston jail, along with its $40,000 annual budget. The activists dug up photos of Griffin and Garcia appearing in public together and were outraged to discover via social media that Griffin’s We’ve Been There Done That participants, many of whom were once held in Garcia’s jail, were asked to volunteer for Garcia’s campaign, and posed with him for photos wearing their organization’s T-shirt. “Adrian Garcia is basically arresting himself this little army of free labor,” [said] one activist…Sex worker activists obtained audio recordings from some of the meetings that Kamylla attended, and the content made them furious. In one recording, which is posted on YouTube, Griffin insists that a criminal is a criminal, and criminals hurt people, so even anyone who has “prostituted” even “one time” must admit that they share common ground with rapists and even Charles Manson…

Business As Usual (#442)

“She declined the officer’s request“. Badge-lickers are nauseatingly obsequious, even when they’re talking about a savage would-be rapist:

A shocking video…captures the moment a [cop] brutally beats a mother on the street after “she refused to perform a sex act on him”. In the clip, Weerasinghe Arachchilage Kanthilatha, a sex worker from Ratnapuara, Sri Lanka, is seen being struck repeatedly…She can be heard screaming out in pain as she lies on the ground…[P.P. Thissera] threatened to “teach her a lesson” before returning a few days later and attacking her with [his] baton. The incident occurred in September 2014 and caused a public outcry…Kanthilatha and her lawyer have filed a Fundamental Rights petition in the Supreme Court, citing violation of her rights…

Guinea Pigs

Yet another software package designed to sell whores out to the cops:

A San Diego State University professor and graduate student have developed [software]…that they believe could help law enforcement identify human trafficking victims…[it] can browse though thousands of Internet ads for “escorts” and finding potential victims through certain key words, phrases or other indicators….Murray Jennex…said the knowledge management system he and graduate student Marisa Hultgren developed could be a potential tool for [targeting sex workers for arrest]…“We’re looking for things that indicate young people,” Jennex said. “Things like, ‘Barely legal, fresh, college freshman”…The system they developed also searches for indicators that a person is being confined, such as ads that stipulate in-calls only, meaning a client must come to a specific place. The system also searches for signs that a victim is being moved from town to town…Posts that suggest an escort is “open minded” and “willing to try anything” also could indicate somebody is being coerced by a trafficker…

So basically sex workers in their early twenties, or who don’t have cars, or who tour, or who do fetish work, are all “trafficking victims”. The ignorance involved here is truly staggering.

The Face of Trafficking (#567)

Another case of what really happens when a wannabe “pimp” abducts a girl:

An East Bay rapper has been charged with human trafficking and sexually abusing a minor over a period of several weeks, and could spend the next 20 years in prison if convicted. Joshua Richard Durham…goes by the stage name “Five Hunnet”…Police started investigating the case after the alleged victim — a female runaway who is [16] years old — told her family that Durham had been soliciting her…from Aug. 1 through Aug. 11…[and again] from Aug. 31 to Sept. 3 Durham continued to traffic the girl…and also forced her to perform oral sex on him during that time…

As usual: no cartel, no interstate travel, and victim got away in a very short time. This is absolutely nothing like the myths. The story has one horrifying element, though: “Some of his lyrics contain references to pimping, and members of the District Attorney’s Office reportedly instructed…police to listen to Durham’s lyrics for potential evidence…” Can you imagine what crimes the pigs could discover “evidence” for in my fiction?

Here’s what Tara Burns had to say about another highly-publicized recent case:

The public hears about trafficking most frequently in made-up, sensational movies and fundraising tall tales…Did you think sex trafficking was people being forced into prostitution? That hardly ever happens — if for no other reason than that the customers would freak out…in #TheStory, which Zola has clarified is “based on a true story“, sex trafficking happened when Jessica lied and told her they were just going to dance and the guy was just her roommate (fraud in recruitment). Women like Zola have been charged with conspiracy to traffick just for posting ads on the Internet…Sex trafficking in real life and the courtroom is so different from sex trafficking on TV that no one even recognizes it…

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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 (#513)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged activism, agency denial, Amsterdam, asset seizure, Australia, BDSM, brothels, Catholicism, cops, dating, Europe, fantasy, Florida, Follow the Leader, Georgia, Germany, Hollywood, hysteria, law, Madonna/whore, Missouri, Netherlands, One Size Fits All, Philippines, Policing for Profit, prohibitionist myths, rape, Real People, red-light districts, Rough Trade, Shame Shame, Shazam!, surveillance, Swedish model, Switzerland, The Last Shall Be First, The Notorious Badge, transgender, Umpteen Thousand People, Uncommon Sense, United Kingdom, Washington (state), Wise Investment, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on February 15, 2015| 2 Comments »

It is…easier to characterize sex work activists as traffickers and pimps than what they really are: vulnerable women advocating for themselves within a system that is set up to marginalize and dehumanize them. – Alana Massey

Amsterdam

What the fuck is this patronizing bullshit?

Amsterdam may open a brothel where fifty women will get a chance to do their work without pimps. The municipality proposes five buildings with a total of 19 windows available…A feasibility study has been launched to see what all is involved in a prostitution business that is run by prostitutes. The municipality believes that a company which sex workers themselves are responsible for the affairs, will contribute to a prostitution industry with good working conditions without abuses…

If Dutch politicians would stop mistaking their masturbatory fantasies for reality, they’d know that most prostitutes already run their businesses without the dubious “help” of pimps or politicians.

Real People

Here’s a good profile of Bella Robinson, written by fellow activist Tara Burns:

Bella Robinson entered the sex industry as a homeless 18-year-old fleeing an abusive marriage that had rescued her from the foster care system. She’s exactly the sort of “victim” for whom sex trafficking laws were invented. But Robinson—now a human rights activist who has been a hooker (her preferred term) for 30 years—doesn’t think of herself as a victim of the sex industry. She says she’s been sex trafficked by the state and victimized by laws intended to help people like her…

One Size Fits All

Because Shazam!

51-year-old Robert Edward Neves, an American National arrested in the Philippines, will face trial for [dating] a 17-year-old [woman]…Neves is also being charged with [sex trafficking]…it is illegal for any person…to keep or have in their company a minor which is 12 years or under – or who is 10 years or more his junior in any public place…The [young woman said she]…and Neves…met in an online date site…eventually becoming lovers…after they met in person…

Follow the Leader

Costumed hooligans with titles like “officer” abduct and abuse people in much the same way every day:

A 6-year-old boy in Missouri endured an emotional four-hour staged kidnapping because his family thought he was being too nice to people he didn’t know…the boy’s mother, grandmother, aunt and a co-worker of the aunt…have been charged with kidnapping and other felonies…the boy was lured…into a pickup after getting off his school bus, tied up, threatened with a gun, taken to a basement where his pants were removed, and told he could be sold into sex slavery…that he would never “see his mommy again,” and he would be “nailed to the wall of a shed”…[he was bound] in the basement for some time before he was unbound and…lectured…about stranger danger…

Uncommon Sense

…Ticino has always been considered a haven of the Swiss sex industry. Dozens of Italian sex workers, both women and men – regularly commute…there…roughly 600 registered sex workers [work] in Ticino out of a total population of 340,000 residents…But…the local government is trying to push through a new law aimed at cracking down on unregulated prostitution by confining the oldest trade to just licensed brothels, apartments and authorised sex districts…

Umpteen Thousand People Can’t Be Wrong

Dear clergymen: STOP STICKING YOUR DAMNED NOSES INTO OUR BUSINESS. Love, sex workers everywhere.

Representatives of the Church of Scotland have joined other churches and faith groups, including Catholics, Anglicans, Muslims, Sikhs, Quakers and the Free Church, in urging the First Minister to…follow the kind of prostitution law adopted in Nordic countries…Sex worker-led charity Scot-Pep said laws criminalising the buyer exposed sex workers to HIV and violence and had been rejected by UNAIDS, the World Health Organisation and Human Rights Watch…a Swedish report on the issue published this week had concluded that the law made sex workers more vulnerable. Fiona Gilbertson…of Scot-Pep…said…”This is clearly a subject about which the Church has been misinformed, and I would invite them…to read the evidence and to speak to sex workers before proceeding any further with this campaign…”

Here’s my friend Laura Lee on the subject.

The Last Shall Be First

A bill…in the Florida Legislature…would make it a crime for transgender people to use single-sex public facilities…including restrooms…that correspond with their gender identity. Violators would be [subject to]…a year in jail or a $1,000 fine. The bill would also empower people in a…restroom during any “unlawful entry” to sue the alleged interloper and owner of the facility…single-sex facilities…would be restricted to those with a corresponding “biological sex…at birth”…

Yellow Fever

Most of this reads like a script for a really lurid TV cop show, because reporters nowadays believe everything cops tell them as though it were engraved on stone tablets. There’s also infantilization of young people, agency denial, bogus statistics, conflation of all “missing child” cases with stranger abduction and all stranger abduction with “sex trafficking”, the evocation of imaginary “criminal gangs”, pro-criminalization propaganda and a special guest appearance by the vile Lauren Hersh, the prohibitionist who was a prosecutor until she was forced out in disgrace for railroading two innocent men for rape.

Policing for Profit

Here’s another prohibitionist badge-licker who is so busy wanking to his fantasies of “slave ships” that he is unable to comprehend that expanded state power to steal private property will eventually come back to bite him:

Tim Heffer [fantasizes] so strongly that sex [work] is…slavery that he compares the cars…owned by [clients] to slave ships…he testified in support of HB 1558, which would allow [cops to steal]…the cars and money of people arrested for soliciting a prostitute, even if they are never convicted. “Rather than one large ship, they’re smaller vessels…we need to take these ships away from traffickers and buyers”…

Rough Trade (#339)

Who else but a sociopath could “appear to be in disbelief” when he is convicted for the same kind of rape he’s been convicted for at least twice before?

Akis Livas, 52, appeared to be in disbelief when his lawyer explained to him that he would be locked up for…[booking a sex worker] for four hours, and [bringing] an envelope stuffed with paper which he pretended was the $850 to pay her. The woman said when she discovered there was no money, she became scared…she has suffered from a lack of trust in others and [is] still receiving counselling…Livas continued to minimise his responsibility and had not shown remorse…

Shame, Shame

…A mugshot…is a photo designed to tell the state’s side of a story. The subject of the photo, taken at one of the lowest points in their life, has no voice, but the language of the form – the unflattering bright light, the drab background, the name and prisoner ID at the bottom – tells us we are looking at a “criminal”. With the internet, that “we” has expanded to the far reaches of the globe…before the subject can mount a defense, a 1,000-word photo pronouncing their guilt may have already gone viral. Stacking the deck in favor of the already advantaged police, the photos discourage empathy in favor of judgment…this humiliation becomes just another manifestation of punishment…The press partakes readily in this ritual debasement, the most respectable of media outlets eagerly distributing the state’s unflattering photos, of people who have yet to be convicted of anything, on the front page and on the evening news and on dedicated websites that feature nothing but mugshots…

Uncommon Sense (#420)

After months of negotiations, [German politicians]…agreed the final details of a new law governing sex work…but prostitutes say it isn’t fit for [the] purpose…Undine de Rivière…[of the] sex workers’ union BeSD…[said] the rule requiring sex workers to be registered with the authorities…was unacceptable…[as is] requiring prostitutes to have a doctor’s note…while sex workers are happy to discuss measures that can help them practice their profession and maintain their health, they want them on their terms…

Wise Investment (#440)

Much more of this, please:

A metro Atlanta dominatrix…is suing a…private investigator for secretly filming their…session…Lakenya Monfort…contends Reginald Walker…posed as…[a] client…[and used a] hidden…video-camera to record the session without Monfort’s knowledge…[to use] as evidence against Monfort in her child-custody case…Georgia law…prohibits secretly…video-recording someone in a place where he or she has a reasonable expectation of privacy…

The Notorious Badge (#452)

50 shades of clusterfuck:

…the press tour for…50 Shades of Grey [is] now firmly established as among the most disastrous of the past decade…The most glaring problem…is [that]…romantic leads Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan do not like each other…A routine visit to TODAY takes on the excruciating air of a court-ordered couples therapy session…It is not difficult to picture Dornan and Johnson luring one another into a “Red Room of Pain.” It stretches the capacity of the imagination to think that both would emerge alive…[both]…routinely display discomfort…when talking about sex…Dornan [said]…”I had to do stuff to her that I’d never choose to do to a woman…The first day…was kind of an out-of-body experience…I’m like, ‘What the fuck is happening? I’m a dad. What?’…“

The way Dornan repeatedly mentions his child, as if to provide a ward against evil, is fascinating in a Victorian kind of way.

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In the News (#509)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged Arizona, BDSM, bogus studies, Bottleneck, Broken Record, brothels, Canada, domestic violence, Greece, halfway whores, Hollywood, hysteria, internet, law, Mexico, Michigan, O Canada!, Pennsylvania, prohibitionist myths, rescue industry, Rhinoceros, Secret Squirrel, Soap Opera, sporting events, streetwalkers, stripping, Stupor Bowl, surveillance, The More the Better, The Notorious Badge, The Sky is Falling!, We Told You So, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on January 31, 2015| 2 Comments »

In the world of anti-trafficking organizations, money and lies are deeply – perhaps inextricably – tied. – Anne Elizabeth Moore

Secret Squirrel

…there are growing numbers of women…for whom the opportunities offered by smartphones for tracking and surveillance are nothing short of terrifying…“For women experiencing domestic violence, these technologies can be used to further terrorise and intimidate them,” says Sandra Horley, the chief executive of Refuge…Refuges, whose locations are kept closely guarded for the safety of their users, now often warn women fleeing abuse to check their phones for apps that might be spyware, and to switch off location services before they arrive…Jennifer Perry…of the Digital Trust [said]…“The easiest thing is to access the woman in the cloud. A man might buy a phone and set it up for his partner to be ‘helpful’. He knows the username and password. You have women who don’t even realise they have a cloud account in their smartphone…The man can just sit at his computer and watch everything that happens on the phone”…

We Told You So

Super ally Anne Elizabeth Moore published a long, thorough report on the incredible amount of money “anti-trafficking” organizations make despite their total lack of any sort of quantifiable results:

…Considering their common mythical enemy – the nameless and faceless men portrayed in TV dramas who trade in nubile human girl stock – one would hope anti-trafficking organizations would unite in an effort to be less shady. With names reliant on metaphors of recovery, light and sanctuary, anti-trafficking groups project an image of transparency. Yet these groups have shown a remarkable lack of fiscal accountability and organizational consistency…anti-trafficking groups fold, move, restructure and reappear under new names with alarming frequency, making them almost as difficult to track as their supposed foes…

The Sky is Falling!

Great news! There is no actual crime in Pennsylvania:

Pennsylvania State Police are going undercover to root out potential prostitution arranged through dating websites…Troopers work with vice, computer crimes and neighboring municipal police units to coordinate stings and monitor…“sugar daddy” websites…

Broken Record

Most parroting of “gypsy whores” myth now contains a disclaimer.* Note also that the writer slips and says “arrested” rather than “rescued”:

Catholic Charities of Arizona is preparing to serve an increased number of sex-trafficking victims arrested by local police in the days surrounding Super Bowl Sunday…The Phoenix metro area was bracing for a surge in visitors as it got ready to host a triad of large sporting events within an eight-day period. The NFL’s Pro Bowl and Super Bowl XLIX and the Waste Management Phoenix Open golf tournament were all set to take place there Jan. 25 through Feb. 1…Although firm evidence of a correlation between the Super Bowl and an uptick in prostitution is lacking, a 2014 study by Arizona State University’s School of Social Work found that the game produces conditions that traffickers seek to exploit…

The ASU School of Social Work is nothing but a factory for generating bogus prohibitionist studies; it’s the academic leg of the awful Project ROSE.

*For another modified “gypsy whore” iteration, see “Soap Opera” below.

Soap Opera

First-magnitude fabulist Theresa Flores’ maudlin comedy act, distributing soap bars to fight “pimps” hiding in hotel lavatories, continues:

…the Grosse Pointe Soroptimists…offered [hoteliers]…bars of soap…wrapped in labels that feature the National Human Trafficking Hotline Number…A similar effort is under way this week at motels in Phoenix, in advance of the…Super Bowl. Special events…provide an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the issue of human trafficking…Theresa Flores, 49…started the S.O.A.P. program…because she thought hard about what might have helped escape her torture…in the early 1980s…new Michigan laws designed to thwart human trafficking…[removes] the statute of limitations for people who were forced into prostitution as minors. The new law is named the Theresa Flores Act…

Bottleneck

Another demonstration of how regulation of sex work hurts sex workers:

…There are…an estimated 20,000 prostitutes in Greece…of which fewer than 1,000 are…registered…There are brothels (or ‘studios’) where women can register to work legally…Each is granted a licence, issued by the state…There’s a list of…stipulations that must be met before a woman is allowed to work in one of these studios. She must be over 18; have the right to live and work in Greece; be free from STI’s or other infectious illnesses; not suffer from mental illness or drug addiction; and not have been convicted of homicide, pimping, child porn, trafficking, robbery or blackmail. Oh, and she must be unmarried, too…the law isn’t stopping married women from working as prostitutes. It’s simply preventing them from operating in regulated environments and forcing them on to the streets, something which is both illegal and dangerous…

Rhinoceros (#403)

COAST isn’t mentioned here, but this is the same sort of insulting, patronizing bullshit they peddle, pretending that pigs, bureaucrats and other busybodies know more about our profession than we do:

…representatives from Homeland Security met with valley strip club workers to show them what to…look for [in] signs that women are being forced to strip or are underage. The average age of girls entering the sex trade is 13…It’s something authorities worry could increase in Phoenix leading up to the Super Bowl…

Stupor Bowl

The first few paragraphs of this story look like typical “gypsy whores” idiocy and police puffery, then it makes a sharp turn to the right:

…The Phoenix vice squad’s order and earnest claims by [prohibitionists]…are odd in one very important respect: Actual empirical evidence fails to support the claim that the Super Bowl is related to a prostitution spike. “No data actually support the notion that increased sex trafficking accompanies the Super Bowl,” observes Snopes.com…The Village Voice succinctly busted the myth around this time last year…The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women released a report in 2011 confirming that the “sporting events bring sex slaves” story was a myth…and relied on extremely negative imagery about women…In city after city, there has been no Super Bowl prostitution spike…

O, Canada! (All Traffick, All the Time)

Click on the subtitle link above to see what Canadian cops do when they get their hands on information like this:

For two months, women involved in the sex trade in London [Ontario] have been marking places on a map…they’re noting where they live, work, buy drugs, get health care, experience violence, visit social service agencies, spend time and avoid trouble…The final map will be shared with social agencies in London, but not before the women themselves have been asked about their comfort level with the information released…The map will show concentrations of activities, but not identify what any individual woman — all of them anonymous — is doing and where…

Yellow Fever (#426)

Remember Tenancingo, the Mexican town which was supposedly infested with “pimps” and derived “virtually its entire living from sex trafficking”? Remember the hundreds of victims, tens of thousands of clients and millions of dollars? Well, here’s a new story about the prosecution of some of those “pimps” which contains a few clear facts buried in the yellow garbage. Actual number of “traffickers”? Two, plus their employees. Actual number of “victims”? 26. And what was presented as an ongoing operation ended in 2011.

The Notorious Badge (#452)

Given that what’s portrayed in 50 Shades isn’t anything like a healthy BDSM relationship, and that there is no sex work in the book, one must wonder what this is about: “…The movie’s director was determined to make sure the kinky drama was portrayed as realistically as possible so she and [Jamie Dornan] spoke to real-life sex workers to gain an insight into their world…’so that we in no way portrayed it incorrectly’…”

The More the Better (#502)

Cracked appears to be positioning itself as solidly pro-sex worker; the latest is an article entitled “5 Things You Don’t Know About Strippers (Until You Are One)“, written with input from 7 actual strippers, which ends with this:

…we’ve done a few articles on sex workers and porn stars (including a woman who has sex with a ventriloquist dummy on camera) and we keep coming to the same conclusion:

A) The demand for these people’s services is enormous;
B) The vast majority of us partake in some form or another (by consuming porn, if nothing else);
C) They thus fulfill a basic need in a way that the world would sorely miss if they stopped; and
D) We fucking hate them for it. Like, to the point of violence.

Why? We’re honestly asking. Someone let us know.

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That Was the Week That Was (#432)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Procrustean Bed, activism, agency denial, An Example to the West, Arizona, asset seizure, brothels, Canada, Central Asia, Check Your Premises, consensual crime, cops, disease, Do As I Say, drugs, Dysphemisms Galore, end demand, Facts in the Case of Monica Jones, fantasy, First They Came for the Hookers, Florida, France, gangs, Hollywood, hysteria, I Saw My Brain, Illinois, India, internet, Ireland, King of the Hill, language, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, Netherlands, New York, Nigeria, Ohio, Oregon, pathologization of males, Pennsylvania, politicians, porn, prohibitionist myths, rape, Remembrance, rescue industry, Rough Trade, Saving Them from Themselves, shame, South Africa, South Carolina, sporting events, Stand-Up Guys, streetwalkers, stripping, surveillance, Swedish model, The Scarlet Letter, Traffic Jam, transgender, United Kingdom, Vendetta, What Were You Thinking?, Wisconsin, witchcraft, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on August 9, 2014| 13 Comments »

Law enforcement stings designed to shame men who pay for sex are nothing more than the state blowing its own morality horn. – Jim Norton

Rough Trade

A convicted rapist…has been jailed for 11 years…Jason Oates…approached [a sex worker]…and agreed to pay £20…but…produced a large-bladed hunting knife…and demanded that she submit…to sex without charge…Oates…[previously served] three…years [for another rape]…

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

I just can’t imagine how it got there:

Gardai are investigating after a laptop and documents belonging to a garda were discovered in a brothel in Amsterdam…The high-level investigation will probe how the individual’s bag was found in the brothel…

Check Your Premises

Cops in a country preparing to criminalize the purchase of sex insist men won’t be arrested if they confess to attempting to buy sex:

…PACT-Ottawa [reported that] more than half of…sex buyers they surveyed…said they…would call police if they suspected coercion. That jibes with research…by sociologist Chris Atchison…Sextrade101 founder Natasha Falle, who [claims] she [was] trafficked…[in] her teens…[pretends that] “They never questioned our bruises, our broken bones…I used to see between one and five guys a night and I was in it for 12 years”…Det.-Const. Chris Lavergne has yet to field a call from a client…”Is there a way to make Johns understand, you’re not going to get in trouble for calling the police and giving us the information”…

1) Falle is full of shit; I bruise easily and was quizzed every time I had an unusually large one. I daresay nearly every sex worker has had that experience. I do, however, think it’s interesting that she reports a realistic number of clients; I’m sure it will grow later.
2) Lavergne can’t conceive that the reason he “has yet to field a call” is that overt coercion in the sex industry is actually pretty rare.

The Scarlet Letter

What is it with New York state DAs and their sophomoric attempts at “humor”? “Albany County DA David Soares rolled out a new initiative…to combat sex trafficking…Frontpage…will post a photo of every person convicted of paying for sex in the county…” And this op-ed commenting on the “strategy” is so over-the-top it almost has to be a joke:

Some people say that prostitution is a victimless crime…but…there are victims. A lot of them. Children are often forced or compelled into prostitution at an early age…drug addicts sell their bodies to support their habits…prostitutes are often beaten and raped in order to keep bringing in the money for their pimps. Families are harmed by the “johns” patronizing prostitutes. Full neighborhoods fall victim to the plague. Diseases are spread. Human trafficking — a $32 billion-a-year business in New York alone — is now an international crisis…

Saving Them From Themselves

If it had been pictures of himself, I’m sure the cops would’ve taken action:

A mother in South Carolina called sheriff’s deputies on her [15-year-old] son…after finding porn playing on her living room TV…the [woman] “immediately turned off the TV” and ushered her 2-year-old daughter out of the room…before calling the police on her son…the sheriff’s office did not make an arrest or issue a citation…

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic

A federal judge has sentenced a 40-year-old suburban Chicago doctor to nearly six years in prison for using a classified-ad site to trade prescription pills for sex. Joshua D. Baron…blamed what he called “demons” of sexual addiction…the pediatric neurologist placed ads on Craig’s List [sic] offering pills for sex and requesting photos of respondents. He later e-mailed hospital website links to prove he was a physician…

An Example To the West

Patoo Abraham has led protests…to ensure that prostitution is legalized in Nigeria and that sex workers be protected and respected…“We are tired of dying in silence; we want to be able to practice our profession with pride like every other person…Sex work is normal work and there are sex workers everywhere under one form of disguise or the other”…

Stand-Up Guys

Comedian Jim Norton’s article in Time is definitely flawed, but I applaud any client who comes out and has the balls to write about it:

I’m not ashamed to pay for sex—and other men shouldn’t be either…The illegal aspect of prostitution has never deterred me, nor would legalizing it cause me to engage in it more…in a free society, people must be allowed to make choices for themselves that are incomprehensible to others. By keeping prostitution illegal and demonizing all of its parties, we (you) are empowering pimps and human traffickers and anyone else who wants to victimize sex workers…

Traffic Jam

This farrago of racism, xenophobia and “sex trafficking” nonsense is even over the top by Daily Mail standards:

…London has become the hub, the epicentre for a global trafficking enterprise involving thousands of children for exploitation, sexual abuse and even…ritual voodoo killing…Hundreds of children have been abducted from their families in Africa and trafficked to the UK…Many are raped and sexually abused…there is a vast reservoir of lost children…anonymously shuffled from flat to shabby flat – a dark pool feeding child exploitation and misery across the planet…Britain’s generous child benefits system has become an international magnet for fraudsters who…traffick…thousands of children into this country every year to take advantage of payments and these young victims are prey for other vices, too – a ready made market for sexploitation…

I love the way it grows from hundreds to thousands in just a few paragraphs; in his next article I’m sure it will be millions.

First They Came for the Hookers…

These “complaints” are always from cops:

An Oshkosh [Wisconsin] strip club is closed [after]…the…District Attorney’s office filed a civil suit against the owner…in response to several prostitution complaints…The assistant district attorney says Naughty Girls is a nuisance to the community. He is asking a judge to close the business for a year and that all moveable property be sold…

Yellow Fever

Bars and clubs = “hub for underage prostitution” because travel agents say so:

Indian men are flocking to Kazakhstan in droves, if travel and tour operators are to be believed…Reason? The thriving sex industry. Thailand, Singapore and Dubai have been the traditional destinations; but that is changing…Kazakhstan…has become a hub for underage prostitution over the past few years…bars, cafes and club [sic]…are used as pick-up joints…

King of the Hill

Are you slipping, Toledo? In the original “King of the Hill” entry you were #3, but according to WKYC you’ve dropped to fourth place. Maybe if you give grants to “pimps” to build more hair salons you can reclaim your lost glory from Miami or Tampa Bay.

What the Hell Were You Thinking? (TW3 #135)

The term “rescue” used in this context is utterly tone-deaf:

…[South African] University students…[designed] a device intended to…help sex workers’ organisations keep an eye on the safety of their members…[it] has eight Wi-Fi transmitters linked to armbands that will be worn by the sex workers in the vicinity…the armband…[has] four buttons…on-line, off-line, jump [check in to a call] or panic…Should a sex worker send a distress call, the control room will forward her…precise location…to sex worker organisations who will alert the emergency services…

I Saw My Brain

Polk County, Florida…Sheriff Grady Judd assembled a press conference…[to brag about a huge sting operation, but] either didn’t realize – or didn’t care – that a number of the 132 men whose faces appeared on his mugshot “big board” had already been cleared of committing crimes…”It’s fair…Because…when we arrest them as ‘sexual perverts on children,’ I’m going to call them [that]…we have a very liberal…criminal justice system, sometimes it’s more difficult to prove ‘beyond…every reasonable doubt’…”

Given that our “liberal” incarceration machine imprisons five times as many people as civilized nations do, imagine the nightmare that would result if maniacs like Judd got their way.

Dysphemisms Galore

Even by the low standards of the modern American press, this article is hilariously yellow:

…Domestic sex trafficking…is an increasingly common and highly lucrative underground business …involving American girls and young women (but sometimes boys) forced into sex slavery by sick pimps…in places as unassuming as a mall or a train station. Pimps can earn $150,000 to $200,000 a year on each victim they force into prostitution…experts say Philly’s location creates a particularly attractive opportunity for the brokers of enslaved women. “We are sort of in a unique hub area because we’re between New York, Atlantic City, Washington, D.C., Harrisburg – all of which have child-prostitution problems,” said Michelle Morgan, an assistant U.S. attorney…”There are a lot of places for pimps to go from here to make more money, to buy new girls, to trade girls, so it’s a lucrative area”…Tiffany…[was] swept into the dark underbelly of sex trafficking…she [was forced]…to sell her young body to dozens of men…she would have sex with them or do whatever else popped into their twisted minds…

One can barely help picturing “journalist” Morgan Zalot masturbating furiously as he writes those last few lines. The mall occupies the place in modern “white slavery” hysteria that the ice cream parlor did in the first cycle a century ago.

A Procrustean Bed (TW3 #339)

Because “rehab” to “get us off the streets” is a perfect “solution” for the 90% or more of sex workers who are neither “on the streets” nor addicted to any drug:

Members of the Zanesville City Council attended a neighborhood barbecue…to discuss…prostitution…Sandy Gentry…said…the…ideal response…would be to create some kind of rehabilitation facility where prostitutes could go to get help and get off the streets…helping reform their lives would be the best solution…

Vendetta

Buried under all the monstrous male-demonizing and female-infantilizing rhetoric is the unstated fact that the “National Day of Johns Arrests” ballyhooed in this article is the brainchild of one sad, sick woman acting out her twisted psychodrama on thousands of strangers who never did anything to hurt her:

Law enforcement agencies across the country collaborated in a recent series of sex stings that netted the arrests of almost 500 men seeking to buy sex and 14 pimps and traffickers…[as] part of an annual “National Day of Johns Arrests”…Officials said 111 prostitutes were recovered during the operation, including 13 juveniles…

“Recovered” means “arrested and caged”. Note that this big “rescue” found only 13 underage girls in 14 states; so much for the “epidemic of child prostitution”. Phoenix can always be counted on to put an extra-stupid spin on a story like this; a cop with the Dickensian name Trent Crump blathered, “We want people to understand this is not because of Super Bowl, but with the Super Bowl coming, this may be a venue in which people believe and people believe they can come here.” Trent, Maggie McNeill believes and Maggie McNeill believes that you are an idiot.

Remembrance (TW3 #410)

A sequence of a dozen images…taken by [an English] Lieutenant…are believed to be the only photographs ever to surface of British officers from the 1914-1918 war inside a “blue lamp” – the refined category of brothel reserved by secret edict of the British army for the officer classes…Other ranks…were restricted to crude “red-lamp” brothels…

Traffic Jam (TW3 #415)

This is mostly a lot of asinine and self-contradictory political “sex trafficking” bullshit; for example, the mayor belches out “The program saves women’s lives,” but two short paragraphs later the women morph into teens (all of whom are said to be “12 to 14 years old”), and four paragraphs later they’re vomiting out “the needs of the child”. The really interesting thing is the continued harping on “gangs” and the obvious grooming of “sex trafficking” to be the new excuse for the police state once the drug war inevitably dies: “Gangs and other criminal organizations prefer humans [to drugs] because they’re a reusable resource; they can be resold…”

Facts in the Case of Monica Jones

…Emmy-nominated actress Laverne Cox of the hit series Orange is the New Black is lending her support to [Monica] Jones [during Jones’ appeal of her conviction for “manifesting prostitution”]…Cox, like Jones, is a transgender woman of color. She has some serious concerns about the Phoenix law, which some call “walking while trans”…

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That Was the Week That Was (#426)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, Music, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged A Tale That Grew in the Telling, Absolute Corruption, agency denial, Arizona, Between the Lines, bogus studies, Brazil, brothels, Canada, Change a Few Words, Colorado, Cooties, cops, dehumanization, Do As I Say, drugs, FBI, Feminine Pragmatism, Hard Numbers, hysteria, Indonesia, Islam, It Looks Good On Paper, Korea, language, law, left-right myth, Magic Formulae, Mexico, Missouri, Montana, neofeminism, Netherlands, New York, New Zealand, Number Puzzle, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, pathologization of males, Pennsylvania, prohibitionist myths, red-light districts, sex offender registry, sporting events, Sweden, The Naked Emperor, Traffic Jam, Under Every Bed, underage, United Kingdom, Washington (state), Whither Canada?, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on June 28, 2014| 11 Comments »

The left-right divide might be a division between social identities based on class or region or race or gender, but it is certainly not a clash between different political ideas. – Crispin Sartwell

Reading Between the Lines

FBI myth: crack experts at hunting dangerous criminals. FBI truth: lazy pickers of low-hanging fruit: “…The Grand Junction [Colorado] Police Department…and the Federal Bureau of Investigation gathered evidence at [four] massage parlors…on possible human trafficking and prostitution…” Here’s the FBI press release; note that they’ve realized huge numbers of sex worker arrests make them look bad, so they only provide figures for underage workers arrested (under the euphemism “recovered”) and men (probably mostly male sex workers) accused of being “pimps”. If the proportions hold from previous operations, over 2000 adult sex workers were arrested in all.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

This is especially hilarious given the location: “Authorities…say they’ve arrested…Phoenix police officer…John Geroulis…as part of a multi-agency undercover operation targeting human trafficking and prostitution…the 25-year veteran suddenly retired [the next morning].” But this one is even more so:

A sheriff’s deputy and SWAT team member in Washington state was arrested…Darrion Holiwell…physically abused his wife and promoted her as an escort on…backpage.com. He is also charged with using and distributing steroids, and with stealing thousands of pounds of brass and bullets from the police firing range and selling them to gun shops…

It Looks Good On Paper

I get that the writer is a “feminist” rather than a journalist, but surely the New York Daily News has editors qualified to recognize an incoherent mess when they see it:

The world is awaiting the return of nearly 300 Nigerian girls abducted from their school…girls as young as 14…are a familiar sight in the sex trade. Demand is so great that traffickers not only import women from abroad, but target…American kids…Brianna [was]…kidnapped…by a school janitor at the age of 9, she was sold to a pimp…The bill she is championing creates the crime of…buying a child for sex…

Change a Few Words

Note how little you’d have to change in this excerpt from the first draft of Radley Balko’s book to make it about the war on whores:

…Nixonians…pushed the idea that drug use was connected to crime…They took their…absurd estimate of heroin addicts…multiplied it by another absurd figure—the amount of money the administration estimated the typical heroin junkie spent each year to get high…then capped off the equation with a third faulty assumption: that heroin addicts steal all of the money…The resulting figures, which seemed to increase with each reiteration of them, were several times larger than the total amount of property stolen in the entire country…Nixon’s top aides themselves didn’t believe their own bull…They were knowingly lying to bring the country along on a drug war. The press jumped in with sensational stories to help dehumanize the drug offenders…

Pick a Color

It’s such a pleasure to see someone admit this in the mainstream media:

…the left-right axis…is conceptually confused, ideologically tendentious, and…infested by contradictions…the idea that…political and economic power…can be pulled apart and set against each other…is…obviously false, because hierarchies tend to coincide… corporate capitalism has always completely depended on state power, and the basic practical thrust of left statism has always been annexation of the economy…The…robber-baron period is often held to have been…[eventually] constrained…by the state [but] the…procedures employed by [industrialists]…depended fundamentally on state sponsorship and state violence…in the so-called Progressive Era…specific cartels and fortunes were compromised, [but] the consolidation…continued, as…government became the central bank…and the modern bureaucratic corporation emerged…the…spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on…one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism…between…Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth.

Yellow Fever

Jezebel swallows the “trafficking town” myth like a big, slimy…

In an extensive investigative series called Pimp City: A Journey to the Center of the Sex Slave Trade, Fusion explores Tenancingo, Mexico, a town that makes virtually its entire living from sex trafficking…According to the documentary…”women are actually a commodity to be used over and over and over again…a pimp can make half a million dollars a year with three women working for him, each seeing an average of 20 clients a day, each for 15 minutes”…

In case you didn’t know, Fusion is a site attempting to position itself as the sleaziest organ in the yellow corpus, like an unfunny Weekly World News.

Number Puzzle

…the Dutch National Rapporteur Human Trafficking...recommends…to register individuals as victims more frequently, regardless of if there is an indication of actual trafficking…she acts as if the false positives …are not a big deal…we’re making reports…of situations that have nothing to do with human trafficking, which is making our data completely meaningless…only 2% of the so-called victims want help…[laws] make it impossible for…a sex worker to arrange [travel or visa] for…yourself, but if you get help then that’s called trafficking…Having a guard is seen as suspect, having lots of friends, too, and also having few friends…[even] if an agent…“feels” that it’s trafficking…that’s [enough]…

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (TW3 #312)

…mayor…Tri Rismaharini…announced the closure of the “Dolly” prostitution complex in [Surabaya]…hundreds of prostitutes and others who said their livelihoods depend on the sex trade blocked streets…in protest…The government plans to provide $425 to each of about 1,500 sex workers to help them start a new life…

Sex workers have defiantly vowed the district will remain open despite the edict.

Under Every Bed

One day, we’re going to look back on all this and laugh. All of us, that is, except people rotting for decades in prison on bogus “sex trafficking” charges.

…”The truckers…of Montana have partnered with us to put…human trafficking awareness posters on their trucks,” said…Attorney General Tim Fox. “The truckers move all across the country, they’re in…a lot of places that human trafficking might take place…We’ve had…young girls…trafficked out of Montana…and…into Montana. Even right here in Billings…because…we’re…in the intersection of I-90 and I-94″…

Traffic Jam (TW3 #318)

I welcome ugly bandwagon-jumping like this because it hastens the day when the public is utterly sick of “sex trafficking” nonsense:

There are few things in opera more depressing than watching great singers struggling in the face of an obstructive and pretentious production. Yet alas that is the case with the Royal Opera’s first presentation of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut for more than 30 years. Jonathan Kent…opts for a contemporary setting in which wide-eyed Manon arrives – from eastern Europe? – with her pimp of a brother at a sleazy casino and becomes the fluffy mistress of a banker. He forces her into soft porn…and then kicks her into sex-traffic hell…Puccini creates an atmosphere of lush melancholy romance, but Kent can interpret it all only in terms of today’s headlines…

Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (TW3 #318)

It’s time once again for the pompous, asinine, methodology-free “Washington is the World’s Daddy” report (AKA the “Trafficking in Persons” Report), in which the US State Department presumes to judge and rank how every other country “deals with” an imaginary problem defined into existence by American prudishness and “analyzed” chiefly by how closely that country apes American anti-whore brutality. Canadian prohibitionists are happy to cite the report this year in order to shore up their criminalization crusade, but New Zealand has no such agenda and therefore told Uncle Sam where he could stick his demeaning “report card”:

…The US State Department Trafficking in Persons 2014 Report…criticised New Zealand’s lack of a comprehensive anti-trafficking law, and recommended New Zealand’s legal framework be expanded to prohibit and punish all forms of human trafficking…The report [included evidence-free accusations]…of…children…subjected to street prostitution…[and infantilized Asian] women…at risk of coerced…prostitution…[Immigration Minister Michael] Woodhouse said all allegations of human trafficking were investigated, but none had resulted in substantiated evidence…

The Naked Emperor (TW3 #324)

In which danah boyd takes a few more steps toward the light:

…journalists and the public reify a Hollywood narrative of what trafficking is supposed to look like — innocent young girl abducted from happy, healthy, not impoverished home with loving parents and then forced into sexual acts by a cruel older man…the…reality…is much darker and implicates many more people in power…many youth…are not pimped…[they] begin trading sex for basic services — food, shelter, protection…when it comes to minors, most anti-trafficking advocates and government actors argue that it’s all trafficking. Except when that label’s not convenient…

Magic Formulae

Most of this vile article glorifies the FBI’s pogrom against consenting adults under the guise of “fighting sex trafficking”, but this section needs to be pasted to the foreheads of every whore who believes in magic formulae:

…At least two of the women inquired…whether the supposed client was in fact a police officer…[one] woman…“did a cop check” on the officer and then said, “Okay, I just want to make sure you‘‍re not a cop.” Undercover detectives agreed to a price…and exchanged the money — usually it had to be placed on a bedside table or television, as the women refused to handle the money directly. The detectives then signaled for back-up, and detectives and agents swarmed the room…

Absolute Corruption (TW3 #326)

Jesse Friedman…filed a defamation suit against Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice for knowingly publishing false and defamatory statements in a report summarizing her review of Friedman’s 1988 conviction…In one example, DA Rice made the entirely fabricated claim that Jesse Friedman “wrote, possessed and distributed” shocking pornography involving incest, bestiality, and child rape while he was in prison. The DA provided as proof a printout of a series of…stories…[from] the Internet, written by and credited to someone else, whose email address appears at the bottom with an invitation to contact her. As the DA was well aware, Jesse Friedman was incarcerated at a maximum-security prison, and had no access to the Internet…

A Tale That Grew in the Telling (All Traffick, All the Time)

How low can they go? “[Cop] Adam Kavanaugh…said…'[a sex worker] is a person who has been victimized and probably raped at age 8 if not earlier’…”

Whither Canada? (TW3 #423)

While I’m happy to see political conservatives calling for decriminalization, I have to wonder why Tom Flanagan can’t see the moral panic is already well underway:

…Perhaps the most alarming thing about Bill C-36 is its potential to reunite the coalition of radical feminists, social conservatives, and law-enforcement authorities that gave us the triple moral panic of the 1980s over imaginary sexual abuse of children…I hope we’re not seeing a new moral panic over prostitution, but the signs are worrisome. Conservative MPs are talking darkly about pimps in schoolyards. The Minister of Justice has started to create a new class of folk devils by calling the customers of prostitutes “perverts”…

Hard Numbers (TW3 #424)

I do keep telling you so.

…The World Cup is supposed to be good for sex workers’ wallets…But…sex workers aren’t having an easy time of things at Brazil 2014…with sex workers allegedly pushed out of their usual haunts by police looking to crack down…it’s…more difficult for the workers to find clients. And when they do, the…crowd isn’t quite as imagined. “They came here all dirty, thinking we are obligated to go out with them…They…get drunk and won’t spend money with us,” [one sex worker] said…

Feminine Pragmatism (TW3 #425)

Matthias Lehmann, who studied Korean sex workers’ situations for several years, has some choice words for that “sex working grandmothers” story:

…Lucy Williamson…leaves out the police almost entirely…and…fails to mention the…[government’s offer] to pay…rewards of up to one hundred million won (US$98,000) for tip-offs about prostitution activities…Williamson also omits that…South Korea’s constitutional court is mulling over the constitutionality of the country’s anti-prostitution law…

Cooties

Note the weird dehumanization of sex workers by calling them “networks”:

Swedish police have issued warnings that it’s increasingly common for prostitutes to rent apartments for work…”The better the hotel personnel get in seeing prostitution, the more unwilling these networks are to stay in the hotels” [said creepy cop Simon] Häggström [who] added that the number of rented apartments where prostitution occurs is minimal, but still “tragic”…

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That Was the Week That Was (#136)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged A Moral Cancer, A Working System, Above the Law, activism, agency denial, apes & monkeys, Australia, avails laws, bogus studies, brothels, censorship, Central Asia, comics, cops, crypto-moralism, cult of the child, dehumanization, dirty, disability, disease, Don’t Buy It, Georgia, Get Out of the 19th Century Often?, Having and Eating Cake, hysteria, Illinois, India, Japan, Japanese Prostitution, Kansas, Latin America, law, lawheads, Legalization a Good Idea?, Mexico, Middle East, Monkey Business, My Readers Write, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, neofeminism, New Orleans, New York, No Other Option, Pakistan, pimps, porn, prohibitionist myths, psychology, See No Evil, So Close and Yet So Far, sporting events, stereotypes, streetwalkers, stripping, Traffic Jam, Under Duress, United Kingdom, video, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism, yin and yang on February 10, 2013| 48 Comments »

Whorephobia…can manifest in various forms, including…rejection of a fellow…human being…projection of one’s own life experiences onto another…and in severe cases, frothing at the mouth…and feverishly campaigning for extreme punishment and prohibition of Whores and Whore-adjacent peoples, places, and objects. – Aspasia Bonasera

No Other Option

Another good article about sex work with disabled clients, this one a first-person account from reader Laura Lee. Due to the movie The Sessions this has become a very “hot” topic, which is good because it deals a strong blow to the “victimized prostitute” narrative. For more on the subject, here’s Becky Adams:

Japanese Prostitution

Customers…now have another option…at [Tokyo]…cuddle club Soineya…For $11 per minute, patrons…can ask for the oshiri makura (butt pillow) service and rest their heads on the behinds of its female staff…Customers must first pay an admission fee — starting at 3,000 yen (around $34) — and then have the option to purchase premium services, such as foot massages…[or] laying in a female employee’s lap…

Don’t Buy It

Interestingly, “sex trafficking” fetishists waited until Super Bowl Sunday to trot out their claims this year, probably to avoid the high-profile debunking which will soon be inevitable; the story was updated less than 38 hours after its initial appearance to include a reference to an article for which I was consulted last year and the opinion of Rachel Lloyd, a “sex trafficking” promoter who has criticized the rampant exaggerations and the “gypsy whores” myth. The main attraction is yet another soi-disant “survivor” spouting the typical tinned narrative (brutal pimp, 50 clients a day, etc), and there’s a bonus appearance by SOAP. The most interesting bit is this snapshot of “Chinese Whispers” in action: the story claims that “133 underage arrests for prostitution were made in Dallas during the 2011 Super Bowl,” when in actuality a very-typical 133 adult arrests of all types (not prostitution alone) were made in the 2½ weeks before the Super Bowl. The number of actual “pimps” arrested? One, an idiot who got the idea from the hype.

Get Out of the 19^th Century Often?

Atlanta’s police chief…George Turner has asked city council to approve a…banishment law…the first conviction would result in the accused prostitute being ordered not to return to the area they were arrested…upon second conviction, the accused prostitute would be banished from city limits forever…Larry Miller…said he supports anything that would put a dent in the prostitution plague…

Human beings are now a “plague” to be “banished” from an autocrat’s realm.

Chupacabra

Dr. Brooke Magnanti on the “pimp” myth:

…I have never met a person even remotely like the stereotypical pimp, and yet I “know” they exist, largely because I have been told so over and over again. I’ve met streetwalkers, both drug-addicted and not; escorts and call girls, same; not one ever had what popular imagination would classify as a “pimp,” but then I keep getting told I’m not representative, so maybe the literally hundreds of…sex workers I’ve met are just “not representative” too?…Independent sex workers who organise their own affairs…Roommates who share a flat…escort agencies with a dozen or so girls…Massage parlour owners. Women whose house is used by other sex workers…People who set up message boards and internet forums…All of these are…called “pimps” by the anti-sex lobby. A guy in a crushed velvet suit on a street corner, keeping his girls high and working the neighbourhood? Not so many of those…

A Working System

Look past the fashionable “sex slave” rhetoric to what’s actually going on here:

…Chee Mei Wong…[allegedly] ran the Diamonds brothel in …Sydney…between…2008 and 2010…[and] employed six women…who…were told they would have to work until they paid off the cost of their airfare, visa and course fees [around $5000]…Despite…having paid off their debt after a “short period of time” it is alleged Ms Wong threatened she would have their visas revoked if they left. But Ms Wong’s barrister Bruce Quinn said she…only worked at the brothel as…receptionist…[and] the matter was simply an “industrial dispute” and a “sham” created so the women could stay in Australia…

These sorts of conflicting claims are not unusual in contract disputes, and unfortunately many people are quick to accuse others of wrongdoing in order to divert government attention from themselves. The important thing is that nobody here was criminalized for her profession, and the same situation could have arisen in any industry employing migrants.

My Readers Write

Aspasia published a bang-on and hilarious parody of medicalized pop-psychology entitled “Join Me in the Fight Against Whorephobia” which you simply MUST read in its entirety to appreciate. I also recommend this thoughtful essay in which Obsidian proposes that the same shortage of eligible women which is at the root of so much violence in the Middle East may also influence the differences between homicide rates in American cities:

…the Big Apple saw a 50-year record low of just over 400 murders in a city of over 8 million; while for Chicago, the murder rate topped 500, with a population of roughly 2.5 million. Much has been said about the differences…in…their approaches toward fighting crime…Chicago has a proportionately larger police force than does NYC…[but] there are more Women to Men in NYC, than in Chicago…it’s been long known that whenever there are more males to females anywhere, trouble ensues. Indeed, we are beginning to see this manifest itself in earnest in places like China and India, where the male to female sex ratio is so off the chain that extreme exhibitions of behavior are being seen on the part of the males…

See No Evil

…U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple sentenced Christjan Bee of Monett, Missouri, to three years in prison for “possessing an obscene image of the sexual abuse of children…[namely] a collection of electronic comics, entitled ‘incest comics,’…[containing] multiple images of minors engaging in graphic sexual intercourse with adults and other minors”…In other words, he is going to prison for drawings; no actual children were involved at any point.

A Moral Cancer (Metaupdates)

You may have seen the latest “meat kills!” pseudo-study; of course, the media didn’t bother to report that the “researchers” and sponsors were all vegetarians who didn’t bother to control for little things like diabetes and age.

Above the Law

Well, this is different:

[Vincent Burroughs of] Oregon…has filed a lawsuit against an IRS agent…claiming he was coerced into [a sexual] relationship…Dora…Abrahamson contacted Burroughs about an audit…flirted with [him] over the telephone…offered him massages and sent him a photo of herself in her underwear…”She said that she could impose no penalty, or a 40 percent penalty, and that if he would give her what she wanted, she would give him what he needed”…

Traffic Jam

Mexican officials broke up a bizarre cult that allegedly ran a sex-slavery ring…The “Defensores de Cristo”…allegedly recruited women to have sex with a Spanish man who claimed he was the reincarnation of Christ…Followers were subjected to forced labor or sexual services, including prostitution…prosecutors were still trying to work out which of the detainees may be considered victims, and which were abusers…

Cult messiahs invariably have sex with female followers, and how is contributing sexual labor any different from contributing money or other labor as members of established religions do? But due to “trafficking” hysteria, it becomes “sex slavery” even though the “authorities” themselves admit that any assignment of “victim” and “abuser” status will be arbitrary.

Yellow Fever

The high standards of American journalism have reached Pakistan:

Meet Doctor Maria Zulfiqar Khan…In her recent programme, she conducted a self-styled raid on a massage center in Lahore…and harassed the women…police [accompanied] her, but she played being in charge…we see women helplessly trying to hide their faces…[and Khan]…going through handbag of a lady…picking up a condom…and shouting…”what is this? what is this?”…Khan also plays being an interrogator…and…at one point, not agreeing to the answers…says sarcastically, “yeah right, tell that to the cops when they take you”…At the end of the programme…she visits [the] house of one of the girls…and…tells her audience “this man made [his] daughter a prostitute, what an animal he is”…

Under Duress

For those who suspect I’m biased, here’s legal scholar Michelle Alexander:

…police have a special inclination toward confabulation…[and] an incentive to lie…[they] shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so…Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police commissioner…[decried] a police culture that treats lying as the norm…Gustin L. Reichbach of the [New York] Supreme Court…condemned a widespread culture of lying…in…drug enforcement units…the Bronx district attorney’s office was so alarmed by police lying that it decided to stop prosecuting people who were…arrested for trespassing at…housing projects…Numerous scandals involving police officers lying or planting drugs…have been linked to federally funded drug task forces eager to keep the cash rolling in…

For Those Who Think Legalization is a Good Idea (TW3 #34)

The Indian Supreme Court’s waffling on decriminalization has emboldened prohibitionist legislators, who tried to quietly criminalize prostitution by defining all sex work as “exploitation” and therefore illegal under existing law. The National Network of Sex Workers has appealed to the President of India to veto this sleazy back-door scheme, but if he does not you can bet a court challenge will not be long in coming since Indian sex workers, unlike most in the United States, are unified to fight for their rights.

Monkey Business

A minor war has broken out…in the village of Kiad [Saudi Arabia,] where large groups of hungry baboons from nearby valleys are attacking residences in search of food and drink…Adel Medini [said]…“The baboons are targeting empty houses and are well aware of what they are doing…They proceed according to studied plans. That’s why their attacks do not fail…a resident…[returns] to find his home in disarray. Some people…thought that thieves had…ransacked their houses…”

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic (TW3 #39)

Remember the scientists who proved one could find neural activity in a dead fish? Well, here’s a video of a thought forming in the brain of a larval zebrafish:

So Close and Yet So Far

I really wish people who support legal prostitution would talk to actual sex workers or even just do a little research before writing articles which perpetuate ugly myths such as “It’s no longer just a drug-addled woman forced onto lonely street corners” (it never was), and “sex workers are likely reticent to draw attention to their illicit life by divulging STDs and surely no one checks customers for STDs”. The latter is an especially damaging myth because you can guess his proposed “solution” to this nonexistent problem: compulsory disease checks for registered whores (but not amateurs, who are free to spread disease at will).

On the Simultaneous Having and Eating of Cake

The Kansas…Supreme Court ruled that exotic dancers are employees of the club where they work, not independent entertainment contractors…[at] Club Orleans [in] Topeka…dancers were required to pay non-negotiable “rent” for use of the stage and dressing rooms, as well as extra fees for the disc jockeys and bouncers…House rules governed what the dancers could do in their shows and the prices they had to charge for specific types of dances…The women were required to sign in with the bouncer at the beginning of a shift and weren’t allowed to leave…until the end of the shift…

The Devil’s Toys

In this book review, Harvey Silverglate made the same point I did yesterday:

In Unlearning Liberty, [Greg] Lukianoff…[presents many] examples of campus censorship …65% of liberal arts campuses have speech codes that violate…free speech norms…Lukianoff…persuasively argues that…contemporary campuses can be seen essentially as incubators for a future society governed by censorship of iconoclastic ideas and kangaroo courts that enforce those prohibitions…some…now sitting on the federal bench do not blanch when innocent citizens are convicted of violating statutes and regulations that no normal person could possibly understand [because] students…get accustomed to the administrative tyranny…and…don’t have much adjusting to do when they gain, and abuse, real power of their own…

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That Was the Week That Was (#26)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged Australia, bad customers, Bad Fantasy-Good Reality, Bell Hook & Kettle, Between the Lines, brothels, Canada, censorship, Check Your Premises, Coming and Going, cops, Counterfeit Comfort, dirty, East Asia, Europe, FBI, France, Google, Hooters Japanese Style, hysteria, Illinois, internet, Japan, law, Louisiana, My Favorite Updates, neofeminism, New York, Norway, pimps, porn, psychology, restaurants, serial killers, sex offender registry, stereotypes, streetwalkers, Surplus Women, Swedish model, Texas, The Course of a Disease, underage, United Kingdom, Vietnam, What a Week!, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on June 30, 2012| 69 Comments »

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority. – Joseph Addison

We’re halfway through the year already! Here’s a new item followed by eight updates and four metaupdates.

Feeding On Their Own

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (one of the goons behind the toothless threats against Backpage and a major promoter of the “gypsy whores” myth) has accused Google (which gave $11 million to anti-whore groups) of failing to enable Abbot’s snooping. I’m not really concerned with the conflict itself; I’m just glad to see two supporters of trafficking hysteria at each other’s throats. Maybe Abbott will be too busy fighting Google to persecute as many consenting adults as usual, and if this costs Google a lot of money they’ll have less to give to prohibitionists this year. Let’s hope this becomes a trend; perhaps Martha Coakley will sue CNN next.

Updates

Reading Between the Lines (November 11^th, 2010)

The last time the FBI diverted federal funds to conduct local prostitution busts under the guise of “fighting sex trafficking” I had a full report to dissect, but this time they’re playing coy; though press releases for “Operation Cross-Country 6” crow about the “rescue” of 79 “children” and the arrest of 104 “pimps”, no mention is made of the hundreds of adult women who were no doubt arrested as well (over 800 of them if the proportions are similar to those of the last raid). As for those “children”: most underage whores are about 17 so the majority of these probably are as well, though we’re only told they were “as young as” 13 (which would be true if only one was). Statistically, 66 of these “child sex slaves” have never even met a pimp, so where did 104 “pimps” come from? The answer is that most of them are probably male or transgender prostitutes, cast as “pimps” to fit the narrative. I’ll write more on this when more complete data becomes available, but in the meantime here’s an analysis of local reports compiled by the ever-thorough Emi Koyama.

Hooters, Japanese Style (December 15^th, 2010)

Japanese cops are adopting American-style prudishness and repression:

…police…arrested five employees affiliated with a restaurant chain that features female staff members in revealing clothing. Nikkan Gendai…sees the bust as another example of the demise of another popular form of salaryman entertainment…Attired in bikinis that expose their midriffs, the girls perform dance routines…and shake their hips as they take food orders…“After these girls get off work, they’ll attract stalkers,” says lawyer Toshi Okabayashi…“Since this type of employment could also develop into a hotbed for prostitution, the police cannot overlook these places.” The lawyer adds that these recent arrests are intended to set an example…

I’m not sure why the police should be concerned with “hotbeds of prostitution” when the trade is essentially legal in Japan; that “set an example” bit is chilling.

Check Your Premises (March 10^th, 2011)

Another man convicted of “child pornography” for taking photos of a woman with whom he was legally having sex:

…Marshall Hollins had a 17-year-old girlfriend…perfectly legal in Illinois, where the age of consent for sex is 17. Yet because Hollins took pictures…he was convicted of three child pornography offenses and sentenced to eight years in prison…the Illinois Supreme Court rejected Hollins’…arguments…While 17 might be old enough to have sex, the court said, allowing the event to be photographed entails additional risks that arguably require another year’s worth of maturity and wisdom…dissenting Justice Anne M. Burke noted…that…”all five photographs…are extreme closeups of the couples’ genitals,” including neither faces nor “visible identifying marks such as scars or tattoos”…

So in the American mind, the “risk” of creating an unidentifiable “dirty” picture outweighs that of creating a human life.

Surplus Women (September 27^th, 2011)

This rather bizarre item from The Sun presents a sympathetic view of an accused serial killer, but dismisses the three Winnipeg sex workers he may have murdered in a single phrase. Well, at least it doesn’t dwell in lurid and loving detail on the women’s profession as an equivalent American article would.

Bell, Hook and Kettle (December 6^th, 2011)

Though the Salvation Army claims that whores are all “victims” who need rescue, it apparently feels differently about homosexuals:

…In talking to…Serena Ryan and Pete Dillon on their Salt and Pepper radio show [audio here]…Major Andrew Craibe, a media relations director for one of the [Salvation Army’s] Australian branches, had this exchange with the hosts:

Ryan: According to the Salvation Army, [gay people] deserve death. How do you respond to that, as part of your doctrine?
Craibe: Well, that’s a part of our belief system.
Ryan: So we should die.
Craibe: You know, we have an alignment to the Scriptures, but that’s our belief.

The doctrine they’re referring to is…the Salvation Story: Salvationist Handbook of Doctrine, which borrows heavily from Romans 1:18-32…the Salvation Army has officially distanced itself from Craibe’s remarks…

The Course of a Disease (February 16^th, 2012)

The Norwegian body politic may yet fight the Swedish cancer into remission:

Norway should rip up a law that criminalizes sex buyers, Oslo’s social affairs chief believes, as a new report shows a marked rise in violence against prostitutes…Anniken Hauglie [said]…”The reality is that the law has made it more difficult for women…It’s our political responsibility to take this feedback seriously”…the Pro Sentret report indicates that the law has…made prostitutes much more susceptible to violence at the hands of their clients as the sex trade moves further underground…Many of the women also said the new law had scared off many of their more reliable customers, while troublesome and violent clients were relatively undeterred…

The fact that the ban hasn’t decreased prostitution may also help: “In 2011, the number of prostitutes…rose by 28 percent compared to the previous year, according to…Pro Sentret, the country’s official help centre for prostitutes…”

Meanwhile, in France:

…Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the [French] women’s rights minister…said in an interview that she would be organising a conference of experts on how to contain the sex-trade and human-trafficking… “Since the 19^th century and…Josephine Butler, Britain and France have been the core countries in the international mobilisation against prostitution. I really hope that these common roots are still alive”…

I hope so, too; though Josephine Butler was against prostitution personally and promoted the idea of whores as “victims”, she also opposed the idea of using laws to control or “abolish” it.

Yellow Fever (June 18^th, 2012)

If you thought 20 clients a night was a bit hard to believe, and 35 a night wholly absurd, how do you feel about 50?

Tamara Vandermoon…ran away when she was 12, the same age she turned her first trick…before she knew it she was prostituting herself up to 50 times a night, the money going to her pimp or to feed [her] drug habit…When it comes to child and adolescent sex-trafficking in the United States, the FBI ranks Minneapolis-St. Paul among the top 13…With its tangle of highways…its year-round sporting events and frequent conventions, millions pass through on any given day…many teens who wind up in the sex trade are runaways targeted by men who coerce or threaten them through physical or psychological abuse…

It would be hard to imagine a more ludicrous collection of myths and fallacies in one short article. Besides the turgid client count there’s the ridiculous belief that a large number of highways constitutes evidence that a city is a “sex trafficking” hub, the myth that sporting events attract whores and the lie that most teen whores are recruited by “pimps”, and that’s just in the first six bite-sized paragraphs (before it descends into badge-licking, “trafficking” platitudes and “end demand” rhetoric). I almost feel I should stand up and applaud.

My Favorite TV Dramas (June 27^th, 2012)

William Shatner gets it, even if the former mayor of Ilfracombe doesn’t:

Star Trek actor William Shatner…[appeared on] the BBC show Have I Got News for You…When he mispronounced the town’s name, guest panellist Charlie Brooker said he had made it sound “deeply sexual” and Shatner replied: “The place is laced with prostitution.” [Paul Crabb, Former Mayor of Ilfracombe] emailed Shatner’s agents: “As Captain James T Kirk, Mr Shatner has been to places where no man has gone before, however, [this]…clearly shows he has never been [here]. If he came, we could show him that there is no prostitution in Ilfracombe”…In an email…Shatner replied that prostitution “commonly means sex for something of value…I would be hard pressed to believe that sex was not being had in Ilfracombe for something of value, perhaps a lengthy marriage, children or a valuable career. In any event, my apologies for having singled out Ilfracombe as a potential haven for prostitution…”

N.B: With 10,840 people, Ilfracombe might have as many as 15 whores.

Metaupdates

Counterfeit Comfort in TW3 (#8) (February 26^th, 2012)

Louisiana just won’t give up trying to destroy people’s lives:

A new Louisiana law requires sex offenders…to state their criminal status on their Facebook or other social networking page…[it] builds upon existing sex offender registration laws, in which the offender must notify immediate neighbors and a school district of his or her residency near them…The law states that…[a registrant] “shall include in his profile…an indication that he is a sex offender or child predator and shall include notice of the crime for which he was convicted, the jurisdiction of conviction, a description of his physical characteristics… and his residential address”…

In other words, he’s “required” to provide lunatics with detailed instructions to make it easier to murder him. No doubt other states will follow Louisiana’s lead, despite the fact that onerous sex offender notification requirements are known to increase the risk of re-offense by socially isolating the registrant.

Coming and Going in TW3 (#17) (April 28th, 2012)

Anna Gristina finally left prison Tuesday evening after her bail was reduced to a more reasonable figure:

…A Manhattan judge signed…Anna Gristina’s $250,000 bond package, clearing the way for her to be released with an ankle bracelet…Gristina, 44, is a mother of four who tends to rescued pigs…but prosecutors say she also was the madam of an upscale sex service for 15 years…Gristina has said she was merely starting a matchmaking service, not peddling prostitutes…

Tracy Quan published an interesting article on Gristina’s defense which points out, as I have before, that the line between matchmaking and “pandering” is a purely arbitrary one.

Bad Fantasy, Good Reality in TW3 (#20) (May 19^th, 2012)

Dr. Kimberly Hoang was not satisfied with merely publishing the truth about Vietnamese sex workers in her dissertation; she also gave an interview to Vietnamese media:

…Dr Kimberly Kay Hoang…[said] “Most people assume that women engaging in the sex industry do so because they are kidnapped, forced, or coerced into sex work…However, few studies have been able to furnish empirical evidence to support these claims…Legalizing this work would provide women with the same legal rights as other working people”…

What a Week! in TW3 (#22) (June 3^rd, 2012)

As part of the process of licensing what will be Australia’s largest brothel, Urbis think tank did a study on the effects of brothels on neighborhoods. Its findings?

There is not a definitive relationship between the opening and expansion of…brothels and any increase in crime.

There is no proven correlation between decreases in property value and the location of sex premises in an area.

There is no evidence that anti-social behaviour in inner city areas can be attributed to the clients or staff of sex premises.

So, sex industry premises, much like other contentious uses such as funeral parlours, can cause a level of discomfort for some members of the community. At the same time, the sex industry has a role to play in the social and economic vibrancy of cities and sex premises are a legal and legitimate land use.

One Year Ago Today

“June Q & A” defines my own terms “archeofeminism” and “neofeminism”, discusses the Indonesian “Obedient Wives Club” and offers assistance to a man who has difficulty achieving orgasm with a partner.

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Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged agency denial, Bangladesh, ethics, fantasy, hysteria, Latin America, neofeminism, Nevada, New York, pimps, stereotypes, Yellow Fever, yellow journalism on June 18, 2012| 22 Comments »

The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick. – L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

Many reasonably-intelligent people in the media and even academia are afflicted with a curious kind of farsightedness; they can see events of the near past (say 25-150 years) with clarity, but are completely unable to recognize their resemblance to modern ones. The example that leaps immediately to mind is “sex trafficking” hysteria, which as I’ve previously demonstrated bears a remarkable similarity to the Satanic Panic and is virtually indistinguishable from the “white slavery” hysteria; Furry Girl has also pointed out its resemblance to the “crack” panic of the 1980s. Furthermore, the bizarre, exaggerated stories told by “sex trafficking survivors” look very much like the “recovered memories” of self-proclaimed victims of extraterrestrial visitors and Satanic cults. Yet somehow, even people who understand the concept of moral panics cannot identify the “trafficking” myth as one of them. It’s not unlike the way that people recognize tyranny in politicians of the opposing party, but not in those from their own party, or who fail to comprehend that the War on Drugs is no different from Prohibition of the 1920s.

But the example I’d like to address today is yellow journalism, which is the substitution of sensationalism, scaremongering, scandal and bogus research for real reporting and ethical journalism. The term is most closely associated with flamboyant newspapers of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and the majority of articles on the subject concentrate wholly on that time, as though it were a phenomenon relegated to the past; in actuality it has become the norm, with once-respectable media outlets such as CNN, the New York Times and the BBC competing with each other to publish the most lurid, judgmental and fact-free stories on sex work and many other issues.

Case in point: National Geographic. It would be difficult to imagine a more staid publication, but the TV network which bears its name is simply awful; the few times I’ve watched it I’ve been appalled at the number of errors, distortions, omissions and what I must presume to be outright lies in its programs. One year ago today I reviewed an episode of its Taboo series ambitiously entitled “Prostitution”, only to discover that its director and writer appear to have been at cross purposes:

…the single most common form of prostitution in the Western world, namely escorting, was entirely ignored in favor of lurid concentration on a very small fraction of the American market. The director seems to have leaned a little on our side…[but] the writer leaned the other way: Every negative statement about prostitution was expressed as a fact, while every positive one was said to be an opinion. Statements about the terrible conditions of their lives made by the Bangladeshi prostitutes and the American streetwalkers were reported with the word “is”, while statements made by the legal Australian and Dutch prostitutes were reported with the word “claims”. In other words we hear that the streetwalker is miserable, but the Aussie brothel girls only claim to be happy. It’s a subtle bias, but one a less-critical viewer would absorb without noticing.

This ambivalence seems to be the norm at NatGeo (the network’s attempt at a “hip” nickname for itself); Amanda Brooks recently agreed to appear in another of their shows entitled “Sex for Sale: American Escort” (apparently an attempt to make up for our omission from the Taboo episode). After being “assured…this was a stand-alone documentary focusing on the US and the legal issues surrounding prostitution”, Amanda agreed to spend two (unpaid) days with them, and this was the result:

…I watched it in horror. The title alone let me know this was not a serious documentary examining criminalization in the US. In fact, they barely mention criminalization or its effects. They don’t bother to figure out that criminalization is the reason for a lot of the pushback they receive when trying to interview agencies…My role was “blink and you’ll miss it,” which was a bit of a relief by the end. The “undercover” harassment of random agencies in Vegas was nauseating. I have no love for escort/stripper agencies in Vegas but this show actually made me feel sorry for the people who were just running a business…The supposed pimp-daddy in shades interviewed by Mariana [van Zeller] appears to be a hobbyist indulging in what’s known as “role-play.” Even [my photographer] thought the guy was fake and she doesn’t deal with pimps, hobbyists or agencies…Focusing the “hidden” camera on the one girl’s boobs was completely uncalled for, especially given the victim-y slant of the whole show. Exploitation is exploitation, whether it’s a pimp, client, or “hidden” camera. What turned my stomach the most was the Vegas escort they interviewed/exploited. Though they obscure her face, at one point they show her site and it was recognizable…I felt ripped off, for sure. On the other hand, I was also relieved that I didn’t play a more-prominent role in this disaster. The CNBC documentary I did in 2008, while it ruffled some feathers over its display of websites, treated us with a lot more respect overall and had as balanced a view as it’s possible to get with mainstream media. I’m still very happy with that documentary. This effort was not that. Not even close…

It used to be that one could tell the difference between articles in respectable news sources and those in the tabloids. But what real distinction is there when the BBC distorts and exaggerates a story in exactly the same way as the New York Daily News?

In this small Mexican town that sends sex slaves to New York, little boys dream of growing up to be pimps…The town of 10,000, about 80 miles from Mexico City, is Mexico’s undisputed cradle of sex trafficking, one end of a pipeline that leads directly to our city’s streets. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s New York field office arrested 32 sex traffickers last year; 26 of them were from Tenancingo. It’s a family business, and through the decades, the pimps have perfected methods to coerce women into sexual slavery using romance, lies and the threat of violence. Over the last 20 years they have branched out of Latin America, sending sex workers to New York and other U.S. cities, experts said…Each family sends its youngest and most handsome men across Mexico to pose as salesmen with nice clothes and fancy cars, Munoz Berruecos said. They woo rural women waiting at bus stops or taking Sunday strolls in the park. Once the women are seduced, they are coerced into prostitution. The women are held inside the Tenancingo “security houses” — where some say they were repeatedly raped. If they have children, the kids are kept in the town for leverage after they are dispatched to red-light districts. Some go to Mexico City. Many end up in Queens, where johns can order them for delivery by calling numbers advertised on cards, key chains or bottle openers, authorities say…Officials said each prostitute they bring to New York — where they service up to 35 johns a day — nets the traffickers about $100,000 a year…

Here’s Dr. Laura Agustin’s debunking of the BBC version of the same story. I only have two things to add in regard to the Daily News version: note that the number of clients per day has now ballooned to 35, and consider the repeated iterations of (unnamed) “experts said” and “authorities said” (one of Frank Mott‘s defining characteristics of yellow journalism is “a parade of false learning from so-called experts”). Despite the paper’s blatant exploitation of women to sell advertising you won’t hear a word from “feminists” about it, or about the stereotypes of female stupidity, gullibility and muddle-headedness this sort of story promotes; for neofeminists, that’s OK if it makes men look like monsters and whips up anti-sex sentiment in the hoi-polloi. And for the media, lying is OK if it rakes in cash, even if that means drowning the reputation won by the hard work of previous generations of reputable journalists in a sea of yellow ink.

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