Meth is another animal altogether. Opiate abusers can use the stuff for decades and there systems get used to it and still function. Meth operates on totally different areas and systems, quickly escalates and can tear a person down much faster. It also is much more toxic to the system and changes the brain structure much more rapidly. Legalizing meth is a terrible idea, and does not compare to opiates in any way.

I believe anyone can get grace, however anyone abusing folks like this fellow did may be one of those rare people that are simply evil. Women on meth are far more likely to have severe diagnosed disorders such as Borderline personality, Narcissism, Depression etc. Because they are so vulnerable to men and a system that punishes and does not assist women, they rapidly devolve into the worst abusive situations imaginable. Men bottom much faster then women because when they run out they are on their own with little to support them. Women by virtue of the system that makes them powerless are taken for longer rides in turn for sex, and someone men can abuse and dominate. This does several things: It enables longer drug use for greater damage. It furthers the physical and sexual abuse that creates PTSD and a host of other Disorders. It exposes them to STD’s and others infections that return often after getting clean to shorten and destroy the life they have left. As many have children in a system that harshly treats single moms, they loose their parental rights, and find great guilt and difficulty in regaining them. The children suffer terribly, and are victims themselves if they are with their moms while she is using.

Tempting an addict to perform for drugs is like offering candy to kids at school to be raped later. This is hardly a victimless crime. The fact that people are discussing the victim’s “responsibility” in this just shows how all of us have been programmed to believe that perpetrators like this are somehow less than 100% responsible. This man is the worst type of criminal and a very sick person. Severe sentences need to be brought to keep this type of predator from victimizing a group of people that are already dealing with a big monkey. If anything can almost bring one to militancy it is a man like this. I deal with 3 times as many men as women in addiction, and have buried equal numbers from STD and violence related deaths. (18 in two years.) What is wrong with our society that this hasn’t created outrage? As many that seek abusive relationships have been victimized before, it just feeds the cycle even more. (I have had parents and their adult children both go through our programs.)

Legalization simply makes it look cleaner; it doesn’t stop the problem or the pain. Putting real effort into treatment, providing sanctuary for women in abuse, and putting away the causes of the abuse for severe sentences with treatment makes much more sense. Blessings.

Prostitution : Rights of Women or right to women ?

10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution

The Legalisation of Prostitution : A failed social experiment

Sex: From intimacy to “sexual labor” or Is it a human right to prostitute?

Streets Apart

Legitimating Prostitution as Sex Work : UN Labour Organization (ILO) Calls for Recognition of the Sex Industry (Part One)

Legitimating Prostitution as Sex Work : UN Labour Organization (ILO) Calls for Recognition of the Sex Industry (Part Two)

“Solution

Decriminalize the women in prostitution. Criminalize the men who buy women and children and anyone who promotes sexual exploitation, particularly pimps, procurers and traffickers. ”

Quoted from:
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

There’s a big if, all righty. Especially since those ‘innate differences’ would have to be not only in sexuality, but in approaches to power, entitlement and abuse.

Looking back on my own pregnancies, I suspect that my chemistry has a greater influence on me that I wanted to believe going in. I didn’t have to deal with post partum depression or anything like that, but pregnancy changed me. Subtle chemistry changes did change my approach to things; certainly my approach to power and how to use it has changed considerably. Which I suppose is why I don’t consider chemical differences influencing attitudes as big an “if” as you do.

mythago wrote:

Oxytocin is the hormone that causes birth contractions, isn’t it?

Correct. It’s also involved in lactation - it’s often called the “bonding chemical”. Since most of my reading on it goes back to when I was breastfeeding, I’m afraid I can’t help you in finding any studies on its interaction with estrogen. My breastfeeding books are long gone.

There’s a big if, all righty. Especially since those ‘innate differences’ would have to be not only in sexuality, but in approaches to power, entitlement and abuse.

I doubt there would any “innate, biological” check on women exercising sexual power abusively - men are not innately protected from STDs, and I don’t see that pregnancy would have weeded out women who went to male prostitutes. (Much less those who went to female prostitutes.)

Women’s higher level of estrogen interacts with oxytocin to make them more touch sensitive and the like.

I’ve never seen any peer-reviewed study that said this, but I’d be very interested to looka t one. Oxytocin is the hormone that causes birth contractions, isn’t it?

However, I think it’s probably more that the more men feel threatened by women, the more they feel driven to humiliate prostitutes.

I suppose you’re right. In my experience, guys as a whole were far more fussed about “women taking over” in the 1970’s and ’80’s - the only guys I really “hear” saying that now are the MRAs - while they started fussing about guy rights stepping on their toes more recently, but that could just be an accident of my environment. Or it may be the majority of guys who felt the most strongly about women getting “too many rights” then are now quieter but more angry.

That does get me to speculating - a lot of prostitutes report that johns have gotten more abusive (in minor ways like “water sports”, not so much in terms of beatings), and going on historical documents more johns are now demanding a much greater variety of activities. If misogyny and homophobia are closely connected, does that mean that the more men feel threatened by homosexual rape, the more they feel driven to humiliate protitutes?

It’s possible. However, I think it’s probably more that the more men feel threatened by women, the more they feel driven to humiliate prostitutes. If forced to hazard a guess, mine would be that it’s women moving closer to civil equality that has led to the change, not gay rights.

Of course, I do see the two as intimately connected. Maybe the spectre of being “turned into a woman” by the dread butt-sex starts getting a whole lot scarier as the right to treat women like “women” (ie, chattel) is taken away.

There are plenty of misogynistic porn stories with the same theme, so I don’t think that gives much support to the idea that women aren’t naturally drawn to a particular kind of sexually-violent fantasizing that men are.

Because a lot of the women I know writing that sort of thing are trying to work through their own rapes. Whether this is the best way for them to go about it is a hotly debated topic - rape victims writing it arguing with rape victims who insisted that no one who’d been raped would write that sort of thing. I would argue that women in a culture where they are likely to be raped are approaching the theme from a different direction than men in a culture where they are not likely to be raped.

mythago writes;

It would surprise me; why wouldn’t they?

I’m not arguing that women in a strongly matriarchal society wouold be sweetness and light. I am arguing that if there are innate differences between women and men, they’d most likely show in the area of sexuality, because that is where women and men are most physically different. A male client using a prostitute bears little of the risk of the activity; the woman carries all the risk of pregnancy and is more likely to get STDs. A female client using a male prostitute would carry the greater risk than he would, so there may be an innate, biological reason that women in power would not express that power sexually the same way men do.

While a lot of the differences between how men and women experience sex have been discredited - women do have a strong sex drive; women can not only orgasm but are multi-orgasmic, women need the “male” hormone testosterone and men the “female” hormone oxytocin in order to orgasm, etc. - there are still checmical-based differences in how men and women experience sex that are innate. Women’s higher level of estrogen interacts with oxytocin to make them more touch sensitive and the like.

ginmar wrote:

When it’s an adult woman acting out her hostility toward young girls who got the fictional guy she wanted, it can be well and truly frightening.

I’ve mostly seen it where it’s young girls punishing their contemporaries, but, yes, it’s a squick fest. Still, it’s women punishing women, women forcing a rival through a threat they both face, which may or may not translate directly to women sexually punishing men when the women are in power.

That does get me to speculating - a lot of prostitutes report that johns have gotten more abusive (in minor ways like “water sports”, not so much in terms of beatings), and going on historical documents more johns are now demanding a much greater variety of activities. If misogyny and homophobia are closely connected, does that mean that the more men feel threatened by homosexual rape, the more they feel driven to humiliate protitutes?

While there may now be fannish stories out there where the sexually tortured victim revels in it, I haven’t run across any written by a woman (printed fic was more female-dominated than ‘net fic is).

Oh, I have, I have. Trust me, there’s tons of it out there, and the vast majority of it is written by women (fandom is still an overwhelmingly female phenomenon, even in these newfangled internet days). In fact, there’s enough of it that at least one fanfic site I’m aware of requires the use of the abbreviation N/C->C (for “non-consensual to consensual,” ie - the sort of story where someone is raped but by the end of the experience is enjoying it) to be included somewhere in a story’s blurb to warn off those readers who are squicked or offended by that sort of rape fantasy pr0n. And like Ginmar said, there’s also the term “rapefic,” which refers to the entire, errr…ouvre of rape-based pornographic fanfic.

Tons of women get off on sickfic and non-con, and tons of women write it. The difference, IMO, lies more in the disparity of who, in the real world, is more often actually trying to turn those fantasies into reality . And I think that Mythago is right to suggest that that has a lot to do with who’s got the power. I also think that it’s got a lot to do with which particular violent rape fantasies we privilege as having some kind of bullshit “sociobiological reality” (talk about an oxymoron!), and which ones we encourage people to consider obviously nothing but minor provinces of the Land of Make-Believe.

Beats me why some people think that female writers are cuddly, either. There’s a truly scary fanfic phenom called rapefic which features women and girls writing gleefully about the rape of female characters. The female character is turned into a whining dog who begs and pleads, can’t fight it off, asks for it, then loves it. When it’s an adult woman acting out her hostility toward young girls who got the fictional guy she wanted, it can be well and truly frightening.

So it’s OK to have torture and suffering, just as long as nobody’s enjoying it? There are plenty of misogynistic porn stories with the same theme, so I don’t think that gives much support to the idea that women aren’t naturally drawn to a particular kind of sexually-violent fantasizing that men are.

Of course, I could just be flashing back to the lesbian BDSM ’sex wars’ of the 80s.

It would not surprise me if far fewer women used prostitutes in a culture where they carried the power men do now for some innate reason.

It would surprise me; why wouldn’t they? It’s not as though we live in a world where, when women are given power, they uniquely fail to abuse it the way men do.

I don’t ever remember reading about pliers or vomit in a Penthouse Letters column, but I’ve seen plenty of “hurt/comfort”? slash (some people claim that term is where ’slash’ comes from).

I’ve been reading hurt-comfort since the 1970’s - it predates slash (although not by much) and I would guess that half of it still is non-slash. To quote Camille Bacon-Smith, who did a study of fanfic in the 1980s’, “Unlike sadomasochistic fantasy material, hurt-comfort places the source of the injury outside of the dyad of sufferer and comforter…. At no point in any of the literature I have read does the sufferer enjoy or deliberately seek out pain.”

While there may now be fannish stories out there where the sexually tortured victim revels in it, I haven’t run across any written by a woman (printed fic was more female-dominated than ‘net fic is). Even if it’s an alternate universe and the other heroic character is one of the rapists, he generally rapes because it’s expected rather than because he enjoys it, and as the story progresses the rape victim teaches him to appreciate loving as equals. Authors who flat out state that they write male-with-male sex because they can’t imagine a man treating a woman as an equal, still have those two males learning to love with consideration, in a way our society often codes as female.

Completely off topic, but the term “slash” comes from the abbreviation “K/S” in fanzine directories like Forum (later Datazine), where editors advertised zines they were selling and solicited fic and art for zines they were publishing.

Samantha writes:

Hospitals take great care dealing with human fluids because of the high risks for transmission, women without hysterectomies face pregnancies, condoms can fail to stop AIDS even if used every time (they’re not), and condoms don’t stop gonorrhea or genital warts, a leading cause of cervical cancer.

Prostitutes (male and female) are at higher risk with male customers, because they are in essence being injected with disease carrying fluids. Women are at a higher risk for some diseases because symptoms are hidden longer and because they are diseases men don’t suffer from (cervical cancer, chlamydia, etc.). It would not surprise me if far fewer women used prostitutes in a culture where they carried the power men do now for some innate reason.

Samantha wrote:

I can’t say women wanting to please their sex partners sexually is a pathological result of misogyny or that men wanting to be pleased by their sex partner is pathological because I believe neither. Two people coming together for intimate sharing like that, giving pleasure to each other and taking pleasure from each other, isn’t bad in itself. It’s bad when one feels entitled to take more than they give- that’s the very definition of “to exploit”?.

I agree. I think, at its best, sex reverses expectations - you give by receiving, and you receive by giving. I prefer to consider what sex might be if everyone was “human” rather than speculating on what it might be under a matriarchy as pathological as the system we live with now.

Or a model in which they’re supposed to enjoy intercourse, but only as a function of pleasing their partners; orgasms for women are a sign that the man is technically skilled in bed, and of course women don’t have any desire to do anything other than what pleases their male partner.

I agree that most people need a connection for sex, and prostitution is a very ugly aberation. I just think that if all things were equal, many women would be just as slimy as many men when it comes to unethical sex.

Traditional female sexuality is not “kind,”? “cuddly,”? or “nurturing,”? but pathologically other-directed. It makes no provision for pleasure, and it defines fulfillment in terms of male approval and affection. It’s not a more balanced, more normal sense of sexual self; it’s the masochistic inverse of a sadistic convention.

I think I understand what Piny is describing, and I think there really is a pathological model of sexuality that is pushed upon women. To put it crudely, there’s a model of sexuality in which women are supposed to simply lay there, completely immobile and unresponsive, through intercourse.

That’s not a matter of being generous to your partner, or being kind, cuddly, or nurturing. It’s not simply letting your partner take the initiative. It’s a matter of completely denying that female sexuality exists at all, that women even have desires, much less the right to act upon them.

That said, I don’t believe selflessness in people, women being part of people, is caused by misogyny or other oppressions. Humans naturally get along a lot better with each other than not else we wouldn’t be here, and this sociality is our greatest asset. More men willing to exploit the social contract (with women and other ‘inferiors’ especially) is largely the result of power differences and patriarchal inculcation.

Not preying on other people’s vulnerabilities is good; accepting poverty wages because you have to is bad. Both may reside on the “feminine” side of things in the gender binary, but that doesn’t mean their causes and effects are the same.

I think most men, like most people, are concerned about others more than not, but it’s usually directed towards other men more than women, as an anthropology essay I know only by title suggests “Let’s Go Get a Girl”?: American adolescent male social bonding.

I can’t say women wanting to please their sex partners sexually is a pathological result of misogyny or that men wanting to be pleased by their sex partner is pathological because I believe neither. Two people coming together for intimate sharing like that, giving pleasure to each other and taking pleasure from each other, isn’t bad in itself. It’s bad when one feels entitled to take more than they give- that’s the very definition of “to exploit”.

One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands, XTC, contains the lyrics:

I won’t take from you what you can’t take from me
and I’ll leave nothing here that you can’t use upon your trip
I won’t take from you what you can’t take from me
and I’ll leave nothing here but love and milk aplenty for your tea

Elena, prostituted sex is not consequence free for men or anyone else because there is no such thing as risk-free sex. Hospitals take great care dealing with human fluids because of the high risks for transmission, women without hysterectomies face pregnancies, condoms can fail to stop AIDS even if used every time (they’re not), and condoms don’t stop gonorrhea or genital warts, a leading cause of cervical cancer. That’s the one-sentence health-only reasons, but there are tons of other reasons why prostituted sex can never be consequence free.

I think women don’t use prostitutes for the reasons most men don’t, because they want to have sex with people who want to have sex with them. IMO, that’s natural and normal and maybe that’s why it’s the preferred method among homo sapiens whose dominant mating style is categorized as serial monogamy.