Curtsy Feministing.

Economists Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and Sudhir Venkatesh have published a study of the economics of street and brothel prostitution in Chicago. They used a variety of data sources, including paying prostitutes a fee to allow “embedded data trackers” (who were themselves mostly ex-prostitutes) to follow them through their working days¹ and keep records of all transactions. As far as I can tell, only female prostitutes were studied.²

Their conclusion:

This study provides a rare window into the lives of those who are most marginalized in society. Surprising to an outsider are the fluidity with which these women move in and out of prostitution and other work, their willingness to absorb enormous risk for a small pecuniary reward, and the blurred lines between good and evil, where police extort sex and pimps pay efficiency wages.

Also from the study (in context, it’s clear that when they write “prostitution” or “street prostitution” they mean to include both streetwalkers and brothel workers, but not more high-end prostitutes such as escorts):

The transaction-level data we collected suggests that street prostitution yields an average wage of $27 per hour. Given the relatively limited hours that active prostitutes work, this generates less than $20,000 annually for a women working year round in prostitution. While the wage of a prostitute is four times greater than the non-prostitution earnings these women report (approximately $7 per hour), there are tremendous risks associated with life as a prostitute. According to our estimates, a woman working as a prostitute would expect an annual average of a dozen incidents of violence and 300 instances of unprotected sex.

Other findings — some expected, some surprising.

• About 1 in 33 tricks is a “freebie” with a cop. A street prostitute gets arrested about once every 450 tricks. “A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one.”
• Between “freebies” to cops and freebies to gang members in exchange for “protection,” about 5% of all tricks are freebies. (Freebies to pimps don’t seem to have been counted, unless I missed it.) (ETA: As is pointed out in the comments, “freebies” are essentially rapes.)
• “On average the prostitutes work roughly thirteen hours per week, performing roughly 10 sex acts total. Average revenues generated per week are about $340. Most of this comes in cash, with some payments made in drugs.”
• Street prostitutes with pimps get paid more than those without pimps — even after the pimp takes off his 25%. Working with a pimp also means having to give fewer freebies to cops and gang members, and a lower chance of violent assaulted by a customer. However, the overall risk of violence is about equal, because of the chance of being violently assaulted by the pimp.
• A study of prostitution in Mexico found that customers pay significantly more to have condomless sex. However, in Chicago there’s barely any “no condom” extra charged. The authors theorize that this is because condoms are the “default” that must be negotiated away from in Mexico, but not in Chicago.
• Most prostitutes also hold other jobs. “We estimate that these women earn an average of $7.24 per hour in their outside jobs, or about one-fourth what they earn as prostitutes.” During times of high demand for prostitution (the example studied is the 4th of July), a significant number of women enter the prostitution market on a short-term basis.
• The authors — after pointing out their study is a very rough estimate — estimate that there are “4,400 women active as prostitutes citywide in any given week.” That estimate only covers street prostitutes. They also estimate that there are, at a minimum, 175,000 johns using Chicago street prostitutes each year.

Hat tips: Lawyers Guns & Money, Hit & Run, Hit & Run again, and Foreign Policy blog. (Both Foreign Policy and Hit & Run misstate what the study found about condom use and pricing.)

1. Or nights, I suppose. (back)
2. You can read a draft of their paper here, in pdf form. (back)

From Melissa at Shakesville:

So there’s this judge. Her name—her name—is Teresa Carr Deni, and she’s a municipal judge in the Philadelphia Municipal Court. And recently, a defendant in her courtroom was accused of raping a prostitute at gunpoint—and inviting three of his friends to rape her, too. It might even have been more, except that when a fifth man arrived and was offered a turn, he asked why the girl was crying and declined to rape her while she wept and his friend pointed a gun at her, instead deciding to help her get dressed and leave.

The thing is, Judge Deni dropped all sex and assault charges at alleged gun-wielding gang-rapist Dominique Gindraw’s preliminary hearing. She decided he should be held on armed robbery for “theft of services.” Not only can prostitutes not be raped, according to Judge Deni, but calling what happened to the 20-year-old victim rape “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”

Words fail me, but the title of Skemono’s post — “Prostitutes aren’t people, after all” — seems to sum it up. But it’s worth mentioning that after being let go by the judge, this man raped another woman (also a prostitute, raped in the same manner) four days later.

But later today I’m still going to try to write a letter: Mike in the comments at Feministe posted a link to the Complaint form for the Pennsylvania Jucidial Conduct Board.

Or you can contact Judge Deni’s office directly (curtsy to Rotten Word).

Echidne writes:

The case also makes me wonder what all the sins are that we collectively assign prostitutes. There is an assumption that prostitutes have somehow consented to be abused and perhaps even murdered and that therefore the society is not responsible for awarding them the same protection other citizens deserve.

See also posts at Group News Blog, Reclusive Leftist, Lawyers Guns and Money, Young Philly Politics, Quizlaw, Anonymous Law Student, Angry Grrl, and Vomit Comet.

I wasn’t going to comment any more on Clint Heine, but his comment threads get worse. SimonD said:

I want to offer a job for Maia in K’Rd. My massage parlor needs 2 women to dance nude on stage.

Does anyone know Maia’s full name? I want to forward the job offer to WINZ, so they can get registered unemployed people like Maia to apply. I know WINZ doesn’t like unemployed people who are registered with them to decline a job offer (any jobs really). So, there is a chance that Maia will take my offer.

For those who don’t know the NZ benefit system, if you turn down a job you can go on a benefit stand-down for up to 13 weeks. So people on benefits can’t turn down work.

SimonD wants to coerce me into sex-work by cutting off my other forms of income.*

Clint Heine’s objection to this isn’t based on my right to my own body:

If her blog is accurate I do believe she is already well known to the WINZ staff in her area. I somewhat doubt you’d want somebody like her in with your lovely girls. :)

I’m proud to say that he’s right. If I was to work on K’Rd I’d educate, agitate and organise, and SimonD wouldn’t know what hit him.

But the point here is that coercing a woman to work in the sex industry by cutting off her other forms of income is rape. These clearly men view women as objects to be used by them, and my desire is irrelevant. This is the second time a man on Clint Heine’s blog has expressed a desire to punish me with sex, and Clint Heine has no problem with that at all.

* In reality WINZ do not require women to accept jobs in the sex industry.

Garance Franke-Ruta, in an op-ed published by OpinionJournal, argues that people below age 21 should not legally be able to consent to appear in porn.

But the “Girls Gone Wild” problem concerns adult porn: At what age is a girl ready to make that decision, one that she will live with–technologically speaking, at least–for the rest of her life? A woman of 18 may be physically indistinguishable from one who is 21, but they are developmentally worlds apart. […]

A new legal age for participating in the making of erotic imagery–that is, for participating in pornography–would most likely [be] sometimes honored in the breach more than the observance. But a 21-year-old barrier would save a lot of young women from being manipulated into an indelible error, while burdening the world’s next [”Girls Gone Wild” owner] Joe Francis with an aptly limited supply of “talent.” And it would surely have a tonic cultural effect. We are so numb to the coarse imagery around us that we have come to accept not just pornography itself–long since routinized–but its “barely legal” category. “Girls Gone Wild”–like its counterparts on the Web–is treated as a kind of joke. It isn’t. There ought to be a law.

On her own blog, Garance explains further:

Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I think I’ve seen the limit on how screwed up this country is about sex, we retop ourselves. Case in point (via the Agitator):

On March 25, 2004, Amber and Jeremy took digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in unspecified “sexual behavior.” The two sent the photos from a computer at Amber’s house to Jeremy’s personal e-mail address. Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.

Court records don’t say exactly what happened next–perhaps the parents wanted to end the relationship and raised the alarm–but somehow Florida police learned about the photos.

Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.

So for that, they will for the rest of their lives be registered sex offenders. (Or maybe not - see comments.)

Amber appealed, claiming that this application of an anti-child-pornography law to her taking private photos of a perfectly legal encounter with her boyfriend violated her right to privacy (which is guaranteed in the Florida constitution). Earlier this month, a Florida Appeals Court ruled against Amber. The majority decision, written by Judge James Wolf, hinged on whether or not Amber could have had a reasonable expectation of privacy when she emailed the pictures to Jeremy’s personal email address. According to Wolf, she could not have had any such reasonable expectation of privacy, because maybe she or Jeremy would have decided to show them to other people at some point in the future, and anyway the internet can be hacked.

No, really. That was his reasoning. And that’s not even the stupid part.

Here’s the stupid part: Judge Wolf argues that the conviction must be upheld so that Amber and Jeremy can be spared trauma and smeared reputations.

Appellant was simply too young to make an intelligent decision about engaging in sexual conduct and memorializing it. Mere production of these videos or pictures may also result in psychological trauma to the teenagers involved.

Further, if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minor’s careers or personal lives.

Try to grasp the jaw-dropping illogic in all its nonsensical glory:

1) Amber is “simply too young to make an intelligent decision.” But she’s not too young to be a held responsible for the crime of child pornography.

2) The state must prosecute Amber in order to protect her from psychological trauma. Because being tried and found guilty of a sex crime is obviously the least traumatic option for Amber here.

3) If the pictures were someday released, that might have hurt Amber and Jeremy’s careers or personal lives. So instead the court permanently brands them as convicted sex offenders, which in no way could potentially harm their careers and relationships in the future.

Sheesh!

(Curtsy: Julian Sanchez.)

Amy Phillips at iLiberty¹ and Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet are both blogging against a proposed Texas law which would fund anti-sexual assault programs by adding a $5 tax on top of the admission fees for strip clubs.

Like Tracy and Amy, I’m unhappy with the idea of sin taxes. But I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing in years to come. It’s an inevitable result of the growth of anti-tax ideology; when it becomes unfeasible to pay for government services through ordinary taxes, it’s natural to try targeted taxes aimed at groups that are either too unpopular, too disorganized or too poor to put up an effective lobbying resistance. So: Cigarette taxes. Liquor taxes. Lotteries. And now “tassel taxes.”

From the Houston Chronicle:

State Rep. Ellen Cohen, a freshman Democrat and executive director of the Houston Area Women’s Center, and Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, are sponsoring the legislation. […] Although she is not suggesting that people who frequent strip clubs commit sexual assault, Cohen said money generated by sexually oriented businesses should pay for sexually oriented crimes.

“We are talking about a service that does objectify women and it seems like an appropriate place to raise those kinds of dollars,” she said. “It’s apples to apples.”

It’s estimated that the $5 fee would produce $80 million over the biennium. Cohen wants to see $12 million of that dedicated to sexual assault programs. She, the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault and the Texas Council on Family Violence, which are supporting the measure, are flexible about where the rest of the money would go.

But if the idea is a tax on objectification, why not tax the sale of men’s magazines like GQ — and women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan, for that matter? And why not a special tax on all cable TV boxes and Texas TV network affiliates? It’s not as if strip clubs are the wealthiest or the most numerous purveyors of objectification that exist. And isn’t it dishonest to try and sell this as a tax to pay for anti-sexual assault programs, when 85% of the money raised will go to the general fund?

This is general taxation by other means. If you can’t tax the people without being creamed in the next election, then you just tax the unpopular people. So you dress up a tax that supports the general fund as a tax against sexual assault; and you don’t go after the networks or GQ or Cosmo because those things are so much more popular than strip clubs.

So what’s my take on this? If I was king of Texas, I’d use a sensible income- or wealth-based income tax to pay for government, rather than sin taxes, which are inevitably arbitrary and unfair. But it’s not up to me; in the end, it’s up to voters, and most voters want a full-service government without paying for it with higher general taxes. So the choice is either to accept the so-called “sin taxes,” or to do with fewer government services - including $12 million a year less for anti-sexual-assault programs.

If that’s the choice² then I say, bring on the sin taxes. They suck less than the alternative.³

And with all due respect to Amy — who I like a lot — if libertarians object to this, maybe they should rethink the over-the-top anti-government, anti-tax ideology they’ve been pushing for decades, which is part of what has brought us to this state.

* * *

Amy writes:

As Salon magazine’s Broadsheet blog, Tracy Clark-Flory points out the danger of giving legislators the power to financially punish legal activities that they find morally objectionable. In this case, they’re punishing women who choose to take their clothes off for money—because that admission fee is most likely going to come out of the pockets of employees, not the club’s profits—because they don’t like the choice these women have made or the choice their customers make to patronize such clubs.

1) If government can’t “financially punish legal activities that they find morally objectionable,” then some possibly reasonable environmental policies — such as charging higher taxes on factories that pollute due to not updating their equipment — would have to be taken off the table. There are times when a middle ground between making something absolutely illegal, and not addressing it with policy at all, makes sense; usually that middle ground involves fees or taxes.

2) Who is going to pay for the increased admission fee depends on how flexible the demand for attending strip clubs is. My guess is that it’s not very flexible — that is, I think strip club patrons are not going to stop going to strip clubs just because admission is raised $5. If I’m right about that, then most of the extra $5 will be paid by strip club consumers, rather than by dancers or management.

1. Amy used to blog at “The Fifty Minute Hour,” one of my favorite libertarian blogs. I’m very happy to find out where she’s blogging nowadays! (back)
2. Maybe it’s not, it’s not like I know anything about Texas politics (back)
3. Of course, I don’t go to strip clubs, drink alcohol, gamble, or smoke, so I could be accused of favoring sin taxes because they’re paid by other people. But for what it’s worth, iirc I voted for the ridiculously high cigarette tax here in Oregon, and since one of my partners smokes like a chimney, it’s quite a bite out of our shared income. (back)

The headline on this news story makes it seem like everyone involved in prostitution in Atlantic City, New Jersey and elsewhere have chosen to play a dangerous game, but for many it isn’t a game, but a trap, one that benefits pimps, Johns and other exploiters.

AP

Selling sex on the streets of this gambling capital is a dangerous pursuit: Streetwalkers have been strangled, smothered, slashed and set ablaze. […] Atlantic County Prosecutor Jeffrey Blitz said the Atlantic City cases were sufficiently different from the Egg Harbor deaths to make authorities believe they were carried out by different attackers. He also resists speculation that the four ditch bodies were the work of a serial killer, noting that autopsies could not determine the cause of death for two of the women. No arrests have been made in any of this year’s attacks in and near Atlantic City.

In any case, the attacks illustrate how dangerous it is for prostitutes, who are statistically 18 times more likely to be killed than other women, and 40 times more likely to die from other than natural causes, according to national studies.

These stark statistics are aided by the disdainful attitudes many people have toward those trapped in prostitution. The girls and women become something less than human. If something bad happens to them, they either brought it upon themselves or it’s no great loss.

The nation’s most notorious prostitute killings were committed in the Pacific Northwest by a single attacker who came to be known as the Green River Killer. In pleading guilty in 2003 to the murders of 48 prostitutes, Gary Leon Ridgway told a judge he targeted street walkers “because I thought I could kill as many as I wanted to without getting caught.”

Unfortunately, the view some people have of other people as a commodity contributes to people like this. Whenever someone says about a crime victim or alleged victim, “she’s just a hooker” they are robbing her of her humanity and they are revealing a lack within themselves. At its worst, this perceived lack of humanity can cause a person to rationalize committing crimes they otherwise wouldn’t commit.

It can cause teenagers to think of attacking and murdering the homeless as nothing more significant that a little fun.

Like many prostitutes in similar situations, Spazz, who said she was beaten by a “trick” two years ago, didn’t call police when it happened. Like all four hookers found dead behind the motels in Egg Harbor Township, and like 85 percent of prostitutes nationwide, Spazz has a drug problem.

I suspect that many of these women who are at the highest risk have a long history of problems that drugs keep at bay. For some it is childhood sexual abuse, for others drugs may be their only coping mechanism. Any drug treatment program that doesn’t deal with suppressed issues sets most participants up for failure.

Unfortunately, those who don’t break free of drugs and/or prostitution are usually given all the blame for ineffective programs and the cynicism of the program drop outs. If they fall victim to the ultimate preditors, too many of us are unwilling to call them innocent victims.

(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.

If you aren’t sure what that means, please read this before commenting.

In the summer of 2005, my financial situation, which had been shaky for months, finally reached critical point. A letter came from my bank demanding immediate repayment of everything I’d borrowed on pain of court action, and I knew I had no means of finding the necessary sum within the time they were willing to grant me.

I ran through an inventory of my assets, which didn’t take long. The most valuable thing I owned was my computer, and I’d only bought it for a tenth of the sum the bank was now demanding. Desperate, I started to wonder what an able-bodied white baby would fetch in a black-market paid adoption and whether I would be able to find a prospective buyer willing to make a down-payment while the baby was still in utero.

So I know what financial difficulties can do to a person’s thought processes, and that’s why I’m not rushing to criticise Amp for his decision to sell amptoons.com. If I’d owned a valuable domain back then and received the offer Amp received, I probably wouldn’t have even stopped to wonder what they would use it for.

I’m sticking around, but I know some people would prefer not to read or link to Alas now because of this connection. Some of these are people whose opinions I respect and whose comments I would hate to miss, so I’m going to start reposting the bulk of my Alas posts on my personal blog, The Iron-On Line. They will doubtless end up buried among memes, one-liners and updates about my life, but I hope people who can’t forgive Amp for this sale can still join in the discussion.

I was 21; I’d been politically active for a couple of years and made some decisions. One was that I wasn’t going to ‘hold paper clips for evil’ (that’s the exact phrase I used in my head). This had been relatively easy, because up till then, apart for some administrative work, most of my earnings had been from babysiting and nannying.* I needed money, so I went to a temp agency to see if I could get any admin work.** I’d thought about what I’d do if they offered me something I found repugnant, and I decided I’d pretend I was busy. I was really excited to get my first job, excited and nervous. I was to type plans for an architecht - that sounded OK I thought, that sounded compatible with my politics. Everything was going fine until I got there and I was given the plans that I was supposed to type.

They were plans for a prison.

I could have left, I would never have worked for the temp agency again, but that wouldn’t have been the end of the world. I wasn’t on the bones of my ass, but I wanted to get more work, I didn’t know what I was doing next and I wanted to work.

That was hardly the only time I’ve done things I disagreed with. I’ve typed up letters telling large corporations how to avoid paying their taxes, I’ve done admin to help a temping agency figure out who they’re employing on the railways (undermining union labour - in many ways this is the one I feel worst about), I’ve put out invitations for an event the WTO was holding, and I’ve even worked for the New Zealand Defence Force. I’ve also been the benefactor of an income stream that makes everywhere I’ve personally worked look as ethical as working full-time for a revolution (as the Red Queen probably wouldn’t say).

So when I say that I am still blogging here, and don’t have a problem with what Amp did, that’s not because I don’t hate the sites that are being promoted. The fact that women’s bodies are a commodity, things to be bought and sold, upsets and depresses me. The fact that some people see my body, the one I live my life in, as an object - scares me.

Instead, it’s because I hate everything. Every object we make, everything we do, is perverted by a system that puts profit before people, by misogyny that is tearing a little bit out of all our souls, by the way we suck the resources, not just out of foreign lands, but from the marrow of the bones of the people who live there - and then tell them what’s wrong with the way that they live, by the many other ways we organise our world and stop people from being frree.

There’s no way out of participating in that - not for anyone.

This probably sounds despairing, it’s not meant to be. Like Natasha from Feminish I believe another world is possible. I just don’t think we bring it about through what we do individually. If we’re going to create that world that I have to believe is an alternative to this one then it’s going to be because of what we do collectively. We each have to play a role in the various machines at the moment, but that doesn’t stop us, when we’re strong enough and organised enough from pushing those machines over.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have bottom lines. Every one of us will have things we wouldn’t do, actions that we couldn’t live with ourselves if we took. There are always places where we have to take a stand, not because we believe it’ll change the world, but because taking that stand is the only way we can make it clear who we are and what we believe. I understand and respect that for many women linking to this site is something that they can no longer do. I just wanted to try and explain why I felt differently.

* See my analysis wasn’t nearly as developed as my sense of self-righteousness. I have a huge political problem with child-care as a luxury item. I don’t think that if parents want an evening off (or not to be prosecuted after school or during the school holidays - which was a lot of the work I did), they should have to pay through the nose.

** I certainly should have had an analysis of temping agencies as a way of getting around labour legislations and essential to the casualisation of the labour market, but I don’t think I did.

Regarding the sale of Amptoons.com (which I posted about last month), Hugo writes:

Barry, you owe your readers a public forum where you can further explain your decision, and offer those who are stunned and hurt an opportunity to express that to you directly.

It’s the right thing to do, and it needs to happen right now.

Okay. Here’s the same post, this time with the comments open.

* * *

Announcement: I’m not the owner of “Amptoons.com” anymore. I sold it a couple of months ago.

Five months ago, I was facing two problems. First of all, I was in real financial trouble - we were paying all our bills, but by a slimmer margin each month, and if things had kept on going that way it was only a matter of time before we’d come up short. Plus, one person in the house hadn’t been able to pay his rent in a long time, while another seemed on the verge of being unemployed (although as it turned out, that was a false alarm).

Second of all, I kept on having to beg my host not to shut down “Alas” for using too much server time - and in fact, “Alas” was briefly shut down more than once, and I was forced to remove a lot of functionality in order to reduce server load. My host kept on telling me that I needed a dedicated server, but the cost of that is well beyond anything I could consider.

Then a buyer approached me offering to purchase amptoons.com, so he could use it to improve search engine rankings for his clients (how that all works isn’t something I have any knowledge of). He offered a substantial sum of money - not enough to erase my money worries, but enough to ease the pressure for a while. Plus he offered to provide a free dedicated server for “Alas.”

The contract took months to wrangle, but here’s the bottom line: The new owner has absolutely no control over the content of “Alas.” However, “Alas” plus my cartoonist pages are the only parts of amptoons.com I have any access to or control over. The buyer also has the right to put in one or two inconspicuous links on “Alas,” positioned in a way that would make it unlikely that anyone but search engine robots would follow the link.

I was assured by the buyer that he would never host porn sites on “amptoons.com.” And I wrote into the contract that his link on “Alas” could never be a direct link to a porn site. But beyond that, I have no ability to control what the buyer does with his pages - the deal is that he has absolutely no say in what’s on “Alas,” but we also agreed that I have no say over what he does with his own property. And - as a couple of “Alas” readers have noticed - some pages I don’t own include links to porn.

[Edited to add: A couple of readers have speculated that I didn’t know that the new owner would link to porn on his pages. That’s not true; I kept the links off of “Alas,” but I knew that he would be putting links to porn on his own pages.]

I’m essentially in the same position as someone with a blog on “blogspot.com” - I don’t own the domain, and although I control what’s on my own blog, I don’t have any say over what’s posted on the domain other than my little piece of it.

I realize that some “Alas” readers will feel that I’ve sold out, or that this puts me beyond the pale. I’m genuinely sorry for that. For the record, I don’t feel I’ve been victimized (as one person suggested in email), nor do I feel like I’m a total sell-out. What I feel is this: I’ve made a compromise, one that I probably wouldn’t have made in a perfect world.

That’s all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled political rants.

* * *

New comments from Amp:

I warned the new owner that a likely result of this sale would be many other blogs delinking “Alas.” He said that didn’t matter to him and wouldn’t impede his profit; whatever his business model is based on, he isn’t concerned about that.

My views on porn: I’m not terribly pro-porn; most porn, like most mass media, seems sexist and harmful to me. The arguments that porn prevents rape or is in some way tremendously beneficial to society strike me as not at all supported by the evidence. On the other hand, I’m also not especially anti-porn, in that I don’t see porn as being particularly separate from or different than regular mass media, either in how sexist and racist it is, or in the harm it does. I’m convinced that there are other problems far, far more pressing than porn, and I think what I’ve written about over the years reflects that. If all porn disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow, I think that sexism, misogyny, and the wage gap would continue uninterrupted.

As I understand it, from the questions I asked before selling “amptoons.com,” the practical outcome of what the new owner does is that when someone searches for “porn,” they’re more likely to find his clients’ sites than other clients’ sites. I’m not thrilled with that, but I also frankly don’t believe it makes the world a worse place if porn company A gets ranked above porn company B in porn searches. Nor do I believe that I could have prevented such manipulations from taking place by refusing to sell the domain.

For me, this compromise is similar to the compromise I’ve made in the past accepting pay for cartoons from small publications who depended on strip club and escort ads for their income; or for being a secretary for various firms on Wall Street (some of those firms do, in my view, far more harm than porn ever has).

I’m not saying what I did was great. It wasn’t. It was a compromise, one that I felt I had no choice but to accept. It’s not something I would have done if I thought I could afford not to do it. It’s a bad thing, disturbing to me, and understandably disturbing (or much worse than disturbing) to my anti-porn readers. I know that some people who formerly liked me will now have lost all respect for me. I understand that, and I regret their departure; at the same time, my respect for them is undiminished.

That said, I’ve never been big on the politics of personal purity. It’s hard to be sure, because I’ve written thousands of blog posts and comments, but I don’t think I’ve ever criticized another feminist for being insufficiently pure in their personal life, their porn use, their income source, or the ads on their blogs.

* * *

One criticism of me that I think is especially strong is that I should have announced the sale of amptoons.com before it happened, to give people a chance to comment and to give other bloggers the chance to delink. It was wrong of me not to do that, and I sincerely apologize for that.

“Alas” reader “Curious” has usefully posted many links to other bloggers criticizing me on this thread. Some of the bloggers are people who have, as “Achilles and Patroclus” says, “the same folks who have been berating Amp for being insufficiently feminist for literally years now”; but others are people who have been quite kind to me over the years, and who I don’t think are knee-jerk Amp-bashers.

* * *

Comments are open for discussion (very much including criticism), but the usual moderation policies apply. Also, I want to remind people that I’m not at the computer all the time, so it may be many hours before I read comments.

This thread is for feminists, feminist-friendly, and pro-feminist posters only.

Via Riba Rambles, I see that last month, Northwestern University’s Anthony D’Amato suggested that more porn leads to less rape. D’Amato points out that rape prevalence (as measured by the federal government’s big National Crime Victimization Survey) has gone down in recent years (his comparison - he calls the decline in rape “steeper than the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression” - may be the single least relevant comparison I’ve ever read).

D’Amato points out that even as rape prevalence has declined, porn consumption has gone up:

There is, however, one social factor that correlates almost exactly with the rape statitistics [sic]. The American public is probably not ready to believe it. My theory is that the sharp rise in access to pornography accounts for the decline in rape. The correlation is inverse: the more pornography, the less rape. It is like the inverse correlation: the more police officers on the street, the less crime.

The pornographic movie “Deep Throat” which started the flood of X-rated VHS and later DVD films, was released in 1972. Movie rental shops at first catered primarily to the adult film trade. Pornographic magazines also sharply increased in numbers in the
1970s and 1980s. Then came a seismic change: pornography became available on the new internet. Today, purveyors of internet porn earn a combined annual income exceeding the total of the major networks ABC, CBS, and NBC.

(Okay, the “sic” was cheap of me. Whaddaya want? I’m running a blog here. G’way.)

Three problems with D’Amato’s theory:

1) During recent years, the NCVS has found a steep decline in all violent crime, not just rape. It seems likely that whatever’s causing the decline in all violent crime measured by the NCVS, is also causing the decline in rape measured by the NCVS; but it seems unlikely that pornography reduces all violent crime.

2) The NCVS measurement of rape prevalence is crap. Many other studies - including two major studies conducted by the Federal government - have found much higher rates of rape prevalence than the NCVS. Particularly notable is this study, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which directly compared the NCVS’s methodology for measuring rape prevalence with modern “best practice” survey design - and found that the NCVS vastly undercounted rape.

(D’Amato does say that the decrease in rape is collaborated by other sources, but he doesn’t cite any specific sources other than the NCVS).

3) D’Amato has no measurement of porn prevalence other than internet access, nor does he do any real statistical analysis. In contrast, studies with sophisticated statistical analysis and more accurate measures of porn usage - such as the study published in Four Theories of Rape in American Society - tend to find that porn usage has little or no correlation with rape prevalence.

D’Amato has one good point; there is no evidence that the rise in internet access (and, presumably, in porn usage) has been accompanied by a rise in rape prevalence. That makes it seem unlikely that porn is a cause of rape, as some radical feminists have suggested.

My own belief is that whatever porn’s effects on rape prevalence are, they’re probably too small to be measured.

UPDATE: Abyss2Hope and Feminist Law Professors both have excellent posts critiquing D’Amato’s paper.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where no mouse fears an elephant. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

Over at Rachel’s Tavern I am answering some of the emails I have gotten in my new monthly mailbag post. In this post here at Alas, I am going to post my response to the most common questions I have been getting, which are of course about the Duke Rape case.

I have gotten numerous emails on this subject, so I figure I should give a general statement on the case. Mostly people have been asking why I haven’t been posting and if my lack of posts indicates that I now believe that these “boys” are innocent. There are a few reasons I haven’t been posting. First, the information on the case has been slow to trickle out, so I have decided only to update when there are big developments in the case. Second, the vast majority of the recent stories on the case have involved leaks from the defense, which I don’t consider newsworthy. They have routinely leaked information to try to spin the case in their favor, which is of course the job of the defense attorneys, but they simultaneously refuse to release the actual documents for the media to review. In fact, there was a really good story in the NY Times today with the following quote:

“I have no doubt that Mike believes her,” said H. Wood Vann, a lawyer in Durham who once represented the woman in a joy-riding case and has also done general legal work for her parents. Mr. Vann said that he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt but that few other people in town do, and he added that many wonder why Mr. Nifong persists.

“At some point in time he’s going to have to get to a tipping point,” Mr. Vann said. “His case is going to hell in public opinion. He’s suffering death by a thousand cuts.”

Mr. Nifong’s silence makes it impossible to evaluate the case as a whole. Certainly some evidence has not been revealed … the next hearing is set for June 22 … and the defense has released evidence selectively, presumably showing only those parts that strengthen its public position.

I generally agree with that quote. The Prosecutor is losing in the court of public opinion, and that is because the only chatter we hear is from defense attorneys, who would have people believe that there is no grounds whatsoever for this case. If the case was as groundless as they claim, then the grand jury and/or the judge would have intervened. You’ll have to pardon me if I am a little skeptical of defense attorneys claims, especially since we are hearing them with no rebuttal. That also leads to the third reason I have not been putting up as many posts on the case.

I am relatively certain that the defense attorneys are reading these blogs trying to figure out what will stick with people, and I didn’t want my blog to be used as a means for them to test the jury pool. In fact, I suspect that one of the emails I received was from someone close to the defense in this case (I could be wrong, but that is my guess.) The defense in this case is a vast well oiled machine. In fact, one of the best articles on this matter came out in the Washington Post. The articles is called “Lacrosse Players Case a Trial for Parents,” and it shows you how powerful the families in this case are.

Now I’d be liar if I didn’t say I think the defense team is winning the court of public opinion, but I also know that the DA has been firm in maintaining his support for the victim and this case will be tried in a court of law, not the court of public opinion (which is the other reason my posts have been a little sparse lately). The defense team seems to be taking the condemning the condemners strategy in what appears to be an attempt to keep this case from going to trial. I assume they are thinking that if they taunt the victim and the prosecutor enough the charges will be dropped.

So there you have it those are my current thoughts on the case…..if you want to read an extended version of the mailbag, you can come over to Rachel’s Tavern.

It seems unlikely that many “Alas” readers are fans of how the liberal website “TalkLeft” has been discussing the Duke rape case (you can find a summary of the case here) . Because although Jeralyn of “TalkLeft” is a liberal, she’s also a defense attorney, and her inclination is to suggest that the accusation is false.

Nonetheless, she’s worth reading because she is a defense attorney (and an excellent one, from all I’ve heard), and there’s a good chance that if the Duke rape case ever winds up in court, the defense lawyers will tell the jury and the press something similar to Jeralyn’s current speculations. Jeralyn’s posts on this case (so far) can be read here, here and here.

Right now, it appears that any story told by a defense attorney will need to explain these elements in particular:

• “Medical records and interviews showed that the woman had signs, symptoms and injuries consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted vaginally and anally.”
• Evidence that a physical fight took place: Bruises and injuries to the alleged victim (who I’m going to call Mary Doe from now on), some of Mary Doe’s fingernails broken off and and found at the scene, items belonging to Mary Doe (such as her cell phone) left behind.
• Mary Doe’s claim that she was raped by three men at the party. Why would she lie?

Here’s the narrative Jeralyn suggests - I’ve pieced it together from a few different places in the post and comments here:

The accuser arrived at the house at 11:30. The other dancer was already inside. They began to dance. After a few minutes, they felt threatened by the racial and sexual comments, left and got in a car outside. They both were coaxed to go back in and they did, but got separated.

There could have been a physical assault without a sexual assault… There apparently was an issue about the money. They paid up front and were angry she quit after a few minutes and wanted their money back. That could have resulted in a physical altercation.

One interpretation could be that the nails did not come off during the alleged rape but during a physical assault over the money. …

In short, it doesn’t look like anything incriminating or confirming a rape was found in the [house] or the vehicle.

The implication is that Mary Doe has made up the rape charge for revenge against the Lacrosse players who beat her up during a fight over money.

What about the medical evidence? In an earlier post, Jeralyn quoted a pathologist to suggest that this evidence cannot prove rape:

DR. MICHAEL BADEN, FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST: Usually, a physician can’t tell consensual from non-consensual. They can tell whether there’s been intercourse or not intercourse, but not whether it’s consensual because one can have bruises and certain injuries from consensual sex and one can have no injuries from non-consensual sex.

So a defense attorney could argue that all the medical evidence shows is that Mary Doe had sex with someone before she went to the Lacross players’ house that night. Alternatively, if the DNA evidence conclusively shows that the accused men (whoever they turn out to be) did have sex with Mary Doe, it will be claimed that the sex was consensual prostitution, followed by a fight over the money.

I believe Mary Doe is telling the truth. But Jeralyn’s narrative accounts for all the known facts and probably can’t be proven wrong. If this case ever comes to a court, I expect that the defense will tell a story pretty much like the one Jeralyn is telling, and it won’t surprise me if a judge or a jury buys it.

* * *

Meanwhile, at the vile FrontPageMag.com, David Yeagley wrote an incredibly racist, woman-hating, stripper-hating article about the Duke rape case (Delusions of Mediocrity, Echidne, Sadly, No! and Feministe have fisked the article). There is simply too much offensive material to quote it all, but here’s a few examples to give you the flavor of it:

The reports say the woman is a divorced, 27-year-old “mother” of two, attending North Carolina Central University. She is not a person of note, and is said to do exotic dancing as a side job to pick up extra cash. …

For me as a reader, I had to stop in amazement at the contempt Yeagley managed to get across with the simple device of scare quotes around the word “mother.” You almost have to admire the efficiency - a lesser racist woman-hater might have taken a whole paragraph to pack in the hatefulness Yeagley can communicate just with punctuation.

Then I started reading again, and had to stop again almost instantly because the vileness of the scare-quoted mother is nothing compared to the vileness of how Yeagley uses the phrase “person of note.”

So, that black woman said, “No,” eh? First, she’s in a profession where she’s expected to do tricks for clients. Second, she’s walking into a house full of young, drunken athletes, who happen to be white. Third, she called the police and complained once; then she went back, but then left. And then she went back again! That’s a peculiar way of saying “No,” it seems to me. …

But, exotic dancing…and then to cry “abuse”? This may be pushing victimhood beyond reason. …

(Yeagley in comments:) The woman went there to “turn’em on.” That’s what she’s getting paid for. That she would three times RETURN, when she had every reason to fear, shows excessively poor judgement on her part. She was literally asking for it, for whatever happened anyway.

Remember, if you’re black, and a woman, and a sex worker, then you’ve already consented to have sex, and you can’t be raped. You’ve literally asked for it (in the figurative sense of the word “literally”). And if you think otherwise, why that’s just plain pushing victimhood beyond reason!

(By the way, “Minnobserver” at Feministe pointed out that although Yeager claims to be a adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Liberal Studies, he’s not listed on their webpage. I just phoned the UO CLS office, and the person there says he’s never heard of Yeager and doesn’t have him listed as any kind of professor or instructor.)

* * *

Yeagley is an obvious, over-the-top racist and woman-hater, and it’s hard to imagine anyone other than fellow racist woman-haters taking him seriously (not that Frontpage will suffer any blacklash among conservatives for printing this garbage).

But what’s striking to me is that if a defense such as the one Jeralyn at TalkLeft outlined works, it will work because it appeals to Yeagley-like attitudes in the jurors and in the public.

Why are people so quick to believe that if a sex worker says she’s been raped, she must be lying?

Why is it a viable strategy for a defense attorney to virtually admit that their clients are the sort of scum who’d gang up on a lone woman, beat her up, and take her money - but then ask the jury to find that their clients are credible witnesses, and the beat-up woman who claims she’s been raped is not?

Because in our society a black sex worker is not a “person of note,” but rich white athletes are. What’s rare about Yeagley isn’t that he thinks it, but that he says it so overtly.

This thread is open to feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly posters only. If you don’t think you fall into Amp’s definition of “feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly,” and you wish to make a comment, you may do so at the cross-post on Creative Destruction.

I should start by reminding everybody that Justice 4 Two Sisters is following the case closely. So many bloggers have been following this story closely. Feel free to put your links to your postings in the comment section or links to particularly good analyses.

I don’t expect that we will be hearing much about the case until the DNA evidence comes back in a few weeks, but I did read at least one report where the DA was saying that if they don’t have DNA he doesn’t want to go ahead with the case. I’m nor sure if that report is correct or not because earlier he was saying that he is confident that he can win the case without DNA. We’ll see what happens.

1. The victim’s father speaks out to a local TV station. Including this statement,

The man described what his daughter looked like when she was released from a hospital.

“Her face was all swollen up, her jaw. She couldn’t half walk. One of her legs was hurt,” he said.

The alleged victim, an N.C. Central University student, mother of two and part-time exotic dancer, had been hired to perform at a party. That was when she claimed the sexual assault took place. The attorney for the lacrosse players said the men are innocent.

“There is no doubt in my mind, because I’ve seen the look in her face. I’ve seen the bruises on her face,” the alleged victim’s father said.

The man said his daughter’s physical scars pale in comparison to the emotional ones, and that he hopes his daughter finds new ways to make ends meet.

2. Duke University Student Government. Also includes an interesting link to a pro-feminist men’s group.

3. The lawyers representing the players call the media hype a “lynch mob” and give a hint at what their strategy is going to be–the victim staged it and the DA is out to get re-elected (classic condemn the condemners strategy).

4. Student activists continue protesting. It seems that some students are quietly posting banners supporting the team, while other are openly protesting. They have also noted that this is not the first incident where a LAX player has been accused of racism (one put a black face picture on Facebook and the other is said to have made comments about Black fraternity members eating watermelon and chicken.)

5. National and International media descend on Duke. (So my claim that this would not make national news was wrong. Thank goodness.)

6. This is a very good story from the Raleigh News Observer. They say that the police are confident that the earlier call about the racial slur did not come from the victim. They also say when police showed up at the house to investigate the slur no one answered. I also encourage people to listen to the full 911 tapes posted on this page. I am confident that the first caller is a White woman. (Definitely worth reading if you are following the case. The Raleigh paper has had much better coverage than the national media.)

7. The Duke Chronicletakes a decidedly apologist turn in defense of the lacrosse team, saying things like the racial slurs were alleged. The headline says, “White, Black-or Duke?” a very typical colorblind phrasing. (I have not seen that neighbor who over heard the racial slurs back down one iota–I guess the student paper is insinuating that the victim and the neighbor are lying. Here we go.) Here is a markedly different editorial from a Black woman at the school (make sure to read the anonymous comments left at the bottom and note that at 3PM on the 31st eastern time there were not comments on the White, Black-or Duke? article.)

8. An article out of Australia that uses the stop snitchin’ analogy like similar to the one I made in the earlier post.

9. The local Durham paper has some quotes from the district attorney Mr. Nifong. We probably won’t be hearing anything for a while.

10. A good story from the local paper that details how forensic evidence is collected in rape cases. It also raised the question as to why it took so long to gather evidence.

11. Some are questioning the timeline of the two calls to police. Here is the link to the story.

12. And last but not least someone who says, he believes that the “Duke Raping” never occurred. If you want to see more conspiracy theorists like this feel free to come to my blog Rachel’s Tavern, folks with this view are trying to take over the comments section. Please feel free to come do battle with them.

I am making it my personal mission to get the word out this terrible story. 46 members of the Duke Lacrosse team are taking DNA tests after some of the players were accused of gang raping a woman who they invited to be a dancer at a party. I also don’t want people to think about this story as a gender issue, but as incident that reveals how racism, sexism, and classism intersected to make this young woman particularly vulnerable to a sexual assault. If you read this report from ABC News you will hear very little about race. However, if you this story you get a better idea of what most likely went on. A group of young wealthy White men felt that it was ok to assault this woman, raping her and yelling racial slurs at her. This should be blowing up in the blogosphere folks. This is also one of those “if this had happen to a White woman would we have already heard about it” stories.

Here’s what the local paper said happened,

The woman who says she was raped last week by three members of the Duke University lacrosse team thought she would be dancing for five men at a bachelor party, she said Friday. But when she arrived that night, she found herself surrounded by more than 40.

Just moments after she and another exotic dancer started to perform, she said, men in the house started barking racial slurs. The two women, both black, stopped dancing.

“We started to cry,” she said. “We were so scared.”

The women subsequently left the party, but decided to come back after one of the men apologized. When the women went back into the party, “Two males then pulled the victim into a bathroom as three men sexually assaulted her for an approximate 30-minute time period, according to the warrant,” according to the student newspaper

The woman was able to get away and call the police, and she was subsequently admitted to the hospital. When the police came to the house to investigate, the men refused to cooperate, and now the police are testing 46 out of 47 of the men on the team ( I saw one report saying that the victim’s cell phone, purse, and an acrylic fingernail were found at the house when they finally got in.). I understand that these young men are legally innocent until proven guilty, but the evidence in this case seems very strong.

On a more positive note, the student paper is reporting that about 250 students and community members have been protesting for 3 days outside of the house where the incident happened. It seems that the house has receive complaints from neighbors in the past.

The young woman is a student at North Carolina Central University (a historically Black University), and she is the mother of two. She was working for the escort service as a dancer to support her family and pay for college.

The race/class/gender dynamics of this whole case are really scary, and they reveal a great deal about our power structure in this country. This young woman ended up in the vulnerable position of being a sex worker because she was trying to better her family and her education. The two young women left the party after the racial slurs began and they feared for their safety, but I can’t help wondering if they were thinking about how they were going to pay their bills or feed their kids when they went back in, something most of these young men don’t even have to think about. I wonder if these guys were thinking about how much power they had over this young women when they yelled racist slurs and when they physically and sexually assault this women? I also wonder if those guys who remained silent were more concerned about protecting their buddies than stopping this terrible assault. How much do they think this woman’s life is worth?

One of the people quoted in the student paper said that the school spends so much time protecting students from the people in the community, but in this case clearly shows how the people in the community also need to be protected from the students.

I encourage people to put up the story on their blogs, and put pressure on the University to investigate the team and level some sort of disciplinary actions, and of course this legal system also needs to do its part to put these men behind bars. I think one way people in the blogosphere may be able to help, in addition to agitating for the full force of the law to come down on these men, is by setting up some sort of fund to help this young woman pay for college (if anybody knows how this can be done). (Thanks to Baft Rage for the heads up on this.)

Also posted at Rachels Tavern

The British government has set out a new prostitution strategy. It seems to consist of helping sex workers, for instance by allowing them to work in pairs away from the street and offering them help with any drug or alcohol problems that might have forced them into prostitution, raising awareness among johns and pursuing exploitative pimps and people traffickers.

Changes like this don’t always produce the desired effect when they’re implemented, but it looks reasonable on paper.

According to the Sun newspaper, British immigration officials have been granting visas to foreign nationals in exchange for sex. (Now updated with a link to the Sun’s original story - many thanks TheInkSlinger.)

I find it ironic that a newspaper which proudly advertises its daily topless photograph was the one to break a story about what is effectively a form of prostitution. My cynical guess is that the Sun was less concerned with the exploitation than with the anti-immigration potential of the story.

What I’ve been reading lately…. Please leave comments about, well, anything. And as always, feel free to post links, to your own stuff or to other folks’ stuff.