I was reading an article about Mexican brothel laws. Mexican brothels apparently use the “legal, but heavily regulated, including medical testing of prostitutes” approach to prostitution I’ve heard Americans advocate (and which is the approach used by Nevada).

I’ve also heard Americans advocate for the New Zealand approach (legal, and basically no more regulated than any other business), and for the Swedish approach (prostitution is legal, but being a John is illegal).

But so far, I’ve never heard an American advocate for the US system. The US system doesn’t eliminate prostitution — according to Patty Kelly, the author of the article on Mexican brothels, 30 percent of single American men over 30 admit to having paid for sex,¹ “and according to the National Task Force on Prostitution, 1 percent of women claim to have worked as erotic service providers at some point in their lives.” The system is brutal to sex workers, encourages corruption in cops, and wastes tax money on useless enforcement. No matter what you think the goal of prostitution policy ought to be, the US policy fails.

Yet it doesn’t seem seriously possible that US policy could change, either, except possibly in a couple of the more liberal or libertarian states. There’s no money behind changing the laws, and no political upside for congresspeople in advocating for change. (Plenty of downside, though — can you imagine the mailers? “Senator Smith wants to open a legal brothel in your neighborhood!” and so on.)

Kelly concludes her article:

Despite the Eliot Spitzers, the Heidi Fleisses, the Eddie Murphys, and, best of all, the pastor Ted Haggards, we deny, deny, deny that prostitution plays a role in our culture. Like Sonia lies to her family back in El Salvador about what she does for work, so too do we lie to ourselves as a culture, though on a far more massive scale. What I admire about Mexico is not the legalization of sex work in some states, but the widespread cultural honesty about the topic. What I admire even more is New Zealand’s effort to transform their own honest assessment of their situation into a public policy that benefits both sex workers and society. The final conclusion of the sex workers, the nun, the police officer, the criminologist, the public health specialists and others who formed the committee to evaluate New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act states that “traditions and attitudes [about prostitution] developed over many years and cannot be changed overnight.” This is true. But perhaps it is time we start trying.

1. I originally wrote “30 percent of American men over 30 admit to having paid for sexual services,” and then updated it to more accurate wording. (back)

Since we’re discussing porn, I thought I’d post this, which I thought was interesting. I’m not sure if it’s porn or not — it has no nudity or explicit images — but it’s probably NSFW. The video features interviews of people talking about porn, interspersed with video of them masturbating while viewing porn. Since the camera was apparently positioned on the monitor, the people seem to be staring directly at the viewer as they jack or jill off, which I think creates a more intense effect than porn images of masturbation.

The people interviewed are a little more diverse than you’d find in mainstream movies and TV — or in mainstream porn, for that matter — but much less diverse than I’d wish them to be.

“If I go to the debate on pornography, I’ll just fume about the fact that everyone’s got stupid analysis but me.” I said that a couple of months ago, and I was joking, but only a little bit.

Feminist discussions on sexually explicit material tend to be heated, and change no-one’s mind. The latest discussions on The Hand Mirror, another blog I write on, have followed this pattern. I want to explore why.

Media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal and produced to be bought and sold (which is a mouthful, but I think more precise than ‘pornography’) sits at an intersection: Desire, sex, the construction of men’s sexuality, the construction of women’s sexuality, bodies, work, the role of the state, objectification, the creation of rape culture and commodification (and much more, those are just what’s on top for me).

It only takes small differences in feminists’ analysis, weighting or experience of a couple of these before they’re coming at the issue that we call ‘pornography’ from completely different angles.

As well as making the issue complicated, these many facets also mean that those no such thing as a disinterested party. Everyone has a stake in what is being discussed, but what is most triggering about the discussion about sexually explicit material varies widely.

To simplify one example more than is really justified: discussions of sexually explicit material may trigger some women’s experiences of having their sexuality and desire denied, while the same discussion might trigger other women’s experience of having other people’s sexuality or desire forced on them. (I don’t mean this as a dichotomy, just an example of the sorts of talking past that can happen in these discussions).

I think it’s very difficult even to talk about, or articulate any of this, because the vocabulary we have around sexually explicit media is so limited. The distinctions I think need to be made about are numerous and complex:
Was it made by an individual expressing their personal desires?
Was it made to be bought and sold?
Did everyone involve in making it give genuine consent?
Does it normalise misogynist ideas about women, women’s sexuality, women’s bodies, or sex?
Do they normalise racist ideas about any group of women or men, their bodies or sexuality?
Does it normalise a limited view of human sex or sexuality?
How do the ideas it contains interact with rape culture?
Does it normalise a particular type of body?

Now the answer to most mass-produced mainstream pornography from Ralph to are yes (or no depending on the question). But my point is that these are different questions, and they’re different again from:

What do we do about it all? What do we expect other organisation, or the state to do about it all?

Those are just my questions, I’m sure other people have different ones (I’m sure I’d have different ones if I wrote them on a different day, after reading different material). Unless we are clear about what exactly we’re talking about, unless we actively try and overcome the difficulties I’ve outlined, we’ll never have anything useful to say.

I wrote this post - I decided to continue talking about pornography, despite my cynicism, because I think it’s important. I think untangling these threads, understanding the role of sexually explicit material in women’s oppression is vital. I think the first answer to the question: ‘what is to be done?’ Is that we have to figure out how to talk about this.

The comments on this post are open to feminists, and feminist allies only (I appear to have forgotten how to do the rule).

There is a new kind of poetry happening in NYC called The Poetry Brothel. The basic idea is that the poets are prostitutes and the patrons are johns who pay to have poetry read to them in private. There is also a featured performed, who is promoted in a tone recalling the promotion of burlesque, and the whole presentation in general, I think, is meant to recall the speakeasy’s of the prohibition era. Here is a review of the event. Some excerpts (I have eliminated some of the line breaks from the original):

The prostitute whispers, wets her lips and prepares to bare… her heart with a poem. Welcome to New York’s Poetry Brothel, where punters delve between the lines, not the sheets. At a weekend session in a Manhattan night club called the Zipper Factory the look was bona fide bordello. Literary ladies of the night flitted between intimate, candle-lit nooks, red lights and paintings of nudes. Some of the poetesses for sale sported retro-style garter belts and frilly knickers. One swanned about in a top hat and feather boa. But transactions at the Poetry Brothel are of the mind, not the body, and a moment with the catalogue, replete with pictures and whimsical descriptions, reveals what’s on offer.

The Madame — real name Stephanie Berger — came dressed for the part in low-cut dress, elbow-length black gloves and a peacock headdress. “I’d rather be in the bedroom hearing poetry than listening to some old man sitting on a chair on a stage,” she explained by the light of a guttering candle. One-on-one encounters, for which “clients” pay three to five dollars in addition to a 15 dollar entry fee and one free reading, took place upstairs. The “whores” read from their own material, much of which is free verse, making for intense, sometimes baffling performances.

…

But for those needing a break, the Poetry Brothel laid on flamenco guitarists, a fortune-teller, a blackjack table and a bar specializing in port and whisky[.] The young hedonists, most of them students, appear to have struck a surprisingly successful formula. “There just aren’t that many poetry readings where poets show a lot of cleavage,” said The Professor, otherwise known as Jennifer Michael Hecht, aged 43 and a real life professor at Manhattan’s New School. She teaches writing to many of the Brothel’s regulars and is proud of the result.

…

“It’s kind of like the Weimar Republic without the Nazis. At two in the morning you have 20- or 30-year-olds lying all over the place reading poetry,” she said.

…

The Madame promised that the Poetry Brothel welcomed all. “Many are young men with perhaps a secret interest in poems,” she murmured. “Just look at the menu. Get a recommendation. Or say you don’t care. Say: ‘I need poetry. I’m hungry.’”

On the Poetics Listserv to which I subscribe, there has been a mildly heated discussion of this. Here are some snippets (I have retained all original punctuation, etc.):

Ruth Lepson wrote: cooptation of poetry by capitalist objectification of women. not funny. to use a brothel as a metaphor is disgusting. I remember when Denise Levertov criticized a poet for using napalm as a metaphor for personal pain, saying you don’t know what it feels like & it’s much worse than the way you are characterizing it.

Adam Tobin wrote: Why is the capitalist exploitation of women at a brothel worse than, say, the capitalist exploitation of women at a Zipper Factory? It’s just a different kind of labor, no? Given that some artists are seemingly comfortable with capitalism, why should they not acknowledge it in the name of their ventures?

I understand, of course, that brothels have a particular history with a
particular kind of violence attached to it, but so do factories. Do you
direct the same righteous anger at Andy Warhol?

John Cunningham wrote: Political correctness be dammed, I like the idea of “Poetry Brothel”. Firstly, isn’t feminine or feminist poetry (whichever you prefer) spoken from the body. Secondly, here is a legally sanctioned place of ‘intercourse’ (the poetic kind, a.k.a. communication) where the practitioner are protected. For those of you who are speaking out against the body being used in commerce, why are you not speaking out against football or hockey where male bodies are being used in commerce? When you consider the damage that is done to the male body during that contact sport and the lingering effects of it in terms of permanent injury and disability such as arthritis and other diseases, isn’t this just as bad? Or is it that one affects women whereas the other affects men? If we’re going to get on a train, lets get on the right one - the one that carries both male and female on equal terms.

Gwyn Mcvay wrote: Omigod, you’re so right. I hurt in my anterior cruciate ligaments for all of those men FORCED or DECEIVED into collegiate and professional sports every year; BEATEN if they try to leave; often denied any other employment options in the case of being transgendered; not allowed to keep a PENNY of their earnings… oh wait.

First, I have to be honest and admit that I have not actually gone to The Poetry Brothel, so I cannot report firsthand on what it is like, and so what I am talking about here–as were most of the people on the Listserv–is the idea of it, and I confess to being of two minds about this. On the one hand, The Poetry Brothel strikes me as brilliant satire; on the other hand, I think it goes too far for precisely the reasons that Ruth Lepson articulated in her response. But maybe that’s what good satire is supposed to do; and yet, talking about it as satire implicitly ignores the fact that it is an ongoing event, where real people spend real money, which someone somewhere is collecting and using (for whatever purpose).

Any thoughts?

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

I was just coming to “Alas” to post about the horrific assault of Dymond Milburn, but I see Jeff is already there. But I wanted to add three quick points to Jeff’s comments.

1) The assault on Dymond Milburn is about racism.

It’s self-evident that Dymond was targeted for being female while outdoors; but what some blog posts I’ve read have missed is, she was also targeted for being black while outdoors. Renee writes:

Daily the social reduction of bodies of colour occurs. It is no accident that black girls are the ones that most likely to receive corporal punishment in the education systems that still allow it, just as it was no accident that two black girls were chosen to re-enact the middle passage. This little girl is the living example of the ways in which black women continue to suffer and yet we are not allowed to be angry.

2) As Jill points out, the assault on Dymond Milburn is about the wretched treatment of prostitutes by our society.

The police grabbed Dymond, they claim, because they believed she was a prostitute. What makes the story newsworthy, however, is that Dymond was a 12-year-old girl, not a prostitute. If she had been a prostitute, the abuse she received would be objected to by only a few far-out radicals. Prostitutes are raped and assaulted by cops all the time, and no one says boo.

3) The assault of Dymond Milburn was about a culture of police arrogance and abuse.

The fact that three cops acted together implies something very different than one cop acting alone and trying to hide his act.¹ But the really telling thing is this: “Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond’s school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant.” Rather than trying to cover it up, or rather than punishing these three cops, the police force decided to enact retribution on the 12-year-old girl for resisting being dragged into a van by three strange men. And a prosecutor is aiding them in this. This isn’t bad apples; it’s a system.

I’d really love to see these three men — and their commanders, and the prosecutor — fired and publicly humiliated. Unfortunately, probably the system will protect its own; and the abuses of blacks, of women, and of prostitutes (and of many other groups, as well) will continue.

1. One of the three, Officer Gilbert Gomez, has since been promoted to vice Narcotics commander, a position which presumably affords him even more opportunities to get away with assaulting 12 year olds. (back)

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

“Any male who wears as woman’s attire in public for immoral purposes shall be guilty of an offense and on conviction be liable to a fine not exceeding one thousand or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year or both.”
-Section 28, Syariah Criminal Offenses (Federal Territories)

Unlike other majority Islamic countries that have law based on Syariah or have secular laws influenced by Syariah, Malaysia doesn’t allow for sex change operations. Countries such as Egypt, under the dictatorial secular ND party allow for sex changes for those whom are considered to benefit from such operations; the same with the Islamic Republic of Iran under mullahs of the Guardian Council.

However, in Malaysia this is not the case (even though it used to be until the early 1980s) which has caused much despair and trauma for the Mak Nyah (transsexual) population in Malaysia estimated to be numbered at around 25 to 30 thousand.

Journalist and videographer Poh Si Teng, whom I have the pleasure of calling my friend and have been able to work with, decided to spend some time with Mak Nyahs in Kuala Lumpur to chronicle their hardships, feelings, and thoughts about being Mak Nyah in a society that rejects them with its laws and its homespun take on Sunni Islam.

Her documentary (click here to buy), titled Pecah Lobang (”Busted”), chronicles the lives of Mak Nyah prostitutes in Kuala Lumpur who have taken to prostitution in order to support their families (as they can’t normally find jobs within mainstream society). Along with putting their lives within the lens of a video camera she also gets them to open up and talk about police brutality, relationships with their families, and their relationship with God.

Read more »

This is a documentary by my wonderful friend (whom I had the honor of meeting in a mass media and law class which has developed into what will obviously be a life long friendship) Poh Si Teng.

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.