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.

As usual, a list of some of the things I’ve been reading lately. Please feel free to post comments about that stuff, or about anything else you’d like to discuss. Also, if you have a blog post (by yourself or someone else) you’d like to point out, or any other interesting links, please do so.

On Z Magazine’s website, Gail Dines and Robert Jensen are criticizing the left’s attitude towards pornography:

I think they make a good point. Partly, perhaps, as a result of the polarization caused by the “porn wars” in the 1980s, and the desire to avoid even a hint of censorship, lefty defenses of porn sometimes seem more knee-jerk than thoughtful. But you don’t have to endorse censorship to critique the sexism, misogyny and racism found in a lot of porn.

Where Dines and Jensen fall down, in my opinion, is in not providing a working definition of what pornography means. The truth is, porn - like “partial birth abortion” - is one of those terms that is used so loosely, it has become impossible to be sure what any particular author means unless they explicitly define their terms.

For myself, I think “pornography” is any media produced with the intention of being used as a masturbatory aid by the audience. But my definition of porn includes material that contains no violence and is not degrading in any obvious way (for example, Colleen Coover’s comic Small Favors), while Dines and Jensen’s analysis doesn’t even seem to acknowledge that there could be such a thing as non-degrading, non-violent pornography. Does this mean that they see all sexually explicit materials - even something like Small Favors - as degrading and implicitly violent? Or are they not counting such material as “pornography” at all?

Two cover-my-behind points. First of all, I’m not denying that there’s a lot of porn out there that is disgustingly violent, and disgustingly misogynistic. Just clearing out my spam makes it clear to me that porn makers believe they can generate a lot of business by appealing to misogyny: “come see this bitch get nailed!” is if anything a mild example of the misogynistic language typical of much porn advertising. Assuming that market incentives work, the high prevalence of this sort of advertising indicates that there is considerable profit for porn producers who make direct appeals to woman-hatred. And there seems to be a similar, although perhaps slightly smaller, market for overtly racist porn.

Secondly, just because a piece of porn is not overtly misogynist or overtly degrading, doesn’t place it beyond feminist criticism. For instance, a lot of porn (such as Playboy-style naked posing) endorses not only very traditional ideas of what is or isn’t attractive, but also implicitly endorses the idea that sexuality is something possessed by women, which men must pry out of women. To me these ideas are problematic; they support a narrow and limiting idea of sexuality, which I think is harmful to society. However, this isn’t a problem with porn qua porn; the same harmful ideas I dislike in even “non-violent” porn, are also found in abundance in non-porn media like “women’s magazines,” “men’s magazines” and popular sit-coms. So although I think this is a legitimate critique of a lot of porn, it doesn’t make sense to single out porn in general for this critique, since these flaws are evident in virtually all of pop culture.

Regardless of what definition of porn Dines and Jensen are using, or if they’re overlooking the existence of non-degrading porn, it’s clear that their critique is applicable to a lot of the porn out there - and that there’s no reason that leftists should give racist and misogynistic porn a pass, when we don’t give racism and misogyny in non-porn media a pass.

UPDATE: Tiffany at blackfeminism.org weighs in, and also discusses “the virgin-victim-whore trichotomy.”

Via Mark Kleiman, this very readable six-part series about a wealthy businessman and pillar of the community, Dick Dasen, who over the years paid “hundreds” of women to have sex with him. At first, he met the women through abusing his position as a volunteer credit counselor. Later, he quit doing the credit counseling and instead paid women who were already taking money for sex from him “referral fees” for finding new recruits.

Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be an especially tempting deal for young, female meth addicts.

At some point in the last few years, the appointments had gotten out of hand. Huge sums of money… estimated between $1 and $5 million total … were flowing out. Dasen told police that he had paid some women as much as $100,000. The women involved referred to themselves as “Dasen girls,”? and they recruited among their friends, taking payments of as much as $2,000 just for bringing in anyone new who was young, thin, reasonably good-looking, and down on their luck. Since methamphetamine is perhaps the greatest luck-destroyer on earth, many of the girls came into the circle by way of using the drug. So much of the cash flowed directly back into the methamphetamine trade, law enforcement officials say, that Kalispell, population 15,000, experienced a big-city style epidemic of addiction and all that goes with it — crime, domestic abuse and violent conflicts over drug deals and money.

Dasen used the money to play power-trips with the women. And it doesn’t appear that the women were able to use the money to improve their lives much:

Another part of the power, Jenna and Summer said, was to stop payment on the checks that were written to the women for sex. “You’d go to cash the check, and the bank teller would say there was no money in that account, and then you’d go call Dick, and he’d be out of town,”? Summer says, “and it would be right when you needed the money the most.”? And then they would wait, as long as it took, for him to call them back and tell them the money had been deposited to cover the check. “That’s how I finally lost my trailer,”? Jenna said. “The money didn’t come through in time, and they foreclosed on it.”?

There is little doubt that the flow of money, when it did come — and it usually did, eventually — was not the lifesaver that everyone imagined it would be. It seemed like just another trick, kind of like the meth they all bought with it, that seemed like it would make everything alright, but actually it just disappeared, wrecking your life in the process.

“I don’t know of anybody who did anything positive with the money,”? Connie said. Thousands and thousands of dollars went into local keno and poker machines, hours and hours spent sitting, high on meth, staring at the blinking lights, smoking.

The end result? Some of the women who came forward have been arrested for prostitution, or for recruiting. Dasin himself is facing a trial, and it’s possible he’ll be able to wiggle out with a slap on the wrist - it’s a safe bet that he’ll have the best legal defense available. The most serious charges involves sexual encounters with underage girls. Maybe Dasin will spend a long time inside a prison - I think he deserves it.

But what if Dasin had been smart enough to avoid involvement with underage girls? Then he’d be facing virtually no serious charges. That disturbs me. The power dynamic between a broke meth addict and a sober millionaire is like a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Woody Allen; taking advantage of that power dynamic to negotiate for sex is despicable. I’m not sure that the resulting sex in that situation is rape, but I can’t call it fully consensual, either. We call sex between an adult and a 14-year-old statutory rape because a 14-year-old is not able to genuinely consent to sex, even if she thinks she wants to. By that standard, can a meth addict be said to genuinely consent to prostitution?

On the other hand, at least one of Dasen’s “victims” would be pissed off by my view:

You know, everybody’s talking about Dick, how he gave us all this money and made us victims, like we can’t take any responsibility for ourselves. I don’t buy that. I’m a grown woman and I’m responsible for what I do, and for what I did with the money. You ask if I’m pro-Dick Dasen, and yes, I am. Dick for Mayor! I notice nobody is asking if just maybe Dick is a victim of all of us. How come nobody’s asking that?

So what kind of punishment should men like Dasen get?

The legal penalties for sex crimes with underage girls are fairly clear, and severe. But what should be the sanction, legal or otherwise, for enabling addiction, for feeding the meth economy, for taking advantage of weak, desperate people for your own gratification, for abusing a position of trust?

My instinct is that men like Dasen deserve whatever punishment the law can make stick. But I’m skeptical about how “victimless” crimes are enforced in real life; there’s a lot of evidence that the people arrested for such crimes are disproportionately non-white and poor. (That’s one reason I don’t favor handgun bans). Dasen’s story is making the news because a rich, white man being charged with these crimes is a novelty.

Plus, is it really practical to make “enabling” a crime? In law, I think people should be responsible mainly for their own acts, not for acts by others.

I don’t have answers. But anyone who (like me) favors drug legalization or prostitution decriminalization should be willing to think hard about this story. As the reporter asks, “what’s the lesson of a case in which a long series of ‘victimless’ crimes somehow resulted in a lot of victims?”

I’ve mentioned in passing on this blog that I think prostitution should be decriminalized, but that being a John - that is, hiring a prostitute - should be criminal. I thought it might be nice to share with “Alas” readers one of the articles I’ve read which has helped convince me that this is a policy worth pursuing.

Here are some key quotes from “The Swedish Law That Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual Services,” by Gunilla Ekberg (of Sweden’s Ministry of Industry, Employment, and Communications), an article printed in the academic journal Violence Against Women (Vol. 10 No. 10, October 2004). I’ve liberally cut and pasted and changed the order of quotes to make this post; if you’ve got some time, I recommend reading the entire article (.pdf file).

For many countries, the options available for solutions to the problem of prostitution and trafficking in human beings for sexual purposes have been very limited. Some countries, such as Canada and the United States, have opted to criminalize the victims of prostitution…the women and children…as well as the buyers, through solicitation laws. These laws have generally been put in place for reasons of public order and are not based on gender equality or with concern for the well-being of the victims. The effects of such legislation have been that these laws are applied mainly to the victims.Victims have been arrested, fined or imprisoned, and have rarely been given access to services that could assist them to leave prostitution. The buyers usually escape punishment.

Many countries are looking for better and more effective solutions to the problem of prostitution than punishing the victims or, at the other extreme, legalizing prostitution activities, which, in reality, is capitulation to the prostitution industry. The Law in Sweden is an effective alternative to state-legitimated systems of prostitution. [...]

On January 1, 1999, the Swedish Law that Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual Services (the Law) entered into force. This Law recognizes that it is the man who buys women (or men) for sexual purposes who should be criminalized, and not the woman. The Law is gender neutral and is, as mentioned previously, a fundamental part of the comprehensive Swedish strategy to combat prostitution and trafficking in human beings. [...]

The ultimate goal of the Law is to protect the women in prostitution by, among other measures, addressing the root cause of prostitution and trafficking: the men who assume the right to purchase female human beings and sexually exploit them. From the Swedish experience, we know that when the buyers risk punishment, the number of men who buy prostituted women decreases, and the local prostitution markets become less lucrative. Traffickers will then choose other and more profitable destinations. The Law That Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual Services is a law that recognizes the harmful effects of prostitution on the women and girls who are the victims. This law is a fundamental step in abolishing prostitution and trafficking in women and girls. If more countries would address the demand for prostituted women, by criminalizing not only the pimps and the traffickers but also the buyers, then the expansion of the global prostitution industry would be seriously threatened. [...]

It is important to note that this legislation only targets buyers of persons in prostitution. The persons who are in prostitution, the victims of male violence, are not subject to any kind of criminal or other legal repercussions. The government pledged money and assistance to women who are victims of male violence, including prostituted women. Thus, the state, to a certain extent, is responsible for assisting women to leave violent situations, including prostitution, and for providing women with access to shelters, counseling, education, and job training. [...]

The Law is currently worded as follows:

A person who obtains casual sexual relations in exchange for payment shall be sentenced… for the purchase of sexual services to a fine or imprisonment for at most six months.[...]

The offense comprises all forms of sexual services, whether they are purchased on the street, in brothels, in so-called massage parlors, fromescort services, or in other similar circumstances. To put the length of imprisonment in context, the longest sentence that can be imposed on anyone for any individual criminal offense in Sweden is 10 years. [...]

WHO ARE THE SWEDISH MEN WHO BUY PROSTITUTED WOMEN?

Every eighth man older than 18 years in Sweden, or approximately 13% of men ages 18 years and older, have, at least once, bought a person for prostitution purposes within Sweden or in other countries (MÃ¥nsson, 2001; National Institute of Public Health, 2000). These men represent all ages and all income classes. The majority are, or have been, married or cohabiting, and they often have children. Men who have or have had many sexual partners are the most common buyers of prostituted persons, effectively dispelling the myth that the buyer is a lonely, sexually unattractive man with no other option for his sexual outlet than to buy prostituted women. [...]

The effective enforcement of the Law is ultimately determined by the attitude of the leadership within the local police forces, as well as that of the individual police officer. In Sweden as in other countries, the police force is a male, homosocial, and conservative working environment…a police force that is being asked to enforce a law that seriously threatens traditional male values. Therefore, initially, representatives of the police were critical of the law, suggesting that it would be difficult to enforce (”Polisen Kritiserar nya Sexköpslagen,”? 2000). For example, in some cases in which men have been apprehended for purchasing sexual services, the police officers involved have agreed to send the letter of notification of a crime committed to an address of the offender’s choice, rather than to his home address, presumably to protect the offender from scrutiny by his spouse or other family members.

To increase the police officers’ competence and knowledge about prostitution and trafficking in human beings, the National Criminal Police in collaboration with the Division for Gender Equality, as well as several local and regional police forces, have established education programs for its personnel on this subject. This has had noticeable and immediate effects. The initial criticism of the law as being difficult to enforce has ceased. One year after the program began in 2003, there was a 300% increase in arrests, believed to be the result of the investigating officers’ better understanding of the reasons behind the legislation, their deeper comprehension of the conditions that make women vulnerable to becoming victims of prostitution and trafficking, and the development of better investigation methods. [...]

EFFECTS OF THE LAW ON TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN

The National Rapporteur for Trafficking in Women at the National Criminal Investigation Department (NCID), Kajsa Wahlberg, is responsible for the collection of data related to investigations and convictions for trafficking crimes in Sweden and for reporting annually to the Swedish government about the trafficking in women in Sweden. In her reports published in 2003 and 2004, she noted that there are clear indications that the Law has had direct and positive effects in limiting the trafficking in women for prostitution to Sweden.

The NCID estimates that between 400 and 600 women are trafficked into Sweden every year, mainly fromthe Eastern European countries such as Estonia and Lithuania, as well as from Russia. This number has remained fairly constant during the past several years (National Criminal Investigation Department [NCID], 2004). This figure should be compared to the numbers of women who are victims of trafficking for sexual purposes in neighboring Scandinavian countries [...] where the purchase of sexual services is not prohibited. In Denmark, 5,500 to 7,800 women are prostituted every year. It is estimated that 50% or more of these women are victims of trafficking in human beings. [...]

The NCID has received signals from Europol and national police forces in other European countries that Sweden no longer is an attractive market for traffickers. Traffickers and pimps are businessmen who calculate profits, marketing factors, and risks of getting caught when they decide in which countries they will sell women into prostitution. In conversations recorded during crime investigations, pimps/procurers and traffickers have expressed frustration about setting up shop in Sweden and attracting customers who are willing to buy their women in prostitution. According to these intercepted telephone conversations, and fromadditional testimonies given bywomenwhoare victims of trafficking, the pimps and traffickers experience the following difficulties:

• Prostituted women must be escorted to the buyers, therefore giving less time to fewer buyers, and gaining less revenue for pimps than if women had been in street prostitution.
• Swedish men who want to buy women for prostitution purposes express serious fear of being arrested and prosecuted under the Law and hence demand absolute discretion from the pimps/traffickers.
• To minimize the possibility of exposure/detection, the pimps/traffickers are forced to operate apartment brothels in more than one location and to change locations regularly. Thus the mode of operation is expensive and requires that the pimp have local contacts. The necessity of several premises is confirmed in almost all preliminary investigations that have been carried out in 2002.

[...]NORMATIVE EFFECTS OF THE LAW

As with all laws, the Law has a normative function. It is a concrete and tangible expression of the belief that in Sweden women and children are not for sale. It effectively dispels men’s self assumed right to buy women and children for prostitution purposes and questions the idea that men should be able to express their sexuality in any form and at any time.

When I last brought this up, Mythago wrote in a comment:

Amp favors a system that pretends to recognize the dignity of prostitutes, but in reality”“and under the guise of merely controlling their johns”“really keeps prostitution illegal. Amp, do you really believe that preventing prostitutes from earning a living will mollify pimps or help the prostitutes any?

I think that, in an imperfect and sexist society, prostitution will inevitably, in a significant number of cases, mean that the prostitute is hurt and abused by men - both the johns and the pimps. (Note I say “by men” purposely; whether you’re talking about male or female prostitutes, the vast majority of pimps and johns are male). The unequal power relationships involved guarantee it.

(In theory, prostitution could work differently, and better, in a more equal and decent society; but we ain’t even close to being there yet, so that’s kind of a moot point when discussing policy preferences.)

It’s actually a lot like having a minimum wage. Outlawing low-wage work does, beyond a doubt, hurt some potential low-wage workers; it would be easier for some people to find work if they could legally offer to work for a dollar an hour, for example. However, not having a minimum wage would hurt even more low-wage workers to a greater degree, because they’d be exploited to a greater degree than they currently are. (Note: Please don’t allow the comments discussion of this post to be divirted into a discussion of the minimum wage. If anyone feels an enourmous need to discuss the minimum wage, email me and I’ll do a separate post about it sometime soon.) To quote Michael Albert:

We set a minimum wage which precludes people paying or accepting less, even should they wish to. Violators can be fully cognizant adults. Low pay can be in their immediate interest. It doesn’t matter. The conditions of the economy and society coerce people, by the obliteration of alternative options, into accepting grossly dehumanizing, demeaning, and exploitative work. We say you can do the same work on your own, but we prevent an employer from paying you to endure the outlawed conditions. Similar logic justifies laws against demanding sexual favors for employee advance, or ignoring workplace safety regardless of the preferences of those involved. When the balance of power between constituencies is grossly unequal, we believe the state should proscribe certain behaviors. This is established.

I agree, as Mythago says, that it would be an unfair blow to some prostitutes that prostitution is not totally legal. But I think that complete legalization would be an even worse blow to more prostitutes (and non-prostitutes too), compared to the Swedish Law. (I also think that even total legalization, although I don’t favor it, would be better than the status quo here in the USA).

(It’s also worth noting that the Swedish law included increased efforts, and increased funding, for providing prostitutes with resources and training to leave prostitution. )

The 1970’s porn movie Deep Throat is coming to movie theaters near you:

Deep Throat,” the infamous 1972 adult film that led to a government crackdown on pornography, is being re-released in theaters as a new generation of lawmakers wages a renewed assault on smut, trade paper Daily Variety reported in its Tuesday edition.

The release of the Linda Lovelace opus, which was banned at the time in 23 states, coincides with the premiere of the documentary “Inside Deep Throat,” which hits theaters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston on Friday.

The original film, which was made in six days for $25,000 and has grossed over $600 million, will not be ready until at least Feb. 18, the paper said. Las Vegas-based Arrow Prods., which owns the rights to the mob-funded “Deep Throat,” started striking 10 prints on Monday, it added. Five of the prints will be edited to garner an “R” rating, which allows admission to children aged under 17 if accompanied by an adult.

The media reports I have read seem to present the relaunch as yet another battle between the freedom of expression gang and those who want to ban pornography, and every one of them so far has taken the side of the freedom of expression. This is not that surprising. Porn is everywhere today and things which were seen as shocking in the early 1970’s are no longer so. That porn, and especially violent and misogynistic porn, might directly or indirectly hurt some women is not a hot topic in the mainstream media, and neither is the possibility that plentiful supply of porn geared towards the sexual desires of mostly men might lead to a distorted view of women’s sexual needs and the expected sexual behavior of women. Instead, when something sexual provokes wider outrage this tends to be about the consequences of porn to its unintended viewers, such as children. The Janet Jackson breast episode is a good example of what the media might address.

All this explains the treatment of Catherine McKinnon’s comments about the movie. She participated in a panel discussion at the New York premiere of Inside the Deep Throat, a documentary about the movie, and she appears to have been the one on the panel who was most vigorously arguing the unpopular points about porn’s possible effects. This is how she was written up later on:

Mitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. “What’s so funny?” she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff’s hand shot up - “I can do it,” he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going “me too!” (Gigi Grazer - wife of Brian - later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touché). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.

And:

Former New York Times movie critic Elvis Mitchell moderated, and the group consisted of HarperCollins publisher and controversy lightning rod Judith Regan, journalist Peter Boyer, famed criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz and feminist professor Catherine McKinnon.

The latter, who turned out be quite mad, I thought, immediately coined the phrase “throat rape” about what happened on screen to the movie’s late star, Linda Lovelace.

That declaration produced hissing, and a few laughs, from the audience.

McKinnon, infamously known in intellectual circles as the “feminist censor,” does not often appear before mainstream audiences. Her “partner in crime” is the militant feminist Andrea Dworkin, who was not among us.

“Inside Deep Throat” producer Brian Grazer’s hair was already standing straight up. More of McKinnon’s theories might have made it curl.

And so on. In other words, Catherine McKinnon is viewed as an extremist, someone quite removed from mainstream ideas, someone who is a safe object for general ridicule. Yet I could list many current commentators whose views are more extremist in some other directions and who still get accorded both respect and a place in public debate. Consider Ann Coulter’s proposal to nuke Islamic countries and to convert them to Christianity or Michelle Malkin’s views on detention camps as a good way to prevent terrorism. To name the men whose ideas are even more outrageous would take me the rest of this post. Clearly, some extreme views are more acceptable than others.

But what does McKinnon really say? The anti-feminist websites tend to have a field day picking out isolated comments from her writings, all of which are intended to show how unreasonable McKinnon is, and sometimes her name is used in debates to tar all feminists with the same brush of freakiness. This is partly McKinnon’s own fault. She likes to use strong statements as a rhetorical device, and they do work to draw attention to what she is saying. But they tend to do this only in a superficial sense and seldom lead to an extended discussion of what her actual arguments are. Or this is what I believe. Though using careful phrazing is not as exciting to begin with, it tends to turn fewer listeners off and ultimately results in a more fruitful discussion.

Consider the often heard argument that McKinnon compares all heterosexual sex to rape. I read the book in which this idea is discussed before I was aware of McKinnon’s mythological proportions among the anti-feminists, and this let me interpret her arguments quite differently. Not necessarily agree with them, but to see what her point might be, and to me it was that if sexuality is defined by purely patriarchal standards women living in patriarchy are unaware of their true sexual desires and needs and therefore cannot in a fundamental sense make free choices to engage in sex. This may not be the reading that McKinnon intends, but it’s quite a different reading from the one which equates voluntary sex with rape. Even more generally, McKinnon writes theory and to understand her arguments one must understand the way she defines the concepts. Not that this excuses her use of the terms in public debates without proper definitions.

All this is background for my argument that when McKinnon called the events in the Deep Throat “throat rape” what she said was quite different from what the audience heard. Linda Lovelace, the actress performing in the movie, stated in her autobiography that swallowing a penis so deeply did not come naturally to her but needed a lot of practice. She also revealed that her then-partner and manager had used physical violence to control her during the making of the movie:

Unlike two earlier autobiographies, Ordeal was not a titillating affair, and the liberation Lovelace talked about was not sexual but deeply personal. Chuck Traynor was not her ‘creator’ as she had previously announced, but her abuser. She claimed that she had made Deep Throat under threat of physical harm, and explained that Traynor would use guns and knives to get his way. There was also a confession that some found ironic: on the set of the movie, Lovelace felt less threatened than she had before; the movie people were a creative family, and she drew strength from her new relationships. Traynor observed this, and would double his beatings.

The generous reading of McKinnon’s comments would take all this into account. But feminists seldom receive generous readings these days and radical feminists practically never, even when the point they are making is one that deserves wider discussion.

Yesterday I posted a Telegraph article about a woman in Germany being forced to choose between losing unemployment benefits and taking a job in a brothel. It now seems likely that the Telegraph article is not true.

In the comments to yesterday’s post, Alison points to this Reuters article, which says:

A spokesman for the Federal Labour Office said that if job seekers said they were prepared to work as, for example, dancers in strip bars, advisers could put them in touch with any suitable employers, but vacancies would not be displayed in job centres.

He also stressed job centres would not look for prostitutes on behalf of brothels, nor offer sex industry jobs to people who hadn’t specifically mentioned it as an area of interest.

Also, according to Alison, “Germany has special laws about sex work, including a prohibition of coercing people into sex work, and provision that sex workers can quit at any time for any reason, without working (for example) a period of notice.”

Finally, Snopes has been looking in the German press without finding any confirmation of the “be a prostitute or lose your benefits” story (hat tip: Heliologue.)

It’s impossible to say for certain, but it looks likely that the Telegraph story is false. Which is good news, of course. Thanks, Alison!

UPDATE (Feb 1): There’s reason to doubt this story is true. Check out this post for details.

Original post is below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »

I mentioned in passing in an earlier post that I’m not in favor of legalizaing (or decriminalizing) prostitution. (Instead, I favor “the Swedish solution,” which is to decriminalize being a prostitute while retaining - and enforcing - laws against being a John or a pimp).

I don’t really have time to blog today, so I thought I’d post some quotes from “Legalization: The Australian Experience,” by Mary Lucille Sullivan and Sheila Jeffreys, from the academic journal Violence Against Women Vol 8 no 9 September 2002. It’s articles like this one that have cooled my interest in the legalization approach.

I thought this was interesting enough to be worth quoting. From “Globalization and Violence Against Women,” by Lorraine Radford and Kaname Tsutsumi, in Women’s Studies International Forum (Jan 2004).

You may have heard about this already; a Hooters in Florida was planning to host a “Little Miss Hooters” contest. (Sounds to me like the management there had drunk too much of the “Hooters is a family restaurant” kool-aid).

Instapundit linked to it, there was a storm of angry e-mail, and the contest was cancelled. Sara at Diotima then asked an interesting question:

Will Baude answered (and here I’m paraphrasing) that the problem with “Little Miss Hooters” is that it isn’t consensual (if I were Mary Daly, I’d probably write that as “con/sensual”), since a sub-five-year old girl isn’t old enough to consent to be a quasi-stripper. But Sara responded that “there is a legitimate source of consent in this situation - the girls’ parents…. Parents give consent for their children all the time, why shouldn’t they be allowed to give consent for their daughters to be in a Little Miss Hooters contest?”

(If you’d like to read the full Sara/Will debate, you can do so by following the links found here and here).

It’s ironic that I link to Sara’s post, because I’m the opposite of the people she sets her question to: I can explain why working at Hooters is not just another job choice. But I can’t quite articulate why the “Little Miss Hooters” contest is such a big deal.

* * *

First, why I think it’s degrading to work at Hooters.

At a wedding rehearsal I attended last week, a bridesmaid wore a dress that left nothing but her nipples to the imagination. I didn’t, and don’t, consider that degrading. If it makes her happy to wear a dress like that (and as far as I could tell, it did), it’s not my place to scold her for it.

So I don’t think it’s intrinsically wrong to wear revealing clothing, “flaunt your sexuality,” or whatever. But I still think there’s something wrong with Hooters.

Here’s the thing; a Hooters waitress isn’t dressed like that because it makes her happy. Shes’ dressed like that because there’s money to be made providing men with young women wearing revealing clothing and flirting with customers. And if she’s having a bad day, or just isn’t in the mood to flirt or wear revealing clothing or be looked at by strange men, and if it’s not fun for her? Well, then, she better pull on the baby tee and pretend to be having fun, because that’s her job.

That, in my opinion, is degrading.

Of course, you may respond, if having to fake emotion for money is degrading, then many jobs in capitalism could be called degrading. “Yeah, so?,” I might respond. (It’s not like I ever claimed to love capitalism.) Also, there are very few things as pesonal as sexuality, and how one chooses to express sexuality; and considered in that light, working at Hooters is worse than working at McDonalds.

(I also agree with the usual feminist critique of Hooters, but I assume that “Alas” readers are familiar enough with it so they don’t need me restating it.)

So that’s why I think there’s something wrong with working at Hooters, even though I understand that women working at Hooters may not have better alternatives (which brings up questions of job discrimination against women, but that’s another post).

* * *

But what about “Little Miss Hooters”?

Of course, I find it disgusting. But that’s an emotional reaction, and, although emotions can be a helpful moral guide, we have to be cautious. After all, it’s emotinalism about children’s sexuality which has led to parents being arrested for taking innocent photos of their nude children.

There’s the argument that a “Little Miss Hooters” contest will encourage pedophelia, but I don’t buy it. Normal adults don’t see anything sexual about a four-year-old in a tied-up t-shirt; and whatever creates pedophiles, I don’t think it’s contests like this one.

Nor do I think that the contest organizers were intending a pro-pedophilia statement. They were just playing with the fact that small children dressed as adult costumes are adorable (think of a little girl dressed as Mae West - or as a fireman, for that matter - to see what I mean). To me, it suggests they’ve gotten so used to “Hooters” that they’ve lost track of how the rest of the country sees their business (hence my comment above that they’ve drunk too much “Hooters is a family restaurant” lemonade).

I think it’s horrible to teach little girls that they should be valued according to their ability to be more conventionally pretty than other girls. But that’s an objection I have to all child pageants (and to many other things in our culture), not to “Little Miss Hooters” in particular. (It’s notable that the widespread disgust for “Little Miss Hooters” in the blogosphere isn’t matched by a similar disgust for all the other “Little Miss” contests out there).

There is, also, the matter of consent - but in general, I think parents ought to be free to “consent” to things for their children (stopping short of actual abuse or abandonment).

So why condemn “Little Miss Hooters” in particular? So far, I don’t have any better answer than “it squicks me.” And, clearly, it squicks a lot of other people, too.

But I’m not sure that’s a good reason to make “Little Miss Hooters” a big deal. In fact, there’s a danger in over-reacting to stuff like this. From a Salon article:

Anyhow, that’s where I stand: disgusted (or perhaps just squicked?) by the whole idea of “Little Miss Hooters,” but not able to articulate any reason to find it grosser than any other child pageant. Reader suggestions are welcome.

Good article in the Chronicle of Higher Education comparing pornography and the Abu Ghraib photos.

Nonetheless, I find the comparison more than a little stretched, and perhaps even distastefully opportunistic; the Abu Ghraib tragedy shouldn’t be understood primarily as a chance to bring the porn industries abuses to light.

Subtler, and more interesting to me, is the comparison of Abu Ghraib photos and historic photos of lynchings.

Read the whole.

From Matthew Yglesias:

I’m not sure why the quote should take into account the anti-porn faction of feminism. That faction has been more-or-less led by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, both of whom would, I think, passionately deny being liberal. In her writings, MacKinnon is as bitterly anti-liberal as any conservative.

MacKinnon and Dworkin’s leadership was unfortunate, in my view. As brilliant as both women are, they nonetheless led radical feminism into a futile fight for anti-porn legislation that split feminism. The result was to sabatoge what had been, up to that point, an effective radical feminist movement with many great accomplishments. (Susan Brownmiller makes a similar argument in her memoir In Our Time). I don’t think radical feminism has yet recovered from the wrong turn it took in the 80s.

Jim Leitzel - normally of Vice Squad, but in this instance guest-blogging on Crescat Sententia - reports that the Federal Government is cracking down on the owners of “Extreme Associates.” According to an ABC News report from August:

Jim also links to the case of a couple in Dallas who were “found guilty of three federal obscenity charges last month.” Following the link Jim provides, we learn that

And in an earlier post on Crecat, Jim links to “an amazing case” of “a couple in California who ran an Internet bulletin board was found guilty in Tennessee of purveying obscenity. (The same material might not have been considered to be obscene in California, which has different “community standards.”)” Following the link, it turns out that once again the material being prosecuted involved pornographic depictions of rape.

I wonder, is there a pattern here?

First Amendment lawyer Lawrence Walters, discussing the Extreme Associates case, fails to provide any independent reason we should care if Extreme’s customers are deprived of the chance to jack off to images of women being brutalized and raped. Instead, Lawrence suggests a “slippery slope” argument: we must defend Extreme Associates or Playboy magazine will be next! This argument assumes two things: first, that censorship of Extreme Associates will reliably (or even probably) lead to the censorship of Playboy, and second, that it would be an unbearable loss to culture if Playboy was unavailable.

Putting aside the question of why we should care if Playboy ceases to exist, I have to wonder - is there any evidence to support the theory that censorship of extreme rape porn will inevitably lead to the censorship of soft porn? After all, child pornography has been aggressively censored for decades, without any apparent “slippery slope” effect completely destroying our other free speech rights. If child pornography is any example, it should be possible to aggressively censor rape pornography without suffering any unbearable slippery slope effects.

• Janice Raymond’s 10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution. I tend to favor legalization myself, and furthermore Raymond has a well-earned reputation as a bigot (towards transsexuals). Nonetheless, she makes some good arguments against legalization here.

• The Rhubarb Patch presents a good same-sex-marriage debate, although in my opinion the pro-gay-marriage side of the argument wins. There are other entertaining debates available in the patch, too. I’m not sure where I saw this link - Diotima, maybe?
• CicerosGhost was momentarily falsely accused of rape, and so experienced “conflicting views on what it means to actually rape someone.” What happened to him was wrong, but why is only rape written about this way? I mean, I know people who have been falsely accused of stealing cars they had legitimately borrowed. People are falsely accused of using drugs, of child abuse, of all sorts of things. Yet only false accusations of rape seem to move people to rethinking the validity of the crime.
• Excellent post from Easily Distracted: Please Touch. The writer brings his daughter to two museums - one public and mobbed by those rude lower-class kids, one private and relatively free of rudeness (one bullying kid aside). Private/public conflicts, middle-class guilt complexes, and everything else that makes the world spin round.
• Hey, right now a google search for “reclining cucumbers” doesn’t lead to any entries. But maybe soon it’ll point to this blog. Then I’ll be able to corner the blog market in readers interested in reclining cucumbers. And after that, the universe itself.
• Good “Findlaw” article on the new partial-birth abortion ban.
• Robot Jenny describes her top ten childhood frights.
• Nathan Newman argues that the democratic primary race is all over but the shouting. With his fundraising advantage and now the major union endorsements, Dean (Nathan argues) is unbeatable. If he’s right, Emma will be in beer a year from now.
• Speaking of Howard Dean, Mark Kleiman dissects the “guys with confederate flags” controversy and finds it wanting.
• I’ll probably still vote for Kucinich, though. Here’s why, in a nutshell.
• CNN reports on the stupidest lawsuit of the year: Merriam-Webster is being sued by McDonalds for copyright violation for including the word “McJob” in their dictionary. Via Boing Boing.
• New additions to the blogroll: MidEastWeb blog, an excellent lefty blog on Israeli news. And also Curmudgeonly Clerk, a good right-wing law blog. And also Easily Distracted, a good lefty academic blog. And Dan Drezner, another good righty blog.
• Making Light has a great post discussing pro-woman, pro-gun, and the NRA.
  I’d also like to see them get into some earnest discussions of what firearm strategies are best suited to the kind of violence women most frequently encounter: up close and personal, involving someone who isn’t a stranger. If they’re serious about self-defense for women, they have to consider which guns are best for prostitutes to carry, and what kind of muzzle velocity it takes to stop a berserk ex-husband.
• PETA’s usually flat-footed publicity department scores a hit with this animated piece, The Meatrix. Via Crooked Timber.
• Dan Drezner and Robert Reich agree: manufacturing jobs are disappearing the world over, not just in the USA. Extremely interesting, if true. (Via Prometheus 6)

  As an aside, Peter Parker is a superhero. So is Scott Summers. So are Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, Matt Murdock, and Billy Batson. Does this tell us anything about Dan Drezner and Robert Reich?

• Has Lovecraft taken up gardening, or is it Lemon Porn? Then again, maybe you’d rather read a story summed up by the quote “Lucy had a great sense of humor and I’m sure she would appreciate being my coffee table.” Be sure to visit these and other results of the Boing Boing Link Fu contest.

Some readers have asked me to explain this passage, from the post before this one, in more detail: