One of the choices for relationship status on some social networking sites is, “It’s Complicated.” That’s me and the book I’m writing. I haven’t written any blog posts in awhile, and that’s because I’ve been struggling with my other writing.
I’ll be back soon with new posts. In the meantime I had to turn off comments because of the volume of spam I was getting. Once I find a good plugin to take care of that I can open them back up for discussions.
It’s Monday, which means there’s another episode of The Bachelorette on ABC tonight.
For those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, The Bachelor is a reality TV show where an attractive single guy meets 25 attractive single women and eliminates a number of women each week until he narrows the field down to the one he’s going to marry. The fascinating-trainwreck aspect is that all the women live in a house together, dorm-style, and since they’re all competing for the same guy …but I digress.
The Bachelorette is the same thing with the gender roles reversed: one woman, 25 men.
The problem is, the show doesn’t really work. In 15 seasons of The Bachelor, only one couple is still together. The Bachelorette has a better record, with 2 of 6 still together.
And it’s not that the various Bachelors and Bachelorettes didn’t connect with anyone on their season. At the end of each season almost all of them were sure they were going to marry the person they had chosen. Something went wrong later.
Dating, especially in the early stages, is more heavily influenced by chemistry than by compatibility. But chemistry alone is not enough. People get to know one another and figure out if they can make it work, if they are compatible, whatever you want to call it.
What The Bachelor does is keep things at that chemistry/first date level for the whole show. Participants go on extravagant dates involving things like helicopter rides, diving off a private yacht to go snorkeling, horseback riding on the beach, bungee jumping, racecar driving, etc. In other words, not your typical date. Note that many of these activities are adrenaline-producing thrills, which can create an artificial feeling of closeness or bonding. Other dates are extravagantly romantic, the kind of thing most women would never experience. Or else the dates involve skimpy clothing and sexual situations. The show’s producers know how to create infatuation.
And although these dates look relatively normal on TV, due to production needs the daters are often pulled apart for interviews, asked to repeat a conversation for a better camera angle, posed for shots, etc. So it’s hard to say how much the show participants really learn about one another.
Participants are provided with vast amounts of alcohol on dates, and are sometimes kept up until the wee hours of the morning on a night shoot. These circumstances impair judgment and relax inhibitions.
And then there’s the whole competition aspect, in which the many who are competing, may come to overvalue the one they’re competing for, and even their own feelings toward that person, out of a spirit of competition or insecurity.
So by the end of the show, the Bachelor or Bachelorette may be proposing to someone with whom they have only chemistry, not any real compatibility.
And chemistry is a terrible reason to choose a mate. Chemistry is far, far more common than most people think.
In a way, prostitution has a lot in common with The Bachelorette. Just as with the show participants, everything usually stays at the “first date” level for a long time: escorts make an effort to look especially nice, conversation stays on safely neutral topics, and while there may be the trappings of romance – candles, wine, soft music – the romance itself is absent.
Prostitutes and their clients feel chemistry all the time. An informal survey of several sex worker friends confirms that all of them have felt it to varying degrees. Most of them placed the percentage at about 10-25% of clients, which sounds about right to me. One woman said her number was higher but she believed that was because she was very selective in who she took on as clientele (in other words, she was screening out people who would be unlikely to have chemistry, before ever meeting them). Another woman said she’d only felt it once or twice with extremely attractive men, but I know from previous conversations she is only in sex work for the money, and doesn’t really like the work. All the other women do.
In other words, all you have to do is be receptive to experiencing chemistry, and it can happen.
A few sex workers do end up dating clients. This rarely ends well.
Dating is a difficult enough proposition for a sex worker, given that most potential partners can’t deal with their sexual jealousy. In theory, most clients don’t have this problem, but most of the escort/client relationships that I’ve seen end, have done so because of one person or the other concealing a sexual or emotional infidelity – or some other breach of trust.
But most sex workers understand that chemistry isn’t that important, in the big picture of dating someone.
And yet there’s a perception in the general public that chemistry is rare and that when you experience it, you should pursue it and see where it goes. The problem, IMO, is that most singles don’t date enough people to realize how common it is. Most singles will go on a few dates, and then get together with the first person they feel strong chemistry with. In a few months, when the excitement starts to wane, they start over again.
Chemistry might be enough to sustain a reality TV show, but it’s not enough to sustain a relationship.
I recently came across this 2010 article in Atlantic magazine: “The End of Men.” The article discusses how women now make up more than 50% of university students and more than 50% of the workforce, and how women are thriving more than men in the new economy, which values intellectual labor over physical labor.
The article makes some controversial points; read the comments to see just how controversial – but please take your blood pressure medication before you start on the comments.
I’m going to focus on just a few of the less-controversial bits, and then discuss what I see in the future for prostitution (as well as for the family).
Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. … Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women.
Note: the other two job categories are janitorial and computer engineering, in both of which fields women are capable of performing as well as men, so this may change as well.
The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. … Since 2000, manufacturing has lost almost 6 million jobs, more than a third of its total workforce, and has taken in few young workers. … In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age … was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded.
Women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast.
Most men who patronize escorts are professional workers making at least six figures – or if less, not much less. This is only anecdotal evidence, but I will add a few supporting points. If you saw a $200 escort once a week that would cost you over 10k a year, which isn’t really supportable on less than 100k income. Some men who earn less than that will see escorts less often, or instead of escorts they might engage the less-expensive services of a streetwalker or one of the lower-priced massage workers. But for the most part, escort services are priced out of the range of the working class or lower-middle-class man’s budget. So the group from which most johns are drawn – those are the jobs where women are replacing men.
Near the top of the jobs pyramid, of course, the upward march of women stalls. Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities … Only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and the number has never risen much above that.
So, as I see it, economically three things are happening here. The working class is becoming more predominantly male, the middle class is becoming more predominantly female, and the realm of true wealth remains dominated by men.
Men are biologically wired to want a lot of sex, and be interested in many partners, in order to father as many children as possible.
Women are biologically wired to nurture, protect and provide for their children. Until very recently, the best (and sometimes only) way to do this was to get a man to do the protecting and providing, or at least help out with it. In return, he got other services, like companionship, domestic work, and sex. Most people do not see this as a transaction, but rather as a partnership. But any partnership exists only so long as it benefits both partners.
In 1970, women contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2 percent, and four in 10 mothers—many of them single mothers—are the primary breadwinners in their families.
If a woman no longer needs a man to get what she wants, how are men going to get what they want? Obviously this is a gross overgeneralization: women want more than just security and men want more than just sex. But those are the primary, dominant drives when it comes to partner choice. Biology does not change just because society does.
Most men will not be able to rest on their paychecks alone: they will need to make themselves attractive to women on some other basis if they want a partner. In many cases that won’t be a problem (it doesn’t seem to be now), but I do believe there will be more women choosing to remain single, or choosing more casual partnerships that don’t involve commingling funds.
If women are choosing to remain single, then in the absence of a huge upswing in polyamory, that means that an equal number of men will be left single.
Even if women want to get married, they may have trouble finding partners who meet their expectations:
In February, I visited with Ashley Burress, UMKC’s student-body president. … “In 2012, I will be Dr. Burress,” she said. “Will I have to deal with guys who don’t even have a bachelor’s degree? I would like to date, but I’m putting myself in a really small pool.”
The sociologist Kathryn Edin spent five years talking with low-income mothers in the inner suburbs of Philadelphia. Many of these neighborhoods, she found, had turned into matriarchies, with women making all the decisions and dictating what the men should and should not do. … Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes … Edin thinks the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach.
Changes for Men
While the decline in the number of men with 6-figure jobs might seem to suggest that there will be fewer johns, I think the opposite is true.
Two or three (simultaneous) results are likely: 1) A larger number of single men who, while
they may earn less, will have fewer economic responsibilities, and thus may have more disposable income…and less female companionship 2) Married men who have more disposable income because their wives are making more 3) Men will continue to make up the majority of CEOs and other high-wealth positions.
All of these things point toward an increase (or at worst, no change) in the ability to pay for sexual services.
All of the above points to a likely increase in the demand for prostitution. Even if we put sexual desire aside for a moment, I forsee there being many men who feel disenfranchised, either because they cannot find a mate, or because they feel like their mate doesn’t need them. Prostitutes, by definition, need men and their money. As they have throughout history, they will continue to provide whatever it is that men are not getting at home or from traditional courtship.
And while many people think that prostitutes are economically disadvantaged women with no other viable economic options, this is more accurate for the streetwalker (15% of prostitutes) and fairly unaccurate for the indoor worker, i.e. escorts, massage parlors, etc. (85% of prostitutes). Even now, women with advanced degrees are choosing prostitution when they could be making great money doing something else. So there’s no reason to believe that the supply of prostitutes will shrink, unless the profitability of the work declines, or demand drops. However, I’m not saying we’ll have more prostitutes. I personally believe that the decision to enter prostitution has less to do with economics, and more to do with a woman’s attitudes toward sex, men, and morality – how she feels about the idea.
I think that the number of prostitutes will remain about the same; if the percentage rises or declines it won’t be by much. However I believe the demographics will change a lot. There will be fewer women who choose prostitution out of economic desperation, because other opportunities are opening up. The prostitute population will be higher in levels of income and education.
It’s impossible to predict what the effects of these economic changes will be, because there are too many variables. All I can do is throw out some possibilities.
One possible, though extreme, outcome of this economic shift could be a move toward
polygamy. Those male CEOs will be able to (indeed, already can) attract multiple partners. I don’t think Warren Buffet’s about to start a harem, but he easily could. If enough of the top men do this, there’s going to be a problem. As in fundamentalist Mormonism and Islam, you would end up with a small percentage of the men monopolizing a large number of women, leaving the poorest or youngest men partnerless. When you have a large number of disaffected men you have a rebel army. But like I said, that’s just one extreme possibility.
On the other hand, maybe men and women will switch roles, with women being the primary breadwinners and men being the primary nurturers of their children.
Maybe women will do it all on their own and hire men when they need them. There probably won’t be an upswing in male prostitution for female clients, though, simply because of the biological differences in sex drive.
Maybe the boys growing up today will take on more traditionally female attributes, like becoming better communicators and students, and we’ll end up with a 50/50 balance in most professions.
Maybe men will rebel, assert their physical strength, and push society back into full male dominance.
Maybe paid sex will become the norm, and women will only take on unpaid partners who have something else to offer.
What do you think will happen?
In Part One of this post, I said that I believe that advocates for sex workers should acknowledge the presence of exploitative practices and other industry issues. Not only are they issues we ought to be tackling – as related to sex workers’ human rights – but the prejudice the general population holds against the majority of sex workers is based on these issues. If we can reduce or eliminate them, we can take a step closer to decriminalization.
Now, in Part Two, I will explore possible solutions to 4 sex work industry problems: underage prostitution, STI/HIV risk, sex trafficking, and domestic parasite pimps.
Obviously these are not easy issues to resolve. But the more ideas we come up with, the more likely we are to hit on a successful idea.
I’ve included these two very different issues together because I have a proposal that would help solve both problems.
Imagine a website that anonymously collated the results of STI tests nationwide. Medical personnel enter the test results online and receive a computer-generated ID number which they give the patient. The patient can give this number to any potential sex partners, who can go to the website and verify the most recent test results.
Now imagine that the medical personnel also mark the patient’s age when entering the test results. All of a sudden, you have a way to make sure that girl is over 18 and doesn’t have the herp.
It occurs to me that both of these services would be hugely beneficial to civilian dating as well as professionals – the website could be used by anyone from porn stars, to frat boys, to people who just met someone on eHarmony. The beauty of that is, there would be no stigma attached to using the test-posting website, since it’s not just sex workers. Hookers can use it, johns can use it, and Suzie on OKCupid can use it.
This puts the power to participate in the individual’s hands, rather than creating a nanny state.
A few simple precautions should make this system difficult to game:
Ideally this should provide a system wherein the patient number cannot be connected to the patient’s name, which will avoid the problems caused when the porn star HIV-test database was leaked to pornwikileaks.com.
This proposal uses technology to solve an old problem in a new way. In fact, technology is the only thing required to make it happen: expertise in online database architecture with an emphasis on security, and a secure connection from the many medical offices to the website. Checking someone’s test results on the fly? There’s an app for that (or there could be).
A side benefit to the above-proposed website would be the difficulty for traffickers to participate, since they’d have to provide fake ID and leave the trafficked girls alone with medical personnel.
It would certainly make it easier for individuals to look at their local sex-work advertising venues and easily determine which providers are likely or unlikely to be trafficked.
Without being able to provide test results, traffickers will lose business. Some may move further underground. Some may still do well by simply lowering prices until clients don’t care about verifying the girl. Some will keep looking for ways to game the system.
But at least some will also decide it’s too much work for not enough profit, and stop. We could just keep tossing up obstacles until trafficking is just too hard. But it might be easier to just make it less profitable.
First, a definition. Parasite Pimp: a pimp who takes all of a prostitute’s earnings to control her, like the ones described in ‘Yeah, he’s my Daddy’: Linguistic Constructions of Fictive Kinships in a Street-Level Sex Work Community. Not to be confused with someone who performs a service for a sex worker in exchange for a reasonable percentage or flat fee, like a driver, massage parlor owner, outcall agency owner, etc. We can quibble about what a reasonable percentage is, but certainly we can agree 100% is not reasonable.
Getting women to leave abusive partners is a huge undertaking whether or not prostitution is involved. As long as they’re adults, we have to allow people to make their own decisions, however poor we find their judgment. But we can reach out to pimped workers and give them information and access to resources that might help them to leave.
Eliminating exploitative pimps is a complex issue for many reasons. One is the distrust of pimped street workers for anyone who is not part of their social network, especially independent prostitutes:
A street-level prostitute who does not have a pimp is often called a “renegade” or “renegader”. The term “renegade” reflects the arguably traitorous nature of the woman who chooses to work for herself, and by definition is a disloyal person who betrays or deserts others. … As Renee said, “She’s gonna come all up in here and make that money and don’t give it to nobody but keeps it for herself? Oh, hell no.” The idea of autonomy for a woman on the street seems almost offensive to the other women—as if an economically independent renegade is a personal affront to another woman’s family.
Another barrier to eliminating parasite-pimps is the difficulty in getting more privileged sex workers to be willing to reach out to street workers as equals – without being patronizing, nor ignoring the essential similarities.
Both groups of workers are isolated by the illegal nature of the work. Both groups of workers are most concerned with being able to maintain friendships, romantic relationships, and families, perhaps to counteract that isolation.
Unless we can give a pimped worker a social network to leave to, she won’t leave what may be the only family she has.
I believe that decriminalization would make it easier for street workers to leave their pimps, because they would not have to be hidden from the public eye. They would be able to form other relationships and friendships, working on their own or banding with other workers for safety. There has been and continues to be a huge shift from street work to indoor work enabled by the internet and especially by smartphone technology. Street workers are learning how they can work indoors with more safety and I personally know women who were pimped at one point but left once they got tired of their pimps and learned how to do everything for themselves.
I think that’s a realistic expectation, for pimped street workers to transition to independent or agency-percentage indoor work. It’s much more realistic than trying to get someone to leave what seems like everything (family & friends, and the ability to make hundreds a night) in exchange for what seems like nothing (social ostracization and some entry-level minimum-wage job).
But we can’t wait on decriminalization to do this for us. What can we do to give exploited street workers more opportunities now?
What other issues do you see that the sex work industry might work out internally? Comment below or email me.
I recently came across an online issue of a university women’s studies journal from 2010, a special issue on ”Demystifying Sex Work and Sex Workers.” There are several interesting articles, but two in particular caught my attention.
The first is ‘Yeah, he’s my Daddy’: Linguistic Constructions of Fictive Kinships in a Street-Level Sex Work Community.
For this paper, a dozen female streetwalkers in Phoenix, Arizona agreed to be interviewed as they were undergoing a diversion program after a prostitution arrest. All currently or recently had pimps.
The way these women are isolated from the rest of society (both by their pimp and by being shunned by society) is exemplified by the tone of this ethnographic article. The culture of pimped streetwalkers is approached like National Geographic filming a remote Amazonian tribe. All that’s missing is the voiceover narration by some British colonialist.
This is not a remote tribe, these are people who live in our cities and towns.
Bitch is so pervasive that street-level sex workers use it as a referent to other street-level workers with whom they are very close. Renee says, “For me, it’s more like a term of endearment,” to which Diamond agrees: “Yeah, that’s my homegirl, that’s my best friend…that’s my bitch.” Diamond went on to say, about her pimp, “At first, in the beginning of the relationship we was cool, like ‘babe’, but when I start hittin’ the streets for him, oh, I din’ even, I barely even heard my name. It was just bitch, bitch.”
The second article is Illegal Lives, Loves, and Work: The Effects of Criminalization on Sex Workers in Canada.
In Canada, prostitution is not illegal, however a number of related activities are illegal, and their illegality tends to endanger the sex worker. This article discusses in particular how the laws affect the workers’ social networks.
This second paper’s pool of 12 Canadian sex worker interviewees had an average age of 36 and an average length of experience in sex work of 13 years. Although they made for an eloquent group of interviewees, this group of sex workers is just as much an anomaly as the pimped streetwalker.
I read the articles in that order, and it struck me how easy it can be to minimize the experience of the indoor (non-street) workers because they aren’t being exploited every day. But indoor workers do make up 85% of the prostitute population, and most indoor workers have the same issues as the workers in the Canadian study:
This law [criminalizing anyone who lives off a prostitute's income] affects all areas of your life — your partner is then considered a pimp, regardless. Or if you have an adult child living at home, some folks would consider that parasitic. If there is an adult offspring living in the house they’re living off the avails of their parent. It criminalizes what in any other industry wouldn’t even be an issue (Lisa, current sex worker)
Personal Narratives
One thing I appreciate about this journal issue is the focus on letting sex workers tell their own stories, rather than simply quantifying the workers as statistics. The result, in these two papers, defines a clear problem that advocates for sex workers’ rights will need to tackle if we want decriminalization.
The general population’s image of the prostitute is that of a (usually pimped) streetwalker, even though streetwalkers only make up about 15% of prostitutes.
One-hundred percent of the sex worker’s earnings, every night, went directly to their Daddy, as Diamond said, “’cuz I was givin’ him not a percentage or a portion but all my money, all my money goes to him.” Diamond and Renee both stated they had to hand over every dollar, literally every cent, to their pimps or they would “get in trouble” (Renee). Diamond said, “If I had a dollar he didn’t know about,” and Renee interrupts, “If I had fifty-cents!” and Diamond continues, “he be like, ‘wachu doin’ with change [laughs]?”
But other sex workers – those who are, or are perceived as, higher class – would like to deny that pimps really exist, in order to advance the case for decriminalization.
“In the public’s mind and I think in politician’s minds, there is this mythical and distorted image of the “pimp”. When people talk about the procuring laws they are thinking about pimping, about physical abuse, coercion, again a lot of racist and really class biased imagery. And it’s simply not true…” (Kara, current sex worker)
I believe that we need to get creative and find our own solutions to the real problems that do exist, if we want to show that you can tackle those issues without resorting to laws that endanger all sex workers. We need to figure out how to combat the abuse and exploitation of some, as part of our overall campaign for the safety of all sex workers.
Part Two of this post will consist of some suggestions from me on how to deal with specific issues that endanger sex workers – those issues like trafficking, parasite pimps, safer sex, and underage workers – that prohibitionists are always exaggerating, but which really do exist, however rarely. If we are able to address these issues rather than dismissing them, then I believe we can start to eliminate opposition to our cause.
I’m not going to argue that prostitution and marriage are the same thing. They’re not.
But they did evolve side by side. In hunter-gatherer societies (which still exist in some locations today), women are often precluded from hunting because they’re pregnant or nursing. So in order to get protein in the form of meat, to feed herself and her children, she needs to get a hunter to give her some. Some women may have brothers or fathers who hunt, others may form domestic partnerships of varying duration, but some will simply exchange sex for meat or something else she needs but cannot provide herself.
This is why it’s called the oldest profession in the world, although surely hunter must have come first? Perhaps the subtext here is that ‘primitive’ man wouldn’t have hunted if he wasn’t forced into it by the temptations of loose women.
But the truth is that women are inherently practical beings when it comes to providing for themselves and their children. As Brandy Deveraux shared on her blog back in March,
“All the posturing, theorizing, comparing, name calling, etc can be done but it doesn’t make my car payment and it doesn’t put food on the table. … Could I have done all this with a part time regular job in addition to my normal job. No, I was pulling in more with the part time gig [in sex work] than I was working at my full time job. Being paid in cash daily helped me to catch up quicker”
Prostitution is just practical for some women. That’s why there are still sex workers in sub-Saharan Africa despite the HIV infection rate. But we’re not in a hunter-gatherer society or even a third world one. And it is still so eminently practical for many women, especially those with other responsibilities (single moms and college students, for example) because it offers the most amount of money for the least amount of time spent.
When it comes to providing for a family, it’s much more attractive in some ways to have one dedicated hunter. And this is how marriage evolved. But men decided that if they had to give all their meat to one woman, they wanted to make sure she wasn’t getting other venison on the side. Wifely chastity was enforced by many religions that sprang up once people settled into farms and cities. By the time Christianity came along, the Madonna vs. Whore duality was already widely established; the mythos of the Virgin Mary just gave it a new name.
Marriage could not have evolved without both men and women consenting, but once it had, wifely chastity became almost a fetish. Men went to such lengths to protect “their” partners from other men that women became prisoners or property. The Great Wall of China, the moat-and-castle, the harem – all were built to preserve female chastity. Foot binding, hoop skirts, and burqas, all to prevent women from straying or being coveted.
Wives were also kept in line with societal pressure. You can’t sleep with any other men, or else you’re a whore. One or the other, you have to pick. Wife or hooker.
Maggie McNeill’s post today is about how one University of Arkansas economic study found that “many women, especially educated, affluent women, are making a rational decision to enter certain segments of the prostitution market.” However, the study (described in this university news story) assumes that a woman who chooses prostitution necessarily leaves both the job market and the marriage market:
“Our model demonstrated that the prostitution market may be pulling educated women – these so-called ‘high-opportunity-cost’ women – out of the conventional labor market and the marriage market, in many cases,” said Jennifer Hafer, a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Arkansas.
But the truth is that you don’t have to choose just one. You can be in the traditional workforce and married at the same time. You can be in the traditional workforce and also engage in sex work. And you can engage in sex work and be married.
That one’s the hardest for most people to comprehend. Marital monogamy is held up as the gold standard in our society. But if you look at infidelity and the divorce rate, you’ll find that’s not what all human beings do. Some people do mate for life and maintain sexual fidelity. Other people seem to enjoy being paired for a few years, and then part ways. Some people have multiple committed partners. Other people have one committed partner and other casual partners. Some people only have casual partners.
The actual practice of human beings spans the entire spectrum between Madonna and whore.
The relationship between housewives and prostitutes doesn’t have to be us vs. them. But it’s going to take conversations between people from all points on the spectrum to eradicate the adversarial wife vs. wanton myth.
Previously on VS.
Back in January, some men went into at least 11 Planned Parenthood clinics in 6 states. The men, sometimes accompanied by women, “claimed to be involved in sex trafficking of teens, some of whom are in the United States illegally.” Planned Parenthood immediately informed the US Attorney General.
It turned out, however, that these were activists associated with Live Action, Lila Rose’s anti-choice youth group “that uses surreptitious videotaping and manipulative editing for media and political campaigns.”
The videos, heavily edited, were then released to various conservative media outlets and caused a furor that nearly resulted in Planned Parenthood losing federal subsidies. The arguments put forth by conservatives conflate abortion with contraception.
That’s right, the anti-choice movement has a new target: contraception. As stated in an article I recently read, “the biggest stumbling block for them has been finding a way to make a move towards restricting access to contraception while still trying to keep something like a decent reputation with the public. Attacking sexual liberation and women’s rights has always been at the heart of the anti-choice movement…”
In some state and local jurisdictions, politicians are debating de-funding women’s health clinics, on the grounds that although the funding doesn’t pay for abortions, those procedures take place in the same building. For example, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels signed a bill de-funding family planning aid in that state.
The Chattanooga-Hamilton County Health Department in Tennessee is debating the same kind of family planning cuts, even though there are no abortion providers in that county.
One of the ways that the anti-choice movement is having so much success restricting access to contraception is the way they conflate abortion and contraception. A number of these people describe “the morning-after pill” also known as Plan-B, as an abortion pill. But this pill must be taken no more than 48 hours after unprotected intercourse in order to prevent conception, which doesn’t happen for 3-7 days. Plan-B is a high dose of birth control pill hormones, nothing more. RU-486, the abortion pill, is another medication entirely.
Their rhetoric treats birth control pills like gateway drugs, “claiming that women wouldn’t have abortions if they didn’t get it in their silly heads that they should be able to have sex for pleasure instead of procreation.”
And that’s really the crux of the matter: this particular brand of anti-choice activist wants to restrict sex to married procreators.
Women who want to keep control over their own bodies need to pay attention to this. First they say that women cannot have sex for money. Then they say that women cannot have sex for pleasure. We should all be able to have sex, or not, when we wish, for whatever reason we wish.
You and I may disagree about abortion, but we should both be able to agree that abortion and contraception are two different things, just as prostitution and trafficking are two different things.
The implications of family-planning being widely de-funded would be profound, for women from all walks of life.
All of these things affect not only the individual, but society. We already have one of the worst healthcare systems of any developed country. There’s no reason to make it worse.
There’s a new development in the Long Island Serial Killer case that hasn’t seemed to get much attention, despite being a fascinating story that reveals much about the relationship between police and prostitutes in the US.
Frankly, the best coverage of the entire serial killer story has come from UK papers, where I first read about it. The headline of this one is “Two NYPD cops with history of hooker problems ‘under suspicion’ for ‘Craigslist Ripper’ Long Island murders.”
Hooker Problems. What are hooker problems? you might ask.
One officer was accused of having sex with prostitutes while on duty. He was pressured to resign.
The other officer was accused of assaulting a prostitute, and was once arrested during a sting operation. He was transferred to desk duty, because nothing could be proven.
Now, just because they’re under suspicion in the serial killer case does not mean either one of them did it. But let’s look at what they did do. Let’s look at hooker problems.
It seems like the first officer, who allegedly had sex with numerous streetwalkers and “down and out women” while on patrol had a number of problems, including sex addiction, abuse of authority, and dereliction of duty.
The second officer’s alleged crimes would suggest a violence problem, and possibly also sex addiction.
A lot of questions remain unanswered by this story, but one in particular springs to mind. If cops have been working this as a possible serial killer case since December, and have thought at least since March that the killer might be a cop… why are they just now looking at cops with this kind of history? If it was a child sexual assault and murder you can bet they’d have questioned all the pedophiles in a 60-mile radius the first week.
Another question springs from that: why are cops so surprised that prostitutes don’t want to come forward with evidence? Imagine you were the victim of officer #2′s assault, walked into a police station, and saw him (or another of his ilk) sitting behind a desk. Would you walk out or make a report?
And yet a third: why haven’t they responded to pressure to grant amnesty to NY prostitutes until the killer is caught? It’s a strategy that worked well in a similar case recently in the UK.
I guess it must just be a hooker problem.
Espionage thrillers are a popular genre with men, both in film form and in novels. There’s something about the cloak-and-dagger routine that’s inordinately appealing. The secret agent uses his wits to foil the bad guy by means of deception, masking himself literally or metaphorically.
Some men jump at the chance to act out these fantasies in their own lives, by deceiving strangers, colleagues, and loved ones in their pursuit of prostitutes.
Some examples of things that johns do to hide their patronage of prostitutes:
As you can see, this is a pretty extensive list, but I’m sure I’ve missed a few behaviors. Although not every client uses every strategy listed here, some will use almost all of them. Seems like it would be pretty exhausting, but for some men, it’s part of the thrill.
Prostitution is not just about sex. It’s about fantasy. It’s about how a man views himself. For some men, visiting prostitutes is appealing not in spite of the dangers, but because of them. He is James Bond in pursuit of Pussy Galore. He is Jack Bauer outsmarting anti-prostitution terrorists. He is Jason Bourne, always one step ahead. He is the Secret Agent Man.
There’s a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
With every move he makes
Another chance he takes
Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow
-lyrics from Secret Agent Man, made famous by Johnny Rivers
The Wall Street Journal cares about the assault of prostitutes? Really? Since when? Oh yeah, since serial killer headlines are selling ad space.
Two cases of hooker assaults in Manhattan and it makes an internationally-read newspaper. Those were the two that got reported. There were probably another 3-4 that didn’t. Hell, I’m surprised those two were reported.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, where sex workers have a dedicated worker-only forum devoted to reporting bad clients, there were 28 “problem clients” reported in the month of April.
(A couple of these guys committed more than one offense.)
None of the victims said they had reported these crimes to the police.
Now, it’s really hard to extrapolate from this list to apply it to New York, for several reasons:
But as a snapshot, it does give the sense that there are probably a lot more crimes being committed against New York sex workers that are not getting reported to the police, much less making the Wall Street Journal.