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Photo by Flickr user lylamerle. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Mark Kleiman of The Reality-Based Community addresses the popular meme that Senator McCain is above criticism because he was a prisoner of war (POW.) While you'll want to read the whole post here are some points relevant to topics we discuss here.

McCain was a former POW when he cheated on his wheelchair-bound wife and then dumped her for the younger, prettier, able-bodied heiress to a beer fortune.

...

McCain was a former POW when he said (as a "joke," of course) "You know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno's her father." And he was still a former POW when he apologized to Bill Clinton but not to Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, or Janet Reno.

McCain was a former POW when he screamed an obscenity at his wife in public.

...

McCain was a former POW both when he denounced the "agents of intolerance" and when he embraced them.

McCain was a former POW when he denounced Swiftboating and attack ads, and remains a former POW as he embraces them.

...

McCain was a former POW when he reversed his positions on abortion, tax cuts for the rich, and immigration reform.

He said it here.

I'd add that it's *not* John McCain's post-POW responsibility that members the press prefer ride on the tire swing at one of his estates (the Sedona one I think) instead of taking him to task. That would be *their* responsibility.

Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy, after listening to NPR the other day, relays a fairly important point

Billie Jean King is interviewed on Morning Edition; she is perplexed that whenever a woman achieves anything, it is perceived as having an effect only on women. Since of course women — and our little hobbies — are too insignificant to have any public influence on Dude Nation. King notes that people come up to her all the time to thank her for what she’s done for “women’s tennis,” rather than for tennis in general.

She said it here.

I think Billie Jean King asking whether an achievement is "good for women" or "good for humanity" is a good way out of the "empowerfulment" trap. I'm enough of a small-l libertarian to recognize that ever individual is not obliged to act on all of humanity's behalf. But I'm also enough of an environmentalist to recognize that no global benefit accrues when one shifts one's waste stream elsewhere rather than actually reducing it. And so I'm pretty sure it's not enough to say "opting out" of a career to raise children and let one's partner support one is *empowering* unless you can make the case that it authentically benefits *everyone.*

And not to put too fine a point on it but that "opting out" example is kind of perfect because to make the claim under King's terms you'd have to be able to demonstrate how the arrangement benefits not just the opted-out partner but the partner who therefore assumes the entire financial burden at the expense of his or her family as well. And, while we're at it, are any children one opts out to raise really better off with *less* contact with their work-away partner and more of the stay-at-home one? And all that comes up before you get anywhere near whether one's own "opt-out" advances everyone.

And obviously "opt out" is only one example. And also obviously while King and Twisty Faster were talking about women the principle applies wherever kyirarchal modifiers are routinely appended to words like "candidate" or "athlete" or "filmmaker" or "student."

And finally I don't know how many of my readers were around when King was an active player but the world a year after she beat Bobby Riggs at tennis was measurably better than was the year before. And not just for women but for *anybody* who was previously doomed to the grievously narrow gender expectations of the era.

Amanda Brooks of After Hours and some of her fellow prostitutes and activists from Nevada have been experimenting with local brothels where their work is nominally legal. Brooks, who merely didn't enjoy her first stint, passes along a link to a colleague, Mariko Passion of Educated Whore, Urban Geisha, that's outright hellish.

New rules and regulations and a house meeting which lasted almost 2 hours. S was chastising the captive audience of 10 working girls and 2 staff like we were in 8th grade detention. It went on for almost 2 hours without any dialogue or debate. On and on she went about how ungrateful some girls were for complaining about the food, or the lack of customers or the lack of money that we made. On and on she went about how some of our rooms smelled like trucker asshole and how we never took out our garbages. She made comments about how if we were on the streets we would probably get arrested 7 or 8 times and we would probably get HIV. The fear factor was definitely a huge part of this lecture. Instilling the fear that there was no way that we could ever find any better working conditions than where we were right now, and if we dared to complain about it, we could pack our bags and try to find better. On and on she went about how drinking and smoking pot made us fat and lazy. On and on she went about how people need to keep their mouths shut about other people in the house. On and on and on… How we wanted to be in our rooms all the time and use this like a hotel. She had said that only one other house had more customers than this one, that was the Asian brothel, and all the girls there were from overseas and had to pay huge debt bonds. It was the most blatant example of how pimps and madams become trapped in that power position where they feel that talking down to, criticizing or literally beating up their workers is the only way that they are capable of listening.

She said it here.

It's a lovely example of why you can't just staple the word "legalize" next to the word "prostitution" and call it a day. Although technically I have to say in Nevada *prostitutes* aren't so much legal as *brothels* are. The laws governing the system a) totally benefit brothel owners, b) utterly assume the actual sex workers are common criminals, and therefore c) trickles very little of the proceeds to the actual workers and d) requires that they actually *remain locked in the brothels* for up to 10 days at a time! On the clock the whole time and expected to get up for "line-ups" at any hour of the day or night to the tune of a very loud buzzer or bell. And (sez Mariko at her main blog, Bound, Not Gagged) it's no better in Australia.

According to conversations I’ve had with Rachel Whotton from Scarlet Alliance, the same is true for brothel owners in Australia. In Oz, they have become a political lobby and are speaking out against any non brothel sex worker, trying to convince parliament that if a girl were to not work in a brothel there would be no way that she could keep herself safe or clean. This is the overall belief from many people in the general public, and it is the legacy of male priviledge in all its ugliness.

She said *that* here.

The good news is that Mariko successfully bailed out of her experiment and has headed back to her home town and her former non-legal job. Pretty bleak, by the way, when sex workers feel safer, healthier, and more respected working as illegal out-call escorts than legal brothel prostitutes!

The point being, though, that systems like Nevada's or Australia's or countless others that merely institutionalize existing proprietary, punitive assumptions about sex workers will always be part of the problem. Yes, earlier this week in comments I mocked the idea of sex-work as empowering (any more than any other trade such as plumber, surgeon, or actuary can be.) But that's because I think the real problem isn't that sex-work makes anyone *more* powerful, it's that the status quo is so flipping *disempowering* that almost any improvement looks like up.

And all I'm saying is that *if* legalization policy was merely going to institutionalize the status quo then anti-prostitution activists *aren't crazy* for opposing legalization. Heck, *if* the only alternative to Nevada-style "legalization" was the Swedish model that decriminalizes sex-work but criminalizes customers then I'd probably support that model instead (even though it evidently only drive sex-workers back underground where their customers are forced to operate.) Instead *if* one was going to make prostitution legal at all then all the power, the benefits, the money, and the freedom to form associations needs to fall to the sex workers themselves rather than pimps, quasi-legal escort-service managers, illegal brothel owners, and customers (the status quo most places in America) or the legal brothel owner (the Nevada and Australia model) or the government.

(And since it's a month with a vowel in it it's time for me to repeat my caveat that while I feel pretty strongly that independent prostitutes should be able to work legally I'm not actually all that crazy about prostitution itself because of the way it institutionalizes the dynamics of constructed gender and a patriarchal ideology of heterosexual sexual scarcity. Barring the setbacks of a Nevada/Austrilia-style takeover, though, prostitution could be transformed just as easily if it's legal as if it's illegal. And if it happened to be legal then workers would have *way* more safe, legal access to law enforcement, legislative policy-makers, and the courts.)

Update: Afterthought: reading through both Brooks and Mariko's posts I was struck by how much more humiliating, degrading, and dehumanizing the working *conditions* are compared to the actual work itself. This is *not* an assertion that sex work is cush, just that *when* one commits the evident heresy of looking at it as a form of *labor* instead of, say, evasion of the wages of sin where hanging's too good for them adulteratin' hoors, one almost immediately notices just how much it doesn't have to be that way, and just how much our own complicities support keeping it that way.

Ezra Klein on Bill Kristol's concern trolling of Senator Obama's non-selection of Sen. Clinton for VP.

People standing on glass ceilings shouldn't throw stones. Read it in context here.

Photo by Flickr user sicoactiva. Used under a Creative Commons license.

JR of SilkenVoice echos Bitchy Jones and other independently sexual women who look at the world in one more Onion-style 'Cosmopolitan' Institute Completes Decades-Long Study On How To Please Your Man** way to please one's male partner. (See, especially, the exchange in the last few seconds of that video.)

Recently I overheard a conversation between two women with whom I am acquainted, a conversation that ended with: "....and he forgot to take out the garbage two weeks in a row! So that's it. No sex for a week." I shook my head. I said. "Oh, I'd handle that very differently." She said "Oh?" I said "Yes," and then waited. She took the bait. She said, "What would Kay do?" I grinned and said, "I'd tell him we were going to have sex morning and night every day for two weeks." "That's not a punishment!" she exclaimed. "Really?" I said and arched an eyebrow. "I didn't say he could cum." That shocked her speechless. Hee hee. She said it here.

Yup. Even *if* it was a good idea to sexualize punishment why on earth pick the method that most thoroughly cements every conventional gender stereotype in the book? And *definitely* if one was going to use sex for punishment why punish one's self as well as one's partner?

[** Onion link va Dr. Petra Boynton. --fl]

Via Lux Alptraum, Monica of $pread Blog takes recent sex-work glamorizers to task. (That's sex-work *glamorizers* she takes to task, not actual sex workers.)

I feel like, right now, in the media, sex work is being enthusiastically embraced by any woman who fancies herself progressive, liberated, sexually desirable, and sexually curious, but it's not the type of support real sex workers benefit from, or are, when it comes down to it, actually involved in at all. Because this trend isn't part of a larger discussion to seriously reassess legal and cultural attitudes about sex work. It's far more narcissistic than that. I think the idea of putting yourself out there as a (possible) consumable piece of merchandise is gratifying, and talking about in an article is in many ways an attempt to publicly confirm your fuckability. Susannah Breslin writes

It’s become increasingly hip to trumpet the “empowering” virtues of sex work, but the fact of the matter is that the realities of sex work are far too hardcore for most aspiring “hipster hookers” to handle.

But it seems to me that this attitude is less about empowerment and far more about impressing people: I'm so cool I have all these hooker friends, I'm so cool that I could make men pay me if I wanted, etc. It's just another way to quantify and assert one's value as a sexual being, and I don't see a lot of men joining in on it. So again, this article depresses me. It depresses me to think that sex work is treated as the last frontier of women who feel the need to prove that their looks and their sexual prowess have worth. You have worth, whether or not you're cashing in on it.

Read the quote in context here.

That last line is amazingly affirming while also totally lancing a number of myths and misconceptions about prostitutes. I particularly appreciated Monica's sly inversion of the myth that sluts/whores are really just damaged approval seekers with her point that some people see prostitution as a sort of competitive plateau of visual and cultural desirability that's easily strived for but difficult to achieve. Point being it's at least as problematic to idealize prostitution "up," glamor-wise as it is to idealize it "down" moral bankruptcy-wise.

Anyway there are a ton of equally wonderful, "duh, d'ya think" convention-busting ideas in Monica's post that you probably ought to read it no matter where you stand on the issues. For instance in a single paragraph I've reformatted as a bulleted list

• Again, what other profession would we do this with? "I was going to help with the open heart surgery for my article, but ... at the last minute I threw up and ran out of the room." "I was going to sit on the 10th floor's ceiling beams with the construction workers so I could bond with them over lunch, but my fear of heights was just too great, so I just stayed on the second floor, crying and shaking in my hard hat." Maybe there's a reason you're not already working in the profession you're writing about.

• [M]aybe this cavalier attitude about sex work needs to be called to a halt, like, right now.

• If it's such an emotional minefield, if your friends have so thoroughly explained all the potential pitfalls, why would you make an under 24 hour decision to start doing it?

• Why would you be foolish/arrogant enough to assume that sex work is so extraordinarily unskilled and accessible that you just hop right into it and do a good job?

• Anyone can make money with sex work, but it doesn't follow that everyone who performs sex work is good at it.

• Probably everyone has made themselves a sandwich before, but it doesn't mean they're qualified to open up their own restaurant.

• [I]t certainly doesn't follow that just because sex work is open to everyone (and I mean EVERYONE, regardless of gender, size, race, or sexuality) that everyone should do it.

I think *if* we're going to continue debating prostitution it would help to have a better understanding of what it is rather than what we *imagine* it is -- whether we imagine it's the most glamorous thing since "Pretty Lady" to the most debased thing since "Taxi Driver." It's not that there's no room for debate, it's just that it's probably a better idea to debate *what is* rather than what we *think* it is.

Last January Bruce Lambert of The New York Times reported that...

A police detective and his female companion kidnapped a 13-year-old runaway girl and forced her into prostitution with 20 men at private parties, the authorities said on Wednesday.

Read the quote in context here.

Details of the story, which I first heard about via $pread blog**, are depressingly, predictably classic: runaway girl, gets "help" from a recruiter who evidently straightforwardly *sold* her to the couple, is prostituted to... quite a few of her pimp's customers, is smacked around (by the woman in the couple) for "underproducing," gets a chance to escape and heads straight for the police.

The story resurfaced August 4th of this year when the two traffickers were sentenced to three years for kidnapping.

So what I want to know (my personal bugaboo) is will the erstwhile detective, Wayne Taylor and his partner Zalika Brown be forced to register as child-sex offenders for the rest of their lives once they're released from prison? And what aboutthe 20 men at those "private parties," let alone all the other customers who paid Taylor and Brown for sex with a thirteen year old girl? (And it doesn't matter that Ms. Brown ordered the victim to tell customers she was 19. Last I heard ignorance of the law was no excuse.)

And not to put too fine a point on it, if adult prosecutors aren't interested how about giving child-protective agencies a crack at perpetrators of child-prostitution?

Anyway I think public policy should free anyone who actually *wants* to be a prostitute, or any other kind of sex-worker, to work independently of pimps, predators, pastors, and prosecutors. And I'd like to add that they should *also* be free from unfair and illegal (not to mention immoral, inhumane, and inhuman) competition from pimps, traffickers, and their conscripted and prostituted victims?

So, again, WTF?

[** I've known for a while about $pread Magazine, an independent sex-worker trade publication. I only found their blog a few minutes ago though. --fl]

Photo by Flickr user Saifi. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Megan of Jezebel says of Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal editorial

"We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins." For one, no, Peggy, I don't think that life begins when a man ejaculates, and the science bears me out on that one.

Read the quotes in context here.

Cool to see more mockery of the right-wing's ultimate "life begins at ejaculation" conceit. Seems like only yesterday I was saying that's the real end goal of the "you poke her you own her" school.

And not to be tetchy or anything but I'm pretty sure if life begins when you buy condoms then Noonan needs to help fast track same-sex marriage because I'm *pretty sure* a healthy plurality of those buying condoms are, oh, say, gay men. And couples where one party but not the other has herpes or other socially transmittable diseases, even if they (sensibly) use pills, diaphragms, IUDs, sponges, spermicides, rings, timing, and/or other actual contraceptives to prevent pregnancy when or if there's a condom failure.

While they must surely have been asked, and possibly even answered elsewhere, here are a few more questions about my previous post about those new "conscience" clauses Bush flacks in Health and Human Services cooked up:

1) Further Questions:

• Does that mean doctors may now in good conscience ignore Supreme Court rulings about withholding life-saving care for women who's health or lives are threatened by late-term complications of pregnancy?

• Does that mean doctors may now in good conscience ignore everyone-but-Oregon's laws that require them to let their patients suffer lingering, painful death?

• Does this mean doctors (and don't forget pharmacists) may now in good conscience dispense Plan-B emergency contraception over the counter to women of *all* ages even when the law says otherwise?

• Does this mean federally- and state-funded doctors, pharmacists, and other caregivers including teachers may now in good conscience ignore "gag law" policies preventing them from mentioning anything but abstinence when counseling their clients?

• Does this mean doctors, pharmacists, and other caregivers in good conscience are now protected from employers that insist they deny or withhold care, medication, or information about *all* options for dealing with issues of contraception, pregnancy, and STIs?

Just curious.

2: Proactive Activism Opportunity

Oh yeah, and while we're at it if those "life begins at ejaculation**" types get their way, especially if they get their way with the broad language they all shoot for then here's an other question. There's an *extraordinary* correspondence between "pro-lifers" and major polluters and opponents of occupational health and safety and product-safety regulation. So I wonder how happy they'll be when anyone from mainstream environmentalists to consumer activists to a revived EPA to the anti-vaccination/anti-fluoridation crowd starts throwing everything from civil lawsuits to criminal complaints to shareholder activism to survivor's benefits claims for nominal "life" that was "cut short" by exposure to, say, spontaneous-abortion-inducing, miscarriage-inducing or even implantation-inhibiting chemicals, manufacturing byproducts, and toxic waste?

And remember, according to the Bush "administration" appointees it's enough to *imagine* a product causes the "loss of a human life" at the fertilized-egg stage so science? Who's going to need science to back up their claim of irreparable (if possibly also undetectable) carnage caused by mine tailings, sediment dredgings, pesticide oversprays, plastic-packaging outgassings, packaged-food preservatives, food-coloring agents, "sick building" workplaces, and on and on and on?

Note: now obviously it would be pretty terrible if the 'wingers finally landed a "life begins at conception" ruling from, say, the Supreme Court. But there's no reason, at all, at all, for a nice, healthy group of pro-choice-oriented legal activists to set up a highly-visible operation issuing (or even just promising to issue) white papers detailing all exciting new ways activists could use a "life begins at conception" against asbestos producers like Dick Cheney's old Halliburton-Dresser subsidiary to liquor distillers to air fresheners manufacturers to oil refiners to non-organic farmers. A heck of a lot of "pro-life" money comes from sources in those industries and I think it would be wonderful if they were taken to task for their support.

[** The "you stick it you own it" scoring method they *really* believe in. --fl]

Via Jessica of Jezebel the final version of that new HHS memo meant to "protect the rights" of anti-choice doctors is out.

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt says. “Doctors and other health care providers should not be forced to choose between good professional standing and violating their conscience. Freedom of expression and action should not be surrendered upon the issuance of a health care degree.”

Read the quote in context here.

Does that mean doctors may now in good conscience ignore the South Dakota law requiring them to lie about abortion procedures?

Megan of Jezebel, in her "Crappy Hour" feature with IM buddy and political pundit Spencer Ackerman, raises a point that I think might explain some of the nature, and bitterness arising out of, for instance, the "blowjob wars." The snippet below involves speculation about who John McCain might select as a Vice Presidential running mate.

MEGAN: ...At what point in the race do you think Lieberman would start undermining McCain the way he did Al Gore?

SPENCER: Not even SLIGHTLY and here's why. Lieberman is animated by the classic neoconservative grievance of rejection by his first love, the Democratic Party. Jacob Heilbrunn's book goes into this pathology in detail. And honestly, I have to admit I understand it, given my inability to let go of this whole TNR shit. [Note: Ackerman was fired from The New Republic for failing to drink kool-aid with neocons. --fl] That's why Lieberman has been such an eager attack dog for the right ever since he lost his primary in 2006 — he wants, and wants badly, to redress what the left did to him. He's not actually rightwing. He's anti-anti-left, and ferociously so.

MEGAN: Well, you know, if you want to be a hawk, don't expect a bunch of doves to come flocking to you.

SPENCER: He's obsessed with his own transcendent righteousness.
They said it here.

The problem with transcendent righteousness, in any debate, is that, like Leiberman, one can wind up doing damage to one's own cause at the expense of respect or influence in *either* camp.

Speaking of pills, here's a quick followup on my earlier post about hormonal contraception, smell, and partner preference. Amanda Schaffer of The XX Factor at Slate.com says (emphasis hers)

In the past, some research found that women tended to prefer the smell of men whose MHC makeup differed more extensively from their own. That result remains controversial, but from an evolutionary perspective, it makes for a good story. When women mate with less similar men, their kids may have more robust immune systems that can better fend off a wide range of diseases. In theory at least, that advantage may have helped to shape women’s tastes over time. As for the pill, if it were to skew preferences toward MHC similarity, women might smile on less genetically favorable partners, leading to problems in the long run. When women stop taking the pill, for instance, their tastes might shift again, resulting in “the breakdown of relationships," as one researcher speculated. Hence the maelstrom about women choosing the “wrong” men.

Strikingly, however, the current study fails to confirm the premise of that whole story. When women smelled men's T-shirts at the outset, before any of them took the pill, they showed no preference for men with more MHC difference. That is, they did not exhibit the supposed tendency that the pill supposedly disrupts. What’s more, when women taking the pill smelled the T-shirts again, they showed no preference for men with more MHC similarity. Yes, the pill-takers tended to rate the smell of MHC-similar men more favorably than they had before. But to repeat: They still didn’t prefer the similar guys overall. Despite the hype, then, this study’s findings are limited – and pretty messy.

Of course smell can play a role in romance. And the scent of MHC difference could turn out to be one factor – of many – that influences women’s choices. But really, when it comes to searing insight into longing and romantic crisis, T-shirt sniffing has nothing on Flaubert.
She said it here.

Again the "in the past" studies (more info at Wikipedia) are neither terribly new (they go back to the 1970s) nor even terribly controversial. But also not terribly determinative of mate selection unless you're a rodent. Also, if I recall correctly a confounding factor is that with mate selection the actual preference is for potential mates that are somewhat *but not too* different.

What *is* different is that while the authors of the current study don't seem to be participating in it there's a large and concerted conservative political assault on hormonal contraception. Oh, and along *those* lines, good news out of California today.

Anthony McCarthy of Echidne of the Snakes perhaps inadvertently shines a light on a classic "no-sex" class assumption.

You get used to filtering out commercials during the evening news but once in a while one breaks through your defenses. At the tail end of a Levitra commercial Sunday they included sudden deafness as a reported side effect. Sudden deafness now joins the list of announced effects of taking whoopie pills...

...the most interesting question is how far geezers, themselves, are willing to go to achieve rock hard erections into their late senescence. Would they accept having their head fall off, one wonders? Would they miss it? I’ve got to listen more closely tonight to hear if death is a reported side effect of aphro-geeziacs, by name or not. The answer may have already been reported.

Read the quote in context here.

A bit of desk clearing though. "Geezers?" "Late senescence?" "Aphro-geeziacs?" Sheesh, ageism much? Also, you don't have to be geriatric to have problems with erections. Prostate cancer survivors, diabetics, men with heart disease, and men with untreated (and sometimes treated) depression experience it long before they're "senescent," and sometimes even before their hair thins or grays. But I digress...

So! I've mentioned elsewhere that I think it's unfortunate that medication like Viagra is assumed to exclusively benefit men, or that contraceptive pills exclusively benefit women. McCarthy's post reminded me of those strongly-gendered assumptions about the two medications and then, with his "whoopie pills" characterization, gave it a nice nudge forward. Check it out!

- Language of erection pills: frivolously facilitate (men's) sexual enjoyment, i.e. "whoopie." Because, you know, inside the "no-sex" class paradigm only heterosexual men enjoy sex. Their heterosexual partners merely endure it.

- Language of contraceptive pills: virtuously prevent (women's) pregnancies. Because, you know, inside the "no-sex" class paradigm women's interest in sex begins and ends at pregnancy.

But are women always and only interested in contraception only so they won't get pregnant while passively lying back and thinking of England? And are men really always and only interested in erections for own pleasure? Sure, sometimes (and for those sometimes thank goodness for modern sensibilities about divorce.) But always? Only? The dominant paradigm says so. Why support it?

As I said in that previous post, for most heterosexuals both contraception (especially earlier in life) and erection medication (especially later in life) are as much for *couples* as for individuals.

---

Quick question about Viagra and similar drugs: It looks like there really are a lot of unpleasant side effects and it sounds like they're not all that rare either. So are they really consumed as recreationally as pop culture seems to think they are?

Photo by Flickr user lawgeek. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Earlier today I mentioned an article, via Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors, about an underage girl from Massachusetts who was being prostituted out of a New Jersey motel room.

Authorities: Kidnapped girl rescued at motel

ABSECON — Police arrested a Vineland man and three other people after a Massachusetts girl called her mother to report she was being held against her will at a White Horse Pike motel.

...

Authorities would[n't] give the exact age of the victim, or when she was first allegedly kidnapped, stating only that she is under 18.

Source: South Jersey News

Response #2:

I've mentioned this elsewhere recently but can anyone explain why let alone pimps and traffickers of the underaged, let alone their customers, shouldn't spend the rest of their lives on sex-offender registries?

And no, it doesn't matter whether their prostitution is voluntary or, as in the case of the New Jersey girl, coerced. Nor does it matter that (as Lux Alptraum correctly points out) "...adolescents are not children." Because as she also points out, neither are they adults.

And yet, as Debra Boyer pointed out in "Who Pays the Price? Assessment of Youth Involvement in Prostitution in Seattle" (pdf)

The routine fine for those arrested for “patronizing” is $500 although the maximum that can be imposed is $1,000.

What's not just wrong but sick and wrong is that in virtually all instances the penalty for "patrons" of minors is no higher with the result that...

- Customers have no incentive to check. Which is ironic because in cases of non-prostitution "She looked old enough to me" isn't a defense. It's also ironic because evidently customers have no qualms, at all, about checking whether a sex-worker is actually an undercover cop.

- There's no additional penalty for those pimps and traffickers who conscript minors. Which is a particular shame since minors, especially runaway or kicked-out minors, are particularly vulnerable.

- Particularly disturbingly from my perspective is that, evidently, if there are no additional penalties then police and prosecutors evidently have no additional incentive to investigate or bring charges against prostitution, or "patronage" of minors.

- And finally, if "patrons," pimps, and police aren't checking ages and responding accordingly then it's easier for minors themselves to slip into prostitution, either voluntarily or by conscription.

Show of hands, please, if anyone thinks that status quo is just hunky-dory? Didn't think so. So! WTF?

Actually, three WTFs

1) Why aren't anti-prostitution activists specifically targeting child prostitution for reasons other than flash or buzz value? (For instance would Professor Bartow have given the New Jersey child case any attention at all if she wasn't pushing to extend TVPA coverage to all adults?) It seems to me that even if you wanted to stop *all* prostitution going specifically against prostitution of minors would let you build up a lot of momentum. Unless I'm mistaken and anti's are content to let children be prostituted in order to maintain a high scare-quote quotient against prostitution in general. (Anyone know why anti's are so reluctant to single out prostitution of children? Is it that they like the shock-troop value that child prostitution adds to what might otherwise be a more straight-up libertarian issue?)

2) Why aren't pro-prostitution activists specifically supporting targeting child prostitution? It seems like a no-brainer if you really wanted to see prostitution legalized and/or normalized. Not least because anti-prostitution types get so much mileage with prostituted-child statistics (even if, evidently, they never otherwise lift a finger to stop it -- see the preceeding point.) And not to put too fine a point on it but why on earth do adult prostitutes tolerate competition from minors in the first place? Why on earth do they tolerate the diversion of paying customers to generally less expensive and more conventionally desirable child prostitutes? (Anyone know why pro's are so reluctant to single out prostitution of children? Is it that most adult sex-workers have better sense than to draw attention to themselves for fear of arrest? Is it because nominally pro-prostitution customers themselves enjoy "patronizing" children when they can get away with it? Especially since there appear to be no, zero, none consequences if they do under the current system?)

3) Why aren't reporters, parents, community activists, politicians, and police specifically supporting targeting child prostitution? Actually this might be less of a no-brainer than the preceding ones because, to too many people, once someone's had sex, even if they're a child, they're "broken" or "damaged goods" or their "innocence" is "lost." On the other hand, it seems to me that they'd be most easily recruited to support anti-child-prostitution policies.

At any rate this seems like a classic case of if you're not part of the solution you're the problem** whether you disapprove of, approve of, or are utterly indifferent to prostitution between adults. So again, WTF? If you're not part of the solution you ought to be ashamed of yourself: pimps and patrons of prostituted minors should be registered as the unambiguous sex offenders they are.

[** Not just part of it. --fl]

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors asks a rhetorical question that... really needs asking. First the setup

Authorities: Kidnapped girl rescued at [New Jersey --fl] motel

ABSECON — Police arrested a Vineland man and three other people after a Massachusetts girl called her mother to report she was being held against her will at a White Horse Pike motel.

The mother notified Absecon police, who responded late Tuesday night to the Super Lodge Motel room where the girl was staying. She told police she had been threatened with a stun gun, forced to stay in various motels for at least a week and forced to work as a prostitute in the Atlantic City area.

Police said the four captors returned to the motel shortly after officers arrived and were arrested.

...

The girl was treated and released from an area hospital and is now home in Massachusetts, according to a statement issued by the Absecon Police Department.

Authorities would[n't] give the exact age of the victim, or when she was first allegedly kidnapped, stating only that she is under 18.

Source: South Jersey News

and now Bartow's question:

Had she been 18 or over would she have been assisted, or arrested? Please, if you have any decency in your soul, support passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

She asked the question here.

Response #1:

Under the current version of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act the victim would have been assisted rather than arrested even if she was over eighteen. The current TVPA is very clear that its coverage extends to anyone who is subject to "force, fraud or coercion" and the mom's complaint would have been sufficient to invoke the act.

The TVPA, which is up for reauthorization this year, has been subjected to some pretty substantial amendments in the House of Representatives that have pitted various anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking groups against each other with the result that the whole thing has become bogged down in the Senate.

But Bartow is correct that it would be a very big problem if TVPA is allowed to lapse. A very big problem because not only would the haphazardly-added anti-coerced-prostitution provisions go down but so would the *main* provisions of the bill against human trafficking of *all* kinds. The question is which side will blink first.

To echo Bartow, if opponents of reauthorization of the unamended bill had any decency in their souls they'd drop their amendments and let the bill pass.

Commons
Photo "Drue checks Heather's pheromones" by Flickr user Brouhaha (Jonathan). Used under a Creative Commons license.

Oh Noes! Teh Pill! It affects Woemenz Nozez! ZOMG!**

Because you know what windup little smell-driven automatons women are. Because without that nasty Pill bollixing your nostrils you'd all go back to sticking with your partners no matter how big an asshole they turned out to be. Better outlaw them pills then.

Whatevs.

Actually, I heard about the study, or maybe something along the same lines, some time last Winter, before it got picked up and politicized as some kind of reason women shouldn't be allowed to take the pill. Instead fellow classmate brought it up during her student research presentation on the effect of scent on sexual arousal.

The way she told it was that non-pregnant women are often more attracted to the smell of men who are genetically unlike them, but when they are they prefer the scent of men they're more closely related to. She said that since hormonal birth control simulates pregnancy that going on the pill can alter one's preference for the scent of one's partner.

That actually made sense, and a number of women in the class nodded and said they'd noticed something like that when going on or off the pill during a relationship.

But here's the deal: neither the presenter nor anyone who nodded their heads indicated it was a particularly big deal.

Which suggests, as with the stupid oxytocin-burnout argument for (only women, naturally) avoiding multiple partners***, the scent-preference-altering phenomenon, even if it does exist, can't be all *that* strong, right? I mean think about how the 'winger vision's supposed to go

A) Non-pregnant women like the way unrelated men smell, so
B) They form lifelong, abstinenet-till-marriage, monogamous-afterwards relationships with these unrelated men, and
C) Become pregnant, whereupon according to these theories
D) Their scent preferences just as they would during pill-induced artificial preference change meaning... what?
E) While they lose interest in these genetically heterodox-scented partner for the duration of their pregnancies?

Except, well
F) I don't think it works that way. Or
G) If it does it's not a very strong effect, because
H) Pregnant women would always avoid their genetically heterodox-scented husbands and hang out with their genetically "homodox"-scented male relatives, which
I) We don't, um, actually see because
J) Scent isn't the only attraction criteria in the first place, nor
K) Even if scent *was* the only criteria items A-I suggest it couldn't be terribly determinative because, y'know, most people stay together
L) Whether they're pregnant, or on the pill, or not

[** In other words a *lot* of people have been commenting on the peculiar conclusion anti-contraceptive types have drawn about a very small, not-even-all-that-recent study about hormonal contraception and scent. --fl]

[** The claim is that repeated oxytocin release with multiple partners causes women to burn out on romance. The fly in that ointment is that pregnancy releases a gazillion times more oxytocin and yet after birth most women a) continue to harbor romantic feelings after birth and b) consider having additional children. Part b being, for me, the bigger deal breaker. If a little too much oxytocin is supposed to make one unable to form romantic attachments ever again then lots more of the same stuff ought to make women disinclined to get pregnant again or, especially, disinclined to love subsequent children. And not to put too fine a point on it, in most cases where we encounter women burning out on romance or childbearing the reasons tend to be a lot more clear cut than hormone-receptor exhaustion. But I digress... --fl]

Donald Zimmer of AskMen.com manifests the foolishness of the "no-sex" class paradigm in "sex health advisor" column

sexual surplus

My husband and I have sexual problems. I am a freak; ready and willing to please him in any way, shape or form (with the exception of him being with somebody else). I will let him watch me as I do another female or let him do me while I do another female, but I don't like to share at all! The question is: How to I spark his interest in sex and keep it?

At one point he couldn't keep his hands off me. Now I can barely get him to put them on. I would just like to keep him interested, and was wondering if y'all had any advice? I'm not an ugly woman; I have put on some weight but my breasts went from a 36B to a 42DD. When they were smaller I had no feeling in them at all; now it's a whole different story! Plus I like the benefits that they bring to the bedroom.

Alexandra

Alexandra,

I think the source of your problem can be best summarized as follows: You can have too much of a good thing. In other words, your husband's current lack of interest may be the consequence of his having enjoyed free rein in the bedroom for so long. There's a lot to be said for keeping some forbidden fruit in a relationship; in the absence of taboos, every sexual act can become commonplace.

I'm no therapist, Alexandra, and you may eventually conclude that a therapist is required. But in the meantime, try doing a little withholding. You'll be surprised at how much more we want what we can't have.

Donald Zimmer
Read the quote in context here.

What's the name of that website Amanda Marcotte used to reference? The one that reverses genders in any English text you paste into it? (I think as well as handling gendered pronouns and body parts it may have also been able to substitute first names, as in "John" for "Jane" or "Donna" for "Donald.") Anyway I ask because I'm... pretty sure Zimmer would have had different advise if his correspondent had been named "Alexander" instead of "Alexandra."

I mean, don't you think? Although actually our narratives about gender are such that *if* a man bothered to write in with such a complaint I'm not sure many advice columnists would have bothered answering.

I *am* sure, however, that a man wouldn't be advised that "... your problem can be best summarized as follows: You can have too much of a good thing. In other words, your [wife's] current lack of interest may be the consequence of [her] having enjoyed free rein in the bedroom for so long."

Funny thing, of course, is that it's actually excellent relationship advice for *any* partner who's sexual appetite is larger than his or her partner's! What makes it funny though, again, is that no one ever offers that solution to men even though we're far more likely to express the complaint.

See what I mean? The "natural" answer for a high-libido woman is "play hard to get." It's not the "natural" answer for high-libido men (which by convention is usually abbreviated as "men") because most people recognize that while it's possible it's neither fun nor easy...

Nor is "have less sex" exactly the most consistent advice for someone who's request was...

...how to have *more* sex.

Double-bind much?

[Hat tip to AAG. --fl]

---

Quick semi-digression: I chose the word "appetite" carefully, by the way, because that same disparity shows up in a lot of places. A few years ago some enterprising young economists studied phone dynamics of couples in long-term relationships. Their finding was that if one member needs to check in every two days and another every three then the first member will do nearly all the calling... with resulting resentment and irritation about "clinginess" and/or "aloofness"... even though given just a little more time the second member would want to check in *just as badly as the first!* And might even be the "clingy" member with a different partner who needed to check in every four days. The point being that "I'm not lonely *yet*" isn't the same as "I don't get lonely" or, more significantly, "I'm indifferent to you." In food the analogy would be "No thanks, I'm still full from our last meal," not "I never get hungry." And in sex the analogy would be "I'm not horny *yet,* not "I have a low or no libido."

---

P.S. I was so startled by Zimmer's advice I nearly forgot about Alexandra's trapped-in-the-paradigm self-introduction: "My husband and I have sexual problems. I am a freak; ready and willing to please him in any way"

Unpacking all the different layers in those two sentences could take all day. Let's just say in order to be a freak she'd have to

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, discussing a This American Life episode about babies who were switched at birth and *remained* switched even though one of the mothers knew, that's relevant to... oh, all sorts of issues.

Unable to stand up for what she knows is true because her husband dismissed it, Mary Miller goes commando with the passive aggressive tactics, and it’s hard to blame her because she’s seeing her daughter raised by neighbors (the town this happened in is tiny) and she can’t do anything about it.  She drops hints and makes jokes to the McDonalds.  She sends her biological daughter cards with weird language about how she and the daughter she’s raising are “sisters”.  She apparently drops so many hints that everyone in her church knows about it, but of course, they don’t think it’s their place to do anything about it, and end up joining a semi-conspiracy of silence against the McDonald family. 

Mary Miller’s explanation for her passivity on this is heart-breaking.  She was sick, and thought she was going to die after the childbirth, but I don’t think that did much but delay the opportunity to reveal the mix-up for a few weeks, maybe months.  More to the point, when she brought it up to her husband, he immediately decided that it had to stay a secret because revealing it would embarrass the doctor.  As Mary puts it, that was that, because she simply couldn’t afford to resist her husband or cross him in any way.  She had 6 children at that point, and was dependent on him. 
Read the quote in context here.

What's significant to me isn't the bit about the mother. Or even that she was told "stifle yourself." Or even that she was stifled in her *doctor* might be embarrassed! Or even that her fucking husband was so alienated from his role as biological father of his own children that he was unconcerned that a child he was raising might not be his!!**

No, what's significant to me is that eventually her whole congregation knew about it, seemingly understood that it was a problem for a mother to knowingly raise one child while watching another family raise her own, and *still* didn't say anything to correct what, certainly early on, would have been an easily correctable mistake.

The other day I mentioned a broad problem of groups either making emblems of problematic members when they're confronted by outsiders, or, more often, permitting problems or problematic individuals to remain unconfronted rather than cause embarrassment for themselves or each other (let alone the embarrassing individual him- or herself.)

[** Put *that* in your pipes and smoke it, oh sociobiology/ev-psych adherents of the patriarchal/paternity gene theory of gender. If an actual pre-feminism, pre-60s *patriarch* didn't care who's child he was raising why allege human genetically-determined behavior so favors such a position today that egalitarianism in general and feminism in particular is doomed, doomed, doomed? --fl]

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, an early John Edwards supporter, reacting to the evidently large number of 'wingers needling her about it suggests that

[T]hey suck and are horrible people who really, really hate women, in no small part because they’re stuck in a self-perpetuating no sex/misogyny loop.
Read the quote in context here.

Having no access to Pandagon server logs I can make no independent assessment of those who are pinging her with trackbacks. I *can* say, however, that her point about the self-perpetuating no-sex/misogyny loop rings a bell.

Traveling as I am through the rural and small-town midwest I've had occasion to encounter, closely or very peripherally, all manner of people of all ages, classes, various races, religions, and nations of origin, and social statuses and all I can say I don't think any of them, regardless of status, seem to have had any trouble finding partners or reproducing. At all.

Which I think puts a serious kink in the proposition that "low status" men are necessarily doomed to lives without partners or children.

Misogyny, on the other hand, knows neither class nor status. In fact the only benefit status and class seems to confer on misogynists is the ability to buy one's way, at least temporarily, into something that looks like relationships. That and the ability, maybe, to try and convince others that relationships like their are supposed to be desirable and/or the norm... or that it's anything but women's "gold-digging" that's responsible for men's sexual unhappiness.

In a piece subtitled "Why does it take a cliché to draw attention to the problem of fathers' rights?" Dahlia Lithwick of Slate makes the vivid point that our fondness for the stereotype of the dramatically aggrieved ex-husband seeking greater custody of his children interferes with reforms of divorce and custody proceedings that really ought to be, and maybe need to be, taken up.

I recognize the allure for some men of the man-pushed-till-he-snaps narrative. My husband rents those movies, too. But for every Clark Rockefeller and Darren Mack, there are dozens of nonviolent fathers who believe that the mere fact of their divorce should not result in an arrangement in which they pay for the right to see their kids on alternating Sundays. If the family-court system is ever going to improve, we need to hear their stories, not these endless tales of kidnappings and murder. Much of what's wrong with family law today lies in warmed-over stereotypes of men as fundamentally unsuited to caring for children. Lionizing Clark Rockefeller or other violent, lawless fathers will not promote fathers' rights or fix the family-court system. It merely perpetuates the same outdated ideas about fatherhood and fathers that have tainted the family-law system for too long.

The rest of the article is pretty cool. You'll find it here.

That seems about right. Of course I'm a father and I have a hard time with poorly examined stereotypes so of course I'd encourage that sort of destigmatization, where the Alex Baldwins, and Clark Rockerfellers become non-poster-boy icons of divorced fatherhood in favor of, you know, the more representative, um, majority.

But the general point seems pretty important for so-called "sex bloggers," who -- I'm pretty confident an assessment of court records would show -- differ from non-bloggers only to the extent that they publish rather than don't publish their experiences and opinions.

And yet thanks to current case law, in need of reexamination or not, bloggers in general and "sex bloggers" in particular are extraordinarily at risk of what I'd like to (arrogantly) deem the Figleaf Principle: twitting about sex obstructs discussion of substantive issues.

This can play two ways, by the way. First, upon discovery a judge officiating a custody hearing may be much more inclined to act on a motion that includes salacious allegations of sex clubs or bisexuality than on one that includes allegations of more substantive issues such as means of support or management of substance dependencies. And second, alarm over salacious allegations may distract supporters from what may be more seriously substantive ones.

Both concerns, I might add, are justified. An "otherwise" blameless divorced mom who supplements her income by anonymously reviewing sex toys in the privacy of her own home *should not* be at risk of losing custody. A couple involved in BDSM *should not* be able to wave their floggers or rope burns at each other in court. And a judge *should not* be swayed by the "scandalous" nature of a custodial parent's sexuality, *especially* if said sexuality in no way infringes on his or her parenting. But on the other hand *we* shouldn't let acceptance of a good party organizer enable his or her drinking problem. Nor should *we* let our admiration for this or that leather master enable his or her tendency to abuse the owl-shit out of acolytes.

Octogalore, guest-blogging at Feministe, semi-coins a term and then asks some fairly important compare and contrast questions.

There have been so many posts out there in the past few weeks about sparkle that I don’t know where to start. I’m using “sparkle” as a catch-all for burlesque, sex work, fashion, any kind of sexy display or fashion statement. Here are just a few of them.

As I said in my whack at the subject, the discussions have centered around whether it’s (a) an empowering and feminist choice, (b) harmless fun that’s not meant to be either feminist or antifeminist, or (c) patriarchy-compliant antifeminism.

I came out (b) there, for reasons you can check out if you like.

...

The patriarchy isn’t going to topple based on sparkle. It might be compromised, though, if women had equal economic power. And I don’t mean any one kind of women, but all women having equal economic power compared to men who are similarly situated (Of course, that wouldn’t solve many other problems, like world poverty, racism, ablism, etc., which are worthy of discussion as well but not my focus in this particular post).

So we can stress about leg shaving, but I have a sneaking suspicion it doesn’t matter. If “the patriarchy” were reading many of these posts, they’d be chortling right now. Fiddling while Rome burns! The real battles are too laden with guilt and with women second-guessing each other, they’re going unfought.
This is a pretty sparse excerpt. You'll probably want to read the rest of the post here.

I'm a little less sanguine about certain elements of sparkle (a useful term b the way) than Octagalore. For instance to the extent some elements of sparkle (prostitution, for instance, or stripping) contribute to or play into the dominant "no-sex" class paradigm, and other elements (competing with other women to show up in the most "outrageous" and/or expensive clothes) seem like excursions into the beauty trap. And finally I get a little concerned when people confuse "drag" with gender, feeling for instance that failing to wear a skirt makes one "look like a boy" as a woman I used to work with claimed.

So, three quibbles with Octagalore's choice but mostly only quibbles because, yeah, struggling to wriggle free of patriarchal indoctrination doesn't mean I don't have that indoctrination up to my scuppers. And based on that indoctrination the feminist debate over "Teh Blowjob" isn't just incomprehensible to Patriarchy, and it isn't just irrelevant to Patriarchy, it appears as largely *supportive* of Patriarchy by refining and/or extending the "madonna/whore" dichotomy.

Also, as Octagalore proposes, if Patriarchy really was a directed enterprise instead of a self-perpetuating *result* then yeah, arguments over sparkle would have Patriarchy blowing apple juice out its nostrils compared to it's