Wowzie! Economics professor Marina Adshade has some pointed things to say about assumptions about prostitution and customers in the hotel industry that has a lot of direct bearing on the recent assault on a housekeeper at New York's Sofitel Hotel.  I'd just add that her experience and the story she recounts strongly emphasizes several toxic dynamics that, I'm convinced, would be altered if prostitution was not illegal.  The following excerpt is longer than I usually provide but it's telling.  My analysis follows the excerpt.  Here's Prof. Adshade:

Apparently, I am the only person not surprised by the alleged events that took place in Sofitel Hotel in New York City that lead to Dominique Strauss Kahn’s arrest. My lack of surprise has nothing to do with the man in question, but rather stems from my time, as a teenager, working as a chamber maid in a major Toronto hotel. During this period I gained intimate knowledge of the behavior of international travellers in hotels; especially that of powerful, and somewhat entitled, men toward the often vulnerable women working the hotel floors.

My personal experience is that those men expect hotel workers to provide sexual services.

...

A few weeks after the filmed version of [a] pimp interview was shown to my Economics of Sex and Love class a student came to me with the following story. He had recently started working at the over-night desk in a local hotel (which, by the way is part of a major hotel chain). His very first night on the job an angry hotel guest arrived at the front the desk in the early hours of the morning demanding assistance.

It turned out that the guest had asked for a prostitute to be sent to his room, presumably through the concierge, but when the girl had arrived she refused to perform the all of the services he demanded. He tried to force her to cooperate and when she managed to escape the room he pursued her down the hallway. To his chagrin, she escaped, which is what lead him to go to the front desk to complain.

What makes this a revealing story is that the reason I am able to tell you these details is not because this girl went to police and pressed charges against her attacker but because the man in question went to the front desk of the hotel and asked the clerk what he planned to do to solve HIS problem –he had paid for a service that he did not receive and clearly felt the hotel was responsible.

...

I am not suggesting that the woman who made the accusation against DSK was a sex worker, far from it. I am suggesting that some employees at hotels, such as the concierge mentioned in my pimp piece, have perpetuated an expectation among international travellers that they are entitled to sex services that are, at the minimum, illegal, and do not necessarily involve the consent of the women involved. This expectation of sexual services is putting women who work in hotels at risk and unless hotels are prepared to act to protect them, and rid themselves of the pimps on their payroll, it will only continue.

Source: Big Think

That sounds extremely, disgracefully, likely.

Now you might be wondering how, since I'm an advocate for the legalization and labor organization of prostitution, I could possibly spin this into a case for legalization.  If sex work were legal wouldn't that make it even easier for irate assholes to chase prostitutes down hotel room halls and then demand that the concierge help find them and force them to comply?

Um.  No.

First of all, hard as this might seem for slut-shamers to process, if the sex worker had a legal right to do business she could have called the cops and/or pressed their panic button the instant the customer became abusive.  As it is, since her business is illegal she would have instead been arrested had she called the police.  Oh, and extra credit?  Since the hotel doesn't have to admit any formal relationship with the prostitute, even though the concierge might have made the actual appointment the hotel can charge a recalcitrant sex worker with trespassing!

Secondly, contrary to slut-shaming expectations, prostitutes, alike all human beings have the exact same right and expectation to have their consent respected as house cleaners, concierges, or, for that matter, cab drivers or cabinet ministers!  Not to sound too picky or anything but a customer has no more right or legal standing to force a prostitute to give him a blow job she hasn't agreed to than he has a right to force a cab driver to give him one.  Not even if the prostitute has agreed to, say, intercourse.  Again, that takes a little while to soak in if you've got that "you poke it you own it" attitude, or that "she gave up all her rights to say no the first time she said yes" attitude, or especially that "what, she's just a dirty whore" attitude.

But, yeah, doesn't work that way.

Oops!  Let me rephrase that.  It shouldn't work that way.  But it does.  And why would that be?  Why is there an expectation that one can force one's self on a prostitute in a way one can't on a car mechanic?  Because you try it on a car mechanic and he or she can tell their manager.  She or he can call the cops.  He or she can pepper spray you if necessary!  And in so doing expect, you know, to be treated like a victim instead of a fucking criminal!  Prostitutes?  Not so much.

And here's where it gets really hinky: it gets to a point where customers can gain such a sense of entitlement that they imagine they actually can demand sex from unwilling housekeeping staff.  Though evidently, at least so far, not car hops or cab drivers.

In my very strong opinion legalization completely alters that dynamic.  Not only for the sex workers themselves, who could then legally check in with the concierge but could also legally inform colleagues of her whereabouts and legally call the police if she felt threatened or coerced.  That's just the most obvious change.  But more subtly it would change the in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound attitude of, um, gentlemen who imagine they can impose themselves on any hotel staff and expect to have any "misunderstandings" cleared up by the front desk.

So anyway, yeah, I think legalizing prostitution would still be a good idea even in instances like the DSK arrest where the victim clearly wasn't a sex worker at all.

Randall Munroe took two minutes to answer Ben Stein's (and by extension The American Spectator's) fatuously privileging question regarding the arrest of IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn: "People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes?"

On a whim, I just did a little research, and couldn’t believe what I found.  Guess who holds an economics degree?

Paul Bernardo.

For those not familiar with the case, Bernardo is one of the nastiest serial killers in history. He and his wife drugged, raped, and tortured to death a number of schoolgirls in the late 80’s and early 90’s. The story is the stuff of nightmares.

Source: xkcd blog

To be fair, Bernardo may not have been a "true" economist -- when he began murdering his victims he was only majoring in economics.  So Stein and his fellow rape apologists at the Spectator could probably say "yes, but what true Scotsman economist has been convicted?"

The flip answer would be that James Urbaniak was able to quickly come up with a list of professional, public economists who've been convicted of violent sex crimes.

The better answer to Stein's logic (and a more chilling answer in most ways) would be to ask the conceptually identical question "how many air force base commanders in major NATO countries have been convicted of violent sex crimes?"

I'd just add that my question isn't just about Stein's classic-Republican "seen any elephants*" logical fallacy.  It turns out that not only were they both serial rapist/murderers, Paul Bernardo and former CFB Trenton Base Commander Russell Williams may have been acquaintances in college but they may have taken the same economics classes.

* Recall jokes of the form "Q: Bobby, why are you tearing up strips of paper?" "A: To keep the elephants out of the pantry?"  "Q: How do you know that keeps elephants away?"  "A: Seen any elephants

I just stumbled across a post about porn from a long-dormant blog called The London Exhibitionist. It’s old but wow does he have a great take on the state of American-originated porn! I’ve been digging into the intimate link between male insecurity and “empowerment“lately. This guy illustrates the point nicely. (Emphasis mine.)

Gonzo type porn, seems to regard the women as the enemy and the act of sex is punishment (for what?). When you see the idiot with the camcorder talking the woman into bed, their ham-fisted, mono-syllabic sledgehammer approach usually has the women rolling her eyes, even when it’s fake and the woman is a pornstar guaranteed lay.

The men in these pornos always externalise their arousal: (This bitch has turned me on). In doing so they put the woman on a pedestal and then resent them for being there (now she’s gonna get it). It seems to me that sexual attraction isn’t about how a woman looks, but is more about how we look at a woman. Women don’t turn us on, we turn ourselves on.

My take on all this crap is this: Inadequate men who know they cannot exist as equals to women then validate themselves through dominating them and belittling them.

Source: The London Exhibitionist

Ka-sheesh is there gold in there!

The biggest part being about the way men end up indoctrinated to believe that arousal comes from somewhere else. That’s an idea, by the way, that goes waaaay back. It’s roots break the surface back with the myth of Eve as temptress and they’ve been buckling pavement on and off ever since. For instance the nominally saintly Leo Tolstoy bitterly blamed his wife for his repeated failures to practice celibacy. (Her anguished, fearful diaries suggest a… different reason.) And while “women as temptress” has largely gone back underground in favor of the “men as remorseless horndogs,” London Exhibitionist reminds us the earlier notion is obviously still there.

The problem with imagining the source of our lust is someone else’s responsibility is that it leaves us thinking it’s a problem we’re helpless to deal with.

I also really appreciate his point about the two-fold injustice of first elevating women to etherial objects of worship… and then resenting them for that too. It’s kind of a pattern in the dominant paradigm. See also “women see us only as providers,” “men just need a place to have sex, women need a reason,” etc.

The ugly problem in each case is that we’re creating our own powerlessness. That we’re the ones giving it up doesn’t make us any less powerless. But, dudes, you can “get back” at women as much as you like, be as angry at women as you wish, write whole epic Tolstoy novels about how evil women are if you’ve got the patience for it, but at the end of the day if we don’t get that we’re responsible for sense of powerlessness no amount of fuming women females in general or feminists in particular is going to get it back.

When you’re drowning in knee-deep water panicky thrashing and yelling won’t save you nearly as well as standing up.

Via Tyler Cowen Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree points to an interesting-looking social psychology paper on entitlement and selfishness as it relates to a sense of victimization.

Does feeling like a victim make you selfish?:

Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive (and avoid negative) outcomes. In Experiment 3, participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement.

via Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – Vol 97, Iss 5

Barker said it here.

Quick note: Barker may have been citing the print version. For whatever reason, though, the the article appears online in JPSP Vol 98, Issue 2: Victim entitlement to behave selfishly Zitek, Emily M.; Jordan, Alexander H.; Monin, Benoît; Leach, Frederick R. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 98(2), Feb 2010, 245-255.

I’m not going to cough up ~$12.00 to read the gated version but while digging around for more information it looks like the same results turn up quite a few similar studies of selfishness, fairness, and sense of entitlement. I ought to add it makes sense because it’s been my intuition, stated repeatedly online and in real life, that privilege and entitlement (stereotypical male in particular, kyriarchal in general) derives more from insecurity and resentment than the stereotypical spoon-in-your-mouth aristocratic sense of “the peasants are revolting.” And finally makes sense because I’ve been around my children and their friends for 13 years now… although that experience might be unscientifically anecdotal. :-)

At any rate, assuming the research supports the conclusion, and assuming it confirms similar prior research, it’s going to supports my contention that those who exercise privilege tend to perceive their actions as defending themselves from unfairness or attack. With the result that asking, say, men to “give up” their privileges never seems to work (and, when it does sort of work, seems really wimpy, half-hearted, or passive-aggressive. Or chivalrous, which would be by far the least productive!)

I think it also supports my developing strategy of attempting to recruit “oppressive” classes with the entirely reasonable (and often easily-observed) point that conditions that are worse for someone don’t necessarily imply that conditions are better for you.