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The Two Rules of Desire, Vampires, and Ephebophiles

Mon, 2009-08-24 18:03 — figleaf

In the last item of a celebrity-news roundup Margaret of Jezebel quotes True Blood actor Stephen Moyer on the appeal of vampires.

“The thing about vampirism is that it taps into a female point of view – you have an old-fashioned gentleman with manners who is a fucking killer… it’s an interesting duality, because in our present society it would be an odd thing for a woman to say, ‘I want my man to be physical with me.’”

Read about it, and follow the links, here.

It’s funny, this weekend I had lunch with fellow-Seattleite-for-now Holly of The Pervocracy. Overall conclusion: she’s an awesome human being. Anyway, we were discussing various tropes in porn and pop culture and wound up dissecting the twin trends of men’s stereotypical fantasies about unrealistically young women partners as embodied in Literotica’s abundant stories about 18-year-old 8th-graders, and women’s equally stereotypical fantasies about unrealistically old men as embodied in the fantasy of 120-year-old Twilight characters with nothing better to do than sit and watch his girlfriend sleep undisturbed.

Moyer’s quote casts at least a little light on where the vampire appeal comes from. Although I’d add there’s the additional cultural reinforcement that except maybe for Sookie Stackhouse being “bad” with a vampire involves the pay-for-it slasher-movie risk getting your throat ripped out. Not a “fate worse than death,” but actual death being one way past Rule #1’s proscriptive clause.

As for the notion of men and sexually immature women I think that goes deep into Rule #2: a man with a woman who’s not yet sexually mature is sort of by-definition not going to be desirable, giving him both “permission” to apply leverage and a “what did you expect” if it doesn’t work out.

Statutory-Rape/Sex-Work Bleg

Tue, 2009-03-10 23:26 — figleaf

“To bleg is to write a blog entry or comment for the sole purpose of asking for something.” — Blogglossary.com

SnowdropExplodes of A Femanist View reports on another case where the sin of pedophilia is washed away by the magic of being sex for hire.

Livvy @ The English Courtesan writes about a 15 year old girl who was working as an escort. According to the news article she links, the girl’s work was discovered when a teacher searched her school bag and found condoms, lube and the card of the escort agency.

So far the only person to have faced charges in court is… the schoolgirl herself. Not the escort agency, and not the clients (both of whom have actually broken the law, whereas the schoolgirl herself, as far as I can see, hasn’t – unless she was liable to tax on her earnings).

Read the quote in context here.

Seriously, this isn’t an insolvable problem. It continues to astonish me that anyone, let alone paid professionals, are so persistently dazzled by Teh Sex Work yet so indifferent to statutory rape let alone (in the case of trafficked individuals) rape rape when sex-work is involved.

I know a number of readers are more familiar with sex work than I, from both the pro- and anti- perspectives. Any idea what the sticking point would be?

New York's Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act Signed Into Law

Fri, 2008-10-17 13:18 — figleaf

Nick Confessore, former political blogger and now of The New York Times, says

September 26, 2008

[New York] Gov. David A. Paterson on Friday signed into law a bill shielding sexually exploited girls and boys from being charged with prostitution.

The law, known as the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act, will divert children under the age of 18 who have been arrested for prostitution into counseling and treatment programs, provided they agree to aid in the prosecution of their pimps.

He said it here.

[Via $pread magazine online. —fl]

The law has evidently been held up for year in the New York state legislature by law-n-order types, Senate Republicans and NYC Mayor’s office who believed it would just make it harder to “crack down on prostitution.”

The compromise bill allows charges to be reinstated for child prostitutes who refuse to cooperate with court mandates and also includes a sort of “one strike you’re in” provision where reoffenders just go to jail.**

While I’m actually, eh, sympathetic with qualms that if poorly administered the new law could just provide new avenues for gaming the system, on the other hand system-gaming-wise it’s already pretty much nickel night at the casino. So what’s wrong with attempting an approach that sidesteps that system?

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere there’s a bit of a disconnect between the standard protective impulse “OMG, here’s an underage victim who’s been conscripted into prostitution” and the standard response which is “arrest the little whore.”

Whichever way we might feel viscerally about sex work we can not be proud of the pure oxymoronics of “criminal victim.***” And on the face of it, anyway, this looks like a step away from punishing victims and towards punishing (silly me for asking, I know) the actual criminals in such cases: pimps, traffickers, and customers who buy and sell children’s bodies.****

—-

Next up, one hopes, would be diversion initiatives along Safe Housing / Safe Environments lines? The answer would appear to be… yes. According to a summary of the bill from something called the (randomly via-Google) Polaris Project Action Center there are provisions for…

Safe Houses

  • Every local social services district is required to provide a short-term safe house to sexually exploited children who live in its district. In addition to secure housing, the facility should include 24-hour crisis intervention and access to various medical care and other supportive services. Existing resources, including respite beds or runaway and homeless youth programs, can be used if appropriate, and local social service districts may work together to provide these resources on a regional basis.
  • The Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) is required to contract with an appropriate agency with experience working with sexually exploited youth to provide at least one safe house for longer-term care, in a geographic area that would meet the needs of sexually exploited youth and that cannot be readily accessed by perpetrators of sexual exploitation.

Planning
Every local social services district is required to:

  • Determine the needs of sexually exploited children in their respective districts;
  • Include the determination of the need in the integrated county plan;
  • Provide crisis intervention and community-based programs to meet the determined need; and
  • Recognize and plan for the separate and distinct needs of girls, boys, and transgendered youth who have been sexually exploited.

Oh, but wouldn’t you know? Perhaps the bigger objections to the bill weren’t so much about about law ‘n order as some people not wanting to pay to do the right thing.

A recent study conducted by the state Office of Children and Families reports that counties are currently not equipped to handle the needs of this victim population. The study, New York Prevalence Study of Commercially Sexually Exploited Children, was released April 18, 2007. It examined 159 agencies from a sample of local departments of social services throughout the state, including New York City. Among its conclusions, the study details the service availability and capacity, as well as the problems preventing local departments of social services from providing the necessary services.

Hmm… should we help victims or lock them away? Yeah, “which one’s cheaper” is always a moral choice.

[** If convicted. If I’m not mistaken one of the big problems for pimped or trafficked sex workers of any age is that their pimps and traffickers a) know the ropes and b) can afford good successful lawyers. —fl]

[*** I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere my strong preference for a different, more appropriately focused construction… like treating customers of child prostitutes as Level 1 or Level 2 lifetime-registerable child sex offenders. The act, incidentally, mainly covers children under age 16 so “chilling effect” on what really ought to be legitimate adult sex work customers? Not so much. —fl]

[*** Oops, maybe I’m not so happy: Based on Confessori’s article it looks like Bloomberg et.al. pressed for requiring cooperation against traffickers but… as usual no mention of prosecuting the customers of pimps and traffickers. —fl]

The Ultimate 'No-Sex' Class

Thu, 2008-01-10 18:40 — figleaf

image caption says 'lolicon,' it has a nicer ring than 'pedophile'
Photo from Gilding’s page, hosted at Photobucket.

Gilding of Gilding the Lily brings news of a telling word and illustrates it with an even more telling picture.

‘Lolicon’ is a slang portmanteau of the phrase “Lolita complex”. In Japan, the term is used to describe an attraction to girls below the age of consent, or an individual attracted to such a person. Outside Japan, the term most often refers to a genre of manga and anime where childlike female characters are depicted in a sexualized manner or engaged in sexually explicit acts. The equivalent term for the sexualization of or attraction to young boys is shotacon.

As the genre created by and for men evolved, according to Kinsella, it moved from these cute, tough heroines towards depictions of girls as sexual victims: naked, helpless, fearful, sometimes bound or chained and was expanded into computer games and animated videos.

She said it here.

See… I… Look… Thing is, if you’re a real man what possible problem could you possibly have with relationships — sexual, social, marital, or otherwise — with real women? What conceivable reason could one ever have for preferring sex with a child (helpless, fearful, virginal, or otherwise) instead of a grown woman with all her faculties? [Note: Or for those inclined to shotacons, a grown man. —fl]

Seriously!

For all that I advocate for the end of masculinity, I always have and always will enjoy my extraordinarily lusty heterosexuality[**]. And when I say I’m a reluctant but sincere monogamist I’m sincere about the reluctance part. But I’m just saying that if I started making a list of the women I could imagine spending an afternoon, or a weekend, and/or a lifetime with, from fellow bloggers to fellow commenters online to friends new and old to acquaintances to erstwhile co-workers, bosses, employees, teachers, fellow students, or trainees, to doctors and nurses, paralegals, lawyers and judges (ok, only one judge so far), UPS drivers, baristas, coaches, teammates, in-laws, and camp-mates I might use up every pen and wear down every pencil in the house and yet… I just don’t see much room there for non-adults.

And for once I’m not talking out of my usual disquiet about all the ways adult interference can disrupt children’s normal sexual development and lead to their inability to appreciate all the varieties of real sex throughout the rest of their long, long lives. Nor am I asking out of moral outrage, parental concern about my children, nor fastidious adherence to legal ages of majority, emancipation, or consent. Those would all be expressions of concern for “lolicon” and “shoticon” children.

Instead, at the moment, I’m concerned about the men and women (don’t be a dope, of course there are surprising numbers of both) who for whatever reasons imagine that sexual attraction to those who are not yet peers — let alone children who might be “naked, helpless, fearful, sometimes bound or chained…” is anything but an admission of their own infirmity, their own inadequacy, their own miserably insecure unpreparedness.

Yes, yes, I know it’s somehow supposed to be manly. And yes, yes, in some cultures heaven is supposed to be filled with perpetual virgins (doesn’t that sound far more half-empty, or empty outright, than half-full?) And yes, yes, some cultures neither stigmatize nor traumatize children’s sexuality. Let’s just say, then, that unless such societies give adult members no, zero, none choice and require them to have sex with inexperienced children rather than adults, then in both those cultures and any others it’s fair game to ask what possible motivation grownups might have for choosing, let alone preferring, not merely “barely legal” but barely pubescent children for sex partners.

[** Near as I can tell, as social constructions go neither masculinity nor femininity have much to do with heterosexuality. In fact, considering the constraints they impose I think one could make a nice case that the constraints of femininity and masculinity interfere mightily with both heterosexuality and lust. —fl]

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