Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

This is a follow-up on yesterday’s post about how “just another crack-whore from the street” is a pretty accurate predictor whether a serial killer’s victim will be a) missed if she disappears, c) file a complaint or press charges if she survives, or c) will be taken seriously if she survives and files a complaint.

From the Times Online

Police [had] been called to Sowell’s house several times, most recently two weeks ago when a naked woman fell out of a first floor window, suffering cuts and scrapes. She declined to press charges.

...

The last visit they made was on September 22, just hours before a woman went to police to complain that Sowell had invited her to house for a drink, then become enraged, choking her with an extension cord and raping her.

It was not until last Thursday, October 29 – 37 days later – that officers followed up her complaint by visiting Sowell’s property, where they uncovered the first bodies. Sowell was arrested on Saturday.

Times Online, Nov. 4

So. Why do you suppose the “naked woman” declined to press charges? Why do you think they took 37 days before they bothered to follow up on

Finally, I started college in Olympia, Washington, at a time when police and everyone else believed the notorious Ted Bundy was still trying to harvest victims. Turned out he’d moved on literally weeks before I arrived. There were notoriously few clues about him back then — authorities had only recently linked a name, Ted, to him but weren’t sure if it was real or just an alias. There was nothing lackadaisical about the police response, the college’s response, or student-body response to Bundy.

Meanwhile, though, just 40 miles north the “Green River” killer, Gary Ridgeway, who was only just hitting his stride, had already murdered roughly as many street and subsistence prostitutes as Bundy had murdered “good” girls. It would be at least several years… really till bodies started being found weekly… that police and the public finally took notice.

Which I think supports my point that not only social but the legal obstacles make street and subsistence prostitutes particularly inviting targets for serial killers. And, Ted Bundy’s celebrity not withstanding, we see that in the raw numbers of serial-killer victims.

And just to be clear? Those same conditions make them every bit as vulnerable to all manner of non-lurid crimes such as rape, robbery, assault, and “regular” old murder.

Fran Langum of Blue Gal says

Several bloggers including Echidne have pointed out the stupidity of the Freakonomics piece on prostitution. Working up outrage (over their utilitarian arguments re paying for sex) is difficult when faced with the Total Asperger Blinders of the authors: borderline autistic economists who don’t insert “humanity” into their equations don’t deserve a lot of ‘analysis.’ (Next up: the economy is down, so why aren’t more parents eating their babies?)

Read the quote in context here.

Note: lest you think she’s joking check out the highlighted sentences of this 2002 article in Slate.com by Steven Landsburg (emphasis mine.)

I am privileged to teach in one of the world’s most respected economics departments. We’re on pretty much everyone’s top-15 list, and by a lot of measures, we’re considered top-five. I mention this by way of pointing out that this is not some bunch of bozos we’re talking about here.

And yet somehow last summer, we managed to spend a week in a state of collective befuddlement, obsessing over a seemingly impenetrable conundrum that came up over lunch: If people stand still on escalators, then why don’t they stand still on stairs?

It was observed early on that if you stand still on stairs, you’ll never get anywhere. But for reasons I can no longer entirely reconstruct, that explanation was dismissed as overly simplistic.

He said it here.

Of course if I was too hard on them I’d have to explain how managed to hang on to a seven year old memory of an article about economists and escalators. And I remember the smell of simmering brain cells during a numbers-theory midterm I took in combined computability and cognition (a cheerful exploration of the limits of rationality) where one of the two questions was “prove that two plus two equals four.” Which, if you can’t use arithmetic or what you learned in pre-school, is tougher than it sounds.

And it’s not like imponderably obvious questions don’t deserve scrutiny. My favorite cautionary example about gender as a social construct instead of objective reality is the case of Joan of Arc, for whom wearing men’s clothing was so obviously a crime against God and nature that her English captors used that as the legal reason to burn her at the stake! Rather than than, say, leading a peasant army against her English captors, which she also did. Point being that what seems obvious isn’t always.

But I digress. The rest of Fran’s post turns an paragraph from the Freakonomics essay and turns it into an also fascinating and fundamental question about what constitutes the essence of prostitution: what exactly does it mean when a businessman in Texas phones a sex-worker in Chicago who charges him to fly down and do… something or other involving non-sexual devices and activities that “most people wouldn’t even recognize as sex per se.” Oh, that and she’s got a funny section about how if someone who’s paid to simulate having sex on film is an “actor” and someone else who’s paid to do non-sexual things is a “prostitute” then what happens if a “prostitute” buys a camera…

No, seriously, go read Fran’s whole, entirely work-safe post, and site, here.

Following up on a post from last January, a press release by Thom Mrozek of the DOJ Central District of California Office reports that…

LOS ANGELES – Five defendants, all members or associates of an extended family, face potential life prison sentences after being found guilty today of international sex trafficking for participating in a scheme that lured young Central American women and girls into the Los Angeles area and forced them into prostitution, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King for the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien for the Central District of California.

The defendants, four Guatemalan nationals and one Mexican national, were convicted of conspiracy; sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion; and importation of aliens for purposes of prostitution. The jury in the case was unable to reach unanimous verdicts on additional charges.

During a six-week trial, the government presented evidence that the defendants targeted young, uneducated, impoverished undocumented women and girls from Guatemala, and conspired to lure and smuggle them into the United States, where they were put to work as prostitutes. All but one of the victims were enticed with bogus promises of legitimate jobs. But after arranging for the victims to be smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border, the defendants used a combination of threats – deception, rape, physical violence and witchcraft – to compel the victims to perform acts of prostitution.

Read the rest of the press release here.

In my original post I mentioned one of the victims who pretty clearly believed she was being voluntarily smuggled into the U.S. to do domestic labor despite the defendants claims that all their victims had agreed to be smuggled for sex work. Mrozek’s press release suggests only one victim had arrived with the intention of doing sex work.

But as I also mentioned in the original post it doesn’t really matter what their intention was: the victims agreed only to be smuggled — transported across the border for a fee. The perpetrators instead trafficked them, withholding their incomes, forcing them to work without compensation, and keeping them physically and psychologically captive —including with threats to… wait for it… turn them over to immigration service for imprisonment and deportation.

Trafficking would still occur without restrictive immigration and border-migration policy. And sex trafficking might still occur if sex work was legal and socially destigmatized. But the motivation to trust one’s luck to someone who might only smuggle you but… might not would nearly evaporate. And so would the opportunities for traffickers to hook their victims in.

CJ of Happyendingz – confessions of an erotic masseuse explains two really critical points, one clarifying sex worker and the world’s opinion of them…

Hey – we provide a service just like anyone else in the service industry where everything is negotiated up front. Would you walk up to a waitress and take whatever food she’s carrying? No. Just because she’s “your” waitress, doesn’t mean she’s carrying “your” food. Calling a masseuse a “sex toy” is like calling a waitress a “stove.” (And bravo to the guy who said “accountant” vs. “adding machine”!)

It’s the same thing with us. When you’re in my session room, you have to negotiate for services rendered just like anyone else. What some of the newbies assume (incorrectly) is that they “own” us for the next 30 minutes and can do whatever they damn well please because they’re paying for it. They start off all pushy and grabby, and then act surprised when you tell them to back off. I got news for ya – you’re not paying to remove the word “No” from my vocabulary. That seems to be the biggest misconception about “sex workers” in general – that anything goes just because cash is involved.

Case in point – About 2 months ago, I had a Mexican guy come in and ask for a 30 minute session. When I joined him in the room, he was sitting in the chair fully clothed, but with his pants down around his ankles. When I asked him what the fuck he was doing, he said he just wanted a blow job. I told him this is not that kind of place and he started to argue with me. Apparently he didn’t understand the difference between a massage parlor and a brothel.

She said it here.

Now we could just stop here and have a good eye roll at the clueless customer’s coarse presumptuousness. And maybe have a productive, authentically sex-positive discussion of boundaries assertion in relationships romantic or otherwise. Or, since the customer was from Mexico, we might make up some sort of tip-toe-y narrative about cultural differences. Or we could even admire her disdain for the viciously dehumanizing, used duct tape notion that sex workers “sell their bodies” as opposed to selling a service.

But that would miss the opportunity to get into CJ’s other point: communicating expectations to men – something I think is both more important and much cooler

Now when I pointed out that this guy was “Mexican” it’s because in Mexico (so I’ve been told) there is virtually no difference between a brothel, massage parlor or strip club. Down there they are all one and the same. I didn’t get offended by him, I just had to carefully explain things to him. When it finally registered with him what I do for a living, we both had a laugh and he settled in to a normal session.

She recognized and explained the difference in expectations. Even with his pants around his ankles he got it. Yeah, it’s a nuisance he made it all the way into her room before someone explained the difference. But instead of being some kind of freakout immutable force of violent male horniness he got it, even with his cultural and possible language differences, even with his previous experience… heck, even with his pants around his ankles!

That’s so much more interesting, and useful, than our standard narratives about women as hapless and men as ravening animals. Does it happen like that all the time? Do all such interactions end (literally and figuratively) with such happy endings? No, probably not. But most of them already do. And more would if we bothered making stories like that the expectation-setting narrative for men, and women, instead.