Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Matthew Yglesias thinks instructively about why people imagine some kinds of preventable deaths are more important than others.

It’s quite true that human beings do not have a great intuitive grasp of statistical arguments or a great love for them. But the world would be a better place if people thought of these things in a more statistically informed way. Likewise it’s true as Jon Chait says that people generally think differently about intentional murders than thinks like car crashes. But this, though it’s definitely a fact of life, is also a problem that it would be good to ameliorate over the long run. People tend to view threats stemming from identifiable, individual villains as more problematic than impersonal ones. But while this is a fact of life, it’s also a mistake. If we do something to very slightly reduce the risk of a terrorist attack that has the inadvertent consequence of causing a large number of additional highway deaths then that would be a mistake.

Read the quote in context here.

I’m… fairly confident many of the same principle applies to matters of sex, choice, reproduction and contraception, agency and autonomy, etc. Opposition to hormonal contraception, for instance, not because of the small but real risk of embolism or thrombosis in the woman who takes it but instead an infinitesimal-to-the-point-of-imagination risk that ovulation and fertilization of a hypothetical “life” might somehow magically occur… and yet somehow not implant. To name one. To name another, fanatic willingness to murder healthcare providers in church over abortion but absolute zero, nothing, none interest, at all, in parting a hair to prevent about approximately equal numbers of miscarriages (environmental- or stress-induced or otherwise)... or to do anything at all about stillbirths, infant or maternal mortality, or prevention of childhood deaths from, say, asthma.

But again it’s a general principle. Although expand the scope just a teeny tiny bit and you’re left wondering about the “moral” hesitation in the early 1980s that allowed HIV to become a global epidemic instead of a relatively isolated outbreak, where squeamishness about thousands of “h-word” people (hemophiliacs, heroine users, and homosexuals) mainly in the U.S. allowed it to spread to tens of millions of “pa-word” people (pretty-much anybody.)

This post is a follow-up on a previous post about men, alcohol, and sexual assault. This post and the previous ones are responses to Jessica Valenti’s post, “A “what about the menz?!” I can get behind,” at Feministing. I recommend extending the current social infrastructure around drunk driving to situations known to lead to “date” or acquaintance rape by the intoxicated perpetrators responsible for a very large class of sexual assaults.

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99% of men, like all adult human beings, can control themselves perfectly well, even when they’ve been drinking. Sure, more people have trouble once they start drinking since one of the first pharmaceutical effects of alcohol is impaired judgment. But humans have this amazing capacity to a) make plans in anticipation and b) to make social arrangements with friends, as for instance, when arranging for a designated driver, for friends to “take away my keys,” and so on in order to forestall a bad decision to attempt to drive while drunk.

In fact, even when someone doesn’t plan ahead there’s still the social effect of #b, above, where even if you haven’t made arrangements in advance people now have it pretty ingrained that they don’t let friends drive drunk. It’s even ingrained enough that most people, even when drunk, will back down when reminded they shouldn’t drive.

You don’t have to be that old to remember when people said that was impossible. Now? Not so much. Plus, now it’s such a faux pas to ignore the advice of friends and even strangers that a transgressor will have difficulty living it down next day. The good news about that is that pretty much any skepticism people might have today about men’s inability or reluctance to avoid drunkenly assaulting dates or acquaintances is identical to the skepticism Designated Driver and other anti-drunk-driving campaigns when they came out. One big difference? The drunk-driving campaigns had nothing to point to and say we can do it like that.

Would a campaign to include the same kinds of pre-agreements and social pressure against drunken sexual assault that we have against drunk driving be 100% effective? No. It hasn’t been 100% effective against driving. But a policy doesn’t have to be 100% effective to be worth undertaking, and those anti-drunk-driving initiatives have been very effective.

Finally, one reason an initiative doesn’t have to be 100% effective to be worth it (besides the obivous one of fewer perpetrators and victims) is that it makes it harder for the 1-6% of repeat offenders to “blend into the background.” Just like hard-core drunk drivers are more visible and confrontable now that most decent people know to hand over their keys, serial date-rapists would have far less cover for their activities.

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By the way, if I was to implement, say, a campus-wide drunken hookup policy I’d probably use a “too drunk to drive, too drunk to competently hookup” metric. That doesn’t have to mean everybody has to go home alone if they’ve been drinking, just that at that point it ought to be socially acceptable for friends to, for instance, check in with a couple that’s heading up the stairs the way they’d check in if they were headed out to their car. And even a strict policy ought to account for cases where both parties have agreed to hookup before they got hammered. (Yes, I’m aware that drinking is almost universally sanctioned on campuses. I said if I was implementing the policies. And campus policies just mean the initiative would have to be informal rather than official.)

The author of Ask a Manager answers an unfamiliar question with grace and aplomb

[Question] “My co-worker is a very open person and tells me to cover for her every time she has to leave the office. Our boss and manager are not here half the time so when they are not, my co-worker leaves either early and/or takes a really long lunch. At the beginning, the excuse for leaving early was because of a date. But she later told me that she’s actually sleeping with people for money. She comes back all proud, telling me how much money she made in an hour.”

[Answer] I’d just be straightforward with her and tell her: “I don’t care what you do in your personal life, but while you’re off making money, you’re leaving me to pick up the slack here. You’re putting me in a bad position, because you’re asking me to cover for you and you’re leaving me with more work.”

Read the quote in context here.

The comment threads are pretty interesting too, some judgmental, some libertarian, some addressing it as a law and order question, others as a straight-up work problem.

A woman from New Zealand takes a similar approach to the Manager

Here in New Zealand it’s not an illegal activity and I would deal with it as suggested above. However if it was an illegal activity, say dealing drugs, then I would be informing management immediately.

The last comment at the moment (dated Nov. 30th) is from the author of the original question clarifying some of the assumptions in comments.

Well I wrote this email in an effort to guide me in the right direction, but really it is easier said than done. I totally agree that prostitution is illegal and she shouldn’t be doing that, but in reality it is a victimless crime. I can not call the cops on her because I just don’t have the heart to do that.

She is really a very good person and is an excellent mother. Most of the people who post comments here assume that since she is selling her body she must be a bad mother. She is not giving that example to her kids. For her kids she works only in the office. Her kids are her priority. Although, I do not agree with her spending habits she provides the best she can for her kids.

Kind of takes away some of the cartoonish shorthand in standard debates about sex work. She’s clearly not “trafficked,” and it would be very difficult to construct her as a victim, a thrall, or dehumanized. But she’s leaving her day-job co-workers holding the bag and pulling her freight plus abusing her responsibilities to her employer.

And yet more evidence that single, blanket characterizations of sex workers, or single, blanket policies for dealing with sex work, would be inadequate to its complexity.

A younger friend of mine has this job. She was recruited into it at a very early age… not even twelve when she started doing it. She was very good at it — wound up making far more as an “amateur” than any of the other kids in her school. When she turned 18 she discovered she could make quite a bit more if she kept doing it than she could with any of the other entry-level jobs that were available to her. So she turned pro. Now, as she approaches her 30s, she’s growing weary of it and wondering if she’s up for it anymore and wondering even harder what she could do instead that would make anything like the same money, in this economy. Especially considering how she’s specialized in her particular skills, how she barely made it through high school, and how her prospects of going to college or even a trade school are pretty dim.

There’s a lot of heartache in her line of work. She develops sometimes intensely personal and intimate relationships with her clients but no matter how close they become the clients always move on, always lose interest. And though she tries to keep tabs on them they often forget about her entirely.

Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex says my friend may soon have a hard time getting a visa to do it in Canada. For her own “protection.”

[Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenny’s] ministry issued a media release stating that the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act will “protect vulnerable foreign workers such as exotic dancers and live-in caregivers who could be victims of exploitation”.

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According to Wong, one measure to evaluate the vulnerability of a person is insufficiency of funds. “If we allow them in, we are actually putting them in great risk,” Wong told the Straight. Wong confirmed that the bill is driven by Conservatives’ aversion to foreign strippers in Canada. “That is one of the major concerns because, legally, according to admissible criteria, these workers can come in but experience has told us that once they come in, they will be exploited,” she said.

Erika Del Carmen Fuchs of the Justicia for Migrant Workers B.C. doesn’t agree with the Conservative approach. Fuchs told the Straight: “If there’s a problem with human trafficking, they should go after traffickers, not the people being trafficked.”

In May, two Filipino caregivers alleged mistreatment by Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla’s family. The caregivers claimed that they worked 12 to 16 hours a day and that their passports were confiscated. If the bill becomes law and is applied to cases similar to the Dhalla affair, Kurland said that the only remedy available for caregivers would be to get kicked out of Canada.

She said it here.

My friend is a professional nanny.

This is not to say nannying and, say, stripping are directly equivalent professions. But they evidently are similar enough to be treated the same way by… particularly thumb-fingered and/or heartless lawmakers.

Personally I think if one were trying to make workers safer, especially immigrant workers, it would be a better idea to actually protect the workers instead of outlawing them.