You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (19 page)
Read You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos Online
Authors: Robert Arthur
To hear the voices of proud women who choose sex work, go to the blog “Bound Not Gagged.” For example, this statement from Ms. Honey Pot:
I have a PhD, viable skills, and many years of experience as a corporate executive. I do this, because I enjoy it. Hearing or reading that we do this because we do not possess options, makes me cringe. I am sick and tired of the old feminist rhetoric that we escorts are victims. I am not a victim. I make my own circumstances. I am doing this of my own free will and loving every minute of it.
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Unlike Ms. Honey Pot, there are undoubtedly many sex workers who do it primarily for the money. Call girls are paid $300, tax-free, per hour compared to the $10 per hour in alternate fields. However, the same could be said about many jobs. It would also be a more enjoyable profession if it was legalized and did not carry such a stigma—a stigma perpetrated by slut-shaming anti-prostitution activists who deny any rational woman would ever do it.
(5) Most prostitutes are brought into the business as children—
The statistic that the average age of entry into sex work is thirteen is widespread on the Internet and has found its way into legitimate media such as
Vanity Fair
magazine and ABC’s
Nightline
.
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It appears to have originated from the aforementioned anti-prostitution activist, Melissa Farley.
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This shocking statistic is a lie, because Farley cites studies that focused on juvenile prostitutes, in other words, the average entry age for
juvenile
prostitutes was thirteen.
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A different study—from Farley’s own book—found the age of entry to be a more believable twenty-three.
55
Another anti-prostitution lie that has been echoed everywhere from the
New York Times
to CNN is that 100,000–300,000 children are sold into prostitution in America annually. This twisted number actually came from two professors’ estimates as to how many children are “at risk” for sexual exploitation. Their numbers included such vulnerable groups as all juveniles living near the Canadian border who have their own mode of transportation. The actual number of children kidnapped and sold as sex slaves is more likely in the few hundreds.
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MOTHER SUPERIOR
Diane Sawyer Would Never Have Sex for Money, Why Are You?
In ABC’s 2008
20/20
series “Prostitution in America: Working Girls Speak,” Diane Sawyer went about proving that (in the words of the producer) “behind every prostitute is a story of sex abuse, drug dependency, or mental illness. No one chooses this.”
Predictably—despite street prostitutes being a small minority of all sex workers— the show focused almost completely on street prostitutes, passed off street prostitute statistics as applying to all sex workers, and only interviewed anti-prostitution experts who believed no woman could possibly choose sex work.
Sawyer doggedly got every prostitute to admit to past sexual abuse, drug use, or mental illness. Any other reason was unacceptable. When one young woman said she did it for the cash, Sawyer grimaced and raised her voice, “Why? You could have gotten some other job . . . and kept yourself. Why?” After some introspection the woman owned up to being raped when younger and having low self-esteem.
Sawyer ran into difficulty at the legalized Nevada brothel out in the middle of the desert. The women, including a licensed R.N., said they did it for the money. However, one of them privately told Sawyer that “a lot” of the women use illegal or prescription drugs to get through the day. Case closed.
A clip of a casual interchange between a sex worker and an aspiring one showed what might have been said more frequently if Sawyer wasn’t shaming her interviewees: “To be honest, it’s not much different than going home drunk from your college frat party with a different guy except you’re getting paid.”
The show was apparently not going to bother to interview any call girls/escorts at all, but in the wake of the New York governor’s prostitution scandal they scrambled to get one. Sawyer appeared to finally have met her match with the escort. When asked how she felt about being offered money for sex for the first time, the escort answered “liberated” and added that she was “a very sexual person.” Sawyer did not like that answer at all, saying: “It can be a sexual person and at the same time really value the sanctity of your own body.”
After challenging the woman about “moral choice” and giving away something that “should not be sold,” Sawyer laid it out:
Sawyer: I’m having a really hard time believing that there isn’t suffering in you. I don’t believe it . . . . Were you abused as a child?
Woman: No.
Sawyer: Teenager?
Woman. No.
Sawyer: Drugs?
Woman: No.
Sawyer: Emotional problems?
Woman: Yeah, I think I do. I’m afraid to be vulnerable.
Later the woman wrote on her blog (
Debauchette
), that she did the interview because she wanted to break “the old Victorian trope of the broken, dysfunctional, fallen prostitute, incapable of forming her own opinions or making her own decisions.”
She also wrote that she was disappointed that the documentary didn’t interview more women like her and that they didn’t interview any “(real) sex worker activists.” Case closed.
—David Bauder, “ABC to Air Prostitution News Special,” AP, 19 Mar. 2008; and “Boom,”
Debauchette
(blog), 20 Apr. 2008, ret. 3 Sep. 2008.
(6) Trafficked women are sex slaves—
When anti-prostitution advocates are not using junk science to inflate numbers, they are blurring definitions to achieve the same result.
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Although the terms “trafficked women” and “sex slaves” are often used interchangeably, they are not the same.
A study of Vietnamese migrants in Cambodia found that out of a hundred “trafficked” women, only six had been tricked into sex work. The rest knew they would be working in a brothel before they left Vietnam and they did it for “economic incentives, desire for an independent lifestyle, and dissatisfaction with rural life and agricultural labor.” When “rescue” organizations raided the brothels and “saved” them, they “usually returned to their brothel as quickly as possible.”
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Emigration for sex work is driven by poverty and barriers to female employment in developing countries and Eastern Europe. If anti-prostitution activists cared more about women and less about sexual morality, they would devote themselves to these issues. Better employment options would give these women more of an incentive to
voluntarily
leave the industry.
EXAGGERATED FEARS #2
AIDS
The risk of contracting AIDS from heterosexual sex in the developed world was greatly exaggerated for political reasons. First, it was thought AIDS would not get governmental interest if it was seen as merely a “gay disease.” Second, heterosexual AIDS was used by the left to support sex education, and those on the right to trumpet extramarital sex as evil.
In the late 1980s when the New York City health department carefully interviewed men claiming to be infected by women (as opposed to simply taking their word for it like other health departments), they found that almost no one fell into this category. Closeted gay men and intravenous drug users have an incentive to lie, and when New York City stopped their interviewing process, the heterosexual transmission numbers went “through the roof.”
E | R |
Receptive Anal Intercourse | 1.70% |
Receptive Penile-Vaginal Intercourse | .08% |
Insertive Penile-Vaginal Intercourse | .04% |
Receptive Fellatio | .00002% |
Insertive Fellatio | .00001% |
Note: Being uncircumcised raises risk two times. Presence or history of genital ulcers in either partner increases risk five times. Transmission rates are higher in developing countries, where many people suffer from already crippled immune systems.
—Marie-Claude Boily, et al., “Heterosexual Risk of HIV-1 Infection Per Sexual Act,”
Lancet Infect. Dis
., Feb. 2009; Michael Fumento, “Myth of Heterosexual AIDS,” 2 Nov. 1998, ret. Fumento. com, 8 Sep. 2006; Brendan O’Neill, “Exploitation of AIDS,”
Guardian.co.uk
, 12 June 2008; and Beena Varghese, et al., “Reducing the Risk of Sexual HIV Transmission,”
Sex. Transm. Dis
., Jan. 2002.
(7) Legalized prostitution increases coercive trafficking—
Anti-prostitution activists claim Sweden’s 1999 criminalization caused trafficking in Sweden to go down “dramatically.”
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The evidence to support this has been revealed to be bunkum,
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but the media continues to repeat it.
Outside of unsubstantiated quotes, there is “absolutely no evidence” that legalized prostitution contributes to the trafficking of involuntary victims.
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In the United Kingdom, where prostitution is legal, sensationalism about the trafficking of sex slaves led to a massive crackdown using every police force in the country. Eight hundred and twenty-two brothels, flats, and massage parlors were raided. They did not find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution.
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(8) Tougher laws would end prostitution
—In the mid-1980s police doubted even a tripling of enforcement efforts could “make a dent” in their respective cities’ prostitution problems, and individual cities’ crusades against prostitution in the 1970s supported this assertion.
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Before Saddam Hussein’s removal from power in 2003, convicted prostitutes could be beheaded in Iraq. Even in this extreme “tough on crime” climate, poor men could still procure affordable prostitutes.
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(9) Prostitution is illegal everywhere but “freaky” places like the Netherlands—
Countries where prostitution is legal include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, and Turkey. In these countries, prostitutes are able to organize and advocate for their rights. Durbar, a sex worker collective in India, has over 65,000 members.
The United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is a 1979 treaty that upholds “the right to a free choice of profession and employment.”
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The United Nations’ CEDAW committee has determined that this human right includes voluntary prostitution.
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The United States is the only democracy not to have signed CEDAW.
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Prostitution is not the only sexual behavior that is criminalized. All states criminalize sexual intercourse with minors. The oldest age of consent in America is eighteen. In most states the age of consent is age fifteen or sixteen, however, there can still be vague morality statutes that apply until age eighteen.
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Public nudity is also illegal in most of the United States. In 2010 Missouri made it a crime for adults to be naked even in strip clubs where only consenting adults are present. The United States Supreme Court has stated that this is not a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression because “Public nudity is the evil the state seeks to prevent . . .”
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1.
For a fundamentalist Christian diagram showing how sexual immorality leads to “crime, drugs, murder, suicide, riots, truancy, violence, poverty, litigiousness, and economic weakness,” then “social collapse,” see Daniel Heimbach,
True Sexual Morality
(2004), p. 38.
2.
“The comprehensive safe-sex education message ignores basic human nature—that when given the option between two alternatives, some people will choose the worst alternative.” Ret.
SexRespect.com
, 17 Sep. 2010.
3.
Steven Gold and Ruth Gold, “Gender Differences in First Sexual Fantasies,”
J. Sex Educ. Ther
., 1991, 17, pp. 207–216.
4.
Most of the remaining children learned from peers or siblings. Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Catanese, and Kathleen Vohs, “Is There a Gender Difference in Strength of Sex Drive?”
Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev
., 2001, 5(3), p. 255.
5.
“. . . the sexual revolution has proved to be a disaster for American society.” Ret.
SexRespect.com
, 17 Sep. 2010.
6.
Stephanie Coontz,
The Way We Never Were
(1992), p. 202.
7.
The average age of first teen intercourse is 17.7 versus 15.8 in America. Linda Berne and Barbara Huberman, “European Approaches to Adolescent Sexual Behavior,” Advocates for Youth, 1999, p. 5.
8.
The birthrate was 6.9 per one thousand women aged 15–19 versus 54.4. Planned Parenthood, “White Paper: Adolescent Sexuality,” Jan. 2001.