Still Futzing W/ Computers

Still dealing with the aftermath of the disk crash. I don't have a personal computer set up for myself yet.

More T-shirt philosophy:

Goddess of bossy underlings, Normality!
What murders are committed in thy name!
—W. H. Auden

T-shirt Philosophy

I had a hard disk crash today. I wasn't backing up that computer because it didn't have anything important on it. Of course, now that the crash has occured, I'm realizing how much stuff crept into that hard disk that should have been backed up. The work I was doing for the new blog, for example.

I'm not sure how long it will be until I post again. Just to post something, here's some random T-shirt philosophy.

1) Criminalizing work is violence against humans.

2) Sex work—because it's illegal to pay for play.

3) Supporting families, paying taxes, selling ass.

4) Johns pay for their own fantasies. Prostitutes pay for abolitionists' fantasies.

5) Spitzer was right! A naked prostitute is better than a career in politics!

6) Sex work—helping women stay independent since 1,257,305 BC.

7) Strippers—support your right to bare charms!

8) A man is not a plan, but twenty male clients and a web site is a good start.

9) Condom-free means H-I-V, but well protected gets your joint connected.

Client #9 Is...

Client #9 is

1) The masculine answer to Chanel #5. Gives men the aura of the populist crusader, protecting the common people from Wall Street crime and prostitution rings. For the steamroller in your life.

2) A great name for a punk rock band. With songs like "How much to skull fuck you" and "I'm too broke to buy blow jobs", these drinking class heros have built a loyal following among horny, angry, immature young men.

3) The last of nine contestants on the TV game show "Who Wants To Be A John", in which married middle-aged men compete for the affections of pretty young women by asking for unprotected sex.

4) What Miss Moneypenny called Agent 007 behind his back.

Foreign Language Sex (work news)

I'm working on some blog posts about the expected criminalization of sex purchases in Norway. I'm reading a bunch of old articles from Aftenposten and Verdens Gang for background information.

I've been reading Isabella Lund's blog. Maybe "reading" isn't the right word. My Swedish sucks, so I've been doing a lot of staring at words and wondering what they might mean. I understand enough to get the impression that she has interesting things to say, but I'm missing a lot.

That led me to start wondering about a volunteer sex work foreign news service. If you have competence in a language other than English, pick one information source and do a short summary whenever something appears in that source. Translating entire articles probably isn't a good idea, since it probably violates the author's copyright. Also, that much translation is a pain in the ass and may lead to burnout. But a brief synopsis along with a couple of translated quotes under the Fair Use principle would allow those of us who don't speak that language to keep up with that particular information source.

I'm thinking about tracking Aftenposten during the lead up to the sex purchase ban, which will take place in January 2009 if the law is passed as expected. I think Lund's blog would make a good project, since it's written by a Swedish sex worker and reports on relevant news in Scandinavia. If other people take on similar projects in other languages, we'd need a central place to post notices whenever we do a new synopsis. Or Amanda Brooks may want to post the notices with her News Bits posts on the SWOP-East blog. I haven't talked to anyone about this. I'm just throwing it up on the blog to see if I get any response.

Norwegian Crown Princess Visits Prostitutes, Ticks Off Feminists

My information comes from this article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. It's interesting because the crown princess's visit ties into the unique ways in which the politics of sex work work themselves out in Norway.

According to the article, dated March 8, 2008, the Norwegian crown princess Mette-Marit visited the Pro Senter in the capital city of Oslo during the center's Open Day. The Pro Senter is a government funded organization that provides services for prostitutes, including help for men and women who want to continue as prostitutes, and help for men and women who want to leave prostitution. In addition, it does social research and provides information on prostitution to anyone who asks for it. In other words, in addition to providing help to prostitutes, it also functions as a de facto advocacy and rights group. During the visit, Mette-Marit saw woman of various nationalities preparing food, listened to music, and viewed some art installations.

This promptly ticked off the feminist group Ottar, which strongly supports banning prostitution. Norway is considering a ban on the purchase of sex, similar to Sweden's, and in fact it appears to be a done deal; it will most likely take effect in 2009. However, it is still being hotly debated. Under the Norwegian constitution, the royal family is required to remain neutral in political debates. While the article doesn't mention Mette-Marit expressing any opinions, and the visit has the general air of a royal gracing a charitable event with her earnestly well-meaning presence, Ottar demanded that the crown princess take part the following day in a yearly march in support of womens' issues; specifically, that she support the criminalization of prostitutes' customers. According to Ottar's spokeswoman, this was necessary to restore balance.

While the crown princess never expressed an opinion on the criminalization issue, she may have been involved in some subtle advocacy. When she and the crown prince met, she was a waitress. Before they met, Mette-Marit lived out of wedlock with another man who is the father of her first son. Prior to her wedding, she admitted to using drugs before meeting the prince, and there are rumors of one or more sex tapes with her and her ex-boyfriend. Since marriage, she's been behaving like the ideal royal wife, but she still seems to identify with and sympathize with people whose life styles are frowned upon. So her visit may have been intended as a tacit show of opposition to the criminalization of sex purchases. I haven't seen any articles that indicated that she met Ottar's demands and showed up for a pro-criminalization event, or otherwise tried to "restore balance".

To 5150

You wrote in a comment here:

...I kept doing it...over and over again...and I'll probably do it sometime in the future. Why? I haven't quite figured that part out yet.

St. Augustine wrote that he committed the same sins over and over. He also said that it was possible that he could commit them again.

When my mind speculates upon its own capabilities, it realizes that it cannot safely trust its own judgment, because its inner workings are generally so obscure that they are only revealed in the light of experience...
— Augustine Confessions X:34

In Zen we say that the eye doesn't see itself. The mind doesn't ask how it perceives, or why it makes certain decisions. Even neuroscientists don't investigate their own minds; they stick their electrodes in other peoples' brains.

People whose lives go well will probably never give any serious thought to this. It's the fuck-ups who notice that we are not what we think we are. With sins and failures comes the realization that we have no special knowledge. Without knowing who or what we are, without possessing wisdom or holiness, we have to allow the mind to operate blindly, trusting the act itself and accepting the consequences.

If a man wishes to be sure of the road he is traveling on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.
— St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul

Not that we have any choice.

Why I'm Right

5150 made a comment on my Spitzer post pointing out that she does things even though she feels guilty about them. That's a pretty significant objection to my claim that Spitzer was buying sex because he didn't feel guilty about it.

As a matter of honesty, I feel obliged to list the reasons why I may be wrong. First, I quoted a statistic that said that twenty percent of the US population doesn't see anything wrong with paying for sex. That statistic came from an Internet poll. There are lots of problems with Internet polls. I won't go into the problems, but polls where the respondents are self-selected are considered less than perfectly reliable. I've seen other polls with similar statistics, but it's been a long time and I don't remember where. And I quoted the statistic from memory, and my memory may be faulty.

Second, I quoted a statistic from interview with a sociologist that said that one fifth to one sixth of the male population has paid for sex. I don't know whether that's the sociologist's opinion, or whether it's backed by research. Even if it's backed by research, an interview is not a peer-reviewed publication. There could be problems with the research.

Third, I made the assumption that the guys who were buying sex where the same ones who didn't feel guilty about it, and the guys that didn't buy sex were the ones that would feel guilty about it. The assumption was based on the fact that the statistics were roughly the same, and the assumption seemed to be carried out in the posts on the Letters From Johns blog, a very small and self-selected sample of johns. And note further that this unproven assumption was also my conclusion, that Spitzer bought sex because he didn't feel guilty about it.

Fourth, even if my data and my assumptions were correct, they were correct for most men. That doesn't mean that every individual acts that way. As 5150 points out, she has done something she felt guilty about. And when I think about it, so have I.

I did point some of this out in the post, but not all of it. One thing I didn't talk about in detail was the importance of which aspect of an act one feels guilty about. I worry about pollution, but I don't feel guilty about the specific act of buying a car, and so I own a car. On the other hand, I do feel guilty about frequent unnecessary use of the car, and so I use public transportation to get to work. My guilt affects the specific acts I feel guilty about, but not associated acts.

However, I'm not perfectly consistent. I feel guilty about driving too fast, because that is a risk to myself and everyone else on the road. But sometimes I drive too fast. Guilt has caused a marked decrease in the amount of speeding I do, but it hasn't eliminated it entirely. 5150 felt guilty about prostitution, but did it anyway. And most of us can think of things that we feel guilty about, but do anyway.

I still believe that there's a good possibility that Spitzer bought sex because he didn't feel guilty about it. But I have to admit that it's far from proven.

The title of this post is Why I'm Right, and I'm obligated to explain why, in spite of everything I've just written, I'm still right. The reason is that it's my blog and I'll be right if I want to. Dammit! ;)

Spitzer Unbound

I've seen a lot of explanations for Spitzer's practice of hiring prostitutes. One explanation I haven't seen anyone propose is that he didn't see anything wrong with it.

Note that I'm not saying that he didn't see anything wrong with hurting his wife, or damaging his career. And he probably accepted conventional public morality, meaning that if everyone said something is wrong, he went along. But saying that he went along with a prohibition doesn't mean that he felt any guilt or revulsion about violating it. It just means that he paid lip service without questioning whether his commitment to the prohibition had any depth.

Periodically, someone will do a survey about sexual morals in the US, and roughly one fifth of the respondants will state that they see nothing wrong with exchanging sex for money. (That figure is from memory.) I read a statement recently from a sociologist who studies sexual behavior who said that only one fifth to one sixth of men in the US have ever bought sex from a prostitute. Assuming that the men who think it's OK to pay for sex are the ones who are paying for it, it appears that men who don't think it's OK to pay for sex don't do it. I don't have any data to confirm that, but it seems reasonable that if one fifth of men think it's OK to pay for sex, and one fifth of men have paid for sex, then the two groups consist mostly of the same men. And if four fifths of men don't think it's OK to pay for sex, and four fifths of men haven't paid for it, then it also seems reasonable to suppose that the two groups are also, roughly, the same.

The web site Letters From Johns contains anonymous descriptions of various mens' experiences with prostitutes. This is hardly a scientific survey, but it does describe how a small group of men responded to the experience of paying for sex. Generally, the men who tried it once and never did it again report feelings of shame, guilt, or revulsion. The men who continued doing it report no negative feelings. These types of feelings convey our values; in other words, they're an expression of our morality. Someone who has no feelings of shame or guilt over paying for sex doesn't see it as immoral. They may pay lip service to the morality of the eighty percent who oppose paying for sex, but it's not part of their own morality and it doesn't drive their behavior.

Spitzer was a repeat customer for the escort agency he dealt with, and newspapers report that he hired prostitutes from other sources. So he apparently had no feelings of revulsion about paying for sex. He may be strongly committed to his own moral principles, but he based his career on being the representative of a public morality with a different set of principles. Even now that he's been forced to resign, he's talking about himself as if the public morality were his own; he talks about failing to meet his own standards. He had the misfortune to be unbound from a publicly accepted moral principle, but to be unable to acknowledge it. He had no feelings of moral guilt to prevent him from revealing his unbound state.

About Blogging

First of all, apologies for not posting. I have regular readers, and when I don't post for a week, they become terribly disappointed. Both of them.

Or maybe they're both figments of my imagination and I have no readers at all. How vain I must be to think that anybody is interested in my opinions. :)

And apologies for not checking and posting comments. Unfortunately, when I'm too busy to post, I'm often busy enough that I forget to check for comments. It's rude of me and I'm very sorry.

I actually have a back log of posts on the subject of bias, but I've been too busy to post material that already written. Yea, that busy.

When I started this blog, I decided that I wasn't going to worry about readership. I know how to set up the blog so that I can track visitors and view readership stats, but I haven't done it because I don't expect to develop a following. I don't write the sort of blog that attracts attention. My posts aren't sexy, and I don't have stories about sex. I don't focus on the bizarre or extreme aspects of sex work. I don't condemn, or try to provoke controversy, or try to show why one group of human beings is inferior or dumber or more hypocritical than another. Or at least, I don't do that most of the time, although I probably slip occasionally. No, I'm just a regular fucking voice of reason, and isn't that boring?

Aside from occasional lapses into sarcasm, I'm more interested in understanding people than judging them. By that, I don't mean that I think I know what it's like to be a sex worker. I have been part of a sector of society different from the one I occupy now as a college educated knowledge worker. I've seen college students visit my previous world for a summer, and leave thinking that they understand it all. Belle de Jour wrote that if you haven't been a prostitute, you have no fucking clue, and I have no reason to think that that doesn't apply to me. As far as the instant empathy that comes from shared experience, I don't have it. So I don't speak for any group of sex workers that I write about.

I have been close to, and had conversations with sex workers and ex-sex workers. Not a lot, but enough to recognize that our similarities far outweigh our differences. I know that certain aspects of sex workers' behavior are singled out for derision, and yet these same behaviors are found in everyone. I know that finding work is not as simple or straightforward as it is portrayed, and that chance and circumstance play a larger role in our careers than we want to believe. If you compared Malissa Farley with the average sex worker, you would probably find that they found their professions in similar ways, and that they engage in similar patterns of thought.

As for me, I'm opinionated, prone to jump to conclusions, and probably hypocritical more often than I realize. I'm always sure that I'm right, even when I haven't taken the trouble to thoroughly study the subject I'm opining on. I've done some study on the subject of sex work, but I'm not an academic expert. I blog in order to talk about the things that I have in common with sex workers, which includes some aspects of human behavior that aren't very pretty. My motivation, and the thing that gives me the strength to be honest about myself, is my religious faith. Being a Buddhist doesn't give me any special insight into humanity, but it does give me a kick in the ass.

So the only thing I have to offer a reader is a fairly normal human being trying to make sense of other human beings. And in the process of doing that, I expose my own weaknesses and stupidities. If that were enough to attract a large readership, we'd all be celebrities, wouldn't we?

Biases; Surveys

I've been reading papers on prostitution again, both papers whose conclusions support criminalization and papers whose conclusions support decriminalization of prostitution. What I've gotten from that is not better arguments for the position I support (decriminalization), but a reminder of some of the ways in which researchers, and the rest of us, bias our data.

Surveys

Surveys are a good way to get biased data. Every one who conducts surveys knows that the answers you get depend on how you word the questions. One way of biasing a survey is to ask questions about an ideal world, and use the answers to support concrete action. For example, many prostitutes don't consider their job ideal. They would prefer to be doing something that paid more, or had more prestige, or was less dangerous. Ask them if they think prostitution should be eliminated, without giving the question any context, and they're very likely to put the question in the context of their own aspirations and say yes. In an ideal world there they would not have to practice prostitution.

However, ask them if they think they should be forced to give up prostitution and take up one of the currently available alternatives, and they would probably say no. In general, they are prostitutes because it is more attractive than any currently available alternative. If they've been forced into prostitution by the patriarchy, it's still better than any of the alternatives the patriarchy is offering. And if they're informed agents exercising free will, as liberal theory claims, then they've chosen prostitution because it's the best choice available.

Ideal world questions are fine if you want to create alternatives for prostitutes that are superior to prostitution. If prostitutes are generally satisfied with their jobs, creating alternatives isn't going to cause a lot of them to leave prostitution. Or if you create the wrong alternatives, prostitutes won't find them attractive enough to make a switch. So if you are creating alternatives, you want to know if prostitutes want alternatives, and what sort of alternatives they want.

However, I don't know of a single debate that hinges on whether to provide prostitutes with alternatives. In every case that I know of, the debate is whether to make prostitutes current jobs easier (decriminalization), or to try to drive prostitutes out of their current jobs without offering an alternative (increase penalties for prostitutes and/or clients). In that situation, ideal world questions produce misleading results. Prostitutes generally don't want to be driven from their current jobs when the job market isn't offering good alternatives. Even if they hate prostitution, they hate the best alternative more.

1 In 5 Children Approached By Online Predators

I lied. So did ABC News when they announced this in 2006. In 2005, Jim Acosta reported on CBS Evening News that "when a child is missing, chances are good it was a convicted sex offender." And that's not true either.

According to an article on the Live Science web site, the real risk to children is not online predators and convicted sex offenders. Most crimes against children are committed by the victim's own family, church clergy, and family friends. And contrary to Acosta's claim, the least likely explanation is a convicted sex offender. More prosaic causes like running away, abduction by a family member, and getting lost are at the top of the list of explanations.

Live Science traces the "1 in 5" statistic to a study done by the DOJ in 2001 that reported that 19% of the children between the ages of 10 and 17 had received an unwanted sexual solicitation. The DOJ defined "sexual solicitation" as a "request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult." This could include one teenager asking another if they were a virgin. When only the sorts of contacts that were a threat to children were counted, the statistic dropped to 3% of teenagers in the age range receiving unwanted contact.

Anti-porn activists link porn to predators and child sexual abuse. Inflated statistics help scare up support. The sad, stubborn truth behind the sexual predator hysteria is that the greatest threat to children comes from people they know.

The following is quoted from an article in the English newspaper News Of The World.

How can he see himself as a politician and visit brothels at the same time?

While the newspaper is English, reporting and editing have apparently been outsourced to a parallel universe where English politicians never visit brothels.

The politician, Alan Boyce, was an unsuccessful candidate for Parliament. He visited the Big Sister brothel in Prague, where clients get free sex in exchange for allowing their activities to be videotaped and broadcast. So Boyce visited a brothel in the most publicly visible way possible. Politicians that honest are rare, and like Boyce, unelected.

Enlightenment 101

Two recent blog posts.

A stripper starts her career:
Evil Tart

And a middle aged pornographer almost ends his career:
Mike South

It happens, and we know we're not in control. After it's over, we tell ourselves stories about the experience that put us back in control. But it, the thing that happened, is completely us. There's no part of ourselves separate from the experience to be in control. When you're riding a tiger, is there some part of you that isn't busy trying to hang on?

People talk about being one with reality, but nobody seeks out the true experience.

Mirror

The following is a quote from an interview with Susannah Breslin at the clusterflock blog. She's talking about her unsuccessful attempts to sell the idea of a non-fiction book on porn.

My favorite rejection letter came from a well-known editor at a major publishing house who passed on it by stating that he would have to leave this project to those editors whose values were less influenced by the radical Protestant movements of the 16th and 17th centuries.

When he says "values", he's not talking about his personal morals, although these values may serve that purpose also. He's talking about the criteria he uses in his role as gatekeeper for books. These values help determine what information becomes publicly available.

I wish everybody were this honest.

Later in the interview, Breslin engages in some honesty of her own.

Interviewer: "Is there a unifying goal for the work you do?"
Breslin: "...I'm interested in exploring the heart of darkness in our culture, which can be seen by entering the American sex trade."

To me, the "American sex trade" is a mirror. I can look in the mirror and hold up my desires, my biases, my fears, the blender full of social messages, religious formulas, and acquired classification systems that constitutes my conscious thought; I can hold up an entire society, as I know it, and the mirror faithfully and honestly reflects it back.

Of course, I could find this mirror anywhere. I could look into the illegal drug trade and find my own face looking back. The fact that I've chosen sex work as a mirror says something about me, just as Breslin's choice of porn as her heart of darkness says something about her, and the editor's decision to identify his gatekeeper role with radical Protestantism says something about him. But in this case, all this honesty is a glimpse of something reflected in the mirror of sex work.

News Bits Priestess Amanda Subverts Religious Piety

From the SWOP East News Bits:

A personal comment about what I see in my daily Google Alerts; it's really strange to me how many religious dblogs concern themselves with prostitution or use the word prostitution in their blog posts. Just sayin...

It's because our thoughts are so pure.

Really Amanda, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

All Work Is Like A Bad Simile

About a month ago, Audacia Ray made a post that ended with the sentence "And so help me, if anyone says that all work is like prostitution, I will scream."

I've been seeing this statement or statements like it, and if I see another I won't scream, but I will wince. The underlying argument is that everyone is a prostitute because everyone has to exchange something for money. Using the same logic, all workers are computer programmers because computer programmers exchange something for money. And all workers are lawyers for the same reason.

It's easy to see why some prostitutes make the argument that all work is like prostitution. Prostitution carries a stigma, and some prostitutes want to overcome that stigma by pointing out the similarities between prostitution and other work. That attempt is understandable but bound to fail because everyone recognizes the fallacy it's based on. People who aren't sex workers don't sell sexual services, and that difference is what creates the stigma. Pointing out the similarities won't make the difference go away or cause people to stop stigmatizing it.

When the "all work is prostitution" statement is made by non-prostitutes, it's generally less benign. It's usually made by someone who believes that some aspect of their job is morally dubious, and the "prostitution" statement is an attempt to claim that everyone's work is immoral in the same way. But instead of removing the moral stigma of sex work, this reinforces it by using sex work as an archetype of immorality. All in all, the "all work is prostitution" statement works against prostitutes.

However, there are ways in which all jobs are like prostitution. First and most obviously, all jobs involve the exchange of work for money. Secondly, workers, both prostitutes and non-prostitutes, wouldn't be doing their jobs if they weren't being paid. And all workers choose their jobs by comparing jobs that are available to them and ranking them based on pay, flexibility, prestige, security, and any of a large number of other characteristics. Or sometimes they pick a job because someone offers it to them when they need a job. So while different prostitutes choose their job for different reasons and through different processes, the reasons and possesses are the same as those that lead other people to choose other jobs. People opposed to prostitution argue that prostitutes are forced into prostitution, or that they choose prostitution because the lack the correct political consciousness, or because they are immoral; in other words, they try to explain prostitution by identifying what makes prostitutes different from other people. But the evidence indicates that people become prostitutes because they are like everyone else. Normal, ordinary decision making causes different people to choose different jobs, one of which is prostitution.

Prostitution is unlike other jobs for the same reasons that any job is unlike other jobs. In addition, prostitution has a socially determined stigma. Even if you don't agree that prostitution should be stigmatized, you have to acknowledge that the stigma has important consequences, and the stigma is therefore an important difference. However, prostitution also has similarities to other types of jobs, and those similarities stem from the fact that prostitutes are drawn from the same population as other professions. It's a fact that prostitution is unlike other jobs. It's a delusion that prostitutes are unlike other humans.

Driving With Your Cell Phone Is Like Selling Sex

I was driving yesterday, and came to a stop sign. Three cars, including mine, approached the intersection at roughly the same time from three different directions. I arrived second. I and the driver who arrived third waited for the driver who arrived first to go through the intersection. And waited. The first driver was talking on his cell phone, looking back and forth at myself and the other driver, and not moving. Eventually I got tired of waiting and put my car in gear, starting through the intersection. The first driver, still on his cell phone, decided to proceed at that point, cutting me off.

I made a post recently in which I talked about the Prisoner's Dilemma game in relation to strippers who sell sexual services. The Prisoner's Dilemma game represents any situation where people need to cooperate in order to protect some resource or to create something good, but it is to the advantage of each individual to cheat and not cooperate. It's widely understood that talking on a cell phone while driving makes driving less safe, not just for yourself but also for the people you could potentially have an accident with. But a lot of people talk on the cell phone while driving anyway, relying on other drivers who aren't using cell phones to compensate for the cell phone user's mistakes. As an example, the driver I encountered yesterday relied on me to brake and avoid hitting him when he drove into the intersection after I was already in it. In the language of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, he was counting on me to cooperate while he cheated.

The truth is that I also sometimes "cheat" in Prisoner's Dilemma situations. Drivers cooperate to keep the roads safe by driving safely and respecting traffic laws, but sometimes when I'm in a hurry my driving becomes less safe. I may cut in front of people and force them to brake, or I may rush through a stop sign. I try not to do this, but sometimes the short term, personal advantage dominates my thinking. And of course, the more I drive that way, the more likely I am to have an accident, even though the odds of having an accident each time I cheat are low.

We all think of ourselves as cooperators, but most of us cheat from time to time. People vary in the amount of cheating they do. Some people have specific areas of their lives where they never cheat; for example, I don't cheat on my taxes, although I sometimes pay them late. But as with my occasional unsafe driving, it's rare that someone never cheats. We almost always have some area in our lives where we don't think it's that important. Someone who never cheated would probably be considered obsessive.

As I mentioned in the previous post, strippers need a business that is licensed as a strip club in order to work. Most strippers cooperate to protect the strip club license. Those that don't cooperate may have one of several reasons. First, they may not expect to work at the club very long. In that case, selling sexual services in addition to stripping maximizes their short term income in a situation where the long term doesn't exist.

Something similar may happen if stripping is a part time job. A part time stripper may not value her job if she has another source of income, or she may feel that a second, part time job isn't worth while unless she can increase her earnings through prostitution.

If a stripper is bad at her job, she may need to sell sexual services in order to make stripping worth while. Or she may feel entitled to sell sexual services as a way to make up the income difference between herself and more capable strippers.

She may believe that all strippers sell sexual services.

It may have occurred to her that one stripper selling sexual services one time doesn't pose much risk to a strip club, but it may not have occurred to her that one or more strippers doing it regularly increase the risk a lot. So she may feel that she's not harming anyone.

She may be a prostitute who finds a strip club convenient for getting business.

And there are probably reasons I haven't thought of.

We all use this type of reasoning when we cheat. We do things in short term situations that we wouldn't do if we had to live with the consequences over the long term. Those of us who have worked two jobs know that we tend to make demands of our second job that we wouldn't make of our first job. Cheating is more likely to occur among people who are poor students than people who are good students, poor athletes are more likely to cheat than good ones, and so on in any situation where people can be ranked according to how well they perform.

In some cases, the decisions of strippers who sell sexual services may be perfectly rational. In other cases, they may be rational only from a short term view point, but we all sometimes fail to take the long term into account. In any case, the thought processes that lead them to sell sexual services are the same processes that we all use in various areas of our daily lives. Stripper/prostitutes are engaging in ordinary, human thinking. This ordinary thinking leads them to sell sexual services, just as it sometimes leads me to drive too fast. For most of us, having safe roads is much more important that regulating the behavior of strippers in strip clubs. Using the same logic as stripper/prostitutes, we do things that are a risk to ourselves and others.

And we wouldn't be human if we didn't judge stripper/prostitutes for taking foolish risks.

Valentine's Day Thievery

The Thieves

Lovers in the act dispense
With such meum-tuum sense
As might warningly reveal
What they must not pick or steal,
And their nostrum is to say:
'I and you are both away.'

After, when they disentwine
You from me and yours from mine,
Neither can be certain who
Was that I whose mine was you.
To the act again they go
More completely not to know.

Theft is theft and raid is raid
Though reciprocally made.
Lovers, the conclusion is
Doubled sighs and jealousies
In a single heart that grieves
For lost honour among thieves.

—Robert Graves

The point of Buddhism is this lost honor; the loss of "you" and "I". It occurs during orgasm, but it occurs many other times. There is no activity or exercise that leads to giving up "self". It occurs naturally and spontaneously, without any contribution from the fantasy we call "myself". You can't force it to happen, but it happens all the time.

"Zen" means meditation, and Zen Buddhists spend a lot of time meditating, but there's nothing special about meditation. Picking one activity and calling it spiritual and elevating it above other activities is a bit silly. After you have sex, you get up and you go about your life, and everything involves "you" and "I". The same thing happens after meditation. You're not more selfless now that you've meditated, or more enlightened.

A large number of Buddhists practice tantra. A very small proportion of Tantric Buddhists engage in tantric sexual practices. It's not very common, but it gets a lot of attention. A lot of Buddhists frown on it and call it "dark" tantra, but it's like meditation; there's nothing wrong with it as long as you don't imagine that it's more spiritual than washing the dishes. Go to the act without knowing who is doing it. Lose your honor, whether you are having sex, meditating, or washing the dishes. Don't try to advance spiritually, or gain insight, or progress to a higher level. These are all forms of honor, baggage carried around by the self. Instead of worrying about what you're going to get from the act, just focus on the act.

Lap dances, computer programming, scrubbing the toilet; they're all the same. Whatever you are doing right now is the gateway to liberation.

William & Mary President Resigns

The president of William & Mary College resigned today after controversy over his decision to allow a sex worker art show to take place on campus, according to the Washington Post.

Gene R. Nichol, whose resignation took effect immediately, sent a letter yesterday to the campus community saying that he had been the victim of a relentless and vicious campaign and that he had been offered money to not characterize his departure as a fight over ideology.

Here's the full article at the Washington Post website.

The Real Belle de Jour

There's something odd about the controversy surrounding Belle de Jour. Ordinarily, a woman who's had sex with a lot of men tries to deny it, and people attack her by calling her a whore. In this case, the lady is loudly insisting that she's a whore, and people attack her by insisting that she isn't. And the truly fascinating part of this is that the prudes who are attacking her don't think she deserves to be a whore. True whores suffer for their whoredom, which serves as proof of their virtue. Since Belle hasn't suffered, she's not virtuous enough to be a whore. Either she's an outright fraud, or a whore manqué.

It's fairly common for celebrities to have their identities defined for them by members of the public. Us and People magazines and the tabloids make their money by telling their readers who the subjects of their articles are. They spin fantasies that their readers buy because they are based on a few facts and involve real people.

Belle gets the same treatment from a different class of professionals. The people who are spinning tabloid fantasies about her don't work for tabloids. They are respected feminists and journalists who work for top rank newspapers. And the fantasies that they've created don't merely tell us who she is, but whether or not she actually exists. As Ermine Saner summarized it in The Guardian,

There was much speculation that she had been created by a writer or a collection of writers; that she didn't genuinely sell sex; that she wasn't even female. Her experiences, said some people, including sex workers, didn't ring true.

Since Belle has succeeded in keeping her real name hidden, no one can talk to people she's known or worked with and confirm her stories. The only evidence is what Belle has chosen to say about herself. So let's look at that briefly.

First of all, while Belle may have drawn a lot of attention, she's not the first upmarket escort to write about her experiences. And the other escorts who have written about it have used their names and exposed themselves publicly, making it possible for anyone who has the means and the will to do some sleuthing and look for evidence of fraud. So far, there's no evidence that their stories are fiction. Furthermore, other escorts tell a similar story; they did it for the money and it was a job. Sometimes they enjoyed it and sometimes they didn't, but they weren't traumatized or seriously abused. And from personal conversations, I can say that prostitutes who don't want to publish their stories or expose themselves publicly say similar things. This is all anecdotal evidence, and it doesn't tell us what proportion of prostitutes feel that their work is just another form of paid labor, but it does tell us that there are prostitutes who feel this way.

It's this general story, sex work as a job, that offends so many people. Nina Hartley has experienced the same thing over the course of her career in porn. No one can deny that she exists or that she made porn; the evidence exists in too many videos. But while the facts are undeniable, her detractors deny her experience of those facts. They deny that a woman can experience sex work as anything other than degrading, and therefore Hartley's description of her experiences is inauthentic. If Hartley had published her experiences anonymously, her feminist opponents would have claimed that she was an invention. They would have claimed that no woman could have written Hartley's story and she could only be the product of a male imagination.

So while Belle remains anonymous, and her story remains uncomfirmable, the story itself matches stories that can be confirmed. The general outline of her story isn't inherently unbelievable or unrealistic.

In addition to attacks on the general story, Belle's detractors claim that the details are unrealistic. The Guardian brought in an ex-madame to say that Belle's clients weren't the sort of men that the madame had seen when she was in the business. The ex-madame had apparently specialized in lonely older men, which was clearly not the demographic that Belle appealed to. Belle's niche seems to have been younger men in search of a good time, as opposed to older men seeking companionship. Younger men are known to hire prostitutes, so while the details of Belle's clients may not have matched the ex-madame's experience, they do match what is known about one segment of prostitutes' clientele.

One columnist at The Guardian went out and found a prostitute whose experiences were very different from Belle's, and used this as evidence that Belle was lying. The basic line of argument was "my prostitute trumps your prostitute." As I've pointed out, there are other published accounts of prostitution that back up Belle's general story, just as there are other accounts that paint a picture different from Belle's. One story doesn't trump or cancel out the other. Different people have different experiences.

There are people who take the tabloid approach to Belle. They accept the facts as she presents them, but try to define her identity by giving the facts their own spin. For example, Belle likes mild BDSM. It's not particularly harmful, or dangerous, and it provides some extra stimulation that some people get off on. For some people, this is Belle's dark side. That's a value judgment. Everyone's entitled to their value judgments, and their entitled to publish them, but doing so establishes their own identity, not the identity of the person being judged. Calling Belle's kinks dark tells us that someone is frightened by them, but it doesn't give us any negative information about the kinks themselves. It doesn't tell us that they cause physical harm, or psychological trauma, or early senility, or an increase in the crime rate. It does tell us how some people perceive sexual practices different from their own. Attributing this perceived darkness to Belle is a form of fantasizing.

And some people criticize Belle's writings and associated TV show for glamorizing prostitution. The glamorization consists of not depicting the dangerous lives of streetwalkers and similar prostitutes, and of not telling about escorts who got into escorting, discovered it wasn't what they wanted to do, and want to get out. The situation would be similar if Karl Lagerfield wrote his memoirs of his career in the fashion business and was criticized for not devoting the book to the plight of ill paid and ill treated Guatemalan seamstresses. It's true that there are clothing factories where workers receive very poor, even abusive treatment. It's also true that some people have tried to break into high end fashion design and have failed, emerging bankrupt and shaken by the experience. However, if I bought a book with the expectation of reading about Lagerfield, I would be disappointed if it turned out to be about everyone else. The memoirs of successful people do tend to glamorize their professions by leaving out the stories of people who failed, but that's the nature of autobiography; it isn't about other people.

I don't know anything about Belle de Jour that everyone one else doesn't know. In spite of the title of this post, I don't claim to know who the real Belle de Jour is. And I'm willing to admit that I'm probably just as gullible as the London Times, who hired a supposed expert in writing style to analyze Belle's writing and published the results on the front page. (The expert's claim that the writer Sarah Champion was Belle turned out to be false.) I could be taken in by someone who researched prostitution and wrote a fictional account of her life as a prostitute. The point is not that my knowledge or intellect are superior to the people who cast doubt on Belle's story. The point is that we have no evidence that she isn't who she says she is, or that she didn't do what she said she did. A sustained attack made without evidence doesn't tell us anything about the person being attacked; we need evidence for that. But an unsupported attack is evidence that tells us something about the people making the attack.

Complexity in Comics

Amanda Brooks has discovered that getting involved with sex worker activists makes her more aware of diversity. I get my consciousness raised by the enlightened and ennobling world of comic strips.

The comic We the Robots reminds us that since there are different types of people, there must be different types of hookers to service those people.

Most of us view strippers as a stereotype. But now, thanks to Something Positive, we can choose between two stereotypes.
Stereotype A
Stereotype B

And it's only fair to let a stripper deliver the ultimate put down.

You can tell I'm all progressive n stuff, because I have three stripper stereotypes instead of just one or two. There's stereotypes A and B from the two links above, plus everybody's all purpose stereotype, the X with the heart of gold, where X is one of hooker, stripper, or corporate general counsel. My life is much better with three stereotypes, because I don't have to work as hard at pigeonholing strippers or corporate lawyers. No matter who they are, I can fit them into a predetermined category and make assumptions about them.

Facetiousness aside, we all deal in stereotypes and assumptions. It's a way of dealing with the fact that everyone is complicated, and there's only twenty four hours in a day, and most of them have to be spent doing something other than trying to understand a world full of complicated people. The problem is not so much that we use stereotypes as a time saving shortcut, but that we end up mistaking the stereotypes for reality.

Saving Miners from Mining

Coal mining, like prostitution, is a dangerous profession. The southwest part of the state I live in, Virginia, is dependent on coal mining for jobs. The area is underdeveloped, and a man who is willing the crawl around all day and get dirty can make $18 an hour, which is pretty good wages in that part of the state. The mining jobs vary in safety, depending on whether the employer is a large corporation and is careful to avoid dangerous mining practices, or a small local operator that gets the coal out by any means possible. As an example, when a large corporation mines a seam of coal, they leave pillars of coal in the caverns they create to support the roof. This prevents cave ins. When the seam is mined out, i.e. when the large corporation has gotten out all the coal it can safely extract, it stops mining the seam and a local operator takes over with his own crew of men. The local operator makes his money by extracting all the coal the large corporation couldn't safely extract, including the columns of coal that support the mine roof. Usually the operator is able to get his men out safely, but not always. Sometimes the roof collapses unexpectedly, trapping and killing miners.

Southwest Virginia also has an ongoing problem with narcotic addiction. We don't usually associate rural areas with drug abuse, but southwest Virginia was hard hit by oxycodone addiction when that became a national problem. When the Feds managed to clean it up, other narcotics took the place of oxycodone. There's even a black market for methadone, due to the large number of people who are in methadone maintenance programs.

Drug addiction affects all parts of society in southwest Virginia, not just the coal miners. However, there's a high rate of addiction among miners. Miners often suffer serious injuries on the job that are accompanied by debilitating pain. They are prescribed strong narcotics to control the pain. When you have large numbers of people taking powerful narcotics, even for legitimate medical reasons, it's inevitable that some of them will become addicted. So miners are exposed to narcotics along with everyone else, but they get additional exposure because of their injuries. Miners who are in a methadone maintenance program have to take jobs with the more dangerous local operators, because the large corporations administer drug tests.

I'm going to engage in a little counterfactual fantasy. Lets imagine that our society decides to treat coal mining the same way it treats prostitution.

First of all, criminalization won't end the demand for coal. A large portion of the electricity generated in the US is generated in coal firing plants. It's also used in iron and steal production and a lot of other types of manufacturing. Like the demand for sex, society's demand for coal isn't going to end any time soon. Just as there's a large illegal market for sexual services, there's going to be a large illegal market for coal.

The guys that were mining coal are going to need jobs. They were making $18/hr or better, and they've got kids to feed and truck payments to make. The available legal jobs start at minimum wage and, if they're really lucky, might go up as high as $10/hr.

The coal seams are there, the demand for coal is there, and the guys who know how to mine coal need jobs, so a black market for coal develops pretty quickly. Since the industry is now illegal, and since it generates a lot of money, it attracts other forms of crime. For example, miners are known to carry money, so they are frequently robbed. Miners make good robbery targets because they can't complain to the police.

Miners also become targets for violent crime, including serial murders. They now have to sneak into mines at night, making them vulnerable to attacks by armed criminals. Frequently, when a miner disappears, no one is aware of it except immediate family, who are afraid to go to the police. When miners or their families do complain about violence, they are told it is their own fault, or that damaging a miner's body isn't really a crime because miners allow their bodies to be violated by coal mining. Or that all miners end up injured anyway, so it doesn't matter if someone injures them.

Ten percent of the coal that is mined by illegal miners passes into the hands of individual police officers running small scale protection rackets. The miners are subject to intense police harassment unless they supply the officers with coal.

Periodically, local police departments round up known miners. If the police officers catch miners with safety equipment, for example hard hats, they damage the equipment is such a way as to make it useless. There's no reason for doing this, other than the police officers' entertainment.

While it's illegal to hire miners to work in your mine, mine owners are rarely arrested or prosecuted. Mine owners are generally wealthy, have good lawyers, and are well connected. While operating a mine is considered immoral, mine operators aren't seen as having the moral taint associated with mining. Someone who mines coal, even if they do it only once, is sullied for life.

Religious leaders condemn coal mining as immoral, while prominent figures in the men's movement declare that all mining is violence against men. When miners aren't treated as criminals, they are treated as mentally incompetent children. Their decision to mine coal for a living is attributed to lack of education and drug addiction. Programs are set up to help miners escape mining, without creating alternative jobs that pay as much as mining. Consequently, the recidivism rate is very high, which reinforces the contemptuous attitudes held by police officers and social workers.

While some serious academic research on coal mining occurs, researchers have trouble getting grant money, and their research is ignored. On the other hand, anyone willing to make sensational claims about human trafficking, forced labor, or drug use or childhood trauma as a cause of mining, gets immediate attention from the media and legislators. The assumption shared by all popular theories is that the problems miners face are inherent in mining, rather than being a consequence of the circumstances under which miners work. Since a small proportion of the dangers miners face can be attributed to mining itself, the argument is that all problems faced by miners are inherent in mining. Serious researchers have trouble attracting attention or funding because their research fails to support this assumption.

As the evidence of harm to miners and the increase in crime mounts, various organizations put pressure on legislatures to increase the criminal penalties for coal mining. New laws are passed that equate mining with human trafficking, make it illegal for miners to congregate in places where they can be found and hired by mine operators, and allow police to seize the assets of suspected miners.

Since miners no longer have health care benefits, miners who are addicted to narcotics buy narcotics from drug dealers, leading to a rapid increase in deaths from overdoses. Increased injuries lead to increased self-medication for pain, further raising addiction rates.

Sweden takes an alternate approach, decriminalizing mining but making it illegal to buy coal. This has the same effect as criminalizing mining; it drives mining underground and makes it more dangerous. However, officials in the Swedish government present the laws as a success to rights organizations and other governments by misrepresenting the data gathered to evaluate the new laws, For example, officials claim a reduction in human trafficking when Swedish government data actually show an increase in trafficking. Due to this and other misrepresentations, other governments start proposing similar laws in an effort to emulate Sweden's "success".

Miner's rights organizations argue that the crimes associated with mining are the result of the criminalization of mining, and not inherently associated with mining. They argue that the best way to protect miners is to treat mining as a normal profession, decriminalizing it, giving minors police protection, supplying adequate health care, and enforcing safety standards. They are ignored.

Prostitute Mortality & Homicide Rates

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industry with the highest rate of job related fatalities is a miscellaneous grouping called Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, & Hunting, with 29.6 fatalities per 100,000 workers in 2006. A very close second is Mining, with 27.8 fatalities per 100,000 workers in 2006. Taxi driving, a sub-industry not broken out in the BLS's statistics, has been estimated by other researchers to have a homicide rate of 29 per 100,000 taxi drivers per year. Taxi drivers carry large sums of cash in their cars and are easy to rob, which makes them the frequent target of armed robbers and makes their job very dangerous.

The recent observance of the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers got me wondering about how dangerous it really is to be a prostitute. It's impossible to accurately calculate job related fatalities among prostitutes for the US, for obvious reasons. As a proxy for an accurate estimate, I used a study done using police and health department records for Colorado Springs, Colorado, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2004. The records cover the period from 1967 to 1999. The rate of death among active prostitutes due to homicide was estimated to be 229 per 100,000 prostitutes per year. Job related mortality due to all causes for prostitutes was estimated to be 459 per 100,000 prostitutes per year. However, the authors of the paper said the following about their research: "It is likely that we underestimated mortality in our current analysis."

The authors cited a study done in Nairobi, Kenya, which estimated the mortality rate for prostitutes at 310 per 100,000, and another study done in London, England, with 401 deaths per 100,000 prostitutes. Three different Canadian data sets yield homicide mortality rates of 181, 112 - 225, and 127 per 100,000. A study of prostitute mortality in London, published in Sexually Transmitted Infections in 2006, estimates the overall mortality rate at 480 per 100,000 prostitutes per year. So the estimates for the homicide rates and the overall mortality rates in the US are in line with estimates from elsewhere in the world.

A complication is that the mortality estimates for prostitution is based only on data for visible prostitution: streetwalkers and other prostitutes who are known the the police and health authorities. The majority of prostitutes operate out of sight of public officials. These are prostitutes who work under safer conditions; escorts, for example. Given the fact that we have no empirical information on which to base an estimate of the total number of prostitutes, or the mortality rates for all prostitutes, there are only three things we can say with reasonable confidence.

First, that the visible prostitution sector has a very high job related mortality rate; 229 per 100,000 per year for homicide, and 459 per 100,000 per year for all causes. Very roughly, that's sixteen times the mortality rate for the two most dangerous industries tracked by the BLS.

Secondly, the mortality rates for the hidden prostitution sector are unknown.

And thirdly, while prostitutes who work in the hidden sector are less exposed to criminal violence, they are still more exposed than women in the general population. Prostitutes in general can't go to the police for protection because what they do is illegal. And prostitutes in the hidden sector spend time alone with clients they don't know, or don't know very well. That's less of a risk for escorts than it is for streetwalkers because escorts can screen customers and think about the information for a while before they make an irrevocable decision. Streetwalkers have to make instantaneous decisions with almost no information about the customer. But the risk for escorts still exists, and the real rates of both homocide and non-lethal violent attacks are almost certainly higher for prostitutes in the hidden sector than for women in the general population. We just have no way of estimating how much higher.

However, there's another problem with an overall estimate for prostitution mortality rates. The difference between mortality rates for visible and hidden prostitution is probably so high that, even if statistics for the hidden sector were available, averaging the rates across all types of prostitution would produce statistics that were too high for the hidden sector, and much too low for the visible sector. In other words, average mortality rates for all prostitutes wouldn't represent the actual mortality rates for any specific group of prostitutes, or the risk faced by any individual prostitute. Given the wide variety of conditions under which different groups of prostitutes work, meaningful statistics have to target specific groups.

Where to give a planet an enema

The Mercury Messenger flyby produced this photograph of a geological feature that the scientists at NASA have named the Spider. It doesn't look anything like a spider, but I guess government funded science can't name a geological formation the Anus.

How long before satirical news shows start announcing that the Spider is being renamed after <insert name of politician here>?

The German Invasion

I've been reading the blogs of two porn performers who came to the US from Germany: Annette Schwarz and Katja Kassin. Most of Schwarz's posts flog videos that she's performed in. The posts that describe her personal life tell stories about slutty behavior; exactly the sort of thing to sell her as someone whose videos porn fans would want to see. When she's not selling videos, she's generating interest in herself as a performer. I don't know how long she'll keep it up, but so far she's been pretty persistent. I suspect that she's getting advice on how to advance her career and what to blog. If so, then she's smart enough to take advice and disciplined enough to make a consistent effort. I have no idea if anything she posts about herself is true or not. Porn is all about the illusion, but you can create an illusion by telling an edited version of the truth, so her stories about herself may actually be true. Whether they're true or not, they sound like scenes from a gonzo video; e.g. anal sex in a restaurant bathroom.

Katja Kassin's been around for a while. She has a fan base and an income-generating website, and continues to perform in videos for other producers. Her blog is a marketing device, but in a more subtle way. She's clearly selling sex; you can't miss the photographs of her tits and ass, or the words "I take cock in every hole." But the content of her posts is rather different. Her descriptions of her personal life don't have any sexy stories, and her descriptions of her work are rather business-like. Where Annette Schwartz tells you how much she enjoyed having sex with another performer, Kassin tells you how nice they were. Against Schwartz's personae of sexually reckless adventuress, Kassin presents herself as a responsible professional. She talks about the risk of STDs, money management, career development, the logistics of feature dancing in various parts of the US, and other unsexy topics. Schwartz praises physical attractiveness; Kassin praises friendliness and competence.

Porn performers are independent business people, and both Schwartz and Kassin appear to be pretty smart. Whatever they write in their blogs is calculated to increase their income. But what Schwartz thinks will earn her more money is an image of unrestrained sexual activity and a live-for-the-moment personality. Kassin wants to persuade us that she's thoughtful, intelligent, and someone who plans and carries out long range projects. Schwartz's approach of building an exaggerated reputation as a heedless nymphomaniac is stereotypical porn marketing directed at the stereotypical porn fan. Kassin's approach is to make herself seem vulnerable by appealing to our understanding, by showing us that she wants to been seen as a normal human being. Interestingly, this seems to be working for her.

Response to Avalon

I was going to add a comment to the last post, responding to Avalon's comments, but I realized that that my response was long enough to require its own post.

Avalon wrote:

I didn't consider myself to be a "sex worker" for a long time because I never had sex with anyone. But over the years, I see how stripping is grouped in the same category.

The line between sex worker and "civilian" is pretty arbitrary at times. A fashion model is basically a clothes horse; she's paid to present clothes to potential buyers with a certain amount of flair and stylishness. But if a model becomes popular and is hired by Sports Illustrated to appear in the swimsuit issue, she's not selling clothes. The men who buy the magazine aren't going to buy the bikinis. The models are selling the opportunity to look at their bodies, which is part of what strippers sell. So a model who isn't hugely successful is a civilian, but a model who becomes well known, is a role model for young girls, and is able to earn massive amounts of money through endorsements and merchandising deals, is a part time sex worker. That is, she's a sex worker if strippers are sex workers. If supermodels aren't sex workers, then neither are strippers.

There's a range of types of models who sell the opportunity to look at their bodies. Porn models sell photographs and videos of themselves having sex. Erotic models make their entire bodies available for view, but omit the sex acts. Glamor models pose without clothes, but their poses aren't as revealing as the poses of erotic models. And swimsuit models pose provocatively, but cover their breasts (usually) and crotches. Where do you draw the line between sex worker and civilian? Which group is not earning money from sexual attraction?

There's some movement back and forth between stripping, escorting, and porn. That doesn't automatically make stripping sex work. Most strippers don't move to escorting or porn, and it wouldn't make sense to classify stripping as sex work just because some strippers do make the move. Some fashion models also move to escorting or porn, or supplement their modeling income with escorting or porn, and it seems to happen about as often as it happens with strippers, but we usually don't classify fashion modeling as sex work.

The rules seems to be that if it involves displaying your body and its disreputable (e.g. stripping), it's sex work. If it involves displaying your body and it's not disreputable (e.g. bikini calendars), it's not sex work. If it's disreputable, everyone will talk about the link to escorting and porn. If it's not disreputable, no one will talk about the link.

As I said, it's pretty arbitrary.

On the topic of religion, Avalon wrote:

I don't know much about Buddhism, being raised by a Christian preacher. Religions fascinate me though, they are designed to make us live better lives and be better people...

We have similar backgrounds. I was raised as a Presbyterian. My father wasn't a preacher, but I was required to attend both church service and Sunday school every single Sunday for the first eighteen years of my life. When I was ten, my father made me take notes on the sermons and then give a summary and analysis afterwards. Ugh.

The paradox of Christianity is that it is intended to make us lead better lives without making us better people. Christian doctrine holds that we are sinful by nature, and that doesn't change when we are saved. Whether we're saved by grace alone or by a combination of grace and works, the underlying person is inherently sinful, and therefore salvation doesn't make us better, although it saves us from the consequences of sin.

Buddhism teaches that there's no soul, or inherent nature, and therefore there's nothing that can be better or worse. The idea of becoming a better (or worse) person is a delusion. But "right action" is still important, because our actions creates the conditions that lead to liberation or that block the path to liberation.

Both teachings are hard to live with. Most of us want to believe that better behavior makes us better people. It's hard to accept that superiority is what religion is trying to save us from.

The Community Of Saints & Whores

On a popular Buddhist discussion forum, someone made a post asking about looking at porn. One of the first responses simply pointed out that the Buddha taught kindness. That's not an unreasonable thought. If you think of someone with kindness, you are in a sense making a community with that person, offering the other person a chance to benefit from your interaction. Even if it's just a thought, rather than an actual interaction, it still requires recognizing the other person's humanity.

Another response to the original question was that you should be grateful to anyone who performs a service for you. Porn performers offer to include you as a viewer in an activity that is usually performed without viewers. If that is what you like, and you take advantage of the offer, why not be grateful? Accepting an offer with gratitude means acknowledging the other person's kindness rather than treating them as an object to be manipulated.

These two responses were drowned out by a flood of posts containing fantasies about the neuroses of porn performers and denunciations of the people who exploit them, along with the usual infantilizing assumptions about porn performers' motivations and their inability to decide what's in their own best interest.

As with any other religion, Buddhists are drawn from the general population and have the same feelings of shame towards sex and demeaning assumptions about sex workers as the general population. Their attitudes are not determined by their religion, but by their society. Gratitude and kindness are certainly part of Buddhism, and it would be nice to be able to say that Buddhists practice what they preach, but we don't, at least not any more than any other group of people.

Christians tend to get the blame for this type of hypocrisy, but that's just because they're the biggest religious group in this country. Over all, they're probably no better or worse than any other group. And even among sex workers, you'll find condemnation of other sex workers' choices, belittling of other sex workers as people, ingratitude, and unkindness.

If I condemn sex workers for being sex workers, I think and act the same way they do. If they condemn each other, their behavior is the same as any religious community. There's nothing special about either people who are devoutly religious or people who earn a living from sex. We're all the same.

The Odds Of Getting Caught

There's a problem that goes by a number of different names, depending on where it's found: Prisoner's Dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commoms, the Fishery Problem, etc. The problem occurs whenever a number of different people share something that can be used up, but none of them own it or control it. As an example, the blue crabs of the Chesapeake Bay were once plentiful. Since no one owned them, anyone could catch and sell them, and everyone did. Now there aren't enough blue crabs left to provide watermen with a living. Pollution also played a role, but the biggest problem was overfishing. Since no one owned the crabs, no one had any incentive to limit their catch to sustainable levels. Only the states of Virgina and Maryland had the power to limit catches, and they were under constant pressure from the watermen to keep the catch limits higher than sustainable levels.

The problem occurs whenever it is to everyone's advantage to protect a resource by not abusing it, but it is to each individuals advantage to cheat. In the case of blue crabs, it is to the watermens' advantage if they all cooperate to protect the blue crab, but it is to each individual's advantage if they cheat and catch as many crabs as possible while everyone else follows the rules. The result is that everyone cheats, and everyone is harmed.

Something similar happens in strip clubs. A strip club owns something valuable; a license to operate as a strip club. The club gets to keep the license as long as it's employees don't break any laws. The violations most likely to cause a license to be revoked are liquor laws and prostitution laws. And the people who might violate the prostitution laws are the strippers. Unlike Chesapeake watermen, club managers can enforce cooperation by firing cheaters. But enforcement is never completely effective; a minority of strippers continue to sell sex.

For a prostitute, working in a strip club has advantages. She doesn't have to worry about the sort of violence that only occurs when there are no witnesses. She doesn't have to advertise; the club does the advertising for her. The risk of arrest is reduced; if a customer has bought a few dances, the odds of him being an on-duty policeman are much lower. And while she's waiting for someone to buy her sexual services, she can make money from dances.

For a girl who don't want to admit that she's a prostitute, being a stripper provides her with an odd sort of alibi; she's not really a prostitute, she's just a stripper who does extras. If a guy buys a dance, she upsells him to the VIP room. If he's in the VIP room, she upsells him to sex. Or she uses sex as an inducement to upsell him to the VIP room. Or better yet, he begs her to let the him pay for sex. She's just doing it because the customers pressure her into it.

So for some strippers, the advantages of cheating outweigh the advantages of cooperation. A single violation doesn't increase the club's risk of losing its license very much. Their only concern is the risk of getting caught by a manager. They're pretty certain that they're not going to get caught, and they probably wouldn't if they only did it once.

Let's say a stripper/prostitute provides sexual services during one out of every twenty encounters with a paying customer, or 5% of the time. She's directly observed in the VIP room by a manager four times out of one hundred encounters, or 4% of the time. She has a 4% chance of getting caught each time she has sex with a customer, which is the same as saying that she has a 96% chance of not getting caught. Using a binomial distribution, the odds of getting caught rise to 19% if she has sex five times over 100 encounters, and to 56% if she has sex twenty times over 400 encounters. In other words, the more times she has sex with a customers, the more likely she is to get caught, which seems pretty obvious. But each individual time she has sex with a customer, the odds of getting caught are only 4%. So each time a customer offers $100 for sex, she's weighing that $100 against a 4% chance of getting caught, which is the same thing as a 96% chance of not getting caught. $100 and a 96% probability of not getting caught sounds like pretty good odds. If she's someone who lives moment to moment, or if she's under pressure to earn a lot of money quickly, she may not make the conceptual leap from a one time safe bet to an aggregate risk that rises as the number of violations increases.

Assuming that it takes a while for managers to catch and fire the strippers who sell sex (the cheaters), I'm curious about what effect they have on the strippers who don't sell sex (the cooperators). My guess is that while the cheaters attract customers the cooperators would rather not deal with, they also help the cooperators earn more money. If a customer comes into a club with the expectation of buying sex, he may know that some of the strippers are prostitutes, but he doesn't know which ones. To get a stripper to talk to him, he has to pay for her time. So he ends up spending money on a few cooperators before he finds a cheater (prostitute). Once he figures out who the cheaters are, he no longer has to spend money on cooperators, but the turnover in strip clubs tends to be high, so he still has to spend money on new strippers before he figures out who the cooperators and cheaters are. And many customers never seem to learn; they keep trying to buy sex from strippers who have repeatedly refused them in the past.

The thing I don't understand is why someone would go to a strip club hoping to hire a prostitute. Hiring an escort seems like a lot less work. Some people will tell you that the combination of alcohol and naked girls is enough to explain anything, but some other possible explanations are:

• It's a two step process: they go to the strip club for the strippers, but once they're there, they get aroused and start wanting a prostitute.
• They're using the strip club as a way of fooling themselves into believing that they're not really trying to buy prostitutes.
• What they really want is an old fashioned brothel, where men could get entertainment, alcohol, conversation, and prostitutes all at the same place. In the US, brothels are illegal but strip clubs come close, offering strippers instead of prostitutes, so they go to strip clubs and act as though they were in a brothel.
• They just can't learn.

Female-only Buses in Mexico City

From Yahoo News:

Buses for females only in Mexico City.

No comment needed.

Not Blogging

I haven't been blogging because I've been reconfiguring the LAN I run at home. Several of us share an Internet connection, with a maximum of eight computers connected to the Internet. I've been routing everything through a UNIX box that I was also using as my personal computer. That's not a good idea, since malfunctioning user software may require a reboot, and then everyone wants to know why they've got no Internet connection, or why they can't get files off the file server. Reboots are also significantly slowed by the user software, so a reboot may last five minutes.

So the router, the imap server, and the file servers (for UNIX, Windows, and classic Mac) are going to get their own UNIX box. I'm deinstalling all the user software and moving my home directories to a new computer, which will get turned off when I'm not using it.

And at some point, I really should get myself a Windows box running again. I haven't been using Windows for over two years. Well, not at home. At work I write programs that run under Windows. So there's something to be said for having a Windows system at home. But I'll probably replace the Windows shell with some sort of Blackbox derivative. On my personal UNIX box I'm using Blackbox with the grey style. What does it look like? It's grey. "Grey" totally describes it. God, I miss black and white television. ;)

Consent

Integrated Internet Whoredom has a couple of posts about the problem of coercion and consent in erotic photography. The posts are here and here.

When a photographer and a model agree to do a shoot, either it's a standard type of shoot in which the details don't have to be discussed, or the model and photographer discuss the shoot ahead of time. This gives the model time to think over the shoot and decide whether she's comfortable with it. Once she arrives for the shoot, she knows what to expect and she's given her informed consent.

It's the model's ability to evaluate the shoot ahead of time that makes her consent meaningful. When we have to make complex decisions on the spur of the moment, we frequently make bad decisions. This is generally recognized in any situation where you have to make a decision that has important consequences. A doctor doesn't expect you to make a decision on elective surgery in five minutes. No one expects you to sign a contract on a house that you saw for the first time fifteen minutes ago. Car salesmen will often try to pressure you into making a quick decision, but car salesmen have a reputation for unethical behavior.

Models usually want the shoot to go well, and are willing to take direction from the photographer. During the shoot, they make spur of the moment decisions about their responses to the photographer's requests. Some of these spur of the moment decisions may be bad decisions, but it doesn't matter because the important decisions about the overall nature of the shoot have already been made. Under these circumstances, a bad decision may result in one or two bad pictures, but the consequences aren't likely to be any worse than that.

Supposing the photographer wants to do something that he knows the model isn't likely to agree to? One way to get around the barrier of consent is to force the model to make important decisions on the spur of the moment. This greatly increases the chances that she will make a bad decision, i.e. a decision that she wouldn't have made if she had had a chance to think it over. This can be particularly effective if the importance of the decision isn't immediately obvious. For example, a photographer may ask a model to do something that puts her in a position in which it becomes difficult to say no to further requests, or puts her in a position in which she feels afraid to refuse further requests. If she is in a position where it is difficult to leave, the photographer can do things that would otherwise have caused her to end the shoot by leaving.

The problem with these tactics is that they don't result in consent. Informed consent requires that the model has had time to think over any important decisions. Free consent requires that she made her decisions without fear or coercion. Even if a model doesn't raise strong objections, there's still no consent. Any time someone has to make an important decision without time to think it over, their consent is forced and not free.

Some photographers value spontaneity. They want to make requests that the model isn't expecting so that they can get the model's unmediated response. This may be fine if it is discussed with the model ahead of time, and if there are limits to the spontaneity and the model is told what those limits are. The photographer has to remember that if a request is unexpected, any response is spontaneous, including a refusal. And since the circumstances limit the model's ability to give free, informed consent, the model should have the chance to look over the photographs made during the shoot and request that some photographs be destroyed. If she doesn't have several days ahead of time to decide if she's comfortable with the shoot, she should have several days afterward. Consent requires time to think the shoot over.

Gratitude

If you compare sex workers and physicians, there's a lot of similarities. Both groups perform their jobs primarily to earn money. Physicians go through a very difficult, expensive, extended training, and most of them do it because they expect to make a lot of money. Sex workers are ostracized, but continue as sex workers mostly because they can make more money as sex workers than they can in other jobs.

Both sex workers and physicians can be carriers for disease, and individual sex workers and physicians sometimes are. But both groups are highly aware of disease and educated about it, and for the most part both take precautions to avoid getting diseases or spreading them to other people.

Both groups frequently do things for their clients that could be considered harmful. Prostitutes have sex with married people. Doctors over prescribe antibiotics, contributing to the development of drug-resistant diseases. Both groups are known to lie or hide the truth from their clients. Both groups have a reputation for drug abuse, in both cases because they work in environments where drugs are readily available. Both groups talk about their clients behind their backs in disrespectful ways.

In other words, physicians and sex workers are normal human beings.

In spite of physicians' failings, we're grateful for the service they provide. Physicians' clients are a mixed lot; their behavior is sometimes pretty awful. In spite of that, we don't blame them for their clients, or think they're stupid for putting up with bad behavior, or treat them with disrespect because anyone can buy their services. In fact, we praise them for making their services available to everyone, and providing the same level of care to everyone.

Sex workers are average people with normal failings. Their clients run the gamut from lowlife to nice guy. Necessity forces sex workers to provide the same quality of service to all their clients. Within limits, they provide services to anyone who can pay.

Physicians benefit society in obvious ways. The evidence supports the argument that sex work lowers violent sex crimes. When societies legalize pornography, there seems to be a drop in rapes. Similarly, a researcher compared a number of factors across several different countries, and concluded that there would be 25% less rape in the US if prostitution were legalized.

Like physicians, sex workers are imperfect human beings who sell a form of kindness in order to earn money. Like physicians, their services are available to anyone, including people they may not personally like. And like physicians, sex workers' kindness, however mercenary, makes the world a little better.

Shouldn't we be grateful for that?