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?