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.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
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,
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, February 1, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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>?
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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.
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.
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