Over on the Twitter, retired call-girl Maggie McNeill is urging some of us bloggers to join her campaign to make every Friday the Thirteenth a day to speak up for the rights sex workers. She think's it's especially important to get support from outside the sex work community:

A number of advocates are working to respond to the lies, propaganda and misinformation wherever we find them, but we can only do so much and we're often outnumbered by the brainwashed zombie slaves of the "trafficking" witch-hunters.  Also, we're often accused of distorting facts to make ourselves look good, and no matter how assiduously we work to present a balanced view this is a natural and credible accusation against anyone who advocates for some issue which directly concerns her. That's why allies are so important; it's much harder for the prohibitionists to shout down people who don't have a dog in the fight, but merely support prostitutes' rights on moral grounds.

That makes sense, and although I don't have much time today, I have posted on the subject before, including a two-part series about how a deceptive Illinois law to protect prostitutes from exploitation will actually make things worse for them and how to really protect prostitutes. I also wrote a series about how the supposedly feminist idea of prosecuting the customers discriminates against men, confuses prostitution with slavery, and shows contempt for women's choices.

The problem is that I'm a middle-aged male, so when I stand up for the right of attractive young women to perform sex acts for money, oppponents can dismiss my arguments as self-serving. I think it's much more effective when sex workers speak up for themselves. To that end, I strongly recommend Maggie's blog The Honest Courtesan. It's straightforward and well-written, full of carefully researched arguments and (if you're into that sort of thing) salacious details.

(Maggie McNeill is also an occasional contributor to Nobody's Business.)

It's probably a sign that there's something wrong with me, but somehow I find this video charming. It's composed entirely of just-before-things-get-naughty scenes from porno movies. I guess that knowing what happens next produces a certain tension with the innocent music and images.

Warning: In and of itself, it's safe for work, but technically these are scenes of porn stars in pornographic movies. Also, younger and more sensitive viewers may find the '80's hair styles disturbing.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

This is the third and final post in a series of responses (starting here) to an opinion piece by Melissa Farley and Norma Ramos arguing that the customers of prostitutes are sexual predators and should be punished as such. The article made me angry, and I'm trying to explain why.

The equation of slavery and prostitution appears several places in the piece I'm responding to and in other writings by Melissa Farley and others at her website Prostitution Research and Education. For example, here's a summary of an article by Janice Raymond:

This article discusses how prostitution is exempted from other kinds of violence and human rights violations, how prostitution is legitimized by distinctions between "forced" and "consenting" prostitution.

Maybe I've spent too much time among the libertarians, but reading that excerpt literally makes me sick and angry. I can feel my gut churning. With that one sentence, Farley is casually dismissing the most fundamental concept of libertarian philosophy: The distinction between choice and coercion.

This is the crux of why I hate Farley and Ramos' article: They want us to believe there is no difference between letting someone do something and forcing them to do that same thing. It's a disturbing bit of moral blindness that leads to public policy madness. If we blithely dismiss the difference between freedom and force, there's no limit to the insane implications.

For example, since road construction is a dangerous job, and since many construction workers lack a college education, are we to conclude that construction work is immoral---"roads built on the blood of dead workers" and so on---and that making a distinction between "forced" and "consenting" construction work is a way of excusing reckless disregard for the welfare of men?

Or how about the men who serve in our army? That's a very dangerous job, and it's well known that soldiers are disproportionately minorities and poor people. Is it a lie then to say we have a "volunteer" army, since clearly no normal person would "volunteer" to be shot at?

Thinking about military service should remind us of one more evil consequence of confusing choice and coercion: We can make that mistake in reverse. That's why fools like Congressman Charles Rangel argue in favor of military conscription on the grounds that letting minorities and poor people volunteer for the military in disproportionate numbers is somehow unfair. As if forcing people into the military could ever be more moral than letting them volunteer.

I don't know how people think that way, because it seems so simple to me: Unless someone is mentally incompetent or a child, you can't harm them by increasing their choices or help them by taking choices away.

By ignoring the difference between force and freedom, there's no limit to what Farley and Ramos could define as a crime, simply because they don't like other people's life choices.

I assume they sincerely want to help women live better lives, and they believe they can do so by preventing women from choosing prostitution. However, by ignoring the difference between sex slavery and voluntary sex work, Farley and Ramos are disrespecting the choices these women made. They are showing utter contempt for the way some women choose to live their lives.

In this, Farley and Ramos have a lot of company.

Many people in the world want to "protect" women from their own choices. For years, women were not allowed to choose to be police officers or fire fighters...or doctors or lawyers. For years they were not allowed to choose to fight in our nation's military forces. In Saudi Arabia, women aren't allowed to choose to drive cars, or leave home on their own, or show their faces to the world. 

Where do you draw the line? I doubt that Farley and Ramos want to go as far as the Saudis to protect feminine virtue, but what exactly do they want to stop women from doing? If they don't want woman to trade sexual intercourse for money, then how do they feel about massage parlors where the women only give hand jobs? How about strip clubs? Are they bad too? Does it make a difference if it's lap dancing or air dancing? If stripping is too much, how about dancers who wear bikinis? How about Hooters waitresses?

If it's the money that matters, what about nude beaches? What if it's a private nude beach that allows women in for free but charges men? I assume Farley and Ramos oppose pornography, but how about artistic photography of nude women? What if it's not so artistic? Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler? Or is Hustler going too far? If I'm photographing a nude model just for fun, am I exploiting her? Or am I only exploiting her if I "buy" her by offering her money to pose?

That would be a strange definition of exploitation---you're only exploiting someone if you pay them---but then I gather Farley and Ramos are okay with women having sex, just not getting paid for it. What if a man buys a woman a nice gift after sex? What if she insists on it? What if he leaves her money to buy her own gift?

I suspect Farley and Ramos would accuse me of posing all these questions not to get answers but just to muddy the waters and draw attention away from the more important issue of protecting women.

I guess there's some truth to that, because I don't really need to know how Farley and Ramos would answer all my questions. You see, I already have my own answers, which are far more respectful to woman than what Farley and Ramos have written. It's easy to have all the answers, because it's the same answer to every question: Let the woman decide.

Yesterday, I posted Part 1 of my response to an opinion piece by Melissa Farley and Norma Ramos arguing that Eliot Spitzer and other men who hire prostitutes should be punished as criminals. The article made me angry, and I'm trying to explain why.

To start with, although Farley and Ramos want leniency for prostitutes, they don't want legalized prostitution. They regard the prostitutes' customers as sexual predators, and they want them punished.

[T]he Justice Department has sent a clear message that it is acceptable to buy and sell women for sex; this in the face of growing evidence that prostitution is emotionally and physically harmful to those used in it, and that prostitution and sex trafficking are inextricably linked--prostitution is the endpoint of all sex trafficking.

There are two logical errors in that paragraph. First, the assertion that "prostitution is the endpoint of all sex trafficking" is a tautology. It's simply true by definition: If the trafficking didn't end in prostitution, it wouldn't be sex trafficking.

The second error is the implication that the converse is true, that all prostitution is sex trafficking. I know of no reason to believe this to be true.

Farley and Ramos would disagree, and it is here that they show not only their hatred for men, but also their disrespect for women.

Prostitution is not a victimless crime. The DOJ policy is out of step with volumes of evidence that prostitution arises out of adverse social conditions such as being sexually abused in childhood, poverty, racism, lack of educational and economic opportunities, disability, and a culture that increasingly commodifies girls.

This is a blatant rhetorical bait-and-switch. Farley and Ramos say that prostitutes are victims of prostitution, but everything they list---sexual abuse, poverty, racism, lack of opportunity, disability---is something that may lead women to prostitution, not something caused by it.

By way of example, consider another unpleasant job women do: Cleaning toilets on one of those late-night office cleaning crews. That's not a job I'd want. Should we therefore make it a crime to hire women to clean toilets in an office building because many cleaning ladies are driven to it by poverty, lack of opportunity, or an inability to get better jobs? Or would that just deprive a poor woman of a job?

For many women, sex work isn't their problem, it's a solution to their problem, and the problem is almost always the same: Not enough money. Taking away their customers takes away their money.

Farley and Ramos want us to believe that punishing prostitutes' customers is good for prostitutes, and to that end they cite a 1999 change in Swedish law that penalizes customers but not prostitutes. It has apparently reduced prostitution by 40 percent.

That sounds like a law that works, but I wonder how the prostitutes feel about a 40 percent loss of revenue. I wonder how they feel about a law that drives their work even further underground. Farley and Ramos don't seem to care, as long as the men are punished.

Even when the pimps are alleged to be running a high-end, high-class call-girl service, they still sell women for sexual use and still take their cut. And those in it, like Ashley Dupré--a young woman whom Mr. Spitzer bought for sex--more often than not, have entered prostitution as a result of long-term abuse, neglect, and economic desperation; a situation that worsens disproportionately for women as the economy declines.

I'm struck by the choice of words that conflates prostitution with chattle slavery. Pimps "sell woman" and Ashley Dupré is "a young woman...Spitzer bought." That's nonsense. Spitzer didn't buy Dupré, he paid her to perform a service. A messy, intimate service that might be phsiologically and emotionally hard on Dupre, to be sure, but it was still just something she did for him, and then she left.

(I realize that men can threaten women with violence to gain control over them and "own" them, but that's not what happened here. That's not how most prostitution works in this country.)

Ms. Dupré...met up with the pimps and johns at Emperor's Club VIP in New York, a prostitution ring that sometimes moved women from the United States to Europe on what they called "travel dates" rather than human trafficking.

The twisting of language in this piece is apalling. In all the accounts I've read, Dupré approached the escort services looking for work. And when you read the phrase "human trafficking," is the first image that comes to your mind one of adult women getting on airplanes in America and flying to Europe?

There is real slavery in the world, and some of those slaves are forced into prostitution. But that's not what happened to Ashley Dupré, and it's not what happens to most women in the business.

[Part 3 is up]

In response to the news that former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer would not be charged with any crimes crime for hiring prostitutes, Newsweek magazine published an opinion piece by Melissa Farley and Norma Ramos arguing that this was "a stunning betrayal of the public trust," and coming out in favor of cracking down more heavily on men who hire prostitutes.

The DOJ also chose not to charge Mr. Spitzer for transporting a woman across state lines for the purpose of prostitution--a violation of the Mann Act. Congress might be interested to learn that its laws are being effectively nullified by DOJ policy.

Actually, I think of Congress might be very relieved to learn that the Mann Act is being ignored. I'm sure Spitzer wasn't the first elected official ever to bring a prostitute to Washington, D.C. He probably wasn't even the first one that week.

As much as I've enjoyed the downfall of that self-righteous jerk, I don't think Spitzer deserved to go to jail for any of this. More than that, the artidle by Farley and Ramos made me angry---surprisingly angry---and it took a while to figure out why.

Part of the reason for my anger it is their willingness to bend all logic and reason to achieve their goal of villifying men who pay for sex. For example:

Prosecutorial discretion cannot be based on gender bias, nor can it eliminate whole classes of people that the law was designed to protect.

That's exactly backward.

In every other form of vice, enforcement priorities are directed at the people most involved in perpetuating the crime. Police target drug dealers instead of drug users because one drug dealer can sell to 50 drug users. Similarly, police target bookies before gamblers and dogfight operators before dogfight spectators. The idea is to concentrate on the people who commit the crimes as a way of life, rather than the people who commit them once in a while.

(Actually, although police are after the bigger players in theory, and are usually willing to "trade up" to get them, as a practical matter it's often easier to catch the little guys, especially when it comes to drugs. But that's a different problem.)

When it comes to prostitution, Farley and Ramos want to turn these priorities on their head and charge the customers of prostitutes rather than the prostitutes, and the reason for it is because the prostitutes are women, and their customers are men. It is Farley and Ramos who advocate a gender bias.

Update: Permalink and Comments fixed...I hope.

[Part 2 is up.]