Here's my seasonal public shout-out to the awesome people who bought me awesome gifts from my Amazon wishlist, including books written by two of my favorite Twitterfolk: @pennjillette and @evgenymorozov.  Thanks to JV, HD, MM, SB, and BJ!  (Please include your email in the "gift comments" field so I can send you a thank you email.)

My cool new books:

* The Art of War by Sun Tzu
* The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays by EP Thompson
* The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov
* God, No!: Signs You May Already Be An Atheist and Other Magical Tales by Penn Jillette
* Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About a Changing Industry edited by Annie Oakley
* The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future by Cynthia Eller

I turn 28 this month, so as always, I shamelessly encourage birthday/Festivus gifts from my wishlist on Amazon.  Click on the menu to sort by priority, as some items are higher on my list than others.  I'm currently salivating pretty heavily over the $85 Breaking Bad shoes, hint hint.

(PS: If you buy any of these books through my links, a portion of the price goes to SWAAY.)

"...I got a job as a 'featured extra' in a brothel scene for the pilot of a TV show starring an Australian Dane Cook equivalent.  Over several takes with each camera angle, I had to walk by as he tells my character, 'Sorry you knew your uncle too well!'  The entire crew went wild the first time they heard it.  Everyone in the room was all, 'BRA-VO!' like he was the Neil Armstrong of sex worker incest jokes.  The general public—the same people who think Sasha Grey shouldn’t be allowed to read Dog Breath to kids—are probably going to think it's totally hilarious and 'edgy.'  I didn't laugh once at any of the lines in two days of shooting.  Comedy is my passion, yet I felt like an old schoolmarm.  I was one of the only people who couldn’t see the emperor’s new clothes...

The opposite of bro jokes isn't a humorless PC academia bubble; it's good jokes."

-- Kat, in The Morning After Podcast on titsandsass.com  (Also see her personal blog at katstories.tumblr.com)

In a similar vein: Danny Wylde recently wrote about serious gross creepiness he experienced while working in a mainstream entertainment environment.

If there's one thing the Occupy movement has taught us, it's that lots of people have a very poor grasp of logic.  For example, the most common rebuttal to my disagreement with Occupy is something like, "Oh, so you love fascist police states?" or "Why do you hate the poor?"  This one is called false dichotomy - creating two fake "sides" and painting your opponent as having only two choices.  (Another example: people who claim you're either a feminist or a misogynist, and that there is no other option.)

To help my readers better understand common fallacies of logic so they can be better debaters and thinkers, I figured I should illustrate them using arguments we commonly field as sex workers.  Hat tip to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe and Michael C. Labossiere at Nizkor.

Argument from ignorance: claiming that something must be true because it can't be proved to be false.

"There are no good studies on how many child sex slaves are being tortured by pimps and traffickers in our city, so we can only assume it must be in the tens of thousands."

Appeal to belief/popularity: arguing that if a belief is common, it must be true.

"Everyone knows that the watching porn turns men into rapists and abusers."

Related: Appeal to common practice.

"Okay, maybe our numbers aren't perfect on how many men rape their wives after seeing pornography, but sociology isn't a perfect science."

Argument from personal incredulity: if someone can't understand an issue, it is impossible for anyone to understand it.

"I would find it extremely degrading and oppressive to show a stranger my body for money, therefor you couldn't possibly not feel degraded and oppressed by your work."

Begging the question: asking a fake question that can only result in answers that make your opponent look bad.

"Have you always believed that raping people for money is acceptable?"

Argument from authority: a supposed authority believes something, so it must be true.

"Many professional feminists with PhDs believe that all sex work is sexual slavery, so that must be the correct position."

Purposefully confusing correlation and causation: two factors occurring at the same time does not mean that one factor is the cause of the other.

"Ted Bundy admitted that he loved pornography, therefor, pornography caused him to murder people."

Guilt by association: discounting a position because it is has something in common with beliefs held by "bad" people.

"Sexual predators and pimps wish there were fewer laws regulating the sex industry, why are you on their side?"

Red herring: introduction of an irrelevant issue to distract from topic at hand.

"Sure, you say you're in favor of adults having the right to perform in porn if they choose, but what about the helpless children who are raped in abused in the production of child pornography?"

False continuum: claimed inability to see any difference between two concepts, such as consent and non-consent.

"When money is involved, there's no such thing as true consent, so no one is actually consenting to sex work and it's all rape."

Over generalization: declaring a position based on very little or select information.

"The only prostitutes I've ever noticed in my city are the drug addicts turning tricks on skid row, so all sex workers must be transient drug addicts."

Appeal to consequences of a belief: something must be true because a person doesn't like what it would mean if it weren't.

"Decriminalizing prostitution must be bad for society, because I would hate to live in a world where sexuality is accepted as a commodity."

False dichotomy: reducing a complex issue to only two black-and-white positions.

"You say you're against shutting down Backpage.com.  How can you think it's acceptable for pimps to be trafficking in child sex slaves?"

No true Scotsman: dismissing evidence you don't like as not real.

"Sex workers are oppressed and beaten by their pimps on the street, so you must not be a real sex worker.  You are not representative."

Appeal to emotion: making an argument based on feelings.

"Would you want your own little girl being sold by a pimp on the internet?  Unless we stop the traffickers, your family could be next!"

Non-sequitur: an argument that doesn't make sense at all.

"This strip club must be shut down because here is a school several blocks away."

Misleading vividness: appealing to an especially dramatic example.

"A 13-year-old girl was rescued by police after she was kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to sexually service hundreds of men to earn money for her captor, who regularly raped and beat her.  Therefor, any scenario that involves selling sex is inherently exploitative."

Slippery slope: claiming if you accept idea A, you must also accept idea B.

"If we decriminalize sex work and accept the practice as normal, then we'll have to do so with other forms of sexual deviance, like pedophilia and bestiality."

Straw man: rebutting an imaginary position that is easier to debate than the real issue.

"These pro-trafficking activists think that sexual slavery is a choice, but we believe in human rights and human dignity."

Middle ground: the belief that the truth must be somewhere in the middle.

"Some people say that watching adult pornography causes men to rape children, and some people say that's not true at all, so the truth is obviously that watching porn only causes men to rape children half of the time."

Tautology: restating your premise as its own evidence.

"Sex work is degrading and wrong because getting paid to have sex is immoral."

Ad hominem: attack the person, not their argument.

"And what would you know about anything?  You're just some stupid whore."

The moving goalpost: continuing to change the way you qualify proof or correctness as an opponent chips away at your argument.

"Okay, so there may not be 300,000 child sex slaves in America like we've been claiming in all of our fundraising materials, but even if there are only 3, it's still a massive problem that warrants just as many donations and grants."

Firstly, I apologize for the lack of uppity pro-ho materials on my blog lately.  I haven't been as motivated to explain the same things over and over, as I have been defending porn and sex work for almost a decade now.  (Fuck, I am so old now.)  The thing is, there's no such thing as a new argument against sex work, although there are more and more studies suggesting things like the benefits of porn consumption, or that "secondary effects" of adult businesses are a myth, or that it's just not true that millions of underage sex workers are trafficked little girls being exploited and controlled by pimps.  It's like debating the Bible - there will never be any new arguments in favor of creationism, but there's always more evidence in favor of evolution - once you know how to rebut all their arguments, all you can do is repeat yourself, which can get boring.

Now, moving onto my annoyance of the season: the left's current love affair with the utopian notion of "free" college for everyone.  Perhaps the most commonly articulated concrete demand from Occupy protests has been for "free" college for everyone.  (The most common vague demand is "end corruption" but since that's an abstract concept with no definition or proposed solution, I can't really be expected to discuss it seriously.)

How on earth could anyone be against "free" college?  If I'm against "free" college for everyone, it must mean I hate learning and knowledge and poor people, right?  Lefty people recoil in horror like I'm some kind of hard-right Tea Partier, but above fiscal conservatism, my beliefs about education are actually due to my deep and flagrant disregard for the presumed authority and superiority of academia.

I am against "free" college because most people don't need college

While everyone would prefer to have a high-paying job and be a millionaire astronaut rock star brain surgeon, there will always be a huge demand for less-skilled labor, even as we lose some of those jobs to overseas factories and technology.  According to the list of the largest employment sectors from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, only one in the top ten (nursing) requires college education.  The others - retail sales, cashiers, office clerks, food service, waiting tables, customer service, janitors, laborers, and secretaries aren't exactly careers that require a lot of advanced training.  Saying that everyone should have a degree so everyone can have a high paying job is like saying everyone should be rich - it sounds fun, but in reality, it's an untenable concept.  Not everyone can have a job that pays $50+ an hour, and even if we did pay that to janitors and sales clerks, the market would adjust and make everything that much more expensive, negating the value of that higher pay.  Everyone likes to believe that they are special and gifted and brilliant and deserve college, but in actuality, most people are average (that's why it's called "average"), plenty of people are below-average, and all those people still need jobs.

And after all, if everyone has a degree, no one has a degree.

I am against "free" college because college degrees has been devalued by the very people who insist on the importance of "free" college

Thanks to the expansion of liberal arts education and the efforts of largely left-leaning academia, degrees don't mean much now.  College degrees in my dad's era meant you must have some serious training in objectively useful stuff like science, engineering, medicine, or business, but now, anyone with a student loan or trust fund can fritter away their time earning a degree in knitting or feminism or contemplating what it means to exist.  The British have an awesome phrase for this: a "Mickey Mouse degree," meaning a degree in some silly subject that has no use in the real world.

The other day, I was curious what it takes to get a degree in women's studies or feminism, since such people largely seem to be nitwits with no comprehension of things like statistics or biology.  Look at this list of fluff required for bachelor's degree program at the University of Washington.  Anyone who has at least a C-average can be a women's studies graduate, no pesky math classes required beyond the single "Quantitative and Symbolic Reasoning" class required of all UW graduates, in which they only need to earn a grade of .7, which is a D-.  And that's not even a math requirement - it can be met by taking astronomy.  So remember, when you see someone with a feminism/gender studies degree from UW (and presumably other colleges), you're looking at someone whose most strenuous degree requirement was getting a D- in a freshman-level science class.  And then they wonder why they can't find high-paying jobs.  (It must be The Patriarchy purposefully oppressing them, right?)

I am against "free" college because I don't support the idea that college is the only or best way to learn about every topic

I find it strange that the left, which in the past has embraced "unschooling," free schools, and learning skills on a peer-to-peer basis, in recent years has decided the only and best way to learn about anything is at college.  By rallying for "free" college, the left's argument hinges on the idea that college is the only road to success and knowledge, which is just plain false.  Most of my friends are not college graduates, and that includes the number of people I know in the non-ho world who make over $100k a year.  The thing I've seen, across almost every single field, is that you don't need a degree if you're a smart and reasonably tenacious person.  To me, the only reason to pay for an official education is if you want to go into a field which requires a degree, like medicine or engineering.

I am someone who has managed to teach myself - a school dropout - how to do everything I need to do to run a small business.  (And yes, there's a lot more to what I do than just taking off my clothes.)  I don't think the ability to learn things on your own is so difficult that plenty of other people couldn't tap into if they tried.  I know so many other self-starters who have built successful careers and small businesses on their own, without needing degrees, as well as many who regret wasting money on college because they think their degree was largely useless.  I'm a believer in skill-sharing and learning directly from each other in a cooperative and hands-on environment, which I consider a much more "radical" perspective than the current left's mindless brainboner for all things academia.  (In this vein, I am happy to back Kio Stark's new book on Kickstarter, Don't Go Back to School: A handbook for learning anything.  A Yale dropout and teacher at NYU, go check out what Kio has to say in case you're wary of my "bias" as a non-college person.  I don't know her personally, but her partner and geek entrepreneur Bre Petis is awesome, so I'm guessing Kio's awesome, too.)

College seems like "special ed" for people who lack the initiative and follow-through to learn how to do things in the real world.  For people not getting medical/science/useful degrees, I can't fathom why they will gladly spend tens of thousands of dollars to read books in groups when they could read those same books at home for free.  It would be a pain in the ass to build a home chemistry lab with a ventilated fume hood and safe disposal for hazardous waste, so I understand taking chemistry lab at college, but fucking literature?  Art?  Philosophy?  Gender theory?  The pro-college people are such babies that they can't figure out how to read a book without it being spoonfed to them on a schedule and being explicitly told which parts of the text were the important bits.  And on top of that, they're supposed to be intellectually superior to me, the drop-out?  I've easily read and written more about feminism, human sexuality, sexual politics, and gender than your average women's studies graduate, but I ultimately win because I didn't flush $50,000+ down the toilet to do so.  (In fact, I've come out financially ahead.)  I guess that's kind of my ultimate fuck-you to the "educated" feminists.

I am against "free" college because it isn't actually free

What people on the left have a very hard time understanding is that "free stuff from the government" isn't actually free or from the government, it just means the cost is diffused over time and to all taxpayers.  "Free" simply means that your neighbors are footing your bills.

I am against "free" college because it's not my responsibility to fund other people's hobbies

On Bill Maher's show a couple of weeks ago, he noted that in 2009, about 37,000 people graduated college in computer science and engineering, and about 89,000 in visual and performing arts.  To use his perfect phrase: "A lot of people are going to college and doing bullshit."  A blog post I read about one man's genuine quest to understand Occupy Wallstreet noted that he couldn't find a single person in Zuccotti park who had a science degree, but found tons of unemployed actors and artists.  Americans going to college these days seem to do so largely to study things of personal interest to them, regardless of whether that degree will help them find gainful employment, which, phrased another way, is called going to college to learn amusing new hobbies.

I love books, I love crafts, I love non-pretentious art, I love discussions about sexuality and gender, I genuinely enjoy all sorts of the stuff liberal arts colleges teach, but I don't believe that I should be forced by the state to pay for other people to read books and navel-gaze and contemplate the "true" meaning of feminism.  When you argue that something should be taxpayer-funded, your argument is that your beliefs should be forced onto other people through the government and under threat of imprisonment and fines if people do not comply.  That's a pretty strong position to take, and while you can say that of all taxes, I'm more in favor of forcing everyone to pay for the maintenance of roads than I am of forcing people to pay for someone to take up fun new craft projects and read classic novels.

Unlike many others who are interested in women's studies and art and philosophy, I have the ability to separate my personal interests and hobbies from things which I believe the government should force others to fund.

I am against "free" college because it will probably cost more

I'm not an economist, so I don't know how to run the numbers on this, but I can only imagine that taxpayer-funded college would cost more.  If tuition is $10,000 a year, how much more is it going to cost on top of that in additional taxation infrastructure and enforcement and school welfare disbursements?  It seems like creating an HMO for schools, which just adds a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic costs to the service of education.  (It would create jobs, on the sole plus side, but if we're going to give people jobs just for the sake of giving jobs, I'd rather we spend that money to employ people to update and modernize the country's crumbling infrastructure.)  So, ultimately, when you're calling for "free" school, you're calling for school to cost more.  If the goal is that everyone goes to college, then not only is everyone still going to be paying for college through higher taxes over the course of their lifetime, but they're wasting money by paying for more red tape around that college degree.

The solution to our current bullshit- and fluff-filled world of expensive college degrees is not to have everyone get an expensive degree in bullshit and fluff, but to point out that the emperor has no clothes in the first place.

Let's move on, let's take the initiative to teach and learn from each other, and let's stop embracing the idea that college has a monopoly on learning.  College is indeed necessary for some people, and offers skills that would be difficult to learn on your own (like my chemistry lab example), but it's not the be-all end-all of success or knowledge.  And stop demanding that your neighbors foot the bill for your hobbies, unless you want me to come back at you and force you to pay for me to take up new hobbies of my own.

 

My debates with the pro-"free" college crowd generally go like this: They insist that they need a degree in order to get the high-paying job they believe they deserve; I tell them if so, they should stop wasting their money on their non-useful art/philosophy degrees and get a degree that will actually be a good financial investment; they tell me that they don't care about the money, and they are enlightened and believe in learning for learning's sake; then I ask them why they needed to get an official degree to prove that they believe in learning purely for learning's sake, and why do they say they don't care about money when a minute ago they said that they want a higher paying job; at which point their logic folds in on itself and they stop replying.

Update, argument two: The art college fetishists insist that everyone is entitled to go to college and that they believe oh-so-passionately that useless degrees are a human right.  Then I ask them why they don't channel that passion into spending their own money on footing the bill for others' liberal arts college tuition, and they balk and come up with an excuse as to why they shouldn't have to fund their beliefs, but that I should be forced by the government to fund their beliefs.  Seriously, kids, this is why we have these things called charities.  Anyone can spend their own money supporting the "worthy cause" of their choice, but you do not have a right to force all Americans to financially back your pet issue.

 

I've turned off comments on this post because I'm tired of having to read pointless bullshit from pretentious morons.

"Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment.  From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education.  A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men.  Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female...

As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (The End of Men, July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women.  As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980.  Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.

No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education.  An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether.  The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance.  Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce.  Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction."

-- Kate Bolick, in All the Single Ladies on theatlantic.com

The point of this piece wasn't feminist-bashing, but I love seeing factual information like this in a source as widely-read by lefties as the Atlantic.  It doesn't mesh with the feminist fantasy that they are constantly oppressed in all areas of life, and I'm sure they'll still keep harping on their lie of a vast income disparity.

Feminist propaganda claims that women "earn 70-something cents for every dollar that a man does," which makes it sound like there's some kind of payscale drawn up by The Patriarchy that dictates salaries for people of different sexes doing the same job.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The reasons that men have been earning more money than women is not because of sexism, but because men work longer hours at more dangerous jobs which require more education.  In other words: men make more because they deserve it.

In the last month, there has been more and more talk from some sex workers about how awesome the Occupy movement is, including some of my ho activist friends on Twitter who are part of different Occupy encampments.  SWOP-NYC has a pro-Occupy post, Jessie of SWOP LA throws in her support, Trisha wrote about the issues of SlutWalk and Occupy, and Melissa Gira Grant wrote a strangely pearl-clutching piece about how sad it is some people -gasp- do sex work to pay for college.

I've been wary and on the fence about the Occupy movement and its vague, utopian, barely-articulated aims.  Occupy embodies basically everything I hate about the left, and the best I've been able to muster so far is feeling sorry for people who have been assaulted by police.  Today, I went from on the fence to against Occupy Seattle.  I was trying to get to the nonprofit vegan grocery store, Sidecar, a place I'm happy to support because all the proceeds go to an animal sanctuary.  I sure timed my bus errand poorly, because I ended up behind an Occupy Seattle march.

First off, the protesters went out of their way to disrupt as much traffic and transit as possible.  I talked to my bus driver, and he said the group had told Seattle Metro they would be marching along a certain route, giving Metro a chance to divert buses in the area to another street.  Once the time came for the march, however, the Occupy folk changed their official plan and went down the street where they knew Metro buses were being re-routed, all to maximize problems for commuters.  That's a pretty asshole move.  How is going out of your way to screw up as many public transit lines as possible harming the super-rich?  Are there a lot of country-ruining billionaires on the bus during rush hour?  I guess I never noticed them though all the students, disabled people, punks/hippies, elderly people, nonwhites, single moms, young folk, and homeless-looking people who typically make up much of Metro's ridership.

After half an hour on a bus that was barely moving, I gave up and angrily walked home in the freezing rain, knowing it would have taken hours to get to my destination.  Congratulations, anti-capitalists, you prevented me from spending my money at a nonprofit, so I shopped at a corporate grocery store instead.  I went home and watched the clamor unfold on Twitter.  The march had moved on to occupying a bridge, shutting down traffic in both directions.  This bridge is one of the connections between the central Seattle area and the University of Washington and the outlying suburbs, as well as a major hospital complex at the university.  Occupy Seattle was cutting off a key route for hospital access, which could genuinely cost lives if ambulances had to re-route and go back to other another bridge in an emergency.

Less than 24 hours after winning national sympathy when Seattle police pepper-sprayed a small elderly woman, Occupy Seattle experienced a big wave of hatred from the general public, pissed off at missed meetings, missed classes, missed flights, and being stuck in traffic for no good reason.  Twitter users were cheering for them to be beaten, shot, pepper-sprayed, and many hoped aloud that the bridge would collapse, or that protesters would fall/jump to their deaths.  Comments on various local news websites all echoed similar opinions - anger, annoyance, confusion, and rooting for harm to befall protesters.  There were countless comments where someone said they supported Occupy before, but this changed their minds.

Any sane activist would be thinking, "Oh shit, we made a huge fuckup here.  The public is angry at us, we're blocking hospital access, and we're not accomplishing anything other than showing people that we like to cause pointless disruptions.  This has been an absolute disaster."

Instead, the resounding consensus among protesters on Twitter was that the event was a massive success, and Occupy Seattle marchers and supporters responded to people who disagreed by making fun of them, insulting them, telling them they are the enemy, and generally celebrating the fact that the public had turned against them after the bridge occupation.  It was like watching some spoiled punk teenager gloat about how they're really "sticking it to the man" by pissing off "the squares" with their green hair.

What today highlighted for me is my growing uneasiness with how Occupy protesters continually scream that they are "the 99%," insisting that they represent just about everyone in the country.  I don't like seeing strangers keep arguing that they are my spokespersons, that they can attest to the interests and beliefs of most Americans, that they are protesting "for me," and even that they are me.  This creepy rhetoric reminds me all too well of how anti-sex worker crusaders always insist that they are acting and speaking on our behalf, without ever deigning to listen to us.  There is something deeply and profoundly fucked up about declaring oneself the mouthpiece for people whom you don't know, aren't trying to get to know, and in many cases, who actively oppose what you are saying and doing, such as it the case of the vast numbers of Seattle folk irate over having their evening disrupted by a core group of perhaps a hundred protesters who were trying to stay on the bridge as long as possible.

Where this whole thing goes from eerily cult-like to comical is that the people who pretend to be and represent "the 99%" are a tiny minority, even in a large left-leaning city, and they were causing a problems for the majority.  Occupy Seattle wasn't representing the desires of anyone but themselves, least of all working and lower-income people who rely on public transit to get around the city.

Occupy Seattle: you are not the 99%.  You do not represent me, you do not represent Seattle, and I wish you people would stop insisting that you do.  A group that relishes in causing disruptions purely for the sake of causing disruptions does not embody the key political concerns of most Americans, any more than a right-wing billionaire does.  You are an obnoxious minority that continues to further isolate itself from the rest of the public, and I can't think of one positive thing you have contributed to my city.

But all that doesn't matter.  According to Occupy Seattle kids, the fact that I dislike them just means that they've been victorious in their protest, despite the fact I will never be earning in the top 10%, let alone the top 1%.

As a sex workers' rights advocate, my life would be so much easier if the sole metric by which I judged an activist "success" was how many members of the general public I could get to hate us.  It's easy to turn the public against you, any lazy dipshit can do that.  Influencing the public to adopt more progressive and tolerant ideas?  That's not as adrenaline-soaked and fun as instigating confrontations with the police, but it leads to actual and long-lasting change, which is precisely the kind of work that needs to be done.

 

Update one: In looking at more local coverage, the first three comments on a cheery pro-Occupy article on SLOG summed up today's debate so neatly, especially the middle one as being the most used defense by bridge protest supporters.

Gern Blanston: "Claim it for the 99 percent." What a fucking joke! When they shut down a bridge, or a busy downtown street, they're preventing everyone else from going about their daily lives. They're just a bunch of self-important, grandstanding pricks. They don't speak for me.

what_now: Maybe there are things that are more important than people going about their daily lives?

LJM: the problem is that you're suggesting that one group of people know which "things" are "more important" than going about their daily lives, and which "things" are less important. You can use this reasoning to justify any type of inconsiderate behavior by people who claim to be doing it for your own good.

Update two: Seattle Central Community College - where Occupy Seattle set up residence after moving from their original location in the shopping district - has been complaining about the public health hazards being created by the camp in the form "accumulations of garbage, poor food handling, discarded syringes and needles, fire safety hazards, dog feces, and disposal of wastewater."  Congratulations again, Occupy Seattle, you've succeeded in be-filthing a facility that caters to lower-income people.  That's really sticking it to the evil super-rich, isn't it?  (As I saw someone else point out today, if they really want to stick it to banks through civil disobedience, why not occupy bank-owned foreclosed houses?)

Occupy supporters are seemingly unable to come up with non-false dichotomy arguments to support their protest at the bridge.  It's all hyperbole like, "Oh, so you love watching billionaires raping the country?" or one who told me that I must be too busy fawning over the Kardashians to care about anything else.  You can be against Occupy Seattle and its dumbass tactics without being pro-cop, pro-bailout, pro-apathy, and pro-status quo.  I was, in fact, anti-status quo before this new wave of Carhartt Warriors grew their first pubes.  (Do dirty anarkids still wear Carhartts?  Am I totally dating myself in my choice of derisive terminology?)

Also, I actually do support using disruptive and controversial protest methods, but only when they are targeted and/or express a clear message and demands.  (Examples being crashing a shareholder meeting to send a message that a corporation should stop engaging in such-and-such practice, or civil disobedience on a logging road that prevents logging companies from cutting down any trees that day.)  Making things hard on huge numbers of Seattle residents who just want to get home from work makes people hate you, and accomplished absolutely nothing.  Yes, it got media coverage and attention, but so what?  Is the only goal of Occupy Seattle to get lots of bad press?  Does getting bad press fix the economy or make one single person's life better?  No, but it sure is easier than engaging in strategic activism or doing something positive.

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the only agency that keeps track of how many children the legal system rescues from pimps nationwide.  The count, which began in June 2003, now exceeds 1,600 as of April of this year, according to the FBI’s Innocence Lost website — an average of about 200 each year.

Through interviews and analysis of public records, Village Voice Media has found that the federal government spends about $20 million a year on public awareness, victims’ services, and police work related to domestic human trafficking, with a considerable focus on combating the pimping of children.  An additional $50 million-plus is spent annually on youth homeless shelters, and since 1996, taxpayers have contributed a total of $186 million to fund a separate program that provides street outreach to kids who might be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.

That’s at least $80 million doled out annually for law enforcement and social services that combine to rescue approximately 200 child prostitutes every year.

These agencies might improve upon their $400,000-per-rescued-child average if they joined in the effort to develop a clearer picture of the population they aim to aid.  But there’s no incentive for them to do so when they stand to rake in even more public money simply by staying the course."

-- Kristen Hinman, in Lost Boys on villagevoice.com

If you haven't read this new installment in the Village Voice's series exposing the myths around sex trafficking, I suggest you do so.

 

Last night, I was doing some reading about the most popular political panic of the mid-80s, and stopped to tweet, "Sex work activists should read about the political manufacturing of the crack 'epidemic.' 25 years ago, it was crack; now it's trafficking."  I'm no expert on drug issues, but I feel like I should explain my comment in more detail, so here is a (non-exhaustive) list of parallels between the crack epidemic and the sex trafficking epidemic.  I think it would benefit sex workers' rights supporters to look at how another moral panic was whipped up and profited from by those with special agendas.

Medicalized diagnoses, criminalized cures

First, I have to start out with an important note on how language is used as a tool to frame an issue in one's favor.  Proponents of both the crack craze and the idea of sex trafficking as a vast and ubiquitous problem (and inseparable from consensual sex work) use language of health problems like epidemic, plague, disease, and addiction, but their proposed solutions to both are arrest, shaming, further marginalization, and punishment.  Imagine if police responded to the health problem of people having the flu this winter by conducting taxpayer-funded raids, kicking in the doors of homes where people were suspected of staying home sick - arresting them, subjecting them to fines and imprisonment, and even keeping a public registry of the dangerous monsters who have been convicted of carrying the flu, preventing people who ever had the flu to be able to lead a non-flu-tainted life.  But we don't do that to flu sufferers for that "epidemic."

Causes and effects

Continuing on with of the topic of medical euphemism is the issue of confusing symptoms with causes of social ills.  The crack "epidemic" was framed by politicians on both sides of the political spectrum as not a symptom of poverty, inequality, and larger social disparities, but as the cause of social problems in the first place.  Urban ghettos weren't getting worse because of the lack of social services, educational opportunities, affordable healthcare, and quality jobs, they were simply suffering from crack cocaine.  Sex trafficking is also seen not as a response to social forces such as some countries having more wealth than others, the desire to go abroad to earn better money, few employment options for undocumented migrant workers, or the difficulties in legally entering a Western country if you're poor.  No, sex trafficking is the social ill to be eliminated, and all that complex stuff about class, race, immigration, and gender gets neatly swept under the rug in favor of an explanation that lets people scapegoat manufactured omnipresent boogeymen while failing to address real social problems.

At last, an issue everyone can support!

As mentioned above, the crack panic wasn't just a right-wing pet project, but a topic around which both liberals and conservatives could battle to see which party could take the loudest and harshest stance.  No more worrying about pesky minor problems like the economy and joblessness, let's give everyone a chance to come together and agree: the real issue plaguing the country is crack/sex trafficking.  There are few topics around which both Democrats and Republicans will battle over who supports/condemns it more, and when such is the case, you have to consider the idea that such an issue is being used as a shiny distraction.  (See also: hysteria around terrorism being successfully deployed by all politicians to keep people from thinking about eroding civil liberties and a tanking economy.)

Both panics exploded in popularity during major economic downtowns

The crack epidemic could be said to have peaked in the late 1980s, the same time as the US was experiencing a recession.  Our current recession and financial meltdown dovetails perfectly with the rise of interest in and coverage of sex trafficking.

The solution to both problems is not harm reduction, but arrest and locking people up

Billions of dollars were spent on stateside law enforcement as a means to curb the "epidemic" of crack addiction, but where did that get us, as a country, aside from having the world's highest rate of incarceration?  Likewise, does anyone really feel safer in when their tax money is used on costly police stings that arrest and jail prostitutes in hopes of being able to fin even one "trafficking victim"?  Lots of money is wasted on "cures" that do nothing to help real victims, do everything to drive both victims and criminals further underground, and ultimately only achieve good PR and further funding for police, politicians, and other people with a stake in selling the moral panic.  The solution is never to provide services to people at risk of exploitation, but to use arrests and imprisonment to try and cover up things that cause discomfort among members of the middle and upper classes.

Who needs evidence when you have hysteria?

Question the anti-crack rhetoric, and a public figure would be attacked as "soft on crime," and detractors could obtusely ask how one could be in support of the crack plague taking over the country.  Similarly, if you question any part of the agenda of those selling and profiting from the sex trafficking scare, you are painted as being in favor of raping children and the sexual enslavement of millions.  The topic is framed and such over-the-top hysterical ways, it leaves no room for reasonable discussion of the facts.  Anyone who questions anything is a monster.

Emotional-tinged "statistics" trump real data

Parents were told that young people around the country were falling victim to crack addiction, and that "an entire generation" was hooked on the substance.  However, even according to government surveys, cocaine use/experimentation of any kind had peaked among young people in 1982, and in 1986, while the media was touting the coming crackpocalypse, daily cocaine use of any variety among high school seniors was a mere 0.4%.  (How many of them were crack users in particular is unknown.)  Less than 4 out of every 1000 seniors is obviously not "an entire generation" addicted to crack, but boring facts like that have no place in a moral panic.  (Just like boring facts rarely get any play in discussions about sex trafficking, where people prefer to fantasize about how millions of children are being captured and raped at every turn.)

The "epidemic" is portrayed as a personal threat to all Americans and their children

Those with something to gain have managed to hype both crack and sex trafficking as attacks upon the fabric of our culture over which everyone must worry, painting pictures of crack dealers hiding behind every corner, ready to get Johnny Quarterback hooked on drugs, or kidnap little Betsy Countryclub from her ballet lessons and sell her into a child sexual slavery ring.  Everyone is a target, and the evil people are poised at this very moment to ensnare your children.  There's no time to think, only to worry hysterically.

It's not about race and class, except when it is

With both the crack and sex trafficking panic, there is this pervasive undercurrent of fear of the other, fear of nonwhite and poor people, fear of them infiltrating us and ruining everything "we" built.  The crack epidemic was about fear of poor, urban Blacks and Latinos, mostly young men who might be in scary gangs.  The sex trafficking epidemic, when not about stealing your children for sexual slavery, has the more subtle racial component of a fear of migrant workers sneaking into "our" country and doing morally distasteful things with our husbands, our dads, our brothers, corrupting us, tearing at our family values, and making us impure by association.

Extreme cases are way more exciting than our routine problems

Alcohol, car crashes, and tobacco kill tons of people, but that's not very exciting, and such "mundane" deaths hardly every make the news.  But comparatively-rare crack-related deaths and injuries became a top political issue for both parties.  Likewise, spousal abuse, domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault are accepted as facts of life, only making the news when there's some bizarre, celebrity, or "funny" angle to the story.  Yet, when occasional cases of barbaric forced sex trafficking or the pimping of an underage girl are uncovered, it's held up by proponents as a major problem that is happening to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the country.  The focus is always on exploiting extreme cases for political gain and financial contributions, and insisting that extreme cases are the norm.

The issues play well on TV and make for dramatic publicity stunts

In 1989, George Bush Senior held a famous press conference to hype the crack problem where he showed bag of the substance and declared that it had been seized in a drug deal in the park across the street from the White House.  A photo of Bush holding the bag was printed in newspapers around the country, proving that crack was everywhere now, even in "good" neighborhoods, and thus, warranted the panic of all Americans.  However, the backstory to that photo-op is much more interesting.  Since no drugs, let alone crack, were available for purchase in Lafayette Park, the government needed to manufacture a situation that would make for good televison.  An 18-year-old African American high schooler was cajoled to come to the park to sell the crack, a young man who famously asked the undercover DEA entrapping him, "Where the fuck is the White House?"  I can't recall the last time a week went by that I didn't read about an anti-trafficking publicity push, carefully coordinated and framed for maximize sensationalism.

Now, the "war on drugs" is largely recognized as a failure

I can only hope the war on sex workers, framed as the "war on trafficking," will meet the same fate.  I'd love to hear how anti-drug war activists were able to shift public perceptions from the early 90s onward, because we should really emulate whatever they've been doing.  (Or how to play up everything the government and moral crusaders are doing incorrectly.)

 

If you have more interest in this topic, the most awesome and in-depth thing I read was The Construction of America's Crack Crisis by Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine.  Hat tip to their research for providing a bunch of the information in this blog post.

After 8 days of rolling around Los Angeles, the billboard run concluded yesterday.  (We were given a full bonus day because winds last week prevented the company from being able to safely deploy.  That sounded weird to me at first, but looking at the billboard trailer, I can see how wind could easily tip the thing over.)

I've posted more photos (sent by the awesome Stacey Swimme, who also handled press inquiries) here, but here's a couple that give you the basic idea of the project:

The billboard didn't get the response I would have expected from the media.  I didn't think we'd make front-page headlines, but I thought that we would garner more blurbs.  Maybe the press is burnt out on covering protesty topics because of the Occupy thing, maybe this isn't that interesting to them, or maybe having a mobile billboard made it more difficult to be able to report on.  I think the only media coverage (outside of sex worker blogs) were these four items:

* LAist covered the billboard 3 months ago when fundraising concluded.
* LA Weekly covered the story on their blog, no idea if it made it into the print issue.  The article is inexplicably illustrated with a photo of an Asian woman licking a toe.
* XBiz, a porn/novelty industry trade magazine/site covered the billboard.  This is the first time I've ever seen the phrase "sex work" on the front page of their web site, which makes me happy, because so many porn people like to think they are different/better than other sex workers.
* ABC local news in LA did a story, which was supposedly positive, but there's no video online.

But, press or no press, countless thousands of people in LA had a chance to read a definition of what a sex worker is, and I hope that the project has helped spark a lot of conversations.  I'm very proud that something I organized got off the ground, and I'm already wondering where to take a public awareness campaign next.

A few months ago, SWAAY's mail box received a neat package in the mail from Respect, Inc, with an impressive sampling of useful literature, and cute condom packets.  Click on the photo to enlarge, and see PDF versions of Respect, Inc's literature on their web site.  I love seeing what other groups have to offer, and these set a great example of what sex workers' rights activists can be doing to serve their communities.

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