"When the magazine first launched in 2005 we drew the ire of many radical feminists who were in fierce opposition to the sex industry and sex workers. One of the rumors hurled around was that $pread was funded by Larry Flynt and/or organized crime rings. Which is hilarious, if you know anything about the budget of $pread and our all-volunteer staff. It became something of a joke among us that we were funded by unorganized crime, since much of the magazine's work was sustained by contributions from sex workers who worked in both legal and illegal parts of the industry."

-- Audacia Ray, in Unorganized crime on audaciaray.tumblr.com

Let's here it for "unorganized crime"!

"This whole tradition – the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to 'ruin' themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by 'giving it away' –restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can't even begin to articulate.  None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form."

-- Kerry Howley, in Thoughts on Thoughts on Spitzer on reason.com

"Behind the most powerful manufactroversies, lies a predictable formula: first, a new problem is generated by redefining terminology.  For example, an autism 'epidemic' suddenly exists when a wide range of childhood mental health diagnoses are all reclassified as part of an autism spectrum.  The reclassification creates the appearance of a surge in autism cases, and that sets the stage for cause-seeking.

Second, 'instant experts' immediately proclaim that they have special insight into the cause.  They enjoy the authority and attention that their unique 'expertise' brings them and begin to position themselves as a 'little guy' crusader against injustice.  They also are likely to spin conspiracy theories about government cover-ups or pharmaceutical malfeasance to make their case more appealing to the media.  In many cases the experts have a financial incentive in promoting their point of view (they sell treatments or promote their books, for example).

Third, because mainstream media craves David and Goliath stories and always wants to be the first to break news, they often report the information without thorough fact-checking.  This results in the phenomenon of 'Tabloid Medicine.'

Fourth, once the news has been reported by a mainstream media outlet, the general population assumes it’s credible, and a groundswell of fear drives online conversation on blogs, websites, and social media platforms.

And finally, celebrities take up the cause while personal injury lawyers feast on frightened consumers who now believe that they are victims of harm perpetrated on them by the 'medical industrial complex.'  Meanwhile flustered government health officials have no scientific evidence of harm, but cannot prove a lack of association without further research (and that takes time).  So they offer what seems like tepid reassurances, which are perceived by some to be tantamount to an admission of guilt.

And that’s how a lie becomes an urban legend.  Perception is nine tenths of reality."

-- Dr. Valerie Jones, in Review: How the Internet is being used to hijack medical science for fear and profit on scientificamerican.com

Hmm, doesn't this sound an awful lot like porn/trafficking/prostitution/sexuality/kink/strip club hysteria?

"Manufactroversy (măn’yə-făk’-trə-vûr’sē)

1. A manufactured controversy that is motivated by profit or extreme ideology to intentionally create public confusion about an issue that is not in dispute.

[...]

As a scholar of rhetoric, I have studied some modern cases of manufactured controversy to discover how to best confute these contemporary sophists, and I have come up with some preliminary hypotheses about what makes their arguments so persuasive to a public audience.  First, they skillfully invoke values that are shared by the scientific community and the American public alike, like free speech, skeptical inquiry, and the revolutionary force of new ideas against a repressive orthodoxy.  It is difficult to argue against someone who invokes these values without seeming unscientific or un-American."

-- Leah Ceccarelli, in Manufactroversy: The Art of Creating Controversy Where None Existed on scienceprogress.org

Sex workers rights advocates have a lot to learn from anti-science lobbying movements and how they work to successfully confuse and misinform the public through "teaching the controversy."  See one of my earlier blog posts on the subject here.

"It shouldn't be a surprise that more groups than just global warming and evolution deniers use this strategy of designing bad studies and legislating from them.  They might be the best known, however, because their motivations are so easily understood.  They're downright transparent.  A few scattered cranks (there are always stray cranks) aside, the political forces behind evolution denial are religious.  Those behind global warming denial represent economic interests that are threatened by our need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.  These groups are easy to spot because we understand their motivations for winnowing information down to only what they want to believe.

There are topics, however, where the deniers are less obvious, even when they engage in similar tactics.  Their motivations are subtle or complex, or they form unlikely coalitions, bound together only by their views on a single subject.  The strict marginalization of sex-oriented businesses is one of those topics.  It unites pro-business conservatives who are appalled by sex and pro-sex liberals who consider profit equal to exploitation, plus a lot of people whose reasons are as varied as their sexual interests.

Whatever their motivation, those who argue that the presence of adult businesses has a detrimental effect on crime rates and property values are still engaging in the same kind of denialism.  They're relying on just a small portion of the available information to make their case."

-- Stephanie Zvan, in Sex, Science, and Social Policy on almostdiamonds.blogspot.com

"I don't know to what we owe this phenomenon – the way well-intentioned folks so readily swallow the sordid storytelling and swollen numbers – never questioning their validity, never asking any questions of the purveyors of these second-hand 'facts'.  Why do we want to believe this?  Why do we always want to believe in the plundering of innocents, the pimp-daddy in the bushes, the young body broken and worn out by repeated bouts of unwanted intercourse?"

-- Juliana Piccillo, in Change.org has changed…to certifiably insane on julianapiccillo.wordpress.com

I expressed similar thoughts a while ago in this post of mine: Degrading, violent desires