Prostitution
The ease with which men imagine women as prostitutes
Prostitution is serious business. Women tend to understand that. I’ve never known a woman (a real woman, as opposed to some online twit-bot) who didn’t regard prostitution as a very serious and dangerous line of work. Certainly it’s not something you’d do if you had other options. It’s scary as hell, since johns are insane [...]
Today’s dose of casual sexism
From Glenn Greenwald, famed advocate of human rights for men: …as soon as Scott Ritter began telling the truth about Iraqi WMDs, he was publicly smeared with allegations of sexual improprieties. As soon as Eliot Spitzer began posing a real threat to Wall Street criminals, a massive and strange federal investigation was launched over nothing [...]
David Letterman, the voice of dude nation
I was about to hit the sack this morning (don’t ask) when I noticed a few emails in my inbox about David Letterman. “Is he still alive?” I wondered. It occurred to me that perhaps he’d died in an autoerotic asphyxiation accident, and would soon be joining David Carradine and Michael Hutchence in the Freakazoids [...]
One Perfect Sentence
Twisty: The idea that women’s public sexuality can so precisely mirror traditional male fantasy while simultaneously existing in a kind of pro-woman, I-do-it-for-myself alternate universe is the cornerstone of funfeminist “thought.”
So close and yet so far
I slept! Nine hours, I think. The world is a beautiful place again. Or it was until I got to my computer and started on the news. Two items this morning caught my eye with their promise to tell the truth, to actually say what the hell is going on in this godforsaken crack-brained world [...]
He couldn’t be bothered with a single mention of all the raped and enslaved women?
I haven’t been watching the Ken Burns documentary “The War,” but this post over at Heart’s got my attention: Where in the name of all that is holy are the comfort women? And it’s not just the “comfort” women; it’s all the enslaved and prostituted and raped women in that global apocalypse, that furnace of [...]
So that’s why all the morons think prostitution is an empowerfuling career choice
I keep as much distance between myself and popular culture as possible, so I’ve only just now discovered that for the past few years HBO has been running some utterly unrealistic “reality” show about a brothel in Nevada, a happy place where happy people do happy things, just because they’re so darn happy. According to [...]
O the joys of being an empowered sex worker
As I understand it, the rationale behind legalizing all kinds of sex work is that the women (strippers, prostitutes, etc.) will then enjoy the rights and dignities of workers in other fields. They’ll be able to set boundaries, demand safe working conditions and reasonable job standards, earn respect for a job well done, all that [...]
Prostitution Debate Part 2: New Zealand
(See Prostitution Debate Part 1: Thailand for an introduction to this series. That first post also contains the moderation rules for the debate.) This is going to be a very different post than I’d expected it to be. New Zealand decriminalized prostitution in 2003, and I’ve seen it mentioned online as a model that ought [...]
Prostitution Debate Part 1: Thailand
(See also: Prostitution Debate Part 2: New Zealand) As promised, here’s the first part of a little series of posts on prostitution. Back in The Thread That Won’t Die, I explained here and here what I have in mind: First of all, I’m going to start a new post in a couple of days, or [...]
