View Full Version : The Morality of Prostitution
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In my previous message, I support INDEPENDENT escort ads in which the girl is making money for herself no matter what age but I am totally against places which have prostitute slaves or servant in which a family gives up the child to pay off a debt. These places are worser than pimps and I am already against pimps because they exploit prostitutes. If prostitution were legalized and understood by society we would have none of this black market type of pimp prostitution. I blame the prudes that make the rules in what is accepted in society AND the lawmakers that give in to them and fear that they would not be voted in by the prude majority in America if they don't do what the prudes say.
Actually, I have to agree with RN about prostitution being harder than it seems. There are always assholes for customers that you mentioned, RN. It still is shorter hours though instead of working in the factory but you have to deal with customers which I would personally hate because I deal with customers in my Verizon job. I HATE that aspect of my job and there are always customers that also try to get one over on you as well. I haven't thought about that in my previous statements so I change my mind on that aspect. The fact that landlords look at you as a bad person depends on the society which you live in. If you live in America as a prostitute, you are a criminal but if you live in Brazil or Holland, they turn the other way. Yes, some countries are harder to work as a prostitute than others and I agree with RN because of the negative association of prostitutes with laziness or criminals. There is always bad in any job you do but I think working 84 hours a week and having no life is the worst and I wouldn't wish what happened to my mother on my worst enemy. And prostitution is not even an option here in America because it is criminalized and persecuted by prudes. There was no easy way out for my mother and she couldn't afford college because she was paid so little that she couldn't save enough to even pay for it here. Her money went for food and rent and cheap clothing. There is a big difference between making a living and surviving and my mother was just surviving. Making a living is being able to afford the basic necessities and go to college and eat good once in a while at least but my mother NEVER could do anything with her meager wages. If she were in Holland where there is no negative feelings towards prostitution (except with the American tourists) then she would be better off working in the red light district temporarily to get money for college and live a better life after getting a degree . But instead she lived in a financial threadmill of poverty and work until my father got her off of it by marrying her.
Vampyr - "Heart of Darkness" has to be understood in its context - it's not in any way about a trip of badness as such - and not in any way an organised one. In order to get the picture, you at least have to view the famous #1 rated (70's) movie "Apocalypse-now" and know it was based on a book titled "Heart of darkness"....... Which leads you to a weird world of the unknown and unexplored...mind-wise too.
RN, sometimes I wonder if you have had a sheltered life...... as a hooker I mean.
Yes, I appreciate that you know everything about unwanted, smelly, mindless johns. But still, as I understand it, apart from the fact that making money was the driver, you did have a choice to refuse the ones that were too appalling.
For two reasons; one, you could have another customer the next night (or hour) and still be ok. and two, you were probably not at the mercy of the "house" when it came to taking on customers.
What is bad and a reason for concern is bonded sex workers in brothels in the 3rd world - and equally bonded sex workers "imported" to Western Europe by mafia people (young girls from very poor eastern Europe countries who are deprived of their rights and their passports by the mafia.) They don't have those luxuries of choice.
These are girls who not necessarily have volunteered for "the trade" but rather been forced into it.
(An evening in town and a nightly follow-up in bed with a girl of the trade has never been something I have easily stayed away from :-)
I like to think I have been lucky, not running into one of these unfortunate girls. But I never know - of course the girls get very professional at hiding their misery too. And I honestly don't really know if I ever ran into one.
I know that this was discussed a while ago - and I agree and live by the stuff you say "know no evil" - meaning as long as the girl does not give any form of messages she is uncomfortable, it's ok.
But it also means I am more than a bit sensitive about girls who seem not to be comfortable - and no, it's not an option to pay more money, it's just to let them go........
The Virgin Terr
11-09-02, 20:54
before you support a prohibitionist position on anything, remember this: you are supporting violence or the threat of violence to force others to do as you wish. you are no better than someone who forces someone into prostitution against their will. you're possibly even worse, because at least those individuals don't try to justify their coercion with the claim of acting in the best interest of the coercee. they don't claim moral superiority over those who disagree with their blatant bullying. they are honest in their assertion that "Might makes right".
er- VT I didn't get your point kinda. Sober up and elaborate.......
That's what I meant by due diligence. If I check age, I try to understand the situation I'm walking into in terms of the place, conditions, the amount of freedom each woman has in the process, etc., then I'm not going to spend an immense amount of time obsessing over things. If I'm not sure, or get a bad vibe, I walk. Now, if it turns out that I've been mistaken after the fact, then I'm going to feel bad about it and wish I had known so I could have acted differently, but I'm not going to sit around blaming myself for ruining someone's life or anything. Instead, I'm going to hope that I brought some degree of temporary care and kindness as a balm in a bad situation.
The Virgin Terr
11-11-02, 13:43
traveller, i was sober when i wrote my last post, as i am now. elaborate?, ok. obviously, i'm referring only to prohibition involving consensual behavior. obviously i don't oppose legal prohibition of behavior involving non-consensual predatory behavior. but for victimless crimes, such as prostitution and drugs, proponents of these laws support the use of the overwhelming power of the state to terrorize individuals into refraining from engaging in behavior which harms no one or at least if harm is involved, it is with the consent of the individual. what's the difference between the person who uses violence to force someone into prostitution and the person who uses violence to force someone out of prostitution? i doubt if there's anyone more opposed to either than myself. on the other hand, in my view at least, prohibitionists are much more likely to be tolerant or supportive of forced prostitution, since they are supporters of coercive social relationships in general, and indeed forced prostitution itself is an outgrowth of prohibition and the prohibition mentality.
Forced prostitution thrives on prohibition because prohibition creates a black market with pimps which has forced prostitution. In the American prostitution scene, ALL of the prostitutes have pimps or work as a debt prosititute because they needed a loan from a mobster and then they couldn't pay it back so they sell their bodies as currency. They would have done this without a pimp or loan had the US legalized prostitution and let the girls sell their bodies independently to make that money and without being stuck with interest which keeps them working for the loaner pimp longer. Instead the prudish special interest groups and politicians that conform to them beat morality over our heads thinking that prohibition and abstinence is the best way. These are the same assholes that CAUSE teenage pregnancy by standing in front of condom isles barring teenagers from buying condoms and worse yet enacting a minimum age ID law of 18 to buy them. Thus teenagers can't buy condoms and they practice unsafe sex and teenage girls get knocked up. Look how pathetically backwards our laws are and for what: Morality? This country needs a facelift on our laws for it to truly be a free country.
Originally posted by darkseid
In the American prostitution scene, ALL of the prostitutes have pimps or work as a debt prosititute because they needed a loan from a mobster and then they couldn't pay it back so they sell their bodies as currency.
Umm, excuse me, but as much as I actually agree with your position in an overall way, this is complete and utter nonsense. ALL prostitutes in the US are either pimp or mob connected? That's absolute hokum, and I challenge you to back it up.
Even if it were 10% it would still be too much, and I think that number is still high, but it's probably a lot closer to the truth than your blanket statement.
No offense meant -- I just get cranky things like that are tossed out to strengthen an argument. They end up circulating and generating their own kind of life, and undoing "the common wisdom" can be an activist's worst nightmare.
In the US, if a woman even tries to do her services independently, she gets traced by cops and arrested. That iswhy the same girls aren't always in the sex ads. Sometimes they serve a short sentence then reappear a few months or years later but the law goes against her and discourages her business so she ends up having to get a loan from a pimp because she has a criminal record and can't get it from a bank and ends up working for the pimp just for room and board. They can start off independent BEFORE they get their first criminal record that ruins the rest of their lives and that is what I am getting at in my previous statement that the american prostitution scene is run by pimps or other black market influences. If the girl isn't part of it now, she will end up in it because of the draconian laws against them. There may be a few that get away with it and not end up with pimps though so I do see your point joe and I take back the word "ALL" and exchange it with "most".
vt, i am sorry, the "sobriety" comment was a feeble attempt to be funny - although i can see it might be offensive too. no offense meant.
the us scene seems to be one very much accommodating us double standards - yes we like the concept of sex and we are so 21st century liberated - but doing it??????
back here i am wading through scripts from do-gooder feminists who try to define mongering as a menace - defining prostitution as a "problem". in my opinion prostitution as such is not a problem at all. yes, the badness showed e.g in the swedish movie lilja 4ever is happening. but as rn put it wisely as always - those things are prohibited by other laws already. forcing 15-year olds into the trade against their will is criminalised left right and center.
yoy simply don't need a specific law to protect anyone against this.
point is, feminists don't like the idea of men wanting to get it off with a girl just for the fun of it. or who knows - the same feminists claim that the main problem of porn (another favourite enemy) is that it is oriented towards men - because it focuses on "penetration" (and noone had the guts to call the these uglies by their right name - concrete lesbos???)
prostitution is not a problem in its own right. actually, it is a blessing to mankind, no matter what the rightous say.
it is a problem it seems to people of a religious or political bias.
nevertheless, there are a bundle of people (women) who seem to dedicate their lives to the "fight against prostitution" - "fight against **** sex in the far east (that is the 20yo's who at 5* blank and 90 lbs look small by western standards)" and "fight against man in general".
everyone now think i am in favour of the demure, thai girl ........
i am not. i am in favour of the strong, self-confident western girl who does something else than mess up her life in the feminist orgs......but rather beleives in herself enough to beleive she wants a man- and can handle him in a resonable way and still enjoy it.
The Virgin Terr
11-12-02, 20:20
forget about it, traveller, i'm too sensitive and sometimes jump to conclusions about being criticized. fact is, i'm a drugged out pervert going by the standards of the american establishment. i thought you might be taking a potshot (pun accidental) about my marijuana use. i often am moderately stoned when posting here, like i am now. unlike the stereotypes in the media of stupid stoners, i find my mind to function better in some ways under a moderate influence, and the amount of impairment in others is manageable. as you can see, i'm still eloquent.
i disagree with the view that prostitution prohibition is primarily a passion of radical feminists. i think men are just as responsible, possibly more so. men after all dominate the legal profession, which includes politics. sexual restrictions probably have their origin in part from dominant social males seeking to control women and less powerful men. and i think religious factors outweigh gender in this debate also. if we could somehow dump religion, everything in society would loosen up.
wonder what happened to dickhead?
Well, darkseid, if you still think it's "most" then I think you're using a pretty liberal definition of pimps and organized crime. To me, there's a big difference between someone who runs an escort service (which technically is "organized crime" and some of which probably have real connections to it, though far from all, and which also can be considered pimping under the law) and the classic "bad muthufucka on the street" type pimp or mobster. I've met large numbers of independents, ranging from women at clubs who do things on the side to those who advertise their services in a variety of ways. Tons of escort places are run by ex-sex workers who want out of the direct side of the business.
As far as not having the same girls as in the ads being an indicator, I respectfully disagree on your interpretation. Prostitution can be a fairly transient business for a variety of reasons, including women searching for greener fields, leaving the biz, moving up or down the food chain for a variety of reasons, and, yes, being arrested. The bottom line for a service is that if they're got a picture of a beautiful woman and it brings in business, they're going to keep it whether she works there or not. That's not anything more ominous that bait-and-switch marketing, since horny guys will usually say ok to the substitute who shows up at the door.
I've no disagreement whatsoever that being arrested, getting a record, etc., is horribly unfair and follows women the rest of their lives. I think it's ridiculous and criminal of society to do so. But I still find your leaps from the unfairness of the law and society's attitude into a direct underworld of eternal darkness to be a bit extreme. There are all kinds of levels of prostitution, and to assert that most of them have to do with organized crime requires a bit more than assertion, I think. Can you quote me any authority for that? Some crime task force or statistics or something?
I ask because for me it goes back to the earlier discussion regarding client culpability. I've no particular desire to support mobsters and those who enslave women physically or emotionally, so your assertions of a broad situation mean that either you're incorrect or I need to rethink my behavior or screening process.
I agree that prostitution is a very transient business done for various reasons. These reasons can change with various factors. For example, a girl doing it in the beginning for the thrill of having sex with different men can be driven to the alternative reasons by getting a criminal record and not being able to do anything else so she is stuck in that lifestyle just to pay the bills. She will most likely remain a private escort if she gets enough clients at a steady or fast pace. If business goes bad, however, she would join an escort service to advertise for her. They might post a younger picture of her and the horny guys call her and acept once she shows up and find out that she is an older woman or they might put a different picture altogether. Then there's the more extreme cases like the street pimps. If she gets no business at all, she works for the street pimp for room and board and provides her services for a much less than the escort services. Sometimes drugs can be involved if she takes them when she is depressed from her life falling apart from this criminal record and she does it for cheap drugs or to repay her tab.
I know this is the extreme, bad, hard-lucked case which happen to maybe 3 percent of them but it sometimes does. It may happen to a lesser degree. Not every freelanced escort that does it for the thrill of it or just for lots of money can get away with it. Those that do, I cheer them on and hope they NEVER get caught and get a criminal record for doing something that is not wrong in any sense. Some women do prostitution temporarily to get out of debt or to get out of a tight financial situation. I hope they never get caught either. Putting women in these situations in jeopardy by giving them a criminal record is flat out wrong and these laws are not always started by feminists but are also started by prude mayors like Rudoplh Guliani. His reputation was going down the tubes as a draconian mayor until that fuckhead Bin Laden blew up the World Trade Center and this event boosted the reputation of that draconian prude of a mayor. If it wasn't for 9/11, people would see this bastard for what he is. A homo with a stick up his ass that doesn't like men to have fun sex with women in any way. After all, he closed down most porn shops and made all strip joints topless only, clearly a homo! He also closes down all nightclubs that have strippers in them or requires them to fire the strippers or just make them topless.
The Virgin Terr
11-13-02, 13:11
wearing my activist hat, i want to raise a new topic here: jury nullification. jury nullification is a legal right in the u.s. (i have no idea if it exists in oz, perhaps RN can enlighten us) of people serving on juries to vote according to their own conscience regarding guilt or innocence of the accused, so that for example in a victimless crime prosecution, a technically guilty person can be acquitted by a juror who disagrees with the particular application of law in this case. it's a right rarely exercised however, as the perverse establishment is opposed to power to the people, and most of the people are perversely dedicated to obeying authority, no matter how twisted that authority may be. most people on juries aren't even aware of this legal right. jury nullification is perhaps the best way common people have to fight oppressive laws, for if it were widely practiced, victimless "crimes" such as prostitution could be effectively abolished. i have a couple websites you can check out for more on this subject: commonsensejustice.us and fija.org (fija stands for fully informed jurors association). fight for your rights!
I'm still here, vt, but what's jury nullification got to do with pussy? I don't give a rat's ass about jury nullification. And I already said everthing I have to say about pimps. Find a pimp, stick a chisel in his ear, and tap the chisel firmly with a hammer.
The Virgin Terr
11-14-02, 00:22
don't be dumb, dickhead. jury nullification is about activism, activism is about freedom, and freedom is about getting more pussy! comprender?
Hmm, by that logic, tree frogs or discarded used tires are about the environment, the environment is about activism, etc., etc., viola, more pussy. Generic activism strategies are a bit of a stretch for the morality of prostitution, don't you think?
Actually there is a clear connection between pussy and discarded used tires, as the latter are used to make those industrial strength condoms the window girls use in Amsterdam.
Aww... that explains it. In eastern Russia the chicks carried around some that looked and felt like lengths of bicycle tube with a knot in one end - recycling without the scientific fuss? Better bring your own.....
manofkosice
11-14-02, 14:09
Surely the point about the juries is, if people called for jury service refuse to convict girls and their clients then the law is effectively abolished.
Quite so, but that's true of any victimless crime as well, and is something that's been tried and failed repeatedly in other instances as an activist strategy. There are also dozens of other activist approaches available for use, but that doesn't really mean that throwing them out advances this topic. I always appreciate VT's take on things and contributions, but this one seems more of a stretch in terms of topic than most.
The Virgin Terr
11-16-02, 03:35
most of what we discuss here is unrelated to "the morality of prostitution" because it's a given we all support it, so we ought to discuss how we can more effectively combat those who are against us. jury nullification could be one effective tool if more people were aware of it, and i for one am always interested in civics lessons which broaden my knowledge and outlook, such as can be found at fija.org/jury.pdf which discusses at length the theory behind jury duty in the first place: to empower common citizens to check the power of their governments. that, afterall, is the broad principle behind victimless crime legislation: too much governmental power.
anyone know of any john's organizations present or past? this seems the obvious place to begin. if there isn't one now nor has there ever been one, then the obvious question is what if anything can be done, what kind of message will it take to mobilize those among us inclined to organize and become more socially active? perhaps a creative and inspired challenge to the morality of the law itself? a message which causes a little light to go on inside our heads which says "i have nothing to be ashamed of and i'm sick of hiding what i do and having to fear negative consequences for doing it"? not to mention of course the fact that prohibition makes prostitution more difficult to engage in, more expensive to engage in, and less satisfying.
Well said on all counts, RN. Any activist fight is essentially an appeal to the conscience of the public, and the battle is to articulate the moral struggle to the degree that the public has no question what side they're on (and, if you really want to win, it had better be yours.) And the truth is, frankly, that at this point the case has not yet been made in a manner irresistible to that portion of the public unlikely to have anything to do with prostitution. Those are the hearts and minds that must be won, and the tongues that must be engaged in speaking. Hearing it from sex workers or customers isn't going to do it -- both are too easy to pigeon-hole as having a personal stake in the matter, which renders their perspectives automatically partisan.
Terry, I give in for a small while, since you're clearly not going to let this one rest until we go for it. I disagree with you, however, that everyone here has the same attitude about the morality of prostitution -- I think there are many variations and nuance, and that is still for me the most viable discussion area, as opposed to turning this into an activism strategizing thread. That might make for an interesting discussion thread to have in place, but to my mind it is still quite distinct from this stated topic.
There's no question that the courts are a prime area of general activist activity, with lawsuits and legal challenges to laws being to areas of choice in most instances. For what it's worth, the only really viable and successful jury nillification strategies I'm aware of have been lawyer-driven, as they are the ones who need to make the case in the courtroom, and mostly related to race. So a proper activist strategy in this regard would be to first articulate the reasons why jury nullification is the only proper moral response (and your level of thundering hyperbolic howls about an unjust society aren't going to do it in this case -- you're not going to get anywhere asking most citizens to pull their houses down. That may have worked to some extent in racial cases, but here the degree of emotional appeal is different) a good citizen can have, pull that together with some kind of support structure that gives lawyers a leg to stand on legally and morally, and then work to educate lawyers about this strategy. Finally, it would take some kind of promotional/educational campaign to direct those in legal trouble to sympathetic jurors and a low-key success campaign in the media (stories such as "X number of juries over the last X number of months have done this...") to sow the seeds that there is a shift in conscience.
To my mind, though, that's still very much cart-before-the-horse and an unlikely way to truly affect change. A generic case for victimless crimes is less likely to truly sway the hearts and minds of people than a clear number of cases that demonstrate adequately what the impact of the current situation is. People cannot comprehend 40,000 people being killed in a Chinese earthquake, say, but they can be deeply affected by the picure of an individual child from such a disaster left a shaken orphan. Prostitution activists have yet to define that kind of picture, which sends a clear message without even needing to say anything, in such a way that the public itself demands change. And that latter situation is the way effective change will happen.
People speaking out and marches in the street may help signal the sentiment exists, but they won't really do anything in the absence of clear evidence of a position's broad appeal, unless those people speaking out somehow become that picture for the public that tells the unavoidable truth of the matter. As much as I personally support decriminalization, I've seen nothing in terms of articulated positions that would convince my neighbors or friends -- and that's not even to get into the issue of explaining why decriminalization is different from legalization, and what regulation has to do with societal branding, etc., all of which are complex issues. Right now the basic public image of sex workers is still either one of forced indenture and human trafficing, immoral harlots who will steal anyone's husbands for a buck, or disease-carrying societal rats. Effectively replacing those pictures in the mind of the common person with new ones of equal power is, to my mind, the true area of activist battle.
Oh, I don't disagree at all, RN, that personal testimony is critical to the process, and I believe wholeheartedly that demystifying and conveying the people behind the image is absolutely important. But that's something that generally can only be done on a small scale, and as you note, unless you make real inroads in your scheduling it can be difficult to make it happen in places where you really need to work hard to make change happen -- the "it's immoral" camp. And regardless of how personally charismatic you or others might be, I think it's still works best if it also is accompanied by strong voices who can be termed disinterested observers as opposed to those with an economic or lifestyle stake in the issue. This latter point is simply that making impacts from two or more sources is likely to strengthen the impression -- you've given it a human face, and getting backup from external sources for the facts you quote only reinforces the impression you've made
And I agree it's unfair that certain groups need to hear from someone in authority, but I'd caution that it's not just because epithets can be hurled at sex workers (though of course that's also part of it) because it's something most political activist campaigns have faced. Blacks in the USA wanting equal rights were "uppity," people concerned about environmental issues are "long-haired tree-huggers," people who don't want urbansprawl are "anit-progress" and so forth. (We could talk about the emotionality and irrational fears that aboriginal struggles have produced in OZ, as well.) But when any of these groups is successful in many ways it is because they manage to convey a more primal message of justice than what is involved in passing this or that piece of legislation. And part of my point was that I don't see where the prostitution lobby has managed yet to articulate that -- it's there, but it's still underneath, and it can't touch those who take the "it's immoral" perspective who are your most vehement opposition. To make it work, and touch them, I think it needs to be something where someone who sits outside of the scene can imagine themselves being part of it and feeling the injustice. And the majority of people are going to have trouble imagining themselves, for example, having multiple thousands of sexual partners -- that's the image that will still overwhelm them, not the message you're trying to convey. In truth, from a practical political perspective, you don't need to change the minds of the "it's immoral" set, you simply need to sow enough doubt in their minds that their opposition becomes lessened.
On one level I think the whole external authority thing is because people want support when they change the way they think -- especially if it flies in the face of the way they were raised and what they have always "known" and having authorities convinces that they're not making a foolish choice. Just human nature, I guess.
And, sorry, sometimes it's hard to take my activist hat off since I've worn it for so long :) And it's particularly tough when I'm wandering around, as now in Thailand, in a culture that's not my own, where the differences strike me continuously and force me to question my own precepts, and where it is far from my place to criticize or make change, but only to better understand.
Not so different from many sectors, really. I think I mentioned here before one of my favorite cartoons -- a firing squad formed as a circle. That's my impression of so many advocacy movements; they spend more time fighting each other than those they ought to be. Reminds me of a book fair in NYC in the 70s where there were three branches different of the American communist movement. They ended up in an actual physical brawl over who was the "true" communist party. Needless to say, no one came anywhere near that part of the room for the three days of the fair. I felt really sorry for the folks sitting near them.
Your political strategy is the classic legislative approach of forming temporary alliances based on narrowly defined common interests. It's how libraries and conservative-book-burning religious zealots can sometimes be on the same side of an issue. Still, the lack of a true concerted message means you'll only be able to win some of the battles and not the big war for the public heart.
Seems to me that it should at least be posed as something like "common people doing uncommon work facing uncommon obstacles" or something like that, which does cover all those in the equation (though since the implications of common are problematic this would need to be wordsmithed -- and normal doesn't work, either -- this is off the top of my head as opposed to really working it) to stress the normal nature of those involved and paint things as something that your neighbor could reasonably be doing, or which is at least connected somehow to something they do. That would at least get everyone under the same umbrella and give an opportunity to have one primary message regarding the sector as a whole as opposed to this or that particular issue. There's always plenty of room and opportunity for the latter, but if it can be used to reinforce a greater common message then the effect multiplies.
Damn, VT, you got me doing it after all...
BTW, did you see where in England they're preparing to overhaul all their laws regarding sex crimes? One of the things in sort of the footnotes was a mention that Blair's guys were studying the issue of how to do away with criminal issues regarding prostitution, which sounds like decriminalization to me...
Dear Joe and RN,
Firstly, apologies about my in's and out's here - i live up to my nick.
It apparently is very hard to argue with anyone of you, mainly because what you say makes sense and I agree - and then how to argue?? The "stand-off" thus has to rest for a while I guess...
You would both be the kind of people I wold like to see getting voted into Parliament. With real opinions, common-sense-based, rather than opinions directed at getting the most votes.
And that is, alas, also the reason none of you never will be.
"Real" politicians have only one concern - getting votes. Meaning, expressing views which easily catch with as much people as possible, whether dumb or smart.
What we are about here is justifying something that for a number of right and wrong reasons has been put in the "wrong" basket for at least 5000 years.....
However much we agree on this... how on this earth do we expect that the dull, sleepy "man in the street" (or his wife(!!!!)) who are basically non-risk taking people who get worried if the TV program changes unexpectedly..... can understand and accept that some other people may want to do other stuff, like having sex with someone they really don't know at all and see what happens - jump outta an airplane or go to a place in the world which is on the local authorities "warning list"?? - can vote for someone who advocates that this is actually great fun and the real meaning of life???????
> You would both be the kind of people I wold like to see getting voted into Parliament.
Ah, far too many skeletons in these closets, I fear -- and every intention of collecting many more! But thanks for the compliment.
But to take a shot at your question -- I actually have a pretty high view of the overall good sense of the man and woman in the street, and I generally trust in their hearts. It's their understanding of complex issues that's the problem -- the average person is fighting hard to make their own life work, and so are not likely to spend the time necessary to really understand the nuances of most situations that don't effect them truly directly. So to get anywhere, one has to find a way to universalize the problem, to convince the average person that this is not just a problem about these other people, but about the averae person's lives. This is obviously a major struggle that plays out in different and often confusing ways -- such as, for example, the US's Republican party's hammering at the "family" theme and their ability by doing so to gather support, in spite of the fact that they really have a pretty abysmal record on social programs aimed at the family. It's a way of spinning things that works, however.
That's been my point here -- one can win this or that legislative battle by marshalling forces and making coalitions, but to truly change public perception takes a long-term effort to explain how a particular issue is about exactly the same things as is going on in the man or woman in the street's lives. In this case that's doubly difficult because prostitute is still an epithet, so one must tread carefully when you draw the comparison, lest the common person says, "You're saying I'm like what?" :)
Joe, I've got those bones rattling outta the closet too - make no mistake about it...:)
However, I am not too conviced about your faith in the "man in the street".
Said man has biases all over. Not the guy you meet in the bar somewhere, but the average voter guy who drives past the bar on his way home to the missy.
His wife has even more of them...
Some of these biases are based on religion. The curse of the world - anything from American dual-morality ways via European lawmaking to Iranian or Afghan (or Somali) men being dead scared of the fact that there is anything in existence like female sexuality. And they all blame it on God why it is forbidden and bad and whatever.
A newspaper in Nigeria said that if Mohammed lived today, he would consider the Miss World participants as potential wiwes - probably true, but some uneducated, blind followers of a faith designed by man burned down the newspaper offices the day after....
The Virgin Terr
11-21-02, 17:12
i wasn't aware of that development in breat britain, joe, how did u hear of it? i keep up well with international news relating to the "drug war" and those seeking 2 reform via a comprehensive weekly online newsletter, but there is 2 my knowledge nothing similar regarding prostitution. great 2 hear if in fact true, and in keeping with similar developments happening in many countries seeking liberation from american style prohibition of illicit drugs. i apologize if it offends anyone that i mix the 2 issues freely, but they are absolutely the same to me; that being who controls our bodies; ourselves, or the fucking government? anyways, if u are privy 2 a particular information outlet specializing in reform of prostitution laws, let us all know of it.
i've been away for a few days and see i've stimulated some discussion. it's a start. i'm under no illusions that social change is easy or fast, my purpose here is simply to test the waters to see how much interest or potential enthusiasm can be generated. it appears that among the very few of us here, quite alot, but what about our millions of colleagues involved to some extent personally in prostitution? if we could get just one percent of them involved, we could have an organization of quite significant proportion. one measly percent, that's only one out of every hundred people! surely one out of every hundred of us can be prodded into an organization dedicated to advocacy, don't you think?
The Virgin Terr
11-21-02, 17:54
since i failed 2 address some of your comments regarding morality and nuances thereof, i will briefly. the morality issue is simple or complex as u choose 2 make it; i prefer keeping it simple, and again, analogous to drug prohibition. prohibition doesn't work and causes far more harm than it prevents. the question properly put and 2 best advantage is 2 make it an issue of personal freedom from tyrannical social (governmental) control. at the most basic level, i suppose the argument revolves around one's philosophical view of human nature, or put another way, whether one views said nature from a rational viewpoint or an irrational (religious) one. the irrational religious viewpoint argues that human nature is "fallen" or "sinful"; the rational viewpoint makes no such negative moral judgement, and therefore is not inclined 2 reflexive condemnation.
as for "nuances", again, one can make that as simple or complex as one prefers. i distrust those who gravitate towards complexity; it's an effective tactic for paralysis, for endless debate. all actions entail some degree of risk and uncertainty. if u want 2 eliminate risk and uncertainty, commit suicide, because life is inherently "dangerous". if, on the other hand, one chooses the risk of life, and rejects the religious or negative moral view which denies human freedom by condemning human nature, morality is simplified to the poiint that it all boils down to one simple thing: free choice. freedom from coercion and deceit. so long as there's no deceit or coercion involved, all activities may be regarded as morally positive.
VT -- the thing on Britain I saw in two places: on Yahoo, via Rauters, as a kind of footnote/afterthought to the bigger story of the general overhaul of the sex laws and in one of the English Thai papers I picked up (sorry, I forget which one it was, and I've already recycled.)
Traveller, I agree that the man (or woman) in the street has biases and baggage, cultural and religious programming, etc. But I still think it's possible to appeal to broad moral issues and couch things in such a way that they become harmonious with that programming. Just look at the civil rights process, something that helped shift attitudes prevalent for most of US history. No, it didn't get everyone, and no, it didn't finish the job to this point, but there's little question that the general man in the street's attitude is markedly different than, say, forty years ago. So it's possible -- it's just not easy or fast, but that's no surprise, given the nature of how a society works.
And for what it's worth, the whole thing in Nigeria, though unfortunate, was clearly pretty predictable. Miss World organizers were absolutely nuts for choosing to hold their festival there in the first place -- on the one side you've got a sizable fundamentalist Muslim population who thinks the whole thing promotes promiscuity and is basically immoral, and on the other you've got contestants boycotting because a number of women who have conceived out of wedlock have been sentenced to death. I've got a friend who lives there, and even he thinks his country is nuts. But you don't change people's minds by having a newspaper reinterpret religious dogma and taking to task those who follow it -- gee, they get angry, what a surprise -- you do it by making things smaller in scale, down to a person or two, and portray those stories in such a way that they become universal and sympathy is engendered. It's the lesson of the famous National Geographic photograph of the Afghan girl with those haunting eyes...
The Virgin Terr
11-23-02, 02:47
after reading your latest posts, if you are in fact a 300 lb. trucker from ohio, you're going to extraordinary lengths to fool us, RN.
regarding those posts, the articles you site demonstrate the unworkability of allowing law enforcement officials an influential hand in drafting prostitution legislation. you might as well have the catholic church or muslim clerics involved. they're prohibitionists at heart, and any legalization scheme they'll deign to approve will reflect that bias.
p.s. now that we're "senior members" of this forum, what does that mean exactly? will less "senior" contributors stand in awe of our experience and credentials? :-)
So in essence she is the same as an Attorney General in the states, a politician who runs general things related to the area and sets policy. But it's good to see that you're not making this at all personal, and are keeping the big picture view :)
(And are we now so heirarchical that no one else gets to kneel but junior members? C'mon, RN, you know we high and mighty senior officials very much need to be put in our places as well...)
Seriously though -- is this draft ever actually going to be released and made available for comment, or is this simply political theatre at this point by both sides?
A "Frequent Kneeler's Card" huh? :)
My guess would be that she'll study the draft the SA has put out, pull in a few feathers to give it a friendly gloss, and then go ahead and put something out. Politically, she probably needs it out, even (or especially) as a complete failure, since she's been yapping about it for so long. A good question, of course, is why it's taking so long since she's not seeking any advance input from those in the sector, and who else she might in fact be getting such impact from.
The most superior sexual practice is 68.
RN, first let's kill all the politicians (Shakespeare rewritten...he had lawyers in mind...)
Secondly, I'll never post a response to you again if you offer a "Senior's discount" - for hecks sake it sounds like the offer given by public transport to 65-year olds with health problems of all kinds all over.......
Grr :-)
65 year olds with health problems need affordable pussy too, I think. I'll let you know in 19 more years.
Dickhead, RN, Traveller et al.,
Very entertaining thread here, discounts! Excellent, roll on retirement! Please refer to my post on “68” at (11-17-02) WSG Forum > Special Interests > Jokes & Humorous Stories. LOL.
Regards,
Havanaman
Havanaman, went to that page, not been there before, I caught on RN's hilarious "mate's rules" - she is in the know.......
And RN, can you give some info on that government horror story?
How is it worse, RN? And in political terms, does it actually have a chance of happening, or is it dead in the water? It sounds, without reading it, as if unfortunately now your best bet may be for a continuation of the status quo, and a political fight for a more receptive government.
RN, horror indeed......
I read the stuff.
The first thought was this couldn't even happen in America.....but of course it could.
The whole thing gives an impression of being implemented in Afghanistan during Taliban rule (guess they forgot to put in the stoning and lashing, but that could be fixed later..) The legislation seems more extensive in volume and detail than the entire corporate law of a modern country......
So the mandatory pick-up line is gonna be "hey lemme see your licence" - lest I subsidise the Aussie government with $6000?
And if I pick up a girl in a bar who fancies the fact that I can take her on an expensive holiday and buy her clothes ("consideration doesn't need to be money") - a) we both get fined massively for hooking up, and b) later on we both gotta rid ourselves of $6000 for making out without a rubber...
They forgot to put in a 14 year prison sentence for leaving the lights on....(or maybe not - some kids could see ya if they peeked in)
What they are saying is thay want to make this as awkward, humiliating and unattractive as absolutely possible. Which is probably very intended. And they don't believe they will lose a lot of voters or their voting wives by doing so. Politicians don't give a damn about any kind of common sense or human rights or anything on its own - they calculate only the impact of their acts on the polls and votes. And on this one they consider it low-risk.
Let's buy ourselves an attractive, free-spirited deserted island with good climate and easily built infrastructure to get away from this. (And introduce rocks as the currency - as the lizards, I will grab a big rock and attract the cuties:-)
(Oops - that last idea was grabbed by some Englishmen looking for a place to put prisoners in the 1700's.......)
If anyone wonders what can make RN so upset about this, I assure, after reading the stuff, that there is no reason to wonder about it whatsoever.
In the starter of the official document, (Named the "Prostitution CONTROL bill") it is made very clear what is going on - and it is not decriminalisation (rather the opposite) - and not worthy of the name "legalisation" in any sensible way either. Just some extracts frrom the overview;
"Reason for enacting this act"
- "....the policy of CONTAINING prostitution has proven to be inadequate"
- "...there is a need for the CONTROL of prostitution to be regulated by law."
- "...it is INAPPROPRIATE for the CONTROL of persons involved in prostitution to be subject to the normal principles of administrative law." (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
What this is really saying is they would gladly lock up anyone related to the business, whether as SW's or johns (oh, yes, lots of stuff providing an opening to the slammer for us too), or go to the football stadium and watch them be stoned the Afghan way.
I might maybe be ranting too here..... but as a lawyer, with an awareness for what I thought was a modern society's concern for human rights and women's rights, this is horrendous.
It seems, however, that the world is going this way. The freedom gained in the 70's when people and government were liberal and relaxed in respect of sex and freedom of the individual seems to be over.
In the US they are seriously passing bills that will allow Big Brother government complete access to, and control over, all kinds of communication between people world-wide. Europe is following most probably.
We who venture in this group do not approve - rather we are mostly horrified of this "world of total control by someone in government". At least we are aware of it - probably lots of others would disapprove loudly too if they just got the magnitude of it...
People who love excitement, freedom and thrillseeking seem to be an endangered species - get a job in the government and survive??????
Hell, no.............
RN -- I've been on the road without much net access, so I'm just kind of catching up here for a moment. I'll probably not be able to take a look at the text for a few days, but it truly does sound like a nightmare, and your fingering of the control board as the real agenda sounds pretty well dead on. If everything else is thrown out and they get that, which sounds "reasonable" to those who don't really look at it, then they can get whatever they want anyway.
This means you're going to need to battle on several fronts and with a couple potential strategies. First, you're going to need to either completely block passage, if that's possible. Second, you're going to need to work to get the various ridiculous parts taken out. Finally, if you can do the second but not the first, you're going to need to work to defang the control board by working to not actually give them control of anything. A very tough, tough battle when something like this comes from the more liberal party, to say the least.
RN,
(sorry this will be pretty technical but I guess maybe useful)
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights:-
Article 11.1. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
Article 12. No one shall be subject to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, or attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to protection of law against such interference or attacks.
The UN International Covenant on Civil and Political rights:-
Article 2.3.1. To ensure that any person, whose rights or freedoms are herein recognised are violated, shall have an effective remedy, notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity, to ensure that any person claiming such remedy shall have his rights thereto determined by competent judicial, administrative or legislative authority...
Australia as a country and a UN member must have ratified these conventions, and laws (made by regions) which are in contravention of the conventions will be unconstitutional.
There are several more interesting provisions in the a/m conventions, and in genereal the stuff contained in the "control bill" seems to a large degree to be in contravention of the UN conventions.
Best bet - find a human rights lawyer who also knows constitutional law who is willing to support, and challenge the stuff as being in breach of national constitution. Should work on several of the major problem areas.
Originally posted by Traveller
RN,
(sorry this will be pretty technical but I guess maybe useful)
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights:-
Article 11.1. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
Anybody who's relying on that should stay out of Méjico or any other UN member country that follows the Napoleonic code = "guilty until proven innocent."
RN,
sorry if I appeared to be "educational". It seems you have your act together, with legal teams and all.
This is really about moral majority (?) against common sense and (most importantly) international law as decided by the UN???
Moral majority tends to win all the time.
The wiwes just don't want to have a possibility for the man in the house to fool around with girls of the night - and I guess that is all there is to it.
So - kill it.
RN,
The law is a strange thing which is a bit lodged between a rock and a hard place.
Most people think the law has a life of its own, being there to regulate the relations between people, and between people and their government, and if there is a "wrong" the law will put it right.
Some times it will. But "the law" has flaws - of several kinds. Someone wise said it is like the Ritz hotel in London - open to everyone (who can pay, that is).
Also, the law lives in a kind of symbiosis with politics (power). Judges look to what is "politically correct" at any given time and place and tend to bend their decisions in that direction when deciding matters. The opinion of the political establishment weighs heavily in this respect. Those who say that law is not influenced by politics lie.
That said, the law, and international pressure backing it, sometimes works. Western world governments (including Australia for anything but geography), are to some degree vulnerable to this.
On the matter of international and UN law in general, I do not think it can any way be used to force a legalisation of prostitution. But I think that to some degree it can work to fend off the worst excesses intended by your government in the process of doing so - including the "camouflaged" introduction of "martial law" through a Board who can decide anything without being answerable to noone.
There - got a bit educational again, then :-)
BTW, saw your site - keep up the good work, you.
RN
I have been reading a bit.
You say you didn't complete high school. BUT you are well sopken and i have gained a great deal of knowledge from you ... Thank you
With the bill you presented a girl out for a good time good be looked at as an un licensed professional. After alll most men when wining and dining are after a reward ... if the lady offers such does that make her working with out a licence?
I believe the board is afraid of having a sex worker on it as they feel they may be exposed to haveing hired a profesional. BUT with out a sex worker represented how can there be fairness?
I believe Japan at one time had leaglized prostatution and made it illeagal to the pressure of the U.S. all it did was force it underground
One cannot legislate morality.
For those who want to proclaim the Bible . Were is it mentioned that any brothels were destroled .. i have read were tables were Tables overturned at the temple... I am not saying religion is right or wrong just over zelous. They want to pass laws to protect them selves from what they precieve to be evil. When was the last time some one was expelled from the church for some thing..
Well i just wanted to add my 2 cents. good luck.
The Virgin Terr
12-11-02, 22:36
RN, for what it's worth, i think you could be enormously more effective as an activist if you felt you didn't need anonymity. do you fear being targeted by the police if you went public? do you fear family rejection, or having your children being made into targets of derision? how old are your kids by the way, if that's not too personal?
trade you some cold for your heat. the northeastern u.s. has been below freezing most of the time for several weeks now.
RN, I've been on the road bouncing from place to place for the past week or so, and net access has generally been either unavailable, unreliable, or both. I've kept up a bit, but have only posted a couple of short things in the Thailand area.
I'm heading back north tomorrow, and will probably be back on my own computer sometime next week, where I can bore everyone to death once again :)
The Virgin Terr
12-16-02, 16:24
since this conversation has gone moribund, i have an idea to add to it. doctors and lawyers are among professionals seen as generally greedy, particularly lawyers, and sometimes unethical. however, in both instances there are notable exceptions, particularly with doctors donating their services to the poor. my point is this: what about prostitutes? there are certainly many people in this world who are sexually deprived, and one of the reasons sited by some prostitutes for job satisfaction is giving pleasure to their customers. do you suppose that in a different world in which prostitution wasn't illegal or "immoral", there would be some prostitutes who would donate their services to needy customers, such as disabled veterans? servicing need, instead of satisfying greed?
VT, I have sometimes been greedy, sometimes unethical (in particular for the client's benefit), but without doubt, the real satisfaction is with a job well done - meaning the client is satisfied. Sometimes I have indeed compared my job to that of a prostitute - you get paid to satisfy your client's needs as well as possible (and when it is really successful it is rewarding in its own right too).
The times I have met sw's who think likewise, I have had a great time....the soulmate experience......I do not want people to understand this, not even accept it -but in my opinion it proves that the mind of the mind and the mind of the flesh somethimes may work the same way..I don't really think that there is such a difference between a great SW and a good legal mind - in any sense.
So, VT, is this your new organization -- "Mercy F*ck, Inc.?" With a slogan something like -- "It's time to stop screwing the poor and start screwing the poor?"
I think the "greedy hooker" thing is a bit off point, as the original perspective posited doctors and lawyers as also fitting into the stereotype. I think defining things more along the lines of "successful professionals who decide to donate their services for social good" might be a somewhat more positive spin to put on the whole concept and one that makes it a bit less hot-button.
And, RN, though I absolutely understand your defensive take on things, and personally think it's a more than abstruse and problematic idea, being a doctor or lawyer is also a job, and the point is that those folks also donate their services. I've done so myself many times, even though what I do is how I eat, same as a prostitute, kitchen hand or whomever.
RN-I didn't mean to compare professions in all their respects - only in the sense that doing a job well can be as rewarding - or more - than the "greed" content.
When it comes to the emotional stuff - I can see your point, and I appreciate that a sw has more problems with this than most - however it does exist in the other "professions of greed" too - I know of a lawyer who is defending a man who raped and killed a very young girl - his stepdaughter - who was a classmate of his own kid......and greedy doctors who are begged to "turn off the machine" for terminally ill people who are suffering badly....
There is always bundles of tough emotional stuff around. Being with a sw of course I pay, even overpay mostly (hey you didn't hear that) so the pay part is taken well care of. But I also do my very best to treat them as GF's and "regular girls" and expose them to the risk of getting emotional (or really try my best to). Sometimes it really "works" - more often before, (the age thingy) but still...... As I read you getting the girls emotional is really a bad thing (and I have no problem seeing why)....but at the same time that is what most of us want....as discussed at length before here.
Hey RN,looking at one of you're posts,it looks like you have a LOVEJONES for blackmen....welllllllllllllll I'm gonna look you up oneday if I happen to be in "the land from down under":p
While there are certain similarities between lawyers and hookers, lawyers usually only screw you once but it lasts a long time. Whereas, a hooker will try to screw you as many times as possible in a short period of time. Normally, getting screwed by a lawyer costs about 1000 times as much as getting screwed by a hooker. Also, when you get screwed by a hooker, typically you know it right away.
These are the basics.
The Virgin Terr
12-18-02, 21:17
didn't mean to get you so riled up, RN. i think my attitudes are just way ahead of my time regarding anything having to do with sex or other personal freedom issues. if the screwed up human species wasn't so fucking ballistically restrictive about sex in general, i don't think my idea would be considered at all radical. in my world prostitution would be government subsidized. there would be plenty of money for it with the elimination of military expenditures and the end of violence as a remedy for social conflict. providing sexual pleasure for free would earn you some kind of positive recognition. perhaps we could include a new category of nobel peace prize.
"stop screwing the poor and start screwing the poor"? i like it, joe! you have a job awaiting you in public relations in my imaginary alternative universe.
The Virgin Terr
12-19-02, 21:19
i'm going to really stir the pot up now with these next comments. if shit is going to change regarding the criminalization and stigmatization of sex activity in general, it's going to have to come from men, not women. first of all, i think men are the source of sexual repression, not women. it's mainly men who have created the religious, legal, and ideological basis for the repression.
that said, the price of sex is outrageous, and it gives women involved in sexwork incentive to see the current corrupt system remain in place. as it currently stands, sexworkers can make 10 times as much per hour as many professionals whose work is more skilled and demanding, such as school teachers. how can this be? a job that takes no special skill or training and isn't unpleasant or boring pays 10 times as much as one which requires a great deal of training, is more difficult, and has more social value?
frankly, i don't think sexwork should be more valued than most mainstream occupations, or pay more. i'm sure there's a great deal of resentment by many sex industry consumers over the outrageous price satisfying this most basic need entails. and we consumers or johns or whatever greatly outnumber the mostly female sexworker population, so it's up to us to make change happen, not them, and it's us who will benefit the most.
RN, first, I obviously think stereotypes are problematic regardless of profession -- I was just making the point that the issue itself is rather beside the main issue. I don't at all disagree that sex work is different than being a lawyer (a doctor may be closer, as there are varying degrees of physical intimacy) but that brings up two things, to me -- first, where does one draw such a line? Is it just sex where the line would be drawn, as opposed to such things as nurses do, or masseuses, or physical therapists, etc., all of which can be highly personal and intimate? And, if usch a line is to be drawn, doesn't that call into question the oft-repeated demand that prostitution be treated just as any other job or profession? It seems tough to make the argument defining it as different and then to ask socially for it to be treated the same. :)
VT, I don't absolutely disagree with your point regarding men needing to change, as men still clearly control the vast engines of society, by and large. But I'm not convinced that it's as one-sided as you purport -- clearly women have much at stake in monogamous society as those so often bearing primary responsibilities for raising family. As far as the whole price issue, well, market forces are market forces, and when supply outstrips demand the price goes down.
VT, your comment that men are the source of sexual repression, I fully agree, this is in my opinion not even worthy of debate. Sexual repression is mainly created by men in order to control women - by religion, law, social stigma or whatever.
But I beg to differ indeed otherwise. In my opinion, sexwork is (or "should be considered as") different from other work - in the sense that those who do it admittedly take on the risk of getting emotional problems of all kinds - it is a service directed at emotions more than anything else - and of course a lot of them do.
We (the johns) try to distance ourselves from this problem - and at the same time we want the newfound friend to get emotional immediately (the ultimate GF experience) - and then we know we will never see her again. If we succeed in our desires in the emotional sense - we are instantly breaking another heart.
If we meet someone who appears "professional" and keeping her distance on the emotional level (hey, she doesn't even kiss for real...) we complain that the "GF experience" was not there. For sure. I know, cause I think exactly that way myself.
Confession made, then.
Chuckling my head off over Dickhead's comparisons between lawyers and hookers, I would like to carry that one a bit further -
you may compare the backyard divorce lawyer (or ambulance chaser) with the kind of hookers that VT wants to give freebies to the needy - heck, government employed poor girls who are supposed to be "obliged" to give away themselves (or at least their body) to anyone??? (I agree that the ambulance chaser should really be on a (low) government salary and sometimes give away his stuff for free too, but he doesn't - so why should she??) There is no reason at all that guy should make a dime more....
Then compare the lawyer who advises a large corporation to the effect that they make zillions - with the killer GF experience "once in a lifetime" sw. Sure the lawyer will make more (he has a substantially richer client) but the girl is well worth of her talents, and should be free to charge accordingly. It is still cheaper than a comparable girlfriend - she will want a sports car too.
Actually, thinking of it, I would probably want (much) more money per hour to shag an ugly, sex-starved, emotionally unstable woman 10 - 15 years older than me who was not of my choice (?) than for any kind of legal work. (That is, if I'd ever do it.)
Am I then, going out there to complain that a drop-dead cutie at 19 claims a bundle if she is to screw, be happy and friendly to, and otherwise fool around with a 50-year old???
The whole thing is about getting something that for some reason or another (in this case disproportionate sexual attractiveness, whether caused by looks, age, shyness or whatever), is out of range in the first place, and may become in-range by the introduction of money.
The times I have met with this situation, and experienced a young, beautiful, GF-type girl, I have considered that paying even way more than she has expected has been the thing to do. In my mind, "overpaying" only applies to those lousy mishap experiences. And the good ones deserve what they can get.
The Virgin Terr
12-20-02, 19:14
i think i've made very similar arguments in the past in this forum, so i apologize for repeating myself, and RN, i imagine i probably pissed you off alot more than you indicated. if that be the case, thanks for being gentle in your rebuke. btw, atheists celebrate the solstice, not christmas, so merry solstice to all.
america's inner cities are islands of poverty amidst general wealth, with the exception of those involved in the illicit drug trade, who have money to burn. these aren't the folks who should have the most money, but that's what prohibition creates, a class of dangerous and undeservedly wealthy daredevils. if marijuana were decriminalized, instead of costing over $100/ ounce, people would be giving it away in the streets. to some extent the same would hold true with sex and prostitution, although for as long as humans exist in our present form, there will always exist a financial market for beautiful young girls. it would just be one hell of alot cheaper. sexwork doesn't necessarily include penetration, it's up to the individual what boundaries are set, so if you don't wish to be penetrated, you don't have to. alot of sexworkers make a living just showing themselves, providing fantasy for masturbation. likewise, if you don't like having little choice in your clientele, work independently only with those you approve of. i've never advocated and never will advocate that any particular sexworker should be required to satisfy any particular customer. if a customer is too much of a jerk or unhygeinic, go ahead and tell him to fuck off instead of fucking him. same goes for unsafe sex. there are some things no amount of money is worth, and what those are should be up to the individual. got it? please don't accuse me in the future of making coercive suggestions, because that isn't accurate and i resent it.
Since we're doing the holiday greeting thing, I'll toss mine in as well, though here in Thailand the main indication and effect of Christmas is that meals and rooms for the day are basically tripled in price to make tourists feel at home. :) Enjoy yourself on the beach, RN, and try to remember that those rays can do damage, especially in the heat you've been having down there!
RN, again, those professions you mention could (and have) all donated services in various situations. People have worked as butchers in charitable situations, and morgue workers or undertakers have most definitely done the same -- I've a friend who's an undertaker who has donated his work in times of great disaster and in places in the world where there is abject poverty. Actors and actresses, pretending to be people they are not and doing things they personally would not do, also do things for charity -- even adult film performers, whose jobs involve sex. We can propose a scenario in almost any other job where someone could conceivably donate their services, but prostitution is where the line is being drawn. Is it strictly an issue of penetration, then, and thereby a nod to the feminist perspective that the experiences of a woman in this way are fundamentally and indescribably different? Receiving, as it were, rather than, as is the case with a doctor, an undertaker (something where there can be great emotional hazard not to mention clear physical contact in a dramatic way) giving? Hmmm.
Again, let me make clear what I said in the beginning, which is that I basically agree with you on this issue. It's just the logic of the argument I find a bit troublesome -- in that the other "abnormal" jobs wouldn't make the statement that because of the very nature of their jobs it's impossible to conceive of them being done for charity, not only because of the nature of the work, but because by definition doing so would remove the actuality of the work (i.e. if you're not being paid, you're not being a prostitute.) And if the work itself requires this kind of special-case scenario, where essentially every other job that exists could potentially have a charitable (and thereby public sector) benefit except for prostitution, then I do think a broad line of difference is being drawn, as the argument then is that the only potential social benefit is entertwined tightly and inescapably with the act of parting men from their money for sex. And I think you know that I've no issue or argument whatsoever with prostitution being recognized and treated as a profession -- this thread is about discussing the, ahem, ins and outs of the issue.
VT -- your "giving it away in the streets" assertions boggle me. While there may be a place or two in the world where people give dope or sex away in the streets because it's decriminalized, that has a lot more to do with those particular cultures and their values (such as for religious reasons) than it does legality or supply and demand. People gave marijuana away to their friends during the 60s because they were growing it, it didn't cost them anything, and they wanted their friends to have a good time, and people give sex to their friends as well, but that's a very different thing than a free-flowing river of drugs and women for everyone just because the chains of legal oppression have been lifted. In places where prostitution is legal, women do not simply "give it away in the streets" as they bottom line is still that they are businesswomen trying to make a living, and they will charge as much for their services as the market will bear, same as any other businessperson. And if it's cheaper in those places, it's generally because they are places where poverty rules, and people are desperate for money. Not exactly a great manifestation of utopian ideals...
The Virgin Terr
12-23-02, 00:37
jz and RN, we're not communicating very well because i think you guys are being more realistic and i'm being idealistic. i'm not talking mere legalization, or even decrim in a society which continues to stigmatize certain instances of consensual sex. i'm talking about a world in which kids aren't traumatized by threats and fear-based misinfirmation about sex by their parents, teachers, government officials, and many of their own peers. in a world which didn't resort to such tactics, and which accepted sex for the natural and wonderful thing it is, it would be so much more available that a true free-market based cost of sex would be established. i believe that the number of women willing to engage in acts of prostitution would increase EXPONENTIALLY. i believe that most women would at some time engage in flagrant prostitution. conversely, demand would actually decrease as there would be fewer men feeling chronically sexually unfulfilled. based on laws of supply and demand, obviously prices would have to be dramatically lower. scoff at me for being an unrealistic dreamer if you like.
as for RN's argument that getting penetrated makes a prostitute's job categorically different than all other occupations, bullshit! the casual ease with which most prostitutes go about screwing their customers belies the notion that penetration is traumatic. if it were, then regardless of financial need women would not choose to engage in it. just like any other job, it's only traumatic if a client is abusive. i've been with way too many prostitutes to buy this. what she's basically saying with this argument is agreeing with radical feminists who claim sexwork is inherently demeaning. bullshit. she is correct that even with condoms, there is danger of std transmission, which has to be taken into account. there are other ways for satisfying sex too occur that don't involve penetration. they can be utilized for lower-priced encounters, or forgive me, charitable "mercy sex".
i also don't buy the argument that sexwork and sex for pleasure must be distinctly different things. most women i'd pay to have sex with, and of these, one factor determining how much i'd pay would definitely be how attractive the woman is to me. some i'd do only for free or if they paid me, and how much i'd charge would depend on how unattractive she is. in other words, the cost or price of sex with me depends on the partner. i don't know why the same shouldn't hold true for women. you're telling me that your price shouldn't change regardless of how attractive or unattractive your prospective partner is? makes no sense to me. i think how much you charge or are willing to pay to have sex with any particular person should depend on the degree of attractiveness or lack thereof. it makes no sense to have sex for free with one guy, and to charge the same price of another who is only a shade less attractive as you would for somebody you find very unattractive. that's like having one price fits all for jobs of differing difficulty.
You're right, VT, that we're talking about different worlds. If I wanted to postulate an idealistic world I'd just go for the Star Trek kind of perspective where nobody needs any money, you can simply replicate anything you need or want, pretty much everyone is good-looking, and if a woman/man doesn't want to sleep with you, there's a functional android who does. I like mine grounded at least withing shouting distance of reality, so I can seek ways to affect actual positive change.
I don't go as far (or anywhere nearly as harshly -- what gives?) as you on the penetration thing. And I don't at all see what someone taking advantage of someone else has to do with the issue of penetration at all -- there are bad service providers in all professions, just as there are good ones. While I also don't agree with the radical feminist perspective, that doesn't mean sexwork can't and often isn't traumatic -- many women feel themselves forced into it by circumstances, supporting their families at the cost of all societal status. I've talked with far too many who feel that way not to know it's true, and it's that kind of stigmatization groups like RN's properly fight against, to leaven the negative effects.
And I completely don't get your last concept, which seems to be a sliding scale for services based on the "attraction" of the provider to the client and vice-versa. While it may be true that women with characteristics most find desireable (age, looks, etc.) can command more money, and that someone who's radically attracted to this or that person is probably willing to pay more to be with them, I don't see how that at all translates to a provider giving a "hunkiness" discount or tax, and, moreover, how such an idea at all squares with your "sex for the poor" idea. While it might be true that providers may charge more if they're radically unattracted to someone, that's usually either a way to try to say no or to compensate for perceived risk or difficulty (as in dealing with someone radically obese or old) as opposed to anything at all revolving around sexual attraction. Lack of physical attraction, except in extreme cases, isn't really a degree of difficulty in the way that you describe it. In order to be a sex worker in the first place, I think you've got to cultivate that degree of distance RN has written about in order to distance what you're foing with your body from your heart and mind and, in many, many cases, your libido. I think for many women workers it can be as difficult to have sex with someone you're attracted to as not, as you can then look at what is not happening in your real life. Personally, paying to sleep with the ideal person of my sexual dreams isn't exactly what I want -- I want that person as an equal, a partner, not as a provider or customer.
The Virgin Terr
12-23-02, 16:23
sometimes one can't or shouldn't express negative things directly, in which case they may be expressed later towards a third party. perhaps such is the case here if u feel i've been harsh. this kind of forum is good for that i think. let off steam.
my idealistic world ISN'T hopelessly make believe, as u seem to indicate. i'm not talking about a world where everyone is beautiful and healthy and have what they want whenever they want it. the fact is, the real world could be alot better given a radical alteration in morals and values, and how people choose to relate with one another. hunger, poverty, and to a great extent loneliness can be eliminated. this is well within the realm of possibility, but would require radical changes in society, which given the entrenched backwardness and oppessiveness of current policies, will be difficult to achieve. i just take issue with those who sabotage such positive thinking with negativity. there is no practical reason why we must live with oppression and it's deprivations. we don't need androids if only humans will begin living up to their potential. there are plenty of attractive people who are going to waste.
female genitalia are designed for penetration. why make penetration out to be special? it's routine.
i don't know why u can't get the logic of sliding scale rates for sex based on attraction. i've already made my position on this crystal clear, so we'll leave it at that. sex should be beneficial for both parties, so if one can't derive pleasure from it because their partner doesn't turn them on, that's where money can compensate. this concept has nothing to do with charitable sex, and i don't see why you thought i was making a connection there.
Perhaps you misunderstood, VT -- it's not that I don't understand your idea regarding sliding scale, it's that I believe it's based on a false premise, which is that attraction really factors into the female sex worker's equation the same way it does in a male customer's. I think that is simply hooey, and if that does not factor in, then your entire equation is flawed.
As far as your version of utopia being somehow more real than my crack about Star Trek, I beg to differ. First of all, you focus on my comment about all the beautiful people there, which was more a snide critique of the unreality of the presentation via TV. Then you completely overlook the fact that that version of the future embodies precisely the things you call for -- a "radical alteration in morals and values, and how people choose to relate with one another. hunger, poverty, and to a great extent loneliness can be eliminated. this is well within the realm of possibility, but would require radical changes in society." I fail to see why your vision is more or less make-believe than the one I offered, frankly. I'm not terribly convinced yours is more desireable.
Your version of "positive thinking" contains a peculiarly sexist view of the world, in my opinion, in that you consistently put forward the proposition that given money and a loosening of law and stigma, most women will immediately start having sex with whole scores of people, and that the money side of the equation is important because all women are essentially prostitutes at heart and if things change most of them will thereby indulge. You have proposed in the past your perfect relationship as one where you pay money for intimacy, both physical and emotional, but where you basically choose the parameters of the relationship and can simply end it with no strings at any point, regardless of the degree of emotional closeness you require from your paid partner. I find that not only insulting to the women involved, but also male sexual dreamland.
"there are plenty of attractive people who are going to waste"
Yes, what a tragedy, when they could be re-engineered for your sexual pleasure instead, never mind their own wants and needs. I honestly don't know why you object to the idea of androids -- your concept of people is pretty close to that, really, it seems to me.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, as I don't mean it to be, but frankly your version of the future isn't one I find myself particularly attracted to, and that's not because I am bound down by the chains of current society, it's because the way you present it atyiculates a particularly ego-centric model all based on your own needs, wants, insecurities, and desires, where the rest of the people involved are somehow to be molded to that, regardless of their own motivations or tendencies. Not my vision, thank you.
The Virgin Terr
12-25-02, 19:51
you must not like prostitutes, joe, since you go ballistic at the idea that potentially everyone could become one. i smell a reactionary hypocrite who likes his prostitution under the existing status quo, ghettoized, stigmatized, outside the social mainstream.
you love to twist what i say. i believe you could feel right at home in a cult.
btw, i'm not a fan of star trek or sci fi in general. i'm sure if there was any real correlation between my idealism and whatever supposed idealism there is in the various star trek series, i'd like the show. from the little i've watched, the shows strike me as puerile morality plays set in a make believe future.
It's not at all that I don't like prostitutes (talk about twisting something someone says!) it's that I don't agree with the position, which you've repeatedly stated, that most women essentially are prostitutes who don't indulge because of fear of social stigma etc., as I find it terribly insulting to women in general -- that their essential core motivation is rooted in money, that by extension they've little true interest in love, family, relationships, etc., and, as that you've said again and again, it's only big bad society that's keeping them all from dropping their panties at the sight of your wallet. If you don't like the fact that I don't like or agree with that, well whoopdedo.
I've no problem with women making choices to use their bodies in whatever way they see fit, and if every woman wants to become a prostitute that's up to them -- it's the generalizing reimagining of morality to suit your desires I object to, and since you want to pay for sex and have control over the relationship in that way, you're happy to posit that's the underlying nature of things as opposed to the relationship model, with no real basis for that other than your own wishes. Tell me, how exactly do you remotely prove that to be the fact of things short of your massive reworking of society? Any decent examples from the past or present, and psychological studies, anything at all other than your gauzy rhapsodizing that might at all support your premises?
I'm sure if I wanted to be in a cult, you'd be more than happy to provide one, as you seem to have a great yearning to be this misty visionary whom everyone follows, as long as you don't actually have to get specific or do anything. You're awfully testy just because I say I'm not particularly a fan of your particular vision of the future, and it's a classic diversionary tactic in discussion/argument to dismiss the critic as opposed to look at the criticism. If you want to talk hypocrites, sitting on the top of the mountain is someone who posits a utopian world where the benefit accrues primarily to them, and then whines because people don't fall in line. You want to hurl the dreaded "reactionary" epithet at me? Fine -- here's one back -- sometimes revolutionaries are just idiots who want to blow everything up because no one's paying enough attention to them.
As far as Star Trek, sci-fi, etc. -- a truly excellent missing of the point about the issue of society undergoing massive change, regardless of the specifics involved.
So I take it you didn't get your perfect woman all wrapped up under your tree? Sheesh.
Holiday Greetings,
I seldom look on this thread because I think that utilizing terms like "morality" in reference to anything is a bit absurd. Morality is an intensly fluid term or concept that changes with the culture, historical context and the persons involved. At best, it's judgemental and egocentric nonsense. Therefore, I usually bypass this thread.
However, I hit this thread by mistake when looking at "American Women" and read, to my utter disbelief, that people are actually suggesting that working girls should be giving it away for free??? Do people out there believe that a SW should let some guy penetrate her and do it for nothing??? I suspect that this is a pretty big step for many women to begin with - better yet do it for free??? My God, they have bills to pay and they have to eat too. For those of you who are advocating this, would you do your job and expect not to get paid??? Really???
At 54 year of age nothing really surprises me anymore but this "concept" did. Our economies and standard of living are based pay for services and prostitution (or whatever you want to call it) is NO different.
Thanks for indulging a sexy old man.
The Virgin Terr
12-27-02, 01:51
actually, what i've been meaning to say all along is that i'm an out of touch with reality sexist pig who wants women to act like robotic androids so i can get my sexual needs met. i just couldn't find the right words. thanks, joe, for helping me out there.
paddy, it's just outragous how some lawyers work pro bono for what they consider good causes rather than selling themselves only to the highest bidder all the time. there should be a law against it, don't you think? i can't stand professional people who go through all the difficulty and expense of becoming licensed professionals only to become do-gooders. sickens me. anyone who isn't straight out for profit shouldn't be in business!
RN, we're all "donating" our time here. anyone who wishes to cease doing so may stop at any time. if thinking that prostitution is an easy gig for someone who likes sex in the first place and doesn't tire of it easily (or rather it would be if having to operate under black or grey market conditions didn't introduce unnecessary dangers and difficulties) makes me a "misogynist", well, i'm a misogynist then. i guess that's another thing i was trying to say, only i couldn't think of the right word until you came along. i guess disagreeing with you or mocking you is just further proof of my misogynistic personality. like this concept of combining business with pleasure. if you can walk and chew gum at the same time, i don't see why you can't have an orgasm and get paid for it. it's what customers actually prefer, most of us. it's called "girl friend experience". unfortunately it's a catch-22 situation, since the more pleasure the prostitute experiences, the less (s)he can justify charging the customer for providing his/her pleasure. under real free market conditions, i think this would be another factor to drive down prices, as prostitutes who best combine business and pleasure would corner the market, and would charge less while giving more. prostitutes who think it's only about money and providing "professional" service can't compete with others who bring real passion into the deal. call me a misogynist, but i happen to think that it's possible for a woman to seek getting pleasure and financial benefit simultaneously. i think it happens all the time concerning "amateur" dating. why not "professional" also? can't walk and chew gum at the same time?
finally, there are no places in this world which even come close to providing their citizens with victimless crime free societies. (that is, societies where people can actually live and let live, free from meddling "moralists".) that you think there are testifies to the huge difference in opinion we share regarding what freedom is.
The Virgin Terr
12-27-02, 02:35
one more thing, RN. of course i'm only doing this because i'm a misogynist, but i disagree vehemently with your claim that some "amateurs" are actually less sexually discriminating than working girls. i don't know any who will have dozens of different partners. well, might occasiuonally find that at a swing club, but any woman who loves sex that much, if she's relatively attractive, is awfully stupid to indiscriminately give out what so many are happy to pay for. that's why there aren't any doing it.
and before you claim i'm contradicting myself paddy, there's a huge difference between indiscriminately donating service to anyone and discriminately donating to worthy individuals/causes. ain't no reason why prostitutes can't do that, if lawyers can. assuming of course that prostitutes are capable of feeling empathy for the less fortunate, and are also capable of deriving satisfaction from altruism.
The Virgin Terr
12-27-02, 03:09
other than the fact that it's illegal and someone's wife/girlfriend might want to kick the shit out of you, there's no reason why you can't go to your favorite social establishment/bar/whatever, and announce to all present: "guys, i'm horny as hell, and i'm going to scratch that itch because i'm sure many of you want to scratch it for me, but unlike you, i have to worry more about things like std's and pregnancy, plus i already have other mouths to feed from previous sexual encounters, so here's the deal: make me an offer i can't refuse, and i won't". you'd be killing 2 birds with one stone, and being a woman with the benefit of greater sexual endurance than guys in general, you could do it with several different guys. i know pleasure and money are like apples and oranges, but it would be up to you at that moment whether you want more apples or more oranges. you could have it either way: go strictly with the highest bidders, or go more for "chemistry" and anticipated "scratch relief". in either case however, you could seek and receive both simultaneously.
i think you're just dithering with some of your arguments, like whether or not having an orgasm is "gfe". that's beside the point, which is how open are you and willing to have one? from my point of view, "gfe" is about being open and desirous of experiencing pleasure, so it's not just about getting paid. if pleasure is merely an unsought "fringe benefit", that doesn't qualify as gfe. that's just an involuntary body response. gfe is about transcending "professionalism" by allowing both yourself and your customer the privilege of being a sexual animal.
The Virgin Terr
12-27-02, 04:04
always keeping in mind that i'm an out of touch with reality sexist pig who prefers female androids over real women, i don't see why most women couldn't do what i just suggested RN could. any woman, or most any woman, could have sex for both pleasure and profit, because most men want to have mutually pleasurable sex with them and are willing to pay a reasonable price to compensate for inherent gender differences which naturally makes sex for women a more complicated matter. the only reason it doesn't happen is repression. so instead of everybody's needs being met, both sexual and material, we have stupid laws and stupid games resulting in many people's needs being frustrated. let's not forget also, that this concept of heterosexuality being prostitutional in nature is a misogynistic one, since it means all heterosexual women possess an inclination towards prostitution, and apparently it's hateful of women to think of them as prostitutes. it's apparently much more loving to think of them as madonnas who only have sex out of love of their partners, with no regard for their own needs.
The Virgin Terr
12-27-02, 04:34
joe, i'm not reading your posts anymore. i think it's because of jealousy. i can't stand it when someone smarter than me takes what i say and summarizes it so accurately and effectively that i can only respond: that's how i should have said it in the first place! but by all means feel free to continue clarifying my ideas for the benefit of others who may be confused by my irrational ramblings, clouded by my predatory misogynistic instincts. i just wish i had your brilliant mind and sensitivity towards women.
VT, I'm sorry that I offended you so much, as that was not my intention -- your posts were not something I agreed with, included things I found personally troubling, and I stated why. As far as reading or not reading my posts, well, that's obviously entirely up to you.
RN, hope you had a nice vacation. First, I completely agree that an orgasm is not the defining issue of the GFE -- it's an overall level of attention, demonstrated (if still bogus) affection, and quality of experience. Having a sex worker have an orgasm is great from my perspective, but it's not what adds the GFE label.
I think your list of donation of services makes a great deal of sense, is of immense service to the community, and your comments are certainly a valuable contribution to this board. That said, it still does rather beg the question, doesn't it? Lawyers also do donate time in court, anyone with a psychology degree could argue they are providing a service here, etc. I think it comes down completely to the issue of definition of the core nature of a job -- if, as you say, the only important definition of a prostitute is someone who takes money in return for providing sexual gratification, then the core service provided is that gratification. (Let me note that I'm not absolutely convinced that's the proper definition, btw.) If that's the case, then if sexual gratification is not the donated service, then it's a completely off-center donation, which would be akin to a lawyer donating use of his car, library of law books, or office. The core aspect of the lawyer is legal assistance, so there are various avenues that can manifest itself.
Perhaps, since penetration is the core issue of things, perhaps a frottage service corps could be arranged :D And, again, let me be clear that I'm not necessarily in favor of the whole idea here, but I think it presents an issue that goes right to the title of this thread, as it's about looking at prostitution within the overall societal structure and making comparisons.
Hi guys,
I haven't been on this thread for a while but looking at what has been said about prostitutes giving their services away for free is kind of absurd. Besides, prostitutes in the poorer neighborhoods charge less than prostitutes in higher classed neighborhoods who dub themselves as "escorts". They are more affordable to the poor also. The lower class prostitutes are most of the time lower quality and not as good looking but at least a poor person could afford her. I have driven around the poor areas just to find out the black market prostitution scene there but not to get involved because of the cops circling the neighborhood like sharks and because I don't trust them but I asked the prices of one of them and she said $15 for a BJ, $50 for full service. An escort in midtown Manhattan would charge $300 for an average looking girl to $1000 for a supermodel looking gal. For the poor folks who need sex, they should go to the cheaper but not as good looking girl who is willing to charge less and there are those types out there. The biggest thing preventing them from doing so is the draconian anti-freedom American laws against prostitution. But I'm sure there are bargain prostitutes for the poor even in other countries. In Brazil, I found such a place that is frequented by the unemployed and lower class locals called Terma de Copacabana versus the high class and expensive Terma Centaurro. All prostitutes make money with this profession otherwise they wouldn't be prostitutes by dictionary definition if they gave away their services for free. I would just consider them the normal girl who has pity sex with the less fortunate instead of a prostitute.
It seems as though mere discounting should satisfy vt's rather inchoate requirements. What about some type of discount card for frequent fuckers? Blow four loads, get the fifth one free? Something like that? Laundromats and fast food chains do it so why not savvy, marketing-oriented hookers?
Oh, wait a minute. The absolute last thing I need is for hookers to be more marketing-oriented. Forget I said that.
I am not making sense right now due to TSB. But let me state that conventional economic laws cannot be ascribed to pussy because it is the only natural resource where you can give it away but still have it. This skews the whole supply and demand thing. Pussy has no marginal cost. If you follow conventional economic theory, total revenue is maximized when you supply pussy or anything else up to the point where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. Thus, you would indeed have to give pussy away to maximize its utility (works for me!).
Perhaps this is what vt was getting at, although I rather doubt it. Anyway, I leave for Buenos Aires in nine days and perhaps that will allow me further research. I will negotiate my best price, and then see if I can get a discount for being ugly. Wish me luck (but not too much).
DH
Please subscribe to Z's newsletter, "The Attack of the Troglodyte."
Hey, Z, have you truly given it all up? Perhaps Thailand is affecting you in a slightly different way -- next thing you know you'll have my haircut and be wearing a saffron robe!
I don't have any disagreement with you regarding looking for emotional satisfaction with prostitutes, but there's also no question that it's a pure pleasure to be held, to be physically close to a woman, and intimacy extends far beyond just screwing. I think the issue is this -- as a customer, how much do you want/need to believe the experience is "real" as opposed to make-believe? If you truly need reality, and you're using prostitutes to substitute for real relationships, then you're dead meat. But that doesn't mean things need to be mechanical, unemotional, etc. During my time here in Chiang Mai, when I've seen a woman it's basically been the same one I hooked up with when I first got here two months ago (I know, a gross violation of your principles, but those are yours, not mine) and that means things are naturally different when we get together now than when we first did, as we're both familiar with what the other likes, she's a hell of a lot better at pushing my physical buttons, there are patterns, past conversations, etc. I'm still leaving in a week or so and things will completely end, but I can still like her, be interested in what goes on in her life, and have a wider-spectrum experience without falling in love with her, sending her money from overseas, or believing that this is something other than a very nice client-provider relationship.
And hey, Dickhead -- is this the really long stay you were looking to arrange somewhere, or just a quick trip?
Just a 10-dayer, JZ. I had thought I would be unemployed at this juncture but instead I have work through May. That is kind of a good news/bad news situation as this gig is getting dangerously close to a real job, and I haven't had one of those in a long time. But I do enjoy it and I should have time to roam in the summer.
"When Irish eyes are smiling,
All the world 'tis bright and gay;
When Irish eyes are horny
'Tis off to Argentina for a lay!"
I have to disagree with you Z on people seeing prostitutes being losers. In fact most of their clients are like myself who see them for pure sexual pleasure. I only have conversations with them just to assure that they are not a blowup doll and that they are people. I also use them for sex practice so I can be great at the real thing. I usually ask them for their honest opinion after sex if I was good and I explain the situation and also add that that is why I am paying them. Most of them are honest especially the first ones that said I needed work and they gladly helped me on my techniques and showed me the right way of pleasuring a woman. And their techniques work on the non-pro women I date. The non-pros would definitely let you know if they liked it or not. In fact, if my dad did not pay for a prostitute before I met my first girlfriend in Brazil, I would have totally sucked at sexing her. The first prositute taught me a lot about technique and I stayed with her for 2 hours which my dad paid for. I considered it more of a sex class than a session.
Originally posted by RN
one simple question...what is your definition of "emotional satisfaction"?
If that is a "simple" question, out of curiosity, Rubbie, what would be your definition of a "complex" question? :)
Then plus I'm trying to think of ANY plausible reason to be holding a battery directly above one's keyboard that does NOT involve reloading a "Pocket Rocket" or similar device. I don't recall seeing any battery operated monitors over in Oz.
Perhaps you got carried away with said device to the point where the screen SEEMED to go blank?
Now I am suspicious as to why you needed a tissue at the exact moment your vibrator was making the screen go blank ... oh, wait a minute, that's a guy thing.
My New Year's wish is permanent eternal darkness for Z E L D A. What a germ. Put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger, you misfit misanthrope.
DICKHEAD GETS HIS NEW YEAR'S WISH! Z has been banned (again). It's guys like that who make Americans unwelcome at times.
Z and RN, I am also a video game fanatic. I have a Playstation2 and I love Grand Theft Auto Vice City and Dead to Rights. Video games do help me take my mind off of sex between vacations being that I can't get any in New York City due to the lack of available women and the fact that prostitution is illegal. And I think it is possibly because of all the complaints of the husbands these prostitutes are married to. The brothel services I used to go to that were shut down by mayor Guliani had more than half of their prostitutes that were married. Almost all of the women of NYC are married. This shows how much control American women have over their men here in the big city. American women have their men on a leash here and if the men bite free, they lose more than half of their income so that is why they stay married and not get divorced.
I guess I am lucky I am not tied down to an American woman. I can stay up all night playing games without someone bitching that I am keeping her up all night.
Happy new year everyone!!
RN, these issues have been discussed at length here before... and as always you are dern right from a common sense point of view. (Grr I want to disagree with you but how??)
BUT, I am unfortunately not politically correct in any way - and I guess neither are most other guys here. So I will be chasing that GFE 18-year old who gets it all wrong by your standards - and I will keep doing my best to make her lose her wits.....
I know it's bad and wrong and all - and yea, sometimes it gives a bad concience too - but that is what it is all about.
Well, personally, I would have no problem if a hooker told me she couldn't see me because she was seeing someone else. She could leave out the "fucking" part, I reckon, but I would not be imagining or convincing myself that she was having tea with the guy. I think you should just be straight up about it. But, of course, I'm a dickhead and I was born at night but not last night and I have no illusions about this shit after all these years.
I do believe it was thirty years ago this month that I had my first prostitute. Maybe these chaps just don't have enough life experience.
It'll blow over in no time, I bet.
Actually this client has no right to feel the way he does because he should already know you are doing it as a business and you have many other people on line for your services. Some guys need the caring act to take their mind off of the fact that they are alone and aging without a mate so that is part of the service. Besides if you have a large clientele, they have to schedule appointments because you can't be at 2 places at once. That client has to accept that. Sometimes I had to schedule with the busiest escort to see her because of the demand. You are also entitled to what you want to do with a client and what you don't want to do. In my reviews, I include the statement that services may vary to individuals. Some clients are clean like myself so you might give some extra serivices because I took the time to clean myself and have good hygiene and some stink so you wouldn't want to give oral to them stinking nuts or if they have bad breath, you won't kiss them in the mouth.
Any guy who goes to see a hooker without showering, flossing and brushing, shampooing, and putting on clean clothes should get NOTHING. However, standards may have to be relaxed in the Third World due to practical considerations (no water).
Dickhead Douches Daily
Very sorry to hear that, Rubbie. Blackmail as in trying to "out" you, or as in trying for money? If the former, I recommend you go to an attorney (barrister? solicitor?). If the latter, might have to consider going to the coppers.
Or could you round up some mates and have a friendly chat with these lads? Any guy who gets jealous in a situation like that definitely needs some counseling.
DH
The Virgin Terr
01-04-03, 05:19
at the risk of strengthening my negative reputation on this forum among it's most avid contributors, once again i'm the politically incorrect cad who dares to criticize RN, who we all appreciate as the only regular female contributor for providing welcome diversity. it seems to me however that perhaps because others are grateful for her participation, or perhaps out of chivalry, you other guys treat her like she's above criticism.
my favorite prostitute was a mexican girl who made love to me as sweetly and soulfully as any real girlfriend would. she was fantastic, my favorite regular for a couple years prior to my moving away. there was never a jealousy problem between us, even though i sometimes chose someone else when she was available, or occasionally she would be preoccupied working a sugar daddy when i wanted to be with her. i think the reason our relationship was so mutually satisfying was because neither of us was hung up on the idea that real love is possessive love. perhaps we didn't have real love, but our sessions were as great as real lovers from my perspective because there were no intimacy barriers between us that i could detect. the point i want to make is that a sexworker can really only satisfy me as a client if she can provide an authentic gfe, and in my opinion she can't do that if she's inclined to associate real intimacy with possessiveness. someone like you, RN, a self admitted extremely jealous type, could never cut the mustard with me because you can't keep intimacy and jealousy apart. i doubt you'd have problems with clients like the one you've just described if this weren't the case, because like attracts like, and i imagine any client you'd take a shine to will naturally be another jealous type. also, if you didn't feel a need to "protect" this client's feelings by misleading him regarding your relationships with other clients, he wouldn't get the idea that he's like your one and only client. i know you're probably going to go ballistic, but that's my opinion: jealous individuals make lousy clients and workers alike. only non-jealous individuals can combine intimacy and promiscuity, which is what makes both good clients and workers.
RN -- very sorry to hear about your problem, and I don't see where you've got a thing to feel you did remotely in the wrong. This guy obviously got possessive and made presumptions, and somehow feels justified in doing so.
Loathe though I am to suggest this, if this whole scene keeps escalating it might be time to fight fire with fire. I would hope it won't come to that, and I think if you continue to just be straightforward about everything with your clients/potential clients in the long run you'll be ok. I don't know about Dickhead's collection of lads approach, but I think his lawyer/cop suggestion is a pretty good one. I know you have solid scruples about client privacy, but if this lout is willing to ignore yours, you may want to do the same in reverse, or at least mention this as an option (the threat being stronger than the execution.) The last thing an employer, for example, would want to hear is that one of his workers is obsessing over and abusing a sex worker. All of this, of course, depends greatly on who you're dealing with, and it doesn't sound as though he's someone with both oars dipped very deeply. And it sounds, at this point, as though he's just engaging in juvenile acting out because he's been cut off after being a jerk. Not that this makes it any easier for you, especially as it's easy to use email to do such things.
The question I have is this -- how is it these guys are all in email contact? Are they all referrals of each other, or do you send a newsletter to a list of names or what? :)
[QUOTE]Originally posted by joe_zop
I don't know about Dickhead's collection of lads approach[/QUOTE
It's not like I said to give them a dirt nap or anything (not sure they have those in Oz?). Occasionally wayward lads need a bit of direction, and proper education and counseling are then necessary. "Wall-to-wall" counseling can be particularly useful.
Now books are very educational and can also be wonderful counseling aids. For example, if you put a thick paperback book over someone's kidneys while you are counseling them with say a pipe wrench perhaps, no marks will be visible yet the counseling will still be quite effective. This type of moderate and gradual approach allows the wayward one to truly see the error of his ways, while ensuring a sufficient deterrent effect.
This guy jacking with Rubbie is acting like a pimp; threatening, trying to control, and blackmailing all sound like "stupid pimp tricks" to me. I can't quite recall but it seems I may have previously mentioned once or twice that pimps are not my favorite subset of society. The pipe wrench and phone book procedure is just one of the many techniques I discuss in my handy new book, "How to Housebreak Your Pimp" (also available electronically on my website, www.ihatepimps.org).
Here is a sample excerpt: "A pimp is much like a puppy in that they both have short attention spans. In order to gain a pimp's full attention, stick a chisel or a drift in his ear and gently tap it with a hammer."
Originally posted by the virgin terr
at the risk of strengthening my negative reputation on this forum among it's most avid contributors,
Overall I don't think your rep is neg but you seem to be working on pushing it that way lately. Why is that? DH
my favorite prostitute was a mexican girl who made love to me as sweetly and soulfully as any real girlfriend would ... i think the reason our relationship
You didn't have a "relationship" with her any more than you have one with your barber. DH
there were no intimacy barriers between us that i could detect.
So she was a good actress as well as a skilled prostitute. Theater is important in Mexican culture. DH
the point i want to make is that a sexworker can really only satisfy me as a client if she can provide an authentic gfe,
That just shows how much you really want a girlfriend. This makes me question whether mongering is a good idea in your case. DH
also, if you didn't feel a need to "protect" this client's feelings by misleading him regarding your relationships with other clients, he wouldn't get the idea that he's like your one and only client.
Isn't that just good business sense and professionalism? Only an idiot of Brobdingnagian proportions would think he was a HOOKER'S only client! DH
Sorry if these aren't my finest posts but my flight got cancelled and there isn't much entertainment in this airport. DH
The Virgin Terr
01-05-03, 12:23
to those who may find my opinions exasperating as hell, my suggestion is: DON'T READ THEM. skip over them. for others, read on...
i am a utopian idealist, and basically my philosophy is advocating "free love". i'm going to be using alot of quotation marks around the words i use because words can have very slippery meanings and quotation marks convey that, but i'm also going to try to explain my thoughts fully enough so that even "mere mortals" such as yourselves can understand them, and grasp the "immortality" of my message.
"free love" isn't about indiscriminate fucking or having sex for "free". it's about the freedom to fuck consensually whoever you wish under whatever conditions you wish, including prostitution. in fact, prostitution is the key to the proliferation of "free love", or promiscuity.
perhaps unlike most of you, i associate sex and love. generally speaking, love has many components, including trust, respect, passion, affection, and commitment. i think the more sex there is in the world and the more "freely" it's given, the more love there'll be. frankly, i think we're in big trouble as a species because we've become so sexually repressed and consequently so miserly in how we love. giving someone money is an act of love as much as sharing your body with someone who desires it.
jealousy is a sick and evil compulsion to control one's lover by claiming ownership of their body, sexuality, and love. it's the primary mechanism behind repression and the pitifully fucked up and self destructive species we've become. jealousy is completely incompatible with the precepts of free love and promiscuity and a world in which the religious ideal of brotherhood and altruism can be attained. jealousy is also incompatible with the wide acceptance and spread of prostitution for obvious reasons just stated. prostitution is the key to the spread of "free love" and the attainment of a world in which "brotherhood" is more than a dream.
dickhead, you're too cynical to respond to. joe zop, i've stopped reading your posts, so i can't respond to them.
RN, i can't recall an instance of anyone "criticizing" you other than myself, but then perhaps i haven't been around as long as you and i don't read all the areas where you post. from what i have read, i would say "Mild disagreement" is the closest anyone else has come to being critical of anything you've said.
reading your more detailed explanation of what went down between you and your troublesome client, i have to say i'm more sympathetic with your position. but i still think that as an individual who strongly associates "love" with monogamy or "faithfulness", you can't be a very good prostitute or advocate of the prostitution cause. you can't provide your clients with the "intimacy" they may crave and not have. you can only provide an "act" which even the dullest of them will see through in time.
Hi Virgin Terry,
I seldom surf this specific thread although I'm somewhat familiar with your postings.
In lieu of your psuedonym of "Virgin Terry" and realted writings, I've never quite been able to determine if you are a male or female??? I ask this question respectfully and apologize if you are offended by my query.
Warpig2000
01-06-03, 03:02
Dickhead, I totally agree with you on the hygene thing EXCEPT flossing if your planned activities include DATY. This is a safety issue- flossing can cause abrassion and bleeding of the gums making it easier for HIV and other STD's to be passed through the route of infected body fluid/ blood contact. Normally DATY is safer than other intimate unprotected activities and everyone has to decide their safety/comfort level, but Flossing can up the level of risk to that of being on the recieving end of a BBBJ and swallowing. And while a dental dam or abstinence from DATY is probably the safest course all around, I generally like to practice this activities with providers I feel are generally health concious and get regular check ups, if the girl is willing of course.
I'm not totally sure that it is a replacement for a dental dam but I like to swish my mouth out with Perioseptic mouthwash (contains hydrogen peroxide in an .05% concentration) about 20 minutes to a half an hour before the date, and immeadiately afterwards when DATY is on the menu
Hygene is very much important and it was good of you to bring up the point.
RN- I agree with you totally that a provider should be able to set her limits where she will and will not go, I do however feel it is ethical that she explain those limits to the client as clearly as the prevailing law of the land will allow her without entraping herself.
I could perfectly understand where in some jurisdictions "I only perform covered oral" etc. before the session would probably get a girl busted, and gentlemen owe it to themselves to use reviews where possible, and read between the lines. I hope your 'dificult' client gets his head out of his rectum and lets you move on with your life.
Many good points are made in this thread. I admire Terr's idealism but in my opinion you have to learn how to deal with the world as it is, life on life's terms.... The 'do gooders' and 'moralists' who resent the hobby and alternate lifestyles also have their 'worldview' of 'how things ought to be', and are equally active in trying to bring their competing vision about. You have to be flexible and see the forest through the trees- but by being a 'majority of one' you also have the freedom to act by your concious, as long as you accept the consequences for your decisions. This is what being a Free Agent (as opposed to being a robot) is all about.
I must agree with VT that jealousy is the product of a sexually repressed society. Our society enforces monogamy and the fact that we MUST only have ONE sexual partner or else we get arrested or taken to the cleaners if we have an affair. This country is UN-FREE in the sexual way in every way. If an immigrant from India comes over with his 5 wives, he gets handcuffed and forced to sign divorce papers with four of them if he is to live in this country. Well, that's the law here in America. I know, I know, some of you might disagree with me and say follow the law or get out. I do follow them but that doesn't mean I like them.
The fact that we can only have one partner in this society creates jealousy. We are forced to make a pact with one woman and if we break the pact with her, we lose our shirts to divorce or we get arrested for being johns in prostitution or arrested for polygamy. We therefore become more possessive of the only woman we can have or the wife. If the girl should cheat, we have a lot to lose because if she wants the divorce, we still lose our shirts. It's a no win situation here in America. This monogamy doesn't encourage free love and sex. It represses it. It also gives American women the idea that they can control us with sex. They hate other countries that have prostitution so they send camera toting drones who are brainwashed by the moralists to expose the countries with briothel establishments and try to shut them down. And the saddest thing is that a majority of these exposes are American or British. What PRUDES!! They should leave us free loving people alone and let us live the way we want to live. But these moralists think it's wrong and it doesn't conform to THEIR standards of morality which is monogamy. They think it ruins marriages. Marriages are actually ruined by this moralist attitude of jealousy. If we all were allowed to have open relationships, the wife wouldn't have to have the obligation to provide sex to the husband. Some women like sex and some don't. But almost every man loves sex and sometimes the wife can't provide it so monogamy would actually RUIN this marriage because there is no compromise for a monogamous relationship. He is stuck with a sexless marriage and without prostitution, which is the American idealogy, the husband would go nuts and would divorce the sexless wife or kill her so he can find another wife who might provide him with sex. Prostitution is a great compromise for this type of marriage because they would have still been married and the husband would get some sex and the wife would not have to provide sex and would still get the companionship she wants from the husband. But noooo, America has to be moralist and deny that poor couple that right to have an open relationship by taking away prostitution and making such laws and negativity against affairs. We live in a repressed society and repression is in no way a definition of freedom. Is this still a free country? You decide. I will not say any more on this question because I don't want to be bashed for being an America hater.
jadegatelover
01-06-03, 20:09
Hi all,
Here's my dilemma. I'm 31, only been with one woman, still with her and plan to marry next year...after over 10 years of courtship. yep high school sweethearts. For the last three years or so I've had this one nagging thought.
What are other women like?
It's gotten to a point where the sight of a woman sets me off imagining the things I'd do to her and the way I'd like for her to reciprocate. These urges are quieted after some internet porn and masterbation, but that's becoming less and less of a long term solution. This leads me to think that being with someone else is also not the answer, but I can't think that far now.
I've never wanted to find another girl to have discreet sex with because I don't want or can't emotionally divorce myself from the act. For a long time I didn't want to use the services of a hooker because I imagine her hating me as a person and would rather grind my wallet for the amount of time it takes me to cum.
Now, I'm still hopelessly torn and getting a little desperate, to the point where I'm looking at going overseas to satiate this curiosity/lust, or whatever. I figure I'd go and do the deed before I get married. Reasoning that at least I didn't commit "adultery". I know I"m reaching here but I'm hanging onto whatever I can.
For you guys who may have experienced similar angst, what happened? how did you resolve it? One option is to talk to my sweetie, but not sure how to start.
Do you guys wish you never went down this road?
If so, did it stop at one incident?
RN, your perspective or real incidences would also be greatly appreciated. too bad you're not in the business anymore, otherwise, I'd fly down under with flowers in hand :)
Field Commander
01-06-03, 22:45
This an interesting (and long) interview to Camille Paglia by Tracy Quan: I think it's really worth reading it
Miami Vice does "Culture"
The Prostitute, The Comedian -- And Me
by Tracy Quan
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In 1990, when I began reading Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, I was so excited that I would only put her book down to sleep, eat or turn a trick. It lay on my bedside table next to the phone, a small supply of condoms tucked inside the front cover. Whenever I slipped into Sexual Personae to unwrap one, I felt vindicated. What better way to pay tribute to Paglia's ideas? One evening, after attending a PONY (Prostitutes of New York) planning session, I found myself at Performance Space 122 in Manhattan's East Village. I was nearly thrown down the stairs, in my high heels, by a (female) performance artist who accused me of "reading Camille Paglia". I had committed heresy -- by suggesting that women are often the privileged sex -- and was forced to defend myself with a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag filled with PONY mail. Swinging my paper weapon around in wild desperation, I escaped down the steep staircase, hobbled somewhat by my favorite shoes.
As my terror gave way to inspiration, I realized that I was destined to meet with the intellectual diva who had helped to inspire this angry feminist assault. THE PROSTITUTE, THE COMEDIAN -- AND ME was originally published in Puritan (Number 31) in the winter of 1993, as part of an interview series focusing on the sexual attitudes of well-known authors and artists. I am greatly indebted to Stan Bernstein, the creative force behind that series, for his editorial guidance, and to the entire staff of Puritan magazine. -- T.Q.
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TRACY QUAN: Your view that men have created civilization to escape Woman's dominance is very different from the feminist notion of male domination. Quite honestly, it's a point of view I would expect to hear from a prostitute -- because most prostitutes understand that aspect of women's power. I've also noticed a knowledge of prostitution which many feminists lack. Did you have a lot of friends who were in "the life"?
CAMILLE PAGLIA: I never knew a prostitute in my life... I studied history. My conclusions also come from observing -- movies, media, reading -- and also from seeing prostitutes on the street.
The movie Butterfield 8 had a huge impact on me. When Elizabeth Taylor (playing Gloria the call girl) said, Sic transit Gloria mundi, I loved it: a call girl using this famous Latin phrase of the Pope's! I see a parallel between prostitution and being a monk or a nun.
TQ: One of my aunts is a nun. I think I'm the only niece who relates to her lifestyle, because I'm a hooker.
CP: There's something similar -- a very organized way of dealing with sexuality, with human issues. The prostitutes I see near the University of the Arts look very competent, very professional. They look fabulous! I've always felt that prostitutes are in control of the streets, not victims. I admire that -- zooming here and there, escaping the police, being shrewd, living by your wits, being street smart. I think that with prostitution, getting the money is control. I identify with that. In college and even in high school, I did not as a woman like the situation of giving it away for free.
I view the prostitute as one of the few women who is totally in control of her fate, totally in control of the realm of sex. The lesbian feminists tried to take control of female sexuality away from men -- but the prostitute was doing that all along.
TQ: Many feminists would disagree. They paint this outlandish caricature of the ***** -- she's powerless, and totally victimized.
CP: Feminists like to quote these absolutely specious statistics, a typical trick of the feminist movement of the last twenty years. For example, they'll say the majority of prostitutes have been sexually abused as children. But there's no evidence for this! The most successful prostitutes are invisible, because the sign of a prostitute's success is her absolute blending with the environment. She's so shrewd, she never becomes visible. She never gets in trouble. She has command of her life, and her clients. The ones who get into the surveys have drug problems or psychological problems. They're the ones who were sexually abused. Feminists are using amateurs to condemn a whole profession. This is appalling!
I'm against the harassment of prostitutes. Unless they are actually interfering with people's movements, they have a perfect right to be doing what they're doing.
TQ: Why, in your view, does prostitution exist?
CP: It exists because men's sexuality is not fully absorbed in marriage. In fact, the problems of being married produce other sexual needs -- not for all men certainly, but most. Prostitution exists for sexuality to be free from the duties and obligations of home, for the man to be free as a sexual agent. A lot of the sex which an ordinary gay man has is very close to what a prostitute has with a straight man. It has to do with keeping the sex impulse free.
TQ: Some "pro-sex" (or "sex-positive") feminists have told me they'd like to see more women buying sex.
CP: They're misunderstanding what prostitution is. Prostitution is Woman's command of men! No woman should ever have to pay for sex. In the sixties I thought everything would be equal: women would want sex just as much as men; we'd have as much porn for women as for men. But over time, that hasn't happened, and my thinking has evolved. I cannot believe anyone would still say that. What kind of woman would pay for sex?
TQ: A woman who wants to be serviced by a professional?
CP: Xaviera Hollander, who I really admire, said that now and then she had female clients. I love her book The Happy Hooker. She describes a movie star who wanted to be tied up with her husband's neck ties and ravished by two women with a dildo. And Xaviera was being unusually moralistic, saying, "I've never understood this. I thought such a beautiful creature should be treated tenderly!"
But that will always be such a small number of women, compared to what men do. When men go to prostitutes there's a tremendous psychodrama at work. The man engaged in a transaction with a prostitute is trying to resolve some problem he has with the dominance of Woman. The money is a way to detach emotion from it. There's an element of shutting off the dominance of Woman. I applaud that because it's a way to get the masculine impulse free. But women don't need to do that. Most women who pay for sex are pampered women. They have a facial, a massage, a manicure and then -- servicing. It's just like having a masseur.
TQ: One of the co-founders of the International Committee for Prostitutes' Rights, a women's studies professor, called for an alliance between the "Madonnas" and the "******." What do you think of the feminists who want to eradicate the "***** stigma"?
CP: That's hypocritical. It's such a superficial analysis. They're looking around the current culture to explain things that you need a historical sense to understand. You have to look back over time, at the heritage of these things. The prostitute is not, as the feminists believe, socially constructed. She's dealing with the natural fact of sexuality. The social constructions of our time are Judeo-Christian.
You'll always have the women who are willing to live within the Judeo-Christian institutions, like marriage, with the official sanctions. Then you have the women who are the pagan outlaws. There's a fantastic sizzle for the man, going between them. It's not just something "the patriarchy" has created: good girl/bad girl. It is not. Human nature is split. The needs of the body are impetuous and animalistic -- they could never be contained by these Judeo-Christian codes that are trying to control it.
TQ: Do you see eradication of the *****'s stigma as a liberal fantasy?
CP: How can you eradicate the stigma? The prostitute is always going to be an opponent, in some sense, of all the official institutions. The prostitute gains by that sharp identity. If you have that kind of identity, then take personal responsibility for it. Stop asking everyone else to change their attitude. Stop saying "Love me, please, mommy and daddy." The stigma of the prostitute is the badge of her identity. That is why the client goes to her. If he wanted someone without a stigma, he'd go and screw the lady next door.
TQ: How can prostitutes have a meaningful relationship with feminists?
CP: Any attempt to make prostitution somehow reconcilable with the recent phase of feminism is a dead end. Prostitution is a pagan form and current feminism is a puritanical Protestant form.
The prostitute, dealing with men outside the institutions of marriage or religion, sees sexual reality clearer -- and pornography shows lust clearer -- than the feminists see it. Lust is sexual reality, and the prostitute historically knows how to deal with it. The comedian is much more accurate about sex than the feminists. Like a prostitute dealing with a client, the comedian deals with, and is constantly in flux with, the audience.
The comedian has to get a laugh from the audience, just the way a prostitute has to get an orgasm from the client. They are looking looking looking at the audience, constantly reading the audience, just like the prostitute. The prostitute and the comedian are right on the edge, very mentally alert -- working working working with the responses. I'm never in agreement with the feminists. They're off in a box talking to each other. They have an ideology. They are not observing! But the prostitute and the comedian and me: we are observing -- looking at the way people think and act. As the culture is shifting, you're working working working it...
TQ: I wonder if you would have the patience to be a hooker. If you were in the profession, I think you'd be in a more flamboyant area of the trade.
CP: I could have been a fabulous dominatrix if this had been more available twenty years ago. I could have made a fortune and paid off every bill I ever had in my life! Fifteen years ago, when I wrote about nipple clamps in my chapter on Michelangelo, S&M was still in very small esoteric areas of the urban scene. By the time Sexual Personae got into print -- that's how long it's taken -- now S&M is everywhere. My period of experimentation was before all this. If I were young now, I'd certainly be experimenting with S&M because my mind was moving in that direction. But it happened too late for me.
TQ: S&M was once an elite phenomenon. Why is it now so popular in American society?
CP: It also happened in imperial Rome. In the old days, Rome was like our New England. You were, like, dutiful and you thought of the state and the good of Rome. There were all kinds of sumptuary laws -- you couldn't spend money on jewelry, there was a certain way to behave. It was very simple, prudent, frugal, industrious. Suddenly, the culture got very large. It moved from republic to empire, from Rome within Italy to this Mega-Empire! The movie "Cleopatra" with Liz Taylor is very good (even though it was considered a bomb) because it shows that great moment of transition from the old republic into the new empire. And that is when people became much freer. My conclusion is that S&M comes back when people are most apparently free. As religion breaks down, as government and law and order break down, S&M sex bizarrely reappears.
TQ: Another thing about the sexual culture of the classical period -- in Sexual Personae, you point out that a smaller phallus was considered desirable in ancient Greece. How did the preference for the larger phallus evolve?
CP: Most of the world has probably always esteemed a large penis, except for Ancient Greece. I think that was an exception to the rule. In Greece, there was a period of interest in proportion -- they were working out the ideal proportions of the human body. (You know, the same period when they were trying to figure out the dimensions of the Parthenon.) They decided the head should be one-sixth of the total body. The penis, in proportion to this, can't be that big.
Roman statues were in the style of Greek nudes, and nudes that survived from the Greco-Roman period always had small penises. In art, the penis has often been extremely small, imitating the Classical Greek style. Women who went to museums in the nineteenth century and saw these nudes were probably very surprised when they got married and realized the actual proportion a penis has to the male body!
For the upper class in Athens, for the people who spent their leisure time exercising and watching the beautiful boys, a small penis may have been a sign of beauty. But the people who were building the Parthenon -- they probably wanted a big penis. Today, in the upper class, you never see obese people. It's socially unacceptable. But in the shopping malls, and in working class life in America, you see lots of obese people. There's no social pressure against it. In the same way, people speaking about us in the future will say, "Well, thin was in. Looking at all the ads from the period, thin was in." Yet, the working class was fat as ever. Same thing here. For a brief moment among the upper class in Athens, a small penis was considered philosophical. It meant you were not driven by animal appetite. It may have had no impact whatever on what was going down on the dock in Piraeus: a big penis was just as in as it has ever been.
TQ: So, the animal appetites were suppressed only among the very effete...
CP: At the same time that you had these great sculptures of the Greek boys with the small penises -- and later in the Hellenistic period -- you also had pottery featuring these satyrs with huge penises. Wild, hilarious scenes! Satyrs, with a half-goat body and a giant penis, chasing down a hermaphrodite or woman or a boy. And they're raping him! You can see clearly that a large penis was animalistic to them. A lot of my ideas about rape are coming from that, the fact that men find rape fun and erotic. It seems so obvious if you look at the whole history of art.
TQ: Candida Royalle, who was an X-rated star in the Seventies, is now producing sex videos with a feminist orientation. I've heard her say that a lot of porn is unrealistic or demeaning to women. How do you feel about feminist porn?
CP: Feminist porn means you remove all the things you don't like. You censor porn to make it subscribe or conform to a prefab ideology. It's diluted. You remove all the lust from it. This idea that porn has to conform to the ethics we live in real life is ridiculous. You can look at things you would not tolerate in real life. You can watch people being whipped or beaten or abused in porn, and you tolerate it because it's in the realm of imagination, of art. Porn gets its charge from taking a taboo and violating it. Porn should be grotesque and coarse, it should do everything possible to offend and humiliate. When people say, "That's irresponsible, we don't want to see that," I say, "Why not?" I want to see everything: the most horrible, the most unimaginable. I want to see it and get a charge off it. Feminist porn's absurd. I'm totally against it. I like regular porn.
TQ: When do real life ethics become a concern in porn?
CP: A lot of people say, "I'm for erotica but I'm against kiddy porn," or "I'm against violent porn." I can understand why people would be concerned about using live children in porn. But I would support kiddy porn drawings and paintings. I mean those Cupids we use on Valentine cards -- that's kiddy porn.
TQ: Or "baby porn".
CP: Baby porn, yes. Caravaggio, half his work is kiddy porn. I told a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner, "What is all this talk about snuff films? I want to see a snuff film." People went crazy. But I don't want to see a real woman being killed! When we go to a mystery movie, we want to see an actress pretending to be dead. Same thing. A truly avant garde film maker today would make a snuff film. A truly avant garde film maker will find the taboo. Where's the taboo? It's in snuff films? Then make a snuff film!
TQ: Candida Royalle and other feminists have contended that we need to see more "real women" in porn, not just the "nineteen-year-old blonde, busty female."
CP: I also am tired of a certain kind of California look which has been done to death, but it's not because they're nineteen and busty. I prefer European-type bodies which are kind of fleshy. The flesh is flowing. I think languor is more sensual than, "Hey! Let's get this stuff out of the way and I'll take on sex with you and then go out and do my aerobics." The American cheerleader thing -- there's a dead element. In earlier porn, the untoned bodies were lewder, more lascivious. This new, hard Amazonian look -- I'm not sure I like it. As for being busty and nineteen years old. Why not?
The whole point is to see something you can't see in ordinary life! Maybe we can enlarge the idea of what constitutes beauty, not to include ugliness or the ordinary, but to include fleshiness.
TQ: Leaving aside the concept of feminist porn, do you think women's porn is here to stay?
CP: Most women don't get a big charge off of voyeurism. It's not satisfying to them. Okay, in the suburbs women go to the video store and choose the porn to watch with their men. But they're still buying it to enjoy in a couple. It's not pure porn. The way an individual male will go out and get a heap of things, and take it back to his apartment and look at it by himself? There are hardly any examples of women doing this. I do, but I'm unusual. The phenomenon of John Hinckley -- a solitary person in a room agitating himself erotically and mentally -- that's male behavior. Feminists, in their approach to art history, believe that men are taught to stare at women and make objects of them. But men are staring because it's biological. There's an aggression thing involving the eye in male sexuality. It's related to hunting. That's why there's an enormous porn industry for men and hardly anything for women. It will never be comparable.
TQ: I was advised by one of Candida Royalle's staff to stop calling their product "porn." It's aimed at women, so they call it "erotica."
CP: Oh, I hate that. This idea of trying to revise what we're doing by calling it "erotica". I reject that. I'm not saying, "I like erotica." I'm saying, "Michelangelo is a pornographer." We have to understand that the Pieta with the nude Christ -- that's pornography. Michelangelo is slobbering over that body. If you can understand the sacredness of the Pieta and simultaneously understand its pornographic elements, then we're very far along the road here, okay?
Doctor_Skank
01-07-03, 10:03
jadegatelover,
Cheating on a partner:
All I can say is think it over before doing it... in my experience it can have a negative effect on one's sense of morality and self-worth. If you can get over that, as I did, then it becomes remarkably easy. Or maybe too easy.
I don't know about you, but I am totally fascinated about the differences between women sexually... it varies wildly. And the search for new experiences becomes addicting. Prostitution is a relatively easy outlet for this need. And the search, whether in clubs, sex tourist destinations or just with the girl next door is in my case never-ending. Rewarding at times, nerve-wracking at others (many of my experiences were with "real" girls who eventually wanted more serious involvement), sometimes expensive, sometimes scary, sometimes a huge ego-boost, sometimes demeaning... but always somehow fascinating.
So if you go that route, you may just be opening a can of worms. You may find what you're looking for...which could also be a bad thing for your relationship.
But still...as fascinating as it is, it is "just" sex in the end.
Jadegatelover, it would be best to satisfy this curiosity before getting married because sometime during the marriage it will bite you in the ass and then you will have an affair with the woman next door or any opportunity that comes around. I would find the best looking woman you can get your hands on, any way possibl;e even if it's prostitution and have sex with her and see if she compares to your fiancee. If your fiancee is better, then she is the right woman to marry and yes, you can feel the "sparks". If not, then perhaps the sexual chemistry is not there and you are dating her as a best friend or soulmate rather than a sexual partner for life. If you still love her as a soulmate, make a compromise where you can have sex with other women and still remain married to her. Have an open relationship with this arrangement. Also don't wait till the bachelor party to satisfy this, it'll be too late.
The Virgin Terr
01-07-03, 15:30
jadegatelover, assuming you're for real, which is a bit of a stretch, my emphatic advice is to begin getting real with yourself about the power of sex. i come from a failed marriage where i was conflicted for years between my desire for sexual freedom and my social indoctrination that monogamy was what "true love" was all about and that desiring other women was WRONG! the marriage failed of course because vibrant healthy relationships can't include secret desires and wrenching guilt feelings for merely having them. if you can't be honest with your fiancee about your desires, you have a flawed relationship. it may be painful to do so, but you need to be true to yourself before you can be true to anyone else.
going the prostitution route can be tricky for someone who likes a sense of intimacy with their sexual partners. avoid streetwalkers! if you're american going abroad if you can for prostitutional sex is recommended, unless you're wealthy and can afford the very high prices of a top of the line big city escort service or independent hooker in the classifieds. america generally sucks for commercial sex, over priced and poor "service". another route worth exploring if you can afford it and want more of a relationship aspect is find someone via ads looking for a "sugar daddy". this route may offer the best chance of satisfaction if you're looking for someone who is not only a sexual firecracker but also a possible relationship, as you can get to actually know alot about her as a person, and screen out incompatible personalities during an initial interview or soon after. abroad commercial sex can be much more affordable and satisfying.
again, if you have this "itch" which is driving you crazy, the worst mistake you can make is think you can suppress it indefinitely via willpower. much better to explore it now than after you're married and possibly have children as well. things will be alot more complicated and a divorce more painful than breaking up now, if your girlfriend can't accept and love the real you.
RN, we'll just have to agree to disagree for now. and yes paddy, i am a guy, sorry if that disappoints you. down boy! heel!
jadegatelover
01-07-03, 23:06
Thanks for your perspectives. I understand it'll ultimately be a hard decision.
I have decided to talk to her about it, maybe even seek counseling. Now I've got to figure out how to best approach it.
Dick,
You'd have to understand what makes me me before going on about unreal and such. I've posted on several different continent sections.
My screen name...consider me well read or a fan of a particular author. Take your screen name for example, unoriginal in a simple-minded sorta way or is your real name Richard... or does it much matter?
Hi RN, I am planning a vacation this spring around the end of May to the 2nd week of June. I booked a tour for Germany for the first week but I am forced to take a second week and I was considering going to Australia to check it the action there and if I like it, I would consider migrating there. Migrating is a huge move and I so far like Canada or Brazil. However, Brazil is more of a country to retire to and Canada is a great place to spend my middle age. I would NEVER go to China because it sucks in a major way. The only other languages I speak fluently are English and French (English much more fluently). Australia seems to be a good choice but I haven't checked it out yet. Do you have any advice of tips on migrating there and the best city to visit? I would also like to know the EASIEST way to get in as well. I am willing to try the back door because I know that Sydney is much harder to get into than let's say Brisbane. I am getting tired of the US and its horrible women. In fact I am among the worst of the American women, New York City women I might add.
Originally posted by jadegatelover
Hi all,
Here's my dilemma. I'm 31, only been with one woman, still with her and plan to marry next year
Now THAT{s the road I wish I{d never gone down! DH
Originally posted by RN
Darkseid,
Go to the "What Country Has The Best Women For STR" section. Dickhead and I had a discussion about travel/moving to Australia not too long ago. It's easy enough to visit, but it's almost impossible to get residency. If you have any other questions, write them in the other section...may as well keep all the info in one place. (Once all these guys try an Aussie hooker, they're ALL gonna want to know how to move here!! LOL)
Actually my research revealed that I probably could have gotten residency under your point system IF I were younger, like under 30, given my education and qualifications.
So, my New Year{s resolutions are to become younger, taller, and more good looking. DH
jadegatelover
01-10-03, 17:26
Gentlemen,
The purpose of this Forum is to provide for the exchange of information for Men who are looking for sex with Women.
Please try to refrain from personal attacks and stick to the subject.
Jackson
The Virgin Terr
01-10-03, 22:07
jadegatelover,
i liked your response to dj, way to stick up for yourself, virgin! (of this business). i'm not all that experienced at it myself, and involve a limited number of american women, quite a few mexican women in the border towns of nuevo laredo and tijauna, and recently some canadian escorts, again on the border. i do take some exception to your crack on "ugly, uneducated, third world women". you have something against people with limited educational opportunities who grow up in poverty compared to most americans? it's not there fault, and frankly i prefer people from humble backgrounds for their down-to-earthness. i can assure you many of these girls are far from ugly. alot of them are freaking gorgeous, breathtaking, instant bonerizing women. the kind of girls you'd drool over on many college campuses, we're talking jennifer lopez/ shakira quality women in terms of appearance. we're talking some degree of satisfaction for men who lust for women of the highest physical quality. one other thing. i pay women to touch them, not the opposite. i pay to drink in sensually magnificient female bodies. if that makes me sexist, someone who makes women into "sex objects", so be it. i don't think it does, because i take into account the whole person in a relationship, but in prostitution, customers are paying specifically for a sexual relationship and beauty is of great importance to me for sexual/sensual satisfaction, so i naturally and unashamedly prefer the most beautiful women for sex.
i'm poor at relationships, so perhaps i'm the last person to take advice from. i'd hate for you to break up such a long term relationship for the wrong reason. long term relationships aren't to be taken lightly, good ones are priceless.
jadegatelover:
While I understand your crankiness with Dick Johnson, and he does at times have a way of being shall we say less than diplomatic, his points are not completely invalid, in that this forum exists for men to share information about women, and the emphasis is on the word share. And for what it's worth, I think his first response to you had reasonably legitimate questions, and you're really the one who escalated by taking whacks at his screen name.
If your opinion of the women involved here is that they are "ugly, uneducated women from 3rd world countries" then you truly do show not only your naivete but a great deal of truly unnecessary hostility. That's not only a very judgemental outlook, but one that's highly inaccurate on several levels, and a comment that far more than any other begs the question of why you're posting on this board. I take the generous perspective that you mostly wantedto take a whack at DJ and not anyone else, but civil is a two-way street, and escalating into name-calling as opposed to dealin with legitimate and undrstandabe questions is hardly conducive to you getting the answers you're seeking.
I think a lot of folks here took decent tries at giving you a response, and I'm going to try another.
Suppose your scenario was slightly different, and you weren't 31 but 21, and you'd had a steady girlfriend for pretty much the same length of time. Should our advice to you be any different? Th bottom line is that at the core of things you'r clearly uncertain whether or not you want to commit to this woman, evidenced both by your desire to taste the grass on the other side of the fence, and your inability to get off that fence and marry her. That's far more the issue and the point than anything else, and that's what you should be thinking about -- the "other women" part of the equation is a red herring. There are plenty of folks who marry younger than you, have the same concerns, and do fine. There are plenty who go into it worried they're missing something and mess everything up. It's all about you, not the situation, and that's why the advice here on this is rather superflous, and why folks can get cranky about it.
Bottom line -- you're an adult, and you must decide what it is that you want. Do you want this woman, or are you going to spend time worrying that you're not going to have everything you think you should in life? If it's the latter, then you'd better get on with getting on. While you're deciding, the clock continues to tick, and your life continues to slide by. You don't want to have this same conversation in five years, or spend time regretting that you couldn't decide. You're on the diving board -- either jump or consider another sport :)
Jade Gate:
JZ and VT tend to be rather verbose so let me summarize more succintly:
Get the fuck off this board, you ungrateful asshole.
The Virgin Terr
01-11-03, 23:59
it's saturday night and i'm remembering a saturday night a few years ago in downtown nuevo laredo, not the red light district. i frequented a bar there had lots of pretty young ladies, some of whom would respond favorably to a gentleman's propositon. this was, by the way, wear i met my favorite regular. but on this night, i'd already been laid, and just returned to the bar for another beer before calling it a night. i was almost tapped out on money, had like $16. this was a bar few americans frequented, so i stood out, and was approached by this young mexican guy who told me he had an 18 yr.old american girlfriend of his there who he was looking to set up. i thought what the hell, can't hurt to check her out since she was right there. i told him i only had $15 bucks left, which displeased him, but he said ok. i figured the girl was going to be ugly and/or fat. i was astonished when the girl he introduced me to was absolutely stunning and young as advertised. wow! i took her back to my hotel for a whole hour. she was a virgin to prostitution, and clean, magnificient undressed. an hour with a gorgeous, fresh, american girl of high school age, fucking and licking and caressing and kissing, $15. that was my lucky night.
Jade Gate, spending another Saturday night alone with these shallow American women that hate dwarves or elves, like myself makes me want to be in Brazil or any other Third World country right now so I have to disagree with you on the ugly third world country part. In fact, Third World women are much slimmer, prettier and more passionate in bed. I also didn't have to pay for some of the sex I got from these countries and the girlfriend I met in Brazil was happy and well off in Brazil. If you don't want to try Third world country women then fine miss out on it! You can scratch that curiosity itch with European, Canadian, or perhaps another American woman, or else if you really don't want to scratch that itch then you are really satified with this woman and should not try other women.
Field Commander
01-18-03, 20:37
THE FURY OF COCKS
There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
animal sad,
and only the night before
there they were
playing the banjo.
Once more the day's light comes
with its immense sun,
its mother trucks,
its engines of amputation.
Whereas last night
the cock knew its way home,
as stiff as a hammer,
battering in with all
its awful power.
That theater.
Today it is tender,
a small bird,
as soft as a baby's hand.
She is the house.
He is the steeple.
When they fuck they are God.
When they break away they are God.
When they snore they are God.
In the morning they butter the toast.
They don't say much.
They are still God.
All the cocks of the world are God,
blooming, blooming, blooming
into the sweet blood of woman.
by Anne Sexton
Just treat well these girls; It's not a matter of "Morality" it's a matter of respect.
Tough to follow a Sexton poem -- she's too much, bawdy, profane and holy all at once. Not to mention brilliant. (And, unfortunately, dead.) My kind of feminist, except for the dead part :D
But Vice, morality and respect aren't mutually exclusive -- there's still a fair amount of ground in terms of the whole scene once respect is given.
Field Commander
01-23-03, 21:33
Joe_zop,
I totally agree with you.
The "whole scene" is really complex, what I wanted to say is that sometimes people are able to surprise you positively.
It's difficult to express this idea by words. Poetry often is able to do it. The only one sure thing is change and I approach life (and "these forum hobbies") with an open mind. How can I say ? I don't defend positions, I move.
Miami thinks
Vice plays
RN, you've been awfully quiet of late -- can you give an update on your client problems?
Agreed completely on the American Women section -- it's just an orgy of repetition at this point, which is a shame, as at times in the past there have actually been some interesting conversations and points being made there. And, yes, it's been pretty dead in here, but perhaps that can be rectfied somewhat. (It's nice to have a good net connection again, though I dearly wish I had brought Thailand's weather back home with me, as shoveling snow just doesn't do it for me!)
When you say you've been working on your submission for the bill, does that mean you're working on one for your agency or for one from you as an individual? Are there any portions of the proposed bill at all that strike you as viable? And do you have a sense of the political climate at this point, to know which way the wind is truly blowing? In other words, taking the advocate's perspective of undying optimism for your cause out of the equation, is there something that can/will pass here, and is your fight going to be to pass it or stop it?
No disagreement with you on the morality of the situation -- but let's just face it that it's a two-way street. As in any business transaction, both sides need protection and recourse against the other acting badly. It's keeping that balance that's the trick in the whole equation.
Finally, I'm sorry to hear about the client -- he's really still going at it after all this time? Jeez. I take it any kind of quid pro quo is out of the question, huh? Are you getting any reaction/support from other clients?
DJ -- the info on the situation's earlier in this thread. The issue's not income, it's reputation.
Originally posted by RN
Traveller,
Here's an interesting little fact about the "Lucky Country": Australia has no 'people's' Constitution and no Bill of Rights (the so-called Constitution we do have describes Parliamentary processes, etc). That says it all really.
I have gone through all the UN declarations and covenants I can get my hands on, to the point of quoting legislation in my sleep. What I have discovered is that there were several "loopholes" created in those documents, to allow individual countries to fiddle with them. The biggest gap left open was the "morality clause" (my words, not theirs). This was apparently done so that UN laws/recommendations could be applied to every signatory, regardless of the country's different cultures and faiths...they were given scope to interpret what "protecting public morals or public order (ordre public)" meant.
For example, everybody has the right to Freedom of Movement UNLESS you are a prisoner and/or on bail, and UNLESS the Government considers that you are a threat to public order or morals. This little "clause" was specifically created to give individual Governments the right to restrict the freedom of movement of street-based sex workers. Basically what I'm saying is that our Government has the ability to deny us our basic human rights, and get around any declarations we may be a signatory to, because our occupation is "immoral".
There are also problems with using Article 12 here...
a) the local definition of "public place" was broadened, to the point where it's pretty much impossible to claim that prostitution happened in a private place.
b) calling someone a criminal when they ARE a criminal doesn't amount to damaging reputation (and hooking is criminal), BUT if prostitution is made legal and they publicly announce that you are a hooker, they are simply stating your legal occupation so it is also not considered an attack (even though that announcement could destroy your honour and reputation...what do they care).c) in the case of sole-operators, they ARE allowed to interfere in your "home" because it is considered your workplace...
The list goes on.
As far as being able to "invoke principles of administrative law", which this draft seeks to deny us, you could be right about that one. We have huge legal teams preparing submissions about that sort of thing, as we speak. Same with the Privacy legislation, as well as Trade Practices.
But our biggest problem is that damn Board.
Hi RN, I had to go back to an earlier post about the "morality" clause and this clause stinks. This clause was brought about to please the UN which tries to please the rest of the world including the morality based good ol' USA and Japan (with the prude Prime Minister lady). I guess Australia is trying to avoid scandal reports made by American journalists about sex in other countries. I had a run into one of these journalists in one of my trips to Holland. 20/20 was trying to do an expose on the Red Light District. Since they want to hide prostitutes from the international public they don't allow cameras and they tried to chase the cameraman and journalist. Since I was caught on tape, I helped pin down the cameraman. Australia doesn't want to risk the same type of exposure so they try to hide sex workers as much as possible and therefore they deny prostitutes the same rights as citizens. If there was a lawsuit involving a prostitute and her client, it would be aired on international televison and hence they impose the broad definition of the public place.
I blame any government that give into the moral pressure of the US and other moralist countries for injustices done to sex workers. I think the conditions you have to go through just to report a crime is absurd. The authorities put your case in the backburner and probably would take a traffic ticket case over yours because the government doesn't want the moralists to know you exist in their country.
If I were in Australia, I would give that client of yours a good old fashion butt kicking with the years of training I practiced kung-fu. Whoever messes with my friends messes with me. It seems the authorities don't do anything for sex workers anyway.
You're kidding - you're paying this guy money? For what? This is too strange and ridiculous for words -- please shed some light on the whole situation.
As far as the bill, let's face it -- the world climate of the times is one of overall repression, and conservative agendas are coming out of the woodwork in the face of that, looking to capitalize on people's fears and ignorance. It takes a lot to fight not only the trend but the specifics, and it will take still more work in the future to get it undone. It's doubtful that you're going to change the entire tone of the bill, as the government's certainly not going to substitute your framework for theirs, so snuffing the sucker and maintaining the status quo sounds like the best you're going to hope for at this point.
Hmm, well, in retrospect it sounds as though a gift of that size should probably have been viewed as something with warning bells attached, but who can make that kind of judgement when things are going well?
If giving the money back will end things, then it sounds as though that's the simplest and cleanest way to get out, even if it is completely ridiculous. Do you have the same kind of information about him? (Real name, job, family, etc.?) I ask not because I think you'd want to use it but for your own protection. I hope you've scrupulously kept records of all of your correspondence with him, and I'd also make sure I had a copy of the phone records and pull all this stuff together into a file, just in case. It's unfortunate from a financial perspective that this whole thing has put you off seeing other clients, but on an emotional level that's certainly understandable.
I guess hell doth have other furies, and possessive men are definitely one of them. I do think that the attitude he displays mimics a lot of what one sees in various places on this board, which is the idea that "I've paid for her, so everything's up to me and I can do what I want" which has a basic dehumanizing function underneath it all. The whole issue of possession and equity is a very strange one, no doubt, and it's one that changes by perspective. I know that I had similar disconnections with the woman with whom I spent most of two months in Chiang Mai.
I was the only one giving her money (she really didn't want to be in the business, and is now out of it) and we had a constant back and forth about the amount of time and attention I expected in return for paying for everything. Wasn't about jealousy or possession, (or even sex, really, as that wasn't the main issue, as I was truly more after companionship) it was more that I didn't feel it should all be in one direction and that I should be getting an equitable amount of time and focus in return, and my definition of that was pretty liberal.
We did work it out, which is why it lasted as long as it did, and both of us ended up happy. She ended up with all her bills paid, a new and better place to live, a new job that means she can just go to school and take care of her family, some extra things for her kid, parents, and self, etc. I had a very pleasant interval with a beautiful and intelligent woman, someone to share time and experiences with while far from home and essentially alone in a strange place -- as well as managed to learn a lot since I basically got involved in every aspect of her life, from her family to her history to her dreams and way of thinking, etc. Plus, because I was aware exactly of her financial situation, I was able to help solve things in a way she couldn't manage, and at costs not at all unreasonable for me. (Mostly I helped her think differently about how she needed to deal with money.)
Now, if I was wired differently, that could very easily have been a dangerous situation for her both financially and emotionally, as I could have used the money to control her in a variety of ways. It just goes to show something we've discussed here before -- that in many cases the women involved in the trade are there because they see no good alternatives in terms of making the kind of money involved and still managing to move their lives forward in the directions they want.
As to the bill -- sounds as though stalemate is the tack to go for, then, if the differences are this wide and unresolveable. Good to hear that the press is tweaking, though it's not really surprising that the Police Minister didn't attend the forum, given that she's managed to be pretty well isolated and insulated throughout the whole process, from what you've previously said. You may well be right that she's the fall-guy, but she could also be a sacrificial lamb in this equation, though the question then, of course, is who's doing the sacrificing.
Wow! Congratulations on your victory over this horrible bill, RN. :) I wish something like this would happen here in the United States but each time I join a protest for porn or prostitution, we always get ruled out by the Puritan majority in this country. At least Australians aren't brainwashed that prostitutes are criminals so as to alienate them. In the US, the prostitutes, brothel owners, porno film makers, and transvestites, even when they join forces, would still be outnumbered and outvoted by the Puritan majority.:( Sex is just not accepted in America and that is why I lost all hope for this country and want to become an expat.
That's great news, RN, though of course it would be better to know officially that the thing's withdrawn as opposed to via the rumo(u)r mill. Seems a little premature for any kind of announcement like that, if only so the government can save face.
And fifty-three pages is far from shabby as a submission, especially considering you were working on things for others. Any thoughts about what you should do with that? Seems a shame to let it just get turned into electronic mulch.
The real question for the sex industry in your region is really how can you take advantage of this new united front to make things better, as opposed to simply not worse. Any sense of whether people, now that they feel empowered, can can continue to work together?
PurpleNGold
02-20-03, 15:31
Originally posted by darkseid
Wow! Congratulations on your victory over this horrible bill, RN. :) I wish something like this would happen here in the United States but each time I join a protest for porn or prostitution, we always get ruled out by the Puritan majority in this country. At least Australians aren't brainwashed that prostitutes are criminals so as to alienate them. In the US, the prostitutes, brothel owners, porno film makers, and transvestites, even when they join forces, would still be outnumbered and outvoted by the Puritan majority.:( Sex is just not accepted in America and that is why I lost all hope for this country and want to become an expat.
Ever hear this story? There are two imperial roman senators discussing how to prevent slaves from running away. The first senator says, "What if we brand a large mark on their foreheads? That would make them easily identifiable no matter where they went." The second senator becomes deathly pale, and states, in a fearful whisper, "Awful idea. If they could easily identify each other, then they would realize how badly they outnumber us!"
I don't think the puritan majority is anything more than a very public minority. They don't have to fear reprisals in there personal and professional lives by speaking out their ridiculous views. Like RN pointed out, it took a veil of anonymity to allow the sex industry to speak up for itself. If something like that could be accomplished (fat chance under the current regime) then, I think that the sex industry and its clientele would find out just how much clout could be brought to bear.
-- P & G
The Virgin Terr
02-21-03, 14:08
welcome back, RN, and i'm happy to see you so upbeat about recent events, and to know your voice hasn't gone away.
purplengold (where'd that name come from?), welcome to the discussion. from what you've submitted thus far i think i'm going to appreciate your contribution. i'm going to play devil's advocate though to your idea that puritanical ideology is in the minority. i tend to be pessimistic about sexual freedom because i perceive that my own totally positive view of sex is completely foreign to the mixed or negative views of the majority. it's true that much sexual behavior is irresponsible with negative consequences. to me, that indicates a need to promote thinking about how to get people to behave more responsibly, but i think for most people it leads to condemnation of the sex drive itself. what do you think?
I disagree that puritanical attitudes in this country (the US) are merely a vocal minority. I blame it on the rise of Protestantism in general and Calvinism in particular in Western Europe in 17th-19th centuries. Read Robert Malthus' Essay on Population. He viewed the working class as being incapable of behaving responsibly sexually and felt that if they were given more than a subsistence level of food, they would reproduce in an unchecked fashion and doom the planet. His solution (at least in his second version) was to delay marriage to a much later age. Of course, this was only for the working class and the upper classes could do whatever they damn pleased. His essay was often used by the Victorians to justify their bizarre and extreme forms of sexual repression, as well as to justify paying shitty wages.
And VT, "much sexual behavior" would NOT be "irresponsible" and "lead to negative consequences" if all these fucking puritans weren't preventing decent sex education in the public schools, discouraging contraception, getting freaked out about masturbation, and condemning alternative sexual practices.
BTW I think purple and gold are probably the team colors of P & G's college.
The Virgin Terr
02-21-03, 22:54
interesting shit about malthus and the victorians, dh. reminds me of something i read about clare boothe luce, the beautiful right wing wife of the right wing publisher of time magazine, henry luce. as i recall, claire luce was introduced to lsd in the 60's when she herself was about that age. well, ole claire absolutely loved the shit. but she still supported it's suppression (illegality) on the basis that the lower classes shouldn't know about it. it's the exact mentality that underlies the whole war on drugs, where accurate information is suppressed and government propaganda and coercion rule.
re. the whole issue of human attitudes towards human nature and human behavior, the basic supposition of christianity is that human nature is inherently "sinful" and in need of salvation. this provides the blueprint for all of our repressive laws and attitudes.
But where the Protestants broke from the earlier Christians was in believing that privately amassed capital was a good thing. Aquinas would never have stood for that. Malthus may have been totally wrong since he never anticipated that technological advancement would push the food supply curve out as far as it has. Or, he may have been right but it will take a few more centuries or perhaps millennia.
But in the context of prostitution, even though the world may not be overcrowded in absolute terms (or maybe it is), there are problems with population distribution and gender imbalance that lead to an increase in prostitution. Look at the tropics. They have higher birth rates but less productive land as compared to the temperate regions. That means far less chance of full employment, which means prostitution.
And gender imbalance in places like Colombia (due to murder) and Bolivia (due to war and migration) are now beginning to be replicated in Mexico as the predominately male breadwinners go to the US to work. Sometimes they don't come back and the women thus turn to prostitution. You have opposite gender imbalances in India and China due to female infanticide and selective abortion, the latter being particularly prevalent in China since the institution of the one-child policy. This is leading to a lack of suitable wives and a postponement of marriage, increasing the need for the males to patronize prostitutes.
Therefore, no analysis of the morality of prostitution is complete without an analysis of population problems. But fundamentally it is still the rich against the poor. Malthus came from a wealthy family and was one of eight children (in fact, although he did take his own advice and married quite late for his time, late 30s I think, he himself had three kids). Rich gringos travel to Costa Rica, etc., throw money around senselessly with no regard for local practices, and that fucks it up not only for the local guys but for cheap ass Dickheads like me.
RN, the problem with welfare or social services as an antidote to women being forced into prostitution is economic. Australia has natural resources such as minerals and grain and therefore can create a social services or welfare infrastructure. The Latin American countries, having being thoroughly raped by colonialism, can not. They lack democratic social institutions and the income and wealth stratification are extreme. In the Amazon, the people know they are screwing themselves for the future when they deforest the land to get cooking fuel, but there is not a hell of a lot they can do about it on a short-term, subsistence level. Nor do the Caribbean countries have much in the way of natural resources. The Bahamas is an excellent example. It was settled when plantation owners from the Carolinas sailed there with their slaves to see if the land was good for growing cotton. It wasn't, so they sailed away in the middle of the night and left the slaves to fend for themselves, since it was cheaper to buy new slaves than to sustain all the old ones on the return trip. From a sociological perspective, perhaps this legacy of abandonment helps to explain the phenomenon there of the "out children," or children of men who already have an "official" family and thus do not support the out of wedlock kids.
I have chided you for this before and I will chide you for it again: your perspective is clearly that of someone who hasn't experienced countries that are thoroughly impoverished. It is simply unrealistic to think that any significant form of social welfare is a realistic solution in such countries.
And, as we've also discussed before, there is plenty of poverty in the US and although social services exist, the Puritans who run the social services want to take prostitutes' children away and put them in foster homes, instead of helping them to support them. And, again using Mexico as an example, since the US does not make social services available to illegal immigrants and generally not even to LEGAL immigrants, there is little incentive for the entire family to sneak across the border. So, normally only the guy does. Many, many times these fine hard working people achieve their goal of working for a while, sending money back to their families, and returning when they get the chance. Other times they get thrown in jail. Other times they are lonely and meet another woman and have a kid with her and it becomes convenient to forget about their other family back home.
Continuing to use Mexico as an example, although this can be applied to other former colonies as well, the largest gang rape in history took place there. The legacy of this is that the Mexican hates his Hispanic father who represents the rapist, but does not respect his Indian mother who represents the victim. The vast majority of mestizos, or Hispanic/Indian blend, have Hispanic fathers and Indian mothers, at least if you trace it back to colonial times. This goes a long way to explaining the "macho" phenomenon in these cultures: double sexual standards, wife beating, etc.
On the other hand, most of the prostitutes in the US are junkies. Yes, a lot of them have kids but unlike in Latin America, they are not doing prostitution to support their kids. They are neglecting their kids and feeding their pipe instead. All I can do about that is apologize. So, morally, I try to avoid US prostitutes and redistribute what little wealth I have (there is not enough money to pay people in my profession after all the athletes and movie stars have bellied up to the trough, apparently) to Latin American prostitutes.
But Western European countries such as The Netherlands in particular and Belgium as well have extremely good and extensive social welfare systems, yet mucho mucho prostitution as well. I can't say if their welfare systems are more extensive or "better" (worse of course rather than better if you are a Bush supporter) than Australia's since my area of expertise is prostitution and not welfare, but at least roughly comparable I would venture. How, then, do we account for the well-established prostitution there? In The Netherlands it appears to be a way to attract foreign capital (sex tourism); this is understandable when you realize that country has virtually no natural resources and has always depended on foreign trade and being an intermediary. But, in Belgium the scene appeared to be geared to locals (although most of the hookers I ran into were not Belgian).
This brings me back to the VT hypothesis and makes me think that prostitution exists because it is fun to have sex with different people and then not have to worry about getting all involved in a relationship with them. And, if we didn't have the puritan influence we could just have the sex without the prostitution. That's kinda what it was like in the US in my adolescence when the drugs were better.
In The Netherlands, prostitution is "pretty much" legal. I say that because they have a concept there: "It is not legal but it is permitted." But basically yes. There is even a drive up red light district that is owned by the city of Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a great city for museums and culture, and you can get weed there legally and women there legally. Too bad the weather sucks and the hotels are damned expensive (true of all of Northern Europe IMO). The local women are gorgeous so when I go there I just watch them bike by in their long plaid skirts and I am fully operational. They are tall and fair like you with very healthy looking skin, hair, teeth, etc. My opinion based on my travels is they are the most beautiful women in the world on average although there are more absolutely beautiful women in Spain. But I digress as that has nothing to do with morality.
In Belgium there are some red light districts that have been subject to increasing restrictions in the past few years. There are also obvious brothels. Whether it is officially legal or merely tolerated, I am not completely sure. I think it is technically illegal or restricted to certain areas. But it sure as hell isn't like the US where it is DEFINITELY neither legal nor officially tolerated AND sucks. Some guys say there are great escorts available in the US who will do anything you want for $400 an hour US and if I ever have that kind of money I will let you know. Oh, wait a minute; no I won't. I will go to Argentina and get laid ten times an hour for the same money instead. Now that is more moral as I am redistributing wealth.
RN, I doubt your tome will exceed your free web limit unless you try to turn it into a PDF file or something like that, and probably not even then unless you do something complex with it. I you don't put it up as web pages, just pop it up as a text or zip file -- shouldn't be any larger than one of your jpgs, and probably smaller.
As far as the whole legal process goes -- I'm reminded of a quote by Otto von Bismark, "Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made." Unfortunately, contrary to that, if you don't know what's ground up inside, you may not like the taste.
I think your perspective about how people react to laws is exactly correct -- they first look at how the law is going to affect them personally, and make a judgement based on that. If they don't use prostitutes, don't work as one, well, then curtailing rights means nothing. On the other hand, if health problems result, and costs go up, then it does affect them andthey'll pay attention. That's one of the great secrets to advocacy action -- push the button that shows people this has to do with them if you want a reaction.
To chime in on the Netherlands/Belgium versus Third World debate, I think the bottom line is that in those instances there are two aspects involved. First is simply social climate -- the Netherlands and Belgium have always been relatively liberal in terms even of European perspectives, perhaps because they're small, basically port-oriented and thus have usually had a fair amount of multi-country interaction and influence. If you get sailors coming to port on a regular basis you're going to have to find some way to accomodate them, lest they come in, bust up the local area, and then sail away. Or worse, come in, knock up a bunch of daughters of the middle class, and then leave. You don't want to restrict the sailors, because your economy depends on their ships. Prostitution is a practical social solution. The second things is the relative degree of wealth and social stability that are there, reflected in welfare practices, so prostitution is far more a "choice" than "the only avenue open." I've only been to Amsterdam a couple of times, but a large number of the women I saw in the RL district there were foreign, though there were also Dutch women working, of course. In my conversations with women there (of course I can never help but talk and ask questions :)) most of the foreign women said they came there specifically to work in the industry, because it was safe, the rules were clear, and they didn't have to worry about being treated like a criminal. The Dutch women said, well, it's a job where I can make a lot of money. There's little social stigma, which makes a huge difference in a western context.
It's simply different in the Third World, no matter what, and virtually anywhere geographically there are some similar underpinnings. In the Third World, everyone, and I mean everyone, is an entrepreneur by nature, because there is not sufficient financial structure and support to presume that you're going to receive regular assistance on anything from your government. There are not enough formal "positions" available as regular jobs to go around, and, in many places, even if there are you may need to know someone or to grease palms to get or keep them. So survival and an ability to make your life better depends on a perspective of having something within your own control that you can use on to make money and get food. Whether this is hustling trinkets for tourists, renting pirate videos to locals, making ready-made food on busy streets, or prostitution, the underpinning is still one of personal entrepreneurship and control. This is what you do to feed your family and to get ahead.
Thus, the whole stigma issue is different. There may be moral or societal codes (as in South America with Catholicism) but those are generally trumped by an understanding of practical realities -- in the same way the moral structure of the Church has historically mixed with pagan practicalities throughout the world. You may believe in Jesus, but the church doesn't have anything that directly addresses the need for rain for the crops or good luck for healthy harvest, so you also make sacrifices or offerings to the appropriate minor deities or gods that do. Same thing with prostitution -- while it may technically violate the Church's moral structure, it's mitigated by the fact that the intent is not sin, but sacrifice, as you're providing for your family. Therefore, it exists in a state where it can be officially condemned but also sympathetically understood and tolerated. In situations where other religions, such as Buddhism, are involved, the religions strictures are simply less intolerant and damning on the surface of things, and that also helps mitigate social perspective.
It also changes the situation of the parents involved -- indenturing your child in prostitution, while negative, is often seen as a sad choice made for the good of the family on both sides of the equation -- the parents are surrendering higher social aspirations for that child, and the child is sacrificing herself for the improvement of the family. (I mention this not because I'm at all in favor of it, though some women willingly make this "sacrifice" for their families -- the outcomes here are the kinds of things I loathe in terms of condition and issues of personal choice, and I'm in favor of aggressively going after the operators of such enterprises -- but because people in the west simply cannot understand how a family could do this, and put uniformly negative and heartless labels on the family as opposed to looking at the social stucture.) The same perspective applies in cases where it's not about indenture, but choice. It's the responsibility of grown children to care for the parents who have cared for them, so many times the youngest adult daughter(s) end up in prostitution to help fulfill their family responsibilities (this happens often throughout southeast Asia.) Visible improvement in the family's situation is critical to the equation, as without it there's no justification -- so the addition of electricity, some new clothes and additional food, etc. demonstrates the practical and social correctness of the sacrifice, since the family as a whole sees improvement, and the community can see it as well. So though this child is sacrificing her social aspirations (and thereby will need and deserve support later, after her working days are finished) the family as a whole sees true benefit, and often a rise, as opposed to reduction, in social status.
originally posted by rn
out of interest - are the women in the cities you mentioned more 'professional' (generally of course) about their work? would you say that most of those women choose to work in the sex industry - rather than being foced by circumstance or a third party- more often than, for example, in a third world country?
i am not really sure what you mean when you say "professional" in this context (note to jz: when faking being european be sure to use single quotation marks like rn did and not double ones like i just did). brussels wasn't so great for mongering and i never met any hookers who were belgian. i remember a black jamaican woman, a polish woman, and a gal from slovenia. being a dickhead, i do not take the jz social science perspective of asking a lot about their backgrounds, although i do often enjoy talking to them. that is assuming we have a language in common. my french is not sufficient to do much more than negotiate price and services so when in belgium i try to find english speakers and that may account for why i never ran into any belgian hookers. but as jz said, there are lots of local girls in a'dam, and they all speak english. the dutch are the most cunning linguists in the world and are required to study i believe five languages in school. my experience has been that they are a bit too antiseptic so i usually try to find thai girls there (of whom there are many). i would never get to the point of asking a hooker why she got into the business, though. all the hookers in a'dam certainly appear to be there of their own free will, but certainly the economic realities in their own countries are a factor.
however, since i hate pimps i would do my best not to choose a hooker who was being forced into it by a "third party." i have not been to southeast asia and the more i read this board, the less i want to go there partially for those type of reasons. i mongered a lot in hong kong and all the girls were mainland chinese and not from hong kong. i was not going to brothels there due to 1) language barriers and 2) being a lazy dickhead so i just pulled women off the street right by my hotel. i do not think there were any third parties involved. i remember one quite excellent experience with a gal from beijing who had one of those electronic translators in one hand, a currency converter in another hand, and a cell phone in another hand. we were standing there on the street by the tsim tsat tsui subway station, trying to work out price and service in this fashion. it was hilarious. i was with a friend and girls kept coming by and tugging on his sleeve, saying "massage!" "sex!" and he was freaking out. some of them were **** for sure. i have heard anecdotaly that there is forced prostitution in hong kong.
now as far as being forced into it and third parties are concerned, i had lengthy conversations with several of the women i screwed in buenos aires. no pimps, just boyfriends who knocked them up and ran off, and no jobs in the outlying provinces, so more or less "forced" to move to the city and hook. but the two i chatted with the most (did a repeat with one and spent a whole evening with her which for me is most unusual) mentioned that they liked sex a lot and so it was an easy choice. i got flamed on the board over there for recommending these two street walkers over going to the clubs. people were slamming me for recommending something so "dangerous." what a load of crap. they were nice sweet girls. the unemployment rate there is 25% so you have to factor that in. prostitution is supposedly illegal in argentina but i can't see how that could possibly be because there are mind-boggling numbers of streetwalkers, tons of clubs, jillions of outcall girls, and so forth. plus, the non-prostitutes will screw on the first date so that is handy.
in mexico, where i have a lot of experience, many of the girls are being "managed" by someone and a lot of them don't seem to like or feel good about what they are doing. i feel few mexican women would "choose" to be prostitutes. there i tend to choose clubs over streetwalkers, try to find a girl with a good attitude and get her phone number so i can call her later and avoid the pimp issue to a somewhat greater degree. more moral and a lot cheaper too! that is the only country i have mongered in where all the hookers are from that country. other places appear to have a majority of foreigners, or in the case of argentina, not a majority but a significant minority (mostly from brazil and paraguay).
the only place i have been where i know for sure that sex for money between consenting adults is absolutely legal absolutely everywhere (but only if there are no fucking pimps involved) is costa rica. my experience there is that the majority of the prostitutes are from colombia and the dominican republic; i had a few costa rican gals but was not impressed. there's jobs available in costa rica, by and large, and the costa rican gals i met usually had a day job and were hooking by free choice to have money for luxury items. therefore i would say they were choosing the work based on its relatively high rate of pay rather than sheer economic necessity.
so is hooking to buy nice clothes less moral than hooking to feed your kids? don't know don't care because i don't think prostitution is the least bit immoral anyway. i say that to my friends and i get the old "would you want your sister to do it?" line. i doubt it would bother me. what's funny is my female friends seem to be less bothered about my hobby than my male friends. i do think that if the woman has to take all comers as is the case in some places, that is immoral.
I'm with you, DH, that it doesn't really matter why someone is in the game -- as far as I'm concerned, one can do whatever one wants with/to their body as long as it's not harming someone else. (And my sisters can and will do what they damn well please regardless of my attitude about it, and they're still going to be my sisters. As long as they don't become politicians...) My point in talking about the whole indentured servitude aspect was more about the cultural differences in terms of family attitude and reasoning than anything at all about justification.
Don't get me wrong on Southeast Asia -- it's far from all indentured servitude, which is in the minority, and in fact you'll come across far more of that in, say, India, than you will in Thailand or Indonesia. It absolutely depends on where you are -- something like that is more likely in Cambodia, for example, and families in Vietnam, Burma, and Nepal are more likely to indenture their daughters. It's also true that even in some of these same brothels there are women who are absolutely there by choice as well. Personally, I'm not much for brothels anyway, and I avoid such a scene in the region on principle, as even if I'm paying an independent I'm supporting the system, but there are tons of other options in any event -- in all places in SEA there are a wide range of freelancers. I don't actually see a huge difference between Thailand and some of the Caribbean/Central/South American areas in terms of overall scene, though there are obvious cultural and magnitude differences. There are actually far fewer pimps or handlers in SE Asia than in most other places, though there are probably more boyfriends/husbands in the background, chiefly because of the distinctions between "farangs" and locals. But these are intentionally hidden by the women involved, as they are generally selling the "girlfriend experience" and that would be harmful to the illusion. You get tons of women in Thailand with the exact same story as you've described in BA -- a high percentage of the women I met there were supporting kids who their parents were looking after, after their Thai boyfriend/husband had split. And the usual approach was to go from someplace rural to a larger city a ways away. The unemployment rate in Thailand is fairly low, so it's not all about lack of options.
And for what it's worth, I'm not one to grill anyone or ask how they got into the game -- just asking someone about themselves is usually all it takes to get the story, as many women want to explain themselves once they're treated as a normal person. (And I generally like to know who I'm spending time with no matter what the circumstances.) The reality is that few people, in or out of the game, can resist telling their life story if given the opportunity which is something I learned during my journalism years, where I was constantly surprised how much information people would give to someone when knowing it could/would end up printed somewhere.
JZ, I am not saying that you are "grilling" the women but more saying that I sort of don't give a shit some of the time. And I am not saying that I wouldn't go to SEA based on the indenture thing. I am just saying that between the humidity and the bugs and Freeler and Skinless' pet rats that I will stick to Latin America where I know the language and understand the culture. I am not sure I would do well in a consensus-type culture, being a Dickhead and so forth.
Understood, but I seriously don't find it any worse in terms of climate, bugs, etc., than most of the other places I mentioned. Freeler and Skinless were talking, I might add, about a particularly grungy $3/night hotel I looked at based on their encouragement and decided not to stay in, sorta cheap hooker heaven in one of the less attractive cities in Thailand. And the culture's mostly Buddhist, so they're fairly tolerant -- they get tons of tourists so they're pretty used to Dickheads by now, and I suspect you'd be one of the less obnoxious, as you at least have a brain attached and some tolerance for different ways of thinking, unlike many travellers I met there. If you were comfortable in Mexico and Costa Rica there's no reason to worry about SEA. Heck, my 73-year-old mother managed it twice.
Oh, I am not WORRIED about it. I have BIG brass balls if nothing else. I was mostly kidding about the rats and I realize that Skinless and Freeler tend to stay in shall we say "low end accomodations." It just doesn't sound to me like I'd feel quite as at home as I do in Latin America. I think I am actually Mexican and not Irish and got switched at birth in my crib. But I use a modified Dickhead approach in Mexico and not full Dickhead mode. Full Dickhead mode works great in Amsterdam and it worked really great in Buenos Aires. The weather in the tropics is just a bit too extreme for me unless it is at altitude. It's a moot point right now as I am all scheduled out until 2004.
The Virgin Terr
02-22-03, 20:23
dickhead, what has been your experience with long term relationships? i'm curious, because it appears u prefer prostitution for both it's convenience and that it's a way to have sex without a relationship. i, on the other hand, prefer relationships and sex to go together, perhaps because i want so much more from women than just sex, but lacking charm or access to a society that's amenable to my views, and thus alienated, i have to resort to prostitution, and go without relationships. if i was to have a relationship i think my ideal partner would be a prostitute, and i would support her decision to "work", both because i would benefit financially from her income as her mate, and also because i want to do anything i can to encourage prostitution because i have empathy for all the other lonely guys like me in the world. don't u miss having someone to love, i mean more than for just a quick fuck? don't u miss having someone to share your life with on a day to day basis, sharing thoughts, dreams, losses and victories? creating memories and a bond which transcends the physical?
i have a similar question for RN: didn't u miss, while u were working, having a deep relationship? i know u've said in the past how possessive u r and how u couldn't understand or respect a man who wouldn't be possessive of u, so u can't have a deep relationship with anyone while working, but didn't u miss it just the same? if prostitution is to become truly "moral", doesn't it have to become a "job" whose participants can lead completely "normal" and complete lives?
The Virgin Terr
02-22-03, 20:34
to clarify my last post: don't get me wrong, i love propositioning women whose beauty knocks my socks off. it's just that, in a perfect world, i'd want to have a relationship along with the paid sex. having a relationship has other fringe benefits as well. once a women knows u'll be sticking around for awhile, if she likes u, u can get some great discounts, as well as alot of outright freebies!
Well, that is an EXTREMELY personal question. I have had 3 LTRs as in shacking up, including one marriage. 6 months, 7 years, 2.5 years respectively. #1 was great but she had goals and ambitions beyond what I had and was somewhat out of my league, or at least the league I was in at that time (her family was way rich, like tens of millions of dollars, and I was a high school dropout who grew up so poor I had to jack off the dog just to feed the cat, plus she was Jewish and would never have married outside the faith). We both knew that going in and when she graduated she was gone. We knew it would end that way. Only mildly painful and I learned a lot. #2 was true love. We got married after 3 years and it went downhill fairly quickly. She was emotionally unstable which I could not deal with in the long run, having grown up with a completely insane, manic depressive parent. The instability got worse over time and plus I was not ambitious or well-educated enough for her (she had a graduate degree and I was a high school drop out). Class differences. The divorce was not a bad one. The breakup was pretty painful. I got over it after maybe a year. #3 was a waste of time. We were co-workers and it was easy but as I believe I have posted previously, she immediately began to gain a LOT of weight and developed lockjaw. Now the tables were turned vs. the marriage and she was not ambitious or well-educated enough for me (I was in the process of working my way through college at the time and she was pretty ignorant, not well traveled, etc.) Breakup was only nasty in that it was hard to get her to move out of my house and I finally had to just say look you got 30 days. We stayed friends for several years but then drifted apart over an issue of me lending her money and her not repaying it as agreed (although she finally did). I was faithful during all these relationships, at least during the live-in and committed stages.
I had a very good friend who I used to screw off and on when neither of us was in a relationship, or more accurately when I wasn't in a relationship and she was pissed off at her boyfriend du jour. After 20 years of friendship and 10 or 12 years of off and on fucking, we began to get emotionally involved. She said she wanted to leave her boyfriend for me. We went on a trip and it was great. We sealed the deal for her to tell her boyfriend she wanted out. She got cold feet and decided not to do it, largely because she thought he had more money than me (he didn't) and was willing to support her in a more luxurious house, etc. She wasn't honest with me about and kept saying she was waiting for the right time to tell him. Finally she leveled with me. That one really hurt, big time. It's been 3.5 years since this all went down and I was in pretty bad shape for close to a year. Fucking a lot of hookers helped me get over it, for sure. She is still with him and amazingly we repaired our friendship, although it took a long time. The friendship is pretty good right now but I did permanently lose a lot of respect for her. Now the boyfriend, who quit his job at the height of tech boom to start his own business, is going bankrupt and she is dropping hints again. Ain't gonna happen.
Do I miss having something to love? Sometimes. Do I find having to constantly consider another person's wants and feelings annoying? Yes. Do I want another relationship? Maybe, but this time there's gotta be more in it for ME. ME ME ME this time. Do I think it will happen? Probably not. Do I think it has a higher probability of happening in Latin America than in the US? Definitely. Is that why I am moving down there, at least part-time? No. Would I be moving down there if there weren't lots of prostitutes? No. Will I be 100% faithful in the next relationship if it ever happens? No, I will nail anything that moves. Do I enjoy sex without relationships? Yes, very much.
Do I think you, VT, can have a loving relationship with someone who is out there hooking? I doubt it. Could I do it? I doubt it but my odds are better than yours since you are a tender, sensitive guy and I am a fucking Dickhead. Would I do it? Absolutely not.
The Virgin Terr
02-22-03, 20:54
i should also add that i want more prostitution because i have empathy for women who could benefit from it's social acceptance; women who like sex and would benefit economically from being able to sell it. gotta go now, but i have much yet to say on this and related subjects.
The Virgin Terr
02-22-03, 21:32
i can reply to dickhead's post i just read b4 i go. dickhead, i can empathize with your heartbreak, having been there bigtime myself once, following a 6 year relationship/marriage. i was devastated for about a year afterwards, and it changed me permanently, radicalizing and liberating me from previous limitations such as sexual jealousy. partly i think i can speak so blithely about sharing a lover because i've never had the experience with anyone i truly cared about. it probably would be very difficult, but i think with the right ideal person, if she exists, it could work. my relationship role models are a couple that are friends of mine and have been together over 30 years, with most of that time having a very open relationship, the kind where it doesn't bother one to watch the other getting fucked by someone else. people who are completely tuned into sex in a completely free way. don't know how they manage it, but they are so much closer and more affectionate with one another than any other couple i've known, i think because they don't need to hide anything from each other.
relationships do require effort and sacrifice, so unless the benefits outweigh the costs, they aren't worth it. that's why compatibility is so important. u have to find someone who can support u emotionally and who u can respect and have platonic friendship, and shared interests. and if u have a compelling dream or goal to pursue, your mate must share that also.
i'm not as smart or knowledgable or "manly" as u probably r, so you're right about it being more difficult for me to get women, any kind of woman. for someone to fall in love with me she'll have to get to know me and she'll also have to share my worldview and my desire to be a "messiah", or liberator of society. aren't many out there like that i suppose, so it may well never happen. but as far as being tender and sensitive, those qualities are part of being strong, part of love, and i'm sure women appreciate that.
You are an idealist who wants to CHANGE the system. I am pragmatist who would rather figure out ways to BEAT the system or be happy within it. There are a lot of changes to the system I would favor but I lack your zealotry to be the one to change it. Too difficult and I am too lazy. Also I have no interest in watching anyone fuck anyone. I am not into threesomes or swapping although I have tried it. I don't like to fuck with any third, fourth, fifth, etc. party in the room. It is just not my bag. And, if I were watching someone fuck my girlfriend I would then be in the same room with a naked guy with a hard on and that has NO appeal to me.
What if you watch your girlfriend fuck some other guy and she comes better with him than she does with you? You would not be able to handle it. You are a dreamer, albeit an articulate and undoubtedly nice one. I want to live in the real world.
PS: I never said anything about you not being able to get a woman although you have certainly said it yourself many times.
RN -- well, the European spelling is really more American spelling, in not using "ou" in colour/color, etc. And while, yes, Americans do recognize and use "I've" and "I'd" DH's correct in pointing that it's not heavily done, and does have some regional aspects.
A small suggestion for your site -- if you're going to put things up as Word documents, then load them into Word and use the "save as" function to save them under new names. This can dramatically reduce the size of the file -- after multiple edits and saves Word docs can get pretty bloated with "undo" information. You could probably reduce them further by saving as Rich Text (RTF) files, which basically every wordprocessor, including Word, can recognize.
The whole indenture thing is really complex, and occurs with many variations and types. In the case you mention I'd have far more qualms, as there truly was no advance knowledge or assent, but many women/girls do in fact understand in advance that they are being indentured, try (naturally) to talk their families out of it, but then acquiesce and "do their family duty." Again it comes down to cultural differences in terms of family obligation and structure, and I don't pretend to emotionally understand all the nuances, though I think I've gained a fairly good understanding of the overall dynamics. (In some ways I'm reminded of boys being apprenticed during the middle ages, where their situations could also be incredibly harsh and difficult, and there often wasn't even a wage involved, only room, board, and learning a trade.)
The difference in the economics cannot be overlooked -- it can take say 40 to 60 thousand baht to buy and open, say, a small food stall, which works out to 900-1400USD. That's a tremendous amount in a country where many office workers earn 4000-7000baht a month, but for the women you mention, even in their scenarios of clearly unfair money distribution, that's a very viable plan and they can even be far more ambitious. (If they're go-go dancers in Bangkok they can make that much in a month, but they'll never save it or leave the biz to open a such a business.) In a brothel in Cambodia or Thailand or wherever they will not make anywhere near what they're making in Oz, but their debt load is far, far lower. Even so, many will prefer to stay once they're paid off, as the same reality of the business is true there -- it pays far more than most other options women from these circumstances have. And that's true even in the out-of-the-way little towns where people are paying $5USD or less per session.
I think what it demonstrates is the need to include those affected or involved in the contextualizing and changing of their situations. It's easy for someone like me from a reasonably wealthy country to make snap judgements about situations based on my own expectations and sense of "what's right" but as you say, attempts to "help" might actually be actually very damaging to the very people targeted for improvement.
And we're sorry to wreck your sleep -- not! :D It's been a while since there was a decent discussion going on in this section. (I do so wish Philip Augustus was still with us -- his intelligent and lively voice is definitely missed!)
The Virgin Terr
02-23-03, 03:42
dickhead, i can get a woman, but she has 2b as special as i am. my zealotry is both a blessing and a curse. zealots need other zealots 2 relate 2. zealots either end up heroes or goats; it's a role of the dice, like anything in life. just because you're not a zealot doesn't mean u aren't special. like i said b4, you're smarter and more worldly than i am, and it takes all types to make a world. i'm wiser or crazier, but in any case, i can't b "normal", i can't adapt 2 anything i can't relate 2. only time will tell how things turn out. i can either b a martyr or a loser: i hope i can find the courage 2b the former.
RN, you're thinking is still confused and contadictory. oh, i'm sorry, i misread your message. maybe you're not confused after all. you're right about the tragedy of thai women being deceived into becoming prostitutes, and you're also right about the rightness of not imposing you're solutions upon them. it's an imperfect world for sure. everyone makes mistakes, so we can only hope that they result in making lemonaid out of lemons. i'm looking forward 2 your response 2 my earlier query.
RN, see -- $500AUD is more than 50,000baht each month, which is a massive amount. (And in USD it's 80,000baht, which is a mind-boggling amount for people who have lived on 100baht a day.) I think this should also be looked at in the context of what many women from SEA do in terms of going abroad to work in other countries.
Hong Kong and Singapore are filled with thousands of domestics from Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, where they are poorly paid by local standards but paid highly compared to what they can make at home. Hong Kong has something like 225,000 of these workers, more than half from the Philippines, and there's been a lot of controversy over the past year, as and organization representing the workers rejected have efforts to raise their minimum wage, fearing it will price them out of the market, and currently to be heavily taxed, trying to shift employement to locals. The governments of the various countries have threatened to stop sending workers if their equilibrium is upset. The minimum wage is less than 500USD a month -- so far lower than the women you mention are making -- and most of these workers are doing the same thing, working and sending what is considered a very large amount of money back to their families.
While I was in Thailand, the governent tried to get Thai workers out of Israel because some had been injured in a bombing (which caused great alarm at home, as it was the first time Thais had been involved) ordering the employment companies responsible for them to get them back. Again, the workers refused, angrily, saying they were not targets, they felt safe, and they were making a lot of money for their families.
So I think it's very understandable that these women would decide to stay -- they've already seen and been through the worst, know what to expect, and the money dazzles enough to offset their dislike of the work and also gives a justification for what they've been through (not to mention helps them not be "victims" in their minds -- let's not forget how people blame themselves for getting into positions they could not possibly forsee.) They can picture their positions once their "debt" is completely paid off, and in the cultural context of putting oneself last behind the families, they're gaining tons of face. It's also highly unlikely that anyone at all at home knows what they're doing, so their social status is protected if and when they do get home, unlike local workers who are near the bottom of the social structure.
That doesn't mean it's not still slavery, and immoral on the face of it -- a distinction about those who are tricked into this as opposed to those who accede to family wishes. But hurting these same people twice isn't a solution, as you've seen.
I completely agree with you about the idiocy of the government, but it's certainly no different than similar positions it takes on other issues. Outside of the condoning aspect, the government is going to have a hard time accepting the idea of putting itself in a position where domestic sex workers protest about being put out of work by a government sanctioned flood of foreign ladies. Talk about a politician's worst nightmare! LOL
And there's a big difference between being a fool about things technological and simply not having experience and knowledge. Yours is clearly the latter case, and you shouldn't kick yourself for it. Those of us who have been dealing with this stuff for a long time only know it because we repeatedly beat our heads against the walls trying to figure out solutions to stupid simple things...
Yeah, well, the Australian government doesn't want ANYBODY moving there. It isn't just Thais, or prostitutes, or Thai prostitutes. If say for example I don't know maybe a well-educated financially stable 45 year old professional American Dickhead wanted to move there, they wouldn't let him in either. Under their point system, you have to be a YOUNG college educated professional, preferably with an advanced degree or enough money to open a business. Fuckers.
And RN, Aussies, Brits and the lot use 'single' quotation marks and that is correct. We Yanks use "double" quotation marks and that is correct. There's some other boring differences in the use of ; semicolons and the like. Brits and Aussies would say 'I've an appointment at three o'clock' while MOST Yanks would say either "I have an appoinment" or (incorrectly) "I've got an appointment," which is redundant. When Aussies lose their job, they get retrenched. When Brits lose their job, they get made redundant. Yanks, on the other hand, get laid off. Just like "fanny" means ass (or arse!) over here but pussy over there.
Let's face it, when it comes to blaming women for having sex, it's a long-standing cross-societal tradition ranging from rape to prostitution to adultery to pregnancy, where women are always far more likely to be censured. To a certain extent I can understand the whole "they took money" aspect as a way of defining these women as participants as opposed to victims, even though it's of course unfair and ridiculous, in the sense that without taking money there's no way they can be anything but victims, whereas getting money enters the slippery slope of where someone is a victim and where someone is just telling a story to avoid responsibility. The latter case means actual thought might have to enter into the justice equation. Of course the operators absolutely know this, so paying the women means that they can claim willingness, thus trying to mitigate their own responsibility, and avoid being absolutely labelled as slavers, which is a far harsher label than pimp, even though that's of course exactly what they are. The unfortunate side of things is the knee-jerk reaction of the authorities, who just plain don't want to deal with what's really going on as opposed to shipping off the victims and pretending that actually does anything positive.
But of course, RN, you've just had an object lesson in how difficult it is to get lawmakers to entertain complex thoughts and new ways of looking at things...
And it's not, obviously, as though your government has any corner on this market, either. Over the past year in the States there have been raids on large numbers of Asian massage parlors, chiefly Korean, some of which have operated under the same general indenture scenarios, some of which have not, and the reaction is the same -- hey, you're an illegal immigrant, out you go, sorry if you happen to be someone who had a rough time.
And DH -- Thailand's the same way in terms of immigration, only even more extreme. If you are not born Thai, you cannot be a citizen -- period and ever. You cannot live there for a long period unless you have specific employment, or are a retiree with an specific level of income. And any of this can be revoked at any time, by any bureaucrat or by the gummint at large. And though, if you're one who actually does live there long-term, you can own property such as a house or condo, you cannot own the land it is on and you cannot own a business without a Thai partner. But at least Thailand's had the good grace to be traditionally xenophobic, which makes this a logical cultural extension, as opposed to Oz's history of being a place where ships simply unloaded people. (Hmm, when you think about it, RN, Oz's history of population expansion is remarkably similar to the situations of the women we're discussing, in terms of forced relocation, which makes the reaction even more ironic.)
Nope, the Kiwis aren't letting any Dickheads in either.
Well, it is rather a shame since I would make an excellent yobbo. But really, I didn't find too many places that wanted to give permanent residency to this particular Dickhead. Mexico will deign to accomodate me when I am 51. Although, all you have to do in the case of Mexico is leave the country for ten seconds every six months. Costa Rica ditto but substitute 72 hours for ten seconds (and I think 90 days for six months; can't remember right now). Oz and NZ have limits on how many tourist visas you can get in X period of time, and the tourist visas are only 90 days instead of 6 months, so I couldn't "butterfly" between those two countries.
Therefore I developed my plan B of working here for 4-5 months while living rather frugally, then spending my hard earned money elsewhere.
Note to my president:
Dear George: Congratulations. You have finally succeeded in driving me out of the country, which I'm sure was your goal all along. But fret not as I view it as an opportunity and not a failure. Here is my pink Irish ass, kiss it one time and may its fragrance linger on your lips for an eternity.
PS: Dear Board, I apologize for this unrelated post.
The Virgin Terr
02-23-03, 21:23
i haven't read any of your posts made since i last posted. i'll do so and respond later, but first i have a train of thought to share.
zealotry. dickhead calls me a zealot and u know what? he's right. i am a zealot. but dickhead, i have a question for u: what about the wealthy capitalists of the corporate world, who buy the politicians who run our world, and what about those politicians who criminalize marijuana and promote the massive organized violence of war which has killed tens of millions of people in the last century alone, while leaving many more with shattered lives? and what about the ordinary hard working law abiding citizen who votes for these politicians and supports their decisions? these people aren't zealots? i think pot smoking should be openly encouraged for it's medicinal and therapeutic value, but i don't think anyone who doesn't want to try it should be forced to or face criminal penalty. so tell me, who are the real zealots in this world? i'm a zealot only in reaction to the incredibly hubristic way that civilization has evolved, and i think the only sane people left in the world are other zealot activists who r fed up with war, capitalism, a society which values wealth over life.
do you know why so many people go apeshit over violent, aggressive sports like football? it's because society as a whole encourages controlled violence and aggression in men. and u know who does that the most? women. women do it by mating more frequently with men who r violent and aggressive in a controlled manner. war is all about "controlled" violence, although in reality it often is out of control. without the threat of violence, the repressive laws we hate wouldn't exist. i think the only violence society should sanction should be in response to the relatively rare instances when someone engages in individual unsanctioned violence. if u think about it, the vast majority of violence in the world is government sponsored and promoted. this sickens me so much that i'm zealously opposed to the whole fucking system that oppresses and abuses us all so the ruthlessly ambitious and aggressive men who are in charge can be obscenely wealthy and powerful. so i am zealous, but in my view, if u aren't, there's something wrong with u. if u think everything's cool or you're just too cynical to care, you're part of the problem.
Man, did you even read my post? I think there are a lot of things wrong, so many in fact that I am leaving the country to the maximum extent that I can, which unfortunately is only about 65%.
I admire your zealotry and am certainly not using the word "zealot" as an epithet. I am not a capitalist and never have been. I am a collectivist who believes in redistribution of wealth. Nor did I vote for this fuck who is starting this war. I am not "too cynical to care" but rather cynical that there will be meaningful change to the system within my lifetime, the majority of which lies behind me rather than in front of me (at least in terms of years; perhaps not in terms of adventure). I cast my ballot every year but it is just voting for the fuck who makes me want to puke the least.
But I do like football, and I enjoyed playing it (although I prefer baseball). I like my violence to be without weapons.
PS, the Shift key is just to the left of the z and 2 is a number, not a word. "u" is also not a word but rather a letter. I have no idea what "ur" is. Please try not to write like Tapioca.
The Virgin Terr
02-23-03, 22:08
after reading or scanning all posts of the past day, i feel more like an apologetic zealot, seeing how out of place my zealotry is among u. i apologize and ask your forbearance. i just don't know of any more appropriate places to vent, so i do it here. the personal anguish sexual repression causes me makes it a focal point for my passion.
RN, i don't operate under the assumption that most prostitutes are also free lovers, but a few r, just as some women who aren't prostitutes r. i do operate under the assumption that prostitutes who like their work like sex more than most women, and that's a plus. also, prostitution is a profession that attracts more beautiful women, because beauty is a prime asset for a prostitute to have. i have a strong preference for beautiful women. and frankly, if a woman thinks prostitution is a good thing, she probably is or has been one herself, and i couldn't have a long relationship with anyone who doesn't share my passion for freedom and pleasure. so all that adds up to the idea that pro-prostitution activists who r passionate about freedom and pleasure and who r enlightened to the benefits of open relationships r the ideal women for me. i wonder how many such women exist, who r also age compatible, prefer sensitive men, and in search of their soulmate?
dickhead, make sure not to wipe before bush kisses your ass.
DH -- if driving you out of the country is part of W's goal, then there's no doubt I've gotta be on his list as well. But the sucker's going to have to try harder, as I'm still someone who believes it's possible to make change happen, and he's only got a limited amount of time to keep screwing things up, another five years or so at worst, and this country can recover from that. I once moderated a panel on repression and censorship, and an artist (originally from Sri Lanka, btw) at the table put forth the idea that censorship was good for him, even though he preferred it not exist, as it forced him to be more inventive which thereby made him more effective.
This is, of course, off topic on its face, so let me relate it a bit back to the thread and say that overall it's a question of tolerence of differences in values, which acceptance of prostitution clearly represents, and in terms of accepting and listening to other perspectives and approaches, on any issue, this administration is clearly the most absolutely intolererant we've had in a very, very long time. The concepts we're now seeing used in the name of security will absolutely lead to significant erosion of privacy, and who you decide to sleep with will no doubt be on the list, as it's a hot-button way of marginalizing people, especially when it comes from the inflexible christian perspective that currently dominates.
The Virgin Terr
02-23-03, 22:26
dickhead, dickhead, dickhead! another person giving me grief about my sloppy, lazy, personal shorthand writing. ok, if 'you' are bothered, perhaps i'll change for 'you', lol.
i'm pretty cynical myself. i apologize for coming on so heavy. i'm not quite sure what i'll do if i ever encounter anyone who says to me "so you want to change the world; let's do it!" but dude! i was only talking shit! i enjoy talking shit though, because it's the truth.
my heroes are people who have changed the world by leading movements that changed society, in other words, prominent activists. it's incredibly hubristic of me to embrace such an ambition for myself, but as you're witness to, i'm at least toying with the idea.
Originally posted by joe_zop
DH -- if driving you out of the country is part of W's goal, then there's no doubt I've gotta be on his list as well. But the sucker's going to have to try harder, as I'm still someone who believes it's possible to make change happen, and he's only got a limited amount of time to keep screwing things up, another five years or so at worst, and this country can recover from that.
If and when that happens perhaps I will reverse the steps I am now taking. To misquote Ted Kennedy, "we'll drive off that bridge when we come to it." But since the part of the year I have to be here is during elections (and football season, and the World Series) you can rest assured that I will VOTE. Right now I am voting with my feet.
Originally posted by the virgin terr
i'm not quite sure what i'll do if i ever encounter anyone who says to me "so you want to change the world; let's do it!"
Reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite profs: "You know the difference between pioneers and settlers? Pioneers have arrows in them."
my heroes r wealthy entertainers and rich athletes. oh and i figured out what "ur" is. it goes between um and uh.
Just giving you shit, but your personal lazy shorthand does make your posts harder to read.
The true measure of any society is how it treats its weakest members.
The Virgin Terr
02-23-03, 22:51
last rant for today: another thing i hate about western civilization is that it treats nature with all of the subtlety of a bulldozer, pun intended. there, i'm done.
dickhead, activists are pioneers of social change. not all pioneers die violently, because if they did, there wouldn't be any settlers to follow them.
PurpleNGold
02-23-03, 23:01
Thanks for the warm welcomes. I would have posted sooner, but hadn't been watching this thread, and hadn't realized how active it was. So much was posted over the past day, that I'm not sure whether I'll even remember all the ideas I had while reading. And, still, this is gonna be a long one...
For those who asked... Purple & Gold are Laker's colors. 4 more 40 pointers and Kobe will break Wilt's record!!! (Hmmm... how can I relate that to morality of prostitution?)
Virgin_terr: 02-21-03 10:08
i tend to be pessimistic about sexual freedom because i perceive that my own totally positive view of sex is completely foreign to the mixed or negative views of the majority. it's true that much sexual behavior is irresponsible with negative consequences. to me, that indicates a need to promote thinking about how to get people to behave more responsibly, but i think for most people it leads to condemnation of the sex drive itself.
I agree that most sexual behavior is irresponsible and causes a lot of bad in the world. Just take a glance at teen pregnancy statistics and the spread of diseases like AIDs. I think the root cause are the very policies in place to prevent irresponsible behavior. Rather than trying to do something to educate people and encourage responsible sex play, our governments, churches, schools, etc. pass 'decency' laws that forbid teaching children safe ways to express and explore their natural urges.
Several years ago the first condoms were handed out in schools and children were given counseling concerning birth control. Overboard conservative groups were up in arms. "We're promoting promiscuity! We're telling the kids that they should do this! We're all doomed!!"
Well, the programs went ahead, and the U.S. saw a decrease in teen pregnancy as a result. Now, in Britain, where they have the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Europe, they're is a furor over a program to teach young students about oral sex as an alternative to full intercourse. The same arguments are coming out. Will we never learn?
Dickhead: 02-21-03 17:43
I disagree that puritanical attitudes in this country (the US) are merely a vocal minority.
I suppose my statement was a bit too simplistic. It's not just that those who are so vocal are an actual minority. Many of those who are so vocal against any sexual actvities outside of traditional marriages are in fact some of the biggest contributors to 'immorality'. Not a season goes by that you don't read about how some big politician was caught with a prostitute, or in the arms of another woman (or man). How this self-righteous do-gooder got busted buying kiddie porn, etc. Let's not even get into the proclivities of the clergy. So, all this fuss that is made in our media concerning how wrong all this is amounts to lip service. Yet, it's powerful lip service because it creates this communal repression.
An example. Two friends of mine were recently wed. The woman I've known since she was a wild child in high school. She was into my father's porno collection more often than myself. The man, I've known for a couple years, and have enjoyed the hospitality of Tijuana with him on more than one occasion. Now, during a dinner conversation the topic of pornography came up. The woman started talking about how they had rented a porno during their honeymoon, but how it was so disgusting that they had to turn it off. The man chimes in about how silly the acting and plot were. What the hell? They both know that I'm aware of their individual views. Yet, here I was listening to them lie to each other concerning how they felt about a fuck film. If they cannot even admit the truth to one another, how could they possibly stand up in public and vote/defend their views.
BTW, I found a reference to Malthus on Population (http://www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/malthus/popu.txt). It'll take me a while to read through it.
Dickhead: 02-21-03 20:05
Therefore, no analysis of the morality of prostitution is complete without an analysis of population problems.
There was a lot of posting concerning whether or not prostitution should be a valid choice for women in dire straights. I think most of that came from this kind of analysis. And, I'm thinking that the two issues are distinct. Whether something is moral or not is not the same thing as whether one should do it in the face of starvation.
I totally believe that it's a valid choice for many of these women. They do what they have to for survival. Does that make it moral? What if they have another choice? Does that change the morality? I don't think so.
If someone kills another human being in order to save himself (i.e. a soldier in combat), it doesn't change the fact that killing is immoral. Just excuses the act within context.
Dickhead: 02-21-03 22:35
And, again using Mexico as an example, since the US does not make social services available to illegal immigrants and generally not even to LEGAL immigrants
This is incorrect. I've had a discussion about this with a relative who works as a welfare fraud prevention agent. She told me that, illegal or not, people who apply for medicare, foodstamps, etc. are judged solely on their financial situation. She said that it is even illegal to call INS. Strange.
Also, there is a law, at least in California, that says a hospital emergency room cannot turn away a patient strictly on the grounds of immigration status.
Dickhead: 02-21-03 23:12
makes me think that prostitution exists because it is fun to have sex with different people and then not have to worry about getting all involved in a relationship with them.
That's part of it. But, I think there are many different reasons for people to be using professional services.
Virgin Terr: 02-22-03
if i was to have a relationship i think my ideal partner would be a prostitute, and i would support her decision to "work", both because i would benefit financially from her income as her mate, and also because i want to do anything i can to encourage prostitution because i have empathy for all the other lonely guys like me in the world...
RN: 02-22-03 03:36
That is the very reason why I would not date while working. Because men cannot see past the "sex" that a sex worker has, and they always seem to figure that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If I was going to have a partner while I was working, I would only ever date another sex worker (past or present). a) they would understand the difference between work and sex, and b) they would never throw the fact that I was a wh*re back in my face. (It would make issues of disclosure at the beginning of the relationship less complicated as well).
I need to re-think my ideas concerning the morality of prostitution. I know that, if I were to date a pro, I would expect her to give up that line of work. Not so much that I think her job is wrong, but because, like RN says, I wouldn't be able to see past the "sex" that she is having at work. It would bug me. I just couldn't handle having to say "Have a good day at the office."
Does this mean that I really don't consider it moral? VT has a point, that if prostitution is just a job, like any other job. Why shouldn't the employees have normal lives? Yet, I can't see myself dating an active provider without expecting her to curtail her activities.
RN: 02-22-03 8:39
So if someone forces me to have sex then walks away, that's rape - but if he throws me 100 bucks after the fact, that suddenly means I consented to it??
There was a discussion of this in the Bangkok and 'Thai Women' threads. RN, I think it's rape either way.
RN: 02-22-03 4:29
If they were able to come to Oz legally, they would have no need for these lowlife pimps. Brothels would be able to sponsor Asian girls and pay their airfare over here (they do that at the moment for girls from interstate - pay the airfare, then take it back from their first couple of bookings). Of course the Government won't do that, because they would be seen to "condone prostitution". Stupid assholes - would they rather be seen to condone Asian syndicates trafficking women??
Unfortunately, the government knows that legalized prostitution is a magnet for sensationalist media looking to cache in on the 'vocal minority'audience. Yet, the women traffickers are a shadow entity that escapes public knowledge in the general case. A sad statement about the priorities of such 'humanitarian' states as the US who chastises other countries for lack of equal rights for women.
Well, this has been long. Sorry about that. I'll try to stay more current with the postings.
PG, while Medicaid is a federal program, it is administered by the states and in my state, for sure, neither illegal aliens nor resident aliens are eligible for it. I am not sure about food stamps. Nor are resident aliens eligible for TANF or "welfare" in my state, with the exception that if one parent is a resident alien and the other is a citizen who is either absent or incarcerated, the resident alien is eligible for TANF if and only if the paternity (or rarely, maternity) of the absent or incarcerated parent has been PREVIOUSLY established. However, it is true in my state that immigration status cannot be used to deny services at a public hospital.
Since you are a Lakers fan, you probably live in California and "everyone knows how liberal and left wing they are out there." :)
PurpleNGold
02-23-03, 23:31
Originally posted by Dickhead
Since you are a Lakers fan, you probably live in California and "everyone knows how liberal and left wing they are out there." :)
Wish that were true :-) Unfortunately, CA is a fairly conservative and, historically, republican state.
A quick web search reveals that CA has had 37 total governors since achieving statehood: 20 Republicans, 15 Democrats, 1 Whig or "American" or "Know Nothing" and 1 Union party, whatever the hell that is (anti-secessionist, I would assume?).
I think the essence of the issue of being in a relationship with a sex worker comes down to one single question more than any other -- "How is the sex I have with her different than the sex she has with clients?" And that is a question based on the issue of emotional security, as I think it has far less to do with the sex itself than it does with the emotional veneer around it. In other words, if my partner is brilliant at her job, and her job entails convincing men for a short period of time that she cares about them and that their happiness is the most important thing on earth via sexual congress, then how can/does one know the truth of where one stands in a relationship with her?
It's not about how many dicks she's sucked or taken, it's about what I can or cannot believe when she's involved with mine.
Obviously, this is true regardless of whether a women is a sex worker or not, as it's the basic issue of trust and security in a relationship, but I think the situation and issue gets magnified in this instance, because you are being with someone whose stock in trade is being a physical and emotional chameleon who also has, as RN has so aptly described elsewhere, the ability to mentally and emotionally distance herself from what it going on as a way of maintaining that self. I think the bottom line in a relationship like this is the fear that this would be happening, not so much that your partner would be treating her clients like you, but that she'd be treating you like her clients.
Well, RN, really, relationships are all about ego, period, both male and female, and men certainly don't hold a patent on ego issues there -- though theirs may manifest in specifically different ways. Relationships are like religion in that it's necessary to willingly suspend disbelief and trust in things you can't see or quantify. (Which probably explains why there are so many people disappioned in both!)
And though I know we're close to revisiting the issue about disclosure of a sex worker past in a relationship, I truly do think the issue is one of confidence and trust. Knowing whether or not you can believe your partner is key, or at least knowing how far you can believe them and in what areas. It's rather the same issue of being with an actor or actress, fraught with the same difficulties (though the particulars of when someone is or isn't on state are different, and role play is different from emotional disengagement.)
For me, personally, the past is only an issue insofar as it affects the present. Presuming I have a good sense of trust with a woman, I don't care in the least how many partners she has or has not had other than knowing how I need to treat her in terms of adjusting to the fact that she has or does not have experience in relationships. I care in that I prefer someone who's got skillz, but there are different ways to get them as well :) But then for me the truth is that it's far more critical that I've got someone with whom I can spend a good three days out of bed and be comfortable and compatible -- the bedroom is important, of course, but it's easy to get along when screwing, and the test of a relationship is more when you're not.
I don't see myself having any particular trouble being with someone who was/is a sex worker, honestly, as that would really be a secondary issue. My ego's big enough to drown out pretty much anything other than the noise of my own selfish needs :D and I've spent enough time with people in the trade in various situations to have a decent sense of how things would or wouldn't work. I would probably not want her working while with me, but to be perfectly frank that's less about what she'd be doing, and more because I can't picture being with someone who isn't highly intelligent and quick, with some degree of ambition, and people with those characteristics can do many other more fulfilling things, and are generally going to be more fulfilled by them -- something for which you present ample evidence. And the latter issue is, of course, also ego-driven in that I recognize I work best and am happiest when I'm with a partner who challenges me to move or get left behind, and I need an equal, not a lesser. If I was to be with someone who had all those characteristics, who also made a truly compelling case for why sex work happened to do all that in a way that I could see and use as a catalyst, then I'd have to say go for it.
And what if you do find out what his son's name is, or what suburb he lives in? Does that move the issue of what is or isn't real sharing? Where's the point at which things can cross over? That crossover can happen in any kind of situation, from doctor-patient to co-worker, etc.
The problem really is that the membrane separating what is real and what is not is so very thin, and in a relationship it's necessary that the perception of that membrane be agreed upon and shared. As Einstein said, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." And heaven knows there are plenty of relationships in the real world that have no depth, even among people who have been with each other for years. People who live together and still operate on a "need to know" basis.
Witness your recent situation -- your client misunderstood what reality was, and the nature of the relationship, hence all hell broke loose. While he's an extreme case, the seeds of that kind of misunderstanding are within all of us, all the time, in every situation.
We never even got NEAR 'the line'!
You mean, near your line, right? Obviously, this bozo's was was different, which is part of the point -- in any relationship there's negotiating and exploring lines.
PurpleNGold
02-24-03, 16:15
RN, I guess you're right about liking something and considering it moral being two separate issues. I can think of other things that I don't care for, that I wouldn't question as to morality. This is a good thing because I prefer leaving cornerstone beliefs intact for now :-)
I don't think I'd have a problem becoming serious with a former sex worker. A woman's past just doesn't bother me. In fact, after my last two serious relationships, I think I'd prefer a situation in which my partner has enough experience to know whether she is happy with the relationship or not based on what else is out there.
As far as 'crossing the line', the comment about sex workers doing what they can to convince their clients that they are the most important in the world is what bugs me. I believe that, as soon as you convince someone of who you are, and, when that illusion is maintained permanently, then it becomes reality. So, I know that I couldn't distinguish between the relationships my girlfriend is having with clients and the relationship she's having with me.
A quick edit to note that I've passed my centennial post :-)
The Virgin Terr
02-24-03, 20:09
RN, i take it that sex worker activism is very important to you currently. what about 5, 10 ,15 years from now? will the issue be resolved to your satisfaction, and if not, will you still be an activist? which raises the further question: how will you resolve your activism with your personal life? you seem very ambivalent on this because you operate on the idea that men, or at least the men you would consider desirable, prefer women with a relatively unremarkable sexual history. how can you hide your history if it's hinted at by your interest in advocating for prostitutes rights?
society is flawed because it's "moral" provisions preclude individuals who lack at least a veneer of "propriety" from positions of power. perhaps this is why you don't want a guy who could accept your past; because such a guy would obviously be a social pariah himself.
The Virgin Terr
02-25-03, 12:19
there is a certain inconsistent weakness in your position. you want to end discrimination against sex workers, yet you yourself discriminate against men in your personal life if they don't discriminate against prostitutes in theirs. see what i mean?
RN, the point is that your line might be very clear to you, but that doesn't necessarily help it be obvious or solid to someone with whom you're involved, be it customer or lover (and we were mostly discussing the latter.) This is true in all relationships, as of course we can't see inside someone else's heart or brain, but the issue isn't simply about what you feel or convey, but about how it's received. You earlier said this was about male ego -- you're right about that to the extent that it's about the ego of any partner who needs to find ways to reassure themselves in a relationship. You answered the question ("How is the sex I have with her different than the sex she has with clients?") from the sex worker perspective, but my point was that no matter how you answer it, the answer may not make enough sense or have enough impact to provide sufficient emotional security to the guy in this equation, whos asking himself how he can truly know the truth of the matter, since he's with someone who's good at convincing strangers she cares about them. The nagging issue is, if she's doing it with them, how can I trust she's not doing it with me? As I said, it's about emotional security, as it always is in a relationship, and it's just more difficult to obtain in this equation because the issue of "can I believe what my partner is showing me" -- which people always have -- is front and center.
If a sex worker says that she loves you, and that you mean much more to her than her clients do - should you really be doubting her word?
Certainly not if you want to be in a relationship with her, and I agree wholeheartedly with what you've said regarding trust. There's a point where either you have it or you don't. We all know that trust in relationships has a million ways to disappear, and I simply think, as I said, that it's a tougher row to hoe here.
In the examples you cite people believe either because they simply do or because they want it to be true. Sex work isn't different in terms of what must happen for such a relationship to work, only in terms of the specifics of the scenario. To take your example further, if a lover tells you that their affair was a mistake, they want to be with you, etc., you're much more likely to truly believe it if it's the first time such a thing has happened than if it's the fifth. The fifth time you start to doubt the sincerity, or at the abolity of the person to match actions to words. And knowledge that a sex worker, like an actor, has fluency in telling people what they want to hear as a way of getting what they want (something on which sex workers most certainly haven't cornered the market!) simply adds somewhat to the potential for doubt. I'm not at all saying it's impossible, and I'm not at all disagreeing with you regarding the unfairness of that, and that it's all in a guy's head, I'm just saying it's more likely to be an issue than if you're with, say, a bank teller.
Let's face it, we're all fairly insecure little animals in general, easily spooked when it comes to relationships. (I give you the American women thread as a case in point.) This whole issue represents dark forest to lots of folks, which is why a discussion such as this is so great.
I think you're reading too much in here, as well as imparting a greater emphasis than I mean -- and it's not about the stereotype. I'm simply saying that by and large relationships are difficult, period, as people can always find something to worry about, and that this whole issue clomps into that category. It's not necessarily about someone saying they're in love with you -- you believe that if you believe that -- it's about when things get difficult, and when trust and faith become necessary.
It's also simply not about where someone is a sex worker and where someone is just a woman -- as is the case with everyone, we're all more than one thing at a time, and when people look at each other they can see multiple layers. Do you ever "turn off" being a mother? Could someone who knew you ever look at you and not have at least some recognition of that? How would being a sex worker be different in terms of that level of recognition? It's not different for other professions -- when my friends look at me, they also see what I do for a living as part of who's staring back.
I absolutely know people can treat theatre people that way, as I've lots of actor friends, and I've had exactly that conversation several times, both with the theatre folk and their partners/ex-partners. A actress I went to college with (perhaps the most gorgeous women I've ever known -- one play she was in sold out -- which never happened at that college -- mainly because she had a nude scene) who worked in Hollywood and who I still see on occasion in New York, where she's now a producer, has told me of several very similar discussions with boyfriends. An actor is always an actor, on or off the set, as far as people are concerned, and whether or not they're acting at any given instant is a constant issue. And, with some actors I know, this is a very viable issue, as they're always "trying things on" to see how they work or feel. That's part of why they're good at what they do.
I've got a good friend was married to a psychologist, and he used to tell me about her using "the tricks of her trade" as a way of controlling him, and his sense that she treated him like a patient at times, as a case study as opposed to true partner. (Whether any of this was true or not is beside the point, of course.) I've been accused of mining relationships for writing material, and listening to someone as if they were a potential character in a book. (True on occasion, on actually almost all occasions, but not that specific case.) If someone is not secure, they look for reasons why that's not the case, and let's face it, it's rather easy to find them in the instance of a sex worker.
So relax, RN, I'm hardly saying this is a death knell for all your future potential relationships! Cripes, please recall that I also said I didn't see this as being a problem for me personally, and that I could absolutely picture being involved with someone who was/is a sex worker, as to me that's a secondary issue.
PurpleNGold
02-27-03, 01:32
Originally posted by RN
If a sex worker says that she loves you, and that you mean much more to her than her clients do - should you really be doubting her word?
And in another post:
Perhaps I'm just being overly sensitive about it, but to me, it seems like this whole thing is led by the stereotype of the 'lying, cheating wh*re'. That the idea that she probably can't be trusted is already planted in your mind, and from that comes the excuse that she is an expert in the art of deceiving men. To put it in (overly) simplistic terms, an actor would not automatically be doubted, because she would be considered a woman at home and an actor at work. But the belief that a sex worker could be playing you like she plays her clients, seems to come from the assumption that she is a sex worker 24/7.
In almost every conversation with a Thai girl that I almost started a relationship with, she told me that her customer had bar fined her, taken her to dinner and to play pool, then, only chatted with her in the hotel room. After the first two or three times, my first thought was always, "I know what you do for a living. Why do you lie to me?" Then, I thought about it and wondered why I should consider trying a real relationship with someone that I obviously don't trust. It wouldn't matter if she's lying to me or not. I don't believe her. That thought, along with some good advice from fellow WSG'ers (JZ included) convinced me to put those thoughts on a shelf.
I didn't doubt her because I thought that she was a "lying, cheating, wh*re." I doubted her because I thought she was just trying to spare my feelings (and avoid any unpleasant discussion that could have arisen).
I would feel the same about any woman who said, "This guy, who is vacationing here for the purpose of getting laid, took me out. He paid a lot of money to feed and enterain me. Then, he took me back to his hotel room and chatted with me the whole night." Yeah, right.
PurpleNGold
02-27-03, 01:53
Originally posted by RN
The common perception out there is that you can never really be an EX sex worker. All the things that you mention, are things that people will always suspect me of being capable of. I guess it really does worry me a lot, and it's one of the reasons why I said a long time ago that I would almost prefer my partner not to know about my past. I find it unfair that sex workers are automatically assumed to be somehow less trustworthy than other women - but I find it even more unfair that EX sex workers are judged on something that occurred in their past.
I can only speak for myself, and, I'm sure that there are more people, than not, for which your statement is true. But, I know that I could put the past behind me. I don't think I'd want to sit in front of the fire hearing details, but for a woman to tell me that she had been a sex worker in the past or that she had had lots of partners would not bother me. And, I would certainly rather know the truth because I think it's important to know who my partner is and how she's gotten to be that.
P&G, just for the record, there are a number of working Thai girls for whom I paid a barfine, went and had fun with, and never slept with. For a variety of reasons, including but not restricted to figuring out the girl was half-crazy, a druggie, depressed and moody, very tired, only wanted to eat/dance/talk, etc. Also true with several at my favorite little beer bar in Chiang Mai, where I never dared/wanted to sleep with anyone, as I knew everyone and everyone's history/problems/dreams, and liked just hanging out there, and didn't want anything to change that, but also true in a number of other places. The woman I spent the better part of two months with I often simply took out, and even though we slept together there were a fair number of nights where it was simply that, sleep. But then, as I wrote elsewhere, my trip, though it involved taking advantage of what the country had to offer in terms of companionship, was not first and foremost about that.
So it's certainly possible, at least, that this woman was telling you the truth, but it's unlikely in general terms, as you note. And the issue of trust in a real relationship is simply paramount -- if you're skeptical going in, it's tough to get that little voice out of your head.
RN, I certainly didn't mean to imply that the stereotyping isn't out there, and doesn't have a dampening effect -- we both know it does. But my presumption is that someone who's afflicted with such perspectives would probably not be pursuing a real relationship with a sex worker, current or ex, nor would it likely be happening in the other direction unless the worker had a solid wish for pain.
PurpleNGold
02-27-03, 04:44
JZ, I figure she might be telling the truth. In fact, maybe she was only telling me about the customers that didn't have sex. But, what you point out is exactly what I was getting at: if that voice is going off in my head, then I need to realize that there is a serious trust issue.
I think that, if she were not active in the field, I really wouldn't care about her past. I would just have to get past that voice so that I could hear about the particularly significant events that she wanted to share that concerned her prior career.
The Virgin Terr
03-01-03, 14:06
RN, perhaps i do sometimes distort your stated views by virtue of my own prism of the world. perhaps i'm harder on people who are closer to my views than i am on those who aren't even in the same ballpark, to use an american term, which means aren't even close. i want to radicalize the liberal and ignore the conservative as hopeless. i'm glad you don't take much offense to my criticism. so how 'bout some more, lol? if you don't consider yourself a pariah, then why is it necessary to remain publically closeted? and if "mongers", to use dickhead's term, aren't pariahs, can you name any politicians who are publically acknowledged mongers? generally politicians flaunt something which is popular with a majority of voters such as religiosity, and hide "politically incorrect" behavior such as "mongering", don't you agree? they have no problem with being viewed entering a church, but don't want anyone catching them visiting a "house of ill repute". regardless of personal viewpoint, it's the majority that determines who is a pariah and who is acceptable. so while you yourself may not publically discriminate against "people like us", i think it's incorrect to state we're not pariahs.
The Virgin Terr
03-01-03, 15:32
dickhead, are you familiar with the country singer loretta lynn's autobiography, COALMINER'S DAUGHTER? it portrays the instrumental role loretta's husband had in initiating and promoting her career. this brings to mind your frequent condemnatory remarks on pimps. do you think there's really necessarily a difference between a man who promotes his wife's career in a "legitimate" field of entertainment as opposed to one who promotes a career for her in sex? why? in either case, the man is facilitating her work, and sharing in the financial benefits. if a guy is not sexually possessive and is fortunate enough to find a mate who is gifted sexually with both looks and enthusiasm, why shouldn't he be able to encourage and promote for her a career in selling sex?( other than the fact that in so doing they are choosing pariahdom for themselves)
I have not read the book but I am familiar with story of Loretta and Oliver "Mooney" Lynn. I recently read an interview with her. He qualifies as a pimp in my book. He married her when she was 13 which is repugnant. He beat her regularly which is repugnant. He would not give her any spending money even though he did not want her to have a job, which is repugnant. He did not support the children at times which is repugnant.
And she had the classic battered wife symptoms of being an apologist for him, and still is an apologist for him. I am less familiar with the extent to which he managed and/or pimped her singing career since I am not a country music fan.
RN has spoken of how the laws in WA prevent an SW from having a guy around for security and protection. I have no problem with security and protection and do not consider that to be pimping. What IS pimping is when the guy forces the gal to work, beats her if she doesn't, treats the money she earns as his own, and gives her as much or as little of her hard earned money as he feels like. To that extent it doesn't matter to me if the guy is forcing her to work as a prostitute, a country and western singer, or a cake decorator. It is all pimping and they should all be tortured and killed.
Do I make myself abundantly clear?
PurpleNGold
03-01-03, 17:37
Originally posted by the virgin terr
can you name any politicians who are publically acknowledged mongers?
Nope. Not a one. But, due to the frequency of political scandals, I believe that the majority of the male politicians are mongers. Probably, the busts on an AMP or prostitute are sometimes driven by a DA who got bad service himself, or one of his friends did.
regardless of personal viewpoint, it's the majority that determines who is a pariah and who is acceptable.
In this case, I think it's a fear of losing one's place in society that keeps people thinking that sex industry affiliates (including mongers and mongerettes) are a minority in the first place. Think about it. How many members does this board have. How many boards like it exist? How many people are there that don't even know about the boards, but participate. Yet, there's a tiny percentage of all these people who would actually stand up and proclaim their views publicly.
PurpleNGold
03-01-03, 17:51
On the topic of pimps:
Any person who abuses another individual, presses another individual into work against his/her will, enforces an unfair revenue sharing schedule in which the other individual has no say, coerces another individual into addiction in order to maintain control over that individual or performs any act that harms another individual should be treated as a heinous criminal. This means that most pimps are heinous criminals.
However, I could imagine a situation where a pimp could be a boone for a sex-worker. A pimp might not be forcing the sex-worker into her career. A pimp might just be helping the worker to keep her shit together. A pimp can provide security and marketing for the worker. The pimp could be the person to whom the worker can turn in times of trouble. The pimp could be the sexually non-posessive boyfriend who provides love and nurturing to the sex worker. Is there a pimp out there who does this? I don't know. But, if he's out there, then I don't think he's a criminal.
The Virgin Terr
03-02-03, 16:09
more on pimps, this excerpted from a chapter of a book about prostitution which is a conversation between anti-prostitution "feminists" and prostitute activists. here's the prostitute activists response to the feminist question: what about the pimp?
"feminists have always tried to save us from the pimp. ryan lives with val (both women, both pro-prostitution activists). she takes money from val when she's out of work. technically speaking, she can be taken away for 7 years. it's sort of the unwritten thing- we're not allowed to live with anyone, and we're not allowed to have a mate, and we're not allowed to give them any money."
"you're not allowed to habitually be in the company of a prostitute. that makes you a pimp. this means we're not allowed to have friends, we're not allowed to have lovers. these are the pimping laws they're defending, which is a way of telling us we can't have anybody. we're not good enough, and the only people that would be seen or caught dead around us are no-goods anyway because nobody decent would really associate with us. "
it seems to me the point of criminalizing pimping is the same as criminalizing prostitution. it's not to protect anyone: there are already laws against assault, rape, theft, etc. sufficient to do that. their purpose is to make prostitution as difficult and dangerous as possible so as to discourage it.
The Virgin Terr
03-04-03, 21:00
i'm curious about the silence which follows some of my posts like the last one. does everyone think i'm a nut, or am i just too politically incorrect, defending the likes of pimps, those shadowy figures so effectively demonized in the mainstream media the same way prostitutes are? don't get me wrong, dickhead, i admire your hatred of abusers and exploiters, i just don't share the notion that all "pimps" fit that category, any more than i buy the idea all prostitutes are "victims".
Nah, VT, don't be so paranoid. I think it's just that not everyone has as much time on their hands as we do!
Hysteromania
03-05-03, 01:23
Just thinking about pimps conjures up negative images as we have seen portrayed in movies and the likes. Shallow, vulgar creatures who dress poorly and treat their women badly all the while most importantly, jacking up the price mongers have to pay.
I suppose that is the only real reason I dislike pimps is that he is the middleman and is standing in the way between you and what you want. If the girl is providing the service, than she should receive the bulk of the pay. Therefore, the girl does not enjoy it as much as she is getting less but since you paid more you are expecting possibly more. That is a losing situation for both sides. Best to pay the girl directly and both be happy when you can. If she is upset with the amount then she can be discontent with you. I would hate it if a girl was discontent because the price her pimp put on her and then passed on that bad service to me but then again, I had only negotiated with one pimp before and that was in Singapore.
It is simply something we always do, try to find out the supplier and go direct. Looking at how many people order the same product of online rather than go to the neighborhood Wal-Mart.
Lastly, a question to throw out to you, do you consider touts to be pimps? Afterall, they get commission and can lead you to the girls even though they normally do not provide the girls security for example.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 03:38
VT,
In my post, I was trying to say that pimps aren't inherently evil. So, I guess I was siding with you to some degree. The problem is, any experience I've had concerning pimps (including the media) has been negative. So, I just don't think there are many out there who are anything but scum.
Bullshit. Pimps ARE inherently evil, worthless, cancerous brummagem until proven otherwise. This means the street definition of pimps and not Webster's fucking dictionary generic definition. Anyone with any experience knows a pimp when he sees one and it does NOT include "security guards." Any guy who makes his so-called living off of some woman's pussy is a waste of skin and a disgrace to the dick carrying race. I recommend that if you see a pimp, you should piss in his mouth UNLESS his face is already on fire.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 04:00
Dickhead, that was some colorful imagery :-)
I can't agree that pimps are inherently evil. To say that, I'd have to say that there is something inherently evil about the hobby. And, I don't believe that.
If we assume that prostitution is a job like any other, then why isn't a pimp just a manager like any other? Granted, as soon as a manager, in any profession, abuses his subordinates, he becomes scum. But, like VT pointed out, we already have laws for dealing with that.
Also, would you extend your vilification of pimps to include mamasans at a brothel?
There are very basic differences between pimps and business managers, security guards, etc., and they fall mainly in the arena of control. If a woman hires someone to help her keep her shit together, provide security, etc., that's one thing, but if it's a parasitic relationship where control is in the hands of the guy, when it's the woman doing the selling, then it's exploitive and evil. Going after some woman's webmaster or significant other who's babysitting because they're assisting in pandering is complete bullshit, but someone who's taking a "percentage" while essentially doing nothing deserves every bit of DH's and the law's vengeance and more.
I don't have any experience with mamasans. That is an Asian concept and I am a Latino monger, primarily. I have an admitted double standard as well. I have no opinion on female pimps. It is only male pimps who are so low that their heads should be pounded so far down into their chest cavities that they have to unbutton their collars to blow their noses. I have only been to Hong Kong in Asia and I stuck to independents. I always try to stick to independents. Why the fuck do I need a middle person to drive up the price?
You seem to feel that the hobby cannot exist without pimps. That, unfortunately, makes you a pimp by proxy and I forgive you only due to your obvious naivete. Managers don't beat up their employees. Pimps do. Managers don't prevent their employees from quitting. Pimps do. Managers provide substantial expertise that contributes to the success of the business. Pimps provide intimidation, brutality, and victimization.
"If we assume that prostitution is a job like any other, then why isn't a pimp just a manager like any other?" That is the most naive statement I have heard in a very long time.
If you would confuse a manager with a pimp, you would confuse cutting a fart with shitting your pants. There is some more colorful imagery for you.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 04:31
Originally posted by Dickhead
I don't have any experience with mamasans. That is an Asian concept and I am a Latino monger, primarily.
That's certainly not an asian concept. That's a brothel concept. Maybe the term 'mamasan' is asian, but in the western style brothels, we refer to the same position as the 'madame'. Means the same thing.
I have an admitted double standard as well. I have no opinion on female pimps. It is only male pimps who are so low that their heads should be pounded so far down into their chest cavities that they have to unbutton their collars to blow their noses.
Again with the imagery. I like it :-)
However, why the double standard? That undermines your argument that pimps are inherently evil. A pimp is a pimp, regardless of sex. Would your double standard become a triple standard if the female pimp were a bulldyke?
I have only been to Hong Kong in Asia and I stuck to independents. I always try to stick to independents. Why the fuck do I need a middle person to drive up the price?
No argument here if you feel safe with independents. But, from my experience, the independents are more often rip-off scam artist bitches. Not always, but more so than in an MP or go-go bar. Do you ever visit MP's? There is certainly a middle man/woman there. What about the owner of the bar where the chicas work? Isn't that a pimp?
I don't use SW's, so I don't encounter the street pimp. But, I've had lots of dealings with bar owners and brothel madames. I certainly find no fault in there jobs as long as it is a situation in which the women can quit at any time.
You seem to feel that the hobby cannot exist without pimps.
That, unfortunately, makes you a pimp by proxy and I forgive you only due to your obvious naivete.
LOL Interesting leap of logic. I certainly don't believe that. Nor, would that make me a pimp by proxy. I think that bar owners, and madames certainly make things run more smoothly. But, as you pointed out, there are independents out there. And, some of them are legit (and even quite good).
Managers don't beat up their employees. Pimps do. Managers don't prevent their employees from quitting. Pimps do. Managers provide substantial expertise that contributes to the success of the business. Pimps provide intimidation, brutality, and victimization.
You operate under the assumption that there are no pimps like what I described in an earlier post, and what VT described. Yet, I think you are only considering the low-life street pimp shown in B movies and on sensationalist news reports. How can you be sure that VT's pimp (man or woman) doesn't exist?
"If we assume that prostitution is a job like any other, then why isn't a pimp just a manager like any other?" That is the most naive statement I have heard in a very long time.
I would prefer, 'lacking complete cynicism'. I can understand why the statement would offend if you can't bring yourself to imagine anything other than the vulgar image of the street pimp that you've been brainwashed with. But, think about what VT said: Vilification of pimping is an indirect way to vilify prostitutes.
If you would confuse a manager with a pimp, you would confuse cutting a fart with shitting your pants. There is some more colorful imagery for you.
The two things are non-sequitir. But, I have, at times, wondered if I was about to fart or shit. In those cases, I just head for the toilet to be on the safe side.
Funny how I've gone from tacitly agreeing with VT to defense of that argument. I guess we learn something new about ourselves every day.
Keep the images flowing :-)
Well, the last time I was in a brothel was in Sydney about 3 years ago. There was a receptionist who explained the services available, then rang a buzzer to let me in. I then dealt +++ DIRECTLY +++ with the ladies. I am sure the house got a cut but I am also sure they were not about to beat up the ladies if they chose not to have sex with me. Since then I have probably screwed at least 50 prostitutes without entering any brothels. I have had some OK experiences in brothels but I don't prefer them.
Why the double standard? Because I can see some situations, based on my experience, where due to cultural factors and job discrimination there are no other viable alternatives for a woman with children to support said children when the fathers refuse to. On the other hand, I think a man in that situation should mug dumb tourists or steal from parked cars or sell fake drugs to support his children, rather than PIMP his woman. Think about a nursing mother. She needs to eat well to allow her child to survive. A man, on the other hand, should eat dirt, bugs, and excrement to survive rather than PIMP a woman. That is just how I feel. I don't really give a shit if it is a double standard. Men are physically stronger and should god damn well act like it.
Let me make myself perfectly clear:
If a woman wants to sell her pussy, that is her choice. If a man wants to sell his asshole, that is her choice (yes, I said her). If a man wants to sell a woman's pussy, HE IS A FUCKING PIMP AND SHOULD BE CASTRATED VERY SLOWLY. If a woman wants to sell a man's dick, I am available under the right circumstances.
Three rules for maintaining one's morality while enjoying paid sex:
1) Choose independent girls above the age of consent.
2) Choose girls who are independent and old enough to know what they are doing.
3) Choose only those girls, of legal age, who keep 100% of the money that you give them AFTER you have sex with them.
And if in the process of the above, you happen to run into any pimps, consider smacking them around a bit if it is indicated by all facts and circumstances.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 05:07
So, you're saying that you don't see the owners of the brothel as pimps? What are they then? And, how do they differ from shop owners who hire help?
I think I misunderstood you about the double standard. I thought you were saying that it was okay for a woman to pimp another woman. That's cleared up now.
As for men being physically stronger... I'm 6' 205 lbs. A lot of fat on me these days, but I used to be in pretty good shape. Even, back when I was on the wrestling team, in high school, I knew some women that could have benched a lot more than me. It's really not true that women are stronger than men.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 05:17
Originally posted by Dickhead
3) Choose only those girls, of legal age, who keep 100% of the money that you give them AFTER you have sex with them.
Can we extend this logic to say that you should only buy clothes from retailers who give 100% of the money back to the poor people in the sweat shops? Guess we're all going naked.
Well, I really don't give a shit what brothel owners are because as I said I rarely patronize them. And, I don't patronize streetwalkers who have pimps. I patronize INDEPENDENTS. I don't really even like "bars" and if I do go there, I try to get phone numbers and hook up later; thus, the middleperson is eliminated and the prostitute keeps all the money I give her.
In my experience, some brothel owners or bar "mama sans" or whatever are pimps. Example: some bar owners in Mexico snag naive country girls at the bus station and offer them "work" and then "turn them out" and make them pay for ever and ever and ever for the "fee" they "owe" for being set up in the business = PIMP. Some are not. Example: In Costa Rica, where prostitution is legal but pimping is not, bar owners charge hookers a "cover" to enter the bar but whatever happens after that is up to the woman. It is a flat rate and not a commission. Do I think that is a manly way to make a living? Hell no. Do I respect it? Hell no. Do I want to cut their balls off? Not really. Maybe just kick them in the balls a few times.
Then in Argentina there is a service where women can pay a flat monthly fee to have their picture, personal info, and phone put on a website. After that it is up to the woman. Is that the same as the Costa Rica scenario? Pretty much. But it is a woman running the business so it doesn't bother me because it is not unmanly. Is it unwomanly? I have no idea; I have no concept of "unwomanly." There is my double standard. I recognize it as such. That is just the way it is. Women just flat don't have the same job opportunities in that part of the world. Men have more options and so should be able to come up with something else.
Also, I don't watch TV or movies and my "image" of pimps is not an image at all but based on 30 years of actual, real experiences.
Originally posted by purplengold
Can we extend this logic to say that you should only buy clothes from retailers who give 100% of the money back to the poor people in the sweat shops? Guess we're all going naked.
No, because in the case of manufactured goods, profit = revenue - (direct materials + direct labor + manufacturing overhead), whereas pussy has a 100% margin. It is the only thing where you can give it away and still have it.
Originally posted by RN
You'll never get laid in my country if you insist on paying AFTER the sex.
Well, Rubbie, I am living proof that you are wrong. In Sydney, had to pay up front. In Melbourne, showed that I had the money, said I would pay afterwards IF all parameters of agreement were met, no problem. Again I chastise you for extrapolating your experiences to other areas. Perhaps I would never get laid in your STATE if I insisted in paying after the sex!
Paying up front is also a "brothel" concept and is also a reason why I rank Australia as being "antiseptic" as opposed to "GFE." My experience with independents (world wide) is that if they don't DEMAND the money up front, I often give them the money up front, but if they do, I often up and split. Think about it.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 05:47
I'd like to point out that I'm in no way defending anyone who would abuse/enslave another person--for any reason, pimping or otherwise.
I'm just extending VT's argument that the possibility of a benevolent pimp exists (I sort of see this as the bar owners and madames in places where the girls can quit at will). And, in that case, that person is not evil. Therefore, pimps are not inherently evil. It is their actions that make them so.
As far as your bit about 'profit =...' how about we change my previous statement back to: "only buy clothes from retailers who give 100% of profits back to the people in the sweatshops?" The garment industry is certainly as exploitive as the sex industry. Do you know how much the Gap pays workers in China to make your khaki pants and pullover sweater? Virtually nada. Yet, you're supporting them?
I'm not saying to go all lovefest on the next pimp you meet, but, maybe try looking at the situation with a more open mind.
Oh, and, never go to movies or watch TV? I believed that the first time I heard it. My physics professor used to brag about how he never went to the movies and didn't own a TV. Went to his home once, and, there in the living room was a whopping 80" Screen that worked off a projector system. Gotta throw the bullshit flag.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 05:48
Originally posted by Dickhead
Again I chastise you for extrapolating your experiences to other areas.
Isn't that what we're all doing?
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 05:51
Originally posted by Dick Johnson
Same thing with pimps. There's the street pimp, there's the brothel mgr and then there's the 'unseen' pimp running a bunch of freelancers. I have many freelancers to be not true FL in the strictest sense as they all have to report to a 'manager'. And the mgr 'safe keeps' their money and keep the girls on an invisible leash. Knowing where they are at all times.
Good point. This makes me think of the situation with the street girls in Tijuana. The girls appear to be FL, but they are, at the very least associated with their hotel. And, there is much speculation, due to the apparent assigned spots, that they have pimps running them in the background.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 05:56
Originally posted by joe_zop
but someone who's taking a "percentage" while essentially doing nothing deserves every bit of DH's and the law's vengeance and more.
I'd like to point out that this is what every entrepreneur aspires to. Take a good idea. Get the business going. Hire competent staff to run it for you (because you really don't have the skills to manage a big business). Then, sit back and enjoy the profits while the help does the work.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:01
Hope VT gets on before this discussion dies down. Otherwise he'll post something, everyone will have said their piece already, and he'll think we're ignoring him again :-)
Originally posted by purplengold
As far as your bit about 'profit =...' how about we change my previous statement back to: "only buy clothes from retailers who give 100% of profits back to the people in the sweatshops?" The garment industry is certainly as exploitive as the sex industry. Do you know how much the Gap pays workers in China to make your khaki pants and pullover sweater? Virtually nada. Yet, you're supporting them?
Oh, and, never go to movies or watch TV? I believed that the first time I heard it. My physics professor used to brag about how he never went to the movies and didn't own a TV. Went to his home once, and, there in the living room was a whopping 80" Screen that worked off a projector system. Gotta throw the bullshit flag.
Listen you yuppie asshole, I have not owned a TV in over 20 years and I have not been to a movie in at least 8 years, and I have not been to a movie of my own volition in close to 20 years. I READ BOOKS. You should try it some time. And you may have a closet full of Gap clothing and pullover sweaters but I have none of either. Plus I don't post in any place where I don't have actual knowledge. And it is "exploitative," not "exploitive."
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:04
Originally posted by RN
Well yeah, but in this case we are talking about people raking in the profits of rape. And I'm not trying to be melodramatic - but if we are talking about a stereotypical pimp forcing a woman to have sex against her will (or keeping her in sexual servitude with drugs, violence, etc), then it constitutes sexual assault.
But, I don't think that's where the argument is. No one has said that this is condoned. In fact, see my posts in the Thai section to verify my opposition to this.
We're talking about whether or not managing a stable of pros is inherently evil. My position is that it's not. Certainly, there are evil people who do this (and probably the majority), but the management itself is no more evil than the actual labor.
Originally posted by purplengold
Isn't that what we're all doing?
NO!
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:09
Originally posted by Dickhead
Listen you yuppie asshole, I have not owned a TV in over 20 years and I have not been to a movie in at least 8 years, and I have not been to a movie of my own volition in close to 20 years. I READ BOOKS. You should try it some time. And you may have a closet full of Gap clothing and pullover sweaters but I have none of either. Plus I don't post in any place where I don't have actual knowledge. And it is "exploitative," not "exploitive."
LOL whatever.
I'm not a yuppie. I am very well read (I just find time for both). I don't shop at the gap because I think it's too expensive (not in an attempt to make a statement that I'm an individualist. I do that in more individualistic ways). And, for the record (from 'webster.com'):
One entry found for exploitive.
Main Entry: ex·ploit·ive
Pronunciation: ik-'sploi-tiv
Function: adjective
Date: 1921
: EXPLOITATIVE
Exploitive is a more modern form of the same word.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:11
Originally posted by Dickhead
NO!
Really? So, you think that we are actually creating knowledge? Odd. I thought we were discussing our points of view, which, are direct results of extrapolating our experiences.
PNG, I apologize. I meant to call you an illiterate yuppie asshole, because "exploitive" is not in my Merriam-Webster's dictionary at all (copyright 1999; I think Al Gore had already invented the internet by then). It is not a more modern form of exploitative; it is an imaginary form of exploitative.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:15
Originally posted by RN
Don't make me bring out the whip and the knee-high boots again...
I gotta take a trip to Oz :-)
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:19
Originally posted by Dickhead
PNG, I apologize. I meant to call you an illiterate yuppie asshole, because "exploitive" is not in my Merriam-Webster's dictionary at all (copyright 1999; I think Al Gore had already invented the internet by then). It is not a more modern form of exploitative; it is an imaginary form of exploitative.
You can check the site (http://www.webster.com). Do a search for the word exploitive.
Think we could get Jackson to start a diction thread? We could discuss the differences between nauseous and nauseated.
Illiterate? Hmmm... sort of silly to call someone posting discussion on the internet illiterate. You might want to use your, outdated, paper dictionary to look up the meaning of the word.
This is off topic. I'm dropping it.
You're right, PNG. I'll just call you a naive, sycophantic, craven fucking asshole and let it go at that.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:24
Originally posted by Dick Johnson
But I have to say that your GAP theory is a bit different. I know that people protest about low wage sweatshops and while it is unfortunate, it is a just tough way to make a living at poorer regions. Some of these workers would rather be a pro than work 10 hrs a day for low pay.
Yeah. I know that Gap thing isn't quite the same. But, it's as close as I could think of to an exploitive relationship that's recieved a lot of public attention
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:27
RN, I noticed you post in the American Women forum. You're posts are helpful there, so fuck skinless. Post away. :-)
Originally posted by purplengold
Yeah. I know that Gap thing isn't quite the same. But, it's as close as I could think of to an exploitive relationship that's recieved a lot of public attention
"I" before "E" EXCEPT after "C" and in words that sound "A" as in "neighbor" and "weigh." Might be time time to turn off your TV for a while and quit eating so much popcorn at the movies. Then maybe you wouldn't be 6'0" and 205.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:31
No offense meant towards skinless. I've been laughing my ass off at his adventures. Just figured to put it that way because Dickhead's gotten me into an combative mood.
Well, RN, since you have made it clear that your ass is off limits, what are we to do BUT stare at it?
I would be into that after a nice soapy shower.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:43
This is way off topic, but how do you make the smiley's?
Smiley face = colon + right parenthesis.
Frowny face = colon + left parenthesis.
Originally posted by RN
; + ) for a wink, : + ) for a smile
Frank Zappa:
"Don't fool yourself girl; it's winking at you ..."
Originally posted by RN
Ok, so now I know what to do next time a fight breaks out - I just have to steer the conversation towards my ass!
As long as something gets steered towards your ass.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 06:52
Originally posted by RN
Any more naughty talk from you Mr Dickhead, and I'll be steering my paddle towards yours!
If you offered to let me steer the paddle, for a fee, would that make you a pimpette?
Pat Benatar:
"Hit me with your best shot,
Fire away."
But don't you think you ought to pick on someone your own size?
(directed at RN and not Pimple and Gold)
I am not into anal penetration but I do like to spank women, especially with hairbrushes and ping pong paddles.
Also if you alternate it with ice that is good and plus if you have a feather handy that helps.
But sometimes the ice or the handle of the hairbrush do accidentally penetrate JUST a little bit ...
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 07:00
Originally posted by RN
You know - I think all these one-line posts constitute some kind of record for this section! (Considering most of the regulars suffer from extreme cases of verbal diarrhoea).
This conversation has racked up 5 pages of the forum in a few hours. It's been fun.
Dickhead: bygones
Of course I put a condom on the handle of the hairbrush.
Plus only one hand has been on the keyboard ...
Fortunately I am ambidextrous. Does that make me bisexual?
And remember Rubbie, I am your friend, not your enema.
Masturbatory habits? My dear, I believe you misunderstand where my non-keyboard hand has been. It has been on the ping pong paddle, polishing it up for you.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 07:11
Originally posted by Dick Johnson
Dickhead, this is not cybersex you know. See ya guys:D.
Come on Mr. Johnson. He doesn't watch movies, so he must not be watching porn. He's online right now, so he's not out with a chica. He's gotta get his jollies somewhere ;)
Porn has never made any sense to me. Maybe I am just sick, but I prefer live flesh. If I were into porn, I could have saved a lot of money over the years.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 07:16
What about the guys producing porn movies? Aren't they a type of pimp? I mean, they're out there getting women to have sex so that they can sell the images to guys who will then beat off (a form of sex). Are they inherently evil?
(And here we are, back on topic...)
I am the one who brought up the ping pong paddle so you owe me 100 quid.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 07:18
Originally posted by Dickhead
I am the one who brought up the ping pong paddle so you owe me 100 quid.
Hey. This is good reasoning. Next time I'm with a pro, I'll bring up anal sex. Then tell her she owes me a premium for proposing the idea.
I do believe guys producing porn movies can be pimps especially if there are drugs involved. I am not sure all of the actors and actresses in hard core are there of their own free will (free willy?)
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 07:20
Some of the Japanese shit I've seen leads me to agree with you, Dickhead, concerning free will. I think some of those girls get tricked into it. THat's sad. And, in those cases, I'm all for your type of justice. Well, maybe I would be a bit harsher than you suggest.
Originally posted by purplengold
Hey. This is good reasoning. Next time I'm with a pro, I'll bring up anal sex. Then tell her she owes me a premium for proposing the idea.
Does the phrase "chili dog" have any significance to you?
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 07:22
Originally posted by Dickhead
Does the phrase "chili dog" have any significance to you?
That's a particularly nasty concept within this context. Are you saying that you like that?
Personally, I've never been one for that kind of thing. I even wonder about the chicks who do it in porn. I'm sure that enemas were used beforehand, but still.
Oh no fuck no. I'm just saying if you bring it up and then ask for money you might get one. Dickhead detours around all dirt roads.
Originally posted by RN
Sure. I'll pay you AFTER the service, and only if the experience lives up to my expectations.
That is a win-win situation.
I have ping pong paddles with the rubber coating with the many nipples and also the old fashioned sandpapery kind.
PurpleNGold
03-05-03, 07:27
Well, I gotta get some sleep. It's tiring being in a profession like mine when you're illiterate.
But, one last thought to keep the farewell on topic: If we say that all pimps are inherently evil because of their job--regardless of whether or not they drug, beat, etc. their girls--then, aren't we saying that prostitution itself must be inherently evil?
Ciao
I don't think anybody ever said that. I gotta crash too.
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