NothingToDread.com

The following quote is from a recent article I wrote directing readers towards a powerful article written by Anastasia at Sexualité (www.chaosnoir.com):

We tend to forget that more often than not the true victims of these victimless crimes are at home watching the kids. The real victims are often the wives and children of the customers. Anastasia has written a brutally honest article from the perspective of the victim at home. Click here to read Whores, Politicians, and the Urban Myth of Feminism at Sexualité.

A Victimless Crime?
March 18, 2007

Do yourself a favor, even if you don't read any of the other sites that I link to, read Anastasia's site regularly. Anastasia's articles range from personal experience and opinion to erotic fiction. Reading her site makes me reach for a higher standard on this one. It also reminds me that I don't even have a foothold on the path leading towards becoming a writer of her caliber.

Yesterday, Anastasia wrote a follow up to Whores, Politicians, and the Urban Myth of Feminism that she called Chinese Whispers.

When I sat down and wrote a post titled 'Whores, Politicians and the Urban Myth of Feminism,' in March I didn't think it would end up being linked in three places, one of which is an article that has been doing the rounds, written by Cathy Young for Reason Magazine. I really love it when clever essayists downplay a person's situation, as I feel has occurred in this case. Sure, I did thank her for including my blog post (weren't there any North American bloggers who wrote about their experience on the other end of prostitution?), but the follow up sentence after the link to my post remained in my mind all this week:

"It is sometimes claimed that the true victims of prostitution are the johns' wives. But surely women whose husbands are involved in noncommercial... and sometimes quite expensive... extramarital affairs are no less victimized."

I'd like to take the opportunity to say that I didn't use the word 'victim' within the post, but the strange world of blogging can also be one of Chinese Whispers, where people interpret things the way they desire to interpret them. I wouldn't call leaving a relationship a victim-like behavior, and yet there were some who linked to my post (prior to Cathy Young's article) who insinuated this.

Chinese Whispers
Anastasia at Sexualité
May 13, 2007

I can't say if Cathy Young has ever read nothingtodread.com, but since I and not Ana suggested that the Johns' wives are the true victims of prostitutions, I feel a bit responsible for the resulting changes to the Chinese Whisper. What's a Chinese Whisper? It's what we called the telephone game when I was a kid. Somebody whispers something into your ear. You repeat the message to your neighbor, and they continue the chain. The fun is to see how the message is transformed by the time it reaches the end of the chain. There was a lot more to Ana's original post than what I implied in my introduction. There is also a lot more to Chinese Whispers than what I will address here. Please accept my suggestion that you read both posts yourself.

I'd like to respond to Ana's objection to the use of the word victim to describe her and women liker her who have been faced with a mate's use of prostitutes. We live in a world where everybody gets a trophy. In a world that calls survivors heroes, it's only natural that nobody would want to be viewed as a victim. I suppose that victims are the new survivors. I use the word victim as somebody who is harmed by and act or condition. The fact that I once hospitalized a man who tried to stick a knife in my back doesn't change the fact that I was the intended victim of his assault. My usage of the word victim does not imply weakness on the part of the subject. Whether a woman leaves a man whose actions cause her harm does not change the fact that she was victimized by his behavior.

As far as I'm concerned, Cathy Young's clever little statement about extramarital affairs was meaningless. Extramarital affairs, prostitution, its all the same even if the other woman doesn't know that she's her lover's whore. Both the economic and financial damage done by the affair is the same as visiting a prostitute, but that doesn't lessen the impact of prostitution on the family.

I don't have very strong feelings about prostitution. What single men do with their penises and money is their own business. What married men do is between them and their families. I just don't see the benefit of our current system of prohibition. It doesn't lessen the impact of prostitution on society, it only makes it more lucrative for those on top. I have enough experience with human nature to know that corruption will continue; however, legalization would result in some regulation. Some regulation is better than no regulation.

Speaking of naive, several years ago I visited one of those "Oriental" massage parlors that have all but driven legitimate massage establishment out of existence. I never expected to be offered more than a traditional massage that at most might include some sexual innuendo and titillation. Regardless of what I may have expected, I did not expect to encounter a full service brothel with a clear line of sight to the local police station. Somebody at the police department must have been on the establishment's payroll. The young Asian girls in the line-up were very young, and they appeared to be frightened. It wasn't hard to imagine that these girls may have been underage and working against their will. Call it morality, fidelity, or a fear of disease, but I wasn't up for that sort of an adventure. I was actually afraid to try and leave without a session of some sort so I paid for a legit massage administered by a ham-fisted Korean called Bunny. She spent the next half hour brutalizing my body with what may have been the only legitimate massage she ever attempted. I got my bruised and battered body out of there as soon as I could... Legal or not, the cops in that city would not be any less corrupt. I just can't imagine that the situation I witnessed would not improve in a legally regulated environment. At the very least they could openly advertise the nature of their business and schmucks like me wouldn't suffer at the hands of Bunny.

Conventional wisdom classifies prostitution done right as a victimless crime. Boy meets girl, boy pays girl, and boy has sex with girl. They go their separate ways. Everybody lives happily ever after. When it's a victimless crime boy doesn't get robbed, and girl doesn't get raped. In those stories girl doesn't have a drug habit, she doesn't get beat, and her bruised and battered corpse won't be dumped in a ditch.

If one is to choose a victim in all of this, it's only natural to choose the sex worker. We tend to forget that more often than not the true victims of these victimless crimes are at home watching the kids. The real victims are often the wives and children of the customers. Anastasia has written a brutally honest article from the perspective of the victim at home. Click here to read Whores, Politicians, and the Urban Myth of Feminism at Sexualité.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that my experiences with prostitution are limited to less than a handful of youthful encounters. None of those encounters involved street prostitution. All except one took place south of the border in Tijuana, Mexico. Ok, there was that time that I found out what really takes place in those "Oriental" massage parlors, but that's a story for another time. By the time I visited that massage parlor, I had such a healthy fear of the things that I could catch that I didn't order from the a la carte menu.

Mother told me, yes, she told me I'd meet girls like you.
She also told me, "Stay away, you'll never know what you'll catch."

Rick Nielsen - Surrender

Nearly a quarter century has passed since my friends and I were forced to choose between spending the night on the street and sleeping in a Tijuana whorehouse. We chose the whorehouse. Despite the fact that that was not my first visit to such an establishment, my experience with prostitution is limited to less than a handful of youthful encounters.

In this funny Captain Morgan Rum commercial, two guys in need of a designated driver walk into a pizza joint and order a pizza delivered to their home so they can hitch a ride with the delivery driver.

The commercial reminds me of the time (Over twenty years ago) that my friends and I had to come up with an equally creative solution to a lack of available lodging in San Diego. I was undergoing training at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms, California. There wasn't much to do in 29 Palms, so weekends were spent anywhere but there. One weekend we decided to head down to San Diego where we planned to divide our time between drinking in Tijuana and sleeping in San Diego.

We arrived in San Diego and took a trolly to the San Ysidro border crossing. We spent the remainder of that day, and most of the evening, consuming large quantities of alcohol in some of Tijuana's finest dives. After a day of drinking and blanket shopping, we crossed back into the US and started looking for a hotel that didn't preface the word "vacancy" with a big fat "NO". We didn't have any luck. I don't remember the reason, but there didn't appear to be any vacancies in San Diego that weekend. Eventually, three of us headed back into Tijuana. Our luck wasn't any better there. We were left with two choices. We could sleep on the street, or try something creative. Our creative solution involved heading to a nearby brothel where we purchased all nighters with the local talent. I was so exhausted by the time the girl showed me to our cell that I got a lot more sleep than you would imagine possible in a Tijuana whorehouse.