Finally, I hope, journalists are beginning to wake-up to the reality of government's oppression and outright persecution of sex workers in the United States. To paraphrase Norma Jean Almodovar, author of the book From Cop to Call Girl, "Cops rob, rape, extort, solicit, pimp, beat and kill sex workers with impunity, because no one will take their word over that of a police officer." If, and only if, sex work/prostitution is decriminalized, and both male and female sex workers are given the same legal standing as every other citizen, can the abuse be stopped. It is time for journalists to do something they used to be good at, back in the days of Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell: discover the truth, and report it to the public.
Law enforcement at the upper levels has always preferred "low-hanging fruit" for its moral crusades: not political corruption, or organized crime, or Wall Street financiers engaged in defrauding their customers of billions. No, they like to sweep the streets clean of the sex workers, the petty drug pushers, and the two-bit street hustlers, painting over the minor exterior corruption, while the real rot continues unchecked just below the surface. Not a single Wall Street financier has yet been indicted for their part in the economic shenanigans that nearly brought the World's economy crashing to a halt in 2008. Only Bernie Madoff, an "independent financial consultant," whose crime was ripping off the wealthiest Americans, has seen prison time for the systemic corruption that we still have not fully recovered from.
Maggie then points out that taking out Rentboy.com may have been a strategic mistake by the government:
"In the long run, though, it may prove very expensive for the prohibitionists. As I've complained on a number of occasions, mainstream gay rights organizations seem unconcerned at best[nonworking link], and hostile at worst to sex worker rights[nonworking link], despite the fact that members of the GLBT community are disproportionately represented among both sex workers and clients (many closeted gay men rely almost entirely on escorts for male contact). Gay, Inc has obsessively pushed its white-picket-fence married-couple big-table fantasies to the exclusion of the majority of queers who will never want lifelong committed monogamy, despite the fact that the entire gay rights movement owes its origin to sex workers...
Now that picket-fence queers have every conceivable right their straight vanilla counterparts enjoy, Big Gay will need a new campaign to pursue"and the feds may have just provided it. The personal information of thousands of closeted gay men is now in the hands of evil monsters who view human beings only as points to be racked up, and if that's not a gay rights issue I'm not sure what is..."
Maggie used to be a professional sex provider--prostitute for those of you who are a little slow on the uptake--and no, I was never a client of hers, but she and I--libertarian and left-wing liberal--are pretty much in sync when it comes to the question of decriminalizing prostitution. I have written about her and her beliefs fairly extensively in five articles for OpEdNews since 2012: "Making Sex a Crime," "Rebel With a Cause," "Aiding the Evolution ," "Real Feminism: A Male Perspective," and most recently "Fortitude versus Greed" last year. She is not stupid (Masters in Library Science), or sleazy (much more of that warm, Earth Mother feel), and she has experienced some of the worst aspects of police abuse first hand.
The United States in matters of sex suffers an extreme bifurcation of its national personality; an insane Madonna-prostitute Complex that leaves males confused and women fearful. And this bifurcation of our sexual personality goes back for more than a century, according to Lara Riscol, in her book Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Human Sexuality:
"Our dominantly Christian nation's schizophrenic approach to sex has deep roots. Likely former Governor Elliot Spitzer wouldn't have been so disgraced for feeding his costly call girl fetish in 1870 when New York City's second-largest economy was commercial sex. Yet America's prostitution-powered era wouldn't have tolerated a women's studies graduate auctioning off her virginity to finance her master's in family and marriage therapy, a la Natalie Dylan. Women weren't allowed the same transgressions as men. Of course women weren't allowed the same opportunities. Traditionalists argued that the intellectual rigors of higher education would shrink female reproductive organs and deny a real woman's one true calling: motherhood...
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