NoPornNorthampton

YouTube Video: "Quotes on Porn & Sex for Sale"

We recommend this 5-minute presentation from JoinPornBusters:



See also anti-pornography videos and more as compiled by AntiPornographyBlog.

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 12/16/2009 6:48 AM

Center for Public Integrity Report: Sexual Assault on Campus

The Center for Public Integrity published a valuable report on campus sexual assault on December 1. In an email to members they write:
Students who have been the victim of sexual assaults on college campuses face a depressing litany of barriers that often either assure their silence or leave them feeling victimized a second time, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s nine-month investigation Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice...

This important project was informed by interviews with 48 experts familiar with the college disciplinary process—student affairs administrators, conduct hearing officers, assault services directors, and victim advocates—as well as 33 students who reported being raped.

Nearly half the students interviewed by the Center for this project reported they unsuccessfully sought criminal charges; district attorneys often shy away from such cases, because they are “he said, she said” disputes sometimes clouded by drugs or alcohol. That often leaves students to deal with a campus judiciary system shrouded in secrecy. Those who do come forward can encounter mysterious disciplinary proceedings, closed-mouth school administrations and off-the-record negotiations. At times, official school policies lead to dropped complaints and, in some cases, gag orders later found to be illegal. College administrators believe the existing processes provide a fair and effective way to deal with ultra-sensitive allegations, but alleged victims say these processes have little transparency or accountability, and regularly result in little or no punishment for alleged assailants.

Accompanied by multimedia features including interviews with student survivors and a toolkit to help students, parents, educators and administrators explore this issue in their own campus communities, these first reports in an ongoing series tell a powerful story about the need for transparency and accountability in classic Center fashion.

Read about the project here...

See also:

Pictures from The Clothesline Project at Smith College



Assault and Abuse Against Women Epidemic
Most intimate partner victimizations are not reported to the police. Only approximately one-fifth of all rapes, one-quarter of all physical assaults, and one-half of all stalkings perpetrated against female respondents by intimates were reported to the police. Even fewer rapes, physical assaults, and stalkings perpetrated against male respondents by intimates were reported. The majority of victims who did not report their victimization to the police thought the police would not or could not do anything on their behalf.

National Center for PTSD Fact Sheet on Domestic Violence
It is estimated that, regarding violent behavior toward females within the context of an intimate relationship, only 20% of all rapes, 25% of all physical assaults, and 50% of all stalking are ever reported to the police [Tjaden & Thoennes study]. Victims may be reluctant to come forward for a variety of reasons. First, they may fear retaliation from their partner. They may have been directly threatened that if they tell anyone they will be killed, or they may just fear the worst. Second, there is shame associated with choosing a partner who could be violent, and there is shame associated with staying with a violent partner. Finally, some victims may have tried to seek help from the police, the courts, or others and been dissatisfied with the help they received.

StandardNET: "Pornography at root of more and more domestic violence incidents"
One in four women have experienced or are in a violent domestic relationship...

Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn Confuses Young Men about How to Behave
There's a professor of psychology at UMass Boston who has done his doctoral dissertation and subsequent research on sexual aggression among young college males, and he's found that in dozens and dozens of interviews that young guys will sit there in a room with him, and they'll admit to or talk matter-of-factly about, "I did this to her, I did that, and we did this and that," and they never once refer to themselves as rapists, of course, and they never once refer to the behavior that they've engaged in as raping behavior, or in any way criminal. But this psychologist will tell you that he knows that if they were under oath in the court of law, they would be admitting to first degree felonies, but they think it's normal, perfectly natural herterosexual relations.

Porn and a Hostile Learning Environment at M.I.T.
One example is in the dorms, where despite requests by women students that pornographic films not be shown in common living rooms, some male students insisted on their right to show the films. In two cases, a male student insisted on showing Deep Throat, a film which presents Linda "Lovelace" Marchiano, who we talked about earlier today, despite women students in the dorm telling this particular man that it was offensive to show Deep Throat since it has been documented in her books--Ordeal and Out of Bondage--that she was tortured and terrorized into [making it]. Secondly, they told him that at least one of the students who was a resident of that dormitory had been throat-raped in that particular way, and she felt particularly traumatized by the showing of that film. Despite her efforts and other women's trying to talk to him about showing the film, he showed it anyway to a whole group of students from the dorm. As a result, she and other students lost sleep, she lost a lot of school time. The one student was a doctoral student, and felt extremely harassed. She tried to address this through the M.I.T. administration and go nowhere because they refuse to take an active stance around pornography. And then she was further harassed in that dormintory through threatening notes, etc., for trying to stop the showing of that film...

Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn and a Hostile Living Environment at M.I.T.
I was one of the few women who spoke out and attempted to explain to men and women why pornography hurt me. Rumors spread quickly throughout the dorm about me, and people I once considered friends gave me nasty looks. While visiting a friend, I was verbally harassed by three men. The same graduate resident who had been present at the pornography showing silently watched me being driven to tears, reaffirming the men's stance and their abusive treatment of me. A friend of mine was threatened by the house president that she would have the lab partner from hell if she did not quiet down and silence me. For about two weeks, I was followed around the dorm by one of the men. He would be at most two steps behind me, encroaching upon my feeling of personal space and my sense of safety. He would wait for me outside of people's bedrooms trying to listen to conversations, in places he was not known to frequent. When the housemaster was made aware of the situation by a friend, all of the proposed actions seemed unreasonable. It felt as if I was only setting myself up for retaliation. After feeling the anger from people while speaking out against pornography, I did not feel strong enough to face more intimidation and harassment from my peers.

Behind the Scenes of Deep Throat with Linda Lovelace
[Explicit language:] "Marchiano traveled to campuses to speak out about her two and a half year imprisonment by her husband/manager Chuck Traynor. Linda's speech encouraged women on the campus to protest outside the fraternity-sponsored showing of Deep Throat. She said that in this movie there are visible bruises all over her body that attest to part of her torture. The fraternity brothers' response, was to shout out during Deep Throat: 'Fuck her, hurt her, rip her.' Toward the other females on the screen they screamed comments such as 'Ugly bitch and whore.' They chanted, 'Bruises, Bruises, Bruises!' continually during the film."

Porn Use Correlates with Infidelity, Prostitution, Aggression, Rape-Supportive Beliefs
In 1995, Human Communication Research reported on a meta-analysis of 33 different studies. Researchers found that "Exposure to pornography increases behavioral aggression. While there are many factors that influence this effect (for example, the content of the pornography viewed), the researchers conclude that a connection between exposure to pornography and subsequent behavioral aggression exists."

In 2000, researchers reported in Annual Review of Sex Research that "A relationship exists between frequent pornography consumption and sexually aggressive behavior. This relationship is especially strong for those with the highest "predisposing" risk level for sexual aggression. Those who are at high risk for sexual aggression and who frequently consume pornography have sexual aggression levels that are four times higher than those who do not consume pornography frequently."

Evidence Assessment: The Role of Pornography in the Physical Abuse of Women
The REA [Rapid Evidence Assessment] identified three studies involving such women. Sommers and Check (1987) surveyed 21 battered women from a shelter and a comparison group of 21 women from the university to investigate the role of pornography in the physical abuse of women. They found the partners of the battered women read or viewed significantly greater amounts of pornographic materials than the partners of the comparison group, and the ‘battered women experienced significantly more sexual aggression at the hands of their partners than did women in the comparison group’ (p 189).

American Association of University Women
According to the report ["Hostile Hallways: Bullying, Teasing, and Sexual Harassment in School (2001)"], based on a national survey of 2,064 public school students in 8th through 11th grades conducted by Harris Interactive:
  • 83% of girls and 79% of boys report having ever experienced harassment. 
    • The number of boys reporting experiences with harassment often or occasionally has increased since 1993 (56% vs. 49%), although girls are still somewhat more likely to experience it.
    • For many students sexual harassment is an ongoing experience: over 1 in 4 students experience it "often."

 

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 12/3/2009 3:07 PM

Hugo Schwyzer: "A Note on Homosociality and Strip Clubs"

We recommend Hugo Schwyzer's 12/1/09 article, "Bonding through revulsion and desire: a note on homosociality and strip clubs". A few excerpts:
Homosociality is the notion that for American men in particular, the approval of other males is of paramount concern, even more sought after than validation from women...

Men in our society, as countless scholars of gender have pointed out, are socialized to find particular delight and meaning in activities from which women are excluded, or which most women find repugnant and objectionable...

The effectiveness of strip clubs as a homosocial bonding strategy is thus linked to two things: the shared sense the male patrons have that their wives and mothers disapprove of their being there, and the opportunity to establish their credentials as “red-blooded, straight American guys” by sharing the experience of objectifying women’s bodies...


See also:

Ad in the 12/3/09 Valley Advocate:

Valley Advocate Website Announces 2008's "Best" Adult Entertainment Club; Holsopple's Inside Report on Stripping (explicit language)
Rather than expose this industry for what it is, the Advocate has decided to party with the exploiters and the abusers. Let editor Tom Vannah know how you feel about this.

Strip Poker Men's Club: Women's Lib to Blame for Men's Going to Strip Clubs
On June 24, the Strip Poker Men's Club [explicit link] straight-out blamed women's lib for men's going to strip clubs. We quote:
Man's Perfect Excuse for Visiting Strip Clubs

...Over the past 30 years women have encroached on just about every professional field that was considered previously a mans domain. In past times man used to be able to come home to a lovely, devoted and sweet wife that looked after his needs, realizing that the man earned the crust, and was laboring tirelessly 6 days per week. He returned home from a hard days work, his food was on the table, the house clean, the children patiently and obediently waiting his return and swept off to bed in the early hours of the evening, allowing the man to enjoy some of the remaining moonlight hours with his indulging wife.

But something changed…

Women became tired of waiting at home, cleaning the baby’s nappies and ironing her husband’s clothes day-in and day-out, and for young women joining the workforce in the mid 1980’s their course had already been set, they were determined not to tread in the same steps as their battling mums had done before them.

Men lost all control, and life, as we knew it; was under-going an irreversible change.

These days for men that are married, come home to an un-kept and generally empty home, their wife or partner is also out at work and often returns home later than the average male, pursues the corporate ladder and excuse the pun, like a bitch on heat. The male picks up the children from day-care, cooks the meal, does the laundry and patiently waits for his partner to return and in some sick twist of fate still somehow falls into to some outdated statistical category that says that men still do little around the home!

Well it didn’t take long for men (married, single or repeatedly divorced) to realize that they now truly are holding the short end of the stick.

What was man going to do?

There is something about the atmosphere of a Strip Club, the way in which women strut their stuff on stage and not breaking eye contact is almost an animalistic approach that not only attracts men sexually but because of the eye contact that most women have mastered to enable to do their job well, it seems to offer men what they are so desperately in need off and they haven’t been able to get from today’s modern woman, “attention”...

So there you have it, no need to feel guilty, it's one of life's small escapes, the last bastion of the male domain, enjoy it!

As Andrew Sullivan notes, there are valid reasons why some men feel dissatisfied with today's society. Adult entertainment, however, is a poor way to respond to this, is a distraction from seeking better solutions, and creates new problems.
Sullivan: [A]s our economy becomes less physical and more cerebral, as women slowly supplant men in many industries, as income inequalities grow and more highly testosteroned blue-collar men find themselves shunted to one side, we will have to find new ways of channeling what nature has bequeathed us. I don't think it's an accident that in the last decade there has been a growing focus on a muscular male physique in our popular culture, a boom in crass men's magazines, an explosion in violent computer games or a professional wrestler who has become governor. These are indications of a cultural displacement, of a world in which the power of testosterone is ignored or attacked, with the result that it re-emerges in cruder and less social forms. Our main task in the gender wars of the new century may not be how to bring women fully into our society, but how to keep men from seceding from it, how to reroute testosterone for constructive ends, rather than ignore it for political point-making.
"Waitressing, I cleaned the floors and I own a box of men's wedding rings that I found on the floor."
I went back to the strip bars to make money. I cannot tell you the lie and the fantasy that it is for men. Waitressing, I cleaned the floors and I own a box of men's wedding rings that I found on the floor...

The degradation and inferiority and humiliation of being presented as two tits and a hole for entertainment was not as bad as the sexual harassment I received from the management of these places. Customers are not allowed to touch you, but management can and does. You cannot complain to the Labor Board because they say you put yourself there willingly, and usually it's under the table. I felt worthless...

The Science Behind Pornography Addiction (explicit language)
[Performers in the sex industry] have high rates of substance abuse, typically alcohol and cocaine, depression, borderline personality disorder which is a particularly serious disorder and dissociative identity disorder which used to be called multiple personality disorder. The experience I find most common among the performers is that they have to be drunk, high or dissociated in order to go to work. Their work environment is particularly toxic. One study on strippers indicated that they were likely to be punched, slapped, grabbed, called cunt and whore and to be followed home or stalked. Not surprisingly, these women often work with bodyguards. This live form of pornography causes violence and the customers receiving these Permission-Giving Beliefs become carriers of these beliefs back to their homes, onto their jobs, into the street, onto the school yard. There they encounter women and children who do not have bodyguards.

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 12/3/2009 1:39 PM

January 15-17: Stop Porn Culture Slideshow Training, Bellingham, WA

We are pleased to share this announcement from Stop Porn Culture:
Our next slideshow training will be January 15-17, 2010, in Bellingham, WA. Come and get the experience, knowledge, and confidence to talk publicly against pornography in your community. The training will include in-depth presentations on topics such as:
  • the links between pornography and violence against women
  • background on the economic industry that is pornography
  • First Amendment and other free speech issues
  • women in the industry
  • the sexualization of children
  • the question of “alternate” images
  • how to organize in your community
We will also have a long session of practicing Q & As in small groups.

The training will end with a session on self-care for presenters and activists since, as many of you know, this work can be grueling. For more info and to register, go to http://stoppornculture.org/training/

We are also planning our next international feminist anti-pornography conference next June in Boston. We're not ready for registration just yet, but you can mark your calendars. It will be June 12-13, 2010.

See also:

Gail Dines Presents: Pornography and Pop Culture (explicit)

Rebecca Whisnant: "Not Your Father’s Playboy, Not Your Mother’s Feminist Movement" (explicit language)

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 12/2/2009 5:35 PM

Springfield Republican: "Strip clubs need Sarno ultimatum"

The Springfield Republican published this editorial today:
Strip clubs need Sarno ultimatum

After two murders and countless testosterone and booze-laced disturbances, Springfield’s strip clubs have presented the city’s License Commission with a plan to bolster security...

We have said in the past that the city should shut the clubs down because of the trouble they attract.

Sarno himself has said the clubs have given Springfield a black eye, and state police have called them a disgrace to the city.

Springfield’s downtown is too small to support a split-personality nightlife that has restaurants, theater, sporting events and a first-class symphony orchestra sharing the streets with criminals and gang members who frequent the clubs...

See also:

Republican: "1 dead, 5 seriously injured in shooting rampage at Springfield strip club" (5/31/09)
Club 418 "has had problems in the past," but its record isn't much different from other strip clubs, police said.

"They are all about the same. And that's the second this year," Bobianski said, referring to the January fatal shooting of a man at the Mardi Gras at 91 Taylor St.

Springfield Republican: "Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno says strip club killing gives city a 'black eye'" (6/1/09)
State Police Lt. Thomas J. Daly, who has patrolled downtown for the last four years with the State Police Community Action Team, said incidents of violence and lawlessness are becoming painfully common in the club quarter, particularly at closing time when hundreds of people file out into the streets.

"What we see is a situation that is becoming intolerable," he said. "It is a disgrace to the city."

He said it is common to see open drug dealing and gang activity downtown on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The city needs to act quickly to get it all under control, he said.

Springfield Republican: "Man fatally shot inside strip bar" (1/22/09)

Springfield Republican Reports on Strip Clubs and the Mafia (7/8/07)

The Evidence of Relationships Between Adult-Oriented Businesses and Community Crime and Disorder

The Case for Secondary Effects

Secondary Effects Across America: 1977-1999

Crime, Nuisances Motivate Cities to Regulate the Location of Adult Entertainment Uses

US Appeals Court Upholds Daytona Zoning and Public Nudity Ordinances; No Grandfathering for Lollipop's Gentlemen's Club; Rebutting Daniel Linz

Hampden Superior Court Lets Capital Video Reopen Viewing Booths in Springfield; A Proposed Solution (9/30/08)
Massachusetts municipalities can enact an "amortization clause", meaning that all non-conforming adult uses have to come into compliance within a fixed period of time. The town of North Reading, MA has one of these clauses (PDF):
E. Amortization.
(1) Any adult use which exists in North Reading at the time of the adoption of this bylaw shall cease and desist all adult use activities within five years (5) of the effective date of this bylaw.

(2) Adult uses which apply for and are granted a special permit under the provisions of this bylaw shall be exempt from Subsection E(1) above.

Amortization is perhaps the best strategy we're aware of for Springfield to improve the quality of life for downtown residents and revitalize the area. It would be clear, effective, lasting, and legal.

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 11/19/2009 6:19 PM

A Review of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex

NPN's Jendi Reiter reviews Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex by David Henry Sterry and R.J. Martin, Jr. (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2009).
This fascinating but uneven anthology of personal essays by current and former sex workers gives readers a glimpse into the complex emotions of those who make a living selling intimacy. Contributors run the gamut from abused teenage streetwalkers to porn celebrities like Nina Hartley and Georgina Spelvin (The Devil in Miss Jones). The essays are roughly balanced between positive and negative portrayals of sex work, with perhaps too many that one could categorize as "war stories"—tales that speak honestly and vividly about bizarre, dangerous, or sad interactions between sex workers and clients, but without a broader analysis of whether the profession is inherently toxic.

One such account opens co-editor David Henry Sterry's moving and darkly funny introduction. Sterry is the author of Chicken, a memoir of his nine-month stint as a teenage prostitute in Los Angeles.
I flash back to 1974, standing in front of what was then Grauman's Chinese Theater, alone with nothing but twenty-seven dollars in the pocket of my nut-hugging elephant bells. A very nice man wearing a T-shirt that said SEXY started talking to me as if he was my best friend. At a certain point, he asked me if I'd like to come back to his place. To have a steak. That steak would cost me a lot more than sixty-five dollars. In fact, it was the most expensive steak of my life. After he used me in ways I hate to remember but can't force myself to forget, I escaped with my life. As the sun was coming up, I was in a dumpster about to eat some fried chicken garbage when another very nice man approached me. Turns out, he was a talent scout for the sex business. A week later, I was having sex for money. (p.1)
As Sterry recalls, he spent the following 20 years engaging in self-destructive behavior before a therapist guided him to exorcise his demons by writing his memoir. Later he went on to establish a writing program in the basement of the San Francisco–based outreach group Standing Against Global Exploitation. SAGE offers medical, vocational, and emotional support to people who've worked in the sex industry. Some of his students' brief and devastating essays are included at the end of the anthology.

Sterry writes that he wanted this anthology to do justice to the multifaceted nature of sex work, steering a middle path between the oversimplifications of activists who portray the profession as either exploitative or liberating. Mainly he succeeds, though I would have liked him to include at least one author with an openly radical feminist/abolitionist perspective. Did he feel uncomfortable approaching such people, or did they refuse to be in the same book as porn apologists like Carol Queen? I can only speculate.

Sterry's reluctance to criticize the choices of others in the business helped me understand why some sex workers feel they can't identify with the abolitionist camp, even if their own experience was negative. Sex work carries such a stigma that he treasures the bonds of community with others who've been "in the life", comrades in arms who understand his mixed feelings and difficult memories in a way that civilians can't.

I use the military analogy because this psychological dynamic does remind me of veterans who will mince no words about the horrors of the battlefield but can't quite call themselves "anti-war" (and may even resent civilians who take that stance). To repudiate one's past, awful as it may have been, feels like repeating the original shame and trauma to the ego.
On the prostitutes-as-victims side, there seems to be no room for people who want to have sex for money in safe, sane, sanitary conditions. On the prostitutes-as-empowered-sex-workers side, there seems to be very little acknowledgment that many people are actually trafficked, abused, and exploited. In my experience, there are many people who, given the state of the world, choose to have sex for money. And there are abused victims and humans who are trafficked against their will.

Of course, much of the divide is driven by money, class, and race. Many of the people in the prostitution-as-empowerment world come from middle- or upper-class families. They have better access to education. They're much more likely to end up as high-class call girls than ten-dollar crack hos. It's like the difference between working in a restaurant that serves sixty-five-dollar steaks and being held against your will, toiling feverishly eighteen hours a day in a sweatshop. Yet both those things are called prostitution. (p.5)
Sterry's observations are right on target. Unfortunately, this is the last time that a comparative political perspective finds its way into the anthology.

Many of the authors who are featured in the early pages of the book are well-educated, independent sex workers who have left the business or combined it with fringe performance art. One doesn't get the impression that they are under the control of a pimp. They probably have the intellectual background to explain why they had a more positive outcome than the average prostitute, but they don't follow through.

Annie Sprinkle, for instance, offers a breezy, cutesy list of "40 Reasons Why Whores Are My Heroes", followed by the sobering essay "Remembering Our Dead and Wounded: Why We Started the International Day to End Violence Against Prostitutes". It's hard to close the cognitive-dissonance gap between the two pieces. Most likely she thinks that by recharacterizing sex workers as sensual free spirits and nurturers, we can end the stigma that makes law enforcement and the general public indifferent to violence against prostituted women. That's a worthy goal. However, it's even more likely (based on past experience) that these "happy hooker" sentiments will be misused by adult industry profiteers to whitewash the realities of sex workers' lives. Many women enter this business out of economic desperation, not because they want to have fun with multiple partners or cure society's sexual repression.

So why would I still recommend this book? First of all, it's a great read. The authors plunge us into the depths of unconventional relationships where humor, tenderness, pain, and aggression uneasily coexist. Standout entries include Candye Kane's fond memories of her stripper babysitter, Juliana Piccillo's ill-fated affair with a vice cop who tried to "rescue" her, Lilycat's satirical look at the rules of phone sex, Lauri Shaw's heartbreaking account of rejection by her mother, and Sterry's unexpectedly sweet encounter titled "I Was a Birthday Present for an Eighty-Two-Year-Old Grandmother".

Moreover, it's important to let sex workers speak for themselves. People on both sides of the debate need to listen to stories that don't simply confirm our worldview. All relationships are complicated; sex-for-money is probably more complicated than average. Sterry and Martin have gathered some essential pieces of a puzzle that still waits to be assembled into a coherent picture.

See also:

A Review of Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers
In the debate over the morality of stripping, each camp typically puts forward a one-sided image of the exotic dancer as victim, slut, or feminist heroine. Bernadette Barton, a sociology and women's studies professor at Morehead State University in Kentucky, wanted to break through this impasse and look more closely at the complexities of strippers' lives. This highly readable and even-handed book consolidates her five years of research, based on interviews with exotic dancers and first-hand observations. She visited more than thirty strip clubs in San Francisco, Honolulu, and a medium-sized Southeastern city she renames "Silverton", taking care to include both working-class and upscale venues.

Barton found that many strippers are intelligent, self-aware women who are making an understandable choice from the limited options available to them. However, both the fledgling dancers and society at large underestimate the hidden costs of the profession. These include harassment by customers and management, social stigma, discrimination in housing and employment outside the sex industry, difficulty forming intimate relationships, and a workplace environment that encourages substance abuse. The longer a woman stays in the business, the more the negative factors outweigh the positives. Barton found that the balance shifts after about three years (p.7). By this point, though, the stigma and the lure of fast money with flexible working hours have made it harder for such women to transition to a normal job.

A Review of Christine Stark, "Girls to boyz: Sex radical women promoting pornography and prostitution"
Because they are women and/or homosexuals, sex radicals who enjoy sadomasochism and purchasing prostitutes get away with claiming to undermine patriarchal norms, while in fact they are perpetuating other women's subordination. Sex radical Veronica Monet, in a 1997 essay, wrote about hiring a prostitute in Nevada because she believed women had a right to do anything men could do. According to Stark's own research on Nevada's legalized brothels, the owners routinely groom underage runaways to enter prostitution when they turn 18, then virtually imprison them in the houses, with no money and no way to communicate privately with the outside world (pp.283-85). In a remarkable display of callousness, sex radical Donna Minkowitz has bragged about masturbating to news stories about the 1992 Glen Ridge, NJ case in which teenage boys gang-raped a retarded girl with a baseball bat. (p.286) Female-to-male transsexual sex radical Pat Califia writes articles glorifying pedophilia and incest. (p.286) How exactly does this challenge the dominant power structure?

A Review of D.A. Clarke, "Prostitution for everyone: Feminism, globalisation, and the sex industry"
Whatever one thinks of Clarke's economic analysis (unrestricted loans to developing countries create their own set of problems), it's hard to ignore the similarities between common pro-porn arguments and the ideology of the unrestrained marketplace. Neoliberalism's key article of faith is that the marketplace is the ideal paradigm for all human interactions, and that it will produce fair and free outcomes if only we don't regulate it in any way. (p.165) There is no room in this philosophy for noneconomic values such as kindness, human dignity, responsibility to the community, civil rights other than the right to property, or equality among social groups. Similarly, porn advocates behave as if the moral issues begin and end with women's individual choices: as long as she's being paid to be gang-raped, beaten, forced to drink urine, and so on, the rest of us are off the hook. Pro-porn leftists need to realize they are acting as shills for an ideology that reduces human beings to commodities or consumers, the same belief that they oppose in other contexts. (p. 169)

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Raunch culture came along as a way for women to have their cake and eat it too. We could feel empowered without needing to make enemies or stop having "fun" as defined by the commercial media. In this way, says Levy, feminist energy became co-opted by a consumer culture in which solidarity for political change is replaced by personal advancement at the expense of other women. For a large part of raunch culture's appeal, she says, is that it permits women to hang onto their feminist credentials while using their sexuality to achieve success in a male-dominated business world.

D.A. Clarke: Women Adopting Men's Bad Habits Is Not the Answer
Ruthlessness, hardness, force and intimidation have characterised the successful businessman, soldier, gangster, politician and pimp from the very beginning. If we admire those qualities, we implicitly endorse the world these men have created - perhaps we subscribe to the fantasy that women can become hard enough and mean enough to compete with men on their own turf. Suppose we do so, and suppose some of us win: will a world that contains a token handful of lesbian aristocrats among its ruling class be a better world?

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 11/17/2009 6:35 AM

Pictures from The Clothesline Project at Smith College

Here are pictures from The Clothesline Project at Smith College, November 1-8, 2009.
The Clothesline Project is an exhibit intended to break the silence around sexual assault and gender violence. It is a vehicle for people affected by sexual violence to express their emotions or share their stories by decorating shirts, which are then hung on a clothesline. The event is a week long. Sponsored by AWARE.























































































See also:

StandardNET: "Pornography at root of more and more domestic violence incidents"
One in four women have experienced or are in a violent domestic relationship...

Testimony from Northampton Shelter for Battered Women: Half of Abusers Use Pornography as a Part of the Abuse (explicit)

Abusive Relationships and Porn: The Similarities (explicit language)

Evidence Assessment: The Role of Pornography in the Physical Abuse of Women

Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today's Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)
Ana Bridges: "...I'm going to begin to talk about what it is that we found after looking at these 304 scenes in these 50 top selling pornographic films. In total in the 304 scenes we coded a total of 3,376 acts of aggression. That ends up averaging...to an aggressive act every minute and a half. The scenes on average contained eleven and a half acts of verbal or physical aggression...

Kink.com: Bondage Porn Gone Chillingly, Cheerfully Corporate (explicit language)
Sex and Submission
"Our powerless girls scream as they are tied up and forced to have sex over and over. Are they screams for help or do they really just want more?"

Hustler Cartoons: Racism, Misogyny, Anti-Semitism, Homophobia, Pedophilia, Incest, Ridicule of Disabled People... (explicit)
A man watches TV while a woman looks on. On the wall, there's a baseball bat in a case with this sign: "In case the bitch gets mouthy, break glass".

Businessmen at a meeting discuss a new doll product, "Baby Kick and Bleed with Bandage and Crutch". The child is shown saying, "Please no!" The caption reads, "...And we pitch it toward the battered-child market!"

The police are called to a home with domestic violence. On the wall are portraits showing women in bandages and smiling men. One cop says, "Yep, it looks like another family with a history of wife abuse."
Childhood Spanking Linked to Coerced Sex and Risky Sex in Adulthood; Amazing.net Milks Pain for Profit (explicit)
Pain 25
Remember when your daddy would come home from work and beat the living shit out of you? Remember how your
flesh bruised and bled at the end of his belt? Some days you thought your worthless life was over. My how you
begged and cried. Good times. Damn good times. Well now you can relive those special moments. Take Pain #25
home today!

Herbert, Brooks and Osayande on Misogyny, Money and Power; Amazing.net's War on Women and Blacks (explicit)
Extreme Audition #6
What happens when you have a tiny little blonde walk into your studio? Well a lot of fun for Michael Kahn. This pretty little thing was in tears by the end of this video. She had no tolerance for pain and so it was great fun to beat her little ass.

Pain #26
Can you maintain ninety minutes of masochistic mayhem?! Watch today's most worthless degenerates line up for abuse and debasement. On the street. In private. Female pigs have been stripped of all dignity. Listen to their wretched screams. Watch their distorted pained faces. Then jerk off to the brutal inhumanity of it all!

Now on Sale at Amazing.net: The Swirlies (explicit)

Now Showing at Amazing.net: The War on Relationships (explicit)
Pain In The Ass
The bitch has been naggin at you all fuckin day. Take out the garnage. Do the dirty fuckin dishes. Dont drink so much beer. Blah Blah Blah. Theres only so much a man can fuckin take so when its bed time make it your turn to be the major pain in her ass...

Now Showing at Amazing.net: The War on Privacy and Consent (explicit)
Blame It On Daddy
Look what daddy made them do. These chicks are fucked up and they just can't get enough. Adopt these sluts today make them call you daddy and see what they won't do!

Blame It On Daddy #2
Hi daddy look what I'm doing! Look at what you made me do dad... I'm all fucked up and I can only cum from anal!

Some Porn Hard to Distinguish from Training for Pedophiles (explicit language)
Movies sold by Capital Video and its affiliates include "Amateur Initiation 29", "Bubble Gum Virgins", "Early Entries #4", "Forbidden Cherries", "Home Schooled #3" and "It's a Young Girls Thing".

Amazing.net: Making Nazis Sexy (explicit)
Plenty of movies have been made about the Nazi regime, but only the porn industry expects you to orgasm to it. Now on sale at Amazing.net/Goflix.com, you'll find Nazi Torture Castle (explicit link)...

Punishment Porn: "Whether-She-Wants-It-Or-Not" (explicit)
Strictly Speaking Spanking, a magazine on sale at Bookends of Enfield, calls itself "entertainment for consenting adults". On reading the magazine, however, one could be forgiven for becoming confused about the role of consent in the entertainment...

MacKinnon: Framing Torture as Porn Magically Makes It Acceptable

Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn Confuses Young Men about How to Behave
There's a professor of psychology at UMass Boston who has done his doctoral dissertation and subsequent research on sexual aggression among young college males, and he's found that in dozens and dozens of interviews that young guys will sit there in a room with him, and they'll admit to or talk matter-of-factly about, "I did this to her, I did that, and we did this and that," and they never once refer to themselves as rapists, of course, and they never once refer to the behavior that they've engaged in as raping behavior, or in any way criminal. But this psychologist will tell you that he knows that if they were under oath in the court of law, they would be admitting to first degree felonies, but they think it's normal, perfectly natural herterosexual relations.

Porn Use Correlates with Infidelity, Prostitution, Aggression, Rape-Supportive Beliefs
In 1995, Human Communication Research reported on a meta-analysis of 33 different studies. Researchers found that "Exposure to pornography increases behavioral aggression. While there are many factors that influence this effect (for example, the content of the pornography viewed), the researchers conclude that a connection between exposure to pornography and subsequent behavioral aggression exists."

In 2000, researchers reported in Annual Review of Sex Research that "A relationship exists between frequent pornography consumption and sexually aggressive behavior. This relationship is especially strong for those with the highest "predisposing" risk level for sexual aggression. Those who are at high risk for sexual aggression and who frequently consume pornography have sexual aggression levels that are four times higher than those who do not consume pornography frequently."

Testimony in Minneapolis: "Pornography in the home is insidious. Girls pick up the message, they act it out, they don't know why they feel suicidal and crazy."
I believe a lot of battering of young girls has to do with sexual feelings, much of what comes every time in families where there was pornography. The father feels sexual towards his daughter, wants to repress that, and instead of taking responsibility for his addiction, which is out of control, beats his daughter. It is connected many times. I have had fathers open up to this when they come to family therapy and talk about it...

Testimony in Minneapolis: Role of Porn in Child Sexual Abuse; Pornographers Perpetuate, Profit from Dysfunction
Whether or not pornography is causative of real abuse practices, it is fully and profoundly supportive of them... Pornography "de-sensitizes" men to the real and gross violation of a human being involved...

What is key to the issue is that permission, societal permission, is at the core of real paternal child molestation; and at the core of most marital and stranger rape...

Influence of Porn on Sex Practices: Dispatches from the Field (explicit language)

Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography on Family Values; Women's Desire to Have Daughters Plummets
The most astonishing effect of prolonged pornography consumption on family values, however, concerns the desire to have children... [E]xposure to pornography reduced the desire to have children, and it did so in a uniform fashion. Male and female respondents, students and nonstudents alike, wanted fewer children on the average. The desire to have male offspring dropped 31%. The desire for female offspring, being lower overall, dropped by about twice that margin: 61%. This reduction proved specific to gender. Male respondents expressed little desire for female offspring altogether. It's the desire of females for offspring of their own kind that, after consumption of pornography, shrank to one third of its normal strength...

Exposure to Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual Victimization
Some males who have never acted on their desire to have sex with a child may be ignorant or anxious about how to proceed with this. Such concerns can inhibit them from perpetrating such an act. Child pornography removes this impediment by providing instructions for the sexual abuse of children. Tyler, a detective sergeant in the San Bernardino, California, Sheriff’s Department, testified in hearings on child pornography and pedophilia conducted by Senator Arlen Specter about a child pornography magazine that described “how to have sex with prepubescent children” (Child Pornography and Pedophilia, 1984, p. 33). During these hearings, Senator Specter also discussed a book titled How to Have Sex With Kids that described “how to meet children, how to entice them, how to develop a relationship with them, and how to have sex with them”(p. 30). Sexually explicit illegal material presumably demonstrates at what ages it is possible for adult males to penetrate young children anally and vaginally. Similarly, Gail Dines, Robert Jensen, and Ann Russo (1998) analyzed a scene in the best-selling pseudochild pornography video titled Cherry Poppers Vol. 10 that included “realistic detailed instructions on how to initiate a child into sex” (p. 88). Dines, Jensen, and Russo considered it to be “a manual for how to perpetrate a sexual assault on a child” (p. 88)...

We have not seen any pictorial child pornography that shows a sexual predator being apprehended by the police or ending up in prison...

Exposure to large amounts of child pornography undermines viewers’ fear of legal sanctions, public shame, and ostracism...

Porn's "Verbatim" Accounts of the Pleasures of Child Sexual Abuse Don't Square with Reality 
To read any genuine book about incest (for example, Florence Rush's The Best Kept Secret or Diana Russell's The Secret Trauma) or accounts of genuine survivors (for example, Louise Armstrong's Kiss Daddy Goodnight) is to enter a totally different world, where the sorrow, the sense of betrayal, the pain and confusion are palpable...
Let me quote from a letter I received from a victim of incest:

I have been preoccupied with understanding the act of sexual assault on children for thirty-five years, since the moment I was myself assaulted. I liken this experience to being dropped (at five years old) from an airplane over the middle of the Pacific; whereupon I spent thirty years of my life swimming from one piece of debris to another, alone and vulnerable to attack. All the while I kept myself alive mentally by sheer determination to discover how this could have happened... I recall my attacks vividly. My father had divorced and remarried, taking custody of me. My new stepmother's father came to visit and proceeded to attack me, twice. He would wait until I was asleep and then I would be awakened by a hand clamped over my mouth...and then he proceeded. The violation was as if an atomic bomb had gone off in my head. All I could think about was trying to ascertain whether or not I was dead or alive. I was actually fighting death face to face. I have no trouble understanding how some children actually die during such an attack.
Compare this account with the lies told in incest pornography. The contrast is both startling and chilling... The novelized accounts of incest are fantasy, but the promotion of lies about women and incest, the propaganda, is no fantasy, but a form of action that serves to justify incest and insensitivity to survivors of incest. And, of course, incest itself is not fantasy. All the fallacies held by the public at large about incest are given legitimacy by these accounts:
  1. Incest is harmless.
  2. Incest is instigated by daughters, fathers simply respond; that is, daughters seduce their fathers.
  3. Daughters who are willing victims are insane.
  4. Coercion plays no role in incest.
  5. Any physical harm is so temporary that it is like a fantasy.
  6. Fathers have incest with their daughters out of love.
  7. Incest is a natural act.
These fallacies/fantasies (lies) have a distinguished lineage. For when Freud decided that the accounts of incest (which he first believed) were in fact nothing but the overheated fantasies of adolescent girls, he shifted the onus of responsibility from adults to children. Incest then became a question of wishes, fantasies, and impulses on the part of children toward their parent, not acts engaged in by adults.

Rick Porras, Capital Video Executive, Would Rather You Not Know He Is a Pornographer (explicit language)
...Considering the role of porn in domestic abuse and child molestation, [Rick Porras] might not be proud of some of the magazines sold by Capital Video, which include such material as:
Magazine: World of Black Bondage

Article: ONCE A Slave...
"Because this babe has a submissive personality and a heart-shaped behind, she makes the perfect slave. Be that as it may, she got the notion into her pretty head that she wanted to play dom.

"Well, her man quickly disabused her of the idea that she could dominate him. He got rough, took away her leather paddle, threw her onto the bed and tied her into a series of strict positions."
Photo Caption: "The look in her eyes tells us that she would like this bondage session to end pretty soon. Forget it, girl!"

Photo Caption: "Her Master has told her, 'Don't you dare move.' She's finding that immobility is in itself a form of torture."

Photo Caption: "Because her body is beginning to ache, she writhes on the carpet. It makes watching her even more arousing."

Photo Caption: "Tied to the post, Tracy takes a fearful whipping."

Story: My Father, The Hero
First He Protected Me, Then He Porked Me!

Story: Getting Gooey With Uncle Louie
His Huge Cock Made Me A Woman!

Story: Portrait Of A Hot Pussy
My Brother Painted Me Nude, Then We Got Lewd!

Story: Two On A Tool
I Gave Both Of My Daughters A Good Fuck!

Any feelings of discomfort or embarrassment would be completely understandable. Fortunately, there is a simple way to ease them. Quit. Today.

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 11/8/2009 1:56 PM

Letter to Gazette: "Urges Valley Advocate to stop running escort ads"

Today's Daily Hampshire Gazette publishes a letter to the editor from NoPornNorthampton's Adam Cohen. Links have been added to the text below for the convenience of the reader. The Gazette (a daily) and the Valley Advocate (an alternative weekly) are owned by the same company, Newspapers of New England, and serve similar regions in Western Massachusetts.
Urges Valley Advocate to stop running escort ads

To the editor:

The Gazette writes of past suffering in its Oct. 26 editorial, "Slavery's unfinished story," but you can find present-day exploitation in the Gazette's sister publication - the Valley Advocate - and its massage/escort advertising section. Many of these ads appear to involve prostitution.

As Joe Parker writes for Prostitution Research & Education, "Real sexual relationships are not hard to find. There are plenty of adults of both sexes who are willing to have sex if someone treats them well, and asks. But there lies the problem. Some people do not want an equal, sharing relationship. They do not want to be nice. They do not want to ask. They like the power involved in buying a human being who can be made to do almost anything."

The results? As reported by the Chicago Tribune in April 2008, a comprehensive 2004 mortality study, conducted by the American Journal of Epidemiology, shows that workplace homicide rates for women working in prostitution are 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women (which is working in a liquor store) and the average age of death of the women studied was 34.

In one study, 75 percent of women in escort prostitution had attempted suicide and prostituted women comprised 15 percent of all completed suicides reported by hospitals.

In an interview on WHMP radio in March 2008, Valley Advocate editor Tom Vannah argued that most prostituted women freely choose their "job," but the reality is that most feel trapped by poverty, abuse, addiction and coercion. The harm, trauma and despair are all too evident. It's time for the Advocate to exit the escort business. More information on the subject is available on the Internet.

Adam Cohen

Northampton

See also:

Our Poster to the Valley Advocate: "Stand up for women! Drop your Massage/Escort ads"

Not For Sale Media Project; Downloadable Posters

Cincinnati: Coalition asks CityBeat to stop allowing promotion of prostitution through advertising

Orlando Weekly Drops Adult-Services Ads in Wake of Police Sting; "Operation Weekly Shame"

Orlando Sentinel: "Weekly's publisher: Arrests are payback" (10/23/07)
"When the video comes out, it will be telling because our officers tell them about specific sex acts they perform for money and ask how they can get that across better to their clientele," Zambouros said...

"First Amendment rights do not protect anyone from committing a crime," he said.

The Village Voice Earns $80,000/Month from Prostitution, Sex Trafficking and other Adult Ads (explicit language)
[Manny, a former pimp,] says it's not difficult for a pimp to recruit his harem.

"You don't have to tie a girl up -- you just keep her high."

MSNBC Investigates Human Trafficking and Prostitution in the US; Valley Advocate Advertises "Foreign Fantasies" Where "Everything Goes"

Puncturing Alan Dershowitz's Delusions about Prostitution
Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh analyzed arrest records and sexual transactions in Chicago. Far from earning a thousand dollars an hour, prostitutes typically receive $25-30 per hour. The risks of getting a disease are high--condoms are used in only a quarter of tricks. The average prostitute experiences one violent assault a month...

Ask the Valley Advocate's New Owner to Drop the Sex Ads

Belltown Messenger: "Greed, Lust and Ink"

"New York Press No Longer Marketing Arm for Prostitution/Trafficking"

Another Victory for NOW-NYC: New York Magazine Drops Sex Ads
One would think that this would be exactly the kind of exploitation the [Village] Voice would revel in exposing. But because the Voice is free, it apparently needs the revenue brought in by, this week, 10 pages of these ads.

And so its press release yammers on about how our freedoms are "under attack by the Bush administration," and makes NOW sound like the Taliban, and finally trots out the same pathetic excuse New York once made: "If there is evidence that any advertiser in our pages engaged in...sex slavery..." Blah blah blah.

It's hard to be part of the solution, when you're part of the problem.

November 13-14 Symposium in Philadelphia: Trafficking in Sex and Labor

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 11/7/2009 9:21 AM

November 13-14 Symposium in Philadelphia: Trafficking in Sex and Labor

Please circulate this flyer widely. Download the full-size PDF (95KB). Register here for the symposium.




See also:

Hunt Alternatives Fund: Demand Abolition
Demand Abolition supports the modern-day slavery movement by combating the demand for sex trafficking. By conducting and disseminating research, convening key stakeholders to share best practices, and educating policymakers, Demand Abolition catalyzes systemic social change to reflect the dignity of all people.

Polaris Project Launches TraffickingResourceCenter.org

Press Release: Action Network to use RNC and Minnesota State Fair to Bring Attention to Problem of Sex Trafficking

Sweden's Prostitution Solution: Why Hasn't Anyone Tried This Before?

Abolishing Prostitution: The Swedish Solution - An Interview with Gunilla Ekberg by the Rain and Thunder Collective

"New York Press No Longer Marketing Arm for Prostitution/Trafficking"

"Trade - A Film Brings Sex Trafficking Home"

New York Times: "The Girls Next Door"; Worldwide Sex Trafficking; Role of Porn

Gloria Steinem at Smith: Cooperation, Not Domination
...there are more slaves in proportion to the world’s population--more people held by force or coercion without benefit from their work--more now than there were in the 1800s. Sex trafficking, labor trafficking, children and adults forced into armies: they all add up to a global human-trafficking industry that is more profitable than the arms trade, and second only to the drug trade. The big difference now from the 1800s is that the United Nations estimates that 80% of those who are enslaved are women and children...

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 11/2/2009 7:46 PM

New York Times: "For Runaways, Sex Buys Survival"

Those who speak about "choice" in prostitution should consider the choices faced by the young and homeless. The New York Times reports on 10/27/09:
For Runaways, Sex Buys Survival

...Most of the estimated 1.6 million children who run away each year return home within a week. But for those who do not, the desperate struggle to survive often means selling their bodies.

Nearly a third of the children who flee or are kicked out of their homes each year engage in sex for food, drugs or a place to stay, according to a variety of studies published in academic and public health journals. But this kind of dangerous barter system can quickly escalate into more formalized prostitution, when money changes hands. And then, child welfare workers and police officials say, it becomes extremely difficult to help runaways escape the streets. Many become more entangled in abusive relationships, and the law begins to view them more as teenage criminals than under-age victims...

“It’s definitely worsening,” said Sgt. Kelley O’Connell, a detective who until this year ran the Boston Police Department’s human-trafficking unit, echoing a sentiment conveyed in interviews with law enforcement officials from more than two dozen cities. “Gangs used to sell drugs,” she said. “Now many of them have shifted to selling girls because it’s just as lucrative but far less risky.”

...more than two dozen convicted and still incarcerated pimps described the complicated roles they played as father figure, landlord, boss and boyfriend to the girls who worked for them. They said they went after girls with low self-esteem, prior sexual experience and a lack of options...

Built of desperation and fear, the bonds [juveniles] form with their pimps are difficult to break. Some girls continue working for pimps even after the pimps are incarcerated...

When recruiting, some pimps said they prowled homeless shelters, bus stations and shopping malls or posed in newspaper advertisements as photographers and talent scouts. Others said they worked Internet chat rooms and phone-sex lines...

For those girls not already engaged in survival sex, the grooming process was gradual and calculated. At first, the sex is consensual. Before long, the girl is asked to turn occasional tricks to help pay bills...
The article goes on to describe a successful policing approach in Dallas that involves identifying high-risk teens (repeat runaways), building trust with them and sheltering them in a special city facility. This approach is ready to be tested in other parts of the country but is languishing for want of federal funds.


See also:

Escort Prostitution: A Response to Tom Vannah, Editor of the Valley Advocate
We have asked the Advocate to drop ads for escort services and other commercial sex enterprises. Unfortunately, Mr. Vannah believes this is a matter of freedom of speech. Any compassion he might feel for people in the sex industry or the community at large is not as important.

Mr. Vannah concedes that "there is some percentage of people who are not willing participants in the sex industry", but believes that if the Advocate refuses to accept Massage/Escort ads, this will unacceptably crimp "artistic freedom". He mentions Mapplethorpe pictures as an example. How dropping ads for commercial sex enterprises will compel the Advocate to turn away Mapplethorpe pictures is not clear to us...

While a few women may choose a life of prostitution in a truly voluntary fashion, the reality for most is a history of sexual and/or child abuse, separation from their family and/or country, and poverty. Addictions to drugs or alcohol are common. They are routinely lied to, coerced, abused, threatened, and blackmailed (e.g. 'I'll hurt your family back in the Ukraine if you don't cooperate').

News Roundup: Age of Entry into Prostitution Declining

Prostitution: Factsheet on Human Rights Violations
The average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years (M.H. Silbert and A.M. Pines, 1982, "Victimization of street prostitutes, Victimology: An International Journal, 7: 122-133) or 14 years (D.Kelly Weisberg, 1985, Children of the Night: A Study of Adolescent Prostitution, Lexington, Mass, Toronto). Most of these 13 or 14 year old girls were recruited or coerced into prostitution. Others were "traditional wives" without job skills who escaped from or were abandoned by abusive husbands and went into prostitution to support themselves and their children. (Denise Gamache and Evelina Giobbe, Prostitution: Oppression Disguised as Liberation, National Coalition against Domestic Violence, 1990)...

Estimates of the prevalence of incest among prostitutes range from 65% to 90%. The Council for Prostitution Alternatives, Portland, Oregon Annual Report in 1991 stated that: 85% of prostitute/clients reported history of sexual abuse in childhood; 70% reported incest. The higher percentages (80%-90%) of reports of incest and childhood sexual assaults of prostitutes come from anecdotal reports and from clinicians working with prostitutes (interviews with Nevada psychologists cited by Patricia Murphy, Making the Connections: women, work, and abuse, 1993, Paul M. Deutsch Press, Orlando, Florida; see also Rita Belton, "Prostitution as Traumatic Reenactment," 1992, International Society for Traumatic Stress Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA M.H. Silbert and A.M. Pines, 1982, "Victimization of street prostitutes," Victimology: An International Journal, 7: 122-133; C. Bagley and L Young, 1987, "Juvenile Prostitution and child sexual abuse: a controlled study," Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health, Vol 6: 5-26...

Pimps target girls or women who seem naive, lonely, homeless, and rebellious. At first, the attention and feigned affection from the pimp convinces her to "be his woman." Pimps ultimately keep prostituted women in virtual captivity by verbal abuse - making a woman feel that she is utterly worthless: a toilet, a piece of trash; and by physical coercion - beatings and the threat of torture. 80% to 95% of all prostitution is pimp-controlled. (Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality, 1995, New York, New York University Press)...

Realities of Teen Prostitution Mock Notions of 'Sex Work', 'Sex-Positive', 'Freedom' and 'Empowerment'; Media Glamorizes Pimps
[ABC News:] "I think in the last couple years we've seen a real increase in the glorification of pimp culture," Lloyd says. "Girls growing up now, and boys too, are beginning to see this as cute and sexy or glamorous and not really understanding the realities of the sex industry..."

"What you see in the movies, what you see on TV -- it's not like that," Sara says. "They don't tell you the part about the rapes. They don't tell you about getting beat up. They don't tell you that you might die every day."

Salon: Atlanta's underage sex trade
The problem isn't restricted to so-called Hotlanta; Herbert notes, dispiritedly, that "the overall market for sex with kids is booming in many parts of the U.S." But the city's role as a convention and travel hub has given it a particular boost. And advocates say that the prevailing preference for ever-younger prostitutes -- fueled by "the cultural emphasis on the sexual appeal of very young women and girls" and "the widely held belief among johns that there is less risk of contracting a disease from younger prostitutes" -- has pimps and sex traffickers recruiting more at-risk kids than ever before.

The Village Voice Earns $80,000/Month from Prostitution, Sex Trafficking and other Adult Ads (explicit language)
[Manny, a former pimp,] says it's not difficult for a pimp to recruit his harem.

"You don't have to tie a girl up -- you just keep her high."

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Posted by NPNAdmin at 10/31/2009 4:58 AM
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