Re: Final Comment

1998-01-12 Thread R. Anders Schneiderman

At 03:21 PM 1/9/98 PST8PDT, Jim wrote:
 Surely nobody disagrees with the idea that sex-slavery or underage
 prostitution is wrong. The sex-workers comments were not aimed at
 coerced or non-consensual prostitution, but at prostitutes who bject to
 being criminalised in the name of saving their honour.
 James Heartfield
 [ Jim replies with examples of stupid statements by Milton Friedman ]
...
Capitalism produces a whole host of slick facades to "show" that 
choices are indeed free choices or if they are even "constrained 
choices", we are all constrained and they are choices nontheless.
But the reality is that what appears to be "consensual" is the 
"consent" given when the alternative is not simply less money but 
rather no money; the "consent" given when the alternative is not 
simply less comfortable shelter but rather no shelter; the "consent"
given when the alternative is a slow and horrible death.

Jim, in case you've forgotten what list you're on, this is the Progressive
Economists list, not the NeoClassical Economists list.  Nobody on this
list--including the two prostitutes who chimed in--is saying or even
implying that prostitution is "consensual" when the choice is turning
tricks vs. starvation, or letting one's family starve.  Nobody.  Honest.

Surely criminalization of prostitution will not solve anything and 
surely criminalization leads to more underground activity and makes 
it more difficult to control the disease trends. But the sanitized 
brothels of Nevada and Canberra are light years away from the 
brothels of Patpong, the conditions of young Indian prostitutes in 
Great Falls or the conditions of a highway prostitute servicing long-
distance truck dirvers in India. And those, especially on the left 
and even call themselves leftists, and then talk about "free choice", 
or "free consent" or "consenual prostitution" under capitalism 
and based on the isolated and perhaps self-serving or perhaps even 
self-rationalizing rantings of a few white middle-class "high-class" 
hookers in Canberra, well there is a party available for your 
political action--the RIGHT-WING libertarian party.

Again, who do you think you're arguing with?  It's hard to imagine that in
a country like, for ex, Thailand you could meaningfully talk about
"consensual prostitution" when the alternatives to prostitution are awful,
scarce, or nonexistant.  But what does that have to do with prostitution in
other regions of capitalism?

I met a few Coyote activists when I was working at the Berkeley Free
Clinic, and they really changed the way I think about prostitution.  In my
heart, I don't how someone can actually want to sell sex for a living if
they've got any alternatives, but the women I met from Coyote said they
genuinely preferred being a hooker to being a waitress, a secretary, or
most of the other working class jobs that were available to them.  At one
point, I did ask, "would you want your daughter to become a hooker?"  One
said yes, the other said, "no, but I wouldn't want her to have to be a
secretary or a waitress either, and I definitely wouldn't want her to be a
housewife in a fucked-up marriage like I was; I want her to get an
education and move up."  Their goal wasn't just to legalize prostitution
and improve working conditions for hookers but to improve the situation for
all women, so that no women would end up becoming a prostitute because they
felt they didn't have an alternative.

If you want, you can treat the Coyote activists I met as suffering from
false consciousness, or you can class-bait them as just speaking for 'a few
white middle-class "high-class" hookers.'  That seems to me like a pretty
simple-minded way of dealing with a complicated issue.  Like I said, I have
trouble imagining turning tricks as feeling anything other than degrading,
but what the hell do I know?  There are lots of people who have sex lives
that seem degrading to me, but they don't seem to be any less happy or more
messed up than the rest of us.  Would any of this still exist under
Socialism?  Who knows?

Nobody on this side of the table is arguing in favor of putting people in
situations where they choose to do things that feel completely and utterly
degrading in the way that forcing someone to perform sex for money
can--that amounts to contractual rape.  Nobody here is saying that having
the IMF include legalizing prostitution as part of their economic agenda
for destabilized East Asian countries is something we should push for
(although I'm sure someone will suggest it in the WSJ op-ed pages).  All
we're saying is, it doesn't make sense to argue that prostitution is
inherently degrading when there are more than a few prostitutes who say
that they don't experience it that way.  Putting women in economic
situations which they perceive as degrading, whether it's prostitution or
marriage, is evil.  But arguing that all true lefties have to see sex the
same way is little more than political correctness dressed up in 

Re: Final Comment

1998-01-10 Thread James Heartfield

In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], James Michael Craven
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Capitalism produces a whole host of slick facades to "show" that 
choices are indeed free choices or if they are even "constrained 
choices", we are all constrained and they are choices nontheless.
But the reality is that what appears to be "consensual" is the 
"consent" given when the alternative is not simply less money but 
rather no money; the "consent" given when the alternative is not 
simply less comfortable shelter but rather no shelter; the "consent"
given when the alternative is a slow and horrible death.

This is all very well, but you seem to be arguing that there is no
difference between wage slavery and slavery, or between adulthood and
childhood.

To argue that the power of capital is coercive surely does not mean that
we might as wll be slaves, does it?
-- 
James Heartfield




Re: Final Comment

1998-01-09 Thread James Heartfield

In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], James Michael Craven
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
But just as these privileged few don't speak for 
me (also one of the "privileged few" in relative terms) and certainly
do not speak for the part-time teachers or the grounds keepers, so no 
hooker from Canberra can speak for all "sex workers"--like a teenage 
Blackfeet girl in Great Falls or a sex slave in Patpong--just because 
she is doing tricks and is a self-proclaimed "activist" for sex 
workers.

Surely nobody disagrees with the idea that sex-slavery or underage
prostitution is wrong. The sex-workers comments were not aimed at
coerced or non-consensual prostitution, but at prostitutes who bject to
being criminalised in the name of saving their honour.

Fraternally
-- 
James Heartfield




Final Comment

1998-01-09 Thread James Michael Craven

I lived in Puerto Rico 1983-86 and worked as a Senior Planner for the 
Planning Board of the Office of the Governor of P.R. My original 
assignment was to work as a project leader restructuring and 
examining the input-output system used for planning and forecasting 
estimates.

After some time I was asked to design and carry out an "inductive" 
(adductive) study of the linkages, leakages and dimensions of aspects 
of the underground economy of P.R. (Drugs, Prostitution, Bolitos 
(numbers rackets) with reference to the probable effects on leakages 
from final demand (and the interactive effects through cells of the 
input-output matrices). Because P.R. is relatively small in area and 
because the induced investment/profit imperative mechanisms of 
capitalism lead to spatial agglomerations of investment, jobs, 
incomes and also those involved in underground activities, and 
because the hypothetico-deductivist scenarios for estimating 
dimensions, linkages, leakages of underground activities yielded 
nothing but indeterminate scenarios (scenarios built upon/derived 
from other scenarios...), it was thought that some filed study 
(bottom-up) was needed. At the time almost 2/3 of the population of 
P.R. was on pagos transferencias (some form of transfer payments), 
there were emerging incidences of AIDS in San Juan and other factors 
lead to this work being commissioned.

I was tasked with working with D.E.A., PR Police (Control de Vicio), 
FBI, Treasury, IRS and anyone else from which I could obtain 
informant reports, locations/agglomerations of underground activities.
Before I accepted the assignment, I demanded and got assurance that I 
could work in the field without any police or police informants 
working with me and that I would not under any circumstances identify 
or assist in the identification/apprehension of any sources. I worked 
almost exclusively in Spanish language and was turned loose.

Through some political contacts (I was a supporter of the 
Independentistas and curiously the government knew it) I 
progressively made more and more contacts with prostitutes (in 
brothels like the Black Angus--not Stewart Anderson's--in San Juan, 
and others in Ponce, Mayaguez, Arecibo, Aguadilla etc as well as with 
street prostitutes etc.) I took special care to make sure I was not 
followed or observed by any police informants.

I was interested in such factors as national origin, length of time 
in P.R., plans to leave P.R., average income, rental and other 
expenses, living arrangements, percentage of income sent to relatives 
outside P.R., arrangements with pimps, buying habits, drug habits, 
reasons for entering prostitution, any plans to leave it, other 
illegal activities involved with etc.

I offered to pay for time spent and on off time so that the people 
would not suffer loss of income; interestingly very few wanted money 
for interview time and more and more would come after fellow sex 
workers would tell them that I could be trusted, wasn't interested in 
laying any kind of morality trip on anyone; for many they expressed 
that it was a kind of catharsis talking about their lives, dreams, 
conditions of work etc. Some with whom I talked were indeed schooled 
and some were students at U.P.R. or Interamerican. I also talked with 
male prostitutes some of whom were 14 and 15 years old.

The vast majority of sex workers with whom I dealt were poor 
Dominicanas, Haitians, Columbianas, Cubans (only about 20% of the 
prostututes in P.R. were Puerto Rican). And yes I found many who 
wanted it legalized but when I asked if prostitution were legalized, 
and if social attitudes changed such that prostitution were seen as 
just another kind of work, would they have any objection to their 
sons or daughters going into the business, not one said they would 
have no objection--every single one with children or plans to have 
children said they were working so that their children would not have 
to do what they were doing. I did ask if the work was seen to be 
degrading because of social attitudes and if producing sex services 
could be seen as no different than producing any other kind of 
service if only society's--and the individual prostitute's--attitudes 
toward sex and morality would change and in virtually every case, or 
almost every case the response was "you just don't know what it is 
like to have some stranger huffing and puffing over you, playing 
domination games, asking if you have a young daugter under 14 and 
offering an extra bonus to fuck her, doing you with no regard or care 
as to how you feel about the act itself." (Some of the types of 
comments I used to get). I would hear stories about being set up for 
gang rape, about being beat out of the meagre money and about John's 
who would offer extra NOT to use a condom. 

And this debate is not new to me. I have known about COYOTE and other 
such groups for a long time; I read some of their stuff. So I would 
ask: If prostitution were