7 Comments

1. Brendan:

   It doesn’t take a genius to see the obvious. The men are younger: more testosterone. Young men who visit prostitutes are likely to be pretty low on the human ladder–even more so than the sort of older men who have no problem going to prostitutes. And times are tough: and tough times and tough places are where you find prostitution, especially at the lower end economically, if one can put it that way. Also, our times have seen a dramatic incidence in the sexualization of human beings: beginning with the “sexual revolution,” the blatant and totalitarian use of sex in advertising, the relaxing of mores in television, and finally the internet; not to mention the hormonization of food and the early sexuality of girls, “beauty” pageants, etc., etc. Sexuality has been totally commercialized, then further debased, dehumanized, totally separated from love and union. It’s about human animals in heat, about lust–except that many species of animals have a sure instinct and dignity that human animals lack. Not for nothing is lust considered classically as one of the 7 deadly sins. There isn’t a single religion that isn’t explicitly against it.

   1 September 2010, 3:48 pm

2. Henry:

   The United States is concerned about women worldwide. It is touched and outraged by one Afghan woman, Aisha, whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband. To defend her honor, it has killed hundreds of thousands of her brothers and sisters. To protect her, it has destroyed her country. It’s the principle that matters. We care about the individual, at least those who are useful to our agendas. It’s the masses we don’t give a flying whoopee about. How can we not raise our voices, for example, when an imprisoned prostitute — hardly a criminal, really, even less so than adulterer — is left in a cage, to be baked to death for at least four hours in 107-degree heat? Her captors ignored her pleas for water. They wouldn’t even allow her to use the bathroom, so she soiled herself before passing out. She was still alive, however, when finally taken to the hospital, where doctors allowed her to die. Incredibly, no charges have been filed. Such barbarity and judicial callousness deserve our fullest condemnations, except that hardly anyone has heard of Marcia Powell, 48, who died in an Arizona prison in May of 2009. The mainstream media ignore her, because her abject death cannot be exploited for political purposes. We’re not trying to bomb Arizona.

   Collapsing America
   http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26350.htm

   13 September 2010, 2:45 pm

3. Jane:

   If you want to see just how low the average mentality has sunk, here is a glaringly clear example: 89,000,000 views. No one comes close:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embdtwW-sSE&feature=channel

   17 September 2010, 10:52 pm

4. Jane:

   Well, call me a liar. I was just told I am totally wrong. Lady Gaga beat the pants of it:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I

   17 September 2010, 10:55 pm

5. DeAnander:

   I thought the original youtube vid whose link Jane posted might be horrendously offensive or violent or whatever… was afraid to click on it… but instead it turns out to be “Valley Girl simultaneously channels Dear Abby and Dr Ruth” or something like that. I was expecting to be nauseated or horrified but ended up yawning — which is somehow comforting, in a way

   18 September 2010, 8:20 pm

6. C.C.:

   Stan,

   After reading your 2nd ever post on this blog (The Porn Debate, in which you had an interesting debate between you and Sex Worker), I am wondering how your view on pornography and prostitution have changed. I am aware that your overall view of pornography and prostitution remains the same (mainly that these two activities remain the two of the biggest indications of the overall male patriarchy that continues to rule worldwide). However, are there any aspects of your thoughts on prostitution and pornography that has changed since 2005?

   I ask this after seeing the evolution in the following conflicting thoughts: pacifism vs. iron logic of war, social democracy in a still-largely capitalist system vs. full scale socialism-anarchy without money, your recent conversion to Christianity after being largely agnostic for a majority of your life, etc.

   I realize that I can probably answer my question by simply reading through your entire list of blogs throughout the years. But damn, I’d rather hear it explicitly and fresh in the year 2010 (I think that this is actually an excuse for my somewhat academic laziness).

   By the way, I am the same “Anonymous” blogger that recently asked you to clarify your current pacifism. After reading “Full Spectrum Disorder”, it was a little confusing at first to connect the current pacifist Stan Goff with the Stan Goff of 2005 that believed that the FARC was fighting an unjust, but necessary, war.

   Thanks!

   20 September 2010, 8:53 am

7. DeAnander:

   I still believe that violence in the home imperils us all. Just as it spills into the streets, it schools the next generation in violence. But now I wonder if that is truly where violence starts, at home. When my father attacked my mother or me, he was often angry about something altogether different. He laid into us — me especially — because I was there. But the response? The techniques? Those were things he had learned in the army. In fact it must have been his success in learning to act so swiftly, so effectively, so violently that made him a hero and earned him the highest honors of three allied countries. His medals hung on the wall at home, under glass. Friends of our family often said to me: “You must be so proud of your father.” I was. I admired him and loved him, even though I knew what his heroism cost us, and him, at home.

   One stronghold of the battered women’s movement — in Mary land, if I remember rightly — distributed T-shirts bearing the words WORLD PEACE BEGINS AT HOME. I believed it. Raise up children in peaceful homes free of violence, I thought, and they will make peace. But now, having spent the last many years in and around wars, I think the motto is painfully idealistic. The relationship it describes is reciprocal, but not fair. World peace may begin at home, but violence just as surely begins in war; and war does not end.

   [...]

   Think of wars of recent memory and those still going on in the world today. Think of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Burma. Think of Darfur, South Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone. Think of Sri Lanka, Kashmir, East Timor, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea. Think of Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Georgia, Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia. Think especially of the United States, which has been at war, overtly or covertly, some place (or many places) in the world almost continuously since 1941.

   Today children and their mothers are among the first victims of such wars. Despite the conventions of modern warfare that forbid armies to target civilians, it is civilians who die in far greater numbers than do soldiers. The more high-tech the army, the more sophisticated its weaponry, the safer the soldiers; but that shield does not extend to citizens. In fact, in many conflicts today, ruthless leaders use an effective strategy to destroy the civil society and culture of the enemy: a deliberate but unacknowledged war against women.

   – Ann Jones

   Dazed late-night thoughts…

   [back to thread topic] The egregious abuse of prostituted women, another face of this “deliberate but unacknowledged war”… much of prostitution starts “in the home” with battery and incestuous child molestation and rape. Much of prostitution exists to service armies, officers, occupying troops: the war industry. The porn and prost industry meanwhile conditions boys and men to return “to the home” and re-enact the contempt for and instrumental use of women modelled by the industry; in a similar conditioning process the military uses porn in training and desensitising recruits, inculcating misogyny in a cumulative litany of Other-bashing that eventually justifies assassination and mass murder… and then the well-trained soldiers come “home”… and so on…

   This notion of “the home” as a safe, protected zone separate from the dangers and cruelties of the world must be one of our most cherished illusions. When it is true (a loving family, a happy childhood, a marriage based in mutual respect and care) it is forever threatened by the forces of greed, corruption and violence “outside”; and when it is not true (which sadly seems to be much of the time) it is not only *not* separate from, but an integral part of, an apparently endless cycle of replication…

   30 September 2010, 2:30 am

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