The Abortion Stumble

There are a couple of things that I would have expected to come up amongst all the press coverage of Donald Trump's abortion stumble this week:

“I am pro-life,” Trump said. Asked how a ban would actually work, Trump said, “Well, you go back to a position like they had where they would perhaps go to illegal places but we have to ban it,” Trump said.

[Chris]Matthews then pressed Trump on whether he believes there should be punishment for abortion if it were illegal.

“There has to be some form of punishment,” Trump said. “For the woman?” Matthews asked. “Yeah,” Trump said, nodding.

Trump said the punishment would “have to be determined.”

• When I read this, the first thing I thought of was, "Oh, this is the same mistake George H. W. Bush made in 1988." From the transcript of the second debate against Dukakis:
  

  [ANN] GROER: [I]f abortions were to become illegal again, do you think that the women who defy the law and have them anyway, as they did before it was okayed by the Supreme Court, and the doctors who perform them should go to jail?
  

  BUSH: I haven't sorted out the penalties. But I do know, I do know that I oppose abortion.
  

  I'm not trying to read to much into this response, by the way. As in Trump's case, this was widely and immediately interpreted as favoring punishment for women who obtain elective abortions.* And as in Trump's case, Bush promptly walked it back.
  

  But here's the thing: I had a pretty strong memory for the details of this episode even before I looked it up, and I fully expected it to be brought up in the context of Trump making the same mistake (or "mistake"; more on this later). Yet despite googling various combinations of "Trump, Bush, 1988, abortion", I discovered not one single article that tied these two events together. That's . . . weird.
  

• I have seen several articles that in various ways have tried to hang Trump's retracted statement around the Republican Party. Salon provides an example (Trigger Warning: Amanda Marcotte):
  

  [T]he official stance that Republicans are supposed to take is that women are victims of abortion and therefore cannot be held responsible for it. Yes, it’s true that women pick up the phone, make the appointment, talk through their decisions with medical professionals, sign paperwork and then either take a pill or let the doctor perform an abortion, but none of this should be taken, in conservative eyes, as evidence that women are the people responsible for the abortion happening. Women are regarded by conservatives as fundamentally incapable of making grown-up decisions. If they choose abortion (and by implication, if they choose sex), it’s because they poor dears were misled.

  Point taken. But . . . this is hardly Exhibit A in the female deprivation of moral agency. For that, we must turn to the war on prostitution, a.k.a. "sex trafficking (H.T.: Trumwill):
  

  The [Swedish 1999 anti-prostitution] legislation was built on the public consensus that the system of prostitution promotes violence against women by normalizing sexual exploitation. Thus, in a society that aspires to advance women’s equality, it is unacceptable for men to purchase women for sexual exploitation, whether rationalized as a sexual choice or as “sex work.”
  

  Sweden does not penalize the persons in prostitution but makes resources available to them. Instead it targets and exposes the anonymous perpetrators – the buyers, mostly men, who purchase mainly women and children in prostitution.

  Come to think of it, even statutory rape laws are also premised on one party to the crime claiming "victim" status, so much so that it now apparently customary to drop the "statutory" qualifier altogether when reporting on them. It is somewhat ironic that female teachers have lately had a determined go at defying our stereotypes in this regard, but either way, the law is hardly a stranger to designating certain classes of people as victims without regard to the facts of individual cases.
  

* I went looking for video of this moment and couldn't find it, but my recollection is that the reason Bush said "I do know" twice in the second sentence of the reply was that the crowd was audibly reacting to the first sentence.

The Revenge of the Street-Walker

Senator Portman writes:

COLUMBUS, OH – Today, U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) convened a screening of I Am Jane Doe, a film available on Netflix that chronicles the stories of several victims of online sex trafficking on Backpage.com.

Except . . . I watched I am Jane Doe, and the stories of these young women are exactly what I did not find in the movie, at least with respect to their experience in sex trafficking. I was hoping to hear their accounts of having been walking to school when they were abducted by strangers and chained in a basement to be forcibly raped for months on end. I expected -- since I suspect this is probably the case -- to hear their accounts of how a string of bad decisions about everything from drugs and boyfriends to deceiving their parents and sneaking behind their backs ultimately led them to their sorry ends. But the documentary contains none of that. The women and their handlers repeatedly assert that they were "raped a thousand times" and that what happened to them was "not their fault". But if you listen closely, you realize the filmmakers know this doesn't mean what you might think. One activist with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (there are several organizations whose representatives are interviewed, but NCMEC figures prominently) admits that trafficking victims "believe that prostitution was the best of their bad options," or words to that effect, and a former trafficker, now working as an anti-trafficking consultant, explains that while the fear of violence is certainly part if it, seduction was his primary tool. But the argumentative thrust of the film is that because sex with underage girls is "statutory rape", it is therefore morally fungible with forcible rape.

Here are some other things I saw in the film:

A Whole Lot of Motte and Bailey

Most people who make a distinction between voluntary and involuntary prostitution believe the term "sex trafficking" applies to the latter and not the former. But as I have written before, this is not the case. And the filmmakers and the people they cover are allowed to jump back and forth between their condemnations of "child sex trafficking" and "sex trafficking" without ever having to give an account of exactly what they mean and exactly what their expectations are of companies earnestly trying to stay within the law.

For instance, Backpage does, apparently, have standards for the adds it runs. It specifically bans the use of a number of words and phrases that imply a participant might be underage. It forbids mentioning amounts of money or increments of time. And it forbids any specific descriptions of services.

The result looks something like this ad I cut and pasted from Backpage's "Dating" section this morning. In its entirety:

Hello gentlemen! It's *****. I'm a college student looking for assistance with expensive tuition and books! 😏 Are you looking for Companionsiiip after a stressful work day/week? Look no further my sensual hands will do the trick and make you explode from your worries !! 💥 I offer candlelight relaxing music and curve fitting lingerie . U won't regret calling me
Please be respectful over phone 📲 ***** ***/***/****
Limit texting please
😌 Call now for appointment 💋😘
😊Im offering in by south ****** ) or out to your place all over area for extra .. I travel between ******/*****/**** generous men only please❤️.. ..i proof I'm 100% real.. Only available today. Ask about hot girlfriend joining 👭

Poster's age: 28
[Name, location, and phone number redacted. Spelling and emoticons in the original.]

Any reader of this advertisement with even a modicum of worldliness knows what's being offered here, just as we know that scantily clad young woman loitering in a seedy downtown area is a streetwalker (or a cop), and we know that the people pulling up their cars to talk with her are Johns (or cops, or some flavor of well-meaning idiot). But prosecutors are not allowed to bring charges against such people based on what they know, only on what they can prove, which is why vice squads, as I understand it, actually have to get these people in a room and negotiate a fee for service before they can make an arrest.

The Backpage plaintiffs, and their political and activist supporters, however, want to turn all this censoring against Backpage, asserting that it proves that Backpage is instructing the advertisers how to evade law enforceemnt and that therefore Backpage is itself in the business of sex trafficking. It's hard not to notice the Catch-22 being created.

The kindest interpretation of this is that they believe that since underage prostitution hides amidst adult prostitution (much as underage alcohol consumption hides amidst adult drinking), that therefore it all has to go. But nobody actually comes out and says this. Rather, "child sex trafficking" is used to conceal a much larger agenda.

The SJW Mentality

The film shows a state legislative hearing during which an attorney for Backpage, Liz McDougal, is called to account for the adds placed on her website. As shown, the state representatives make speeches, ask snarky questions and then repeatedly interrupt her attempts to answer. It says something about our political culture that the documentary takes this as evidence of the questioners' moral righteousness rather than for the boorish behavior it actually is.

Less egregiously, the film gives a grand total of two sentences to a defender of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act before immediately telling us that the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both of whom submitted amici in favor of Backpage's interpretation in the Doe case, receive the bulk of their funding from Facebook and Google. I couldn't help get the impression that the intent was to generate popular pressure against Facebook and Google how the

Then there are the legal decisions themselves. To date, all legal action, both criminal and civil, has been dismissed, accompanied by opinions that are well-reasoned and emphatic in the context of the law. Yet not a single complete sentence from these decisions is quoted in the documentary. Instead, we are treated to fulmination after fulmination from lawyers and activists, angry at the fact that the "wrong people" enjoy the same protection of the law as the "right people", assuring the watchers that the judges are clueless and stupid for interpreting the law as it is clearly written.

The Runaway State

That plaintiff lawyers try to make the best of their client's weak legal position is unfortunate, but understandable, and in any case, Backpage doesn't seem to have any trouble affording its defense. The fact that several prosecutors have attempted to torture the law in their cases against Backpage is less forgiveable, and especially the late-2016 criminal charges filed in Texas and California. Given the judiciary's clear and consistent interpretation of the law, these strike me as nothing less than abuse of power, and it doesn't matter that the abusers think they're on the side of the angels.

My thoughts:

If it needs saying, I don't have a brief for prostitution, even of the "consenting adults" variety that many libertarians want to pass off as a victimless crime. I don't especially care about it, except insofar as it generates obvious negative externalities, among which street-walking is the paradigmatic example. If anything, it seems that to extent Backpage has moved the flesh trade off the streets and onto the internet, it has actually performed a public service. But neither do I especially care about the laws against it: ban it and its ads too, if that's what you wish to do.

And frankly, I'm losing interest in Section 230. If you had asked me last year, I would have said that continued immunity for forum operators was necessary to maintain a free and open internet, and that however little we like Backpage's inability or unwillingness to police its "adult services" and "dating" sections, we should be wary of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

However, over the last couple of months we have watched the big technology companies themselves strangle the baby before our eyes. So their current lobbying to continue to offer us all the bathwater we want to drink doesn't seem nearly as compelling as it once did.

That said, legislation based on lies and deception is unlikely to yield the results we want or expect. There are already examples of how the hysteria surrounding sex trafficking is causing punishments wildly disproportionate to the underlying illegality. So even if we take at face value the good intentions behind, say, S. 1693, I am skeptical that the legal regime that follows will look like anything we will be happy with.

"Consenting Adults"

Here and here, Ross Douthat continues to pound nails in the coffin of the arguments on behalf of legalized prostitution.

There's a lot I could say here, though most of it has been said. I would agree that prostitution is the ideal candidate for subsidiarity, mainly because my concern about it is only that it not bother me. On one end of the scale, the legendary ranches in some of Nevada's more laditudiarian counties are properly the concern of the residents of those counties, but surely none of mine. On the other end, I will happily pass any law necessary to prevent my having to pass a fishnet-clad trollop on the walk with my kids to the park.

But surely the arguments for legalization are sterile; on the contrary, if anything, the momentum is on the side of further federal restrictions. Liberals, having lost (or rather, discarded) the ability to discuss morality in terms other than power and exploitation, have framed their opposition to the trade in those terms: ie. pimps and johns use disproportionate power to exploit the women involved. The notion that the women are somehow victims rather than perpetrators is an absurd caricature of prostitution as it is actually practiced at the level of Eliot Spitzer (for instance). If the caricature is deployed on behalf of increasing the penalties for customers, okay, its dumb reasoning, but whatever. If it requires lowering the penalties for the escorts, then it's time to throw a flag on a foul play.

But that's not really what I want to write about. The subject of today's post is liberals' touching belief in the words "consenting adults" to wave away all objections.

Liberals are exceedingly selective about applying this standard. It does not apply to, say, an employer freely contracting with an employee a wage less than the legal minimum, for instance, nor does it apply to the flesh trade for those who oppose it -- for you see, these are commercial transactions that possess power differentials, and are therefore exploitative.

And sex? It depends. Liberals do not always speak with one voice. Some follow their reasoning to its logical conclusion; others stop well short of that. But pointing out liberal inconsistency is shooting fish in a barrel; it's still not why I'm writing this post.

Whence "consent"?

Liberals invoke "consent", to the extent they do, as in the natural order of things. In my libertarian youth I drank deeply from this well myself, at least in regard to the law; Locke's Second Treatise was one of my favorite reads. But I have come to realize, much as I still value consent, or more broadly, freedom, as a good among many, that it is very much a cultural artifact.

I would say this is particularly true as applied to sex. Without being an historian or an anthropologist, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that from the days of our hunter-gatherer past, sexual access to women has been regarded as a valuable resource. Wars have been fought over it, and when the last blood had been spilt, well, to the victor go the spoils; consent of the women involved couldn't have been more beside the point.

"Phi's in favor of rape!" I can almost hear the usual screeching. Well, no. But I am trying to provide some historical perspective. We have, in fact, done much to prevent rape at the wholesale level described above. But we have done this by (1) building a nation-state capable of defending itself from external aggressors and (2) obtaining "consent of the governed" at a level sufficient to provide effective enforcement of the laws. These have allowed us to carve out a space where a women's consent is a necessary precondition to the lawful engagement of sexual relations. This is as it should be. But to say that consent is always and everywhere a sufficient condition is a different matter.

Whither "consent"?

"The Constitution is not a suicide pact," wrote Justice Robert Jackson, and neither should the abstract idea of "consent" be allowed to undermine the society that protects it.

I heard a striking statistic about the demography of China. I have forgotten the generational span, but the numbers were startling: the generation that is coming of age, there will be 150 men for every 100 women. Now, chew on that for a moment. What do you think the attitude of the (150 - 100) x 1.3 billion chinamen without women will be toward liberal blathering about "consent" will be? Somehow I don't think they will be much impressed. Somehow, I doubt they will be amenable to abstract reasoning of any kind. I will predict, however, that these numbers describe a society that will either (1) launch a war (it won't matter much against whom) or (2) collapse into violent chaos of uncertain outcome.

There are some caveats worth mentioning here. The particular cultural practices and government policies that led to China' s demographic position are obviously different from the ones at play in the U.S. And for all the beta-male griping about the "woman shortage," and even my own jaundiced view of the hook-up culture, I will acknowledge that the "market inefficiencies" tend to work themselves out by the time women get into their 30s, and adultery and prostitution are as-yet non-mainstream phenomena.

However, this doesn't mean that our own cultural vectors are not pointing incrementally in either the Chinese direction or in some other "non-steady-state" direction all our own. It doesn't mean that every effort to arrest them should be dismissed with the "consenting adults" mantra, or that we should ignore opportunities to improve "affordable family formation".

Jim Manzi approaches the question from a more theoretical angle here.

And here an agreement (perhaps) from a woman living the life.

"Spitzerian"

I was hoping to get credit for inventing this word, but it turns out to already have another, and rather more reputable, meaning. So I will have to settle for a secondary definition:

Spitzerian (adj): 2(a) Of or relating to the act of procuring commercial sex. (b) having the quality or atmospherics of such a procurement.

Example: "I feel very uncomfortable when handing cash to a young woman. The aura is very Spitzerian; that's why Mrs. Φ always pays the baby-sitter."

Update: In this vein, Ross Douthat points up the cognitive dissonance among liberals regarding the legal status of prostitution.

Meanwhile, something about Donna Hughes' description of imminent changes to federal prostitution law makes me uneasy. Perhaps its the evasiveness: after two pages, I still couldn't say with more than 90% certainty that the Wilberforce Act makes being a John a federal crime. The law itself seems evasive on this point and is probably the product of exactly the cognitive dissonance that Ross describes. For my part, while I would support existing law, I see neither a constitutional nor pragmatic case for further federal involvement.

No Dog in the Fight

From the Let-it-Burn department:

A giant Teutonic brothel

HOW modern and liberated Germany’s Social Democrats and Greens sounded in 2001. They were in government and wanted to raise the legal and social status of prostitutes. So they enacted a law to remove the stigma from sex work by, for example, giving prostitutes full rights to health insurance, pensions and other benefits. “Exploiting” sex workers remained criminal, but merely employing them or providing them with a venue became legal. The idea was that responsible employers running safe and clean brothels would drive pimps out of the market.

Germany thus embarked on an experiment in liberalisation just as Sweden, a country culturally similar in many ways, was going in the opposite direction. In 1999 the Swedes had made it criminal to pay for sex (pimping was already a crime). By stigmatising not the prostitutes but the men who paid them, even putting them in jail, the Swedes hoped to come close to eliminating prostitution.

. . . .

In the end, the policy choice comes back to culture and ideology, argues Susanne Dodillet at the University of Göteborg. Both the Swedish and the German laws originated in the feminist and left-leaning movements in these countries. But whereas progressive Swedes view their state as able to set positive goals, Germans (the Greens, especially) mistrust the state on questions of personal morality as a hypocritical and authoritarian threat to self-expression.

Here is yet another example of a debate that has removed itself so far from the concerns and interests of ordinary people that I just can't manage to be much interested anymore.  This article (and the Economist is admirably candid about its social leftism) looks at prostitution through a prism, not of morality, nor of family stability, nor even of the well-being of individual women, but of an intramural fight between various shades of feminism.  All that remains is for me to decide which faction of my enemies to whom I should offer surrender. With choices like these, I should probably prefer the German way, since I, too, though with better reason, mistrust any likely German state on questions of personal morality.  But, mostly, I plan to sit this one out.

Seeking an Arrangement?

Via Half Sigma, a NYT article about the matchmaking site SeekingArrangement.com,

. . . a down-and-dirty marketplace where older moneyed men and cute young women engage in brutally frank transactions. They’re not searching for longtime soul mates; they want no-strings-attached “arrangements” that trade in society’s most valued currencies: wealth, youth and beauty. In the cheesy lexicon of the site, they are “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies.”

[snip]

Beth Bailey, a Temple University historian of courtship, said that her first reaction to the site was “revulsion.” But when she reconsidered it within the historical context of dating, she had a somewhat different response.

Heterosexual relationships, including marriage, have long involved economic transactions, but Bailey points out that when men provided financial security, they traditionally did so in exchange for a woman’s sexual virtue (and potential to bear and rear children), not for sexual thrills. For that, they often turned to prostitutes and mistresses, involving a more frank money-for-sex exchange. It’s only in the last century that money has been traded — albeit indirectly — for sexual attention from “respectable” unmarried women. In the early 1900s, courtship shifted from girls’ porches or parlors to a commercial venture: a date. Etiquette manuals of the time were explicit — boys were to pay for meals, entertainment and transportation, and in return, girls were to provide well-groomed company, rapt attention and at least a certain amount of physical affection. His money bought not only companionship but also her indebtedness.

“It made a lot of people uneasy, because if men’s money was central to the dating relationship, what distinguished it from prostitution?” Bailey says. Seen in this context, Bailey argues, Seeking Arrangement “is a piece of contemporary society. It’s simply more explicit and transparent about the bargains struck in the traditional model of dating.”

With an important distinction. Whatever the transactional standing of 20th Century dating culture (and how innocent it seems in retrospect), up until quite recently it at least pretended to be actual courtship, i.e. a way of wooing a husband or wife. In contrast, the whole point of SeekingArrangments.com is that marriage is explicitly off the table from the get-go.

But then, marriage seems almost an accidental byproduct of mainstream "dating" culture anyway. Once you allow sex outside of marriage, you find all the secondary defenses against complete sexual anarchy to be so weak as to be hardly worth the effort.

So it's hard for me to get much upset by Brandon Wade's creation. On the contrary, from a nerd's point of view, it is appealingly democratic: money is fungible, and here it buys opportunity for an almost-exclusive GFE with a pretty young woman. Plus, it has two apparent advantages over prostitution: it's more satisfying to the ego, and it's more cost effective. Remember that Ashley Dupre' wanted $5k per hour, whereas here $5k buys a month or more of attention.

But the externalities remain: such activity continues our distortion of the sexual marketplace away from monogamy, marriage and family.

One more thing:

Sugar babies outnumber daddies 10 to 1, Wade says.

In hindsight, it's hard for me to remember why I was once so fool as to believe in the moral superiority of women.

A Rare Sighting of Supply-and-Demand

From The Economist:

Sex doesn’t sell:  An old industry is in deep recession

. . . In part, this reflects the sluggish economy. Overall consumer spending at the end of 2012 was almost 4% lower than its 2007 peak. And Vivienne, an independent escort in the south who works part-time to supplement her income as a photographer, says paying for sex is a luxury: “Food is more important; the mortgage is more important; petrol is more important.” She is offering discounts out of desperation, reckoning it is better to reduce prices by £20 ($30) than to have no customers at all.

The days of being able to make a full-time living out of prostitution are long gone, reckons Vivienne, at least in larger towns and cities. “It’s stupidly competitive right now,” she laments. More people are entering prostitution, agrees Cari Mitchell of the English Collective of Prostitutes. Some working women in Westminster say they have halved their prices because the market has become so saturated. In London, and increasingly elsewhere, immigrants provide strong competition. But Sophie, an expensive escort in Edinburgh, says she is seeing an influx of newbies including students and the recently laid-off, many of them offering more for less.

Parts of the sex trade are comparatively hale. At the top end of the market, Marie, another escort in Scotland, says custom has not dried up. Girls increasingly report requests for discounts, she says. But those who lower their prices sometimes swiftly raise them again, deterred by the kind of customer who is attracted to bargains.

Want a Get-out-of-Jail-Free Card? Become a Prostitute!

I have written several articles over the years about efforts to grant prostitutes immunity from prosecution while simultaneously doubling-down on the penalties for pimps and johns.

From Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio)'s press release last week:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), founding Co-Chair of the Senate Caucus to End Human Trafficking, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) today introduced bipartisan legislation, the Trafficking Survivors Relief Act, which would help human trafficking victims by clearing any federal convictions for nonviolent crimes from criminal records.

Human trafficking is a modern day form of slavery affecting millions in the United States and abroad. This crime involves either the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit a person for labor or commercial sex, or the exploitation of a minor for commercial sex. As a result of being trafficked, victims are commonly charged with crimes such as conspiracy, money laundering, drug trafficking, and related offenses that then follow them for the rest of their lives. These charges make it difficult for human trafficking victims to find jobs and housing, leaving them vulnerable to being exploited and trafficked again.

“Trafficking victims are not criminals and they are not prostitutes. They are rape victims,” said Senator Portman. “I’ve met with a number of brave trafficking survivors in Ohio who have told me that after they were forced into sex, they were charged with prostitution. This just makes no sense and it hurts them at a time when they are recovering from the unimaginable trauma of being trafficked and sexually abused. It’s time to stop punishing these victims and instead help them get their lives back.”

“Under current law, when a human trafficking victim is forced into slavery, in many cases, they are tagged with a multitude of criminal charges, even though they have absolutely no freedom to say no to their captors,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. “Congress has a responsibility to end these injustices, and our bipartisan bill would vacate the criminal convictions of trafficking victims who were forced to break the law while they were trafficked. We all have a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable Americans, and I will continue to urge all of my colleagues to support this bill.”

NOTE: The Trafficking Survivors Relief Act would clear from criminal records any federal convictions for nonviolent crimes committed as a result of being trafficked. It would require victims to provide supporting documentation in order to get their non-violent criminal records vacated.

Sounds like a good law, right? From the text of the legislation*:

“Sec. 2.(b)(1)(A) CONVICTIONS OF COVERED OFFENSES.—A person convicted of any covered offense (or an eligible entity representing such a person) may move the court which imposed the sentence for the covered offense to vacate the judgment of conviction if the covered offense was committed as a direct result of the person having been a victim of trafficking.

What is a "covered offense", you ask?

Sec. 2.(A)(2) the term ‘covered offense’—(A) means a Federal offense that is not— (i) a violent crime; or (ii) an offense, of which a child was a victim . . .

The important thing to know here is that, in general, the practice of prostitution itself is not against federal law**. This legislation is basically handing out get-out-of-jail-free cards for any OTHER laws that "victims of trafficking" may have committed, which the press release helpfully enumerates: conspiracy, money laundering, drug trafficking. Okay, but as Sen. Gillibrand said, "they have absolutely no freedom to say no to their captors." Right?

Sec. 2(a)(8) the term ‘victim of trafficking’ has the meaning given that term in section 103 of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (22 U.S.C. 7102)

Following the link:

22 USC 7102 (15) Victim of trafficking: The term "victim of trafficking" means a person subjected to an act or practice described in paragraph (9) or (10).

(9) Severe forms of trafficking in persons: The term "severe forms of trafficking in persons" means-(A) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or (B) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

(10) Sex trafficking: The term "sex trafficking" means the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.

(4) Commercial sex act: The term "commercial sex act" means any sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person.

When we get to the end, we realize that, despite the PR representation of them as "rape victims", the beneficiaries of this legislation include prostitutes who were ever recruited, harbored, transported, provided for, obtained, patronized, or solicited, i.e. ALL prostitutes. Actual victims of fraud, force, or coercion are defined separately, but both groups count as "victims" for the purpose of the law.

I don't have a settled opinion on whether or not this is good legislation or not. But I am prejudiced against any law whose advocates believe themselves reequired to lie about it to get it passed.

* The text is taken from the version of the law proposed in the just-expired legislative session; Portman and Gillibrand may hav e new text, but I haven't found it.

** As far as I know, though there are all sorts of restrictions beyond the "White Slavery" laws. For instance, federal civil servants are prohibited from engaging prostitutes.

Juicy Bar Ban Trending

So, the Osan AB Juicy Bar Ban, reported here a year ago, now applies to all servicemen stationed anywhere in Korea.

From the policy letter:

Paying for companionship directly supports human trafficking and is a precursor to prostitution. This practice encourages the objectification of women, reinforces sexist attitudes, and is demeaning to all human beings. Preventing service members from supporting human trafficking and prostitution outside our installations helps ensure the highest levels of readiness, promotes good order and discipline, and provides for the health, welfare and safety of our personnel and community.

Of course, FKCC hasn’t presented any evidence for his assertion that allowing their soldiers access to female companionship is prejudicial to readiness or discipline, nor even defined what “precursor” means in this instance.  But that’s the fun part of being a general officer:  you get to just make stuff up, and make people nod along.

But nobody cares about “human trafficking”; this is all feminist appeasement.  But props to Gen. Scaparrotti for figuring out who his real masters are.

Happy Veteran's Day.

Juicy Bars and the Perks of Power

From Stars and Stripes:

Air Force Puts Squeeze on Juicy Bars

OSAN AIR BASE, South Korea — Juicy bars might soon be a thing of the past in the area just outside the gates here.

U.S. Air Force officials have in recent months been systematically putting the notorious bars in the Songtan Entertainment District off-limits and giving their owners a choice: Get rid of your juicy girls or American servicemen will not be allowed to patronize your establishments.

As a result, the number of juicy bars — where scantily clad women flirt with servicemen to get them to buy high-priced juice drinks for the hostesses in exchange for their company — has dropped from 44 to 10 over the past year outside Osan Air Base.

I don't recall spending much time around Osan (although I probably spent some). But I did prowl around Itaewon a few evenings back in the early 90s. I vaguely recall the term "juicy bar" now that I read it -- it may be local to Osan -- but the word I used at the time was cabaret. Years later, an officer described the environment around our Korean installations as "the Wal-Mart of sex", and I'm inclined to agree. Back then, everything was inexpensive, including the women.

The effort by Osan Air Base officials to put juicy bars off-limits or to force them to jettison their flirtatious hostesses -– even those not deemed to be in the business of prostitution -- marks a dramatic change from the way the U.S. military in South Korea has dealt with such establishments.

Seventh Air Force commander Lt. Gen. Jan-Marc Jouas said, “The Department of Defense, the U.S. Forces Korea (and the) Air Force (are) pretty explicit in the fact that we have zero tolerance toward trafficking in persons. What is new is that we are putting that into action and placing (off-limits) these establishments that, in our view … are trafficking in persons.

“The presence of juicy girls that are contracted, whose passports are held by the bar owners, who are moved from city to city and bar to bar – it’s indentured servitude and it’s inconsistent with who we are as a service, and the standards we’re trying to establish on base and within the sphere of influence we have outside the gate,” he said.

"Human trafficking." Much in the same way that liberals have ruled out-of-order objections to extra-marital sex and then stretched the definition of "rape" -- a real and bad thing -- to cover sex with legal minors, they have ruled out-of-order objections to immigration and then stretched the definition of "human trafficking" -- a plausibly real and bad thing -- to cover "sex" for money . . . which is now stretched to include conversation for money. So yes, if in fact Filipinas are being held in Korea under conditions of involuntary servitude, then absolutely the American military should cooperate with the Korean and Philippine governments in freeing them. But there are several levels of rhetorical dishonesty, the point of which is to communicate the message: "I have power, and you do not."

[I]n 2010, then USFK commander Gen. Walter Sharp said it would be unfair to punish the owners of all juicy bars for the sins of a minority of proprietors.

“The bottom line is that juicy bars … have women that are there to talk to soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines,” he said. “You can’t presume that things go beyond that, which is what you would have to do if you want to put them (all) off-limits.”

Which sounds reasonable to me. Personally, in my youth I was unable to sufficiently escape from the contrived nature of those kind of interaction to enjoy them. I remember being angry, upon subsequent visits to my dentist when I was in college, that the beautiful dental technician who asked the same questions about my engineering classes wasn't really interested in either me or my academic career. She was just doing her job of ensuring customer loyalty. I shrug about this now, but as a very single young man I felt like my emotions were being triffled with.

My personal reaction aside, I'm not sure why what "juicy girls" are doing is any worse than what psychotherapists do.

Jouas said most juicy girls are brought into South Korea illegally on visas saying they are here to work as entertainers. Instead, they are “put to work in bars to sell drinks at an exorbitant price, but what they’re really selling is their company and that oftentimes leads to prostitution.

I can't help but hear the echoes of my fundamentalist high school: holding hands is not permitted. Holding hands might lead to kissing, which might lead to petting, which might lead to . . . .

Not that I'm judging or anything. I'm all in favor of drawing defensible lines in an effort to uphold Christian morality.

Of course, that's not the agenda. We finally arrive at the real reason for the War on Juicy Bars:

Referring to juicy bars, Jouas said, “There’s nothing good about them. I think they further an attitude toward women that’s unacceptable. There are a lot of our servicemembers that don’t want to go into those bars because they’re pretty creepy.”

Robert Woltman, a 51st Security Forces Squadron investigator, said, “They’re selling women for companionship. They are selling time with females, which is leading to sexual assaults down the road. That environment is moving on base.”

A draft report by an 8th Army sexual assault task force – obtained by Stars and Stripes earlier this year – suggested something similar.

“Contradicting messages portrayed in the facilities patronized off-post, which send a message in support of sexual activity and contrary to the values of proper conduct,” the report said. “This may lead the malleable to engage in conduct that they know is not acceptable.”

Let it burn. The military has, at the highest levels, been busy attempting to extirpate Christian influence since 2004. If the feminists are now having trouble with what non-Christian morality looks like, they're on their own.

Secrets of Success

From The Pawnbroker (1964):

I guess I should object to Sol Nazerman’s assertion that the Jews don’t have a land myth; on the contrary, at 3800 years old, Zionism takes the cake for the most enduring land myth in history.

Otherwise, several things stand out:

• Sidney Lumet made this movie in 1964.  I’m guessing that the image of a Jew operating a small independent shop in an inner city neighborhood resonated with audiences back then in a way that it doesn’t today.  Besides the fact that Gentiles are today actively discouraged from thinking of Jews at all except as yet another victim class, most Jews today have evolved beyond the “middleman minority” role.
• As Andrew Young got himself fired for pointing out, Jewish shopkeepers were replaced in the inner city by Koreans, who were themselves replaced by Persians and Arabs.  Their experiences have much in common with one another:  a high degree of frugality; cultural insularity; and strained relations with the surrounding community.
• Sidney Lumet gives us an unromantic view of the inner city that has more in common with The Wire than with media portrayals of “the black experience” in most of the intervening period.  It shows, not just crime, but a wide range of dysfunction including prostitution and drug addiction.  But this dysfunction, or the perception of it, is behind the negative views that middleman minorities have of most of their customers.
• I was surprised to find nudity in this film.  The MPAA rating system wouldn’t be introduced until 1968, and the Hays Code was still in effect.  Can anybody think of instances of other mainstream films from this area that show a woman’s breasts?

Tech bleg:  I had no sooner uploaded this movie to YouTube when I received an email:

Dear Phi:

Your video, The Pawnbroker (1964) - Secrets of Success, may have content that is owned or licensed by UMG.

Wow!  How did YouTube figure this out so fast?  Could material copied from a DVD, decrypted, and edited in Windows Live Movie Maker still have metadata that would identify its origins?  Because it boggles the mind that YouTube has a computer that can recognize a particular movie scene.

Taken

I saw the movie Taken on DVD. It's an reasonably good though highly derivative film with uneven execution.

First the good. Thematically, the film is embarrassingly perfect. If Dick Cheney, Steve Sailer and Roissy were to team up to make a movie, this would be the movie they would make.

• Liam Neeson plays Bryan, a retired CIA operative in the James Bond mold. He's living in LA to be close to his seventeen-year-old daughter, Kim. Kim is living with his ex-wife Lenore, who bitches at him for the first 15 minutes of the movie. Lenore had left him for a wealthy businessman who can afford to do things like buy her a horse for her birthday.

• Kim wants to travel to Paris with her friend Amanda. Lenore encourages them while Bryan objects: the world is a dangerous place for 17-year-olds to go running around unaccompanied. Bitchiness ensues. Bryan relents on the condition that he receive a complete itinerary, addresses, phone numbers, and regular phone calls. He doesn't: seeing them off at the airport, Bryan learns for the first time that Kim's and Amanda's plans are to follow U2 on a European tour. "All the kids are doing it," says Lenore.

• In Paris, the girls share a taxi from the airport with a charming young man who makes plans to meet them later. Amanda tells Kim that she plans on sleeping with him. (In this context, we learn that Kim is still a virgin.) Amanda has poor taste: the young man turns out to be a scout for Albanian mafiosi, who kidnaps foreign women traveling alone and forces them into prostitution.

• Kim is on the phone with her father when the Albanians arrive; he thus obtains a description of the kidnappers. Bryan promptly flies to Paris to track down his daughter. Mayhem and violence ensue. (The French police turn out to be on the take.) Bryan captures an Albanian gangster who tells him, after being properly "motivated", that Kim, as a virgin, will be auctioned off to a rich Arab sheik. Amanda, in contrast, is drugged and raped to death.

Let's review. Bitchy, faithless ex-wife: check. Teen slut receives her comeuppance: check. Immigrant scum: check. Torture: check. Feckless Frenchmen: check. Like I said, this is embarrassingly perfect. Even I would have thrown liberals a bone somewhere.

Now the bad. I very nearly abandoned the movie during the early scenes. The frenetic pacing was inappropriate for Bryan's supposedly peaceful retirement. The dialog the screenwriters use to communicate the backstory is implausible. Bryan works a security detail for a pop diva, but this doesn't seem authentic even by the standards of The Bodyguard, let alone In the Line of Fire.

The movie improves dramatically after the kidnapping, but even here there are problems. As several critics have remarked, the film owes much of its pacing and action scene style to the Bourne films. This wouldn't be a bad thing, necessarily. The problem is that at 57, Neeson has visible difficulty carrying this off. Age matters (trust me on this), and what Matt Daemon can do in his 30s is not appropriate for a man in his 50s. Neeson would have been better served by the style of, say, Man on Fire, in which Denzel Washington plays a gravely injured ex-CIA agent who uses careful planning instead of raw physical prowess to rescue the girl. (The movies are also thematically similar, which would have invited unfavorable comparisons.)

Seventeen-year-old Kim is played by 26-year-old Maggie Grace. Grace overcompensates for this miscasting by aping the awkwardness of a young teen that hasn't quite grown into her own body; unfortunately, the effect makes her come across as developmentally disabled. This was disappointing. If the filmmakers wanted to highlight Kim's youth and innocence, they would have been better served by an actress that was actually young and innocent.

But these are small quibbles. I would still recommend the movie, but be prepared to be annoyed for the first 15 minutes or so.

Link Love XVII

A survey of scientists is not the same as science. Still, considering that AGW tub-thumpers long relied on such surveys as a cudgel on skeptics, they're hardly in a position to complain now that the surveys are turning against them.

Immigration plus prohibition turned out to be a boon to organized crime. But when it comes to prostitution, immigration plus decriminalization doesn't work out so well either. Guess which one will be thrown under the bus.

Fun fact: according to the Census Bureau, 45.3% of Mexican immigrants are on food stamps. 24.1% of all immigrants get food stamps, compared to 13.9% of native-born Americans. Any predictions about which of food stamps or welfare will get thrown under the bus?

Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but this NYT article is the first notice I've seen the press take, or the President mention, of the non-DoD share of the budget cuts. My idle speculations is that the Left is leading with the DoD cuts to generate pressure on Republican lawmakers from their own constituents to cave on whatever Obama is demanding. Seeing as how that doesn't seem to be working, we may be watching a shift in strategy.

Panetta made the required Congressional notification that we'll be furloughed one day per week starting in April. Money's tight, so the DoD is cutting back. Except when it's not.

On a related note, I got a kick out of this bit of Navy propaganda:

Key attributes which will sustain a successful repeal of DADT:

• Leadership: DADT repeal was a major policy change. Focused leadership will continue to ensure a positive impact on unit cohesion, readiness and the effectiveness of a given unit. Front line leaders are tasked with building unit cohesion and maintaining readiness in a diverse force to meet mission requirements.
  
  

• Professionalism: As members of the Naval Service, we have taken an oath as military professionals to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and have made a commitment to our Navy Core Values. Emphasizing these professional obligations in a post-repeal environment will reinforce expectations of personal behavior.
  
  

• Discipline: The Uniform Code of Military Justice remains our legal foundation of good order and discipline; and provides for enforcement of standards of conduct and laws, and prohibits harassment, sexual assault or other violence. Accountability is a cornerstone of good order and discipline and will continue to guide standards of acceptable behavior.
  

Right. Because all this worked out so well integrating women into the armed forces. Right?

Speaking of which, the movie The Invisible War took a moment to make sport of military propaganda urging women to be proactive in avoiding sexual assault. Yet when the subject turns to gun control, Colorado Democrats suddenly have new respect for the buddy system.

On a related note, the NRA has pointed out that gun control doesn't reduce crime, and in the context of the AWB, the Justice Department agrees. Of course, the Justice Department also thinks the solution is even more gun control.

MLMs and Me

Via Steve, this NYT article on the dueling diversity-mongers betting billions of bucks over the future of Herbalife inspired me to write of my own exposure to “Network Marketing”, a.k.a. multi-level marketing (MLM).

My grandparents were Amway salesmen back in the late 1970s (at least, I think it was the 1970s, but it might have been the early 1980s), recruited by friends into the organization.  They eventually left with a garage full of not-especially-effective laundry detergent, which we were still using well into the 1990s.  I myself was too young to have any appreciation for the Amway business model, although I was old enough to know that Amway products weren’t very good.

I have a stronger recollection of the visit the Shaklee Vitamin people paid to my parents house circa 1980 (plus or minus a couple of years).  As my parents explained later, a (somewhat distant) professional friend of my father called and asked to come by to discuss “a personal problem”.  Invited over to the house, he arrived with what turned out to be a higher-level Shaklee pitchman.  My parents, whose Scots-Calvinist resistance to salesmen puts my own to shame, wouldn’t allow them in the house before asking them straight out if they would be required to buy or sell anything.  They were assured that this was not the case.

I sat in on their presentation, and received my first exposure to  the MLM method of marketing goods to consumers.  For those of you new to the concept, MLMs recruit recruiters of recruiters, an endless chain of representatives who build “downlines” fueled by personal consumption of the MLM’s products, some residual became the sales commission for the “uplines”.  So the Shaklee reps weren’t exactly lying:  my parents had they become involved, would theoretically have not been required to purchase any products, nor would they be selling products as such.  They would have been Shaklee representatives recruiting  further levels of Shaklee representatives.  So while someone obviously would have to buy something for anyone to make any money, no individual would be required to.

Flash forward to the early 1990s at a sizeable military town in the Southwest.  An associate from work called and asked to come by my apartment.  The words “personal problem” may not have been spoken, but that was definitely my impression at the time.  And as in the Shaklee experience, my friend served as a stringer for a higher-level rep who made the bulk of the pitch.

“So . . . it’s a pyramid scheme,” I observed at the conclusion.

“No it isn’t!” exclaimed the rep with no small animation.  “We have a letter from the FTC saying we’re obeying the law!”

“I don’t care about the FTC,” I replied calmly.  “I’m saying that, structurally, the money-making enterprise you are pitching here requires an ever-expanding base of consumer-marketers recruiting and ever-expanding base of consumer-marketers.  Definitionally, this is a process that must end in saturation, leaving the bottom of the pyramid consuming products but not actually making any money.”

We went around and around on this point without much progress.  Several times, I disavowed any interest in being a salesman of any sort but expressed interest in seeing the product catalog.  Several times, the rep replied that while they would be willing to show me the catalog at some future date, what they really wanted was for me to recruit.  Since I worked with the stringer, I think I may have eventually seen a catalog; I am certain I never purchased anything; few of the products advertised were ones for which I was in the market, and none were price competitive.

Flash forward a few months later.  I received my second pitch for network marketing.  A “friend” (in the sense that we attended the same young-adult Bible study group) invited me downtown to a restaurant to discuss a “business proposition”.  This sounds relatively honest, but my specific impression was that it was a business that he himself was creating.  I won’t quibble over definitions, except to say that MLMs encourage their reps to think of themselves as “business owners”.

Our dinner meeting was somewhat frustrating.  I was treated to a list of interview-type questions about my goals, financial objectivds, etc., followed by a fairly lengthy and very general lecture on “residuals”, i.e. profit margins.  It was frustrating because (a) I didn’t see myself as applying to join his “business” and (b) the ECON 101 struck me as pretty obvious, yet my “friend” wouldn’t skip to the part where he actually told me what the business was.  At the end of it, he invited me to another meeting where it would all be explained.  “Why don’t you explain it to me now,” I suggested.  “Sorry, but that’s not how I do business,” my “friend” said.  “If you’re really interested, you’ll come to the meeting.”

I was pretty irritated by this point, but since I didn’t yet smell an MLM and, being single, didn’t really have anything better to do with my evenings anyway, I eventually came to the public school auditorium with 1000 other potential recruits for the “meeting”.  The ushers carefully sat us in the front; the recruiters sat in the rows in the back, making slinking out early extremely difficult.

The “meeting”, as you might expect, was conducted in the spirit of a revival meeting by a man that, I swear, was a spitting image of Wayne Newton.  Apparently, every one in the room worked for him.  There was a long inspirational talk about “financial independence”, the revelation that this was indeed an MLM, and a final revelation that this MLM was called “Amway”.  It was not long after “Amway” that I decided that, conspicuousness be damned, I was walking out the door, but I want to share the one visually striking evidence as to what the opportunities in MLMs really are.  At one point, Wayne Newton asked everyone who had achieved the first level of network growth to stand up, and the back half of the auditorium duly rose.  The first level of growth would earn its recruiter, IIRC, $6 per month in commissions.  Wayne progressed through the levels until reaching the level of “financial independence” at which we could quit work:  $20K per year.  (This isn’t as absurd as it sounds:  in the early ‘90s in the Southwest, there were a whole lot of people scraping by on less than $20K, including, just barely, me.)  There were, I think, two individuals in the back left standing at this level of success.  Everyone else in the auditorium was supporting those two people, who were themselves supporting Wayne Newton.

Those two recruiting attempts within the first six months of my residence were the most aggressive.  Other attempts would follow over the next two years, but they were much more conversational.  By the time I returned from Japan two years after that, my professional status had lifted me out of the target demographic, and/or the enthusiasm for MLMs had cooled in the face of much better job opportunities.

In preparation for this article, I set about researching Shaklee’s multiple run-ins with the FTC.  I failed at this research; indeed, it appears that Shaklee has successfully purged the entire internet of its malodorous legal history.  But I eventually came across this exhaustively compiled political, legal, and regulatory history of MLMs.  The article deserves to be read in its entirety if you have several hours to devote to it.  But I wanted to comment on a few summary points I gleaned.

• The standard MLM pitch as my parents received it from Shaklee and I received it from Amway is, according to formal FTC interpretation of the law, illegal.  This, frankly, had not occurred to me at the time.  I did not believe that anyone was, strictly speaking, lying to me about the income opportunities since the improbability of realizing those opportunities was so immediately obvious.  But as Steve points out, MLMs attract – and exploit – the bottom half of the bell curve, while I sit firmly in the top 5%.  The author writes:

  Most recruits will join because of the "business opportunity" and because they are led to believe the products are not only in high demand but are unique ("always!"), exclusive ("absolutely!"), elite, upscale, innovative, super-concentrated, miraculous, healthier, more environmentally friendly, etc. When the business opportunity fails, they either accept the theft because they've had it drilled into their heads that only losers quit and settle on believing that they're buying these products at some tremendous discount because they're in a "buying club", or quit and feel so guilty they fail to understand they've been robbed. Now imagine an entire legion of MLMers paying for millions of these overpriced, uncompetitive products just so they can participate in a compensation plan they believe is leveraged to help them earn a reasonable part-time supplemental income if not a vast fortune, and you've got MLM's gravity-defying money funnel, which is more aptly compared to a vacuum cleaner sucking the income stream from the bottom up.

• The FTC wields incredible power.  During the Clinton administration, the FTC under Robert Pitofsky pre-emptively shut down a string of MLMs, forcing them on pain of bankruptcy to sign Consent Decrees without ever having to bring a criminal case in court.  You don’t have to love MLMs to be bothered by unaccountable power.
• Contrariwise, MLMs in the 2000s went to some lengths to cozy up to Republican politicians in the name of “free enterprise”.  You don’t have to hate MLMs to be bothered by the prostitution of your philosophy for the bottom-feeders of capitalism.
• We live in a hyper-regulated economy.  As the article makes clear, everything has a set of regulations governing the minutiae of its behavior.  Franchises are regulated.  Buying clubs are regulated.  Independent contractors are regulated.  Commissioned and direct sales are regulated.  And of course, employment is regulated.  Post 2008, I am somewhat less sympathetic than I once was (though not entirely unsympathetic) to the argument that this regulation is as bad in principle and practice as some libertarians will often insist.  But I am pretty sure that no good can come from having the regulations and then allowing MLMs to exploit (or create, or merely assert) loopholes in those regulations to operate with impunity on the grounds that they aren’t actually a buying club, or a franchise, or a sales force.