I’d go as far as to say that someone looking for ways to be an asshole is more likely to choose socially accepted targets. Maybe it’s not even meaningful to assert that one causes the other.

There reigns for many an idea that people should be held to a standard of sexual moral coherence. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t a sexual hypocrite, but often it’s for reasons of care as much as reasons that feel compromising.

Are there not more and less damaging kinds of hypocrisy?

I think I understand what you’re saying about the requirement that indicate their allegiance to a monogamous (usually straight) ideal of sexual behaviour in order to be considered acceptable citizens, suitable for public office. At the same time, I don’t see how sex can be totally separated from intimacy, from emotion, hence from power, hence from morality. And while it may be absurd to demand total coherence, I still feel sorry for Craig’s and Spitzer’s wives. I feel sad for these woman who were (I would strongly suspect) lied to, betrayed, and humiliated. I don’t care to be “pro-sex” if that means I have to totally discount such women’s pain or even blame them for feeling it.

Contacts
Madeleine Dash, Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK), 877-776-2004 x 2 swank@riseup.net

Audacia Ray, 718.554.1714
Sarah Bleviss, Sex Workers Outreach Project NYC (SWOP-NYC), swop.nyc@gmail.com
Prostitutes of New York (PONY), pony@panix.com
Desiree Alliance, http://www.BoundNotGagged.com

Sex Workers Blow Spitzer a Farewell Kiss

New York, NY - In the wake of former Governor Spitzer’s resignation, sex workers and human rights advocates remain concerned about the representation and future of “Kristen” and other sex workers, who do not have the legal and social privileges that will be afforded to Mr. Spitzer. The identity of the sex worker implicated in this case has already been made public, a situation mirroring many a sex worker’s worst nightmare. “Kristen’s” exposure may entail not only bring her legal repercussions, but invasion of privacy, financial hardship and social opprobrium.

Rather than continuing to sensationalize Spitzer’s actions and those directly involved, we urge the press and the public to shift their focus to the legal climate under which sex workers operate, while respecting “Kristen’s” agency to have chosen sex work as a viable source of income. “Everyone wants to know how high her rates were, all the salacious details, but the real issue at stake here is that the hypocrisy of criminalizing sex work has been exposed! It’s a part of our society, of every society, and we need to take this opportunity to stop with the value judgments and start coming up with policies that respect the human dignity of all people, sex workers and all workers. ” says Dylan Wolfe of SWANK (Sex Workers Action New York).

Former Governor Spitzer took a lead role in developing the NY State Anti-Trafficking Law as well as other initiatives that stigmatize sex workers and their clients. It is the stigma of sex work that leads many individuals like “Kristen” to keep their occupations a secret, creating further isolation and opportunities for exploitation. This same stigma compromises the safety and well-being of people like “Kristen” when their private lives become public knowledge. Sex workers are then forced to work further underground, rendering them more vulnerable to abuse, while denying them access to the basic civic participation, health and social services available to other people. “Hopefully Mr. Spitzer’s unfortunate public decline will send a message to all like him who pass laws that endanger the safety of sex workers while indulging in the service themselves,” Sarah Bleviss of SWOP said, “Sex workers clearly provide them a very valuable service; it’s time for lawmakers to return the favor.” Too little attention has been paid to what the repercussions of this case will be for those most directly concerned, sex workers, and more generally to the impact of laws and attitudes that marginalize them. It is time for a change.

Spitzer pushed through penalty enhancements against clients of all sex workers. Sex worker advocates fought against such provisions because these policies drive people who need help further underground. Often prostitution is wrongly conflated with trafficking and vice-versa. People are trafficked for many kinds of work, be it domestic labor, farm work or other jobs, and this kind of exploitation undoubtedly needs to be addressed. The majority of men, women and transgendered people working in sex work, however, are ’normal’ members of society who have used their own intellectual agency to decide to make a living in a sexually-oriented way. Laws, like the Mann Act (against inter-state transportation for the purposes of commercial sex), are too often used for punishing sex workers and their clients rather than those who profit from their exploitation.

Sex workers make a living in an industry with the potential for high risks and little by way of protection from abuse. The stigma surrounding our work can be lethal at its most extreme: we are often the targets of notorious serial killers, like the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway who targeted prostitutes because he thought he “could kill as many of them as [he] wanted without getting caught.” If sex work were decriminalized and legitimized as a form of paid labor like any other, or seen simply as an intimate exchange between consenting adults, the associated harms would be greatly diminished. Furthermore, sex workers could access their basic human rights and social services without fear of legal reprisal or personal upheaval. “Eliot Spitzer has represented himself to the public as a law and order man, and ironically, has been in the vanguard of further criminalizing sex workers and clients. . . However, it’s a shame that so much time, energy, and tax payer resources are being spent to criminalize consensual sex between adults. It’s time to decriminalize prostitution.” says Sarah Blake of Prostitutes of New York (PONY).

Incoming Governor Paterson and other law-makers need to create policies that actually reflect the realities of their own lives and those of their constituents, including sex workers, rather than the harmful legislation of morality, whereby private matters become public scandals.

Sex is both beautiful and repulsive.

I don’t think it’s quite so easy to separate for dismissal the “ick factor” from the issue of patriarchy and privilege.

I know, the good liberal is supposed to affirm the beauty and normalcy, never the mania and the ick. Ick is supposed to be remnant of more uptight, hiearchical and misogynist times. Mania is a myth of the unenlightened (or the unhip).

But sometimes ick is just ick, base impulse just base impulse.

I have never heard or read anyone who defines themselves as anti-porn say they believe that; I have read one feminist say she believes that. She’d be you. You defend jerking off to porn Amanda.

One of the longest threads on the porn anti-porn issue ever was with Delphyne and some other anti-porn feminists fighting that purile point of view from you and a couple of your regulars.

“and end up trying to make impossible to narrow down distinctions between “erotica” and “porn”.”

Impossible…only for you Amanda.

Craig , Haggard, and Baker aren’t just men caught with their pants down, but performing behaviors that they’d have you or I thrown in jail for, or at least burn in hell. Spitzer was worse. . .

I believe you may have lost some perspective here: while the specific hypocrisy of Spitzer — jailing women for the acts he paid them to engage in — is deplorable, to say the least, they do not measure up to the global suffering caused by Craig and his ilk. Craig has consistently lobbied and voted against reproductive rights, funding for AIDS research, and contraception education in Africa. Within the scale of human suffering, Spitzer may deserve a place in the second circle of hell, but Craig, and his ilk, assuredly are deserving of their place in its eighth circle.

1. That “everyone agrees to those rules these days”: I don’t know what world you live in, but I am always taken aback at the extent and degree of pleasure in moralism re adultery and prostitution in the MSM and by ordinary humans from all classes after a revelation like this.

I have lots of evidence for this. There reigns for many an idea that adultery = lying= a fundamental tendency toward immorality= a tendency toward illegality = incompetence to citizenship. This is an entirely normative chain, and doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny (except when it does! but that’s exceptional).

There reigns for many an idea that people should be held to a standard of sexual moral coherence. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t a sexual hypocrite, but often it’s for reasons of care as much as reasons that feel compromising.

Then there’s the idea that one’s response to adulterous events reveals one’s moral scaffolding. I know more than a few progressive people who won’t vote for Hillary because she stayed with Bill after his revelations of adultery, since it shows that she is morally damaged and emotionally weak and dependent. I know more than a few people who think of his sexual appetites as pathological because he’s restless, animated, and non-monogamous in inclination.

All of these distortions, of the persons and their audiences, have to do with a sexual ideology that places the performance of sexual self-control and fidelity to promises to be “good” and sexually transparent at the center of their judgments about what make people worthy, and I think that’s just wrong. Why should sexuality be the key mark of one’s competence at personhood, when a whole host of other qualities of ethical human sociality also matter?

2. People who think that “people bring these things on themselves,” as though popular media or community scandal and illegality are some kind of natural justice, are giving into the most unimaginative kind of normativity. It’s true, they bring it on themselves. It’s also true that most law and norms that model the good life around monogamy are ridiculous.

My main point here is that there is no agreement, there is massive incoherence, about what transgressions of a couple’s public monogamy can mean (we have no way of knowing).

2. I agree with the commenter who pointed out that Spitzer was not interested in porn as moral crime (even if he said that) but that his reformist rage was all about how men abuse massive amounts of money. He was much less interested in crimes insofar as they were also against people.

3. Both Pandagon and I are interested in the roots of erotophobia. We’re just looking at different roots. It’s an overdetermined situation. I never said we should look away when powerful anti-sex moralists turn out to be practitioners of what they moralize against (a ridiculous charge, since I called attention to the situation by writing about it) but that we should think about what we can make from it apart from that a structurally-enforced hypocrisy appears as abuse of power and that patriarchy had been getting its battery recharged. No one could disagree with those claims.

So one thing is that some people people who discipline sex in the political sphere feel overmastered by it in the private, and compensate in the private by lots of fucked up acts, including, let’s say, Spitzer’s (although I actually don’t know, and neither does anyone, what precise kinds of fuckedup-ness). Agreed.

But another thing, and this is my point, is that as long as sex is seen mainly as power and not as pleasure, and as long as sex is seen as a bad danger to individual sovereignty rather than one of the few places people really work out the pleasures in trust and play, sex will continue to play the public and private role of index to power and submission and not a lot else. It’s important to stand up for a pro-sex imaginary in a puritan public. It’s important to shape the meanings of sexual scandal so the discussion doesn’t turn to paint the numbers bad-men-victimize-women-through-sex analysis. It’s not that it’s not often true, but it is also true that hardly anyone is given the tools to control, to manage, and to like what’s destabilizing and confusing about sex. I was speaking up for that.

I know you don’t disagree with this, mainly. We’re both speaking dialectically! Cheers! In solidarity, LB

1. That “everyone agrees to those rules these days”: I don’t know what world you live in, but I am always taken aback at the extent and degree of pleasure in moralism re adultery and prostitution in the MSM and by ordinary humans from all classes after a revelation like this.

I have lots of evidence for this. There reigns for many an idea that adultery = lying= a fundamental tendency toward immorality= a tendency toward illegality = incompetence to citizenship. This is an entirely normative chain, and doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny (except when it does! but that’s exceptional).

There reigns for many an idea that people should be held to a standard of sexual moral coherence. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t a sexual hypocrite, but often it’s for reasons of care as much as reasons that feel compromising.

Then there’s the idea that one’s response to adulterous events reveals one’s moral scaffolding. I know more than a few progressive people who won’t vote for Hillary because she stayed with Bill after his revelations of adultery, since it shows that she is morally damaged and emotionally weak and dependent. I know more than a few people who think of his sexual appetites as pathological because he’s restless, animated, and non-monogamous in inclination.

All of these distortions, of the persons and their audiences, have to do with a sexual ideology that places the performance of sexual self-control and fidelity to promises to be “good” and sexually transparent at the center of their judgments about what make people worthy, and I think that’s just wrong. Why should sexuality be the key mark of one’s competence at personhood, when a whole host of other qualities of ethical human sociality also matter?

2. People who think that “people bring these things on themselves,” as though popular media or community scandal and illegality are some kind of natural justice, are giving into the most unimaginative kind of normativity. It’s true, they bring it on themselves. It’s also true that most law and norms that model the good life around monogamy are ridiculous.

My main point here is that there is no agreement, there is massive incoherence, about what transgressions of a couple’s public monogamy can mean (we have no way of knowing).

2. I agree with the commenter who pointed out that Spitzer was not interested in porn as moral crime (even if he said that) but that his reformist rage was all about how men abuse massive amounts of money. He was much less interested in crimes insofar as they were also against people.

3. Both Pandagon and I are interested in the roots of erotophobia. We’re just looking at different roots. It’s an overdetermined situation. I never said we should look away when powerful anti-sex moralists turn out to be practitioners of what they moralize against (a ridiculous charge, since I called attention to the situation by writing about it) but that we should think about what we can make from it apart from that a structurally-enforced hypocrisy appears as abuse of power and that patriarchy had been getting its battery recharged. No one could disagree with those claims.

So one thing is that some people people who discipline sex in the political sphere feel overmastered by it in the private, and compensate in the private by lots of fucked up acts, including, let’s say, Spitzer’s (although I actually don’t know, and neither does anyone, what precise kinds of fuckedup-ness). Agreed.

But another thing, and this is my point, is that as long as sex is seen mainly as power and not as pleasure, and as long as sex is seen as a bad danger to individual sovereignty rather than one of the few places people really work out the pleasures in trust and play, sex will continue to play the public and private role of index to power and submission and not a lot else. It’s important to stand up for a pro-sex imaginary in a puritan public. It’s important to shape the meanings of sexual scandal so the discussion doesn’t turn to paint the numbers bad-men-victimize-women-through-sex analysis. It’s not that it’s not often true, but it is also true that hardly anyone is given the tools to control, to manage, and to like what’s destabilizing and confusing about sex. I was speaking up for that.

I know you don’t disagree with this, mainly. We’re both speaking dialectically! Cheers! In solidarity, LB

1. That “everyone agrees to those rules these days”: I don’t know what world you live in, but I am always taken aback at the extent and degree of pleasure in moralism re adultery and prostitution in the MSM and by ordinary humans from all classes after a revelation like this.

I have lots of evidence for this. There reigns for many an idea that adultery = lying= a fundamental tendency toward immorality= a tendency toward illegality = incompetence to citizenship. This is an entirely normative chain, and doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny (except when it does! but that’s exceptional).

There reigns for many an idea that people should be held to a standard of sexual moral coherence. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t a sexual hypocrite, but often it’s for reasons of care as much as reasons that feel compromising.

Then there’s the idea that one’s response to adulterous events reveals one’s moral scaffolding. I know more than a few progressive people who won’t vote for Hillary because she stayed with Bill after his revelations of adultery, since it shows that she is morally damaged and emotionally weak and dependent. I know more than a few people who think of his sexual appetites as pathological because he’s restless, animated, and non-monogamous in inclination.

All of these distortions, of the persons and their audiences, have to do with a sexual ideology that places the performance of sexual self-control and fidelity to promises to be “good” and sexually transparent at the center of their judgments about what make people worthy, and I think that’s just wrong. Why should sexuality be the key mark of one’s competence at personhood, when a whole host of other qualities of ethical human sociality also matter?

2. People who think that “people bring these things on themselves,” as though popular media or community scandal and illegality are some kind of natural justice, are giving into the most unimaginative kind of normativity. It’s true, they bring it on themselves. It’s also true that most law and norms that model the good life around monogamy are ridiculous.

My main point here is that there is no agreement, there is massive incoherence, about what transgressions of a couple’s public monogamy can mean (we have no way of knowing).

2. I agree with the commenter who pointed out that Spitzer was not interested in porn as moral crime (even if he said that) but that his reformist rage was all about how men abuse massive amounts of money. He was much less interested in crimes insofar as they were also against people.

3. Both Pandagon and I are interested in the roots of erotophobia. We’re just looking at different roots. It’s an overdetermined situation. I never said we should look away when powerful anti-sex moralists turn out to be practitioners of what they moralize against (a ridiculous charge, since I called attention to the situation by writing about it) but that we should think about what we can make from it apart from that a structurally-enforced hypocrisy appears as abuse of power and that patriarchy had been getting its battery recharged. No one could disagree with those claims.

So one thing is that some people people who discipline sex in the political sphere feel overmastered by it in the private, and compensate in the private by lots of fucked up acts, including, let’s say, Spitzer’s (although I actually don’t know, and neither does anyone, what precise kinds of fuckedup-ness). Agreed.

But another thing, and this is my point, is that as long as sex is seen mainly as power and not as pleasure, and as long as sex is seen as a bad danger to individual sovereignty rather than one of the few places people really work out the pleasures in trust and play, sex will continue to play the public and private role of index to power and submission and not a lot else. It’s important to stand up for a pro-sex imaginary in a puritan public. It’s important to shape the meanings of sexual scandal so the discussion doesn’t turn to paint the numbers bad-men-victimize-women-through-sex analysis. It’s not that it’s not often true, but it is also true that hardly anyone is given the tools to control, to manage, and to like what’s destabilizing and confusing about sex. I was speaking up for that.

I know you don’t disagree with this, mainly. We’re both speaking dialectically! Cheers! In solidarity, LB