Sex industry

Iceland is trying to ban online pornography and the sex industry in general. Good luck with that.

ULTRA-LIBERAL Iceland wants to ban online pornography. It is just the latest step in its attempts to eliminate the sex industry entirely. In 2009 it introduced fines and jail terms for those who patronise prostitutes (whom it treats as victims). In 2010 it outlawed strip clubs. In February the government decided to take on the glut of smut online and floated the idea of banning violent or degrading pornography, which some Icelanders take to mean most of it. No country has yet wholly succeeded in controlling commercial sex, either through legalisation or criminalisation. But all over the world, particularly in rich democracies, policymakers are watching to see whether Iceland succeeds—and may follow in its footsteps if it does.

Iceland’s proposal is in its early stages and may lose momentum after an election on April 27th, which the government is expected to lose. But its plan puts it in some odd company. Saudi Arabia similarly bans strip clubs, prostitution and pornography. But it also stops women from driving, forbids them from travelling without a man’s permission and restricts their right to vote. In the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Gender Gap report, which compares progress in 135 countries towards sex equality, Saudi Arabia ranked 131st.

Iceland, however, is determinedly pro-women. Half the cabinet and 25 of the 63 members of Iceland’s parliament are female. The country is run by the world’s only openly lesbian prime minister. Iceland is also pro-sex. Its supermarkets sell condoms and mini-vibrators next to checkouts. A new sex-education film informs teenagers that sex should be something they want to do again and again, and then maybe again. Some 65% of Icelandic children are born outside marriage, more than any other country in the OECD. Same-sex marriage has been legal since 2010 and gays and lesbians can adopt children. Icelandair ran a campaign featuring the tagline, “Fancy a dirty weekend in Iceland?”

The country’s initiatives against the sex industry have been championed by a powerful feminist movement. “Tackling online porn, particularly the violent kind, is part of a broader set of policies to protect children and reduce sexual violence,” says Halla Gunnarsdottir, a political adviser to the interior minister who has proposed the law. But the more ambitious Iceland has become in its war against the sex industry, the less success it seems to enjoy.

Bizzare. They came for the strip clubs first…

Obviously David Farrar’s hurty arse and the mention of Ron Jeremy are connected to the hospitalisation of the porn star with an aneurysm…I can see it can’t you:

Cult porn star Ron Jeremy is in a critical condition in hospital after being treated for an aneurysm near his heart.

Jeremy, 59, who is perhaps the adult film industry’s best known faces, checked himself into Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles after experiencing severe chest pain.  Read more »

The various teacher union oppose Charter Schools because they say the teachers won’t be required to be registered. They reckon kids will be at risk.

I’ll bet this teacher was registered when he was offending:

A former Tauranga teacher paid a teenager to have sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend, while he watched.

Andrew Loader, 49, pleaded guilty to a charge under the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 in Tauranga District Court today, the Sunlive website reported.

A charge of paying a 16-year-old for sexual services was withdrawn and replaced with one of contract sex with a person under 18.

Loader paid the man, who was in a consensual sexual relationship with the girl, to have sex while he watched. He was remanded on bail for sentencing on March 15.  Read more »

Yesterday I blogged about hookers and  brothels and suggested that contrary to the reported study that men just wanted a root.

Of course a few of my women readers jumped in and over analysed the issue but one gave this explanation for why men visit hookers:

Which is awesome. That’s the perfect excuse.

Imagine it…you come home after letting a bit of pressure out of the back wheels and the missus goes all “Inquisition” on you. Using Lucia’s fantastic excuse, you simply bat off the query with a nonchalant response like this:

“I was in the knock shop looking for God. He wasn’t there so tomorrow night I will have to try the one down the road where I heard he stopped in for a few beers, the free bbq and a blowie Saturday arvo.”

A car wash in Malaysia has cottoned onto a winning strategy….though perhaps they should have tried this in Las Vegas. Perhaps Air New Zealand should try this to “realign” their Air Points scheme:

Malaysian police have shut down a car wash that was offering regular customers free sex after every ninth car wash.

Malaysian newspaper The Malay Mail reports the car wash in the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Sunway Mentari had been open for three months and had formed a partnership with a local massage parlour, enabling customers to redeem free sex from the brothel as part of a customer loyalty scheme.

The Mail reports that police stormed the parlour and found several stamped loyalty cards that had been used by customers to cash-in on the car wash deal.

Malaysian officer Emmi Shah Fadhil told The Malay Mail that the bust was unexpected.

“It was supposed to be just another routine operation,” Emmi Shah told the paper. The police squad that raided the massage parlour were told of the deal during the raid, and they found five customers taking advantage of the offer.

“To get the extra ‘offer’, customers must send their cars for washing nine times within a certain period,” Emmi Shah says. “The tenth car wash will entitle them to free sex.”

I knew a wise old geezer who once told me that you don’t pay a hooker for sex…you pay them to f*ck off afterwards. Another mate thinks you pay cock tax no matter what, so at least the cock tax with hookers is pre-negotiated and agreed before hand.

Katherine Feeney has discovered some interesting research:

Suggestively and succinctly entitled The Hobbyist and the Girlfriend Experience: Behaviors and Preferences of Male Customers of Internet Sexual Service Providers, the work is newly published in the American journal Deviant Behavior and comes from two experts credentialed in the field of prostitution and personal relationships.

And the conclusion basically finds most men surveyed preferred not to consider the women they ‘bought’ as “dirty whores” or bodies “for sexual release”.

Instead, the majority of the 584 male subjects paid for sex because they were looking for the “girlfriend experience or GFE over all other personal qualities and behaviours”.

How does that sit with your expectations?

Does it fit with your thoughts about why some people pay for sex?

The demographics are intesting too:

If it jars, then you might be interested in the author’s disclaimer. Their subjects were members of a particular adult services forum, and they were all male – mostly white, middle-aged, educated married and earning six-figure salaries. In other words, they are not representative of every person who pays for sex (and I say person, because females hire sex workers too).

But still, it’s important to note these blokes weren’t conforming to the usual, negative John stereotypes. They were seeking an “idealized version of a girlfriend” in the women whose services they purchased, with ‘ideal’ seemingly meaning a woman who is up for sex, interested in his needs, not too emotionally demanding and cares to come when he “makes the effort to bring her there”.

I’m curious, how does this ideal fit in with the male readers of this blog? Is this what you want from women?

And they want fairly straight sex too…which will please Andrei and Lucia no end:

Furthermore, the researchers found these guys preferred good (pardon the moral deliberateness) old-fashioned “penile-vaginal coitus” to any other sex act. Not anal or oral or any other kind of freaky-deaky sex so commonly thought of as the kind men really want.

Again, I’m curious about how this finding fits in with the male readers of this blog.

I think Katherine Feeney is all at sea…I bet Cactus Kate knows exactly what the real answer is…that the blokes just want a no hassle root and for the chick to shut up and disappear afterwards, just like my wise old mate from Wellington said.

The Germans are canny sometimes. Take this idea for raising public cash:

A “sex meter” scheme, taxing prostitutes €6 a night to work the streets of Bonn has raised more than €35,000 for public coffers in its first year, authorities said this week.

Prostitutes working the streets of Germany’s former capital have to buy themselves a ticket from the converted parking meters each night, or face a fine.

“The sex tax has been accepted by the prostitutes,” said city spokeswoman Elke Palm. The idea, introduced last August, was an extension of a tax imposed on brothels in the city at the beginning of 2011, Die Welt newspaper reported.

This would solve Papatoetoe’s problems with street walkers and also could possibly be used by Christchurch City Council for raising funds for the rebuild. Come to think of it Len Brown could do this to pay for his train set.

ᔥ Sydney Morning Herald

Our Police like to use the words “in the public interest” but usually in a sentence like “It is NOT in the public interest to prosecute”. They usually use it when investigating political corruption by the Labour party. In Australia though we can see a more interesting use of the term:

THE developer hoping to build Australia’s largest brothel has told the NSW Land and Environment Court the proposal to double the existing business is ”in the public interest”.

Stiletto’s in Camperdown, owned by the big-time punter Eddie Hayson, wants to spend $12 million to expand from 19 to 40 working rooms by building a three-storey extension on an adjoining Parramatta Road block.

Commissioner Susan O’Neill began the hearing outside the Camperdown bordello yesterday, where a local resident, Stephen Chavura, said that he and his wife, Xanthi, bought a nearby unit after the City of Sydney rejected the development application last year.

”You can’t have the sort of community where you’re going to have families and young children growing up, and that [the brothel expansion],” he said.

In knocking back the application, councillors had cited concerns about its effect on the local area and size of the development. Liberal Shayne Mallard dubbed it the ”Westfield of brothels”.

Yesterday’s site inspection by the court continued inside Stiletto’s, although Peter Tomasetti, counsel for the applicants Artazan Property Group, denied the Herald access.

Artazan, the company managing the project, is challenging the council’s view that the expansion is not in the public interest, arguing in its submission the development would be a ”significant generator of employment” and would therefore have an ”advantageous economic effect”.

It told the court there would be a maximum 50 staff on the site at any one time, including sex workers, cleaners, administration and management staff.

”The development is in the public interest as the regulated supply of sexual services to the community meets a basic human need,” the submission read.

ᔥ Erika Christakis

Etrika Christakis has a post about the concept of fair trade porn:

We have fair trade coffee and humanely raised pork. So why can’t we create a market for ethically sourced pornography? A couple of decades ago, people didn’t give much thought to their food’s provenance. We didn’t care about carbon footprints or the working conditions of the poor Africans who sold us our coffee beans. Slowly, however, consumption habits began to shift under the weight of scientific evidence and cultural change. We’re becoming a little more selective in our consumer choices.

Yet not with that multi-billion dollar white elephant: pornography. We hear rumblings here and there about the sexual trafficking of women and children, and it’s always a relief when a criminal ring is busted for what’s euphemistically called “abuse.” It’s reassuring to know that whatever was going on in the far reaches of a few sick minds has little to do with our own primitive — but relatively harmless — impulses.

But do porn consumers ever think about where their porn is sourced? What a downer! No one wants to hear about drug-addicted runaways or Albanian teenage sex slaves. Nobody wants to imagine STD infections on movie sets or the life circumstances that would impel a woman to engage in physically punishing sexual acts on camera. (And just Google the word “bukkake” if you want a quick education in the mainstreaming of fringe sex acts.)

Seems a pretty good idea…fair trade porn….let me think a bit more about that.

Part of the problem is our reluctance to acknowledge the pornification of contemporary life. If we can relegate porn to the margins of our cultural conversation, we can pretend it only touches a small minority of adult men, rather than the vast majority of Americans, many even in their first or second decade of life.

Maybe it’s just too embarrassing to admit the extent of our obsession, but people of all stripes really like watching sex acts. For example, surveys of Evangelical Christians report porn viewing rates similar to the general population. Utah leads the nation in per capita subscriptions to online porn. Technology has produced the ideal Petri dish for the biggest sexual market in human history, providing easy access, affordability, and anonymity in one appealing package.

Right so fundies seem to be into porn in a biiiiig way…I’m convinced.

But shouldn’t consumers have some context to evaluate what they are viewing? Shampoo bottles and Tuna cans assure us that animals were unharmed. Shouldn’t we know if porn actors are subject to out-of-control STD rates, or are forced to do things against their will? At a minimum, a Porn housekeeping seal of approval would tell us by, and for whom, the porn was made. It might make you think twice before downloading that random YouPorn video or chatting with a “horny Russian slut” at LiveJasmin.

There probably are attractive, uninhibited people who are excited by the rewards of porn careers — people who are untroubled by the ethics or lifestyle limitations of making a living as sex workers, or who at the least may consider it the best of their uninspiring options. But there are probably relatively few of these people, and consumers should know who they are so they can make informed choices.

Making such informed choices would have a few collateral benefits. If we knew for sure that porn production was free of coercion and desperation, for example, we might find there are fewer women willing to be gagged, choked, and “triple penetrated” on camera.

Hard to fault her logic really.

Fair Trade porn might also finally allow us to call a moratorium on assertions that women aren’t aroused by visual imagery or don’t sometimes fantasize about anonymous, unemotional sex. And market forces could eventually affect the aesthetic standard of pornography, which might, in turn, shift the skewed gender balance of viewership. If you think this is a fairytale, recall that a generation ago, no one talked about animal abuse or the case against corporal punishment. Cultural norms do change.

Pornography is a fact of life, and parental controls and moralizing spoilsports won’t make a dent in its exponential growth. But the bar needs raising. The sustainable food movement hasn’t eliminated factory farms or our inexhaustible craving for junk food. But it provides an alternative model of consumption that we can aspire to. Organic and fair trade practices are leading us, gradually but inevitably, to a better relationship with food. Maybe Fair Trade porn could reconnect us to a better relationship with the human body.

Sounds like something the Greens can promote.

ᔥ NZ Herald

Another tough guy who abuses children afraid of his own name:

A man has appeared in court on 16 charges relating to making, distributing and possessing child pornography.

He also faces a charge of doing an indecent act on a child.

The man, who is in his 40s and has been granted interim name suppression, appeared in the Rotorua District Court yesterday.

He entered no pleas to four charges of making child pornography, two charges of distributing child pornography, 10 charges of possessing child pornography and a charge of doing an indecent act. The offending is alleged to have been committed between October 20, 2010 and May 12, 2011.

He needs a long drop off a short rope.