Archive for the ‘Sex’ Category.

Lying with numbers (Kat Banyard Edition)

In a rather desperate screed that is apparently an extract from a book that she is flogging, sex work abolitionist Kat Banyard suggests that:

On average, a woman was paid for sex by 76 men each week.

Exactly how many active sex-workers there are in the UK is unknown but estimates range between 50,000 and 100,000 – and all come with various caveats attached. The most widely quoted figure is 80,000, an estimate from 1999 for the European Network for HIV/STD Prevention in Prostitution (EUROPAP) project and was derived by Hilary Kinnell.

In a 2006 census in New Zealand (the only country where sex work has been fully decriminalised), 0.285% of the female population declared themselves to be active prostitutes. According to a 2015 report from the Office for National Statistics the estimated female population of the UK in mid 2014 was 32,803,100. Assuming a similar percentage of sex workers as New Zealand this gives us an approximate figure of 93,500.

Sex work is a broad brush term that covers everything from cam and phone girls, strippers, dancers, some masseuses, dominants as well as the obvious. If we assume that only the latter category are what Kat meant by ‘paid for sex’ then we would need to reduce our estimates to match. With, once again, no way of knowing what the ratio is I’m going to make an assumption that its 50%. I would, frankly, imagine it to be higher but let us be as generous to Kat as we can.

If we apply that 50% to the oft-quoted Kinnell number then that’s 40,000 women each being paid by 76 men a week or somewhere around 3 million commercial sex encounters a week… or almost 10% of the current male population of the country. Replace that 40,000 figure with 25,000 (50% of the lowest estimate) and you have 1.9 million transactions per week (or approximately 6% of males). Does anyone seriously think that this is the case?

Thus Kat Banyard is, to put it politely, talking utter rubbish… but then what else can you expect from someone who thinks that all sex work is violence against women?*

* Quite how this is the works in instances where men pay other men for sex escapes me.

Clarissa elsewhere

At Libertarian Home commenting on the Ashley Madison business.

Friday 13th

A Red Umbrella - the symbol of sex worker solidarity

Every Friday 13th Maggie McNeill asks people to speak out in support of the decriminalisation of sex work and activities surrounding it. Those who have read this blog for long enough or follow me on twitter will have realised by now that this is something I support wholeheartedly.

Why the support? Obviously as a libertarian I see no reason why consensual contractual interactions between adults should incur the wrath of the violent state but there is more to it than that. I’ve previously mentioned that I’m known to enjoy the kinkier side of life. This includes activities that the anti-sex wing of the puritans who seek to rule our lives would prefer wasn’t available to be seen. That’s not the whole story either.

Several years ago (exactly which year I can no longer remember) I once provided sexual services for cash, trying (very badly in hindsight) to play the dominatrix to his submissive.

There have also been a couple of moments in my life when, if things had happened very differently, survival sex work could well have been a necessity. For me it may have been the path not taken but others have had to walk it and some will have suffered as a result of activities which could have made it safer being outlawed.

We in Great Britain (note I do not say UK) are fortunate in that prostitution in and of itself is not illegal – however activities such as brothel keeping (which stops sex workers grouping together for their own protection) are. This is not the case in other countries. In the so-called ‘Land of the Free’ prostitution is illegal and rescuing ‘victims’ is big business for both law enforcement and charities. Sweden pioneered what is now referred to as either the ‘Swedish Model’ or the ‘Nordic Model’. Under this approach the customers of sex workers are prosecuted. Northern Ireland is following this route and the Canadian government, after their Supreme Court struck down all of the laws surrounding sex work because it ruled them harmful, is trying the same even though the government there admits it is likely to be only a matter of time before another challenge in the Supreme Court produces the same result.

New Zealand has shown the way forward. It would be nice if the rest of the world followed.

“Sit on my face…”

Charlotte Rose

The Authority for Television On Demand (ATVOD) is the not so new UK regulator (quango) for on-demand programming and the reason for its existence can be traced back to how the UK.gov decided to implement the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive. As always if there is an easy way to do something and a hard way, UK.gov will take the latter approach and thus ATVOD was born.

Although it initially set its sights on the MSM, in particular the pockets and the websites of dead tree press, ATVOD has found much easier prey in the form of online adult entertainment and restricting access to it in the name of protecting the children. HighLowlights including pushing for bans on payments to non-UK-based websites and lobbying for laws to increase the age-checking carried out by UK-based providers.

In a Statutory Instrument laid before parliament on November 6th 2014 and which came in to effect on December 1st, the Culture Secretary Ed Vaizey proposed that the content of UK-based video on demand (VOD) services should be held to the same standard as physical media as set down in the Video Recordings Act of 1984 (a response to the moral panic about so-called video nasties in the early 1980s).

Myles Jackman addresses the assembled crowd

In practice this means that only content that would be passed for an R18 certificate can be sold legally by VOD producers in the UK with some of the practices that this excludes being:

  • Fisting
  • Facesitting
  • Watersports (if another person is involved)
  • Heavy bondage
  • Discipline beyond a mild spanking

Many UK-based producers of adult content (which include Dominatrixes who film and sell video clips of their sessions) are, understandably, rather miffed at this change as it is likely to lead to the closure or relocation of those studios which produce the non-mainstream content that it is now illegal to sell.

One of them, Charlotte Rose, organised a protest (including facesitting) for yesterday in Old Palace Yard, across the road from the Palace of Westminster and I, as someone who is an occasional consumer of video material covered by this change in the law, went along to it (and took some photographs – including the ones you see here).

Face Sitting VI

The protest took a while to get going with things not formally getting under way until almost 30 mins after the advertised start time. As well as Charlotte, speakers included obscenity lawyer Myles Jackman and Jerry Barnett of Sex and Censorship. The main point made by both Jerry and Myles was that this is not just about porn but rather the ever tightening restrictions in the UK on the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression – of which clamping down on pornography is but one strand. The recent attempts within the UK to impose the ‘Swedish Model’ (successful only in NI so far) of banning the purchasing of sexual services are another and I have no doubt that UK readers of this blog can call to mind other things.

Charlotte says that she wants this to be just the start. Time will tell if that is anything other than wishful thinking.

Just do(n’t record) it

UK Law:

Legal: Consensual sex between people aged 16 and over.
Illegal: Taking pictures of people aged 16 and 17 that can be considered sexual in nature as, because they are under 18, the pictures are, by law, child pornography.

Yes, I’m aware this situation isn’t new. I just wanted to point out, for posterity, how blitheringly stupid the situation is.

Dr. Wollaston and the Case of the Smartphone Ban

Known bansturbator Dr Sarah Wollaston was reported by the BBC yesterday (before the story was subjected to some rewriting) as apparently being in favour of banning teenagers from using smartphones in order to save them from the dangers of sexting.

The original BBC story was based on the exchange between Dr. Wollaston and Norman Baker (Minister for Crime Prevention) during Home Office questions yesterday afternoon (emphasis mine):

Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con):
What steps she is taking to prevent harassment through the sending of unsolicited sexual images via the internet and telephone.[902169]

The Minister for Crime Prevention (Norman Baker):
The coalition Government takes all forms of harassment, whether online or offline, very seriously. We have robust legislation in place to deal with cyber-stalking and harassment, and perpetrators of grossly offensive, obscene or menacing behaviour face stiff punishment. We will continue to work collaboratively with industry, charities and parenting groups to develop tools and information for users aimed at keeping society safe online.

Dr Wollaston:
I welcome the measures that the Government have taken to prevent sexual violence against women and girls. The Minister will be aware that many young people have been pressured into sending intimate photographs of themselves only to find that those images are sometimes posted, distributed or shared without their consent, which is an important form of bullying and harassment. What measures have been taken, and does the Minister support measures to prevent smart phone use by those who are not mature enough to understand that it can result in an important form of bullying?

Norman Baker:
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who makes an important point. We have given teachers stronger powers to tackle cyber-bullying by searching for and, if necessary, deleting inappropriate images or files on electronic devices, including mobile phones. It is critical to educate young people about the risks of sending intimate photographs. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre has developed a specific educational resource to tackle sexting that is designed for use by teachers. There are numerous laws in place that can be used to deal with those who behave in this appalling manner.

On the basis that we should be able to trust Hansard, I’d say that the original BBC piece (sadly now lost unless anyone managed to screen grab it) entitled “‘Sexting’ abuse: Wollaston urges teen ban on smartphones” was an accurate representation of the words spoken in the house.

However Wollaston took to twitter after the the story was published and people started to mock her to say that…

before going on to ‘clarify’ her remarks…

All of which may or may not be more reasonable but if that was what she meant, why not say so at the time (she did have follow-ups prepared before she walked into the chamber, didn’t she?) rather than having to issue her clarifications in the face of laughter from an audience all too inclined to believe that yet another MP is out of touch with reality?

Oh Daddy, you know that eBook you bought for me…*

The morality police achieved another victory in their battle to return us to the days of covered table legs yesterday when high street retailer WH Smith (SMWH) took their entire website offline.

Why the drastic action? Because the Daily Fail (that bastion of the soft-porn click-bait) happened to notice that if you searched for ‘daddy’, the site listed a number of books that could not be considered as suitable for children. I do wonder though how many children are a) going to be using the SMWH website and b) how may are going to be searching for daddy. Heck, I’m an adult whose interests could be considered quite wide-ranging but I don’t think I’ve ever used that term in any search box anywhere on the web.

That SMWH have taken such drastic action isn’t much as a surprise as they have history when it comes to bowing to the whims of special interest groups.

In order to solve the ‘problem’, which is limited to self-published items, SMWH have decided that, once their website returns, they are going to not list any eBooks which fall into this category for the forseeable future – regardless of their content.

Personally I’d suggest that a better approach would be to update their search functionality to include such basic abilities as ‘safe-search’ and ‘include/exclude self-published items’ but that would require knee-jerk puritans not to be knee-jerk puritans…

* With apologies to Christine McVie and Fleetwood Mac

Young love

As we know from that bit of the media which isn’t still raking over the Andrew Mitchell non-story and the waste of time which was the Liberal Democrat party conference, a 15-year-old girl has eloped to France with her maths teacher.

Cue much wailing as well as pleas for her to come home and him to give himself up.

As she is under 16 the word ‘paedophile’ as well as various slang terms have been used online, if not by the media. It is, of course, the wrong word to use as she is, in terms of sexual development anyway, mature. If the teacher really does prefer partners in this stage of life then the term is ‘ephebophile’.

A teenage girl being attracted to an older male is not a story. As a general rule they tend to prefer older boys and men simply because the boys of their own age are usually behind them on the maturity curve.

Given then that developing teenage girls in the UK (and the developed world) tend to spend a significant part of their lives in schools and that schools will likely have at any one time several young-ish male teachers, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that sometimes the object of a girl’s affections will be her teacher.

Most of the time it will remain just a crush, one that the teacher may well be unaware of, and will go nowhere. There are times though when it will go further and I’d be surprised if there is a secondary or upper school in the land in which a relationship between a pupil and a teacher hasn’t taken place at some point.

I can think of one definite example from my days in the sixth-form* attached to my secondary school and there were persistent rumours about one of our humanities teachers*** involving a number of female pupils. In neither case, to the best of my knowledge, was any action taken against the teachers concerned.

Some will rail about the age of consent and how, because the law has imposed a legal age of 16, sexual congress with anyone under this age is an issue whilst waiting until the day of their 16th birthday isn’t. What they forget is that they themselves were young once and that the idea of the law telling you on which day you were able to make the beast of two backs with your partner may well have been as meaningless to you as the laws about when you could drink and/or smoke. Or perhaps, depending on personal preference, even the laws surrounding narcotics today.

Indeed the Telegraph has reported that the French police aren’t actively looking for her because the age of consent on the other side of the Channel is 15 and thus there is no crime taking place.

(Across Europe the age of consent is generally between 14 and 17 years of age, with the outliers being Spain at 13 and Turkey at 18.)

The sin in such circumstances is not that girls involved are 14 or 15 but that the teachers, who are In loco parentis, breached the trust placed in them by the families of the pupils and their employer.

By involving himself so comprehensively with Megan Stammers, Jeremy Forrest has destroyed whatever life he might otherwise have hoped to build in the UK. Assuming he does come back to these shores he can look forward to a criminal record, an entry on the sex offenders register, potentially some gaol time and the inability to ever work or act as a volunteer in any position which requires a CRB check to be performed. And, I would suspect, speedy divorce from his jilted wife.

Megan, who is unlikely to be an entirely innocent party, will likely get away scot-free.

* We were both going through 6th form together and he was one of our maths teachers. Barely out of university himself, he was no more than 8 years older than us and the relationship between the two of them ran for a couple of years or so. The first that the rest of the students knew about it was when we were in pub celebrating the end of our lower-sixth** and they spent a reasonable part of the night tonsil tickling. We certainly didn’t tell anyone about it and they kept it discrete (he didn’t show up on the 18th birthday party circuit for example). She showed up at my 18th wearing an engagement ring whilst only 17 herself at the time (she was the only person in the year younger than me IIRC) and my mum pestered me for sometime to say who it was. I eventually told her after my younger brother left the school 3 years later.

** Obviously none of us were 18 but we were all drinking and no-one was asked for ID.

*** The closest I got to the truth was over a beer with a mutual friend some years later when I found out tha he’d got married. Jokingly asked if it was to one of his former pupils, my friend smiled and said no.

“Do you wanna see me do the shimmy again?”

Sandra White MSPThe latest prohibitionist to come to my attention is one Sandra White, SNP MSP for Glasgow Kelvin. Ms White, it seems, has a bit of a bee in her bonnet about lap dancing clubs. In fact she dislikes them so much she would like to give councils in Scotland the power to close down each and every one of them without fearing any legal come back:

Glasgow MSP Sandra White is calling for laws to ensure all Scottish councils are given powers to refuse applications – and to choose to close down all lap dancing clubs.

[…]

Ms White, who believes lap dancing is exploitative to women and that it is a front for the sex trade, will propose clubs should be subject to a strict licensing regime.

This would let councils set the acceptable local number at zero. The SNP MSP is ready to lodge a Private Member’s Bill, which will then go to consultation.

She said: “I feel so strongly about this and that is why I’m going down this route. This would give councillors the choice to say if one lap dancing club is too many.

“Under this legislation they would be able to decide that and not risk being taken to court by lap dancing club owners.

“It would not be mandatory and the decision would lie with each local authority.

“I am hopeful this legislation will be passed eventually.”

Yes, that’s right, apparently we can make the lap dancers safer by driving their places of employment* underground. Could someone please remind me how that approach made the lives of prostitutes and drug users safer?

This isn’t Ms White’s first go either. Her last try, two years ago, was rejected by 76 votes to 45 despite being backed by Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill. The Scottish Government has signalled that it will back her again.

The only crumb of comfort that I can see is that she didn’t try to claim that ‘it is for the children’. Perhaps she’s saving that for the next attempt (assuming that this one fails)?

* My understanding of the matter is that lap dancers are typically self-employed and pay a sum to the club owner to work there. In return they keep what money they make from the punters.

Compare and Contrast

Leda and the Swan is a story from Greek Mythology in which Zeus takes the form a swan and seduces (or possibly rapes) Leda.

Compare…

During the Renaissance their union was depicted in potentially erotic overtones by many artists including in paint by Leonardo, Michelangelo (a copy of which is shown below), Correggio and in marble by Bartolomeo Ammannati.

Leda and the Swan, a 16th century copy after a lost painting by Michelangelo, 1530

A number of the paintings, including those by the aforementioned artists, ended up in the collection of the French Royal Family. The ones by Leonardo and Michelangelo are now lost, believed destroyed by moralistic family members, whilst Correggio’s had to be repaired after Louis d’Orléans took a knife to it.

Contrast…

A modern day take on the subject by the photographer Derrick Santini (shown below), which had been exhibited in The Scream gallery in Mayfair:

But a Metropolitan police officer who saw the Derrick Santini image from a bus was alarmed.

He alerted his colleagues and two uniformed officers went to the gallery, which is owned by the Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood’s sons, Tyrone and Jamie.

Jag Mehta, the sales director at the gallery, said she spoke to the officers and asked what the problem was.

“They said the photograph suggested we condoned bestiality, which was an arrestable offence,” she said.

“It’s crazy. Perhaps the cultural references were lost on them.”

As the exhibition was already over, they took down the artwork, which shows the animal ravaging the naked woman.

“They stood there and didn’t leave until we took the piece down.”

Ah, the stupidity of the extreme pornography law passed by the our previous, unlamented government.

Leda and the Swan by Derrick Santini

Prudishness is not dead, it has just changed slightly.