“FEAR is an acronym in the English language for ‘False Evidence Appearing Real.’ —Neale Donald Walsch

Having examined how the sex-negative “scare” tactic is perpetuated, let’s look at the pernicious “confuse” tactic. This tactic relies on an audience not to fact-check, as it includes outright lying, omitting important facts (“de-contextualizing”), and even creating false contexts. In this way, the tactic is identical to Andrew Breitbart’s famous example: take the facts, strip them of context, and present them in as emotionally charged a way as possible.

Herein lies the danger of being too complacent, of not being skeptical enough. The people presenting information will take advantage of others’ inaction, exploiting that for all it’s worth using severely biased or baseless claims. For the sake of example, I’ll detail how Donna M. Hughes used obfuscation and decontextualization to discredit documentary filmmaker Tara Hurley. Buckle up. (Or skip to the summary.)

A context for exploring de-contextualization

Donna M. Hughes was an influential figure in the legal and political battle to re-criminalize prostitution in Rhode Island. She views Tara Hurley and her 2009 documentary, Happy Endings?, as opposition because she sees the film as questioning her statements about the facts at hand. After the film was released, Donna M. Hughes was asked for her comments about it and responded via her invite-only email list, DIGNITY.

Below the brief video clip of Happy Endings? are Hughes’ comments (obtained because others republished them on public blogs, although she later uploaded the review to her own website), interspersed with my own re-contextualizations. Note how Hughes starts with emotionally-charged fear-mongering; she manipulates her audience into a reactionary state to discourage them from analyzing her next statements. In other words, she induces cognitive bias.

Donna M. Hughes
Professor, University of Rhode Island

May 25, 2009

Several people have asked me for my opinion about the film “Happy Endings?” On Sunday, I had the opportunity to see the entire film. Here are my comments.

The film should not be viewed by underage children because it includes a sex act filmed in one of the spa-brothels. Some adults may be offended by this.

This is not a film that should be used for education on sex trafficking.

The film isn’t used for education on sex trafficking, nor shown to children, but by adding these statements Donna M. Hughes is insinuating that those are (or could be) the intended uses of the film. Hughes simultaneously removes the scenes from their original context and reframes them in her artificial one (underage children watching on-screen sex, and sex trafficking).

Tara Hurley, the filmmaker, has testified before the RI House Judiciary Committee and said on talk shows that based on observations making the film, there is no sex trafficking in Rhode Island. This is the view that is conveyed by “Happy Endings?”

There are serious omissions of information about the people in the film and political biases that the filmmaker does not acknowledge.

The filmmaker does not identify the three Korean women interviewed in the film as brothel owners or operators.

They are not the women doing the sex acts. By definition, the women interviewed in the film are women pimps and possibly traffickers. The women-pimps have a vested interest is saying that the women are there voluntarily. (Letting the women-pimps speak for the women doing the sex acts is like letting the owners of a sweat shop speak for the people running the sewing machines. Of course, they say the workers are content.)

After the front-loading, Donna M. Hughes makes a barrage of unsupported, unexplained claims, planting seeds of mistrust about Hurley’s work. Like this video of a hypnotist taking advantage of a person’s suggestibility, the succession of claims Hughes makes overloads an emotionally hijacked reader. I’ll address Hughes’ allegations of Hurley’s “serious omissions of information” and unacknowledged “political biases” later, but first let’s tackle the simple thing.

Hughes says the three Korean women interviewed in the film were not identified correctly, but that is a flat-out lie. Of the three Korean women interviewed in the film, two (“Heather” [screenshot] and “Danielle” [screenshot]) are clearly identified as openers of Rhode Island-based spas¹ and the third, “Jen”, is identified as an employee. Moreover, “Jen” speaks directly to performing sex acts for money (click through for an example video).

If Hughes had maintained the context of the film, she’d surely have noted these facts. But Hughes isn’t really talking about the sex in the documentary, she’s talking about trafficking, her own imposed context. Alas, Donna M. Hughes has a history of forgetting the obvious when it suits her.

So, if by “women pimps and possibly traffickers” Donna M. Hughes means, “someone who chooses to perform sex acts in exchange for money with a client, or who facilitates such an exchange,” then she’s right. By Hughes’ logic, all prostitutes are women-pimps, and possibly traffickers, as are all female strippers, porn performers, erotica models (and possibly a number of non-erotic models), as are all of those women’s female agents, publicists, photographers, and so on and so on.

Much of the film was made at an Asian spa-brothel called Central Health (76 Derry Street, Providence). This brothel was included in a federal investigation of Asian Organized Crime for sex trafficking and money laundering. It was one of 31 brothels in an organized crime network operating along the east coast from Boston to South Carolina. (U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York v. Tae Hoon Kim, Sung Chul Il, Fnu Lnu, Tae Jun Park, Kyong Polachek, Byong Il Son, Jin Sook Kim Lee, and Miae Choi-son, August 14, 2006.) During this investigation victims of trafficking were identified. They were controlled with threats to their families in South Korea.

Hughes references the investigation cited in this FBI press release (on which this American Chronicle article, this New York Times article, and this Free Republic post are based). While the investigation lead to convictions, no connection to the spas mentioned in the film were reported by media. Indeed, the only apparent connection is the FBI’s report mentioning the Central Health spa a total of 2 times, both on page 47 of the FBI complaint (itself a 66 page document).

Here is the extent of the references to the “Central” spa:

On March 14, 2006, at approximately 9:13 p.m., while CHOI and KIM were both transporting girls, they discussed how much girls were making at a brothel named “Central” [in Rhode Island]. KIM responded that girls could easily make $18,000 to $20,000 per month. CHOI stated that he would be going to “Central” the following Saturday.

That’s the entire connection. Exactly zero people from Rhode Island were prosecuted for crimes in this case. As she is wont to do, Hughes doesn’t lie, simply imply (or is it “implie”?) by saying that the Central Health spa was “included in a federal investigation,” despite the fact no evidence of its involvement “in an organized crime network” is available. Instead, she lets the lack of context and the fear-primed imagination of her audience do the rest.

Of particular interest in the FBI complaint is this footnote (on page 42) because the discussion of gambling is similar to the stories told by the Korean women in Happy Endings?:

On May 11, 2006, ICE raided several brothels, including “Downtown,” in Providence, Rhode Island. Following the raid, FBI and ICE agents interviewed numerous workers arrested at those locations. […] Among the interviewed workers was a female identified as Kyung Jin Park. During Park’s interview, she claimed that she had arrived at “Downtown” via a bus from a gambling parlor. Although she denied working as a prostitute, she admitted knowing KIM. However, she claimed that KIM was a friend and had never transported her to any brothel or arranged for her to work as a prostitute.

It’s unclear any evidence was uncovered revealing trafficked women in the Rhode Island spas, beyond the dubious association of conversations about traveling to casinos—topics that the Happy Endings? documentary actually covers, too (but you didn’t hear that from Hughes).

After even more digging, I found an article in the Providence Journal that reports on raids at some spas, including the Central Health spa, published in May, 2005, the year before the previously-linked news reports about the federal investigation (which also began in May, 2005, but in Queens, New York City). Also interesting is this apparent reprint of another Providence Journal article mentioning continued police raids at the Central Health spa. (To ensure the forum posting’s reprint was legit, I obtained a PDF version to verify the source, since a search of the Providence Journal’s website turned up nothing.) In part, this third article reads:

The police say the businesses, Central Health and the Midori Spa, are really houses of prostitution. There are close to a dozen such businesses in the city, according to Lt. Thomas A. Verdi. Because indoor prostitution is legal in Rhode Island, the most the police can do is to bust the businesses for giving massages without a license.

“We’re going to do it weekly until these houses of prostitution either close their doors, or we close them legally,” Verdi, who heads the Narcotics & Organized Crime Division, said last night.

The police certainly can’t be faulted for lacking determination. If that weren’t plain enough, in a similar investigation that searched the Asian Fantasies spa (also in the Happy Endings? film) in Warwick, Rhode Island three years later, the Providence Journal reports, and I quote, the police have found no evidence that three Korean women questioned at the scene of the April 9 [2009] raid were victims of human trafficking.

All told, Hughes’ statements are consistently questionable at best and are deeply entangled with factual untruths at worst. Since the challenge of piecing apart what sex-negative activists say carries such significant overhead when decontextualization tactics of this caliber are used, only the deeply committed put in the effort to do it. This means that the tactic can both manipulate one’s base and exhaust resources of opponents.

Back to Hughes’ commentary:

One woman-pimp who is interviewed in the film tried to open a spa-brothel in Fox Point (and was defeated by community organizing against it). She was the operator of Asian Fantasies spa-brothel in Warwick (1550 B Post Road), which was raided last month (April 11, 2009).

The saga of the “Fantasies” spa is actually part of the Happy Endings? documentary but, again, Donna M. Hughes’ context doesn’t say that. Ironically, Hughes’ own omission has the effect of peddling herself as the provider of “the full story” when in fact nothing could be further from reality. Hughes’ claims of “serious omissions of information” from the film are hypocritical.

The third woman says at the end of the film that she is going to open her own spa-brothel.

Recall that earlier Hughes’ own commentary stated the filmmakers did not identify the appropriate women as operators of spas. Hughes is now contradicting herself.

We never hear the voices of the women at the bottom, the ones who are sexually exploited and often abused, and sometimes trafficked. We only hear the voices of the women-pimps and two male pimps.

Here, Donna M. Hughes’ argument betrays confirmation bias, the reciprocal of cognitive bias. Rather than dupe her audience, she dupes herself.

Hughes clearly doesn’t believe that any women capable of speaking in the Happy Endings? documentary are the “women at the bottom,” and therefore she won’t listen to what they say when they contradict her. Only when she hears someone confirm what she already believes does she find them trustworthy. In other words, it’s a loop! (The same faulty logic is used to defend religion.)

I went through the trouble of transcribing this excerpt from “Jen,”² to show you what some women say that Hughes doesn’t believe counts as being “sexually exploited.”

First, when the undercover cop came in, and I charged him $80 for hour massage…and I take him to the shower room, I wash him down and I covered his private parts with a towel and he takes it off, throws it and says, ‘Don’t cover me with this crap! […] Please, touch me right here.’ Which is his private parts. And he takes my hand and put it ‘there.’ […] He says, ‘Oh, I got to go!’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. I didn’t give you a massage at all! Why you leaving?’ […] Then, 10 minutes later, he comes with 10 or 15 big people. Everybody is police. They’re coming one by one. They say, ‘Okay, you come out.’ [I say,] ‘What did I do?’ [They say,] ‘Shut up!’

While it’s possible the women Tara Hurley interviewed were lying, Hughes portrays her own speculations as fact. That helps her assertions appear real, regardless of whether or not they reflect the truth.

Filmmaker Hurley does not identify close relationship to the sex industry. According to her own blog she has been asked by the Erotic Service Providers Union to be their representative in Rhode Island. A convicted madam from this organization visited her in February. They discussed strategies to decriminalize prostitution.

Hurley has been showing her film in sex industry venues (not human rights film festivals). The film “Happy Endings?” premiered at an erotic film festival (Cinekink) in New York City in January. Next it will be shown as part of a Sex Workers Film Festival in San Francisco in June. (The hostess of the festival is Carol Leigh, also known as “The Scarlet Harlot,” who recently published a book entitled The Unrepentant Whore.)

Here Donna M. Hughes is (cleverly) incorrect on several counts.

First, Hughes references Hurley’s blog post about speaking to Maxine Doogan, founder of the Erotic Service Providers Union (ESPU). This sets up a context connecting Hurley to “the sex industry.” Next, Hughes cites screenings of Happy Endings? to confirm that context in the reader’s mind.

The cited screenings are carefully selective since, according to Nancy Green, one of the people who republished Hughes’ commentary, Hughes herself watched Happy Endings? when it was shown at AS220, a non-profit community arts center. Other venues where Happy Endings? was screened include Brattle Theatre in Boston as part of CineMental, a Boston Underground Film Festival, and the Colombus Theater, both hardly “sex industry” venues.

More damning, however, is the timeline. Pay attention to the dates Hughes mentions as well as the dates she doesn’t mention, along with where she mentions them.

The Happy Endings? screening at Cinekink took place on February 28^th, 2009, not in January as Hughes says. Hurley’s referenced blog post is dated February 22, 2009. Not only does Hughes state the Cinekink screening took place in the previous month, she says this after planting the insinuation that Hurley collaborated with “the sex industry.”

Now, I looked, but could find no evidence that Hurley had connections to the sex workers’ rights movement prior to making Happy Endings?, and Hughes offers no evidence to back her claim. Nowhere does Doogan ask Hurley to represent the ESPU in Rhode Island, or anywhere else for that matter. Tara Hurley has further stated she had no clear opinion on prostitution laws before making the documentary, and actually disagrees with Doogan’s support of de-criminalization.

The film has a grotesque quality to it. All the faces are blurred out, the voices are disguised. The camera often focuses only on the mouth or body of the speaker. There is grainy black and white footage from surveillance cameras inside the spa-brothel. For a number of scenes of men coming to the brothel, Hurley filmed from an upstairs window of the brothel.

There’s actually no indication that any of the spas in the film even has “an upstairs” area. The footage of men coming to the spa is stationary, so I’d think it’s another shot taken from surveillance footage. Only the filmmakers can tell us for sure but, again, Hughes seems eager to present herself as a psychic.

If you already know something about sex trafficking in Rhode Island, you can pick-up a few interesting details from the film, but overall, most viewers will leave confused, or worse, they will believe what the women-pimps that say about women choosing to work in the brothels. It is not fair to the exploited and abused women to pretend that this film represents their lives.

At the end of her commentary, Hughes deflects the confusion she introduces by claiming that’s what Happy Endings? does. By doing this, she also implies she knows The Truth about these “brothels” and their “women-pimps,” while injecting her own “sex trafficking” context into the framework of prostitution. While it’s certainly commendable to be fighting against sex trafficking, Donna M. Hughes’ definition of “sex trafficking” is so ostentatiously broad that just about anything related with sex, including adult sex education centers and community-based sex education initiatives like KinkForAll, could fall under her definition of the crime.

How many misdirections did you count?

Obviously, I don’t buy Hughes’ snake oil. In this piece alone, there are at least 7 ways smoke-and-mirrors are coloring reality.

1. Donna M. Hughes’ opaque list-serve ensures her audience is composed primarily of the lulled and trusting. While there’s unquestionably value in private communication, the sex-negative and the hateful like Hughes regularly stir the pot using private channels to maintain plausible deniability for having done so. For instance, when the fact that Megan Andelloux’s threatened arrest (originating from another of Hughes’ emails) was added to her Wikipedia bio, a pseudonymous editor using the handle “EconProfessor” adamantly contested the addition, repeatedly calling it a “false speculation” and a biased “theory.” (For her part, “EconProfessor” neither confirms nor denies being Margaret Brooks—an economics professor at Bridgewater State College and one of Hughes’ collaborators—and objects to the suggestion.)
2. The words Donna M. Hughes uses are particularly noteworthy, and they become more incendiary as the piece wears on. In her intro, Hughes calls the establishments “spa-brothels,” then drops “spa” and only uses “brothels.” (If you choose to watch Happy Endings?, and as you watch the media and listen to activists generally, pay close attention to the language used in each case.) Progressively loaded, fear-based language is a red-flag that one is attempting to hijack an issue.
3. At several points, Donna M. Hughes blatantly lies about the contents of the film, such as when discussing the Korean interviewees.
4. The meat of Hughes’ decontextualization is the mention of the FBI investigation, which requires a significant amount of sleuthing to re-contextualize appropriately. And in piecing the timeline and geography together, we discover much wider data like pre-existing political distaste for these Rhode Island spas, and a lack of evidence. Considering her penchant for wanting to stir the pot unnoticed, I’m left wondering about Donna M. Hughes’ own influence over the very events she presents.
5. In none of Hughes’ claims is an actual link provided for readers, and the few supplied references are vague at best. I had to do a lot of digging to follow her claims to their sources. While poorly-referenced claims may be intentional obfuscation or mere laziness, it surely isn’t high quality; go examine the rest of Ms. Hughes’ publications and you’ll wonder (as I do) how an academic can be considered reliable when they so often use references so poorly.
6. Donna M. Hughes’ ability to manipulate readers with cognitive bias is so expert that even when her own commentary contradicts itself, as the example of identifying spa owners shows, it may usually go unnoticed.
7. When Hughes discusses Hurley’s alleged bias, she thoroughly misrepresents the facts (including others’ stated positions) and, notably, convolutes the timeline of events. Understanding timelines is hard enough when they’re presented simply, so it’s no wonder one can overlook the distortion.

The lesson in all this isn’t actually about sex trafficking, prostitution, or documentary films. The lesson is the importance of demanding transparency. Never blindly trust anyone, no matter how well-established they are. Do this to me, and definitely do this to people like Donna M. Hughes who consistently distort reality through decontextualization, obfuscation, and outright lies.

If you don’t demand transparency and accountability, you will not have it. Yes, you—not the media nor anyone else—you have to demand and critique the evidence. Until “We The People” (both individually and collectively) hold authorities and each other to the principled standards of integrity on which America is founded, all we will get is more shaming, fear-mongering, and needless suffering.

Do not let another minute pass where behavior like Donna M. Hughes’ is commonplace. Do the work to connect the dots, ask for help when you need it (because you will), and always remain skeptical. Then publish and share what you know. Because what is unfair, it seems to me, is that some people opportunistically abandon ethics, disregarding others living in obvious hardship whether sex trafficking victim or not—and no one should be sitting idly by while that continues.

No one.

For what it’s worth, Tara Hurley offered her own rebuttal. As Hurley says in her comment, Alec Bourne says it best: ‘It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.’

1. As shown in the screenshots, “Heather” is properly identified at 12 minutes and 20 seconds into the film, while “Danielle” is similarly identified at 1 hour, 13 minutes, and 10 seconds into the film.
2. Look for this excerpt in Happy Endings? beginning at 21 minutes and 5 seconds into the film.

“Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.” —Marianne Williamson

The sex-negative strategy is composed of two major stages, each with its own primary tactic. First, scare; second, confuse. Both tactics are wielded against institutions (a political party, universities, medical associations, etc.) and individuals (activists, celebrities, researchers, journalists, etc.). In this series of posts, I examine these tactics closely, using real-world case studies and examples.

Although the actors and details of a particular situation are obviously unique, the overarching culture creates a cycle of abuse in which one can observe obvious patterns. Let’s begin by looking at a couple recent examples of the “scare” tactic.

Fear-inducing messages and the media

In the United Kingdom, reports of a surge of sexually active 11 year old girls have made headlines recently and are understandably concerning. However, as Dr. Petra Boynton elucidates, the headlines are inaccurate:

Rise in 11 year olds on the pill (Sunday Times); One thousand girls on Pill at 11: Huge rise in contraceptive prescription for pre-teens without parents knowing (Daily Mail); Huge rise in 11-year-olds on the pill (Telegraph).

The UK appears afflicted by ‘soaring’ numbers of sexually active girls, who lie to parents, enabled by GPs. Is it accurate? No.

[…]

This was picked up first by the Sunday Times then spread to other newspapers, websites and broadcast media. As we’ll see, journalists did not show due diligence in investigating the story.

While sensationalist journalism is hardly eye-opening, what is important to observe is how sex-negative activists employ mass media to implant their revisionist reality in an anxious populace. As Dr. Petra says, There is an ongoing crusade by elements of the media to be anti young people, particularly young girls, and against all forms of sex education. And, as we’ve already heard, scandalous headlines about teenage nymphos sound a lot more exciting than the real story. Dr. Petra correctly observes that the media sets these stories up as moral debates where there are distinct baddies (doctors, trampy teens, and anyone offering sex education) and goodies (Christian/Family groups, parents).

And the kicker, as Dr. Petra also notes, the frenzy can be traced back to the Christian Medical Association, on which most of the reporting relied, but did not critique. Let me repeat that, because it’s very important: journalists relied upon sources whom they did not question.

Once journalists have a story, however, experts are put in the difficult position of re-contextualizing a decontextualized report. In Dr. Petra’s words from BBC Radio, The problem with the story was it, I think, jumped to very extreme conclusions without explaining the wider data. (Quote begins at 13:07 in the recording.) Moreover, when experts try to introduce rationality, they get the Third Degree—they get the grilling the agenda-driven source should have gotten.

Through simple ignorance, over-eager sensationalizing, or intentional misreporting in the worst cases, journalists distributed fear-based messages that had parents scared about the well-being of their children, children unwittingly cast in the horrific role of untrustworthy miscreants, and sex-positive adults as (you guessed it) child exploiters. (Dr. Petra chronicles that most of the calls I took from journalists today were seeking to pitch me into battle—cast in the un-winnable role of the ‘pro sex bogeywoman’.) Only the bravest of sex-positive educators and activists would be willing to step into the fray at this point, so of course most remain quiet.

Again, while details across stories vary, the framework—a self-reinforcing catacomb of fear-based messaging and emotional appeals—remains consistent. Observe, for instance, the recent love affair anti-porn activist Dr. Gail Dines is having with the media.

Gail Dines and her colleagues insist that when men view porn, it leads them to child molestation, and when women view porn, it gets them gang-raped. However, the actual data tells a different story. So insidiously effective is this tactic of fomenting moral panic (and decontextualization, which I’ll detail in an upcoming post) that Gail Dines even headlines in left-wing women’s media.

Look under the hood and you can see Gail Dines’ campaign is promulgated by Christian groups and companies with explicit anti-gay histories, that her most visible sidekick is faith-based Pink Cross “charity” founder Shelley Lubben, or that among her most vocal supporters is former Bush-era Obscenity Task Force Prosecutor Patrick Trueman (whose own “Porn Harms” group crows with obvious delight at censorship of sex-positive discussions). Here too, the fear-inducing messages—and the thinly-veiled threat—is the same: “good girls don’t; men are predators.” It is a centuries-old reinforcement of gender stereotypes and The Patriarchy, of all things!

Moreover, some of these people are journalists themselves, collaborate directly with sex-negative activists or, as is the case with Julie Bindel, both. (For her part, Bindel has actually suggested that academics who disagree with her positions should be shot.)

This happens time and again, across all kinds of sexuality-related issues. Watch this pattern playing out right now about the misguided “end the demand” protests targeting Craigslist. The media only rarely mentions that the protests are organized by anti-prostitution activist Melissa Farley, a questionable source at best.

There are many people doing what they can to allay specific out-of-proportion fears, but I see far fewer people striking at the root issue: the fear-based landscape itself. Although organized fear of this magnitude may win at the ballot box, creating laws that cause real harm, it has no place in the better society we all claim to want.

Those who oppose our most basic rights are not, as many would have the public believe, just well-meaning, ordinary citizens. They are calculating opportunists who operate at the highest levels of academia and government, influencing policy and opinion to the advancement of their personal and political agendas—at our expense.

The cost of inaction is your sexual freedom, the ability to exercise your rights to love whom and how you choose, to control not only your own life but how you make life. That freedom is stolen by a threat used against anyone who dares say something that opposes or exposes sex-negative interests for the shame they are, as former US Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders and countless others can testify. That threat, in the hands of the sex-negative and the hateful, goes something like this: “If you question us, then you’re a child molester, a sexual predator, a rapist, and/or an enabler of those horrors.”

These people have two primary weapons, fear and obfuscation, which they use to pass unjust laws and attack political opponents. And they wield these weapons masterfully. As Melissa Ditmore, Ph.D., wrote (in 2008!) of the worrisome increase in panic-driven legislation, in this case legislation addressing sex work:

Sex law is often a front for ideology that constrains rather than liberates women. What most appalls me about the recent conflation of trafficking and sex work in law and policy is that some feminists support the confusion. These women would normally never dream of telling other women how to behave, because they have fought against imposed constraints in their own lives. Yet they seem to think it is acceptable to tell sex workers what is best for them, and they are prepared to use dubious political alliances to advance their moral agenda.

Only when the whole truth and nothing but the truth is laid bare, evidence reveals these “concerned citizens” as the hypocritical ideologues they are. Even the recent ruling overturning “Proposition Hate” explicitly recognizes this: The Protect Marriage campaign advertisements ensured California voters had these previous fear-inducing messages in mind. The evidence at trial shows those fears to be completely unfounded. (Emphasis mine.)

So watch the media closely, and critically. Your freedoms and your future need you now. As Driftglass said on Kink On Tap 52, First of all, a robust and powerful investigative media is necessary to a democracy. And secondly, citizens have to take responsibility for knowing shit and getting angry about shit and then taking action about it.

That’s why I’ve been reading FBI complaints, government press releases, news archives, and a host of other documents in order to learn all I can about how hateful people with political influence operate. And if I don’t share what I know, fewer people will be equipped to take action. So, very soon, I will share, because as Jacob Applebaum said, People in the United States of America have the ability to democratically change this situation if they are unhappy with the truth; they now have information that will assist them in having a clearer picture. Perhaps they will demand more transparency and more accountability.

I’m angry because we live in a world where we’re made to feel afraid of our own bodies, and of touching our bodies, and of other peoples’ bodies, and touching them, and of other people’s bodies touching. These things should be beautiful, but because some people aren’t comfortable with them, nobody is allowed to be.

I am angry because parents are made to distrust their own children, children are made to feel like—and even prosecuted as—criminals, and when a woman respected enough to become the Surgeon General of the United States said that maybe, just maybe, if we don’t frighten kids away from masturbating they’d be more knowledgeable and responsible about sexuality, she lost her job. And this sex-negative culture is so strong, now it may even pervade the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists—the people who are supposed to teach us about sex and our bodies.

And I’m angry because I feel like I can’t make myself heard, and because too few others are speaking up. I’m angry because if you do speak up, you’ll get attacked. You’ll be accused of terrible things, like being a child molester, or enabling rape.

I’m not angry because I was attacked, I’m angry because anyone could be, at any time, and nobody will even bother to watch the whole video before passing judgment. And everybody just accepts this, as though it’s natural for the world to be like this. But it isn’t natural—our culture was manufactured this way.

We could all trust a little more, and panic a little less, and everything would be so much better. But I can’t make that happen, and I can’t make people listen to me. Even if people wanted to listen, they’d have a hard time because other people make sure you can’t read what I write or hear what I say in spaces like public libraries. But most people won’t even try, simply too afraid that they’ll be viewed as dirty, porn-loving perverts.

So I’m isolated, and I’m angry. But the one thing I refuse to be is quiet. Because this culture is telling us we’re supposed to be afraid, and silent, and “decent.” And if I buy that, then I’ll be just as hollow as the lip service this fear-based culture pays to honesty.

There’s an(other) interesting brouhaha in digital anti-porn versus (IMHO inappropriately named) pro-porn debates. But instead of a porn site, this time the battleground is Facebook.

Violet Blue’s “Our Porn, Ourselves” Facebook fan page, a carefully patrolled page where over 3,000 people (including myself) discussed the issue of pornography in the context of the anti-porn and pro-porn arguments, has been removed. Exactly why that happened is known only to Facebook at the moment, but here’s what the anti-porn activists behind the @Porn_Harms twitter account said:

#facebook removed very innapropriate #proporn page. Thx FB for enforcing your no-obscenity rules. #children shouldn’t have open access there

Ah, yes. Children. Won’t somebody think of them? Please?

Noticing, @DodgerWA made a very simple, obvious point:

Interesting. According to @porn_harms even simply talking about #proporn ideals is “innapropriate” (sic).

.@Porn_Harms Links on the #proporn FB page were to articles about porn, not porn itself.  It’s called social discussion & education.

This is a very telling example of anti-porn being pro-censorship. It is perhaps the most blatant example of the embodiment of anti-porn ideals on the Internet, which clearly forbid not merely the distribution of imagery that anti-porn zealots like Gail Dines find offensive, but simply ideas that they find offensive.

Make no mistake: anti-porn is pro-censorship. They may say they’re not, but read closely and you’ll see references to MacKinnon-style censorship laws that would suppress access to the kinds of ideas that were on Violet Blue’s Facebook page. And they make these (sometimes subtle) references all over the place.

To wit, this recent Boston Globe article about Gail Dines:

Having viewed countless images as part of her research, Dines says there should be legislation that would define pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights and would entitle women to sue the industry for harm done to them.

Arguments like this have earned her […] the inevitable accusation that she favors censorship (Dines says she does not) and that she is an anti-sex prude. At that, she just rolls her eyes.

(Emphasis mine.)

Well, Ms. Dines, some accusations are true.

Update: Sometimes, the anti-porn contingent is not so subtle. Here’s them crowing about the pro-porn fan page’s removal. Comments include “Its all Gods mercy. More are yet to be removed God must rule” and “Thanks, FB. GOOD JOB…WA HOO! LOVE IT…PRAISE GOD!!!” (Click to enlarge.)

In addition to this post, interested readers can find plenty more good information and context at Iamcuriousblue’s blog.

That’s why I continue to receive numerous personal, private, correspondence from people of all genders, backgrounds, ages, and concerns who are uncomfortable about speaking non-anonymously. These folks have already made a leap of faith merely by emailing me (emails are not anonymous), yet what they have to say is so vital, is so important, and I believe is so prevalent that not sharing these “private conversations” publicly routinely pains me. I frequently ask for permission to publish these exchanges (even though I consider anything that comes to my inbox fair game for public blogging) out of respect for the concerns of others, regardless of my personal inclination towards radical transparency.

This stockpile of personal correspondence, the things these “garden-variety,” “normal,” even “vanilla” people tell me about themselves and their lives in one-on-one conversation that they would not feel comfortable sharing more publicly is evidence of the reality that “the moral majority” is simply a misnomer. They are, in fact, merely one very vocal minority. And, what’s more, so am I—I am a different vocal minority.

Since it will always be easier to destroy, to shame, to hate, than it will be to create, to empower, and to love, my challenge is to prove to the silent majority how necessary their voices and their actions really are. Until some perceived heretic such as myself can stand up to the monster of cultural shaming, to challenge the tyranny of “common sense,” and to expose the enraging and despicable lies activist academics peddle as fact, the silent majority will remain silenced by the vocal minorities fighting to maintain the cultural, religious, and economic status-quo.

On that note, here’s one such (slightly edited) exchange that I think is eye-opening with regards to its under-reported, and perhaps unacknowledged, prevalence. Like many others, this person prefers to remain anonymous because their “views have the potential to piss just about every camp off.” (That’s rarely been on my list of reasons why not to do something, but I respect the sentiment.)

So without further ado, here’s the closest thing to a guest post I’ve published on this blog:

Maymay,

I can finally sit down and write you an email on some of the thoughts I’ve had while reading your posts. Let’s start with the Submissive Man in 2007:

I wanted to write about why many submissive men are just as responsible for debasing their own sexuality as the many pro- (and so obviously not-so-pro-)dommes who take delight in squashing them down while lifting them of that burdensome weight in their wallets. (“Thank you for stealing my money, Mistress, would you like another dollar?”)

There seems to be this strange notion in femdom that women are superior to men. As a fantasy, I can kink on that notion for perhaps a two minute stretch at a time (perhaps longer with a visual like something by Sardax) before I discard it at as silly (for me). I’m not a loser. I’m not a worm. I’m not a piggy. I’m not worthless. I’m not a maid. I’m not a handyman. And I’m not a wallet. These notions of male submission don’t resonate with me at all. In fact, I think my submission to a woman has a special meaning because I’m awesome; the type of submission I do when I’m submissive is not necessarily “better,” but it is different, and it is under-represented.

There are tons of internet femdoms urging me to prove how worthless I am to please them; why not femdoms urging me to prove how awesome I am to please them?

I certainly don’t want to step on other people’s fantasies, yet there comes a problem when certain fantasies can’t be distinguished from reality, and when certain fantasies marginalize others (like mine). Sexual dominance really isn’t necessarily the same thing as status superiority; just because I often want women to have the former, it doesn’t mean I believe them to hold the latter.

Like you, the other thing I have trouble relating to is paying money for “financial domination”, “tribute”, or “sessions,” at least not in typical contexts. As a student of seduction for many years, I want people to do stuff with me because they are enthusiastic about it. I want people to want me. If someone doesn’t want me enough to do something with me without any exchange of money, then they don’t want them as much as I would want them to want me.

I originally figured out some of the problems with males attempting to exchange money for female sexuality from the seduction community, in posts like these.

By the cultural default, paying money implies that I am inadequate in intrinsic desirability, and that I must “sweeten the deal” financially to make up for this inadequacy. I do not accept that framing of the situation at all! If I’m not desirable enough for someone to want to be sexual with me without me having to include extrinsic incentives outside their enjoyment of the activity, then we are really not a good fit.

An important lesson I’ve learned is that a lot of the status that people give me depends on how much status I act like I have. Similarly, people seem to treat me as more desirable when I act like I’m desirable, and when I act in a way that shows that I believe that they will find me desirable.

Yet if I offer someone money for a sexual experience, I am acting as if I believe that I’m less desirable to her than she is to me; my belief in my lower desirability will then serve as evidence to her that she should also believe that I have lower desirability. By the same logic, I understand your ambivalence about pro-dommes asking you to session with them. If I received such a suggestion, I would be offended inside, because it would imply that she saw me as less desirable than I saw her, and that she considered it acceptable to rub that perception in my face and have me be thankful for a chance for an asymmetrical interaction with her. Thanks, but no thanks.

I would argue that pro-dommes (and non-pro) are also being short-changed by these exchange metaphors in their own dating lives. They (and men who approach them as potential lovers) are used to accepting a metaphor which devalues the man’s desirability. I’m currently seeing a pro-domme. She asked me out after we got talking…but I wonder what would have happened if instead I had followed one of the standard submissive scripts and asked to be her slave, pay her tribute, worship her, or session with her. There is a good chance I would have destroyed my desirability for her, and we wouldn’t now be enjoying experiences that she charges other men hundreds of dollars for in “sessions.”

Since I want people to want me, I go to great lengths to make myself attractive to people I’m seeing. Getting ready can take me several hours, and even more if I’m going out as a girl. As a student of
seduction, I enjoy using my knowledge of sexuality and psychology to create mutually-enjoyable situations. Sometimes, I view the images and interactions I create as a form of power, and sometimes I view them as a form of service; these views are not mutually-exclusive. With people I go out with, part of my effort to create an attractive image and enjoyable interaction involves avoiding and ruthlessly shutting down interpersonal dynamics that undermine my desirability or value as a person; this could be construed as a service.

Since I believe that a lot of stereotypical male submission dynamics and scripts will undermine my desirability and value in even a dommes’ eyes (including, but not limited to, forms of financial exchange), I am forced to reject them in order to maintain a mutually pleasing and sustainable interaction. For me, the best way to “serve” (to the extent that the notion of service resonates with me) is to reject the stereotypical, self-undermining notions of service that are associated with the devaluing of submissive male sexuality. I serve the relationship, and I serve the other person through my service to the relationship, even if this service involves me rejecting tempting cultural scripts, rejecting certain dynamics or tests from the other person that I judge as harmful to the long-term health of the relationship, not necessarily giving them everything they want when they want it, asserting myself, presenting strong opinions, being challenging, or saying “no” or “not yet.”

I’m really grateful for all the personal correspondence I’ve gotten and I hope it continues. I also hope that more such correspondence—in whatever form it takes—encourages people to open themselves up a bit more than they otherwise would. Although this exchange was about a topic germane to BDSM and, therefore, this blog, I’ve had similar exchanges with self-described “normal people” who held “unpopular,” “under-culture,” or just plain “perverted” views.

And you might be surprised to learn how many of them came from doctrinal socially conservative or religious backgrounds.

You guys are the silent majority. I’m a bullhorn, a loud voice, maybe a lighthouse doing my best to shine light onto an otherwise dark and rocky shore of a corrosive and repressive hegemony. But I’m not the meat of the matter, you are. What will it take for more of you to speak up and speak out?