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Nov. 29, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:53
534 Prostitution Part 2
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Hi everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. This is I'm up for a walk at lunch.
This is part two of the grim and gruesome series on pornography.
And just sort of in the interest of full disclosure, I wanted to mention that I've enjoyed pornography in the past.
So this is eye-opening for me as well.
I kind of had a gut feeling about this, which I probably ignored for too long, but it definitely is eye-opening for me as well.
When I look back on my own, You know, non-paid and very mild consumption in this area, it's something to just...
You know, it's eye-opening for me as well, so I hope that this doesn't sound like I'm hurling down judgments from on high, although I'm sure it does.
There's a good article that I'm going to read.
It's, you know, not...
Nothing's gospel, right?
Of course, right? Except reality and logic.
So, do take from this what you will.
I found it to be some interesting perspectives on the John side of things.
This is called How Prostitution Works by Joe Parker.
And I'll put the website link to this on the board.
And so, I'll sort of read it with a little bit of commentary.
You can let me know what you think. Introduction.
Prostitution, pornography, and other forms of commercial sex are a multi-billion dollar industry.
They enrich a small minority of predators while the larger community is left to pay for the damage.
People used in the sex industry often need medical care as a result of the ever-present violence.
They may need treatment for infectious diseases, including AIDS. Survivors frequently need mental health care for post-traumatic stress disorder, psychotic episodes, and suicide attempts.
About a third end up chronically disabled and on Social Security.
The sex trade plays an active role in promoting alcohol and drug problems.
Pimps also use prostituted women in forgery and credit card fraud.
The community must pay for chemical dependency treatment, insurance costs, and incarceration.
Not, of course, something that I would agree with from that standpoint, but there are costs, of course.
In addition to these costs, the community loses the contributions which might have been made to legitimate community productivity by those used in the sex industry, or used up in the sex industry.
The operators of sex businesses not only do not pay for these expenses, many have managed to avoid paying taxes at all.
Well, that's another discussion.
The jobs. No business can afford to create a product for which there are no buyers.
The first step in understanding the sex industry is to understand the customers, the jobs.
Real sexual relationships are not hard to find.
There are plenty of adults of both sexes who are willing to have sex if someone treats them well and asks.
But there lies the problem.
Some people do not want an equal sharing relationship.
They do not want to be nice. They do not want to ask.
They like the power involved in buying a human being who can be made to do almost anything, which would sort of tie into some of the stuff that I was talking about this morning.
The business of prostitution and pornography is the use of real human beings to support the fantasies of others.
Anyone working in prostitution who tells a John too much about who they really are interferes with the fantasy.
They risk losing a customer and may get a beating as well.
In real relationships with real people, you are stuck with the limitations of who you are, who your partner is, and what you can do together without hurting each other.
Some people do not want real relationships or feel entitled to something beyond the real relationships they have.
They want to play super stud and sex slave or whatever inside their own heads.
If they need to support their fantasies with pictures, videotapes, or real people to abuse, the sex trade is ready to supply them.
For a price, they can be a, quote, legend in their own minds.
The most common type of prostitution customer is the user.
He is quite self-centered and simply wants what he considers to be his needs met.
The user would deny any intent to harm anyone and might even claim some empathy for the sex workers he uses.
However, his empathy does not extend to discontinuing his using behavior nor to helping anyone escape from the sex industry.
He does not care whether the person he is using is unwilling or unusually vulnerable.
He simply feels entitled To whatever he wants, whenever he wants it.
If someone is hurt, that is not his problem.
He sees himself as a respectable person and works to protect that appearance.
Users provide a large, safe and steady income for the pimps and other businessmen of the sex industry.
Sadists, and again, I'm not saying this is true of anyone on the board, I'm just sort of pointing out this article is interesting.
Sadists are people who have the ability to take pleasure in another person's fear, pain and humiliation.
They constitute about 10% of the population.
I don't know about that statistic, but we shall see.
Sadists vary in severity ranging from those who just want to make you feel bad on up to those who do torture murders.
There is a definite practice effect.
If allowed to hurt people, often their sadism gets worse.
Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse by sadists drives their child victims into the street, trying to escape, right?
This was what I was talking about this morning.
The pimps and, quote, chicken hawks, the people who prey on the young, take it from there.
Sadists are attracted to prostituted women and children because they are willing to get into a car or come to a place where the sadist can be in control.
Sadism is about control.
Hurting people who cannot stop them is the most intense and pleasurable form of control.
Sadists pay close attention to matters of power.
They are most brutal with small women and children and are more careful with larger women and men.
They avoid people who may have someone to protect them or someone who may take revenge on the victim's behalf.
There are pimps who specialize in supplying victims to sadists and those who base their fees on the amount of damage done to the victim.
Sadists are found at all levels of society, including the respected and powerful.
They often use this, saying, you're just a whore, nobody's going to believe you.
If they do kill someone, they are very aware that, to some extent, the effort society puts into finding the killer will reflect the value placed on the victim.
People working in prostitution are safe victims.
I think there was a... A guy out in BC, a pig farmer who'd killed 20 or 30 prostitutes, and it took them years and years and years to find him, and I'm sure that the finding turned out to be accidental, or a voluntary confession or something like that.
Necrophiles are people who can take pleasure in filth, degradation, and destruction.
They are the users of the sick, the old, the psychotic, the brain damaged, the tract, and tattooed casualties of the sex industry in the end stages of their lives.
For necrophiles, broken bodies and broken minds are a turn-on.
They glory in their superiority over ruined human beings and feel entitled to express their contempt in every way.
Necrophiles must keep their perversion secret from their friends and families, both to protect their social standing and to protect their fantasies of superiority.
Normal people just would not understand.
And again, I'm not saying anyone on the board is related to this, I just think it's a very good article.
Child molesters participate in the sex industry in several ways.
Some have been aware of sexual attraction to children, often of a particular age and sex, from some time in late childhood.
They then make the choice to act on it.
Some have sadistic characteristics.
Children are easier than adults to control.
The molester's own children in his own home are the easiest of all to control.
Necrophilic child molesters enjoy the knowledge that when the molesters are finished with them, the children's lives will never be the same.
They enjoy the fact that the children may later self-destruct in addiction, prostitution or suicide.
It proves that they were right.
Sex offenders against children operate with varying degrees of sophistication.
Some do careful grooming. They use pornography to break down resistance and supply drugs and alcohol and money.
Others just start out with forcible rape.
Many claim unusual, quote, love for children.
They claim that sex between adults and children is not harmful and should be legalized.
Pedophiles actually teach children that they are helpless, hopeless, worthless, and only good for sex and hurting.
A large portion of workers in the sex trade started out as sexually abused children.
Some were even broken in by being shared with or rented out to others by their own families.
I know one person with whom that was the case.
There are specialist pimps who provide children to Johns.
The fees vary depending on the age, sex, and appearance of the child, as well as the amount of damage the child has already incurred.
When caught, the pimps and John's claim not to have known the child's real age.
There is a market for small adults made up to look like children, both for direct sex and for pornography, but the truth is in the fees.
Real children sell more for more than fake ones.
The pimps. No one really wants to have sex with five, ten or twenty strangers a day, every day.
Besides the sheer numbers involved, some of those strangers are going to use the person in ways that are bizarre, painful or disgusting, and occasionally fatal.
When people who have worked in prostitution call it repeated rape, they are not exaggerating or being hysterical.
They are being legally precise.
Rape is sexual intercourse against the will of the victim, carried out by threat or force.
In prostitution, the John performs a sex act with the unwilling victim but subcontracts the intimidation and violence to another man, the pimp.
The John would like to believe he is paying for sex, but the person he has sex with gets little or none of the money.
The money goes to the pimp to pay for the force needed to keep prostituted women and children working.
It goes to the drug dealer who provides whatever it takes to keep the workers from becoming psychotic or committing suicide.
It goes to pay the businessmen who provide the real estate, support services and legal protection for the trade.
Pimps come in three general types.
Media pimping, like other kinds, involves selling fantasies that ultimately hurt people.
Two of the central lies are that women are only good for sex and men are only good for violence.
They claim that they produce sex and violence because that's all that sells.
In fact, many other things sell as well or better.
Blah, blah, blah. The media stuff, to me, is less important and less valuable.
You can read the article yourself, of course.
Business level pimps extract.
Profits from the sex industries in ways that minimize the risk of public exposure or criminal prosecution.
They own the bars and strip clubs which attract concentrations of potential jobs.
They offer jobs as dancers and hostesses to vulnerable young people who are potential candidates for more direct use in the sex trade.
They own the adult bookstores, massage parlors, motels, and legal brothels.
They posture as legitimate businessmen, conceal their ownership behind corporations and frontmen, and deny knowing that their property is being used in the sex industry.
They charge sex businesses far higher rents and fees than they could get from legitimate tenants, which indicates they know what the businesses are doing.
Through contacts in the business community, they arrange for sexual services for visiting businessmen, politicians, celebrities, and sports teams.
By keeping these arrangements secret, business pimps ensure a degree of protection for their other activities for their customers in high places.
Business-level pimps separate themselves from the dirty workers of the sex trade by treating them as independent contractors rather than employees.
This enables them to avoid having to pay taxes, overtime pay, health insurance, and workman's comp.
If one of the workers is arrested, the businessman is protected from any legal involvement, they subcontract any violence needed to the street-level pimps.
With support from elements of the legitimate entertainment industry as well as the street-level pimps, they produce and distribute commercial pornography.
They support and have the support of civil liberties, advocates who oppose censorship regardless of the harm done, blah blah blah.
They manage to hold on to their profits.
They generally face the greatest dangers from the IRS, not from the police.
Now, street-level pimps are the foot soldiers of the sex industry.
Typically they are small-time criminals who have high needs for sadistic gratification.
The Johns and business-level pimps subcontract to these men the brainwashing, terror, beatings, and occasional murder needed to keep prostituted women and children, and I'm sure men, working.
Pimps are part of the business even where prostitution is legal.
Brothels do not run employment ads.
The brothel owners require that any new employee be referred by someone ready to supply whatever force is necessary to control the woman.
Street pimps learn the business from friends and relatives already in the business, from other criminals in jails and prisons, and from other pimps they meet hanging out in the bars and clubs.
Occasionally, someone especially talented in greed and cruelty learns the trade solely by practicing on available victims.
Pimps tend to avoid identifying themselves as such, except to other pimps.
They like to present themselves as husbands or boyfriends or protectors.
When caught in acts of violence, they try to prevent outside interference by claiming it is only a domestic matter.
In fact, the pimps themselves are the greatest danger to those they exploit.
The Johns and the police are lesser hazards.
Street pimps pride themselves on controlling their victims by psychological manipulation.
They claim that prostituted women and children give their money to the pimps because they, quote, love them.
In criminal language, she loves me means I can control her.
Street pimps try to play down their use of threats and violence despite the fact that it's their biggest contribution to the sex industry.
Throughout human history, there has been the kind of greed that takes the form of wanting to own other human beings.
Slavery died out in most areas because it was unprofitable compared to more modern methods of production.
The one trade where the would-be slaver can still find success is in the sex industry.
For many pimps, the gratification of owning slaves is as important as the drugs and the money.
Contrary to the images in the media, most pimps exploit members of their own race.
Many are nearly the same age as their victims.
Most pimps are male. Women are sometimes involved in helping a male pimp to control his stable or act as madams in brothels owned by someone else.
Some run escort or outcall services themselves, but maintain relationships through which they can call on male enforcers when needed.
Occasionally, women are involved in supplying their own children to pedophiles, pornographers, or others in the sex industry.
The mother's own addiction is the usual cause, plain greed for money, and the mother's own sexual perversity are less common motivations.
That's a broad statement, but who knows, right?
Street-level pimps usually spend their money on clothes, jewelry, cars, especially on their own addictions.
They are often involved in other types of crime, especially drug dealing may go to prison for those.
Successful prosecution for pimping itself is quite unusual.
The sex industry is ultimately about power.
This is best demonstrated by the care which the industry takes to ensure that those it uses are powerless.
The predators are neither irrational nor stupid.
They watch carefully for a kind of victim profile and avoid anyone who may be uncontrollable or dangerous.
They focus on young people coming out of families that are abusive, disorganized or non-existent.
One fundamental function of the family is to protect its members, especially its children.
The family also is a team, and all players must do their jobs.
If a member is lost or disabled, then others in the extended family or community must step in to carry on.
When one or more adults in the family are absent, addicted, mentally ill or severely demoralized, the children are in danger.
When the family is poor or part of a devalued minority group, The opportunities for education and good jobs are limited.
Some members of those families may be willing to take risks.
If the young people are being terrorized, beaten or sexually abused by the very people who should be protecting them, many are going to take their chances on the street.
For some, new dancing or even prostitution may look better than no job at all.
If they are underage, have no address or cannot afford to help their parents involved, most social service agencies will not help them.
Children are still treated as some adults' property.
The juvenile system has little interest in non-criminal runaways or throwaways.
There are age requirements for normal jobs, usually between 14 and 18 years of age.
The very young are practically forced into the sex industry, even before the pimps and johns get involved.
They may have to do prostitution from age 12 or 14 until they turn 18 and can get a quote better job, such as nude dancing.
There are three general patterns for breaking someone into prostitution.
In slave-taking, a young male predator befriends the victim long enough to be sure she is not dangerous herself nor protected by anyone who is.
He manipulates her into a situation where she can be kidnapped and held in isolation in a place the slaver and his friends control.
Over a prolonged period, she is terrorized, tortured, and gang-raped.
She is threatened with her own death or that of anyone she loves.
She is told...
Sorry.
Once she is convinced that her only chance of survival is to do exactly as she is told, she is, quote, turned out.
Her first trick may in fact be a member of the prostitution organization set up to make sure she performs as directed.
After she has been properly seasoned, she is put to work for her captors or sold to another pimp.
The domestic violence transition targets young people coming out of abusive homes who are emotionally needy and have no real idea of what a normal love relationship looks like.
They become involved with a quote boyfriend who initially treats them better than they've ever experienced before.
The boyfriend gradually becomes extremely controlling and eventually violent.
He introduces commercial sex in terms of his pressing need for money.
If you love me, you will do this.
He quickly transitions from just this once into you are just a whore, my whore, and requiring daily prostitution.
He continues controlling the victim with alternating emotional manipulation and explosive violence while living on her earnings for as long as she lasts.
The grooming process is used by older and more sophisticated predators and is especially used on younger children.
These perpetrators become adept at identifying abused, neglected and depressed children and, quote, befriending them.
They develop a special relationship, one that isolates the child from others and makes the child feel indebted to the groomer.
Slowly, resistance is broken down using gifts, money, alcohol, drugs and pornography.
In the sex industry, pornography is not only a profitable product but also a working tool.
They engage the child in progressively more direct sex and begin to merge the abuse into the child's identity.
You want this. You like this.
You made it happen. Now you are dirty, perverted, queer, and so on.
These predators often are only interested in children of a specific age or appearance.
When they develop beyond that, the kids may be passed off to pedophiles interested in older children.
Being suddenly dumped for no understandable reason is often very painful for the child.
Over a lifetime, these predators may victimize an incredibly large number of children.
The emotional damage they do leaves the child even more isolated and vulnerable to further involvement in the sex industry.
Gender differences. The experience of prostitution is remarkably similar for males and females, but there are some differences.
Most young men used in prostitution are heterosexual.
They are drawn into the sex industry by many of the same forces as are women.
Many Johns consider themselves straight and claim that only the prostituted young male is gay.
Those used in male-on-male prostitution are often left with tremendous confusion about their actual sexual orientation.
When trying to escape the life, they may encounter all the prejudices encountered by gays in addition to the stigma of prostitution.
Rape and sexual slavery are common in jails and prisons.
There is considerable public support for it as a normal part of the punishment.
I'm not sure about that.
Some of those who run institutions do their best to maintain a safe and controlled environment.
They may be hampered by outdated, hard to supervise buildings and lack of staff.
Others may care very little about what inmates do to each other.
Inmates who go to staff for protection often end up in protective custody, which is practically the same as disciplinary isolation.
The response of convicts towards snitches ranges from abusive to deadly.
Almost all these traumatized men eventually are released.
Many dissolve into alcohol and drug dependence or are disabled by psychological symptoms.
Others wander the streets intoxicated, armed and ready to react explosively to any threat of harm or humiliation.
Women used in prostitution usually have children sooner or later.
Mothers who cannot protect themselves rarely can protect their children.
In the endless world of sex, drugs, and violence, the children may be neglected, traumatized, or even become merchandise in the sex industry themselves.
One of the most painful events in the life of prostitution is losing custody of the children, regardless of how good the reasons for that loss may be.
Most prostituted women want very much to be good mothers, often trying to give the children the love and care they never received themselves.
The birth of a trick baby, that is one fathered by some unknown John, produces very complicated feelings.
Some mothers can separate their feelings for the baby from the anger at the way the baby was conceived, but others cannot.
Some, quote, trick babies are given up for adoption by mothers who fear they otherwise might abuse them.
If the baby was fathered by a pimp, or is at least claimed to be in official records, the courts may fail to recognize or ignore the real nature of the relationship.
The pimp may be given visitation rights or even custody.
This gives the pimp a new person to threaten and a new means of controlling the mother.
It makes escaping from the sex industry even harder than it already is.
Both male and female survivors of prostitution usually develop a tremendous hatred of men, especially those in authority.
They hate both for the actual harm done and the help that was not given when it was terribly needed.
So, society's role.
We're almost done. The larger society provides the pimps with a very powerful weapon.
It makes prostitution an identity, not an occupation.
Once you have taken money for sex, you are a prostitute.
Society does not allow an expiration date on that identity, nor a way to be publicly accepted as something else.
What does this just happen with Paul McCartney's wife?
She was on an Arab boat or paid to be there.
I can't remember. Society offers help to people in trouble, largely based on the value set, on that person.
It's much easier to get help For a married middle-class domestic violence victim than for a refugee from the sex industry trying to escape from a pimp.
And it's riskier, of course, too.
Many people prefer to view prostitution as a, quote, lifestyle choice or even an addiction to a lifestyle.
They think most people in the sex industry are there to support their drug habits when actually the drugs are used to cope with what is happening to their lives.
Society assumes that nothing can be done to help them, so there's no need to try.
The pimps count on it. Being trapped under the control of violent and merciless men without hope of outside help sets the stage for Stockholm Syndrome.
When the victim cannot successfully fight or flee, she may try to form a protective relationship with her captor.
She hopes that if she can prove her love and loyalty to the pimp, she can love him into being good.
This can become such a desperate attachment that she actually believes she loves him and passes up chances to escape.
Stockholm Syndrome often is the real reason for what others see as the choice to stay in the sex industry.
Prostitution and the drug trade go hand in hand.
Customers for sex are often biased for drugs also.
Many pimps are supporting their own habits and dealing drugs as well.
The pimps consider drugs and alcohol a cost of doing business.
Without the chemicals, their livestock may become psychotic or commit suicide.
In addition to the brainwashing and violence, addiction provides a form of control.
Drugs also produce isolation from people who might otherwise try to help a victim or protect a victim or help her escape.
The only creature less worthy of help than a prostitute is an addicted prostitute.
The health effects of prostitution or devastating prostitution, especially in childhood, is at least as effective as war in producing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Survivors usually have some combination of depression, anxiety, and dissociative disorders.
Brain damage, psychosis, and suicide are common.
Long-term psychiatric disability, serious medical illness, and the effects of accumulating injuries shorten lives.
People who have had luckier lives as well as those who profit from the sex industry in some way frequently refer to prostitution and pornography as victimless crimes.
They point to a tiny fraction of sex workers who actually might be involved by choice.
They selectively read history to find some tiny minority somewhere at some time who gained something in the sex business.
The very selectiveness of their attention indicates that on some level they know that for almost everyone involvement in the sex industry is a terrible misfortune.
As many an old cop will say, anyone who thinks prostitution is a victim of this crime hasn't seen it up close.
Now, I mean, there's a lot of controversial stuff in that article, a lot of stuff that, I mean, I'm just sort of educating myself on this based on some sort of Ideas or thoughts that I've had over the years, but it is...
If it is, of course...
I mean, the basic argument goes like this, and I posted this on the board, and I'll talk about it a little bit more this afternoon after part three, when we can hopefully put this behind us for a while, because it is stomach-turning in the extreme.
But... If the majority...
And I mean, to me, it's like such a majority that it's, you know, statistically identical to everyone, but I know that's not provable, so I'm not going to stand by that as an axiomatic proposition, but if people are in the sex trade because they were abused as children,
and if the people who Contract with a prostitute are continuing the exploitation, and if the exploitation of others is an indication of low self-esteem, or I would say almost virulent negative self-esteem, then that's where the proposition comes from.
So if women are in the sex industry because they were abused as children, and If the person who contracts with a prostitute is continuing the exploitation and abuse of that human being, regardless of the money involved, and if we accept that exploiting and harming another human being or exploiting the leftovers of pedophiles is an act of somebody who has low self-esteem,
or if we assume that exploiting others is an indication of low self-esteem, that's where I get the basic argument that going to a prostitute is evidence of low self-esteem.
Downloading a couple of clips of porn from the internet is not really in the same category, though I'm not going to say, because of my own sort of history there, I'm not going to say whether or not, you know, the degree to which and that and the other, and I never paid for it, whatever, I was a single guy.
But the sort of act of going to a prostitute, the director...
Now, people say, well, okay, if you didn't go to the prostitute, what would the prostitute do?
It'd be even worse for her, right? Well...
In a free society, there's no age restrictions on who gets to work.
There's no need for social security numbers and all the nonsense that goes along with that.
The DROs are going to be very interested in the whereabouts of children because there's going to be liabilities associated with that.
We've talked about this before earlier on in the podcast series.
And, of course, the legalization of prostitution would be helpful.
It would be helpful in terms of giving people a route out and reducing the potential of some of the violence that occurs.
But nonetheless, the basic fact remains that The harm that accrues to these women and men which leave them sort of pointed at the sex trade industry and the near impossibility of getting out of that sex trade industry and the crippling emotional bad habits and destruction that goes on in the sex trade industry does not lend people to be very well positioned for getting out of said industry.
So I can certainly understand that it's a challenge, right?
It's a bit of a bottomless hole. Now, what I don't know, and I was sort of chatting about this with Christina last night, what I don't know, and I'm certainly going to go out and think about whether I want to do this or not for this afternoon, but I don't really get how, like, if the theory is correct, right, if the theory that there is a continuation of abuse by going to the prostitute, I don't know where that comes from in a man.
I mean, it's Something to do with hatred of the mother or something to do with the controlling and violence and probably sexually disturbed mother.
It's hard for me to sort of figure it out.
I've tried coming at this from a series of angles and I'm not having much luck at all.
So, I mean, maybe I'll sort of have a flash on the topic this afternoon.
Maybe I won't. But I'm not sure whether or not I'll be able to do it any kind of justice.
So, anyway, thank you so much for listening, and we'll get back to more pleasant topics soon, but this is sort of a body I didn't really want to drive past, and this was a sort of passing comment that has produced, you know, a veritable firestorm of anger and criticism and hostility and contempt and swearing and raging and so on,
right? So... You know, sometimes being a philosopher is easy, and sometimes being a philosopher is not easy, and this would certainly be one of those weeks.
But it's certainly worth exploring to see what's going on here.
At the root of it, certainly nothing that I have seen in the reactions to a lot of people on the boards and in my email and through the IM systems, none of what I'm seeing is Exactly bringing down the central thesis of shame and humiliation in interactions in this kind, in the prostitution kinds of interactions.
So, so far, the trail has not gone cold on the theory, and that means that it's still worth pursuing.
I can't...
I still can't get to what goes on for those who visit, men or women, who visit the prostitutes.
I still can't quite get it.
Now, that could be because the theory is totally wrong, of course, right?
Putting it forward is a passionately argued for possibility.
I certainly can't claim to have proven everything, but I still can't quite get through to the desire for that level of humiliation and self-contempt and to pick up the shattered souls left behind by pedophiles and use them for your own sexual pleasure and throw them a couple of bucks.
I just... I really can't make that Now, of course, I've never done drugs.
I've never visited a prostitute.
I've never been involved in the sex industry.
So it's hard for me to sort of figure this one out.
But maybe that's also because there's something in myself that I'm not able to see.
I'm certainly willing to keep looking that way.
So, as always, thank you so much for listening.
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