Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (16 page)

The
Times
article uses the phrase “sexual assault,” and includes the phrase “the girl had been forced to have sex with several men.” The word
rape
is only used twice and not within the context of the victim’s experience. This is not the careful use of language. In this instance, and far more often than makes sense, language is used to buffer our sensibilities from the brutality of rape, from the extraordinary nature of such a crime.

Feminist scholars have long called for a rereading of rape. Higgins and Silver note that “the act of rereading rape involves more than listening to silences; it requires restoring rape to the literal, to the body: restoring, that is, the violence—the physical, sexual violation.” I would suggest we need to find new ways, whether in fiction or creative nonfiction or journalism, not only to reread rape but to rewrite rape as well—ways of rewriting that restore the actual violence to these crimes, that make it impossible for men to be excused for committing these atrocities, that make it impossible for articles like McKinley’s to be written, to be published, to be considered acceptable.

An 11-year-old girl was raped by 18 men. The suspects ranged in age from middle-schoolers to a 27-year-old. There are pictures and videos. Her life will never be the same. The
New York Times
, however, would like you to worry about those boys, who will have to live with this for the rest of their lives. This is not simply the careless language of violence. It is the criminal language of violence.

Men Who “Buy Sex” Commit More Crimes: Newsweek, Trafficking, and the Lie of Fabricated Sex Studies

Thomas Roche

An old-school radical antiporn, antiprostitution activist known for criminal antics is in the news again, portraying a heavily biased anti–sex work survey
¹
as science, when in fact it’s the same message Melissa Farley has been screaming her entire career. Sadly, press outlets like
Newsweek
,
²
Reuters,
³
Jezebel,
⁴
and the
Sydney Morning Herald
⁵
are taking the bait, ignoring the fact that their information comes from a dubious report by a biased organization putting out a press release on PR Newswire
⁶
—a for-pay distribution service that features relatively little other than self-promoting garbage.

News outlets are treating the information as if it’s from a scientist, or a social sciences organization, or an objective source, or as if it’s based on anything like a real study. It’s not any of those things.

The “report” is really a series of prejudicial interpretations of a prejudiced in-person survey made by an openly biased researcher who has spent her entire career pushing this same point: summarizing “research” funded by an organization that has no earthly purpose other than to eliminate prostitution by any means possible.

Melissa Farley, the first author on the “report,” which was presented on July 15, 2011, at a meeting of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, is probably most famous for claiming that call girls are no less damaged than street prostitutes by their experiences of sex work. Farley was arrested 13 times in the 80s for defacing bookstore copies of
Penthouse
; her account of that crusade appeared in an article titled “Fighting Femicide in the United States: The Rampage Against
Penthouse
.”

Farley’s latest bit of activism is a “report” of a survey—incorrectly called a “study”—that recruited 202 men to answer questions in person. About half of the men “buy sex” and the rest do not. In Farley’s parlance, “buying sex” means frequenting prostitutes. The use of the term
buying
is insulting. It’s a transparent attempt by Farley to conflate human trafficking with prostitution, and she’s been doing it her whole career.

But that equation is garbage; it’s meant to differentiate between nonsex services and sex, as a way of taking the agency out of women’s hands and placing it squarely in the hands of—whom? Farley? No, damn it—men. Not to get too 70s about it, but wasn’t that why I became a sensitive New Age guy to begin with? So the women I knew could stop having their power taken away?

For what I hope will be the last time but I know will not, let’s get it straight: If you can “buy” sex from a sex worker, then you can “buy” therapy from a clinical psychologist and “buy” accounting from an accountant.

Sex is not a thing, it is a behavior—or, rather, a series of behaviors, with an endless gray area between where one behavior ends and another begins. If you agree with me on only one point in this discussion, let it be that sex is not a thing.

Women are not notches that guys carve in their bedposts (or on the dashboards of their Chevelles). One does not “acquire” sex from a woman, and the suggestion that one does is equivalent to saying that a woman’s virtue is a finite quantity that can be taken away.

Farley knows this, but she also knows that you get better sound bites by claiming, explicitly, that slavery and prostitution are not just related, they are literally the same. Seriously. She claims that there is no difference, in the same way she has claimed that there is no difference between the experience of the streetwalker and the experience of the call girl or brothel worker. This concept is frankly insulting to anyone who’s ever been friends with a woman who walked the street.

But Farley feels a need to equate the trafficked juvenile in Thailand with the $500-an-hour call girl. In so doing, she’s engaging in the inexplicable cognitive disconnect that alienates so many otherwise right-thinking women in my generation from Feminism with a capital F; she’s convinced herself that by speaking of concrete social issues as if they were cultural abstractions, she can achieve an impossible social agenda, as Andrea Dworkin hoped to do by saying that “penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent.”
⁷

Farley’s conclusions in the new “survey” should therefore surprise no one. According to her highly biased claims, men who “buy sex” have a greater predisposition to rape, less respect for women, and are more likely to have committed crimes than men who do not buy sex.

A survey, incidentally, is not the same as a study. A study is a formalized procedure for obtaining concrete and measurable data, with steps taken to ensure that compared data sets are equivalent. In my opinion, social sciences surveys are worth nothing at all. They’re like marketing focus groups. They show a fantastic tendency to display interviewer bias.

Good surveys are transparent about what questions are asked and how they are asked. They don’t come with foregone conclusions established by the bias of the lead author. They are not funded by organizations with a stated goal of eliminating the behavior they are asking questions about. And even good surveys are still just surveys. In the case of qualitative data—for instance, how well or sick chemotherapy patients are feeling—steps are taken to eliminate interviewer bias. There’s no indication that such steps have been taken in Farley’s survey; in fact, given Farley’s track record, it seems clear that they have not.

But still, plenty of news agencies find some “interesting results” here—as if there were any results at all, other than Melissa Farley repeating the same histrionic, man-hating screed that she’s been howling since the 80s.

Nah, don’t worry about the fact that the results come from one of the most virulent anti–sex work, antiporn activists, one who displays a serious lack of transparency in her survey procedures. Why should you?
Newsweek
sure didn’t.
Newsweek
’s piece was originally titled “The Growing Demand for Prostitution,” but apparently somebody objected so they changed the title to “The John Next Door.” Smart move, since their smokescreen of terror is based on a report that does not address whether there is in fact a rising incidence of prostitution.

The following quote is from the
Newsweek
article “The John Next Door”:

The men who buy sex are your neighbors and colleagues. A new study reveals how the burgeoning demand for porn and prostitutes is warping personal relationships and endangering women and girls.

Men of all ages, races, religions, and backgrounds do it. Rich men do it, and poor men do it, in forms so varied and ubiquitous that they can be summoned at a moment’s notice.

And yet surprisingly little is known about the age-old practice of buying sex, long assumed to be inevitable. No one even knows what proportion of the male population does it; estimates range from 16 percent to 80 percent. “Ninety-nine percent of the research in this field has been done on prostitutes, and 1 percent has been done on johns,” says Melissa Farley, director of Prostitution Research and Education, a nonprofit organization that is a project of San Francisco Women’s Centers.
⁸

Does anyone else spot the fallacy here? “Men of all ages, races, religions and backgrounds do it,” “… in forms so varied and ubiquitous that they can be summoned in a moment’s notice,” “And yet surprisingly little is known about the age-old practice of buying sex.” If it’s so common, how is it that “surprisingly little is known about it?” Or is it just that those who know about it aren’t important—because they’re not people? But now Melissa Farley has talked to those inhuman monsters—and she knows what horrible misogynist thoughts these inhuman drooling beasts are thinking when they buy sex.

Newsweek
’s credulity also underlines Farley’s dynamic in choosing two quotes from survey participants as the subtitle of the report:

One man in the study explained why he likes to buy prostitutes: “You can have a good time with the servitude,” he said. A contrasting view was expressed by another man as the reason he doesn’t buy sex: “You’re supporting a system of degradation,” he said.

If this dualism seems familiar to you, it’s the same double standard women have been subjected to for the whole of human history. Are you the Madonna or the whore? Do you “buy sex,” or do you respect women?

If the assertion that most or nearly all men do this but “nothing is known about it” also sounds familiar, it’s the Victorian split that feminism rightly objected to in social sciences, particularly in Freud and his followers. It’s just been turned around to face
men
. In one of his most egregiously sexist statements, Freud said: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”

Freud famously treated women as “other.” This was a way of shaming their desires and dehumanizing them. It was necessary for someone—Freud, or another male social scientist—to “understand these strange creatures” before that understanding could enter the body of human knowledge. That’s because, to Freud—as to many if not most male social scientists before feminism—women were not people.

Men who buy sex are not people to Farley—or to
Newsweek
, apparently. Farley sold them a prize plucked from the jaws of woman-hating Victorian sexuality, having transposed the Madonna /whore and watcher/watched dichotomies onto the male experience. By turning her outrage on men, Farley is silencing women just as upper-middle-class white feminists, and particularly feminist social scientists, have long been accused of doing. This is not science; it’s a vendetta against male sexuality, cherry-picking the very worst examples as horror stories to create a pathology that includes all men—and any women who don’t think and behave exactly the way Farley wants them to.

Reuters does an even more half-assed job of “reporting” on Farley’s “research” in an article that’s been reprinted in many news outlets and cut and pasted frequently, probably because it’s got such a catchy and easy-to-understand headline: “Men Who Buy Sex Commit More Crimes, Report Says.”

Men who pay for sex are more likely than men who do not pay for sex to commit a variety of offenses including violent crimes against women, according to research conducted in the Boston area.

Men who paid for sex were more likely to report having committed felonies and misdemeanors, including crimes related to violence against women and those related to substance abuse, assault and weapons, the study found.

The study was designed, among other things, to test attitudes of men who buy sex. It found that as a group, they share certain attitudes and behavioral tendencies different from their nonbuying peers.

Almost three in four of the sex buyers reported they learned about sex from pornography, whereas only 54 percent of the nonbuyers did so.

The two groups also held significantly different attitudes regarding whether prostitution was consenting sex or exploitation. Men who bought sex were significantly less empathetic toward women working as prostitutes.

Two thirds of both groups concluded most women prostitutes had been lured, tricked or trafficked into the work.

But sex buyers “seemed to justify their involvement in the sex industry by stating their belief … that women in prostitution were intrinsically different from nonprostituting women,” the study’s authors said.
⁹

It hurts my brain to think that someone at Reuters could have written this with a straight face: “The study was designed, among other things, to test attitudes of men who buy sex. It found that as a group, they share certain attitudes and behavioral tendencies different from their nonbuying peers.”