Death of the D.C. Madam
Susannah Breslin wrote a piece for Salon today about the apparent suicide of the so-called "D.C. Madam," Deborah Jeane Palfrey.
When her 76-year-old mother, Blanche Palfrey, called 911 just before 11 a.m., the emergency operator asked if her daughter was still hanging from the rafter. "Yes," said the madam's weeping mother, who had regularly accompanied her daughter to court the month previous, "I can't move her. I'm 76 years old."Breslin interviewed three women who are currently documenting online their past and present lives as sex workers, and asked for their thoughts.
Another sex worker I spoke with, who writes online about her call girl experiences but requested anonymity for this story, was pained by the news of Palfrey's death as well as the related older news of the death of University of Maryland professor turned call girl Brandy Britton, 43, who killed herself in January 2007 while awaiting trial on prostitution charges. Britton was a one-time employee of Palfrey's; after Britton was found hanging in her living room, Palfrey pronounced, ironically: "I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of."Link. Image: Reuters.The call girl I interviewed was struck by the emotional stories behind these public deaths. "The first thing I thought about was the incredible isolation that both of them probably felt," she said. "Because you're doing something that's perceived to be so morally wrong that you're immediately outside society, as a prostitute or a madam. You've got this secret life or a compartmentalized life, and then to be pushed out there and villainized -- I can only imagine the incredible isolation they must have felt."
As a sex worker, she went on, you live a "double life." A madam whom she worked for before she went freelance was intensely paranoid, "crazy," prone to anxious late-night phone calls. "It got to her. She would call me up and panic, thinking they were out to get her. It was the psychology of sex work, the fear of being outed."
UPDATE: details of Palfrey's suicide note released: Link. (thanks Susannah).
yes, of course she killed herself. these d.c. girls are so unstable. has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. move along, nothing to see here.
very sad, and a little suspicious. was the despair so intense that she would put her mother thru that ? i'm not usually prone to conspiracy theory, but she was threatening to out the names of her hi-profile d.c. clients.....
She was convinced that she would be murdered. She even said that she would never commit suicide; if it appeared that she had, it meant that someone had gotten to her.
it's not like her clientèle are concerned with human rights or anything.
OMG. Are we going to invoke "conspiracy theory" to white wash over the incredibly strong evidence that this was a hit job for this case too?
Even the most cursory examination of the facts results in an overpowering stench of foul play.
I'm surprised this hit the front page of boingboing with no mention of the extensive questions regarding the history of this story raises. i'm not saying xeni is in on the cover-up campaign, but...
my re-cap of the story is here. the money quote is "If taken into custody, my physical safety and most probably my very life would be jeopardized," she wrote. "Rape, beating, maiming, disfigurement and more than likely murder disguised in the form of just another jailhouse accident or suicide would await me."
note a couple things...
1. the interview where she said she WOULD NOT COMMIT SUICIDE was with alex jones, who is a little nutty, but her words stand. you can here them on audio clips linked to from my link above...
2. she already had released her phone records to a major news outlet a year earlier... it is a common thread that they killed her to stop that. however, she presumably had other personal evidence that may have been damaging.
3. some of her high-profile customers (like an ambassador and a conservative thinktank head) were already outed, and it seems pretty likely that others would have no problem offing her to keep their role quiet.
*Putting on my tinfoil hat*
There has to be more to this story than we know. She made plans to make sure her car/condo would be paid for while she was away (prison). Apparently took a white box of 'information' when she went to her mothers (as stated by the landlord she talked to just before leaving).
The last thing that strikes me was the phrase "suicide notes". Notice that there's an 's'...meaning more than one. Who leaves more than one?
If she felt her life was in danger, I would think that she may have sent correspondence to someone, somewhere...a "in the event of my death" type letter. Wait a few weeks, I bet there will be new 'evidence'.
Actually, i think it would be of great service to the story to update the front page article with a link to at least one of the respective sites that document this...
again, my re-cap is HERE
the original story and the original interview where she said she would never commit suicide was alex jones... his link is HERE
the new york times article at least mentions the conspiracy theories, but not the most important evidence, namely the audio of the interview she did only in march where she stated firmly that she would not kill herself (linked to in both links above)
i'm not saying xeni is in on the cover-up campaign
And I'm not saying that Xeni's hair looks a little too much like Marilyn Monroe's. I'm not saying anything. Nothing at all.
It'll be great when the day comes that we can grow up around this subject.
Truly ironic that the leaders of the "morally wrong" crowd condemning the world's oldest profession are continually, decade after decade, regular customers.
Probably this ongoing tragedy is maintained largely by the giggly, adolescent, gossip-rag mentality it seems to inspire in us. What up with that?
with the elections coming up and the obvious timing of this (with there being a powerful incentive for palfrey to bargain with prosecutors for leniency during the sentencing phase of her trial), i can't believe anyone is accepting this as a suicide. it reminds me of the two sago miners who both coincidentally died in apparent suicides, after having raised safety concerns with their supervisors before the sago mine explosions back in january 2006. the thugs of the world have been silencing their critics and whistle-blowers with 'apparent suicides' since history began--it's just the more extreme manifestation of the school yard bully's perverse impulse to make their victims slap themselves in the face--and yet, we still prefer to take the easy way out, and blame it on the victims to comfort ourselves with the belief that it can't ever happen to us. sad. for all of us.
I'm curious: does anyone here think prostitution should be illegal? And if so, why?
Breslin's story focuses on the stigma against prostitutes. She talks about the isolation they feel as a result of the perceived immorality of their work. Will decriminalization remove the stigma against prostitutes to solve the problem that Breslin identifies? I'm really not sure enough on this to even state an opinion.
Breslin also mentions the exploitation of prostitutes by madams (or pimps). Would decriminalization reduce the potential for exploitation of prostitutes? Here, I think the answer is yes.
Conservatives robbing their companies blind.
Conservatives getting rich on media piracy.
Conservatives patronizing prostitutes.
Conservatives snorting cocaine.
And that's just today's news.
This is like GTA for Senators.
Hr's prf. Hllry fnd t Bll ws cstmr.
In response to SISTER_Y; I seriously think there would be far fewer sexual assaults if prostitution were legal. Normally I'm a pretty conservative guy but this is one of those cases where I think a more liberal view would actually be benificial. It would be awful hard to control and regulate but if done properly it could be a real (pardon the phrase) release of unhealthy social pressures.
first off, prostitution isn't the oldest or first profession. it's old but age doesn't validate anything.
i dissagree with prostitution because it turns human beings into cattle - when a man or a woman trades money for sex they devalue both themselves and the person accepting the money.
prostitution isn't sex positive because prostitution is sex with everything positive removed.
and to believe that legalized prostitution would lead to a decrease in sexual assault makes no logical sense. people who commit sexual assault aren't just dudes with raging boners frustrated by their innability to score tail, they're people who want to sexually dominate and humiliate someone - the type of men who very likely visit prostitutes already.
Skipper I seriously think there would be far fewer sexual assaults if prostitution were legal.
It *is* legal in some countries. And in some areas in the US. Prostitution being legal does not some how magically help channel pent up men's aggressions away from rape. What legalization could do is allow prostitutes a safe way to report rape without endangering themselves with jail time.
Whether or not you support people using the institution or selling themselves sexually, it's going to exist. We can either drive it underground, or allow it to exist legally. There are good and bad sides to both, but keeping it illegal the way the US (and most countries that have it as illegal) will punish the prostitutes more than the johns.
markmarkmark's point is valid, in that prostitution dehumanizes people. But it's far from the only job that does that, and keeping it illegal won't fix that problem. For that matter, we have to ask ourselves why, if we're going to have something like legal video porn out there, we can have that be legal, and prostitution be illegal. There's no real difference between the two as far as I can see. You're still paying people for sex acts.
And yeah, the porn industry can be massively dehumanizing too. But it's legal dehumanizing. At least in America.
Although she supposedly said she would rather "kill herself than go to jail", I'm really suspicious about this one. There were a lot of powerful people wrapped up in this, each with enough motive to make sure her stories stayed untold.
Where is the customer list? That's one thing that's been missing from every story, whatever side you're on.
Let's see the names, and hold them to the same standards that the 'names' held her.
#17 i dissagree (sic) with prostitution because it turns human beings into cattle - when a man or a woman trades money for sex they devalue both themselves and the person accepting the money.
You mean, they deny your opinion of their "value."
and to believe that legalized prostitution would lead to a decrease in sexual assault makes no logical sense. people who commit sexual assault aren't just dudes with raging boners frustrated by their innability to score tail, they're people who want to sexually dominate and humiliate someone - the type of men who very likely visit prostitutes already.
I'm guessing you have no sound statistical basis for any of those assertions. Correct?
Thanks for the responses. MarkMarkMark, I wonder if when you say "i dissagree with prostitution because it turns human beings into cattle" you are saying that you wouldn't personally engage in it, or that you think it should be illegal for everyone?
And piggybacking on MarkMarkMark and JJasper - do you think there's something in the very nature of prostitution (and maybe porn) that makes it dehumanizing, or does there exist some possibility for prostitution and porn that is not dehumanizing? And if your answer is that there is something essentially dehumanizing about it, what is it? What makes selling sex different from selling our ideas or the labor of our hands or pictures of our faces?
(Another argument against decriminalization that hasn't been raised yet is the idea that a market for sex decreases the specialness of sex-as-gift, similar to Richard Titmuss' empirical conclusion that societies that allow blood selling have worse blood supplies than societies that don't, because people are less likely to donate blood - his book is The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy.)
#21 Man On Pink Corner - interesting point. How do we know whether the commonly accepted wisdom that "rape is about power, not sex" is actually true? If anything, the evolutionary bio research points to the opposite conclusion - that rape is a reproductive strategy, hence very much about sex. (I shouldn't even have to say it, but that's not meant to excuse rape in any way. A better understanding of the nature of rape might lead to better prevention and enforcement strategies, though.)
Daly and Wilson have written on this (see their book Homicide); there's also Thornhill and Palmer's A Natural History of Rape.
There's a lot more to the legalization debate than simple pro/con positions. Harvard Law School just had a really spectacular conference on this with some interesting pieces published. You can start here and see the response to it: http://media.www.hlrecord.org/media/storage/paper609/news/2008/04/24/Opinion/Point.Prostitution.Must.Remain.Criminalized-3347353.shtml?reffeature=recentlycommentedstoriestab
Basically, the author argues for the Swedish model of decriminalizing the sex workers while keeping the johns/pimps criminalized as traffickers in women.
I disagree that prostitution and porn, by definition, are dehumanizing. Criminalization of sex, America's pastime, leads to the dehumanization, as the entire culture participates in the construction of prostitutes and porn actors and their clients as somehow broken or abnormal.
Speaking to the point of the story, I can only hope that a definitive list of clients comes out of the murder investigation. Knowing that it's happening in DC, that hope flickers out of existence a nanosecond after it's born. This won't go anywhere, and the guilty will go free.
Man On Pink Corner @21:
I think a lot of people here have been making assertions, and that nobody's been backing them up with statistics, sound or otherwise. Do you have some? If so, produce them. Until then, MarkMarkMark's footing is no worse than anyone else's.Skipper @16:
Skipper, you're saying that people who balk at illegally purchasing the services of a prostitute -- a relatively minor crime, not much prosecuted -- use violent sexual assault as a substitute?That makes no sense at all. First, if they're deterred by not wanting to break the laws against prostitution, they should be deterred even more by the far greater illegality of sexual assault.
Second, they're not the same experiences, except from a purely theoretical topological viewpoint. If either one is what you want, the other is not a substitute.
Third, it's unpleasantly reminiscent of the old line about how we have to have bad girls in order to keep the good girls pure. That is: men are entitled to sexual favors from women; so the only way some women can be allowed to not have sex is if other women take up the slack.
All kinds of unpleasant implications shake out of that one.
#24 Anonymous, thanks for the link. (The link is to an essay by a second-year law student that lays out some of the feminist arguments for continued criminalization; here is the response, by another second year law student, that gives some of the feminist pro-decriminalization arguments.)
Most people use "legalization" to refer to a system where prostitution is legal but regulated by the government, as in Nevada, tending to lead to a system of brothels licensed by the government. "Decriminalization" usually refers to outright repeal of anti-prostitution laws.
Most people seem to agree that the situation in Nevada is a tragedy. It's certainly not regulated for the benefit of the women working as prostitutes. It doesn't exactly stop illegal prostitution from happening in Nevada, either.
Eyes still wide shut.
What about religious prostitution eg. temple prostitutes in India? Isn't that dehumanizing too? Shall we convert them with fire? I say no.
Prostitution was openly practised in Medieval Europe and previously - nothing illegal or "dehumanising"about it - but disreputable amongst Matrons (especially Christian Matrons) . It became illegal only well after the introduction of syphilis by Columbus's returning boyos from the New World found a "focus" in the seaport brothels, and their reputation took a nosedive... an unclean profession, an unsafe profession, where before it had been perhaps if not the most noble perhaps the most simply human.
(Dehuman or inhuman/e is the "criminalize it" response to simple human needs of expressing our natural kindness affection and sensuality, regardless of whether or not any exchange whatsoever is involved, or if the "exchange" is for love honor and obeisance or for cook and clean or for marriage vows or simple money so long as directly uncoerced (indirect coercion is in the eye of the beholder, or is it the beholden?). Particularly when the Magistrates become involved in the investigations and interrogations involving such niceties. Oh, what fun! A state enquiry funded by the public into the morals of certain of its subjects! So much better than maintaining sewers, schools, hospitals, etc.
By what right or theory do the cops (or the Law if u would) get to be involved in the bedroom? Is this not an area of human and public health for at most regulation not criminalization (kinda like drugs or abortion, where the Law also comes between you and your body, suicide too) and not the hungry profit-driven maw of the cold cold justice "system", unafraid to use violence?
Another example of Christian/Judaic/Moslem "morals" improving peoples lives by emotionally and often physically destroying them. I vote to allow humans to be humans, and to limit the State to enquiries of relations between subjects involving fraud deception or violence , and to stay out of the relations between a subject and his or her own conscience, unless this interference can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society and further be clearly demonstrated as a reasonable limit on the subjects' rights to live and learn by making his or her own stupid mistakes. I suppose "vice" cops could become "Don't do that not good" teachers, but they gotta work on their arguments.
Consensual sex should never ever lead to State violence against a subject. Legalize the sex trade. Prosecute sex slavers. Deincentivize crooked pigs. That is all.
Deincentivate? Disincentivize?
About the Swedish model:
Forcing part of the business underground forces the entire business underground, with all the problems that entail.
Even if the prostitutes are not breaking the law, in the eyes of the public they are aiding and abetting a crime, thus they are ostracised.
The Dutch model is, perhaps, a better alternative.
Unfortunately, it moves an activity many people think of as 'dirty' and shameful into the broad light of day.
Is there such a thing as prostitution in hunter gatherer cultures? I suspect not. If so then given that hunter gatherer is our natural state, I'd bet that the first prostitute went to work right after the first crop failure. Which would make it the second oldest profession, after farmer.
in the update posted with "her" suicide notes, the retort against claims of her murder comes from the police that ruled it a suicide... so to lend any credence to the idea, they would have to admit failure... unlikely... even if they aren't in on it.
i still think there is enough evidence that this is a setup to at least consider showing that there is a dialogue...
eyes wide shut indeed.
@20 sluggo... some names have been released and are in my link in post number 8. my best theory for why she was killed is that even though she gave away the names to abc, they maybe didn't do as good a job looking through them as the courts might have had they had to go through them during a prosecution.
re: prostitution...
i think the conditions that make prostitution viable are at fault, not the prostitutes... finding a legal balance is tough, which is a good part of why i'm an anarchist. most johns are o.k., and even some pimps (or madams), so criminalizing those folks is tough, too...
i think the u.s. going after madams (or pot smokers or speeding drivers or other petty crimes) is pathetic, considering the crimes against humanity and the environment being perpetrated every day by corporations and the government in our names, so it's hard to get outraged
She was convinced that she would be murdered. She even said that she would never commit suicide; if it appeared that she had, it meant that someone had gotten to her.
Bears repeating, Antinous.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong as I'm a naive young girl, but what is the difference in selling your body and going out to bars and waking up in hotels without the slightest clue of your partner's name or age or anything?
I personally have issues with contact; as I'm not even into kissing for several dates and certainly go no farther (which is appropriate but more and more less common in my age group)- I wouldn't participate. But why not decriminalize? Women can sell pictures of their bodies. They can sell displays of their bodies in erotic situations, performances. They can even sell touching of their bodies in certain gentleman's clubs.
Prostitutes -are- at high risk for sex crimes.
If they were able to report those, they would be less so in danger. I don't believe rape of random individuals would decrease- as Mom said, First, if they're deterred by not wanting to break the laws against prostitution, they should be deterred even more by the far greater illegality of sexual assault. However, violence against prostitutes could well decrease when men didn't have the idea in head that the prostitute wasn't going to go to the cops for fear of jail. Or they could end up being murdered.
Still - it's going to happen anyway. Put it out in the open and at least those who abuse will stand a chance of being prosecuted, and those who use their capabilities to turn a profit will be less stigmatized.
Sister Y -
And piggybacking on MarkMarkMark and JJasper - do you think there's something in the very nature of prostitution (and maybe porn) that makes it dehumanizing, or does there exist some possibility for prostitution and porn that is not dehumanizing? And if your answer is that there is something essentially dehumanizing about it, what is it? What makes selling sex different from selling our ideas or the labor of our hands or pictures of our faces?
Essentially dehumanizing? No, but as men (who're the major consumers of porn and prostitution) are encouraged by society to dehumanize women who sll sex.
Situations in which it's not in part dehumanizing are rare. That said, the fact that it's a dehumanizing job does not make it any better or worse than other legal dehumanizing jobs.
My main moral problems with both industries are centered around men having objectified and degraded women, not around the act its self, or people in the sex industry. I think it can be conducted as something non dehumanizing, and it should be conducted that way, safely and legally.
Personally, I can't see criminalizing a consensual, private act between adults. If it becomes coercive, than prosecute for harassment, slavery, extortion or whatever is appropriate. Of course, half my friends are ex-hookers or ex-porn actors, so I'm not the most unbiased judge.
@34,35,36 - Agreed.
Personally, I can't see criminalizing a consensual, private act between adults. If it becomes coercive, than prosecute for harassment, slavery, extortion or whatever is appropriate.
That pretty much describes my intuitions. There are those weird fringe cases - should you be able to literally sell yourself as a slave (not in a fun pretend way) and have that be a binding contract? - though that's a contract-enforcement example, not a criminal one.
Maybe, maybe, if there were a compelling argument that curtailing certain rights would definitely reduce suffering greatly, I'd buy it. I just don't think that argument flies in this case.
Noen #32 - Is there such a thing as prostitution in hunter gatherer cultures? I suspect not.
Chimpanzees do it, though perhaps that's just a by-product of having come into contact with us civilized post-industrial humans.
We decriminalized prostitution in my country (New Zealand) several years ago, you know what didn't happen? An explosion of prostitution.
No harm was done, and there's no question that the lives of those women (and men) that go into sex work is now a little bit safer.
It also means that clean & safe brothels - brothels that already existed, of course, but under different names - are now routinely checked for hygiene standards compliance, worker safety, and so on. And rather than heavy handed dragging people - whether sex workers, or brothel owners - through the criminal system, local councils can now use a moderate approach to control siting of brothels (and exterior signage) for minimum disturbance.
Chimps are not much of a model for sexual etiquette. The males form rape gangs.
They're a horrible but accurate model, in some respects.
Not much using pointing the finger at primates after seeing that seal non-consensually sodomizing a penguin the other day. Why can't we all just get along?
as far as suicide goes, the woman had just put down enough cash to PREPAY HER CONDO FOR THE NEXT SEVEN YEARS! sorry, i don't mean to shout, but that is a pretty big incentive to live. also, the similarity in the deaths of the two women is pretty telling. women very rarely hang themselves, and the fact that these two are connected via bizniss gives something to the belief that this may be a bit more than a co-inky-dink. suicide noteS? fishy stinky. as far as should it be legal, of course it should! the spread of sexually transmitted dieases could be greatly reduced if we were to use the dutch model. even the nevada model would suffice . not likely to happen anytime soon as logic holds no charm in this paradigm. to paraphrase: no suicide, yes prostitution. ciao!
Has anyone, anywhere, ever, even just once, seen a judge or politician come out in favour of decriminalizing prostitution and admitting to be a user? Just once? Ever?
#32 Interesting question, NOEN. I can't recall in my reading any hunter/gatherer society where prostitution as a financial practice exists or existed. There is plenty of sex, of course, and it is safe to assume that the arts of seduction have always included gift-giving and similar enticements. The Inuit practice of loaning or borrowing wives, for instance, was not prostitution as we know it, but rather a reciprocal arrangement that furthered social interdependency, and was conducted with the full consent of the wives involved, or not at all. One cannot imagine the selling of sex as a profession or existing as a functioning moiety.
Prostitution seems to be, as per your hunch, a creation of the agricultural revolution, as are many of humankind's ills. In fact, I am more inclined each year to agree with the cyninc's assessment that the agricultural revolution is proving to be as great a disaster for the earth as a meteor strike.
Buddy66 - that's so interesting. I hadn't thought of this connection before, but it seems that your definition of prostitution presupposes a market economy as we know it, which may be a relatively new invention (reciprocal gift-giving being the earlier form of redistribution). Could there be prostitution without a market economy?
To me, it seems like an arbitrary limit - I'd say that a reciprocal gift exchange is similar enough to a market exchange to "count" as prostitution. Just the first example I can put my hand on is Daly & Wilson, quoting Bronislaw Malinowski on the (non-market) Trobriand islanders circa 1929:
like any real world problem it's incredibly easy to decide what is the right choice for ones self.
the trouble occurs when we have to make the choices for everyone, which is something i make a point of refusing.
as far as i'm concerned, prostitution shouldn't occur, and ideally, shouldn't even have to occur.
men shouldn't need sex badly enough to pay for it and women shouldn't need money badly enough to have sex for it.
however, the reality of the situation is far from this ideal, and that's why we have problems.
should we legislate morality?
think about it.
here on boingboing the answer from most would be a resounding no, and i would mostly agree.
however, if morality is not legislated then the world would be much much worse then it is.
censorship sucks, but i like that pornography is hidden from children, or that now in ontario all cigarette products are no longer allowed to be visibly displayed.
with issues like this there isn't a right answer only a series of answers that have degrees of rightness and wrongness, (which in this case isn't morality but how well it solves the problem).
it's just as bad to decry prostitutes as immoral, sinful terrible women as it is to claim that they're they bear the torch of the oldest profefssion and that they are classy and it's somehow the christian rights fault that people feel bad about their choices because neither sides are the truth.
when two groups disagree the solution isn't for both sides to present arguments and points of view that are almost parodies of what they believe in their intensity, feeling taht this is something they have to do to match the intensity of the opposition.
the solution to all problems isn't squabbling over the right way to do it but working together to find solutions that are realistic and please as many people as possible.
if i ever was to literally pay money for sex i would feel worthless because i am incpable of controlling myself. i'm not an animal, i don't for rape gangs, i've only engaged in intercourse that is both consensual and based not in animal instict but instead in love and romance and blah blah blah.
i guess the real problem for me is that i believe people are different and better then animals because we can control our base and animal desires, and to let yourself be controlled by sexual desire is pathetic and that paying for sex is embarrasing and shameful but that is what i think.
clearly sex is important, but we're not mindless pigs, consuming and fucking and grunting and dying pointlessly.
i guess i just think we're better then that.
Prostitution is not a victimless crime. Women do not chose to become prostitutes willingly. That should indicate ya'll got something wrong somewhere.
So far the arguments in favor of legalization have been of the "legalizing it will clean up the streets" type of reasoning. Which sort of misses the point of why we have laws.
Prostitution is the by-product of a culture that despises women and gives them second class citizenship at best. Change that, give women more economic power and choice in their lives on a par with men and you'll drastically reduce prostitution. I notice the same thing with male prostitution. It is always those on the bad end of the power dynamic that engage in it.
I think that if you made it so that women did not need to turn to prostitution in America you'd have some pretty sorry Republicans joansing for a fix. Reading Susannah Breslin's "John Diaries" it's clear to me that Johns create prostitution in order to salve their broken psyches.
That's sad I suppose but it also means that legalizing it will do nothing to address the central issue.
But it will disincentivate crooked cops and let the workers (some of whom do indeed enjoy their work) access the protections we all have when dealing with violence or the threat of it.
There is nothing at all immoral in prostitution per se, certainly the State being involved is more immoral, as by definition this state control is necessarily coercive.
"Immorality" as used here centers on deprivation of Liberty by coercion without a compelling societal reason - a question of Justice.
Why no Minimum Guaranteed Income with Universal Basic Health Care funded by progressive taxation? This would obviate so much poverty caused "immorality".
Is not Poverty not Prostitution the real issue for the State to "attack" (to use the American's Uberclass's idiom - the right word is "resolve".)?
Oh yeah more on-topic...remember the Bloomberg scandal of the eighties, a murdered S&M call-girl with elderly wealthy super-Reaganaut clients - or maybe you don't (Why not with your Scandal-obsessed Press? No Democrats/progressives involved, so no story...).
Well this thread went all over the place. To get back to the original topic, I'd say it's far more likely that this woman was silenced and did not commit suicide. I won't blame just Republicans, because I have no doubt there are Democrat Senator johns who also want their reputations protected, and there's no telling just who was behind this (and we'll almost certainly never know).
But it's the Republicans who yammer and yammer and yammer about family values while frantically shoving their filibusters into every signing order they can pin down. And get caught repeatedly. And continue to yammer.
I can almost hear one of them making a tearful confession of hanging the madam, and then changing his mind later and saying, "No, no, I was actually struggling to keep her from hanging herself, and in fact, she was actually trying to hang me, yeah that's the ticket...and so that's why I won't resign."
*pause*
"Support the troops!"
or maybe we should accept occams razor and figure that a woman who lived a lifestyle wherein suicide or other self harm is likely common, (prostituting in and of itself could be considered self harm), when swamped in misery and with the knowladge that she'd very likely be convicted decided that jail wasn't the way out.
or we can pretend that all those drat darn conservative jerks must have been trying to cover their sneaky selves so that they could continue to push drm and censorship and keep causing all the problems in the world because it must be their fault.
not saying they didn't do it, or she wasn't murdered, but it's just as lame to assume that the people you hate did it automatically no matter who those people are.
Sister Y, imagine that: Bronislaw Malinowski, the father of Functionalism, was a romantic! I think that's sweet.
The major social consequence of the agricultural revolution's population explosion was the shift from human relations based on kinship to those based on property; it wasn't long until people themselves became property. We often forget that all the ancient civilizations were based on agriculture...and slavery. And what, after all, is prostitution if not a form of property-defined slavery?
Market forces can sure make a mess out of people.
"Palfrey had vowed that she would not go to prison, even telling a Washington writer that she would commit suicide first. "
maybe she killed herself then eh?
noen - Prostitution is not a victimless crime. Women do not chose to become prostitutes willingly. That should indicate ya'll got something wrong somewhere.
I'm sorry, Noen, but you're wrong. Some women do not make a choice, but some do. Denying these people the power of reason is not a liberating or feminist act even if they're doing something that makes you personally uncomfortable.
You're right in that there's a bad power dynamic, but keeping it illegal has consequences that produce a power dynamic between the women and the police, as well as the women and the johns.
I think that if you made it so that women did not need to turn to prostitution in America you'd have some pretty sorry Republicans joansing for a fix.
The thing is, it's an easy choice to make for some people, who might well take a job flipping burgers or working retail. High end prostitutes can make 1 thousand dollars tax free in an evening. That sort of money is just really tempting for people, even if they do have comfortable lives. Taking that temptation away is going to require convincing men not to pay for sex if it's offered for sale.
In the interim, I'd rather see a setup where we're dealing with the current problems caused by prostitution being illegal.
@52 Do you know what the phrase "it's far more likely" means?
it means that it's more likely, but i'm tappa tappa-ing away secretly at work and it's possible i made some mistake that i've not pciked up on.
it's even pretty likely that i've made mistakes as i already make a point of ignoring capitilization conventions and i'm using a work computer that doesn't have a spellcheck or grammer whatever installed in its browser.
please elaborate?
i love boingboing enough (and defend it enough) that i believe i have a right to complain a bit here.
i still think boingboing dropped the ball on not even referring to the controversy on the front page of this story. ALL the comments i've seen on this thread (on the original topic) are of this mindset.
for a website that loves bigfoot so much, and is obviously skeptical of the government, i'm surprised that this "conspiracy theory" dialogue isn't even alluded to, let alone the prominent standing it deserves, IMHO.
i don't care so much personally, but it would be nice for this woman's memory...
btw, great prostitution legalization discussion... it's one of the hardest questions (up there with what to do with violent people, and should property exist) and some really interesting data points have come out.
also, mintphresh... where did you get the seven years payment data? i'd love to add that link to my article...
Teresa - I have been thinking about your comment at #26 all morning (the last part, specifically) and I just want to expand on it.
When you shudder at the idea that "men are entitled to sexual favors from women; so the only way some women can be allowed to not have sex is if other women take up the slack," it seems that you're saying that men are not entitled to sex in the sense that they don't have a right to, say, rape women to get it. This seems obvious. But isn't their desire and need for sex still legitimate and important? Just because I don't have the right to steal food from someone else doesn't mean my need for food isn't legitimate and important. Just because I don't have the right to kidnap someone to keep me company doesn't mean my desire and need for companionship isn't valid.
There's another thing here, too: just as it's wrong to ignore the biological asymmetries that make life harder for women (smaller size, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation), it's unfair to ignore the biological asymmetries that make life harder for men (greater sex drive, lower sexual choice). Those of us lucky enough to be attractive women have probably never experienced deprivation of sex; that doesn't mean that the deprivation isn't a real harm for some people, and something we should prevent if we can do so without impinging on the rights of others. Plenty of people are physically unattractive, or have unattractive personalities, through no fault of their own, and have a hard time attracting sex partners in the absence of a market.
Of course, one of the problems with the idea that the market could lead to greater fairness is that the initial distribution is totally unequal and unfair, especially toward women, and maybe you could argue that men suffering a lack of sex is somehow "payback" for this inequality. The best solution to this, of course, is Ugly Canuck's at #49 - guaranteed minimum income plus health care. But once that's done, I think there would still be a biologically-based asymmetry of sexual desire and sexual choice that it wouldn't be immoral to allow a market to correct.
Oh and I thought the "original topic" was Susannah Breslin's article, which spends more time discussion prostitutes and their suffering than the suicide/homicide of the DC Madam. If not, sorry for hijacking the thread, but it is nice to see a mature discussion of the issue of prostitution.
if morality is not legislated then the world would be much much worse then it is.
I think the opposite is true as regards sexual 'morality'. Forcing people into closets of various shapes and sizes guarantees that they'll find alternative and sometimes unsavory ways of taking up the slack. One of the reasons that prostitution exists is that consensual sex between adults is still, even now, frowned on outside of certain, very limited situations.
Sex through history has rarely been fully consensual. The argument against boffing a willing fourteen year old holds true for an employed husband and his wife who depends on him for financial support. If you're not truly independent, how can you fully consent? How many people are fully independent and able to exercise perfect and complete free will? Not that many. Prostitution, like most sexual activity, is no better than quasi-consensual.
God, I'm just an incurable romantic!
I think that's sweet.
@60
Well for that matter any job is at best quasi consensual. Most of us are still wage slaves of some sort. At the end of day, sex work is just another job - though one that some of us prefer to other ways of making a living.
Our society is pretty repressed and has a lot of weird shame around human sexuality. I doubt that sex work would go away in a healthier society - but I think it would certainly lose some of its seedier and more abusive aspects if people had better attitudes about sex. And people would be committing suicide when they are "found out."
ugh - that should have read "wouldn't be committing suicide"
George Carlin said it best:
"Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. So why isn't selling fucking legal?"
Zuzu, there are some perfectly fine laws that restrict the sale of things that are legal to give away for free - like adoption regulations and overtime laws and laws against selling organs. But yeah, prostitution doesn't belong on that list.
If it doesn't hurt someone else, what a sane person wishes to do with their own body is their own business, and ought to be legal.
Can anyone really disagree with that?!?
I think minimum wage laws are a good idea. And workplace safety laws.
"If it doesn't hurt someone else, what a sane person wishes to do with their own body is their own business, and ought to be legal."
sure, but prostitution hurts. it hurts families torn apart or women drawn into a world that they never wanted to be a part of and mothers who have to find their daughters hanging dead who now have to alter the natural order of things and bury her child, not the other way around.
in an ideal world, i can see prostitution being legal and clean and friendly and totally rad, but for that to happen we'd need to fix a lot of much bigger problems first - which isn't to say that the plight of prostitutes and sex workers isn't important, but call girls killing themselves is less important then 20,000 dead in burma.
wooooooo priorities!
#68,
Do you think ubiquitous illegal prostitution is less harmful than legalized, regulated prostitution?
Frthrmr, wht hv y bn dng bt th 20,000 dd n Brm? r y s bsy slvng tht tht y hvn't fxd th prblms n yr wn lf? r y brk, strvng nd vhclr frm yr trlss ffrts t stp gncd, fmn, nd dss n dvlpng cntrs? dbt t.
The existence of larger problems does not mean we should ignore our more immediate, albeit more minor problems.
What "far more likely" means is that I was saying that it seemed more probable that in THIS case (which, um, didn't involve drm or censorship), THIS woman was murdered rather than committed suicide, and in contrast I did NOT say or imply or hint at:
"we can pretend that all those drat darn conservative jerks must have been trying to cover their sneaky selves so that they could continue to push drm and censorship and keep causing all the problems in the world because it must be their fault"
And in fact I clearly said that we'll never know who did it, if it wasn't suicide, and there are doubtless Democrat Senators who also had a vested interest in these women shutting up permanently.
I went on to say that, in spite of this, it's Republicans who yammer about sexual morality while getting caught doing the nasty, and then continue to yammer.
first off, i'm not saying that we should ignore small problems but just that as a society we tend to look at shiney or sordid things, instead of things that aren't sensational but are important.
real, hard, difficult situations get overlooked because they're hard and difficult and real.
also, burman isn't my bag. i do things to support causes i feel moved for whilst supporting those causes indirectly that i can't directly support, and when i can directly make a positive difference i try my best to do it.
ALSO!
my hyperbole wasn't directed at any one posters hatred of conservatives but rather the overwhelming attitude held by readers of this blog - not that it isn't occasionally warrented but that means that it's occasionally unwarrented.
sorry you thought i was taking a dig at you, but that wasn't the case at all.
"The overwhelming attitude held by readers of this blog" is that Big Brother needs to fuck off and leave consenting adults behind closed doors alone. The overwhelming majority of us here utterly resent the "nanny state" and the "father knows best" mentality.
It transcends mere partisan politics.
will the majority of boingboing readers react with such vitrol at something that should have been pretty obvious exageration and satire.
plus i live in canada so when it comes to the nanny state or whatever i'm likely less frustrated then you unlucky yanks.
All conservative/liberal p***ing matches aside, when I heard about this my immediate thought was she was murdered. I do not doubt it one bit. I don't care what Joe Media says, if you screw with a government enough, they WILL wipe you from the face of the earth like the pittance of a human being you are.
And I highly doubt anyone less than a sacrificial patsy is gonna go down for it.
markmarkmark,
You're the only one here who's screaming.
markmarkmark @73:
When a writer uses one of the ironic tropes and it doesn't work for his or her readers, the writer is always the one in the wrong.(That's assuming readers of reasonable intelligence who are reading in good faith: not a high bar.)
#73
Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from pretention.
And you're pretty pretentious.