Sex In The Public Square - Comments

Sara and Lewis are young and in love.

Lewis — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:02:46 -0700

"Sara, before we go forward, I gotta tell you something."
"Yes, what?"
"Do you know what it means for a man to be uncircumcised?"
"Well, I know they cut some skin off every baby boy's dick. Why are you asking?"
"Well, I'm not circumcised."
"So you have that extra skin?"
"Yes. Does that bother you?"
"I can't say. Every man I've known has looked pretty much the same and I suppose they were all circumcised, as you say."
"Do you want to see for yourself?"
"Well OK." She giggled and blushed. "I guess this is my lucky day."

With trembling fingers I unzipped my fly, parted my underpants, and extracted my tool, making sure my foreskin was pulled fully forward, so that she could see what was making me so nervous.

"Ewww, that's gross. It looks like a giant earthworm. You pee through all that skin? It's gotta be stinky and dirty under there, and full of germs. I will never let that thing come near my mouth. And the thought of having a dirty thing like that inside my pussy really weirds me out."

While she was speaking, I became enlarged and the head burst through the foreskin.

"See, it's not dirty at all. I wash under there with soap every time I shower. And my dick has a head just like what you're used to. When I'm hard the skin sort of disappears."
"I'm sorry, Lewis, but a dick that looks like that just doesn't make me hot. In fact, it gives me the creeps. You're the first boyfriend I've had that comes with that funny extra bit. You know, I changed a lot of diapers when I did babysitting, and I never saw anything like that. And the only time a girlfriend of mine talked about a dick like yours was when she had a boyfriend who was born in Guatemala or something like that. And let me tell ya, she found his dick weird."
"Come on, Sarah, give me a chance. I can prove to you that I'm just as good as the other guys you've known."
"Lewis, I just don't want to waste time thinking about your funny looking dick. Let's just be friends. If you can't live with that, I'm going home right now."

The above dialog is pure fiction, and I've NEVER experienced anything like what it describes. But I spent decades being deadly afraid of finding myself in such a conversation, which would have broken my very horny heart! Rejection, big time.

I submit that the single most powerful driver of American infant circumcision is parents' fear that their young adult sons will find themselves in a situation akin to that of Lewis in the fictional narrative above.

Worse yet, I feared getting into such a conversation with a Jewish girl, and to my eye, Jewish girls are the hottest of all. I admitted to two Jewish girls that I was intact. One said "Isn't against the law?" but after a bit of conversation sighed, saying "I guess I'll have to live with it." She later married an Eastern European goy. The other girl told me in writing that it had never crossed her mind that being intact was a sexual handicap. She raised the matter with her closest Jewish girl friend, who completely agreed. Decades later, I learned that some secular Jewish girls have a bit of a foreskin fetish. I suspect that potty-mouth Howard Stern has some younger Jews more foreskin friendly.

Years ago, the woman I'm now married to let her hair down, saying "I have herpes, it was my fault, and I'm not dealing with it. I am afraid I can't get married." I told her "I'm in a similar situation. I'm not circumcised." It was quite hard for me to say that, even though I knew that she had spent years in bed with earlier lovers whom I rightly guessed were uncut. She is the only person I have ever heard say the word "foreskin" aloud.

The boys among whom I grew up were the usual potty-mouthed lot. But it was not until I was in college that anyone ever let on to me that he knew that his male equipment had been surgically altered. I have concluded that most USA parents never said anything to their sons.

To me, male circumcision is not a horror. Nearly every penis I've seen in the flesh has been circumcised; done right, it is not a mutilation. Rather, male circ lies at the nexus of a lot of muddled thinking about health and sexuality. The problem with routine circumcision is simply this: billions of men around the world are intact, yet there is no talk of a urological catastrophe. Circumcision might slow down the AIDS train wreck in Africa. But it is irrelevant in the North Atlantic, where the nation with the highest rate of HIV infection (the USA) is also the most circumcised one.

FGM, on the other hand, is an unqualified horror, barbaric and senseless. African girls, you are so beautiful with your tall lean bodies, ebony skins, very short hair, and sweet sweet smiles. And then a hard faced middle aged woman cuts out your clitoris and inner lips with an unsanitary First World razor blade. It makes me want to scream "BLACK LABIA ARE BEAUTIFUL JUST AS GOD MADE THEM!!" FGM is a horrible reminder that it is often our own kind that are our worst enemies.

payment in kind, support, cash

Chris OSullivan — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:30:37 -0700

Separating the issues of sex for money from the issues of slavery; A one on one consensual interaction between adults is really between the adults interacting.

A married man supporting a mistress in addition to his family.

A single man supporting a mistress.

A group of men supporting a single mistress.

A group of men supporting a network of lovers.

A group of men supporting a network of sex workers.

A single man paying a single woman for a date.

A single man paying a single woman for sex.

A single man paying many women for sex.

A married man paying a single woman for sex.

A married man paying many women for sex.

Who's the injured party in a primarily tort based system?

Wives if they exist and if they object or are injured.

If a mistress is not to be arrested, why should a prostitute be arrested.

This all assumes an uncoerced freely entered into relationship.

Introduction

WilliamC — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 17:05:30 -0700

I found out about this wonderful forum a week ago when I met Elizabeth at the Left Forum. I'm WilliamC and I want to be a regular participant in this project. I'm 61 years old (an old fart!) and have been involved in the struggle for sexual liberation all of my life. In the 60's and 70's I was involved in the "alternative lifestyle" movement which eventually became the polyamory and swing movements. I identified as poly for many years, but found it very difficult to connect with women in that context. I think that the poly movement at that time was very much the victim of patriarchal structures. I haven't been to a poly oriented event in many years. I still struggle because I like sex and I want to connect deeply and honestly with women. I've come to believe that it would be best for me to stop using pornography for now. I really don't like commercial porn anyway. It feels very exploitive to me. At least it triggers fantasies that I don't really want to act out in the real world. This is a decision just for me and just for right now. I want to keep evolvoing and to be involved in a movement that links sexuality and politics. One of my objections to the early poly movement was its anti political nature. People were interested in whatever they were doing but not interested in connecting it to a larger political struggle. I believe very strongly that the personal is very political. I hope to meet more of you over time.

Sexual abuse

John Kuehne — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:54:23 -0700

If parental rights don't include sexual abuse, why should they extend to the amputation of sexual tissue?

Inconclusive?

Ron Low — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:38:30 -0700

To say the science on whether FORESKIN FEELS GOOD is inconclusive is to put too much stock in the reports that seem intended to downplay the value of the intact state. For example, one widely publicized study claimed no difference between cut and intact, but they only tested at two spots on each organ and they didn't measure the foreskin itself at all (and they only had a sample of a few dozen).

A much better study measured 17 standard spots on 100s of penises, including the foreskins of the intact, and the scar lines of the cut. The 5 most sensitive parts were all on the foreskin and frenulum, and among the cut the most sensitive spot was adjacent to the scar.

There simply can be no debate that circumcision removes exquisitely sensitive tissue including about half (that's 20,000) of the specialized pleasure receptive nerve endings.

Foreskin - not a medical emergency but a natural wonder

Andre Maranhao — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:22:53 -0800

How little our society knows about this unique structure of the penis! It is a jack of all trades but does each exceedingly well – at least two dozen functions. I’ll focus on sexual pleasure only, for brevity. As the primary organ of sexual touch and endowed with a denser supply of fine-touch receptors than anywhere on the male body (anywhere even on the rest of the penis), it is THE primary source of sexual pleasure in the male. Please see http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/sorrells_2007/. This sentence sounds absurd to an American nation of cripples (59% infant circ rate, higher for current male population, 15% globally) who have hardly had contact with a whole man, but is true. Cold and Taylor ‘boldy went where no man has gone before” in their histological study which helped elaborate science’s understanding on what nature has taken millions of years to perfect – the tremendous and varied nerves gracing this structure, capable of transmitting the most exquisite and delicate sensations of touch, heat, and pressure. Please see http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/taylor/ Actually, at least 8 prior scientific authors dating back to the mid 1800’s have elaborated on the types of nerves found within the prepuce, but it seems modern science, and American science in particular, does not celebrate sexual pleasure and has hidden this information, unconsciously perhaps. Spoken more succinctly than I could, Paul M. Fleiss, M.D. in What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Circumcision says

“The primary zones of erotogenous sensitivity are the frenulum, ridged band, and preputial orifice, and the external fold of the foreskin. Continuous and gentle stimulation of any one of these areas can elicit pleasure, orgasm, and ejaculation. “

Each component of our sexual anatomy contributes to the complex interplay and symphony of sensations, collected by the organ, and transmitted to the brain whose development perfectly matches and decodes that tactile experience, solely for the pleasure of its owner, and taking any part away is like hearing a beautiful Mozart symphony…without the string section. Who would suggest reducing the labia minora or clitoris even one little bit? Why do we consider penile reduction surgery 'ok' in this country? Bodily integrity against a background of cultural value placed on obviously essential body parts makes cutting on non-consenting humans for any reason other than dire medical emergency seem like a heinous crime. Denmark is considering nonconsensual circumcision just that. So should we, as we already have a 1970’s law banning FGM, including for reasons of religion, it is important to note. That law sits right now, in our books, and yes, U.S. doctors engaged in cutting women for the same reasons (please look it up if you are doubtful) in this very country in which we are living, right up to the year in which this law took place.

I’ll list a few other functions of the foreskin and every one of these functions, including those of sexual pleasure (not a phrase we like to associate with science, but I dare say within the realm of human experience, and so *should be given equal status) have studies to back it up. But I’d like to suggest people here consider that there are two groups of areas where studies are not necessary; shared similar experience and experience of body functioning.

Immediate experience. A hammer is dropped on my toe. Studies aren’t needed to convince others that pain is the result. We’ve all experienced something similar.
Indirect experience. A hammer is dropped on another person’s toe. Again, we’ve experienced something similar.
Direct body experience. Cutting out the front of one’s tongue. Studies aren’t needed to convince the person that the sense of sweetness will be gone. They will not experience sweetness.
Indirect body experience. Cutting out the front of another’s tongue. We all have that sweet sense capability in the front of our tongues and can figure out that removing that unique part of the tongue will reduce our pleasure in eating substantially.

This partly explains why we have so few studies documenting the sensitivity of female genitalia – we all know that cutting genitalia means a bleaker sexual experience (this reason of sexual sensation adds to our prior reason – bodily integrity – to fight for genital integrity for females), and given the lack of personal understanding around basic male sexual anatomy, why some people have published poorly designed studies that don’t even measure what the specific anatomy can detect. For example, the glans is endowed with deep pressure receptors, and very few fine touch receptors, yet Master and Johnson tested glans of intact vs cut men in a way that would not elicit any difference because they were ignorant of the specific sensitivity of the glans. It’s not so amazing that being sexual ‘experts’ their knowledge is often re-quoted as fact (without even a full disclosure of their methodological approach), when in reality, they might as well have been testing the eyes of color-blind vs color-capable individuals with black and white images, and concluded that there’s no difference in vision between the two!

The reason that we lack studies on male sexual experience is because funding is not available for controversial sexual studies in a foreskin-phobic society, and because we devalue the sexual experience of men, trivialize it, and maybe reaching into (for others) uncharted emotional territory, subtly shame and blame men around their sexuality, just as we do for women. In males, we take that sexual shame into the area of male genital disfigurement. Being a nation comprised of mostly disfigured men, we call this ‘normal’ and ‘attractive’, like a nation of war vets missing their left ears since birth, and judging a biologically normal two-eared person as unattractive.

It is important to note that circumcision was originally promoted as a cure for what was considered dangerously unhealthy in the latter part of the 1800’s – masturbation. It gave the struggling new field of medicine some serious traction and credibility, since it could not solve many of the diseases of the day, but at least it knew by ‘borrowing’ from the Jewish tradition, how to cut pieces of anatomy off. It did not have any knowledge of this anatomy beyond what was needed to do ensure the survival of the patient, did not, in fact, wish to know. It was, with the help of many devotes such as Kellog (the cereal guy), successful in convincing the public - amist social discomfort around sexuality and its negative impact on spirituality - of it's moral and physical benefit. People were eager to take any steps necessary to assisting in their moral cleanliness. Conflating cleanliness with morality degraded into the current myth that cut men are unclean.

Funding in the rest of the world for studies on the male structure are completely unnecessary, exactly because their men posses that body part and do not need elaborate studies, in-depth nerve knowledge, and counter-studies to combat the biased and often blatantly false medical studies, to show that yes, we’ll be keeping what nature has blessed us with, thank you very much.

My last point – what other body part can you think of that is dangerous to its owner, contributes to medical risks, and whose value in its function is superseded by its risks? I can think of none, except when it comes to the uniquely United States perception of the prepuce. We’re the only country in the world cutting the majority of our males for non-religious reasons, basing our moral superiority over countries that practice FGM partly on highly selective and biased medical claims. Again, current global circumcision rates are around 15%. We take our children to the doc to help eradicate an ear infection. We don’t ask him to cut out his ear in an operation in which that same child as an infant would be fully conscious! If you think 5-20 minutes of pain on a helpless infant who has no say, should be considered an acceptable proactive medical practice, I invite you - male or female - to consider the situation where a mandatory law requires you have your intact genitals cut without anesthesia. The analogy breaks down a little here on a number of points, but is only meant to illustrate the complete lack of power and autonomy given around the decision to remove someone else’s body parts, for whatever reason. Only when there is a dire and imminent medical situation that could result in death or greater physical damage, and where that person is unconscious or incapable of making their own decisions, should we be allowed to amputate unhealthy body parts. Ethically, we cannot condone cutting healthy body parts that pose no immediate danger.

Nature doesn’t birth every mammal on this planet (except bats) with a foreskin because she’s made a mistake or because she hasn’t selected it out of the gene pool yet and has politely asked *us to finish the job for her. Foreskins are not a congenital birth defect, nor are they vestigial! A female secretes smegma (Greek for soap, since that’s *exactly what it is - there is scientific information about this), have more UTI’s, are equally at risk for AIDS, as compared with their male counterparts.

So, here briefly, are some other reasons for a prepuce:

Provides for smooth intercourse by reducing friction for both partners. The penis is more like a sleeve than a static ram-rod or dowel. Artificial lubricants are rarely needed during sex between an intact man and an intact woman.

Encourages the male to make gentle deep thrusting motions during vaginal sex so that he is in contact with the clitoral hood and clitoris, making it more likely for the female to experience orgasm during intercourse.

Produces smegma, a healthy natural skin emollient, which helps lubricate the skin and allows for effortless insertion during intercourse and greatly facilitates masturbation.

Provides immunological defense during infancy and childhood, when it is tightly fused to the glans via synechia – the same bond that holds your fingernail to it’s bed (imagine a toothpick being pushed underneath to destroy that bond and you may have a flavor for the pain experienced by an infant, and yes, sadly there are studies on infant pain during circumcision – please see http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/lander/. Human vivisection comes to mind after reading that study.)

Provides further immunological defense throughout life through specialized immune cells and activity found only in the foreskin of the penis.

Exposes the primary erotogenic sexual tissue during erection so that a male’s most highly sexually sensitive apparatus via his mucosa may come in contact with the female’s sexual mucosa.

Produces pheromones and releases these powerful sexual attractants more copiously during arousal.

Protects the glans and keeps it moist.

Please see CIRP.ORG and CIRCUMSTITIONS.COM for more information.

Andre Maranhao

infant circumcision - male or female - is unacceptable

vikingirl — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 05:42:02 -0800

Elizabeth, there is not just anecdotal evidence that suggests men who are circumcised are more resistant to condom use. Robert Bailey leader of two of the African trials has also admitted that the intervention groups in the African studies showed more risky behaviours and less consistent condom use. This makes biological sense, after all, circumcision excises tissue containing most of the fine touch nerve endings on the penis. So adding a condom to that is like being double desensitised.

We also have research evidence that heterosexual men who have been cut may be more likely to have anal sex (see Laumann's research into male sexual behaviours) This is backed up by anecdotal evidence from those communities in which most men are excised. Again backs up the case for the sensory deficit shown by Sorrells et al.

It's also interesting to note that no one looks at excising the female labia and hood as a prevention against HIV although similar circumstantial evidence exists to that which excited the circumcision lobby to do the RCTs on male foreskin excision in Africa - ie a large study has shown a correlation between cutting and HIV protection, many of the areas which cut these parts show a lower rate of HIV and they have lots of Langerhans cells. There are also studies which appear to show a link between poor genital hygiene and HPV (such as Human papillomavirus and risk factors for cervical cancer in Chennai, India: A case-control study by Franceschi et al ) and hygiene is now mentioned as a risk factor on cancer help sites, yet no North American ever says on seeing a little newborn baby girl 'eeugh natural is sooo disgusting and unhealthy, lets cut her dirty little baby bits.'

Excising this tissue from baby girls, even with anaesthetic would be deemed an unacceptable breach of her bodily integrity and any attempt to justify it medically (as Egyptian doctors have typically tried to do) an apology for a barbaric ritual best consigned to history. We apply this to the amputation of the labia minora (8% of Egyptian circs) and to the clitoral hood (apparently the main target of most Indonesian circs, and an unknown number of Egyptian and Afghani and African circs) as much as the clitoris even though i don't think there's been any study proving widespread psychological or sexual dysfunction from FGC (in fact those having a clitorectomy for vulval cancer here in the West are typically told most women can come afterwards). When the BMJ ran an article saying that 800 women in Britain were having their labia/hood circumcised voluntarily on the NHS there was outrage at the risk to sensory pathways and the fact that society (and pornography) may be encouraging body dysmorphia, but no mention to the risk to sensory pathways in excising genital parts from a man, nor the body dysmorphia involved in foreskin hatred.

Body parts belong to the person they are attached to and he or she has an automatic right to choose to keep all of them. The only case in which this right can be overridden is where there is an overwhelming risk of leaving them and the person is not able to consent - because they are in a coma for example.

I'm upset to find the web is full of women blogging in support of forced male circumcision. I ask them all to think a little about how they'd feel if the roles were reversed, and all America's disgust and body dysmorphia was applied to their innocent delicate bits.... and precious research dollars being spent on halting a decline in infant female circumcision and promoting it as a benefit rather than a violation....

If women aren't prepared to lay down their prejudices and look at this issue from an ethical standpoint (let alone a scientific one).....then may Solomon's wisdom - and his knife - be applied to them.

but on the other hand...

Mark Lyndon — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 04:00:51 -0800

If male to female transmission is higher, then that in turn increases the risk to men who have sex with them. My second link did show a statistically significant connection between HIV status in women and partner circumcision btw.

Either way, I think we can all agree that circumcision can only help men who are having unsafe sex with an HIV+ partner. HIV doesn't strike people at random, and it just seems to me that the focus should all be on ABC (Abstinence, Being faithful, Condoms). Any partial solution, be it circumcision, vaccine, or microbicide will lead to more unsafe sex. This will presumably be more so for circumcision, since it's the most sensitive part of the penis being removed. There have already been reports of people thinking that circumcision means they don't need condoms despite all the warnings. I genuinely think that promoting circumcision will result in more deaths from AIDS in Africa rather than fewer. If funds and health resources are diverted from ABC to circumcision, this will only make things worse.

The article says this btw: "Some previous studies found that circumcision led to little, if any, decrease in penile sensitivity". If you look at such studies, they almost always measure sensitivity of the glans, rather than the inner foreskin. They typically don't even measure the most sensitive part of the glans. To me, that either suggests ignorance on the part of the researchers, or that they didn't actually want to find any decrease.

I don't have a problem with condoms btw. I used them for over two years with one girlfriend who didn't like the Pill.

Actually...

Elizabeth — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:06:18 -0800

To be clearer, the study shows no significant difference in rates of transmission, though it is true as you say that eight more women in the circumcision group contracted the virus, something that is alarming all on its own.

I suppose that if circumcision were consistently found to decrease men's risk of acquiring the virus it could be argued to decrease the risk to the women who have sex with them, but it seems to early to be able to say that with confidence. Condom use still seems necessary... and more effective.

A question I have is about whether men (or women) in the US are particularly resistant to the use of condoms on a regular basis.

circ and HIV

Mark Lyndon — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:27:03 -0800

Latest news is that HIV+ who are circumcised are more likely to transmit the virus to women:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/96175.php

Note that

1) this study appears to have resulted in eight extra women acquiring HIV than if all the men had been left intact.

2) that the rate of transmission was higher even after the healing period, which means that more women may acquire HIV after the experiment is over, solely because their partner was circumcised as part of an experiment.

This is not the first time that HIV in women has been linked with partner circumcision:

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/2/371

Re the circumcision thread

Elizabeth — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:45:56 -0800

A few people have recently submitted comments that essentially say "research shows there is no evidence..." but have no provided any links to references. I am not posting new comments that simply assert a relationship or deny a relationship. Please provide evidence/links to support any major claims if you want your comments posted.

thoughts on WNYC show

kerwynk — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:25:54 -0800

First of all, thanks very much to Audacia for handling the show so deftly - very nicely done.

One of the main concerns I have with the anti-trafficking legislation is that it encourages policing activities that are actually counter-productive for the overwhelming majority of sex workers. But understanding why this is true requires that one have a realistic understanding as to the diversity of working conditions within the sex biz.

Earlier in the show, Sonia Ossario claims that only an extreme few (those "jet set call girls") have control over with whom and where they have paid sex. She states that "the vast majority of women and girls who are in the sex industry...don't have that luxury. [They] are trafficked here [or] work in brothels." There's a lot wrong with this picture, not the least of which is that it fails to include males (something I hope we chat about more within the forum this week). The equation of trafficking with literal "slavery" serves to further escalate both the rhetoric and the legislative proposals required to engage with what is understood to exist, and also further divorces the NYC-NOW analysis from reality.

At one time, and to some extent again today, the focus in prostitution policy was on street-based workers. Most researchers agree that street-based workers now make up only about 15% of the total of sex work. Street-based workers are themselves divided in their conditions, with many "classes" of strolls and of workers on the streets, and with only a subset facing stereotyped conditions of miserable homelessness with lots of drug use. Another group of people (mostly female, but also including some men) does not do sex "work" exactly, but trades sex for drugs rather than for cash. In terms of sex worker activism, I'd argue that people living in extreme forms of poverty and/or with intense drug involvement should in many ways be a higher priority than middle-class folks who are doing well. How Ossario thinks that increased criminalization will help the most destitute of the poor - especially when most people in this group cannot afford so-called "pimps" (and are therefore not "trafficked") - is beyond me.

There are indeed some people who might benefit from increased criminalization, namely people who are indeed held directly against their will in actual slave-like conditions. To me, however, this is where the numbers seem to be awfully thin. What realistically happens with anti-trafficking legislation is that lots of brothels where migrants work are busted, and no one is "rescued" because so very few are victims of the sort imagined by Ossario. So while such raids might indeed get lucky and actually help someone, they harm many others along the way (by arresting them and potentially rendering them subject to deportation) - is this an effective use of the police in a fight against "slavery"?

Even people who genuinely need the police may suffer because the anti-trafficking approach as currently constituted stigmatizes and punishes the group that would be most able to see if someone was in trouble and most able to tell the police: clients. Even if one thought that prostitution were a negative, one could still reach out to clients in order to solicit their aid in monitoring the brothels. The approach of NYC-NOW takes the opposite tack, and instead works to make it more difficult for sex workers to work (e.g. by trying to convince newspapers to end all advertising), thus making it more difficult for people to work independently and making people more vulnerable, not less.

One basic problem is that so many people are ready to believe that "the overwhelming majority" of sex workers live in slave-like conditions. People don't think of the approximately 20% of sex workers who have middle-class backgrounds (even if they're not exactly part of the "jet set"), and that the overwhelming majority of people who are more working-class and yet work independently or in underground brothels are not in any way "enslaved," even if the work might kind-of suck. Anti-trafficking approaches as currently constituted make conditions worse for this vast majority, not better, and only offers dubious benefits for - at a guess - 250 people in the US today.

I guess I could go on and on here, and I've already written a lengthy thread, but I'll just end with one final point. The difficulty with the NYC-NOW position - aka the CATW position - is that they are using the issue of trafficking to fight against the entire sex industry, or rather to get the police to wage their fight. As Ossario states, "it's hard to separate" trafficking from the general sex business. Send the police against all of it, I suppose! Well, it seems to me that it is usually pretty easy to distinguish slavery from other forms of exploited wage labor. Migrant workers on factory farms sometimes face literal slave-like conditions, for example, and when they do, the police should help them. The vast majority of these workers, however, face something horrid, but not slavery. Raiding every single farm with migrant workers is not only an inefficient waste of one's police force, it is a tactic that harms many other workers by putting them at risk for deportation. A truly better plan for this majority who suffer from extreme economic exploitation, but not "slavery," would be to legalize their entry into the US and enforce a good labor standard (not that this is likely right now, but one can dream......). In what world is it impossible to tell the difference between the two types of oppression? Only in a world in which sex work is already such a degraded and un-thought-through possibility that it becomes impossible to imagine that someone might rationally choose it.

If people are concerned that bad economics forces people into prostitution, then "anti-trafficking" is a terrible means to address that possibility. If people are concerned with outright slavery, then I suggest they adjust their tactics to create a policing system that does not punish hundreds and hundreds in order to help a rare individual (shall we raid every home in the US in hopes of finding a kidnapping victim?). If, on the other hand, NYC-NOW is merely interested in confusing people and pushing their own anti-sex work agenda in the muddle, then they are doing a very good job of it. We need to figure out how to do better.

Sorry for the ramble....

HIV Prevention

Doug — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:20:13 -0800

What about the role that circumcision plays in HIV transmission? To what extent is circumcision a public health concern, especially when it comes to transmitting the virus to women through vaginal sex?

An adventure into a brave the world

LadyJ — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:22:54 -0800

It's an exhilarating experience, although fraught with moments of beginners' doubts, to emerge at 62 as someone who is actually becoming a domme, spanking, flogging and otherwise "erotically torturing" men who wish me to do so. I've paged through Jay Wisemen's beginning primer for years and didn't act on any of the tantalizing fantasies until I found myself on a website called Alt.com. Granted, there were profiles of men and women from every description and intensity of the BDSM spectrum and most of the male profile pictures tend to be more penile than personal in nature -- long, thick, crooked, flabby, as if they were the main enticement to a 62 year old whose initial lovemaking as a sexually repressed young wife and then suburban housewife was to avoid at all costs having to do anything with those things except allow them into one and only one somewhat reserved orifice. But there were a;sp intelligent men who wanted to be submissive in this area of their lives, men who represented all ages and inclinations. Men who craved discipline, felt an inner need to be submissive and ordered to bend over my sofa and feel my crop. In fact, a crop of them. I am learning the roles (no pun intended) making lots of mistakes and sorting through lots of e-mails. It's a little like dating with you in charge of all the activities, a power and control trip. Of course I'm a novice and my few real-life encounters so far have been far from perfect; but it is an exploration that leaves me wishing for more with few regrets so far...

Welcome, BarkingStar!

Elizabeth — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:50:32 -0800

I'm so glad you like what we're doing here, BarkingStar, and that you share so many of our goals. I hope you'll jump right in and find ways to make the Square an even more wonderful place :)