Oh thank god – at last women can eat cashews and walnuts. They’re more expensive than the men’s, of course, but at least we can have them.

The empowerment of sex work:

Lauren Darlington looked every bit the sweet 16-year-old with a mouth full of braces when her mum forged her birth certificate so she could work as a prostitute. Seven years later she is real, raw about her demons, blogging to touch others.

Her mother got half her earnings – in other words her mother was her pimp. That’s nice.

Lauren agreed to having sex for money – she wanted to get her mum out of financial trouble. But now, aged 23, she realises she was a vulnerable child and she is still paying the price and trying to make sense of the memories.

Looking back she can see she was being groomed, heavily influenced by adults she trusted. And the world of prostitution was glorified.

You mean the world of prostitution isn’t glorious? How can that be?

At the time Lauren and her mum were on welfare. Money was tight.

“They did a lot of drugs around me and one day on the way to her drug dealer’s place it came up that she was a prostitute. Mum blurted out she had been one before so could never again and the talk of the money and how ‘easy’ it was. I offered to do it for us. And that’s something I have always said and held guilt around. It was my choice.”

With a history of self harm and a fragile mindset, being plunged into the seedy adult world was damaging.

“I was hit, degraded, the mind games … I was 16 and looked it and covered in fresh scars. But I turned off. The Valium mum would give me and lack of sleep helped.”

The scars mark her razor blade slashes. Cutting her forearms and thighs was a way she tried to tell the world she was in serious trouble.

What trouble? Let’s not be sex negative here.

Eventually she told her father what was going on, and her mother was tried and convicted. They’ve reconciled. But women pimping out their daughters? Not cool. Not empowered.

H/t Rob

Guest post by James Garnett, a followup to his post yesterday.

We all know this, but it’s worth stating again: being able to build equity over time is a very important way that most of us are able to get ahead in the world. Working hard matters, too, but it’s not enough.

My father worked hard. On his return from naval service in the Korean War, he used the GI Bill to earn a degree in engineering. That got him a good job, with which he and my mother were able to buy a small home on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Over the years, they saved money and built home equity, and by the time the 1980’s rolled around they were able to put me and my two sisters through university using a combination of savings and equity loans.

And here we have Maine governor Paul LePage being “colorful.”

Paul R. LePage, the ever-combative Republican governor of Maine, refused on Friday to apologize to a Democratic state lawmaker for leaving a threatening and expletive-studded voicemail message that was criticized by some state Republicans and left top Democrats suggesting that Mr. LePage should resign.

You’ll be wanting to know what the expletives were. The Times doesn’t want to tell you, but I listened to a recording at Salon. The epithets were:

• You cocksucher.
• You little socialist son of a bitch cocksucker.

Not very gubernatorial, I think you’ll agree.

Mr. LePage did apologize in a statement Friday to the state for his choice of words in the voicemail message, but in a 35-minute news conference he said he was not apologizing directly to the Democratic state representative who was the target of his wrath, Drew Gattine. The governor said he was offended because he believed Mr. Gattine had called him a racist.

“I am enormously angry,” Mr. LePage said at his news conference, suggesting — perhaps not seriously — that he would step down if Mr. Gattine did as well. “I’m not shying away from what I called him.”

Precisely what Mr. LePage called Mr. Gattine is unprintable here, but, suffice to say, the profanity-laced voicemail message, which Mr. LePage left on Thursday and Mr. Gattine provided to The Portland Press Herald, was incendiary even by Mr. LePage’s uninhibited standards.

“Prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people,” Mr. LePage said in the message. “I’m after you. Thank you.”

It’s fine that Mr Gattine gave the recording to The Portland Press Herald, because the Gov told him to make it public.

After leaving the message Thursday, Mr. LePage told reporters from The Press Herald and the television station WMTW that he would like to have a duel with Mr. Gattine, saying he would point a gun directly between Mr. Gattine’s eyes.

That’s charming. I feel so proud of the United States these days.

The episode grew out of a town-hall-style meeting on Wednesday, where, according to The Portland Press Herald, Mr. LePage told an audience member that he kept a three-ring binder of photographs of arrested drug dealers in the state, which is in the grips of a heroin crisis, and that 90 percent of them were black or Hispanic.

Mr. Gattine said he believed Mr. LePage’s comments were racially charged, but he denied calling the governor a racist.

The Guardian has more on what the Gov said on Wednesday.

At a town hall event in North Berwick on Wednesday, LePage said the majority of drug dealers arrested in Maine were black or Hispanic in origin.

“I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison,” he said, “but they come. And I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ring binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn. I didn’t make the rules – I’m just telling you what’s happening.”

At a subsequent press conference, video of which was released by the Press Herald, he said: “Look, the bad guy is the bad guy. I don’t care what colour he is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red.”

Addressing the state’s Republican house minority leader, Ken Fredette, a military lawyer, he said: “Don’t you? Ken, you’ve been in uniform. You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of colour or people of Hispanic origin.”

Um.

The BBC has details of what the Gov said after leaving that phone message.

He later invited reporters from the Press Herald and WMTW TV channel to an interview to explain the voice message, and told them he wished he could shoot Mr Gattine in a duel.

“I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825,” Mr LePage said.

“And we would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you… I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this legislature to help move the state forward.”

It’s the Era of the Bully.

There are a lot of ways to enforce orthodoxy. A very popular one right now is to accuse heretics of “denying my/our lived experience,” at which point the heretic had damn well better apologize and swear to do better, or else prepare to be shunned.

But lived experience isn’t a conversation-ender. People can claim to have experienced anything, including absurdities, so why should it be treated as ungainsayable? People have claimed to be victims of  Satanic rituals, alien abductions, the Freemasons, reverse racism, hauntings, The Jews, misandry – you name it. They’re not always right, and they’re not always telling the truth. We’re not required to believe everyone’s stories about “lived experience,” so the accusation of failing to do so shouldn’t be a conversation-ender, much less grounds for shunning.

Furthermore, experience is one thing, and what we call it is another. There’s an enormous gap between experience and language, and it’s a necessary part of critical thinking to poke and prod the way we name things. People can claim their lived experience tells them they are and always have been women despite having male bodies, but that doesn’t mean they’re right, even though it’s their experience they’re talking about. We can be wrong even about ourselves – but who doesn’t know that? What’s that “even” even doing there, as if it’s surprising that we can be wrong about ourselves? We lie to ourselves, but much more we just plain get things wrong. The subjective isn’t infallible – to put it mildly.

The politics of trying to ignore this is not a healthy robust politics. It’s the opposite of that. It’s a politics of temper tantrums and lying, and that won’t work out.

So there was a book launch today in Townsville, Queensland in Australia of Prostitution Narratives, a compilation of sex trade survivor testimonies. The launch was disrupted by pro sex trade advocates.

Members of the public were invited to the book launch at a Townsville domestic violence service over three weeks ago, through advertising on social media.

The domestic violence service that offered the use of their conference room, as they do for many groups,  was contacted by a representative of local sex industry group RESPECT, a couple of weeks ago. They said they disagreed with the event and asked to leave their flyers at the venue.  The host service agreed to accept the flyers.

On Friday last week sex trade advocates visited the domestic violence service saying they had information to offer and asked to put up posters of partly naked women in the sex trade “looking empowered”.  While the host in no way discouraged their attendance at the event it was made clear that the posters would not be allowed because they would cause offence to survivors, and no offensive conduct would be tolerated.

They could have given a better “because” than that, I think. They could have simply said no, this is our event, and we’re not obliged to display your posters that take a view fundamentally opposed to our view.

That’s clear enough, isn’t it? An anti-racism event isn’t obliged to display racist posters just because someone asks. A feminist event isn’t obliged to display misogynist posters just because someone asks. That’s a perfectly legitimate reason, and there’s no need to get into the weeds of “offence” and “offensive.”

The book launch was subsequently held at another venue because the domestic violence service provider was not able to ensure attendees’ safety. 

The response from the sex trade advocates was extremely threatening. They said they would not be responsible for the behaviour of their group members at the event. At the launch itself, former president of the Scarlet Alliance, Elena Jeffreys ( HERE ), stood on a chair and interjected while survivors were speaking. She attempted to harass and, in my view, intimidate both survivors and other speakers at the event.

This type of harassment, and what I see as threats against survivors who give voice to their experiences is becoming increasingly common, in my view.  Sex trade advocates are perhaps alarmed at the rising tide of people who are coming to understand the reality of the sex trade, and the harms it causes, especially to women and children.

The sex trade lobby’s continuing aggressive attacks on survivors’ freedom of speech exposes it for the violent, abusive, manipulative and coercive trade it is, in my view as a survivor of this trade.  I also find the intimation of threat to a domestic violence service absolutely unconscionable.

And not really all that feminist, either.

Maajid Nawaz had an excellent piece on the “burkini” issue at the Daily Beast yesterday. He says the ban is absurd and petty, and also playing into the hands of the Islamists, who want to see a religious war cleaving the world into two factions. But he also says that the whole “modesty” thing is terrible.

There is no better way to kickstart dividing people along exclusively religious lines than by committing atrocities in the name of Islam. Their hope is that everyone else also begins to identify Sunni Muslims primarily by their religious identities, in reaction to the atrocities. In this way, religious identity has won and citizenship becomes redundant.

But the backward trajectory of contemporary liberalism is matched by a backward trajectory within Islam today.

In modern Muslim-majority contexts and up until the 1970s, the female body was not shamed out of public view. As one Egyptian feminist asserts, this was mainly due to the social dominance of the relatively liberal, middle-class elite in urban centers.

But throughout the ’80s, theocratic Islamism began replacing Arab socialism as the ideology of resistance against “the West.” As is always the case with misogynist dogma, the war against the “other” necessitated defining what is “ours” and what is “theirs”—and our women, of course, were deemed “ours.”

Suddenly, women’s bodies became the red line in a cultural war against the West started by theocratic Islamism. A Not Muslim Enough charade was used to identify “true” Muslims against “Western” stooges. Religious dress codes became a crucial marker in these cultural purity stakes. Only the fanatic can ever win in this Not Muslim Enough game. Any uncovered woman was now deemed loose, decadent, and attention seeking.

Mahnaz Nadeem has an excellent piece on the burkini ban at Sedaa.

She looks back to a time when Muslims weren’t under relentless pressure to demonstrate their religiosity.

Before then Islam was cultural and spiritual and no-one was publicly over-preoccupied with proving how puritanical they were; they were more concerned about the day-to-day and making the most of their arrival to this land of opportunity. Iranian Fatwas, Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine issue, 9/11 and Wahhabi funding changed our psyche so that we came to adopt religious positions by default on absolutely everything under the sun.

Which is a bad trend, because the religious position isn’t always the best one, to put it mildly.

Muslim women who wear the costume are paradoxically rejecting the confines of their home and are wanting to participate in the liberating activity of enjoying the outdoors. They have not decided to envelope themselves in an all-concealing burqa to ensure they go undetected and unrecognised.

Rather the wet-suit provides a Muslim woman an opportunity to dip her toe in the water literally and metaphorically which ordinarily she may not entertain were she required to expose more of her body. It is the first step toward the Muslim community appreciating that the Muslim woman can be part of the outdoors as much as the indoors.

There may be a multitude of other reasons a Muslim woman or any woman for that reason wishes to wear it: she may not want to be sun burned; she may have a skin-complaint, she may want to keep warm; she might be body conscious for non-religious reasons; it just might be more comfortable.

Here’s a surprising thing: bikinis actually aren’t comfortable at all for most women. You have to be truly flawless to feel ok wearing those things where people can see you. Beach anxiety is a running joke and has been for decades.

‘Creeping Sharia’ has had its day and if we want to survive in Europe we need to have a far more intelligent strategy, where we can keep hold of our Islamic faith yet not offend the dominant population’s sensibilities. It is going to be a very tricky task indeed, and will need some intelligent thinking rather than a defensive victim approach. Our conduct and a secular attitude is going to speak much louder than any attempts at religious PR.

In short the “burkini” ban is the cumulative result of years of tolerance towards Islamism encroaching into the public sphere, but this recent attempt to deal with it has resulted in unfairly targeting Muslim women. Instead, the pulpits and criminal elements need to be taken more seriously by French authorities and Europe at large, even perhaps reflecting on our relationships with countries that espouse extremist ideology.

Encroaching on the civil liberties of Muslim women’s rights to enjoy the sun and water is not the solution. Equally Muslims need to appreciate the honeymoon period of encroaching Sharia is over.

Muslim men could wear burkinis in solidarity. That would make the whole thing seem less targeted at women, and less calculated to put them in the wrong no matter what they do.

Breaking news: France’s highest administrative court has ruled the burkini ban illegal.

The State Council upheld a challenge by human rights groups which argued that the ban in the Riviera resort of Villeneuve-sur-Loubet infringed personal freedoms in a ruling that is likely to set a legal precedent for 29 other towns that have banned the garment.

The ban “constituted a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of fundamental liberties, ” the State Council said in its judgement.

Patrice Spinosi, a lawyer for the Human Rights League, said the decision to “suspend” the ban would also apply to the other 29 French towns.

I’m sure you’re all well familiar with this incident in Nice:

There’s no denying it’s beyond bizarre to see four armed cops standing over a woman and forcing her to take some clothes off.

In more news from the Moral Squalor Files – the ACLU is suing an Arkansas county for setting up a debtors’ prison.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the City of Sherwood, its district court judge, and Pulaski County. The suit claims they’re violating a person’s due process rights, and preying on the poor, by creating a never-ending spiral in hot check cases.

This lawsuit claims that the Sherwood courts are trapping people into a never-ending spiral of repetitive court proceedings and ever-increasing debt, adding it’s been happening for the past 25 years or so.

Squalid though we are, we don’t allow debtors’ prisons.

“In this country, you cannot be jailed if you cannot pay your debts. That’s called debtors’ prison and that’s something we did away with some 200 years ago,” said Rita Sklar, ACLU of Arkansas Executive Director.

The suit is on behalf of four people who were convicted of “hot check crimes.”

“A single bounced check written 10 years ago for $15 can be leveraged into a debt of thousands and thousands of dollars in fines and fees for inability to pay the original check and then inability to pay the payments that were set up,” added Sklar.

It goes on to say the hot check court hearings held every Thursday are held in secret, with no transcripts available and closed off to the public. It also adds that hot check defendants are unknowingly signing a waiver of counsel because they’re told they must fill the form out to enter the courtroom.

Well that doesn’t sound at all suspect.

You can read the lawsuit on the article.