Recent large stories in Britain and the US keep the issue of whether prostitution should be legalised in the public eye. I think it should. The resignation this week of Eliot Spitzer, a US politician and former state prosecutor who quit after allegations about his use of prostitutes' services - despite his prosecuting them in his day job - and the recent conviction of the British murderer of five Ipswich prostitutes, convince me we should legalise it. The benefits are many:

People like Eliot Spitzer and other vicious, corrupt state officials would have fewer ways of annoying the rest of us, which is unquestionably a public good. Pimps who control prostitutes, or who attempt to do so, would have fewer opportunities to prey on such women. The spread of sexually transmitted disease would be reduced, if not eliminated because a client could shop around to find brothels that enforce hygiene checks and advertised themselves accordingly. If he caught a STD, the client could sue the brothel, just like a client can now sue a pizza joint if he or she gets food poisoning. And finally, because if an adult woman or man wants to sell sexual favours, that is their business, and no-one else's, period.

John Derbyshire, the UK-born commentator who writes for the right wing US publication National Review, has this comment, which reminds me of why I am not a conservative:

Prostitution, like drug trafficking, is one of those zones where libertarianism bumps up against the realities of human nature.

Wrong. Prostitution and drug trafficking, which are both illegal, demonstrate perfectly the libertarian argument that if you ban trades between consenting adults (children are another matter), then criminals and the plain reckless will provide them, damaging society as a whole.

To a lover of liberty, it is hard to see why a woman shouldn't sell her favors if she wants to. Trouble is, weak or dimwitted women end up in near-slavery to unscrupulous men, and I think there's a legitimate public interest in not letting that happen.

Oh come on. One might as well say that liberty is only for intelligent, smart people who write for right-wing Washington magazines. Of course, unintelligent, feeble-minded people screw up, but the case for liberty is that people are better off if they are presumed to be best able to judge their own interests. The fact that some cannot do this does not overturn that point. Encouraging personal responsibility is good for society as a whole (sorry to use such a collectivist expression) even if it is true that some individuals are not good at taking such responsibility.

The best private sector solution would be a guild system, like the geishas had in old Japan. There'd be entry standards for the guild. Women would have to pass exams, and have some entertainment skills other than the obvious ones. The guild would police itself, expelling miscreants. Freelancing outside the guild could be under strong social disapproval, even made illegal.

He is talking about a form of trade union closed shop for prostitutes, sanctioned by law. But then what about the businesses that try to gouge concessions from politicians to get into these closed-shop deals? How would such 'guilds' be able to start up? What about registration fees? I can see a wonderful opportunity for political and business corruption here.

No, sometimes we ideologues have it right: the simplest, most radical option is also the most practical one. Even if you morally disapprove of prostitution - I do not - as a practical matter, legalising it makes lots of sense. Compared to what goes on down in most parliaments, prostitution is a noble calling.

The screenwriter, Tad Safran (whoever he is), has penned a rather coarse and unpleasant item about the physical pros and cons of British vs American women. It says something about the state of the Times (of London) that they would print this sort of thing at all. There may be some limited truth in his observation that women (or for that matter, men), spend different amounts of time on personal grooming and appearance. But in my experience of travelling to the States, I have seen enough examples, from both sexes, of scruffiness/smartness to reckon that his generalisations are BS.

This is a rather more uplifting study on the wonderful womenfolk of these Anglosphere nations.

Note: in my original item I said Safran was an actor, not a screenwriter. Mea culpa.

One of my fellow Samizdatistas recently told me that whatever business model the porn industry is following now is what Hollywood is about to follow. To see the future of Hollywood, look at porn now. Porn, so I was told, now, already, distributes itself by being given away, and then if you like something you see for free you go to the originating porn site and pay a bit, either in cash or in advertising attention or for individual products, because that turns out to be an even better deal, and worth paying a bit for. Hollywood is slowly learning this lesson.

But is it actually too late for them to learn? Look what is apparently now happening to the porn industry:

DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube, especially a secretive site called YouPorn. And the amateurs are taking over. What's happening to the adult-entertainment industry is exactly what's happening to its Hollywood counterpart - only worse.

So, is that what is about to happen to Hollywood also? Will movie and TV entertainment of the clothes-mostly-on sort also be overrun soon by amateurs?

WIth thanks to Instapundit for the link.

Important data on the meaning of curves and wiggles.

It is a story told of more than one matinée idol, and no doubt actionable, so let us call him The Star.

The Star was rumoured in a big Hollywood prostitution case to have been one of the most regular [I almost wrote "biggest"] clients of the latest martyred madam. An interviewer caught up with him.

- "Mr Star, is it true you hired call-girls."
- "Now I'm not going to comment on the case, and I never had any contact with Miss X; but it is no secret I have used call-girls plenty of times in the past."
- "But Mr Star, you are known as one of the sexiest men in the world. You could surely have all the girls you want for free. Why pay anyone for sex?"
- "I didn't pay them for sex. I paid them to go away afterwards."

It seems our madly interfering government now wants to police our private lives a bit more closely, and thereby make them a bit riskier. According to The Times:

Unmarried women and men will be able to make claims against their partners to demand lump-sum payments, a share of property, regular maintenance or a share of the partner’s pension when they separate. They will also be able to claim against their partners for loss of earnings if they gave up a career to look after children.

The reforms are to be published by the Law Commission, the Government’s law reform body. It is expected to drop any proposal for a time stipulation, so that only couples who had lived together for, say, two years, could bring a claim; or any bar on childless couples.

Plans that would have made it harder for the partner who stays at home to lodge a claim have also been dropped. Courts will no longer have to be satisfied that the unmarried couple jointly decided that one of them should give up their career and stay at home and that the decision was not made just by one of them. [...]

The reforms would apply to both opposite and same-sex couples in “an intimate relationship.” But the Law Commission emphasises that the plans are about granting individuals a remedy, not rights, when they split, and says that the measures will not undermine marriage but make the law fairer.

A marriage or civil partnership is a clear, deliberate, decision. I don't think the state should control the form of family that is possible, but at least those particular controlled forms are optional, and formally delineated. This opens the way for officialdom to delineate and the courts to investigate any relationship for an actionable degree of intimacy, and for divorce lawyers to open a whole new field of speculative actions. Divorce lawyers will just love the idea that there's no minimum length of 'intimate relationship' involved, and that unilateral reliance by one party can create a liability for the other. And they've been agitating for it for years (e.g. in Solicitors Family Law Association, Fairness for Families: Proposals for Reform on the Law on Cohabitation, 2000 - sorry, can't find that online).

It would be an impressive feat on behalf of the state to make both marriage less attractive (some of its appurtenances - for those who want them - would come free) and at the same time to make sex and friendship outside marriage more risky - and possibly more risky the more affluent you are.

It might do some good of course, undoubtably there are people who are mistreated by partners or mistaken about their rights. But to punish every other single person in Britain for the cruelty or ignorance of a few is an appalling way to go. The parade of motivated winners tells you what you need to know: mad clingy girlfriends, scrounging scrubs of boyfriends, family lawyers, smug marrieds, investigators, officialdom, and prurient tabloids.

I can see a spin-off gain for the proprietors of anonymous, deniable, premises for lovers' assignations. (Brighton?) Perhaps the Argentinian or Japanese speciality hotel businesses would get emulated here. But that would still be risky for the rich and famous. The only people certain to come out with improved credit (in both senses): proper, professional, prostitutes.

Francis Stokes, creator of YouTube sensation God, Inc:

It's funny and kind of charming when things like this, the Sexual Harassment Policy Video, never evolve beyond their most primitive and mockable state. Being poster children for the post ironic post-post modern society we live in, it's hard to even imagine something so bleedingly achingly sincere. And yet totally insincere. A sincere video would flash across the bottom the screen the entire time, "PLEASE DON'T SUE US. WATCHING THIS MEANS YOU CAN'T SUE US. YOU PROMISED. YOU SIGNED A THING."

But my point is, we live in a society that is keenly aware of irony. You'd think there'd be nothing left to mock. But thankfully, we have group think. A bunch of beaurocrats would never agree to allow the Sexual Harassment Policy Video to have any knowing hint of irony, even if they each individually hold the strong belief that personally they aren't stodgy humorless corporate drones, after all, they watch "The Simpsons". So group think will prevail where post modern can never go. You can't really have a funny Sexual Harassment Policy Video. And it's this commitment to non-humor that makes it so hilarious.

Read the whole thing to find out the answer to this post's title.

Back in my day, the toms weren't much to look at, but you look at these Polish birds in London these days and yer think, blimey, I'd pay money for that!

- So said a London taxi cab driver the other day, starting off with what I had taken to be the preamble to an anti-immigration rant to a captive audience (me) but which turned out to be a hosanna to the value to the British gene-pool of the latest wave of mass immigration. He said because of the area he worked, he frequently picked up and delivered high class 'courtesans' to their place of gainful employ.

Steve Edwards relates an interesting story unfolding in the Chinese blogosphere:

Chinese Internet vigilantes have launched a hunt for a self-professed British bounder who has sparked outrage by blogging about his seduction of women in Shanghai. The campaign to uncover the identity of the blogger and have him kicked out of China is the latest in a series of online denunciations that have drawn comparisons with the humiliations inflicted by mobs during the Cultural Revolution.

Traffic on the Sex and Shanghai blog [currently restricted to members only - JW] had surged from 500 hits to more than 17,000, thanks to a swarm of castration threats, anti-British rants and attacks on women who sleep with foreigners.

That some Chinese men are haunted by a sense of sexual inadequacy should come as no surprise - it is a trait that can be uncovered universally. However, there seems a particularly 'Chinese' way of expressing this, combining a sense of wounded pride, chauvinism and sexual frustration. I recall similar goings on a few years ago when a young Chinese female author wrote a scandalous (by Chinese standards) book that was subsequently banned. The protagonist, a Chinese teenage girl, got up to all kinds of naughtiness. In the most infamous scene, she has sex with a German in a public bathroom, stating something like "riding his big cock was like sitting on a fire hose". Such explicit prose brought forth a torrent of outraged letters to the author and messages posted on bulletin boards. Most of them were deeply offended by the sexual encounter with the foreigner, and many threatened sexual violence involving the respondent's own (presumably fictitious) monster appendage.

The ugly controversy these isolated tales of sexual licence generate obscures - yet also confirms - the fact that generally, Chinese women are probably the most sexually conservative in East Asia. Despite its ostensible headlong rush to modernise and embrace the rest of the world (not an entirely apt metaphor, considering my forthcoming conclusion), such controversies show that much of Chinese society harbours a visceral discomfort with the consequences of throwing open the gates to Johnny Foreigner. This evidently includes large elements of the net-savvy middle class; a demographic that usually has progressive views ascribed to it. Socially, China is still quite an illiberal society, despite the adoption of many Western values. Foreign workers in a city like Shanghai can lose sight of this in the familiar surroundings of expensive consumer goods, rows of the steel and glass churches of capitalism and a general will to party like it's 1999 amongst the city's elite and emerging elite. Nevertheless, as this story confirms, conflating the two cultures can still be dangerous; even in the midst of China's latest Cultural Revolution.

Four firefighters are due before a disciplinary hearing over their refusal to hand out leaflets at a gay pride march in Glasgow

When did the 'enthusiastic participation' become compulsory?

I've remarked here before on how the paedo-craze leads to possession of ordinary images of children being deemed indecent, and hence their possession a serious crime, depending on who has them. Now comes an example where there were no children (nor, as the facts suggest, any young adults) involved at all, except in the imagination of the court speculating about the imagination of the defendant.

The Times reported yesterday:-

A COMPUTER expert who altered indecent images of naked women to make them look like children has been warned that he faces a prison sentence.

Stafford Sven Tudor-Miles scanned photographs of adult porn stars into his computer and used sophisticated digital equipment to reduce the size of their breasts.

The images, which Tudor-Miles also manipulated with graphics software so that the women were partially dressed in school uniforms, appeared to be of girls aged under 18.

For those who have not been keeping up with the intricacies of UK sexual offences legislation: Possession of, or (more seriously) making, indecent (not defined) photographs of children (defined as being or appearing to be under 16) became illegal a while ago. But it was extended to pseudo-photographs, i.e. digitally edited images, in 1994. And the age criterion was raised to 18 just a couple of years ago. And the courts have in their wisdom decided that copying an image to or within a computer counts as 'making' it.

So photoshopping or downloading a picture (which also counts as 'making' it) that appears (to the court) to represent someone under 18 and is indecent (as it appears to the court after hearing the evidence of prosecution experts that may relate as much to the nature of the defendant and the context in which it was found as that of the picture itself) is a crime bearing a prison sentence and registration as a sex offender - even if the defendant made absolutely certain that no-one under 18 was in any way involved.

You can screw your sixteen-year old girlfriend or boyfriend however you both like*, but snap them with their top off, or even leering suggestively, and use it as a screensaver, and you are a manufacturer of child pornography who could easily, given bad luck and a zealous prosecution, end up unemployable and/or be locked up to be tortured by career criminals. I don't know how unlucky Mr Tudor-Miles was, but The Times also quotes Ray Savage, one of the professional experts involved in the case:

“I’ve seen it in only two previous cases,” he said. “To create an image of a child by altering an image of an adult is just as serious as downloading child porn, and probably more worrying in terms of the time taken and work involved to produce such images.

“In general terms, these images can be as crude as someone having pasted a cut-out of a child’s head on to an adult’s photo.

“At the other end of the scale, someone will use sophisticated computer image manipulation equipment to alter the size of the breasts and genitalia to make a very realistic image.”

More worrying? Mr Savage worries me more than Mr Tudor-Miles.

If our protectors wish to stamp out people having sexual fantasies about schoolgirls, then police raids and mass arrests here and here are clearly called for. Better still, lets deal with the problem at source and stop women going to school. It worked for the Taliban. I have it on good authority that you still can not buy a stripy tie or a navy-blue mini-skirt in Kabul.

[* But not, under the new Sexual Offences Act, wherever you like.]

A victory in the Netherlands for freedom of expression:

A political party formed by paedophiles cannot be banned because it has the same right to exist as any other party and is protected by democratic freedoms, a Dutch court has ruled. The Brotherly Love, Freedom and Diversity party (PNVD) was launched in May to campaign for a reduction in the age of consent from 16 to 12 and the legalisation of child pornography and sex with animals, provoking widespread outrage in the Netherlands.

The Solace group, which campaigns against paedophiles, sought a ban on the group, asserting that the party infringed the rights of children, and that its ideas were a threat to social norms and values in a democratic state. But a court in The Hague held otherwise.

- The Times (from the Reuters report)

Good for the court. Even easy-going Dutch society is prey to populism, it seems. Without constraint on 'democracy', then eventually non-majoritarian views will squeezed out; not defeated in argument, but denied even consideration.

Worth noting (1): Solace [can anyone find a web-site? I will link it if so], who would rather nobody hear the views of the PNVD, made their claim based on some putative 'rights of children'. I would like to know quite how it enhances anyone's rights to exclude from the political sphere discussion of policy on the age of consent, pornography, the treatment of animals, or the use of drugs - those questions that have aroused populist ire. Have any actual children complained? And if so, how have they been injured by ideas?

Worth noting (2): What is causing most frothing at the mouth both there and here is the idea of lowering the age of consent from 16 to 12. But that is the most plainly arbitrary, indeed vapid, of all the fringe policies on offer. While opponents can not bear the idea of even discussing a change, the precise age (unlike in Britain or the US) has not been agressively and rigidly policed in the Netherlands, and prosecutions of cases without actual rape or breach of trust are very rare. Those exceedingly law abiding teenagers who can not wait until they are 16 can hop on a subsidised train to France (15), Germany (14), or Spain (13) for a dirty weekend.

(His Most Catholic Majesty's Kingdom of Spain is not generally pointed out by moralitarians as on the brink of social collapse - but then 13 is a rise from the Franco era, so perhaps it is more democratic...)

If I were his lawyer, I would point out that using a government office for having sex with his secretary was far less ruinous for Britain than how he might otherwise have been using it. While Prescott was harmlessly fucking his secretary, the rest of the cabinet were probably hatching schemes to make us all line up and be fingerprinted. Put it this way: would you rather he was shafting his secretary, or the nation? We got off lightly.

- Harry Hutton

The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted 'Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep'. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet.

To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?

As someone who follows such things I had expected the latest Home Office consultation exercise to go according to the standard pattern, thus:

1. Home Office makes suggestions for changes in public policy...
2. ...'evidence' is taken from interested parties including police in search of promotion, contractors in search of contracts, and researchers seeking posts on the new quango to be created...
3. Home Office considers, announces its plans have 'general support', ticks box marked 'public consulted' and carries on with making legislation for parliament to approve.

So I was gearing myself up to write a piece on the repulsive sight of a department torn between the desire to regulate everything and to maintain PC social norms. Citing the ignominious failure of the Victorian Contagious Diseases Acts, I was going to pour scorn on the futility of a regulatory regime that licensed brothels while denying the most basic economic rights to prostitutes, and created 'zones of toleration' in an effort to buck the market while punishing the streetwalkers it purported to protect.

The Goverment has shot my fox. And it turns out the fox was packed with explosives. Someone has overturned the (paradoxical) regulatory liberalisers and has decided puritan prohibitions are what we need. The move is instead to be to "Zero Tolerance" of 'kerb crawlers' - and quite without comment, the continuation of zero civil-law rights and next to zero criminal-law protections for prostitutes themselves.

The Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart was quoted yesterday on the BBC as saying that prostitution "is child abuse" because many prostitutes begin selling sex below the age of consent. That is an insane argument driven by the demands of moralism. By the same token unpaid sexual contact must also be child abuse, because most people's sex lives begin before that arbitary, if increasingly rigidly totemic, mark. Someone, somewhere, is making David Blunkett, who was responsible for the original pseudo-tolerant proposals, look like a liberal.

Does the devil's name begin with B? The emphasis on cleaning up public untidiness by bullying is of a piece with the respec' agenda. And there have been suggestions that the inate liberalism of the Home Office - not something spotted by many commentators before now - is interfering with the operation of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit.

Just another brick in the wall, perhaps. But turning the public agenda on a sixpence, and producing plainly mad arguments for doing so, are ominous. The Head Boy is ever more a dictator, and ever more the apostle of social conformity.

The Italian government, desperate for any additional source of revenue as it beggars the surrounding economy with its imposts, has slapped a fresh tax on the country's porn industry. It will be intruiging to know just how much this tax raises or whether, as may probably happen in Italy, the tax drives the industry under the bed, so to speak.

Personally, I have more regard for people who earn an honest living making racy videos than tax collectors.

Paul Coulam sees that a contempt for private property leads people to do some very strange and self-defeating things. Free association? Not any more.

Amazing as it may seem the government has today banned 'gay clubs' as a result of campaigning from the gay lobby.

According to the Times:

Hoteliers, bed-and-breakfast owners and pub landlords will no longer be able to bar gay people from their premises under new laws to be announced today [...] The Government will accept today an amendment to its Equality Bill that will outlaw discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in providing goods and services or organising public functions. The amendment [...] will also mark the end of gay or lesbian-only clubs because bars and nightclubs will no longer be able to turn away straight people.

How stupid can these people be? Many gay businesses survive as such only because they can so explicitly discriminate, especially in their advertising. This ridiculous new law will be a very serious threat to the continuation of a 'gay scene' in many towns across the country. It is tricky to foresee all of the unintended consequences of this one. Gay clubs operate varying degrees of explicit discrimination depending on the locale or type of club. The strictest hard core gay cruise clubs generally operate a 'men only' door policy, which does the trick, but this itself may be or may become illegal - who knows what horrors of forced integration are still to come?

However many of the more general gay dance clubs operate what they advertise as a 'gay majority policy' which is usually employed to refuse entry to large parties of girls only. Gay clubs are often the best clubs in a particular town and tend to attract groups of girls who want a night away from predatory straight men. Of course the large numbers of unwary girls in these clubs itself attracts the straight men and before long the club has lost all appeal for gays. In the case of hotels there are lots of hotels in various, often remote, parts of the country that offer gay only accommodation and advertise as such. Will such advertising be illegal? In the short term after this absurd bill is passed clubs, bars and hotels will continue to operate discrimination informally but all it will take is some petulant activist or a council with a bee in its bonnet or some obsessive bureaucrat to stick their oar in to ruin some particular venue or business.

The picture below has been making the rounds of the net aviation (and other) communities the last few days. The young Aussie lads chanced upon a motor race event whilst on coastal patrol. They went into a temporary hover all the better to communicate with numerous and luvly birds on the ground.

Someone caught them in the act and the photo went up on a professional pilot's site from whence it spread to other places.

The lads seem to be in a bit of hot water over it, no doubt due to complaints from the PC (Pulchritudinously Challenged) sector.

A few years ago I read of lower spine stimulation by a doctor working with paralyzed patients. It had 'interesting' effects when done in just the right spot. Another, or perhaps the same doctor, Stuart Meloy, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina anesthesiologist and pain specialist, has been experimenting with an FDA approved stimulation device for lower back pain. At least one woman in his pain trial had breathtakingly enjoyable orgasms along with the pain abatement.

Other work I have read reports there is a lower spinal nerve area which controls the timing of ejaculation in men. Perhaps it is the same? The article does not say. Dr. Meloy has completed an initial medical trial on the use of the stimulator, now dubbed the 'orgasmatron', by women with orgasmic dysfunction. According to women in the trial, it works exceedingly well.

It may beat the knickers off a vibrator, but at $17,000 for surgical implantation this will definitely be a rich girl's toy. I wonder if anyone has asked Woody Allen for a comment?

Everyone is entitled to their sensibilities, however wacky, just so long as they do not try to make them the law of the land. As a result when I describe Los Angeles Times writer T. J. Simers as a 'weird prude', it is not with the sense of loathing, hatred and vitriol I would have used were I under the impression he was suggesting that his disquiet over a picture of a beautiful young woman in a pair of shorts (and presumed wish to see people share his puritan values regarding women) be reflected in the law of the land by imposing censorship.

But a 'weird prude' is indeed what I think he is. Whilst I see that bizarrely the age of consent in the benighted state of California is 18, in the vast majority of the world and even in much of the USA, the age at which one is permitted to engage in sex is 16. Moreover even if for some reason you conclude that the age at which young adults should actually have sex should be 18, surely only the most purblind would actually expect a 16 year old to be asexual even if they were abstinent.

So when an attractive physically active 17 year old has a picture taken wearing no less clothing than that in which millions of people have seen her win tennis tournaments...

... T. J. Simers asks, no doubt thinking the true answer is beyond the pale:

Now what do you think when I tell you the girl in the ad is 17 years old?

Well, yeah. The girl is question is Maria Sharapova and since she won Wimbledon, quite literally tens of millions of people know exactly how old she is. And what do I think? I think "Nice legs! What a babe". I am, distressingly, old enough to be her father, but that does not change the fact she is a very attractive young woman. So what?

He continues:

Sharapova may or may not be the most mature 17-year-old the world has known, but she's still 17. A kid. And if the message to young girls everywhere in the L.A. area is that sex sells - rather than Wimbledon championship tennis, shame on anyone who rewards AEG this week and takes their daughter to Staples Center.

Where were her parents? "There you go," said Lindsay Davenport. "I wouldn't do it, and I can tell you my daughter wouldn't either."

Well Lindsey Davenport was a great tennis player but I for one am also relieved she never struck such poses, though gallantry prevents me from elaborating what I think are the obvious reasons for that. But why oh why does Mr. Simers or Mrs. Davenport think a 17 years old should an asexual being? The advertisement was not one in which Maria Sharapova was offering to have sex with anyone, just displaying her athletic assets (her body) in a way in which many would find rather attractive. Being attractive does indeed sell so why pretend otherwise? Is the fact she is not pictured in the act of playing tennis somehow make her sexuality more obvious than these...

Clearly this is not a young woman who is in denial regarding the fact she is a sexual being and hardly seems like some bewildered victim of heartless ad man dressing her up as Lolita. I rather doubt the camera man had to wrestle a teddy bear out of her arms to get her to strike that pose. For T.J. Simers to find the WTA image offensive is perverse and suggests to me that he must have some quaint notions of what 17 year olds are really like and how people should perceive them.

Millions and millions of people are married or in long term sexual relationships by the time they are 17 and many of those are also parents, which suggests that the peculiar notion of infantilising young adults and calling them 'kids' for as long as possible is rather far off the mark.

I think what really made this whole thing seem so daft to me was that I have just got back from an interesting exhibition about the Crimean War which features an account of a 14 year old who had accompanied the British forces on that campaign and it all really does make some of the modern notion of a strict division between adulthood and childhood seem truly preposterous when talking about a worldly 17 year old Russian woman who, if you have ever heard her interviewed, is obviously no fool.

There is something profoundly odd about the mindset of a certain ilk of conservative.

After legalising prostitution last year, the New Zealand government has now issued a 100 page Occupational Health and Safety manual.

The recommendations - which the New Zealand Herald said will also be distributed to brothels and sex workers - include detailed advice on safe sex practices such as the storage and handling of sex toys and disinfecting equipment.

Employers are asked to ensure condoms in a variety of shapes and sizes are always available, and to provide beds that support the back for a variety of services to be performed without strain or discomfort.

Sex workers are cautioned to watch out for occupational overuse syndrome, often caused by rapid repetitive tasks or forceful movements, and to carry a small torch in case they need to check clients for sexually transmitted diseases.

Comprehensive training of staff in the safe use of all equipment, particularly for fantasy work, is also recommended.

Ah, governments. Where would we be without them?

Some readers will have observed that I fight an often lonely battle against the forces of the militant lesbian, anti-humanist, fascist, tree-hugging puritan conspiracy to wipe out masculinity. We know as a scientific fact that the best lovers are larger men. I have previously commented on the sexual inadequacy of skinny types.

It is therefore clear that the current obesity obsession in this country is part of a nefarious conspiracy aimed at wiping out Great Britain. Was Henry VIII skinny? Did Winston Churchill eat tofu?

Help is at hand in the form of a marvelous new book Eat What you Want and Die Like a Man: The World's Unhealthiest Cookbook. The reason for this masterpiece is set out in the Foreword:

I wrote this book because I was tired of being told what to eat. I was tired of the Food Pyramid and vegetable oil and small food. I was tired of pinch-faced little people who actually got angry when I talked about lard and egg yolks. I felt it was time for a backlash. Time to celebrate things like bacon grease and heavy cream. Don't we have better things to feel guilty about? Like the resurgence of velour?

This is not a serious cookery book, says the author. No doubt he could be sued by the pinch-faced little people.

So says local MP Robert Brokenshire. It is a moot point, actually. I am not convinced the social fabric in Adelaide is really under that much pressure. There is nothing wrong with Australia that making us responsible for ourselves again will not fix.

That is by the by. Mr Brokenshire is a local MP who is angered by this website, which is a sperm donor registry. The problem with the site is that it is run by, and aimed at, lesbian couples.

Mr Brokenshire has introduced a private Member's bill in the South Australian Parliament to prohibit such websites.

At present, homosexual couples are not permitted to use publicly funded fertility centres in SA.

The Australian Sperm Donor Registry bypasses these laws because it only connects the donors with recipients � forcing potential mothers to arrange insemination themselves.

Ms Thompson, who started the registry with Ms Ryan almost a year ago, said they had 'matched up' about 70 recipients.

My first instinct is to ask why the State is funding any fertility clinics- but the notion that the taxpayer should pay for all health in Australia is one of those assumptions that is just not questioned out here.

Be that as it may, if the State decides to discriminate against certain people on the grounds of their sexuality, people, being free, try to work around such restrictions, in the way Ms Thompson and Ms Ryan have. But you cannot keep a good Statist down, and Mr Brokenshire and his Parliamentry thugs, who know what is best for this couple, and me as well, are on the case.

After all, there is a social fabric to protect.

I recall, quite a few years ago now, watching one of those terribly serious TV documentaries that purported delve into the psychology of sexuality. The only part of the programme that I can actually recount was an examination of a gas-mask and uniform sexual fetish that appears to be almost entirely a British phenomenon.

The impressively qualified talking-head that they employed to interpret all of this, speculated that this particular fetish had its roots in World War II when the images of gas masks and uniforms (in the context of great national emergency and danger) left its imprimatur on a lot of impressionable pre-adolescent boys.

This was also shortly after Gulf War I when Israelis were all issued with gas-masks for fear of some chemical attack from Saddam. Hence said talking-head predicted the emergence of a similar sexual phenomenon in Israel in years to come.

It all sounded quite plausible at the time but its very difficult to judge whether or not they hold any objective truth. I was reminded of this, though, by a recent conversation with Dr.Chris Tame of the Libertarian Alliance on this subject and what (if anything) lies at the root of sexual fetish. The object we were discussing was not gas-maks though, but cigarettes.

In short, has smoking become eroticised?

I think there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that it has. If websites like Smoking Models are anything to go by then some people are clearly getting their kicks from photographs like this:

And this:

The linked site is devoted to nothing except loads and loads of photographs just like these and while the girls are undeniably young and pretty there appears to be nothing which could seriously be described as pornographic. Nor is there any nudity as such. As best as I can tell, it is the actual act of smoking a cigarette which is the focus of attention.

I found the linked site by means of a 'Google' search which also thew up hundreds of sites just like it (although many are clearly of a more carnal nature) and that means that demand for this sort of thing must be fairly widespread.

At the risk of betraying a relatively sheltered life, I cannot remember seeing this kind of thing before. Perhaps it was only the advent of the internet that made it possible but Dr.Tame is quite a few years my senior and he seems to think this has fairly recent provenance. If that is true, then it begs the question of whether the Western world's sustained 'holy war' against smoking has caused this eroticisation. Is it possible that years of cultural demonisation of smoking as wicked, anti-social and dangerous has gifted to cigarettes a quality of thrilling taboo?

If smoking has indeed been fetishised then I suppose it is a variation on the time-honoured theme of unintended consequences. It would just serve the nannies and health-fascists right if all their efforts to eradicate the evil weed had resulted in turning cigarettes from a casual habit into objects of obsessive desire.

Today I received the following email:

Brian,

Brian has started a webring of Brians with blogs. If you would like to join us, go and sign up here.

Brian

What is a webring? If I signed up to it, would the rest of my life be ruined? The Brian who sent me this email seems to be gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that, consenting adults, some of my best friends..., I'm personally in favour of gay marriage, blah blah blah. But if I sign up, will I be bombarded with gay porn for the rest of my days?

In general, I feel that it is good that we Brians are getting together, and if a webring is what I think it may be, we can perhaps sit on one, in a circle, perhaps somewhere in the countryside, and discuss the Brian Issue. That is, we can discuss why cuckolded husbands, send-up substitutes for Jesus Christ, etc. etc., in the movies, all seem to be called Brian. Brian is not a cool name, is my point. Maybe we Brians can get together and change that. (The danger, of course, is that by getting together in such ways as these, we might merely confirm all the existing anti-Brian stereotypes, and cause Brianphobia to become even more deeply entrenched.)

Meanwhile, how many indisputably cool Brians can be assembled? I offer two outstanding contemporary sportsman: the West Indian cricket captain and ace batsman Brian Lara, and the Irish rugby captain and ace centre threequarter Brian O'Driscoll.

Having already done most of my schoolboy sniggering in private (although I reserve the right to indulge it again at a later date) I think I can now bring myself to say a few (semi) serious things about this:

Belgian legislators are hoping to bring that to a close with a parliamentary bill that would draw prostitutes into the legal fold and bring the industry under state control, providing sex workers with labour rights and greater health protection.

But for a fee.

The sex workers themselves would be expected to pay up when the tax man calls - boosting state coffers to the tune of an estimated 50 million euros a year.

It represents an attractive option for a country currently struggling to balance its budget deficit - a means of generating money while affording prostitutes better protection.

Not so much legalisation then as part-nationalisation and while it would be nice to imagine that Belgium's lawmakers have been driven by a genuinely liberal impulse it is more likely that they have been prompted by the desire to get their sticky mitts on all that revenue.

However, I think complaints would be out of order. The trade in (ahem) 'personal' services between adults is not a crime and should not be treated as one, so although they may have to hand over a chunk of their earnings to the state at least the prostitutes (and their clients) will have been freed from the constant threat of arrest and prosecution. That is a good thing.

Aside from the fact that we can now justifiably and factually regard them as pimps, the Belgian government would undoubtedly argue that they cannot legitimise the sex industry without subjecting it to the same taxes that every other legitimate industry is forced to stump up. Nor should it be overlooked that gangster protection may prove cheaper than the Belgian state but tax-inspectors generally do not use razors as a means of enforcement.

I sincerely hope that HMG decides to follow the Belgian example on this issue but I don't expect they will do so anytime soon. Even in this day and age there is still a deeply-ingrained Sabbatarian disapproval of 'bawdiness' in this country that manifests itself as a very noisy and effective 'no' lobby at the merest mention of relaxing the laws on prostitution. I wish it were not so because even a taxed-and-regulated sex industry would be an improvement on the current arrangements.

Cultural commentator - from a generally conservative vantage point - David Brooks has some interesting things to note about the popularity of men's magazines like Maxim, and about what this says about our culture. In a nutshell, he suggests that this shows that the advance of feminism and even political correctness (however you want to define that) may not have produced the results some commentators may have wanted.

He also makes the point, which to my mind rang true, that 'reactionary' attitudes are often not the preserve of the upper classes, but often most deeply held elsewhere, such as among America's rap music artists. Here's a nice quote:

We have a dynamic urban culture that treats women like whores and that regards owning a Mercedes as the highest possible human aspiration, and the leading articulators of progressive opinion have nothing to say about it. They can't seem to bring themselves to admit out loud that their most effective ideological enemies have turned out to be the same underprivileged people they wanted to rescue from oblivion.

This observation is hardly new. Yet even someone like yours truly, who likes to watch action movies, dreams of fast cars and feels no shame in enjoying pictures of lovely women, can feel a bit troubled about where things can be headed. I don't know if the kind of things Brooks frets about are problems that have to be 'fixed' in some way.

There definitely has been something of a backlash in parts of our culture against the dictates of political correctness. It doesn't surprise me all that much that the kind of mindless dreck published by the Maxim mags of this world is so popular. Maybe we are just observing the cultural equivalent of Newton's law at work - every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It applies to space rockets and it applies to culture as well, maybe.

Student Amy Keel in the Harvard Crimson explains why she destroyed a phallic sculpture:

"As a student of Harvard University, neither I, nor any other woman, should have to see this obscene and grossly inappropriate thing on my way to class. No one should have to be subjected to an erect penis without his or her express permission or consent.

Many women and men, including myself, are the victims of sexual assault, child sexual abuse and rape. The unwanted image of an erect penis is an implied threat; it means that we, as women, must be subject to erect penises whether we like it or not. There was nothing "challenging" or "subversive" about the penis. The only thing it did was create an uncomfortable environment for the women of Harvard University."

Presumably she would not have enjoyed the parties at the very countercultural communal flat of my CMU grad school days. We had wild ones. If you are a true conservative rather than a libertarian, they were everything you feared was going on some where... and more.

There was one Halloween party where a large chunk of the Fine Arts department ended up in our flat. It was a night Fellini could have been proud of.

Some of the costumes were so creative I remember them to this day. There was a gay friend of the household from Globe Players, our Shakespeare company, who came as "The Dope Fairy". He wore a pink tutu, ballet tights and a Santa's bag. He moved about the party spreading happiness where ever he went... and then there were the four fellows from Painting and Sculpture. They really put effort into it. It must have taken days to build the chicken wire frames, paper mache them and do the painting. They came as organs. Male and Female.

Have you ever had a 6 foot breast bump into you at the punch bowl? Or seen a face staring out at you from the middle of a hairy...

Perhaps I'll skip that one.

It seems some of the conservative media are getting all hot and bothered over sex on the campus. If the allegation that tax payer funds were used were true, I would agree on that very limited issue. Universities should not be State funded. Period and full stop. In any case, the University of Arizona event in question apparently wasn't campus funded:

The university insists none of their money went toward promoting the controversial festival. It was underwritten by a public-funded arts council and held both off- and on-campus.

Another even less objectionable event occured in Indiana:

Other universities have also lately had trouble maintaining the line between sex and education. At Indiana University, officials are probing whether any laws were broken when pornographic filmmakers from Shane's World entertainment, based in Van Nuys, Calif., used a campus dorm to make an adult movie last month.

It's hard to see what laws could be broken. I don't think any force was used by the filmmakers. Hell, if you were an undergrad and a porn starlet hopped into YOUR bed, which of the following would you say?

1. Help, Police! I'm being attacked by a sex goddess!
   
2. Thank you God!
   

Why does sex seem to be such a hangup for so many of the conservative orientation?