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.” 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:
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. June 11th, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Francis Stokes, creator of YouTube sensation God, Inc:
Read the whole thing to find out the answer to this post’s title. March 18th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. February 10th, 2007 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Steve Edwards relates an interesting story unfolding in the Chinese blogosphere:
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. September 3rd, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
When did the ‘enthusiastic participation’ become compulsory? August 28th, 2006 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:-
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:
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.] August 11th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
A victory in the Netherlands for freedom of expression:
– 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…) July 20th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. May 9th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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? January 18th, 2006 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
As someone who follows such things I had expected the latest Home Office consultation exercise to go according to the standard pattern, thus:
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. December 29th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. December 15th, 2005 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||