hunter of justice

New judicial ruling: no medical deduction for visits to prostitutes

No, I'm not kidding.  HT to Feminist Law Professors for pointing out this new decision from the U.S. Tax Court -

In Halby v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, T.C. Memo 2009-204, the Tax Court ruled that William Halby, a New York attorney (for 40 years) and specialist in tax law, could not deduct as medical expenses $65,934 for visits to prostitutes in 2004 and $42,152 for the same purpose in 2005. The opinion did not say whether this one-third drop in one year reflected an improved medical condition, a diminished disposable income, or a realization that he could be prosecuted. 

Further, the court holds that the amounts spent for "books on sex therapy and pornographic materials ... were incurred for [Halby's] general welfare, not pursuant to a doctor's prescription or for a specific medical condition." That would be $2,368 in 2004 and $5,005 in 2005. Has this guy never heard of the internet? Or little blue pills?

And you thought tax law was boring ...

New job opportunities in Nevada sex work: men wanted

From AP:

The owner of a Nevada brothel suffering from the recession thinks she has been ignoring about half the market — the half that prefers men. Bobbi Davis is looking for male prostitutes to help expand the clientele at the Shady Lady Ranch, her small roadside brothel about 150 miles north of Las Vegas. "We've had requests for men in the past, and there's nothing else like this out there," she said.

Indeed, the 25 legal brothels scattered throughout 10 rural Nevada counties are staffed by women and cater to men. The Shady Lady, however, isn't the only one thinking about hiring male prostitutes. Nevada Brothel Association lobbyist George Flint says other brothels have approached him with the idea lately to drum up business. Like Nevada's gambling, hotel and convention industries, the prostitution business has hit hard times. Flint estimates that bordellos have seen a roughly 50 percent drop in revenue since the economy turned sour. "Business is so bad right now, I think brothels would do anything to survive. Disposable income is just in short supply at the moment," he said.

Flint says other brothels have offered male prostitutes over the years, with little success. He argues that the business model for a brothel that caters to women just doesn't pencil out. "Seducing a woman and seducing a man in a brothel environment are different things completely. One can take a few minutes, the other can take hours. It wouldn't make money," he said. Davis agrees that women customers could differ significantly from men, though she plans at least initially to keep her current prices for services — $500 for two hours, $800 for three. "That may change. We're figuring that women may want a longer period of time, maybe a little more romance. They're not quite like men in that respect," she said.

Davis said the requests she has received for male prostitutes have come mostly from women, but that she also would welcome business from men seeking men. "I can't discriminate, nor would I want to," she said, adding that it would be up to prostitutes to decide whether they entertain any particular guest. Licensing male prostitutes might be a problem. State law allows for legal prostitutes of both genders, but the health codes that regulate the business largely are written to apply to female prostitutes. That includes a requirement that the working girls have mandatory cervical exams. "It's kind of hard to do that with a man," Davis said.

Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo, whose office administers work cards for prostitutes, said he's aware of Davis' plan and has sought legal advice from the district attorney. Meanwhile, Davis is drawing up her help wanted ad. She said she'll be looking for one or two men "in good shape, in their mid-30s to 50s." Asked about the age range, she notes that's another way women differ from men. "Look at George Clooney, he's 50 and he's still considered a very sexy man. Women don't consider a man washed up by the time he's 50," she said.

Conservative feminists, together with other idiots, oppose honoring "revolutionary" sex worker

The following post from the Times of London tells the latest chapter in the story of a woman I'm embarrassed to say I had never heard of, but who was well enough known in Europe to garner lengthy obits like the one in The Independent, which called her a "virtuoso writer and revolutionary whore." Someone needs to write a biography about this lady.  As for the likes of the "women's rights activists" who object to honoring her, the less said ...

A decision by the [Geneva] city government to transfer the remains of Grisélidis Réal, a renowned prostitute and champion of prostitutes’ rights, to a grave of honour next to some of the city’s most illustrious former citizens has erupted into a very public row. In the conservative Swiss financial centre the idea of a prostitute being buried near to the Protestant reformer Jean Calvin, the right-wing Argentinean-born writer Jorge Luis Borges or the educationalist Jean Piaget has appalled traditionalists and even angered women’s rights activists.

They believe that the elevation of a woman who represents a profession demeaning to their gender is wrong and have threatened to stage a protest. “This is an insult to all women. It is the pinnacle of bad taste to bury a woman who glorified prostitution next to the religious reformer Calvin,” said Odile Roulet, a Geneva lawyer and activist who has lodged a complaint with the local council.

Born in 1929 to a respectable middle-class family, Réal became a prostitute after completing her studies in art and music. She moved to postwar Germany to entertain Allied soldiers, with a preference for the British whom she deemed “true gentlemen”. She became popular as an author of books about her life as a high-class prostitute, such as A Courtesan’s Dance Card. In her memoirs she detailed the often embarrassing perversions of her clients, many of whom were later publicly identified from her descriptions.

When she retired from entertaining clients at the age of 66, Réal became a social worker, establishing associations and groups to help prostitutes and to campaign for their rights as sex workers. She died of cancer in Geneva in 2005 aged 75 and was buried at a normal cemetery. In March last year Geneva city authorities said they intended to exhume her remains and lay them to rest at the Cimetière des Rois – Cemetery of Kings.

Local laws stipulate that only people of exceptional merit can be buried at the cemetery, but Patrice Mugny, an MP and head of the cultural authority of Geneva, said Réal deserved her neww status. “Grisélidis Réal championed the women’s right of choice and she fought her whole life over for prostitutes to be able to do their job with dignity. She was famous all over Europe for her struggle,” he said...

The double standard lives

Yesterday, a 24-year-old college student was sentenced to six months in prison for managing the prostitution business that former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer patronized, the exposure of which led to his resignation.  Spitzer was not prosecuted for any crime, in light of the fact that he used no public funds to pay for his visits to prostitutes.

Cecil Suwal was not so lucky.  Apparently, the six month sentence she received was something of a compromise between the two years of imprisonment sought by the prosecution and the recommendation  from the court's probation office of a suspended sentence plus time on probation.

Katherine Franke nailed what was going on here:

One way to understand this is that Michael Garcia, the U.S. Attorney in New York, has decided that when Eliot Spitzer paid to have sex with the women who worked at Emperor’s Club V.I.P, he had sex and they committed a crime. In fact, it is the policy of most federal prosecutors to charge sellers, but not buyers, of sex with a crime. Last I checked, the federal government hesitates not in the least to prosecute both the buyers and the sellers of illegal drugs, and both the givers and the receivers of bribes. Yet sex, it seems, is different.

Even sex hits hard times

The Nation

By JoAnn Wypijewski

...Act I. Scene I. Before. Ed Hayes, New York attorney and man about town, has long gauged the stock market's temperature by a High-End Girlfriend Index and High-End Stripper Index. "When times are really good, guys spend fortunes at strip clubs: $2,000, $5,000... You got a 20-something-year-old, he just got a $3 million bonus, he might spend $20,000 in one night. This guy in a club once says to me, 'Listen Eddie, whatever I spend it's cheaper than the divorce.'" Likewise, a courtesan's time, even if it cost $10,000 a month, was a bargain next to the package for courting the young, fashionable girlfriend: the lease on a car, the $2 million Lower East Side condo, the dinners and baubles and $1,265/night weekend getaways at the Mandarin Oriental....

Such was the situation before panic set in at the top. In the intimate economy, sex has always been the least of it, particularly at the levels of mad wealth, where transaction costs take a different form. Average townhouse: $17 million. Baby: $50,000. One-day Yelling Center evaluation of the child's bad behavior: $4,250. ... In the web of exchange relations, perhaps the only person who fully grasped the extreme privilege and vulnerability of her situation was that relative rarity, the high-end call girl who had hustled her way up from the cheap brothels and champagne bars, and whose survival has always depended on a careful calibration of spreading her risk.

Scene II. The phone stopped ringing. Sandra was the new girl with the agency in July, when she was getting twenty calls a night for phone sex, while established workers got fifty. Most callers wanted her "co-ed" character--blond, petite, barely legal. Some wanted her mature lady. About five times a month someone called for her "ebony" character. Sandra is 35, creole--black to white men, unless she tints her hair red and wears green contacts to bring out her Latin features, as she sometimes does to get a gig dancing in a club. Since the crash, her twenty callers have dwindled to six; the other girls' to twenty. ...The day the bailout passed she got fifteen calls.

Playing politics with sex workers, British version

guardian.co.uk
Belinda Brooks-Gordon

In her speech to the Labour conference this September, the home secretary Jacqui Smith made clear her intention to criminalise clients of "trafficked" sex workers and stated that, from October, she will begin work to outlaw paying for sex with those who are "forced into prostitution at another's will, or controlled for another's gain".

Stirring stuff, yet Smith seems coy about giving the actual figures for trafficked workers. The official figures for the police operation Pentameter 1 showed, that despite 55 forces hunting for them, only 88 women were trafficked. Since it is accepted on all sides of the debate that 80,000 work in the sex industry, then the number of those trafficked amounts to 0.11% of those in sex work. According to a recent parliamentary answer, Pentameter 2 improved on that performance with the recovery of 167 victims of trafficking – but that still represents only 0.21% of sex workers.

In other words, the impression Smith gives that the sex industry is rife with trafficking is highly misleading. Meanwhile, criminalising the clients – who often tip off police when they have qualms about a worker's status – of that small percentage will only make things worse for the workers.

Smith wants to remove the word "persistent" from kerb-crawling laws as, in her view, "once around the block is once too many – and so we'll make kerb-crawling punishable as a first offence". This will create a new law for police to stop anyone at will. Smith also wants to give councils and the police new powers to close down brothels and clamp down on exploitation. But this only displaces the trade and puts women on the street where they are less safe.

SF to vote on prostitution

Among the most fascinating local elections this year is a ballot initiative in San Francisco that would effectively stop enforcement of anti-prostitution laws and prevent use of racial profiling to identify victims of trafficking.

Bay Area Reporter

by Seth Hemmelgarn

...Opponents say the measure, Proposition K, would prohibit law enforcement from going after sex traffickers ... The measure would also prohibit the police department from applying for federal or state funds that involve racial profiling to target alleged trafficking victims. But in her argument against the Prop K, District Attorney Kamala Harris states the measure would strip all funding to investigate human trafficking rings.

In 1994, according to the measure, the Board of Supervisors established a Task Force on Prostitution to examine prostitution and to recommend reforms. In 1996, the task force released a report recommending that, among other things, the city stop enforcing and prosecuting prostitution crimes.

Prop K calls for the police department and the district attorney "to enforce existing criminal laws that prohibit crimes such as battery, extortion, and rape, regardless of the victim's status as a sex worker."

Maxine Doogan, who is largely responsible for getting the measure on the November ballot and is the founder of the Exotic Service Providers Union, said Prop K would not stop law enforcement from going after child abusers or traffickers.

Slava Osowska [another Prop K supporter] said law enforcement officials racially profile Asian sex workers, such as women in massage parlors, and assume that they're trafficking victims.

"The only way they can investigate is through racial profiling and making assumptions with no evidence," Osowska said.

Heather Weigand, a Prop K opponent, is program manager for Safe House, which helps provide housing, shelter, food, one-to-one therapy and other services to women who have been working in prostitution....Weigand said she opposes Prop K because it would open the city to pimps, johns, and traffickers, "and it does not protect any women in sex work ... it harms them by tying the police department's hands in investigating prostitution-related crimes."...

Osowska said the measure would make it easier for clients and sex workers to go to authorities when there's evidence of sex trafficking.

Connie Chan, a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office, [said that] Mayor Gavin Newsom assembled a task force on trafficking that included agencies such as the health and police departments. "Through this collaborative multi-agency effort numerous inspections and investigations into sex trafficking operations have ensued, resulting in over 20 brothels posing as massage parlors being closed down in San Francisco," Chan wrote....

Researchers condemn British report on prostitution

guardian.co.uk

Top academics involved in sex research ...claim that research into prostitution in the UK published last month by the Poppy Project, which is partly funded by the Ministry of Justice, is inaccurate and unethical. The research in the Big Brothel report "exhibits serious flaws in its mode of data collection and analysis," they warn.

The group of 27 key figures in sex work research from prestigious universities across the UK and overseas claim the report was conducted with neither ethical approval nor acknowledgment of evidence and co-authored by a journalist known for producing anti-prostitution findings.... The report's findings lend weight to Home Office moves to make it against the law to pay for sex.

The row comes just days before the October 8 deadline of a Home Office consultation into proposals to amend existing legislation on prostitution and brothels.

The proposals, which will go before parliament in December, would create a new criminal offence of paying for sex with a person "controlled for gain", and enable police to close brothels and change the definition of kerb-crawling.

The academics, led by Dr Teela Sanders at Leeds University and Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon at Birkbeck, University of London, ... stated: "The report builds a damning picture of indoor sex work on the basis of data whose reliability and representativeness is extremely doubtful and a methodological approach that would be considered unethical by most professional social researchers.

"It makes claims about trafficking, exploitation and the current working conditions of women and men employed in the indoor sex industry on the basis of that data," the response says.

"These claims cannot be substantiated in terms of the methodology, the data presented or in terms of wider, ethically approved, peer reviewed academic evidence.

"In short, the report does not provide any evidence concerning the current working conditions of women and men employed in indoor sex work venues in the UK."

The Big Brothel report, co-authored by journalist and campaigner Julie Bindel and Helen Atkins, received huge media coverage last month. But critics accused it of conflating fears over trafficking with general prostitution.

Brooks-Gordon said: "You can't just churn out political propaganda and say it's research. You end up with very dangerous policy....

The report's research evidence is based on telephone calls with brothel receptionists rather visiting or speaking to sex workers themselves and is therefore unreliable, the academics warn....