A few weeks ago Amber Rhea sent me a link to this story:
One man’s battle against Midtown prostitutes and their johns
“Armed with a flashlight, a video camera and pepper spray, the longtime Midtown resident takes the MPSA’s white pickup truck on regular predawn patrols of his neighborhood’s tree-lined residential streets.
Auto break-ins are the neighborhood’s most persistent crime, he says, but definitely not his focus. Gower is at war with the neighborhood’s prostitutes. “It’s the most visible sign of disorder in the neighborhood,” he says.”
(snip)
“Activists point out that driving prostitutes out of Midtown won’t actually solve the underlying causes of prostitution. It just moves the prostitutes a few blocks away.”
Now that story was pretty upsetting. Not only is Gower harassing sex workers he’s being butt ass stupid. What if he videotapes a man cheating on his wife? The wife sees the video of her husband with his girlfriend on the side and divorces him. Couldn’t the husband sue Gower? Or say a woman gets arrested for prostitution who wasn’t a sex worker at all. Say she’s just dressed up sexy to go to a bar with friends? Couldn’t she sue him as well?
But I didn’t blog about the story right away. Life, as it tends to do, got busy and I forgot all about it.
Luckily Amber didn’t. She’s been keeping an eye on this story and just recently sent me another link. Same type of story but with another guy.
Behave, the Video Vigilante is watching
“It was a bright-blue winter morning in this Bible Belt capital, and Brian Bates was happy. The balmy weather conditions, he explained, were conducive to his peculiar line of work: public humiliation.
Steering wheel in one hand, camcorder in the other, Bates slowly drove a white Ford Explorer with tinted windows past a procession of sad-eyed prostitutes. But his camera was not trained on them; it was targeting their customers.
Bates, the self-styled Video Vigilante of Oklahoma City, sneaks up and surprises men consorting with prostitutes and then posts cleaned-up versions of the footage on the Internet — to disgrace them.”
(snip)
“What started out as the modern equivalent of a tarring and feathering in a town square has become a paycheck for Bates, a former marketing manager for a hospital. Bates still has a regular job cobbling together lists of people jailed the night before that he sells to ambulance-chasing attorneys every morning. But he’s hoping to leave that behind for a full-time career as a public humiliation professional.”
There is nothing shameful about seeing a sex worker. Sex workers of all kinds meet specific needs. Outlawing different types of sex work doesn’t make these needs magically disappear. If Gower and Bates really wanted to deal with these “problem prostitutes” how about being an activist for legalizing prostitution? If these women didn’t have to fear arrest they could work out of their homes. They wouldn’t be hanging out in these men’s neighborhoods and they wouldn’t be risking arrest. They would have better working conditions and likely make better wages.
As an actual activist I’m annoyed that they use “activist” to describe Bates. What’s worse is he’s making a job out of it. Both men have a suspicious loathing of prostitution. Sure there a lots of people that don’t like prostitution but these stories paint these two at practically foaming at the mouth with rage. This makes me suspect that they have some sexual skeletons in their closets. I could be wrong. But in the six years I’ve been working the phones I’ve developed a sort of “pervdar”. People with venom for a sexual activity or fetish often secretly desire the very thing they proclaim to despise.
If I’m right and these men one day act on their repressed desires it is my hope that someone is there to not only videotape their actions but to upload the footage to the internet. Let the public shamers get publicly shamed themselves.
Amber also pointed me to a Violet Blue story from February that relates to these stories.
Kink.com and Porn Hysteria: The Lie of Unbiased Reporting
“Steve Rubenstein and Jesse McKinley are reporters, and so we require that they report and not serve us with opinion, instead. In both articles, slanted phrases such as “dirty movies” were slipped in like a hostess silently sliding a coaster under your drink — blink and you don’t even notice it’s part of the judgmental scenery — when a more accurate term like “adult” could serve better. Rubenstein’s piece went the distance, making Kink’s employees into “manacled performers.”
But the most interesting example was the presentation of unchallenged material in the form of quotes from people on the street as anti-porn pundits — with no weigh-in from pro-porn pundits. Protesters were quoted as saying, “This neighborhood is already plagued with enough violence and prostitution as it is” and “Kink degrades the neighborhood, degrades women and offers ‘dead end’ jobs that no decent person would want.” Such statements bracket the piece — with no counter-opinions about pornography — and are presented in such a way that readers could interpret opinions as fact. Kink.com was indeed quoted — but only about their use of the space.”
Posted by Vixen as Political Rants, News, Sex Workers at 11:22 PM CST