Goal of this sexy project:
This is the first article in a series attempting to take a more modern look at sex work, sex workers and sex trafficking. Currently we face a hysteria resulting from organized, well-funded attacks against these traditional aspects of social sex.
We live in a world in which the world’s population has increased like a skyrocket from less than 2.5 billion people to 8 billion people in this writer’s lifetime. In the 1970s we thought many of us would soon be starving but it is not happening. Food is generally plentiful. REFERENCE
Now I am convinced there are many social changes, some long overdue, resulting from this change in population! In our modern world many aspects of sex deserve modern understanding. A huge increase in population is not the only change, of course, but it is a factor which leads to many other changes tin he way a big rain may lead to a flood.
Just my opinion, but hear me out.
My name is John Kane. I am a sex tourist and I speak for all sex tourists. Of course, there is also more to me than just sex tourism. Here is what I will talk about in a series of blogs and my attempt at a book.
First, claims of huge amounts of violence against sex workers are false. I am an advocate for honest research regarding this issue especially because I have been shocked by respected academics who have made stunning claims about violence. One of Thailand’s most respected universities has made the claim that 28% of all freelance sex workers in Thailand (sample size 128) experience violence EVERY WEEK. That is a ridiculous claim but it was republished several times in international media around the world including World Bank regional publications and. academic articles attributed to Harvard and Johns Hopkins researchers. It is extreme claims like this which feed a hysteria – sex always gets extra attention.
This concerns me and, so, I used the same words in the same locations with a sample size of 500. I found virtually no claims of violence and certainly not in just one week. That university has refused to respond to my requests to defend their research, but this kind of questionable “research” is not rare. I consider this to be at the core of attacks on sex work. There is a lot of money available to organizations ready to work on a problem of violence that may not exist.
Second, claims of kidnapping and forcing children to be sex workers are also false. In the real world, outside this hysteria, the use of the word “children” as opposed to “teens”, or “young adults”, etc., is clear. The use of the word “children” is intended to produce an emotional response. I am not here to offer any knowledge of pedophilia. I have none to offer except pedophilia is a completely different issue. It has no defense except it is getting unwarranted attention by being folded into the hysteria about sex work and “trafficking”. It is useful know that around the world a common age for some teenagers to lose virginity is 15 &16 years old.
Third, there is a long history of migration. Many groups of people have sought opportunity in other countries. Examples include religious people seeking freedom in what became the United States, starving Irish during a potato famine, Jewish people escaping Nazi Germany prior to WW11, and more. All these groups ultimately merged in new societies at times when the world’s population rarely exceeded 2 billion people. Migration has changed. In a world with 8 billion people, people who are already in place want to hold onto what they have. Some prostitution has often been a tool to facilitate migration. Migration is under attack. A first step is to turn a new word, trafficking, into a pejorative. Migration has a long history and giving it a new word, “trafficking“, with emotional tales to go with it, is only a tool to stop/slow migration. Of course, it is more complicated, but it does also feed that hysteria in the assault against more traditional aspects of sex.
I have struggled over how to get started. What you see here is different than what others are saying. Huge amounts of money are being used to “rescue” sex workers who need no rescue, to save “children”, and stop migration. Simple, right?
Regarding sex work, sex workers and sex trafficking, we are living in a big balloon filled with baloney. A new industry of amateur-social workers are flourishing on exaggerations and lies to generate funds based on emotion and titillating stories of women and children being brutalized and sold.
This kind of exaggeration is dangerous to us all. Whatever violence against sex workers or any woman is a crime and should be treated accordingly. Physical crimes which support this concern now are the kinds of things normally left to local law enforcement, not international intervention. Concern for children seems to have resulted in government funding of orphanages and childcare centers for children too young to be part of this problem. Oddly there are some countries – Japan, Italy, and others – which desperately need population growth of younger – workers but resist it.
Recently, I was inspired by Joe Scarborough, an MSNBC broadcaster and former US Congressman who said on his show that there was virtually no racism to report in his Church experience in the deep south in his youth: He said this: “I only speak for my own experiences. This is my life, the arch of my life. I know people doubt. I can only tell you my life.“
Well, I too have my experience, and this is my life. Many will doubt it. Regardless, I too should speak up if I see harm in the stories of others. It is time to understand sex differently. Sexual behavior is a social activity that evolves. But change often receives strong resistance. Seeing population increase by roughly 300% is cause to examine change to many aspects of our lives, including sex.
In my case, after my divorce in 20XX, I responded to serious loneliness/depression and even notions of suicide by stumbling onto paid recreational sex. I was reaching out for comfort, even love, one hour at a time. I had other choices so common these days: alcohol, drugs, pain killers, and, yes, suicide. REFERENCE
Sex work worked for me. I will talk about that.
I found what I call recreational sex in Washington DC, Dominican Republic, Germany, Madagascar, Kenya, Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.
Now I call that Recreational Sex. You can call it that too if you wish. It is a good name for paid sex when there are so many other variations of sex available in our life which also qualify as recreational sex. This tells me that it is appropriate to stop these attacks on sex work, sex workers, and trafficking. The only answer is honest research in the face of scandalous and archaic claims of others. If violence is exaggerated, if children is a different issue and if we remember trafficking is really migration, there is powerful reason to look past the motional hysteria and big money that soils these sex issues.
Recreational sex seems like a good word to me. Your comment is welcomed.
With some training in demography under my belt it became easy to see numeric comparisons. I realize a sex tourist. The places I went to were well known as the big, big places for tourist sex. I say that because I want to be clear that I did not skulk around small villages in the poorest countries offering candy bars to children – as sex tourism is often depicted. The places I went to were very busy, crowded tourist centers. Sex tourism into Thailand, Germany and Holland, and other places are counted in the millions and a major factor in countries annual income. There may seem to be many sex workers but when you compare those numbers with the numbers of all women, with the numbers of all single women of potential mating age, and with the women participating in sex with consenting partners unrelated to sex work and you have new perspective on the size of this problem with is under attack by a lot more than just local law enforcement.
And, surprise, none of these horrible things the media, movies and governments tout so graphically simply can not be found in these large sex tourist locations by me. It isn’t hidden. It just isn’t there. I suggest we find it, or go home.
Major places where sex tourism and sex work take place are, busy places, where sex workers are publicly available for researchers to ask especially if they have any desire to be rescued. Frankly, convincing women to seek rescue is one of the most difficult jobs of NGO staff face. NGOs must prove their mission as required by the grants they receive. When you read NGO newsletters, as I do, you realize it is rare any woman is rescued from actual harm, but they are subject to training programs and that sort of thing. We should agree to find the real crimes and not the consenting sex partners.
I live in Thailand, a true scientific laboratory of sexual behavior. Women all over Thailand travel of their own free will to be in the four or five well known tourist locations where truly poor women can make money from tourists when other opportunities in their province or village have little or nothing to offer.
These (migrating) workers often find their work in places where businessmen put up the money to provide places for them to meet potential customers. Investors in big nightclubs and small bars need to be rewarded too. They struggle with being confused with being “pimps” and “traffickers” and for this reason alone they deserve a handsome reward for the financial risk they face.
Maybe in a modern world with 8 billion people, many on the move, the result may be that questionable claims of “children” and violence and archaic stigmas and notions of sin will fad away. That already seems to be happening every day. This is what this discussion is here to encourage. Hopefully I will suggest a lot of ideas about this which will be discussed in ways you have not thought of before.
It is these experiences which need to be studied by honest academics: sociologists, economists, statistic demographers, maybe theologians, and other truly thoughtful people to seek understanding of social change in a modern world over three times bigger than it has ever been before.
Anti-sex media paint a picture in which all sex workers are suffering and will beg to be rescued from prostitution. Again, false. Many young women travel of their own accord to go where prostitution is located. This tells me (and you) that these sexually based concerns are exaggerated. If vast numbers of women are being paid money they desperately need and tourists get the social interaction they came for, how can this be considered a big problem. I call this evidence of healthy recreational sex, in this paid recreational sex.
I have had some experience and training in principles of academic research so, I do some of my own research, again looking for those titillating stories so easy to find in media, in movies, and bloggers – but not in the real world. For me, this was early evidence that what we are being told about sex work, sex workers, and sex trafficking is not true. It does not require a PhD to see what is going on around you. Maybe there is nothing to see.
RECAP
These are subjects to be discussed in this blog and subsequent book.
I will expose dishonest research, share my personal experiences, and ultimately ask readers to recognize social change in a modern world. For example, the social requirement of lifelong monogamy seems to be in major decline along with the power of traditional religions. No sex prior to marriage, gone. The acceptability of same sex marriage is now widely established. The existence of new forms of unpaid recreational sex is becoming established too.
With better information/research we can determine where the problems lie in the face of major disinformation. For many people, sharing sex, not based on love, between a lonely person and another person who needs financial aid is completely reasonable. Stigma against sex work can fade away just it has for many other social changes as history moves on. Paid recreation is known as the world’s oldest profession because it has a lot to offer. It is just sex!
The next article will be about sex in our modern world and the fine line that separates acceptable sex and sex which is under attack now. It But it is a completely personal activity between consenting people so cut out the crap and decriminalize sex work. The crimes we hear so much about are crimes, not sex.
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The next article will about exposure of the role of the United States – government roles and religious influence – resulting in stirring up hysteria about sex work, sex workers, and trafficking.
The next article will be about discussion of what I have learned about sex workers, their families, friends, opportunities, and expectations for their futures.
The next article will discuss who these men are customers of sex workers, both as tourists and local men.
2.
Let’s talk about the Good Sex.
I suggest to, you my readers, that understanding sex work, sex workers, and sex trafficking requires a basic understanding of other forms of sex. Frankly, sex work is in its own subtle competition with all forms of current sex.
We should not immediately consider these presumed horrible, stigmatized issues about sex unless we pause to consider what kind of sex is considered acceptable sex. Maybe you disagree with my use of “good sex” in the title as there are surely people who think there is no such thing as good sex. But I will talk about sex which people routinely participate in. And I assure you all people participate in some kind of sex vastly outnumber people who are customers of sex workers.
This too has changed a lot over my lifetime, and maybe yours, but I suggest we talk about sex which is not under the same attack as sex work, sex workers, and sex trafficking. This may be necessary for understanding of a hysteria we face regarding the attack on sex work, sex workers, and sex trafficking.
Remember that world population has grown by 300% in a shockingly short time. Has anything or everything changed. Is change bad or good?
Based on my experience at least early in my lifetime most men and women met their partners-in-life in an environment of American society often shrouded in religious piety. Sex rarely took place before marriage. Divorce was often viewed as shameful. Church was a common place to meet friends including boys and girls who were potential life-partners. Friends, in that environment, recommended potential relationships. People met in school to and schools were often at least partially segregated. Women graduated from high school often as virgins. Women went to universities with at least the subliminal intention to meet the man of their dreams. There is more that can be said but this is enough. This may be an honest representation of middleclass America in my youth (1950s and up and to the mid 60s). An example of a good marriage was Ossie and Harriet on TV who famously slept in sperate beds. No sex was even implied in TV then.
Maybe you don’t remember things that way, but I thought I should say that before I attempt to explain what I see about how of relationships are formed now. By the way this is when the skyrocket of growth of world population from 1947, at 2.5 billion, to 8 billion population now, 2021 according to the results of UN Census. By looking at this first, do you think we will see significant changes?
REFERANCE
After 30+ years married I was alone for the first time in adult life. I missed sex.
What do you do? I tried. I started by going to a couple bars. One was popular with young adults, kind of like a college bar. One was clearly for older adults, but not my age or style. Bars, even neighborhood bars, have a long history of couples meeting. Many have their own features and attractions. Some might have live music and dancing. Happy hour prices are common. Surely sex can be found at local bars all over the USA and the world.
There is the example from media here too. One of my very favorite TV shows is the Good Doctor. My favorite doctor is Dr Brown, an attractive smart woman with lots of problems. She offers this example: one day a patient died and her mother, who has alcoholic problems died in a car accident. How did Dr Brown react?
That episode of the Good Doctor ended when Dr Brown went into a dark bar, ordered a drink, and was picked up by a man -end of the show that week
And what was the message in that? I suspect impressionable young women and also impressionable me saw our hero, Dr Brown, settling her stress from a tough day with a drink and implied sex with a stranger. Okay.
I discovered matchmaker services. One of the biggest was MATCH.Com. I met two women close my age late 40 or early 50s. I had dinner with them and that was the end of Match for. The women I considered on the website all described themselves has having perfect lives with good jobs, good friend, and all they need was a long-term partner. Yikes! I was filled with baggage. Even I didn’t want me. Some sex would be nice though. I was very surprised to read the three rules MATCH told me to follow to establish a relationship: first, have coffee in a public place to be sure your new friend is safe, second, have a better kind of date like dinner, and three, the third date was called the magic date when you have sex. Wow!! Sex as part of the third date. Everyone – men and women – learned it was normal to have sex on the third date. I never achieved a third date. I often wondered how many men could really put this instruction into play. How many men could keep a couple of women on their string and drop them after their magical third date?
How similar is that to good sex work?
Many of these matchmaker websites seem to have disappeared now. They are replaced specialized website for elderly people or Christians or those who only wish to date. The most famous dating website is surely Tinder where people can look at pictures of people who are close them and can select them if they both like each other’s picture. A date (and famously sex) can take place immediately. And, frankly I think the word “date” has changed to almost automatically include sex unless you explain otherwise.
I recently saw a blog about a favorite young female actress which I like. Included the normal autobiographically stuff. the website told me that she had dated a shocking number of popular male actors. These to say anyone, especially a celebrity, is dating (implying more than say three dates each, implied she has had sex with that list of men who were named. I suggest that is implied. That is now. Words change meaning over time, and this is an example.
3.
Role of the United States in resisting Sex change around the world
This is the second article in a series attempting to take a more modern look at sex
If I were asked like that, I would have said that there are many ways in which I see the USA as being a follower regarding many social changes. Yet it is the United States which is at the core of a hysteria about sex work, sex workers, and trafficking. I think you will be amazed later when I tell you about President George W. Bush’s PEPFAR Pledge, a shocking example of international extortion about sex work. REFERENCE
Short explanation about the PEPFAR Pledge
The book, The Real Population Bomb, 2012, Liotta & Miskel, tells us that by 2025 twenty-seven cities will exceed 10 million people and six hundred cities will have over a million people. But the city I grew up in – suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio – and many similar cites are getting smaller every year. These authors pound home the point that many of these new megacities are ill equipped for growth. People will seek to migrate to where life will be better. Social change is likely to change as never before.
the tales we are being told, entertaining as they may be, are leading us to believe that all real harm of sex work and sex trafficking are the same everywhere. People with international experience understand this to be blatantly false except to anyone who has fallen under the spell of that hysteria. The role of sex work in one country may be much different than in another country, but if it is all supposed to be understood as being horrible, even sinful, that is the way it will be portrayed by those who wish that it be seen only in that way.
examples.
The story of sex workers and of sex trafficking is a story closely intwined with social change and resistance to social change.
Social changes steadily progress from generation to generation. And it’s progress is different from place to place. The first indication of the resistance to social change regarding sex work and trafficking is scary stories about individual women being forced by brutal men to do sex work. Although writers of these kind of stories may produce a product that will sell well, they are wittingly or unwittingly signing on to the hysteria that kind of writing produces.
I am in a position to see a bigger picture. Skilled writers may turn to experts regarding sex worker and trafficking. Those writers report what they have learned from experts without regard for the motivations and rich funding that have empowered those experts.
For several hundred years, known as the dark ages, free thinking women were savagely slaughtered, not specifically for being sexual free thinkers, but for a desire for freedoms at a time when the Christian church welded what today is shocking misogynistic powers. Women were called witches. Many aspects of religious power and control regarding the role of women is still held although with increasing struggle. Understanding of sex work is part of that struggle.
A hundred years ago the hysteria about sexuality was called the White Slavery period in world history both in America and Europe. This was closely related to immigration. Women desperate to immigrate for a better life, as many are now, were from Eastern Europe and men accused as pimps were Jewish men. Did you know that? Our current resistance to immigration has a similar smell: resistance to migration of desperate women and with ethnic men to blame.
Now we are in a state of hysteria over claims of harm resulting from what is clearly recreational sex. Yet recreational sex is rampant.
When does recreational sex start? XXXXXX has conducted respected research to learn when women and men become sexually active. This research holds respect among academics and does not seem to be under influence of hysteria over sex work or trafficking. In XXXX this study claimed that the common age when women became sexually active was XX years. So, calling them women in this study accurately identifies the gender, but they are teenagers. In the next study in XXXX the women were discovered to commonly active sexually had dropped to XX
of age. Similar ages are discovered for many other countries. This could be called the age when recreational sex begins.
There have even been Hollywood movies based on plots where high school age girls are under pressure to lose their virginity before they enter university, an activity which is now associated with the high school senior prom.
is also different between places around the world. Before I was born the world’s population rarely exceeded 4 billion people. It went up or down after wars or pandemics but not by much. After World War Two, and for the first time, the world’s population steadily skyrocketed and has recently exceeded 8 billion people. That growth has slowed down but continues to grow.
When this concern became a new hysteria in the 1970’s, we were told that we would all be starving soon. That did not happen, but substantial social change took place, for example decline of family farms and growth of agricultural industry and all that went with it..
But like climate change, pollution, ice melting, etc., which we concern ourselves with now, there is very surely social change we are ignoring. All of these concerns are slow moving and easy to ignore, but they are taking place and includes social change. Whether you personally believe various socials changes are good or bad, change takes place steadily just like ice melts. Not immediately noticeable, but clearly happening.
But this does not mean organized groups with substantial funding and political influence are not continuing attacks on millions of women around the world often based on religious purity and traditional stigma.
If you have seen the popular books, videos and organizations leading attacks on prostitution, you know a few of the basics: rescuing women, trafficking of women, children, and violence, brutal men and helpless women. Simple. Easy words to drum up donations.
But it isn’t that simple.
