Deborah Jeane Palfrey: Another Casaulty of the War On Sex
The Sex Pox, The War on Sex/Sluts/Gays/Whatever May 1st, 2008
Update: Susie Bright has just posted her tribute of sorts to Deborah Palfrey at her blog; also, see Audacia Ray’s snippet at her new Village Voice blog, The Naked Truth. Amber Rhea has just posted her reaction as well.
Original post:
In case you haven’t heard the news of late, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “DC Madam”, was found dead at her mother’s home in Florida today.
Right now, they are calling it a suicide; but with these things you never know.
Palfrey had just been convicted of prostitution and bank fraud charges in running an escort service out of Washington, DC….the same service that ultimately claimed now former New York governor Eliot Spitzer and (still) Louisiana US Senator David Vitter as its clients. She had been threatening to reveal the names of her clients, which apparently included some heavy-hitting political figures, but had been denied at every turn by the court system.
I would like to say that I’m surprised…but I’m not…because this is the ultimate (if to the extreme) means to which our sex-negative society deals with women who challenge the status quo when it comes to our hypocritical sexual mores. It’s much easier to drive the woman to suicide or simply murder her than it is to take a realistic look at how our laws and social mores against consensual adult sex (for free or for pay) do far more destruction and degradation than the actual sex acts and services that are bought and sold.
(That’s right, GenderBorgians, I said “acts” and “services”. not “bodies”; women who do sex work are not comparable to slaves, and they still own their own bodies, regardless of whether you like what they do with them.)
Like the Duke University rape accuser who gets slimed and virtually raped over and over again in the media because she dared to even make the claim that she was raped (and NO, MRA jackals and all other “White pity” fools, this is NOT permission to send me your half-baked comments on that case, either).
Like the rape crisis center owner who decided that a woman like Renegade Evolution should be denied the right to even counsel women who have suffered from abuse….merely because she might defile the center with her clients.
Like the cops in LA who mocked and laughed at and dehumanized an arrested street hooker into wetting her pants because they could only see her as an “object” to be used and manipulated for their benefit. (But I guess that since they were trying to get prostitution off the streets, that makes it OK for some so-called radicalfeminists, right???)
Like every Goddess-damn porn starlet, sex worker, adult model, and merely overtly sexual woman who has to face the full stigma of “slut-baiting” for simply not being as “pure” or “chaste” or “decent” for the public taste. Not even a young adolescent like Hannah Montana is immune from the anti-sex gaze; lest even sweet virginhood is defiled by her actress character flashing a bra for her boyfriend.
And all this done in the name of “protecting women and children”, no less.
But let us ban Playboy and Penthouse from military bases; let’s ban all “violent porn” and jail anyone with possession of such; let’s jail all the men “johns” and stick them in reeducation camps “john’s schools” so that they learn that thinking about women as sexual beings is a sin, that touching your genitals to the thought of women pleasuring themselves and other people is such an evil threat; that your very erection can only be a weapon that kills and maims and you should be shamed to have sexual feelings.
And we say that we are better than the fundamentalist Muslims because we don’t do clitorectomies or burqas???
Goddess Damn America, indeed. (At least, until we get some freakin’ common sense about consensual sex and the limits of government intervention in such matters.)
In the meantime….may you finally find peace, Ms. Palfrey. And may not another woman have to suffer your fate merely for being a sexual being…and respecting the sexual side of others.
[As usual, Bound, Not Gagged has much more as the story develops...and see also Ren Ev (who's been on freakin' FIRE of late).]
Tags: Serious Bullcrap, The War on Sex
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