Hypocrisy in sex, and how to legally pick up hookers

[Tdarcos]

The following is from my blog at http://paul-robinson.us and I thought I'd copy it here:

But that's not what it means

There are a number of people who don't want to suggest that an 11-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl should be using a condom to have sex because they're afraid of the girl getting pregnant.

Duh, I have a strong suspicion that when an 11-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl end up becoming parents, it's because he wasn't using a condom!

Over and over and over again, 5,000 years of history tells us that no matter how much you push abstinence programs, kids still have sex and because you aren't drilling it into their heads not to have unprotected sex, some of them (well, the females only but I mean it in terms of them together having the problem) are getting pregnant and it ends up being either a disaster or an unmitigated disaster depending on how bad you consider the problem.

I think there was a story about how there were two female winners of the contest or scholarship or something like that at some high school (or it might have been junior high) who wrote the best essay on not having premarital sex, or on abstinence, or whatever it was, to basically tell other students at that age that they should not be having sex. The two girls turned up pregnant.

You look at all the things, the laws making teenagers having sex criminals, the laws making prostitution illegal, the laws (generally struck down) making fornication, adultery and sodomy crimes, the laws that make pornography illegal, or possession or sale of sex toys illegal, are all a result of the strong puritan background and general prudishness of sex and the typically hypocritical opinions people carry around where they publicly condemn various opinions about sex while at the same time doing things themselves privately that they themselves claim they wouldn't do or think that they have the right to declare what other people consent to do to each other to be illegal.

Allow some kids to see two people having sex, if you haven't filled their heads with all sorts of bad ideas, and they'll just see it as two people who care about each other and making each other happy.

But we'd call that (showing the explicit video of two people making love) contributing to the delinquency of minors. But there'd be no trouble showing two guys beating each other to death to the same audience of kids, even if it was actually a snuff video. (Which is yet another urban legend.) I have no idea why showing kids a video of some guy pounding on his woman (or her pounding on him if it's done "woman on top") as a result of them having sex and both of them enjoying it is bad for kids, but show two guys pounding on each other with their fists to inflict the maximum amount of pain and injury is not.

One shows two people expressing how much they care about each other, the other shows two people expressing how much they hate each other; the first can be banned but the second can't. (Which is correct; you can't ban video of people fighting.)

Which is another thing. If you have a video of the prototypical example I gave of the 11-year-old boy and the 14-year-old girl having sex, that's child pornography and illegal to show publicly (and probably to possess). But if he was beating the crap out of her with his fists, that would be legal to show in public and to possess.

In fact the fact that kids are now getting cameras and showing themselves in sexually explicit poses and getting caught in the old child pornography laws is causing problems nobody thought of.

It's one thing if you want to make illegal pictures of some child who was raped or otherwise exploited; it's quite another thing when two kids have consensual sex, which is legal (the laws in their state follow what is referred to as the 'Romeo and Juliette' exemption where if they're under 18 but less than 3 or 4 years of age difference it's not a crime for them to have sex) but the video of them having sex with each other illegal, and convicting them of distribution of child pornography by e-mailing it to each other.

I'm not kidding; a court of appeals upheld a felony child pornography conviction against two kids who did exactly that. It was legal for them to have sex, but illegal to film it and e-mail it to each other, and the appeals court gave some weird excuse to argue that it's important that they be protected against sexual exploitation by giving them a prison sentence and marking the two of them as sexual predators who now have to register with the police for the rest of their lives. (I'm presuming the laws that usually expunge criminal convictions at 18 don't apply to convictions involving sexual offenses.)

At least one judge had the good sense to dismiss an attempt to prosecute a similar case.

What we need to have is a law on the books that state that you can't commit a crime as a result of what you do to yourself, and if what you're doing is in concert with someone else where they also are consenting to what they are doing to themselves, you can't also be charged with conspiracy for what the two of you do to each other as long as it stops short of criminal homicide or similar actions.

After I wrote this, I realized the answer is that it should not be illegal to film (video) an act or distribute that video if the underlying act is not in and of itself a crime. This would eliminate kids from having underage sex because of the exemption for being close aged, while at the same time, being criminally charged for having (illegally) recorded the sex they were (legally) having with each other. Since the sex itself was not illegal, the video of the same should not be.

But then you still have the problem of charging them with a crime for what they do to each other. Well, in states where they passed the example I gave of 'Romeo and Juliette laws' that's been solved, but we need to do something similar.

But I suspect some people won't like that because it would decriminalize attempts to commit suicide (which is used as an excuse to put people who try to kill themselves in a mental institution). I've heard that in China, (obviously unsuccessful) attempts to kill yourself are punishable by the death penalty. How ironic.

Whether we should criminalize sex between a 15-year-old and a 40-year-old is another issue; for a large percentage of cases it's usually some slimy guy my age hitting on a young girl who's innocent and doesn't know any better. But sometimes it isn't. I may be old fashioned, but I think there is a big difference between some 14- 15- or 16-year-old boy having sex with a woman two or three times his age (which if people didn't fill his head with sickness, he's going to think was the greatest thing to happen to him), and some guy my age doing it with a 15-year-old girl.

Of course, if she's 18, nobody cares. Whether she is really exploited probably depends on the circumstances. But the law doesn't take that into account, the general rule is "16 will get you 20." But when they said that, it was only illegal when a guy had sex with an underage girl. Nobody tried to argue that some how underage boys had to be protected from older women.

Nabokov's Lolita is considered an example of exploitation of a minor. Herman Raucher's Summer of 42, on the other hand, is considered a touching coming of age story.

Witness some sheriff trying to confiscate copies of the film The Tin Drum because, apparently it involved a young boy getting laid by some older woman. Notwithstanding the fact nobody considered this story objectionable until the movie had been out for twenty years. (A later court would find the confiscation either was illegal or unwarranted.)

I've never really understood how the Supreme Court found an exception for pornography in the 1st Amendment. I can understand a law against child pornography of sexual abuse vicims, but I've never understood how you can declare material made by adults for adults to be unprotected by the 1st Amendment other than because some people don't like it and the courts basically have used that as an excuse to say that some material can be protected and some can't.

Which made me think of something; if someone videotaped a woman being raped, would that be considered something which can be made illegal? Well, as it stands, if she's under 18 it is; I'm not sure what happens if she's over 18. But if it was a fake for a movie, the one involving an underage girl probably still remains illegal as child pornography, but not if she's over 18. To do otherwise would mean the movie The Accused, where Jodie Foster is raped on a pool table, would be declared to be obscene and banned same as they would have declared the movie to be child pornography if it was a simulated rape of a 15-year-old using an actual underage girl.

This would make an interesting story except I think it was done once. Before Russ Meyer got into directing porn, he did a movie called The Seven Minutes about an obscenity trial of a book, and how the publisher successfully argued the book was art rather than smut.

If you've ever heard of how the U.S. Supreme Court got into deciding what was or wasn't smut, you might have heard of the Miller case. In Miller v. California the High Court set down the rules for what is or isn't obscene. It's got to basically be explicit, dirt for dirt's sake over the whole film, and have nothing else going for it. ("stimulating to prurient interest, violates community standards, and utterly lacking in redeeming social values.") Which would probably cover almost everything on YouPorn.Com, but in any case, what has happened is, some porno producers started adding serious commentary as filler in order to cause the work in question to violate the Miller test and fail to be obscene. Put a few minutes of argument over the death penalty, gun control or obscenity itself, and you've got a winner that fails Miller.

I've heard Miller was basically a not-very-likable guy who used to pirate other people's porn and sell it himself. I think he tried to argue when he got caught distributing porn that the stuff he was selling was obscene and thus not copyrightable (which is correct) but the judge would point out that the work was illegal to distribute!

Now, let me go onto one of the other items I mention to expose our own hypocrisy, laws against prostitution. The late, great George Carlin did it far better than my poor power to add or detract. He pointed out it's legal to make sales, it's legal to have sex, but it's illegal to sell sex. It's only illegal do do so openly, if you do something else, and include sex as something you add free, you can get away with it. If someone figured out we could have every woman on the street advertising that she's doing web design for $175 an hour - and basically you can learn how to do that in 10 minutes - there'd never be another conviction for prostitution because she'd mention she does web design, goes to the guy's place, asks to see his computer, and then waits for him to suggest they have sex. Or maybe she claims to find him interesting and suggests it. Since she didn't ask for money for the sex, she's not committed a crime, and he didn't offer money to have sex, he hasn't either.

Further, she could be carrying around an old computer to perform the work and could set up the task to be performed.

The point is that $175 an hour for web design is not out of line for the work, and thus it's going to be hard to claim it's actually for the sex. When I first got my commission as a notary public I realized that something similar could be done for street walkers who only charge $20 or $40, that they get notary commissions and offer to do mobile notary, where they charge a trip fee for an unlimited number of notarizations, and then if they "find the guy interesting" suddenly decide to be willing to have sex with the guy.

I'm not the type to hire hookers but I'll pass on this piece of advice on how to pick up hookers and be guaranteeed you can never get arrested. You don't ask them for sex when you pick them up; you ask if they're willing to do nude modeling. If you're talking to a female cop, she has to turn you down because hiring someone for nude modeling isn't illegal and she can't bust you; the hooker wouldn't care.

[Jack Straw]

Passionate about this, eh?

What we need to have is a law on the books that state that you can't commit a crime as a result of what you do to yourself

We need more laws on the books like you need another child pr0n.

The answer is LESS laws, not more. I find it surprising that you'd rail on the injustice and inequality of our laws for 10 pages, then say the answer is more litigation.

Re: Hookers

The point is that $175 an hour for web design is not out of line for the work, and thus it's going to be hard to claim it's actually for the sex. When I first got my commission as a notary public I realized that something similar could be done for street walkers who only charge $20 or $40, that they get notary commissions and offer to do mobile notary, where they charge a trip fee for an unlimited number of notarizations, and then if they "find the guy interesting" suddenly decide to be willing to have sex with the guy.

I'm not the type to hire hookers but I'll pass on this piece of advice on how to pick up hookers and be guaranteeed you can never get arrested.

If you are going to have the girl carry around a computer and claim you're paying her for 'web development', you need to worry more about the whore ripping you off than the cops busting you.

How is she going to do dev when she's clapping the entire time?

[Flack]

Oklahoma City woman trades sex for case of chips.

I didn't realize that was going rate.

[Tdarcos]

Oklahoma City woman trades sex for case of chips.

I didn't realize that was going rate.

I notice you're from Hell, Ok. Has it ever frozen over there?

[Flack]

Oklahoma Blizzard Leaves 1 Dead, Spurs Emergency State.

Yes.