Small town prostitution
They mention having no teeth like it is an obstacle to being a prostitute; I guess they have not heard of gummers.
I can’t believe that guys actually pay for that. Just reading about her makes my skin crawl.
I couldn’t ever imagine paying for it. However, if I WAS going to pay for it, she better look like a swimsuit model.
Anita Clair Fellman is an idiot.
In an article that focuses on a woman who’s hung dry wall and painted and worked as a caregiver and a seamstress.
I’ve been told that once you have a woman with no teeth, you’ll never go back. I don’t know if that means you’ll never go back to her or if you’ll never back to women with teeth. (Here’s a disturbing thought, picture your grandfather looking at your grandmother and saying, “Honey, I want you to leave your teeth out tonight.” :eek: )
I think you, and others here, miss the point. The police pay lip service to helping these women, while exploiting the situation by fining them and their customers. This creates some revenue for the local gov’t. and appeases the citizenry, but does nothing to solve the problem.
I see nothing humorous about the plight of these women, their toothlessness is just another symptom of their plight.
We, as a society, waste a lot of tax dollars on frivolous things while ignoring the poor, uneducated and disadvantaged. Ignoring these problems just assures that they will continue to fester and repeat w/ each generation.
What can be done? Well, I think a universal health care program would be a good start. Then we can demand real educational reform, not just some program designed to make the statistics look good. Then we might change the focus of the drug problem from punishment to rehabilitation. Some of these things are being done on a local basis, but their success is being ignored by politicians who find it easier to sell law and order, the stick and the carrot, instead of compassion.
Seamstress? Was this in Ankh-Morpork? 
“For as little as $10 to $20, men can get some Salisbury hookers to do anything they want. Some even accept a mere hit of crack cocaine or a few ounces of heroin for their services.”
I don’t know much about this, but isn’t a couple of ounces of heroin, like, a lot? Way more than $20 worth, right?
mm
The tone of the article is beyond cruel. But I think it says more about the men than it does the women. That a guy would sleep with someone he finds repulsive, when he can just toss her a few bucks and not even engage in sex, makes me wonder a lot more about him than I do about her. It’s about as uncharitable a mindset as I’ve ever seen. “I’ll give you the ten bucks, but I won’t do it for nothin’.”
You missed the part where Ms. Johnson described her various physical problems, any of which would probably disqualify her from any of those jobs. I’m sure she also has a police record, which would disqualify her as a caregiver.
I’m agreeing with A. R. Cane here. She’s being manipulated and used by everyone she’s come into contact with. Her johns want to get their rocks off, the cops want her for information, and the reporter used her for a very sensational story. Not one of these people have stepped in to offer her help to get her out of prostitution and into some kind of rehab, from which she can rebuild her life, and they sure as shit haven’t offered her any help getting basic necessities, even in the short term.
astro, you live there. If this bothers you that much, why don’t you use your position as a taxpayer to pressure the cops and city to get this woman off the streets and into some assistance? I’m sure you’d rather see your tax money used for that.
Robin
No, I didn’t miss that part, it simply wasn’t relevant to my point, which is that Anita Clair made some pretty honkin’ big assumptions about prostitutes by characterizing them the way she did.
She made blanket assumptions that may or may not be true for large groups of people. Just because it isn’t true for one person doesn’t invalidate her statement, and speaks more about the sloppiness of the reporter than it does about the situation at hand.
Robin
Can I be totally selfish here for a sec? Okay, she has teeth knocked out, a bad back, a bladder that is drooping on her, a grandmotherly age and I assume all the health and skin care of a prostitute addict.
And men pay to have sex with her.
And I’m the one not getting laid.
OK - back to your non-selfish discussion.
And what do we say about people who ass/u/me?
So out you go and hook, already. All you have to do is be prepared to spread for someone who’d go with an elderly $10 crack whore. :rolleyes:
Or, I could take her home with me. She gets food and shelter, I get sex. It’s win-win, I tells ya. Oh wait, that would mean she’s still technically a hooker. And I’d be sleeping with someone that is, to put it nicely, physically unpleasant to me.
Damn, what a bind.
Oh well, sex was not that big a deal anyway.
As Bridget Fonda said in some craptacular movie: “I never did mind about the little things.”
I hate to sound brutal, but what would happen to Shelly Johnson is she wasn’t turning tricks? Despite her other skills, she apparently considers herself unemployable at any regualr job. And I guess the welfare system in Maryland isn’t there for her. So if she wasn’t working as a prostitute would she literally be starving to death?
God, these women are heartbreaking.
When my mom was in jail (for non-prostitution charges) she got a lot of hookers thrown in with her. The cops pick them up, toss them in jail for a few days, then put them right back out on the same street they got them from. What do you think these women are going to do? They’re back on the streets, nowhere to go, nothing to get them there if they did, no skills, no education, no one to support them. They’re going to go back to what they know works – hooking and selling themselves. If they had any other recourse they wouldn’t have been hookers in the first place.
Yeah, you look at them and think, get a job, get off the streets, you filthy hooker. But these women don’t have any self-respect, they’ve never been taught to have any. They’re treated like the lowest of the low. These are broken women, who have been treated like the crap you scrape off the side of your boot for a long time, sometimes years. Most of them have drug addictions. They’re being taken advantage of by those nasty men, pimps and johns. They’re in constant danger, from ODs to disease to some john who likes his fun a little too rough. One of my mother’s cousins put her own teenage daughter out working as a hooker, to pay for her mama’s drug habit. A john held her down and drowned her in a bathtub. She was, oh god, sixteen, seventeen?
Back during the late 1980s and early 1990s, we saw story after story about how we needed to update our view of prostitution; whores needed benefits, health care, protection and dignity (whaaa???) A group called Come Off Your Old, Tired Ethics (COYOTE) made a lot of noise about decriminalizing and regulating prostitution, saying it was a “victimless” crime. Even my beloved Razorette pooh-poohed the idea that prostitutes usually were optionless women or girls who were coerced or cajoled into the trade.
Nowadays, we’re seeing more references to prostitutes as the victims of the crime; stories abound about runaways being recruited coerced into hooking, and we’re hearing more and more about sex slavery. **Mississippienne ** has it exactly right – under the expensive clothes, jewelry and makeup, even the $3,000-a-toss call girls are pathetic losers who trade their human dignity for a flashy lifestyle.
No female human being really prefers fucking for money to working with her clothes on. I’ve interviewed dozens of prostitutes, done newspaper and magazine articles on the subject, never once found a hooker who said that, as a child, she’d dreamed of being buttfucked by three complete strangers a week so she could drive an expensive car and live in a tony apartment.
Using another human being as a sex toy just isn’t funny. It isn’t acceptable. It isn’t moral, in any way, shape or form.
Now, let’s talk about pornography …
When I was a crazy homeless guy, I knew all the local hookers in the part of town I most often frequented. They were losers. That wasn’t a description of their character, but their circumstances. They had lost. Lost damn near everything in most cases. Most of them continued to loose, and some eventually lost their lives. What many had was a desperate desire not to loose their children. Drugs were a major factor, but not a universal one. Same with Pimps.
On the average, they were not very bright. But there were exceptions. On the average, they were not skilled at things that will get you a job. There were exceptions. On the average they had abysmal self images. I never saw any exceptions. Most of them were very passive, and even the overlay of brash sexual assertion was an obvious pretense. Most of them were afraid of just about everyone, except me.
I had the one thing that made me absolutely safe for them. I was a crazy homeless guy, and obviously could not be condescending or judgmental to them. It was that simple. I could not effectively despise them. So, mostly they were kind to me. They asked me questions, a lot, because they found out I had answers for most of the questions they had. Coffee, or a Mcburger were the coin of our mutual realm. They paid for a service, and I provided it. I even liked a few of them, in a personal sort of way. Some of them found in me a despicable being, available to be condescended to, or mocked. That too was a need I could fill.
Prostitution is a crime involving nothing but victims, mostly voluntary victims. Pimps should be stoned to death on sight; but not too quickly. Johns should be photographed, and published for public mockery. Maybe a month sleeping on my old bench, down on the square, too, for repeat offenders.
Tris
“As I know more of mankind, I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.” ~ Samuel Johnson, 1783 ~