Study: Why do men visit prostitutes?

Ashley Wells, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; Julie Bindel (The Guardian); Hillary Duff

Why men use prostitutes: The reasons why many men pay for sex are revealed in the interviews that make up a major new piece of research.
 

"I don't get anything out of sex with prostitutes except for a bad feeling," says Ben. An apparently average, thirtysomething, middle-class man, Ben had taken an extended lunchbreak from his job in advertising to talk about his experiences of buying sex. Shy and slightly nervous, he told me, "I am hoping that talking about it might help me work out why I do it."

Julie Bindel

I, too, was hoping to understand his motives better. Ben was one of 700 men interviewed for a major international research project seeking to uncover the reality about men who buy sex. The project spanned six countries. And of the 103 customers we spoke to in London -- where I was one of the researchers -- most were surprisingly keen to discuss their experiences.

The men didn't fall into obvious stereotypes. They were aged between 18 and 70 years old; they were white, black, Asian, eastern European; most were employed, and many were ­educated beyond [high]school level. In the main they were presentable, polite, with average-to-good social skills. Many were husbands and boyfriends; just over half were either married or in a relationship with a woman.

 

Science: 700 men were interviewed for the research project, which aimed to find out why men solicit and buy sex (Christina Griffiths/Getty Images/Flickr RM).

 

Research published in 2005 found that the numbers of men who pay for sex had doubled in a decade. The ­authors attributed this rise to "a greater acceptability of commercial sexual contact," yet many of our ­interviewees told us that they felt ­intense guilt and shame about paying for sex.

"I'm not satisfied in my mind" was how one described his feelings after paying for sex. Another told me that he felt "disappointed -- what a waste of money," "lonely still," and "guilty about my relationship with my wife." In fact, many of the men were a mass of contradictions. Despite finding their experiences "unfulfilling, empty, terrible," they continued to visit prostitutes.

 

Call to legalize World Cup sex trade

I interviewed 12 of the men, and found it a fascinating experience. One told me about his experience of childhood cruelty and neglect and linked this to his inability to form close ­relationships with anyone, particularly women.

Alex admitted sex with ­prostitutes made him feel empty, but he had no idea how to get to know women "through the usual routes." When I asked him about his feelings ­towards the women he buys he said that, on the one hand, he wants ­prostitutes to get to know and like him. On the other hand, he is "not under ­delusions" that the encounters are anything like a real relationship. More

• READ: Research report on men who buy sex (PDF)
• COMMENTS (334)

• Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution
• Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic
  
• Sex trafficking: we can learn from victim
  
• Sex trafficking: a futile war of statistics
• No trafficking? Well, there's a hell of a lot of women suffering
• Prostitution for fun and profit
• A bad bill for sex workers
• City bankers "regularly offer prostitutes to clients"
• Prostitution
• Social exclusion
• Women
• Teenager's painting of penis on parents' roof spotted in space 
• Tackling the trafficking myths
• Enough hand-wringing on prostitution
  
• More myths about students going on the game
  
• Belle de Jour, you're nothing like her
• The Girlfriend Experience invites us to rethink attitudes to prostitution
  
• Vile diminishing of Boy George's crime
  
• Tracy Quan: Male prostitution comes to Nevada

Monk who brought Zen Buddhism to US dies

Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

Joshu Sasaki Roshi celebrates his 50th anniversary at Rinzaiñji Zen Center in Los Angeles in 2012 (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)

 

Monk who brought Zen Buddhism to U.S. dies at 107

Zen Buddhist teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi, a leading figure in Zen Buddhism in America whose legacy was later complicated by allegations of sexual abuse, has died. He was 107.

 

Roshi died Sunday afternoon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said Gento Steve Krieger, head monk at Rinzai-ji, also known as the Cimarron Zen Center, in Jefferson Park. He died of complications of old age, Krieger said.

 

Roshi arrived in Los Angeles more than 50 years ago and was among a wave of Japanese teachers to tailor Zen Buddhism teachings to Westerners. He once pledged to students that he would not die “until Zen is born in America.”

 

“He was a Zen master,” Krieger said. “I don’t know anybody else who lives that completely and that fully. When you meet somebody like that, it changes your opinion of what a human being is.”

 

He opened dozens of Zen centers, including one on Mt. Baldy known for its rigorous training regimen.

 

Decades later, allegations from dozens of former students that he had sexually abused them...More

4,000-year-old PORN found in Bible (video)

Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; Jamstamanify; History Channel

Sisterly centerfold and the Mormon pool boys of The New Electric Sound (Lime Ricki)

Eve as temptress, seductress little better than the succubus and demoness Lilith as represented by sexy British actor Elizabeth Hurley in the remake of "Bedazzled" (salon.com)

WARNING: Cussing! Reference to sex and deviant acts from Hebrew and Christian biblical sources including bestiality recounted by giggling dummies reading from the Bible Reloaded!

Due to the popularity of the Wisdom Quarterly ancient Egyptian post, 3,000-year-old PORN discovered, we continue our archeological investigations -- this time to the perverted (pandaka) world of Biblical sex. As if Israeli Patriarch Lot, a hero of the Christian Bible (Genesis and Isaiah), offering his two daughters up to be raped by the bisexual rapists of Sodom weren't enough, or his having incestuous sex with them later (religioustolerance.org), the perversions actually came much earlier. Buddhist texts make reference to sex, but Buddhism is not nearly so uptight about it nor does it use it as the basis of blaming an entire group.

• CARTOON: God in the Garden of Eden (Adult Swim)

Lilith (Jewish Midrash) is nothing but trouble!

During the time of the Garden of Eden, before Eve and everything she has been blamed for, there was Lilith and another woman Naamah. Lilith's great crime was that she was a feminist who did not want to constantly make love missionary style, which she felt made her feel submissive. But the god YHWH and the man ADAM think she should be. So they coerce her, she refuses, and they convert her in his-story into a demon who makes love to demon, a baby killer, and a wet dream maker molesting poor young boys in their sleep. It's not your fault, men; it's women who tempt and seduce you; you should totally make them wear face veils and body-length coverings like your non-Judeo-Christian brethren.

(History Channel/Morningstar Entertainment) Who would ever have thought that such a simplistic creation myth could be connected to so much in our culture: sex, sexism, sin, Sumer (Sumerian history and the Epic of Gilgamesh), Jewish Chris Columbus, obsession with youth (thanks, Ponce), the real sources of "God," the "Gods," and other Bible stories?

• VIDEO: Lilith: Sexy demon and Adam's first wife
• The Bible Reloaded .com

College: "affirmative sexual consent" (audio)

CC Liu, Seven, Amber Larson, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; AirTalk (scpr.org, May 30, 2014); Savannah Badalich (Huffington Post), Michael Slate Show (KPFK.org), Sunsara Taylor

Two weeks into my 2nd year at UCLA, I was sexually assaulted by a friend and fellow Bruin during a student government retreat. I was a director within the group... More

Huffington Post? It was sold to a conglomerate (Tom Tomorrow/thismodernworld.org)

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FEMEN says no to patriarchy and sexism

The California Senate passed a bill Thursday, which requires colleges to incorporate an "affirmative consent standard" when investigating sexual assault [from rape to harassment] complaints.

 

It's an outrage! Not in my India! (AJ)

State lawmakers say college campuses need a cultural change to prevent sexual assaults. Senators Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) and Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) -- co-authors of SB 967 -- say sexual relations between students should not leave room for ambiguity.

 

Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-LA (AP)

We know that "No means no [and only yes means yes]," but is there more than one way to give consent to sex? Is this bill primarily about spurring a new attitude toward sex for college students? How would complainants prove they never said yes, and vice versa? LISTEN (17:09)

Guests: Kevin de Leόn, (D-Los Angeles) California Senator who co-authored SB 967 and Mark Hathaway, private defense attorney in LA, whose practice includes students and others accused of sexual misconduct.

• India: three brothers confess to gang-rape, murder of teens
• India's Fuedal Rapists [and the Shakya caste] (NY Times)
• Amana Fontanella-Khan “Pink Sari Revolution”
• Tell me how you drink your coffee, so I can tell you who you are (Food for Thoughts)
   

Unbelievable rapes in India; police participate

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Julie McCarthy, Scott Neuman

Teen gets three years in gang rape, murder of Indian woman: a protester in India chants slogans as she braces herself against the spray fired from police water canons during a protest sparked by the gang rape of student. This is the first verdict in a case that has sparked international outrage over the brutal crime (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images/NPR).

Young girls hold banners during a demonstration Thursday in Lucknow, India, after police arrested several men for allegedly gang raping and murdering two teenage children, sisters, then hanging their bodies from a tree. At least one of the perpetrators was a policeman (Azam Husain/Barcroft Media/Landov).

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Slutwalk, London (Garry Knight)

NPR's Julie McCarthy reports today on another alleged gang rape and murder in India -- this one involving two teenage sisters from the lowest Hindu [slave or "untouchable"] caste, whose bodies were found hanging from a mango tree.

 

McCarthy says the two girls, ages 14 and 15, were killed in a village about 140 miles east of India's capital New Delhi.

 

What U.S. child rapists look like, incest, too

"They reportedly had gone to a field to relieve themselves but never returned," McCarthy says. "Like hundreds of millions of Indians, they lacked a bathroom at home."

The girls' family belong to the Dalit caste, formerly known as "untouchables," the lowest rung of India's ancient [social stratification-by-birth] system of societal hierarchy.

What Indian rapists look like. Men convicted in notorious case to be sentenced (npr.org)

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Men say no to rape of their female relatives

The Press Trust of India says charges have been filed against seven people, including two police constables. Local media report that one of the policemen allegedly participated in the attack. The other is said to have refused to listen to relatives who reported the two girls missing.

 

Prison guard and homosexual rapist

The Associated Press says: "Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree throughout Wednesday, silently protesting the police response. Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls' bodies as they swung in the wind, and preventing authorities from taking them down until the suspects were arrested."

 

Human Rights campaigners say Dalit women are frequently the target of attacks, and this incident is yet another in a series of violent rapes against Indian women in recent years that have united India in anger.

FEMEN says no to rape, no to patriarchy!

Last year, four men were sentenced in the highest-profile of the cases -- one involving a young woman on a bus who was gang raped [in front of her boyfriend who was beaten unconscious] and later died from injuries she sustained in the [violent sexual] assault. More (MORE)

• Report: main man accused in India rape case commits suicide in jail
• Mother of India gang rape victim faces suspects in court
• The truth about incest (urban shaman Deborah King)
• Does cosplay go too far? Is it depersonalization?
• Why licking peanut butter or nuts is bad for you

What child molesters look like (photos)

Ashley Wells, Amber Larson, Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Huffington Post; RAINN

Jackson family child rapists and sex abusers (Perquimans County Sheriff's Office)

 

Not a "victim," Grace McDonnell

The sheriff of a small American county in northeast North Carolina says he is "disgusted." Why?

He is disgusted by the parents of six men who are accused of sexually abusing their sister for nearly a decade, at a private family compound.

 

"I blame the parents for this," Perquimans County Sheriff Eric Tilley told The Huffington Post on Tuesday.

Prison guard/sexual predators arrested

"It's your responsibility as a parent to teach [your children] right and wrong. When you see a child doing something that is totally wrong and you don't correct them, then the child thinks it's okay."

• [Are they Christians? Not "good Christians," of course. But, yes, they are all Christians, patriarchal Protestants. FEMEN says no to patriarchy.

"Silent all these years" (rainn.org)

Tilley said his deputies charged the six brothers, ranging in age from 19 to 27, on May 6 [2014], with a number of crimes related to the alleged sexual abuse of their 16-year-old sister [which means she is still a child].

The sheriff said the alleged abuse began when the girl was 4 years old and continued [for a decade] until she was almost 15.

 

Authorities have identified the brothers as Aaron Jackson, 19, Benjamin Jackson, also 19, Nathaniel Jackson, 21, Mathew Jackson, 23, Jon Jackson, 25, and Eric Jackson, 27.

 

I raped Justin Bieber. He was asking for it?

Charges against the brothers range from rape to sexual assault, according to Tilley.

 

The men's parents -- John Jackson, 65 and Nita Jackson, 54 -- face charges of felony child abuse.

 

"Part of the investigation revealed that, at one point, the mother observed some of this activity and never did anything about it," Tilley said of the charges against the parents. More

• 

  End the silence (rainn.org)

  Yeater had sex and a baby with then child pop star, now accused felon, Justin Bieber 
• Horrible Ann Coulter's attempt to make fun of #BringBackOurGirls goes wrong
• Did mommy-blogger Lacey Spears poison her 5-year-old son for attention?
• Prison guards love systematic homosexual abuse
• Pittsburgh prison guards: We raped the convicts

"Unlawful Sexual Practices"

Maya, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; "Ask Maya" with commentator Jeffery Kaung

Sex is bad? Don't look at it. Don't think about it. And whatever you do, don't wish for it. That's what our parents teach us, but that's not what the Buddha taught lay Buddhists.

  

According to an abbot in Theravadan Burma, the words "unlawful sexual practice" would be more clear and effective than simply "sexual misconduct" for defining the Pali term kamesu micchacara.

In the Pali discourses expounded by the Buddha, he described altogether 20 types of females [not 10, Jeffery Kaung?] with whom males should avoid having penetrative sexual intercourse.

• See Buddhism's "Sexual Misconduct" Defined for the ten types of females who are off limits, at least from the perspective of ancient Indian society and possibly universally. We are awaiting Kaung's list of 20.
  

What did the Buddha teach any why? (HSUN)

Every male who is engaged in these forms of sexual relations with any of these females was said to be guilty of dire misconduct that results in the worst kinds of karmic consequences.

But for females, not every female from the given group of 20 is similarly guilty. In other words, only 12 women from the group are guilty for engaging in sex, and most of these females have already been married off or become "owned" by a particular male and his family. [It should not come as a surprise to Western readers that women were treated like chattel in European marriage contracts until very recently, and the practice is followed to this day in many places including Asia and India in particular.]

The rest of the females in the classification are not guilty since they are not married or have no contractual "owner" yet. Besides, in some of the Buddha's sutras, he encouraged most lay disciples to practice celibacy. 

Believe it or not, females have sexual agency

[We do not know of a single discourse that encourages lay celibacy except as an occasional practice for uposatha lunar observance days and periods of intensive Buddhist practice, such as meditation retreats, temporary ordination, or as the natural consequence of spiritual attainments such as the blissful absorptions and the permanent liberations beyond stream entry and once returning. Please specify, Kaung. We would be very happy to examine these sutra references.]

However, the Buddha said that if one fails to be completely celibate, because s/he is already married, then one should always refrain from "unlawful sexual practices" in his/her everyday life -- as a person with clean feet [avoids a puddle of urine on the road].

Besides, the Buddha also described four (4) features that lead a sexual relationship between a male and a female to be "unlawful conduct." In fact, the Buddha had already mentioned in his discourses how it was "noble" [enlightened] for one [with noble attainments] to stay celibate. However, he said that if one could not practice celibacy because he/she was already married...

[Kaung, if you cite these sutras, we can respond and clarify. Maybe the Buddha wants everyone to be happy, and maybe celibacy is the supreme (brahma-acharya) vehicle/teaching toward that, but it's not something he said lay Buddhists should do or had to do.  Living beings are reborn into this Kama Loka, Sensual Sphere, because of their sensual cravings. Denying them or forcing celibacy on people is not the way to transcend craving. To be reborn into the more blissful Fine Material Sphere, the Immaterial Sphere, or the supremely blissful attainment of ending rebirth (enlightenment and nirvana) requires seeing things as they really are, seeing sensuality as it really is, penetrating the disappointment (dukkha) articulated in the Four Ennobling Truths. We want living beings to be happy, the Buddha wanted people to be happy, and you probably want people to be happy. Truth is the way to that, not oppression and imposing rules on how people have to live. If we are wrong, please show us. We can show how open minded the Buddha was, how the Dharma is a path that avoid extremes, and leads beyond sensual craving to supersensual bliss and then insight and liberation from the bondage of craving, aversion, and delusion. We arrive there step by step, not by behaving like ascetic renunciants. There is a much easier way to let go than brute force and self-denial -- and it is "calm and insight," blissfully happy absorptions and systematically contemplating the 12 links of Dependent Origination. "There is no path to happiness; happiness is the path!"]

 

Males, Females, and Sex

Dhr. Seven and Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)

The Buddha, Battambang, Cambodia, S.E. Asia (Kim Seng/captainkino.com/flickr)

 

We have already been responding to Jeffery Kaung's letter in brackets. But let us go more deeply.

Kaung, everybody should always avoid "unlawful sexual practices." One need not avoid sex; yet, one need always avoid misconduct in regard to satisfying one's sexual desires. And that is easy to do... except in a repressive society that denies one sexual access. Our societies, East and West, now deny us, or try to deny us, legitimate avenues of sexual expression outside of marriage. That may make sense in conservative parts of Asia, as in rural or small communities, but it does not make a lot of sense in urbanized city environments which emphasize the individual to the detriment of extended familial affiliations.

This has to apply to females just as much as males even if India was already a patriarchal and sexist society that assumed sexual agency only for males. Females have the same agency and, therefore, are liable to get in the same sort of karmic trouble as males. Who can believe that when, for example, a man has sex with a married woman, only she is guilty of cheating on her husband? From a literal and closed minded reading of Buddhist texts (i.e., AN X.206), only he would be guilty. She would be said to have seduced him into a great deal of karmic trouble, but no mention is made of her infidelity to her husband, presumably because she has no agency and therefore no ability to make an intentional choice to cheat, which of course is ridiculous.

And with regard to child molestation, which is a severe form of "sexual misconduct" or "unlawful sexual practices," a female can certainly molest just as a male can. Would anyone in this day and age think, "Oh, she's a female, she has no sexual agency, so she can't possibly be guilty of intentional sexual conduct, how much less misconduct"? It's preposterous. Wisdom Quarterly speculates that it was the sexism influencing the Dharma, and not the Dharma itself, which left us with this one-sided set of rules for males only. We hear precious little about the nuns, Buddhist females at the time of the Buddha, or Buddhist girls and women today. 

That is our era's sexism continuing to diminish women aided and abetted by the sexism of the past, and the male Monastic Order, the Bhikkhu Sangha, has much to answer for keeping this unequal state of affairs in place. The status quo, which the Buddha did so much to overturn, was quickly set back up and given legitimacy as if the Buddha had participated in oppressing females when he was the first world-teacher to elevate them to equal status. 

If one says that the Buddha didn't go quite that far, but instead subordinated them to the Monastic Order, then one has not read the Bhikkhuni Vinaya (The Nuns' Code of Discipline with its origin stories explaining each rule), which enumerates ahistorical garudhammas or "additional nuns' rules" that could NOT have come from the Buddha (see the scholarship of Ayya Tathaaloka). 

• The Extra Rules for Nuns Ven. Tataaloka (Ayya Tathaaloka) on the eight "Principles to be Respected" by nuns (garudhammas) and the formation of the female Buddhist Order (bhikkhuni-sangha). The additional monastic rules for women are a "definite historical impossibility." (See also The Buddhist Nuns of California)

But we are all taught that he offered eight or more additional rules to his stepmother, Maha Pajapati, the world's first Buddhist nun, who gladly accepted them to wear like a beautifying head dress or hair piece. Someone, likely sexist male monastics, inserted those to ensure the supremacy of the male Monastic Order. The abbot from Burma you quote without naming is neither likely to realize that nor admit it if he does.

UN: Vatican tortures, rapes children (NPR)

Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; Sylvia Poggioli (NPR, 5-6-14)

Yeah, we molest kids, of course. We even make "sacred" art about it for our churches.

 

UN grills Vatican officials on sex abuse

Maybe I still run things in secret. *Giggle*

A U.N. committee has found that the systematic sex abuse [of children] by Catholic priests in the Vatican's corporate body (the Roman Catholic Church) amounts to torture.

["Torture" is defined by international treaties to which the Holy See is apparently a signatory, or the court might not have any say over their crimes against humanity. 

Small "country" but very, very rich

The Vatican is not only Roman Catholic HQ. It is also a tiny city-state independent of Italy and Rome. Vatican City is its capital. It has massive cash, art, and gold reserves in its own corrupt banking system and private financial institutions. It has a tiny population of roughly 1,000 elite clerics and Swiss guards, and a CEO whose rotating position is popularly called "the papacy," which Pope Francis currently fronts, and which Benedict may still run the way Dick Cheney ran the U.S. while G.W. Bush shook hands and acted a bumbling fool too simple to be much of a threat.]

At the Holy See's first appearance before the committee, experts on the panel peppered the representative with questions. On Tuesday, the Vatican has a chance to respond. LISTEN

News from Russia

A strange, soulless man and his utterly failed presidency

Russian interests not limited to Ukraine alone

Hiding the US-NATO military overkill

Whatever happens, Belarus will stay with Russia - Lukashenko

Canada's Ukrainian borsch has bitter anti-Russian taste

Washington drives the world to war

Worldwide May Day marches: Cali, Russia...

Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; AP/Yahoo News; NBC; FEMEN

With rise of Putin-ism and patriotism, former USSR restores May Day rally in Moscow (AP)

Topless FEMEN Int'l training at Paris HQ ends: We are returning to Ukraine and our countries to fight patriarchy with FEMEN! Be strong, sisters and brothers! We will win! (femen.org)

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MOSCOW, Russia - About 100,000 people have marched through Red Square to celebrate May Day, the first time the annual parade has been held on the vast cobblestoned square outside the Kremlin since the fall of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1991.
 

May Day anti-US drone protest (crwflags.com)

In keeping with Soviet-era traditions, Thursday's parade was organized by trade unions and honored the working person.

But it also celebrated Russia's annexation of Crimea and was seen as part of Pres. Vladimir Putin's efforts to stoke patriotic feelings. Marchers held up signs saying "Let's go to Crimea for vacation" and "Putin is right." Russian flags fluttered through the crowd. More

• 

  Workers unite! (openmediaBoston.org)

  New Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert: John Oliver (HBO, Sundays, 11:00 pm)
• Money for sexual harassment training on Capitol Hill
• College Sex Crimes: 55 colleges and universities under investigation, including Univ. of California
• Harvard staff claims retaliation by Management for sexual assault complaint
• SLIDESHOW: California burning: Etiwanda Fire burns, Buddhist temple impacted, schools closed
• Student DEBT "celebrated" outside the Dept. of Education
• Brockton traffic stop leads to allegations of assault by PD

Los Angeles May Day 2014

"Capitalism divides - Mayday unites"

(NBC) Thousands of community advocates and immigrant rights supporters took to the streets of downtown Los Angeles today (Thursday, May 1st) and marched for worker rights and immigrant justice. Three different May Day marches were planned by three different groups. As a result of the marches, some downtown streets were closed Thursday, starting at 9:00 am. More + Video