Back Issue: October 2011

Prostitution is the elephant in the American parlor; though most men and a sizable fraction of women see it standing there, they refuse to talk honestly about it lest they upset their half-blind old Auntie who either can’t see it or has mistaken it for a large and rather oddly-shaped sideboard or ottoman.   –  “Elephant in the Parlor“

As long-time readers know, October is my favorite month.  Part of it is because of the weather and the shortening of the days, but a lot of it is because it ends in my favorite holiday, Halloween.  I try to do as many horror-themed columns as possible in October, but it isn’t always easy; in 2011 I only managed five of them, and that’s including the one for Halloween itself and this month’s fictional interlude, “Pearls Before Swine” (which is, BTB, one of my personal favorites).  The other three were “Moondance” (on sex, death and October weather), “Frightful Films” (a love-letter to horror movies), and “Mass Hysteria” (in which I compare “sex trafficking” hysteria to the War of the Worlds radio play scare).

Semi-coincidentally, the day before the latter column I published “The Country of the Blind“, which uses a metaphor drawn from a different H.G. Wells story; this must’ve been a good month for that sort of thing, because “With Folded Hands” was also inspired by a classic science fiction tale.  And as I explained last month, the “one year ago today” feature provided plenty of inspiration, too; “A Serpent’s Tooth” and “Bad Fantasy, Good Reality” were inspired by the columns of a year before (though they dealt with new articles), and “Slap on the Wrist“, “The Crumbling Dam” and “Wine, Women and Song” were direct sequels to their precursors.  This month’s harlotography, “Su Xiaoxiao“, had little resemblance to the previous year’s harlotography despite appearing on the same day, and this month’s  updates and Q & A columns were likewise scheduled on the anniversaries of similar columns, but of course featured new material.

By this point, columns based on individual news stories had become the rule rather than the exception; “We Told You So“, “Marching Up Their Own Arses“, “Wholesale Hypocrisy“, “An Ounce of Prevention“, “The Punitive Mindset” and “Elephant in the Parlor” all fall into that category.  So do “The Enlightenment Police“, “May I Add…” and “Scrambled Eggs“, but these all deal with “welcome to our world” topics, those in which non-sex work subjects are discussed with similar rhetoric.

As usual, a few columns don’t easily fit into any grouping for discussion.  “The Pigeons Come Home” discusses a complaint asking the APA to revoke Melissa Farley’s membership for gross ethical violations; “None of Your Business” recounts Jimmy Swaggart’s difficulties with whores (on the anniversary of the second time he was caught with his hand in the crumpet tin); “Under a Rock” asks why so many people are in denial about the existence of neofeminism; “Stranger Than Fiction” tells a strange story about stranger people from my university days; and “A Visit to Soapland” recounts my husband’s visit to a Japanese bathhouse.  The latter is my most-read column of all time, by a comfortable margin; as you can imagine, my husband will never let me live down the fact that the most popular essay on this blog was written by him instead of me.