Counter-Countermeasure

When we say “science” we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.  -  Wyndham Lewis

While unsupported arguments from authority are a powerful persuader for a certain fraction of the population (especially when they agree with existing cherished beliefs), they simply aren’t enough to carry bad policy any more.  Don’t get me wrong; they’re still the basis for the majority of laws, rules and regulations.  However, the internet provides a powerful tool for those who actually know something about a subject to present facts which refute the propaganda, no matter how heavily it is promulgated by establishment media.  This allows them to break the government’s information control over skeptics and people with at least a grade-school level of scientific literacy, who can in turn make their own arguments from authority to counter the official narrative.  Bogus studies have thus become a vital tool for keeping the masses sedated; since most people aren’t scientifically literate or well-informed enough to recognize a fake “study” when they see it, this gives the mythmakers their own “facts” with which to counter those disseminated by the real experts.  And even though those experts can debunk the faux “statistics”, the establishment’s lies are much louder and shouted through a far larger number of megaphones, so countermeasures may not be believed even when they’re heard.

This is why it’s always a relief to see debunking of “sex trafficking” mythology reported in large media venues; the moral panic will not end until our debunking of the fetishists’ claims begin to receive equal publicity to statements of those claims.  Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about:  the “trafficking” paradigm pretends that huge numbers of underage girls are forced into the trade by evil “pimps”.  But unfortunately for pimp-fantasy-lovers, this is not only false, it was disproven by a major study funded by none other than the US Department of Justice:

…the John Jay study…“thoroughly obliterated the…core assumptions about underage prostitution…Only 10 percent were involved with a…pimp…about 45 percent got in…through friends…Nearly all…said they exchanged sex for money because it was the surest way to support themselves.  In other words, the typical [underage sex worker]…is not a tween girl, has not been sold into sexual slavery, and is not held captive by a pimp”…law enforcement “authorities” were very unhappy with the results…which is why they have been buried…the DoJ…immediately ditched [principal researcher Ric] Curtis in favor of his younger, hungrier and less-principled assistant [Meredith] Dank, who was obviously instructed to do another study which would find what the DoJ wanted found - that pimps run the whole show - so as to shore up “sex trafficking” mythology and justify the vast expenditures and rampant civil liberties violations of the War on Whores.  Since interviewing real sex workers would merely find the truth again, they were largely avoided except for an easily-manipulated handful in prison…And since interviewees might still tell some truth despite incentives to the contrary, the fantasies of cops and prosecutors were included to balance that…

Of course, this countermeasure was touted far and wide; it was called a “landmark” study and its preordained “conclusions” were trumpeted in every news source in the US and many abroad, and the fact that it was as bad a piece of bogus “research” as anything Melissa Farley or the Schapiro Group ever produced wasn’t obvious to the average consumer of establishment infotainment.  Not to be outdone, Curtis and others performed a data analysis of the John Jay and several other studies to serve as a counter-countermeasure to Dank’s countermeasure.  While Dank interviewed 36 jailed street workers, the new study drew on interviews with 372 still in the business; while Dank encouraged 73 jailed “pimps” to tell tall tales, the new study drew on non-leading interviews with 85.  Naturally the results were totally the opposite, and best of all they were reported in several major venues.  International Business Times was first, though its headline bizarrely contradicts the article itself by claiming “half” of underage sex workers were “lured by pimps”:

…Although 87.2% of these young sex workers reported wanting to leave their line of work, none of them stated that a controlling pimp was their reason for staying…The most popular cause for staying…was economic status [and] problems with finding…alternative employment…only 10% of the minors had a pimp at the time of the research, only 1.6% lived with a pimp and 47% reported not knowing a pimp…pimps were only responsible for initiating 8.1% of the minors into sex work.  Instead, minors were coerced into joining the industry by their peers 47% of the time and their customers 23% of the time…

Slate’s coverage a week later was even better:

…the researchers…found…that the narrative of [underage prostitution]…they had been sold by local activists—one where knife-wielding pimps lure girls into prostitution then brutalize them into compliance—existed in only rare cases and didn’t describe most people’s experiences…“stereotypical pimps are far less common and important to street sex markets than would be expected…all sex workers in both Atlantic City and New York City described experiencing increasing, rather than decreasing, agency and control over their work over time.”  Many of the girls and boys they interviewed “had left pimps because they were violent, mentally abusive, lazy, poor business associates, unable to protect them, extracting too much money, or no longer fun to be around,” sometimes within days or weeks of meeting…Pimps, too, failed to fit the stereotypical mold.  “We were told pimps were not approachable because they were too dangerous and didn’t want to talk,” [said Dr. Anthony Marcus]…“But all they wanted to do was talk, talk, talk—that’s what they do for a living”…One pimp told them that going after underage girls constituted “pimp suicide…teenage prostitutes don’t earn enough money”…And while some pimps boasted about exerting control over “their” sex workers, the women working with them told a different story…

The war of information continues:  sex workers explain what the demimonde is really like, prohibitionists counter by pretending we don’t know what we’re talking about and presenting lies and exaggerations as though they were facts, then activists and sex work researchers debunk the bogus reports.  Measure is followed by countermeasure, which is in turn answered by a counter-countermeasure; though it may seem hopeless, big lies take a lot of effort to maintain, while we only have to keep repeating the truth.