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A Very Old and Very Fake Sex Work Statistic at The Advocate

By Chris Hall
September 15, 2014
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Ten dollar bill sticking out of crotch of blue jeans.I know that The Advocate isn’t the radical firebrand it once was; after all, the entire LG (sometimes BT) movement isn’t the radical hotbed it once was. Still, it kind of hurts to see them making the same mistakes about sex work that the straight media does. Today on Facebook, Melinda Chateauvert pointed out to me that they’d published this infographic, titled “Numbers Crunch: Prostitution.” Most of the info looks right, or at least plausible, but there in the second half, they reproduce one of the biggest pieces of junk social science about sex work out there. Specifically, item number 9 says:

BETWEEN 11 and 13: Average age when boys and transgender youth become victims of prostitution.

I just published a nearly 4,000-word article in The Atlantic chronicling why this is complete bullshit, so I take the fact that The Advocate can’t be arsed to do their fact-checking a little personally. It’s really easy to find out why this statistic is so bad that it’s “not even wrong” as they say in science.

"Disinfographic" from The  Advocate, with annotations about why it's bullshit.

This statistic has been debunked so many times, it’s not even funny.

Usually, the “age-of-entry” nonsense is used to refer to girls, and implies heterosexual prostitution. But nevertheless, there’s no research backing up the claim that massive numbers of children go into prostitution at such young ages that they could statistically outweigh those who go into sex work in their late teens, twenties, or older. Those studies that have made such claims have focused entirely on samples of people under the age of 18, which automatically skews your results. They’ve also tended to focus exclusively on young people who have been arrested or “rescued,” which also skews the results towards people who are in trouble. For a really good, detailed examination of what’s wrong with these numbers, I recommend reading Emi Koyama’s blog post, “The Average Age of Entry Into Prostitution is NOT 13.” It’s one of the first pieces that I looked at as a reference for my Atlantic article.

There’s also problems with the claim that go beyond the merely statistical. For instance, look at the phrase, “become victims of prostitution,” which immediately erases the line between prostitution and child-rape. In hindsight, I will acknowledge this as also being a problem with my piece in The Atlantic; I should have been more careful about making a distinction between sex work, which is done as an economic choice, and abuse. It’s a very important distinction, and to ignore it also erases the agency of those who do sex work by their own initiative.

Besides failing to check their facts, The Advocate doesn’t even cite their source for the “age-of-entry” stat, probably because they got it through the journalistic equivalent of chatting at the water cooler. I would be very surprised if the person or persons who created this particular dis-infographic knows where they heard it. However, I can make an educated guess at the ultimate source: The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U. S., Canada and Mexico, by Richard J. Estes and Neil A. Weiner. The Estes and Weiner report came out in 2001, and included this snippet, based on interviews with 210 underage subjects:

Average age of first intercourse for the children we interviewed was 12 years for the boys (N=63) and 13 years for the girls (N=107). The age range of entry into prostitution for the boys, including gay and transgender boys, was somewhat younger than that of the girls, i.e., 11-13 years vs. 12-14 years, respectively. The average age of first intercourse among minority boys and girls was younger than that of the non-minority youth we interviewed, i.e., 10-11 years of age for minority boys and 11-12 years of age for minority girls.

Emphasis added, to show it specifically matches the claim in The Advocate’s graphic.

As I say in my own article, I don’t have any particular gripe with the Estes and Weiner study, but I do have major issues with how it’s used. The quote above is referring only to the proportions in their sample; it is not making a universal claim, about prostitution in America as a whole. It is certainly not making such a claim about prostitution in 2014. In a mainstream publication, I would roll my eyes in frustration. When I see this stuff in The Advocate, I feel disgusted at how easily they play respectability politics.

-30-

 

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Filed Under: Featured, Media, Sex Work Tagged With: age of entry statistic, Journalism, lgbt, media, Melinda, Sex Work

Sex Ed of the Past: Count Spirochete

By Chris Hall
January 19, 2011
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Campy vampire "syphilis" on the left; real syphilis on the right.

I have a real fascination with the history of sex. Because sex as a whole is kept so securely in the closet, its history is one of the most poorly-documented areas of our culture, and it’s easy—almost inevitable—for each generation to feel like they invented everything that’s not ten-up-ten-down heterosexual intercourse. Partly because it’s so well-hidden, the history of sex is especially revealing about who we were then and who we are now.

Below is a great example of the history of sex education called “The Return of Count Spirochete.” Despite its crude and colorful appearance, it wasn’t intended for children. According to the “Armed With Science” blog, “Count Spirochete” was produced in 1973 for the National Naval Medical Center to educate members of the U.S. Navy about the risks of syphilis and gonorrhea. It doesn’t look like a military educational film; what it resembles, more than anything, is an episode of “Schoolhouse Rock” dedicated to VD.

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Media, Sex and Gender

The Shrinking Public Square

By Chris Hall
September 28, 2008
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As you may or may not know, I’m the co-founder of a web site called Sex in the Public Square. Although the name seems straightforward enough to me, it seems to perplex a lot of people. If you want to get a good idea of what we’re on about with the title of our site and why the concept of “the public square” is so important to us, go on over to Audacia Ray’s site, Waking Vixen. You should be doing that anyway, but if you haven’t been checking her out recently, she’s had some experiences lately that illustrate neatly the realities and risks of talking publicly about sex.

  • First of all, Dacia tried last month to open an account at Citibank for her business, Waking Vixen Productions. After filling out the preliminary paperwork, she received a voicemail delicately informing her that her line of business made them unable to take her account.
  • Then, early this month, she got a similar notice from iTunes, notifying her that her podcast, Live Girl Review, could no longer be included in their directory. ITunes was less direct than Citibank, saying only that podcasts could be excluded “for a variety of reasons.” On checking out their podcast spec sheet, she found “strong prevalence of sexual content”  included among the possible reasons that Apple can kick you to the curb.
  • And just last week, Google yanked her Google Checkout account, barely twenty-four hours after she’d put her new short film The Love Machine up for sale. According to the e-mail Google sent Dacia, “the products or services [she’s] selling on [her] website are considered ‘Restricted’ per our policy- Adult goods and services.”  [Read more…]
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Filed Under: Media, Sex in the Public Square Tagged With: Audacia-Ray, Blogging, Sex

To Go Where No One Should Venture

By Chris Hall
April 2, 2008
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There are the good kinds of masochism and the bad kinds. The good kinds involve getting tied up in a barely-lit dungeon while someone torments the hell out of you with floggers, needles, or Wartenburg wheels. The bad kind includes reading anti-porn blogs and watching fundie preachers on TV out of some misbegotten urge to “inform yourself.” Or, apparently, going to see the new movie, 10,000 B.C. While I have engaged in the first two, I will not be engaging in the third, especially since Adam Lipscomb has already done so and blogged about the experience in painful detail. The poor lad sounds traumatized.

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Filed Under: Media Tagged With: 000 B.C., 10, Adam Lipscomb, movies, schlock

The New York Times Sets It Straight

By Chris Hall
March 31, 2008
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Sarah Jenny Bleviss brought this Editors’ Note in the New York Times to our attention, in which the paper admits to serious reporting errors in its coverage of sex workers. An entire two-thirds of the original article has been deleted from the article, which supposedly profiled three “high class call girls” in New York. It turns out, though, that two of the women were sex workers but not prostitutes:

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Media Tagged With: media

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