Common Ground

Night and a small shower starting to fall on  a sunny weekend of fantastic music at the Dunmore East Bluegrass Festival... the crowd at the Strand Bar is jumping to Whiskey Deaf, and Jane and myself are skipping like spring lambs (sort of) back up the hill to for a few minutes of Mons Wheeler Big Band, before regretfully heading back to our respective homes.   Jane, life-long friend, has Dunmore family connections and for fifteen years has been saying to anyone who'll listen that something unique goes on there every August.  And so we took the Passage East ferry which churns over between Crook and Hook to Dunmore... (hence the expression, by the way, "we'll catch them by Hook or by..." attributed to a warlike Cromwell)

I always feel amazingly privileged to watch really talented and committed musicians at work, and had imagined pure music sessions didn't much happen anymore - or not of a kind the general public could access at least - but I was wrong. In Dunmore, bands rotated from venue to venue in short sets, and if you missed the first session, you could catch them later at the next... 

 The atmosphere was completely relaxed but performances were so intimate that I didn't like to push in with cameras, so please excuse my dreadful photograph.

- I really loved the wild quality of the Demolition String Band in the Azzurro (below) 

Pictured above, though, was my absolute favourite ... Land's End...  See them if you ever get the chance.  And aside from amazing musical prowess, they also showed great good humour.   What this apparently peaceful picture doesn't capture...

(aside from one of the band members who must have stepped out the very moment I took the photo),

....is that, as word spread of the tremendous end of night show Land's End were putting on in Power's, the place became crammed.  My photo was taken from the top of steps leading up to the back door, and over the heads of the crowd.  Out of shot, almost nose to nose to the performers, a group of burly rugby supporters was jiving rambunctiously.  Neither seen is the the mean spoon player who had proficiently accompanied every band - all day. The band asked him up on stage for the last few songs as one of the rugby jivers filmed on a phone, and two more beat time on his torso and head with barbeque utensils...

And still the band played on..

 Our diet was Guinness, barbeque and fruit and nut cake baked before setting out - actually it all gelled better that appearances might suggest.

Industrial Weight Spin in the Service Industry

Fingle

by Brandon Mably in Rowan Kid Classic

…not quite chill enough yet for this incredibly warm sweater and I know I said I wouldn’t knit again, but this one wasn’t onerous.  Also sorting colour focuses my mind –  you mix colour yourself in this pattern, and knit on the double..

I needed something to focus on as I contemplated very peculiar events indeed happening around Amnesty International’s terrible decision to advocate legalising brothels and pimps, and their attempt to pass this off in some quarters as a human RIGHT ??  - If the issues weren’t so grave, this would almost be funny... but they are, so it's not funny at all.

Everything needs to swim to survive, and I expect that the sex industry's vast money making potential must have attracted the attention of more mainstream varieties of shark.  They'll have worked out that selling sex needs to be dressed up a bit nicer in order to get to the benefits of respectability. And laundering its way towards those would explain the concerted avalanche of spin and general glossing of the sex industry for the past year or so.  That some people are buying right in to this zillion dollar PR game is shocking...

Why?! How can people possibly believe this stuff?! It's plain as the nose on your face that, with very rare exceptions indeed, nobody wants to a prostitute, and nobody should ever be forced to be through circumstance, and therefore it should not be legislated for... What's next to mainsream - suicide bombing? Lots of future in that for girls and women too, according to some...

So I'm concluding the reason is that we, the general public, are for the most part inured to prostitution.   We don’t care, don't see as a priority ... actually don’t really see as human… see but actually don’t see at all… We'd probably edge away if we coincided with one in a queue in the local shop, or if one were soliciting outside our home, mightn't be long about shooing them off, and feeling pretty good about ourselves that we'd rid the neighbourhood of something unpleasant or, well, something... and I feel I can speak with some authority on this because I live in an area where this happens frequently. 

Then, the industry and punters that do see very clearly are pretty heavily vested in keeping things blurred... hiding in plain sight...clinically invisible... An extra few layers of PR puffed round them can only further that end...   

When absolutely forced to think about prostitution, most of us also think of "it", and not a sad procession of deprived and abused individuals with whom we wouldn't trade places in a month of Sundays. Then we write "it" off by rote with oldest-profession clichés, before blanking "it" out completely for more pleasant thoughts, like live-and-let-live and doesn’t-affect-us....

And if ever a situation should arise such as...

"Well...wasn't that..? In that car there...?"

No, couldn't possibly have been, is the answer.

Clean and well run brothels...? Now that would be okay, some say, because for some, prostitution is free expression. 

But if you're prepared to listen to survivors, they'll reply: 

Make no mistake - a few adolescent walks on the wild side aren't prostitution. The industry chooses carefully, and if you’re in any position to choose mentally, educationally, materially, they won't be choosing you.

That soft flank, however, is where the industry's spin has been effective....  Nice people like to live and let live; like to see themselves as respecting other people's life choices...

Then came Amnesty, and sandwiched prostitution in between LGBT rights and abortion under a general banner of freedom of choice.  Their bizarre approach to the broken girls and women caught up in its thrall is:  blank the survivors, reward the exploiters and paint misc. anyone else opposing their very peculiar construct into an anti-freedom corner....   

Who has time to figure that out? Especially in relation to prostitution which doesn't affect us anyway, does it...?  All of which confuses and deflects scrutiny, and winds up serving the sex industry very nicely indeed... Good job, PR companies! 

And as prostitutes don’t matter (and that’s the way the industry likes to keep them), most "regular" citizens are unlikely, therefore, to ever ponder on the fact that most prostitutes will have been well entrapped by age 15, if not younger.... (Know any 15 year old girls? how d'you reckon they'd fare behind a closed door with someone getting kicks out of the fact they don't want to be there?).   And most "regular" citizens will not gain insight either into the fact that that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for Amnesty's much vaunted freedom of choice or self determination for the prostitute, does it?

Dancing About Architecture

Dancing about architecture, on a beach too... I love this peaceful place. Hard to fathom that not far from here - only round the corner, in fact - is where young girls removed from all they know are believed to have been trafficked into Europe for use in the sex trade...two totally different concepts coinciding in a way that most right-thinking people would never even consider putting together...  

Why would they? Why should they?

M. Scott Peck contends that a positive force can exist independently,  but anything rooted in negativity is parasitical - in need of goodness to feed off - and no better place for it to go to cause havoc than where good people are gathered...  This theory is often borne out, with church and institutional abuse immediately springing to mind.  We've all heard accounts from the world over of powerfully positioned predators preying on innocence, and all bearing nauseatingly familiar patterns. Even to those who lived through those times, it can still be bewildering to understand how such evil sway remained uncontested for quite so long, right in front of our eyes. Admirable-seeming individuals operating smoothly on the surface, while peddling their slyly insidious rot right through the lives of good people, mass hypnosis ensuring that all challenge to their supremacy was off limits.   And if anyone tried to challenge, they'd find themselves crushed socially, emotionally, spiritually, physically, economically... How did they -  priests, politicians, police and mothers superior - achieve all that? There must have been a first lie somewhere which vested interest made sure to kick the dirt well over.

First lies...

Uncanny, isn't it, how similar that scenario is with the perennial efforts of the prostitution industry to appear "normal". It even made top story and became quite an ongoing preoccupation in The Economist this time last year.  Yet there's something so familiar about its constant shrouding in denial the abuses and litany of savageries perpetrated on vulnerable people which define what prostitution actually entails.  A minority definition of one true god - in this case, high finance - that's pretty familiar too.  Equally, its shouting down as illiberal and unenlightened anyone calling out those fundamental lies all conforms to a well rehearsed pattern... certain types of ugliness never leave: they just shift shape.

How truly awful then, to learn that, of all organisations, Amnesty International is imminently considering the advocation of decriminalising prostitution as policy... all with the best of good intentions...

How depressing is that?

A conversation I had with someone very pure indeed in relation to fundraising for another social cause keeps coming to my mind.

“You only deal with X”, I was saying.  “People are going to ask why not Y too: you'd be a much easier sell with Y...”.

“And indeed they’re right”, he agreed. “There’s a huge need for Y”.

A pause.

Then I said, “But couldn’t you even SAY you’re ABOUT to try to sort out Y…?”

“X is all we can do. To attempt Y would dilute our effectiveness”.

“Well then, tell me what your success rates are – there’s a tack I could use”, I said.

“Oh.. very low – at best 20%”, he said smiling. “In this area, you never really anticipate high success rates”.

“Em… but.. what..I mean, how could we possibly…?”

“Karen, there'll never be a day when we don't have X: that's the truth. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to level the pitch and offer hope and a helping hand to anyone who wants to take it. If you're thinking 'business' with impressive balance sheets, you're probably in the wrong place. "

Girls and women in prostitution are not regular workers - they're being exploited.  Ask any district judge how often victims of domestic violence go back for more, wholly convinced it's what they want... It's not condescension to point this out: it's just stating facts. When you're inhabiting adversity of a kind that most of us couldn't dream up in our worst nightmares, it's easy to see how you could drift into an outlook of better the devil you know than the devil you don't; and it becomes almost comprehensible how the "work" mightn't seem so bad, nor the danger so constant nor beatings quite so keen when you're doped up to the eyeballs most of the time...   

Then, think about this: who exactly would be anything other than appalled to encounter their mother, sister or daughter in a brothel?  Is anyone - least of all Amnesty International - seriously suggesting we legislate to accommodate that mentality?  And can anyone seriously believe that men who pay for sex intend to show respect and abide by laws?  They're buying a so-called right that they couldn't ask of a peer.... they buy sex to take advantage of the power they see money as bestowing on them, and that's the start point, only the beginning of what the prostitute has to contend with. If ever there were a parasitical manifestation of pure misogyny, this is. 

On an average day, in an average world, decent people have trouble envisaging what the truly devious are capable of, and in my opinion that innocence or ignorance (depending on your viewpoint) is where evil prospers.  Abuse of vulnerable women should never be allowed to be just a regular fact of life we need to legislate into something unremarkable.  Speeding glibly by the existence of prostitution as though a given - and an acceptable one if only a few legislative tweaks were made - only adds to its offense. There are choices:

- We can call out the fundamental first lie and refuse to tacitly agree to cast entire sections of humanity on the scrap heap filed under the nice, clinical banner of "sex work".  

- We can offer every assistance possible to those trying to escape.

- And we can shame and prosecute the pimps and punters for their ignorance, presumption, selfishness and lack of humanity, rather than make their lives even easier and more rewarding.