Will the REAL WHORES Please Stand Up?
While I believe prostitution is abuse - I commend Margie Burns for bringing attention to the very screwed-up priorities of the Justice System and our own myopic views.
The sad suicide of Deborah Jeane Palfrey
by Margie Burns
The news yesterday that Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called 'DC madam,' hanged herself in a shed on her mother's property, was sad and rattling.
I did not cover her trial in DC, did not sit in on any of it or follow it particularly closely. But somehow her suicide feels closer to me than it rationally, objectively is. That may be partly because I did write about her famous client list a few times, earlier. My main interest was what effect, if any, the attacks of September 11, 2001, had on her business patterns.
Answer: if anything, the burgeoning defense and security booms kicked off by those attacks probably helped her business over-all, at least in a diffuse way. Exploiting 9/11 has provided a gusher of funding, and the gusher has trickled down to the service industries in the metro DC area.
Palfrey's own connections also included another woman who committed suicide, Brandy or Brandi Britton, often referred to as a "college professor," who sometimes worked for Palfrey's escort service.
Britton also hanged herself. And while I did not know her, she also taught part-time at the campus where I teach as an adjunct, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Brandi Britton's story was another one I did not follow closely, and every time I think of her or of her children, I wish that I had had the imagination or awareness to reach out to her. Judging from reports, she had enough talent so that she could have survived the conviction for prostitution, if her situation had been even slightly better.
But slightly better, of course, is exactly what it wasn't.
Meanwhile, this whole vicious process does nothing to make our Department of Justice look better. The inconsistencies if not injustices can be found at every level:
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The sad suicide of Deborah Jeane Palfrey
by Margie Burns
The news yesterday that Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called 'DC madam,' hanged herself in a shed on her mother's property, was sad and rattling.
I did not cover her trial in DC, did not sit in on any of it or follow it particularly closely. But somehow her suicide feels closer to me than it rationally, objectively is. That may be partly because I did write about her famous client list a few times, earlier. My main interest was what effect, if any, the attacks of September 11, 2001, had on her business patterns.
Answer: if anything, the burgeoning defense and security booms kicked off by those attacks probably helped her business over-all, at least in a diffuse way. Exploiting 9/11 has provided a gusher of funding, and the gusher has trickled down to the service industries in the metro DC area.
Palfrey's own connections also included another woman who committed suicide, Brandy or Brandi Britton, often referred to as a "college professor," who sometimes worked for Palfrey's escort service.
Britton also hanged herself. And while I did not know her, she also taught part-time at the campus where I teach as an adjunct, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Brandi Britton's story was another one I did not follow closely, and every time I think of her or of her children, I wish that I had had the imagination or awareness to reach out to her. Judging from reports, she had enough talent so that she could have survived the conviction for prostitution, if her situation had been even slightly better.
But slightly better, of course, is exactly what it wasn't.
Meanwhile, this whole vicious process does nothing to make our Department of Justice look better. The inconsistencies if not injustices can be found at every level:
-Ms. Palfrey's business was prosecuted when reportedly eighty-something other businesses in metro DC are not being prosecuted.Meanwhile, my condolences to Ms. Palfrey's mother, with whom I sympathize deeply.
-As ever, the girls are being chivvied into court and into the penal system, and the so-called johns are not.
-A wider social scene that includes a lot of young women acting basically as underemployed prostitutes, and sometimes being married off as such, is driven by corporations in every business from fashion to publishing to lobbying.
-And then there's that little matter of what are figuratively called whores, in --for example -- the news media. They get all the rest of us, journalists, treated like prostitutes, as they we all had our hands out to the rich and famous, panting to sell out. They join the ranks of the overpaid underqualified, and entrench the position of their natural cohort. They supported the immoral, illegal, unconstitutional invasion of another country that constitutes the Bush administration's fiscal and monetary policy. They put GWBush into the White House in the first place. When is their day in court?
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