- Cut and cut again.
MONDAY, JANUARY 12 This week—of foxy apologies, super-heroic Seahawks, and the double amputation of a single penis—kicked off in the world of semantics, as navigated by the Seattle City Council, which today voted unanimously to change the name of the crime of “patronizing a prostitute” to “sexual exploitation.” “In a nutshell, the idea is to attack the demand-side of prostitution and human trafficking,” said Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes to the Seattle Times. “You do that by recognizing that in most cases the prostituted person is a victim… and by making it clear that there are consequences for coming to Seattle to buy sex.” (Regarding those consequences: As the Times reported, state senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles is working on a bill to bump up the crime of patronizing a prostitute/sexual exploitation from a simple misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor, increasing the offense’s maximum penalty from 90 days to a year in jail.) But today our subject is semantics: “I think words do matter,” Holmes told the Times. “We patronize Starbucks stores. You engage in a crime of sexual exploitation.” Forever taking issue with the practice of labeling all prostitution “exploitation”: self-pimping professional sex workers, whose logical arguments against being treated like victims of abuse are perennially drowned out by emotional pleas to stop treating victims of abuse like sex workers…
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