On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, James Michael Craven wrote:
> Harry,
>
> Since you assert that my assertions about the nature and effects of
> prostitution are mere a priori assertions, please answer the
> following: 1) How many prostitutes have you personally spoken with at
> length about these issues? 2) How many prostitutes has your graduate
> student spoken with? 3) Under what conditions? (e.g. a Japanese
> person interviewing prostitutes in Japan might have a real problem
> because of the pervasive and brutal influences of the Yakuza and
> prostitutes might fear reprisals); 4) What empirical work have you
> done/published in this area?; 5) How many activists dealing with mail-
> order-brides, prostitution etc in Asia and elsewhere have you spoken
> with?
Jim: THIS kind of argument, I think, is called "appeal to authority". I
haven't done ANY formal field research in the sex industry, nor have I
pretended to. What I know has come from informal interaction and
investigatiang the results of others research. You sound like a Pentagon
spokesperson back in the 1960s to anti-war dissidents: "If you haven't
been in the battlefields in Vietnam, then you don't know what you're
talking about and should shut up and believe the authorities!" This kind
of argument assumes that we disagree about facts and that you can one-up
me because you have "been there". Our arguments here have never been about
"facts" Mr Gradgrind, but about what we make of various situations we have
seen, heard and read about. Indeed, you have never disputed the examples I
have pointed to, only thrown up evidence of other situations as an excuse
for dismissing the former. You have been so intent on laying out
evidence from your experience and waving your revolutionary fervor that a
real dialog has never happened. (As to Satoko's work, I've already given
the url for her proposal and she can speak for her self when she returns
from the field. What I can tell you is that she has been living and
working in the red-light district of a major Japanese industrial city and
keeping a detailed journal on her experiences and what she has learned
from her sex-worker friends.)
>
> If anyone is interested, I can make copies of my work (in Spanish)
> in Puerto Rico ("Dimensions, Impacts and Dynamics of Some Industries
> of the Underground Economy of Puerto Rico") including some of my raw
> notes and informant reports available.
>
Jim: Like I said, although I might disagree with your interpretations if I
had been with you, given our different perspectives, I have not disputed
your experience. Your research has not been challenged and there is no
need to offers your notebooks as proof.
> Here we go back to an old debate. When any and all forms of rebellion
> or counter-culture are framed as progressive and characterized as
> "self-valorization", "individualistic empowerment" etc, then it
> becomes very easy to legitimate--even commodify--narcissistic self-
> indulgence as "revolution."
Jim: Here you go again. Please cite, concretely, where I have "framed"
"all forms of rebellion or counter-culture" as "progressive" or called
them "self-valorization"?? I have not. You rave and rant, raise up straw
men and burn them to the ground. You convince, I dare say, no one, of
anything except your own intemperateness.
The libertarians and other anarchists
> love this stuff because it allows them to indulge in their own
> individualistic acts and self-indulgent life styles (that really do
> nothing for anybody except themselves and a few followers) and handle
> the congnitive dissonance problem by framing any and all acts of
> ultra-individualism as "rebellion" and therefore "revolutionary."
>
Jim:Ah, ha! So now you flail away at "libertarians and other anarchists"
and try to tar me in the process, just like you did with Satoko and
Japanese racists. You don't come right out and attack me directly, you do
so through loose association. Tsk,tisk! You may think that all
libertarians and anarchists "indulge" themselves and rationalize it as
revolutionary, but if you do, it just shows you don't know many of them.
> They can say "we are all whores" in some way so therefore what the
> hell, one kind of whoring is the same as another.
Jim: Show me some anarchist writing where this is done. You won't find it
in Emma Goldmann's work, or any other that I have seen. In as much as I
have said "we are all prostitutes" you are clearing trying to smear me
indirectly. But I have never said "therefore what the hell"! That's your
fantasy, conjured up because, I guess, you can't see what to do with the
arguments that I have suggested to you.
On one level I can
> see the argument, and certainly academics who do Faustian bargains
> for tenure, promotions, publish-or-perish etc have no business
> "looking down" on prostitutes; on the other hand, I just can't forget
> the pain and devastation I have seen in Asia and elsewhere. I'm
> sorry, but this crap
Jim: "Crap"? There is a basic rule in conversation that I think should be
followed on the Net as well as elsewhere. When conversation degenerates
into the use of abusive language, it should end.
about the voluntarism and "free exchange" and
> "self-empowerment" and "self-valorization" glosses over some very
> ugly and very brutal realitites. Tell all of this stuff to the young
> Shan girls who are lured or even bought into brothels in thailand,
> who are kept in peonage and abject slavery, who are used even after
> they acquire AIDS and other diseases and then sent back to their
> villages to die.
>
Jim: The brutalities that some women (and children and men) suffer in the
sex industry have been denied by no one. No one has suggested that you or
anyone "forget". Only that you not be so blinded by it that you give up
thinking and only rant.
> Historically the anarchists and "left"-libertarians and "bohemians"
> who have infiltrated Left movements have always taken much more than
> they have ever given in my opinion. By framing all ultra-
> individualistic acts as "rebellion" and all "rebellion" as
> "revolution" they can crank out their narcissistic self-indulgent
> poetry or crank out their profitable Left-market-niche theories
> (carving up reality and facts to fit real a priori theories) without
> any real coommitment, discipline, focus or whatever.
>
> Well as that other individualistic and rebellious and
> counter-culture "revolutionary" Dennis Miller says: "Of course that's
> my opinion, I could be wrong."
>
> Jim Craven
>
Jim: What you have ended with is a canned rant -an, I would guess, well
rehersed denunciation of the "ultra-left" totally unconnected through any
argument with what I have said before. Rant on, but you will rant alone.
Harry
............................................................................
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA
Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427
(off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cleaver homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html
Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
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