Ask the Valley Advocate to Stop Profiting from the Sexual Exploitation of Women

We have heard that the Valley Advocate, our local alternative weekly, prides itself on championing the cause of the underdog. Unfortunately, if that underdog is female, another champion will need to be found.

In the back pages of the Advocate, and on their websites, you will find ads like the following:

Escorts, Massage, or TVs/TS

REBEKA Sweet, Sexy & Sophisticated w/Hot, Tight Body 413-433-xxxx Most Saturdays 10am-6pm

LIPS OF AN ANGEL Will Grant U 3 Wishes Multiple Hours Avail. 413-657-xxxx

SOMETHING SPECIAL “Tiffany” “Emilly” N. Hampton to Keene to Brattleboro Hiring 18-25 yo 413-588-xxxx

HOT COLLEGE Co-eds Rule Summer! School’s Out, Clothes Off, SEXY Co-eds NAKED! 413-244-xxxx

Jessika & Jenni We Aim to Please! 2 Girls Avail, 24/7, in/out 860-268-xxxx

“EXOTIC HEAT” At Your Service! Cum See The Summer Sizzlin Special 413-657-xxxx

CONSENTING ADULTS Experienced professional service. Special rates for new clients. 413-977-xxxx

WET & WILD! Super Soaked & Sexy Sexy, Fresh New Faces 413-244-xxxx

“EXOTIC ENT.” Sexy Prof. Discreet 20 minute Specials! Cum See The End of Summer Specials 413-657-xxxx

EXXXQUISITE COMPANIONS 413-537-xxxx

NOTHING LIKE YOUR GIRLFRIEND Slim, pretty, 25, smart & *wild* 413-695-xxxx

Adult Employment

Personal Assistant Hiring attractive female 18-30 for back rubs, oral and more. Call anytime 413-233-xxxx

Entertainment for Hire

MAXIM 8 NEW MODELS. PRIVATE LINGERIE SHOW. 413-731-xxxx

Strip Club Ads

Magic Lantern of Route 20, Palmer, MA

Mardi Gras of 91 Taylor Street, Springfield, MA

XSTATIC of 240 Chestnut Street, Springfield, MA

Talklines

49 cents/MINUTE CHEAP SLUTS 1-800-625-xxxx…

HORNY SLUTS Get You Off For Only $10 BUCKS 1-800-xxx-SLUT

While ads like these only take up a few pages in the paper or on the web, their financial impact is probably greater than they appear. Apparently it is common industry practice to charge commercial sex enterprises up to four times the standard advertising rates.

Over the past several months, we have delivered to the Advocate’s offices at Eastworks volumes of information about the link between escort ads and prostitution, the harms of strip clubs, and the fact that New York Press just decided to walk away from adult advertising. We have relayed our concerns directly to editor Tom Vannah. We have received no response. The ads continue. We invite you to join us in asking the Advocate to cease facilitating this business. Contact them here.


See also:

“New York Press No Longer Marketing Arm for Prostitution/Trafficking”
New York, New York – Under the new ownership of Manhattan Media, New York Press, a weekly publication, will be free of ads that advertise illegal massage parlors and blatant ads promoting prostitution. Manhattan Media initially will take a financial hit by dropping sex ads that have made up a sizable percentage of New York Press sales, but the long-term growth prospects for this widely-circulated newspaper dramatically increase as it is remade into a reputable publication.

“Tom Allon is a trailblazer,” said Sonia Ossorio, President of the National Organization for Women in New York City. “He sees the future of the newsprint business, and that future isn’t reliant on the fast, cheap money of the prostitution industry. With the increased public awareness of global trafficking of women and girls, including American teenagers, advertisers and readers find newspapers loaded with explicit content and photos of half-naked women just not acceptable. Not something they want in their reception room or on the coffee table.”

Today, trafficking human beings for sexual exploitation, labor, and domestic servitude is the third fastest growing illegal enterprise. The United States is the second highest destination in the world for trafficked women…

Ads provide buyers of commercial sex access to trafficked women…

Another Victory for NOW-NYC: New York Magazine Drops Sex Ads
New York Magazine agreed Tuesday to stop accepting sex ads after the local chapter of a women’s rights group threatened protests outside the popular weekly publication…

[NOW-NYC] has been asking other local media to stop taking the salacious ads and said it has won agreements to do so from 14 other publications including Time Out New York and New York Press…

“Trafficking exists because there aren’t enough women to do this assembly line brothel work,” the president of NOW’s New York City chapter, Sonia Ossorio, said. While no one knows exactly how many women are prostituted against their will, it is indisputable that some come to New York with promises of legitimate jobs only to find these don’t exist and there’s only one way to pay off their debts.

One would think that this would be exactly the kind of exploitation the [Village] Voice would revel in exposing. But because the Voice is free, it apparently needs the revenue brought in by, this week, 10 pages of these ads.

And so its press release yammers on about how our freedoms are “under attack by the Bush administration,” and makes NOW sound like the Taliban, and finally trots out the same pathetic excuse New York once made: “If there is evidence that any advertiser in our pages engaged in…sex slavery…” Blah blah blah.

It’s hard to be part of the solution, when you’re part of the problem.

New Competitor to Craigslist Rejects Ads for “prostitution services and other questionable listings”

Testimony from Northampton: Porn Entwined with Years of Domestic Abuse; Sex Ads in Alt Weeklies (explicit language)
After an unwanted visit from him, when he was abusive and once again insistent on sexual acts, I discovered later when receiving my phone bill, that prior to the abuse, he had made many phone calls to the 1-900 sex calls that he had [seen] in the Valley Advocate…

Valley Advocate: “Erotica: Eden’s Dark Side”
The mafia and its business associates understand the First Amendment, and they know how to push liberals’ buttons. They’ve done it before in this area with dismaying success, recruiting liberal lawyers to help keep notorious Springfield mobster Al Bruno out of jail in the early ’90s, to mention one example…

It’s a far cry from D.H. Lawrence, from gentle line drawings of women making love with women, to a store front that sets a porn mogul with a history of mafia ties up in the middle of Northampton’s Rte. 5 business district. It would be an irony, and not a happy one, for the more elevated arguments in favor of porn to shield the underside of the industry as it would touch down in Northampton, possibly drawing profits to interests quite at odds with the character of this community.

Pasadena Weekly: “Lives for sale”
“They’re always a point of concern,” Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian told the newspaper. “We follow up on them fairly regularly. I have always been surprised that the [Pasadena] Weekly underwrites the exploitation of women to some degree.”

…“Asian Lovers: Best Young Girls in Town,” “Asian Girl: Pretty Apples,” “Grand Opening, Young Asian Cuties,” read several ads that appeared recently in the Weekly…

Ivy Suriyopaf, an attorney with the Asian-American Defense League, said that if an ad is suspicious, newspapers shouldn’t run it.

“Publications have a choice about whether to run certain ads,” said Suriyopaf. “If they have any reason to believe that businesses are conducting illicit activities, they have a social responsibility to report it to the authorities or, at the very least, not run the business’ advertisements.”

Belltown Messenger: “Greed, Lust and Ink”
…the only motivation for running escort ads in the first place is unbridled greed-and these supposedly liberal publications can’t have it both ways when defending the rights of society’s underdogs in their editorial content…

Carolyn McKenzie: Disease, Intoxicants Prevalent Among Strip Dancers (explicit language)
I’ve had wives call me and say, “I’m reading the credit card bill, and there’s all these strange expenses on it, places I’ve never heard of.” Well, those places are the cover organizations for the clubs, or the massage
parlors, or lingerie services that their husbands have been frequenting. The next question I get is, “Well do you think I need to get a physical check-up?” And I say, “Yes, you do.” I can’t tell you how many of them call me back and say they have turned up positive for an STD. I also want to tell you about these 39 women that we have helped to get out of the industry. Out of that number of 39 women, only 6% were married. 90% were single moms trying to support their kids… 75% of them had STD’s when we took them in for their medical check-ups. 16% had felony records that they were working with and 25% had misdemeanors. 95% of them were using drugs and alcohol, and three of them had addictions so severe that we had to put them in long term rehab programs.

The Science Behind Pornography Addiction (explicit language)
[Performers in the sex industry] have high rates of substance abuse, typically alcohol and cocaine, depression, borderline personality disorder which is a particularly serious disorder and dissociative identity disorder which used to be called multiple personality disorder. The experience I find most common among the performers is that they have to be drunk, high or dissociated in order to go to work. Their work environment is particularly toxic. One study on strippers indicated that they were likely to be punched, slapped, grabbed, called cunt and whore and to be followed home or stalked.

Strip Clubs Are the Next Hot Thing on Wall Street, Fund Manager Tells Barron’s
“…the girls who work there, the dancers, or what the industry calls the “talent,” pay $150 to $200 a shift for the privilege of working…

“I asked one guy in the business, ‘What’s the biggest risk to your business model?’ He said if the government stops immigration from Eastern Europe.”

New York Times: “The Girls Next Door”; Worldwide Sex Trafficking; Role of Porn
In Eastern European capitals like Kiev and Moscow, dozens of sex-trafficking rings advertise nanny positions in the United States in local newspapers; others claim to be scouting for models and actresses…

”…[Young women’s] idea of prostitution is ‘Pretty Woman,’ which is one of the most popular films in Ukraine and Russia. They’re thinking, This may not be so bad…”

Gloria Steinem at Smith: Cooperation, Not Domination
…there are more slaves in proportion to the world’s population–more people held by force or coercion without benefit from their work–more now than there were in the 1800s. Sex trafficking, labor trafficking, children and adults forced into armies: they all add up to a global human-trafficking industry that is more profitable than the arms trade, and second only to the drug trade. The big difference now from the 1800s is that the United Nations estimates that 80% of those who are enslaved are women and children…

State of Minnesota, Report of the Attorney General’s Working Group on the Regulation of Sexually Oriented Businesses, Office of the Attorney General (June 6, 1989)
This is a seminal work which investigates the secondary effects of adult businesses from a number of different research perspectives. Not only is the effect on crime included, so is the effect on neighborhood disorganization and disorder, as are the effects on property values addressed. The New York study also concluded that business locations with adult-oriented businesses had a significant loss of sales tax collections (42%) as compared to control areas. Studies of Minneapolis, St. Paul, Indianapolis, Phoenix, and Los Angeles are cited. RICO and organized criminal elements of the industry are also discussed. It was found that dramatic increases in crime rates were directly associated with the introduction of adult-oriented businesses into any community studied. Evidence is articulated indicating that property crimes were forty to fifty percent higher, and sex-related crimes were found to be seventy to as much as 500 percent higher–depending upon the municipality. Other non-crime community issues are also discussed.

Prosperous Minneapolis Commercial Area Blighted by Proliferation of Adult Enterprises
The adult bookstores and theaters which now line Lake Street have indelibly marked the character of the business community. Once a prosperous commercial area, East Lake Street now is characterized by decline and deterioration. Many legitimate businesses have moved out of the neighborhood and new ones have not replaced them. Business owners are frightened by the real possibility of business failure. When women do not feel safe on the streets, they will not come to the stores to shop. Legitimate businesses do not want to subject their employees, especially women employees, to harassment from the customers of the adult bookstores and theaters.

New York Times: “As Prostitutes Turn to Craigslist, Law Takes Notice”

Andrea Dworkin: Time for Progressives to Stand with the Victims, Not the Users (explicit language)
This is a political point: what once was the Left wants to be the user, does not want to be anywhere but on top of the used; and some so-called feminists want to be the user, not to be under, not to be the condemned, the injured.

Hustling the Left
As Craft demonstrates in the numerous Hustler cartoons she reproduces on her site, the magazine mocks child abuse (often by depicting the child as sexually precocious and seducing the adult), and promotes racism and violence against women. Hustler invites readers to identify with Nazis, wife-beaters, incestuous fathers and kidnappers of children (the famous “Chester the Molester” cartoons). The Left would show no mercy to any other corporation that made money by trafficking in racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic images. Why does the porn industry get a free pass?