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Sex

Well, yes

In direct response to the claims made on Guido Fawkes’s website, a spokesman for Mr Hague said: “Any suggestion that the Foreign Secretary’s relationship with Chris Myers is anything other than a purely professional one is wholly inaccurate and unfounded.”

There are different meanings of the word \”professional\” of course.

MacShane on trafficking

Dennis MacShane really is a one, isn\’t he?

David Cameron and Nick Clegg stand accused of sending the \”wrong signal\” to pimps and human traffickers across the world after the coalition decided against endorsing an EU directive designed to co-ordinate European efforts to combat the trade in sex slaves.

As new figures show that fewer traffickers are being jailed than at any time in the last five years, Labour called for a government rethink on the directive, appealing to the pro-European Liberal Democrats to explain to their coalition partners the benefits of EU action.

Denis MacShane, Labour\’s former Europe minister, launched the appeal after the government decided not to sign up to the directive. The document includes a common definition of the crime of trafficking, to make it easier to convict offenders in the EU\’s 27 member states.

Absence of successful prosecution is taken to be proof that not enough is being done.

Only five people were convicted of human trafficking for sexual exploitation in the first six months of this year, according to figures from the UK Human Trafficking Centre, compared with 33 and 34 in the previous two 12-month periods. A further nine were convicted of other offences, having been arrested on suspicion of trafficking.

The alternative, that the low number of successful prosecutions means that not many are committing the crime seems not to be even considered.

For example, we don\’t take the low number of High Treason prosecutions as being evidence that we must change the definition of High Treason. Rather, we take it as evidence that not many people are committing High Treason.

And yes, MacShane\’s partner is indeed one of the loopier campaigners on this point, almost as bad as Julie Bindel.

LGBTQI

A new acronym appears: LGBTQI.

And what does it mean?

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning and Intersex

The \”transgender\” is sometime replaced with \”transgender/transexual\” which would, I suppose, give us LGBTTQQI.

I suppose we could have the occasional bit of fun by adding further terms: LGBTTQQII, so that we can include the indifferent. Or LGBAPIASTQQII for LGBanyportinastormTTQQII.

At some point though wouldn\’t it make more sense to simply say NEH?

Not exclusively heterosexual?

Who? Who?

Cabinet minister may act over false claims of gay affairs

The thing is, have things moved on enough now that the allegation would be an affair or two, thus breaching his oath to his wife, or that he\’s gay? Which of the two is actually considered disreputable these days?

On gamete donation

I believe the dignity of parents, donors and the unborn would be threatened by introducing marketplace values.

And without marketplace values there won\’t be those unborn to have their dignity threatened.

When are we English going to get over this distaste for \”trade\”?

Err, why?

Currently the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA) imposes a £250 cap on payments so as to avoid commercialising the procedure.

\”We are suggesting moving closer to the Spanish system. But there is no suggestion of adopting the US model where a good-looking girl with a degree can get $30,000 (£19,000) for her eggs.\”

But the low payment is thought to be behind a shortage in egg and sperm donation which is driving infertile women and men to overseas – often unregulated – clinics, according to research.

Now the HFEA is considering adopting the Spanish system which would see the payment cap lifted to £800.

\”We want to review egg donation,\” Professor Lisa Jardine, the chair of the HFEA told the Sunday Times.

Why won\’t you move to the American system?

You\’ve already bought into the idea that people are, at least in part, motivated by money. So why not allow an open market?

If you allow payments that are too high then the principle of donation is lost.

You, the \”ethical\” bureaucrats, may think that the principle of \”donation\” is very important but:

The number of women registered as egg donors has risen slightly from 946 in 1998 to 1,150 now. The real problem is that the number of women wanting fertility treatment has risen much faster than this.

It seems that of the 25 million odd women in the country 24,998,850 disagree with you.

What the fuck is it with these people that makes them assume that their distaste for trade is shared by everyone else?

For that\’s what it is, it\’s just that old English nonsense that bringing money into things is just not done.

It\’s absurd, we\’re so short of men willing to toss off into plastic cups that sperm is imported wholesale from Denmark.

Project Acumen: not quite what we\’ve been told really

Project Acumen is yet another investigation into trafficking into the sex industry.

It\’s what led to the stories of there being 12,000 trafficked women last week.

Seems that there are some problems with these numbers.

Like, y\’know, they\’re bollocks?

….then you’re trafficked. Because that’s what the protocol says. Now it doesn’t say that in Westminster law because the Home Office is full of highly paid assholes living off the taxpayer who haven’t learnt to cut and paste yet,

Yes, you really do want to read it. Apparently, if you\’re working in a brothel because you\’re poor and not paying your national insurance stamp then you\’re trafficked.

Fun with numbers

One of those numbers that we don\’t really know all that much about is the number of Teh Gays there are.

No one has actually gone around everyone in the country and asked how they prefer to have their gonads fondled: Tab A to Slot A, Tab to Tab or Slot to Slot. So we can only make approximations.

We do get numbers like 10% of the population but those come from activists like Peter Tatchell who have an obvious desire to big up what they are activists about. They also seem to include all of those who have ever gone tab to tab or slot to slot as being always desiring to do so. A bit like calling the child who has tried spinach once a spinach eater even if all subsequent attempts to offer spinach lead to it being hidden behind the potatoes.

We also get numbers like 1 and 2% and these seem to represent those who are exclusively tab/tab, slot/slot, desires not changing at all dependent upon circumstances (for given the malleability of human sexuality we know very well that the desire for sex/love will overcome much finickiness about the type of it in restrictive circumstances).

So today we are given the figures for civil partnerships:

Figures published by the Office for National Statistics show that in 2006, the first full year after the law changed, there were 16,106 civil partnerships.

The following year, after many of the couples who had been waiting to enjoy legal union took advantage of the new law, there were half as many – 8,728.

The figure fell again in 2008 to 7,169 and figures published on Thursday show there were 6,281 civil partnerships last year.

Of these, 51 per cent were between male couples while the average age of men having civil partnerships was 41.2 and 38.9 among women. Most took place in Westminster and Brighton.

So, what\’s the number of marriages?

The provisional number of marriages registered in England and Wales in 2008 was 232,990.

Now in some ways these numbers are directly comparable, in that civil partnerships are only for Teh Gays while marriages are only for Teh Straights.

In others they\’re not….that first year of CPs is clearly the clearing of something of a backlog. We might wibble about straights being more likely to marry because of children but given that the majority (I think it is now?) are born outside marriage that\’s not all that important.

So we might take a stab at saying that Teh Gays appear to be about 3% of the population.

What we\’ve actually got is that the number of gay couples sufficiently committed to wish to register that committment in a legal manner is about 3% of the straights who wish to do the same. But it\’s not an unreasonable way of estimating prevalence in the general population is it?

Project Acumen

Looks like we\’ve got the numpties writing the reports again:

UP to 12,000 women have been smuggled into Britain and forced to work as prostitutes earning hundreds of millions of pounds for organised crime gangs, reveals a new study.

Sigh. Being smuggled into the country is one thing. Working in the sex trade is another. And being forced to work in the sex trade yet another. Evidence of one is evidence of illegal immigration. Evidence of one and two is evidence of illegal immigration for the purposes of working in hte sex trade.

Only evidence of three is evidence of sex slavery.

The two-year study, known as Project Acumen, revealed that 30,000 women are working in brothels around the country.

Police estimate 17,000 are immigrants and believe 11,800 may have been trafficked into the country.

Right:

The study also found that around 5,000 of the foreign prostitutes ­working here had suspected they were likely to end up working in the sex industry long before they left home.

That\’s incredibly lame.

What we want to know is what is the number who are forced into sex work….what is the number who are being raped repeatedly?

Shit, did they get Julie Bindel to write this one too?

Err, no Tracy

In Britain, that’s an average of 12.7 heterosexual partners over a lifetime, compared with just 6.5 for women. Except that it is logistically impossible for the average man to have more partners than the average woman.

Depends which average we\’re talking about: entirely possible for 1% of women to have hundreds or even thousands of sexual contacts and 99 % to have few.

We even have a name for those who make their living doing so: prostitutes.

Err, Laurie?

The distinction between sexuality itself and the submissive, identikit heterosexual performativity currently demanded of young women and girls is a crucial one. Only when we accept that girls have sexual agency can we ask why it is so often stripped from them by structures of violence, shame and abuse. Only when we understand that young women and girls have legitimate sexual desires can we demand to know why those desires are stolen, exploited and sold back to them by a culture that bombards them with images of perky, passive, pouting women whose defining characteristic is their erotic availability to men.

Yes, it\’s OK, I do know that there are more variations of sexuality under the Sun than anyone has quite managed to catalogue as yet (no one has as yet listed all of the examples of Rule 34 for example).

However, in a species which reproduces sexually it\’s really not all that much of a surprise that the general, widespread, most common, \”normal\” if you like, expression of sexuality is about sexual reproduction is it?

You know, Tab A, Slot A, availability or not for that activity, that sort of thing?

Seems entirely reasonable

Gill had written: \”Some time ago, I made a cheap and frankly unnecessary joke about Clare Balding looking like a big lesbian. And afterwards somebody tugged my sleeve to point out that she is a big lesbian.\”

After a mock apology, he continued: \”Now back to the dyke on a bike, puffing up the nooks and crannies at the bottom end of the nation.\”

Balding complained to Witherow. She was then \”appalled\” to receive a reply stating: \”In my view some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society.

\”Not having a privileged status means, of course, one must accept occasionally being the butt of jokes. A person\’s sexuality should not give them a protected status.

\”Jeremy Clarkson, perhaps the epitome of the heterosexual male, is constantly jeered at for his dress sense (lack of), adolescent mindset and hairstyle. He puts up with it as a presenter\’s lot and in this context I hardly think that AA Gill\’s remarks were particularly cruel, especially as he ended by so warmly endorsing you as a presenter.\”

Ms Balding has responded by taking to Twitter to call Gill a \”twat\”, one of the synonyms for the female genitalia.

So far advantage Gill I would have said.

Being a bit coy

So, err, what was this reference?

As part of the promotion, supposedly embarrassing messages would be posted under the user\’s name, which could be seen by friends entitled to view their Facebook profile.

But the promotion backfired when a parent protested after finding her 14-year-old daughter had been sent a message that made direct reference to a hardcore pornographic film, which has an underground following.

The film the message referred to is particularly controversial because of practices it depicts. One parent, a Mrs Rickman, voiced her concerns on the social networking site Mumsnet.

Two women one cup or something?

And what is so disgusting that Mrs. Rickman would get the reference but that her 14 year old should be protected from the very mention of?