Clarification
Regular Guy said:
You'll have to elaborate on this one for me. Not quite sure of "180 deg. turn." (I think you mean we tend to stick to Incall and Outcall.) If you are suggesting that what many of us are all engaging in here (outcall in the pleasant environment of a quality establishment) is less marginalized by society than at the street level. Okay. Not sure if I got that right.
Quite true! This is part of the dark side of the hobby and you are right. They don't have the resources or the wherewithal to post here and if on drugs and dealing with exposure to the elements, being debilitated is a factor. Olie did a wonderful job of educating us on that aspect with photos and commentary some time back. Thing is though, he did it on this board and many here followed it. So we can't say we weren't educated as to the aspects of the street side of it all. Not sure what case they might plead. That it is not as bad on the streets as we might paint it?
Self-serving ignorance is not a specific trait of hobbying; the phenomenon has its usefulness in various sectors of human activities.
Yet a certain amount of ignorance is vital to hobbying. This hobby is sustainable under the condition that there will always be enough participants who agree to ignore some of the embarrassing information pertaining to the industry. In other words, whoever partakes this hobby, there’s a point he’ll need to turn his back, make that 180-degree turn I was talking about.
Otherwise he would be acting against his own interest. He wouldn’t be hobbying anymore because hobbying is very much about not addressing the issue of prostitution. Once a hobbyist steps out of bound, he can either choose to see or to ignore or, perhaps, turn into a monster of contradiction, akin a certain poster we came to know all too well.
The photographic diary posted in the Street Action section raises dissent and reasonable protest. It also has its usefulness, one that extends well beyond the consumer report-type information and reaches outside the sphere of board members and clients. That being said, such information might only be the tip of the iceberg as even the most informed and daring street action guru won’t push his curiosity pass the critical point where he’d have to reconsider his hobby.
There are indeed sectors of the city, buildings, parks, that remain uninvestigated, ignored or overshadowed the same way there are dealings within the “higher spheres” of the industry that are better left untold, ironically speaking.
But self-serving ignorance is not the exclusive privilege of hobbyists. The animators of the social debate surrounding prostitution, the abolitionists as well as workgroups such as Chez Stella, also have a vested interest in ignorance. Conveniently, Chez Stella choose to brush off the issues of juvenile and street-gang related prostitution, which btw is marginalized by self-appointed experts like Fran Shavers who has yet to provide some local data instead of extrapolations of foreign data to backup her statements.
Meanwhile, abolitionists are too caught up in their paternalistic discourse to bother listening to what prostitutes have to say. To abolitionism icon Richard Poulin, there would be no such thing as independent providers: the prostitute must be victimized and infantilized at any cost.
Board discussions surrounding the hobby, social discourse, public policies, these have limited connectivity with the realities of prostitution.