sexuality

When Augusta licensed its prostitutes

by Bill Kirby at The Augusta Chronicle

Augusta was booming in 1941. A military buildup had downtown streets swelling with soldiers from the nearby Army camp. . . ‘The soldiers want girls and are going to get them.’ Regulation, he concluded was the only practical solution. ‘The problem of prostitution in army camp towns cannot be solved by the moral indignation of good citizens. The traffic cannot be eradicated in a city of Augusta’s size even in normal times, let alone when 20,000 or more young men from all walks of life spend their leaves and money within her borders.’

Study suggests ‘hookups’ can turn into meaningful relationships

University of Iowa News Release

We didn’t see much evidence that relationships were lower quality because they started off as hookups. The study suggests that rewarding relationships are possible for those who delay sex. But it’s also possible for true love to emerge if things start off with a more ‘Sex and the City’ approach, when people spot each other across the room, become sexually involved and then build a relationship.

6 Reasons to Have Casual Sex

by Monica Shores

Casual sex and one-night stands are almost always framed as damaging to women, particularly young women. In recent years, writers like Laura Sessions Stepp and Wendy Shalit have issued dire warnings about the alleged dangers of sex outside of committed relationships. Let’s call this rhetoric what it is: a tired repeat of the sexist double standards that have haunted women for centuries.

If we want having sex with all sorts of people to be accepted, whether money is exchanged or not, can we accept those who prefer having sex with virtual characters? Last year I wrote about cosplay, in which dressing up has a big role in erotic scenes. Now here’s an article that explores erotic and sexual practices associated with otaku, a Japanese word referring to people devoted to or obsessed by anime, (animation) manga (comics) and video games - geeks of a particular type. Fantastic worlds peopled with fabulous characters, but here entrepreneurs have evolved dating-entertainment business opportunities to appeal to this group often sidelined in stories about sex - the social prejudice being that people without conventional attractive looks and personalities can’t expect to find partners. Jobs entertaining these customers involve informed conversation about their subcultures. The traditional sex-industry image of the erotic maid is used, too - the service they provide being, in the first place, ’soul care’, performed interest in customers’ concerns.  Temporary girlfriends, virtual girlfriends, maid escorts - this is a real hybrid phenomenon. Note: 1000 yen = 8 euros

The Otaku Sex Industry: sometimes, the real thing is better? 

Benjamin Boas, 11 March 2010, Japan Subculture Research Center

. . . Otaku have been booming in the popular consciousness since 2005, when Fuji TV aired its prime time drama Densha Otoko, a beauty and the beast romance starring an otaku. Women’s magazines raved about how the show championed otaku as new potential partners for middle-aged career women, but otaku remained incredulous. That same year, Toru Honda wrote Dempa Otoko, a manifesto calling for otaku to abandon “love” for human females and embrace moe for two-dimensional characters. His book sold 33,000 copies in three months, and fans planted signs in Akihabara reading, “Real Otaku Don’t Desire Real Women.”

But Honda is the voice of an extreme minority. “We may have sworn off dating, but that does not mean we don’t have sex,” says Hiroyuki Egami, 23, a prominent voice among himote, a catchall for otaku types unpopular with the ladies. By Egami’s estimation, paying for sex is easier and more honest than wining and dining women to prove oneself a worthy mate.

Those who share Egami’s assessment may head to one of dozens of cosplay cabaret or image clubs found in Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ikebukuro. While many just use the terms of otaku culture such as moe to make a splash, some take pains to attract a demographic deeply involved with media images of the opposite sex.

“Pure-cos” in Shibuya caters to all of the fantasy wishes of its customers by offering close to one hundred costumes based on famous anime heroines. Employees are expected to talk the talk as well; on its hiring page, Pure-cos warns potential employees that customers will expect them to talk and converse about their favorite anime and manga. Staff are rewarded with all the manga they can read during breaks and coupons for the local Mandarake store.

The shift to more physical pleasures is also apparent in Akihabara. The omnipresent maids used to just pour tea, but the boom surrounding Densha Otoko has put cafes in fierce competition and encouraged a diversification of services. Royal Milk, for example, offers its customers “soul care,” 60 minutes of one-on-one talk time with a maid for 9,000 yen. With a market of lonely men that ripe it was only a matter of time before talk shifted to sex.

The area in front of The Radio Kaikan used to be called Maid Row for all the costumed girls passing out fliers there. However, adverts for maid escorts—costumed girls who play the part of a temporary girlfriend–began to outnumber those for cafes, and authorities chased the maids off the street in June 2007. Today, many men shopping in Akihabara have one or even two maids escorts by their side. They pay 1,000 yen per 10 minutes for the company and compliments on computer-buying skills. Maid escorts ostensibly work between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m., the operating hours of most stores in the area, but local authorities warn of “maid enjo” prostitution after dark.

It remains to be seen how purely “otaku” any of this is. Even as clubs using the otaku vernacular are on the rise, the major buzz in the community surrounds games such as Love Plus and Dream C Club. In the former, players can use their Nintendo DS to interact in real-time with a virtual girlfriend. The latter is a virtual hostess club, which simulates an ultra-real experience down to the overpriced drinks. Real money is exchanged for virtual currency to enjoy an array of services. While otaku imagery in the mizu shoubai world may be on the rise, it seems that otaku still prefer to pay for the not so real thing.

Nile Cruise: Photo Rudolph.A.Furtado

Do you know whether or not you are a prostitute? asks a sign in Shanghai I wrote about last year. Like that piece, the one below mulls over the slippery meanings ascribed to women’s behaviour in regard to sex, whether any money is involved or not. This time the setting is urban, middle-class Egypt. Excerpts highlight the anthropologist’s attempts to pin down what her companions mean when they call a woman a prostitute, in part revolving around her studies of Gulf tourists visiting Egypt. What’s being discussed is sometimes known as whore stigma, according to which certain behaviours signify dirty status for women who are certainly not sex professionals.

What is a Prostitute? 

L.L. Wynn,  24 June 2008, American Sexuality

It was 2000 and I was at a dinner party in Cairo. I was sitting with Malak, a belly dancer, and we were eyeing up a young woman who had large oval eyes thickly lined with black kohl and a wide mouth painted salmon.. . . Malak looked her up and down skeptically, and then she said to me in a low voice, “She’s a prostitute. Look, obviously that vulgar man thinks so too, because he wouldn’t dare put his hands all over her like that unless he was sure she was a prostitute.”

. . . It took me a long time to understand what Egyptians meant when they said “prostitute” . . .  But it wasn’t until I could finally shed my own cultural preconceptions about prostitution fundamentally being tied up with money and sex that I finally understood what my Egyptian friends meant. . .

. . . they imagined that Saudis came to Egypt to drink, visit prostitutes, and do everything else that was forbidden back in Saudi Arabia. . . . If I said that I was going to such-and-such a nightclub to observe, and that nightclub was known to be a hangout for Gulf Arabs in the summer, my friends would all try to dissuade me: “Don’t go there, men will harass you. They’ll think you’re a prostitute.” . . .

. . . when suddenly he said to me, “Look, Lisa, a case study.” With the fork he pointed in the direction of two women with short hair who were sitting at a table in the corner. “You really think they’re prostitutes?” Case study had become our code word for a prostitute because of my academic interest in the subject. Lina looked over and agreed with Ayman. “Definitely case studies.”

“I just don’t see it,” . . . Ayman just shrugged, but Lina made an attempt. “It’s a lot of things—they way they look, the way they dress, their makeup, their attitude, the expressions on their face, their body language . . .”

. . .  you don’t look like a prostitute. First of all, you’re always with the same people, in a mixed group of men and women. The worst they might think is that you’re the girlfriend of one of the guys in the group, but we don’t sit close together or touch, so they probably wouldn’t even think that. Second of all, your makeup isn’t like those women. They’re wearing thick black kohl all around their eyes, top and bottom. Third of all, your clothes are more decent—you cover up more than they do.” “Okay, maybe tonight I’m covered up, but sometimes I show more skin.”

. . .” Okay, look, I found one thing that I can point out about those women. You see that one that’s wearing the short sleeveless dress? Look, you can see her bra underneath the arm-holes. And the hem keeps turning up and showing her slip. Put the two things together and you can see that they aren’t used to dressing up and looking comfortable in elegant clothes.”

. . .  “You see that woman with the long wavy black hair sitting at the end of the bar?” The one wearing the skirt with the long slit up to her thigh?” “Right. This woman is well known for being very wealthy and loose. Her father died and she inherited a lot of money and she has her own apartment and she has sexual relationships with men just for pleasure. She’s a prostitute.. . . it’s obvious by the fact that she has her own apartment. A respectable woman does not live alone. . . ”

. . . Eventually I realized that the reason I was struggling to understand the concept of a prostitute had everything to do with my own preconceptions about sex and money. I thought of prostitutes as women who had sex for money. But as I reflected on my friends’ relationships and the role that money played in them, I remembered that all of my Egyptian female friends took money from the men they were dating or married to. It didn’t matter whether they were rich or poor, or even whether the men could afford it. No matter what, their boyfriends, fiancés, or husbands paid for evenings out, for doctor visits, and often for luxury items such as jewelry and designer sunglasses. When they married, men paid women a large bride price, a sum of money up to $10,000 that was hers to spend as she liked. Married men usually gave their wives stipends, even if the wives had their own jobs.

In short, it was not the injection of money into a sexual relationship that defined it as prostitution. . . . Nor was “prostitution” even necessarily about sex, since a woman could be labeled a prostitute when there was no proof that she was sexually active at all. For example, sometimes Zeid and Lina would have disputes over whether a particular friend of Lina’s was a “prostitute” or not. Zeid, for example, claimed that one of Lina’s childhood friends was a prostitute because she drove around alone after midnight. . .

Note: language issues are covered in the article, such as the use of the English word prostitute to distinguish certain meanings from those carried by Arabic words.

Red-light districts use red, pink and orange light for a reason: the warmth we feel at being bathed in them. These colours are found in all kinds of sex-industry businesses around the world, whether brothels in China or saunas in the West.

The eyeball experiences pleasure on its own looking at these colours.

It seems to be more visceral than aesthetic. We see prostitutes here but we also just take in the red colours. The green just acts as a frame above and the blue below.

I wonder how many monogamous couples have red bedrooms?

Some people think swinging and polyamory have nothing to do with the sex industry and are offended to be associated with it. In my conception, swinging parties and sex clubs do form part of the industry, because money is exchanged for opportunities to have, watch, smell and listen to sex - one’s own and others. The managers of venues often provide possible partners for your pleasure - sex workers. And, on the other hand, many customers in sex-industry bars and clubs spend time and money without ever buying ’sex’ itself. The lines supposedly dividing these different entertainment enterprises are very blurred.

When people are offended by this inclusion, it means they think the sex industry is something negative. Since I don’t see it as negative, I’m not insulting anyone who’s associated with it. Rather, I’m engaged in figuring out how and why people think they can differentiate between commercial and non-commercial sex. As far as I can see, after studying it for many years, there’s no way to clearly separate them. Which is a result! It’s a result to find out that the separate categories they teach us about aren’t true, or are, at least, questionable. If you’re more interested in this, consider the cultural study of commercial sex, in its original conception and then later.

Morrissey’s original article moves from Ireland to Berlin and includes many entertaining details. Here I’ve excerpted only the bits most relevant to the sex industry.

More sex with strangers, The Independent (Ireland)

By Deirdre Morrissey, 30 August 2009

. . .  I asked Dominique how she came to open a sex club that hosts parties with titles such as Angel in Bondage, Saturday Night Fuck and Circus Bizarre. “Sex is one of the most interesting aspects of my life. I study it, I talk about it, I do it and I teach it,” said Dominique, in a very matter-of-fact tone. “In 1984, when I was 17,” she continued,

“I started working as a table dancer. Then later I began working as a dominatrix, and shortly afterwards I found out that my mother also worked as a dominatrix. So, the sex industry is in my blood. When I was 20, my mother wanted to retire. . . But she reluctantly agreed to manage my S&M studio and leave punishing the slaves up to me. It was hugely successful: 10 years later we had a thriving family business with 20 girls working full-time.

“Then, four years ago,” she says, “myself and my partner were . . .  at the most notorious sex resort in the world, Hedonism, in Jamaica. While lying in a hammock one day, we looked at each other and decided to open our own fantastic sex club back home in Berlin. . . where the primary focus would be on creating an environment where visitors, all driven by the same longings and desires, could meet to enact erotic fantasies and sexual dreams.”

. . . From the exterior, the club could be mistaken for somebody’s home except for the name Insomnia over the door. . . . Rory paid a cute brunette kitted out in provocative lingerie and high heels a cover charge of €20 for the two of us — very reasonable, given the nature of the club. . . . We went up a few steps and into this huge, red-lit ballroom with a ceiling that reached for the sky. A huge dance floor, with a bar down one side, was littered with deviants. Hardcore porn was being projected onto a massive, 40ft cinema screen overlooking the dance floor. Topless bartenders were shaking cocktails and above the bar was a mural of a giant, cartoonised, glammed-up orgy. . . .

The dance floor is where the foreplay takes place, but little adjoining rooms are where the real action is. A couple of scary girls had a big henchman stripped down to a red thong. The muscles on his arm bulged out either side of a thick metal armband and he wore a studded metal collar around his neck. He was bound in chains and while one of the girls was whipping him, the other tightened his leash each time he howled. . . . In the jacuzzi a couple were having fun while their respective partners watched.

A crowd was gathered around some action in a little side room. . . Some kind of operation was being performed on a girl who lay completely exposed and bound to a medical contraption of some sort. . . . a mezzanine level overlooking the dance floor. The entire area was taken up by several enormous tented beds occupied by couples, threesomes, foursomes and, in some cases, whole teams. . . .

A few years ago I did research on how sex-licensing works in Westminster, the London borough where Soho, Mayfair and Shepherd’s Market are located. The Licensing Act of 2003 (which applies only to England and Wales) streamlined several different licensing schemes into one, authorising local governments to grant a single premises licence to sell alcohol and provide forms of regulated entertainment. The four basic objectives to be taken into account when granting licences are: the prevention of crime and disorder, public safety, prevention of public nuisance and the protection of children from harm.

Businesses and entertainment conceived as sexual (because of the parts of the body that get exposed) must be declared and submit to regulation: sex shops, peep shows, stripping, lap-dancing, pole-dancing, table dancing. Places that have these licences are referred to as Sex (Encounter) Establishments. Gentlemen’s clubs, strip pubs and other venues are included. Regulated activities may allow near nudity but prohibit dancers from standing closer than a metre/3 feet from customers. Regulations always prohibit touching.

Each local authority grants its own licences, which is what the following note from Camden, another borough of London, is about. When I was doing research, Camden had a large number of licensed premises offering sex entertainment. The current issue is whether the Council will include burlesque in the conception of entertainment that must be regulated as sexual.

Camden Council Statement on burlesque
Date: 29/7/09

Camden Council is not preventing burlesque performances in any premises in the borough, it embraces the diverse entertainment on offer in Camden.

Our concern is to ensure proper regulation of the premises proposing to offer licensable activity. Our focus is on the premises - not the performers. It is the responsibility of the venue’s licence holder to ensure they have the correct permission for the event they are hosting.

Burlesque performance in its widest form can include various art forms and this alone would not require a licence. The Council’s concern is with any performance which may involve nudity. The Council looks at each application on an individual basis to assess what type of licence is required.

The Council has met with the burlesque community in response to their concerns and agreed to seek a clearer understanding of what constitutes adult entertainment. This will help define what reasonable measures premises should put in place prior to adult entertainment being performed.

A further meeting between the Council and the Institute is scheduled to take place in September 2009.

More discussion at Save Burlesque in Camden

Recently I wrote about the New York School of Burlesque.

Cosplay is costume play, common to sex and sex work both. Connexions to the sex industry are highlighted in bold. This is an example of the blurry area between commercial and non-commercial sex, where ‘workers’ can be lovers and friends, and vice-versa.

Japanese Cosplay and the Sex Industry 

M. Kiromi

Japanese Cosplay is about the person becoming a chosen character or idea. The person looks and acts exactly like the character they are portraying. You become a specified character in order to become a cosplayer. The sky is the limit, if you can dream it you can become it. Cosplaying is about having fun.

Japan and most other countries have participated in cross dressing as well as cosplay in the sex industry. This is an age old practice where costumes have been used for sexual practices, and dressing up is used for sexual play which is commonly known as a sexual fetishism.

In Japan as well as other countries there are special facilities where you can rent costumes for a night of ecstasy and passion. Specialized facilities like hotels or inns cater only for the sex industry. The costumes you can hire for the occasion range from school uniforms, nursing outfits, or whatever suits your fetish they will accommodate you with the outfit you request.

The Japanese cosplay industry has long been the home to professional cosplayers since the rise of Comiket the Tokyo Game Show, as well as other conventions, there is a misconception that cosplay is specific only to Japan. The term Cosplay is from Japanese origin but this flamboyant occupation is now supported by practicing fans globally.

Terms and conditions have been set by cosplay groups, that whatever character you have chosen to dress up as, you have to become the character, in words, action and nature. Japanese cosplay is not only dressing up and acting out, there are also a rich culture as well as tradition behind the character they have chosen to portray.

However there are costumes worn without any conviction by Japanese cosplayers that westerners would not consider wearing as it would be culturally not correct like a Nazi uniform or any other uniforms worn by dictators in the past. Japanese cosplay does not only cover specified role playing but covers all kinds of obsessive fandom.

I met Jo Weldon more than ten years ago; I think Priscilla Alexander introduced us. The last time I saw Jo was at the Miss Exotic World contest in Las Vegas last year and all I got to do was give her a hug because she was hurrying to a judges’ meeting while I was waiting on line. Other highlights of our relationship include eating tuna-melt sandwiches while discussing threesomes and watching Betty Dodson’s Viva La Vulva!.

If you live in New York, you’ve got the opportunity to attend Jo’s School of Burlesque and learn, among other things:

• the sexy shimmy
• the tantalizing glove peel
• the devastating bump n grind
• the dazzling tassel-twirl 

Burlesque has never stopped being popular, but for some reason commentators are always saying it’s ‘new’ or ‘under revival’. I often think that the ‘newness’ story is about our being able to know more about everything now that we’ve got the internet, youtube, facebook and so on. Anyway, here’s a CBS report from last year about Jo’s school:

Another ever-contentious element of talks about burlesque involve whether doing it is sex work or not; whether burlesque dancers and strippers are sex workers; whether there is a hierarchy in which some kinds of dance are lower and more sexual (lap dancing is named) while others are more artistic. Jo always says she loves them all.

By the way, when I left the Exotic World contest I was hoarse from cheering so much.

On Monday Sarkozy threatened to make wearing a burka in public illegal in France. I wrote about this kind of thinking last year in The Guardian. This issue is related to migration, it is related to trafficking and it is related to commercial sex. Ideas about how the right kind of women should look predominate in the history of women: you’re meant to cover yourself up more, or less, or in some particular way. From the original text of Sarkozy’s speech:

Le problème de la burqa n’est pas une problème religieux, c’est un problème de liberté, de dignité de la femme. Ce n’est pas un signe religieux, c’est un signe d’asservissement, d’abaissement. La burqa ne sera pas la bienvenue dans notre République française.

From the BBC story:

We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity. That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity.

Note the applause from politicians when he makes these statements.

Women wearing burkas are not welcome in France. That ‘Frenchness’ should depend on clothing I find very scary. That the idea of personal identity should be institutionalised by the French state I find even scarier. The original title of the following piece was Which migrants assimilate best? How do we know?, which editors changed to

What Not to Wear - if you want to be French

The Guardian, Comment is Free,  6 August 2008

Laura Agustín

A woman from Morocco who has lived in France for eight years with a French husband, has three French children and speaks fluent French, was refused citizenship recently on grounds of being insufficiently assimilated. The Conseil d’etat said Faiza Silmi’s way of life does not reflect “French values”, particularly the goal of gender equality. The judgment claims she lives in “total submission” to the men in her life because she wears the niqab, which covers all of the face except the eyes. The decision was approved by commentators from right, left and centre. Fadela Amara, the urban affairs minister, called Silmi’s clothing a “prison” and a “straitjacket”. Predictable debates about fundamentalism unfolded in the media, with Silmi appearing as a strange, distant object.

What does Silmi herself say? The website Jeuneafrique.com has just published her first interview with the French press, corroborating another in the New York Times. Silmi’s voice emerges clearly:

I am not submissive to the men in my family nor do I lead the life of a recluse and I go out when I want. When I drive my car, I wear my niqab. I alone decided to wear it, after reading some books. I respect the law and my husband respects my decisions.

While she talked, her husband served tea. Read the rest of this entry »

As regular readers know, I’m trying to figure out how the lovely utopian goal of Gender Equality landed us in a future I never expected, where ‘progressive’ and ‘feminist’ could be associated with policies that position women as innately passive victims. Activists interested in sex-industry legislation usually cite Swedish prostitution law as the fount of all evil, with its criminalisation of the buying of sexual services. This law is a cornerstone of an overall Swedish policy to foment Gender Equality, and so is rape legislation that has led to bizarre statistics commented on in this story published the other day in Sweden’s English-language daily The Local. 

The Local, 11 May 2009 

Is rape rampant in gender-equal Sweden?

Laura Agustín

from okejsex.nu

Rape is a complicated crime. A research project funded by the European Commission’s Daphne programme reveals that Sweden leads Europe in reports of rape. At 46.5 per 100,000 members of the population, Sweden far surpasses Iceland, which comes next with 36, and England and Wales after that with 26. At the same time, Sweden’s 10 percent conviction rate of rape suspects is one of Europe’s lowest.

The report’s comparative dimension should probably be ignored. Instead of assuming that there are four times as many rapes in Sweden as in neighbouring Denmark or Finland, as the figures suggest, to understand we would have to compare all the definitional and procedural differences between their legal systems. It is significant that Sweden counts every event between the same two people separately where other countries count them as one. Most of Sweden’s rapes involve people who know each other, in domestic settings.

The countries reporting highest rates of rape are northern European with histories of social programming to end violence against women. In Sweden, Gender Equality is taught in schools and reinforced in public-service announcements. Should we believe that such education has no effect, or, much worse, an opposite effect? Raging anti-feminist men think so, and raging anti-immigrant Swedes blame foreigners. Amnesty International says patriarchal norms are intransigent in Swedish family life. Everyone faults the criminal justice system.

In contemporary Sweden, women and girls are encouraged to speak up assertively about gender bias and demand their rights. Public discussions have revolved around how to achieve equal sex: Gender Equality in the bedroom. We can consult okejsex.nu, an official campaign whose homepage shows pedestrians obliviously passing buildings full of scenes of violence, suggesting it is ubiquitous behind closed doors. Okejsex defines rape as any situation where sex occurs after someone has said no.

In many countries, and in many people’s minds, rape means penetration, usually by a penis, into a mouth, vagina or anus. In Swedish rape law, the word can be used for acts called assault or bodily harm in other countries.

That may be progressive, but it’s also confusing. You don’t have to be sexist or racist to imagine the misunderstandings that may arise. If younger people (or older, for that matter) have been out drinking and dancing and end up in a flat relaxing late at night, we are not surprised that the possibility of sex is raised. The process of getting turned on – and being seduced – is often vague and strange, involving looks and feelings rather than clear intentions. It is easy to go along and actively enjoy this process until some point when it becomes unenjoyable. We resist, but feebly. Sometimes we give in against our true wishes.

Sweden is also proud of its generous policy towards asylum-seekers and other migrants who may not instantly comprehend what Gender Equality means here, or that not explicitly violent or penetrative sex acts are understood as rape. That doesn’t mean that non-Swedes are rapists but that a large area exists where crossed signals are likely, for instance, amongst people out on the town drinking.

Discussions of rape nowadays use examples of women who are asleep, or have taken drugs or drunk too much alcohol, in order to argue that they cannot properly consent to sex. If they feel taken advantage of the next day, they may call what happened rape. The Daphne project’s Sweden researchers propose that those accused of rape ought to have to ‘prove consent’, but attempts to legislate and document seduction and desire are unlikely to succeed.

What isn’t questioned, in most public discussions, is the idea that the problem must be addressed by more laws, ever more explicit and strict. Contemporary society insists that punishment is the way to stop sexual violence, despite evidence suggesting that criminal law has little impact on sexual behaviour.

We want to think that if laws were perfectly written and police, prosecutors and judges were perfectly fair, then rapes would decrease because a) all rapists would go to jail and b) all potential rapists would be deterred from committing crime. Unfortunately, little evidence corroborates this idea. Debates crystallise in black-and-white simplifications that supposedly pit politically correct arguments against the common sense of regular folk. Subtleties and complications are buried under masses of rhetoric, and commentaries turn cynical: ‘Nothing will change’, ‘the police are pigs’, immigrants are terrorists, girls are liars.

Is it realistic or kind to teach that life in Sweden can always be safe, comfortable and impervious to outside influences? That, in the sexual sphere, everything disagreeable should be called rape and abuse? Although the ‘right’ to Gender Equality exists, we cannot expect daily life to change overnight because it does.