*** Outside of the sources, text below is same as in cartoon. ***

In 2013 elite American media outlets are in a fury about the Obama DOJ’s criminal investigation of James Rosen of Fox News under the Espionage Act of 1917. (3)

In contrast, the criminal pursuit of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks for the same “crime” led much of the US journalistic community to shun him. (4, 3)

In 2010 the NY Times Executive Editor said that Assange was not a “kindred spirit” and that his prosecution would not necessarily be an attack on press freedom. (1)

The Espionage Act of 1917 was first used against non-government-employees who had received and disseminated classified information by the W. Bush DOJ. (2)

Sources

1. Jeff Bercovici, “NY Times Editor: WikiLeaks Is ‘Not My Kind of News Organization,’” Forbes.com, 16 Dec. 2010. LINK

2. Glenn Greenwald, “Attempts to Prosecute WikiLeaks Endanger Press Freedoms,” Salon.com, 14 Dec. 2010. LINK

3. Rebecca Shapiro and Jack Mirkinson, “Obama Administration’s Media Surveillance Unleashes Wave of Condemnation,” HuffingtonPost.com, 22 May 2013. LINK

4. Nancy Youssef, “In WikiLeaks Fight, US Journalists Take a Pass,” McClatchyDC.com, 9 Jan. 2011. LINK

The great graphic novelist, Chester Brown, was kind enough to write a blurb for my book, You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos:

We think we understand our society’s taboos, I certainly thought I did. But reading Robert Arthur’s fascinating, powerful book showed me how little I knew about the subject. You Will Die challenged me in the way that really good books do.

He also gave me a copy of his celebrated biography of the Canadian revolutionary, Louis Riel, with a signed drawing on its title page (pictured above). As the kids used to say back in the 1940s, it blew my wig.

Brown’s latest best-selling graphic novel, Paying For It (2011), details his life as a patron of sex workers. His intimate description of the practice is a welcome rejoinder to the media’s portrayal of all johns as callous misogynists.

Yesterday the Feral House version of You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos was released in both paperback and e-edition. The Feral House version is revised, updated, and has a new concluding chapter on the taboo of death. My illustrations from the self-published versions (Suburra Publishing) were removed and I begrudgingly admit this gives it a more professional appearance.

For those people who have supported me through this journey, I would like to thank you and share a little bit about the odyssey. I began writing this book about ten years ago when I was living in an abandoned schoolhouse in south central Pennsylvania after graduating from NYU Law. It was about five years later that I began self-publishing the first version. It was initially hand-bound. I used thin black cardboard from Ollie’s Bargain Outlet for the cover. For the second edition, I graduated to binding the book with covers made from cereal boxes.

An early fan of my book was a woman from Toronto. After e-mail correspondence and one short visit, I moved in with her on the corner of Bloor and Concord. I lived a bohemian existence there for about a year. Toronto is a wonderfully open-minded city. Evidence of this is that I received no complaints for the early promotional materials I posted in our window facing Bloor traffic.

Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex was the first bookstore to carry You Will Die and one of its employees was the first person to request my autograph. Below is an old picture of a cereal-box You Will Die sitting for sale at Seekers.

I never expected much out of You Will Die. I thought it would be a short experiment. As I wrote in the introduction to my self-published version back in 2006, “If this book is a failure, I will try to conform to society, find a wife, get a real job, and settle down.”* The problem was that every time I was about to label it a failure and move on, I would catch a break. Some of the bigger breaks included winning the Montaigne Medal, having some blog posts/cartoons go viral, finding an agent (Jon Sternfeld), and finally finding a publisher.

Due to its nature, few people will be open-minded enough to read my writing, much less appreciate it. For those who have done both, I give my heartfelt thanks. You Will Die will probably never be a financial success, but one of the reasons I do not regret devoting such a large portion of my life to it is because of the fascinating people with whom it has brought me contact. In the “Death” chapter I wrote:

Life is absurd. No meaning is provided for you. It is marvelously bizarre, random, and comedic. You are brought here to wander and coexist for a brief moment, and then you are gone just as inexplicably and suddenly as you arrived. Many people never ponder death and merely accept the beliefs of those around them. They get pulled into the temporal concerns of the ego and the routine of robotic conformity.**

We will both die, so thanks for pondering life with me while we are here. If you are ever in DC and want to meet for a beverage containing the drug of either caffeine or alcohol, shoot me an e-mail.

Some You Will Die trivia:

My favorite comment on Narco Polo was the following by Moses in 2011, “how about updating your website you lazy dick head?”

* Yesterday, I proposed to my girlfriend in the fountain at DC’s Dupont Circle. She said yes.
** Some of this wording was borrowed from a popular philosophy book. Kudos to anyone who can name it below. In You Will Die proper credit was given.

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In coordination with the January 1st release of the Feral House version of You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos, AlterNet published my article, “Ten Ways Social Taboos About Sex, Drugs and Death Scare Us from Learning the Truth.”

The ten harmful misconceptions caused by taboos covered in the article are:

1. Taboo: Drugs—Misconception: Jesus was against drug use.
2. Taboo: Sex—Misconception: Few women choose to be sex workers.
3. Taboo: Drugs—Misconception: Drugs do not aid creativity.
4. Taboo: Excrement—Misconception: We go to the bathroom properly.
5. Taboo: Drugs—Misconception: Illicit drugs are exceptionally deadly.
6. Taboo: Sex—Misconception: Jesus was against non-marital sex.
7. Taboo: Nasal Mucus—Misconception: Nose-picking is bizarre.
8. Taboo: Sex—Misconception: Homosexuality is a choice.
9. Taboo: Drugs—Misconception: Drug dealers cause drug use.
10. Taboo: Death—Misconception: Modern medicine can save us.

Thanks to Kristen Gwynne (@kristengwynne) at AlterNet for running this unconventional piece.

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In America, our government locks up exponentially more prostitutes than sex traffickers do. Trafficked sex slaves do exist, but in the United States they constitute a microscopic percentage of sex workers. From 2000–2007, 1,362 victims of human trafficking were identified by the federal government in the United States. (4) (This number included those trafficked for non-sexual labor as well.*) In that same time period, there were over half a million prostitution arrests. (3) This means that in America for every identified sex-trafficking victim there are hundreds, if not thousands, of willing sex workers arrested by law enforcement.

Bolstered by anti-sex feminists and fundamentalist Christians, American politicians have fought the legalization of prostitution under the guise of preventing sex trafficking. The assertion that legalizing sex work promotes sex trafficking is counter-intuitive and there is “absolutely no evidence” to support it.** (8)

The false nexus between legalization and trafficking was exposed by the British. In the United Kingdom, where prostitution is legal, sensationalism about the trafficking of sex slaves led to a massive crackdown using every police force in the country. In 2007 and 2008, 822 brothels, flats, and massage parlors were raided. They did not find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution. (2)

Sex trafficking is a heinous crime that should be combated, but sensationalizing the problem in order to persecute all sex workers is just as heinous. Imprisoning sex workers to “help” them is cruelty masquerading as morality.

Driving prostitution underground imperils the safety of all sex workers. Criminalization is what allows them to be abused by traffickers, clients, pimps, and the police. (7) Prosecuting sex workers and branding them with permanent criminal records destroys their lives. Sex trafficking is evil, but so is criminalization.

(For more Narco Polo postings and cartoons on sex work go here.)

* It is likely that sexual slavery accounted for only a small minority of this number. In a 2005 Nation article, Suzanne Tomatore, an attorney who heads the Immigrant Women and Children Project of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York was quoted as saying that the “vast majority” of her clients were trafficked into domestic work. (6)

** Studies of the “Swedish model” that make this claim have been thoroughly discredited. See Maggie McNeill’s synopsis of an Australian governmental analysis or Dr. Laura Agustín’s writings on the topic. (5, 1)

Meet Some Sex Workers

To hear the voices of some proud, intelligent, and fabulous sex workers check out the blogs The Honest Courtesan and Bound, Not Gagged. An entertaining and witty Twitter feed of an active sex worker is Nun Ya’s @Ishfery.

This post is dedicated to the sex-worker rights activist, Robyn Few, who passed away last month. She patiently answered my queries years ago. You can learn more about her life here and read a New York Times article on her activism here.

Sources

1. Laura Agustín, “Trying to Prove Swedish Law Reduces Trafficking: Garbage In, Garbage Out,” theLocal.se, 16 Aug. 2010. LINK
2. Nick Davies, “Inquiry Fails to Find Single Trafficker Who Forced Anybody Into Prostitution,” Guardian, 19 Oct. 2009. LINK
3. There were 653,500 prostitution related arrests from 2000–2007. “Easy Access to FBI Arrest Statistics 1994–2008,” OJJDP.gov, 2011, ret. 7 Apr. 2012.
4. Jerry Markon, “Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence,” WashingtonPost.com, 23 Sep. 2007. LINK
5. Maggie McNeill, “Down Under,” The Honest Courtesan (blog), 9 June 2011. LINK
6. Debbie Nathan, “Oversexed,” TheNation.com, 2005 Aug. 29, p. 3. LINK
7. An Illinois study found that police accounted for 30% of all reported abuse, compared to 4% arising from pimps. Noy Thrupkaew, “A Misguided Moral Crusade,” NYTimes.com, 22 Sep. 2012. LINK
8. Ronald Weitzer, “Moral Crusade Against Prostitution,” Society, Mar./Apr. 2006, p. 37.

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