Debbie Nathan

Hey New York City! This Saturday, January 26 at 7 p.m. at the feminist Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side. I’m presenting my new book Pornography. It was published late last year by Groundwood, a Canadian children’s press.

Children’s press? Porn for Kids??

Officially, Pornography is part of a “social issues” series for older high school and younger college students, intended as a tool for writing research papers.

But a funny thing happened during writing and post publication: I noticed that seasoned adults, too, were intrigued when I described my research and later passed around my book.

That makes sense. Pornography is an easy, quick read (and it’s quite stashable in purse or pocket since it’s a little paperback). It’s current-eventsy and analytical. It takes up all the old pro- and anti- arguments from the 1960s to 1980s, updating them to the politics, personalities, genres and technology of today’s age of the hyper-commodity and Internet.

These homemaker pals from southern California manufacture and sell “Erotic Pornatas” — take offs on Mexican party pinatas — as a group hobby. I photographed them at an adult-entertainment trade show in Las Vegas in 2005 while researching my book Pornography.

Caveat: No pix in the book. But I did view lots of material for my research. Maybe that’ll save you the time to do other things. Or, if you’re into porn, you can compare your experience with my comments and interpretations.

Come by Bluestockings on Saturday (or just buy the book! Click here). Follow along as MILR (Mother I’d Love to Read) Deb debunks myths and adds nuance to claims such as:

• Porn is growing financially by leaps and bounds.
• Most porn workers were abused as children.

• Porn industry profit makers are all greedy shmucks.
• Porn endangers women, especially the violent shit being mainstreamed nowadays.

• Porn oppresses performers.
• Porn addicts men.
• Porn is liberating.
• Porn is fun.
• Porn is ruining sex for people in the real world.
• Porn pressures everyday women to get Brazilians and boob jobs.

• That girl Shalom Auslander and his wife saw before they changed to South Park was only acting like she was having a bad day.

• Gonzo. Bukkake. Gag Factor. Jenna Jameson. Nina Hartley. Twink. Robert Jensen.
• Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Join the blah and explore why there’s so much of it in the first place! Which may be the real point (also seriously discussed in Pornography).

Here are directions to Bluestockings:

On the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington - 1 block south of Houston and 1st Avenue.

By train: 1 block south of the F train’s 2nd Avenue stop and just 5 blocks from the JMZ-line’s Essex / Delancey Street stop. By car: If you take the Houston exit off of the FDR, then turn left onto Essex (aka Avenue A), then right on Rivington, and finally right on Allen, you will be very, very close.

This post has also been published as an article in the January 4, 2008 issue of El Paso’s Newspapertree.com. A version also appears in the Jan. 1-15 issue of CounterPunch. 

Lots of Americans have heard about the Mexican city Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, Texas, and the 400 or so female murders that have happened there since the 1990s. Many who’ve heard have flown to the border to hold press conferences and make movies or put on plays and offer help. Especially women – including famous ones. Jane Fonda, J. Lo, Sally Fields, Minnie Driver, Eve Ensler – all know of the killings, or at least those involving long-haired adolescents who worked in maquiladoras and went to church and were good daughters before they ended up in places like Lomas del Poleo as anal-raped mummies and maybe a tattered bra.

Lomas del Poleo. Some Godforsaken desert spot on the Juarez fringe where at least a dozen bodies were found in the sand from 1996 to 2003. Most never identified, but one was Veronica Castro, a teen working at a big, foreign-owned assembly plant when she disappeared. The corpse of another girl, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez, was found elsewhere near town, but at the time she was killed she lived in Lomas. Her mom, Paula Flores, is the first person who thought of blanketing Juarez utility poles with pink crosses to draw attention to the murders. As a result of such activism, the murders have come, internationally, to be known as feminicide. Embedded in that term is the idea that women are dying violently in Juarez precisely because they’re women. It’s a political concept, a theory, and thus awful but in its abstraction oddly comfortable.

The killing fields at Lomas del Poleo, on the other hand, are a hundred percent real, and straight-out scary to even think about. Don’t go there, the zeitgeist whispers: it’s isolated, desolated, gritty, scuzzy, a place only for cloak-and-dagger journalists, while the rest of us can just read about it and maybe march downtown with the stars, or sign Amnesty International petitions.

But now, something every bit as bad as the feminicides is occurring in Juarez, in the same area where Veronica et al were dumped. Yet few people in the US, or even El Paso, know or care about this new horror. And because they don’t, the murdered women of Juarez are being buried from consciousness.

How can they be resurrected? By digging into current events at Lomas del Poleo, where an entire community is being tossed for basically the same reasons the area’s females are blotted out.

A professor took me there years ago, when the feminicides was fresh news. She was studying the concept of border females as waste matter, in concert with the generalized phenomenon of illegal municipal dumping. Her theory included the fact that Juarez maquiladoras were organized and managed so the entire, mostly woman, workforce at the average plant would quit or be fired from their jobs – or “turn over,” the industry calls it — in less than a year. Massive turnover would quickly and efficiently dispense with labor once it was deemed worn out, or too expensive because of employers’ legal obligation after several months to give workers perks like health insurance and end-of-year bonuses. The professor felt that the maquiladora economy of female worker disposability was affecting the entire culture and that more and more in Juarez, all women were being defined as throwaways. That, she said, was fueling the brutal murders – and not just of scores of the long-haired, stranger-raped girls everyone talked about, but even of the many hundreds more victims who were being killed and dumped not by unknowns, but by their husbands, boyfriends, and neighbors.

This professor had ideas about why all those female bodies were ending up in the desert. She did not think it reflected some serial killer’s unique MO. Because municipal sanitation services are so lacking in Juarez, she said, everything unwanted – from household trash to human beings — gets thrown, sub rosa, in the outskirts. We poked with our eyes and some sticks in this parched, garbage-strewn place called Lomas del Poleo, where corpses had recently been discovered. We found only withered shoes, soiled Pampers, and bleached baby dolls. Not unexpected, the professor said. But what surprised me – I still remember after all this time – was the old man who ambled from behind a hill on a burro, herding goats and smilingly doffing his hat to wish us buenas tardes. “Where on earth did he come from?” I thought. Heretofore I’d assumed Lomas del Poleo was just some vacant, Boschian hell hole. Now I wondered if it was more inviting. Then I forgot the man, and Lomas. I moved away to the US interior.

But last month I was visiting El Paso for some winter fun in the sun. Another friend, a border community activist, took me to a meeting in a sparsely furnished green building across the river with no heat and everyone huddled in jackets and soberly talking in turn. Some were students from downtownish Juarez who had nice glasses and OK wardrobes. Others were “colonos” – the flea-market dressed residents of Lomas, many of who have lived there over 30 years. They’d walked a mile down from a mesa to reach the cold green building, because they are not allowed to hold public gatherings in their own neighborhood. Nor can they bring in friends or guests, for meetings or anything else resembling politics. To enter their own community for whatever reason, they must pass a guard house staffed by snickering male thugs with guns.

The thug checkpoint and all the rest of Lomas are enclosed by concrete posts, barbed wire and trained dogs. People cannot pass unless they live inside. Trucks supplying basics such as tortillas,

Photo by Detritus at Flikr.com

water and milk, are also disallowed. At the meeting in the green building, I talked with two women who appeared in their seventies. One was stringy and gnarled; the other squat, with white, lusterless hair like cheap twine. They both lurched slightly with old age or fatigue. They said there used to be many stores up in Lomas, but now hardly any remain. To get groceries each day, they must walk the mile downhill, then make their way back to the armed punks and wire and canines.

Sometimes when people leave the area to get food, or to work in maquiladoras, they return and find their houses razed to rubble by bulldozers. One of the women said this happened to her middle-aged son, and it made him so apoplectic and heartbroken that he died. She described such things and wouldn’t let me take her photo or use her name. She and her neighbor were terrified of reprisals. Their fear sickened me.

This is all going on a few miles from El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Barnes & Noble, StarBucks, and the bikini waxing day spas of upper Mesa Street. What is happening in Lomas del Poleo is not unlike the logistics and doings of a concentration camp. Yet practically no one in the US – even those who’ve marched for and donated to and worried about the murdered women – seems to know. Or care.

The reason, perhaps, is that the barbed wire and dogs have nothing to do with how the feminicides are presented: as crazy, titillating speculations about serial killer conspiracies, rich-boy mafias, narco orgies, Satanic rituals and the black market vending of kidneys. Rather, the current disaster is connected to much greyer, more tedious speculation: the kind involving real estate. Plats, deeds and mortgages are not quite the stuff of Who-Done-Its. They turn even more arcane when combined with Mexican tenancy statutes. But these topics –

Photo by Antonio Zazueta Olmos, on flicker.com

land and law — are back story to the border’s little modern-day terrordrome. Because it’s closed to people like me, I haven’t actually set foot in it. But to understand the awful things I heard of and saw at that community meeting last month, I’ve explored the web, talked with people including Lomas residents and organizers, and watched documentaries on Youtube. This is what I’ve learned.

It goes back to 1945. That’s when the Mexican government seized thousands of acres of desert from a mining company just south of the border, not far from the West Side of El Paso and what is now the town Sunland Park, New Mexico. Shortly after this expropriation, corrupt, profiteering Mexican bureaucrats sold the property to private owners, though doing so was illegal. These owners sold to others. One eventual purchaser was a prominent Juarez businessman, Pedro Zaragoza, Sr.

Years later, in 1975, Mexico’s President Luis Echeverria declared part of this vast acreage to be federal land. Now things were really confused, because the boundaries of the national holdings were not surveyed: they were still mixed with areas that private buyers – including Zaragoza – considered his property. Even so, the problem seemed inconsequential. President Echeverria notified the private purchasers that if they wanted to argue he’d wrongly designated their holdings as federal land, they should file legal claims. No claims ensued. Apparently the buyers didn’t care one way or the other because the land was considered scrubby, remote, and of little worth.

But not all felt this way. In the early 1970s, fifty or sixty poor families came to a mesa they named Granjas Lomas del Poleo – Poleo Hills Farms — in search of country living. Most had earlier immigrated to Juarez from destitute rural areas farther south. They wanted to escape urban chaos and raise goats, pigs and chickens. Word got out about Lomas and one man appointed himself community leader. He helped new settlers pick out five-acre plots, where they built houses, grazed animals and tilled the land.

Eventually, Lomas boasted about a thousand inhabitants, a small church, a kindergarten, a grade school, and some ten stores. The community was still parched and desertified, and many homes were little more than hodge-podges of wood pallets, with rusted box springs for front yard fences. But the view was gorgeous: to the east a long range of mountains; on the west the Rio de Janeiran majesty of a peak topped with a giant statute of Christ. Residents knew there was an issue about exactly which land in the area was federal and which was already privately owned, but they weren’t much concerned. According to Mexican law since the Revolution, if land is unoccupied and undeveloped, poor people can gain title just by living on it a few years, as long as the owner does not dispute their tenancy. This is par for the course in Mexico. Indeed, according to those familiar with Lomas, many residents went to government agencies and courts and got papers recognizing them as owners of their tiny plots.

The affable man on the burro whom I ran into way back when was one of these Lomas people.

But in the late 1990s, big, private owners like Pedro Zaragoza’s widow and sons – one of them also named Pedro — realized Lomas was getting valuable. Real estate interests on both sides of the border were hatching grand plans for a new international port of entry and a NAFTA-esque, binational community. It would straddle the international line at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and include extensive manufacturing parks, as well as passage for cargo trucks and lots of brand new housing and stores.

As Juarez attorney Carlos Avitia has since explained to the Paso Del Sur community activist organization in El Paso, Mexican entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas decided their city’s growth would take place on outskirts that include Lomas del Poleo. “These are huge investors,” notes Avitia. “They plan to turn this into a suburb… All of a sudden they’re very interested in every last sand dune.”

Indeed, since the 1990s a highway has been built linking the Mexican state of Chihuahua west of Juarez to New Mexico’s Santa Teresa, where all that transborder development is set to take place. So far, very few people live in Santa Teresa, but its port of entry has been operating for years now. And in late 2007, part of yet another big road opened in northwest Juarez. Called the Camino Real, it has so far cost almost a million US dollars, and when it is done it will connect downtown Juarez to Santa Teresa. Right across from Santa Teresa will be a Mexican twin town called Jeronimo. The two will be be foreign trade zones with people living in them. The spanking new, binational development is currently almost uninhabited. But it’s projected to grow to 100,000 residents in the next decade or so.

The two main developers of Jeronimo and Santa Teresa are, respectively, Eloy Vallina – one of Mexico’s richest entrepreneurs — and Bill Sanders, a major international realtor (more here) who heads a controversial redevelopment plan for downtown El Paso. It aims to replace acres of historic but run-down buildings, mom-and-pop shlock shops

Bill Sanders lectures at Cornell U.

and poor residents with big box stores, mall-type businesses, and mixed-income housing that will not provide public rental subsidies for the many undocumented immigrants who currently live in the area.

Vallina is a member of Sanders’ development group for Santa Teresa. His son, Eloy Jr., sits on the board of private consortium which sprang the redevelopment plan on El Paso two years ago and has since provoked great controversy there. Vallina Sr.’s plans for the foreign trade zone Jeronimo are as strongly contested in Juarez as Sanders’ designs for El Paso are on the north side of the border.

Jeronimo opponents note that because the development is so dependent on massive infrastrucure – like the Camino Real highway — public taxes and resources are improperly being diverted from Juarez to one man’s private suburb. A major concern is the future of municipal water. The bolson that supplies Juarez is running out, and the only way to recharge it is from another aquifer, which sits beneath Jeronimo. But if that water is pumped by Vallina’s project, Juarez won’t get it and the city could go dry.

Also troubling is that anticipation about Jeronimo and Santa Teresa has led to fevered land speculation in Juarez, according to New Mexico State University’s Frontera News Service. Tiny lots not far from Lomas del Poleo have lately increased by 26 times their original price, with buyers offering as much as

International port of entry at Santa Teresa, NM

$39,000 for each parcel. The Juarez real estate explosion really took off when Bill Sanders bought 21,000 acres in Santa Teresa and announced his binational development project. This happened in 2003.

Perhaps not coincidentally, 2003 is the also year when formerly peaceful Lomas del Poleo – walking distance from the tidy, democratic United States of America - started to resemble an armed camp, a zone in the Palestinian territories, a World War II ghetto, a place of chilling violation of civil and human rights.

Two years ago, a soft-spoken, understated-looking guy named Bill Morton wrote a piece (here) for the online newsletter of Annunciation House, a church-based refuge for undocumented migrants in downtown El Paso.

Camino Real Highway (photo by DN)

Morton is a Catholic missionary and priest – thoroughly gringo – who at the time was pasturing a little church in Lomas. In his article, he describes hearing rumors there in 2003 that he at first didn’t think made sense.

Just a year earlier, the government had finally – after over three decades — supplied Lomas with electricity. Posts and wires had been installed, and each house had a meter. Now, residents were telling Morton they heard that all this infrastructure was slated to be removed. Morton pooh-poohed their worries. Why would the government take out what it had so carefully put in just months ago?

But the rumors were correct. Lomas residents and the Zaragoza family were already in court disputing who owned the land. One Zaragoza, Pedro Jr., recently told former Texas Observer reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen Welsome (see here) that he considers Lomas inhabitants nothing but illegal squatters and land speculators. To up the ante and discourage occupancy of the area, the Zaragozas had gone to a judge and obtained a ruling to remove the utilities. Government trucks came in, accompanied by police. They pulled out all the posts and wires. Lomas was left without light, refrigerators, or fans.

The Zaragozas also obtained orders forbidding more building in Lomas so that new people wouldn’t there come to live, and current residents, unable to improve their homes, would feel pressured to leave. More ominously, existing housing was targeted for destruction. Soon after the electricity was removed, scores of menacing young men invaded the community. They were what Mexicans call guardias blancas, “white guards” -– privately contracted paramilitary goons. Their boss is a Catarino del Rio, who in the past has worked for the Zaragozas and is assumed to be on their payroll now. The thugs brought in heavy equipment, which residents assumed would be used to destroy their homes.

At first, people in Lomas dug ditches to block the tractors and demolition machinery. Complaints were also made to the Juarez police, who ordered the shock troops out. They left, but by spring 2004 were back, occupying a plot of land and building a camp with a watch tower, barbed wire, and a guard house. Ever since, Lomas residents have had to pass this checkpoint to enter their neighborhood – which is now completely fenced in by tall, concrete poles and wire. Many people complain that the guards have maced and kicked residents. They demolished a church and are said to have poisoned pet dogs. In the dark of electricity-less nights, they’ve prowled around and shone flashlights into houses. And people who leave to buy groceries or go to work come back to find their homes pulverized.

Some residents report that the guards carry AK-47s; others have seen rifles sticking out of their jackets. In Mexico it’s illegal for civilians to carry arms, never mind military-grade weapons. But when the Juarez police have been called they’ve done nothing. A resident got into a fight with Zaragoza’s thugs after a house was razed. He was fatally beaten. Not long afterward, a home caught fire. Two small children burned to death. Authorities and Pedro Zaragoza said the conflagration was due to a stove left lit when the mother went out, or to illegal electricity hookups connected to a line some distance from the house. Witnesses countered that the house had no power, and that goons had been seen walking around, possibly spilling gasoline, just before the home ignited.

Juarez’s city administration does nothing about these outrages except support the Zaragozas by encouraging Lomas’ shell-shocked residents to move. Many families have gone to another community downhill. Others have been relocated to a row of tiny, concrete structures that the city offers as alternative housing but which provide no land for the livestock raising and horticulture that residents practiced on

Photo by Rachel Falcone, Flickr.com

their own holdings. Juarez lawyer Avitia has noted that the Juarez politicians have a stake in supporting the eviction project. They are friends and associates of real estate entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas and Eloy Vallina. (Eileen Wellsome interviewed Juarez mayor Hector Murguia, who confirmed that he and Pedro Zaragoza are friends.) Eviction helps the magnates by freeing up land for development related to Jeronimo, Vallina’s golden goose just south of Santa Teresa.

Once poor but bustling, Lomas has lost three fourths of its population and almost all its stores since the goons came in. About 55 families soldier on, braving the constant threat of their houses being demolished, and the nerve-wracking sense that they and their community are being disposed of, and few care. Still they stay, insisting on their right to the land. They have lawyers and their suit against the Zaragozas. Attorney Avitia has worked extensively on the case. He says the law is on the Lomas residents’ side and eventually they will win.

But in an escalating battle of one-upsmanship, the better the legal proceedings go for Lomas del Poleo inhabitants, the worse they are pressured to leave. Lately, political groups and NGO’s from

Photo courtesy Bruce Berman

both sides of the border have been trying to help. Attempts to hold organizing events in the neighorhood several weeks ago were met with the paramilitaries and their weapons, dogs, pushing and shoving and threats.

At the meeting I attended in the green building downhill, I asked if someone would take me up to see things for myself. “We can’t,” I was told. “It’s too dangerous.”

Amid this state of seige, it also seems risky to discuss the one thing that has brought international human rights attention to Juarez: those murdered, thrown away women. The people I spoke with at the meeting were like everyone who’s held on in Lomas — militant, determined to make a stand. But they also appear so demoralized and desperate to save their homes that they are willing to renounce the dead girls dumped on their turf.

I asked both the old women I talked with about the female corpses found in Lomas starting in the late 1990s. “Oh, no!” one demurred. “Didn’t happen.” “Lies!” the other added sternly. “There were no bodies here. Ever.”

I recounted this conversation later with my friend the activist, who explained the old women’s reaction. So many things have been done by the pro-eviction forces to

Photo by Mark Paulda, Flikr.com

discredit Lomas, he said. Depicting it as crummy, slummy, and crime ridden. A dirty place that needs cleaning and vacuuming, even of its residents. What better way to bolster that claim than to talk of corpses in the sand? That’s one reason Lomas inhabitants deny the fact of the female dead.

My friend also pointed out that city and state government in Juarez and Chihuahua have for long been on a campaign to make people and social organizations feel guilty for speaking up about the murdered women and trying to connect their fate with other social problems. The old women, he said, “show how this campaign has permeated all walks of life.” Their silence is historically constructed, and understandable.

Understandable, but especially horrid, because to shut up about feminicide, Lomas residents must even mute their own blood. The white-haired lady I talked to: Early in our conversation, she said her son died after his home was demolished by Zaragoza’s thugs. Later, she grew more expansive. “It wasn’t just the house,” she confided. “It was also that his child – my 18-year-old granddaughter — disappeared four years ago. Went out one day with her boyfriend and was never seen again. The police found her ID card in the boyfriend’s pocket. But he works for the government. He was never charged or prosecuted. My son couldn’t do a thing. He lost his house and his daughter. Both losses killed him.”

We know what happened to the house. But how about the daughter? Like Veronica Castro, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez and so many others, was she tossed in the sand? Somewhere just a skip and a jump from Mesa Street, El Paso and Sunland Park, USA?

Please, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, J. Lo, Amnesty, and everyone who’s signed petitions, put on performances and marched for the dead girls of Juarez. Come back to the baggy-raggy border in your form-hugging clothes and fitting words. Come back and excavate the women by standing by their threatened neighbors – who also are being tossed and buried like garbage. Come back and dig up Lomas.

***

(For more resources about the repurcussions of Juarez and El Paso-area real estate development, including a feature-length video documentary, see here, here and here.)

CounterPunch just reprinted a fascinating piece by Uruguayan journalist Raul Zibechi about Mexico’s Brigada Callejera de Apoyo a la Mujer (Street Brigade in Support of Women). It’s part of the Mexican Sex Work Network collective, which works with prostitutes and transvestites. “This has meant transcending the ‘victim’ role and becoming people who want to be recognized as workers by their peers,” says Zibechi, “not seen as beings who have ‘fallen’ into the world’s oldest profession.” The Zapatista’s Subcomandante Marcos has met with the organization and praised their activities.

Zibechi describes how the group runs its own hotels and health clinics for sexoservidores, the Spanish word for sex workers. It finances these efforts through condom sales, and Zibechi wrote a sidebar detailing how the network runs that business. Counterpunch didn’t run the sidebar, so I’m copying it, below, from its original venue, the Center for International Policy – a great think tank in New Mexico that does radical analysis of the political economy of Latin America and how it’s affected by globalization and neoliberalism.

Here’s Zibechi’s condom sidebar, with some pictures from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America that I’ve collected from the web:

A Question of Charm

The sale of condoms is the main source of financing for the diverse projects of the Mexican Sex Work Network. Choosing the type of condom alongside design and name becomes a form of claiming ownership of the instrument of work and protection, and was left up to the ideas of prostitutes and transvestites.

“When we began the AIDS-protection program,” remembers Elvira, “we realized that price was one of the main problems. For older ladies, to spend 25 pesos on a condom was to invest almost everything they had charged the client.” Firstly they looked for donations from the State, which through CENSIDA, the organization dedicated to the fight against AIDS, donated them 60,000 condoms a month. “But when we began to report cases of corruption they reduced that to 3,600 condoms.”

They began to visit various distributors and factories and found that, in exact opposite to what market laws should indicate, buying in bulk raised the prices. They got in contact with a manufacturer who agreed to sell to them at the same price as to pharmacies and other distributors. “We nearly fell over in shock. He sold us condoms at 75 cents (about US$.07) each but in the pharmacies they’re 12 pesos ($1), that is 15 times the price of the cost,” Elvira says.

The Network began to distribute condoms at the price of one peso each, and with that profit they managed to subsidize almost all the projects, but particularly the clinics that consumed the bulk of their resources. “Before putting them on sale we spoke to the compañeras, we did workshops to see what they wanted, because some condoms smelled very bad or irritated because they contained harmful substances. They themselves suggested the name “El Encanto” (The Charm) to the three-month long debate process in which hundreds of sex workers chose between 20 brands.” The brand had to be attractive for both the client and for themselves. Currently, they sell three million a year.

But the transvestites decided not to use the chosen condom because it wasn’t suited to their needs. “They said it’s very thin and they were right, because it was designed for vaginal use and it would break when they used it.” They found a stronger and more lubricated condom and started the same debate as the women had had. In the end they decided to print the rainbow of sexual diversity on it, and a pink triangle. “They chose the name Triángulo (Triangle) because that’s the symbol with which the Nazis stigmatized homosexuals, so in that way they adopted it as a tribute,” says Elvira.

They failed with the female condom. A few years ago they began to import it from England until a multinational company realized that the Mexican market was growing and withdrew the Network’s permission to distribute. In effect, the market is very monopolized. “While in the world there are 67 condom factories, there’s just one for female condoms. We have to wait for there to be more competition,” says Elvira, with irony.

Subcomandante Marcos is El Encanto’s most famous supporter. In Mexico there is a long history of “condom fairs.” In November 2005 the 50th National Condom Festival was celebrated in Mexico City’s central plaza and in various states local annual fairs are held to raise money for organizations linked to sex work. Recently the first “virtual condom store” made its debut on www.elencantodelcondon.com.

( Almost all illustrations in this post, including the black-and-white nude, are computer generated and do not portray real people. Some virtual images are reproduced from work published by Dartmouth College Professor Hany Farid … see below for more about him.)

More of the latest sex-pol research and news: from studies of young people and sexuality, to Constitutional controversies about pornography record keeping, virtual vs. real child porn, and sex offender civil commitment law

According to a Nov. 11 Washington Post article, a new study from the University of Virginia finds that youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are less likely to end up delinquent than those who lose their virginity later. In part, say the researchers, this could be because sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble.

Virtual clothing mannequins from H&M

The Virginia study will appear in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

The study’s investigators acknowledge the dangers of having sex early. For example, young adolescents are less likely to use condoms than older people, which puts them at risks for STD’s and unwanted pregnancy. But, the researchers note, other nations mitigate these risks through sex education. Meanwhile, U.S. sex ed funded by the federal “abstinence only” budget must hew to a curriculum that links sex to delinquency, and allows no talk of birth control.

Speaking of America’s anti-sex-ed political culture, Advocates for Youth reports on its blog that the Democrats have been utterly craven lately. A recent report, from the Democrat-controlled Labor Health and Human Services Appropriations conference committee, includes the full $28 million increase requested by President Bush for abstinence-only-until-marriage-programs. “The Democrats have now granted the president and his anti-sex education zealots a whopping $141 million dollar budget for abstinence-only programs — something they could never achieve even under a conservative Republican Congress!” Advocates for Youth notes.

“Never mind the congressionally-mandated evaluation released in April showing abstinence-only programs have ‘no impact on adolescent behavior,’” Advocates continues. “Never mind the 2006 study by the Society of Adolescent Medicine which stated that these programs ‘threaten fundamental human rights to health, information and life.’ Never mind the 2004 report from Congressman Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) oversight committee demonstrating that 80% of abstinence-only programs contain ‘false or misleading information.’ Never mind the 13 governors who have refused abstinence-only dollars because they see no reason to use precious state dollars to match federal funds for programs that simply do not work.

“With one breathtakingly cynical move,” says Advocates, “the Democratic leadership has now stamped its brand on one of the biggest ideological boondoggles in congressional history.”

Meanwhile, the kids keep on trucking, doing who knows what? Do we really want to know? — God forbid, it might turn out to be boring! That’s the suggestion of yet another new study, of 18 to 24 year olds. It was reported on by Adult Video News (AVN) — the trade mag of the porn biz. According to AVN, which cannot possibly be happy about this, the research finds that young adults’ visits to internet porn sites over the past couple of years have been decreasing.

Visits to porn sites dropped from 16.9 percent of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9 percent as of the same time this year. That’s a 33 percent decline.

Why the drop? Members of the Gen Y demographic, one researcher says, are increasingly hanging out in social networking sites. They’re probably “too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin.”

Of course, some young adults (not to mention their elders) are taking pictures of their own skin and posting the results to amateur porn sites, or just stashing the product in their sock drawers. Until this month, anyone who took photos or videos such as these was supposed to go through an elaborate legal process, defined by a federal law popularly called 2257. That process involves inspecting the models’ and performers’ IDs to confirm they’re over 18, making copies of the IDs, and keeping them on file for government inspection. But due to a recent higher court ruling, 2257 has just been struck down in several states.

For years, 2257 has taken up a lot of the adult porn industry’s time and resources. In addition, the law theoretically applies to amateurs – even to husbands and wives out to spice up their conjugal fun. As technology and law writer Declan McCullagh, of CNET, explains: Under 2257, “An adult couple taking a single erotic photo of themselves with a digital camera in their own bedroom is required to (a) inspect their own government-issued photo identification; (b) ascertain that they’re at least 18 years old; (c) photocopy their own IDs; (d) photocopy the erotic image; (e) file this information in physical form; (g) display the date and a street address “prominently” in their files; (g) open these files to agents of the Justice Department without advance notice. If they don’t take each of those steps, both members of the couple, according to the law, are subject to a federal felony–up to five years in prison, as well as fines.

Whew!

But in November, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down 2257, ruling that its record-keeping requirements are overly broad and violate Americans’ free-speech rights.

The ruling covers several states, including Tennessee. This is where one of the defendants uncovered by Kurt Eichenwald’s work on the Justin Berry case was doing business when he was charged with helping Berry run a porn website that contained illegal images of a 14 year old. The defendant, Timothy Richards, was charged with and convicted for crimes including violations of 2257. In his defense, Richards claimed he didn’t know that the 14 year old was underage, because Justin Berry posted a fake 2257 disclaimer, asserting that the model was over 18 and he had records to prove it. The government didn’t buy Richards’ claim about being duped by Berry. Neither did a jury.

Now, Richards plans to return to court to argue that his 2257-based convictions should be overturned.

Interestingly, documents that emerged this summer in legal actions related to Richards’ case indicate that then New York Times reporter Eichenwald was using privileges as an administrator on the same illegal site that Richards was helping Berry operate – the one with the 14-year-old porn model (for details, see here, here, and here). According to his own statements, Eichenwald was involved in this child porn administrative role as a “private

Sex offender demographics map

citizen,” not a reporter doing research.

Because of the 2257 violation, he is theoretically also subject to being criminally charged — just as Tim Richards was. Earlier this year, a DOJ prosecutor and an FBI agent attended a court hearing related to Eichenwald’s involvement with the site, but would not say if he was being investigated. (Just after that hearing, Eichenwald retained a criminal defense attorney.)

Now, with the 2257 requirement overturned in Tennessee, anyone residing there who’s in Eichenwald’s shoes might breathe a little easier. On the other hand, Eichenwald lives in Texas, a state not currently subject to the circuit court ruling that overturned 2257. Time will tell whether 2257 is overturned nationwide.

And speaking of child porn laws – this is a little dated, in October October the New York Times interviewed Hany Farid. He’s a Dartmouth College professor who tries to do quantitative analysis to figure out whether photographs have been altered. Discussing his work (click here to see some), Farid remarked that he has “been an expert witness in several child pornography cases.”

Back in 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that possession of computer-generated child porn is protected under the First Amendment because it doesn’t depict real children, but instead is built by morphing adult bodies to look younger, or it’s made completely from scratch.

Images of children in sexual poses are repugnant to most people, to put it mildly. But so are many other images we all are legally permitted to view. (Personally, I get especially sick when I see pictures of sexual assault from Abu Ghraib, or the photo of the naked little girl running from the napalm attack during the Viet Nam war.) Those items are protected speech – covered by the First Amendment. Child porn is not protected because traditionally, in order to create the material, sex crimes have been perpetrated against real minors. The images would otherwise not exist. Child porn was outlawed to discourage manufacture of a product that’s predicated on actual minors being made to perform sexually — when by legal definition they cannot consent to such acts. The reasoning may be arguable to First Amendment absolutists. Still, it’s serious reasoning.

But what happens now that we’ve got technology to make “virtual” images of people, even children, doing anything — even sex? In other words, what happens when kiddie porn contains no kids?

It’s possible to produce fake but real-looking images, Farid told the Times. And now defendants in child pornography cases – particularly when they involve material from the internet – are arguing that what they got caught with is virtual. Which would make it not illegal. The government has the burden of proving otherwise.

“So now in these cases,” Farid continued, ”defense lawyers will sometimes argue that the images aren’t real. So far, I have only testified on the side of the prosecution.”

What Farid and the Times omitted is that a judge in at least one child porn prosecution has rejected Farid’s work and deemed it unreliable. CNET’s McCullagh reported several months ago about Massachusetts resident Rudy Frabizio. He was indicted after his employer found sexually explicit images on his computer that appeared to involve minors.

When Fabrizio contested the government’s claim that all the images portrayed real children, the FBI contacted Professor Farid and asked him to run one of his analysis programs on the porn. But Frabizio’s lawyers discovered that Farid’s program had a 30 percent error rate. The program often classified a real photo as computer generated. It also classified a cartoon image as real.

The government opted not to use Farid as a witness and tried to replace him with an FBI agent who said he could tell which imagery depicts real children, versus which is fake, simply by looking.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner rejected that claim. “In a world of rapidly changing technology,” she ruled, “where the availability and use of Photoshop and other, similar programs is widespread, substantial evidence suggests it may be possible to digitally create or manipulate photographs in a manner the naked eye cannot detect. The government has not shown otherwise.”

What we have here is terra that’s mostly incognita, in which we need to think and rethink our child porn laws. How do we protect real children from sexual exploitation, while also protecting free speech as much as possible? To figure this out, lots of questions need to be answered. But first, they have to be asked. And that can be unpleasant.

For instance, all those people who want to see child porn: can they be sated by looking at virtual imagery that doesn’t exploit actual kids? Or must they have “reality” to feel happy? (This is dark variation on the same question television and Hollywood execs happily mull when it comes to mainstream media desires. Witness the public’s fascination with “reality TV” and with trying to tell the difference between “truth” and mere “acting.” In response, witness also the mainstream’s ever more sophisticated attempts to play tricks with our perceptions…often to our great delight.) (By the way, the graphic to the left does represent a real person, a suspected sex offender. Interpol puts scrambled images such as this on the Net, with an unscrambler code to facilitate identification and apprehension of the suspect.)

We don’t know much about people who harbor fantasies about sex with minors. What in the world goes on in their heads? We don’t know what percentage act their fantasies out criminally, versus how many just keep everything in their imagination. If it were to turn out that most do the latter, then — creepy as it sounds to the rest of us — it might do the world some good to give them fantasy images in which no real children are victimized.

But if any kind of image, even virtual, tends to provoke illegal sexual behavior against minors, we would want to seriously consider outlawing even fantasy material.

The problem is, we don’t know what’s what. There’s little research on the psyches or behavior of adults who are sexually attracted to minors (prison studies hardly count: incarcerated populations are notorious for telling researchers what they think they’re supposed to say, instead of what’s the truth).

Instead of high dudgeon and moralism, we need more and better research about people who are sexually attracted to those much younger than they, and what makes them tick. Until we know better, we won’t be able to help adults stay away from children And children will remain at unneeded risk for exploitation.

Professor Farid’s work has been funded by the federal government. No doubt he’s back at the drawing board.

Sex offender “buffer” map of Iowa City, computer generated

The rest of us should be, too. We should be pressuring the feds to fund scientifically sound, critical inquiry into human sexuality.

Don’t hold your breath. Let it out and let’s revisit the sex offender civil commitment controversy. The government was back in court in November in North Carolina, opposing a judge’s September ruling that sex offenders can’t be held in federal prison after they’ve served their sentences.

The ruling responded to a court order handed down on behalf of five convicts incarcerated at a federal sex offender prison. The feds said they were “sexually dangerous” and therefore needed to be civilly committed in mental hospitals – possibly for the rest of their lives. Civil commitment was approved under the federal “Adam Walsh” law, enacted last year.

But the judge said that to commit a person indefinitely, the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he or she is “sexually dangerous.” In an earlier order, the judge wrote that “there is serious question as to whether the federal government could ever prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual is both suffering from a mental illness or abnormality such as pedophilia and unlikely to refrain from sexually violent conduct in the future as a result of that illness.”

For now, the ruling affects only eastern North Carolina. But there’s a big prison there for sex offenders, Butner. It’s one of only a handful of such federal facilities in the nation.

Meanwhile, an inmate strike and protest is going on at a similar place in California. Sex offenders who’ve been civilly committed to a state hospital for sex offenders in Coalinga have been refusing food and engaging in other civil disobedience since the summer. According to a long article in the Los Angeles Times, they’re complaining of lack of psychotherapy services; many also feel it’s unconstitutional in the first place to be locked up after serving their prison time.

I still get asked about David, whom I wrote about in New York Magazine a couple of years ago. He’s the undocumented Mexican who was living in a basement with over two dozen other immigrants. People wonder how he’s doing. David and one of his former roommates, Jose, keep in touch because they live near me, in Washington Heights. So here’s the latest.

They got kicked out of the basement several months ago when the apartment building was sold and the new owner decided to follow codes. David’s girlfriend is still in Colombia, stringing him along, and he’s the patient type. For female companionship, he and Jose still hang out at that dime-a-dance place in Inwood, which just expanded into a bigger building but has the same girls working. One of them hooked up with a 60-year-old customer and they got married. David quit his restaurant job and now works as a truck mechanic. Jose is in construction and apartment remodeling, which he says are booming here in NYC. If you want to know the state of the economy go ask the illegals. Invite them to dinner.

David and Jose came over on Thanksgiving. Over turkey and trimmings with some Bailey’s, they also provided updates on the military aspect of life these days for the undocumented in New York.

Jose recounted being on the street in Queens last month and witnessing what he described as an immigration raid conducted on a main thoroughfare. He said police were involved. I found this hard to believe, since NYC has a policy prohibiting cops from checking immigration status. After David and Jose left and the dishes were washed, I got on the Net and did some checking.

First thing I found was a squib from the New York Post, describing an October 14 raid on a “phony-green-card ring” in Queens that netted some 40 suspects. The Post crowed that the raid “was kick-started by a story by Post reporter Douglas Montero,” who went undercover last year to show how easy it is to buy fake documents.

The Post article was short, sweet, and — of course — in English.

Over at the Spanish-language El Diario and other ethnic outlets, however, things were far lengthier and more distasteful.

Here’s my summary, translated:

It was less a raid than a dragnet: Police and FBI agents threw fencing around an entire block in Jackson Heights and started questioning people trapped inside. Yes, authorities were looking for sellers of fake drivers licenses and social security cards — items commonly purchased by immigrants so they can work. But the dragnet provoked rumors that other people besides forgery vendors were being busted, simply because they’d got caught up in the fencing and were undocumented. The operation took place on 84th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, a busy shopping area. It caused panic.

This was Sunday at noon. The 2010 World Cup Soccer playoffs were starting, and Roosevelt Avenue’s bars and restaurants were jammed with fans parked in front of teles. As rumors spread about the raid, frightened people streamed in, seeking refuge from the fencing and police.

The operation ended at 2 p.m., but for hours afterward Roosevelt Avenue was deserted. Even the 5 p.m. soccer match between Brazil and Colombia failed to re-enliven the street. Storekeepers complained that sales were down. “There’s a lot of fear,” said one business owner.

Jose was still frightened a month later, at my Thanksgiving table.

A few days after the dragnet, David said, he and Jose were in a cafe near the West Village. While they were waiting for their order, in walked two men in ICE uniforms (ICE is “Immigration & Customs Enforcement” — the new, official name for what Mexicans call “la migra”).

David and Jose were petrified. They sat stock still at their table, trying to be cool. Waiting, just waiting. Here’s what finally happened.

The ICE agents ordered some food. To go. It came. They went. David and Jose finished their meal.

Back at the Thanksgiving table, we changed the subject to Creedence Clearwater (Jose has been trying to understand the lyrics to “Cotton Fields”).

I later vowed to spend more time on IndyMedia’s “Voices that Must Be Heard” site (click here). “Voices” is a translated, continually updated digest of the best of the ethnic press in New York City. It regularly covers newspapers in dozens of languages. Reading Voices weekly, you get a pretty good idea of what’s going on in our immigrant communities — and sometimes not just in New York.

Take that quick item I wrote a few months ago about male smugglers — coyotes — being nicer to female smugglees than they used to be (click here). Well, according to a recent Voices That Must Be Heard piece, translated from El Diario (click here), it’s not just that guy coyotes are becoming more sensitive. It’s also that the human trafficking profession is shifting gender: these days, lots of smugglers are women.

They talk in the Diario article about how they can take care of migrant moms and children better than male coyotes can, because the women smugglers turn their own abodes into safe houses, providing their customers tasty, home-cooked meals and comfy beds. Female smugglers also try to devise better ways for their clients to travel north than those yucky treks through the deadly but macho desert that no normal girl and her babies wants to bother with. (For a recent, very moving description of what such people leave behind when they make those terrible crossings, click here.)

It won’t be long before big, beefy Vicente Fernandez types will also choose women coyotes over their own sex. Real man may not eat quiche. But they still go for a nice bowl of pozole casero and clean sheets en route to Gringoland.