The Good Men Project is Just Another Bunch of Good Ol' White Boys Promoting The Renting of Trafficked Human Beings as a way to obtain what the renters call "Good Sex"

image of men from The Good [White Pro-procurement] Men Project is from here

This is what some of the white het men at The Good Men Project Magazine have to say about what makes them different from the usual WHM supremacist men's magazines:

What makes the Good Men Project Magazine different? Oh, just a few things…


First, we’re trying to make the world a better place. Seriously. In that pursuit, we give 25 percent of our profits to organizations that help at-risk boys. Second, we’re trying to redefine what a men’s magazine can be. Sure, we write about sports. Yes, we write about sex (although we do it without selling sex). [bold added for emphasis by me, Julian]

Where do those funds go, helping those boys? See this, from the bottom of the web page where the image was found:

The Good Men Project Magazine is owned and operated by Good Men Media Inc. Good Men Media Inc. has licensed The Good Men Project name from The Good Men Foundation. Good Men Media will give a significant portion of its revenues back to the foundation in return. For more information, please contact info@goodmenproject.org

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This post contains two stories. One is about two good men, a 25-year-old Nepali filmmaker Ghanshyam Timilsinha, and Dayaram Dahal, a prominent commercial film director. They are seeking to end sexual trafficking. What follows the article in which they discuss their film projects is another article from the magazine above. It promotes the idea that very privileged Western guys can be good, especially when they are using a woman to promote the idea that sex with prostitutes can be good--for prostitutes. How unselfish and honorable of them. NOT. Let's have a look at what good men actually do about the global atrocity privileged Westerners call "sex work". Please click on the title below to link back the the source website, calcuttatube.com.

Nepal filmmakers turn their lens on trafficking 

Kathmandu, Nov 25 (Calcutta Tube) Even as Nepal’s best-known crusader against trafficking of women and children won recognition as a global hero, filmmakers in the Himalayan republic, one of the worst victims of sex slavery, are seeking to bolster the campaign by turning their lens on trafficking.

Four days after Anuradha Koirala was declared CNN’s hero of the year 2010 for the role played by her NGO in Kathmandu, Maiti Nepal, in rescuing thousands of women and teenaged girls from the brothels of India, 25-year-old Nepali director Ghanshyam Timilsinha Thursday began shooting his new film, ‘Uni Bechiyepachhi’ (After she was sold).

‘I come from Sindhupalchowk district (in northern Nepal), one of the worst preying grounds of traffickers,’ says Timilsinha. ‘I believe filmmakers have a responsibility towards society and for one year now, I have been trying to make a film that will make people aware of the menace and contribute to its eradication.’

To be shot in Nagarkot, Kathmandu and the towns on the Indo-Nepal border, Timilsinha’s film is based on the true story of an 18-year-old from Nuwakot, another district targeted by traffickers.

‘When she was studying in Class IX, the teenager, who comes from the underprivileged Tamang community, was tricked into slavery in a brothel in India’s Mumbai,’ Timilsinha told IANS.

‘The middle man promised her father she would get a good job in India and bought her for NRS 50,000.’

‘The teen’s plight became known last year after she was rescued from the brothel following a raid coordinated by Maiti Nepal,’ he added.

But the victim’s woes did not end with being rescued. She was stigmatised in her own village and tried to take her own life twice. Finally, she was forced to leave home and return to Kath-mandu.

‘Being a film that seeks to inspire as well as educate, `Uni Bechiyepachhi’ ends on a positive note,’ says Timilsinha, who is regarded as having the blessings of the opposition Maoist party.

‘My protagonist, Chinimaya, is backed by a trio who go to her village from Kathmandu to help her rehabilitation. At first they come under attack by the villagers but gradually they prevail in having the village declared a trafficking-free model village.’

Timilsinha says the Film Development Board has assured state help to screen the film in remote villages by waiving taxes.

‘People in the remote villages, especially the Tamang community, lack education and employment opportunities and become easy prey to exploitation,’ Timilsinha says. ‘I want the film to reach these areas to create mass awareness.’

Probably the first Nepali feature film on trafficking, ‘Cheli’ (Girl), was made almost 20 years ago by veteran director Ranadhwoj Rana, who passed away this month.

Since then, there have been several tele-serials and documentaries.

Last year, Dayaram Dahal, a prominent commercial film director, made ‘Kaha Chhau Kaha’ (Where are you?), based on trafficking victims’ tales.

‘It was mainly based on two women, one of whom was sold in an Indian brothel and the other forced into prostitution in a Gulf country where she was lured with the offer of a job as a domestic help,’ says Dahal.

‘My film focused on the suffering of the victims but now, I want to make another film to focus on the root causes of trafficking: illiteracy, poverty and unemployment.’

The rescue of trafficked victims is not the solution, Dahal says.

‘You will not realise it in Kathmandu but if you go 10 km further and enter a village, you will see how difficult it is for villagers to survive,’ says the 39-year-old director. ‘If they had education, employment and were not so abjectly poor, they would not succumb to false job promises.’

The other reason for trafficking, he says, is discrimination and violence against women.

‘We have discrimination even during childhood,’ he says. ‘Girls are not sent to schools and women are exploited and tortured. These social factors combine to make trafficking a home-grown problem. What we need is not films on victims’ suffering but films that suggest a solution.’

(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at sudeshna.s@ians.in)

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What follows is one of the most white het male supremacist self-serving pieces of CRAP I've seen on a site promoting the idea that men can be good. I don't question whether men can be good. Men can be. Men can stop rape. Men can not rape. Men can intervene whenever they hear that a man is mistreating a woman. Men like Ghanshyam Timilsinha and Dayaram Dahal can and do challenge men's right to rent and possess women and girls. But, usually, men don't do this. So, usually, men aren't "good" in doing that work. What white het men are especially very good at is being self-serving and abusive while pretending to be "good".

There is a website called "The Good Men Project". What they appear to be making a case for is this: there is such a thing as The Good Procurer, The Good Pimp, and a Good Way to Rent Human Beings for what some entitled, immature, and privileged men call "good sex". To these men I say this: you are being utterly irresponsible in publishing what follows on your website. You clearly are seeking to promote a rather obvious lie that prostitution is generally non-abusive, when all indicators are that it is abusive--to women and girls, by men who abuse women and reach orgasm doing so. You could at least have the integrity to own that's what you aim to do with an article like this.

It is the viewpoint of this blog that some privileged human beings renting other human beings, who they structurally oppress, for sex-as-exploitation, is an abuse of power. It is fundamentally abusive and oppressive to women as a class.

To read what follows, you'd think women fear men because Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon wrote about how men abuse women sexually. In that anti-feminist pro-prostitution view, women don't fear men because men harass women, or batter women, or rape women, or incest or molest girls, or disrespect and disregard women as full human beings, for example by only seeing them as sexxx-things for men. No. Men are to be feared because feminists say bad things about bad, bad men. I'm not a betting person, but I'd wager that a pimp wrote what follows. If she isn't a pimp, she sure makes all the same points that pornographers and pimps-without-cameras make when promoting "sex work" as--surprise--socially responsible and good for those who participate in it. Please click on the title just below to link back to The Good Men Procurer Project.

The Professional

November 22, 2010 By Charlotte Shane 

‘I don’t regret selling sex. It’s allowed me to meet many good men.’

I was in my early 20s, teaching undergrads in the morning, taking graduate classes in the afternoon, and selling nighttime webcam sex shows on a site that regularly featured professional porn stars like Jenna Jameson. The man watching me that night bought 90 minutes, which would have cost him nearly $600. I’d landed a big fish, and I didn’t want to lose it. But when he told me his request, I froze.

“Why don’t you take a nap?” he wrote.

It was the most unusual request I’d ever received. And, as you probably know, people feel free to get very unusual when they’re anonymous online.

“You look like you could use some sleep,” he continued.

“Don’t you want to tell me your real name?” I asked, smiling, shaking the ends of my wig around my face. I doubted my sleeping would actually keep him interested.

“We can get to that later,” he replied. “Just nap a little for now. And put some clothes on, or you’ll get cold.”

I arranged my body in a flattering position and laid my head on a pillow. What is with this guy? I thought.

I wouldn’t figure it out until much later.

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Disclaimer: coercion is wrong, kidnapping is wrong, and hiring someone underage is wrong. There are men (and women) in the world who want to inflict suffering on others, and hiring a sex worker gives them an easy way to do it.

But I’m tired of seeing men and women buy into the lie that male sexuality is inherently violent and sadistic. My experience as sex worker has taught me the opposite.

When I first began working in the sex industry, I believed the cultural script about the men who made it profitable. Male sexual desire consisted of seeing thin young women naked and suffering, handled roughly, used callously. I read and trusted every word by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. There was so much evidence to support their theories of how male hatred of women was expressed through abusive sex.

Frankly, men terrified me. I suspected they were incapable of compassion. To get them off, I thought, they all needed cruelty.

♦◊♦

I started working online during the peak years of anal-sex mania, and requests of ass-to-mouth (ATM) and double penetration (DP) with toys were common—not that I (always) honored them. One of the pleasant things about webcam was that it was possible to fake almost anything, especially penetration.

On the webcam site, non-paying visitors could type anything they wanted into the un-moderated chat windows: “Your family must hate you.” “I bet you have AIDS.” “You’re a fat whore.”

But not every man treated me this way, even with the luxury of complete anonymity. My first regular client was a man who talked with me for up to an hour before asking me to bring myself to orgasm. He wanted to see an orgasm, and he didn’t make demands about how I achieved it. Then came another regular who had only days earlier attempted suicide after a breakup with his fiancée. A year after we first met, he told me that our friendship—which many people would dismiss as illusory and degrading—was sometimes all that kept him from making a second attempt.

One young man in particular left a deep impression. He was younger than I was, working a blue-collar job in New Jersey, and he couldn’t afford much private time. But he would stay at his computer for as much of my shift as he could, cracking inside jokes and distracting me from other users’ insults while I was in free chat waiting for someone to pay for a show. We talked about music, his puppy, and the girls he was dating.

In this strange cyber world, he became a dear friend. And years after I retired from webcam, we still occasionally reached out to each other through email. Once he wrote, “It’s funny, you used to be this sexual icon that I would never have. Now it’s just like you’re an old friend I haven’t talked to in a long time and all I wanna do is catch up.”

I began to attract more and more men who wanted conversation, who bought me gifts and sent postcards and told me about their lives. They wanted to see me play with myself; they didn’t want to see me hurt. I became more vocal about what I did and didn’t like—in part because, for the first time, I was figuring out what I did and didn’t like. When someone told me to do something I didn’t want to do, I would refuse. I started countering requests for anal with “I will if you will.” It was possible to engage with them. It was astounding to me how many men would listen and suggest something else if I told them what I was doing hurt. They were free to leave and spend their money elsewhere, but few did.

It occurred to me that many men had trouble expressing empathy because no one had ever taught them how. Most were clueless, not brutal—although some were both. Lots of these guys had grown up so confused and undereducated about the female anatomy that they hardly even had a sense of what sensations might feel best or what activities were most satisfying.

The more men I talked to, the more sympathetic I felt. I was approaching the biggest epiphany of my life: men had as much anxiety and shame around sex as women did. We were all in this together, and any ideology that couldn’t admit as much was doomed to fail.

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It was this newfound comfort that facilitated my switch to in-person sex work. The vile cesspool that is the Internet made transitioning easy. Refreshingly, I never had a man call me fat, ugly, or diseased while we were standing face to face. And the men I met in person were shockingly tame when it came to sexual quirks.

On webcam, I was asked to play the part of a murderous dominatrix who poisoned her submissive and stood laughing over his grave. One customer wanted to see me tie myself with boat rope in impossibly bizarre configurations. I even had a regular who got off on me fake-sneezing and blowing my nose.

But with escorting, the ATM and DP requests were long gone. In the flesh, men were downright vanilla. Some in-person clients did want to incorporate violence, but only when they were the recipients. (Even the most casual research will bear out the fact while dominatrices can make a good living kicking the shit out of men, female submissives are so rarely in demand that most have to work as a switch in order to stay afloat.)

People who deeply distrust the sex industry—who’ve been personally harmed by it or find it threatening or who associate it only with exploitation—often get very angry when escorts (or academics who study sex workers, like Sudhir Venkatesh) claim some clients don’t want sexual interaction.

But it’s true: some don’t. I’ve been hired by men who never asked me to get naked, never requested that I touch their genitals. There’s always conversation, regardless of the other activities during a date: clients talk to me about their parents (especially their fathers) and about failing marriages or life after divorce. They often show me pictures of their children and, sometimes, spouses.

The longer I’ve worked, the more it seems that the sex is often a front. It’s an entry point that allows men to make their real request (for affection, understanding, and connection) while still satisfying stereotypical ideas of masculinity. What most men want is a great romance or, at the very least, a great friendship. They want to feel like they’re falling in love. They want to feel loved in return.

The clients who do want to have sex—and of course, there are many—don’t want that sex to be uncomfortable or unpleasant for me. They want to me to take pleasure in the act as well. They want to feel attractive and competent and gentle and attentive. Many of them are all of those things. If they express guilt about paying for sex, I don’t try to talk them into feeling otherwise. When one man said he should stop seeing me because the money he spent on our appointments should be going toward his kids’ college funds, I replied, “Well, if it makes you feel any better, it’s going toward mine.” (I never saw him again.)

Yes, I’ve met men who didn’t respect my boundaries and who harmed me, inadvertently or purposefully. But such men were few and far between, and I refused to see them again.

Not every man who visits a strip club, watches a clip of porn, or pays for sexual companionship wants to commit an act of violence against a woman. Rapists and murderers are the ones who want to rape and strangle people; some of them hire escorts, some don’t.

When Melissa Farley tells The Economist that men who hire prostitutes “are not nice guys looking for a normal date. They regularly attempt to rape and strangle women,” she’s not talking about my experience. Farley’s cloudy thinking rests on the belief that a man’s sexual interest in a woman is fundamentally disrespectful, fundamentally abusive, and fundamentally wrong.

But what’s wrong is the stigma surrounding sex work. In the professional world, there is no other service arrangement in which clients are accused of hating those whom they hire. Not janitorial work, furniture moving, notoriously dangerous meat-factory work, or any other job that requires use of the service provider’s body in grueling, unhealthy ways.

♦◊♦

In the seven years I’ve known “Napman,” the gentle soul whose strange request opened this piece, he’s yet to let on that he secretly desires to strangle me. He periodically sends me gifts. We email and punctuate our updates with pictures. He knows the names of all of my pets—he even knows where I live. I told him about this article. I came to know him as a man who only wanted what most men want: to do something nice for someone else.

There are many important conversations to be had about the sex industry, but I don’t believe those conversations will be beneficial unless they move beyond cartoonish depictions of villainous, lustful men victimizing innocent and vulnerable women.

I’m not claiming that my experience is representative of all sex workers, or even all sex-working women, but I know my experience is not entirely anomalous. I don’t regret selling sex for a variety of reasons—one of which is that it’s allowed me to meet many good men. And in doing so, it’s forever changed me for the better.