I'm totally with you on the child rapist excuses, Gainor. I'm a little bit less with you on the Late Night womanizer excuses. Remember: just because a man's legal relationships with consenting adults happen to be aired the same week that a notorious child rapist was arrested does not mean that the two incidents are related. And I'm really not with you on the mainstream media's Olympics "excuses," which amount to Katie Couric announcing, "Despite a high-powered, star-studded U.S. appeal from Oprah to the Obamas, the Olympics are awarded to Rio.”

Which is worse: Hollywood filmmakers excusing child rape, or Katie Couric alliterating on "Oprah," "Obama," and "Olympics"? To Gainor, it's pretty much a draw!

"Turn on any network last week and you saw famous people making excuses. It didn’t matter if it was Hollywood morons defending a rapist, David Letterman pretending he was a victim for treating his staff like a harem, or Barack Obama denying responsibility for the failed Olympic bid," writes Gainor. "It looked like some nightmarish recast of an awful 'Family Circus' cartoon with all of the major characters shouting 'not me' with their hands fully in the cookie jar."

Nope, my bad! According to Gainor, it "doesn't matter" whether these people are excusing heinous sex crimes against minors, or simply refraining from speculating as to the Olympic committee's reasoning for granting the games to Rio.

Gainor's logic linking defenders of Polanski, Letterman, and Obama boils down to this: the media is failing to treat Roman Polanski like he committed a crime. The media is also failing to treat David Letterman and Barack Obama like they committed crimes. Because they didn't. I'm just going to assume that my own failure to ignore this crucial distinction designates me as a member of the liberal media. Hey, got anybody who didn't do anything wrong that requires an excuse from the mainstream media? Hit me up!

Bonus FOX News fail: "awful 'Family Circus' cartoon" is redundant. Every Family Circus cartoon is awful.

When the American Library Association's annual conference kicked off in Chicago last Thursday, some attendees wanted the world to know that librarian get-togethers aren't all about shushing and stacking: There's a lot of fucking, too.

The nearly week-long librarian meet-up, which began July 9, delivers "over 300 educational programs" to professional bibliophiles each year—including workshops like "Collection Development: Decision Making With Data" and "When Is Nice Too Nice? Strategies For Disengaging From the Talkative Patron." Some attendees, however, haven't been entirely satisfied with the ALA programming. So they launched a "secret" Twitter account for librarians to share more intriguing professional insights. A typical anonymous ALA tweet:

Some librarians are exhausted by the conference's material ("I have reached the point of the conference where I no longer give a damn about anything anyone is saying any more.") Others are inspired by a perceived lack of cultural acceptance for a librarian's sex life ("I am an adult. I am a librarian. I enjoy good sex. Including at this conference. What is the problem?"). Most of them, for whatever reason, are talking about fucking—that's the "sexy" part. Not everyone is happy about it. That's where "stern" comes in.

According to the librarian-blogger at not all bits, ALA's first anonymous Twitter free-for-all, @alasecrets, was accessible via a username and password circulated among conference-goers. Less than two days into the festivities, however, the account was shut down by a fellow librarian. Writes not all bits:

Well, it saddens me that a member of the library profession took exception to @alasecrets and shut it down by logging in and changing the password. They protected the updates thereafter so, supposedly, people couldn’t see them.

You’re going to have to pardon my language here but FUCK that. I despise censorship in any form and I especially loathe the idea that a librarian shut down that Twitter account. So I did something about it.

The sexy librarian gossip site has now been re-born in the form of @ALASecrets2009—and re-illustrated with an icon of a Naughty Librarian Halloween costume (pictured). Conference attendees can now only post to the new feed by e-mail, meaning that fun-hating librarians can't tinker with the account details to quiet the masses. For the less horny librarian, the #ala2009 hash tag still offers up plenty of non-sexual ALA chat fare.

The first go-around of librarian fucking Tweets has now been "protected" from the public. Below, the ten sexiest nerd tweets from the feed's second incarnation:

TEN:

NINE:

EIGHT:

SEVEN:

SIX:

FIVE—THREE:

TWO:

ONE:

UPDATE: The American Library Association annual conference will be held in Washington, D.C. next year. Yesss.

UPDATE 2: Some sexy preservationists have uncovered the lost secret tweets!

In last month's "Capital Ideas," a publication of the Chicago Booth school of Business, Steven Levitt gives the Freakonomics treatment to Chicago-area prostitution. The conceit of "Trading Tricks," as with Levitt's examination of the inner-city drug trade [PDF], is that prostitution is a market like any other.

Levitt, along with Columbia University professor Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, reveal that prostitutes "want to be where their customers can easily find them"—just like "stores do in shopping malls." That the price of a trick "increases with the risk associated with a particular sex act"—just like in construction work. And that pimps increase the wages of loyal prostitutes in order to "effectively raise the penalty associated with being fired, which will hopefully induce better behavior on the part of the prostitutes"—just like with any employer.

But prostitution is not a job like any other:

Levitt and Venkatesh found that condoms are used in only one of every four tricks, making the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection very high. These women face other perils as well. Prostitutes report that they are violently assaulted about once every month. Compared with jobs outside of prostitution, such as a daycare or babysitting job, prostitutes earn far more at about $25 to $30 per hour, or, roughly four times what they would take home otherwise. But because prostitution is such a dangerous, unpleasant, and stigmatizing job, are these women really earning enough to compensate them for the risks they bear?

How does Levitt account for the "unpleasantness"? By asserting that prostitution is—except for that!—a job like any other:

Levitt says that from the prostitutes’ point of view and given the menu of options they have, they must believe that it is a fair compensation because they have chosen this profession. Many of them will do other work as well and prostitution is just part of a portfolio of ways that women get by in these communities. "Prostitution doesn’t seem to be a stark moral choice," says Levitt. "It’s like a job. When it pays better, women will quit other jobs to do it."

Levitt asserts that prostitution is not a "stark" choice because street prostitutes do choose to be street prostitutes. (I won't count escort services here, where I'm betting the "unpleasantness" of violent physical and sexual assault comes more infrequently). What Levitt fails to provide is at what age, education level, and economic status these women make that choice—and what other jobs are on this "menu of options," particularly at our current unemployment rate.

Sure, prostitution is a choice. But it's an illegal choice, and that's a problem. As long as prostitution goes unregulated—or is regulated by police officers who trade sex for a blind eye, pimps who have no legal oversight to keep them from beating prostitutes to keep them in line, and clients who know the prostitutes won't call the (corrupt) cops on them when they act too rough—it is a stark choice, and not in the way that "any other" job kinda sucks. A lot of jobs on Levitt's "menu" are "unpleasant"—but when you work as a waitress, or cashier, or stripper, there are at least protections in place to prevent your boss from beating the shit out of you, and prosecuting him if he does. Brushing violent crime away because prostitutes "choose" to endure it is misleading and damaging—just as women "choosing" to stay in abusive relationships doesn't make that abuse "fair."

Women can make money as prostitutes, and I think that's a fine choice. It doesn't excuse the government from keeping it illegal—and dangerous.

Photo by dreamsjung