From Craigslist to Blacklist
I love Craigslist. I've found roommates, apartments, concert tickets and furniture through it. I recently posted an ad for the site and got a flurry of responses, including the perfect one. But in the meantime, I also received emails from people intimating that I might be interested in various other services, if you know what I mean. Considering that my ad was related to children, it was a bit disconcerting to realize that I was working the classifieds in the midst of pervs.
Here comes news that Craigslist has stopped providing its explicit sexual services forum:
On its famously bare-bones Web sites, the blue-lettered link for adult services was gone. It had been replaced with a black box, containing one word: "censored."
Craigslist's usually outspoken leaders gave no explanation for their move and no signal as to whether it would be permanent. Last year, the site increased the screening of these ads after authorities in New England said a man had killed one woman and attacked two others he'd contacted through Craigslist.
Prosecutors had been complaining about the criminal traffic being run through the site. The question is whether Craigslist decided on its own that it didn't want to support that enterprise anymore or whether it felt government pressure to cease. Sounds like the latter.
I was rereading Jonathan Rauch's excellent essay on the importance of Hidden Law in governing moral affairs. He suggests that there are gains to be made by keeping it difficult to engage in immoral behavior, without going so far as to make it illegal. It's downright shocking how much has changed in the decade since he wrote that. Many in our culture are reticent to even make the case that anonymous sex, much less prostitution, might have a serious downside.
If Craigslist did make this change only in response to government pressure -- rather than a more reasonable public outcry -- it indicates that the state increases its power when the people lose their moral voice.
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Comments :
May '10
Re: From Craigslist to Blacklist
When we were living in Norfolk, I ran an ad in a local paper advertising portraiture painting, put that MFA to work and all that. The only response I got was from some creepy dude who wanted me to draw him nude. Yes, of course, I've painted nudes, but never for commission and certainly never used someone I didn't know or trusted as a model.
Jul '10
Re: From Craigslist to Blacklist
Interesting that they accept ads for prostitution.
But not for guns.
Jun '10
Re: From Craigslist to Blacklist
Kenneth: Interesting that they accept ads for prostitution.
But not for guns. · Sep 4 at 10:11pm
I guess that it all depends on whether or not you're shooting blanks.
May '10
Re: From Craigslist to Blacklist
If an individual, or society, is incapable of controlling itself, it will be controlled by someone else.
Aug '10
Re: From Craigslist to Blacklist
I have used Craigslist to facilitate activities analogous to, if probably not precisely the same as, Mollie's unwanted responses (no ... I'm not proud of it, but I can't and won't pretend to be a better man than I am).
Here's what struck me as ridiculous about CL shutting down its adult-services listings, at least from a "public space" POV. Right on the same site there are hookup listings, "men seeking men," "men seeking women," etc., which I can assure y'all (no, I won't link, the curious can do their own legwork) are quite as graphic (probably more so, at least M4M is) as the "escort"/"massage" ads.
The M4M listings also are sometimes used as coded prostitution solicits -- "seeking generous" is one such euphemism. And frankly, if one were a perv seeking a victim, a free-hookup premise works just as well as a prostitute solicit, maybe better. Once the clothes are off, what will happen will happen.