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“Killing your hooker” on Facebook

Jill

A guest-post by Miranda from Women’s Glib.

It has come to my attention that there is a Facebook fan page entitled, “Killing your hooker so you don’t have to pay her.” The page boasts such updates as, “Ever stab your hooker with a blunt object to add insult to injury?” The page was created about a month ago.

And, as of today, it has 22,127 fans.

This is a deeply offensive, misogynistic, and outright violent page. Hypothetical violence is not funny, but real violence is even less amusing — and this violence is real. The murder of sex workers is frighteningly commonplace, and all too often is excused under some bullshit pretense that sex workers are expendable, are unhuman.

What happens online matters. George Sodini showed us that much. Wrote Bob Herbert in the aftermath of Sodini’s shooting:

We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

…We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

Facebook pages like this one are surely a form of entertainment, of shits and giggles, for those involved. For the sex workers who are killed for no other reason than hatred, the amusement fades.

This “entertainment” is what happens when people hate women, hate sex workers, and see violence as a viable solution to their rage.

Please, please visit the “Killing your hooker so you don’t have to pay her” Facebook fan page and report it for its offensive content. (Scroll down and look in the lower left corner of your screen to find the link to report it.)

Cross-posted at Women’s Glib.

37 thoughts on “Killing your hooker” on Facebook

  4. Becky, I searched for it from my homepage and found it, but not it only has two members. I reported it anyway. Who knows what’s going on.

  5. Same as Andrea- looks like the group was shut down, the restarted…however, the group only had 3 members and one post- one that said ‘lets get this group back on its feet’ so, clearly shutting down the page once didn’t get the message across. I reported them again, with the note “Violence against sex workers still not funny!”

  6. I’m guessing from the “lets get this group back on it’s feet” wall post, the original page was removed and now a new one has been set up.

  8. There’s quite a few that are popping up and they all seem to be run by gamers who play “Grand Theft Auto”. Starting to think that a larger protest should be in order here, particularly of that that video game.

  9. The page you’re describing was taken down yesterday, but there are many similar facebook groups. In protest “Hookers for the ban of the groups calling for their murder” is keeping track of similar groups as they arise. It’s for sex workers and allies, so it would be great if people joined.

  12. This is why I don’t bother with Facebook anymore. Too many college frat-rats and high school boys sniggering at each other. The law of the crowd strikes again, and in spades. (The intelligence of the crowd drops to the level of the least intelligent individual, according to this law.)

  13. Politicalguineapig, I know what you mean. I still use fb, but I’ve taken a hardline of unfriending and blocking anyone who joins things like that or posts sexists/racist videos, pictures, etc. My list of blocked people may be growing, but at least my own homepage is pretty safe.

  17. There’s quite a few that are popping up and they all seem to be run by gamers who play “Grand Theft Auto”. Starting to think that a larger protest should be in order here, particularly of that that video game.

    I don’t think that’s really fair. Hypothetical: lots of pedophiles have mustaches. Should we protest mustaches?

  18. @Doc Alpert – couldn’t find where you pulled that quote from, but I think the connection to Grand Theft Auto is that a very visible part of the game is killing prostitutes. (I haven’t played, but I’ve read about it – correct me if I’m wrong, anyone.)

    So, protesting the extremely popular, influential video game that promotes or glamorizes killing women to its millions of customers would be relevant, and not akin to pedophiles have mustaches, mustaches should be protested.

  21. I just reported two similar groups to the one that was shut down earlier today, which I also reported.

    According to Carnal Nation there are 232 Facebook groups that contain the words “dead hooker.” What. the. fuck.

    Concerning Grand Theft Auto: When I was 16 and GTA was the new “hot shit,” beating up or killing the hookers was everyone’s favorite thing to do. Male or female, everyone I knew at the time found it hilarious. I clearly remember watching my “BFF” beating this hooker with a baseball bat until she could “get her motherfucking money!” She was giggling hysterically, and I was thinking, “Why does everyone love beating up the hookers especially? Why is it funnier than other types of violence in the game?” It began to creep me out and helped pushed me a little closer to feminism.

  22. I was just telling a gamer friend today that GTA the MMO would be much more satisfying and fun than GTA, because I would totally play a hooker and then when some guy tried to kill me, I’d pull out my gun, shoot him in the face, and steal his car.

    I dislike the whole GTA franchise because the violence has almost no consequences. No one fights back. The hooker never kills *you*. Neither do the people whose car you steal. I mean, in the real world, men who live such anarchic and violent lifestyles die by violence, really young. It’s like a fantasy of violence without consequences. I would prefer violence *with* consequences.

    It probably wouldn’t make it better if the hooker would sometimes kill you in self- defense, but damn, it would feel much more satisfying to me.

  23. The sad fact of the matter is, Facebook is run by a group of racist, sexist, misogynist and homophobic pigs who are all about the benjamins. So, I wouldn’t hold out much faith in getting them to take the page down. After all, they allowed a fan page to George Sodini to remain.

  24. I didn’t know where to find the page, so I searched “kill hooker” on Facebook. 111 results.

    I’m going back to bed.

  27. “I dislike the whole GTA franchise because the violence has almost no consequences. No one fights back. The hooker never kills *you*. Neither do the people whose car you steal. I mean, in the real world, men who live such anarchic and violent lifestyles die by violence, really young. It’s like a fantasy of violence without consequences. I would prefer violence *with* consequences.”

    It depends on the game. The latest two or three most certainly do feature hookers who fight back. They also have random NPCs who will fight back if you try to start a fist-fight, steal your car if you leave it around, and call the cops on you if they see you commit a serious crime or if you commit a crime against them. Though that’s mostly sandbox-type stuff.

    The main game missions are generally either against other criminals who are armed and will happily turn the player character into ten kinds of hamburger or (relatively) non-violent, with the danger coming from encounters with the police, who will also happily turn the player character into ten different kinds of hamburger. So it’s hyper-violent and the consequences are certainly far less than what would be realistic–you can just replay a mission until you figure out a way to avoid getting mown down in a hail of submachine gun fire or taken out by a police sniper–but it’s not quite as no-consequences as all that.

  29. Andrea: I don’t know if I have any friends who’d be part of that group. Except for my brother, sadly. (Although he actually respects women, so I don’t know. He’s in the right age demographic.) It’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to think that men of my generation are a total wash.
    Alara: I’d play that. Actually, I think City of Heroes is kind of like the RPG of Grand Theft Auto.

  30. Good thing that our PS3 doesn’t play games in the console. And it is also a good thing that we no longer play GTA — we all play Call of Duty all the time nowadays. This kind of violent, misogynistic thuggery shall have no place in a civilized world, not even on Facebook.

  33. Rhode Island just made indoor prostitution illegal under the cover of ‘anti-trafficking’. I was just thinking today how the evils of trafficking– slavery, murder, rape, child abuse, threats, extortion, robbery– are all heinous crimes that should be prosecuted no matter who the victim is.
    The fact that some people are outside the protection of the law is reflected in this post.

  34. Hi all,

    I’ve been resisting joining FB (don’t want it to eat my life) but as an ally I was SO ENRAGED by this casual act of violence that I just joined FB to report the post, only to find it had been taken down and others put up.

    Here is the admin’s comment:

    “This is a GTA4 reference so don’t get your panties in a knot or i’ll beat you with a golf club and pick up the glowing yellow cash.
    Admin.- A.J. Fulgham”

    (GTA = Grand Theft Auto)

    So it’s okay because it was in a video game???

    And here is an interesting pro-sex-work article dealing with violence against sex workers:

    I’ll go join the protest group now.

  35. a rose is a rose @26:

    Good idea. maybe that’s the right way to combat these things, get lists of all their members and keep them on a””creepers no one should date” list on facebook.

  36. The original group still exists under a new name – as per A Rose is a Rose’s link, but it’s worth noting that two other groups with the original name have sprung up. I’ve reported both. They’re absolutely foul.

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