Breakdown of communication

Hugs Should be free, or at least given a fair trial.

I just noticed on Facebook that a friend of mine joined a group called Love Your Hooker and Pay Them Well. This struck me as an odd group to join, but being a progressive guy who has slouched around a bit and seen some things, I wasn't too surprised that it was a pro-sex-worker group. Upon inspection, however, I became aware that the group wasn't necessarily pro-hooker so much as it was anti-murdering hookers, which to my mind seems like the kind of thing you don't have to waste a lot of your life being against. Who goes around killing hookers, after all? Serial Killers, I suppose, but they have to go around killing someone, so why should hookers get special rights?

Delving a bit deeper, I discovered that the group arose in direct opposition to another group (take your pick) on Facebook, which it believed to be inciting the murder of sex workers. Again, I was a bit incredulous, but I was starting to get a little tickle in the back of my mind, like killing hookers is a meme that's fairly widespread. And so it is. In fact, I know dozens of people who have killed hookers in order to avoid paying them - they all did it in a video game called Grand Theft Auto.

In GTA, the main character is not a nice guy. He is, in fact, a ludicrously antisocial guy who has a knack for getting a hold of guns. The primary means of travel in GTA is to walk up to a car that is stopped at a light, beat the driver up and steal their car, then drive around shooting out the window and crashing into pedestrians, cops, motorcycles, and basically whatever else is available to crash into. A widespread fact about gameplay in GTA is that after a sex worker has provided you with their service, you can kill them to retrieve any money you paid them. This fact is interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is not in any way an objective of the game to procure the services of a prostitute. Doing so in the first place is completely unrelated to any other goals the player may have. Secondly (and probably more relevantly), killing the hooker shouldn't really be thought of any differently than killing anyone else in the game (and you really can kill just about anyone in the game at any time), however, to most players, it is considered different. In a game where the primary joy of play is the realistic simulation of driving around and killing strangers, killing the hooker is considered by most players to be something of a transgression. That's why it's a meme: it's a notorious act, and it is treated as a curiosity by GTA players.

So, the original Facebook group, which appears to have been removed and replaced by 4 others, was a childish in-joke amongst video game players about something outrageous. Far from inciting violence, it was in itself a sort of ironic whistling at the extremity of the violence in question. As for the anti-hooker-killing group, I suppose it is composed of people who don't play such video games.

I would say that the pro-sex-workers group has a great deal of redeeming value in and of itself. Love is positively grand, and hookers, well, they're better off being paid well than not, I suppose. I don't believe the group's grand purpose should be to shut down one Facebook group. Particularly if they're only doing it because they don't understand the context the group is speaking from.