Ryan and Debi Cragun’s Blog

So, things are winding down for us here in Cincinnati. I’m probably headed to Tampa, mid-June, to take occupancy of the home we are buying down there. Debi will be following me shortly thereafter.

After 6 years in Cincinnati we’ve been thinking of things we’ve wanted to do but haven’t done and have been trying a few of them. Monday, for instance, we went to Taste of Cincinnati, downtown, to see what we’ve been missing. We aren’t frequenters of large social functions like that, but the manifest purpose of this one made sense - try a bunch of different food for relatively cheap (technically, you probably pay more for it than you would in a restaurant, but since you only have to order a sampler, you’re kind of paying less). We had never been to Taste of Cincinnati and there was something we wanted to try because so many people in Cincinnati rave about it - Montgomery Inn’s BBQ ribs.

I think my months eating meat over the last year for research have kind of softened my attitude toward vegetarianism (that and I’ve realized that it isn’t, technically, the healthiest diet - one light on meat is). So, we were willing to give it a try. We plopped down our $5 for a sampler of the ribs and dug in. The verdict? We aren’t really missing much… Ribs are mostly fat, filled with gristle, and very greasy. The BBQ sauce was admittedly good, but not something so amazing I’d consider giving up being a vegetarian for it. So, one more thing we can cross off our list of things to try in Cincinnati. If you have any suggestions of “must-do” things in Cincinnati, feel free to post them as a comment to this post. (Note: We probably aren’t going to go to the new Creationism museum because it costs so damn much. I just can justify spending $40 for the 2 of us just to laugh our asses off at the idiocy of creationists. At that price, I really would be supporting their anti-science agenda, which I can’t stomach.)

We tried a few more things while at Taste of Cincinnati, but they weren’t as unique (for us, at least) as the ribs: Debi got some frozen lemonade (which was okay, but not worth $3.50), I ordered some mushrooms and escargot from Le Petit France (escargot doesn’t really taste like anything; at least, these snails didn’t), we also got some samosas (not great; had better) and some baklava for dessert (the baklava was good). It was pretty warm Monday afternoon while we were there, so we didn’t stay very long. But it was fun and a good chance to try some things we wouldn’t normally try.

We did notice one thing while we were there that was kind of intriguing. A man was walking up and down the street where the booths were wearing a placard that said “Bush Killed Saddam” on the front and something like “end the war” on the back. Debi pointed out the obvious problem with the sign - most of the people in the U.S. won’t care at all that Bush is in some way responsible for Saddam Hussein’s death. If anything, that’s a nod in favor of Bush (I’m not saying it is for me, but for people in the U.S., generally). If he really wanted to get people’s attention he should have put something like “Bush is Killing Our Soldiers” on the placard. That would have at least gotten him some attention.

Which leads me to the thought I had while there: No one was paying the guy the slightest bit of attention! Granted, he wasn’t saying anything, just handing out flyers and walking up and down. But, seriously, no one even batted an eye at his placard. It was as though he was wearing a sign that said, “Hi, ignore me.” (Which, ironically, probably would have gotten more attention as people would want to know why they should.) No response whatsoever from the crowd. The lack of response got me to thinking: What is it about an event like this that makes that kind of protest disappear into the background? I don’t know, of course, the actual answer, but I have to think it has something to do with the reasons why people go there in the first place - to forget about “life” for a while (to quote the famous Cheers tagline). Like I said, I don’t know if that is true, but I’d be interested to know why others think people go. For Debi and I it was strictly to try some new food and have lunch/dinner (that was our lunch and dinner on Monday).

As a sociologist I can’t help but people watch at an event like this. There were a lot of young, single people cruising - both guys and girls. I wonder if anyone actually meets a potential partner at an event like this? There were also a lot of families and couples there, and they seemed genuinely engaged in walking up and down the street perusing the booths. I wonder if they were thinking what I was thinking, “Why is everyone else here?” Or were they really just forgetting about normal, quotidian, day-to-day life for a while?

(Note: We also went to the Krohn Conservatory butterfly show the weekend before last. Having been to a number of butterfly shows because of Debi’s interest in butterflies, we were a little disappointed. The butterfly conservatories in Niagara Falls, Canada, Hershey, PA, and Grand Cayman were all better. Plus, they weren’t nearly as crowded (and people weren’t allowed to touch the butterflies, which effectively kills them by stripping the scales from their wings).)

In preparation for my class on sex work tomorrow (it’s a class on human sexuality) I did a little sniffing around to see what I could find on prostitution in Cincinnati. One of the first thoughts that came to mind was to see if the Cincinnati Police had any statistics on their website regarding prostitution. They didn’t have anything easily digestible, but they do have a complete list of their arrests online. After I got over the shock that the Cincinnati Police made 50,000 arrests in 2006 (seriously, it was like 49,997) in a city with close to 300,000 people in it (if it were not for repeat arrests that would mean 1 in 6 people was arrested in Cincinnati in 2006), I found what I was looking for… sort of. Any criminologists reading this (hint, hint, Mike) will probably correct my analysis, but my cursory examination of the data revealed the following prostitution information:

• 673 arrests for solicitation of prostitution
• 383 women arrested; 290 men
• 332 blacks; 322 whites; 19 undetermined

I’m sure the numbers are probably a bit higher, but this was the clearest indication of prostitution and sex work I found in the arrest records, so I went with it. There are, of course, a few intriguing things about the above. First, more women are arrested than men. Certainly more women are sex workers than are men, but why aren’t more “Johns” arrested for solicitation than are the sex workers themselves? (This is aside from the fact that I think prostitution should be legalized and regulated to protect the workers, but that’s a different issue.) Also, more blacks than whites? Even though blacks make up a large percentage of the population of Cincinnati, that is a disproportionate share of arrests for prostitution. Are blacks more likely to: (1) sell sex, (2) buy sex? My guess is that neither of those are true. The real answer, and I’m only speculating here (again, criminologists’ views are welcome), is that whites, given their higher SES, are more likely to frequent sex workers who are not on the street (e.g., escorts or call services rather than streetwalkers). Streetwalkers are, by definition, more public and more prone to arrest and police harassment.

Finally, one nifty element of the arrest spreadsheet is that it includes the actual address of the arrest. A quick import into Streets and Trips and I was able to plot almost all of the arrests in 2006 for prostitution on a map of Cincinnati (this is just the jurisdiction of the Cincinnati Police, so it is limited to a relatively small geographic area). (Note: Click on the image to see it full size):

Living in a relatively quite, semi-suburban neighborhood, I don’t see many streetwalkers nearby. I’m not completely oblivious; I know prostitution is taking place despite it being illegal (see comment on legality above). I just didn’t know where it was happening. I can’t say I’m stunned by this, but it is kind of interesting to see.

I successfully defended my dissertation yesterday! Hooray! A few minor revisions and I can finally turn my attention to getting chapters from it published. With all the preparation the defense required, I basically haven’t been doing much else - including blogging. But life has continued…

I’m grading mid-terms from the three classes I’m teaching this quarter and caught this quote that gave me a good laugh. One of the assignments I give the students in my sociology of religion courses is to write a religious autobiography. In describing his parents’ devotion to Catholicism, this student made a slight error in his phrasing,

“They practiced their faith at home by having a crucifixion in every room…”