Voices of Survivors of the Sex Trade: Prostitution Is Sexual Slavery, Gang Rape, Sexual Abuse
Aug 25th, 2008 by admin
If you read around the blogosphere — I won’t call it the feminist blogosphere because more and more, the writers I’m thinking of say they are not feminists, though they continue to blog in venues frequented to some degree by feminists — a few vocal, highly motivated people can be found working very hard to regulate feminist discourse around the prostituting of women. This is nothing new; anti-feminists, conservatives, Republicans, the Religious Right, liberals, libertarians, pro-pornography, pro-prostitution First Amendment types, have always worked hard to regulate feminist discourse, to tell us what we can and cannot say, what words we can and cannot use. As the saying goes, who defines has the power, and even those who have never heard that language understand on some level that this is true. Struggles around the framing of discourse, the defining of terms, the use of words, naming — these are always deeply political and are always about power. As is true of all of the other movements for liberation, feminist women have committed themselves to resisting sexist speech: “bitch,” “slut,” “cunt,” “hag,” “battleaxe,” “dyke”, “witch,” and words like “lady,” “gal” and “girl” as well. Even where women have differed over strategy — whether a particular word can be effectively “reclaimed,” for example — we’ve always known if only in an as-yet unarticulated way that language both describes and constructs our reality as second class citizens. When a businessman says to another businessman, “I’ll have my gal call your gal,” he is making a statement about male power and female subordination. He is also participating in the social construction of his own power compared with his and his colleague’s “gals’”. Men referring to women as “girls” or “ladies” invokes a specific history of women’s subjugation that includes infantilizing us, defining us as the “weaker sex,” fragile, with tender sensibilities, in need of male protection rackets, constructing a reality in which as women we feel pressured to behave as though we really are weak, fragile, tender because that is what is expected of women. Words have power; they are never “only words.” They describe our realities but they also, in specific ways, create our realities.
So feminists are told by nonfeminists or anti-feminists that we should not say prostituted women “sell their bodies.” In fact, we shouldn’t say women are “prostituted” at all. We should make clear distinctions, we are told, between prostituted women and raped women and between prostituted women and trafficked women, except, again, that we shouldn’t say “prostituted.” ‘Prostituted” suggests subject-object relations, more specifically a subject (a john) acting on an object (a woman). Only some women in the sex trade are trafficked we are told, and only some are prostituted, not all. That’s just the thing though– prostituted and trafficked women get fairly short shrift in these circles. They tend to be the footnote, the afterthought, something like, well, yes, there are those women and girls and we care about them, but we are more interested in establishing that we are not them. We are the women who “chose” prostitution. And as feminists, we are not supposed to interrogate the nature of that choice, or even question it, or analyze or critique it, even though the fact that women are prostituted and trafficked and raped as prostitutes shapes and constructs the lives and realities of all women, including our own. We are told we should listen only to sex workers themselves, the subtext being that we should accept what they say at face value.
So I have done that. I spent some time doing searches on my blog here to find the words of survivors of the sex trade in their own writings I have posted here over the past couple of years. Following, in their own words, are what women have to say about having survived the sex trade:
Monique, who was a stripper who started an organization for survivors of stripping:
[She] did her best to maintain her dignity. When a man started throwing stacks of dollar bills on the stage, she realized “he was getting off on seeing the women crawling all over the floor to pick the money up.” When it was her turn… she refused to bend; he kept throwing more. “At the end of my dance I asked someone to bring me a broom; I swept it all into a garbage bag and left.” She’d snagged $800 in singles– all from that one man.
Men propositioned her almost every night. “I told them if they wanted a hooker they should go to Sunset Boulevard. I’d say it loud to humiliate them because I felt humiliated. ” Sometimes she had to get aggressive when customers groped her. Once a man licked her body … she beat him on the head with her shoe. Another time as she danced, a man yelled, “Come here and bend over, b****.” She flicked her foot and tipped his drink onto his lap; when he cursed at her, she punched him in the face.
But beneath her toughness was a despondent woman. While the other girls danced to loud, fast songs, [she] chose sad cuts by Erykah Badu, Sade and especially, Rickie Lee Jones, whose forlorn, streetwise air she identified with. [She] remembers the lyrics of one song she performed to, “It’s OK, it’s not that bad,” and the irony of the words rang true for her. It wasn’t OK… She was in a state of almost constant dissociation– “it was like taking a Vicodin; I was numb all over” — and she was stuck… There was always some financial emergency, always a reason not to quit.
…Once … she invited her mother to the club and got a supportive response. “Mom told me I brought art into dancing.” …
[Older dancers] often had bad plastic surgery and [would] have to have sex with customers because they weren’t in demand as dancers. They’d put a tablecloth over their lap and let a man put it in.
I danced for 10 long years
until at the age of 37 i looked in that mirror one day as i was getting ready to go on stage
and i seen an old, strung out, drunk girl that was
headed to destruction.as i got older all the young girls took my money
you know they want the “fresh meat” 18-21
year olds, and you’re stuck waving a rose in the back seats for the attention unless you turn a trick.i no longer dance but now my daughter is doing it!
talk about your sin seeking you out!
and i regret that i ever did it now
it took my dignity away
and even my identityno wonder they give you a stage name
to all those girls that are no longer stripping
God Bless you
and if you are stripping, i know what you went through, i know how you feel
i was once there myself. all i can say is my prayers are with you, and hope someday you will find the strength to walk away
“I spoke to some of them,” Ms. Adel writes, “and they said they would rather be in prison than have to go back out there and get abused by Saudi, Kuwaiti, and other Gulf States men who still hold grudges against Iraq and find pleasure in abusing Iraqi women to make them pay for Iraq’s war against these Gulf States in 1991.”
Toby Summer, a survivor of prostitution
This strategic lie attempted to turn my degradation into something else, something more human, something that was not force or coercion. Poverty and oppression against women and lesbians certainly qualify as force and coercion, even if the barrel of the gun is behind the curtain of sex. What was accomplished with this lie was not a changed reality but merely a renaming of reality for something other than what it was….
The lies that I’ve lived with, trying to make prostitution into anything other than what it is, are why I’m writing this paper; I did not want to do this paper. I hate every minute that I have been forced to spend on it. Like every fuck. Confronting how I’ve been hurt is the hardest thing that I’ve had to do in my life. A hard life, if I may say so. It is humiliating to acknowledge victimization. It is really quite simple: if you lose, you don’t win. One cannot be hurt and not be a victim to the perpetrator, and to all those who come after to watch the show. To avoid further abuse by the sexual practice of humiliation, I claimed the intolerable as my own, because being a victim was and still is intolerable. What I am doing in this paper is the intolerable. I want you to know that. I’m doing it because I can’t stand … the pretense of regard towards women bought. Buying a human is not regard. It is another lie. Prostitution is not freedom; not just another job. It is the abuse of women. It is sexual slavery. Period.
Norma Hotaling a survivor of prostitution, whom I blogged about here:
Hotaling left the streets in 1989, and now she tells her story to rooms full of johns. To one such group, she described her old self as “homicidal and suicidal. I was waiting for one of you to take me out somewhere and act a little crazy or ask me to do something I didn’t want to do or push my head a little bit harder down on your dick, and I was going to kill your ass. And I had a plan and I had weapons and I had a deep desire to do that, because I was so full of rage.”
…”People talk about prostitution, for some reason, like survival of the fittest,” she says. About “the girls with sexual abuse, the girls that are on the street, the girls who are drug addicted, society says, ‘Oh well, they got eaten up; they weren’t the strongest of our herd.’ This is a group of women nobody cares about.” …
….”In the beginning,” she replies, “I only wanted the women to have a venue to speak. I thought it would be powerful for them to confront another layer of their history, to actually confront men and tell them the truth finally about prostitution. So I went in there thinking it would be a success if the women didn’t get tomatoes thrown at them and ended up feeling empowered.”
She didn’t think much about the men’s response, partly because the women are her priority but also because she “did not believe that men would even consider giving up their right to buy women … This was a privilege and a right that men have because they’re men. ‘You’re superior, so you get this.’ And we were asking them to look at it, but I didn’t think they’d give it up.”
…When prostitutes protest that their johns are nice guys, she says she asks them, “‘Can you be the real person that you are, when he walks in the door, if you’re having PMS or angry at someone? No, they don’t want you that way.’ That’s the limitation that prostitution offers these guys, and they start seeing women as these limited human beings. So when women get angry, they’re like, ‘Fuck you, I’ll go buy Sally, she’s never angry.’ Or ‘She’s not hurt, she doesn’t have sexual abuse, she doesn’t have sexual harassment at work.’
“And that’s a real problem,” continues Hotaling. “The men who run the economic system that women work in, the political system, the men who make laws — if they’re johns, they don’t see women as whole people.
I hate that. I hate that men can rape, and I don’t see their face. I hate that men could torture me, and I do not even know how men were in the room.
I hate that I was raped for so long by so many men that each man I show is just the tip of the iceberg.
For me, that is the worse effect of prostitution is that my memory has been wrecked.
And all men who used me look the same.
One way I remember is through the staring of men before, during and after they used me.
It was a look where I could not believe in hope. In that stare, I lose that I was human.
I became a sex object.
I feel that look send fear into me. I feel it turning me into an obedient sex toy.
That stare has enter my nightmares.
I want to to see beyond that stare.
Suki Falconberg, prostituted by the U.S. military:
I would like to know what the women sailors aboard the ship think of this rape of their prostituted sisters—do they make the connection? High rates of sexual assault in the military are directly related to the time-honored rape of for-sale women by sailors. Train and allow men to rape one group of women, and they will rape others as well.
I read that the Nimitz is planning to dock in Hong Kong this month. Perhaps PBS could do some ‘postscript’ filming–follow the men into the brothels. As a woman who was raped and prostituted by the U.S. military, I would like my side of military history to be told. What is ‘fun’ for the sailors is life imprisonment in rape hell for us prostitutes. I wish women journalists and filmmakers would cover what happens to us.
Andrea Dworkin, survivor of the sex trade:
… the premises of the prostituted woman are my premises. They are the ones that I act from. They are the ones that my work has been based on all of these years. I cannot accept–because I cannot believe–the premises of the feminism … that says we will hear all these sides year after year, and then, someday, in the future, by some process that we have not yet found, we will decide what is right and what is true. That does not make sense to me. I understand that to many of you it does make sense. I am talking across the biggest cultural divide in my own life. I have been trying to talk across it for twenty years with what I would consider marginal success.
I want to bring us back to basics. Prostitution: what is it? It is the use of a woman’s body for sex by a man, he pays money, he does what he wants. The minute you move away from what it really is, you move away from prostitution into the world of ideas. You will feel better; you will have a better time; it is more fun; there is plenty to discuss, but you will be discussing ideas, not prostitution. Prostitution is not an idea. It is the mouth, the vagina, the rectum, penetrated usually by a penis, sometimes hands, sometimes objects, by one man and then another and then another and then another and then another. That’s what it is.
I ask you to think about your own bodies–if you can do so outside the world that the pornographers have created in your minds, the flat, dead, floating mouths and vaginas and anuses of women. I ask you to think concretely about your own bodies used that way. How sexy is it? Is it fun? The people who defend prostitution and pornography want you to feel a kinky little thrill every time you think of something being stuck in a woman. I want you to feel the delicate tissues in her body that are being misused. I want you to feel what it feels like when it happens over and over and over and over and over and over and over again: because that is what prostitution is.
Which is why–from the perspective of a woman in prostitution or a woman who has been in prostitution–the distinctions other people make between whether the event took place in the Plaza Hotel or somewhere more inelegant are not the distinctions that matter. These are irreconcilable perceptions, with irreconcilable premises. Of course the circumstances must matter, you say. No, they do not, because we are talking about the use of the mouth, the vagina, and the rectum. The circumstances don’t mitigate or modify what prostitution is.
And so, many of us are saying that prostitution is intrinsically abusive. Let me be clear. I am talking to you about prostitution per se, without more violence, without extra violence, without a woman being hit, without a woman being pushed. Prostitution in and of itself is an abuse of a woman’s body. …The more complex you manage to be, the further away from the reality you will be–the safer you will be, the happier you will be, the more fun you will have discussing the issue of prostitution. In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women’s bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It’s impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after. Women who have been abused in prostitution have some choices to make. You have seen very brave women here make some very important choices: to use what they know; to try to communicate to you what they know. But nobody gets whole, because too much is taken away when the invasion is inside you, when the brutality is inside your skin. We try so hard to communicate, all of us to each other, the pain. We plead, we make analogies. The only analogy I can think of concerning prostitution is that it is more like gang rape than it is like anything else.
Oh, you say, gang rape is completely different. An innocent woman is walking down the street and she is taken by surprise. Every woman is that same innocent woman. Every woman is taken by surprise. In a prostitute’s life, she is taken by surprise over and over and over and over and over again. The gang rape is punctuated by a money exchange. That’s all. That’s the only difference. But money has a magical quality, doesn’t it? You give a woman money and whatever it is that you did to her she wanted, she deserved. Now, we understand about male labor. We understand that men do things they do not like to do in order to earn a wage. When men do alienating labor in a factory we do not say that the money transforms the experience for them such that they loved it, had a good time, and in fact, aspired to nothing else. We look at the boredom, the dead-endedness; we say, surely the quality of a man’s life should be better than that.
The magical function of money is gendered; that is to say, women are not supposed to have money, because when women have money, presumably women can make choices, and one of the choices that women can make is not to be with men. And if women make the choice not to be with men, men will then be deprived of the sex that men feel they have a right to. And if it is required that a whole class of people be treated with cruelty and indignity and humiliation, put into a condition of servitude, so that men can have the sex that they think they have a right to, then that is what will happen. That is the essence and the meaning of male dominance. Male dominance is a political system.
It is always extraordinary, when looking at this money exchange, to understand that in most people’s minds the money is worth more than the woman is. The ten dollars, the thirty dollars, the fifty dollars, is worth much more than her whole life. The money is real, more real than she is. With the money he can buy a human life and erase its importance from every aspect of civil and social consciousness and conscience and society, from the protections of law, from any right of citizenship, from any concept of human dignity and human sovereignty. For fifty fucking dollars any man can do that. If you were going to think of a way to punish women for being women, poverty would be enough. Poverty is hard. It hurts. The bitches would be sorry they’re women. It’s hard to be hungry. It’s hard not to have a nice place to live in. You feel real desperate. Poverty is very punishing. But poverty isn’t enough, because poverty alone does not provide a pool of women for men to fuck on demand. Poverty is insufficient to create that pool of women, no matter how hungry women get. So, in different cultures, societies are organized differently to get the same result: not only are women poor, but the only thing of value a woman has is her so-called sexuality, which, along with her body, has been turned into a sellable commodity. Her so-called sexuality becomes the only thing that matters; her body becomes the only thing that anyone wants to buy. An assumption then can be made: if she is poor and needs money, she will be selling sex. The assumption may be wrong. The assumption does not create the pool of women who are prostituted. It takes more than that. In our society, for instance, in the population of women who are prostituted now, we have women who are poor, who have come from poor families; they are also victims of child sexual abuse, especially incest; and they have become homeless.
Incest is boot camp. Incest is where you send the girl to learn how to do it. So you don’t, obviously, have to send her anywhere, she’s already there and she’s got nowhere else to go. She’s trained. And the training is specific and it is important: not to have any real boundaries to her own body; to know that she’s valued only for sex; to learn about men what the offender, the sex offender, is teaching her. But even that is not enough, because then she runs away and she is out on the streets and homeless. For most women, some version of all these kinds of destitution needs to occur.
…I want to emphasize that in these conversations, these discussions about prostitution, we are all looking for language. We are all trying to find ways to say what we know and also to find out what we don’t know. There is a middle-class presumption that one knows everything worth knowing. It is the presumption of most prostituted women that one knows nothing worth knowing. In fact, neither thing is true. What matters here is to try to learn what the prostituted woman knows, because it is of immense value. It is true and it has been hidden. It has been hidden for a political reason: to know it is to come closer to knowing how to undo the system of male dominance that is sitting on top of all of us.
I think that prostitutes experience a specific inferiority. Women in general are considered to be dirty. Most of us experience this as a metaphor, and, yes, when things get very bad, when terrible things happen, when a woman is raped, when a woman is battered, yes, then you recognize that underneath your middle-class life there are assumptions that because you are a woman you are dirty. But a prostitute lives the literal reality of being the dirty woman. There is no metaphor. She is the woman covered in dirt, which is to say that every man who has ever been on top of her has left a piece of himself behind; and she is also the woman who has a purely sexual function under male dominance so that to the extent people believe that sex is dirty, people believe that prostituted women are dirt.
The prostituted woman is, however, not static in this dirtiness. She’s contagious. She’s contagious because man after man after man comes on her and then he goes away. For instance, in discussions of AIDS, the prostituted woman is seen as the source of the infection. That is a specific example. In general, the prostituted woman is seen as the generative source of everything that is bad and wrong and rotten with sex, with the man, with women. She is seen as someone who is deserving of punishment, not just because of what she “does”–and I put does in quotes, since mostly it is done to her–but because of what she is.
She is, of course, the ultimate anonymous woman. Men love it. While she is on her twenty-fourth false name–dolly, baby, cutie, cherry tart, whatever all the pornographers are cooking up this week as a marketing device–her namelessness says to the man, she’s nobody real, I don’t have to deal with her, she doesn’t have a last name at all, I don’t have to remember who she is, she’s not somebody specific to me, she’s a generic embodiment of woman. She is perceived as, treated as–and I want you to remember this, this is real–vaginal slime. She is dirty; a lot of men have been there. A lot of semen, a lot of vaginal lubricant. This is visceral, this is real, this is what happens. Her anus is often torn from the anal intercourse, it bleeds. Her mouth is a receptacle for semen, that is how she is perceived and treated. All women are considered dirty because of menstrual blood but she bleeds other times, other places. She bleeds because she’s been hurt, she bleeds and she’s got bruises on her.
When men use women in prostitution, they are expressing a pure hatred for the female body. It is as pure as anything on this earth ever is or ever has been. It is a contempt so deep, so deep, that a whole human life is reduced to a few sexual orifices, and he can do anything he wants. Other women at this conference have told you that. I want you to understand, believe them. It’s true. He can do anything he wants. She has nowhere to go. There is no cop to complain to; the cop may well be the guy who is doing it. The lawyer that she goes to will want payment in kind. When she needs medical help, it turns out he’s just another john. Do you understand? She is literally nothing. Now, many of us have experiences in which we feel like nothing, or we know that someone considers us to be nothing or less than nothing, worthless, but for a woman in prostitution, this is the experience of life every day, day in and day out.
He, meanwhile, the champion here, the hero, the man, he’s busy bonding with other men through the use of her body. One of the reasons he is there is because some man has been there before him and some man will be there after him. This is not theory. When you live it, you see that it is true. Men use women’s bodies in prostitution and in gang rape to communicate with each other, to express what they have in common. And what they have in common is that they are not her. So she becomes the vehicle of his masculinity and his homoeroticism, and he uses the words to tell her that. He shares the sexuality of the words, as well as the acts, directed at her, with other men. All of those dirty words are just the words that he uses to tell her what she is. …She’s expendable. Funny, she has no name. She is a mouth, a vagina, and an anus, who needs her in particular when there are so many others? When she dies, who misses her? Who mourns her? She’s missing, does anybody go look for her? I mean, who is she? She is no one. Not metaphorically no one. Literally, no one.
The women above who survived the sex trade, prostitution, stripping, have said that it was:
- Sexual slavery
- Gang rape
- Sexual abuse
- Life imprisonment
- Rape hell
- Intrinsically abusive
They say it took their dignity and their identity away. They were “fresh meat.” They were “sex objects.”
I have been listening to them and I believe them. These are the words of real women describing their lived realities. I find that their experiences inform and shape my own and vice versa, that as women living under siege, we are connected, that for each of us, our liberation and full humanity is bound up in the other’s. So I have to reject words and language which intend to bracket these women’s lives off from the lives of all other women, the ones who “made choices”. I may read paeans to sex work as “choice,” may take them seriously; I won’t reject them out of hand. I will, however, consider them in context. That so many millions of women throughout history to this day had no choice but sexual slavery has constructed the choices and realities of all women, whatever those choices may have been. So long as a woman can be forced into sexual slavery, “choice” eludes us all. Why would I agree to language that erases this reality?
Heart
Last week a man tried to register at my anti-prostitution forum saying how awful child prostitution is and how something simply must be done about such terrible crimes against humanity. He went on to say pornography is not prostitution and that a conniving 15-year-old Traci Lords tricked pornographers with fake ID and cost pornographers MILLIONS [sic], ending with (direct quote) “I can see how she benefited.”
I don’t remember where I read the following sentiment about how men see rape, but it has been my frustrating experience that it is true:
<i>”Men believe forced sex is a terrible, violent crime against women, so they believe it’s good that sex is very rarely forced.”</i>
Men believe forced prostitution is a terrible, violent crime against women, so it’s good that prostitution is very rarely forced.
I assume this is in answer to Ren’s series of posts over at Feministe aimed at educating the feminists about all about sex work this week? I do agree on the niggling over “terminology” but also didn’t see anything in what she’d written about ignoring segments of prostitution that suck more than others. I guess I’m a “priviledged” sex worker (educated, career experience, choosing this for the money and free time it affords) but even I think prostitution sucks. It goes against so much that I believe in but I’ve come to terms with feeling like a sell-out. Keeping a blog about it helps keep things in perspective for me. I don’t exactly have a “healthy,” “sex positive” attitude about sex work. Also, the stories you posted here make me very sad.
What I’ve seen is sex worker activists saying it’s inaccurate to say all female prostitutes are “prostituted women” because it erases those who aren’t. Renegade Evolution was talking about this on Feministe just a few days ago, there are both prostituted women and sex workers by choice. It does sex workers no good, and it does feminism no good to try and erase either one of these. But sadly I see this done on both sides of the prositution/pornography debate.
That’s a great piece of writing by Andrea showing so clearly that prostitution and child abuse are political systems, and not a series of unfortunate circumstance or personal choices.
The awful nonsense people will listen to in order to abandon one another is one of the saddest things about humanity.
It all starts with children of both genders being handed around among the fathers and ends with unequal representation in parliament; unequal representation in ruling bodies (that does not reflect population) is coercion.
The unfortunate purpose of all this is I think, to maintain reproductive access to young females by males over forty, this is seldom seen in other species (males sperm degrades with age) and must take a lot of false cultural manoeuvring to enforce. Including mentally damaging the opposition before it gets old enough to put up much of a fight. Child abuse is essential to the patriarchy, if young men reached adulthood able to contend with their fathers, if women reached adulthood with a healthy sense of self, the whole thing would collapse.
Thanks for this wonderful post, Heart. Excellent resource! All those stories are very compelling.
Only some women in the sex trade are trafficked we are told, and only some are prostituted, not all. That’s just the thing though– prostituted and trafficked women get fairly short shrift in these circles. They tend to be the footnote, the afterthought, something like, well, yes, there are those women and girls and we care about them, but we are more interested in establishing that we are not them. We are the women who “chose” prostitution. And as feminists, we are not supposed to interrogate the nature of that choice, or even question it, or analyze or critique it, even though the fact that women are prostituted and trafficked and raped as prostitutes shapes and constructs the lives and realities of all women, including our own. We are told we should listen only to sex workers themselves, the subtext being that we should accept what they say at face value.
Exactly… agenda… agenda… The purpose of the pro-”sex work” lobby is to try to conceal the reality of prostitution being inherently a form of sexual slavery and violence against women. Some women in the radical feminist movement are survivors of the sex trade.
I have been listening to them and I believe them.
So have I. So do I.
I have to reject words and language which intend to bracket these women’s lives off from the lives of… the ones who “made choices”.
Exactly, I hate when the stories of survivors are footnoted or bracketed and portrayed as “forced prostitution” or “not the usual kind of sex work” by pro-pornstitution folks.
As the saying goes, who defines has the power, and even those who have never heard that language understand on some level that this is true. Struggles around the framing of discourse, the defining of terms, the use of words, naming — these are always deeply political and are always about power.
Well-said, Heart. Patriarchists have the power of naming, it’s unfair.
Patriarchists: do not <b>ever</b> try to control <i>my</i> language!
the sex trade, prostitution, stripping
You might wanna add pornography too, Heart? Have you ever heard of the stories of Jersey Jaxin, Belladonna, etc? See these pornography stories here: http://www.againstpornography.org/womeninsexindustry.html
Thanks a lot for this great post, Heart. The voices of sex trade survivors have to be heard, as most women & girls who enter prostitution do so with choices that are NOT free.
Sorry, I meant to say:
Patriarchists: do not ever try to control my language!
(wrong html tags)
I think men do force sex: if a man is inside of a woman, getting close to orgasm, and she’s uncomfortable or just isn’t into it and tells him to pull out, how many men will do it?
Without her having to cry?
I think men beleive this is their right under patriarchy. Men’s orgasm comes first, and if she doesn’t like it then ‘don’t have sex’.
Those are powerful, important stories that deserve to be told. I draw a firm line between coerced or unwilling prostitution and more positive experiences of sex work not because I disagree with that, but because I think it weakens the impact of the experiences of prostituted women to be conflated with those of sex workers.
The two groups have different needs and should be allowed to define their own language seperately and unsilenced. To apply the language needed by one group to the other is not only inaccurate and insulting, but counter-productive. The women in question rarely seem confused about which category to file their experiences under.
whatsername said- “What I’ve seen is sex worker activists saying it’s inaccurate to say all female prostitutes are “prostituted women” because it erases those who aren’t. ”
What ive seen, over and over, are those activists try to stop these definitions being used in ANY context. They can use whatever terms they want to describe their reality - they have no right to demand what terms i am allowed to use for mine.
If I write about my own experiences, and what i have seen, among the women i have been close to, and i refer to us as prostituted, or as abused, raped, used, forced - because those are the words that are appropriate for us - then i dont see what business it is of any “i do it cos i want to” activist to claim my language is wrong, that it doesnt work for them. Its not about them!
If they want to spend 24/7 talking about the merits of ’sex work’ for them on their blogs, whatever. What i dont like is the way that they set themselves up as the “go to” people on all issues related to it, and try to push out dissenters and people with alternative views on the subject using slander, rumour, and fake ‘civility’. I think its crap the way they claim to be all ‘anti censorship’ while at the same time trying desperately to clamp down on other peoples language, about their own realities.
I dont like the way, also, that some ’sex worker activist’ groups have set themselves up to speak-for, without any transparency of who makes the decisions and how their agenda is decided. I wonder how they can be so unrepresentative and yet claim to represent, and that that is allowed and even called feminist, and that those who offer opposing views are squashed as soon as possible.
Ive not seen any self identified as prostituted woman be asked to write for Feministe. I could be wrong, i may have missed that. But i wonder how come they do invite, more than once, a self identified pro capitalist libertarian non-feminist (who is a founding and posting member on another blog full of MRAs and anti feminists!) to do so.
I dont understand where the disconnect comes. I think that the title “sanctimonious womens studies set” is not as much of a joke as they like to think.
A few people have attempted to comment working from the premise that I oppose decriminalization. I don’t and never have. I am in favor of decriminalization and support the Swedish model, as I have written many times: decriminalize prostitution, criminalize the buying of sex. If your comment was premised on an inaccurate understanding of my views, please rework it. I don’t want to have to straighten stuff out here that is based on an ongoing mischaracterization of my and other radical feminists’ views.
Hi, Peridot, thanks for your comment. The problem is, or one problem, is the experiences of women like those I’ve quoted simply are ignored by those who hold the perspective I’ve described there, or worse than ignored. I’ve sometimes seen a survivor attempt to join a discussion with pro-prostitution people and be treated horribly– told the rough equivalent of, “Well, it sucks to be you but that’s not my experience,” as though that is all that really matters. And then the person attempts again to participate in the discussion and keeps repeatedly being being blown off, often by men who prostitute women themselves. Having said that, I appreciate your acknowledgement of what has been posted here by survivors.
whatsername, I approved your comment but it bothers me because here again, you have ignored these horrific statements of survivors, blown them off. I also dealt at length in my post with the issue you raise around choice but you’ve commented as though the issue wasn’t addressed at all. If you’ll go back, you’ll see that it was, in some depth. In these threads, care has to be taken to carefully read what is said and not to misrepresent or mischaracterize what has been said.
As to this: What I’ve seen is sex worker activists saying it’s inaccurate to say all female prostitutes are “prostituted women” because it erases those who aren’t. It does sex workers no good, and it does feminism no good to try and erase either one of these.
This isn’t really true. In many ways it certainly does benefit those who promote and advocate for prostitution and pornography to erase the realities of the women I’ve quoted here because those realities are gut wrenching and horrifying and the telling of the truth gets in the way of promoting prostitution as all about women’s “choices” (under capitalism). I spam comments every day from people who, for example, insist that women who are clearly choking, gagged, throwing up, who are being hurt in extreme porn like what Max Hardcore made before he got slapped are not an issue because the women “agreed”, they “chose”, they consented, they made bank. People say it’s no big deal what happened to LInda Boreman because she got paid money, a whopping $1,800 bucks for a film that has grossed millions of dollars and still is though Boreman died years ago. These women’s lived experiences which everybody can watch on video are trivialized and made to be meaningless on the basis, again, that they earned the almighty buck. That being what women’s “choices” amount to is addressed so, so well in the excerpt from Andrea Dworkin that I posted up there that begins like this:
It is always extraordinary, when looking at this money exchange, to understand that in most people’s minds the money is worth more than the woman is. The ten dollars, the thirty dollars, the fifty dollars, is worth much more than her whole life. The money is real, more real than she is. With the money he can buy a human life and erase its importance from every aspect of civil and social consciousness and conscience and society, from the protections of law, from any right of citizenship, from any concept of human dignity and human sovereignty. For fifty fucking dollars any man can do that.
Helzeph, so true about the connections of incest and child abuse to pornography and prostitution. I actually ended up writing this post because of something I read on the DIGNITY listserv about a survivor of the sex trade who has an organization that focuses specifically on the connections between incest and child sexual abuse and prostitution and pornography. In her work with survivors, she uses the step program/recovery model where women who have gone through what Dworkin calls “boot camp,” i.e., they were groomed via incest and sexual abuse for prostitution, support one another in overcoming and recovering from the incredible harm that has been done to them that results in their remaining in the sex trade even when they want out. The “boot camp” of child abuse has got to end for the sex trade to end. That is also a focus of Norma Hotaling’s work.
Thanks for your comment, Maggie– I agree that pornography is a form of prostitution of women, though I haven’t read about the women you link to there (and will).
Julia, so sadly true. This is something all heterosexual women know about, isn’t it. There’s a “Family Guy” episode I’m thinking about where Lois starts to have a heart attack while she and Peter are having sex. She tells him, “Peter, I’m having a heart attack, I have to go to the doctor,” and he says, “Okay, just a minute, just a minute, just a minute, okay, let’s go,” i.e., he gets his orgasm before he takes her to the hospital. Of course, the message is, no doesn’t mean no, stop doesn’t mean stop, even if your partner is having a heart attack, and this scenario is so common and easily recognizable that it is made part of a cartoon that millions of people laugh at it, thinking nothing of it.
hexy, I am more interested in getting underneath these issues around choosing to be a sex worker or being prostituted to talking about the whole notion of exchanging money for sex, what that means, and in particular, what it means that overwhelmingly men pay money for sex with/from women. It’s as though this is some sort of given, as though there’s nothing to say about it, when it is and always has been of central importance to feminists. We live under male supremacy. We can all see this if we look around ourselves– men own the land, the corporations, the churches, overwhelmingly they are the governors and kings and priests, and of course, this has been true for millennia. Right now we live under basically not even capitalism but a burgeoning neofascism where more and more corporations and megacorporations run the world. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the post I wrote a couple of days ago about the revolt of indigenous persons in Peru against the plan of the Peruvian president to sell or lease indigenous lands to corporate interests (for oil drilling and timber) in the wake of the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. I quoted Judy Barrie in that article who makes the very fine point that capitalists, socialists, communists, Marxists all neglect something very important when they advance their economic theories. For capitalists (and neofascists) it’s all about individual profit margins, and the greater the profit margins, the better. For socialists and communists and Marxists it’s about distribution of whatever profits are made amongst workers or citizens of the country, depending what theory we are talking about. What none of them get to, though, is the costs to the biosphere, the earth, the land, creatures, the environment. And where they leave off is where Andrea Dworkin and feminists in general have historically begun. It is not enough to begin and end discussions of issues around buying and selling of sex with “choice” and the fact that money is exchanged for it. We have to also calculate in what has been *taken* from the women from whom men buy sex, the cost in terms of their lives and bodies. Just as we have to calculate in the costs of what is done to the earth, trees, waters, the lands in the quest to use them to make money. This isn’t only true, of course, so far as prostitution goes. Women’s bodies really are harvested in much the same way crops are harvested, animals are harvested, the earth is harvested. We don’t only have the sexual brothel, for example, we also have the reproductive brothel where women’s bodies are mined for eggs, for babies, all the way up to hired out as surrogates. If we say that we value life — human, animal, the earth — then I think we have to think about what exchanging money for lives and for what is harvested from what and who is alive means, and whether this kind of harvesting can or should be tenably supported, or can be supported with integrity, by feminists attempting to envision and build a new world. When we begin to think in these terms it becomes more clear that the differences around whether prostitution is or is not “chosen” might not be what it is most important to consider.
I notice you don’t care about the word “slut.”
Why, of course not. Because you’re full of thinly veiled slut-shaming.
Sarah, my list of sexist words wasn’t comprehensive. There are thousands of hateful words used against women and I want a world where none of them can be used ever to hurt any woman. That certainly would include the word “slut.” As to slut shaming, there is nothing like that here. If anyone is to be shamed — not, in my opinion, a very useful tool or strategy for change — it is those who have built empires for themselves by way of the prostituted bodies of women.
I’ve had some posts working in my mind around this for a while now. (I’m not addressing you right now, Sarah, but talking generally.) Just recent Frank Colacurcio Sr. was sent to jail. The guy is approaching 90 and I have heard his name all my life since I was a little girl and there were rumors he was in cahoots somehow with Gov. Albert Rosellini in Washington where I grew up. This guy has made a multimillion dollar empire running strip joints. Along the way he’s been criminally charged several times for sexual assault, including of a minor, there is a lot of evidence he murdered several people, not long ago he paid off some members of the city council in Seattle trying to get a rezone for one of his clubs. The women who work in his clubs describe horrific stuff that goes on. He doesn’t care what kind of sex the dancers have with customers as long as they get paid for it. He charges them a certain amount of money per day to dance in his clubs and if they don’t earn that amount, they owe him. Those charges can rack up and rack up for various reasons until there is no way they can think of leaving the business and he is a dangerous and violent man and they sure are not going to be able to skip out. He has an open invitation to the dancers that anyone who wants to come to his house at night gets $1K. Of course, I am sure they can all hardly wait to hop in bed with this guy who is a felon many times over in part because of his ongoing pattern of assaulting dancers. This is a very very rich man, a millionnaire many times over with his empire now passed down to his son. If shaming were a good tactic to use or accomplished anything (I don’t think it does, but whatever), these are the guys who are to be shamed. They have caused untold, untold, untold amounts of harm to women, to men, to children, to all of us.
Here’s a link to Ann Bissell’s sex trade survivors website:
http://www.annebissell.com/newsroom.htm
Here’s a link about Colacurio:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/2008-07-09/news/woodfellas-frank-colacurcio-and-his-million-dollar-empire-of-flesh/
Right then Heart, let’s speak on context…and I’ll try this again and amend a few things to be accurate and less openly hostile…yes, I do realize you support the Swedish Model, oversight on my part. Noted.
I lived out west, where gal is far less demeaning than girl, or ma;am or lady, or Miss. Just as men are called guys or dudes, women, often, are refered to as “gals” and in my experiece it is not meant to be demeaning. It’s a term other than woman or girl.
The stories I posted, well, gee, Mariko and Amanda’s Nevada Brothel tales would be right up your alley. They are horrible in their own right, in every way. Tricked by a female brothel owner and subjected to very shady conditions in a place they felt unsafe and could not wait to get out of, Mariko went there because she literally needed the money. Not exactly shiny, happy stories. And Robyn Few, as much as she is hated by many, mentions flat out entering the sex industry at the age of 13 to survive. I’ve not in my posts ignored the unpleasant aspects of the business, and to assume (when I still have five or so days left of blogging there) that I would not post MORE on the less pleasant aspects and horrible parts of sex work/prostitution for various people involved in it is somewhat putting the cart before the horse.
I mention both sex workers AND prostituted women, but that has been omitted by various folks throughout this conversation. Why? There are both: sex workers and prostituted people. Denying one group or the other does no good, because both kinds are out there and have different needs/wants. I don’t see the horror in recognizing that.
Even I have had shit times in my business, which you said you were oh so sorry for…yet…when I make an effort to discuss sex work/ prostitution in a place where people might learn something they don’t already know, I get slammed for it. Why hasn’t Feministe invited others to blog there? I don’t know. That question has to be asked of them, not me. I have no say in who they invite to guest blog. I’d be happy to suggest a woman like R.Mott or V be invited to guest blog there, hell, I will. Would they do it? I don’t know. Would those women accept the invite? I don’t know that either.
And V- listen, yes, I am a libertarian, people do not have to like it- and sure enough- they don’t. Not even many of my allies. No, I am not anti-capitalist, but is more in depth than that. I’ve never said capitalism is fantastic and great and we should never look at other systems or modify the ones currently in place. For instance, would I support a more socialist form of medical care? Yes, I would….because all people should be able to see doctors and not go around injured or sick because they can’t afford medical care. And why yes, I’ve said such things before.
As for the feminist critics blog, no, I was not a founding member. I became disillusioned with a lot of feminism and feminists and was then, after the blog have been around for awhile, invited to blog there. Some months ago, I quit that blog and have not posted there in quite some time. A self-identified radical feminist has also blogged there once or twice as well. I found conversations there to be useless and frusterating, so I quit.
Ren, I’m going to approve your comment in a minute, but without the last sentence. My post here wasn’t addressed to you specifically. Your and others’ recent writings about the language around sex work are among a couple of things that got me blogging about this. Another was the arrest of Frank Colacurcio and another was having spent some time on the Sex Trade Survivors site after reading about it on the DIGNITY listserv. Another is e-mail conversations I’ve been having with survivors of the sex trade. And another is, I have a difficult piece of writing I’ve been working on about the arrest of Radovan Karadzic that is kicking my butt so I’m writing something different because I’m procrastinating. :-p
Another thing that factors in for me: how can I stand for sustainability, for life, the earth, forests, skies, oceans, how can I embrace Deep Green iow, which is where my life and my feminism have taken me, without being as concerned about sustainability and life so far as women’s lives and bodies are concerned? I have to stand politically with the indigenous tribes all over the world for many reasons, one of which is, once the megacorporations have used up all of the trees in the rainforest and all of the oil in the Arctic, once the profits have been realized and spent, all of us will suffer for it, most of all everything and everyone who is gone and dead and devastated because of what the corporations have taken and sold. How much more is this true with respect to the bodies of women?
Ren, quickly, I don’t have much problem with women calling gals, “gals,” that’s not the same thing, I don’t think, as businessmen calling their secretaries “gals”. It’s all about “gals” this and “gals” that in the Michfest community, for example, and I have no problem at all with that– we are all women and nobody is using that term to diminish someone else. I also am not particularly one to get all fired up because someone says “gal” randomly and sure don’t feel offended if you say it! I am also from “out west.” I’ve lived in the Pacific NW all my life, was born here.
Why? There are both: sex workers and prostituted people
There is a whole world of issues around this statement, many are named in this thread. It’s not this simple and should not be made to be this simple. This is where the power struggle is, right here. It’s not so much a power struggle between you, Ren, and I, or the pro-prostitution people and the anti-prostitution people. It is a power struggle, when you get right down to it, between men and women, and the words we use to describe it will either benefit men or they will benefit women, overall.
Heart, when a good section of your own readers assume this was about my series at Feministe, what the hell am I supposed to assume? And you are well within your rights as the blog owner here not to post my last statement, but it’s true. However, when I am being called out for never talking about Prostituted People when I have…well, flat out lies right there, that can easily be disproven by merely reading what I’ve written at Feministe. And people can talk about simplification as much as they want, but you well know there are actual people involved in this whole ordeal…some are sex workers, some are prostituted people, and to them, there is a difference. That, to me, is important.
And I am very, very sick of seeing sexworker outreach/advocate organizations demonized. It’s a travesty, considering they actually DO a lot of work to HELP sex workers and prostituted people of all kinds. I mean, I’d actually encourage you and whomever else to attend an event like the one in Chicago, I have no doubt it would be educational. I don’t think it would change your mind on anything with the sex industry itself, but it might at least make folk think about what it is we do.
Thanks for your comment, Maggie– I agree that pornography is a form of prostitution of women, though I haven’t read about the women you link to there (and will).
You’re welcome. Thanks, Heart, for your interest in the link I posted. Yes, pornography is prostitution too.
If they want to spend 24/7 talking about the merits of ’sex work’ for them on their blogs, whatever. What i dont like is the way that they set themselves up as the “go to” people on all issues related to it, and try to push out dissenters and people with alternative views on the subject using slander, rumour, and fake ‘civility’. I think its crap the way they claim to be all ‘anti censorship’ while at the same time trying desperately to clamp down on other peoples language, about their own realities.
Resisterance (V), what you said here above is nail bang on the head! So damn right.
There is a whole world of issues around this statement, many are named in this thread. It’s not this simple and should not be made to be this simple. This is where the power struggle is, right here. It’s not so much a power struggle between you, Ren, and I, or the pro-prostitution people and the anti-prostitution people. It is a power struggle, when you get right down to it, between men and women, and the words we use to describe it will either benefit men or they will benefit women, overall.
True, Heart. The term ‘prostituted women’ is accurate because most women who enter prostitution do so with choices that are NOT free. Patriarchy limits choices. And so does porno-iarchy! As I said: Patriarchists (that includes the few women patriarchists too), do not ever try to control my language! I use terms I want to use, terms that recognize women & girls’ oppression under patriarchy, sometimes even new terms I invent if I want to.
That’s a great piece of writing by Andrea showing so clearly that prostitution and child abuse are political systems, and not a series of unfortunate circumstance or personal choices.
Yeah, I agree, Helzeph.
I don’t exactly have a “healthy,” “sex positive” attitude about sex work. Also, the stories you posted here make me very sad.
Yeah, Peridot, I also appreciate your acknowledgement of what has been posted here by survivors.
There are thousands of hateful words used against women and I want a world where none of them can be used ever to hurt any woman. That certainly would include the word “slut.” As to slut shaming, there is nothing like that here. If anyone is to be shamed — not, in my opinion, a very useful tool or strategy for change — it is those who have built empires for themselves by way of the prostituted bodies of women.
Same here, I agree. And it’s the johns who (almost) always have the power and the 100% full agency in all of this!
I spam comments every day from people who, for example, insist that women who are clearly choking, gagged, throwing up, who are being hurt in extreme porn like what Max Hardcore made before he got slapped are not an issue because the women “agreed”, they “chose”, they consented, they made bank.
Sorry to hear you had to deal with horrible and sad comments like these, Heart.
I am more interested in getting underneath these issues around choosing to be a sex worker or being prostituted to talking about the whole notion of exchanging money for sex, what that means, and in particular, what it means that overwhelmingly men pay money for sex with/from women. It’s as though this is some sort of given, as though there’s nothing to say about it, when it is and always has been of central importance to feminists. We live under male supremacy. We can all see this if we look around ourselves– men own the land, the corporations, the churches, overwhelmingly they are the governors and kings and priests, and of course, this has been true for millennia.
Yep.
I think men do force sex: if a man is inside of a woman, getting close to orgasm, and she’s uncomfortable or just isn’t into it and tells him to pull out, how many men will do it?
Without her having to cry?
I think men beleive this is their right under patriarchy. Men’s orgasm comes first, and if she doesn’t like it then ‘don’t have sex’.
Powerful statement you’ve made here. Yeah, Julia, you’re right. So sad, distressing and true. :( And I have been there… just like so many other women have been there…
I do realize you support the Swedish Model, oversight on my part. Noted.
I also do support the Swedish model like Heart does. I want prostitutes to be decriminalized, but not johns & pimps. I want johns and pimps to be criminalized. Thanks for noting that…
I’d be happy to suggest a woman like R.Mott or V be invited to guest blog there, hell, I will. Would they do it? I don’t know. Would those women accept the invite? I don’t know that either.
Cannot speak for Rebecca or V, so I can’t say nothing about that… They would have to let’em know what they think (if they want to) about this themselves…
Even I have had shit times in my business, which you said you were oh so sorry for…
Yes, we did say that.
yet…when I make an effort to discuss sex work/ prostitution in a place where people might learn something they don’t already know, I get slammed for it.
Who’s really getting slammed here? Well, what V said:
If they want to spend 24/7 talking about the merits of ’sex work’ for them on their blogs, whatever. What i dont like is the way that they set themselves up as the “go to” people on all issues related to it, and try to push out dissenters and people with alternative views on the subject using slander, rumour, and fake ‘civility’. I think its crap the way they claim to be all ‘anti censorship’ while at the same time trying desperately to clamp down on other peoples language, about their own realities.
What Julia said in her above comment is so terribly true, distressing and sad… :( It is about rape and forced sex under patriarchy… It brought tears to my eyes…
Ren, the people who assumed my post was a response to yours aren’t my regular readers (I don’t think? They don’t usually post.) I didn’t say you never talk about prostituted people, I said I think prostituted people are often given short shrift by those who advocate for and endorse prostitution and pornography. I have appreciated your frankness around the difficulties you have faced yourself and have felt sincerely alarmed and disturbed by your descriptions of the crap you’ve had to deal with.
Nobody here demonizes sex worker outreach programs, that I have seen. The comments I pasted up there were in several instances written by women who lead sex worker outreach programs. Norma Hotaling’s SAGE was the first, or one of the first, outreach programs to prostitutes begun at the grass roots level by women who had survived the sex trade. ”Monique” began an outreach to strippers that has been highly successful. The woman I linked to a couple comments up, Ann Bissell, also heads an organization for survivors of the sex trade. Andrea Dworkin spent years working with and on behalf of prostituted woman. Hotaling, Bissell, Dworkin, Monique — all are or were survivers of the sex trade who began outreaches to survivors of the sex trade. They are supported here.
heart:
Nobody here demonizes sex worker outreach programs, that I have seen
Look no further than Maggie Hayes.
Maggie:
“Who’s really getting slammed here? Well, what V said:
If they want to spend 24/7 talking about the merits of ’sex work’ for them on their blogs, whatever. What i dont like is the way that they set themselves up as the “go to” people on all issues related to it, and try to push out dissenters and people with alternative views on the subject using slander, rumour, and fake ‘civility’. I think its crap the way they claim to be all ‘anti censorship’ while at the same time trying desperately to clamp down on other peoples language, about their own realities.”
As I said, I do not choose who guest blogs at Feministe. And, apparently, at least to several people…gee, I have some idea of what I’m talking about. I’ve not tried to push anyone out of any conversations occuring at Feministe, and I’ve stated REPEATEDLY that all kinds of voices and stories need to be listened to. Including the not nice ones and those of prostituted women. Prove otherwise, or stop with the accusations. Wooo, I have issue with term “selling yourself/selling your body” because I find it dehumanizing? Hang me for it. And oddly enough, I’ve never censored anything any woman has said to me at my blog or any place I’m blogging at…so yeah, I can claim to be anti-censorship.
I don’t see how that statement is demonizing. I think that groups like SWOP do attempt to set themselves up as the go-to people. As I’ve already also said, a couple of times by now, there are organizations formed at the grass roots level by survivors of the sex trade besides SWOP and similar groups and some of them have been around for a long time. What they have to say is valuable and SWOP should not set itself up as the go to guy.
I think there are many, many ways to silence women. One way is to allow the ongoing posting of misinformation, mischaracterization and lies about them. Series of attack posts against women also serves to silence them. Gangpiling silences women. Not speaking up when a woman is being attacked or lied about publicly silences women. I don’t believe that moderating blogs is censorship and I don’t believe not moderating them equals not censoring them. There’s nothing keeping anyone from starting her own blog, after all to end the “censorship”. I don’t care who blogs at Feministe and I don’t think V does either. I think her point was, there is one point of view only that is allowed in the circles I was referring to in my blog post here and that isn’t V’s point of view.
I don’t know what accusations you’re talking about and will just refer you back to my post and comments. My issue isn’t and wasn’t with your having said selling yourself/your body is dehumanizing. My issue is with this ongoing attempt to regulate feminist discourse and with the policing of terms going on, especially by those who don’t identify as feminists. Words are, again, political. They aren’t just words. They don’t just describe reality, they also create it,
Heart
Heart- I’m sure, SWOP or not, I was asked because they know who I am. I didn’t ask to blog there, I didn’t set myself up for anything. They asked. And the impression that SWOP is the only org out there and is trying to define itself as such, is…well…wrong? It’s a large organization, sure, but no one from SWOP has ever said they are the Only One, nor acted as if there are not others out there. There are tons of them out there, world wide, and many are linked off of all kinds of blogs, including SWOP member ones. I’ll be posting a massive list of such organizations at Feministe, and no, they won’t all be SWOP related. And I’m not trying to regulate anyone’s discourse…I stated a term bothered me, actual discourse ensued, with no regulation whatsoever.
And it’s not what Maggie said here that I’m refering to. She spends plenty of time mocking sex worker outreach orgs on her own blog. The way she set up her tag for them shows that plainly enough.
“One way is to allow the ongoing posting of misinformation, mischaracterization and lies about them. Series of attack posts against women also serves to silence them. Gangpiling silences women. Not speaking up when a woman is being attacked or lied about publicly silences women. ”
And there has been plenty of that all around…you’ve faced it, as have I, as have countless others, no doubt.
I don’t care who blogs at Feministe and I don’t think V does either. I think her point was, there is one point of view only that is allowed in the circles I was referring to in my blog post here and that isn’t V’s point of view.
Yeh, thats it, in a nutshell. I don’t relate to almost anything on feministe - its US, for a start. I certainly wouldnt be interested in doing anything there, and im not asking to be asked, at all. Altho i think our home grown “big feminist blog” suffers from similar problems. Class-wise, and ren i think youre aware thats an issue for me, its just that side of middle class, academic, liberal feminism that doesnt really speak to me much at all.
And thats part of the problem. The big feminist blogs, the ones with the ginormous readerships that like to pretend theyre representative of feminists across the board, well they just dont, really.
And so it is with the sex workers rights advocates. Ren, you said:
“I am very, very sick of seeing sexworker outreach/advocate organizations demonized. It’s a travesty, considering they actually DO a lot of work to HELP sex workers and prostituted people of all kinds”
Demonised by who?? I dont trust them, ive said that many times. The one thats always doing the speaking-for over here, gets invited onto the radio/tv/papers to give their views above anyone else, is the ECP. That organisation has no transparency, and I find that worrying, very much so. We’re talking about representing, speaking for, a whole group of people who are among the most ignored, the most unheard. I think its important to know who exactly is making the decisions about what is best for that group. I appreciate the difficulties, problems with anonymity, etc. I get that. But we could know, for example, what proportion of the membership of these so called sex worker advocate groups, are comprised of actual sex workers, and how that membership is spread (how many exotic dancers vs prostitutes vs phone workers, etc). I dont know how these groups are being demonised when they are the only ones apparently allowed to define the language and the direction that we take on this stuff. If you listen to mass media, including most of the big fem blogs, anyway.
And I think those of us who have at some point in the past been involved in that industry, in many and various ways, shouldnt be discarded as if now we’re out of it we cant have a view on it or our time in it. I think thats dangerous. Its like, we used you up, and now youre struggling with mental health issues and god knows what else, we dont care what you think about it. Bring on the new young things, who can be put through much the same, until theyre too messed up for us to bother with either.
And I still dont understand why orgs that tend towards the “pro” side, are acknowledged as sex worker advocates, whereas orgs that focus very much on providing ways out, are not necessarily defined as such. I think that is also a problem.
So the problem - as heart put it and i agree - is that i can turn in any direction and hear a pro pov. For you, ren, the way you write, you seem to see yourself as you say - a renegade, a rebel maybe, in that you are pro. For me - well i dont feel that way, i feel that its a casually accepted and excused part of society - when i was very very young i idolised sam fox ffs (not that i dont like her as a person now, but ykwim). To me, the yay its porn time! thing is everywhere - i get porn channels advertising on my cable, several of the other channels have porny programs late at night anyway, we have page 3, nuts and zoo, i cant even use the free browser on my phone without adverts for porn being right there on the front page, including other phone users amateur videos. Its hard to find torrent and download sites that dont have sex phone and site ads all over the page. Every night the tv ads on all commercial channels here have ads for hook-up phone lines with extremely young looking women posing and to me, filtered through my own experiences, it looks very exploitative. And whats the answer, dont use my phone, never watch tv, dont look at ads on billboards, and close my eyes when im walking into petrol stations so i cant see the upskirt pics on todays ‘news’paper covers?
Basically - there is almost nowhere i can turn without seeing a yay porn/prostitution pov. I have to hunt around for anything else. And those of us who talk about it negatively, in terms of our own experiences, find we are squished, threatened, accused of all sorts, and generally shut out of every discussion on the subject, even on mainstream feminist blogs, because people who see it as a choice dont like our terminology.
Sorry for the long post, that probably doesnt cast much light.
Thanks for posting the words of women who actually escaped prostitution. I think this idea that women actively “choose” gang rape (serial johns doing what they want to with women’s bodies) is highly relevant.
When I see plentiful very well paid ordinary jobs out there for women, I’ll believe this false “choice” argument.
I’ve heard all kinds of garbage my whole life about things I knew damn well were terrible for any human being. I’ve always thought degraded the women in it, dehumanized the men who read it. I’ve always hated drugs and the growing drug culture that I watched take over the country, because boomers ten years older than I was thought it was “cool.” I’ve seen how sex addiction has destroyed the gay male community, killed hundreds of thousands of gay men, and pornified their entire identities. And they are walking cesspools of pornification believe me! Cesspools.
What’s so hard to get that women get “seasoned” and “trained” into low self-esteem thus making them ripe for incest, abuse within families, only to be the ideal candidates for pimps? There are woman hating radio shows that coach men into how to make women have low self-esteem and how to pump em and dump em, and these are mainstream radio shows that men call ins support and cheer. Women call in to AGREE with these animals, go figure.
Who lies in wait at the Greyhound bus stations with “free” lodging and food, for the girls who run away from home? The pimps, the porn hounds, the dirty old men of any age, that’s who.
I think it is awfully hard to face up to your life if you are demonized for being you, but I don’t see many people in America who actually have read Dworkin in detail or have followed the evil trail of sex tourism around the world. Heck, a lot of people equate female genital mutilation with male circumcision! Yes, many men think it’s the same.
Just what are the motives of the pro-porn gang? Well follow the money. I don’t think any woman out there chooses this mess; I think they are conned, charmed and forced into it by abusive male family members and by a bad job market for women. This bad job market is designed to make women compliant and available to men. Remember the days when women were frozen out of all high paying jobs and into heterosexual marriage? The only real choice exists when there is one!
The only real freedom of speech is when women get their fair share of it. The pro-porn people the pro-prostitution people are all for this garbage, just as the sex, drugs and rock and roll people thought recreational drugs were cool. Now we have crystal addiction everywhere, women strung out on the streets, and major drug lords worldwide involved in the trafficking of women as well.
Remember that old fashioned word vice? Well it’s all about the “selling of women” that is the ultimate vice, and we need to support all the women who have escaped hell, and like bodisatvas, returned to that hell to rescue more of their sisters. That’s the compassion of Dworkin– read her memoir if you want to see a real secular saint of feminism. All women can be victimized by a porn atmosphere, and the fools who promote or defend this stuff are just lying. They could care less about the lives of women and children; they’re in it for profit, their in it to degrade all those who stand up to them, they are up to their neck in some of the most evil vice the world has ever known, and the hide behind the first amendment waiting their next victims.
This stuff is so evil that I won’t ever go to those creepy sites. I thank goddess Heart has the courage to go into darkness and report back to us. I won’t read those people, I won’t fall victim to the very evil of their words, which contaminate the heck out of me. I freak out seeing pole dancers advertised in lesbian magazines and bars! I had to walk out of a bar feeling sick when I discovered that that was the “entertainment.” I was unaware how bad things had gotten. The women who run Girl Bar in Los Angeles promote this stuff, just as they show lesbian porn in slick video screnes lining the bar. The cover charges are $15 or more on a Saturday night, and the gym size dance floor is crowded to the max. Add up all that money, the women who own this place are lionized and fawned over in the lesbian community. They donate a lot of money to lesbian and gay causes and the community protects them. The owner of Lesbian News is an apolitical profiteer–it’s about money and big ad bucks not about community support. That’s the lesbian end of it, and that is chicken feed compared to the sleazy gay male world here.
Until I see all those high paying jobs chasing after women– eaily gotten with minimal education, I’m going to question the “myth” of choice.
Having been a victim of constant hetero-tyranny and a lesbian hating world, I know the hetero-patriarchy brainwashes women, cons them into marrying men, makes women feel they are crazy for knowing deep down inside that they are lesbians. I know all the women of the 50s who married men, who took 40 years to realize their true selves. I’ve seen the hetero brainwashing machine night and day, and I’ve watched from the sidelines as the male porn/prostitution con game victimizes yet another generation of women and girls.
Everytime I hear some woman justify this sexualizing pornified world, I think to myself “There stands an unaided incest survivor, an abuse victim, a child rape survivor.” Everytime I hear women supporting this stuff, I know that underneath this is a survivor of some attrocity that might be a suppressed memory. I see very mentally ill lesbians out there into S & M because no one gives a damn about them, or cares to foot the therapy and hospital bills. I’ve seen this first hand, I’ve heard the S &M crowd with my own ears, and I know what these women have been through.
Just remember Cardinal Abuse Enabler Mahoney of Los Angeles still has his job. His catholic church paid over $600,000,000 to child rape survivors and he is up to his eyeballs in complicity and aiding and abetting the monsters who did this. Not one of those monster priests was ever excommunicated, not one. He sits on his high cathedral throne in L.A., and people still support him and attend his masses. And still there is no outrage over this.
All I can say is pro-porn people, show us your financial interest in all of this, because we know your are profiting and selling women too. You don’t want to lose out on your womanhating selling gravey train, you don’t want to admit that you are aiding and abetting child rape and seasoning either, no you support free speech only for the abusers and profiteers and you know it. Shame on you!! Shame and more shame!
Goddess I hate these sleaze bag and their internet lies! This is the very heart of darkness.
Thanks for very important post. I always moved and stirred back into action by Suki Falconberg’s writings. She reaches into my soul, and remind me how it was to be prostituted.
I feel it is important to place many voices and words of prostituted women and girls in the public sphere. It is too easy to dismiss their words if it is always just individual “stories”.
There are too many women and girls suffering now, for that dismissal to be allow to happen,
I will always acknowledge that some women are not unhappy in prostitution, but they are not the majority.
There can be a downgrading of prostituted women by making out that they were just “unlucky” to have so much violence. There can be an implied suggestion that their experiences have caused long-term mental damage, so their words should be taken with a pinch of salt.
This was done to Andrea Dworkin and Linda Boreman.
It is damned hard saying the realities of being prostituted, for all too often the words are translated into whatever stereotype the reader has of prostituted women or sex workers.
I find it quite confusing and offensive how the damage done to prostituted women and girls is made invisible, by creating loads of boxes to fit them.
Women mass raped by the armed forces are separated from men who rape in other brothels. Men who may be tourists, locals, sports fans, rich men and on an on. All these men are choosing buy a class of women and girls, and can rape and torture behind closed doors.
I get angry that child prostitution is separated out from adult prostitiutes. As if hitting the age of 16 upwards, suddenly makes you safe in the sex trade. And if the majority of women enter prostitution when they were underaged, then do they gain control just by reaching adulthood, or is the damage too deep.
Trafficking is a common practice in most forms of prostitution. I am saddened that internal trafficking is dismissed or made invisible by the language of the managers saying it is the women’s choice. Choice to be move from one city to another city. Choice to pass round different aspects of the sex trade - lap-dancing to escorting, street prostituton to working in a brothel etc.
But all too often internal trafficking is consider unharmful when compare to “real” trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation from country to country.
I find all this separating out is used lessen the reality of the damage that being prostitued does to the body and mind.
It is hope that if prostituted women are taught to be divided then they will never speak out about that men feel entitled to tortured, raped and murdered them. Just coz they have paid cash.
Sorry this is very incoherent, but I am very ill at the moment.
Hey, my name spells “Hays”, btw, Ren. No “e” in it.
Ren, the people who assumed my post was a response to yours aren’t my regular readers (I don’t think? They don’t usually post.) I didn’t say you never talk about prostituted people, I said I think prostituted people are often given short shrift by those who advocate for and endorse prostitution and pornography.
Yes, because when we say “pro-porners”, it is not always about you (as if the whole issue revolved around you), but about all pro-porners, who are patriarchists who maintain the male-supremacist system by defending prostitution and pornography- that also includes people who defend pornstitution that we meet in everyday life. Pro-porn views are mainstream, not margin. We, radical feminists are in the margin and are too often misrepresented and demonized.
Nobody here demonizes sex worker outreach programs, that I have seen. The comments I pasted up there were in several instances written by women who lead sex worker outreach programs. Norma Hotaling’s SAGE was the first, or one of the first, outreach programs to prostitutes begun at the grass roots level by women who had survived the sex trade.
Exactly, I already knew about that and I wasn’t demonizing, just pointing out who is really being demonized.
I don’t see how that statement is demonizing. I think that groups like SWOP do attempt to set themselves up as the go-to people. As I’ve already also said, a couple of times by now, there are organizations formed at the grass roots level by survivors of the sex trade besides SWOP and similar groups and some of them have been around for a long time. What they have to say is valuable and SWOP should not set itself up as the go to guy.
I think there are many, many ways to silence women. One way is to allow the ongoing posting of misinformation, mischaracterization and lies about them. Series of attack posts against women also serves to silence them. Gangpiling silences women. Not speaking up when a woman is being attacked or lied about publicly silences women. I don’t believe that moderating blogs is censorship and I don’t believe not moderating them equals not censoring them. There’s nothing keeping anyone from starting her own blog, after all to end the “censorship”.
Exactly, Heart, thank you. These were the points I was trying to make.
I don’t know what accusations you’re talking about and will just refer you back to my post and comments. My issue isn’t and wasn’t with your having said selling yourself/your body is dehumanizing. My issue is with this ongoing attempt to regulate feminist discourse and with the policing of terms going on, especially by those who don’t identify as feminists. Words are, again, political. They aren’t just words. They don’t just describe reality, they also create it
I agree, Heart.
And Ren, we do acknowledge what you went through that was bad. As I said above:
“Even I have had shit times in my business, which you said you were oh so sorry for…
Yes, we did say that. ”
Sorry to hear you had shit times in your business. No woman deserves that.
The issue isn’t about that however. The issue is about the repeated online attacks on us, posts and posts and posts and posts after posts, when we’ve not done nothing to you whatsoever apart from disagreeing with you and wanting to have our own Radical feminist views expressed freely on our blogs without having to be targeted as a person for the politics we believe in. Why won’t you leave us alone?
As V said: If they want to spend 24/7 talking about the merits of ’sex work’ for them on their blogs, whatever. I wouldn’t mind that either.
What I mind, however, is this:
I think there are many, many ways to silence women. One way is to allow the ongoing posting of misinformation, mischaracterization and lies about them. Series of attack posts against women also serves to silence them. Gangpiling silences women. Not speaking up when a woman is being attacked or lied about publicly silences women.
And this:
What i dont like is the way that they set themselves up as the “go to” people on all issues related to it, and try to push out dissenters and people with alternative views on the subject using slander, rumour, and fake ‘civility’. I think its crap the way they claim to be all ‘anti censorship’ while at the same time trying desperately to clamp down on other peoples language, about their own realities.
Great points, Heart & V. Never will I demonize a woman for prostituting, that’s a total misrepresentation of my views. What I do not condone, however, is constant attacking, targeting and bullying by Kennerson et al.
All I can think of reading this thread is “ownership”. Men think it is OK to buy women, to limit our choices, to limit the space we are allowed in, to limit our lives.
And it’s not what Maggie said here that I’m refering to. She spends plenty of time mocking sex worker outreach orgs on her own blog. The way she set up her tag for them shows that plainly enough.
All I can say is that I am very angry at “sex work” advocates, i.e. pro-prostitution organizations, for (1) defending this widespread crime against women that is called prostitution and (2) for denying major research findings that have proven that prostitution is intrinsically an abusive form of sexual slavery and sexual abuse for most women who are in it. Which is why I set up my tags this way, because I do not believe in “sex work”.
As I said above: agenda… agenda… The purpose of the pro-”sex work” lobby is to try to conceal the reality of prostitution being inherently a form of sexual slavery and violence against women. Some women in the radical feminist movement are survivors of the sex trade.
The pro-”sex work” lobby advocates legalization of the whole ’sex’ industry, that makes me really angry because advocating the decriminalization of johns buying their “right” to (ab)use prostitutes & advocating the decriminalization of pimps making profits of prostituted women’s suffering is just like advocating the legalization of rape or domestic violence to me. Which is why I set up a tag ‘”sex work” advocates’.
Research has proven that outright legalization does NOT work.
Demonised by who?? I dont trust them, ive said that many times. The one thats always doing the speaking-for over here, gets invited onto the radio/tv/papers to give their views above anyone else, is the ECP. That organisation has no transparency, and I find that worrying, very much so. We’re talking about representing, speaking for, a whole group of people who are among the most ignored, the most unheard. I think its important to know who exactly is making the decisions about what is best for that group. I appreciate the difficulties, problems with anonymity, etc. I get that. But we could know, for example, what proportion of the membership of these so called sex worker advocate groups, are comprised of actual sex workers, and how that membership is spread (how many exotic dancers vs prostitutes vs phone workers, etc). I dont know how these groups are being demonised when they are the only ones apparently allowed to define the language and the direction that we take on this stuff. If you listen to mass media, including most of the big fem blogs, anyway.
And I think those of us who have at some point in the past been involved in that industry, in many and various ways, shouldnt be discarded as if now we’re out of it we cant have a view on it or our time in it. I think thats dangerous. Its like, we used you up, and now youre struggling with mental health issues and god knows what else, we dont care what you think about it. Bring on the new young things, who can be put through much the same, until theyre too messed up for us to bother with either.
And I still dont understand why orgs that tend towards the “pro” side, are acknowledged as sex worker advocates, whereas orgs that focus very much on providing ways out, are not necessarily defined as such. I think that is also a problem.
Exactly, V. Same here! I’ve been in touch with an organization that help women out of prostitution. I’ve also met members of CATW (Coalition Against Trafficking in Women). And they would never argue prostitution is “sex work” because they’ve seen what prostitution is really about, which is why these anti-sexploitation organizations help women out with exit programs. I believe that “sex work” advocates are full of fallacies, or deluded.
Just what are the motives of the pro-porn gang? Well follow the money. I don’t think any woman out there chooses this mess; I think they are conned, charmed and forced into it by abusive male family members and by a bad job market for women. This bad job market is designed to make women compliant and available to men.
That’s right, Satsuma. Pretty much. Thanks for noticing the patriarchal & capitalist agenda here!
Trafficking is a common practice in most forms of prostitution. I am saddened that internal trafficking is dismissed or made invisible by the language of the managers saying it is the women’s choice.
True, Rebecca. It is very distressing.
All I can think of reading this thread is “ownership”. Men think it is OK to buy women, to limit our choices, to limit the space we are allowed in, to limit our lives.
Exactly, Julia, the johns (almost) always have 100% choice in the prostitution matter, while most women & girls who enter prostitution do so with choices that are NOT free.
Patriarchy limits women’s choices, that’s a fact!
The johns believe it is their “male right” to use and abuse women. Johns choose buying women for sex because prostitution is inherently about the degradation and torture of women.
What’s so hard to get that women get seasoned and trained into low self-esteem thus making them ripe for incest, for abuse within families, only to be the ideal candidates for pimps?
YES, Satsuma. Thank you. I was trying to figure out how to say that succinctly. And follow the money. Look who stands to profit.
I’m not an expert on libertarianism, but as I understand it, a fair exchange involves value freely given for value. How does libertarianism deal with pre-established inequality, in that context? What I see is the owners and the oppressors taking what they want by force. They don’t offer a fair deal. They say, “I’m going to take your land and your livelihood away from you. I’m going to give myself the lion’s share of the food and resources, and deny you education, opportunity and freedom of movement. Now, go ahead and try to barter with me to get some crumbs to live on, if you think you have anything left I might want.” What does this have to do with freedom of choice?
What Satsuma said about S/M reminded me of this passage from Sonia Johnson’s “Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation.” She quotes Cheri Lesh:
It is time to stop pointing fingers and making accusations. Time to look at something very hard and real. We are all crazy and weird about sex. Heirs to thousands of years of degradation and torture, of man as S and woman as M, of white as S and non-white as M, of God as S and human as M, of civilization as S and nature as M–who among us can claim immunity, who among us has not tasted the whip sting of poison in the honey, has not confused the slap with the caress? Sadomasochism is the basic sexual perversion of patriarchy.
Then Johnson continues:
So in arguments for sadomasochism as a way of relating to others sexually, we must be aware that we each bear responsibility for creating an alternative to patriarchy that is an alternative. Hurting others/asking to be hurt, dominating others/asking to be dominated, humiliating others/asking to be humiliated–feeding the basic patriarchal addiction–is not finding an alternative. Instead, it is rationalizing and succumbing to the patriarchal imperatives most deeply imprinted on our psyches. It is fiercely seductive–as all addictions are–and it is lethal.
I don’t mean to speak for anyone else here. But I do know that this passage really struck me as relevant to my experience and to what I’ve allowed and excused before I saw it for what it was.
I’m sorry–I carefully put those quotes in italics, but the formatting disappeared. The first sentence is Satsuma. The Cheri Lesh quote runs from “It is time . . .” to ” . . . patriarchy.” The Sonia Johnson quote is the second to last paragraph. The rest is me.
Oh, and I read your post on the Indigenous uprising in Peru. I’ve been following that on other sources, but it’s always good to see non-Indigenous bloggers giving space to Indigenous voices!
(I’m not sure if this posted the first time around, apologies if it appears twice)
Heart:
I am more interested in getting underneath these issues around choosing to be a sex worker or being prostituted to talking about the whole notion of exchanging money for sex, what that means, and in particular, what it means that overwhelmingly men pay money for sex with/from women. … It is not enough to begin and end discussions of issues around buying and selling of sex with “choice” and the fact that money is exchanged for it. We have to also calculate in what has been *taken* from the women from whom men buy sex, the cost in terms of their lives and bodies.
Personally, I think the big debate about choice and such is a complete waste of time! As I said in my first comment, women who are or have been in the sex industry generally have a pretty good idea whether their experience has been voluntary or not and whether or not it was a positive one. These arguments by other people going on around us about who choose what and how they can do so under patriarchy and blah blah blah… they take energy away from the conversations that need to happen and drown out discussion about what we actually need.
To me, that’s the only point at which this distinction needs to be made: The needs of a sex worker and the needs of a prostituted person are different. Attempting to label us all prostituted people and provide exit services and trauma support to women who want support and recognition of their legitimate work is just as damaging as providing free condoms and industrial rights to women who feel that their entire experience amounted to rape. Haven’t we learned, over and over again, that we can’t stick a “one size fits all” solution on any problem that feminism faces? As women, we are wildly diverse.
I stand by the point I’ve been making for years, that this is one of those topics that needs to be kept segregated. Sex worker rights and support for prostituted people are entirely different issues. It’s flat out DAMAGING to have either conversation interrupted, whether the well-meaning interrupter is chiming into a discussion about exit services and trauma support to insist that some women choose prostitution, or whether they’re jumping into a discussion about how to make decrim work to demand we talk about the women who are forced into it.
Sex worker rights organisations in Australia ARE sex workers. We’d get a lot more done if we didn’t have to keep arguing with anti-sex-work groups, and I’m sure that applies both ways.
And Heart, I hear you on anti-capitalism. I’m not a huge fan of the system we live under either. But hey, I’ve still got to live under it as best I can, and that means earning a living. I’m sick of the hidden assumption in so much anti-capitalist rhetoric that sex workers should be on the front line martyring our incomes for the anti-capitalist cause just because of the nature of our work.
Many really great thoughts here. Very true, Rebecca– what magically turns a young woman who has been in the sex trade from the time she was 13 into someone who can “choose” it at 16 or 18?
Also so true re the boxes you are talking about, this sort of categorizing of women, parsing them out according to their supposed or theorized levels of “choice” and suffering and cold-hard-cash-earned, and the kind of men who buy them/rape them/abuse them and where the buying/raping/abusing occurs, and then placing them onto a sort of hierarchy of pain where their supposed level of “choice” and cash earned theoretically begin to mitigate their risk and suffering, such that in the end, the pro-porn, pro-prostitution side has what matters: some number of women in the sex trade who, say they, are not harmed by it, chose it, and like what they do, and in the end, that’s all the pro-porn side needs to continue to advocate for and endorse what causes unimaginable, unconscionable suffering, not only to prostitutes but to all women (and men, for that matter).
Also so true re “internal” trafficking, and again, the slimeball Colacurcios come to mind. They run a company that advertises in the newspaper for “dancers and waitresses.” This company has been around for decades. Young women “apply” without realizing that they are entering into the world of prostitution. They are interviewed and become “waitresses” first. Of course, they do not make any money to speak of as “waitresses” because in Washington, the strip joints sell soft drinks, no liquor (which keeps them out of the hands of, and off the radar of, the liquor control board). So, a certain number of them then become dancers. Now the fun begins. They are promised much, especially money, and a lot of these women are, of course, poor, single mothers, students, they need money, they see the other women doing this, they figure they can always quit if they hate it. But now they are “independent contractors,” meaning they aren’t employees getting paychecks like when they were waitresses, they have “contracted” with the club they dance with. They now have to pay a certain amount of money every day as the establishment’s “cut.” This is used to control them because the cut the establishment gets often becomes a tab that can grow like topsy, and the desperation creeps in as they owe more and more if, for example, they have had a bad week, they have to pay the rent or medical bills, they are addicted to something. Now they are in a vulnerable position, and club managers and bouncers can put the screws to them, pressuring them for sex or pressuring them to have sex with certain men, their friends, guys they stand to benefit from having around. If they resist, they get punished, are given bad hours or the worst hours, are reminded how much they owe and pressured to pay it.
Then comes the shipping of the women out of state, as you say, Rebecca, to Alaska to dance in clubs there, to California and Nevada to dance in clubs down there, and the women do not have a choice, because again, they owe and not only do they owe, they owe “management” who in this case are felons convicted of assault and other acts of violence and who are suspected of five murders years ago which remain unsolved and for which they were never tried.
The other thing is, as “independent contractors”, these women receive no benefits of any kind, no medical, dental, no insurance, no sick days, no vacation, and must pay their own federal and state income taxes. When this begins to be calculated in, the amount of money they are actually earning begins to shrink. Many times, the women do not pay their taxes or underpay them which makes them incredibly vulnerable. I assisted with a class action lawsuit some years back brought by three exotic dancers against a strip joint. There were many dancers who wanted to join the class and would have, but that would have meant they would have had to produce whatever financial records they had, including their income tax returns, and so they would have had to state under oath that they had not filed their returns or had understated their income, and of course, they are not going to do this when they are attempting to stand against the kind of men they were standing against who will definitely use this information against them any way they can, report them, you name it. They are also going to have to testify under oath that contrary to the law, they engaged in acts of prostitution while they were dancers (the fact that management told them to, forced them to, or turned a blind eye doesn’t matter– it’s their word against management, and this is their job, how they make their living). In the end, only three women remained in the class, and they each got less than $16,000, which amounted to NOTHING to the club they worked in. Scarily, the woman who was first to begin the lawsuit died shortly after she received her judgment in an “accident” of some sort.
This is a desperate place to be: being forced to have sex with customers because you owe and you need to pay your bills and your taxes and the place you dance, knowing it is illegal and taking all of the risks for that, surrounded by men who will treat you well only if and when they are in a mood to, possibly dealing with addictions and many other obligations and bills. So women deepen their involvement in the sex trade in various ways, trying to make enough money, more money, trying to gather enough money to get out, which rarely happens.
Call this “choice” and “she is an adult” and “she was paid” all you want, it is, in fact, trafficking.
I find all this separating out is used lessen the reality of the damage that being prostitued does to the body and mind.
It is hope that if prostituted women are taught to be divided then they will never speak out about that men feel entitled to tortured, raped and murdered them. Just coz they have paid cash
Exactly. This is what the Max Hardcore devotees try to comment here all the time, “She knew what she was doing, she was paid for it.”
anuna: I’m not an expert on libertarianism, but as I understand it, a fair exchange involves value freely given for value. How does libertarianism deal with pre-established inequality, in that context? What I see is the owners and the oppressors taking what they want by force. They don’t offer a fair deal. They say, “I’m going to take your land and your livelihood away from you. I’m going to give myself the lion’s share of the food and resources, and deny you education, opportunity and freedom of movement. Now, go ahead and try to barter with me to get some crumbs to live on, if you think you have anything left I might want.” What does this have to do with freedom of choice?
Exactly, anuna and great point. Libertarianism celebrates deregulation (read: the subprime mortgage meltdown and ensuing world chaos we are all faced with now), megacorporations earning unlimited profits, all pornography all prostitution all the time, whatever makes ya happy as an individual, and don’t worry about, like, the earth, the seas, the animals, the powerless, the marginalized and how what you are doing will affect them, focus on things like the fact that if the megacorporation wasn’t THERE, then those 8-year-old girls wouldn’t be able to EARN a dollar a month or year weaving the rugs you want to buy at Wal-Mart at such a nice low price. Focus on the “choices” of the women in prostitution and porn because, hey, without the sex industry, they wouldn’t be able to earn money at all and aren’t they adults? Focus on the “pragmatic”. I mean, we need those non-renewable resources, we need that oil in the Arctic, we need the trees in the Amazon, we need those diamonds for our pinky fingers, we are humans, we rule the world, the scientists will come up with something, or if they don’t, the politicians will make some kind of deal, in the meantime, all I care about is cutting the very best deal that I can cut for myself right now. It’s a politics devoid of ethics.
V: We don’t really have the proliferation of “lads mags” that you all seem to have over in the UK, but, I see your point wrt to adds and cell phones and such, and I can see where the lads mags would make people angry-I also know they are not, as a general rule- put up or wrapped where only people who are adults can get them…and I have said and agree with the notion that such things are not good. Even as someone who is not against “adult entertainment” I do think it is FOR adults, and should be kept that way. I also get irked when I walk into a clothing store and see the kinds of things they are marketing to mere girls…and yes, I get as sick as anyone of finding adds for viagra and penis enlargement in my e-mail….
Shrug. I actually think your comment was really good, long or not, and yes, it contains things to think on.
(Ren, I’m not going to approve all of the grandstanding you want me to approve here wrt Satsuma or anyone else. You and those you hang out with online appear to lie awake nights strategizing attempts to publicly shame, attack, and demonize any woman who stands up to ya’all. A quick perusal of your blog will reveal many straight up attacks on women– entire posts dedicated to that project. Own and deal with your own crap and then maybe I’ll reconsider. I also won’t be participating in anything remotely likely to even smell like blogwar stuff. You’ll have to do that elsewhere and on your own. – Heart)
You know, Ren, re working to lessen harm to women in the sex trade, I can completely get behind that project. But there’s something else that got me writing this post, in addition to all the other stuff I’ve already mentioned. Someone I like and go back a ways with recently interviewed Nina Hartley, who with her husband, Ernest Green, is part of your circle of people apparently concerned about harm and sex worker rights and so on. (For those who do not know, Ernest Green publishes the SM/Fetish mag “Taboo” which is owned by Hustler. )
I was fairly discouraged about this interview and was then told Hartley doesn’t advocate for condom use in porn anymore which I found hard to believe. I went poking around and found this to be true. NOTE, MAY TRIGGER.
So much for harm reduction. Even if it’s true that condoms might increase the chances for transmission of STDs in some instances and acts in pornography, not using condoms while performing in pornography, on film, films distributed widely, models an incredibly destructive message to those who watch porn, including young people, including young women who get into the sex trade. The fact that porn performers are tested monthly does nothing to mitigate or lessen that particular harm or the ongoing, cascading harm that inevitably will result from young women having sex with random men without condoms.
This stuff somehow doesn’t get talked about much on the pro-porn/pro-prostitution blogs.
Heart, I’m not surprised that you won’t post me standing up to Satsuma and her attacks, frankly, and I wasn’t attacking Maggie I was explaining that as upset as she gets, well, she’s not the only one. I stated she’s not the only one who gets upset about things, and I MERELY ASKED Rebecca a QUESTION…even stated that her voice needed to be heard…how is that grandstanding or an attack????
That I do not understand at all.
And let’s not act like I’m the only one who attacks people or calls them out. It’s not true, and you know it.
Heart:
There was actually a huge discussion of mandatory condom useage on my blog at least. And there have been discussions on how porn is crap sex education, and STD’s/STI’s, safer sex practices, and all those things. If I need to prove that, I can, but yes, it is all there.
Nina & Ernest were also a huge part of getting AIM established, which absolutely counts as harm reduction, and continue to work on similar related issues. They absolutely care about workplace safety and the well-being of performers, this I know from dealing with them personally. Porn is in no way a perfect business (no business is really), but the two have them have done a lot to make it better for the performers, and seeing that dismissed? Well…not so keen on that at all.
Heart - Can I respond to Rens comment addressed to me? Because im responding to ren about her post on feministe as much as her comments here. i feel safer responding to it all here than i do there, but if you would prefer i took this comment to feministe, then i will cos this is your blog!
Of course you can post it here, V. — Heart
Ren -
Something i want to say is - we (me and you) have very different perceptions of the same thing. Which doesnt mean either of us is necessarily wrong, because we can only speak from our own position. Ive avoided you for ages because i struggle to keep that in perspective, and i think you do too, judging from the amount of hatred you direct at radical feminists.
The vocal sex worker advocate orgs - especially those that have absolutely no transparency into what the positions of their membership might be - also lack perspective. They tend to push one position (pro!) as the only possible one, but they often go further and there is a lot of trashing aimed at feminist anti-prostitution work, and of ex-sex workers who are negative about the industry. I think that they attempt to monopolise control over acceptable language, so some ’sex worker advocates’ actually operate to silence and further victimise a proportion of the people they claim to represent.
So your piece on feministe about whether we should be allowed to say “selling our bodies” - seems to me like part of that policing. And also hypocritical, since i’ve seen you argue on many occasions before against language censorship. I dont know why this would be different?
You don’t use that phrase to describe what you do, fine. But other women do. I don’t actually like to use the word prostitution for what i’ve done. Just as its easy to deny addiction “cos i don’t inject”, its pretty easy to deny prostitution “because i never did it for cash money”. Exchanges of sex for other sorts of goods and favours, in my experience, are really common, but most of us doing that don’t describe it as ‘exactly’ prostitution. I think that’s a class issue within those circles themselves - i may fuck for drugs but i don’t accept cash, so i’m better than *her*. I may fuck for cash but i do it out of a nice flat, so i’m a better class than a street hooker. I may do dancing but i dont do touching. Etc.
And i wonder, when you say you don’t sell your body, whether that too is partly about *you* marking out your own position in the sex work hierarchy. You don’t merely sell your body, you sell a certain standard of services, so you claim to provide a better service that someone who maybe just provides a body. I don’t know if there’s anything in this that resonates with you, i’m sure you know all about the class distinctions among sex workers that i’m talking about though.
But so anyway, i wonder whether your annoyance with the terminology is about that hierarchy, and setting yourself apart as having higher service quality, or something like that. As you say, its your choice to do it, and you can use whatever words you want to promote your own services and get the best payment you can for them. But i don’t reckon you should draw lines through other peoples language like that - maybe its well annoying having to always tell people “actually i don’t do that, i do *this*”, but unfortunately that’s what you’re gonna have to put up with if you defend the right of other people to keep using the terms they find relevant for themselves.
Just like people like me have to constantly correct (or switch off) people who assume we did it for kicks or out of choice, because we were ‘dirty sluts who couldn’t get enough’, because we were ‘too lazy to get a real job’, or because we just looooooved the attention, or etc, rather than because we were stuck in a messed up situation and didnt have (or know) any other way of getting by. Its not much fun for me either, to hear people banging on about how exciting and liberating it all seems cos they ‘watched billie piper the other day on call girl and she wears such wicked stuff’.
Ren, I would have been okay with you “standing up to Satsuma” for yourself, Ren Ev, but not on behalf of the beleaguered masses you think she “shames” and whom you think you should defend here. That’s what I mean by grandstanding. I mean, you want to defend Satsuma on behalf of mothers? Hello, mother of 11 here, grandmother to four, I think I can handle it! That is just deeply disrespectful behavior. You’re no knight in shining armor and I do not need any protection from you against radical feminists here and nobody else here does either. You shame and attack women constantly, publicly, by name, so where do you get off acting as though you are now some huge defender of women? Too, it’s blogwar stuff. I’m not going to let this thread be used as some sort of launching pad for bringing up all the resentments and aggravations you (or anyone else) have been accumulating over the years reading various comments here. In your comment directed to Rebecca, you made a show of how you would “ask” for something of Rebecca and be respectful and so on. Why don’t you just directly ask her instead of talking around her here or referring to her in the third person. That is just really deeply disrespectful to all of us here.
Heart, fine.
Satsuma- Thank you for asuming that I, as a person who is in the sex industry and occassionally enjoys BDSM, have been molested or raped as a child, so on so forth, and have suffered some sort of trauma, ect., Such things are untrue, and you are in no position of authority over the truth of anyone else’s expierences, so I’ll thank you not to speak for me (as a sex worker) on such matters or assume you know what the truth (for me) is or has been.
Fair enough, Heart? Also, I asked Rebecca because she was here, involved in the thread, and I’d prefer to ask her rather than just link her at Feministe. It seemed expedient and was not intended as some great insult towards her or anyone else.
Can I respond to V here? If so…
Ren -
Something i want to say is - we (me and you) have very different perceptions of the same thing. Which doesnt mean either of us is necessarily wrong, because we can only speak from our own position. Ive avoided you for ages because i struggle to keep that in perspective, and i think you do too, judging from the amount of hatred you direct at radical feminists.
I think all people have different perceptions, as for actual “right and wrong”, I think often, it’s somewhere in the middle? If that makes sense at all. And, sigh, I don’t hate ALL radical feminists. Do I have serious issues with some people? Yes, I do, and I shall admit and own that freely.
The vocal sex worker advocate orgs - especially those that have absolutely no transparency into what the positions of their membership might be - also lack perspective. They tend to push one position (pro!) as the only possible one, but they often go further and there is a lot of trashing aimed at feminist anti-prostitution work, and of ex-sex workers who are negative about the industry. I think that they attempt to monopolise control over acceptable language, so some ’sex worker advocates’ actually operate to silence and further victimise a proportion of the people they claim to represent.
That may very well be true of some people involved in various orgs. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know with some, the treatement they received at the hands of SOME anti folk definitely harmed and pushed them in the pro direction, they ended up, no matter how terrible their actual experiences, feeling used and discarded by the anti side, or found once they began to question some anti tactics, well, very very silenced. So, I suppose like many things, it goes both ways? I mean, everyone out there it seems has been trashed and treated badly, gets angry, and trashes and treats badly back. Anger and feeling dismissed and demonized (all around, to and from ANY side) breeds that sort of stuff I think.
So your piece on feministe about whether we should be allowed to say “selling our bodies” - seems to me like part of that policing. And also hypocritical, since i’ve seen you argue on many occasions before against language censorship. I dont know why this would be different?
I’ve always, personally, hated the term, and asked people not to use it. (Asked, not demanded, and suggest they think about it), and I’ve explained why…I think it’s horribly dehumanizing. Most folk in the sex biz I’ve spoken to, which yes, range from people like me to transwomen of color who do street level work, seemed to hate the term. However, if that is how others describe their expierence, then by all means, they should use the terminology that seems to fit or describe things for them. I didn’t intend to tell women who have been in the sex industry that they should define their exepereinces in terms I prefer…I mostly meant other people who have never been there shouldn’t…oversight on my part for not making that clearer, and I apologize.
You don’t use that phrase to describe what you do, fine. But other women do. I don’t actually like to use the word prostitution for what i’ve done. Just as its easy to deny addiction “cos i don’t inject”, its pretty easy to deny prostitution “because i never did it for cash money”. Exchanges of sex for other sorts of goods and favours, in my experience, are really common, but most of us doing that don’t describe it as ‘exactly’ prostitution. I think that’s a class issue within those circles themselves - i may fuck for drugs but i don’t accept cash, so i’m better than *her*. I may fuck for cash but i do it out of a nice flat, so i’m a better class than a street hooker. I may do dancing but i dont do touching. Etc.
And i wonder, when you say you don’t sell your body, whether that too is partly about *you* marking out your own position in the sex work hierarchy. You don’t merely sell your body, you sell a certain standard of services, so you claim to provide a better service that someone who maybe just provides a body. I don’t know if there’s anything in this that resonates with you, i’m sure you know all about the class distinctions among sex workers that i’m talking about though.
Um, I sell the same services anyone else in the sex industry does-and I’ve done it in some less than stellar places too…and a peeve with me is that class distinction thing…I don’t think I’m better than any other sex worker/ prostituted person…we’re all different, but its not about better.
But so anyway, i wonder whether your annoyance with the terminology is about that hierarchy, and setting yourself apart as having higher service quality, or something like that. As you say, its your choice to do it, and you can use whatever words you want to promote your own services and get the best payment you can for them. But i don’t reckon you should draw lines through other peoples language like that - maybe its well annoying having to always tell people “actually i don’t do that, i do *this*”, but unfortunately that’s what you’re gonna have to put up with if you defend the right of other people to keep using the terms they find relevant for themselves.
Nope. It’s not about that. It’s because I find the term dehumanizing. As I said, I sell the same things other people in the industry sell, but that’s not the whole of me as a person, or even the whole of my body…there is more to any and every human than that, and when a person (person not in the business, especially) implies otherwise, I find it very dehumanizing and even quite moralistic and judgmental. But point taken, if other people wish to use that term for themselves, it is not my place at all to say that they can’t.
Just like people like me have to constantly correct (or switch off) people who assume we did it for kicks or out of choice, because we were ‘dirty sluts who couldn’t get enough’, because we were ‘too lazy to get a real job’, or because we just looooooved the attention, or etc, rather than because we were stuck in a messed up situation and didnt have (or know) any other way of getting by. Its not much fun for me either, to hear people banging on about how exciting and liberating it all seems cos they ‘watched billie piper the other day on call girl and she wears such wicked stuff’.
Well, even those of us who do choose to do it get to put up with a lot of that crap too (lazy, its all about attention) so on… Hell, if there is one thing I do believe whole-heartedly, its that people, no matter how or why they ended up in the sex industry, have to put up with a whole lot of bullshit assumptions and hateful crap from other people…from the lazy/you loved it trope to the you must have been raped by your dad/are deluded trope. No one scenerio or set of circumstances fits all people involved, and I am sure all folk get annoyed with it being assumed they and their situations are something they most certainly were not.
Why do so many people hate Andrea Dworkin? Even women I know who consider themselves strong feminists shudder when they hear her name. I agree with everything I have read of hers. It pains me that nothing was done to honor her when she died, and she died so young. There was supposed to be a banner for her in our Take Back the Night march (2005) but there was nothing…..DemocracyNow!, which I thought more progressive back then, only gave her a headline, but did an entire segment on O.J. Simposon’s lawyer when he passed waya (both died in the same year).
It makes me crazy to see how some feminists have co-opted porn. It seems like they got tired of fighting and said ‘if you can’t beat em…..’ I like Hip Mama magazine, but felt like vomiting as I read the current issue - there’s an article about a woman who retrieved her self-esteem taking a pole dancing class and having $60 thrown on-stage for her at her class performance.
Is this the best we can do?
v wrote: “I don’t actually like to use the word prostitution for what i’ve done. Just as its easy to deny addiction “cos i don’t inject”, its pretty easy to deny prostitution “because i never did it for cash money”. Exchanges of sex for other sorts of goods and favours, in my experience, are really common, but most of us doing that don’t describe it as ‘exactly’ prostitution.”
This where you get kicked out of the credibility club. In my experience, the majority of the kicking out is done by strippers who call themselves (but not girls sucking for their supper) sex workers, phone sex operators who call themselves (but not boys fucking for drugs) sex workers, women who sell nude pictures of themselves and call it (but not an actress posing in Playboy) sex work.
The term “sex work” is a top-down phrase meant to mark the hierarchy within prostitution, to highlight the differences between women instead of their commonalities. If you don’t explicitly embrace how men sexually exploited you as a prime indicator of your identity then you are out of the hierarchy and are expected to shut up. Personally, I think there’s a unique perspective shared by those of us who have repeatedly been beaten so viciously we thought we were going to die, but patriarchy hasn’t devised a sexy, catch-all club moniker to euphemistically dignify that experience.
When women paid to get fucked is honestly called prostitution then I might consider using the term ’sex work’. So long as women in pornography are considered not prostitutes but “sex workers”, I’m going to have to treat the term as a tool used by the dishonest and in-denial to intentionally mislead people about the truths of what prostitution is and how it affects prostituted women.
This is a very interesting debate. I freely admit that for me it is hard not read and write without the gut of me when I was prostituted wanting to scream with frustation. It is very when you have been on receiving end of the “ugly” side of the sex trade, to always stay calm and reasonable.
I was interested in V saying how hard it to name when not paid in cash.
I would name it now prostitution, but when I lived it had no language for what was happening to me.
I had sex with strangers in exchange for a bed, when I didn’t want to home to my abusive stepdad.
I had sex with strangers for free drinks.
I had me beaten up unconscious instead recieving cash, then I would also have sex.
I was given “presents” or food instead of money, then had sex.
And sometimes I was in cash, usually not the full rate, then had sex
Now I say that is all prostitution.
I tried hard to believe it wasjust one-night stands.
But there no talking, just violence and fucking.
There no meeting before the cold act of sex.
I did not see their faces.
I did not know their names.
All I knew was to do whatever they wanted, and to hope I was not hurt too bad.
I had to pretend to myself I just unlucky.
I could not allow myself to know I was being manipulated by the club manager.
I could not allow myself to know that the men that raped and tortured me had pre-planned the abuse.
I could not allow myself to know that those same men would rape and torture other girls that worked in the club.
I could not believe I was trapped.
I think it is bloody hard for women and girls who in the hellish end of the sex trade to have a language for their reality. They have to make it unreal to survive.
I think having a language when working in the sex trade, can be coz experiences not “too bad”, so there are still words.
The worst of living inside trauma is there no language that is adequate to say the pain, grief, confusion and terror.
That can only come if you lucky enough to survive.
(As for writing for Feministe, it is their choice who they invite. I am not American, so it is of little relevant to me.)
This where you get kicked out of the credibility club. In my experience, the majority of the kicking out is done by strippers who call themselves (but not girls sucking for their supper) sex workers, phone sex operators who call themselves (but not boys fucking for drugs) sex workers, women who sell nude pictures of themselves and call it (but not an actress posing in Playboy) sex work.
yeh, thats familiar to me too.
WRT to Sam’s comment, isn’t this the exact sort of thing that I did that upset everyone in the first place…defining terms for other people & their experiences??? I mean, if I shouldn’t be doing it, neither should Sam, really…I mean, I know a lot of very un-privileged people who call themselves “sex workers”…
Why do so many people hate Andrea Dworkin? Even women I know who consider themselves strong feminists shudder when they hear her name. I agree with everything I have read of hers. It pains me that nothing was done to honor her when she died, and she died so young.
I also get upset by that too, julia. Andrea Dworkin was absolutely amazing.
I believe she was hated because she firmly stood against patriarchy and she was very vocal about resistance to patriarchy. And, in a patriarchal society, such a woman is hated, including by some (patriarchist) “feminists”.
To me, anybody who defends pornography, prostitution, Christianity, capitalism, male-supremacist laws, custom or institution, etc. (while being fully aware -without necessarily admitting it- that these things are inherently misogynistic or oppressive) is a patriarchist.
So much for harm reduction. Even if it’s true that condoms might increase the chances for transmission of STDs in some instances and acts in pornography, not using condoms while performing in pornography, on film, films distributed widely, models an incredibly destructive message to those who watch porn, including young people, including young women who get into the sex trade. The fact that porn performers are tested monthly does nothing to mitigate or lessen that particular harm or the ongoing, cascading harm that inevitably will result from young women having sex with random men without condoms.
Thanks for letting us know about this, Heart. I am not surprised at all, but useful to know. It is so sad.
You and those you hang out with online appear to lie awake nights strategizing attempts to publicly shame, attack, and demonize any woman who stands up to ya’all. A quick perusal of your blog will reveal many straight up attacks on women– entire posts dedicated to that project.
You shame and attack women constantly, publicly, by name, so where do you get off acting as though you are now some huge defender of women? Too, it’s blogwar stuff. I’m not going to let this thread be used as some sort of launching pad for bringing up all the resentments and aggravations you (or anyone else) have been accumulating over the years reading various comments here.
True, Heart. :(
I would have no problem whatsoever with Ren if she was blogging about “how wonderful it is to be a sex worker” or “how great porn is” (fair enough, her views- free speech- I wouldn’t even link to her posts to target them) and if she did leave us alone. But what she is doing on her blog is clearly (sometimes sexualized) cruelty & utter distortion of our words and it is triggering (hate speech). Does Ren not know I am a survivor of rape? If you’re really pro-pornstitution, well then defend it, do just that, use your own “anti-porn feminists” tag to express that you disagree with them (as I said, I use the tag ‘”sex work” advocates’ to show how & why I’m I am very angry at & disagree with them) but do not target individual bloggers (who are survivor of rape & sexual abuse) by their name, this is really nasty stuff. This is online bullying.
I only used your name twice, Ren, on my blog regarding the W&M issue back in April, and when I did it was for defending Sam, defending us, while trying to show your cruelty of targeting people who’ve done nothing to you apart from disagreeing with your crowd and wanting to have our own views expressed freely on our blogs without having to be targeted as a person for the politics we believe in (whether you like radical feminism or not). Then, after these two times, it was over and done with, gone. I would never use your name again in my posts.
Please have more consideration for survivors of rape. And when you allow your pro-porn male friends Kennerson, IACB, etc. to target us by name, you are actually allowing and condoning misogynist bullying from men to us, btw.
Why don’t you leave us alone? As I said, radical feminism is in the margin of society while pro-porn views are in the mainstream. Pro-porn views are usually popular and loved out there, while radical feminist views are (usually) either totally hated or not even heard of. Look around. Pro-porn views are mainstream. So, why wouldn’t you just leave us alone then? I mean, because of the fact that pro-porn views are mainstream & popular in contemporary culture (and hardly anybody is interested in rad fems’ work anyway), why wouldn’t you stop targeting us by name as individual women? I’m asking you politely, Ren?
And I do believe you are capable of a civil answer, perhaps?
Maggie- This is me being civil via not addressing 90% of that comment with my side of the story. Stop pressing me and utterly discounting the actual work sex workers rights advocates do and it won’t be much of a problem at all. We disagree, I often find things you say as offensive as you find things I say. Civil enough for you? Because I’m afraid, at this point and time, that’s as civil as I’m going to get. Things I disagree with or find to be mocking or discounting, yes, I’m going to say something, just as many people would do, but you know, the last two threads I’ve been in that you’ve been in, I would’ve been more than happy to leave you alone, if not mentioned and called out by name. I’m utterly content not to speak to you again on this thread, actually. Is that civil enough?
Ren, I think that you are interested in using words that bracket off the having of sex for money from feminist and political considerations. I think you want the words you use to communicate that having sex for money can be value neutral and apolitical. I think Sam is interested in using words that communicate that this isn’t really possible. And that’s really the issue, or one issue: Is it possible to have sex for money and declare, via the words you use for it, that what you are doing does not have political ramifications so far as sexism, so far as relationships and interactions between men and women under male heterosupremacy? I don’t think it is, because we live in a sexist, misogynist world. We cannot escape this reality by denying it via the words that we use. Since feminism concerns itself, among other things, with the politics of relationships and interactions between men and women, and since feminism views language as an important site of political resistance, feminists can’t with integrity or honesty use language that betrays our own deep convictions about the nature of sex inequality and what role prostitution plays in maintaining sex inequality.
Here’s an example that might not offend one and all, might not be irretrievably inflammatory, and that might be somewhat illuminating. Some years back Amy’s Brain wrote a post, and I think it was on her blog, about why she disagreed with married women or men referring to their husbands or wives as their “partners.” She disagreed with that for reasons that are comparable with what I’m articulating here. Calling a husband or a wife a “partner” communicates that the relationship is value neutral and apolitical, that there is no qualitative difference between persons married with the full blessing of the surrounding male heterosupremacist culture and persons who are partnered but forbidden to marry because they are lesbians or gay men. It obfuscates, in other words, the feminist politics around civil marriage in a way that inures to the benefit of the societally benefitted or privileged (married people), as opposed to the disenfranchised (lesbians, gay men). If there’s really no difference between married het partners and lesbian partners then what’s wrong with lesbian partners and why do they keep demanding equal rights? Why don’t we all just call our significant others “partners”, and voila, civil marriage as a perk and enforcer of compulsory heterosexuality goes poof! Except, of course, that it doesn’t. Instead real, important, destructive political realities get erased.
In the same way, calling selling sex for money “sex work” inures to the benefit of the surrounding male supremacist mainstream, not those of us who have been harmed by it, whether by rape, pornography, prostitution or sexual abuse. If sex for money can just be work like any other work, and “sex work” is really not qualitatively different from all other kinds of work, then what about the millions of women who have gone through hell because they had sex for money? Where do they fit in? Where is their voice? They are made, as others have said, to be somehow less than “sex workers”, aberrant, the suggestion being that there is something wrong with them, they are abnormal, they are the exception to the rule, when in fact, we know that they are by far, by far, the rule and not the exception. The word “sex worker” is like the word “partner” used by het people. It hides political realities that are central to the struggles of feminism.
There are, of course, layers and complexities here. If you tell me personally in a discussion with you, Ren, that you do not want me to call you “prostituted,” or describe you as “prostituted,” then I won’t in my discussions with you, because to do so would conflict with other ethical and political values of mine around respecting individual women and what they have to say about themselves and their lives and about treating women with respect. So, I will look for other words that communicate my meaning and that are not the equivalent of throw downs. That doesn’t mean, though, that I won’t defend the term because it does accurately describe a phenomenon I believe has historically until today been central to the perpetuation of male supremacy: men paying women for sex. It communicates who does what to whom. Your or others saying the word is unacceptable is like someone who is married saying calling her husband her husband is unacceptable; in each case there as an obscuring of important and specific political realities feminists are concerned with.
Too, I don’t really care on an individual level whether someone calls her husband or someone calls his wife his or her “partner.” I know people are operating according to the understanding and insight that they have and they’ve probably never thought too much about it. But if someone launched a campaign to insist that married people should use the term “partner” and not “husband” or “wife,” I would then have to take issue with that because again, that would amount to a deliberate effort to conceal the reality of compulsory heterosexuality and the way it is privileged under male supremacy.
You know people who find spiritual fulfillment in prostitution, but far and away most don’t. You call yourself a sex worker, but far and away most people in prostitution don’t. A good many don’t call themselves “prostituted” either, and since I don’t speak to them but instead direct my words to johns, pimps, pornographers and their enablers, my language takes the most clear, widely-accepted term to convey to them what an estimated 90% of people in prostitution say they have experienced.
People urgently need to see these people as people first, not as income-generating products in a capitalist system first (hello all the “Tax it!” comments that infest public discourse.) Sex is already considered women’s work. Prostitution has been called the world’s oldest profession for decades (centuries?) and much more harm than good has been done to women, children, and men from that longstanding pimps and johns framing. The creation and popular use of “child sex worker” is an inhumanity that sustainers of the old frame newly introduced to my planet.
Time for a new frame that puts people before profits.
sam:
When women paid to get fucked is honestly called prostitution then I might consider using the term ’sex work’. So long as women in pornography are considered not prostitutes but “sex workers”, I’m going to have to treat the term as a tool used by the dishonest and in-denial to intentionally mislead people about the truths of what prostitution is and how it affects prostituted women.
I’m sorry, but I’ve read that paragraph several times now and it still doesn’t make sense to me. You’ll consider using the term sex work when everyone else starts using the term prostitution? You prefer to use the term prostitution BECAUSE the women in question use the term sex work? I’m lost.
“Sex work” is a label coined by a sex worker, used by sex workers, and promoted by sex workers. It doesn’t just make the point that we’re not all prostitutes, it reframes the language in a fashion that avoids the negative connotations of “prostitution”. As I’ve said repeatedly, I completely respect the right of any women who considers herself to have been prostituted and exploited to choose her own terminology, and I will respect her by using it. I do not respect non-sex-workers who flatly deny sex workers that same right.
Maggie:
As I said, radical feminism is in the margin of society while pro-porn views are in the mainstream. Pro-porn views are usually popular and loved out there, while radical feminist views are (usually) either totally hated or not even heard of.
While I’ll agree with you that “pro-pornography” views are more mainstream than “anti-pornography” views, I think you make an error when you attempt to extrapolate this to love and popularity of actual sex workers vs radical feminists. We’re a marginalised group. Trust me, I WISH the stigma surrounding what I do for a living would disappear, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.
Heart, I’ll just add a thank you for letting this conversation happen here. I’m not sure what you’re editing out of Ren’s comments, but simply having a discourse instead of posting past each other is something I always like to see from women and feminists.
The creation and popular use of “child sex worker” is an inhumanity that sustainers of the old frame newly introduced to my planet.
Ugh. That is just sickening.
Because I’m pretty new here, and no one knows me, I’d like to say that I don’t think of myself as an authority, and am not trying to tell other people what to think. I suspect what I quoted about S/M upset some people, who probably felt judged. It wasn’t my intention to blame any women for their sexual feelings, but rather to question a system that I believe installs certain ways of thinking about sex into us.
Heart’s post 51 reminded me of something, because I am a heterosexual married woman, and I have a husband. The institution of heterosexual marriage has certainly been called into question in feminist discussions. But that doesn’t make me angry and defensive, because I can see for myself why this institution is questioned. The whole idea of patriarchal marriage IS harmful! Heterosexual privilege and enforced heteronormativity ARE oppressive! All of the above support the patriarchy! It is liberating as well as painful for me to be able to see this, and question myself about how I’m going to deal with it. Motherhood is vigorously questioned, too, and I’m a mother. White privilege? Got that too. I don’t feel guilty about any of those things, but I do see the problem.
So I guess my question is, when all these things so integral to me and many other women are up for questioning, why is it unfair to question porn and prostitution? What is so all-fired special about satisfying men’s sexual demands for pay, such that it should be beyond questioning? I dunno. That seems like expecting too much privilege.
And back to S/M for just a minute: I work in the science fiction community, and there are a lot of BDSM people in sf fandom, so I’m not unfamiliar with that. So I know BDSM people feel they are a persecuted minority. But to me, as I look around at society and the images I’m presented with, it looks as if S/M is all-pervasive in society. Maybe mainstream society picks on certain people who operate outside approved structures, but within the patriarchy, S/M is heartily approved. All I have to do is look back on my own Catholic wedding with its symbolism to see that! The white gown, concealing and constricting the bride’s body and turning her into a container for her “virginity” . . . the crucifix itself . . . the word “deflowered” . . . being “given away” . . . Yuck!! Jeez, why didn’t they just put a collar on me and get it over with?
Not meaning to derail the topic, just to give an example of why I think it’s important and valid to question the sadomasochistic power play that’s so important in pornified sex.
I think you make an error when you attempt to extrapolate this to love and popularity of actual sex workers vs radical feminists. We’re a marginalised group. Trust me, I WISH the stigma surrounding what I do for a living would disappear, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.
You are totally misrepresenting my views, Hexy. I do know that women in prostitution are a marginalized group and that their is a stigma surrounding prostituting. However, that stigma is NOT created by radical feminists but by johns, pimps, prostitute-haters and woman-haters. As Heart said above: “There are thousands of hateful words used against women and I want a world where none of them can be used ever to hurt any woman. That certainly would include the word “slut.” As to slut shaming, there is nothing like that here. If anyone is to be shamed — not, in my opinion, a very useful tool or strategy for change — it is those who have built empires for themselves by way of the prostituted bodies of women.”
You are misrepresenting my views, Hexy. Never have I said that I was “extrapolating this to love and popularity of actual sex workers vs radical feminists.” Some radical feminists are former prostitutes (’sex workers’). And my comment was to Ren, not you, btw. Please stop misinterpreting what I say.
Ren- I’m asking you politely, Ren?
And I do believe you are capable of a civil answer, perhaps?
my comment was to Ren, not you, btw. - I mean… you’re not trying to speak for her… are you…
Ren- my comments and questions are still here., btw
Hexy, I’ve edited two of Ren’s posts. In one I edited out one sentence because it indicated she thought my blog post in its entirety was directed towards her, and it wasn’t.
In one other of her posts, I edited out stuff that seemed too likely to result in yet another blog war. Other than that, I haven’t edited anything.
Here’s the deal. While yes, I respect women and honor what they have to say about themselves and their lives as a matter of my radical feminist principles, at the same time, I’ve lived a bit. 15, 16 years ago, I would have told you I loved being a literalist Christian, loved my role as a submissive wife, loved making house and home my all, chose it all. I wasn’t and wouldn’t have been lying. It’s not that I wasn’t happy in all of that, in a certain way, I was. But to be happy in it, I had to do violence to myself. I had to harm myself and tell myself it was right and good and even empowering to harm myself. I know how that works.
So when a woman tells me she has chosen something I believe hurts her and me and all women, I can believe and affirm her on a certain level, remembering always that I also told women that I was choosing something that hurt me and all women, that I wanted to be believed, and that eventually, I had to leave all I believed, had to abandon all I had said, at great cost, to save my own life.
This is what happens when you get old, become a crone. You’ve lived a long time, lived through many things, recognize what you’ve experienced in other women. You try to hold it all together, you try to harm none. It’s hard.
We believe women and affirm them where they are, and we seek a world in which women can live free.
I mean… you’re not trying to speak for her… are you…
I mean of course I know you’re NOT trying to speak for her. Sorry (my bad).
My comments and questions to Ren are still here though…
Anuna: So I guess my question is, when all these things so integral to me and many other women are up for questioning, why is it unfair to question porn and prostitution? What is so all-fired special about satisfying men’s sexual demands for pay, such that it should be beyond questioning? I dunno. That seems like expecting too much privilege.
Exactly. And also exactly to your observations about SM. Those of us out of patriarchal religions are intimately acquainted with SM and know it for what it is– a mechanism designed to perpetuate heirarchy, patriarchy.
I will have more to say tomorrow, tonight I am very tired, but for now, let me tell you how much you ROCK. Your insights are always so amazing and right on time, anuna.
Heart
Heart, what you say about the use of the word partner is partly why women such as Riane Eisler and I are trying to reclaim that word. Usually when a woman calls her husband a partner, it is wishful thinking, and when a man calls his wife a partner, he is obfuscating the true nature of that relationship, for his own reasons, possibly to placate her. I have never been married, though I have considered it. If I call my SO my partner, it is far from value neutral and apolitical. It means he does not try to control me. I use the word to defy all the conventional wisdom about relationships, to make a political statement, and to place value on that defiance. I do not believe in any kind of traditional marriage, nor the perks associated with it. If there must be perks associated with intimate relationships, they should be available to everybody in such relationships. Anything else, to my mind, is a violation of the separation of church and state, but of course, that has never stopped our culture from promoting relationships it approves, while trashing other relationships as less worthy, sinful, abominations, or worse.
More on topic, the term sex work is just too convenient for men. They love those euphemisms that legitimate and cover up what is really going on. I always wonder about this choice argument, would any woman choose to have sex with a john if she was not getting paid? If she really wanted it, she would not take money for it. If she needs the money, how can that be a free or informed choice?
maggie, I replied, the comment has not been let through…and NO ONE speaks for me, but me.
Sam doesn’t get to decide shit for me. Does my work have implications, sure it does…so does you having 11 kids. Are either of us to be hung for it, or let other people judge us for it? NO!
And you can say what you want, even say the terms you prefer…partner, husband, prostituted…
But if someone says NO, that’s not how it is, will you listen? You may be older than me, but at edging on towards 37, I am no child.
Sam: You know what? Don’t speak to me, or presume to speak for me. You had your chance to speak with me, and I regret that didn’t happen. Do I see it as spiritual? Hell no. But I do dare you, or anyone else, to say that I haven’t helped people who want out or helped people who have left…I dare you. Because I have.
And guess what? In My Life, what I Do? It’s not all about the MEN.
Maggie, is your question will I leave you alone? Is that it? Well, if so, it depends.
The difference, Ren, or one difference, is I’m not defending having had 11 kids, saying it was a good or empowering or an unbounded choice, and more relevant to this thread, I haven’t invented or used words that obfuscate the nature of my choices. I’m not drawing some distinction between, for example, what it meant for me to have had 11 kids and what it means for other women in other situations to have had many children or suggesting that the nature of my choice was different from theirs, or that my choices somehow did not shore up male heterosupremacy or were empowering to me or other women, because they did and weren’t. I’m not leading some crusade that women with huge families should call themselves “family workers” instead of mothers with huge families.
As to whether or not any of us should be judged for our decisions and choices, well, people in the grip of their inner judge will judge, you know? I see you judging women all the time, Ren, day in, day out. And so what? As a feminist I am going to make judgments about acts and politics that harm women. I don’t have to go the second step and mistreat women because I don’t like what they’re doing, but that’s a different issue. As to “hung for it,” that kind of stuff isn’t helpful here, it’s heat, not light, nobody’s suggested anything like that, so kindly tone it down a notch.
Sam and I and all feminists certainly may and are obligated to analyze the choices women make and the words they use to describe those choices because as women we are all affected by what other women do, the choices they make, their politics. I can accept and affirm a literalist Christian Quiverfull mom, believe her when she tells me that is her choice, treat her with respect and like her personally and be her friend while at the same time subjecting her choices and words to fairly rigorous and thorough feminist analysis, as I have here on my blog many times. My analysis doesn’t “hang” her or me or anyone else. My feminist analysis is critical and central to my own feminism, my own liberation, my own life.
I have listened to you here, Ren and I believe what you say about your life and your choices. At the same time, I know that throughout my life of now 56 years made many choices that I defended at the time — choices to take up with really bad men, choices to enter into destructive and damaging communities and relationships, choices to embrace politics and world views that hurt me and other women — and the perspective I have now because of those choices I made and had to abandon necessarily informs how I respond to what you say and the sense I make of it.
As to what you do being not all about the men, well, if it were not for the men and the patriarchal, male supremacist society and world men have built, your choices and life would be different, no? At the very least you would not be subjected to some of the horrific stuff your work has subjected you to because you are a woman and your clients are men. And the same for me, and all women, as second class citizens under male supremacy, our choices are bounded, limited, not free. Feminism exists to create a revolution that will change all that.
Heart
NO ONE speaks for me, but me.
Yes, I know that. (I said Sorry to Hexy above- I didn’t like the fact she misrepresented what I’d said, that’s all).
We disagree, I often find things you say as offensive as you find things I say.
But I don’t target you by name with dozens and dozens of posts that are triggering to rape survivors.
Anyway, you evaded my main questions. Which were:
Does Ren (you) not know I am a survivor of rape?… Pro-porn views are mainstream. So, why wouldn’t you just leave us alone then? I mean, because of the fact that pro-porn views are mainstream & popular in contemporary culture (and hardly anybody is interested in rad fems’ work anyway), why wouldn’t you stop targeting us by name as individual women?
Face it: Pro-pornography views are usually what’s popular out there, while radical feminist views are (usually) either totally hated or not even heard of. And there are more people who give attention to your work than there are people who give attention to mine…
You evaded my main questions. I knew you would. Which exactly proves Heart’s point here:
You and those you hang out with online appear to lie awake nights strategizing attempts to publicly shame, attack, and demonize any woman who stands up to ya’all. A quick perusal of your blog will reveal many straight up attacks on women– entire posts dedicated to that project.
You would never stop targeting individual women (for the politics and views they believe in) by name with triggering things. There is no way you would. Which is a very sad and cruel fact…
the last two threads I’ve been in that you’ve been in, I would’ve been more than happy to leave you alone, if not mentioned and called out by name.
Sometimes, you said my name first in those threads, I’ve not forgotten that.
I’m utterly content not to speak to you again on this thread, actually. Is that civil enough?
Because of ignoring some crucial questions… I’ll just have to keep ignoring the nasty targeting and bullying by name, in the future, by splitting my mind into parts, by pretending what your crowd is saying, about me while singling me out as an individual person with triggering (sometimes sexualized) cruelty and distortions & misrepresentation of many of my words, is not there… I’ll just have to… keep pretending this targeting by name doesn’t exist… split my mind into parts… numb the pain… take the pain away… split my mind into parts…
More on topic, the term sex work is just too convenient for men.
True, which is why I reject that term. I still acknowledge that there are many very unprivileged women in the sex trade who call themselves ’sex workers’ while feeling negative about prostitution though. And when they tell their painful stories while using the term ’sex work’, well I’m absolutely fine with that. Their stories matter as much as so many others’ who’ve been harmed in the sex trade. Obviously, their pimps (and some of their johns) called it “sex work” when they spoke to them, which makes sense why these women have internalized the term. I can fully understand that… We’re living in a patriarchy…
That doesn’t change the fact that “sex work” is not in my dictionary, as it is patriarchal and it benefits men with their age-old anti-woman beliefs. As Sam said, prostitution has been called the world’s oldest profession for ages and ages. And prostitution has not yet been recognized as an inherent form of sexual slavery and violence against women for the vast majority of the women & girls in it…
Julia- because you love Andrea Dworkin (former ’sex worker’), I have a very powerful quote from her to leave here in this thread:
“The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable. The power of the master is absolute and incontrovertible. His authority is protected by civil law, armed force, custom, and divine and/or biological sanction. Slaves characteristically internalize the oppressor’s view of them, and this internalized view congeals into a pathological self-hatred. Slaves typically learn to hate the qualities and behaviors which characterize their own group and to identify their own self-interest with the interest of their oppressor. The master’s position at the top is invulnerable; one aspires to become the master, or to become close to the master, or to be recognized by virtue of one’s good service to the master. Resentment, rage, and bitterness at one’s own powerlessness cannot be directed upward against him, so it is all directed against other slaves who are the living embodiment of one’s own degradation.
Among women, this dynamic works itself out in what Phyllis Chesler has called “harem politics”. The first wife is tyrant over the second wife who is tyrant over the third wife, etc.
The authority of the first wife, or any other women in the harem who has prerogatives over other women, is a function of her powerlessness in relation to the master. The labor that she does as a fuck and as a breeder can be done by any other woman of her gender class. She, in common with all other women of her abused class, is instantly replaceable. This means that whatever acts of cruelty she commits against other women are done as the agent of the master. Her behavior inside the harem over and against other women is in the interest of the master, whose dominance is fixed by the hatred of women for each other.
Inside the harem, removed from all access to real power, robbed of any possibility of self-determination, all women typically act out heir repressed rage against the master; and they also act out their internalized hatred of their own kind. Again, this effectively secures the master’s dominance, since women divided against each other will not unite against him.”
– Andrea Dworkin, in Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, pp. 85-86.
We live in a patriarchy. Patriarchy limits our freedom. More women need to realize that, see the male-supremacist system for what it really is, it is crucial…
if it were not for the men and the patriarchal, male supremacist society and world men have built, your choices and life would be different, no? At the very least you would not be subjected to some of the horrific stuff your work has subjected you to because you are a woman and your clients are men. And the same for me, and all women, as second class citizens under male supremacy, our choices are bounded, limited, not free. Feminism exists to create a revolution that will change all that.
Great points, Heart! I agree…
We live in a patriarchy. Patriarchy limits our freedom. More women need to realize that, see the male-supremacist system for what it really is, it is crucial…
Sorry, I forgot a ‘t’ in the Dworkin quote above: “… all women typically act out [t]heir repressed rage…”
Sorry I forgot something else in the Dworkin quote above. I forgot “self-” somewhere.
“…to identify their own self-interest with the [self-]interest of their oppressor…”
Could you please edit the 2 omissions in the Dworkin quote in my comment above, Heart?
(you don’t necessarily need to publish my pointing out errors I’ve made in the quote, btw. Simply edit it, please.)
Now you’re misrepresenting me. I never said the stigma was created by radical feminists.
I’m sorry if that’s not what you meant. I believe you, Hexy. It’s just that radical feminists are too often mistakenly portrayed as “shaming the women in prostitution” (not by you but by others on the blogosphere) as if we were the ones who “created the stigma” while the stigma was created by the misogynists of the patriarchy. Sorry for misinterpreting.
I just don’t think you do anywhere near as much to get rid of it as you like to think.
That’s your opinion. Well, nobody is anywhere near as much to get rid of it as we would really want that stigma gone. Sweden’s law has eradicated a great part of that stigma, IMO. I’ve met Swedish people who did not believe in that stigma and they said that in their country women in prostitution are (generally) not shamed nor stigmatized. Sweden’s law is great because prostituted women are provided with help & exit programs, and the few women who genuinely want to stay in prostitution are not criminalized in Sweden. You may disagree with that, but I won’t… I’m pro-Sweden’s law, you favor another legislation… but *let’s not argue over that, please*, I really do not want to… Different people support different legislations…
You DO present, quite frequently, the idea that women in your particular kind of radical feminism are shunned by mainstream society, and that “pro-pornography” types are lauded.
Well, IMHO, it is true, Hexy.
If by that you meant people other than sex workers themselves, fair enough… but it hasn’t been clear to me at all from your usage.
Exactly: I meant people other than the women in prostitution. I meant the wider culture as a whole. Sorry to not be clear.
I don’t speak for Ren, and I wouldn’t bloody dare try to!
Hexy, as I’ve already said *twice* (look) above:
1/”I mean of course I know you’re NOT trying to speak for her. Sorry (my bad).”
2/”NO ONE speaks for me, but me.
Yes, I know that. (I said Sorry to Hexy above…”
Ren had (sort of) replied to my comment but I could not see it (as it had been somehow stuck in moderation). I could only see you replying to my comment, which had given me a mistaken impression for a number of minutes, sorry. Then I did notice, Hexy, which is why I then wrote “I mean of course I know you’re NOT trying to speak for her. Sorry (my bad)” 40 minutes later. Sorry for the *misunderstanding*.
So, yes, I have comments in my moderation queue.
My problems are several and among them are these:
* If I approve some of the comments, I will be approving mean-spirited, undeserved, unproductive attacks on fine women;
* If I edit the comments, deleting the mean-spirited, undeserved, unproductive attacks and snarks, then the commenters appear to have been reasonable, polite and respectful when they were not. But only I know this because I’m the only one who saw the comments before they were edited;
* If I do not approve the comments, the suggestion is that I cannot or will not respond to the issues the comments raise.
* If I do approve the comments, many who read here, survivors of the sex trade, in particular, but others of us who are survivors as well, will be triggered in ways which are very hard to deal with. The comments I’ve already approved have been severely triggering to some of my regular commenters.
I will be approving comments soon, but I wanted to preface my approvals with the above. I don’t like approving ugliness, self-congratulatory bullshit, disingenous grandstanding, and comments mostly intended to inflict distress, or comments which — intentionally or unintentionally — trigger good women. In the end, I think the interests of women will be better served if I do approve the comments in their entirety than if I don’t.
I might change my mind about that at any moment after approving and responding to the comments in my moderation queue. I will be watching the responses carefully. If you want your comment to be approved, don’t attack anyone, don’t be dismissive, don’t be a jerk, participate honestly and decently in the discussion.
Heart
Sorry, Heart, I forgot another thing (one more thing) in the Dworkin quote from Our Blood. I forgot “on other women” somewhere.
“…all women typically act out [on other women] their repressed rage against the master…”
Could you please edit this and correct this 3rd omission in the Dworkin quote in my above comment?
Sorry to bother you with that. I love quoting Dworkin and I hate making errors when I do.
Again, you don’t necessarily need to publish when I’m pointing out errors I’ve made in the quote, btw. Simply edit them, please.
You didn’t ask my opinion but if you had, I’d say don’t publish them. This dead horse has been beaten many times over the years. Let it rest in peace.
Heart, you said something about getting underneath the notion of choice in pornstitution, and getting down to the notion that men are paying money for sex work. That’s really it, that’s the heart of the issue, and that’s the thing that “voluntary” sex workers ignore. Sex is made into a commodity. Women’s bodies are made into a commodity. Pornstitution says that women are things to be bought and sold. We bring this up over and over and over again in some form or fashion and the “sex pox,” as Ginmar puts it, come out of the woodwork and completely ignore that aspect of it.
So when you turn sex into a commodity you cheapen it. When you turn women into a commodity you dehumanize us. It’s that simple. I thought we outlawed slavery? Then why are women still things to be bought and sold–even if it’s just a few parts of our bodies and just temporarily?
Eating is not a commodity. But one of the hallmarks of civilization, as Daniel Quinn puts it, is that food is locked up where once we could procure it freely. Drinking is not a commodity. Yet water privatization threatens to be an even larger political issue than oil ever was, with far more explosive results worldwide. (You think the Iraq war’s bad?) Seeking shelter is not a commodity, but we just witnessed what happens when you turn houses into a get-rich-quick market. Breathing is not a commodity, but oxygen’s the latest thing to be made into a consumer product (aside from medical uses) and I know I have no aspirations of ever going into an oxygen bar.
Why do we think nothing of commodifying sex? It is said that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. Even if that is true, and I don’t think it is, we all know which gender most often solicits money in exchange for sex. For a long time, also, marriage resembled nothing more than a prostitution transaction–the father of the bride was paid by the groom’s family for the privilege of marrying the daughter. (They didn’t turn it around and demand a dowry from the bride’s family until later, and even now in some cultures the wedding-price still comes from the groom.) And then there were female slaves. Those were the three classes women fell into. Whore, wife, and slave. We’ve always been owned by someone, even temporarily. So I can guess why we think nothing of commodifying sex. Because it’s the men doing the buying. And we all “know” men should be able to buy whatever they want. The Earth’s being destroyed on the basis of that very premise.
Another point I realized the other day: If you expand the pornstitution industry and look at where women are now buying sexual services from men, you see an interesting contrast. I was thinking specifically of strippers, and Chippendales in particular. All they ever do is strip and pose for pictures. Yet they have an identity of their own, even if it is manufactured. Their bigger fans probably even know each individual man by name. And the group itself is known nationwide, probably throughout North America in general, even by people who don’t like stripping by either sex.
You don’t see that kind of notoriety in female strippers beyond the local scene unless they were porn stars first. Ever. They’re not supposed to have names. It’s not about their identities and personalities.
Ain’t that something?
So I can guess why we think nothing of commodifying sex. Because it’s the men doing the buying. And we all “know” men should be able to buy whatever they want. The Earth’s being destroyed on the basis of that very premise.
Exactly, Dana, and great comment.
What calling this buying that is done by men, of women, does is, again, it erases who is doing what to whom. It is MEN buying the bodies of WOMEN, if only for a short time. It is women’s bodies that are purchased and it is men who are the purchasers. Yes, there are outliers, a very few women who pay for sex from men, but they ARE outliers, there is no history of millennia of women’s enslavement there, there is no history of disenfranchisement or marginalization on the basis of sex, so the meaning is completely different, and let’s face it, the few men who sell sex to women are NOT in danger, do not get raped, do not get battered by the women, do not get pregnant. (Not so so far as men who are prostituted by men, but that is a different situation entirely, women have nothing to do with it.) In a sense men who sell sex to women really might be able to say they are choosing “sex work” in a way that a woman never can because again, what we do takes place in a specific context of sex inequality.
As one formerly prostituted woman wrote to me (about this thread) via e-mail, calling prostituted women “sex workers” and using terms like “harm reduction” and “non-forced prostitution” is deeply insulting to her because it makes johns invisible, it makes the reality of a lifetime of having been groomed for prostitution invisible, and it places the responsibility to “reduce harm” or work for “harm reduction” on the prostituted women, as though it is up to them to make sure they are not raped or beaten. It also, again, erases the salient, central fact that it is MEN who are buying and WOMEN who are working. Sort of like the way the media says that a woman “was raped” or “was murdered,” but often avoids saying that a man raped a woman or a man murdered a woman. The misogyny that is central to prostitution, to rape, to battering, to violence against women gets erased and prostituted women are left without language to describe their reality.
Heart:
I’ve never seen the term “harm reduction” used to imply that the onus to reduce harm is on the prostituted woman or sex worker, and I’ve been involved in several harm reduction movements covering everything from sex work to drug use/abuse. The sex industry harm reduction model covers things like decriminalisation and legal protection, free provision of barrier contraception and access to medical treatment and support services as determined by the needs and wants of the people in the industry.
While I certainly empathise with your contact-via-email’s concerns about being labelled with language that isn’t hers (see, oh, everything I’ve posted) her objection to harm reduction as phrased here is based on a miscomprehension.
Hexy, I don’t think my contact suffers form a “miscomprehension.” I think she is talking about her lived reality in which there is all of this lofty speech from sex workers about all kinds of harm reduction– everything, of course, but the kind of “harm reduction” that would have actually benefitted her and 90 percent of the women and girls in the world who are prostituted, i.e., NOT HAVING TO BE PROSTITUTED AT ALL, not having to be raped, not having to be battered, not having to disocciate, not having to self-medicate, not living in fear, not being treated like so much trash. When the focus is on the rights of those who identify as sex workers and when theirs is the public agenda, the 90 percent of those who are prostituted and do not identify as “sex workers”, who want out, become invisible– to everybody. Because patriarchy wants very badly to focus ON the sex workers, and on all of this great harm reduction, and on the fact that sex work can be made “safe” or “safer”, *that way the 90 percent of women and girls who are involuntarily prostituted and can never be made safe can be ignored*. Prostituted women do not think of themselves as “people in an ‘industry’” working for their “wants and needs.” They are prostituted, used and abused like kleenex, and they want OUT before someone kills them or they kill themselves. God, hexy, you SO talk out of both sides of your mouth. On the one hand you make this huge distinction between SEX WORKERS and PROSTITUTES and insist the two categories not be confused. On the other hand you talk about harm reduction, decriminalization, etc., as though ALL prostituted women are in fact “sex workers,” referring to them as people in the “industry” who are organizing around “needs and wants”. It’s exhibit A of what my contact is talking about. She didn’t care about harm reduction, she didn’t want to be called a sex worker, she wasn’t organizing around needs and wants, she just wanted to get OUT, as by far most prostituted women DO. You speak for a tiny minority internationally of women who say they have chosen. When you do that you *erase the realities of those who do not choose* and especially *in the eyes of the men who create and perpetuate the demand in whose best interests it is to view all prostitutes as “sex workers” and to pat themselves on the back for supporting “harm reduction.”
Right here in this thread we’ve got Ren defending a pornmaker/star/prostituted woman, Nina Hartley, who is an icon, who publicly rejects the use of condoms in het porn because it’s “boring” and inefficient. (Hartley is also a nurse!) When I challenge what that models to basically the entire porn-watching population (who begin at a young age these days), Ren’s answer is that she wrote a blog post once about what bad sex ed porn is, like that’s some answer. I don’t care how many condoms get handed out in the Third World somewhere (as someone commented proudly in a post I haven’t approved yet), what about fracking highly privileged sex workers married to publishers of Hustler’s fetish porn modeling random, highly dangerous, het sex practices with many partners, without condoms? How is handing out condoms in Chile addressing the tremendous harm that particular modeling does, in terms not only of what is imitated by young people, but what is demanded (and taken) from prostituted women by johns? Hell, Nina Hartley does it without condoms, everybody in porn does it without condoms, why shouldn’t he be able to go without condoms?
Maybe the onus is not on prostituted women to prevent harm yet, but if the prostituting of women is framed as an “industry” where those in the “industry” are working towards getting their “needs and wants” met, then ultimately, the onus WILL be on prostituted women, because if all of these “sex workers” are doing all of this great stuff for themselves, what’s prostituted women’s problem? Shouldn’t they get off the dime and organize for harm reduction between getting raped and beaten by johns, pimps and who knows who all? These women’s struggle to just live through another day is being ERASED by a few very privileged people who on the one hand other them relentlessly and on the other hand presume to speak for them.
I don’t care how many condoms get handed out in the Third World somewhere
Well I care about condom distribution in the developing world (third world is pejorative now), I live in Cambodia. In Cambodia whether the sex work is through trafficking or voluntary the women call themselves sex workers. They feel that “prostitute” is pejorative. The major of sex workers in Cambodia turn to sex work through poverty, rape or trafficking and they are damned sure they want protection through condoms. People living with HIV are discriminated against and Cambodia has a high rate of HIV transmission.
http://saorla.blogspot.com/2008/05/ignorance-is-no-excuse.html
It’s nice that you have the luxury not to care when you live in a country that withdraws billions of dollars in vital aid when condoms or abortions for sex workers are funded.
http://saorla.blogspot.com/2006/10/religious-right-and-development-aid.html
http://saorla.blogspot.com/2007/07/flicker-of-common-sense.html
You have a choice not to care. You could choose not to be callous about that choice. But your government makes sure to put these women in further danger
Oh and by the way, there’s virtually no porn in Cambodia and definitely no hardcore stuff but sex work is at every level of society
I apologize, Saorla, I should have qualified what I said about condoms. Of *course*. you are correct, we need condom distribution everywhere in the world, no question. I was making a (pissed off) reference to a comment I haven’t yet approved (and may not) in which someone who is allied with pornographers who, in fact, make, promote and publish porn where actors don’t use condoms, uses the fact of having distributed condoms in Third World countries as evidence of some commitment to harm reduction. Of *course* it’s good that the condoms were distributed, wherever they were distributed. It’s horrible, however, to use that as evidence of your efforts to reduce harm when you’re allied with people who are responsible, in fact, for tremendous harm to prostituted persons (and all women).
From the correspondent I referred to earlier, in response to your comment, Hexy:
“Oh and by the way, there’s virtually no porn in Cambodia and definitely no hardcore stuff but sex work is at every level of society”
Saorla,
I apologize if I’m incorrect, but I get the impression that you are making this comment based at least in part to many of the people here being anti-porn. As such, I would like to say personally, I am anti-porn. I am not unaware that prostitution exists in parts of the world in which porn does not. Prostitution and sexual violence against women has been around long before the advent of porn. I personally do not deny this and I personally have never seen another anti-porn feminist deny this either. My feelings are simply that the porn industry (at least in its current form) is but one factor that is both a cause and a symptom of misogyny in society. It is not the only cause or symptom. And even if it all ceased to exist tomorrow, misogyny would still be with us. But even given the fact that porn is not solely responsible for misogyny and the existence of prostitution (not by a long shot), I still feel that the porn industry is at best not helping the plight of women at all, and at worst, it’s contributing to the problem significantly. I tend to lean far more to the “at worst” side of the equation.
What?! They don’t have the internet in Cambodia?
Well a Canadian man was recently sentenced for pedophilia in one of Thailand or Cambodia (he was charged on incidents in both countries but can’t remember which took). He had his capers plastered on the internet, in sites filled with the photographed escapes of other sex tourists. I can’t believe for a minute that pornography plays no role there. I think someone is defining pornography very strangely.
“escapades of other sex tourists”.
There has been some fact-devoid propaganda circulating as “what Cambodian sex workers want” that directly contradicts what all the available research into prostitution in Cambodia says sex workers in Cambodia really want.
A 1995 study of 6110 sex workers in Cambodia revealed that 84% of those interviewed wanted to leave prostitution.
Reasons included:
- desire to return to their home village and reunite with their families
- ashamed of the job and want to start a new life by engaging in a small business or work in a more decent occupation
- do not want to grow old in the business and would want to have other income-generating skills
- want to find a husband which she could not achieve if she continues to work in prostitution
- want to continue her studies.
A lesser percentage, 16%, have given up hope for being freed from prostitution. They cite the following reasons:
- shame in going back home to their families and villages
- have no other skills by which to live by
- cannot marry anymore because of their background
- it is easier to find income in prostitution compared to other jobs they have had.
“Child sex workers” aged 12 to 17 years old comprise 31% of all Cambodia’s prostitutes.
http://www.hrsolidarity.net/mainfile.php/1996vol06no04/219/
“What?! They don’t have the internet in Cambodia?”
I’m no expert on Cambodia, but I’m sure that whatever internet connection exists - or resources to connect to the internet - is very scarce to not existent.
I am positive Cambodia has had a problem with prostitution since long before the internet was invented.
Actually, the perception of Cambodia, along with other countries in SE Asia, being a paying rapist’s playground is a new development historically. According to what I’ve read, there wasn’t much of a trafficking or prostitution problem in Cambodia until quite recently. A summary edited from online sources:
“Prior to 1970, the trafficking in children was not practiced as today. Between 1970 and 1975, the nation was controlled by a military government that caused much suffering to the people in rural areas, which increased the flow of migrants to the urban areas. During this time trafficking and prostitution were practiced. During the Khmer Rouge time (1975-1979) people were living in unwalled prisons and migration, trafficking, and prostitution were prohibited as a result of movement restrictions, oppressive social controls, and the collective economy.
After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and the re-establishment of relationships with neighboring countries, the trafficking and exploitation of non-Cambodian children began and increased. 85-95 per cent were Vietnamese girls. The arrival of the UN’s Transitional Authority in Cambodia peace-keeping troops in 1992 was also the arrival of a great increase in prostitution and the trafficking of women and children. By the end of 1992, the estimated number of sex workers in Phnom Penh alone was more than 20,000. When the UNTAC mission ended in 1993, the number of sex workers dramatically decreased to between 4,000 to 10,000.
In Phnom Penh in 1995, 31 per cent of prostitutes were age 17 and under, while the total number or prostitutes under 18 years of age in all of Cambodia grew to 20,000. About 65-70 per cent of the prostitutes were Cambodian while 30-35 per cent were from Vietnam, China, or other countries.
An alarming trend is that the age of sex workers is becoming younger and the number of trafficked women and children is increasing. The report also provided the youngest ages of prostitutes found in various years as follows: 1992 study-18 years old; 1993 study-15 years old; 1995 study-12 years old; 1997 study- 11 years old.”
It is an old story that war creates desperate women and children willing to let men rape them in exchange for food, shelter and money, but in the 1990’s prostitution changed globally.
Pornstitution industries around the world exploded in the 1990s as the WTO and NAFTA made pursuit of money over human rights and health an official edict, as the disparity between rich and poor grew, as high-speed internet porn consumption multiplied the number of men seeking to use prostitutes (UK john demand doubled between 1995 and 2005), as more SE Asians started selling their daughters for luxuries like TVs and designer clothes where before absolute poverty forced the sale of children, and a host of other reasons whose confluence made an entire subcontinent of Earth synonymous with child rape and cheap hookers who “love you long time.”
I’m removing this comment based on having received an e-mail from Saorla.
Heart
Sam - quite a few of your assertions are incorrect
85-95 per cent were Vietnamese girls - No they weren’t but that’s the myth that is spread by Khmer men who think that no pure Cambodian woman would ever engage in sex work
SE Asians started selling their daughters for luxuries like TVs and designer clothes where before absolute poverty forced the sale of children - No, that is another rumour. Absolute poverty is the reason people sell their children in this country.
Prior to 1970, the trafficking in children was not practiced as today - The vast majority of child trafficking is not for sex work but to sell and sell trinkets on the street of Bangkok for Western tourists
Prior to 1970 there was a military coup and absolutist monarch and colonisation by the French. I don’t know where you are getting your information but life is very different on the ground.
I am not denying that there is sexual slavery. I am not denying that there is rape. I have punched sexpats in bars and intervened in violent situations. All I am saying is that the sex workers want protection. They want condoms to be available. They want harm reduction strategies.
“Actually, the perception of Cambodia, along with other countries in SE Asia, being a paying rapist’s playground is a new development historically.”
Sam,
I have tremendous difficulty believing that. Prostitution is something women have been forced to engage in since time out of mind. It may be that it’s gotten worse recently (in the past 20-30 years) due to more foreign men traveling to these countries and an increase in trafficking…
For the record, nobody here, including me, has argued against things like condom distribution. As I’ve already said, and it’s a no brainer, of course, condoms are critical as are other strategies designed to help women in the sex trade (i.e., imo, decriminalization). My point was, how can someone boast about distributing condoms when they’re allied with, for example, pornographers whose films feature condom-less sex?
I have wanted this thread to highlight the experiences and voices of those who have been in the sex trade, and in that context, I’ve wanted to talk about the significance and meaning of the words used to describe their experiences. I think what my correspondent wrote in my comment up there is really important. Of course, condoms, but how are they a solution, when johns will threaten women or hurt them because they ask that condoms be used or when pimps require them also to have sex without condoms because the pimps can charge more? How are they a solution when a generation is growing up exposed to porn featuring risky sex without condoms? Of course, by all means, condoms, but let us listen to the voices of women from the sex trade that are right here telling us why words like “harm reduction” are hollow in light of their experiences.
Soarla, I gave my source, the Asian Human Rights Commission.
“It may be that it’s gotten worse recently (in the past 20-30 years) due to more foreign men traveling to these countries and an increase in trafficking”
That’s my point.
The idea that prostitution always has been and always will be without much variation is a false one. Prostitution is not inevitable. Many social factors influence what percentage of men in a population pay to exploit prostituted women and children, from 80% to 50% to 10% to zero.
Contrast Cambodia’s situation to another country that really has been known for prostitution over the centuries, Fiji. They too have experienced an explosive increase in both quantity and kinds of prostitution the past few years. From a June 2008 article:
“As reported by The Fiji Sun, its Chief of Staff, Cheerieann Wilson, had an interview with Mr. Viliame Naupoto, Fiji’s Director of Immigration, about the problem of prostitution in Fiji which has apparently become a ‘booming trade overnight’.
Prostitution has long been existent in the region, with stories from way back in time when explorers first discovered the region. However, it has become a major social problem with the increased exploitation of not just women and men but also children. And with other social problems especially poverty driving people into the business, eradicating the problem has become even more difficult.”
http://www.solomontimes.com/news.aspx?nwID=1956
If I were to post a link to my archive of news stories from the past three years describing an increase in child prostitution around the world, you could spend a month reading it to the end. I don’t have such an archive.
What I have is a link to a smattering of about forty online news stories I’ve collected over the past three years saying the age of entry into prostitution globally has dropped dramatically since the early 1990s. It’s incomplete as an archive goes, but only takes ten minutes to read and packs a punch. I don’t expect most readers to withstand the soul-sapping horror of that thread to get to the fourth page’s quote “Five years ago, I never saw babies,” so I’m placing it here.
http://genderberg.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=518
Prostitution has not existed everywhere for all times, and that common mistake is a part of why resistance against the increased sexual enslavement of more women and younger children has been slow going. Shoulders are shrugging dejectedly instead of being put to the wheel diligently.
>>How is handing out condoms in Chile addressing the tremendous harm that particular modeling does, in terms not only of what is imitated by young people, but what is demanded (and taken) from prostituted women by johns?>>
This is a heartbreaking statement for someone in a movement that was once so important to me. Heart, most of the women that receive the condoms, probably a huge percentage want out today just like Farley’s study says they do. They are prostitutes with little or no other choice, in a rugged South American Capital City. For all the millions spent on TVPRA, these women still have no choice and no money for condoms. They and the outreach workers disdain the US and UK one for causing catastrophic funding cuts that leave them susceptible to HIV, but as much because they see the US and UK as out of touch with reality. They see the US and UK as focused on political ideologies and models while for them it is about living to the next day.
Giving out condoms in Chile addresses the harms by making it possible for the to live another day without HIV. Their lives matter Heart. Most of the women receiving condoms in Chile as part of Pledging Action are the classic prostituted women. They deserve the right to live just as we all do. Their needs are entirely pragmatic as this juncture. Getting out of the sex industry requires replacing the reason they are in it. Ie: money to survive.
Unless you can find a way for them to leave today, I fail to see the benefit to the women in Chile of being denied condoms. Their lives matter as much as hours do.
Please, if you are going to excorciate me and my activism, have the courtesy to at least post the paragraph you are referring to. To take my words apart without so much as posting what you are referring to makes the context vague to anyone other than you and I.
Jill, I agree with you that women in the sex trade need condoms. I have said that many times, it’s a no brainer. I am not proposing that condoms not be distributed far and wide, and I agree with you that funding cuts that keep women from condoms, STD testing, health care, all of it, are HORRIBLE, inexcusable, catastrophic.
What I don’t get, Jill, is why you don’t work to end prostitution and the sex trade completely.
Honestly, why don’t you? It’s a sincere question. And why do you ally yourself with pornographers who produce no-condoms het porn? Again, my question is sincere, and I am interested in your answer.
Giving out condoms in Chile addresses the harms by making it possible for the to live another day without HIV.
You are missing or evading the point. Did you read my correspondent’s comment up there about how difficult it is for a prostituted woman to get johns to use condoms? About the danger she puts herself in when she tries to? Nobody is saying, again, stop with the condom distribution — EVER. Hasn’t been said, won’t be said. I am saying (as others are) don’t, on the one hand use distributing condoms as evidence to show you care about harm reduction, while on the other hand supporting and allying yourself with people who are actively causing harm, like, again, pornographers who produce condom-less het porn. Don’t blow off what women like the women in my post said or the women in this thread have said by concluding it all under, “Yes, but we are committed to harm reduction, look, we distribute condoms and porn actresses and actors are tested for STD’s once a month, and besides, porn is bad sex ed and I said so on my blog.” This ERASES the realities of a very vulnerable population in all the ways described in this thread. It says, “We are not going to try to END the sex trade, but we will try to ‘reduce harm’.”
The question on the table is, why don’t you try to end the sex trade?
Please answer that question, I am interested in your answer.
The main reason I am not approving some comments is, the comments I already have approved from the same people are simply too triggering to too many women reading, particularly survivors of the sex trade. I can’t bring myself to approve them, mostly for that reason. I’m still thinking about it, but the more I think about it, the less inclined I am to approve them. There are a few women who have been really negatively affected by some of what has been posted here, and what bothers them isn’t what radfems have posted.
“The idea that prostitution always has been and always will be without much variation is a false one. Prostitution is not inevitable.”
I don’t believe prostitution is inevitable. Not in the slightest.
I would like to publicly apologize to Saorla for the post I deleted yesterday morning in 89. I pole vaulted to conclusions about her in ways that were hurtful, and she did not deserve that. I am sincerely sorry. I have privately apologized via e-mail, but she feels that since my comment was public, my apology should be public. I think she’s right, hence this comment.
Heart
When will Heart’s questions be answered. Why are you stopping with “harm reduction”. And why are you so narrowly defining harm and it seems, congratulating yourself you’ve actually DONE something when the true harm continues.
Answers to questions.
What I don’t get, Jill, is why you don’t work to end prostitution and the sex trade completely.
I used to Heart. From 96-2002 I did just that with personal activism and from 98 to 02 with Minnesota’s Freedom and Justice Center and Escape: The Prostitution Prevention Project. Prior to the passage of TVPRA and the funding suffocation which harms women in prostitution far more than it ever will pimps or tricks. We don’t cease funding to Rape Crisis/DV/SA shelters and focus all the resources on education for a reason. Because the resources provide very needed services, shelters, crisis lines, etc. Regardless of how noble an intention to end as an example domestic violence, we can’t shut out women who are for whatever reason, not willing or able to leave an abusive partner. Using this analogy, regardless of my personal views and intense desire to end DV, I have to recognize that not every woman can leave as the option, not every woman chooses to leave for any number of reasons. Someplace along the journey to fight to end oppression in the sex industry, there was a decision made that resources should all go to funding projects that work only on the end result of ending the sex industry.
It is great that their are programs out there to assist women who are able to, or who choose to, or to provide resources to anyone trying to find their way out. But the narrow vision of Bush Administration policy abandons everyone else. To use Chile as an example. Someone has to be the one to focus first on immediate needs. I think most of us can find good reason to give condoms and most of us actually oppose the outright termination of programs that are based on immediate needs rather than way down the road.
Claudine O’Leary formed a great project in Chicago, Young Women’s Empowerment Project which addresses both those that can and choose to leave and those who can’t or don’t choose to.
It is an incorrect assumption that I don’t work to end the sex trade. I work with those projects and right now my only affiliation is to a project operated by a radical feminist in Rhode Island named http://www.humantraffickinged.com In which you will find out that I had a very difficult time for a majority of my time in the sex industry. Look under narratives. Or in the project credits. Yes, I am Jill Leighton. I don’t use the name because of a contractual dispute with a movie producer for Lifetime Television who purchased the story through 2010 but wanted to remove most of the violence in it and insert a rescuer family member and a Harvey Keiteleasque in Thelma & Louise type character. I balked at stripping the violence out because to do so destroys the point of which the concept was originally pitched which was to expose very real harm that happens in the sex industry.
You are missing or evading the point. Did you read my correspondent’s comment up there about how difficult it is for a prostituted woman to get johns to use condoms?
I’m not evading the question. I don’t understand what you are asking me. The way I understand it doesn’t make sense to me. If I am understanding the question correctly, regardless of how hard it is to get johns to use condoms that isn’t a reason to stop giving them out. Any time a john does use a condom is one less time the woman has to worry about HIV. I wish it were a case where if a john refused to use a condom that either there would be no sexual intercourse, or penalties for the john. I have very minimal patience or sympathy for johns in the best of circumstances. I have zero patience or sympathy for those who force women to have sex without one. But until the balance of power is adjusted taking a huge amount away from men, the bottom line is women are going to have to fight the battle to get the men to wear a condom often. Which is utterly astonishing to me as HIV transmits in either direction. I don’t understand the logic the john is using by not wanting a condom. Nonetheless it happens. We can’t take away the condoms unless we take away the johns. Regardless of how one feels about patriarchy, about misogyny, about abuses, the answer is two fold. Taking steps to prevent situations where johns don’t force intercourse without condoms and making sure that condoms are available. One doesn’t rule out the other. We offer DV services to women that don’t leave the abuser as much as any of us that have been counselors have hated knowing that the woman returned to the man. Nonetheless when she needs services we provide them. Past, present and future. Perhaps we differ because my counseling training and advocacy was not specific to the sex industry. It encompassed s/a d/v, r/c. There are more than one aspect to combating s/a d/v and r/c. Education and social change to end the violence is great and important but it doesn’t trump the need for services for those needing it right now.
I”m assuming no one here would reject or call for the rejection of services to a DV victim because for whatever reason she is going to go back to the abuser.
Heart, i’m not evading your questions. I mean this with no disrespect, there is nothing in any question that anyone can ask me on these issues that I feel the need to be evasive.
why don’t you try to end the sex trade?
Actually I have and at levels still do. Just isn’t my only focus.
“We are not going to try to END the sex trade, but we will try to ‘reduce harm’.”
Both have to happen in any scenario to end the sex trade. Reducing the harm is no less important than any other goal. They can be tandem but they both have to exist. I’ve been there, been the point of contact for an exclusively end sex trade project, Escape The Prostitution Prevention Project, when women who need services right now came and asked for immediate assistance. Telling them that was not our focus, that our focus was on ending the sex trade. That didn’t fly well with the homeless prostitutes living from night to night in a shelter, if there were enough beds, in December in Minneapolis. I was not the right person to tell them sorry I have nothing to offer you other than the knowledge that I am fighting to end the sex industry and hope for the future. They were worried about each night, about food, clothing, shelter from the brutal cold, not a macro level social change. It’s great to work at macro level and there are plenty of good activists working on macro level. Some have to work on micro level at the same time as working macro level. Some have to focus just on micro level. I’m not the right person for macro level exclusive projects. I tried that, tried to make it work for four years. Doesn’t work for me.
VER. Hasn’t been said, won’t be said.
It is being said right now by the Bush Administration on a worldwide basis. Thus the condoms for chile project.
This ERASES the realities of a very vulnerable population in all the ways described in this thread.
I disagree. Harm reduction save lives for another day so that the person can be alive when the social change comes. I would be guilty of erasing a very brutal reality of women in the sex industry if I came back from Chile and focused just on ending the sex industry on their behalf and dismissed their reality. They expected me to come down there filled with US imperialist macro level concepts when their reality was night to night. They have seen outreach projects suffocated and their lives placed at risk by US policy. We can’t erase their reality in the pursuit of social change no matter who valiant the effort.
d allying yourself with people who are actively causing harm, like, again, pornographers who produce condom-less het porn.
I would ask you the same thing Heart. Why do you ally with activists that are supporting TVPRA which has killed thousands world wide? I have no understanding of how feminists can not feel entirely betrayed by the alliance that has developed between some who call themselves as feminist that work with or directly for the US Government and the TVPRA based suffocation of services worldwide which kills people on a worldwide scale.
As far as answering your question. Porn is knowledge base weakness for me. It isn’t something I watch, isn’t something I have ever watched pretty much in my entire life. It holds no appeal to me. I am likely still effected by being on the receiving end of harm that perpetrators used porn as part of the mechanism to inflict. Nonetheless, my fight and quarrel is with the perps, not the material they use to harm. But it is not a strength of mine. I don’t assess porn as a high priority when HIV that can infect tonight is still present. It is important to win wars not every battle. Not that I would have rejected condoms from them, but I don’t know that anyone in porn had anything to do with the condoms project. I also am not involved on the collection side of that project. My involvement was on the Chilean side not the US.
Why are you stopping with “harm reduction”.
I’m not. I never said I was. Actually it is the opposite. I left Project Prosper in 2004 because the org’s board at the time wanted to just focus on harm reduction and I wasn’t comfortable with that approach. Harm reduction is important but it also is not a single answer to all problems.
I realize a lot of assumptions are made on both sides by lack of understanding and knowledge about people we don’t know well. One only need to hear a Jill brenneman speech and it is clear that I do not stop at harm reduction, and that I have a less than stellar view of the sex industry, of pimps and of johns. The criticism that came from my presentation in Williamsburg, VA last spring at William and Mary was that a lot of time of the presentation was spent on a very graphic description of the sex industry’s worst side. But like harm reduction I don’t just stop at one train station. There have to be solutions along with the addressing the harm.
And why are you so narrowly defining harm and it seems, congratulating yourself you’ve actually DONE something when the true harm continues.
Sis I don’t believe you and I have ever met. Forgive me if I’m wrong but since we don’t know each other, it would be appropriate to ask me how I feel rather than telling me. It would be appropriate to ask me what I’ve done rather than telling me. Or presenting your view as knowing me when it is obvious you don’t. I have done alot. As much as anyone here on addressing the harm. This isn’t my first day in activism. I have actually done plenty. Because I know there is a lot of mistrust and acrimony I am respectfully asking that prior to engaging in launching hostile and incorrect assumptions you take the time to find out if they are accurate.
There is a lot of talk about triggers. I have my own history and my own time of extensive harm in the sex industry. Incuding pain and hitting triggers isn’t a one sided issue. We all cause these situations to exist and whether advertently or inadvertently trigger others. Each person’s pain is important and we can’t dismiss the pain of others easily or we lose our humanity. There is humanity in each of us and each of our respective movements. Misogyny and patriarchy are the greatest winners when we as women fail to at least first seek knowledge and humanity in other women that we don’t know before inflicting harm and pain. We all have had times where we have launched aggressively and hostily out of lack of knowledge. Maybe we all need to re-evaluate who the enemy is and who stands the most to gain and the most to lose when we let lack of understanding of each other’s humanity and our own prejudices fuel pain that didn’t have to be inflicted on others.
respectfully and in peace
Jill Brenneman
The idea that people in porn don’t need to wear condoms because they are tested monthly, is just ridiculous. It’s great that they are tested, of course. But, they need to do both. To protect the people having sex, and to be responsible to the public. Some people might say that people in porn don’t have any responsibility to the public. Still though, what about the lives of the people in porn? Why shouldn’t safer sex be a requirement in that industry? Would viewers be less likely to buy porn if people were using condoms? What is so sexy and awesome about porn with no condoms?
This just seems flat out stupid to me- not using condoms. Being tested once a month is better than nothing, but is still completely inadequate protection.
What is so sexy and awesome about porn with no condoms?
Everything. Same that’s sexy and awesome about PORN, times 10.
More degrading, dangerous, brutish, uncaring, dominating and just plain oppressive.
Also why it’s mostly Latina, black, native and Asian women who have to tolerate no-condom pornstitution.They’re already not worth anything.
Jill (and everyone), although I don’t like this kind of commenting ordinarily, I am going to respond to various points point by point this time.
What I don’t get, Jill, is why you don’t work to end prostitution and the sex trade completely.
I used to Heart. From 96-2002 I did just that with personal activism and from 98 to 02 with Minnesota’s Freedom and Justice Center and Escape: The Prostitution Prevention Project. Prior to the passage of TVPRA and the funding suffocation which harms women in prostitution far more than it ever will pimps or tricks.
Ending prostitution helps women. Working to end prostitution helps all women.
My question — which you still have not answered despite many many words written, is — why can’t you work to distribute condoms and support prostituted women ***while at the same time fighting to end prostitution***. I don’t see why both are not possible. In fact, both are EMINENTLY possible and both are what women like Norma Hotaling of the SAGE project, Andrea Dworkin, and other formerly-prostituted women have done and continue to do. I think it’s both/and. We support prostituted women in every way we can while, at the same time, we do all we can to help them and all women to leave prostitution.
We don’t cease funding to Rape Crisis/DV/SA shelters and focus all the resources on education for a reason. Because the resources provide very needed services, shelters, crisis lines, etc. Regardless of how noble an intention to end as an example domestic violence, we can’t shut out women who are for whatever reason, not willing or able to leave an abusive partner.
This again, elides the point. OF COURSE we continue to fund Rape Crisis/DV/SA shelters and OF COURSE we support women no matter whether they stay with abusive men, no matter whether we can actually end domestic violence.
And we ALSO DENOUNCE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, educate courts, police, social workers, teachers, students, children, women, men, corporations as to what domestic violence/sexual violence are and we INSIST that these will end.
How well would it go over to mount an anti-DV/SA campaign in which you were simultaneously rejecting criminal penalties for perps? Or suggesting that since men are always going to abuse, we should just work to clean up the messes they make? Because that IS what you are suggesting here, that we should focus on cleaning up the messes johns/punters/tricks/pimps make and leave off being concerned about throwing their sorry asses in jail and especially EDUCATING the entire UNIVERSE as to the harms of prostitution and pornography (which is a FORM of prostitution), to include children, women, men, young girls, in the schools. We should be talking about what is WRONG with pole dancing classes for girls and young women, not just winking at it as though it is nothing. We should be talking about what is WRONG with pornography. We should talk about what is WRONG with prostitution. AT THE SAME TIME WE ARE SUPPORTING PROSTITUTED PERSONS.
Using this analogy, regardless of my personal views and intense desire to end DV, I have to recognize that not every woman can leave as the option, not every woman chooses to leave for any number of reasons. Someplace along the journey to fight to end oppression in the sex industry, there was a decision made that resources should all go to funding projects that work only on the end result of ending the sex industry. It is great that their are programs out there to assist women who are able to, or who choose to, or to provide resources to anyone trying to find their way out. But the narrow vision of Bush Administration policy abandons everyone else. To use Chile as an example. Someone has to be the one to focus first on immediate needs. I think most of us can find good reason to give condoms and most of us actually oppose the outright termination of programs that are based on immediate needs rather than way down the road.
Again, I see absolutely zero reason not to focus on immediate needs AND call for an end to prostitution in every way that end can be made to come about. We can and should (and some of us have been and will) do BOTH. Just as we can focus on the immediate needs of DV/SA survivors AND insist that DV/SA never happen again and say that we will not rest until it never happens again, and that we will not give up so long as we are living on this earth, because the lives of women depend on it.
It is an incorrect assumption that I don’t work to end the sex trade. I work with those projects and right now my only affiliation is to a project operated by a radical feminist in Rhode Island named http://www.humantraffickinged.com In which you will find out that I had a very difficult time for a majority of my time in the sex industry. Look under narratives. Or in the project credits. Yes, I am Jill Leighton. I don’t use the name because of a contractual dispute with a movie producer for Lifetime Television who purchased the story through 2010 but wanted to remove most of the violence in it and insert a rescuer family member and a Harvey Keiteleasque in Thelma & Louise type character. I balked at stripping the violence out because to do so destroys the point of which the concept was originally pitched which was to expose very real harm that happens in the sex industry.
This is great. I still am not understanding, though, why you cannot make a very strong stand against prostitution, period. Multi-tasking is a good thing here. We can support victims of traffficking, we can support prostituted women/victims of SA/DV, AND we can INSIST that no person ever again be prostituted. We can do it all at the same time. You are choosing, for reasons that make no sense to me despite your many, many words, to do everything BUT vigorously, outspokenly oppose prostitution and pornography. That makes no sense to me.
You are missing or evading the point. Did you read my correspondent’s comment up there about how difficult it is for a prostituted woman to get johns to use condoms?
I’m not evading the question. I don’t understand what you are asking me. The way I understand it doesn’t make sense to me. If I am understanding the question correctly, regardless of how hard it is to get johns to use condoms that isn’t a reason to stop giving them out. Any time a john does use a condom is one less time the woman has to worry about HIV. I wish it were a case where if a john refused to use a condom that either there would be no sexual intercourse, or penalties for the john. I have very minimal patience or sympathy for johns in the best of circumstances. I have zero patience or sympathy for those who force women to have sex without one. But until the balance of power is adjusted taking a huge amount away from men,
So long as women are prostituted the balance of power cannot be adjusted. Because it is prostitution in all of its many forms, including pornography which creates the power imbalance in the first place. End prostitution, end pornography, the balance begins to be restored, then and only then.
As I have said many times by now, I am not saying, no one is saying, we should stop distributing condoms in every possible way. We should definitely continue to distribute them. While at the same time DEMANDING an end to the sex trade.
What you’re advocating for, again, is something like, let’s just get the bandaids and the pain relievers, the splints, the casts, the doctors to the victims of DV, but we can’t really worry about outlawing DV or preventing it “until the power balance begins to be restored” between men and women. Criminalize domestic violence (as we do), call it the CRIME that it is, throw the suckers in jail (which we don’t do often enough), get them treatment, protect the women, and you BEGIN to restore the power balance between men and women. Again, domestic violence is what CREATES the power imbalance between men and women and so it has to end. Treating victims only, without punishing their batterers, does not one thing to correct power imbalances between men and women. In fact, it just makes it easier for men to keep battering; now he can count on the surrounding culture to clean up the messes he has made, he isn’t even REMOTELY responsible for them.
In the same way, ONLY handing out condoms or testing or decriminalizing, WITHOUT calling for an end to prostitution and criminalizing menn who buy sex just makes things easier for johns/punters/tricks. They end up with even LESS responsiblity, if that is even possible, than they ever had. They rape, they batter, they imprison women, they sexually abuse, and leave issues like condoms and testing to everybody but THEM. Criminalize them and throw them in jail!
the bottom line is women are going to have to fight the battle to get the men to wear a condom often. Which is utterly astonishing to me as HIV transmits in either direction.
This is misleading. Men are far more likely to transmit HIV to women and to other men than women are likely to transmit HIV to men. And women almost never transmit HIV to other women via sex. I don’t think I’ve heard of a single instance.
I don’t understand the logic the john is using by not wanting a condom. Nonetheless it happens. We can’t take away the condoms unless we take away the johns.
Exactly! So let’s “take them away”! Let’s load them all onto airplanes and send them into space, I don’t really care. Let’s provide the condoms and let’s work for a world where women DO NOT HAVE TO SELL SEX and therefore DO NOT HAVE TO FIGHT WITH MEN OVER CONDOMS.
Regardless of how one feels about patriarchy, about misogyny, about abuses, the answer is two fold. Taking steps to prevent situations where johns don’t force intercourse without condoms and making sure that condoms are available. One doesn’t rule out the other.
Why oh why oh why do you always stop there. You are so right. One doesn’t rule out the other. And NEITHER rules out insisting that prostitution end and criminalizing the buying of sex.
We offer DV services to women that don’t leave the abuser as much as any of us that have been counselors have hated knowing that the woman returned to the man. Nonetheless when she needs services we provide them. Past, present and future. Perhaps we differ because my counseling training and advocacy was not specific to the sex industry. It encompassed s/a d/v, r/c. There are more than one aspect to combating s/a d/v and r/c. Education and social change to end the violence is great and important but it doesn’t trump the need for services for those needing it right now.
Of course it doesn’t. But given your breadth of experience and education, I am pretty sure you do not argue that battering and sexual abuse should be legal? Should not be criminally prosecuted? I think you serve DV/SA survivors and you call for education and you insist that perps be brought to justice.
This is NO DIFFERENT. Support victims of the sex trade, provide services, condoms, medical care, and mobilize, organize, and ACT to criminalize the buying of sex.
I”m assuming no one here would reject or call for the rejection of services to a DV victim because for whatever reason she is going to go back to the abuser.
Of course not. AND no one here will argue that domestic violence should be legal, should not be criminally prosecuted, and vigorously, either. We should support victims of the sex trade, provide condoms, medical care, whatever care we can find for them AND insist that those who prostitute these women PAY for it via criminalizing the buying of sex.
why don’t you try to end the sex trade?
Actually I have and at levels still do. Just isn’t my only focus.
And for all the reasons I have listed and that have been listed in this thread and my original post, I think that is a big PROBLEM. I think you are sending this very mixed message, that among other things includes this idea that all we can really do now is clean up the horrible messes that men have made. We can’t bother to criminalize their crimes against women, against children, against humanity, to include the buying of sex in whatever form. I think we have to do that. Anything less is, like a survivor of the sex trade wrote elsewhere this morning, “like a bandaid on a slit throat.”
“We are not going to try to END the sex trade, but we will try to ‘reduce harm’.”
Both have to happen in any scenario to end the sex trade. Reducing the harm is no less important than any other goal. They can be tandem but they both have to exist. I’ve been there, been the point of contact for an exclusively end sex trade project, Escape The Prostitution Prevention Project, when women who need services right now came and asked for immediate assistance. Telling them that was not our focus, that our focus was on ending the sex trade.
This makes Zero sense to me.
I have done grass roots, direct action domestic violence work now ever since I was the victim of it in 1974. At times I have helped prostituted DV survivors to leave their batterers. At times, I have helped them to find apartments, jobs, etc. Throughout ALL of the support I and women I worked with attempted to give, we ALSO consistenty and openly and nonapologetically let it be known how opposed we were to the sex trade. It is 100 percent possible to do this while not attempting to coerce someone to leave and while not judging them for NOT leaving. It’s just like with DV. We can tell women they do not deserve to be battered, we can vigorously and openly oppose battering, and we can continue to support them in all the ways we can when they go back, then come to us again, then go back, etc. The difference is, of course, that at LEAST with DV we have the laws on the side of victims. So far as the sex trade goes, we do NOT, which makes it MUCH harder for us to help women to get OUT.
That didn’t fly well with the homeless prostitutes living from night to night in a shelter, if there were enough beds, in December in Minneapolis. I was not the right person to tell them sorry I have nothing to offer you other than the knowledge that I am fighting to end the sex industry and hope for the future.
Okay, this is way over the top strawman (as so many of your arguments are, i.e., this ongoing suggestion that anybody here opposes condom distribution. Nobody does! It’s a strawman argument.) Who on god’s green earth is suggesting that if a prostituted woman comes to someone for help, they should say, “No, we only work to end the sex industry.” !!!! This is just nuts. If a woman comes to us for help, we do whatever we can and we ALSO say that she does not DESERVE what she is having to suffer, that no one should have to be a prostitute, a stripper, that no woman should have to sell sex to survive. You do it all at the same time.
They were worried about each night, about food, clothing, shelter from the brutal cold, not a macro level social change. It’s great to work at macro level and there are plenty of good activists working on macro level. Some have to work on micro level at the same time as working macro level. Some have to focus just on micro level. I’m not the right person for macro level exclusive projects. I tried that, tried to make it work for four years. Doesn’t work for me.
Fair enough, but I think if you want to be taken seriously, you should at least STATE your opposition to the sex trade and that you want to see it end. I see you working really hard to avoid saying precisely that and offering excuses for why you aren’t saying it. Saying it is important. Voices in opposition to the sex trade are IMPORTANT. You can still keep doing all the micro level stuff you do.
EVER. Hasn’t been said, won’t be said.
It is being said right now by the Bush Administration on a worldwide basis. Thus the condoms for chile project.
Well, the Bush Administration is wrong, no surprise there, and here we are talking about what the views and politics are here on the blogosphere and among feminists in the real world.
This ERASES the realities of a very vulnerable population in all the ways described in this thread.
I disagree. Harm reduction save lives for another day so that the person can be alive when the social change comes. I would be guilty of erasing a very brutal reality of women in the sex industry if I came back from Chile and focused just on ending the sex industry on their behalf and dismissed their reality. They expected me to come down there filled with US imperialist macro level concepts when their reality was night to night. They have seen outreach projects suffocated and their lives placed at risk by US policy. We can’t erase their reality in the pursuit of social change no matter who valiant the effort.
You know, Jill, I’ve already responded to the above at length and it would be too boring and repetitive to restate what I’ve already said more than once. I will say, though, that I think you are 100 percent completely wrong to “disagree” when survivors of the sex trade have stated here that your position DOES erase their realities. You cannot disagree with their realities. You can dismiss them, as you are doing, ignore them, count them as not important, but that, again, is triggering. And I think it’s completely disrespectful.
allying yourself with people who are actively causing harm, like, again, pornographers who produce condom-less het porn.
I would ask you the same thing Heart. Why do you ally with activists that are supporting TVPRA which has killed thousands world wide? I have no understanding of how feminists can not feel entirely betrayed by the alliance that has developed between some who call themselves as feminist that work with or directly for the US Government and the TVPRA based suffocation of services worldwide which kills people on a worldwide scale.
Nah, “in bed with the Right” isn’t going to work here, however you sugarcoat it. I am working and fighting and committed to SUPPORTING prostituted women and survivors of the sex trade in every possible way. Where the government gets it right, I’m all for that, where the government gets it wrong, I’ll work with whomever gets it right. What these other random invisible feminists you’re referring to here might be doing I don’t know; I do know that many feminists believe and act in really destructive ways and when they do *they are no allies of mine.*
And you still didn’t answer my question. You’ve got your name up on your blog allied with pornographers and women who wholesale endorse and advocate for the liberating power of the sex trade! Yet you say you oppose it. So which is it? Maybe I’ll take what you have to say here seriously if you can show me where I or anyone else in this discussion is allied with the Bush regime.
As far as answering your question. Porn is knowledge base weakness for me. It isn’t something I watch, isn’t something I have ever watched pretty much in my entire life. It holds no appeal to me. I am likely still effected by being on the receiving end of harm that perpetrators used porn as part of the mechanism to inflict. Nonetheless, my fight and quarrel is with the perps, not the material they use to harm. But it is not a strength of mine. I don’t assess porn as a high priority when HIV that can infect tonight is still present. It is important to win wars not every battle. Not that I would have rejected condoms from them, but I don’t know that anyone in porn had anything to do with the condoms project. I also am not involved on the collection side of that project. My involvement was on the Chilean side not the US.
Fair enough; nevertheless, het porn featuring no-condom risky practices, that in fact IS sex education for millions of young people, is a problem, don’t you think? Yet, there you are, allied with people who advocate for and defend this. How about some outspoken statements from you on your blog or in other work that you do about the destructiveness of no-condom porn featuring highly risky sex practices?
Also, porn actresses are prostituted women and if they’re having no-condom risky het sex, “HIV that can affect tonight” is certainly an issue!
Why are you stopping with “harm reduction”.
I’m not. I never said I was. Actually it is the opposite. I left Project Prosper in 2004 because the org’s board at the time wanted to just focus on harm reduction and I wasn’t comfortable with that approach. Harm reduction is important but it also is not a single answer to all problems.
So? Again, repetitive, I’ll say it anyway, it can all be done at the same time. And should be. If we want to build a new world.
I realize a lot of assumptions are made on both sides by lack of understanding and knowledge about people we don’t know well. One only need to hear a Jill brenneman speech and it is clear that I do not stop at harm reduction, and that I have a less than stellar view of the sex industry, of pimps and of johns. The criticism that came from my presentation in Williamsburg, VA last spring at William and Mary was that a lot of time of the presentation was spent on a very graphic description of the sex industry’s worst side. But like harm reduction I don’t just stop at one train station. There have to be solutions along with the addressing the harm.
Again, nobody has argued otherwise.
And why are you so narrowly defining harm and it seems, congratulating yourself you’ve actually DONE something when the true harm continues.
Sis I don’t believe you and I have ever met. Forgive me if I’m wrong but since we don’t know each other, it would be appropriate to ask me how I feel rather than telling me. It would be appropriate to ask me what I’ve done rather than telling me.
It would be appropriate to be respectful of the regular commenters here as well. You do come across as self-congratulatory, Jill. Even referring to yourself in the third person there, “If you’ve ever heard a Jill Brennemann” speech. What’s that about? Why not, “When I speak, I…”
There is a lot of talk about triggers. I have my own history and my own time of extensive harm in the sex industry. Incuding pain and hitting triggers isn’t a one sided issue. We all cause these situations to exist and whether advertently or inadvertently trigger others. Each person’s pain is important and we can’t dismiss the pain of others easily or we lose our humanity. There is humanity in each of us and each of our respective movements. Misogyny and patriarchy are the greatest winners when we as women fail to at least first seek knowledge and humanity in other women that we don’t know before inflicting harm and pain. We all have had times where we have launched aggressively and hostily out of lack of knowledge. Maybe we all need to re-evaluate who the enemy is and who stands the most to gain and the most to lose when we let lack of understanding of each other’s humanity and our own prejudices fuel pain that didn’t have to be inflicted on others.
This sounds good and taken at face value, I don’t think anybody here would disagree. What I’ve seen though is that you have continually dismissed the idea that words like ”sex worker” and ”harm reduction” and their accompanying politics, in the words of survivors themselves, in and of themselves *inflict harm and pain*. You continue to inflict that harm and to inflict that pain while simultaneously making these lofty statements about the “times where we have launched aggressively and hostilely out of lack of knowledge” and the need to evaluate our “lack of understanding” and our “own prejudices”. As though it does not reveal an incredible lack of understanding to dismiss the voices of survivors in this very thread. It’s also so insulting, patronizing and offensive. The message is something like, your being triggered by my use of words like “sex work” and “harm reduction” is really not important to me. It’s so unimportant that I’m going to talk right over you and dismiss your own words and replace them with my own. Then, in crazy making fashion, I’m going to talk about my commitment to your humanity and to understanding! Because you know, Jill, your compassion and understanding in those moments is not extending to the women whose voices have been heard in this thread. And that, too is so triggering. You want to be viewed as understanding and compassionate and so on while engaging in language and rhetoric which is neither. You want to express a commitment to the humanity of all women while simultaneously dehumanizing them by ignoring what they have to say.
Following is something I read today written by a survivor of the sex trade, but rewritten by me because I didn’t get permission to post the exact words.
****
***********
Heart
I don’t consider handing out condoms doing something for the pornstituted women and boys.
In fact the best analogy I can think for you and your enabling pornsitution is the Mormons who enable malnutrition and homelessness by handing out that no-food, white bread to street people. They then climb back into their vans, and head out to the Stake where they write it down as part of the ‘points’ for getting their husbands into heaven. Whose entry to heaven are you working on Jill?
Also as to this:
The criticism that came from my presentation in Williamsburg, VA last spring at William and Mary was that a lot of time of the presentation was spent on a very graphic description of the sex industry’s worst side.
This certainly speaks volumes about the organizers of the William and Mary conference!
How is getting fucked over and over again a job?
What service is being provided, and/or what’s the product being sold?
From my correspondent via e-mail:
You know, I wonder if your reluctance, Jill, to be very clear and straightforward in opposition to the sex trade — because you say you are opposed to it, so your alliances, especially, make little sense to me — has to do with not wanting to offend your allies, who have money because they are pornographers and who can donate it selectively in ways that allow them to claim they care about reducing harm while continue to pimp and prostitute women. I think this is what my correspondent is talking about in part so far as the way the sex industry actually decides whether and how harm will be “reduced.”
We see this all the time with leftist sexist men. There is all this pomp and circumstance over the fact that they support abortion rights or they joined NOW, and now, I guess, about their “harm reduction” projects. These things, of course, allow them to continue prostituting women while presenting as some sort of hero, especially if they have some bucks, like your allie fetish porn publisher Green does, courtesy of Larry Flynt, a man whose daughter says he sexually assaulted her. Pornographers *do* have money and that is power and that is one of the most important points to be made here. Most women in the sex trade, by far, do not have the resources to protect themselves against violent men and a greed-driven sex industry. It’s sickening to hear this stuff about reducing harm when, when you get right down to it, the harm that is *actually* being reduced is more the harm to the reputations and credibility of the very few privileged persons in the sex trade who have money and power.
Or — I’ve been reminded — maybe, Jill, you are afraid of these guys? That would be very understandable. Andrea Dworkin called them out fearlessly and ended up made into pornography in Hustler and degraded, dehumanized and demeaned in the most vile of ways. Dworkin sued Larry Flynt and lost. The message is, Flynt and his crew can harm radical feminists and anti-pornography persons five ways til Sunday and it’s perfectly all right. It’s very true, to fear them is reasonable.
Looks like I’m late to the thread, as usual! My twopence:
Re condom distribution: afaic, the idea that handing out condoms will solve problems for prostituted girls and women relies on a denial of the power relations involved in prostitution. A prostituted woman can have all the condoms in the world, but if the john refuses to wear them, it makes no difference. The john has the power in this, not the prostituted person. He is the one who can decide whether he is going to be ‘gentle’ or violent, pay or not, wear a condom or not, whether he will kill or not. The prostitute is not the one who decides; he decides. While obviously giving out condoms is no bad thing in itself it is not a solution, and can perhaps also be considered to be putting the onus back on the victim in this situation, and not the perpetrator. Give out condoms by all means, but such an action must be taken in conjunction with actions to end sexual exploitation of women and girls, or it means nothing.
Re: ‘harm reduction’. The phrase makes me pause. It is about reducing harm, not wiping it out. It basically accepts that prostitution is harmful, but shrugs its shoulders at tackling the source of the harm and instead goes for reducing it- meaning harm still exists. Somewhere Heart said that the ultimate right is the right NOT to be prostituted. I think that says it all. No harm should be accepted as normal, or inevitable.
Re fear: it is entirely rational to be afraid of men like Flynt and Hefner and their ilk. I am very afraid of them because of the suffering they have caused and continue to cause, because of their hate speech and mockery of those who are harmed by their abuse. Being triggered is not about just being pissed off. Being triggered means reliving past torments, that dreadful panic, the feeling you might die, the feeling of the hand over your mouth once again, the silence. The feeling of being punished for having survived. When these pornographers taunt those who protest, they know damn well the effect their words will have, and they enjoy that cruelty. I am very afraid of these men. I hate them too, because I despise cowards.
Also, in my not-entirely-thorough read-through of this thread I have got the impression that very few of the pro-porn commentators have referred to the stories of prostituted women that were embedded in the original post. Instead, the onus has been on attacking Heart for things as ridiculous as leaving out the word ’slut’ on a list of bad words. Business as usual then.
Great comment, Laurelin.
Here’s what’s even more ridiculous: I think I responded to whomever it was who was all about the word “slut” being left out way up there somewhere. Then I went back up and looked and the word was there all the time!
That’s one thing that has really troubled me, too. Other than in passing and generically, the pro-porn side doesn’t respond or even mention the actual stories and thoughts of women out of the sex trade, not only in the post but in this thread, other than again, glancingly or “oh poor things, I feel sorry for you,” this really patronizing, dismissive, messed up attitude when it is coming from those who could be confronting prostitution, buying sex from women, instead of, in some instances, glamorizing it and going on about how, all in all, some women really enjoy it, yeah it has its bad moments, but. Well, you know, women say they enjoy a lot of things. I said I enjoyed being a fundamentalist Christian, wearing a head veiling and long dresses, and being a loving and submissive wife. Sometimes women say they ejoy being hurt during sex. Women say, at times — and believe it; for reasons related to our subjugation, we often filter out memories of pain and trauma – that they enjoy addictions of various kinds, like to alcohol, substances and all manner of intentional self-harm. My saying I enjoyed my old world doesn’t change the fact of all the ways it harmed me, my children, and all the ways it continues to harm ALL women. Women in my old world claiming they choose it and find it liberating or empowering doesn’t change the fact of all the ways it harms them and all women and, especially, doesn’t address what is most important: that if my old world and the way it subjugates and harms women ended today, that would be the absolutely best case scenario for all women, including those in my old world. And absolutely, it’s the same thing when it comes to the selling of sex for money.
The term ’slut-shaming’ drives me up the wall.
Don’t. Call. Women. Sluts.
It’s not a nice little word we can reclaim because it wasn’t ever ours in the first place. It is word reeking of misogyny. It is a word that judges women by their sexual activity, and for that we should not be using the word. In ‘reclaiming’ it all one does is revert back to the former position- defining a woman by the sex she has/ is perceived to be having. It’s sick.
And yes, I agree, about the issue of saying one enjoys things. I think back on my ‘old’ life, and remember how many things I said I enjoyed, even when I knew I was lying. Sometimes I knew no better; sometimes I thought I would change and then enjoy these things I was supposed to. I also enjoyed things that harmed me. Enjoyment doesn’t negate harm. For a banal example, I love tea but that doesn’t stop the caffeine in it from setting off my OCD big time.
This comment resonates very clearly with me. We hear too little from you Laurelin.
“Being triggered is not about just being pissed off. Being triggered means reliving past torments, that dreadful panic, the feeling you might die, the feeling of the hand over your mouth once again, the silence. The feeling of being punished for having survived. When these pornographers taunt those who protest, they know damn well the effect their words will have, and they enjoy that cruelty. I am very afraid of these men. I hate them too, because I despise cowards.”
Thanks Sis. I have just got my laptop fixed, so you may well be hearing more from me now, in a commenting capacity!
Yeah, Laurelin. In recovery circles, there is often discussion of what causes addicted people to relapse, and one is, they idealize how much fun it was to be drunk or high or whatever or how much they enjoyed it. They filter out the memories of the hangover, injuries, even arrests, destructive things they did while they were using. I think there’s a biological/chemical component too. We know that bulimic women, for example, and women who cut, experience a sense of relief when they do these things that is caused by the release of endorphins. When people are injured in accidents or whatever, the body releases endorphins then as well because it’s a crisis situation and there is pain, so there might be little memory of the pain. I was beaten very savagely with a metal pipe to my head and face and though I recall the blows, the blood streaming down, my eyes swollen shut so I couldn’t see, feeling for my eyes to see if they were still there, I don’t recall any pain. It’s the response of the body to trauma. I wonder how much of this liking of prostitution is similar to addictive processes where fleeting moments of maybe just relief, release, momentary numbing of some kind, are all the woman remembers, the rest, she blocks out and then experiences the need for the good feeling again. The one link I posted up there is a link to a group started by a once-prostituted woman whose program uses a recovery model, one day at a time, resisting your inner addict.
Not to mention, all of us who have been in battering relationships said we loved our husbands and enjoyed being with them, even after they battered us, until finally we realized it wasn’t just a random, aberrant thing that they had done and fled. Did we love our husbands and enjoy being with them? Well, yes– in the way the battered do.
I find being a survivor of the sex trade, and choosing to speak out about my experiences, that there is very little care taken by supporters of the sex trade if their words may trigger women like me.
I am put in a double-bind situation that if I get “emotional” it is used against me to say my mental welfare means my words should be discounted. If I write in a clear and calm manner, my words are said to be just my point of view and no reflection of the sex trade.
But I know that my words are connected to the conditions that the majority of prostituted women and girls are forced to live in.
I know the world of “sex workers” is a minority world, made of women who are often highly privileged.
The reason that I choose to campaign to bring an end to the sex trade, is that I do not believe it can made “safer” for the majority of prostituted women and girls.
It is a system that allows women and girls to be raped.
These rapes are gang rapes, rapes that are sadistic, rapes in all parts of the body.
These rapes are done over and over, with no time for recovery.
That is not a normal work environment.
It is a system that allows the buyers to beat up the women and girls.
It is a system that has such a constant flow of women and girls that the murders or suicides will not effect the profit-flow.
If in that system, some privileged women are having a good time - that can never ever make up for the deep suffering of the majority.
And sometimes, afterward, we kept silent. Sometimes long, long after we are free (from a particular situation) we keep silent, smile, try to be brave. Put on a good face. It didn’t happen; it may have happened to someone somewhere far away, long ago.
Don’t talk about the negative things?!? Go forward. Put it behind you. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. It happens in all families. You didn’t need to be there, or stay, you chose to. She was one of those. You’ve made your bed now lie in it. It’s in the past. Why do you want to keep dragging up the past?
He was always nice to me. He did good things for his community. We owe him so much, this building, that funding. He championed women’s equality at work.
It’s over. Stop bringing up your pain. You’re just using it to manipulate us.
She did? I didn’t know.
She always seemed so happy.
I think there’s a biological/chemical component too. We know that bulimic women, for example, and women who cut, experience a sense of relief when they do these things that is caused by the release of endorphins.
I was a self-harmer, and although I wouldn’t say (even then I wouldn’t have said) that I ‘enjoyed’ it, it did, as you say, give me a release from intense emotion, no matter how brief. But it was still harmful. My arms, my thighs were still cut up and bleeding. I still felt the pain.
It was harmful.
‘Enjoying’ self-harm has to be seen in the context in which it takes place- in the midst of severe emotional pain or trauma.
Sorry for the multiple posting, but…
It has also occurred to me that I have done things in my life and said I enjoyed them- but what I really enjoyed was the social/ other approval I received for these things. That is not true enjoyment either.
Yeah, laurelin, so true and good point. Does any woman, for example, really “enjoy” things like subsisting on 800 calories per day, working out 1-2 hours per day, getting everything plucked or waxed from head to toe, wearing clothes that are tight and uncomfortable, wearing high heels, spending hundreds of dollars for all of the above? No. What women enjoy is the admiration and affirmation they receive because they have conformed with patriarchal beauty standards. What they enjoy is the feeling that they have the support of men. Because men have the power in male supremacy to grant or to withhold that particular kind of affirmation and support. Jeyoani and I were talking about this in the context of the response to Sarah Palin. Both of us were initially impressed with Palin, then disappointed when we actually heard her speak. We had the same reaction. In processing through our responses, we recognized that Palin has male support, and that much of the appeal of Palin to the multitudes is, indeed, that men support her. Male support and approval feel good, something like, the powerful people in the world like you and have your back and affirm you, so maybe you are somewhat safe and maybe you have value. If Palin steps out of line one moment, though, she is going to be toast. That approval will vanish in a heartbeat. A post is coming about that.
Anyway, more on topic, do women ”choose” to do all these things I listed in the first paragraph there? These “choices” so-called occur in a specific context. Does a woman in a battering relationship “choose” to stay with her batterer? Yes, if choosing means she decides her chances are better if she stays than if she leaves. In the same way, Does a woman choose all of these beauty rituals? Yes, if choosing means her chances are better so far as societal approval, perks, benefits than they would be if she didn’t “choose.” Does a woman “choose” “sex work” or prostitution? Only if choosing means, she thinks her chances are better so far as survival than if she doesn’t “choose.” Does a woman “choose” fundamentalist religion? Only if choosing means, she’s got a better chance to survive in the religion than out of it.
I’m sure I’ll get moderated out again, but what the hell?
I work out for lots of reasons, including over all general health, I like the way muscles look as much as anyone else does, my body is physically stronger than it is when I don’t work out, and I like to play sports…being in shape lends itself to better being able to play sports. Yes, it also benefits my job, but it is most certainly not all about the men.
Body Hair? Yep, influenced by society, but it also think not having any feels better, to me, personally.
Clothes- sometimes I prefer tight clothes, sometimes I prefer loose clothing, depends on the weather a lot and what I’m doing. I wear tight clothes for work, but I also wear them for running…because trying to do a 10k in baggy sweats in the dead of summer is not practical or healthy. So, no, in that context (the running one), it’s not about the men at all.
Now, I have no idea if you think women can like being physically fit or athletic for themselves or not, but yep, it is a factor in working out for me at least. Sports have been a part of my life for a long time.
Jobs? Well, my last straight job, I made less money, but I had full medical and paid vacation. Currently, I make more money, but have no medical (on my own) and no paid vacation- I don’t work, I don’t get paid. Yet, I still chose my current work because I like the job better.
It’s never that simple and clear cut.
and the addiction model might apply to sex addicts, but to people (all of them or a majority of) in the sex business or involved in BDSM or whatever…kind of a stretch, isn’t it?
Meh, why am I bothering?
Ren, honestly, using all the restraint I can muster.
What you wrote there has nothing to do with the last couple of days’ posts. It does not engage. It is not responsive. I had zero to say in the comment I think you’re responding to about muscles, sports or being athletic. No athlete, no woman who is all about sports and muscles, subsists on 800 calories a day. Women who work out 1-2 hours a day and eat 800 calories a day are harming themselves to be thin. I was talking about the way women self-harm to conform with patriarchal standards of beauty but feel they are choosing this. You’re talking about something completely different and irrelevant.
Yes, I’ve been spamming you. Because you have, in a dedicated fashion, just as here, ignored, dismissed and trivialized the thoughts and responses of all of the survivors who have taken the time to read every comment here and who have risked posting in good faith. I don’t see that you’re here in good faith. You have yet to thoughtfully engage anything women have written here.
and the addiction model might apply to sex addicts, but to people (all of them or a majority of) in the sex business or involved in BDSM or whatever…kind of a stretch, isn’t it?
So you’re saying former prostitutes who go into recovery/12 step programs and benefit by them were sex addicts? Right. I guess battered women are also sex addicts and that’s why they go back to their batterers. There really is, often, something like addiction working in both battering relationships and in women involved in the sex trade
Most women in the sex trade, by far, are groomed for it by being raped, incested, sexually assaulted as youngsters. Like Andrea Dworkin said, incest is boot camp. Most women in the sex trade, by far, enter the sex trade as minors. They aren’t just exchanging sex for money and that’s that, they “chose”. They flee their abusers, end up exploited by adult men, descend into a web of exploitation that ultimately, and quickly, is all they know. They’re kids. Just like women married to batterers get caught in a web of exploitation that is all they know. Women stay and go back, among other reasons, because of the fleeting, occasional (macabre and sadistic on their abusers’ part) hopes and pleasures in lives that are otherwise under the control of abusers. The man who beats his wife nine days out of ten brings her flowers on day 11 and she thinks, oh, it was all a mistake, he’s going to change. The woman who is raped and beaten as a prostitute nine days out of 10 encounters a guy who treats her with respect on day 11 and thinks, see, my luck is going to change. Of course she thinks this way, what are her options. She’s going to leave her marriage and he’ll kill her, or take everything she has or take the kids or who knows what and then what. She’s going to leave prostitution and do what? So, there is denial. Women “forget” the horrors they have experienced, as we’ve already talked about. And a whole lot of other things we have discussed in this thread. Trying to make a different life seems impossible and they are so lost in the trauma of the life they are living they cannot think straight or see straight to anything different. Recovery programs, among other things, address issues around denial and the kinds of thinking that result in women going back to harming themselves. Just like battered women go back, thinking they love the guy that beat the crap out of them, it will be better this time, etc., women in the sex trade go back, thinking it wasn’t really that bad, they made good money, they’ll do this and that and things will change. They need support in resisting these impulses to harm themselves which returning to the sex trade and returning to batterers represent.
But we’ve talked about all this stuff already.
Joan Kelly has a post up today that is relevant, starting about 2/3 of the way down.
http://joankelly6000.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/still-flailing-am-determined-to-snap-out-of-it-soon/
Laurelin:
I had quite a lengthy period of self-injury, when I first got sick. I wouldn’t say I “enjoyed” it, but I would say it kept me alive.
One of those situations where the person in my head, me, gets to decide whether it was the best choice under the circumstances.
I am glad to see Laurelin has her laptop back and is blogging/commenting again with such clarity and brilliance!
As she says, all talk of harm reduction is just bullshit. Until the sex-positives start talking about harm elimination, then we shall talk about the few happy hookers out there, and how wonderful and empowering the industry is. Until then, there is far too much harm, coercion and violence within this ‘industry’ (which looks a lot like sexual slavery). Until every person who sells their body for sex is there of their own free will and fully-informed choice, there is little to say to the sex-positives.
Stop talking about the few happy hookers, and start caring about the 90-odd percent of women and girls who want to leave prostitution. Stop talking about harm reduction, and talk about harm elimination. Stop talking about choice and talk about fully informed choice.
Dialogue with the sex-positives is a completely pointless exercise. They can’t think about anyone other than themselves and their (male) approval ratings. That is not even remotely feminist.
Hexy- I was not trying to say that self-harm is the ‘wrong’ choice, or that one should be prevented from chosing it. I am just saying that the context must be taken into consideration. I don’t agree that self-harm was a ‘free choice’ for me- it was one of a number of what I consider to be lousy choices available at the time.
and also the self-harm I undertook perhaps had some beneficial aspects… as far as my own experience goes, I can’t say for sure. But I do ultimately think that I harmed myself too, in the sense that my body was damaged (however superficially) by it.
Hope that makes sense. This is very hard to verbalise.
Laurelin: Hexy- I was not trying to say that self-harm is the ‘wrong’ choice, or that one should be prevented from chosing it. I am just saying that the context must be taken into consideration.
The discussion at issue was about what self-harm in the context of male heterosupremacy means for women.
Responding to that by saying, as you basically have, Hexy, “Well, I wanted to,” is not a response at all. It is not in good faith. It’s an attempt at a reversal, a trying to make Laurelin the Big Meanie, as though she was saying fuck-all about you or what you might have chosen, ever. She was talking about HER OWN LIVED REALITY and her thoughts about it, she wasn’t saying ANYTHING about what you may or may not have done sometime, let alone about what you “get” to decide.
There’s been this ongoing ignoring on the part of the pro-sex trade side of basically everything that has been posted here *by survivors*. That’s why there are a whole bunch of spammed comments to this thread that are not going to see the light of day. There will be actual, respectful *engagement* — not this glossing over and just saying, over and over again, well, I like to work out, I like to shave, I chose to self harm, you’re a meanie for bringing it up, as though any of that is even remotely relevant — or comments will not, again, be approved. Ignoring survivors who are putting themselves out there, risking becoming ill because they ARE putting themselves out there, to just assert and reassert, essentially, that their lives don’t matter to you at all, all that matters to you is what you, yourself, might have wanted to do some time, amounts to erasure. It is destructively and triggeringly dismissive. It’s what men do to us 24/7.
Just chiming in to say how much I appreciate Womensspace’s presence and community–this kind of post and thread being a big reason why.
I suspect those who’ve felt the abuse of the industry haven’t the stomach to read and engage most of the feminist community anymore. How awful that so many survivors are never even believed, their perpetrators never convicted, their pains and ills never properly handled and then they must find their own movement overwhelmed by the voices of the privileged.
Why do feminists treat this “sex industry” (in quotes–not my phrase of choice) so different from other topics? It’s so backwards to me–why don’t we also mostly talk about women with good health care coverage when the topic is women and health care? Or let’s talk about women with good babysitters when the topic is child care. Or maybe talk about women who might be getting the same pay as men when the topic is Equal Pay.
It is akin to talking about the current housing market and then giving the most air time to a couple of real estate agents who happened to sell some houses this month.
From my correspondent:
I’ve been thinking a bit about this, the relationship of self-injury behavior denoted as mental illness to that of prostituted women, battered women. It seems both rely on individualism as reasons why women participate/are involved in certain behavior or relationships. (i.e. “why doesn’t she just leave?” or “there’s something wrong with THAT man” rather than looking at the social and political constructions of masculinity that led to the man become a batterer or seeking out prostituted women). If we chose to participate in this behavior, then we can choose to get out, yes?
Even biology can be environmental rather than meaning one is born with a deficiency in serotonin or whatever chemical. For example, the hormones in food, the fact that animals raised for food in the U.S. are generally grain-fed rather than grass, all this effects our biology.
It just frustrates me that so many people, especially, but certainly not limited to men, see a situation as being something a woman got herself into, is choosing (even if she feels like it’s a choice!) without noting the herstorical and geopolitical location and time such “choices” are being made.
So, for some of us they may indeed be choices. But choices among the what we perceive, and what may in fact be, the viable options for survival for us.
Note to Jill Brennemann:
In the comment of yours in moderation now, you’ve attacked a radical feminist woman, documenting your attack by linking to a repost of a 2003 thread at Strap-On.org. First may I say, Strap-On.org is not a reliable source of information so far as radical feminism goes. It’s a transgender site with a history of attacking radical feminists.
But to try to figure out what you were referring to, I followed the links in the link you provided back a ways through the web archive you linked to.
From my reading, you were involved with an organization called “Escape Prostitution”, http://www.escapeprostitution.com, in the early 2000s, and at that time, you were an abolitionist helping women to leave the sex trade. Radical feminists and abolitionists who knew of this organization referred women in the sex trade to the organization. At some point in 2002-2003 you changed your mind and begin advocating for “harm reduction” instead. For a while, women in the sex trade who were referred to Escape Prostitution for support in exiting found themselves instead at a “sex work” site not specifically for women who wanted out. Radical feminists were appropriately angered by this about face, which occurred rather abruptly and without warning. It looks like you closed the website down, but then for a while, some sort of abusive image or text was popping up, again, angering radical feminists who had supported your formerly abolitionist work.
Also around this time you were involved with another organization, “PROSPER.” Early on this was a radical feminist organization. As part of your work with this group, you advocated for bringing on a woman as board president who was not a feminist and who in the end changed the focus of the organization such that it no longer had a feminist focus and took a neutral stance towards “sex work”. The result was that at least one radical feminist left her work with PROSPER and wrote about it later.
This is two organizations that were once feminist or radical feminist and which focused on helping women exit the sex trade that after your involvement no longer had that focus.
Of course, radical feminists who supported your work are going to be angry about this! One of them wrote about what had happened, she was angry, she left it up for a while and she took it down. You note in your own comment that it isn’t up anymore. I’m sure if it was, you’d have sent me the link.
Yet you somehow want me to join you in condemning the radical feminist who wrote about this feeling angry and betrayed and rightfully so. You wonder why I am allies with “people like this”, siting to the fact that, you say and I guess you think the Strap-On thread somehow proves, that this radfem disputed your history.
I don’t know what happened there. I have learned to take just about everything posted to Strap-On about radical feminists (!) with a grain of salt. I do know that it would be highly upsetting for radfems to have trusted you and supported you in your leadership in two nonprofit organizations designed to help women leave the sex trade, only to watch as you do a 180-degree turn, blaming radfems for it!
I think you’d best take a look at your own alliances, no? There are people you are allied with who have spent much, much time calling women, radical feminists and not, liars, disputing what they say about their lives, realities and histories, calling them crazy, calling them every name in the book, launching ridiculous but damaging attacks, and in some cases, threatening and stalking us. So, how about you check that out.
Also, I don’t respond well to threats along the lines of, “If you don’t approve my comment, that will prove that everything I want it to prove is so!” No. I don’t really want to get into any of this stuff more than I have in this comment, it’s a morass, and I do not think you would come out looking so well in the end either.
For the record, I don’t fault you for changing your mind. People change their minds. I don’t even fault you for changing your mind quickly. I do fault you for blaming radical feminists for a change of mind that resulted in them supporting you for a while when your organizations had completed changed to something they wouldn’t normally have supported, but did, because they trusted you. I do blame you for attempting to use my blog to launch an attack on a radical feminist who works really hard, was understandably feeling betrayed by you, and who doesn’t have anything up on the internet right now about you at all. Why you think I should attack her on your and Strap-On’s say so, I have no idea.
Jill, I am not interested in piecemeal paragraphs that could come from anywhere at all. I have no way to know what happened and no way to investigate any of your claims. And my blog is not the place for what you are attempting to do.
Okay, so now you have commented that what you have sent to me comes from the site of the radical feminist in question. Okay. That has exactly what to do with me? Your issue is with her, not me. I know nothing about any of this and sure won’t presume to speak to any of it.
I am a bit surprised to see that so many of the posters here think that the pro-porn stance is overwhelmingly held by a majority. The pro-porn stance only seems to be the mainstream belief, but this is only because it is embraced by the media, but the beliefs of members of the media certainly do not represent those of Americans, let alone people across the globe.
Being against porn and prostitution are ideas that are so far left that they come out the right, and vice versa. It is one of the few issues that feminist wo/men and conservative, religious wo/men can agree on, whereas pro-porn/prostitution views have no place on the right.
What is more mainstream than being “for” porn is being indifferent to it. A lot of people are apathetic towards the issue of porn, they accept it, choose to consume it or not, and it ends there. Some consumers do see it as problematic, but not to the point where they will avoid using it or will protest it, or if they don’t see it as problematic, they will rarely bother to praise or defend it.
I’ve found it to be difficult to find people that are for legalizing prostitution, because well…the idea of the government endorsing the buying and selling of flesh just doesn’t appeal to many people.
I disagree with how so many of you seem to be throwing your hands in the air and saying “they’ve won, the people have spoken and our views are unpopular.”
America is still an overwhelmingly religious, conservative nation, and Americans are disgusted by all the smut that has found its way into the mainstream. Democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives, or whatever label you want to slap on, are sick of all the porn. They may be against it for different reasons, but it’s still a common ground. Pro-porners have no common ground with anyone except for eachother.
Even on a global perspective, the pro-porn view is unpopular. Many countries have outlawed or regulate it. Let’s not forget about the billions of people of various religions and beliefs who find these things unacceptable.
I think it’s sad to always see feminist and conservative women criticising eachother. There is such a thing as “conservative feminism,” y’know ;).
All women who are against porn and prostitution should put their religious and political beliefs aside, join together and fight against it. There’s strength in numbers, and there just aren’t that many people who agree with the extremist, pro-porn stance.
Don’t let the media fool you into thinking that your beliefs are unpopular.
Nothing seems to be easier than seeing someone whom you can help but not helping.
I suggest we start giving it a try. Give love to the ones that need it.
God will appreciate it.