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.