Julie Bindel on Sheila Jeffreys’ New Book on the Sex Trade, “The Industrial Vagina”
Nov 12th, 2008 by admin
Julie Bindel has a post up today about Sheila Jeffreys’ new book, The Industrial Vagina:
Jeffreys has also discovered just who is making money out of this market. It is, of course, a huge earner for pimps, traffickers and brothel owners, but many others are profiting too: hoteliers make extra revenue by supplying prostitutes to businessmen; taxi drivers make commission by delivering male tourists to particular brothels. “Billions upon billions of dollars are made off the backs of women in this industry,” says Jeffreys, “and feminists opposing it are up against powerful groups of men, and often entire governments . . . Where is the criticism from the left of this gross capitalist industry? We can slate the tobacco and nuclear industries, but not the sex industry, in which the poorest and most disenfranchised women are abused.”
The women involved rarely make money from prostitution, she claims, despite the popular view that the work is highly lucrative for them. Jeffreys includes evidence from studies carried out in Australia and Canada, which shows that the average annual wage for women in brothel prostitution is just £15,000. “We need to take this discussion away from the feminist arguments about whether it is harmful to women or not,” she says, “and look at it as a massive, massive industry where the profits are not going to the women.”
…”Prostitution and marriage have always been related,” says Jeffreys. “What is shocking is that today marriage is becoming more fashionable amongst some young women”. She writes that even in the case of employed, well-paid professional women “the right of men to women’s bodies for sexual use has not gone but remains an assumption at the basis of heterosexual relationships”.
…The strength of Jeffreys’ new work lies in just how many aspects of the sex industry she covers, and her understanding of their intersections. For instance, she points out the links between mail-order bride sites and pornography; between lap-dancing clubs and trafficking operations.
She believes that the use of prostituted women by the military, which has long taken place around US bases in Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines, has been the most important factor in the globalisation of the sex industry. In countries “where the industry thrived under military occupations,” says Jeffreys, “and the Netherlands where brothel prostitution is legalised, men flock from elsewhere to gain access to prostitution services.” Jeffreys asserts that countries that have legalised prostitution are “pimp states”. “If the state facilitates the prostitution of women, it is obviously maintaining male supremacy. These states are directly colluding in maintaining women’s inequality.”
As we speak, Jeffreys is preparing for a trip to Europe where she will be lecturing on prostitution as a harmful cultural practice, on a par with female genital mutilation. I ask if she is expecting criticism from her audience. “Of course,” she laughs, “feminists always get flack when we tell the truth about the sex industry. But women will continue to be harmed by it so long as we continue to believe the lies.”
H/t to the F-Word.
Heart
Jeffreys includes evidence from studies carried out in Australia and Canada, which shows that the average annual wage for women in brothel prostitution is just £15,000. “We need to take this discussion away from the feminist arguments about whether it is harmful to women or not,” she says, “and look at it as a massive, massive industry where the profits are not going to the women.”
I’m not sure I agree with Jeffreys that we have to take the discussion away from whether prostitution is harmful to women or not; if our argument is that women aren’t getting the profits, then the response will be that women should get the profits and the issue of women’s bodies as a consumer good is decentered, which doesn’t seem like a good direction for us to go.
What I do agree with is, most women don’t make much money via prostitution. It doesn’t help that some (like RE, don’t flame her because I don’t want to get into that here, I’m naming her because it’s the straight up thing to do, though I’m not going to link) agree to be prostituted in (gonzo) porn free of charge, without being paid at all. That really raises the bar for struggling poor women who turn to prostitution/porn for survival! “Oh, forget you, we’ve got women who will do it for FREE.”
Jeezus.
Hi Heart,
Yes, that bolded section sticks out like a sore thumb. Methinks she is attempting vainly to appeal to the male left. Hah. As if anything could appeal to the male left as much as their pr0n does.
Totally agree that Sheila Jeffreys’ statement about focusing on fact prostituted women do not earn much money can so easily be used by pro-prostitution individuals. These individuals will claim ‘let’s pass legislation so prostituted women earn a minimum sum per male John - oh and by the way although we’ll pass this legislation we will not implement it.’
No, we need to focus on the male demand and the deliberate and calculated dehumanisation of all women through prostitution. Apart from this Jeffreys is once again ‘on the ball’ which is why she will once again be castigated as a lesbian blah blah. -The usual misogynstic and women-hating insults thrown at women who dare to challenge male supremacy and their presumed sexual rights over women.
I think it very important on how long-term the harms are to prostituted women.
This is very personal to me, because I am in great shock at how terrible PTSD is after managing to get away from the sexual, mental and physical torturing that was my existence in the sex trade.
Yes, I did get very little money or when I was too bad a state to notice or unconscious not paid although. But that was a minor harm compare to being gang-raped, forced to re-enacted any porn scenarios or fantasies, being beaten up or brought to the edge of death.
To be honest prostitution made me hate money.
I am living with extreme PTSD, my body has pain most of the time. That is a harm that no magic wand can rid of.
sigh. context, Heart, context. I, when making content of MY OWN creation, do not get paid. I do it for free because I am making it. Sometimes I have OTHER people to pay in those cases, and why would I pay myself to be in something I am making? When I am in something someone else is making, I get paid.
Lest you forget, I am not just a woman who “agrees to be prostituted in (gonzo) porn”, I am one of those evil souless pornographers as well.
Context is important after all.
However, I might do it for free for other people, because, why yes, while I do like the money, I just like doing it to do it anyway.
Context, Ren, context.
The context is the whole entire world, in which millions of impoverished women are being trafficked and/or forced into sexual servicing men, such that they are raped/tortured/brutalized in an ongoing way. They have no choice.
When you — a degreed, privileged, middle class American — revel in your freedom to create pornography free of charge, you certainly do not raise the bar for anyone in the group I just described. That was my point. It doesn’t matter if somebody else makes it and you do it free or if you make it and you do it free, you do it free because you can, you write about it here on the internet because you can, the result is the normalizing of sexual brutality, rape and torture, and all the women who can’t– millions of them– suffer for that.
That was my point. So yeah, context. So far as your personal preferences and likes and dislikes and so on, I don’t think they’re germane to this particular thread.
I am truly sickened by RE’s contention that her ‘choice’ to be raped, gang banged and brutalized, and to depict those aberrations, should be the measure of those activities. No well person chooses to be raped, or thinks it’s not a brutality, even if she’s smiling while it happens. I’m not responding to her. I just won’t leave her post uncommented on, except by you.
This is an excellent post, and the comments are quite good as well.
The bottom line is that female sexual slavery is worldwide, and that many of us have tried for years to end it.
Pornography is a vice and an evil that people now get badly addicted to, and every lesbian I’ve met who’s into all this stuff was once a victim of childhood sexual abuse. S & M also comes into play with female to male transgenders, and that pornography and subculture is out there as well.
We need to tell the truth about why women would ever get involved with all of this degrading stuff in the first place, and the huge connection between girl childhood sexual abuse is huge in this.
One could almost say that men “season” girls they own in childhood (fathers, uncles, boyfriends) so that when they grow up, they are programmed to go into prostitutuion.
No mentally healthy woman who had true options would do any of this, and all the pro-porn people are well aware of this.
Huh. So when I have sex with men for free. I’ve never been paid for sex (at least not explicitly — I suppose some might argue that maybe dinner counts). Am I lowering the standards to rock-bottom? I mean, all these women giving away sex for free helps to create and sustain a market for sex, which means that some men will choose to pay for it. Are all of us who have consensual not-for-pay sex now complicit in the abuse and torture of women who are trafficked, raped and otherwise brutalized?
I have very conflicted personal views on pornography (my views on whether or not it should be legal to make and distribute are far less conflicted), but I don’t buy for a minute that a woman who does porn for free because she’s making it herself — in other words, because she’s going to make money off of its eventual sale — is somehow responsible for the exploitation of other women who don’t have that same privilege. Privilege is a tricky thing to navigate, and feminism doesn’t give us clear answers, but in my understanding, neither framework is supposed to be used to beat other people over the head with. Feminism is not a tool to shame other women. Understanding the dynamics of privilege isn’t a way to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator, or to guilt people for what they have.
We are all part of complicated systems of oppression. We are all complicit to one degree or another; the difference is, some people are outright exploitative of others and seek to cause harm. I don’t know Ren personally, but I read the same blog of hers that you do, and I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone would put her in that category.
And anyway, this post isn’t about Ren. It’s about the systematic exploitation of women. And yet somehow, the villain of choice is a sex worker herself, demonized simply because she doesn’t consider herself to be a victim? Come on.
Jill, women having sex “for free” on their own terms in the privacy of their own bedrooms is not on a par with women creating videotapes of brutal, violent sex, or apparently brutal, violent, sex, and disseminating them over the airwaves, over the internet and into the homes and sexual psyches of however many men and boys, and girls and women for that matter, watch that stuff. Pornography and prostitution are “constructors.” We talk a lot as radical feminists, and other kinds of feminists, for that matter, about “social construction”, about the way nothing is “essential,” nothing is “inherent” or “immutable,” in other words, about the way people are not “just born that way.” People are the way they are not only because of accidents or incidents of their births but because of what they see in the world, what they learn in the world. The sexuality of little boys and little girls, of men and women who grow up seeing, or, in whatever manner, end up watching brutal sex in which women are tortured, brutalized, degraded and shamed are in fact having their sexualities *constructed* in that watching. They’re learning this is what sex is, this is what is really sexually exciting and titillating, this *humiliation of women*. This torture of and brutality towards women.
Are you putting that out in the street? Are you filming this kind of sex and putting it out there for public consumption? Are you talking about what you’re doing 24/7 on your blogs in the company of, for example, guys who are the creators of extreme SM pornography and magazines affiliated with Hustler Magazine, in the company of various dungeon masters and you name it, all of whom are creating these kinds of materials — brutal, violent, degrading, humiliating sex for public view — for the general public? I don’t think you are. And no, whatever you’re doing, or other women are doing, for free in their own houses is not what I’m talking about there.
I mean, if someone puts a noose up in their yard in a threatening manner, or burns a cross, that person can do time and well they should, absolutely, because they are engaging in hate speech. If someone decorates their home, yard, business with Nazi insignia they may well do time as well. Because our society has determined at long last that at least some forms of “speech” are so destructive, so toxic, so hateful, so murderous, such a blight on the psyche of human beings that as a society we will not tolerate this kind of thing in the name of “speech.” And why? Because this kind of “speech” is only free speech for some. It’s free speech for racists. It’s free speech for white supremacists. Nobody is going to go into somebody’s home and arrest them for drawing their own pictures that only they see or for enacting their own racist scenarios, and why? Because they’re not disseminating that in the public sphere. When stuff like this is widely disseminated in the marketplace and just among the general public without legal consequences or ethical or moral sanctions — in magazines, in books, on the internet, television, movies– the message to one and all is, this is fine, this is good, there is no harm in this, this is all good times, this is free speech. And what gets lost is, for the victims of this stuff, or those who were victims and those who remember, there is no free speech. There is only, again, free speech for racists and white supremacists.
In the same way, it’s one thing, again to do whatever a woman does in private. I’m not saying that what a woman does in private is meaningless– it is not. I think what she does in private is always political. But there’s a difference between that and filming something and sending it out into a world that basically endorses ANY — that means ANY — depiction of torture, rape, murder, humiliation of women.
You blog at Feministe. You know what that’s about. You read your spam queue, you read your incoming searches. You know that haters are out there 24/7 looking for incest materials, torture materials, rape materials, brutal sex, and you know what? They are finding that stuff. And they are getting off on it. And the abundance of it reassures them that there’s nuttin wrong with that, all the cool kids do it, I mean, what are women for, after all, but to be bound, gagged, tortured, humiliated, debased, why, after it’s all done, they put a big SMILE on their face, it was nuttin’ but a thing, you know?
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry over your coming here to my blog in your, as far as I know, inaugural comment here, to scold me for “shaming” women and “beating women over the head” and for being a bad feminist. Ha. Bitter and really, really cynical ha. I think in the context of this discussion, your scolding and apparent self-righteousness are absurd. I am thinking about all of the little 12 and 13 year old girls — yes — on Myspace posting photos of themselves in degrading, debased sexual situations and positions. I am thinking of all of the little 12 and 13 year old boys all the way to one-foot-in-the-grave men getting off on what these little girls are posting. I am thinking about the way those little girls and those boys and men have the view of sexuality they do, and of women’s place and women’s bodies they do, in part because the internet, the airways, the movie houses, the theaters, the publishing world are FILLED with this kind of imagery, imagery in which women, again, are gang raped, raped, period, bound, gagged, brutalized, manhandled, cuffed around, and again, this is what women really LIKE, the message is, this is what women are FOR. And so as women and feminists we say NO, some of us, we have to say NO, this is NOT what a girl’s body is for. This is NOT what a woman’s body is for. We were not born to be gang raped. We were not born to be brutalized, tortured, bound and gagged and to LIKE it. This is not the world we created and want. When we say this, we pay for it big time, and why? Because this IS the world as many men and many boys do want it, they want it to stay that way, witness your and my spam queue, witness your and my incoming searches, read the newspapers, watch the news, all we have to do is look around.
The demand that is created by all of the above and similar things and phenomena for brutal, misogynist sex ends up fulfilled for the most part by the most marginalized women and girls in the world — children, the poor, the abused and abandoned, drug addicts, homeless women and girls, kidnapped women and girls, women who endured the “boot camp” of rape, gang rape and incest coming up. They are openly kidnapped and trafficked throughout the world, or because of their limited options and vulnerabilities, they end up trafficked throughout the world in some other manner, and then they can’t get out because they don’t have the power to, because they are sick, because they are debilitated, imprisoned, beaten by their pimps or procurers or johns, disocciating, and so their lives are an endless, enduring hellhole of pain, torture, degradation and shame that many do not survive. The pain and torture will not end even if they are so fortunate as to find a way out. Ahead of them will be years and years of post traumatic stress and physical infirmity, often manifested as severe pain in their bodies, pain for which doctors and health professionals have few answers.
You know, my concern is about the men who are “shaming” these women and girls every moment of every day throughout the world or who can’t wait for their next opportunity to do so. My concern is for the girls and women so shamed. My concern is for every girl whose initiation into sexual encounters is or will be brutal and degrading, humiliating, because boys and men think that’s what sex is about or because the girl thinks that’s what sex is supposed to be about and she is trying to be, as a girl, what she is supposed to be. My concern is for all of the women exited or escaped from the sex trade who battle agonizing pain and debilitation every single day because of their experiences of rape, torture, brutality at the hands of men, some of whom read this blog, and not only one person, there is quite a number of women exited from the sex trade who read here. So when I encounter women who have allied themselves with powerful white, heterosexual men (Hustler and its affiliates) and who every day are making a public statement that really, brutal sex is good times, really torture is good times, when I encounter women who agree with male power that the fact that money exchanged hands equals consensual sex, I’m calling it out as publicly as it is being put out there by whoever is putting it out there, and particularly if they are identifying as profeminist. When I encounter women who do this for free because it’s just so damn much fun, guaranteed, I’m calling that out. Because what they are doing harms all of us — men and women, boys and girls — in a way that what each of us does in private never can, does or will. (Which does not mean we should not be talking a lot about what we all do in private, we should be.) What they are doing is promoting, advocating for, phenomena, practices that shore up male heterosupremacy at its very core. And in the process, of course, they shame and erase all the girls and women in the world victimized byall the men who want and buy and make this shit and who are enriched and benefitted by it, with the result that these girls and women are effectively “beaten over the head” and “shamed” for men’s sexual pleasure. I’d suggest, Jill, that your outrage might be misplaced and better directed to those who end up even more likely to be victimized because, heck, privileged white women do it for free, the cool kids do it for free, put a smile on their face and tell the whole world how great it really is, as a cast of male porn publishers, Hustler Magazine, Larry Flynt and consumers of violent, misogynist imagery applaud wildly. Yeah, that’s helpful. That really brings us closer to our full humanity as women.
I suppose the substance of, again, this inaugural exchange between us is somewhat unfortunate. But I tell you what, I lay awake nights thinking about how we might end the hate speech that is pornography and prostitution. Lots of us do. Because this causes grave, grave harm to girls and women. I will never stop saying that, I will never stop supporting girls and women so harmed (ALL of us) and I will never stop calling out those who are publicly insisting that really, it’s not all that. If that means I get called out for “shaming” or “beating women over the head” or being a bad feminist, then it will, I guess. I will point out, as I have here, how ludicrous that really is though. I actually do agree with you that feminism is not about shaming women or beating them over the head, but again, I think your indignation is misplaced. There are feminists who do that all the time, it’s the mainstay of their blogging careers, it’s the way they get people to read — shaming and beating other women over the head — and some of them have guest blogged at Feministe’s invitation. You might check that out.
I don’t do that kind of thing, though. You can scour my blog, you will not find it. And calling out apparently profeminist pornographers is not, I don’t think, that.
Heart
I’m glad SJ brought economics into this as (oddly) it tends to get ignored in discussions about prostitution.
“The women involved rarely make money from prostitution, she claims, despite the popular view that the work is highly lucrative for them.”
Men see protitution as a fair trade: they get what they want and women get paid in return. There is little public discourse on how economic desperation pushes women and girls to this.
I think of all those women in Iraq who have been forced into prostitution just to survive. They are used up by everyone yet I’d guess the men who use them think those women do it by choice (I guess they could choose to starve). Is there really that much difference between these Iraqi women and 14 year old throwaway kids in LA? When the latter turn 18 and know no other way to survive, are they suddenly prostituting themselves by choice?
I know, the above are extreme examples of people who are, more or less, unwittingly plunged into it. What about working class women? They’re often left out of these discussions. What about single, young women who don’t have access to much quality education. A lot of these women end up in clubs as servers, bartenders. There’s more money on the pole so why not? It’s not like there are huge opportunities for advancement for servers. Then, of course, the girls on stage are offered more money to do more. . . In a growing number of clubs, the latter is expected. I know three women who ended up in the “industry” this way. One got out early and relatively unscathed. Another left the industry drug addled and destitute, but with a friend who was willing to take her in and help her apply for public assistance, drug programs, etc. The third woman is dead. She never reached 35. The initial pull for all three was money. The lure of lots of it and fast. Not one of them ended up with much of anything.
We’re heading into a worldwide recession, maybe even a depression. These downswings in the economy alway hit women the hardest. When even the crappy jobs evaporate what will happen to the poorest women?
“So when I have sex with men for free. I’ve never been paid for sex (at least not explicitly — I suppose some might argue that maybe dinner counts). Am I lowering the standards to rock-bottom?”
Despite what the boys over at Alternet say: Sex does not equal pron, Jill. I’ve read enough of your posts to believe you already know this.
Both Sheila Jeffreys and Julie Bindel are FAB radical feminists, and I have a crush on both. *sigh*
The popular argument FOR prostitution has always been that ‘women are adequately compensated/remunerated for the transaction‘. Such utter bullshit, because the ‘wages’ are no where near what it commonly believed, nor is the emotional or physical endurance of the average prostitute adequately ‘compensated’. And it is pure bullshit to bring up the ‘example’ of the top end of the market to illustrate the majority of the market. Whilst this is not the only reason to be anti-pornstitution, it is still an important one, primarily because it is a common defence of prostitution.
And as for the so-called feminist(s) who do gonzo for free, yeah, *way* to set a market standard and fuck the others who actually need the money to survive. It’s not all about YOU. Feminism ain’t all about being popular with teh boyz ya know. Economic survival is a reality for most of the women (and girls) who are prostituted.
Thanks. I hope Jill will read that, and re-read it. And think about it.
Will Jill finally get it, now or soon, that she is enabling the abuse of a woman when she uses this bullshit reasoning. It’s because of thinking such as hers that women like the other posting here are locked in a life of torture and slavery, no matter what spin she puts on it.
Jill is no better than Flynt.
Just FYI: 15,000 GBP is actually $33,000AU.
While not huge, that’s a wage that exists across industries. Tech support. Junior receptionists. Store hands. Etc.
For an industry that largely consists of part time workers, it’s not exactly the “AHA! TINY MONEY!” that Jeffreys and Bindel seem to be presenting it as.
What shocks me is how women can defend this nonsense. Is this just an Internet thing or have some women become completely clueless about what the real nature of pornography and prostitution is all about.
Even some lesbians I know have told me that being in relationships with women who were once with men was a contaminated sexual experience as well, because they had learned the bad habits of men unnknowingly. If this subtle difference can be discerned, then just think of the horrors out there in the pornification and prostitution of the world.
As I said before, women who so passionately defend this trash are highly likely to have been the victims as children of childhood sexual abuse themselves. Millions of women have suffered this evil as children at the hands of male relatives and close family members, and they are actually never treated or given the help they need to recover from this. The weirdness of women getting into all of this evil I believe is directly connected to women as girls being seasoned and abused. Oftentimes this is so traulmatic, that the girls don’t “remember” consciously the abuse at all. But it is “remembered” in their bodies and in cellular memory, and I believe when women feel drawn to be in porn, or to do burlesque or to promote this degrading S & M underworld, well, they have already been programmed.
Society programs all kinds of behavior, but the imprint of sexual objectification is very strong and very awful for women. In fact, the sexism and sexualization of women is so all pervasive, that I find a lot of straight women don’t even know it’s happening around them. It’s why I’m a radical feminist, because I do see the damage and the attrocity, and as a privileged and lucky lesbian who never had to be forced into sex with men ever, and to be lucky enough never to have to live with men, I feel this clarity gives voice to my passionate anger at pro-porn pro-prostition women — calling this sex positive feminism is very much like calling NAZI pro-white race supporters! Meaning they give valuable self-esteme to poor oppressed white people. How women don’t get this again goes back to the childhood conditioning. The pro-porn “feminists” will never admit this, but I believe that’s what happened to most of them, and surviving the horrors they self-medicate with S & M or support all of it. It’s complex, but I see this so often I can’t deny the reasoning behind it.
I am finding very hard to feel coherent about this subject, for I am in the middle of very horrific PTSD, because of the violent prostitution I had to do.
Much of it was made into pornography whether I know or not.
Men that choose to be violent to prostituted women and girls used them as live porn. Often making photos or videoing with or without permission. A lot of porn especially hard-core uses the bodies of prostituted women who have been deeply damaged by other parts of the sex trade.
Money is of little or no relevant after the regular rapes, batterings and mental tortures that the majority of prostituted women and girls have to survived.
I am deeply hurt and almost speechless that money should be a central issue.
What really matters is the minds and bodies of prostituted women and girls, not whether earn a “decent wage”.
No money can make up for the countless violent rapes I had to live with - not the sadistic anal rapes, not the gang-rapes, not the chocking half to death on penises. No money makes up for hit in the stomach, hit round the head, or being strangled.
Prostitution made hate money coz it was associated with pain, being degraded and holding on to life by the skin of my teeth.
So, prostitution should be framed as an human right’s issue, framed as violence against women and girls. Of course economics are extremely important, but if that becomes the main issue, it letting women and girls stay inside a system that is destroying them.
I live now with the double hell of PTSD, where I can feel all the pain that I deadened to survive. I have pain nearly all the time. I live inside a grief where I feel like I am collapsing.
What money can help with all that.
I’m going to see Herbie Hancock, that is a piece of joy.
I don’t believe that income for a minute. It’s either a typo, or highly qualified and/or compromised in some way.
As you well know Hexy.
Enough with the spin.
Or not women at all.
“As I said before, women who so passionately defend this trash are highly likely to have been the victims as children of childhood sexual abuse themselves.”
I think it’s really wrong to speculate that pro-porn feminists must have been abused as children even if they don’t remember it. I think that is crossing a major line.
I also think it’s totally unnecessary. We live in rape culture. You do not have to be actually raped to internalize misogyny and the eroticization of dominance and submission. I agree that socialization is why a lot of women support porn/prostitution but let’s not make assumptions about the details of their actual lives.
I can respect the rights of sex workers to do sex work, and if they tell me they are feminist I don’t see it as my place to tell them they’re wrong. But I’ve yet to hear an argument advocating porn and prostitution that takes into account not only the people who are privileged enough to have a meaningful choice about whether or not to do it but also those who ARE forced/coerced into it.
“I don’t buy for a minute that a woman who does porn for free because she’s making it herself — in other words, because she’s going to make money off of its eventual sale — is somehow responsible for the exploitation of other women who don’t have that same privilege.”
Not even when that pornography is titled “Whoreabuse” and depicts violent scenes you would expect to find in a fuckumentary with such a title- that doesn’t affect the exploitation of less privileged women?
Theoretical acceptance of rape porn can sound almost intellectual so long as no one brings non-theoretical examples of rape porn into the discussion, actual titles and actual acts of eroticized violence presented to the public in real products bought and used to masturbate by real men. You’d shit yourself if you saw a full listing of titles from the pornographer you’re defending, which is why you have never asked to see that title list and why one hasn’t been offered for you or anyone else to see.
Idealogues blindly advocate pet theories instead of looking with their own eyes. Stop being so afraid of the answer you never ask the question and educate yourself about the the content of the pornography you’re defending by watching it.
Mariella, I hate to burst your bubble but the numbers of sex workers and “sexualized” women out there who were abused as children are just limitless. I’ve seen this come up again and again in the lesbian groups that have become verbal trash heaps now that pornification has set in. I’ve seen this weird sexual behavior in lesbians who really were raped as children. It’s very very out there.
We don’t want to admit that the rape culture that young girls are put into fuels the sex industry, the strip clubs, the porn shops.
And no, women don’t have to do any of this work at all. They are conned into it, they are gulled into it, and the uncles, daddies and step dads out there are all into it. It’s hidden, it’s creepy and it’s a bloody epidemic. Any prostitute who tells you she led an ideal childhood is really not telling you the truth.
It took me years to figure out how Manson got to his “Manson girls” because they all came from such “ideal” middle class white homes. Now I know the answer.
There are plenty of women who were born into poverty or went to bad schools who had nothing to do with the sex corrupted industries out there. They worked ordinary jobs, scrambled for college money, and got their acts together. They also were never raped by fathers, uncles or mother’s boyfriends. We need to get at the truth of this, and get out of the denial. Sex work and prostitution are never “normal” behaviors just because women are in poverty, there is the X factor that pushes girls over the edge. We need to be real clear real fast about what this is really all about women!
And P.S. Sis is right, the trash talking women who Heart allows on this site now and then could very well be men in disguise. The thing is Sis, I’ve heard women talk this trash and deal out this pornified talk just about everywhere in young lesbian groups. They are really into S & M, they don’t know the dangers of this world, and women aren’t getting the message out there. I can’t speak for the women on these blogs, but pornification has reached toxic limits in lesbian drop in groups in Los Angeles. I just tell what I see and hear directly.
I’ve done enough reading on childhood sexual abuse to qualify for an advanced degree now, and I know the symptoms in adult women. Not all the time, but I’m more aware of this than when I was a lot younger.
Women have faced untold horrors, and the Internet is actually fueling more porn, and more trafficking and more sexual abuse of girls.
Hard as all of this is to talk about, we have got to see the truth!
To the person who attempted to comment demanding to know whether a prostituted woman can be both an incest/rape/sexual assault victim AND white and privileged, hello. The answer is yes.
Since when did being white and privileged prevent any little girl, any teenager, any grown woman, any old woman, from rape, sexual assault, incest, battery, domestic violence, or murder? NEVER.
To wit: feminism.
There’s a guy on trial in Switzerland right now for imprisoning his daughter in his basement for all of her life, raping her all her life, and forcibly impregnating her so that she has seven kids by her father. They were all locked in the basement and he never let them out, including when one son was sick. That son died.
The father owns all sorts of rental properties including the apartment building where he imprisoned his daughter and grandkids. He also imprisoned his mother in there when she was very old, locking her into a room with no windows until she died.
So, yeah. They were all white. All privileged in the sense that we talk about white privilege and class privilege. And they were raped, imprisoned, tortured, murdered anyhow.
As have millions of other women similarly been.
No wonder we have struggles so far as feminism go. How can someone even ask that despicably absurd question in all sincerity?
I’ve been thinking about what Mariella said, about not making assumptions about women who are in porn and prostitution having been abused. And I was kind of surprised by my own conclusion. I would not assume that other women were raped or abused. But, if they say “I was never raped” or “I was never abused” or “I was not traumatized by porn,” I would also not assume that I knew what they meant by that. Not without knowing them much better and talking with them in depth.
The reason I think that is that there was a time when I would have said “No, nothing like that ever happened to me! I had a normal childhood!” And now I just look back and I’m very puzzled. I don’t understand how I could have said that. I had trouble figuring out how to give examples without giving too much information and possibly triggering, so I hope I’m on the right side of that line. I trust Heart’s moderation. One example: when I was five, some older boys basically kidnapped me one day. I wanted so badly to run away, but I was minding my little brother, and they had a big club and told me they would bash his head in and kill him if I didn’t obey. They took us to a secret place and molested me for some period of time, I don’t know how long, and finally let us go. The whole time I seriously thought I was going to die because I couldn’t believe they would do stuff like that and think they could get away with it. But they did get away with it because I was too afraid to tell.
The really weird part is that I then “forgot.” I didn’t really forget–I knew that happened and it was there in my mind, but somehow I pushed it away and never thought of it. So if anyone had asked me if I’d been abused, I would have said “no.” And I would have thought I was telling the truth.
I never, ever would have thought that was rape. And even when I grew up and read more about definitions of rape, and how under some definitions, what happened to me would have qualified, I never applied that to me. To some other little girl, maybe, but not to me.
My little sister was pregnant at fifteen. The father was 24 and in the Army. When a 24 year old soldier has sex with a fourteen year old girl, it is rape no matter what, even if she says she “wants” it. But I don’t think my sister ever characterized what happened to her as rape. If you’d asked her, she would have said she was not raped. She probably would say that she’d committed a sin of fornication. She would have blamed herself.
I never had any information about sex as a child, except that if you had any “bad thoughts” you would go to Hell unless you went to confession. I finally got my information from a copy of a well-known porn novel that I found in my father’s bookcase. It was one story after another of girls and women being prostituted and raped. But I wouldn’t have called it that because it is made to appear that they like it, and that they consented. Even when it is painful, even when they are too young. So that was my sex ed. Smile and say you like it, or else. Yet I was so glad to find out at least what sex was and how you did it that I would not have considered myself traumatized. It only started to bother me later. Then I found my father’s huge stash of gay male porn. That really did a number on my young mind. And of course I could never ask anyone what it all meant. BUT if you’d asked me if I was traumatized by porn, I would have said “porn? What porn? There’s no porn in my life.” Because I would have interpreted “porn” to be things like Playboy, or dirty movies. Don’t ask me how I could twist things around like that in my own mind. I don’t know how denial works, but I know that it does work.
I don’t mean that women are lying when they say they haven’t been raped. I just think that means different things to different people. My “normal” might include things that would horrify someone else. It also means different things at different times in your life. I think that if I could “forget” what happened, someone else might too. Minimize it, try to make it go away. Because no one wants to feel they are just a victim. I feel more powerful when I say “I am strong! That didn’t hurt me! That was nothing!” And that is what I used to say, because I needed so badly to feel strong. When I finally got a therapist, I blamed myself for not understanding what happened to me and doing something about it. She said, wisely I think, that people need to be in a safe place before they are ready to face some things, and that maybe I had just never felt safe enough until then. Women who are in porn/prostitution are not in a safe place. It would not be surprising if they viewed things differently. I do not mean they are making things up or deluded. I just think it’s realistic to recognize that you can’t expect to know all about a person right away, based on a few questions.
Nail, hammer, bang, Anuna. as usual. I am convinced that almost all women have had experiences like those you describe and that most have yet to realize or recognize they have been raped or otherwise sexually violated. There are so many women in the world who have been raped in their marriages, so many assaulted as little girls, teenagers, so so many.