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.

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?

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.

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.

“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.”

As you well know Hexy.

Enough with the spin.

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.

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.