The Nineteenth Carnival of Radical Feminists. . .

. . . is now up at Pisaquari’s place, Buried Alive.

It includes many interviews (herstories) of radical feminists:

– Amy’s,

– Demonista’s,

– Allecto’s,

– My Own,

– Sam Berg’s,

– Bonobobabe’s,

– Amananta’s,

– Julia’s, and

– Jenn’s.

It also includes links to excellent writings by other radical feminists, e.g. Nine Deuce (of Rage Against the Man-chine), Rebecca (of Rmott62), Amananta (of Screaming into the Void) and Marcella Chester (of Abyss2Hope), etc. And more!

Please check out all the great content of this new carnival here. Pisaquari did a wonderful job. Congratulation for all the hard work and thank you so much!

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Also, please check out this new anti-rape myths campaign:

This is Not an Invitation to Rape Me.

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ETA (10/31/2008): Tonight, it is Samhain.

From Sharkbait’s blog:

Now, please take a moment to consider all the women who have been, will be and are being, persecuted as Witches around the world.

In Sisterhood and Solidarity,

SharkBait.

Please check out this post.

It is Witches’ Eve tonight. And misogyny continues.

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The Culture of Patriarchists Hates Women

 

“All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable. . . Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort with devils. . . it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft. . . And blessed be the Highest Who has so far preserved the male sex from so great a crime. . .”

“. . . the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives. . . “

“When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”

— Three quotes from the Malleus Maleficarum (by Kramer & Sprenger), guide to the Inquisition’s Witch trials, witch-hunter’s manual, and Christian pornography.

 

“We now know most of what can be known about the witches: who they were, what they believed, what they did, the Church’s vision of them. We have seen the historical dimensions of a myth of feminine evil which resulted in the slaughter of nine million persons, nearly all women, over 300 years. The actual evidence of that slaughter, the remembrance of it, has been suppressed for centuries so that the myth of woman as the Original Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure. . .”

— Andrea Dworkin, “The Herstory – Gynocide: The Witches,” in Woman Hating, p.149.

   

 

 

 

“While women who stepped out of line in early modern Europe were tortured and killed as witches, today such women are regarded as cunts or bitches, deserving what happens to them.”

— Jane Caputi and Diana Russell, “Femicide: Speaking the Unspeakable”, in Ms., 1 (3), p.34-37, 1990.

“We’re not disrespecting women, we’re disrespecting bitches.”

— Easy E of NWA, 1990.

“Why is it wrong to get rid of some fuckin’ cunts?”

 — Kenneth Bianchi, “Inside the mind of the ‘Hillside Strangler'” by Schwartz & Boyd, in Hustler (1981, August), p,36.

“Repeat the syllables
until the lesson is pumped through the heart:
Nicriven, accused of lasciviousness, burned 1569.
Barbara Gobel, described by her jailors
as “the fairest maid in Wurzburg,”
burned 1629, age nineteen.
Frau Peller, raped by Inquisition torturers
because her sister refused
the witch-judge Franz Buirman, 1631.
Maria Walburga Rung, tried at a secular court
in Manheim as a witch,
released as “merely a prostitute,”
accused again by the episcopal court
at Eichstadt, tortured into confession,
and then burned alive, 1723, age twenty-two.

What have they done to me?”

— Robin Morgan, “The Network of the Imaginary Mother,” in Lady of the Beasts: Poems.

Originally, the researchers’ goal in this study wasn’t to document the effects of pornography on sexual assailants. Their research was aimed at studying the sexual abuse of street prostitutes, both prior to and following entrance into prostitution.

In a comment (in which the offender mentioned some pornographic material) which was reported by one of the prostitutes who was a victim of rape, an assailant told the woman:

“I know all about you bitches, you’re no different; you’re like all of them. I seen it in all the movies. You love being beaten.” (He then began punching the victim violently.) “I just seen it again in that flick. He beat the shit out of her while he raped her and she told him she loved it; you know you love it; tell me you love it.”

Another prostitute reported her rape to the researchers in this way:

“After I told him I’d turn him a free trick if only he’d calm down and stop hurting me, then he just really blew his mind. He started calling me all kinds of names, and then started screaming and shrieking like nothing I’d ever heard. He sounded like a wailing animal. Instead of just slapping me to keep me quiet, he really went crazy and began punching me all over. Then he told me he had seen whores just like me in [three pornographic films mentioned by name], and told me he knew how to do it to whores like me. He knew what whores like me wanted… After he finished raping me, he started beating me with his gun all over. Then he said, “You were in that movie. You were in that movie. You know you wanted to die after you were raped. That’s what you want; you want me to kill you after this rape just like [specific pornographic film] did.’”

This particular woman suffered, in addition to forced vaginal penetration, forced anal penetration with a gun, excessive bodily injuries, including several broken bones; and a period of time in which the rapist held a loaded pistol to her vagina, threatening to shoot, insisting it was the way she had died in the film he had seen. He did not, in fact, shoot after all.

— Silbert & Pines study.

 

Misogyny is historical.

Misogyny is also contemporary.

I admit I have written posts which were very powerful and, even sometimes, yeah, optimistic, on this blog. This ain’t going to stop and I will keep writing such posts in the future.

But right now, I’m just feeling low…

We live in a world that doesn’t take violence against women seriously.

Most people say rape is bad but they do nothing to work toward a world where rape wouldn’t exist, let alone analyze or identify all the institutions, customs, behaviors, etc that make rape inevitable.

People would rather say that rape is “inevitable”, which is false. Rapists are not born, they are made. Most radical feminists have identified the things that make rape possible, which are notably socialization to masculine norms and behaviors, repression of empathy toward women, children, and/or some other males (in the few cases of men raping other men), pornography, pornified culture, patriarchal customs & institutions, etc.

Regarding prostitution, millions and millions of women and girls are being raped on a daily basis. And hardly anybody cares. Many people just do not want to hear the truth about the sex industry. Some feminists or women who genuinely care about other women are having that truth hidden from them, often by malestream media, sometimes by glamorized prostitution culture, etc.
 

I reject the term “sex work” as it is somehow too convenient for the men who (ab)use prostituted or prostituting women . I still acknowledge that there are some very unprivileged women in the sex trade who call themselves ’sex workers’ while feeling negative about prostitution though. And when they tell their painful stories while using the term ’sex work’, well I’m absolutely fine with that. Their stories matter as much as so many others’ who’ve been harmed in the sex trade. It is possible that their pimps or madams (and some of their johns) called it “sex work,” “a job” or “work” when they spoke to them, which makes sense why some prostituted women have internalized the term “sex work.” In contrast, however, there are some formerly prostituted women who loathe the term “sex work” because they feel that it attempts to conceal the great suffering they’ve experienced in the prostitution industry and that it also tries to make prostitution look “respectable” when it’s not, when it is in fact a violation of a woman’s body and rights. Anyway, I can fully understand both cases.

We live in a patriarchy. . . Patriarchy socializes us, fucks us over, violates us, restricts our freedom and our autonomy, etc. The list goes on. . .

That doesn’t change the fact that “sex work” is not a term I use, as it is patriarchal and it benefits men with their age-old anti-woman beliefs. Prostitution has been called the world’s oldest profession for ages and ages. And prostitution has not yet been recognized as an inherent form of sexual slavery and violence against women (for the vast majority of the women & girls in it) by most people. . .

As I said somewhere else, the term ‘prostituted women’ is accurate because most women who enter prostitution do so with choices that are NOT free. So, when we say ‘prostituted women,’ we also mean that women in the sex industry are being prostituted not only by the men who sell them or buy them, but that they are also being prostituted by the whole oppressive patriarchal system and all its restrictive forms of socializations. 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! The language was invented by the patriarchy, and I want to obey no edict or rule given by the male-supremacist system. 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.

For instance, when we, radical feminists, say ‘herstory’, we mean by that beautiful word: the history of women, pointing out that the history of women should matter as much as the history of men. But the history of men has always been more documented in patriarchy. That’s why accurate documentations of herstory would be so important in order to understand how much, as women, we have been hated for a very long time. The witch-hunt in early modern Europe is only one of the so many examples in the history of misogyny.

I have another definition for pornoiarchy. It is also a society that restricts sexual imagination, i.e. that constricts us as sexual beings, because it is a patriarchal society invaded and controlled by pornography. Because pornography tries to control sexuality; it maps out people’s sex lives with the same old scenario of male-over-female domination. To me, not being able to imagine an egalitarian sexuality (that wouldn’t rely on the objectification and the degradation of another human being) is myopia. I believe that sexual imagination can go beyond the boundaries of pornoiarchy.

To me, anybody who defends pornography, prostitution, Christianity, capitalism, and/or male-supremacist laws, customs or institutions, etc (while being fully aware -without necessarily admitting it- that these things are inherently misogynistic or oppressive) is a patriarchist.

Andrea Dworkin was absolutely amazing. I believe she was hated because she firmly stood against patriarchy and she was very vocal about resistance to patriarchy. And, in a patriarchal society, such a woman is hated, including by some (patriarchist) “feminists”.

Any radical feminist woman who speaks out eloquently against porniarchy becomes unfortunately #1 on the patriarchists’ shitlist.

Thus, because patriarchists have the power of naming (i.e. the power of language, which was invented by the patriarchy itself, the power of words, the power over communication and expression), they can hate and misrepresent radical feminists as much as they please. That is to say that every single word, every single argument, every single phrase, every single expression of feelings, etc that a radical feminist uses, says or writes can potentially be (deliberately, carelessly, or disingenuously) misunderstood, twisted around, quoted repeatedly out of context, and bent out of shape by the patriarchists. Because (you see?) the patriarchal status quo has to be protected by its cruel guardians.

As a result of only this simple fact (patriarchists having the power of words), the list of misrepresentations of radical feminism (& radical feminists in general) is endless. It is present in the malestream media, in the academia, on the Internet, etc.

It is as though this great amount of lies and distortions about radical feminism were this huge vortex of water, and we, radical feminists, were constantly being dragged down to drown underwater inside this whirling mass of suffocating misinterpretations of the words we say.

Patriarchists have to be powerful in the ongoing task of slandering us. They are trying to make sure that we will never be taken seriously and that the male-supremacist status quo is being bolstered.

Therefore, pro-pornography views are usually what’s popular out there, while radical feminist views are (usually) either totally hated or not even heard of. I witnessed all this in real life as a fact. During years and years, I had only heard pro-pornography views on the subject (especially from men and ex-boyfriends, and the mainstream media, etc) before discovering radical feminism by chance when I was online. I only found radical feminism by chance. I had never heard of radical feminism before May 2006. And before I decided to become a radical feminist, I’d quickly figured out how much radical feminism was hated, misrepresented and/or shunned from mainstream society. That didn’t stop me from becoming a rad fem, but that’s another story.

Note: While I say that pro-pornography views are usually what’s popular out there, I am talking about the culture of men. I believe that most women are anti-porn at heart, even amongst the few ones who use pornography. Most women want to stay away from pornography because it is too painful to look at. They usually use the terms “disgusting” or “filthy” but they in fact do notice that porn is degrading to women. As for the ones who use it, I believe that, when they can look at it with a clear mind, they obviously notice that it is not advancing freedom for women, or that it does not promote equality.

Before hearing about the feminist critique of pornography, I only had vaguely heard about feminism and never heard of radical feminism. But now, being a radical feminist and having heard and read about all the multiple misrepresentations of my type of feminism, I realize how much it hurts.

I’ve realized that radical feminism is the complete antithesis of patriarchy. Patriarchy is the very system of oppression and control we’re living in. Therefore, radical feminist politics are the solution to the overthrow of the male-supremacist system. What makes me mostly sad is that most women do not know all this.

Wouldn’t there be such a huge barrier imposed by malestream media in order to prevent mass-communication from rad fems to women, along with stereotypes & lies being widespread about radical feminism written in so many places on the Internet, women would know about radical feminism and they would know that it is not to be hated but understood clearly. Radical feminism is a call to freedom from all forms of oppression through the destruction of power structures.

A fellow blogger once said to me:

“I think a lot of women have some sort of coping mechanism that allows them to deny or ignore reality. I take it as a luxury, when I can.

But long-term, it becomes resistance to change and the women who work remain few and the task relentless.”

— Sophie, of 2 B Sophora.

This is true.

I believe that women don’t necessarily need to read radical feminist writings to see how much men and the culture of patriarchists hate us. They just have to seriously open their eyes to notice that fact. However, I do believe that radical feminist books help you identify all the different complex structures that cause all these atrocities perpetrated by men against us. It gives you words to be able to properly describe your experience of having been born female within a world that regards female humans as second-class citizens.

I also believe that women have this coping mechanism, as Sophie explained, to pretend that reality is not what it really is. I resorted to that kind of psychological dissociation when I was younger. I also admit that now I still have my ‘mind-split’ process taking place now and again to avoid falling into depression.

When I notice too much the increasing aggression against women as a class, the sexism that permeates society, the ever-increasing violence and misogyny within pornography, the fact that prostitution has still not been recognized as a violation of women and girls’ human rights and the numerous distortions and misrepresentations of radical feminism, I sometimes tend to mentally disconnect from all this pain. Because I’m just this little person and I can’t take all this. Consequently, like Sophie, I take it as a luxury, when I can.

Nevertheless I agree that, in the long term, the ‘mind-split’ becomes a resistance to change. Women have to speak out on male violence:

. . . one thing I will never, never be is silent. I’d RATHER be critical, judgemental and negative of male supremacy, and be perceived by other women and men as a harpy, an evil bitch, batshit crazy etc, etc… than be silent on the atrocities that men are committing against women every day. It sickens me too much not to speak out. It sickens me too much not to speak out loudly and angrily. Men’s violence is just too horrendous and sickening to ignore.

— Allecto, in a comment to one of my posts.

Allecto’s words echo in my ears. When I listen to these words, it gives me strength. I feel like I don’t care about being criticized for speaking out on male violence and male supremacy; I want to keep screaming and shouting about how much the culture of patriarchists hates women; I want to keep screaming and shouting about how much men hurt women in a patriarchy.

In this society, men hurt, abuse, rape, beat up and, sometimes, murder women. Not all men abuse women, but many of them do. I’ve already explained that masculinity (i.e. social gender construct) is the root cause that underlies this system.

Male violence against women is not only widespread; it is often accepted as being “just life.” How do we explain that within a culture that has eroticized rape in the first place, i.e. that has made rape “sexy”? 😦

Nowadays, it is almost impossible for a woman to have a close friendship or relationship with a guy without him trying to force intercourse onto her, or trying to persuade her to “do this” or “do that”. Also, generally, a wife has to allow herself to “be fucked” by her husband as a ‘duty’.

I get a clear picture of the current situation here: Rape (as real feminists define it) is commonplace, tacitly considered “normal” in our patriarchal [pornified] culture.

As Ruth Anne Koenick, director of Rutgers’ Department of Sexual Assault Services and Crime Victim Assistance, said when she was interviewed by Robert Jensen:

People don’t come out of the womb wanting to be rapists nor believing that they are to blame when they are victims, but that’s where so many end up. What does that say about the culture’s belief systems?. . . One of my favorite people once said, “Rape is illegal, but the sexual ethic that underlies rape is woven into the fabric of our culture.”

During my life, I have been raped, coerced into sexual activity and domestically abused by some men who used pornography.

I remember the pain. I remember the lack of empathy I could see in their eyes. I remember how they would sometimes ignore me when I cried.

I remember them grabbing me, them slapping me, them bruising me, them tying me up to the bed and telling me I’d “enjoy it”.

When the pain became too intense I’d just mentally shut down, dissociate my mind from all this.

When I was living in domestic violence, I kept ignoring the bullying through dissociation, denial, by splitting my mind into parts, by pretending that the cruelty that I was subjected to was not there. . . I just had to. . . keep pretending this abuse I was sustaining wasn’t happening to me. . . I’d split my mind into parts. . . I’d numb the pain. . . I’d take the pain away. . . by splitting my mind into parts. . . I was perfectly able to ignore all the pain when I could. . . split my mind into parts. . . numb the pain. . . blank out all the sexual and domestic abuse I had suffered from men.

The pornography, I wanted to stay away from it. There was some kind of a sick feeling I was getting when seeing it, I could not quite describe what it exactly was at the time. But now I think that it had something to do with the fact that only taking glimpses at the raw woman-hatred that it was made me sick, which is why I tried to stay away from it in spite of boyfriends constantly trying to force the pornography – visually or sexually – onto me. Ignoring the pornography was another way of numbing pain.

In general, when something was too painful, too sexist, too demeaning, too hurtful, I would just mentally shut down from it by escaping to another corner of my mind.

It is an excellent coping mechanism. But it just doesn’t always work. And we, women have to speak out on male violence. We also have to speak out on victim-blaming; that is atrociously widespread in this patriarchy.

As Laurelin once wrote:

‘Victim mentality’ assumes that there is something about the victim that makes them a victim, something the victim does that invites victimisation, and that therefore the victim is responsible for their suffering. It asks the victim to take responsibility for the actions of their aggressor. And it is used because it easier to pile more blame upon the vulnerable than it is to stand up and point out that there is something wrong with the world in which the victim, the aggressor, and the speaker live.

— from Perpetrator mentality.

I wish all the victim-blaming which pervades society would stop. It is the aggressor’s fault when a woman is raped, abused or beaten up; it is, broaderly, patriarchy’s fault, not the victim’s. But how do we explain that within a culture that is contaminated by sick messages (rape ideologies) like these?= ““Women don’t know their own minds; men know better what women really want and need sexually,” “A woman might not want it at first, but once she gets a taste of hot sex, she can’t get enough,” “Women are sexually manipulative,” “Getting her drunk is a way to get her in the mood,” or “All women are whores at heart and want to be fucked by any available man;”” these are misogynistic messages that come straight from the mainstream contemporary pornography industry. Fact: we live in a rape culture.

I go to college five days a week and I have to put up with the fact that I’m studying in the same classroom as men of my age who probably use porn (just under half of the class is male; a little more than half is female). It makes me sick. When I hear guys laugh at sexist porn or rape jokes, it demoralizes me, but I’d rather remain quiet. Sometimes, these things still shock me too. Probably because I so much want them to stop; I want this pornified culture to stop. But then, after the ‘surprise’ effect is over (it usually lasts for 5 minutes at the most), I just feel terribly exhausted and distraught and I almost feel like shouting at them, “Fuck off with your porn! You woman-haters! You’re fucking abusing women, only by watching this.” Sometimes I swear I wish I could say that to them, but I don’t. . . because I know I’d get terribly slammed for that. I’d be hated, just for telling the truth. 😦

Thus, I’d rather work with women, or get the chance to talk to the women whenever I can. Because I know that, 90% of the time, women will listen to me (and sometimes will discuss the issue at length) when I say to them that pornography is degrading, woman-hating, violent, etc.

Finally, I would like to add that this is pointless women arguing with each other or hating each other in this world, because it distracts us from seeing who really is in power in this society, who is in a position of privilege, i.e. men in a patriarchy. I believe that when women fight or are being cruel to each other it can be called “harem politics” (as some writer once suggested – see quote below). Women who fight, who hurt each other, who are jealous of each other, etc will not unite against patriarchy.

I mean, of course, we all screw up sometimes. We all sometimes happen to, intentionally or unintentionally, hurt each others, e.g. Woman A hurts Woman B, then Woman C hurts Woman D, etc. and vice-versa, etc. Arguments we sometimes have among female survivors of male violence and among women as a class are patriarchy-related. Patriarchy intends to perpetually distract us from being angry at the male-supremacist system which maintains rape, pornography, prostitution, battery, etc as “inevitable facts of life.”

Patriarchy often disconnects women from each other. Woman-hating is historical. Male supremacy takes different forms: patriarchal religions, marriage, forced childbearing, prostitution, pornography, institutions that protect gender roles, etc. The list is big. I believe that women would have to identify all sites of oppression under patriarchy if they ever want to be able to overthrow the system.

Patriarchists are counting on our ignorance, our disconnection from each other, our refusal to see how much their society and culture hates us, our refusal to see all the harms men have been doing to us throughout history. Patriarchists are counting on all that. They “are betting that we cannot face the horror of their sexual system and survive,” as Dworkin wrote in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (p. 224). This is why, like many other women, I struggle everyday in this patriarchal culture. . .

“The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable. The power of the master is absolute and incontrovertible. His authority is protected by civil law, armed force, custom, and divine and/or biological sanction. Slaves characteristically internalize the oppressor’s view of them, and this internalized view congeals into a pathological self-hatred. Slaves typically learn to hate the qualities and behaviors which characterize their own group and to identify their own self-interest with the self-interest of their oppressor. The master’s position at the top is invulnerable; one aspires to become the master, or to become close to the master, or to be recognized by virtue of one’s good service to the master. Resentment, rage, and bitterness at one’s own powerlessness cannot be directed upward against him, so it is all directed against other slaves who are the living embodiment of one’s own degradation. Among women, this dynamic works itself out in what Phyllis Chesler has called “harem politics”. The first wife is tyrant over the second wife who is tyrant over the third wife, etc. The authority of the first wife, or any other woman in the harem who has prerogatives over other women, is a function of her powerlessness in relation to the master. The labor that she does as a fuck and as a breeder can be done by any other woman of her gender class. She, in common with all other women of her abused class, is instantly replaceable. This means that whatever acts of cruelty she commits against other women are done as the agent of the master. Her behavior inside the harem over and against other women is in the interest of the master, whose dominance is fixed by the hatred of women for each other. Inside the harem, removed from all access to real power, robbed of any possibility of self-determination, all women typically act out on other women their repressed rage against the master; and they also act out their internalized hatred of their own kind. Again, this effectively secures the master’s dominance, since women divided against each other will not unite against him.”
–- Andrea Dworkin, in Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, pp. 85-86.

ETA (10/30/08): I just added the sentence “Misogyny is also contemporary,” and I definitely should have done it before (see comments).

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Resources and Stuff…

It’s been a long time since the last time I blogged. Been busy dealing with some very urgent and important real life problems that needed sorted out. . .

A few things I would like to bring up:

— In September, the Eighteenth Carnival of Radical Feminists, exploring a radical feminist understanding of hierarchy and class, was up at Witchy’s place. There will be the Nineteenth Carnival of Radical Feminists up at Pisaquari’s place, Buried Alive.

— The Stop Porn Culture Slideshow is back online! Please read my post I Blame The Porno-iarchy for a good introduction to it.

— A new website is up (from an email I received):

Our Voices Matter (OVM) is a new, grassroots, online project being launched to bring to the forefront the voices of individuals who have been harmed by prostitution, pornography, and/or trafficking. OVM seeks to provide a safe space for survivors to give voice to how prostitution, pornography, and trafficking have impacted their lives.

Our Voices Matter aims to shatter silences, create healing, raise awareness and incite action. OVM seeks to gather the pain, hurt, abuse, and horrors of survivors into a loud, overwhelming, and hopeful outcry that can and will be heard. OVM is an assertion that women and children matter; that the quest for a day when women and children are not bought and sold is worth fighting for; and that real social change is imperative to actualizing this goal.

Our Voices Matter seeks your involvement:

* Share your testimony. We welcome written, audio, and video testimony as well as art, poetry, and other creative mediums. Testimony can be shared anonymously or with a pseudonym. All communications are confidential.

* Spread the word. Please circulate this link to individuals and groups that may be interested in taking part. Please post the available flier in your community or at your local rape crisis center, battered women’s shelter or other community space for women.

You can also share your story anonymously (or by using a nickname) here on my blog if you’ve been harmed, affected by pornography or harmed in the sex industry. Survivors of pornography and prostitution, let your voices be heard. Your stories matter.

— A new film, by Chyng Sun & Miguel Picker, The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality & Relationships is now available from the Media Education Foundation website.

— Also, from Melissa Farley of Prostitution Research & Education:

. . . Despite the illogical attempt of some to distinguish prostitution from trafficking, trafficking is simply the global form of prostitution. Sex trafficking may occur within or across international borders, thus women may be either domestically or internationally trafficked or both. Young women are trafficked for sexual use from the countryside to the city, from one part of town to another, and across international borders to wherever there are men who will buy them.

Prostitution is widely socially tolerated, with the buyers socially invisible. Even today, many mistakenly assume that prostitution is sex, rather than sexual violence, and a vocational choice, rather than a human rights abuse. Although clinicians are beginning to recognize the overwhelming physical violence in prostitution, its internal ravages are still not well understood. There has been far more clinical attention paid to sexually transmitted diseases among those prostituted than to their depressions, lethal suicidality, mood disorders, anxiety disorders (including post-traumatic stress disorder) dissociative disorders, substance abuse, and traumatic brain injury. Regardless of its legal status or its physical location, prostitution is extremely dangerous for women. Homicide is a frequent cause of death.

Prostitution is an institution akin to slavery, one so intrinsically discriminatory and abusive that it cannot be fixed–only abolished. At the same time, its root causes must be eradicated as well: sex inequality, racism and colonialism, poverty, prostitution tourism, and economic development that destroys traditional ways of living. The conditions that make genuine consent possible are absent from prostitution: physical safety, equal power with johns and pimps, and real alternatives. It is a cruel lie to suggest that decriminalization or legalization will protect anyone in prostitution. Until it is understood that prostitution and trafficking can appear voluntary but are not in reality free choices made from a range of options, it will be difficult to garner adequate support to assist those who wish to escape but have no other choices. Enforcement of international agreements challenging trafficking and prostitution can aid in this effort as can laws challenging men’s purchase of sex.

It is important to address men’s demand for prostitution. Acceptance of prostitution is one of a cluster of harmful attitudes that encourage and justify violence against women. Violent behaviors against women have been associated with attitudes that promote men’s beliefs that they are entitled to sexual access to women, that they are superior to women and that they are licensed as sexual aggressors. Those concerned with human rights must address the social invisibility of prostitution, the massive denial regarding its harms, its normalization as an inevitable social evil, and the failure to educate students in the mental health and public health professions. Trafficking and prostitution can only exist in an atmosphere of public, professional and academic indifference.

— from the article Human Trafficking and Prostitution.

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And, finally. . . for my little return to the blogosphere, let’s chill out a little and put some music on!

Here is Neneh Cherry, one of my favorite (female) singers, in the video of Woman:

Lyrics of Woman:

You gotta be fortunate
You gotta be lucky now
I was just sitting here
Thinking good and bad
But I’m the kinda woman
That was built to last
They tried erasing me
But they couldn’t wipe out my past
To save my child
I’d rather go hungry
I got all of Ethiopia
Inside of me
And my blood flows
Through every man
In this godless land
That delivered me
I’ve cried so many tears even the blind can see

Chorus:
This is a woman’s world.
This is my world.
This is a woman’s world
For this man’s girl.
There ain’t a woman in this world,
Not a woman or a little girl,
That can’t deliver love
In a man’s world.

I’ve born and I’ve bread.
I’ve cleaned and I’ve fed.
And for my healing wits
I’ve been called a witch.
I’ve crackled in the fire
And been called a liar.
I’ve died so many times
I’m only just coming to life.

Chorus

My blood flows
Through every man and every child
In this godless land
That delivered me
I cried so many tears even the blind can see

Chorus

[Please note: I do not agree with every lyrics in the song, just some bits and pieces I can relate to.]

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On Choices (Part 2): Prostitution and the Agency of Johns

Introduction

This post is a follow-up to my previous (March 2008) post On Choices.

A couple of important points I had made in that post:

1/ Prostitution is a global industry of sexual exploitation in which sex is traded for money, clothing, food, drugs, shelter, or favors. Prostitution includes strip bars, lap-dancing clubs, massage parlors, brothels, saunas, adult and child pornography, street walking, live sex shows, phone sex, prostitution rings, Internet pornography, escort services, peep shows, ritual abuse, and mail order bride services.

2/ The ‘sex’ industry has done a great job in focusing the debate on “women’s choices”, while the focus of any discussion on the subject should be on the consumers who CHOOSE to use pornography, and, in the case of prostitution, on the johns who CHOOSE to buy women for sex.

 

Agency: Who really has it?

One of the most common misrepresentation and accusation that gets thrown at radical feminist who take a stand against pornography and prostitution is that we’re somehow “denying women’s choices” or that we’re “ignoring women’s agency” in all this.

I know that in my previous post I stated that I acknowledged the lack of choices that most women who enter the ‘sex’ industry have. I still do. I meant that, in a patriarchy, women in general have more or less limited choices and that our agency is often shaped by patriarchal logic, by male supremacy. I meant that most of the women and girls who end up in prostitution are the female human beings with the most limited choices.

Still, I’ll tell you what I think of this “rad fems deny women’s choices” accusation:

Rad fems do not “deny women’s choices.”

Yes, we, women as a class, do have agency, but it is somehow more or less restricted within the boundaries of patriarchy. The male-supremacist system is not here to benefit us, which always more or less limits our choices.

Accusatory people haven’t properly read our work or haven’t paid enough attention to all our words. I, myself, in my post On Choices, wrote:

“I believe it is possible that there are a few women out there who do freely choose to enter the industry, are fully aware of what’s involved and/or make a lot of money. Still, I do not believe it is honest people focusing all their attention on those few somewhat privileged women while ignoring the vast majority of prostituted women who never got the chance to choose a better life, who are being controlled and mistreated by pimps, and who are used and abused by johns.”

In another post, Prostitution, Trafficking and Law, that came after that, I wrote:

“Never will I stop being on the side of the overwhelming majority of prostituted women who never got the chance to get a better life and are suffering unbearable pain and injury on a daily basis!”

The fact is that Melissa Farley, a feminist researcher on prostitution, and some colleagues of hers conducted a large-scale study interviewing 854 people (who were in prostitution) across nine countries. The results of this research can be found here. 89% of those prostituted or prostituting people (most of them women) stated that they wanted to escape prostitution immediately. Which makes it obvious that their choices and agency were limited within this cruel industry.

Farley has carried on researching on prostitution ever since, one of her most recent studies being on the ‘sex’ industry in Nevada. Farley was repeatedly slandered and misrepresented by the pro-prostitution lobby and its followers. She was repeatedly slandered and misrepresented by some women who claimed they advocated “the rights of women”.

But what was most unfair and disturbing was that the voices of the 89% of those prostitutes who said they wanted out of prostitution were denied and silenced by the pro-prostitution lobby. People who claimed they “defended sex workers’ rights” refused to hear those important voices. The voices of those so many prostitutes, who’d made it clear that prostitution is not a “career choice” but abuse and violence on a daily basis, were silenced by the pro-prostitution lobby in order to try to promote their agenda (i.e. “prostitution as work”).

“Melissa Farley is lying”, “Biased research” or some other foolishness, the pro-prostitution lobby and its followers said. No, there was no way that lobby was going to believe such a comprehensive research and the voices of the so many prostitutes who had been interviewed in it. . . because, obviously, there was so much ‘vested interest’ in protecting the ‘sex’ industry for those pro-prostitution folks, right? (rhetorical question)

Recently, I left a comment on Rebecca Mott’s blog, telling her that she was NOT the only ‘example of the harms of the sex trade’ (as she put it). I’ve met women in the radical feminist movement who are survivors of the sex trade. I’ve been in touch with an anti-prostitution organization that helps women exit the sex trade. And most of the members of that organization are radical feminists and they are very pro-Swedish model abolitionists because they have worked with so many prostituted women and girls who wanted out of the sex trade, not “better working conditions”.

I also said to Rebecca:

“You are far away from being the only survivor of prostitution. I’ve read and heard so many stories similar to yours. These important stories have so much educated me on the harms of prostitution. Two years and a half ago, I was ignorant, i.e. I had no idea that all of this was happening in prostitution ’cause I had never read nor heard stories like these.”

I love Rebecca. She’s one of my favorite writers. And, by speaking out her truth, she’s hoping to help many women who are or have been in the sex trade to be heard and/or speak out on the harms that are inherent in prostitution.

Thing is that when we criticize pornography and prostitution, we sometimes hear (but not always) someone say “But my friend does porn or strips or prostitutes and she likes it”. Well, here is how I would respond to this: I would never judge your friend for her choices and I don’t know her exact circumstances or what the experience really means to her. I think she is an exception because the circumstances within which most women and girls who enter prostitution and pornography are as follows:

— past experience of child sexual abuse, rape or physical abuse; because when a woman or a girl has been raped or molested (sometimes repeatedly) in childhood, she is more likely to be re-victimized, and more vulnerable to recruitment for pornography and prostitution. By this, we do not imply that a woman who has been abused in the past is incapable of making choices, but we are just trying to shed light on all the complex feelings that abuse (especially rape) entails: it is very traumatic and it can make you believe that you’re just a “sexual object” or a “thing”, that it is your only value or purpose in this world. Abuse in general often leads to self-hatred in the victim, and the victim sometimes needs to find a place where they can have a feeling of “being loved” or “empowered” (even if it’s fake). All these feelings and more. To summarize study findings, research carried out interviewing prostitutes (some of whom had pornography made of them) and clinical literature on different types of prostitution, it is estimated that between 65% and 95% of those in prostitution were sexually assaulted as children;

— poverty, economic hardship, or homelessness; because, yes, serious money problems can lead some women to entering the ‘sex’ industry;

— international and domestic trafficking; because some women are transported by pimps from one place to another for the purpose of prostitution. And many of the practices systematically used by pimps to control women in prostitution — sensory deprivation, dehumanization, threats to family, deliberately induced exhaustion — are the same as those used by military torturers, as also recently reported in Traffick Jamming;

— and socialization to the pornified culture; because we, radical feminist, do acknowledge that some women choose to enter the ‘sex’ industry but also acknowledge that most of the choices of those women are probably uninformed, i.e. some young women have only seen the “glamorization” side of the pornstitution industry and are not fully aware of what it entails.

As I wrote in On Choices:

“There are many agencies that specialize in recruiting young women to the porn industry with the promise of making big money and becoming a star. Indeed, the money is an attraction for mostly young, working-class women who face limited choices in a harsh economy. Given those economic realities and the glamorization of pornography, it’s not surprising that some young women will see this as a viable career option. Undeniably, the whole culture promotes the “porn star” job as a glamorous job. In TV shows, the image of the “porn star” is shown as “liberating” and “empowering” for women.”

We do not imply that every woman who makes certain choices is poor, uneducated, and/or horribly abused. We are not saying that every single woman or girl in the ‘sex’ industry has had exactly the same experience. We just want to point out to the fact that most women in prostitution (i.e. that includes pornography) are the female human beings who have entered the ‘sex’ industry with choices that are not really free. We are saying that their agency, in general, has been somehow unfortunately constrained, limited or influenced by patriarchal (il)logic and we deeply empathize with them.

And we, radical feminists, sincerely empathize with those women because WE KNOW they are being terribly harmed in the pornstitution industry. Here is another page on things to know, based on research, not mere guesses.

Now, the REAL question is: Who really has agency in this patriarchal society?

I will tell you who really has it in a patriarchy:

It is the john who really has it, the porn user, the strip club patron, etc. It is HIM.

He has the agency of buying a female body, the body of another human being, and do whatever he wants to her, whether she wants it or not.

He has the agency of buying, renting or downloading movies that contain images of her naked body wounded or hurt, her personality dehumanized, her self humiliated and degraded, her mind so harmed (sometimes beyond recovery), her face sometimes shown onscreen as enjoying the torture because the pimps control the script and run the show for the johns. Movies and images of her to which the john/porn user cruelly jerks off to.

He has the agency of going to clubs where her body is exposed, objectified and degraded for his own selfish pleasure.

He has the agency of creating the demand for an industry within which she, for the most part, will not have full agency and will be hurt.

He can insult her. He can beat her. He can rape her. He can tie her up. He can throw money at her and say “That wasn’t rape ’cause I paid you”.

He can reproduce the image of her being degraded, tortured and/or hurt, this image being used as a ‘jerk-off’ material, and share it with other men at an exponential rate, technologically speaking (i.e. internet porn, etc.).

He can do anything to her. Because HE has the full agency to do so.

Within patriarchy, his agency is, more often than not, unlimited. Because the patriarchy works toward his advantage. Male supremacy serves him, fulfills his purpose.

He’d rather try to prove his “masculinity” to his male friends by using porn or buying prostitutes. He’d usually rather go toward that direction instead of questioning the whole concept of masculinity altogether. Generally, he doesn’t even know that masculinity is not innate, that he could choose humanity instead.

His agency is thoroughly defended in a patriarchy. However, within a society that purports to be egalitarian, the patriarchal defense of his agency to use and abuse women has to be implicitly expressed under the cover of “her agency”, i.e. framed in arguments such as “That woman, she wants it, they all do” or “women freely choose to prostitute” and blah, blah, blah. . . ad nauseam. . . ultimately tacitly meaning (in fact): “I, the man, want to degrade her and use her for my own pleasure, thus I have the ‘right’ to do so” or “I, the man, freely choose to have her as my prostitute, my ‘fuck object’ or my property”. This is what you hear when you get to the core of his thinking.

 

“Subhumanity”: Who really sees prostituted women as ‘subhuman’?

I already explained why we, radical feminists, refer to women in the ‘sex’ industry as ‘prostituted women’ somewhere in there.

There is an unfounded accusation that has been thrown at radical feminists and that stuns me: “Radfems see women in the sex industry as ‘subhumans'”. Blah-the-fucking-blah.

I will tell you who really sees prostituted women (“sex workers”) as ‘subhuman’:

The male with the pornographic mind does, NOT radical feminists.

As Rebecca Mott recently posted on her blog:

“When men rape prostitutes, it is not real. How can there be a rape, when he has paid.

Injuries on prostituted women and girls don’t matter, it just rough sex. Men know her fear or lack of reaction is just part of the act.

Hadn’t he seen in porn over and over that women like her like to be raped. Women like her enjoy violence with sex.

Didn’t porn say that whores will do anything for money.

I know in my body as it remembers the tortures men did to me, that they saw me as real-life porn. I know as I remember their contempt, their laughter at my injuries and not believing that I could feel pain.

God, I remember those men posing me on the bed, against the wall, in alleys, on top of graves, in back rooms at the club. At those times, flashes of photos from the hard-core porn went over me.

I know I was infected by porn, as I became a robot performing the sex acts the men wanted.”

I certainly do not believe that the men who bought and abused Rebecca were seeing prostituted women as real human beings. I believe that they saw them as ‘subhuman’.

It is not uncommon to encounter this type of men. The men with the pornographic mind. Many non-prostituted women frequently meet those men in real life. But prostituted women, unfortunately, are the ones who are the most horribly abused by these men.

These men believe in the sexual philosophy of the Marquis de Sade (whether they know it or not), which is, to quote:

“. . . there is no more selfish passion than lust; none that is severer in its demands; smitten stiff with desire, ’tis with yourself you must be solely concerned, and as for the object that serves you, it must always be considered as some sort of victim, destined to that passion’s fury. Do not all passions require victims?”

— Sade, in Juliette, p.269.

I totally disagree that “all passions require victims.” There are many sexual and sensual passions that can be enjoyed with the inclusion of the respect toward another person’s dignity, the inclusion of the caring, the connection, the equality and the mutuality.

Sade was a rapist, a batterer, a child abuser and the world’s foremost pornographer. Sade has his apologists and his ‘libertarian’ defenders who mistakenly portray(ed) him as an “avatar of freedom”. Sade helped pave the way for the unfair ‘leftist’ defense of pornography we’ve been confronting for years.

Here is de Sade’s conception of sexuality served to the male pornographic mind (translated in its full cruelty): “All that matters is your own selfish male pleasure. Do not care about being cruel to women or treating them as objects. There is nothing more important than your orgasm even if it requires necessary victims.” Cruel conception indeed.

As Andrea Dworkin wrote in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (p.100):

“[Sade’s] convictions are ordinary, expressed often in less grand language. . . they are fully consonant with the practices. . . of ordinary men with ordinary women. . .”

It is to wonder what those ordinary men are influenced by?

Dworkin also wrote:

“. . . pornography and prostitution were one and the same thing. We know that the world’s foremost pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, tortured, raped, imprisoned, beat, and bought women and girls. We know that influential male thinkers and artists who enthused about rape or prostitution or battery had, in many cases, raped or bought or battered women or girls and were also users and often devotees of pornography.”

Seriously, I will tell you who sees prostituted women as ‘subhuman’:

Not radical feminists, we fully empathize with women in the sex industry. We realize that most of them have had a somehow limited agency in patriarchy and that they are being terribly abused by abusive johns.

The johns, the tricks, the porn users, the strip-club patrons, etc. are the ones who really see prostituted women as ‘subhuman’.

They are the ones who think it is their “male right” to treat women in the sex industry as ‘subhuman’ objects.

They are the ones who have the, barely questioned, agency to see women in the sex industry as ‘subhuman’ through pornography, in the act of prostitution or at the strip club, etc.

They are the ones who believe there are necessary victims required for their self-centered orgasm.

They are the ones who create the demand for these widespread crimes against women that are called pornography and prostitution.

They are the ones who believe it is their “male right” to use, objectify, degrade, hurt, harm, abuse, rape, beat up, torture and/or (sometimes) kill women.

They are the ones who believe it is ‘male nature’ to do so, without seriously thinking about how culturally trained their porn use, etc. have been within a culture that unfairly condones such an unfair abuse of female human beings by describing it as “adult entertainment” or “sex work”.

These johns, tricks, porn users, strip-club patrons, etc. are the ones who have to stop seeing prostituted women as ‘subhuman’ and who have to stop creating the demand for a brutal misogynistic and racist pornstitution industry that relies on the discrimination and the ill-treatment of half the world’s population to cater to its consumers/johns’ cruel appetite for the degradation of women and girls.

Postscript: for another excellent resource on prostitution, please see also my previous post Prostitution, Trafficking and Law.

ETA (08/25/2008): For another excellent resource on prostitution, please see also Heart’s new post Voices of Survivors of the Sex Trade: Prostitution Is Sexual Slavery, Gang-Rape, Sexual Abuse.

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I Blame The Porno-iarchy

Intro/Definitions

As I define those terms (dunno how other radical feminists define them):

‘Porno-iarchy’ or ‘pornoiarchy’: a patriarchal society invaded and controlled by pornography & the culture it has pornified, as well as a society upheld by men’s cruel needs for female sexual subordination. For proper definitions of what pornography really is (stated by different feminist writers), please click here.

‘Pornified Culture’: a culture which has been invaded by the mainstreaming of pornography.

‘Sex Poz’: my light-hearted abbreviation of “sex-positive”, a label which the pro-pornstitution ‘feminists’ often use to describe themselves, while deliberately attempting to conflate pornography with sex as if they were the same thing. See one of my comments at Rage Against the Man-chine for an expression of my opinion on this lack of distinction between porn and sex.

‘Pornstitution’ (Originally coined by Sam Berg): Pornography and prostitution, both the same part of the same misogynistic ‘sex’ industry. Also highlights the fact that the sex trade is a system of interconnected misogynistic forms of commodified sexual abuse.

‘Rad Fem’: just an abbreviation of Radical Feminist, that’s all, as I learned this shortening term (‘radfem’) from my private discussions within the Genderberg feminist anti-porn forums.

‘Malestream media’: Mainstream corporate media, largely controlled by white capitalist men in suits.

‘Herstory’: the history of women (as the term is sometimes used by radical feminists) , not the history of men (which has always been more popular and talked about in a patriarchy).

 

Why do I blame the porno-iarchy?

I blame the porno-iarchy for all the sexual violence done to the women in the ‘sex’ industry.

I blame the porno-iarchy for the lack of choices most women who enter prostitution have (when I say ‘prostitution’, that also includes pornography as a form of prostitution of course).

I blame the porno-iarchy for the sexual violence perpetrated against so many women and girls who are in prostitution.

I blame the porno-iarchy for all the misogyny, degradation, abuse, and racism that are inherent and blatant in the content of mainstream pornography.

I blame the porno-iarchy for all the harms caused by pornography to women and children (and sometimes to men) in this unjust male-supremacist society.

I blame the porno-iarchy for so many women and girls having to make themselves look “sexy” or “fuckable” to men in the goal to achieve a false sense of “empowerment” (been there myself when I used to go clubbing).

I blame the porno-iarchy for the fact that so many women and girls have to force themselves to have sex when they don’t necessarily want to in order to please their boyfriends and husbands.

I blame the porno-iarchy for the fact that so many women and girls are sexually coerced into sexual acts (coming from the ‘domination/subordination’ pornographic mind) they do not really want to practice.

I blame the porno-iarchy for all the rapes, the battery, the sexual and physical violence against (mostly) women and girls that happen in this culture.

I blame the porno-iarchy for blaming the victims of rape (saying that’s “her fault, she’s responsible for what happened because blah, blah, blah. . .”) and not the rapists.

I blame the porno-iarchy for sometimes not even believing rape victims (saying that “she probably consented or enjoyed it”).

I blame the porno-iarchy for the (usual) censoring and demonizing of radical feminists in the malestream media.

I blame the porno-iarchy for accusing us of “siding with religious zealots”.

I blame the porno-iarchy for not letting us rad fems educate enough people on the harms of pornography ’cause of the malestream media being tied to the pornography industry, ’cause pro-porners are endlessly trying to silence us and ’cause of ‘leftist’ liberal stubborn pornography-protecting mind (as Gail Dines & Robert Jensen say ‘Pornography is a Left Issue‘, not a right-wing one)

I blame the porno-iarchy for some women defending pornography and prostitution in the name of ‘feminism’.

I blame the porno-iarchy for the pro-pornstitution ‘feminists’ being unfairly magnified by malestream media.

I blame the porno-iarchy for slandering us, radical feminists, and totally misrepresenting our views or simply not understanding why we’re so angry at the pornstitution industry (because of the HARMS!!!).

I blame the porno-iarchy for many other things you might also wanna mention to me here, rad fem or anti-porn readers?

 

Acknowledging Harms and Lack of Choice

“She wants it; they all do” is the biggest lie coming from pornographic misogyny.

The vast majority of women in pornstitution do not want all this degradation and torture to happen to them, but they are subject to all this because of Lack of Choice, as I’ve also already explained here and there.

I just read another interesting article, ‘You’re consenting to being raped for money’, about a prostitute who tells us about how “the life” really is like and how prostitution is glamorized in pornified media partly because “[y]ounger women are being coerced into valuing themselves by what they look like and men’s definition of how a woman should be valued. . . Women are being told that their bodies should be accessible at all times to men. . . there is a conspiracy to turn women into readily accessible semen receptacles.” A truly male-supremacist pornified conspiracy indeed!

Although I do not much like the expression “sex work” (more on that soon enough), I believe that the ‘sex’ industry is largely male-controlled (even though there are quite a few women who are now sexploitation business entrepreneurs & who abuse other women) and I do not believe that “outlawing strip clubs & porn” would address the demand for pornstitution, I find the comment that this person left in the Traffick Jamming blog nevertheless very interesting:

 

“The comment by Maggie Hays sums up my experience as a stripper in many ways. The only difference is my boss and the management were women and they were perfectly content to exploit us women just as any man would. I have known women who got into porn and prostitution and I know all about how sex work often leads to violence and S/M. Sex work is inherently violent as it demands the objectification of the person, and what is happening at Kink is merely the final result of a warped and morally bankrupt industry. That is why porn should be outlawed as should strip clubs. These are only legalised forms of prostitution. I saw so much abuse and violence at [sic] criminality at my club, it was insane. Prostitution was openly being conducted as was drug dealing. And we were all regularly physically and mentally abused by the patrons and the staff. I have been viciously attacked by pro-stripper apologists on stripperweb.com for my testimony, which shows how people on the pro-sex industry side have zero compassion for sex workers and don’t want the truth about the business to be disseminated on the internet.”

— Pamela, in her Traffick Jamming comment.

 Pamela, in case you read here, I can understand that this is so terrible the abuse you have both suffered and witnessed in “sex work”. I hear you, sister. The fact that these pro-porn women (whoever they were) had no consideration for your painful experience and unpleasant feelings regarding prostitution is absolutely horrifying. And I do hope that, wherever you are, you are alright and you’re gonna be alright.

The fact is that once a woman has entered the sex industry and she is harmed within it, there is no going back. The damage from past ill-treatment, the PTSD, the pain, the unsettling trauma, etc. are all there. And the pornstitution apologists would have us believe that she “chose it”, thus nothing can be said? Many (especially male) pro-prostitutionists would have us believe that once a prostituted woman has ‘chosen it’ and has been paid, the harms done to her body and mind can then all be dismissed or forgotten. What an anti-woman propaganda! 😦

Also, the ‘sex poz’ lobby would have us believe that prostitution is (for the most part) not abusive, that it is work, and that pornography is liberating or can be. . . What a rhetorical nonsense! Broken record, *yawn*. . . It is such a distressing shame that some women have been deluded into believing all this very nonsense and thus have been encouraged to defend pornstitution.

I do not believe in “sex work”, i.e. “prostitution as a good career option for women”. I believe that prostitution is an inherently harmful and misogynistic form of sexual abuse. This is why I do not call prostitution “sex work”. Prostitution is not the oldest profession, it is the world’s oldest lie.

While prostitution has existed for a very long time, slavery existed before prostitution, as feminist historian Gerda Lerner related in The Creation of Patriarchy. This is an important part of the herstory to know, just as important as knowing about the witch-hunt in early modern Europe, the mass-gynocide caused by patriarchal religion and its pornographic Malleus Maleficarum (See Dworkin’s chapter on the witches in her first book, Woman Hating, for a recap on what happened to women deemed witches during the Inquisition in early modern Europe).

And talking about herstory, prostitution and contemporary society, here is an excellent quote from Sherry Lee Short:

 

“. . . the arguments of pro-sex industry advocates and proponents have a common theme: the industry springs from a liberal mindset and frees women and men, sexually, politically, and spiritually. Part of this logic is that sexuality — particularly women’s sexuality — has been oppressed historically and that the sex industry offers women and men the liberating possibility of unbridled sexual expression. This logic ignores the fact that the use of women in prostitution as well as other forms of sexual commodification has existed for as least as long as there has been an historical record. Thus, if sexual commodification were freeing, then sexual oppression would be uncommon or, more likely, exist only as some curious historical fact. This logic also ignores the reality that the sex industry thrives where the political, social, and religious milieu is fundamentally conservative. It thrives where beliefs about women and children and their roles are the most traditional. . .”

— Sherry Lee Short in Not For Sale, Stark & Whisnant Eds., p.309.

In this patriarchy we’re living in, pro-pornstitution folks are just as reactionary as religious zealots. Both groups uphold patriarchy and perpetuate age-old woman-hating lies. They merely do it in different ways.

I do not believe in “sex work”, just like I do not believe in “feminist porn” (oxymoron). Prostitution and pornography are inherently misogynistic. If sex is about a process of discovery and connection between two people, then there can be no “cookbook”, no ‘recipe guide’ for non-patriarchal sexuality. And to not reiterate, I’ve already expressed my opinion on ‘feminist porn’ somewhere in this post here.

The idea that prostitution is “sex work” is the biggest fallacy of the pro-prostitution lobby. It has been & is being a direct cause for the ever-increasing trafficking and exploitation of women in prostitution.

We, radical feminists, generally refer to women in the sex industry as ‘prostituted women’ because (1) we acknowledge that they’ve had extremely limited choices under patriarchy & we empathize with them, (2) we realize that most of them are under the control of cruel pimps & brutal or hurtful johns, and (3) we want to emphasize the fact that most of the victims of the ‘sex’ industry are female.

More people should realize and admit that most women in prostitution are tremendously and awfully harmed within it.

There is such an incredible victim-blaming in this society and that spreads like sickness. Being a victim is not a character flaw. A rad fem friend once told me about this: Only in a society which regards women who have been abused as responsible for their own victimization, only in a culture that moans that the oppressed should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, can the word “victim” be seen as an insult.

Calling someone a victim is seen as much an insult as calling someone oppressed to some people, including in the academia. Also, the word “victim” also implies that there is a victimizer, which can be very disturbing to recognize for some women who want to feel empowered, such as the ‘sex poz’ feminists for instance.

Some women just do not want to face their oppressed status. And I’ve been there myself once, at some point in my life. I used to live in some sort of ‘denial’ ’cause I wanted to feel empowered and desirable to men a few years back. Because the reality of my inferior status to men would have been just too painful. . . to realize.

I believe that we, women, should all start understanding our inequality, we should all become aware of it in the hope of changing the world in which we live (a world ruled by the patriarchy and the porno-iarchy) and working toward genuine equality between the sexes.

As I said, I believe that discussions on prostitution should now be directed toward the johns, who always have 100% choice in this matter.

The legalization of prostitution does not work. Organized crimes and trafficking still occur in the Netherlands, where prostitution is mistakenly seen as “work”, as it has recently been reported here. There, in this article, a spokeswoman for Equality Now (an anti-trafficking organization) lately said that “[i]nstead of controlling prostitution, legalisation has led to a disastrous outbreak of increased exploitation of women in the sex trade, sex trafficking and other related crimes.”

On the other hand, the Swedish law, that prosecutes johns, pimps & traffickers and provides exit programs for prostitutes, has worked. As recently reported in the Herald Tribune:

 

“Swedish officials have vowed to step up the fight against prostitution, using a unique law that targets sex buyers instead of prostitutes. [. . .]
“Sweden is not a good place for (your) business,” Justice Minister Beatrice Ask said in a warning to those who buy sex or are involved in trafficking. “(There’s) a very big risk of getting caught, and getting caught big time.”
Sweden’s unusual prostitution law, which allows the sale of sex but prohibits the buying, faced ridicule when it was introduced nine years ago. However, other countries are now considering emulating the Swedish model, which officials say has reduced the demand for prostitutes and reshaped attitudes toward the sex trade. [. . .]
The plan boosts policing against sex buyers and expands rehabilitation centers for sex workers and trafficking victims. It also trains hospital workers and social services employees to deal with suspected cases of prostitution and trafficking.
Integration Minister Nyamko Sabuni noted that men are the primary buyers of sex.
“Prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes is a serious barrier for social equality and equality between the sexes,” she said.

 

The thing is to be able to understand the Swedish prostitution law and its success, more people must understand the harms intrinsic to prostitution itself. More people must understand that prostitution is not “work”, it is violence against women, as the failure of legalization and the success of the Swedish 1999 legislation have proven.

[ETA: No, by saying “lack of choice”, rad fems do not “deny women’s choices”. We do NOT see prostitutes as “people with no agency”. Clarification of that in this new post here, On Choices (part 2): Prostitution and the Agency of Johns.]

 

Pornography: Looking into the Reflection of Porno-iarchy.

Stop Porn Culture, a feminist anti-pornography movement, has recently launched a new website, on which people (especially women) who don’t know what pornography is really about (i.e. who still believe ‘this is just pictures of people having sex’) can watch the most recently updated slide show which presents a feminist critique of the contemporary mainstream pornography industry (*you must be 18 or over to watch this – Warning: may trigger*) and then they can witness the undeniable misogyny of the content of porn.

As the creators of this slideshow said in the script for it:

“This presentation provides a critical analysis of these sexist and racist images that are so harmful to children, women, and men; to our relationships; and to the culture at large. For many, this show is an introduction to a feminist understanding of the pornographic culture, and the slides may be hard to look at. We have included these harsh images not to shock but to help us understand porn culture so that we can organize against it.”

I have seen that slideshow, I have been trained to be able to present it at some point in the future, and I do know how well-made and eye-opening it is. After projections of it in large rooms, I would always notice how (usually) more than three quarters of the audiences were horrified by this appalling abuse of women that pornography is and how this slideshow would stir anyone (who has at least a remnant of humanity left within him/herself) into action.

Although I do not visit pro-porn blogs anymore, I lately got told by rad fems about how silencing these people are trying to be and how intolerant they really are.

As it has, a few days ago, been reported by A Birch Tree, there has been a misunderstanding of the law and the blogger also said:

“I suppose what really ruffles the finches’ feathers [referring to the name of the blog Tree of Finches] is that the pro-porn lobby seems to show so much concern for the “rights” of porn participators when it comes to using their images without proper documentation, but not when it comes to, say, their terrifyingly high rates of PTSD or the fact that 80% of them don’t even get the courtesy of a condom, much less how they tend to discount the stories of any woman who has been horribly abused by the porn industry. No no, their (arbitrarily applied) concern is over documentation. That’s obviously the important issue.”

In the slideshow script, it is written:

“. . . the women’s faces are not blurred and are often recognizable. We cannot know how these women would feel about having their images used in this presentation. We have made the difficult decision to show them, because the women’s facial expressions are crucial to understanding these images. We ask you to recognize with us the moral complexity of this decision, keeping in mind that these women are human beings with dignity. “

 

As a commenter at A Birch Tree’s said:

“I don’t think that the porn slideshows are intended primarily to change the minds of porn-users – though they do (if I remember the Stop Porn Culture slideshow rightly – it’s offline) present the images with a feminist critique, pointing out the aggression and hatred in the images. The slideshows are also a way for women & other activists who don’t use porn and have had little exposure to it to get an idea of the reality of porn. It’s all too easy to assume that porn is just images of people having sex. . .”

  The matter is in no doubt complex. If you don’t show pornography, then people can just say, “Pornography is just about people having sex,” and thus easily shrug off the issue. And if you do show pornography, then you can possibly trigger some rape or prostitution survivors in the audience. But then anybody can decide to stop watching the slideshow or get out of the room (if it’s a public presentation) anytime though.

Going back to the subject of the women in the images, I remember a line of the slideshow script that says “in some DP [double penetration] films, the woman is shown grimacing, or saying things like “that hurts” or “please make it stop”; her apparent pain is part of the appeal” while at the same time on the screen the slideshow is showing pornographic pictures of women suffering, their terrible facial expressions of pain.

Once we understand that these women are victims and not “actresses”, it becomes perfectly understandable while we would show that slideshow.

Ghastly and horrendous images of military torture or victims of war have for a long time been broadcast on television and have often been recognized as being the greatest incentive behind the mass demonstrations against war and military torture.

I doubt the thousands of victims who were shown on TV, suffering or drenched in blood, would all have given their consent to the filming and photos of their bodies being used by anti-war protesters. The children burned with napalm and the victims of Abu Graib couldn’t possibly have given consent to have their photos used by journalists and anti-war or anti-torture activists.

Saying that none of the images of pornographic torture, showing the women humiliated, suffering and having their bodies being injured, should be allowed to be used by feminist anti-pornography educators within the framework of the feminist critique of the pornstitution industry is just like saying that the free speech of anti-war activists should be suppressed.

To restrict the political use of images merely because the victimized subjects did not give permission could make whole categories of journalism impossible (and I don’t care if pro-porners later on deny all the facts that I’m writing here — as denying facts and slandering rad fems is all they do anyway).

We are neither the users who cruelly masturbate to this atrocious and widespread crime against women that is called pornography, nor are we the pornographers who capitalize on women’s pornographic ordeals.

We show the slideshow because we want to stir people into feminist actions against the pornography industry. We want to stop the demand for this gruesome abuse. We want to stop the abuse itself, by educating communities and working toward reducing (largely) male demand for female sexual slavery, torture, agony and suffering.

Something tells me that porn apologists, deep down, know that our feminist anti-pornography slideshow is a powerful educating tool against their anti-woman propaganda (although it is something else that they will inevitably deny as usual, of course). That is why they’re trying to silence us. Their protest against our slideshow is nothing else but another attempt to shut us up. And it will fail! 🙂

As Diana Russell, a long-time antiporn slideshow presenter wrote in her 1993 book Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm:

“I have found that showing pornography is an effective and rapid consciousness-raiser about misogyny and male views of women. It helps to enhance women’s understanding of many males’ dangerous notions of what it is to be a man. It often also succeeds in arousing women viewers’ anger (and some men’s) at the contempt and hatred of women they see in the pictures and captions.”

Anti-porn feminist Diana Russell has been reproducing pornography in her showing of the evidence of harms for decades. There has been no legal challenge that I’m aware of.

As a formerly prostituted woman (that a friend of mine knew) once said:

“Please DO look at the photographs, which are not owned by the people depicted, but by the torturers. As long as the only people who see these and others like them are the torturers and torture and pornography consumers, women haters, abusers and traffickers win, because ordinary people will not see what pornography is really about.”

Showing the slideshow is one of the best way to make our point when we say that mainstream pornography is misogynistic. Contemporary pornography is a lot more about images and films than words, so restricting our critique to words would be inadequate.

One of the aims of the feminist anti-pornography slideshow is to encourage empathy for porn performers (whom porn consumers do not regard as human beings, but cruelly use them as “fuck-objects” instead). I remember how sad and angry I felt after I’d attended that slideshow’s screening. While the slideshow is onscreen, we witness these women’s suffering in it, which makes it known so it cannot be ignored.

If pornography is protected as “free speech”, then so should be any criticism of it while showing its images.

Seeing pornography is like looking into the reflection of porno-iarchy, taking a look into the mirror of male dominance. It is nauseating, distressing but sometimes it is necessary when we want to educate other people to combat the harms.

 

Porno-iarchy’s Influences: The Undeniable Links between Pornography, Sexual Coercion and Violence

The harms of pornography are undeniable.

Pornography increases the belief in rape myths. Examples of the rape myths that regular pornography users (and sometimes also people living in a rape culture) are more likely to believe are as follows:

[Rape Myths]

“Women are eager to accommodate seemingly any and every sexual request.”

“When a woman says ‘no,’ she means ‘yes’.”

“Women incite men to rape.”

“Women secretly fantasize about being raped.”

“Rape doesn’t happen very often.”

“False reporting of rape is common.”

“Women secretly enjoy being raped.”

“Women who are drunk are willing to engage in any kind of sexual activity.”

“Real rapes are only committed by strangers.”

“Women who are sexually assaulted ‘ask for it’ by the way they dress or act.”

“A woman who goes to the home or the apartment of a man on their first date implies that she is willing to have sex.”

“Any healthy woman can successfully resist a rapist if she really wants to.”

“Many women have an unconscious wish to be raped, and many then unconsciously set up a situation in which they are likely to be attacked.”

“If a girl engages in necking or petting and she lets things get out of hand, it is her own fault if her partner forces sex on her.”

“Being roughed up is sexually stimulating to many women.”

“Sometimes the only way a man can get a cold woman turned on is to use force.”

“Many times a woman will pretend she doesn’t want to have intercourse because she doesn’t want to seem loose, but she’s really hoping the man will force her.”

[End of Rape Myths]

There obviously are many more rape myths perpetuated by pornified culture out there that I haven’t mentioned above, but only reading those makes me understand why all my ex-(porn-using) boyfriends didn’t stop coercing me into sexual activities and carried on abusing me after I’d cried, shown my discomfort or said No. And worse still, I can understand why my story is so similar to many other women & girls’ stories.

Women’s oppression is now been kept away from public eye and pushed into the private sphere, where women are most at risk of male violence. No wonder why few rapes end up in convictions. Sexual coercion has become “sexy” in this culture, and women & girls are being trained to submit to men, in just the same way I had been trained to submit to men. During all those years, I’d been consciously ignorant of pornography’s harms while however subconsciously I knew about those harms because I’d experienced them.

Another woman wrote to me on my blog:

“I always feel bad about myself. I can not remember everything but I know I was molested by some relatives who used pornography to show me what to do. I have been sexually harassed, stalked, peeped, raped, hit, grabbed, shaken, name called by many men. I do not have one woman friend who has not had similar experiences. I am 32 years old. What am I supposed to do? I am considered abnormal because i hate pornography. I have been told I need therapy because of my views about men and porn. I am scared too death of what is happening to women. I have no support group in the area where I live for this sort of thing. There must be a better way. I appreciate this site and other sites like it because I do not feel so alone when I read these stories.”

What am I supposed to do?

Fight the lies (*) of porn culture. I hear you, anonymous sister! Don’t feel bad about yourself, you haven’t done anything wrong. I’m so sorry all these terrible things happened to you. (((Big Hugs))) I’m a victim/survivor too. Please join us if you like. The people who tell you you’re abnormal are wrong. You are perfectly normal because you hate pornography, and the folks who tell you the opposite are the ones who need therapy, or more exactly a good anti-porn ‘therapy’. Truth is that this whole fucking pornified culture & society needs a good anti-porn ‘therapy’. Although, I would definitely replace the word ‘therapy’ with ‘education’, radical feminist educational material such as books for instance. Those books educated me about the world I’m living in more than any other books I’d ever read.

The very male-supremacist system that engenders and maintains porno-iarchy has to be smashed out of existence.

No doubt we have a long way to go and a lot of work to do but we mustn’t give up, no matter how many times pro-porners slander us, call us liars, or try to silence us with their empty slurs.

We must carry on because WE KNOW about the undeniable harms that pornography causes. And nobody, no one, can take that knowledge away from us. WE KNOW.

Unfortunately, more people still have to know about us and our feminist anti-pornstitution struggle.

Meanwhile, pornography keeps harming women and children.

Women and girls are being coerced into all sorts of patriarchal sex they do not want.

Women and girls are being raped by men who use pornography.

Young girls, sometimes aged twelve, are being socialized to objectify themselves.

Young boys, as they grow up, learn how to use pornography and objectify women and girls.

Rape jokes and misogynistic jokes keep being told and laughed about.

Pornography keeps sustaining a rape culture.

Men keep using pornography as if it were “just sex” while being blind to the sheer misogyny, racism, and violence against women or, worse (in some cases), while being excited even more by those things that pornography inherently entails.

Men keep coercing their wives & girlfriends into watching pornography and into re-enacting the sexualized humiliations and degradations that are in it.

Pornography keeps influencing men’s minds and actions.

All this and more, ad nauseam. The harms carry on and on.

All this has to stop.

Pornography’s intrinsic harms and sex-based discrimination have to be acknowledged by everyone who calls her/himself a feminist or a pro-feminist, at least.

And the harms of pornography and prostitution will eventually have to be recognized by society at large.

We, radical feminists, will keep speaking out on those harms that the ‘sex’ industry generates and perpetuates.

Surrender, I will not.

Surrender, we will not.

 

(*) Heart has recently created a website “Fight the Lies,” intended to debunk the slanderous myths about radical feminists, BTW.

 

“Women must be the only group, and sex the only means, in which a form of oppression is openly defended, not to mention sold as pleasure and even accepted by some of the oppressed, as a means of their liberation.”
— Catharine A. MacKinnon, in Pornography: Driving the Demand in International Sex Trafficking, Captive Daughters Ed., p.32.

“Sexual capitalism, which has found a way to commoditize nearly every imaginable act of sexual subordination, has even found a way to repackage and recycle some of its victims. As a result, a small number of women who have had lifetimes of abuse and learned their sexuality in the sex industry serving men are now able, often with backing from male sex industrialists, to promote themselves as sex educators in the lesbian and feminist communities. [. . .]
“[Some] formerly prostituted women who promote the sex of prostitution — but now get paid to lecture and publish — provide a message that even some feminists have found more palatable than all the visions and ideas we have shared about how to transform sex, how to love each other in passionate equality as the basis for a future in which women could really be free. [. . .]
“As feminist research. . . shows, women are aware of the threat of men’s violence and change their lives in response to that fear even though they may not have experienced serious assault. Against this everyday reality of ordinary women’s lives, the notion that an orgasm “under any circumstances” could vanquish that fear and remembered vulnerability is perhaps pseudofeminism’s cruelest hoax.”
— Sheila Jeffreys, in How Orgasm Politics Has Hijacked the Women’s Movement. [Emphases Mine]

“For the sake of argument, let’s assume that some women who perform in pornography make completely free choices to participate, as women in the industry often assert that they do, with absolutely no constraints or limitations on them. That could be the case, though it doesn’t alter the unavoidable conclusion that some number of women in the industry — likely a majority, and quite possibly a significant majority — choose under conditions that make choice much more complex (histories of sexual abuse, economic hardship, perceived and/or actual lack of opportunities, within a culture that glamorizes the sex industry).
“In most cases, the consumer has no reliable way to judge which women are participating in the industry as a result of a meaningfully free choice. When a consumer plays a DVD at home, he has no information that could help him make such a judgment. Therefore, he likely is using a woman whose choice to perform was not meaningfully free.
“But what if he had that information about the nature of the conditions, objective and subjective, under which the women made that choice? Even that is not so simple. So long as the industry is profitable and a large number of women are needed to make such films, it is certain that some number of those women will be choosing under conditions that render the concept of “free choice” virtually meaningless. When a man buys or rents a DVD, he is creating the demand for pornography that will lead to some number of women being used — that is, being hurt in some fashion, psychologically and/or physically — no matter what he knows or thinks he knows about a specific woman.”
— Robert Jensen, in Men and Pornography.

“The word pornography, derived from the ancient Greek porné and graphos, means ‘writing about whores’. Porné means ‘whore’, specifically and exclusively the lowest class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut available to all male citizens. The porné was the cheapest (in the literal sense), least regarded, least protected of all women, including slaves. She was, simply and clearly and absolutely, a sexual slave. Graphos means ‘writing, etching, or drawing.’
“The word pornography. . . means the graphic depiction of women as vile whores. [. . .]
“Contemporary photography strictly and literally conforms to the word’s root meaning. . . With the technologically advanced methods of graphic depiction, real women are required for the depiction as such to exist. [. . .]
“In a time of widespread economic impoverishment, it is growing: more and more male consumers are eager to spend more and more money on pornography-on depictions of women as vile whores. Pornography is now carried by cable television; it is now being marketed for home use in video machines. The technology itself demands the creation of more and more porneia to meet the market opened up by the technology. Real women are tied up, stretched, hanged, fucked, gang-banged, whipped, beaten and begging for more. In the photographs and films, real women are used as porneia and real women are depicted as porneia. To profit, the pimps must supply the porneia as the technology widens the market for the visual consumption of women being brutalized and loving it. One picture is worth a thousand words.”
— Andrea Dworkin, in Pornography: Men Possessing Women, pp. 199-202.

“I [feel] deeply wounded by women who named themselves “feminists”, then say how harmless the sex trade is. I am sick of being reasonable about this.
“I say here that you cannot be a feminist and support the sex trade.
“I have said this in many ways and many times. I know that you choose not to hear. But again I say, do not call yourself a feminist and suppport the sex trade. [. . .]
“When you promote the sex trade, you are discounting a whole section of women and girls. You are placing them as sub-humans.
“For, by backing the sex trade, you [are] saying that the performers, lap-dancers, prostituted women and girls, escorts and all the other women and girls in the sex trade do not feel pain. That [they] do not have a life outside of their role in the sex trade. [. . .]
“And I do not believe in feminist porn. I thought feminist politics could go beyond the sexuality of degradation. . .”
— Rebecca Mott, former prostitute, in I Have Had Enough.

[edited to add: 07/28/2008= a while after the wonderful Biting Beaver wrote those words, Buggle reminds us of them. Truth has to be told and re-told. Thank you, sister!]

ETA: I thought about the term “PORNO-IARCHY” because it blends the two words Pornography and Patriarchy. It fuses the two, that’s how I invented it. Patriarchy invented the language. Patriarchy also sometimes controls the language (i.e. “patriarchists have the power of naming”, as I read about that before). So, I say that every radical feminists can invent their own anti-patriarchal language and words as they please. I believe it is fruitful to invent new anti-patriarchy words.

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Thoughts on Men, Oppression, and Sisters

Why do (most) men have to be the way they are? That’s a question I used to ask myself when I was a little younger and abused by them.

Why do we sisters sometimes have doubts about the future? Why do we sisters sometimes lose our strength?

I mean. . . Where do I start?

Few men are interested feminism in the first place. Most men on this earth haven’t even got any interest in any kind of feminism whatsoever, let alone radical feminism.

There are times I’m strong at hiding my deepest feelings about men and oppression, especially sexual oppression.

I mean, there are times when I’m very optimistic. That is when I’m happy about having learned the truth about what’s happening around me, what is wrong with this world and how we, radical feminists, can advocate for real progressive change.

I’m glad to have discovered radical feminism and I will always be. Few women ever get the chance to even know it exists, and, quite honestly, I had lived 26 years of my life without even knowing such a truly radical movement for change existed.

And there are other times, like right now, when I just want to scream and cry. There is such an incredible amount of oppression on this planet (that patriarchy causes) that I just want to stop hiding my deepest feelings.

I am revealing them now:

Will all this ever stop? We, women, do share a common condition. We constantly live in oppression and fear of male violence.

We, radical feminists, believe that masculinity is a social construct. We believe that rape, child sexual abuse, battery, the pornography use, the prostitution of millions and millions of women & girls are not inevitable facts of life.

We instead believe that men are human beings, just like us, but that they have been culturally trained to repress whatever feelings they have in common with us (although it doesn’t always work). Men are routinely socialized to be tough and not to show their sensitivity (too much).

We also believe that rape, child sexual abuse, battery, the pornography use, the prostitution of millions and millions of women & girls happen because men have had such a masculine or hyper-masculine socialization that makes them do these horrible things.

However, I fear that some of my radical feminist sisters might have already thought about the very same thing that crosses my mind. That is, because men are what they’ve become, due to millennia of patriarchy, what if there is no hope for change? What are we going to have to do? Consider that the problem lies in the men? And I think this idea is awful because such statement is somehow underlain by rotten “biological” explanation.

As Andrea Dworkin, a feminist who has always been demonized and misrepresented by the pro-pornography lobby, once stated:

The vital question is: are we to accept their world view of a moral polarity that is biologically fixed, genetically or hormonally or genitally (or whatever organ or secretion or molecular particle they scapegoat next) absolute; or does our own historical experience of social deprivation and injustice teach us that to be free in a just world we will have to destroy the power, the dignity, the efficacy of this one idea above all others? [. . .]

. . . the price we pay [in believing biological ideology] is that we become carriers of the disease we must cure. [. . .]

It is shamefully easy for us to enjoy our own fantasies of biological omnipotence while despising men for enjoying the reality of theirs. And it is dangerous–because genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination. [. . .]

What I mean to say is that, if we seriously start believing that the problem lies in the male biological sex, we lose. Our radical ideas, our progressive belief of gender as being a social construct is completely lost.

I mean, yes, men do oppress us.

Men do hate us in a particular way that they do not want to admit.

Men do objectify us.

Men do want to see us submit to them.

Men do spread our legs, grab our arms painfully tightly, pull our hair, bruise our thighs, make our eyes water, etc.

Men do imagine us everyday saying No but meaning Yes or saying Yes & meaning Yes to any possible humiliation that comes from the hierarchical sex they’ve seen in pornography. (Whatever any other gruesome detail coming from their pornographized mind I’m not going to mention here but you, sisters, know what I’m talking about.)

Men do coerce us into sexual activity.

Men do rape us.

Men do prostitute some of us to feed the demand of other men who want to buy our bodies.

Men do make pornography of some of us.

Men do beat us up.

Men do sexually abuse our children.

Yes, these are the painful realities of abuse in this world. Yes, all this happens every day.

But, you know what, sisters? No, it doesn’t have to be that way.

No, no, and no!

The fact that there are some men on this earth who do not use pornography and are respectful of women proves that rape, battery, etc. are not “natural” or biological inevitabilities, no matter how many writers try to argue the opposite.

Throughout history, there have been (almost exclusively male) writers trying to “prove” that hierarchy and aggression were just unavoidable facts of life, and gosh knows how many times they’ve been quoted by radical feminist writers as examples of defenders of male supremacy by claiming “biological” arguments.

Sisters, I do know that men are so fucking dangerous and I totally agree with Allecto.

Yes, I’m not very optimistic when I hear a male porn user speaking that way to a young woman who’d started an anti-porn petition:

 

“I LIKE WATHCING GOOD BITCHES GETTING FUCKED.
THE PROBLEM IS THE SHIT ROGERS SHOWS IS ALL AMERICAN CRAP WITH THE FILTHY DIRTY AMERICAN GOOK WHORES. THE BETTER PETITION WOULD BE TO SHOW REALLY GOOD HARDCORE UNCENSORED JAPANESE PORN. THE GOOD ONES ARE: GANG RAPE BUKKAKE (COVERED IN CUM) LESBIANS BESTIALITY GANGBANGS NIGGERS FUCKING LITTLE GOOK WHORES. IF YOU SHOW WHITE BITCHES, MAKE THEM MILFS AND AMATURES” [SIC] 

 

— from the mouth of a john/consumer, as reported by Demonista.

 

This clearly shows that the secret thoughts of the porn users, which they sometimes express vividly online, are filled with misogyny and racism.

Neither do I feel optimistic when I hear about a so-called “pro-radical feminist man” (who was in fact a porn user) who sexually assaulted a woman and made pornography of her.

(However, as I have lately become a little more suspicious of male allies without necessarily writing them off, I believe, sisters that we’ll seriously have to be careful in the future, try to find a way of making sure they are genuine.)

Nor do I feel hopeful when I hear about a gang-rape that was filmed by a bunch of male “bukake” fans.

And I certainly am not seeing this world other than cruel when I hear about all the rapes, the sexual coercions that are endlessly perpetrated in this pornified culture by scores of men who don’t even give a shit about any type of feminism.

Nevertheless, sisters, we mustn’t give up the fight. We must continue to ask for a radical change in the behavior of males. We must ask for the complete eradication of gender itself.

As Andrea Dworkin, my favorite (and so unfairly misrepresented) writer, said:

[O]nce we do not accept the notion that men are positive and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely real; but the model itself is not true. We are living imprisoned inside a pernicious delusion, a delusion on which all reality as we know it is predicated.

In my view, those of us who are women inside this system of reality will never be free until the delusion of sexual polarity is destroyed and until the system of reality based on it is eradicated entirely from human society and from human memory. This is the notion of cultural transformation at the heart of feminism. This is the revolutionary possibility inherent in the feminist struggle.

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic nonidentity in women–that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know them so that this division of human flesh into two camps–one an armed camp and the other a concentration camp–is no longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed. The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations–for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right–these institutions are real and they must be destroyed. If they are not, we will be consigned as women to perpetual inferiority and subjugation. […]

Only when manhood is dead–and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it–only then will we know what it is to be free.

— Andrea Dworkin, in The Root Cause.

 

 I am an anarchist of the patriarchy.

I want the whole concept of manhood to die.

In the book Refusing to Be a Man, John Stoltenberg argues that males can refuse to be men and genuinely act out in favor of social equality and justice. Males should be human beings, not men.

The anti-gender ideology which underlies radical feminist politics is very simple once you grasp it: In order to create a just world where rape, battery, child sexual abuse and any form of discriminations would not exist, not only pornography, prostitution and patriarchal religions & institutions must be abolished, but gender itself, i.e. the patriarchal polar role definitions of ‘men’ and ‘women’, what it means to be “masculine” or “feminine”, must be destroyed.

Sexism must be eradicated. And it will be, on the day people stop enforcing it or believing it as inevitable. It will be when males do realize that we, females are no “other species” but human beings just like them, and vice-versa.

No, sisters we mustn’t say the silly excuse “the problem lies in the men”, no matter how tempting this becomes when we lose hope while seeing all this violence against women not being taken truly seriously.

Instead we must carry on asking for change even if all the oppression of the world looks like it has the size of an ocean and we’re trying to empty it with teaspoons, even if we feel like we’re losing our strength.

Recently, I had someone telling me that I was “hysterical” (this isn’t an exactly pro-woman term). But we, rad fems, have a complete passion for being angry, as our anger often suppresses our sadness or pain.

Of course, male-supremacist society particularly dislikes angry women.

But, you know what?

I don’t care about sounding angry or “hysterical”. I want to keep up the fight for radical change.

I wanna keep standing up and carry on asking our oppressors to stop oppressing us or stop apologizing for sexual oppression as “unavoidable”.

I do know, sisters, that pro-porn women are females, just like us, who share our common condition.

But they are also the smokescreen to conceal our real proscribers, our real ‘nemeses’-wannabes: the (largely) male supporters of pornography and prostitution.

The men who defend pornography and prostitution do defend female sexual slavery. They are the real guardians of the status quo. They are the ones who predominantly support the gynocides,(*) the sexual terrorisms that are called pornography and prostitution.

We must carry on exposing the harms of pornography and prostitution while arguing against “biological inevitability”, which is anyway nothing but patriarchal ideology we must refute.

We must ask for men to change, to understand us and to stop hating us (whether they admit it or not).

We must ask for conversations on pornstitution to be directed toward the subject of the johns/users, who always have a 100% choice in the matter. They are the ones who feed the demand for the gynocides,(*) the sexual terrorisms that are called pornography and prostitution.

Apologists for bad things as “being natural” are people who do not want the status quo to be overthrown. They want it to be maintained.

We must be strong, sisters, and keep up the good work.

Those who try to shut us up will not succeed. They will fail. 🙂

No matter how small a group we are. We are a sisterhood.

One day, we’ll get bigger. No matter how much time it takes.

Most women out there do not defend pornstitution and aren’t comfortable with it. That is a fact. We must count on it.

 

(*) Gynocide, according to Dworkin, is “the systematic crippling, raping, and/or killing of women by men.” (Dworkin, Our Blood, p.16) Also referring to the witch-hunt in early modern Europe. Patriarchal religion orchestrated the killing of nine million women as witches. The Malleus Maleficarum was a form of (Christian) pornography.

 

“Female sexual slavery is present in ALL situations where women or girls cannot change the immediate conditions of their existence; where regardless of how they got into those conditions they cannot get out; and where they are subject to sexual violence and exploitation.”
— Kathleen Barry, in Female Sexual Slavery, p. 40.

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The Porn Apologist Bullshit Arguments List and How to Respond with Confidence

See this? Yeah, that’s a broken record. I chose this image for this post because I sincerely believe that all the pro-porners, pro-prostitutionists, pro-sexploitation folks, pro-hate speech & pro-“sex work” activists (or whatever you rad fems wanna call them) sound like a fucking broken record with all their “same old shit” reactionary arguments that do nothing whatsoever to help women as a class, arguments that, on the contrary, bolster the patriarchal anti-woman status quo. Thus, I have decided to write a a list of the porn apologists’ bullshit arguments.

I know these are all parts of the same broken record we hear every day; I know that some people (especially some men) are so stupid and stubborn in defending such a widespread violation of women’s bodies in order to maintain their own selfish sexual pleasure, I know all this. I also know that the pro-pornstitution folks are not only folks we meet online. The pro-porners we meet online are so easy to avoid or dismiss when we want to ignore them (thank fuck for that) while the pro-porners we meet offline are most often our co-workers, classmates, friends, even sometimes partners and so on. These offline people who defend porn aren’t so easy to avoid and, more or less often, we find ourselves in a conversation on pornography with them at some point.

It usually happens like this: They suddenly bring up pornography or prostitution for whatever reason, as part of a “joke” that we don’t find funny at all (but rather sad — as we do know that there’s a terrible sexual slavery going on out there and people keep on denying it) or simply because they’ve been influenced by pornified pop culture. Then we feel like we cannot tolerate these pro-porn arguments any longer so we start informing them on what we know about the sexual slavery industry. But, unfortunately, we’re feeling so upset that we just stop talking. There is just so much to say and we don’t know where to start. And, on top of that, there they go! Talking the same old reactionary bullshit arguments we’ve heard ten thousand times again and again, sounding like the same old broken record. . . And we start losing our confidence. . . so we stop talking.

Therefore I prepared this handy “Porn Apologists’ Bullshit Arguments List and How to Respond to Them with Confidence” collection in order to help myself and other rad fems to challenge those apologies confidently IRL. I constructed it as a dialog:

Porn Apologist: Women freely choose to sell their bodies in pornography and in prostitution. How can you criticize the women’s consent to be in porn?
Rad Fem: Contrary to myths, radical feminists have never criticized women’s involvement in the pornography industry as performers. Instead, we focus on the difficulties within which they make their choice to participate. Documentaries and articles on pornography in the mainstream media (which generally pick a very small number of performers out of the so much larger number of porn performers out there) typically show pornography performers as “happy women who have made a totally free choice”. However, the reality of the circumstances within which the vast majority of those women entered the porn industry are very much different from this whole mainstream media glamorization crap. A lot of thorough research on prostitution (based on interviewing hundreds and hundreds of prostituting women) has shown that child sexual or physical abuse or neglect, poverty, economic hardship, past experience of battery or rape, trafficking, socialization to the sexist and racist pornified culture, etc. are key factors for women who enter the ‘sex’ industry. Feminists do not condemn the women who are in the industry, but we empathize with them. We understand that they are terribly exploited and harmed in this industry. As one woman who used to prostitute said that, while she was in prostitution, she would have yelled from the roof-tops how wonderful being a prostitute was, but that, while now she’s still healing from her prostitution experience, she has “found that the worse thing of exiting prostitution is seeing the real reasons [she] became a prostitute. Seeing it could of never been a choice. It was just a way to self-destruct.”[sic]

Porn Apologist: Women in porn make a lot of money anyway.
Rad Fem: Some research and testimonies have suggested that most strippers, prostitutes and pornography performers do not make a lot of money. Although some do, the idea that all of them make a lot of money is another part of the pornographers’ and the mainstream media’s propaganda. Most female porn performers do not get rich, particularly due to their brief “shelf lives” — male consumers often want to see new women being exploited — so even if pornstituted females initially command a high rate per scene or per movie, their market value as “fresh meat” declines rapidly. Thus, even if there are a few really famous porn “actresses”, the vast majority of the women in pornography leave that business feeling exploited, pained and ashamed by this terrible experience or after being considered “overexposed” by the consumers and producers. So, the pornography industry keeps using and discarding female bodies after having used those human beings as if they were pieces of meat. There have been words coming from people who have been involved in the industry to testify of this brutal reality. Besides, even if these women get paid for performing in porn, does it mean that it should excuse the extensive physical, psychological and emotional harms done to them? So, once a woman has been paid, the torture committed against her body is expiated, huh? Well, that’s an incredibly cruel and unfair way of reasoning! No amount of money whatsoever should excuse any harm done to a woman’s body.

Porn Apologist: Pornography is not prostitution.
Rad Fem: The fact is that pornography IS prostitution, plus a camera.

Porn Apologist: Look, prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. It should be legalized and regulated. That would make it safer.
Rad Fem: Prostitution is NOT the oldest profession, pimping is! Countries where prostitution has been legalized have become Number One destinations for traffickers. There is no evidence that legalization in any way benefits women in prostitution — indeed it simply legalizes the harm caused to women. Prostitution is inherently a form of violence against women and a violation of women’s human rights and dignity as persons. The belief that prostitution is “sex work” is being a direct cause for the widespread international and domestic trafficking of women and children for prostitution. The Netherlands (where prostitution is regarded as “just a job like another”) remains one of the primary destinations for victims of human trafficking (as again recently reported in the article “Home Office goes to Amsterdam for prostitution ideas” in politics.co.uk) and half the window brothels over there have been closed since 2006 because of an exponential rise in organized crime and money laundering and also the trafficking of women and children. Legalization is, in effect, a failed experiment.

Porn Apologist: Sexuality is good. Why are you anti-sex?
Rad Fem: Being against pornography and prostitution does not equate being against sex, FFS. Sexuality is just a part of being human and may involve a lot of strong feelings of affection and connection to another person when a sense of genuine care is involved. But pornography is stripped of any empathy and it fuses sexual desire with the degradation and abuse of women. Being against pornography does not mean being against sex, it simply means having recognized that there is a sexual world of imagination based on equality & respect and that goes beyond sexuality as simple “domination/subordination”.

Porn Apologist: Only conservative right wingers criticize porn. Are you a religious zealot?
Rad Fem: Radical feminists have, for a long time, opposed Christianity by recognizing it as patriarchal religion. Mary Daly, for example, is a prominent radical feminist writer of the feminist critique of Christianity. Radical feminists usually see Christianity as patriarchal and oppressive to women. So, no, I’m certainly not religious and I’m very much of an atheist. Perpetuating the myth that radical feminists “are siding with religious zealots” just because we oppose pornography has always been one of the favorite pro-porn tactics of the so-called “sex poz” lobby.

Porn Apologist: If there weren’t any porn, there’d be more rape.
Rad Fem: Do we ever suggest that the availability of loads of films showing children being beaten up would reduce child physical abuse? Of course not, because we know it’s not the case. So why would it be different with pornography? Few rapes get reported to the police and correlational studies only based on reported rapes have limits. While a few studies have shown a decrease in reported rapes, many other correlational studies, as shown here, have shown dramatic increases in sexual violence with the availability of pornography. Pornography has no “catharthic” effect whatsoever. Also, this “catharthic effect” porn apologist excuse quite sounds like a threat: “We need pornography or we will rape more!” Blah-the-fucking-blah. . .

Porn Apologist: Pornography has no effect whatsoever. It’s only a fantasy.
Rad Fem: So why do corporations spend billions of dollars each year on mass-mediated advertising if not precisely because they know ads have effects on people? Why would it be different with pornography? Pornography HAS effects, negative ones! Besides, as I said before, “an industry which relies on the suffering of half the population in order to keep catering to its ever-expanding demand is not fantasy!” Fantasy is in the head. Pornography is mediated and mass-marketed. I feel a lot more free not having my fantasies being controlled by pornography. . . Freud argued that the sexual abuse that his female patients had been experiencing in childhood (and had been telling him about) was just a fantasy. Freud knew that child sexual abuse was pervasive in his time, but he kept on denying it as “fantasy” (Source: Testimony of Jeffrey Masson, author of The Assault on Truth, in “The Los Angeles Hearing, Los Angeles County Commission for Women, April 22, 1985”; in Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin Eds., In Harm’s way: The pornography Civil Rights Hearings; 1997.)

Porn Apologist: Where is the harm in porn?
Rad Fem: The first people who are harmed are the prostituted women constantly used, abused and discarded by the industry. Then, the harms extend to the women outside of the industry. The easiest way of making violence invisible is by sexualizing it, making it appear as “just sex” to the viewer. Pornography makes rape, sexism and racism sexy. It makes force look like a thrilling sexual experience to men. Pornography desensitizes its users to female degradation, it makes them believe that women enjoy all sorts of pain and humiliation. Pornography increases the belief in rape myths. Pornography is pure woman-hating propaganda! Many women are coerced by their boyfriends and husbands into sexual acts they do not want because of those men’s pornography use. Pornography also increases the violence perpetrated against prostituted women. As reported by former prostitute J.W. in Massachusetts, for instance, she “considered the men who were into pornography to be the most dangerous and potentially violent since that is what aroused them”.

Porn Apologist: Advocating censorship is not a good thing. Pornography is free speech.
Rad Fem: Who’s talking about censorship here? You, not me. I’m talking of harms. Pro-porners often use the inaccurate word “censorship” to stigmatize any feminist work against pornography and to try to shut us up. Censorship or banning would never address the demand for pornography. Educating people on the harms and asking for an end to men’s demand for an industry that is predicated upon and produces sex-based exploitation and widespread aggression has nothing in common with censorship. Pornography is not free speech, it is hatred of women. The only freedom in pornography is the one for men to abuse women. In a male-supremacist, capitalist society, the First Amendment protects only those who can exercise the rights it protects. Where is women’s freedom of speech in all of this? Pornography keeps women and other people who have been harmed from exercising their rights to free speech.

Porn Apologist: Feminists are often man-haters. That’s why they criticize porn.
Rad Fem: In a patriarchal society where misogyny is the norm, whenever you point out to the fact of male violence against women you’re accused of being a “man-hater”, while whenever a man says a misogynist comment or laughs at misogynist jokes he’s never accused of being a “woman-hater”. Feminists aren’t man-haters and they criticize porn because it is harmful and it is strongly linked to violence against women. Isn’t it natural for men to watch porn? Pornography expresses sexual freedom and all men use porn.
Rad Fem: If it is natural for men to use porn, then how come some men have given up on their porn consumption and haven’t died? Not all men use porn. And pornography is not freedom; it is a mechanical, mindless, plasticized, inhuman, cruel and disconnected form of sexual imagery made by big corporations who only want to make big bucks. Besides, if pornography was so “natural” for men, why would it be so relentlessly misogynistic? Men have usually been socialized so differently from women that we can hardly claim anything about their nature. From an early age, males are typically trained to repress their feelings of sensitivity, care and empathy. It doesn’t have to be that way but gender roles both uphold and are maintained by male supremacist social order. And pornography typically reinforces gender, i.e. what it means to be “masculine” and what it means to be “feminine”.

Porn Apologist:

Porn Apologist: But, I don’t look at the bad and extreme stuff. Misogyny is not really inherent in pornography. And pornography is neither violent nor racist.
Rad Fem: Violence is pervasive in pornography; it is normalized because it is made to look like “just sex”. Any proper and clear-headed study of the content of the best-selling porn titles will reveal that violence and contempt for women are pervasive in mainstream pornography, as a comprehensive 2007 media research based on top-selling porn titles listed in Adult Video news (results of the research are revealed in this video here) has proven. As for the racism, pornography typically portrays black women as subhuman, dirty, primitive “ebony hoes”, black men as savage, animalistic beasts, Asian women as slavishly obedient, and Hispanic women as “hot-blooded Latinas”. If you don’t recognize these stereotypes as horrifyingly racist, then I’m afraid I can’t help you. . .

Porn Apologist: Look, women are objectified everywhere, even in the media. How is pornography different? I simply cannot imagine a world without the objectification of the female body.
Rad Fem: While mainstream media has clearly been invaded by soft-core objectifying pornography and that’s certainly not a good thing, hard-core mainstream pornography is worse. Women are not human beings in pornography, just things. . . Dare imagine a world that would not rely on the objectification of women, dare ask for justice and real sexual freedom within a new world where women would have the right to their own bodies without having to force themselves to have sex with men, where we would have true intimacy and mutuality, and where our lives wouldn’t be invaded and controlled by pornography.

Porn Apologist: Women look at porn too.
Rad Fem: While women’s use of porn has somehow increased since the Internet, the VAST majority of pornography users are men and the industry knows it (but they’re not gonna tell you). Porn producers, when interviewed at the Las Vegas porn convention, said most of the consumers of their materials are men. That is why porn is so endlessly misogynistic and degrading.

Porn Apologist: Hey, do you know that there’s also feminist porn available out there, that is to say porn for women?
Rad Fem: Women-made porn is a smokescreen to protect the largely (mostly) male-run, male-led pornography industry. It is only a small portion of the industry. The solution to ending the harms of pornography is not to create “feminist porn”. As I said before, “[m]isogynistic porn (which is the type of sexual material that most men want to see and masturbate to) isn’t going to go away so easily, and women and children will continue to be harmed. There are so many more urgent things and so many more struggles to overcome before we are able to live in a non-patriarchal society and maybe think about such things as any “egalitarian forms of erotic arts”!!! Indeed, thinking about such things before the overthrow of the whole patriarchy itself happens, is nothing other than capitulation! And it is insane! Considering and confronting the harms of pornography and prostitution to women and children, and working toward the building of a new non-patriarchal world, are paramount causes!!! As Gail Dines pointed out at the 2007 feminist anti-porn conference, we live in an “image based culture” (i.e. any thing, to be valuable, has to be made into an image) and the answer to stopping porn culture is not more images. Personally, I feel A LOT MORE FREE without having images or so-called “art” control my life and/or sexuality!”

Porn Apologist: If you don’t like porn, just don’t watch it.
Rad Fem: If this could only be that easy! Women have to interact with men who use pornography every day without knowing about the harms. I walk in the street and see soft-core porn on billboards. I cannot watch T.V. without stumbling upon a show or a film within which a joke on pornography is being laughed about. I cannot go to a party without seeing a bunch of guys laughing at the porn pics on their phones they’re showing to each others. The list goes on. . . Pornography is everywhere. What you’re saying sounds so much like saying “If you don’t like the president, then forget he is the president!” or “If you don’t like pollution, then forget it also comes from cars”.

Porn Apologist: Porn was the only sex education I had. I can’t give it up.
Rad Fem: Then you have been sexually “educated” by what is the mainstream sex miseducation for men, a form of media within which women are stripped of their own humanity and portrayed as sexual objects, as things to be penetrated. How original! Wouldn’t you be more free without having the corporate pimps mapping out your sex life? Besides, even if you’re not causing harm to women you know, by not giving up on pornography, you believe that there are acceptable losses, “necessary victims” in order to satisfy your self-centered orgasm to the sexuality of cruelty, the sexuality of disconnection from truly meaningful feelings toward another human being. By creating the demand for pornography, you generate, maintain or condone the harms it causes as well as submit to the self-objectification it creates when it controls you, shapes your sexual thoughts into a twisted manner and when you become addicted to it. So, why not giving up and have your own dreams for yourself? Why not accepting that your sex (mis)education did not involve sexual justice and equality between sexes?. . .

That’s it for now, readers. In case some of you want to add any porn apologist bullshit arguments (that I forgot to mention) to the list, please do so in the comments. Or, simply give your feedback, rad fems & pro-radfems, if you want to. . .

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Some Anti-Porn activities

The Fourth Carnival Against Pornography and Prostitution is now up at The Burning Times. Have a good reading time!

Also, I found this via Allecto who got it thanks to Demonista: please sign this petition to ask Rogers Communications (a Canadian-based corporation that is the largest provider of cable to Canadians) to stop selling misogynistic and racist pornography.

“Pornography tells lies about women. Pornography tells the truth about men.”
— John Stoltenberg, pro-feminist writer.

“At the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence, serving Linn and Benton counties, most women we work with say their abusers are heavily into pornography.”
— Mary Zelinka, assistant executive director of a Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence in Oregon.

“When people deplore sexism and racism but make allowances for their proliferations in pornography, pornography has achieved its aim: the creation of acceptance for materials that publicly practise and advertise the hatred and domination of women of colour. Pornography perpetrates racism through the sexualization and fetishisation of racist stereotypes.”
— Joyce Wu, in her article Not a Fantasy: Racial Hatred and Misogyny in Pornography.

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A Message from Sam Berg, just to clarify something…

Now, I’m being told that there is a lot of vitriol being said about Sam Berg, me and others over the pro-porn blogosphere right now and I’ve not even had a look as I am not interested. As I said before, I don’t go to *their* places anymore as I don’t care about what’s being said about me by a sad bunch of people who don’t even know me and who pathetically don’t have anything better (?) to do than trash rad fems on their blogs. I perfectly know that all the nonsense pro-porners talk, the jeers and the gender-specific name-calling they sometimes use clearly show pornography’s negative effects on them, as I have said before. . .

So why don’t I care about what pro-porners say about me? Because I know that these people are all so full of it, obviously. . .

But, although in my previous post I’d said that “the next post I’ll make on this blog will not be about the same subject. I’ll go back to doing my patriarchy-bashing and exposing the harms of pornography and prostitution” (count on it next time for sure), I’m merely posting this message from Sam, upon her recent and urgent request, in order to clarify something because serious lies and misrepresentations are apparently being said about her right now over the “sex-poz” blogosphere. Here it is from Sam:

There are a lot of lies being told about me right now. I’m used to that because it comes with the pro-woman activism that kooky kid called life dropped into my lap like an unexploded bomb, but it’s rather concentrated at the moment. Most of it is nonsense, like that I’m trying to get the pro-sex work group kicked off campus (I’m not) or that I’m afraid to debate sex workers (I’m not) or that I said RenEv made threats personally to me (she didn’t and I didn’t say she did), but there is one very serious bit of business tucked into the ever-heaping distortions that I feel must be addressed.

Renegade Evolution is saying that I sent her threatening private emails. I have never emailed RenEv. Not once. What would be the point?

So where did the supposed emailed “threat” come from? I think I know, and I think you’re all going to want to learn what I know, because the pieces are fitting together for me very clearly for the first time.

Remember that person who committed fraud by lying to one of Genderberg’s moderators about being anti-pornography and anti-prostitution so they could spy on our private forums and then release words from there publicly? If you need or want a recap about the violation of women’s safe space that happened one year ago today in April 2007 you can read this post at Sinister Girl’s.

Caught up? Good.

Also in April 2007, the aforementioned lying person started a hate blog called “Radical Feminist Terrorism” where the person who stole private writings from Genderberg [forums] spewed her vituperative guts out with such psychotic absurdities as:

“You can’t really understand the hatred that is embodied in many of the posts on Genderberg. Many members of that forum simply do not see other women as human at all.“

“I am not sure why the belief that women should be free to live as they wish is so dangerous. I do know that to many in the Genderberg this belief in women’s freedom is utterly inexcusable. They will do anything to destroy it.”

“While many will claim that Genderberg is a “safe space” my belief is that there should be no safe space for those who work to destroy women. There should be no dark corner where ANYONE can get together and plot against or foster hatred of women.”

“There is no evil that these haters of women will not stoop to. There is no vile act of malice they cannot justify. They will do anything in their power to destroy or silence anyone they disagree with. In their hate they are trying to destroy her. In their blood lust for a purge they are trying to force Renegade Evolution to reveal who I am. They want to close the hole so they can go back to plotting against women in the dark.”

“In my time on Genderberg I read more hatred of women than I ever read or saw in pornography.”

Seeing how loony the anonymous Radfem Terrorism blogger clearly is, I brushed off replying substantively because the raging dementia speaks for itself.

Throughout May and June the moderators at Genderberg worked like demons to try and figure out which of the 100 or so members was the leak. We ask every member a series of questions before approving them and we were going member by member to try and restore some of the lost sense of security that made one prostituted woman feel she had to leave Genderberg. By early July we pooled our research and figured out that the leak was someone who registered as “Miriam” with a bunch of hooey about being anti-pornography and caring about prostituted women. I deleted “Miriam” from the memberlist and sent her the following email on July 5, 2007:

“I feel bad for you because you’ve obviously been seriously fucked up by people in your life, but if you don’t back off slagging on radfems you’re going to force my hand.

I can prove you committed fraud when you lied to moderator deedle about your gb membership, and I can prove you were the one who leaked Pony’s words. Because you’re a pathological liar, you’re probably thinking you can lie your way out of this just like you’ve done other times.

You can’t.

I didn’t out you before because I have a soft spot for seriously fucked up women like yourself, but I’m not above initiating legal action to show the ex-sex workers in my little community that their privacy and continued peace of mind is something I take very seriously. If you cared about sex workers one tenth as much as you manipulatively tell people you do then you would not have violated a sex worker-heavy community like you did.

Stop telling lies, Miriam. You’re not as good at it as you think you are.”

Now ask yourself why RenEv thinks my email to Miriam threatening to reveal that I know Miriam wrote the “Radical Feminist Terrorism” blog was somehow a threat to reveal personal information about RenEv.

— Sam Berg.

I’m guessing that’s another side of another story again exposed now, as I can see. Thank you so much for your honesty about this email, Sam. I can imagine that (1) you were protecting Genderberg’s security & privacy and (2) you were very angry at the facts that Pony’s words had been leaked from G’berg’s private forums by somebody and that rad fems were being trashed on the pro-porn blogosphere (as usual). I also believe that the clarification was important, which is why I’m posting this.

But now, honestly, I do not want to talk about those pro-porners’ names ever again on my blog (in future posts — I’ll let rad fems comment on what they will here in case they want to say anything). I do not want to talk about these names anymore after that due to the fact that, as I have said before, they aren’t worth paying attention to even though I spoke in defense of Sam as they clearly went way too far in their nastiness this time with the way they treated her regarding the issues that surrounded that porn panel. . .

(BTW the post over at Heart’s on the W&M panel and her comment thread were very interesting)

They’ll carry on bashing us as if that’s all they’re capable of and I’ll be carrying on bashing patriarchy and pornstitution meanwhile. . .

Edited to add: See also the similar post at Laurelin’s on Sam Berg responding to her detractors, and Laurelin’s little comment thread that follows it. Also, check out the comment thread at Witchy’s.

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Well, here is a new post! On Sam Berg and other things…

Okay, as y’all know, I blog intermittently, whenever I’ve got enough time to settle down and write an article (partly due to my busy schedule). I think that if I write more and be less shy then my words will flow just like that. . .

Sometimes I also need to know where to start and how to start. I’m still pretty new to the rad fem blogosphere but, as I wrote about before in this previous post here, I’d rather not care about what’s being said about me, over the so-called “sex-poz” blogosphere, by ignorant pro-porners who don’t even know me and merely attack me just because I’m a radical feminist who staunchly stands up for her politics, that and the fact that I and my fellow rad fems have an anti-pornstitution agenda which is the very antithesis of their agenda.

Is this worth posting vitriol about us just because we are rad fems and we disagree with *their* politics and we don’t allow *them* to post comments on our blogs due to our important reasons we’ve got (i.e. this post here)? Obviously not. Which is why they’re not really worth paying attention to.

Most of the time, they don’t seem to have anything better to do than trashing rad fems on their blogs, which, as I pointed out in a comment to this post at Witchy-Woo’s, is so fucking pathetic BTW. I need not fear. I need just laugh at their silly radfem-bashing and also be angry (sometimes) at what they’ve done to my sisters when they’ve gone too far (as in the case of Sam, for instance). Let’s see. . .

First, there was this other post at Witchy-Woo’s. I’m guessing she meant to speak of the patriarchy by saying “the shitheap” To quote some of Witchy’s words in this post:

“. . .then they get booked to speak at the last minute in discussions about how what they do impacts upon the rest of us (women). And they agree! And then they start posting about “laughing like a super villain” and their “wank worthy fantasy” of debating “some anti-porn sex work types”. To me, the language used is the same language that rapists use (I’m a rape crisis counsellor, I’ve heard it a million times) – it has nothing to do with where women are in this ‘debate’ at all. . .”

I posted a comment to Witchy’s post over there. It was:

“Excellent post, Witchy-Woo, this is terrific! 😀

I’m totally in agreement with you here. I loved your point here:
” So I tend not to go there these days; to the shitheap. I’m so past shitheap performers trying to argue the *real* with me like their privileged 10% stacks up in any meaningful way against the 90%. Yes, they argue that. Liars. They lie. They negate the lives of those suffering for the choices they make and then have the audacity to promote themselves as the ‘one true voice’ in the well of silence centred in the poverty of those they argue they represent.”

So, so true, the few privileged ones are acting as if the world revolved around them. They cannot get past their “me, me, me, me” arguments and “what about me?” and so forth. What a narcissism that is on their part! And they do lie. They pretend to care, they pretend to be the ones who represent and defend the vast majority of prostituted women in order to promote their “sex work” agenda. There are some major studies that proved that legalization of prostitution has failed but they refuse to hear that fact. They carry on stupidly talking their “choice” rhetoric and have the cruelty of denying major research studies (= http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/c-prostitution-research.html
https://www.againstpornography.org/womeninsexindustry.html

Most prostituted women are silenced by abusive johns and pimps and do not get the chance to speak as much as the few privileged women do.

“laughing like a super villain”? “wank worthy fantasy”? I agree that these comments were totally inappropriate. This makes me think: this kind of language is awfully similar to the sort of language a porn-using abuvive [sic](*) ex-boyfriend of mine was often using when talking to me.

And this is absolutely unethical and dishonest to change the participants on one side of the panel only a few days before the event without even letting the opposing panelists know about the change. Would a rad fem be supposed to turn up there and then find out? How shady that is!

“If I’d been invited to a speaking event where the panel members were changed within the week prior, I’d pull out on principle – whether I wanted to debate them or not. ”

Damn right, Witchy-Woo!”

(*)Please excuse my typo, I meant to write “abusive” instead.

Second, there was this post at Laurelin’s on what silencing is and what it isn’t. And I completely agree with what Laurelin says in that post. To summarize what Laurelin said, I’ll tell you what silencing is and isn’t:

– Silencing is (1) when you can’t speak for fear that the cruelty in the reactions of others will have bad consequences on your mental, physical or emotional health; (2) when someone uses pornified language in an attempt to humiliate radical feminists like you because you stand against that person’s selfish pleasures, or disingenuously accuses you or other rad fems “of siding with right wingers” because of that; (3) when someone disseminates jeers, insults and hateful remarks at you and other rad fems who also oppose their politics or rad fems “whom *they* perceive to be speaking against *them*”; (4) when someone endorses these tactics, complies with them, has the cowardice of doing so; (5) when someone suppresses the speech of others with their “me, me, me, me” narcissistic self-importance, mocks and taunts, jeers at rad fem dissenters like you, distorts, misinterprets your views; and (6) when someone “assumes the ultimate priority of one’s own speech.”

– Silencing isn’t (1) when you don’t publish knee-jerk pro-porn comments on your blog, your own personal space; (2) when someone’s having one’s actions critiqued by radical feminists. “the critique itself presents no barrier to their continuing to act.”; and (3) when someone is asked to take responsibility for one’s own words. And I’ll add that it doesn’t matter if the person continues to argue that “those words were being said in a particular context and blah, blah, blah” so long as what the person’s said was truly enough inappropriate or abusive, there’s no context whatsoever that should prevent a fair critique.

Third, there’s Sam’s important version of the story, as I believe it is fair that we finally get to expose what really happened:

The Prime of Miss Sammi Berg

Drumroll, please!

ahem

On March 19th I was invited to a panel debate on pornography at William and Mary College. My contact for the organizing group was Constance Sisk, who told me funding assistance could likely be found to fly me 3,000 miles across the country so I agreed to be penciled in until enough money could be raised. A call for donations among anti-pornography feminist colleagues covered airfare, and I had just enough vacation days earned at work to take off.

On March 24th I confirmed that I would gladly join the two other two confirmed panelists, on the anti-pornography side, John D. Foubert, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the College of William and Mary, and on the pro-pornography side Amanda Brooks, a former escort and sex work advocate.

Constance told me April 2nd that they moved the panel date to the 21st and the rest of April slid by without communication until April 16th when an anti-porn friend informed me that Jill Brenneman and RenEv blogged they would be on the panel. I had received no word from Constance of this and was dumbfounded that wholesale changes were being made to the panel just five days before the event without informing me. I had agreed to do the panel with John and Amanda, and I hadn’t gotten any emails saying she couldn’t attend or that they were looking for a replacement.

If they had told me Amanda couldn’t make it I would have suggested that pornographers and strip club owners are very easy to find through legal channels so they could have been asked to appear on the panel. I would have also suggested that the number of porn-using men on campus should have been able to produce just one pornsturbator willing to defend his porn consumption. Because I was under the impression that Constance & Co. were being honest with me about their intentions, I chalked up the lack of a pornographer or porn-using man on the panel to inept organizing and the extreme amount of publicity given recently to sex work advocacy at William and Mary.

How much sex work advocacy has been given a voice there can be answered with the name Constance. I spoke with John Foubert for the first time Thursday and he told me that Constance is a big pro-sex work advocate on campus and she brought the sex worker show to campus the past three years. A woman named Audrey invited John to the panel because Constance didn’t think he would agree if she asked him. Constance was a guest on Jill’s radio show a few weeks ago, and Jill did a pro-sex work chat with William and Mary college folks a few weeks ago, but in her emails Constance claimed ignorance of the lengthy pro-porn and radical blogosphere debates on this contentious subject.

Constance. Constance said she was excited to have me coming and offered to let me spend Monday night at her place, where she planned on cooking dinner for a group of people post-panel. How do you think it would feel if a pro-choice feminist were invited to a predominantly pro-life campus by a predominantly pro-life group and the pro-life organizer did everything Constance did without revealing her pro-life politics to her pro-choice panelist and house guest?

Little story: Heading home from presenting at a prostitution conference I was in the airport shuttle with a middle-aged black social worker with her name tag still pinned to her blouse. I’m a young, white, tattoo-bearing woman and at the time I think my hair was blue. We exchanged delicate pleasantries and danced around how we talked about the conference until she sat up earnestly and cut to the chase, “So, are you for or against?” When I replied, “Against,” she slouched down and sighed and we grooved on the same anti-prostitution track until we got to the airport.

I agreed to do the panel with John and Amanda three weeks ago. Though it was unethical to make major lineup changes at the last minute like that without telling me and things started feeling really fishy due to the lack of notification about the event anywhere besides pro-john blogs (it’s not listed on W&M’s events calendar or advertised around campus), I agreed to debate Jill. I could not agree to debate Ren, and I don’t suppose I have to tell most of you reading this why but I’ll touch upon it a tad anyway.

Here are Ren’s thoughts on sharing a panel discussion table with me:

“So serious I am taking it very seriously. And looking forward to it in my uniquely grim and serious way. Planning and preparing with a very serious, serious sneer on my face.

And also laughing like a super villain the whole time. Why?

Once upon a time, I had a wish, a dream, a surely wank worthy fantasy of some anti-porn sex work types having to face down, in a forum, and debate those from the other side. And I wanted to be there.”

“And, yes, oh yes, I am seriously looking forward to it. I have so lusted for such an opportunity. Very seriously. And yes, if possible, I will have the whole thing on video. Get your cerebral wanking tissues ready.”

Serious serious sneers, super villain mocking laughter, wank worthy fantasies, whole thing on video, get your tissues ready.

Those are the words of a malicious person licking their chops in anticipation of a messy, humiliation-inducing scene they will relish. Those are the words of a person trying to waste my time with personal attacks when my time is best used educating audiences about the facts of human trafficking, prostitution, and pornography. The trash talk began within hours of being surreptitiously offered the spot on the panel, and that sort of smug pugnaciousness and disrespectful engagement was instrumental in prompting John to cancel his appearance on the panel and he suggested to me that I do the same. I believe we were right to cancel. I refuse to pose for the pornographically spiteful scene being painted.

What to do when a woman who says she’s happy in prostitution says, “Take me, for example” when you know if you actually do take her as her own example by quoting her own words and deeds she will complain, “How dare you make an example of me?” Say you’ll speak with her about prostitution as a global system and of all women’s oppression as the core problem but you don’t want to talk about her personally and she’ll reply, “You refuse to hear my truth.” If you talk about her personally like she insists then you’re the baddie radfem who makes it personal. It’s a lose-lose ruse.

I’d love to debate a porn-user, and there are tens of millions of them. I’d love to debate a pornographer and there’s no lack of those either. I’d love to debate a john. They don’t want to debate anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminists. They want women in the prostitute supply pool to subjectively defend them against the objective mounds of testimony and undeniable data that anti-pornstitution feminists can produce proving pornography and prostitution violate women and girls human rights immensely. Most of you have seen how deftly I wield the wealth of information I’ve collected in my noodle to make the case against men’s right to economically coerce sex from others. Some of you have seen me do it before with Ren:

here

and

there

Saturday morning I woke up to an email from a professor asking if I can come speak to a few women’s studies classes of hers in May. It turns out I can make the date. Life skedaddles on and so do I.

— Sam Berg, creator of Genderberg.

IMHO, what happened was absolutely dishonest, cruel and unfair. And I’m glad to have exposed Sam’s side of the story as it is clear that Sam in no way deserved such a treatment and massive online misrepresenting and bashing of her all over the pro-porn blogosphere! And I’m not the only one to expose it. There’s also Laurelin, Witchy-Woo and Heart, so far.

I read about all the bad things pro-porners have done to us and all the lies they’re spreading about us rad fems on their blogosphere. I’ve read this thread at Witchy’s and two very well-written posts from Stormy, Bumblebees and It’s a Bug’s Life, so I know all this nasty targeting and online bullying of rad fems has been going on for some time and a while before I came to the rad fem blogosphere and sometimes I feel like saying we mustn’t take all this shit they throw at us passively anymore but I believe that ignoring them when they stupidly trash us on their blogs is best. I used to find it hard to ignore them but we have to.

I’ve seen those pro-porn blogs before and you know what? They’re all so unbelievably pathetic! All the nonsense these pro-porners talk and the gender-specific name-calling they sometimes use clearly show pornography’s negative effects on them. They aren’t worth paying attention to, which is why I gave up caring about what they say about me as I made it clear in this post here, I don’t give a shit about what they say about me and I believe the best thing to do for someone who’s targeted is not to give a flying fuck about what they say about oneself, which is why the next post I’ll make on this blog will not be about the same subject. I’ll go back to doing my patriarchy-bashing and exposing the harms of pornography and prostitution.

Other women out there will come to our blogs and listen. They hate pornstitution (or do not feel comfortable about it) so they will follow their feelings and there will be other new Rad Fems in the future — at least it is how I became a rad fem: by listening to what I believe was a group that had strong arguments backed up by thorough research and facts and refusing to listen to the other group that merely had money, corporate media, lobbyists, lawyers, managers, marketeers, industry analysts, paid writers of “opinion” and “journalism”, publicists, etc. to defend their fallacious arguments supporting misogynistic industries. Rad fem arguments are so real and based on experience. The “other side” is so fake: it is patriarchy, it is “the state of schizophrenia” (as I would call it).

The overwhelming majority of women out there hate (or do not like) pornography. That’s a fact. And the overwhelming majority of prostituting women out there are harmed in the sex trade. That’s another fact. Those facts, among other things, mean that we have to keep on writing. We are speaking the truth and pro-porners hate it and try to silence us. I will not be silenced. And the pro-pornstitution “feminists” are merely magnified by and elevated in patriarchy while being endlessly promoted by porn defenders, that’s all.

But now the fact that they’ve done this to Sam clearly shows that they’ve now gone way way way too far. Sam Berg just wanted something fair as a pornography discussion forum, not the pro-porn side of the panel being changed merely a few days before the event without even letting her, one of the anti-porn panelists, know about the change. The way Sam found out about it via an anti-porn radfem friend telling her she’d seen Ren posting about it on her blog (instead of her being contacted by the organizers about it) wasn’t the way she was supposed to get to know about it. And the way Ren was rejoicing at the anticipating of the event on her blog was utterly inappropriate. The words Ren was using were inappropriate.

There is a complete understanding in why Sam would never want to debate a woman who has once wished a gruesomely vivid death to women who want to stop the exploitation of women that is currently happening on a massive scale (never mind the apologies and so-called “context” for that sentence that Ren had said, if she really was so sorry about what she’d said that day, she would have deleted that “Hate & hardline” post from her blog altogether). I wouldn’t want to debate somebody like that and I know Sam has very good personal reasons not to want to debate her.

I know Sam. She’s my friend. I even met her in person and I can tell you she’s a wonderful radical feminist well-devoted to her politics and she’s also a very nice person. And Sam has never said threats whatsoever to any pro-porner, hasn’t ever done anything wrong to the pro-porny crowd apart from disagreeing with their views and once using one of Ren’s quotes as a bottom signature in her Genderberg forums. As if briefly quoting what someone had once written on her blog was such a crime? Come on, give me a break!

I’ve had pro-porners on their blogs stealing way too large quotes (like sometimes nearly whole articles) from my work on this blog without them even asking for copyright permissions. If they’re angry at Sam for once using a short enough quote from Ren as a sigfile, then perhaps I should be angry at *them* for stealing parts of my work by providing way too long quotes on their blogs without asking for my consent, which is very unfair and dishonest BTW?

What Sam has been accused of is untrue and unfair, whether pro-porners like it or not, it is the truth now exposed, clarifying what really happened as a matter of fact. . .

Finally, I really miss rad fem Biting Beaver. I remember how in late 2006/early 2007, I used to read her amazing blog so often. Gosh, I really miss BB. I wish she’d come back online someday. One Angry Girl, with a little bit of my help, recently put up a new blog with some of BB’s important writings on it, Archive of the Biting Beaver. I hope BB sees it someday and that it (hopefully) helps bring her back online.

Edited to add: Please check out my new post here to see a new message from Sam Berg.

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