Yeah, yeah, I know…I’m becoming obsessed with beefing on Gail. Given the weekly dose of raw sewage she spouts, it’s not surprising.
But, something hit me yesterday on my way to work about the way Dines projects her own sexual puritanism on other women even while she claims to be their biggest defenders.
Let’s go back, if you will, to that debate that Gail had with Sarah Ditum for the New Left Project…in particular, the final rebuttal that Dines made in prematurely ejecting herself from the debate. I quote indirectly from her via my previous post here:
The ascendency of a toxic mix of neoliberal ideology and postmodern notions in the academy makes it almost impossible to recognize structures of power and the reality of exploitation, or to argue against the idea that we are all rational individuals freely choosing an empowering lifestyle. This insidious virus has infected feminist thinking, resulting in a feminism devoid of any political or structural analysis. This ridiculous turning away from feminist roots has made radical feminists look like relics of a bygone era who hold on to outdated notions of systematic power and systemic inequality that limit the life chances of women and shape the choices we make. We look like a bunch of party poopers who refuse to celebrate all that great agency young women now have as they are encouraged to strip, wax, and fuck themselves into empowerment.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Republicans have declared war on women’s bodies, women still earn less than men, are still the ones who are responsible for child care, are still raped, harassed, molested, trafficked, and are increasingly having to deal with men who are stuck in perpetual adolescence (what the sociologist Michael Kimmel calls Guyland, the parallel universe to Pornland). These men are their buddies, their bosses, their politicians, their lawyers, their doctors, and their partners. Guyland men continue to make laws that limit women’s lives economically, medically, legally and politically, because — like for all adolescent boys with hard ons — women who are not fuckable are invisible to them.
It’s the “women who are not fuckable are invisible to them” part that got me thinking.
First of all..how are women “invisible”?? I mean, not even adolescent boys think about sex 24/7, and they most cerainly do NOT sexualize every woman or girl they see, does that mean that their mothers, grandmothers,aunts and sisters are now “invisible” by Dines’ standards? Surely she’s not sayng that they are “fuckable”, is she??
Secondly….certainly, a man focusing on a woman as a masturbation fantasy subject or a live and willing sex partner can get caught up in the high of sexual arousal, but that doesn’t render even that woman “invisible” the rest of the time outside of being sexually aroused. Most fans of porn performers, for example, see no problem with the latter discussing the non-sexual aspects of their lives and respecting them as full human beings and not only the subject of their sexual fantasies. Do Victoria Dvrok’s multiple master degrees or Asia Carrera’s MENSA membership or Diamond Foxxx’s military service simply go out the window just because they happen to have been adult entertainers? If anything, their non-sexual accomplishments provide an accentuence that bolsters their appeal as sexual subjects, while also providing an important anchor of reality.
But that leads to my own ephiphany about Dines’ projection: What’s to say that Gail doesn’t simply believe that women who are traditionally attractive, who have well maintained bodies, who do have higher than usual libidoes, and who are also compentent enough to be in positions of power…must be illegitimate because they only “fucked their way to the top”, or used their sexual attractiveness to “seduce” the men in charge as a means of promotion? Isn’t that inherently a major insult and slander to those women, whose only crime is that they are attractive enough to induce sexual arousal? In other words, isn’t this just another round of slut-shaming and bringing down successful women merely because Gail doesn’t like their personal sexuality?? Isn’t Gail, in doing this, reinforcing the very same antifeminist and fundamentalist stereotype that has been used to maintain the glass ceiling in business and keep women down in general since time immortal??
Not to mention, isn’t Gail not so tacitly approving of the old conservative meme that only conservative (or radical feminist) women who totally embrace and promote the dominant sexual conservatism should be allowed any form of political or social power, and that any woman whose sexual proclivities exceed the narrow standards of her ideology should be either “reeducated”, restored to abject poverty and denied the assumption of social protection, or merely left to suffer and die??
In other words, Clones…perhaps all of Gail Dines’ mouthing off about male sexual rapicity and The Great Male Porn Capitalist Conspiracy is merely just a ruse and a cloak to mask her innate fascist view of female sexuality and her desire to control and regulate other women out of sheer jealous spite?
Naaaaah….she really is a authentic radical Marxist who believes in full equality for men and women. And, Orly Taitz really, really is a sane human being.
Well, Clones…it was 48 years ago today that me and my twin sister were brought into this sentinent world. Gee, it seems like just the other day.
Actually, that’s not quite the whole story…and just to clear things up, I will explain.
For so many years, I was told that my birthday was on May 15th….which has been actually confirmed by my parents before they passed away.
The problem?? The doctor who oversaw my (and my sister’s) birth — I beat her out by about two minutes…scoreboard!!! — decided to put down on the birth certificate the wrong date….namely, May 7. I didn’t find this out until I was around 18 and needed my birth certificate to apply for technical school; before then, I had used May 15th as my birth date.
After plenty of investigating, I found out the error, but since the original doc is now deceased and no one knew how to correct the error to put the proper date on the certificate, I decided to just let it ride and keep it as is.
Natually, this causes some confusion, since some of my documents are still based on May 15th as my birth date, while others use May 7th.
In the end, I just said “Screw this shit…I’ll just celebrate both days.”
Thusly, today is my “unofficial” birthday that I celebrate publically, and May 15th will be the “official” one I celebrate with fam and close friends.
That’s what you call making lemonade out of lemons.
So…just consider this one-half of my birthday…with the other half falling on the 15th.
I thought that I had covered all of the bases regarding the recend mass lunacy dump of Gail Dines…but I missed the most insane episide of all. Which, I will now rectify for y’all.
Last month, the Feminist Porn Awards took place in Toronto. They are kinda like the AVN’s, but for a particular group of women who are attempting to continue the tradition of creating and nuturing an alternative style of adult sexual media that emphasizes female pleasure and attempts to appeal to the hence untapped demographic of women looking for an alternative to the “male-dominated” traditional porn. They also celebrate erotic productions and more progressive content featuring traditionally marginalized groups, such as the transgendered (FTM performer Buck Angel, whose film Sexing the Transman XXX won a fistful of awards this year, was one of the featured attractions), as well as independent lesbian and people of color outlets.
The inspiration of “feminist porn” comes from the pioneering work of porn performers in the 1980′s such as Nina Hartley (Yeah, right…like anything progressive and pioneering about women in porn wouldn’t have her fine ass print on it??), Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera, and in particular, Candida Royalle, who was the first woman performer/producer to break ranks with the mainstream with her Femme Productions line of woman-centered porn. This tradition was further extended during the 1990′s by women like Tristan Taormino, who was the first female producer to specialize in humanizing anal sex for women as a safe and pleasurable act. You could even make a case that it was these “feminist porn” performers that paved the way for both the current success of mainstream “couples porn” offered by profitable shops like VIVID and Wicked, and for opening up more opportunities for women behind the camera as producers, directors, and even company owners.
So….who would hate on such a profound and progressive project to reform porn from within and bring actual progressive values into it??
Why…how about a devout “Marxist”-feminist activist? Yup, that would be Professor Gail Dines.
This all went down when Maura Kelly, a regular columnist/blogger for The Daily Beast, went to the latest Feminist Porn awards show and promptly posted a provocative writeup on whether “feminist porn” was worth the hype, and whether it could even be considered feminist in the classical sense. In her story, Kelly quoted from various “fem porn” producers and actors on the diversity of the product, ranging from the traditional “cuddle and romance” stuff more typical of romance novels to even consensual BDSM and ravishment fantasies.
If feminist porn sounds relatively wholesome to you—if you’re picturing sex that might be graphic but is also gentle and romantic, the kind of lovemaking that might have occurred on that beach in From Here to Eternity if the camera never cut away from Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster to the waves—you might be getting the wrong idea. Some porn that’s considered feminist depicts women who are hog-tied while having sex that looks painful, or women who are suspended from the ceiling while men penetrate them. That’s feminist?
Yes, proponents say. What makes these films “feminist” isn’t just that they feature performers who are more diverse in shape, size, sexual orientation, age, and race than in mainstream pornographic movies, but that the performers engage in sexual behaviors they enjoy. The directors and producers often “ask the actors what they like to do,” says Jansen. In mainstream porn, the performers don’t have any say in the matter.
“Some women are turned on by being submissive,” Jansen explains. “We need to respect that their choice for themselves is not degrading or sexist.” She adds, “There is so much shame and negativity around sex already. People need to feel positive about their desires.”
Now, you can debate for yourselves the validity of the statement that mainstream porn performers have no choice over the acts they are paid to do on screen of online..but that’s a different kettle of fish and chips.
Naturally, any good article needs an antagonist, and guess who Kelly recruits to give the counterpoint on “feminist porn”?
Critics contend that porn simply cannot be feminist, no matter who’s making it or how enlightened the directors think they are. To begin with, there’s the question of objectification. “Anyone willing to feed off women’s bodies and use them as raw materials to make a profit has no right to call themselves feminists,” says Gail Dines, an anti-porn activist and the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. “Even porn without overt violence is a form of exploitation since it reduces women to a series of body parts.”
And feminist pornography doesn’t preclude overt violence. In fact, Dines argues, feminist porn is getting horrifically brutal, just like the mainstream stuff—so much of which, she says, features women being forced to perform oral sex until they gag, or to endure men going straight from penetrating them anally to orally, with no break in between. Feminist porn is “increasingly copying the big boys,” Dines argues. She points to a site called Sex and Submission, which features previews of films that she says are considered feminist porn but that show women performing as sex slaves, strapped to boards or chained up, while men—sometimes more than one at once—have aggressive sex with them.
We all know, of course, how Gail has real issues with oral sex, ass-to-mouth sex, anal sex, gang bangs, facials, and any form or depiction of sex that doesn’t meet her exacting standards of “bodily integrity” and “intimacy”…especially if those kinds of sex involve erect male penises or imitations thereof. And, Gail’s complete ignorance of female domination and the recent emergence of “pegging”, where women anally penetrate men — see Francesca Le’s very popular site HisAssIsMine.com (NSFW, of course), is merely par for the course with her, as is her failure to conceptualize gay male, lesbian, and transgendered porn.
However, those issues pale to the real issue that Gail Dines has with not haing total control of the debate and not being able to browbeat her critics and targets to bits.
Apparently, she didn’t like the fact that she was only quoted as the counterpoint to the pro- “feminist porn” position, and in a couple of comments to the Daily Beast blog posting, she let Maura Kelly have it with both barrels…while also taking some pot shots at other feminist porn icons as well for their association with The Great Male Capitalist Porn Patriarchial Conspiracy.
Oh, so much rotten, spoiled beef rolled up into one paragraph. Roll with me on this one, Clones.
So, Gail…you think that any one who seeks your counsel on your positions on porn must merely regurgitate your talking points, and not be allowed to give all opinions an equal bearing, or they automatically become tainted as “the enemy”??? Funny, but that’s not how journalism works, madame. At least, not classical journalism.
Secondly…way to smear Tristan Taormino with the guilt-by-association card merely because she worked with John “Buttman” Stagliano and Ernest Greene. Because how else can Gail simply slip slide past Tristan’s obvious feminist credentials and her life’s legacy in making safe anal sex vids but to link her to one man who was charged (and acquitted) with obscenity, and another man who did consensual BDSM videos. (Of course, in Gail’s cracked mind, any man who produces BDSM automatically becomes “a sadistic torturer of women”…even if he happens to be married for 10+ years to only the most iconic feminst porn performer of all time. Gee, Gail…jealous of Nina much??)
Oh…and comparing images of women engaged in consensual acts of sex which happen to include mild violence with Amnesty International pics of actual nonsexual torture involving hot irons, sticks, and other means of death and destruction, only further the notion that Gail Dines is simply reaching for whatever lifeline fuels her raging obsession with hating on other women who have more sexual fun than she would allow them to.
Yet, even that wasn’t enough, for in response to a commentor who gently childed her for missing the concept of “journalism”, Dines offered this further counterresponse.
To paraphrase the old Schoolhouse Rock adverb jingle: “Lolly’s, Lolly’s, Lolly’s, get your cracked memes here…”
Funny, Gail, but I don’t remember God or the Goddess or any one else giving you special dispenssation to declare who deserves to be called a feminist and who doesn’t. Sorry, but you do NOT own the exclusive patent to feminism, and thusly you LOSE the right to lecture anyone on what a feminist should be. In fact, Gail, if anyone deserves to have their feminist creds questioned on the basis of their behavior and actions, it’s not Nina Hartley or Tristan Taormino..it’s rabid antis like YOU who are not averse with colluding with the worst antifeminists (like Shelley Lubben and PornHarms) in order to get your favored laws passed.
Also, once again for the 2,468th Goddess damn time, Gail: You are no more a Left analyst than Ron Paul is a progressive; and your bastardization of both classic Marxist theory and legtimate criticism of corporate power to sell your sexual fascism and erotophobia isn’t fooling anyone with a working brain cell.
If anything, Maura Kelly bent over backwards to give Gail plenty of room to vent her spleen, and yet that didn’t prevent Dines from still ripping her as the equivalent of Katie Roiphe (the current Great Satanette of modern feminists), and reducing her evenhanded article to a mere “fluff piece”. That alone should say more about the madness of Gail Dines than it ever did about either Maura Kelly or the feminist pornographers that Gail would simply love to wipe off the face of the earth.
I’ll simply leave it to another commenter responding to Dines to summarize this.
Problem is, Louise, if Gail was to finally allow the light bulb to go off in her head and allow for some actual knowledge about porn and feminism, her head would probably explode from all the stress. Plus, how would she be able to make all that money and gain such prestige as a Marxist feminist apostatic critic of capitalism??
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ADDENDUM: As sometimes is the case, something that you wanted to add doesn’t appear until after you have hit the “Publish” button…but it’s so important to showing how so out of it Gail is regarding Tristan Taormino that I have to amend this post.
Dines had pointed out in her first comment fart that Taormino had worked with both Ernest Greene and John Stagliano. What she failed to note, however, was that the joint project that the three did together just so happened to be the first video adaptation of Tristan’s book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex For Women, which was released by Evil Angel back in 1999, and won several prestigious AVN awards in 2000.
Gail did get some things right about that particular video: It was full-on gonzo, it was pretty hardcore, and it did contain lots and lots and lots aaaannnnnnnddd LOTS of anal sex. Unfortunately for Gail, that’s where she goes off the rails.
The actual video is pretty much a hardcore educational and instructional video on how to safely introduce women to the joys of anal sex play. It actually begins with Tristan issuing a challenge to “Buttman” Stagliano that if she can convert one of his performers into liking anal play, then he has to fund her video. When he takes her on and presents “Ruby”, whom he says is pretty much unreceptive to taking it upp her butt, Taormino goes to work using all f her tools of the trade so to speak. Plenty of toys and lube and about an hour or two later, Ruby’s orgasming like a fountain, and Tristan has her movie funded.
The rest of the video is a progression in education: Nina Hartley donates her anal spincter to become a living anatomy tour; Chloe and Ernest Greene show the proper way to prepare for doing anal via a cleansing emena; diverse combinations of partners and arrangements for playing anally are shown (MMF, FF, and of course MF)…and the whole thing is topped by a grand orgy featuring Tristan herself being serviced by everyone!
Not exactly sadistic torture or men ripping women’s asses….right??
In fact, by showing that women actually do seek and find and are able to enjoy such pleasures openly and without shame, and tha male porn producers are indeed willing to listen to the needs of women, The Guide For Anal Sex For Women would seem to absolutely rubuke and blow to a smoldering cinder all of Dines’ presumptions about women in porn being mere receptacles of men. Small wonder, I guess, that she reacted with such bile to the Daily Beast article.
Ever got the feeling that some people are just made to be Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius…and some people are destined to be the Road Runner??
I need not tell you about how Shelley Lubben is once again attempting to cover her ass up from the fact that her antiporn ministry, the Pink Cross Foundation, has been getting hit hard from both defections and from exposure of her crooked methods of recruitment and her financial shenanigans.
But this latest attempted swing-and-a-miss is so beyond even her expectations of sheer lunacy.
For her latest attempt at CYA spin, Shelley recruited one of her friends, a disk jockey from LA who glosses himself as “Mace Ravenwolf”, to cut a YouTube video defending Shelley as just an plain, average, Christian woman reaching her hands out to young girls in distress from all the damage done to them by the big, bad porn industry.
Unfortunately for him he also decided that to really reward Shelley for whatever she gave him for his time, DJRavenwolf also decided to take direct aim at Michael Whiteacre, who has been one of Lubben’s most direct critics and exposers.
It’s how he did it that’s the point of this story.
The original video is no longer at Ravenwolf’s channel, due to reasons that will become obviously apparent as you read on. However, Jordan Owen managed to use large snippages of DJ the DJ’s clip for a massive and total pwnage takedown video of his own…and it includes all the lunacy.
Jordan pretty much hits all the highlights and lowlights, so I will simply defer to his analysis.
Yet apparently, not even the video was enough of smearing Whiteacre as the supposed pawn behind the original Porn Wikileaks (the real story can be found by reading Kayden Kross’ now classic reset of the whole saga that she posted to XBiz.com) or the evil “porn predator” who allegedly paid the likes of April Garris, Sierra Sinn, and Maddy Avanti $1,000 each to turn tail and testify publically against Lubben. Nor, was a private email sent to Mace by the very real and sentinent carbon life form known as Sean Tompkins, who now operates The Real Porn Wikileaks site/forum, which politely asked Ravenwolf to either correct the record or take down the video.
Ravenwolf’s response? He not only didn’t take the video down, but he promptly added this block of text to his description section of that video:
That’s right, Clones…Ravenwolf attempted to doc drop Michael Whiteacre.
The original description had some sensitive information that was redacted by Sean when he reposted it to TRPWL for a response post; I have gone ahead and further redacted info regarding Michael’s given name.
Aside from the really, really big-ass monstrous lies put forth in this idocy (for the record, Michael has never been charged with any crime, let alone anything haing been expunged from the record), it;s the sheer amateurism that shows up here.
First off…Sean’s last name is Tompkins, not Thompkins. If you’re going to make bald-faced lies, you might as well get the Goddess damn names correct.
Secondly…”I’m not going to drag his parents into this”…but you still note that you have their phone numbers?? The reason it’s called “blackmail”, DJ the Mensa, is because it is usually most effectively done in private, with a real threat. When you reveal that you have their numbers in public (and last time I checked, a publicly listed YouTube channel fit the definition of “public”, you defeat the purpose of your intentions.
Third, the last thing that you do for an effective doc drop is to tip your hand towards your victim. Telling the world that you have their personal phone numbers, but are saving them for “a special occasion”…you might as well put a damm red blinking light on top of your head
And finally, you don’t fool an attorney who has already beeen the target of other foiled doc drops in the past. If Monica Foster, who actually has some knowledge and skill in the art of stalking, couldn’t stop someone like Michael Whiteacre, then how do you think that your puny efforts will accomplish anywhere near success?
Anyways…Whiteacre’s not one for dodging battles, and he packs nukes of his own. He got YouTube to get Ravenwolf’s video pulled for violating their TOS regarding threats and harrassment, and he’s added this episode to the mounds and mountains of evidence he’s compiled agianst Lubben. In fact, Michael feels that in his ineptitude and sheer brass, DJRavenwolf may have inadvertently given him an important smoking gun in his efforts to ultimately bring the Ministress and her cult empire down to meet justice. As he elaborated in a comment he posted to TRPWL:
For a guy who thinks I was behind PornWikiLeaks, he sure has an easy way with emulating their tactics. What a scumbag.
Regarding the libelous claim in his video that I’ve paid off women (he calls them “girls”) who had been affiliated with Shelley Lubben to get them to lie on the record, I think it says a lot about what integrity is worth to Greg Pawlak/Mace Ravenwolf that he thinks people would jump at selling their own for $1,000.
Also, I have never been charged or even arrested for Assault & Battery, or Narcotics, and I have never had my record expunged. If it had been expunged, how would anyone know? Idiot.
It’s also funny that now he asserts he has my phone number (which Shelley Lubben has) and publishes an Arizona address for me at which I receive no mail and that I’ve only ever placed on one official document. Wanna know what that was? My YouTube DMCA counter-notice to Shelley Lubben Communications (after she false-flagged my videos about her). YouTube requires a non-PO Box address, so I complied with an address no one else had, in hopes that one day she’d do something like this.
She did not disappoint me. This links Lubben to Ravenwolf as his source. He is not just defending her — this was done either at her request or with her complicity.
Got ya, Lubben. You are one desperate and exceedingly stupid criminal. And you and bitchboy-deluxe Greg Pawlak are both fucked.
[Slight edit by me due to an error pointed out by Greta Christina in the comments...thanks to her for everything she has done....and is still doing.]
One of the wonderful things about debating antiporn/anti-sexwork ideologues is that for all their attempts at trying to fudge and distort the issue of self-agency of prostitutes and porn performers, it always seems to come back to the core belief that the latter are so incapacitated by their “background” and their profession that they simply can’t be trusted to speak for themselves, and need the special paternalism of their “saviors” to rescue them from their fate.
The essential principle goes thusly:
“I really don’t like what those dirty sluts and whores are doing, they are enabling rapists and insatiable men, and degrading and objectifying real women and children, and making things bad for us respectable men and women who use sex for its proper sacred purposes, like monogamy and intimacy and making lots and lots of babies. But, I’m too chickenshit to be honest about my sexual prejudice…plus, I want to stll keep my ‘progressive’ credentials as a concerned activist..and I have feminist credentials that I want to keep. Oh, wait, I know…I’ll just say that those tramps and ‘ho’s…errrrrrrrr, those ‘prostituted women’ are mere ‘victims’ of their past psychological and physical sexual abuse as children, and that their supposed ‘love’ of their job is simply a ‘rationalization’ used to cover up their past abuse and justify their current lies. That way, I can dismiss their supposed ‘self-agency’ as merely a cover for succumbing to the patriarchy, as well as a mask to hide their true ‘illness’, and make me look more like the paternalistic, but well meaning, avenger sweeping in to ‘rescue’ them. Go, me!!! Gail Dines RULZ!! Nina Hartley SUCKS a Million Cocks!!! War Melissa Farley!!! OUT!!!”
As has eternally been the case with most sex-negative bashers, they often wrap this basic principle in the flag of “expertise”, based on the “overwhelming evidence” proving their thesis, well documented in peer-reviewed and carefully modeled studies.
Of course, when other people actually manage to access those studies and report back that the “overwhelming evidence” turns out to be nothing more than the explicit anti-sexworker, if not antisex, propaganda based on nothing but the usual right-wing stereotypes and slanderous hyperbole of what sex workers and their clients (or porn performers and their fans) actually do, these vaunted “crusaders” all of a sudden get an extreme collective case of hemmoroids, claiming that they are being attacked and abused and ambushed and distorted, and that their critics are nothing more than enablers, even paid agents, of the “prostitution lobby”, or just (if they happen to be men) simply deniers letting their dicks and their “addiction” speak for them.
Being a long time advocate for decriminalization/destigmatization of sex work and a sex-positive Leftist, I’m more than intimate with those kinds of assaults, since they are thrown at me personally on an occasional basis for my heresy of believing that sex workers and porn performers are worthy of respect and dignity and having their opinions and experiences respected as well. Some attacks, thoough, are whackier than others.
The following would fall under the “totally whack” category.
You will recall that I participated in a debate now brewing over at Free Though Blogs on the issue of decriminalization of sex work. It all started when “abolitionist” activist and writer Taslima Nasreen decided to post someblogblasts decrying what she called “sex slavery’ and endorsing the “Swedish Model” legislation (save the women, jail and punish severly the men) as the only real solution to eliminating the real harms of illegal sex trafficking.
This so upset Greta Christina — an FTB regular, an atheist humanist, and sex-positive progressive feminist, and the one who introduced welcomed Nasreen to FTB — that she was moved to post her own counterpoint refuting Taslima’s assertions, and standing up for the right of sex workers — most of whom oppose the “Swedish Model” as counterproductive to their efforts to reform sex work and make it work for them.
Snipping from Greta’s post does it no justice, so I’d rather you just go there and read it for yourself.
Of course, any time anyone decided to make a defense of sex workers, it will bring out the usual anti professional trolls who will attempt to “correct” people who dare to challenge “abolitionist” ideology. People like “Nikolay”, for instance.
This is why I mainly see prostitution as a non-coercion form of sex slavery; there is often not much of a choice. There is a lesser extent of this you’d see in first world countries of course.
However, one should seriously consider the background of those, who despite having other choices, venture into prostitution. While there is-as far as I know-insufficent study into the background of prostitutes, overwhelming majority of those-as high as 75 percent-come from abusive background, often rooted in their childhood. So one must consider the psychological and bio-genetic psychological effects that abuses have on the developing brains. It essentially re-wire the brain, not to mention wrap one’s conception of the world. Even those who say they do it out of choice, one must consider how much of a choice did they really have in the first place? This is something the author completely failed to consider when speaking of the prostitutes who seem to be content with their work and see it as something of a job, or a choice.
This is why prostitution is inherently harmful. Instead of giving them compassion and empathy, we reinforce their psychological view of the world; that people don’t really care about who and what they are. All they (johns) care about is seeing them as sexual objects, not as human beings, even if they are treated with respect.
It is for the reasons above that legalizing prostitution would be wrong, not to mention immoral on so many levels. Of course, the reasons above are rarely something that people take in account, especially the law-makers. Simply put, people generally don’t attempt to conceptualize or internalize others well at all.
Not to mention that Dutch’s legalizing of prostitution actually makes the situation worse, and Sweden’s anti-prostitution law more successful. Look it up yourself.
Unfortunately that is all people generally see prostitutes, as whores and not human beings with pain deep somewhere inside their soul that they choose to blocked out.
Or, a shorter Nikolay: Prostitutes (and porn performers) should not be trusted to speak for themselves because they all are speaking from the pain of long term sexual abuse as children, and their support of their profession is nothing more than a cry for help and rescue from their scrambled brains from all that abuse.
Of course, Nikolay offers no such initial evidence of such, nor does he cite any instance of where he gets his “75%” figure…he just asserts it with the affirmation that he’s knows what he’s saying, and everyone else is totally wrong.
I had been contributing my thoughts to other comments there, so I decided, “What the hell, might as well sound my Black ass off here, too.” Thusly…
Responding to Nikolay @ #269:
Me: “And yet, even at that, even in a perfect world where everyone is paid a decent livable wage and able to economically fend for themselves, they will always have sexual desires and feelings, and want outlets for those desires. And, not always within monogamous marriage, either.”
Nikolay: Yes, clearly, but you’d still find number of prostitutes halved by more than half in this scenario.
And you know this….HOW?? Because you know every damn sex worker/prostitute/woman in the world?? Because you simply assume that in your perfect world, trading sexual favors for some form of value wouldn’t still exist?? Of course, plenty of prostitution as currently defined would vanish if total egalitarianism (aka “communism”) was achieved…but a lot of it would evolve in the same way that midwifery, pharmacology, and most other social industries were evolved through professionalism.
And remember this, too, Nikolay: The countries with some of the most horrid conditions of sex workers and the worst forms of human trafficking (sexual and otherwise) also happen to be pretty much the same countries with authoritarian governments that impose a very conservative sexual morality (whether religious or “radical feminist”) and which state as their public moral duty to eliminate all alternatives of sexual commerce or sexual choice other than those narrow forms they impose by political fiat.
And yet, despite all that sexual repression (or, probably more likely, BECAUSE OF IT), there still remains a vast “market” and a never ending “demand” for sexual favors. What you attempt to censor the most, you merely make more desirable, and when you deny people the ability to channel basic human desires through safe and sane and consensual channels, they will inevitably seek them through other, more dangerous means.
Besides, I did say that I’d prefer a world where sex was freely given and sought and delivered through less dangerous forms than the current system..and if that results in prostitution being reduced anywhere near 50-75%, well, so much the better. As long as the remaining 25-50% who would still choose sex work are given their proper respect and worth as full human beings, there should be no objections from anyone truly progressive.
Me: “The fact remains that not even abject poverty prevents men an womem from having sexual feelings, and as long as there are people with cash and people willing to offer themselves to relieve those issues, then they always will be some form of prostitution or sex work.”
Nikolay: ….I’m not sure you wrote this carefully when you did, it doesn’t make sense. Abject poverty, not sexual desires-is what pushes huge number of women and some men into prostitution or labor hardship.
I wrote exactly what I meant; you just don’t want to acknowledge it. Plus, you totally distorted what I said, anyway.
Yes, abject poverty is the principal means by which poor/working class people are pushed into human trafficking in general…but that still does not mean that everyone who does sex work who was economically coerced into it will be so turned off by the sexual aspect.
Sex work should be treated like any other kind of work, and those who perform it should be given the same type of respect, responsibilities, and rights that other workers take for granted…..but that doesn’t mean that the basis of their work — namely, the SEX — shouldn’t be ignored. Take away the abject poverty and the stigma, and you will still have plenty of sexually assertive and sexually aroused human beings searching for outlets and releases for their desires. And, even poor people have sexual feelings and desires; just because they don’t have the outlets that middle- or upper-middle-class folk have doesn’t mean that they are all merely robots or fundamentalists.
I guess that the fundamental difference between us, Nikolay, is that I as a sex-positive leftist RESPECT human sexual desire that transcends race, class, gender, and nationalities, and that I’m not willing to have working class and poor people be forced to surrender their right of self-determination in all matters just so I can impose a perfect “one size fits all” morality on all of them.
Sex and consensual sex work is NOT the enemy. Human trafficking and poverty IS. Learn and understand the difference.
The main point here I was trying to convey is that as much as sex work is like any other work, it is still about SEX, and as long as there is human desire and the willingness to exchange sexual favors for subsistence, there will always be some form of sex work, even in societies where full egalitarianism is the rule. If religious fundamentalism hasn’t been able to squash out sexual desire through government fiat or physical punishment or even the death penalty, do you really think that something like the Swedish Model (or mandatory condom usage) will accomplish the same social engineering??
Well…that really must have fried Nikolay’s brain, for he thusly proceeded to attempt to waylay me for “distorting” everything he said…while promptly reinforcing every single one of his theses…and adding some real whoppers in addition. I’ll just hit the highlights for brevity’s sake.
Nikolay: ….I’m not sure you wrote this carefully when you did, it doesn’t make sense. Abject poverty, not sexual desires-is what pushes huge number of women and some men into prostitution or labor hardship.
Anthony: “I wrote exactly what I meant; you just don’t want to acknowledge it. Plus, you totally distorted what I said, anyway.
Yes, abject poverty is the principal means by which poor/working class people are pushed into human trafficking in general…but that still does not mean that everyone who does sex work who was economically coerced into it will be so turned off by the sexual aspect.”
Never said it applies to everyone. The keyword is MAJORITY-majority of the women WORLDWIDE are forced into prostitution due to economic hardship. I don’t doubt you’ll find women who might enjoy prostitution despite the economic coercion. After all, it surely helps to rationalize and justify your profession that you would never have chosen to do in given alternative economic outlet. And that’s not even mentioning those who are psychologically damaged by abuses of any kind or other delerious background in their childhood-teenhood. It’s simply human nature to try to rationalize what you do despite inherently disliking it. Your mind simply would not have coped otherwise.
Let me define the economic hardship. “You” shall be in reference to yourself and your family members. When you cannot obtain medicine treatment necessary, attend school, pay rent, and other basic needs to survive or to create economic mobility, i.e going from school into a job, that is an economic hardship. It never has been sexual desire that becomes the driving vehicle for women into prostitution. Most women can easily get sex at the snap of the fingers upon walking into the bar if they do wish to. Most women don’t venture into prostitution merely because of their morality belief, social or cultural belief or norms. In additional, generally there are predictable characteristics of your average prostitutes.
The problem with that assertion — well, other than the gall of Nikolay deciding that he can define what the “average” prostitute feels and what their motivations are — is that he ignores the basic fact that human trafficking isn’t just about sex trafficking or prostitution. There are many forms of human trafficking involving cheap labor, from field work to domestic labor to industrial jobs, and none of them involve engaging in sex with your employer. (At least, not publically. Now, exploiting the economic disadvantages and legal immigrant status of most laborers to force sexual favors out of them IS unfortunately all too common, but mere sexual harassment is a fundamentally different kettle of fish from being “forced into prostitution”.)
And, what a perfect mechanism Nikolay has to blow off the assertions of sex workers not so favorable to his prefered solutions: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they speak.” Even if they insist that they were never abused as children, even if they provide solid proof that their upbringing was free of abuse (other than the usual economic strife), Nikolay can simply dismiss them as either abject liars and enablers saying those things to avoid “the truth” of their “oppression”, or pathetic sick women still suffering the byproducts of their “abuse”…or simply, that depleted “minority” exception that only exists to prove his rule about the “majority”. Shelley Lubben would be mightily impressed.
And this just takes the cake: “Most women can get easily sex at the snap of the fingers upon walking in the bar if they wish to.” Yeah, right…but most women can’t easily get sex AND GET PAID FOR IT. That’s pretty much the point, isn’t it? Plus, I thought that according to most “abolitionists”, women of that sort didn’t exist, or were just a byproduct of the “pornification” of popular culture and the “objectification” of women??
But oh, no….Nikolay’s not quite finished yet.
Anthony: I guess that the fundamental difference between us, Nikolay, is that I as a sex-positive leftist RESPECT human sexual desire that transcends race, class, gender, and nationalities, and that I’m not willing to have working class and poor people be forced to surrender their right of self-determination in all matters just so I can impose a perfect “one size fits all” morality on all of them.
Ridiculous, I have never advocated that. I refer you to my preceding paragraphs. Let me ask you (which means any guy in general) this; you come across a beautiful prostitute that you are willing to pay to have sex with. She tells you that she was sexually abused as a child. Or because she could not afford to find alternative economic outlet that she desperately needs to support her child(ren) or parents or sick family member in needs of treatment. In the first case, do you think it’s okay to use her to fulfill your sexual desire? Don’t forget, you are having sex with a person who used to be a child that were abused. In the latter cases, is it okay to do the same? If their background scenarios were the opposite, they are very unlikely to pursue the prostitution venue. Don’t you think that’s really overlooking their basic human dignity?
Ahhh…nice attempt to guilt trip me with that variation of the old “How would you feel if that was your daughter, or wife, or sister??” card. I mean, clearly, those (male) clients who pay for consensual sex work must be heels for ignoring the fact that they are really raping those girls (or at least, taking undue advantage of them) because they are ignorant of the abuse that those poor girls are suffering from…and if they really cared for those girls’ being rather than merely using them as mere cumdumpsters, they should immediately cease and desist and give all that money they would have given the girl/woman for all that ‘objectified” sex over to groups like Shared Hope International to end sex trafficking for good!! Because, of course, as Ashton Kutcher said so well before he cheated on Demi Moore: “REAL MEN DON’T BUY GIRLS!!!”
Most normal people would see that as an insult to people who are surviving and recovering from real abuse, or those who are truly coping with mental illness. Not to mention, those who are in sex work who are totally sane, of sound mind, and still like the idea of getting paid for doing sexual acts they also happen to like for free.
Yet even this is just an appetizer for his roundhouse finish, where he turns his guns on porn performers, and shows his “expertise” is nothing more than the usual paternalizing bullshit you’ve come to expect from the Maggie Hays/Robin Morgan/Diana Russell crowd.
“Sex and consensual sex work is NOT the enemy. Human trafficking and poverty IS. Learn and understand the difference.”
……Perhaps I should now mention that human trafficking is my main area of study. I have read several books, hundred of articles, etc on human trafficking. So perhaps you need not assume any ignorance on my part as to the difference. Poverty IS the driving vehicle and the enemy for prostitution and human trafficking. Your average prostitute is un-educated, poor, lack alternative outlet for economic opportunity to support themselves/their children/family. I’d rather to give free money to the prostitutes than to use them to satisfy my sexual needs. In this way, I’d respect their basic human dignity, respect them and love them as my mothers, sisters, childhood friends.
In respond to the conjecture criticism, and to Anthony on elaborating more; there are very few studies on the background of porn actresses. Inherently this is due to the shady nature of porn industry. However few that does exist, they indicate that the vast majority of the porn actresses come from abusive background, broken home, farther issue, with low self-esteem the norm. Imagine that your cheerful fourteen years old classmate girl announced on one day that she wishes to enter pornography or prostitution. That never happens, even in a society perfectly acceptable with these institutions. The exceptions I’ve read are in some eastern Europe countries where social culture and institution of the communism era collapsed completely with enormous rise of abject poverty, child pornography and prostitution, in the landscape enveloped with violence, alcoholism and broken homes.
Simply put, conjecture or not, your average girl or woman isn’t going to participate in prostitution or porn industry if she comes from psychological and loving background, are given economic alternatives, grow up in cultures that are not hostile or marginalized them nor hyper-sexualized them from early age as is currently the form in USA, which does shape the consciousness of both genders, even fully-grown adults (especially males). That isn’t just going to happen, whenever it be due to self-imposed values, social or cultural norms, religion, etc. It’s not “oh please, think of the children and the world”. That simply ignores the reality. As I’ve said, your average prostitute or porn actresses generally have these following characteristics of their background; abuse in their childhood, broken home, abject poverty, economic hardship ( the latter two are generally seen in a lesser extent in western society such as USA or Canada as compared to eastern Europe or Asia countries for instance). The hyper-sexuality media institution in all forms further foster the pattern of thinking within males that makes it seem acceptable to view women in a more marginalized sense. I see this all of the time in movies of any country.
Anthony, you asked me if I have interviewed these women. I don’t need to do that to know this is simply true. Why don’t you do the interviewing yourself? Or read up more on this very subject. Or watch the interviews and listen closely to their words, in what they say, and watch closely their eyes, their faces, even in the face of rationalizing themselves. In either case, if you’re lucky and get honest answers from prostitutes, you’ll find that what they tell you fit in perfectly with my statements. To me, this is common sense just on the basis of human dignity, on the basis of seeing them as not merely faces but daughters, sisters, mother, on the basis of understanding what and how sexual trading inherently are, and their basis for their evolution.
Yes, indeed. When facts don’t jibe with the ideology, just adjust the facts to fit the ideology.
If porn performers like Nina Hartley (Bachelors of Science in Nursing, San Francisco State University, 1984, magna cum laude) or Asia Carerra (proficient enough in piano to have performed TWICE in Carnegie Hall, IQ of 156), or Shy Love (TWO Masters degrees in Accounting and Taxation) or Lisa Sparks (Masters of Art in Multimedia) or Vicky Vette (extended career in middle management and even a licensed home builder prior to entering porn at the age of 39) disprove the thesis that porn stars are merely psychologically damaged young ingenues…well, just ignore them and speak as if they don’t exist.
And, of course, blame the “hypersexualized culture” and the “hypersexuality media institution” for warping men’s heads into denying that these women are nothing more than sex objects for men to masturbate into, rather than women to be respected for all of their accomplishments, sexual and otherwise. Because we all know that actually recognizing sex workers as complete and full human beings offering sexual services to people who are willing to pay for those services while still treating them with respect would blow huge holes in the ideology of radical antiporn/antisexwork activism. Small wonder that Nikolay can only resort to insults and regurgitation of his “facts”.
Ultimately, Nikolay wore out his welcome, and got run by Greta, but not before polluting her blog with his numerous brain droppings of rhetoric. Perhaps, we can learn from this that the way to handle trolls like this is to just give them enough rope to hang themselves….and allow their essential antisex nature to show itself ultimately…right before breaking them off with the truth. In other words, first you kick their ass with solid truth, and then you kick their ass OUT. Never failed me…ever.
Props also to Divinity (aka GodlessStrumpet), XXXild, Iamcuriousblue, Ace Of Spades, and FeministWhore for adding their contributions of truth…and especially Greta Christina for showing fools like Nikolay what it is and where the door is at.
Remember when Gail Dines posted her screed on the “censorship” of Appalachian State professor Jammie Price over the latter’s screening of the antiporn documentary The Price Of Pleasure…and how Dines used that case to spew her usual Male Porn Capitalist Conspiracy theories?? Also remember this nice quote:
I have never before heard of an academic suspended for either talking about or showing porn.
The assumption being here that any professor who attempts to even talk about porn in a more positive light gets nothing but free rides and accolades, while those who attempt to show the “dark” side of porn — you know, the side that induces ordinary men to become out-of-control rapists and vampires and sex fiends masturbating fervishly fifty times a day, waiting for the next victim to use as his own personal cumbucket — is essentially run out of academia on high-speed rail, thanks to the awesome power of the porn lobby and their capitalist moles??
Well..as usual, Gail has it completely bass ackwards….because there are plenty of examples of college professors whom have been censored or even fired for even taking up a pro-porn (or even anticensorship of porn) position….and there is enough intimidation of college professors by right-wing (and radical feminist) watchdog groups to ensure that the idea doesn’t even arise in the first place.
However…there are exceptions to every rule, and places where the attitudes on college campus are a tad more progressive. An example that Gail Dines missed while beefing on Appalachian St. tookk place recently.
Peggy Gish teaches human sexuality at California State University at Fresno (which most of us non Cali’s shorten to Fresno State University), one of the main state universities located in the mostly conservative Central Valley area of central California. For 25 years, she has used as a reinforcement to her teachings videos on sexual intimacy amongst couples, and until this year, she had had no issues with her students. That might have to do with the fact that Professor Gish makes it plain from the beginning that her courses will contain somewhat explicit material before hand, and that any student feeling uncomfortable about that will be able to leave the course without penalty. According to her, only one student has walked out of her videos, and she couldn’t tell whether it was from discomfort with the explicitness. (More likely, a slightly different kind of “discomfort” requiring a trip to a bathroom stall…or a bunk bed??)
This year, however, when she decided to include as part of her course a video put out by the Sinclair Institute titled “Better Sex Sexplorations, Vol. 1: Advanced Sexual Techniques & Positions”, her lucky streak ran out.
Making love is an art much like painting. Some couples use only primary colors, but when you use an entire palette, your sex life becomes a vibrant and thrilling adventure. Join some of the world’s leading experts as they help you become an artful and irresistable lover. Attractive real life couples explicitly demonstrate adventruous new techniques. Discover uninhibited positions that lead to pleasure, satisfaction, and closeness for a lifetime. Learn how sensual massage and erotic talk can enhance your intimacy and sexual pleasure. Watch together and bring your love life to new heights of sexual intensity.
Advanced Sexual Techniques is the first video in our three video Better Sex Series. Volume 1 discusses how to increase your sexual knowledge, increase pleasure, and heighten intimacy. Twelve couples from different ethnic backgrounds take you on an explicit sexual journey that explores sexual positions and techniques.
In essence, this is basically a straight hetero couples video designed to improve sexual intimacy between monogamous/married couples…except jacked up with some decently explicit scenes of couples performing and talking about how expanding their sexual horizions improved their marriages/relationships immensively.
Gee…sounds like exactly the kind of wonderful “essential sexuality” that folk like Gail Dines see as an viable alternative to the usual “body punishing” cumfests found in “typical” porn, right??
You would think so…but some right-wing activists, who see porn behind every bush and under every stadium bleacher and who think that even mild exposue to even the most benign forms of porn will ultimately “corrupt” young adults into sexual freakery, don’t take so kindly to even married couple porn in our vaunted universities.
One such group runs a website called CampusReform.org, a sort of Far Right “watchdg” site for monitoring Central Valley schools for excessive “leftist” activity; and when a student of Gish’s class tweeted his “shock” at seeing a “porn film” in his class, the Brietbart wannabes were quick to spring to action.
Oliver Darcy, a “conservative blogger” and a former student at the neighboring University of California-Merced, posted a full-on red-flag blog post on the shock and horror of Gish’s showing this “pornographic, full-length” film in public at taxpayer’s expense:
Fresno State Public Health Professor, Peggy Gish, played a pornographic, full-length film for her class on Tuesday. The adult film was called “Advanced Sexual Techniques, Volume One” and contained both sexually explicit audio and graphic video.
Campus Reform learned about the incident after a student, who does not wish to be identified, came forward.
According to an online synopsis the movie follows “12 couples of varying backgrounds and ethnicity” who “explore sexual positions and techniques.”
[...]
It is not known what educational value the showing of the adult film added to the course.
According to our source, the entire class seemed to be in shock that the professor chose to play the explicit film.
After numerous requests, a university spokesperson finally provided the following comment:
The educational video about which you inquired is a 20 minute segment from a longer DVD. This is an element of a 3-unit, semester-long “Introduction to Human Sexuality” general education course that explores physiological, psychological, social, cultural and developmental considerations for life-long understanding related to sexuality. It is not a required course. Students who take the course are advised, in advance, that they may find some content objectionable and that they may opt out at their discretion. Since material is provided in a variety of formats, students have the opportunity to gain course content for assignments and exams without being required to view material they may find objectionable.
The university spokesperson, however, has failed to respond to further questioning from Campus Reform.
Of course, leave it to a wingnut to suggest that a video on couples sexual intimacy has “no educational value” in a course on human sexuality. The thinly veiled concern about “backgrounds and ethnicity” (read that to mean, “Oh, noez…ZOMG…they’re teaching NEGRO/MUSLIM sex as superior to American Christian sex!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!111ONE111!!!!”) is a nice touch for all the nativists out there, too.
But, if they figured that the CSU-Fresno administration would react as App St. did with Jammie Price, they would be greatly disappointed. From a slightly less biased account of the brohaha via the Huffington Post:
A statement sent to The Huffington Post from Andrew Hoff, dean of Fresno State’s College of Health and Human Services, defends Gish and explained the 20-minute video segment was an element of a three-unit, semester-long Introduction to Human Sexuality general education course. The class explores “physiological, psychological, social, cultural and developmental considerations for life-long understanding related to sexuality,” he said.
“It is not a required course. Students who take the course are advised, in advance, that they may find some content objectionable and that they may opt out at their discretion,” said Hoff in the statement. “Since material is provided in a variety of formats, students have the opportunity to gain course content for assignments and exams without being required to view material they may find objectionable.”
And, then, the Huffington Post article give what appears to be the final verdict on this case (emphasis mine):
Hoff said, “The goal is providing relevant information so all students, no matter their learning style, are prepared to offer informed opinion and make critical determinations regarding issues raised in class.”
University-level courses typically utilize a range of materials to deliver course content, he adds.
The school isn’t planning disciplinary action and considers the matter closed.
It may not matter, because Professor Gish was shaken enough by the entire affair that she did consider killing the video for her next semester. A follow up interview she gave for the official CSU-F journal The Colleagian tells what she went through:
Angry callers, some from as far as the East Coast, have left messages in Gish’s office phone, condemning her for allegedly showing porn to her students. A caller who identified himself as “William” left a message on Gish’s office phone in which he sarcastically commended her for her “extreme liberal beliefs.”
“It’s people like you that really help us conservatives by showing pornos to your students,” he said in the message. “This really gets the message across that people like you don’t need to be teaching in a public university or university whatsoever.”
Gish is unsure if she will show the video in the future due to the coverage it has received in the media.
“I love my job and would not take any chances of doing something that would put it in jeopardy,” she said. “But even more importantly, I wouldn’t do something that would be offensive to my students.”
And, even the student who tweeted his discomfort with the showing of the video has expressed remorse.
Darcy also wrote in his blog that the anonymous student claimed the class was in shock when the film was played.
The student, however, said he wasn’t offended by the video and has apologized to Gish for publishing the post to his Twitter account.
“At first, we all seemed sort of awkward and laughed,” the student said about the class while the film was shown. “It wasn’t anything negative.”
Now, what does all this have to do with Gail Dines?? Well, it shows that contrary to her notions of a “porn conspiracy” that enables the nastiest of porn to be defended, if not prompted, on college campus without dissent, it is actually quite rare for any defense of porn to be prooffered on campus without a firestorm of protest from the Right (and, to a lesser extent, from the antiporn feminist “Left”). There are individual exceptions to that rule, especially in California, where there are a few tenured professors who do fight the good fight for truth and reality when it comes to porn and human sexuality (folks like Jessi Fischer (aka The Sexademic) and Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals (of Porn Valley Vantage) and Constance Peley, to give notable examples) who also are targets for their more progressive positions. Yet, strangely enough, Gail can’t be arsed, even though she is a tenured professor and a supposed “Marxist”/ Leftist who should respect academic freedom, and purports herself to be such an expert on global capitalism and its political power, to make even a tacit stand against attempts to stifle academic debate and discussion…except when her side happens to be the ones attacked.
And then there is this fact that can’t be denied: the position of Breitbart wannabes like Oliver Darcy is far, far closer to Dines’ stated ideals about sexuality in general than those of Peggy Gish, especially when it comes to pornography and women’s sexuality. After all, if Dines is more than willing to accept the funding and help of PornHarms in the name of “fighting capitalist porn”, then it would figure that she would give a free pass to the conservatives at App. St. who probably did protest the explicitness of The Price of Pleasure and go straight for the “Damn Pornographer Capitalists!!!” card off the bottom of the deck. And also, why doesn’t Gail go after the App St. administration who levelled the harsh suspension at Professor Price without, apparently, the right of appeal? Does she think that Paul Fishbein has that much influence there??
Summary memo, Gail: You can’t bitch and moan about academic censorship only when your side gets “hosed”. If Peggy Gish had gotten the same treatment as Jammie Price, would you have done the decent thing and raised so much as an eyelash towards her treatment at the hands of a right-wing public lynch mob…one with far greater power and funds than the “porn industry” would dream of?? Would you spend even a pixel defending a video like Better Sex, Vol. 1, which seems to me to be exactly the type of “erotica” that celebrates happy, healthy, and safe monogamous sex in a form that even a feminist would love?? Would you even so much as lift a finger to defend the right of female college students to watch a video that would actually empower them to learn how to sucessfully negotiate and celebrate their sexuality in a non-degrading and empowering fashion?
Oh, what the fuck am I saying?? This is GAIL DINES we are talking about..she’d probably dismiss the video as yet another “niche” gimmick by “capitalism” to fool women into seperate them from their money, and a deliberate distraction from the “real” attitudes of porn-watching men displayed by sites like GagMyCockBitch[dot]com, MakeHerEatMyShit[dot]com, and DrownHerWithTonsOfCum[dot]com*, even if their profits don’t even reach the top single digits, or equal one day of the Southern Baptist Convention’s daily take from tithes. But of course, the SBC doesn’t do porn like the Marriot hotel chain or Microsoft does, so their capitalism is AOK by Gail..heck, maybe she thinks that their women can be the easiest to flip over to her form of “radical feminism”.
Then again, shared sexual fascism makes for not-so-strange bedfellows.
*Back away from the Google, Clones…those sites don’t exist…except probably in Gail’s mind.
Updated with new information on the Jammie Price/Appalachian State affair that set Gail Dines off….scroll to bottom.
You know…earlier when I posted on Gail Dines’ earlier rant at CounterPunch on the Sandra Fluke/Rush Limbaugh brohaha, I figured that it would be just a matter of time before she would rip off the restraints and get back to what she does best: distort and lie about porn.
Well…that didn’t take long, did it?
Yesterday, Gail posted another essay over at CounterPunch getting back to her roots as antiporn “feminist” propagandist and “anticapitalist” conspiracy theorist. The subject, this time was the alleged censorship of a college professor who dared to present one of her previous antiporn agitprop screeds in her class.
The professor in question is one Jammie Price, who teaches sociology over at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina; and the screed was a extended antiporn “feminist” documentary called The Price of Pleasure, that was released in 2006.
Apparently, according to Dines (I Googled all over but couldn’t find any other source story for her claims, so I have to go on what Gail says in her essay), Price presented the documentary in her class in its entirity; and three of her students (out of 120 total who saw the film) promptly filed a complaint with the App St. administrators, claiming that the material was “inappropriate” for a classroom setting. I’ll let Gail take over from there:
[...] Dr. Price was not allowed to learn the names of the students or to meet with them, was denied a hearing, and was immediately suspended and told that she could not enter any offices or classrooms in the Arts and Sciences buildings. Should she want to obtain “materials, computer files, pick up mail …” she needed to make arrangements to be escorted by a member of the faculty.
How interesting that a university decides that an academic analysis of one of the most profitable industries in the world is “inapproriate.”
WOW…that’s pretty strong sanctions…of course, Dines makes no mention of how long the suspension was (One week?? To the end of the semester?? Permanent??), or whether or not Professor Price had the option of appeal due to her tenure as most professors do.
But as for the “inappropriate” finding?? Well, that could be debatable…actually not quite.
You see, The Price Of Pleasure does go into a lot of the financial analysis of the porn industry, in line with Gail’s core analysis of how “capitalism uses porn to make tons of money off the ripped vaginas, prolapsed anuses, and sperm-abused faces of women as male masturbation objects”. Mostly, however, TPoP is an visual malestrom of agitprop, using (without the permission of the models featured or the studios maligned) vivid and graphic images of the kind of “body punishing” sex that the creators feel that is the predominant message of porn. It also attacks consensual BDSM and sites like Kink.com as “torture porn”, even going as far as using clips of women being bound, gagged, flogged, and otherwise “abused”, taking them totally out of the context of the actual consensual themes.
Now, Gail Dines should know all about this, because she and her fellow antiporn crackpot Robert Jensen (also a regular CounterPunch contributor) were actually credited as “consultants” by the actual producers of the documentary. Plus, she should have probably known that in more conservative portions of the country, even a doc dedicated to antiporn theology would run the risk of being “flagged” by conservatives who would be squicked by the use of thinly veiled overt sexual imagery.
More likely, of course, is that Dines is well aware of that, and simply wants to gloss it over because it’s so much more fun to evoke The Great Capitalist Porn Conspiracy, and claim that it was the porn industry, rather than prudish conservatives, that got Applachain St. to punish Jammie Price for the crime of showing TPoP.
The grand irony in all of this is that Dines has been intimately involved in campaigns to silence pro-porn (or at least, anticensorship) voices in college before. In fact, she even goes and describes one such matter: her attack on Indiana University for having the gall to invite alt.porn icon Joanna Angel to speak at their campus.
In 2008, the porn press was abuzz with the great news that Joanna Angel, owner of the porn site Burning Angel, had been invited to speak to a human sexuality class at Indiana University. No pretense was made that this was going to be an educational event by the porn news site X Critic, when they wrote, “She will be showing the students clips from her movies, handing out sex toys and enlightening them with a positive view on pornography.”
I wrote a letter of complaint to the president of Indiana University pointing out that the role of a university classroom was to educate the students, not provide a captive audience for capitalists to push their products.
The president’s office responded in a rather odd way. They asked the professor to apologize to me for bringing in Joanna Angel, as if this whole case was a personal insult to me. I think we should be speaking about porn in the classroom, but not as a fun industry that sells fantasy, but rather as a global industry that works just like any other industry with business plans, niche markets, venture capitalists and the ever-increasing need to maximize profits.
Of course, the fact that Burning Angel and other alt.porn sites were explicitly created to debunk and transcend the supposed hegemony of the “male-dominated” imagery that Dines claims to dominate porn, probably didn’t register too well with Gail. The real issue was that porn performers not matching her stereotypes of them as mindless “cumdumpsters” or victims of serial rape and assault simply shouldn’t be given the chance to defend themselves or their chosen profession without the approved radfem antagonist present to “correct the record”.
Problem is, though, Gail allows her sexual reaction to slip through the cracks even as she attempts to whitewash TPoP as merely an economic critique of the porn industry.
Instead of claiming that we are all empowered by porn, The Price of Pleasure delves into the underbelly of the industry, illustrating its points with images drawn from some of the most popular porn websites. These are not pretty, nor are they very erotic. We see women being choked with a penis, women smeared in ejaculate, women being slapped and spit upon, and in a particularly horrible scene, a woman retching after she has licked a penis that was just in her anus (called Ass to Mouth in the industry).
Now…any woman reading this who has managed to actually be deep throated, or whom has had facials done on them, who has engaged in a scene with spitting and slapping, and whom has actually survived AtM without dying of E Coli poisioning or being choked to death with the guy’s penis or not being able to wash the spooge and spit off with soap and water afterwards, please raise your hands. (Not you, Monica…I’ll get to you later.)
And, of course, this should never, ever be confused with a conservative, fundamentalist critique of sexuality….of course not!!
It seems to me that Price’s crime was to provide a progressive critique of the porn industry, rather than wax lyrically about how porn empowers women sexually. She showed a film that takes an unflinching look at the real porn industry.
Ahhh, yeah. A “progressive critique”. Seriously.
One of the producers who was seriously slandered in that video was Ira Levine (who also produces and writes under the professional name Ernest Greene); one of his bondage videos was hijacked and used without his consent for the documentary, and he was also interviewed by one of the doc’s creators, Dr. Chyng Sun, as part of the “fact-finding research” for TPoP. (Remember Dr. Sun’s original criticism that was published in January 2005 in CounterPunch?? Remember also Nina Hartley’s response to that?? Oh, did I also mention that Ernest is Nina’s husband, too?) Being both an actual progressive AND a long-time sexual rights activist involved intimately in the kink field, Ernest actually understands what really goes on in an BDSM themed scene…and he used the pages of the Blog of Pro-Porn Activism to both review and refute the cracked claims of TPoP, as well as document the way they stole and abused sexual content to fit into their ideology. Hisfourpartseries is available and accessible through the home page of the BPPA blog. Anyone wanting a true progressive critique of how right-wing antisex propaganda attempts to work would be highly encouraged to read that series.
On the other hand…anyone wanting a totally whack and completely insane analysis of the whole affair could do much worse than accessing the blog Porn News Today, which offered up this wonderful breakdown of the Dines CounterPunch article:
I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re officially in the “End Times” as of today. The woman in this article, a professor, tried to educate her students as to the truth about the potential detrimental effects of pornography on one’s life, and she was suspended for it.
Meanwhile you have sextoy companies (who are of course Free Speech Coalition members) like the Screaming O sponsoring college campus events at USF (I’m convinced that their front man works directly for Satan), and Wicked Pictures screening their movies to students at UCSB.
Why even TRY to give young people the knowledge they need to make educated healthy decisions in life at this stage? Being that pornography is the psychological drug to enslave the masses of this generation why stop there? Maybe the United States should go ahead and legalize not just marijuana, but cocaine too and start distributing it to middle school kids (highschool age kids just aren’t young enough now days).
Once the middle school kids are hooked on both the porn and the cocaine – after they make it to Highschool (the ones that live that is), call in the porn companies to recruit the 16 year old girls during lunch break (the kids won’t be eating lunch anyways being that cocaine takes away your appetite). It’ll be like a job fair! Hell, I’ve been saying for a while that the age limit to be in porn should be raised to 21, but being that it’s the END OF DAYS lets go ahead and lower it to 16. Why not? Come on psychos, if you’re going to transform Earth into HELL lets do it RIGHT!
The person who wrote this mash of thrash?? Monica Foster. “Christian porn star”, self-identified apostate, and now, apparently, joining her mentors Shelley Lubben and Gail Dines in the agitprop network.
At least this can be said about Monica: she’s now down to one crazy personality, rather than five. Too bad that personality is more of a mole for sexual reaction, a double agent working both sides of the street. Pick a side, dear, before you get hit.
[Update (4-23-12)]
I had said that the only source for Gail Dines’ account of what happened at Appalachian State was her CounterPunch article…but now I’ve found the real source.
The Chronicle of Higher Education blog released on April 10th a full blog post documenting the entire episode regarding Jammie Price…and it is illuminating as much for what really did happen as what Dines simply cherry-picked for her antiporn crusade. I’ll simply repost the entire article for your viewing pleasure.
A tenured professor of sociology at Appalachian State University has been placed on administrative leave following complaints last month from four students about her “inappropriate speech and conduct in the classroom,” including showing a movie about pornography.
Jammie Price, who has been a professor at Appalachian State for eight years, showed a well-known film called “The Price of Pleasure” in her introductory sociology course. The film, which she got from the university library, criticizes the porn industry and other businesses that make money off it.
According to a letter Ms. Price received last month from Anthony Gene Carey, vice provost for faculty affairs, Ms. Price failed to warn students that the material may be “objectionable or upsetting,” and at least three students complained to administrators that the content was “really inappropriate,” Mr. Carey wrote.
Another student complained to administrators that during another class meeting, Ms. Price had made “disparaging, inaccurate remarks about student athletes,” said the letter from Mr. Carey. He also said Ms. Price had inappropriately talked about her personal life and her political views in the classroom and “repeatedly stated that you do not like working at Appalachian” and “criticized the university administration.” In his letter, Mr. Carey said Ms. Price would be placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the university’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Compliance.
Ms. Price, who has hired a lawyer and filed a sex-discrimination complaint against the university with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, asked the administration for a hearing on the charges but was denied. Administrators told her that is because she is on administrative leave, not under disciplinary suspension. When the university placed her on leave, it told Ms. Price she could not enter any classrooms or offices in the College of Arts and Sciences and took away her keys. It also told her not to speak about the matter with any students or colleagues.
The American Association of University Professors wrote a letter to the university’s chancellor this month, saying that, in Ms. Price’s case, the consequences of the paid leave were the same as a suspension. It also said AAUP guidelines say professors should be suspended “only if immediate harm to the faculty member or others is threatened”—something it said wasn’t evident in Ms. Price’s case.
The association also criticized the university because, it said, it appeared the administration had not consulted with any faculty committee before placing Ms. Price on leave.
The university didn’t return phone calls from The Chronicle seeking comment.
In a written response to Mr. Carey, Ms. Price said all the topics she covered in the course—including personal examples from her own life—were appropriate for an introductory sociology class. She said the movie on pornography included interviews with well-known scholars and is a legitimate teaching tool. “Part of the learning process for some students may be moving past the discomfort they feel when faced with core concepts in an introductory-level sociology class,” she wrote. Ms. Price said the university placed her on administrative leave for covering subjects “pertinent to sociology.” As such, she said, the university action “violates my rights to academic speech.”
Ms. Price told The Chronicle she believes the administration is punishing her because she has spoken out about things on the campus, including what she describes as a male-only poker club that includes administrators and faculty members.
“Men in the poker club gain more power, privileges, and income than others on the campus, and protection from student charges,” she said. “Since I started speaking out about this poker club, I have been bullied and harassed.”
So, from what it appears, the issue is NOT porn per se, but an administration taking advantage of some complaints about the “inappropriatness” of showing TPoP without any prior warning for triggering (as well as the other miscellaneous smack leveled by Ms. Price on other issues) in order to punish a whistleblower for “troublemaking”. Overbroad and a genuine assault on academic freedom?? Most probably, and one that will be resolved within the proper channels. A planned assault by the porn industry to “censor” a critical documentary?? Ahhhhh….no, I don’t think so.
Nice try, Gail…but as usual, you come up a day late and ten dollars short.
If you remember my last post, I covered the insanity of Shelley Lubben and Gail Dines on the issue of sex work and porn. But they’ve been mastering the art of propaganda for ages.
The third woman in our trifecta of crazaa, though, might not be known nearly as much as Gail or Shelley…but she might be the craziest of them all.
Taslima Nasreen may not be a household name to people in the West…but go over to places like India or Pakistan, and her name is definitely on almost every person’s lips. In some lips, usually accompanied by curses. You see, Nasreen is a renowned writer who has won numerous awards for her books by prestigous orgs such as PEN American Center…but has also drawn massive social protests and even death threats and fatwas for her unabashed assaults on fundamentalist Muslims and their treatment of women. For the past 18 years, Nasreen has actually lived in exile from her native country due to the very real possibility of death, and she is still considered to be persona non gratia in certain sections of her native country due to her heresy. You might consider her to be the feminist equivalent of Salman Rushdie…except that not even Rushdie encountered this much fervent reaction.
But while Taslima should be rightfully praised for her braveness in confronting the horror of extreme misogyny and mistreatment of women in her native country, it seems that she has, in the process, embraced an only slightly different form of social and political repression. As in, the extreme fundamentalist wing of “radical feminism” that reduces all male-female relationships to violence and rape, and which seeks to abolish any form of sexual interaction not redeemable to their narrow standards of “egalitarianism” and “intimacy”.
When Taslima Nasreen accepted an invitation to join the weblog network of atheist skeptics known as Freethought Blogs, known for their promotion of not only free and open discussion, but staunch critique of established religion, it seemed initially that she would be a perfect fit for that group, considering her strong stances and commitments. Problem is, they forgot about the other shoe of “radical feminism”…the one that Taslima promptly used to dropkick her extreme theories into action.
The first blow was an essay Nasreen wrote titled “Sex Slavery Must Be Abolished”, which the title suggested was an attack on the illegal and abusive aspects of the underground sex trafficking industry that has devastated many countries. The problem was, though, her essay quickly degenerated and disintegrated into what ultimately became a propaganda piece for the most extreme of what is called the “abolitionist” position on sex work most promoted by activists like Melissa Farley, Donna Hughes, and Andrea Dworkin, and propogated by organizations such as Prostitution Research, the Center Against Trafficking In Women, and Women Against Pornography. (I’ll explain the latter anon.)
Nasreen makes her position pretty much explicitly through a series of button notes, of which I will respond individually.
Lie1. Prostitution is an oldest profession. Truth1. Prostitution is the oldest form of patriarchal oppression, not oldest profession.
Really?? You mean, older than religion itself?? And what about cultures of goddess worship that predated Christianity and where prostitutes were seen as figures of high regard worthy of respect and admiration?? The same ones that were literally destroyed by….fundamentalist Christians and Muslims??
Lie2. Prostitution is sexual freedom. /Prostitution is sex. Truth2. Prostitution is sexual exploitation./ Prostitution is not sex, it is sexual violence.
Right. A consensual exchange of money for sex is considered “violence”, not sex. Even when no actual violence takes place. Even when both sides consent. And, even when there is mutual sexual pleasure and mutual respect between both parties. Plus, no advocate for decriminalizing sex work has ever said the obvious stawman argument that “Prostitution is sex” or “Prostitution is sexual freedom”. That Nasreen seems willing to go there says more about her attitudes about sex than about prostitution itself.
Lie3. Legalizing prostitution gets rid of sex traffickers and pimps. Truth3. Legalizing prostitution benefits sex traffickers, pimps,clients,sex industries.
Lie4. Men need sex therefore prostitution must exist. Prostitution is a natural form of human sexuality. Truth4. The sex of prostitution is not “sex” for women in it. Most men who use women in prostitution have other sexual partners.
Point #3 is highly debatable, since no one has ever said that decriminalization would get rid totally of “sex traffickers and pimps”, but it is clear and obvious that existing criminalization (both of the conventional conservative and the “Swedish Model” forms) have sure as all hell not removed “sex traffickers” or “pimps” or even placed a dent in illegal and dangerous sex trafficking. But of course, since Taslima has already gone head first into the empty pool of “all prostitution sex is rape”, it would follow that she would reduce all efforts to decriminalize it to supporting “sex industries”, “pimps”, and other assorted male “rapists”.
And…this notion that because most men who seek sex workers for sex happen to have other partners, this translates into “sex with prostitutes isn’t really ‘sex’ but rape”?? Gee, Taslima…are you saying that men should settle for sex only with their significant others, and that any attempt to go beyond their monogamous mates for sexual relief amounts to “using women”?? Sure…because women don’t have sexual urges, right? And this is different from the fundamentalists you decry….HOW??? Simply because you are a “radical feminist” secularist??
Lie5. Women choose to enter prostitution. Truth5. Prostitution is not an acceptable job for women. They are forced to enter prostitution. Prostitution is an abusive institution and women stay poor in prostitution. It is not a vocation choice, it is human rights abuse.
Lie6. Legal prostitution protects women in prostitution. Truth6. Legal prostitution does not protect women in prostitution from harm. All prostitution , legal or illegal, harm women.
Never mind the fact that countless sex workers have testified that they chose by their own selves to enter the sex trade, and that many women have faced no or little abuse and have even managed to make a decent amount of money and escape their extreme poverty. And, never mind the fact that many women who do say that they were economically coerced into doing sex work nevertheless don’t quite agree with the analysis that they are merely mindless victims of “human rights abuse”, and would much prefer to work to make their profession safer, saner, and more condusive to human rights. In the Utherverse of Taslima Nasreen, those women simply don’t exist…or, they are simply dismissed as either stupid “cumdumpsters” or paid agents of the evil Male Pimp Rapist.
For brevity’s sake, I’ll skip over to one last “bullet point” that says wonders about Nasreen’s insanity.
Lie8. Prostitution is deterrent to sex crimes. Truth8. Prostitution is associated with increased rate of sex crimes.
Feel free to notice how Nasreen’s arguments are a nice parallel with arguments made against homosexuality or medicinal marijuana or other “victimless crimes”…arguments often put on by the very same fundamentalists whom issue fatwas and death threats against any “infidel” who dares to challenge them?? I guess you can’t completely take the fundamentalism out of some people, right?
Nasreen got plenty of heat from other Freethought readers on her initial foray, but she didn’t budge one inch….in fact, she issued a followup blog (“Do Women Really ‘Choose’ To Be Prostitutes”) where she cited mostly propaganda from Melissa Farley’s Prostitution Research blog to justify her absolutist positions on sex work and prostitution as mass rape.
If there was ever an exchange that encapsulates the dead-headness and total denial of the “abolitionists”, it is this comment reaction Nasreen to a comment by Maggie Mayhem, an active sexworker.
As a sex worker activist and active sex worker, what I want to say the most is *please listen to our voices.* We want rights, not rescue. Those speaking for us have trampled our voices for far too long.
In the United States and around the globe, sex workers are forming collectives and unions to fight for our rights. Mainstream feminism and patronizing anti-trafficking orgs have continually propagated lies about sex work statistics and have actively shut down our organizing efforts. The sex worker led efforts to decriminalize prostitution in San Francisco, CA were largely opposed by feminist organization and one of the biggest anti-decriminalization donations came from Gloria Steinhem herself.
Please listen to us. We don’t need to be saved, we need to be supported.
House slaves did not want the abolition of slavery because they were treated considerably better than field slaves. Would you say slavery should not have been abolished only because some privileged slaves wanted to remain as slaves?
Never mind that “house slaves” in the antebellum US South opposed slavery with the same fervor as the field slaves because in the South, ALL Blacks were mistreated in the same way. To Taslima Nasreen, if you oppose her chosen methods of abolishing sex work (“Swedish Model” legislation shaming the women while jailing and essentially castrating the men merely for having erections), than you are either a “house slave” or a pimp wannabe.
Natually. Nasreen’s invasion of FTB with her sexual fascism has not gone unopposed. Greta Christina, a legitimate sex-positive feminist, and the one who first introduced welcomed Nasreen to the FTB network, has come out with a strong blog essay rebuking all of TN’s hackery and delusionary hyperbole, and offering a much more diverse picture of sex work. Natalie Reed and Richard Carrier have also posted trenchant criticisms of Nasreen in their own network blogs as well. In addition, principled sex worker activists outside of FTB have also felt free to correct the lies of Taslima and question her credibility as a skeptic in light of her endorsement of anti-sexwork/radical feminist theology. See the works of AGodlessStrumpet — aka Divinity33372 — and XXXild, as well as the videos of Feminist Whore, for some genuine education.
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Of course, it would follow that Taslima’s views on that other target of radfem ire, pornography, would parallel her views on prostitution…and she has posted a blog entry recently (“Let’s Eroticize Equality“) expanding her cracked vision of sexuality onto the “porn industry”.
Naturally, she starts out citing the historic motto of antiporn “feminist” Robin Morgan (repeated by antifeminist James Dobson), “Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.”
Then she attempts to mime Gloria Steinem’s classic distortion between “erotica” and “pornography” as a hammer to beat down the latter. She even goes as far as to redefine porn using the definition of radical antiporn activist Diana Russell:
Pornography: Material that combines sex and/or the exposure of genitals with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behavior.
Nice open-ended definition, ehhh? So much better than the traditional definition of “pornography” as “depictions or descriptions of sexual content or other accounts intended strictly for sexual arousal”.
By, contrast, here’s Nasreen’s and Russell’s definition of “erotica”:
Erotica: Sexually suggestive or arousing material that is free of sexism, racism, and homophobia, and respectful of all human beings and animals portrayed.
Of course, there are no examples of explicit hardcore porn that can fit the positive definition of “erotica”, now is there?? Not if you simply refuse to even attempt to locate them.
But the real whackiness of Nasreen’s ideology is exposed near the end when, after providing linkage to sites promoting her treasured theories of “porn addiction” and how porn absolutely destroys regular marital relationships by substituting idealized images for real people, she then attempts to drive her readers to three sites she says are typical of the predominant type of porn that men watch and masturbate to. (Followed, in an typical ideological flourish, by a link to a song to apparently wash the filth off, I guess.)
She embeds the links so that viewers aren’t initially aware of their true content, but from scrolling over each of the links, they lead to three sites threatening labeled, respectively, BrutalVideos[dot]net, GangRapeVideos[dot]net, and SexRapeVideo[dot]com. (Unlike Taslima, I actually do respect my viewers enough not to ambush them, so I will not embed the links here. They are active in Taslima’s original post.) The problem is, though, that it takes sheer balls to reduce the viewing habits of millions of porn viewers to three sites that would, even collectively, not even come close in viewership to ONE Nina Hartley video.
And even worse…those three sites aren’t even commercial sites, but free video trading/photo trading “tube sites” where people simply upload their privately owned videos for others to view. Not to mention, also, that the videos of such sites are more than likely either outtakes of videos of consensual sex gone somewhat awry, or consenting adults engaging in “acting out” of rape fantasies. Yes, Taslima, some women do in fact enjoy fantasies of being overpowered against their will. No, Taslima, that is not the same as sexual assault or sexual battery. And no, Taslima, watching such videos do NOT induce most men to fits of lust or desires to rape every woman nearby..in fact, most regular porn viewers would probably be put off by such portrayals, since far less hostile content is so readily available.
This is the agitprop equivalent of the Nazi Party using depictions of “hooked nose Jews” as crooked businessmen, or racist Ku Klux Klansmen using images of Trayvon Martin with a Colt-45, a backwards cap, and half-mast pants giving “gang signs” to justify his death and the targetting of all Black men. And, it’s standard operating procedure for the fundamentalist antiporn radfems (see Gail Dines minting GagMyCock[dot]om and GagFactor[dot]com for similar effect).
The point, though, is that this slandering of men who use porn (or simply whose sexual proclivities don’t fit neatly into radfem dogma) is simply the byproduct of the sexual essentialism that is the heart of the critique of porn and sex work, as well as the mirror imagery of their core beliefs with those of the Religious Right (Dines and Steinem’s distortion and fabrication of “Marxism” notwithstanding).
In the end, though, just as Gail Dines has ceded that nothing she says or writes will change over the views of her critics, I’m sure that Taslima Nasreen will say that nothing she writes will change others’ view of the world. Their point is not to debate, anyway; their mission is to promote their form of sexual conservatism (though personally, I’d say that their vision is closer to sexual FASCISM) as a means of controlling men in the same way that traditional religion has used sexual morality and sex law to control women. You would think that a journal called “Freethought Blogs” would be able to see through such blatancy and call out such bullshit for what it is. Thankfully, there are people there who understand that; maybe, they can mount enough of a challenge to counter the invasion of sexual reaction by the likes of Taslima Nasreen.
Myopia is defined in most dictionaries as ” total inability to understand and comprehend the truth.” If this week in antiporn activism is of any indication, then the Force of Myopia is running particularly strong with certain antiporn/antisexwork “activists”. This is actually a three part series…but only parts 1 and 2 will appear here; Part 3 will be on my next post.
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We begin with the adventures of our favorite ex-porn girl Ministress, Shelley Lubben…who got caught early last week by Sean Tompkins of The Real Pornwikileaks attempting to crawfish her way out of one of her most embarrassing moments: the historic Porn Star Kareoke event of 2009. That would be the one where Shelley was filmed getting her tits signed by porn legend Ron Jeremy after sucessfully bidding for a “date” with him..then cutting it up on the dance floor with stripper moves that Shyla Stylez would be impressed with.
Problem is, though, that doesn’t quite jibe with the image of a stout, austere, anal-retentive fundie Christian out to “save” impressionable porn girls from their clits that Shelley would rather put out in public.
So, when one of her peeps attempted to get Lubben’s side of the story on what she was actually doing at that PSK fundraiser, the Ministress came up with an explanation worthy of notice. And, that would be “worthy” as in….the craziest and most hilarious Goddess damn lie pulled out of her ass since the many dicks that used that particular orfice in Roxy’s Gangbang 3:
Yeah, right, Shelley. If you really knew Ron Jeremy as a “close friend of yours”, then why would you assume that he would ambush you like that and force his Sharpie on your “clavicle” like that?? That a man whom almost all his peers describes as a total teetottlar who doesn’t even drink socially, would go out and essentially sexually harass a close personal friend..or any woman, for that matter?? And also, don’t you think that most normal, sane women would respond to someone putting a Sharpie anywhere on their person with something a bit more direct than looking up at the sky and “praying to God”, and then waiting one month later to admonish him for his “boorish” behavior?? More than likely, the only prayers that would be given would be for Hedgehog’s life after the offending woman kicked the living shit out of him….right before the cops arrived to arrest him for sexual assault with an ink pen.
The other issue with Shelley’s tale is that she forgot that people carry mobile phones with them…the kind that make pictures which are posted to YouTube and websites like TRPWL. You know….like this one??
Yeah…she sure looks real sad and angry that RonJ is signing her “clavicle”.
And she looks even sadder and angrier outside the club, too:
I guess you’d feel “sad and angry,” too, if you just wasted $700 of your ministry’s cash on attempting to bear God’s witness to a porn hunk like Ron Jeremy. Or…maybe, it’s just the Seroquet and Henny kicking in to numb the pain.
Oh, but Shelley wasn’t finished with her rationalizations. Far from it.
Oh, yes, indeed. You see, Clones, only us freakin’ heathens and porn-addicted losers would see a woman dressed in her perfect Sunday-go-to-slut-out gear and spend $600 of her own ministry’s money to act like a squeeful fangirl and get an autograph from a legend in his field. I guess that in private, she would have sealed the deal of “saving” Jeremy by signing her name on his dick, then??
And what, Ministress Lubben, of this video showing you dancing wild and free?? Was that the Holy Spirit and the Holy Annoiting flowing..or was it just a tad too much Patron??
Pink Cross Foundation President Shelley Lubben cutting up the rug at the Porn Star Kareoke fundraiser in 2010 (via YouTube, h/t Jordan Owen)
‘Course, no one — not even me — begrudges even Shelley Lubben of her right to cut it loose and have a swell time on occasion, and even get a bit carried away in the spirit of alcohol. All of God’s children stray from time to time. The problem is, Minitress, just own up to it and acknowledge it, and stop trying to pretend that you are so above being human and that you can impose ruleson others that you yourself won’t follow. The road to Hell is not paved with temporary strayers….but chronic, deliberate liars. And, especially, hypocrites.
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Our second journey into Antiporn Cloud Cuckoo Land comes from another reliable and dependable source for sheer lunacy: Wheelock College professor and preiminent antiporn “feminist” activist Dr. Gail Dines. (OK, so her doctorate wasn’t in sociology; but how so much more powerful she seems with the title attached to her name.)
Gail, of course, is still hard at work with her world tour and her continuing mission to spread the secular gospel of “radical feminism” as a viable alternative to the supposed dead end political funk that the Left suffers from, and strenuous opposition to adult consensual sexual expression and media (what she deems as “pornography”) as the template for degradation of, objectification of, and ultimately, rape and violence against women and children, is one of her essential foundations of her crusade.
Pushing the Left head first into the deep and empty pool that is “radical antiporn feminism”, though, is not an easy task, because there are still those renegades and apostates and holdouts who still insist that people should be able to evaluate and make choices in their own lives based on their own experiencs, and that not all or even the majority of porn expresses the type of brutality that Dines so graphically expounds.
Never underestimate, though, the capabilities of Gail to use every trick in the book — fair and unfair — to trip up these infidels and win the day for her side.
This week, a Canadian British political group called New Left Project released the transcripts of what was supposed to be a debate on how the Left should deal with porn. Gail Dines, through her now classic propaganda screed Pornland: How Porn Is Hijacking Our Sexuality, represented the radfem antiporn “Left” view; freelance writer/journalist Sarah Ditum represented the more progressive, less censorious view. The format was basically standard for written debates: Ditum published her critique of Pornland; then Dines would respond, then Ditum would rebut, then Dines would counter rebute, and then the two would summarize their thoughts (with Dines getting the last word in).
Problem was, as usual, Gail just couldn’t handle the trenchant critique of Ditum, and promptly bailed herself out of the debate at the “second rebuttal” stage…but not without her usual bit of fireworks and Scud missile launching and histrionics towards women who don’t follow her exact template for “liberation” from the Evil Capitalist Patriarchial Porn Conspiracy.
Thankfully, another prominent Dines critic, Jordan Owen, was able to obtain the transcripts of the debate, complete with all the whackiness; and he has some choice words in response to Gail’s whackadoodle, as well as her chickening out. It’s a long vid, but worth the visit.
But, if you don’t have the time, I can hit on some highlights.
The main thesis of Ditum’s first critique was that Dines was playing fast and loose with definitions of “pornography”, and that her sourcing was both woefully inadequate and completely distorted and warped to support her POV that porn was the center of both women’s oppression and capitalism. Some snippage:
Maybe that sounds like quibbling. After all, most of us would know pornography when we see it. But there’s no definition of pornography in UK law: “obscenity” is covered by the Obscene Publications Acts (obscene material is defined as that with “tends to deprave or corrupt”), and there’s also the legal category of “extreme pornography”[2] (“grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character”) introduced in 2008. But these definitions are intended to be narrow, and there’s obviously a huge volume of material that is pornographic, and yet doesn’t fulfill the criteria for with obscenity or extremity.
The dictionary definition, conversely, is wide. Here is the OED’s most recent take on pornography: “The explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings; printed or visual material containing this.” Suddenly, the field of pornography is a vast and muddy place. Amateur-authored slash fiction – in which fans of a book, film or TV show invent non-canon relationships of varying profanity between favourite characters – is probably in, according to this definition. Shoots of topless girls in lad mags like Nuts or Zoo are in (but the magazines are not pornographic works as a whole, because they include sport and lifestyle features).
[...]
In Pornland, I believe that Dines’ comes up with the least useful and most dishonest definition available. While she uses the word pornography to discuss her target, and expands her argument in the broadest cultural terms (she enumerates the ways in which pop videos, HBO and Hollywood cinema have all contributed to the process of “pornification”), the material on which she bases most of her discussion is the sub-genre of video pornography known as gonzo. (From the introduction: “I want to make it clear that when I talk about ‘porn’, I am referring mainly to ‘gonzo’.”)
On page 88 – that’s several chapters into the case she has been building against porn – Dines finally offers what could be interpreted as her working definition of pornography. It is, she writes, “depictions of cruel acts that one group [ie men] is perpetrating against another group [ie women].” (It’s notable that Dines elects not to look at gay or lesbian pornography, thereby depriving herself on an opportunity to test her thesis about porn’s modelling of male-female sexual relationships by comparing it to the presentation of male-male or female-female relationships.) In other words, she has defined porn a priori as cruel.
Now, I won’t get into again how Dines continues to make the fatal error of defining “gonzo” as a subgenre rather than a particular filming style that puts the viewer as if (s)he’s part of the action, or how Dines one more time truncates the definition of “porn” to fit nicely into her reductionist view of male-female sexuality as close to rape….never mind how Dines merely flips off gay male/lesbian or transsexual porn as irrelevant.
So…how does Gail respond to such a critique? The only way she knows how….by slut-baiting and cum-dumping on Ditum as an “elitist neoliberal” out of step with the “real world” that “radical feminists” like Dines are committed to transform through destroying “the porn industry”.
First paragraph of Dines’ response gives her game away.
How wonderful that Pornland has evidently been what Sarah Ditum calls “astonishingly successful.” It is about time someone other than the pornographers got public airtime to talk about what is probably the most influential form of sex education today in the western world. The book has had its fair share of criticism, mainly from adolescent boys (by adolescent I refer to their emotional rather than chronological age) who, after much analysis and thought, decide that the problem with Pornland is that it was written by someone who “needs a good fuck.”
Of course, Ditum had wrote that Dines’ book was “highly influential“, not “highly successful”, and not even the sternest of critics (like Jordan or moi) have ever, ever written that Gail only “needs a good fuck” to solve her alleged puritanism. (I did say something in the past about a vibrator, though…but that’s different.) And, of course, Ditum said nothing of the sort, either. The reduction of Pornland critics to “emotionally adolescent boys” is a nice touch, too.
As to Ditum’s claim that Dines focuses on the most extreme content that justifies her biases and ideology at the expense of other subgenres of porn that are far less corrosive and violent….well, Gail has a retort there, too: Why study the plankton and the goldfish when the whales and sharks are right there, eating everything in sight?
My failure to give a detailed definition of porn, or my refusal to celebrate porn as a diverse set of cultural products, comes not from laziness or oversight but a commitment to a radical political economy. Located within a wider Marxist framework, political economy is a way of studying how media images both produce and reproduce systems of inequality. It is concerned with macro questions of class, race, and gender oppression, and aims to understand how media as a system of images, messages, norms, and ideas construct hegemonic discourse in ways that serve the interests of the ruling class.
So political economists interested in how the news media shape people’s ideas about politics are not going to look at, say, the New Left Project, Socialist Review, or the New Statesmanas examples of how most people in capitalism get their news. Instead they are going to go toThe Daily Mail, The Sun, The Mirror, BBC, ITV, and so on, since it is these outlets that shape the hegemonic thinking about political power, capitalism, and (in)equality. This does not mean that left-wing media are not of interest to study, but it will not be of much use to anyone who wants to understand why the rich continue to get away with robbing the workers blind.
Hence, why would I—a radical feminist who is interested in how porn shapes masculinity, patriarchy, and hegemonic discourse—spend my time looking at porn that maybe a handful of people get to see? Why would I bother with marginalized imagery that has virtually no impact whatsoever on mainstream culture? What I look at is what business and technology studies people call the “Dominant Design.” This refers to “a basic architecture of product or process that becomes the accepted market standard.” Today the dominant design of the porn industry is gonzo. This is not something I made up. It is not me “fixing the debate” or “propagandizing against all pornography,” but the reality of the porn industry today.
That would be a viable retort, Gail, if you manage to finangle the meaning of the term “pornography” to include such things as nude pictorals from Playboy or Penthouse, sexy music videos from MTV or BET, and even glossy backpage ads from Cosmopolitan and the lad mags; mix them all up with the mostly free picture/video trading of amateur homemade porn videos through tube sites and Bit Torrent downloads, and fit them all in a nice package you mark as “gonzo” and fire at your opponents.
The main problem is, though, it just doesn’t fit the real world. Actual Gonzo/POV porn is more profitable for producers of commercial porn, mostly because it is cheaper to produce than “feature” porn or “vignette” porn requiring somewhat of a plot or setting or scenario to justify the sex. Those profits are mitigated, though, by the fact that anyone with a digital phone or camera, a website, and access to coding, can create and sell their own pay website in an instant, or, simply post it free of charge to any web forum or message board for all to see. That kinda undermines the profit motive pretty damn quickly…and in fact, it has been the accessability of free porn that has done more to undercut the profits of “the sex industry” more than any other factor (the economy in general excluded).
And really, Gail: “Why would I bother with marginalized imagery that has virtually no impact whatsoever on mainstream culture?” Marginalized, you say?? You mean, that Tristian Taormino’s pioneering videos teaching women to enjoy anal sex safely have had NO impact on “mainstream culture’s” acceptance of anal as a legitimate heterosexual act?? That Nina Hartley’s “Sex Guide” videos promoting active female pleasure is simply some “marginalized” efforts in a sea of “body punishing sex” promoted by Meatholes and Max Hardcore?? And for someone so willing to dismiss the actual experiences and abilities of women within porn, you sure have a way of using women in porn when it suits your purposes of ideology (as in Jenna Jameson or Belladonna or Shelley Lubben).
I’ll just skip over Dines’ jeremiad on the supposed “expansion” of porn in capitalist society, since Jordan in the video covers that pretty well.
The real fun comes when Dines tries to go after Ditum for allegedly misinterpreting and twisting out of context the infamous Neil Malamuth study attempting to link porn usage with sexual aggression. Here’s Ditum’s original:
The problem, again, comes back to that definition. If we accept that porn is ipso facto cruel, then it makes sense to ask whether porn inures its users to violence against women. But if we reject Dines’ synthetically narrow idea of what pornography is, then the causal relationship between porn use and misogynistic violence becomes more difficult to believe in. And if we look for evidence, it starts to fall apart completely. Dines claims in the text that there are “a slew of psychological studies to support [the] claim” that “porn does indeed help to shape the worldviews of men who masturbate to it”, and yet in the endnotes she only cites one review from 1989. This is poor scholarship, but at least it’s reflective of the general insufficiency of the whole field of study. As Dr Petra Boynton points out[7], “The evidence base on the effects of pornography is not particularly clear, given that many studies are limited by small samples; riddled with experimenter expectancy effects and demand characteristics; poorly designed and poorly reported lab-based research that often features male undergraduates who’re not representative of the wider population.”
Naturally, Gail takes serious offense.
I was surprised to find a very clear error in Ditum’s account of Pornland. She states that when I discuss the studies, I cite only one study, from 1989. She then goes on to say that this is poor scholarship. Damn right it is! Who can make a generalization from citing one study? Not me. I cite the 1989 study in footnote 6 of chapter 5. Then, in footnote 7, I cite Pamela Paul’s qualitative study from 2005, and then in footnote 12, I cite an article by Neil Malamuth, Tamara Addison, and Mary Koss from the Annual Review of Sex Research. I talk about this article in the book because it is a review of meta-analytical studies of the effects of porn. This means that Malamuth and his colleagues do a detailed analysis of over 30 years’ worth of studies. They do not “cherry pick” studies but instead examine the weight of the evidence and conclude that “experimental research shows that exposure to non-violent or violent pornography results in increases in both attitudes supporting sexual aggression and in actual aggression.”
Does Ditum think that Malamuth, one of the most respected researchers in the world in this field, is going to make some wild claim without first looking at the body of research that has accumulated over 30 years? Ditum wants “sturdy evidence” before she will accept that porn has an effect on consumers. If hundreds of peer-reviewed articles don’t constitute “sturdy evidence,” then I don’t know what does.
That would be fine….except that the Malamuth study comes to the exact OPPOSITE conclusion of what Dines says it does!! Ditum reads Gail the scoreboard in Rebuttal #2.
[...] If exposure to pornography were demonstrated to be a cause of harm to the psyche of the viewer, then it would be necessary to weigh up the public goods of a right to free speech and a right to a private life (in which an individual may make or consume pornography), against the public ill – if that ill could be proven. But it has not been proven.
Not by Dines in her book, and not by the Malamuth study which she proffers so enthusiastically. According to Dines, this meta-analysis proves that “experimental research shows that exposure to non-violent or violent pornography results in increases in both attitudes supporting sexual aggression and in actual aggression”. Actually, while Malamuth et al tentatively endorse the idea of an association between pornography consumption and sexual violence, they stop a very long way short of asserting a causal relationship. I will quote from the paper at length: “on the basis of the research available, it is not feasible to gauge the relative importance of media influence generally, and of pornography in particular, in relation to other factors [...] It is unlikely that in and of itself any type of pornography exerts a powerful influence on large numbers of people.”
Ouch. Even I had to feel that one.
Small wonder that Gail felt the need to go all Pat Buchanan/Braveheart/Joan of Arc all over Ditum and turn the debate into a classic crusade between the “populist” antiporn “radicals” and the “elitist” liberals. I’ll just post the last three graphs and allow you to feel the effects of a raving lunatic.
In the end the debate between Ditum and me is much bigger than Pornland. It is a battle over the heart and soul of feminism. And what is at stake is not just a debate about porn, but ultimately the nature of this movement that made all our lives better. The battles are not between generations or waves (as some would argue) but between those who adopt a radical understanding of power, institutions, capitalism, empire, and liberation, and those who seek safety in a more liberal, don’t-rock-the-boat ideology that celebrates individual empowerment over collective social change. No surprise that this appeals to the more privileged group of women, since they have been the ones to benefit mostly from the crumbs thrown to women post-1960s.
Ditum, and similarly minded women who support an industry built on the backs of poor and underprivileged women, are empowered. To varying degrees they have economic, educational, and skin privilege that allows them to celebrate porn from a safe distance. They won’t be the ones taking it up the ass on camera, so they can afford to wax lyrical on the ways that porn can be “messy, sometimes unpleasant and sometimes delightful….” I remember giving a lecture at a hideous conference at Yale University Law School in which I was the only anti-porn feminist on a panel of six. Nauseated by the pro-porn drivel coming from the other panelists, I went to sit in the library at lunchtime, away from my “colleagues.” I got talking to the cleaner, a woman pulling a double shift on a weekend to pay for her daughter’s college tuition at the nearby public university. I wondered what this woman would have made of listening to a bunch of academics talk about porn as empowering for women when she was scrubbing floors for her daughter’s education. I bet she would have thought that these academics had lost their minds.
What feminism has lost is radical politics. I joined a feminist movement that refused to collaborate with patriarchy, but over the years I have seen it become something that has slowly but surely capitulated to the demands of the power structure. It is now as unthreatening as Cosmopolitan, since what is there not to love about a “feminist” who fights for the rights of men to jerk off to porn? And while we women debate each other about how difficult it is to define porn, the predatory capitalists are busy building new niche markets and developing new and improved ways to degrade and debase women. So please don’t ask us radical feminists to waste our time coming up with scholarly definitions. We have an industry to close down.
And then, even that is a mere appetizer to the main course of human foie gras and fartage that Gail dropped in her final response to Ditum where she declares herself the victor and then tucked tail and ran away from her stinkbombs. I’ll just quote it in full for posterity’s sake, and add emphasis to the .
This debate feels like a marriage gone sour. After years of fighting with the same person, you know exactly what they are going to say, and with equal tedious predictability, you know what your response is going to be. It is a bit like fighting by numbers. This debate has been going on for thirty years, so instead of me arguing about capitalism, free speech and definitions of porn, I am going to end this debate by saying that there is no solution. There is no single study (or multitude of studies) I can cite that will shift those who sympathize with Ditum, and to be fair, this holds true for feminists who are anti-porn. At root what we have here are deep philosophical differences about the nature of agency, freedom, capitalism, sexuality, heterosexuality and power.
I am a radical feminist who is opposed to the commodification of human life. I do not believe that we should let a capitalist media industry shape our culture, sexuality, and gender relations, and I am opposed to the systems of inequality that supply the sex industry with human flesh. Women, and men, end up in the sex industry because they are the losers in the capitalist roulette. Yes, you may very well know someone’s cousin’s best friend who has a law degree but chooses to do porn, but this does not change the reality of how the vast majority of people end up in the sex industry. Take away capitalism, racism, and sexism, and tell me how you will staff the sex industry. Remove all the systems that make life unbearable for a majority of people on this planet, and my bet is that you will have not have thousands of women who volunteer to be in porn so that nameless men, who think they are nothing more than a cumbucket, can jerk off to them.
The ascendency of a toxic mix of neoliberal ideology and postmodern notions in the academy makes it almost impossible to recognize structures of power and the reality of exploitation, or to argue against the idea that we are all rational individuals freely choosing an empowering lifestyle. This insidious virus has infected feminist thinking, resulting in a feminism devoid of any political or structural analysis. This ridiculous turning away from feminist roots has made radical feminists look like relics of a bygone era who hold on to outdated notions of systematic power and systemic inequality that limit the life chances of women and shape the choices we make. We look like a bunch of party poopers who refuse to celebrate all that great agency young women now have as they are encouraged to strip, wax, and fuck themselves into empowerment.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Republicans have declared war on women’s bodies, women still earn less than men, are still the ones who are responsible for child care, are still raped, harassed, molested, trafficked, and are increasingly having to deal with men who are stuck in perpetual adolescence (what the sociologist Michael Kimmel calls Guyland, the parallel universe to Pornland). These men are their buddies, their bosses, their politicians, their lawyers, their doctors, and their partners. Guyland men continue to make laws that limit women’s lives economically, medically, legally and politically, because — like for all adolescent boys with hard ons — women who are not fuckable are invisible to them.
I have no studies up my sleeve to prove to Guyland men that women deserve true equality. As with civil rights, this is a political principle, not an empirical question. In any event, studies do not change the world. The only thing that makes a difference is collective organizing and education, and that is what radical feminists do. We believe in a future free of oppression, and a cornerstone of this future is a world free of commodified sex and a media landscape that does not reproduce patriarchal culture. This is a truth we hold dear and there is no study, argument, or theory that will persuade us otherwise.
So as you see, Clones, rehabilitating sexual puritanism and castration as a radical cutting edge revolutionary strike against the Patriarchy and capitalism doesn’t need any steenking studies or arguments; just trust us and either lead, follow, or get run over.
And, of course, in a perfect “radical feminist” society, finding people who like sex to film themselves having sex for their own pleasure will be impossible…mostly because if folk like Dines have their way, people will be so brainwashed….errrrrrrrr, “reeducated” with the idea of loving, caring, emotionally dependent monogamous “intimacy” that orgasms and erections will be rendered useless. Of course, criminalizing erections and the depiction thereof will sure help things a lot, won’t it?? (Also…since even adolescent boys don’t have erections 24/7, what in the hell does that make “unfuckable” women then?? And how do you make women invisible in the first place?)
Of course, the women who actually DO take it up the ass, in the mouth, and in their vaginas (or, whatever combination thereof they prefer, both on camera and in private) will have no voice or no choice of their own when Dines’ “radical feminist” revolution actually does go down. And the men who harm no one, rape no one, and live as free and law-abiding citizens, who just so happen to jerk off to porn that harms and threatens no one, and who manage to muddle through their lives without reducing women to anything less than full human beings, will also have no choices or voices when they are castrated or herded into jail or “john/pimp schools” to reeducate them on the joys of sexual guilt tripping when the Dines/Jensen/Ghally policies of “feminist” sexual shaming are enforced by the next enlightened “anti-capitalist” regime.
And while all this is happening, real human trafficking and economic slavery will continue to thrive and survive, thanks to all the newly “liberated” women and children freed from their “oppression” and dependency on “punishing body sex”…and the money from those professions that allowed them to survive and escape even worse fates.
But, I guess that by then, REAL socialists (you know, that actual word describing real anticapitalists that Dines refuses to use?), the ones who actually take Marxist anaylsis about class relations and workers’ activism seriously and not just as rhetoric to sell a fundamentalist sexual reactionary agenda, will have to come in and show fascist pretenders like Gail Dines that there is a distinct difference between voluntarily and consensually taking a dick in the ass and really getting involuntarily screwed by the State.
Oh…and on that cleaning lady that Gail attempts to mime ala “Joe The Plumber” (aka Samuel J. Wurzelbacher), I’ll just allow Sarah D to have the last word on that (from her review of the entire debate):
In my opener, I argue that Dines has misrepresented the evidence and failed to offer a coherent idea either of what pornography is or why it’s necessary to be against it. Dines’ response begins with a gesture of bad faith when she misquotes me in the first paragraph (I called Pornland “astonishingly influential”, not “astonishingly successful” – picky maybe, but she could at least have tried to get that right), and then tries to smear my position by referring to critics who “decide that the problem with Pornland is that it was written by someone who ‘needs a good fuck.’”
Now, I’m sure many people have said this about Dines, but I didn’t, and by characterising her opposition in this way, she’s making an early effort to discredit all my criticism by association. Perhaps she felt it was necessary to be cheap because her responses to the points I actually make are uniformly weak. Charged with not offering a substantial definition of pornography, she says, “please don’t ask us radical feminists to waste our time coming up with scholarly definitions.” (I thought “highly regarded academics” were meant to have at least a minimal engagement with “scholarly” standards. Silly me.) Challenged on her use of evidence, she offers a cherry-picked quote from the Malamuth study. She condemns my understanding of capitalism, while giving an account of industrial relations with no mention of workers.
The best bit, though, is when she accuses me of speaking from privilege and then puts words in the mouth of a cleaner in order to support her argument. Seriously:
I got talking to the cleaner, a woman pulling a double shift on a weekend to pay for her daughter’s college tuition at the nearby public university. I wondered what this woman would have made of listening to a bunch of academics talk about porn as empowering for women when she was scrubbing floors for her daughter’s education. I bet she would have thought that these academics had lost their minds.
I’ve italicised the conditional phrases in that section. What it means is that she didn’t ask the cleaner what she thought, and the cleaner didn’t say that she agreed with Dines. Dines could bear to think a little more about her own privilege before she makes sock-puppets of any adjacent manual workers. I could have attacked her substantially on that alone in the next part of the debate, but instead I wanted to focus on her use of evidence. She had cited Malamuth, so I quoted further from that study, showing how she had sheared off the caveats and qualifications applied by the authors to their findings.
And her reaction to this is the most revealing part of the whole exchange. Having previously claimed that she had a “slew” of evidence on her side, she now cut the debate short with the statement (in the yet-unpublished part four) that “there is no study, argument, or theory that will persuade us [i.e. radical feminists]“. This is an amazing admission, because what she’s saying is that the evidence doesn’t matter. Confronted with her own misuse of the research, she states that the research has never influenced her beliefs anyway. The reason Pornland reads as though is was constructed from the a priori belief that porn is bad is because that is exactly how it was written. Every claim it makes is compromised by this deep intellectual bias.
There’s the essence of Gail Dines right there: accuse others of “elitism” and not caring about the opinions of the “working class”…and then promptlly stealing a working-class cleaning lady’s voice and appropriating it for herself without even asking her. But…only sex positive leftists and “pro-porn” feminists are “privileged”. Seriously, indeed.
Feminism reduced to the likes of Gail Dines is feminism truly lost. In other words: right-wing feminism. At least Sarah Ditum’s brave enough to call bullshit out in public. More of that on the Left would do it some good.
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I haven’t even gotten to the craziest of the antiporn whackiness (the invasion of the Freethought Blogs by Taslima Nasreen…but that will have to wait until my next post. I’ll just let you digest this for now.
As a bonafide sex-positive leftist and supporter of sex-positive feminism for the past ten or so years, I’ve been pretty much used to the usual rounds of criticisms that are thrown towards those of us who proudly claim that label.
Mostly, they are caricatures created by either right-wing fundamentalist religionists or the more extreme “radical feminists”, which simply reduce us “sex pozzies” to nothng more than “fun feminists” who put the pursuit of individual orgasms, high heels, push-up bras and breast implants, and “slutting out” over the real concerns and needs of women, or men who simply want to use sex-positive theory as simply a means to get into women’s bras and panties. The idea that we are capable of multitasking and pursuing the goals of basic broad human rights AND empowering people to pursue sexual pleasure in a safer, saner, and more expansive environment, seems never to get into their skulls, since they are so invested in their essential pursuit of containing, if not outright censoring, sexual expression not redeemable to their narrow value systems.
This isn’t to say that sex+ feminists and sex+ activists aren’t prone to mistakes or not to be held accountble for their/our actions, or that many of those who are proponents of sexual liberation along with broader human rights shouldn’t respect legitimate and useful criticism or strongly evaluate and adjust their efforts to fit the local situation when necessary. But, on the whole, it would be nice if those willing to invent phantasms about the assumed “failure” of sex-positive activism would actually listen to and evaluate the actual people and their records before going off on such tangents.
Needless to say, Audacia Ray is NOT a rabid antiporn feminist or a fundie Christian; in fact, she has been exactly the prototype of tireless, sensible sex worker rights activist that represents the best of what progressive sex work activism is. She also has full experience walking the talk as an activist sex worker, even going as far as being involved in the production of a porn video (was it The Edge of the Bed??), nearly 5 years ago, when she fully identified with the goals and ideas of sex+ feminism.
Well…that was then, and this is now; and both the passage of time and evolution of Dacia’s work have greatly changed her views on sex work and sex+ theory…so much so that she has now broadly repudiated and renounced the label of “sex-positive feminist”, and has moved significantly further away from the ideals of “sex positivity”.
The culimation of this process is an essay that she produced and published as part of the official anthology for the 2012 Momentum Conference (herefore referenced as @MomentumCon), a meetup of activist women exploring the many intersections and vectors connecting sexual rights activism, sex work , activism, and women’s roles in sexual media and sexual relationships. (The anthology is available on sale via Amazon.com. ) Dacia has now made her essay more publically available through her Tumblr blog, and I will use that as the foundation for my counter-response to her exposition on, as the essay title theeorizes: “Why The Sex Positive Movement Is Bad For Sex Workers’ Rights”.
Before I dive in, I shouldl make this perfectly clear: I have nothing but absolute respect for Audacia Ray and her efforts to improve the lives of sex workers, and nothing that I will say here in criticism of her words in this particular essay should be misinterpreted in any way as a personal criticism of her work. This is simply intended to be a friendly, if spirited, criticism of what I believe to be her slightly tainted impressions of sex-positive activism.
My first slight beef with Dacia comes with this passage early on in her essay:
However, the promotion of pleasure and sex positivity within the sex industry and as an element of sex worker rights activism, is proprietary to a small but very vocal group of people, namely: white, cisgender women who are conventionally attractive, able-bodied, and have some degree of class and educational privilege.
Now, it is unabashedly true that many sex+ activist spokespeople are majority White, middle-class or above in economic status, cisgender, and able-bodied women and men who do, especially when compared with the majority of what makes up the sex worker diaspora, have some degree of economic and educational advantages. Problem is, though, how does that convert into saying that sex+ activism is inherently a set back for activism?? Does being a college-educated White woman with “conventional beauty” automatically disqualify you from having legitimate social empathy for the plight of those less privileged?? And, does having the resources to escape the worst of poverty and engage in a more expansive and open sexuality inherently close such people off to genuine progressive social action??
And, what about activists who aren’t so privileged?? What about, say, a working-class Black male who has never ventured into a strip club or couldn’t even afford to even enter a sex club, but who nevertheless understands the essential link between expanding resources and rights for everyone under egalitarian principles and breaking down and demythisizing the dominant conservative belief that sexuality should only be experimented under the most narrow, reactionary environments? What about activists of color, or working-class women, who endorse the fundamentals of sex-positivity? (Dacia, how about meeting someone like Divinity and telling her that her core beliefs are mere byproducts of her “privilege”?? Or, perhaps, someone like Aspasia Bonesera??)
Actually engaging with real sex+ activists should dissuade people of the notion that we are all nothing more than the sum of our collective dildos.
The irony in all this is that Dacia sounds all too much here like another White elitist middle-class cisgendered able-bodied woman who also made pretty much the same charges and overbroad assumptions about sex+ folk. Of course, Zinnia Jones’ girlfriend Heather was a bit more obtuse and had far more ulterior motives than Dacia has…but does that mean that Dacia’s kinder, gentler, softer critique doesn’t still miss the point?
Then, there is this, where Dacia prefaces her main critique:
Before we dig in, let’s talk for a minute about unintentional consequences. Surely, you might argue, sex positive feminists, including people who work in the sex industry and those who do not but respect the rights of sex workers, see sex positivity as a means to achieving social good, with a few great orgasms along the way. Why would sex positive feminists want to halt the progress toward human rights for sex workers? I believe that the answer is that sex positive feminists do not intend to create barriers for the achievement of sex workers’ rights, but that there are ways in which this happens anyway.
So, by Dacia’s opinion, sex+ feminists should not be judged by their intentions, which do come from a good place, but by their results, which have been universally proven (at least in Dacia’s mind) to be an ultimate detriment to sex worker activism. Never mind that plenty of sex worker activists would disagree with that broad brush statement, or that it could be considered highly debatable whether or not sex worker activism has been helped or hindered by sex positivity. The point is that it’s just not Dacia’s perogative to declare the game over in mid-stream.
And once again, Dacia’s reduction of “sex positivity” to orgasms and high heels simply flies in the face of actual activism by sex+ people…especially those on the Left. Since she was one of the more eloquent actiivists, she should at least know better.
Then, there is this note about the audience she is shooting for in this critique:
The audience for this essay is very much my peers, people who have had experiences and privileges similar to mine. Beyond our circles, most of what I’ll write here is glaringly obvious, and in communities of color, for people with disabilities, as well as among trans women and men, and other groups we aspire to but do not actively include, this is not news.
But…”glaringly obvious” by whom?? Does Dacia assume that those outside of the supposedly protected “sex positive” bubble are nothing more than truthseeking radicals who have found, like her, the real truth behind “sex positivity”?? That sounds dangerously close to something that a full-blown anti like Diana Boston would say….and she would probably, if she didn’t know better, nod approvingly. We know that Dacia’s not going there, so why make that assumption?
Dacia then moves on to an overview of the history of the interlock between sex worker activism and feminism, and gets to the root of her critique of sex+ feminists:
This, however, creates a chain of denial – many feminists who focus on reproductive rights do not value the contributions of sex workers to their movement, and many sex worker rights advocates who focus on bodily autonomy do not value the particular issues faced by people who do sex work because of coercion or dire economic circumstances. Or, perhaps a fairer way to put this is not that these things are not “valued,” but that there isn’t an active effort made to make space for a multitude of concerns. In action, this looks the same. And so, while sex positive sex workers focus on trying to get a seat at the table of reproductive rights, they simultaneously deny other people in sex work a space at their table.
Ahhh…sorry, Dacia, but that’s just plain conjecture. How in the HELL can sex+ feminists have enough power to “force” out other points of view when they themselves are effectively forced out under intense pressure from the more radical antiporn/prohibitionist radfems who loudly challenge even their addition to the debate?? When groups like Women Against Pornography and CATW are allowed to use gutter tactics to smear and distort sex+ feminists, and level such lovely insults as “cumdumpster” and “tools of the male dick” in order to dismiss their attempts at education, how else do you expect them to react in kind? And, why is it innately sex+ feminists’ fault, and not that of the anti extremists, when attempted debate on sex work dissolves and disintegrates into turf warfare??
In short, it is NOT the responsibility of sex+ feminists to represent the views of ALL sex workers, or even to claim to represent every single one. Their objective is to present what they see as the best approach to promoting their beliefs…and their contributions are simply too important to be merely dismissed with a flip of the hand or a charge of stifling other choices.
My main critique of Audacia, though, is based on what I consider to be a complete distortion of one of the seminal manifestos of sex positive feminist/sex radical tracts….namely, Dr. Carol Queen’s seminal essay, “Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma.” (One note: the essay first appeared not in Jill Nagle’s anthology Whores And Other Feminists, but in an earlier anthology titled Sex Work: Writings By Women In The Sex Industry, which was published around 1986-ish.) I have the full essay archived as a page on this blog; I’d highly suggest a view.
Here is how Dacia critiques Doc Carol’s early vision:
In Queen’s essay, the sex positive feminist perspective on sex work is very much a reactive one that was generated in opposition to what she refers to as the “‘poor abused whores’ lobby.” Queen argues that sex workers who enjoy their work and “live well, with no loss of self-esteem” have “sufficient sex information and are sex-positive [sic]” (p. 129). But as big a part of the job as it is, sex work is not all about sex for many people who do it. The emphasis on sexuality unfairly erases the other half of the equation: work. Queen asserts that:
No one should ever, by economic constraint or any kind of interpersonal force, have to do sex work who does not like sex, who is not cut out for a life of sexual generosity (however attractively high the fee charged for it). (p. 134)
But the reality is that people who don’t like sex, or don’t like having sex with strangers, or aren’t sexually oriented toward the gender of the clients they see, or don’t like doing sexualized performances, work in the sex industry every day. And it is just that parenthetical “attractively high [fee]” that is the reason for their actions. For the majority of people who work in the sex industry, money, not sex, is the driving factor. Until a day comes when jobs are available that have wages that are competitive with the sex industry, particularly for cis and trans women, people of color, and young people who need to get out of unstable or violent housing situations, many people will sell or trade sex.
OK…so many people do sex work that aren’t necessarily sex-positive. And, many people who would rather do other things do sex work because it’s one way to score a quick payday. So, what does that say for those who do in fact get into sex work for the sex?? I’d say…..not much.
And, that’s a distortion of what Queen actually originally wrote. Allow me to add some context by posting the whole section of that snippet.
There is no sexual majority, although the whole society conspires to behave as though there were.Our clients – mostly married heterosexual men who show an illusory exterior of “normalcy” (whatever that useless concept means) – are also cross-dressers, anally erotic, bisexual, fetishistic, wrapped up in wild fantasies no traditional heterosexual marriage could ever contain.And what the “poor abused whores” lobby will never tell you is that many sex workers, too, are fetishistic, sexually curious, nonmonogamous by nature, and exhibitionistic, delighting in the secret proof our profession provides us that restrictive sexual mores are rupturing everywhere.
No one should ever, by economic constraint or any kind of interpersonal force, have to do sex work who does not like sex, who is not cut out for a life of sexual generosity (however high the fee charged for it).Wanting to make a lot of money should not be the only qualification for becoming a whore.We in this profession swim against the tide of our culture’s inability to come to terms with human sexual variety and desire, its very fear of communicating about sex in an honest and nonjudgemental way.We need special qualities, or at the very least we need a way of thinking that lets us retain our self-esteem when everyone else, especially do-gooders, would like to undermine it.
Activist whores teach, among other things, a view of our culture’s sexual profile that differs from traditional normative sexuality.Every whore embodies this difference each time s/he works.It is time for all whores to embrace this difference, to become ambassadors for sex and gratification.The politics of being a whore do not differ markedly from the politics of any other sexually despised group.We must include radical sexual politics in our agenda, becoming defenders of sex itself.Our well being and our defense depend on it.
Quite clearly, Doc Carol’s emphasis was on promoting “activist whores” as sex+ pioneers in using sex work as a means of transgressing and widening sexual boundaries in a world where such boundaries are constantly being set and moved by the broader “sex wars”. Hardly an renouncement of those in it strictly for the money.
Plus…does Dacia really believe that decoupling sex worker activism from sex-positivity and promoting sex work as just another job or profession will prevent the antis and their fundamentalist allies from overemphasizing the sexual that much more, and simply continuing their campaign to wipe sex work off the map? Right…like gay marriage has domesticated antigay forces obsessed with their Leathermen/gay bathouse fantasies and false nightmares of jock-wearing twinks with erections loaded with HIV-infested sperm ready to invade schools and bedrooms?? Remember, being a Catholic college school girl didn’t prevent Sandra Fluke from being labeled a “slut”, a “whore”, and a “porn star” by Rush Limbaugh…and it won’t stop Melissa Farley or Shelley Lubben from labeling even former performers or street workers “prostituted women” or “hookers”, either.
But, this paragraph is really what made my blood boil, and even prompted a thought that Dacia had turned full on fundie/anti:
Emphasizing sex and pleasure harms the sex workers who aren’t firmly in the self-defined population of being sex positive and sexually educated, by unintentionally shaming them for not being enthusiastic participants in the sex they have at work. When engaging in the trade or sale of sex is helping an individual to meet their basic physiological needs, they often do not have the personal resources to channel energy into making the experience of transactional sex perfectly pleasurable for either themselves or their client. Not every sexual experience, whether paid or not, has to be perfectly erotic. This is an unreasonable expectation, and one that makes it more difficult for people who have negative experiences to speak openly about their truths with sex work or sexuality more generally.
So, did I read that right, Dacia?? By merely saying that she enjoys her job and all the benefits of getting all that good sex and getting paid nicely for it, a sex+ feminist sex worker by her mere existence shames all other sex workers who aren’t so fortunate (in either quality or quantity of sex or compensation); and imposes a needlessly impossible standard of eroticism that distracts from and actively works against the betterment of those at the bottom. And, plus, it makes it harder for those who don’t have absolutely perfect experiences to speak out against the harms they suffer regularly.
WOW. Shelley Lubben or Rebecca Mott couldn’t have said it better. What better means to isolate and throw under the bus sex worker activists who’s only sin is that they happen to be happier and more successful at their work. That’s like saying that someone who makes it to become an assistant manager at, say, IBM, is tainted and a distraction to those other workers still suffer as entry-level workers with low wages and no benefits…and they should be fired or demoted as a means of elevating the others.
But mostly, it is a bald-faced strawman that belies the reality of actual sex-positive activists who have worked tirelessly on the Left to improve overall workplace conditions and wages for everyone in sex work, not just those most advantaged. Do I need to remind Dacia that the most eloquent and fiercest sex-positive activists started out as Leftists who simply applied their visions of greater autonomy and freedom from the class and race and gender spectrum over to sexual politics? Do the names Margo St. James, Susie Bright, Scott Tucker, and Nina Hartley ring any bells?? Need I also remind her that many sex+ activists who started out as sex+ leftists were mostly hounded out of the feminist and political Left movement by exactly the gutter-style tactics of the antis and Puritan Leftists, with collusion from the broad Right and Center??
It almost seems as if Audacia wants to be the Bill Clinton of the sex workers movement, repudiating her earlier excessively “liberal’ positions and moving towards the “radical center” as a means of reviving sex worker activism. That’s all well and good for her, but throwing sex positive liberals and Leftists under the bus and denying their contributions to the struggle in order to do that, is just not justifiable…..even if, as I said, her motives are in the right place. Even more, it simply gives that much more ammo to the hard Right that if sex+ folk can be repudiated by “liberals”, then they are open to free fire attack and abuse from everywhere else. That’s pretty damn dangerous territory, and not condusive to the goal that Dacia stated.
One last quote from Dacia:
If we put aside our attachment to the sex positive construction of sex work, we will certainly hear things that will be hard to sit with. But for sex positivity to be a useful framework, one that encourages the pursuit of social justice, it must also engage with the ugly pieces of sexuality, and not in a simplistically reactive way. Otherwise, the concept of being a sex positive sex worker is a self-serving marketing practice, in which the enjoyment of sexuality is being sold as a product to both workers and our clients.
A legitimate challenge…but one that has been answered time and time again.
I’ll just let Nina Hartley conclude this with some snippage from one of her classic essays from 1993, on how feminists and sex worker activists AND sex-positive leftists can work together and not cross each other. Full essay is here.
When I entered this field of endeavor nine years ago, it was not only to explore my sexuality; I wanted to be an aware feminist voice from inside the business. I made myself available to anyone who wanted to talk about what I did and what it meant. I’ve done countless TV and print interviews, written numerous articles (both sexy and serious), and spoken to many college classes. I’ve faced a variety of people, some sympathetic, some not so happy at my existence. I’ve looked into the eyes of women who look back at me with hatred, and I was able to understand how women could be burned as witches. I’m usually fairly calm during these exchanges, since I am at ease with my subject and because my experiences with sex are some of my most cherished moments — not the source of my deepest pain.
The common thread I see connecting my most vocal feminist opponents with each other is that they are operating from a base of often justified rage. This is fine. Angry women can and have affected needed change. However, they must understand just how much time and energy is expended wastefully when one is continually angry and outraged. They must learn to practice self-awareness and acknowledge when their anger is justified and when it is self-indulgent, when it is a positive force for growth and change and when it is overpowering one’s ability to think clearly. If they are honest, the distinction will be self-evident.
Speaking as someone who has made peace with my sexuality and that of men in general, it boils down to this: how does one choose to deal with one’s rage and what triggers it? I choose to feel it, acknowledge it, recognize its origins, own it and then incorporate it into my ever-evolving sense of Self. I choose to process my anger and go on with my life since I don’t want to waste the only life I have by having anger color everything, every day.
What can feminists do? As members of the third wave of the revolution begun 30 years ago, we need to continue our struggles, in both the public and private spheres, toward equality. What lies between now and utopia is day-to-day living. We need to do our best to demonstrate compassion toward those in pain — and to recognize when we need to mind our own god-damned business. I suggest we use feminist sex workers and feminist porn as a fifth column and use the erotic medium to change men’s and women’s attitudes at their deepest neurobiological level. We cannot-we must not-be drawn into limiting by law what consenting adults do in private. Don’t worry about how other people enjoy themselves. Instead, turn some energy to providing support to those who ask for it. Take care of your own compost heap before feeling free to meddle in others’. Learn to relax a little; we’re not going to change the problems of the world in our brief lifetimes. Pet a cat. Meditate. Work in our gardens. Take a walk. Get a massage. Give ourselves more orgasms and appreciate how far we’ve come in only thirty years.
Let us see past our antagonisms, and create some common ground so that we may build a solid future for generations of feminists to build upon.
And…let us understand that sex-positive feminists have added and will continue to add strength and knowledge to the sex worker activism movement; and continue to hash out our differences so that we can create a better movement for everyone….whether they have lots of orgasms, or not.
Update (5-10-12):
Divinity (aka Godless Strumpet) has now posted at her blog a much more detailed and thorough critique of Audacia Ray’s assertions about sex-positive feminism and its impact on sex worker activism. Some snippage from that post:
I understand that Ms. Ray believes that she is only trying to help. She states in her piece;
“the promotion of pleasure and sex positivity within the sex industry and as an element of sex worker rights activism, is proprietary to a small but very vocal group of people, namely: white, cisgender women who are conventionally attractive, able-bodied, and have some degree of class and educational privilege.”
…so now I suppose I am expected to qualify my oppression to her. Ok, I am a cisgendered, heterosexual, Mexica/American woman. And I do mean “Mexica” as I have also embarked on a journey of self de-colonization and reject terms like “Hispanic” (meaning “of Spain”) for myself. I am an atheist; and yes Christian privilege does exist, former sex worker (stripper), addict in sobriety, formerly homeless and one major illness away from homelessness again as I am too poor to afford health care and live pretty much week to week. I do have a lap top. I was lucky enough to come into a HUGE sum of money for me ($800) and decided to invest in one because at almost 40 with little money I knew educating myself on the internet would probably be the closest I would ever come to getting an education beyond the GED that I have now. So I”m not the most privileged in the world but I am also not the most underprivileged and I know that.
I trust I’ve groveled enough to prove to Ms. Ray that I am qualified to speak on issues concerning my own oppression. If my irritation at Ms. Ray’s piece is a bit transparent I will tell you why. I have been fighting to get my voice and arguments heard not only as a sex workers’ rights advocate and sex-positive feminist but as a woman of color contending with classist and racist anti-porn feminists who say they feel sorry for me and my “lack of options” and then turn around and call me “uneducated” when I don’t agree with them about what’s best for me for a couple of years now. The slut-shaming and harassment they have exacted on me has shocked and disappointed me because I never expected it coming from so-called “feminists.” I have fought very hard to prove that I am not just some privileged, sex obsessed “slut” to the audience they have tried so hard at every turn to disconnect me from. I don’t appreciate Ms. Ray telling them that they are basically right about me. I wonder if it ever occurred to Ms. Ray that in saying sex-positive feminists are mostly highly-educated, white women blinded by their own privilege that she was actually helping to further silence women like me who don’t fit that mold within the movement. As if it’s not hard enough to get my foot in the door as an un-formally-educated, Godless, ex-stripper of colour who is staying sober one day at a time!
I’d seriously recommend you go to Div’s place and read the post in its entirity for the full effect.
Also, Feminist Whore has released this week a YouTube video reflecting her own critique of Dacia from her perspective.
