Some More Education On Sex Positive Feminism And Sex Worker Activism From Carol Queen (Read And Learn, ZJ And Heather!!)

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Anthony

I had originally posted this as a page to my SmackDog Chronicles blog back in 2005-ish…it immediately came to mind when thinking of a response to Heather and ZJ.

Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Thought,

and Whore Stigma

by Dr. Carol Queen

(From Whores and Other Feminists, ed. Jill Nagle (New York, Routledge Press, 1977, pp. 125-135)

I GROW MORE DISAFFECTED FROM POLITICS – both traditional and progressive – with every passing year. Only one sort of politics keeps my attention, feels relevant, stays vital: the politics of sex. I don’t mean primarily feminism, the politics of gender, but rather what some people call sex radicalism. Sex radical thought departs from both right- and most left-wing ideologies by honoring sex and desire and by posing the power relations of sexual orientation and behavior vis-à-vis the culture’s traditional sexual mores. What is illegal? What is despised, and why? What is transgressive; and what systems are shored up by the boundaries we transgress?

Sex Radicalism and Feminism: Not Always in Bed Together

As we will see, sex radical thought is both deeply feminist and also profoundly challenging to many attitudes and assumptions promoted by contemporary mainstream feminism. While I continue to identify with feminism, I also regard it with some disappointment: though I feel that most of its core principles go without saying, I certainly do not feel their unmodified relevance to all areas of my life, particularly to sex.

Feminism has greatly influenced the intellectual development of sex radicalism, many of whose earlier theorists – Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, and Carole Vance, to name just a few – were (and are) outspoken feminist women. Feminism itself, however, does not embrace sex radicalism completely; nor is a feminist political analysis that is untouched by sex radicalism enough to unravel the various sources of sexual – not just gender – oppression. Gayle Rubin notes in her influential essay “Thinking Sex” (1) that sex radicalism’s analysis focuses on oppression sourced in “the stigma of erotic dissidence”; feminism, by contrast, is a theoretical attempt to analyze and act against gender oppression, having no position on sex except where sexual issues are seen as devolving from gender inequality. Feminism finds no shortage in gender-linked problems with sex – rape, spousal abuse and abortion rights are three examples that have spurred much feminist organizing and action – though I will argue that it is possible to cast this net too widely, seeing gender as the primary or sole issue where matters are more complex, as in lesbian oppression, S/M, pornography, and prostitution (just a few issues that have challenged mainstream feminism).

I myself grew up into feminist thought when it was fresh from its dalliance with ‘60s-style sexual liberation ideology. A woman ought to be able to do what she wants with her body and her sexuality, I read in books like Sisterhood is Powerful and Our Bodies, Ourselves. In my wholehearted agreement these became my feminist foundation. I was treading water in a sea of hormones, beginning to experiment with partner sex, learning to masturbate, slyly managing to access forbidden books. I wanted to know about sex; I wanted to feel powerful in it; I wanted to experiment, have lots of lovers, love both men and women; to be sexually free in a way I knew most women of my mother’s generation – and certainly my mother herself – were not.

For a time it seemed – at least, I believed – that feminism was my straight-forward ally in these desires. But mainstream feminists, as it turned out, had never been entirely been comfortable with sex. While I was happily devouring Sisterhood is Powerful at the age of thirteen, the National Organization for Women was trying to purge lesbians from its membership; not long after, Betty Dodson caused a heated stir – accompanied by walkouts – at one of NOW’s national meetings when she showed slides of vulvas. Sexual representation, even that of women, was controversial within orthodox feminism long before the mainstream media discovered Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon.

The trail of my sexual fascinations, no less than my sexual politics, led me into the gay and lesbian community; and I stayed there from late adolescence through my twenties. There I learned a lot about sexual freedom and living as an outlaw; I was out as a lesbian in a small city, where I got my share of hate mail and death threats. I learned that many people are profoundly unwilling to let others live their own (especially sexual) lives. I saw the politics not only in gender but also in sexual behavior and sexual identity. Within a culture, power accrues not only according to class, race, and gender, but also by virtue of sexual orientation and behavior, actual and presumed. Uneven access to power formed the very basis of the way my generation learned to understand politics, even though within feminism the phrase “sexual politics” meant something quite different than the politicized sexual dramas I saw playing out all around me.

The next fork in the road came when I explored S/M with a lover. She was too nervous about other people’s opinions to let anyone know about our experiments in power-erotica, although I had heard rumors that in fact there was a small lesbian S/M support group within our community. I learned from this how fearful of discovery over a sexual “kink” even someone who was sexually well-adjusted – and already living counter to social norms – could be. Not long after, I began reading in the lesbian press that many women all across the country were conducting similar experiences; and that my lover had in fact been right to be worried about our community’s response. The lesbian/feminist community was being torn apart by heated disagreements about what constituted appropriate lesbian sex. In this context, more than the Maoism that had also influenced early radical feminism, I became familiar with the term “politically incorrect”. (That this term has been co-opted and used against feminists and progressives is only one of the bizarre political reversals faced by those of us whose politics were forged in ‘60s era notions of liberation.)

I had now learned that a key point in my understanding of feminism – that it is my and all women’s right to explore and define our own sexuality – was not universally accepted in the community of women who called themselves feminists. Arguments raged about sex and about sexual representation….that is, pornography. Increasingly I found myself on the side that was being termed politically incorrect. So when I heard the term “sex radical” for the first time, I knew before I even heard the definition that it applied to me.

Sex Radical, Sex-Positive

Sex radicalism means to me that I am automatically on the side of the minority sexual viewpoint or behavior; because our culture carefully and narrowly circumscribes what is acceptable, much of the sexual world gets left on the wrong side of the fence. Sex radicalism also means that when I hear the voices of those who have been left out of the discussion, I choose to believe what they tell me about their own lives, even if it contradicts some “expert’s” opinion; it also means that I maintain my own sexual integrity, if not cultural popularity, when I follow my own desires and trust where they lead.

Sex radicalism is also profoundly feminist, and with good reason. While many men are oppressed (in reality or potentially) for their sexual desires and practices, women are encouraged to never explore or experience sexual feelings in the first place. We are supposed to exist sexually within a (married, monogamous) relationship with a man, or else not at all. When we do step across the boundaries of compulsory heterosexuality and “good girl” propriety, we are often treated viciously. Women need each other’s support (although we do not always get it) to navigate the rough waters of living nontraditional sexual lives. Mainstream feminists learned this lesson from lesbians, who would not withdraw their demand for support from feminist organizations and institutions; it has not, however, extrapolated what it has learned to women elsewhere on the sexual fringe.

Upon further exploring sex radical thought, I learned the concept of “sex-negativity”, which most of us in this erotically benighted culture drink in along with our mother’s milk. I learned that there is indeed a community of people who are sex-positive, who don’t denigrate, medicalize, or demonize any form of sexual expression that is not nonconsensual. In our general society – where sex is sniggered at, commodified, and guiltily, surreptitiously engaged in – being outspokenly sex-positive is sex radical indeed; for even those of us who love sex are usually encouraged to find someone else’s preferred sexual expression abhorrent.

I discovered sex-positive thought in various places: through my study of sexology; through my friendships with sexually adventurous others, especially gay men; in the leather community; and, perhaps most importantly, through meeting women who were both outspokenly sexual and feminist and who refused to let one quality cancel out the other. These “sex-positive feminists,” as many of us have taken to call ourselves, embrace the feminist analysis of gender inequality, but challenge the silence or conservative positions of Dworkin- and MacKinnon-influenced feminism on sexual issues. Many sex positive feminists are veterans of the feminist sex ward over pornography and S/M; and many are current or former sex workers. Coming to a radical sexual world view, especially through my contacts with women who could relate to and who could mentor me through my confusion about sex and feminism, actually proved to be excellent preparation for becoming a whore. When I did so, I discovered a world very different from the one for which the vague warnings of mainstream feminists had prepared me. My comments are sourced in the whores’ world I have known; I do not intend to encompass the experience of those whores who do not work voluntarily, who are underage, and who act out the negative expectations imposed on them by a sexist and sex-negative culture.

Why Whores Need Sex-Positive Thought

Sources as disparate and discordant as Hollywood movies, right-wing Christians, and prominent feminists tell us that the sex industry make a career of pandering to men’s desires because, as victims of histories of abuse, we have no boundaries and sometimes no choices. For some of us there is some truth to this; there are certainly people whose mental and spiritual health would benefit from getting out of the business, and they are well served by support in doing so. But we learn next to nothing about those women for whom sex work is an excellent occupational choice and nothing at all about male sex workers – isn’t it a bit ironic that men are present in the sex industry in every capacity that women are, yet their lives, failing to fit neatly into theory, are simply ignored?

One orthodox feminist argument against whoring is that it gives men further sexual access to women; leaving aside whether reality is so simplifiable, how might they choose to argue against men having access to men? And why aren’t more of them clamoring for women to have equal access to sexual entertainment and service? These questions point to more fruitful areas of exploration about the nature of female and male sexual socialization, the reasons male patronize prostitutes (of whatever gender) and the place of sexual pleasure in male and female lives. Sex-positive feminists find these questions compelling; mainstream feminists often do not even ask them.

As an activist in the sex-positive community, I have met well over a hundred prostitutes, a few dozen dominatrices, and a number of models and porn actresses – far more than have most anti-sex work activists and even most sex researchers. Just one factor stands out to distinguish those who live well, with no loss of self-esteem, from those who may find sex work a difficult or even damaging career choice. Most of the former have sufficient sex information and are sex-positive. Most, too, are staunchly feminist, even though some of them refuse to embrace the term, associating it with women who do not understand their circumstances and who do not support their right to work and control their own bodies. Most of the latter have internalized negative attitudes about sex, especially divergent sexual behavior, and certainly about sex work itself.

In this respect, the latter are no different from those who have devoted their lives to agitating against sex work. None of these crusaders, whether they emerge from the Religious Right or the feminist Left, voices respect for sexuality. (Rubin, in fact, calls mainstream feminism a “system of sexual judgment”(2) — an accusation its adherents have not yet managed to disprove.

If these activists truly wanted to improve the lot of sex workers (which, of course, they don’t; they merely want to do away with the sex industry), they would insist upon thorough and nonjudgmental sex information for clients as well as whores. One basic piece of information would be that women – and whores – do not exist to be sexually used by men, but that any sexual interaction, including a paid one, benefits from negotiation. This would facilitate the climate of respect that anti-sex work demagogues claim is absent in a paid act of sexual entertainment or gratification. The paucity of sex-positive discussion about what is possible in a commodified context often negatively affects sex workers themselves.

In fact, when we whores see a client or when a peepshow worker or stripper interacts with a customer, the presence or absence of respect has much to do with how sex-positive the client or customer is – and something to do with our own sex-positivity. It also depends upon each person’s degree of self respect and presence or absence of sexual shame. Men who have taken (and internalized) the most damaging blows around their right to sexual pleasure are among the most unpleasant clients to deal with. Unfortunately, the well-publicized opinions of the anti-sex work crowd are highly judgmental about the motives of those who pay for sexual pleasure and entertainment. I have encountered many men whose self-acceptance – and social skills – have been impaired by hearing too much media credence given to the opinions of people who are in no position to make even an educated guess about what friendly relations between whores and their clients would be like. Sex-positive feminists are only now beginning to get enough media attention that their message can trickle down to these men and to other women.

Combined with our treatment by a sex-negative law enforcement and legal system and the notorious tendency of the police to think of aggressions against us as something other than crimes, many of us are routinely victimized – by police if not by our clients and customers. Meanwhile, most of society looks the other way, including many feminists who are quick to point out how egregiously our clients are “abusing” us simply by giving us money for sex of erotic entertainment. Feminists should be among the first to clamor for decriminalized prostitution, yet many remain silent and even vigilant in the fight to further criminalize prostitution. Feminists should raise their voices in protest when police abuse whores or ignore our need for police protection. Yet too often these voices are silent, even though these socially sanctioned abuses fall disproportionally on those most lacking feminist and other support: women of color, poor women, transgendered women.

Even when a supportive hand is extended, it often comes with a stipulation: get out of the business of do without help. The not-so-silent message is: if you elect to stay in the sex industry you can expect abuse, and we can (will) do nothing to help you. Parallel this to the deep (and deeply legitimate) concern feminists have shown to women in battered and abusive relationships; current thinking in the battered women’s movement emphasizes that women be supported where they are, not offered conditional assistance.

Some of us want out of the business, but many of us want to see conditions improve, with everybody else out of the way. All of us would be served by a dose of sex-positive thought, which might allow us – many for the first time – to think of what we do as a professional service, not demeaning, on-the-fringe behavior. An ever-increasing number of us want our sexually schizophrenic culture to look at the realities, not the lurid myths, of what we do; and to see that when sexual pleasure is seen as positive and honorable goal, much of the negative fruit of the sex industry is deprived of soil in which to grow.

Why Johns Need Sex-Positive Prostitutes

One stereotype has it that sex workers provide sexual relief to society’s “wretched”: the old, the unattractive, the unpartnered. This myth can fetch us a certain amount of grudging respect even as it lets others (who can’t imagine having sex with such people) distance themselves from us – as if only the young and the firm are allowed to have a sexuality in the first place, and as if whores render a service by keeping unacceptable sexualities out of the public eye. Certainly we count among our clients those who could fall outside the rather narrow limits of the erotically entitled. We also count among our clients the married, the well-off, the conventionally attractive, the famous, the socially skilled: the inheritors of patriarchy. Whores know, if no one else in society is willing to admit, that outside their relations with us, these men often have as little luck getting their erotic needs met as their “less fortunate” brothers.

One often frequently hears that whores are sought by kinky clients whose desires are unacceptable to other people. This, I think, is the source of part of the contention that clients want to abuse us; in spite of the fact that all over the country women are slurping on their partners’ cocks for free, experimenting with bondage, and arranging or at least fantasizing about threesomes, a large percentage of the U.S. population still considers activities like these beyond the pale, degrading, and abusive, even when consensually performed. In fact many clients bring socially unacceptable desires to sex workers – or at least desires that are unacceptable in their own bedrooms. And until the climates in their bedrooms change, sex professionals will be among their only outlets. The anti-whore sentiment that grows out of the conviction that there is only one kind of appropriate sex and that all others are sinful and/or abusive (depending on the sort of morality embraced by the critic) is precisely the cultural norm in opposition to which sex radical politics grew.

Sex radicals see as a problem – and a source of oppression – in any one’s conviction that their own sexual patterns are right while someone else’s are wrong. Getting between the lines of the anti-sex-work ideologues’ reasoning, we find various concerns embedded but not often articulated: a married man is wrong to take his sexual desires to anyone but his wife; a married man is wrong to have sexual desires if his wife isn’t comfortable with them; oral sex is depraved; giving men an outlet for blowjobs will just make the man want them at home, and blowjobs are demeaning to women; sex is demeaning unless a romantic bond (or a Christian bond) exist between a couple; giving a man an outlet for any kind of sex, including sexual looking [voyeurism], will make him want more sex/kinkier sex, if a prostitute isn’t immediately available, he will harass/rape other women; getting sex from a professional is the same as infidelity; men should not have access to sexual variety; prostitutes carry HIV (to “innocent victims”). (This says nothing of the numerous married men who actually patronize male whores; but again, this common situation is scarcely ever recognized and commented on by sex-work abolitionists, especially feminist ones.)

It is as though sex, especially male sex, is a bubbling cauldron of trouble, and if we don’t keep a lid on it, awful things will result.

In fact, this is precisely the lesson my mother tried to teach me. Her example, however, was not inspiring; and if all the women who rail against the sex industry have sexualities as closed as hers, the culture is in a painful, festering state indeed. “Do you know,” she whispered to me wide-eyed some months after my father’s death, “your father tried to convince me to perform oral sex on him six times during our marriage?”

“Dad,” I thought, “you animal! Once every five years! Have you no self-control?” More than once I’ve wished my distressingly buttoned-down dad – whose sexual unhappiness rubbed off on everyone in my family – had turned to a whore to let off some steam.

Like my parents, a majority of our clients have marriages marked by desire discrepancies and difficult communications about sex. Many women have grown up being fearful about sex, either because of unpleasant experiences or because these feelings were inculcated in them at (sometimes literally) their mothers’ knees. Others have grown up believing that sexual experimentation is wrong. Feminism, when it successfully reaches to these women at all, rarely contradicts the deep sexual antipathy they carry.

The availability of paid sexual gratification and entertainment does nothing to improve these partners’ sexual relationships except, perhaps, to take the pressure off; it has been argued that having a valve on the pressure cooker actually preserves marriages like this by minimizing the impact of their sexual contradictions. I’m inclined to believe this is true, but it still doesn’t cast a very rosy light on the situation; for one thing, are the women’s sexual desires being met in relationships such as these? Not very likely! My answer to the problem – universal sex-positive education and sexual empowerment for women – lies far away in the horizon.

Wives Need – and Can Learn From – Whores, Too

In the meantime, I think the unequal lot of these couples could be balanced somewhat by a growing availability of sexual entertainment for the women whose partners are going out and getting theirs by hiring professionals. Of course, this scenario would involve that our culture take a whole new look at women and sex. The gander may not be ready to share the playground with the goose; but, just as importantly, women may not be prepare to take into the marketplace desires they’ve been trained to romanticize. Much feminist theory has spotlit the ill effects on women’s self-esteem and autonomy of channeling sexuality into a relationship; but few feminists have suggested women could learn something by having more options for sexual fulfillment in the marketplace. As with the question of pornography and its appeal/availability to women, many sex-positive feminists support more female-centered choices in sexual service and entertainment, the proliferation of which might well affect the entire sex industry for the better. And if conflating sex and romance keeps women available for marriage (usually implying their acceptance of male control over their sexuality), how might detaching sex from romance serve to change what women desire from sex?

Viewed from a sex radical lens, whore stigma derives from whores’ sexual availability and presumes copious sexual activity. From a sex-positive feminist perspective, most whores are available and sexually active on their own terms. It’s no wonder that whore stigma attaches itself more viciously to women than to men, for in this society a sexually emancipated woman is threatening and despised; neither “slut” or “whore” is a name most women want to wear. Sex workers cross this line, either proudly or not, for money, adventure, or rebellion. Would our client’s wives – or even many mainstream feminists – be willing to brave that stigma for a chance at sexual agency? What about for the promise of greater solidarity among all women? Early feminism tried to erase the whore stigma for just that reason; today’s feminist orthodoxy would often rather do away with whores. Any issues that divides women – and this is one of the most potent divisions of all – is crucial for feminists to consider and resolve.

Other whores won’t necessarily agree with me, but I’d be glad to see sex work wither away because everyone became so sex-positive that a market for our services no longer existed. Perhaps then we could become the sexual healers and sex educators that many of us believe we (potentially or already) are. Of course, we’re nowhere close to that utopia; in the meantime sex workers can help facilitate gratification for those who wouldn’t ordinarily get it, and we can all – whores, sex radicals, sex-positive feminists, and critics alike – continue to ask questions whose answers point to an increasing level of comfort and safety for sex workers (as well as, incidentally, for our clients).

A Sex Radical, Sex-Positive, Whore’s-Eye View

The stereotype about sex workers that says we are driven to this demeaning lifestyle by a damaged history must be exposed as the sex-negative and, yes, sexist crap that it so often is. (How eerily this parallels what used to be said about lesbians?) This image is neither universally truthful nor even helpful for analyzing the situations of those whores whom it describes, unless the question is also asked: What separates those sex workers who experience their lives negatively from those who do not? Abolitionists won’t ask this question, because it implies that there might be a strategy for creating a positive sex industry, but we whores and all our supporters, including sex-positive feminists, must ask it continually. Abundant and accurate sex information, as I noted above, is a key determinant.

And while I maintain that it should be everyone’s right to do sex work, I hope people will consider their motives for it whether they are thinking about entering the sex industry or are already a veteran. It is never too late for anyone to begin to root out his or her sex-negativity, and the whores who haven’t done so – those whose damaged lives and horror stories are so eagerly pointed to by the anti-sex-work activists, and even those who disrespect their clients’ desires – may lack the most important qualifications for the job. It is the responsibility of the culture to work on its negative attitudes about sex and us and our work; but it is whores’ responsibility to work on our negative attitudes about ourselves.

The movement for sex workers’ rights should acknowledge that we have professional responsibilities and should assist every whore in meeting them. Giving sexuality, the basis of our trade, the respect it deserves must be foremost among these. In fact, as of this writing the North American Task Force on Prostitution has a subcommittee that is developing a code of ethics for whores.

Women and men who do sex and sexual entertainment for a living are targeted by laws as well as social opprobrium, and so are our clients and customers – though the latter form a shadowy, hard-to-recognize army.We are regarded more as outlaws than they are, and this can be one of our strengths:seeing, often with the support of other sex workers, that we constitute a group with different sexual norms, oppressed because of these differences, is the first step toward embracing radical politics and understanding that we are only one group out of many that have been culturally labeled and mistreated.A feminist analysis, too, helps us see ourselves as a group with shared circumstances, one for whom gender is by no means irrelevant.Certainly, we should have pride in ourselves and hopefully in what we do, and sex radical politics, along with a sex-positive belief system and a sex-positive feminist analysis, can go a long way toward ensuring that we develop that pride.

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.

Inviting Feminism into Bed with Us

And in the end, what does this have to do with feminism?

Today, mainstream feminism is a site for anti-whore activism, a locus for demagogues like Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Kathleen Barry to agitate for the abolition of our livelihoods and to lobby for our silencing.Ordinary feminist women are often swayed by their rhetoric and may have no opportunity to hear our side of the story.(Certainly every letter I’ve ever sent to Ms. has gone unpublished.)We have learned to our dismay that a woman’s feminism is no guarantee she’ll be open to sex radical thought; sometimes, sad to say, the opposite is true.Whores make other traditional feminists defensive about issues of sexual stigma, boundaries, and the nature of women’s sexual relationships with men.However, we could equally powerfully raise consciousness around these issues, since sex-positive whores have learned to sexually negotiate at the intersection of our clients’ desires, our limits and boundaries, and with regards to issues of safety and emotional well-being.Were we to be acknowledged by orthodox feminists as the experts we are, our voices could help push the feminist analysis of sex in positive, productive directions.This could only strengthen feminism’s appeal, since sexuality is such a powerful, and often problematic, issue in so many women’s – and men’s – lives.If feminism were to take seriously my question about what separates the experiences of women who hate sex work from those who thrive doing it, would that not have profound implications for the lives and sexual strategies of ordinary women?

Further, taking whores – whores, not just “degraded” ex-whores – seriously would support a feminist claim that is at the moment fatuous:that feminists care about the experience of all women and are open to learning from the experience of all women.Whores are only one of a multitude of groups who do not get an open-minded hearing in mainstream feminism today.

It can be argued that whores labor on the front lines of patriarchy.Feminists really ought to be more interested in the things we see, hear, and experience there.Sex-positive feminists are, of course, and support the issues we consider important, including improved working conditions, safety, and freedom from harassment.They, unlike so many orthodox feminists, understand that we do not consider our work itself a form of sexual harassment; that many of the abuses committed within the sex industry have little to do, in fact, with sexuality; that we are not selling ourselves or our bodies (a reprehensible turn of phrase repeated, often as not, by feminists, who ought to have more concern for the power of language to shape reality) any more than does any other worker under capitalism; sex-positive feminists remember that any worker under capitalism is subject to mistreatment. [Note: My emphasis added here, for the benefit of you fellow leftists out there who will deny any concerns about economic discrimination. -- Anthony]

They understand that we value our work when it allows us autonomy, free time, and a comfortable income; we often like living outside the narrow circle society circumscribes of ladylike behavior; we are not “good girls,” nor do we aspire to be; and we relish the opportunity our work provides us to learn secrets, to support our clients’ forays away from traditional masculine sexuality, to transgress restrictive boundaries and rebel against the rigid limitations created by our own fear of sex.

To what degree is the failure of mainstream feminists to educate themselves about us a result of their fear of sex and/or of being labeled a whore?Like many feminists’ antipathy toward lesbianism, this is a feminist issue with implications far beyond the politics of sex work.

Sex-positive feminist whores invite all women to consider these issues, confront their own whorephobia, and learn from us.

How Some Liberals Still Don’t Or Won’t Get It When It Comes To Sex Positivity And Sex Work (Or, Educating “Queen Atheist” Zinnia Jones And Her BGF “Heather”)

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Anthony

It seems that every year or so, someone who is supposed to be on the right side of the sex debate needs to be educated on the basic facts about the term “sex positivity”.

Like, for instance, that it is NOT the polar opposite of “sex negativity”, or a mere turn of phrase used to condemn.

Or..that it encompasses the acknowledgement of ALL sexual experiences — good, bad, beautiful, ugly, mundane, or profane.

Or..that it is not only “grab your cocks and doff your jocks” or “hook up with as many people as possible”, but simply respect the experiences of those who might just like sex more than you do. (And, for those of us who might be of the latter, those who don’t.)

It seems like a no-brainer to say this, but sometimes it has to be said out loud, because nearly every month, someone who should know better always seems to allow presumptions and assumptions about “sex positivity” being nothing more than “fuck ‘em and leave ‘em”.

Or worse yet…allow their sites to become the messenger of outright antisex prejudice.

Unfortunately, Zinnia Jones — atheist/gay/transgender activist, YouTube warrior, and on most issues a proven progressive — decided to jump to the other side this week.

Basically, she got her girlfriend “Heather” to post a “guest editorial” video at her YouTube channel (with the transcript posted at Zinnia’s blog as well) addressing the fundamental differences between “sex-positive feminism” and the antipornography feminist opposition.

Problem was, though, Heather’s comments weren’t quite so even handed as she thought.

Here’s the original video, as posted to Zinnia’s YT channel:

For something that is supposed to be a balanced assessment, it sure seems to be tilted heavily towards the antiporn side, isn’t it??

Other YouTubers, such as Divinity33372 and FeministWhore and BobChaos23 have responded vigorously to Heather’s nonsense (their response vids will appear here anon), but I thought that a full detailed response here is also needed….especially since Zinnia has attempted to pooh-pooh critics of Heather by reducing them to the “Only sex workers can comment on sex worker issues?? Pshaw!!” card.

Wrong, ZJ…it’s not about the messenger, its the message.

Which I will now prove with a through fisking of Heather’s message. (Yeah, it’s been a while, but why should Gail Dines and Shelley Lubben get all the fun??)

Sex positive feminism is a relatively new movement in feminism which originated in the 1990s. It arose as a reactionary movement in direct opposition both to millennia-long patriarchal and usually religious movements against specifically women having sex, and opposition to second-wave feminists’ anti-pornography viewpoints. It is the idea that a woman’s sexual liberation is central to women’s liberation as a whole; that a woman’s freedom must include the freedom to have sex whenever, however, and with whomever she likes. Parallel goals include recognizing different kinds of beauty, and celebrating various sexualized expressions of beauty, masculine, feminine, and everywhere in between, including pornography and sex work.

Wrong right off the bat, Heather. The first group to call themselves “sex-positive feminists” came up in the mid 1980s, out of resistance to the efforts of the original antipornography feminist movement led by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon and Kathleen Barry and Shelia Jefferys. They were people like Gayle Rubin, Amber Hollibaugh, Pat Califia, Alice Echols and Carol Queen, and the first true manifesto of that movement was an essay titled “Thinking Sex” that Rubin wrote for an anthology called Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality in 1986. I know this because as a library rat attending both Southern University and the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette), I used to read and sneak off copies of Rubin’s essay. So..not quite the “baby” movement you pretend to dismiss.

And also, Heather…most of us who call ourselves “sex-positive feminists” do agree about women having the right to have sex “whenever, however, and with whomever she likes”. What you miss is that we also fundamentally believe that women should have as much a right to say “Hell to the NO” if she does NOT want to have sex whenever she doesn’t want, or with someone she doesn’t particularly like, or at any particular time. It is as much about saying “No” as it is about saying “Yes”, and it’s essentially respecting the autonomy of a woman’s choices and decisions.

But why is Heather so obsessed with the “sex positives only want to have lots of sex” meme? Let’s read on to the next paragraph:

Opponents of sex positive feminism, sometimes derisively referred to as “sex-negative feminists,” argue that pornography objectifies women, sex work keeps women second-class and in a great deal of danger, and that the sex positive movement is not actually feminist but a disguised extension of male privilege – a movement which overwhelmingly makes colorful excuses for the objectification of women and favors men’s dicks. Sex positive feminists are sometimes derisively referred to as “fun-feminists.”

Yeah….it’s so “derisive” to refer to those like Gail Dines or Shelley Lubben or Melissa Fairley who would use the power of the state to smear and condemn and slut-shame women who choose to have more sex than they would allow as “sex-negative”. Of course, that doesn’t prevent Heather from dealing out the antiporn talking points and the old “fun feminists” and “favors men’s dicks” slams..because when it’s done from her side, it’s just brilliant analysis, not hateful smearing.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refer to those on the feminist side of the opposition to the sex positive movement as anti-pornography. The division of feminism into sex-positive and anti-pornography feminism began in the 1990s and persists through today, and like any radical movement in its adolescence, sex positive feminism has brought enthusiastic and idealistic attention to some important issues – and has some glaring blemishes on its face.

For the sake of simplicity, indeed….because to Heather (and, by extension, Zinnia), only antiporn femininsts can be true feminists. And of course, only the “pro-porn” side has blemishes….the censorship and the intimidation and the collusion with the antifeminist Right on the antiporn side is just…well, a side show strategy.

And also…how lovely that the “sex-positive feminist movement” is the one labeled as “radical” and in its “adolescence”, even though it has endured for well over 30 years now. Considering how antiporn feminists have assumed for themselves the label of “radical feminism” for the past 40 or so years, one can wonder where Heather has been.

Sex positive feminism has been a positive force in the acceptance of queer sexuality. The movement places heavy focus on the acceptance and inclusion of different sexual orientations and gender identities, which was long, long overdue. It is also inarguably important that women be able to enjoy the freedom of having sex with whomever they want and whenever they want to do it. For too long over too many thousands of years, women’s sexuality has been institutionally controlled. Only recently has western culture stopped actually killing or shunning women for having extramarital sex, and there are still exceptions. Some eastern cultures still mutilate women’s genitals to keep their sexual expression in check. There is definitely a place for sex positive discussion in the gender equality movement.

Gee, Heather….thanks, I guess. Of course, as Divinity has stated, it is also sex-positive feminists and sex worker activists who have been at the forefront of transgendered rights, while most of the more devout antiporn “feminist” activists have been the most lacking, if not on occasion the most prejudiced. But, can’t give the sluts that much credit, because that would really screw up your “balanced” assessment…right??

Oh….and if you are going to call out sex pozzies for their elitism, Heather, it would really be a good idea not to practice elitism in your own analysis. I mean…”Eastern cultures”?? You do know that male genital mutilation is still quite popular in the US, right??

At the core of the rift between sex positive and anti-pornography feminism is their interpretations of what constitutes empowerment and oppression in the larger arena of female sexuality, from high heels and lipstick to submissives in sub/dom relationships to sex workers. Simply put, while anti-pornography feminists tend to view socialized aspects of female sexuality as coercion until proven innocent, sex-positive feminists see most of it as consent until proven guilty.

Of course, makeup and body modification has been around for millennia, long before the first porn movies were ground out of San Francisco grindhouses in the early 1970′s, and well before camcorders, VCR’s, and the Internet allowed sexually explicit media to become accessible to a larger audience. So, how is this exactly a “sex positive” versus “antiporn feminist” issue??

The anti-pornography crowd, for example, will often argue that high heels, miniskirts, and makeup are uncomfortable, expensive, and in some cases near-crippling, and that to call them empowering expressions of femininity is disingenuous and insulting. Sex positive feminists might argue that high heels are hot and if women choose to wear them, then they ought not be shamed either by agents of the patriarchy wishing to devalue them due to their visible desire for sex, or by their sisters in feminism who would take something as benign as an article of clothing and claim that it was oppressing women. After all, heels make their calves look good.

OK…so high heels, tank tops, bare midriffs, and miniskirts aren’t for everyone. Anyone who knows any credible “sex-positive feminist” who has even began to suggest that people be required to wear such material against their will under punishment of law, please raise your hand.

Again, the point is NOT that wearing high heels is sexy; the point is that women who choose on their own free will to wear such heels and miniskirts for the purpose of desiring sex from wiling and consenting men should not be condemned or prejudged (or abused or raped, for that matter). Which is EXACTLY what most of the most strident antiporn feminists do all the time…and what Heather is doing right now.

The same goes with things such as pornography and sex work, where anti-pornography feminists claim that a monetary contract for sex is oppressive and dangerous to women (and men, but disproportionately women), sex positive feminists claim that women can consent to these things as much as they can consent to sex without pay, or as much as they can consent to any other sort of work that pays them, and the only difference between getting paid to be a secretary and getting paid to be a sex worker is that sex outside of marriage is considered by the patriarchy to be improper and debasing for women.

While sex positive feminists certainly have a point by saying that women should be considered able to consent to sex in all contexts and can even consent to wearing things traditionally labeled sexy, and while they definitely have an argument that women should not be shamed or devalued because they look sexy or have sex for work, there are significant problems with these arguments.

“A point”?!?!? The ability to give and deny consent isn’t just an afterthought, Heather; it’s an essential part of female autonomy and equality. Why are you so willing to constrain women’s choices in the sexual arena, but no where else??

Full gender equality does not yet exist, and many of us are hesitant to join in enthusiastically on current ideals of sexiness in the contexts of interpersonal relationships, feminine presentation, and especially commerce. While sex positive feminists claim to be challenging those ideals, they are only doing so inasmuch as they intend to add to them with things not previously considered sexy (for example, fat acceptance). While there is certainly a place for that, there is also a pervasive and purposeful push for acceptance of the current ideals if that’s your preference. The idea that any sexual preference whatsoever is legitimate and natural, and is probably only considered bad because patriarchy, is to deny how overwhelmingly the current ideals benefit heterosexual men at the expense of the rest of us. How awkward and out of place would it be to hear a heterosexual man say that he was not in fact oppressed or anything, but simply wanted to burn his hair with styling tools, then put on those crippling shoes, revealing short shorts, and daily face paint because he thinks it’s sexy and therefore women think it’s sexy, and he likes women and sex? No one would mistake such an individual for empowered. If it seems absurd to expect from men, then it ought to seem absurd to expect from women.

Oh, hold up here. Is Heather saying that we shouldn’t accept personal choice and consensual adult relationships because “they benefit heterosexual men at the expense of the rest of us”??? You mean, like, lesbian relationships are harmed because porn is legal? Like, sex pozzies are responsible if a man decides to cross dress and calls it “empowering” for him?? Funny, but I didn’t think that it was Heather’s call to determine for other individuals what they consider “empowering” or “degrading”.

Furthermore, one woman’s discomfort is another woman’s fetish, and only someone hell bent on imposing her own myopic sexual tastes on others through shame and fear would dare to imply that a crossdressing man or a woman “dressing the slut” is such a cosmic threat to women as a whole.

Further to the point, this focus on expanding the ideals of beauty and sexiness so that everyone can have a slice to further empowerment for women is doing exactly the opposite of what feminists have been working toward for decades, and not for nothing. It keeps us locked in this asinine prison of a value system that teaches women they must be aesthetically pleasing to be sexually desirable and sexually desirable to be whole. Again, how awkward would it seem to base a movement on reassuring men that they’re all handsome? Or, to use a stereotype more often associated with men’s desirability, to assure them that no matter how little money they have, they’re rich so long as they’re confident?

Ahhh..the old “them damn sex-pozzies only want to put out for men and kneel to men’s dicks!!!!” card. The notion that many women may want to dress sexy for themselves because it makes THEM feel good about themselves seems to have bypassed Heather’s synapeses. I guess that women discovering their clitori and the joys of self-induced orgasms through masturbation are simply the dupes of male pleasure, too??

And how nice for Heather to riff that sex-positive feminism entraps women in “patriarchy” by implying that only sexiness will get them over. Never mind that antiporn feminism continues to reinforce the same tired traditional stereotype that an assertively sexual woman is merely a vassal of men and a traitor of women, deserving of shame and abuse?

However, the biggest and most shameful crime of the sex positive movement is the cherrypicking of testimonials from sex workers of all sorts – from nude models to actors in pornography to exotic dancers to escorts – as though middle-class, healthy, educated agents of gender equality made up a significant portion of the industry’s representatives. The stories of hundreds of thousands of women who worked in the sex industry and experienced emotionally painful objectification, dehumanizing treatment, addictions, and abuse should not be dismissed as problems that can be erased by simply erasing pimps, and cannot be replaced with the assertion that sex workers are adults and therefore have agency and consent freely or that porn is healthy. Safe working environments and emotionally healthy consent simply are not components of most sex workers’ realities. Sex workers are overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly unsafe. Scrawling the word “empowerment” over the sex industry is by far the sex positive movement’s largest insult toward women.

Yup…save the biggest damn lie for last. Heather may have missed the memo that plenty of sex worker organizations and activist sex workers have been attempting for decades to reform and transform the “sex industry” to make it more condusive for women and men; and that sex positives are more than aware of the pitfalls and dangers that lurk within doing sex work. If the environment for sex workers isn’t too healthy right now, it’s no help that antiporn abolitionists would rather wipe sex work off the map and undercut those efforts.

But, it’s still a baby. Maybe it will grow up someday.

Actually, it’s already fully grown and mature…which is more than I can say about Heather’s analysis.

I could say more, but I’ll let Div and this other active sex worker named “Amyi” take it away, since they say it better than I ever could.

How Vicky Vette Turned The Payroll Tax Cut War Into A Brilliant Brand Marketing Coup…Through The $40 Blowjob

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Anthony

Ask any successful businessperson what is the most important factor in selling his/her business, and he will respond usually with the basic three-word edict:

“Location, location, location.”

The best advertisement in the world will make no bit of good if no one sees it, and to maximize your potential sales audience by going where they are and grabbing the microphone and promoting your product makes all the difference in the world.

Some companies are so wealthy they can literally buy their own audience. Most bizmen/bizwomen, though, must rely of strategic placement to put out the word for their product.

And when the product happens to be adult sexual entertainment, sometimes you must rely on sheer luck or just skilled targeting.

And sometimes, your hard work does indeed pay off big time.

As it did yesterday with Vicky Vette.

If you are not in the world of adult entertainment, you might not know who the hell Vicky Vette is, so let me give you the abridged bio version.

Once upon a time, a gorgeous Norwegian-born and Canada-raised woman who had spent pretty much her entire early adult life in various middle- to upper-management/retail — including even selling houses — decided to follow her inner slut, her bodacious rack, and her throbbing clit into the wild world of explicit adult entertainment. From then on, she moved to hardcore modeling, to active porn performing, and to live feature dancing, rounding up nearly 300 or so video credits and a reputation for consistency and work ethic as well as for eternal horniness…and all of this in her late 30′s and 40′s!!

Then, having tired of some of the drama and potential drawbacks of relying solely on video filming, she “retired” from movies and focused her efforts on content for her home website, VickyatHome.com (warning, site is NSFW for explicit sexual content). Using all the tools of marketing and corporate saavy she had accumulated, as well as her penchant for honest fan interaction, she was able to transform her site into one of the most popular adult websites around. She then used that springboard as a means to launch her own network of adult websites, the Vette Nation Army (again, NSFW), where she gathered some of the more sucessful “MILF” performers together to share her high standards of fan interaction. Her network now boasts of 12 active members, a devout and large membership base that has consistently kept her site at the top of the rankings, and the reputation of being one of the hardest working women in adult webhosting.

That, in a nutshell, is Vicky Vette.

(Disclosure alert here: I happen to have been a fan and follower of Vicky from the beginning of her porn career; having joined her website since 2005…and I am a moderator for many of her Yahoo fan groups and her members’ message board. Don’t let my bias get in the way of the story, though.)

One of her greatest weapons in her War of Mass Seduction is Twitter. You wouldn’t know it now, but she had to be persuaded to even use the service when she first discovered it…she was more on MySpace back then. Now, she has worked Twitter so well that she is part of an elite group of adult superstars with more than 200,000 followers (currently at 218+K as of this moment). And, she’s willing to share the wealth so readily that three other VNA featured stars — Sara Jay, Gabby Quinteros, and Bobbi Eden — have eclipsed the 100K follower mark themselves.

(Yes, I know, Clones, that is still dwarfed by the top celebrity Twitterers whose follow base can get into the MILLIONS…but we are talking about the ADULT industry here.)

What does all this have to do with $40 blowjobs and the payroll tax cut wars?

Well, you can thank the White House, CNN, and the Funny Or Die website for that.

Of course, the big political story today was the continuing battle between the Obama White House and the Congressional Republicans/Tea Partiers over extending the payroll tax cut enacted in 2010 for another year. (The GOTP tonight blinked, accepting a vote to extend the cut and some unemployment benefits for two months so that the next Congress could do battle.) But, as of this morning, things were still fluid.

For once, the Democrats, who usually are the ones to cave in to the demands of the Repubs/Tea Partiers, decided to stand their ground on principle and defend the middle- to working-class tax cut, saying that the Repubs were only opposed to it because they wanted tax relief only for the wealthy at the expense of the rest of America.

As part of that defense, the White House, whom has mastered the art of using Twitter hashtags for exploiting the online zeitgeist, had come up with the meme of #40dollars, which represents the $40 per year that average working Americans would lose in their paychecks if the payroll tax was restored. (Just do a search on Twitter using the hashtag #40dollars to see how popular that became.)

Here’s their opening tweet in the series:

OK…pretty mundane story, right??

CNN must have thought so, because they used a segment of their afternoon news show, CNN Newsroom, to discuss the standoff with Republican Congressman Fred Upton (Michigan).

During the interview, Upton and the CNN panelist discussed the White House public media campaign to sell the tax cut using Twitter, while in the background, tweets using the hashtag #40dollars was scrolling across your TV screen.

Which is how, if you weren’t quite looking, you might have missed this tweet:

Now, it only crossed the screen for about two or three seconds before the cameras dissolved back to the panelists….which is unfortunate, because if the directors had held on for just a tad longer, they would have discovered this tweet:

You could say that Vicky was simply having a bit of fun with her followers…but then again, last year sister VNA girl Bobbi Eden was dead serious about giving free hummers to all of her followers if her native Norway team won the World Cup soccer finals. (Tragically, they lost to England.)

Naturally it was just dumb luck that Vicky happened to be posting a naughty tweet using the #40dollars hashtag just as CNN was reporting on how Twitter was being used to direct the debate.

Yeah, right…sure it was…she more than likely planned it all along.

The point is, though, it worked…but would it turn from a molehill into a mountain??

Cue the folks at FunnyOrDie.com, who watched the same segment…and struck the motherload…errrr, motherlode. And wasn’t afraid to tell the world, either.

This is where the amazingness took over. CNN clearly didn’t intend for its viewers to read these tweets. It was just a visual aide to show that this thing was, in fact, happening on Twitter. They scrolled quickly down the screen for a second or two before getting back to the shot of the interview. And if you weren’t paying attention, you would have missed it. But if you thought something felt a bit off for second, and you rewound your DVR back to the moment right before they cut back to Fred Upton, you would have seen this:

Let’s zoom in a little on that second to last tweet.

YESSSSSS! CNN! They showed a tweet from a porn star named Vicky Vette participating in the 40-dollar-hashtag. “If every single one of my followers gives me #40dollars ~~ I will blow you all rt.” The “rt” at the end is perfection. And for one fleeting moment on Wednesday, daytime CNN was perfection as well.

Remember, Clones….porn starlets normally don’t get anywhere close to CNN unless they are either dead from HIV/AIDS, converted born-agains like Shelley Lubben reflecting on how abused and raped they were, or Bree Olson playing one of Charlie Sheen’s “goddesses”.Not even Larry Flynt can buy this kind of positive spin..and yet the Commander in Briefs was able to kick the sumbitch down with one strategic hashtag.

With that one tweet, Vicky Vette may have done more to enhance her bottom line, and the positive side of adult, then anyone this side of Nina Hartley has even done. (Apologies to Stormy Daniels, who did a decent job of dispatching Gail Dines in a porn debate on Dr. Drew’s “talk show”…but that was more isolated.)

If there is anything such as followup or justice in this world, CNN should give Vicky a segment interview to explain herself. After she blows up even more than she has now, though, I’m sure they won’t find it hard to locate her. She’s the blonde with the body for sin, the brain for business, and the heart for the long haul.

You go, General.

Monica Foster Supplemental Memo: Why Cyberbullying Julie Meadows/Lydia Lee For Her Kindness Will Only Get Her Lubbenized

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Anthony

Just when you thought she couldn’t go beyond herselves, Monica Foster (nee’ Alexandra Mayers) lowers the crazaa bar once again.

Apparently, getting her ass kicked — figuratively and intellectually speaking — by Michael Whiteacre and especially by Sean Tompkins of The REAL Pornwikileaks (not to be confused with the original Pornwikileaks that Monica is apparently attempting to revive to continue the Donny Long tradition of smearing anyone who disses her) has only intensified the nuclear explosions affecting her synapses.

The problem is, unfortunately, that rather than face the music and her critics head on like a real woman should, Monica has decided to aim and fire her nukes at a woman whom simply has done nothing to deserve it. Worse yet, she has gone to even threatening her family with not-so-thinly veiled death threats.

The victim of Monica’s cyberbullying is none other than Lydia Lee, formerly known and loved and respected as Julie Meadows.

The grand irony of Foster’s vendetta is that Julie was one of the first women to actually attempt to aid and comfort Monica when she was apparently at her worst state. But that was when Monica was so busy playing both sides of the PWL street, sending out bogus racist messages and even going so far as to fake a plea for help from a potential suicide attempt.

(You will remember the supposed Twitter war that she had with “Darrah Ford” over her alleged opposition back then to Lubben’s ministry….but then you wonder why they never communicated directly with each other. Could it be that “Darrah” was herself another one of Monica’s personality inventions?? Until she makes a comeback, we’ll never know, shall we??)

Of course, Lydia/Julie and her husband Doug has been one of the most vocal critics of the Ministress and her pumped up holy roller antiporn ministry; with plenty of former Lubbenites going to her to reveal their inside stories on the abusive behavior just underneath the Godly surface of the Pink Cross Foundation. (The latest whistleblower, “Kristenye”, has her story documented here.) Between that and Sean’s revelations that Monica wasn’t the angelic “victim” of Donny Long’s bigotry but an active participant in all the bloddy madness, there’s enough damning evidence to unravel Monica for years.

So what does a crazy person do when her ass is caught in a lie?? Simple…she simply goes on a Twitter rant of epic proportions, filled with all sorts of conspiracies, slanders, and holy references.

Which is exactly what Monica Foster did this past Tuesday.

Julie has reposted the entirity of Monica’s full metal twattage at her blog, and rather than repost all of it here, I’d rather respect her wishes and her copyright and just refer y’all over there. (Of course, you can also simply visit Foster’s Twitter page (@MonicaFoster) and view the madness for yourself, since Monica kinda forgot to privatize her tweets, and thusly has made everything public for anyone to view.) Suffice it to say, though, that Monica covers plenty of ground….here are the main supplementary points

1) The “LA porn industry” is un-Godly, and needs to be razed and burned to the ground. (This is an extension to her earlier belief that a dark Satanic force rules over Porn Valley. Funny, but it didn’t prevent her from making money as an escort…Lenny Dykstra’s bounce check notwithstanding.)

2) Monica is the apparent victim of an “anti-American” terrorist cabal within the “LA porn industry”, led apparently by Diane Duke of the Free Speech Coalition and porn producer/director Will Ryder, with Julie Meadows and Michael Whiteacre and Sean Tompkins as the lead jihadists, so to speak. (Mike’s devout Judaism doesn’t get in the way of his “terrorist” tactics, of course.)

3) Lydia Lee has been promoted in this lunatic conspiracy theory of Monica’s…once, she was simply a “fat bored housewife”; now, she’s a “cocaine whore” and a “deadbeat mom” who’s being “pimped out” by hubby Doug and who is just jealous because Shelley Lubben is revealing the “truth”.

4) MIke Whiteacre (liberally referenced by his real name, which I will NOT reveal here) is in fact an “antiporn superhero” who is in fact revealing just why Monica is totally right about the evil of the porn industry. That, and he’s also an Israeli “terrorist”.

5) Monica also has created new imaginary friends — namely “Francesco Barbarino” (Vinny’s long lost son, I guess) and “Dion from Combat Zone” — whom she openly hopes pays all her “friends” (read that to mean, her critics) a visit for dinner…with cement shoes as the requisite attire, if you catch her drift.

But wait…this gets better. Much, much, much better.

Obviously not satisfied with waiting for Francesco and Dion to do their thing, Monica teamed up with another Lubben fan girl and ex-porn/ex-escort strumpet, Desi Foxx (nee’ Diana Gundenson), who promptly posted a couple of “editorial cartoons” depicting their desired solution to all the crisis…mostly involving the MInistress driving a bus over her critics. (The offending toons were also captured by Julie and posted at her blog, I recommend you go there if your stomach is strong enough.)

Desi Foxx, of course, you know as the woman whose medical records were pilfered last year from the AIM database and released to yet another one of Donny Long’s sites; remember that she and her daughter Elli Foxx (they worked together as a tag team as working prostitutes, and even made porn together as a mother/daughter team) sued AIM in what amounted to be a PR stunt for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s vendetta against AIM and for mandatory condoms for all porn shoots.

Oh..and then there’s also Monica’s counter to Sean Tompkins’ counterattacks revealing the hypocrisy and outright brutality of Foster’s attacks on Julie Meadows and her family. When Sean used the pages of TRPWL to reveal the names and checkered history of some members of Monica’s family (namely, her sister and her mother), Monica responded by creating a Blogger website strategically named Pornwikileaks.com (and another faked up blog called “Porn in the Valley”) from which she spewed more of the same crapola about being “terrorized”. She’s also created a “fan page” dedicated to smearing Michael Whiteacre, too.

Now, Sean and Michael are big boys who know how to defend themselves against idiocy, and who are capable of beating fools at their own game; that’s how Sean and the crew were able to take down the original PWL and Donny Long’s bullshittery. Julie, to her credit, while stunned enough at the turncoat behavior of Monica at first, has managed to retain her classic grace and class; but even she understands the value of a good counterattack, because she and Doug have promised legal action against Monica. Considering how protective Doug is of Lydia, I wouldn’t be surprised that other, more earthy, means of protection is being enacted as well.

Perhaps the real threat of jail time will finally enable the sensible portions remaining in Monica Foster’s brain to finally kick in and back down from her nonsense before real people get hurt. Perhaps, there is still enough good will left in Monica that she will realize that her impressionist act of being a “Christian porn star” just isn’t compatible with her behavior and actions, and that she will actually live the word and walk the talk of a true Christian.

Perhaps…it will snow in South Louisiana, too. I wish we would be that lucky.

Blowback can be a real bitch, Monica. One last time: Check yourself before you wreck yourself….and others.

Sometimes It Really IS That Easy….The Ministress’ Latest Attempt At Crapaganda Blows Up In Her Face

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Anthony

“People always say to me, ‘The camera doesn’t lie’. Well, people can lie with a camera.” – former NBC News anchor/correspondent/journalist Linda Ellerbee

Let’s say, for instance, that you are a prominent antipornography activist who has been riding high off the profits of those you have maligned and abused for so long. Yet you face real trouble on the horizon: the victims of your campaign have rallied and are fighting back, your empire is crumbling from within as former members bail out on you and expose your inner workings; and your attempts at censorship have only resulted in restraining orders lobbed right back at you. How, exactly, do you rally yourself and your troops??

Well…if you happen to be Shelley Lubben, you simply make yet another one of your craptacular propaganda videos essentially linking porn with rape, and then hope that the blind outrage supersedes any attempt at reasonable logic.

Which is exactly what the Ministeress attempted to do today.

For what it is worth, this is the latest video that appeared over at Shelley’s YouTube channel, interjecting featured comments by Lubben at various venues with what she labeled as “shocking footage of ‘porn sex’” involving what appeared to be some very abusive and outright degrading depictions of sex scenes being shot.

One “scene” depected a woman clearly distressing from doing what appears to be an anal scene without any benefit of lube or desire; with the woman screaming, “It hurts so much!! It hurts so much!!” Another scene — complete with the required subtitles, just so that you get the point — showed another female performer raging at her fellow mate for attempting to put something in her that she didn’t want, ultimately resulting in said woman pushing said man off her and getting off the couch, cussing and fussing all the way.

There was also a still screen shot of yet another woman with a man’s arms around her, apparently being choked, with an expression of what appears to be utter pain and dread on her face.

And through it all, Shelley was doing voice overs and throwing up her usual flak about how this is exactly what the porn industry is really about, and how everything else is simply the propaganda used to hide “the truth” that PORN KILLS!!!!!!!!!!!!

In short, it was the usual Lubbenesque party line, kicked up to Emeril Lagasse notches unknown.

If you weren’t a regular follower of Shelley and her antics, you might have been convinced.

Strangely enough, it was enough to convince even a pronounced critic of Lubben, Julie Meadows, who posted the Lubben clip as part of a blog post where she expressed her disgust for what she saw, and challenged Shelley to name names and scenes. (Julie has taken to copyrighting her posts now in order to protect herself, so I won’t provide any quotes without her approval; you’ll just have to go over there for now and read for yourself.)

Considering that Julie has had her own run-ins with asshole producers and shifty smash-mouth “gonzo horror gothic” producers like Max Hardcore, it’s perfectly understandable why she reacted the way she did. And it did seem that the deliberate manipulation of emotions intended by the video would have a payoff.

And then, the truth intervened to bust the bubble of lies…with the prick provided by Michael Whiteacre, that old nemesis that haunts Shelley Lubben the way stank used to haunt privvies.

First, Whiteacre brought some much needed background context into the debate, including Lubben’s prior attempts at chacanery and distortion:

To the best of my knowledge, that is NOT secret “unreleased” Behind-the-Scenes footage. I wonder what the Behind-The-Scenes footage of those scenes really show — like, perhaps, that the performers were unharmed and pleased with the scene? Lubben was 100% wrong in her criticism of Anna Span’s video (that the performer “hated it” and was obviously in pain). The real BTS footage showed a performer who herself suggested the action in the scene that Lubben assumed was abusive, and was elated before, during and after.

Video like that can be edited a hundred different ways. We don’t know — absent context — whether the performers were coached to play up the “abusive” pro emotional aspects. What I do know is there’s not a single reputable producer in the industry who would release something like that without also releasing the BTS footage showing consent as a CYA move.

I’ve seen lots of contestants cry on camera during various intense “challenge” TV shows, and on Fear Factor. I’d like to see a video compilation of moments of extreme TV show contestants breaking down from strain, anxiety, heartbreak or exhaustion on camera. “Shocking Footage of Contestants Abused on Extreme TV.”

And then Michael did what few of those who follow antiporn extremist tactics are willing to do: he actually beat Shelley to the punch and actually sourced the video clips used by Lubben in her video. The results??

I have just been informed that the scenes in this video are all stolen from efukt clips. The content is from Duke Skywalker’s “Facial Abuse” and JM Productions “Porn Most Outrageous Outtakes.” This is not “secret footage the porn industry doesn’t want you to see.”

One clip is “Whoregasm” Date: 9.6.11, from JM’s “Porn’s Most Outrageous Outtakes Vol. 2″; another is “Dude Upstages Everyone at Gangbang” Date: 8.3.11; the “Facial Abuse” scene is from “Pornstar Meltdown” 8.21.09 – her name is “Ellie.”

Oh, big surprise. Shocking, indeed. Shelley STEALS clips from other sources and then alters them without the original approval to serve her agenda?? Where’s YouTube on this?? Call the DMCA cops!!!

But wait, it gets better. The actual site where those clips were stolen from is called efukt.com (warning, very NSFW link), which brands itself as an “adult humor site” that pretty much panders to the same male adolescent “Bevis and Butt-head” audience that Larry Flynt used to pander to in the old days of HUSTLER, with the “Chester the Molester” toons and the scatalogical humor and the “politically incorrect” off color bantering.

But the most important thing about those clips?? Most of them were outtakes. OUTTAKES. In fact, one of the principle videos from which these clips were produced was titiled: Porn’s Most Dangerous Outtakes, Volume 2; the other video cited was a JM Productions rag titled Facial Abuse…which basically sounds like a particularly extreme gothic fetish vid.

Shocking?? Yes. Disturbing??? Definitely. The embodiment of “porn rape”?? Not so much.

And, about as representative of what really happens at porn shoots as David Duke being a civil rights activist.

Don’t get me wrong here…there are plenty of assholes and predators in adult who will stop at nothing to trick women into doing things that can be hazardous or injurous..or worse. And porn producers need to do a much better job of screening out such people.

But, if one thing can be made perfectly clear from this debacle, it is this: With Shelley Lubben, The Monstrous Lie is a feature, not a bug. If you have to depend on her to “save” porn women from themselves, then you are truly fucked. And not in the good way, either.

And On The Other Side Of Bayou Crazaa: My (Updated) Open Letter To Monica Foster (From Sybill To Bachmann In 2.5 Seconds)

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Anthony

[This is actually a repost and an update to a "memo" I posted over at my Lady Chatterley Boudoir blog last October. I am updating it to reflect new info and how Monica Foster has now overstepped the line seperating lunacy from outright vicious bitchiness...thus deserving a far more serious reading. Updated info will appear in brackets and italicized.]

In all my years as an observer and a fan of porn and its talent, I see plenty of personalities come and go. It’s part of why I absolutely love being a fan.

I also love the fact that explicit adult media is one of the few places where people are free to let their hair down, so to speak, and reveal things about themselves that they wouldn’t even be able to get away with in “civilian” life.

But as with most renegade professions, though, you will get that special breed of personality that oversteps the line which separates eccentricity from outright lunacy, from simply being one of the only slightly abnormal freaks, to being the latest candidate for the straightjacket.

And then…there is Monica Foster, who rips the lunacy book to shreds.

(Snarky photo of Monica courtesy of Michael Whiteacre, via Sean Tompkins of TRPWL.)

For those who do not know, Monica Foster is a now former middle-grade Black porn performer whom at one time was seen as a serious reformer who wanted to improve the conditions for women getting into the industry. Heck, she even created a series and a website (GettingIntoPorn.com) in which she used her insider credentials and personal experiences to mentor young women seeking to enter the industry. She also created a complimentary site called GettingOutOfPorn.com, which offered guidance for those who wanted to get out as safely as they got in.

At one time, I considered her to be enough of a genuine person that I even included links and endorsements of her organization over at my blogs. I was under the impression that here was a serious and eloquent voice that was willing to fight the good fight from within to make the industry a safer and better place.

That was then…before I encountered the Sybll that lurked underneath the sexy chocolate covering.

[Which has now been shed by Monica in favor of the full Lizzy Borden/Michelle Bachmann ensemble.]

The first warning sign came when Monica decided to make a Federal issue out of how many porn starlets were escorting on the side, and how that was leaving porn performers open to a variety of diseases, including HIV. Of course, at the same time, Monica was herself escorting and offering “girlfriend experiences” to various rich guys. How do we know that?? Because when one particular rich guy, former pro baseballer Lenny Dykstra, solicited Monica’s…ummmm, “services” but somehow forgot to back up the check he paid her with actual funding, Monica went all ape shit upside his dome, using all the tools of her trade, including Twitter and her “Monica at Home” podcasts and blog, to light up Dykstra for bouncing his checks. (Never mind that that goes against the cardinal rule of sex work: Cash Payments ONLY. Though, I wonder if debit cards are now welcome.)

[Nothing has changed on that since then...Monica's still running smack about how escorts are destroying porn with their diseases, while still moaning about Dykstra's bounced check. Not much to see here, so I'll move on.]

OK…so maybe that’s not a good example, since Monica could claim that she’s only mentoring from bad experiences and warning people.

But, then, there is her obsession with Vanessa Blue and Michael Fattorosi.

The former is one of the premiere Black porn starlets; the latter is the former’s current significant other, and a high-falutin’ attorney who dabbles in defending adult sexual media’s legal interests (hence his former Twitter gloss @Pornlaw).

It all goes back to the bad old days of the original Pornwikileaks. No, Clones, NOT the current version that is being run splendidly by Sean Tompkins; but the original one that was essentially Donny Long’s attempt to seek revenge on the industry.

For those who remember, the original PWL was essentially a racist, homophobic, bigoted to almost neo-Nazi standards shop where Donny Long and his insider acolytes would post the most vile, hateful, and abusive rumor, as well as deliberately “out” performers using their real names, actual addresses, and even private medical records. It was ultimately shut down when some of its most prominent victims decided to use DL’s own methods against him and out him and his supporting cast.

Monica Foster’s role in all that?? Well, she claims to have been a prominent victim of Donkey Long’s aggression, complete with all the race baiting, the outing, and even the threats to her personal life. In fact, it got so bad that she even publically tweeted of committing suicide due to all the stress involved. And, she is generally credited with ultimately bringing Long down and reforming PWL away from the hate.

[Of course, we all know that Mike South, Mercedes Ashley, Michael Whiteacre, and their underling lieutenants beating Long at his own IP game bear most of the credit, and Monica was at most a loud booster.]

The problem is, though, that for someone who claims to be such a victim of the original PWL, Monica sure has a strange way of promoting them. Even with the racist attacks on her, she was still very much active in all of Long’s forums, and she even went so far as to call Long “a genius”.

[Not to mention the accusation that has now gotten around that Monica actually faked up racist smack in order to prop up her "victimhood" (see here), and even attempted to gain the original PWL database -- the one with all the phony names, racist/sexist/antiporn/gay bashing smack, and all the private medical information thieved from AIM-MED -- all in the name of "truthseeking", of course. Nothing at all to do with her, oh noes.]

As for her vendetta against Vanessa Blue and Mike Fattorosi?? Well, Monica claims that “Pornlaw” was in fact totally involved with and supportive of the original PWL’s racist assaults, because (according to her) Fattorosi often would post to the XXXFilmJobs forum (one of Long’s favored platforms for his rumor mongering), and some of his clients somehow got exempted from getting their personal information outed in the original PWL database. Vanessa Blue is attacked merely for being Fattorosi’s sig other, and for being an alleged “traitor to her race” (Blue had previously been romantically involved with Black porn megastud Lexington Steele, but they broke off acromoniously).

Then there was the Classic Epic Twitter War that ensued between Monica Foster and “Darrah Ford”; the latter being a former porn publicist/rumor specialist who adopted the gonzo style of the legendary porn gossipist Luke Ford (in fact, there is no relation).

The genesis of that particular smackfest was when Monica decided to break off her support of….yeah, her again….Shelley Lubben and the Pink Cross Foundation’s efforts to reform former porn girls through “the love of Jesus Christ”. “Darrah”, whom has now disappeared without a trace since the whole PWL drama went down, was at one time one of the loudest supporter of Lubben and her ministry, often under the supposed “feminist” drive of retaking porn from the evil male establishment. “Darrah” was also a strong supporter of the drive by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (assisted lovingly by the Ministress) to mandate condom usage on all porn sets, while at the time, Monica was on the fence.

Once again, though, that was then. Now, it seems, Monica has reversed herself (again) and is now in near total support of Lubben, even going as far as to be fundamentally critical of those who are calling into account her distortions and outright lies. And this is even in the face of overwhelming evidence of how Lubben has used her ministry as her own personal money bank, or how she, in spite of her claims to have “saved” porn women from drug abuse, actually has enabled same abuse as a means of keeping her acolytes in line. (See Madelyne/Michelle Avanti).

How bad has it gotten?? Last year, Monica gleefully contirbuted to the documentary series developed by Michael Whiteacre and Julie Meadows, “The Devil And Shelley Lubben”, which sought to expose the contradictions and distortions of Lubben and her ministry.

Now?? She’s openly accusing Whiteacre of “stalking” and “harrassing” Lubben, and she’s publically broken off with Meadows (now using her real life given name of Lydia Lee), calling her a “fat bored housewife” who “deserves to be cheated on and to contract an STD”.

[To say that Julie Meadows has been pretty much wrecked by Monica's turncoat bitchiness is an understatement...read up here and here.]

And in case even that is not enough for you, there is Monica’s newly found friendship and alliance with Nica Noelle and January Seraph, the two principal founders of the fledgling Adult Performers Association, which claims itself to be the first organization of adult performers of its kind. Nica and January also happen to have major personal issues with both the Free Speech Coalition (the current lobbying/public information org for the industry) and its newly created STD testing group, Adult Performers Health and Safety Services (APHSS). January’s issues are mostly with the FSC’s position against the .XXX domain and the security of the APHSS database used to monitor and protect performers during the testing process; Nica’s problem is with the supposed “monopoly” that FSC/APHSS has in the process of testing, which freezes out her right to choose her own testing company. Since Monica has been a long time opponent of FSC and APHSS, and their predecessors over at AIM-MED, it makes for a natural alliance.

[More like made for an alliance....Nica has now bailed out from APA, citing "harassment" from "PWL" peeps as the reason. Probably more because she simply couldn't stand scrutiny for fellow travelling with Monica and her clown act.]

Also, there is that other bitter Twitter war ongoing between Michael Whiteacre, who happens to be one of the more tenacious defenders of FSC/APHSS, and both Nica and January, whom have also accused Whiteacre of some overly aggressive and nasty tactics of “stalking” and harrassment. Obviously, Monica has now gone all-in for the women, which dovetails quite nicely with her newly found love for Shelley Lubben.

[Oh, I haven't told you about the latest and most obscene act that Monica pulled on Sean Tompkins of TRPWL; she basically accused him of being a "pedophile" for posting pics of his daughter online....right after she basically called for her peeps to pray for his daughter's death. Right along with praying for the mass death of anyone attached to the "LA porn industry". Sure...like her God has so much time to sling lightning bolts for her. Sean's detailed the tweeterhea over at AWM/TRPWL, find it here and here.]

I believe that you get my point now, Clones. It’s one thing to change your mind and switch your views in a certain point in time. When you change your views back and forth the way Imelda Marcos changes shoes?? You might have a slight personality disorder.

Or…you just might be just plain freakin’ NUTS.

Memo, Monica: Back away from yourself. And…yourself. And…your other self.

[And while you're at it, Monica, back away from the faux Christian pornstar cliff, because if you're not careful, it will eat you up just like it's starting to consume your mentor. Two words, dearie: "You're next."]

A Brief Lesson On Fair Use Policy And Why The Ministeress’ DMCA Assaults Are All Hawk And No Spit

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Anthony

I’m still awaiting any bit of response as of this morning from Shelley Lubben Communications, Inc., on my counter notification regarding YouTube’s blocking of my mirror of the first video installment of “The Devil And Shelley Lubben”. Considering that she might have far bigger issues on her plate now, I’m probably waiting until the 12th of never, 2100.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to give y’all some background into Lubben’s most recent and blatant attempts to throttle her YouTube critics with DMCA takedowns, how YT’s bias toward copyright holders stifles free speech and expression, and how the concept of “Fair Use” makes her attempts so feeble and unneccessary.

You will remember that earlier, the Ministeress had gone into a DMCA takedown binge against every one of her critics, exploiting YouTube’s stated copyright policy to strike down originals and mirrors alike, citing her copyright protection and ownage of original material that she claimed was “stolen” to use against her. Michael Whiteacre, for example, had his entire channel taken down for “numerous copyright violations”, including the original installment of TDASL; while another critic of Lubben, Jordan Owen, had some of his vids targeted…including the original “8-foot staff” video that I had mirrored.

All of the videos have been restored and the records of the targets cleansed, and ultimately YT didn’t find enough to pursue any further charges…so why has Lubben been allowed a second try? And, how can those of us protect ourselves and our channels from future false flag DMCA takedown attacks?

Ahhh, but the solution has but two words: “Fair Use”.

Although the United States has become progressively more tightwadish when it comes to protecting copyright, it has not yet (despite recent efforts) been able to enable the 1% to copyright the world and force others to pay usurous tribute to them every time we type their name. There is still a First Amendment right to free speech and public expression, and public figures can still be held accountable for their words and actions in the court of public opinion.

And, much of that protection is thanks to that wonderful exception that was carved out of copyright law called “Fair Use” (actually, U. S. Code Title 17), which basically states that even otherwise copyrighted material can be used without fear of penalty under certain parameters and conditions.

Which conditions and parameters, you ask?? Quoeth FindLaw.com:

Under the Copyright Act, the fair use of copyrighted material without permission is allowed when used for the following purposes:

Criticism
Comment
News reporting
Teaching, includes making copies for use in the classroom
Scholarship and research
Parody

These uses do not grant the right to use the copyrighted work in its entirety. Rather, the use should be limited to quoting, excerpting, summarizing, and making educational copies of the material.

There is, though, one minor glitch in the Fair Use umbrella protection: deciding whether written or filmed material falls under that protection is usually left to the legal system (read, the courts) to decide on a case-by-case basis, and your local mileage may vary between jurisdictions. There is, however, a four-pronged Factor Test, mapped out under the terms of the Copyright Act, which courts regularly use to determine if a piece of work borrowed from another person is protected under Fair Use. Again, quoting from FindLaw.com:

Courts consider four factors when evaluating whether an unauthorized use of copyrighted material is fair. The following factors are guidelines under the Copyright Act:

The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes: Courts consider whether the use is transformative. For instance, was the purpose of the new use transformative, did a new expression change the original work, or did the use create new information or lead to new ideas? The more transformative a new work, the more likely a court will consider it fair use.

The nature of the copyrighted work: Courts look at whether the copyrighted work is creative or factual and whether it is published or unpublished. Creative works, such as fiction, creative nonfiction, pictures, and graphic works, typically receive more protection. Factual works, such as history accounts and scientific works, receive less protection because of the benefit to society from the exchange of ideas . Authors have a right to decide when to publish their work, so the use of unpublished works without permission is less acceptable than using published works.

The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole: Courts consider how much material was copied and was the copied material a central part of the original work. When a large portion of the entire copyrighted material is used or it includes the use of a central point , it is less likely that a court will consider it fair use. For, parody, however, it is acceptable to borrow a large portion and to use the central part of the original work.

The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work: A court will look closely at a use that deprives a copyright holder of income, regardless of whether the new material is competing in the same market. Important factors include the current market and the potential market.

Courts may use additional factors to determine whether the unauthorized use of copyrighted material is fair.

So…how is that relevant to the current battle of wits between Shelley Lubben and her critics??

Well..let’s use the infamous “8-foot staff” video as an example.

Note that I am using the original that Jordan Owen posted to his channel that was cleared by YT for reposting, NOT my mirror that was also blocked (and is now pending a counter notification request).

Let’s say that Shelley had decided to call Jordan’s bluff and actually take the matter to court, saying that “Your Honor, there is no doubt about this…this is theft of my work intended to harm me by mocking my passionate religious beliefs and my mission against the destruction and the harms of pornography. He invaded my property and distorted my work…make him pay.”

Using the Four Factors, does Shelley have a proper case??

Transformative work that changes the ideas presented in the original video Shelley posted?? Gee…I’d say so, since the annotations that Jordan added simply addresses some of the whack accusations and charges that Lubben adds to her antiporn “altar call” for her ministry.

Use for nonprofit/educational means?? Last time I checked, YouTube was a FREE platform for anyone with the ability to post videos, and neither Jordan nor Michael Whiteacre were using their videos to sell books. Shelley?? Not so much.

Was Shelley’s original vid intended to be published, and is it considered to be a “creative” or a “factual” work? Non-published and more creative work gets more copyright protection than public and published works, and the fact that this was a private altar call to her followers does give Lubben some protection. On the other hand, there were some prominently public statistics and assertions about public people in that video that could be considered to be public expression, and as we all know, political speech has NO copyright protection whatsoever.

Was only a portion or all of the copyrighted work used?? Here is Shelley’s strongest case she can make, because she can claim that in adding annotations to her video and reposting it as his own, Jordan basically violated the “can’t use a video in its entirity, only clips and snippets” principle. Problem is, Ministeress, that gives you only ONE of the Four Factors, and you are screwed on at least two of the other three.

Effect on the potential market value of the original Lubben vid?? Unless Shelley plans to make her little staff prayer part of her ministry video/CD/DVD series (and why that, when she has plenty of material she can use that isn’t quite so…inane??), I fail to see how a four minute YouTube video available for free really affects her market value…any more than her Cambridge University meltdown can??

In other words…in three of the four principal factors in determining Fair Use protection, Shelley would get killed in court. The only chance she would have would be if she got a favorable judge who agreed with her professed antiporn biases and would be more in line with focusing strictly on the fact that she had her YT vids copyrighted, and that anyone using them without her expressed approval is deserving of legal action. There may even be judges of that ilk around…but they’re also the kind who would also agree that Barack Obama isn’t a citizen of the United States, too. Lotsa Luck finding that judge, Shelley.

Indeed, the only reason why Shelley has been able to go even this far might be due to YouTube’s very, very secretive and amphrous copyright policy, which remains an enigma for those who are the victims of excessive DMCA takedowns. Apparently, all one has to do is state to YT that their video posted is copyrighted and to mount a challenge to every other use of that vid as “a violation of copyright”, and YT responds with warp speed to shut the offenders down, without so much a warning or even an appeal, other than the counter notification option. And even then, you have to go through such hoops and bells and whistles to even locate the damn form, and then you have to wait 14 business days for the original challenger to respond with either an official lawsuit or a settlement offer…then, if none is forthcoming, the videos are reinstated. But, the strike remains against you, and on your third strike, your channel gets pulled…though there is a period after which the strike(s) is/are removed if no other violations are found.

The grand irony in all of this is that Google, who owns YouTube, fancies themselves as one of the most protective and open when it comes to full expression; they have even been the subject of some vicious attacks from supporters of tougher and more astringent copyright legislation, who claim that Google is essentially a fair haven for content thieves and one of the main reasons why stronger measures are needed.

Why Google would go through all that, yet allow their main video engine to be reduced to a haven for deliberate and excessive DMCA takedown attempts which are nothing more than thinly veiled censorship and throttling of criticism and accountability, is a question I’d really wish to level at their brass.

But…I’ll hold off for now and just wait for my videos to clear the gauntlet.

In the meantime, Ministress, just be lucky that I don’t have lots of bank to throw lawsuits back down your throat, or that I have far better and more productive things to do with my life. Besides that, you might want to focus your efforts a bit towards saving yourself, because it’s going to be kinda hard to do DMCA takedowns from a jail cell. Even, one cured and blessed by your God.

Will The Next Shelley Lubben Ministry Be Centered In Her Own Jail Cell?? The Ministress Gets Served A TRO, With More To Follow

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Anthony

It seems that the House of (Shelley) Lubben is about to get a very rude awakening.

No, this is NOT about the apparent new $480K home in Bakersfield, California, that Shelley and hubby Garrett recently moved into.

Rather, this is about the entire ministry of antiporn lies and distortions getting their well deserved blowback from those she and her acolytes have maligned and harassed for so long.

And apparently, one of them decided to get serious about it.

As in…Temporary Restraining Order serious.

AdultWikiMedia.com (aka TheRealPornWikileaks) released today a copy of the official TRO document that was delivered to The Ministress’ front door this morning by Tulare County officials. While the details of why the TRO was issued and the identities of the parties pushing the TRO remained unknown at this time, it’s not a surprise that many entities have accused Lubben of stalking and intimidating tactics against her critics.

Here’s TRPWL’s copy of the TRO doc sent to Lubben’s crib:

We do know from the information included within the TRO doc that Lubben was hit originally with a TRO on December 5th by a Tulare County judge (identity unknown, of course), but managed to escape the notice somehow. The document says that Shelley is required to attend a hearing on December 21st, where she will have to defend herself against the TRO becoming permanent.

One can guess whom the party filing for the TRO and claiming harassment by Lubben is. (Maddy Avanti?? Chris Moore (Shelley’s brother)?? Michael Whiteacre?? A combination of all three??)

The problem for Shelley, though, is that her problems may only be beginning. This may open the floodgates for even more legal and civil actions against her and her Pink Cross Foundation, challenging both her handling of tax-exempt funds and her stewardship of her ministry. For all the claims of having saved many, only two ex-performers (Jan Meza and Jenni Case) actually are working members of her ministry, at least after Maddy (nee’ Michelle Avanti) walked out and turned whistleblower on Shelley and the PCF.

Between that and her failed attempt to use DMCA takedown challenges to throttle her critics on YouTube (of which yours truly is intimately involved), it appears that the walls are starting to cave in on Shelley. We’ll see if this either enlightens her or sends her over that final cliff.

Memo To The Ministress: Back Away From The DMCA Launcher, Because It’s Not Gonna Shut Me (Or Anyone Else) Up

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Anthony

Well…the war of smack between Shelley Lubben and her critics has now gotten real. I mean…really real. With open thoughts of attorneys moving in.

The focal point was when Michael Whiteacre and Jordan Owen, two of the more pronounced critics of The Ministeress, decided to coordinate on a video that was originally released over at Shelley’s YouTube channel. That would be the one where Shelley decides to pass an altar call to her God and Father to pray for her antiporn ministry to continue to save lives and rescue damsels in distress from the big, bad Satanic porn industry…with the assistance of an eight-foot pole. (Apparently, heaven doesn’t quite have Wi-Fi yet, so more spartan means of communication was needed.) Mike discovered the video and passed a mirrored copy to Jordan, who then re-edited and released it, adding his own irreverent annotations and subtitles.

The resulting video became so popular that it was mirrored by plenty of folks…yours truly included.

Well, apparently, Lubben didn’t particularly like the heat that that video produced, and so she petitioned YouTube to force out the mirrors of her video…using her copyright powers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and her holding company, Shelley Lubben Communications, Inc., to push YouTube to take down the vids. Under YT policy, any business entity can claim copyright over an image or video posted at their site, and can block any images posted there without their approval…and if copyright is claimed, the offenders could not only face temporary suspension of their accounts up to even deletion and banishment, but also serious legal action for repeated violations. Indeed, Mike Whiteacre’s YT channel was pulled in its entirity for “numerous copyright violations” due to claims of copyrighted material “stolen” from Lubben’s channel.

For his part, Whiteacre has responded with his own counter claim that the alterations of the original video should not have been pulled by YouTube, because such commentary of a public material is protected and exempt from copyright by the “Fair Use” doctrine, which protects the use of media satire and commentary of public figures.

Many mirrors of the annotated Lubben “8-foot staff” altered video were also hit with DMCA takedown notices and deleted as well A few supporters of Jordan and Mike have seen fit to repost the vids as a means of protest against such blatant censorship. I also happen to have a saved cache copy of the video stored here, and I will offer a link to it for anyone who wants to see it.

But Jordan wasn’t merely intent with letting it lie, either; he posted this YT video where he announced the attempted DMCA takedown, and brought forth a few questions on whether this newly discovered “Shelley Lubben Communications, Inc.” was really another scam to like her pockets with money from her supposedly tax exempt Pink Cross Foundation. He made major reference to the analysis of the PCF’s 2008 and 2009 tax returns that Doug and Lydia Lee (the latter also being the former Julie Meadows) had posted last year at Lydia’s YT channel (“JulieMeadowsInt”) and at the Julie Meadows blog. And, he used a synopsis of “Shelley Lubben Communications, Inc” that was posted to a site called Manta.com which stated that the company had total average assets of $99K a year, distributed between two people (probably Shelley and her hubby Garrett, who is listed in the PCF tax returns as “Secretary/Treasurer” and paid a salary, like Lubben as “President”.)

For his troubles, Jordan got an attempted drive-by fisking by one of Shelley’s YouTube fangirls, the aptly named “Booboo”, who both challenged his use of a supposedly tainted business-rating website and attempted to bring in some personal issues of Jordan’s past into into her assault (as in, the fact that Jordan was at one time a member of a “Satanist” cult). Since Jordan has aptly dispactched that nonsense, I’ll simply leave that story as it is.

It turned out, though, that either Shelley had no backup or that the charges were actually proven to be false, because two weeks ago, Whiteacre was given full approval to repost his videos and was returned his channel back; and a week later, Jordan was awarded his right to post his video again as well.

That would, I would think, clear my name and allow my video mirrors to proceed…right??

Apparently not, I guess, because yesterday, I received a notice from YouTube that my mirror of the first installment of “The Devil And Shelley Lubben” — the one created by Michael Whiteacre and Julie Meadows — was hit with a DMCA copyright notice and was pulled…and that since it was the second time that a video I posted was hit such, I was one strike away from having my YT channel pulled permanently.

Never mind the fact that the original video installment is still active and now posted over at Whiteacre’s YT channel, and also at his website TheDevilAndShelleyLubben.com, and that there are many, many other mirrors of the series out there. As far as I know, no other mirror of that video has been challenged under DMCA copyright rules.

That tells me that this is more of a personal assault on ME for speaking out against Shelley and her ministry, probably because the acolytes think that since I don’t have Mike Whiteacre’s legal chops or income, I can be bullied into silence.

I. Don’t. Think. So.

The remainder of this post should be considered to be a direct memo to Shelley in response.

Uhhh, Ministeress??

People wealthier than you have made numerous attempts to shut me up and shut me down…and I am still standing and posting. I’ve faced down far more potent threats than the peashooters you are attempting to fire at me…so what makes you even think that I’m gonna let up on you now??

You know damn well that those videos are protected under both Fair Use principles (criticism or satire of a public figure for public actions is NOT liable to copyright violations), and basic First Amendment protections of free speech. Also, since I do not attempt to make one red cent out of my mirroring public critiques of you and your ministry, you simply don’t have a legal leg to stand on.

Only those who are afraid of the truth and who can’t defend their actions resort to such blatant censorship and intimidation and blackmail to silence their critics. Is that your idea of delivering your “message of Christ”?? Or…is it just your way of covering your behind to protect your wallet??

I’ve already filed the counternotification process to get my video cleared, based on the fact that the original videos were cleared for broadcast. If neccessary, I will be going to the ACLU or the EFF or whatever agencies are there.

Oh…and Ministeress?? You do know that it is a federal felony to make false multiple DMCA copyright accusations, right?? Since you’ve already been found to have made several in the past, you do know that you are risking even more scrutiny than ever…if not a serious court date??

You may want to think about that one, Shelley…or you might want to make plans to start up that prison ministry.

Or..you can just give it up, let free speech and free expression hold its course, and be woman enough to stand up to the criticism by actually responding to it in a mature and (dare I say) truly Christian way.

Your choice, Ministeress.

Red Garter Club Blog (Version 3.2)

A slightly irreverent journal view of the world from the eyes of a Black, middle-aged, sex-positive Leftist. (Part of the Red Garter Club Network)

Monthly Archives: December 2011

Some More Education On Sex Positive Feminism And Sex Worker Activism From Carol Queen (Read And Learn, ZJ And Heather!!)

Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Thought,

and Whore Stigma

Sex Radicalism and Feminism: Not Always in Bed Together

Sex Radical, Sex-Positive

Why Whores Need Sex-Positive Thought

Wives Need – and Can Learn From – Whores, Too

How Some Liberals Still Don’t Or Won’t Get It When It Comes To Sex Positivity And Sex Work (Or, Educating “Queen Atheist” Zinnia Jones And Her BGF “Heather”)

How Vicky Vette Turned The Payroll Tax Cut War Into A Brilliant Brand Marketing Coup…Through The $40 Blowjob

Monica Foster Supplemental Memo: Why Cyberbullying Julie Meadows/Lydia Lee For Her Kindness Will Only Get Her Lubbenized

Sometimes It Really IS That Easy….The Ministress’ Latest Attempt At Crapaganda Blows Up In Her Face

And On The Other Side Of Bayou Crazaa: My (Updated) Open Letter To Monica Foster (From Sybill To Bachmann In 2.5 Seconds)

A Brief Lesson On Fair Use Policy And Why The Ministeress’ DMCA Assaults Are All Hawk And No Spit

Will The Next Shelley Lubben Ministry Be Centered In Her Own Jail Cell?? The Ministress Gets Served A TRO, With More To Follow

Memo To The Ministress: Back Away From The DMCA Launcher, Because It’s Not Gonna Shut Me (Or Anyone Else) Up

December 2011
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