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Week Of The Anti-Porn Crazaa, Part 3: Taslima Nasreen Puts The “Taz” In Anti-Sex Work/Anti-Porn Hysteria

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If you remember my last post, I covered the insanity of Shelley Lubben and Gail Dines on the issue of sex work and porn. But they’ve been mastering the art of propaganda for ages.

The third woman in our trifecta of crazaa, though, might not be known nearly as much as Gail or Shelley…but she might be the craziest of them all.

Taslima Nasreen may not be a household name to people in the West…but go over to places like India or Pakistan, and her name is definitely on almost every person’s lips. In some lips, usually accompanied by curses. You see, Nasreen is a renowned writer who has won numerous awards for her books by prestigous orgs such as PEN American Center…but has also drawn massive social protests and even death threats and fatwas for her unabashed assaults on fundamentalist Muslims and their treatment of women. For the past 18 years, Nasreen has actually lived in exile from her native country due to the very real possibility of death, and she is still considered to be persona non gratia in certain sections of her native country due to her heresy. You might consider her to be the feminist equivalent of Salman Rushdie…except that not even Rushdie encountered this much fervent reaction.

But while Taslima should be rightfully praised for her braveness in confronting the horror of extreme misogyny and mistreatment of women in her native country, it seems that she has, in the process, embraced an only slightly different form of social and political repression.  As in, the extreme fundamentalist wing of “radical feminism” that reduces all male-female relationships to violence and rape, and which seeks to abolish any form of sexual interaction not redeemable to their narrow standards of “egalitarianism” and “intimacy”.

When Taslima Nasreen accepted an invitation to join the weblog network of atheist skeptics known as Freethought Blogs, known for their promotion of not only free and open discussion, but staunch critique of established religion, it seemed initially that she would be a perfect fit for that group, considering her strong stances and commitments. Problem is, they forgot about the other shoe of “radical feminism”…the one that Taslima promptly used to dropkick her extreme theories into action.

The first blow was an essay Nasreen wrote titled “Sex Slavery Must Be Abolished”, which the title suggested was an attack on the illegal and abusive aspects of the underground sex trafficking industry that has devastated many countries. The problem was, though, her essay quickly degenerated and disintegrated into what ultimately became a propaganda piece for the most extreme of what is called the “abolitionist” position on sex work most promoted by activists like Melissa Farley, Donna Hughes, and Andrea Dworkin, and propogated by organizations such as Prostitution Research, the Center Against Trafficking In Women, and Women Against Pornography. (I’ll explain the latter anon.)

Nasreen makes her position pretty much explicitly through a series of button notes, of which I will respond individually.

Lie1. Prostitution is an oldest profession.
Truth1. Prostitution is the oldest form of patriarchal oppression, not oldest profession.

Really?? You mean, older than religion itself??  And what about cultures of goddess worship that predated Christianity and where prostitutes were seen as figures of high regard worthy of respect and admiration?? The same ones that were literally destroyed by….fundamentalist Christians and Muslims??

Lie2. Prostitution is sexual freedom. /Prostitution is sex.
Truth2. Prostitution is sexual exploitation./ Prostitution is not sex, it is sexual violence.

Right. A consensual exchange of money for sex is considered “violence”, not sex. Even when no actual violence takes place. Even when both sides consent. And, even when there is mutual sexual pleasure and mutual respect between both parties.  Plus, no advocate for decriminalizing sex work has ever said the obvious stawman argument that “Prostitution is sex” or “Prostitution is sexual freedom”. That Nasreen seems willing to go there says more about her attitudes about sex than about prostitution itself.

Lie3. Legalizing prostitution gets rid of sex traffickers and pimps.
Truth3. Legalizing prostitution benefits sex traffickers, pimps,clients,sex industries.

Lie4. Men need sex therefore prostitution must exist. Prostitution is a natural
form of human sexuality.
Truth4. The sex of prostitution is not “sex” for women in it. Most men who use women
in prostitution have other sexual partners.

Point #3 is highly debatable, since no one has ever said that decriminalization would get rid totally of “sex traffickers and pimps”, but it is clear and obvious that existing criminalization (both of the conventional conservative and the “Swedish Model” forms) have sure as all hell not removed “sex traffickers” or “pimps” or even placed a dent in illegal and dangerous sex trafficking. But of course, since Taslima has already gone head first into the empty pool of “all prostitution sex is rape”, it would follow that she would reduce all efforts to decriminalize it to supporting “sex industries”, “pimps”, and other assorted male “rapists”.

And…this notion that because most men who seek sex workers for sex happen to have other partners, this translates into “sex with prostitutes isn’t really ‘sex’ but rape”?? Gee, Taslima…are you saying that men should settle for sex only with their significant others, and that any attempt to go beyond their monogamous mates for sexual relief amounts to “using women”?? Sure…because women don’t have sexual urges, right? And this is different from the fundamentalists you decry….HOW??? Simply because you are a “radical feminist” secularist??

Lie5. Women choose to enter prostitution.
Truth5. Prostitution is not an acceptable job for women. They are forced to enter prostitution. Prostitution is an abusive institution and women stay poor in prostitution.  It  is not a vocation choice, it is human rights abuse.

Lie6. Legal prostitution protects women in prostitution.
Truth6. Legal prostitution does not protect women in prostitution from harm. All prostitution , legal or illegal, harm women.

Never mind the fact that countless sex workers have testified that they chose by their own selves to enter the sex trade, and that many women have faced no or little abuse and have even managed to make a decent amount of money and escape their extreme poverty. And, never mind the fact that many women who do say that they were economically coerced into doing sex work nevertheless don’t quite agree with the analysis that they are merely mindless victims of “human rights abuse”, and would much prefer to work to make their profession safer, saner, and more condusive to human rights. In the Utherverse of Taslima Nasreen, those women simply don’t exist…or, they are simply dismissed as either stupid “cumdumpsters” or paid agents of the evil Male Pimp Rapist.

For brevity’s sake, I’ll skip over to one last “bullet point” that says wonders about Nasreen’s insanity.

Lie8. Prostitution is deterrent to sex crimes.
Truth8. Prostitution is associated with increased rate of sex crimes.

Feel free to notice how Nasreen’s arguments are a nice parallel with arguments made against homosexuality or medicinal marijuana or other “victimless crimes”…arguments often put on by the very same fundamentalists whom issue fatwas and death threats against any “infidel” who dares to challenge them??  I guess you can’t completely take the fundamentalism out of some people, right?

Nasreen got plenty of heat from other Freethought readers on her initial foray, but she didn’t budge one inch….in fact, she issued a followup blog (“Do Women Really ‘Choose’ To Be Prostitutes”) where she cited mostly propaganda from Melissa Farley’s Prostitution Research blog to justify her absolutist positions on sex work and prostitution as mass rape.

If there was ever an exchange that encapsulates the dead-headness and total denial of the “abolitionists”, it is this comment reaction Nasreen to a comment by Maggie Mayhem, an active sexworker. 

As a sex worker activist and active sex worker, what I want to say the most is *please listen to our voices.* We want rights, not rescue. Those speaking for us have trampled our voices for far too long.

In the United States and around the globe, sex workers are forming collectives and unions to fight for our rights. Mainstream feminism and patronizing anti-trafficking orgs have continually propagated lies about sex work statistics and have actively shut down our organizing efforts. The sex worker led efforts to decriminalize prostitution in San Francisco, CA were largely opposed by feminist organization and one of the biggest anti-decriminalization donations came from Gloria Steinhem herself.

Please listen to us. We don’t need to be saved, we need to be supported.

Taslima Nasreen’s response:

House slaves did not want the abolition of slavery because they were treated considerably better than field slaves. Would you say slavery should not have been abolished only because some privileged slaves wanted to remain as slaves?

Never mind that “house slaves” in the antebellum US South opposed slavery with the same fervor as the field slaves because in the South, ALL Blacks were mistreated in the same way. To Taslima Nasreen, if you oppose her chosen methods of abolishing sex work (“Swedish Model” legislation shaming the women while jailing and essentially castrating the men merely for having erections), than you are either a “house slave” or a pimp wannabe.

Natually. Nasreen’s invasion of FTB with her sexual fascism has not gone unopposed. Greta Christina, a legitimate sex-positive feminist, and the one who first introduced welcomed Nasreen to the FTB network, has come out with a strong blog essay rebuking all of TN’s hackery and delusionary hyperbole, and offering a much more diverse picture of sex work. Natalie Reed and Richard Carrier have also posted trenchant criticisms of Nasreen in their own network blogs as well. In addition, principled sex worker activists outside of FTB have also felt free to correct the lies of Taslima and question her credibility as a skeptic in light of her endorsement of anti-sexwork/radical feminist theology. See the works of AGodlessStrumpet — aka Divinity33372 — and XXXild, as well as the videos of Feminist Whore, for some genuine education.

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Of course, it would follow that Taslima’s views on that other target of radfem ire, pornography, would parallel her views on prostitution…and she has posted a blog entry recently (“Let’s Eroticize Equality“) expanding her cracked vision of sexuality onto the “porn industry”.

Naturally, she starts out citing the historic motto of antiporn “feminist” Robin Morgan (repeated by antifeminist James Dobson), “Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.”

Then she attempts to mime Gloria Steinem’s classic distortion between “erotica” and “pornography” as a hammer to beat down the latter. She even goes as far as to redefine porn using the definition of radical antiporn activist Diana Russell:

Pornography: Material that combines sex and/or the exposure of genitals with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behavior.

Nice open-ended definition, ehhh?  So much better than the traditional definition of “pornography” as “depictions or descriptions of sexual content or other accounts intended strictly for sexual arousal”.

By, contrast, here’s Nasreen’s and Russell’s definition of “erotica”:

Erotica: Sexually suggestive or arousing material that is free of sexism, racism, and homophobia, and respectful of all human beings and animals portrayed.

Of course, there are no examples of explicit hardcore porn that can fit the positive definition of “erotica”, now is there?? Not if you simply refuse to even attempt to locate them.

But the real whackiness of Nasreen’s ideology is exposed near the end when, after providing linkage to sites promoting her treasured theories of “porn addiction” and how porn absolutely destroys regular marital relationships by substituting idealized images for real people, she then attempts to drive her readers to three sites she says are typical of the predominant type of porn that men watch and masturbate to. (Followed, in an typical ideological flourish, by a link to a song to apparently wash the filth off, I guess.)

She embeds the links so that viewers aren’t initially aware of their true content, but from scrolling over each of the links, they lead to three sites threatening labeled, respectively, BrutalVideos[dot]net,  GangRapeVideos[dot]net, and SexRapeVideo[dot]com. (Unlike Taslima, I actually do respect my viewers enough not to ambush them, so I will not embed the links here. They are active in Taslima’s original post.) The problem is, though, that it takes sheer balls to reduce the viewing habits of millions of porn viewers to three sites that would, even collectively, not even come close in viewership to ONE Nina Hartley video.

And even worse…those three sites aren’t even commercial sites, but free video trading/photo trading “tube sites” where people simply upload their privately owned videos for others to view. Not to mention, also, that the videos of such sites are more than likely either outtakes of videos of consensual sex gone somewhat awry, or consenting adults engaging in “acting out” of rape fantasies.  Yes, Taslima, some women do in fact enjoy fantasies of being overpowered against their will. No, Taslima, that is not the same as sexual assault or sexual battery. And no, Taslima, watching such videos do NOT induce most men to fits of lust or desires to rape every woman nearby..in fact, most regular porn viewers would probably be put off by such portrayals, since far less hostile content is so readily available.

This is the agitprop equivalent of the Nazi Party using depictions of “hooked nose Jews” as crooked businessmen, or racist Ku Klux Klansmen using images of Trayvon Martin with a Colt-45, a backwards cap, and half-mast pants giving “gang signs” to justify his death and the targetting of all Black men. And, it’s standard operating procedure for the fundamentalist antiporn radfems (see Gail Dines minting GagMyCock[dot]om and GagFactor[dot]com for similar effect).

The point, though, is that this slandering of men who use porn (or simply whose sexual proclivities don’t fit neatly into radfem dogma) is simply the byproduct of the sexual essentialism that is the heart of the critique of porn and sex work, as well as the mirror imagery of their core beliefs with those of the Religious Right (Dines and Steinem’s distortion and fabrication of “Marxism” notwithstanding).

In the end, though, just as Gail Dines has ceded that nothing she says or writes will change over the views of her critics, I’m sure that Taslima Nasreen will say that nothing she writes will change others’ view of the world. Their point is not to debate, anyway; their mission is to promote their form of sexual conservatism (though personally, I’d say that their vision is closer to sexual FASCISM) as a means of controlling men in the same way that traditional religion has used sexual morality and sex law to control women. You would think that a journal called “Freethought Blogs” would be able to see through such blatancy and call out such bullshit for what it is. Thankfully, there are people there who understand that; maybe, they can mount enough of a challenge to counter the invasion of sexual reaction by the likes of Taslima Nasreen.

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The Gail Dines Principle: When Life Gives You Lemons, Blame It All On Porn (Or, How To Transform The Dominique Strauss Kahn Rape Scandal Into Yet Another "Porn Culture" Rant)

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In the world of political punditry, there is nothing more annoying than the person who is so fixated on one subject, that he or she manages to turn every question on any other topic back to that particular obsession.

Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about?? Well try this hypothetical example:

Wingnutter:  “Obama’s a socialist who was born in Kenya!!! He must be IMPEACHED!!!!”

Viewer: “Oh, that’s all fine and good…but what’s your position on raising the debt ceiling??”

Wingnutter: “Gee, Paul, I’m all for it, as long as we get rid of all this unnecessary big government spending and all these job-killin’ taxes…but seriously, we first gotta get rid of that socialist President who wasn’t even born here!!  Why don’t you ask him to reveal his birth certificate and prove he’s a citizen??”

Viewer: “Ahhhh….hasn’t President Obama already done that, like, twice?? And what does that have to do with the deficit ceiling?”

Wingnutter: “What are ‘ya, some kind of liberal?? That wasn’t a REAL birth certificate, and we can prove it!! Next question, please?”

New viewer: “OK, so what do you think about the FAMiLY LEADER pledge on marriage and other vows of fidelity to conservative social policies…and would you be willing to sign on to it?”

Wingnutter: “But, of course, absolutely, I’d sign in a heartbeat!!!.I believe in strong conservative family values..which is why we MUST get the truth about that socialist Obama and his Kenyan citizenship!!”

Yeah, now you get the picture.

Some people have so ridden their one-trick ponies so far to the ground that they don’t even know how to address other issues without ultimately boomeranging back to their obsession.

And then, there is the special breed of wingnutter, who is so obsessed with his pet cause that he can’t help but take even the most unrelated events and somehow connect them to his pet myopia.

Or, in the continuing case of antiporn “feminist” hit woman Professor Gail Dines, her pet cause.

As you all know, Gail has a hard-on for pornography. Obviously, it’s not the traditional kind of hard-on, it’s more like porn is her special obsession, her chew toy, the center of her universe, and the alpha and omega of her activism as an antiporn activist. To Professor Dines, porn is simply the root of male evil, the reason that men get erections and exist fo abuse, dominate, degrade, and ultimately, rape women; and there is no social ill on earth that she can’t attempt to connect to the prevailence of it. No matter how tangentally unrelated a particular issue may be, you may rest assured that Gail will find some way to connect that issue to the evil prevailence of the “porn culture”.

And today, at the CounterPunch website, Professor Dines manages to meet if not exceed her high standards of deflection and reductive reasoning in blaming porn and “porn culture” for current events.

In this case, the issue is the ongoing saga of former International Monetary Fund chairman Dominique Strauss Kahn, potential candidate for president of France, who has been embroiled in a particularly heated sex scandal. If you will remember, around a month or two ago an African woman who was at one time DSK’s maid dropped some very disturbing charges on him, basically claiming that he had physically and sexually abused her while working for him. The case claimed global notoriety (that’s what happens when billionaires and global leaders are involved in scandals), but ultimately resulted in nothing, because the French prosecutors ended up having to drop the case, claiming both a lack of physical evidence and major inconsistencies in the woman’s charges. It didn’t help matters either that major newspapers in France and around the world put out stories explicitly attacking the character of the woman accuser, all but calling her out as a prostitute and a golddigger merely setting a “honey trap” in order to blackmail DSK in order to both hurt his election chances against incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy and to get paid.

Naturally, in such a media environment, the woman accuser has gotten some support (both moral and financial) from people who feel that once again, a woman who makes an accusation of sexual assault upon a wealthy man is getting the shaft (no pun intended) and having her accusations not only dismissed offhand, but also treated with the usual amount of derision and slut-shaming and denial that all women making such charges are demonized with.

And, it should be noted that Strauss Kahn faces another round of rape accusations from another woman, which are still pending.

Now, this may play to the themes of how women are taken seriously or not when it comes to charges of rape, or how wealth and privilege have disjointed the criminal justice system to the point that those with money and power and the ability to set the media to their side can manipulate the system to their benefit, at the expense of the less privileged.

And if Gail Dines had attempted to analyze that aspect of the case, then there would be no issue.

Problem is, for Gail, everything must ultimately point back to porn…and her essay attempts, in her own cracked style of snark and sarcasm, to finger the “porn culture” for enabling DSK — and by extension, all porn using men, to get away with rape.

Buckle up, Clones…it may get a bit bumpy.

DSK and the Meaning of Consent

I have a great idea for a movie. Here’s the pitch: A poor, slutty immigrant takes a job as a chambermaid so she can have great sex with the hotel guests. One day she hits the jackpot. She walks into a room only to be met by an irresistible stud old enough to be her father. Known in his home country as “The Seducer” he offers her a full view of his impressive manhood.

Overcome with lust, she falls to her knees and the two have great consensual sex. But being a woman and all, she is a lying, scheming whore and accuses the seducer of rape.  The poor seducer becomes one more victim of “sex offender hysteria,” as one caller to National Public Radio named it, and now he must defend his good name.

Where to pitch this? I could go to the usual adolescent boy filmmakers such as Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler, since they specialize in making movies about manipulative predators who are really good guys underneath. But wait. I have a better place. The porn website Maid Bangers seems tailor-made for this story. The teaser on the website reads: “Tom and Steve are on a Mission … They conquer hotel after hotel. When they are in town, not one maid is safe! “ (Emphasis Theirs).

On the site, free teasers lure in the viewer. Take “Luna” for example. According to the text, “Luna was spotted by Steve in the hallway and he immediately went after her. He came up with some lame excuse to get her back to the room, and it worked great. Once in the room, she couldn’t resist the boy’s charm.” Sound familiar? “Maya” has a similar experience. “Tom and Steve invited her in and before she could really understand what happened, she had a cock up her ass & one in her mouth.” Just in case this sounds like a rape to you, don’t worry — the pictures surrounding the text show Maya having hot, orgasmic sex.

You get the point, do you?? Because we all know that all men are so alike in their mission to impale and rape women through porn sites like Maid Bangers.  Hell, DSK, when not spending his time screwing whole countries with “Shock Therapy” economic policies, probably was kicking up a six pack of Perrier and Jouet watching MILF Hunter videos seeking the best approach on how to conquer his next female victims.  Of course, how a French billionaire and public politician would happen to get his hands on such porn to begin with, or why DSK just didn’t go the Arnold Schwarenegger/Nicolas Sarkozy route and simply cheat with a hawt female celebrity or bed his own maid willingly, didn’t enter Gail’s hive mind when she was writing this claptrap.

And, as always with Gail, there is the disbelief that any woman would have enough sexual desires of their own to seduce men and women on her own merits merely because she can or because she actually likes sex. That’s just The Big Lie imposed by “The Pornographers”, you know….we all know that “our sexuality” is much better than that….right??

And no, Gail or Clones thereof, that is not an excuse for rape…that simply says that women are capable on their own of inducing sex without the need for men’s approval or any injections of testosterone or reading up of bad XXX vignette videos.

Addedum: I actually decided on a lark to browse through the Maid Bangers site (WARNING: link definitely NSFW for explicit sexual content)….and lo and behold, it is basically nothing more than a Bang Bus clone where somewhat professional porn performers act out their sex scenes under the plot and setting of playing “hotel maids”. All of the performers are under contract and model releases, right down to the 2257 forms, and the sex they do is very much consensual, open, freely sought, and well compensated. Hardly the virtual rape and “sexual slavery” that Gail pretends it to be…and nowhere close to any relation to the Strauss Kahn maid’s real life plight.

Also…Dines is a bit lacking in her research this time, because it seems like she got her information about the “Luna” scene straight from the guest preview page, rather than actually viewing the video (which requires a paid $29.95 per month membership), though if Gail really was up to it, she could have simply gotten the two-day $1 trial and gotten access to the actual video, or simply viewed the free trailer that was available.

Finally….how nice of Gail to focus attention on “Luna” as an example of an “oppressed” woman of color allegedly abused and gang raped by White men. It’s especially nice when the other women featured in the Maid Bangers preview, “Crystal”, “Missy”, and “Deseiree”, are all White women.  (There is one other Latina, “Maya”, who is featured, but somehow Dines managed to miss her.) Errrrrrrr…oopsie???

But let’s get to the heart of the matter, shall we?? Quoteh Dines with the money graph:

The Strauss-Kahn story belongs in the world of porn. It is here that all sex is consensual, no matter how manipulative and violent, and all women are whores who need a man to release their inner slut. In porn, women don’t do unskilled, low-paid work to feed themselves and their children. No, they work because this is where you go to get laid. Sites such as Fuck the Nanny, Nurse Hardcore, Naughty Bookworm, and Secretary Porn all tell the Strauss-Kahn story. Women don’t need a living wage, health care, safe housing, child care, or a career. They just need monster loads of “jizz” to make them happy.

Oh, so let’s see here. Fantasy skits like the vignette series mentioned above are, according to Professor Dines, not merely just fantasies to fuel the lusts of horny guys (and girls) seeking a quick means of getting themselves off and getting through the grind and boredom of the day. Nor, are they enterprises where the performers simply use such costume fantasies (now known and celebrated as “costume play” or “cosplay”) to act out their horniness and get paid a decent sum for that scene. Nope…according to Gail, they are the embodiment of corruption of real life nurses, secretaries, maids, teachers, and students who suffer the full and unadulterated effects of sexual harassment, coercion, degradation, and even rape, because impressionable men who view these scenes inevitably — actual experience with real live women who work these professions be damned — believe and act on the belief that ALL women in the universe should be their own personal sex toys and concubines, to be used and abused for life.

Course, that thesis fails to explain how such series can coexist with other vignette series such as My Friend’s Hot Mom  and Naughty Office (Naughty America) and Big Tits Boss (Bang Brothers), not to mention all those MILF and Cougar flicks, where the WOMAN is explicitly placed as the aggressor seeking the men to seduce, or where the WOMAN is the one with all the power who goes after the unsuspecting man (or woman) for a passionate sex session or two. But, I’m sure that Gail will have a talking point ready for that, as she usually does.

Oh, and Professor?? It is not necessarily inconsistent for someone to call for a livable wage, better workplace conditions, equitable pay for comparable work, safe and adequate housing, and universal health care, and still enjoy consensual cosplay featuring enthusiastically busty and horny women roleplaying. It really isn’t. Heck, you can even do all that and believe that coerced sex and rape is bad, bad, bad. Honest and for true.

Only in a porn culture could we take seriously the idea that what transpired between Strauss-Kahn and the unnamed woman was consensual. Only here could we actually spin a story of a single mother risking her livelihood to have Strauss-Kahn’s penis rammed down her throat.  And only here could we focus on the credibility of the woman while making light of the history of a man who was well known for his predatory behavior.

Riiiiight, Gail…because only in a “porn culture” could a prosecutorial panel investigating the case find not enough or conflicting evidence such that there wasn’t enough to warrant indictment. In Dines’ perfect world not affected by “porn culture” or male privilege, a man accused of what Strauss Kahn was accused of would simply be declared guilty by acclamation, and sent to the nearest Swedish Model camp for “reeducation” on how women should be treated…right after the castration and lengthy jail sentence.

Now, the brutality of the media attacks on the woman accuser certainly is problematic, as much so as the media attacks on the woman who filed those rape charges at Wikileaks mastermind Jullian Assange (Funny, but Dines had very little to say about that firestorm when that came down….not even a reference to the Pornwikileaks drama.) But, how is that any different from the most recent and still ongoing pilleraging now being bestowed on Carlee Anthony, the young woman who recently was acquitted of murdering her young child in a very nasty public trial? Oh, wait…Carlee Anthony is female, and upper middle class, and White…not quite exploitable material for antiporn “feminist” analysis. Plus, even porn’s rejected her (in fact, most porn folk I know are as convinced of her guilt as Dines is of DSK’s). When Gail starts digging into Nancy Grace as much as she digs into DSK, then maybe we may have something interesting.

And besides…there’s always the wrongful death suits and the media offers for book deals, which I figure will probably set the accuser up for life. Unless, working-class Black women aren’t seen as marketable as middle-class White girls.

And here’s where Professor Dines goes off the cliff, because she attempts to mine another sex scandal of foreyear.

And don’t let’s forget that this is a black woman. We know that black women have the tendency to be “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”  If they could smear squeaky clean Anita Hill, a conservative Christian who spent her early career demonstrating her allegiance to the white Republican establishment, then every woman is fair game.  David Brock, a former research fellow with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, recalls in his book, Blinded by the Right, how he set about destroying Anita Hill by taking a “a scattershot approach, dumping virtually every derogatory—and often contradictory—allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix. Hill was an ambitious incompetent passed over by Thomas for a promotion. She was “kooky.” She was a man-hater. She had a “perverse desire for male attention.” She had a “love-hate” complex with Thomas. She made “bizarre” sexual comments to students and coworkers. She sprinkled pubic hairs into her law students’ term paper.” He now says that what he did was disgusting, but it worked, and Anita Hill became one more victim of a misogynist culture that protects its own at any cost.

Nice try, Gail, but some facts get in the way of your assault.

First off…all that and more were lobbed at Anita Hill when she made her historic sexual harassment charges at Clarence Thomas during his SCOTUS confirmation hearings. Mostly, though, they were made by fundamentalist Right wingnuts in an attempt to smear her charges and grease the wheels for Thomas’ ultimate confirmation vote. It was politics, not male sexual aggression, and definitly NOT porn, that motivated the smear attacks on Professor Hill.

Secondly, blindsiding David Brock as the premier hit man for the smears on Anita Hill without mentioning the fact that he didn’t just repudiate those tactics as “disgusting”, but openly and unabashedly backed up his “come to Jesus” vow by founding Media Matters For America to right that grievous wrong and openly oppose right-wing propaganda spinning, is a bit disingenious on Gail’s part. Kinda like the Right quoting former West Virginia US Senator Robert Byrd’s historic KKK membership to smear all Democrats as innate racists, forgetting that Byrd long since repudiated such bigotry and has backed it up with his votes….all the while covering up and whitewashing the Republican Right’s far more obvious and current racial bigotry.

And speaking of hypocrisy…here is the most delicious irony of all this smack from Dines’ piehole. Clarence Thomas, for all his Long Dong Silver fetishes and “pubic hair in Coke cans” lore, has been more or less the most consistent and fervent SCOTUS justice when it comes to advocating outlawing pornography from the face of the earth. In other words, he is far more on Gail Dines’ side of the debate, though not necessarily on the feminist wing. ‘Ya’d think that Gail probably knows that from all those meetings she has had with Pat Trueman’s Pornography Harms group or the money she probably gets from Morality in Media. But, I guess that when you are writing for a putatively lefty rag like CounterPunch, such facts get lost in the ether. (And, neither Nick Sarkozy nor even DSK himself are exactly political sex-positives on the issue, either.)

Leave it to Gail, of course, to close her rantage by getting back to the “porn determines real life” meme.

Next on the chopping block is French Journalist Tristane Banon, the goddaughter of Strauss-Kahn’s second wife who claims she was attacked by Strauss-Kahn. I was going to pitch this story, too, to the porn industry but it turns out someone beat me to it. The porn movie, Goddaughter 3, tells the tale of “a beautiful temptress who uses her alluring erotic skills to climb ‘the family’s’ ladder of power. She does anything with anyone to reach the top …. The danger, mystery, intrigue and hot, sultry sex are back!”

Ho, ho….very funny. Ha, ha….it is to laugh.

Besides that, isn’t that the tale of almost every recent mainstream TV drama series?? I mean, wasn’t that the theme of every single Jackie Collins novel?? (Remember the Lucky/Boss/Lady Boss series??) Why should porn get all the blame when Lifetime, FX, and the Big Four channels get to swaddle all over in the theme of “woman sleeps her way to the top” without any penalty?

Why??  Because Gail Dines is a crackpot pretending to be a “left feminist” riding a one-trick pony called “porn culture”. The sooner progressives realize her act and start listening to genuine progressive sex workers not so inclined, the better for all of us.

Memo to CounterPunch: Time to call in Nina Hartley again to repudiate this bullshit. I hear she’s available again.

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Why SlutWalk Is More Feminist Than Most Feminists Could Even Dream Of (Or, Reason #5,876 Why Gail Dines Is The Bill O'Reilly Of Radical Feminists)

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Most of you know me as a fierce defender of and even sometimes worshipper of sexually assertive women.

It’s not because I aim to get into every one of their panties, either.

(Though, admittedly, the thought has crossed my mind a time or two. A day. OK, OK, an hour a day. Oh, all right…plenty of hours a day.  Hey, I’m an average man with feelings and working sex organs; can’t deny that.)

On the other hand, though, that desire for women who aren’t afraid to “play the slut”, if not even “BE the slut”, comes with an ethic and a responsibility to respect them as full human beings not reduced to the size of their chests, butts, or clits.

Even when they fully choose to show themselves off or put themselves out for their own sexual pleasure, it is fundamental that anyone worthy of having a human conscience remember that just because they put out does not make them your very personal sex doll or vibrator; and that outside of the fantasies they provide, they are and should be respected and given all the privileges of privacy that all women deserve.

Needles to say, that also includes the right NOT to be sexually assaulted, or to be catcalled against their will or consent, or to be judged by their style of dress.

Actually, that goes for all women in general, whether they choose to dress in a burqa, a business suit, or a tank top and miniskirt. Whatever they decide to put on (or take off) is inmaterial to whether or not they are available to you. If she wants you, she will say so; otherwise, just assume the default position of NO and move on. (And no, “maybe next time” does not mean “Yes” either…it means just what is says.)

It is depressing to actually have to type this in the second week of the fifth month of the year 2011, because the idea that a woman’s choice of clothing determing her supposed sexual availability and giving a green light to any rapist or other sexual assailant to ignore her stated rejections should have been put to permanent rest a long time ago.

What turns this into an even greater travesty is when the voices for “modesty” and forced chastity and browbeating women for their choices happen to call themselves “feminists”.  Nay…”RADICAL feminists”.

And this is why I once again have to drop another Gail Dines Stupid Radfem Right update on you. Not that I likeusing up valuable pixel space ripping on the Wheelock College professor/antiporn “leftist” activist/faux feminist, but when she goes like Bill O’Reilly and says something more astonishingly, breathtakingly, viciously boneheaded than her usual mimes about porn being the Great Male Patriarchial Capitalist Menace, I feel the need to write something before my blood pressure bursts.

This time, the “good” Professor has decided to sink her teeth into the unwilling neck of an emerging movement known as SlutWalk, which was designed to defend the right of women to wear whatever the fuck they wanted and resist rape and sexual assault in their own way.

SlutWalk originally started out in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, by a feisty group of feminists who got seriously pissed off when a Toronto policeman named Michael Sanguinetti decided to shoot his mouth off about rape prevention. Problem was, he blamed the victims of rape for their own accounts, directly implying that they wouldn’t be raped if they had just been a bit more selective with their style of clothing.  The direct quote from Sanguinetti (courtesy of The Guardian UK):

“You know, I think we’re beating around the bush here,” Michael Sanguinetti began, blandly enough, as he addressed the 10 students who turned up for the pep talk. Then he said: “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.”

Ahhh, yeah. Because the many women who didn’t dress “like sluts” and still managed to get sexually assaulted don’t quite matter, right?? And, of course, the men who do in fact attack women only attack women who dress like “sluts”, thusly, they should be given the benefit of the doubt that they are motivated solely by rampant lust rather than anger and violence and rage vented through sex…ahhh, really???

It was in anger of a different kind that some feminists in Toronto decided to directly take on Sanguinetti’s bullshit straight on and defend the notion of female sexual self-determination against such slut shaming and rape ideology. Thusly, Slutwalk Toronto was born online (and on Facebook), and a protest march organized..which has basically exploded and metasized into a worldwide movement against the mythology and etology of slut shaming.

Their manifesto released at the time of the original protests in Toronto speaks for itself; so I will simply reprint it in its entirity.

BECAUSE WE’VE HAD ENOUGH!

On January 24th, 2011, a representative of the Toronto Police gave shocking insight into the Force’s view of sexual assault by stating: “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”.

As the city’s major protective service, the Toronto Police have perpetuated the myth and stereotype of ‘the slut’, and in doing so have failed us. With sexual assault already a significantly under-reported crime, survivors have now been given even less of a reason to go to the Police, for fear that they could be blamed. Being assaulted isn’t about what you wear; it’s not even about sex; but using a pejorative term to rationalize inexcusable behaviour creates an environment in which it’s okay to blame the victim.

Historically, the term ‘slut’ has carried a predominantly negative connotation. Aimed at those who are sexually promiscuous, be it for work or pleasure, it has primarily been women who have suffered under the burden of this label. And whether dished out as a serious indictment of one’s character or merely as a flippant insult, the intent behind the word is always to wound, so we’re taking it back. “Slut” is being re-appropriated.

We are tired of being oppressed by slut-shaming; of being judged by our sexuality and feeling unsafe as a result. Being in charge of our sexual lives should not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of violence, regardless if we participate in sex for pleasure or work. No one should equate enjoying sex with attracting sexual assault.

We are a movement demanding that our voices be heard. We are here to call foul on our Police Force and demand change. We want Toronto Police Services to take serious steps to regain our trust. We want to feel that we will be respected and protected should we ever need them, but more importantly be certain that those charged with our safety have a true understanding of what it is to be a survivor of sexual assault — slut or otherwise.

We are tired of speeches filled with lip service and the apologies that accompany them. What we want is meaningful dialogue and we are doing something about it: WE ARE COMING TOGETHER. Not only as women, but as people from all gender expressions and orientations, all walks of life, levels of employment and education, all races, ages, abilities, and backgrounds, from all points of this city and elsewhere.

We are asking you to join us for SlutWalk, to make a unified statement about sexual assault and victims’ rights and to demand respect for all. Whether a fellow slut or simply an ally, you don’t have to wear your sexual proclivities on your sleeve, we just ask that you come. Come walk or roll or strut or holler or stomp with us.

Join us in our mission to spread the word that those those who experience sexual assault are not the ones at fault, without exception.

“No one should equate enjoying sex with attracting sexual assault.” Isn’t simplicity wonderful??

Remember, Clones, these are NOT porn performers or exhibitionists insisting on their right to walk the public streets naked at rush hour, nor are they sex workers calling for their right to walk the streets in front of the local high school. These are basically your mothers, your daughters, your girlfriends, your friends….in short, average women insisting that they, not some asshole policeman, can determine for themselves when to attract wanted sexual attention and when not to….as well as restating the essential truth that no woman should ever be blamed for being the victim of sexual assault, and that no man should be allowed to use the excuse of a woman’s state of dress as a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card or to ever justify sexual assault or battery.

Sounds like progressive feminism to me. Who would ever oppose that kind of movement against sexual assault, other than holy roller fundamentalists who insist on forcing chadors, burqas, and veils on women as a means of “protecting” them from the evil “male” desires??

Who, you ask?

Cueth the Professor from Wheelock College and antiporn activist named Gail Dines.

Of course, she was too chickenshit to post her observations from her home base in the US, so she (and another professor/rape “expert”, Wendy Murphy), decided to use the friendly pages of the Guardian UK to vent her spleen as to why SlutWalk is BAAAAAAAD for women and feminists, if not fundamentally antifeminist.

At least, anti- the kind of sexually restrictive, reactionary, closed-minded, fear-mongering “feminism” that Dines love to waddle in.

Most of her rant focuses on the stigma that the broader culture still attaches to the word “slut”…which she so lovingly not only approves of, but even uses as a wedge against those women stupid enough to accept their right to sexual self-determination not redeemed by her own radical feminist values. Some snippage follows:

It wasn’t long ago that being called a “slut” meant social death. No “nice” boy would take you home to meet his parents and no “good” girl would ever be your friend. At the same time, refusing to submit to sex meant you were a “prude” or “frigid”. In short, there was no right way to be. Things have improved a bit in that young women are more insistent on their right to sexual autonomy, but sexually active women remain vulnerable to harsh social judgments even as the mass media celebrate and encourage such behaviour. And research shows that the label “slut” still has long-term negative consequences, especially for younger girls.

Now, I’m not denying that such attitudes about women being “prudes” and “frigid” don’t exist among select few people….but notice how Dines turns it against women who do resist the stigma and who do declare themselves to be sexually assertive…as if they are the cause of the “negative consequenses” of rape. Of course, you will remember that the meme of “We’re just ‘prudes’ because we resist evil male sexuality!!” is a classic projection of Dines used to ward off charges that she indeed wants to censor sexualiy of women. To which the proper answer should be: “Well, if the shoe fits….”

The fact that more than 2,000 turned out to march around Boston Common suggests that women are, indeed, hungry for sexual autonomy. But something else was at work here: many of the banners protested the ubiquity of sexual violence in the lives of women. Signs made by protesters showed that women are angry with being blamed for male violence and fed up with the failure of the culture to hold men accountable. Clearly the theme of the SlutWalk has struck a nerve, with similar events being planned around the world, including one in London in June.

The organisers claim that celebrating the word “slut”, and promoting sluttishness in general, will help women achieve full autonomy over their sexuality. But the focus on “reclaiming” the word slut fails to address the real issue. The term slut is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal “madonna/whore” view of women’s sexuality that it is beyond redemption. The word is so saturated with the ideology that female sexual energy deserves punishment that trying to change its meaning is a waste of precious feminist resources.

So now, Dines and Murphy are attempting to steal the thunder of SlutWalk by claiming that their motives are not what they have explicitly stated themselves…and also attempting to undermind them by telling them that their mission is a failure because….the word “slut” is simply beyond redemption as a bludgeon of “patriarchy”.

You may note the thinly veiled implication that as a result, any woman who attempts to claim usage of the term as a symbol of sexual self-assertiveness and autonomy is, by Dines’ edict, a mere pawn of, if not a direct agent of, said “patriarchy”, and a useful idiot of “male sexuality” in opposition to “female sexual agency”. In other words, Dines simply paraphrases the long lived dictum of her predecessor and mentor, Catherine MacKinnon: “If ‘slutdom’ is a part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality.”

Oh, did I say “thinly veiled”??? The next few paragraphs state it far more explicitly:

Advocates would be better off exposing the myriad ways in which the law and the culture enable myths about all types of women – sexually active or “chaste” alike. These myths facilitate sexual violence by undermining women’s credibility when they report sex crimes. Whether we blame victims by calling them “sluts” (who thus asked to be raped), or by calling them “frigid” (who thus secretly want to be overpowered), the problem is that we’re blaming them for their own victimisation no matter what they do. Encouraging women to be even more “sluttish” will not change this ugly reality.

As teachers who travel around the country speaking about sexual violence, pornography and feminism, we hear stories from women students who feel intense pressure to be sexually available “on demand”. These students have grown up in a culture in which hypersexualized images of young women are commonplace and where hardcore porn is the major form of sex education for young men. They have been told over and over that in order to be valued in such a culture, they must look and act like sluts, while not being labeled slut because the label has dire consequences including being blamed for rape, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and self-mutilation.

Because, you see, according to Gail Dines and Wendy Murphy, calling yourself a “slut” simply enables men to think of ALL women as “sluts” in the negative “I want to rape them with impunity” way. In fact, the mere calling of oneself a “slut” engaging men to mere erections and sexual arousal is more than enough in this evil “porn culture” to encourage violence and degradation of women.

Naturally, Dines and Murphy are far too sophisicated as “radical feminists” to come out and say that maybe Officer Sanguinetti was right all along and that women who dress “sluttily” are to blame for their own violence  And, quite naturally, they are quick to place the fundamental blame on the rapists themselves and give the women a break as the ultimate victims of male assault.

The problem is, though, that their core ideology of laying the fundamental blame on “male rape culture”, fueled by porn, capitalism, and mere male erections, doesn’t really allow for women fighting for themselves to reclaim their own individual right to be safely sexually assertive, or to even dress the way they want. Indeed, in a back-door kind of way, they actually give plenty of tribute to the fundamentally repressive, conservative meme of “she asked for it” by basically accepting carte blanche without any proof of evidence the fact that men are at root evil rapists led by their erections to brutalize women.

It’s as if the fundamental fact that the overwhelming majority of men do in fact respect women enough to not assault them even if they are dressed in a way that sexually arouses them doesn’t even register with Dines or Murphy. Or, that most women are more than capable of negotiating with men the acceptable boundaries of consent and what is and isn’t acceptable behavior or contact based on time and place…and, more importantly, that women and men are able to have those boundaries enforced through mutual trust, consent, mutal pleasure, and, if needed, the power of the state.

Besides all that, Dines and Murphy conveniently gloss over the far more powerful institutions of society that do NOT reward women for “slutdom”, but in fact punishes them profusely through loss of respect, loss of self-esteem, and even loss of social and economic privileges, if not actual physical punishment. Porn performers may get paid a decent amount of money, but they don’t compare to Hollywood movie actresses or politicians or even CEO’s…and I’ll bet ‘ya not many of those are self-identified “sluts”. For every Cameron Diaz there are at least five Demi Moores; and Sarah Palin still makes more money than Lisa Ann could ever dream of. (Unfortunately, since Lisa Ann’s a lot more moral and accomplished than the Half-Governor ever will be. Even fully clothed.)

Of course, Dines and Murphy do have an alternative to promoting “slut” theology….unfortunately it’s the same old tired “authentic female sexuality” divorced from real fact or experience or orgasm, rooted in the usual radfem notion of “radical female sexuality” (or, what the old heads would call “radicallesbianism”) freed from the bounds of male dictums and demands…and of male erections, too.

Women need to find ways to create their own authentic sexuality, outside of male-defined terms like slut. The recent TubeCrush phenomenon, where young women take pictures of men they find attractive on the London tube and post them to a website, illustrates how easily women copy dominant societal norms of sexual objectification rather than exploring something new and creative. And it’s telling that while these pictures are themselves innocent and largely free of sexual innuendo, one can only imagine the sexually aggressive language that would accompany a site dedicated to secret photos of women.

While the organisers of the SlutWalk might think that proudly calling themselves “sluts” is a way to empower women, they are in fact making life harder for girls who are trying to navigate their way through the tricky terrain of adolescence.

Women need to take to the streets – but not for the right to be called “slut”. Women should be fighting for liberation from culturally imposed myths about their sexuality that encourage gendered violence. Our daughters – and our sons – have the right to live in a world that celebrates equally women’s sexual freedom and bodily integrity.

How nice that two women who  have no problem sharing the dais with such prominent progressive “feminists” as Patrick Trueman, Shelley Lubben, and Judith Reisman, can lecture other feminists on what they should represent as “authentic female sexuality”. And how even nicer that they can promote their version of “It’s not your fault, but close your damn legs and cover yourselves up anyway, because you are enabling the men to leer and that’s raping us anyway” as a means of “sexual freedom” and “women’s autonomy”.

I’ll take Susie Bright and Nina Hartley’s brand of feminism over this crap any day of the week.

And I’ll STILL respect a woman’s right to say “HELL NO” and mean it, and still say “YES” and mean that, too.  Whatever she chooses to wear.

I love and worship sluts — the real ones and the wannabes just playing for fun — just too damn much to degrade and disrespect them as much as “feminists” like Gail Dines do.

But, she wouldn’t be the Bill O’Reilly of radicalfeminists otherwise.

And Slutwalk wouldn’t be the best of legitimate progressive feminism if they didn’t incur her wrath. All the better for them, I say.

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The Mind Of An Antiporn "Feminist" Hater: One Part Arrogance, Four Parts Idiocy, And Five Parts Presumptuous Bullshit (Or, A Response To A Julie Meadows Hater)

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If there is anything that most definitely is assured to yank my chain enough to lash out in anger, it is the presumption that someone knows enough about a particular group of people that they can claim to speak for them…even when actual members of that group are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.

But when that same person who assumes the role of personal analyst refuses to even acknowledge that other people can actually have a different experience than said analyst assumes, and basically decides based solely on analyst’s personal bias to ignore if not totally distort and deny the experiences of those others….well, then we’re at the point of battle.

Two such cases are whacking my brain today.

The first, which I will only briefly touch upon, is a nice steaming mountain of crap that was deposited by right-wing columnist Ross Douthat in this morning’s New York Times concerning his belief that old fashioned monogamy is on the way back from the shackles of the sexual revolution. Since Susie Bright has already summarily dispatched and disposed of his shit brilliantly, I will simply defer to her excellent rebuttal and leave it at that.

Number Deux, on the other hand, is a bit more disturbing, and needs some background.

Newly inducted Progressive Headbussa Lydia Lee (formerly known as Julie Meadows) posted at her blog today a rejoinder to a particularly dense attempt to dismiss her experiences as an adult erotic performer. For those who may not know, Lydia/Julie was involved deeply in the porn/erotica biz for quite a while, leaving only around 2005-ish when she found true love with her current husband Doug. Alarmed by the vast distortions and lies put forth by some to villify and reduce her experiences in porn to the least common demominator and the absolute worst form of rape and abuse (example: Shelley Lubben), as well as those who have made lots of profit in the industry yet have used the noteriety as a vehicle for publicity and gossip mongering (examples: Jenna Jameson and Montana Fishburne); Lydia has used her resources to at least correct the record by stating her much more benign and lucrative and socially empowering experiences as a porn performer.

Unfortunately, Julie’s personal herstory cuts right in the middle of the saw stories and propaganda and wishful tragic thinking that far too many people have invested their careers and livelihoods in in their attempt to “save” porn performers and sex workers from their supposed alleged sins and errors, and rescue them from their alleged horrid fates of permanent rape, slavery, and total dependency on the brutal sexual desires and demands of men. Which is why such people feel the need to outshout women like Lydia and put her back in her apparent place.

One such attempt took place in the form of a comment sent to Julie’s YouTube page by an unnamed antiporn “feminist”, who basically gave a concentrated synopsis of the basic APRF attitude towards women in porn who don’t quite fit into the convineint harness of “slave” in need of radfem (or born again Christian) rescue and redemption.

Lydia does an excellent job of refutting this rubbish, and I encourage you to read her rebuttal over there….but I just had to add some fisking of my own to kill the extra strong stench of BS.

Let’s take it from the top, as always:

“Sex is fun. Really, really fun. Pornography is not fun for women. Jenna Jameson, an actual pornographic actress, has said this. Because they have to do it for a long time, and they have to make it look good, which means she has to strike poses and hold them while having sex or having her picture taken. Having sex in all its forms for hours on end is tiring, and she spoke about how sore she was during and after. Pornography effectively takes something that is fun, and turns it into something that is painful for its female participants.

First of all…..doesn’t that sound verbatum like something that our intrepid wannabe “journalist” Cameron Rowe would say?? In fact, that sounds interestingly like something that Cameron DID say during his long-winded rant he tried to pass off as an “expose” of the industry. Of course, it just as likely might be one of several antipornfem stalkers who troll YouTube looking to dig their fangs into anyone attempting to question their brillliant analysis of porn and male/female sexuality (Nuclearnight/Antiquelens, perhaps??)

But, never mind who exactly gets credited for such lunacy, it’s the quality and concentration of BS that counts here. I mean….Jenna Jameson’s book speaks for every single porn performer?? A book mostly ghost written by Howard Stern’s publicist Judith “Big Clit” Regan mostly for the Fixed Noise/Bill O’Reilly “fallafel” crowd…the same ones who would cheer BillO when he noted that dirty American massacre at Malmady during World War II?? (Ahh, it was the Germans, Mr. O’Reilly, who massacred the Americans, not vice versa..honest and for true.) A book that even Jenna herself generally repudiated as a publicity stunt done to raise her Q ratings during a particularly nasty breakup with her first husband/porn producer Brad Armstrong, and a financial feud with her original production company Wicked?? Funny how Jenna continues to make plenty of money off of the same industry who supposedly raped and abused her (she still owns ClubJenna.com, which puts out plenty of her content as well as other female talent in her network). And unlike the Ministeress Lubben, Jenna has never repudiated her porn career or even implied that she was ever abused or raped by fellow performers. (She does say that she was raped as a child growing up in her book, but that’s not quite the same, now isn’t it??) Nice try, but not the best example of “porn slavery”.

As for the supposed “gruesome” and grueling process of actually making porn: yes, shifting into those positions for the proper camera angles can be a bit stiffening; hot lights, a lighting crew that on occasion can forget the empirical  value of Scope mouthwash and/or Old Spice stick deodorant (or basic bathing and brushing), and a director screaming at you every five minutes does not do wonders for you libido or the romantic mood, and taking a 9″ up your ass for more than 3 minutes can lead to plenty of soreness. Porn sets will never be confused with moonlight balconies or honeymoon suites.

But, guess what?? It’s not as if porn professionals who get paid plenty to fuck and suck on camera are the only ones to have to endure aches and pains and risk injury for the good of their profession. Let’s play a bit of word association and change a few words of that first paragraph to reflect a slightly different form of physical activity that pays its talent well:

“Football is fun. Really, really fun. Football practices and games, however, are not fun for National Football League players . Doug Williams, an actual professional quarterback, has said this. Because NFL QB’s have to throw passes and escape defenses for a long time, and they have to make it look good for the fans, which means he has to take vicious hits or run in the pocket to avoid sacks and throw the ball downfield to score touchdowns and win games. Throwing footballs in all its forms for hours on end is tiring, and he spoke about how sore he was during and after practice and after games. The NFL effectively takes something that is fun, and turns it into something that is painful for its male participants.

And remember…even Doug Williams made more money the year he helped lead the Washington Redskins to that Super Bowl victory than Jenna Jameson did in her entire career. Shall we move to condemn the NFL, then, for the way they treat and abuse their talent??

Oh, who cares about them overpaid players, anyway??  This is about PORN..and SEX!!  Sex is different, you know.

Let’s go back to our hater.

And then there is always the potential of catching STDs with pornography or promiscuous sex. Yes, it’s regulated with blood tests, but it’s a not perfect system. Apart from the medical field, which has all kinds of safety precautions, I cannot think of a job that consistently put you in such proximity to catching potentially fatal or untreatable diseases.

Because, of course, only porn performers are slutty and promiscuous and so out of control sexually enough to contract STI’s and then infect the rest of society with them. It’s not as if STI’s didn’t predate the growth of the modern adult porn industry by…well, millenia?? Or, that the actual rate of infection amongst porn performers is actually well below that of non-porn performers, because exactly of the testing and treatment regimen that performers are expected to undergo?

Then again, it’s only in porn that you are at risk for deadly diseases.  Not meatpacking, not sanitation services, not microbiologists, certainly not garbage collectors or electric lineman, or miners or leathernecks on oil platforms, or….

And do you honestly think that women doing porn don’t have issues with sex? I agree that a lot of people have strangely puritanical views about sex, but porn actresses don’t have liberated attitudes about sex. They most likely equate their appeal as a sex object to their self-worth; the more men who will have sex with them, the more valuable they are. This flawed thinking is usually the result of sexual abuse, especially as children. Second, there is a huge amount of drugs in the pornography world; most women are probably addicted to some drug or another, and they aren’t going to find any work that pays them so much in so little time, so they do porn to feed their habit.

Oh, freakin’ gag me with a dirty dildo, please.

First off, having sex on stage or on screen for a professional porn performer is his/her JOB; she is not hired for the purpose of being promiscuous. What she does outside of her job does not reflect upon her requirements to get paid for what she does do. Yes, being more of an exhibitionist and not being so squicked at being naked in front of the camera and showing yourself off to millions who will be masturbating to your imagery does help you do your job much easier, but that’s more of an extra boost rather than a core requirement.

And for this mindless crap about “self-worth” determined by the number of sleeping partners: well…if a woman’s hot enough and open-minded enough, accomplished enough in the skillz of sex that she can pull men to suck and fuck at her convinience, and she’s smart enough to protect herself from disease and bad hookups…then what the hell is the issue, exactly?? Or, is our hater really ticked off due to jealousy that these supposed “sluts” and “sex objects” are getting laid more and better than she is??

Oh…and their thinking is “flawed” because of “sexual abuse”??  Really?? Can you prove that, or do you, dear hater, just assume that any woman who wants, desires, and actively seeks sex beyond your treasured boundaries with those evil brutal men with their hated erections, is by your edict “sexually abused”…or simply dumb, mindless “cumdumptsers”??

Let’s not also forget the “they’re all on DRUGS!!!!: meme, too. Because those evil skanky, trampy sluts…errrrrrrrr….those poor, poor slaves of patriarchy, wouldn’t be doing such things were they not hooked on heroin or meth or crack or whatever medication those evil male pimps are pushing on them. Even, of course, when they say that they are clean and sober and clear-headed enough to get in on their own free will….that’s just a LIE that they’re paid to say!! WE know better!!!!

Yeah.  Those who usually say that they know better are usually the ones who in reality don’t know shit.  Which is why they crack down so hard on those who do know.

Finally, a lot of the stuff they do in porn is gross. I’m not a prude, I’m not judgmental. I’m not sure what I can say here without getting deleted, but an objective analysis of some of the acts that are popular in porn tells me that they are simply physically unpleasant for a woman. This isn’t the moral condemnation, not judgmental “get a job!” rhetoric, not a fear of sex. The actual physical sensation of having some acts performed on you are unappealing, man or woman; yet, these acts are consistently performed on women in lots of mainstream porn. That’s why these acts don’t make it into the niche market of porn for women, and why they don’t feature in “couples porn”.

Last time I noticed, the term “gross” was in fact a value judgment. not necessarily a state of fact. Now, we can agree that some things are indeed quite gross…but on other issues it’s clearly in the eyes of the beholder. And, of course, the obligatory “I’m not a prude; I’m not passing judgment” disclaimer, that always takes place right before an antiporn radfem breaks out one of their passing judgments that certainly sounds prudish. And it’s certainly not a moral judgment to say that the acts found in mainstream porn are “unappealing” to women….at least, not to SOME women. But, if you simply eliminate the large number of women who actually enjoy such acts in their personal life, and who probably did long before they saw it reflected back at them from a porn video or a pictoral or an erotic story, then you can say that you’re not making a moral judgment because such women simply don’t exist. At least, not in our hater’s twisted mind.

As for the “unappealing” part: well, then, why do people continue to purchase mainstream porn by the buckets if they find the acts shown so “unappealing”??  And…who is our hater to suggest that she can speak for those consumers and users of porn on the subject of what they consider appealing?? And, what is, in reality, the difference between “porn for women” and “couples porn” and what she calls “mainstream porn”?? Emphasis on female pleasure?? Less gynocological closeups of the nether regions?? More kissing and fondling??  Less facials?? Less anal??

Besides, why emphasize the difference in subgenre, anyway, since it’s all just a male conspiracy to make the fundamentally degrading and injurous nature of porn more sellable to impressionable (and totally stupid, I guess) women who don’t know the reality of “true” and “authentic” female sexuality as “true feminists” (radical lesbians??) know?

Also, Fishburne’s daughter said she did porn to get into real acting. Name one legitimate actor who started out in porn apart from Sylvester Stallone, who made his name with the Rocky movies and then it was revealed that he’d done a skin flick.”

I’m going to gloss over for now the question of whether porn performers are in fact legitimate actors who only focus their art in the erotic/sexual realm (and the fact that they do in fact have to play roles and even develop some plots in order to get to the sex); and simply respond that Tana Fishburne didn’t need to go into porn to establish herself as a mainstream actress, since being Lawrence’s daughter would have been more than enough to get her some gigs. She went into porn basically to piss off her family, and to rebel…like most other young women do. Also…you do know that the former  Govenator of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, also posed for Playgirl, right?? So did Burt Renyolds.  And..Bo Derek posed for Playboy, too. They may not have started out in porn, but they sure did use porn to engage their careers later on.

But why should I ramble on, when a real live porn performer whom actualy did the job and came out of it pretty much unscathed can speak volumes better than I ever could. Kick it, Lydz: (special points with added emphasis by moi)

There were moments when I questioned my involvement in the adult industry because my current husband could not understand it. In trying to understand him, and trying to explain that it is nothing that a non-industry person would assume it to be, I had to wonder if maybe there was something “wrong” with me for even being interested in the business. I can tell you this, it feels worse to second-guess myself and contemplate the idea that I’m a bad person than it does to actually remember my time in the industry. I have so many wonderful memories of people–crew people, actors, directors, people I didn’t have sex with because the sex part was so secondary to the larger interactions among people that exist in the adult industry. The seedier people, they are easy to spot and avoid if you don’t want to surround yourself with seedy people. That even one person–myself–can come from that industry with my personal and happy experiences means that others do, too. Inari Vachs always struck me as someone who was a very smart, very sexually open and happy person. Chloe [Nicholle] actually got clean after entering the adult industry in the 90s. Shelley Lubben was a hardcore pornographer and now she’s a hardcore religious nut. Anything she does is going to be over-the-top because that’s the way she does it. Jenna Jameson, too. If I want to know what it’s like to be a mainstream actor, I won’t ask Julia Roberts, I’ll ask someone not in the stratosphere of fame because their perspective isn’t like everyone else’s. I’d ask an average person. I was an average porn star and I never witnessed the atrocities these people claim are on every porn set. Never. I ran into one woman in my agent’s office who had bruises all over her and said that it happened from doing a scene on a rock. I said, “You have got to demand better treatment. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Exercise that right!” That’s life. I’ve been poor and on welfare. I’ve used food stamps to survive. Believe me, there are other ways to survive if you’re really unhappy. No dignity is lost in accepting charity if the alternative means selling your soul.

Or, to put it the way Ginger Lynn Allen titled her proposed biography: “I Did It. I Liked It. So What?”

 

Addedendum: Julie Meadows just reminded me via a comment here that I would be derilect in my duties without recognizing that it’s no picnic for the men who do porn, either. Damn…she’s smart, and she’s right.

Contrary to popular rumor, not every man — even one with a schlong bigger than 6″ — can just walk into a porn studio, grab the nearest porn slut, and bang to his heart’s content. Ahhh, no..it just doesn’t work that way, even in gonzo. In fact, it’s a lot tougher on the men because in addition to having to maintain their erections throughout the time needed for taping a scene, they absolutely must be able to pull out and blast on cue when the director calls for it. If he can’t do that, he won’t make it past the first cut. And with all that, they are even paid less than the women are. Imagine that…the profession most slammed for being anti-woman actually pays female talent more than men. In short, in simple economic working class measures, porn might be the most femnist profession around. Maybe that’s what sticks in Gail Dines’ craw so much that she hates on porn, ehhh??

 

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Why Gail Dines Is About As Leftist As The Tea Party (And As "Marxist" As Rush Limbaugh)

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You all know that I’ve written plenty of pixels on Gail Dines and her brand of antiporn “feminism” (and yes, the quotes are deliberate).

Unfortunately, even many who see the illogic and looniness behind her arguments still manage to label her as a “leftist” or even “Marxist” due to her frequent use of progressive rhetoric to justify her case against porn as the ultimate capitalist evil against essential “women’s sexuality”.

The fact that she gets plenty of ink in putatively “progressive”/Left journals like The Guardian, CounterPunch, AlterNet, and a few others, not to mention the influence on other putative Left writers such as Robert Jensen, Chris Hedges, and Noam Chomsky, also adds to the assumption that her viewpoint represents the majority of the Left.

As one who is solidly and squarely on the Left (and pretty far Left at that), allow me to call bullshit on that assumption.

First off….there are plenty of right wingers who appropriate leftist rhetoric to confuse people in the name of selling their program. There was a reason that Hitler called his party the National Socialists….and it wasn’t because he was a true socialist, either. (Sorry, Jonah Goldberg,) Similarly, plenty of nationalist right-wingers have claimed to be antiwar and opposed to empire building like most true progressive folk are…but once you cut underneath the surface, you find a very ugly undercurrent of bigotry –whether racial or sexual. (See Ron and Rand Paul on that one, or, if you dare, daze into the underworld of fascists like Lew Rockwell.)

Secondly….even though to label Gail Dines a right-winger overall would be a bit of an overkill, I would say that there are parts of her argument that do indeed dangerously approach the very authoritarianism near and dear to traditional rightwingers everywhere. In nearly every Dines speech, there is the assumption that she speaks for not just herself or for a specific group of women, but for Every Woman (at least, all those women not eternally poisioned by or paid for by The MAN. This is why she refuses to even debate one-on-one with pro-porn feminists or even active porn performers who don’t share her apocalyptic views about porn or sexuality….she sees that as “giving voice to the pimps”. There is also an assumption of a total black-versus-white paradigm between a essentualized and “natural” positive women’s sexuality (labeled as “our sexuality”) versus the dark and rapicious and evil “male sexuality” that porn supposedly imposes on women. To her, if you do not totally endorse the former, then you are part of the latter; there is no middle ground or any shades of gray (or any other color) allowed.

And thirdly….there is the usual resourse of conspiracy theorists to oversignifify the mundane act as either a revolutionary act of resistance or an essential act of enslavement. A most recent case in point, in Dines’ case?

Last month, on the heels of the Adult Entertainment Expo that took place in Las Vegas, Dines posted one of her usual rambles that she regularly does for the London-based Guardian website. In it, she reflects mostly on how the porn convention reflects the relative corrosiveness of “predatory capitalism” imposed on women’s bodies through “gonzo porn”…along with the usual rhetoric about “cumdumpsters” , forcing women to wax/shave their pubic areas, and how porn has corrupted “our culture”. (A rather trenchant rebuttal to Dines, by someone who actually attended AEE, can be found here.)

Now, there are certainly plenty of predatory capitalists around….and far too many of them. I would guess, though, that the overwhelming majority of them are probably NOT pornographers. In fact, I’d even say that some of the most agreesive capitalists happened to be staunchly antiporn activists….like, say, the Koch Brothers who fund Tea Party activists or Rupert Murdoch, who practically runs FOX News Channel as the propaganda wing of the Right. Why does Professor Dines give the latter such a pass, while casting her laser-like ire solely on a small convention like AEE?? (Also, remember that AEE used to be part of the much larger Consumer Electronics Show, before the latter squeamed about being associated with “porn” and broke AEE off into its own seperate wing. And beginning last year, AEE and CES don’t even share the same venue. So much for the complicity of “predatory capitalism”.)

Besides that…most true Marxists study capitalism as a process of exchange of labor for value, not as a venue of specific corporations selling products or advertisements. Focusing on sexy ads or MTV videos or gossip of Miley Cyrus taking up pole dancing would be considered by any real Marxist to be a distraction from the main issue of democratic control of the means and ends of production. Last time I read, Gail Dines has never advocated porn performers taking control of the studios and making their own product….her game is to simply ban the shit off the face of the earth.

It’s one thing to criticize the effects of “porn culture” on impressionable adolescents growing up. It’s quite another to declare that busting porn is “anti-capitalist” and that anyone who doesn’t go along with antiporn efforts is inevitably a “libertarian” and a Republican. Especially when you are allying yourself with the very aggressive “predatory capitalists” who would bust not only porn, but every other form of progressive speech and action.

When you share the dais with the likes of Pat Trueman, you should lose your right to call yourself a leftist. When you attempt to defend the meltdown of Shelley Lubben, then that should seal the deal.

Yeah, Gail Dines is a “Marxist”, all right. Like Rush Limbuagh.

 

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A "Stench" of Anti-Porn Myopia: Starring Gail Dines and Featuring: "Damaged Genitals"?!?!

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[Also crossposted to BPPA]


It’s one thing to witness the usual myopia of antipornography “feminists” on a daily basis.

It’s quite another thing altogether to see it in as concentrated form, as in the following “essay”.

It was originally posted on Thursday to a site called wickedlocal.com (unfortunately, the site seems to be out of service), then transferred to AdultFYI.com, where I discovered it. The “essay” is apparently in response to all the brohaha over college campuses across the country screening the feature porn movie Pirates 2: Stagletti’s Revenge. The movie, whose original has won numerous awards for its theme and plot as well as representing what many critics see as the potential of erotica featuring high level art, has generated a bit of controversy; the University of Maryland at College Park cancelled a planned screening of the film due to protests from conservative activists and right-wing politicians threatening to cut off funding for the university. Not so with the University of California at Davis, which allowed Pirates 2 to be screened without much in the way of controversy there.

At least…not on campus.

However, someone — more than likely an antiporn “radicalfeminist” activist — took grand exception to UC-Davis allowing the film to be shown on their campus…hence, the following “essay”. Normally, I wouldn’t use this site for full fisking I usually don’t use BPPA for fisking…for this  blog, though, it’s standard…. but and this article is so concentrated in its myopia that it more than deserves the in-dept treatment.

Plus…it features our favorite antiporn “feminist” activist, Dr. Gail Dines of Wheelock College, who brings her own special brand of wingnuttery into the mix, as you will see.

I will give some annotation as I go, as usual.

“Stench of eroticized violence”: Actresses in Porn Have to Stop Working because of Damaged Genitals

I’m sure that you will get the gist of their point right away. But read on…

Students at several universities, including U.C. Davis and U. Maryland, recently planned to show a XXX “hardcore” porn film on campus, not as an educational event but as a form of entertainment. Maryland pulled the plug on showing the film for kicks and played a small part of it, instead, as part of an educational panel (albeit after the state legislature threatened to take away hundreds of millions in state funds). But U.C. Davis gave it the green light as a rip-roaring good time for students, citing “free speech” and calling the film a “safe alternative” to drinking.

I’m afraid to read the school’s definition of “safe.”

Now, the writer tends to ignore (or, more likely, wants the reader of his/her essay to ignore) the facts as to why UM-CP “pulled the plug” on the screening of Pirates 2…probably because it would have raised a particularly thorny question of collusion between antiporn “radicalfeminists” (of which the reader all but openly describes his/herself as) and more traditional right-wing Christian anti-feminist fundamentalists (whom mostly led the opposition at Maryland). And we all know that such collusion just doesn’t exist, don’t we??

And I’d say that compared to other hijinks on most college campuses, watching a basically moderate-core porn flick certainly does constitute “safe” by most people’s definition. But, I guess that most people don’t have the special perspectives that only radical antiporn “feminists” can offer.


Colleges well understand the multiple ways that porn is harmful. According to Oklahoma State Professor John Foubert, men who use porn are more likely to commit sex crimes than those who don’t.

No surprise there because porn normalizes and eroticizes violence against women. It hurts men, too. Porn addiction is a huge and growing problem that has destroyed the lives of many men — and studies show that men who use porn have worse sex than those who don’t. Other human relationships are also negatively affected. 75 percent of men in prison for child rape admit using child porn — and 75 percent of men in prison for child porn — admit sexually abusing numerous children.

I’ve bolded the more outrageous “statistics” put forth by our anonymous “essayist”….do they sound like they come from the same identical sources that gave Melissa Fairley her “95% of all ‘prostituted women’ want to get out of the business” meme?? How whacked out do you have to be to believe this crap??

I mean…isn’t John Foubert kinda biased..and where does he get his “stats” that say that men who consume porn are more likely to commit “sex crimes” than those who don’t?? Yeah…if you consider solo masturbation or seeking consensual sex with other willing adults to be a “sex crime”. Or…if you merely consider getting an erection in the wrong place at the wrong time to be considered to be a “sex crime”, too.

And how nice of our “essayist” to go the extra mile to interview all those child rapists in prison — and all those pedophiles, too — and trust their opinions that it was that evil PORN (especially the kind featuring consenting adults) that caused them to go after kids and rape young girls. Oh, wait, (s)he didn’t do any research or interview any men in jail?? (S)He just lifted these “statistics” out of his/her as….piring ideology?? Oh, never mind…read on, MacDuff:

All these reasons explain why an “official” university showing of porn would violate Title IX as a form of sexual harassment. And while an “unofficial” presentation by students isn’t prohibited by federal law, schools can and should forbid all showings of such films on campus.

Oh, really??? I didn’t know that Title IX could be used as a form of censorship?? I always thought that that was a mandate of protecting discrimination against women in college campuses…and that showing porn on campus in restricted areas didn’t quite reach the level of discrimination. (And what about the women involved in the actual making of the film, or the women who flocked to see the movie…shouldn’t they have the same rights of non-discrimination to see the film themselves??

We’re not talking about “Sex in the City” here. According to Wheelock College pornography expert, Professor Gail Dines, the vast majority of “mainstream” porn sold in this country depicts women being brutalized — often by multiple men — with objects and weapons. And it isn’t “fantasy.” Real women are really hurt while men experience sexual pleasure. “Actresses” in the “industry” often have to stop working after only weeks because their genitals are so damaged and their bodies so mutilated they are no longer “valuable” in the business. If this is what “mainstream” porn is like — just imagine the “hard core” stuff they showed at U.C. Davis.

Ahhh, yes…Gail Dines….such an unbiased and openminded authority on pornography and its impacts on women. The woman who says that interracial porn is innately racist merely because it depicts Black men with huge penises. The woman who says that even “mainstream” girl-girl porn is harmful and must be banished because it reflects “male-centered” values imposed into female sexuality. No surprise that she would just as thusly label any and all depictions of porn as “women being brutalized” by men….because in her cracked mind, a man with an erection is one small step removed from a rapist…if not an actual rapist. Therefore, by definition, any sexual contact between a man (or group of men) and a woman depicted in porn automatically counts as “brutality” and “women being harmed while men experience sexual pleasure”.

Oh….and I’m guessing that UC-Davis doesn’t show “hard core” stuff at all, since most students there can easily get enough of that online through their own damn laptops.

But, it’s this “actresses” in the “industry” being “brutalized” with “weapons” and “objects” (gee, you mean that dildos and vibrators are weapons of mass destruction more dangerous than even knives and guns????) meme that deserves special mention. Now, it’s clear that women in porn are more than suspectable to personal injury on occasion; that’s the occupational hazard of their job. Anal tears, anal lapses, vaginal tears, yeast infections…all are the possible hazards that come with the occupation. (The threat of STD’s is not too far from the horizon, either…though thanks to the modern regimen of standardized STD testing, it is far less of a threat than assumed by outsiders.)

How this is that much different, however, from the possibility of physical injury from other athletic endeavors that are far more socially accepted than porn is, is a legitimate question. After all, football players, basketball players, ballet dancers, gymnansts, and even bowlers are just as much of risk to injury to their person, but I don’t see anyone calling for the banishment of Football Division major college football or baseball or basketball..let alone calls to ban ballet. But, you know…sex is different.

This has nothing to do with morality or censorship — it’s about the serious damage caused to an entire society when sexual degradation of women is celebrated as pleasurable entertainment.

Instead of knee-jerk free speech excuses, universities should use this controversy as a teaching moment.

Yeah. Nothing at all to do with morality at all….despite the claima of “sexual degradation” of women. No claims of censorship, either….disregarding three paragraphs earlier, where our “essayist” directly calls for college campuses to simply not allow such films to be shown on their campuses.

And of course, none of those “knee-jerk free speech excuses”…that’s only reserved for radical antiporn activists who are totally “censored” and overwhelmed by the full financial power and weight of “pornographers” and their evil puppets in the media.

Institutions of higher education enjoy an honorable place of leadership in this country — and they’re not the government — which means they aren’t beholden to the “real world” laws that allow the systematic degradation of women through the lawful proliferation of even the most vile pornography.

Schools should take this opportunity not only to rise above the “real world” but also to collapse the ugly hierarchy of isms that too often allows hateful material directed at women to be protected as free speech — while similar “speech” directed at other “types” of students is prohibited.

Ahhh…hate to break this to ‘ya, Mr./Ms. Sparky, but most institutions of higher learning are publically owned and financed by the state, which means that they are still bound by the laws of their state’s constitutions…the very ones that protect the right of their students as citizens of America and of their respective states to view certain media and content. And that would include even the right of material that some would consider to “allow the systematic degradation of women through the lawful proliferation of even the most vile pornography”. Of course, we could debate whether Pirates 2 even comes close to the level of “vile pornography” or whether it promotes “the systematic degradation of women”…but that would require an actual debate, which seems not to be on the agenda of this “essayist”.

And about those “other types of speech that are prohibited”…if by some chance (s)he is referring to “hate speech” codes used against particular kinds of speech directed at racial minorities (Blacks, Latin@s) or GLBT folk; well, we can also debate whether these codes really do protect such people, or whether they merely provide a crutch for those who are in power (and BTW, the latter still tend to be White men) to play divide and conquer. Besides, there is a fundamental difference between targeting actions directly going against certain groups and censoring individual thoughts….not to mention the idea that thinking about women (and men) as free and autonomous sexual beings is somehow at the same level as, say, burning a cross in a Black student’s yard or marching around a Jewish neighborhood wearing Nazi gear. Most of us are capable of seeing the difference. Most of us, that is.

This point cannot be overstated. U.C. Davis thinks the brutal abuse of women in film is protected speech — but presumably they don’t feel the same way about films that celebrate the violent abuse of blacks, Jews, Muslims, etc.

Any school that indulges such a hierarchy should prepare itself for an uprising. Women are tired of the unequal enforcement of free speech principles on college campuses. It’s time to showcase this injustice by demanding that schools also show other movies that celebrate the violent abuse of blacks, Jews and Muslims.

If schools forbid these other films, women will at least have successfully unveiled the pernicious ways universities have participated in the subjugation of women in higher education and larger society.

Oh, now wait a minute…..hold the fuck up here. OK….so the alternative to simply not showing such “degrading” and “damaging” porn flicks as Pirates 2 on college campuses is to simply have supposedly progressive radicafeminst women on campus rise up and demand that schools show….Birth of a Nation?!?!?! Oh. now I get it….better to have racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, homophobia, and all the other isms to thrive so that “women” can get rid of the evil that is porn, right??? How mightily progressive of you, Sparky. NOT.

And what delicious irony….universities who open their campuses to women, who give out scholarships to women, who, thanks to the aformentioned Title IX, have given so many oppurtunities to women, and who contain all those nice Women’s Studies curricula which produces such “radicalfeminists” as Gail Dines….they are all just part of the evil Male Conspiracy. All due to one feature porn flick.

The remaining option is for schools to allow all styles of violent, hate-filled movies to be shown as entertainment — in venues where core American values such as civility and equality are forming roots in newly developing minds. And then what will happen to our communities of young people — when campus air becomes a pungent fog of “hatred as pleasure,” seeping into the brains of our next generation of leaders as they learn about politics, science, business, the arts, law and human behavior?

“Safe” alternative to drinking, indeed.

Yup, yup, yup….we must not allow impressionable minds to be polluted by bad ideas…especially the idea that consensual sex can actually be an enjoyable thing to ease the burden of college life. Especially the idea that anal sex is something other than the main transmission of HIV/AIDS among gay men. Especially the idea that women might just discover that sex — especially sex with men — could be an actual pleasurable and mutually satisfying experience. Or that explicit sex can be reconciled with high art and thematic values.

Such evil, hostile beliefs must be purged from our universities pronto, so that our women can be raised with integrity and honor, and with the total ignorance and blindness and wilfull repression that only pure radicalfeminists can provide.

And this is why “we” must prevent films like Pirates 2 from being screened at college campuses. And why people like Sasha Grey must be outed for the dirty slut and perverted trollop she really is.

Congratulations, Professor Dines…you’ve created another Frankenstein.

Now..pardon me while I take a cold shower to wash the stench of horseshit off my body. Ugh.

(Much props to our fearless Henchwoman God Emperor for discovering this essay mountain of crap first, for giving it the business it deserves, and for issuing the challenge.)

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Why The TPoP Producers Are A Bunch Of Chickenshi…..errrrrr, Chickenheads

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Oh, WOW..like this wasn’t too expected of them.

It seems that the last two times that the producers of the antiporn agitpropfest known as The Price of Pleasure attempted to promote themselves were a little too large for their comfort…mostly due to the contingent of porn performers, producers, and other assorted sex workers that apparently ambushed them seeking to tell the other side of their wretched tales of porn harm (what we civilians would call “the truth”.

Well….for tomorrow’s scheduled screening of the “documentary” at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, you won’t have to worry about that happening, because….well, I’ll just let Ernest Greene fill in the details (from the Blog of Pro-Porn Activism):

Well, it turned out pretty much like I called it. Today Nina made voice contact with the indivdual at U.S.C. here in Los Angeles who is coordinating the 2/26 showing of The Price of Pleasure and was told that this showing would be for “faculty, staff and students only” and thus closed to the general public. The voice on the phone declined to divulge the physical location at which the screening would take place.

Clearly, there are some people Professors Sun and Jensen and their cronies don’t want to meet face to face. I’m shocked, shocked I say! After they’ve shown such ethical regard for the rights and concerns of those who appear in their masterpiece of documentary objectivity, I’m positively gob-smacked that they would go into hiding at the prospect of encountering these individuals in person. How could this be?

Are the makers of this film, as it turns out, cowards as well as liars? If not, why their reluctance to have it widely seen in the very locus of the industry it claims to expose? One would think this would be the venue in which the producers would want to make their case the most fervently. They were certainly nervy enough when it came to trucking their cameras around the floor of the AEE in Vegas, hounding performers who were trying to work and promising to tell their side of the story. Of course, in that situation, it was the producers who were asking the questions.

Clearlly, when they’re the ones whose actions are being “questioned” and “examined,” well, that’s quite a different matter.

Anyone who believes in his or her creative work stands behind it, even in the face resistance. What does it say about the motives, methods and character of these flimmakers that they batten down the hatches merely at the prospect of being confronted by a handful of angry women in the same age group as the invited students who feel they were exploited and misused in the making of this project?

Nothing good. In trying to shame all of us, they seem to have been more effective at shaming themselves, both in the content of their cinematic smear-job and in the behavior they’ve exhbited while trying to ensure it’s viewed only by those already sympathetic to its one-note message.

Nope, not good at all, but so, so typical.

Myopia: it’s not just for right-wing Republicans anymore.

—————————————————————-

Update: When Ren Ev reprinted this post over at her place, she got this comment from an self-described “antiporn feminist” who was also miffed at the restrictions imposed at the USC TPoP screening:

[Posted by Anonymous @ 10:59 on 2/24/09]

I too wanted to attend the film. I am actually in the feminist anti-porn camp. I am a recent grad school graduate of USC. But I am not familiar with the building in which the film is being shown. So, when I called up the Executive Director of Women’s Student Assembly (is that who you spoke with?) she rudely informed me that only CURRENT students and faculty are allowed. I want to clarify that this is not Robert Jensen’s idea. I wrote the director an email expressing my disappointment and also emailed the director of the film. He was quite kind and told me that he thought the screening was open to the public. He spoke with the event director at USC and got back to me. He apologized and he had hoped that I could get it. Unfortunately, it was not his decision to make.

I am frustrated. Whether you are in the pro-porn or anti-porn camp. Whether you want to see the film to further your education about the harms or the perceived virtues of the porn industry…I am upset that it is not open the the wider public.

————————————————————

[posted @ 11:04 PM on 2/24/09]

P.S.
Oops, I forgot the mention why only current students and faculty are allowed to see the documentary. Well…at least the reason I was given was that the students funded the event and it would be too expensive to have the event be any larger. Doesn’t make much sense to me but that is what I was told.

Ernest, though, was having none of that, and dispatched this response:

[posted by Ernest Greene @ 11:33 PM on 2/24/09]

Anonymous:

“Oops, I forgot the mention why only current students and faculty are allowed to see the documentary. Well…at least the reason I was given was that the students funded the event and it would be too expensive to have the event be any larger. Doesn’t make much sense to me but that is what I was told.”

And if anyone believes that, perhaps I could interest them in some credit default swaps. Being a U.S.C. grad, I’m sure you’re aware of the variety of venues on campus in which this film could have been shown and that several would have easily accommodated a substantial audience.

The film and its presenters will already be present, so their travel costs must have been covered already. If paying a projectionist or other minor costs would have been associated with showing the picture in a larger space, a small fee charged at the door would more than adequately have covered any additional expense entailed in opening the program to a wider audience.

I would be equally skeptical of the director’s claim that the decision to close the screening was made by anyone affiliated with the university, or that he was unaware of the restrictions imposed. If the producers insisted on an open showing or refused to allow it to be screened under any other circumstances, I hardly think the institution would have been in a position to overrule them.

Just as the producers lie in their film, they clearly lie about their intentions regarding who may or may not see it and for what reasons.

They’re certainly nothing if not consistent.

Oh, one more thing. Though Jensen frequently appears with the film, as well as in it, he is not one of its directors, and I would no more believe that closing the screening was not his idea than I would believe anything else he said. He seems to adjust his descriptions of the nature of his involvement with this project according to his audience as he tends to adjust his remarks on other subjects to his assessment of the listeners in general, as has been thoroughly documented here and elsewhere.

—————————————————————————————

[posted by Ernest @ 12:04 AM on 2/25/09]

And if you go to the TPoP Web site now:

http://www.thepriceofpleasure.com/screenings.html

You will see that the listing for the upcoming showing reads as follows:

Los Angeles, CA
02.26.09, Thursday
7 pm
University of Southern California
(Current students, faculty & staff only)

When the screening was first announced on this site, this was how the listing read:

Los Angeles, CA
02.26.09, Thursday
7 pm
University of Southern California
Women’s Student Assembly
kristen.priddy@gmail.com
626.487.4171

Then, when I posted this information on The Blog for Pro-Porn Activism, the listing was changed within a few days, as follows:

Los Angeles, CA
02.26.09, Thursday
7 pm
University of Southern California

But of course, none of these changes, including the suddenly announced restriction to current students, faculty and staff were in any way an attempt to manipulate access by the producers. They would never stoop to such tactics.

Funny how the word “current” just popped up over there today, presumably right after anonymous called to inquire.

‘Ya just gotta love how they move them goalposts, do ‘ya. Pete Carroll has nothing on them.

Funny that that must have occurred right I gave a ahoutout to USC students to crash their party, too?? You really think that they are reading our journals??? Naaaaaahhhhh!!!!

What a bunch of chickenheads.

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Another Bob The Sexual Guilt Tripper Update: Winning Converts One Smear at a Time

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It’s been a while since I’ve done a pile on on Robert Jensen, my all time favorite male self-flagellator and antiporn crusader….and he’s been busy as a Stormcloud honeybee of late.

First off, he’s been busy pimping both the featured slideshow Stop Porn Culture, and doing a traveling minstrel show pimping the antiporn “documentary” The Price of Pleasure to mostly unsuspecting audiences.

Except, when he tried to sell the snake oil of TPoP in Los Angeles last week, he got the surprise of his life: a small crew of some of the adult sex media’s most trusted spokespeople decided to raid Bob the Sexual Guilttripper’s show to call him out on some of his smears and lies about their profession and the women who performed in it.

Oh..and guess who was in the Truth Squad, if you will?? Yup….that would be Ernest Greene and Nina Hartley, who — along with Mark Kearnes of AVN, porn auteur/columnist Gram Ponante, and performers Mika Tan and Vanessa Blue, amongst others — buttonholed Jensen from pillar to post.

Ernest has documented all of the juicy details of the roasting over at the Blog of Post-Porn Activism, and Mr. Ponante has done a similar review of what went down here as well.  Suffice it to say that it was pretty interesting to see Jensen attempt to crawfish himself away from the distortions of his “documentary”.

I’d strongly recommend you read their essays in full to get the effect of the back-and-forth..but if you are too lazy or busy at the moment, I can allow Mika Tan’s succinct two-line sentence beginning her protestation of TPoP’s misrepresentation of her profession speak for a condensation:


“I am very disappointed in this movie. It’s inaccurate. And defending it, you have begun every sentence with a disclaimer.”

Oh…and speaking of disclaimers….after surviving that roasting in LA, Jensen hopped a plane to San Francisco where he participated in another presentation promoting another antipornfeminist project, the Stop Porn Culture slideshow sponsored by himself and Gail Dines.

Now, when you venture into Frisco, and you do anything sex wise, you have to deal with the wrath of Violet Blue, full time sex columnist and rebel troublemaker for all things sex-positive.

Violet decided to use antiporn feminism in general and SPC in particular as her own pinata for her most recent Open Source Sex column that appears in print at the San Francisco Chronicle and online at SFGate.com….and managed to unearth some fascinating info about the complicity of the “feminist” producers with some not-so-feminist activism. Quoting Violet from her column, via her awesome Tiny Nibbles blog:

There’s a new anti-porn movement in town, and it’s — the feminists again. I know, whatta letdown. But I’ve got quite a few surprises in this week’s column, Please Use Porn Responsibly: Violet Blue’s concerns about the new anti-porn feminist agenda. No, you won’t believe what these people are saying and doing — some really legally questionable stuff. In this post, I have the screencaps from my investigation for this column, where I discovered that the main website for the nonprofit is by — you guessed it — Christian conservative extremists. In bed with feminists, again… Wow, so 1970s. Click the images to read the whois data better…

The reference is to the fact — quoted by Violet in the column — that the domain owner of the Stop Porn Culture website just so happens to be an organization called “Skyward-bound Productions”, which states on its home page that one of its main missions happens to be (quoting from a Google cached copy of their home page) :

“…assisting churches and non-profit organizations [to] get the materials they need to spread the ministry of Jesus Christ.” [...]

She even manages to smackdown Bob the Guilttripper a tad:

It’s great to see the new antiporn agenda; their arguments are full of holes as usual, but they’re gaining traction by appearing to be unbiased and reasonable — and non-religious. Like, look at this totally unbiased piece running in the SF Gate / Chronicle the same day as mine. (That’s irony, folks.) I really wish I’d known Mr. Jensen was going to be in town today: I have a radio interview from 2-? downtown, dance class, and then and a private dinner celebration all coinciding at the same time he’ll be at Modern Times Books on Valencia tonight. Anyone want to go ask him a few questions for me? Seriously: I’ll send you three questions to ask him, you record the results, we’ll put it here. It’s a real offer, and they are serious questions.

I’m sure that Professor Jensen would be thrilled to have a sincere and honest debate with Violet.  Really, he would.

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Oh, Please, Adam and NPNH…Get A Freakin' Clue!!!

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Oh, but this is sooo sweet….it seems that Adam and the folks at NoPornNorthhampton.com are having a bit of a snit….because we of The Great Pro-Porn Posse is undercutting and “censoring” them again.

Apparently, they got word of Renegade Evolution’s latest campaign to bust their favorite antiporn activist Gail Dines and her Stop Porn Culture slideshow by using the very same 2257 federal regulations that require record keeping for explicit sexual imagery. Ren is basically saying that if folks like John Stagliano has to go to jail because his videos might be accessible to “minors”; then why the hell is SPC allowed to go off scot-free and present their slideshows in open daylight to public audiences using the very same sexual content??? In venues much, much more accessible to minors, even???

Anyways…Adam and the NPNH gang let off their steam with a biting rebuttal at their site, where they attempted the same old tired smack about how the big, baaaad, evil pro-pornies are out to “suppress” their speech….and they start out by quoting an eariler “example”:

Porn defenders are usually staunch advocates of the First Amendment, but when the issue is speech they don’t like, many can’t resist groping around in the legal code to find a way to shut down analysis and criticism. We encountered this last summer, when the owner of the website Cruising for Sex wrongly claimed that copyright law prohibited us from reproducing a small portion of The Gloryhole FAQ.

The “Gloryhole FAQ”, in case you are intersted, is NPNH’s slightly biased and totally whacked and cracked attempt to explain away the practice of “gloryholes”; which are basically private areas where people (mostly gay men, but increasingly straight hetero folk, too; can engage in semi-public sex through holes punched through the walls. (Yes, Adam and NPNH is as obsessed with demonizing gay sex just as much as they are with porn…especially when it comes to playing the “anal sex causes HIV/STDs” card. They just so happened to randomly quote from the explicit (and free) Cruising for Sex website to prove how dirty and evil “gloryholes” and those who would participate in them are….copyright violations be damned.

Funny, but all the CfS webmaster did was to say that NPNH violated his copyright by using his images and words without his permission; it’s not as if he’s trying to put them out of business….no, wait…isn’t that exactly what Adam and his crew are attempting to do to adult bookstores and to porn itself??? Can you say, “Pot/kettle hypocrisy,” Clones??

They then get to the issue of “certain pro-porn activists” (Uhhhh, please, Adam, try to give Ren Ev and Ernest Greene their deserved props for their idea!!) attempting to “stifle” StopPornCulture…though they, unlike Ren Ev, manage not to even link to the SPC website or their slideshow (which has now been removed from the SPC site, interestingly enough).

Unfortunately, Adam shoots himself in the foot with the first attempted shot:

According to Wikipedia, the 2257 Regulations “require producers of sexually explicit material to obtain proof of age for every model they shoot, and retain those records”. The primary goal of the regulations is to prevent the employment of underage performers, such as Traci Lords.

First off: Wikipedia?!?!?! Damn, Adam….you could have just quoted the regulation directly from the Department of Justice; why the need for Wiki??

Secondly…you do know that it was Traci herself who fabricated her age in order to get into porn before she was legal, right???

And finally….if the goal is really to prevent underage performers, then why not use existing laws against kiddie porn and not require 35 year old performers to provide such intimate and private information to the Feds?? Or, do you think that Nina Hartley is really a 17 year old trapped inside a 46 year old body???

Oh, but it gets so much better….here’s how NPNH explains why antiporn activists like them should get free passes from having 2257′s documenting regs apply to them:

To apply 2257 to the StopPornCulture slideshow is clearly unconstitutional. Under the First Amendment, restrictions on explicit expression that is not “obscene” must be as narrowly tailored as possible to achieve the government’s objective. Not only would application of 2257 to political critiques of the adult industry be overbroad, it would undermine the purpose of the statute–prevention of child porn–because the effect would be to severely impede criticism of the primary producers of pornographic material.

Application of 2257 would also be viewpoint discrimination because the record-keeping requirements would be so burdensome to nonprofit secondary producers as to shut down all multimedia presentations from that perspective. By contrast, the adult industry can far more easily absorb this inconvenience, both because of their wealth and because they are closer to the original production.

In other words, it is totally OK for the government to target (and for groups like NoPornNorthhampton) to target and censor sexually explicit media and imagery and slander its participants as either paid rapists and molestors (or mere mindless sluts and disease carriers, and even prosecute them or regulate them to financial ruin. But, if anyone dares to call out such efforts for the censorship it is….well, they are practicing “viewpoint discrimination” against “the little guys/girls” fighting the good fight against the defiling and degradation of women and children; not to mention defending “sexual capitalism” (Sam Berg’s favorite phrase) and the profits of the evil “sex slavery” trade.

Yeah, right.

Let me see now….OK, so Ernest Greene is a producer of porn, as well as an employee (so to speak) of Larry Flynt’s HUSTLER empire (in his stead as chief editor of TABOO magazine), and he happens to be Nina’s husband and occasional producer of her videos. And Ren Ev is a part-time performer of porn by her own right. That leaves moi (who has produced exactly…well, two or three pieces or written erotica that I got exactly NOTHING for); Peter (aka Iamcuriousblue); Trinity, and Amber Rhea….none of whom, as far as I know, have earned one red cent for our opinions on porn and such.

On the other hand, you have StopPornCulture, who exists as a non-profit organization which directly solicits funds for their projects, whose speakers (Gail Dines, Bob Jensen, Rebecca Wheishaut, et. al.) demand and receive royalties and honoraria for speaking at colleges and universities; and who directly receive money from “faith-based” groups backed by the Bush Administration.

But….it’s the “pro-porners” who are attempting to “stiffle” NPHN and SPC’s speech, right???? Ahhhhhhh…yeah.

Oh, yeah…and for folks who are always complaining about personal assaults on them, they are pretty quick to go personal on their critics, are they?? Here’s how they reset their justification of smacking down Ren:

Many things make no sense in Pornoland. The latest example is the position of Renegade Evolution, a porn advocate, “a bit pathological about the rights of free speech,” who objects to our linking to her public statements without permission (even though she linked to NoPornNorthampton on July 8 with no prior notice) and our referencing her material in a critical context. A key element of what free speech is about–truth emerging from open debate–seems to have escaped her…

Ren Ev carries on her arguments here, but the bottom line is she perceives referencing her speech to criticize it to be an inappropriate use that amounts to “exploitation”. I suppose you could characterize any critical examination of anyone’s speech in this way, although I doubt this encourages the kind of open debate the founders of our country prized. Free speech is not just isolated individuals spouting off without reference to each other.

Examining pornography and pro-porn arguments is critical to understanding how porn works, why it’s harmful, its addictive qualities, and the toxic, narrow version of sexuality it sells. We appreciate that porn advocates may be upset or embarrassed by having their materials used in this way, but their interests must be balanced against the harms the sex industry imposes on third parties and its own participants. We will not cease to use the industry’s copious amounts of self-damaging evidence against it. This includes cases of commercial exploitation of other people’s likenesses without their consent, a far less defensible act than referencing material to make a political argument.

Maybe Adam forgot when writing that first paragraph about the Founding Fathers that their concept of “open debate” tended to ignore certain groups of people…such as men who didn’t have lots of property or people of color….or WOMEN.

And of course, no one is denying Adam or anyone else (even freakin’ Witchy Woo or Stormcloud, for that matter) the right to be critical or Ren Ev in their own venues….she’s a big girl and can defend herself quite adequately. But, if you are going to fire nukes at other folks, you just gotta be able to accept that they will fire back in kind…and if you hit any innocent people with your fire, then you can’t blame the other fellow for your mistakes.

But just for Adam’s amusement, allow me to requote his last paragraph, albeit adjusted a bit to reflect the actual truth of the debate:

Examining erotophobia and extremist anti-porn “feminist” arguments is critical to understanding how sex-hate and sex fascism works, why it’s harmful, its addictive qualities, and the toxic, narrow, and restrictive version of sexuality it promotes. We appreciate that anti-porn advocates may be upset or embarrassed by having their materials used in this way, but their interests must be balanced against the harms that attempting to wipe out consensual adult sexual speech and sexual expression and sexual media imposes on third parties and its own participants. We will not cease to use the antiporn “feminist” groups’ copious amounts of self-damaging evidence against them. This includes cases of commercial exploitation of other people’s likenesses without their consent, a far less defensible act than referencing material to make a political argument.

And unlike NoPornNorthhampton, we don’t charge a fat fee for our activism….and our doors will remain open, as long as you are respectful.

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