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Mother Jones Jumps The Antiporn Shark; Endorses The Lubben/Dines/Trueman Lunacy (So Much For "Principled Progressive Journalism")

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Oh, swell.  Bad enough that AlterNet and several other outlets of “left” journalism have decided to go all-in on endorsing antiporn “feminist: ideology…but today we got the mother of all endorsements…this time from Mother Jones magazine.

Today, MJ released at their website an article by Stephanie Monciser claiming to be a reset of the events of last Tuesday’s “Pornography Harms” speakout in Washington, DC.

Unfortunately, it seems that the author must have either decided to impose her own antiporn biases on her coverage, or simply was reading off the talking points of the conference speakers.

The result was less of a rundown and more of a promo for all the tired cliches, anecdotes, and saw stories about the harms and “social costs” of porn, and a barely veiled endorsement of antiporn activism and policies.

All this, mind you, in a “leftist” magazine.

How deep is the suckage?? Let us fisk, my friends.

Have the Feds Gone Soft on Porn?

We all know how the Internet has changed the porn business. The video clips available for free to any pimply faced teen with a modem make Deep Throat look positively PG-rated. But might the Internet also change the anti-porn biz? Once the exclusive province of evangelical prudes like Phyllis Schlafly and furious feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, the evils of pornography are becoming more of a mainstream political issue—if only because most of us, at some point, have stumbled upon a site like www.naked.com while innocently searching for a fruit juice company.

OK, so porn’s availability on the Internet has made it more accessible. As if Playboy/Penthouse/HUSTLER pictorals and adult book stores and the Playboy Channel weren’t antagonizing the local censors during the last period of antiporn activism (the 1980′s) or that men and women didn’t have sex on the brain that often before VHS recorders and camcorders and digital cell phones??  And please…I watch plenty of porn as an adult all my life, and I never came upon naked.com. I never mistreated any women or beat or raped anybody, either. I guess that I’m an anomoly??

On Tuesday, a group of anti-porn activists and scholars arrived on Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress and their staffs and to call for beefed-up federal enforcement of obscenity laws. They weren’t there to fret about the pornographers of old: the loveable chauvinist Hugh Hefner and his scantily clad bunnies, or even the not-so-loveable-but-occasionally-principled First Amendment crusader, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. No, they had come to alert Congress to websites like GagFactor.com, whose teasers alone are way more graphic than anything Hefner ever published, and whose content doesn’t portend a spirited First Amendment defense.

Ahhhh…first off, even during Hef’s golden age of Playboy, there was HUSTLER publishing content just about as “graphic”. And Penthouse was showing full-on beaver shots long before the Internet was even born. Secondly, just how many people actually have even heard of GagFactor.com (which is a site dealing with women gagging while performing fellation on overly well endowed men) before the antiporn crusaders decided to use them as scapegoats for their crusade against ALL forms of explicit sexual media??

And as for the lack of a “spirited First Amendment defense”: I’d think that a magazine purporting itself to be progressive would mention the fact that the basic reason for the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment is NOT to protect speech that is already popular, but to protect speech that is the most unpopular…because the unpopular speech is usually the greatest targets for punitive censors to attack. I mean, if GagFactor was nearly as popular as what the antiporn censors say, then it wouldn’t be quite the easy target, right??

But of course, unlike the right-wing potentates they mime, liberal and “progressive” sex censors and antiporn “feminists” have to rationalize their beliefs with their supposed principles of free expression…hence, the maze of confusing rhetoric and the ‘rope-a-dope” tactics.

“The days of women wearing a coy smile and not much else are long gone,” Gail Dines explained to the congressional crowd. A women’s studies professor at Boston’s Wheelock College and author of the upcoming book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality, Dines has perused Gag Factor, and she described some of its content to the crowd—including a video of a woman with her head in a vice during oral sex. “Porn is an industrial product,” said Dines, who has studied the industry for 20-plus years. “I cannot believe how brutal it has become so quickly.” Gag Factor and their ilk, she added, are now the main source of sex education for boys.

Of course, the idea that gagging or getting off on a depiction of a woman porn actress doing a BJ while attached to a vise might not be the most arousing for the majority of male viewers or consumers of porn, or that depictions of eccentric porn scenes are really no indication of how the viewers really feel about women in general (or even the actress agreeing to do the dreaded “hummer in a vise” scene), gets somehow lost in the ether that Dines breathes continuously. In her mind and that of her associates, this is what ALL porn, even supposedly harmless nekkid women inserts, ultimately leads to, and this is how ALL men not cured by “radical feminist” or Christian fundamentalist principles get their sexual joneses off. And, of course, how porn helps capitalism make a shitload of cash, too. It’s as if Dines never heard of snuff films during the 1970′s and 1980′s.

If someone over their at that briefing had the ovaries to explain to Dines that the overwhelming majority of porn out there still consisted of the usual vanilla style sucking, licking, and fucking (mostly consisting of single girls masturbating or playing with toys, or married couples engaging in sex, or women playing with each other, would that change her view about all porn leading to scat, gag, and Max Hardcore?? Or that one of the prime producers of what she describes as the horrific, most misogynic porn happened to be a woman (Janet Zicaro/”Lizzie Borden”)??

But let us not digress too far…for Ms.Monsicer’s just warming up the orchestra.

Government prosecutors, the speakers said, haven’t kept pace with the industry’s rapid expansion. (In 1988, for instance, the adult entertainment industry released 1,300 porn videos. In 2005, it released more than 10 times as many.) Indeed, Patrick Trueman, a chief obscenity prosecutor at the Department of Justice under the first President Bush, stopped short of bashing Attorney General Eric Holder for going soft on porn. But he came mighty close, suggesting that the multibillion-dollar porn industry is a low priority for the Obama administration, even though the government typically prevails when it aims to shut down porn providers. Prosecuting the biggest fish, rather than the occasional small-fry consumer, Trueman suggested, would make a huge dent in the volume of online smut.

Obviously, this magnitudal increase in porn consumption  in nearly 20 years must be the work of organized crime or the Porn Mafia or the Great Male Mass Rape and Degradation Conspiracy…because technological advances such as HTML and portable camcorders and digital cameras and cheap personal desktop and laptop computers, plus revolutionary data storage and lightning fast broadband service, combined with plain old human curiosity and horniness, just couldn’t be responsible on its own…’ya think?

Also, it should be noted that most of the “successful” obscenity prosecutions that were delivered by the Justice Department’s Obscenity Task Force under Trueman were mostly cases involving either extreme acts that were already fundamentally unpopular due to their content approaching the line between consent and violence (such as the Max Hardcore and Lizzie Borden cases), or cases where they were able to forum shop for jurisdictions more fundamentalist and more likely to see their way (the John Stagliano case).Perhaps it was also because for Trueman, as it probably was for others in the former Bush Administration, busting porn was a hell of a lot easier fry and a greater emphasis than , say, environmental protection or civil rights enforcement; so much so that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was working day and night to expel regional attorneys who didn’t tow the antiporn line (and the “bust the liberals” line as well).

But all that doesn’t matter, since Trueman’s main goal isn’t to analyze porn viewer’s habits; it is to put them away for life and wipe any form of sexual expression not endorsed by the Religious Right off the face of the earth. Why Mother freakin’ Jones is quoting him as a valuable source is the real issue. I’m guessing, though, that like most antiporn liberals, the MJ editorial staffers decided that having Dines and Shelley Lubben over overrode any concerns about promoting the direct polar opposite of their belief system, and just let it slide in favor of peddling the antiporn “Left” position.

Christian-right groups have been complaining about porn forever, of course, and Trueman, a lawyer with the anti-gay Alliance Defense Fund, falls within that camp. But technology has made the right’s argument far more compelling, as the Internet has brought pornography to a far bigger and more vulnerable audience than ever before. The adult entertainment industry has fought to protect its burgeoning business by invoking the Constitution and arguing that its work is an expression of free speech. Its lobbying group, in fact, is called the Free Speech Coalition. And it’s true that the courts have found soft-core porn like Playboy, and the bookstores selling such wares, to be constitutionally protected. (For adults, that is. Legally, soft-core porn is labeled as harmful to minors.)

Courts have also struck down as unconstitutional previous attempts by Congress to curb Internet smut with restrictions like age-verification screens and bans on teaser photos. In one case, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that parents need only put filters on their computers if they wanted to protect their kids—apparently unaware of data showing that many parents are also downloading porn.

Note the term “vulnerable”..as if people are simply incapable of making their own decisions and passing their own judgment on what they see and hear and watch. Mostly, because if people see that porn is relatively harmless and only induces people to play with their genitals or even maybe have sex with other people, then they might question all the nonsense about sexual prudery and “modesty” that they have been impaled with since all eternity.

The crack about “softcore porn is labeled as harmful to minors” is simply disingeneousness to the ultimate…since surely they know that everything from “parental advisory” labeled  CD’s to softcore late night skin flicks are readily available to people simply by getting their legal adult friends to purchase the stuff. And how can they tell that simply being “exposed” to full on erections, naked nipples, bare asses, bared midriffs and split beaveer shots will automatically turn “regular” humans into bezerk, stark-raving animals ready to attack every woman they see?? Because the Bible or Saint Andrea Dworkin said so??

Also, the fact that “parents” are downloading porn means….what?? That they are incapable of setting boundaries and limiting their young children from doing the same?? Or are only fundie Christains and/or radical feminists the only ones that can be treusted to control their baser instincts and run away from the dreaded Porn Demon??

But according to Trueman, much of the explicit material found on the Internet these days isn’t protected speech but obscenity, which is prosecutable. That means there’s likely no First Amendment protection for Gag Factor and other sites that trade in close-ups of graphic acts, lewd genital displays, sexual violence, and all the gross stuff—bestiality, incest, excretory functions—that meets the legal definition of obscenity.

Thankfully, for now at least, Trueman’s opinions on obscenity law remain just that: his opinion. As of today, the Miller Standard still exists regarding local interpretation of obscenity laws, in spite of the best efforts of the Religious Right and the Radfems to tweak the law to their own ends. But the question remains, again: why is a progressive magazine like MJ uncritically promoting his position as the default liberal position as well??

Next raving lunatic, please.

Making the point with blurry PowerPoint skin shots was Donna Rice Hughes, an “Internet safety expert” better known as the woman photographed sitting in Gary Hart’s lap as the then-presidential candidate sailed his boat, the Monkey Business, en route to the Bahamas. Hughes has since reinvented herself as an anti-porn activist. “For 15 years, children have been spoon-fed a steady diet of pornography,” she noted.

Hughes wasn’t just pushing the standard hysteria. Studies, she explained, have found that more than 40 percent of kids age 10 to 17 have checked out porn online, and many are checking out child porn, too. More compelling were her slides, used to illustrate just how easy it is to find porn simply by accident: Searching a generic term like “watersports” can turn up a host of sites featuring pictures and videos of women getting peed on. Then there’s the Boys.com/Boyz.com mix-up, which sends kids looking for a primer on teen fashion (the former) to a site offering an unfiltered view of graphic anal sex (the latter). According to Hughes, research suggests that the age of first exposure to this sort of visual is 11.

Hughes suggested that the porn industry is intentionally designing websites to lure in young users, too, in much the same way that the tobacco industry has: with cartoons. Consider “DisneyPornLand,” a site where kids can see Disney characters having sex, and freebies—graphic teaser clips available to anyone, regardless of age.

I guess that it would have been a really bad time for someone to interrupt and say that antiporn propaganda is as much responsible for promoting “watersports” as a gateway for…well, watersports, since it’s pretty likely that the people who are into golden showers probably didn’t get there merely by badly planted Google or Yahoo! searches. Not to mention the basic fact that in order to actually get into the really explicit sites, you need a credit card and serious ID…and someone will ultimately discover the credit statement down the line. I know of few 13 year olds who have credit cards not given them by their parents, you know.

Plus, unless you happen to believe in the “gateway/slippery slope” theory that ALL porn leads directly to the most graphic, horrorific, and vomit-inducing, itt’s far more likely that most adolescents who are exposed to porn during their developing years tend to find the same vanilla-style porn that most consenting adults regularly consume, not the “extreme gross-out” stuff so favored by Hughes and the like. That they tend as much to continue to act and live like nomal developing human beings seems not to reach the working synapes of our porn demonizers. Then again, letting reality get in the way of a good witch burning never was a feature of antiporn activist (un)thinking.

Oh..and if the former Donna Rice wants to believe that XXX spoofs and hardcore satire of popular Disney cartoon characters.are the basic equivalent of kiddie porn invented to corrupt the morals of impressionalble kids…..well, I guess you can’t please everybody.

She then played a short clip of interviews she has done with teenagers talking about the effect of porn on their lives and relationships. Hughes chats with “Justin, 16,” who freely admits to having a porn addiction problem. She asks whether the girls he eventually did have sex with were anything like the ones he saw in the videos. “No, ma’am. The girls in real life are nothing like in pornography,” Justin replies. “I’ve never had a girl want to do the same stuff those women did.” The bemused look on his face is worth a thousand words.

And this is a problem….how??? I thought that the principal knock on porn was that they portrayed women in real life as nothing more than “cumdumpsters” and “bi-hot sexeeee sluts” whose only purpose in life was to drop to her knees in front of every male erection they see and give up their rectums, vaginas, and mouths for the pleasure of men. In other words, porn is just an exaggerated fantasy that is not quite in touch with reality?? Of course, it’s just as if not more likely that the megative messages about women in porn and sexually assertive women can be spread just as often by people who are so threatened by women and men deliberatively breaking down the imposed restrictions and moral stopgaps that have regulated sexuality for millenia. People mosty like….antiporn activists??? No wonder why rightwingers and their radfem colleagues support sexual shaming and extreme guilttripping as acceptable policy in curing men and “slutty” women of their “sins” (or of the implanted myths of “the patriarchy”).

Oh, but I haven’t even gotten to the epic climax of the day’s business: Shelley Lubben’s turn at the mic. I will have to hold that for Part 2 of this essay; I have pressing business in order and have to go offline for a bit. But trust me, Clones, she is her typical off-the-chain whack.  I’ll be back, to paraphrase the Governator.

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EdenFallacys…Errrrrrrrr, EdenFantasys.com: Now Officially The BP Of Sex Toy Websites…Except That All That Flows From Their Well Is BS (Updated)

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[Updated....scroll to bottom.] [Updated again.]


Since I last posted on the troubles of the EdenFantasys.com website and their basic fundamental issues with manipulating outside links and denying outsiders their proper credit (what we would call pixellized plagarism), things have only blown up to a magnitude.

For those of you not familiar, EF was busted by sex blogger Maymay (over at Maybe Maimed, But Not Harmed) for using crafty Javascript chicanery to basically cloak links gathered from outside sources so that they would become invisible to search engine bots like Google and Yahoo!, converting them to internal links within their family of sites. The effect was to artificially game the system to boost their own site read counts at the expense of the original creators of links that they were, in effect, stealing from. To put it directly, EF was taking links from outside sources (and aggressively recruiting them, too, through “link exchanges” and affiliate agreements with other sites like AlterNet.org) and creating a virtual black hole “Roach Hotel” where incoming links get in, but links to the outside were hijacked and scrubbed before they got out, so that bots could not count them correctly.

This would be bad enough, were it not for the fact that EdenFantasys had also been building up a pretty bad reputation before hand for its treatment of some popularly known and loved sex bloggers.  Always Aroused Girl (AAG), for example, has well documented her battle with EF regarding some back pay that was due her for work rendered with them. Essem ‘Em has her own stories of how she was treated by the brass of EF after a Google Document spreadsheet containing personal information was inadvertently leaked to the public.And then there is the story of Epiphora, who got booted from the EF forums under what can only be described as “questionable circumstances”. Maymay himself originally started his own investigation leading to his groundbreaking post because the EF brass raised hell over his own site using a link to an article that, while originating from EF, was also posted to AlterNet. (Apparently, the idea that contributors can often link to different sites got lost in the translation..or EF was just that damn greedy for the Alexa ratings.)

Well….the popular saying goes that the original crime usually doesn’t kill as much as the attempt to cover it up. If the efforts of EdenFantasys are any indication, then British Petroleum might have a bit of competition in the Grand Cover-Your-Ass MegaFAIL competition.

There are so many ways that a company can react to getting caught doing wrong. Consider the following to be the official list of how NOT to come correct and resolve your behavior.

First off…it is probably not a good idea to respond to your critics by censoring them out of your forums. Especially, if said critics have caches to save their censored posts before you drop the hammer on them. Or..if they have their own damn blogs. Case in point: Epiphora:

Well, apparently my painful-to-my-eyes comment was TAKEN VERY SERIOUSLY:

I have been working hard to not only introduce Eden Fantasys to parts of the blogosphere that have never before heard of us, but also to get them comfortable with us. And that’s hard to do when there are people undermining that work, effort and fragile trust by seeking out reviews to vote down, leave snotty comments on, etc. This goes hand in hand with what I said in my thread about the Off-site Review Program — bloggers have their own voices, just as all of you do, and they’re entitled to use those voices to present their reviews, even if they do so in a manner that you don’t agree with or find appealing — or on a blog whose layout you don’t find to be visually appealing.

So by this reasoning, anyone who rates a review “not useful at all” should be worried, as should the people who agreed with me that the blog is painful to the eyes. And by the way, I do not SEEK OUT reviews for any reason. I subscribe to the reviews RSS feed, and only open reviews of toys that look interesting to me. But sure, go ahead and spread lies.

This part — this is the part that really got me:

Epiphora’s recent behavior is nothing new; we made the decision to permanently ban her because she is a repeat offender, and the fact that she is a repeat offender clearly shows that she has no regard or respect for the community — that includes all of you, not just the “community” in terms of the forums here on Eden Fantasys and the EF staff.

Excuse me, but how dare you? Did you really just say that I have no respect for anyone, let alone the sex blogging community? Somehow I think my readers, followers, and friends would disagree. Entirely.

Apparently this has “been coming for a long time” and I am a “repeat offender.” Right. A repeat offender — and 2 1/2 year veteran — who was never warned. Never flagged. And who never committed any offenses worse than anyone else. The decision is final.

So, let me get this straight…..a well respected blogger gets run from a forum without any warning, without ever being flagged for her comments, and without even a wave…because she criticizes a blog theme as “painful to the eyes”?!?!? Did Sam Berg’s twin sister take over that forum, by any chance??

Ahhhh, but it gets better…turns out that when Maymay’s story broke and people attempted to use the EF forums to ask basic fundamental questions about their shady practices, the moderators’ response was to go to the time honored tactic of the guilty: They simply banned those critics and wiped their posts clean off the map. Or, to use a popular phrase down here: they “zipped” them.

An example from another sex blogger whom have had issues with EF in the recent past, BritniTheVagiwig from Oh, God, That Britni’s Shameless (from this post):

I posted a link to Maymay’s article detailing EF’s unethical “linking” practices in the EF forum. As you know, I already posted about them here. Well, EF being the “transparent” and classy place that they are, removed the post. See? It no longer exists. But, fear not! I still had the page up and screencapped it, so you can see that this thread did actually exist.

[capped original pages from EF forum redacted for length, you can read them over there at Britni's blog post here]

[...]

If the picture isn’t working for you, AAG has individual screengrabs of the thread.

EF claims to be about “transparency” and “community,” when, in fact, they’re about none of those things. And this? Is complete and total bullshit. Anyone that still defends this company is unethical, too. There’s no defending this crap.

EDIT: I have now been blocked by EF, and was not given a warning, or an email explanation. At all. I just went to log in, and it told me my account was locked. I’m the third person that I know of. To me, it looks like they’re trying to get rid of anyone that could possibly know (and spread) the truth. The truth hurts, don’t it? That’s called “damage control.”

Not only that, comments are being deleted all over the forum. Comments are there and then gone. Threads are, too. Threads say “new comment,” yet nothing is there, implying deletion. Myself, Sex and Law, and Holly (Woman Tribune) were all locked out of our accounts for posting comments or threads pointing out the error of EF’s linking policies. [...]

Ahhh, but not to worry…EF justifies their censorship…errrrrrrrr…their protection of their assets from undue criticism.

And here is the bullshit explanation they’ve given, which as you can see, people are still letting them know is incorrect. The “examples” they cite aren’t even backing up their point. None of them use the same script that EF does, even though they’re citing them as examples. And anyone that tries to point that out, or why it’s unethical, is being deleted. You can read Google’s explanations of why “sneaky Javascript redirects” are unethical and wrong here. [...]

What…..bullshit, you say??  You mean, like this elongated post written by the president of EdenFantasys attempting to defend their linkage theft??

[Originally posted at EF's forum, reposted at AAG's blog here]

Dear contributors,

I want to address recent concerns about EdenFantasys’ linking practices.
I am talking about multiple links placed on our website by thousands of contributors: reviewers, forum participants, manufacturers and general users.

Thousands of users post daily on EdenFantasys. These are posts on the forum, reviews, commentaries, personal profiles and today we even opened up our video platform EdenTube. This is all user-generated content (UGC) which requires special handling to assure our website is not damaged with malicious software that could compromise our commerce operations, credit card security compliance procedures, and overall could shut down the website.

It is a common practice on all user-driven websites, including giants like Facebook, MySpace, Yelp or any of the others. You read from time to time about disastrous outbreaks of trojans – virus software – inserted this way into platforms. When it is detected that the posted content contains scripting, linking or other coding symbols beside just alphanumeric characters, the standard coding procedure is to raise a security alert flag. Then there are two ways to handle this: a program can erase / delete all coding from the content or encapsulate it into a separate module that won’t be able to interfere with the rest of the website.
EdenFantasys uses high efficient and the most advanced Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX with DotNET and JQuery frameworks to handle this technical problem. As a matter of fact, our server logs detect over 1,000 daily attempts to insert malicious software on all available user-submit forms. These technologies allow us to be a safe and reliable place.

Some helpful examples include these sites, which do the same JavaScript-based encapsulation:

[list of "links" removed because they all pointed to EF instead of the intended sites]

Those are just a few of the millions of sites who utilize this linking practice as means for protection of user-generated content on interactive platforms.

All linking within SexIs Magazine, on contributor profiles, and elsewhere on EF have always been encapsulated. This allows us to be able to display all of the content instantly without pre-moderation and to share traffic with our contributors.

If there is anyone here whose promise was not met, please contact us and we’ll address the problem immediately. We all appreciate your patience here. The allegations made by a few individuals are misguided, misinformed and surely confusing to most people. This is the stuff of highly experienced programmers and it is easy to twist such information out of context. I wanted to address it here for your reassurance. We care deeply about our community, and as you can see, this is another way we endeavor to make Eden a safe place to play and shop.

Eden is my greatest passion, watching this community grow and seeing people interact with each other on so many levels has been a dream come true. There is no other place like this, and I truly feel that we have the best community out there. We are looking forward to even better times and more exciting features in the future. Thank you to every person who has made Eden such a special and welcoming place!

And then, the lead programmer of EF decides to double up on the doublespeak.

I am the lead programmer here at Eden – here is my input, I hope it is helpful!

99% of modern browsers support JavaScript and it is turned on by default. On our website, we heavily use JavaScript, AJAX, JQuery Framework and XML in order to make information available faster, more secure. Most parts of our website will not work without JavaScript.

In most cases modern search engines do not understand the dynamic information, although it would be highly beneficial for us if they did, since they are missing a lot of information.

As software developers, we will continue to use JavaScript because we believe that the dynamic applications are the future of Internet and are better for our customers.

Thanks!

It would have been a wonderful defense….were it all true. AAG came up with the Word of the Year to describe this: “Bullshitilicious.”

This is bullshit of the highest order of magnitude, folks. It’s even more bullshitilicious when you consider the posts they removed from that thread before locking it:


And this, courtesy of Mistress Kay:


Or this, courtesy of Sex & Law:

Why did EF not want these questions raised? Because any explanations they can give are nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

All sites need security measures in place to keep users with malicious intent from causing damage. I’m sure EF has implemented many valid techniques to deal with hacking and spam. But this linking scheme is not one of them. Ask yourself this: Would EF really be concerned about malicious content on Aslan Leather’s profile page? Isn’t Aslan Leather a trusted enough “partner” with EdenFantasys to be worthy of an honest link back to their site? The very simple answer is the best answer: Of course they should have a real link; a link that is visible to human eyes and to Google. Every verified manufacturer and contributor should have a real link, instead of an “encapsulated” link. This is the kind of link that reputable sites give their friends and even their competitors.

And Maymay himself took little time to debunk this mountain of crap (from here, also again via AAG):

I read their response, and investigated (briefly) some of the other sites they claim are using “encapsulation,” a term I’ve never heard of in this context before. I believe they are using a classic smoke-and-mirrors tactic, a classic “we’re doing it for your your own good, your safety, your security” misdirection, which is disingenuous. I call bullshit on EdenFantasys’s response, because the proof of the other websites’ innocence is underneath the “View source” button, just like the proof of their guilt is.

Here is a snippet of code of a link from one of the sites Fred mentioned, Lifehacker:

<a href="http://www.proteron.com/">LiteSwitch X</a> [Site via <a href="http://onethingwell.org/post/610183401/liteswitch-x">One Thing Well</a>

The above snippet was taken from the page at http://lifehacker.com/5541901/liteswitch-x-makes-macs-application-switcher-far-more-useful.

That snippet of code from Lifehacker, as you have already no doubt guessed, is exactly the same with and without JavaScript. It’s exactly the same in Safari and Firefox. It’s exactly the same on a Mac and a PC. It’s exactly the same for humans and for Googlebot. It’s exactly the same as other links on Lifehacker.com, even though it’s a link that points off-site.

So where is the “encapsulation” Fred is talking about? Maybe in his head. Or maybe he only wants his disingenuous story to be in the heads of non-technical users.

All of you can do exactly what I’ve done to test his claims. Disable JavaScript and view source. If you don’t already know the reality, then look into it for yourself, and then try to reconcile what you see with EdenFantasys’s story.

Let’s look again at EdenFantasys’s code for “links,” again with JavaScript disabled:

<span ID="EFLink_68034_fe64d2">female consumers make up 56% of video sales.</span>

In no way do the two snippets bear any significant resemblance. Fred’s claim that other sites like Lifehacker are doing the same kind of sneaky JavaScript redirects is a flat-out lie. The audacity of his statement (he must have known someone would challenge the claim), is stunning.

The more EdenFantasys tries to throw smoke in the face of their unethical behavior, the more obvious their deception becomes, and you don’t need to be a professional web developer to tell the difference.

When it comes to technology, I don’t believe openness and honesty based on promises should be sufficient. When it comes to technology, demand actually honest and open code. Demand transparency, otherwise you get people like Fred making promises and crying “safety!” while doing exactly the kind of unethical SEO as they’re doing.

So no, I totally don’t buy their response. Not even a little. Not even close.

Moreover, the kind of link-filtering EdenFantasys describe doing for “safety” is a technique already implemented by sites like Twitter and Facebook, which both function very differently from the way EdenFantasys does. Arguing that removing offsite links and programmatically altering links in syndicated content to point back to themselves for “security” reasons is a weak straw-man argument. There are more effective ways to offer security, and I think any technical professional worth their salt can understand that.

That post he made is not intended to clear his company’s name, it’s intended to placate the already loyal and to confuse the as-yet undecided.

Violet Blue (the Sex Blogger, of course) has already quaintly called EdenFantasys' sitch a "reputation crisis". I'd say that it's more like a freakin' nuclear meltdown. Several bloggers have now joined in a very public boycott of not only EF's retail service, but also the services of SexIs, their online magazine (no small feat, considering that the latter features the likes of Nina Hartley and Rachel Kramer Bussel as regular contirbutors), and a campaign to get Google to intervene to sanction EF for violating their rules of proper crediting and linkage is also underway. Only time will tell whether the power of the wallet will be enough to shame EF into submitting to reality of Internet etiquette and protocol...but the damage to their respect amongst the sex+ blogging community may never be undone...maybe even as soiled as the poor animals off the Gulf Coast awash in BP's black crude.

A nice and complete chronology of linkage (all of it real and original, of course!!) to all of the gramd EpicFAIL that is EdenFantasys can be found at Heartbreak Nymphomania.

Update: Oh, nice going, EdenFantasys....or, as I will now go ahead and call them now, EdenFALLACYS.  You couldn't help yourselves with censoring people who posted to your forum...but now you are targeting people who merely post criticism of you...on Twitter?!?!?

Quoteh Juliettia:

It seems that while I have broken no rules of conduct much less posted in the forums since Epiphora’s wrongful banning, that my own account was locked tonight without any warning or explanation.  While EdenFantasy Staff cannot be expect staff to monitor the forum 24 hours a day you can bet that they have a watchful eye on twitter at all hours of the day.

Not more than twenty minutes after I tweeted to Epiphora to add me to her list of those who were leaving #Edenfallacys was I suddenly logged off of my EdenFantasys account. Upon trying to log back in red text glared on the screen stating that my account had been locked and I needed to call customer service.

WAY TO GO EDENFALLACYS! You’ve banned/locked/’cooled-off’ my account due to something that I said off-site. Not only did you ban me based on something I said off site without mentioning you, you also did not provide a warning or e-mail as to your explanation of such. I know it’s not personal because other reviewers have voiced they too were locked out. Of course you don’t owe me an explanation, as you’ve made it clear you owe NO ONE a truthful explanation for anything. We’re all just lying right? Right.

At first I was on the fence of continuing to review for Eden after the way staff responded (or lack there of) to the concerns and questions surrounding Epiphora’s banning. However the recent behavior of deleting threads/posts containing concerns voiced by other contributors after the discovery of Edens unethical link farming while claiming that they do not delete or alter threads and posts in combination of banning my account for no GOOD reason aside from being butt-hurt has only reaffirmed my decision.

We are not children to whom you can say, “YOU’RE GROUNDED GO TO YOUR ROOM!” *banhammer*, instead we are adults with real questions and concerns about the company that claims to care about what the contributors think. If you have nothing to hide then you would not be deleting posts and threads. Instead you would ease the concerns with an answer that makes sense rather than a pile of bullshit containirng bullshit examples that was proven to be bullshit. Sorry Eden, but some of us are not sheep. You can’t just pull the wool over our eyes and scold us for daring to say something that isn’t filled with the sounds of puckering lips.

It’s no doubt that Eden has fucked up. It’s not just the contributors anymore. Other sex toy companies and sex celebrities have noticed as well. Hell even Tristan Taormino retweeted the problem. This is growing and I cannot even predict the impact that it could have. As the saying goes, “Just one upset customer can be the end of your business.”  That one then becomes hundreds. Word of mouth in today’s internet advanced society is a powerful thing.

Update #2 [5-22-10]: Epiphora just posted a scathing update that consolidates pretty clearly how assholic EdenFantasys has been, with ever growing horror stories of sex bloggers and former EF customers recounting their experiences. If EF was a corporation, then right about now they would be up before a House committee, under oath.

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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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Nine Deuce = Four Six * 2 + BS Raised To Infinity

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Oh, and I thought that she was just doing a Good Cop/Bad Cop scene.

But it seems that Nine Deuce has now totally drank the Kool-Aid, and has dived all in. And she offers this “News Flash” to all us idiots who still can’t understand why she’s so down on those who don’t quite agree with her and her GenderBorgian friends.

Allow me to break down each of her talking points one by one.

The existence of gay porn does not disprove the argument that non-gay porn is degrading to women. There might be a different dynamic going on in a lot of gay porn (I remain unconvinced), but that doesn’t really mean anything other than that maybe gay porn needs to be analyzed by itself rather than under an umbrella with hetero porn. What we’re talking about when we talk about het pornography is the comingling of power with sex, which is THE CENTRAL FEATURE OF PATRIARCHY.

Well…if the existence of gay porn shows that men who are into gay porn don’t quite care about “degrading” women (or, simply like to see men fucking and sucking other men), well, it probably doesn’t prove anything. Unless, you happen to believe, as some of your own allies and bomb throwers just so happen to believe (*cough*Luckynkl *cough, cough* Satsuma *cough*) that male sexual obsession for gay sex only replaces the recipient of gay sex for the woman in the “submissive” (and thusly, “degraded” and “abused”) role. Otherwise, you’re right, it proves not a Goddess damn thing about how straight male desire for porn inherently “degrades” women. That, I guess, is a given that needs no proof whatsoever…at least not to pure “feminist” masters such as you.

Choice does not equal progressiveness. You can choose to do heroin if you want to, and it might feel fucking awesome, but that doesn’t make you a freedom fighter. You can be a feminist and be into BDSM, but you can’t claim that BDSM is feminist. Just because something feels good does not mean it’s feminist.

No, some choices are not necessarily harmless to one’s self or others. Injecting a syringe full of heroin into your body certainly can do much harm to one’s person. Engaging in consensual sex with someone whom you want to be with, and who wants to be with you sharing the pleasures, however, isn’t quite so harmful as injecting heroin, now isn’t it?? Not, at least, unless it fundamentally upsets certain fee-fees of certain lunatic “radicalfeminists.”

And no, ND, you just don’t get to dictate to other women what acts become “feminist” and what acts aren’t. Feminists can be into BDSM, and even feminist who would never do BDSM sex themselves can respect the rights of those women — whether they call themselves feminists or not — who are. Unless you are endowed by the Goddess upstairs or the Rulers Above (hey, wouldn’t the latter be, like..a PATRIARCHY?!?!?!) with special powers to dictate their personal likes, then I don’t think you have the authority to read their minds and rule their brains.

F/m BDSM (generally) does not fetishize and sexualize the oppression of people who are still oppressed. Therefore, its existence does not prove that there’s nothing problematic about the mingling of sex with oppression in M/f BDSM, burlesque or not. Again, it’s a matter of the need for separate analysis.

Oh, hold the fuck up here….so female dominant/male submissive sex is perfectly OK with you even if it goes horribly awry because it doesn’t involve mixing sex with “oppression”??? In other words, it’s perfectly OK to harm men BECAUSE men innately harm women by merely THINKING about dominating them through sex?? I thought that radicalfeminism was opposed to ALL forms of domination and submission equally across the board?? Ahhh..OOPS.

Questioning a practice does not equal abuse or oppression. And you can’t spend 15 paragraphs explaining that BDSM, as a “choice,” fits the (warped) definition of feminism and then compare the consequences of your choice to the oppression that lesbians and gay men face. Unless you are ready to say that female submission is innate or that being gay is a choice.

I guess that means, then, that religious conservatives really do have a right to question BDSM sex as a “choice” on their terms?? Because , ND, if you are saying that being a gay person really isn’t a choice, but being into BDSM sex IS one that can be “undone”, when what’s to say that that Christian Rightist might not use your argument to support the opposite view (i.e., that BDSM sex is merely a perverse “lifestyle” that defies God’s plan for sex, just as homosexuality or non-procreative sex does?? And why should we not compare you to the fundies when you use terms like “consequences of your ‘choices’”??

In order for me to oppress you, I have to be in charge of something that directly affects your life. I’m not.

Ahhhh, WRONG…..all you have to do in order to oppress someone is to deny that person his right to full humanity and dismiss his/her right to free will. You and your GenderBorg sisters do that almost every other post.

If I were truly denying anyone’s agency, I’d refuse to question their assumptions and behavior. I assume we are all responsible for the choices that we make, even though social forces tend to influence those choices. I know that there are people who are aware that M/f BDSM and/or porn are tinged (or saturated) with patriarchal oppression and choose to participate in them anyway, either because there is some benefit in doing so or because they think they can do them “the right way.” I doubt that’s possible, so I’m asking people who think it is to explain how that might be. Would it be better for me to treat other adult human beings like babies who can’t bear to be asked defend their beliefs?

Well…it would help if you actually respected those who attempt to defend themselves from your bromides, rather than simply use their answers as fuel for your cannons to shoot them down even more.

I can have a theoretical problem with something and speak my mind about it without specifically addressing an individual. If you don’t fit the definition of the kind of person I’m discussing, don’t take it personally. Everyone has the right to judge everyone, but we don’t have the right to enforce our judgements. Therein lies the difference between free speech and oppression.

Oh, why should we even take it seriously?? Especially when you deliberately temper your responses with ad hominem attacks on people’s looks or personal tastes, or basically call people you disagree with as rapists and child molesters even when they have done nothing wrong?? Even when you attempt to wave the exclusive “feminist” flag to rip down anyone who happens to disagree with your analysis of their personal practices?? When you even go as far as to deny and dismiss their own freakin’ testimonials about their lack of personal harm?? Gee, now that’s a really good question there, ND….why should we take you seriously??

Your bigotry and ignorance, on the other hand, should be taken very seriously, simply because it is being spewed in the name of a movement that is supposed to stand for something progressive rather than reactionary.

This is “Logic 101″, ND?? More like Bullcrap One.

——————————————————————————————————-

The comments section is dominated by the usual voices with the usual boilerplate…until right to the end, where ND exposes her true paternalistic self. First, the comment before hers as a background:

[Comment by thorne on 2/26/09 @ 6:00 PM]

“Gayle – No shit, right? It’s incredible to hear the language of the oppressed co-opted by people who fetishize oppression.”

Did your read the part where we explained that we can be jailed or lose our kids? have you heard of the spanner case? Does it amuse you to play “this group is more oppressed than that group”? Our community has real life problems hate speach being the least of them.

We do not fetishize oppresion. What we do is power exchange. Power exchange does not magically turn evil whe it is MF instead of FM or FF or whatever.

I get that you want to make the point that the kink community is just and excuse for a bunch of male sadists to justify their abuse of woman. I get that the hundreds of comments by men and woman and the ocean of websites that explain otherwise will make no impression here.

I am also not taken in by the wide eyed, “all we are doing is questioning bdsm. If you lifestyle is ok why does it bother you when I we question it?”

It depends what the questionis doesn’t it?

Is it just innocent inquiry when someone wants to know if gay men are more likely to abuse children, and then asks the question over and over?

Oh, but get a load of ND’s reply to that one:

[Posted by Nine Deuce on 2/26/09 @ 6:27 PM]

Stop comparing your situation to the plight of homosexuals. And stop comparing my arguments to those of asshole homophobes. There is something to the idea that M/f BDSM fetishizes women’s oppression, and you aren’t going to take attention from that by setting up a false and easily discredited analogy.

Why are people getting fired for being into BDSM? Ah Talking about sex at work isn’t cool, whether you’re straight, gay, into BDSM, or celibate. It’s just not appropriate. And to be honest, if I were a parent, I’d be concerned if my child’s other parent were into BDSM because I wouldn’t want my child exposed to it. It’s absolutely ridiculous to think you ought to have the right to normalize that kind of behavior in front of children who haven’t got the critical thinking abilities to understand what’s going on.

We all know that the vast majority of child molesters are straight men, which has been shown in study after study. I’m asking the questions about BDSM because what I’ve seen on a lot of websites amounts to serious emotional and physical abuse, and because I have, whatever you guys want to claim to the contrary, read women’s writings about being upset and frightened by the treatment they receive. The fact that I’m not yet convinced that what you’re into is cool and meshes with feminism doesn’t make me dishonest, it just means that I’ve yet to be convinced that black is white and up is down.

Yup….people into BDSM who happen to get fired from their workplaces deserve to be fired because they boast about their work there. And….obviously, people who do BDSM should not be allowed anywhere around children..or, I assume, even to have or raise children, lest they be pollluted with such “degradation” and violence. Spoken like a true feminist, indeed…who happens to be an agent for the local Sex Morality Police Squad. Lou Sheldon would be proud of ‘ya, ND.
P.S. Ren Ev dispatches ND’s crap with the usual flourish here….and check out Ernest’s comment within, too.



P.P.S.: Natalia adds her own personal smackdown here…and Ren has a sarcastic follow-up. And also, see Trinity.

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More Anti-BDSM Whackoid Smack From The GenderBorg (Your Turn, Polly!!)

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Just as I promised earlier….more highlights for the mighty FAILFest that is the Great GenderBorg Anti-BDSM Crusade.

If you remember, all this started when Nine Deuce over at Rage Against the Manchine decided to mine her radfem credentials to blast women who are into BDSM sex as mere tools and “slaves” of men and perpetuators of “female slavery”…since the men who are into male domination in that particular subculture are nothing more than rapists. (Actually, ND tends to think that any and ALL men who are into ANY kind of porn or “patriarchial” sex not to her liking are prima facie rapists and abusers of women….it’s just that male doms are, to her, the most open and explicit examples.) A couple of male doms and their significant other “slaves” came in to defend themselves and their professed tastes; whereapon the rest of the GB tribe ambushed them as ignorant, blind traitors (for the women) or outright rapists (for the men).

I won’t reset all of the debate, since ND, Renegade Evolution, and the usual participants have more than enough documentation for you to ponder.

But I will today reference a particularly “brilliant” (in the way that serial killers, Dick Cheney, and Newt Gingrich  are brilliant) piece of GenderBorgian anti-BDSM agitprop produced by Polly Styrene at her own blog which attempts to make the case of how BDSM is so innately anti-woman. Basically, it says a lot more about the thinly-veiled biases and deep assumptions of GenderBorgian ideology than it does about the men and women who freely practice BDSM sex.

The prejudice comes right out with the title:

BDSM is violence against women

Yup…..even if the woman is dominant and the man is the submissive, it’s all about the woman being “violated”. But I guess that that doesn’t matter to Polly, since fem dommes don’t even exist.

Polly then begins with the usual mocking snark at women defending their sexual kinks:

You heard. Oh but oh noes, menz get beaten up too! Hmm, yes and men are sometimes sex workers, as Mr Douglas Fox constantly points out.

Now of course y’all are sitting here now, and going “But I’m into BDSM, and all that ever happens is that my manz handcuffs me with the  pink fluffy Ann Summers handcuffs and spanks me lightly. It’s a power exchange doncha know”

Only men who are “pimps” and “punters”, of course….never real live sex workers. And of course, only rich and privileged and pampered women who are so stupid as to partake in such anti-woman sex practices would ever come forth to defend such brutality.

She then resets Nine Deuce’s “experiment” of placing an ad in a local paper pretending to be a sub looking for a “power exchange”, which results in the usual biased and tainted analysis of the respondents:

The dudes in the first group were the least overtly terrifying of the bunch, but they were creepy and offensive in their own way. Most of them wrote what could best be described as novellas and used the word “art” in their comical and terribly written blatherings about their BDSM “philosophies.” Their descriptions of their sexual fantasies were like letters to Penthouse Forum written by dudes who wear eyeliner, with a lot of “trembling,” “aching,” and “quivering” in between the generous helpings of “pussy” and “cock.” They all described the mental and physical sensations they would cause our poster to experience down to the last detail with the kind of confidence that only men who are terrible in bed possess. Nearly all of them explained that their ultimate purpose was to help their submissives grow as human beings and that they understood that feminism had caused emotional conflicts for women who felt the “natural” “feminine” urge to submit to a (much older and wiser, naturally) man/dad/teacher (for a bunch of purportedly countercultural motherfuckers, these guys sounded an awful lot like Promise Keepers). Many of them addressed our poster as “little one.” Honestly, I thought I was reading the lyrics to a George Michael song half the time. Retch is right. These guys may have even fooled themselves into believing that their particular sexual fetishes are the kinds of things that women “crave deep within their souls,” but they’re kidding themselves with all their talk of transgression.

Now, let’s ignore the smack that ND implies that she knows from these respondents that they really would be “terrible in bed” based on their responses to her “ad”. (OK…you don’t really know these blokes, but you can pass judgment on their personal sex lives merely based on their responses because…what?? Special GenderBorg ESP??? Or merely imposing and projecting your pre-imposed biases about men and sexuality on them?? And remember, these were the least offensive of the bunch.

Then there were the dudes who didn’t bother to pretend there was any kind of philosophical basis for their desire to dominate and humiliate (their words, not mine) women. Their responses were all detailed descriptions of the kinds of sex acts they’d be carrying out on her, with nary a question about what she might fancy. They got very specific about the kinds of tools they were bringing to the table (literally and figuratively) and exactly how they would restrain our poster so they could “rape” her “asshole” and whip her “tits” and “cunt” with whatever instrument their shockingly uncreative minds could come up with (usually a belt). They too described the sensations this would cause for the poster, because they were just positive that they could make her “cum over and over” by hitting her and calling her a “filthy little slut,” a “cum slut,” or a “little whore.” These dudes made no attempt to disguise the fact that they get off on humiliating and hurting women, though they did dress that up a little with candle wax, leather, and various bizarre implements. (A lot of them were really into shibari, a — surprise! — Japanese bondage technique involving rope. Seriously, fuck Japan.)

Oh, please…do we really need such a literal reading?? And since when is “making her cum over and over” (that would be called in the civilian world “giving her an orgasm”, ma’am) considered a part of “humiating and hurting” her….unless you happen to believe that orgasms are part of the problem with BDSM sex…if not, THE WHOLE FRACKIN’ POINT of it all. (And Hello, ND….you were writing as a fem sub wanting a sexual encounter; I’d figure that you’d expect that your respondents would assume that and speak about that they had in mind. If you can’t deal with the answers, don’t ask the question to begin with.)

And then there was the third, and most shocking group, at least in ND’s mind:

The third group was by far the most frightening. They read the word “submissive” and creamed their shorts at the idea that there was a woman out there who’d let them act out Max Hardcore vignettes on her. None of them had anything to say about the “art” of BDSM or the sensations our poster would experience, but rather just told her which hole they’d like to rape her in (guess which one came in at number one) before they ejaculated on her face. Her wishes did come up a few times, always in the form of the insatiable desire to lick semen up after being raped. That’s about all I can say about that lest I break something or kill myself.

First off, Max Hardcore isn’t BDSM; he’s hardcore extreme gonzo.  Second, people responding to sexual fantasies tend to be a bit over-the-top and extreme in private one-on-one sexual conversation, and say things that they would never say or do in the public realm. And third…female dommes can think about “raping” their sub men with the same intensity (men do have mouths and anuses, you know).

The point of all this is that Nine Deuce takes what amounts to be mere extreme sexual fantasies — extreme ones, I’ll acknowledge, but no less fantasy — and makes them out to be actual ACTS that these men want to impose on her “submissive”.  In other words, these men are nothing more than potential rapists, if not ACTUAL rapists for merely speaking of these evil desires to “humiliate” and “abuse” women. The proper analogy here is to call for castrating people for not merely committing adultery, but merely THINKING of it in their brains or speaking of it to another person in private conversation.

But….that’s Nine Deuce’s particular myopia. What Polly Styrene does is simply run the pattern, catch the pass that ND offers, and, like Larry Fitzgerald knifing through the Steeler defense in Super Bowl LXIII, runs with it to the end zone….or, more appropriately, over the edge of Sanity Cliff.

Ok let’s look at what happens in real BDSM. It’s ’safe, sane and consensual’ right?

Well the dude below might have disagreed on BDSM being ’safe’. If he were still alive to disagree that is.

The “dude below” reference is to a tragedy that took place in 2007 where a British businessman was killed in a terribly botch bondage scene when he got suffocated.

Not good.  Also, not representative of what counts for the majority of BDSM. Yes, scenes can go horribly ary with calamitous results….just as planes can go down into the ocean and NASCAR drivers can lose their lives driving at 200+ miles per hour on oval tracks. But we’re talking about sex here, not stock car racing or flying….the rules are different.

And keep in mind the date: 2007. Yeah…one act in two years outweighs countless scenes where nothing even close to tragedy happens.

Polly continues:

And as for consensual. Well this is the argument that was recently put on ‘comment is free’ about why BDSM is different from christian cults. Namely that BDSM has a ’safe word’ and that consent is not given once, but can be withdrawn at any time.

Well even if that IS the case, there are still problems. But let’s be  honest, that’s  not always the case. Because if you are a ’slave’ you give consent once and that’s it.

Actually, the “safeword” is only one means of enforcing consent; another, as Ren Ev has pointed out, is to simply negotiate before the scene takes place what will happen and what is to be expected of both the dom and the sub.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg for Polly to prove the deadliness of BDSN:

Let’s consider the case of Glenn Marcus. Now if you google this guy you will find lots of people on BDSM boards defending him and saying what a great guy he is.

She then quotes freely from Ann Bartow’s Feminist Law Professor’s blog on the story of Glenn Marcus, who apparently is a especially brutal dom who especially loves his BDSM sex excessively violent and “degrading”. (And, who just happened to be a BDSM webmaster of a site (slavespaces dot com) which was a target of the federal government anti-trafficking laws….back in 2007.)

And of course, such evil can only lead to the ultimate slavery, according to Polly (and Ann Bartow), as in the case of “Jodi” (quoting from court testimonials, with emphasis in original):

In October 1999, the defendant arrived in Maryland, where he handcuffed Jodi to the wall and told her that he would punish her after he took a nap. (Tr. at 104.) While she was on the wall, Jodi testified that she had a moment of clarity and decided that she wanted to leave. (Id. at 104-5.) She told Celia, another woman serving the defendant, and Celia helped her get down. (Id. at 105.) Joanna awakened the defendant, who ordered that Jodi be returned to the wall. (Id.) When Jodi informed the defendant that she wanted to leave, he told her to shut up. (Id.) He then put a whiffle ball inside her mouth, closed her lips shut with surgical needles so that she was unable to speak, and placed a hood over her head. (Id. at 105-7.) While she was on the wall, he whipped and beat her with a cane extremely hard for an extended period of time and had sexual intercourse with her. (Id. at 106.) The defendant then took Jodi off the wall and attached her with handcuffs to a flat board, at which point he attempted to sew Jodi’s vagina closed using a sewing needle and thread, only stopping when the needle broke. (Id. at 106-7.) A butt plug was inserted into her anus (Govt. Ex. 2C, at 369, 1223), and the defendant used a knife to carve his initials into the soles of her feet (Tr. at 107). While this incident was taking place, Jodi was crying and screaming. (Id. at 107.) The abuse was photographed and Jodi had to write a diary entry about it, and these were placed on the defendant’s website. (See Tr. at 109; Govt. Ex. 2C at 365-74, 1217-24.) This was the most extreme punishment to which Jodi had ever been subjected. (Tr. at 123.) Prior to this experience, Jodi believed that she would be able to leave any time she wished. (Id. at 108.) However, after this episode, Jodi testified that she felt “completely beaten down,” “trapped and full of terror.” (Id. at 108.) She no longer wished to be involved with the defendant and remained with him only out of fear. (Id. at 170.)

The fact that she did ultimately leave him and even testified about his extreme abuse at his trial means not that much to Bartow or Polly….it’s all about smearing all male doms with the taint of Glenn Marcus.

The article goes on to the usual bit about whacking “feminists who claim that BDSM is a sexuality and we shouldn’t criticize it” as the same old privileged, “elitist” women who masturbate on the backs of “poor women” being ultimately abused and raped.  And then, Polly goes for the jugular:

Yes BDSM takes place in gay relationships, and yes men like to be dominated. But – as the response to Nine Deuce’s ad showed, there are still plenty of men out there who want to dominate and abuse women in horrific ways.

And yes, yawn, yawn, yawn, a BDSM community *controls* these guys. Oh give me strength. Look at all the defence of Glenn Marcus by the ‘BDSM community’. And anyway what about all those women outside the “BDSM community”. Those women who just read an article on the F word. Who are maybe a bit confused, not sure what their feelings are but hey – a feminist website says BDSM is feminist. That’s ok then!

To translate, if you are a “feminist” defending BDSM sex, even if it is freely wanted and consented to by the participants, and even if no injury or harm occurs within the scene, then you are an enabler of rapists and murders and misogynists..and MEN. Doesn’t even matter if you’ve never even heard of Glenn Marcus (or his court case involving prosecution of his website for “sex trafficking” due to its BDSM theme, which is much of the point of all the “defenses” of him)….if you defend him, you are a murderer.  Just as if you defend Douglas Fox’s right to exist as a sex worker, then you are a pimp and a rapist…because we say so.

Q. E. Frackin’ D.

And just in case you forget which side Polly Styrene chooses to roll with, her comments section includes all the usual GenderBorg participants….Stormy, Bonobobabe, mAndrea, Laurelin, and even Nine Deuce gets in on the fun.

I’ll simply let Ms. Bees and Wasps Agent speak for the collective though this comment:

OK, I need some “help” here radfems. I am now fully edumacated on “proper BDSM” and “whoopsies, accidents do happen BDSM”. So, into which category does the following, involving a paid professional, fully empowered and consenting, get put into?

Natel King (porn stage name of Taylor Sum(m)ers):
http://www.oneangrygirl.net/natel_king.html

It’s all just harmless, empowering fun right? Lots of safe words, an “industry” in which a shit load of sex pozzie feminist bloggers promote as being the ultimate achievement of womanyness. In fact, I believe there is a former radfem blogger on the F-Word promoting BDSM as fluffy kittens because her boyfriend likes it, so she does too. (geez, don’t all stampede to point out the lack of even basic feminism in that scenario)

OK, I lied. I don’t really “need help” with this one. Lots of women (and girls) get used up, injured, murdered, in BDSM and porn (and let’s face it, mainstream porn pretty much looks like BDSM porn these days). It is NOT feminist to promote such activities to females as “em-fucking-powering”. It is NOT prudish to be against such mainstream and voluminous damage to the specific females involved and the knock on effect to females in general.

Stop promoting BDSM to other women as empowering and “just play”.

Stop promoting porn (even so called nice porn) to women as empowering and a valid career option.

Stop promoting prostitution as empowering and a valid career option.

It is NOT healthy for the majority of female participants. It is NOT healthy for womankind in general. And it certainly ain’t feminist to promote it.

Now grow up you dim-witted third wave / librul / sex pozzie feminists. And get a fucking clue.

Yup…instead, start promoting the new fourth wave/neoconservative/sex-fascist “feminism” as the new movement??

I think I’ll end this now before I end up throwing my monitor at the wall.

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Why Porn Starlets Having Children Beats Right-Wing Racist Asshats Having Children (Or…An Open Letter to Asukasan)

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….or should that be, YouSUCKasan…

First off, the rantage which fuels my current rage, as appearing in the original:

How does everyone in the community feel about Jenna Jameson’s pregnancy? Jameson and boyfriend, Tito Ortiz, recently announced that they are expecting twins together, and I was wondering how you felt about porn stars(or I guess ex-porn stars in Jameson’s case) having children.

Personally, I’m against it. Even though my opinion means nothing to these people, or even to others around me, I don’t think that porn stars should be allowed to have children. I feel that it is a bad environment to raise children in-and I don’t even want kids of my own-and I don’t think porn stars deserve to be parents. If prostitutes are demonised for having children, then why not porn stars? Because doing porn is “legal” and somehow less harmful for children.

I don’t care if Jenna “has always wanted children” or that she said she would quit porn after getting pregnant.. I don’t think that she should have children. If Jenna worked a legitimate job and made legitimate money, maybe I feel she would be more deserving of children. I feel pain for her twins when they grow up, being known as Jameson’s children. Imagine when they go to school, “Isn’t your mom a whore*? Does that mean you’ll be a whore when you grow up, too?” “Is your father your real father, since your mom has had sex with so many men?”

I would hate to see a child put through that kind of life, because Jameson’s career as a porn star will be with her for the rest of her life-doing porn is the only thing she will ever be known for; it’s the only thing she ever wanted to be acknowledged for: “Right now, my goal is to be the biggest star this industry has ever known.”

Not much of a goal...

Now, others more accomplished than moi (namely, Ren, Trinity, Debs, Natalia, and Caroline, among others…and especially Ernest Greene, who has actually worked with Jenna enough to know that her motherhood skills are greatly underestimated) have commented on the vileness of such comments….and even some of the most virulent antiporn feminist activists came out in the discussion thread which followed this blast in challenging asukasan’s main point. Suffice it to say that the notion of someone who herself is unwilling to have children by her own choice attempting to get into Jenna’s uterus and dictate to her when and if she should bring children into this world merely because she happens not to like Jenna’s chosen profession — or simply Jenna’s use of her body for her own “selfish” sexual pleasure — strikes me as just one notch short of outright Nazism. No, check that….it IS Nazism.

I would guess that dear asukasan would probably not be so keen to the idea of forcing women not to have children if it was directed towards, say, poor people or dark-skinned people or the differently abled. In fact, if any male even came close to openly advocating that any woman should be denied her right to control her own uterus, he would be — and rightfully so — banished to the Patriarchy where he belongs.

But, there is the real world..and then there is the GenderBorg world, where all rules collapse to the black hole of the Sisterhood of Womyn Warriors, and where women who insist on their right as women to make decisions about their own bodies are condemned as sellouts, traitors, “sexbots”, “sparkle ponies”, slaves to TEH COCK….or just plain MEN. Especially if you just so happen to like the wrong kind of sex that doesn’t meet Teh Movement’s rigid standards.

That, though, is totally secondary to my main point, which may come to a surprise to folk like asukasan when (or if) she ever leaves the protective cocoon of groupthought and actually talk to and listen to women in the real world: Porn performers are ALREADY HAVING CHILDREN, and HAVE BEEN HAVING CHILDREN SINCE TIME IMMORTAL……and the world hasn’t spun off its axis yet.

I personally know of several moms or soon-to-be moms who happen to be porn performers — whether active in movies or on the Internet — and for the most part, their children happen to grow up to be responsible, respectable, and, for the most part, normal human beings, with no more neurosis than what normal kids endure.

And as for the particular case of Jenna Jameson cited in the OP: I’m guessing that considering all the bank that Jenna has saved up, and her skills as a business woman (you do forget that she actually RUNS a freakin’ website and has actually produced films featuring performers other than her…she didn’t make all those millions only on her back, you know), I’m guessing that she will make a pretty damn good mother….a hell of a lot better than a lot of “normal” women. In fact, I’d say that her experiences in porn and her skills in the art of sex will actually be a bonus for her kids, in that she will have a hell of a lot of knowledge in the subject to pass on to her kids….not to mention that she will be more than able to inoculate them from the very bullcrap that asukasan thinks that they will get thrown at.

Besides…don’t you think that Jenna has already steeled herself against the old “‘Ya mamma’s a cumdumpster WHORRRRREEEE!!!!ONE!!!11111!ELEVEN!!!ONETHOUSANDONEHUNDREDELEVEN!!” insult enough?? After all, she’s had to fight that chant all her life from everyone, including Judith Regan (who produced her bio) to Bill O’Reilly (who openly called her a “slut”…right before soliciting her for a copy of her videos….for research purposes only, of course), to detractors from the “mainstream” media (one lovely quote from when her pregnancy was released to the public from a tabloid: “What if the baby gets stuck in the uterus from all the semen collected from all the sex she’s had in porn??”)

Of course, having all but outed Jenna and all women who engage in sex not meeting her “feminist” standards, asukasan issues the all-so-typical “But….but…I’m not really a bigot!!” fake disclaimer:

(*Note: I hate using the word “whore” when describing women, and my use of the word is strictly for thought process, because not many people-kids and young adults anyway-would ever refer to a porn star as just that. They’ll use some kind of derogatory form, such as “whore” to describe a porn star.)

Oh, but of course…we “radical feminists” would NEVER, NEVER, EVER resort to calling a “prostituted woman” or any “victim of male patriarchy” such a BAAAAAAD name….that’s reserved only for sellouts and traitors and “cumdumpsters” and “sexbots” who are in denial of the true nature of their sin…..ahhhh, I mean, their victimhood!!

Oh, and they even get it wrong on the fundamentals: Jenna Jameson met Tito Ortiz (star of the Ultimate Fighting Challenge series and father/husband) right after she formally retired from making porn….which means that she won’t even be an active porn performer when she finally raises her twins. That makes the question of her being in porn kinda moot, doesn’t it??

Not that it would matter if Jenna or any other woman performing in porn was raising a child while performing; that is their right and their privilege, and none of anyone’s damn business.

This is the molten lava of stupid, folks. This doesn’t just burn…it melts steel. And it is the fool’s gold of “feminism”, too. David Duke looks like a freakin’ liberal compared to this shit.


ADDEDUM: A bonus SYAD/STFU to the commentor who decided to add the “SO’s/boyfriends/husbands of porn stars are simply pimps” smack. I guess that these women were much too brainless to get into porn on their own, right???


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Heart(less) And The GenderBorg: Distorting Dissent (Part Two)

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OK…sorry for being a bit late on the continuation of the last post….call me lazy.

When we last left Heart and the GenderBorg gang, they had dispatched the attempts by Renegade Evolution and Hexy to challenge their uniform monolith belief in the innate evil and universal harm that porn and prostitution is on EVERY WOMAN….the latter defined as “every woman who perfectly believes in the GenderBorg’s ideology, that is.

We now fast forward to another portion of the thread, where Heart decides to go after yet another challenger to her hive-mind ideology….namely, Jill Brenneman, former sex worker turned radical feminist turned “harms prevention” advocate.

Now, Jill B’s story requires a bit of background: At one time, she was a total believer in the GenderBorg ideology and even teamed up with various abolitionist organizations and activists; the most notorious of whom happened to be Nikki Craft, who runs the rabid antiporn site NoStatusQuo.com. Then, some time in the beginning of the 2000′s, Jill got a change of heart or some sense got implanted into her, and slowly started to back herself and some of the organizations she backed away from radfem ideology. For that act of apostasy and “betrayal”, Jill has been suffering ever since; including a series of nasty personal attacks on her experiences that Craft posted over at NoStatusQuo’s blog page “Stormwatch”. In one particularly screechy post, Craft goes all out and claims that Jill (then using the nome de guerre Jill Leighton) was using her experiences to trash radfems, if not out right lying about them.

Fast forward back to the WS thread, where Jill attempted to call out Heart directly on who’s doing the “lying” (reprinted in the comments section of Ren’s blog):

While you are focusing on my “lies”….. And how I don’t listen to survivors. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on radical feminist Nikki Craft’s website about me?

http://web.archive.org/web/20040229163134/www.nostatusquo.com/stormwatch/strap-on.html

Of which Nikki defended as Nikki writes” After I put up the stupid little several page website letting people know you had flipped sides, and left it up a few week, long enough for people to know it, I never posted about you again” Actually as verified by third party archive it was much more than a “few week”, was more than just a stupid little website, as in my opinion, this is the worst fear of any survivor, to be publicly called a liar about their experiences, or crazy, as Nikki calls me both and presents it as fact.

Personally, I wouldn’t do that to anyone. Regardless of politics or any other reason.

Are you willing to publicly deal with this? Nikki wages these efforts even with your allies all for the sake of radical feminist purity.

Should you choose to hide from this issue, it will be a statement of how you respond to survivors when this kind of incident is perpetrated against a survivor considered beneath others, and perpetrated by a radical feminist.

Why do you align with this kind of feminist Heart

Needless to say, that comment didn’t make it past Heart’s moderation. Get a load of Heart’s proclamation to her blog as to why; it is classic in the way Joe McCarthy and Karl Rove are at personal slander.

on 11 Sep 2008 at 4:17 pm137admin Identicon Icon admin

Note to Jill Brennemann:

In the comment of yours in moderation now, you’ve attacked a radical feminist woman, documenting your attack by linking to a repost of a 2003 thread at Strap-On.org. First may I say, Strap-On.org is not a reliable source of information so far as radical feminism goes. It’s a transgender site with a history of attacking radical feminists.

But to try to figure out what you were referring to, I followed the links in the link you provided back a ways through the web archive you linked to.

From my reading, you were involved with an organization called “Escape Prostitution”, http://www.escapeprostitution.com, in the early 2000s, and at that time, you were an abolitionist helping women to leave the sex trade. Radical feminists and abolitionists who knew of this organization referred women in the sex trade to the organization. At some point in 2002-2003 you changed your mind and begin advocating for “harm reduction” instead. For a while, women in the sex trade who were referred to Escape Prostitution for support in exiting found themselves instead at a “sex work” site not specifically for women who wanted out. Radical feminists were appropriately angered by this about face, which occurred rather abruptly and without warning. It looks like you closed the website down, but then for a while, some sort of abusive image or text was popping up, again, angering radical feminists who had supported your formerly abolitionist work.

Also around this time you were involved with another organization, “PROSPER.” Early on this was a radical feminist organization. As part of your work with this group, you advocated for bringing on a woman as board president who was not a feminist and who in the end changed the focus of the organization such that it no longer had a feminist focus and took a neutral stance towards “sex work”. The result was that at least one radical feminist left her work with PROSPER and wrote about it later.

This is two organizations that were once feminist or radical feminist and which focused on helping women exit the sex trade that after your involvement no longer had that focus.

Of course, radical feminists who supported your work are going to be angry about this! One of them wrote about what had happened, she was angry, she left it up for a while and she took it down. You note in your own comment that it isn’t up anymore. I’m sure if it was, you’d have sent me the link.

Yet you somehow want me to join you in condemning the radical feminist who wrote about this feeling angry and betrayed and rightfully so. You wonder why I am allies with “people like this”, siting to the fact that, you say and I guess you think the Strap-On thread somehow proves, that this radfem disputed your history.

I don’t know what happened there. I have learned to take just about everything posted to Strap-On about radical feminists (!) with a grain of salt. I do know that it would be highly upsetting for radfems to have trusted you and supported you in your leadership in two nonprofit organizations designed to help women leave the sex trade, only to watch as you do a 180-degree turn, blaming radfems for it!

I think you’d best take a look at your own alliances, no? There are people you are allied with who have spent much, much time calling women, radical feminists and not, liars, disputing what they say about their lives, realities and histories, calling them crazy, calling them every name in the book, launching ridiculous but damaging attacks, and in some cases, threatening and stalking us. So, how about you check that out.

Also, I don’t respond well to threats along the lines of, “If you don’t approve my comment, that will prove that everything I want it to prove is so!” No. I don’t really want to get into any of this stuff more than I have in this comment, it’s a morass, and I do not think you would come out looking so well in the end either.

For the record, I don’t fault you for changing your mind. People change their minds. I don’t even fault you for changing your mind quickly. I do fault you for blaming radical feminists for a change of mind that resulted in them supporting you for a while when your organizations had completed changed to something they wouldn’t normally have supported, but did, because they trusted you. I do blame you for attempting to use my blog to launch an attack on a radical feminist who works really hard, was understandably feeling betrayed by you, and who doesn’t have anything up on the internet right now about you at all. Why you think I should attack her on your and Strap-On’s say so, I have no idea.

There is but one small problem with Heart’s missive: The actual post linked in Jill’s original post that was rejected goes not to the StrapOn.org site, but to a post by none other than Nikki Craft HERSELF, at her own site NoStatusQuo.com, where she attaches some posts from a thread that came from StrapOn.org to a piece that all but calls Jill a liar, and even denies that she (Nikki) ever worked with Jill in the first place A direct quote from that particular post:


Unfortunately in order to “reposition” herself she’s having to lie about her work in prostitution. These lies are documented and will be posted soon here on STORMWATCH. And I don’t know who didn’t allow her to speak if she didn’t bleed for them. Ironically, at one point I felt if I had to read another of her postings I would leave the list she was posting her “Jill as ultimate victim” postings on.

It should be noted that I have never worked with Jill Leighton, never would have because I found out early on she was a liar and untrustworthy, have only had a few email exchanges with her over the years, and have had no connection with IDNP, would never believe that prostitution could be eliminated, and I am fully aware that many women go into prostitution because they “choose” to do so.

In these emails Leighton claims I am writing threats to her, which is not true. I will be writing more about these threats on this website.

Nikki Craft, 11.19.03

Once again, we see the GenderBorg Doctrine as enforced by Heart in full force: If you are a victim of violence and a woman, your experience will be respected…provided that you completely give yourself in full to the GenderBorg ideology; any variation from that, however, makes you an outright enemy to the sisterhood, and your personal experiences of abuse are automatically rebuked and ignored.

As Jill followed up in a post at Ren’s place:

Few thoughts on Heart.

She is calling Nikki’s website an attack on Nikki. Check out what Nikki had to say about me.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040229163134/www.nostatusquo.com/stormwatch/strap-on.html

Heart doesn’t reveal the information source of Nikki’s calling a survivor, in this case me, because it reveals the very top part is written by Nikki.

And later on in the thread:

Heart can’t post my post in it’s entirety. If she did it would reveal http://web.archive.org/web/20040229163134/www.nostatusquo.com/stormwatch/strap-on.html

Is archived by www.waybackmachine.org and that the waybackmachine crawled Nikki’s site to get this. Heart doesn’t provide this link, tries to make it sound as if I posted the shit about myself on strap on board. No,,, It was Nikki.

She backtracks some as she posts later that Nikki was justified because she was upset with the conversion of Escape the Prostituiton Prevention Project to harm reduction/trans theoretical.
Please, someone tell me how that would justify what nikki did?

On top of it, I didn’t even make the decision about Escape converting to a trans theoretical model. That was made by the Board of Directors of which I was not.

To add insult to injury, the reason why Escape became Prosper and ended the rad fem format was because of Nikki and Melissa. Nikki and Melissa threw their weight at radical feminists that had contributed to Escape and it’s website. Aside from Kelly Holsopple and Katherine Depasquale, all withdrew their material. All of the radical feminists quit the board of directors. It left a huge hole to fill, and given that Escape was suddenly persona non grata in radical feminism, gee, radical feminists wouldn’t join the org, so the board positions went to non radical feminists.

So Heart not only justifies Nikki’s actions but she throws in her own threat warning me if I continue to push this issue I won’t come out looking good. Oh yeah I will because the truth is entirely on my side and Heart, is lying to cover up the truth.

Be careful who you threaten Heart. You might not like the consequences if you act on the threat. And take that however you like Heart.

Oh and Heart. For someone so proud of her perception skills. It is fucking Brenneman, not Brennemann.

And the half effort to raise the trans issue Heart. Gee, maybe I’m trans as the last three letters of my name are man. That is fucking conclusive proof right there.

Yeah…the transsexual bashing doesn’t exactly help, either.

And then, Jill clears the record once and for all. I’ll simply repost it here without comment.

Jill Leighton/Jill Brenneman are the same. A movie producer for Paramount Pictures owns the rights to Jill Leighton the name and the story. This is through 2010. The producer and I were at huge creative differences of opinion over how much artistic license he could take in the screenplay as I balked at fictional rescuing characters to the level that he wanted. He had in mind a fictional family member hooking up with a fictional police officer of the Harvy Keitel, Thelma & Louise variation with a huge change in facts to make it work on Lifetime Television.

Nikki Craft. Yes the one and same Nikki Craft. Nikki feigned being very upset at the ideological change of what was then Escape The Prostitution Prevention Project to include harm reduction. Actually it was total disingenuous shit as Nikki coulnd’t have care less about as she phrased it “women who were traumatized and just wanted to get out of prostitution and went to the website only to be horrified at seeing harm reduction”

Nikki wasn’t so horrified that she didn’t contact virtually all of the website’s material contributors and pressured them, along with Farley’s assistance to remove their material from the site. Nikki and Melissa did very well in that effort as most did withdraw consent to use the material. It was replaced with harm reduction and eventually sex worker rights material although the organization did not fully covert to sex worker rights until 2006.

Same Melissa Farley. Despite my stint in the radical feminist movement, there were significant problems between Melissa and I and unresolvable issues between Nikki and I. Nikki’s ethical breaches are astonishing.

Heart supports Nikki’s website feeling that I must have planted the archived evidence to discredit Nikki. Not possible. It is archived on a third party archival portal called www.waybackmachine.org

The material that Heart refers to was crawled at Nikki’s website www.nostatusquo.com/stormwatch/index.html Which Nikki called an active disaster in the anti prostitution movement. The archives that heart believes could be falsified are crawled and archived with nikki’s nostatusquo.com url still embedded.

Heart’s post on this later indicates that Nikki’s behavior as illustrated by the blatant calling my experiences delusional lies and mocking and embellishing them for effect, as justified as rightful anger by radical feminists who were upset with the orgs ideology change.

While it is inappropriate for anyone else to remotely even defend themselves when Heart’s allies are going to be the recipient of any hostility. Any level of abuse is fine if the recipient is not a radical feminist and the perps are.

Outstanding feminism there Heart. The same logic is used by batterers. If only she didn’t make him so angry he wouldn’t have battered her……… It’s ok to be a batterer and abuser according to Heart, if the abuser is a radical feminist that has been made angry.

Heartless woman, that Cheryl Lynn Seelhoff. And that’s no smack intended at all.

——————————————-

One more example before I close this: further down the thread there is a discussion on how women victims of violence will sometimes engage in “self-harm”, that is injuring themselves deliberately, as a means of coping with the extreme violence. That moved Hexy, who was a victim of violence, to attempt to bring in her own experiences…which prompted this exchange with Laurelin, who is as hard core an radfem as it is, but obviously shows an actual bit of compassion for a fellow human being. (All comments were reprinted by Hexy at her blog Hexpletive).

First, a couple of comments by Laurelin:

121laurelin

I think there’s a biological/chemical component too. We know that bulimic women, for example, and women who cut, experience a sense of relief when they do these things that is caused by the release of endorphins.

I was a self-harmer, and although I wouldn’t say (even then I wouldn’t have said) that I ‘enjoyed’ it, it did, as you say, give me a release from intense emotion, no matter how brief. But it was still harmful. My arms, my thighs were still cut up and bleeding. I still felt the pain.

It was harmful.

122laurelin

‘Enjoying’ self-harm has to be seen in the context in which it takes place- in the midst of severe emotional pain or trauma.

Here’s Hexy’s response:

129hexy

Laurelin:

I had quite a lengthy period of self-injury, when I first got sick. I wouldn’t say I “enjoyed” it, but I would say it kept me alive.

One of those situations where the person in my head, me, gets to decide whether it was the best choice under the circumstances.

Hexy didn’t say whether that comment made it through moderation, but I will assume that it did.

Laurelin’s response was actually quite respectful and civil, almost human in considering the issue:

131laurelin

Hexy- I was not trying to say that self-harm is the ‘wrong’ choice, or that one should be prevented from chosing it. I am just saying that the context must be taken into consideration. I don’t agree that self-harm was a ‘free choice’ for me- it was one of a number of what I consider to be lousy choices available at the time.

132laurelin

and also the self-harm I undertook perhaps had some beneficial aspects… as far as my own experience goes, I can’t say for sure. But I do ultimately think that I harmed myself too, in the sense that my body was damaged (however superficially) by it.

Hope that makes sense. This is very hard to verbalise.

OK….so there are fundamental disagreements there, but at least an attempt at a genuine dialogue. Maybe, perhaps, there may be a real common ground forming??

Yeah, right.

Enter Heart with the stink bomb to slam the door shut on that.

133admin

Laurelin: Hexy- I was not trying to say that self-harm is the ‘wrong’ choice, or that one should be prevented from chosing it. I am just saying that the context must be taken into consideration.

The discussion at issue was about what self-harm in the context of male heterosupremacy means for women.

Responding to that by saying, as you basically have, Hexy, “Well, I wanted to,” is not a response at all. It is not in good faith. It’s an attempt at a reversal, a trying to make Laurelin the Big Meanie, as though she was saying fuck-all about you or what you might have chosen, ever. She was talking about HER OWN LIVED REALITY and her thoughts about it, she wasn’t saying ANYTHING about what you may or may not have done sometime, let alone about what you “get” to decide.

There’s been this ongoing ignoring on the part of the pro-sex trade side of basically everything that has been posted here *by survivors*. That’s why there are a whole bunch of spammed comments to this thread that are not going to see the light of day. There will be actual, respectful *engagement* — not this glossing over and just saying, over and over again, well, I like to work out, I like to shave, I chose to self harm, you’re a meanie for bringing it up, as though any of that is even remotely relevant — or comments will not, again, be approved. Ignoring survivors who are putting themselves out there, risking becoming ill because they ARE putting themselves out there, to just assert and reassert, essentially, that their lives don’t matter to you at all, all that matters to you is what you, yourself, might have wanted to do some time, amounts to erasure. It is destructively and triggeringly dismissive. It’s what men do to us 24/7.

Imagine that: a person’s full recounting of all her pain and suffering and hurt just flippantly dismissed and reduced to “I wanted to self-harm”…..all because she’s not one of THE CHOSEN ONES, THE TRUE FEMINISTS. I guess that only those women who are 120% with GenderBorg ideology will have their struggles endorsed as “survivors”….the rest of the womanhood can simply go straight to Hell, or else they must be lying, like Jill Brenneman did, like Ren did about her recent bad night with racist rednecks, or like Hexy did about….well, her entire life. Not even Laurelin thought that Hexy’s response was “meanie”, but who cares when you are in the middle of raging against the “Man-chine” and protecting your ideological flank against apostates and outsiders???

Obviously, Hexy was stunned enough to post this rejoinder….which, quite naturally, didn’t make it through Heart’s filters.

136hexy
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Laurelin:

Hexy- I was not trying to say that self-harm is the ‘wrong’ choice, or that one should be prevented from chosing it. I am just saying that the context must be taken into consideration. I don’t agree that self-harm was a ‘free choice’ for me- it was one of a number of what I consider to be lousy choices available at the time.

That I do agree with. Context is vitally important. I think you and I may just differ on how we see the best of a crappy selection of choices: to me, the ability to make that choice is still an act of power, however slight. I could choose to harm, or I could give in and die. The alternative made it a strong choice for me.

and also the self-harm I undertook perhaps had some beneficial aspects… as far as my own experience goes, I can’t say for sure. But I do ultimately think that I harmed myself too, in the sense that my body was damaged (however superficially) by it.

Hope that makes sense. This is very hard to verbalise.

I understand the difficulty. When I first began to try and vocalise my experiences of self-injury and what the experience meant to me, it was near impossible to put those feelings into words.

I wrote about my relationship with my SI scars recently. It sounds like you and I see the damage done to skin very differently. Those scars to me are now proof of a battle won, not proof of damage. We all prioritise these things differently, though, and I in no way mean to imply that your understanding of your scars and your experience is wrong or bad… I am simply pointing out that, like everything else we’re been discussing, the internal experience varies wildly from woman to woman even when the external experience looks similar.

Thank you for addressing me courteously, btw, it’s something you’ve never failed to do.

Heart:

Responding to that by saying, as you basically have, Hexy, “Well, I wanted to,” is not a response at all.

“Well, I wanted to”? ?

That’s how you read what I wrote? Laurelin seemed to recognise my experience. Your ability to recognise suffering and trauma in women seems firmly wedded to how closely their ideology resembles yours.

I didn’t self injure because I “wanted to”, Heart. I self-injured because if I didn’t find some way to ground the riot of pain in my head, to vent it and connect it to my body, I was going to kill myself. That you can read the words “[self-injury] kept me alive” and translate it to “well, I wanted to” really explains so much of the apparent understanding going on here. Talk about denial of lived reality!

Oh, and as for “what you may or may not have done sometime”? Such dismissive language, even as you accuse women of using the same. I wish I could show you my skin right now… years of using self-injury as a coping mechanism certainly, as Laurelin pointed out, leaves its mark on your skin.

[...]

137hexy
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

As for the words you’ve quoted from various prostituted women? I haven’t commented on them apart from saying that they’re important and should be heard because, well, I think they’re important and should be heard. What else would I say?

Women expressing their experiences = not something I’m going to argue with. Women denying mine, however? Well, see above posts.

The next comment is from Hexy at her own blog; it breaks the issue down succinctly:

Apparently, in addition to not caring how stressful and harmful it might be to those of us not on “Heart’s side” (I reject the label “pro-sex-trade” quite vehemently) to have no respectful engagement regarding our experiences, to have our experiences ignored when we put ourselves out there and risk our mental health to be beaten down and erased by women who only care about the lives, stories and pain of women who fit the right narrative, it’s now entirely acceptable to dismiss, minimise and erase the experiences of women who have battled serious mental illness and experienced self-harm and self-injury. I’m stuck wondering if there is any female experience Heart won’t co-opt as her own.

Doesn’t matter, hexy…because in the alter-world that Heart and the GenderBorg belong in, you are either with them or with the patriarchy, with them or with the “pornographers”, with then or….you’re a MAN (or at least, an apologist for MEN). Your experience doesn’t count unless and until you accept St. Andrea (Dwokin) as your personal savior and Sam Berg, Nikki Craft, and the rest of the Ministry of Women-Identified Women as your personal preachers. Anything less is surrender and death.

As I’ve said often, the “radical feminism” of Maggie Hays, Cheryl Lynn “Heart” Seelhoff, Sam Berg, Nikki Craft, and the rest of the GenderBorg Collective is about as feminist and radical as Sarah Palin is a feminist. And I’d bet that even Ms. Dan Quayle would be a perfect fit for this cult, too.

Pardon me now while I take a long, hot shower to remove the stench of frozen shit off my body. UGGGGGH.



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