All oppressive systems utilise mutually exclusive dichotomies.
The plutocracy for instance will often lambaste the poor for not being able to work or think their way out of the badly paid job they work long hours at, the working class’ is that they’re just not showing enough initiative, why when I was their age I was already on my way to earning my first million!* And if the working classes take a look at the system and say “fuck this” and start resorting to crime because that earns more money for less actual work (though with increased risks of course) they’re evil and lazy, why I never had to break the law to make my money.**
Of course every rich person has killed someone, whether directly or as a result of their mad scrabble to be even richer than the Jones’s in the Mansion Ranch next door (across the mile or so of estate that separates the Right people from each other), but that is as of nothing versus those poor folk who ignore concepts like property rights in their mad scramble to survive in system that actively wants to kill them.
Same goes the for the Aryanocracy or Heteronormitivity, Mexicans are, on the one hand, lazy feckless criminals, and on the other hand, evil scheming bastards who are going to take over the world by picking lettuce illegally for 10 cents an hour, and homosexuals are, if they’re not all “I’m queer, I’m here, get used to it”, then they’re obviously ashamed of their lifestyle choice, and obviously agree that it’s just plain wrong, and if they actually are all into pride and outness, then they’re shoving their immoral lifestyle into everyone’s face, and perverting the children† in the process.
Oppressive systems are of course like this naturally, they’re basically ginormous collections of various interlocking and symbiotic memes, and thus subject to selective pressures, those systems of oppression that didn’t set up a series of contradictory concepts which enabled people who didn’t fit into any one predefined stereotypical manner of behavior to be screwed over just as much as those that did, was destroyed or surpassed by better systems of oppression, who could oppress so much better and thus continue to give the oppressor classes their wonderful privileges without fear of the oppressed classes breaking the system from within due to something crazy like consistency and fairness.
Now you may have noticed that certain themes tend to run through the various systems of oppression I mentioned, the plutocracy always states that, no matter what the working class do, they’re still inherently lazy because they’re not rich and no matter what homosexuals do, their sexuality is still inherently icky.
A similar theme runs through the patriarchy in regards to sex, sure, on the one hand women are supposed to be asexual and do not want to have sex under any circumstance, but on the other hand men have a Y-chromosome given right to have sex whenever and however they please.
How does The Patriarchy square that circle? Oh, just a little thing called the Rape Culture.
Now I’ve written before about how the only patriarchally approved form of sex is rape, this is because rape is an act which, by definition, involves a person not wanting to have sex but some guy having sex with them anyway, to the rape culture and patriarchy this is perfect, you have a man having sex but they’re not having sex with an actually sexual person, and in such a traumatic and violent manner that the person who has had sex thrust upon them may even end up giving up consensual sex all together.
This is why the most visible rape culture concept you’ll likely see is the whole rape victim blaming thing, which works by a bunch of guys and patriarchal tools coming along and talking about the many ways in which, obviously, the victim did something wrong, like how they gave their prima facie consent to be raped by doing something crazy like leaving the house, or going to college, or joining the military or drinking alcoholic beverages.
Now such talk is of course insane, you can’t be raped and have been at fault, you can’t go out and get raped, that would imply that it was in some way a consensual act, and rape cannot be a consensual act, ergo you cannot go out and “get” raped, the very idea is nonsensical.
But the point is to conflate consensual sex with rape, so that activities or behavior that occur primarily because a woman is not hiding her sexual nature and may even want to do something as crazy as want to have consensual sex with someone, such as dressing “like a slut” (or just being a stripper, prostitute, porn star etc… a member of the rape class basically) or drinking (a major part of most human mating rituals in the first world), inherently also imply that a woman wants to be raped too, because obviously there is no distinction between consensual sex between two (or more) people who really want to have sex with each other, and a man masturbating using a woman’s body.
Now the distinction between consensual sex and rape is simply that, with consensual sex we have two (or more) people who really want to have sex with each other, while with rape you have one guy who feels it necessary to prove his manliness by fucking someone who either A) actively doesn’t want to have sex or B) doesn’t struggle too hard.
Now note that I mentioned people who want to have sex with each other, as Bitch|Lab pointed out, mutuality is key here (the only really important thing when it comes to sex positive feminist views towards any sort of sex), everyone has to actively want to have sex with everyone else involved or it’s not sex by the sex positive feminist conception of sex, the idea that if a person doesn’t object too loudly then it’s not rape is rejected by sex positive feminism as an entirely patriarchal line of rape enabling bullshit.
Which brings me around to the never ending argument that’s been going on at Pandagon between prostitutes waving the banner of “choice” and “sex positive feminism”, a gay man who needs his blow jobs on demand and the “radfems” who the other two groups think hate prostitution because prostitutes have sex for money, whereas they actually hate prostitution because prostitutes have sex for money.
OMGWTFBBQ, I hear you cry (nice pronunciation btw), people not getting the subtle nuance of an argument? Surely not!? You ask, confused and scared at this strange new world you’ve glimpsed in which nuance appears to be too much for some people to handle.
Next you’ll tell us that people have been whipping out Dworkin as an insult for reasons other than allying with right wingers during the 80s against porn and prostitution, you joke.
Heh.
Which is really the only reason anyone should point to Dworkin and radfems as a bad thing, their thinking and writing, and more importantly their legal work making date rape a crime and all that, are pretty sound and they can shit internal consistency, what with them having such stuff up the wazoo and then some.
That they allied with the right-wingers and have since been demonised by the patriarchy and feminists alike should really stand as a testament to how making deals with the right wing are going to end up with you getting screwed over.
Of course, it’s technically a fight over the legalization of prostitution, but if it was then there’d be questions asked like “does legalization actually help the most vulnerable and abused prostitutes?” and stuff, not “I deserve the right to sell my body for cash and enable the patriarchy because I am able to get other work, and this is feminist and empowering because I say so”, which is nice, because women should feel empowered enough to be so moulitsas± in public, however that doesn’t in anyway make the moulitsas argument any less… moulitsas.
Because prostitution is wrong, and here’s why…
Now KH, the main legalisation pusher in that thread, is convinced that prostitution is not coercive, and htat prostitution is just another form of sexual choice – like blowjobs and engaging in consensual sex. Now her main reason for this is based on a long winded bit of academic masturbation, which starts off with this little gem:
Nonetheless, the following discussion will focus on a narrower sense of the term more in line with its use by major historical philosophical writers and contemporary theorists alike. This usage will rule out, by stipulation, such things as mere disapproval, emotional manipulation, or wheedling.
So basically she holds her position by playing semantics with some wording using the wanky academic concept of “coercion”. Uhuh, that’s philisophically sound, that everyone else uses the term in the normal way to mean methods of manipulation that include emotional manipulation, as well as socio-economic manipulation, is beside the point, she has redefined “is” to justify her profession and that’s the end of that (I am of course using a magical term that her academics had to actively point out they weren’t using, which I made up entirely, of course).
We know that prostitution is coercive in the normal, as opposed to the “Could I make it any more clear that I’m really reaching for justifcations here?”, sense of the word coercion from the most basic economic concept of supply and demand.
Now everyone knows supply and demand, hell it’s all most libertarians and right wingers know about economics, but due to supply and demand, a suppler with a monopoly in something can jack their prices sky high because they don’t have to worry about competition undercutting them, they’re the only supplier in town and so if anyone wants to buy their produce, they need to pay those prices and thus have no real bargaining power, unless demand is almost non-existent.
If the dynamic then becomes a matter of needs versus wants, the power imbalance becomes even more pronounced, because the person who needs something is in a position where, unless there’s a serious bounty of supply for that needed stuff, they have no choice but to pay what ever they have to obtain it, and if the supplier merely wants their money, because for instance they’re rich already and are now just amassing a huge money filled swimming pool for their own personal amusement, then they can turn the person who needs down, refuse to sell them anything, if the person who needs tries to haggle or pay less than is being asked, and so the person with needs gets screwed over more often than not because it is dangerous to even risk trying to haggle or negotiate a better price.
Now obviously a person who relies on prostitution to pay their bills and to just generally live is not in the superior bargaining position compared to the john who use them, who neither need them nor are particularly pressured to use any particular prostitute – not only can johns haggle but they have the ability to dictate terms to the prostitute who has a huge force (hunger, the luxury of having a place to sleep).
Prostitution is clearly a buyer’s market, and prostitutes are sellers, inherently degraded by their lack of power even when their profession is something they’ve entered into by “choice”.
The prostitute needs the money for their survival, and the john merely wants to have sex with a woman, and so a pressure is put on the prostitute to perform when they do not want to and/or how they don’t want to.
Now despite the fact that when a woman is having sex when/how she doesn’t want to, it’s not sex, it’s rape, which is coerced sex, KH still sits stubbornly by the concept that there’s nothing coercive about having sex for money.
Now I think I get what she’s sort of going on about, I do, one you get past the whole fucked up semantics BS, there is the whole “If someone offers you a million dollars to eat shit, you can refuse” thing, no one’s actively forcing the prostitutes to have sex when/how they don’t want to.
Well, except the socio-economic conditions inherent to prostitution of course.
Now the more eagle eyed among you may have noticed that an argument that basically says “Well if she had sex with him and chose to be a prostitute, then she wasn’t raped, she consented” and automatically erases the fact that the prostitute did not want to have sex then/like that, which is always rape, duh.
And yes B|L, this was put forth by a person claiming to be a sex-positive feminist. Sans any of the various contexts that I needed to be informed about after the Bussel flamewar, Bussel sounded like the sort of anti-fem I hear much too often, lording the right to be victimised while slamming feminists with some really randomised citations (that’s the anti-fems btw, after you add in a shit load of context to Bussel you find out that she’s wasn’t actually lording the right to be victimised, she’s just moulitsas). Yes it’s fucked up that I’m more familiar with common anti-fem arguments than Moulitsas feminist ones (I’m looking at you Levy).
But as I was telling my crack dealer this morning, I’m a fucked up kinda gal.
Anyhoo… If a woman isn’t able to consent it’s rape, If she was willing at one point but changes her mind later on, it’s rape if you don’t stop guys, even if she’s a prostitute/pr0nstar/stripper, it’s still rape if she doesn’t want to have sex with you.
DUH!
Now you may have noticed I used a word which usually gets the prostitution legalisers aggravated; “degrade”.
This is not me saying “oh, they have sex for money, they’re being degraded”, I’m saying that someone has to play pretend that they’re enjoying themselves while having sex with a person to whom they are not physically attracted to is being dehumanized.
One of the words used to support various sex-negative concepts under the cover of sex-positive feminism is “empowering”, stripping is “empowering”, being just (as in no life outside of being a stay at home mother, not as in being any kind of mother is something less in and of itself) a stay at home mother who caters to your “manly” guy’s every whim while ignoring your personal wants and needs is “empowering”, being a prostitute is “empowering”.
Now the funny thing is that out of those three, stripping is probably the only one that even approaches being “empowering”, because the thing is that, no one tells her how she does her routines, that’s her choice and her choice alone (I think, I could be wrong), the woman who’s trapped in that abusive marriage (and what else would you call a marriage in which a woman unilaterally takes on the stresses of a family while the husband complains about how she isn’t satisfying his every sexual whim often enough?) and the prostitute don’t’ even have that level of freedom in their “empowering” profession.
Yes yes, I suppose a prostitute can turn down clients, but again there’s that matter of really needing the money that means that’ll happen in extremis only.
And while she’s on the clock she is not herself, not sexually, not personality wise either, a john doesn’t just hire a prostitute’s body for an hour or an evening, he hires her personality as well, she hires someone who’ll laugh at his lame ass jokes and smile and go “oh it’s so big and hard” at appropriate moments.
It’s a trope borne entirely of the abrahamic faiths’ belief in a mind/body duality that creates this idea that sex is a purely physical thing that is somehow separate from the mental/spiritual aspect of a person, it isn’t, it can’t be.
Which is why the term “empowering” is such a classic case of doublethink when used in relation to prostitution, A prostitute is not doing what they want to do sexually, they’re doing what the john wants to do sexually irregardless of what the prostitute feels about that particular act.
It may not be rape if a woman does an act that bores them to tears and through which they have to pretend to be enjoying themselves, but it’s certainly not “empowering”, the precise opposite in fact, it’s dehumanizing.
And the amount of time, work and money that has to go into a prostitute’s body during her career is also another aspect that robs the whole thing of it’s empowering aspect, the closest equivalent to the dehumanizing nature of prostitution is shitty things in the service industry, those bullshit jobs where not smiling at all times when customers are present is a good way to get fired, those jobs are also dehumanizing, no question about it, but at least in most of those jobs I can get off work, and then eat and drink myself fat, or not get a face left because I’m getting old, and the next morning I can go into work, fat or wrinkly or ugly as sin, and as long as I remember to smile between 7 and 6 everyday, I still get paid.
But a prostitute has to go to the gym and stay trim, has to get the cosmetic surgery if possible, otherwise they’ll suffer a drop in customers, and the only empowering thing about either of the service industry jobs, the money you get from them, starts to dry up.
And the higher paid the hooker, the more crap they need to do to stay a high paid hooker, until their bodies are 80% silicon/collagen, 19% water and 1% themselves, at all times.
And as I’ve written previously, another trick oppressive system use is to turn a person from an individual, into a role, a job, a duty.
The Lovage song Sex (I’m a) notes this fact actually, where the chorus has a man going “I’m a man” over and over again, while a woman replies with all the roles she can be, “I’m a bitch”, “I’m a hooker”, I’m a little girl”, “I’m your mother”, “I’m a blue movie” the female half of the dialogue goes, never matching the man’s definitive statement that he’s just “a man.”
The core principle of feminism is that women are people, not roles, not jobs, people, and while people can take on roles when they want to, they can only take on roles as an expression of their personhood, and jobs that gradually subsume more and more of a woman’s personhood beneath their need to earn money, going so far as to disfigure her appearance so that men can better masturbate with her, are not feminist.
Now are y’all ready for the Big, Bad, horse molesting “But” to this whole tawdry affair?
But…
None of that matters a damn in the prostitution legalisation debate.
Whether prostitution is legalised has to be all about whether legalisation or decriminalisation helps stem and stop abuses in the industry, nothing more and nothing less, that some women decide to have sex for money is irrelevant to the legalisation debate, yes they should be called on their patriarchal bullshit when they call prostitution feminist or sex-positive, but the moral debate that broke out on pandagon has nothing to do with whether prostitution should be legalised, the debate should always be “can this or that legal change help those women who are being abused in an industry that is already illegal but exists anyway?”
And my personal stance is that the answer to that question is highly situational, which is were I feel Dworkin and most prostitution fighters, whether for or against legalisation, err heavily.
Universal attitudes to legalisation/decriminalisation are foolish, I could see it possible that in some locales, prostitution could be legalised and give prostitutes and shit load of much needed legal rights and protections that will be used to their benefit, and legalisation doesn’t forego attacking the root cause of prostitution – patriarchy – not by a long shot.
But then again legalising prostitution anywhere within a few hundred miles of Yale, Harvard or Duke will do nothing more or less than essentially legalise rape, the police simply won’t arrest, the juries won’t convict, the worst possible thing in the world you could do for prostitutes in that particular socio-political environment is legalise prostitution, even decriminalisation would rely too much on the local police not being out and out misogynists who joined the police force because they really like beating poor people with their batons (which they fiddle with constantly).
So it depends, if there is a good reason to think that legalisation in some form will be helpful within a particular social context, then by all means, I’ll have your back.
Just don’t tell me that prostitution is empowering, or feminist, or about you being sexually free, just don’t, I hate people who can’t even be bothered to lie to me well, cheap lies won’t do anything but piss me off.
It’s about the money, so say it’s about the money, there’s no shame in admitting that.
* Because they already had the massive amount of starting capital that is absolutely needed, due to that being how economics works, to make even more money (money being entirely unlike tribbles and all) in our great “meritocracy”, and their bags of inherited cash also allowed them to survive the first couple of false starts, like those times they ran several businesses into the ground through raw incompetence for instance, which strangely enough never get mentioned in those great tirades against the incompetence of poor people that asswaste failure right-wingers are so fond of.
** Of course this is largely true, when you can throw money at the politicians to change the laws so that all those handy cost saving schemes (like incredibly lax health and safety regulations) are perfectly legal, not to mention hire the lawyers and accountants who know all the little legal loopholes that enable them to never pay taxes and to avoid breaking the letter of the law while bending the law’s (and the workers’) spirit into crazy pretzel shapes that inexplicably never quite break it (though onlookers are always amazed that it doesn’t, “how can anyone or thing contort themselves like that?” they often ask, as though the answer is ever going to be anything other than “because they’re paid to hyuk hyuk hyuk…”) and thus the rich, strangely enough, never quite break the law.
† Who seem to go to way too many pride parades and gay bars than would seem credible if the constant paedophilic obsession of homophobes is to be believed. One can only assume that wingers raise their children in gay leather bars. Actually, now that I think about it, that would explain rather a lot really.
‡ I’m thinking of using Kos’ name as a term to replace the morally questionable terms “moron”, “idiot”, “retard”, “mong” and “dumb”, as in “my god, that was really moulitsas” or “Stop being moulitsas and get a move on”. To put it into a relative context, the bush administration is really really, incredibly moulitsa.
Delphyne,
You have very strong opinions on this subject, & evidently a high degree of certainty that your empirical judgments are true. Have you never read any of this literature? How rational is it to be so self-certain about a contingent matter of fact if you haven’t seen the evidence?
Most of the literature isn’t online, at least not free. You have these choices: deny the research exists; dismiss the findings w/o seeing them (I know in your epistemology findings reported by men are inherently dubious, at the very least); go to the library. In order to fully participate in the discussion, you need to do the last. We’ll wait until you get back.
Gayle Rubin [1984] discusses the then-extant literature, & also the confused conceptual underpinnings of views like yours. I don’t recall whether it reports new findings, but think not. Same w/ Weitzer [2005] (which is online, as is another by him.) Everything else reports new data.
Oh, okay, “fucked by dad.” there’s the kind of lucid, objective, empirical/statistical research we’ve been looking for.
delphyne, what exactly is your personal stake in all of this? I mean, I know what mine is; and I know what the sex workers talking here is; and I know what that of the people who’ve been there and done that and had a horrible abusive time is. I’m not at all clear what your deal is. but, as kh says, you do seem to feel really really strongly about this. and, I’ve observed, about other related issues that have nothing to do with actual money changing hands (consensual BDSM, say). seriously, what is up?
Delphyne,
‘… whoring—in any form—is hell, & the only reason women do it is to get money for coke NOW!’
‘ … humiliating a woman (what sex work is all about)…’
‘ … prices seem to have gone down …’
‘Coke is what this whole industry is about. The majority of the clients are doing it in some capacity, & so are all the hos.’
‘…women in the industry today … ALL got fucked by their dad …’
‘In this business EVERYONE hates everyone else.’
‘…we all LOVE drinking pink cider.’
‘The average sex worker’s career is six months.’
‘He will never marry you.’
In general, if it doesn’t fit this person’s preconception, it’s not ‘real.’ Thanks for the reference. I already have a general sense of your taste in this kind of thing, but, really, I don’t see how the above helps your case.
Belledame222 raises an interesting question, & there’s a related one: why you should point specifically to this sort of dreck as confirmation of your views.
There is evidence & there are prior beliefs (to put it in Bayesian terms). We all have imperfect knowledge about what goes on between other people in private. We have our own experience, we have the reports of acquaintances, & we have research data of varying quality. But we also have prior beliefs. People differ in how heavily they weigh, how tenaciously they cling to, their presuppositions in the face of disconfirming evidence. Do you have any insight into your prior beliefs or why you weigh them so heavily when evaluating actual evidence? As belledame222 suggests, your damning generalizations about male sexuality, your response to disconfirming evidence & the women (& men, of course) who adduce it, & your Tourettish discourse on dicks, sucking, sucking cocks, the dicks that must be sucked, sticking his dick in it, etc, etc, all outside the context of sex work, do begin to raise questions about how you fit into the usual models of rational deliberation.
“pink cider”?
yep.
aw now see, I would love to stick around and watch this one rage on all night, but I have to go to work (after I do a bunch of coke and wonder how I manage to look in myself in the mirror, that is). Y’all have fun without me, since it is a forgone conculsion that my evening will be miserable.
RE,
Don’t forget your cider.
okay, went to the site. three thoughts in no particular order:
1) it sounds like Kassandra is or was having a truly wretched time, and I hope to hell she gets or has gotten out of it
2) I note that OAG has quotage from Lily Burana along with her other “evidence for the grim horror that is sex work” page. um, I know Lily B, at least online; while obviously I take her book as on the level as anything else she says, I doubt very much that she’d be too keen to see herself being talked about in this context. certainly she’s not turned to the abolitionist side.
3) call me dense, but I’m still not clear what “pink cider” is…
Pink cider is a kind of apple cider. It’s pink because of the Geneva apples’ red flesh. It has a berry-like aroma & a fresh, delicately bitter taste. The Geneva is rich in tannin. Like me, it’s lively, with persistent bubbles.
“oh.”
I gotta say this, not for the first time: I mean, yes, I’m a patriarchy-enabling pervert, that’s pretty well established. And yet on the whole the most unappetizingly graphic language/imagery (verbal) seems to come from the abolitionists, I have noticed. I mean, yes, there are porn sites that skeeve me (also); but you know, I’ve really had to go out of my way to look for ‘em.
or, alternately, just follow some of the links of the people who rage against it.
at any rate, I had never known the practical problems with, say, horsefucking porn before reading one particularly passionate and rather detailed diatribe against it (along with its advocates, I believe. which, the next time I meet one at a party, I will certainly tell him: haha, you can’t fool me! I know very well horsefucking is not good clean fun!)
…well, she amended, that, and: the porn or porn-esque stuff that skeeves me the most seem to hate and be disgusted by not only the women (and their bodies) but the men, too, really.
i mean seriously: if one were really “men and their various bodily functions, yay!” one would probably not be simultaneously virulently (male) homophobic. yet, there we are.
>And that is freaking stereotype that puts me over the edge and does nothing but help a wholesale image of victimization for not only us poor whores but ANY woman who has been abused or molested. Hell, not all women in sex work have been molested, and there are a ton of women who have been molested who are not whores. Why do they get to be seen as thinking, rational people when us whores (survivors or not) obviously cannot be?>
That is a point, yes.
Another way of looking at this is: the suggestion is that some abuse victims/survivors are worthier of dignity/empathy than others.
certainly i have been seeing this play out with at least a couple women, *not* sex workers–who are indeed abuse (sexual and otherwise) survivors, have been as bald and vulnerable about it as anyone else…and yet, because of a voiced difference of opinion wrt this stuff and related stuff, are basically treated like pariahs and worse by the very people whom you’d expect would be the most sympathetic (i.e. many of the radical feminists who are also passionately “anti”).
[...] Bitch|Lab, belledame222, Renegade Evolution, and several others are defending the act of trading sex for money from being called into question by that ruffian R Mildred. [...]
KH, again you’ve strayed into the territories of reading lists and insults, so once more it becomes very easy to ignore your posts. I can provide you long lists of books and articles you should read but it doesn’t actually add anything to the discussion.
I’m not quite sure why everybody has suddenly got so hysterical because I quoted the words of a prostitute. Is it because she isn’t singing the praises of the marvellousness of prostitution but instead is talking about her real experience?
On the rhetoric. This compulsive talk about sucking, warm wet holes, dicks, cocks to be sucked, the dick that must be sucked, sucking the boss’s dick, sticking it in, tepid arid holes, sucking the boyfriend’s cock, sucking the neighbor lady’s dick, the cock inside me, the thing that ate my knickers, that guy masturbating inside my live body (always ‘live’, leaving necrophiliacs where?), etc., etc. This is the low rhetoric of sexual violation. It needs renovation.
It can seem inauthentic. It certainly isn’t the language hookers I’ve known, including hookers in a bad way, use to describe their lives. Neither do most people who’ve ever had any real contact with them. There’s a flat quality, simultaneously over-graphic & under-specific, rote & prurient at the same time, that doesn’t ring true, especially to people whose lives it purports to describe (& who can be annoyed when their lives are appropriated as fodder for somebody else’s psychosexual drama.) If your sense of violation comes in any significant degree from within you, expresses your only own imaginative life, or what you’ve read to cultivate it, then your rhetoric will remain disablingly abstract. It’s odd that people who feel so passionately about the subject don’t spend more time with hookers, who could teach them a lot, including how to talk dirty.
It can have a manipulative, bullying quality. It conveys a sense that the speaker uniquely feels the violation women suffer, the authority of privileged access to someone else’s misery. That she knows the darkness that’s hidden from others. This is specious. People who disagree with abolitionist dogma, & who don’t routinely resort to such flamboyant rhetoric, are perfectly capable of (at least) equal concern for others, often with more basis in shared interests & experience. Talking dirty in the manner of a preadolescent child doesn’t accrue insight or moral authority.
It can be creepy. If the point were just self-expression, a chance to vent some kind of inchoate rage under color of concern for others, then it might not matter whether it conscientiously described anyone else’s life. But if the wellbeing of a despised & abused class of women really does matter, then abolitionists should presumably be anxious to get things right, & to persuade. And not to be seen to be more peculiar than they have to be.
Oh my God, KH you’re getting prudish about vulgarity.
This just gets better and better.
“hysterical.”
delphyne, are you sure you’re not a man?
I didn’t know how to spell overwrought.
You just did spell it. And I’m not ashamed to say I blush at the thought of your name.
You’re so sensitve KH. Maybe you should stay away from these discussions.
jeezus. Sure you don’t want to stomp off in another huff, delphyne? Or if you don’t want to leave in a huff, you can leave in a minute and a huff. And if you don’t want to leave in a minute and a huff, you can leave in a taxi.
Anyone else or just me?
what, noticing the decompensation? no, it’s not just you.
I didn’t stomp away in a huff belledame. Your insults were getting in the way of a discussion as KH’s are doing so now.
You both seem to have a bit of a problem sticking to the topic and often seem to prefer talking about me or any other anti-prostitution feminist who happens to be handy.
I’m still wating for the links that prove that prostitutes just love their work and want to do it forever.
I know I notice something, but can’t put my finger on it.
I’m still waiting for the links that show that prostitutes want pimps and johns legalised and plan on staying in the business forever.
I’m unaware of any data that sex workers plan on staying in the business forever. I doubt any exists. (Slinks away w/ tail between legs.)
OK, I’m still waiting for actual data from surveys or studies that show that the majority of prostitutes want pimps and johns legalised and don’t want out of the life *right now*.
Go to p. 218 of Weitzer (2005) for a quick lit. review. I checked & it’s online.
KH, I do you the courtesy of providing you with direct links and even some quotations so you can read it right here. What’s stopping you doing the same?
Don’t be a child. It’s not in front of me. You’ve got the title, you could have found it in less time than it took you to complain.
Well I’m waiting, even if delphyne’s gone to bed. I’m still waiting for the actual data from surveys or studies that show that the majority of prostitutes want pimps and johns legalised and don’t want out of the life.
Acvtually, I’m intregued. Do tell.
and I know for a fact Delphyne isn’t a man.
KH, you’re the only person here who has previously misrepresented a citation’s content to further your arguement, expecting checkable citations isn’t asking so much really.
Delphyne writes:
“I’m not quite sure why everybody has suddenly got so hysterical because I quoted the words of a prostitute. Is it because she isn’t singing the praises of the marvellousness of prostitution but instead is talking about her real experience?”
Give me a break, Delphyne. Are you sure this is even the writing of an actual sex worker? Or just somebody writing snarky shit in the persona of supposed sex worker. Something to piss off the SuicideGirls fans, right next to the fawning interview with the twin jailbait Nazi folksingers. I mean, were talking about Vice Magazine here.
Ultimately, I don’t know if the author of the piece really was a sex worker or not – Googling “Kassandra Marin” turns up nothing but that article. At best, the Vice article is one more sex worker anecdote out of many (and you’re the one who’s asking for hard date rather than anecdotes), at worst, its not even so much as an anecdote, but just somebody’s preconceived idea of what prostitution must really be like.
You -know- delphyne isn’t a man, w-w? like, in the Biblical sense?
I dunno. I think I need some hard data proving y’all aren’t actually a rugby team with extra Y chromosomes.
I mean, how can I know otherwise until you come up with a study?
and, it better be on the Internets. -with- a link. and statistics. and charts.
more seriously: when exactly did The Topic become “prove now that most prostitutes don’t want out of The Life Right This Minute?”
while i wait for an answer to that one, I’ll just be following that white rabbit; he seems to be in an awful hurry; it must be something important.
oh and as long as we’re going back toward unanswered questions:
1)delphyne, what’s your position on unionization for sex workers?
2) What is your personal stake in all this?
3) Can any of y’all play “Melancholy Baby?” If not, why not? Do you have statistics?
(I -may- have some of the Gayle Rubin at home; if so, I’ll be happy to type it up here. it’s gonna have to wait till I actually return home, though. i am perversely sort of enjoying the idea that this thread might actually still be going in a week).
Delphyne:
“I’m not quite sure why everybody has suddenly got so hysterical because I quoted the words of a prostitute. Is it because she isn’t singing the praises of the marvellousness of prostitution but instead is talking about her real experience?”
It’s not her account, per say, it is the pervading belief that ALL members of the “whore subspecies of homosapian” were repeatedly raped by daddy and junkies. That is what gets to me. I am neither, but you can bet the farm that is what people automatically think about me, and almost all women like me, without knowing jack and or shit about us. Even I admit there are times I REALLY dislike my work, but if I don’t hate it (and myseslf for doing it) all the time? Well, just not good enough. Not tragic enough.
Oh, and here, check out the Coyote site, the sex workers rights site, where you can find handy links for the World Charter for Prostitutes Rights & the North American Task Force on Prostitution…all three organizations have sex workers past and present in their member rosters and working towards things such as decriminalization. http://www.bayswan.org/COYOTE.html
And y’all have a nice way of pulling this maneuver…
“Sex worker who was abused and does drugs and hates her job and tells why she hates it and an rants about how shitty it is? Golden! Quote her, use her as THE EXAMPLE!”
“Sex worker who is okay with who she is and what she does and seems to be sane and rational and might even like her job?” Obviously lying or confused. Mock away!”
Here, have some happy whores…ones who consider themselves feminists as well!
http://www.counterpunch.org/hartley02022005.html
http://www.dazereader.com/anniesprinkle.htm (NWS)
http://www.counterpunch.org/nathan12112004.html
http://www.goodforher.com/about/girls.html
http://www.webgrrls.com/eva/feminism.html
“You saw the other girl on Nightline because that’s what the news people want to talk about. Who wants to see a happy porn star? It’s like a car accident. No one wants to pay attention to the traffic; they’d rather stare at the wreckage.”
-Christi Lake
No of “us” ever said all women in the sex industry were happy. But none of you seem even willing to consider that some women are…
waitwaitwaitwaitaminute. that KAsandra whosis article was ganked from “Viceland magazine?” never mind Prussian Blue; this one’s nice, too: and hey, yet more evidence about the disgusting degradingness of porn from someone who was there. well, -gay- porn; this author seems just fine with het porn. mm, misogyny, homophobia and sex-neg: do we have a trifecta? why yes! we do! and it’s so, so, so…titillating:
http://www.viceland.com/issues/v11n3/htdocs/lying.php
“The most ridiculous job I ever held down was copy editor/ghostwriter/ad designer for a series of gay porn magazines and three straight porn publications aimed at a more mature audience. Have you ever seen Over 40, Over 50, or Over 60? How about Black Inches or Latin Inches? Or White Inch? Yes sir, for three long weeks I was at the helm of all those stellar titles. And I had no clue what the hell I was doing. I was a 21-year-old college dropout, addicted to cocaine, with no computer knowledge, who lied in his interview like a seasoned criminal. “Are you fluent with Quark and PhotoShop?” Oh, sure. Isn’t everyone? “What school did you attend?” I was a double major at NYU, graduated top 10 percent of my class. “Do you have a problem with sexual content, gay or straight?” Fuck, no. All my friends are gay and I love it!
So I got the job, and an $85,000 salary plus benefits. I was the king of the world-—to celebrate, I bought myself an eightball and a blowjob. Then I actually had to do some work.
…I was so confused. I hadn’t hit my real deviant sexual peak yet. I thought I was kinky because I stuck baseball bats in girls’ pussies.
…When they asked me to correct something in Quark, I looked the word up in The Chicago Manual of Style. Debbie told me it was a computer program and opened it up on my desktop. I took one look at the toolbar and started to cry. You don’t bullshit your way through Quark. Nor do you try and write gay copy when you don’t like fags.”
***
Boy, that’s a stellar reference all right. I can see why you’re holding out for the -rilly legitimate studies- (on the Internets); clearly you guys are SERIOUS.
If it’s so easy to find, why didn’t you find it yourself? You had a computer in front of you, and you knew what article you were searching for; it would have been easier for you to find it by searching than for anyone else to find it.
It took me about ten minutes to find it (it would have been much quicker if you had provided the title of the article, or the publication) – Weitzer had three different articles regarding prostitution published in 2005, but only one included a page 218. The article, in .pdf format, is here.
Assuming I’ve even found the right article, that is. Page 218 does have a lot of references to support the idea that the majority of non-streetwalker prostitutes like their jobs and have healthy self-images. (What’s not addressed is what they think of legalization.)
Much earlier, Bitch Lab wrote:
I think this is a false dichotomy. No doubt some sex workers are themselves “do gooder white middle class feminists.” And given the racism and classism that would inevitably be part of any professional organization, they’d probably end up being at least some of (and perhaps dominating) the leadership of any such organization.
Yeah, I know that it’s odd to bring that up so much later. So I’m an odd person.
“…but just somebody’s preconceived idea of what prostitution must really be like.”
Reading through this Weitzer piece, which is one person’s opinion and nothing more, I am left thinking that’s exactly what we have here–(Weitzer’s) preconceived idea of what prostitution is like.
This is only an abstract, and an abstract of a commentary at that; not a study. We can’t know anything from an abstract. Neither can we know anything about his references without reading them in full study, not in abstract.
Is there conflict of interest here? I would like to see a declaration of conflict of interest from Weitzer.
Are you a john R. Weitzer?
“…but just somebody’s preconceived idea of what prostitution must really be like.”
“Reading through this Weitzer piece, which is one person’s opinion and nothing more, I am left thinking that’s exactly what we have here–(Weitzer’s) preconceived idea of what prostitution is like.
This is only an abstract, and an abstract of a commentary at that; not a study. We can’t know anything from an abstract. Neither can we know anything about his references without reading them in full study, not in abstract.”
What abstract? So far, the two mentions of Weitzer articles and both have linked to the full articles, not abstracts. Weitzer’s articles are not “studies” but review articles, evaluating other studies. Review articles, of course, are a perfectly valid and necessary part of scientific discourse.
“Is there conflict of interest here? I would like to see a declaration of conflict of interest from Weitzer.
Are you a john R. Weitzer?”
Why don’t you find Weitzer’s email address and ask him? I don’t think he reads this forum.
But, hey, who am I to call into question impeccable sources like Vice Magazine?
Ampersand did give us the full pdf of the Weitzer commentary. I misspoke. Regarding Weitzer’s references we have once again, only Weitzer’s opinion. Vice Magazine is a magazine not a scientific journal. We know what type of publication it is, and know we are not getting a scientific article. Weitzer’s commentary would more appropriately have been published in the popular press too, and then we wouldn’t have the confusion caused by this pretense of scientific rigour.
What?
“Weitzer’s commentary would more appropriately have been published in the popular press too, and then we wouldn’t have the confusion caused by this pretense of scientific rigour.”
Just how many scientific journals do you follow, Pony? Review articles of this kind are a standard part of most journals. Pretense of scientific rigor? Well, there are those of us who think Farely’s studies have a great deal of pretense of scientific rigor. What makes Farley’s work more “scientific” than Weitzer’s analysis? The fact that you happen to like Farley’s politics and not Weitzer’s?
Delphyne (et. all)
I don’t mind reading the words of prostitutes who dislike their jobs. What gets to me is the blanket assumption that anyone who works in the sex industry was raped by dad and is a junkie, because that is not true. I get tired of everyone who looks at/speaks to/speaks about women in the sex industry assuming that. Yes, in some cases it is true, but in some it is not, but you can bet the rent check everyone assumes that about all of us, and it gets old. Being seen as immoral, broken, subhuman junkie scum gets real old real quick.
Also I note it is a popular trend to find a woman who fits those stereotypes and hates her work (and herself for doing it) and use her as THE example, yet the words of those who are not that example…well, no reality or credit there. I am fairly certain that 90% everyone loves so much applies to street prostitutes almost exclusively, and it is probably damn accurate for them. But for all sex workers? No, I do not think so.
Oh, and here…links…
This one is for Coyote (http://www.bayswan.org/COYOTE.html), a sex workers advocate group who wants law reform (also has links for The North American Task Force on Prostitution, and The International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights . All three are organizations with sex workers in the membership rosters who advocate various levels of law reform.
And here, a sampling of sex workers (who consider themselves feminist) who enjoy/ defend their work:
“You saw the other girl on Nightline because that’s what the news people want to talk about. Who wants to see a happy porn star? It’s like a car accident. [No one wants to pay] attention to the traffic; [they'd rather stare at the wreckage].’
-Christi Lake
http://www.counterpunch.org/nathan12112004.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/hartley02022005.html
http://www.dazereader.com/anniesprinkle.htm (NWS)
http://www.swop-usa.org/Harlot.php
gah, sorry about the more or less double post, this here interweb is messing with me.