I pour you gravy, over some pies tonight…
someone on a manics comm stated that weebl was james, and bob sean. TOTALLY true. and made it even funnier.
Joins the “pile-on” on poor, poor Twisty
Alright, don’t tend to do this publicly, but here I am.
All I’ll say on a public arena is, I agree with buggle, delphyne, etc. Bonobobabe and Undercover Punk explain why beautifully.
PS read this brilliant incorporation of species into intersectionality while you’re at it, peas and carrots.
PPS, do I need to say anything about George Tiller being killed for performing late term abortions, thereby “murder,” by an all too sane, all too masculine man*? OK: seriously f’ed. Pro-life my ass.
*I, like Jane Caputi, believe that the clear majority of men who kill are not anomalies, not deviant, not insane.
Upcoming posts…
Will happen:
-Responding to Lierre Kieth’s and another defender of corpse-consumption responses on a mutual friend’s facebook page.
-Eating on the cheap–and veg*n–in Kitchener, Cambridge, Waterloo in particular (I’ll be inviting reader input on this one, for both in this area and other locales)
-Reproductive technologies as methods of controlling the Other, as illustrative of the mutual oppression of women and animals, as reproducing racial, class, species, and sex divisions.
-”Pedophilia” as child hatred (misopedia?), social hypocrisy of condemning “pedophiles” when normal male sexuality is channeled into being fixated on children and childlike adults
-Some favourite spoken word of mine on youtube
Will probably happen:
-Feminism and slash fanfic, particularly in the fandoms Supernatural and Manic Street Preachers (eg Supernatural is a very “not feminist friendly” show, yet so many women and girls write and read slash of it, some injecting very feminist/egalitarian messages, but many reproducing antifeminist themes, eg patriarchal depictions of female characters)
-edited to add: should I try taking this http://kittywampus.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/twisting-the-meaning-of-sex-class/ on? I mean it’s been covered a bazillion times by other so-called “cultural” feminists, but why should I not reacquaint my head with a brick wall? Presumably, for starters, she’s not familiar with Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, from 1969, or Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating (1974) and Our Blood (1976), if she finds actual radfems to not be so (hint: GAYLE RUBIN HAS NOT BEEN ANYWHERE NEAR RADICAL FEMINIST IN DECADES! She, in the 80s, repudiated the article the blogger quotes from). Shulamith Firestone is fairly not representative of radical feminism. She wrote one book, then dropped out, and her views re: reproductive technologies have been proved wrong.
Vegan Freaks forum?
I was wanting to register for the vegan freaks forum, but it’s by invite only. Can anyone hook me up?
ps I’ve been vegan (freegan style, so dumpstered/food co-op dairy and egg products, I’ve eaten*) for over a year 
And I’m definitely of the ethical/political variety.
*My freegan position also has a lot to do with the socio-economic class of my family. Being pure vegan is VERY difficult when you get much of your food from a food co-op, and only buy specialty vegan foods when they are on sale/reduced because you can’t afford them otherwise. I was vegetarian since I was 11, and found that easy, but had to give up an absolutist approach to veganism when I tried it at the ages of 9, 11, and 20 (last year).
JHR Laurier’s publication on 2010 Vancouver Olympics – PDF
Click here, via AW@L’S site
My article about prostitution, trafficking, and the Olympics is on pages 6-7.
Yay!!
May Day of Action for Immigrant Rights, and anti-arms shows petition
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/MayDay2009/
I’ll be attending the Toronto action organised by No One Is Illegal on Saturday (link contains more info). Hope to see you there!
http://prax.ca/coat/No-Arms-Shows please sign this too 
Suicide Food?, or Portraying Animals as Enjoying, Encouraging Own Slaughter (a rant)
“suicide food” taken from http://suicidefood.blogspot.com/. http://vegantabulous.blogspot.com/2009/03/vegetarian-myth-open-thread.html is also highly recommended
I want to explain something: justifications for slaughter are read by veg*ns as justifications for pornography or rape are read by (radical) feminists or justifications of lynching and segregation are read by antiracist activists.
The view that animals LIKE being farmed and killed is PERVASIVE (eg see above link). Even people otherwise understanding of animal rights (eg opposing animal testing) can actively participate in this, such as Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen.
Reading The Vegetarian Myth angered me (for a fantastic–to me–reception to it see http://vegantabulous.blogspot.com/2009/03/vegetarian-myth-open-thread.html), but parts of it felt like a punch in the gut. For one thing, a huge part of her argument about the stupidity of vegans seemed to some to be based on a sarcastic, satirical conversation by vegans (http://www.postpunkkitchen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=90752&p=1, and http://www.postpunkkitchen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=19376), that she apparently took very seriously, and worked strenuously to debunk. However, she has informed me that it did happen seriously, circa 2001, and there’s no reason to believe she’s lying about this. But basing a large part of her book on a eight year old conversation that she can’t seem to find more recent examples of and cite them results in this readers’ annoyance, not outrage or anguish.
What was anguish was her defense of killing–animals, of course, not humans. eg, “for someone to live, someone else has to die. In that acceptance, with all its suffering and sorrow, is the ability to choose a different way, a better way.” and “The grass and the grazers need each other as much as predators and prey. These are not one-way relationships, not arrangements of dominance and subordination. We aren’t exploiting each other by eating. We are only taking turns.”
Of course, she doesn’t mean humans need to die for others to live, let alone that humans need to die for animals to live.The facts are, which she and plenty of others, seem endlessly to perpetuate while either denying that they are doing so, or assuming that there is nothing wrong with, is this: humans have more right than any other creatures to live. While animal killing humans is “horrific” and cannibalism is “barbaric” to the vast majority of humans, we have so much right to life that, even when not necessitated by survival (self-defense and/or food to stave off starvation), we have the assumed right to kill a “lesser” animal to consume their corpses as meat. Not only that, but it’s the way it should be.
If she and others who tout the above quoted line of thinking actually stood by what they claim, they would not be placing humans outside of being prey. They’d be living amidst predator species, allowing nonhuman animals to cull the human animal herd of the sick and elderly. Which we DO NOT do. They ARE one way relationships. There is no mutuality in fact or practice in the stated bargain. We do not get killed and eaten, except in rare instances, by carnivorous or omnivorous animals. In fact, when it does happen to humans, we punish the animal who kills with death. Even committing a severe bite is deemed sufficient to kill an animal, even a dog, a species whom we generally don’t consume. The animals we eat, whether vegans or flesh-eaters, don’t get to eat us. Animals who could kill and eat us are not allowed by making us inaccessible and capitally punishing those who do.
Vultures and flesh-eating dirt-dwellers do get to eat us, but only after we die in ways not related to being treated as eatable, ie disease, or death by another human. Not only that, but we regard these creatures as aborrent, as disgusting and gross because of where they live, what they eat, how they look, in shining examples of speciesism. Humans, especially males, are the death-dealers to humans, not animals, and humans equate awful humans with being these creatures and can even find it better to be a human dealer of death to humans than to be a “slug” or “maggot.”
Additionally, we not only do not eat animals that are already dead; we don’t eat elderly ones, or one’s that are naturally sick (however, we do eat animals that are sick from industrial farming practices, but they are often young, babies even, and would be healthy if not for said practices). We regard it as unhealthy, by and large. We are not as noble as vultures or others feeding off the already dead to help the return of the body to the earth. We slaughter billions–about ELEVEN BILLION in the US and Canada alone–of animals EVERY YEAR for their flesh. We kill additional billions in animal testing, fur and leather, abandoning puppy milled animals, and other animalcidal practices. We are not like carnivorous animals, killing for survival, and only taking what we need. About 335 000 000 people do not need 11 billion animals yearly, by any stretch of the imagination.
The following quote by Derrick Jensen is guilty of the same, and beyond: “I go back again. I remember the predator-prey bargain: If you consume the flesh of another, you take responsibility for the continuation of its community. I open the refrigerator. Eat more.
“This time the salmon says something else to me: “I know you don’t like killing. If you help take out the dams that will help us survive. Then you can kill and eat all the salmon you’d like. We will even jump out of the water and right to where you are waiting. You won’t feel bad about killing us, because you have helped our community. We will gladly do this for you, if you will help us survive.””
If you can’t understand where I am coming from, envision the latter quote stating this:
“I go back again. I remember the john-prostitute bargain: If you use the orifices of another, you take responsibility for the continuation of its trade. I go down to the brothel. Buy more.
“This time the woman says something else to me: “I know you don’t like raping. If you help take out the traffickers that will help us survive. Then you can rent and rape all the women you’d like. We will even jump out of the women’s shelter and right to where you are waiting. You won’t feel bad about prostituting us, because you have helped our trade. We will gladly do this for you, if you will help us economically survive.””
or perhaps this:
“I go back again. I remember the white-of colour bargain: If you degrade the skin of another, you take responsibility for the continuation of its community. I buy more sweatshop labour clothing. Hate more.
“This time the person of colour says something else to me: “I know you don’t like hating. If you help take out the corporations that will help us survive. Then you can exploit and hate all the racialised bodies you’d like. We will even jump out of the sweat shop and right to where you are waiting. You won’t feel bad about hating us, because you have helped our community. We will gladly do this for you, if you will help us survive.””
And therein lies a fundamental justification of oppression: the oppressed ENJOY it. They WANT it. “Good” women (white, heterosexual, middle class, not sexually abused) are postulated as enjoying rape by the “good guys” (white, middle class, family, “not really rapists”) and needing to be protected from rape by the “bad guys” (of colour, poor, strangers, “real” rapists), not to mention being turned into pornography for other men or sometimes killed in “s-m games gone wrong” or “the bitch was going to leave me.” “Bad” women (of colour, lesbian, poor, in prostitution) are not afforded such protection at all, and “good” women often find that their “goodness” does not protect them. While “pets” are offered some protection, they too can find their “cuteness” doesn’t protect them. Farmed animals are postulated to enjoy being not only raped in farming (eg dairy cows are impregnated yearly through artificial insemination, which is standard practice even on organic farms), but to enjoy being sent to slaughter and being turned into food. What protection do food-animals get? Certainly not the protection of most animal-welfare laws.
And in enters the “they would die without us” argument, also known to take the forms of “they need us” and “how could we change now after domesticating them?” But do women need men, or do they need the end of men’s oppression? Do people of colour need whites, or do they need whites to stop being racist? While it is true that domesticated species would mostly die in the wild, unlike human oppressed folk, turning them out to fend for themselves isn’t the only solution. Companion animals and farm sanctuaries show that. Not to mention, is freedom not better than oppression? Is it better to not exist at all (for potential future farmed animals) then to live lives of oppression? I’d say yes.
When looking at debates around corpse eating, look at the money that is behind these industries. We have turned it into a multibillion dollar business–worth WAY more than the ejaculation industry (aka “sex” industry), by the way. In the US, pornography alone is worth between $8-12 billion, in Canada a billion. In Canada alone, “meat” is worth $21 billion, with dairy and eggs at $13 billion, and seafood $4 billion. They have far more economic, political, and social clout that any group of veg*ns has. To compare the agricultural animal products with vegan agriculture, here are the statistics for the latter: grain is $4.5 billion, and fruit/vegetables is $6 billion (according to the meat industry too: http://www.cmc-cvc.com/english/industry_statistic_e.asp).
Who controls how we perceive reality? What humans need to eat? What animals and other oppressed groups are “really like”? Certainly not veg*ns, and even more certainly not nonhuman animals.
also on facebook
PS Part 3 of the Carnival is on it’s way. Sorry it’s sooo late! It’ll probably be up Wednesday.
21st Carnival of Radical Feminists, part 2: 30 posts
Demonista’s finds (as in, I take responsibility for its inclusion). This is part 2, there will probably be two more parts. Sorry to break it up so much! I’ve limited the number of entries per blogger to three, out of expediency.
A schadenfreudal orgasm by Jen.
Mom and Sex Work Is Transphobic at Valerie Speaks
Equality is Equality is Equality, Dispatches from Nappyville: What’s the Mother of a Black Child to Do?, and For Black Women, Hatred Begins at “Home” by What Tami Said
Can’t You Say Something Nice About Prostitution? by Peridot Ash
I Am Back with Apologies by Amber
Jennifer McClune’s WARNING Ladies: Being a Jerk is the Male Default Setting!, “You Told Harpo to Beat Me?”: How Hip Hop Music Defines and Divides Black Women, and With Friends Like These, or The ReTOOLed Misogyny of Feminist Dudes at Celie’s Revenge
Create for Animal Rights: Not Man’s best friend and Free Lucy! (the elephant)
FOKUS Networking Conference Statement on Trafficking & Prostitution at Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW)
A recent Biting Beaver post, at Archive of the Biting Beaver, GFE’s or “Girl Friend Experience”
Bermuda Radical writes On the Struggle Against Patriarchy and reposts The Radical Women Platform.
Thoughts on “Consent” by Laurelin in the Rain.
Equalist Sex by Belenen.
On Being Alone, Love Me, Love My Menstruation, and Foie Gras by Bonobo Babe.
Some venting and activism courtesy of the lj community feminist_fury: I came across these magnetic words by anji, I am in a DIY community by Codie, and The Prettiest Girl in Class by Lady Hedge.
Feminist Reprise posts on white antiracist errors, News of the day apropos moi, and Ageism and Radical Feminism.
Let’s not forget the requisite Joss Whedon bashing 
Dans la Reine, inspired by Fengi, posts about Dollhouse.
I’ll try to get the third part up within a week. And now, on to responding to comments
Sorry! (Carnival of Radical Feminists, pt 1)
I am running insanely late on it, and I apologise profusely. My March has been crazy busy with drama *wring hands*–eg school, friends, personal life, facebook even
I feel awful about holding things back so much, so I’ll post what was sumbitted to the carnival and emailed to me. I’ll post my finds at a later date soon. Again, apologies!
So, carnival, part un.
Menstrual Poetry presents January 5-11 is Women’s Self-Empowerment Week! posted at Healing Yourself Heals the World.
Ama Lee presents Speaking Truth to Power: An Interview with Jennifer Baumgardner posted at Feminist Review, saying, “I know she’s not traditionally thought of as a radical feminist, but I do think this interview shows complex thoughts about feminism.” *I included it because of her I was raped project.
Ama Lee presents And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women posted at Feminist Review.
Nandita presents Defined by Blood posted at Cold SnapDragon.
Anti-Porn London presents What are we Reclaiming For? posted at Anti-Porn Feminists.
Pippa presents Sheffield Fems and Inaccessibility posted at incurable hippie’s musings and rants, saying, “Inaccessible feminism. Background article here: http://incurable-hippie.blogspot.com/2008/11/access-to-feminism.html“
freethinkr presents On Femininity (and Masculinity) posted at notes of a freethinker.
Heart presents The Colonizing of the Feminist Blogosphere: Why Feminists Should Have Boycotted Fem 2.0 posted at Women’s Space.
Rebecca Mott presents Won’t Go Away, Some Personal Thoughts on Unionising, and These Things Make Me Angry posted at rmott62.
Romeo Vitelli presents Fallen Women posted at Providentia.
Heart presents other wimmin’s bloggings:
But He’s Such a Nice Guy at Historiann.
Zip Code Based Study of Porn Consumption Finds Red States Consume the Most at Feminist Law Professors.
Two posts at Amananta: The Whitewash Continues and More Evo Psycho Bullshit.
I’m so tired of arguing with sex-pos feminists at Hell on Hairy Legs.
My Sexual Revolution by Julie Bindel.
Language Does Matter by Rebecca Mott.
Sully and Suleyman at Freedom Rider.
Open Letter to Depressed Women at Free Soil Party Blog.
SM Berg presents Just thoughts. . . on blogging and stuff by Maggie Hays.
MTV: Sex, drugs, and (almost no) rock and roll… FOR KIDS! by Nine Deuce.
When the number of bodies hit double digits,
finally the police begin seriously investigating cases of missing
prostitutes by Feminist Law Professors.
Part 2 will include blog posts I’ve decided to include, spoken word with a radical feminist bent, international news stories relating to women’s lives, feminist music videos, conference statements, etc. Topics include prostitution, mother-daughter incest, the myth of “the good profeminist males,” animal liberation, body image, recovery from sexual abuse, the politics of hair for black and mixed race women, masculinity, love, sisterhood, Nazism, female genital mutilation, and more!
If I taught feminist/women’s studies, the materials I’d use would include…
at least parts of Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women, Ice and Fire, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Scapegoat, Heartbreak, Woman Hating… and so on
Radically Speaking, eds Diane Bell and Renate Klein
music by Tori Amos (albums from the choirgirl hotel, boys for pele, little earthquakes, scarlet’s walk, etc), Ani DiFranco (eg “Letter to a John”), Bikini Kill, Blue October (eg “Sexual Powertrip,” “Razorblade,” “Drilled a Wire…”), Consolidated (pretty much everything of theirs), Sarah Slean (eg “I Know”), Queen Latifah, Public Enemy (eg “Revolutionary Generation”), Manic Street Preachers (eg “Yes,” “Born a Girl,” “Little Baby Nothing”)
bell hooks’ ain’t i a woman
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics
Catharine MacKinnon’s Are Women Human?, and Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws
documentaries such as “Searching for Angela Shelton,” “Aileen,” “Dreamworlds 3,” “Generation M,” “The Price of Pleasure,” “Inside Boystown”
films such as Foxfire, Rabbit Proof Fence, Serenades, The Color Purple, If These Walls Could Talk, Poison, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Fishing Trip, Eclipse, The Five Senses, Frida, Dolores Claiborne, Edge of Seventeen, No Child of Mine, Sex Traffic, Monster, Ginger Snaps trilogy, Bastard out of Carolina, 2 by 4, Man Without a Face, Deepa Mehta’s films (Fire and Water especially)
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Patrick Roscoe’s Birthmarks and The Truth About Love
Francesca Lia Block’s The Hanged Man, Echo, Weetzie Bat series, I Was a Teenage Fairy, Guarding the Moon
James Baldwin’s Another Country
Rus Funk’s Stopping Rape: A Challenge for Men
Not for Sale, eds Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant
Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider
Mary Daly’s Pure Lust and Quintessence
Jane Caputi’s Goddesses and Monsters and The Age of Sex Crime
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Warrior Marks, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, Her Blue Body Everything We Know, etc.
Carol J Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat and Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals
Sheila Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina, Anticlimax, Unpacking Queer Politics, The Idea of Prostitution
Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Mayra Hornbacher, Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
Marilee Strong’s A Bright Red Scream: Self-mutilation and the Language of Pain
John Stoltenberg’s Refusing to Be a Man and The End of Manhood
Ntozake Shange’s for coloured girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf and nappy edges
this awesome roundtable on pornography between Dworkin, Norma Ramos, Shange, Marcia Gillespie and Gloria Jacobs.
Robin Morgan, the Word of a Woman, Saturday’s Child, Sisterhood is Powerful/Global/Forever (all 3)
This Bridge Called My Back, eds Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua
Just Sex: Students Rewrite the Rules on Sex, Violence, Activism, and Equality, eds Jodi Gold and Susan Villari
Shere Hite’s reports on female and male sexuality, the family, and love (all 4)
whooo, that’s enough…at least for now
From Right Wing Women, by Andrea Dworkin
Part of chapter 3, “Abortion” from http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/RightWingWomenAbortion.html. In future, I hope to type out and post the rest of this chapter. Or, get a scanner, and scan it. But I don’t gots the money (don’t even have my own computer )
Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men.
The pop idea was that fucking was good, so good that the more there was of it, the better. The pop idea was that people should fuck whom they wanted: translated for the girls, this meant that girls should want to be fucked–as close to all the time as was humanly possible. For women, alas, all the time is humanly possible with enough changes of partners. Men envision frequency with reference to their own patterns of erection and ejaculation. Women got fucked a lot more than men fucked.
Sexual-revolution philosophy predates the sixties. It shows up in Left ideologies and movements with regularity–in most countries, in many different periods, manifest in various leftist “tendencies.” The sixties in the United States, repeated with different tonalities throughout Western Europe, had a particularly democratic character. One did not have to read Wilhelm Reich, though some did. It was simple. A bunch of nasty bastards who hated making love were making war. A bunch of boys who liked flowers were making love and refusing to make war. These boys were wonderful and beautiful. They wanted peace. They talked love, love, love, not romantic love but love of mankind (translated by women: humankind). They grew their hair long and painted their faces and wore colorful clothes and risked being treated like girls. In resisting going to war, they were cowardly and sissies and weak, like girls. No wonder the girls of the sixties thought that these boys were their special friends, their special allies, lovers each and every one.
The girls were real idealists. They hated the Viet Nam War and their own lives, unlike the boys’, were not at stake. They hated the racial and sexual bigotry visited on blacks, in particular on black men who were the figures in visible jeopardy. The girls were not all white, but still the black man was the figure of empathy, the figure whom they wanted to protect from racist pogroms. Rape was seen as a racist ploy: not something real in itself used in a racist context to isolate and destroy black men in specific and strategic ways, but a fabrication, a figment of the racist imagination. The girls were idealistic because, unlike the boys, many of them had been raped; their lives were at stake. The girls were idealists especially because they believed in peace and freedom so much that they even thought it was intended for them too. They knew that their mothers were not free–they saw the small, constrained, female lives–and they did not want to be their mothers. They accepted the boys’ definition of sexual freedom because it, more than any other idea or practice, made them different from their mothers. While their mothers kept sex secret and private, with so much fear and shame, the girls proclaimed sex their right, their pleasure, their freedom. They decried the stupidity of their mothers and allied themselves on overt sexual terms with the long-haired boys who wanted peace, freedom, and fucking everywhere. This was a world vision that took girls out of the homes in which their mothers were dull captives or automatons and at the same time turned the whole world, potentially, into the best possible home. In other words, the girls did not leave home in order to find sexual adventure in a sexual jungle; they left home to find a warmer, kinder, larger, more embracing home.
Sexual radicalism was defined in classically male terms: number of partners, frequency of sex, varieties of sex (for instance, group sex), eagerness to engage in sex. It was all supposed to be essentially the same for boys and girls: two, three, or however many long-haired persons communing. It was especially the lessening of gender polarity that kept the girls entranced, even after the fuck had revealed the boys to be men after all. Forced sex occurred–it occurred often; but the dream lived on. Lesbianism was never accepted as lovemaking on its own terms but rather as a kinky occasion for male voyeurism and the eventual fucking of two wet women; still, the dream lived on. Male homosexuality was toyed with, vaguely tolerated, but largely despised and feared because heterosexual men however bedecked with flowers could not bear to be fucked “like women”; but the dream lived on. And the dream for the girls at base was a dream of a sexual and social empathy that negated the strictures of gender, a dream of sexual equality based on what men and women had in common, what the adults tried to kill in you as they made you grow up. It was a desire for a sexual community more like childhood–before girls were crushed under and segregated. It was a dream of sexual transcendence: transcending the absolutely dichotomized male-female world of the adults who made war not love. It was–for the girls–a dream of being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling equality, not the traditional male dominance.
Wishing did not make it so. Acting as if it were so did not make it so. Proposing it in commune after commune, to man after man, did not make it so. Baking bread and demonstrating against the war together did not make it so. The girls of the sixties lived in what Marxists call, but in this instance do not recognize as, a “contradiction.” Precisely in trying to erode the boundaries of gender through an apparent single standard of sexual-liberation practice, they participated more and more in the most gender-reifying act: fucking. The men grew more manly; the world of the counterculture became more aggressively male-dominated. The girls became women–found themselves possessed by a man or a man and his buddies (in the parlance of the counterculture, his brothers and hers too)–traded, gang-fucked, collected, collectivized, objectified, turned into the hot stuff of pornography, and socially resegregated into traditionally female roles. Empirically speaking, sexual liberation was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose–it turned out–was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints, and in that it was successful. One consequence for the women was an intensification of the experience of being sexually female–the precise opposite of what those idealistic girls had envisioned for themselves. In experiencing a wide variety of men in a wide variety of circumstances, women who were not prostitutes discovered the impersonal, class-determined nature of their sexual function. They discovered the utter irrelevance of their own individual, aesthetic, ethical, or political sensitivities (whether those sensitivities were characterized by men as female or bourgeois or puritanical) in sex as men practiced it. The sexual standard was the male-to-female fuck, and women served it–it did not serve women.
In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an issue. It was assumed that–unrepressed–everyone wanted intercourse all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of and proof of sexual repression. Fucking per se was freedom per se. When rape–obvious, clear, brutal rape–occurred, it was ignored, often for political reasons if the rapist was black and the woman white. Interestingly, in a racially constructed rape, the rape was likely to be credited as such, even when ultimately ignored. When a white man raped a white woman, there was no vocabulary to describe it. It was an event that occurred outside the political discourse of the generation in question and therefore it did not exist. When a black woman was raped by a white man, the degree of recognition depended on the state of alliances between black and white men in the social territory involved: whether, at any given time, they were sharing women or fighting territorially over them. A black woman raped by a black man had the special burden of not jeopardizing her own race, endangered especially by charges of rape, by calling attention to any such brutality committed against her. Beatings and forced intercourse were commonplace in the counterculture. Even more widespread was the social and economic coercion of women to engage in sex with men. Yet no antagonism was seen to exist between sexual force and sexual freedom: one did not preclude the other. Implicit was the conviction that force would not be necessary if women were not repressed; women would want to fuck and would not have to be forced to fuck; so that it was repression, not force, that stood in the way of freedom.
Sexual-liberation ideology, whether pop or traditionally leftist-intellectual, did not criticize, analyze, or repudiate forced sex, nor did it demand an end to the sexual and social subordination of women to men: neither reality was recognized. Instead, it posited that freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere. No persons were held responsible for forced sex acts, rapes, beatings of women, unless the women themselves were blamed–usually for not complying in the first place. These were in the main women who wanted to comply–who wanted the promised land of sexual freedom–and still they had limits, preferences, tastes, desires for intimacy with some men and not others, moods not necessarily related to menstruation or the phases of the moon, days on which they would rather work or read; and they were punished for all these puritanical repressions, these petit bourgeois lapses, these tiny exercises of tinier wills not in conformity with the wills of their brother-lovers: force was frequently used against them, or they were threatened or humiliated or thrown out. No diminution of flower power, peace, freedom, political correctness, or justice was seen to be implicit in the use of coercion in any form to get sexual compliance.
In the garden of earthly delights known as the sixties counterculture, pregnancy did intrude, almost always rudely; and even then and there it was one of the real obstacles to female fucking on male demand. It made women ambivalent, reluctant, concerned, cross, preoccupied; it even led women to say no. Throughout the sixties, the birth control pill was not easy to get, and nothing else was sure. Unmarried women had an especially hard time getting access to contraceptive devices, including the diaphragm, and abortion was illegal and dangerous. Fear of pregnancy provided a reason for saying no: not just an excuse but a concrete reason not easily seduced or persuaded away, even by the most astute or dazzling argument in behalf of sexual freedom. Especially difficult to sway were the women who had had illegal abortions already. Whatever they thought of fucking, however they experienced it, however much they loved or tolerated it, they knew that for them it had consequences in blood and pain and they knew that it cost the men nothing, except sometimes money. Pregnancy was a material reality, and it could not be argued away. One tactic used to counterbalance the high anxiety caused by the possibility of pregnancy was the esteem in which “natural” women were held–women who were “natural” in all respects, who wanted organic fucking (no birth control, whatever children resulted) and organic vegetables too. Another tactic was to stress the communal raising of children, to promise it. Women were not punished in the conventional ways for bearing the children–they were not labeled “bad” or shunned–but they were frequently abandoned. A woman and her child–poor and relatively outcast–wandering within the counterculture changed the quality of the hedonism in the communities in which they intruded: the mother-and-child pair embodied a different strain of reality, not a welcome one for the most part. There were lone women struggling to raise children “freely” and they got in the way of the males who saw freedom as the fuck–and the fuck ended for the males when the fuck ended. These women with children made the other women a little somber, a little concerned, a little careful. Pregnancy, the fact of it, was antiaphrodisiacal. Pregnancy, the burden of it, made it harder for the flower boys to fuck the flower girls, who did not want to have to claw out their own insides or pay someone else to do it; they also did not want to die.
It was the brake that pregnancy put on fucking that made abortion a high-priority political issue for men in the 1960s–not only for young men, but also for the older leftist men who were skimming sex off the top of the counterculture and even for more traditional men who dipped into the pool of hippie girls now and then. The decriminalization of abortion–for that was the political goal–was seen as the final fillip: it would make women absolutely accessible, absolutely “free.” The sexual revolution, in order to work, required that abortion be available to women on demand. If it were not, fucking would not be available to men on demand. Getting laid was at stake. Not just getting laid, but getting laid the way great numbers of boys and men had always wanted–lots of girls who wanted it all the time outside marriage, free, giving it away. The male-dominated Left agitated for and fought for and argued for and even organized for and even provided political and economic resources for abortion rights for women. The left was militant on the issue.
Then, at the very end of the sixties, women who had been radical in counterculture terms–women who had been both politically and sexually active–became radical in new terms: they became feminists. They were not Betty Friedan’s housewives. They had fought out on the streets against the Viet Nam War; some of them were old enough to have fought in the South for black civil rights, and all had come into adulthood on the back of that struggle; and lord knows, they had been fucked. As Marge Piercy wrote in a 1969 expose of sex and politics in the counterculture:
Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of what passes for common practice in many places. A man can bring a woman into an organization by sleeping with her and remove her by ceasing to do so. A man can purge a woman for no other reason than that he has tired of her, knocked her up, or is after someone else: and that purge is accepted without a ripple. There are cases of a woman excluded from a group for no other reason than that one of its leaders proved impotent with her. If a macher enters a room full of machers, accompanied by a woman and does not introduce her, it is rare indeed that anyone will bother to ask her name or acknowledge her presence. The etiquette that governs is one of master-servant. 5
Or, as Robin Morgan wrote in 1970: “We have met the enemy and he’s our friend. And dangerous.” 6 Acknowledging the forced sex so pervasive in the counterculture in the language of the counterculture, Morgan wrote: “It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn’t want to be raped.” 7 These were the beginnings: recognizing that the brother-lovers were sexual exploiters as cynical as any other exploiters–they ruled and demeaned and discarded women, they used women to get and consolidate power, they used women for sex and for menial labor, they used women up; recognizing that rape was a matter of utter indifference to these brother-lovers–they took it any way they could get it; and recognizing that all the work for justice had been done on the backs of sexually exploited women within the movement. “But surely,” wrote Robin Morgan in 1968, “even a male reactionary on this issue can realize that it is really mind-blowing to hear some young male ‘revolutionary’–supposedly dedicated to building a new, free social order to replace this vicious one under which we live–turn around and absent-mindedly order his ‘chick’ to shut up and make supper or wash his socks–he’s talking now. We’re used to such attitudes from the average American clod, but from this brave new radical?” 8
It was the raw, terrible realization that sex was not brother-sister but master-servant–that this brave new radical wanted to be not only master in his own home but pasha in his own harem–that proved explosive. The women ignited with the realization that they had been sexually used. Going beyond the male agenda on sexual liberation, these women discussed sex and politics with one another–something not done even when they had shared the same bed with the same man–and discovered that their experiences had been staggeringly the same, ranging from forced sex to sexual humiliation to abandonment to cynical manipulation as both menials and pieces of ass. And the men were entrenched in sex as power: they wanted the women for fucking, not revolution: the two were revealed to be different after all. The men refused to change but even more important they hated the women for refusing to service them anymore on the old terms–there it was, revealed for what it was. The women left the men–in droves. The women formed an autonomous women’s movement, a militant feminist movement, to fight against the sexual cruelty they had experienced and to fight for the sexual justice they had been denied.
From their own experience–especially in being coerced and in being exchanged–the women found a first premise for their political movement: that freedom for a woman was predicated on, and could not exist without, her own absolute control of her own body in sex and in reproduction. This included not only the right to terminate a pregnancy but also the right to not have sex, to say no, to not be fucked. For women, this led to many areas of sexual discovery about the nature and politics of their own sexual desire, but for men it was a dead end–most of them never recognized feminism except in terms of their own sexual deprivation; feminists were taking away the easy fuck. They did everything they could to break the back of the feminist movement–and in fact they have not stopped yet. Especially significant has been their change of heart and politics on abortion. The right to abortion defined as an intrinsic part of the sexual revolution was essential to them: who could bear the horror and cruelty and stupidity of illegal abortion? The right to abortion defined as an intrinsic part of a woman’s right to control her own body, in sex too, was a matter of supreme indifference.
Material resources dried up. Feminists fought the battle for decriminalized abortion–no laws governing abortion–on the streets and in the courts with severely diminished male support. In 1973, the Supreme Court gave women legalized abortion: abortion regulated by the state.
If before the Supreme Court decision in 1973 leftist men expressed a fierce indifference to abortion rights on feminist terms, after 1973 indifference changed to overt hostility: feminists had the right to abortion and were still saying no–no to sex on male terms and no to politics dominated by these same men. Legalized abortion did not make these women more available for sex; on the contrary, the women’s movement was growing in size and importance and male sexual privilege was being challenged with more intensity, more commitment, more ambition. The leftist men turned from political activism: without the easy lay, they were not prepared to engage in radical politics. In therapy they discovered that they had had personalities in the womb, that they had suffered traumas in the womb. Fetal psychology–tracing a grown man’s life back into the womb, where, as a fetus, he had a whole human self and psychology–developed on the therapeutic Left (the residue of the male counterculture Left) before any right-wing minister or lawmaker ever thought to make a political stand on the right of fertilized eggs as persons to the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is in fact the goal of antiabortion activists. * The argument that abortion was a form of genocide directed particularly at blacks gained political currency, even though feminists from the first based part of the feminist case on the real facts and figures–black and Hispanic women died and were hurt disproportionately in illegal abortions. As early as 1970, these figures were available in Sisterhood Is Powerful: “4.7 times as many Puerto Rican women, and 8 times as many black women die of the consequences of illegal abortions as do white women . . . In New York City, 80 percent of the women who die from abortions are black and brown.” 9 And on the nonviolent Left, abortion was increasingly considered murder–murder in the most grandiose terms. “Abortion is the domestic side of the nuclear arms race,” 10 wrote one male pacifist in a 1980 tract not at all singular in the scale and tone of its denunciation. Without the easy fuck, things sure had changed on the Left.
The Democratic Party, establishment home of many Left groups, especially since the end of the 1960s ferment, had conceded abortion rights as early as 1972, when George McGovern ran against Richard Nixon and refused to take a stand for abortion so that he could fight against the Viet Nam War and for the presidency without distraction. When the Hyde Amendment cutting off Medicaid funding for abortions was passed in 1976, ** it had Jesse Jackson’s support: he had sent telegrams to all members of Congress supporting the cutoff of funds. Court challenges delayed the implementation of the Hyde Amendment, but Jimmy Carter, elected with the help of feminist and leftist groups in the Democratic Party, had his man, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., head of the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, halt federal funding of abortion by administrative order. By 1977 the first documented death of a poor woman (Hispanic) from an illegal abortion had occurred: illegal abortion and death were again realities for women in the United States. In the face of the so-called human-life amendment and human-life statute–respectively a constitutional amendment and a bill of law defining a fertilized egg as a human being–the male Left has simply played dead.
The male Left abandoned abortion rights for genuinely awful reasons: the boys were not getting laid; there was bitterness and anger against feminists for ending a movement (by withdrawing from it) that was both power and sex for the men; there was also the familiar callous indifference of the sexual exploiter–if he couldn’t screw her she wasn’t real.
The hope of the male Left is that the loss of abortion rights will drive women back into the ranks–even fear of losing might do that; and the male Left has done what it can to assure the loss. The Left has created a vacuum that the Right has expanded to fill–this the Left did by abandoning a just cause, by its decade of quietism, by its decade of sulking. But the Left has not just been an absence; it has been a presence, outraged at women’s controlling their own bodies, outraged at women’s organizing against sexual exploitation, which by definition means women also organizing against the sexual values of the Left. When feminist women have lost legal abortion altogether, leftist men expect them back–begging for help, properly chastened, ready to make a deal, ready to spread their legs again. On the Left, women will have abortion on male terms, as part of sexual liberation, or women will not have abortion except at risk of death.
And the boys of the sixties did grow up too. They actually grew older. They are now men in life, not just in the fuck. They want babies. Compulsory pregnancy is about the only way they are sure to get them.
Carnival of Radical Feminists
…will be coming out in a week. The deadline is a couple hours, but I will still take entries through my email demonista at gmail dot com until the 8th.
Some of those who will be in the carni include heart, Rebecca Mott, Jennifer McClune, and Nine Deuce. You’ll have to wait to see who else!
I kinda want to have two pieces of mine in it, but feel selfish about wanting to include them. They’d be the one on prostitution in Vancouver Olympics, and one I’m working on about the mutual oppression of women and animals. I’m on a Carol Adams kick (I’m reading Neither Man Nor Beast), and I’m about to get into a big brouhaha over on facebook over my status reading that people who eat farmed foods, yet claim they care about animal cruelty are full of crap.
Vancouver 2010 and Legal Brothels
This is the edited version I sent into Laurier’s chapter of JHR after the editors’ suggestions.
Considering the amount and range of coverage of the 2010 Olympics in both mainstream and alternative media, there is a shocking paucity of recognition of an issue that hits women and children, especially those further marginalised by race and class inequalities – the Olympic sex trade. It seems forbidden for women in prostitution, feminists, First Nations activists, or any other concerned people to speak of the sexism, racism, and colonialism that will become apparent as a largely male tourist demographic participates in the sex trade as they follow the Olympics to Vancouver.
It is truly bizarre—influxes of men into nations are quite plainly seen as opportunities for the prostitution industry. The legal and illegal sectors of the sex trade industry traffic and exploit women (and men, and children), and many men buy into it. Some news-stories, true to racist/classist misogynist form, are going with the tagline “the world’s oldest profession”—which is phallacious: it implies that it was the first thing women did for wages in past economic systems, as if it is in women’s nature. In truth, as feminist historian Gerda Lerner argues, prostitution as we know it began when slave owners realised they could sell the rape of their enslaved to other men for a large return on profit—it was the monetary exploitation of their bodies combined with the realisation that the sexual pleasure they got in raping others could be transferred to other men.
Pro-sex work organisations want to legalise prostitution and set up government-approved brothels. It is explicitly stated, by both supporters and detractors, that this is being done for the Olympics next year, with the businesses behind it stressing that yes, it will be done in time for the influx of sports-watching men. Incredibly, some reporting on the proposal of legal brothels in Vancouver has the audacity to claim that the women in prostitution claim they are needed for the Olympics. The West Coast Cooperative of Sex Industry Professionals (WCCSIP) is eager to say that legitimate businesses will fund a “co-operative brothel” for the games. Most support for getting women in street prostitution into indoor prostitution illustrates how this has little to do with support for their safety, health, human rights, or dignity. Supporters often plainly state it is about “cleaning the streets up” and “protecting children from seeing it.” In other words, predominantly white, middle class people don’t want the “good people” to see. This would further evident in Vancouver, where the criminalisation of homeless people is thorough, with loss of shelter, no sit no lie laws, and police violence against squatters. Another common reason is the tax revenues that could be gained. Possibly most importantly, a lot of men want to buy prostitution sex legally, and cling to the view that it is harmless and between consenting adults. Most commentary on the topic involves these rationales.
It’s illustrative to look to already legal systems of prostitution to demonstrate it’s about cleaning up the streets and providing women for male consumers. In legal brothels, only women are tested for sexually transmitted diseases, never the customers. Research by Mary Sullivan of women in legal brothels in Australia, Janice Raymond of Holland, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women of Germany, and Melissa Farley of Nevada show how little attention is paid to the women’s safety. Women are taught hostage negotiation, have panic buttons, and such in the better brothels. Women actually have less control over the prostitution experience than they do in street prostitution, such as not being allowed to refuse a john, and exorbitant fines to police their behaviour. Countries that legalise experience increased street prostitution, child exploitation, and trafficking.
Prostituted women, such as women in the research mentioned throughout, as well as “Peridot Ash” (a pseudonym), Suki Falconberg, Rebecca Mott, speak out against legalised prostitution in any form that legitimates pimps, procurers, and johns as “businessmen” or “facilitators.” They strongly believe that those in the industry not be treated as criminals—and that the abusers must be. They stress both the international scope of the industry, and the damage it does to the body and mind. Kelly Hollsopple’s fantastic study of women in stripping reveals that emotional, sexual and physical abuse runs rampant, and Lisa Kramer’s astute analysis of women’s emotional experiences of performing prostitution in a variety of types, most indoor, reveals profoundly negative impacts and effects on the mind. They, most eloquently Andrea Dworkin, also discuss how as prostitution is increasingly entrenched in society, justice for women becomes more and more difficult. Johns are encouraged to see women and “lesser” males (eg Aboriginal, poor, homosexual) as simply existing to facilitate male masturbation; those “masturbation aides” are constantly told, by pimps, johns, even the average citizen, that that is what they are, and what they are good for. In fact, it is so true to their nature, it should be legal for men to use them as such.
Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter produced a powerful documentary of prostituted women’s voices called “Flesh Mapping.” Other groups opposed to legalised brothels include Ex-Prostitutes Against Legislated Sexual Servitude (X-PALSS), Aboriginal Women’s Action Network (AWAN), members of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, CATW, and the umbrella campaign No 2010 Brothels. They speak powerfully of the racism that they see as inherent in prostitution, from the heightened vulnerability of women who are Aboriginal, Asian, Black, and from the former USSR; to the sexism seen as inherent—approximately eighty five per cent of prostituted people are female according to many studies, such as those in Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress, ed. Melissa Farley, and the vast majority of johns are, well, johns, not janes.
Additionally, these groups all speak of both their experiences as currently and formerly prostituted people, and empirical studies which show that the vast majority—most studies, from Farley to Kramer to the UN’s International Labour Organisation, find over ninety per cent—of those in prostitution want to escape it, not be told they just need to do it indoors. Farley and Jacqueline Lynne did a study on women prostituting in Vancouver experiences of trauma, from rates of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) double that of war veterans to broken bones by pimps to homelessness and rapes by johns.
An instructive lesson as to what could well happen if the legal brothels are set up for the Olympics, is to look at what happened during past Olympics and other international sports events. During the 2006 Olympics in Athens, an estimated 40 000 girls and women were trafficked to satisfy the increased demand for prostitution sex, according to Victor Malarek, author of The Natasha’s: Inside the New Global Sex Trade. Germany, which has a legal system of brothel prostitution, held the 2006 World Cup. The UN-affiliated NGO CATW says that of the 400 000 people in the prostitution industry there, ninety per cent were immigrants, with 40 000 trafficked into Germany for the sole purpose of this mega-sporting event. Additionally, legal brothels often act as covers for trafficking, and make investigation difficult.
So why is there so little press surrounding this issue of prostitution—is it because so many of them are women of colour? Is it because the vast majority of “customers” are white men? As we continue to understand the construct of the Olympic Games as expressed through their three pillars of culture, sport and environment, it is important to critically assess if these pillars are being holding, and it is perhaps even more important to ensure Canada’s commitments to human rights are being upheld.
