Heart(less) And The GenderBorg: Distorting Dissent (Part Two)
Asshattery, Stop Reading Your Fax, Fool!!, The Feminist Sex Wars, The War on Sex/Sluts/Gays/Whatever, Wingnutteria September 16th, 2008
OK…sorry for being a bit late on the continuation of the last post….call me lazy.
When we last left Heart and the GenderBorg gang, they had dispatched the attempts by Renegade Evolution and Hexy to challenge their uniform monolith belief in the innate evil and universal harm that porn and prostitution is on EVERY WOMAN….the latter defined as “every woman who perfectly believes in the GenderBorg’s ideology, that is.
We now fast forward to another portion of the thread, where Heart decides to go after yet another challenger to her hive-mind ideology….namely, Jill Brenneman, former sex worker turned radical feminist turned “harms prevention” advocate.
Now, Jill B’s story requires a bit of background: At one time, she was a total believer in the GenderBorg ideology and even teamed up with various abolitionist organizations and activists; the most notorious of whom happened to be Nikki Craft, who runs the rabid antiporn site NoStatusQuo.com. Then, some time in the beginning of the 2000’s, Jill got a change of heart or some sense got implanted into her, and slowly started to back herself and some of the organizations she backed away from radfem ideology. For that act of apostasy and “betrayal”, Jill has been suffering ever since; including a series of nasty personal attacks on her experiences that Craft posted over at NoStatusQuo’s blog page “Stormwatch”. In one particularly screechy post, Craft goes all out and claims that Jill (then using the nome de guerre Jill Leighton) was using her experiences to trash radfems, if not out right lying about them.
Fast forward back to the WS thread, where Jill attempted to call out Heart directly on who’s doing the “lying” (reprinted in the comments section of Ren’s blog):
While you are focusing on my “lies”….. And how I don’t listen to survivors. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on radical feminist Nikki Craft’s website about me?
web.archive.org/web/20040229163134/www.nostatusquo.com/stormwatch/strap-on.html
Of which Nikki defended as Nikki writes” After I put up the stupid little several page website letting people know you had flipped sides, and left it up a few week, long enough for people to know it, I never posted about you again” Actually as verified by third party archive it was much more than a “few week”, was more than just a stupid little website, as in my opinion, this is the worst fear of any survivor, to be publicly called a liar about their experiences, or crazy, as Nikki calls me both and presents it as fact.
Personally, I wouldn’t do that to anyone. Regardless of politics or any other reason.
Are you willing to publicly deal with this? Nikki wages these efforts even with your allies all for the sake of radical feminist purity.
Should you choose to hide from this issue, it will be a statement of how you respond to survivors when this kind of incident is perpetrated against a survivor considered beneath others, and perpetrated by a radical feminist.
Why do you align with this kind of feminist Heart
Needless to say, that comment didn’t make it past Heart’s moderation. Get a load of Heart’s proclamation to her blog as to why; it is classic in the way Joe McCarthy and Karl Rove are at personal slander.
on 11 Sep 2008 at 4:17 pm137admin Identicon Icon admin
Note to Jill Brennemann:
In the comment of yours in moderation now, you’ve attacked a radical feminist woman, documenting your attack by linking to a repost of a 2003 thread at Strap-On.org. First may I say, Strap-On.org is not a reliable source of information so far as radical feminism goes. It’s a transgender site with a history of attacking radical feminists.
But to try to figure out what you were referring to, I followed the links in the link you provided back a ways through the web archive you linked to.
From my reading, you were involved with an organization called “Escape Prostitution”, www.escapeprostitution.com, in the early 2000s, and at that time, you were an abolitionist helping women to leave the sex trade. Radical feminists and abolitionists who knew of this organization referred women in the sex trade to the organization. At some point in 2002-2003 you changed your mind and begin advocating for “harm reduction” instead. For a while, women in the sex trade who were referred to Escape Prostitution for support in exiting found themselves instead at a “sex work” site not specifically for women who wanted out. Radical feminists were appropriately angered by this about face, which occurred rather abruptly and without warning. It looks like you closed the website down, but then for a while, some sort of abusive image or text was popping up, again, angering radical feminists who had supported your formerly abolitionist work.
Also around this time you were involved with another organization, “PROSPER.” Early on this was a radical feminist organization. As part of your work with this group, you advocated for bringing on a woman as board president who was not a feminist and who in the end changed the focus of the organization such that it no longer had a feminist focus and took a neutral stance towards “sex work”. The result was that at least one radical feminist left her work with PROSPER and wrote about it later.
This is two organizations that were once feminist or radical feminist and which focused on helping women exit the sex trade that after your involvement no longer had that focus.
Of course, radical feminists who supported your work are going to be angry about this! One of them wrote about what had happened, she was angry, she left it up for a while and she took it down. You note in your own comment that it isn’t up anymore. I’m sure if it was, you’d have sent me the link.
Yet you somehow want me to join you in condemning the radical feminist who wrote about this feeling angry and betrayed and rightfully so. You wonder why I am allies with “people like this”, siting to the fact that, you say and I guess you think the Strap-On thread somehow proves, that this radfem disputed your history.
I don’t know what happened there. I have learned to take just about everything posted to Strap-On about radical feminists (!) with a grain of salt. I do know that it would be highly upsetting for radfems to have trusted you and supported you in your leadership in two nonprofit organizations designed to help women leave the sex trade, only to watch as you do a 180-degree turn, blaming radfems for it!
I think you’d best take a look at your own alliances, no? There are people you are allied with who have spent much, much time calling women, radical feminists and not, liars, disputing what they say about their lives, realities and histories, calling them crazy, calling them every name in the book, launching ridiculous but damaging attacks, and in some cases, threatening and stalking us. So, how about you check that out.
Also, I don’t respond well to threats along the lines of, “If you don’t approve my comment, that will prove that everything I want it to prove is so!” No. I don’t really want to get into any of this stuff more than I have in this comment, it’s a morass, and I do not think you would come out looking so well in the end either.
For the record, I don’t fault you for changing your mind. People change their minds. I don’t even fault you for changing your mind quickly. I do fault you for blaming radical feminists for a change of mind that resulted in them supporting you for a while when your organizations had completed changed to something they wouldn’t normally have supported, but did, because they trusted you. I do blame you for attempting to use my blog to launch an attack on a radical feminist who works really hard, was understandably feeling betrayed by you, and who doesn’t have anything up on the internet right now about you at all. Why you think I should attack her on your and Strap-On’s say so, I have no idea.
There is but one small problem with Heart’s missive: The actual post linked in Jill’s original post that was rejected goes not to the StrapOn.org site, but to a post by none other than Nikki Craft HERSELF, at her own site NoStatusQuo.com, where she attaches some posts from a thread that came from StrapOn.org to a piece that all but calls Jill a liar, and even denies that she (Nikki) ever worked with Jill in the first place A direct quote from that particular post:
Unfortunately in order to “reposition” herself she’s having to lie about her work in prostitution. These lies are documented and will be posted soon here on STORMWATCH. And I don’t know who didn’t allow her to speak if she didn’t bleed for them. Ironically, at one point I felt if I had to read another of her postings I would leave the list she was posting her “Jill as ultimate victim” postings on.
It should be noted that I have never worked with Jill Leighton, never would have because I found out early on she was a liar and untrustworthy, have only had a few email exchanges with her over the years, and have had no connection with IDNP, would never believe that prostitution could be eliminated, and I am fully aware that many women go into prostitution because they “choose” to do so.
In these emails Leighton claims I am writing threats to her, which is not true. I will be writing more about these threats on this website.
Nikki Craft, 11.19.03
Once again, we see the GenderBorg Doctrine as enforced by Heart in full force: If you are a victim of violence and a woman, your experience will be respected…provided that you completely give yourself in full to the GenderBorg ideology; any variation from that, however, makes you an outright enemy to the sisterhood, and your personal experiences of abuse are automatically rebuked and ignored.
As Jill followed up in a post at Ren’s place:
Few thoughts on Heart.
She is calling Nikki’s website an attack on Nikki. Check out what Nikki had to say about me.
And later on in the thread:
Heart can’t post my post in it’s entirety. If she did it would reveal web.archive.org/web/20040229163134/www.nostatusquo.com/stormwatch/strap-on.html
Is archived by www.waybackmachine.org and that the waybackmachine crawled Nikki’s site to get this. Heart doesn’t provide this link, tries to make it sound as if I posted the shit about myself on strap on board. No,,, It was Nikki.
She backtracks some as she posts later that Nikki was justified because she was upset with the conversion of Escape the Prostituiton Prevention Project to harm reduction/trans theoretical.
Please, someone tell me how that would justify what nikki did?
On top of it, I didn’t even make the decision about Escape converting to a trans theoretical model. That was made by the Board of Directors of which I was not.
To add insult to injury, the reason why Escape became Prosper and ended the rad fem format was because of Nikki and Melissa. Nikki and Melissa threw their weight at radical feminists that had contributed to Escape and it’s website. Aside from Kelly Holsopple and Katherine Depasquale, all withdrew their material. All of the radical feminists quit the board of directors. It left a huge hole to fill, and given that Escape was suddenly persona non grata in radical feminism, gee, radical feminists wouldn’t join the org, so the board positions went to non radical feminists.
So Heart not only justifies Nikki’s actions but she throws in her own threat warning me if I continue to push this issue I won’t come out looking good. Oh yeah I will because the truth is entirely on my side and Heart, is lying to cover up the truth.
Be careful who you threaten Heart. You might not like the consequences if you act on the threat. And take that however you like Heart.
Oh and Heart. For someone so proud of her perception skills. It is fucking Brenneman, not Brennemann.
And the half effort to raise the trans issue Heart. Gee, maybe I’m trans as the last three letters of my name are man. That is fucking conclusive proof right there.
Yeah…the transsexual bashing doesn’t exactly help, either.
And then, Jill clears the record once and for all. I’ll simply repost it here without comment.
Jill Leighton/Jill Brenneman are the same. A movie producer for Paramount Pictures owns the rights to Jill Leighton the name and the story. This is through 2010. The producer and I were at huge creative differences of opinion over how much artistic license he could take in the screenplay as I balked at fictional rescuing characters to the level that he wanted. He had in mind a fictional family member hooking up with a fictional police officer of the Harvy Keitel, Thelma & Louise variation with a huge change in facts to make it work on Lifetime Television.
Nikki Craft. Yes the one and same Nikki Craft. Nikki feigned being very upset at the ideological change of what was then Escape The Prostitution Prevention Project to include harm reduction. Actually it was total disingenuous shit as Nikki coulnd’t have care less about as she phrased it “women who were traumatized and just wanted to get out of prostitution and went to the website only to be horrified at seeing harm reduction”
Nikki wasn’t so horrified that she didn’t contact virtually all of the website’s material contributors and pressured them, along with Farley’s assistance to remove their material from the site. Nikki and Melissa did very well in that effort as most did withdraw consent to use the material. It was replaced with harm reduction and eventually sex worker rights material although the organization did not fully covert to sex worker rights until 2006.
Same Melissa Farley. Despite my stint in the radical feminist movement, there were significant problems between Melissa and I and unresolvable issues between Nikki and I. Nikki’s ethical breaches are astonishing.
Heart supports Nikki’s website feeling that I must have planted the archived evidence to discredit Nikki. Not possible. It is archived on a third party archival portal called www.waybackmachine.org
The material that Heart refers to was crawled at Nikki’s website www.nostatusquo.com/stormwatch/index.html Which Nikki called an active disaster in the anti prostitution movement. The archives that heart believes could be falsified are crawled and archived with nikki’s nostatusquo.com url still embedded.
Heart’s post on this later indicates that Nikki’s behavior as illustrated by the blatant calling my experiences delusional lies and mocking and embellishing them for effect, as justified as rightful anger by radical feminists who were upset with the orgs ideology change.
While it is inappropriate for anyone else to remotely even defend themselves when Heart’s allies are going to be the recipient of any hostility. Any level of abuse is fine if the recipient is not a radical feminist and the perps are.
Outstanding feminism there Heart. The same logic is used by batterers. If only she didn’t make him so angry he wouldn’t have battered her……… It’s ok to be a batterer and abuser according to Heart, if the abuser is a radical feminist that has been made angry.
Heartless woman, that Cheryl Lynn Seelhoff. And that’s no smack intended at all.
——————————————-
One more example before I close this: further down the thread there is a discussion on how women victims of violence will sometimes engage in “self-harm”, that is injuring themselves deliberately, as a means of coping with the extreme violence. That moved Hexy, who was a victim of violence, to attempt to bring in her own experiences…which prompted this exchange with Laurelin, who is as hard core an radfem as it is, but obviously shows an actual bit of compassion for a fellow human being. (All comments were reprinted by Hexy at her blog Hexpletive).
First, a couple of comments by Laurelin:
121laurelin
I think there’s a biological/chemical component too. We know that bulimic women, for example, and women who cut, experience a sense of relief when they do these things that is caused by the release of endorphins.
I was a self-harmer, and although I wouldn’t say (even then I wouldn’t have said) that I ‘enjoyed’ it, it did, as you say, give me a release from intense emotion, no matter how brief. But it was still harmful. My arms, my thighs were still cut up and bleeding. I still felt the pain.
It was harmful.
122laurelin
‘Enjoying’ self-harm has to be seen in the context in which it takes place- in the midst of severe emotional pain or trauma.
Here’s Hexy’s response:
129hexy
Laurelin:
I had quite a lengthy period of self-injury, when I first got sick. I wouldn’t say I “enjoyed” it, but I would say it kept me alive.
One of those situations where the person in my head, me, gets to decide whether it was the best choice under the circumstances.
Hexy didn’t say whether that comment made it through moderation, but I will assume that it did.
Laurelin’s response was actually quite respectful and civil, almost human in considering the issue:
131laurelin
Hexy- I was not trying to say that self-harm is the ‘wrong’ choice, or that one should be prevented from chosing it. I am just saying that the context must be taken into consideration. I don’t agree that self-harm was a ‘free choice’ for me- it was one of a number of what I consider to be lousy choices available at the time.
132laurelin
and also the self-harm I undertook perhaps had some beneficial aspects… as far as my own experience goes, I can’t say for sure. But I do ultimately think that I harmed myself too, in the sense that my body was damaged (however superficially) by it.
Hope that makes sense. This is very hard to verbalise.
OK….so there are fundamental disagreements there, but at least an attempt at a genuine dialogue. Maybe, perhaps, there may be a real common ground forming??
Yeah, right.
Enter Heart with the stink bomb to slam the door shut on that.
133admin
Laurelin: Hexy- I was not trying to say that self-harm is the ‘wrong’ choice, or that one should be prevented from chosing it. I am just saying that the context must be taken into consideration.
The discussion at issue was about what self-harm in the context of male heterosupremacy means for women.
Responding to that by saying, as you basically have, Hexy, “Well, I wanted to,” is not a response at all. It is not in good faith. It’s an attempt at a reversal, a trying to make Laurelin the Big Meanie, as though she was saying fuck-all about you or what you might have chosen, ever. She was talking about HER OWN LIVED REALITY and her thoughts about it, she wasn’t saying ANYTHING about what you may or may not have done sometime, let alone about what you “get” to decide.
There’s been this ongoing ignoring on the part of the pro-sex trade side of basically everything that has been posted here *by survivors*. That’s why there are a whole bunch of spammed comments to this thread that are not going to see the light of day. There will be actual, respectful *engagement* — not this glossing over and just saying, over and over again, well, I like to work out, I like to shave, I chose to self harm, you’re a meanie for bringing it up, as though any of that is even remotely relevant — or comments will not, again, be approved. Ignoring survivors who are putting themselves out there, risking becoming ill because they ARE putting themselves out there, to just assert and reassert, essentially, that their lives don’t matter to you at all, all that matters to you is what you, yourself, might have wanted to do some time, amounts to erasure. It is destructively and triggeringly dismissive. It’s what men do to us 24/7.
Imagine that: a person’s full recounting of all her pain and suffering and hurt just flippantly dismissed and reduced to “I wanted to self-harm”…..all because she’s not one of THE CHOSEN ONES, THE TRUE FEMINISTS. I guess that only those women who are 120% with GenderBorg ideology will have their struggles endorsed as “survivors”….the rest of the womanhood can simply go straight to Hell, or else they must be lying, like Jill Brenneman did, like Ren did about her recent bad night with racist rednecks, or like Hexy did about….well, her entire life. Not even Laurelin thought that Hexy’s response was “meanie”, but who cares when you are in the middle of raging against the “Man-chine” and protecting your ideological flank against apostates and outsiders???
Obviously, Hexy was stunned enough to post this rejoinder….which, quite naturally, didn’t make it through Heart’s filters.
136hexy
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Laurelin:
Hexy- I was not trying to say that self-harm is the ‘wrong’ choice, or that one should be prevented from chosing it. I am just saying that the context must be taken into consideration. I don’t agree that self-harm was a ‘free choice’ for me- it was one of a number of what I consider to be lousy choices available at the time.
That I do agree with. Context is vitally important. I think you and I may just differ on how we see the best of a crappy selection of choices: to me, the ability to make that choice is still an act of power, however slight. I could choose to harm, or I could give in and die. The alternative made it a strong choice for me.
and also the self-harm I undertook perhaps had some beneficial aspects… as far as my own experience goes, I can’t say for sure. But I do ultimately think that I harmed myself too, in the sense that my body was damaged (however superficially) by it.
Hope that makes sense. This is very hard to verbalise.
I understand the difficulty. When I first began to try and vocalise my experiences of self-injury and what the experience meant to me, it was near impossible to put those feelings into words.
I wrote about my relationship with my SI scars recently. It sounds like you and I see the damage done to skin very differently. Those scars to me are now proof of a battle won, not proof of damage. We all prioritise these things differently, though, and I in no way mean to imply that your understanding of your scars and your experience is wrong or bad… I am simply pointing out that, like everything else we’re been discussing, the internal experience varies wildly from woman to woman even when the external experience looks similar.
Thank you for addressing me courteously, btw, it’s something you’ve never failed to do.
Heart:
Responding to that by saying, as you basically have, Hexy, “Well, I wanted to,” is not a response at all.
“Well, I wanted to”? ?
That’s how you read what I wrote? Laurelin seemed to recognise my experience. Your ability to recognise suffering and trauma in women seems firmly wedded to how closely their ideology resembles yours.
I didn’t self injure because I “wanted to”, Heart. I self-injured because if I didn’t find some way to ground the riot of pain in my head, to vent it and connect it to my body, I was going to kill myself. That you can read the words “[self-injury] kept me alive” and translate it to “well, I wanted to” really explains so much of the apparent understanding going on here. Talk about denial of lived reality!
Oh, and as for “what you may or may not have done sometime”? Such dismissive language, even as you accuse women of using the same. I wish I could show you my skin right now… years of using self-injury as a coping mechanism certainly, as Laurelin pointed out, leaves its mark on your skin.
[...]
137hexy
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
As for the words you’ve quoted from various prostituted women? I haven’t commented on them apart from saying that they’re important and should be heard because, well, I think they’re important and should be heard. What else would I say?
Women expressing their experiences = not something I’m going to argue with. Women denying mine, however? Well, see above posts.
The next comment is from Hexy at her own blog; it breaks the issue down succinctly:
Apparently, in addition to not caring how stressful and harmful it might be to those of us not on “Heart’s side” (I reject the label “pro-sex-trade” quite vehemently) to have no respectful engagement regarding our experiences, to have our experiences ignored when we put ourselves out there and risk our mental health to be beaten down and erased by women who only care about the lives, stories and pain of women who fit the right narrative, it’s now entirely acceptable to dismiss, minimise and erase the experiences of women who have battled serious mental illness and experienced self-harm and self-injury. I’m stuck wondering if there is any female experience Heart won’t co-opt as her own.
Doesn’t matter, hexy…because in the alter-world that Heart and the GenderBorg belong in, you are either with them or with the patriarchy, with them or with the “pornographers”, with then or….you’re a MAN (or at least, an apologist for MEN). Your experience doesn’t count unless and until you accept St. Andrea (Dwokin) as your personal savior and Sam Berg, Nikki Craft, and the rest of the Ministry of Women-Identified Women as your personal preachers. Anything less is surrender and death.
As I’ve said often, the “radical feminism” of Maggie Hays, Cheryl Lynn “Heart” Seelhoff, Sam Berg, Nikki Craft, and the rest of the GenderBorg Collective is about as feminist and radical as Sarah Palin is a feminist. And I’d bet that even Ms. Dan Quayle would be a perfect fit for this cult, too.
Pardon me now while I take a long, hot shower to remove the stench of frozen shit off my body. UGGGGGH.
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Tags: Mount St. Bullcrap, nothing but the fisk, radicalfeminists gone wild
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