Oh, but it would figure that the Feminist Sex Wars would blow up again in my absense…but I never thought that it would get this crazy. But then again, you should never underestimate the ability of the GenderBorg Hive Collective to ramp up the slut-shaming and McCarthyite bashing to new heights of pig crap.
And leave it to the reigning Free Soil Party candidate for President of the United States, Cheryl Lynn Seelhoff (aka Heart) of the blogs Women’s Spaces: The Margins and Fight The Lies to lead the lynch mob…..errrrrrrrrr, the charge of passionate antiporn/antiprostitution radical feminists to and now beyond the frontier of lunacy.
(And no, Clones, I am not linking their sites, since I have no need for any future drama. Do the Google thing.)
The latest episode took place in a elongated thread at Heart’s place Women’s Spaces, in which the original subject happened to be on respecting the voices of women in the sex industry. Only thing was, the only voices that Heart wanted to be respected were those that perfectly matched her basic fundamentalist ideology of “Prostituted women are mere victims of men, and thusly, all prostitution is forced sex by men over women”. It seemed that women who happen to BE sex workers who did not agree in perfect lockstep with Heart’s abolitionist philosophy were basically rendered invisible, if not baited as the enemy….and much, much worse.
All the usual parrots took part in this “debate”: Sam Berg, Maggie Hays, and “Rebecca” (Mott??) all took part in cheerleading for the greatness of “radical feminism”.
But the real excitement came in the thread comments, when some infidel apostates decided to attempt to bring their own views into the mix which didn’t quite march in perfect goosestep with the GenderBorg hive mind. The result was some convenient and quite masterful engineering by Heart (in her capacity as admin for the blog) in not only suppressing their attempts at opposition, but flat out altering their views to support her strawarguments to be knocked down. Naturally, those who got altered did not get their actual views aired uncensored (that is normal policy at Heart’s place)….but apparantly outright censorship wasn’t good enough; Heart also felt free to post commentary on the posts that she refused to unmoderate and allow to be shown.
A few example of Heart’s mad moderation skills follow anon.
First, this example applied to Renegade Evolution, who had the audacity to attempt to answer a direct smear by Maggie Hays. Ren has posted an extended archive of the thread, complete with redacted and modded comment, over at her blog.
on 26 Aug 2008 at 10:13 am16 Renegade Evolution
Right then Heart, let’s speak on context…and I’ll try this again and amend a few things to be accurate and less openly hostile…yes, I do realize you support the Swedish Model, oversight on my part. Noted. I lived out west, where gal is far less demeaning than girl, or ma;am or lady, or Miss. Just as men are called guys or dudes, women, often, are refered to as “gals” and in my experiece it is not meant to be demeaning. It’s a term other than woman or girl. The stories I posted, well, gee, Mariko and Amanda’s Nevada Brothel tales would be right up your alley. They are horrible in their own right, in every way. Tricked by a female brothel owner and subjected to very shady conditions in a place they felt unsafe and could not wait to get out of, Mariko went there because she literally needed the money. Not exactly shiny, happy stories. And Robyn Few, as much as she is hated by many, mentions flat out entering the sex industry at the age of 13 to survive. I’ve not in my posts ignored the unpleasant aspects of the business, and to assume (when I still have five or so days left of blogging there) that I would not post MORE on the less pleasant aspects and horrible parts of sex work/prostitution for various people involved in it is somewhat putting the cart before the horse. I mention both sex workers AND prostituted women, but that has been omitted by various folks throughout this conversation. Why? There are both: sex workers and prostituted people. Denying one group or the other does no good, because both kinds are out there and have different needs/wants. I don’t see the horror in recognizing that. Even I have had shit times in my business, which you said you were oh so sorry for…yet…when I make an effort to discuss sex work/ prostitution in a place where people might learn something they don’t already know, I get slammed for it. Why hasn’t Feministe invited others to blog there? I don’t know. That question has to be asked of them, not me. I have no say in who they invite to guest blog. I’d be happy to suggest a woman like R.Mott or V be invited to guest blog there, hell, I will. Would they do it? I don’t know. Would those women accept the invite? I don’t know that either. And V- listen, yes, I am a libertarian, people do not have to like it- and sure enough- they don’t. Not even many of my allies. No, I am not anti-capitalist, but is more in depth than that. I’ve never said capitalism is fantastic and great and we should never look at other systems or modify the ones currently in place. For instance, would I support a more socialist form of medical care? Yes, I would….because all people should be able to see doctors and not go around injured or sick because they can’t afford medical care. And why yes, I’ve said such things before.
As for the feminist critics blog, no, I was not a founding member. I became disillusioned with a lot of feminism and feminists and was then, after the blog have been around for awhile, invited to blog there. Some months ago, I quit that blog and have not posted there in quite some time. A self-identified radical feminist has also blogged there once or twice as well. I found conversations there to be useless and frusterating, so I quit.
Heart’s initial response seems actually human:
on 26 Aug 2008 at 10:48 am17 admin
Ren, I’m going to approve your comment in a minute, but without the last sentence. My post here wasn’t addressed to you specifically. Your and others’ recent writings about the language around sex work are among a couple of things that got me blogging about this. Another was the arrest of Frank Colacurcio and another was having spent some time on the Sex Trade Survivors site after reading about it on the DIGNITY listserv. Another is e-mail conversations I’ve been having with survivors of the sex trade. And another is, I have a difficult piece of writing I’ve been working on about the arrest of Radovan Karadzic that is kicking my butt so I’m writing something different because I’m procrastinating. :-p
Another thing that factors in for me: how can I stand for sustainability, for life, the earth, forests, skies, oceans, how can I embrace Deep Green iow, which is where my life and my feminism have taken me, without being as concerned about sustainability and life so far as women’s lives and bodies are concerned? I have to stand politically with the indigenous tribes all over the world for many reasons, one of which is, once the megacorporations have used up all of the trees in the rainforest and all of the oil in the Arctic, once the profits have been realized and spent, all of us will suffer for it, most of all everything and everyone who is gone and dead and devastated because of what the corporations have taken and sold. How much more is this true with respect to the bodies of women?
Never mind that numerous commentators before then openly referenced Ren’s guest appearance at the Feministe blog for their criticisms of her beliefs…it’s still not all about Ren. Or so we think.
The thread then dissolves into a virtual jill-off…oh, so sorry, bad analogy since masturbation is so against the GenderBorg edict as a selfish male-imposed, compulsive woman-hating act….discussion go-round between Heart, Maggie, Satsuma, and a few others agreeing on the basic harms of prostitution and how only those who want out and want it banned should matter.
And then, all of a sudden, Heart strikes with her first moderation moratorium, against Ren:
(Ren, I’m not going to approve all of the grandstanding you want me to approve here wrt Satsuma or anyone else. You and those you hang out with online appear to lie awake nights strategizing attempts to publicly shame, attack, and demonize any woman who stands up to ya’all. A quick perusal of your blog will reveal many straight up attacks on women– entire posts dedicated to that project. Own and deal with your own crap and then maybe I’ll reconsider. I also won’t be participating in anything remotely likely to even smell like blogwar stuff. You’ll have to do that elsewhere and on your own. – Heart)
This was the “grandstanding” from Ren that prompted that banishment:
Satsuma:
“Everytime I hear some woman justify this sexualizing pornified world, I think to myself “There stands an unaided incest survivor, an abuse victim, a child rape survivor.” Everytime I hear women supporting this stuff, I know that underneath this is a survivor of some attrocity that might be a suppressed memory. I see very mentally ill lesbians out there into S & M because no one gives a damn about them, or cares to foot the therapy and hospital bills. I’ve seen this first hand, I’ve heard the S &M crowd with my own ears, and I know what these women have been through.”
Well, thank you for assuming to know the lives and history of every single woman involved in any aspect of the sex industry or who does not constantly cry out against the modern world or who happens to like BDSM, and writing them all off as damaged and incapable of rendering decisions due to the vast damage you assume they all have suffered, slapping on a heaping does of ablism and superiority, and making yourself an authority on the lives and experiences of other women. Well done. Your arrogance astounds me.
“All I can say is pro-porn people, show us your financial interest in all of this, because we know your are profiting and selling women too. You don’t want to lose out on your womanhating selling gravey train, you don’t want to admit that you are aiding and abetting child rape and seasoning either, no you support free speech only for the abusers and profiteers and you know it. Shame on you!! Shame and more shame!”
Woo, look, shaming and demonization ALL at once! You know, between the hate and arrogance I’ve seen you throw at people like sex workers, heterosexual women, mothers, and well, a bunch of other people who do not follow the Satsuma path, I have to wonder about your agenda. You speak often about money and for strong, smart, warrior women jobs, Satsuma. What do you do? Nice profit margin in that? What makes you think you are so much better than so many other people? What’s the trauma that led to this sort of absolutism and megalomania?
Goddess I hate these sleaze bag and their internet lies! This is the very heart of darkness.”
Nice….just lovely, really.
Rebecca- I want to do a post at Feministe which links to the blogs of sex workers/prostituted people, current and past, and I’d like to link yours, because I do think what you say is important, but I want to ASK first if that’s okay with you. If it isn’t, I totally understand. Context would merely be “here are some blogs by people who are now or were formerly involved in the sex industry”.
Maggie: No “E”, noted. No, actually, most sex work advocates are for decriminalization, not outright full on legalization. And I’m sorry, yes, I am sure that Heart wasn’t merely thinking of me when she wrote this, however, the timing was just too perfect, the criticism of a word I use often “gal”, the discussion on language? Well, a lot of people all around found the timing just a little too convenient for this to merely be random and, oh gee, not at all about what I happened to be posting on at Feministe. I hadn’t even noted the post here until a transblogger dropped me a note saying “How can people be upset with you for writing about Harm Reduction?” Which, you know, is a good question? And once again, the piling on and attacks are a two way street. You get angry at sex worker advocates and the term sex work? Well, I get angry and people who mischaracterize sex worker advocates and refuse to realize, why yes, there is such thing as a sex worker. Oh, and the constant refrain (like in your response to V there) that we’re full of fallacies and deluded? Do you have ANY idea how damaging that is? People will take that kind of attitude and use it to say, “all those people are liars and stupid”. Not helpful, at all.
In the very next post, Heart decides to latch her jaws on Nina Hartley (WARNING: link to possibly NFSW material) — porn actress, sexual rights activist, and pro-sex feminist — for being such a threat to Heart’s brand of “radical feminism”…and she she adds a nice McCarthyite-like smear of Nina’s husband Ernest Greene using his advocacy for safe and consensual BDSM play, his editorship of the sex zine TABOO, his employ at the empire of HUSTLER magazine, and his and Nina’s stances on condom usage in porn as a hammer against them both:
on 27 Aug 2008 at 10:47 am40 admin
You know, Ren, re working to lessen harm to women in the sex trade, I can completely get behind that project. But there’s something else that got me writing this post, in addition to all the other stuff I’ve already mentioned. Someone I like and go back a ways with recently interviewed Nina Hartley, who with her husband, Ernest Green, is part of your circle of people apparently concerned about harm and sex worker rights and so on. (For those who do not know, Ernest Green [sic] publishes the SM/Fetish mag “Taboo” which is owned by Hustler. )
I was fairly discouraged about this interview and was then told Hartley doesn’t advocate for condom use in porn anymore which I found hard to believe. I went poking around and found this to be true. NOTE, MAY TRIGGER.
So much for harm reduction. Even if it’s true that condoms might increase the chances for transmission of STDs in some instances and acts in pornography, not using condoms while performing in pornography, on film, films distributed widely, models an incredibly destructive message to those who watch porn, including young people, including young women who get into the sex trade. The fact that porn performers are tested monthly does nothing to mitigate or lessen that particular harm or the ongoing, cascading harm that inevitably will result from young women having sex with random men without condoms.
This stuff somehow doesn’t get talked about much on the pro-porn/pro-prostitution blogs.
SNA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-PPPPPPPPPP!!!!
That is the sound of a ‘Dog blowing up in rage after reading that particular post. (Warning: The following rant may be triggering .)
Hey, Heart(less), you un-fucking, no-account, lying, slandering bit….ahhh, woman: If you ever managed to get your head out of your ass and actually read up on Nina Hartley and her particular stands on condom usage, you’d see that she doesn’t even come close to advocating what you say she does. She and Ernest are NOT opposed to condom usage in porn; she only opposes government attempts to IMPOSE MANDATORY condom use on the industry, mainly due to the fact that such regulations are, in their view, totally ineffective, mostly unenforcable, and basically counterproductive in that they will more than likely succeed in driving performers away from mandatory STD/HIV testing….not to mention the fact that there is no mandate against popular condom usage in porn to begin with, since most porn studios already have a standard “condom-optional” policy. (And some studios, like Vivid, actually have a mandatory condom policy in place already. Or, at least, they did last time I checked.)
And as for the “having sex with random men without condoms” smear: Gee, Heart, why not just come out and say outright that all women in porn are nothing more than voracious sluts who can’t stop bending over or kneeling down to every man they see?? Last time I checked, it was mostly the responsibility of health professionals and sex educators, not the porn industry, to educate the populace about safer sex techniques….and while it would be a very good thing for people who work in the sex media to promote voluntary safer sex techniques whenever possible, simply mandating that any performer who doesn’t use condoms or who doesn’t insist in using condoms is inevitably a disease carrying menace preying on impressionable young women is simply beneath contempt. for anyone calling herself a feminist. Also…I guess that she doesn’t see men who get infected with STDs to be as much victims needing protection as women apparently do?? So, Lara Roxx is a victim because she contracted HIV from a tainted double-anal scene, but Darren James is a sex predator and murderer because he contracted the virus as well???
Oh…and young women don’t have to be in porn to be having sex with random men without condoms; and the overwhelming majority of them actually survive intact without contracting any disease altogether. How about giving them some credit for protecting themselves from STDs, Heart?? Oh, I forgot….that would really fuck with the “women don’t choose to have sex with men; that’s the PATRIARCHY’S brainwashing kicking in!!” meme. When truth meets GenderBorg ideology, the latter will always win in Heart’s mind.
Oh, but there’s more of Heart trashing Nina and Ernest later on in the thread…but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.
After some more exchanges where Ren attempts to defend herself against Maggie and the rest of the hive, Heart lays down the law concerning future posts in moderation:
on 29 Aug 2008 at 12:10 pm75 admin
So, yes, I have comments in my moderation queue.
My problems are several and among them are these:
* If I approve some of the comments, I will be approving mean-spirited, undeserved, unproductive attacks on fine women;
* If I edit the comments, deleting the mean-spirited, undeserved, unproductive attacks and snarks, then the commenters appear to have been reasonable, polite and respectful when they were not. But only I know this because I’m the only one who saw the comments before they were edited;
* If I do not approve the comments, the suggestion is that I cannot or will not respond to the issues the comments raise.
* If I do approve the comments, many who read here, survivors of the sex trade, in particular, but others of us who are survivors as well, will be triggered in ways which are very hard to deal with. The comments I’ve already approved have been severely triggering to some of my regular commenters.
I will be approving comments soon, but I wanted to preface my approvals with the above. I don’t like approving ugliness, self-congratulatory bullshit, disingenous grandstanding, and comments mostly intended to inflict distress, or comments which — intentionally or unintentionally — trigger good women. In the end, I think the interests of women will be better served if I do approve the comments in their entirety than if I don’t.
I might change my mind about that at any moment after approving and responding to the comments in my moderation queue. I will be watching the responses carefully. If you want your comment to be approved, don’t attack anyone, don’t be dismissive, don’t be a jerk, participate honestly and decently in the discussion.
Heart
Translation for those of you not learned in GenderBorg speak: “Any attempt by ‘pro-porn’ sellouts or infidels to rain on our parade of bashing pornstitution as the Devil will be dealt with severely through alteration or outright censorship. Only good, strong, antiporn radical feminist thought will be allowed through uncensored…in fact, we encourage true ‘feminists’ to rise up and drown these dirty attempts by traitors and porn addicts to infiltrate our beloved space.”
It gets so bad that Maggie actually resorts to responding to comments that were still in moderation, as in this case:
Ion 29 Aug 2008 at 12:41 am74Maggie Hays
I don’t speak for Ren, and I wouldn’t bloody dare try to!
Hexy, as I’ve already said *twice* (look) above:
1/”I mean of course I know you’re NOT trying to speak for her. Sorry (my bad).”
2/”NO ONE speaks for me, but me.
Yes, I know that. (I said Sorry to Hexy above…”
Ren had (sort of) replied to my comment but I could not see it (as it had been somehow stuck in moderation). I could only see you replying to my comment, which had given me a mistaken impression for a number of minutes, sorry. Then I did notice, Hexy, which is why I then wrote “I mean of course I know you’re NOT trying to speak for her. Sorry (my bad)” 40 minutes later. Sorry for the *misunderstanding*.
And this was Hexy’s response….unfortunately, it didn’t make it past Heart’s censors for some particular reason (reposted at Hexy’s blog Hexpletive):
76hexy
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Maggie, in regards to this:
Hexy, as I’ve already said *twice* (look) above:
My comment has been stuck in mod for a while, and from what i can see still is (which confuses me, as you’ve replied to it).
When I made that comment, those comments from you weren’t visible.
Interesting that Maggie’s response to Hexy’s original comment gets posted, but Hexy’s response doesn’t.
Fast forward a bit to another section, where Heart decides to mine an unnamed “contact” — apparently, a sex worker — to support her viewpoint:
on 01 Sep 2008 at 9:25 pm79 admin
[...]
As one formerly prostituted woman wrote to me (about this thread) via e-mail, calling prostituted women “sex workers” and using terms like “harm reduction” and “non-forced prostitution” is deeply insulting to her because it makes johns invisible, it makes the reality of a lifetime of having been groomed for prostitution invisible, and it places the responsibility to “reduce harm” or work for “harm reduction” on the prostituted women, as though it is up to them to make sure they are not raped or beaten. It also, again, erases the salient, central fact that it is MEN who are buying and WOMEN who are working. Sort of like the way the media says that a woman “was raped” or “was murdered,” but often avoids saying that a man raped a woman or a man murdered a woman. The misogyny that is central to prostitution, to rape, to battering, to violence against women gets erased and prostituted women are left without language to describe their reality.
This warrants this response from Hexy, which, suprisingly enough, immediately gets through the filters:
on 01 Sep 2008 at 11:08 pm80hexy
Heart:
I’ve never seen the term “harm reduction” used to imply that the onus to reduce harm is on the prostituted woman or sex worker, and I’ve been involved in several harm reduction movements covering everything from sex work to drug use/abuse. The sex industry harm reduction model covers things like decriminalisation and legal protection, free provision of barrier contraception and access to medical treatment and support services as determined by the needs and wants of the people in the industry.
While I certainly empathise with your contact-via-email’s concerns about being labelled with language that isn’t hers (see, oh, everything I’ve posted) her objection to harm reduction as phrased here is based on a miscomprehension.
Which become the fuel for Heart to slander Nina one more time, and grant a passing shot at another convert to “harm reductiion, Jill Brenneman of SWOP-East (uncited here, but assumed; emphasis on special smears added by me):
on 01 Sep 2008 at 11:56 pm81 admin
Hexy, I don’t think my contact suffers form a “miscomprehension.” I think she is talking about her lived reality in which there is all of this lofty speech from sex workers about all kinds of harm reduction– everything, of course, but the kind of “harm reduction” that would have actually benefitted her and 90 percent of the women and girls in the world who are prostituted, i.e., NOT HAVING TO BE PROSTITUTED AT ALL, not having to be raped, not having to be battered, not having to disocciate, not having to self-medicate, not living in fear, not being treated like so much trash. When the focus is on the rights of those who identify as sex workers and when theirs is the public agenda, the 90 percent of those who are prostituted and do not identify as “sex workers”, who want out, become invisible– to everybody. Because patriarchy wants very badly to focus ON the sex workers, and on all of this great harm reduction, and on the fact that sex work can be made “safe” or “safer”, *that way the 90 percent of women and girls who are involuntarily prostituted and can never be made safe can be ignored*. Prostituted women do not think of themselves as “people in an ‘industry’” working for their “wants and needs.” They are prostituted, used and abused like kleenex, and they want OUT before someone kills them or they kill themselves. God, hexy, you SO talk out of both sides of your mouth. On the one hand you make this huge distinction between SEX WORKERS and PROSTITUTES and insist the two categories not be confused. On the other hand you talk about harm reduction, decriminalization, etc., as though ALL prostituted women are in fact “sex workers,” referring to them as people in the “industry” who are organizing around “needs and wants”. It’s exhibit A of what my contact is talking about. She didn’t care about harm reduction, she didn’t want to be called a sex worker, she wasn’t organizing around needs and wants, she just wanted to get OUT, as by far most prostituted women DO. You speak for a tiny minority internationally of women who say they have chosen. When you do that you *erase the realities of those who do not choose* and especially *in the eyes of the men who create and perpetuate the demand in whose best interests it is to view all prostitutes as “sex workers” and to pat themselves on the back for supporting “harm reduction.”
Right here in this thread we’ve got Ren defending a pornmaker/star/prostituted woman, Nina Hartley, who is an icon, who publicly rejects the use of condoms in het porn because it’s “boring” and inefficient. (Hartley is also a nurse!) When I challenge what that models to basically the entire porn-watching population (who begin at a young age these days), Ren’s answer is that she wrote a blog post once about what bad sex ed porn is, like that’s some answer. I don’t care how many condoms get handed out in the Third World somewhere (as someone commented proudly in a post I haven’t approved yet), what about fracking highly privileged sex workers married to publishers of Hustler’s fetish porn modeling random, highly dangerous, het sex practices with many partners, without condoms? How is handing out condoms in Chile addressing the tremendous harm that particular modeling does, in terms not only of what is imitated by young people, but what is demanded (and taken) from prostituted women by johns? Hell, Nina Hartley does it without condoms, everybody in porn does it without condoms, why shouldn’t he be able to go without condoms?
Maybe the onus is not on prostituted women to prevent harm yet, but if the prostituting of women is framed as an “industry” where those in the “industry” are working towards getting their “needs and wants” met, then ultimately, the onus WILL be on prostituted women, because if all of these “sex workers” are doing all of this great stuff for themselves, what’s prostituted women’s problem? Shouldn’t they get off the dime and organize for harm reduction between getting raped and beaten by johns, pimps and who knows who all? These women’s struggle to just live through another day is being ERASED by a few very privileged people who on the one hand other them relentlessly and on the other hand presume to speak for them.
Yup…so many delusions wrapped in one comment. So, if we are to believe Ms. Seelhoff, Nina Hartley (your friendly neighborhood “prostituted woman”…never mind the fact that she has never even been a prostitute) and Ernest Greene (male sadist and the official flack for HUSTLER magazine and that daughter-raping, child-molester enabling, ripping-women-through-a-meat-grinder supporting Larry Flynt), are solely responsible through their lack of support of mandatory condom usage for the abuse of every freakin’ woman involved in the making of porn.
Yet, in the end, condom usage won’t even matter, because it simply creates a ruse for defending and maintaining the sexual slavery that prostitution and pornography inevitably come to. Sweet, Heart(less)….real sweet. And a nice racist touch with the “third world countries like Chile” smack, too.
And she even manages to get Nina’s history wrong AGAIN. Nina did earn a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing from San Francisco State University in 1985 (Magna cum Laude, to be exact), but she never actually became an active nurse. Porn and teaching the world about sex became her true calling.
Naturally, Hexy had a response to all this cracked bullshit….and naturally, it was never posted (at least, not at Heart’s place; it was posted at Hexy’s though):
Heart:
God, hexy, you SO talk out of both sides of your mouth. On the one hand you make this huge distinction between SEX WORKERS and PROSTITUTES and insist the two categories not be confused. On the other hand you talk about harm reduction, decriminalization, etc., as though ALL prostituted women are in fact “sex workers,” referring to them as people in the “industry” who are organizing around “needs and wants”.
I’m afraid I don’t see the contradiction. I do think the needs of sex workers and prostituted people are wildly different, and I think you just affirmed that by stating that the things I mentioned (all of which are clamoured for by sex workers around the world) do no good for prostituted people. I’m agreeing with you! Sex worker’s rights are rubbish for people who don’t want to be sex workers in the first place, and I’ve never said otherwise.
But I’m not going to say that women like me, sex workers, women in the sex industry who don’t consider themselves to be prostituted people, should therefore NOT have human and industrial rights. We want to be able to do our work safely and legally. That’s important. Prostituted women want out of the industry, they want support to be safe from those victimising them, and they want other options. That’s important too. Since when does feminism require that we choose some women to have rights and options and others to not matter enough?
It’s exhibit A of what my contact is talking about. She didn’t care about harm reduction, she didn’t want to be called a sex worker, she wasn’t organizing around needs and wants, she just wanted to get OUT, as by far most prostituted women DO.
And she is equally as important as women who say we DO want to be called sex workers and given safe working conditions, no more and no less! Her “needs and wants”, be they exit strategies or anything else, are important. Why is this so hard to grasp? If sex workers can pour so much of our incredibly limited resources and activism into helping women who don’t want to be sex workers, why can we not even get a nod and the right to name ourselves from those who devote their entire activism to these ends?
You speak for a tiny minority internationally of women who say they have chosen.
No, I don’t. I speak for myself. I happen to agree with a hell of a lot of women who stand behind sex worker’s rights, across the world, in a huge variety of privilege and economic conditions.
I don’t care how many condoms get handed out in the Third World somewhere (as someone commented proudly in a post I haven’t approved yet), what about fracking highly privileged sex workers married to publishers of Hustler’s fetish porn modeling random, highly dangerous, het sex practices with many partners, without condoms?
Heart, I’m completely stunned that you just posted that. Are you honestly saying that you think Nina Hartley not using condoms in a commercial pornography context is more important than the fact that women are DYING because they can’t get their hands on a life saving piece of latex? You honestly feel that the message sent to Western porn consumers by Nina Hartley’s work is more deserving of attention than impoverished third world sex workers not being able to access the condoms they have demanded from international health support services?
How is handing out condoms in Chile addressing the tremendous harm that particular modeling does, in terms not only of what is imitated by young people, but what is demanded (and taken) from prostituted women by johns?
It’s not. Women in third world countries aren’t getting HIV because “johns” have seen condom free sex in porn, they’re getting HIV because they don’t have access to the condoms they want and need. It’s not all one issue.
Maybe the onus is not on prostituted women to prevent harm yet, but if the prostituting of women is framed as an “industry” where those in the “industry” are working towards getting their “needs and wants”
Exit strategies ARE a want and need that has been addressed by sex worker’s rights groups, amongst other groups. This has been pointed out repeatedly. You continue to ignore it.
These women’s struggle to just live through another day is being ERASED by a few very privileged people who on the one hand other them relentlessly and on the other hand presume to speak for them.
You know, I’m pretty sure that this comment already won’t be published, as not only have my previous comments been moderated out, but I’ve well and truly lost my temper a few paragraphs ago. So to hell with being polite for this bit: Heart, you do NOT get to talk to me about privilege. There are a hell of a lot of women in worse circumstances than me, and I try to do the best with what limited privilege I have, but I am DONE with having heterosexual, able-mind-and-bodied, white American non-whores try to tell me that I’M the one with unchecked privilege in a conversation because I have the audacity to insist that disability, race, and past trauma doesn’t completely negate my agency, and to have the crazy idea that ALL women involved in any way in commercial sex and prostitution have the right to decide for themselves (OURselves) what will make our individual and group situations better.
I’ve always thought you’re an important feminist voice, Heart, even when I’ve personally disagreed with particular politics of yours. This isn’t a political disagreement. This is you, personally, telling women in the sex industry to STFU and insisting that women with far fewer options than yourself are too privileged to be part of a discussion.
Oh, but wait…it gets even better.
Unfortunately, it is getting late, and my eyes are rolling backwards. We will continue this on the morrow.
NOTE: Ren resets the whole episode here; and check out the awesome two part video blog she made concerning the whole issue here. (Warning: definitely NSFW!!!!) Hexy gives her perspective on the matter here, and Caroline (who’s fast becoming my all time favorite headbussin’ Brit (just call her the anti-Witchy-Woo) gets her whacks in at Uncool here.
