I've had Toby Clark's Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century sitting on my shelf for ages, but only finally started reading it.  There were two stories in the women's art section that I thought were especially interesting and worth sharing with readers of my blog.  The book appears to be out of print, but I'm thus far enjoying it, and would recommend tracking down a used copy if you're into art and politics.  Here's excerpts on two people I liked, with the accompanying imagery:

Most of those who produced propaganda for the suffrage movements were not professional artists, through the implications of their work sometimes challenged dominant ideas about art.  Some even took on the art institutions directly, and adopted them as the stage for political actions.

The British campaigner for women's suffrage Mary Richardson did this in 1914 when she took a small axe into the National Gallery in London.  She used it on The Rokeby Venus (c. 1650) by Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), smashing the glass and slashing the painting a number of times before being restrained and arrested.  She explained at her trial that her motive had been to draw attention to the treatment of the suffragette leader Emily Pankhurst, who had been on hunger strike in London's Holloway Prison.  It was not an isolated event but one of many propaganda activities which the militant wing of the suffrage movement had carried out in Britain since 1905 to gain the vote and oppose wider discrimination against women.  The attack on the painting would have been partly understood as an extension of the suffragettes' tactic of smashing department store windows, which assaulted the feminized spaces of consumerism like a parodic inversion of shopping.  By moving the battle to the nation's foremost art museum, Richardson brought the values of the state's guardians of culture into the line of fire, and choosing a famous picture of a nude woman, she targeted the point of intersection between institutional power and the representations of femininity.

Richardson's act provoked a complex set of meanings and effects.  At first sight, it looks like an attack on the control and exposure of the female body as an object of male erotic pleasure.  Richardson remarked that she had disliked the way the way men in the gallery had "gaped" at the picture.  But she admired the painting itself, comparing Velazquez's Venus with her own political heroine, saying, "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful women in mythological history as a protest against the Government destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history."  Yet Richardson had not destroyed the picture, but altered it, making a new image - the slashed Venus - which was widely reproduced in photographs in the national press, as Richardson had surely anticipated.  Though the newspapers' response was hostile, demonizing "Slasher Mary" as a monstrous hysteric, Richardson had succeeded in using the mass media to disseminate "her" picture of a wounded heroine, in effect a metaphorical portrait of the martyred Plankhurst and of the suffering of women in general.

And:

Born as Lucy Schwob to a family of Jewish intellectuals, [Claude Cahun (1894-1954)] engaged in a varied career of art, acting, poetry, and political activism.  She became involved with the Surrealists after meeting them as members of a group of communist artists in 1932.  At this time, there were serious tensions in the Surrealists' relationship with communism.  [...]

Cahun left the communists in 1933.  Much of her artistic activity depended on the radical transformation of her own appearance.  She had worked on montages and photographic self-portraits since 1914 as a student at the Sorbonne, and from 1919 she wore dramatically short hair, sometimes dyeing it pink, green, and gold.  Alongside her adoption of various pseudonyms, her self-portraits explore a repertoire of playfully shifting identities, portraying her as a soldier or convict with shaved head, or as a wild parody of the Hollywood good-time girl, or as a circus acrobat.  Like Hoch's art, Cahun's work was closely allied to her lesbianism and to a practice which involved a parodic masquerade in a series of stereotypically feminine roles which only emphasized her adamant refusal to conform to them.  Until recently, these activities lacked a context through which they could be widely understood as "political."  As a form of propaganda, they are certainly oblique, although at an everyday and popular level the adoption in public of a non-conformist appearance has been readily understood as a form of political statement since long before the age of the hippies and punks.  As it transpired, Cahun's most explicit propaganda work would be as a member of Resistance forces against the Nazi occupation of Jersey, where she lived during the war, engaging in four years of anti-Nazi activities which included flying a banner from a church which read, "Jesus is great, but Hitler is greater - for Jesus died for the people but people die for Hitler."  She was arrested in 1944 and condemned to death by the Gestapo.  Despite a reprieve, she spent nearly a year in prison from which she never fully recovered, physically or mentally.

People, and social movements, cannot grow without dealing with their shortcomings, especially if those problems are uncomfortable, dramatic, or awkward to fling into the open.  This lengthy post is me throwing a molotov cocktail of things-that-have-gone-publicly-unsaid, but I wanted to start my critique only after I give some quick context of what else has been said recently.

For backstory on "this month in sex worker blog controversy", start with Amanda's post about excluding women like her who are mainstream sexy and heteronormative.  Snippets:

There is a deep prejudice permeating the sex worker rights movement in the US. Just because some of us have a mainstream appearance doesn’t mean we don’t deal with the same stigma that every other sex worker does, that we somehow work under a different set of laws. Just because we look much like the “pretty” depictions of sex workers in mainstream media doesn’t mean we’re not “real,” it means we’re making money (most sex workers are in sex work to make money).

[...]

“Inclusiveness” and “diversity” are such huge preoccupations in the movement that they often derail energy and focus on the real-world issues staring all of us in the face. In the stampede to be inclusive and make sure that all ethnic/gender/occupation/whatever boxes are ticked and that a token representative is present, a huge majority go unnoticed and unwelcome.

Then, she called out two of the biggest names in sex blogging, Susie Bright and Mistress Matisse.  Single sentence summary:

The Craigslist debacle of 2010 really separated the in-the-trenches sex workers from those quite obviously above it.

Amanda's posts are the tip of an iceberg, and it's not just her, and it's not just about any one or two famous sex bloggers saying detached or offensive things.  Overall, the big issue I've seen floating around America in the last 6 months is that there are a number of sex workers who aren't happy with the Big Name Visible People in sex worker politics, Big Names who notably couldn't even be bothered to attend this year's Desiree Alliance sex worker conference.  Many sex workers I've talked to aren't thrilled with the increasing inaccessibility and academic-esque nature of sex work dialog, don't feel like their world is being well-represented, and are privately whispering things like, "Wait, what was it that so-and-so actually did that makes them a sex worker?  And how many years ago was that?"

In sum, it feels like there's a lot of important and exciting shit brewing just under the surface in sex worker politics, and more people looking to get involved in some sort of political stuff - if they can find a way to do so.

For those of you who don't know me well: this is coming from someone who got started in sex work almost 9 years ago (full-time for 8 years), is not involved in any sex worker rights groups and has a semi-outsiders perspective on sex worker activism, but who considers herself to have a pretty good grasp of the history of social movements and activism in the United States over the last 50 years.

Here's what I see from where I'm sitting:

1.) The sex worker rights movement should be led by experienced and current sex workers.  No one should be excluded, but we sorely need more voices from folks who aren't hipster feminists with only brief involvement with sex work.

It's truly great to have part-timers and people who did/do only a small amount of sex work speak about their experiences.  I am glad that people who don't "need" to be involved in the fight for sex workers rights care to do so anyway.  It also testifies to how sex work is not a monolith and can often be something people do once in their lives, or for a few months, or a few years, or with one special patron they see twice a year.  I am not dismissing those folks and their stories or their work as activists, but for people who have flat-out spent less time sex working, they sure do comprise a whole lot of our tacit leadership and spokespersons.

The vocal sex worker scene needs more people whose primary motivation wasn't a quick bout of fun self-exploration.  That's a totally valid reason to do sex work, and I'm not saying you're bad or irrelevant if it describes you, but it's simply not representative of sex workers in this country as a whole.  (I enjoy the explorative and creative aspects of my work, but it's still my full-time job that I do for money.)  The over-representation of sex-positive dabblers also contributes to the anti camp being able to dismiss sex worker activism as something by and for a tiny minority of the most privileged and "happy hooker"-esque.  Even if we love our work, as I do, I think we do ourselves a disservice by over-selling the erotic/transgressive/feminist aspect of it in an attempt to counter false stereotypes that all sex workers are abused addicts who hate their jobs.

When I feel extra cynical, I wonder if there's some kind of unwritten rule that says the less sex work you've done, and the longer it's been since you've done it, the more aggressively you ought to shout about how you're a sex worker and thrust yourself into public conversations as such.  (Of course, this rule does not apply to typical sex workers, it applies only to the educated feminist types.)  I've been a full-time, no-"real"-job sex worker my entire adult life, and frankly, I think this buys me a bigger seat at the table than someone who appears in a few porn videos a year, or was a stripper for a semester a decade ago.  (Just as, of course, I think people who've been sex workers since before I was born deserve an even bigger seat at the table than I do.)

This doesn't mean I dislike part-time or former sex workers (I adore many of them and think they've made some amazing contributions!), nor do I think that they shouldn't be included, or that they aren't "real" sex workers.  I simply want the folks with the most at stake and the most experience to have the most say in what's going on and how their jobs are portrayed.  Radically offensive perspective, I know.

2.) The sex worker rights movement needs to make itself and its issues accessible to more supporters and sex workers, not just feminist bloggers, the kinkster/sex-positive scene, and academics.

If you were to casually surf across popular sex workers rights blogs and articles, you'll find stuff like how to reframe human trafficking through a lens of post-colonial theory, impassioned calls to stop cis-sexist language constructs, and the forced rehabilitation centers  in Cambodia.  These are all excellent and fascinating topics of discussion to me, but (sadly!) they only interest a very small amount of other people.  Sex worker discourse is dominated by people who chose to forget that most folk in America aren't familiar with the idea of being "cisgender", can't find Cambodia on a map, and all they know about "colonialism" is that pilgrims wore funny hats.

Your average person (sex worker or potential ally) does not have a graduate degree-level understanding of gender, feminism, or immigration politics.  They don't even possess the vocabulary to join the conversation we're having amongst ourselves.  Think of it this way: we're trying to implore people, "Save the whales from extinction!", except their concept of what a whale looks like is "a grey cow that can breathe under water", they don't know what save implies in this context, and they need to look up extinction in a dictionary because they've never heard the word before.  The steep learning curve is alienating.  When I see so many sex worker rights discussions going on, I wonder if some people have ever ventured outside of the intellectual pervert cliques of New York City and San Francisco.

It's not like I disagree with what most of the brainy clique is writing, or think they should stop saying it, but I'm a pragmatist who knows that deconstructing every facet of hetero-normativity is not the most pressing issue for most sex workers.  Yes, everything is connected, "let's not be single-issue", I get that - but some people are like a chef so busy trying to explain how to make impressively intricate fondant cakes that they forget that their audience hasn't even mastered Jello instant pudding yet.  I'm not anti- fondant cake, but let's start with getting everyone on board with that just-add-milk-and-stir thing, and then work our way up from there, shall we?

If you want to change the world, you have to be able to meet people where they're at, to explain things to average people using plain language.  Broad-based social change is not a competition to see who can talk the furthest over the heads of the general public.  That famous quip about how "the only thing that's ever changed the world is a small group of committed people" is complete bullshit.  You do need those core instigators, but if it starts and ends there, your cause is doomed.

Further, sex workers really need to reconsider what it means to "build bridges with other communities."  We can get every last feminist sex blogger and BDSM enthusiast to say they agree with our cause, but, well... that's not really progress. The way I see, the root thing we're working to change is public opinion and stigma before we can do anything else - like changing or repealing laws - and sex workers need to actually reach out to the general public.  I love sex bloggers and kinksters and think they have been great allies, but they are members of the choir, not the people that we most need to reach.  It seems like 99% of outreach efforts are focused on influencing less than 1% of the population.  We need to stop kidding ourselves and acting like it's a major accomplishment to convince someone who's already devoted to transgressive sexuality that they should support sex workers, too.  (I'm not dismissing our cool allies in the pervert scene, I'm stating that we need more allies.)

3.) The "working" class needs to be at the forefront of the sex workers rights movement.

In Jim Goad's polarizing book, The Redneck Manifesto, he lays things out thusly:

The working class doesn't write a lot of history books.  The working class doesn't produce many movies or radio shows.  The working class doesn't need to hire media consultations or theatrical agents.  The working class has played an itty-bitty role in fashioning its public image.

That's because the working class was too busy working.

I might not be "working class" in the sense Goad means it, but I'm "working" class within the sex work scene in that my focus has been on actual sex work, not on writing about it for liberal news sites and academic journals, debating anti-prostitution activists on TV, or promoting myself as a guest lecturer available to talk to college students about "feminist porn".  Even as I blog, consider writing a book, and start expanding into doing more political stuff, I'm still working a full-time job as a pornographer and web cam performer, which is where I devote most of my energies.

I know we're all busy, but I'd like to see more sex workers take just a bit of time to get involved in something, or speak out, or share their stories.  I don't want sex worker politics to belong only to a handful of feminist intellectuals, I want to see blogs and contributions and stories and ideas from people sprinkled all over the country, doing all sorts of different work, especially those who have no prior experience with activism and political organizing.  I want to see new faces.  I want these faces to be diverse, but without refusing to acknowledge the reality that most sex workers are able-bodied cisgender women who adhere to mainstream beauty standards.

It saddens me to see any sex worker feeling like there's no place for them because they're not a punky queer hipster (pseudo)intellectual.  It's such a bizarro-world scenario where a a teeny little minority of (ex) sex workers can make the majority feel like they are the ones who don't fit in.  I know a number of long-standing, smart, politically-minded, and/or boundary-pushing people whose work and opinions don't get mentioned in political sex work and "feminist porn" discussions because they don't fit into the established superficial mould of what a "smart sex worker" is supposed to look and act like.  Is sex worker activism a momentum-gathering social movement or a temporarily trendy subculture, like ironic mustaches?

I stated that I'm calling for a "working" class uprising, and I chose that word for a reason.  I didn't call for a coup.  I don't want to silence anyone or tell anyone to stop doing what they're doing.  I am calling for the rest of us to literally rise up, to become the dominant voices not because we take voices away from others, but because we are speaking up for ourselves.  If you don't like how things are going, or don't feel represented by the current sex worker political scene, it's up to you to make sex worker politics yours through your own participation.

4.) I live up to what I ask of others, so I'm starting a new project.  Its focus is on providing accessible information about sex work to a general audience.

I've had an idea for this independent project floating around in my head for a while, and decided that now is the time to finally get on it.  Independent as in something I can operate mostly by myself, without joining an existing group and devoting time to organization meetings, worrying about consensus processes, and frankly, having to rely on other people - who may end up flaking out on me.  While I will be asking for input, advice, and help from other people, I'm a ultimately a lone wolf, and I want something that's mostly operated by me, because then I know it will get done.

The political work (I sort of hate the word "activist" because of the subculture scene image it implies) I've been involved with off-and-on over in the last decade has been of a very different framework than general education and outreach.  My experiences are with more targeted issues where there's some clear goal and there are more definitive metrics to gage success.  Changing the big picture for sex workers is fucking hard.  This isn't "let's get this company/person to stop/start doing this specific thing."  Sluts and whores (and women falsely perceived to be so) are some of the most hated people across every human culture in the world.  Every single religion is anti-sexuality, and that affects our global psyche in ways I don't think all people realize or care to admit.  So, while this isn't little Furry Girl's first try at doing something political, it's a truly challenging construct due to its vastness and how much it's ingrained in our world.  Also, it's funny to me that I generally agitate for more "radical" positions on issues, but what most needs to be done for sex workers is providing polite, 101-level basic public education, so what's what I'm going to do.

The launch date on my project hasn't been determined yet, but some time in the spring.  I promise, it will be good, and I'll write more about this soon.  In the mean time, if you have a fancy-pants job and aren't hurting too badly from the recession, I would appreciate any early-bird donations to get the ball rolling.

I've decided on what I have the skill, time, and interest to contribute.  What will you start doing this year?

[Edit to add: this project is now launched at SWAAY.org]

First, some background and terminology for those of you not familiar with this debate.  Laypersons often confuse and conflate legalization and decriminalization, but they're two different approaches.

To legalize sex work would mean regulating sex work and sex workers.  For example, prostitution has been legalized in some parts of Nevada: but only at licensed brothels where women are required to get weekly health screenings and pay all sorts of fees to become a registered prostitute.  A sex worker is treated as a controlled vice without a lot of options.  Think of legalization as similar to how bottles of liquor are handled in states where you have to go to special government-run stores (with bad hours) to purchase them.

To decriminalize sex work would mean to remove any laws that make sex work illegal or regulated.  It does not treat sex work as a special class of work that requires extra taxes, permits, fees, or regulations.  A sex worker is like any other worker in the eyes of the law.  Think of decriminalization as akin to being able to freely buy and sell oranges without needing a special orange permit or to reside in an citrus-zoned area.  You can buy oranges from a top-end grocery story, or from a guy on the side of the road.

I am in favor of decriminalization, of course.

A key argument for legalization is that it's safer for everyone because the sex industry needs regulation, and the arguer will compare it to how we regulate healthcare industries.  After all, prostitution means dealing with bodily fluids and germs and things, so don't we need the government to mandate by law that workers are getting STI tests and/or using condoms?  Doctors and nurses are licensed and regulated!

My answer is to let a free market decide.

Under decriminalization, if sex worker wants to work in a "proper" brothel where they are required by the brothel owners to use condoms and get STI checks every week, they can.  And if a customer wants that level of regulation to feel safe, they can patronize those businesses.  Other sex workers can work independently, or for agencies that don't require weekly STI checks, or in a small group working together out of a single space (ho-op?).  Customers can then make their choice as to whether to use their services or not.  Sex workers (and clients) don't need the government to decide what's best for everyone, protecting consenting adults from determining the level of risk they find acceptable for their own lives.

But, back to the medical analogy.  It's a good point, right?  We don't just let random people pose as doctors and operate on patients, or encourage any person show up to a hospital and work as a nurse, so why let sex workers and their clients negotiate their own boundaries?  I agree with the medical analogy the legalization camp uses, but they are completely uninformed in how they use it.

The healthcare industry already is a free market where anyone with any level of training (or lack thereof) is allowed to set up shop and offer to heal customers.  Homeopathy, hypnosis, aromatherapy, ayurveda, eating bizarre ground up animal parts, all that.  You can choose to have a baby in a hospital, or give birth in a kiddie pool in your living room with unlicensed self-proclaimed midwives and/or doulas.  You can choose to go to a medical doctor or a shaman when you have an ailment.  You can pray to Jesus, or you can get take insulin for diabetes.  You can even be like Bob Marley and willingly die of untreated curable things if you so please.  I might laugh hysterically at new age healing beliefs, but that doesn't mean I think adults shouldn't be allowed to make that choice.

Now that this is settled, can we stop using the medical analogy, please?

(This is not to say that I think that independent decrimininalized sex work is some sort of homeopathy-esque scam or of a lesser quality than legalized/regulated sex work.  The analogy is only valid so far as the free market aspect is concerned.)

I've never given blog space to one of my favorite dystopic tales of all time, a short story that is both clever speculative fiction, and applies to parts of the porn debate.

As a precocious 12-year-old in the smart kid English class, I was introduced to Kurt Vonnegut in the form of Harrison Bergeron, a short story from the 60s.  Vonnegut was one of those authors I read at just the right time when I was growing up - alongside Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell - folks who crafted tales that resonate so perfectly with how awkward outsider kids feel about the world.

Vonnegut's story begins,

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

In this future, we have finally achieved the feminist/liberal dream of equality through by punishing and handicapping those who are beautiful, strong, and intelligent for the heinous crimes of making others feel insecure.  In effect: affirmative action taken further down its slippery slope, this time, to equalize out any and all "unfair" advantages which no one must be allowed to possess in life.

After all, if one person (like a feminist or unattractive woman) reacts to another person (like a supermodel or porn star) with insecurity and jealousy, the only way to solve this "problem" is to punish and criticize the attractive party, and try and pass laws to prevent the delicate party from ever being "forced" to feel insecure ever again.

I highly recommend reading Harrison Bergeron, which isn't terribly long, and will perhaps cause you to ask interesting questions about "equality."

Something happened at the end of 2010.  I finally became Andy Warhol.

"Don't pay any attention to what they write about you.  Just measure it in inches." -- Andy Warhol

Just kidding.  I don't think I'm that famous.  (And unlike him, not one feminist has actually tried to murder me yet.)

But, I've finally hit that point - sparked by a frothy mixture of more people talking about me, and more letting go of keeping up with haters - where I'm not even trying to read everything people say about me any more.  Google Alerts for my name and my blog are only glanced at, not read in their entirety, and certainly not used as motivation to jump into fights with people on the internet about whether or not I am an asshole.  (I already know I'm an asshole.  I just happen to be an asshole who's correct most of the time, like all the best villains of fiction.)

Haters are so funny.  I'll never get over the hilarity of how verbose and devoted people get when obsessively, repeatedly explaining to me how "boring" or "unimportant" they find me, and I've attracted heaps of those detractors-cum-fans in the last six weeks between two popularity spikes.  (Although, an all-time favorite insult was from two or three years ago, when a Republican pornographer launched her triumphant fuck-you at me on a forum.  She revealed that she found me so extremely boring that she even wrote a whole blog entry about how boring I am.  Yeah, uh... you sure showed me!)  It's like being in kingergarten and knowing who secretly likes you based on who bothers to throw dirt at you, except now, the dirtiest dirt to be thrown is accusations of having bored the hater.  Let the record reflect that I'm not the one who's hounding my political opposites, following them around the internet in the excited hopes that maybe they'll pay attention to me.  I stay in my own virtual house for the most part - something of an internet cat lady shut-in, I suppose.  I hardly even comment on my friends' blogs (sorry!), let alone spend my life seeking out blogs of strangers I can dislike so I can self-righteously lecture them about exactly why I dislike them.  What a bizarre and neurotic thing to do!

Those two popularity spikes I mentioned were my pantless TSA protest (almost half a million views on the video!) and my Assange rape skepticism post (mostly wigged out about by feminists).

No one whose opinion I care about has attacked me, but I did earn praise from three people I admire.  Penn Jillette called me a hero on Twitter for my TSA protest, Dan Savage quoted my thoughts on rape in a post titled "What She Said,", and Laura Agustín commented in support of my rape piece.  I'm going to cherry pick and say I got all the external validation I could want between those three.  And, of course, there was a torrent of people commenting all around the web about how I'm a monster who's basically responsible for everything bad that's ever happened to anyone.  It's pretty rad that I somehow manage to simultaneously be the most insignificant yawn-fest people have ever deigned to notice, and also powerful enough to be personally responsible for stuff like "rape culture" and terrorist airplane hijackings.  I'm an enigma like that.

A couple of months ago, I received an unsolicited email from a literary agent asking me if I had a book proposal she could check out.  Seeing as how getting my shit together and writing a sample chapter and proper proposal was already on my "things to do in the near-ish future" list, it was very flattering to have someone express interest without me even trying.  And, maybe it will go no where and no publisher will want to print anything I say - I'm not going to get over-excited.  (I have a major loathing of how commonly people brag about how they're "writing a book," like just saying it out loud means you're halfway to winning a Nobel Prize.  Ain't nothing special about writing a book, kids - you don't get any bragging rights until all those words are, you know, being purchased in stores in book format.)  Even with that cynicism in mind, I'm flattered by the interest.  I wonder, snidely, how often literary agents track down blog comment trolls to say things like, "Your scathing paragraph of how [so-and-so] is ugly and stupid was absolutely brilliant!  Please send me a book proposal and sample chapter as soon as you have one.  You have a unique voice!"

(Seriously - has anyone ever gotten a book deal based on their "work" as a commenter on blogs?  Has anyone ever parlayed posting comments on other people's web sites into anything substantive or memorable?)