Email your mailing address to feminisnt(at)feminisnt.com, and I'll send you a few of these delightful weatherproof vinyl stickers to brighten your day and the days of those around you.  This offer is valid anywhere in the world, because I love my readers so much that I'm busting out the $1.05 international stamps.  I generally eschew energy expenditures that are solely about antagonizing one's opposition, but the cost of a few cocktails is worth the fun I am already deriving from these stickers.  And besides, I have so much free energy after I stopped wasting time debating feminists on the internet.

I thought about writing a post to fully flesh out why I believe that feminism is just another bullshit religion, but I've already addressed those general topics many times if one reads through my archives, so if you're all cryface about my stickers, you can do your own reading without my hand-holding.  I'll summarize the topic only once, and then I will ignore and delete the dozens of comments I'll no doubt receive from the same old annoying detractors who always demand that I re-explain everything I say, just for them, because they are so very special and entitled to my time.

Why is feminism just another bullshit religion?

Feminism is a belief system unsupported by actual data and which often uses outright lies to justify itself and push its political agenda; feminism is impervious and opposed to revision and progress; feminism denies and hides its own oppressive history to look nicey-nice and inclusive; feminism does not allow for questioning or any deviation from its ideology of women as inherently helpless and men as inherently villainous; feminism views science as suspect at best and evil at worst, since rationality, competition, and fact-based thinking are supposedly "patriarchal" values; feminism hinges on hyping the world as an extremely horrible and dangerous place, and only through adhering to it can one find salvation; propaganda that feminism (like religion) has a monopoly on morality and ethics, and that you must subscribe to one particular belief system in order to consider yourself an ethical/moral person; ultimately, because it's a tangle of circular logic where its conclusion is based on that very same conclusion (that women are feeble and to be told what to do because women are women are feeble and to be told what to do), much like a religion.

Moving on, as I have in past years, I made a list of my ten most popular or controversial posts.  It's usually a list of ten, but this year we had a tie, so I'm including eleven.

* Why I am against sexy breast feeding and using a baby as a marketing gimmick to sell porn [August 2011]
* Hipster dude self-publishes book of Google Street View images of supposed roadside prostitutes [July 2011]
* Not all sex workers love Occupy: the creepy dynamic of pretending to speak for "the 99%" [November 2011]
* What do I mean when I say "sex worker"? Why I'm against an overly-broad definition [May 2011]
* Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street and how to fail at activisting [September 2011]
* Why I call them "anti-sex worker" rather than "anti-porn" or "anti-prostitution," and why you should too [June 2011]
* Why I am against "free" college for everyone [November 2011]
* The common logical fallacies deployed by anti-sex worker activists [November 2011]
* Are Pagan-themed sex businesses entitled to special legal rights? [September 2011]
* Blackface for sex bloggers: why it's offensive for non- sex workers to claim to be one of us [May 2011]
* Frequent Addressed Accusation: "Why not work to make feminism better?" [August 2011]

Finally, I always appreciate gifts myself.  If you want to thank me for the time I put into writing and tweeting and sharing news and stuff, my Amazon wishlist has items for every budget, and you can send a gift card in any denomination.

"The reason I went out on that limb [making anti-drug war comments when speaking at Liberty University] was partly penance for my two great aunts who devoted their lives to the Women's Temperance Union and certainly played a part in creating Prohibition nearly a century ago.  They are both deceased now, but I think it's important to realize that their religious outrage over alcohol created the legal precedent to allow the federal government to come between my lips and my throat.  In essence, to tell me what I could and could not ingest.

That such a precedent would morph in our day into illegal raw milk, homemade pickles, and home cured charcuterie certainly never crossed their minds.  But this is why we must be very careful when we ask for the government to remedy our outrage.  Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity.  A government that can take away alcohol can also take away heritage food.

[...]

The moment the government determines that you do not own yourself, that society owns your body, you give up all personal choice and autonomy.  You are no longer a citizen, but a slave.  Not a person, but a pawn.

[...]

Right now, farmers can give away raw milk and home made pickles; the prohibition is on sales.  What is it about taking money for something that suddenly turns it from a wonderful charitable product into a hazardous substance?"

-- An interview with Joel Salatin in Creating Sustainable Agriculture Without Government Subsidies on reason.com

I don't like how Salatin sees veganism and locavorism as opposing ideas (I bet that a greater percentage of vegans support farmer's markets and are concerned about buying local/sustainable than typical American omnivores), or his support of homeopathy and alt "med," but most of the article is pretty awesome.  I found Salatin's anti-GMO stance especially great: the need to fight Monsanto from a property rights perspective, not with more government regulation of GMOs.  (An example of how enforcing existing basic laws is better than creating more red tape and more laws.)  Overall, I enjoy seeing how people from various walks of life can make the same connections about government intrusion on their bodies and their lives - whether a Christian farmer or an atheist ho.

I openly admit it: I generally hate activists, activist subculture, and everything that is typically associated with activism.  (All three of those external links should be considered required reading on the topic.)  Anyone who is not themselves a part of the problem knows that activism is absolutely fucking insufferable, as it attracts many of the worst, dumbest, most mentally unstable people in the world - who all want to imagine themselves as heroes and saviors.  So, not only are you battling for a political issue, but you're faced with a double burden of having to do so while dealing with activists themselves, like trying to run a marathon through a swamp.  Because activism "has to" be inclusive, it welcomes everyone with open arms, despite whether or not they ever do anything objectively useful: the people who love wielding power by blocking consensus processes and causing constant infighting in a group, the over-the-top PC hysterics whose "contribution" to "activism" is lecturing everyone around them about why they are not enlightened enough, the people who derail every simple task into an exploration of ephemeral philosophical issues like "the need to examine gender roles," the people who have self-righteous fits about the need to "get out there and do something!" without ever stopping to think if that something is really going to help anything (or even make things worse), the people who only seem to drop by when there's a photo-op or something important happening, lifestyle protesters who drift around and latch onto any random cause without putting effort into understanding it, the larger groups that take public credit for the work of small grassroots groups, the people for whom "activism" is a mere performance to achieve status among their educated lefty friends, the people who steal funds from projects because they feel entitled to a little unofficial stipend here and there... I could go on and on.

I say this as someone for whom activism is not my social scene.  I realize it's a different experience for people who, for reasons I have never understood, actually enjoy spending their time with activist-identified people.  People can and do build their lives and families in activist cliques.  Sure, I've made some genuine friends via activism, but we'll always be the two people snickering in the back of the room while other people do their best performances of being "heroes."

Activists are so fucking awful.  It needs to be acknowledged more often.

This is where my important lesson comes in, because if you read my blog, you probably agree with a good bit of what I've written so far.

The most important lesson I could ever impart about activism is to remember that it's not about activists.  It's about your cause.  Never confuse the two, because they couldn't be more different from one another.

I realize that sounds like a no-brainer, but it's something I have struggled with for more than ten years, and something I've seen the best people also battle.  I've gotten in fights with more activist-identified assholes and fame-seekers in more scenes in more cities than I can count, and there are so many times where my mind wants to jump to, "fuck you people, fuck this cause, I hope you all fall into a giant blender" and just leave them to keep going about their ego-boosting ineffectual nonsense.

I've gotten better at finding my own way, interacting only with small and select groups of people, and focusing my time on the things that I think will do the most for a cause, not for the "cause" of social status in activist cliques.  Taking this sanity-preserving path means I generally work alone or in pairs, but the extra workload has always been more than balanced out by not needing to haul around dead weight.  I hope that more people will take the same route (especially new folk who could be entirely spared the horrors of the activist subculture), and work on small, non-"inclusive" projects, where there is a narrow focus, a clearly stated mission and goal, no time wasted on debating the "true" meanings of abstract philosophical concepts, and above all, an emphasis on always putting the cause above activism.

"Beach boys and women sex tourists: every journalist's dream topic...

Reporters want to know if the boys are 'really' prostitutes and why the girls are paying; they have trouble figuring out who is exploiting whom.  It's a bias, of course, to insist someone has to be exploiting since money and sex are involved, rather than seeing these as ordinary relationships, the kind that travelling people have been having since human life began."

-- Dr Laura Agustín, in Girls who buy sex from beach boys: Sex tourism in Bali on lauraagustin.com

This article on Bali reminds me of one of my own anecdotes: a few years ago, I spent a couple of nights on the coast of Kenya in a town called Watamu.  It's the only place I've ever been where the sex tourism was about women as purchasers.  It was an amusing dynamic for me to suddenly be the one propositioned by sex workers.  The gorgeous beach boys would come up to the (mostly middle-aged) white women and say something like, "Would you like to go shopping?" or "Would you like company for dinner?"  The guys were not overtly asking for cash for a set time period or a sex act, they seemed to want to stay in an upmarket hotel and be purchased gifts, clothing, and fancy dinners (and hopefully get some "spending money" as well).

The thing with being the most conservative visible sex worker is that it makes me feel bad for all the actual conservative sex workers who see a movement that is overtly hostile towards them.  I've heard from plenty of sex workers over the years who are centrists or Republicans and feel completely alienated from the sex worker politics subculture.  Although they want to get involved and defend their human rights, they see a group of people with whom they have only one thing in common, and a lot in contrast.  They don't see their kind represented at all, and they don't want to fight an uphill battle for acceptance.  They won't sign up for an interest in "deconstructing gender" or "overthrowing capitalism" as unofficial requirements for being a sex work activist.

Because the US sex workers' rights scene is mostly conjoined with the sex-positivity, feminist/anti-patriarchy, Pagan/new age, anarchist/socialist, abortion rights, anti-traditional beauty standards, and gender radical circles, it scares off so many potential allies, as well as sex workers.  It's like there was some group decision made at a party I wasn't invited to where "we" decided to make ourselves look as unappealing and unrelatable as humanly possible.  (A strange choice, considering that gaining public acceptance and showing that we're normal people is the thing we desperately need in order to make political progress.)

Sex work activism in the US desperately needs diversity.  The current crowd seems to think that diversity means, "recruit some poor folk and people of color, but only if they are left-wing feminists."  We need a diversity of ideas, folks - not just an array of skin tones and income brackets that all espouse the same politics.  I'd love to see some Republican and conservative sex worker activists, even though I'd no doubt disagree with them on plenty of topics.

In response to all the people who think I'm a hardcore right-winger, I thought I'd post a chart made by the Political Compass Test, which now lets you view your own beliefs plotted alongside those of the current presidential candidates.  I guess I just can't fit in anywhere.

"I can't count the number of times I've defended figures like Howard Stern and Bill Maher—straight entertainers who 1. fully support gay rights but 2. sometimes tell jokes that sensitivos consider homophobic.  These guys are on our side and they're good for our side.  Yeah, sometimes the tell jokes or do bits that are rooted in what is clearly their own personal discomfort with/fear of gay sex, particularly that man-on-man buttsex they never tire of hearing about, obsessing about, joking about, etc.  But you know what?  There are a lot of people out there who oppose gay rights because they're uncomfortable with gay sex and a lot of these folks—and lots of them are the kinds of guys who listen to Stern—are convinced that their own personal discomfort with gay sex requires them to oppose gay rights.  What the Sterns and Mahers demonstrate is that you can be a little uncomfortable with gay sex—you can even have sense of humor about your discomfort, you can even tell the occasional joke about it—and still support the full civil equality of LGBT people."

-- Dan Savage, in Required Listening: Howard Stern on Ellen, JC Penney, Bullied Gay Kids, Rosie, Santorum, Bachmann, et al on slog.thestranger.com

Thank you very much to the awesome people who sent me gifts from my Amazon wishlist: Raikin, Stella Maris, AP, BO, and CL!  (Please make sure include your email address in the "gift comments" field on Amazon so I can send you a thank you.)

My new books:

* The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
* Not Bad For A Human an autobiography by Lance Henriksen, with Joseph Maddrey
* The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science by Julie Des Jardins
* Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles J. Wheelan
* Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature by Marcus Du Sautoy
* Whores and Other Feminists by Jill Nagle
* Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos
* The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self by Michel Foucault
* Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman
* Taste the Flavors (The Erotic Web) by Stella Maris (sent to me by the author, a fan of my sites.)

And who could resist the Breaking Bad chucks?  MF sent them as a birthday present a while ago.

If you buy any of these above-mentioned books through their Amazon affiliate links, a portion of the price goes to SWAAY.

Are donations to SWAAY tax deductible? Where does the money go?

SWAAY is not a federally-registered 501(c)3 nonprofit, and your donations are not tax deductible. Becoming an official nonprofit costs a lot of time and money, and requires having a board of directors that disclose their legal identities. This is an additional barrier to sex worker organizing, because most sex workers do not want to publicize our legal names.

As of April 2012, SWAAY is currently $2297.32 in debt for what has been spent to establish the project. During our first year of operation, 2011, expenses broke down as follows: 65% for printing shirts, stickers, and buttons; 14% of for office supplies and shipping; 12% for web site related costs and advertising; 8% for bank fees and credit card interest; and 1% for miscellaneous expenses.

SWAAY is a genuine volunteer-based grassroots project without a paid staff. No one who has worked on SWAAY has received payment other than stickers and/or a complimentary SWAAY shirt.

I've had detractors (who've never even met me or been involved in activism themselves) accuse me of using SWAAY as a personal profit-making project, as though there must be untold riches to be made selling sex workers' rights shirts.  Nope, I've never paid myself a penny, and I have no plans to draw a salary.  My goal as an activist is always to just break even with what I spend, and I would feel weird drawing a salary for my "volunteering" endeavors.  I think it's a good thing for nonprofit and activist projects to disclose whether their organizer(s) makes their living from running the project.  (That doesn't mean they're bad people or the project is corrupt, but I favor transparency.)

So, as I said, SWAAY is about $2300 in the hole.  (It has its own credit card which I used to start the project, and am now working on paying off.)  If you'd like to donate or buy some awesome merchandise, it's appreciated.  I would love to do more public outreach projects like the sex worker billboard, but all those things take money, and I'm not willing to rack up any more credit card debt at this time.