When I was pondering what to name my blog, I devoted several days of intense shower-thinking to the matter before settling on "Feminisnt". To me, if a feminIST means one who is a proponent of feminism, a feminISNT is one who is not, without necessarily being anti-feminist. Huzzah! Clever unique term coined! Point me!

But, alas, like most good ideas, this one had been thought of before.

A Google search for the term netted the term almost exclusively as a typo by people who can't spell feminist.

There already existed one blog with the title: feminisnt.blogspot.com A few months later, another one with the title came along, feminisnt.wordpress.com

Most notably is a Vancouver group/person who puts "FEMINISN'T" stickers/stencils on advertisements that feature images of women. Nothing says "nuanced discussion of sexuality and gender politics" like stickering random advertisements that feature images of attractive women, I suppose. It doesn't matter what the women in the ads may think about the subject, if they're volunteers with any real causes, or donate to help women's organizations - they're sexy, so they obviously they're bad. Much like the graphic porn photos anti-porn campaigners use without consent of the human beings they feature, the women here have had their likenesses reappropriated without their consent and have been objectified to suit the will of the outsider. Mmmm... solidarity with all womankind, that.

So, yes- I know I'm not the first person to use the term, and I will try harder to be clever in the future.

For a long time, I resisted starting a blog. I don't want to be another node in the pink ghetto who writes my take on the story of the week in between tales of getting fucked and the latest free photo galleries from porn sites I jack off to. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with those things, it's just that other people already have it covered.

However, I think there still exists plenty of room for blogs about sexual politics written by sex workers themselves. We're a group of people who are ignored and excluded from all sorts of dialogues, and hated fiercely by people on the right and the left, so I have more of a motive to write in defense of sexual autonomy than I do to write a review of how I attempted to get off using the latest high-tech strangely-shaped sex toy.

After working on the outskirts of the porno industry since 2002, I have steadily been moving from wanting to modernize and re-define the concept of feminism to wanting to stop beating that dead horse entirely. Many of my friends and favorite people consider themselves feminists. A lot of my enemies consider themselves feminists, too, and they exist in larger numbers, with better funding, and with better brand recognition as the face of feminism. (Why fight like mad to have your awesome new organic fairtrade beverage be recognized as "Coca Cola", when there already is a firmly established Coca Cola company that sucks? Why not just focus on being great under your own power, with your own title?) I spent way too much of my own time trying to shoehorn myself into feminism, and I look back on that as an embarrassing waste of my energy.

Feminism as a word/identity is used to describe so much of everything that it has ceased to mean anything at all. Is fucking people for money feminist? Is climbing the corporate ladder feminist? Is wearing an abaya feminist? Is shaving your pussy feminist? Is being a stay-at-home mom feminist? Is BSDM feminist? Are sewing and crafting feminist? Is makeup feminist? Is being a woman in the military feminist? Is broccoli soup feminist?!?! You have people lined up, ready to fight to the death over their absolute certainty over whether or not such things are truly feminist. (What the word "feminism" stands in for, of course, is deemed permissible by the "right" kind of people.)

In general, I'm tired of "feminist" being used as a blanket qualifier to mean "awesome", especially when it comes to the concept of feminist porn. I think "awesome" works just fine as a qualifier for awesome.

I seek to advance the idea the first person in any debate to propose that their position is correct because it's the most "feminist" has hereby lost the argument. I have been guilty of this one plenty of times in the past, but I can learn from my mistakes.

I feel like I've taken back something, like friends have taken back "fag", "fatty", or "cripple". I've taken back "not a feminist" and claimed it for myself, and in doing so, have disarmed a lot of people who've hurled it at me as an insult in debates. I wasted a lot of my time and energy arguing over whether or not I'm a real feminist and if my work - and the work of other sex workers - can be construed as feminist acts. So now, rather than get all upset when an asshat says I'm not a feminist, I can shrug it off and say, "yeah, so what?" I feel like this dismissal "empowers" and "liberates" me more than anything else that modern feminism could ever hope to provide me.

One of the things that's been batting itself around in my head over the years is, "What purpose does 'feminism' serve, today, in industrialized nations? Why the need to identify as a 'feminist'?" I've never seen a satisfactory answer. Much like quizzing someone on their religion, the answers are some defensive permutation of "it just is!" For some folks, that's sufficient, and I won't try to wrest their important identity label from them, but I need tangible reasons to do and believe things.

Writer Jorge Luis Borges famously described the Falklands War as "two bald men fighting over a comb", and that image perfectly describes the war for the title of "feminist", too. Why are we supposed to want what it is that we're fighting for?

I've pumped a lot of quarters into this here claw machine, but sheer stubbornness kept me from realizing that I didn't even want a small stuffed animal.