"I had but one interest in writing, and it may surprise you to know, it wasn't turning out a book.  I wanted a column.  A big, glossy, Sunday-magazine column in a reputable broadsheet.  I was going to be the girl Millington.  And possibly even start dating a German and dye my hair fuschia as well.

But, I was promptly informed, that was never going to happen.  'It won't fly at the Guardian,' one person advised me.  'Half their Saturday magazine staff threatened to walk after they offered a column to stripper.'  And that was only a stripper.

I grumbled and harrumphed, and that revelation, plus the predictably rubbish reviews from the Guardian and Observer a year later, led me to a single conclusion: it's quite alright to be a self-identified feminist, and a whore, so long as you're Valerie Solanas and want to kill the men you fuck."

-- Belle de Jour, in a July 2005 entry on belledejour-uk.blogspot.com

A little background: I grew up as the freakish nonreligious kid in a conservative part of the country.  I'm not one of those people who was raised in a big liberal city or whose parents taught them college-level concepts before the other kids could even read.  I grew up around people who told me that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by Satan to trick us.  I've always been drawn to nature and science, and have spent almost 14 years paying attention to the evolution wars - ever since the subject came up in biology class in seventh grade.  Sexuality activists can learn from the contemporary creationist movement's most successful strategy, and how to not play into it.  I've touched on this topic before, but wanted to write about it in more depth after watching not just anti-sex worker activists, but also supposedly "pro-porn" feminists, using this tactic over the course of this month's re-hashing of the porn wars.

To get a two-hour crash course in the modern creationist movement, I recommend watching Expelled, courtesy of The Pirate Bay, whose motto should be For When You Don't Want Your Money Supporting Something™.  The movie is a "documentary" narrated by conservative actor Ben Stein, aimed at "exposing" the horrifying "bias" within American schools to not teach Christian myths often enough in science classes.  (Unlike other countries with indoor plumbing and electricity, Americans already do have so much creationism in their schools and public life that most of them don't believe in evolution.)  The film clumsily pushes the idea that atheist radicals like biologist Richard Dawkins are taking over science and shutting down any "debate" about creationism.  Stein gives the topic the full loony treatment - which, of course, includes a stroll around Dachau to sensitively remind viewers that a belief in evolution and science invariably leads to Nazi death camps.  Stein never plainly states in the movie that he's a creationist who doesn't believe in evolution.  He argues that anyone who definitively supports evolution is trying to "silence debate about these important issues", playing like he's just a doe-eyed and confused Joe Everyman who thinks we the people have a right to hear "all opinions" on an unresolved matter.

Creationists might be intellectually-stunted to the point of hilarity when it comes to their interpretations of the world around them, but they are a very clever and well-funded bunch when it comes to getting their ideas wedged into American society.  Their most important and successful tactic is a propaganda campaign that they call amongst themselves "teaching the controversy": to not deny evolution outright, but to drum up "debate" and make the public think that the jury's still out about whether or not the world is 6000 years old.  In reality, no credible institution or researcher lends any believability to the idea that there's a "controversy" in the scientific community over whether or not Christian mythology negates everything we know about biology, geology, and physics - but that's just a minor unmentioned pesky detail, like there being no credible studies to suggest any harm in viewing porn or decriminalizing prostitution.

Creationist nutters aren't the only special interest group that is hell-bent on "teaching the controversy".  You see this sort of thing all the time with other areas where a person knows their own religious/moral beliefs have no factual basis, and that there's likely lots of solid evidence against their position, so their only hope is to cloud the issue to make their own position look more tenable.  Such as:

"Oh, I'm not against abortion!  But I do think young women should know that a lot of people have been asking questions about whether women who get abortions are more likely to end up with cancer later in life."

"Oh, I don't hate the gays!  But I think the public should know that there's all sorts of conflicting information about how unhealthy it is for children to be raised by homosexuals."

It's a sort of malicious argument from ignorance - someone posits, "I can't possibly make sense of this terribly confusing issue," - when, of course, they perfectly well do have a side - "so, we all really need to think more about what a grey area we're looking at and not make up our minds so hastily."

In the world of internet debates, this shoddy debate tactic is called concern trolling.  The concern troll is never for or against anything, they've just got "concerns" they need to keep raising.  No matter how many times you keep countering these people, they can keep popping up with some other "concern" that adds further confusion to the issue and makes it harder to discuss using facts.

"I think it's a classic hallmark of psuedoscience - which is that you just keep shifting the goalpost until you get to a hypothesis that's, frankly, untestable".

- Dr. Paul Offit, in Point of Inquiry's "The Costs of Vaccine Denialism" podcast

Lately, I've seen more sex-positive types adding to this problem by reminding everyone that "we" ought to be more respectful of anti-sex worker activist's arguments, and that the sex worker and pornographer community is failing to address these "concerns", such as:

"What about the women who feel insecure about themselves when they see sexy skinny women in porn?" The feminist answer to this is to sell a woman a book telling her that yes, she really ought to feel oppressed and ugly when she sees women's bodies in advertising and entertainment, and to whine a lot about such images being displayed.  My solution is to tell people to own up to their insecurities, and develop positive self-esteem that's not based on comparing themselves to idealized images in the media.  We all choose how we react to the world around us, and a large-chested size two model in a porno isn't forcing any woman to hate her own body.

"What about that study that shows sexually aggressive men look at a lot of pornography?" What about it?  Non-scientific and anti-porn minds take the study to mean looking at porn causes men to behave aggressively, even though such a conclusion is a classic logical fallacy.  I'd respond by telling people to read about the difference between causation and correlation, and to know that there are many more studies from all over the world that show a correlation between increased access to porn and a decrease in sex crimes.  If we're playing the correlation game, there's much more research to suggest that porn makes the world safer and less dangerous.  (Three I have bookmarked are Anthony D'Amato's 2006 study "Porn Up, Rape Down" about porn and rape in the United States, Dr. Milton Diamond's 1999 experience with studying porn and sex crimes in the US and Asia, and economist Todd Kendall's work, including "Pornography, Rape, and the Internet.")

"What about porn companies that don't treat their performers well?" None of us have any real statistics about what percentage of performers feel abused or unhappy with their jobs, and I'm not going to waste my time debating my guesses with other people who are also making guesses.  (My guess, though, is that the porn industry has a higher level of job satisfaction than most other occupations.)  Are some workers in the porn industry mistreated or miserable?  Of course, sadly, but that doesn't make the jiz biz especially evil.  There are exploited workers in every sector in every country in the world.  Further, it is pornographers and performers who are the most likely to know about adult companies that have had complaints from talent.  If you want the real scoop on a given porn company and how well they treat their workers, you don't email a women's studies academic on the other side of the country to ask for a referral.  You ask people in the porn industry.  Sex workers are pretty damn protective of each other and will gladly share if they've ever heard of a company engaging in bad business practices.

It annoys me to live in an age of public discourse where people are coddled and told that every idea is valid and just as likely to be correct as any other idea.  Ideas are not lottery tickets - each with an equal and random chance of winning.  When it's almost unheard of to unapologetically state that a given idea or person is flat-out wrong, the intellectually-lazy public believes that the truth always lies in the middle.  Not everything is a compromise.  Not everything is a debate.  Not everyone's opinion is a beautiful and unique snowflake - sometimes, it's just yellow piss-filled slush.

The sex-positive scene, and the world at large, needs to stop giving concern trolls and those who "teach the controversy" an equal platform with equal consideration.  Their goal is to dump impenetrable grey area paint all over everything so that the well-reasoned text beneath becomes unreadable.  It only encourages them to acknowledge and give legitimacy to their every little whimper and fuss.

As a younger person, I wasted a lot of time and energy line-by-line debating anti-sex worker loonies in front of small internet audiences, and I won't make that mistake again.  I'd rather just make good ethical porn, and occasionally blog about sex work politics to a wider audience.  One of the most powerful political slogans I've ever seen was a Bobby Sands quote on a mural in Belfast that read, "Our revenge will be the laughter of our children."  Well, my revenge in the porn wars will be the laughter of the performers I hire to make awesome smut with me - and there have been a lot of genuine smiles and laughs on my shoots.

As the dust settles a bit in the wake of all the discussion about Stop Porn Culture, many bloggers are still trickling forth with their own "and this is what all sides keep missing in their posts about the matter" posts.  It's good to see the discussion keep going, and I'll be the latest to hitch my wagon on the end of the ongoing "people are missing the real point!" train.

A running theme I saw in the conversation about Stop Porn Culture, as well as at other times, was people commenting that we need to prove to anti-porn activists that feminist porn exists.  These people's hearts are in the right place, but I don't think that tactic has any chance of swaying feminists who hate pornography.

Some sex workers and pornographers identify as feminists, some of us don't.  As I complained once in a room full of people shooting daggers out of their eyes at me, I'm sick of seeing the word "feminist" being used as the sole or primary qualifier of whether or not a given idea/product/person is good or evil.  It's sloppy, reductionist thinking.  While I'm not at all against anyone calling what they do "feminist porn", and indeed love what comes out of the feminist porn scene, it's awfully tiring to see people act as though the only ethical porn out there is the stuff being made by a handful of small producers in San Francisco.

When people fixate on the importance of spotlighting and praising feminist porn, I, and others like me, are tacitly being slighted.  Why is the label of "feminist" more important than the actual production of what's been discussed?  How about rather than squealing endlessly about feminist porn, we use the term ethical porn instead?  It makes more sense and actually explains, in simple English, what you're talking about.  It would be nice to see inclusiveness towards all the awesome and ethical non-feminist pornographers (ahem - like me), and you'll also avoid the endless semantic debates with anti-porn activists over what feminist "really" means.  Sidestep that bullshit - it's a useless distraction, and you'll never win an argument with it.  Believe me, I spent years trying.

When we get lazy and use the word "feminist" as an all-purpose stand-in for "ethical", we create a false dichotomy by inferring all porn not marketed specifically as "feminist" is not produced ethically.  This helps our enemies fracture us, and it hardly fosters productive dialog about the real politics and ethics of porn production.  If we want to have open discussions about labor and production issues - rather than endlessly rebutting baseless accusations that watching porn turns men into rapists - we need to drop the loaded terminology and use proper descriptive words.

It's also irksome to see the way in which many people in the pro-porn community rush to decry anti-porner's highlighting of BDSM porn in their materials.  While the anti-porners cherry-pick presenting the most graphic and kinky porn they can get their hands on - images of women being degraded, humiliated, and beaten - the pro-porn retorts to this emotionally-manipulative tactic annoy me just as much.  It completely plays into the divide-and-conquer efforts of anti-porners.  "Hey, most porn isn't violent and degrading!  You're just using horrible examples!  Most mass-market porn is wholesome, not abusive!"  This only serves to further enforce the sex-negative overall social norm that kinky sex is defacto unethical and nonconsensual sex.

Excuse me, but since when did either side research the porn in question and figure out if the examples used by anti-porn nutters were produced under conditions that were agreeable to the performers?  Whether the women in the images are doing artistic soft-focus implied nudes or having their faces rubbed into a puddle of piss on the floor, there's no way to tell by looking at an photo how the performers really felt about being a part of the production.  When you're only looking at and talking about images of a pre-negotiated scene, you're glossing over everything that actually matters.  It would be like asserting that a war movie is an illegal snuff film because you, as an audience member, are certain from the "evidence" you were given that you saw people get shot and bleed to death.  Or, that since you found Hollywood's latest romantic comedy to be light-hearted and fun, you're absolutely certain that everyone involved with its production was treated fairly and loved working on the movie.

Guess what?  I've met a lot of women who work in front of the camera doing "violent", "degrading", and "humiliating" porn, and they consistently gush about how amazing their work is and how happy they are with their jobs.  I actually think I hear more kinky porn performers express happiness about their work, and more often, than I see even other happy sex workers glow about their jobs.  Is that anecdotal evidence?  Sure, but it's a lot of anecdotes - more anecdotes than the anti-porners can trot out in the form of a few ex-performers who later decided they regret their jobs and felt abused by having worked in porn.

To channel my inner Christian Bale: hey, it's fucking distracting when people chase the red herrings of "feminist porn" and "violent porn".  Let's stop that, and focus on the comparatively boring issues of discussing labor politics within sex work.

Last weekend, a conference took place in Boston for an organization called Stop Porn Culture.  Homely academics and anti-sex worker activists gathered to express their latest justifications to one another about why they're afraid of kinky sex and jealous of women who attract the male gaze - er, I mean, why they're against pornography.

Three sex bloggers also went to the conference of (by one estimate) about 150 attendees.  Violet Blue put up a counter-Stop Porn Culture blog, Our Porn, Ourselves, to raise awareness of the fact that lots of women love porn.  (Anti-porn activists struggle to always frame their argument in terms of men versus women and porn versus women, which is an false dichotomy.  They insist that your only choices are that you support women's rights, or you support the sex industry.  They get major constipation-face if you point out the massive plot holes in this gender-segregation story, such as gay porn, dyke/queer porn, and women who are consumers/clients - let alone the issue of women sex workers themselves who are happy with their work.)  Over on Twitter, a group of people were back-and-forthing about the conference, but it was a discussion that mostly left me shocked as to how obtuse and paternalistic some "allies" can be.

At the outset of the discussion, I was reprimanded by several people and told I'm mustn't even joke about porn being evil since I'll surely get quoted out of context and harm the cause.  I wonder what it's like to feel like to be so smugly self-important that you refrain from all use of sarcasm, finely honing every tweet to make sure that no one could ever misquote you or take offense at what you typed, because surely, your 140 character tweets hold within them the future of discourse on sexuality?  I'm always ruining things for the proper upstanding folks - this time, I was guilty of debasing Twitter to a mere vehicle of amusement and brief exchanges, rather than the erudite academic journal for which everyone else uses it.

The core concern from most sex blogger types commenting on the topic, though, is that apparently, "we" need to respect anti-sex worker activists, "be kind" to them, and seek to engage them politely and find common ground - not be angry or sarcastic like me.  Easy for you to say, folks - they aren't trying to put you in prison or take your business away from you.  How big of you to be cordial to those who are not seeking to make your life more dangerous or difficult.  It's no real skin off your enlightened backs to tut-tut philosophically at people about how they should react to their oppression when you're not the one being oppressed.  It's armchair politics at its most offensive.

This isn't just an annoyance of mine with sexuality issues, it's a problem amongst liberals/lefties and how they discuss all sorts of political issues.  I think the underlying problem is that these sorts of people just can't stand the jarring, ego-deflating idea that their opinion as an Very Concerned Outsider isn't as important or valid as the opinion of an insider.  It isn't.  (As a white chick, I would never harangue a person of color about why my opinion of how to handle racism is better than theirs.)

I absolutely do not aim to build bridges with extremists who hate sex workers and want us penniless and in prison, any more than I aim to do so with people who commit anti-queer hate crimes.  I wouldn't really even want to debate them directly, unless I felt the particular forum was large and neutral enough.  People who have devoted their lives to taking away freedoms from other people are not seeking compromises and rational conversation - they are devout ideologues, not misguided random citizens that just need the real facts.

Ours is an info war of changing attitudes, and then laws, to grant us rights, respect, and dignity.  I'm not going to use my energy trying to cozy up with the group of people who are the least likely to ever change their outlook on the issue.  It's simple strategic thinking - when you waste your limited resources fighting impossible battles, you're neglecting a lot of perfectly winnable battles.  For example, if your goal is to get people to become atheists, you don't have to be terribly bright to realize that an effective way of doing so is not by flying to Saudi Arabia and pestering fanatics who have made a pilgrimage to Mecca.  It's not engaging in a "public debate" that could convince a larger audience of your logically-superior argument, it's ramming your head into a wall in a place where the dialog is controlled and utterly dominated by the most hardcore of your opposition.  (I do, however, fully support spying on your enemies in their native environments so you can understand their agenda better.)

One of the women urging "us" to respect people who put sex workers at risk complained that I was "devaluing other opinions".  Twitter being so succinct, I'm not sure if she meant that I shouldn't devalue the opinions of anti-sex worker activists, or that I shouldn't devalue her opinion that we need to work with them and engage them at their own conference.  As I thought about how to parse it, though, I realized it didn't matter.  Why, yes, actually - I do devalue the opinions of people who aren't sex workers that feed a need to tell me what to do.  Whether you're an anti-porn feminist or a pro-porn feminist.

Oppressing sex workers isn't an opinion.  It's an action.  I could care less if these nutters sat in their cat-filled spinster apartments and didn't like porn - that's an opinion.  But they're not content to just not watch porn themselves, they try to force their world view on the rest of us.  Anti-porn and anti-sex worker activists are political organizations that take actions by lobbying governments to restrict sex workers' access to safe working conditions and to imprison them for being indecent and sinful.  Since we're getting technical here, I do "respect their right to have an opinion", but these people stopped having merely "an opinion" a long time ago.  It makes me think of those who were defending the Mormon church for "just having an opinion about gays" in 2008 when they illegally financed the massive propaganda campaign that took civil rights away from queer couples in California.

Being more "kind" or "respectful" towards people who've built profitable careers creating panic, purposefully lying to the public, pressuring governments to pass bad laws, and bashing sex workers isn't going to make them switch teams.  These are not people who can be engaged with in a reasonable debate using facts, calm voices, and warm handshakes.  Being a smart activist means knowing the difference between those who are distinctly and unabashedly your enemy, and those who are on the fence and could benefit from hearing from you.  Being a smart sex worker ally, I would further contend, includes not spending your time patronizing me about why I ought to respect people who seek to drive me out of business and into jail.

(PS: After I wrote this post, I did more catching up on blogs and found that Audacia Ray had already written something on the chatter and counter-organizing around the Stop Porn Culture conference. Here's her post that also discusses the pointlessness of debating anti-porn radicals.)

Last week, I asked the universe for book suggestions as I sought out secular feminist critique/anti-feminist writings.  Since then, I've spent too many hours poking around on Amazon, searching for keywords, and clicking over to more and more recommended products.  I've added some new books to my wishlist that I hadn't heard of before, as well as some classics that we're all supposed to read.

The Smart People Books I haven't read could fill a swimming pool, frankly, but I don't lose any sleep over it.  I actually like that my opinions and analyses are largely from my own little head, and not ideas I simply lifted from the reading list of a Women's Studies 101 course.  I'm not saying it's a bad thing to read up landmark works on any topic - I should do more of it myself - but I think we've all been in debates with people where it's obvious they don't have an original idea of their own and are only capable of quoting/paraphrasing what someone famous has said on the subject.

In my effort to expand my fancy book-learnin' horizons, I've been looking at the popular feminist classics I have not read.  I think that I'll enjoy a few of them, while others will probably feel like I'm being waterboarded with stupidity.  As I went searching for these various texts, bracing myself for solid servings of man-hating and conservative views of sexuality, one made me stop in my tracks.  I realized that maybe I'm wrong about feminist theory.

Immediately upon finding it, Susan Faludi's most renowned work, Backlash, seems pretty fucking rad:

(If I win the lottery, I will devote my life to making low-budget action flicks starring scantily-clad gun-toting hot chicks, with titles such as The Second Sex, Female Chauvinist Pigs, and The Beauty Myth.  You know you already want to watch these movies.)

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