This post is a part of the Scarleteen Sex Ed Blog Carnival.  Find links to posts from other participants here.  This is veering off the course in which other participants have been headed, since I don't want to write about why sexual education is a good thing, or hit with you my own sales pitch for why Scarleteen and why you should donate, so I've written about a sexual health issue near and dear to me.

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If you have a uterus and fallopian tubes, you've been hearing the same thing since you were in junior high (or earlier).  When it comes to birth control, your options are condoms, the pill, or maybe, if you're feeling unconventional, the shot or the IUD.  But what about those of us who don't want to take hormones or have an IUD painfully jammed up our cervixes?  I got myself fixed four years ago - via tubal ligation - and I couldn't be happier with it.

First, a note on gender and language: for the sake of brevity and smoother writing, I'm going to refer to those who have a uterus and fallopian tubes as "women", but this doesn't mean that I don't consider trans women to be women, nor do I mean to exclude those who do not identify as women, but who may want a tubal ligation.  Birth control isn't only an issue for straight people.  Aside from all the bisexuals, consider, for example, a gay-identified, uterus-having FTM trans guy who fucks men, or a cisgender woman who has an non-op/pre-op MTF trans woman as her partner.  It's just too hard to write inclusively of every possibility and still have concise, readable sentences.

I have never wanted children.  I do not like children.  Where most women light up with delirious joy when they see babies and little kids, I'm just hoping the child doesn't vomit or blow its nose on me.  I choose to focus my maternal energies on my cat-baby and on my various projects.

Our culture demonizes childfree women as profoundly selfish, cold, and unfeminine.  Sterilization for women seems to be more controversial and patently offensive than abortion - I'm not just saying "not right now" to the prospect being a mommy, I'm saying, "absolutely fucking never."  I'd guess there are more places in America that will perform abortions than will sterilize childfree women.

Try on these common responses for starters:

"Aww, you'll change your mind when you hit 30!  Wait until that biological clock of yours starts a-ticking!"

"Sure, you think don't like kids now, but it's totally different when they're your own!"

"Your life as a woman just won't be complete without experiencing pregnancy and birth!"

"Smart and pretty people need to out-breed those ignorant hicks!"

And so on.  All of the sentiments assume, whether overtly or just subtly, that the only reason for me (and by extension, other women) to exist is to pop out babies, that it's where I'll find my "real" happiness in life, and that I'm controlled by a biological clock, incapable of making rational decisions about my fertility.

I've dated a couple of guys who wanted vasectomies.  I went to their mandatory counseling sessions with both of them.  It was easy as pie!  No condescending insults, no pervasive culture of, "Come on, now, all men want to have babies!  You'll probably change your mind anyway, you silly creature!"  They were dudes, and it's natural for dudes to not want to have kids.  No one shames or questions the sanity of men who get sterilized.

I got to watch one of my boys have his vasectomy performed, which was awesome, and took less time than getting a pedicure.  Had I been supplied with a syringe of lidocaine and an autoclave, I could have performed his vasectomy on my kitchen counter using cuticle scissors, a crochet hook, and a soldering iron.  He didn't even need stitches afterwards, and while he spent a few days taking it easy, he didn't need much pain medication at all.  Vasectomy was easy to obtain for him, cheap, and didn't have many risks or a long recovery time.

When I was 22, I decided it was time to get serious about finding a doctor to sterilize me.  If you're looking to get a tubal ligation, I highly recommend doing what I did: get a list of doctors from Planned Parenthood that they refer women to for tubal ligations.  Here in Seattle, I think it was over a dozen doctors.  I called one.  I told the receptionist that I'd like to make an appointment to talk about getting a tubal ligation, but that I wanted to make sure before I even bothered to come in that the doctor didn't have a problem sterilizing young childfree women.  The receptionist put me on hold, then told me it shouldn't be an issue.  My consultation went much better than I expected.  I came in there armed to the teeth to argue about my right to be sterilized, but the doctor was already on board.  He just gave me a short spiel about how tubal ligations are to be considered permanent.  To cap it off, he even ranted briefly about how rude and paternalistic it is that other doctors won't sterilize women who want it.  I was in!

My experience in finding a great doctor on the first try seems to be pretty unique, however.  Talking with other women, or looking at forums dedicated to birth control, you'll see tale after tale of women frustrated at being denied the right to control their own fertility, belittled by doctors and told that no, they actually will want to have children.  I am so glad I didn't have to go through that.

I was scheduled to have a laparoscopic tubal ligation, which means I'd just have one tiny little scar.  I decided that I didn't want a sterilization via Essure or the other new methods of inserting things into your fallopian tubes by forcing things up my cervix and (hopefully) correctly into my tubes.  Firstly, because the multiple procedures involved in these methods sounded more painful and stressful than tubal surgery, and secondly, because my doctor has been doing tubal ligations for 30 years and not once had any failures that he was aware of.  I didn't want to be awake and having someone jab away at my internal organs, I wanted to be knocked out and wake up in recovery when the jabbing was completed.

When my special day in the hospital came, it was a serious, all-day event, not like the "pedicure" my ex had gotten.  I switched into a gown, and got an IV line started to give me a saline drip and antibiotics.  It was done in a real operating suite, with my doctor, an anesthesiologist, and other helpers there to attend to me.  I would have to spend most of the day in recovery in the hospital.  (All this means that a tubal ligation costs loads more than a vasectomy.  My tubal was 10-20 times as expensive as your average vasectomy.)  The method of sterilization my doctor used was placing silicone rubber bands around my doubled-over fallopian tubes, which apparently has a shorter recovery time, and doesn't carry the risk to other internal organs that a slip during a cut-and-cauterization procedure could.  Here are my before-and-after shots, look for the white arrow pointing to the doubled-over sections of tube in the lower pictures:

There was a bit of bruising at the incision area, but after just two weeks, you had to look hard to see the small reddened scar that was barely snaking out of my belly button.  I will probably never have to worry about pregnancy again.  There is a slight risk that my body could "heal" itself, but sterilization beats out other birth control methods for efficacy.

I don't mean to sound like a hippie who's afraid of science, but I'm wary of the long-term effects of women taking birth control pills for 20+ years of their lives.  I've still used condoms for most of the sex I've had in the last 4 years, but I'm happy that my backup method is internal and intrinsic, not something external that I have to rely upon being granted access to.  No one can ever take away my right to keep being sterilized.  It's like a buy-versus-lease question, and I wanted to buy my freedom so no one would ever take it away from me.  Although I think it's highly unlikely the government would de-approve the birth control pill, IUDs, and Depo-Provera shots, I really value that I will never have to leave my fertility up to the whims of politicians and the laws of whatever country I might find myself in.  (And, you know, after the zombie apocalypse, how many years do you think the remaining stockpile of birth control pills will last?)

I frequently meet other women who either already have an active interest in getting sterilized, or dismissed the idea as just too difficult until they met me.  I wish that more people were aware of what tubal ligations involve, and that it's not actually impossible to get them, even if you're young, single, and childfree.  As more women are choosing to not have children, I wish the sterilization was as widely-promoted as other forms of birth control, rather than a method relegated to the end of the list, surrounded by extra caveats and dismissive language.  It's not for everyone (neither are IUDs, the shot, the patch, or the pill), but if you know that having biological children is not for you, don't be afraid to get out there and demand it.  You might get turned down by a doctor or few, but don't get discouraged.

If money is an issue for you, all states have federal funds allocated to providing birth control to those with low-income, free of charge.  In Washington state where I live, this Malthusian keep-the-poor-from-breeding-up-more-welfare-babies effort is called "Take Charge", and in Seattle, you need to earn less than (last time I checked) $1600 a month to qualify.  (The amount varies by area.)  Go to your local Planned Parenthood or other clinic, and ask about funding options if you're low-income.  Also, check with doctors about payment plans - that might be an option if you don't have insurance.

So, this is my own contribution to sex education today: telling you about my choice method of pregnancy prevention, and my hope that in time, sterilization for women will become more widely-accessible, and as stigma-free as it is for men.

A few resources:

* Planned Parenthood's info on sterilization for those with eggs and those with sperm
* The sterilizationqa LiveJournal Community  (Yeah, I know, shocker - people still use Livejournal)
* The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (I highly recommend the "Biology and Breeding" and "Science Fiction and Fantasy" sections)
* The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless (Awesome book)

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Scarleteen is an nonprofit, body-positive resource for young people who are looking for medically-accurate, non-judgmental sex ed.  Good projects like Scarleteen can't survive without funding, so consider making a donation.  I'm happy to say that my smut company is in the list of the top-tier (over $1000) donors to the site.

It seems like every couple of months, there's a new fear-mongering book being hawked by one of the professional feminists about the vileness of sexual commerce.  A core component of their actual Serious Face critique of the jizz biz is insinuating that we have the totally unique atrociousness of possessing a financial motivation with our jobs.  We in the sex industry work to earn a profit.  We make money.  We get paid to do stuff.  We sell things and services.  Gasp!

This line of attack would be hilarious, if it weren't also so disgusting to see that these types make their living off the backs of sex workers - meaning they are literally nothing more than the most disrespectful and exploitative of pimps.  They spread panic about us to get interviewed on TV.  They use naked photographs of us without permission (in flagrant violation of federal porn statues) during their paid speaking appearances.  They twist our words and purposefully misrepresent our stories in their books.  They draw salaries as the heads of nonprofits who exist to take away our rights.  They make up statistics out of thin air about how awful we are in in order to get donations for their projects.  They receive tenure at fancy universities by lying about us to impressionable students.

They have a financial motivation.  They are out to earn a profit.  They get paid with their book deals and public appearances.  And they're probably better at profiting off the exploitation of sex workers than any pimp or trafficker out there.

There's 10 seconds - a single line of dialog - from Wayne's World that always plays in my head whenever I see professional feminists soliciting for their latest cash-grab.  Now it can can be what plays in your head, too.  This clip is from the middle of a scene of Wayne and Garth ranting about the importance of not selling out, while engaging in product placement.

Last week, I had a pushy customer on cam who went from a "cute begging little boy" routine trying to sweet-talk me into fingering my ass (after I already told him that I don't do anal cam shows), to insulting me and textually yelling at me that I have to finger my ass for him.  While I don't enjoy dealing with people like that, spending time with that dumbass netted me $28 in profit.  I could have kicked him out or insulted him back, but I actually wanted to see how long he'd last so as to extract as much money from him as possible.

I've never gotten so much as 28 cents when regular people (feminists, conservatives, and other irritants) insult and degrade me.  At least when a customer is a rude and obnoxious person, they have the decency to pay me for putting up with them.

Oh, violent forced sex trafficking - how you give liberals a raging concern boner!  Since nothing excites a do-gooder quite like the chance to blare their uninformed "down with bad stuff!" opinion on a topic as exciting as forced sex trafficking, the latest Craigslist restrictions have prompted a month-long circle jerk for the self-righteous.

I haven't read all of what's been in the press in the last few weeks, but it's the same script that gets dusted off every few months when there's a "new" sex trafficking panic.  And, because anti-sex worker activists aim to turn all issues into a sex trafficking panic, those types are lined up to regurgitate their morbid sound bites about how all exchanges of sexual energy for cash are basicallythesamething as raping trafficked underage sex slaves.  (And, my side is plenty practiced with our less-heard replies, such as, "Do you have any evidence of any of your claims and statistics?", or "How is it that imprisoning/deporting abused sex workers makes their lives magically all better?", or "Have you ever actually asked these communities of people you claim to be saving what they want?")

Whether it's a conservative news source or a feminist/lefty one, the same cliches and hysteria get repeated without fact-check.  In a year when people on my end of the political spectrum are talking a whole lot about the importance of citing primary source materials in journalism, where's the outcry when the media just completely makes shit up about sex work?

I haven't really written about trafficking and "rescue", and it's not because I'm lazy or trying to avoid unpleasant subjects.  I have the sense to know that if something isn't my area of expertise, I ought to hush and listen to people who are in the know.  I know a bit on the subject, but other people are better teachers.

If you would like to educate yourself about trafficking, I have two homework assignments for you, which can be completed in a weekend.

First, read Laura Agustín's Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry.  We all have our golden books about a given topic that we recommend on a regular basis, and there's nothing that cuts through the bullshit with a sober, researched, post-colonialist mentality like Sex at the Margins.  I'll let the book's back cover summarize its contents:

This groundbreaking book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims, and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest.

Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' disempowers them.  Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radical analysis.  Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry.  Although they are treated as a marginalised group, they form part of the dynamic of the global economy.

Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire of social justice.

You can read this book over the course of one day - it's weighty subject material, but it's not a huge volume at 194 pages (plus citations/sources/index).  It's worth buying, as you'll probably want to lend it out to your friends.

Secondly, the people impacted by the rescue industry are not lawn chairs - they actually can and do speak out for themselves.  A fair bit of video material has been produced by the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (primarily about sex workers in Cambodia), and is available for free on the Sex Workers Present Blip.tv station.  Spend a day watching those videos.  Most are not specifically about trafficking, but they will give you a dose of reality with the struggles faced by aggrieved sex workers in the developing world, including protesting being "rescued" and sent to what are tacitly prisons where they may face violence and rape at the hands of those who are supposedly rehabilitating them.  Most of these videos are not light watching, but it's material worth seeing.

If anyone has links to independent accounts (not quotes from anti-sex worker/anti-trafficking groups' own donation-soliciting literature) from people "rescued" while working in the United States, please post them.  I'd appreciate hearing their experiences and learning about what happens when migrant sex workers get "saved" in my country.

Agustín's academic work gives you a good foundation of research and informed theory, and the videos in the Sex Workers Present collection give you real first hand accounts directly from sex workers from developing countries who've faced the brutal end of "rescue" and meddling from outside organizations who claim to be "helping" them.  I consider this to be the your homework if you'd like to have a decent grasp of the issue.

One of the gems I've taken from Mistress Matisse's blog over the years has been her repeated admonishment (though not said in the context of politics) to be wary of how often the word help is just a nice way of saying control.  I think there's no more applicable place than in the world of anti-sex worker activists.  Sure, the line is, "We want to help women escape the sex industry", but what's really being said (and done) is, "We want to control other people's choices about their own bodies and dictate politically correct employment options to people whose complex situations we don't care to understand."

We already have too many do-gooders who presume to know what's best for sex workers, especially poor sex workers, migrant sex workers, and those in developing countries. What sex workers need are allies capable of listening.  So, go read up on the research, and then listen to what sex workers are actually agitating for on their own behalf.  I assure you, it's not that they wish more liberals, NGOs, and celebrities would barge into their lives and dictate how they ought to live.

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.)

I guess that's what everyone wants in a book, right?

For most people, that's not hard to find.  Take any average computer programmer, carpenter, pastry chef, archeologist, or soldier, and there will be books from authors more skilled in their field, ready to offer philosophical insights and practical information.  I don't think there's anything like that out there for me, unfortunately.

What I want is thoughtful, aggressive, non-misogynistic, and secular critique of feminism.  It doesn't really seem to exist.

Today, I went browsing around on Amazon - with its wonderful recommendation engine - in search of any anti-feminist sorts of books that I'd actually want to buy and read.  What I get are piles of books written by overgrown frat boys, religious people, and hardcore conservatives who think women should have never been allowed out of the kitchen in the first place.  I'm in earnest search of The More Awesomely Eloquent Me, and all I'm getting is stuff about Jesus, abortion, the homosexual agenda, the dangers of communism, and an out-of-date collection of essays by Phyllis Schlafly.  (Whose work I suppose I should read anyway, just for a historical perspective from someone who fought second wave feminism.)

Although I didn't find anything that was exactly what I'm looking for (criticism of feminism), I'm considering these three books:

* Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young.

* Venus: The Dark Side by Roy Sheppard and Mary T Cleary.

* A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce by Alec Baldwin and Mark Tabb.

Already in my collection, but as of yet unread, are these other two that I hope will be interesting.  Both of these authors have a bunch of books out, and I bought one of each to test the waters, and the Jesus-ness of their politics:

* The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle for Women's Freedom by Phyllis Chesler.

* Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women by Christina Hoff-Sommers.

Edited to add: I also have in my existing collection The Myth of Male Powerby Warren Farrell.  I should have included this book in my original post, but my "to read" stack is embarrassingly tall, and I forgot about it until a commenter reminder me of him.  I've only read the introduction so far.  I was bracing myself, from the title, for an angry douchebag rant, but instead, I got a well-thought-out "this is what I've learned after being a professional feminist" from a former board member of the National Organization for Women.

So, what else is out there?  Where's the secular non-conservative criticism of feminism that I want to read?  I asked this on Twitter, but what I suppose I didn't make clear is that I'm not looking for feminist-identified authors criticizing other factions of feminism, or feminist-identified people who acknowledge issues they have with parts of feminism.  I am looking for something outside the echo chamber, outside of pots calling kettles black.  Things not written by feminists.  I realize that, on the left/liberal side of the political spectrum, if you fail to identify as a feminist, you're treated as though you enjoy microwaving baby kittens for amusement.  But come on, there have to be plenty of other assholes like me, right?

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