"...SCTNow, along with similar anti-trafficking concerns, uses a simplistic language of good and evil in its discussions of trafficking.  In this way, its selling of the anti-trafficking movement closely mirrors the selling of the 'War on Terror' in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.  Instead of untangling the resentment against American imperialism built up globally through centuries of exploitation, many Americans rushed to accept the nonsensical explanation, put forth by politicans and pundits, that terrorists 'hate us because they hate freedom.'  We wanted enemies that we could name and locate so that we might destroy them, not lessons in humility and self-reflection.  Likewise, today’s mainstream anti-trafficking movement appeals to middle-class Americans with the idea that trafficking happens because there are bad people out there just waiting to take your kids away from schools and malls.  Thus, its prevention efforts focus less on the systemic realities of poverty, racism, domestic abuse, and the dire circumstances surrounding runaway and thrownaway youth, and more on installing high-tech security cameras at schools and stationing more security guards at malls.  And it measures the success of its activities by the number of criminal convictions it achieves, rather than by the long-term health and well-being of the women and children who are most at risk."

-- Emi Koyama, in Trade Secrets on bitchmagazine.org

Firstly, I apologize for the lack of uppity pro-ho materials on my blog lately.  I haven't been as motivated to explain the same things over and over, as I have been defending porn and sex work for almost a decade now.  (Fuck, I am so old now.)  The thing is, there's no such thing as a new argument against sex work, although there are more and more studies suggesting things like the benefits of porn consumption, or that "secondary effects" of adult businesses are a myth, or that it's just not true that millions of underage sex workers are trafficked little girls being exploited and controlled by pimps.  It's like debating the Bible - there will never be any new arguments in favor of creationism, but there's always more evidence in favor of evolution - once you know how to rebut all their arguments, all you can do is repeat yourself, which can get boring.

Now, moving onto my annoyance of the season: the left's current love affair with the utopian notion of "free" college for everyone.  Perhaps the most commonly articulated concrete demand from Occupy protests has been for "free" college for everyone.  (The most common vague demand is "end corruption" but since that's an abstract concept with no definition or proposed solution, I can't really be expected to discuss it seriously.)

How on earth could anyone be against "free" college?  If I'm against "free" college for everyone, it must mean I hate learning and knowledge and poor people, right?  Lefty people recoil in horror like I'm some kind of hard-right Tea Partier, but above fiscal conservatism, my beliefs about education are actually due to my deep and flagrant disregard for the presumed authority and superiority of academia.

I am against "free" college because most people don't need college

While everyone would prefer to have a high-paying job and be a millionaire astronaut rock star brain surgeon, there will always be a huge demand for less-skilled labor, even as we lose some of those jobs to overseas factories and technology.  According to the list of the largest employment sectors from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, only one in the top ten (nursing) requires college education.  The others - retail sales, cashiers, office clerks, food service, waiting tables, customer service, janitors, laborers, and secretaries aren't exactly careers that require a lot of advanced training.  Saying that everyone should have a degree so everyone can have a high paying job is like saying everyone should be rich - it sounds fun, but in reality, it's an untenable concept.  Not everyone can have a job that pays $50+ an hour, and even if we did pay that to janitors and sales clerks, the market would adjust and make everything that much more expensive, negating the value of that higher pay.  Everyone likes to believe that they are special and gifted and brilliant and deserve college, but in actuality, most people are average (that's why it's called "average"), plenty of people are below-average, and all those people still need jobs.

And after all, if everyone has a degree, no one has a degree.

I am against "free" college because college degrees has been devalued by the very people who insist on the importance of "free" college

Thanks to the expansion of liberal arts education and the efforts of largely left-leaning academia, degrees don't mean much now.  College degrees in my dad's era meant you must have some serious training in objectively useful stuff like science, engineering, medicine, or business, but now, anyone with a student loan or trust fund can fritter away their time earning a degree in knitting or feminism or contemplating what it means to exist.  The British have an awesome phrase for this: a "Mickey Mouse degree," meaning a degree in some silly subject that has no use in the real world.

The other day, I was curious what it takes to get a degree in women's studies or feminism, since such people largely seem to be nitwits with no comprehension of things like statistics or biology.  Look at this list of fluff required for bachelor's degree program at the University of Washington.  Anyone who has at least a C-average can be a women's studies graduate, no pesky math classes required beyond the single "Quantitative and Symbolic Reasoning" class required of all UW graduates, in which they only need to earn a grade of .7, which is a D-.  And that's not even a math requirement - it can be met by taking astronomy.  So remember, when you see someone with a feminism/gender studies degree from UW (and presumably other colleges), you're looking at someone whose most strenuous degree requirement was getting a D- in a freshman-level science class.  And then they wonder why they can't find high-paying jobs.  (It must be The Patriarchy purposefully oppressing them, right?)

I am against "free" college because I don't support the idea that college is the only or best way to learn about every topic

I find it strange that the left, which in the past has embraced "unschooling," free schools, and learning skills on a peer-to-peer basis, in recent years has decided the only and best way to learn about anything is at college.  By rallying for "free" college, the left's argument hinges on the idea that college is the only road to success and knowledge, which is just plain false.  Most of my friends are not college graduates, and that includes the number of people I know in the non-ho world who make over $100k a year.  The thing I've seen, across almost every single field, is that you don't need a degree if you're a smart and reasonably tenacious person.  To me, the only reason to pay for an official education is if you want to go into a field which requires a degree, like medicine or engineering.

I am someone who has managed to teach myself - a school dropout - how to do everything I need to do to run a small business.  (And yes, there's a lot more to what I do than just taking off my clothes.)  I don't think the ability to learn things on your own is so difficult that plenty of other people couldn't tap into if they tried.  I know so many other self-starters who have built successful careers and small businesses on their own, without needing degrees, as well as many who regret wasting money on college because they think their degree was largely useless.  I'm a believer in skill-sharing and learning directly from each other in a cooperative and hands-on environment, which I consider a much more "radical" perspective than the current left's mindless brainboner for all things academia.  (In this vein, I am happy to back Kio Stark's new book on Kickstarter, Don't Go Back to School: A handbook for learning anything.  A Yale dropout and teacher at NYU, go check out what Kio has to say in case you're wary of my "bias" as a non-college person.  I don't know her personally, but her partner and geek entrepreneur Bre Petis is awesome, so I'm guessing Kio's awesome, too.)

College seems like "special ed" for people who lack the initiative and follow-through to learn how to do things in the real world.  For people not getting medical/science/useful degrees, I can't fathom why they will gladly spend tens of thousands of dollars to read books in groups when they could read those same books at home for free.  It would be a pain in the ass to build a home chemistry lab with a ventilated fume hood and safe disposal for hazardous waste, so I understand taking chemistry lab at college, but fucking literature?  Art?  Philosophy?  Gender theory?  The pro-college people are such babies that they can't figure out how to read a book without it being spoonfed to them on a schedule and being explicitly told which parts of the text were the important bits.  And on top of that, they're supposed to be intellectually superior to me, the drop-out?  I've easily read and written more about feminism, human sexuality, sexual politics, and gender than your average women's studies graduate, but I ultimately win because I didn't flush $50,000+ down the toilet to do so.  (In fact, I've come out financially ahead.)  I guess that's kind of my ultimate fuck-you to the "educated" feminists.

I am against "free" college because it isn't actually free

What people on the left have a very hard time understanding is that "free stuff from the government" isn't actually free or from the government, it just means the cost is diffused over time and to all taxpayers.  "Free" simply means that your neighbors are footing your bills.

I am against "free" college because it's not my responsibility to fund other people's hobbies

On Bill Maher's show a couple of weeks ago, he noted that in 2009, about 37,000 people graduated college in computer science and engineering, and about 89,000 in visual and performing arts.  To use his perfect phrase: "A lot of people are going to college and doing bullshit."  A blog post I read about one man's genuine quest to understand Occupy Wallstreet noted that he couldn't find a single person in Zuccotti park who had a science degree, but found tons of unemployed actors and artists.  Americans going to college these days seem to do so largely to study things of personal interest to them, regardless of whether that degree will help them find gainful employment, which, phrased another way, is called going to college to learn amusing new hobbies.

I love books, I love crafts, I love non-pretentious art, I love discussions about sexuality and gender, I genuinely enjoy all sorts of the stuff liberal arts colleges teach, but I don't believe that I should be forced by the state to pay for other people to read books and navel-gaze and contemplate the "true" meaning of feminism.  When you argue that something should be taxpayer-funded, your argument is that your beliefs should be forced onto other people through the government and under threat of imprisonment and fines if people do not comply.  That's a pretty strong position to take, and while you can say that of all taxes, I'm more in favor of forcing everyone to pay for the maintenance of roads than I am of forcing people to pay for someone to take up fun new craft projects and read classic novels.

Unlike many others who are interested in women's studies and art and philosophy, I have the ability to separate my personal interests and hobbies from things which I believe the government should force others to fund.

I am against "free" college because it will probably cost more

I'm not an economist, so I don't know how to run the numbers on this, but I can only imagine that taxpayer-funded college would cost more.  If tuition is $10,000 a year, how much more is it going to cost on top of that in additional taxation infrastructure and enforcement and school welfare disbursements?  It seems like creating an HMO for schools, which just adds a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic costs to the service of education.  (It would create jobs, on the sole plus side, but if we're going to give people jobs just for the sake of giving jobs, I'd rather we spend that money to employ people to update and modernize the country's crumbling infrastructure.)  So, ultimately, when you're calling for "free" school, you're calling for school to cost more.  If the goal is that everyone goes to college, then not only is everyone still going to be paying for college through higher taxes over the course of their lifetime, but they're wasting money by paying for more red tape around that college degree.

The solution to our current bullshit- and fluff-filled world of expensive college degrees is not to have everyone get an expensive degree in bullshit and fluff, but to point out that the emperor has no clothes in the first place.

Let's move on, let's take the initiative to teach and learn from each other, and let's stop embracing the idea that college has a monopoly on learning.  College is indeed necessary for some people, and offers skills that would be difficult to learn on your own (like my chemistry lab example), but it's not the be-all end-all of success or knowledge.  And stop demanding that your neighbors foot the bill for your hobbies, unless you want me to come back at you and force you to pay for me to take up new hobbies of my own.

 

My debates with the pro-"free" college crowd generally go like this: They insist that they need a degree in order to get the high-paying job they believe they deserve; I tell them if so, they should stop wasting their money on their non-useful art/philosophy degrees and get a degree that will actually be a good financial investment; they tell me that they don't care about the money, and they are enlightened and believe in learning for learning's sake; then I ask them why they needed to get an official degree to prove that they believe in learning purely for learning's sake, and why do they say they don't care about money when a minute ago they said that they want a higher paying job; at which point their logic folds in on itself and they stop replying.

Update, argument two: The art college fetishists insist that everyone is entitled to go to college and that they believe oh-so-passionately that useless degrees are a human right.  Then I ask them why they don't channel that passion into spending their own money on footing the bill for others' liberal arts college tuition, and they balk and come up with an excuse as to why they shouldn't have to fund their beliefs, but that I should be forced by the government to fund their beliefs.  Seriously, kids, this is why we have these things called charities.  Anyone can spend their own money supporting the "worthy cause" of their choice, but you do not have a right to force all Americans to financially back your pet issue.

 

I've turned off comments on this post because I'm tired of having to read pointless bullshit from pretentious morons.

The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order
by Rene Denfeld
Copyright 1995

★★★★

I loved this book, and I don't know how I didn't discover it until recently, because it's very me in many ways.  It has so many of the issues that I would cover if I were to write an entire book about why feminism is stupid and counter-productive, to the degree I'm actually relieved someone else has already done it so well.

Having been published 16 years ago, Rene Denfeld's references to leading feminists and prominent areas of feminist concern are, as would be expected, a bit dated.  (It is pre-internet, pre- sex-positive, and at the end, briefly notes a newfangled area of feminism showing hope in its youthfulness: riot grrrl.)  For example, there's an entire chapter mostly about the growing irrelevance of NOW, but in 2011, I honestly can't think of the last time anyone mentioned NOW, as it has become fully irrelevant.  Some stale issues aside, like NOW and lesbian separatism, the overall tone of the book, criticism of core portions of feminist theory, and the good framing device of comparisons to the morality of the Victorian era are all still valid.  (Even more so now in some matters, with feminist books like "A Return to Modesty," as well as a general increase in hysteria about "the pornification of our culture.")

Denfeld decries victim feminism, man-hating behaviors such as painting all men as potential rapists and dangers, the expansion of definitions of rape and sexual assault to include cat-calling and sexual comments, the obsession with new age spiritualism, that omnipresent mysterious force called "the patriarchy," and even some older embarrassing dirty laundry like feminist opposition to abortion and birth control (because they turn women into consequence-free sex holes for men).  Overall, I love the book's relentless questioning of feminist ideas (whether it be banning porn or adopting goddess religious) with, "...but what good will that do for the majority of women, especially poor women?"

While most of the book has nothing to do with sex work issues, the section on the feminist campaign against porn was solid, doing well to exemplify the vast schism between feminist concerns and the issues that impact average women.  When discussing porn, the book doesn't quote sex workers or consider our perspectives/rights at all.  The anti-anti-porn arguments in the book are about censorship and time-wasting moral crusades.

By foregoing political and economic activism, current feminists have created a campaign that smacks of classism.  Many of the feminist activists working against porn are middle-income and well-educated women.  The subjects of their attacks (porn actresses and nude models) are predominantly lower-income and less-educated people - and usually not boasting choice jobs at magazines or universities.  It must be recognized that many women freely choose to enter the porn field.  And some of their choices are no doubt influenced by the fact that it pays more than flipping hamburgers.

But the antiporn activists don't seem interested in helping lower-class women - try telling an impoverished mother on welfare that outlawing Playboy is the answer to her troubles.  And try telling a porn actress that it's better to starve on minimum wage than it is to pose for pictures that middle-class women find immoral.  Lost in the rarefied world of academia and backed with cushy jobs, these feminists forget that women can't feed their children on censorship.

[...]

Just as in Victorian times (when respectable ladies condemned unrespectable lower-class strumpets), a select group of middle-class women have bestowed upon themselves the title of saviors of female virtue.  And just as Victorian ladies blamed prostitutes for their husbands' faithlessness, today's feminists implicitly blame women in pornography for the most reprehensible crime: rape.

Another thing I love is the chapter on feminism's promotion of new age religions, although this has died down a bit since the book was published in the 90s.  As someone who angrily bit my tongue as a pagan religious ritual opened last year's Desiree Alliance sex worker conference, I appreciate those who share such annoyances.  Denfeld's book rightfully hammers home that there is no historical evidence to suggest that a magical war and weapon-free matriarchy ever existed, though new agers are always quick to rebut that inconvenient truth with conspiracy theories about how The Patriarchy has suppressed the evidence.

A snippet:

The religion is based on theory that reeks of old fashioned sexist stereotypes.  Women, again, are held to be the gentler, nurturing, compassionate, and clearly unassertive sex.

This vision of women as spiritually superior - and spiritually pure - has led to devastating inertia.  Political and economic activism is suddenly portrayed as quite unnecessary, even distasteful.  Instead, goddess aherents are convinced that witchcraft rituals of chanting, burning sage, sending spells, and channeling Aphrodite with effectively advance women's rights.

And so feminism today has taken a distressing step away off the path to equality onto a detour down the yellow brick road.  Feminist leaders are now telling women to perform the modern equivalent of the Sioux Indian Ghost Dance, to spend our energies frantically calling upon a mystical golden age in an effort to create a dreamlike future - because such rituals are better suited to our superior nature than fighting directly with men for our rights.  This ideal of feminine spiritual purity was used effectively against women in the Victorian era; they were told that, for the more spiritual sex, prayer was the only appropriate means of improving the world.  Then, as now, it's striking that the more ineffective an action, the more it's said to reflect "female" values.

Meanwhile, millions of women - young and old - have to cope with unequal pay, lack of affordable child care, nonexistent job opportunities, and raising families without health insurance.  Countless more face unavailable birth control and abortion, sexual harassment in the workplace, or no workplace at all.  And many face the trauma of rape and domestic violence under a judicial system that too often slaps offenders lightly on the wrist.  Goddess worship does absolutely nothing for these women.

If this sounds like embellishment to you, perhaps you're not old enough to remember the massive popularity of one particular nutter who goes by Starhawk.  She was devoted to distracting the west coast left during the 1990s and early 2000s, admonishing activists to focus on spell-casting and sending out magic spirit vibes rather than engage in protests or directly confronting businesses/governments.  Thankfully, Starhawk gets thoroughly ridiculed in the book, including a "blockade" of hers where a bunch of witches shined flashlights in the direction of a nuclear power plant in an attempt to shut it down.  When the power plant later had a temporary technical issue causing some downtime, Starhawk took credit.  (You can't make up stuff this funny!)

In the chapter rebutting the notion of a patriarchy that's somehow a sentient force and conspiracy to oppress women through the evils of science and rational thinking, Denfeld gets a standing ovation from me yet again.

Patriarchal theory appeals to many feminists because it takes the onus off women when it comes to problems such as racism, sexism, and violence - although female Ku Klux Klan members to abusive mothers, women have done their share to add to these ills.  It is also appealing because it acts as a rallying cry, allowing feminists to condemn a common enemy  while ignoring class and cultural differences among women.  By asserting that all women are oppressed under the patriarchy, feminists often implicitly dismiss the experiences of minority, poor, and working class women: A single mother on welfare and Gloria Steinem are portrayed as having more in common than not.

What makes this ironic is that oppression is defined solely from the viewpoint of current feminist leaders, who tend to be well-educated, affluent white women enjoying careers as authors, speakers, and tenured professors.  For instance, in The Beauty Myth, a 1991 book detailing how there is a "backlash" against women via beauty standards, Yale graduate Naomi Wolf likens the beauty methods of upper-middle-class women to the medieval torture instrument known as the iron maiden, a spike-lined body-shaped casket in which victims suffered slow, agonizing deaths.  When women who exemplify the American dream and the fruits of feminism - educated in the finest universities, getting paid for the careers of their choice, well-respected, and enjoying all the freedoms and comforts life has to offer - write books comparing their lives with medieval torture, it's not surprising that many lower-income women don't find much in common with the movement.

In the nineteenth century, as feminist concern moved on from fighting for the right to vote to fighting to repress sexual materials and female sexuality, a familiar issues played out in the wake of a new law passed to prevent - you guessed it - child sex trafficking.

Rather than used to halt child prostitution, this legislation was mostly enforced against poor adult women.  It dramatically changed the structure of prostitution, with devastating effects for the women involved.  Full-time prostitution up to that time was largely a brothel industry maintained by women.  While these brothels varied from squalid shacks to fancy houses, they at least offered prostitutes a degree of safety and economic autonomy: Many women were assured food and a roof over their heads as well as protection from the authorities.  But under this feminist-driven law, the brothels were closed, forcing prostitutes to work on the streets, where they had to rely on male pimps for protection... Far from eradicating prostitution, these feminists only drove them underground -- and once out of sight, the prostitutes suffered more.

Where the Denfeld and I sharply diverge, however, is that at the end of the day, her book is about inspiring young women to "reclaim" feminism and make it a part of their identities, and insisting that anyone who supports birth control or equal pay is a feminist, whether they like it or not.  Despite being written to get more people to call themselves feminists (though it's never explained why on earth that matters), I still consider this a great read.  I took a bunch of notes, and will be reading some of the source material and using it in places in my own book, if and when that ever comes to fruition.

Buy The New Victorians through this Amazon link and a portion of the sales price will go to SWAAY.

 

"I'm against sex work, but I'm not against sex workers."

It's the get-out-of-jail-free-card of many feminists, religious campaigners, and other protectionists.  They support us!  They acknowledge our choices!  They see us as real people!  And they can't wait to show their loving solidarity with us by putting us in jail, taking away our income, and making our jobs as dangerous as possible.

It's such an astoundingly hypocritical argument, it leaves me stunned every time I see it.  That's why I refuse to buy into their de-personalization propaganda that insists on a vast separation between destroying the porn industry and impacting the people who work in porn, or pushing the police to conduct raids on places of prostitution and affecting the lives of people engaged in prostitution. They see nothing odd about trying to have it both ways: being the heroic would-be saviors of the fallen with one hand, and with the other, the cause of the fallen's increasing unhappiness.  They're the abusive boyfriend who brings you flowers after giving you a black eye.

While I'll use terms like "anti-porn activist" when I want to be specific, by and large, I use the phrase "anti-sex worker activism" to describe the religious/political movement to attack sex workers by calling for further criminalization of their lives.  I'd like to see more people adopt this language, because it's important to not play into the anti's strategic disinformation campaign that swears it's possible to take away sex worker's livelihoods, and even imprison them, without affecting them as people.  We all know this is a lie, so let's stop letting their language frame the debate.

There's no other social movement I can think of, other than overtly religious conversion campaigns, where activists insist on "loving the sinner."  Anti-fur protesters don't dump red paint on storefronts while holding banners that say "We love furriers and mink farmers!  We're here to help them find different careers!"  Women's shelters don't have mission statements that say, "We're here to support men that batter and rape their wives.  Our mission is to help those men by providing a place for their partners to hide from them, and legal resources for those women to file charges against them to put them in prison for a long time."  It sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?

Don't let anti-sex worker activists keep playing this intellectually dishonest game.  Their public personas rely on being seen as saviors of sex workers who are here to fight for the humans trapped in the sex industry, but it needs to be confronted that they are working against the expressed wishes of sex workers, they are negatively impacting our lives, and that there's no such thing as "supporting" sex workers by making our lives difficult and dangerous.  Their language seeks to discuss sex work as concepts and theories, we need to use language that shows how deeply personal and non-abstract sex work is to sex workers.

(A sampling of images of covered women in the midst of Egypt's revolution during the last week.  More photos of women in this gallery and this one and here, too - not all of whom are Muslims or wearing headscarfs, niqabs, or chadors.  There's also an album for Facebook users, requires login.)

Before reading my post, you should know a bit about the situation on Egypt.  If you have not been closely following international news, I made a comic/infographic explaining the January 25h revolution through Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, so at the very least, go read that for the basic context.  If you want more information, here are three short videos that I liked, with totally different tones - the first has upbeat scenes from Egypt and Tunisia (which ousted their dictator recently), the second is a heartwarming look at Egyptians taking care of each other and the city of Cairo, and the third is a serious vlog made by a brave young woman who helped start this revolution.  For stuff specifically about women taking part in the Egyptian revolution, see pieces from Slate, Matt Cornell, Newsweek, Global Voices, Democracy Now, and The New York Times.  Lastly, you can watch ongoing events on Al Jazeera English's web stream - this is still unfolding!

I made my most controversial and widely re-posted tweet on Twitter a week ago.  Here's a sentence that proved even more polarizing than I expected:

I hope that western feminists who infantilize Muslim women see photos of Egyptian women in burqas rioting against a dictatorship.

Aside from some angry stupids, my statement received good responses from both cool Western folks and residents of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.  (As an aside, for those calling me out for using the term "burqa" when the photos from Egypt show women wearing scarves and chador/niqabs/hijabs: yes, I knew that.  Accessible language is important to me, and everyone American has an idea of what "burqa" means.  And, Twitter only allows for so many characters.)

For most people, the idea of a sex worker supporting covered Muslim women sounds absurd.  What could we possibly have in common?

I do feel a sense of solidarity with Muslim women who are belittled for choosing to wear an abaya, chador, niqab, burqa, or what-have-you.  As a sex worker and a devout atheist, I am hardly what you could consider an apologist for the injustices women suffer in the MENA region and how Islam views women/sexuality in general.  But, that doesn't mean Muslim women are feeble-minded weaklings.  I know what it feels like to have other women decide that you're too stupid to be allowed to make your own decisions.  Western feminists, by and large, claim that I have been brainwashed by the patriarchy, and must be "saved" from my decision to work in porn.  Likewise, the same people tend to impose their judgments on Muslim women, arguing that they need to be "saved" from the religious brainwashing forcing them to adhere to Islam.

It's easy to feel paternalistic towards Muslim women - the more covered, the more pitied - and they are definitely a caricature in the West for what "oppressed" and "sexism" looks like - just like sex workers.  The same people who say it's hypocritical for covered Muslim women to demand freedom in Egypt will also scoff at sex workers demanding respect in the states.

One of the things I often remind people is to remain conscious of is whether their desire to "help" others is rooted more in solidarity, or in paternalism.  It's a troubling dynamic to me, and not only because I'm in a group of people greatly affected by it.  It's a very slippery slope to start deciding that other adults are incapable of deciding what they want to do with their lives.  Would you have any interest in building bridges with someone who condescendingly believes you can't be trusted to decide what to do with your life and what clothing (not lack thereof) to wear?

When dealing with social issues like Egypt's revolution, you have to look at things first not through the lens of feminist gender analysis, you have to get basic and consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  (For those unfamiliar, it's a pyramid setting up human needs, starting from food/water/shelter, and being topped out with self-actualization.)  Think of it also as a "social change hierarchy of needs": you can't lecture people about how they should focus on pondering whether wearing head coverings are sexist, when paying for food is a daily struggle for them.  This might come as a surprise to some, but when people don't have money for bare necessities, live in daily fear of the police, and have no hope for their futures, they're not laying in wait for middle and upper-class liberals in America try and dictate a political agenda to them.  I would love to see full gender equality in the MENA region, but I'm sick of seeing people doing the "let them eat cake" thing in regards to Egypt.

The situation in Egypt is exciting to me not only because the revolutionary spirit started in Tunisia is spreading, but because so many of the protesters seem to be young and less conservative than previous generations.  This gives me hope that this is a win for women - both in the long and short term.  American conservatives are busy fear-mongering about radical Islam, arguing hyperbolic nonsense that if Egypt's president leaves, sharia law will be instituted and women will be beheaded in the streets of Cairo.  After seeing so many women boldly rising up, screaming at male police, demanding the present leave, organizing a revolution, and getting involved in changing their country at the grassroots level, I don't think the women of Egypt would stand for it.  We Enlightened Western Liberals don't need to save them.  They're saving themselves.

(I don't want the comments on this post to turn into a debate abut Islam or religion in general, so save it for one of my posts that specifically address religion and sexuality, okay?  PS: Tracy Quan has also written about covered Muslim women.  See her 2006 piece here.)

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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