I recently finished reading an advance copy of Chester Brown’s new book Paying For It. I’m writing a review for someone who is (appropriately) hopefully going to pay me for it, so I’m not going to talk about the book specifically right at the moment. But…I was interested in talking about Tom Spurgeon’s review of the book, and some reaction to it.
Tom’s review is striking because he so strongly insists that he doesn’t want to talk about the book’s content.
I felt myself at a disadvantage throughout the entire process of reading Paying For It, Chester Brown’s long-awaited graphic novel about his becoming a John and how that part of his life developed over a lengthy period of time. I have no interest in prostitutes, less interest than that in the issue of prostitution and sex work, and can muster only the tiniest bit of prurient intrigue for watching how a cartoonist of whom I’m a fan orients himself to the aforementioned. That’s going to sound like a protestation, but I genuinely mean that I lack a fundamental interest in that specific subject matter.
Consistently enough, Tom then goes on to say that his favorite part of the book was a moment having nothing to do with prostitution.
The most fascinating sequence in Paying For It for me didn’t involve a single naked woman or the sensible peculiarities revealed by the veteran comic book maker as he unfurls the operational workings of such enterprises from the consumer’s end. What I enjoyed most was a few panels where Brown tries to orient himself to the fact he’ll soon move from the home of one-time lover and longtime friend Sook-Yin Lee. Buffeted by very understandable waves of grief, Brown gathers himself, pounces on a brief, inexplicable flash of happiness and pins it to the white board of his consciousness like an amateur entomologist. I’ve read that section four times now. It feels much more intimate than any time the cartoonist depicts himself in the sexual act, more revealing, even, than when Brown suggests we take a second look at his actions throughout this work for the implications of a surprising, final-act twist. The greatest strength of Paying For It comes in its facilitation of these tiny, off-hand moments, less its ability to bring us the world in which Brown moves than the manner in which he processes what he sees once he gets there. (m emphasis added)
In the remainder of the review, Tom continues this back and forth, expressing discomfort and indifference to Brown’s major themes while concluding that the book is still great. “Whatever the comics equivalent of saying you’d watch a certain actor read a phone book might be,” Tom says, “that’s Chester Brown.”
Over at tcj.com in comments, Jeet Heer expressed some doubts as to whether this was a useful approach to Brown’s book.
I also want to know what Tom thinks about sex work. Which is another way of saying that, like Joe Sacco’s various books on contemporary wars and Crumb’s Genesis, Brown’s book is one where the content requires the reviewer to give more than just an aesthetic judgement and also weigh in on the content and issues raised. Given the nature of the work, I think its important to be upfront about one’s response to Brown’s arguments/opinions, although of course it’s possible to like the book and think that the legal and cultural changes he’s advocating are completely out to lunch.
Tom responded sharply.
I couldn’t disagree more that any kind of response is required of anyone writing about a work, either in this case or generally, although I realize that some folks may think less of any piece that doesn’t engage a work on those levels. Those kinds of strictures don’t seem logical to me — or fruitful, even. Heck, I think you can make a stronger argument that any response to Paying For It needs to be in comics form before it needs to engage X, Y, Z issues in A, B, C ways. And as the former’s obviously silly I think the latter’s silly, too.
I’ll catch you guys up next time (first time) we meet as to my deep and personal opinions on the sex work stuff. It’s faaascinating. (No it’s not.)
And Jeet then backed and filled a bit.
Just to clarify: I thought Tom’s review was really smart and incisive. So if he doesn’t want to tackle the politics of the book head on, that’s fine. But someone (not Tom, if he doesn’t want to) should take “Paying For It” seriously not just as a comic by a major cartoonist but also a book with a radical political message — that message is worth trying to evaluate (along with, of course, the sort of formalist evaluation of the book that Tom did so well).
What’s interesting to me is that this is, I think, a debate that comes up a lot in comics criticism. That debate being…what place does content have in a discussion of a comic? Does it matter that Crumb’s Genesis (for example) has nothing particular to add to the discussion of Genesis? Do we need to think about Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s attitudes towards sex when reading Lost Girls? Is it important to think about Ditko’s objectivism when evaluating Ditko? Or are the contributions of cartoonists tied into their art — so much so that responding to what they’re saying, as what they’re saying, can be beside the point?
In that regard, I think it’s interesting that when challenged, Tom went immediately to the idea that it makes more sense for reviews to be done in comics form than for reviews to have to engage with ideas. Again, he said:
Heck, I think you can make a stronger argument that any response to Paying For It needs to be in comics form before it needs to engage X, Y, Z issues in A, B, C ways.
He then adds that either requirement (review in comics form or review responding to polemic) is silly — but he seems to believe that the first is (at least marginally) less silly than the second.
Like Tom and Jeet (in his second comment) I’m somewhat reluctant to say, “reviewers must react to a work in this way.” On the other hand…I do agree with Jeet’s first comment, that works of art, especially polemical works of art like, say, James Baldwin’s essays, really seem to be demanding an engagement with their ideas. If you refuse to grant them that engagement — if you insist, I will not talk about racism, I will only talk about Baldwin’s prose style and the moments of personal revelation of universal human insights — you are in fact missing the point in a fairly profound manner.
What’s interesting to me, too, is that I don’t think Tom does miss the point in that way. He disavows a polemical stance, but there’s ample evidence in the essay that he is not so much indifferent to Brown’s opinions as uncomfortable with them — especially when they’re expressed in the prose appendices rather than in cartoon form.
This is a far cry from what comes through in the essays: that Brown’s orientations might somehow be the basis for policy and cultural change, that all stigma is correlative, that the removal of cultural discrimination afforded paid sex is the difference between the world we live now and a world that functions a bit more like Chester Brown. When the cartoonist moves away from his own experiences and into broader proclamations about the nature of romantic love and assertions that more frequent monetary remuneration in sexual relationships will somehow ease relationships between men and women, it’s hard to engage with what he’s saying beyond being certain he means it. To put it more directly, even for someone not invested in the general subject matter, many of the broader arguments fail to convince.
That paragraph to me doesn’t sound like someone who is not invested in the subject matter. It sounds like someone who disagrees with Brown — but who values his cartooning so much that he’s ambivalent about saying so.
The thing is, to me Tom is being in many ways more generous to Brown when he agrees to think through and reject his ideas than he is when he suggests that you can put those ideas aside, and that the main thing to go to Brown for are the cartooning choices irrespective, almost, of the issues they engage.
For example, you can say Jimmy Stewart would be great if he read the phone book…and, in fact, I wouldn’t mind hearing Jimmy Stewart read the phone book as an exercise in dada. Still, the fact remains that Jimmy Stewart was at his very best when he was directed by Hitchcock and John Ford and Capra in movies that did not suck. Acknowledging that he is not so great when in movies that weren’t so great (like the mediocre The Mortal Storm) is not an insult to him. Rather, it’s a compliment to his real greatness; he’s an actor that deserves great movies — and indeed, his greatest performances are not separable from his best movies.
Similarly, I think we owe cartoonists an evaluation not just of their formal talents, or of their small choices, but of what they do with those talents, and what those small choices add up to. To withhold that is not a mark of respect for comics or for individual cartoonists. Quite the contrary.
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It’s worth noting that both Sean Collins and Chris Mautner have reviews in which they engage fairly directly with the polemical aspects of Brown’s book.
I like everything that you’re saying here, Noah. What Spurgeon seems to have done is deliver a huge (unintentional?) backhanded compliment.
I am pumped to get my hands on this book precisely because I disagree with Chester Brown’s thesis as much as I can be said to understand it (since I’ve not had an opportunity to read it). The book is one that I absolutely want to challenge and challenge myself against–because I think it’s probably ripe with ideas that I want to lock horns with.
I think that in a text that exists primarily to express a single idea or promote a cause, we cannot be said to have reviewed or critiqued it if we shy away from engaging with those ideas. The James Baldwin example in your piece. Yes. Precisey. Exactly that.
“Who watches the watchmen?” “Who reviews the reviewers?”
Hi, Noah. You’re mostly wrong, as usual. I like plenty of criticism that engages with the ideas presented. I like writing it; I like reading it. (I’m not always fond of reviews that only do that, like the “let’s you and him fight” pieces NYROB sometimes runs, because I think they can be predictable and not engaged with the text, but even the worst of those are way better pieces than anything I write.) That review wasn’t a statement of critical values, it was a review. I’ll write 200 this year.
In the discussion on TCJ from which you draw quotes, I was rejecting the rigidity of Jeet’s statement that a review has to do A, B, or C, not that engaging ideas as presented is a bad thing. I’m not a good enough writer that everything I write is a hidden pathway into my deepest thoughts. I wish I were!
I’m really not that interested in the issue of prostitution, although I know there’s little chance convincing you when you get an idea to the contrary. I have opinions on the issues presented, sure. I have opinions on everything. I have an opinion on who the best Price Is Right host was (Bill Cullen). I just don’t have strong opinions about the particulars here, or the work didn’t engage me that way, so it’s not where I went. I talked about it because I think that a lot of the reviews will engage those issues more directly, and I wanted to pipe in as someone who wasn’t engaged that way.
That I believe the appendices were mostly an unfortunate add-on maybe plays into that bit — I don’t see the supporting material and the comics as a seamless whole, and I think engaging the issues you’re more or less going after what’s in the appendices, and that didn’t interest me. I’m more interested in the things I wrote about, and on a parallel track that Chester is so deeply interested in these thigns. I recognize that there are people that are interested in these issues and that there are people that will probably write really fascinating reviews of that material. But I couldn’t feign a passion I don’t have.
I didn’t think that was a very good review, I thought it was fairly gassy and light on insight. I’m very appreciative that other people took it as a good one and that you took it seriously enough to write about it. It’s just a particularly weird one to reverse engineer a core set of critical values, and I hope you won’t mind if I don’t hold myself to them.
“I like plenty of criticism that engages with the ideas presented. I like writing it; I like reading it.”
But…I never said you didn’t! I never said that these were your core critical values! For that matter, I didn’t say you were very interested in prostitution!
Anyway, thank you for stopping by. Always nice to see you in comments!
And thanks Darryl.
Looking at the essay again, Tom…I guess I could be read as suggesting that you do actually care about prostitution.
The thing is…I guess I don’t think you’d need to care about prostitution as prostitution to be engaged polemically with Brown’s book. He has really strong opinions about love and sex and romantic relationships, topics that most people care about at least to some degree. Those broader implications were the things that you did seem to engage with and express discomfort with (or at least so it seemed to me.)
Haven’t read the book, and won’t be getting it unless my financial situation drastically improves. In any case, can’t help getting — and forming — impressions about it from the excellent descriptions in the critiques available. (Thanks for the links, Noah.)
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Darryl Ayo says:
I think that in a text that exists primarily to express a single idea or promote a cause, we cannot be said to have reviewed or critiqued it if we shy away from engaging with those ideas. The James Baldwin example in your piece. Yes. Precisey. Exactly that.
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As Tom Spurgeon notes, “When Paying For It functions as a comics-format documentary about how Brown’s way of moving through the world is improved by his employing prostitutes, it accrues effectiveness in a variety of ways.”
Is the mostly-writing appendices section — where Brown explicitly “express[es] a single idea or promote[s] a cause,” the very reason why “Paying for It” exists? To Spurgeon, this quite understandably involves Brown stepping away from his comics-creating abilities into the realm of attempted punditry:
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When the cartoonist moves away from his own experiences and into broader proclamations about the nature of romantic love and assertions that more frequent monetary remuneration in sexual relationships will somehow ease relationships between men and women, it’s hard to engage with what he’s saying beyond being certain he means it. To put it more directly, even for someone not invested in the general subject matter, many of the broader arguments fail to convince. That they represent issues that can be argued, even passionately so, doesn’t seem all that remarkable an endorsement in the Age Of The Internet.
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To make his preferences even more explicit, Spurgeon continues:
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Give me scenes like the one where Brown argues with Seth over the issues, seething and impatient with Seth’s answers and his own, desperate and human in wanting to make and win such discussions, over any number of facile dissections of each argument’s actual merits. Within the context of a personal narrative, seeing Brown dismiss the possibility of abuses as things he doesn’t himself see has a revealing, human quality; pushing past such arguments in a more standard mini-essay on the issue itself seems way more problematic.
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In the former, Brown is — as filmmakers are likewise urged to do — showing rather than telling; deploying his unique gifts, upon which Spurgeon rightly bestows insightful praise. That his critique pays not much attention to Brown the Polemicist, on display in the appendices, hardly indicates that he “cannot be said to have reviewed or critiqued” Paying For It because he gave Brown’s “ideas” short shrift; he paid attention to the part of the book which deserved it.
As he politely described it, the part which didn’t was “boilerplate political and moral theory…that more frequent monetary remuneration in sexual relationships will somehow ease relationships between men and women.”
Alas, as a thinker, Chester Brown is gloomy proof that the USA has no monopoly on reality-denying dumbassitude.
Interviewed on his running for office as a libertarian (who had no trouble taking advantage of government arts grants, the virtually free health care taken for granted by Canadians): “I was an anarchist because I think that freedom is a good thing.”
( http://drawn.ca/archive/steve-murray-and-chester-brown-comic-jam-on-libertarianism/ )
CB: “If marriage collapses, new social and legal structures will arise.”
Why then, the black ghetto should be filled with all manner of “new social and legal structures” to deal with all these fatherless kids, the plight of financially-strapped, overstressed single moms…
Some more Brown foolishness, from Sean T. Collins’ critique:
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Brown advances an admittedly quixotic vision of a world where paying for sex is an utter commonplace, a practice so pervasive that the need for professional prostitutes is lessened because you or I would have no problem exchanging money for sex with our attractive friends and acquaintances and vice versa, the same way we might go to movies together or send a friendly email. The important thing to Brown isn’t just decriminalizing the supposed offense of giving or receiving money for sex, it’s deflating the romanticized aura of the act itself…
Brown has rejiggered his life in order to avoid the “evil” of romantic love, or “possessive monogamy” as he comes to exclusively put it…[because] his unhappy experiences with romantic relationships mean that romantic relationships are a categorical evil…
[Brown, meet Dave Sim!]
[Brown quotes] someone on how “outcall” prostitutes (those who come to your apartment) are unlikely to be sex slaves since they could always go for help instead. Anyone who’s watched a single episode of Law & Order: SVU or Dateline NBC could shoot this whole element of things so full of holes you could use it as a colander…
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http://seantcollins.com/2011/04/comics-time-paying-for-it/
Chris Mautner mentions, “I almost threw [the book] across the room when Brown suggested there was no such thing as drug or alcohol addiction…” (At http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/04/robot-reviews-paying-for-it/ )
I’m not sure I agree that Brown the polemicist can be easily cordoned off in the notes, Mike. You’ll have to see what you think after you read it though!
There are actually lots of adaptive social structures in inner-city black communities, including (but not limited to) the much more active role of grandparents in raising kids, and a general reliance on extended family networks.
Not that this solves all the problems of course…but those problems include systemic discrimination and segregation which would still exist even if single-mother headed families were much less predominant.
I’m certainly not anti-marriage myself, but I don’t think it’s possible to refute Brown quite that easily….
I didn’t know he’d run for office!
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[Brown, meet Dave Sim!]
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In case I wasn’t being obvious enough, I’m not equating Brown’s attitudes with Sim’s. It’s something of an improvement when, in reaction to the breakup of a romantic relationship, one just happens to come to the realization that romantic love is evil, as opposed to realizing that women are evil.
And whatta nice coincidence that his “sex should be a free and open economic transaction” attitude just happens to give Brown a moral free pass on taking part in participating in the exploitation of women, taking advantage of whatever desperate economic circumstances forced at the very least most of them to degradingly sell themselves.
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‘You’re consenting to being raped for money’
A second series of the television drama The Secret Diary of a Call Girl – about a prostitute who loves her work – has been commissioned. Appalled at the sanitised picture it portrays, a woman who charges for sex tells Emine Saner what her life is like…
“It is highlighting in a big way a very tiny segment of the industry,” says Karen, who wanted to talk to the Guardian about her experiences in light of the hype surrounding the programme. “The majority of what this industry is about is a lot of pain, misery and distress. It annoys me that the media like to highlight only the prostitutes who say how empowering this is. There might be a few out there who think that at this moment in time, but that is not true for the vast majority. What pisses me off about [Belle de Jour] is that you’re very rarely going to have a client that you like having sex with. You have to learn to disassociate your body from your mind which is dangerous for your psyche. For the vast majority of prostitutes, it isn’t glamorous – it is damaging and dangerous – yet it seems to be promoted as some kind of career option.”
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More, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/11/gender.socialexclusion
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I didn’t know he’d run for office!
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Th’ gory details in the old TCJ message board “Chester Brown Runs for Office” thread: http://archives.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?p=78295&sid=bb3f775cd7c21b8de171472e6f0cb1a6
If you’re interested in reading about the pros and cons of sex work, Mike, I’d very highly recommend Jenna Jameson’s autobiography, How To Make Love Like a Porn Star. She’s quite honest about the unpleasant aspects of the job, as well as honest about the upsides (a lot of money, basically.) I have a review here.
I think it’s really easy to both demonize and glamorize sex work. I think it’s basically a shitty blue collar job (that is, boring, sometimes dangerous, and demeaning) with the added downside of serious stigma and the added upside of the potential to make significantly more money, with significantly less hours, than is usually possible with shitty blue collar jobs.
I tend to think that legalization would benefit both sex workers (who could get police protection) and society (which wouldn’t be wasting resources trying to stop the unstoppable, and would have more options for regulation.) Legalization would not by any means change the fact that it’s a shitty blue collar job, though.
Legalization would also make unionization an option for sex workers, which I think would probably be a good thing.
These are all opinions I had before reading Brown’s book, incidentally. His take is rather different from mine.
Noah, you’ve just done what Jameson and so many others have condemned– lazily equating pornography actors with prostitutes.
Most prostitutes worldwide aren’t free agents, Chester, Noah. Most prostitutes are slaves.
I said they were all sex workers. Jameson’s unwillingness to make that broader classification says a lot about stigma, but I don’t think it’s particularly convincing overall. If you read her book, there’s one scene — her first male-sex scene I think — where it’s a gonzo shoot and the guy with the camera gives her more and more cash to perform different sex acts with him. She has some funny lines where she speculates on whether he thinks she’ll make him a lot of money or whether he’s motivated by more prurient considerations. It’s really not clear to me how that transaction is essentially different in kind from prostitution.
I don’t think most prostitutes worldwide are slaves. I don’t know how you could possibly find statistics on that in any case. Certainly, in places where prostitution is legalized, like Australia and Holland, there are many women who work as prostitutes who are not slaves. You could argue that they’re wage slaves, certainly…but again, that’s an argument about shitty blue collar jobs rather than about prostitution in itself.
I’ve talked to women who said that they’d rather do prostitution than do a hooters-type job, on the grounds that the latter was more degrading and offered less control. I’ve talked to women who worked as prostitutes because of the money and out of something like feminist motives (autonomy, control of their own sexuality.) On the other hand…there are obviously lots of women who get into it for reasons involving addiction and find the whole experience hideously degrading and horrible. And there are women who are forced into it, too, which is obviously evil.
I don’t see how any of those women are helped by laws criminalizing prostitution is the thing. Kidnapping is illegal, period; anybody who does that should go to jail. But making prostitution itself illegal seems like it just makes it more difficult for women to go to the police when they’re in trouble.
Umm, Noah– this is one instance where I’ll have to ask you to trust my information.
I KNOW.
Oh come on. How on earth could you know that the majority of prostitutes in the entire world are sex slaves? Unless you’re doing secret statistical analysis for the UN?
Anyway, as I said, I don’t think it really affects the argument for legalization one way or the other.
You should definitely google “prostitution, slavery.”
Noah, you persist in conflating porn actors/actresses and prostitutes into the category of “sex workers”. They are very distinct populations.
It’s true that many porn actresses/actors are filmed under durance, but it’s the exception in that vast industry. Symetrically, it’s true that many prostitutes are voluntary and independant– but again, far fewer than you’d think, even in Hamburg or Amsterdam.
They are mostly slaves, from Albania, Bielorussia,Congo, Cambodia. Their lives are Hell.
For the record, I’m in favor of decriminalising or legalising prostitution…but history shows this does little to mitigate the horrors that attend it.
Porn actresses not infrequently work as prostitutes; prostitutes often work as strippers, strippers often work as porn actresses. I don’t think the populations are all that distinct —though I haven’t seen studies or anything.
I’ve often heard assertions that the vast majority of prostitutes are sex slaves. I’d need some fairly convincing evidence to believe it though. Like I said, I think there’s an impulse to demonize the work as well as to glamorize it. I don’t doubt that many people are in this situation, but I’m skeptical that it’s as prevalent as you’re claiming.
I don’t know; googled for a couple second and found this. Care to link a rebuttal?
Not at this late time, but Jesus, Noah– you sure can pick your sides.
the only book i’ve read on the topic is disposable people, by kevin bales. about modern slave trades, not just, but including the sex industry in thailand and elsewhere. it’s been a long time since i read it, i’m not sure bales ever addresses the topic of what percentage of sex workers are slaves, though obviously one of the topics of the book is how prevalent human trafficking is.
Well, siding with Susie Bright is a little uncomfortable maybe…the woman she’s interviewing seems to know what she’s talking about though.
Here’s Wikipedia:
“According to a 2008 report by the US Department of State: “Annually, according to U.S. Government-sponsored research completed in 2006, approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does not include millions trafficked within their own countries. Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors, and the majority of transnational victims are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.”[13] The United Nations stated in 2009 that estimates showed there could be around 270,000 victims of human trafficking in the European Union.[14] Not everyone believes that such large numbers of people are trafficked against their will. The Economist and Elizabeth Pisani claim that only a small proportion of prostitutes are explicitly trafficked against their will.[5][15]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_prostitution
This site has various estimates of numbers of prostitutes in the world:
http://prostitution.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000095
One estimate there says 40 million prostitutes in the world in 2001.
The Economist says that
“The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are at least 2.5m people in forced labour at any one time, including sexual exploitation, as a result of trafficking.”
http://www.economist.com/node/11561082
That’s supposed to include domestic instances, and all forced labor, not just sex. So we’ve got 40 million prostitutes worldwide vs. an absolute maximum of 2.5m people in forced prostitution. Those numbers just don’t come anywhere near adding up to a conclusion that most prostitution is forced prostitution.
I mean obviously any sex trafficking is too much sex trafficking. But thinking of prostitution as if it is mostly sex trafficking seems like it’s really misleading if these numbers are anywhere near accurate.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
If you’re interested in reading about the pros and cons of sex work, Mike, I’d very highly recommend Jenna Jameson’s autobiography, How To Make Love Like a Porn Star.
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(Shakes head in disbelief.) Well, at least you didn’t recommend “The Happy Hooker”…
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I think it’s really easy to both demonize and glamorize sex work.
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No need to go to the extreme of “demonizing” it; though a proportionately very few women may be able to do it and not suffer significant psychological damage, it’s a foul enough thing as it is.
It’s mind-boggling to me that anyone would remotely consider “glamorizing” it…
I was thinking about this thread before going online today; the fact that — unless I blinked and missed it — none of the male reviewers/critics thought to condemn Chester Brown for his part in the whole degrading mess. Surely, I thought, because typical male attitudes are so utterly different from typical female ones. Being called a “stud” is a compliment for men; a gigolo resents not that he has to perform sexually for money, but that he’s not the one in a position of financial and social power in the relationship.
For women as a group, the sexual act is not as easily externalized, seen as a mere enjoyable physical activity.
Proving my point about male attitudes:
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I think [prostitution is] basically a shitty blue collar job.
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Whew! Go ask women you know if they’d consider letting strangers screw them for money on a constant basis as no worse than digging ditches or scrubbing out toilets for a living.
From the downloadable Word file at http://tinyurl.com/3rslhph :
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…Women in prostitution are constantly subjected to humiliations of all kinds, theft, physical and sexual assault, as well as the health risks from being sometimes required to have unprotected sex…Even when the violence does not occur, the threat and the lack of protection are always there…
Beatings, rape, and even murder are generally considered ‘occupational hazards’ of prostitution..One study puts the mortality rate of women and girls in prostitution at 40 times higher than the national average…
Studies of sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder in US rate the condition in those involved in prostitution as ‘enormously high’, higher than Vietnam veterans seeking treatment for the condition. Two thirds of women in prostitution report suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (compared to 5% of the general population). The vast majority report sustained recurrent physical and sexual assault in working hours, feelings of being emotionally numb and tortured by recurrent nightmares and flashbacks. European studies document the strain and trauma in prostitution and liken the effects to the effects on victims of incest and rape.
…As well as overt, direct physical violence, trauma in prostitution is caused by engaging in multiple sex acts with strangers . Having to tolerate this much intimate, bodily invasion requires psychological or chemical (with drugs or alcohol) dissociation in order to cope… Women report resorting to various ‘shutting off’ techniques – distancing, disengagement, dissociation, disembodiment and dissembling, as survival strategies The women try to switch off, to separate from and fragment their real selves, thereby intensifying the harm and damage caused by prostitution…
Women in prostitution in the so-called First World countries are disproportionately drawn from economically and racially marginalized women and a significant proportion of the women are drug-addicted…
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And, I wonder if Alex’s usage of “slave” is broader than what Noah is thinking of. From dictionary.com:
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slave
1. a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another; a bond servant.
2. a person entirely under the domination of some influence or person: a slave to a drug.
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Wouldn’t the warped, abusive/protective pimp & hooker relationship fully fit the second definition?
Some thoughts at “Are Prostitutes Slaves?”: http://freedomcenter.org/freedom-forum/index.php/2009/01/prostitutes-slaves/
And…
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More than half of prostitutes in one study said one or both parents drank to excess; more than half had family members who abused drugs regularly.
51% of prostitutes in one study had a father who battered their mother. 62% of prostitutes were physically abused as children.
Most prostitutes have been sexually abused as children. Finkelhor and Browne state that child sexual abuse leads to feelings by the victim of betrayal, powerlessness, stigmatization, and the sense that sex is a commodity. These feelings often make children vulnerable to revictimization, including child prostitution.
2/3 of prostitutes were sexually abused from the ages of 3-16. (The average age of victimization was 10).
2/3 of prostitutes abused in childhood were molested by natural, step-, or foster fathers. 10% were sexually abused by strangers…
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From another downloadable file, at http://tinyurl.com/3k7bpfp .
More info, including a link to ” ‘You Just Give them what they Want and Pray they don’t Kill You’: Street-Level Sex Workers’ Reports of Victimization, Personal Resources, and Coping Strategies,” at http://jfi.sagepub.com/content/12/3/361.abstract
Curse the lack of a “preview” feature! My downloadable file links just led to the Google search pages where I found the documents in question. Try these “quick view” links instead:
http://tinyurl.com/3oojyfk
http://tinyurl.com/3ntnup5
Shitty blue collar jobs can be really horrible. Working in a coal mine is a really dangerous, dirty, depressing, soul-killing job. So is being a cop in a lot of ways. So are lots of other shitty blue collar jobs, from working in McDonald’s to data entry. They’re not as stigmatized as sex work…but you could argue that that is because sex work is done by women and because it’s sex, rather than because the jobs are innately worse.
I don’t really know what point there is exactly in condemning Brown…and I think the assumption that women are more moralistic in these matters is really not especially convincing. Brown’s got a number of endorsements from sex workers on his cover blurbs, for example. Susie Bright wouldn’t condemn him. I know a number of other women who wouldn’t either.
In terms of the abuse…I can well believe that sex workers have higher rates of abuse than other professions. That doesn’t mean that they’re victims first, last, and only for their entire lives. And I don’t see how putting them in prison for trying to earn a living recompenses them for their childhood abuse.
Finally…the assumption that Jameson’s autobiography must be a piece of crap is really depressing, and kind of insulting. It’s exactly the sort of stigma that makes sex workers lives worse, not better. As it happens, her autobiography is one of the smartest, most entertaining, most honest n books I’ve read from the last 10 years. I can’t think of a non-fiction memoir that’s anywhere near as good — not Paying for It, not David Heatley’s sexual memoir, not Bechdel’s memoir. And no, not Maus either.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Shitty blue collar jobs can be really horrible. Working in a coal mine is a really dangerous, dirty, depressing, soul-killing job. So is being a cop in a lot of ways. So are lots of other shitty blue collar jobs, from working in McDonald’s to data entry. They’re not as stigmatized as sex work…but you could argue that that is because sex work is done by women and because it’s sex, rather than because the jobs are innately worse.
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Oh, do McDonald’s and data-entry workers suffer from a mortality rate “40 times higher than the national average”? Post-traumatic stress disorder rated as ” ‘enormously high’, higher than Vietnam veterans seeking treatment for the condition…sustained recurrent physical and sexual assault in working hours, feelings of being emotionally numb and tortured by recurrent nightmares and flashbacks”?
That kind of stuff is why I rate prostitution as “inherently worse.”
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I don’t really know what point there is exactly in condemning Brown…
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I wouldn’t lead a mob to set his apartment on fire, but isn’t it worth at least mentioning that his “activities” have a moral dimension, which are worth noting and reacting to? And which his “everybody should be free to casually sell themselves for sex, without that possessive ‘romance’ stuff messing everything up” attitude thereby conveniently places on a level above such criticism?
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…and I think the assumption that women are more moralistic in these matters is really not especially convincing.
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Not so much “moralistic” as biologically programmed as a group to think of sex in a different fashion. For instance: how many rich and powerful women in history ever had male harems? Compare the statistics on rape and child abuse committed by males versus that done by women, and so forth.
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Brown’s got a number of endorsements from sex workers on his cover blurbs, for example. Susie Bright wouldn’t condemn him. I know a number of other women who wouldn’t either.
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What could be more impressive and convincing? Mere statistics from scientific studies, or a batch of cover blurbs — surely picked by the publisher at random, to yield a balanced analysis — from “sex workers”?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I can well believe that sex workers have higher rates of abuse than other professions. That doesn’t mean that they’re victims first, last, and only for their entire lives. And I don’t see how putting them in prison for trying to earn a living recompenses them for their childhood abuse.
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Did I say that, or advocate jailing them? (Though it’s no surprise, as noted in one article I linked to earlier, that the emotional damage from the “job” makes it much more difficult for them to improve their lives.)
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Finally…the assumption that Jameson’s autobiography must be a piece of crap is really depressing, and kind of insulting. It’s exactly the sort of stigma that makes sex workers lives worse, not better. As it happens, her autobiography is one of the smartest, most entertaining, most honest n books I’ve read from the last 10 years. I can’t think of a non-fiction memoir that’s anywhere near as good — not Paying for It, not David Heatley’s sexual memoir, not Bechdel’s memoir. And no, not Maus either.
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I’d earlier read your review of her (and her co-author’s) book. Just that cover alone (the soulless, plastic pseudo-sexuality slathered there I find utterly repugnant) somehow doesn’t give the impression that Bechdel’s “Fun Home” or “Maus” have found a threatening literary competitor. And your comments and quotes from the book hardly convince, either: https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/02/jenna-does-jenna/ .
“Not so much “moralistic” as biologically programmed as a group to think of sex in a different fashion”
Christ. The women of the world thank you for your condescending pap, I’m sure.
I think fulminating about emotional damage from the job is the kind of assumption of victimization I’m talking about. Many sex workers do not see themselves as particularly victimized, and do not find the job particularly emotionally horrible. In addition, many who do find it horrible are nonetheless making choices between probably really unpleasant options, which is to say that prostitution is the result of a bad situation, rather than the cause of it. That’s the case for the many women who enter prostitution because of drug addiction, for example — though of course prostitution no doubt makes things even worse for some. I suspect, on the other hand, that sex work, and the possibility of making money relatively quickly, is a boon for others even if they don’t like the job all that much, just as many people work jobs they don’t like that much because they need the money. I think it’s just insulting to assume that prostitutes aren’t able to make those kinds of calculations, with all their pluses and minuses, just as well as anyone else.
I actually talk at some length in my review about the moral implications of Brown’s position. So maybe that will satisfy you.
Re: stress. Part of the stress prostitutes suffer is stigma related…and no doubt related to criminalization as well. Nonetheless coal miners have pretty high rates of illness and fatality, I’m pretty sure.
Re Maus vs. Jameson — different strokes, obviously. But you seemed to be sneering at it because it was the work of a sex worker. Your comments about the cover don’t really change that impression.
I don’t really like Fun Home or Maus very much, so I”m sort of damning Jameson with faint praise by comparing it to them. But her autobio is good in its own right too.
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…Noah Berlatsky says:
Re Maus vs. Jameson — different strokes, obviously. But you seemed to be sneering at it because it was the work of a sex worker. Your comments about the cover don’t really change that impression.
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No, I don’t believe that being a “sex worker” (gee, don’t “exotic dancers” resent thus being grouped with streetwalkers?) necessarily means one is incapable of creating something with literary worth, or insight.*
Yet not only the cover, but the title pretty much told one what to expect.
And, is it “condescending pap” to point out that — aside from our “higher aspects” — we are also biological organisms, in great part driven by unreasoning, primal urges and mechanisms (why do people who can’t make ends meet still have one kid after another after another?), whose much-vaunted egos may be put out of commission by a leaky valve, powered by chemical reactions, fated to entropic rot?
* Joe Sacco’s “Yahoo” #6 featured the mostly “grim n’ gritty” true account of Susan Catherine’s experiences (she has the writer credit) as an itinerant stripteaser. Traveling to various logging towns in Canada, as I recall. Once, a guy she’s dating breezily asks her to have sex with his father: “He’d get a kick out of it!”
She says, “You don’t know how that makes me feel…”
(Dialogue quoted from memory.)
(Discussed at http://archives.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?p=120168&sid=1377a9d057f61c209c006dd4ad57155a , where the Not Safe For Work cover may be seen…)
“And, is it “condescending pap” to point out that — aside from our “higher aspects” — we are also biological organisms…”
It’s condescending pap to assume that people’s opinions are predetermined by their sex organs, yes. Pointing out we’re biological organisms is different from claiming you have some sort of insight into how exactly that impacts people’s behavior.
And jumping around and shouting “it’s science!” doesn’t actually make it science.
It’s not uncommon for strippers to move into working as prostitutes, or vice versa. Many don’t want to do that, of course, and don’t. But pointing out that one is more stigmatized than the other doesn’t change the fact that they’re all stigmatized in similar ways and for similar reasons.
The title of the Jameson book has little to do with the content. All you’re saying in your criticism is that it’s being marketed in a sensational way. But, of course, Jameson has spent her entire life marketing herself in a sensational way. That’s what you do when you’re a porn star. You’re saying that that aspect of her profession makes her uninteresting and “repugnant”. In short, you’re just restating the stigma that applies to sex workers.
It’s entirely reasonable to be put off by the crass capitalism of porn. And if you read the book, or even part of it, and don’t like it, that’s fine too. But you’re basically just dismissing her for what she does…which, again, is how people treat sex workers in general.
Probably no one cares…but one of the interesting things about the Jameson book is that some of her experiences that are most exploitive aren’t necessarily a direct result of her job. They have to do with a series of controlling boyfriends who start going out with her knowing what she does for a living, and then basically demand she *stop* working.
There are many things associated with the job that are unpleasant too; her boob job is botched by a hack surgeon, for example, and I think (can’t remember exactly….) that there was some question about compensation with some of her early photograph work. And everybody and their mother (more or less literally) hits on her, and she talks openly about the emotional stress of doing sex work. I don’t think anyone would come away from the book thinking its glamorous or that they’d like their daughter to do it (Jameson wouldn’t want any daugher of *hers* involved, she makes very clear.)
(shakes head in disbelief)
You know, maybe if prostitution were decriminalized and sex workers had some respect in our society, the rates of PTSD, rape etc. wouldn’t be so high.
I know several sex workers personally. None of them find the job deeply traumatizing from what they’ve told me – they’ve been in uncomfortable situations and had to deal with creeps, certainly, but nothing life-ruining. That is certainly not the case for all sex workers, but it’s not the case for all coal miners, either. I won’t claim to speak for them, let alone for sex workers as a group – this is just what they’ve told me directly. It certainly depends a lot on one’s working and employment conditions, safety mechanisms, etc., just as in any other potentially dangerous job.
Also, the whole thing about the pimp-hooker relationship is only relevant to prostitutes who have pimps, which none of my friends do.
A lot of anti-sex work sentiment seems to amount to a relatively sophisticated form of slut-shaming.
And yeah, the line about “primal urges,” and really any rhetoric about biologically inherent difference is very, very sexist. It’s also implicitly transphobic, racist and all sorts of nasty things, in that it plugs into an evolutionary psychology-type framework of understanding human beings that (apart from being not terribly scientific) tends to serve as a mechanism to confirm the busted prejudices of wealthy, white male researchers. Your reasoning puts you in the company of the authors of The Bell Curve, in other words, which isn’t good company to be in.
Mike, have you ever knowingly met a sex worker? They’re not all women, for one thing, and their work conditions vary quite widely. You may think that you’re being a Noble Defender of Women here, but that’s actually the problem – it’s a very condescending, sexist and dismissive attitude towards women, women’s sexualities and women’s bodies and decision-making capabilities that allows you to take that stance. It’s known as “white knighting” – man comes into a conversation and sets himself up as the Defender of Women, in the process adopting a stance that’s sexist and possibly actually harmful to women. Said rhetoric is usually structured in such a way as to betray an assumption that others – especially women – in the conversation have never seen these points made before and generally don’t know what they’re talking about. We get this crap on feminist blogs all the time. With or without statistics to quote, what you got to say ain’t nothin’ new, believe me.
All of the above was addressed to Mike
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Anja Flower says:
…I know several sex workers personally. None of them find the job deeply traumatizing from what they’ve told me – they’ve been in uncomfortable situations and had to deal with creeps, certainly, but nothing life-ruining.
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I’m glad they’ve escaped being badly damaged. Funny, though, how “I personally know some sex workers who aren’t messed up” cancels out that “Studies of sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder in US rate the condition in those involved in prostitution as ‘enormously high’, higher than Vietnam veterans seeking treatment for the condition. Two thirds of women in prostitution report suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (compared to 5% of the general population). The vast majority report sustained recurrent physical and sexual assault in working hours, feelings of being emotionally numb and tortured by recurrent nightmares and flashbacks.”
In the same fashion that many folks dismissed all those “smoking causes cancer” studies by saying, “I knew somebody who smoked three packs a day, and he lived to be 90!”
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A lot of anti-sex work sentiment seems to amount to a relatively sophisticated form of slut-shaming.
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Is pointing out that prostitution is overwhelmingly dehumanizing, degrading, and dangerous “slut-shaming”? And, who here has called these women forced into this situation — by dire economic circumstance or threat of violence — “sluts,” or even hinted that they’re personally morally contemptible? (I’d save my contempt for the “johns”…)
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And yeah, the line about “primal urges,” and really any rhetoric about biologically inherent difference is very, very sexist.
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Well, sometimes reality and prejudices coincide. It might be called “sexist” to say, “men as a group are more prone to violent and criminal behavior than women,” or “women in general are more concerned with stable, monogamous relationships than men are,” backed up by bucketloads of research.
But, this is simply facing reality squarely on, no matter how it might disappointingly fail to conform to our wishes and theories.
To point out that these hidden biological/evolutionary/psychological forces exist is not to say that we are utterly helpless before them, or that EVERYONE is equally in their thrall. And that we should be AWARE of how these forces may be subconsciously motivating us to make decisions that may not necessarily be in our best interests.
“Knowledge is power”; wouldn’t a woman who’d read “Women Who Love Too Much” and thus been made aware of the psychological mechanisms which drive many women with abusive fathers to unthinkingly replicate that dynamic in their romantic relationships, be forewarned that she was about to make that same mistake again?
What truly would be sexist would be to say that (as Marilyn French wrote in “The Women’s Room,” as I recall) “all men are rapists and that’s all they are”; or that “all women really want is to stay at home and take care of babies.”
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It’s also implicitly transphobic, racist and all sorts of nasty things, in that it plugs into an evolutionary psychology-type framework of understanding human beings that (apart from being not terribly scientific) tends to serve as a mechanism to confirm the busted prejudices of wealthy, white male researchers.
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That the fact of evolution was twisted into “social Darwinism” (that the rich are superior, the poor inferior, and thus each rightly deserves their place) doesn’t mean that evolution deserves to be dismissed.
This is the same kind of “thinking” deployed by Chester Brown when — because doctors weren’t able to help his mother — he dismissed the existence of schizophrenia. Or the guy who was on TV a lot before most here were born, who said because the Communist regime of Russia falsely labeled dissenters as “insane,” to have a nonpolitical excuse to lock them up, therefore insanity didn’t exist.
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Your reasoning puts you in the company of the authors of The Bell Curve, in other words, which isn’t good company to be in.
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No, because they twisted research and statistics to come up with the ends they wanted. On some long-ago TCJ message board thread I’d posted links to refutations of the “research” of “The Bell Curve.” (Ah, here it is: http://archives.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?p=25609&sid=697834363c4b4b142b4e0bfedfef16c4 )
If I bring up genetics, does that then automatically put me in the company of Nazi eugenicists?
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Mike, have you ever knowingly met a sex worker? They’re not all women, for one thing, and their work conditions vary quite widely.
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Yes; and yes, of course I know all that.
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You may think that you’re being a Noble Defender of Women here…
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I care greatly about a very few women; the vast majority, as with men, are idiots. I don’t want them to suffer, but it’s depressingly obvious the human race as a group is a pack of morons hell-bent on its own destruction, and there’s nothing I can do but get swept along with the mass of lemmings over the cliff; griping about the stupidity of it all to the last.
The Bell Curve twists evidence…and you don’t actually have any evidence at all. That’s a difference, I’ll admit.
As Anja and I both said, stigmatization and criminalization may well be responsible for a significant proportion of the stress and health effects that you’re discussing.
Well, of course. But even in countries where prostitution is legal, there’s a lot of abuse and violence towards sex workers.
Anja, you are a bit too quick to dish out the labels.
“But even in countries where prostitution is legal, there’s a lot of abuse and violence towards sex workers.” But the question is what’s the best legal regime for protecting the human rights of sex workers. People like Brown argue that decriminalization and normalization would make it easier for prostitutes to get legal help and police protection when they are abused. That’s the argument that needs to be engaged with.
There is a lot of abuse and violence in many institutions, for example marriage. Is that an argument for making marriage illegal or trying to abolish marriage? Or is it an argument for trying to create an infrastructure that allows married people in abusive relationships to escape their cirumstances and (if necessary) get legal and police protection?
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Jeet Heer says:
“But even in countries where prostitution is legal, there’s a lot of abuse and violence towards sex workers.” But the question is what’s the best legal regime for protecting the human rights of sex workers. People like Brown argue that decriminalization and normalization would make it easier for prostitutes to get legal help and police protection when they are abused. That’s the argument that needs to be engaged with.
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I’d certainly endorse decriminalization, unionization, and extending every matter of police protection towards prostitutes. (Though not extending to their — as sometimes happens — being able to aggressively solicit business in the streets, then scream “faggot” at any male who turns them down.)
No one among this bunch seems to have anything to say in favor of “stigmatization.” Yet, cannot social/peer pressure have a positive role to play? If no one looks down upon ANY kind of activity which doesn’t harm others (as if lousing up your own life would have no repercussions among one’s family, the greater society), does that mean girls will think that turning tricks is no different than working at McDonald’s, and the only psychic damage from selling their bodies to strangers is that caused by that nasty moralistic, hypocritical society?
Parents, would you see your kids performing blow-jobs for bucks as “just another lifestyle choice,” a job no different than any other?
(Why, in Chester Brown land, that would be just another way for folks to raise money for their schools. Who needs car-washes, when Moms can spread their legs to make money to get the school band new uniforms, and nobody would think anything was amiss about it.)
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Alex Buchet says:
Anja, you are a bit too quick to dish out the labels.
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Which serves as a segue to…
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Anja Flower says:
…And yeah, the line about “primal urges,” and really any rhetoric about biologically inherent difference is very, very sexist. It’s also implicitly transphobic, racist and all sorts of nasty things, in that it plugs into an evolutionary psychology-type framework of understanding human beings that (apart from being not terribly scientific) tends to serve as a mechanism to confirm the busted prejudices of wealthy, white male researchers. Your reasoning puts you in the company of the authors of The Bell Curve, in other words, which isn’t good company to be in.
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In what way is automatically assuming that “white male” researchers would therefore naturally be reactionary oppressors of women (and gays, transgendered, etc. folks) not racist or sexist?
The idea that researchers are rolling in the bucks, and driving to the lab in a Beemer is…well, not exactly “reality-based.” But, “wealthy”=evil, so….
And, scientists who say there are any “biologically inherent differences” between the genders — never mind if it’s in areas like “spatial perception” or the tendency to employ different methods of problem-solving — are therefore “very, very sexist,” and no different than the consciously deceptive statistic-manipulators of “The Bell Curve”? Check.
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You may think that you’re being a Noble Defender of Women here, but that’s actually the problem – it’s a very condescending, sexist and dismissive attitude towards women, women’s sexualities and women’s bodies and decision-making capabilities that allows you to take that stance. It’s known as “white knighting” – man comes into a conversation and sets himself up as the Defender of Women, in the process adopting a stance that’s sexist and possibly actually harmful to women. Said rhetoric is usually structured in such a way as to betray an assumption that others – especially women – in the conversation have never seen these points made before and generally don’t know what they’re talking about. We get this crap on feminist blogs all the time. With or without statistics to quote, what you got to say ain’t nothin’ new, believe me.
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…And that attitude, in a nutshell, is why the Women’s Movement has marginalized itself, is seen as a bunch of extremist man-haters, why its hard-won gains continue to be eroded.
The Civil Rights movement made its greatest gains when whites and blacks worked together; with Jews as many of its strongest champions. Then Martin Luther King was assassinated, black separatism and anti-Semitism surged, and the same thing happened.
What you have in both cases are ideologues, separatists, and purists (who, by an amazing coincidence, thus make themselves more powerful and influential) insisting they want no part of the larger society, arguing they have nothing whatsoever to learn from anything that any male or white has to say, spitting upon those who’d sympathize with or aid them as “condescending” or “paternalistic.”
But…you are being condescending, Mike. Anja’s not saying that men have no role to play in the feminist movement. She’s saying that you’re claim that women are “biologically programmed” to have a moralistic attitude towards sex is condescending nonsense. To which you reply that the whole problem with the women’s movement is that it doesn’t embrace men as allies when they make idiotic sexist statements. I also like the way you first insisted that you are not into slut shaming and then say, well, maybe it would be a good idea to shame some sluts after all.
I don’t agree with Anja that any appeal to biological difference is innately sexist…but I think that it very often is. Certainly, the broad, baseless claims Mike’s making about gender difference you’re making seem to me to qualify.
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I think the abuses in institutions question Jeet raises is interesting. I think the abuses in some institutions — prisons, possibly compulsory schooling — are severe enough that I think there actually is a good case for abolishing them. I don’t feel that way about marriage, though.
You know what? Forget I attempted to get involved in this conversation. I don’t have enough statistics, enough fancy rhetorical footwork or enough patience for it.
I point out a really obvious power dynamic in which the widely controversial field of evolutionary psychology, to which many scientists and academics are opposed (Stephen Jay Gould for example), seems to be a platform for people who benefit from the privileges of whiteness, maleness and relative wealth to make terrible arguments that reinforce those privileges, and I’m told off as “extreme.” In the process, evo psych is conflated with the completely uncontroversial (unless you’re a right-wing religious type, I suppose) wider field of evolutionary science. There’s a whole wider discussion to be had about the subjects of gender, sex and sexuality and the interrelation thereof, but at this point I lack the sustaining energy to go through *that* particular headache-inducing conversation for the umpteenth time.
It must feel very nice categorically deriding all feminism as “extreme,” consuming research about differences between “male brains” and “female brains” without underlying it with any sort of real gender analysis, and all that sort of thing. The current variety of vaguely poststructural/postmodern, queer-theoretical and sex-positive feminism, though, is sympathetic to my own hard-won understanding of my sex, gender and sexuality as a queer and transgender person. The biological essentialism you are invoking has no room for people like me, and yes, biological essentialism is racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, ableist, and pretty much every other “ism,” too – it’s one of the major points at which most of the “isms” converge. You want to lump me in with the Black Panthers and other token “extremist” groups for preferring social justice and feminist perspectives over widely derided and controversial “science” that attempts to explain rape as “natural?” Sure, go right ahead.
No, I don’t have any sophisticated analysis of sex work, and I don’t claim to. I have friends who do it, and many more who have done it in the past any may again in the future. A lot of young transgender people here in San Francisco do it to get by. There’s also a vigorous contingent of our queer & trans community here and elsewhere in the United States who are very into making pornography that is by and for queer & trans people, and all about portraying our sexualities on our own terms. None of my friends or the people I’ve talked to about sex work or prostitution specifically claim that it’s all stars and fluffy bunnies, but it’s also not all terrible evil slavery, it’s not all run by slavers and pimps, it’s not all systematic rape. I don’t know much of anything about the wider world of sex work, so no, I don’t know how representative the view I have into that world is. I can say, though, that their are obviously better, more humane ways of doing sex work. I know people who engage in them. Beyond that, I will openly confess to being ignorant.
And at that, I’m out of here. It was probably foolish of me to get involved in the first place, but I see stuff like this and I just can’t keep my gob shut.
For the record, I should’ve been clearer – I don’t think that gender is completely, 100% without biological basis. I just think, like Noah does, that the vast majority of appeals to biology are B.S. defenses for busted, sexist attitudes. Appeal to biology and appeal to super-hard-line social construction of gender are both used to attack transgender people and deny the validity of our gender identities, so while I’m very much on the social construction side of the fence, I’m not a hard-line constructionist. I don’t want to end the gender system, I just want to give it a really hard shaking.
Oh, one other thing – men DO have a role to play in the feminist movement. They just don’t get any special exemptions from being called out for sexist behavior on account of their being men.
I’m just waiting for the point where Anja calls Mike a Nazi. We’re headed into Godwin’s Law territory.
This is the quote that apparently set Anja off:
“Not so much “moralistic” as biologically programmed as a group to think of sex in a different fashion. For instance: how many rich and powerful women in history ever had male harems? Compare the statistics on rape and child abuse committed by males versus that done by women, and so forth.”
I find nothing at all wrong with the above. The point about male and female harems is a historic fact. It goes back to pre-human mammalian behavior: the Alpha male gets everything.As for the predominance of males as rapists, that is a solid fact that echoes through the entire history of the human race.
(I disagree about child abuse, though. It seems that slightly over half of non- sexual abusers of children are female.This is probably because in most societies women remain the principal caregivers to children.)
At no point did Mike or anyone else even hint at “attacking transgender people.” You have a bad habit of extrapolating falsehoods from other’s statements, Anja, as I’ve learned to my cost.
“Parents, would you see your kids performing blow-jobs for bucks as ‘just another lifestyle choice,’ a job no different than any other?
(Why, in Chester Brown land, that would be just another way for folks to raise money for their schools. Who needs car-washes, when Moms can spread their legs to make money to get the school band new uniforms, and nobody would think anything was amiss about it.)”
Mike: you are being completely dishonest here. No one is talking about “kids” in school selling sex. Chester Brown is explicit that his goal of decriminalization and normalization is aimed at consenting adults. You’re argument is about as honest as that of Christian conservatives who used to argue that legalizing homosexuality would open the door for legalizing pedophilia and beastiality.
Jeet, Mike hasn’t been able to read Brown’s book yet, so he’s going on hearsay. I’m sure he’s not being intentionally disingenuous.
Alex, humans are really different from other mammals, as you may or may not have noticed. Evolutionary psychology along the lines you’re arguing is, as Anja says, really, really tendentious, not particularly scientific, and, in general, almost complete bullshit.
Males having harems rather than women could, just possibly, have something to do with social patriarchy rather than the fact that we’re somehow all programmed to act like moose. Same with rape…though the fact that more men are rapists also probably has something to do with the biological fact that men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, rather than with some sort of hazy biological theory about who is programmed to do what.
Anja’s point is that biological determinism along the lines that Mike is going is used to argue that transgender people aren’t “natural” and to justify persecution.
Noah’s interpretations of my points are correct.
Saying that an idea is racist, ableist, transphobic etc. is not the same as saying that the person spouting those ideas is all of those things. I’m not interested in calling anyone a Nazi. I’m interested in seeing people confront the fact that many of our more “traditional” ways of thinking about human difference tend to lead to social injustice. Even if I do call someone out for a specific comment, it’s a call-out on that one comment, not an allegation that the person who made it necessarily meant anything bad by it, or is somehow a bad person.
Anyhow…
Wrong, Noah. The idea of harems being a social construct is absolutely laughable. Tell that to a silverback gorilla.
Why are men bigger and stronger than women? It’s called sexual selection, Noah, one of the strongest evolutionary pressures there is.
Mike made no statement whatsoever about transgender people.
Anja doesn’t impress me– or intimidate me, which is xir usual tactic– with xir narcissistic, self-serving, professional victim bullshit: I had transgender friends before the fool was born.
If I “intimidate” people, Alex, I suggest you avoid anti-oppression blogs, in which people call each other out, thank each other for it, and don’t make a big deal out of it. I suspect you would find such spaces very, erm, “intimidating.”
I’m a “professional victim” now, am I? I’m a basement-dwelling art student who uses feminist and queer theory-type thinking to try to understand hir struggles with gender and the oppression ze and hir friends face. How professional! How intimidating!
I feel like I have to constantly and consciously carve out a safe space for myself everywhere I go, online and off. “Victim mentality?” What would you have me do, ignore it? I’ve tried that strategy already. It didn’t work. HU has been quite hospitable to me, which is a credit to Noah and to the others (Caro, for example) who’ve helped to make it that way.
Unfortunately, even here, when I point out that someone is employing the same kind of evo-psych argument that’s used to justify transphobia, they just about bite my face off.
Just like having friends who’re sex workers doesn’t make me an expert on sex work, having friends who’re trans doesn’t mean you necessarily know a lot about being trans.
Gah, so much for leaving this damned thread alone…
Alex, I hadn’t realized that human beings were silverback gorillas, or that all human societies were based around harems. Thank you for enlightening me. I will go off and groom my mate now, and perhaps eat a banana.
Come to think about it, a banana does seem like just the thing right now.
Amusingly enough, I’m actually allergic to bananas, so if I were to eat one, I would spend the rest of the day vomiting.
Speaking of apes…
I remember reading The Third Chimpanzee (by Jared Diamond), and he talked about polygamy among mammals. A quick rule of thumb is that the larger males are in comparison to females, the larger the harems will be (consequently, there will be more males who are shut out of the mating process).
Gibbon males are equal in size to females, so they tend to be monogamous. Male gorillas are twice the size of female gorillas, and they tend to have harems of six to seven females. Humans and chimps fall somewhere in-between. Diamond believes that hunter-gatherer bands were “mildly polygynous.” But the massive harems of kings and emperors wasn’t possible without agriculture, government, and a patriarchal culture to support this patent inequality.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
But…you are being condescending, Mike. Anja’s not saying that men have no role to play in the feminist movement…
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…Just that they’d better not say anything in favor of feminism, or against sexism; because then they’re guilty of “set[ting themselves] up as the Defender of Women, in the process adopting a stance that’s sexist and possibly actually harmful to women.”
“Said rhetoric is usually structured in such a way as to betray an assumption that others – especially women – in the conversation have never seen these points made before and generally don’t know what they’re talking about. We get this crap on feminist blogs all the time. With or without statistics to quote, what you got to say ain’t nothin’ new, believe me.”
So, men had better not say anything that feminists have heard before, because feminists will assume they’re being condescended to, are being treated like they’re ignoramuses.
Does that sound like confident behavior, or insecurity? If liberals hear someone say, “George W. Bush is an idiot,” or “The war in Iraq is a disaster that we were deceived into,” do they get in a huff about it, or heartily agree with those obvious truisms?
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Anja Flower says:
Oh, one other thing – men DO have a role to play in the feminist movement. They just don’t get any special exemptions from being called out for sexist behavior on account of their being men.
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Alas, through attitudes and tactics as quoted above, for men to say anything qualifies as “sexist behavior.” Why, even making an anonymous financial donation could be attacked as “condescending” and “paternalistic.”
‘Way to drive away half the human race as potential allies! But, sexism is now virtually dead, oppression of women is practically nonexistent, so why should women need any help?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
She’s saying that you’re claim that women are “biologically programmed” to have a moralistic attitude towards sex is condescending nonsense.
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As I responded to you earlier, women as a group are “Not so much ‘moralistic’ as biologically programmed as a group to think of sex in a different fashion.”
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To which you reply that the whole problem with the women’s movement is that it doesn’t embrace men as allies when they make idiotic sexist statements.
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(Sarcasm Alert) Oh yeah, right, that’s exactly what I said. ..
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I also like the way you first insisted that you are not into slut shaming and then say, well, maybe it would be a good idea to shame some sluts after all.
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What I actually said was, “If no one looks down upon ANY kind of activity which doesn’t harm others (as if lousing up your own life would have no repercussions among one’s family, the greater society), does that mean girls will think that turning tricks is no different than working at McDonald’s…?”
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I don’t agree with Anja that any appeal to biological difference is innately sexist…but I think that it very often is. Certainly, the broad, baseless claims Mike’s making about gender difference you’re making seem to me to qualify…
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“Broad” claims? Mine are laden with qualifiers. “Baseless” claims? Well, it’s true they’re only based on countless biological and psychological studies, brain-scanning, hormone studies, and other nonsense, as opposed to assertions by Theorists…
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Anja Flower says:
You know what? Forget I attempted to get involved in this conversation. I don’t have enough statistics, enough fancy rhetorical footwork or enough patience for it.
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But, if I hadn’t argued against your comments every bit as strongly as I would’ve done against some testosterone-oozing male, then I’d have been condescending! Treated you like you couldn’t take the heat!
Y’ just can’t win…
(The ridiculous thing is that we’re all on basically the same side. It’s like the experience of an old friend who once joined the Communist Party, only to discover that instead of attacking capitalism, they spent huge amounts of energy in arguing over dogma, fights with less ideologically “pure” Communists.)
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It must feel very nice categorically deriding all feminism as “extreme,”
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What I actually wrote was, “that attitude… is why the Women’s Movement…is SEEN as a bunch of extremist man-haters…”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…the fact that more men are rapists also probably has something to do with the biological fact that men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, rather than with some sort of hazy biological theory about who is programmed to do what.
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So then wimps are less likely to be rapists than the athletic? But, doesn’t the fact that rapists often use weapons such as knives or guns to terrorize their victims into submission minimize the “bigger and stronger” factor?
And are big, muscular women thus statistically much more likely to go around raping wimpy guys?
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Anja’s point is that biological determinism along the lines that Mike is going is used to argue that transgender people aren’t “natural” and to justify persecution.
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Sure; just as the fact that left-handed people like me weren’t as statistically common as “righties” was used to persecute ’em:
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In the Middle Ages it was believed that the right hand was given by God and the left hand was given by Devil. This is why the left-handed people were persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition. There is a deep-rooted belief prevailing in the social consciousness up till now that left-handedness is a deviation from the norm, and the right-handedness is considered to be this norm. Over centuries left-handedness has been thought to be a defect, a disease and even a handicap…
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ttp://www.thesportjournal.org/article/types-and-effects-motor-adaptation-left-handed-persons-daily-life-and-contemporary-sport-tra
Again, though, we shouldn’t toss any bit of science in the trash-heap (or dismiss it as “almost complete bullshit”) because some creeps will misuse it.
“Alas, through attitudes and tactics as quoted above, for men to say anything qualifies as “sexist behavior.” Why, even making an anonymous financial donation could be attacked as “condescending” and “paternalistic.””
I’m a man. Anja doesn’t think I’m being sexist. (At least not in this instance.)
She thinks what you said was sexist. That doesn’t mean she’s mad at all men; it just means she thinks what you said was wrong. Your eagerness to tar all feminism because someone disagreed with you does little to help your case.
Evolutionary psych is mostly bullshit. As Anja said, see Stephen J. Gould. There are no studies, I don’t believe, which back up your claim that women are biologically programmed to be more moralistic than men. What studies there are make much narrower claims about specific situations and specific populations of women. And even those are quite unconvincing.
It’s really frustrating to see people who know next to nothing about science relying on pseudo-scientific crap to make broad claims about gender differences and then use such theories to sneer at feminists. But I guess such it has ever been, since the days of phrenologists….
I’d strongly recommend you read either some Stephen J. Gould or else John Horgan’s book about the mind. Either of those will tell you that your countless brain-scans, hormone studies, and other nonsense are, precisely, nonsense, and that scientists have very little idea of how hormones and brain function connect with actual human behavior. Our understanding of human minds is very, very rudimentary. Claiming otherwise — insisting that humans are like silverback gorillas, or that we’re programmed to do this or that according to gender — is really not supported by anything but the fantasies of ignoramuses eager to inscribe social realities onto nature.
The biological fact that most defines humans is language. The one thing you can probably say about human beings is that they are programmed to create complex societies based upon shared language. Once you get past that to specific statements about how human psyche’s are biologically programmed — you’re really just talking out of your ass and calling it science.
Re: rape — I was pretty much just talking off the cuff. I think rape is much more about patriarchy than about biological sex. There are some biological factors that arguably make it easier for men in general to rape women in general, such as relative body mass and the details of the pumbing. But using even actual biology to make generalized statements about destiny is really dicey, as you note. Can’t you see that if body mass issues are so easily put aside, then vague generalizations about what might or might not be happening in terms of brain chemicals are even more to be mistrusted? If social factors (like guns) can so easily overcome actual physical biological differences, why do you assume that those social factors are secondary to psychological factors which certainly can’t be measured or quantified with the accuracy of body mass?
Biological determinism is not science. Nothing you’ve said has anything to do with science. You want me to treat your claims seriously as science? Do what scientists do and cite studies — like, actual studies, not popularized balderdash claiming to be based on studies. Till you do that, you’re not dealing with science anymore than I am — less, since I at least know that what I”m saying isn’t science.
Oh, come on. There are obvious somatic limits to our possible behavior. These feed back to our brains.
Biology OBVIOUSLY influences the psyche. A person with chronic pain, an alcoholic, a top-level athlete– all see their body influence their mind.
I suppose the Stephen Gould book you refer to is ‘The Mismeasure of Man’. I recommend it. But it doesn’t deal with the modern proponents of sociobiology that have people riled up, such as E.O.Wilson.
http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/scientist-feminist.jpg
“Oh, come on. There are obvious somatic limits to our possible behavior. These feed back to our brains.”
Sure. See my comment re: body mass.
The trick is that people love, love, love to go from “biology has something to do with behavior” to “women and men act very differently because they have different brain chemistry and different evolutionary programming.” Our knowledge of the brain and of the mind just really is not sufficiently complex or nuanced — to put it mildly — to be able to make that kind of leap.
It’s obvious that biology influences the psyche. But how it does so, and whether that influence is closely tied to gender, is something for which we have very little scientific evidence.
As an example — we still have very little sense of how alcoholism or addiction in general work. Are these things biological? How are they biological? We don’t really know — which is why we can’t really predict whether someone will be an alcoholic, or create a vaccine for it. We don’t really even know whether some kind of vaccine would be theoretically possible, I don’t think.
Similarly, all top-level athletes don’t act or think the same way. Body shape and fitness has little predictive power for behavior. Given that, how much more limited must the predictive power be for much less quantifiable factors like hormones and brain chemicals?
And, yeah, Mike, I’d call that cartoon sexist. Also smug. Not your best work.
Alex-
See Gould’s essay on evolution and the Panglossian paradigm (you can Google it) for his critique of Wilson.
Nate: I read the essay long ago. (I’ve read all of Gould’s popularist writings, and a few of his professional ones.)
My point was that in that particular book–‘The Mismeasure of Man’– Gould doesn’t take on Wilson and the sociobiologists.
Noah: Mike’s cartoon is a valid response to the crap he’s put up with here.
‘It’s obvious that biology influences the psyche’– well, Gawd dayum, you finally admitted it. That we don’t know HOW this influence works is no denial of its existence, though.
The human brain is probably the most complex ordered system in the entire universe. It’s affected by environment, culture, genes, the expression of genes, the body, and consciousness.
Look, I’m 57 years old. I’ve known a lot of men and a lot of women. They are not interchangeable.
How much this is due to cultural factors, and how much to somatic and/or genetic ones, I wouldn’t venture to explore.
But you are caricaturing Mike’s position: he hasn’t said, as you implied, that women and men are genetically programmed robots.
Within our limits, we humans are individuals, and capable of transcending these limits: it’s part of what being human is about.
(Aside to Anja: there’s a French proverb applicable to you — “Heureusement que le ridicule ne tue pas.”)
“How much this is due to cultural factors, and how much to somatic and/or genetic ones, I wouldn’t venture to explore.”
Ah, good. So you didn’t start blathering about silverback gorillas and harems. I just imagined that.
Mike’s position is a caricature. I’ll agree with that.
Just weighing in to randomly suggest that validating endless promiscuity may be something with real objective problems, mostly for the people involved. Now, I acknowledge that many problems would certainly be somewhat alleviated by legalizing prostitution (along with pretty much all nonviolent offenses), but it really is worth noting that not many bright people– queer, misogynist, etc. (certainly those aren’t mutually exclusive categories)– aren’t willing to say, for fear of getting lumped in with boneheaded ideological abstinence/coerced celibacy, and completely evil sexuality retraining. What if we thought about promiscuity being something that was worth discouraging? Despite (perhaps precisely because) it is “against nature?”
Well, the problem then is, what does that mean practically, in terms of discouraging promiscuity? Do we pass laws against pornography? You run into first amendment problems, and also with the issue that the sexuality that tends to get most censored is that which isn’t mainstream. Do we look for social stigma? That tends to make things worse, not better, for sex workers, I think. Do we make divorce more difficult, and/or level fines for adultery or some such? The first has historically not been ideal for women and could arguably make abuse situations hard to deal with; the latter seems like it would require an enforcement structure that would be both intrusive and unworkable.
It’s sort of the problem I was talking about on that Trollope thread. There’s obviously a lot of downsides to the capitalist tendency to treat sex as a commodity. But it’s hard to see what alternative you have other than restricting freedoms in ways which almost inevitably have the most oppressive impact on marginalized groups. I love Andrea Dworkin to death, but her practical anti-porn crusades had effects which were probably basically all bad.
I don’t know. Marx and Freud and Jesus and all sorts of influential people have had some pretty spotty long-term results with their noble aims. I already said I think legalizing prostitution may decrease negative results of promiscuity, just like lifting Prohibition ended some bad aspects of the alcohol business, like people getting shot in booze-fueled gang wars.
The question of putting morality into practice is not a small issue, and it may be possible that the best way to get teenagers to stop fornicating is to tell them repeatedly how awesome it is. Marginalized groups pretty much never benefit from any legal prohibitions other than those specifically and carefully designed to protect marginalized groups. I can’t help you with all that.
I mean, I can talk about it. But Looking at capitalism and saying “this is liberating.” is only true in the sense of big-picture equality. It isn’t true in the sense of allowing groups to sustain themselves autonomously. People should know that when they are extolling the glory of sex, they are truly touting the libidinal economy that is our most central and incontrovertible social fact.
But is eroding any possible moral line actually liberating? Nietzsche thought so. I beg to differ.
Yeah, I don’t like Nietzsche. I just read Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, and he is a contemptible Nazi.
My problem with capitalism is always, geez this is horrible…but I don’t really know what is better. I don’t think prostitution is in general especially liberating for anyone ( though some johns and some prostitutes may experience it as liberating to some degree, of course.) But It’s not really clear how you would go about reducing it in ways that didn’t make matter worse.
Well, you have to change how people think about things, which means people have to just start thinking about things differently. They have to make up their minds, and have viable alternative paradigms at hand.
In general I think that means getting people who have different points of view on an issue, which often means (when you’re not dealing with contemptible Nazis) building bridges between those people to show them what they have in common, despite, usually, being somewhat right about different aspects of a problem, for different reasons.
Noah, I really appreciate your spot-on defenses of my positions, but I cannot for the life of me understand what you see in Andrea Dworkin. Of course, like most trans feminists I tend to think of all radical feminists as Beelzebub in the form of a lesbian ranting about the Sacred Goddess Energy that flows through the MoonBlood of every Womyn, and about how trans women lack said Sacred MoonBlood Goddess Energy and are Secret Evil Cultural Imperialists/Rapists and Really Men and should all be shredded and sacrificed to Diana – oh, and trans men are self-hating butches in denial, don’t forget! I know that Dworkin wasn’t Mary Daly or Janice Raymond, and I of course sympathize with her hatred for patriarchal sexual violence and coercion on a very basic level, but really, what do you see in her?
I very much identify as sex-positive, but for me, sex positivity is about healing our cultural and personal wounds around sexuality. It’s about finding ways for us to engage in more communicative, powerful, personally fulfilling sexuality, honoring each other’s sexual needs as human beings instead of based on vicious hierarchies that favor a very narrow cast of types and shame people who are too large or small, disabled, trans, have the wrong skin color, the wrong kind of genitals, the wrong gender, the wrong kind of psychology or beliefs, and so on. It means feeling safe in our own skins, acting in a safety-conscious manner, and overcoming guilt and around healthy sexual activity – not just fucking a lot for its own sake. Some people *are* highly sexual, and that’s fine; others are less sexual, or asexual. That’s fine too. And yeah, some folks really enjoy making porn and doing sex work, within healthy, safety-conscious and respectful conditions. It’s certainly not for everyone, but the people I know of who do that are queers who do it because they want to see an alternative to the fairly disgusting aspects of capitalist/profit-driven porn. They don’t have a whole lot to do with the crass, juvenile sort of sexuality that takes up so much of our cultural space.
So yeah, there are people who I *do* view as frankly sexually immoral, and polyamorous queer feminists who work at women-owned collective sex shops and make kinky porn ain’t it.
Anja, this gives me an opportunity to…provide gratuitous links!
Andrea Dworkin and twilight!
Andrea Dworkin and Shivers!
In the event that you (very reasonably) don’t want to read those…the things about Dworkin I like are her really uncompromising pessimism coupled with her radical utopian vision. She’s very smart and looks at things in unexpected ways — and she’s really, really unimpressed with liberalism’s claims to be making the world better for women.
I found it hard to believe that she’d be against transexuality…and sure enough, she appears to have argued explicitly against binary sexuality.
If you haven’t, you might read her book “Intercourse”? Or you could start with her intellectual mentor Shulamith Firestone’s book “The Dialectic of Sex” which has less of the things that might make you nervous about Dworkin.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Your eagerness to tar all feminism because someone disagreed with you does little to help your case.
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I’m hardly attacking all feminism; I’ve been a feminist (though hardly a “party-line” one) since 1970 (a tip of the hat to “The Female Eunuch”), probably before a lot of the people here were born. But this is nuance-free thinking we’re dealing with here.
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Evolutionary psych is mostly bullshit…There are no studies, I don’t believe, which back up your claim that women are biologically programmed to be more moralistic than men.
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Pure and simple statistics make it blatantly obvious that men are vastly more likely to commit rape, sexual abuse, robbery, murder (not to mention starting wars and genocide) than women. Take a look at reality instead of Theory…
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It’s really frustrating to see people who know next to nothing about science…
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This from the chap who said, “Males having harems rather than women could, just possibly, have something to do with social patriarchy rather than the fact that we’re somehow all programmed to act like moose,” thus dismissing that human behavior could derive from animal behavior.
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…your countless brain-scans, hormone studies, and other nonsense are, precisely, nonsense, and that scientists have very little idea of how hormones and brain function connect with actual human behavior. Our understanding of human minds is very, very rudimentary.
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In your own mind, maybe.
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… that we’re programmed to do this or that according to gender — is really not supported by anything but the fantasies of ignoramuses eager to inscribe social realities onto nature.
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Yeah, our gender has NOTHING to do with our behavior. It’s all “social realities.” And you use “programmed” to push the false impression that I’m arguing that humans are simply biological robots, utterly helpless before the onslaughts of hormones and evolution.
But, gee, what about when nature — as shown by animal actions — displays behavior which reinforces beliefs about sexual stereotyping? When males tend to be more aggressive, females more involved with caring for the young?
I guess we just dismiss any studies showing that as “complete bullshit.”
And, of course there is room for variation within groups; for instance, my wife and I see procreation as an utterly incomprehensible bit of financial suicide and self-imposed enslavement. Were anatomy TOTALLY destiny, we’d have been crankin’ out the kids. There are even…
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Sex Role Reversals Common in Wild Kingdom
Among promiscuous African topi antelopes on the savannah, the battle of the sexes runs in reverse—females aggressively compete for mates, while the males play hard to get.
Such role reversals more common in the animal kingdom than currently thought. ..
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http://www.livescience.com/7426-sex-role-reversals-common-wild-kingdom.html
(How much y’wanna bet that somebody who totally dismisses whatever scientific studies don’t fit his beliefs, utterly embraces those which do, even if they’re not any more comprehensive or carefully done?)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The biological fact that most defines humans is language.
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Right; because animals are completely incapable of using verbalizations to communicate with each other. And anything which says otherwise is “bullshit.” Such as…
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Con Slobodchikoff at Northern Arizona University…has found that prairie dog colonies have a communication system that includes nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They can tell one another what kind of predator is approaching — man, hawk, coyote, dog (noun) — and they can tell each other how fast it’s moving (verb). They can say whether a human is carrying a gun or not…
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Much more, at http://www.grandin.com/inc/animals.in.translation.ch6.html
That’s pretty great that you’re willing to engage the idea of sexual immorality, Anja. And once you andorse the concept of a line (since obviously, to me anyway, sex itself is very very far from bad or icky or perverse in and of itself) the question is just where to draw it, and why.
But I would perhaps call myself sexuality-positive, rather than sex-positive. Since I think a great deal of how people spend their time is involved with dealing with anxieties around sexuality, I can certainly see how safe-space sex shops could be considered a coping mechanism. But it pretty literally reifies that link between libidinally-fueled narcissism and safely-surveillanced boiopower capitalism that is the one aspect of Firestone and the “gay utopia” (which I support and want to reform and live in) that makes me deeply uneasy.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I think rape is much more about patriarchy than about biological sex.
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So, when animals rape each other, or when a male puts himself in a “fuckable” position before a stronger one to show his submissiveness, the Patriarchy Made Them Do It!
That demonizing usage of “Patriarchy” irritates. In particularly women-oppresive societies, are fathers that close to their sons, carefully nurturing them to keep women under their thumbs? Why, the brief-lived Men’s Movement arose because, among other things, connections between fathers and sons in our culture was so frequently piss-poor, or missing altogether. Howcum right-wing women in positions of power — Margaret Thatcher, Ann Coulter, get along just fine in this “Patriarchal” system? Would not calling it something like a Dominator/Exploiter System more accurate?
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If social factors (like guns) can so easily overcome actual physical biological differences, why do you assume that those social factors are secondary to psychological factors which certainly can’t be measured or quantified with the accuracy of body mass?
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Why do you assume that psychological factors have nothing to do with biological ones?
And to further complicate the issue, psychological factors can influence the biological. For instance, prolonged emotional stress causing changes in the structure of the brain, harm to the rest of the body…
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Biological determinism is not science. Nothing you’ve said has anything to do with science.
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Nothing I’ve said — or the serious, substantial studies I’ve cited — is arguing that because of biology, humans are total robots, which MUST obey their programming. Simply that biology is a powerful influence over our behavior. Not the only one, but pretty damn domineering nonetheless.
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And, yeah, Mike, I’d call that cartoon sexist.
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Because to point out that a feminist would misinterpret something they heard as an attack upon women is an attack against women. Right. (And I was actually careful to pick a photo of a woman who, though pissed off, would not look grotesque…)
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Mike’s position is a caricature. I’ll agree with that.
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In your own mind; in the same fashion the scientist’s statement is distorted by the misperception of the feminist.
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Bert Stabler says:
…What if we thought about promiscuity being something that was worth discouraging? Despite (perhaps precisely because) it is “against nature?”
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Problem is that the two genders, in general, have such different attitudes. As a group, women are far less likely than males to go around screwing anything that will sit still long enough.
Is it “biological determinism” to point out that females are somewhat more likely to be the ones getting pregnant and stuck raising the young, while males can just “come and go”? Thus encouraging the former to be more serious about “committed relationships”?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Well, the problem then is, what does that mean practically, in terms of discouraging promiscuity? Do we pass laws against pornography? You run into… the issue that the sexuality that tends to get most censored is that which isn’t mainstream.
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As feminists found out when they joined forces with the Religious Right to pass anti-pornography legislation. And gee, the places that got busted most were those with gay erotica…the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again!
Alas, lesbians into S/M and such rough stuff often found their porn banned by other lesbians. (Some feminist bookstores compromising by putting them in a section labeled “Controversial.”)
One such comments:
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….I repudiate politically correct lesbian lovemaking. P. C. lesbian lovemaking, for the uninitiated, consists of the following: Two women lie side by side (tops or bottoms are strictly forbidden—lesbians must be non-hierarchical); they touch each other gently and sweetly all over their bodies for several hours (lesbians are not genitally/orgasm oriented, a patriarchal mode). If the women have orgasms at all—and orgasms are only marginally acceptable because, after all, we must be process, rather than goal, oriented—both orgasms must occur at exactly the same time in order to foster true equality and egalitarianism. (I’m not kidding about this orgasm stuff: A “feminist” critique of a paper I published in the journal Women and Therapy included the charge that my thinking was “male-identified” because I talked about treating anorgasmic lesbians. The critic charged that orgasms shouldn’t be important to lesbians, only to men. I’ve given up a lot for the lesbian-feminist movement, but this is where I draw the line.)…
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http://www.ipgcounseling.com/lesbian_theory_1.html
Hoo boy! So genitally/orgasm-oriented sex, is “patriarchal”?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…the things about Dworkin I like are her really uncompromising pessimism coupled with her radical utopian vision…
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Oy! The fields of history are littered with the physical and emotional victims of “radical utopian visions,” from cults to dictatorships…
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Alex Buchet says:
I suppose the Stephen Gould book you refer to is ‘The Mismeasure of Man’. I recommend it. But it doesn’t deal with the modern proponents of sociobiology that have people riled up, such as E.O.Wilson….
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Looking up info on “Mismeasure,” I heartily agree with Gould’s attacks upon “The Bell Curve”-type crapola such as…
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…the claim that intelligence is highly heritable and that the social environment has little influence on the abilities of individuals…that IQ was not much influenced by the environment….that differences in intelligence between whites and blacks in the United States were innate and ineradicable…that [a 19th-century] study of differences across race in cranial capacity showed that whites have larger brains than people of other races, particularly those of African ancestry…
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http://monthlyreview.org/2006/02/01/debunking-as-positive-science
Pernicious malarkey which some folks then use to smear far more recent and sophisticated studies which are nuanced and complex.
Mike, I’m sorry, I’m not reading all that.
I will say though, that while I not infrequently find your opinions both moronic and evil, I’m always impressed by your personal ability to keep your temper and generally behave with grace. I look forward to our next go round.
Bert, Dworkin is definitely Firestone plus strong ideas about sexual immorality. Have you read Intercourse yet?
Dworkin was a far more subtle and many-sided figure than she was painted as in the media. I was surprised to learn that she was conflicted, for example, about laws criminalising pornography. She apparently decided at last that she was against them, much as she loathed porn.
Alex, really? I didn’t realize she changed her mind. That’s pretty cool. You don’t have a cite by any chance, do you?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, I’m sorry, I’m not reading all that.
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Curses! Foiled again… (Skulks off to his underground Fortress of Argumentativeness…)
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I will say though, that while I not infrequently find your opinions both moronic and evil…
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Not intelligent and evil? (A single tear runs down…)
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I’m always impressed by your personal ability to keep your temper and generally behave with grace. I look forward to our next go round.
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Well, thank you, And, sorry about bringing “argumentfests” into HU…
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Alex Buchet says:
Dworkin was a far more subtle and many-sided figure than she was painted as in the media…
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Yes, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that…
I absolutely need to read me some Dworkin. I love that essay about Dworkin and Twilight you linked to. If you have Intercourse, I’ll borrow it (snicker snort).
And I should mention… I do believe in gender as well as sexuality, just not what is awkwardly dubbed “gender-normativity.” I don’t want to deny that animals have gender, since I think one’s gender is in the body as much as the culture, but gender is always about power, and differentiations based on power. As C.S. Lewis says, there are male natural phenomena (mountains) and female (oceans), and we are all female in relation to God. But what do you do with feminism then?
The answer is that feminism is about queering gender.
I can lend you Right-Wing Women; I lack Intercourse.
Andrea Dwokin’s books — the double entendres that keep on giving.
I was vaguely aware of Shulamith Firestone being in some way pro-trans; I didn’t know that she was considered the mentor of Dworkin. I was also aware of Dworkin being more complex than commonly portrayed; however, her wild mischaracterizations of kinky sex in her famous Congressional testimony against porn are enough to make me think that perhaps she wasn’t complex enough in places where complex outlooks are important.
Science or no, I’m really interested in getting beyond Manichean men-versus-women war-of-the-worlds politics. Those sorts of models fail to describe or account for the oppression I experience and see others experiencing, and in many cases actually *produce* said oppression. Whether it’s scientists or feminists doing it, gender thinking that consists of comparing the grand categories of Men and Women and pitting them against each other reifies the gender binary, promotes the continued treatment of that dualism as a bedrock distinction, one of signal importance. Such thinking collapses far too much richness and complexity into the Man and Woman categories; it sacrifices too much, and transgender people – especially non-binary trans people such as myself – get sacrificed in the process. Queer sexuality gets sacrificed, and is replaced by gay/lesbian sexuality. Individuals and the immediate social realities in which they exist get served up on the altars of these two great symbolic beasts, of Man and Woman.
I’m not anti-science per se; I just don’t think that science is our one, great tool for which all our other intellectual tools should be abandoned, and I don’t find the intellectual frameworks in which scientists seem to be doing gender-based research very useful. Maybe they will be in the future – who knows?
Bert, yeah – queering gender is certainly the project worth doing here.
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Don’t people ever get tired of the “radical utopian visions kill people” line? The established order kills a holy fuckton of people every day, and is currently eating the planet alive, which may well lead to entire human populations dying from resource-starvation, resource wars and enormous natural disasters; the only reasons we’re not all screaming with rage about it and trying to tear the whole damned thing down are that (a) we’ve internalized a whole lot of pro-system logic and justifications over the course of our lives, making all the downsides seem “normal” and “just the price of doing business” and (b) nobody seems to be exactly sure what the way forward is anymore. Yesterday’s Great (and largely failed) Movement was Marxism: big, unified goal, with lots of internalized squabbles about how to get it done, and with some really nasty outcomes. Today’s Great Movement is alter-globalization, which is largely a big, unified reaction; now that we’ve seen how power dynamics can turn Marxist revolutions into right-wing faux-“socialist” dictatorships, we’re not all so eager to be unified around that ideal any more (no matter how appealing the basic moral case of radical socialism continues to be), but we all *know* that we don’t like enormous transnational corporate behemoths eating the poor and working-class of third-world countries for dinner, so we go out and hold mass protests against it. What do we want to replace it? Social democracy or democratic socialism, a resurgence of the union movement, another try at Marxism, libertarian/anarchist-communism, the total destruction of civilization and replacement by primitivist forms of living – it depends on who you ask, doesn’t it?
Meanwhile, the established order continues to eat the poor, hungry, people of color, people with disabilities, queer and trans folks, women, indigenous people etc. for breakfast.
Eric Hobsbawm seems to think that everything’s pretty thoroughly fucked, and that the future is likely to be mighty grim and miserable. Perhaps he’s right?
Yeah; there’s a pretty good case to be made that, at the moment at least, pragmatism is more dangerous than utopianism.
Dworkin wasn’t perfect. But she’s pretty cool; you should try reading one of her books sometime and see what you think.
Recommendation duly noted. What would be a good first read to get a feel for her? I’m guessing I would be most sympathetic to Right-Wing Women, but that might not give me such a good feel for the rest of her work.
Wouldn’t it be nice if people got more used to weighing the costs of pragmatism versus utopianism, instead of simply seeing the potential costs of utopianism and backing away?
I really like Right-Wing Women; basically it’s about why right-wing women are right in thinking that liberal men do not necessarily have their best interests at heart. The most controversial stuff is probably her discussion of abortion, which she is not so sure is a great liberating force for women.
Intercourse is really good too. I think; more theoretical less journalism-y. I like them both though.
One solid reason to think about utopianism versus pragmatism is that Americans have a reputation for being both and, I think, are generally neither. Americans really don’t like socialism, so this is probably not the place to make that happen. And frankly, socialists are generally some of the more pragmatic types, when it comes to social engineering and international affairs. Not us.
We are actually more interested in big absttact principles– Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness chief among them. I understand finding that infuriating, but those are the terms of the debate. Finance, agribusiness, and insurance (which is sort of just part of finance) are corrupt industries that the government should perhaps cease to prop up, rather than propping it up further. We can protect small businesses by not letting corporations steamroll in and out of the country without paying for the privilege of shitting all over the landscape and its sundry inhabitants. We can improve education by either enforcing desegregation or by scrapping compulsory factory schools and distributing any public money fairly in supporting literacy and vocational programs that don’t subsidize rich communities.
Really, the worst-of-all-possible-worlds mix of utopianism and pragmatism tends to be what explains most of the countless closet skeletons and endless blood on the hands of our otherwise incredibly diverse and idealistic country.
Noah you’d think with the talk of Dworkin you’d at least be familiar with Mackinnon.
Also despite your claims you can’t do research in to prostitution there’s actually an entire organisation devoted to it. Coincidentally, there’s a nice piece by Mackinnon on there.
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/mackinnon1.html
In addition, this study basically systematically disproves every claim you’ve made about prostitution as damaging myths.
link here
Hey Marcus. I didn’t say you couldn’t do research on prostitution; I said that I didn’t think you could prove that the majority of sex workers *worldwide* were sex slaves. As it turned out, it was actually easier to disprove that fairly conclusively than I thought it would be (scan up to find figures if you missed it.)
That second link isn’t to a study? It’s to a list of talking points, most of which I’ve heard before, and none of which seem especially convincing.
For example:
“FACT: All prostitution harms those in it. Legal prostitution does not protect women
in prostitution from harm.”
That’s just not a fact. There are many prostitutes who say that prostitution is not particularly harmful (you can find them saying it in Spread magazine, for instance.) You could argue percentages I guess…but if you’re actually saying *all* are damaged, then you’re claiming to know better than the women actually involved who say they weren’t. You’re insisting their victims both of men and of false consciousness. It’s condescending and ridiculous.
It also aggregates, facts, statistics and research from 5 sources.
‘ tend to think that legalization would benefit both sex workers (who could get police protection) and society (which wouldn’t be wasting resources trying to stop the unstoppable, and would have more options for regulation.) Legalization would not by any means change the fact that it’s a shitty blue collar job, though.
Legalization would also make unionization an option for sex workers, which I think would probably be a good thing.’
[Research on legal brothels in Nevada shows that legalisation does not protect
prostituted women from the violence, abuse and psychological and physical injury that
occur in illegal prostitution. In many senses the opposite might be true. A pan-European
study also found that levels of violence were high in both indoor and outdoor settings and
where brothels are regulated. In the Netherlands, where prostitution has been legal since
2000, the government is rethinking its approach as it is seeing more and more signals that
abuse of women is continuing.
Legal prostitution in the Netherlands, Nevada, and in Australia has been connected
with organized crime. Two-thirds of the legal brothels in Amsterdam’s red light district
have been closed down because it was impossible to control organized crime, according to
the mayor.]
[An argument for legalizing prostitution in the Netherlands was that it would help
end child prostitution. Yet child prostitution in the Netherlands has increased dramatically
during the 1990s. The Amsterdam-based ChildRight organization estimates that the
number of children in prostitution has increased by more than 300% between 1996 (4000
children) and 2001 (15,000 children). ]
[In Germany, the service union ver.di offered union membership to Germany’s sex
workers. They would have been be entitled to health care, legal aid, thirty paid holiday days
a year, a five-day workweek, and Christmas and holiday bonuses. Out of an estimated
400,000 sex workers, only 100 joined the union. That’s .00025% of German sex workers.
The same phenomenon (not joining prostitute unions) is true in the Netherlands.
Legalisation does not erase the stigma of prostitution and could even make women more
vulnerable because they must lose anonymity.]
These are not talking points, these are cited facts and statistics.
Since you also seem to be fine with anecdotal cases being used as evidence for an entire view, there’s also this.
‘Some
prostitution survivors have stated that it took them years after leaving prostitution to
acknowledge that prostitution wasn’t a free choice because they had to lie to themselves in
order to survive.’
And I’ve heard of Mackinnon of course! I haven’t read anything by her until now.
I like that she doesn’t want prostitution to be illegal. And I like the way she links capitalism and prostitution, and her skepticism about the language of rights and privacy. I can find common ground on all that.
The problem is the totalizing vision of prostitution. There are a lot of prostitutes who really don’t see their work as rape. There are many who do in fact work for themselves — which makes the claim that they’re enslaved really difficult to maintain without insisting on some sort of condescending and thoroughgoing false consciousness argument.
Basically McKinnon insists on seeing prostitution from the vantage point of the *most* exploited. I think there are many prostitutes who *do* work under conditions where using language like “rape” and “slavery” makes sense. But in insisting that that’s the one true experience of prostitution and erasing other folks, you end up defining prostitutes and women by their victimization. They turn into helpless slaves who need the do-gooding offices of human rights workers to save them.
I mean, just as an example…I really doubt that most prostitutes would tell you that targeting johns for prosecution would be ideal. Even people who are turning tricks for crack…I mean, they want the money. Obviously their situation is horrible and turning tricks often makes things worse rather than better in some sense…but the fact remains that if you asked them what they needed, they would say things like, probably, money, or possibly help getting off drugs, or protection, or whatever, but arresting johns probably would really not be high on the list. I guess the point is you’d say, well, we’ll get rid of the market by arresting johns…but that really hasn’t worked so well with drugs….
I don’t doubt her sincerity or her passion, and she’s smart…but it doesn’t really sway me.
What’s at stake for you, Noah? I mean, I bet if Street Hustle magazine did a survey of wealthy drug dealers, a lot of them would tell you that having a steady income is pretty great– because it is. But so what? I mean, they’re not wrong about their quality of life, and legalization would make their income a lot less risky (though perhaps smaller), but why is it so especially fabulous to sell your body for money when people who don’t answer magazine surveys really have some shitty experiences?
‘The problem is the totalizing vision of prostitution. There are a lot of prostitutes who really don’t see their work as rape. There are many who do in fact work for themselves — which makes the claim that they’re enslaved really difficult to maintain without insisting on some sort of condescending and thoroughgoing false consciousness argument.’
90% of prostitutes surveyed claim that they would like to immediately leave prostitution if they could, since they can’t, one must conclude that it is either coercion, poverty or economic need FORCING them to continue their job, since they cannot choose to leave their job that they have said THEMSELVES they would like to immediately leave, and their job is having sex with people, then it follows that they cannot choose to not have sex with people and are thus being raped. When 90% of a group are being raped and are socially powerless then yes, they are a group in need of human rights workers and the law to help them. Arguing otherwise is rape apology. Arguing for the legalization of prostitution is, as the overwhelming amount of statistics and research done by reliable sources (which you have been shown over and over again) in places that have tried it, arguing for the increased rape of children and women.
What you are doing is essentially wishy-washy hand wringing to the level of a caricature in the face of humongous amounts of evidence, it’s like arguing that beating your spouse should be legalized because some victims don’t complain or believe that what’s being done to them is wrong.
note I am specifically arguing for making it illegal and a civil rights violation to BUY sex, not sell, in case that wasn’t clear.
Well, there are obviously other ways to do legalization than that in Nevada…which Chester Brown talks about and which sounds pretty bad.
I don’t know…here’s a paper which argues that crime rates, HIV rates, and other problems are not higher in places that legalize prostitution.
This study argues that violence is normative in prostitution…but it doesn’t address legalization, as far as I can see….oh wait, there’s an interesting survey where they asked women what they needed. A vast majority said they needed to leave prostitution…but there’s a substantial minority, especially in the U.S., who seem to think legalization might be helpful.
I think this must be the report that most of that data is based on. It’s pretty convincing that the legalization attempted in the Netherlands and Australia hasn’t been effective. The conclusion is that Sweden — which appears to prosecute buyers of sex rather than the sellers, much as MacKinnon suggests, is the most effective.
“In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women
and children. The underlying rationale to reverse a legalisation approach was
that prostitution, like all forms of violence against women, constitutes a barrier to
gender equality. Since moving towards gender equality is a fundamental priority
for Sweden, logically its policy must be based on an approach that seeks to end
prostitution, rather than manage/legitimise it. ”
So basically exactly what MacKinnon wanted to do. Women are seen as victims and treated accordingly.
However…this site suggests that the Swedish model is much more controversial than that essay indicates.
For example:
Also, there appears to be a fair amount of disagreement about whether Sweden has actually reduced prostitution or whether it’s just another way of criminalizing it, with all the attendant problems.
This study has a lot of contradictory information, but it strongly suggest that the number of foreign sex workers in the Netherlands has dropped, which would indicate that legalization has had a positive impact on reducing trafficking.
And there’s this from the Economist website:
Sienna Baskin’s article there is also a pretty effective defense…and she points to New Zealand as a place where legalization seems to have been helpful in reducing violence against prostitutes.
All right, that’s all the research for the night. Thanks for pushing me on it, though Marcus; I feel like I learned stuff.
Finding opposing viewpoints on the web is actually what I do for a living, believe it or not.
“90% of prostitutes surveyed claim that they would like to immediately leave prostitution if they could, since they can’t, one must conclude that it is either coercion, poverty or economic need FORCING them to continue their job, since they cannot choose to leave their job that they have said THEMSELVES they would like to immediately leave, and their job is having sex with people, then it follows that they cannot choose to not have sex with people and are thus being raped. ”
Deciding to have sex because you have to make money is not the same as being raped, just like deciding to work at a job you hate to make money is not kidnapping. You can argue that both are immoral, or that the first is more immoral than the second; I think that’s reasonable. But I don’t think using the term “rape” helps to understand what’s going on.
I think you can make a good argument from the various data that the issue of whether or not to legalize prostitution should really be secondary to the issue of making sure prostitutes have services which allow them to leave the business if that’s what they want to do. I’m personally in favor of massive tax increases on the wealthy — and, you know, fuck it, on the middle class as well — and a much stronger social safety net, including nationalized health care and substantial welfare payments. Presumably the best way to make sure that people aren’t turning to prostitution out of poverty would be to make some sort of good faith effort to actually reduce poverty.
Also…as I think I’ve shown, the research is somewhat less clear than you’re making it out to be, and in particular the claim that criminalizing johns is very helpful seems to really not be incredibly convincing.
As just an example of the problem with using rape to describe all prostitution; that woman whose letter I reprinted above described being raped by the police. She felt she was not raped by her customers. It seems like allowing her to make that distinction is important.
“The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are at least 2.5m people in forced labour at any one time, including sexual exploitation, as a result of trafficking.”
This is a really disingenuous stat to site since the estimate of forced labor if you don’t only count trafficked people is at least 10 times that amount, and that’s specified to be a minimum, as in their most conservative estimate.
In addition that 40 million number you cited is from an article that directly disagrees with you, the same article points out that the average age of entry in to prostitution is 13.
Hey Bert. I am taking a deep breath and not returning your snark in kind.
I am happy to assume that you and Marcus are arguing in good faith. If you could extend me the same courtesy, that would be lovely.
Marcus…good point. The actual estimate of number of women in forced prostitution is 1, 390,000 though. The total of all kinds of forced labor appears to be 12 million (not 20 million.) So I’m still not seeing how you get to Alex’s claim that most women are coerced…unless I guess you use the broad definition that they’re coerced because they’d rather be doing something else, which I don’t think is a helpful way of looking at it, for reasons already discussed.
If the folks who got the 40 million number disagree with me on policy suggestions, I don’t really see how that changes the narrow point I was making here.
a) New Zealand is actually an incredibly problematic case as the laws drafted have made it impossible to find out whether prostitutes are underaged. The review committee themselves were forced to admit this.
b) The review refused to look in to trafficking within borders and declared it not human trafficking. The US State department did look in to it and found that there has been human trafficking going on.
Both underaged workers and human trafficking are the two things that go up when prostitution is legalized in every other case.
c) The only review conducted has come under a lot of flak for bias.
d) New Zealand is a minute country of 4 million people that had some of the lowest gender inequality in the world, half of the population is concentrated in two fairly small cities, it’s essentially the only place that approach might work due to the ease with which one can actually keep track of the sex workers.
Not only do the ILO have a very narrow definition of forced labour, but they admit both that their methods were very experimental and that those numbers are the absolute bare minimum because they were, “very cautious”.
‘If the folks who got the 40 million number disagree with me on policy suggestions, I don’t really see how that changes the narrow point I was making here.’
Did you miss the part where I pointed out that the source of that statistic also provided the statistic that the average age of entry in to prostitution is 13? That’s not a disagreement on policy, that’s a statement that directly disagrees with you that the majority of prostitutes have not been exploited or raped a child cannot make the choice to enter in to prostitution. India alone estimates 1.2 million child prostitutes currently exist in their country.
‘If the folks who got the 40 million number disagree with me on policy suggestions, I don’t really see how that changes the narrow point I was making here.’
Did you miss the part where I pointed out that the source of that statistic also provided the statistic that the average age of entry in to prostitution is 13? That’s not a disagreement on policy, that’s a statement that directly disagrees with you that the majority of prostitutes have not been exploited or raped a child cannot make the choice to enter in to prostitution. India alone estimates 1.2 million child prostitutes currently exist in their country.
‘that they’re coerced because they’d rather be doing something else’
This is an incredibly ignorantly privileged statement, it’s not that they’d ‘rather be doing something else’ it’s that, given the choice, they would immediately leave sex work, but they cannot due to poverty or coercion.
Some more statistics:
[62% reported having been raped in prostitution. 73% reported having experienced physical assault in prostitution. 72% were currently or formerly homeless. 92% stated that they wanted to escape prostitution immediately.]
I don’t really want to enter into the statistics battle, as I know nothing about it and don’t have the time or energy for research.
Just a little question, though:
Noah, you seem to reject wage slavery-type arguments – i.e. that having only one viable option for employment, and having to take that option no matter how terrible, is a form of forced labor – out of hand. Why is that? *If* a particular person is compelled by circumstances of one kind or another to engage in prostitution for employment, doesn’t that constitute a kind of forced sex, especially if they’re experiencing trauma or other severe negative effects as a result? If so, what’s the distinction between this kind of forced sex and forced sex that’s described with the word “rape?” Do you prefer to only describe it as rape when the survivor does so? If so, I understand your reluctance to engage in false-consciousness arguments, but perhaps you’re being reluctant to use them even when they’re appropriate?
As for how common the above scenario is, I’m not going to get into that as previously stated…
Perhaps there’s a subjective “sliding scale” of sorts from wage slavery sex, which might technically be called rape but isn’t experienced as such by the sex worker, to what might be called wage rape? I don’t know.
I do think that discussion of anti-prostitution laws as themselves violations of the consent culture required for safer and healthy sex would enrich this discussion greatly. That would include rape, sexual harassment and abuse perpetrated by police officers, as well as the fear of seeking help from the the police, the judicial system or agencies that report “criminal” behavior to the government, since doing so involves turning oneself in as a lawbreaker. This is especially the case for transgender prostitutes, as trans people tend to get mistreated (and sometimes severely abused) by cops, courts, jails, prisons, and even hospitals.
What do people think of decriminalizing prostitution, but severely punishing pimping?
‘What do people think of decriminalizing prostitution, but severely punishing pimping?’
I would also be for this.
Noah, no snark intended! I was trying to move you away from a pragmatist discussion to a moral one, that’s all. Please forgive how it apparently came off. I don’t know the power of my own unintended bile.
But I think Anja’s “wage rape” response to the false consciousness claim is an awfully good one. But I think, as always, you’re arguing a completely valid viewpoint that is worth engaging.
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Anja Flower says:
Don’t people ever get tired of the “radical utopian visions kill people” line? The established order kills a holy fuckton of people every day, and is currently eating the planet alive…
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Sure! But, aren’t Modernism, Progress, our cultural belief that capitalism and the unrestrained Free Market will make a better life for everybody, “radical utopian visions” too?
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Eric Hobsbawm seems to think that everything’s pretty thoroughly fucked, and that the future is likely to be mighty grim and miserable. Perhaps he’s right?
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Of course he’s right; the facts might as well be spelled out in blazing letters a hundred feet high, which sure don’t prevent people from seeing them.
Marcus…ha! So the ILO is basically backing up my first point…which is that quantifying this issue is very difficult and perhaps impossible.
Incidentally, I didn’t say that the majority of prostitutes hadn’t been exploited. I said they didn’t seem to be coerced from the statistics as far as I can tell. Obviously, child prostitution should not be legalized.
I figured there had to be something wrong with New Zealand….
Again, physical abuse is not a case against legalization.
Anja, I don’t reject wage slavery arguments out of hand at all. I don’t think it’s helpful to conflate it with rape (though a sliding scale might work). The reason is (a) I think it downplays actual rape (which prostitutes face as well); and (b) when you start talking about rape, you’re immediately demanding a criminal justice approach, and as you point out that as often hinders as helps. If the objections to the Swedish system hold, prosecuting johns doesn’t really improve things very much (it just tends to drive the whole business underground…though presumably you’re at least not getting the problem where prostitutes are being jailed — which would be an improvement over what we’ve got here, certainly.)
Sweden seems to prosecute pimps as well. That article suggests that Bert would like their regime, since it’s based on a clear moral vision (McKinnon’s, basically) where the goal is to eliminate prostitution, prostitution is seen as part of a system of gender inequality, and men who exploit women are subject to sanction. It seems to have several clear advantages over what we do…though it’s *not* clear that those advantages include reducing prostitution or reducing child prostitution in any significant way. Still, if the choice was between what we have at the moment and the Swedish system, I would instantly choose the Swedish system. If the choice was between Sweden and New Zealand…I think I’d be tempted to give New Zealand a try. Marcus’ insistence that it wouldn’t work here seems reasonable, but it’s not clear what other regime would work here, and it seems like it would be worth trying something that appears to have worked in a limited way somewhere.
In terms of moral arguments vs. statistics and such…I’m not averse to moral arguments per se. I guess part of the problem is that I’m not exactly sure where I fall on the moral issues at stake here. Insisting that prostitution is a matter of choice and we all should be left alone about it seems wrong (I think Marcus thinks that I actually endorse this position?) But the claim that prostitution, however it’s conducted, is automatically and always a violation of women’s rights and gender equality doesn’t convince me either.
Like I said earlier, this discussion has made me wonder if the focus on criminal justice approaches, pro or con, is really maybe the wrong way to go. It seems like the most pressing need is to provide women who want to get out with the opportunity to get out. I think changes in laws would probably be part of that, but I don’t know that they’d be the most important part. On the contrary, the Netherlands’ experience suggests that changing the laws without committing the resources to helping women creates as many problems as it solves.
Also, Marcus…could you give a cite for the problems you discuss with the New Zealand system?
Re: increases in child prostitution and trafficking under legalization…as I suspected, those are both disputed points. these folks for example argue that statistics on this issue are really questionable. (The below if from a downloadable doc on the site.)
“5. Legalization of prostitutes and decriminalization of the sex industry increases child prostitution.
Here again Ms. Raymond provides statistics, of what accuracy we can’t determine. Whether child prostitution is actually increasing or the knowledge of its occurrence is increasing is difficult to ascertain, as we have no good baseline data on its extent. APLE is strongly opposed to child prostitution. APLE asserts that adult men and women may engage in sex without fear of arrest. The existence of child prostitution and the possibility of increasing levels of it are enforcement issues, not ones of inadequate laws.”
One argument *for* legalization would be that you could better police the system. In that case you *should* find more child prostitution after than before, not because it’s increased but because the whole system is less shadowy.
I’m not rejecting out of hand the idea that there could be an increase…but the argument that the statistics are very dicey seems pretty reasonable.
Though looking around on the web is making me more inclined to think that child prostitution does rise under legalization….I haven’t seen anyone effectively refuting it, anyway.
This is a pretty convincing article claiming that legalization doesn’t work very well. They argue john’s should be forced to register and undergo std tests.
Though here’s a very positive discussion of legalization in New Zealand.
And here’s Prostitution Research making the case against New Zealand… They seem to have some good points…though I can’t imagine any situation in which they’d say that legalization was a good idea….’
Also, some of Prostitution Research’s objections seem to be along the lines of saying it’s still stigmatized (which seems fairly obvious) *and* NIMBY complaints that people are forced to live near places where prostitution exists. So on the one hand they’re saying it’s failed to remove the stigma and on the other they’re saying it’s not stigmatizing it enough. Which makes them seem a little confused.
This says prostitution in New Zealand has not increased according to official government reports, which would contradict Prostitution Research’s claim…. More details on the government report here.
You know, I never suggested that morality should be legislated. I do like the idea of punishing corporations that hire illegal immigrants instead of punishing illegal immigrants, which is sort of the analogy to pimps and prostitutes (except pimps often suffer from many of the same problems their workers do), or johns and prostitutes (I don’t know much about the socioeconomics of johns). But shit always flows downhill, as they say. Which is sort of my reason for libertarian attitudes. Although it is intriguing that, as the least regulated economy in the First World (maybe), we have more people in prison than the population of, oh, New Zealand.
So, yeah, rehab and support services for prostitutes. That sounds good, if sort of biopower-ish. Prostitution really seems so similar the illegal drug market to me (which is how I inadvertently offended Noah)– resistance needs to be local and specific and grassroots..
Noah, what I mean by “wage rape” isn’t one of those ridiculous radical feminist dilutions of the term “rape” (“there’s a transgender woman at my womyn-only music festival! I’ve been culturally raped!”), but something that really is experienced as rape-for-money, complete with the desperate desire to escape, the severe dissociation, the post-traumatic stress and other mental health effects, et cetera. Again, I don’t know how common that experience of prostitution is – I’ve certainly never had anyone tell me about an experience like that, but I’m working from a limited menu in that respect as previously stated. I tend not to think of it as a characteristic experience, but I don’t really know.
I’m certainly not calling automatically for a “criminal justice approach” once a situation is labeled “rape” – or, at least, not one in which the state forces itself upon a sex worker with the excuse of “saving” her. The state loves to be given new excuses to invade and control the lives of the marginalized and underprivileged, which is a kind of force I’m not too enthusiastic about. A survivor of wage rape should be able to choose whether to get the state involved, and should be able to terminate that involvement, keeping in mind that the agents of the state (police especially) can themselves be rapists and abusers.
Anyhow, I tend to be reflexively pro-decriminalization.
I’d like to point out how broken the ideas of prostitution as “men oppressing women” and attempting to “solve” prostitution by “helping women” are. It’s a very gender-binary approach, and is none too kind to those prostitutes who aren’t women. It also tends to sink into a “men are always abusers, women are always victims” mentality, which is hilariously untrue – I got to sit through a rather harrowing account of rape and serial sexual abuse at the hands of a lesbian radical feminist the other week, actually.
As always, I’m highly suspicious of the types of feminists who make these anti-sex work (and anti-porn) arguments; they tend to be binarists, transphobes, and in favor of various nasty and heavy-handed state interventions.
Noah, this is why I’ll probably never be on board with your love of Andrea Dworkin – as appealing as the idea of a non-transphobic radical feminist is, with a title like Pornography: Men Possessing Women, I’m not likely to be able to tolerate her for more than a few minutes. I’m sure she must view kinky sexuality as terrible awful badness, too, which makes me very ill-disposed to her ideas about sex. When it becomes apparent that a writer would consider a substantial portion of my life to be in some way evil, perverse or damaged, I tend not to be too eager to keep on reading.
Dworkin seems very immersed in a gender-binary worldview, anyhow – am I wrong in thinking that?
At least you didn’t recommend, I don’t know, Julie Bindel or Mary Daly or Germaine Greer. I would’ve been about ready to draw my pistol if you had.
One of the points I saw in one of those essays is that prostitutes will often set up appointments for other prostitutes…so anti-pimp laws can end up targeting prostitutes as well unless they’re carefully written. Basically your “shit always flows downhill” point.
I think we substitute prison for regulation in a lot of ways. We tend to use the court system for everything (i.e.; medical malfeasance, labor disputes…just lots of things.)
What’s interesting/depressing is that there’s actually a broad consensus — on this thread, in everything online I’ve looked at — that putting women in prison for being prostitutes is a really stupid idea. Everybody agrees on this. I don’t think there’s basically any argument to be made for the contrary position; it’s completely obvious to everyone that putting women in prison for prostitution is a bad idea which helps no one and causes significant harm. And yet, not only is this what our current policy is, there is as far as I can tell no actual political will of any sort for changing our current policy. there’s not even a debate about it, really. Which, like I said, is depressing.
And putting men and non-binary folks in prison for prostitution – you’re okay with that?
Snark, sure, but there’s a point to be made.
I tried to read Mary Daly once. She’s pretty intolerably stupid. And her writing sucks.
I don’t think I’ve really read Dworkin on kink…but I think her position on gender binaries is complicated and hard to pin down. She definitely thinks that sexual oppression is a rock bottom way that society is constituted, and that that is inscribed in the actual physical differences between men and women…but I think she sees that inscription as social, at least at some points. She kind of sees gender difference as impossible to overcome (which is the pessimism) but as needing to be overcome (which is the utopianism.) She definitely doesn’t have the, ra-ra, women goddess views of Mary Daly, in any case.
I think it would be worth giving her a try?
RE: the problem with condescending and helping women. I definitely hear that. One of the articles I linked to way, way up there (the Susie Bright one) noted that efforts to help women escape from trafficking were hampered by the fact that sex trafficking as conceived by the helpers didn’t seem to actually exist, at least not in the context of the Mexican border. So you get lots of money being used to essentially harass and deport the people you’re claiming to be helping.
Incidentally, I’ve been trying to track down the source for the 40 million prostitutes claim and almost every source that cites it also cites as part of the same statistics that 4 million new women and children are trafficked for prostitution a year.
‘One argument *for* legalization would be that you could better police the system. In that case you *should* find more child prostitution after than before, not because it’s increased but because the whole system is less shadowy.’
Except that the New Zealand method you endorsed actually made it harder, not easier, to police under aged prostitution.
I’m very, very skeptical of the New Zealand review. They haven’t had any independent groups verify their claims, they present very few concrete findings, mostly vague anecdotal opinions from anonymous interviews. They refuse to look in to levels of people buying prostitution, levels of child prostitution or human trafficking.
The only citation they can give criticizing Sweden is a paper from 2001 which aggregates information from even older papers, written less than one year after the law came to effect. Even at the time of the New Zealand review that paper was 6 years old. They also lie about the results of that paper, claiming that it found no decrease in the amount of people visiting prostitutes, when the only thing remotely like that in the paper is a brief mention that a single outreach group that offers counselling and help for people who purchase sex hasn’t statistically lost or gained many members.
No, I’m not okay with that. Snark and point taken.
What about the David Feingold article cited above? He seems to say that there are several studies that suggest problems with the Swedish model? Or does he not seem credible to you?
It’s not the “ra-ra, woman goddess” garbage I’m concerned about so much as the “kill teh menz!” and “burn teh tranz in fire!” parts. I absolutely cannot stand “saykrid mewnblud uv teh womyn-gawdis” types (or “wombmoonies”), but it’s the godawful, clunking, vag-worshippin’ ideas of gender that these people have (“Yay vaginas! Booo ‘male-to-constructed-female transsexuals’!”) that really get my blood boiling, as they usually end up not just in erasure of my own identity but in, you know, casual advocacy for my death.
Which is always fun for the whole family.
I’ll concede that *bodily difference* is a rock-bottom way in which humanity is constructed, not to say that it couldn’t one day be changed – although, short of brain uploading, I can’t see why it would be as long as division of extra-mental labor is in place. I’m afraid that I’m one of those people who views the conventions of physical sex as significantly socially constructed, though, so if one draws it all back to physical difference, one must at least concede that the concept of “sex” is not the same as that of physical difference, and that physical difference is very complicated terrain indeed and is itself constantly changing and subject to social pressure.
Isn’t gender annoying? Perhaps I’m in a position to find it especially tiring, but really, isn’t it? On my bad days, I find myself sympathizing with gender-abolitionist types – which is a sin in my circles, but really… Gah.
I mean, I don’t think Dworkin would disagree with any of that — not even the frustration at the end. (Maybe especially not with the frustration at the end.)
I think the woman goddess stuff is where some of the antipathy to trans people comes from, isn’t it?
It’s the essentialism (or weird, awkward hard constructionism-essentialism combo thingy) that does it. The WombMoonie crap is just one godawful aspect of it – particularly heinous in that it moves Female Essence into the realm of religion and thereby removes it from any tempering influences that might sway it as social theory. That’s why many of the very worst feminist transphobes are Goddess Power types.
‘In terms of moral arguments vs. statistics and such…I’m not averse to moral arguments per se. I guess part of the problem is that I’m not exactly sure where I fall on the moral issues at stake here. Insisting that prostitution is a matter of choice and we all should be left alone about it seems wrong (I think Marcus thinks that I actually endorse this position?) But the claim that prostitution, however it’s conducted, is automatically and always a violation of women’s rights and gender equality doesn’t convince me either.’
Incidentally Mackinnon doesn’t actually believe this, she argues that the amount of prostitution that doesn’t fall under gender imbalanced systems and rights violations, that is not entered in to while prostitute is a minor and thus unable to reasonably be considered making a choice is so statistically small, unreliable and confined to privileged groups that it’s overwhelmed by the huge amounts of harm done to vulnerable women, children and men and can’t really be considered significant for the purposes of determining the effects of prostitution (she also doesn’t specify that it applies only to women and is in fact partly responsible for the term ‘gender crime’ being used to replace ‘sex crime’ and for bringing a variety of crimes done to males and queer gendered peoples under that heading).
“5. Legalization of prostitutes and decriminalization of the sex industry increases child prostitution.
Here again Ms. Raymond provides statistics, of what accuracy we can’t determine. Whether child prostitution is actually increasing or the knowledge of its occurrence is increasing is difficult to ascertain, as we have no good baseline data on its extent. APLE is strongly opposed to child prostitution. APLE asserts that adult men and women may engage in sex without fear of arrest. The existence of child prostitution and the possibility of increasing levels of it are enforcement issues, not ones of inadequate laws.”
This doesn’t really say anything about child prostitution statistics, all it says is that this group failed to determine the accuracy of the statistics, not that the statistics are unreliable. They then go off on an entirely unbacked tangent with no support cited.
Now that I’ve actually tracked down Feingold’s essay the main problem is that he doesn’t actually mention what independent surveys they were, cite them or give any way to check his claim.
In fact, the only independant studies I’ve tracked down claim the opposite of his claims.
[In 2008 data appeared on a study of prostitution across the Nordic region by the Nordic Gender Institute (NIKK), including work done by several authors from the different Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden). The most visible effect of the Swedish law according to the data presented seemed to be that since the law came into effect less men reported purchasing sex and sex workers were less visible. Social workers reported a gradual decline in involvement over a ten year period and more use of technology. It was unclear how much of this change could be attributed to the law itself. The 1995 Swedish government commission (SOU 1995:15) had estimated that there were 2500-3000 women working in prostitution in Sweden, among whom 650 were on the streets. In contrast, in the 2008 NIKK report estimates show there are approximately 300 women in street prostitution, and 300 women and 50 men who used the internet (indoor prostitution). Similar data from Denmark, where prostitution appeared much more acceptable, obtained by comparable methods, show there are at least 5567 persons visibly in prostitution among whom 1415 were on the streets. Compared to Denmark where purchase of sex is legal, Sweden’s prostitution population then seems to be only a tenth even though Denmark only has a population of 5.5 million while Sweden has 9.3.
In Norway with 4.9 million people it was estimated that there were 2654 women of whom 1157 where on the street in 2007 (among those not on the street in Norway, the numbers were based on those who sought support from social agencies, or who’s advertisements where found on the internet or in a paper) which is over 4 times compared to Sweden’s numbers and over 8 times more per capita. Furthermore, the number of men reporting the experience of purchasing sex in the national Swedish population samples seems to have dropped from 12.7% to 7.6% from 1996 to 2008. No respondents in the latest survey published in 2008 reported they increased, or that they started purchasing sex outside of Sweden, nor changed into purchasing sex in “non-physical” forms. This 2008 survey, which obtained responses from 2500 men and women between 18 and 74, is now also published in English.]
(Did I snark? I didn’t intend to, I apologise if I did.)
I also apologize for the amount of times I managed to use the word claim in one sentence there.
The clarification on MacKinnon is helpful…but there does seem to be an awful lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that there are a significant number of prostitutes out there who don’t see prostitution the way MacKinnon does. Her response is to essentially wave her hand and say that none of those people matter for reason x, y, or z. Practically, that’s not much different than just insisting they don’t exist altogether.
This is a fairly balanced article, which gives some of the pros and cons on the Sweden law.
I agree that the response to the child prostitution increase under legalization is not especially strong. I think they’re claiming that the baseline data is not very good, so the statistics are flawed — that is, they can’t determine whether the statistics hold because the studies themselves don’t provide sufficient information. But yes, the second part of the response seems to be more of a distraction than a real answer to the question at hand.
I wonder if part of what is happening in Sweden is that the sex work is moving elsewhere in Europe? It seems like that wouldn’t necessarily happen in the U.S….
Still, I think you’ve at least provisionally convinced me that the Swedish model would probably be the thing to try for in the U.S. I’m not entirely sure that it’s working quite as well as some people are claiming…but it seems like it would have to reduce police violence against prostitutes, and it would keep prostitutes out of prison, both of which would be major improvements. It also seems like it would be a lot more feasible politically than would legalization….
Did anyone mention that Sweden has maybe the highest standard of living on earth? That might affect something. But I’m happy for them if less people are being locked up for nonviolent offense.
Noah, I know it’s on our highly nonviolent Gay Utopia blog, but– who is that woman who writes about gayness (and thus gender) being NOT 100% constructed?As pro-queer-trans-everything as I am, certainly we all know the danger of the “it’s just their choice” ideology.
Are you talking about Julia Serano?
I actually think that, regardless of statistics and current realities on the ground, the utopian case in favor of prostitution and sex work generally is very strong; that is, I *do* think that a person has a right to determine the uses of their own body, and I know that sex work *can* be done in a way that isn’t abusive, traumatizing, coercive etc. and can actually be empowering. Sex workers can serve as emotional healers, and provide a service that can be very valuable indeed to their clients, and not just a cheap thrill or a way of taking out misogynist anger (although there are plenty of those people around too, I’m sure). In a better world, I think sex work and prostitution specifically would still have a function, though that function might be a bit different from what it is now; the question for me is whether that’s an ideal that can be moved towards by the substantial majority of prostitutes and sex workers generally. I think it can and has been attained in some places here and there; of course, there are also successful anarchist collectives here and there, which gives me hope but doesn’t necessarily prove that the rest of the world will be so organized any time soon. Regardless, sex-positive, worker-positive and feminist sex work and pornography does exist, and I think is something to be treasured and supported. What that means for, I don’t know, streetwalkers in Thailand, I couldn’t say.
I guess I’m thick-headed or naîf– but I’m still trying to puzzle out why, when Mike Hunter criticises feminist extremists he’s a fascist creep, while when Anja Flowers does the same thing she’s an enlightened sage.
(Both according to Flowers, enabled by everyone else.)
“Feminist extremists?” Honey, I’m a radical. I’m just a different *kind* of radical, thanks.
Did anyone accuse Mike of supporting Franco or Mussolini? If so, I wasn’t aware.
Also, my last name has but one, lonely flower in it; I am not a full bouquet. “Anja Flower,” not “Anja Flowers.”
Have you noticed that my criticisms of second wave radical feminism come from a completely different angle than Mike’s? Perhaps that has something to do with it.
Also, who said I was enlightened or a sage?
Oh and FFS my pronouns are gender-neutral – “when Anja Flower does the same thing *ze’s* an enlightened sage.”
I’ll not let you dictate my language, thank you. If I do adopt a neutral pronoun, it won’t be “ze”, either.
Your approach to feminism is ‘eat my cake and have it.’
NO. You don’t get it. MY pronouns are gender-neutral, to reflect MY gender. You do not own my pronouns, and you do not get to decide what they are. If you think otherwise, take your bigoted self elsewhere and harass someone else, Alex.
At the risk of being insensitive, don’t you think that it’s a bit much to expect everyone you encounter to have to read a series of books before knowing how to address you?
I have been reading along with this conversation and watching everybody call everybody else a jerk. But my mind goes white when I see that “ze” stuff. It’s really really hard to deal with self-assigned titles. Only some people are on board with them anyway. Some trans folks want to be “zim,” some want to be “him,” it’s a bit unreasonable to think of anyone who is not up to speed on the philosophy behind your personal identification terminology as a “bigot.”
If I am wrong, I apologize to any trans folks I may be offending–but this sort of thing is way over a lot of people’s heads. I don’t particularly understand the stuff I read from a lot of genders studies people because they seem to sincerely think that these esoteric ideas are immediately apparent.
I’m sorry! But really though, “ze” is not what’s happening in the streets.
Anja wasn’t telling Alex that he should have known already, I don’t think. Ze was telling him what ze preferred so he could use it in future.
It’s a little tricky, and I’ll probably slip up on occasion. But I don’t think it’s all that difficult. It’s just like remembering someone’s name; it’s politeness.
I think everybody had stopped calling everybody else a jerk and we’d gotten to a fairly low-key place until Alex decided he wanted to be trollish again.
As far as the point about prostiution being fundamentally okay or affirming or something, I guess this is where I part ways with Anja. I appreciate nearly all of what xe has had to say, especially about exploitation, state intrusion, and personal autontomy.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that the (semi-literal) bottom line with gay utopianism is so often (as Mike suggests) utopian capitalism. Shrink-wrapped corpses with authenticity-engineered pleasures being pumped into their private consumption bubbles is just not be vision of the ideal community.
It’s not that someone else has more “rights” over a body than the brain that randomly happens to inhabit that body, it’s that everyone’s choices affect everyone else. And running a high-end college-educated brothel may be really no more harmful than helping to gentrify a neighborhood with a cleverly-titled gastro-pub, but it’s not necessarily positive or even neutral, except insofar as its larger irrelevance is mostly harmless.
Not intended as any slight on the communities Anja represents– I just have a pretty crazy vision of queer energy going into something transcendentally world-changing, rather than the kind of mundane stuff most other demographics (especially mine) waste their (our) time with. Honestly, that’s really one of my main dreams, and it might make me a little bit of an asshole.
But in the real world people are never going to know that.
Raising consciousness is good but how is this practically applicable in day to day life?
It isn’t like I’m going to start calling people zim and stuff. In reality, people tend to be referred to as he and she. It’s unfortunate that our ancient language doesn’t have leeway for other options, but it’s pretty hard to imagine that there’s a case for getting mad that people haven’t instantly adopted a newly minted term which many/most people don’t have personal need for.
This is not to slam trans folks. Honestly! I don’t want to be seen as minimalizing people’s value. But rewiring an entire language and culture takes more work than some would like to believe.
Keep in mind I was being disproportionately angry towards Alex because Alex was trolling and being an insensitive, entitled asshole.
I understand that on a conceptual or theoretical level, nonbinary gender is difficult for a lot of cisgender and binary-gender people to understand. I’m not asking everyone around me to read Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, just to pronoun me appropriately. That concept in itself, I think, is fairly simple; men are addressed as “he,” and women as “she” – people who are not men or women should be addressed as something other than “he” or “she.” It can be a little awkward, but I’m okay with just about every gender-neutral pronoun I’ve run into with the exception of the singularly demeaning “it” – you can even make ’em up on the fly, I don’t care. The “xe” you just used works fine!
I already have to use “she” with strangers, people on the street and people I don’t feel safe around, as well as my family, so I don’t think it’s that outrageous.
Keep in mind also that for many trans people, being mispronouned is a trigger – it hurts, or even triggers post-traumatic stress. I’m relatively tough in that way, but the wrong misprounouning at the wrong time from the wrong person, or cumulative mispronouning, can really hurt pretty badly. There’s a reason why trans people tend to be sensitive about it.
I’d love to hear about this vision of yours, Bert! :D I certainly think that something better than a liberated commodity culture of sex is out there to be found.
I’ve…been trying to figure out what I think about the utopian vision of prostitution. Prostitutes as healers kind of triggers my aversion to New Age…and while I’ve heard sex workers talk about their jobs in terms of empowerment, it’s hard to see how that empowerment is outside of a fairly straightforward capitalist paradigm in most instances. That is, it’s empowering to have money — and that’s not illusory. It really is empowering to have money. Sex workers are clearly better off if they’re Ben Franklin than they are if they’re victims. But it’s been a long time since Ben Franklin was a revolutionary.
On the other hand…expecting marginalized communities to make up for our sins in whatever way is pretty dicey, as Bert says
Currently a lot of queer energy is going into marriage, which I think is actually pretty inspiring and utopian in a lot of ways (though I know a lot of queer people have mixed feelings about it.)
Okay…so Alex trolled Anja and Anja trolled back…could we please maybe stop that now? Rather than having some sort of horrible flame war? Would it help if I begged?
Mixed? How’zabout negative? “Negative” works as a label for my feelings about the enormous, exclusive, heroic-proportions push for marriage at the expense of, you know, everything else. Seeing my local queer/trans mental health and medical clinics close while HRC holds eleventy-billion-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinners to push their conservagay BS? Yeah, I think “negative” works to describe that feeling.
To be clear, I think that in a utopian environment, what sex workers are and do would be substantially transformed by way of being in an other-than-capitalist framework. I mean my ideas of utopia (while still not fully gelled at this point) involve, ya know, personal exchange and gift economies and mutualism, the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit. Certainly such people would be something other than what we currently think of as “prostitutes” and “strippers” or as “sex workers” generally,
I know the “sex as healing” thing can be very gooey, yes, but that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue.
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I, Anja Flower, hereby promise to Noah and everyone else to ignore Alex Buchet for the rest of this thread and for the forseeable future, so help me MoonGawdess.
But again; people can’t be expected to assume and assume correctly whether a person doesn’t identify as what gender they appear to be. What you’re saying makes sense in limited, personal or familiar groups and communities, but if I’m a cashier, what do you expect me to say?
Appearances get stranger with strangers: some women with what are considered “masculine features” still strongly identify as female, some men with “feminine features” strongly identify as male. And it appears that in daily life, this is what the common occurrence is:
It’s a tricky row to hoe; there was a thing that said that at a distance, the first thing that humans recognize is a person’s sex. These concepts of transidentity (is that right) are…not new to human societies but not apparent on a reflexive level for most of us. I really hate to offend people even though I seem to do it often.
I think that many people can understand transgender as a concept where “he” becomes “she” or “she” becomes “he.” But the idea of new, nonbinary genders is a little bit outside of the average, everyday perception of the world.
I need to create an official HU oath, I think. Maybe we could swear by Wonder Woman or something.
HRC is largely useless in every respect, isn’t it? Andrew Sullivan hates them with a white hot passion, i know…and there can’t be too many things that you and Andrew Sullivan agree on.
The push for marriage is certainly conservative. I’m not against conservatism though in itself. Sort of moving off of what Bert said…I think marriage is actually a way to see sex as not about individual happiness or economic trade, but rather about commitment and trust and family. Having so many queer people insist on its importance, and insisting that their love and relationships be recognized in that context seems really powerful to me…and maybe does reshape the institution itself as less patriarchal. It changes how we think about husbands and wives and families in a way that seems really…well, like I said, utopian. It’s conservative, but it’s radical too.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just gushy about it because I’m married. I like being married. I feel strongly that other people should be allowed to be married if they want.
Yeah– the gay marriage thing for me is sort of like the racial integration thing- I thought black nationalism was more radical than civil rights for a while, and so i was like– sure, screw whitey (of course I’m white), do revolutionary Afrocentric self-education in the ghetto! Which would be great if it were a viable option. Ditto the Shulamith Firestone inchoate libido-clan contract in which some diverse group of ages and genders can all have some kind of shared hive partnership. You know, like wife-swapping with underage and elderly people too.
But black nationalism gives white racists what they want, just like queer marriage-haters give homophobes what they want. This is our shared public culture, and it needs to change and improve. “Love it or leave it” is a fairly fascist sentiment on the face of it, but it does spell out two options. And to love it means to not give up on the 99% of everyone who isn’t just like you. People can learn to say “ze” and not “fa**ot,” “black” and not “ni**er,” and people can stop being surprised that reality fails to automatically make them feel better about themselves (I mean, as a white man I am surprised how little that happens, but teaching in an all-black low-income high school gives me a good whiff of ambient hatred), and maybe everyone can create shared institutions that aren’t niche markets or normality factories.
Darryl – creating cultural space for recognition and by-default decent treatment of non-binary transgender people is a thorny and difficult problem that requires radical solutions; two such strategies (which I think would be very good for culture generally) would be:
(a) a society in which a child’s gender identity is considered to be unknown until they discover it for themselves, and after that is considered to be a somewhat malleable thing, open to redefinition over the course of life
and
(b) entirely gender-neutral language, in which a person’s gender identity has to be explicitly stated instead of being embedded in pronouns etc.
So, yeah – radical.
In the meantime, though, it doesn’t seem that wild for cisgender people to use neutral pronouns when asked; “I’m not male or female, so ‘he’ and ‘she’ don’t work” seems like a fairly straightforward explanation, and while they can take a little getting used to (especially in speech), it’s not *that* difficult. I’ll put up with a few mistakes when someone is still getting used to it, but the kind of reaction that Alex gave me is just ridiculous privilege-wielding. I only ask this of people who feel safe to me and with whom I’m engaging in in-depth or long-term conversation or a relationship of some kind, anyway, so until broader social change can be effected, the cashier at the market is getting a free pass from me. Not if they call me a “tranny” or “he” or “it,” but they usually don’t – they call me “she” on account of my breasts and certain of my mannerisms, and assume what they will – that I’m trans, that I’m a tall, androgynous cis woman, that I’m a butch dyke, maybe a male-identified crossdresser. I can never really tell.
A binary trans person who transitions is just changing their social categorization (and often, but not always, their body) to match their pre-existing gender identity – they’re not “changing their gender,” although that certainly is a popular simplification/distortion.
People certainly start trying to fit people into the categories of “male” and “female” at a distance, but they can only even see a few secondary sex characteristics; they wouldn’t get a full picture even if they saw the person naked, and even if they had *all* the information, their preconceptions might lead them to be wildly misinformed.
As for gender itself, you can’t tell – you can only be told, and even then, I would say that gender as an internal phenomenon is unspeakable; we require categorical terms to describe it, but those terms are only maps at best – they can’t replicate the individual sensation of being gendered.
Anyway.
I discuss this a lot, so I don’t really want to explicate pronouns and such at length beyond that. It can get wearing.
Bert, I’ll reply to you in a little while when I’ve had a rest from Internets discussion and have gotten some good work done.
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Darryl Ayo says:
…It isn’t like I’m going to start calling people zim and stuff. In reality, people tend to be referred to as he and she. It’s unfortunate that our ancient language doesn’t have leeway for other options, but it’s pretty hard to imagine that there’s a case for getting mad that people haven’t instantly adopted a newly minted term which many/most people don’t have personal need for…
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For all my widespread reading, this thread is the first time I’d ever heard of this “ze” usage. (Which, sorry, reminds me of a comic-book Frenchman talking: “I am Batroc, ze leaper!”)
Still, I’m old enough to come across “ms.” when first introduced to a wide audience in the 1970 bestselling “The Female Eunuch,” and am pleasantly surprised at how ubiquitous its usage has become. So, there is hope…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…The push for marriage is certainly conservative. I’m not against conservatism though in itself. Sort of moving off of what Bert said…I think marriage is actually a way to see sex as not about individual happiness or economic trade, but rather about commitment and trust and family. Having so many queer people insist on its importance, and insisting that their love and relationships be recognized in that context seems really powerful to me…and maybe does reshape the institution itself as less patriarchal. It changes how we think about husbands and wives and families in a way that seems really…well, like I said, utopian. It’s conservative, but it’s radical too.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just gushy about it because I’m married. I like being married. I feel strongly that other people should be allowed to be married if they want…
————————
Not to mention the nitty-gritty factors making marriage so advantageous: all manner of added legal and economic benefits and protections.
Such as being able to get into your new spouse’s health plan, which is what gave the impetus to my Significant other and I to tie the knot after 15 years of harmonious cohabitation. (She’s been burned before; as a feminist, I was hardly enamored of the institution, which is loaded with symbolism of the woman becoming the property of the man.)
Or, the horrendous case of a lesbian who was terribly incapacitated in a car accident. Her gayness-despising family moved in and wouldn’t allow her romantic partner of many decades — a spouse in all but name — to care for her, or even see her any more. Had they been married, she would have been the one with overriding rights to care and make legal choices for her injured partner.
“Gay marriage” (the quotes ’cause I don’t see why it shouldn’t serve as an umbrella for including trans-marriages) also gives a message to straight society, reinforcing what I’ve seen in gay couples I’ve known: that can be just as committed, responsible, boringly domestic as everybody else…
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Anja Flower says:
Keep in mind I was being disproportionately angry towards Alex because Alex was trolling…
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Maybe “trolling” by the more genteel HU standards; on the TCJ message board (and to me) he came across as fairly mild in his argumentativeness. Sheesh, Anja, haven’t you been tossing much harsher criticisms and accusations around?
…And don’t have much personal acquaintance with “second wave radical feminists,” but I was not favorably impressed that so many Pagans, decrying monotheism and the oppressive, patriarchal God, simply do a “flip” and replace this with a single, fecund Mother Goddess. ‘Way to reject that sex role stereotyping, folks…
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To be clear, I think that in a utopian environment, what sex workers are and do would be substantially transformed by way of being in an other-than-capitalist framework. I mean my ideas of utopia (while still not fully gelled at this point) involve, ya know, personal exchange and gift economies and mutualism, the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit.
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While, say, “mutualism” does indeed come across as more sensitive, in what way is that significantly different from capitalism?
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Mutualism is based on a labor theory of value that holds that when labor or its product is sold, in exchange, it ought to receive goods or services embodying “the amount of labor necessary to produce an article of exactly similar and equal utility”.[Receiving anything less would be considered exploitation, theft of labor, or usury.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_%28economic_theory%29
So is “I’ll let you fuck me if you’ll fix that leak in my roof” somehow nobler than the same service being performed for X amount of dollars?
BTW; why, to even our utterly cynical society, would the idea of selling romantic love, or friendship, be repugnant?
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Anja Flower says:
I know the “sex as healing” thing can be very gooey, yes, but that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue.
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There are sex therapists who, as part of their work, indeed go through a range of sexual activity with their patients, and get paid for it. (Some are married; all the ones I’d read about many years back were women.)
And apparently some “sacred prostitutes” in ancient times performed healing lovemaking with traumatized soldiers returning from the wars, thus “transitioning” them back into normal life again, though info on this is awfully nebulous.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution for more info.)
“which is what gave the impetus to my Significant other and I to tie the knot after 15 years of harmonious cohabitation”
Congratulations! (on both the marriage and the 15 years)
On gender-neutrality in speech:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/genpr.htm
Mike – Yeah, I’m glad that the HU comments section isn’t too flamey and vicious. Even so, refusal to acknowledge a trans person’s gender identity is a very deep insult. If it’s made more explicit and vitriolic than Alex made it, it’s just about the deepest insult you can deliver.
Yeah, I wanted religion in high school and so spent several years adopting and then modifying Wiccan and other neo-pagan ritual. By the time I was starting to get it into a framework that felt more real to me – which involved acknowledging bazillions of deities, and acknowledging them as sort of human-created, and calling on them as needed but having favorites – I could no longer sustain the belief needed (which had always been much weaker than my enthusiasm to begin with). The God-Goddess binary always struck me as over-simple, and the Goddess-only stuff as worse.
Mutualism appeals to me because of its promises to deliver socializing effects while avoiding some of the dangers that greater socialization of capital entails. It’s just one thing that interests me, though; I’m not well-read on my anarchist economic theories, and if I was, I’d probably settle on something more thoroughly socialist than mutualism.
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Now, then. Marriage!
Bert, Noah, Mike:
Queer and trans nationalism and separatism are strategic moves for me, not ideal goals. Creating and nurturing a separate culture allows us to exist in spaces in which those around us understand and support us, in which random strangers won’t ask us about our genitals, in which polyamorous and kinky relationships aren’t looked at askance and gender-neutral pronoun use doesn’t have to be explained. It allows us to receive queer & trans folks who’re transitioning and starting a new life, running away, in danger or simply lonely and impoverished into a culture where they can find friendship, resources and understanding. Given that trans people in particular can’t use many state resources that cis people take for granted, often can’t get the medical services we need even if we’re lucky enough to be insured, and can’t trust the police as far as we can throw them, these are important short-term goals.
Would it be good for the wider culture to get who we are and not beat us down for it? Yes, of course. Gender-neutral language and restrooms, a wide cultural understanding of gender, the abolition of gender-coercive institutions, the recognition of relationships outside of the Sacred Circle of Heteronormativity and Cisnormativity: these things are important. However, that’s different than assimilation, and it’s assimilation that the massive push for marriage represents to me.
Should LGBTQQIAOPetc. people be able to legally marry who they want, just like straight folks? Sure. Should we be able to join the military, just like straight folks? Well, you can imagine how I feel about the military, but sure. Marriage, though, is an exclusive, deeply problematic and heteronormative institution any way you slice it, and to imply that it holds the monopoly on family, on stable, long-term loving relationships or on desirable traits in relationships generally is to give in to a romantic conception of marriage that is both ridiculous and assimilationist to the core. Official recognition of partners for the sake of important things like hospital visitation and such can be done without the cultural institution of marriage. I suppose that getting legal marriage is a valid short-term stopgap solution to some problems for some queer folks, but not as a utopian drive. Pouring all of our resources into marriage as this great idealist movement is a move that, in my mind, is laced with internalized self-hatred, a desire to escape queerness to the mythical land of white picket fences that hetoronormative straight folks have never reached in the first place, to run away from queerness instead of embracing it. Meanwhile, all that money going towards marriage could be used to fund the services so desperately needed by poor queer & trans kids, to pay more attention to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and to housing non-discrimination bills, to spread cultural awareness and raise gender consciousness, to lobby for gender-neutral restrooms so that trans people can piss in safety…
I’m interested in seeing conflict with oppressive anti-queer and anti-trans forces in the wider culture victoriously resolved, but not if we have to give up the very large valuable aspects of queerness in the process.
Noah:
Things that I agree with Andrew Sullivan on:
-The Israel-Palestine region exists
-Sarah Palin is ridiculous
-HRC sucks ass
I respect the anti-assimilationist position. Marginalized groups creating their own institutions is really important. There’s the great James Baldwin line, “Do I want to be assimilated into a burning house?”
The thing that that sort of overlooks, maybe, though, is that by being assimilated, you may actually stop the house from burning. Marriage has been heteronormative…but not exclusively, and perhaps not necessarily. Sharon Marcus talks about women in what were essentially marriages with each other, and thought of as marriages with each other, going back to the Victorian era. I suspect it’s been around longer than that.
The insight of conservatism, that I think radicals reject at their peril, is that you don’t make institutions and cultures up as you go along. You’ve got what you’ve got. Civil rights came out of the black church, because the black church was the institution that was there. Similarly, the main institution we have at the moment dealing with relationships is marriage. It’s not a perfect institution by any means, but there’s a lot that’s valuable about it. And people — queer people, straight people, people with a lot of privilege and people who are poor and marginalized — have a stake in it. I just don’t at all buy the idea that somehow caring about marriage is a function of privilege. Being able to make a public declaration of faith and love in the way that your parents and your grandparents have is just not a sign of false consciousness. It’s a recognition that your parents and your grandparents matter, that your society matters, and that your love exists in the context of the past and the present.
Obviously, if people don’t want to get married for whatever reason, I don’t have any problem with that at all. But I do think gay marriage matters, damn it.
This is by Mildred Loving; she and her husband Richard brought the Supreme Court case that outlawed anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S.
The entire statement is here. It always makes me tear up.
Pretty moving!
It’s the “Tribute to the Dog” that gets my waterworks flowing (and I’m a cat person): http://dogpage.mcf.com/misc/TributeToTheDog.html
(Yes, it did it again; “He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince…”)
To add a “sexless-positive” note, Tim Kreider on…
http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/ChemicalCastration.jpg
In the accompanying statement (see the archives for 4/11/07), Kreider notes:
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The British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, in his youth a great womanizer, said in his old age that the diminution of his sex drive was like finally being allowed to dismount a wild horse. I know just what he means. It sometimes seems like I would have no real problems if not for sex. I’ve gotten punched and stabbed in the throat and made to have serious relationship talks. And I get tired of seeing the whole world on a sort of Terminator viewscreen with everything black except the pretty women targeted in infrared…
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BTW, Noah has just censored a comment of mine.
You’ll notice he never censors Anja’s comments.
Oh, and it seems Anja ONLY screams and weeps about being called ‘she’ when it suits xir. On xir website, it’s another thing:
http://www.anjaflower.com/info/info.html
All right, I’m closing this thread.