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The Porn Debate

6th February 2005, 04:40 pm by Stan

Wrapping Profit in the Flag

There was a period of time, when I was very young and chafing in my adolescence against all ‘authority,’ that I read the preposterous novels of Ayn Rand and eventually embraced libertarianism. That’s one of the two things I can find in my own experience to relate to the questions raised by the Nina Hartley response to Chyng Sun’s Counterpunch piece two days earlier in which Dr. Sun described pornography’s connection to male sexuality constructed as aggression. The other dimension I can relate to is pornography itself, which – along with prostitution – has been a perennial facet of the military culture where I spent most of my adult life.

Now there is a digital market distribution of pornography, which has blended prostitution with pornography in the capitalist drive to further commodify sex. That makes it easy for me, right now, to Google-search “porn,” get about a million pop-ups, and check the validity of Hartley’s contention that:

”None of the diversity of our vibrant, raucous and contentious creative culture seems to have attracted Professor Sun’s notice. By focusing on one or two examples she finds particularly heinous, she obscures the broader truth, which is that the marketplace of sexual entertainment contains products for almost every taste and orientation, including material made by and for heterosexual women and couples, lesbians and gay men. It’s not all Bang Bus, and by no means does all of it, or even most of it, conform to the author’s notions of porn-as-expression-of-misogyny.”

Actually, in the words of my great grandmother, an earthy Oklahoma Cherokee who would know, “That’s horseshit.”

Anyone who doesn’t believe me can bring up Google and have a look. I find a porn review site called “Pornliving” there, in which there is a menu of pornographic categories, which lists Amateur (which closer inspection reveals is not exactly true, since these are capitalist ventures), Anal, Asian, Big Tits, Black Girls, Black on White, Blow Jobs, Celebrity, Fetish, Gothic, Hardcore, Latina, Lesbian (in which none of the shaven, siliconed women featured bear the least resemblance to the lesbians I know), Live, Mature, Multiple Models, Pantyhose, Pornstar, Single Model, Soft Core, Teens, Video. In case the blatant racist-sexism of some of these categories or the dehumanization and objectification of women as body parts fails to even bump one’s outrage meter, a peek inside any one of the many sites listed typically describes key forms of sexual action (which is the commodity) – like ejaculating in women’s faces, stretching their anuses with various and often damaging forms of penetration, and gagging them during fellatio – and the vast majority of these sites refer to women in terms like cum-hungry slut, nasty little bitch, etc.

Ms. Hartley’s contention that this is an aberration within a much more benign industry is patently untrue. If she wants to defend it using the First Amendment, she should at least be honest enough to describe this industry accurately. The overwhelming majority of pornography consumers are men. They seek out specific content that arouses them in order to jack off. They are motivated by constructions of sexuality for which they have been socialized. Dominant constructions of sexuality associate masculinity with both misogyny and aggression. Period. The desire to ejaculate in a woman’s face, who you see as a ‘cum-hungry slut,’ is not innate.

The ubiquitous nature of internet commodified prostitution and pornography has only served to reinforce the notion of sexuality as an abstraction and to hide the concrete reality of sexual degradation and slavery. The reality of the world’s third most lucrative industry (right after weapons and drugs) is that it is a daily social catastrophe among millions of women… as well as millions of children, where in the real world beyond the white American comforts of so-called sex-radicals, these women and children have been thrown off the land and into various forms of sexual slavery. The sex libertarians of the porn industry won’t mention this, even though a significant number of the women featured in much of this new porn are precisely these refugees from global destabilization and poverty.

When Dr. Sun and others point out that this is an industry, all we hear from Nina Hartley and her partisans are paeans to so-called ‘sex radicals,’ like Carol Queen, who claim it is a culture. After Linda Marchiano (renamed ‘Linda Lovelace’ by her rapist-pimp husband, Chuck Traynor) went public about how Traynor had habitually beaten her, sold her to other men, forced her to have sex with a dog, and forced her to make porn films for his own profit, Hartley’s pal Carol Queen referred to Marchiano dismissively as “Linda-he-had-to-put-a-gun-to-my-head-to-make-me-fuck-that-dog-Lovelace.” This, presumably, is the ‘sex-radical’ take on rape and battering.

Pornography and prostitution – in the material world – are overwhelmingly not ‘choices.’ They are vast, exploitative, patriarchal-capitalist industries, largely violent, very lucrative, controlled by women-hating men, and destructive of the women (and children) who are victimized by them. Most of the women who are prostituted (including those who are used to produce pornography) are poor, disproportionately from oppressed groups, frequently drug-addicted, the vast majority showing clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, and wanting out. The majority suffered from sexual abuse as children, and many were first ‘turned out’ as minors. Many new prostitutes are ‘broken in’ through gang rape, and constantly abused by pimps.

These claims are based on extensive research, not the anecdotal interviews with industry spokespersons suggested to Chyng Sun by Nina Hartley. The anthology, Not For Sale – Feminist Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, edited by Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant, cites this research extensively, for anyone who is interested in actually studying this predatory industry.

The ‘bad girl’ image coveted by ‘sex radicals’ is a pure exercise of class and national privilege that intentionally ignores how they provide cover for this industry and the dangerous, sometimes deadly, realities behind it. Their ‘choices’ always trump the reality of those trapped in prostitution and pornography, and their solution is not to attack the industry, but to call those enslaved within it ‘sex workers,’ and claim that what they need are unions. Presumably, the unions could sign contracts with the pimps to limit the ‘break-in-by-gang-rape’ periods.

In the sex radical analysis, there are good girls and bad girls. The good girls are those – whether heterosexual, lesbian, or bisexual – who engage in ‘vanilla’ (that is, non-commercial and non-sadomasochistic) sex. The bad girls are whores, women who use pornography, women who sexualize children, and women who buy prostituted women: ‘Whores, sluts, and dykes are bad girls, bad because we are sexually deviant’ (Queen, 1997). Sex Radicals define prostitution as a sexuality and then link that to homosexuality, the sexual use of children by adults, and sadomasochism, calling them ‘sexual outlaws’. They claim to be censored and discriminated against, not by pimps, tricks, wife beaters, racists, corporations, and daddy rapists, but by feminists fighting sexual violence, racism, and poverty. The sex radicals’ ‘good girl-bad girl’ analysis is nothing new or radical; it merely reproduces the conservative patriarchal dichotomy between madonna and whore. Sex radicals simply reverse the valuation attached to the two sides: here bad girls are to be celebrated for their rebellion and audacity, while good girls are scorned and mocked as boring, repressed, and obedient… Queen and other sex radicals have a rebellious, adolescent-style reaction to sex: what they perceive as being ‘different’ or rebellious is good, period. What sex radicals lack in thoughtfulness and feminist analysis they make up for by appealing to emotion. They channel women’s valid anger and desire to rebel against patriarchy into their political camp by misrepresenting the term sex radical. True sex radicalism would mean recognizing structures of inequality and oppression, working toward egalitarian relationships, and aligning with those who do not have social or political power – such as women and children hurt in pornography and prostitution…(Christine Stark, Stark & Whisnant ed., pp. 278-291)

The claim by ‘sex radicals’ – repeated by Hartley in her piece – that anti-pornography feminists (usually radical feminists, whose analysis of gender as a system of power is the most advanced) are either Victorian or opposed to the women who are engaged in prostitution and pornography is not only specious, it is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to interdict further study of the work these women have done.

Everyone I have ever engaged in a debate about Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon, the nemeses of ‘Third Wave’ faux-feminists – and there has thusfar been not a single exception – has consistently attributed arguments to them that they had not made, and proven incapable of articulating exactly what either of them has said about pornography. These proponents of ‘sex radicalism’ that merely flip the patriarchal script, and who justify our own use of pornography or prostitution or both, and people who have never studied what radical feminists have written ingest these red herring and straw man critiques coming from the likes of Queen, Suzie Bright, Nina Hartley, and others.

Much of feminist theory and activism against pornography and prostitution has been and continues to be developed by formerly prostituted women, who are not judging or otherwise maligning prostituted people, but rather exposing pimps and rapists, he sex industry as an institution of male violence and racial and economic privilege… One of the ways sex radical women misrepresent feminist work against pornography and prostitution is by claiming that feminists are in bed with conservative religious groups. This accusation is false… (Stark, Stark & Whisnant, p. 278-291)

Under sex radicalism, the pornography and prostitution industry disappears along with class-based political analysis of sexism, racism, heterosexism… leaving a few, select, privileged women to write about how they can ‘choose’ to oppress or be oppressed. Sex radicalism turns away from feminism, embracing a captor/captive mentality as revolutionary. No matter how many cute ways one spells ‘boys’, celebrating the objectification of women is dehumanizing and reactionary, whether it’s men or women doing the objectifying. (Stark , Stark & Whisnant, p. 290)

This ‘sex radicalism’ beckons to Joy James’ critique of postmodern ‘radicalism’ generally, what she called ‘neo-radicalism,’ that absolves itself of any responsibility to mount a politics of resistance to actual social systems where material power is exercised – in gender, by men over women – by embracing individual ‘empowerment,’ which is one of the touchstones of consumer ideology.

Annie Sprinkle can indulge her adolescent rebelliousness by pissing on camera, and this takes the place of solidarity with the thousands of other women who end up in prostitution through years of systematic abuse. Hartley would have us believe that the pornography-prostitution industry is simply a “vibrant, raucous and contentious creative culture.” This is disingenuous in the extreme. As Grandma Isom would say, “Culture, my ass.”

Capitalist patriarchy is a system. Neither Hartley nor any of her partisans want to talk about this (gasp!) ‘Second Wave’ feminist preoccupation. Capitalist patriarchy, as a world system, incorporates the colonization of women at its very base. The exploitation of millions of desperately poor women around the world by this industry is a direct expression of women’s systemic subjugation. This makes it doubly offensive that Hartley characterizes this whitewashing of the industry’s true nature as class struggle… porn is a good way for working class women to get out of dead-end jobs.

The process of cultural polarization, without a critique of capitalist patriarchy itself, accounts for the inability of many putative feminists – calling themselves ‘sex positive’ – to understand the critiques that radical and left feminists continue to make of pornography and prostitution. Even the use of a term like ‘sex-positive’ is demagogic, implying that those of us who expose the real nature of these misogynist-capitalist industries are somehow… sex-negative. Note how this construction decontextualizes sex from social systems altogether.

The conservative patriarchal reaction against women’s sexual agency has actually contributed to liberal feminists’ abstraction of pornography and prostitution into expressions of women’s ‘freedom to choose.’ Of course, there is a good deal of political cross-dressing involved in propagating this argument, and Hartley’s Free Speech Coalition is a perfect example. It is a front group for the porn industry – which is concerned with its profits – that finds itself at loggerheads with right-wing Christians like John Ashcroft on one front, and that paints left critics of porn – who point out its misogynist content – as partisans of the Christian Right.

This is, of course, a red herring of record proportions. I myself have stood alongside these same rock-ribbed Baptist zealots to oppose a state lottery. Their opposition to the lottery was based on their general opposition to gambling, while we opposed it because it was a highly regressive tax with a shitty record in ‘supporting education.’ The ‘lottery for education’ campaign, cooked up by the gaming industry, was pushed by its own ‘freedom of choice’ front groups.

“We’re not for using the state to shake down people for immense profits, exploiting their desperation and false hope while encouraging a destructive compulsive disorder,” the gaming industry suggested (through Astroturf groups like the Free Speech Coalition). “We’re for harmless fun… and schools.”

In the same way, the pornography industry – which thrives on misogynistic social constructions of sexuality (no, Nina, sexuality is not just a matter of ahistorical “taste and temperament” – says, “We are just protecting your right to free speech.”

Meanwhile, the money is being made – lots of it – and a façade has to be constructed to conceal the reality of commodified sex, which for the enormous majority of its ‘workers’ is a relentless nightmare of violent exploitation.

It is not at all surprising that Hartley frames her argument as a commercial: “The marketplace of sexual entertainment contains products for almost every taste and orientation.”

The ideology is libertarianism… the neoliberal lodestar… the fallacy that ‘freedom’ can only be defined as an attribute of individuals, and then only ahistorically. It is based on the abstraction that a poor Black woman in a hopeless ghetto or a 14-year-old peasant girl decanted into Bangkok by land enclosure have the same ‘choices’ as Suzie Bright or Carol Queen or Nina Hartley.

Reinforcing this American ideology, and by extension, the myopia about pornography and prostitution, is the position of the United States in the world system. Our collective job in the international division of labor is to consume – to buy, buy, buy, and shop, shop, shop. This gives rise to an idea reflected from that practice, that life itself is a series of individual selections, of shopping choices, of lifestyles. This is consumerism.

“The marketplace of sexual entertainment contains products for almost every taste and orientation.”

Consumerism is itself an ideological product and an industry; it can be credibly defined as consumer-demand-production driven by the imperative to extend commodification into every available dimension of our lives.

High-speed, lightweight digital information/communication technology has also become a crucial technology for creating expanded consumer demand. Anyone really interested in ending the oppression of the world’s women needs to examine demand creation as not only characteristic of late capitalism, but how it determines new forms of sexual commodification – and what impact that is having on the millions of women around the world who will potentially end up listed at Pornliving at ‘hot, cum-slurping Asians’ or ‘horny Russian sluts.’

The eroticized degradation of women – cum-hungry teen sluts – brought into the privacy of your own home.

Internet pornography is a mass marketed form of prostitution, now state-protected as ‘speech,’ and however it gets spun by Larry Flynt or Nina Hartley, it still constitutes a huge setback for women who were struggling in an earlier milieu for a toehold on social power. Here is the cul-de-sac of libertarianism and the international system on display together.

D. A. Clark, in her essay “Prostitution for anyone: Feminism, globalization, and the ‘sex’ industry” writes:

The essential issues which traditionally inspired feminists to challenge and criticize the sex industry have not changed despite decades of effort. It has been remarkably difficult for feminists to make any progress on these issues. It is very difficult to get these issues taken seriously. Obviously one reason for that is that feminist activity has not changed the fundamentals of social power. Men still control decisive power blocs such as the armed forces, the higher levels of government, big business and media – and the ‘sex industry’ is a service industry for men. (Clarke, Stark & Whisnant, p. 152)

Decisively, (capitalist) men control the state. The liberal state. That very same one before which the masses genuflect while reverently whispering the worlds, ‘our founding fathers,’ and ‘the Constitution.’

But while no one reading this wants John Ashcroft, or his successor Alberto “de Sade” Gonzales, reading our emails, or spending public money to put linen drapes over the breasts of statues, or intruding into our bedrooms, we still need to be able to criticize the misogynist, slave-whipping, rapist founding fathers. And we need to talk about what the Constitution does and does not do. Because it sure gets hauled out into view every time privilege is endangered.

Let’s not forget that the First Amendment also protects the rights of giant corporations and brokerage houses to control the entire electoral process by calling campaign spending ‘protected speech.’ In this way, the First Amendment privileges the prerogatives of the rich minority while it undermines the popular sovereignty of the entire nation. In the very same way, the First Amendment as it is deployed by the pornography industry to give the cover of ‘rights’ to an abstract individual to protect the prerogatives of a concrete and collectively exploitative, misogynistic, and frequently violent global enterprise.

That’s how the liberal state works. It always abstracts an individual out of history in order to background the real history, and thereby protects power that existed socially, prior to the law, from any form of state intrusion. Those founding fathers were smart slaveholders and Indian-killers and wife-beaters, and they understood perfectly well what they were doing. They were inoculating existing systems of domination from forceful intervention, and making it look like they were doing the rest of us a favor. The very idea of a right of privacy was originally used to protect men’s right to batter their wives.

This disappearance of history is how whites can sue African Americans for ‘reverse racism,’ how California can call an anti-immigrant law a ‘civil rights initiative,’ and Nina Hartley can get away with calling herself, along with Camille Paglia and Katie Rophie and all their ilk, ‘feminist.’ Subtract the history, and the whole issue becomes an academic abstraction, infinitely malleable and permeable to the most outrageous political counterfeiting.

In an interview, Carol Smith, a survivor of pornography, contrary to the abstract libertarian version of pornography, explained how she was sexually abused as a small child, chemically dependent and severely affectively disordered by age ten, and cajoled into pornography at 19 by leveraging her drug dependency. She reports that this is actually the most common trajectory for porn ‘models’ and prostitutes… there is no Pretty Woman. Exactly when was she was capable of ‘consenting’ by libertarian standards? Perhaps at the age of eight when she was first sexually abused? This is certainly a real question in the real world. Her story – which includes her escape from pornography – is not typical. It’s not typical because many do not survive, and most remain addicted.

In her interview, she pointed out that her pornographic videotapes are still being marketed and displayed on the internet, even though she has tried to take legal action to stop them. This has had a tremendously damaging effect on her and her family, but the courts have sided with the pimp-pornographers, based on a contract she signed years ago – a contract signed by an addicted, affectively disordered, young woman, financially dependent on her pimp-pornographer, in a society characterized by male supremacy. This is how consent is defined using the libertarian fallacy in the male capitalist state. Her images, being sexually degraded under the influence of drugs, which have been shown by others to her children, are a pimp’s property.

Libertarianism has always been about one thing at its core – property.

Not only is pornography a service industry, as Clarke stated – a masturbation aid – it is, as radical feminists have long argued, a form of hate speech. Pornography is anti-woman propaganda. It is tantamount to placing pictures of hangman’s nooses in workplaces with Black employees. State protection of pornography (including pornography that is actually digitally distributed prostitution) is state protection of misogynist hate speech.

Hartley can slander me just as vigorously as she slandered Dr. Sun, when she claimed that Sun was “defaming males” and that Sun was sharing positions with the evangelical prudes. Sun did not advocate that anyone “erase all forms of sexual choice.” That was Hartley putting words in her mouth – making a straw man of her in order to tear her up. Neither am I calling for erasing sexual choice. I haven’t even called for legislation to stop pornography (mainly because I doubt it would work, given the depth of male misogyny inscribed on dominant constructions of sexuality). Hartley wants to make this debate about ‘rights,’ to decoy people off what we are saying about this industry – one that she serves now as a lobbyist. I haven’t called for stopping the Klan marches either (another libertarian fave – I’ll stick with rocks and bottles for the Klan.) The lion’s share of this stuff called porn is hate speech, whether you want to make an abstract libertarian defense of it or not.

Imagine if you will, a billboard along an American highway with the caricatured image of a grinning, bug-eyed Black kid in tattered coveralls grinning over a slice of watermelon. Clearly, this would generate an outcry that would result in its removal almost immediately. Yet we can see billboards everywhere that show shaven infantilized (male sexuality is constructed in many ways as pedophilic), hyper-sexualized women, yet there is not only no outcry – there seems to be little discussion of what those images do to our daughters, sisters, partners, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and friends. That’s how deep patriarchy is.

I would also note that it is also culturally ‘okay’ right now to display grotesque stereotypes of Arabs, since the United States government is involved in an active project of killing them by the hundreds of thousands.

Dr. Chyng Sun hit the nail on the head in her fifth paragraph:

“The pornographers want to derail any criticism of the often blatant misogyny of their product and are willing to wrap themselves in political principles to do that.”

* * *

Stan Goff is the author of Hideous Dream – A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and Full Spectrum Disorder – The Military in the New American Century (Soft Skull Press, 2004). His next book, Sex & War, is about gender and the imperial military (due out at the end of 2005). He is retired from the United States Army, and a member of Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out. He is also on the coordinating committee of the Bring Them Home Now campaign, http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/. His series on military issues, “Military Matters,” appears at http://www.freedomroad.org/home.html.

Category: Gender, General  |  Comment (RSS)

66 Comments

  1. Tired of this stupid debate on the Left:

    Yawn: Round 5 million of the porn wars…

    In these debates one often finds oneself going back and forwards agreeing with each side. That’s because it is an artificially polarised argument. Can I suggest:

    Most porn is crap, but some is OK.
    Most is consumed by men but some women do enjoy it too.
    Consenting adults should be able to determine what they consider is OK.
    Yes a lot is a reflection of a misogynist culture, but censorship is no solution.
    In fact censorship is the bigger threat at the moment to both men’s and women’s freedoms.
    .
    And will both sides stop accusing the other of betraying feminism (it is tiresome).

    Now let’s move on shall we…

    7 February 2005, 6:47 pm

  2. Ruby Sinreich:

    Hey Tired, did you actually read the article or did you just start typing your comment after you saw the word “porn?”

    8 February 2005, 12:39 pm

  3. Stan:

    While I did not advocate ‘censorship,’ and am not advocating that now if we are talking about speech and not property, I have to challenge Tired’s claim that “censorship is the bigger threat at the moment to both men’s and women’s freedoms.” I don’t believe this can be substantiated by any empirical index, but more importantly there is an abstraction here of ‘women,’ that implicitly excludes billions of women in the world who are not preoccupied with abstract metropolitan notions of liberty, but rather who are living on the razor-edge of day-to-day existence. It also fails to contextualize pornography within a patriarchal system that reproduces the oppression of even metropolitan women in the form of structural inequality, abuse, and rape. This makes it not only not tiresome to criticize pornography AS AN INDUSRTY, it makes this criticism mandatory for anyone who claims to stand for women.

    8 February 2005, 1:13 pm

  4. River Smith:

    Excellent piece! As someone who has worked with women in these areas for over twenty five years, this analysis resonates fully with my experience.We must encourage this debate on these terms wherever we can. We are engaged in the longest and most profound revolution among humans when we engage in this process. Thank you so much for this work. River

    9 February 2005, 7:36 am

  5. anonymous:

    A lot of the people who consume porn are women, but they aren’t willing to tell people. Then again, neither are most men. The kind of porn they like seems to be essentially the same as what men like: whatever works for masturbation. They don’t seem to like “story” any more than I do. Moreover, their main concern is that the guy be attractive. Some like gay porn, so they see only men, and having sex with each other. I also get the impression they can be compulsive about it, just like men.

    This is strictly from anecdotal evidence, from women I’ve known who use porn. I got this info because I also use porn, and was willing to discuss it.

    This might seem to upset the feminist arguments, but it does not.

    When men exploit and abuse each other, it’s still exploitation. When a child wears clothing made by children, it’s still exploitation. The participation of women, as consumers, doesn’t mean porn isn’t sexist.

    I think a less exploitative porn is possible, but it’s nothing like what we have today.

    9 February 2005, 4:17 pm

  6. Stan:

    It’s interesting. The debate seems to be drawn almost by some form of magnetism to the relative value of speicific content and the demographics of porn consumers. I think this is a Western metropolitan default.

    We have been so well trained to NOT see systems that even when a very detailed argument that puts the focus directly on the system (this one being capitalist patriarchy, with porn as one of its manifestations) is the subject of the debate, we quickly drift away from the discussion of the system itself.

    “Sexism” is one of those terms like “racism” that tends to redirect us away from social structures of domination and into discrete evaluations of singular situations and individuals.

    Capitalism is fundamentally structured not around “greed”, but around a legal fiction called property (enforced by the state) and the social organization growing out of a specific division of labor using specific technologies within that property regime. Patriarchy is also a property-based, divsion-of-labor-based system, with the added dimension of a sexual structuration that operates both within and without capitalist social relations - ownership of not only one’s sexuality but the very definition of sexuality itself, and which is exploitative in non-capitalist settings (eg, the home).

    These two systems are in fact one system that is thoroughly integrated and co-evolved in history.

    “Sexism” refers, it seems, to discrimination based on sex or to language and behavior that is humiliating or degrading based on sex. But when this idea is abstracted out of the actual social conditions - as the article pointed out - it backgrounds the social systems that evolved prior to and outside these legalisms. It assumes some form of abstract equality as its point of departure, even though no such equlaity exists.

    This allows us to claim that a white person who says, “I don’t trust black people,” has moral equivalency with a black person who says, “I don’t trust white people.” Ditto: Woman says, “Men are pigs,” and man says, “Women are bitches.”

    It is sophistry to imply that these are equivalent, becasue the reality behind these statements is one of unequal power. The white person is expressing the justification of a privilege. The black person is expressing a survival mechanism. The woman is venting about the abuses of power that have been used against her. The man is expressing domination. Yet we can find innumerable people who would say both white and black are “racist,” and both male and female are “sexist.”

    Such is the superificiality of late imperialism’s epistemology.

    I’m not trying to crack on the last poster personally, btw. You’re on the right track in some respects I think. But we have to keep our eyes on the prize… the social system.

    9 February 2005, 6:08 pm

  7. Stan:

    All the foregoing comments until today from all points of view have been serious and thoughtful engagements around the issue - whether I agree with them or not. One posted earlier today was pure sarcasm, obviously desinged to provoke a reaction for the purpose of starting a flame war. I can’t think of a single reason to encourage that kind of peurility or to let it become an obstacle to discussions by people of differing views who nonetheless remain respectfully engaged. He got the fire estinguisher. This thread has already attracted more attention than the others, indicating it is an important issue to some people. But if anyhone is inclined to simply fire flamethrowers into the discussion hiding behind the anonymity of the net… go somewhere that it will be left posted. That would not be here.

    10 February 2005, 2:48 pm

  8. Comandante Gringo:

    Damn, but you have one fine intellect, Goff. It’s a pleasure to watch you point out what *should *be obvious: that “sexism” et al. are abstract — and thus concretely useless — categories. And, abstract moralizing being such a fundamental problem on the liberal Left, it’s almost a relief to read this stuff.

    Now if only I didn’t have some doubts about what might be “post-marxist”, academic-influenced leanings in your writing…
    ;>

    10 February 2005, 5:54 pm

  9. Stan:

    What’s a POST Marxist? Is that anything like a POST office? (-:

    11 February 2005, 10:09 am

  10. Jed B.:

    Great article, Stan. More men have to start standing up and speaking honestly about the essence of porn. I like Nina Hartley. Though she’s of an older generation, she reminds me of friends — and she’s smart and sassy even if she’s wrong about how porn fits into the larger constellation. Most of the porn she’s been in as an older woman is not particularly degrading, but is often instructional and includes explicit, pedagogic instruction about how women can find sexual satisfaction — a real problem for many.

    But the root of the problem, which porn essentially reinforces, is that “whores get used.” Good girls want to be bad and bad girls get punished. Men discussing what it is specifically that’s arousing in porn — and noting what sells — is important for getting around the bullshit of “free sexual expression.” I don’t think we even know what that would look like.

    I wrote a reconsideration of Andrea Dworkin for the Indypendent in New York City. It’s linked here. There’s quite a debate.

    http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/140928/index.php

    11 February 2005, 1:00 pm

  11. Sex Worker:

    This is very frustrating Stan.

    Firstly I want to point out that by insisting that all those who engage in prostitution voluntarily in the West are either childish brats or apologists for sexual slavery (which is as different a thing from sex work as forced labour in Burma is from construction work in America) you have effectively shut us out of the discussion. It is very frustrating because we work along side of migrant workers and our organisations have much more direct contact with them than the academics who write these books.

    Often our organisations - not industry groups but workers organisations - have often been ignored in this debate due to attitudes like these. This is despite the fact that their research and work on these issues is often more in-depth and from closer sources than those of academics and charity groups.

    Seccondly, I would like to know what it is that you are concretely advocating. Do you think that prostitution should be made illegal? Do you think that prostitutes should not unionise or self-organise?

    22 February 2005, 6:07 pm

  12. Sex Worker:

    Who gets to choose? Coercion, consent and the UN
    Trafficking Protocol
    Jo Doezema, Institute of Development Studies, University of Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK
    (A later version of this paper published in Gender and Development, Volume 10 Number
    1, March 2002.)
    Introduction
    In December, 2000, over 80 countries signed the ‘Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and
    Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children ‘ (The Trafficking Protocol)
    in Palermo, Italy. This event was the culmination of over two years of negotiations at
    the UN Centre for International Crime Prevention in Vienna. The Trafficking Protocol
    was the target of heavy feminist lobbying. These lobby efforts were split into two
    ‘camps’ according to their views on prostitution. One group, the Human Rights Caucus,
    saw prostitution as legitimate labour. The other, represented by the Coalition Against
    Trafficking in Women (CATW), saw all prostitution as a violation of women’s human
    rights.
    I and other sex worker rights activists were concerned about the impact of a new
    international trafficking instrument on the lives of sex workers. Historically, anti -
    trafficking measures have been used against sex workers, migrant sex workers, and
    immigrants. Several activists from the Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) joined the
    Human Rights Caucus in their lobby efforts, in the hope of ensuring a result that would
    not damage sex workers’ human rights. This paper reviews the arguments made by
    both lobby groups at the negotiations. It focuses in particular on how trafficking came
    to be defined, and the pivotal role played by the notion of ‘consent’. It examines how
    ‘consent’ emerged as the international standard for determining ‘trafficking in women’,
    placing current debates in historical context. Finally, it assesses the potential for the
    Trafficking Protocol to be used to promote sex workers’ and migrants’ human rights…..

    Continued

    http://www.scarletalliance.org.au/library/doezema02

    22 February 2005, 8:20 pm

  13. Sheldon:

    I’m curious as to why your response to Nina Hartley did not appear on the Counterpunch website.

    D.A. Clarke, on whose website your response did appear, other than this blog, says that Counterpunch is a pro-porn website. If so, then why have you e-published there in the past?

    27 February 2005, 7:02 pm

  14. Stan:

    Just got onto a computer with very sketchy connection in Haiti, so I’ll just say that I write for CP because they publish most of what I write, and we are in complete solidarity on other issues.

    Real quick on other replies, in particular “Sex Worker.” I am not going to be drawn into a debate about the abstract individual liberties of so-called sex-workers. It’s a red herring. My point remains that pornography and prostitution — the direct commodification of patriarchally constructed sexuality — are an INDUSTRY, and one that is largely characterized by exploitation and violence. The reason no one wants to debate this characterization of this INDUSTRY as such is that this characterization is demonstrably true, and not just in the third world, but right in Southwest Raleigh.

    This is not about civil liberties, which may the new last refuge for scoundrels. It’s about patriarchy. I hope people will pay attention to the section in the upcoming book about the State… and read both Patricia Collins’ and Catharine MacKinnon’s groundbreaking works on the same.

    Power that exists prior to liberal law is protected by liberal law, which naturalizes it. Patriarchy is just such a power, and it is an immensely humiliating and violent power. I will not background it in order to engage in a liberal political ethics quiz.

    Actually existing prostitution and porn are not only the products of patriarchal power but are in many ways the ideological support for it.

    2 March 2005, 7:39 pm

  15. Sex Worker:

    I read your interview in Green Left Weekly Stan and agree with most of your views on stuff. I am a Marxist and I understand your arguments perfectly well. But what I am saying is not about personal liberation or identity politics… It’s about the working class (including prostitutes like me) and opressed groups leading their own struggles for liberation. It’s also about the moralism that I can see in the American left. You diddn’t even bother to read the article I posted and you dismiss my comment as trying to “suck you in” to a debate about personal freedom and it is not. It’s about concrete reality that people like me actually face. Im not Nina Heartly and have no interest in her or any other capitalist’s or super-stars view on the issues. But people like you and Nina dominate these debates and always do your best to shut people like me and OUR organisations (like the Scarlett Alliance in Australia or some of the international groups that represent sex WORKERS rather than the industry) up or use your power and privalidge to to try and speak “on our behalf” and if PISSES ME OFF. You don’t have to worry I wont try to “suck you in” to any debate because I can see it would be about as usefull as beating my head against a brick wall.

    2 March 2005, 8:45 pm

  16. Sex Worker:

    This is NOT a phylosophical issue but a real situation that affects 1 million women in Australia, including me. If you reduce it to an abstract discussion about “patriarchy” or whatever without discussing material reality and what actually needs to be done then the whole discussion becomes an formalistic, moralistic, intellectual excersise. That is why I asked you those questions.

    2 March 2005, 9:03 pm

  17. Stan:

    Here I am again on the same Paleolithic computer system… which is the reason I can not open your article to read it… it’s a pdf file that I can’t open. I want to read it and respond, but it may be April before I can. I don’t want anyone to think I have any desire to engage in hit-and-run debate. I don’t. And I have nothing against prostitutes, nor have I ever in any regard advocated punishing or stigmatizing them. Nor do my views have anything to do with some streak of Puritanism (a silly contention that gets thrown up once in a while). Anyone who knows me personally would get a great laugh out of that one.

    I suggest people look over my piece, however, before they accuse me of abstraction, moralism, or formalism. This is also a straw man. In fact, the core of my argument is — especially for those who are interested in an historical materialist point of view — that sexuality is a material system of power, and one that is historicaly specific.

    I have never argued that prostitutes shouldn’t organize, et al. I have said that I am skeptical about a union strategy for people in that circumstance. Everything I have written to date on this issue has been aimed at the male power structure that dominates this industry and society. My dissing of women like Carol Queen is for the same reason I dis Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell.

    I also do not speak for anyone except myself. What I write is my analysis, and if the content and structure of that analysis is vulnerable to counter-arguments, I am delighted to be engaged that way. Claiming I am speaking for you (obviously I am not), then saying that it pisses you off, is not an effective rebuttal.

    Nina Hartley’s partner has apparently claimed I called him a pimp or some such bullshit, then proceeded to list all his ‘progressive’ political activities, which he then compared to my own past — which was represented with some lurid images (me standing atop a heap of dead bodies or something like that). Lots of heat. No light. First of all, I never mentioned him at all. The article is right here for anyone who wants to review it. Secondly, neither my personal history nor his can either validate or rebut a single point I am making.

    I want to engage this debate with Sex Worker and anyone else, and for others to debate with one another. My point right now is that a useful debate — one that is ultimately concerned not with wins and losses, but with increased consciousness — is one where we make our points and counter-points with two things… intellectual honesty and rigor.

    We can begin a real engagement most effectively if we take specific points out of one another’s arguments and address them specifically.

    I have a plate of yams and goat that is getting cold.

    Kenbe la.

    3 March 2005, 7:30 pm

  18. Sheldon:

    In the spirit of your request to keep the discussion coherent, I’ll make just a few points:

    1) Nina Hartley’s husband, Ernest Greene, actually does not accuse you of calling him a pimp, verbatim. This is how he began his response to you:

    “Who the fuck do you think you are to judge us?

    ”Let’s have a look at some personal histories here, since Goff has elected to make his own case in the most personal of terms. As I read it, his diatribe pretty much dismisses Nina, and all the rest of us in the sex industry as victims, deluded or otherwise, or perpetrators of heinous crimes. In doing so, he basically calls me out as being no better than a child-rapist, pimp and murderer.” [Free Forums section, http://www.nina.com, 2/6/2005]

    What he is stating is that you are implicitly placing him on the same moral plane as a pimp, etc. since he is Nina’s husband. Since you do use the terms ‘pornography’ and ‘prostitution’ pretty much interchangeably and refer to Chuck Traynor as Linda Boreman’s “pimp-husband”, Ernest’s guess is highly educated.

    As for his delving into his past as an anti-war activist, well, you started your own essay on the matter by waxing nostalgic about Ayn Rand, eh?

    2) It’s one thing to disagree with sex workers on whether or not they should unionize; it’s quite another to openly mock them, which you did with your ‘break-in-by-gang-rape’ remarks. In the 1990’s, the strippers and peep show booth workers at the Lusty Lady theater in San Francisco successfully unionized, a struggle captured in Julia Query’s documentary, “Live! Nude! Girls!” Later, the workers bought out the theater from management, turning into the nation’s first sex worker’s collective, operating on socialist principles. It’s still running strong today.

    3) It is highly inappropriate – indeed, sexist – for a man, any man, to doubt the feminist credentials of a woman with whom he differs on an issue over which women feminists themselves are divided. Nina Hartley is a lifelong member of the National Organization for Women, which in 1973 came out for decriminalization of prostitution precisely because it is the best chance for sex workers to organize themselves for a better life, including the possibility for more Lusty Lady-type arrangements.

    As a performer, Nina herself has quite a bit of organizing history in the porn business, first founding the Pink Ladies Social Club to help female performers out of any industry-related jams, and then being one of the founders of the Adult Industry Medicine[A.I.M] Foundation, which provides health care to all of the San Fernando Valley’s on-camera sex workers. Both outfits were established in the face of management opposition.

    If you want to disagree with Nina Hartley, by all means. If you were to preface that by saying she is a principled feminist but misguided on several issues - instead of the trashtalking to which you have subjected her - that would go a long way to shedding more light than heat.

    6 March 2005, 8:24 am

  19. Anthony J. Kennerson:

    As the person who originally refered Nina Hartley to Chyng Sun’s article to begin with, and has been both a socialist-feminist sex radical and a fan/follower of Nina for the balance of her career as a sex radical, feminist, and Leftist woman, I have, needless to say, some major issues with you, Stan, on both your original article and your responses to some here who disagree with you.

    First, let me explain that outside of our major differences of opinion and philosophy when it comes to sex, sex work and pornography and what should be feminism’s and the Left’s relationship to it, I have nothing but the deepest respect for and generally agree with many of your basic radical principles in so far as they concern economics, capitalism, and war. And I do not and will not challenge your right to disagree with and challenge those feminists and sex radicals on the Left who take a more positive and affirmative viewpoint of sex workers and their craft. Constructive criticism and passionate debate between mutually respectful sides should be an integral part of progressive theory and practice, and I do hope that our discussion does prompt those on all sides of the porn debate to deeper discussion and consensus.

    Having said that, allow me to begin my critique of your position as stated in that article.

    You say that you never intended to smear prostitutes or sex-positives in general….yet everything that you say in the article points out otherwise. When you smear sex-positive thinkers like Susie Bright, Carol Queen, and the like as “privileged Whites” who are totally blind to the supposedly real negative effects of prostitution and pornography on women; on a website designed by antipornography feminists who have used their activism to perform that very smear, and when you promote and endorse that very antiporn position as THE Left/feminist position on prostitution and porn, in complete disrespect to other, more liberationist positions..well, how can that be construed to be anything other than a smear and a denial of their right to exist? And when you rhetoric like “break-in-by-gang-rape” to describe what is in most cases an consensual act of sex between adults; or reduce all men who consume porn or who support women’s right to produce porn or perform in sex work to rapists and “pimp husbands”….well, again, how else should we sex radical Leftists respond?

    Perhaps in your zeal to cast all who oppose antiporn feminist theory into the abyss, you failed to mention the fact that none of the mentioned sex radicals that you slam by name deny in any form the realities of sex work or porn — either its benefits to sexual education and general knowledge of human bodily pleasures or its drawbacks as a profession. Indeed, every single one of those women have, in their own way, used their notoriety and their “privilege” as successful sex activists to improve the social and economic conditions of sex workers and erotic entertainers directly..often in direct opposition to their management. Are you aware of Nina Hartley’s founding of various groups like the Pink Ladies Social Club?? Or her founding role with the Adult Industry Medical (AIM Foundation?? (She and founder Sharon Mitchell made up a video called “Porn 101″ that is required viewing for all women seeking to enter the adult video industry; it states in direct and stark terms the responsibilities and the possible pitfalls that come with being in this industry.) Or have you managed to read any of Ms. Hartley’s many essays that she has written for many anthologies? Or perhaps because they are featured in more sex-positive feminist venues, you can simply dismiss her readings as mere “horseshit” and rank her as another White privileged traitor to her gender? (In another radical mailing list, someone even called Ms. Hartley a “poster bitch for the New Right”; an interesting pejorative for a third generation socialist/feminist/progressive Jew whose parents and grandparents fought against all the usual oppressions.)

    And it should be noted that Nina’s response was limited only to the points made by Professor Sun about the supposed negative impacts of porn, based upon her (Nina’s) own reading of Sun’s personal pontificating. There was nothing about prostitution or overall society or even sex radicalism cited in her essay rebuttal; it was only a defense of her chosen profession and those who consume it regularly.

    As to Nina’s husband Ira Levine (aka Ernest Greene) and his response to your screed that was referenced by an earlier reply: You say that you don’t have the means to reference the original article and thusly you haven’t even seen Greene’s response…yet that doesn’t prevent you from passing comments on them as if you have. I will do Sheldon Ranz one better: I will provide a link to two places where you can see Greene’s reply in full. The first is to the particular thread at Nina Hartley’s free forum where the debate originally took place; and the second is to the Hardcore Gossip website where both your original essay and Greene’s response appear together.

    http://nina.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2664&st=50 (Greene’s reply is the third post down)

    http://hardcoregossip.com/021405-002.html

    In addition, the first post also contains Nina’s own response, just in case there are those who say that she can’t speak for herself.

    And while I do accept your assertion, Stan, that you are speaking only for yourself in this matter, I happen to think that it is totally legitimate for Ernest Greene and others to raise questions about your past history as a hired hand for the military, since you use the military and its supposed dependency on porn as a fundamental foundation for your antiporn views…especially when you wrongly accuse opponents of your position of doing the very same thing that you may have done in your past. I don’t think that Nina Hartley has ever killed or wounded anyone, nor has she fought in battle..she doesn’t even support war as an philosophy, except in extreme situations.

    Finally, there is this: Contrary to some misperceptions of us that are spread around on occasion, those of us that are on the Left and who support the right of people to choose their own sexuality or to consume and produce explicit sexual material and/or media are well aware of the nature of the business and the system of capitalism as a whole. We do not need lectures on the “dark side” of being in the sex industry; nor do we need saviors to rescue us from our own depraved lives….we are more than capable of seeing that ourselves. What differentiates us from the MacDworkinites which would simply abolish sex work and sexual expression under the guise of “protecting women and children” is that we believe that consensual sexual pleasure is, in spite of the risks and dangers involved, still a basic human need and a source of positive life energy. Of course, those of us who are both sex radicals and political Leftists have no illusions that a more humane and diverse and positive relationship with sex will by itself replace the traditional Left program of human liberation from war, poverty, maldistribution of power and resources, ecological destruction, racism, or even patriarchy (Yes, Stan, some of us do believe that patriarchy does exist to be fought, even if we disagree on how and where it should be fought). In the end, the primary goal of human liberation projects, in my view, is to allow the maximum amount of equality and choice for free and equal human beings to fulfill their own destiny and exercise their own autonomy within a communal order of shared values of mutual respect, mutual informed consent, and mutual desires. The desire for a utopia where all discriminations and inequities are removed is a goal to be strived for always by any respectful and meaningful radical; until that time comes, however, we must make do with the world we live in and the people we live with..with all their desires, feelings, and myopias of the present. Respecting those who fight for their right to define their sexuality as individuals and using the institutions of sex work and sexual expression to promote progressive values is hardly, IMO, a repudiation of feminism or socialism or progressivism; indeed, IMHO, it’s a vital extension to it.

    Disagree with us if you may, Stan…but please accept and respect us, for we’re not going away anytime soon.

    Thank you for the time, Stan, and for having this forum…we may disagree strongly on this, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t reach a consensus on other matters. More progressive voices in the blogosphere is a very good thing.

    Anthony Kennerson
    Lafayette, LA

    6 March 2005, 11:13 pm

  20. Stacia Tolman:

    This debate has mostly focused on the supply side of pornography, and not much on the demand side. Are the women who supply images for the pornography industry exercising choice, or are they exploited victims? I think you could debate pretty much the same question about the consumers of porn. Why do people look at porn? Face it, pornography is very boring. There are a finite number of erogenous body parts, and a finite number of ways to rub them together. There’s no human ‘story’ there, either; in fact, it’s the lack of human connection that can make it titillating. Physical ‘intimacy’ with no emotional context or content. (Unless it’s some kind of incest story, in which case it’s about destroying the emotional context.) I worked in a strip joint in Boston many years ago. It was the loneliest place I’ve ever been in. Men at a bar or alone at tables, often not even looking at the dancer. A dancer naked on the runway, shaking her breasts or opening her legs, often not even listening to the music she was supposedly dancing to. When the strippers are not on the runway, they are supposed to be on the floor, striking up conversations with the customers. If a guy wants to keep talking to a girl, he has to buy her a drink. The bartender knows to mix cranberry juice and ginger ale, and it costs the guy (this is 20+ years ago) seven dollars and a half. If they don’t want to pay, the girl goes and talks to somebody else. The girl gets one dollar on every drink, and that’s how she makes most of her money. On weekends crowds of younger men would come in together and make more noise than the ‘regulars’ but behind the bravado they were every bit as alone. This was when to get a sexual compulsion serviced the consumer actually had to go out into the world. Now with internet porn the consumer’s isolation can be absolute, and the Combat Zone in downtown Boston, with all its sleaze and raunch and funk, has been ‘cleaned up,’ but really I think it was just no longer necessary; with the internet, the consumers can stay home and spend money. And that’s what the porn addiction/compulsion is about: isolation. An important part of male oppression is the intense emotional isolation they are subjected to from birth. One of the very few sanctioned ways for guys to experience any kind of closeness with another human being is through sex. This creates the compulsion around sex, which is often called ‘biological’ but is really just desperation. And as with any other kind of addiction, its roots are deeply emotional and started very early in life. It is very powerful, it is anything but ‘freely chosen,’ and it is not fun. This creates the market for pornography, and the demand seems as endless as the supply.

    Sometimes I think those of us who make it our business to think about oppression& liberation give the emotional aspect of the issues short shrift. We’re afraid it’s too touchy-feely or something, a bourgeois self-indulgence. We should get over that. Feminists know, or should know, or used to know that the personal and the political are mutually inextricable. Whether through booze or drugs, food, shopping, or pornography, think how much our economy depends on people purchasing relief from the boredom, fear, impotence, and loneliness that the economy itself has instilled in us.

    9 March 2005, 2:16 pm

  21. Stan:

    Finally back and settling in.

    Up front, Stacia is right IMHO that the deep alienation of capitalist society promotes obsessive behavior. I think she is also correct to put the emphasis here on the commodity-aspect of this, which the conversation is continually turned away from by people calling themselves “sex positive.” That term, by the way, is outrageously polemical, and I’m going to point that out every time someone uses it. The implication is (1) that people who disagree with their position on this issue are somehow opposed to sex, and (2) that the “sex” to which we are implicitly opposed is some undifferentiated category. It’s like saying “pro-life” and implying that the opposite position is pro-death. It is boilerplate language with an agenda… and the agenda is to dismiss opposition. The same applies to “MacDworkinite.” If anyone wants to engage a debate about either Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin’s work, then cite them with quotes or accurate paraphrase, and then answer their argument. This caustic conflation of their names as an epithet is dangerously close to flaming, and I do not think it unreasonable to ask participants to refrain from this kind of baiting. It adds nothing to the debate, and is desinged for the express purpose of provocation.

    The claim that either of them has ever advocated the abolition of “sexual expression” has somehow escaped me even with my repeated reading of their work. Which brings me back to one of my original points. Sexual “expression” is not simply some pristine individual choice. Desire itself, and the practices associated with sexual desire, patriarchally constructed from the ground up, can not be immunized from critique by repeated appeals to the libertarian fallacy of ahistorical, decontextualized, individual choice.

    Making that critique is NOT the same — as has been implied — as Christian theocratic attempts to contain questions of sexually out of the public sphere and regulate sexuality (both manifestations of patriarchy). The critique I and others make is not motivated by squeamishness about sex or conservatism. It is saying that few sexual practices in a patriarchal society are ever innocent of sexuality as a system of power.

    The argument that this is the way things are, like it or not, so we should just accept the situation… sorry, I won’t accept that. That’s a kinder, gentler (and more patronizing) way to say stop making this critique. The industry of prostitution/pornography is not merely an “expression” of anything, and I don’t see any liberatory value to it whatsoever. On the contrary, it is the economic expression of the violent exploitation of women and children. Note that I did not accuse anyone here personally of violence. But the overwhelming reality of pornography and prostitution is one that is both violent and exploitative. If anyone is inclined to refute that statement as it is — not by reworking it to foreground exceptions — then I’m all ears. And I put the two together for the same reason that I put military-police together more and more. The evolution of society is now blurring the distinction between them.

    On Earnest Green’s reply… he says I call him a perpetrator of heinous crimes, no better than a child rapist ,etc. This is nonsense. Here’s his quote: “In doing so [stating that heinous crimes do characterize much of the industry], he basically calls me out as being no better than a child-rapist, pimp and murderer.” This is not true. This is a counterfeit argument that buries a false premise in the conclusion.

    I never once even mentioned him, and only mentioned Nina Hartley by name as a lobbyist. His claim that my characterization of the industry generally as violent and exploitative somehow implicates him personally is a common kind of logical fallacy designed to personalize the debate in order to posture at being outraged (which is exactly what he has done). The rest of his remarks about me are personal (this is an ad hominem fallacy) in order to redirect attention away from the content of my argument. This is not a debate about anyone’s “resume.” Yet the entire rest of this so-called reply was his resume, and there is not a single instance anywhere in the entire “reply” where he has addressed my actual argument… just variation on the theme of his original tactical outrage, and the comparison of his own political bio with the caricature of my own bio.

    One of the things I’d like to encourage on this blog is real debate. It may be hard to recognize these days, because people have been inured to think of food-fights like Crossfire as “debate.”

    Another example — and I’m not picking just on you Anthony, but you’re the seco nd post as I scroll up — is “We do not need lectures on the “dark side” of being in the sex industry; nor do we need saviors to rescue us from our own depraved lives.” This is the substitution of a new characterization of my argument for the real one… and one calculated, yet again, to personalize the debate for the purpose of closing it down.

    My reference to horseshit was very specific. What she said was that pornography “is not all Bang Bus, and by no means does all of it, or even most of it, conform to the author’s notions of porn-as-expression-of-misogyny.” When she says that MOST pornography is not an expression of misogyny, that is either colossal ignorance of the very industry with which one is associated, or staggering disingenuousness. But again, what I actually wrote doesn’t seem ot interest my opponents in this debate.

    Here is a specific debate challenge. Answer the question: Is most pornography misogynist? If so, why did Hartley claim otherwise?

    On Carol Queen… and Chuck Traynor. Traynor was married to Linda Marchiano, who he beat, raped, sold to other men, and coerced into making porn films, including having sex with a dog. I’m a little taken aback that anyone would find my reference to him as a pimp somehow out of the way. He was a violent pimp. Carol Queen in 1997 ridiculed Marchiano, who had escaped that relationship and gone public with here experience. Queen refered to Marchiano (aka Lovelace) as “Linda ‘He-Had-To-Put-A-Gun-to-My-Head-To-Make-Me-Fuck-That-Dog’ Lovelace.” Now we have everyone outraged that I have the temerity to… whatever… but the same folks defending Carol Queen from me.

    I’d like to have someone explain that.

    I never mocked prostitutes, Sheldon, and you know it. Here is my exact quote, since it seems necessary to include it to rebut this kind of slander.

    “The ‘bad girl’ image coveted by ‘sex radicals’ is a pure exercise of class and national privilege that intentionally ignores how they provide cover for this industry and the dangerous, sometimes deadly, realities behind it. Their ‘choices’ always trump the reality of those trapped in prostitution and pornography, and their solution is not to attack the industry, but to call those enslaved within it ‘sex workers,’ and claim that what they need are unions. Presumably, the unions could sign contracts with the pimps to limit the ‘break-in-by-gang-rape’ periods.”

    The latter is a reference to the reality for most street protitutes, who are “broken in” by gang rape. My comments have never mocked the women victimized by this system. My position has been consistently for women as a class (as opposed to for certain privileged, individual women), and readers will seek in vain to find anything I’ve ever written that blames women-victims.

    Make principled arguments, y’all. Damn!

    Same applies to Sex Worker’s claim that I said “all those who engage in prostitution voluntarily in the West are either childish brats or apologists for sexual slavery.” Failure to recognize the common patriarchal root of sexual slavery and the libertarian-captivity of any discussion of sexuality is not always intentional, therefore it is not apologetic. But Nina Hartely’s piece, for all the resaons I explicitly pointed out, is clearly a defense of the INDUSTRY, and it is couched in the terminology of the marketplace. She is a spokesperson for a lobbying-front, which is demonstrable from a five minute web search.

    She is an apologist for the industry, and she intentionally tries to deny or gloss over the real nature of MOST pornography and prostitution. Earnest can get as apoplectic as he likes, but the article is available for anyone who wants to read it and her association with that front group is too.

    Her description of Chyng Sun’s article was deliberately misleading and demogogic (for the reasons available in my own reply to Hartely).

    I don’t have an agenda, at least not some policy prescription. I want the left to have an honest debate about sexuality as a system of violent power. Too many leftists I know either evade the topic, or fall into epistemological habits they eschew on other issues, ie, biological determinism and libertarianism.

    That this topic has drawn such a vigorous reaction, I think I may be onto something… like a raw nerve.

    9 March 2005, 4:57 pm

  22. Sheldon:

    I’ll respond to the rest of your intriguing response, Stan, but to keep my posts at a manageable length, I’ll just focus here on your challenge about what Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon are really all about.

    The term “MacDworkinite” was coined by Nadine Strossen, the first female President of the ACLU and used extensively in her book,
    “Defending Pornography”. It was not, as you seem to feel, designed more recently with the intent to incite flaming. I won’t use the term because Strossen gives MacKinnon too much credit as a leader of anti-porn feminism. Andrea Dworkin was the chief founder, and she recruited MacKinnon years later to become her movement’s legal arm. With all due respect, “Dworkinite” will do fine, thank you.

    And what do Dworkinites believe? They believe that, as Dworkin wrote in her essay, “Why So-Called Radical Men Love and Need Pornography”: “Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives.”(Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, p. 148). They believe that, as Dworkin told a 1979 Take Back the Night rally, “The annihilation of a woman’s personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality and so the night is the sacred time of male sexual celebration because it is dark and in the dark it is easier not to see: not to see who she is. Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life, but especially for women’s lives, can run wild, hunt down random victims, use the dark for cover, find in the dark solace, sanctuary, cover.”(Letters from a War Zone, p. 14) [Please note her use of the word “intrinsic.”]

    They believe that “Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting.”(Pornography: Men Possessing Women, p. 69) This revelation is considered the gospel truth: “The plethora of leather and chains among male homsexuals, and the newly fashionable defenses or organized rings of boy prostitution by supposedly radical gay men, are testimony to the fixedness of the male compulsion to dominate and destroy that is the source of sexual pleasure for men.”(“Pornography and Grief”, Take Back the Night, p. 289)

    They believe that, as Dworkin wrote in “The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door”: “Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.” They believe that “the vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center.”(Intercourse, p. 122) They believe that “The fact is that the process of killing - both rape and battery are steps in that process- is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination.” (Letters from a War Zone, p. 22)

    Not “patriarchically conditioned” men, not “some” men, not “most” men, just “men.” No qualifiers need apply.

    And on the rare occasion when a qualifier is inserted, it is the exception that proves the rule. Dworkinites believe that “[S]exual intercourse under conditions of gender inequality…[is] an issue of forced sex,” as Catharine MacKinnon wrote in “The Male Ideology of Privacy: A Feminist Perspective on the Right to Abortion” (Radical America, July-August 1983). Accurate paraphrase: women are unequal to men in our patriarchy, ergo they can not give meaningful consent to sex with men. Implication: since all branches of feminism regards a sexual encounter where one partner does not give such consent as rape, therefore, all male-female sex is rape. When, say, Stan Goff is having sex with a woman, they believe that he is a rapist, except that the Dworkinites have a fascinating tendency to go easy on male anti-porn militants.

    Substitute “Jews” or “Blacks” for “men” in the aforementioned quotes. Hate speech, anyone?

    10 March 2005, 2:00 am

  23. Sex Worker:

    Hi Stan, I guess that “it pisses me off” isn’t an argument. Neither is “I wont be sucked in…”. So I will try again to make my point, hopefully in a clearer way this time. I am still trying to clarify my own thoughts about some aspects of this issue so this discussion is usefull for me. Not all of my comments are aimed directly at your article or you. When I use the term “sex-workers” it refers to prostitutes, but also to strippers, models, porn actors etc.

    I don’t think anybody’s personal histories are at all relevant in any moral sense (there but for the grace…), or political sense given that you are not promoting the millitary, but they are relevant in terms of perspective. I suspect that in the military you would see the most mysoginist elements of porn, prostitution and culture generally. But it doesn’t give you an understanding of what the daily lives of sex-workers are like or how they feel about it. It doesn’t even give you any real insight into the minds of most clients.

    Also, you read stuff by people like Andrea Dworkin and you will end up with a totally skewed version of reality. She sounds radical because her writing is shocking, but her politics is pure liberalism. She has no more to offer than someone like Valery Solanas (who at least had some imagination and a sense of humour). Dworkin’s views and experiences are not representative, they present no solutions, and you would be hard pressed to find many sex-workers who thought she was anything but a wanker or deeply disturbed.

    So I’m going to explain what prostitution is like in Australia:

    In Australia prostitution has been de-criminalised or legalised in most states (but the specific system does vary). There is virtually no “pimping” – most prostitution is conducted privately by the worker, through escort agencies or in brothels. Most agencies and brothels are managed by women and have female staff (male brothels tend to have male staff instead), the male staff are usually security or drivers - and of these I actually have not met any who I diddn’t think was considerate and trustworthy. People who choose to work independently generally do NOT have pimps, but either work with other workers or advertise. So there is very little of “breaking in periods” or other activities of which you speak. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t happen, just that it is rare.

    This is how it works in most brothels and agencies; the prices range from $55 to $90 per half hour – the norm is about $65 or $70 and there is not any real division between “high class” brothels (though there are very occasional exceptions). Most people choose where they work based on factors such as atmosphere, location, type of client, other workers, how busy it is, etc rather than rate of pay. There is a set service which usually involves massage, head and sex. Anything else costs more and is strictly between the worker and client (the agency gets no cut).

    There is a labour-shortage so workers here have a great deal of choice about where they work and what they are willing to do. The worst most places can do is fire you and you can go to work somewhere else the next day. So you don’t have to see any clients that you don’t want to or put up with any other shit. I have seen brothels where they try to push workers into things or rip them off. Usually this involves taking advantage of new workers lack of knowledge about the industry and their rights or their of being “outed”. Generally other workers try hard to support new workers and let them know their rights and how to deal with stuff.

    An argument I have often heard from lefties is that prostitutes are too “degraded” to be organised to stand up for their rights or that there is too much competition between workers. I have seen no real-life evidence of this at all. In most of the places I have worked there is an understanding that security depends on solidarity amoung the people working there so there are informal rules about looking after each other and not getting too competetive (besides which acting competetive doesn’t actially help get more clients anyway – it just pisses other workers off).

    Most clients (90%) do not have any desire to hurt, upset, humiliate or degrade you. Actually a lot of them become quite worried and upset if they think that they might be doing any of these things. But there are also a minority of clients who seek out prostitutes in order to hurt them. This doesn’t mean just physical violence but all kinds of stupid and crazy psychological games (“head-fucks”). These kind of clients seek out (sometimes sub-consiously) workers who are weak… ie new to the industry, depressed, tired, but mostly unconfident or with low self-esteem. They can pick out weakness in a worker in the few secconds it takes to do the line-up or introduce. After they have been in the industry for a while people realise that they should not work if they are not feeling good, or that if they have to, to watch out for these kind of clients and to warn others if they pick up bad vibes. Essentially, if you are self-confident you will get nice clients.

    Also, your comments about “break in by gang rape” were – maybe not deliberately - extremely dissmisive and mocking of workers attempts to organise. In Australia there are a number of organisations which have nothing to do with the industry but are set-up and run by sex-workers or sometimes with support of community groups (health workers etc). They run free clinics, workshops, put out “Ugly Mugs” (bad clients) lists, information about health and safety, give out condoms etc. The Scarlett Alliance is the peak body for sex-workers groups, networks and projects. Representatives are sex-workers elected at a local level, industry and owners are excluded. They have done a lot of work with migrant workers… Which is particularly important because our government has been targetting migrants for the last few years – many of the so-called anti-trafficking legislation and action has been directed against workers themselves and there is a lot of evidence of collusion between agency-owners and the Department of Immigration. It has been really hard for SA to get a hearing at the refugee-rights and anti-trafficking conferences here because they are dismissed as either “victims” or “apologists”.

    http://www.scarletalliance.org.au/

    http://www.swop.org.au/

    I have more to say… Particularly in relation to your characterisation of the industry and other analysys… But not enough time right now…

    10 March 2005, 3:35 am

  24. Sex Worker:

    One more thing… I have worked with people from all kinds of backgrouds with all sorts of motivations. Some hate the job, some love it (not so much the sex - which is not really considered sex by *most* anymore than massage is considered intimacy by a masseur - but the interaction, psychology, atmoshpere, flexibility, other workers etc). Many people begin doing it due to some sort of personal crisis, however the majority just consider it similar to any kind of low-skilled (in the sense of not requiring education and experience) work. Many of them are what you could call “refugees” from various kinds of social destabilization… But then I have also worked in a Supermarket and most of the people there seemed trapped - through family, lack of education, lack of confidence etc. Their attitudes were similar and came from the same variety of backgrounds. I really never saw a great deal of difference.

    10 March 2005, 3:49 am

  25. Sheldon:

    “It’s one thing to disagree with sex workers on whether or not they should unionize; it’s quite another to openly mock them, which you did with your ‘break-in-by-gang-rape’ remarks.”

    Now that’s what I wrote earlier, Stan. Read it again. I did not accuse you of mocking “prostitutes”, but of sex workers with whom you disagree over unionizing. Sex Worker from Australia sees your comment as mocking, just like I do.

    Your comment assumes that unionizing sex workers is useless and a joke, as if the sex industry is somehow immune to being unionized in ways other industries are not. I provided you with the example of the Lusty Lady, and you chose to ignore that. Is it normal for you to ignore stuff that inconveniences you?

    10 March 2005, 7:53 am

  26. Stan:

    Preface: I feel that Sex Worker and I are involved in a dialogue. Sheldon, on the other hand, seems to be trying to score points. That’s not the same as a debate. But don’t go away, Sheldon. I’m still trying to practice a kind of unconditional love. (-:

    Apology: If my scepticism (NOT opposition!) about prostitutes’ unions (based on my own knowledge of prostitution in the US (where unions are historically weak and most prostitutes enter this practice through childhood sexual abuse and drug addiction) was expressed in any way that personally offended anyone, I offer an apology. It was not my intent. My point is that prostitution as I can observe it on any given day ten miles from where I write this will not, and can not be unionized. It is a violoent criminal underground activity, for which law enforcement generally punishes the women (who are the victims). A union drive will not stop the gang-rape that most experience as part of their introduction to prostitution. The police themselves are often complicit in the enterprise.

    I have no objection to anyone self-organizing as a collective to either defend their interests or ameliorate their conditions. On the contrary. I am a commie, after all.

    On the issue of hate speech, Sheldon’s implication is ludicrous. Dworkin is generalizing about men AS A CLASS, and “men” is a rhetorical marker for masculinity — overwhelmingly dominant constructions of male sexual practice and ideology. Like Malcolm X talking about “whites.” The difference between Dworkin’s defense of women against rape culture (which is a real thing) and Malcolm X’s defense of his nation against the depredations of white supremacy… and the hate speech of men against women and whites against oppressed ntaionalities… is NOT a difference of direction, not a mirror image. This kind of abstraction away from the issue of power is the basis of crap like the reverse reacism lawsuits in the US used to roll back affirmative action, etc. The difference between Dworkin’s critique of me-as-a-class or Malcolm X’s critique of whites-as-a-class and men’s stereotypes about women or white’s stereotypes about oppressed nationalities, is a QUALITATIVE difference, based on actually existing relations not merely of unequal power, but of the structural power of the dominant group necessarily existing at the expense of the structurally subordinated group.

    Dworkin says that male SEXUALITY is “intrinsically” violent. She does not say that males are intrinsically violent. Does she have to make reference in each paragraph to the social construction of sexuality? The dominant construction of male sexuality IS violent.

    The book I just wrote (and am editing for publication at the end of the year), “Sex & War”, explores this theme at great length.

    The reason I am not answering every point that come sthis way is (1) time, and (2) the purpose of posting this article in the first place: to point out that prostitution and pornography serve to commodify women’s bodies and to perpetuate an ideology that constructs male sexuality as violence and domination.

    Sex Worker and I have some common ground that I wan’t to explore when I can plow out from under the accumulating pile of diversions and fallacies. (Unfortunately, I have to leave town again on Sunday because my father-in-law is undergoing heart surgery.) I beg Sex Worker’s indulgence on this account, because I at least intuit a general direction for us to hack out a path to each other. My second apology is for being so scattered by the shit that goes with being unemployed and part of a very heterodox family that I can’t stay as plugged into this as I’d like.

    I hope participants and readers will check Robert Jensen’s and Kimberly Crenshaw’s articles that I posted earler today.

    Gotta run.

    10 March 2005, 1:00 pm

  27. Anthony J. Kennerson:

    Well..I see that all my work has gone to waste here, Stan, since you seem not to have heard a word I said. I originally intended not to respond further, since it seems that any debate with you would be superfluous due to your inflexibility and your total refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of people like Nina Hartley and other sex radical feminists and Leftists..but your latest blasts simply can’t go unanswered.

    First off: the term “MacDworkinite” is a totally legitimate term to describe followers of their joint ideology of opposing sexual expression as “objectifying” and “degradiing” to women…especially since both women have collaborated together in not only developing their beliefs, but have actually joined forces in promoting direct policies to meet their goals. (Remember the MacKinnon-Dworkin “civil rights” ordinance that they promoted during the 80s???) Sheldon has more than adequately given you just a small sample of their beliefs as spoken from their own mouths…and I could add the most recent incident at the “Inside Deep Throat” panel discussion where MacKinnon made the claim that hospitals were actually teeming with women victims of “throat rape” (i.e., fellatio), let alone those women who have actually died from such. (Wherever they are.) If you are so willing to support their claims so devoutly, you should also be willing to acknowledge all of their words..not just cherry-pick what serves your interests while rejecting that which is inconvenient.

    And a nice job of Rope-a-Dope on the issue of Dworkin’s attitude towards male sexuality, too, Stan….you say that she isn’t really dissing men as men, but “men as a CLASS”?!?!? Gee, that changes everything…except that nowhere in Dworkin’s work does she ever use the term “class” or ever use Marxist philosophy..she just describes hetero sex as essential virtual rape. Besides, surely you aren’t implying that the poorest minimum-wage male has more power as a member of such a “class” than Condoleeza Rice or Teresa Heinz Kerry or Carly Fiona or Ann Coulter or any economically privileged female, aren’t you???

    And how nice of you to bring Malcolm X into the fight, too?? But I have to ask….which Malcolm will you use?? the Malcolm who was the titular spokesman for the Nation of Islam and who followed to the letter the devout principles of Elijah Muhammad, which included such principles as Black sepratism, a seperate Black nation, and a fundamentalist Muslim philosophy draped within a Black nationalist ideology?? Or the Malcolm of the Muslim Mosque/Organiation of Afro-American Unity days, which directly repudiated such conservative ideology and moved more towards more radical beliefs?? After all, if you are going to attack sex radicals for being fronts for patriarchy, it doesn’t make sense to quote someone who for a long time represented the worst form of patriarchy known to mankind. Besides. Malcolm abandoned the gross reduction of Black oppression to inate White depravity when he left the NOI and embraced traditional orthodox Islam…a big reason, IMO, that he was ultimately assassinated.

    And, oh..what wonderful hair-splitting you do, Stan, in differentiating Dworkin’s phiosophy as saying that male sexuality is “intrinisically” violent as opposed to the common myth that it is “inherently” violent…I’m sure that we all will see the difference and will give St. Andrea the benefit of the doubt on this one.

    Since the rest of your remarks are simply refried resets of your basic belief that porn and sex work is simply the base equivalence of male rape and exploitation of women, and as such must be delegitimized and repudiated; they require no further response from me, since I have made my beliefs quite clear.

    I will make my point clear for the last time here before I depart from this blog: Sexual expression may be affected and diverted by economic and social structures, but that doesn’t translate into total dependence on those structures. No political ideology or structure can totally control or repress basic human sexual attraction; and even within the most oppressive social systems people can establish communities and relationships of trust and support. Reducing the complex web of human sexuality to mere economic determinism and/or dual hierarchies without acknowledging the factor of individual choice and action and free will and self agency is more than just an act of denial; it is a direct insult and a slander to those who do sex work who manage to survive on their own without the interference of do-good rescuers who claim to speak for them.

    You say that prostitution and pornography “commodify” women’s bodies. In my view, your refusal to listen to the voices of sex workers who don’t fit into your little ideological blinders does more to “commodify” and objectify them than any “pimp” or “pornographer” ever will.

    However progressive you might be on other issues, Stan Goff…on this one you are a stone-cold reactionary..and I will oppose you as such.

    With that, I yield the floor.

    Anthony

    10 March 2005, 4:00 pm

  28. Stan:

    AJK: “Well..I see that all my work has gone to waste here, Stan, since you seem not to have heard a word I said.”

    SG: I heard you quite clearly, and I have spelled out my disagreements. Am I wasting your time because I fail to be convinced by your post?

    AJK: “I originally intended not to respond further, since it seems that any debate with you would be superfluous due to your inflexibility and your total refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of people like Nina Hartley and other sex radical feminists and Leftists..but your latest blasts simply can’t go unanswered.”

    SG: So you are saying… what? That inflexibility is defined as not legitimizing Nina Hartley’s professional apologetics for the porn industry, including her specious claim that “most” porn is not misogynist?

    AJK: “First off: the term “MacDworkinite” is a totally legitimate term to describe followers of their joint ideology of opposing sexual expression as “objectifying” and “degradiing” to women…”

    SG: You are simply stating it is a legitimate term (as opposed to an epithet?), but you are not explaining why this kind of epithet is necessary for this debate. Your explanation of this epithet is merely a repetition of the same reduction of their work that has already been stated here, ie, that they oppose “sexual expression,” which is pretty sly of you, Anthony, because it represents them as being opposed to anything at all that might be included within this amorphous term. They are opposed to patriarchal power, and have made a very good case that pornography — overwhelmingly — is an ‘expression’ of that power, and an indeological promotion of it.

    AJK: “Sheldon has more than adequately given you just a small sample of their beliefs as spoken from their own mouths…and I could add the most recent incident at the “Inside Deep Throat” panel discussion where MacKinnon made the claim that hospitals were actually teeming with women victims of “throat rape” (i.e., fellatio), let alone those women who have actually died from such. (Wherever they are.) If you are so willing to support their claims so devoutly, you should also be willing to acknowledge all of their words..not just cherry-pick what serves your interests while rejecting that which is inconvenient.”

    SG: Do you have a link to this panel discussion, and the quote? And by the way, my arguments are my own. In those areas where I agree with MacKinnon, Dworkin, or anyone else, I may state that, especially if they have very good language to explain it. But, again, this is not a referendum on pre-demonized personalities. My contention is that the pornography and prositution industries are both an expression of and reflection of violent misogyny (and merely citing the minority exceptions is not an adequate rebuttal), and that most pornography is a form of patriarchal propaganda against women (read and comment on the Jensen piece). What is becoming appare nt to me is that any form of dissent from the so-called sex-radical position (or should I use the even more demogogic ’sex-positive’?) will be villified as the equivalent of Pat Robertson or the Moral Majority. Which is, of course, an intentional and unprincipled misrepresentation of my position.

    AJK: “And a nice job of Rope-a-Dope on the issue of Dworkin’s attitude towards male sexuality, too, Stan….you say that she isn’t really dissing men as men, but “men as a CLASS”?!?!? Gee, that changes everything…except that nowhere in Dworkin’s work does she ever use the term “class” or ever use Marxist philosophy..she just describes heterosex as essential virtual rape.”

    SG: The critique of prevailing sexuality — which the rad-fems had to bend the stick pretty hard to get across — includes a critique of the whole LIBERAL concept of “consent.” You’ll find, if you care to research the history of this notion as a legal category, that “consent” evolved stratight out of the swamp of liberal patriarchy, and the critique of it — using explicitly Marxist categories better than many putative Marxists — can be found elaborated in great detail in MacKinnon’s “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State,” as well as Nancy Cott’s superlative history of marriage in the US, “Public Vows.”

    The declension from “consent is problematic” to “all sex is rape,” is an invention of those who demonize Dworkin, and for anyone who cares to hear what she has said on these topics, there is a section of her web site devoted to debunking these slanders at http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/LieDetect.html.

    AJK: “Besides, surely you aren’t implying that the poorest minimum-wage male has more power as a member of such a “class” than Condoleeza Rice or Teresa Heinz Kerry or Carly Fiona or Ann Coulter or any economically privileged female, aren’t you???”

    SG: No, because I am not conflating the two categories as you are… and as any number of Marxists who have ossified a vital intellectual tradition and methodology into grotesque schematic categories have as well.

    AJK: “And how nice of you to bring Malcolm X into the fight, too?? But I have to ask….which Malcolm will you use?? the Malcolm who was the titular spokesman for the Nation of Islam and who followed to the letter the devout principles of Elijah Muhammad, which included such principles as Black sepratism, a seperate Black nation, and a fundamentalist Muslim philosophy draped within a Black nationalist ideology?? Or the Malcolm of the Muslim Mosque/Organiation of Afro-American Unity days, which directly repudiated such conservative ideology and moved more towards more radical beliefs?? After all, if you are going to attack sex radicals for being fronts for patriarchy, it doesn’t make sense to quote someone who for a long time represented the worst form of patriarchy known to mankind. Besides. Malcolm abandoned the gross reduction of Black oppression to inate White depravity when he left the NOI and embraced traditional orthodox Islam…a big reason, IMO, that he was ultimately assassinated.”

    SG: So is this your rebuttal to my point that social power existing prior to the law is intentionally factored out of liberal logic, making possible things like the Bakke reverse discrimination lawsuit? I am, by the way, a Black nationalist, in the sense that Harry Haywood was.

    AJK: “And, oh..what wonderful hair-splitting you do, Stan, in differentiating Dworkin’s phiosophy as saying that male sexuality is “intrinisically” violent as opposed to the common myth that it is “inherently” violent…I’m sure that we all will see the difference and will give St. Andrea the benefit of the doubt on this one.”

    SG: T’wasn’t my intent to change the words, but my point remains unscathed. She is not saying men have a genetic defect that predisposes them to violence.

    AJK: “Since the rest of your remarks are simply refried resets of your basic belief that porn and sex work is simply the base equivalence of male rape and exploitation of women, and as such must be delegitimized and repudiated; they require no further response from me, since I have made my beliefs quite clear.”

    SG: Thank you for simplifying and restating what you claim is my position in your own words. That’s so much clearer than what I say for myself.

    AJK: “I will make my point clear for the last time here before I depart from this blog: Sexual expression may be affected and diverted by economic and social structures, but that doesn’t translate into total dependence on those structures. No political ideology or structure can totally control or repress basic human sexual attraction; and even within the most oppressive social systems people can establish communities and relationships of trust and support. Reducing the complex web of human sexuality to mere economic determinism and/or dual hierarchies without acknowledging the factor of individual choice and action and free will and self agency is more than just an act of denial; it is a direct insult and a slander to those who do sex work who manage to survive on their own without the interference of do-good rescuers who claim to speak for them.”

    SG: Wow, talk about gymnastics! Perhaps we could stick with the first part of that, where there is the germ of a point that can be actually debated, and leave out the phrase-mongering at the end.

    Economic determinism and biological determinism are both errors rooted in dualism… call it Platonic, Cartesian, Confucian, whatever. I have engaged in neither, but this is an appropriate time to bring up dialectics. Implcit in you remarks seems to be some kind of drive theory of sexuality that counterposes nature to society. This is distinctly undialectical. That is precisely my point in continually harping on the fact that DESIRE itself is socially constructed. Strongly recommend “Profit and Pleasre,” by Rosemary Hennessy, to anyone interested in a good treatment of that theme. To make this point, I would simply point to the majority of both porn and other entertainment (as well as advertising)… where we are presented with men and women who are ’self-evidently’ “desirable.” Of course, there’s nothing self-evident about it at all. That’s the way dominant ideologoies work. They make all manifestations of the status quo, with all its open and concealed power relations, appear to be self-evident. The ‘beaty standard’ for women in the metropoles is a perfect example: borerline anorexic, depilitated, painted and coiffed to look like a doll or a child, set atop spike heels (foot-binding occurs to me here), and decked out in anti-utiliatrian clothes. An irony of late imperialism is that as the metropoles become more and more differentiated in the world system’s division of economic labor as exclusively consumers, men are now being drawn into the maw of this kind of sexual marketplace and we are beginnning to see more males with eating disorders, et al, related to body-image obsessions… the objectification of the sexual self.

    AJK: “You say that prostitution and pornography “commodify” women’s bodies. In my view, your refusal to listen to the voices of sex workers who don’t fit into your little ideological blinders does more to “commodify” and objectify them than any “pimp” or “pornographer” ever will.”

    SG: This is a remarkable assertion in its utter indefensibility. In what way, exactly has my position commodified women’s bodies? This is careening dangerously close to flaming.

    AJK: “However progressive you might be on other issues, Stan Goff…on this one you are a stone-cold reactionary..and I will oppose you as such.”

    SG: I’m not a progressive. But ‘reactionary’, last time I checked, means:

    REACTIONARY — adj : extremely conservative [syn: reactionist, far-right] n : an extreme conservative; an opponent of progress or liberalism [syn: ultraconservative, extreme right-winger]

    Is your use of the term tautological? Reactionary is what your positon is, so your position is reactionary? Or can you find other examples of reactionaries who are critical of pornography and prostitution as part of a critique of patriarchal power? Or is this just name-calling?

    10 March 2005, 5:48 pm

  29. Sheldon:

    First, I want thank Stan for offering an apology on the ‘break-in by gang rape’ business. In all my debates with anti-porners over the decades, that’s a first. Perhaps this is a new millenium after all.

    Secondly, I purposely selected quotes from Dworkin where she did not talk about ‘class’, where that word wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity, because I am quite familiar with the ‘class’ dodge offered by her disciples, which is ironic because Dworkin raely invokes the word, instead talking about “patriarchy this” and “patriarchy that.”

    If this were said about Jews, it would not be acceptable as a defense against anti-Semitism because it was Stalin and his apparatchiks who justified their anti-Semitism beliefs and actions by making Jews out to be a destructive CLASS. The “Lie Detector” on Dworkin’s own website does not offer your spin as a defense of the particular quotes I cited; in fact, it wisely shies away from them, perhaps sensing that no credible defense of them can be made. It instead focuses on less damning accusations, like if she gave Alan Dershowitz the finger once.

    If what is wrong with intercourse is that the penis is “muscling apart” a vagina, well, the anatomy of intercourse and human genitalia certainly do not change if men suddenly stop being a ‘class.’ The quote is therefore in league with the same biological determinism that Dworkin has elsewhere claimed to deplore.

    But in general, Dworkin is saying that that all men are inherently contemptuous of all life due to their unique psychological makeup. This stance allows her to pat herself on the back because then she can say she’s not like sociobiologist Edwin O. Wilson, for example, with all his talk of genes.

    Thirdly, conflating Dworkin with Malcolm X is an insult to Malcolm, especially in his Islamic phase, when he dropped the anti-white rhetoric and talked about class, recognizing class differentiation within the races. Dworkin is actually the Farrakhan of feminism, with the constant drumbeating of hatred and scapegoating, with her and her associates, like MacKinnon, calling feminists they differ with Uncle Toms and Oreo Cookies.

    Fourthly, as for my debating style, well, a debate along the lines you desire is only possible when all participants agree on the facts, but draw different conclusions from them. But when the facts themselves are in dispute, any systematic corrections to the record can’t help but look like an accountant’s ledger.

    11 March 2005, 12:27 am

  30. Sex Worker:

    Hi again, here is the rest of what I was trying to say yesterday (I hope this is making sense because I have been a bit sleep-deprived lately)…

    Firstly, you say that the sex-industry is characterised by violence and exploitation.

    I do agree that it is characterised by exploitation and alienation – but so is every other relationship under capitalism. If you want some examples just look at marriage, professional councelling, having to pay for education and medicine, all industries (the textile industry comes to mind as particularly similar)… That doesn’t justify anything; but it is relevant when people are talking about specifically singleing out an industry or occupation to be campaigned against, or when they say that a qualitatively different strategy should be employed when relating to workers in that industry (ie. that they should not be unionised or even that they can not be organised). Also, the reality is that it won’t be dissapearing any sooner than exploitation and comodification of labour generally, creativity and relationships.

    I don’t however, agree that it is particularly characterised by violence. In places where it has been legalised this just isn’t the case (relative to the rest of that society). For example in Australia violence is no more prevalent in the sex-industry than it is in any venue where alcohol is present. Where the industry is characterised by a lot of violence it is always illegal. The drug-trade is the same. If you are perscribes morphine here you just go to the chemist and pick it up for $3 or $4, it is grown by middle-class farmers, scientists and legal business in the area where I am now living. But if you want to buy heroin you have to go to some dodgy area, pay $50+, make eye-contact with people who may rip you off or attack you, you might get cought by sniffer-dogs and thrown in jail by police who are likely to be violent and try to force you to betray your friends. It is grown by people in places like Afghanistan and shipped here on leaky boats by poor Indonesian fishermen and sold by desperate people, while the police, politicians and mafia take all the profits. You can be sure that even if you survive, what you put into your veins will have cost many people their lives. But buying morphine is totally different. If prostitution and drugs were both fully legalised it would take an enormous burden off of the backs of many, many people.

    As for pornography, again I think that you are wrong to single it out, because clear line just can’t be drawn anywhere. If you say that pornography is live-on-camera sex then you ignore mysoginist movies, pornographic cartoons (eg. there are a lot of great Manga films but some of them are horrifically violent and mysoginist), writing and other stuff; you also include a lot of errotica that is done as perfectly healthy expression by artists, exhibitionists and many other people. If you say that it has to comodifies womens bodies etc then you should include magazines like Cosmo and at least half of movies. Yeah it’s easy to point to something like “Bang Bus” or to the sort of Benny Hill-ish, women in nurse suits type porn, but that is just one end of a broad spectrum. My point is that mysoginist depictions of sex are part of a mysoginist society – it is both an expression of that and part of the ideology of it. Pornography is not the source of the problem but just an other manifestation of it.

    I have heard arguments along the lines of prostitution is the “sale of womens bodies” and is therefore different from “work” where a worker sells their labour power. There are several problems with this argument. Firstly, it’s kind of irrelevant – a bit like arguing whether students, public servants, etc are “really workers”. More importantly, selling or renting someones body is sexual *slavery or rape* not prostitution. Situations where a person is given to a client to do with as they please should be illegal, but the truth is that where prostitution is legal that is rarely how it works. Usually the prostitute provides a specific service to the client, the client is not allowed to do anything that they do not consent to. Sex-worker groups have been trying to get this through to both clients and workers for a long time – with some success with clients and a lot of success with workers (which is what counts in the end). When you don’t recognise this difference it blurs the lines when it comes to abuse and rape of prostitutes. It leads to attitudes like that it is not so bad to rape prostitutes because that is just theft – it’s not theft anymore than date-rape is. It is violent, painfull and deliberately humiliating.

    I think that unionisation is the way to go. But I don’t mean using the exact same model of organisation that the trade unions have because it wouldn’t be able to deal with the situation and problems of the industry; besides which there is way too much corruption, collusion and right wing politics (of the look after themselves and try to place themselves above weaker sections of the community type) in the unions here anyway. What is needed is more organisations like Scarlett Alliance (I mentioned in a previous post), which are dedicated to looking after all workers in the industry (not just the well-off white ones) and which also do more of a variety of stuff including services like SWOP does. Projects like co-ops, phone-registers for street workers to report where they are going and when, Ugly-Mugs lists, STD guids (sex-workers in Australia actually have a lower rate of STDs and STIs than the general population) are needed as well as pickets and strikes etc of specific work-places (these have also happened here on occasion). Why I refer to this as “union” is because I am definitely talking about *self-organisation*, as opposed to the model of organisations which some on the left propose run by community groups or ex-workers (even to the extent of excluding current workers).

    The main obstacles I can see with organising sex-workers at the moment are that they are often quite transient and that they are very afraid of being “outed”… While they often settle in a preferred work-place, they also change workplaces and come and go from the industry frequently. This means that a model of organisation based on delegates from specific work-places probably would not be very successful - basing delegates from different states or areas is the most practical. Also, outreach projects like SWOP, publication, internet lists etc provide a good way for workers keeping in touch. However, being “outed” is a much more serious obstacle. There is so much stigma attached to the work that many workers are far more terrified of being found out by their communities, families, etc than of anything else. Also, there is a real threat of being targetted by police, thugs or nutters because they are prostitutes. This means that it is very difficult for workers to be involved in any kind of public activity and organising. It also means that they are less likely to report abuse by clients or employers, or to stand up for their rights generally.

    Finally, characterising prostitutes as degraded or powerless victims is really the worst thing that can be done. To focus on horror stories or talk about how prostitution is by definition degrading just helps to re-inforce stigma. That doesn’t mean that violence and abuse should be ignored or smoothed over. I think it would be a lot more productive to educate people about the rights of prostitues and particularly that it be seen as work like any other work under capitalism. For example, rather than dismissing prostitutes unionising with statements like “the unions could sign contracts with the pimps to limit the ‘break-in-by-gang-rape’ periods”, their organising should be encouraged on the grounds that it can actually get rid of that kind of violence all together. Besides which, as I explained in my previous post, taking on the identity of “victim” turnes you into easy prey. It dissempowers people – both personally and collectively.

    To demand abolition of prostitution makes as much sense as demanding abolition of wage-labour opposed to trying to organise workers. In the long run maybe it will dissapear or change form, but untill then there are hundreds of millions of women involved in this work and they can’t wait untill after the world socialist revolution or whatever. Besides which, sex-workers are just as likely as anyone else to get involved with progressive politics generally, but the opportunity is denied when they are forced to scrape to survive or hide because of fear and stigma. To just demand that prostitution be got rid of and not support organising efforts is a cop-out. It needs to be exposed to the light and that doesn’t mean just talking about how it’s exploitative, but by saying that abuse with in the industry should not be considered “normal” or tollerated.

    Good, luck with your family stuff.

    11 March 2005, 1:15 am

  31. Sheldon:

    Stan, I’m not sure what you meant by others being taken aback by your reference to Chuck Traynor as a pimp or ‘pimp-husband’. I certainly didn’t deny that he was either. I only saw that reference in the context you used it and therefore understood why Ernest Greene thought you were saying something similar about his relationship to Nina Hartley.

    There’s no question that Traynor abused Linda Boreman, but did he force her to do porn? The evidence for that is increasingly shaky and reasonable people, even feminists like Carol Queen, are well within their rights to voice skepticism of her claims.

    Did you know that an unmarried Linda Lovelace returned to porn in the January 2001 issue of the XXX-rated magazine Leg Show, in which she was featured both on the cover and inside in an interview and brand-new softcore pictorial, proclaiming how fabulous she felt and looked at the age of 50? When she died, she was in the midst of collaborating with a former writer for Screw magazine, Eric Danville, on a worshipful retrospective of her porn career called The Compleat Linda Lovelace. During the interview, she denounced Gloria Steinem and other anti-porn feminists for not helping her out financially as they had originally promised and retracted some of the charges she had made decades earlier against the adult film industry.

    Lovelace’s Ordeal and Out of Bondage were actually written by Mike McGrady, a writer for Newsday whose foremost claim to fame at that time was concocting a hoax called Naked Came the Stranger. This purportedly non-fiction book chronicled the adventurous sex life of a suburban housewife named Penelope Ashe, who is listed as the author. “Ashe” was actually McGrady and another Newsday writer, and a different writer penned each chapter. McGrady later was furious at Henry Paris’ hardcore adaptation of the book and developed an animus toward porn. This bias is clearly reflected on nearly every page of his Lovelace books. I suspect that folks like Carol Queen wondered about her association with a known hoaxer and the credibility of anti-porn memoirs printed by then-porn publisher Lyle Stuart.

    In the books, Lovelace (McGrady) made a number of dubious claims. As part of her forced entry into porn, she claimed that Traynor hypnotized her to help her deep-throat without choking. As any licensed hypnotherapist will tell you, it is impossible to be hypnotized successfully against one’s will. That means that, prior to the hypnosis, she was willing (but not able). She also states that no one connected to “Deep Throat” came to help her when she was being beaten by Traynor in a room right next to the film set. But according to Harry Reems in a 1986 interview with Adult Video News, when Chuck and Linda wanted to be alone together, they went to a room on another floor of the same building, so that her screams (if any) could not have been heard by the cast or crew. What Reem said is crucial because Lovelace went out of her way to praise him as a good and trustworthy fellow. On the other hand, the reliability of her recollection is tainted by her own remarks in the books that she was then stoned on marijuana and percodan.

    Then there were those infamous “bruises” – how often did she tell the media and other receptive audiences that anyone watching the movie could see the bruises on her body, especially the legs, implying that porn audiences are rapists-in-the-making because they were masturbating to the visible signs of her ordeal? Well, I saw the movie - several times, in fact - and the only visible “sign” was a symmetrical birthmark on her upper left thigh. When other people pointed this out to her over the years, Linda would then turn around and say that director Gerald Damiano’s make-up talent disguised the bruises. Sure enough, McGrady had already written that down to set up her alibi. And it needs to be stressed that Lovelace herself admitted just before her death that she hadn’t seen “Deep Throat” until 2001!

    Based on the available evidence, Traynor beat Lovelace to get her to quit porn due to his fear that she would leave him because folks like Harry Reems could please her but he could not (Traynor had major problems getting it up).

    Lovelace was able to finally leave Traynor precisely because of the celebrity that she achieved as the first big porn star. Hugh Hefner gave Linda sanctuary when she was on the run from Traynor, and without demanding any sexual favors from her. Far from being a victim of porn, it liberated her from an unpleasant, abusive relationship. When audiences saw her smile in “Deep Throat”, her joy was genuine, in part because she was interacting with people other than Traynor. And, as perverse as it might seem, because Linda came from a very sexually repressed Catholic background, she was willing to go so far as to do things that were shocking and inappropriate, such as bestiality. The more extreme the repression, the more extreme the liberation. But as long as she was associating with anti-porners who were dangling cash in front of her, you would not hear her say that.

    And what dividends did the Dworkinites accrue as a result of their promise of $$? She testified to the Meese Commission that she was a victim of the porn industry and that snuff films do indeed exist. The feminist movement became harshly divided over pornography when Lovelace became a handy tool for anti-porn feminists to beat into political submission feminists against censorship. When Harry Reems and other folks from the porn industry donated money to Linda because of her health problems, she never bothered to send them thank-you notes.

    No doubt some legal authorities work themselves up into a self-righteous frenzy cracking down on the porn industry because they feel they are rescuing other Linda Lovelaces. Contrary to your other assertion, Stan, no, porn dopes not enjoy state protection. Obscenity laws still exist, and as long as they do, adult pornography will never be decriminalized any more than being gay was in the days when sodomy laws were deemed constitutional.

    11 March 2005, 7:36 am

  32. Sheldon:

    Oops. In that last paragraph, I meant to type, “Contrary to your other assertion, Stan, no, porn DOES not enjoy state protection.”
    My bad.

    11 March 2005, 7:49 am

  33. Sex Worker:

    I found this article a while ago… It has some interesting stuff in it about sex-workers attempts to organise in a far more poverty-stricken and mysoginist society.

    There is also a lot more info about the project and other sex-worker innitiatives in India here:

    Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee
    http://walnet.org/csis/groups/nswp/dmsc/

    ——————————–

    Sex Workers With Attitude
    By Marl Marcel Thekaekara
    New Internationalist 368June 2004

    Shock. Outrage. Middle-class morality suitably scandalized. The reactions were predictable. Even Mari Marcel Thekaekara wasn’t quite sure what to expect from a co-operative of sex workers – and in Communist Kolkata (Calcutta) of all places, where co-ops are usually of the Party, for the Party and by the Party. Then she went to find out for herself.

    As I enter the building the first thing that hits me is the sheer, raw woman power. The office is a noisy, bustling, activity-filled place. A few men, mostly behind desks – but the women are unmistakably and completely in control. There are 60,000 women sex workers who are part of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC). The name sums it up – durbar meaning ‘indomitable’, ‘unstoppable’. Whoever thought that up was brilliant.

    Listening to the women’s stories I am filled with admiration for their guts, their spirit and the manner in which they carry on with their lives, cheerfully and matter-of-factly. There is no self-pity, no whining. Theirs is a precarious, fragile existence often filled with violence and uncertainty. I see women with scars, knife slashes and burn marks. Yet they take everything in their stride. I am intrigued by their pride, the in-your-face attitude, especially in the context of India – a hypocritical society not known for its political correctness, much less its tolerance or sympathy.

    ‘How did Durbar start?’ I ask.

    Dr Smarajit Jana, who started it all, explains: ‘Everyone wanted a successful HIV/AIDS project. I was sent to do this but soon realized the basic scientific premise was flawed. The entire global scientific community working on HIV/AIDS assumed that the battle could be won using information (awareness) and technology (condoms). I realized pretty fast that the women were not in control of their lives. Their clients, pimps, partners and madams controlled them. They were frequently harassed, arrested and often beaten and raped by the police. The economic exploitation by money lenders was beyond belief. We realized soon enough that only by empowering them collectively, by addressing their economic, political and social exclusion, could we succeed.

    ‘Of course, this was simpler in theory than in practice. With thousands of sex workers, it’s a buyers’ market. The macho males paying money didn’t want condoms. So even if 10 sex workers refuse sex without condoms they find an eleventh desperate and willing. That’s it. The system collapses. Every single sex worker had to stand firm, stick by the collective decision. There was no way it would work without the power equation changing.’

    Dr Jana’s team began by trying to understand the everyday problems of the community and to seek answers from them. ‘We changed our thinking completely – began addressing the women’s concerns, not just health. The biggest problem was indebtedness. If we were fighting for the rights of these women based on their needs and perceptions, we had to end their economic exploitation.’

    This was the genesis of the USHA Multipurpose Co-operative Society. Moneylenders had the women in a vicious stranglehold. A woman who became ill would have to take a loan of 500 rupees [$11] to tide her over. She’d be frantic to get back to work because she’d have to pay 500 rupees interest a month and be ensnared in the moneylender’s trap forever. The interest would pile up relentlessly – between 600 and 1,200 per cent paid to dozens of loan schemes, each one more complex and diabolical than the other.

    ‘Why a co-op?’ I ask.

    ‘The women decided,’ answers Jana. ‘Banks demanded documents, voters’ identity cards, proof of residence, recommendations – none of which the women could supply. Bankers treated them with contempt too. The old social exclusion bit. We wanted a structure in which the women could participate totally and actively. The co-op won.’

    USHA started small, with 13 peer educators who pooled the day’s earnings of a group of sex workers. Then Mrinal Dutta, the current Director, had a brain wave: ‘Sex workers earn a lot, but never save. Why not collect their savings every morning before the money disappears?’ Mrinal’s mother was a sex worker and he understood the problems intimately.

    So every morning the collectors now go from house to house collecting the previous night’s earnings. Accounts are meticulously maintained and the women’s knowledge of figures and finance has changed dramatically. Many have become literate, too.

    This brilliant idea was the forerunner of a variety of other savings schemes. And USHA’s growth has been remarkable. By the start of 2004 its working capital had reached 25 million rupees ($550,000), its annual turnover 52 million rupees ($1.2 million). Such corporate-style figures have made it the most talked-about co-op in Marxist West Bengal – the success story of the co-op movement. It has 6,000 registered members – only sex workers and their female children can belong – and is run by an elected board of 12 members. The number of members could easily double, but for reasons best known to itself the Government has granted USHA permission to function in just six districts.

    There is a twist in the tale. When Dr Jana first sought permission to register USHA the Government refused. Prostitution is illegal in India under the Prevention of Immoral Trafficking Act. The sex workers were advised to register as a co-op of ‘housewives’. The bureaucrats had not bargained for a face-off with feisty sex workers. When told that they had to register as housewives, one firebrand retorted: ‘The only way I can become a housewife is if you agree to marry me. Are you up to it?’ The embarrassed civil servant literally ran out of the room. After six months of close encounters of a similar nature, the administration threw up its hands and gave permission. This was a huge victory for the organization.

    The DMSC is possibly the only organization of sex workers in India which states clearly and unambiguously that its purpose is not to ‘rehabilitate’ sex workers – that it exists to fight for their rights. It is explicit about its political objective of fighting for recognition of their work as work and of themselves as workers, and for a secure social existence for them and their children. Durbar also seeks to reform laws that criminalize them and impinge on their human rights. Similarly, USHA is clear that it exists not for ‘economic rehabilitation’ but to provide financial support in a crisis and to prevent economic exploitation. Its major victory has been to liberate the women – and disempower the pimp-moneylender-trafficker nexus.

    Such phenomenal growth made professional management a necessity. With its technical expertise and infrastructure, USHA now serves as the major financial institution for the entire range of sex workers’ organizations affiliated to Durbar. Each of these was started to combat one particular problem.

    The Sramjeebee Mahila Sangha aims to stop the violence of local hoodlums and thugs. The Binodini Shramik Union hopes to join the larger international labour movement to fight for the rights and recognition of sex workers as workers. Komol Gandhar promotes music, dance and theatre troupes.

    The Saathi Sangathan, or Companions Collective, was formed to get the babus – non-paying partners of the sex workers, who live with them, often fathering children – to support the fight against the violence and coercion routinely meted out to sex workers and their children. Berabhenge (‘Tearing Fences’) is designed for kids who are haunted by the fact that they do not know who their father is. Often they become the butt of cruel jokes in school when their personal histories leak out. The stigma causes many to drop out of school. Rahul Niketan and Indubala Abasik Vidyala are residential homes – kids live there and go to nearby schools.

    Durbar has created 27 ‘Self Regulatory Boards’ to prevent ‘trafficking’ of women and minors, stop coercion and ensure that those who enter the trade do so with consent and in full knowledge of what the job entails. Durjoy (‘Hard to Vanquish’) Durbar has just been registered to formalize the loose affiliation of all the myriad groups.

    The medical intervention which was the basis for everything has been hugely successful. This was what created trust between the women and the medical team and was the entry point into the area. It began with small clinics in the heart of the district so that women could use them easily and freely. A great deal of work is done for those with HIV/AIDS. Hotline and counselling centres have been set up and an army of health workers criss-crosses the territory, trying to be available when needed.

    Durbar and USHA are unique because they are owned and managed completely by the community – not by an NGO, not by men in suits, not by middle-class professionals or consultants. It is clearly their organization.

    ‘What impact has it made on you personally?’ I ask Kajol Bose, the President of USHA.

    ‘Before, if someone was dying we could not get money except at exorbitant rates of interest,’ she replies. ‘Now I’ve built a house for my family. Paid for my daughter’s wedding. I have money in the bank. But USHA is about more than just money. I am called in to settle local disputes. My word counts. I’m someone here. Not just a nobody like before.’

    Bharati De adds: ‘Our condition is a hundred times better than before. Before Durbar, the police would treat us like dirt. Arrest, beat, rape, abuse us, call us filthy names. Now when I go to the police station, they say: “Have a seat.” Can you imagine – the police saying “have a seat” to me!’

    She continues: ‘Today our women stand in front of a mike, in front of thousands of people, and demand our rights. Yes, life has changed for us. It was a hard fight, but now we can hold our heads up high.’

    http://www.newint.org/issue368/sexworkers.htm

    12 March 2005, 1:08 am

  34. Anthony J. Kennerson:

    Well done, Sheldon and SexWorker…you both seem to actually know about the situation of sex workers from a direct point of view..which is far, far more than I can say for Mr. Goff.

    Stan, you can blow off my criticism of you all you want to, and it doesn’t bother me at all that you disagree with everything I said. The fact remains that these people whom you continue to distort and smear are far closer to the reality of sex work and porn than either you or any one of your devout antiporn followers ever will be. None of your trumped-up, shot-from-the-hip neo-postmodernist rhetoric will change that.

    BTW…every one of the quotes from MacKinnon and Dworkin are from their own words printed in their essays, and from their own mouths via speeches and lectures they have done in the past. And the comment on “throat rape” was taken directly from the discussion that took place after the New York screening of “Inside Deep Throat”. You may wish to whitewash and gloss over their words, Stan, but those who have been the targets of their wrath can’t afford such nitpicking…being called “house niggers” and “Oreo cookies” and “fronts” for rape and violence simply can’t be dismissed.

    And how particularly funny that you take me to task again for using the “MacDworkinite” phrase as an “epithet”, while you all along do the exact same thing with the phrases “sex positive” and “sex radical”…except that you use them as even worse insults for those who challenge your views.

    And finally..if you are going to call me “tautological” in my assessment of your views on sex and sex work as essentially reactionary, it makes a bit more sense not to use circular, “tautological” reasoning in the first place….like in your loaded question to Nina whether or not all porn is “misogynic”. I guess that if she answered in the negative, you would simply brandish her as a liar and smear her some more; and if she admitted that some porn (but not all) is such, then you would still bash her as a hypocrite. So I would guess that it really doesn’t matter to you anyway how she feels; just the fact that she doesn’t march in perfect goosestep to your crusade to wipe out porn and sex work is enough to condemn her.

    Since we seem to be talking past each other now rather than to each other, I believe that I will close my end of the discussion. You go your own way on this, Stan, and I’ll go mine…and let our paths not cross again.

    Anthony

    12 March 2005, 11:36 am

  35. Stan:

    Anthony, my friend, I am pressed for time, and still haven’t had the chance to develop a thoughtful response to Sex Worker (my apologies, SW, but I think you deserve more than a slapshot missive). Anthony, you are taking up valuable bandwidth to merely rant.

    I asked for a citation, and you provided none. ‘He said-she said’ will not do.

    I have combed through your last post seeking any substance at all, and it has been a vain search. You, sir, have turned this into a purely ad hominem attack, and are now merely flaming.

    This is the last post of yours I will leave on the blog.

    I want to reiterate… please listen… my orginal remarks referred to the demographics and the ideological content of most porn and prostitution, and stated that Nina Hartely is the spokeperson for a front organization that lobbies for the porn industry. If the Coalition for Free Speech would care to share its donor budget with us, I will make a substantial bet that its not the sex-workers of South Raleigh that are on that list.

    I believe Anthony distorted what was said — if it was said at all — by MacKinnon and Dworkin, but before I said that, I gave him an opportunity to cite a source. He declined that invitation. But in any case, what is or is not said by any individual does not change the systemof power that underwrites these industries, the demogrpahics of them, nor the overwhelmingly misogynistic semiotics/ideology of them.

    Bye Anthony.

    12 March 2005, 12:18 pm

  36. Nina Hartley:

    Mr. Goff,

    Though I haven’t found it either pleasant or particularly enlightening, I’ve been reading your expressed opinions, re my occupation, my activities and myself, forwarded from your site to mine via my forum participants.

    Obviously, I don’t share your views on the broader questions addressed in these exchanges, and I see no hope of changing your opinions and no value in trying. You’re equally unlikely to influence mine.

    However, as you continue to throw my name around, and to misrepresent me every time you do, I’m taking a moment to clarify, for the benefit of your readers, a few matters pertaining to who I really am and what I really do. If, as you say, facts on the ground are more important than personalities, I would think a few relevant facts about an individual - an actual human-being and not a paste-board cut-out target for your ideological biases - who bears little resemblance to the one you keep sending up as a target, might be of some value to those who care about what’s true and what isn’t.

    It is true that I have, for a number of years, worked in concert with the Free Speech Coalition, which you dismiss as a front-group for the owners of pornography production companies. While FSC assert the right of those companies to create and distribute the products they legally create, this organization has literally hundreds of members, mainly performers, who have no vested economic interest in the profits of any particular producer, but rather seek to defend the trade they practice in a variety of capacities.

    As for my own activities on behalf of FSC, I have served to represent fellow performers on the organization’s board of directors in the past and, once yearly, travel to Sacremento to address California legislators regarding pornography-related issues as part of an FSC-organized effort to counter the 24/7 campaign of disinformation conducted throughout the year by various groups opposing our right to make our livings in a licit fashion.

    For these services, which occupy a tiny percentage of my time, I have never been paid dollar one, nor would I want to be. To characterize me as a lobbyist for the porn industry is to imply that I am a hired shill for its big-money players, which is substantively false. I am not employed by any company in any capacity other than creatively and derive no personal financial benefit in return for the public stance I take in overall defense of an enterprise which I continue to regard as legitimate and, in many respects you heatedly deny, constructive. I pay my own way to lobbying events, and always have.

    I also note that you determinedaly ignore aspects of my resume, though they have been pointed out to you over and over again, that fail to conform to your artificial recreation of my identity for your own rhetorical purposes. You never bother to mention my participation in the creation and operation of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, a none-profit,sex-worker-initiated-and-operated, grass-roots organization that provides HIV/STD testing and treatment, counseling and medical care for sex-workers in our industry. Over a seven-year period, AIM has performed some 80,000 state-of-the-art PCR/DNA HIV tests which have saved literally hundreds of lives by preventing infected individuals from entering an industry where they might have spread deadly infection. We have also provided ongoing support for sex-workers in need of medical assistance and continue to work within the industry to raise consciousness regarding STDs and other health issues that impact our working population. We also provide scholarships and other exit strategies for workers wishing to leave the sex industry.

    AIM is recognized in the international HIV/AIDS serving community as the single most successful HIV/STD harm-reduction program for sex workers in the world. Since AIM’s inception, there have been a total of four instances of HIV transmission related to sex-work in our industry. Our model has been studied by the CDC, the WHO and many other organizations seeking to emulate our model in other at-risk demographics. As a direct consequence of our efforts, STD infection rates in our client base are approximately ten percent of those routinely reported by health officials in other groups of sexually active young people from all components of American society.

    Let me also point out that, like other reforms I have championed in this industry, AIM was not immediately welcomed by producers and gained acceptance as a result of the insistence of performers that AIM’s protocols be adopted by all companies shooting sexually explicit material in the Los Angeles production region. AIM has since expanded its operations through cooperating clinics into other cities in the US and Europe.

    None of this was accomplished with money from producers, though some have made modest contributions from time to time. AIM is supported almost entirely through its at-cost testing services and through fund-raising among performers. Here again, I receive no compensation for my time and energy invested, other than the satisfaction of helping to save the lives of people about whom I care deeply.

    I ask you, in your campaign to abolish sex-work, how many lives have you saved?

    You also fail to acknowledge my role in helping to create the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force - once again, an organization by, for and of sex-workers and feminists who reject the abolitionist model advocated by your “mentors” among self-styled, radical anti-porn feminists. A small group of zealots including Andrea Dworkin, whose direct exhortations to violence against men have been brought to your attentioin already, and her compatriot Catherine MacKinnon, have attempted to sway public opinion in a manner that harms other women through the endless repetition of false charges and outright lies, of which MacKinnon’s recent claim that large numbers of women have died as a result of so-called “throat-rape” inspired by the film Deep Throat is a fine example. You asked an earlier poster for a citation regarding this claim and here it is:

    http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60A10FD385E0C7A8CDDAB0894DD404482&incamp=archive:search

    Telling whoppers like this won’t succeed in abolishing an industry that we all agree is both ancient and vast, or offer any assistance to those sex-workers who struggle daily with its realities. My work with FACT hasn’t benefitted the producers to any significant degree, as the extremes of feminist opinion are neither more nor less a menace to the operations of pornographers than those they echo from their counterparts on the Religious Right.

    FACT’s only mission is to speak the truth about the dangers of censorship and the stimatization of sex-work to women. Societies that suppress sexual expression - of which pornography is a part, whether you and your cronies like it or not - also supress women’s sexual choices. This is a matter of both historical record and current reality. The societies that treat women most brutally - including many in Asia and Africa where porn and other forms of sex-work are most ferociously repressed - regard women as vessels of sin and sex-work a mechanism by which they corrupt the virtue of men.

    Only by slight degree do right-wing evangelical Christians in this country, whose number one priority is eliminating reproductive choice for women, differ with this point of view. You say you have no problem making common cause with ideological opponents where your goals overlap. Is there no limit to such alliances of convenience in your mind? Would you make common cause with abortion-clinic bombers because they, like you, oppose pornography? You dismiss such questions as red herrings but, once again, where the real lives of real women are concerned, such ideologically-driven accomodations have real consequences.

    Every victory of the right-wing campaign to limit sexual freedom of expression is a step toward the eventual control of women’s personal choices regarding their own bodies. You may, as I’m sure you will, scorn this opinion as yet another example of “personal libertarianism”, but that is a luxury of male privilege that women cannot afford. I do find it interesting that the forces of anti-porn feminism, which have failed to gain traction among women, now seem to have found their most outspoken allies among men whose only contact with sex-work and sex-workers is as clients. Perhaps that in some way shapes your perceptions of a situation in which you and your male friends are highly unlikely ever to find yourselves.

    As to your claims that I am an uncritical supporter of all practices and participants in the sex industry, my actual record, which you obdurately refuse to examine or address, reveals that I have dedicated my life and career to improving the conditions of sex-work and have never hesitated to criticize anyone or anything connected with the sex industry in my efforts to do so.

    When prospective performers come into AIM for their required first STD test, they are shown a tape I made with AIM’s director, fellow sex-worker Dr. Sharon Mitchell, that explicitly outlines the potential dangers and abuses workers may face should they choose to pursue this career path. The blunt language in which the potential for abuse and exploitation is addressed has made our Porn 101 tape a bette noire of unscrupulous agents and producers, who have attempted in one way and another to pressure us into abandoning this tape since the very beginning. Instead, we’ve recently updated it with more detailed and timely information.

    I made this tape because I deeply respect the importance of informed consent, unlike yourself, as you apparently don’t believe such a thing is possible where sex-work is concerned. Time and again, I have made myself available to sex-workers individually and in groups to address the injustices and inequities that I know far more personally than you ever will are a part of this business. After twenty-one years here, I have no illusions about the perils and drawbacks of sex-work and no interest in spreading such illusions. Unlike you, I credit sex-workers with the intelligence and personal character to choose wisely in assessing their own risks and rewards when the information is made available to them in a candid and unbiased manner. I support their right to make those choices free of legal harrassment and the misguided efforts of missionaries of whatever stripe of political opinion to force them to live other than how they choose.

    Finallly, I will very briefly address your circular question about the content of porn. Do I consider it misogynistic by nature? Since you’ve already stated your opinion that it is, I don’t think my comments will have much impact on your thinking. However, for the record, no I don’t. Some porn trades on sexual hostility. Most porn is pleasure-oriented and commmonly depicts women as initiators of sexual encounters and beneficiaries of the enjoyment such encounters produce. No example I offer of this type of porn, which comprises the vast majority of products on the market, will be safe from your tortured deconstruction into some form of woman-hating propaganda, so I’m just going to dismiss your description of the products we make as false and distorted to your own ideological ends.

    I instead propose that people genuinely interested in understanding sex-work and pornography read the work of those of us who know these things experientially, as well as those who theorize about it from the more than one point of view. Dis me, and Carol Queen and Susie Bright and our supporters in the academic and civil liberties communities like Nadine Strossen and Linda Williams as you will, you will never attain the credibility that we enjoy because both experience and simple logic support our positions. I invite those with open minds to consider the realities of sex-work and pornography and reach their own conclusions. I do not fear the results of such inquiry.

    Nina Hartley
    Sex-worker, performer and activist

    12 March 2005, 9:30 pm

  37. Survivor:

    Thank you, Stan, for speaking the REALITIES behind the prostitution and pornography industries. As these systems of exploitation and violence continue to mainstream and people become more desensitized to the degradation of these industries and the dangerous representations promoting and in support of these industries, what becomes purposefully hidden, vehemently denied, and outright distorted *is* the reality of the brutal physical, emotional and psychological damage. The backlash has become even more charged as it becomes more and more difficult to speak the harm because people dont want to hear it or acknowledge it or have to take responsibility for their part in it. It’s no surprise how much resistance is met by individuals who speak out against these industries. Who is really being censored? Is it the multi billion dollar “sex industry” which buys their allegiance from the majority of pro-porn spokespersons and “sex worker” mouthpieces alike? Why is it so dangerous for books such as NOT FOR SALE to come out on the market? The truth that many survivors are speaking just isn’t such good PR, is it? Or maybe it’s because while pro-porn/sex-worker forces are being backed and funded by this multi-billion dollar industry, all the money in the world still won’t change the fact that they DO NOT speak for the majority of women in prostitution and pornography…Women who have survived (and there are many, many, many more who have not) and who have tried to speak about their experiences of exploitation, violence, and terror, not to mention the realities of poverty, racism, and misogyny, have been attacked, trashed, threatened, assaulted, humiliated, and restigmatized. Seeing from the censorship of your review and the responses you’ve received that are meant to intimidate and attack you, the irony of who is really being censored is not beyond me. Keep up the good work and keep speaking your voice which is truly *radical* and is needed now more than ever.

    13 March 2005, 6:14 pm

  38. Sex Worker:

    What makes YOU think you speak for the majority? I’m a 25 year old Mexican-American living in Australia. My grandma, mum, dad and many my friends and aquaintances over the years have all worked in the sex-industry at some time and however they feel about it or what they are doing now, none of them has had their “identity destroyed” or is “degraded” or all that kind of BS people like Dworkin wank on about. But you never hear from any of them because they have to hide what they do and have done from moralistic and judgemental so-called progressives. I’ve seen to many people saying “I’m off to night shift at a phone-company call centre” because they don’t want to face the reactions of others (especially “progressives”) for what they do to survive or maintain a reasonable standard of living. I’m sick of the lectures of so-called progressives about how “degrading” it is and I’m sick of keeping my mouth shut so that others can ignore the reality and pretend that it’ll just go away if we denounce it loud enough. I dropped out of school after year 10, but got into uni through an adult-ed bridging course about a year ago. I never would have had the confidence to do that if I had kept listening to all the people with attitudes like everyone elses liberation is so much more important than your “perosonal-liberation” Girl. The left needs a fucking wake up call.

    I posted this on Nina’s forum.

    —————-

    Hi Nina,

    I have been looking at your site for the first time because I wanted to see what you all had to say about Goff’s article. Anyway… I would like to apologise for this comment I made:

    “Im not Nina Heartly and have no interest in her or any other capitalist’s or super-stars view on the issues. But people like you and Nina dominate these debates and always do your best to shut people like me and OUR organisations (like the Scarlett Alliance in Australia or some of the international groups that represent sex WORKERS rather than the industry) up or use your power and privalidge to to try and speak “on our behalf” and if PISSES ME OFF.”

    I was angry because Goff clearly had not read or understood my previous post and was conflating my opinions with those of others (it’s nice to be seen as an individual isn’t it?). But I should not have included you in the attack. I have read your article and while I don’t agree with everything you say, I agree with most of it.

    All your work with health and safety is appreciated, but something that I think you should never under-estimate the importance of in what you do is the confidence you give to sex-workers to see themselves as strong, intelligent and worth-while human beings rather than powerless Victims who need to be rescued.

    I first went into prostitution because I needed to escape from an abusive relationship. One of the tactics he always used against me was to try and make me think of myself as a powerless victim. He tried to make me feel that I needed him to save me (not that I really believed him…but it still hurt my confidence). After I left him he used the fact that I had gone into sex-work as a way to slander me and prove to others on the Left that he was somehow justified in the way he treated me.

    Fortunately, working in the sex-industry, talking to other workers and clients, gave me back even more confidence than I had lost. There is something about working with so many different people you don’t know but getting seeing a side of them that they normally hide… You get such a clear understanding of humans, society and yourself. In particular you realise that how people treat you is directly related to how you see yourself. If you come into work feeling unconfident or depressed you attract clients who want to abuse you. If you come into work feeling confident and don’t take any shit, you get friendly, interesting clients who treat you with respect.

    Most workers (at least in Australia) know this. So do the owners. Sometimes they respond by trying to keep up the spirits of the workers, other times they deliberately play head games to keep workers in submission. It’s all psychology. This is something that is really hard to explain to people who have not been involved in prostitution.

    It is also why people like Dworkin are so dangerous. I think it’s ok to criticise the Industry or even express opposition to it, so long as this is done in a respectfull and open way that is genuinely aimed at improving peoples lives… But what people like Dworkin do is chip away at the most basic ability of sex-workers to defend themselves - their belief in themselves and their fellow workers.

    I think that, from reading some of his other stuff, Goff seems to put a genuine effort into issues about women’s liberation and particularly personal stuff like domestic violence - which the left in Australia tends to ignore - and I appreciate that. It’s very unfortunate tho, that he has taken such a ideological position on sex-work. In doing so he has really limited his ability to actually support sex-workers (whether he supports the Industry or not) and their struggles.

    Now someone calling themselves “survivor” has accused me of being an “Industry mouthpiece” too. Yeah right.

    13 March 2005, 8:29 pm

  39. Sex Worker:

    And I’m also annoyed with this attitude like it’s ok to talk about it and campaign about it - but ONLY if you’ve been “rehabilitated” (reformed or saved).

    For example this idiotic statement (from someone I actually worked with on feminist campaigns several years ago and normally have a lot of respect for):
    “In self-organisation within the sex-for-money industry, the most progressive “sex-work” collectives require that their staff have left this form of work in order that they be able to assist other women to at the least minimise the harm they are exposed to, and at best to leave the industry altogether.”
    http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/614/614p8b.htm

    My response
    http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/615/615p8.htm

    Her response to my response
    http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/616/616p8.htm

    13 March 2005, 8:37 pm

  40. Sex Worker:

    Just to make this clear (so as not to slander anyone) the ex I was reffering to was an activist but had nothing to do with GLW.

    13 March 2005, 8:46 pm

  41. R.M.N.:

    “Wrapping Profit in the Flag” really knocked some sense into my head. Thanks for writing it and for putting out their info and a perspective we don’t hear. There are alot of fencesitters on whether to take a stand or not on these “issues” but it’s clear that if we’re talking about them just as issues we really don’t know enough about how they work. Women, men, and children are harmed. I’m going to keep that as my bottom line. I think the videos and magazines and sex bought and sold try to paint a really different picture. Again, thanks. A real wake-up call.

    14 March 2005, 12:06 pm

  42. Sex Worker:

    WHere is your support for ANY organising by prostitutes? Where is Dworkin’s support for people like DMSC? Where is MacKinnon’s? There is lots of denouncing but not one word of support for the actual efforts of the people involved - just a few dismissive put downs. RNM have you EVER read anything put out by ANY of the sex-workers groups or networks? Stan - every other article you include stuff about the actual grass-roots resistance but not on this issue. And when you people call us “mouthpieces” and say we have had our “alleigiance bought” by the Industry - what does that say about how YOU view sex-workers? You don’t have to listen to anything that me or other sex-workers actually say because if we dissagree with you it’s obviously because we are too degraded or corrupt.

    15 March 2005, 5:36 pm

  43. Stan:

    I am disappointed in SW’s last missive. It puts words in my mouth, and they are misrepresentative words.

    I am shifting my own particiaption in this debate to a later post (no one who isn’t already on this thread is seeing it), at http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=41

    Please post all comments on the porn debate there.

    17 March 2005, 9:12 am

  44. Sex Worker:

    [SW’s comment has been forwarded to http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=41 where this discussion has been moved to.]

    17 March 2005, 10:42 pm

  45. Sam:

    Sex Worker is wrong about Australian legalization. I know she is wrong about legalized prostitution being a good thing for sex workers in Australia and I can, and have directly with her very recently, proved it.

    http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/02/310374.shtml

    My partner’s mom lives in Alaska and she rails on every now and again about the “lower 48″ telling Alaskans they can’t allow drilling in their state if they want to. Telling her it is the oil companies who have framed the debate as Alaska vs. the “lower 48″ when it’s really oil industries vs. the rest of us just makes her mad and more insistant that she ain’t gonna take any crap from the “lower 48″ and fuels the libertarian flames that oil companies pat themselves on the back for fostering so effectively to their continued great profit.

    Australian Sex Worker similarly digs her heels in when presented with solid, peer-reviewed research proving her very wrong about the benefits of legalized prostitution, and the organized criminals who still control the majority of Australian brothels pat themselves on the back.

    I also wrote a response to Hartley’s self-serving Counterpunch piece:

    Hello,

    I’m a good lefty woman, vegetarian, bicyclist, writer, sexual health activist and antiwar protestor.

    I’m also a bit confused as to why Counterpunch liberals who understand implicitly that corporations don’t work in the interests of consumers would make a huge exception for the capitalist CEOs that produce pornography. Having Nina Hartley defend pornography in Counterpunch is like having Dick Cheney defend Halliburton in Counterpunch, or Ken Lay defending Enron in Counterpunch. I can’t think of another time when a very well paid, high ranking lobbyist for a specific industry was considered by Counterpunch to be a credible source for defending said multibillion dollar global industry, so I question why the exception when it comes to men’s sexual entertainment (70-80% of porn is consumed by men).

    How is it progressive men who would not be caught dead in Nike shoes drinking Starbucks coffee in a Hummer will still proudly don a Playboy logo and kid themselves into believing the prostitution/pornography industry is the only capitalist enterprise that genuinely cares about the “freedom” and “liberation” of its consumers and employees more than generating massive profits?

    The prostitution/porn film industry has made Nina Hartley a wealthy woman, and she is paying them back in more ways than Counterpunch editors aparrently know.

    In 2004 pornographers gave a death sentence to Lara Roxx (link below) by demanding she perform unprotected anal sex against her will. Several other porn actors got the AIDS virus from these regular outbreaks that inevitably come with an unregulated prostitution/porn industry. It was also the year porn industry biggies like Larry Flynt and Nina Hartley fought against basic health regulations for sex workers against the explicit wishes of the low level porn performers exposed to repeated unsafe work situations. The commercial sex industry that profits enormously creating unhealthy, sometimes-deadly conditions exposing its ‘workers’ to contaminant human fluids is nothing less than widespread corporate exploitation.

    Like all wealthy corporate bigwigs, Hartley prefers the porn industry self regulate. Despite the fact that only 22% of porn video products comply with the barest minimum of OSHA guidelines for protecting workers exposed to contaminant human fluids, Hartley opposes any accountability and oversight into the porn industry. I ask Counterpunch to consider if this laissez faire, neoliberal business ethic is what you believe to be preferable for most corporations or if it’s an exception you’re willing to make for sexual capitalism.

    I wouldn’t have thought when I went to your website today that Counterpunch would side with a wealthy corporate porn public relations spokeswoman over an NYU university professor asking only for more earnest critiques of pornography’s content than either mainstream or leftist media currently offers. You’re supposed to be the anti-sexist, anti-exploitive corporation folk, remember?

    Thank you for reading,
    Sam

    “Worker Health and Safety in the Adult Film Industry” post-hearing report
    http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/a42/Pdf/afi.pdf

    Professional Dangers (Lara Roxx’s story)
    http://www.oneangrygirl.net/LaraRoxx.html

    20 March 2005, 12:34 pm

  46. me:

    I don’t think that all these people could ever understand what it is like to be annihilated and then remade in whatever image they want over and over again.

    Experiments with new names and new personalities that might be more profitable. The owners trying to change your appearance, your personality, everything about you to squeez a few more dollars out of whatever is left of your humanity.

    Talking to crumbling wrecks of people who come in desperately looking for someone to talk to, be close to, feel superior to. Receptionists who have never done it but pretend to understand the “girls” and give out stupid advice about how to deal with clients, which more often than not just makes you realise how they look down on you or fantasise that they were doing it too. Or clients calling you “good girl” like a dog. Stupid mind games like separating workers who have become friends or playing people off of each other. Maybe they have never begun to hallucinate from sleep-deprivation, lack of light and air and overload of drugs. Maybe they’ve never seen the faces of people they lost transposed onto clients and others.

    Maybe they have never seen other workers slowly crumbling into nervous wrecks, then being thrown out by the management. Maybe they never saw the long-term effects on someones personality after a client smashed their head through a glass door. Or how pathetic they look when someone doesn’t pay them and gloats about it. Maybe they never listened to a teenage girl from their own home town telling you how great the work is in between how she took 10 eccys over the weekend and stopped breathing after her parents would not speak to her on the phone.

    Maybe they never had sex with someone with white shit on their dick who smelled like a dog and then laughed at YOU. And maybe she never had people pull the condom off then say that you wanted it. Maybe they don’t know how much having sex when you have stomach problems from heroin hurts and. Maybe they haven’t felt like she’d just had a knife stuck up her when someone sticks his dick up your arse with no lube.

    Maybe they haven’t watched on coldly from a distance as their immediate personalities dissintegrate leaving only the basest instincts and desperate will to survive. SOme things are too hard to look at and some words too hard to say. Working in a brothel gives you a birds-eye view of the world crumbling and society braking down. There is no light and no hope, just entropy, cold cynicism and survival.

    Maybe you have seen it though.

    “We are looking right through those mirages, right through to our animal actuality, right through to the horror vacui of a world where people can and do erase other people, and no deity descends to make things right.”
    http://www.free-conversant.com/realtruth/128

    That’s why I could not judge you for anything you have done any more than I could the kid I met at a buss stop who’d just come back from Afghanistan, shaking and babbling something about camels in between burning holes in his hand with a cigarette butt. Or a comrade from the Phillipes who executed dozens of his own comrades under Cisons purges - he is still around, still trying, but there is nothing you can do to take it back - what can you say about a thing like that?

    Have these liberals ever spoken to an indigenous woman, a prostitute, with a hole the size of your fist in her head where her husband bashed her with an iron bar? Have they seen people starving to death or dying of tuberculosis and AIDS in the middle of suburbia? Have they heard cops talking about raping “jinns” out on the communities?

    I don’t think they understand anything. And I’m sure that they don’t when they make themselves superior in their privalidged lives by trying to condemn a comrade for being just like all the rest of us. I have never even touched a gun, and I have never killed anyone. But I have let enough people slip through my finger tips, watched enough of them fade away, made consious decisions to do so…

    I don’t think that your analysis is quite right and I don’t think there is enough discussion about solutions here; because I wish there was an solution or an answer in sight. But I can’t see any.

    Sorry for ranting. I hope you are well and I hope your son is too. You have my solidarity.

    3 April 2005, 12:45 am

  47. Mark:

    Just wanted to chime in and say how refreshing the discourse is in this here establishment. In these days of polarization and demonization, which inevitably lead to frustration, :) , it’s hopeful as hell to see people reasonably discussing ANYTHING.

    A pleasure to read. Kudos.

    M.

    M.

    12 April 2005, 1:20 am

  48. embarrassment:

    http://viagra.medical4order.com/cialisvsviagra/ robertslicedsoiled

    23 June 2005, 6:13 pm

  49. jack black:

    best site of its kind :-)

    25 June 2005, 12:52 am

  50. feminista:

    Sheldon is a porn industry shill. What a joke these people who will say anything to defend the sexual use and abuse of women. NO, THIS WOMAN DOES NOT WANT TO BE MEN’S WHORE and countless OTHER WOMEN DO NOT WANT TO BE MEN’S WHORES. Wake up to reality and stop living in sexist male fantasies.

    6 July 2005, 10:30 am

  51. Nikki Craft:

    Hi Stan, Would it be okay to continue this conversation on another page by adding a link at the bottom of this page and the top of the next one so it remains in context? F.U.C.K. might want to add some comments to the points already made here if the page weren’t so loaded down.

    Also wanted to let you know in the CRAPP_E_LIBRARY we have the mp3 of the interview on Sonali’s KPFK show with Ann Simonton and you. I’ve also transcribed some of the text and would appreciate you checking it over to see if there are typos we need to correct. Great quotes from you so far.

    Here’s the url where it resides:

    Nikki Craft
    http://www.hustlingtheleft.com

    P.S. Want to join Puppies Against Patriarchy?

    31 August 2005, 6:52 pm

  52. Maxwell:

    Nina Hartley (& Anthony),

    Again, using gross deceit to “validate” a consumer role so some white, middle class American woman can exploit those who are coerced by poverty.

    Time and time again, although Hartley’s cash cow eclipses Hartley’s “activism,” she suggests actual Feminists are in cahoots with conservatives, despite OUR intense role in activism:
    i.e. domestic violence, unaffordable or inadequate childcare services, threat to reproductive rights, female circumcision, trafficking of girls/women, date rape, increasing depictions of subordinate women in music videos, the magisterium’s censorship of dialogue on admissible ordination of women, the media’s role in “auto-observation”…
    …and Faux-Feminists and “backlashers” who misrepresent the movement’s objectives as anti- -male or -motherhood.

    You ever read the analysis of Abu Ghraib, which concluded the admirable “Prostitution for everyone : Feminism, globalisation and the ’sex’ industry,” which graced “Not For Sale : Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography”?

    Same volume’s Robert Jensen’s “Blow bangs and cluster bombs : The cruelty of men and Americans” or Gail Dines’ “King Kong and the white woman : Hustler magazine and the demonization of black masculinity”?

    Effectively dissected is hypocrisy in “principles,” displayed by pseudo-socialists, Hartley & Anthony, who define radical Feminism’s want to extinguish certain industries as censorship:
    i.e. consumers or advocates of consumers of such industries neglect to address such except to view workers as “dirty pictures” and Fantasy you should be enabled to enjoy.

    The Larry Flynt School of Freedom of Speech!

    Meanwhile, multi-billion dollar sex industries inarguably prey on girls/women who are coerced by gross economic disadvantage maintained by patriarchy; pictures of women dehumanised by groups of men, or one man, saturate contemporary pornography; pornographers, strip clubs, pimps nurture abuse, a sense of violation, or disassociation.

    And the sexualisation of racism, which infests contemporary pornography grows!

    Anyone serious about the rights of others, anti- -Globalisation, -classism, -racism, -sexism is opposed to such complicit tripe as (Faux-Feminist) Hartley’s & Anthony’s, which insults any genuine socialist.

    15 September 2005, 2:46 am

  53. Jennifer McLune:

    EDITED

    You had me rooting for your analysis until your last paragraph….

    Imagine if you will, a billboard along an American highway with the caricatured image of a grinning, bug-eyed Black kid in tattered coveralls grinning over a slice of watermelon. Clearly, this would generate an outcry that would result in its removal almost immediately. Yet we can see billboards everywhere that show shaven infantilized (male sexuality is constructed in many ways as pedophilic), hyper-sexualized women, yet there is not only no outcry – there seems to be little discussion of what those images do to our daughters, sisters, partners, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and friends. That’s how deep patriarchy is.……That’s how deep patriarchy is.

    THIS “WOMAN IS THE NIGGER OF THE WORLD” BULLSHIT HAS GOT TO STOP AMONG RADICAL FEMINISTS!!

    As a black woman and a radical feminist I resent the way you try to use black folk to make the point that race trumps gender as a rallying cry. Thus race=black=male vs. gender=white=female? Where do black women fit in? If as you supposes a racist caricature of sambo would cause outcry and immediate removal how does one explain the ever-growing circulation of hate in so-called urban entertainment and the popularity of using N word among anyone who can purchase a rap album? These racist caricatures have changed form but are still hurtful, and hateful and dehumanizing.

    “Grotesque stereotypes” of blacks still exist in popular culture. Just turn on BET or Mtv or UPN. Or listen to urban radio or mainstream hip hop music/culture.

    As for the ginning sambo figures not acceptable nowadays these types of images are still used in advertising throughout the African Diaspora especially in Latin American societies which are both patriarchal and white supremacist.

    I don’t believe there’s anymore of an outcry when black folks are attacked with racist stereotypes and if those black folk happen to be female forget about it! A war has been declared on the dignity of black women. I think your article is powerful enough without trotting us out to make your point….once again….repeat after me…..

    THIS “WOMAN IS THE NIGGER OF THE WORLD” BULLSHIT HAS GOT TO STOP AMONG RADICAL FEMINISTS!!

    Jennifer

    10 January 2006, 6:26 pm

  54. Stan:

    Wasn’t meant that way, sister.

    But your points are all well taken.

    10 January 2006, 9:25 pm

  55. Julian Real:

    As an anti-race, anti-gender activist who is pro-ethnic and erotic diversity, and who militantly supports an anti-racist radical feminism, I want to respond to Jennifer’s important comments.

    First, I find Jennifer’s anger completely valid and justified. I also find that it communicates, along with her words, very eloquently, a response that must be heard, in all its rageful intelligence.

    My experience, again and again, is that academics and other stoic intellectual elitists prefer not to pay attention to the anger, its meaning, its intelligence. Hot emotions and deep intuitions, as well as cool, mannered thoughts, are expressions of intelligence, but are devalued by a racist, classist patriarchy that prefers and values political discourse in smooth hushed tones bearing an oppressively white middle class accent. (Actually, it prefers political discourse also be liberal and abstract, as Stan has noted here.)

    Elsewhere on this blog, I have posted some of the lyrics of that Yoko Ono/John Lennon song. Credit for the concept, however racist, goes to Yoko. Lennon, well before his death 25 years ago, admitted much of his feminist lyrics came directly from Ono. But of course had John not released that song (Woman is…), it would not have gotten very far into the dominant culture.

    I believe Yoko was taking a big risk in phrasing things as she did. I think she was intending to reveal the fallacy of “the nigger” as a race-related term, however naively. As we all know, it has been used almost exclusively as such, in Amerikkka. Everything from casual discrimination to the rape and lynching of Black Americans has been done with that term evilly spilling off the lips of the white bigot.

    When Oprah Winfrey, among many other very public African-American celebrities, says “I am not a nigger” she is declaring something that racist white folks can barely imagine: that the term is a projection of the white-racist, and is not actually “about” Black people at all. The term reveals a lot about the distorted white racist mind, and the brutal force that mind has interpersonalised and institutionalised. The existence (the political use) of it shallows the depths of white humanity, while it maims and kills Black people. James Baldwin has written extensively about this.

    The term “bitch” which I refuse to say out loud, along with the “n” word, does not refer to real women’s humanity. It is an idea, like the n word, that grew out of misogynist, male supremacist soil, like a weed. It is an idea used against women, effectively used to define and demean, limit and control, women’s humanity. I see the n word operating similarly, but with historic differences that are sure worth being aware of. White women and Black women are not treated equally poorly in a racist-sexist State.

    And white men are not especially bothered (that is, humiliated, terrorised, and killed) while the n word or the b word is being uttered. Those specific words are too often uttered by those with physical force, backed by State power, bringing the hate in those terms into harsh human-harm reality. The words, as I suspect Catharine MacKinnon would agree, are “power-full”. Check out the book, “Only Words” by MacKinnon, for some very cogent analysis of the use of hate speech to create and maintain sex- and race-based inequality.

    Given what Jennifer is saying here, I agree that it is, indeed, time to retire that phrasing, and the phenomenon of trying to get folks to “get” sexism, by paralleling it with manifestations of racism, if the assumption is that “we” (which we?) would care or understand (more) if it the sexism was racism instead.

    “We” don’t care or understand more. And the cross-referencing, which I’m sure I have done many times, also demeans and linguistically disentangles realities that are not separate for most of us, if not all of us. Race and sex are fused and confused experientially, especially in misogynist Amerikkka. That is the early (and rightfully on-going) critique of white feminism: that it assumed or assumes that “white” doesn’t mean anything in the equation of who is harmed and why. Too many white feminists, and, um, far more white anti-feminists, have denied or not adequately owned that being white means operating out of a privileged position, racially (politically), and a very specifically partial one, ethnically and culturally. “White” is not a common or ordinary ethnic cultural experience, world-wide. It is a minority experience, lifted through control of media and white supremacist institutions to be irrationally perceived as impartially, unbiasedly “human” and “universal”.

    I used a portion of that Ono/Lennon song in a piece I wrote about John Lennon’s movement from misogyny to feminism. At the time that song came out the Black Civil Rights movement was recent, and the Black Power movement (however sexist it was), including the excellent community work of the Black Panther Party, was vital. Feminism, as a radical threat to male power, was weak at that precise time. White Amerikkka was histerically afraid of “Black Power” but was not losing any sleep worrying about “Women’s Power” as a possible threat to the status quo. It would take another decade for the big boys to get worried about that. What we have learned in the last thirty-five years, is that racism and sexism are virulent and ubiquitous.

    Any attempts made to prove the wrong of sexism by making comparisons to how [liberal to progressive white middle class?] folks would react to racist or anti-Semitic imagery or other acts is heading in an ominous political direction, however well-intended.

    As Jennifer astutely notes, it’s not as if there is any meaningful indication that race-hate is lessening in the world, or in the U.S. specifically. Such assumptions, that are laden into these sorts of comparisons, are fruitless and dangerous. They imply a dominant cultural militant concern about race-hate and racism that simply is not real; it is nowhere manifest in the powerful white world, with its delusional and dissociated white mind.

    Jennifer, your words have informed me of the dangers, the real harm, of trotting out that old song title, and I stand informed, and inspired by your passionate intellect. Thank you.

    In struggle and solidarity,

    Julian Real

    11 January 2006, 5:58 pm

  56. Stan:

    Sorry to be so short first time. It’s at least refreshing after all this time (this was my very first post on the blog) to have allies posting. I was deluged by the Porn Apologist Posse when it first came out.

    I agree with you both. Let me say again, I didn’t mean it that way. But I said it, and the criticism Jennifer made were points well taken. That was my bad.

    I’ll be leaving this example out of my debate playbook from here on out.

    Learning.

    11 January 2006, 6:36 pm

  57. DeAnander:

    I’m gonna agree w/the critique above… and yet I wave a feeble rag of defence: the uncooling of racism during the late 60’s and early 70’s in mass media (to whatever feeble extent this happened) outpaced the uncooling of sexism; and this was a cultural epoch in which many of us between the ages of 35 and 50 were annealed. So we can remember earnest films about the wickedness of racism (safely projected onto nasty southern sheriffs in small towns far from “civilised” Hollywood or New York), often starring Sidney Poitier, often genuinely suspenseful and moving in their presentation of an anti-racist message — yet these same films hewed to every sexist and misogynist convention even as they were trying to get props for their “ground breaking” liberalism. Star Trek got into hot water with Paramount due to Roddenberry’s insistence on the firwt interracial kiss on TV, while all the female crew members were still costumed in bargirl chic, miniskirts and black mesh hose and come-hither makeup, and shot in soft focus.

    This cultural moment I think influenced those of us who came of age (literally or politically) during the epoch. We saw mass media making a halfassed effort to show Black men as human beings with dignity, character, etc — even as heroic — and to critique racism (however naively) in a decade when female cultural icons were still merely pinup girls. And somewhere in the back of our minds (those of us who grew up on these images and themes), if we became feminists, is a lifelong memory of frustration — why couldn’t bigotry against females have been taken seriously, when the ice was cracking a bit after the dismal 50’s?

    Those concerns (if we limit ourselves to selfconsciously liberal media) still apply. Black male characters and actors still get a better slot in mainstream pwog and librul film making. Take a look at Denzel’s career vs Whoopi’s (sigh)… Finally in the 80’s mainstream schlock caught up in its braindead way with feminism, offering us “issue films” on rape, battery, female rebellion; but the appeal of T&A never really faded. I would almost say that sexism outlasted racism in entertainment, while racism outlasted sexism in business; I could be wrong but it seems to me upper-middle White women made bigger inroads into the corporate boardrooms than Black males (and again, where were Black women? the lost demographic?), while in “entertainment media” the business necessity of presenting women as a consumable for male audiences tipped the balance the other way. I know cartloads of Libruls who are deeply and profoundly revolted by pre-Civil-Rights-Movement overtly racist kid’s books, cartoons, movies etc, yet have absolutely no trouble with contemporary porn. I think this may be where Stan was aiming that remark. And those Libruls I know are mostly of an age with me, and experienced that same half-assed cultural thaw in the 70s.

    I agree that the country as a whole never got over its appetite for racism, and that contemporary “chic” stereotypes of Black gangstas and pimps are just a retread of Sambo. But that persistent “they’d recognise it if it was a racist image/joke/slur, dammit” meme I think does have roots in reality, in a particular historical moment.

    I think it’s time to move on from that moment — it was a while ago, that was then, this is now, etc. But there are times when it still flaunts itself in front of us. I was watching the thriller “The Bone Collector” the other evening (Denzel again, as a near-quadriplegic forensic specialist); and noting that while we can now have Black men as charismatic authority figures, disabled men as romantic heroes, etc., we still cannot have a strong heroine who is not also pinup-beautiful, young, slender, botox-lipped, and destined to become The Hero’s Reward by end of plot. And the Black Woman? Count her, one — Queen Latifah as a live-in RN — one step up from Mammy and cook, though at least she is faithfully tending a Black rather than a White privileged male…

    The fantasy world of semi-politically-correct mainstream film making is of course disconnected from the real life, grinding racism of American politics and economics; but it feeds that nagging sense feminist radicals have, that libruls and pwogs just can’t perceive insults to women as insults — that the librul/pwog understanding of racism is fundamentally as “hostility from White culture that diminishes the masculinity of Black men” — a definition which erases Black women from the picture, as well as keeping women in general firmly in their allotted cultural file drawer (Cute and Available)…

    11 January 2006, 9:16 pm

  58. Julian Real:

    More complicating too is the matter of sexualised racism and racialised sexism, which has been talked about elsewhere on this blog. (Way to go, Stan!)

    As Dworkin noted, the overall flesh of people of Colour becomes a sexxxualised genital in pornography. All that is physically (violently) done to white women’s genitals is done to the exterior flesh of women and men of Colour. In the case of women of Colour, specifically, in the pornography industry and in the larger pornographic society, they are deeply degraded and horrendously harmed both externally and internally, in various ways, depending on the particulars of their ethnicity.

    Whiteness, as a politically charged (empowered) ethnicity, does not protect Caucasian women from harm in pornography or in pornographic society, but it does mean that their exterior skin is less exoticised and thingified, even while all women’s bodies are dehumanised through overall objectification, and fetishisation of their “parts”.

    A key point that I especially welcomed being reminded of, by Jennifer, is one also summed up in this book title:

    But Some Of Us Are Brave : All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies,
    by Gloria T. Hull (Editor), Patricia Bell Scott (Editor), Barbara Smith (Editor)

    Thanks again, Jennifer, for speaking your mind. And thanks, De, for your additional analysis and reflections on that era in Amerikkkan his-story.

    Julian

    12 January 2006, 5:24 pm

  59. Eric Hamell:

    Actually I thought Sex Worker pretty effectively answered Sam on Portland Indymedia. About the Swedish study: it looks like the sole interest in that study was whether the new policy (criminalizing johns but not pros) had caused the level of prostitution to go down (or at least appear to). No attention was paid to whether sex workers’ lives had actually improved as a result. Apparently many had left prostitution, not because they felt empowered but because their occupation had become much more difficult and stressful, having been effectively forced underground. A review of many sex workers’ experience with this law can be found at http://www.petraostergren.com/english/studier.magister.asp.

    22 January 2006, 2:48 pm

  60. Eric Hamell:

    Oh, one other point: the disjunction between most Swedes’ satisfaction with this ostensibly pro-woman law, and the feelings of sex workers themselves, looks like a case of “Out of sight, out of mind” on the part of people who’d rather not have to be reminded of prostitution’s existence.

    22 January 2006, 2:56 pm

  61. Stacy:

    Found this page by accident and after a long read, decided to comment. You took a really wide swing at libertarian ideology - perhaps unfairly. I’m a nihilist myself so don’t confuse me with a libertarian apologist, but libertarian thought is not devoid of moral thought. So their defense of “freedom” wouldn’t negate individual moral responsibility. And for those that don’t find the sex industry ( or just sex in general) to be immoral, then the focus should really be on what constitutes moral behavior rather than constructing an ideological nemesis.

    I have no doubts that the porn industry is destroying people. But as I see it , the act of producing sexual fantasy isn’t the problem. It’s the message and the moral context of the images and the manner in which those images are produced. Say tomorrow porn where to be erased from the Earth and the minds of men. How long would it take for a teenage boy to see a non-sexualized picture of a female and have a sexual thought? The stimulus isn’t social, it’s biological. Men are visually sexual. That notion gets exploited by every marketing firm in existence. The socialization that happens in sex isn’t about the visualization side of sexuality; it’s about what constitutes popular sexual appeal and how people can be conditioned into accepting and consuming it. And that’s the level I think we are left to contemplate moral dilemmas. And in my opinion, it’s the morality of the consumers and the producers that should be examined.

    1 February 2007, 11:17 pm

  62. Stan:

    I see… so boys are visually stimulated by their evolutional hardwiring to desire women with lipstick, shaved armpits, lace teddies, spiked heels, and unnaturally low body fat… and a visual bias can in no way be construed as part of an objectifying male socialization… it seems you are trying to have this both ways, and in the process not a word about commodification (ie, capitalism), or about structured social power. At the end, you have just returned to the old naturalization tactic, and tacked on a bit of moral dualism. And of course, (compulsory, but unacknowledged) heterosexuality is assumed.

    2 February 2007, 8:10 am

  63. DeAnander:

    it is a little known fact that Neanderthal women with extremely pointy feet, a penchant for moving about stealthily on tiptoe (which made them more effective hunters of unwary birds and small rodents) and a fetish for draping themselves with spiderwebs and bits of vine (hunter’s camo obviously) were more fertile, better fed, and hence better mothers :-) the skinny ones were also easier for burly males to toss over one shoulder w/o the risk of hernia (or substantive resistance). thus, all the bizarre visual preferences of civilised patriarchal males can easily be explained by evolutionary biology and a dash of Hanna-Barbera cartoon content. sic semper facibamus!

    2 February 2007, 6:59 pm

  64. Required:

    “I haven’t even called for legislation to stop pornography (mainly because I doubt it would work, given the depth of male misogyny inscribed on dominant constructions of sexuality)…”

    “I haven’t called for stopping the Klan marches either (another libertarian fave – I’ll stick with rocks and bottles for the Klan.)”

    I’m increasingly of the opinion that rocks and bottles may be a part of the solution to pornography too. It would be great to see Blac Bloc’s employed against porn shops in the same way they are employed against McDonald’s restaurants. The former seems to definately be a bigger offender in terms of abuse of workers and producing a toxic product that harms it’s consumer.

    7 April 2007, 10:44 am

  65. Required:

    I’m interested in some discussion around the idea that Andrea Dworkin’s own novel Mercy could be considered pornography under her own civil rights ordinence because it describes “the continuous rape, torture and humiliation of the main character.”

    It seems to me like it fits the definition in the ordinence.

    “Women are presented in scenarious of degredation, humliation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.”

    STAN REPLIES: It’s the final phrase that pegs the definition. Eroticizing (and celebrating) the humiliation. Dworkin was not writing to make humilitation erotic, but to expose what is putatively erotic as embedded in a system of power.

    Apologies for the hasty inserted replies, but I’m running like the proverbial headless chicken lately.

    7 April 2007, 9:14 pm

  66. Eva:

    Hi,
    I would like to know if there is an anti-porn day? and if not, if anyone would be interested in starting one?

    Eva

    16 July 2007, 2:30 pm

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