The campaign was organized by a coalition of individual women and women’s groups, collectively referred to as Amnesty Action.
All these women know that where full decriminalization or legalization of the sex trade take place, trafficking rises. This stands to reason because as scrutiny is removed, organized criminals are able to operate more freely.
They know that an estimated 89 per cent of women in prostitution want to get out; that about half have been raped, approximately 70 per cent have been assaulted, and that the average age of entry is 13-15 years old.
In London, police estimated the number of women outside Amnesty International’s headquarters at 200. There were exited women there, with activists, researchers, journalists — all in sisterhood. The youngest were in their twenties, the oldest were in their eighties.
They were later joined by a few men, one of whom said he’d heard about the protest in an Italian Facebook group two hours before and apologized for not having got involved sooner.
The protesters stood alongside the busy road in London’s rush hour and chanted: “Lock up pimps and johns!” “Women’s rights are human rights!” “Women’s bodies are not for sale!” One brought a mobile speaker and played “All Night Wrong,” a protest song written by Jeanette Westbrook.
They stayed for an hour and a half, refusing to move when asked, reminding Amnesty International staff that the pavement they were standing on was private property.
A particularly enthusiastic security guard was told off more than once for ordering the women around and pointing his finger at them.
His attempt at directing proceedings was feeble and failed miserably.
London’s red double-decker buses stopped in traffic, with passengers watching with interest. Drivers opened their windows to receive cards handed out by the protesters. Passers by gave their details, intending to get involved with the wider campaign.
The was one minor altercation with a passing man who objected to having his path obstructed.
The Amnesty Action women were in an unexpected position; having to oppose the world’s leading human rights organization in the name of women’s and girls’ rights. Women and girls are human, after all…
It speaks volumes that since Amnesty International agreed to the policy in August. A large number of women’s rights organizations have came out in opposition of the decision and in support of the Nordic model, which decriminalizes only the sale of sex and promotes exit plans to get women out of prostitution.
Amnesty International’s policy lets women and girls down, putting their rights last as it declares that access to sex is a human right.
Actually, the right not to suffer inhuman or degrading treatment is guaranteed by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is also guaranteed under both the Palermo Protocol (the UN Trafficking Protocol) and theConvention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), as well as the 1949 Convention, which recognize prostitution as exploitation.
The absurdity of the situation was summed up by Lisa-Marie Taylor, chair of UK women’s rights charity Feminism in London.
“We cannot and will not stand by whilst a human rights organization supports, encourages, and lobbies for the prostitution of women and by extension girls. This flies in the face of the available evidence and we call for human rights organisations to review their position in the light of emerging data from areas that have implemented the model of legalization with appalling consequences,” Taylor told Feminist Current.
The global Amnesty Action protest took place a day before Feminism in London’s annual conference, so a lot of women’s rights activists were already in town
Among them were Canadian registered nurses Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson, the world’s leading authorities on Non-State Torture.
The two founders of Persons Against Non-State Torture know that trafficked and prostituted women are extremely vulnerable to acts of torture committed in the private sphere.
“I am here to share the voices of women who talk about the grave suffering they have endured in their ordeals in Non-State Torture, including the torture that happens in prostitution. I want to shout to the roof tops and to Amnesty International that torture is not work,” Linda MacDonald told Feminist Current.
The two women have spent 22 years supporting victims and campaigning for Non-State Torture to be classified as a specific human rights crime.
“We will never shut up about Non-State Torture,” Jeanne Sarson told Feminist Current.
Feminist Current also caught up with feminist writer and activist, Anna Djinn.
“We are already seeing the Amnesty resolution being used to justify decriminalization of the sex trade and men buying sex, even though everywhere that has implemented full decriminalization has seen an upsurge in sex trafficking. [In Germany], 55 women have been murdered by pimps and punters in the 13 years that the country has had full decriminalization. Only one woman has been murdered in Sweden during its 16 years of the Nordic Model. Amnesty’s policy is steeped in the mindset of male supremacy and has failed to realize that women and girls are human beings with inalienable rights to live in dignity. We are here to remind Amnesty that they are wrong and must redress this terrible mistake,” Djinn toldFeminist Current.
If pimps and johns cannot be arrested and prosecuted for simply participated in an abusive supply chain, authorities must wait for them to actually harm women in the sex trade before they can act.
This is why Amnesty Action will not stop until Amnesty International sees sense and commits to respecting the human rights of women and girls, worldwide.
Janie Davies is a British journalist and feminist living in South West London. She volunteers with women’s rights groups and supports those campaigning for the implementation of the Nordic model. Follow Janie Davies on Twitter @Janie_R_D.
Early in the interview, Hedges brings up the issue of violence, calling it an “endemic part of prostitution,” something he notes that Moran argues is a part of every single act of prostitution, even when that violence happens in a way that isn’t overt.
What’s important about this point is that, when those who advocate to fully decriminalize “sex work” because they claim legalization will make women “safer,” they are either unaware or unwilling to admit that the violence women experience in prostitution goes far beyond just being beat up, for example. There are more subtle forms of violence that johns inflict on the women they pay for sex, including emotional and psychological violence, as well as physical and sexual. Surely anyone who understands rape and domestic abuse, for example, understands that rape and abuse are not only traumatic because of literal physical pain, but because of degradation, the refusal to respect boundaries, the experience of feeling threatened, of having no control over a situation, and the experience of being violated, disrespected, humiliated, and dehumanized. It’s not uncommon for things like molestation and abuse to not be physically painful at all, yet we understand the extent to which these experiences are traumatic for victims. Why people refuse to understand prostitution in a similar way, I don’t know.
“People miss the biggest part of the picture, which is that prostitution is violence, in and of itself,” Moran says. “To put your hands on another person, when you know they don’t want your hands there… And to put your penis into the orifices of somebody’s body when you know that they don’t want your penis inside them or near them… That is pathological behaviour and money doesn’t erase that. Money doesn’t have a magical quality that can take away the essence of a person’s behaviour or an exchange between two people.”
It’s an odd conclusion to come to, for self-identified feminists and progressives, in particular — to pretend as though one can simply buy their way out of being exploiters or erase rape with money. If we know that unwanted sex is a source of trauma for women and that a man who imposes sex on a woman who doesn’t want it is a rapist — why would any person who isn’t sociopathic themselves argue that money changes that reality?
Based on her experience, Moran says there are three different types of johns:
1) The ones who actively get off on hurting women in prostitution
2) The men who are “aware that what’s going on is not right or humane but they choose willfully to ignore that.”
3) The men who “have no understanding at all that what’s happening is not something that should be going on.”
But what they all have in common — a fact that should not even need stating, but does — is “sexual selfishness,” as Moran calls it.
So this, in a nutshell, is what all of those advocates for decriminalization/legalization who claim to be “feminist” or “progressive” are fighting for: men’s right to be sexually selfish. This is the most “sex-negative,” if you will, regressive approach to “sexual liberation” and the most anti-woman position one could possibly imagine, coming from those who would otherwise like to be known as “sex-positive feminists” or advocates for women’s rights.
If the point of prostitution were “consent,” as so many would like us to believe, then men who pay for sex would not get off more quickly at the notion of violating a 15-year-old girl, as Moran points out johns did when she was prostituted on the street at that age. There would, in fact, be no reason at all to seek out a prostitute at all if a man were looking to have a consensual, mutually satisfying sexual encounter. Of course, if you are a man who wants to have sex with someone who doesn’t want you back, a man who simply wants a body to use, a man who wants to impose their desires onto another human being, without having to consider their desires, feelings, or humanity, it makes sense that you would seek out a prostitute.
The truth about prostitution may be difficult to hear, but to deny the basic reality of the situation only demonstrates a foolish commitment to the absurd.
Most objections to the Nordic Model – laws criminalizing the purchase of sex, but not its sale – rely on one of two sets of talking points. First is the proud misogyny of men who oppose abolitionism solely because it prevents their easy access to the bodies of female strangers. But among those who consider themselves feminists, progressives, and Leftists, the greatest opposition to criminalizing pimps and johns comes from claims about the adverse effects those laws will have on prostituted women themselves. Spurred by Amnesty International’s ruling on the issue, the last month or so has seen dozens of articles, blog posts, and editorials attempting to show that the Nordic Model stigmatizes, starves, endangers, and (according to one blog post sent to me recently) “literally rapes and murders” women.
The majority of these objections are either intentionally misleading or just false. For example, defenders of decriminalization often claim the Nordic Model leads to the deportation of undocumented prostituted women who report violence or abuse. This is, unfortunately, something that does sometimes happen. But what these prostitution apologists don’t mention is that the same exact treatment would be received by an undocumented prostituted woman in New Zealand, Germany, or Holland. This applies as well to women who use drugs or commit other crimes.
Interestingly enough, while the supposed horrors of the Nordic Model are trotted out as reason enough for its rejection, the general principle is agreed upon when it comes to explicitly coerced women and girls who are obviously not consenting. Most supporters of decriminalization would, for example, agree that purchasing sex from twelve year-olds should not be legal. And from this position, it follows that some form of punishment or preventative measure should exist to stop men from doing so – one that would, of course, not criminalize the exploited child, but instead provide her with robust exit services, trauma counseling, and other resources. In short, the Nordic Model.
The two-pronged approach of the Nordic Model – criminalization of the clients and pimps, along with social programs to aid in recovery and healing – is generally approved of in the case of trafficking victims and children; the name may be taboo, but almost every meaningful response to sexual exploitation has fallen along its general lines. This is a serious problem for the decrim side, considering their previous position that legislating against clients makes women in prostitution unsafe. After all, it’s hard to conceive of a good explanation for why Nordic-style laws would hurt one group while benefiting the other. All of the dangers consenting women face under asymmetrical criminalization (whatever those dangers actually are) would almost certainly be equally likely for children, sex slaves, and other obviously exploited women and girls.
Consider the common objection that laws against sex buyers drives prostitution into secluded areas, where women are less able to assess clients or call for help should one turn violent. There are deeply flawed assumptions behind this argument – as Trisha Baptie once said, “Women date, get engaged to, marry, and live with men who end up murdering them. And I was supposed to figure out if a man was violent in fifteen seconds versus a minute?” The idea of moving prostitution into the open so women’s distress calls can be heard more clearly is also a callous gesture; apparently, there are large groups of people who respond to an industry wherein women routinely scream for their lives by saying, “You know, we should really make sure this screaming happens in a busy place.”
But you can put all that aside and still see the fundamental inconsistency in the decrim position. If the consenting women in prostitution have their ability to predict violence compromised, I can’t see why a prostituted child wouldn’t either. And if an empowered sex worker can’t be heard when she calls for help, why would the sounds of a trafficked sex slave travel any further? Does this mean that those who oppose the Nordic Model on these groups also support the legalization of paid child rape? If not, how do they take that position without opening themselves up to the same criticisms of endangerment that they use so often against abolitionists?
The same brute fact applies to almost every other complaint made against the Nordic Model. If consenting women will be forced into starvation as clients disappear, so too would children who depend on being purchased to survive. If those who freely choose prostitution will be marked with stigma and shame, there’s no reason to assume that burden would stay off the shoulders of the trafficked and abused. And if these reasons alone are enough to reject abolitionist law in the case of the former, why are these costs suddenly acceptable for the latter? Or, to put it another way: How does a supporter of decriminalization believe trafficking and the prostitution of children can be meaningfully addressed without providing legal cover to rape or creating the conditions that they claim render the Nordic Model unacceptable?
When faced with this dilemma, I see three options: He can agree that the Nordic Model causes harm to both categories of prostituted woman, reject it on those grounds, and endorse men’s right to buy sex from those who are explicitly coerced, in which case he has taken a position most of us find morally repugnant; he can claim that laws against sex buyers don’t harm trafficked or underage women and girls, in which case his argument against the Nordic Model is severely weakened; or he can explain why laws against clients and pimps lead to the deaths of consenting women but somehow manage to save the exploited, in which case he is engaging in denial, dishonesty, or outright fraud.
Last week, Amnesty International moved from being a human rights organization to a men’s rights organization.
Delegates from around the world met in Dublin over the weekend at the biennial International Council Meeting to vote on a policy of what they called “decriminalizing sex work.” This terminology is deceitful; what Amnesty International actually voted on was legalizing the purchase and sale of women and girls.
In response to this suggested platform, over four hundred women’s organizations and activists signed their names to an open letter condemning a supposed human rights advocacy organization for their uncritical support of the global trade in women’s bodies. The men at Amnesty International were apparently unconvinced, and went ahead with their endorsement of decriminalization against all evidence and common sense.
The debate around Amnesty’s capitulation to pimps and johns has forced the Left to confront prostitution once again. The results, as expected, have been largely pathetic. It speaks to the dismal condition of radical politics today when the concepts of “freedom” and “choice” are used to defend any system of wage labor, let alone one that feeds primarily on the bodies of poor women, women of color, and disabled women.
Anyone with sense rejects the notion that “freedom” or “choice” have anything to do with a coal miner’s decision to work fifteen-hour days in a sludge of industrial waste, or a single mother’s decision to flip burgers and stock shelves. Yet somehow we’re supposed to believe that prostitution is a unique and valuable expression of a woman’s innate desires.
It’s not shocking that many men see penetration by male strangers as the pinnacle of women’s freedom. What’s shocking is the speed at which the wider Leftist movement adopted this misogyny as a party line.
Reasoned, nuanced discussions of prostitution, patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism have been largely replaced on the Left with a bankrupt libertarian individualism. The pinnacle of this intentionally apolitical approach is the oft-repeated mantra, “Listen to sex workers!” which Amnesty International specifically used to deflect any criticism of their pro-pimp agenda.
“Listen to sex workers!” is a bankrupt policy position for too many reasons to count. The first problem, as Helen Lewis pointed out recently in The Guardian, is exactly which “sex workers” we should be listening to. I certainly don’t see pro-legalization liberals heeding the words of women like prostitution survivor and abolitionist advocate Bridget Perrier. “I didn’t choose prostitution,” she told me. “Prostitution chose me — because of childhood sexual abuse, racism, and colonialism.” She rejects the term “sex worker” entirely, saying, “What I did was not work. It was abuse.” Are you listening?
Other exited women — Rachel Moran, Rebecca Mott, and dozens more — rarely receive much more than derision and slander from those who claim “listening to sex workers” as their first priority. Entire organizations like SPACE (Survivors of Prostitution Abuse Calling for Enlightenment) are routinely dismissed despite being comprised completely of formerly prostituted women.
These women are often shouted down because, having escaped the industry, they’re no longer considered to be “authorities” on the sex industry today. But Trisha Baptie, another survivor and abolitionist activist, says that’s ridiculous.
“Prostitution doesn’t just affect prostituted women. It affects communities as a whole,” she said. “Women who are out of it now are the ones who have a whole picture of who it harms — they’re not just thinking about how they’re paying their rent.” Was Frederick Douglass not “an authority” on slavery simply because he escaped his chains?
When I asked her whether or not she would have supported legalizing prostitution while she was in the industry, she laughed. “Oh, without a doubt. Absolutely… Because I was relying on it for me and my kids, I would have said I have a right to do this, and that it was my choice to do it. But it wasn’t until I was able to get out and those pressures were taken off of me that I was able to look at it and see the lack of choice I had. Women who have exited have a different view of the men who are purchasing sex. A bit like battered woman internalize all that shame, and once you’re out of it, you can see more clearly what was happening.”
Even currently prostituted women who oppose the industry are ignored in favor of the more palatable “empowered sex worker.” My friend Chelsea endures daily rapes inside the New Zealand brothels that so many Leftists hold up as a progressive example of the system Amnesty International hopes to institute. “The brothels still work the same way they did when it was illegal,” she told me. “We get the worst of both worlds.”
Laws mandating condom use are barely enforced, and women who refuse to let men ejaculate on or inside them struggle to find clients. Should a man harass, abuse, or assault a woman, management can refuse to give out their names, making prosecution impossible.
Some Leftists may think that regulation will bring prostitution out of the shadows, but Chelsea disagrees. “The laws can’t reach us here,” she said. “If we had the Nordic Model, I’d call the cops on all of them the second I get my money, before they get to rape me. If I called cops under [decriminalization] they would say, Did you accept the money? If say yes, they say, boom, consensual.” Amnesty International apparently didn’t listen to this “sex worker” when they decided to put a legal stamp of approval on her rape.
And what about the millions of women, around the globe and here in the United States, who can’t speak loud enough to even have their words dismissed in the first place? There aren’t many talk shows and newspapers interested in giving space to the traumatized indigenous women being bought and sold by South Dakota oil field workers. The immigrant women I have met who sell sex in double-wide trailers outside Seattle dairy farms are unlikely to be tweeting about “whorephobia.” Yet these women are the ones who are most likely to bear the brunt of men’s violence under the guise of “sex work.”
In practice, “listening to sex workers” most often means uncritically accepting the public statements of a small minority of women in prostitution, most of whom are likely to be white, middle-class, young, and able-bodied. This is an egregious failure of the most basic radical politics. Leftists — the ones who should be most aware of the ways our white supremacist, misogynistic, pro-capitalist media system excludes the weak and marginalized — have settled for a bankrupt method of inquiry that self-selects for privileged voices.
More importantly, even if we could somehow poll every single woman in prostitution for their thoughts on the law, a larger problem remains: There isn’t a single tyrannical system on Earth that would be abolished today through its victim’s popular vote.
Any Leftist in America should know this. After all, capitalism itself is widely supported by those who bear the brunt of its abuse — not because they are stupid, ill-informed, or evil, but because capitalism excels at artificially removing alternatives that might allow life outside of it. We understand this. Our politics are robust enough to explain why oppressed people often work to sustain the system that exploits them. So why do we retreat into rudderless libertarianism when the topic switches from wage labor in general to one specific — and specifically abusive — form?
I live now in Northern California, where there wouldn’t be a redwood left standing if the residents had their way. The rivers would be dammed to oblivion and the salmon runs would be extinguished — not because those living here hate the natural world, but because they exist inside a system that has made destroying that natural world their one stable path to rent money, food, and clothes for their children.
Does that mean any laws to save old-growth forests should be scrapped in favor of the short-term survival of lumberjacks and mill workers, most of whom are living on the hope that more trees come down? If your politics end at “listen to the loggers,” the answer would be yes.
Tax law would have to be eviscerated too, of course. The vast majority of Americans, if asked, would gut infrastructure and defund social programs in a heartbeat — again, not out of heartlessness or greed, but because there are millions of poor people in this country who would rather have an extra twenty dollars weekly than a social safety net years down the line. That’s the hard pragmatism of poverty that capitalism depends on, and it’s a logic that Amnesty International and other supposed Leftists have uncritically transformed into policy.
Even minimum wage laws and age regulations are hardly a settled issue among many Americans. I spent my childhood in northern Idaho, among some of the most crushing poverty in the nation. You became used to seeing kids who couldn’t be more than fifteen spend their afternoons in mechanic shops, teenagers paid under the table to move hay and help with harvesting wheat instead of studying.
These children didn’t sell away their chances at an education lightly. Instead they realized the obvious truth that a high school diploma doesn’t help when your family is one paycheck from eviction at any moment. And if you asked these children and their families what they would prefer, quite a few would tell you that removing laws against hiring underage workers would make their lives safer and easier in the short term. How long until Amnesty International “listens” to them and puts children in steel mills?
I could offer a hundred more examples, but the uncomfortable reality is clear: Legislation that curbs the ruthless advance of violent and abusive market system may very well, in the short term, bring undeniable harm to some very real human beings. I know this for a fact. I’ve seen entire families have their financial lives ruined when environmentalists succeeded in shutting down logging operations. I’ve watched poor mothers and fathers burst into tears upon hearing that a Walmart’s zoning application was denied.
This shouldn’t shock anyone; after all, if workers could survive easily in the short term without capitalism, there would be no capitalism. Regardless, they are still hard truths, stories that we as radicals can’t simply wish away as we so often do. But to let them dictate our strategy at the expense of a cohesive analysis of resource extraction, colonialism, and environmental destruction is an even more cowardly cop-out.
There is a dangerous logic to the idea that oppressive systems must be sustained solely because the oppressed depend on them to survive. It sends a clear message to those in power: Exploit enough people, and we won’t try and stop you. Destroy enough viable alternatives, and your business is safe. By this reasoning, the only industries that can safely be dismantled are the ones that don’t coerce the people they bleed dry. What has happened to our movement that we are less likely to call for a system’s destruction the more exploitative it gets?
This contradictory, flawed approach is fundamentally an ideological failure. Around the issue of prostitution, the Left has made policy out of the most vicious libertarian lie: That long-term positive social change can come about solely through individuals seeking out their own individual needs and desires. The Left’s logic on prostitution isn’t just offensive; it’s indistinguishable from the latest Republican talking points. “Listen to sex workers” is the Invisible Hand of the Market repackaged as radicalism. It bases policy on the coerced decisions of the abused and then makes them shoulder the blame when their individual attempts to survive fail to end oppression.
But people in desperate situations shouldn’t be expected to have their eye on long-term social change while they daily struggle just to survive. Demanding they do so is the arrogance of privilege.
I learned this lesson firsthand years ago, when I discovered that a dear friend of mine was being horribly abused. When she disclosed this to me, I immediately offered her whatever help I could — a place to stay, a car ride to the women’s shelter, help with a restraining order. But the request I got in return was much simpler: Her boyfriend, she said, was more violent when he was under stress, and their bills were piling up. She reasoned that if I could put in a good word for him with my boss, he might be able to get work, and the beatings might become less frequent.
My friend’s request was heartbreaking, but it wasn’t stupid. Domestic abuse does, in fact, correlate with financial stress, and in the short term a new job for her abuser might have saved her life. She was a woman in a desperate situation, who decided to pursue the temporary solution that was most likely to keep her afloat. That was her right, and there was nothing weak or short-sighted about it. But how many of us would argue that domestic violence shelters should then “listen to abused women” and apply their resources to landing jobs for wife batterers, or mandatory vacation days for rapists?
Inside a system that artificially restricts opportunity for women, people of color, and other oppressed groups, oftentimes the struggle for survival will take place on the terms of the oppressor: A few more hours working for a multinational corporation, a bundle of socks sewn by children in the Third World for twenty cents cheaper, one last trick before the end of the night.
From its inception, capitalism has banked on these Faustian bargains, leveraging desperation into increased engagement with the system. The task of radicals is to break that cycle through an open confrontation with power. Instead, Amnesty International and the modern American Left have lazily rebranded that coercion as freedom, hoping that free condoms and clean needles will be enough to end the centuries-long legacy of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism that makes the sex industry what it is. For a movement supposedly devoted to the liberation of the oppressed, this is a tragic failure.
This article has been republished with permission from the author. Permission to republish does not necessarily imply endorsement of any positions made by DGR.
What is postfeminism? Allegedly it is the space where we can move past feminism, where feminism no longer holds appeal to women and where it can even be harmful to women. As Melissa Gira Grant writes:
The patriarchy’s figured out a way to outsource hatred of prostitution. They’re just going to have women do it for them.
Grant, who is a former sex worker (to be specific: not a pimp/madam) claims that patriarchy, an amorphous “they” not rooted in material reality, has outsourced the oppression of women to women themselves. This is an argument made by many who claim that women are the ones who cut other women in other parts of the world, who participate in forcing early marriage or abuse other women in the family. Then Grant gets more specific:
I wouldn’t advocate for a feminism that’s buttoned-up and divorced of the messiness of our real lives. Your feelings are your feelings, but you’re not going to litigate your feelings about my body. The feminist ethics that I signed up for were respect for my bodily autonomy, that my experience is my experience, and that I’m an expert in my own life.
What is postfeminism? It is a desire for control over one’s destiny. It is the hope that someday, no one will call you any names or discriminate against you based on your sex. Yet, when this individual oppression ends – the oppression against prostitutes, against trans women, against my right to choose, against me, will this have achieved female liberation?
The postfeminism of today is deeply rooted in neoliberal atomization. A single female’s experiences are just as valid as any other female’s experience. A wealthy white woman who “makes the choice” to become a prostitute – her choice is equally valid as the poor woman of color who “makes the choice” to become a prostitute. Postfeminism promises the liberation of individual women, but not females. These individuals are fighting against “patriarchy”, a concept that is not individualized or even rooted in material manifestations. Rather, it is as amorphous as its own concept: a male slapping a woman, a man cat-calling a woman, or a man who makes a sexist remark at work is patriarchy rearing its ugly head from the aether. Yet a culture of objectification, where women are plastered up like slabs of meat for sale in phone booths, where women dance for money, where women continue to make $.70 on the dollar; this is not considered a war against women. After all – a woman may now make the individual “choice” to engage in these acts, in these careers, may make the individual “choice” not to bear children to get ahead in business. Acts of violence against my body are crimes against women – but larger systems of oppression suddenly become more complex, more bogged down in uncertainty as we must learn to understand that these systems are made up of individuals who have the capacity to make “choices”.
It astounds me that leftists who might otherwise deride the idea of free choice under a capitalist system make all sorts of room for women like Grant to write privileged accounts of the system of oppression called the “sex trade”. Broader women’s movements such as the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network might feel as though an abolitionist stance on prostitution is right and good, but, as Grant would say, they are “privileged” in that their voices are louder than hers – the voice that enjoys prostitution believes that sex work is feminist work. Indeed, the other voices aren’t heard as loudly as the abolitionists “because they’re working”. This amorphous group of women who are pleased as punch to be working as sexual objects for sale are quiet, a silent majority cowed into silence by angry groups of feminist women who claim that 90% of women want out of prostitution.
If the voice of a “queer woman who dates women in her non-sex-work life and has sex with men for work” is not heard as much as the loud majority of feminists who want an end to prostitution, this is because women who “choose” sex work, who come at it from a political perspective of “empowerment” are in the extreme minority. But the individual reigns supreme over the masses in postfeminism just as it does in neoliberalism. When a woman demands her “right to choose”, she is demanding her right. She is situating feminism in a sphere where she does not feel fettered by her sex, where she personally has the ability to pursue whatever she wants. If she is a stripper and a man touches her inappropriately, this is a battle in the war against male domination – but the very institution that shapes his thinking is not in and of itself oppressive. Male domination is boiled down to the individual, becomes a question of one human exerting his will over another’s in an unfair way. It is no longer about systems of oppression, cultures of abuse, or industries of suffering. We are boiled down once again to our individual experiences.
A single person cannot change the world because change is the prerogative of the people. There is no such thing as a mass movement of individuals – they might all be walking in the same direction, but they are checking their smartphones and turning off onto a side street the moment they are required to check their egos at the door.
Melissa Gira Grant’s views are not just dangerous because they blame women themselves for their own oppression – either as angry sex-negative feminists or individuals who just make “bad choices”. They are dangerous because they shift the blame away from male violence and domination and continue to trump the experiences of a privileged few over the many. Why won’t these leftist blogs and magazines run a counter article to this kind of perspective? Anything else would be hypocritical. Perhaps it is simply not what leftist men want to hear: that their individual enjoyment is not the purpose of female liberation.
Feminists are busy people. We fight for equal rights, for stopping violence against women, for ending trafficking, prostitution, and stripping, and for a world where our children can have access to good education, health care, and day care. Now we have another job, because it seems that we are the only group willing to speak up on behalf of men’s humanity—and the only group that has steadfastly refused to buy into the pornified image of men as amoral life-support systems for erect penises.
The porn industry tells us that men need their porn, that ‘boys will be boys’. Now Susannah Breslin informs us in the Guardian that they also need strip clubs so they can express their ‘sexuality’ without fear of a sexual harassment lawsuit. Is this who men really are? Are they in fact so pathetic, socially inept, and incapable of developing authentic relationships with an equal partner? Do they really need to go to strip clubs because they are “a place where they can step outside the anxiety-fraught dating scene and talk to a woman who, as long as he keeps tipping, will give him the time of day”? Do they really need a safe space where they can treat women in ways that would warrant legal action in other contexts?
As the mother of a son, I have a vested interest in speaking up on behalf of men. My son—and I bet your son, too—was born with the full human capacity to develop a sexuality that is not based on the purchase of women’s bodies and feigned attention. But from the day my boy was born, this culture relentlessly bombarded him with messages that to be a real man was to be sexually exploitive, emotionally disconnected, and interested only in screwing as many women as he could. His masculinity was to be measured by his sexual conquests, and to refuse to buy into this limited, debased image of masculinity risked being labeled a pussy, a fag, a wimp—a gender traitor who had to be mercilessly ridiculed and policed by the alpha males of the pack.
When men do submit to the gender prison rules, when they become the sexual predator, the john, or the user, this is somehow construed as an expression of their authentic, inherent sexuality. It’s as if a young man woke up one day and, all by himself, came to the reasoned conclusion that the best way to develop and express his sexuality was to watch women who, often through lack of economic choice, are forced to strip in front of creepy men and pretend that they are thrilled to be spreading their legs to pay the rent and put food on the table for the kids. Both women and men are paying a heavy price for this commercially constructed distortion of sexuality.
In his book Guyland, which discusses masculinity in the U.S., sociologist Michael Kimmel explores how college-age men today are not keeping up developmentally with their female counterparts. Plugged into video games from an early age, masturbating to porn, drinking themselves into a stupor, and replacing dating with hook-up sex, young men are paying a heavy toll.
When we read Guyland in my classes, the women students lose hope of finding a man to partner with—and they are only in their early twenties! They often say that spending time with men their own age is like “babysitting,” and they feel frustrated and angry at having to pretend to be the cool hot girl who likes porn sex. Yet the sad truth is that to ask for something more than casual sex with a guy who gets his sex ed from porn is to break the rules of heterosexuality in a porn culture.
Men, you don’t know this, but we feminists are in fact your best friends. Unlike Breslin, we believe that you deserve the right to author your own sexuality. We have fought against a sex industry that strips you of your sexual integrity, because we know that you are capable of more than what they expect of you. Yes, men, we are rooting for you! But we are rapidly tiring of being the only group fighting for your rights. You need to stop collaborating with an industry that is out to get you, and join the feminists in fighting for an equal and just society that does not reduce you to a penis, and women to a vagina for rent. Stop the sex industry from defining who men are, because your sons (and daughters) deserve better than this.