Catharine MacKinnon’s book, Are Women Human? is riddled with examples of violence specifically targeting women. From beatings, to torture, to rape, to sexual subjugation, to murder, and to genocide, there are myriad examples that show how women are rendered insignificant in the cultural landscape of human rights. MacKinnon’s text asks how women can be considered people since, when placed next to legal renderings of other groups of people, women are excluded from similar protections. She writes:
“Women not being considered a people, there is as yet no international law against destroying the group women as such. ‘Sex’ is not on the list of legal grounds on the basis of which destruction of peoples as such is prohibited. For women as such, there is no legal equivalent to genocide… presumably because it is commonplace, built into the relative status of the sexes in everyday life.”
“Are women human?” remains a question of great significance today, as even those on the left consider us less-than. There is also the fact that, for many, women’s rights are considered “already won” and therefore part of an antiquated movement that should just simmer down.
But the facts speak for themselves: women are still underrepresented in employment in media, government, and education; women bear disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care work; while women are shown to make better use of loans, they are denied loans at a far higher rate than men; women will statistically be more prone to enlisting in credit repair services and accruing far more debt than men despite performing most of the world’s labour, earning on average 24 per cent less than men; and women are more likely to suffer from poor credit due to their relationships with men and through marriage. There are so many facts that show women are saddled with more work, lower salaries, and fewer economic benefits, no matter what level education they attain, no matter their financial investments, regardless of the few who manage to climb far up the ladder. While today, womanhood is still reduced to the superficial — “beauty,” attained or displayed through symbols of femininity, like hair, makeup, jewelry, and clothing — women’s realities are anything but decorative or camp. Women’s lives are still overwhelmingly difficult, as the burden placed on women to undertake unpaid domestic labour while being forced to pay more for beauty, hygiene, and health products stands in stark contrast to what men experience.
From articles that claim feminism is “going too far,” to the recent labelling of women who name sexual harassment and assault as taking part in a “witch hunt,”men are being positioned as victims of women’s efforts to fight misogyny. Sexism is so normalized, any challenges to it are viewed as an unreasonable attack on men.
Recently, acclaimed classicist and feminist, Mary Beard, painted herself into a corner over the Oxfam scandal. In response to reports that the former country director of Oxfam in Haiti, Roland Van Hauwermeiren, had bought sex from women and girls, she tweeted:
“Of course one can’t condone the (alleged) behaviour of Oxfam staff in Haiti and elsewhere. But I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain ‘civilised’ values in a disaster zone. And overall I still respect those who go in to help out, where most of us [would] not tread.”
This kind of comment exemplifies the way women (particularly women living in the Global South and women of colour) have historically been othered — their humanity rendered less legitimate than men’s. Beard’s comments have been described as “genteel racism,” as well as as patently sexist, and the reality is that they are both. This kind of response demonstrates the extent to which sexism has been normalized within the cultural subconscious of society, as well as the way the colonialist gaze positions dark-skinned bodies as provoking white man’s loss of “civility.”
Defending men’s violence and exploitation on account of disaster or difficult circumstances is not exactly new. From the well-documented cases of increased trafficking of females from ages 10 to 24 in India after natural disasters strike, to the recent U-turn in Russian law decriminalizing wife-beating because of the belief that the removal of this “right” posed a threat to men’s “traditional values” and masculinity, there is no paucity of examples at to how the humanity of men is positioned front and centre.
Considering her work in Women & Power: A Manifesto, which analyzes the cultural unconscious of misogyny, as well as her extensive work in the fields of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, it is clear that Beard is skilled at analyzing misogyny in ancient cultures. Her failure to see it in today’s modern culture reveals a troubling (but common) blindspot. Indeed, her comments exist as part of a larger trajectory of British intellectual history and a long tradition of white, male colonization.
Terms like “civilized” beings, “disaster zones,” and “areas that most of us would not tread” are reappropriations of the same patriarchal language that have historically kept whites the colonizers of dark-skinned bodies and males the proverbial “owners” of females. Beard’s phrasing suggests that it is not the male Westerner who is uncivilized, but rather his proximity to the non-Western “zone” and conditions of “disaster” that leads him to behave in this suddenly “uncivilized” way.
Beard is not alone in thinking this way. Too many progressives cannot recognize misogyny when it happens within particular contexts and excuse it circumstantially. We see this in the way the left has excused prostitution and pornography, in terms of the vast numbers of women who are raped by relief workers in Syria, and when we look at the recently reported assaults on and harassment of female aid workers by male staff. But even if Beard’s words are not excusing the acts of rape by relief workers, they reveal a view that women’s bodies must bear the brunt of men’s “civilization” (or lack thereof).
I took a picture in my first months in Haiti while working on child protection projects in Port-au-Prince showing two tents — one factory made, the other a series of bed sheets put together on a clothesline hung upon trees. All around: the rubble from buildings that fell during the 2010 earthquake. The buildings in Haiti fell largely due to shoddy building materials and lack of steel reinforcements, as expensive cement from the US forced many contractors to pour in more sand and less concrete, creating a weaker structure, meaning that this particular disaster was very much man-made. In other words, these sites of “disaster” are created by the very “civilized” men who turn around and exploit the victims of their imposed “civilization.”
Cheapened materials sold at extortionate rates to a people whose lives are dictated by Western G7 powers results in destroyed infrastructure and situationstraffickers take advantage of. Where Beard sees chaos, I see a legacy of colonial encounters and the buttressing of colonial institutions. Let us not forget that it was the British elite who unwittingly engineered the murders of at least one million people and the rapes of thousands of women by hastily planning the Great Partition, continuing the British rule which segregated Indian society along the lines of religion, creating acrimony in a country that had previously been united. This would turn out to be one of the most politically catastrophic decisions made by the UK’s most “civilized” leaders.
Image: March 2010, Port-au-Prince (Photo credit: Julian Vigo)
Several generations of male colonialists have brought us this still present view of “foreign” female bodies as objects of curiosity and the mechanisms responsible for interrupting their “civilized” gaze. We have seen this metaphor of savagery throughout history. In Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz discusses the “Chingada,” a term which references the systemic rape of women during the Conquest of Mexico by Cortès. He writes:
“[I]t is possible to answer the question, ‘What is the Chingada?’ The Chingada is the Mother forcibly opened, violated, or deceived. The hijo de la Chingada is the offspring of violation, abduction or deceit. If we compare this expression with the Spanish hijo de puta (son of a whore), the deference is immediately obvious. To the Spaniard, dishonour consists in being the son of a woman who voluntarily surrenders herself: a prostitute. To the Mexican it consists in being the fruit of a violation.”
Paz’ insight into how colonial encounters in the Americas were directly tied to the violation of female bodies serves as looking glass into later centuries, wherein women were similarly violated through enslavement, rape, and the exchange of their bodies.
In the late 19th century, explorers returning from faraway lands attempted to authenticate their experiences by taking the “real native” from their habitats, bringing their captives back to the West, and putting them on display in the World’s Fairs popular during this time. From the Khoikhoi (in the West, known by the derogatory term, “Hottentots”) of Botswana who were displayed in fairs from Britain to France, to the Indigenous Americans on display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, to the Apaches and Igorots of the Philippines on display at the Saint Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the black and brown body was something of a boon in the scene of freak shows that toured Europe and North America.
The ethos of these males who peddled in the trafficking of women is astonishingly contradictory, just as the aid workers raping and exploiting women in Haiti today: on the one hand, these men set out to instill upon the native, “dark-skinned other” their supposedly progressive values, and on the other, these men set up their objects of curiosity as caged spectacles, imprisoned as a means for the white Westerner to understand their own humanity. These World’s Fair installations were part of the rise of both eugenics and social sciences in the 19th century — specifically ethnology, where people were put on display in human zoos to show Westerners how people around the world lived in what was believed to be an “rapprochement” between West and East, even if entirely curated. The obvious problem with these zoos and expositions is that there was little consciousness at the time about how these “natives” felt about being kidnapped and enslaved.
Where these fairs concerned women, the stories were always the same: kidnapping, sexual slavery, freak shows, then death. Sarah Baartman was taken from the Gamtoos Valley in the Eastern part of the Cape Colony (present-day South Africa) and brought to England in 1810. Bought and sold from handler to handler and shown at various fairs in England and Ireland, she was exhibited as part of a freak show under the name “Hottentot Venus.” Finally, in 1814, she was brought to the Palais Royal in Paris where she was enslaved and became the object of scientific study.
Parallel to male colonizers sexually objectifying women during this time were French scientists who were interested in knowing the size of black women’s labia. The head of the menagerie at the Muséum national d’Histoire, Georges Cuvier, used Baartman in his new discipline, comparative anatomy, developing his theory that Baartman was the “missing link” between humans and animals, with Cuvier referring to her as an “orangutan” and a “monkey.”
Baartman died in 1815 at the age of 25. After her death, Cuvier dissected her body, displaying her remains. Her brain, genitals, skeleton, and a plaster cast of her body were on display until 1974 at the Musée de l’Homme, not repatriated to Hankey, South Africa until 2002. For all the scientific knowledge Cuvier hoped to amass by violating and dissecting Baartman’s body, what he really brought to light was the kind of “civilized” behaviour Western culture interprets as “normal.” Indeed, generations of violations against dark-skinned bodies have had the effect of normalizing rape as a necessary part of civilization.
What would lead someone like Beard to view women as necessary victims of male violence and white male “civility” as something that comes and goes like a headache? The question surrounding our humanity didn’t begin with women’s absence from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nor did it begin with Sarah Baartman’s labia on display for over 150 years. The answer to the question, “Are women human?” lies somewhere between these historical moments and our modern excusing of men’s abusive behaviour, supposedly brought on by “disaster” and the presence of othered bodies and cultures. Women cannot possibly be viewed human so long our humanity is determined by men’s circumstantial “civilization.” These men are in fact the “disaster zone,” ignoring the very civilized request they treat women and girls as human beings.
“Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.” – bell hooks
Last weekend, I was tabling for Deep Green Resistance at an environmental conference. A young man, who looked to be in his early 20’s, came up to the table. I approached him and asked if I could answer any questions.
He pointed at the sticker on the table: “Patriarchy + Capitalism = Pornography.” With a sneer he asked, “Do you really believe that?”
I told him I did. “So are you a SWERF,” he asked, using a common acronym for sex-worker exclusionary radical feminist. “What about agency?”
What an insane thing for a leftist to ask! Would anyone say that I’m “denying the agency of U.S. soldiers” because I oppose US imperialism? Would anyone say that I’m “excluding McDonald’s workers” because I oppose capitalism and the fast food industry?
Of course not. These arguments are self-evidently bullshit. It’s possible (and I can’t believe I have to say this) to oppose larger systems while still having sympathy, and even acting in solidarity, with those who are trapped inside those systems. And just because some women “choose” and “enjoy” working in pornography and prostitution doesn’t mean that we can’t critique the industry—and even critique these women for choices that have harmful effects on others.
The fact that a member of an oppressed class chooses to participate in the oppressive system doesn’t mean their choice can’t be criticized. After all, as the wonderful anti-porn activist Gail Dines has said, “Systems of oppression are flexible enough to absorb some members of subordinated groups; indeed, they draw strength from the illusion of neutrality provided by these exceptions.”
So why does this young white man believe that when it comes to pornography, “agency” is more important than the real, material impacts of the porn industry?
What I explained to the young man is that mass media and culture shapes the way we think. This has been a fundamental understanding of the left for decades. We can call it manufacturing consent, propaganda, or cultural hegemony.
Advertising works. Propaganda works. That’s why they use it.
That’s why Arundhati Roy, writing about right-wing police forces battling indigenous land defenders in rural India, quotes the superintendent of police chief as saying, “See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem [sic] can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss: remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”
Take the same approach and apply it to patriarchy, and you’ll have the last 50 years of this culture: pornography becoming more and more normalized, softcore porn moving into pop culture and social media, and ubiquitous access to demeaning, woman-hating content 24/7 from the device in your pocket.
The pornography industry in the United States is more profitable than Hollywood. It’s also more profitable than the NFL, NBA, and MLB—combined. Porn sites, at any given time, have about 30 million unique visitors watching.
As Sheila Jeffries writes, “Pornography, then, educates the male public. It would be very surprising if it did not.”
Do you really think that getting paid a small amount of money in order to have a strange, smelly man aggressively fuck you is “empowering?”
Women who have escaped prostitution have higher rates of PTSD than soldiers who have been in combat.
Read that sentence again.
There are an estimated 40 million people in prostitution worldwide, most of them (more than 80 percent) women and children. Women of color make up a highly disproportionate number of prostituted women. Of the 40 million, 2.5 million are trafficked. In other words, they are sex slaves. The average age of entry to the industry is 13 years old.
Thirteen fucking years old.
But in the face of this violence, the “agency” of a few relatively wealthy “sex workers” who claim to enjoy their jobs is more important.
If we call prostitution a “job” (rather than a form of abuse), it would be by far the most dangerous job in the US, with a murder rate of 204 per 100,000. Even if we don’t call every sex act within the context of prostitution a rape, about 80 percent of prostituted women have been raped, and they are raped an average of 8-10 times per year.
As indigenous feminist Cherry Smiley writes (brilliantly) in the Globe and Mail, “Prostitution, akin to the residential school system, is an institution that continues to have devastating impacts on the lives of aboriginal women and girls, who are disproportionately involved in street-level prostitution. Prostitution is an industry that relies on disparities in power to exist. We can see clearly that women, and especially aboriginal women and girls, are funneled into prostitution as a result of systemic inequalities such as their lack of access to housing, loss of land, culture, and languages, poverty, high rates of male violence, involvement with the foster care system, suicide, criminalization, addiction, and disability. To imagine that prostitution, a system that feeds these inequalities, should be allowed or encouraged, is dangerously misguided and supports the ongoing systemic harms against our women and girls.”
The whole notion of a SWERF is ridiculous. As Jindi Mehat writes, “Supporting an argument that excludes the majority of women in prostitution, while calling the very women who consider the whole picture ‘exclusionary,’ shows how intellectually vapid and hypocritical so-called liberal feminism is. Just like calling support of prostitution, which exposes the most marginalized among us to increased levels of violence and abuse, a feminist position, this isn’t about women’s liberation, it’s about feeling good and progressive and not having to actually change anything…
“Supporting prostitution and screaming ‘SWERF’ at abolitionists isn’t feminism, it’s capitulating to male supremacy and writing marginalized women off as collateral damage. It’s living in a dream world of consequence-free individual choices. It’s refusing to go beyond scratching the surface, and instead hiding behind buzzwords and tepid half-measures while trying to silence women who are willing to dive deep no matter the cost.”
So what do we actually want?
Radical feminists generally advocate for what is called “The Nordic Model,” a legal approach in which the people (almost entirely men) who buy sex are criminalized, and the people (almost entirely women and children) who work in the industry are provided with resources and programs to help them exit the sex trade and build alternative livelihoods.
This approach has been proven to result in positive outcomes. First, it teaches sex buyers (“johns”), who are primarily men, and the broader society, that women are not for sale at any price. Second, it provides support and full decriminalization to those who are prostituted, giving them options to exit the inherently-violent industry.
In my book, that’s not exclusionary, that’s human rights. That’s feminism.
Featured image: A girl stands alone in a flooded home in the Palifitas neighborhood of Invasão dos Padres, Altamira. The neighborhood has now been completely destroyed by the Belo Monte dam. The area where the community once stood is being turned into a public park by the Norte Energia consortium which built and operates Belo Monte. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Alexia Foundation
The future of Brazil’s mega-dam construction program is unclear, with one part of the Temer government declaring it an end, while another says the program should go on. More clear is the ongoing harm being done by the giant hydroelectric projects already completed to the environment, indigenous and traditional communities.
A case in point: the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam and reservoir, located on the Amazon’s Xingu River, and the third largest such project in the world.
Photographer Aaron Vincent Elkaim and I spent three months in the Brazilian Amazon, between November 2016 and January 2017, documenting Belo Monte after it became operational.
We were based in Altamira, a once small Amazonian city that saw explosive growth when the Brazilian government decided to build the controversial six-billion-dollar mega-dam.
The dam was built in a record three years, despite widespread outrage and protests from locals, along with the environmental, indigenous and international community. Major public figures including rock star Sting, filmmaker James Cameron, and politician and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger waged a high-profile media campaign against the project, but even these lobbying efforts weren’t enough to change the direction of the Dilma Rousseff administration, which was ruling Brazil at the time.
Ana De Francisco, an Altamira-based anthropologist and her son Thomas, visit the Belo Monte Dam in 2016. De Fransisco works for the regional office of the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA), an influential Brazilian NGO focusing on environmental and human rights issues. She has been doing research for her PhD on the displacement of ribeirinho (traditional riverine) communities in the Xingu region. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Alexia Foundation
Ultimately at least 20,000 people were displaced by the dam, according to NGO and environmental watchdog, International Rivers, though the local nonprofit, Xingu Vivo, puts the number at 50,000. Eventually, the project succeeded in staunching the once mighty Xingu, a major tributary to the Amazon and lifeblood to thousands of indigenous and forest-dwelling communities.
Altamira, which lies just downstream from the dam, was transformed overnight becoming a raucous boomtown: the population shot up from 100,000 to 160,000 in just two years. Hotels, restaurants and housing sprang up. So did brothels. According to one widely circulated anecdote, there was so much demand for sex workers in Altamira at the time, that prostitutes asked local representatives of Norte Energia, the consortium building the dam, to stagger monthly pay checks to their employees, so as not to overwhelm escorts on payday.
The boom didn’t last. The end of construction in 2015 signaled an exodus; 50,000 workers left, jobs vanished, violence surged in the city, as did a major health crisis that overwhelmed the local hospital when raw sewage backed up behind the dam.
Boys climb a tree flooded by the Xingu River in 2014. Today, one-third of the city of Altamira has been permanently flooded by the Belo Monte Dam that displaced more than 20,000 people, destroying indigenous and ribeirinho (river-dwelling) traditional communities. The effects were so severe that Norte Energia, the company behind the dam, has been required to carry out a six-year study to measure the environmental and social impacts of Belo Monte and to determine if indigenous and fishing communities can continue to live downriver from the dam. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Alexia Foundation
When Aaron and I arrived in Altamira in 2016, the city still held some charm. Families strolled a popular boulevard skirting the Xingu River in the evening, and restaurants stayed open until late. But Aaron, having spent two years in the region before me, saw a different Altamira. He described the city I was seeing as “hollow,” and noted the disappearance of vibrant communities of ribeirinhos, “river people,” who had lived for generations by fishing at the riverside, and had been displaced by the dam. Many were relocated by the Norte Energia consortium to cookie-cutter suburban homes on the edge of town, far from the river and their fishing livelihood, and without access to public transportation.
Ana de Francisco, an Altamira-based anthropologist and expert on ribeirinhocommunities, estimates that as many as 5,000 of these families were displaced.
Belo Monte was no Three Gorges Dam – the Chinese project that displaced over a million people in 2009 – but it did wreak havoc; destroying communities and traditional ways of life, while also damaging the Xingu’s aquatic ecosystem, which has unique fish and turtle species.
A map showing the Belo Monte mega-dam and reservoir where it bisects a big bend in the Xingu River hangs on the wall of a home in Ilha da Fazenda, a small fishing village a few kilometers from the dam. According to village leader Otavio Cardoso Juruna, an indigenous Juruna, around 40 families live in Ilha da Fazenda, which was founded in 1940. Ilha da Fazenda is a mixed village of indigenous and non-indigenous residents. Residents complain that although they were negatively affected by the dam like others in the region, they were not compensated because they were not designated as an “indigenous village.” There is no potable water, sanitation or healthcare in Ilha da Fazenda, and locals were forced to stop fishing after the dam reduced the river’s flow by 80 percent and massively depleted fish stocks. Otavia said villagers were forming an organization to negotiate for compensation due to the planned Belo Sun goldmine, the region’s next mega-development project. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Alexia Foundation
Featured image: Bridget Perrier speaking at Julie Bindel’s book launch. Image: YouTube. Numerous ex-prostituted women spoke at Julie Bindel’s book launch in London, telling the raw, brutal truth about the sex industry.
Prostitution or sex work? Your choice of words gives the game away, marks out where you stand on the issue. Violence against women or just a job? It is a serious battleground for the soul of feminism.
Into this contested territory lands Julie Bindel’s well-researched book, The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth. At a time when “sex work” appears to be gaining ground in official circles, Bindel is a passionate abolitionist, meaning she does not believe that decriminalization or legalization can protect prostituted women from the inherent violence of prostitution. As such, she advocates for what’s commonly known as the Nordic Model, in which johns, pimps, and profiteers are criminalized and prostituted women are supported to exit the industry. To date, versions of this model have been adopted by Sweden, Norway, Northern Ireland, Canada, Iceland and France.
Unsurprisingly, the Nordic model is vociferously opposed by those who profit from the sex industry, because it will decrease demand, though they choose to cite concern for the women’s safety instead, saying criminalizing pimps and johns will drive the trade underground. However, as a Swedish police officer quoted in Bindel’s book says:
“How can women in Sweden be in more danger than they were before the law? When all she has to do is pick up the phone, even if [the punter] is rude to her, and we will arrest him because he is already committing a crime.”
The panel at Bindel’s book launch in London, attended by more than 400 people, featured three women who have exited the sex trade: Sabrinna Valisce from New Zealand; Bridget Perrier, an Indigenous woman from Canada; and Vednita Carter, a black woman from the US. Their testimonies about the reality of the sex industry were moving, but the stuff of nightmares. It was absolutely clear that prostitution is not another job in need of regulation or unionization. It is a distillation of patriarchy in its purest form.
During the panel, Valisce explained that she rejects the term, “sex worker,” because it glosses over the “sucking and fucking” she had to do. She described her daily routine of standing around for 12-17 hour shifts, wearing only lingerie and six-inch heels, waiting to be chosen by men who would come in bellowing, “Which one of you cunts wants to suck my dick?” This was in New Zealand, where prostitution has been decriminalized since 2003, and is held up as a model of good practice by the pro-prostitution lobby, even though women continue to be killed by johns and pimps.
Perrier was lured into prostitution at the age of 12 and stayed for 10 years. The havoc wreaked by men has left her cervix permanently damaged. As a grown woman, she sleeps with her lights on to keep the nightmares at bay. Perrier talked about the racism she experienced in the industry as an Indigenous woman, and how even funeral homes won’t “touch our dead bodies.” “It’s not the laws that kill our women. It’s not the streets that kill our women. It’s the men,” she said.
Perrier founded Sex Trade 101 to support women who want to leave the industry. She said that 98 per cent of the 400 women she has helped wanted to get out of prostitution at some point. The same point was made by Carter, who has worked with 300-500 women each year, for the last 30 years, through her organization Breaking Free. Carter reports that even women who said they “liked” working in the sex trade complained that they were depressed all the time. “It eats at your soul,” she said.
It seems psychologically and politically consistent that so many of those in the abolitionist movement are female survivors who exited the sex trade. Those who continue to work in the industry not only have a vested interest in its growth, but also in bigging it up — especially to its critics. Fiona Broadfoot (who exited at the age of 26 after 11 years of working in the trade) once told me that she used to challenge anyone who dared question her choice of work, but nonetheless would wash herself, inside and out, with Dettol every night. When I asked Bindel if her research confirmed these experiences in the industry, she said she only came across one survivor among the 250 people she interviewed who continued to promote “sex work” as empowering.
While the gap between the pro-prostitution lobby and abolitionists has grown into a chasm, it was not always so. Bindel’s book reminds us that the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), founded in 1975, were abolitionists in the early days. Their slogan, “For prostitutes, against prostitution” could easily be the tagline for Bindel’s book. They did not argue that sex work is empowering or enjoyable — they saw it as exploitation, as they saw all labour under capitalism.
In recent years, supporters of prostitution have increasingly framed it as a question of choice and women’s agency. Brooke Magnanti — the self-defined “happy hooker” behind the Belle De Jour blog — popularized that narrative; but by all accounts only a tiny percentage of women freely choose and personally profit from it. And it is their voices we hear the most, echoed by their academic supporters and the pimps, whose vested interests it serves, as Bindel has demonstrated. This narrative of “choice” is the poisoned chalice handed down by neoliberalism to feminism. To continue to believe that women freely choose the lives of violent victimization that were laid before us by the panelists at Bindel’s book launch would be grotesque.
This is why I believe that Bindel made an error of judgment in choosing not to devote any space to trafficking. Although she recognizes its importance, in almost the same breath she dismisses trafficking. In a typically memorable Bindel phrase, she says that “sex trafficking is an embarrassment to the pro-prostitution lobby in the same way that lung cancer is to the tobacco industry.” Quite. Trafficking, based as it is on coercion and deception, undercuts the central argument of the sex work lobby, which claims women are exercising their free choice when they enter the industry. Much energy has been expended by these lobbyists in attempting to separate “sex work” from trafficking — the first is presented as harmless and potentially empowering, only the second is accepted as exploitative and harmful. All the while the obvious fact that a thriving sex industry acts as a green light to traffickers is ignored.
Although the statistics are unreliable and heavily contested, trends show that more and more migrant women are being prostituted in the West. A 2009 studyfound that in a majority of European countries up to 70 per cent of women in the industry were migrant women. While not all of them will be trafficked, this is a telling statistic — it demonstrates the unequal economic desperation of migrant versus local women.
Bindel describes trafficking as “international pimping” and believes “that the only difference between international and local pimping is that some women are pimped across borders, and others are not.” But from the phrase “across borders,” a whole series of vulnerabilities flow, as I argued in my book Enslaved. Most notably, not being able to access the protection of the state, such as it is, and living in the shadow of imminent deportation.
Both lobbies acknowledge it is important to tackle the factors which drive women into prostitution, like poverty. It is no surprise that, as Valisce explained, even when women choose to leave, they can spend years exiting and re-entering the industry because of the difficulties of finding work elsewhere.
As long as women are trapped in these situations, we must focus on exit strategies, while also supporting policies that will ensure that women’s health and safety needs are met and that they can live as free from abuse as possible.
Rahila Gupta is a freelance journalist, writer, activist and longstanding member of Southall Black Sisters. She is author and editor of several books, and is currently collaborating with Beatrix Campbell on a book titled, “Why Doesn’t Patriarchy Die?” which will investigate how patriarchy fits with diverse political systems.
When I was in grad school, I got into a heated debate with a classmate who insisted that “white feminism” was a serious problem in the women’s movement. The man (who was white and from the United States) argued that, “white feminism” meant that the women’s movement had centered the lives and experiences of only a select few — privileged white women in the US who traveled mainly in academic circles — “for most of its history.”
I told him I thought the term functioned as a tool to dismiss second wave feminists, glorify the (very problematic) third wave, and encourage infighting among feminists, creating divisions in a movement where collective struggle is crucial. His claim was at odds with the grassroots movement I’d grown up with in the Dominican Republic, which was obviously not led by women in the US (and certainly not by upper-class white women or academics). There are legitimate problems within feminism in my home country, particularly around class difference, but there is far more solidarity than animosity, and Dominican feminism has been consistent in addressing the struggles of rural, working class, and immigrant women.
Notably, during my time as an immigrant in the US, most of the people who complained to me about what they called “white feminism” were white themselves. I felt tokenized; like they wanted me, as a Dominican woman of colour, to validate them and their feminism. I became suspicious of all white people who used the term. Criticizing “white feminism” seemed to be a way for white people to present themselves as different, better white people — as cool, “intersectional” feminists who just happen to be white.
Now that I am back in the Dominican Republic doing shelter work, I believe my friend from grad school was right about one thing: white feminism is real. It is epitomized by gender identity ideology.
The current trend among third wavers, as well as among progressives, is to argue that we can ignore whether people were born male or female and instead use language like “genderfluid,” “multi-gender,” or “genderqueer.” But there’s a massive gap between this language — popularized within Gender Studies classrooms in the West — and the realities of marginalized women in countries like mine.
I’ve been thinking about what gender identity means in the context of the Global South. What does gender identity mean for women and girls who look like me? What does it mean for Dominican women and girls who are marginalized not just by sex, but by poverty, race, and xenophobia?
Recently, the Dominican Republic has been debating whether or not to outlaw child marriage. The country has the highest rate of child marriage in the Latin American and Caribbean region. According to a 2014 survey, 37 per cent of women who are between 20 and 49 years old got married (or became common law partners) before they were 18. The survey also shows that one in five girls between 15 and 19 are in a relationship with a man who is at least 10 years their senior. There is a strong correlation between child marriage and teen pregnancy, which can result in dangerous health complications for girls, like blood poisoning, obstructed labour, and high blood pressure. Indeed, teen pregnancy is the number one cause of death for teen girls worldwide. This is particularly worrisome because the Dominican Republic prohibits all abortion, even in the cases when the mother’s life is in danger.
Plan International, a children’s rights organization, published a study in March, looking at child marriage on the south side of the Caribbean island. They interviewed men who married underage girls, as well as the girls who “chose” these marriages. Almost 40 per cent of the men interviewed said they preferred younger girls because they were “more obedient and easier to control.” The study also revealed that many girls marry older men hoping to escape family violence and poverty, but then face violence from these men once they are married. One 15-year-old girl who was interviewed for the study said:
“I got married because I needed to run away from home. They were beating me. They used sticks. They wouldn’t trust me. One day I said: ‘I don’t want to live like this anymore.’ At home, there was a lot of fighting, one day in front of everybody, they beat me, in the middle of the street. So, I started working at a household. I was 11 years old. It was even worse there, the violence increased. I had to do all the chores, including washing all the clothes by hand. They wouldn’t even let me go to school and they never paid me because they said that they already gave me food. I was suffering a lot. I felt imprisoned I couldn’t even go to the park. I wanted to get married to leave all of that. I thought that if I got married I was going to be in a calm house, that I would be able to eat, sleep and go out. I didn’t know it wouldn’t be like that, like another hell.”
In the Dominican Republic, boys are not expected to clean or help raise their siblings — that is the responsibility of girls. Prior to marriage, 78 per cent of the girls who participated in the Plan International study said they were put in charge of doing household chores like cleaning and caring for their younger siblings. When girls were asked what it means to be a woman, most said that it meant being a mother and a wife.
“Half of the women in Latin America who are in their [productivity years] are unemployed and the ones who do have a job earn considerably less than their male counterparts. For women in Latin America and the Caribbean, the wage gap becomes more exacerbated during their peak fertility years.”
This is because there is an expectation that women are inherently nurturing. Being forced into the position of caretaker translates to women having less savings, being promoted less, and accumulating less money in their pensions.
But gender identity politics reduces this reality — and womanhood itself — to a trivial, malleable identity. It is baffling that in a world where women and girls face structural oppression due to their biology, gender identity politics has thrived.
Susan Cox argues that: “The non-binary declaration is a slap in the face to all women, who, if they haven’t come out as ‘genderqueer,’ presumably possess an internal essence perfectly in-line with the misogynistic parody of womanhood created by patriarchy.” There’s a twisted, neoliberal cruelty in arguing that the primary problem with gender is its impact on the chosen identities of individuals, and not the way it operates systemically, under patriarchy, to normalize and encourage male violence and female subordination.
When confronted with evidence that, historically and globally, women’s oppression is sex-based, gender identity politics simply claims that sex itself is an “invented” social construct.
“Sex and gender are much more complex and nuanced than people have long believed. Defining sex as a binary treats it like a light switch: on or off. But it’s actually more similar to a dimmer switch, with many people sitting somewhere in between male and female genetically, physiologically, and/or mentally. To reflect this, scientists now describe sex as a spectrum.
Despite the evidence, people hold on to the idea that sex is binary because it’s the easiest explanation to believe. It tracks with the messages we see in advertisements, movies, books, music — basically everywhere. People like familiar things, and the binary is familiar (especially if you’re a cisgender person who has never had to deal with sexual-identity issues).”
But feminists don’t argue that sex is real because it is “the easiest explanation to believe” or because of what the media tells us. We argue sex is real because from the moment an ultrasound reveals a baby is female, her subjugation begins. And though “gender identity” is presented as an issue feminism must contend with, it is, as Rebecca Reilly-Cooper explains, completely at odds with feminist analysis of biological sex as an axis of oppression:
“Women’s historic and continued subordination has not arisen because some members of our species choose to identify with an inferior social role (and it would be an act of egregious victim-blaming to suggest that it has). It has emerged as a means by which males can dominate that half of the species that is capable of gestating children, and exploit their sexual and reproductive labour.
We cannot make sense of the historical development of patriarchy and the continued existence of sexist discrimination and cultural misogyny, without recognizing the reality of female biology, and the existence of a class of biologically female persons.”
Far from fluid, the realities of sex-based oppression are strict and enforced through violence — this is particularly true for women of colour and women in poverty.
Presumably, the Romanian women and girls who are filling up brothels in Spain (six out of 10 prostituted women in Spain are from Romania) would like to opt-out of their gender. Evelyn Hernandez Cruz, the 19-year old girl who has just been sentenced to 30 years in jail in El Salvador for having a stillbirth, after being repeatedly raped by a gang member, surely would like to reject her status as “woman.” The 12-year-old girls in Kenya who are sold into prostitution by their families, desperate for money amidst regional droughts, probably don’t identify with being exchanged as if they’re commodities. Presumably the girls in Nepal who die from snake bites and low temperatures in menstruation huts are uncomfortable with the restrictions of their gender.
Even in the US, sex-based oppression is compounded through other forms of oppression, like race. According to a 2017 report, black women are four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related complications, and are “twice as likely to experience a life-threatening complication during childbirth or pregnancy.” A study conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that half of the murders of women in the US are committed by a current or former partners and that black women are most likelyto die by homicide than all other demographics. It is fair to assume that this is not a reality these women “identify” with.
To argue that sex is not real and that gender is innate or chosen, instead of socially imposed, demonstrates both ignorance to the world around you as well as a position of privilege. In this way, we see that gender identity ideology literally is“white feminism”: a (so-called) feminism that ignores the material realities of the marginalized, centers the feelings and interests of the most privileged, and presents itself as universal. It is a “feminism” invented by academics in Western countries that does little to address the struggles of those outside these circles.
“A specific set of single-issue, non-intersectional, superficial feminist practices. It is the feminism we understand as mainstream; the feminism obsessed with body hair, and high heels and makeup, and changing your married name. ‘White feminism’ is the feminism that doesn’t understand western privilege, or cultural context. It is the feminism that doesn’t consider race as a factor in the struggle for equality.
White feminism is any expression of feminist thought or action that is anti-intersectional. It is a set of beliefs that allows for the exclusion of issues that specifically affect women of colour.”
Considering this definition, what do we make of a man claiming that eyeliner defines his “womanhood,” as Gabriel Squailia did this year in an article for Bustle? He writes:
“My politics and my eyeliner became inseparable. Projecting my own sense of beauty, without shame or hesitation, scared the hell out of my opponents. My look was my armor and my weaponry. Every day, my personal power has grown. Strength and security come from drawing lines on my lids, and from the visibility that follows.My sense of myself is personal, particular, idiosyncratic. It involves massive, complex issues of identity and politics. And all of this is present when I’m leaning into the mirror, getting my eyeliner wings just right.”
The ridiculousness of Squailia’s claim that makeup makes him a woman and that power, strength and security are easily available and acquirable through superficial means, is made ever more clear when contrasted with the day-to day realities faced by most women and girls around the world. In his piece, Squailia admits womanhood is something he has been able to put on and take off, as he pleased:
“I stopped wearing anything that scanned as feminine. I didn’t even own eyeliner for 20 years. And I said nothing when people took me for a straight, cisgender man.”
But women and girls oppressed for being born female don’t have the privilege of opting out of womanhood, and appropriating the male privilege of straight men. Patriarchy doesn’t care if women don’t like or relate to their subordinate role.
Many people who consider themselves progressive believe that by swearing allegiance to gender identity ideology, they demonstrate “intersectionality.” But if they truly cared about the intersections of sex, race, and class, they would center women and girls marginalized by those axes of oppression. Instead, progressives and queer activists are centering men who believe oppression is something you can opt in and out of. Surely, most women around the world would take offense at the notion the violence and injustice they suffer is a choice… Or that it has anything to do with eyeliner.
RAQUEL ROSARIO SANCHEZ IS A WRITER FROM THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. HER UTMOST PRIORITY IN HER WORK AND AS A FEMINIST IS TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST GIRLS AND WOMEN. HER WORK HAS APPEARED IN SEVERAL PRINT AND DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS BOTH IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH, INCLUDING: FEMINIST CURRENT, EL GRILLO, LA REPLICA, TRIBUNA FEMINISTA, EL CARIBE AND LA MAREA. YOU CAN FOLLOW HER @8ROSARIOSANCHEZ WHERE SHE RAMBLES ABOUT FEMINISM, POLITICS, AND POETRY.
Where these fairs concerned women, the stories were always the same: kidnapping, sexual slavery, freak shows, then death. Sarah Baartman was taken from the Gamtoos Valley in the Eastern part of the Cape Colony (present-day South Africa) and brought to England in 1810. Bought and sold from handler to handler and shown at various fairs in England and Ireland, she was exhibited as part of a freak show under the name “Hottentot Venus.” Finally, in 1814, she was brought to the Palais Royal in Paris where she was enslaved and became the object of scientific study.
