The following is an essay I wrote, and have recently submitted, for my Sexualities class. A bit long perhaps but the blog’s been kind of short of stuff recently and I thought it might interest some people. Have included the bibliography in case anyone wants to do some further reading.

In this essay I will discuss the issue of pornography which has divided feminists for decades and was, above all else, the defining issue of the so-called ‘feminist sex wars’ of the 1980s. For radical feminists, pornography is widely seen as a form of male violence against women and is believed to contribute to a patriarchal and heteronormative ideology in which women are reduced to objects existing purely for men’s sexual gratification. Many of those liberal or socialist feminists who support pornography on the other hand emphasise its supposed potential to bring about sexual liberation and openness and to allow women to more freely express their sexual needs and desires in a world where traditionally only men have been seen as enjoying a sexually active role. Such feminists claim also that any form of censorship would be inherently detrimental to the rights of women and other historically oppressed or marginalised groups. Although the definition of pornography among feminists and academics is widely disputed I will, for the purposes of this essay, accept the dictionary definition of pornography as being “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement” (Oxford Dictionary, 2011).

While the above definition is largely neutral and would encompass a diverse range of erotic material I feel it is important to place most of my focus on those forms of pornography most prevalent within society and which, it can reasonably be assumed, have the greatest impact and influence within the sexual sphere. In this essay I will attempt to explore in more detail some of the feminist debates around pornography, making particular reference to recent developments and research which has been carried out on the issue. Fundamentally important to any understanding, from a feminist perspective, of pornography and how it operates is the issue of power relations and inequalities between the sexes. I will discuss, in detail, the capacity of pornography to either assist or hinder in the building of a more egalitarian and sexually liberated society. For an understanding of what such a society may look like I will, in particular, draw upon prominent radical feminist writers such as Millett and Dworkin who have been instrumental in having sexuality recognised as a sphere through which gender relations built upon male dominance and female submission can be recreated and reinforced.

Background to the debate

The emergence of the so-called ’second wave’ of feminism in the 1960s coincided which what is widely referred to as the sexual revolution. At this time many people began to rebel against the traditional religious and family-based notions of sexual morality which had regained support and prominence in the 1950s. Growing tolerance towards, for example, sex outside marriage, homosexual relationships and public expressions of sexuality went alongside the development of new methods of birth control, heralding a major shift away from the view of sex as existing ideally for procreation within marriage and in favour of an embracing of sex for recreation. During this period in many countries homosexuality was legalised and restrictions on abortion also began to be lifted. Pornography too was legalised in a number of countries, the first being Denmark in 1969. Read the rest of this entry »

Frida Kahlo: Mad Trot!

Hey! It’s International Women’s Day! So let’s talk about artist Frida Kahlo, and why feminists like her.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist, notable mostly for her graphic depictions of the painful aspects of her life, and for surrealist and colourful self-portraits. Throughout her life she experienced numerous physical and psychological traumas which she documented in her work. She was considerably ahead of her time in a number of aspects of the way she lived her life. Through her skill, she brought women’s issues to the forefront of a male-dominated art world, paving the way for many future female artists. She was also a mad Trotsky-shagging Trot and had an unashamedly revolutionary spirit. Though her physical traumas set her back and haunted her, she still managed to create some incredible art, cope and learn to give as good as she got with an abusive and badly behaved husband (despite her obvious love for him), and leave a lasting legacy in Mexican, female and art history. And that’s what makes her a feminist icon.

She was born in Mexico in 1907, but later in life she went around telling people that she was born in 1910, the year of the start of the Mexican Revolution. Clearly, Frida saw her life as defined by her revolutionary consciousness, and that’s pretty cool. She was of German, Spanish and Amerindian descent.

She grew up surrounded by women, and was one of only 35 women admitted to her fancy school. She wore long, colourful skirts all the time to cover up a leg that hadn’t formed properly as the result of polio, and always walked with a limp. Despite this she excelled at school and wanted to be a doctor. When she was 18 however, her bus crashed, breaking her spinal column, her collarbone, her ribs, her pelvis, her leg, her foot, and an iron rail pierced her abdomen and uterus. This left her permanently unable to have children, resulting in several traumatic miscarriages which she dealt with through her art in later life. She had to spend months in bed in a full body cast, during which time she had an easel fixed to the bed and began to paint. She experienced a lot of pain and constant operations throughout her life, the pain of which is best expressed through her self-portraits:

'The Little Deer'

'The Broken Column'

It is clear from Frida’s paintings that she believed that she was weak and not entirely beautiful, although she was – she exaggerates her facial hair in nearly all of her self portraits, and in portrays herself as incredibly tiny and dainty next to her admittedly large husband, Diego Rivera. She exaggerated what she perceived as her flaws, and at the same time she took ownership over her appearance, her body disfigurements, and her pain, and reclaimed them as something quite beautiful in her art. She did what I’m sure a lot of us would like to do and say ‘fuck you, I don’t care if I have hair where you think I shouldn’t, this is what I look like, I’m a strong Mexican woman, look at what I can create and do’.

Part of that reclaiming was a healing process for herself, in coming to terms with the miscarriages that her bus accident caused her to have. The paintings depicting this might be upsetting for those who have suffered miscarriages or are sensitive to graphic images, so I’ll just link to them here. Frida wanted more than anything to have a family with her husband, so the pain of her injuries served as a constant reminder of the happiness she was denied.

During her lifetime, Frida Kahlo was mostly famous as the wife of Diego Rivera, who was a very successful artist at the time, and the two were well known for their communist activism and turbulent/abusive relationship. Posthumously however, Frida Kahlo’s success has far eclipsed that of her husband, and she is now perhaps the most well known female artist ever. Frida loved Diego very deeply (as her art and writings show), but their relationship was marked with constant arguments, constant adultery on both parts, and some very bad and abusive behaviour from Diego when it came to his intense jealousy over her relationships with other men, and his affair with one of her sisters, which caused Frida to divorce (then remarry) him. What makes Frida very ahead of her time (remember she lived from 1907-1954) was her open bisexuality and affairs with women, including African-American singer and civil rights campaigner Josephine Baker.

Another of Frida’s famous affairs was with none other than the exiled Leon Trotsky, shortly before Stalin’s henchmen set aboot him wi an icepick. Frida had long been a commie, being a member of the Young Communist League and the Mexican Communist Party. Their affair resulted in Diego Rivera falling out with Trotsky, made Trotsky’s wife very upset, and caused Trotsky & wife to move out of Frida & Diego’s house and into another ’safehouse’ where he promptly met his bloody end.

Frida herself died at 47, after yet more pain and further operations, including a leg amputation due to gangrene. She left behind a vast legacy of beautiful paintings, revolutionary spirit, and her former childhood home which she later shared with Diego and Trotsky, the Blue House, is now a museum of her life and art.

There’s a pretty decent film about her life starring Salma Hayek as Frida, which you can download here.

A parting message for International Women's Day

Men, we’ve decided to give you some handy hints on what to get your womenfolk this Christmas.

We don’t really care about any of the things we pretend to be interested in -- what we want this Christmas is for you to find us sexy enough to give us the honour of pleasuring you.

So, please, buy us underwear -- the more impractical, uncomfortable and ’sexy’ the better. After all, that’s what underwear is for, right? Pleasing packaging on the sweet product underneath?

Bra company La Senza have also noticed that men are too stupid to know what their wives and girlfriends are actually interested in, and will need a little extra help -- so they’ve come up with this handy new campaign “aimed at men to help them with their Christmas shopping”.

They’ve put together The Cup Size Choir -- a choir of women, arranged by how big their tits are. Classy.

Firstly, how does watching a load of semi-naked women writhe around and make sex noises help anyone with their Christmas shopping?

And let’s analyse this video a little bit.

In the introduction, ‘The Notes’, each woman is introduced -- by her cup size, of course (who needs names?) -- and gives the viewer a sultry look of… well I think it’s meant to be desire, but all it really does is illustrate that if you are buying La Senza’s products, you are not buying underwear. You are buying women.

Ladies A, B, C and D are introduced standing up and facing the camera, whereas E, F and G are flat on their backs. -- letting gravity give a helping hand in the illusion that you can have plus-sized breasts without a plus-sized body.

So yes, the being-in-naught-but-yer-undies and the lying-on-a-bed aspects made it pretty clear that the “singing” these women are doing is meant to be orgasmic… but who the hell sounds like that when they’re getting it on? As Jezebel once wisely said:

And as if that’s not enough, you can play along and interact with these sexy ladies -- that’s right, those orgasmic noises of pleasure can be controlled by your touch. And each time you make one of the women “sing”, the bed they’re so strategically arranged on is pushed downwards, and springs back up -- it’s almost as if you’re thrusting into her in the real world!

La Senza, we’ve got a message for you.

1) Men are not stupid. Stop trying to make them second guess themselves. When we tell our male partners what we want for Christmas -- that is what we want. We are not trying to trick them into failing by not buying the correct underwear set. If we want underwear, we will tell them what we want -- and what size to get it in.

2) As mentioned above, if we want underwear for Christmas, we’ll ask for it. But the super-sexy-make-me-scream image that you’re selling is not a present for women. It’s a present for men.

3) The sound of our orgasms do not correspond with our cup size.

Now kindly fuck off.

P.S. Additional reporting by Brogan.

P.P.S. I know bra burning is a myth, but it is clearly a very appropriate image for this article.

Sexist arsehole: Judge John Rogers QC

. . .here’s the proof. (Trigger warning.)

A woman from Powys in Wales has been jailed after being raped by her abusive husband. The reason? Because under huge pressure from him and his family, she at one point retracted the allegations.

In November last year she made a 999 call to report that her husband had raped her 6 times. But in January she told Dyfed-Powys police she didn’t want to press charges. They replied that they would continue to investigate anyway, and in February she told them the allegations had been false.

The truth of the matter was that her abusive husband had put her under intense pressure and she had cracked. Her marriage has since ended, and she maintains that she was in fact telling the truth, and the retraction had been made falsely under coercion.

The man involved has now been charged with rape, and the marriage is over. The woman involved had to be moved to a refuge to protect her from him. Clearly, she deserves sympathy and support for the ordeal she has survived. But that’s the opposite of what she received at the hands of a misogynist “justice” system.

After being prosecuted for perverting the course of justice, she was jailed for 8 months last week. Sexist bastard Judge John Rogers QC said:

“Despite all the support and time taken in the investigation you eventually made a retraction. I now have to deal with you because you made a false retraction. If you had to be dealt with for making a false allegation of rape you would be looking at a sentence of two years. The position has now changed but there are two aggravating features. One you have caused a substantial amount of wastage for the CPS and police [wtf?!], and two you have had to admit that retraction was false, perverting the course of justice, and for that the imposition of a prison sentence is inevitable.”

Dyfed-Powys police have also defended their actions, claiming they treat sexual assault “seriously.” However, both they and Judge Rogers have shown a contemptible lack of understanding of the reality of violence against women, and the pressure put on survivors of such abuse. As Rape Crisis point out, there isn’t a specific offence of making a false retraction, and a decision has been made to pursue this woman.

In the quote above, the Judge highlighted the costs to the Crown Prosecution Service and police. But, at a time when across the UK vital services for abuse survivors are being cut because the government thinks rich capitalists need the money more, surely the cost of this prosecution was an unjustifiable waste of public money that we just can’t afford?

Campaigning and support groups have reacted with fury to the outrageous judgment. Holly Dustin of the End Violence Against Women Coalition said:

“Imprisoning a woman for a ‘false retraction’ of a rape allegation sends out a chilling message that parts of the criminal justice system are still in the dark ages in relation to sexual violence and do not understand the pressure women come under from perpetrators during the legal process. The potential threat of prosecution makes it less likely that women will report.

“Victims of rape already have little confidence that the police and courts will treat them fairly which is why only around one in 10 report the assault to the police.

“Resources should be focused on improving the very low conviction rate of just 6% of reported cases, and ensuring that all victims have access to specialist support from a Rape Crisis Centre whether or not they choose to report.”

Cases like this actively make the situation for women in the UK much much worse. The woman in this case is just the latest rape survivor to be jailed for “perverting the course of justice”, leaving us wondering, what justice? For example, Gail Sherwood is a rape survivor who police refused to believe and who was then jailed for two years.

The fact that we have a profoundly anti-woman legal system throughout the UK can’t be denied in the face of this evidence, and tackling it is vital. Cases like these help fuel the myth that women “cry rape”, distract attention from the appallingly low conviction rate for rape, and encourage men to carry out sexual assaults with the knowledge they are unlikely to be punished. It’s time for all those against inequality to take a stand.

Meanwhile, John Rogers is now retired to enjoy his hobbies of gardening and sailing, according to Debrett’s database of the posh. He’s the one who should be locked up, but we’d settle for his boat sinking.

The solicitors acting for the woman in this case will ensure any letters of support and solidarity sent to them will be received by her. Write to:

Geraint Jones & Co, Bronwydd House, The Bank, Newtown, Powys, SY16 2AU

Fourteen years after it first started, South Park remains one of the funniest comedy shows in the world. I am a massive fan, I’ve watched every single one all the way back to the start. Some of them are among the most powerful satirical statements of our time, like the way they absolutely nailed Mel Gibson’s obsession with torture to the one where they managed to make every single person involved in the Terri Schiavo sitation look evil.

I wanted to say all that to make it clear at least part of the reason I’m writing this is concern for the future of a show I love. Because although the most recent series still have hilarious episodes, there are more and more crap ones as well. And a big part of the reason is that South Park is increasingly depending on the “shock value” of rape jokes.

The absolute low point came a couple of years ago in season 12, with an episode about the newest Indiana Jones movie. In it, there were repeated scenes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg raping Indy, as a comment on how crappy the 4th installment of his adventures was. Before we see this we see the boys having flashbacks, traumatised and crying, as they come to admit that “one of our friends was raped.” But then, da dum tsh, the joke turns out that the rape is of Indiana Jones. Ha ha, you never saw that coming did you?!

This episode was widely criticised for being insensitive, unpleasant and unfunny. As if to rub in our faces what they were doing, they didn’t make this joke once, but kept coming back throughout the episode to graphic and pretty horrible rape scenes that aped movies like ‘Deliverance.’

Since then the word rape crops up week after week. In this week’s episode, school councillor Mr Mackey comes out with “Don’t touch that or I will rape you in the mouth!” out of nowhere, before we see a scene of him being abused as a child. Last week they made a character from a US reality TV show into a weird monster which pounced on Cartman with him crying “It’s raping me! It’s raping me!”

Yet again, it seems, we need to go over why it’s not cool to make rape jokes. People who find rape funny are generally men, and generally have no idea just how prevalent it is in our society. The odds are that you know someone who has experienced rape or sexual abuse. A big part of the reason I can’t find these episodes funny is because when they start laughing about rape, I think about my friends and how it has affected their lives. Shows like South Park, Family Guy and The Mighty Boosh use rape so freely, as just another word to shock and get a laugh, that they rob it of how important it is. In their ignorance, they have no idea how many people are going to watch these episodes and suffer from real flashbacks, and genuine trauma, unlike the pretend horror and terror experienced by Stan and Kyle “for a laugh”.

Now, a common response to this is, yes, rape is awful, but so is murder, so why is it being singled out? The problem with that is it ignores the way rape is treated by the justice system throughout the world. Rape is a crime overwhelmingly committed by men against women. In Scotland, only 3% of those tried for rape end up convicted. There are two ways to explain this: either 97% of women who report being raped are crazy liars, or the justice system is systematically sexist and biased against women. These figures of course leave out all those who didn’t even go to the police because they knew at best it would be a waste of time, and at worst it could lead to their public humiliation in court and being branded a liar by the press.

In other words, our society doesn’t take rape seriously. We’ve come a long way from the past in terms of attitudes, but their remains the patriarchal social attitude that women basically deserve it (“What were you wearing? How much had you had to drink? Are you sexually promiscuous?”), and that rape basically performs a function of putting women in their place, and disciplining them for not being sexually available.

In that context, rape jokes help to normalise rape, help to make people feel that it’s not that bad. If rape is only as bad as the latest Indiana Jones movie, then what’s the big deal? When you try and pull someone up for making an unfunny, offensive and hurtful rape joke, inevitably they get defensive, because they find it hard to deal with being challenged. They will tell you that you’re being ridiculous, that it was just a joke, that you should calm down. The fact that big popular shows back them up on rape as comedy scenario is only going to make this worse.

Now, I also want to make clear that I know South Park deliberately sets out to offend. I have been watching it you know. And I understand that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are nobody’s political allies. They are just as happy to mercilessly rip the pish out of anyone from anywhere on the political spectrum. They are not feminists.

But there’s a difference between the rape jokes and, say, Cartman’s constant anti-semitic abuse. And that is that ultimately, you are not meant to respect and admire Cartman. He is ultimately a fat, unbearable spoiled little dick. And many of the targets of the show’s satire are well found – it is funny to laugh at the hypocrisy of liberal Hollywood actors for example. But laughing at the expense of rape survivors just isn’t funny. What South Park does best is forensically take apart why a person or group is hypocritical, full of shit or otherwise worthy of being mocked, and do it mercilessly. The rape jokes aren’t that, they are harnessing the power of rape to shock to produce a cheap laugh from ignorant, uncaring idiots. For the rest of us, it’s JUST NOT FUNNY.

There really isn’t much that’s funny about rape survivors, and they don’t deserve to have their pain mocked, or treated as if it’s the same as seeing a really bad film. Hurting or offending them is something I care about, in a way I don’t, for example, about Scientologists or John Edward. If the show isn’t funny, then it’s failing not just in terms of feminism or decent treatment of fellow human beings, but in terms of COMEDY.

FAO The Mighty Boosh: Changing the rapist to the Donnie Darko bunny doesn't make it funny

So I’m not just saying this because I am pro-feminist. I am saying it because I love South Park. I think it is genuinely one of the greatest and most daring comedies that’s been on in my lifetime. I know it will come to an end one day, but I don’t want it to have a slow death of seasons sprinkled with unfunny episodes. Constantly relying on rape jokes is a sign that the writing is weakening, that they can’t come up with the goods as often as they used to. I’ve seen it happen before, with the latest series of The Mighty Boosh, which was far less funny than the other two, and, not coincidentally, relied heavily on rape jokes.

Another thing that shows that South Park and The Mighty Boosh understand what they’re doing is the reliance on what initally look like cute things that then turn out to be evil. In the latest episode they go on a field trip to the woods, where there’s a mascot called Woodsy Owl that sings a little song encouraging the kids not to litter. As soon as I saw it, the first thing I thought was that it would turn out to be some kind of paedophile. And surprise surprise it turned out I was right. I’ve been trying to see if I can find if there’s a proper term for this phenomenon of the cute turning out to be evil, and couldn’t get any closer than coulrophobia or fear of the ‘evil clown’ (e.g. “Stephen King’s It”). But you’ll know what I mean when I refer to the Woodland Critters of the South Park Christmas special a couple of years ago for example.

Blending horror concepts with comedy can work and be funny, but the fact that I knew what Woodsy Owl was the second I saw him means that this particular trope is being overused and is losing it’s power. To me, it’s appearance was simply about using things that are cute, and therefore associated with childhood and innocence, and violating those expectations to give the eventual shock all the more power. Except it’s getting boring and predictable. But more importantly, the shock and horror of abuse are very real for millions of people, and by laughing at it you’re making them feel humiliated and angry.

I’m not saying that rape is a topic that can never be discussed or treated in TV or other media. Absolutely not. But I would like to see the makers of shows try and do it a bit sympathetically, with at least a token of trying to understand reality rather than sensational patriarchal propaganda that has no care for people’s feelings. Using the word and the act of rape as a cheap shock tactic to get a nervous laugh out of the audience (or, certainly, a big laugh from sexist, ignorant bastards) just isn’t good comedy. And it’s killing the enjoyment of one of my favourite shows for me. So consider this a plea to Trey Parker and Matt Stone to think a little bit more, and come up with more episodes of the show I love.

This week The Office of National Statistics released the figures from a new survey, which claimed that only 1.5% or 1 in 100 British citizens identity as Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual.

After interviewing only a small percentage of the population the ONS have come to the ‘concrete’ conclusion that only “480,000 adults describe themselves as homosexuals — just one in every 100. Another 245,000 — or one in 200 — are bisexual.”

Their statistics also claim to prove that the majority of those who openly admitted to being gay were more likely to have jobs higher up the career ladder than their heterosexual colleagues. 49.1% of gay people are in managerial or professional positions compared to 30.6% of straight people. However, that 49.1% of the boss class have already built up enough cushioning to be able to give up their straight ‘privilege’ and don’t have the worry of losing their position within society because they have the power to control any homophobia they might face. Whereas less powerful working class people, lower down the career ladder, don’t have this protection and have a lot more to lose. The statistic that 38% of gay people are also apparently better educated compared to 21.9% of straight people also backs this up – the ONS just haven’t thought very deeply about why that might be.

Homosexuals, according to this data, are also much younger than the rest of society with “66 percent under the age of 44 and 17 percent aged 16-24″. Which is most probably due to the fact that it’s more ‘acceptable’ to be out in today’s youth cultures than it has been in previous generations.

This survey also explains that: “A third of bisexual households include at least one child but only 8.6 per cent of gay or lesbian respondents live with a child.” Did it even cross these closed minded peoples’ heads that the one third of bisexual families mentioned were quite possibly living in a happy straight household and that the low rate of gay families with children might possibly have something to do with the way society has scapegoated gay parents and how much mad controversy there was about letting gay people adopt.

Naturally surveys like this must be taken seriously due to their obvious ‘accuracy’ and ‘impartiality’. If these articles tell us that only 480,000 adults describe themselves as gay or lesbian then of course we should ignore the fact that 2.2 million or 6.7% of British citizens use Gaydar or Gaydar Girls, just one of the many internet dating websites for LGBT members of society. Never mind the fact that most gay people, just like most straight people, aren’t even on sex hook up or dating websites.

Now that those champions of equality such as The Sun and The Daily Mail have given us this information, which shows us the ‘correct’ percentage of gay people in the British population, The Sun suggests that:

“Now we have a clearer view of the real figures, we need to start asking some serious questions about the vast sums of taxpayers’ money being spent on such a small minority and the disproportionate amount of attention they receive both in Whitehall and in the media.”

You know what would be easier? Turning around

And The Daily Mail proudly states that this survey has exploded “the assumption – long promoted by social experts and lobbyists – that the number is up to ten times higher than this at one in ten.”

Obviously The Sun aren’t completely hostile towards lesbians, as long as it blurs the line between news and porn. The image they used to illustrate the story is obviously a correct representation of lesbians in today’s society and NOT two women both contorting themselves to face the camera for the pleasure of shit head male Sun readers.

Although this ridiculous survey was probably just the result of stupidity at the ONS, the reaction of the right wing press shows that they clearly have an agenda to use homophobia as a way of cutting vital services that the LGBT community depends on, as seen in Glasgow. Here it is pretty much impossible to meet other gay or lesbian people unless you’re one of these well educated, confident, managerial types, who can afford to go to an expensive bar or club. Obviously unsure young people trying to figure out who they are DO NOT EXIST so they don’t need any money spent on supporting their needs.

I’ve just finished reading a book by the Swedish socialist, anarchist and feminist Kajsa Ekis Ekman which she primarily devotes to debunking the arguments used to justify prostitution and the surrogate-mothering industry. Her book was written as a response to the media’s misrepresentation of prostitution as some sort of smart and glamorous career choice for young women to make and at the increasing number of post-modernist academics and ‘queer-theorists’ who have been questioning Sweden’s prostitution laws by, among other things, ludicrously trying to frame prostitution as something ‘transgressive’ and which ‘challenges gender norms’.

The abolition of the victim

Ekis Ekman highlights at length the tactics which the supporters of prostitution have adopted in recent years and exposes how false, absurd and damaging their arguments really are. Particularly interesting I think is when she writes about the attempts that have been made to abolish the term ‘victim’ from the debate around prostitution. To be a victim has come to be seen as something shameful and to refer to someone as a victim is, according to the post-modernists, to deny them their ‘agency’. Ekman exposes why this lie has come about and what wider political consequences it has. Her point here is summed up in a review of the book in Dagens Nyheter:

“To be able to defend that women sell their bodies (and that men buy them) one must first abolish the victim and instead redefine the prostitute as a sex worker, a strong woman who knows what she wants, a businesswoman. The sex worker becomes a sort of new version of the ‘happy hooker’.

“Ekis Ekman shows in a convincing way how this happens through a rhetoric which portrays the victim position as a trait of character instead of using the correct definition of a victim: someone who is affected by something. In such a way the terrible reality in which women in prostitution find themselves is concealed. The fear of the ‘victim’ in the prostitution debate … is something which mirrors neo-liberalism’s general victim hate – since all talk of the vulnerable person immediately reveals an unjust society. Through making the victim taboo can one legitimise class inequalities and gender discrimination, for if there is no victim there is no perpetrator.”

Those who defend prostitution, as Ekis Ekman points out in an interview in the socialist newspaper Flamman, “have a contempt for weakness, a cold and cynical view of humanity, which has the consequence that you only have yourself to blame”.

To see evidence of this we need look no further than the works of ‘academics’ such as Laura Agustin, someone who has gone as far as to deny the existence of human trafficking. Victims of pimps and human traffickers are referred to, in her language, as “migrant sex workers” who actively choose their situation. Discussing women brought into western countries by criminal gangs and locked into flats and prostituted for months at a time, Agustin writes:

“These circumstances where women live in sex establishments and seldom leave them before, without being asked, moved elsewhere receive great attention in the media and it’s taken as a given that this involves a complete denial of freedom. But in many cases migrant workers prefer this arrangement for a number of reasons. If they don’t leave the area they don’t waste any money and, if they have no work permit, they feel safer in a controlled environment. If someone else finds the meeting places for them and books their appointments it means they don’t have to do it themselves. If they have come on a 3 month tourist visa they want to devote as much time as possible to making money”.

Another sickening example from Ekman’s book is that in Australia, a country which has long championed legalised prostitution, victims of child abuse have came to be referred to as “child sex workers”. An official report there talks about a 9 year old abuse victim having been “offered a warm bed and a nice meal” by his abusers and of “thinking it was fantastic” when the men who raped him gave him $50. Any details of the crime he was subjected to are on the other hand almost completely absent, apart from the words: “sex took place”.

What these examples all have in common is that they remove the focus from the perpetrator. They make it sound like the abused, prostitutes, children, the victims of poverty, drug abuse and economic exploitation, have themselves chosen the situation in which they find themselves. By changing the definition of the victim so as to turn it into a personal trait, by turning ‘victim’ and ’subject’ into the opposite of each other, the post-modernists lift away all talk of the deeper structures and power differences which affect people’s lives, something which of course suits perfectly the interests of the rich and powerful by masking the oppressive and unjust nature of the society in which we live.

Transgression of divisions as opposed to their abolition

In another section of the book she talks about what she describes as ‘the cult of the whore’, about the district of Raval in Barcelona, the people there who wear T-shirts with the slogan ‘Yo també soc puta’ (‘I am also a whore’). The cultural admiration of the prostitute is, in Ekman’s view, just contempt from another perspective: “It is still not a recognition of women’s humanity, rather a love of all that is nasty and low which the prostitute is associated with.” Those who wear the T-shirts in Barcelona think they’re being radical, that they’re transgressing norms. But “what they don’t understand is that the whore is not a whore, she is a person”. As Ekman writes:

“White ‘wiggers’ absorb hip-hop, backpackers and travellers absorb third-world cultures, male transvestites and drag-queens absorb the female and the femme absorbs the prostitute. The ‘transgressing’ of divisions anticipates that the divisions remain. When the white play black or when academics declare themselves whores and drug addicts, they are mocking those people who are black, who are prostitutes and who are drug addicts”.

They are, she points out, acting from a position of power and have a complete lack of understanding for what life is actually like for those whom they imitate and shower with false admiration. The difference couldn’t be starker between, on the one hand, the post-modernist’s ‘transgression’ of norms and divisions between people and, on the other, the revolutionary’s desire to abolish them. As Ekman concludes:

“In the absolute meaning there are no whores. There are people in prostitution for a longer or shorter period of time. There are no ‘types’ of people, no characters. They are people who have ended up in a certain situation. The fetishised ‘transgressing’ of divisions separates itself from the the revolutionary ‘abolition’ of them. The abolition of divisions arises from seeing the human being, the humanity in everyone, everyone’s equal needs … It is an objective solidarity which is built on a subjective understanding. One puts themselves in another’s place and imagines themselves under different circumstances. It is to look into someone else’s eyes and see yourself. And with this insight comes also an insight into the cruelty of the system which has made her into a ‘type’.”

Fiction of unions for ’sex workers’

I also liked the section where Ekis Ekman highlighted the fiction of so-called ’sex worker’ unions. The International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW), for example, which is affiliated to the GMB and has spoken at conferences of the Labour Party and the Green Party, is run by a man called Douglas Fox. Fox claims to be a ’sex worker’ and accuses radical feminists of being big meanies out to silence him. Yet on closer inspection it becomes clear that Mr Fox is a liar. Sex worker he most certainly is not, rather he is a pimp who runs one of the UK’s largest escort firms. The IUSW’s membership, you see, is open to anyone, to pimps, to men who buy sex, to sympathetic academics. Of its minute membership of 150 (which compares to the 100,000 plus women and men who work in the UK’s sex industry) only a tiny minority are actual prostitutes. It’s the same all over Europe where similar organisations exist (such as ‘de Rode Draad’ in the Netherlands) – their membership is tiny, most aren’t even prostitutes, and they have never succeeded in pushing any independent union demands.

Those who support prostitution though have of course never been ones for the facts. We see this idea of ‘unions’ coming from both the left and the right because it’s convenient, it gives prostitution a certain false legitimacy. It doesn’t work and it never will work, but it successfully diverts attention away from the deeper questions around prostitution and why it exists in our society.

Related to this is the growth of the so-called ‘harm reduction’ lobby who have gained influence in recent years within a number of governments and international institutions. Ekman shows how this influence grew particularly around the time of the HIV/Aids epidemic of the 80s and 90s when the lobby was asked in by a number of organisations to determine policy on the issue. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) and World Health Organisation (WHO) have, for example, both come out in favour of legalising prostitution on the grounds that it will increase state revenues and make it easier to fight the spread of Aids. Both organisations, Ekman writes, have started using phrases such as “she is not a victim, but a subject” and have called prostitution “a women’s job which should be recognised”.

The effect of this lobby gaining strength has of course been to further legitimise prostitution and make it harder to fight. When Ekman visited the offices of the organisation TAMPEP in Amsterdam, a group for HIV prevention among ‘migrant sex workers’, and asked if they couldn’t do anything to help women leave prostitution the reply she got was “But why would we do that? Our goal is to teach women to be better prostitutes” (ie. using condoms so as to protect the men who abuse them from infection). This aim (of teaching women to be better prostitutes) is supported with millions of euros of EU Commission money each year. Similarly an official pamphlet produced with the backing of the Australian government instructs prostituted women to “look like you’re enjoying it all the time” and tells the women how to turn down a violent man’s demands without “making him lose his lust”. In addition the pamphlet points out that it might be a good idea to try to avoid bruises because it “can force you to take time off work and as a result lose more money”.

Reality of prostitution

As Ekis Ekman makes clear the whole point of the so-called ‘harm reduction’ approach is to protect and uphold the system of prostitution. Those who champion it never ask any deeper questions about the nature of prostitution, its causes and effects. To waste millions on “teaching women to be better prostitutes” is a cruel joke in a world where tens of millions of women and girls are enslaved and systematically raped in the service of men’s sexual desires.

Why, she asks, despite the enormous harm caused by prostitution, does it continue to be allowed in so many countries? The statistics are hardly difficult to find and apply both where prostitution is legal and illegal:

* 71% of women in prostitution have been subjected to physical violence

* 63% have been raped while in prostitution

* 89% want to leave and would do so if they could

* 68% show signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

* Women in prostitution have a death rate 40 times higher than the average

* Women in prostitution are 16 times more likely to be murdered

Something which Ekman argues strongly characterises prostitution is the splitting of body and mind/soul (I’m not sure how best to translate the Swedish ‘jag’), often a survival strategy for those involved in the industry. Almost all the accounts of prostitution clearly show the existence of this splitting: often those in prostitution create two completely different personalities, many stop feeling certain body parts, they disassociate themselves from their bodies.

The supporters of prostitution want us to believe that the body is something separate, that selling it has no wider consequences for those involved. They promote the idea of the body as something which people own and exercise rational control over, a product which, if they’re smart, they can make a bit of money out of. Being able to close off parts of yourself, separate mind and body and, all the time, keep a distance from what’s happening to you is something which has been hailed as an ideal by the friends of prostitution, a sign of strength. The consequence is that those who aren’t strong enough, the majority who for example develop PTSD, are shown little sympathy for it’s seen as their own fault for being weak and having gone into the wrong job.

Post-modernism’s defence of the status-quo

Perhaps particularly important for the left and for those who want to change society is when Ekman talks about how our language has been stolen and used in a way which does nothing other than to support the status-quo. She writes that since 1968 the powerful have had to reformulate themselves and the arguments they use in order to justify their existence:

“Institutions which hold power – capital, the media, academia, the political classes, men’s sexual power and ruling class privilege – have had to reformulate themselves to justify their existence. They can no longer assert that they have power because it is given by nature, rather all power relations have to be justified morally. This is done by hiding them … The nobility, corporations, the media, intellectuals – all suddenly claim themselves to be defiant, marginalised or deviant.

“The story of the sex worker fits into this. It unites an old, gender-role preserving practice with a new rebellious language. It becomes a symbiosis between the neo-liberal right and the post-modernist left. The neo-liberal right get a language which declares prostitution a form of free entrepreneurship and as something which relates to individual freedom. The post-modernist left get an excuse to not fight the prevailing power structure by referring to the voice of the marginalised.

“The post-modernist left is, as Terry Eagleton writes, a reaction to the neo-liberal hegemony. After communism’s collapse parts of the left reacted by masking their defeat as a victory … Instead of pointing out injustices some sections of the left have gone over to defining the status-quo as subversive.

“When it feels difficult to question injustices it becomes tempting instead to redefine them – perhaps injustices are not injustices if we look at them more closely but, on the contrary, rebellious actions? All at once pornography, prostitution, veils, maids and drug use begin to be explained as marginalised phenomena, as a woman’s right, or as an individual choice with subversive potential.”

I think Ekman is absolutely right here and the worst thing the left can do is give up its desire to fundamentally change society, to analyse and expose the power structures and norms which exist and to fight for their abolition. All around us we can see previously radical movements selling out and instead seeking an accommodation with the status-quo. The choice agenda being pushed by some feminists is just one of many examples of this.

Swedish prostitution debate

Finally another thing I found interesting in the book was her discussion of the development of the prostitution debate in Sweden in recent decades. Her opponents such as Petra Östergren and Laura Agustin have long accused Sweden’s sexköpslagen (law against buying sex) as being a result of a complete absence of Sweden listening to the views and interests of those in prostitution. Yet as Ekman shows the government’s prostitutionsutredningen (prostitution investigation) of 1977, which shaped the Swedish prostitution debate for decades to come, was revolutionary in its focus on the views and experiences of prostituted women themselves and the questions it asked about the men who used them.

The centre-right politician Inger Nilsson who had been put in charge of the investigation had initially tried to suppress the women’s accounts after having met with several sex club owners, publishing instead a vastly trimmed-down version of the report with the personal testimonies excluded. When this emerged though there was a storm of outrage from feminists and the government was forced to release the 800 page investigation in full, which came out in book form. According to Ekman:

“It went down like a bomb. It was a landmark which changed society’s view of prostitution. It came to alter the direction of prostitution research in the whole of Scandinavia. Prostitution, just like rape, had become political … For prostitution research it meant going back to the beginning. Of the 19th century research – where the causes of prostitution were looked for in a woman’s personality and in disease – much was repudiated. Instead there began the building of new knowledge where the reasons were looked for in the relations between the genders and in society. And where would the researchers find the basis for this new knowledge? Yes, in the prostituted people’s own accounts.”

Conclusion

While I obviously can’t go into all of her book here I found Ekman’s Varat och varan highly interesting and informative and I think it provides extremely useful ammunition in the fight against the post-modernist turn which appears to characterise much of today’s academia as well as sections of the left. Let us reject the post-modernist victim hate. Being a victim is not shameful or an insult, neither is it a trait of character. For in an unjust world there will always be victims, there will always be people who have less power and wealth than others, who have less control over the direction in which their lives take. That you are a victim doesn’t mean you won’t find ways of adjusting to the situation you find yourself in, it doesn’t mean that you lack the capacity to think and act rationally. What it does mean is that we live in a world sorely in need of change. By abolishing the victim and by framing all of our actions as an individual choice the post-modernists are mounting nothing other than a reactionary defence of the status-quo.

Christine O’Donnell is the Republican candidate for the US Senate in a special election to be held in Delaware in November. She defeated the Republican insider candidate, a guy who’s been in Congress for ages and used to be the state’s governor, with the support of the mass movement for paranoia and fantasy known as the Tea Party.

The Tea Party are a radical right wing alliance of nutters that have been taking over the Republican party, and their success in putting O’Donnell in the candidacy is a sign of their strength. Their movement is opposed to the government spending money on the economy or healthcare, as well as black people in positions of power, as can be seen from the number of birthers among them. Their racism even extends to recently holding a rally in Arizona IN FAVOUR of their new apartheid laws against people of Latin American descent. They’ve provided a rallying cry and natural home for a lot of Americans who are seriously confused about reality. These same nutters have looked for wacky people like them to represent them in office.

Christine O’Donnell is just such a mentalist. In uni she converted from Catholicism to become an Evengelical Christian, and takes the Bible super seriously. The way she sees it, it’s not just a holy book but also a biology textbook, after she claimed there was “just as much, if not more evidence” supporting creationism over evolution, science and dinosaur bones that are way, way old.

But perhaps her most well known pro-Bible belter is her stance on masturbation. She made herself famous as a vocal opponent of taking matters into your own hands. Check the video below of her denouncing wanking on MTV in 1996:

In the video, she famously says “If he already knows what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture,” which seems to imply that she hasn’t heard that WOMEN CAN MASTURBATE TOO. This fits pretty well with her view of women and what they should be -- dutiful Stepford wives living meek and quiet lives and never expressing any thoughts or desires of their own, sexual or otherwise. Men, on the other hand, are raging buckets of hormones just driven to satisfy urges they can’t control, as seen from her comments that nude sunbathing would make it “very hard [sic] for their boyfriend not to want to take it further”, and her call to ban freak dancing because it was responsible for an “epidemic of date rape” (personally I thought rapists were responsible for rape, but there you go.)

Quite why she’s decided to take up such a lost cause as trying to persuade people that masturbation is bad is beyond most sane observers, especially considering the Bible never mentions it. Her anti-wank crusade has been cobbled together on the basis of interpreting other bits of the Bible and what they have to say about “lust”.

O’Donnell calls herself a feminist, but a bit like her twisted understanding of what goes on in our pants, she doesn’t seem to be very clear on what that means:

“I consider myself an authentic feminist. Not as defined by the modern movement. And, let me clarify that a little bit more. I was an English major, so break it down: -ist means one who celebrates. As a feminist, I celebrate my femininity.”

Aha, I see what you did there! Except feminism categorically isn’t about reinforcing a traditional, patriarchal view of women as being essentially “feminine” (submissive, chaste, wearing petticoats, chained to the kitchen sink etc.) Feminism is for everybody because it wants to free us all from the tyranny of men and women having to be defined by false ideas of femininity and masculinity. For Christine O’Donnell though it’s about biblical literalism and keeping your hands out of your pants.

For a picture of what she wants women to be like, we have to go to an unusual place for the debating of gender roles: Middle

This is what a feminist looks like, apparently

Earth! Seemingly the fantasies of her political views reflect a real love of fantasy literature, after she described the Tea Party as being like Aslan (“not a tame lion”), and tried to prove J.R.R. Tolkien was a feminist.

Even the most hardened fan of Lord of the Rings would have to admit that Tolkien didn’t really write in many female characters. And almost all of them are pretty, stupid and not much given to swordplay, orc fighting or anything that the books are actually about. Tolkien was an old fashioned old guy who spent most of his time making up tales with other old fashioned old guys, and exciting as they may be they’re hardly progressive on the issue of women. Their role is to be the beautiful eye candy cooking up banquets for when the heroes get home. Sounds great, reckons Christine.

In her essay, ‘The Women of Middle Earth,’ O’Donnell describes characters like Belladonna Baggins (mother of Bilbo), who, by her own admission is in the book for “about four lines”, as “content, even utterly satisfied, in the role of a wife and mother.”

“To me, Belladonna is the unseen grandmother whose prayers guide and protect her family as they go on to accomplish great tasks. She is the picture of a woman who has led a full life. The few lines written about her tell us that Belladonna did not have many adventures after she married, for her husband provided a great home for her. Belladonna’s independence in her earlier adventurous life before marriage provides a catalyst for Bilbo, her male heir . . .

. . .Some critics claim that Tolkien’s serene version of femininity is offensive to the modern female viewer. As a modern female viewer, I find the assumption itself offensive . . . Everything about Tolkien’s Arwen is tranquil, serene, calming. These qualities are part of the charm of the womanhood she expresses. There are many types of women in the world. Arwen represents one of them. She represents a pillar of calm that is a source of strength for her man. Her great contribution to the war is the strength she provides to the future King.”

Women: Know Your Place (in The Shire).

O'Donnell's natural supporters may be alienated by the latest revelations

This week it came out that she’d done her own small bit to make the world a bit more like the one inhabited by elves and wizards, when she revealed that when she was younger she “dabbled in witchcraft”!

“I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven … I hung around people who were doing these things. I’m not making this stuff up. One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s a little blood there and stuff like that … We went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”

This came to light after footage of her on a talk show back in the 90s was released by it’s host, Bill Maher. The best part is he says he has loads more embarassing material of her which he will keep releasing until she comes on his show, (“It’s like a hostage crisis: every week you don’t show up, I throw another body out”), so the laughs at the expense of the politically crazy look set to keep on coming.

Bonus: Just so you don’t think this was a lone episode of the Tea Party selecting a total mad bastard as a candidate, check out Tim D’Annunzio, a guy they tried to make a Congressional candidate in North Carolina, who believes the US government is the antichrist, believed he was the messiah, that God was going to drop a 1000 mile high pyramid in Greenland and that he’d found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona.

Have you ever wondered what motivates people who are rampant homophobes? What lies behind the desperate attempts of some people to prove their heterosexuality by denying freedom to others based on their sexual orientation?

It’s actually supported by scientific evidence that a major cause of homophobia is the desire to repress unacknowledged or unwanted homosexual feelings. In August 1996 the American Psychological Association did a study in which they used penile plethysmography (basically the technological measurement of hard ons) to “precisely measure and record male tumescence” of men who were avowedly straight’s reactions to to erotic images. Some of the men were professed homophobes, and some were not, who acted as a control group. The homophobic group basically got a lot more aroused by gay imagery than the control group. Questioned afterwards, the homophobes consistently underrated how much they responded to homosexuality.

One group of activists even cleverly wrote to homophobic MPs who voted against equalising the age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual sex, and challenged them to take the same test of their knob’s reaction to gay stimuli.

Basically, the homophobes experienced severe anxiety and a sense of threat from gay images, which the non-homophobic control group did not. While this is in many ways tragic, and would lead us to the conclusion that many homophobes need help and support to come to terms with themselves and their own feelings, it doesn’t give an excuse for some of the truly awful things people do as a result of that anxiety.

There are many cases of prominent and powerful people who were driving a homophobic agenda in religion, politics or society in general who were actually gay themselves. While this self-loathing is tragic, the harm that these people do to the rights and freedoms of others is inexcusable. To celebrate today’s gay pride march, Leftfield brings you a selection of some of the world’s greatest sexual hypocrites (apologies for them all being American, if you’d like us help expand our list to the UK and around the world then give us some extras in the comments!):

Read the rest of this entry »

Not really, but who needs to tell the truth when you can make funny videos!

Buju Banton is one of the biggest names in dancehall music. He’s been making records for over 20 years, some of his undeniably great music has made him one of the biggest stars in Jamaica, and regarded by many as a voice for the poor majority.

Unfortunately, he’s also a violent homophobe. LGBT rights groups around the world have picketed his shows and called on promoters not to book him because of his anti-gay tunes. The most significant is ‘Boom Bye Bye,’ which is basically about killing LGBT people. It advocates shooting, burning and pouring acid as methods.

Many of his defenders claim that he was still a teenager when he released this tune in 1992, and he’s since moved on and doesn’t perform it any more. The truth is that Banton knows that it’s controversial, and so he’s careful about when he performs it because it can potentially get him in trouble. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t do it though, with his mike being cut off at a 2007 show in New York when he began the song.

It would be one thing if his hatred of LGBT people was confined to records, but it’s not. Several witnesses have identified him as part of a mob that broke into a home in Kingston in 2004 shouting homophobic insults, and then beat two men severely, leaving one of them blind in one eye.

Banton denies the claims, and the police have yet to charge him in connection with the attack. But the Jamaican police are notorious for the lack of care for violence against LGBT people, as homosexuality remains completely illegal in Jamaica and punishable by prison with hard labour.

Also in 2004, the founder of the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-sexuals and Gays, (an organisation fighting for LGBT rights under very difficult circumstances and desperately in need of support), Brian Williamson, was murdered in his home by multiple stab wounds from a machete.

Buju Banton himself is currently in US prison after being charged with possession with intent to distribute cocaine last year. But in the meantime, his homophobic lyrics continue to be a rallying cry for hate, which is why the Eclectic Method have put together this little video to set the record straight: