believe me, your parents love you. that's what family means.

people* are so invested in the expectation/default mode of parental love. i'm not sure what compels acquaintances, deans, idiots-at-large, to tell me that they are sure my parents love me. especially when they overhear a side-remark or the manifestations of my knowledge that they, in fact, don't love me.

frankly, the idea that they don't doesn't worry me at all. but i'm sort of concerned about exactly where and why this burning impulse to defend my parents as if love is some feature endemic to bearing/creating children comes from. why are these parent-advocates so invested in the topic? (sure, there seem to be a whole host of topics which strangers think they are such experts on that they can interrupt any conversation in order to muse idiotically in everyone's way. e.g. fate/destiny, george w. bush, vegetarianism, sexism, morality full-stop, and lying etc.)

it seems equally likely that the the passionate connection parents naturally have to their progeny is actually hatred; isn't it more likely that repulsion, contempt, shame, underlie creation? (especially the kind of creation that goes around with the creator's name stapled to the end of itself, making idiotic remarks to innocent strangers.) i mean, i'm reluctant to even send writing which bears my name into the world... and texts are finite and controllably insidious. children aren't. and children are also annoying.

what is so terrifying about the idea of deviant/malicious kinship networks that people i've barely met, eavesdroppers, and strangers feel like it's their task to "remind" me that whatever their behavior, my parents actually love me? deep down. even if no one knows it. not even me or my parents. how come strangers are just abstracted enough to see the truth? you're not in a, thank god, coehlo "novel" so please chill out on the omniscience and overdetermined self-importance. absolute foundationlessness in fact combined with your own interest in the sound of your own voice is not actually enough to make your little life philosophies worthwhile or even moderately entertaining. and informing me that my parent's love me implies that 1. my parent's should love me and i should want them to love me 2. nothing i do can change their love-feelings for me 3. i should want my parents to love me and i should strive to recognize their behavior, whatever it is, as loving 4. because love is there and good and i don't see it then i must actually be complaining about something.... something i shouldn't complain about... and that it is the job of this stranger to realign my worldview so that when he overhears something he will not be so annoyed.

and the reason i mention it is that i'm getting antagonistic about people wasting my time or compelling me to waste my time with chit-chat. but i'd take small talk any day over these brief forays into the meaning of life/family/love.. by people with porridge for brains (or, at the very least, people who i've never met and judged.)

*yes. all of them. all the time.

Addressing Some Misconceptions About Sex Work

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1. Isn't prostitution mostly a choice?

When women involved in sex work are asked if they want to leave, consistently around 90% say that they would stop immediately if they could, but the decision is out of their hands and in the hands of their pimps, their husbands, their landlords, their addictions, their children's bellies. A recent study of street prostitutes in Toronto found that about 90% wanted to leave but could not, and a 5-country study found 92% wanted out of prostitution. If they are there because they cannot leave, they are not choosing to be there.

If prostitution were really a choice, it would not be those populations with the fewest choices available to them who are so disproportionately forced into it. If prostitution were a choice, there would no human trafficking—no billion-dollar black market trade in coerced, tricked, kidnapped and enslaved people.

2. Sex is a powerful commodity.

Tulips were once considered a powerful commodity. That is to say, what men place value on is up to men's subjectivity and is not a human universal. The same was once said about trading black flesh. We're not talking about "commodities to be traded" but human beings. In prostitution it is not sex that is sold—it is power over women.

3. Men would treat prostitutes better if it were legalized.

This has not born itself out in legalization trials in Australia, the Netherlands and Germany.

All attempts to lessen the harms of prostitution have failed because men persist in their debasement of female sexuality and propensity to commit gendered violence. There are plenty of medical records, police records and personal testimonies to substantiate men's violence against women in places where prostitution has been legalized. Where prostitution thrives, the value of women's lives is low and the gendered violence they suffer has not decreased. In fact, the province of Victoria, Australia, in which prostitution has been legalized, has both the country's highest domestic violence rates and highest child prostitution rates.

In theory, it sounds good to say that sane, reasonable people should have the right to sell a kidney for $500 or more if they choose to. But opening the door to body organ selling would not lead hordes of middle-class white American men to sell their organs; instead, such sales would come almost exclusively from populations whose social circumstances cannot seriously be said to allow for free, uncoerced choice.

4. Hasn't prohibition been shown to fail?

Depends on what you're prohibiting. We as a culture prohibit child porn, and it's true that prohibition doesn't "work," if "working" refers to the total eradication of the prohibited material. That doesn't mean, however, that the only other option is legalization.

When we stop focusing all attention on whether or not poverty-stricken teenage girls with abusive histories "really" want to be whores and begin asking why so many men are unbelievably, horrifically violent towards prostituted people, we will begin to ask the right questions. Sweden, for example, no longer blames young women for their own rape, torture and captivity, and recognizes that it is men's demand for bodies to abuse that is the real crime in the sex work equation.

5. Prostitution is world's oldest profession and will always exist.

Prostitution is not the oldest profession—pimping is, men selling or trading female bodies amongst each other for profit. Saying prostitution is the oldest profession makes it sound like women (the sex workers) have always been the cunning seducers, wielding their mighty sexual power over defenseless men. This is a grotesque misogynist lie that men have always promoted because it absolves them of responsibility for the violence they do children and women, and casts them as the victims of women's sexual wiles.

5. Shouldn't prostitution be legalized and thought of as a normal job?

I don't believe that will ever happen, and with good reason. There's no reason to believe there will be a day when being naked won't make people feel vulnerable and exposed. Having a piece of someone else's body penetrate your body is to feel what thousands of prostitutes interviewed say they feel: like a human toilet, like they are being raped over and over again. There is no reason to think this experience will be altered simply by removing some of the social stigma attendant on sex work.

Contrary to what pro-prostitution advocates claim, the worst thing sex workers face is not social stigma, it is rape, strangulation, beatings, burnings and other violence from johns and pimps (pimps being the party johns pay to outsource the violence necessary to keep sex workers obedient.)

6. Why pretend prostitution isn't a part of everyday life?

I don't see anyone pretending our culture isn't saturated with the selling of female bodies, especially not the social workers and researchers trying to find solutions to the misery. When I hear people talk of legalizing it, I see a whole lot of pretending the misogyny and abuse intrinsic to the act of prostitution can somehow be wished away. A number of experiments in legalizing prostitution—some of which, like Sweden's were decades-long—have proved that this simply isn't possible.

7. A lot of women enjoy the work

There is no research or collected evidence supporting this claim. 100% of sex workers in 5 different countries said they didn't want anyone they loved to ever have to prostitute their bodies for survival.

8. Do you think prostitutes should be arrested?

Absolutely not, since I don't believe being desperately poor and/or abused is a crime. But johns, pimps and other sexual predators need to stop their criminally abusive behaviors—and asking them nicely hasn't been working.

9. But people need sex and some have no other way to get it than from prostitutes.

No one "needs" sex like they need food, water and air, and no one has the right to purchase access to another person's reproductive organs in order to masturbate themselves.

Buying prostitutes is less about sexual gratification than about power gratification, because in an exchange of equal partners there is always the risk of disagreement and the need for compromise. 60% of American johns report having regular female sexual partners.

10. But you agree porn and stripping aren't prostitution, right?

Of course they are. If getting paid to perform sex acts is prostitution, using a camera to record people getting paid to perform sex acts is. It is comfortable for people to call porn performers "actresses" to distance themselves from the truth: porn actresses have a lot more in common with other sex workers than they do with other actresses, such as poverty, drug addiction, and a history of sexual assault.

In one study, 100% of strippers interviewed said they had been propositioned for paid sex by strip club patrons. If you don't think strippers are prostitutes, please recognize that your opinion differs greatly from that of men who spend their money to make women submit to them in strip clubs.

11. Can't prostitution be made medically safer with regulations?

Sometimes more safe is still not safe enough. Unless prostituted women are rilized, they can expect to get pregnant and must have repeated abortions. Neither sterilization nor submission to repeated abortions is acceptable, and there is no 100% effective method of containing the spread of deadly STDs.

I'm much more concerned with preventing rape, battery, torture etc., than I am in patching women up after men torture them. Regulating prostitution is about men organizing to provide other men easy access to disease-free bodies, and has nothing to do with women's health, welfare, or well-being.

12. If you try to stop prostitution, won't it just go underground?

This is extortion, something like: "If feminists don't agree to provide men with fresh bodies for their entertainment and sexual self-gratification, then johns can't be held responsible for what they do—and it'll all be the feminists' fault."

Basing public policy measures on the extortionist threat of increased violence in an already very violent environment is no way for a civil society to operate. Also, legalization has not only not stopped the violence prostituted people face, it has actually made it harder for victims to "prove" they were forced and increased the number of people involved with the sex industry overall, hence expanding the number of people affected without stopping the violence.

13. What about women like Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, etc. who say they enjoy being prostitutes?

As with antiwar leaders, many former prostitutes (Andrea Dworkin, Norma Hotaling, Kelly Holsopple, Carol Smith, Anne Bissell) are themselves survivors of the commercial sex industry.

That a few paid prostitutes have learned to profit from advocating the legalization of prostitution does not hold water next to the responses of the overwhelming number of prostitutes without columns in porn magazines, book deals, their own websites, nationwide tours and scheduled appearances on the talk show circuit for exorbitant speaking fees. Some advocates of legalized prostitution, such as Robyn Few and Margo St. James, have been convicted on pimping charges, though they continue to present themselves as ordinary sex workers—not as major players in organizing crimes against prostituted women.

If the wealthy pimps, pornographers and governments who want legalization had solid information proving that legalization has met its stated goals, why wouldn't they spread that information across the Earth? Hugh Hefner would probably make a centerfold out of such "women like it and it's healthy" research.

14. Legalizing prostitution is part of a wider campaign of sexual liberation

Liberation for who? What is it about sex and women that lowers a woman's perceived cultural value if she has sex (even without money) or forcibly, as in cases of rape? Changing the cultural economy that makes sexually active women worthless needs to be changed before legalization can honestly be considered.

There is the unfortunate neoliberal misconception that free markets are the best kind, that the economic marketplace can regulate itself through the cause and effects of competition, supply and demand. Ask yourself if Wal-mart is really the world's largest private employer because they are "better" than other companies. In light of the evident failures of free marketism to produce diverse, consumer-driven and fair business practices, how well should the free marketplace of ideas fare under the same laissez faire system? Why wouldn't we expect the same opportunistic consolidations where money equals the right to speech?

15. Why can't you see johns/tricks who pay for prostitutes as just customers of sexual services?

The man with the money has all the power. A man who has paid to have his sexual fantasies realized expects precisely that, and there are real limits on how much a sex worker can dictate as to what will happen and how far it will go—and this is borne out by the testimony of sex workers themselves. Johns are the demand that keeps the supply of prostituted bodies in constant motion.

It's true that johns do not forcibly abduct women, get them hooked on drugs, seize control of their lives, or in any other way lure them into the sex trade—because they don't have to. Pimps do it for them. Johns and other consumers of commercial sex (e.g. strip club patrons, porn audiences) participate in a system that perpetuates itself through violence and coercion—then say they can't be held responsible.


Courtesy: www.genderberg.com

Fetishizing Oppression and Adapting the Language: Authentic Suffering in Words We Can Understand

On March 5th, 2006 Tufts Women’s Center in conjunction with Tufts Feminist Alliance and Reslife sponsored the production of Deborah Fortsen’s Body & Sold. Purportedly about trafficking, the performance featured a handful of actors reading adaptations of personal narratives interspersed with occasional and seemingly arbitrary choreography. A question and answer session followed the piece.

Body & Sold catered to a voyeuristic trope of fetishized oppression among college students, complicating issues of sexuality, class, home, family, and sex work for viewers. At the same time, its messianic manner reinforced some of the most dangerous misunderstandings about sex work while flattening the issue. Director of the Women’s Center, Peggy Barrett’s, subsequent explanation of her sponsorship indicated dangerous campus-wide misunderstandings of agency.


Employing adulterated first person narratives to tell a “humanizing” account of sex-trafficking, effectively erased and delegitimized actual identities. Within her “accounts,” Fortsen clearly edited the words of her respondents. She had her characters using comparatively intellectualized language and gender studies specific-jargon, which overpowered the tales.

When I spoke with Fortsen a week after the performance, she assured me that the message her characters conveyed was representative of the messages she had gotten from the interviews. So why change the language at all? It was as if Fortsen was helping the people express themselves better than they could without her, as if she was able to articulate words they meant to say (if only they knew them.) Fortsen privileges her own words over others’, seemingly authentic dialects over actual slang, and specificity over more nuanced linguistic construction and capable heteroglossia.


What Fortsen tacitly does in translating her interviews into allegedly communicable ideas goes farther than making stories “intelligible to ignorant audiences.” She makes a statement about what is normal, what is understandable, what is rational, and consequently makes another statement about what is not. Fortsen is guilty of reifying the dangerous classist and racist realities, which help perpetuate violence against women. As Ratcliff points out in “Violence Against Women,” and Cabreros-Sud touches on in “Kicking Ass,” whenever it is convenient, women on the margins are in danger of being erased.

These are often women who, because they are poor or less educated, are perceived as less intelligent, less credible, and less important. Therefore they signify as inferior women. Cabreros-Sud demands we stop homogenizing women based on race and class. But Fortsen makes matters worse as she tailors voices to be heard, making strong but silent statements about what is worth listening to.

Body & Sold also contributed to a thriving campus fascination with oppression. Dorothy Allison talks about the difficulty of relaying spectacular poverty in the first essay of her book, Trash. There she explains how her own history can only occur as a drama- a tragedy or comedy—but can never be re-realized in anecdote. This same limitation principle ensures that Fortsen’s play does nothing more than elevate the audience above the unfortunate and suffering sex workers.

I spoke to director of the women's center, Peggy Barrett, a few days after the production to try to better understand her motives for bringing the play and possibly raise questions about the actual implications of the show. Barrett explained that she wanted to warn women to be careful the choices they make. She has become increasingly aware of students trading sex for favors (at Tufts and on other campuses.) She wanted to nip the issue in the bud.

This explanation, however, betrays a deep misunderstanding of the economic aspects of sex work. Barrett’s warning implies that women in sex work are women who made unwise decisions or have allowed themselves to be duped. Barrett did sneak in a brief and seemingly requisite plug for recognizing women’s agency; she told me that some women do like sex work and reminded me that she isn’t criticizing them. Unfortunately that argument only worsened the trouble by saying that women who are unhappy in sex work are gullible, dumb, desperate, or sick. The only actual effects of this type of warning are, of course, to further stigmatize sex workers on campus.

This is especially dangerous because the student body at Tufts is largely white and largely not poor. To say that women should be wary of the situations in which they become entangled, fundamentally criticizes the Fortsen’s trafficked youth. In this case, it questions people with unstable families- particularly poor people, sons and daughters of single parents, and people whose families have a history of addiction and abuse. This may not explicitly pathologize the poor and people of color (disproportionately “disadvantaged”) but it does reiterate dangerous racist and classist fallacies.

Ensler Moves the Master’s Tool a Little Closer: A Closer Look at Deconstructing (Dis)cumfort Zones and the Tale of the Amazing MiddleClassWhite Vagina

It is almost funny, were it not so terribly grim, the way Eve Ensler’s project works as a two-pronged attack against Audre Lorde’s seminal piece “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” We all know the intention and premise of The Vagina Monologues: none of the ladies of the U.S. are comfortable with their vaginas, in fact, society itself is vagina-phobic so Eve Ensler sets out to empower women through their sex and change our uncomfortable culture one performance at a time.

But the enactment of Ensler’s good will has two major, destructive flaws. On college campuses the performance draws titillated and “allied”* men who disrupt vagina-community in the piece “CUNT!” Second, tokenized accounts of women of color and poor women give the illusion of diversity while flattening differences and re-privileging the straight, white, middle-class vagina.

Ensler’s project to acclimate the world to vagina is an old sex-positive, feminist project. She does collapse sex (organs) and sex(ual intercourse) into some one thing and then tries to vindicate both from proscriptive mores and undue fret. It was part of Dorothy Allison’s agenda with the Lesbian Sex Mafia, which she details in Skin. It’s part of sociologist, Deborah Tolman’s project in, “Doing Desire” as she tries to untangle the difficulties of articulating female desire that young women face. However, Tolman’s book Dilemmas of Desire, as a written text, is usually experienced alone. The Lesbian Sex Mafia’s partial success was predicated upon creating safe spaces. Ensler brings a fraught and tender subject into public space with the hope that bringing the subject there will dissolve or loosen surrounding trauma.

Men are encouraged to view the performance to hopefully destroy their own discomforts surrounding the vagina. However, male presence reifies internalized anxieties and further undoes women’s sense of sexual autonomy in the segment entitled, “CUNT!” In this skit, a performer urges the audience into choruses of the word. But when the male members out-yell the women, the exercise does more harm than good. Allison’s safe space is null. Tolman’s quiet interview rooms and private writing cannot compensate.

There is a room full of men, thinking of themselves as enlightened feminists, (RE)claiming the word ‘CUNT.’ Lorde’s “tools” can be re-imagined: in a supposedly feminist move to take back the word cunt. It is almost as if, from his grave, Aristotle is actually turning the vagina inside-out and into a penis again. As a result, the word never gets handed over, even for the women who attended the Monologues, ‘cunt’ still belongs to men.


The second way in which Ensler’s piece works against Audre Lorde’s is perhaps even more explicit. In “The Master’s Tools…” Lorde addresses her own tokenized presence at a “feminist” conference. Ensler repeats the same tokenization and exoticization of vaginas, making spectacles, give the illusion of true diversity, and steamrolling race and class.

Ensler's inclusion of the diversifying vaginas is pathetic at best and frankly "enriching," like in the part when she attempts to imply racial and ethnic diversity with a catalogue of vagina-names. Refugee and Native American women are later additions to the monologues and both their accounts are brutally violent. So it comes as no surprise when Ensler describes sex workers’ relationships with their vaginas to be “rich and complex.” She adds them in order to enrich and complicate.

What she does by setting their stories aside is exactly what Lorde worries about. Ensler draws from women of color and other minority women explicitly for coloring, marginalized, and minority-specific stories. This tacitly reaffirms the essentialist belief that all minority women have to offer feminism is limited and experience specific anecdotes. Once again we become the great white vagina’s zany and “wonderfully diverse” friends.





* Titillated men go to the performance for titillation. Allies go to show their support for lady-friends. Those seeing the play for the first time should be warned that the two cannot, necessarily, be discerned without intense questioning. Cursory questioning often prompts explanation, “I like vaginas!”









Works Cited

Allison, Dorothy. Skin.

Ensler, Eve. “Introduction” The Vagina Monologues.

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

Tolman, Deborah, “Doing Desire: Adolescent Girls Struggle for/with Sexuality.” Dilemmas of Desire.

Public Service Annoucement.

Dear Readers,

I will blog again soon. My access to Showtime has been curtailed and I have a hard time watching the show with anyone that isn't either self-ironizing or critical. Due to my own weakness of character, I will not sacrifice a Sunday night with a L-Word loving crowd for fodder.

Good news for those of you who were bored.

Advanced warned that should an acceptable source be made available, I will reopen the subject.

Much Love,

Max

p.s. On a more serious note, in response to recent specific public concern. 'The L Word' does not refer to you, Louis. I think you're dandy.

Butch, Femme, the L Word: A Tearjerker

Unfortunately, I only wish I could say that this week's episode was a horrific, error-ridden affront to actual lesbian behavior. The class wars continue to rage and the ladies insult and abuse each other. But the best I can say is they aren't MY people. Certainly there are lesbians for whom this sort of close-minded interaction is regular. I could issue a call for friendly or kind dykes, certainly. I know I don't want lesbians everywhere represented as so bigoted. Then again, this seems to be a natural progression for them.

They ostracize anyone without a manicure and impressive hair product. I'm sure my people would feel just as uncomfortable at that dinner table as Moira did.

The true problem with the last episode is once again with Shane. Why is she, of all people, so nasty to Moira? I feel ambivalent about having a trans-teaching moment on 'The L Word' but I feel even worse about NOT having a butch-femme teaching moment. The last thing young queerdom can take right now is another caged conflation of butch/trans/gender-variant topics. We have to remember that the ladies' learning moment is meant to be one for the rest of the audience (unproblematically heterosexual males included.) Okay, so right now they don't understand her, they think she's a freak. And then what, acceptance? Moira's transition can be accepted but her rough-and-tumble dykehood can't?

It's the writing here that falls on it's face. The show proves to be a relic of close-minded lesbian feminism, where butch/femme meant capitulation. But, guess what dear readers? It isn't the 1960s anymore. Rejecting femme, rejecting butch, are not effective ways to escape the infinite domain of male expectation. Just like grunging it up is just as much "giving in" to the patriarchy as people think pumps and lipstick are. No need to marginalize another community in this Halberstamian love fest (and I DO mean that in the worst way).



I'll take a different opportunity to talk about how the writers make Carmen (the woman of color) capitulate to her parents. I'm too angry to verbalize all of the problems with her huge, loving, easily-duped family and their cultura.

Castration, Degradation, and Humiliation on 'the L Word'

When 'The L Word' premiered three years ago everyone seemed to have something to say about the girly girl lesbians. Queers met the homogenous, facile, femininity with adulation and criticism alike. I knew some gay girls who were thrilled to have hot femme-on-femme-action televised every Sunday. Even they were a little wary about the ubiquity, though. I was living around Boston at the time where the androdyke reigns supreme. There, it seemed, the dykes there felt un[der]represented and also unattracted.


For the writers of 'The L Word,' this wasn't a manifestation of out-dated lesbian feminism. Alice, Bette, Tina, Dana, Marina, Jenny, and the rest of the cast weren't dressing/acting the way they did/do in response to oppressive patriarchy. They weren't worried about oppressing women by acting like men. And they most certainly weren't responding to hegemony as femmes.

So then from the very start Shane, "the butchest one", developed into an icon. And just as the old saying goes, 'L Word' fans either wanted to have Shane or wanted to be Shane. Starting off as the the charm'em and leave 'em favorite, she accumulated a contradictory inner life. The show gave her a history of drug problems and possibly homelessness. They also made her a former boy sex worker. These histories are conflated with her illusive and flighty present pathology. It's a major script error that she has several straight male friends- let alone that she agreed to live with one and his video camera. I have a hard time believing that someone with her history would really be pals with her roommate (I know MY "butchest one" roommate would have punched the man out.) Shane spirals in and out of control until she meets Carmen, the one who would reform her. Carmen "tames" Shane, addressing "intimacy problems" with directness and Shane apparently prepares to do anything for love.

Carmen insists that Shane wear a short white dress twice around her family. When Shane first dons the dress, Carmen exclaims that Shane looks like a little girl. Shane squirms as Carmen's mother makes alterations to the her old garment. The second show of the third season has Shane made-up with hair extensions and pumps. Were Shane an ACTUAL person, it seems impossible that she would cross-dress in order to please her lover's family. There could be no compromise as Carmen transforms and alienates Shane. For some reason, she show portrays Shane as upset and resistant but not terribly uncomfortable. She concedes and seems fairly comfortable in the white dress.

We're still supposed to buy the following hot sex scene intro after Carmen belittles and castrates her lover. If the cross-dressing isn't enough to have your head spinning, Carmen's pillow talk brings her misperception of Shane to the forefront.

Any hope that this was just a blatant and horrific agreement between the two capitulating lovers, misrepresented for the audience, is shot to hell when Carmen wants to fuck Shane. Visibly uncomfortable at this suggestion Shane declines (at least the writers don't have her concede). It becomes clear here that Carmen sees Shane as someone who can be fucked. Certainly this (tragically) happens in real life from time to time, I'm just hoping that the writers aren't going to have Shane change over time in order to accomodate Carmen's sexual expectations. They seem to be a whisper away from claiming that Shane's bodily homelessness is nothing more than some vestige of unreconciled trauma.

I'm sure that they are trying to feminize Shane in order to highlight Moira's upcoming transition but I think this is a monumental mistake. The last thing we should be doing is taking away Shane's phallus to make room for Moira's. The best we can hope for is that Shane will be able to illuminate the severity of Carmen's misperception. Because Carmen doesn't SEE Shane, there is really no peaceful way to reconcile this issue.

In the meantime, I won't be rewatching this excruciating episode if I can help it.