feminism pornography and prostitution

People who have read this blog will know that I have a problem not with feminism itself but with a particular type of feminism: Radical Feminism or Revolutionary Feminism. I don't accept the beliefs of Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Sheila Jeffreys and Julie Bindel. Especially when it comes to prostitution and pornography.

I was looking through the feminism section in a library and I came across two books by feminist authors that interested me greatly. They don't like MacKinnon and Dworkin either. The books are Feminism (A Very Short Introduction) by Margaret Walters and Difficult Women (A History of Feminism in 11 Fights) by Helen Lewis.

Before I quote from both books I want to point out that although MacKinnon and Dworkin don't seem to have changed their native America much, they are responsible for a big change in Sweden. According to Prohibiting sex purchasing and ending trafficking: the Swedish prostitution law by Max Waltman they are responsible for the law there that criminalises men like me.

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Feminism by Margaret Walters page 115

Unfortunately, this legitimate, urgently necessary insistence that rape is, indeed, a serious and violent crime, was distorted by some later feminists. For another American, Catherine MacKinnon, woman is always, indeed almost by definition, a victim. 'To be about to be raped is to be gender female in the process of going about life as usual', she insists.

You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs. When you are older, your husband ties you to a bed and drips hot wax on your nipples and brings in other men to watch and makes you suck his penis ... In this thousand years of silence, the camera is invented and pictures are made of you while these things are being done ...

Her friend Andrea Dworkin argued that 'pornography is the law for women', and flatly, without any qualification, equated rape and sexual intercourse. As, indeed, did MacKinnon, who from the opening paragraph of Only Words (1995) offers a terrible paradigm of what she sees as female experience: a primal paternal rape that freezes us in a state of permanent terror. She constantly evokes the image of a once-violated child who can never grow up, who, she insists, lives on in most women, even those who claim to enjoy consensual sex: 'the aggressor gets an erection; the victim screams and struggles and bleeds and blisters and becomes five years old'. This is melodrama masquerading as feminism.

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Difficult Women by Helen Lewis page 312

It is a mistake for 'gender critical' feminists, who question aspects of transgender ideology, to form alliances with right-wing Christian fundamentalists in the US who believe that changing your legal gender should not be permitted. A similar error was made by anti-porn feminists in the 1980s, whose efforts to point out the misogyny of the porn industry and its products were co-opted by religious conservatives into a broader reactionary agenda.* One shared goal does not cancel out such a fundamental divergence in world view.

*'In 1984 antiporn legislation devised by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, defining pornography as a violation of women's civil rights, was introduced in the Indianapolis city council by an anti-ERA [equal rights amendment] activist, passed with the support of the right, and signed into law by the Republican mayor, William Hudnut,' reported the Atlantic in 1992.

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page 185

Like Pizzey, though, Bindel has found herself at odds with the rest of the feminist movement. She is on the unfashionable side of two of the most divisive and heated subjects in modern feminism: transgender issues and prostitution. She believes that the latter is violence against women, and that sex-buyers should be prosecuted. The current generation of student activists take a more liberal position, stressing individual choice and agency. They argue that decriminalising both sellers and buyers would make the transaction safer.

review of Paid For

Review of Paid For by Rachel Moran part 1

This book is an odd mixture of the author's personal experiences of being a prostitute with Radical Feminist ideology. The oddest thing about it is the numerous quotations from women who are so extreme in their attitudes to sex that they don't have sex with men, under any circumstances. Each chapter of the book begins with a quotation. Five chapters begin with quotations from Ruhama.

Ruhama is an Irish organization that works with prostitutes. It is run partly by nuns from two orders, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters. Both of them ran Magdalene Laundries for decades. These were institutions where women and girls were imprisoned, because they were unmarried mothers or because they had sex outside of marriage.

A 2014 UN report stated: “Girls placed in the institutions were forced to work in slavery-like conditions and were often subject to inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment as well as to physical and sexual abuse. They were deprived of their identity, of education and often of food … imposed with an obligation of silence and prohibited from having any contact with the outside world … unmarried girls who gave birth before entering or while incarcerated in the laundries had their babies forcibly removed from them.”

According to this site, on their website, the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity boasted of “a long history of involvement with marginalised women, including those involved with prostitution”. They are quick to ignore that this 'long history' is a deeply troubled one – one that women all around Ireland try their best to forget and during which women and children were buried in unmarked graves.

Ruhama uses the language of Radical Feminists to campaign for the Swedish model, where men are criminalized for paying for sex. In 2015 the Criminal Law Bill did just that in Ireland.

We know that nuns don't have sex with men, but what about the other women whose quotations were used? Chapter 11 begins with a quotation from Sheila Jeffreys. According to an article by Julie Bindel in The Guardian, Jeffreys was the main author of Love Your Enemy which states "all feminists can and should be lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women."

I thought that a 'woman who does not fuck men' is called a nun. Sheila Jeffreys doesn't have sex with men and neither does Julie Bindel. They might not have sex with women either: their definition of lesbianism is a bit different from most people's.

Two of the chapters (10 and 19) begin with quotations from Andrea Dworkin. At the front of the book is an endorsement by Catharine A MacKinnon who states "THE BEST WORK BY ANYONE ON PROSTITUTION EVER". Dworkin and MacKinnon worked together on the theory of objectification. They took the philosopher Immanuel Kant's theory of objectification, changed it, and brought it into feminism.

Kant's theory was an attempt to find a secular reason why sex outside of marriage is unacceptable. Dworkin and MacKinnon however said that any sex between men and women objectifies women. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says "For MacKinnon and Dworkin, all women's consent to be sexually used by men cannot be true consent under the existing conditions of gender inequality." and "For Dworkin and MacKinnon, however, Kant's suggested solution is inappropriate. Objectification, according to these feminists, is present within all heterosexual relationships in our society and harms women's humanity. Marriage, or any other heterosexual relationship for that matter, is clearly not regarded as an exception by them."

The nuns of Ruhama, Sheila Jeffreys, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon don't have sex with men for religious or ideological reasons. Are they really the best people to ask about issues such as prostitution? Is it not probable that they are motivated not by concern for the welfare of prostitutes but by a desire to stop men from having sex with women? Or stop promiscuity between men and women? They can't stop ordinary men and women from having sex with each other on a Friday or Saturday night or on holiday, but they can stop men paying for sex. Or they think they can.

Dworkin's quotations in the book include “... we are talking about the use of the mouth, the vagina, and the rectum" (chapter 10) and "It is the use of a woman's body for sex by a man, he pays money, he does what he wants" (chapter 19). From this you will get the impression that a man can do anything he wants to a prostitute, including anal sex. Dworkin goes on "It is the mouth, the vagina, the rectum, penetrated usually by a penis, sometimes hands, sometimes objects ...".

My experience is that a man can't do anything he wants. Anal sex is rarely available. Even rarer is penetration by hands: it is weird that she should write that. What's more, in Moran's book she states quite clearly that prostitutes decide what they will and won't do.

"Some men will cite examples to back up their certainties. Usually these will refer to the fact that most prostitutes try to impose physical boundaries on the sexual act. It is true that they do. I avoided vaginal intercourse for the first two years of my prostitution life and anal intercourse for all of it. That is very unusual. I met many women who would never perform anal sex; that was not at all unusual. One particular young woman I met in my first months on the streets would not perform oral sex, ever. She just could not stand to do it and she could not understand how I was of the opposite mindset. I clearly remember her wrinkling her nose up in disgust and shuddering when I told her that all of my jobs were either hand-relief or oral."

Moran's personal experience contradicts what Dworkin wants us to believe. It also contradicts what Moran said herself on television: "You don't go into a factory and have the boss put his penis in your mouth, and the janitor put his penis up your anus". Moran writes that prostitutes will do what is least sickening to them, but that it is still sickening, so they don't have a choice. Choice is a myth.

What is sickening about hand-relief? I can't see how it is any more sickening that working as a bikini waxer or a dentist. As for oral sex, there's a big difference between oral sex with a condom, oral sex without a condom, and a man ejaculating into a woman's mouth. Some women do it for fun. She's missed the point though, the point is that what Dworkin and others have stated or implied is false. Men can't do anything they want to prostitutes. It's a myth.

Chapters 12 and 17 begin with quotes from Melissa Farley, who is the nearest thing that the Radical Feminist have to an academic. Farley thinks that men see prostitutes because they like control. We've addressed the issue of what men can and can't do. If you see someone and you have to pay cash up front, you know you can't get your money back, and they are getting an hourly rate higher than anything you have ever earned, how does that give you a sense of control?

I realise this post is getting very long, so I will come back to it with part 2 in another post.