Dare To Be A Feminist

SWERF stands for Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist.

You know her. She calls herself a feminist and her life work revolves around eliminating sex work jobs.

She thinks men should all be ashamed for being men (naturally visual beings).

The name explains itself, but it is interesting to note that the SWERF mentality IS slowly dying like causes steeped in hatred usually do.

How To Identify If You Are a SWERF

Perhaps you are wondering if YOU are a SWERF. Perhaps you hang around with people in the rescue industry, or you have a good friend who has been saying a lot of things about "prostituted women" lately.

Perhaps you have been CALLED a SWERF and you're wondering

For those of you who have not yet read the long account of the terrible situation Jill Brenneman & Amanda Brooks find themselves in, get a cup of coffee and go do so. Their several year long or...

Sociopath Houston attorney crashes plane with two escorts, hires goons to beat one to death, rapes the other, and gets away with it. Betrayal of trust, traumatic brain injuries, fraud, felonies, and violence against women.

Twenty years ago I first asked two questions that continue to unsettle me today. The first is answerable: What does a woman who sells sex accomplish that leads to her being treated as fallen, beyond the pale, incapable of speaking for herself, discountable if she does speak, invisible as a member of society? The answer is she carries a stigma. The second question is a corollary: Why do most public conversations focus on laws and regulations aimed at controlling these stigmatized women rather than recognizing their agency? To that the answer is not so straightforward.

Angela Campbell is an associate professor in the Faculty of Law, McGill University

In a fortnight marked by intense media focus on sexual assault and harassment in the workplace, another news item – also bearing deep-seated gender implications – has moved far more discretely through the Canadian public circuit. Bill C-36, the federal government’s proposed new law to govern sex work, passed through Senate last week, and is now set to receive royal assent.

A perspective from someone who knows what she’s talking about

There are things, personal things, many sex workers don't want to talk about; including me. And that's a pity. Because it holds the sex worker movement back. Most cultural shifts regarding unequal ...

I met Antonia Crane when I was putting together an anthology I did about sex work & sex workers. From our first correspondence it was clear she was smart, articulate, funny, talented, ballsy and didn't take herself too seriously. I knew she had a...

The Feminist Times has an excellent series on sex work, covering a diverse range of issues. (Sadly, it is only found by searching for the hashtag #SexIndustryWeek, as if finding it on Twitter was more important than a person being able to find all the discussion on the site.) Because it is a diverse series, there are plenty of articles I do not agree with; but that’s what makes it a good discussion, so, please, do take the time to read them. However, there’s one article in particular that raised my hackles and prompts me to write today ~ primarily because it has gone without comment. Such absence of comment might make people think it is “right”. And it is not.

The article is #SexIndustryWeek: Dworkin Was Right About Porn, by VJD Smith of Glosswatch. In it, Smith uses the words of Andrea Dworkin to align all porn as patriarchal misogyny abusing and raping female victims:

The point I am trying to make here is that if clients were contributing something valuable or even something innocuous to our movement, I could deal. Instead, they are perpetrating whorephobia. I fear that people who don’t know better will see posts like this and think these men somehow have more knowledge of our lives and the realities of our work than we do. After all, the conversations surrounding punters and activism are largely cisheteronormative, and most of these men bring their male privilege to the table, while not even being aware of these advantages.

Beyond that, this issue seems to cause a divide between sex workers and, as evidenced by my anon friend, makes those of us who don’t subscribe to this thinking feel isolated, as if we’re doing something wrong. As if it’s our responsibility to listen and care about what men have to say. After all, it’s part of our socialization as women and marginalized people to listen to men, just as it’s part of our male clients’ socialization to speak over us and for us.

This is the full text of the interview with feminist genderqueer sex worker @MxLaudanum, which was quoted in this article on the rescue industry I wrote for Cliterati (published 1/02/14). The interview itself makes a very powerful post in its own right. Written in just a couple of hours, it’s a stunning critique of contemporary feminism and how all of us on this planet tend to view the world in black and white.

I deeply respect Gloria Steinem. But I am terribly disappointed by remarks she's made regarding sex work during her recent tour of India. This publicity tour promotes her latest book, The Essential...

At AVN, a mainstream director said feminist porn made her uncomfortable. The industry is taking notice of feminism and they don't like being criticized...

Has sex-positive feminism, despite its victories, forgotten that sex work is actually work, and often quite brutal?

...Despite the acceptance of “sluts,” the “prostitute” remains a deeply embedded symbolic marker between decency and disrespect. The “ethical slut” engages in sex of her or his own “free” will, while the “dirty whore” insists on getting paid for sex. Sex-positive feminists and other “sluts” believe there is nothing morally wrong with consensual sex between two (or more) people in private, or for adults, in a semi-public setting such as a sex club, dungeon or swingers’ retreat. But money changes everything.

The implication is that with the insufficient “supply” of women, tempting men with a hint of sexuality is too dangerous. This is almost a textbook example of victim-blaming, in which victims of sexual assault or aggression are construed to have been asking for it based on non-verbal cues, such as clothing, demeanor or profession. This sort of rhetoric flares up in large-scale rape cases. While covering the alleged rape of 14-year-old Daisy Coleman, known in the media as the Maryville case, an expert witness on Fox Newssaid, “What did she expect to happen at 1am in the morning after sneaking out?” The example in the New York Times article is a variation on the same concept; the woman is cautioned that she should adjust her behavior because this will either tempt or invite sexual aggression from men. It is not the man’s responsibility to not rape women; it is the woman’s responsibility to not ‘ask for it’.

It may seem redundant to point out the commodification of female flesh in the industry of sex work. However, the issue at hand is specifically the rationalization that it is a simple function of the influx of men that creates conditions fertile for exploitation and predation. Critically absent from this discourse is a question as to why the men in Williston engage in this behavior. Ara Wilson, an associate professor of women’s studies at Duke University, points out that the definition of capitalist markets as “benign vehicles” that merely channel “wants, needs, and desires” overlooks the fact that “desires can be fostered and created.” Anybody can see how a sense of necessity did not precede the existence of consumer goods like smart phones, jewelry, or the millions of toys produced each year. However, with sex work, it’s taken as a given that desire precedes the market, and Wilson notes that a discussion of the creation of desire for sex work “remain[s] surprisingly unexamined”.

The men’s petition in the November issue of the magazine Causeur was signed by figures including the novelist and editor Frederic Beigbeder, several journalists and columnists, comedians, actors and the lawyer Richard Malka, who has defended clients including the former IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The petition stated “some of us have gone, go, or will go to prostitutes – and we are not even ashamed”.

They added “everyone should be free to sell their charms, and even to love doing it.”

But feminists and the government expressed outrage at what they saw as the hijacking of the feminist writer de Beauvoir’s 1971 abortion manifesto in which 343 famous women, including Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau, admitted having had an abortion, something which left them liable for arrest. That petition, which the media later dubbed the manifesto of the “343 salopes” (s**ts or b**ches) helped lead to the legalisation of abortion in France.