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

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 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”.