my kick-ass (but long) essay against "pro-sex feminists"
it's rather ranty, so it's not the most coherent. but it kicks ass! don't bother bugging me with the "but it's consensual" line of crap...my eyes only respect the truth. RADICAL FEMINISM!!! not mush.
“Whatever Turns You On”?: Who is the Who and Who are the Whatever?
You can dress me up in diamonds
You can dress me up in dirt
You can throw me like a line-man
I like it better when it hurts
--Ashlee Simpson, “La La”
Some feminists have attacked the sexual choices of adult women who enjoy consuming and posing for pornography…
Ifeminism turns the old stereotype of feminism on its head. Pornography and prostitution? Let women do what they want to with their own bodies. Verbal sexual harassment? If women want an equal right to explore their own sexuality, they risk encountering the offensive sexual attitudes of others. Affirmative action? You cannot create equality with men by embedding gender privilege for women into the law.
Freedom and choice do not threaten women. Government and orthodoxy do.
--Wendy McElroy, “Introduction to Ifeminism”
Pro-sex feminists keep on saying that women now have the world at their feet. After all, teenage pregnancy is rampant, 18 year old girls are getting breast implants, the average age of entry into prostitution is 14, stripping is repainted as liberation, pornography is kind of corny, but it turns people on, and playing Nazi-Jew or master-slave is just so subversive.
Rarely is rape identified as a hate crime. Governments are too busy reading Playboy and listening to the so-called sex industry profiteers to see prostitution as a violation of human rights. (Sweden being a very rare exception.) The Left and Right are only too happy to go along with the pornographic discourse, that is, viewing prostitution through the pimps and consumers perspective. After all, being called a “cunt,” pimped out, raped, used as an orifice for men to masturbate into is liberating, the penultimate in freedom of choice. As long as it’s not happening to the one not espousing it.
And this is called freedom.
“But it turns me on!”: What Pornography Is, “Sexy” Hatred, Phallocentricism and “Pro-Sex” Conscience
You think I’m going to tie you down and fuck you, don’t you…let you scream and carry on, indulge your rape fantasies and all that good stuff, that stuff that gets you so hot…I can see you dripping now, from the way I grabbed you by the hair and forced you into the bonds, spread-eagled on the bed…you’re a smooth bottom, practiced…your cunt is my cunt and I can put anything into it that I like…The potato slips out…A bottle of shampoo. The handle of a hairbrush. Pinking shears. Yours is the cunt that ate Tokyo. When I’m done with you there won’t be a phallic object left in your apartment that doesn’t smell like your desire. Everything will remind you of me…Silly girl, you’ll let me stick anything into your slit as long as you’re tied up. Maybe next time, I’ll sit and watch which I order you to stick things up into yourself: a flashlight, a fake rubber dog bone, the old standby: a cucumber. Maybe I’ll take photographs of each of these things sticking out of your cunt to horrify my politically correct friends.
Cecilia Tan, “Penetration,” p. 114-117 in The Best American Erotica 1999
Number one: pornographers use our bodies as their language…They must not have that right…Number two: constitutionally protecting pornography as if it were speech means that there is a new way in which we are legally chattel…our bodies then belong to the pimps who need to use us to say something. They, the humans, have a human right of speech and the dignity of constitutional protection…We are recognized only as the discourse of a pimp. The Constitution is on the side it has always been on: the side of the profit-making property owner even when his property is a person defined as property because of the collusion between law and money, law and power…Number three: pornography uses those who in the United States were left out of the Constitution. Pornography uses white women, who were chattel. Pornography uses African-American women, who were slaves. Pornography uses stigmatized men; for instance, African-American men, who were slaves…Pornography is not made up of old white men. It isn't. Nobody comes on them. They are doing this to us; or protecting those who do this to us. They do benefit from it; and we do have to stop them.
--Andrea Dworkin, “Pornography Happens,” in Life and Death, p. 133
When radical feminists say they are against pornography, they mean they are opposed to many facets of patriarchy. They criticize both what pornography is regarded as and what others conviently ignore. As with other forms of prostitution, pornography is racist, capitalist, and, most obviously, phallocentric.
In photograph after movie after “erotic story” after photograph, women, and sometimes children and men, are, above all else, penetrated. Vaginally, anally, and orally. By penises, fists, dildoes, bottles, snakes, horses, phones, and guns. Pornography represents above all else that what women exist for is to be invaded in every orifice by whatever the consumer wants to see her hurt with, especially his penis. These women are real. Despite what the pornographer-pimp wants the consumer to believe, prostituted women are human, not gaping holes.
Somehow “pro-sex feminists” analyses of these forms of imperialism disappear when they are confronted with anything that is called “sex.” They claim to be against racism, but what is one to do with a film called Black Bitch in Bondage? They think, Does this turn anyone on? Oh, it does. It’s fine then. We do need freedom of speech. Racism is bad, but it’s sex, and sex is good, goes their doublespeak.
This may sound absurd, but when one is immersed in the ethics they promote, anything goes as long as it’s sexy.
“She chooses it, so if you oppose it, you’re anti-prostitute!”: The Mythology of the “Happy Hooker,” Bought and Sold Rape, Capitalism, and the Left
Will (the prostituted woman) honor the desires of her clients or trash them as perverted? Does she believe everyone has the right to access sexual satisfaction? Does she honor sexual service and feel positive about providing it?
--Carol Queen, Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of a Sex-Positive Culture, cited by Stark, 2004
Feminists always talk about prostitutes being beat up by the pimps, but statistically women get beat up even more by their husbands.
--Flo Kennedy, cited by Rosen, 2000
We investigated four different types of lifetime violence experienced by these interviewees: childhood sexual assault, childhood physical assault, rape in adult prostitution, and physical threat and/or assault in adult prostitution. Only 6% reported no violence, while 16% reported one of these four types of violence; 30% reported two different types of violence; 33% reported three types of violence, and 15% reported all four types of violence. --Melissa Farley and Howard Barkan, “Prostitution, Violence, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” 1998
Believe me, prostitution is the worst sort of hell; there is no way you can convince yourself you’re even human anymore.
--Evelyn Lau, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, p. 204
Wendy McElroy is able to call anti-prostitution feminists “anti-prostitute” and somehow believe it (McElroy, 2002). That’s similar to considering someone against child sexual abuse as anti-child, but the mythology of free choice and the free market reigns when it comes to sex. Any studies finding high rates of childhood sexual abuse, rape in prostitution, pimping, assault, homelessness, post traumatic stress disorder, etc. are derided by “pro-prostitute feminists” as being only applying to street prostitution (if they don’t outright say that anti-prostitution feminists falsified the statistics). This is false. Studies and interviews have been done on those in escort, stripping, pornography, and brothel prostitution. The consensus includes these: the average age of entry into prostitution in 14, between 55-90% of those in prostitution were sexually abused as children prior to entry into prostitution, about 80% are currently or formerly homeless, between 62 and 85% have been raped while in prostitution, 75% of women in escort prostitution have attempted suicide, 67% had post-traumatic stress disorder, 75-90% is pimp-controlled, over 90% of their views on prostitution are negative, as many as a third of prostituted people are Native. Over 90% of those in prostitution want to get out of it (Dworkin, 1997; Farley, 2000; Farley, 2003; Stark and Whisnant, 2004).
If coercion, violence, slavery-like practices, child labour, rape, racism, isn’t enough to get Leftists angry, prostitution is huge business. It’s capitalism. Pornography grosses $13 billion a year in North America alone. “Sex positive feminists’” privilege is disgustingly demonstrated when one actually sees what they defend. They profit off of saying how liberating, fun, transgressing, and so on it is for other women and children to sexually service men.
When the former USSR collapsed and capitalism took over, a booming trade in women and children began. Under Communism, prostitution was relatively rare and discouraged; women who were and are now prostitutes were once hairdressers, teachers, nurses (Dworkin, 2000). As Dworkin says:
women are being destroyed by a predatory criminality that, like it or not, did not exist under the Soviets. One might say that the new Russia tyranny has been democratized: there are many despots, not one central dictator. As long as the new despotism has victims who are primarily women and children, the international community will not see cruelty as cruelty, brutality as brutality, exploitation and exploitation. But for women the difference between being the entrepreneur and being the commodity is all the difference in the world (2000, p. 327).
Governments actively promote prostitution. Suddenly Leftists aren’t concerned with big government, capitalism, and exploitation when it’s wrapped up in the pretty bow called sex. For example, Leftists extol Amsterdam to Heaven. It’s legal to buy and sell a 14-year-old in Columbia and a 12-year-old in Thailand. In fact, 14% of Thailand’s gross domestic product comes from legalized prostitution-over $30 billion dollars CDN. This lead the International Labor Organization to advocate to the UN that, because it’s big business, prostitution should be accepted and legalized, despite the fact the 96% of the prostituted people they interviewed wanted to escape it (Farley, 2003).
“Sadomasochism is liberating!”: Sadofascism, Sex-Positive “Subversion”, State-Sanctioned Sadism, and Ahistoricism
When academic puritans wring their hands and wonder why "pornography" is being "taught" in universities, they need to look no further than Dworkin's seminal work: Pornography; Men Possessing Women. For countless women's studies students, this text was both our orgasmic introduction to pornography and our first deconstruction of it. Fine then. If she was going open Pandora's box, there was going to be a hundred after her who would revel in their own interpretations. --Susie Bright, “The Baffling Case of Andrea Dworkin”
Most dominants are fond of confronting their victims with their response to punishment and insult. There is no defense and no denial possible when one tastes the liquid evidence of lust that is flowing unhampered between one’s legs. -Patrick Califia, Macho Sluts, p. 152, cited by Kathy Miriam, “From Rage to All the Rage: Lesbian-Feminism, Sadomasochism and the Politics of Memory,” in Unleashing Feminism, 1993
You know the people are really feminine…so dependent on mood and environment, so fickle-(they) idolize virility…not merely obedience but surrender-like a woman. That was the secret of Hitler’s power. He stood up and pounded his fist, and shouted! I am the man! and he shouted about his strength and determination-and so the public just surrendered to him with hysterical enthusiasm. One must not say that Hitler violated the German people-he seduced them! -Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer, speaking at the Nuremberg trials, quoted by Irene Reti, “Remember the Fire: Lesbian Sadomasochism in a Post Nazi Holocaust World,” in Unleashing Feminism, 1993
Sex-positive feminists feel that they can say, being honest, that sadomasochism is different from other types of violence. They may philosophize on how revolutionary it is. They may extort that sexuality is inherently violent. They may complain that they’re being repressed by a tyrannical “vanilla majority” who wants to take their whips and dildoes away.
But what they all say differentiates sadofascism from slavery, or father daughter incest, or the Nazi torture of Jewish people, or rape, or you know, any of those other sexy things to play around with, is consent. Not justice, not equality, not following UN human rights declarations, not human rights codes, but consent. This can allow for such advice as this:
Some people are into extreme degrees of physical helplessness-morbid obesity, physical disabilities, 24/7 bondage scenes-and people should be cautious when they get involved with one of these people…Are they honest about it? And can they successfully compartmentalize their fetish?
…(T)his woman-a woman who hid his car keys and moved stuff up to higher shelves-was obviously into what she perceived as his helplessness. But she wasn’t honest about it, and she wasn’t able to limit her enjoyment of your friend’s helplessness to times when they were having sex. (Savage, 2005)
In the Leftist doctrine, all sex good. Holding up sex to ethical scrutiny bad. Consent changes all. Slavery still not good, but pretending in sex good. The fact that descriptions of sadofascism often sound horrifyingly like the acts of Nazis, slave owners, even sadistic serial killers is ignored (e.g Fielder, 2003; Lengyl, 1947; Pron, 2005; Reti, 1993). There is a total disconnect that is infuriating.
What they have is a strange sense that what occurs in one’s sexual life, the personal, has nothing to do with how one actually treats others and how one views what justice is, the political. As Robin Morgan said in 1982:
“bondage,” “discipline,” props of whips and chains and leather thongs, and allegedly “loving games” between “trusting lovers” carry a political message, too: a ghastly mockery of the human beings who suffered under Iran’s SAVAK torturers, of the human beings who were electroded by Idi Amin’s henchmen, of the human beings who scream in real and agonized pain in the interrogation chambers of South Africa or Chile or East Germany or the Philippines at this very moment…(W)hen you find titillating the same attitudes or acts around which Auschwitz and Belsen and Treblinka involved, something is wrong…(It has) nothing to do with the feminist vision of freedom (p. 117).
What Should Be Done?: The Politics of Sexual Abuse
Gender is a social system that divides power. It is therefore a political system…If one defines politics with Harold Lasswell, and who defines a political act as one “one performed in power perspectives,” and with Robert Dahl, who defines a political system as “any persistent pattern of human relationships that involves, to a significant extent, power, rule, or authority,” and with Kate Millett, who defines political relationships as “power structured relationships,” the relation between women and men is political.
--Catharine MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 160-161
Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. Article 4. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms. Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Article 6. Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. --United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Both the actions of the sate and the actions of individuals can be political, especially when those actions are sanctioned or ignored by the state. With the exception of Sweden, the law is complicit in the abuse of women in prostitution. It needs to be regarded as a violation in human rights. Those hurt through the interconnected forms of oppression known as prostitution, pornography, and sadomasochism, have little or no recourse in the law. The “typical” rape victim is not a college girl, or a girl child, or even “any woman.” The average raped woman is the prostituted, beaten, pornographized woman. Imagine a state saying in a declaration of human rights law explicitly that every single person has the affirmative right to not be sexually abused. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Why?
The justice system both actively perpetuates harm and ignores it. Being prostituted is a crime. Being turned into pornography is regarded as a matter of obscenity, not civil rights. Government doesn’t want to mettle with men’s privacy rights when it comes to hurting women and children. Some suggestions are: passing civil rights bills that recognize prostitution, pornography, and sadomasochism as violations of human rights, not matters of “public decency,” such Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon’s anti-pornography civil rights bill and Sweden’s anti-prostitution laws.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, live by the feminist slogan “The personal is political.” Because systems of hierarchy, whether or not they are called sex, are systems of power.
“Whatever Turns You On”?: Who is the Who and Who are the Whatever?
You can dress me up in diamonds
You can dress me up in dirt
You can throw me like a line-man
I like it better when it hurts
--Ashlee Simpson, “La La”
Some feminists have attacked the sexual choices of adult women who enjoy consuming and posing for pornography…
Ifeminism turns the old stereotype of feminism on its head. Pornography and prostitution? Let women do what they want to with their own bodies. Verbal sexual harassment? If women want an equal right to explore their own sexuality, they risk encountering the offensive sexual attitudes of others. Affirmative action? You cannot create equality with men by embedding gender privilege for women into the law.
Freedom and choice do not threaten women. Government and orthodoxy do.
--Wendy McElroy, “Introduction to Ifeminism”
Pro-sex feminists keep on saying that women now have the world at their feet. After all, teenage pregnancy is rampant, 18 year old girls are getting breast implants, the average age of entry into prostitution is 14, stripping is repainted as liberation, pornography is kind of corny, but it turns people on, and playing Nazi-Jew or master-slave is just so subversive.
Rarely is rape identified as a hate crime. Governments are too busy reading Playboy and listening to the so-called sex industry profiteers to see prostitution as a violation of human rights. (Sweden being a very rare exception.) The Left and Right are only too happy to go along with the pornographic discourse, that is, viewing prostitution through the pimps and consumers perspective. After all, being called a “cunt,” pimped out, raped, used as an orifice for men to masturbate into is liberating, the penultimate in freedom of choice. As long as it’s not happening to the one not espousing it.
And this is called freedom.
“But it turns me on!”: What Pornography Is, “Sexy” Hatred, Phallocentricism and “Pro-Sex” Conscience
You think I’m going to tie you down and fuck you, don’t you…let you scream and carry on, indulge your rape fantasies and all that good stuff, that stuff that gets you so hot…I can see you dripping now, from the way I grabbed you by the hair and forced you into the bonds, spread-eagled on the bed…you’re a smooth bottom, practiced…your cunt is my cunt and I can put anything into it that I like…The potato slips out…A bottle of shampoo. The handle of a hairbrush. Pinking shears. Yours is the cunt that ate Tokyo. When I’m done with you there won’t be a phallic object left in your apartment that doesn’t smell like your desire. Everything will remind you of me…Silly girl, you’ll let me stick anything into your slit as long as you’re tied up. Maybe next time, I’ll sit and watch which I order you to stick things up into yourself: a flashlight, a fake rubber dog bone, the old standby: a cucumber. Maybe I’ll take photographs of each of these things sticking out of your cunt to horrify my politically correct friends.
Cecilia Tan, “Penetration,” p. 114-117 in The Best American Erotica 1999
Number one: pornographers use our bodies as their language…They must not have that right…Number two: constitutionally protecting pornography as if it were speech means that there is a new way in which we are legally chattel…our bodies then belong to the pimps who need to use us to say something. They, the humans, have a human right of speech and the dignity of constitutional protection…We are recognized only as the discourse of a pimp. The Constitution is on the side it has always been on: the side of the profit-making property owner even when his property is a person defined as property because of the collusion between law and money, law and power…Number three: pornography uses those who in the United States were left out of the Constitution. Pornography uses white women, who were chattel. Pornography uses African-American women, who were slaves. Pornography uses stigmatized men; for instance, African-American men, who were slaves…Pornography is not made up of old white men. It isn't. Nobody comes on them. They are doing this to us; or protecting those who do this to us. They do benefit from it; and we do have to stop them.
--Andrea Dworkin, “Pornography Happens,” in Life and Death, p. 133
When radical feminists say they are against pornography, they mean they are opposed to many facets of patriarchy. They criticize both what pornography is regarded as and what others conviently ignore. As with other forms of prostitution, pornography is racist, capitalist, and, most obviously, phallocentric.
In photograph after movie after “erotic story” after photograph, women, and sometimes children and men, are, above all else, penetrated. Vaginally, anally, and orally. By penises, fists, dildoes, bottles, snakes, horses, phones, and guns. Pornography represents above all else that what women exist for is to be invaded in every orifice by whatever the consumer wants to see her hurt with, especially his penis. These women are real. Despite what the pornographer-pimp wants the consumer to believe, prostituted women are human, not gaping holes.
Somehow “pro-sex feminists” analyses of these forms of imperialism disappear when they are confronted with anything that is called “sex.” They claim to be against racism, but what is one to do with a film called Black Bitch in Bondage? They think, Does this turn anyone on? Oh, it does. It’s fine then. We do need freedom of speech. Racism is bad, but it’s sex, and sex is good, goes their doublespeak.
This may sound absurd, but when one is immersed in the ethics they promote, anything goes as long as it’s sexy.
“She chooses it, so if you oppose it, you’re anti-prostitute!”: The Mythology of the “Happy Hooker,” Bought and Sold Rape, Capitalism, and the Left
Will (the prostituted woman) honor the desires of her clients or trash them as perverted? Does she believe everyone has the right to access sexual satisfaction? Does she honor sexual service and feel positive about providing it?
--Carol Queen, Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of a Sex-Positive Culture, cited by Stark, 2004
Feminists always talk about prostitutes being beat up by the pimps, but statistically women get beat up even more by their husbands.
--Flo Kennedy, cited by Rosen, 2000
We investigated four different types of lifetime violence experienced by these interviewees: childhood sexual assault, childhood physical assault, rape in adult prostitution, and physical threat and/or assault in adult prostitution. Only 6% reported no violence, while 16% reported one of these four types of violence; 30% reported two different types of violence; 33% reported three types of violence, and 15% reported all four types of violence. --Melissa Farley and Howard Barkan, “Prostitution, Violence, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” 1998
Believe me, prostitution is the worst sort of hell; there is no way you can convince yourself you’re even human anymore.
--Evelyn Lau, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, p. 204
Wendy McElroy is able to call anti-prostitution feminists “anti-prostitute” and somehow believe it (McElroy, 2002). That’s similar to considering someone against child sexual abuse as anti-child, but the mythology of free choice and the free market reigns when it comes to sex. Any studies finding high rates of childhood sexual abuse, rape in prostitution, pimping, assault, homelessness, post traumatic stress disorder, etc. are derided by “pro-prostitute feminists” as being only applying to street prostitution (if they don’t outright say that anti-prostitution feminists falsified the statistics). This is false. Studies and interviews have been done on those in escort, stripping, pornography, and brothel prostitution. The consensus includes these: the average age of entry into prostitution in 14, between 55-90% of those in prostitution were sexually abused as children prior to entry into prostitution, about 80% are currently or formerly homeless, between 62 and 85% have been raped while in prostitution, 75% of women in escort prostitution have attempted suicide, 67% had post-traumatic stress disorder, 75-90% is pimp-controlled, over 90% of their views on prostitution are negative, as many as a third of prostituted people are Native. Over 90% of those in prostitution want to get out of it (Dworkin, 1997; Farley, 2000; Farley, 2003; Stark and Whisnant, 2004).
If coercion, violence, slavery-like practices, child labour, rape, racism, isn’t enough to get Leftists angry, prostitution is huge business. It’s capitalism. Pornography grosses $13 billion a year in North America alone. “Sex positive feminists’” privilege is disgustingly demonstrated when one actually sees what they defend. They profit off of saying how liberating, fun, transgressing, and so on it is for other women and children to sexually service men.
When the former USSR collapsed and capitalism took over, a booming trade in women and children began. Under Communism, prostitution was relatively rare and discouraged; women who were and are now prostitutes were once hairdressers, teachers, nurses (Dworkin, 2000). As Dworkin says:
women are being destroyed by a predatory criminality that, like it or not, did not exist under the Soviets. One might say that the new Russia tyranny has been democratized: there are many despots, not one central dictator. As long as the new despotism has victims who are primarily women and children, the international community will not see cruelty as cruelty, brutality as brutality, exploitation and exploitation. But for women the difference between being the entrepreneur and being the commodity is all the difference in the world (2000, p. 327).
Governments actively promote prostitution. Suddenly Leftists aren’t concerned with big government, capitalism, and exploitation when it’s wrapped up in the pretty bow called sex. For example, Leftists extol Amsterdam to Heaven. It’s legal to buy and sell a 14-year-old in Columbia and a 12-year-old in Thailand. In fact, 14% of Thailand’s gross domestic product comes from legalized prostitution-over $30 billion dollars CDN. This lead the International Labor Organization to advocate to the UN that, because it’s big business, prostitution should be accepted and legalized, despite the fact the 96% of the prostituted people they interviewed wanted to escape it (Farley, 2003).
“Sadomasochism is liberating!”: Sadofascism, Sex-Positive “Subversion”, State-Sanctioned Sadism, and Ahistoricism
When academic puritans wring their hands and wonder why "pornography" is being "taught" in universities, they need to look no further than Dworkin's seminal work: Pornography; Men Possessing Women. For countless women's studies students, this text was both our orgasmic introduction to pornography and our first deconstruction of it. Fine then. If she was going open Pandora's box, there was going to be a hundred after her who would revel in their own interpretations. --Susie Bright, “The Baffling Case of Andrea Dworkin”
Most dominants are fond of confronting their victims with their response to punishment and insult. There is no defense and no denial possible when one tastes the liquid evidence of lust that is flowing unhampered between one’s legs. -Patrick Califia, Macho Sluts, p. 152, cited by Kathy Miriam, “From Rage to All the Rage: Lesbian-Feminism, Sadomasochism and the Politics of Memory,” in Unleashing Feminism, 1993
You know the people are really feminine…so dependent on mood and environment, so fickle-(they) idolize virility…not merely obedience but surrender-like a woman. That was the secret of Hitler’s power. He stood up and pounded his fist, and shouted! I am the man! and he shouted about his strength and determination-and so the public just surrendered to him with hysterical enthusiasm. One must not say that Hitler violated the German people-he seduced them! -Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer, speaking at the Nuremberg trials, quoted by Irene Reti, “Remember the Fire: Lesbian Sadomasochism in a Post Nazi Holocaust World,” in Unleashing Feminism, 1993
Sex-positive feminists feel that they can say, being honest, that sadomasochism is different from other types of violence. They may philosophize on how revolutionary it is. They may extort that sexuality is inherently violent. They may complain that they’re being repressed by a tyrannical “vanilla majority” who wants to take their whips and dildoes away.
But what they all say differentiates sadofascism from slavery, or father daughter incest, or the Nazi torture of Jewish people, or rape, or you know, any of those other sexy things to play around with, is consent. Not justice, not equality, not following UN human rights declarations, not human rights codes, but consent. This can allow for such advice as this:
Some people are into extreme degrees of physical helplessness-morbid obesity, physical disabilities, 24/7 bondage scenes-and people should be cautious when they get involved with one of these people…Are they honest about it? And can they successfully compartmentalize their fetish?
…(T)his woman-a woman who hid his car keys and moved stuff up to higher shelves-was obviously into what she perceived as his helplessness. But she wasn’t honest about it, and she wasn’t able to limit her enjoyment of your friend’s helplessness to times when they were having sex. (Savage, 2005)
In the Leftist doctrine, all sex good. Holding up sex to ethical scrutiny bad. Consent changes all. Slavery still not good, but pretending in sex good. The fact that descriptions of sadofascism often sound horrifyingly like the acts of Nazis, slave owners, even sadistic serial killers is ignored (e.g Fielder, 2003; Lengyl, 1947; Pron, 2005; Reti, 1993). There is a total disconnect that is infuriating.
What they have is a strange sense that what occurs in one’s sexual life, the personal, has nothing to do with how one actually treats others and how one views what justice is, the political. As Robin Morgan said in 1982:
“bondage,” “discipline,” props of whips and chains and leather thongs, and allegedly “loving games” between “trusting lovers” carry a political message, too: a ghastly mockery of the human beings who suffered under Iran’s SAVAK torturers, of the human beings who were electroded by Idi Amin’s henchmen, of the human beings who scream in real and agonized pain in the interrogation chambers of South Africa or Chile or East Germany or the Philippines at this very moment…(W)hen you find titillating the same attitudes or acts around which Auschwitz and Belsen and Treblinka involved, something is wrong…(It has) nothing to do with the feminist vision of freedom (p. 117).
What Should Be Done?: The Politics of Sexual Abuse
Gender is a social system that divides power. It is therefore a political system…If one defines politics with Harold Lasswell, and who defines a political act as one “one performed in power perspectives,” and with Robert Dahl, who defines a political system as “any persistent pattern of human relationships that involves, to a significant extent, power, rule, or authority,” and with Kate Millett, who defines political relationships as “power structured relationships,” the relation between women and men is political.
--Catharine MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 160-161
Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. Article 4. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms. Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Article 6. Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. --United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Both the actions of the sate and the actions of individuals can be political, especially when those actions are sanctioned or ignored by the state. With the exception of Sweden, the law is complicit in the abuse of women in prostitution. It needs to be regarded as a violation in human rights. Those hurt through the interconnected forms of oppression known as prostitution, pornography, and sadomasochism, have little or no recourse in the law. The “typical” rape victim is not a college girl, or a girl child, or even “any woman.” The average raped woman is the prostituted, beaten, pornographized woman. Imagine a state saying in a declaration of human rights law explicitly that every single person has the affirmative right to not be sexually abused. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Why?
The justice system both actively perpetuates harm and ignores it. Being prostituted is a crime. Being turned into pornography is regarded as a matter of obscenity, not civil rights. Government doesn’t want to mettle with men’s privacy rights when it comes to hurting women and children. Some suggestions are: passing civil rights bills that recognize prostitution, pornography, and sadomasochism as violations of human rights, not matters of “public decency,” such Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon’s anti-pornography civil rights bill and Sweden’s anti-prostitution laws.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, live by the feminist slogan “The personal is political.” Because systems of hierarchy, whether or not they are called sex, are systems of power.