Tag Archives: feminism

Freshman

Leave a reply

For this performer – very much a feminist – it’s the stigma, not the work itself, that harms her. Exploitation within sex work is not universal. The way the anti-sex-work agenda silences women like this by dismissing them as mindless victims is just as dehumanising as other harmful stereotypes meted out to sex workers. There are many things about porn that are problematic and need to be fixed, but stigmatising the entire industry and those within it just makes everything worse for everyone. Feminists: the false dichotomy of virgin/victim is just as bad as virgin/whore and as much a product of patriarchy. Here’s part of a wonderful article at XOJane – “I’M THE DUKE UNIVERSITY FRESHMAN PORN STAR AND FOR THE FIRST TIME I’M TELLING THE STORY IN MY WORDS”:

“…It terrifies us to even fathom that a woman could take ownership of her body. We deem to keep women in a place where they are subjected to male sexuality. We seek to rob them of their choice and of their autonomy. We want to oppress them and keep them dependent on the patriarchy. A woman who transgresses the norm and takes ownership of her body — because that’s exactly what porn is, no matter how rough the sex is — ostensibly poses a threat to the deeply ingrained gender norms that polarize our society.

I am well aware: The threat I pose to the patriarchy is enormous. That a woman could be intelligent, educated and CHOOSE to be a sex worker is almost unfathomable.

I find it interesting that porn (a billion-dollar industry) is consumed by millions of people — men and women (and all other equally wonderful genders) alike — yet no one is willing to consider the lives of the people behind the camera. No one wants to hear about the abuses and exploitation that take place, no one wants to hear about the violence committed every day against sex workers, no one wants to consider that we have hopes and dreams and ambitions.

No, all we are is “whores and bimbos.”

I reject this. Instead, what I ask for is simple. I, like all other sex workers, want to be treated with dignity and respect. I want equal representation under the law and within societal institutions. I want people to acknowledge our humanity. I want people to listen to our unique narratives and dialogues…”

Read the full article here.

laurenphoto2

Defining the Historian

2 Replies

Fern Riddell at the Vice and Virtue blog has written a wonderful post on women throughout history who have written about sex and sexuality. She has listed some notable female writers and exactly why each is important. Here, she explains her motives for doing so:

“…Why do we immediately judge women if they initiate a discussion about sex? What is it about the feminine voice, discussing sex with authority or knowledge, whether that is medical, personal, or historical, that society finds so challenging, so revolutionary, or so subversive? Surely women have been writing about sex for as long as men? I’m pretty sure we’ve been talking about it for even longer. So to try and answer this question for myself I turned first to my books, and then to the brilliant community of historians I know on twitter. And we made a list. A list of women who have written about sex, throughout history, so that I can prove women have been doing this for just as long as men. Sexual knowledge is not the authority of just one gender, although history often likes to tell us differently…”

Read the brilliant post here.

800px-mary_magdalene_in_the_cave-scaled1000

Sexualisation

2 Replies

Sexualisation. It’s become one of those words that people use without really examining what they mean by it. Whenever there’s talk of the media, or technology, or basically anything that has altered since the 1950s, commentators seem to gravitate back to the term “sexualisation” as something terrible that will happen to our female children if we don’t lock them in a tower and remove all ties to the outside world.

Laurie Penny has addressed this more brilliantly than I could ever hope to. Here’s a snippet of her article for the New Statesman:

‘…According to the ‘sexualisation’ logic, a young girl merely has to leaf through a contraband copy of Cosmopolitan or stumble on a Rhianna video on Youtube and wham, that’s it, sexualised. Ruined forever. Nothing to be done, and abuse and wanton, abject harlotry will surely follow.

“The honest facts of female sexual development in adolescence- especially the facts of girls’ desire – have sustained a long history of active censorship,” wrote Woolf in 1997. A decade-and-a-half later, it is still modish for politicians and public health officials to behave as if women and girls had no sexual agency whatsoever, and must instead be protected from the terrible disease of “sexualisation”, which young girls are assumed to catch like the common cold.

Apparently, we cannot cope, as a culture, with the idea that a young girl who experiences sexual desire might not be promiscuous, or wicked, or dangerous. With every technology of pleasure and knowledge at our fingertips, we are not a society that wants to know about female pleasure, or one that respects female sexual subjectivity.

And if young women are victimised – one in six children aged between 11 and 17 have experienced sexual abuse – we still seem to have a problem with placing blame where it belongs, with the abusers, whether they are strangers or members of their own family. No politician seems able to come forward and tell adult men to stop abusing young girls. The problem must, instead, lie with female sexuality itself, too much, or too young, or both. This week, national treasure Joanna Lumley took it upon herself to weigh in and tell young women to stop dressing “like trash” if they don’t want to get raped – an attitude that, despite the best efforts of sex-positive feminists, is becoming more and more common…’

Read the full article here.

155739093